How crime businesses actually work, from fake money to gun smuggling
From fake Rolexes to gun smuggling, former counterfeiters forgers and investigators explain how six criminal businesses actually work.
Transcript
00:00:00My name's Jeff Turner.
00:00:02I've printed over a million dollars in U.S. banknotes,
00:00:05and this is how crime works.
00:00:10I've been called the Picasso of counterfeiting.
00:00:12From my perspective, it wasn't that hard to do it,
00:00:16if that makes sense.
00:00:17It just took a lot of trial and error, basically.
00:00:20The bills just progressively got better and better
00:00:23until I eventually got caught,
00:00:24and the Secret Service said the bills I was making
00:00:27were the best they've seen in 25 years.
00:00:30I started counterfeiting when I kind of found myself
00:00:39in a desperate financial situation.
00:00:41I wrecked a work truck, so I lost my job.
00:00:45And, you know, I had a newborn baby at home.
00:00:48The lease was up in our house.
00:00:50So I was just kind of, you know, in a desperate spot.
00:00:55I was just trying to think of some way
00:00:58to get my family back on their feet, you know.
00:01:01And counterfeiting just ended up being, like,
00:01:03the safest, easiest way.
00:01:05The majority of the money I printed
00:01:07was the 96 series $100 bill.
00:01:10I also counterfeited some of the 2013, the new Blue Notes,
00:01:13but really that was more of, like, a hobby for me,
00:01:16like, just kind of a challenge.
00:01:18The longest process to start counterfeiting
00:01:21was making the digital files.
00:01:23I would say I spent two months of just editing these images.
00:01:28Really, Wikipedia has pretty high-resolution photos
00:01:33in their stock, and I broke the image down to multiple layers.
00:01:37So I would have one image of just the background color.
00:01:41I'd jumble up the serial numbers.
00:01:43I knew I needed to find a real thin paper
00:01:47that was opaque enough to where you couldn't see
00:01:50the strip and watermark through the face of the bill.
00:01:52I went through rice paper, vellum paper, tracing paper,
00:01:56you know, toilet paper, wrappers on toilet paper.
00:02:00I ended up finding that Bible paper was perfect.
00:02:03Bible paper glows a dull purple just like money does.
00:02:07I would acquire the Bible paper by going into, like, bookstores
00:02:11and just kind of taking out the blank pages.
00:02:13Inevitably, I ran out of bookstores in Knoxville.
00:02:17I would coat the bills with a matte lacquer spray can,
00:02:21which basically enabled the counterfeit detection pens to mark yellow.
00:02:26I would also use an invisible ink UV pen
00:02:31to draw an invisible line over the strip.
00:02:34I also found a certain type of iridescent green eye shadow
00:02:38that I would basically paint on to the 100 in the bottom corner
00:02:43to kind of replicate the color-shifting ink.
00:02:46One cashier would run her fingernail along a Benjamin Franklin shirt
00:02:50to kind of feel the rigid texture.
00:02:52I ended up going to, like, a Hobby Lobby,
00:02:55and I found a, like, a fine-tip glue pen.
00:02:59It would dry and give a little texture to a shirt.
00:03:03The 3D security ribbon on the modern $100 bill was hard to crack.
00:03:09The Bureau of Engraving and Printing kind of outsources a company
00:03:13to produce the paper and some of the security features,
00:03:16and I was able to find the patent, right?
00:03:19So it was like it basically explained how to do it.
00:03:22The trial and error was definitely frustrating.
00:03:25When I first started counterfeiting, you know, I would just experiment,
00:03:29and I'd mess up five for every one that I made well.
00:03:34Towards the end, I could make a perfect counterfeit $100 bill
00:03:37in probably five or ten minutes.
00:03:45I've had a few printers kind of break on me.
00:03:47Sometimes the paper would just get so jammed up.
00:03:50It's not so much noisy because I'm using digital printers,
00:03:54but the matte lacquer spray smells really bad.
00:03:59So a lot of times, like, maids at hotels would come into my room
00:04:04and thinking we're, like, huffing paint or, like, something.
00:04:07I'd have to say, oh, my wife spilled nail polish
00:04:10or, you know, just make up these little lies.
00:04:12But eventually I rented a house,
00:04:14and I had ventilation fans that would suck the matte lacquer out the window.
00:04:19So I could kind of spray the bills in front of this exhaust fan
00:04:23that it kind of sucked it out the window.
00:04:26There weren't really, like, big stockpiles of counterfeit money.
00:04:29I would try to, like, essentially launder the money every day, you know.
00:04:34So I'd print maybe $2,000, $5,000 in the morning and early afternoon,
00:04:40and then I'd try to break all those bills before the end of the night.
00:04:49There was probably, like, 10 or 20 of, like, the big corporations,
00:04:54retail grocery stores, you know, Walmart-type stores,
00:04:58and those were the best to break the bills at.
00:05:01I also sold bills to people.
00:05:0425 cents on the dollar was kind of the going rate.
00:05:07If I was breaking a bill in a store, I would try to go to female cashiers,
00:05:11and if I sent women in with the bills, I would tell them to go to male cashiers.
00:05:16When I would break a bill, I'd give them the exact coinage
00:05:20to kind of distract them a little bit.
00:05:22The majority of your amateur-type counterfeiters
00:05:25get kind of called out at the register,
00:05:28and, you know, they'll get a license plate number or something.
00:05:31And I would, like, always park my car far away
00:05:34so they could never get my license plate.
00:05:36I steered away from self-checkout machines
00:05:39because they were just too hard to beat.
00:05:42And some of them even have, like, photographic software
00:05:44where it just analyzes, like, the microprinting and all that stuff.
00:05:48In the beginning, I was definitely nervous
00:05:51because I spent so much time, you know, perfecting these bills
00:05:56that I would notice any little, you know, error or anything like that.
00:06:01I think I've gotten attention to detail that most people probably don't have.
00:06:05And, you know, the knowledge I have for the security features,
00:06:08I study extensively.
00:06:10There was a few times that I would go to the same grocery store,
00:06:15and it turns out that the bills I'd spent last week,
00:06:18they found out about them.
00:06:20But really, most of the time, when a cashier,
00:06:23even if the cashier kind of knows it's fake,
00:06:26they usually give it back to you.
00:06:28Over the two years that I was counterfeiting,
00:06:30I probably only had, like, maybe three or four cashiers turn me down.
00:06:35And I was spending, you know, thousands of dollars every day.
00:06:38Luckily for me, they only had, I think, like, 12 surveillance videos of me.
00:06:44So I was pretty good about kind of staying anonymous.
00:06:48There was a be-on-the-lookout for me and my wife
00:06:51breaking a bill at a specific store.
00:06:54They didn't know my name, though. It was just a picture.
00:06:57The Secret Service has the capability of kind of building cases on people.
00:07:01But as far as local police, I mean, they can't really do much about it, you know.
00:07:12Knoxville has a lot of dealers from out of town.
00:07:15Basically, drugs are more expensive in Knoxville
00:07:18than they are in Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland or Atlanta.
00:07:22So a lot of people kind of go to these mid-level cities to sell their drugs
00:07:26because, you know, you can get a brick in Detroit for, like, $25,000
00:07:31and then cut it and go sell it for, you know, $100,000 in Knoxville.
00:07:37I was addicted to drugs at the time,
00:07:40so a lot of it was buying drugs with the bills.
00:07:44A few dealers I was honest with, and I would say this is what I do,
00:07:49and I ended up selling some bills to a drug dealer from Cleveland.
00:07:53But there was a couple cases of I would buy drugs from these people
00:07:58with the counterfeit money.
00:08:00And the guy that actually ended up setting me up,
00:08:04I probably got him for, like, close to $10,000 over about a month's period.
00:08:10And he said that it was raining one day and one of my bills got wet
00:08:15and the color-shifting makeup smeared off.
00:08:19So he found out that they were fake.
00:08:21He was just kind of impressed and, you know, wanted to start buying them from me.
00:08:26These people would drive from Knoxville up to Detroit to buy, like, a brick of heroin,
00:08:32and they would mix in, like, $5,000 or $10,000 of my bills
00:08:35when they went to their city to re-up.
00:08:39All different stores have their specific method of detecting counterfeit bills.
00:08:45And a lot of, like, the big retailers just use the counterfeit pens.
00:08:50So they typically just mark the bill.
00:08:52And then, you know, if it marks properly, they cash it.
00:08:55If someone's buying a real cheap item with a $100 bill,
00:08:59that's probably more reason to take a closer look at it.
00:09:02Like, looking for the specific item,
00:09:06Like, looking for the strip and the watermark, you know, holding the bill up to the light,
00:09:12helps.
00:09:13Really, the best way to tell if a bill's real is, like, putting it in a bill validator.
00:09:19This is the more modern Blue Note $100 bill.
00:09:24If you hold the bill at a certain angle and shift it,
00:09:27the ink turns from a metallic green to a copper.
00:09:31It's used with magnetic ink.
00:09:33So if you fold the bill in half and set it on the table,
00:09:38you can actually lift it up with a neodymium magnet.
00:09:41There's enough magnetism to actually lift the bill up off the table.
00:09:45So some cashiers will scratch the shirt to feel a kind of rigid texture in the bill.
00:09:51The bills are printed on an intaglio press
00:09:54that kind of raises the ink above the paper,
00:09:57which gives it a certain type of texture.
00:10:00Bills are really hard.
00:10:02There's kind of, like, a real crisp feeling to it.
00:10:06Well, yeah, there is a smell to money.
00:10:09And my bills, I've had a couple people,
00:10:12if I sprayed the matte lacquer, like, too soon to spending it, you know what I mean?
00:10:17Like, a couple people would complain of a smell.
00:10:20I mean, they always accepted the bills
00:10:22because, really, like, every security feature that a cashier would look for, my bills had.
00:10:29So even if they were kind of suspicious or even brought up something like the smell,
00:10:34you know, they still accepted it
00:10:36because there was really no reason to believe it was counterfeit.
00:10:44It was 2019.
00:10:46The dealer from Cleveland, he got arrested up there.
00:10:49He either got caught with my counterfeit money or heroin.
00:10:53And, you know, it didn't take him long to inform on me.
00:10:57And then from there, you know, the Secret Service raided my hotel room.
00:11:00I was in the process of printing when they kicked the door in.
00:11:04So they found computers and printers,
00:11:07and I think I had, like, 6,400 in counterfeit bills that I tried to flush down the toilet.
00:11:14They pretty much caught me red-handed at that point.
00:11:17I was basically looking at, like, about three years.
00:11:21But the Secret Service came to me and basically said that if I pleaded guilty
00:11:29and showed them how I did everything, then they wouldn't charge my wife with anything,
00:11:35and they would give me cooperation credit,
00:11:39and they'd keep my restitution amount under $100,000.
00:11:43So with the cooperation, that got reduced to 10 to 16 months.
00:11:50The maximum sentence is 20 years.
00:11:52I think, you know, white-collar criminals should still go to prison.
00:11:57I mean, I deserve to go, you know, to prison.
00:11:59I was lucky with the amount of time that I served.
00:12:03It got me sober.
00:12:04Really, it was for the best in my particular case.
00:12:13There are organizations in other countries, you know, that have taken a liking to counterfeiting.
00:12:19It's obviously extremely profitable.
00:12:21And, you know, I've heard that a lot of counterfeits come out of Lima and, you know, Medellin.
00:12:27I've seen some bills that I was told came from, like, South America,
00:12:32but the quality wasn't very good, I didn't think.
00:12:36It's criminal organizations in the drug trade.
00:12:39And just like, from my experience, you know, people who were in the drug trade,
00:12:43obviously they're opportunists, you know, if there's a way to make money any other way,
00:12:49from my experience, you know, they'll do it.
00:12:52There's a super note, they say, most likely coming out of North Korea,
00:12:57produced by the North Korean government, that is indistinguishable from a legitimate currency.
00:13:02It supposedly has not only all the security features, but all of them done pretty flawlessly.
00:13:09I started counterfeiting when I was 19 years old.
00:13:17I read The Art of Making Money, a book about Art Williams, who was a counterfeiter up in Chicago.
00:13:23And that kind of gave me the original idea.
00:13:27But everything else was kind of like my own methods.
00:13:30The bills weren't super sophisticated, but they were good enough to sell.
00:13:35A friend of mine's dad was kind of like a connected guy in Tampa.
00:13:41But then my friend overdosed and died.
00:13:44I basically just stopped doing it.
00:13:47You know, at that point, I didn't want to get caught.
00:13:50And, of course, when I started up again later on, it's all because of, you know,
00:13:55just a desperate financial situation that kind of, you know,
00:14:00I was racking my brain for any ways to make quick money.
00:14:04I don't think, you know, there will ever be a way to prevent counterfeiting.
00:14:09You know, even if it goes digital, there's still ways of counterfeiting cashless.
00:14:15Like a person I know was counterfeiting credit cards.
00:14:19The million or so dollars that I had made over my career hasn't impacted the economy much, I would say.
00:14:28But, you know, maybe on like the local level, it might make people lose trust in cash.
00:14:35In fact, a lot of stores in Knoxville don't accept $100 bills anymore.
00:14:39They've got little signs at like Dollar General's and certain stores that I frequented.
00:14:45Obviously, you know, this whole situation kind of flipped my life upside down.
00:14:52You know, I'm sure it wasn't easy on my kids.
00:14:55You know, I had to go to prison.
00:14:57My wife and I are now separated.
00:15:00So, I mean, it's been, you know, rough on all of us.
