¶ Introduction to Seth Harp and His Journey
Special Operations, Cobert.
SPI and.
The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David bark.
Hey.
Everyone, Welcome to episode three hundred and sixty seven of The Teamhouse. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest joining us in studio is Seth Harrp. He is himself an Army veteran and also the author of the Fort Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder and Special Forces, a book that in recent weeks has made quite a splash out there and arrived at some controversy.
But I'm glad that is getting the attention.
It's a book that needs to be read, and it needs to get the attention, and hopefully some of these things get addressed down there.
But anyway, let's jump right into it.
Seth, I want to start off just asking you a little bit about kind of how you came up, how you grew up, what took you towards the army and your military service and then eventually journalism.
Sure, nothing too special. I was an Army reservist in college at the University of Texas and was called up to serve when the Iraq War started, did one tour in Iraq, and then wrote out the rest of my time in the reserves. I actually was a lawyer. I practiced law for a few years and then was always really passionate about journalism. I had written for my college newspaper, including Wallace deployed to a Rock. I was writing for the Daily Texan, and that was a really rewarding experience.
I wanted to get back to that, and so at a certain point I actually went back to school for journalism, and it's a job I'm doing for about the last ten years now. It's been really fun.
And have you always covered national security stuff or like, I'm just a little curious, like what kind of brought you towards this subject matter.
Yeah. One of the fact that I had been in Iraq was a way that I could get assignments, especially to cover the war in Syria, because at the time I graduated from journalism school in twenty sixteen, and as you know, because you were over there, a lot a lot of journalists left Syria after James Foley was beheaded because the security environment was so poor, and the fact that I had been in Iraq was a way for
me to get assignments in Syria. And so I have always focused on the either foreign wars or the military things of that nature.
Yeah, so let's talk about the Fort Bragg cartel. You know, specifically, what kind of tipped you to this subject that you know Fort Bragg was an area that you wanted to focus on.
How did that come about? I just read an article in the New York Times on December fourth, twenty twenty that these two Special Operations soldiers have found murdered on
¶ The Fort Bragg Cartel: Unveiling the Story
Fort Bragg, and that one of them, Billy Levine, had previously killed guy in his house and they had been ruled to justified homicide. I then read a blog post that you wrote, Jack that identified Billy as a Delta Force soldier. Yeah. That was really crucial because the entire time I had been reporting on the war and the military, and even serving in the Army myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force guy being in the news
for any reason. They did keep that pretty quiet. Yeah, So that was at the point in which I realized, Okay, there's there's got to be a story here.
Yeah, and there's a little aside on that. I had a couple of years later after I wrote that, I had a guy I served with in Special Forces who went on to become a delta operator hit me up out of the blue hand spoken to him in years.
Hey, you need to change the title of that article. Man.
Oh wow, that's that's clickbait. You can't write that I wrote. Do Delta Force operators have a license to kill?
Yeah?
It's like, dude, you read that whole thing and that's your takeaway from that.
Come on in your interview with Mark Leschinger's family was also a really important inspiration because you did that before I had even got off the ground, so you know, I I saw from what you had reported that there was some kind of cover up there, so that was an important part of it too. And I just I've been in touch with the with the Lushakers or you know, they're with Nicole Rick and Tammy maybe and Laura Aleshiker who since remarried. I've been in touch with them since
since then. I'm glad you did. I'm glad that you got to talk to them.
And I mean the stuff that Mark's mother and widow and sister told me are like things that well, they stick with you, as you know.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And now the poor girl who witnessed the killing, who identify in the book by a pseudonym. You know, she's kind of grown up now. That was twenty eighteen, so she's, you know, she's a teenager and she is writing about this. She's written an essay that you know, recalls it because she witnessed her father murdered right in front by Billy Levine. So it's it's a pretty heavy story.
Let's kind of dive into that a little bit, because Billy Levine, I guess you could say, is kind of the focal point of your book, a sort of jumping off point. Let's start off and talk about you know him and who was his best friend, Mark Leeshakar.
Yeah, Billy was a Delta Force operator. He had done fourteen deployments. He had been in since shortly before two thousand and one, shortly before nine to eleven. That is, he was a guy who had had a severe PTSD, moral injury, drug addiction, a lot of the things that creep up on guys that are in that community after lots of deployments, all that was going on with them. His best friend, Mark was a nineteenth Group Green Beret. So he was I still to this day don't know
exactly what he was doing in Bragg. He wasn't on active duty, and his group was not at in North Carolina. It's in Washington. So I believe he had some kind
¶ Billy Levine: A Delta Force Operator's Downward Spiral
of desk job at Use of Sock, but they haven't confirmed it. But in any case, he was at Fort Bragg. He's working there. He and Billy had known each other from when Lesha was going through the Q course, and one thing they really shared in common, or one thing that seems to have been a reason why they bonded, is you know, they both were ensted using drugs, like hard drugs frequently, and you know, at a certain point
they got out of control. And the first two chapters of my book are dedicated to this trip they took to Disney World. You already know this whole story. But they take their daughters, they both have young daughters, they take them to Disney World. The whole time they're at Disney World, they're drinking and doing drugs, and Mark evidently ingested some bath salts. I don't know if he went
out and bought that salt. More likely he ingested some ecstasy or something that was cut with you know, fillers, and he started hallucinating. He was convinced that the car was being followed that the car was bugged, and this
really started to get on Billy's nerves. Billy had really bad anger issues, as also can happen to people that have been exposed repeatedly to combat, and he was really getting annoyed by Mark's you know, Shenanigan's long story short, he ends up shooting and killing Mark right in front of his house, or right in the foyer of his house when they get back to Fayetteville, right in front of his daughter who had just let him in the door.
And the important thing is that the civilian authorities and the military authorities at that point jumped in and covered this whole thing up and made the case go away and papered it over as a justified homicide when you can debate over whether it should have been like first degree murder, second degree manslaughter, or any of those charges
I could see appropriate depending upon the prosecutorial decisions. But for them to just say it was self defense, that's a cover up because Mark at the time of his death was unarmed and he didn't even have a screwdriver, which was Billy's cover story that he had come out, and when they rolled the body, there was no screwdriver. Right. The other thing is the bullet fragments under the carpet.
Bullet fragments don't get under the carpet unless you're doing the coupe de grass.
Yeah, yeah, right, And the ballistic evidence shows that he shot Mark from multiple angles and they stood over him and fired to kill shot, which exactly is what they're trained to do.
And it's sadly what the daughter described seeing after Billy died.
Yeah, yeah, she started talking about it for the first time. Yeah. That murder, of course, is just that was covered up, was just a prelude to all the rest of the events that happened in the book. I start off with it to show the type of impunity that these guys have and the link to which the command will go to keep if you're in Delta force, that they'll keep you out of the news.
So yeah, let's talk a little bit about that, because, as you point out, there's never a trial, There was
¶ Cover-Ups and Impunity in Military Justice
never a real inquiry. As far as I can tell, a police sergeant wrote a report said self defense and that was it.
That was the end of it. Yeah, it all just sort of went away.
Yeah, despite the family asking some questions, and I mean It's very weird.
