June 4, 2024
From Bronx Beat to National Heat A Lawman's Tale of Tenacity and Truth
When the weight of the badge meets the human heart, stories of valor and vulnerability emerge. Join me, Jerry Dean Lund, as I sit down with Pete Forcelli, a retired ATF agent with a 35-year tenure in law enforcement, for an honest exchange about the evolution of policing, leadership, and the challenges that come with a career dedicated to justice. Witness the journey from the Bronx's gritty streets to the complex landscape of gun trafficking, and hear Pete's personal insights into the cultural shifts within the force and the pivotal role mentorship played in reigniting his passion for the badge.
Pete Friselli, with his wealth of experience, doesn't hold back on what it takes to lead with integrity. We unpack leadership qualities, communication strategies, and the pitfalls of misusing authority, delving into the essence of what creates a respected leader in law enforcement. The conversation takes a sobering turn as we discuss the controversial Operation Fast and Furious, revealing the unintended consequences that shook the nation, including the tragic loss of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, and the excruciating trials faced by whistleblowers like John Dodson.
As we wrap up this episode, we don't shy away from confronting the need for reform and acknowledging the nobility of a profession often under fire. Pete's dedication to law enforcement, despite the formidable challenges, paints a picture of unwavering commitment and the importance of recognizing and forgiving human errors. We introduce "The Deadly Path," a book providing an impartial account of Operation Fast and Furious, and extend a heartfelt thanks to our audience whose engagement helps illuminate these critical narratives. Share your thoughts with us; your voice shapes the future of our conversations.
As a First Responder, you are critical in keeping our communities safe. However, the stress and trauma of the job can take a toll on your mental health and family life.
If you're interested in personal coaching, contact Jerry Lund at 801-376-7124. Let's work together to get you where you want to be and ensure a happy and healthy career.
Podcast Website www.enduringthebadgepodcast.com/
Podcast Instagram www.instagram.com/enduringthebadgepodcast/
Podcast Facebook www.facebook.com/EnduringTheBadgePodcast/
Podcast Calendar https://calendly.com/enduringthebadge/enduring-the-badge-podcast
Personal Coaching https://calendly.com/enduringthebadge/15min
Host Instagram www.instagram.com/jerryfireandfuel/
Host Facebook www.facebook.com/jerrydeanlund
As a First Responder, you are critical in keeping our communities safe. However, the stress and trauma of the job can take a toll on your mental health and family life.
If you're interested in personal coaching, contact Jerry Lund at 435-476-6382. Let's work together to get you where you want to be to ensure a happy and healthy career.
Podcast Website www.enduringthebadgepodcast.com/
Podcast Instagram www.instagram.com/enduringthebadgepodcast/
Podcast Facebook www.facebook.com/EnduringTheBadgePodcast/
Podcast Calendar https://calendly.com/enduringthebadge/enduring-the-badge-podcast
Personal Coaching https://calendly.com/enduringthebadge/15min
Host Instagram www.instagram.com/jerryfireandfuel/
Host Facebook www.facebook.com/jerrydeanlund
Chapters
00:14 - Leadership, Communication, and Law Enforcement
09:36 - Leadership Traits and Communication Strategies
13:29 - Gun Trafficking Controversy and Retaliation
20:00 - Whistleblower Faces Personal and Professional Turmoil
31:45 - Whistleblowing Impact on Law Enforcement
39:18 - Podcast Guest Appreciation and Contact Information
Transcript
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Welcome to today's episode of Enduring the Badge podcast.
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I'm your host, Jerry Dean Lund, and if you haven't already done so, please take out your phone and hit that subscribe button.
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I don't want you to miss an upcoming episode.
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And hey, while your phone's out, please give us a rating and review.
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On whichever platform you listen to this podcast on, such as iTunes, apple Podcasts and Spotify, it helps this podcast grow and the reason why, when this gets positive ratings and reviews, those platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify show this to other people that never listened to this podcast before, and that allows our podcast to grow and make more of an impact in other people's lives.