00:15:06Now I am the production manager at a printing graphics company in Knoxville.
00:15:13My name is Robert Mazur.
00:15:15I spent two years undercover laundering tens of millions of dollars for Pablo Escobar's cartel.
00:15:21This is how crime works.
00:15:26Money laundering enables cartels to produce the most lethal thing that they produce around the world, and that's corruption.
00:15:33It enables them to be able to control countries, presidents of countries.
00:15:38Operation Sea Chase was a multi-agency task force to prosecute the biggest money launderers of the Medellin cartel.
00:15:46Most of the people I dealt with were high-level drug traffickers who had hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:15:52I'm doing this interview in silhouette because two agencies and an intelligence agency informed me that the Medellin cartel issued a contract on my life.
00:16:07I spent a year and a half putting together what I think is one of the more sophisticated fronts used in undercover.
00:16:13I built the persona of Robert Musella.
00:16:16I dressed the part, certainly had the lifestyle.
00:16:19Rolls Royce, Mercedes, Jaguar.
00:16:21I was embedded in real businesses.
00:16:23Had an air charter service with a private jet.
00:16:26We had a jewelry chain with 30 locations on the East Coast.
00:16:29A lot of cash goes through the Diamond District every single day.
00:16:32So if you've got those kinds of businesses, you have a very good excuse for where the cash came from.
00:16:36I was embedded in an investment company, a mortgage brokerage business, and even a brokerage firm with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
00:16:43And then I and my partner began a two-year infiltration of the Medellin cartel and the banks that were supporting them.
00:16:50One of the keys to doing undercover work is to build your undercover persona, to have as many traits as you do in common.
00:17:00Robert Musella was from Staten Island. I'm from Staten Island.
00:17:03Robert Musella was a businessman. I have a business background.
00:17:06I didn't fake accents, fake anything.
00:17:10I was always just me.
00:17:13The first person I met that was working within the Medellin cartel is a gentleman by the name of Gonzalo Mora, a small-time money launderer who had an import-export business.
00:17:27But the capacity he had to launder was probably limited to about $50,000 a week at best.
00:17:33We had my partner, Emir, deal with him and simply say, listen, my boss handles a lot of this, but he never wants to meet you.
00:17:41He wants to stay in the shadows.
00:17:43But if you could ever convince him to come out of the shadows, the rivers would open and you'd be able to launder untold amounts of money.
00:17:50By the end of that six months, Gonzalo Mora was banging on the door to meet me.
00:17:55You know, it's always best to play hard to get.
00:17:57I also knew these people have a sixth sense.
00:18:01If you're afraid of a dog, they know that.
00:18:04You're the first one they bite.
00:18:06I didn't want to get bit.
00:18:08So I knew that I would be working against myself and undermining my cause if I showed any fear whatsoever.
00:18:18And I told him eventually, listen, I have to get these people to understand that they need to let me invest some of their money.
00:18:25Your only responsibility is to introduce me to them.
00:18:28If I succeed, we'll even do business bigger.
00:18:32He felt compelled to make the introductions.
00:18:35And then I started to climb up the ladder to meet bigger and bigger people.
00:18:45You know, money launderers, like I played the role of, are basically operating what's called the black money market.
00:18:53It's an informal banking system that's made available to people who operate through the underground.
00:18:58So as a black money market operator, I have a supply of dollars.
00:19:02My supply comes from drug traffickers.
00:19:05Now I have to find people who have a demand for dollars.
00:19:09People who want to buy dollars are oftentimes importers around the world who otherwise have to go through their central bank and spend 25 percent of their money to officially get dollars.
00:19:20I could sell it to them for 10 percent.
00:19:22My traffickers, in many instances, wanted Colombian pesos.
00:19:27So the best people I could sell those dollars to were Colombian importers.
00:19:32All I have to do is swap.
00:19:34So I had supply clients, traffickers, and demand clients.
00:19:38But most often the money would wind up into bank accounts controlled by the cartel in Panama.
00:19:43And from there, they distributed it around the world wherever they wanted to hide it.
00:19:48Well, sometimes the money had to be used to buy planes.
00:19:51Like there was a guy, his responsibility was acquiring the aircraft and trucks and things like that that the cartel needed.
00:19:59So he basically was the buyer of the cartel's air force.
00:20:03So I dealt with him because he needed money in order to buy the specific planes they were looking for, which were Rockwell 1000s and Rockwell 980s.
00:20:11Some money is smuggled out of the United States down to Colombia.
00:20:16And it's used to make payoffs to people in the military or prosecutors or politicians or whoever's help they need to buy.
00:20:32Most of the money is in 5, 10s, and 20s.
00:20:34That's because people using illegal drugs buy it with 5, 10s, and 20s.
00:20:38That gets collected by people who have a responsibility here for the cartels to do nothing other than collect money.
00:20:44They try not to have traffickers and money handlers in the same place.
00:20:50Too much asset to potentially be lost.
00:20:53So the dollars generally would come to me in suitcases, duffel bags, boxes.
00:20:59New York was a key point.
00:21:00You get a million, two million dollars per delivery.
00:21:04I generally had runners who picked it up and brought it.
00:21:08You don't usually get the guy who really controls the safe on the street.
00:21:16The way it works is we get the information from Gonzalo Mora.
00:21:20So he might give us a phone number in the form of an invoice number.
00:21:26He might say that, you know, you need to get in touch with Guapo.
00:21:31And he's going to have 250 boxes.
00:21:34It's 250,000.
00:21:36They generally like to meet in a public area.
00:21:38So it might be at a McDonald's.
00:21:40They sit down.
00:21:41Not much gets said.
00:21:43Pushes the keys across the table.
00:21:46It's in the trunk.
00:21:47Amir goes and gets the money.
00:21:49It's usually wrapped in rubber bands in blocks of 5,000 and 10,000, depending upon denominations.
00:21:55You know, a lot of people say, wow, isn't it tempting?
00:21:58You know, you've got all these millions and millions of dollars and it's in cash.
00:22:01There's unfortunately been people in just about every agency that has fallen victim to a slippery slope of greed.
00:22:09My motivation was information became my heroin.
00:22:13If I couldn't get the next big piece of information and I couldn't risk more than I did to get the last piece of information,
00:22:22I felt as though I wasn't accomplishing my mission.
00:22:25Yeah, I was addicted, but I was addicted to information.
00:22:34Layering is a process by which a series of corporations, usually offshore entities,
00:22:41are used to continue to receive what initially started off maybe as a suitcase full of cash.
00:22:48The way we layered, the money would first be put into a certificate of deposit in Luxembourg in the name of an offshore entity.
00:22:57That money was used by the bank as collateral for a loan in a different part of the world.
00:23:02So let's say the loan was in Paris and that was to a Gibraltar corporation.
00:23:06And then that Gibraltar corporation would transfer the funds to Panama.
00:23:10And then from there to accounts controlled by the drug traffickers.
00:23:14And so the purpose that you use layering for is to just confuse the route in which the money is being moved.
00:23:21In order for anyone to trace the money backward, you have to first pierce the corporate veil in Panama and bank secrecy laws.
00:23:30Then you have to pierce the same in France.
00:23:34Then you have to pierce the same in Luxembourg.
00:23:39You know, a lot of times what they do, if they don't want to deal with a person like me, they will use an army of couriers.
00:23:46Call them smurfs, the little blue guys, smurfs running all over.
00:23:49We kind of dubbed them smurfs because let's say there's 10 of them.
00:23:52Their job every day is to go to meet with their money contact.
00:23:57And that guy may have $500,000 in the trunk.
00:24:01And each of them gets $50,000 and a map that tells them where it is locally they can go to use cash to buy money grams, cashiers checks, money orders, travelers checks.
00:24:15They'll buy a money order for $987.25.
00:24:20Try to make it look like it's for a payment.
00:24:22Leave the payee blank.
00:24:23They generally don't want to buy anything over $3,000.
00:24:26So at the end of the day, $500,000 that filled the trunk was now a stack of maybe eight inches high of money orders, travelers checks.
00:24:37There were times when those were offered to me to then take it from there and launder it.
00:24:43That was safety for them because we were not having direct contact with their main money people.
00:24:49We were just getting a FedEx box with $500,000 in money orders.
00:24:56I think the biggest deposit was somewhere around $2.1 million.
00:25:08There was a time that I met in Paris with Pablo Escobar's main lawyer, a guy by the name of Santiago Uribe, and some other people that worked directly with Pablo.
00:25:19He sent Uribe to assess our money laundering processes.
00:25:25At the end of that meeting, we came to an agreement.
00:25:28We would receive in a relatively short period of time $100 million that they wanted to put into a nest egg in Europe in case they had to flee.
00:25:38So when we get back from Europe, we started getting deliveries, a million in the morning, two million in the afternoon.
00:25:45I had told the people who were doing surveillance that they needed to be really careful.
00:25:50We needed to try to keep it as light as we could because they would have counter surveillance out there.
00:25:55One of the people who I dealt with, the person who met with Pablo Escobar, often told me,
00:26:00make sure your people look on the street for gringos, white guys, who were in their late 20s, early 30s, in good shape, wearing jeans, pullover shirts with collars, solid color, jogging shoes, fanny packs.
00:26:13That's where their guns are hidden.
00:26:15Those are los feos, the ugly ones.
00:26:17That's informally what people in the cartel called the feds.
00:26:21So I never used to want to go into an office, but this was getting very important.
00:26:26So I met with the people who were going to do the surveillance, and there was a room full of gringos with jeans, pullover shirts that were solid with collars, and they had fanny packs.
00:26:35And I tried to convince them that that was a uniform that everybody was looking for.
00:26:39But egos are such in law enforcement that sometimes people don't want to take that advice.
00:26:46So anyway, the surveillance got burned.
00:26:49And the next thing that happened is that my partner, Emir Breu, received a phone call from Gonzalo Mora.
00:26:56And in the background was a screaming voice of Gerardo Moncada, Pablo Escobar's main manager, who was screaming that Mucela, I, had to be a DEA undercover agent.
00:27:09Because they saw all the feds there and all deals from here on were off.
00:27:14And I had to talk myself out of that.
00:27:16I guess the point is that there are a lot of different moving parts to these undercover operations.
00:27:22And it's pretty easy for any one of us to do something that might potentially endanger somebody else on the team.
00:27:29All of the traffickers said to me, you know, I love your money laundering system, but the end payout is U.S. dollar checks from accounts that are in the United States.
00:27:43We want you to open up U.S. dollar accounts in Panama.
00:27:46Panama uses the U.S. dollar more than it does its own currency.
00:27:50They know that secrecy is big in Panama.
00:27:54By corporations, by banks, it's harder for DEA to get the information concerning the accounts.
00:27:59But what they told me also was, listen, we want your accounts in Panama because we own General Manuel Noriega.
00:28:05And he will not touch any of your accounts because you're with us.
00:28:09So now I have to open up an account in Panama.
00:28:11I happened to be driving past a branch in Tampa of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the seventh largest privately held bank in the world.
00:28:18It was a big gold sign.
00:28:20I would have never walked in there if it wasn't for that.
00:28:22And they said, well, we'll give you a meeting if you can give us a resume.
00:28:26I had a fully verifiable resume and I had bank accounts with millions of dollars in it.
00:28:31All of which the bank in particular wanted to see before they opened up to me and explained to me how they laundered money for many people in organized crime.
00:28:42And I said to him, all of my clients are from Medellin, Colombia.
00:28:46They operate businesses here in the States that are very sensitive.
00:28:51And it's my job to very cautiously help them to move capital across borders.
00:28:58He goes, well, that's the black money market.
00:29:00We have plenty of customers who deal in that business.
00:29:02He said, you know, yeah, Panama is where you want to be.
00:29:05There's a lot of hands in which these checks go through and sometimes mistakes can be made.
00:29:11And in fact, that's the way I got really inside the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
00:29:16That got me into the inner circle of dirty officers in BCCI.
00:29:20And then I went on to meet more than a dozen of them.
00:29:22The number one person who managed my accounts, a gentleman by the name of Amjad Awan.
00:29:27He managed accounts for people who ran countries for Manuel Noriega.
00:29:32He helped launder Noriega's drug profits from the protection he sold to the Medellin cartel.
00:29:37And during that time, we recorded about 1,200 conversations,
00:29:40all of which were used as the cornerstones of the prosecution of not just drug traffickers and money launderers,
00:29:47but senior officials of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
00:29:50I needed to coast the conversations into the areas where I was exposing their true intent, their involvement in criminality.
00:29:58I couldn't allow them to dance around issues.
00:30:01You have to try to get a way to have the conversation.
00:30:04So one of the things that I used during that time frame,
00:30:07one of the most famous businessmen at the time in the late 80s was a guy by the name of Lee Iacocca.
00:30:11He ran Chrysler. Everybody knew who he was.
00:30:14And so when I would talk to people, especially at the bank, I would say,
00:30:17you know, if my clients came in this room, you might mistake them as being Lee Iacocca.
00:30:22The big difference is they don't sell cars. They sell coke.
00:30:26I dealt with dirty bankers. I dealt with lawyers in Switzerland who formed corporations to hide the source of our funds.
00:30:41I dealt with attorneys in Panama, people who ran financial service corporations
00:30:45that do nothing other than form tens of thousands of corporations for people all over the world.
00:30:51They provide nominee directors that hide the beneficial ownership of accounts and the control of corporations.
00:30:58All of these people are intermediaries who the underworld counts on.
