David Mendoza details his marijuana smuggling empire, which collapsed after federal surveillance led to his flight to Mexico and subsequent arrest by DEA and Spanish police. He recounts the brutal extradition process at Barajas Airport, where he refused to surrender until a diplomat signed first, securing a treaty transfer that allowed him to challenge U.S. sentencing terms in civil court. Mendoza exposes alleged broken diplomatic assurances across global cases like Meng Wanzhou and Julian Assange, arguing the U.S. exploits extradition treaties to enforce extraterritorial laws while evading constitutional protections through an independent legal apparatus. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Pending UN Resolution00:03:53
Has anyone else ever successfully sued the United States, Spain, and the United Nations and won like you have?
I honestly don't know, to be quite honest with you.
I haven't won in the United Nations yet.
Oh, that one's still pending.
That's pending.
But we should have resolution, I'm hoping, by this year.
It's now been four years, we're counting on five.
One of the problems was in the United Nations, our application to the political civil court there.
Out of the UN, one of the judges had passed away recently, so they had to add another judge to the panel.
Okay, um, but it's a promising sign that they've accepted my case, they've gone through my case.
Um, so I'm hoping to win that one too.
So, for people that are listening, just to give context to this whole conversation, can you give me like a 30,000 foot overview rundown of what happened to you and how you got yourself into this mess and out of this mess?
Okay.
A real quick summary of it is basically back in the early 2000s, I was transporting, I was a builder in Seattle, Washington, well, in the Northwest.
And I got a little in over my head that I was just building too much and didn't have enough financial capability to support it.
So I got involved in marijuana.
A very good friend of mine was a marijuana distributor in Canada.
In the early 2000s, Canada had very lenient laws on it.
On growing marijuana.
And so we put ourselves a little coup together there and started transporting marijuana in the United States.
I was then targeted by the feds for distribution and conspiracy to possess marijuana and distribute it.
When I realized it, I got ghost.
I got the hell out of Seattle.
I have my mother's Spanish, my father was American.
So I went to Spain to kind of.
Lay low and get away from all this.
The U.S. asked for my extradition and the Spanish government allowed for it, but with certain conditions.
When I got to the United States, the United States refused to comply with those extradition conditions that Spain imposed.
And so then the process began.
I spent quite a few years in federal courts and Spanish courts trying to understand how the United States could do this and Spain turn a blind eye on me.
I ultimately ended up winning both.
Well, they were scared.
The U.S. I sued Eric Holder and Obama civilly.
And before that, actually, that was heard.
They gave me an offer I couldn't refuse, sent me back to Spain immediately.
I won in the Spanish courts, and I have a pending United Nations court hearing here shortly, what we just discussed about.
Okay, so let's go back to like the beginning of the story.
First, you got into real estate.
I got into building.
Renovating houses.
I was just, I graduated from the University of Washington.
I didn't enjoy school, quite frankly.
It was just a party for me.
My parents wanted me to go into something a little bit more, what's the word I'm looking for?
A little bit more gentlemanlike.
I said, screw it.
I like working with my hands.
I started renovating homes.
I started making a considerable amount of money in Seattle doing that.
Got into bigger projects, buildings, renovating old buildings.
Renovating Homes in Seattle00:10:53
And that's how things exploded.
I got myself kind of, at that time, I owned about four or five buildings in Seattle, in the outskirts, Tacoma, Washington.
Then I kind of migrated to Portland and then from there to Bend, Oregon and then from Spokane, Washington.
So I started creating what some people called an empire, a real estate empire.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
So were these apartment buildings, hotels?
Multi-use mostly.
Okay.
Apartments above.
Commercial below the building of Tacoma was a abandoned five story brick building built in the late 1800s.
Just a beautiful building that was going to turn into seriously nice high end condos.
It was downtown where all the prostitution and drug dealing was at.
And the younger that now remember this was during the time of Section 8?
No, well, Section 8 was more above the hill, but downtown it's where the homeless shelter was at.
So that's where a lot of the prostitution was going on.
But at that time, the tech world was exploding.
That was in the early 2000s.
And so a lot of these guys wanted to be downtown and they wanted to be hip.
So I would develop these condos and rent them out to them.
I mean, do very high end, put like a pool on the roof and barbecue, just do very high end kind of renovation.
And it was targeted really to a lot of these programmers and a lot of these guys that are involved in the tech world.
Okay.
And then who introduced you to the weed world?
How did that start?
I had a very good friend, and I can't mention his name, but I had a very good friend who was involved in the weed business.
As a matter of fact, he owns, well, a few good friends who worked in the underworld of weed selling.
Okay.
And one of those guys actually has just got a $100 million offer for selling his legal dispensaries.
What?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Another one has.
Fertilization company that's doing exceptionally well.
All accepted now, all legit.
And it's kind of ironic.
You know, what I was doing back then, these guys are now making tens of millions of dollars doing it.
They never got busted.
No, but the feds did come to me when I was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, at the prison there, and tried to make me an offer to cooperate against them.
And I told them no.
I said, and they wanted to make me an offer.
He said, well, we'll send you back to Spain if you're willing to cooperate against them because they had a substantial amount of assets that they were looking at.
Attempting to gain from them.
And I said, absolutely not.
The guy says, well, you're going to be sitting here for the next 14 years.
I said, well, it'll be 20 years.
How much money can you make trafficking weed back and forth from Canada to the U.S.?
Well, see, one of the misnomers here, the thing was, is that the U.S. government was attempting to say that the marijuana was mine.
They knew perfectly well it was not mine.
I was just the transporter.
Okay.
Started off with Zodiacs.
We loaded the pontoons up with them and going back the.
Strait of Juan de Fuca cross there.
It was pretty, that started to get heated.
So then we started with lumber trucks.
Because I remember I had a company that was developing property and I would order lots of lumber from Canada.
I was getting it much cheaper plywood, two by fours, two by eights, two by sixes.
You know, I was getting all my lumber packages out of Canada.
So what my friend up there said, it will just make coffins in these lumber packages.
And we'll do it through the distributor so there's nothing attached to you.
You then go to that distributor and grab, it's a US distributor, and grab those full containers or those full loads.
And that's how we did it.
Worked for quite some time very well.
What happened was.
Sorry, when you say coffins, what do you mean exactly?
I'm going to explain that to you right now.
You have a whole pallet or 10 pallets of plywood.
You hollow the center out, okay?
Not the lower 10 layers or the upper 10 layers.
You hollow the center out and you fill that full of weed.
Shit.
So, what happened was, what blew that whole operation up was they didn't fill it fully.
And unfortunately, that when you don't fill it fully, because remember, wood and marijuana is a paper product.
I mean, in essence, it has the same density if you pack it in right.
Okay.
So when they run it through at that time, I suspect their x ray viewing is much better now.
But if it was filled full, they couldn't see any density change on their x rays.
So those loads, I mean, I had a lot of loads that were, that were, Filmed or x rayed and yeah, looked good when it went across the border, no problem.
And you knew they're being x rayed?
Well, the truck driver was in on it.
Okay, got it.
Because that's how they would get it loaded.
But that said, there was one time one of the coffins or one of the loads wasn't filled all the way to the top.
There was about seven or eight inches that they didn't have enough weed to fill.
So it was that void of air.
And when that went through, they looked at it and they said, there's a density difference here.
You know, and then that's what everything up doing the truckloads.
So we shut that operation down.
Then we got into helicopters.
I don't know if you know much about.
So, what happened when they noticed that there was an air gap in there?
Did you even get in trouble?
No, truck driver got busted, got popped.
Truck driver said, I don't know what was in there.
And that's, you know, then what the U.S. Attorney's Office was doing was they were making the truck drivers at that point on forward take lie detector tests.
And if they pass a lie detector test saying they didn't know what was in there, then they could go back to Canada.
Ah.
Okay.
So I just said this was not the right way to do it.
We need to find another way of doing this.
I just, at that point, they were targeting trucks, a lot of these wood trucks coming in from Canada.
So we decided to go the helicopter route.
Next most logical step.
I can't wait till my kids see this.
Don't do what I'm doing or what I did.
At any rate, at that point, we, a good friend of ours was a log hauler and log logger out of the Cascades and the Rockies.
And I don't know if you know the Northwest very well, but the Northwest has a range, a mountain range called the Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier as you go.
That continues on through up into Vancouver, Canada.
You know, Whistler Mountain, that whole range starts from, you know, Down below in the United States and works its way on up along with the Olympic Mountains, along with the gosh, what's the other range?
It loses my mind now.
But at any rate, so what we would do is we would load on the belly of the helicopters four or 500 pounds of weed.
Those helicopters would come down off a ranch in Canada, would come down into the United States, into the forest, and do anonymous drops.
And then they would give me those GPS drop sites.
Okay.
It would take about 12 minutes down and 12 minutes back.
Okay, we would be going in the Okanagan forest.
12 minutes by helicopter?
By helicopter.
Okay.
Now, it's very, very difficult to track those because you're within a mountain range and radar does not penetrate mountains.
Okay.
So when a helicopter flies, a plane has to fly above the mountain range because they don't have the capability of swooping in and out like that.
Right.
Helicopters can stop on a dime, literally.
And move in and out.
So they stay within that range.
So penetration of the radar wouldn't catch them.
All right.
Makes sense.
And if it did, which in our case, at one point, they were able to get onto us.
That's a whole other long story.
But one of the guys that I was, we had a contract with one pilot and actually with two pilots.
And one of those other pilots decided he was going to do cocaine, bringing cocaine back.
Back to Canada because a lot of what was happening with a lot of these guys that were doing what I was doing was they were selling their weed in the United States with that money, taking their US funds, buying cocaine out of LA and shipping it back to Canada.
So they were tripling their money, literally.
I wasn't involved in that and I wouldn't get involved in that, although the US attorney tried to force people who testified against me to say I was involved in that and none of them would.
So these guys were double dipping these helicopter pilots.
Yeah.
They were double dipping.
And the agreement I made with one of them, well, with all of them, with my partner up there, is you only work for us.
End of story.
If I find out in a heartbeat, you're not, you're done.
We're not, well, one of these guys was working with somebody else, taking cocaine back.
And that's how the whole plans kind of fell apart.
That's how they started gathering onto us.
This other branch, which was who I was.
And so they had Ospreys up there.
I don't know if you're familiar with that aircraft or not, but they're the ones that tilt the, That can tilt their rotors up.
They act as a plane, but at the same time, they act as a.
And Blackhawks.
Yeah.
At the same time, they can act as a helicopter.
They shot up some Blackhawk helicopters.
But remember, we were only going 12 minutes down and 12 minutes back.
So they couldn't catch us because it takes.
Once they realize, oh shit, here these guys come.
You guys are back across the board.
We're back across because those Blackhawks, to get the turbines to move around, you just don't turn on a.
It's not like a car.
You turn on a key and the shit starts.
Right, right, right.
It takes a time for the turbines to get going.
It takes a time to scramble them up.
I mean, they're on.
So it was very.
They never really.
They got us on camera once, once, but they never got the load or the driver.
They got the guy going up to the mountain, but they didn't get the actual load.
Border Charging Issues00:04:09
Okay.
That said, that's when I realized the game's over.
We got to get out of this thing now.
It's over with.
You asked the question.
Is there a lot of money in weed?
Yeah, at that point there was.
New York wholesale market was paying me $3,800.
Now, not me, but the guys that I transported their weed for, $3,800 for a pound of weed.
Now I heard it's between $1200 and $1,500 for that same indoor weed.
I'm not sure if that's correct or not.
New York, Florida was paying $4,000 per pound.
My job was to get it there.
My job was to get it over the border and get it there.
So I was charging to get it over the border, I was charging $400 a pound.
All right.
Okay.
To get it, that's to Seattle.
If you wanted it, if your client, whoever the Canadian organization wanted their weed, to Chicago, which was a big market, to LA, which was a fairly big market.
But the problem with LA was they were getting it cheaper.
So the farther east, the more money you were making at that time.
So I made a considerable amount of money.
I would say about.
A million, maybe a little over a million and a half.
Okay.
Cash, you know.
Just on the side, on the side of the real estate business.
It's what helped me kind of.
I have a character of overdoing everything I do.
And I think you'll see that as we go along in this interview how I learned the U.S. law, Spanish law.
I just invest my whole energy into it.
And I started doing that with building and I. Just got over complicated, over financially over the top.
And I needed some infusion.
And that's what gave me the fusion.
And so when I got in the Wii game, it just started like a small ball and started going bigger and bigger and bigger.
And I was like, holy shit.
And quite frankly, it shocked me how much marijuana, and I was only one of the guys.
There was probably like 40 or 50 guys like me doing the same shit.
And it was just, I mean, there was just a market for it.
So it shows me that.
There's a lot more people out there than who want to admit it that smoke weed.
Yeah.
And it's all legal now.
I mean, at least on the West Coast, most of it's legal.
I don't know how it is on your end of the.
Yeah, it's medicinal here.
It's medicinal.
It's not fully unlocked.
In Seattle, you just walk in the store, you grab your pound, and you walk out the store.
And I'm like, fuck.
God damn it.
This shit used to be you have to hide, put it between one trunk to another trunk.
It's not like that anymore.
You just have to be older than 18, I think, is what it is.
It's crazy how many people are still in the U.S. that are locked up for weed.
Oh, dude.
I left people back.
In federal prison, that man, I feel my heart is broken.
I mean, quite frankly, I mean, I've tried to help get out of federal prison, but who have had 30, 40 year sentences, people with life sentences for weed because it was their third time, you know?
And this was, remember, this is all on the Democratic crime bill.
This is not a Republican crime bill.
It's just disgusting.
It's just absolutely disgusting.
And what's the rule?
What is it you talk, in the article, talked about there's a rule that applies when people are locked up for something where that now the law has changed.
So now, like, For example, people that got locked up for weed 15, 20 years ago, if now it's legal, like fully legal, aren't they?
Is there some sort of law that sort of lets them out, lets them free?
That's correct.
But the problem is the states, you have to understand there's federal law and there's state law.
The feds haven't legalized it yet, the feds haven't decriminalized it yet.
The states have.
So if you get locked up federally, you're still screwed.
Now, the feds have been going a little softer on it from what I understand.
But the states, for instance, the state of Washington has pardoned all my crimes within the state of Washington.
Legalizing Weed Laws00:09:06
I tried to ask for some of my property back, but they said, that's not us, buddy.
You have to talk with the feds on that.
Yeah.
So hopefully, hopefully, a lot of those guys in there, you know, I got to be honest with you a lot of Jamaicans I did legal work for, a lot of Hillbilly, a guy who got literally a I don't remember.
It was a 40 year sentence or something for growing weed and getting caught in Montana.
And Montana is fully legal now.
Hopefully, those guys will get some play.
Hopefully.
So, after you said you got something happened when you were transporting with the helicopters and that sort of like spooked you, and you said that it's time to stop.
Yeah, I had a little bit of an indication at that point.
There was a house, and I owned a house in Bellevue, Washington that I built myself.
And across the street, it was in the cul-de-sac.
And across the street was an emptied house that I helped.
The guy came across to me and said, You a builder?
I said, Yeah, I built.
I'd say I try not to do residential anymore.
It's just too much of a headache for me.
I got too many projects going on.
But I helped him put a roof on his house and he did it for an investment purpose to rent it out.
At that point, he was asking, I think, $5,000 to rent this house.
There weren't houses in Seattle.
I'm talking the early 2000s that would rent for that kind of money, even mansions.
And I was in a fairly exclusive area.
All right.
About three months down the road, I just saw this couple.
It was kind of an odd deal.
And this, Convertible beamer, they would the guy would drive every morning at seven in the morning, go into the house while the lady would leave, leave the house, and then they would do the switch around in the evening.
I just thought this is kind of odd, you know, like every time he comes, she goes, every time she comes, he goes, you know, it's just it was just odd.
So, uh, I saw the guy that owned the house, I said, Yeah, I forget his name, I said, whatever his name was.
I said, Uh, so you got the house running?
Oh, yeah, I got the house running.
He goes, Can I pull you aside quietly?
He's like, Pulled me aside.
He said, Yeah, I got Fed agents in there.
I said, Oh, yeah.
I go, and then I just, I thought my heart started clicking.
I go, Oh, yeah.
He goes, Yeah, I think they're recording Harry's house.
They got all this camera gear and shit on the back window.
I think they're recording Harry's house.
And Harry was my neighbor.
And I thought to myself, Fuck, no, they're not recording Harry's house.
They're recording Dave's house.
And I was like, Oh, shit.
Oh, shit.
Time and time is coming close here.
Did your heart almost stop when he told you that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you know what, Danny?
I should.
Probably shouldn't say this, but I'm going to tell you the story.
This is this, this will my one of my Canadian friends, uh, who had an account out of Chicago, um, couldn't get his money across the border.
And I used to take his money across the border for him and one of the helicopters, and I would charge him for it.
It wasn't a free deal, I would charge him for it.
Um, every time that helicopter plier that got up in the air, it was 50K.
That was his charge.
So then I had to make money on top of that too.
So he had some money out of Chicago, and he Told me, he said, Dave, I got a conservative amount of money in Chicago.
Can I get it delivered to you in Seattle?
Is there a way you can get it across?
I said, Dude, I'm as heated as they come.
They're filming in front of my house.
I go, I just, I want no responsibility to this.
I, you know, I'd love to do you a favor, but I want.
So he kept on calling me and crying to me and said, Dude, I don't care what happens.
I need that money and I have to have it.
And I said, Fuck it.
Okay.
I'll do it.