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So if you would do that, I would appreciate that from the bottom of my heart.
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Podcast my very special guest today is Pete Friselli.
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How you doing, pete?
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Good, good Thanks for having me Honored to be here.
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Yeah, yeah, thank you for being on, pete.
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Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
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Sure, sure.
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I spent 35 years in law enforcement, started back in the Bronx in the late 80s 1987 to be exact.
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Walked the beat Back then cops actually walked beats, did it in the projects.
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I did it for a couple years actually.
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Then eventually made my way into a sector car handling, 911 jobs, um.
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About seven years into my career made it into the detective bureau.
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Spent my last eight years as a detective, um, with the housing authority police department and then the nypd.
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After julianne emerged, the three departments together and um then jumped ship.
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In june of 2001 I became an ATF agent.
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Started in New York as a field agent working cases mostly the same kind of stuff I was doing as a homicide detective in New York.
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You know, just didn't need to be a gun nexus but you had plenty of gangs using guns to do bad things.
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Then during those times, went out to Phoenix as a group supervisor for five years.
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Got thrown out of the state of Arizona for blowing a whistle on that Fast and Furious mess.
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Went to headquarters kind of as a punishment.
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Actually Didn't last for long because I had some folks who appreciated that I was honest in my testimony before Congress Sent up to Canada was a liaison up there for two years with Canadian police on the eastern side of the country An amazing assignment.
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I mean, canadian cops are the salt of the earth.
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I actually loved working with them, just good people.
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So two years later went down to headquarters.
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I was put in charge of ATF's leadership and professional development division, so training stuff really outside of my wheelhouse, outside of my comfort zone, but I enjoyed the assignment.
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Then I was sent down to Miami.
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I was originally the number two down there, assistant special agent in charge, then got promoted to the special agent in charge job.
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I was down there, unfortunately for Parkland and the Fort Lauderdale Airport shooting and I was the assistant special agent in charge during the Pulse nightclub shooting.
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So I had a role in that as well, not the shooting itself obviously, but the investigation.
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And then I spent my last four years as the head of training for ATF, which was great because by that time man, I was like over 30 years in the profession.
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I was kind of beat down and you know from politics and the grind and one of my you know areas was the academy.
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So one month, rather one week a month, I would travel down to Brunswick, georgia, which where the AT Academy is and spend time with the new hires and just talk to them.
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And I tried not to be that pompous bureaucrat from headquarters so I'd really just try to engage with them and just seeing that energy like fresh faces coming on, you know, just really wanting to be good law enforcement officers recharged my batteries so it was good.
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But then, you know, got to a point where you know, federally there's a 57 year age requirement to retire.
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I was 55, closing in on 56.
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And I wanted to go out on my terms.
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So I pulled the pin in October of 21.
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And now just trying to stay busy, being law enforcement's biggest cheerleader when they get it right.
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And look, I've called them out when they get it wrong.
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You know.
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But look, anybody expecting law enforcement to be perfect will always be disappointed, because it's a profession staffed by 99% noble people who are humans.
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But no, it's good to be retired, but I'm not going to lie and say I don't miss the job.
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Yeah, yeah, that was quite a career, quite the spreads and into canada and stuff like that and different positions, and it's a lot, lot there too that we could unpack.
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But I kind of want to like talk to you about, um, something you're saying, like you know, the, the leadership of the new, the new people coming in, and that, how that rejuvenated your, your battery, like what would?
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What'd you talk to them about?
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well, a few things actually.
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First I want to go down there and explain to them.
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You know I was blessed in my career to be taught by guys.
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I mean, when I came on as a cop I worked with guys that were around in the Serpico days.
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You know they were the old timers and you know I didn't realize what a gift it was to be around those guys because they had wisdom to share.
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And I'm not trying to say that I was wise at any point in my career, but by the time I was in charge of training I'd learned some things, from my mistakes mostly, but also from seeing some things that others had done and just understanding the culture and how much the culture has changed.