00:31:05There were other people, real money launderers at that time,
00:31:09who were sending what they claimed to be precious metals in and out of the United States,
00:31:14which actually was lead that was covered by gold.
00:31:16And that was their cover for why they were depositing cash and were not bashful about it,
00:31:21talking to the bank and saying, you know, this is a cash generating business.
00:31:24You know, if you have enough that's believable,
00:31:27it's amazing how quickly they'll convince themselves that you are who you say you are.
00:31:32June of 1988, I was told that it would be the first week of October that the operation would be taken down.
00:31:48I've got two years worth of work to do and I got to get it done in about three months.
00:31:52You know, so many times these undercover operations result in indictments.
00:31:57But the bad guys, they're in countries that do not offer extradition.
00:32:02Columbia was one. Someone suggested, well, why don't we have some kind of a personal event?
00:32:09One of the agents said, you know, well, they obviously appear to like Bob. How about a wedding?
00:32:16So we put this together for a supposed wedding in Innisbrook, which is a country club.
00:32:22This got personal. You know, in some instances, children of future defendants were part of the wedding, wives.
00:32:29And the night before, one of my informants went around to the defendants and said, hey, Bob doesn't know this.
00:32:37We're going to have a bachelor party. The cars will be here soon. The arrest team's there.
00:32:41They arrest them. Everybody was in disbelief.
00:32:43And the case concluded with the arrest of about 85 individuals,
00:32:47the collection of fines and forfeitures of about $600 million and the seizure of about 3,000 pounds of cocaine.
00:32:54Ultimately, the bank imploded on the night of the arrests.
00:32:58You know, it was all high fives. They wanted to go out and have a celebratory gathering.
00:33:04I wanted nothing to do with that whatsoever. I was emotionally exhausted.
00:33:09I first learned about the contract on my life about 30 days after the undercover operation.
00:33:23Operation Sea Chase was over. The longest trial lasted six months.
00:33:28I was on the witness stand. I could see the hatred in their eyes even more so.
00:33:34And the eyes of their family members who were there, no doubt.
00:33:38You know, they didn't see me as a person who was just doing their job.
00:33:41They saw me as a person who tricked them.
00:33:44But I never tricked anybody into doing anything other than trusting me.
00:33:49Nobody in there did anything that they hadn't done before.
00:33:53After I testified, my family and I rented a motorhome.
00:33:57We went into the mountains, got away from everybody, and tried to heal.
00:34:03There was a pager number, an 800 number, that the office could call and leave me a message, and occasionally I would check.
00:34:10And I got word that the jury had convicted every single person of virtually all accounts.
00:34:16I went back to the campsite by a river and just sat there thinking about it.
00:34:22And it occurred to me that it was so surreal that I had done the same things that the bankers had done,
00:34:30and I was getting awards, and they were about to go to jail for a long time.
00:34:34And I don't take what I did lightly. Some people think it's a sign of weakness.
00:34:39You know, I did drop a tear or two that day.
00:34:42I kind of think that was good, because I want a government with conscience.
00:34:47I don't want people high-fiving.
00:34:52It's unfortunate, but the law enforcement community and the private sector responsible for trying to attack money laundering have been highly unsuccessful.
00:35:08The United Nations on Drugs and Crime estimates that roughly $400 billion is generated each year from the sale of illegal drugs.
00:35:16What I really do believe needs to be done, you have to understand there are two different sides of banking.
00:35:21There's the sales side and the compliance side.
00:35:23Sales side brings in the accounts.
00:35:26Compliance, in an unhealthy bank, does the background to make sure they're not dealing with a bad guy.
00:35:33That needs to be brought together.
00:35:35I'm suggesting it only on accounts that have $5 million or more that have been received in a year.
00:35:42I think that the account relationship manager that brought the account in should have to file with the bank a sworn statement,
00:35:50affirming that they've asked certain questions, questions that if you ask them would expose whether or not it is an account that's being run by front people.
00:36:02Those questions don't get asked, and they don't get asked now because the sales side always tells the compliance side,
00:36:07if I ask those questions, we won't get this business, because they don't want to answer those questions.
00:36:12We have a joint terrorism task force run by the FBI, but it's also participated in by I don't know how many hundred agencies.
00:36:20There should be a joint money laundering task force that does the exact same thing.
00:36:26There has been an evolution of cryptocurrency.
00:36:29There are people who've been involved in the drug world who have used cryptocurrency.
00:36:33Unlike cash, you can follow crypto.
00:36:36The other problem you have with crypto is you only need to look at Bitcoin and see that unlike the US dollar, its value is not stable.
00:36:43I don't think it's really ready for the big time in the drug world.
00:36:47What is big, gold refining in the Middle East, Dubai, that's big.
00:36:52I retired from undercover work after the second operation when I almost got killed, and that was in the late 90s.
00:37:01I'm extraordinarily grateful to have the platform from which I get the opportunity to speak,
00:37:06and that platform is first a book called The Infiltrator that became a New York Times bestseller,
00:37:12and the basis for a film by the same name starring Bryan Cranston,
00:37:15and then subsequently a book I wrote this past year came out called The Betrayal,
00:37:20a nonfiction book about the second undercover operation that I did.
00:37:24But as long as I've got that platform, I'm going to do everything I can to try to share information
00:37:29that can in some way try to help us with the problem we face with this massive illegal drug problem in our country and around the world.
00:37:39My name's Ed Calderon. I'm a former Baja police agent.
00:37:43I currently work as a security consultant in the United States.
00:37:46This is how crime works.
00:37:49Gun smuggling has armed the people that killed a lot of the people that I used to work with.
00:37:55A lot of these groups are actually stockpiling these firearms for long periods of time.
00:37:59It's hard for anybody to keep track of numbers and what gets found and what doesn't get found in a country
00:38:04that realistically nobody's keeping count.
00:38:13I think the flow is this.
00:38:15Drugs make their way north, and firearms and money make their way south.
00:38:20Seventy percent of all firearms come from the north, from the United States.
00:38:24Operación Hormiga, they call it Operation Ant, basically.
00:38:28Individuals carrying these small pistols across the border is a very common thing.
00:38:33So how many times can they cross the border?
00:38:35Well, if they're Americans, there's no limit to how many times they can cross that border.
00:38:39It's a pretty easy process to grabbing an AK-47, taking it apart into its basic components,
00:38:45putting it in a backpack, and just walking across some of the ports of entry.
00:38:49Another one is just basically having some of these firearms duct-taped
00:38:53and or shrink-wrapped onto your person.
00:38:56So let's imagine I have five mules.
00:38:59Each of them is capable of carrying around probably two guns on their legs,
00:39:03duct-taped to their legs, maybe two more higher up on their thighs, and maybe two on their chest.
00:39:08You just multiply that by the amount of people you have doing that on a daily basis,
00:39:12filling their pockets with ammunition, filling cornflakes boxes with ammunition as well.
00:39:19Tijuana is basically Silicon Valley when it comes to finding ways of smuggling things
00:39:24through one of the most watched borders on the planet, basically.
00:39:28There's body shops. There's places that install radios.
00:39:31There's a bunch of people with a lot of experience in modifying vehicles down there.
00:39:34These businesses have been known to basically construct
00:39:37some of these concealment compartments in vehicles.
00:39:40Many occasions we would encounter or find firearms of different kinds
00:39:44in different vehicle hides in and around some of the places where we operated.
00:39:49Things like pushing the volume knob on the radio and then pulling the brake on the car
00:39:55will release a latch on the passenger side seat, revealing a concealed firearm.
00:40:02American vehicles are the preferred kind.
00:40:05You'll see recreational vehicles utilizing festive days where, you know, spring break,
00:40:13where you'll see a surge of traffic going from the north to the south.
00:40:18A lot of the smuggling operations that have utilized concealment
00:40:22related to regular commercial shipments from the United States into Mexico
00:40:27of agricultural equipment, electrical appliances.
00:40:31A lot of these companies are basically utilized as fronts,
00:40:33and or without knowledge of these companies, they get loaded up with extra stuff
00:40:38on their way towards the border as they pick up a load somewhere in the United States
00:40:42and try and introduce it into Mexico.
00:40:45Another aspect of it is tunnels, drug tunnels.
00:40:48Again, firearms do get moved through those drug tunnels
00:40:51that have been operating and are still operating.
00:40:53Some of the most interesting ones that we managed to see was French-style trebuchets,
00:40:58which are basically giant catapults flinging things across the border at some ungodly speeds.
00:41:05Drone technology.
00:41:06The first crashed cartel drone that I directly saw was a large quad drone
00:41:13that crashed right on the border where the Tijuana River treatment plant is.
00:41:19We saw remote control vehicles, small ones, toy ones basically,
00:41:26loaded up with firearms, munitions, and money being driven across the border by radio control.
00:41:38This is not my opinion, but the Border Patrol is one of the most corrupted
00:41:43federal institutions in the United States.
00:41:45There's been many cases and convictions against them,
00:41:48and these gunrunners have people everywhere
00:41:51and own people in some of these ports of entry
00:41:55to pay corrupted officials across the border.
00:41:58It is interesting that you do not get searched at all at times crossing into Mexico,
00:42:04but if you cross into San Diego, your vehicle gets scanned,
00:42:07you have to step out of the car,
00:42:09sometimes you have to take off your backpack and put it into an x-ray machine so it gets x-rayed.
00:42:14Density scanners might be utilized to try and detect some of the firearms going across the border,
00:42:19but those x-rays are used sporadically.
00:42:23Every now and then you'll get one get used, and it's rare that they find something.
00:42:27There's explosive detection dogs that are out there that are trained to detect explosives,
00:42:32munitions, for example.
00:42:34But again, you have to realize to not only create a dog canine program
00:42:38that is able to detect some of these things,
00:42:40but to maintain them is not an easy thing.
00:42:43In my experience, most of the arrests that we made were pitazos.
00:42:48A pitazo is a Mexican slang word for somebody told on them.
00:42:53Usually it's a personal thing, or usually it's somebody just eliminating competition.
00:42:57Those vehicle hides, a lot of these gunrunners that have been caught in the past
00:43:02were random acts of pure luck,
00:43:06or somebody trying to cut the competition out.
00:43:1120-year-olds, 18-year-olds that have a clean record
00:43:15get hired to buy some of these guns in some of these places,
00:43:18and then they get gathered by the gunrunners.
00:43:21Somebody that has a vehicle, who's a retiree American
00:43:25that crosses the border regularly somehow,
00:43:28maybe goes camping in Baja and stuff like that,
00:43:30it's a perfect candidate to be a mule for firearms.
00:43:33And you load a bunch of cars with people that have a clean record,
00:43:38you load a bunch of cars with people that are not who you typically expect to stop at the border.
00:43:43So they basically utilize people camouflage.
00:43:48What do people expect to see on the border as far as a drug smuggler?
00:43:53So they're going to shy away from that.
00:43:55Women get utilized a lot to move things around.
00:43:59Older women, because of the cultural stigma of Mexican police agents
00:44:04as far as trying to physically search a female,
00:44:07much less a female that is older in age.
00:44:10Social media is a very big part of it.
00:44:12Not only the advertisement of some of these things being sold in some places,
00:44:16but also recruitment of small purchase buyers on the U.S. side.
00:44:21Cartels will troll places like TikTok,
00:44:25will have social media accounts related to one of their members
00:44:29or showcasing some of their activities online.
00:44:32And you'll see wannabes or people sending DMs and stuff like that on the U.S. side.
00:44:37Kids that want to be a part of the lifestyle.
00:44:39It's easy money for a kid, you know.
00:44:42The economy, the lack of opportunities for a lot of these young people.
00:44:46Even with education down there, it's hard to find a job.
00:44:49I was approached several times when I was going through my process of turning into a police officer.
00:44:54And it only takes you doing something for a criminal organization
00:44:58like any of these cartels that operate on that border.
00:45:01It only takes once for them to know your name, to know how to contact you,
00:45:05to know that you are able to provide a service once.
00:45:09And the first time, it's voluntary.
00:45:11The second time, they're going to tell you to do something.
00:45:20The person buying that gun and then handing it to somebody is going to then traffic it down south.
00:45:25He got probably $200, so that's the first payment.
00:45:30And then that gun is now going to be probably doubled down south,
00:45:35or maybe 80% more of the value is going to be added on to it.
00:45:40So you have something that might be worth $800 is now worth $1,500 down there
00:45:45in the hands of somebody that wants that specific gun.
00:45:49The further south you go, the more expensive the firearm.
00:45:52That's kind of the rules about it.
00:45:54The closer you are to the border, the cheaper it is.
00:45:56The gun runner might have connections, and he might have paid somebody off.
00:46:00Usually if it's a large shipment, he'll have security with him as soon as he crosses.
00:46:05By this I mean people that are watching the load and move with him.
00:46:10Some of these people might drive it to a body shop,
00:46:13or they might drive it to one of these beach resorts where you can park your camper there,
00:46:19and that is when the deal happens.
00:46:21That could be where some money gets exchanged.
00:46:23It could have gotten exchanged on the northern side,
00:46:27but that's when the guns become property of whoever is going to get them.
00:46:32I've seen some of the gun runners put guns into places like Tecate,
00:46:37which is to the east in the desert,
00:46:40and basically in traditional places where they can avoid military checkpoints if they can.
00:46:44Or sometimes they don't even care because they actually paid off some of the military as well.
00:46:48It is not an easy process to procure a legal firearm in Mexico.
00:46:52Mexico has a single blanket firearms law.