But here's the deal I go, You got to have that money delivered.
I own a restaurant in Seattle.
I probably shouldn't say that.
Well, the statute of limitations is over, I suspect, by now.
But I had.
You still own it?
Yeah, I still own it.
It's a pizzeria joint that's been there for 30 something years.
Okay.
But I knew the feds were filming.
I knew I was on.
They have your phones tapped?
Oh, they had everything tapped, dude.
So they were listening to this conversation?
No, I had special.
At that time, we had encrypted, God, what was the name of that?
BlackBerry devices.
Oh, they were encrypted.
They were encrypted.
How'd you get that?
The Canadians started that whole program.
Oh, nice.
Oh, yeah.
The Canadian stuff.
They were on top.
Well, I wasn't, but they were.
But we had encrypted devices, the BlackBerry devices.
Now they've pierced 99% of that, and I'll explain that in a different time.
But at any rate, I said, Listen, put the money in boxes.
They got to be cardboard boxes, okay?
And have it delivered to the back of my restaurant, and I'll get it to where it needs to get to.
All right.
So about four days later, I get a phone call from one of my cooks at the restaurant, and he says, Hey, Dave, we got a shitload of pizza sauce that just arrived.
And I said, Just leave it there.
I'll be there.
Right, because everything was in play.
I mean, never seen so much goddamn pizza sauce.
Well, everything was kind of at that point.
I'm getting out of the states.
I pretty much wrote everything off here.
I got to get out of the states.
Um, I told him I was going to charge him $200,000 to get this money across.
I don't care if it's how much money was it.
I'm we're going to get on that here.
So he didn't flinch him for a second, didn't flinch for a second.
Um, at any rate, uh, um, Where was I going?
Okay, so the boxes get delivered.
I go there.
I built this house in Bellevue.
It had an attached garage to the right.
So you just drove right into the garage and the garage door would go down or go up.
It was an electronic door garage.
I go to the restaurant, pick up the pizza boxes or the pizza sauce boxes, bring it in the garage.
At that time, I had two Great Danes, and one was having puppies.
And she, I think, had 12 puppies at that time.
At any rate, they were in the garage because I didn't want them in my house.
Just the puppies shitting everywhere and pissing everywhere.
And my girlfriend at the time wanted them there.
So I said, okay, we put shavings in the garage and stuff.
And I went in the garage, I unloaded the boxes, I put a blue tarp around the boxes just so the dogs wouldn't chew at it or piss at it or whatever.
Right, right.
And I had this project in Tacoma, Washington.
And I had to go back to Tacoma, Washington to start working on it, but I didn't want to leave the money there by itself.
You know, I was just, it was such a volume.
And I knew the feds were literally in the front house, right?
Right in the house front, watching.
Watching you load the pizza sauce.
Well, they didn't see that because I drove into the garage.
I unloaded.
And then I pulled out, and all they could see was a blue tarp, I suspect.
But, you know, they don't want to blow their investigation, I suspect.
At any rate, I'm in Tacoma.
My mom calls me around.
Seven or eight o'clock, and says, You know, it's your dad's birthday today.
We really want you to come over for dinner.
I said, I can't, Mom.
I really can't.
Today is not a good day.
And she said, Your dad wouldn't excuse that for one second.
He's done a lot for you.
I said, Okay, we'll come over.
And I said, But I can only be there for an hour or two, you know, because I'm thinking the whole time that fucking money sitting out there.
And I personally didn't know how much money was in there.
At any rate, my girlfriend and I at the time went to, Their house, we had dinner, and I'll never forget it was really stormy in Seattle, Washington.
Like the rain and the wind was going sideways, just really shitty weather.
And so, we leave.
I told my mom, you know, it's 11 30 or 12.
I said, I got to get home because the next morning I had to get those boxes to another vehicle to get them up so that guy could take it to the helicopter and get them across.
Okay, get that money up and over.
At any rate, as we're coming home, I lived in a cul de sac.
Okay, so that.
Basically, I was the last house in this little redondel, as they say in Spanish.
But I lived in this cul de sac.
And as we were approaching the left hand side to get in the cul de sac, like I said, it was raining and stormy.
My girlfriend looks over at me and says, Did you see that?
I'm like, What?
And I kind of caught it out of the side of my eye, and I saw this blue tarp flying down the road.
And it was stormy and rainy.
I go, fuck, is that the blue tarp with money?
And she goes, what money?
And then she sees all the little puppies just in the middle, running down the middle of the street.
I'm going, oh shit, it's over.
I said, it's over.
And she goes, no, don't, don't, don't say that, don't say that.
I said, it's over.
I said, these fuckers have raided my house.
So she knew about all the, she just knew that there were boxes there.
She didn't know what was in the box, got it.
But she knew about the whole operation, though.
Approaching the Cul-de-Sac00:02:53
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She ultimately cooperated with the feds against me.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
I got 10% of my property.
Fuck.
But that's a whole other story, too.
Anyway.
So I see the dogs running around down the street, and I'm going, Oh, shit.
It's over with.
We're done.
I'm done.
I said, Don't worry.
If anything happens to me, I go, There's certain money, certain places, you'll be fine.
Just make sure.
I said, These are my two attorneys.
Make sure that I get defended.
Right.
And she goes, Oh, don't say that.
Don't say that.
She said, Job.
You're saying this to her while you're driving down the street towards your house?
Yeah, towards my house.
And then I look over and I could see that the garage door was open about this high, like halfway level.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
So I said, Stace, you drive the car.
So I grabbed the puppies and threw them in the back.
I had a pickup truck, throw them in the back of the pickup truck.
I said, you drive to the house.
I went through the neighbor's back of the, and I had this kind of U shaped house that had a hot tub and a pool in the back kind of deal.
And, uh, And a bunch of windows, glass windows.
So I come in through the back and I go in through the back.
I'm looking around and I don't see anything.
I'm like, what the fuck?
It just doesn't make any sense.
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Back to the show.
High NAD Levels Explained00:10:52
And so she comes in the door and she goes like this, like that.
I go, I don't know.
So I walk over to the door that goes into the garage and I open up that door.
And fucking the garage door is about this high.
Now remember, the feds are right there, literally.
Filming everything.
But they don't know what's in those boxes.
So I'm like, what the fuck?
So I look over and you know the garage door has one of these buttons that you can push to lift it or push to drop the door?
You know, one of these little buttons that, electric buttons that you touch and it lifts your garage door.
And also I had one of these little things in the car, the remote control in the car.
So I could do it manually from the wall or I could do it remotely from the car.
Right.
Well, remember I had two Great Danes.
One of them, every time I'd leave, would love to jump up on the window and watch me leave, just freak out.
Because she was, she was, those dogs are about, I mean, they got tall, tall Great Danes.
Yeah.
So, what we put two and two together, and my female Great Dane, Ursula, had jumped up on the wall and her left paw had pushed that electronic button that lifted the garage door.
And I was like, because I could see, I could see her paw print half on the switch.
And I'm thinking, oh, you dirty bitch.
You almost got me hung here.
At any rate, oh my God, we couldn't imagine.
Listen, dude, we got everything back together.
I can tell you, was there a lot of money?
When I got, when I escaped from the United States, I snuck out of the U.S.
I went down to Mexico.
I asked my buddy, because he had to pay me what he owed me, because he said, I'll just pay in the U.S.
I said, no, no, you're going to pay me in Mexico.
And I asked him how much money was in there.
He said, six million.
And when I told him the story, he said, I wish you would have never told me that story.
So, yeah.
So you ended up getting it out of there.
I ended up getting it.
He got his money safely.
I shipped it out.
She ended up telling the feds that story.
That's really made them angry.
Your ex girlfriend.
Yeah.
And that really made them angry.
That really, I mean, because like, you know, that would have made all the headlines there in Seattle.
And then I, when I realized that the gig was up.
Did she give up that guy too?
No.
She didn't know him.
No.
Oh, yeah.
The guy up in Canada.
Oh, yeah.
She, but they couldn't extradite him.
Right.
Okay.
Because that's, remember, that's just hearsay.
She never did anything directly with him.
She, and I'll explain that whole deal.
I don't want to, I'm not trying to crush anybody's life.
But at any rate, another time that I realized it's time to get out of Dodge was when I was, remember, I was developing property in Portland, Oregon, and I was doing a property in Bend, Oregon, a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful piece of property.
It was like the Alamo style, downtown Bend, Oregon.
It's kind of like a ski resort now.
I bought that property.
I think I paid $800, and it's probably worth now $10 or $12 million.
Yeah.
So I was restoring it, I was putting high end condos in there.
And I was going to cap the top of the roof with copper capping around to give it this historic look, right?
So I had to go back to Seattle to buy the copper.
And I was driving back to Portland.
Through Portland, I was heading to Bend, Oregon, because that's the direction you have to take.
At any rate, as I was entering Portland, I had to get off to get gas.
I had about a ton of copper on the back of my pickup truck.
And as I was Getting off the off I 5, actually, off I 205, uh, a mail there was a it was all stopped, traffic was stopped.
A mail truck slammed in the back of me because I guess the guy didn't realize that we were all stopped, slammed in the back of me and threw all the copper all around.
My dog, that big great Dan I was telling you about, flew out of the side of the window in the middle of the freeway.
You know, I was freaking out.
I run out, I grabbed the dog, I put her back in the truck.
She's semi okay, all the copper, and this guy's first.
Crying to me saying, Dude, I'm sorry.
I don't want to lose my job.
I said, I'm not trying to get you in trouble, man.
Just fix my truck and we'll call it even.
I'm not going to give you any sort of grief on bodily injury.
I said, although my dog's all fucked up.
I go, you know, it's my first week at the job.
And he gave me his card.
He covered everything, but the bumper had flown off the vehicle.
And so I threw it in the back of the pickup truck and got gas.
The vehicle was still drivable, got gas, and drove to Bend, Oregon.
Well, when I got into Bend, one of the workers who worked with me had a good friend at the Chevy dealership in Bend, Oregon.
So I said, dude, can you do me a favor?
Can you.
Take the vehicle and take the bumper and have them put the.
Because I had four or five pickup trucks with our company.
I said, Is there any way that you can get this guy, your friend, to do this right away?
Because I got to get back to Seattle.
I got to do all this other shit.
So, yeah, no problem, Dave.
So he takes it there.
About three hours later, he gets a call and he goes, Dave, this dude called me and said that you need to go there.
And he was real weird about it.
And I was like, Huh?
Because, yeah, he was just talking like under his voice.
I said, What the fuck?
He goes, What?
Yeah, he was like, Hey, hey.
Tell Dave, I need to talk to you.
I need to talk to him right away.
It's urgent.
I was like, just, I said, something here ain't right.
So called the mechanic guy?
The mechanic called my buddy who knew him, who took the vehicle there to get the bumper put on the Chevy.
Ah, okay.
Called him and said, hey, I need to talk to Dave.
It's urgent.
Oh, got it.
He was saying it in a weird way, not like you and I are talking.
He was saying it in a very light voice.
And I'm like, that's odd.
So I'm hearing, right?
I've got a very good instinct on how shit works.
You know, as I was like, this doesn't pass a smell test.
Right.
Anyway, so I go there and I'm thinking, okay, maybe the feds went to ask him something or something.
So he has this bumper on this bench and he goes, hey, dude, come here.
He goes, you having problems with the feds?
And I'm looking at the bumper and I'm looking at this mechanic and I go, why?
And he flips the bumper and he goes, look what's there.
I mean, what the fuck is that?
I'm looking at it, and there's this thing that's like this.
It's got a shitload of batteries.
It's got like copper wires sitting out the line of it.
He goes, that's a GPS device.
And it says right on there, property of the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It says right on there.
And it had a bunch of magnets on the one side and was stuck to it.
So I'm thinking, oh shit, these fuckers are tracking every move I'm making.
Why would they put their own?
Why would they give themselves up like that?
Why would they put their logo on it?
I don't have the slightest clue.
It seemed like a bad idea.
But I can tell you because they needed that in federal court, you have to have that device.
They can say they tracked you around, but if that device gets lost or gets thrown out, they can't utilize that evidence.
They have to have the actual device to go in front of federal court and present that as evidence.
Okay.
At any rate, I was like, fuck, dude.
I was like, throw the bumper on.
And then I looked at him.
I said, I'm having tax issues.
He goes, oh, that's.
Definitely it then.
He goes, That's definitely it.
I said, Yeah, I'm having tax issues.
So I go to my attorney, Jeffrey Steinberg.
And you left it on.
I left it on.
I left it on because I went to a payphone.
I called my attorney first out of Seattle and I said, Hey, there's a GPS tracking device on my vehicle.
I go, What should I do?
Because I was going to have one of my dudes take it off and throw it on the cop car or something, just something to fuck with him a little bit.
And he says, Are you doing anything illegal with that truck?
I said, No, it's a, he says, Leave it on.
Leave it on.
It's more power to you.
If you have to go to court, this is what I do.
Leave it on.
All right.
So I went to go see him.
He said, but definitely come into my office as soon as you get back to Seattle.
So I went to go see him.
And he said, Dave, between that house in front of your house, filming you, this GPS device.
And at that time, I had one of my workers look under every single one of the vehicles we owned, even my girlfriend's vehicles and my personal vehicles.
And I had like six or seven trucks and a bunch of other vehicles.
Every single one not only had it on the back bumper, They had them on the front bumper.
Both?
Both.
And there's a reason behind that because at that time, those things would sometimes die.
The batteries would die or they wouldn't give a good signal.
Remember, they thought we were going up in the mountains with these trucks and some would give signals, some wouldn't give signals, but they had them on both the front and the back bumpers.
And I realized that they were all on there.
And I told Jeff, the attorney, I said, Jeff, they're on every one of my fucking vehicles.
He goes, Would you use any of them to transport anything?
I said, No.
He goes, Just fucking leave them on there.
But then he told me, he said, Dave, I can't do as an attorney, I can't tell you something to do that's illegal or to break the law.
Okay.
And he looked at me sternly.
And usually it was a kind of a brother brother relationship we had.
He said, But I had an Irish client here before in front of me.
He said he used to sell LSD out of Seattle and got caught.
With LSD, a whole bunch of it.
The feds wanted to put him in prison.
He said, That Irish client went back to Ireland and never came back.
And that's all he had to tell me.
I said, It's time for me.
Now, remember, my mom was from Spain.
As a child, I would go to Spain in the summertime.
So I had very good, close ties with Spain.
I thought, You don't need to tell me anymore, dude.
I understand what's going on here.
So you were a citizen of Spain and the US?
No, at that time I was not.
I was a US citizen only.
Okay.
But I had to get the fuck out because I knew that the doors were closing on me.
So, this is another story that I got to tell you.
It just will blow your mind.
So, I'm sitting at.
Then I separated from this girlfriend because I found out some other things about her that weren't conducive to the relationship.
Yeah.
At any rate.
Wait, did you have kids together?
Money Belt and Zeke00:15:23
No.
Okay.
No, no.
We didn't have any kids together.
She started seeing another buddy of mine behind my back and all kinds of shit.
Then I was trying to figure out how did this dude know I. Just got a load in the town.
So I started putting two to two together.
So she was kind of giving that information.
And anyway, long story short.
So I started dating one of the waitresses at my restaurant.
Really sweet individual, really nice girl.
And she was really in love with me.
And I just wasn't right for her because I knew I was getting out of town.
Employer employee relationship.
Right.
Those never go good.
Well, the relationship went well.
Just the fact that I knew I had to get out of town.
Right.
Wasn't right.
You know, I wasn't trying to fool anybody.
And I told her, and she got crying and went a whole nine yards.
But anyway, I also had above the restaurant, I had an apartment, two apartments above my restaurant, one in the front and one in the back.
And I had the back apartment for a lot of times that I couldn't make it home or whatever.
I didn't want to drive while I was drinking or something.
Anyway, since I knew the feds were filming there, I was up at the up apartment.
The day before I was about to leave, get Ghost out of Seattle, Washington.
And she's up there, and I'm making a money belt.
I'm making a money belt.
I had to take, I had like 120,000.
What's a, like you're talking like Wolf of Wall Street type of money belt?
I don't know the Wolf of Wall Street money belt, but this is just.
They're trying to like get themselves like into, or to Switzerland or whatever, and they're like bringing all their money to Switzerland and they're literally like wearing a freaking flak jacket.
Yeah.
I haven't seen the Wolf of Wall Street.
Oh my God.
Pull up a picture of the Wolf of Wall Street money.
They have the girl like literally like, they used Visqueen and they literally like, this is a money around her body.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a little bit more.
Now they make actual money belts.
Oh, okay.
That have no metal to it.
So you just, they're basically a thin, where you put 100 packs on there.
It's not the visqueen.
It's just you shove it in there and it zippers up.
Oh, wow.
And it's body forming.
So it's hard to recognize that you have money on you.
Okay.
Okay.
So I've got, we're making this money belt up and she's helping me count the money and she goes, I want nothing to do with anything you're doing illegal.
I said, Believe me, this is my legal money from.
From the construction business, don't worry about that.
All right, all of a sudden, I hear on the back door, I'm like, What the?
I'm like thinking, if it was the feds, they wouldn't be knocking, they would be kicking.
So I said, Go answer the door.
Oh, yeah, go right down below that, yeah, right there.
Yeah, no, I wasn't at that level.
I wish, but I wasn't at that level.
That's funny.
That's going to Mexico.
I'm not involved.
No, I was not at that level.
I had 120 grand on me, but it wasn't, I don't know what that is.
It was all incredible.