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Just to talk to them about the importance of realizing that the badge is not something that represents power, it really represents responsibility.
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And it was funny because one of the blocks I would always try to go down there, because it's the ATF Academy that's broken down into many, many different blocks of instruction the ones that the agents loved was the undercover block, because they get to do undercover pseudo like go out there, mock exercise and everything.
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And then of course, there was the tactics block, which is a couple of weeks long where they're going.
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You know, doing swap type stuff.
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I used to go down during the interview block.
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I wanted them to realize the importance of interviewing.
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If you're going to be a good cop, you're going to be a good investigator.
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Even if you're a good manager, at some point or I hate the term manager leader you need to know how to talk to people and, you know, one of the things I really loved about being an investigator was putting the puzzle pieces together.
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But you know, what I would see is a lot of folks were really good on technology or really good with some of the other things, but they weren't always very good at the human interaction and I blame that on on just the generation today.
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A lot of it's, you know.
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Look, I grew up playing sports in the street where you, you know, you had to learn how to talk to people.
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You had to learn how to deescalate situations.
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Now I see younger folks today who you know they communicate to the person in the cubicle next to them via text, instead of getting up and walking over and saying, hey, what are we doing for lunch?
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They text each other.
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So I would just go down there, you know, explaining the importance of relating to people and building rapport and interviewing.
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You know, explaining the importance of relating to people and building rapport and interviewing and then, more importantly or equally as important, following up on that.
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You know, like if somebody tells you something, don't just take it at face value.
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I know there's a lot of investigators.
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They get caught up with informants, with everything the informant tells them has to be legit.
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No man go out there and corroborate it.
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You know I mean that's what makes you a good investigator.
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But I think talking to people is just the most important skill that any cop or any agent can ever have.
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And then it needs to transfer with you to leadership positions, because you need to listen to your people more importantly than them even sometimes listening to you.
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It's all about serving your folks.
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It's not the other way around when you're a leader.
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Yeah, yeah, definitely, I think you're right.
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There is definitely a different with these different generations, right, different ways of communicating and and that's pros and cons with that.
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But, like, like you said, I, the foundation of what even relationships, right Is the communication, of being able to communicate, whether it's a relationship of interviewing someone or leadership.
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But you have to be able to communicate, not just send an email, send a text or whatever.
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It's that face-to-face interaction.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And look, the most important thing I've learned and this I didn't know right away, it took me years to learn it is listening is more so important than talking sometimes.
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Whether it's in the interview room with a suspect.
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You know those uncomfortable moments of silence are just golden.
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But even you know.
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I see a lot of leaders and I you know, towards the end of my career I dealt with one who, just if you had a one hour meeting with this person, you could expect 57 minutes of him talking at you.
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He'd take a phone call and then give you a minute for you to.
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You know, to summarize and this is instances where you'd have to bring a problem to his attention.
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You're like what's going on here?
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So I just found it was always better to just listen to people.
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I mean, that's how you find out what's happening, that's how you find out about morale, that's how you find out how you can better serve your folks.
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What's happening in your field division or in your area of responsibility?
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Or, as a beat comp, you're going out there talking to people.
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Just, you know, if you listen to them.
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They'll tell you where the problems are.
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But if you're constantly talking at them, they just kind of check out, you know.
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Yeah, why do you think some leaders are like you know, take that approach of just talking, talking, talking and not listening?
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I think it could be a mixture of things, like the gentleman I was speaking about, which is one of the nicest men I've ever met, but his ego was a bit inflated and I think his impression of himself as a leader was as well.
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I just think it depends on the person.
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You know, I found the best leaders to be the most humble people.
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You know, the ones who led by example and the ones who kind of acted as the cushion between the bureaucracy and the madness and their people.
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You know, I mean I try to do that and look if I succeeded, because that's the other thing I always say about leadership you don't get to decide whether or not you were a good leader, and neither really do your bosses.