00:46:55There's a single firearms store in Mexico,
00:46:58and if anybody wants a firearm legally in Mexico,
00:47:02you have to be able to pay for a bunch of documentations,
00:47:05and you usually end up with an overpriced pistol
00:47:08and not a lot of ways to buy bullets for that pistol unless you belong to a shooting club.
00:47:13And if you belong to a shooting club in Mexico, that's a very expensive thing.
00:47:17So in essence, legal possession of firearms is something that upper-middle class people can afford.
00:47:26So people are desperate, and if they want security,
00:47:30usually in Mexico as a civilian, you'll go into the black market.
00:47:39Most of the gun-friendly places on the border are usually where these things are purchased.
00:47:44Texas, Arizona, sometimes even further north,
00:47:48where person-to-person sales and private sales are more permitted,
00:47:51where gun shows are pretty prevalent.
00:47:53Somebody will walk into a gun store and buy and purchase a couple of firearms,
00:47:57and some of these things get moved from a permissive
00:48:01or a place where firearm laws are pretty open to places like California.
00:48:07And the reason you see that is because they're actually being utilized to pay drug loads sometimes.
00:48:13We also have a lot of people ordering some of these firearm parts through the mail now,
00:48:18which is a new method of smuggling as well.
00:48:21People will buy some of these things in the United States
00:48:24and then mail them down to Mexico under false labels and declarations
00:48:28as far as what's inside of those boxes for accessories for firearms
00:48:31and being gathered in a private home, packaged and labeled falsely,
00:48:35and then sent south through packaging services.
00:48:39There are many cases of things being taken off military bases in California.
00:48:43For example, grenades that are clearly coming from military installations in the United States
00:48:49and are taken from military bases by corrupted soldiers.
00:48:54Every now and then you'll see bigger caliber equipment down there.
00:49:01The truth is those account for about 70% of illegal firearms found in Mexico
00:49:05in the hands of cartels and murder scenes and the heads of dead sicarios.
00:49:10The truth is that it's probably more than that.
00:49:12They assassinate political candidates.
00:49:15They use explosives, terror tactics, psychological tactics.
00:49:19They capture imprisoned people.
00:49:23Right now, currently, there's the Sinaloa cartel that's historically been dominating the border
00:49:29and a big part of Mexico.
00:49:31But now there's a new generation cartel, which is a very new, ultra-violent, militarized,
00:49:37almost guerrilla force that has taken over.
00:49:39And with groups like these, they have very specific firearms that they want to buy.
00:49:44So they're not only looking for a gold-plated AK-47 anymore.
00:49:47They're actually looking for night vision equipment to install on their firearms.
00:49:51They're looking for suppressors to put on a .50-caliber precision rifle that they procure.
00:49:57There's these commercial gun manufacturers making a very cool, aesthetically cartel-like pistol.
00:50:03It's obvious if you have a gun company creating a gold gun for a civilian market
00:50:08that they're trying to tap into a fascination or a culture that is currently kind of being fostered,
00:50:15a narco culture.
00:50:16Narco cultura or narco culture is something that's been going on in Mexico for decades.
00:50:20The fascination or the treatment of some of these criminal organizations
00:50:24as almost a Robin Hood-type character, where they're robbing from the rich and stealing from the poor.
00:50:36I can't tell you that making guns impossible to get or restricted or illegal,
00:50:44something like you would see in Australia, would be a solution to anything,
00:50:48because guns are already out there.
00:50:50There's a lot of people that want to blame the United States for everything.
00:50:53I think they clearly have a responsibility when it comes to some of the firearms crossing that border.
00:50:59You have the United States basically outsourcing its counter-drug policy
00:51:06and counter-cartel policy to Mexico through money.
00:51:11The United States, I would say, should do a better job of keeping track of what that money is being used for in Mexico.
00:51:20Some of the arrests that have been made recently by American law enforcement
00:51:24sharing some of their information with Mexico, like sights, lasers, things of this nature,
00:51:30for accessories for firearms, basically.
00:51:32This is what's been, every now and then, gets caught.
00:51:35But again, it's a drop in the bucket with what actually gets through.
00:51:38When we saw some of this activity, who do we tell?
00:51:41Do we tell the same law enforcement agencies that didn't let us know about all those guns walking across that border
00:51:48that ended up killing a bunch of my friends?
00:51:50It was my experience to actually find some of these Fast and the Furious guns during my time active
00:51:58in the form of some FN-57 pistols that were used on some of my friends that I used to work with.
00:52:04This was an ATF operation.
00:52:06The ATF would approach places of gun sales and keep an eye out for certain types of purchases of firearms.
00:52:14The ATF wanted to let these guns walk so they can track them down to Mexico
00:52:18to see if they can somehow make a case for something bigger.
00:52:21But realistically, all they did was let almost 2,000 guns walk across the border.
00:52:26Most Mexicans saw that as a major, not only betrayal by the United States,
00:52:31but also a bunch of conspiracy theories started popping up of, you know,
00:52:36why would you introduce so many firearms into Mexico?
00:52:40The anti-American sentiment in Mexico is at an all-time high, and it's been growing.
00:52:45I think as a Mexican, somebody who was actually born down there
00:52:48and experienced some of the violence that some of these firearms helped foster down there,
00:52:53I think the biggest misconception about gun smuggling is that these guns,
00:52:59these guns have somehow, there's a lot of effort being put forth by the Mexican government
00:53:05to stop these guns from coming down to Mexico.
00:53:07The straw purchasers up here get a slap on the wrist.
00:53:10I think, yeah, some of those penalties should be steeper.
00:53:12The Mexican government, through Marcelo Ebrard,
00:53:15has basically sued a lot of the major American manufacturers, gun manufacturers.
00:53:21The only group legally allowed to sell firearms in Mexico was the military.
00:53:26So it's interesting that the Mexican government did a lawsuit against American gun manufacturers,
00:53:34but they didn't mention in that lawsuit the people that they buy their firearms from.
00:53:40Mexico has a very big problem with corruption,
00:53:43and it has attempted many times to curtail this corruption
00:53:47by developing whole organizations to try and keep police honest.
00:53:52I was put through FBI background checks.
00:53:54I did polygraph testing every year.
00:53:57But even with all of those safety precautions, people flipped.
00:54:02And when they left, they didn't hand over their rifles or their guns sometimes,
00:54:06so they would take them with them.
00:54:13I was a Baja police agent for about 12 years.
00:54:17I did that job until it was time to leave.
00:54:23The corruption levels in the institution that I was in became completely unsustainable,
00:54:28and anybody that wanted to actually do their job and be honest about it
00:54:32was not in fashion or in vogue at that time.
00:54:35I had to leave my job in a hurry.
00:54:37There's no retirement, no severance package.
00:54:39It's a pretty hard job to do.
00:54:41It's a thankless one.
00:54:42But there's a lot of people that are in that fight,
00:54:45a lot of people that are honest,
00:54:47a lot of people that never took a dime.
00:54:49I somehow made it out alive of that system.
00:54:51After concluding my 12 years of service down there,
00:54:54I came to the United States,
00:54:56and utilizing some of the experience and know-how that I got from that experience down south,
00:55:01I've now become a subject matter expert.
00:55:04I do training for civilians, private companies, and the government across the country.
00:55:08Specifically, gun smuggling has armed the people
00:55:11that killed a lot of the people that I used to work with.
00:55:13It definitely has had an effect, not just on me, but on most of my generation.
00:55:18I want to give a voice to the countless people down there
00:55:21that went through some of the experiences that I went through,
00:55:24some of the widows left behind,
00:55:27some of the orphans left behind by some of the conflicts that went on down there.
00:55:32I'm trying to keep that memory and that voice alive for them.
00:55:35My name is Brian Sobolewski.
00:55:37I'm a former diamond thief,
00:55:39and I stole $2.3 million worth of gold and jewelry throughout New England.
00:55:43And this is how crime works.
00:55:46I would compare the jewelry business to the drug business
00:55:49in terms of how shady it is.
00:55:51You're never getting the diamond they tell you is there.
00:55:54You're probably buying junk most of the time.
00:55:57The markup is somewhere between 5% to 800%
00:56:02when you walk into a store to try to buy a diamond.
00:56:06I was 20 when this started, 25 when I was arrested.
00:56:10So it was a five-year spam.
00:56:12So you had my dad, who was the mastermind.
00:56:14My brother, he was the muscle.
00:56:16I was usually the driver.
00:56:18I was usually the lookout.
00:56:20We had an inside guy. Bill was a friend of my dad's.
00:56:23So he would basically feed us who was a good person to go after.
00:56:26If we were going into a store, he would tell us where the safe is,
00:56:29what the safe is, what the safe is,
00:56:31what the safe is, what the safe is,
00:56:33or he would tell us where the safe is, what time the safe opened up,
00:56:36what time the guy would be there.
00:56:38He himself was a traveling salesman.
00:56:40That's how he knew everybody.
00:56:42We used Bill to place an order if it was a store,
00:56:44just so we knew that that product would be in the store
00:56:47and we'd have a certain amount that we'd be able to get from the store.
00:56:50The landscape at the time was you had a lot of mom-and-pop jewelry stores.
00:56:55You didn't have a whole lot of chains.
00:56:57There was K-Jewelers. There were a couple of major chains.
00:57:00But most of them were independent,
00:57:02and they had traveling salesmen with their product line in their car,
00:57:05and they would travel to these stores and try to sell to them.
00:57:08We tried to hit anybody that had claimed false insurance or false robberies prior.
00:57:13We never went after anybody clean.
00:57:15And that's very hard to find in the jewelry business.
00:57:18You'd be surprised how many of these guys are reporting fake robberies
00:57:22and taking the insurance money.
00:57:25Casing a job is maddening, but it's super, super, super important.
00:57:30It's about recognizing traffic.
00:57:32What time a patrol car might go by.
00:57:35All of this stuff fed into what time of day we would do a job.
00:57:39Usually during the day.
00:57:41We didn't mind crowds.
00:57:43Crowds could sometimes help you.
00:57:45People being interested in what's going on there.
00:57:48So for Seabrook, for the Woody job,
00:57:51So for Seabrook, for the Woody job,
00:57:54it was basically what time does he come to work,
00:57:57where does he pull his car up.
00:57:59The Raynham robbery, my brother and I went into a Puppa Geno's right next door,
00:58:03grabbed a slice, and then went back in the car and ate it,
00:58:06and everyone from Puppa Geno's remembered us.
00:58:08Every single person.
00:58:09So that's one of the things about casing.
00:58:11You've got to notice, but you can't be noticed.
00:58:14Noticing.
00:58:15So the cars that we used were never ours.
00:58:17We would go back at night, take the car,
00:58:20we'd go into a mall parking lot,
00:58:21I would unscrew somebody's license plate,
00:58:23we would put that on the car,
00:58:24we would use the car,
00:58:26my dad would bring it back the next night.
00:58:28He would just leave it back on the lot.
00:58:30You could never prepare for every eventuality.
00:58:34There would be no scenario that we could practice and go through
00:58:37that wouldn't eventually present some issue that we would have to overcome.
00:58:42I would go in as a customer based on being as average as possible,
00:58:46but I didn't like it either.
00:58:48It was nerve-wracking.
00:58:49Having a duffel bag with rope, bolt cutters,
00:58:52just in case we had to cut a lock that we didn't have a key for.
00:58:55My dad would go in with his girlfriend.
00:58:57It sounds so sexist, but we needed to have a female.
00:59:01Most of the traveling salesmen that we were going after were males,
00:59:05so it wasn't necessarily about how many women we were going after,
00:59:08we were going after were males,
00:59:09so it wasn't necessarily about how many bodies we needed,
00:59:12it was more about what gender it was.
00:59:14One of the things that we had to do was make sure that we could get into the safe.
00:59:19We knew that if the insurance company protocol for you having loose diamonds
00:59:24and being able to sell them and have them insure them,
00:59:27is that every single time you go to that safe to bring a diamond out,
00:59:30that safe gets re-locked.
00:59:32But my dad did it in a way that he kept sending the guy back and forth from the safe
00:59:37that eventually the guy would just leave the safe open,
00:59:39and most people didn't follow the protocol to the letter.
00:59:42So once we knew the safe was open, that's when we would take down the store.
00:59:45It was 90 seconds at the beginning of the robbery.
00:59:49So when my dad and his girlfriend go in there and start talking,
00:59:51that's not the 90 seconds.
00:59:53It's 90 seconds from when Kev comes in and the guy's subdued.
00:59:56That's when we hit the clock.
00:59:57And that 90 seconds is done.
00:59:59I don't know what you have in your pockets, but we gotta go.
01:00:01So there were times we left a case behind.
01:00:03We didn't take everything.
01:00:05The 90-second rule came from bank robbers.
01:00:08They tell you that you cannot spend 90 seconds in a bank
01:00:12because if you go for the vault, it's going to be more than 90 seconds and you're dead.
01:00:16Everything was based on Kev.
01:00:18He could subdue a victim.
01:00:20It was either cuffs or duct tape or sometimes just standing over him with a gun.
01:00:24So my brother would jump over the case, grab him, and put him down.
01:00:27Say, just keep your mouth shut. We'll be out of here in a couple seconds.
01:00:30Nobody's going to get hurt.
01:00:31My dad went after the safe. I went after the cases.
01:00:34And there was a time we encountered a safe that when we opened,
01:00:37it didn't have what we thought was in it.
01:00:39And my dad just wasn't convinced.
01:00:41And he started fooling around with the bottom of the safe.