At any rate, I get the knock on the door and she goes, she comes back and she goes, it's some guy by the name of Zeke.
And I'm looking over, I'm thinking, Zeke.
I go, that fucker.
I'm just something, just my hairs rose.
Who's Zeke?
I'm going to tell you who Zeke was.
I have a ranch in northern British Columbia.
Okay, it's a huge, beautiful ranch that's right on a river.
It's really beautiful.
It's a thousand acres of wilderness, six and a half miles of a river.
It's just, it's God's land.
And when I was in the game of, and we'll get back to the story of the money belt because you asked a very good question.
When I was in the game of transporting, I decided I wanted to try to grow weed too.
Maybe I could make some extra money doing that.
We, me and one of my Canadian friends, and one of my American friends that introduced me into this game, had we went into partnership in this ranch to try and do an outdoor grow, an outdoor grow on the hillside of this ranch.
It didn't work because the sunlight spectrum wasn't sufficient enough.
You know, you need 12 hours on, 12 hours off.
So we invested like $200,000 into it, and between all of us, and we really lost money.
We lost all that money plus some.
And Zeke had just come out of prison doing a 30 year sentence, got it converted from a life sentence to a 30 year sentence.
Wow.
Okay.
And I didn't know this guy from Jack Shit.
But my American buddy calls me and says, Dave, this guy just came out of prison.
And that attorney I was telling you about, that was my attorney, calls me too and says, This guy just came out of prison.
Can you help him out?
Can you put him to work at something?
He's a solid dude.
But I said, You know, is he physically strong?
Because I was going to throw him in the construction company.
And he said, They said no.
And I, I, I, I had a soft heart for people who just came out of prison, held their mud.
He was in prison for killing a snitch.
Okay.
So it tells you the type of individual he is.
And I said, listen, I'm not really into all that violent shit, but I had a soft heart for him, for this person.
I didn't, I didn't, I had never met him.
I was just getting phone calls from the attorney and from my other friend.
Can we send him up to the ranch?
I said, well, listen, here's the deal.
There's three guys there, and the deal we had with those guys was okay, you guys do all the cultivation, all the work, and all that.
We're going to finance it.
And we're going to break this down 60 40, meaning they get 40% and we, the financiers, get 60%.
And we're looking at probably a $2 or $3 million payday if it worked out.
All right.
So I get this phone call from the attorney and from my other buddy.
And, you know, if I could help him out, he can't do anything real physical.
He's getting kind of old.
So I said, okay, let's send him up to Canada so he can make some real money if he wants to make.
And I felt sorry for him.
So we sent him up to Canada, smuggled him across the border.
Because no ex phones are allowed into Canada.
So I got him across the border, got him up to the ranch.
But after about four or five weeks up at the ranch, these guys are bitching, saying, This Zeke guy, man, is just a nasty individual.
He's on the couch, blowing his nose, wiping it on the couch.
He doesn't do anything, Dave.
Why do we have to split our money with him?
He doesn't even do his own dishes.
He doesn't flush the toilet.
I was like, No, dude, I'm not having this.
So I called my attorney.
I said, You know, that guy you sent up, I can't have it.
I said, I've never met him, but I can't have it.
Um, And then I called my other buddy and I said, Listen, he says, I'll call him.
I'll get him out of there.
So my other buddy said, And that's when Zeke said, I'm going to fuck you guys up someday.
And that's when I got on the phone.
I said, Dude, you don't know me from jack shit.
I did nothing but help you.
I said, If you didn't do what you were supposed to do, that's not my problem.
That's your problem.
And I don't take lightly to intimidation.
And I'm certainly not going to take lightly to your intimidation.
He said a few choice words to me and just hung up and left.
I mean, one day I did meet him.
In Bend, Oregon, when he saw a friend, because my friend said, Dave, he just wants to kind of square up and make ends meet and stuff and kind of apologize.
And I said, okay, no worries.
And I should never have gone to that meeting.
So I went there and I said, you know, I met him.
I said, yeah, no hard feelings of that.
And then he asked me, he said, hey, man, you know, me and my kids are hauling weed across the border in backpacks.
Would you like us to haul any?
I said, no, not really.
I said, just not interested.
And I left it there.
That was like four years before all my headaches started to happen.
Okay.
So when I get that knock on the door, Paige goes over to the door and she says, Zeke is there.
I just got this weird feeling.
Like, what the fuck?
And she goes, yeah, he really wants to talk to you.
I said, well, fuck, look around.
What am I doing right now?
I said, I can't talk to him now.
I said, tell him tomorrow.
I knew.
I just had this weird feeling.
I didn't want to talk to the dude.
I had no need to talk to him.
Right.
I just said, you know, Tell him to come tomorrow at noon at the restaurant and I'll meet him downstairs at the restaurant and we'll have lunch.
So she went back.
He said, Okay.
Then, as I was now, remember all my vehicles were GPS.
So I made a trade with one of the waitresses.
She had this beat up old Toyota Tercel.
And I had brand new pickup trucks, these Chevy Silverado things, 2500s or something like that.
It cost me like 30 or 40 grand a pop.
And so I went to one of my waitresses and I said to her, Can we do an exchange?
I'm going to give you my car.
For your car.
She looked at me and said, Your car is worth 20 of my cars.
I said, Do you want the exchange or not?
I'll offer another waitress.
If not, oh yeah, I'll do it.
So we did an exchange.
I took her car and drove it down.
It was on a Thursday.
I drove down to San Isidro, California, next to the Tijuana border.
You familiar with that area?
Yeah, I'm familiar with the Tijuana area.
Okay.
I've never heard of it.
San Isidro is one of the bordering, U.S. bordering towns to Tijuana.
Okay.
Like right below San Diego.
Okay.
Back then, I don't know if you.
So you never met with Zeke?
No, I never met with Zeke.
And another thing is, another thing is, I asked Paige the next day when I was in Mexico.
Yeah.
I asked Paige because I had to get out of Dodge without going on a flight or anything because these guys could track on my passport.
This guy's going here or there or wherever.
So I asked Paige the next day when I was in Mexico.
I said, So did you go to that?
She goes, Yeah, I served there.
She goes, It was really weird, Dave.
Those were feds 100%.
I said, Why?
And she goes, Because Zeke was sitting by himself and he waited for about 45 minutes, an hour.
And when he realized that you weren't coming, He got up and he left.
Three other separate tables got up and left too.
So I went around the back and saw them all talking by the.
There was a coffee cart outside down the street.
And I saw them all talking and talking with one another.
When they saw me looking at them, they dispersed real quickly.
I said, 100% feds.
Oh, my God.
So I knew.
I said, what they were trying.
What was that?
He was wired.
Okay.
He was wired.
And I found that later when we went into trial.
I got all those documents and all that shit.
He was wired and he was trying to set me up.
So instinctively, I got the fuck out of there.
So, why would they?
What did they do?
They got him on something else and they tried to.
I found out.
I found out.
They got him and his kids trafficking the backpacks.
The backpacks.
Jesus.
They were trying to get my friend out of Oregon because he didn't remember me.
This is how this whole case blew up, really.
They were trying to.
This is how they started understanding helicopters and shit like this.
Apart from this helicopter pilot.
Started working for these guys bringing cocaine back.
The way they realized helicopters were actually happening was because of Zeke.
Because of Zeke.
Wow.
He had gotten popped.
He was doing federal time.
He made an agreement with them.
They had two grand juries against my buddy.
None of them went through.
The grand jury just didn't find sufficient enough evidence.
And then he remembered this Dave Mendoza guy.
And so that's when they started hitting on me.
And that's how the whole case kind of blew up.
That's how this guy who I did nothing but good for.
So Zeke is the reason they were literally renting a house across the street from you.
Yep.
Yep.
That's what we've deducted.
I mean, because they only feed you a certain amount of information in your indictment and you start to decipher some of this shit.
Right, right.
At any rate, so you're going to like this story too with the money.
So I don't know if you know how it works at the border.
Going into Mexico before was a free for all.
Right.
I arrived, I left, remember, Thursday.
I arrived Friday.
Okay.
It took me a day to get all the way down there, a day and a half or something.
I got there early evening.
A lot of the Mexicans on Friday go that have working permits, just walk back across into Mexico, into Tijuana.
And literally, there's tens of thousands of them.
They work in San Diego during the daytime.
Right.
And they do live in Tijuana.
And on the weekends, they go back home.
And there's literally thousands and thousands.
It's like a football stadium, man.
Right.
Right.
So I had my money belt, but right across.
No big deal.
Have you ever been to the Tijuana airport?
When you're driving up the hill, there's a bunch of people.
I've never been to the airport there.
Okay.
Back then, it was a hokey poke, just a piece of crap airport.
Okay.
With all due respect.
You drive up this hill, and there's a bunch of crosses on the hill of all the people who have died trying to cross.
And it's pretty impressive.
But when I got to the airport, I was going on an internal flight within Mexico because I own property and some condos down in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
Jesus Christ, where do you not own properties, man?
So I was going there because I had a very good relationship with the chief of police there in Playa del Carmen.
Playa del Carmen.
Carmen.
It's right next to Cancun.
Okay.
Shitload of federal agents there.
Okay.
Shitload of DA agents out of there.
A lot of that's a drop shipment point for the Colombians and Merida and Quintana Roo to drop cocaine and then it gets transported up to the border.
Right.
So, okay.
But I had a very good relationship with the chief of police there and I still do have a very nice condo on Fifth Avenue there.
Anyway, I get in the Tijuana airport.
It's just a hokey punk small airport at this point.
Mm hmm.
I suspect it's changed dramatically, but back then there weren't iPhones.
There were the Nokias, you know, those Nokias toss and talk.
You'd buy them at the 7 Eleven program, little brick phones, little tiny fuckers, you know.
I would have hundreds of them, you know.
Play the snake on them.
Yeah, I don't remember all that, but I'd make two conversations and it would be tossed out the window, okay?
Because you were pre programmed.
You could order them under Danny Jones or Pepe Gonzalez, you know, you didn't have to give any idea for them, right?
So I had one of those that was, I knew it was brand new, I hadn't used it anywhere.
And I had it in my pocket.
I walked by my ticket.
I go through customs.
Oh, customs.
It wasn't customs because it's an internal flight, but the security check.
And as I walk through the security check, beep, I'm like, oh, fuck.
The money belt.
I'm saying, I'm fucked now.
That money belt.
Nokia Phones and Secrets00:03:26
And he tells me to go back through.
So I go back through and goes, beep, I'm fucked now.
Because I started thinking all that shit that people say.
Oh, you know, those little strips, if you put enough of them together, it'll sound off on those little metal strips.
Really?
Yeah, I've been told that.
I don't know the reality of it.
So I'm like, fuck, I'm done.
There's a cop, Mexican cop, right in front of me.
He's got one of these wands.
I'm done.
Just give him a stack and let you go right there.
I wish it was that easy.
You probably would have wanted the majority of the stack.
I wasn't going to have that.
Anyway, so I walk through and he looks at me and he says, Tienes algo de metal?
Do you have something of metal?
No.
And he goes, so he takes his wand and he goes like this starts from the top.
And I had that Nokia phone.
In my upper pocket, and I'd forgotten about that.
Oh, shit.
And it beeps off on that, and it just goes down like that.
It's all good.
And he says, Oh, to telephonal, your phone.
So I said, Oh, fuck.
So sorry.
And he goes, Go ahead.
So I give him this phone, and I get the hell out of Dodge.
I get down to Cancun.
I thought you were going to tell this motherfucker, plot the plumber.
No, no, I'm not that kind of guy.
I get into Cancun.
I get picked up by my.
You could have tried it.
Yeah.
We get in there, and it's all good.
Tell them in.
I talk to my friend of the chief of police there and I tell him, Listen, I'm having some issues in the United States.
There might be an international warrant out for me.
I go, If it does come across the screen, can you get that?
He goes, Yeah, I got a good friend in Interpol.
I can get it anytime.
I said, I'll give you a thousand dollars if you do.
If it comes across the screen, he says, I'll keep you posted.
Stay there for about a month.
He comes one day and says, Hermano, brother, you're in trouble.
Oh, he says, They're after you.
You're on Interpol.
Oh, can I get my thousand dollars?
I said, I need to see it.
And I'm not giving you shit.
I just told myself, I need to see it.
Because I didn't know.
You just don't know if this guy's trying to play you for money or not.
Or any of these guys are trying to play.
So he came back an hour later, and there I was with my driver's license photo.
And I was wanted for a trafficking conspiracy to possess and trafficking marijuana.
And they also put cocaine on there.
I was like, cocaine.
All right.
Well, fuck it.
I'm out of the country now.
All right.
Just for good measure, they threw cocaine in there, huh?
Well, they did that because they were trying to remember they knew we would give you time but wouldn't give you a lot of time.
And I had a very, we'll talk about that as we go along in this podcast, but I had a very unethical prosecutor, Susan Rowe.
Very unethical.
And you'll see how this whole game walks together.
I didn't know the prosecutors were unethical.
I thought they were all unethical.
Well, I got to be honest, there are some judges like Kuhnauer.
Uh, who's I take my hat off to a gentleman like that, yeah.
But most of them all are playing the game, and you're going to see it.
I'm going to show you in the documentation, right?
It's black and white, okay.
You're going to see that this is a game that these players play from top to bottom, and there ain't no getting out.
And they're all know what the game is, and they think they're all doing the good job of the United States.
What they're really doing is up what true democracy is when they play that game, okay?
Unethical Prosecutors00:16:11
But we'll get into that in a little farther here.
So, this guy brings over.
The document, I give him $1,000.
And I got to get out of Dodge.
Because he says, he tells me right to my face, he says, I can't protect you against this one.
The Mexican cop does.
He says, I can't protect you.
He goes, There's a lot of federal agents here.
You know them.
And I did.
He would point them out to me.
He says, There's a shitload of federal agents here.
They're looking for you, Hartley.
So what did I do?
I drove across the border to Belize.
Took a flight from Belize to Havana.
Were you worried about crossing the border to Belize?
Yeah, I was.
I was worried.
At that point, I was worried the whole time.
Because you would think there'd be federal agents there, too, right?
Yeah, but one of the, remember, there wasn't so much communication through laptops, what they have now.
Right.
Okay.
There was communication.
If they thought anything sort of suspicious, there was communication.
But I just looked like a general American gringo that had Spanish ethnicity.
And I was heading to Spain.
So when I got into Belize, they didn't have direct flights to Spain.
I thought for sure when I arrived to Spain, I would be arrested at the airport.
But I spoke to a Mexican lawyer, and a Mexican lawyer said the only country that's going to protect you is going to be Spain.
If you're a Spanish citizen, you're not a Spanish citizen.
But try it.
So I get to Belize.
I get on a flight from Belize to Havana, Cuba.
Whoa.
What year?
Oh, God, what year was this?
This was 2006.
Okay.
So I was like, but in Havana, they want to, this is just a transfer point.
Right.
You didn't leave the airport.
No, Spain has very good relations.
Okay.
Fairly good relations with Havana.
So does Canada, by the way.
Wait, Spain has a good relationship with them now?
With Cuba.
Oh, yeah.
They've always had.
No, Spain's big economic push in Cuba are the hotels.
90% of those hotels are Spanish hotels.
Right.
I'm just thinking about like the beginning of Cuba and Spain, like with all the slaves and I'm.
No, but I'm, yeah, that's, that's, And that's not just Cuba.
That's all of Central and South America.
The Spanish were evil and bad people there.
But okay, so I fly through a van.
I'm on a flight to Madrid.
You're not going to believe this, man.
There's a God up there that was looking over at me.
I get into customs, my US passport.
I'm the next one in line.
And I see this lady occasionally running the zip on the passport, the little metal zip bar.
I hand her my passport.
Remember, I had my dog.
I packed my dog and put him in cargo.
And I had another special little list thing there saying I had a dog in cargo.
Okay.
When I arrived in Madrid.
So I hand this lady that with this list saying I have this, and she's just immigration, this Spanish police officer.
And she grabs my passport.
She doesn't zip it because I hand her this other paper.
And she's, oh, she makes a phone call off of a walkie talkie, says, yeah, we're having problems getting this dog off the plane because the crate, the way they put the crate in, they put it in sideways because the dog was so big.
And the door wasn't sufficient enough to get the dog out.
So they wanted to open the crate to get the dog out, like they did, and they could flip the crate sideways.
But they said the dog was being very aggressive.
And she said, You're going to have to go to cargo immediately because we can't have a dog half chain on the tarmac.
Because the thing could start running, we'd have to shoot it.
And so I was like, Huh?
None of this kind of stuff.
I was like, What the fuck is going on here?
She didn't want my password.
She just stamped it and handed me and said, And then the two officers took me to the cargo to get the dog.
And I was now in Spain.
There was no more customs.
I mean, there were customs if you carried a bag.
I didn't carry a bag, I carried a dog.
Grabbed my dog, had a buddy of mine pick me up in Madrid and take me to my house in Bilbao.
I was lucky.
I was extremely lucky with a hell of a lot of money on me.
Okay.
I was very lucky.
Then obviously, I'm in Spain.
While in Spain, my mother being a Spanish national, and I being the child of my mother.
Had an instant nationality if I chose to get it.
I got it.
I applied for it.
So that's the first thing you did when you applied for a sister.
Yeah, I did.
And they delayed it and delayed it because then they knew I was in Spain.
The feds knew it, the Spanish authorities knew it.
They were trying to locate me.
At that point, I had a new girlfriend who was my wife, she's Canadian.
I met her in the game of transporting weed and stuff.
She's Canadian.