The way it all went down. It is. Yeah, and I recently obtained a copy of Billy Levine's memoir. Someone that he had been in rehab with in Texas sent me a copy. I wrote in the book that Billy had been working on this document at the time of his death, but I had never seen it. Someone actually sent it to me, and it was incredible to see to read Billy narrating his downward spiral. And one of the things he talks about is that shooting. And you know, among the details that he that he goes into are
exactly how he shot Mark. You know, he even says he almost takes pride in it. It's strange, he almost takes pride in how, you know, efficiently he dispatched Mark, because he One little bit of it that I'm recalling is that, you know, he said that as he stood over him having killed him, he was prepared to shoot him again in the head. Small detail, but you know,
it made an impression. Oh, you know, the reason I brought that up, the reason why I wanted to mention it was not that particular detail, but rather what happened when he got to the police station. Because Billy writes about that too, and you know, it was incredible by his account, the sort of entitlement that he showed, and he was like outraged that they had even questioned him. He was, by his own account, was telling them things
like you know, do you know who I am? And was resentful of the fact that they had even brought him to the police station. And he seemed to expect everyone to just take his word for it that it was self defense, even though, as you know, he told his direct superior in Delta Force originally that Mark had committed suicide, and then he told a nine one one dispatcher that it was stranger who had broken into his house. But he still was like offended at these.
Recover stories at a minimum, h so, but he shocked that the police are even asking him these questions.
I mean, that's the attitude that comes across in the in his account of it that he wrote. Maybe he behaved himself more professionally at the time, but it didn't seem like it the way he wrote about it. I mean, he was like pulling rank is the wrong word because it wasn't rank. But he was just playing that Delta carte hard with the with the sheriff's deputies.
What else did Billy have to say in this memoir that he wrote.
So much I'm still just processing. I only read it two days ago. But he was even crazier than I thought, you know, in the book, I'm not in the business of portraying any of these guys as monsters, like that's just not person of all, because I've met all their
¶ The Broader Criminality at Fort Bragg
family members and talked to them, and I think that they have done monstrous things, including Mark Leshcheker by a lot of accounts. You know, the reason he couldn't make it through Delta's election was because he had committed certain war crimes in Afghanistan. Still Levine as well, you know, he had done terrible things. But I still try to portray them as much as possible as humans and show like they didn't start out this way. It was the result of external factors acting on them to turn them
this way. But reading this memoir that Levine wrote, I realized that he was even crazier than I thought. Like I didn't him he was way off the deep end.
Man.
He was so paranoid and violent and aggressive, Like you can just feel the anger and aggression on every page of the stuff that he wrote.
And as you go through talking about Billy's trajectory and experience, you kind of uncover in the book that there's like this larger theme about criminality around Fort Bragg, that while Billy's situation is fairly extreme and I guess you could say abnormal, but it's not that abnormal. I mean, you uncover a whole string of murders, rapes, drug trafficking.
Around the base. It is apparently is a practice on part of the Special Forces Command as well as the District Attorney of Cumberland County that these guys get special treatment when they turn up in handcuffs. And you know, it's what the motives for that are as a matter of conjecture, but I assume it's to protect the Special Forces from embarrassment, because reporters will jump all over stories if they relate to the Special Forces, So that dynamic
is definitely in play. And yeah, I showcase after case in the book of guys who are accused of murder, rape, drug trafficking, what have you, who are just immediately let off the hook. I mean there are exceptions.
Of course, Dan Gould is in prison right for smuggling cocaine from Columbia in a punching bag.
Right, yeah, two of them, Yeah yeah, a million dollars
worth of cocaine. You know. But I interviewed the officer, the army officer who is at the DEA station or at the US embassy rather in Bogota, who caught who got wind of this scheme, and he said he had a really hard time convincing the DEA to investigate, and you know, he couldn't even get them interested in it until he finally brought them the punching bags and put them through an X ray machine and it clearly showed them a full pack full of cod.
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¶ Sexual Assault and Military Justice Failures
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You talk about.
Aaron Scanlon is another one, allegedly raped by Christopher Vallejo and Chrysto Christo. The unfortunately we know sex crimes happen in America doesn't shock any of us per se, but the way her trial was handled was a circus, like totally like off the wall inappropriate. Can you tell us
a little bit about kind of? And also the other thing too, is that I find quite often is how when one of these cases comes down, the local police department and the military police will bounce it around between each other like pointing fingers in both directions to try to I don't know avoid having to address the issue.
M Yeah, you know, talking about rape trials and stuff and sexual assault in the military. That brings up a lot of toxicity, especially among the people that are like consuming these stories and debating them on the internet. But Aaron Scanlon was an army officer who after this encounter with Crystobo Viejo, she immediately told several people that she had been raped, Like within minutes she told people, I feel like I just got raped. She also went directly
to a hospital and had a rape kit done. She did everything by the book and reporting that rape. She has text messages with Krystobal Vajejo where she accuses him directly of rape and he doesn't respond. My point is that people may not like this, It may not like that I bring attention to some things like that, but nevertheless, this is real what she didn't have any reason to lie about this. People want to impune not necessarily her,
¶ Freddie Huff: From Law Enforcement to Drug Trafficker
but women who are in this situation. They want to impune their motives or say that whatever. But in this case, it really wasn't that way from the evidence. And Chris Bayeho, he was charged with rape. But as we're discussing at a certain point, the Special Forces Command steps in, approaches the district attorney and they work out a deal so
that this is the charges in civilian court. Go Away gets transferred to Fort Bragg to be carried out in the under a court martial goes on and on, like the time is just dragging on, and then they finally have a trial and then surprise, you know, it's an acquittal.
So that's another case of what I describe as a cover up, because I won't go into details now, but you know, I talk about a lot of it regularities in that trial, and there's one I'll call out in particular, just like it's funny how in the cases where the military doesn't actually want a conviction, that the prosecutor who gets put on the case is someone who's never tried a case before. That happened in the Eddie Gallagher case. Now, it seems to have been some contingency there where the
lead prosecutor actually had to deal with some situations. But Eddie Gallagher was prosecuted by a guy who had never tried a murder trial before. That would almost never happen in the civilian court. You would never allow prosecutor who'd never done a capital case to try a capital case.
Same thing happened in the case of Vaejo. The prosecutors that they put on that case it was their first trial ever, so and they got schooled by his civilian attorney who has defended lots and lots of capital cases. I mean, there's so much to go into. I don't even know where to begin.
Another example you talk about, there's a very chapter in your book about the cover girls who work in the mission support troupe and some sexual harassment allegations at Delta Force, and I mean that was it was pretty gross to read that that, you know, somebody allegedly called this woman into her into his office and had her bend over to inspect her underwear, and like, what in the world is going on here?
Guys want to deny that, you know, I see all the comments that that's one they really jumped on that. Politico excerpted that chapter of the book, and so a lot of people, you know, have been jumping on that to say that this environment is much more professional than I portrayed. All I can say is, y'all should have talked to me when I was reporting the book and I was calling all you guys and trying to get
you to comment. I would have happily included those statements, but I'm left to go on not just Courtney Williams's testimony. I would have never published something that was single source.
¶ The Dark Side of Fort Bragg: Murders and Drug Trafficking
I reached out to one of her colleagues who's identified in the book by a pseudonym, without Courtney knowing about the other woman, and vice versa, kept him completely sat interviewed them completely separately, and to the extent that their stories matched. That's what I published in the book. So, yeah, that's what I have to say about those criticisms.