01:00:43And he pressed it and it popped up and everything was inside.
01:00:47The bottom was hollowed out.
01:00:49So I'd always have a ball-peen hammer.
01:00:51And those cases are not easy to break
01:00:54because they all have a layer of plastic in the middle.
01:00:56When you hit it, just a hole.
01:00:59You have to keep smashing and eventually push down this whole piece of cracked glass.
01:01:03And then it makes the items very difficult to get to.
01:01:06So that's why some of these cases, even the jewelry store windows,
01:01:09they were peopled in the 80s that would smash and grab through the window.
01:01:12My dad had rules.
01:01:14We tried not to hurt anybody.
01:01:16In the scenario that we were going into a store that wasn't ours
01:01:20and we were looking to rob a traveling salesman,
01:01:23we would stage it so that when the guns were pulled out,
01:01:26they were only pointed at the victim.
01:01:29So we purposely didn't point them at the store owner
01:01:32so that the victim would say, hey, is he in on it?
01:01:35And that's exactly what happened.
01:01:43There was a plan that my dad had and wanted to hatch
01:01:46that we would go in and actually take down as many stores as we could
01:01:49in the jeweler's building in Boston.
01:01:51There was an actual building with five or six floors full of jewelers.
01:01:55It was something that we squashed
01:01:57because the front desk guy was a police officer.
01:02:00We never had to deal with any security guards
01:02:02because at the time, there weren't many jewelry stores
01:02:05that required an armed guard to be there.
01:02:07The only one was the Double Doors, and we didn't even go in.
01:02:10And you'll notice that about most street-level jewelry stores
01:02:13is there's a foyer, and you cannot hold both doors open together at the same time.
01:02:18You'd have to go through one, take a number of steps before you get to the next one,
01:02:22and that's because they can lock that foyer.
01:02:25And at that point, we're like, nope, most of these stores buzz you in.
01:02:29I can't get into a jewelry store now without being buzzed in.
01:02:32They don't use a high-tech security system during the day
01:02:35because you have foot traffic.
01:02:36And that stuff, you know, are you talking about laser beams
01:02:39that are tripped once you go past them?
01:02:41Well, you can't use that during the day.
01:02:43There are alarmed cases now, but again,
01:02:46you have to consider who's responding to the alarm.
01:02:48When's the last time you did anything about a car alarm?
01:02:52If during the day, during business hours, an alarm is going off,
01:02:55I think for a good couple of minutes,
01:02:57most people are going to think it's a fluke and wait for it to shut off.
01:03:00Most people's first instinct isn't to call the police when they hear that.
01:03:03So now you have a live armed guard in a store now.
01:03:07I think the Pink Panther breaking and entering style jewelry store robbery
01:03:11went away when security systems didn't have to be connected to your phone.
01:03:15So once a silent alarm can, once it's tripped, it can contact a satellite.
01:03:19The satellite calls the cops.
01:03:21You can't stop that unless you find a way to cut the electricity to that entire structure.
01:03:26And even then, they have backup systems.
01:03:28So yes, if the power does go out, that security system is still going to work.
01:03:37If we left in the stolen car, we would meet the Bronco,
01:03:40we would throw everything in the back, and I would go home.
01:03:42That's when I had the opportunity to start going through the stuff.
01:03:45We had to keep the stuff in the house.
01:03:47So we would have $500 to $1 million worth of jewelry, retail.
01:03:52Wholesale, that's probably about $100 grand worth of stuff.
01:03:55My dad would separate it into here are the necklaces, here are the bracelets,
01:03:59here are the rings, here are the uncut gems, here are the cut gems, here are the set gems.
01:04:04From there, it's just putting them into packages that we could sell to jewelry stores.
01:04:11High end stuff is super, super, super hard to sell.
01:04:14You know, little trinkets, little chains.
01:04:16My dad made more money off these little glass jars with little beads inside.
01:04:21If it sparkles, people will buy it.
01:04:25No, there wasn't a level of preference in terms of what you were grabbing,
01:04:29but if I got five cases in front of me and one's full of diamonds and one's full of gold chain,
01:04:34I'm going for that.
01:04:36The gold chain is way easier to sell quicker than a diamond ring is.
01:04:39You don't want to deal with uncut, because then you've got to go find a place to cut them,
01:04:42and that's not easy to do.
01:04:44I would rather sell you a set stone than a loose stone,
01:04:47because more of it's done and you can charge more for it.
01:04:50You're charging for the gold, so when you go in and you buy a diamond,
01:04:52now you're paying for the diamond, you're paying for whatever the gold is in weight.
01:04:55Bill was our main dump site for a lot of the stuff.
01:04:59**** was the other person.
01:05:01He was a jeweler in Nashua.
01:05:03And this was a guy that understood that the markup is where you make your money.
01:05:07And if you buy stolen stuff, you can mark the hell out of it.
01:05:10So if you buy it at 50 cents on the dollar, you can already just charge what you normally would,
01:05:15charge a little bit more, and really, really clean up.
01:05:19**** bought a lot of our stolen stuff in bulk.
01:05:23So getting rid of jewelry in bulk, very difficult to do,
01:05:26because as soon as you have your hands on it, you're an accomplice.
01:05:29So there's a lot to it.
01:05:31So you've got to understand, after a robbery, every single pawn shop is, you know,
01:05:35the cops say, if you see any of this stuff, you call us.
01:05:39So we couldn't just go to a pawn shop and say, here, buy all this stuff.
01:05:42We put it through piecemeal.
01:05:45So it's great to have a pocket full of diamonds, but if you don't have anywhere to dump it or fence it,
01:05:50and fencing is what we call the selling of stolen goods.
01:05:54Get caught buying fenced stuff, and you're screwed.
01:05:59And that's how most people get caught in these situations.
01:06:02Jewelry party is where you just invite a bunch, it's like a Tupperware party with jewelry.
01:06:05So come in and look at our product.
01:06:08We would lay everything out on the table, display it, and people would just look at it,
01:06:12and it's cash. It's a cash business.
01:06:20A lot of diamonds are laser inscribed with serial numbers.
01:06:23You can buy fake paperwork for this stuff.
01:06:25So at the time, it was rare that anything was engraved.
01:06:28The technology wasn't there, and the technology was expensive.
01:06:31So you have now certifying bodies out there that will give you a certificate that says,
01:06:38this is the diamond you're buying, and this is how it's graded, and this is blah, blah, blah.
01:06:42But you can pay for those.
01:06:43One of the ways we used to tell was scraping glass.
01:06:45You might go into a jewelry store or a pawn shop, and they'll take a little pen,
01:06:48and they'll hit it with a little electrical current to tell if it's a real diamond.
01:06:52You're pretty much okay buying any gold, but you've got to make sure it's stamped.
01:06:56So if you have a piece of gold that's, you know, they say is 18 karat gold,
01:06:59but there's no stamp that says 18K, it probably isn't.
01:07:02Gold will not magnetize. That might be a way.
01:07:06I used to try to take some of the stolen jewelry and try to sell it for drugs,
01:07:10and they used to dip it in bleach because they say bleach reacts to the other metal that's in the gold.
01:07:15That's not true. It doesn't work.
01:07:17I'm not going to a store and buy jewelry right now because you're paying an exorbitant markup,
01:07:22and you don't know. You don't know if it's real.
01:07:25Some people are probably looking at their hand right now,
01:07:27wondering whether or not what they have in their hand is worth anything.
01:07:30But diamonds are not rare.
01:07:32A flawless diamond is rare.
01:07:34But sapphires and emeralds are way rarer, if that's even a word,
01:07:39because you just don't find them flawless very often,
01:07:43and you don't find them treated or enhanced in some way artificially.
01:07:48Most of the insurance scams that I observed were hearing secondhand
01:07:52what the person reported was stolen from their store.
01:07:55Every job that we did that Bill was able to go and talk to that person afterwards
01:08:00without knowing that Bill was the one that helped rob him,
01:08:03we heard what he said was stolen.
01:08:05And it was always double. At least double.
01:08:08These guys are taking this problem and turning it into an opportunity.
01:08:12And that's why you're paying so much for insurance.
01:08:15It's because these insurance companies are getting screwed pretty bad.
01:08:20If you're really, really good at it, you will have knowledge of
01:08:24how many police are in that city,
01:08:26which is why we never pulled a job in Nashua, New Hampshire.
01:08:29Nashua, New Hampshire had one of the best police forces at the time.
01:08:33I grew up in Boston with organized crime.
01:08:36I wasn't in it, but we all knew the Angelos ran the state.
01:08:39Ran all of the waste management, all the construction.
01:08:43An entire section of Boston,
01:08:45An entire section of Boston was devoted to strip clubs, drug dealing.
01:08:50And the second you stepped out of the combat zone and did any of that stuff,
01:08:54either an Angelo or somebody from that crew or a cop would thump you for it.
01:08:58That was the place you did it. And it ran really well.
01:09:01Bulger comes in and it just became completely disorganized.
01:09:04No way we would have robbed 22 stores while the Angelos were in power.
01:09:09They would have either come to us and asked for a piece of it,
01:09:12or they would have said these stores are protected and you can't hit them.
01:09:21When you think to yourself, how does a father get his sons involved in something like this?
01:09:25My dad lived a very different childhood than we did.
01:09:28He grew up in Chelsea, right next to Heller's bar.
01:09:31Heller's bar was a mob bar.
01:09:34Right behind Heller's was a huge dirt parking lot where frequently my dad would leave his house
01:09:39and see a tractor trailer pulled from East Boston docks,
01:09:42where the mob picked up most of their stuff.
01:09:45They would park it in the back of Heller's and that's where they would sell everything.
01:09:48And my dad saw this. So my dad followed every rule.
01:09:51He went to college. He was an upstanding member of society,
01:09:54unless there was something on the ground that wasn't tied down that he could take.
01:09:59And that was the mentality, I think, of most people in Massachusetts at the time.
01:10:02Pay your taxes. Keep the man off your back.
01:10:05But if you see an opportunity to take a little something, grab it.
01:10:08My father initially gave this guy his life savings
01:10:11to invest in importing diamonds into the country.
01:10:14This guy decided to take that money from my dad
01:10:17and then tell him that he never got the delivery.
01:10:20And my dad was in a bad place. He was in a very bad place.
01:10:23He finally asked if we would help him.
01:10:26He finally just sat down and said, here's the deal.
01:10:29You guys are going to have to come out of college. You're going to have to work full time.
01:10:32I don't have any money to pay for any of that stuff.
01:10:35Or we could go get the money back from this guy and set him up.
01:10:38And that's exactly what we did.
01:10:41And it started the beginning of 22 other robberies.
01:10:44It started as we got to save dad.
01:10:47And then my dad started presenting all the robberies to us as we're helping people.
01:10:51We're going after this guy. He's dirty.
01:10:54And this guy ripped people off. And if we stop him, he won't rip anybody.
01:10:57It was like a Robin Hood kind of thing.
01:11:00After five, you start saying, hey, we're not superheroes.
01:11:04And we're not here to save the world. What are we doing?
01:11:07And that's when things started to get very—
01:11:10my brother and I were very worried at how much further this was going to go.
01:11:15The real victims are anybody that we stole their dignity,
01:11:20their right to freedom, their right to move about the world
01:11:23without somebody tying them to a chair, and their families.
01:11:26It doesn't stop with them.
01:11:28It stops with anybody that loved that person
01:11:31and had to hear about what happened to them.
01:11:39I was arrested on December 26 of 1996.
01:11:45There was enough distinctiveness about us to separate us from anybody else doing it.
01:11:51There weren't a whole lot of crews.
01:11:53There weren't a lot of multiple people doing jobs.
01:11:55I went to rehab, and I stopped doing robberies.
01:11:57And my brother and father continued.
01:11:59They did two more, and then they did one after prison.
01:12:01But I stopped because I had sobered up,
01:12:03and I went back to school to become a drug and alcohol counselor.
01:12:05My brother was always arrested. My father was already arrested.
01:12:08They were both sitting, awaiting trial.
01:12:10And I knew they were coming for me.
01:12:13To me, prison was a lot like criminal university.
01:12:18So many inmates would go in there and be like,
01:12:20OK, what did you do? How did you get caught?
01:12:22And they leave with knowledge of how to get away with it.
01:12:25So prison can be an education in terms of,
01:12:28if you want to keep doing what you're doing,
01:12:30that's the place to go and talk to the people that got caught
01:12:32and figure out how to do it right.
01:12:34I think the hardest part of my prison sentence wasn't the jail time.
01:12:38It's the stigma.
01:12:42I couldn't get hired.
01:12:44Regret sucks, man. It really does.
01:12:46It's not easy to live with.
01:12:48It was ultimately my decision.
01:12:51I could say that I was 13 years old and wasn't capable of making those decisions,
01:12:54but I was 20.
01:12:56My father and brother passed away February 11th last year.
01:12:59My brother and I had a very difficult and complicated relationship.
01:13:03We very rarely got along.
01:13:05And when we bonded, it was in situations like this.
01:13:08So through our drug abuse, we bonded.
01:13:10Through the robberies, we bonded. In prison, we bonded.
01:13:12But whenever we were outside and needed something substantial
01:13:16to solidify that bond, it was never there.
01:13:21Family Jewels
01:13:24The book I wrote is called Family Jewels.
01:13:27And it was my attempt to use the book as a tool to talk to kids,
01:13:31to talk to people, to maybe use how crazy this story is
01:13:36to kind of scare you straight.