And we applied for my nationality.
They delayed it and delayed it, trying to locate me.
My wife was pregnant at that time.
We just had a child.
And she was pregnant with our second child.
And every time we'd get near the town where I lived in, all cell phones, all chips, everything electronic had to be taken out.
I didn't allow anybody.
So they knew I was in that area.
They just didn't know where I was at.
Specifically, and I was in a very small town that everybody knows me.
They don't like the police there, it's a Basque region of Spain.
They're very anti Spanish, anti police.
And remember, I was being looked for by the Spanish police and the US police, the USDA, that were in Spain.
Well, I was told at one point that they went to the only gas station there that some people were asking about you, and they're not from here.
I mean, they're not from here, they're from Spain.
I said, About me.
Yeah, I didn't tell them shit though.
They wanted to know where you live.
They said the guy said he was a relative of yours, but he had an accento, a Spanish accent, not a Bass accent, because it's like if you're from Florida, somebody from the West Side knows your accent is a little separate, different than certain parts of America.
Okay.
So I said, Yeah.
I said, That's odd.
And he said, Yeah.
I told them, they kept on asking, Where you live?
Where you live?
I said, I don't know who you're talking about.
So I knew that they were getting close.
One point I get a call.
From my attorney in Spain saying, Your passport's ready.
Your nationality is ready.
You got to go to the courthouse and pick it up.
I don't know what it was, Danny.
Something inside of me told me, I handed my girl all the blackberries.
I said, I'm going to go pick this.
I said, Why are you handing me your blackberries?
I had like four or five of these encrypted blackberries.
I said, I just, I don't know.
Just take them just in case.
My wallet took off my watch and went in the courthouse.
The moment I went in there to pick up that passport, I've seen.
I looked to the left, I looked to the right, seeing these big gorillas.
I said, This is my waiting.
They literally snatched me up at that second.
And that's when the whole process of extradition began.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, who were the guys that were there?
Were they DEA agents or?
There were DEA agents and Spanish National Police.
Okay.
The DEA agents, they work hand in hand with all these governments.
I mean, hand in hand.
You'll never see a Spanish police officer work hand in hand with an FBI agent here in the States.
But those fuckers are all.
Through all of the rest of the world.
I mean, and they have authority.
You will see a lot of that in my case.
But at any rate, they shackled me up.
Then they asked me where I lived.
And I said, You tell me.
So we know where you live.
I said, Is that right?
Oh, and I had one Blackberry on me, the only one I used to communicate with my wife.
It was an encrypted Blackberry.
I kept that so I would let her know when to come and pick me up.
Okay.
I had about six or seven Blackberries because every individual that I communicated with, I did it off, not to contaminate phones.
So, at any rate, they took the Blackberry from me and they said, Can you open this up?
I said, No.
I said, Oh, we got like their NSA to open it up.
I said, All right, do what you got to do.
And then they said, Oh, we know where you live.
I said, If you know where I live, then when the fuck are you asking me?
I go, Either you guys are being dishonest or you're trying to, Trying to bullshit me.
I said, talk straight.
That's when one of the USDA agents, big handlebar mustache, came up and said, Oh, you're one of those tough guys.
I said, No, I'm not a tough guy, dude.
Just the opposite.
I'm pretty soft.
I go, But I'm not going to take your bullshit or theirs.
We'll see how you like prison.
I said, Well, they have sunshine in prison.
We'll figure it out, you know?
And so they wrapped me up and took me in front of a federal judge in Spain.
Pedraz, Santiago Pedraz, decent individual, actually tried to help me.
That judge was the one who decided whether I have to go into prison or get bail and come out of, be waiting for my extradition outside of prison.
Okay.
Okay.
He wasn't sentencing judge or trial judge in Spain because now remember, extradition is a judicial process.
You have to go through a trial, they have to prove it, yes or no.
Right.
It's just like being tried in the United States.
Okay.
So I'm in prison.
I hire some of the best attorneys there, worst money I could ever spend.
So, real quick, just a brief little interruption.
Right before they picked you up to get your passport, that's when they busted you.
So, did they actually give you your Spanish citizenship?
They did.
Yep.
It was there.
It was there.
And it actually had been there for over a month.
They were just trying to figure out a way how they could entice me to go pick it up.
Because if I had known beforehand, I was telling my wife, because I was out of the country, I was in Portugal.
And I'd gotten a text from the Department of State of Spain saying, your passport's ready.
So I told my attorney, go pick it up.
And then he called the courthouse.
They said, no, it's not ready.
It's not ready.
So, they were coordinating the trap while I was in Portugal.
Got it.
They're coordinating that trap.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, I'm sitting in Spanish federal prison, Soto de Real, which is actually a fairly decent place.
I mean, not if you're a Spanish citizen, but if you've been experiencing a federal prison or a state prison here in the United States, it's like a humane facility.
You wear your own clothes.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
There's girls in another module.
You know, uh, what?
Oh, yeah, you get vis a vis, which is you have sexual, uh, if you conjugal visits, conjugal visits.
Oh, wow.
Um, no, it's actually very decent.
They're not trying to destroy that relationship you have with your family because in the European Constitution, the human charter rights, and this is what's later ties my case together.
And under the Spanish Constitution, you can do bad, you can get penalized for doing bad, but the Constitution or the police or the establishment cannot.
Harm your family or harm your children, and that's why when they sentence you, they sentence you to what they call a non degrading sentence, and your family should not suffer.
So they have to, they're the constitution forces them to bring you by your family.
So if there's a prison that's a mile away from your family, that's the prison you're going to go to.
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Now, do they limit the amount of visits you're allowed to have with your family?
Uh, you have five a month, five a month, five a month, wow, five a month, and Four conjugal visits.
So every week.
So every week.
And some.
Wow.
That's pretty wild.
And you wear your own clothes.
You got guys running around there with Rolexes and nice clothes.
I mean, big fucking, you know, narcotics dealers.
I mean, just floating shit around there.
Everybody's got a cell phone.
I had my.
Are you allowed to smoke cigarettes there?
Oh, yeah.
Really?
I banned them in the U.S.
I know that.
I was in federal prison.
Oh, yeah.
Of course, you know that.
And also, I probably shouldn't say this, but I had the head of security at the prison.
On the bite.
I was giving them a thousand euros a month to bring me my blackberries and bring me any food I wanted and any drinks I wanted.
Oh, wow.
And it was actually.
Dude, that actually sounds pretty nice.
It is.
That's what I'm saying.
But if you're in prison, you know what the thing is?
It's all relative, Danny.
It's all relative, right?
It's all relative.
Relative to the U.S., though.
Relative to the U.S., but if you're a Spanish citizen, you don't want to go there.
No.
Because you haven't experienced the U.S., you don't want to go there.
It's still prison.
You're still away from your family.
Right.
Still away from you being able to go out and I want to order Chinese food or I want to order Thai food.
You can't do any of that.
You're stuck in this facility.
Right.
But it's humane.
It's humane.
Now, what is the difference between the prison population there and the U.S.?
Do you know?
Yeah.
The prison population there, they cannot have more than 90% populace in their prisons.
That means because the United States has over, it's doubly the populace that's allowed in a prison, in a single prison.
Is that the question you're asking?
So, if it lets you look at per capita of people locked up.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
I thought you meant specifically for the prison.
No, I mean like in the country, like per capita.
It's, dude, they catch you for marijuana.
If it's your first crime, I don't care if it's a ton of marijuana, if it's a ton, you might, if it's your first time, you might get a two year sentence, which you don't spend a day except for the day that you got arrested in prison because it's your first crime.
And if it's a two year sentence, anything a two year sentence or less, you go on home confinement.
Oh, okay.
For a ton of cocaine, which in the United States would give you a life sentence, I had these.
Colombians next to me getting caught with 20 tons, not first time, third time, which in the United States, you're done.
You're done.
In Spain, 10 year sentence.
You go home after five under those conditions.
That's why the U.S. embassy and the U.S. government has put so much pressure on the Spanish judiciary to sentence or change your laws to try and make it harder and harder.
And they did that under the conservative government.
But don't fool yourself.
Both governments work very closely with the United States.
And my case shows this.
My case shows this very clearly.
But in my case, whether it's one pound or one ton of weed, the maximum sentence I would have in Spain is six years one day.
So that means it's mandatory at half time you go home.
Okay.
For home confinement.
They call it home.
It's not really home confinement.
Just go home and you send a flyer in every once a month, basically what it is.
You go work, you go do what you want to do.
You can't leave the country, but you go home.
Okay.
No private prisons, I take it.
No, no, no, no private prisons.
So, for my crime in six years and one day, that's real important to understand because that's the crux of my United Nations lawsuit.
For your crime, right?
Right, against Spain.
Okay.
All right.
So, I was arrested in June, I think, 2008.
Okay.
Okay.
Money Structuring Charges00:03:09
I, in August 2008, I had just graduated high school.
Oh, shit.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I'm not sorry to hear that.
I hope I'm not influencing you in any manner.
At any rate, in August, I get this Spanish resolution of my extradition, meaning there's three court panels from the Spanish Federal Court, the Audiencia Nacional.
There's three judges.
Okay.
And I get this resolution on my extradition.
And there are three things that they require for my extradition to be allowed to go to the United States.
Okay.
One of those things is no money structuring.
Because remember, the United States charged me with money structuring and money laundering.
And Spain said that was duplicate.
They didn't have any such thing as money structuring.
It's either money laundering or nothing else.
What is money structuring?
I'll tell you what money structuring is.
A lot of people ask that question.
I didn't really know what money structuring was.
When you go into a bank, you're not doing anything illegal, and you say, I want a cashier's check for $2,500.
Remember, at $3,000 before, I don't know what it is now, $3,000 or above, You have to fill out a form.
The bank has to fill out a form saying, Danny Jones has made a check for $3,100.
Okay.
Anything under $3,000, it's not required of the bank.
That's what they call money structuring.
You were diverting.
I made a bunch, supposedly, what they said is I made a bunch of checks, which I did.
Not me, but my company did.
I mean, cashier's checks.
Let me show you.
It starts here and it goes.
Those are all your transactions?
Those are all my supposedly money structuring.
There's about $70,000.
In a money structure.
Okay.
But the Spanish court said that's duplicate.
Money structure in Spain doesn't have an equivalent.
Because remember, for them to extradite somebody from another country, your crime has to be equivalent into that country, meaning it has to fall under some sort of penal code in that country.
Okay.
Okay.
So Spain said, This doesn't fall under our penal code.
Money structure doesn't fall.
You have to drop that charge.
We'll extradite him, but you have to drop that charge.
Okay.
All right.
Then the other one was what was the other one?
The other one was no life sentence.
They could not give me because they said when they made the accusations, there was cocaine.
They later dropped those charges, but they said no life sentence.
We cannot have, because Europe does not allow for a life sentence.
Okay.
That's non existent.
Is there a death penalty in Europe?
No.
No death penalty, no life sentences.
Okay.
Then the most important one to me was because remember, the Spanish Constitution obligates it any sentence imposed. may be served in Spain because I had two children.
One, my first child was born with Down syndrome.
I'm now, my wife was pregnant with my second child, Spanish citizens, living in Spain.
She being Canadian, but the boys are Spanish citizens at that time.
Extradition Treaty Conditions00:15:26
Okay.
Or considered as Spanish citizens because they were living in Spain and they were, well, one was born in Spain.
The other one ultimately came to Canada because she was my wife's belly and was born in Canada.
But that's how the court perceived it.
Okay.
So we could not do damage to the kids.
That was very important to me.
Extremely important to me.
Okay.
So now remember, I'm not privy to any of the game of the Americans or how they violate extraditions or any of that.
I'm thinking, Yahoo.
So you didn't expect any sort of foul play?
Any sort of foul play.
I thought, okay.
Not only that, I had the best attorneys that money could buy in Spain.
And I asked those attorneys.
Is this solid?
He says it's imperial.
In Spanish, it means imperial.
Imperial.
Imperial.
La ley is imperial, means imperial.
Nothing is above it.
Okay.
Because it's a final resolution.
Remember, they could have, the Americans could have, the U.S. Department of State or Justice could have asked the Spanish Attorney General to appeal this, appeal these conditions.
They would have lost.
They would have lost, but they didn't.
Okay.
Okay.
So then in October, remember, this was in August, October of 2008.
The feds had seized all my property, all of it, $14 million worth of property.
In the U.S.?
In the U.S.
So they didn't get anything in Mexico or Canada.
They just got your properties that were up in like the Northwest.
Right.
And the reason they couldn't do it, they knew about my properties in Canada and Mexico, but they don't have jurisdiction to take it.
They can't go and tell the Mexican to seize his property.
It doesn't happen.
You know, even the federal judge said, How am I supposed to do that?
So civil procedures are different than criminal procedures.
But they're obligatory.
They can't see something from you and not go through a trial.
Okay.
So they seized my property.
So, how early did you learn that they had seized your property?
I'm sure you had employees, property managers, all kinds of people working at these buildings at your home.
Yep.
About three months, two months, not even that much, probably 40 days before they arrested me.
And the reason they could have done a long time ago.
Or they wanted to do a long time ago, but the criminal U.S. attorney, Susie Rowe, didn't want it because then I could start asking when they seize property and they start that process, then I can start asking for files.
Well, how is this property related to any of my criminal activity?
And they would have to give that up.
Ah, okay.
They didn't want to do that.
Right.
They don't want to do this.
This is a game of chess we're playing here.
Right.
All right.
So they seize all my property.
I'm like, fuck, every fucking piece.
I owed my parents about $800,000 in loans that they'd given me, my parents, okay?
Their whole retirement fund.
For what?
$800,000?
Yeah.
Well, some of the properties, what I would do is I would buy properties.
They would loan me the money.
And then, when I would get that property renovated, I refinance it and give them back their money.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So they were able to make some claims against the U.S. government say, hey, hey, hey, hey.
But a lot of the U.S. government say, no, we're not going to give you the fucking money for this or that or that.
They're innocent parties.
Okay.
At any rate, also, just so you understand, I said, fuck it.
I hired the best attorney in Seattle to challenge that.
But I don't know if you know how civil law goes, but you can't have, you as the owner have to be present.
In the courtroom to challenge it.
You can't send an attorney to challenge any forfeiture seizure.
Shows you how fucked up that law is.
Wow.
So they wanted me to come back because one of the offers that Susie Rowe had given is he comes back voluntarily and then we'll discuss the property.
Well, I knew not to trust these fuckers.
Right.
So I'm not coming back voluntarily.
You're nuts.
Right.
Okay.
So this October 2008 ruling that came from the civil, that the U.S. attorney filed.
Against my property demonstrates that they knew perfectly well, perfectly well, the provision that the courts made, the conditions that the courts established, the Spanish courts established with my extradition.
Okay.
The reason I'm saying this is because one of the arguments that later down the road that the U.S. federal government was saying is we didn't really understand that that required, because it said a possible return back to Spain.
That he could possibly return back to serve his sentence in Spain.
Well, the only reason the judge said that and the judge wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice possible because David Mendoza could have gone to trial and found innocent.
Then he wouldn't need to be returned back to Spain if he didn't want to go back to Spain.
But if he's found guilty, he's required to go back to Spain.
But if you look at that document, that's what the U.S. prosecutor stated in my civil lawsuit, they recognize.
That it requires me to go back to Spain.
This condition requires me.
Even if you're found innocent?
No, no, no, no.
Just requires that the condition is required.
Because remember, the U.S. government later was saying, well, we didn't realize that it required David to go back to Spain.
We just thought we could or we could not.
Okay.
Well, then what the fuck would they impose it?
I mean, none of their arguments made sense, but they were trying to find a way around it.
Okay.
All right.
So, So, what's really important here, too, is they stayed in this document that they submit to the civil court.
And this is when I started getting these weird feelings about this whole deal.
And now remember, I'm still in Spanish jurisdiction, I'm in Spanish prison.
They say, oh, and also the treaty to transfer prisoners is called the Strasbourg Treaty.
I'm not sure if you've ever heard that, but there's treaties, there's international treaties that allow the transfer of Danny Jones from.
Columbia to come serve a sentence in.
There's treaties between each country for extradition.
Correct.
Correct.
Not just the extradition.
Oh.
One thing is the extradition treaty.
Another thing is the transfer of a sentenced prisoner.
Ah, oh, that's separate.
Yeah, that's separate.
That's called the Strasbourg Treaty Transfer.
Okay.
Okay.
All countries, most of countries are assigned to that because they want their nationals to be able to come back to their country.
Okay.
So if an American is sentenced in Colombia for cocaine trafficking or cop doing something, he can serve, come back to the United States to serve his sentence.
All right.
Got it.
But under that treaty, all three parties must give their consent.
So if one of the three parties, meaning the person, the person, and both countries, and both countries.
So if one of those three parties say no, You ain't going back.
You ain't going back.
And this is one of the things that we'll talk about Assange's case and how I'm assisting in that case.
Right.
Okay.
So, what they're saying here in this resolution that the U.S. attorney is saying is also that the treaty does not permit to condition a treaty transfer.
It can request a treaty transfer, but it does not permit or require the government to do so.
Okay, so the court order, remember the Spanish court order requires Americans that once I'm sentenced, I'm to be sent back.
So the U.S. prosecutor says, Oh, Spain could say whatever the fuck they want.
But under the treaty, the Strasbourg Treaty, all three parties must agree.
They're right.
They're correct.
They're not incorrect on that.
But what they're not mentioning is the extradition treaty allows for discretion on how nationals are.
Are given up.
Okay.