Yeah, and you know, I know what you're talking about. And I watched, you know, Brent's response to your book and what was in the article, And I mean, I believe Brent's telling his truth that he would not ever treat a woman in the unit like that. I believe him when he's saying that. But I mean, if you weren't in that room, you really can't say. I mean, he said, by his own admission, he said, I didn't know this woman, I never met her.
You can't really say it didn't happen. Well, Courtney says that a lot of the guys were professional and that where they were cool and they were nice. She talks about the ones who are like good guys. She also including Billy Levine. She said he was very respectful. He would have never that wasn't his style. He was crazy in a different kind of way. Yeah, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, right, Yeah, Yeah.
It's not so much a cultural thing, but their assholes everywhere.
Yeah, the.
Command, even though it's not necessarily a cultural thing, the command. And we see this all the time, even in the conventional military, where the command wants these things to go away because it looks bad for the unit commander, it looks bad publicity wise, you know.
And yeah, yeah, it's worth pointing out too.
I mean, the lack of transparency in Jaysock, in the special Operations community, and I would include the CIA in this argument as well. The lack of transparency has not done these bureaucracies any favors. It just allows these problems to fester and metastasize, and things that should have been exposed to daylight and gotten fixed years and years and years ago. Sexual harassment, sexual assault in the military being a big one. Those are things that could have been fixed.
Yeah, definitely, And you know, they really made an enemy out of Courtney Williams. And she was willing to talk all this, say all this stuff about her work because she felt that she had been treated unfairly, and I ended up really sympathy with her. Uh.
Another interesting thing, I mean maybe interesting to some people. Anyways, You talk about how us to Soak the command actually gets used as a dumping ground for fired operators. In some cases, they're you can get fired from the unit for anything. You know, it doesn't mean you're a bad guy by any means, but some of these guys are having serious issues. And like you quote one guy saying like this is a force protection issue because some of these guys.
Are just so off the wall. Yeah, I remember I got that document from CID through FOYA, and it was I was blown away. I actually quoted it at great length in the book because Yeah, the commander of the headquarters company at USUSAK says that he had at any given time he had as many as a dozen like guys that had been kicked out of the unit. And he talks about how dangerous it was to have guys that a lot of times didn't know why they were reporting there, didn't know why they had been expelled from
¶ Enrique Roman Martinez: A Mysterious Death
the unit, had all kinds of problems. Yeah, and he even says at one point they busted and excel to operator who had at the front gate, who had an ar ten in the backseat with a blanket over it. So he was strongly suggesting or stating out right he was worried one of these dudes is going to do a mass shooting, which was sobering to read.
Yeah, another one I wanted to ask you about. I mean, you do, I don't know how deep you want to go into it. But another disturbing one is Enrique Roman Martinez, eighty second Airborne soldier goes camping in North Carolina with some of his army buddies and ends up dead.
Yeah. Yeah, that one takes it to a totally different place. I mean, the rest of this stuff is like gangland stuff, mafia type stuff, cartel stuff, but the case of Enrique Roman Martinez is like some X files shit. To be honest, like he disappears. Yeah, and you know some you probably recalled Jack that A lot of the suspicion initially focused on the seven soldiers that were with him on that camping trip, but thanks to the Roman mar Tina's family. I got CID's whole file on that case, which was
sixteen hundred pages. Like they it was like the most extensive murder investigation in army history. And man, they seemed like they left no stone unturned. And you can read all these kids. I call them kids because they were like between the ages of nineteen and twenty two. These are junior soldiers in the eighty second And their stories never changed from the beginning. They just said, you know, they admitted that they took drugs, they took LSD, that
some of them did, that Enrique was tripping. He was having a bad trip and was having these eerily He was having these premonitions of his own imminent mortality. He was convinced that he was about to die. But they all just thought he was having a bad trip and went to bed and when they woke up, he was gone.
That's all any of them could tell the police. Then his head washes ashore on the island, you know, two days or three days later, and medical examiners look at it and say, this guy's head was chopped off with an axe. So who could have done that? And why? I think the why is the most important question because although they could never find any forensic evidence connecting any of these young soldiers to the murder, none of them had blood on them, none of them had any injuries.
They inspected their hands, you know, just as cops are trained to do, none of that. But beyond that, none of them had a reason to kill and Enriqui it ever came to light. People speculated this reason or that reason, but there was never any evidence for any of it.
And again, the stories never changed. So for seven people to keep their stories consistent over a period of years, well under the microscope and getting interiorated constantly and also charged with drug use and charged with disobeying orders, the fact that they didn't change their story, I think is really important, and that remains unsolved to this day. It
¶ The Rafer Drop Zone: A Hub for Drug Trafficking
remains unsolved. One of the strangest cold cases in army history, in North Carolina history, and whoever killed Enrique Roman Martinez is still out there. That's what's chilling.
And one more that I want to talk about before we start to circle back to Billy Levine is Thacker and the Rayford drop zone. And he's like a second, if not a third generation drug trafficker. Yeah, on this airfield. Yeah, I mean it's kind of wild.
I struggled where to put that in the book. My editor Alison Lawrence, and she knows how hard we we. We struggle to find the right place for that material. You know that airfield. For folks who don't know, it's called a Rayford drop zone. This is a real business stuff. To be very careful about what I say about them. It's a privately owned business. It was founded by Gene Thackers and og special Forces guy who served like in
the Jungles of Laos. I even have a picture of him with the Prince of Laos at a certain point, like a black and white photo. I don't think it was vang Pow there Wasn't he like a warlord? Yeah? This so he was part of the Humong, right, So this picture was with the and the Hmong were deeply involved in drug trafficking. Famously, this picture was actually with the because so were the Royal Laoatian forces. The Royal Lao Army was also deeply involved in drug trafficking, also
allied with the Special Forces in the CIA. This person was a member of that Laotian government and he was actually busted at a certain point with thirteen million dollars worth, a heroin personally smuggling and trying to smuggle into Paris. I totally digress. You see the problem with this story. It starts going backwards in time and to all these other deep dark aspects. It really was a technical challenge and it shrunk and shrunk construct Now it's like two
pages of the book. But there was just so much there. I mean, there's this story. This whole movie could be made about the guy's career. He was a major drug trafficker. Gene Thacker was It's like a Barry Seal sort of story. Well he knew Berry Seal. Berry Seal was one of his boys. Yeah, Barry Seal, and also Andrew Thornton, the guy who Cocaine Bear. The whole Cocaine Bear story is like is directly involved in this guy and the Rayfer
drop zone. This airport that's right on the periphy of Port Bragg where Delta does their Halo training and where I think maybe the whole greenber maybe you know better than I do. Do all the Green Bereys do Halo. There is it just Delta.
No, Mostly they're out at uh McColl jumping. Who's the training stuff, and then there's a couple of drop zones on brag. But there's also the what is it the Paraclet Parachute Club out there.
That's the private parachuting club that's based there that Levine was evidently a member of. Yeah, now I don't have any you know, dirt, so to speak on that company. I don't know that they had anything to do with anything. In fact, Billy worked at this airport. It's all like
¶ The Cocaine Bear: A Cover-Up Story
connected in a way where the dots are right next to each other, but you can't draw the lines between them. Yeah, Levine's last job was working at this airport. He was on jump Master order. He was training guys to do hehou.
And probably the accelerated free fall course that they run out there.