01:13:38I work as a personal trainer now.
01:13:40I created my own certification.
01:13:43I wrote my own book that lists the programming for this type of exercise.
01:13:48And it is now approved by four certifying bodies for personal training.
01:13:53I do the podcast. I do Family Jewels podcast.
01:13:55Podcast allowed me to go into greater detail.
01:13:58It allowed me to break down each robbery individually.
01:14:01I'm Jim Browning. I'm known as a scam baiter.
01:14:03And I hack into scammers' CCTV.
01:14:06And I've managed to close down hundreds of scam call centers.
01:14:11This is how crime works.
01:14:14What I do is disrupt multi-million dollar scams.
01:14:18The ringleader's exposed.
01:14:20And those people have an awful lot of money behind them.
01:14:24Why the silhouette?
01:14:25Well, it can be quite dangerous.
01:14:27You can imagine the type of things that they may decide to do to stop me.
01:14:38Up until recently, I had a normal day job.
01:14:42And sometimes I would work at home.
01:14:44And I would constantly get the same phone calls that I think most people get.
01:14:49And you instantly know it's a scam.
01:14:52But I was getting those so often that it was interrupting my normal work.
01:14:57I thought, I'm an engineer.
01:14:59I know about computers, know about networks.
01:15:02Maybe I can do something about this.
01:15:04Or at least I want to find out what it is they're really after.
01:15:08And maybe report the people in the hope that I could stop the calls.
01:15:12I encountered Fairmark Travels back in 2019.
01:15:17They were operating a pop-up scam.
01:15:19I was browsing the internet.
01:15:21Suddenly this message pops up saying I've got a virus.
01:15:24And I had to call a number that locked my keyboard and mouse.
01:15:27And from experience, I know that that's a scam.
01:15:30But I deliberately called the number.
01:15:32They told me that they were a Microsoft affiliate.
01:15:36And they needed access to my computer.
01:15:38But I have this little trick where if someone connects to my computer,
01:15:43I can reverse that connection.
01:15:46And that enables me to see their computer.
01:15:49And I was able to find out quite a lot of data and video and audio.
01:15:54Of course, the people on the end of the phone are primed to persuade you that you've got a computer problem.
01:15:59They will want you to, although they may not say the words, remote access to your computer.
01:16:05They will deliberately misdiagnose it.
01:16:08And to fix that problem, even though there's no problem, you would have to pay them.
01:16:13And it varies anywhere between maybe a few hundred pounds up to a few thousand pounds.
01:16:20They will talk reasonably technical sounding language deliberately.
01:16:25But it's all just a script.
01:16:28Most people who are victims of that scam think that it's some friendly person trying to help them out.
01:16:34And in fact, there was nothing wrong whatsoever.
01:16:36It's not just done once.
01:16:38They're scammed multiple times after that.
01:16:46The setup can be very tiny.
01:16:48You can run a scam call center out of a hotel room.
01:16:52You don't need particularly expensive computers to run a scam.
01:16:56And I think a lot of scammers know that.
01:16:58And what I typically find is they will run the oldest of old computers just because they're cheap.
01:17:05The average scam call center has between 10 and 20 people.
01:17:10Fairmark Travels, they set themselves up as a travel agency.
01:17:14They were running out of two buildings in a suburb of New Delhi.
01:17:18In those days, the front offices were all running legitimate work.
01:17:23But in literally the offices behind that building, they ran a scam operation.
01:17:30In fact, they used the same telephone system that they did for their legitimate work.
01:17:35But in the background, they would run this scam call center.
01:17:38So they had almost a perfect setup so that if the police ever did raid the places,
01:17:44they could always point the police to their legitimate work.
01:17:48They actually recorded their phone calls.
01:17:51And I was able to download over 70,000 scam phone calls from other operators in that room.
01:18:05It did help that I could see the supervisor's computer.
01:18:09So I could see the messages going from the people who actually operated the calls right back to the CEO of the company.
01:18:18So if you can think about any normal office organization, they had exactly that structure.
01:18:24The agents are incentivized on how much money they make.
01:18:28And because of that, they get a bonus at the end of the month.
01:18:32So they had supervisors who would tot up every agent's performance.
01:18:37And if you can make more than 30 successful calls, for example, you will make more money.
01:18:44I have seen in other operations that if you don't make your targets, typically you're out of the business completely.
01:18:51It was an operation that ran 24 by 7.
01:18:54They would have different shifts.
01:18:56So they would target Australia early in their daytime.
01:19:00It would move to Europe in the afternoons and evenings.
01:19:03And then at nighttime, it would be the USA.
01:19:06There was another person who was the accountant for the company.
01:19:10They knew which channel it came from.
01:19:12So what sort of scam operation they were running that day, which country it involved, which currency it involved, which payment gateway it involved.
01:19:20You would have all of the detail of that money going into huge spreadsheets.
01:19:25And of course, then that would be laundered elsewhere.
01:19:28So they had everything you would expect in a real office building.
01:19:33They had a HR department, quality assurance department.
01:19:37They would actually listen to some of the scam phone calls and feed back to the agents how they could run the scam better.
01:19:44I was able to see exactly what the CEO was doing because there was a CCTV camera in his office.
01:19:51It was the only one with audio.
01:19:53And he would spend a small portion of the day looking after his legitimate business, the travel agency business.
01:20:00But an awful long part of the day was spent making sure that the next type of scam was going to happen.
01:20:09But I did hear him discussing an Amazon scam and how he would set that up.
01:20:14Things like how they would process the money were discussed.
01:20:24Occasionally, I will encounter networks of money launderers.
01:20:28And if they're asking victims to transfer money, normally it will be to a bank account in their own country.
01:20:36And the reason for that is it's much, much more simple for money to go out of a victim account into a local bank account, a reasonably local bank account.
01:20:45But of course, it hasn't got back to the scammer yet.
01:20:48So there has to be a network of people who will take that initial transfer and move it between a number of countries.
01:20:56An average scam will have at least one money mule in the UK, one money mule at least in a different country other than India, typically Thailand.
01:21:06And between them, they will move money between jurisdictions.
01:21:10I have seen Telegram and Skype groups specifically set up to allow money transfers to happen.
01:21:19So I know with Fairmark Technologies, I was able to see exactly where the money went when it came between the victims and right through to the company.
01:21:28So I could see as each payment was being made, there was an individual transaction in PayPal, which went to a company called Adrit Technologies.
01:21:39And Amit Chauhan is the CEO of or was the CEO of Adrit Technologies.
01:21:46So I got a direct payment link between the victims and his company.
01:21:50And I could tell that he was making at least tens of thousands of dollars per month, but it was closer to $100,000 a month.
01:21:58What they would get is average about $10,000 to $12,000 just from scams each day.
01:22:05But I've seen call centers which are upwards of 200 employees and they can make more than $8 million a month.
01:22:14I have encountered a victim in the UK who had already lost £100,000 to scammers.
01:22:22People write to me as well to say that they have lost a lot more than that again.
01:22:27And again, there's practically nothing I can do once the money has already been stolen.
01:22:41Seeking out victims, criminals absolutely use social media.
01:22:45I'm on a Facebook group where scammers sell people's personal data and there's very little enforcement for that.
01:22:55They will also sell things like credit card numbers. Those are sold openly on Facebook.
01:23:01I get to hear a lot of the calls that scammers make.
01:23:05And I've heard everything from teenagers right through to people in well in their 90s falling for these.
01:23:13The types of scams that I look at are more likely to affect older people.
01:23:18Fairmark Travels were a little bit different from the average scam call center that I look at
01:23:23because they pay a third party to put adverts onto websites.
01:23:29And the advert itself is called a malware, a malicious advert.
01:23:33It goes full screen, has a bit of very loud audio saying your computer is a virus.
01:23:39But most importantly, it has a phone number on it.
01:23:42The one way to tell whether it's a scam is a phone number.
01:23:46If you see a phone number on your screen, 100% of the time that is going to be a scam.
01:23:51Your antivirus will not ask you to call a phone number.
01:23:55They wait for victims to come to them, then they would simply get the inbound calls.
01:23:59That's how they seek out victims.
01:24:07The kind of victim they're after is somebody who's not computer literate.
01:24:11I have to lull them into a false sense of security.
01:24:14So I have to appear convincing.
01:24:17I can't be somebody who is very good with computers, type stuff in really quickly
01:24:23because they'll instantly get suspicious.
01:24:26So whenever I engage with scammers, I have a voice changer.
01:24:30I know in advance what my name, address, credit card and everything else will be.
01:24:34I also have a fake bank page, which I will deliberately flash or show to a scammer
01:24:41to make it look as if I have loads of money.
01:24:44All I need is a little bit of knowledge about the system they use to make that phone call
01:24:51for me to hear other phone calls.
01:24:53I not only can hear the calls, I can see the phone numbers they are calling
01:24:58and I can see a phone call has lasted more than, say, five minutes.
01:25:02It's very likely that that person is being scammed.
01:25:05And what I do is typically call the person when they've hung up and say,
01:25:10by the way, did you know that you were not speaking with your bank
01:25:13or you were not speaking with Amazon?
01:25:16And that is quite often a surprise to the people who've been on the phone for so long
01:25:21because they can be incredibly persuasive.
01:25:29They use terminology all the time.
01:25:31There's never a victim. There's always a customer.
01:25:35So you're a customer, of course, and that's the term I kind of hate
01:25:40because not one person that I encounter is a real customer in any shape or form.
01:25:45Yes, process and whenever you go for an interview in a scam call centre,
01:25:50you have to use the term an Amazon process or a banking process or a refund process.
01:25:57But that is just shorthand for the refund scam or the bank scam or whatever.
01:26:02Whenever they build a rapport with their victims,
01:26:05everyone will sound just like their grandmother or their grandfather
01:26:09because that way they sound more endearing.
01:26:18Obviously, when I can see one computer, just like the phone system,
01:26:23I can potentially also see the CCTV system that are used.
01:26:27A good example is FairMart.
01:26:29I can see the guy actually run up his CCTV cameras
01:26:33and he logged in with the username of admin and an eight character password.
01:26:39It enabled me then to log in and just use the computer or the CCTV.
01:26:46The scam room itself actually had four cameras pointing all four directions,
01:26:49each corner of the room.
01:26:51It was difficult to know exactly who you're speaking to.
01:26:53Obviously, they give fake names.
01:26:55But knowing that they will want to connect to my computer,
01:26:59the very easy thing to do is to change my desktop background to a very garish colour,
01:27:05like purple or green or something.
01:27:07And then as the scammer connects to it,
01:27:10look on the CCTV and see who has got the green or purple screen.
01:27:14And then I can pinpoint and go,
01:27:16ah, right, I'm speaking to that particular guy in the corner there.
01:27:19That's the one I'm going to focus on.
01:27:21So I'll be kind of picking up bits and pieces of files,
01:27:24which may be on their computers.
01:27:26Again, just to help identify who they are.
01:27:30Sometimes some of the computers have ID card information
01:27:34or spreadsheets with real names on it.
01:27:37So I'll be kind of looking for that.
01:27:39I know this is a little bit vague,
01:27:40but equally, I don't want to let the scammers know exactly all of my tricks.
01:27:46But there are definitely techniques that I can use to figure out exactly what they're doing.
01:27:51I was in the fortunate position that not only could I see live CCTV,
01:27:56but they actually had recordings of historic events.
01:28:01And when I did rewind the footage,
01:28:04I could see them position certain cameras and actually turn them around.
01:28:08I was able to kind of roughly work out where things were,
01:28:11but I still couldn't figure it out.
01:28:13So I have a colleague who does something very similar to me.
01:28:17He's called Karl Rock, and he's in India.
01:28:20He has got a drone.
01:28:22And I asked him, would you be able to help me take photographs
01:28:26to kind of figure out where these scam officers are?
01:28:29He flew the drone over the top of the main building
01:28:32and then out to the back of the building as well.
01:28:36When it comes to reporting crime, it's actually very difficult in India.
01:28:40The best way to get any action on the ground from India
01:28:44is to go directly to the local police where that call centre is nearest.
01:28:49It is not enough to say,
01:28:52the people in that building are pretending to be a bank or Amazon.
01:28:56What I have to do is present a victim to the local police
01:29:02to say, this person has had money stolen and it comes from that building
01:29:07and here are the people involved.
01:29:09And that makes it very, very difficult.
01:29:11Obviously, I try to approach the police to say,
01:29:13this scam is operating on your doorstep, but quite often that's ignored.
01:29:18And it's kind of a tolerated scam.
01:29:21If you seem to be stealing money from rich Westerners, for an example,
01:29:26that may be less of a crime.
01:29:28Now, in the case of Fairmart, I was working with a documentary team.
01:29:31The BBC were involved.
01:29:33The police became interested only because of that involvement.
01:29:37Then the police raided those buildings.
01:29:39So they arrested Amit Chauhan.
01:29:41They dismissed the case because there wasn't enough evidence.
01:29:44I would love to see tougher laws when it comes to call centres.
01:29:48I think there should be laws to say,
01:29:50you can't do this.
01:29:51You can't do that.
01:29:52You can't do that.
01:29:53You can't do that.
01:29:54When it comes to call centres,
01:29:56I think there should be laws to say,
01:29:58if you're running a call centre,
01:30:00you have to give the person you're speaking
01:30:05the details of who you are,
01:30:08where you are,
01:30:09your real name,
01:30:10and your real company name.
01:30:12It would be easier, I think,
01:30:13to prosecute some of the scam call centres,
01:30:16and maybe that's the way to reduce some of them at least.