So if a Spanish national is to be given up to a U.S. court, as I was now a Spanish national because I had my Spanish passport, the courts have a discretion on how they do that.
So that discretion is utilized as conditions.
We utilized our discretion.
The court utilized their discretion under these conditions.
We will give them up under the discretion that we conditioned this.
And you accept it.
Okay.
Okay.
That's under the treaty.
So that's what the court was saying.
And when I read this, when I read this civil response from the U.S. Attorney's Office, I don't want to get too complicated here, but when I read that, I went right back in front of this three panel judge court.
I said, hey, guys, I said, these guys aren't giving a fuck about what you federal judges are saying.
They're saying that the treaty doesn't allow to do such.
So then in.
November of 2008, those three judges clarified the conditions for the Americans, made it very clear for the U.S. Department of Justice.
And the last page here says that under what I just explained to you, under the extradition treaty, we have a discretion whether to give this national up or not.
And our discretion is imposing these conditions.
Now, whether you accept it is your problem.
Got it.
If you choose not to accept it, he ain't going.
Right.
He goes home free.
Okay.
End of story.
And it's not whether you choose to send him back.
It's whether he chooses to come back.
So, all of it lied on me.
Okay.
Now, remember, there's a game being played here, and I didn't understand it.
I just, there's intuitively, I was understanding, oh, shit, things aren't being said clearly here in front of this court.
I just didn't.
Too much ambiguity.
Ambiguity.
Yeah, exactly.
So, then the United States sends a diplomatic note.
I don't know if you're familiar with diplomatic notes or not.
Not until I got all your emails.
Do I have this in an email?
You probably do.
You probably do.
I'll read it to you.
It's in English.
Okay.
It's in English, but it just shows you the arrogance.
Let me explain what a diplomatic note is for your audience.
Yeah.
What's a diplomatic note?
A diplomatic note or verbal note is the way countries communicate with one another legally.
So if the United States has a complaint against Russia, their embassy will send Russia, that is, the U.S. embassy in Moscow, will submit a diplomatic note saying, we have a complaint about this, this, this, or this, or This Brittany Griner, we want her back.
Or this Trevor Reed, we want him back.
Okay.
Now, the Russians can ignore it or they can accept it and say, well, and they'll give a response to that.
But that's all of record.
And it's the way countries legally communicate with one another because there's a track record.
Diplomatic notes.
Diplomatic verbal note.
Okay.
Okay.
You rarely hear about them because they're usually kept very quiet and under semi secrecy.
Okay.
All right.
So the United States sent a diplomatic note to the Spanish ministry.
Of justice.
And they included in their diplomatic note, and there's reasons behind this, which I later found out while I was in prison and I was doing all the, basically got my international law degree.
Yeah.
But there's reasons why they construct these diplomatic notes.
Okay.
And they'd make them ambiguous or they use certain type of verbiage in there.
They included money structuring.
They said, fuck it, you're not telling us what to do.
We're going to include money structuring, as you can see there.
And they also said here the United States Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington at Seattle has indicated to the Office of International Affairs that if Mendoza is extradited from Spain, it will not seek a sentence of life imprisonment and that it will do everything in its empowerment to ensure that Mendoza receives a determinate sentence of incarceration.
Now, those are very, very important words, determinate sentence of incarceration from life sentence.
Okay.
And then finally, it says here in this diplomatic note, it says to Spain, The Western District of Washington further indicates it does not object to Mendoza making an application to serve his sentence in Spain in accordance with the Strasbourg Treaty Transfer.
Doesn't object to you making an application.
Right, right.
Now, that's a far cry from what you guys were talking about with the judges.
That's correct.
And not just that.
Who's the United States?
The United States has absolutely no authority to tell me or you or anybody else in federal prison whether you can make an application to be treaty transferred or not.
That's a right within you.
They can't tell you, Danny Jones, you can't make an application to be treaty transferred back to wherever.
Right.
They can deny it, but they can't tell you.
They can't stop your application.
They can't stop your application.
They go through the process.
They can deny it.
All right.
So I instantly took this verbal note when I got a copy of it.
I went back in front of the judges and I said, listen, these guys are clowning us around.
So you got a copy of this before you went to the U.S.?
Yes.
Okay.
I got a copy of this.
In so, your attorney's getting all this or something, yeah.
My attorney's getting all this and forwarding it to me, and he's not seeing.
He said, Oh, don't worry about any of this, they have to because it's imperial under the Spanish law.
Remember, Spanish law is imperial, U.S. law is imperial in U.S. Spanish law knows nothing about U.S. law, and U.S. law doesn't give a about Spanish law, right?
That's the game that's being played here, anyway.
I instantly saw that this, I saw I'm hearing right.
I mean, I instantly said, Listen, this is a joke, dude.
I go, I told the courts.
So, what the courts did is in their April ruling, because this was about a month beforehand, I went back in front of the courts.
I said, Listen, somebody's got to set the Americans straight.
Either they accept the conditions or they don't accept the conditions.
And if they don't accept the conditions, you have to let me home.
I got to go free.
And the story, I mean, you've made us, and the thing is, they couldn't now go back.
They started seeing a lot of tensions going back and forth, but they couldn't now go back on those conditions.
And I suspect a lot of the judges would have loved to have gone back on those decisions because they didn't want the Political play on this.
They couldn't go back on this decision because it was a final resolution.
They had 15 days to appeal.
They didn't appeal it.
So that decision was locked in stone, okay, of putting the conditions down on me.
Right.
All right.
So I get this after complaining about this and bringing it to the court's attention, I get this last ruling in April.
Okay.
The court said, We have done everything we're supposed to do as a federal court.
Diplomatic Assurances00:13:00
And the Spanish executive who's going to turn me over to the United States Marshals.
The Spanish, remember, extraditions are a judicial and executive process.
It's two branches of the government because the courts or the U.S. Department of Justice does not talk directly with Spain.
It talks with the U.S. State Department.
The U.S. State Department asks for my extradition.
Okay.
And this might be a little game of telephone going on.
Yeah.
It's just from one bureaucracy to another.
Right, right.
Right.
So the court said to the Spanish executive once you turn this character over, You are to ensure his surrender to the U.S. authorities covers all, every one of these conditions.
You understand that?
It says it very clearly in there.
And so they made it clear.
All right.
So that was in April.
I get picked up by the U.S. Marshals in Barajas Airport at, let's see, at the end of April.
So we got the photos I emailed to you recently, Stephen, for these.
Next documents.
Yeah, this is real important.
These documents are really, really important because this is what we call the deed of surrender.
Okay.
It's really produced.
So this is sort of like the final straw before you go to the U.S. You actually have to agree to this yourself.
Right.
Well, the problem is 90% of these cases, extradition cases, don't force this.
Oh, I forced the court to do this.
Usually all these hearings happen and okay, yeah, because nobody knows that they're.
That they're really being sucked into the devil.
Right, right, right.
That there's going to be foul play.
But every time I force the court's hands and saying, you need to secure that these conditions are correct, they force this to happen.
This is what's called a deed of surrender.
It's an actual contract.
Right.
Okay.
And you'll see it up there.
There's the one before that.
There should be another one.
Yeah, there is.
I sent three.
The first one with all the.
There you go.
That's the one.
Okay.
That's the one.
You'll see on the right hand side, that's the day I'm being extradited.
Okay.
On the right hand side is the U.S. Embassy's signature.
In the middle is my signature.
And on the left hand side is the diplomat, Spanish diplomat signature.
Okay.
I'm on the tarmac here, getting transferred to the U.S. Marine.
You're on the tarmac.
The plane's running.
Yep.
They're getting ready to put you in the plane and ship you back.
Bag me up as a fucking bag over your head.
Well, he told me.
He says, if you create any conflict with us, we're going to put the black bag.
I was like, what?
What's that?
But they had me chained up with that fucking leather.
Some sort of terrorist or something.
Yeah, with the leather belt and the two ankles chained up with the hands chained up like that.
I'm strong.
I was stripped naked, put in a jumpsuit, ready to get on this plane.
Anyway, they asked me, the Spanish diplomat in Spanish.
Now, this lady, Kimberly Weiss, is a very pivotal individual here on all this.
Okay.
They asked me to sign this document on the tarmac.
I said, I'm not signing unless she signs it first.
Cause I was scared that they wouldn't sign it.
And the court ordered that the document be signed with all the conditions.
I said, You were on the ball, man.
And well, I wasn't on the ball.
I was just, I just knew how fucked up this whole game was going to be.
Right.
Right.
And I said, I'm not signing.
That's when one of the U.S. Marshals, I'll never forget this guy, a bald dude, says, Hey, dude, you're not, he says, you're not calling shit here.
We're calling the shots.
I said, No, you're not, buddy.
I said, I'm in Spanish jurisdiction right now.
Fuck you and fuck everything that goes with you.
I said, I'm not signing that until she signed.
You said that on the tarmac?
Yeah.
And the Spanish police were there and they were just kind of giggling, right?
And so she goes, Oh, she walked out away from us.
She got on the phone and then came back and said, Give me the paper.
She signed it, Kimberly Weiss.
So I signed it.
Spanish diplomats signed it.
She calls Langley.
This guy's playing hardball.
I think she called the U.S. Embassy in Madrid.
Okay, okay.
But behind and afterwards, I never knew, but the next document is the same document contract, but it's signed between the U.S. Marshals and the Spanish police.
Okay, on the right hand side is U.S. Marshals.
Okay.
And on the left hand side is the Spanish police.
Now, why does there have to be the same document signed by different people?
I don't have the slightest clue.
I think the Spanish police were so scared because the courts made it very.
Prominent to them that you better assure this guy gets delivered with all the assurances.
Okay, they were scared.
The Spanish judiciary put the stone down on these guys and said, Listen, if these guys don't complete what they're supposed to complete, because they started seeing the bullshit the Americans are playing here on my expedition.
They started seeing, Okay, what's this diplomatic note about?
Why aren't they agreeing to this?
Why, you know, this is nonsense.
But this is pivotal in my case in the U.S., not in Spain.
So, this is, I don't know if you already said this, but this is what's called diplomatic assurances.
Correct.
Okay.
And this is very relevant to the Assange case, these diplomatic assurances.
That's correct.
Normally, diplomatic assurances are given under verbal note.
That verbal note that we just referred to that didn't say shit, didn't allow shit, didn't do shit.
Normally.
This doesn't have to be signed by anybody.
They're all signed.
Okay.
Either diplomatic notes are?
Yep.
Either diplomatic notes are.
This has diplomatic assurances because it has a diplomat's signature on it who represents the United States of America.
So they tried to.
split hairs in civil court with this when I took Obama and Holder to civil court.
They said, oh, we only give diplomatic assurances through verbal notes.
I said, take a look in Black's Law Dictionary, diplomatic assurances.
Look it under.
You don't need much of a law degree to understand.
It's an assurance given by a fucking diplomat.
And you guys just looked at me.
I was grateful.
I had a very stupid, ignorant U.S. attorney, civil attorney when I was fighting Obama and Holder.
The guy was an idiot.
I got to be frank.
I mean, there's not very many like that because most of these guys are pretty smart and pretty ingenuity on how to fuck you over.
Okay.
So, at any rate, where was I going?
So, who is this Kimberly Wise lady?
Okay.
Let's pull up a photo of her, too.
Because the photo, this photo speaks a thousand words, to be honest.
Yeah.
I'll tell you, that's a good question.
You don't realize who she is until you go through this process.
And then, while I was in, I've become the kind of go to guy now.
Because I learned so much about extraditions while I was in federal prison.
So, I get a lot of phone calls from people who are going through the extradition process in Spain, in Europe, in all different countries.
And they call me and I basically give them where she is on there.
Just type in Kimberly Wise CIA, right?
Or no, probably not CIA.
U.S. Embassy.
U.S. Embassy.
There you go.
Madrid or something like that.
There she is, top left.
Yeah, that's her.
That's a spook.
I'm telling you right now.
That's a spook.
She runs all the renditions.
You know what renditions are?
Yeah, go ahead and tell everybody what they are.
Renditions are not extraditions.
Renditions are black flights when they snatch somebody up out of Europe or they coordinate a transport point in Europe to bring them to the United States.
Rendition is basically a CIA kidnapping.
That's correct.
Now, when I did my civil suit against the Obama administration, I specifically, because her signature's on here, I specifically mentioned her as a signator on this contract.
The American government and the Spanish government.
Both asked me, please do not put her name on that civil suit.
Use employee, blah, and we'll give you a number.
I said, fuck no.
I go, if she's proud of what she's doing, let her name be on there.
Well, it's for her safety in Spain.
I said, I don't give a fuck for her safety in Spain.
What about my fucking safety?
None of you clowns cared about me.
Why should I care about her?
And they were hot about that.
In Spain, there is a law that I can't do it.
But I wasn't in Spain when I filed the civil suit.
I was in federal court.
So I said, screw you guys.
So, this is the civil suit against Obama you're talking about.
Yeah, Obama and Holder.
Okay.
So, I get.
She looks mean.
Oh, dude.
Dude, she's not a good person.
She's not a good person.
I could say a lot of things here that I don't want to say.
She's involved in other cases that I know personally know about.
There's a video we have of her, Richard Medhurst, who's a reporter outside, who does a lot of reporting on Assange's case.
Really good guy.
Everybody should read his Substack article.
That's a Substack article.
Yeah, the Substack article is very good.
Isn't it something?
Very good.
Complete and comprehensive, yeah.
And the guy is a straight shooter and honest guy.
But he got a video of her, and I don't know where he got it from.
But she readily admits, and she it's in a State Department video.
She has direct contact with the judges, with the prosecutors, with the police, basically saying, I control these people in Spain.
Have a is that video on the internet?
Uh, I have it.
Do you, yeah, I yeah, I mailed it to you guys.
Oh, okay, yeah, that's it.
Play it.
Oh, wow.
I work for the consular section in the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, and I have access to some cases, some situations, and some just my work portfolio is super rich because of the United States presence in Spain.
Spain hosts 30,000 American students that come to do their study abroad programs in Spain.
Sometimes students fall victims of sexual assault, and I am very ready to help.
I know the police, I know the prosecutors, I know where they can go.
I know how good or bad the system is and the flaws it has.
So I am very ready to prepare and to assist and to drive victims through the system.
The fact that I'm prepared to help citizens and to make it a little better is extremely rewarding and satisfying.
And it just serves a great sense of purpose.
That's heartwarming.
Remember, that's an internal video.
But I know a lot more about it.
I can't put it out there right now because there are ongoing cases of extraditions out of Spain.
Oh, really?
One was McAfee's, John McAfee's case that I assisted with.
Not a good person.
Just not a good person.
I don't know how that lady can sleep at night.
But it's like all these guys, this whole permanent state, security state that we have in the United States.
These are permanent employees.
You know, you might change presidents, but none of these clowns get out of their positions.
They have an agenda.
And I think they honestly believe they're doing good because they're part of the good old boy system.
They destroy more people's fucking lives.
And they think that, well, you know, I was told to do this and I was told to.
When they reditioned, like this clergy they rendered out of Italy, I'm not sure if you heard about that case.
But during the Bush administration, they renditioned this guy, a clergyman.
He was an Egyptian.
They took him to a black site in Poland and then in Germany.
They tortured him, realized that they got the wrong guy.
CIA did.
US CIA working out of the embassy.
Took him there, tortured him, literally cut parts of his ears and shit like that.
What year was this?
This was during the Bush administration.
Baby Bush.
Okay.
I'll look it up.
What's his name?
Stephen.
Stephen.
Stephen, maybe you look it up.
It's an Egyptian clergy renditioned out of Italy.
At any rate, the Italians, when they had this guy over in one of these black sites, they realized they got the wrong guy.
They got the wrong individual.
They called Condoleezza Rice.
She said, drop him out on the streets.
This guy was found wandering.
In the fucking German streets, half naked, days, you know, because he had all kinds of fucked up chemicals in his body.
And nobody was called to account for it until his family took them to trial or took the CIA agents to court in Italy and said, listen, somebody's got to pay for this.
Well, you know what the United States did?
They snuck out those CIA agents right away so they couldn't go to trial.
Now, think if the shoe was on the other foot.
Forced Arbitration Hearings00:15:23
Right.
If somebody were to do that to US.
Citizen.
You would see all that shit all over CNN, MSNBC, and all that bullshit.
Right.
Now, a lot of this stuff they keep hidden around here.
You don't hear it on your general news.
But I've got another case I'm helping with called the Triblisi case that's as equally disgusting that they have him here and they're refusing to release him back to Belgium.
He was sentenced, did 10 years in a Belgian prison.
When he was taken to the United States, the European court said, wait a minute, he already served his sentence.
You've got to bring him back.
The Americans are refusing to send him back.
So, what is to gain by bringing these people here?
A lot of it is that.
Is this just like a poker?
Is this like a gambling chip?
A lot of it is like that individual you just saw there, Kimberly Weiss.
She thinks she runs the department.
You get these U.S. attorneys, and I'm going to tell you, these U.S. federal judges that are going to tell you, Spain ain't telling me what to do.
Italy ain't telling me what to do.
This is the United States of America.
We hold the big stick, not you guys.
Okay?
And we're going to get into that here in a second.
Because as we kind of transform into what happened to me and how I won, we'll talk about other cases.
Okay.
But so I'm in the United States.
We come up to an agreement.
The U.S. Department of Justice has seized all my property.
There's a couple pieces that they didn't seize one I have in Portland and one I have in Tacoma, Washington.
Okay.
What's the value of all these properties they seized?
Around at that time, $14 million.