I would imagine that's what it is. He talks about it extensively in his memoir and details exactly what his job title was. It was something along those lines. But this airport in the eighties was a massive center of massive drug draffick. I got all these FBI documents that talk about Gene Thacker's role in it, but they could
never catch this guy. I started to admire him in a certain way because he was so good at bringing you know, hundreds of kilos of coke into the United States on these little airplanes that he maintained there right by Fort Bragg. At one point, Florida State authorities chase him because Thacker was a pilot, and they chase him, you know, coming into the country from the Caribbean. But then they have to veer off at the end because they don't want to enter four bags airspace, and so
he gets away clean. But you know the cocaine bear story, that's that's this is the real story. I mean, I have to bury it and foot notes in my book. But you see, I can't even talk about this without getting sidetracked indefinitely. So let me just say the cocaine You know, the cocaine bear story, right, I don't know, I don't know, but I know the movie, right movie. I didn't see the movie, but the bear that overdosed in a bunch of cocaine, and.
I thought I thought it was a fake I thought it was just a fiction movie.
So it was based on reality.
It's supposedly a true story. In fact, when that movie came out, the New York Times and The Washington Post both ran stories saying, is the cocaine bear story true? Yesterday? Is here's the true story. It was about Andrew Thornton, this ex Fort Bragg paratrooper who turned into a drug trafficker and was moving all this weight into the US, and he threw the coke because what they would do is rig the coke with paradrop parag drop whatever, yeah, and then come back and get it later. But he
died on one of his on his last jump. He he he parachuted, didn't pull in time, and or something happened and he died. And so supposedly a bear got into a bunch of the cocaine that he had dropped, an overdose and died. But when I really investigated the story and went back into the news archives and read everything in sequential order about what had been what had actually happened, it was crystal clear that that bear thing
would never happen. And that was a cover story for the cops who freaking stole that cocaine and told the press that a bear had eaten it. That was their cover story. And the medical examiner that the AP interviewed this is like nineteen eighty five. He just tells the reporters in the room straight up. He's like, yeah, that bear didn't eat the cocaine, and the question is where's
the cocaine. This is only the like the nineteen eighties per portion of this story because as you know, Thatcker's son, Tim Thacker, who went on to run the airport and was a Delta Horce pilot. He was a major drug trafficker too, and in fact, North Carolina federal prosecuars in
¶ Freddie Huff's Rise and Fall in Drug Trafficking
North Carolina described him when he was convicted as the biggest methamphetamine trafficker in North Carolina street. So this is the guy running Delta Force's little airport where Billy Levine works.
Interesting, and Thacker's still in the clink the sun.
Oh wait forty years Yeah, yeah, they threw the book at him.
So we can't brush past without talking about this incident that happened just in the last couple of years. Where was it one of the was it the co pilot jumped off the back ramp?
Right, That's how I got pulled into this airport story because in twenty twenty two a guy just literally fell out of the sky.
That's another X Files type Uh yeah, what happened here?
Right? Yeah? I mean and the NTSP has nothing on that. Like they investigated and they ultimately it was just inconclusive. He was the pilot for Ramper Aviation, which is a country that does a company that does a lot of recruiting for it does a lot of contracting for USISK and for the Navy Seals. And Charles Crooks was his name. He was a young pilot and for some reason they were doing I mean, they were flying Special Forces soldiers
that day, presumably Delta operators on training flights. And one of their return flights he just fell out of the plane without a parachute. Why nobody can really say. So that's the mystery. They got me drawn to this whole airport thing. It's really not central to the book, but eventually I just use it as an example of how Fort Bragg's like this Bermuda Triangle for weird stuff that never gets explained exactly. All right, So tell us who
is Freddie Huff. Freddie Huff, as you know, was a North Carolina State trooper who was very good at his job. He was like the best at asset forfeiture. He sees something like nine million dollars in cash. I've looked at these police reports where he's like pulling an inconspicuous Mazda minivan over and finding like four hundred thousand dollars in cash, like hidden in some secret compartm. He just had the knack to do this. But and he was going around
the country giving lectures an asset forfeiture. He was seconded or deputized by the DEA, and the sky seemed to be the limit for his law enforcement career until he gave a DWI ticket to a guy, an insurance executive in North Carolina who is a big donor to the governor in North Carolina. That'll do it. That did it
for Freddy. He was fired before the month was out, they said, and they got him for selling a pair of state issued shoes on eBay, some complete pretense in Freddie's view, which is easy to understand why he would think that. And at that point, you know he's unemployed. He's totally embittered towards law enforcement. He has all this
knowledge about the drug trafficking world. He's kind of a savant at like detecting smugglers, and he decides, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna get into the game myself, and that's what he did, and he turned into a massive drug trafficker.
The way I understood it was that he first started like an import export business, I think, selling washers and dryers down in Mexico, and then, like a good entrepreneur, thinks, what can I bring back with me on the return trip. Yeah, and he had all this nohow from being a police officer, like I was told, he had like a ritual. He would get like naked in the hotel room and wipe down all the satchels of drugs with pneumonia, like wrap them,
rub it down again, wrap it again with cellophane. And then when he drove through the border, he'd have open containers in his car of pneumonia to burn out the noses of the dogs.
Yeah. Yeah, he shared some of those details with me as well, double bagging the bricks and shop towels that have been soaked in ammonia. And he also used diversion tactics. They would have their associate, himI Rosato, who was also convicted with Huff. You know they would have he was because Huff did not look like a drug trafficker. He's a six foot something white guy, high and tight haircut, usually wore a full suit and tie, and he's got
¶ Connections to the Underworld
law enforcement badges, you know, in his wallet, knows how to talk to police, et cetera. He does not fit the profile. Now his buddy, his plug, himI Rosato, did look like a drug trafficker. Fit the stereotype. And what they would do is Hi May when they were rolling up to the checkpoint, the CBP checkpoint outside Laredo, Hime would smoke a joint and just fill up the car with smoke, but he would toss it before they got
to the checkpoint. So when he got there to come into the United States, he would roll down the windows and like these billows of marijuana smoke like che and jump exactly. And so of course officers say step out of the car, dude, you know, get the dogs over here. They're giving him the fourth degree, but he doesn't have anything right and actually smoking weed is decriminalized in Mexico,
so they don't get him on that side either. Meanwhile, Freddie Huff just cruises pass with like ten kilos of coke, five hundred thousand dollars worth of drugs, you know, and they just wave at him. Have a nice day, sir. Are you a US citizen? Yes?
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¶ The Drug Trafficking Network
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And so he's bringing this stuff up to North Carolina for distribution in the Fort Bragg area.
Apparently he was the biggest drug dealer in the Carolinas. I mean the people that associated with him, they all told me Freddie was big man. He was everyone respected him. He was hooking up the Bloods and the crips, gangster disciples, all the street gangs to operate, like in the Raleigh Durham area, in the central part of North Carolina and around Fort Bragg. You know, Freddie was the guy. He
was the one bringing up you know up. There's different estimates in federal court documents, but on the outside end of it, on the high end, it may have been three tons of coke that he smuggled in the US in his career.
And you write about you know how he was almost like a little poblo escobar there in North Carolina, like he was living large for a while there.
Oh yeah, yeah, Apparently he didn't save much of his money. He blew it all by his own admission on prostitutes, high high priced prostitutes and gambling and then doing a cocaine himself.
That was his downfall, was using his own product.