01:30:25I actually ask scammers,
01:30:27why do you do this?
01:30:28The answers that I usually get,
01:30:30there will be people who say,
01:30:32the only way that I can make money is through scamming.
01:30:35And undoubtedly that's the case.
01:30:37But everybody's different.
01:30:39There are not enough jobs for young people.
01:30:42And don't forget,
01:30:43these people in general,
01:30:45they speak English,
01:30:46so they're well educated.
01:30:48They come from the equivalent of middle class backgrounds.
01:30:53They have their education levels.
01:30:56I've seen the CVs sitting on some of the computers.
01:30:59They generally know what they're getting into.
01:31:02So if there was an opportunity to have another job,
01:31:06some will tell me that they will take those other jobs.
01:31:10And some of them do say,
01:31:12I have no choice.
01:31:13I'm only going to do this for a year or two.
01:31:15I personally think the primary reason
01:31:18is the reason why so many people are in it is greed.
01:31:22I have had scammers who have said,
01:31:24well, I do this as kind of revenge
01:31:27for colonial corruption.
01:31:30I do speak to some scammers who do have a conscience
01:31:33and some of them have already reached out to me
01:31:35and exposed their own bosses in the whole thing.
01:31:38And that's admirable.
01:31:40India is more than likely
01:31:43where your robocall is going to come from,
01:31:45which is a really sad reflection on India
01:31:48because India is a fantastic country.
01:31:50But it now means that people,
01:31:53when they hear an Indian accent on the phone,
01:31:56are just that more wary.
01:31:57And that is incredibly sad.
01:31:59Other than India,
01:32:00I have personally encountered ones in Ukraine and Tunisia.
01:32:05The Tunisian call center targeted
01:32:08French-speaking countries, including France.
01:32:17There's a few different ways
01:32:18that scammers will attempt to find victims.
01:32:21And I guess the primary one,
01:32:23someone pretending to be your bank
01:32:25or a large company like Amazon.
01:32:27Unfortunately, if you've got a landline,
01:32:30that is a typical thing you will hear every single day.
01:32:34And one of the biggest ones, for example,
01:32:36is a fake invoice.
01:32:38If you've started a conversation with a scammer,
01:32:41they'd want to get at your money
01:32:44and they will target you in a few different ways.
01:32:47The first one is wanting access to your computer
01:32:50and therefore wanting access to your bank account.
01:32:52They will get you to make a transfer.
01:32:54They'll blacken your screen and they'll make the transfer.
01:32:56The other one is they don't really need
01:32:58or want access to your computer,
01:33:00but they will try to convince you
01:33:01to go to your bank and move money
01:33:03by socially engineering you to send money
01:33:06or withdraw money, put it in a box.
01:33:09And people unbelievably still do this
01:33:11and send it to another address.
01:33:13And the third one is they will persuade you
01:33:15to go out and buy a gift card.
01:33:17And there's different ways that they can do that
01:33:19and read out the gift card number.
01:33:21And if you do that, that's equivalent
01:33:23to directly putting it into a scammer's account.
01:33:26And the most obvious way these days
01:33:28of getting money cleanly for scammers
01:33:32is to use cryptocurrency.
01:33:34There's other sorts of scams.
01:33:36You may have seen SMS messages saying
01:33:38there's a parcel being delivered
01:33:40or a different sort of SMS message
01:33:42targeting someone in your family.
01:33:45Recently, I've come across a group
01:33:47who were operating out of London
01:33:49and they were pretending to be the son or daughter
01:33:53of someone who had lost their phone.
01:33:55So they would send a message saying,
01:33:57hi, mom, I've lost my phone.
01:33:58This is my new number.
01:34:00Can you contact me on this?
01:34:02I need to get some money quickly.
01:34:06It's not easy having multiple identities
01:34:10and I have my own family life to deal with.
01:34:13Like everybody else, doing this in the evening times
01:34:16did take up an awful lot of time.
01:34:18So I do work very odd hours
01:34:20and I have to keep the same hours as scammers do.
01:34:23So, you know, I'm on the night shift
01:34:25just with the scammers as well.
01:34:27So it can be difficult.
01:34:29I have worked in IT for quite a number of years,
01:34:32although these days I could maybe teach a course on it.
01:34:35I haven't got the formal qualifications
01:34:37because I have dug into scams more than the average person.
01:34:42I probably know scams better than most scammers.
01:34:45I'm still learning.
01:34:46I still want to understand better
01:34:49some of the systems that scammers use.
01:34:51They evolve, but I would like to think I evolve with them.
01:34:54I am working on projects that will help victims
01:34:59using AI before scammers start using AI against victims.
01:35:04So I have a YouTube page.
01:35:06The channel name is Jim Browning,
01:35:08which is dedicated to combating scammers.
01:35:12So I have a YouTube page.
01:35:14The channel name is Jim Browning,
01:35:16which is dedicated to combating scammers.
01:35:43My name's Rob Holmes. I'm a private investigator.
01:35:46I've stopped millions of dollars of counterfeit watches
01:35:49entering the U.S. market.
01:35:51This is how crime works.
01:35:56It's estimated that 23.3 million counterfeit watches
01:36:00are circulating in the U.S. right now.
01:36:02There have been plenty of stories
01:36:04of counterfeit watches being sold in the U.S.
01:36:09There have been plenty of stories
01:36:11of the counterfeit watch industry
01:36:13being tied to child labor, sweatshops,
01:36:16and even human trafficking.
01:36:18You're going to have organized criminals
01:36:20who are doing this kind of stuff.
01:36:22When I work undercover as a distributor,
01:36:24I have to be very credible.
01:36:25Doing what I do doesn't come without a little bit of fear.
01:36:30Many of the fakes nowadays come with a box
01:36:33and the authentication certificates.
01:36:35You used to see watches that would just have
01:36:38maybe one of the trademarks,
01:36:40like just the crown on the face,
01:36:42but not the crown on the dial.
01:36:44Now manufacturing has gotten so good
01:36:46that even the cheaper knockoffs have everything.
01:36:50There are people who buy $1,000 counterfeit watches
01:36:55There are people who buy $1,000 counterfeit watches.
01:36:59Patek, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, all the big brand names.
01:37:04And they buy these watches for $1,000
01:37:07because they are near clones.
01:37:10And in that world, the current term is epic.
01:37:13You can't tell it from the original.
01:37:15And especially with some of the brands,
01:37:17especially Rolex, the only way you can tell
01:37:20is by opening up the watch and looking at the movement.
01:37:23Because a Rolex movement,
01:37:24there's no mistaking a Rolex movement from a counterfeit.
01:37:27I don't care how good the Chinese factories are.
01:37:30A Swiss movement made by Rolex
01:37:33is always going to be known once you open the back.
01:37:41If it is sold in America,
01:37:43there's a factory in China that makes an exact copy of it.
01:37:46It's just a matter of how high the quality is.
01:37:48Manufacturing in the counterfeiting world
01:37:51replicates the manufacturing in the real world.
01:37:54Wherever manufacturing is cheap,
01:37:56that's where manufacturing is going to happen.
01:37:59These factories can afford the same machines
01:38:02that the real companies use,
01:38:03and they use the same software.
01:38:05Often that software is stolen through industrial espionage.
01:38:09On these Chinese marketplaces,
01:38:11they have a tier for a manufacturer or a seller,
01:38:15a tier level where you can obtain an inspection
01:38:18by the marketplace.
01:38:20You'll have a third-party inspector come in and take photos
01:38:23and check your location for child labor,
01:38:27all the regular things that people would look for,
01:38:29and you can pay for a clean bill of health.
01:38:32But there's no telling what these factories are really doing.
01:38:35We know that some Chinese factories use forced labor.
01:38:39It used to be the 80s, 90s, even into the early 2000s,
01:38:43the watches would come here by container,
01:38:46and then the logos would be put on in factories
01:38:49here in the United States,
01:38:51in sweatshops right in the major cities here in the U.S.
01:38:54That's kind of stopped because the Chinese factories
01:38:57have become so good
01:39:00that the American factories couldn't keep up with the quality.
01:39:03We find that most of the product comes out of major ports,
01:39:06and Guangzhou, inside Guangdong.
01:39:10China became so good at logistics,
01:39:12it was much easier for people to sell as affiliates
01:39:15here in the United States and have them shipped
01:39:18from the Chinese factories or the middlemen.
01:39:21This is how good these Chinese factories are.
01:39:24QC, which means quality control.
01:39:26They'll send you a high-res photo of your item
01:39:29and the shipping label so you can check the item,
01:39:32make sure it's the right model,
01:39:34and also make sure that the address is correct on your shipping label.
01:39:37You say yes, go ahead, boom,
01:39:39within a day or so you'll get the tracking number.
01:39:46Watches would be shipped in, say, one case of watches,
01:39:49say 1,000 watches or 10,000 watches in a small portion,
01:39:53and the rest of the container would end up being beach balls,
01:39:56you know, cosmetics or anything, cheap stuff.
01:39:59What they do is they ship it to their clearinghouse,
01:40:03a distributor in Pennsylvania.
01:40:06They slap a new label on it and ship it to you from there.
01:40:09So it looks more domestic.
01:40:12And when it looks more domestic, it looks more trusted.
01:40:15But most counterfeit watches reach the United States
01:40:18through the U.S. Postal Service or DHL.
01:40:22Shipped individually to the seller.
01:40:25You could buy one watch, you could buy five watches,
01:40:27you could buy 100 watches.
01:40:29I buy samples from all over the world.
01:40:31One time I had a package sent to me, and it was a toy alarm clock.
01:40:34I opened it up, and there was a watch inside.
01:40:37I haven't received a disguised counterfeit
01:40:41in several years, and I think it's because of how easy it is
01:40:45to get across the border with just a little bubble wrap.
01:40:48The watches you buy on the streets,
01:40:51they're usually bought the same way by the seller.
01:40:54If you buy 100 of them, they're $8 apiece.
01:40:56So you get 100 of those, but the package is only this big.
01:41:00Shipping is going to cost $80, $90.
01:41:02And they know the Postal Service is flooded right now,
01:41:06and customs is flooded right now.
01:41:08So it's really kind of a field day for the mailing of counterfeit watches.
01:41:13The U.S. Customs can't inspect every single package.
01:41:16They used to say they inspected one every thousand,
01:41:20but I don't even know if that's possible anymore
01:41:23with everybody buying $20 dresses and things like that.
01:41:26Counterfeit distributors don't worry about the obstacles
01:41:29because the profit is so high.
01:41:32So if something gets stopped off at customs,
01:41:34they'll just ship you a new one.
01:41:36And that happens very often, even with a container.
01:41:38Those 10,000 watches, they get caught up in customs.
01:41:41That'll just be the cost of business.
01:41:43So those obstacles are pretty simple for them to bypass.
01:41:52In my perception, the demand for fakes,
01:41:56non-deceptive counterfeits, where you know it's fake,
01:42:00is simply because people like getting something over on the man.
01:42:04From the 80s until now, I've found that demand has been pretty consistent
01:42:07throughout the years.
01:42:09I mean, no matter what the economy is looking like,
01:42:11people like a bargain and people like to spend less
01:42:13for something that looks nice.
01:42:15Let me explain the gray market a little.
01:42:17There is a market where people think they're getting a deal.
01:42:22You'll see, you know, 20% off retail, things like that.
01:42:27There's a gray market where things fall off the truck
01:42:31and things are diverted outside of the original supply chain.
01:42:36And once they get here in the United States,
01:42:38they can sell legitimate products.
01:42:40And this is including the watch industry.
01:42:42They can sell legitimate products at 10%, 20% off the original price.
01:42:48And they're real.
01:42:50But these companies have databases with those serial numbers in them.
01:42:53And you take it to a real repair shop,
01:42:56they stick it through the database because a lot of watches are stolen.
01:43:00So you take it to a real repair shop, oh, sorry,
01:43:02this watch was a gray market product intended for another place.
01:43:05So that's why once you buy something on the gray market,
01:43:08you're kind of always working underground.
01:43:11So that leaves you susceptible to buying the epic fakes,
01:43:16the ones that are $1,000, but you're paying $6 or $7
01:43:19because you think it's wink, wink, you know, falls off the truck.
01:43:24And a lot of these companies too that deal in the gray market
01:43:26do what's called mixing.
01:43:28And what they'll do is they'll have some genuine gray market
01:43:31and some that are counterfeit, and they'll just mix them all in.
01:43:35Or they'll sell, you look like a sucker, I'll sell you the fake
01:43:38and I'll sell this guy the genuine.
01:43:40It's a very interesting world, the secondhand market,
01:43:42because it is kind of self-regulated.
01:43:44Obviously, they self-regulate because of lawsuits too.
01:43:47You know, if I make a test buy from one of these sites
01:43:52and it turns out to be counterfeit, they can get sued.
01:43:54So yeah, so there's a lot of liability at stake there too.
01:43:58So the legitimate ones don't do that.
01:44:00But again, you'll have the shady ones,
01:44:02especially the ones that you walk up in tourist areas.
01:44:05And they sell genuine secondhand watches,
01:44:07but maybe the one you have is a fake.
01:44:17I tell people, whether you're going to buy a product
01:44:19or you're going to have a product repaired,
01:44:21go to an authorized dealer.
01:44:23But yeah, these repair markets are very shady.
01:44:25There was a case in the 90s that my father and stepmother worked
01:44:29called the Fort Worth Gold and Jewelry Exchange.