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Your bosses know they tasked you with things to do and whether they were accomplished or not, they can gauge you on that.
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But the only folks who get a vote on whether or not you were a good leader is the folks you led.
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So I just always tried to steal some of the things that I saw from the leaders who I look I'll say it plainly, I love them.
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I mean, I worked for some people I would have walked through fire for and I just tried to steal some of the traits, some of the things that they did, sometimes even the language, the stuff, the way they addressed certain things.
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They did, sometimes even the language, the stuff, the way they addressed certain things.
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And then I also learned a lot from some real assholes.
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But you learn what not to be.
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So I also tried to always keep that in mind as well, to not be like those folks but to be like the really good ones.
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And look, the good ones listened, the good ones wanted to hear what you had to say, the good ones actually appreciated and this is something I love Respectful dissent, you know.
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Like, for example, when I was in charge of ATF's Miami office, I had two ASACs assistant special agents in charge, both great guys, both very experienced guys.
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But we didn't always see things the same way and there were times where we would really go at it like with you know, discussion, and sometimes the discussions would get heated, but never like a personal.
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You know what I mean and I thought that's what made us a good team is that it was never.
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Yes, sir, you know, in the end there were times where I would disagree with them and look, hey, I'm the sack, I get the final decision.
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This is where we're going to go, but it was never.
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In fact, I think that when you use the words because I said so.
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That is like you have just failed as a leader If you throw those words out as someone who is just trying to find out the why, because hey, look some people, they're not pushing back on you, they just want to know why so they can buy into the mission or buy into the task.
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And so when you're there and you throw it or you point this used to kill me you point to the stripes on your sleeve or the or the collar brass.
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This is why, man, that's just epic fail, just bad stuff.
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Yeah, I think that's really hard to recover from as a leader when you, if you do something to that sorts, I mean, yeah, I mean I think most leaders well, they should appreciate those type of discussions but I feel like often they don't.
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They think it's a challenge and take a personal can take a personal.
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Yeah, Well, I think it's insecurity, If I mean, if you're not a secure leader, you're not going to want to hear somebody push back on you because you think they're pushing back on your authority rather than just wanting to understand things.
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Well, and look, I've had some people that work for me who were, you know, boss fighters.
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I mean anything you said to them, they were going to push back.
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If you handed them a bar of gold, they would complain that you didn't wipe your fingerprints off it.
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So I mean, there's that too, but it's just a matter of knowing your people.
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But going back to what we started with, if you don't communicate with folks and understand them and know what they're about, what makes them tick, you can't enter into those discussions intelligently because you don't know.
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Like all right, this person just no matter what I do, there's going to be pushback.
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Or this person just loves the job.
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Some people love the job, they get caught up in things.
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Or hey, maybe this person's having some stuff going on at home, right, and I need to keep an eye on him, or he or she, or help them out on at home, right, and I need to keep an eye on him or he or she or help them out, but if you don't know them, if you're not talking to them, you'll never know those things you know.
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The other thing is, if you're a manager, like at a higher level, trust your managers under you, but also hold them accountable.
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And look the most important thing, this used to drive me nuts hold yourself accountable.
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I'd seen bosses who would bark orders at people and then go out there and just do things that you just catch and say are you kidding me?
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Like that's the boss and that's how they're behaving.
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Because I find that the higher you move up in an organization, the more eyes are on you.
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Oh yeah, and people are watching.
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So I mean, when you're telling people to behave a certain way and you're behaving a different way, or you're allowing your buddies to behave a different way because they're not in your you know rather than you know, you have an inner circle.
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That's always also a recipe for disaster.
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Got to be fair to everybody.
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Yeah, yeah, talk about communication and let's get into the fast and furious story and what that's about.
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Sure, sure.
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Well, I was a brand new supervisor in Phoenix and I had come from New York and when I was in New York I worked on some cases that really just were amazing cases, and not because I'm special or anything like that, it's because I had a good team, good prosecutors, which is critical to a long-term, larger-scale investigation.