Really oh yeah, he admits that that it made him super paranoid. You know, I really personally, I've never done cocaine, certainly never done it in an extended way. But apparently they say that it can make you really paranoid. And that's something I've seen again and again in writing this book, is the dudes that have a really bad coke problem. They ended up super paranoid thinking that people were plotting to kill them, and then plotting to kill those other people.
So it can take you to a dark place. And that's what hoppen into Freddie.
And so, and Freddie was connected to another character here. We needed another person. We need to talk about Tim Dumas who he was a warrant officer of logistics guy for special Forces out of gets out of the military.
And was he if I understand correctly.
Was he like Freddie Huff's connection into like the local black mafia.
Yeah, well, I don't know about the black mafia. He was his connection to Fort Bragg. Okay, so Timothy Duma and a key connection to Billy Levine's murder, which we haven't got to yet. We'll walk into that. But Dumas was a member of the ninety fifth Civil Affairs Brigade, and in my book, that unit comes up again and again with their people being involved in some really questionable incidents.
The Sciots unit down there at Bragg too. Apparently it's not the syops units too, also some weird stuff.
Yeah, oh yeah, for sure, the fourth Psychologue Operations Group and the eighth definitely. But you know, I've taken heat online for people from people because of my characterization of the ninety fifth Civil Affairs Brigade, with people saying this unit's not even soft, you know, blah blah blah, the Civil Affairs like it's a joke. But I have Dumas's enlistment record, and I know that he worked with Jaysock.
He was at the he was part of the Jaysok led task force in Afghanistan and during four deployments, and he talks, you know, in his separation packet which I've read, you know, he talks about his Jaysock deployments and he even has email correspondence with the Admiral William McRaven. So
¶ Fake Police Raids and Kidnappings
I don't really, I can't pretend that I understand exactly what the ninety fifth does.
But he got kicked out of the army for getting creative with the supply room, right, So he was kicked out of the army for drug use. But his separation packet makes clear that for the he was a supply officer, a yeah, quartermaster. But his separation packet makes clear that his entire military career he was losing sensitive items, failing to keep track of you know, gear and weapons, and
basically just stealing stuff. I mean, that's it's well substantiated that Dumas was using his position, and also people close to him in the same unit, Christopher Mann, someone who was never named. People were convicted were charged and convicted of stealing millions of dollars worth of military property. So it's clear as day that Dumas was also involved in that theft, particularly of weapons and diverting weapons to the black market, which is another big criminal activity.
It takes place around for Bragg. However, he was he was kicked out of the military for drug use. That was like the official reason, but there was more to it obviously, And so what is.
Well, first, let's talk a little bit about a little bit more about the association between Dumas and Huff. Those guys were like pretty tight and they were doing some other nefarious activities together.
Yeah, so Huff is trafficking drugs for two years independently, and then in twenty eighteen he meets Timothy Dumas and the introduction. He was introduced to Dumas as a drug traffer. Someone told him, Hey, this guy moves a lot of weight. And Dumas told Huff that he was a soldier at Fort Bragg and that there was a group of Special Forces soldiers at Fort Bragg that were like a little cartel, a little gang. That's where the title of the book comes from. Billy Levine was one of them. He was
one of the guys that was working with Dumas. There were other people that were part of this group and they're distributing tons of drugs on for bragging around it. And Huff found this partnership with Dumas to be very lucrative because Dumas, you know, it's one thing to traffic drugs into the United States. That's hard enough, but then you got to sell it right turn into money. That's a really hard thing to do. Sometimes you got to
¶ The Murders of Levine and Dumas
find buyers, people that can liquidate coke. And that was what Dumas was able to do. He was able to offload a ton of Freddy's product right onto Fort Bragg, where, you know, as I document my book, a lot of these guys do cocaine, a surprising himount more than I would have guessed. So it's you know, the fact that Fort Bragg is this massive drug market is why it mattered to Freddy.
And tell us about these like fake police raids that they were doing at times.
Well, so they both of them are doing tons of drugs and getting deeper and deeper into trouble and they start having money problems because Freddie made millions of dollars when he blew it all on. You know, we already we already said what he blew it on. You know again by his own admission, he said that the girls in aeros dot Com costs seven hundred to twelve hundred dollars an hour news to me. So that's where the
money was going. And they got stolen from by some guy, some gangbanger in I think durham Ra or Ralei maybe, who stole a bunch of drugs from them, and they owed money to some Puerto Rican plug because they were also bringing drugs in from the Caribbean. It wasn't just Mexico. I don't know if we specified that, but Freddy was working with the Lozetto's cartel in Mexico. So they're bringing a ton of product from Mexico, but they're also bringing
it from Puerto Rico. They got behind with their Puerto Rican suppliers and believed that the Puerto Ricans were going to have them killed, and so in order to get their product back, this guy was a street you know, street gangster named hundred K was this sort of hood alias. This guy steals a bunch of coke from and they're like, all right, well, we got to go get it back, and so they disguised themselves as US marshals. They got they made they fabricated these uniforms and they created a
police car. They bought it from a police auction left it still registered to the state. They had all of it, like the versimilitude was very exact. And then they went and hidnapped his right hand man, this dude name that went by the name Rise, kidnapped him, held him prisoner, and told hundred K that they were going to chop off his head if they didn't give him the money. And so it just goes on and on from there. But you know, Huff and Dumas, they were they were
impersonating police officers. They were breaking into houses, they were shooting at people, they were kicking people's door downs, they were driving around like they were cops. And you know, it pretty clear this wasn't going to last forever. This is yeah, things didn't catch.
Up, like it started starting to catch up with them right when I think they hit it was the Mexicans. And like the old lady, the mother in the house started having like a stroke or a heart attack or something, and they had to call an ambulance because they I guess there's some honor among thieves. They weren't there to kill the old lady, you know.
I think that, and also I'm sure they didn't mean to. But also, Huff, you know, being a police officer, knew that he could be charged with murder if that woman had died, because she was like flex cuffed and everything. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you flex cuff an old lady robbing her house and she dies, you're gonna get charged with murder. So Huff, knowing that, uses a drop phone to call the emergency services. But what he doesn't realize is that
there's a hospital like two blocks away. So they immediately show up and and like what the phone was. Yet something doesn't compute about these guys, maybe the fact that they're wearing ski mask and bags of loot over their shoulders.
And so the cops show up, and Freddy didn't know this was possible, but they, you know, they picked up the phone that he had wiped, and they're actually able to geolocate it and show this phone has been in proximity with this phone, and these two phones have been moving around the city and so and that other phone's in his name, and he was on a federal watch list and so that's when the Feds moved in for Freddie.
Okay, and let's walk this back into like what is Billy Levine's association with.
Dumas they work together dealing drugs in Fayeville, and there's strong evidence of that from multiple sources. But Levine was also working with civilians to sell drugs. He was working with a lot of dealers in and around Bayville. Dumas apparently was the biggest. I mean, I should have said before Billy's memoir he uses pseudonyms for everybody, so sometimes it's hard to tell who he's talking about. And I'm still not sure which of the traffickers with whom he's
working He's what pseudonym he uses for Dumas. I have to go through it a few more times and read it more carefully. But I've got other eyewitness accounts that put them together in the same time, in same place, and then obviously they were found dead together. Tell us
about that. So December second, twenty twenty, is a deer hunter walking around Lake MacArthur on Fort Bragg and he sees Billy Levine's truck just abandoned in the woods back there, and a short distance away, Timothy Dumas is laying on the ground, a dead from a gunshot to the forehead. Apparently looks like he's been killed execution style, and Levine was in the back of his own truck, wrapped up in a blanket, having been shot multiple times in the torso.