01:44:33And this guy, his name was Ronnie Cooper,
01:44:36he advertised in all the national magazines.
01:44:38And he would have ads that said, we buy gold, we buy watches,
01:44:42we sell Rolex watches.
01:44:44And he would even do repairs.
01:44:47What he would do when he bought the watches was
01:44:49he would replace the gold with gold plated.
01:44:52And he would constantly be doing that.
01:44:54So you'd be buying a genuine watch,
01:44:56but most of the gold was swapped out.
01:44:58And he did this for many years.
01:45:00And jewelers still do that.
01:45:02They're often called Franken-watches in the replica world.
01:45:05He got five years, the guy.
01:45:07He got five years for mail fraud.
01:45:09That's what they got him on.
01:45:11Because all this stuff went through, you know,
01:45:13shipping and the postal service and things like that.
01:45:15The brands don't like the secondary market
01:45:17because they take away from you buying a brand new product.
01:45:23My dad was the guy on Canal Street in the 1980s and 1990s
01:45:27who caught the folks that were selling counterfeit watches.
01:45:30I grew up in the 80s going on reins with my father
01:45:34and making undercover buys.
01:45:36Canal Street was the epicenter for counterfeit watches
01:45:38in the entire United States.
01:45:40They had Midtown.
01:45:41That was where all the folks with the briefcases would show up.
01:45:44Okay?
01:45:45Those guys would walk around and, you know,
01:45:47the old, psst, hey buddy, want to buy a watch?
01:45:49You know, that kind of thing.
01:45:50Or they would set up a briefcase with legs,
01:45:52and they'd be very mobile.
01:45:54In Chinatown, they would be standalone stores
01:45:57with big metal roll-down, roll-up doors.
01:46:00On raid days, they would go with a van or a U-Haul truck
01:46:04with off-duty cops and firemen inside the back of the trucks.
01:46:09And they would have spotters along the way
01:46:12who would go to local diners and tell them the addresses
01:46:16where they've spotted those watches that day.
01:46:18Then the people would fly out of the trucks,
01:46:21and if they didn't get there in time
01:46:24and the guys rolled down and locked the doors,
01:46:26we had industrial-strength saws
01:46:31where we could saw through those locks.
01:46:33It wouldn't be uncommon for my father to come home
01:46:35with a U-Haul truck full of bags, hefty bags,
01:46:39full of counterfeit watches.
01:46:40Actually, I was the only 14-year-old at my high school
01:46:43that was walking around with a Rolex watch.
01:46:47Everybody knew it was fake, but, you know.
01:46:49During my dad's Canal Street years,
01:46:51he would hire out-of-work actors in New York
01:46:54to disguise themselves
01:46:56and go conduct undercover investigations.
01:46:59Those people dressed up as homeless people, pregnant people,
01:47:02everything you could think of,
01:47:03so that they're going through one day at a time
01:47:06and they don't look like the same person.
01:47:08Doing enforcement on Canal Street, it was no hayride.
01:47:13He had bodyguards, and he also had constant threats.
01:47:18There were people with guns shooting at them.
01:47:20There were very often times
01:47:22where people would come right after my father.
01:47:30I've been investigating counterfeit watches
01:47:32professionally since 1995.
01:47:34So when I started my company,
01:47:35all the luxury brands knew who I was,
01:47:37and they knew I started my own firm.
01:47:40Then I started getting cases from the luxury brands.
01:47:43During my undercover buy process,
01:47:45you know, we have undercover identities
01:47:47set up all over the United States.
01:47:49So, you know, I could buy from the same website five times,
01:47:52and they would think it's five different people.
01:47:54I have every counterintelligence method you can imagine.
01:47:57We do everything we can to make sure
01:48:00that these identities are not traced back to us.
01:48:03The brands usually work directly with law enforcement,
01:48:07if they can,
01:48:08because it's expensive to hire an investigator.
01:48:11My cases are typically cases that might go civil
01:48:14or a case that law enforcement doesn't have the time for.
01:48:17And then once my case is finished, completed,
01:48:21it's put on what I call a silver platter,
01:48:24and then they will pass it on to law enforcement.
01:48:26There's various terminology in the counterfeit world.
01:48:29In the watch industry, a replica is a near-perfect
01:48:34or at least look-alike version,
01:48:36with the trademarks, of an actual product.
01:48:39But then you have lower-level counterfeits.
01:48:41You have, say, $300 to $500 counterfeits,
01:48:44and they're mid-level.
01:48:46And then you have anything under $300.
01:48:48They call them sh**ters.
01:48:50The funny thing is, those cheap watches,
01:48:52they're the ones you buy on the street.
01:48:54The keywords to find these counterfeits
01:48:57evolve because of enforcement mechanisms.
01:49:01You can't just Google counterfeit Rolex
01:49:04or counterfeit Louis Vuitton or even replica.
01:49:06The word replica, for the last 10, 12 years,
01:49:08has been pretty much blacklisted everywhere,
01:49:10along with brand names.
01:49:11So they would come up with different words.
01:49:14They would also use letter swaps.
01:49:18Like for Rolex, they could use R-O-I-E-X-X.
01:49:23If you're seeing words like replica, clone, dupe,
01:49:28or 1 colon 1, 1 to 1,
01:49:31you're probably looking at a counterfeit.
01:49:39If you're trying to figure out if a watch is a counterfeit,
01:49:42first you need a magnifying glass,
01:49:44and then you want to look at the details on the watch face.
01:49:47If there's any imperfection whatsoever, it's not real.
01:49:52One of the great myths of counterfeit watches
01:49:55is that the genuine has a sweeping hand,
01:49:57and the counterfeit has a ticking hand.
01:50:00Well, that was resolved sometime in the mid-'90s.
01:50:04So most counterfeits now have a sweeping hand.
01:50:07So don't be fooled into thinking that's a way
01:50:10to tell a counterfeit from a real.
01:50:12So I was just handed a watch for filming purposes,
01:50:15and I can tell this one's genuine because,
01:50:19see, there's a crown logo at the 12 o'clock mark.
01:50:23And the crown logo has an oval
01:50:28at the headpiece part of the crown,
01:50:31and that's etched in perfectly.
01:50:33The quality of the craftsmanship of this watch is impeccable.
01:50:38The brand name is printed there perfectly.
01:50:42Also, with many of these watches,
01:50:44there's a magnifier at the date.
01:50:46It's called the Cyclops.
01:50:48And counterfeiters don't always get that right.
01:50:51And also, the date with the magnifier
01:50:54can just be a little off.
01:50:55It's not perfectly.
01:50:57If the number's 12, the day is 12,
01:50:59it's going to be exactly there.
01:51:00It's not going to be partially there.
01:51:02And a lot of the counterfeits,
01:51:04they just can't get the date exactly right.
01:51:06And the Cyclops, too, there is a...
01:51:09The original brands have a very specific,
01:51:13non-reflective material they put on that Cyclops
01:51:19that holds it onto the watch.
01:51:22And that's very hard to duplicate as well.
01:51:24So the clarity of the Cyclops is very, very important.
01:51:29Also, you'll see the brand name on the inside of the band.
01:51:33Now, the high-end counterfeits may have those,
01:51:36but you do have to look for these things.
01:51:39Also, the registered trademark on the back,
01:51:42you can look for that and see if they've gone to that great detail.
01:51:46And with this particular watch,
01:51:48because it was made, I'd say,
01:51:50probably at least 20 years ago, maybe longer,
01:51:53in order to find the serial number,
01:51:55you would have to actually take off the band here.
01:51:58And you would have underneath the band edge here and here,
01:52:02you'll have a serial number, and you'll have a model number.
01:52:07Especially with the Submariner and the diving watches,
01:52:11the bezel is very difficult to make.
01:52:15So the Swiss engineering of the bezel
01:52:18is going to be perfect with a genuine watch.
01:52:22Many of the counterfeits, it's kind of jingly as you're moving it.
01:52:25Da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
01:52:27A lot of this stuff isn't one specific thing.
01:52:29You look at the quality and you say,
01:52:31wait, this isn't real because, you know, this is a little shaky.
01:52:35It should be more solid, you know.
01:52:37It's a little light. It should be heavier.
01:52:45The counterfeit watch industry is a financial crime.
01:52:48You deal with all kinds of fraud in this world,
01:52:51especially here in the United States, you know,
01:52:53bank fraud, all this kind of stuff.
01:52:55In the 1940s, there was a law passed called the Lanham Act,
01:52:59and it made counterfeiting trademark goods illegal.
01:53:04And that law stood for a very long time.
01:53:07There were no penalties, though.
01:53:09It was sort of symbolic.
01:53:11And my father, along with a very small community back then
01:53:15of folks lobbying the U.S. government to strengthen the laws,
01:53:18the Anti-Counterfeiting Act of 1984 was passed.
01:53:22And the Anti-Counterfeiting Act of 1984 created penalties
01:53:26for each one of these offenses.
01:53:28Currently, the federal laws are in trafficking.
01:53:33So trafficking is illegal federally.
01:53:35So that's where customs comes in.
01:53:37But most of the sale or display of counterfeit goods is state law.
01:53:42So in New York, you know, New Jersey, California,
01:53:47almost every state has a display for counterfeit as a penalty
01:53:52and also in their penal codes the sale of counterfeits.
01:53:55I've seen people face some serious jail time for selling counterfeits.
01:54:00Often they're the most egregious.
01:54:02But on the street level, folks, it's the repeaters, just like with drugs.
01:54:06Someone purchasing counterfeit goods online
01:54:09probably isn't going to enter law enforcement's radar
01:54:12or the brand's radar unless they are named
01:54:16or discovered as a supplier to someone else.
01:54:19Often, because purchasing isn't necessarily,
01:54:22it's not illegal to purchase, but obviously trafficking is
01:54:26and you're bringing things over across the border.
01:54:28I've seen the civil penalties get very steep.
01:54:32When my clients want to sue someone, often we'll look for assets.
01:54:37If a person owns a house and the mortgage is paid off,
01:54:41you know, these people have the ability to pay $70,000, $100,000 in restitution
01:54:46and a judge will, you know, often comply.
01:54:50So I've seen people's lives get ruined by selling counterfeits.
01:54:55It was in the late 80s when my father came across BTK,
01:54:59the Born to Kill Gang, Vietnamese mafia.
01:55:02One day, his brother, who worked with him,
01:55:06saw a wanted poster with a $200,000 price on my father's head.
01:55:12Turns out, the Born to Kill Gang,
01:55:15they were charging all of these vendors for protection.
01:55:20But they couldn't protect them against my father.
01:55:24So they figured if they killed my father,
01:55:27they would at least alleviate the problem
01:55:29and they would justify their own extortion racket.
01:55:32And because of that, we had locks on every door, every window.
01:55:35And my father told me one day, I remember, he said,
01:55:38Rob, I know you don't like listening to me,
01:55:40but if I ever say duck or jump,
01:55:43you better do it because it might mean your life.
01:55:46And I always took that seriously after that. I still do.
01:55:49When my father's canal street work started really taking off,
01:55:52I was uninterested in the family business.
01:55:54I was 17, 18, 19 years old,
01:55:56and I was kind of going off doing my own thing.
01:55:58But my brother was like 13, 14 years old,
01:56:00and he was primed to do this work.
01:56:02He was bred for it.
01:56:04So my brother was running out gathering license plates
01:56:08and, you know, looking in windows,
01:56:11in factory windows and things like that.
01:56:13I actually rebelled against the family business,
01:56:15and I went to Bible college.
01:56:17And I decided to drive to L.A. to become a stand-up comic.
01:56:20Turns out I wasn't very funny,
01:56:22but in the meantime, I needed a day job.
01:56:25But then I started going on raids,
01:56:28just like my father, on the opposite coast.
01:56:30And it was amazing.
01:56:32Los Angeles' area, similar to Canal Street in New York,
01:56:36is called Santee Alley, and it was a several-block area,
01:56:39just like New York's Chinatown.
01:56:41It is filled, filled with counterfeits.
01:56:44In the 90s, Santee Alley, just like Canal Street,
01:56:47it was the Wild West.
01:56:49Everywhere you went, there were watches everywhere.
01:56:52I mean, people had them up and down their arms.
01:56:54They had them in briefcases.
01:56:56They had them at booths.
01:56:59They had people who rented space out in front of booths
01:57:02and paid thousands of dollars for that.
01:57:04Yeah, and then after years and years of doing that in the 90s,
01:57:08my boss retired in 2001, and I started my own company.
01:57:18I started my company in 01.
01:57:20I was working a lot of the similar cases
01:57:22with my father and my brother.
01:57:24So then my father passed in 04.
01:57:27Yeah, after my father died, I thought it was important
01:57:29to continue the family legacy.
01:57:31His company folded because he had nobody in New York
01:57:34to follow in his footsteps.
01:57:36And then after he passed, my business was taking off,
01:57:39and I needed to duplicate myself.
01:57:42And I figured, what better way to duplicate myself
01:57:45than to partner with my brother?
01:57:47Ever since then, I mean, there's not a day that goes by
01:57:50that we don't think about Dad.
01:57:52I mean, it's hard for me not to look at my brother
01:57:54and see something, you know, one of my dad's traits.
01:57:57We grew up watching him work.
01:57:59He was our hero, and we emulate him.
01:58:02We both do.
01:58:04So yeah, I mean, it's nice.
01:58:06I mean, sometimes I feel like he's in the room.
01:58:34© transcript Emily Beynon
01:59:04© transcript Emily Beynon