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Because you need things you need court orders sometimes, you need subpoenas, you need grand juries, there's things that you need.
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So I worked on a few big RICO cases.
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They all started as, like, low-level gun cases and we would flip the defendant, go in an interview room, interview them.
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So I mean it all fits into, you know, the bigger process of doing investigations.
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So it was weird that when I got out to Phoenix, what I would see is our agents would do things that agents did all over the country.
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They would pull over cars, right, because we would get tips frequently from gun dealers, like legitimate licensed gun stores, saying, hey, something suspicious with this guy who came in and asked how many AK variant rifles we have on the shelves and we'd say, whatever the number was, I'll take them all and would hand over a bag of cash.
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So the dealers would call us and we would roll out there, we would set up surveillance and we would watch the transaction happen and we would follow the car off because we'd want to do it in the parking lot and burn the dealer.
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We would always make up a story hey, we were watching you and we saw you load 13 guns in the car and that's suspicious.
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We would separate folks Again.
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What would cops do?
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Everywhere, all over the country, get different stories.
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You know, we caught them in lies, we know where this is going.
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So what I would see in Phoenix is that scenario would unfold time and time and time again and we would always be told well, just, we'll indict it later, let them go.
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So you have these people who are smuggling guns to firearms traffickers, who are bringing guns down to the cartels in Mexico, and it was always kick in the can, let it go, let it go.
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Another example would be we had one guy who he bought a gun and transferred it to another person and that gun, within 48 hours, was used to kill.
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Well, was used with other guns, to kill 21 people in a town in Mexico called Canadaya.
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So four of those people who were killed were cops.
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Four other cops were taken into the desert and beaten and left for dead.
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So I mean a pretty heinous crime.
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We get confessions from the straw purchaser, the person that illegally bought the gun for the other person.
00:15:26.051 --> 00:15:31.472
We get a confession from the trafficker Well, we're not going to prosecute that case the gun's in Mexico.
00:15:31.472 --> 00:15:35.618
So I'd see this unfold time and time and time again.
00:15:35.638 --> 00:15:40.583
So you know, in my group's initial tasking for my first three years in Phoenix was Mexico-bound firearms trafficking.
00:15:40.583 --> 00:15:50.783
So we seized thousands, literally thousands of guns, but not many people went to prison, which is not really a success when you think about it If you're a federal agent supposed to be making federal cases.
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Some of the cases we were able to take to the county, some we were able to take to the state attorney general's office, but the ones we brought to the US attorney's office, like the federal prosecutors about 90 percent of them they passed on.
00:16:02.126 --> 00:16:07.086
So anyway, years later, 2009, I got down there in 2007.
00:16:07.086 --> 00:16:11.166
So in October of 2009, our group's focus was changed.
00:16:11.166 --> 00:16:26.397
We were focused on home invasions and drug robberies, because Phoenix led the United States at that time in home invasions and kidnappings and they were second in this hemisphere behind Mexico City, which is a much, much bigger city than Phoenix.
00:16:26.397 --> 00:16:33.280
So obviously that's not something to be proud of, but I had worked on some home invasion cases in New York so I was like fine.
00:16:33.280 --> 00:16:42.788
So I was kind of excited different thing to work on something that I had experienced on working on in the past and I was tired of the grind with the US Attorney's Office but they kept turning our cases down.
00:16:42.788 --> 00:16:49.057
But they so they stood up a new group in Phoenix that was tasked with Mexico-bound firearms trafficking.
00:16:49.618 --> 00:17:02.581
Well, after a while we start to hear at these meetings these numbers, like we're on this case with 600 guns, 900 guns, different meetings, and I'm like wow, okay, interesting case, and I'm thinking that they found this historical treasure trove of documents.
00:17:02.581 --> 00:17:10.508
But as the numbers were going up, it was pretty clear that that's not the case, because I mean, if they found the documents then you don't keep finding them.