So that's the double murder on for Brag that we talked about the beginning of this I read about in the New York Times and that you heard about right away too, And that's when all of this stuff kind of started to come to light for the first time because prior to that, you know, the fact that Levin had been the shooter and the Mark Lesher case was not publicly disclosed until Levin himself was killed. Yeah, they kept it pretty quiet. Yeah yeah.
And that's the problem with sweeping problems under the carpet is they get worse and worse and worse until you can't anymore.
As bad as the murder of Mark Leshiker was for Delta Force, it was way worse when Levine himself turned up murder and people started to say, oh, what about this guy he killed eighteen months ago? Yeah?
Yeah, uh, I mean someone has been arrested for those for those murders.
Now, who was that?
And do we have any sort of I guess educated opinions or you know, anything you uncovered in this book about what actually happened there.
That arrest of Kenneth Maurice quake really came out of left field because there were so many suspects. There's so many people who had a motive to kill and Dumas, I mean Dumas had was also a guy who was who is believed to have killed people. He apparently killed a guy named uh named Green, Joey Green aka Joey
¶ The Culture of Violence at Fort Bragg
Bananas is identified in the book, and he may have done other murders for hire. So Dumas had a lot of people who wanted to kill him, and Levigne as well. It could have been you know, Mark suspicion. There was suspicion initially on Mark Leshiger's former teammates. Want to be clear, there's no evidence of that that I ever disclosed or that ever uncovered. But people wondered, you know, the fact
that he killed Mark made people wonder. And apparently these guys have some of them had made some threats, so their suspicion on them, their suspicion on Billy's cartel associates, which his memoir goes deep into. And then finally there's a lot of people who thought more conspira more conspiratorial minded people you know, believe that someone that his own teammates could have done it, that Levine was messing up so badly that someone you know on the inside took
him out. But in twenty twenty three, the Department of Justice indicted a twenty year old black kid named Kenneth Maurice Quick, who lived two counties away from Fort Bragg, has no connections to the military, and was already facing life in prison for an unrelated murder. So his trial is scheduled to begin in early twenty twenty six. And you know, a lot of the sources I interviewed are very dismissive of the possibility of his guilt and say,
you know, couldn't have been him. They're just framing them. Personally, I have to believe that the Department of Justice doesn't accuse he will or murder lightly. I'm still not at the point. Obviously, I'm very critical of many elements of the US government in the book, but I am not to the point where I believe that the DOJ just
frames people in order to solve the case. That said, if Kenneth Maurice Quick did it, then again, like we got to be careful how we talk about this because this is a death penalty case that's ongoing, and these are real people. I don't want to prejudice the case. I don't want to say something that it's not supported or what have you. But what I would like to know about that case is if Maurice Quick did it. If Quick did it, who put him up to it?
Because he was twenty years old, I guarantee you he did not take out these to veteran special operators aged thirty seven and forty four, both of whom were really serious dudes that you do not want to mess with. It would be hard to take out under any circumstances, guys who were always armed, who always kept their head on the swivel. How he could have done that by
himself really challenges the imagination. Yeah, yeah, and so I hope they will look beyond him and see who might have been who might have put him up to it.
Yeah, twenty year old kid out on the drop zone at Fort Bragg, killing two.
Why was he at Fort Bragg? Weird? He has no connections to that base. He lived an hour away. He had all of his previous arrests, by the way, took place in his town of Laurenburg, North Carolina. He had been arrested there multiple times and is accused of having committed a murder there. At one point he was arrested, there was like this shootout of these these a group of guys met at this at this trailer to do a drug deal and it erupted into a close quarters
gunfight and there was like three guys laying dead. Kenneth Maurice Quick laying there shot several times. Police came arrested him, and once he recovered from his wounds, he was charged with killing one of those other guys. So I don't doubt that he is capable or if everything the police alleged about him is true, it seems that he is capable of killing somebody. But again, why these guys? Why
for Bragg? Another thing is the ballistic evidence. Quick was arrested like three or four times for an unlawful possession
¶ Public and Military Response to the Book
of a firearm by a felon, and he always carried a glock. He always carried a nine millimeter glock, and the weapon that was used to kill Dumas was apparently a twenty two or a three eighty. So maybe a small detail, but it's one more reason to question like what exactly the evidence is against Quick and he's pleaded not guilty by the way, which is an important point. That's interesting. Yeah.
I So one of the big quest inestion that comes out of this book for me is what is the relationship between special Operations on Fort Bragg and the Cumberland County Police. Because the police department gives so many free passes to these guys for murder, rape, drug trafficking, I mean, really serious crimes, it gets to the point where it's like, come on, man, what are we doing here? What's really going on here? Is there some sort of money transactional relationship happening?
What is it? Because it doesn't make sense. Yeah, I've never seen any evidence of money changing hands. There is a lot, you know, we've heard over the years in general in the United States, there's a lot of corruption in sheriff's departments and among sheriff's deputies, particularly in small towns. That said, the dynamic that I see and perceive that was explained to me by unit employees like Courtney Williams, is that they have processes in place when one of
their guys turns up in handcuffs. You know, they really spring into action and try to make it go away. I mean they that's they really do try to make it go away. They try to because Delta Force doesn't want any press positive or negative. You know this as well as I do.
They what they like probably fear the most is increased legislation and increased oversight.
Oh yeah, and they really want to avoid that, right, So you can see the incentives that are at work. It may not necessarily be that they have such that they hold guys like Billy Levine and Chris vayeho and Is a high esteem and they want to protect him, They want to protect the unit, right, And so it's not hard to imagine the power dynamics there because you're
talking about a relatively small town. You know, the DA is just a country lawyer, basically Billy West dealing with Jaysok, you know, which is one of the most you know, central institutions of the US government with incredible powers that we really only know a fraction of.
So and Freddie Huff is in prison still to this day. So and Thacker is still in prison. And the person who's been accused of murdering Billy and dumonts or in prison.
So you know, you.
Point to Fort Bragg being like, I don't know if this is right or not, but you make it sort of sound like in your book, like it is this sort of like toxic hub of murder and drug trafficking. I mean, it's Fort Bragg like uniquely bad by comparison to other military installations.
In your research, I mean it seems that way to me. That's exactly what I've been saying all this time, is that this is not normal for a military base to have this many murders and this many deaths. And people will say, well, Fort Bragg's the biggest base, and it is, but on a per capitol level still it's much higher than any other bases. You know, a soldier dies at
Fort Bragg every week. That's a really high mortality rate when you're talking about a population of fifty thousand young men who are all physically fit, like by definition, and the primary cause of death is suicide. We know that the suicide rate at Fort Bragg is like four times a national average and is significantly higher than any other
military base. There's also a ton of overdoses at Fort Bragg, which we have rock solid data from the Department of Defense, which Senator Edward Marky secured after reading one of my stories, Rolling Stone, he got the Pentagon turnover this data, and it shows just what I had alleged, which is at the overdose rate there is way higher than any other military base in both absolute and per capita terms. Those being the two highest causes of death are the most
frequent causes of death. By itself demonstrates there's a problem here with this culture. And then on top of that, there's all these unsolved murders. A little harder to quantify, but you know, I'm tracking like maybe twenty four cases of Fort Bragg soldiers who have been either murdered or convicted of murder or charged with murder since twenty twenty. Very hard to compare that to other bases because you know, I had to piece together this data. There's not like
a repository of that type of data. But I just have there been twenty murders at Fort Hood. I mean, I know there were a lot at a certain point, there was like six in a row, but I don't see it. I think Fort Bragg is pretty unique in this regard, and it could use some oversight in this regard.