Probably worth now $50, $60.
Okay.
But at that time, $14 million.
And we'll come up with that when we go into the sentencing hearing.
But at any rate, so we have an arbitration hearing.
I didn't know what the fucking arbitration hearing was.
So my attorney comes to me in prison or in the detention center, in SeaTac Detention Center, and says, Dave, they really want an arbitration hearing with you.
And I said, What the hell is that?
I said, I'm very, I didn't care if they gave me 100 years.
Because now here I'm an ignorant motherfucker.
And I think, okay, they're going to sentence me to 100 years or 20 years or 40 years or whatever.
I don't give a fuck.
Let's get sentenced.
And I head home.
Then my sentence converts to what a Spanish sentence by law.
Because that's what the treaty requires.
Right.
So I didn't care.
I said, fuck arbitration.
I said, we already agreed.
They said they wanted to give me a decade and a half.
I'll take it.
Whatever it is.
I mean, it's just marijuana.
They're legalizing it.
But fuck it.
We'll take it.
Right.
They had to drop any cocaine charges because they couldn't find it.
Because I said, we'll go to trial.
I'll finish this in trial.
I don't have any problem.
I don't care what you guys went on the weed, but you have absolutely no evidence and you know it.
You have no evidence on cocaine.
I've never done cocaine and you know that.
And so that's when she started.
Kicking back the U.S. prosecutor said, Okay, all right.
So I said, What's the arbitration hearing?
Why do they want an arbitration hearing?
Because remember, arbitration hearings are usually where there's cooperation.
Right.
I said, I'm not cooperating with these fucks.
I said, Get me sentenced and get me home, dude.
That's what you're getting the big dollars for.
He said, Well, we're just going to go in the arbitration hearing and hear what they have to say.
I said, No, no, no, dude, I'm not doing that.
I want nothing like that on my jacket.
I'm not doing any of that shit.
And they finally said, well, we're going to go after your other property if you don't.
I said, you can't go after your other property.
How are you going to go after my other property?
You've already forfeitly, civilly forfeited the other property.
How are you going to go for the other property?
You would have gone after that if you had any evidence whatsoever.
Fuck it.
I go to this arbitration hearing.
Okay.
Because my wife keeps on pestering me.
Oh, just go.
Just go talk to them, see what they got to say.
And in my mind, I always think, okay.
Let's see if they start asking me questions about other people and other things.
I can figure out where all this shit is because I didn't realize exactly where all this was stemming from.
I didn't understand it was coming from Zeke.
I didn't understand where all this bullshit had derived from.
So, my, I also, so I go into this arbitration area.
An arbitration area is a, you got a federal magistrate right there, one room over there full of U.S. prosecutors.
There were six of them in my fucking case, civil and criminal, and me and my attorneys in this other room.
The judge would go back and forth.
And the judge came to the magistrate, rather.
Ricardo Martinez comes to my side of the room and says, Would you like to cooperate?
I said, No.
I said, That's what we imagined.
I said, I thought my attorney made that clear to you.
He said, Yeah, but I'm legally binded to ask you.
I said, No, I'm not cooperating.
Goes back over there, is talking with them quietly over there.
Comes back and says, Okay, how's 14 years?
I said, I'm not really liking it because it's just weed.
But I have to swallow it, I'll swallow it.
Because they were asking 12 to 16.
So then I said, How's 14 years?
And I just told him, I said, If I have to swallow it, I'll swallow it.
But like I said to you, Danny, I didn't give a fuck.
It was 20, 25, 30 years.
Because I knew I was so innocent.
I thought, okay, well, the moment these, once I get sentenced, I send back, I get sentenced to six years.
So I said, Okay, whatever.
Goes back over there and says, Oh, good, yeah.
And he comes back and said, How much money are you going to give the federal government?
I said, How much money?
I go, You fuckers took $14 million from me in property.
What do you mean, how much money?
Well, the U.S. attorneys over there would like to make a deal with you on that.
I said, What kind of deal?
You've raped me financially already.
And he goes, Well, and he goes and he's got this stack of papers.
He goes, They really want that Tacoma building.
And I remember I had this beautiful building I was doing downtown Tacoma.
It was an old 1800 brick building, five stories, big building.
And I was going to turn it into a very nice penthouse and stuff.
And I said, Wait a minute here.
I said, What exactly do they want in exchange for that?
And he goes, Well, They won't oppose your transfer to Spain.
And I looked right at him, like I'm looking at you.
And I said, Mr. Martinez, I said, tell him to put that in writing.
He goes over there, comes back literally within 30 seconds.
And he says, well, she says she, and I knew this was all derived already because in 30 seconds, what he's going to tell me was impossible for him to hear from her, from the U.S. attorney.
So he comes back in literally 30 seconds or 15 seconds.
He walked over there and came back fairly quickly.
And he goes, Well, they really don't want to put it in writing because they don't want it to show that you are buying your way back to Spain.
I go, What are you talking about, dude?
I go, It's required of my extradition.
It shouldn't have to be.
I shouldn't have to hand her anything or you anything else for the conditions of my extradition to be fulfilled.
Well, you know, it can be.
They can really jam it up or make it.
What's the word he used?
Mercurial, like dirty, you know.
I just looked at him and I said, put it in writing because I don't trust these fuckers.
Well, that's when he said to me, he goes, well, that's what I'm here for, to make sure that any agreements are fulfilled.
I said, well, then put it in writing.
Well, we can't do that.
It's the first time I ever saw an iPhone, by the way.
Really?
Yep.
He goes over to the U.S. prosecutors, my attorney, Jeff, what the fuck was his name?
Not a good attorney, just all showboat.
Anyway.
Robinson, Jeffrey Robinson.
Different story, anyways.
My attorney pulls out his iPhone.
It was the first time I ever saw an iPhone because I was in Spain and we were using Nokia and all this shit.
Right.
And he calls my wife.
He says, Liz, it's Jeffrey here.
She goes, Hi, Jeff.
How's it going?
Good.
David's not wanting to sign because I had that property in my wife's name.
Dave's not wanting to sign over that property.
And so she, it's on speaker, so I'm hearing everything and their conversation is going on.
She goes, put him on.
He goes, he's listening right now.
He goes, Dave, what's more important to you, your property or family?
And that kind of hit me in my heart.
And I said, Liz, that's a loaded question.
I don't trust these fucks for one second.
And all that property was for my family.
And these assholes took it all.
And they know that they took 10 times more than what it was involved in my crime.
And they have no shame of their game, none.
I go, Liz, I'm not doing it.
Fuck them.
I went through, like, you don't know my ex wife, but that's why she's my ex wife.
I went through some torture for about a week until I finally said, fuck it, just give him the property.
So I gave him the property.
Now remember, Tacoma was not under forfeiture seizure.
So when I'm doing my battling with the United States government two years down the road to send me back to Spain, I write this judge, Ricardo Martinez, who now is the Chief Justice of the Western District of Washington.
He's just one of those boys that plays the same system.
And I write him.
I said, listen, we had an agreement.
I gave the government a couple million dollar property that's probably worth now four or five million dollars.
I said, and they're not fulfilling their end of the bargain.
And you told me, you told me that that's what you were there for.
I have a letter.
I have the copy of that letter.
And his response to that letter, I don't have it here, but I have it in a container in Seattle.
I didn't want to dig through that fucking container to get to you.
But one of these days I'll show you that letter.
His response was, I can only agree to what was in your court transcripts.
Now remember, arbitration hearings aren't transcribed or recorded.
Because the US government and a lot of other people don't want their clients known that they're cooperating.
Right.
So they don't transfer.
And I understand that process.
Yeah.
But I said, dude, I said, then I wrote him, when he sent that response, I wrote him a second letter that was twice as nasty.
I said, man, you're literally, I said, you're a piece of garbage.
I go, what?
Why would I give the US government a $2 million building that wasn't seized because you guys are nice to me?
There had to have been an exchange for something.
What was the exchange?
Never responded to that letter until this day.
Why would I give the US government?
You admit it wasn't under forfeiture seizure.
There had to have been an exchange.
I just decided, okay, here's $2 million of mine.
Go ahead and fucking take it.
Right.
Come on, dude.
That rings hollow in anybody's fucking common sense.
There had to have been some sort of exchange.
You tell me what the exchange was.
How long was this?
Did you write these letters?
How long was this after that arbitration hearing where he was like, you were asking to put it in writing and he was saying no?
Two and a half years.
Two and a half years after.
Yeah, because I started realizing.
And what did they promise you in exchange?
That they would not oppose my transfer.
Okay.
They did not oppose my transfer.
And at that point, I started understanding law, U.S. law.
I started reading extradition cases.
I started understanding intricately.
There wasn't a day I didn't spend in the law library.
I was kind of like the go to guy.
You know, a lot of these guys I send on some of your programs say, oh, there was always a law library, a law guy that was in there doing.
I really didn't do many people's legal work.
Unless I felt sorry for them, and there was a lot of guys I felt sorry for.
But I learned international law intricately and extradition law very, closely.
That's why I'm working with the Assange case, McAfee's case, I worked with.
There's dozens and dozens of cases.
A lot of these Russians call me, help us out.
Because a lot of these European attorneys fully understand, they're very good attorneys, European law, but they don't understand the US end of it.
And there is a big stick in between there.
And that's what we're going to talk about.
If you got a second, about how I kind of forced this through the courts simultaneously.
Yeah.
Let's get into that.
Okay.
Well, first, at my sentencing, what's important for you to realize and how I still, like, I knew, fuck, I'm done.
I had Judge Zilly sentence me.
Everything was agreed.
I was going to get 14 years.
They didn't want me to bring up the Tacoma property.
And I didn't understand this until the end because if I would have brought up that, Tacoma property exchange at sentencing, there would have been, it would have been typed up.
It would have been, there would have been a record of it that there was agreement.
But my attorney specifically said, oh, you can't mention the Tacoma property.
He's part of this whole fucking game.
That's why all this shit, you know, I just like, I just, looking back, I just shake my head, but it is what it is.
You know, I learned, I learned, like I tell a lot of people, it's not an experience I want to go back to, but I'm glad I did.
I'm glad I did.
Anyway.
At sentencing, and how long was that?
How long did it take to go to sentencing?
Took about a year.
Okay, I was in uh, Sea Tac detention center, okay, took about a year.
Anyway, at sentencing, I asked the judge, Judge Zilly, I said, Your Honor, how much property?
Because they were talking about, well, he's got property in Spain and he's got property in Mexico and he's got property in Canada.
Well, guess what, dude?
I worked like a dog every day of the year.
Every day of the year.
I worked hard.
And they needed three teams of FBI D agents and Homeland Security agents just to follow me around because I worked so continuously.
Whenever I get involved, like you can see with this shit, whenever I get involved in something, I just.
Dive into it hard.
But at any rate, I asked the judge, I said, Your Honor, how much property did you guys seize for me?
Put his glasses down to the rim of his nose, looked over the U.S. prosecutor, Susie Rowe, and said, How much?
She said, Up today, approximately $14 million.
I said, Okay.
She said, Your Honor, how much weed are you guys accusing me of?
It was around a ton.
Looked over, and she said, About a ton.
Can I ask what the value of that was?
She said, Around Two million dollars.
I said, I'm transporting, I'm not owning that weed.
I'm transporting it.
I go, Your Honor, with all due respect, what's wrong with this picture here?
I said, You took 14 million dollars of my money and you're accusing me of a maximum.
I wish I could got two million dollars of this.
Her prices, but I'll accept them.
You took two million dollars.
I've got two million dollars of accusation of weed.
What's wrong with this picture?
There's 12 million dollars that still belong to me.
He just looked at me and, as quick as a wit, he says, Mr. Mendoza, under the United States forfeiture laws, if you mix one dirty penny with 100 clean ones, it all belongs to the U.S. government.
Suing Political Leaders00:15:52
I looked at him and said, Well, your Constitution's fucked up.
That's when he said, Well, don't do crime in the United States if you don't like our Constitution.
All right.
Then he finally said, Do you have anything to say before I sentence you?
I said, Yeah, I do.
I said, As you well know, There are conditions established by the Spanish courts.
I want to make sure the court recognizes those conditions.
I could see his face was getting red.
Kenny put his glasses to the end of his nose and he looked at me and he said, Do you understand what instrument brought you to the United States?
I looked over.
I didn't quite understand what the fuck he was going with this.
I looked at my attorney.
Attorney guy said, I don't understand.
What legal instrument brought you to the United States, young man?
I said, The extradition treaty?
He said, That's correct.
That's correct.
The extradition treaty brought you to the United States.
He said, Are you signatory of that?
You know what that means?
Did I actually sign that extradition treaty?
Right, right, right.
I said, No, but my country did.
He goes, Okay, that's correct.
That's correct.
He said, So by U.S. law, U.S. federal law, he said, Since you aren't signatory, if those conditions actually do exist, and I'm not saying that they do, this is him talking.
He goes, If they do, then it's your country, whoever signed that, who needs to come in front of this court.
And challenge it for non fulfillment.
So to this day, that's when I knew instantly these fuckers from the very bottom to the very top were going to screw me.
And he said, Do you have anything in writing with your signature on it?
I just shook my head.
He says, And he kind of sarcastically laughed and said, Well, when you do, bring it in front of me.
Fuck, I mean, I knew where this was going.
So that's when I got into federal prison because then they transfer you to your facility.
And I started learning international law, international extraditions, and became what they kind of.
Quote as a prison lawyer.
Prison lawyer.
Wow.
And that's how kind of this kind of played its way through.
That said, through this whole process, then I started writing the Spanish justices.
I started writing the Spanish politicians.
At first, we had a little bit of play, but then the hard stick went down on them from the U.S. Embassy, from that woman, Kimberly Lawrence Weiss.
So I knew I had to find, I had to.
Attack these people in two different directions.
I wrote, I knew I'd signed something on the tarmac that applied to these conditions, what you just saw on the screen there, that act of the deed of surrender.
So I asked in my FOIA request, give me that.
I need that contract with my signature on it.
You know what the government's response was?
It's diplomatic communications.
You're not privy to it.
But they did give me the other deed of surrender, which is the exact same fucking document without my signature on it.
And I said, well, wait a minute here.
If that one's diplomatic communications, why isn't this one?
That was my argument to the court.
Nope, diplomatic communications.
I forget what section under title, whatever the fuck.
We're not giving it to you.
They didn't give it to me.
So I went to plan B.
Now, every day I was writing probably 10, 20 letters to judges in Spain, to politicians.
I'm not kidding you.
It was ongoing.
I spent literally thousands and thousands of dollars on stamps.
And I finally convinced the Chief Justice.
Of the Spanish federal court who sent it to me anonymously because he was still the chief justice, the contract that I signed.
So now I hear I had a weapon in my hand in U.S. federal court.
Now, simultaneously, I was suing Spain, not the United States, the Spanish government in Spanish courts for not fulfilling a Spanish court order resolution.
Okay, so I was having these two cases going on.
One in the United States civilly because I was suing Obama and Eric Holder at the time for not fulfilling this contract, and I was suing the Spanish prime minister at the time or president of Spain, who was Mariano Rajoy.
So, so I get to the point where we have declarations in the civil hearing.
All right, the position of the U.S., and I said this guy was an idiot, the U.S. attorney, civil attorney.
Defending this contract or opposing the signature of this contract.
His first stipulation was that the contract was just a receipt.
It was just a receipt.
I looked at him and I said, with all due respect, what is a receipt to you?
A receipt is an exchange.
You buy this Coca Cola, you're going to get a receipt from the cashier saying, I gave you $10 in exchange for that Coca Cola.
I said, what was exchanged here?
And he just tried to, oh, there's $350 that were given, 350 euros.
Yeah, that's part of it.
But then I pointed to that squiggly line that goes up and down.
I said, when we sign that, the document as it says shows you are agreeing to everything up and down this document.
He goes, oh, that was just, that doesn't indicate that.
That was just trying to get the pen to work.
I said, oh, yeah.
I go, and this other one that you signed, that they signed separately with the US Marshals and the Spanish police.
Was that the same fucking pen that they were trying to get to work?
I said, come on, stop.
What did you get your law license out of a cracker jack box?
The fucking judge just started to laugh a little bit.
I could see it and then he held himself back.
I go, You know, that's a lie.
That's bullshit.
I go, And one thing that you know for sure, and the United States government knows for sure, is contractual law is obligatory.
The United States Supreme Court has made it very clear that you have to abide by everything within the four corners of this document.
And it clearly says you are in agreement or you are in agreement to what the Spanish court stipulated.
So then they didn't know where to go because I was going to ask for my property back.
All of it, not just the Tacoma property that they took under disguise.
All of my property back.
And I was going to ask for indemnification because they've kept me in the United States at this point for damn near six years.
It was a little bit, six years, nine months.
As this was going on, and we were having these civil hearings in federal court, I was having hearings in Spanish Supreme Court.
First, we went into the same court, the criminal court that extradited me in Spain.
I said, wait a minute, you guys need to force the Spanish government to take action here.
It's now been six years.
I was supposed to be sent back six years ago.
Once I got sentenced in 2009, I was supposed to be back home.
Now it's 2015.
I'm still here.
And they said, no, we are just the federal courts.
We've established the conditions.
It's not for us how to tell the Spanish government how to do their diplomatic coercion.
Right.
Okay.
So they were playing behind that screen, which really usually works with these South American countries.
Then they just give up and say, fuck it.
I got to do the rest of my sentence here.
Well, I didn't.
So I said, fuck it.
I'm going to the Supreme Court.