00:17:10.508 --> 00:17:20.541
So anyway, a little while into it, a Border Patrol agent named Brian Terry gets killed and all of a sudden this water cooler talk starts that they were walking guns and letting them go.
00:17:20.541 --> 00:17:30.287
And then around this time we start getting calls from the dealers that used to call us, because what happened is, when we would seize the guns, they would never have to be traced because we knew exactly where they came from.
00:17:30.287 --> 00:17:42.411
Well, the dealers were like hey man, why all of a sudden, with this new group, are we getting phone calls from ATF saying the gun was recovered in Mexico, like with us, nobody went to jail but the guns were in our vault.
00:17:42.411 --> 00:17:49.633
They weren't used to shoot some cop or some kid or you know whatever.
00:17:51.715 --> 00:17:57.571
So, but it was around this time that an agent named John Dodson, who was in that group, who knew what was going on, contacted Senator Chuck Grassley's office and said that ATF was walking guns.
00:17:57.571 --> 00:18:22.436
So now I'm at a subsequent meeting and the special agent in charge of the Phoenix field division, who was a nice man, I would argue, very inexperienced when it came to street work, he came in and told us hey, the US attorney's office same US attorney's office that declined all of those cases I was talking about was very upset with John Dodson for contacting Senator Grassley's office and don't be surprised if he finds himself indicted.
00:18:22.436 --> 00:18:24.883
I'd stay away from him, or some words to that effect.
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I remember going home that night, not very happy obviously, and talking to my wife and explaining what happened, all those cases that were declined.
00:18:34.299 --> 00:18:46.217
And now they're talking about indicting John who, candidly, I didn't even know, I don't know if I ever even was on the shooting range with him, ever, Never had a conversation with him, but again, I didn't think it was right, so we had a discussion.
00:18:46.217 --> 00:18:52.999
The very following morning I called Senator Grassley's office and said hey, listen, I spoke to a guy named Brian Downey who was one of his staffers.
00:18:52.999 --> 00:19:02.096
I said, Brian, I know you're being told that by Eric Holder and by ATF and the Department of Justice that ATF doesn't walk guns and that John Knott's is a liar.
00:19:02.096 --> 00:19:10.738
I'm just letting you know he's not lying and if you give me a subpoena, I'll tell you everything you want to know about what's been happening in Phoenix over the past couple of years.
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And lo and behold, a couple of weeks later I get a phone call.
00:19:14.212 --> 00:19:25.805
I'm sitting at my desk and it was another gentleman from Congress, a staffer named Colton Davis, and he's like Mr Friselli, we have a subpoena here for you.
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You can either come downstairs to the hotel across the street, which was a Hyatt from our office, we can come up to the ninth floor and serve you there, or we can come out to your house and serve you there.
00:19:34.886 --> 00:19:48.095
I was like hey, I'll be right down and took possession of the subpoena and that's kind of where the journey began, as far as you know, blowing the whistle and speaking about what happened there and you know and then the retaliation that followed.
00:19:48.095 --> 00:19:55.000
It all began with, you know, them talking about indicting John when for years they weren't indicting criminals.
00:19:57.597 --> 00:19:58.782
Why was the sudden switch?
00:20:00.635 --> 00:20:01.217
That you know.
00:20:01.217 --> 00:20:03.022
That's something I never found out.
00:20:03.022 --> 00:20:04.246
Why was it for years?
00:20:04.246 --> 00:20:09.859
Once the gun made its way to Mexico, we were told they couldn't prosecute because the corpus delecti, the body of the crime, was in Mexico.
00:20:09.859 --> 00:20:12.756
I mean, this was many, many, many defendants, mind you.
00:20:12.756 --> 00:20:16.372
Now, all of a sudden, the strategy is to let the guns go to Mexico.
00:20:16.372 --> 00:20:18.940
So I mean, we were never told why that would happen.
00:20:19.300 --> 00:20:25.047
There were rumblings that one of the things that they were looking to do was to implement this thing called Demand Letter 3.