All right, So let's talk a little bit about the response to the book. It's been out for what two weeks now, and I mean it's definitely taken off. It's gotten a lot of attention, a lot of needed attention. I think, what has the response been like from the public and from the military community.
The response has been, on the whole, it's been really positive. You know, I thought the book would do well. My editor had a lot of confidence in it. None of us expected it to be like a massive bestseller, like on the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and that has really amplified, you know, the response that I've gotten from the military community, which actually is and
a lot of cases, is very positive. I get letters or emails and messages every day from veterans who tell me more stories, just said that they liked the book, they dug it, and they can add this or that. But there is a significant component in like the operator community, I think, who are really resentful of how adversarial you
know the book is. What an aggressive line I took you against them, which you know I can totally own, Like it's not only because of this criminal stuff, but also because I strongly oppose the post nine to eleven war paradigm that these guys have been front and center and prosecuting for years. So I get asked, I do get threats, nothing specific so far, but the tempo has
definitely been increasing. I've seen stuff online that does cause me to worry, and my team, you know, all of them have I've kind of laughed all the stuff off. I've never let that effect anything that I wrote or affect anything that I did in any way. But I've gotten to the point where so many people have asked me, am I not concerned about security that I feel like I need to. Yeah, I do need to take measures.
But before I do any of that stuff, before I go into hiding, like what's his name, Salmon Rushti or something, I mean, I would just like to I know a lot of these guys watch your show, so I would liked if any of them are watching these guys that are, allegedly, according to these suspicions, that are plotting to like kill me, I would just say why, Because you know, I am
an American patriot. I was born in Texas, and you know I went to public school, I went I served in the Army, I worked for I was a lawyer. I worked for the Texas State government. I Am not some wild eyed, crazy, I don't know, woke whatever culture warrior. That's not where I'm coming from at this and I was never it was never my intention to like throw shade on anyone's service. The stuff that I write about in the book are crimes. They're serious crimes. You're talking
about drug trafficking, murder, rape, all this stuff. I'm an investigative reporter. That's what I'm supposed to do, especially when it's apparently related to this elite military unit. Do I not have the right and actually the obligation as a reporter to look into this type of stuff? You really want me to sugarcoat it and write on every page, well, these guys are heroes, and thank them for their service. And I just want to talk about these bad apples.
I don't waste any time with that. I'm just telling the story, right. And if guys are so offended by it, are they really gonna murder a US journalist on US soil to protect their impunity to commit these serious felonies like in make our country like a third world country, you know where journalists get killed for writing about these legitimate stories.
Like I would point out, you know, Seth Harp did not invent the criminal activity that you depict in your book. I mean, it's not your fault that these things happen. You're writing about it and telling people that there's a problem, and they need to be told it's a problem because they've ignored it over and over and over again.
Yeah, do you know for a fact that it's that it is like operators and soldiers that are doing this or is it fanboys that are saying that they are because I and not that they wouldn't, you know.
Not that there aren't guys out there that wouldn't, but I know, especially with like Alpha and with Code over Country, that that like a lot of the vitriol came from, like uh, like the fans, right, the how dare you uh talk shit about US service members or Navy seals
or these brave heroes you know? And I mean I would just add on to that that look at if if you're if you're a soldier or a veteran or even a you know, somebody who admires the military, this kind of stuff is important and for you to try to shut down a journalist who is writing on this stuff again, you know, this isn't like some leftist rant about the evils of the US military. This shit, this
stuff needs to get policed up. Like if you're proud of the military, then you should be proud of people like Seth who exposed this kind of stuff, because this weakens the military. This this you know, these units with this highest spree accord in this high you know, level of performance should not have these type of people in
the unit. And you know, and if if like it's it's a process of you know, TBIs and post traumatic stress and things like that that lead to stuff like this, then the command should be sitting up and seeing this stuff and not ignoring it until it gets to this point.
So, yeah, thank you for saying, sodell, I appreciate that. And you know a lot of guys will strongly disagree with the stuff that I wrote about US foreign policy and against foreign wars, and that's okay. It should be okay because we have the First Amendment right to talk about these things that are important to our country and
to our government. But there ought to be a confluence of interest to at a minimum, wherever you stand on that spectrum, you should not want, you know, people in units like Delta Force to be committing murders and doing drug trafficking and getting away with it. I don't understand who that would help or who would stand up in defense of that.
I think this book also comes at kind of an interesting period of time where the wars have sort.
Of wound down.
You have this population of veterans that are now retiring from the military or getting out of the military, and they're in civilian life, and they're kind of having to process that experience and what it meant to them, what
it was. As the years go on, you know, you see you hit the We're kind of getting to the time period where guys find themselves in AA programs, finding religion in many cases, like there's a lot it's a period of reflection, I think, on the global War on Terror, and there's a lot of things that happened during the war that got swept under the carpet, some ugly stuff that's going to come out. It's in this book, it's going to come out in other books.
In Billy Levine's memoir, he describes in three cases committing unlawful killings in the course of Delta Force raids, and he just mentions it completely in a completely casual way, as as if like no one would even question that. He doesn't even seem to know what he's saying. I'll tell you one example, the twenty fifteen raid that killed that Isis financier Abu sayef Oh in Syria. It was the first cross border raid I think kind of kicked
off the US war in Syria against ISIS. So I knew he was on that raid because I had his enlistened record and the dates matched, so I knew he participated. But in his memoir heves an incredible first person account of that which is just it's something. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, because, as you know, these guys don't talk, and they don't write about books, and when they do write about it, they don't talk about operational details.
Billy broke all those rules. And you know, just one little thing I can tell you in that raid that he recounts, you know, they had orders to take Abusayev alive. Now one of the operators ended up shooting him dead because apparently he reached for a pistol. According to Levine. While that's happening, you know, Levin's clearing another room and his dog takes down a guy that's there, and the guy has his arm all shredded from being attacked by
this canine. And this prisoner is brought to Levine unarmed, and Levin specifically says that he had his hands up by his head, and Levin said that he moved the hair out of the guy's face because I guess he had long hair, and when he saw that it wasn't Abu sayaf, he shot him in the head and killed him. And he even said that, you know, his mouth was slightly open when he pulled the trigger, and that a piece of the guy's brain matter went straight back into the back of his throat and he had to spit
out a piece of this guy's brain. And he just describes this totally illegal killing in a casual way that makes me think that it must have been routine. I don't know to other guys in the unit that they are they that casual about executing prisoners, because that totally is totally forbidden by the laws of war. And that doesn't make me, you know, a Namby Pamby, you know, lawyer e guy type of guy to point that out that's fundamental that you don't execute prisoners again, it's like,
do you want our country to be a third world country? Like, do you want the military to be a professional military? Like I would certainly say yes, you know. So that's just one example about some of the reckoning with some of the operation.
One of the other things I was criticized. I saw people criticizing you was you know, and Billy allegedly had his canine eat the brains of killed enemy apparently, yeah, and people were like, oh, that's not true. That well, I spoke to the same person you did, and her story was exactly the same as what she told you.