So I took it to the Supreme Court.
I said, listen, uh, It's now been six years and some months.
Why aren't I back?
There's a resolution.
There's a court resolution requiring me to come back.
Why aren't I back?
So the Spanish Supreme Court asked for all the diplomatic and verbal notes.
And out of those six years, the Spanish executive or the Spanish diplomats only asked for my return twice, saying, please send Mr. Mendoza back.
He's creating a lot of conflict in the news about us.
Because now my story started carrying traction in Spain.
So, the courts found that insufficient.
The court said, uh uh.
The Supreme Court said, no, no.
You have the utensils to force the Americans to return this prisoner.
You must do it.
But they didn't say when and how much time and all this.
So, I started studying a little bit of Spanish law, and I realized that if it's a human rights violation, the Supreme Court must force the government to act immediately.
So, I filed another motion in front of the Spanish Supreme Court.
They were probably scratching their head and going, This fucker is not getting away from us.
But I forced them to make it because I filed the motion in front of the second motion in front of the Supreme Court and saying my human rights were being violated.
And they were being violated because the Americans and the Spanish in cahoots were aggravating my sentence.
And what I mean by aggravating, making it worse, because I was supposed to be next to my family in Spain.
The last six and a half years, I'm sitting here in a federal prison in the United States.
That's an aggravation of my sentence.
Right.
Well, guess what?
I was extremely fortunate.
The court ruled in my favor.
A separate Supreme Court, because there are six Supreme Courts in Spain, one that specifically deals with human rights.
And that one immediately, that ruling came out right as we were having these civil hearings in front of the federal court.
That ruling came out.
Here's what the Supreme Court said to the Spanish diplomats: said, either you get him back immediately because this is a human rights violation, or we will find a way to get him back.
And I didn't quite understand that.
They didn't specify the way they would get me back.
So I asked my attorney there in Spain, what do they mean by that?
And she said, Dave, you know what they mean by that?
They mean that they'll either not cancel, but suspend the extradition treaty.
They'll suspend the extradition treaty, or they will call it null and void.
And believe me, if they do that, then it has to go through Congress again in Spain.
Everybody has to prove it, all the conditions, and the last thing they want is that to be in front of the news.
Suspend the entire extradition treaty between the United States and Spain?
Right.
So they were shit in their pants at that point.
So, literally the next day that ruling came out in Spanish Supreme Court, my attorney is about to fly from New York to Seattle to go through preliminary, secondary arguments on my civil case against Obama and Eric Holder for failure to comply with the contract.
He's getting on the plane.
He gets a phone call from the U.S. attorney.
He says, If Dave agrees to drop this case, we will send him back next week.
My biggest mistake is I agreed to that.
Fuck it.
I wanted to get home.
I should have kept that alive because I would have been a hell of a lot richer right now.
But I didn't.
I wanted to get home to my family.
So they sent me back.
How would you have?
What would happen if you would have kept the case alive?
I don't know.
This is all speculation, but a contract's a contract, dude.
And under U.S. law, they got to fulfill that contract.
They don't fulfill that contract.
I'm wanting some indemnification.
And you didn't fulfill your contract.
Give me my property back.
Annul the sentence.
Mm hmm.
I accepted this sentence because you were supposed to send me back.
Annul the sentence.
That would have created a huge case of worms.
And the Ninth Circuit that I was in is very clear in contractual law.
That federal judge, that asshole federal judge, Zilly, could have said, I don't agree with this.
But in the appellate court, they would have said no because there's no way they could get away from this contract.
There's no way.
That's why they kept it away from me.
Right.
There's no way.
Yeah.
And that's something.
I got to tell you this story that I wanted to tell you about this buddy of mine.
But during this process, my wife and I didn't want her to wait for 14 years.
I didn't know how long this was going to take.
So, during this whole, how long total were you in prison in the US fighting?
Almost seven.
Almost seven years.
And your wife stayed in Spain the whole time?
No, she was in Vancouver, Canada.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
She lives in Vancouver, Canada with the two kids now.
But at any rate, during this time, our relationship, you know, I'm in prison.
Life's not as easy as it used to be.
She has to live her life.
Right.
There was shit going on.
I finally said, you know, let's just get divorced.
Let's just get separated and let's just get divorced because I can't expect you to wait.
And I don't blame her one bit.
Right.
So we did.
It started becoming dirty, though.
It started becoming dirty where she felt that she deserved more or whatever.
She thought I had a lot more than I had or whatever.
That's my perspective of it.
She probably has a different perspective.
So you're dealing with a whole divorce on top of all this stuff.
Right.
Right.
That's like about the fourth or fifth year while I was in prison.
Well, you're keeping yourself busy.
I'll give you that.
Yeah.
So we're having divorce hearings.
I'm going through these divorce hearings.
I'm in federal prison, mind you.
So, the U.S. Marshals aren't going to take me to Vancouver, British Columbia, in front of a court.
So, we're doing it through video conference.
Okay.
And she tells the judge, she tells the judge there, well, Dave Mendoza, he's trying to get this whole song dance out there.
Yeah, he was one of the biggest marijuana transporters in the United States, blah, He worked with the largest criminal organizations in Canada, Hell's Angels, the Triads, the Chinese Mafia, the United Nations, all these fucking groups, right?
I don't know.
Might be true, may not be true.
The Hells Angels part is true.
Okay.
As a matter of fact, one of his friends just got caught in Argentina with 1,400 kilos of cocaine head of the Hells Angels on the West Coast.
I didn't say a word.
I just let it go on for a long time.
Wow, she's being vicious.
Very vicious.
But then what I said is this Your Honor, with all due respect, and I didn't want to put this out there, I said, but it was already out there.
I said, with all due respect, I said, that's all what she's saying is irrelevant.
What she's failing to tell you is I was going to get a 10 year sentence.
She was going to get a four year sentence.
But I sucked in that four years because I told the U.S. prosecutor, don't remember, I met her in the game.
She was transporting weed.
I said, don't give her the four years.
Give it to me.
So she can be with the kids?
Right.
Somebody's got to be with our kids.
And the judge did accept it.
And the U.S. prosecutor accepted that.
I said, that's what she's not telling you.
She's sitting in that courtroom and able to take care of these kids because of me.
But that's irrelevant.
I said, I've got no spite.
I understand her position, but that's irrelevant.
At any rate, so when I go back to my cell, one of the guys, head of the Gambino crime family, down a couple of cells down from me, Cardoza, Joe Cardoza, used to always say, Hey, if you ever need a cell phone, a huge cell phone.
And I was like, Fuck, I ain't touching that guy's cell phone.
Things fall as hot as shit.
Canary Islands Custody00:15:33
Boofed in 20 this week.
No, but he was a solid dude.
And a lot of these guys are solid dudes, but I didn't want to get caught with something where they could say, hey, you're not going back because of this or this.
I just didn't want to get involved in something like that.
But I said, fuck it.
I want to see if my buddy Chad had gotten what she's saying is true, that my buddy from the Hells Angels got snatched up.
So I started searching.
I said, hey, Joe, can I take a look at that cell phone?
You got internet?
He goes, yeah, I got it all on there.
iPhones?
Yeah, it was like an iPhone.
It wasn't an iPhone, but it was one of those touchscreen.
Touchscreen.
And I was like amazed with those fucking things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I'm looking.
And I'm going, fuck.
He did get caught, but he got caught in Spain and the Canary Islands.
I was like, this fucker, what was he doing over there?
So I'm reading the story, and I guess it was all set up.
This case was a whole setup.
Now, remember, I told you that the feds had come to me while I was at Fort Dix to ask me if I cooperated against certain individuals.
I told you that about two other guys in Canada.
He was one of those.
And I told my wife and I were on good terms.
So when she came to visit me, I told her, make sure, because this individual was in federal prison, this Hells Angel guy was in federal prison in Lompoc, USP Lompoc.
And I said, make sure his wife knows that they're trying to target him because they came to me to see if I would cooperate.
And if they come to me, they got no other options.
I know that.
I instinctively know that.
So he buddy buddied up with some Colombian guy in there that had a life sentence.
And that guy got his sentence reduced, getting 1,600 kilos of cocaine to the Canary Islands.
He went out there to pick it up to take it to Virginia.
He got arrested.
All right.
So I called my attorney.
I called her and I sent her, in prison, you have true links.
I sent her an email and said, Listen, there's a buddy of mine who got jammed up there.
Can you go see him?
So we got an attorney client privilege call.
And she told me, I can't really go there because he's got another attorney signed to him.
I said, Go there.
I'll pay whatever you need to do.
But this guy's a very good friend of mine.
I transported all his weed and he was as honest as the day is long.
Good dude, Chad Wilson.
Sad ending.
So she goes, Well, fuck it.
I'm risking my legal license, but I'll go there.
And she says, Can you send me a True Links email?
These are emails from federal prisons that get monitored that will at least open the door so he knows I'm really talking about you, Dave.
Now, I didn't really know his full name.
I knew him as Bumps.
He didn't know my full name.
He knew me as Mr. Brown because we just In the game here, that you don't give anybody your full name.
It's like giving them your home address or your bank account number.
I was Mr. Brown.
And the reason they called me Brown, the Chinese and the Hells Angels, is because UPS let Brown deliver it.
So they gave me that nickname.
I was Brown.
All right.
Anyway.
Why'd you call him Mr. Bumps?
Bumps, I didn't because that was the name given to him by the Hells Angels.
He was just a short, bumpy, stout guy.
He had the San Diego office and the Vancouver office, the NYME office.
I don't know.
Just all those.
I mean, Say what you want about them, and they're probably a bad organization.
But he was a good dude.
This guy was a good dude with me.
So, my attorney goes, I send her and I said, Hey, this is Brown.
Hey, Bumps, this is Brown.
Get her.
She's well worth every fucking penny.
So, she prints it off.
She goes to Seville, Spain, where he's held in custody in isolation.
She puts it up.
She doesn't speak a lick of Spanish or a lick of English.
He doesn't speak a lick of Spanish.
She puts it right up there.
And the story says, I want you, you're my attorney.
He was looking at a 30 year period because now the laws in Spain had changed.
For cocaine, he was going to get 18 years.
And for head of a criminalization, another 18 years, 36 years.
Oof.
He was looking at in Spanish prison.
And they caught him red handed.
This shows you how thin the world is, how small it really is.
So I said, Mar Maria Del Mar, she's probably the finest attorney in Spain.
If not, she's definitely within the top three charges like it, too.
She went through his case with fine tooth comb and she won my two cases in front of the Spanish Supreme Court with me.
I was going to be transferred back to Spain.
We have already come to agreement.
They sent me to Manhattan, MCC Manhattan, and I was going to be transferred.
She was trying to coordinate so we both could be in the same prison.
But she said, I have his trial right now, so I don't know.
So she.
What she did was in Spain, there's a there's for his case.
Remember, he was caught with 1600 kilos of cocaine.
Okay, counted in Spain.
There's a chain of custody in the Canary Islands to get that to Madrid where the federal courts there has to be a chain of custody on that cocaine, meaning police and judges have to sign off on it that they've counted it and they've moved it.
All right, okay.
She went to the Canary Islands.
Just ready to go to trial.
She went to the shipping company that shipped it.
Didn't tell the federal police that she was going to the shipping company.
Went there and said, You know, on this day, this day, you did a shipment of 1600 kilos for the Spanish police.
They said, Yes.
Can I see that file?
She said, Yes.
Showed her.
There was literally, I think, 1300 kilos, a little over 1300 kilos in weight.
Now, that cocaine has to be in a depository in Madrid because until your files or until your trial is over with, because you have a right.
To inspect every single one of those fucking kilos.
Okay.
But she found it odd.
And she said, Can you certify this for me?
They certified it.
And they said, Yeah, we have to weigh things separately.
What the police said was 1600 plus the pallet weight, whatever it was, X amount.
But we had 1300 plus the pallet weight, X amount.
So she said, Certify that for me.
They certified it.
So she played a long arm in trial, in Chad's trial.
When it opened for trial, she said, Jerome, I'd like to inspect the cocaine today.
And the judge said, Why?
He said, I believe there's going to be some discrepancy.
And the judge said, Okay.
The prosecution and the Spanish federal head of federal police said, No, we can do it tomorrow.
She said, No, I want to do it right now.
She went up.
The judge asked for a bar, went up, talked, and said, We believe that cocaine does not exist in that quantity.
And she showed him the two certifications.
She said, At that moment, Dave, that federal judge knew I was right.
In Spain.
And that fucking prosecutor, she said, he starts to twitch his lip, his upper lip started to shake like a motherfucker.
She goes, Before they can handle anything, we need to get there.
They went there.
She was just like out of the motherfucking movies.
Went in the depository, had the pallets there.
She said, All I did, Dave, was I took off three layers, and the inside of those fucking things were painted wood.
So she told him right then and there.
She said, My client.
Inside of what things?
Inside of the pallets.
You know, there were layers of cocaine.
Yeah.
She took off three layers.
Yeah.
The middle, the core, was all painted wood white.
Oh my God.
Cocaine went missing in the tune of, it was a little bit more than 300 kilos, something like 450 kilos or something.
What?
So check this out.
So she said, Yeah, my client might go to prison for 36 years, but I'm going to have all these guys indicted.
Head of Spanish police, head of the Spanish prosecutor's office.
And named out four or five of them.
The next day, they offered him an expulsion.
So, look how small the world is with this.
Look how small the world is with this.
I fly back on my flight from New York to Madrid.
I'm in my holding cell in Soto Real, in the what they call the super secure holding cells there.
It's kind of like isolation, but it's really not.
I mean, but it is there.
You don't have much movement.
You're cuffed when you move one place until they classify me because they saw me as a dangerous individual.
And I'm talking to this guy who's passing me the food as a German guy.
And I said, You speak English?
He says, Yeah, I speak perfect English.
I said, Yeah, I started talking to him.
And next door, I hear Brown, is that you?
I was going, Motherfucker, is that you, Bumps?
He goes, Oh, dude.
I'm like, Oh, man.
He goes, I owe you my life.
He tells me, I said, You don't owe me shit, dude.
Wow.
He goes, I owe you my life.
I said, Dude, you don't owe me shit.
You owe Mar, you don't owe me.
So, what did he get?
What did he end up getting?
Expelled.
Five years, couldn't come back to Spain for $1,600, whatever the kilos were.
Five years, couldn't go back to Spain.
Couldn't go back to Spain.
Expelled from Spain.
Sad story at the end.
I just found out about a few years ago that he got shot in Vancouver like 24 times or 25 times in the back and thrown over a bridge.
But the guy was a good guy.
I don't care what people say about him.
That guy with me is like a brother.
Wow.
What happened to that cocaine?
That's a good question.
Why wasn't I asked Mar, I said, why aren't these prosecutors or police agents getting charged for that?
It's all brushed underneath the carpet.
I mean, that's what it is.
Wow, man.
Just shows you how corrupt this whole fucking system is, dude.
Just, it's an amazing, amazing, amazing deal.
But it is what it is.
And they just get away with it.
They get away with it.
They just get away with it.
They get away with it.
Brushed under the rug.
Oh, yeah.
Never talks about it again.
Nope.
Nope.
Wow.
So, when you first got to Spain, what was, how much time did you have to serve?
I mean, you'd already done seven years in the U.S. Right.
So, I first get to Spain, my attorney, Mar, goes and talks to the judge.
His name is Grande Malasca.
Fernando Grande Malasca.
He's a.
Conservative judge, but some say fair, some say not.
I mean, it's depending on whose end you're on.
Anyway, she goes, talks to him, tells him about my case, said, Don't worry, Dave will be home shortly.
Okay.
Now, understand when there's a treaty transfer of prisoners, all right, you go to the United States from Colombia, if you get a death penalty, the United States is not going to apply the death penalty to you.
All right.
You're getting, you're transferring your sentence.
To the jurisdiction of the country you live in.
Okay.
So let's say Thailand gives you the dada or death for heroin trafficking, and you're fortunate enough to get a treaty transfer from Thailand, which is how they frequently do it, to the United States.
The United States is not going to execute you.
Okay.
The United States, by the treaty law, requires your law, meaning the federal law or state law of the United States, to resentence you under their law, under U.S. law.
So if you have.
Six grams of heroin, it might only be under the federal guidelines when you get your treaty transfer.
It might only be six months.
You've served six years.
You go home.
Okay.
Okay.
Because otherwise, then laws of other countries would impose on the laws of your country.
Right.
So when Dave Mendoza gets sentenced in Spain to 14 years in federal prison for marijuana, when I go to the United States, I get sentenced in the United States for 14 years in prison for marijuana.
When I go to Spain, Spain can't invent new law to keep me in federal prison for 14 years when the maximum law for marijuana is six years and one day.
Right.
You understand that?
Yes.
That's an important concept to understand.
So during that timeframe, if there are new laws that are imposed or new laws that are brought into that country, they can't impose those new laws because your crime was committed.
Behind me.
Right.
And that's essentially what happened in my case.
When I got to Spain, the federal judge initially, Grande Marlaska, initially said, no, no, he's going home.
He's going home.
The maximum is six years, one month.
Or one day.
And they're going to grandfather in all that time you spent in the US prison.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
The day you were detained, the day I was detained in Spain, it starts from there.
Ah, okay.
The day you're detained.
So they owe you a couple years.
Yeah, they owe me quite a few years.
At any rate, so I get, I'm happy.
I'm sitting there.
She comes and says, Yeah, everything's a done deal.
You'll have your hearing in about a week.
Your transfer is because you have to have a federal hearing to transfer your sentence under Spanish law.