00:20:25.047 --> 00:20:30.236
And this, when I say they, that's not Phoenix, I mean this was people in the Department of Justice.
00:20:30.236 --> 00:20:42.537
The way it works is and I don't know if your listeners might know if you go into a gun store and you buy two pistols, you have to fill out a multiple sale form, right, so you can buy a pistol and that form is not filled up.
00:20:42.537 --> 00:20:50.502
If you go in and buy a bunch of rifles, like those people were doing who were coming up from Mexico, you also didn't have to fill out a multiple sale form.
00:20:50.502 --> 00:20:52.166
It only applied to two pistols.
00:20:52.166 --> 00:21:23.502
So while Fast and Furious was going on, the brass was kind of gleeful in this idea, like, hey, we can implement this multiple sale form for rifles now, and they in fact did as a result of Fast and Furious, where now it's not a national thing, but if you buy more than one rifle in a border state so Texas, new Mexico, arizona, california you have to fill out this form now, which is kind of sickening if you think about it, because, look, a lot of people in Mexico were killed with guns that were smuggled during Fast and Furious.
00:21:23.502 --> 00:21:28.343
Helicopters were downed with rifles, .50 caliber rifles that were smuggled as part of Fast and
00:21:28.364 --> 00:21:28.763
Furious.
00:21:28.763 --> 00:21:39.484
And Brian Terry, who was a Border Patrol agent with BORTAC, which is like the elite of the elite of the Border Patrol, right, you think about Uvalde, that school shooting standoff, right?
00:21:39.484 --> 00:21:48.810
If you remember, while the cops were standing there not you know kind of deciding a plan, a Border Patrol BORTEC guy blasted past them, went in and ended the threat, right?
00:21:48.810 --> 00:21:50.856
These guys are like the high-speed elite SWAT guys.
00:21:50.856 --> 00:21:55.448
I'd put them up against FBI's HRT, and Brian was one of those guys.
00:21:55.448 --> 00:21:57.499
And here he's killed in the desert, you know.
00:21:57.499 --> 00:22:07.336
So the government never explained to the family as to why or what, but if it was to implement this demand letter three, I can't think of anything more appalling.
00:22:07.336 --> 00:22:08.940
But again, I mean he's dead.
00:22:08.940 --> 00:22:15.223
The family wasn't told what was going on and the US attorney's office was thinking of indicting John Dodson
00:22:15.263 --> 00:22:15.625
perhaps.
00:22:15.625 --> 00:22:18.138
And I was like this is just a bridge too far for me as a leader.
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As a leader, there's no way I could stay there and just keep my mouth shut about it.
00:22:22.969 --> 00:22:33.645
And then the other thing is and it really weighed on me is I watched my agents do everything the right way Stop cars, ask questions, gather evidence and always be told no.
00:22:33.645 --> 00:22:39.299
So I was like I had a pretty good run in New York and it was because of those partnerships.
00:22:39.299 --> 00:22:48.778
I watched my agents do what they were supposed to do and realized they'll never reach their full potential, not because of them, but because of the
00:22:48.817 --> 00:22:49.480
prosecutors.
00:22:49.480 --> 00:22:52.817
So I mean, there were so many things that weighed into why it was the right thing to do.
00:22:52.817 --> 00:22:54.803
But yeah, I did.
00:22:54.803 --> 00:23:02.500
It Turned it to like a four-year ordeal afterwards to clear my name, because Us attorneys always didn't like the allegations being levied at them.
00:23:02.500 --> 00:23:17.378
So you know, obviously they turned around and made some counter claims, all of which proved to be untrue, but it was, uh, took four years to do it yeah, how, how did that weigh on you and your family during those, those four years that had to be rough oh, it was rough.
00:23:17.439 --> 00:23:24.756
and you bring up the important thing is like, look, I raised my hand and took an oath and I mean I never expected to go through something like that, nor would I want to ever again.
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But my family didn't.
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So I mean, you know, I moved them from the northeast, they came with me that I was on.
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