Yeah, yeah, Nicole Rick. Yeah. Not only that, but people jump for some reason, people jumped all over that detail to say this must be made up, and therefore the whole book's made up. The crazy thing is that I don't know if you saw this, but somebody on those forums then posted a video shot by a drone that shows exactly what I was talking about. It was mind
blowing to see this emerge. It showed a canine clearly marked as like I don't know if it was Delta, but it was clearly a Special Operations knine just absolutely going to town on a dead body attacking it in the head area in a the vicious way that an attack dog would do. So it was like visual proof of exactly what I wish you were making this stuff up.
I really do, me too, because it's so painful and it's it makes all of us very uncomfortable, right, yeah, to have to address it, but again it gets worse and worse if you don't.
You stand up to it and look, that's not necessarily you don't have to see that as necessarily as a war crime. Like it's an attack dog and the body it's a dead body. You know, dogs are gonna be dogs. But it illustrates the brutality of the world that these guys come up in. And you see that on every page of Billy Levine's memoir where he's talking about participating in all these raids, and you can just feel like that anger and you know, aggression that he later takes
out on the people. Because I didn't get into the half of it unfortunately. I mean, for reading his memoir, I realize I only covered about half, maybe let's say half of the stuff that he was up to in Fayeville in the eighteen months after Mark was murdered. In between and when Billy was murdered during that time. This guy was out of his fucking mind and he was going around armed all the time, he casing civilians houses. He was convinced that this person was trying to kill him,
and that person was trying to kill him. He says he was working for the cartel. He says that, you know, he says, these guys knew what my skill set was, and you know, I proved it to them multiple times. He's very broadly hinting at having done murders for hire for cartel figures around Fayetteville. And he also describes three brutal beatings that he gives people who had stolen drugs
from him or stolen something else from him. And he talks about being like totally covered in blood and beating the shit out of a guy with a hammer, and like he was like he looks around and he sees that everyone is afraid of him because he's got his shirt off and he's covered in blood, and he's like the writing this is if people are gonna admire this about him, Like he doesn't realize that he's lost his mind. It's really sad and scary to see, like how far off the deep end, he was, Is.
There anything from the memoir, because because you just recently got that after this went pressed, anything from the memoir that you wish were in here or that would have changed something in here?
Nothing that would have changed it. I wish all of it was in there, because you know, I never met Billy Levy and I never talked to them, and now here I have one hundred and fifty eight pages in his own words, and like, if anything, it just emphasizes all the stuff that I wrote. It just puts it in even stronger terms to where no one could doubt it, you know, hearing it from from the horse's mouth.
Are there in any of the you know, other criticisms, outrages, pushback you've gotten on the book, anything else you'd like to respond to or clarify for anyone.
You know, something I say again and again in interviews, I really don't dwell on it. In the book. I do write it in two places at least, is it I don't allege that everyone in Delta Force is a criminal, and I don't think that I write. I quote people who say that, like the unit, guys kind of separate themselves into the group. There's like the guys who don't drink, who are like super Christian warriors for God, who by their own lights are ethical people, maybe extremely ethical in
probably a lot of cases. And then there's the other guys. And you know, my book really focuses on the other guys because you have to pick a subject, and that's clearly you know, it's my job to write about the bad guys, not the good ones. Right. But I recognize and acknowledge that there are people in these units who I disagree with the foreign with you know, the wars that they have, that they have fought in and participated
in them. But I recognize that from their perspective, they are, you know, doing the right thing, that they joined the military for the right reasons, and that by their own, you know, internal standards that comported themselves in an ethical way. I've never doubted that, and I am not trying to say that every single person who's in Delta Forces like
Billy Levine. So that's just a clarification that I can't make often enough to the guys who think that, you know, like I said, throwing shade on all of their service, that's not what I know what it's like to be, to be young and to think that joining the military and join the army and be a cool thing to do. That's what I did. And you know, my path diverged at a certain point from these guys, but I like
culturally am sympathetic to them. I come from the same sort of cultural place, you know, being from rural Texas and so forth. So you know, I'm not the you know, the enemy that I think a lot of them. I think I think that I am.
Yeah, what's next, I mean, with all the additional stuff that's starting to come to light and this trial will probably be resolved on six or twenty twenty seven, do you think there's a follow up to the Fort braggcartel.
We'll see. I'll probably write something maybe for Rolling Stone about Billy's memoir and about the revelations that it contains, how it reflects on the book, the details that it adds, and it's a story in its own right, just hearing someone who is so damaged like chronicle their own downfall. And again, you know, it really points to the people
who may have been responsible for his death. Levin and his memoir says that he was working with the biggest drug trafficker in this part of North Carolina and around Bayeville. He says he was a Mexican man named Uno, and I don't know if that's the name that he actually went by or if that's a pseudonym that Billy made up, because he calls a lot of people by their pseudonyms.
So and then you know, the last chapters of his he describes him as a short Mexican guy, featherweight, covered head to toe with tattoos, but someone who was very fearsome. And there's even one scene where he describes this man Uno just brutally beating the shit out of a white drug dealer with dreadlocks and then standing over him and cutting all of his dreadlocks off with a pair of scissors. I mean, the under the view of the Fayetteville underworld
that Billy Levine's memoir presents is truly incredible, surreal. And in the last you know, Billy stopped writing this in May twenty twenty, so seven months after before he was killed, and the final two chapters of his memoir he is talking about how this guy who knows trying to kill him, and it's hard to say whether that's paranoia or the dude really was And did, so there's a lot to explore there. I'll probably write an article about that and also cover you know, quicks murder trial.
Yeah, sadly it was sort of scratching the surface, as I think you understand. There's like so much.
More going on there. Yeah, yeah, seems like it. Mm hmm. Yeah.
So people can find the Fort back, the Fort Bragg Caartel. It's out now, you can find it. Where should people go to look for it?
Seth anywhere books are sold. I know it's sold out in a lot of places. Amazon there's like a three week wait. A lot of big bookstores are sold out, but the last I checked, you could still get it in one to two days from Barnes and Noble other online booksellers. Check your local bookstore. You can find a copy if you if you make an effort, and they've send another order to the printer for more copies. So if you can't get it right now, just hold on. There's more that are.
They can also check out the ebook that never outsells.
I don't encourage any of that. I'm about paper paper books exclusively, but if folks want to do that, when you get their Kendle, I'm not here to judge. But yeah, that's an option, all right.
Yeah, it's out there if you can't find it in the bookshop. Seth anything before we get going, I mean anything that I haven't covered or haven't asked you about that you want to talk about.
Not specifically, you know, I'll just say that, you know, I call you out in the acknowledgment section of the book to talk about your contributions to the investigation. You and I talked from time to time while I was I appreciate the leads that you gave me, and thanks for having me on your show.
Yeahs coming, absolutely, man. I strongly believe in the kind of work that you're doing here. And you know, this show is often like almost a celebration of people's military service and so many ways, but there are times where we do have to talk about the dark side. This book, Code over Country, ALP. Yeah, some of these works are important. Also, Alpha is a great book, so is Code over Country. Both of those books are very well written. I admire Matthew Cole and David Phillips very much.
Yeah, yeah, they're both good writers.
So for everyone else out there, thank you for joining us tonight. Please go check out Seth's book. There'll be links down the description also that you can go and click on and we'll see all of you guys next time.
Hey guys, it's Jack.
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