So I get in front of this clown, this judge.
The day, and my attorney looked at me and said, Something's happened here, Dave.
He's not going to sentence you to the six years in one day.
I said, How can that be?
He can't invent new law.
Well, he says the law has changed.
I said, Even if the law has changed, he can't apply.
That's like I'm out of prison.
I just finished the 14 year sentence.
The law changes, and they bring me back to make it 15 years.
They bring me back in prison to do another year.
You can't do that.
Right.
That's law 101.
And I told the judge this.
He says, No, I'm going to hold the 14 years.
Isn't there a term for this?
Yeah.
There's like a legal term for this.
Expo facto or something like that.
Okay.
Okay.
Right.
Yeah.
There is a legal term for that.
They cannot do it expo facto or something to that effect.
Oh, so also in that article, there was something that was mentioned before you went back to Spain.
The CIA, the FBI, and the State Department, all of these three letter agencies in the U.S. had to like come to some sort of agreement.
They all have to say yes on my treaty transfer.
And none of them wanted to say yes.
They said the major.
Now, really though?
Why?
I don't know why.
I don't know why that is, but they all had to say yes.
And finally, when I won that case in Spain in front of the Supreme Court, my human rights violation case, the U.S. ambassador went to Holder's office and said, listen, you guys, for some reason, are playing a dangerous game.
If they cancel extraditions, you're really going to be.
Shit out of luck.
That's when they immediately didn't understand because this was lower level.
Now, remember, you're talking about these U.S. attorneys who have a tremendous amount of power, who don't give a fuck about anybody.
Don't give a fuck about a Spanish judge.
Don't give a fuck about a Spanish attorney.
They don't give a fuck about Spanish law.
Right, right, right, right.
And that's when it got up, started getting up to the higher levels.
Five Colombian Suspects00:08:53
And I had that civil case and we're just about to hear it.
They were shit, scared shitless.
And there was something, there was like five Colombians they wanted to get the last minute in exchange for you.
Oh, yeah.
You gotta love this one.
I'm sitting there and the after I won the court cases, yeah, the U.S. not U.S., the Spanish embassy comes to see me.
Fernandez Bullnose, she comes to see me and she's got, she's always been a, I hate to use this terminology, but a bitch.
Told me, oh, you're not going to tell us what to do.
I said, yeah, I'm going to tell you what to do.
There's a court order that requires you to do act as, yeah, but you can't tell us how to act and diplomatically.
I said, well, we'll figure that one out in the future.
At any rate, she came all bubbly, all nice.
They called me to the, I was like, why?
The fuck is she wanting?
There's something here that I just didn't quite.
Well, I'm in prison.
And she says, she has this document.
She hands it to me.
She says, I got good news, David.
You're going back.
You just have to sign this.
I'm looking at her.
I said, wait a minute here.
So I start to read it.
And it said, in exchange for these five Colombians.
Because remember, Spain at that point, the federal courts had stopped all extraditions to the United States.
All extraditions.
Okay.
And the United States was pissed at this point.
Because of you?
Because of me.
They had stopped him temporarily.
And the courts couldn't legally stop him.
So, what did they do?
Because I asked my attorney, how did they stop if they couldn't legally stop him?
Every time an extradition request came in, they put it on the bottom pile.
They just weren't processing him.
Okay.
Kimberly was pissed.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, you should have seen when I went in that embassy to get my U.S. passport after I got back.
All heads were popping out of doors.
Anyway.
He's here.
He's here.
Fernandez Bolden hands me this document.
I'm reading it, and it's saying, in exchange for these five Colombians, because remember, you got real powerful Colombians shipping cocaine to Spain, and they get caught in Spain and then extradited to the United States.
And they wanted these five Colombians in exchange for me.
And they said, just sign this document and you're going home.
I read it.
I said, I'm not signing that fucking document.
Then she started freaking out.
I said, Oh, you're always doing the most complicated for us.
Why do you always have to be complicated?
I said, I'm not being the one complicated.
You guys are being the one complicated.
I said, the Spanish court order doesn't say Dave Mendoza in exchange for these individuals.
I said, if I sign this document and this gets out of those suckers from anything, I said, they could kill my family.
They could consider me as part of the reasons why they're going to be in U.S. prison.
I said, fuck that.
I go, you wouldn't do it, so don't expect me to do something that you wouldn't do.
And she just stepped back and she walked out.
I said, fuck it.
Isn't it something how these two, how the governments work together to fuck you?
Yeah, man.
They're vicious.
They're vicious, dude.
They're vicious.
They're as vicious as they come.
They have no remorse.
It's all about their job.
It's all about stepping up in the world.
And then they put you in prison for trying to make a buck or two extra.
So you said no to the Colombians.
And they just said, fuck it, we're just going to send this guy back.
Well, they had no other choice, Danny, because I had a Supreme Court hearing and I was having that civil suit and they had no other choice but to.
All right.
About to do it, but they thought they could get me.
And this is another note at the very end: you have to go in front of a federal judge when you do a treaty transfer.
Because remember, I said the U.S. government needs to officially sign off on it.
Okay, you need to sign off on it, the Spanish government needs to sign off on it, and the U.S. government needs to sign off.
So you have to go in front of a federal court.
So I went to Trenton, New Jersey, I was in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
So Trenton, New Jersey was where the federal courthouse was.
The U.S. Marshals picked me up and took me there.
Three Israelis who were getting treaty transfers, and another individual.
They handed us some papers to sign.
Everybody was signing them, and I was reading everything very meticulously.
And the very last paper, they said, Sign this one.
It said that I would agree to maintain my sentence.
And the Israelis signed it.
And the other guy, I don't know where he was from, I think Holland or something, he signed it.
And I said, I'm not signing this fucking thing.
The treaty doesn't require that quite.
The contrary, the treaty requires that I get sentenced under Spanish law.
If I sign that, that's a contract.
Not only that, it's you guys, the U.S. government.
I told this to the federal judge.
He says, Why aren't you signing this?
I said, It's you guys that say in federal court, you federal judges say in federal court that if the treaty does not require it, you can't impose it.
And the treaty doesn't require me signing this document.
I'm not signing it.
Again, they took a recess, came back five minutes later and just said, Okay.
Signed me off.
But I had nothing to lose, dude.
That's bullshit.
I had nothing to lose.
I mean, I was like, fuck it.
Right.
You know, now I had an ace card in my back pocket, which was a Spanish Supreme Court ruling.
I was hoping they were going to cancel that extradition treaty.
Right.
I said, fuck it.
I got a few years left, even if nobody else gets extradited and has to go through the shit I went through.
Right.
So when I get back to Spain, let's get back to that to Gran de Mallasca.
Right.
So when I get back to Spain, he says he's not going to sentence me.
He's going to sentence me to the 14 years.
And I said, you can't do that.
You cannot, what are you going to make up new law during that process, that timeframe?
Even though the law has changed that allows you to do it now, you can't do that.
You know that.
All he did was look at his pen, look down, he says, That's what I'm sentenced you to.
So he was clearly touched by probably this Kimberly Weiss.
Yeah.
And now he's now Spain's Minister of Justice.
Just to give you an idea how this is stepstones up, you know, these guys.
So, what I did was I took Spain.
Oh, because when I got to Spain, when I was in US federal jurisdiction, I started looking up cases of people, for instance, in the United States that were damaged by another country if I could sue that country.
Okay.
Okay.
Let me give you an example.
You remember the Iranian hostages?
Mm hmm.
Back in the Jimmy Carter Reagan era, their family members sued Iran in U.S. court because they were damaged by the Iranians, allowing them to be captured, kidnapped, tortured, all that shit.
Ultimately, they were brought back to the United States.
Their family members got $150 million each from really, from yeah, this is rarely said from the Iranians, their sanctioned property here in the United States.
So, I was going to do the same to the United States.
I said, fuck it.
I'm going to take them.
And that's why I should never drop that civil suit.
Because when I got to Spain and I said, okay, now I'm going to take these assholes to Spanish civil court.
Well, at that time, the EU passed a law that nobody can sue a foreign country.
Literally, a month before I filed the case, they said, nobody can sue a foreign country.
They have diplomatic immunity.
But I can sue Spain for failure.
To protect my human rights.
And that's what I've done in the United Nations.
And they accepted my case.
I said that I was sentenced post facto.
I mean, basically, sentenced after the fact.
I should have only served six years in federal prison or in Spanish prison.
And the judge declined to do that.
He applied a law after the fact that he shouldn't have.
He knew he shouldn't have, but he was just following the game.
And I'm suing Spain and I'm suing the Spanish government.
And the United Nations accepts 1% to 2% of all cases presented to them.
They accepted mine.
We're waiting for that resolution to come.
Wow.
Yeah.
When did that start?
2017.
Okay.
So, what could possibly happen?
What are the solutions?
First, how it works under the UN, first you have to get a positive resolution, meaning, yes, you were aggravated.
Yes, you're right.
Then you ask for indemnification.
Then you ask for, you know, They took $14 million of my property that they won't give to me.
But they took, instead of six years of my life, they took because now remember when I went out to Spain, I stayed in Spanish federal prison until 2019.
I got out in 2017, but I was still under supervision.
But it's still prison.
Family Reunion Hopes00:02:28
And I should have been home and away and out from 2008 to 2004.
That's six years.
I should have been done with everything in 2004.
My family would have been together.
2014.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, 2014.
Excuse my mouth.
My family would have been together.
I would have been a hell of a lot.
I spent over a million dollars, everything I had in the back, buildings I sold that they didn't seize, everything.
I lost everything.
You just sell buildings from inside prison just to pay for all this?
Yeah.
I went through a divorce, and what I, the last bit I didn't have, my parents passed away while I was in prison.
My mom died of pancreatic cancer.
My dad died of just Alzheimer's.
I mean, it was just sad.
It was sad.
And it was all because of my dad.
Did you get to see them at all when you were in prison?
No.
No, I was sad.
Fuck.
Yeah.
My two little boys, who are now 17, the other one's 16, really don't know me.
They don't know me.
You know, I talked to them on the phone.
I'll tell you a cute story.
I asked Nicholas when he was six, because my mom used to pick him up at the Vancouver border, Vancouver Seattle border, used to pick him up to fly over to see me while I was in prison.
I was in Colorado prison at that time.
And in that prison, the visiting room had a bunch of candy machines on one side.
The prisoners couldn't get up and go to the counter machines, and we had those orange jumpsuits on.
Right.
Because those of us who are in solitary confinement had those orange jumpsuits on.
And when my boy was six, I asked him, Do you remember anything about dad?
He goes, Yeah, dad.
I'm talking to him on the phone.
He goes, Yeah, yeah.
Because my mom would always tell him, You're flying to Spain.
Because he didn't understand.
He knew he was going through metal detectors.
He thought that was Spanish security.
You know, he didn't understand.
You're flying to your dad, has a construction company in Spain.
So, I'd say, so do you remember anything about me?
He goes, yeah, dad, I do.
I do.
I remember a lot of things about you.
I remember you got a big, big office and everybody wears the same orange suit.
I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He goes, but do you still have that?
I said, no, because now I'm talking to him from Spain.
I said, I go, but now I said, I'm living in a different office.
He goes, that's too bad because I remember all the candy machines.
Make sure you get those candy machines in your new office.
Here's a six year old boy, you know, the innocence of that mentality, right?
Innocence of Children00:03:20
And it just, it just, Broke my heart, dude.
It just broke my heart.
I thought, fuck, here's a little boy who's just so intuitive.
And my other boy who's born with Down syndrome, just a beautiful, beautiful, I wouldn't trade him for anything in the world.
I mean, just wonderful kids, doesn't really understand who dad is.
You know, and it gets to that point, it's just like, fuck, none of this was worth any of it.
No, it was worth any of it.
You don't realize, I have a newborn, but you don't realize any of that until you go through the process and you, You see the innocence of these kids and how that whole detachment, the whole thing that the Spanish court ruling was trying to avoid, these fuckers.
And that's what carried the anger out of me.
These fuckers destroyed the whole thing.
It's terrifying.
And the amount of people that this happens to.
Oh, dude, it sucks a lot of people up.
I left a lot of people back there that shouldn't be in federal prison.
And nobody gives a fuck to.
And quite frankly, you know, I helped a lot of African Americans with crack cocaine charges and a gun.
You know, a palm of crack cocaine with a handgun, 30 year sentence.
Well, what about Hunter Biden?
Right.
You know, there's a video of him with a palm of crack cocaine and a gun.
You know, when these guys are sitting doing a 30 year sentence, what do you think their families are thinking?
What do you think?
I mean, it's just, to me, you don't hear anybody outside scream about that shit.
It's disgusting.
Now there's cocaine in the White House.
Yeah, now there's cocaine.
And I'm not a trumper.
Quite honestly, with all respect to everybody's political views, I think the guy's an arrogant, not a bright fucker, but he is who he is.
He's the only one who's done anything for those federal prisoners.
He's the one who passed a two point reduction law.
So a lot of these guys who got 30 year sentences are now getting out at 22, 20, because if it's a nonviolent crime, he's the only one.
So you can say what you want.
Right.
But Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or whatever, all these people, the Clintons, they don't give a fuck.
Right.
That's the prison industry.
That's fulfilling that place.
Yeah, man.
It's scary.
It's scary to see some of the hypocrisy that goes on in politics and in Washington.
And when you see what's going on with what you saw firsthand in some of these prisons, some of the atrocities and destroying people's lives and their families for these bureaucrats to just step up the ladder and improve their career and get more votes or whatever it is.
It's just politics.
It's just a race to the bottom.
Let me give you an example of one.
You know, there's this Russia phobia going on.
I'll give you an example.
I lived with a guy by the name of Konstantin Yaroshenko.
You lived with him in where?
Fort Dix.
Fort Dix.
New Jersey.
Okay.
Here's a Russian, speaks no fucking English.
Zero.
Zilch.
Da, ya, da.
Nothing more.
Konstantin and I became very good friends.
Russian Sanctions Debate00:15:14
I didn't trust anybody.
He didn't trust anybody.
He's a Russian who was taken from Liberia, rendered out of Liberia to the United States for supposed cocaine trafficking or alleged cocaine trafficking by the United States.
He was rendered.
You know the difference between being extradited and rendered?
Yes.
There's a big difference.
One is you go through a judicial process.
If there's sufficient enough evidence, the Liberians say, yeah, take him.
So this guy was trafficking cocaine?
No.
He was alleged to be trafficking cocaine, meaning he was running transportation.
Well, what it was is how I deciphered this is they tried to entrap him into doing so.
Okay.
He wasn't doing it.
There was no evidence of him actually doing it.
Okay.
Okay.
He was transporting cargo.
And when I mean by cargo, it could have been firearms, munitions between in Africa.
And the United States government from Africa to where?
Within Africa.
I think it was coming from Ukraine, from all different countries.
I don't know the intricacies of it, but.
Him and I don't know if you've heard of the name of Victor Boot.
Of course.
But I worked on both those cases very closely.
They were moving firearms, not theirs, not theirs.
There's no evidence of that.
Not only that, Judge Schindler, who sentenced Boot, made it very clear I can't sentence him to owning those firearms.
I can only sentence him to transporting those firearms.
But what the Americans say is that they're sanction busting.
They're sanction busting.
You know what I mean by that?
That if.
Listen, in Angola, for instance, there's geopolitics going on, like Ukraine.
The Americans want to get their grip on that area, and the Russians want to get their grip on that area.
Now, who's right out of it?
Is that because of resources there?
Yeah, most of it's because of resources.
Or in the case of Ukraine, the Americans want to be able to put a base there that can launch directly into Moscow.
Nobody's denying that.
Within two minutes, it would have an ICBM in Moscow.
Well, they can already do that with some of the NATO countries that are surrounding Russia.
They can, but.
Putin had told the Americans a long time ago, uh uh, during that Minsk whole hearing and before that.
And the Americans have the same argument with Cuba.
I don't know if you know the Kennedy crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Exactly.
I think we put nukes in Turkey, I think.
And then the response from Russia was they put them in Cuba.
Yeah.
So that's the geopolitics there.
With Libya, for instance, that was a raping of the resources.
With Syria, that's a raping of the resources.
And what I mean by raping of the resources, Donald Trump said right there on camera, we're going, we got their oil, that oil is ours.
That's why we have troops in Syria.
Nobody talks about that, but we have military troops on the oil, taking that oil.
Boot and Yurashchenko.
Interesting cases, both of them.
So, yeah, back to Boot and Yurashchenko.
So, what you're basically saying is Yurashchenko was kidnapped by the CIA out of Africa and brought to the United States.
There's a special team that the United States put together Louis Millon, Stouch, Rapowski.
It's a special team.
Those agents.
War to target Boot, Yerushchenko, a guy by the name of Moncer Alcazar out of Spain, was extradited with me.
Individuals that no other country could convict or condemn.
So, how do they do?
They manufacture jurisdiction.
What I mean by manufacturing jurisdiction.
Let me give you the example of Victor Boot.
Okay.
Victor Boot.
Okay, first of all, we have to understand the United States makes its own internal laws.
All right.
We have sanctions against Venezuela.
Okay.
Right.
That doesn't mean that a Russian can't sell Venezuela its resources.
Right.
But that doesn't mean that a European can't sell.
That means that an American company or a company that wants to do business in America cannot.
Okay.
Because otherwise, your laws would be trying to impose.
Extraterritorial is how they call it.
Your internal laws can't be outside the territory of the United States.
And I tried to give you this example before.
It's like saying the Russians were to say, well, the United States can't sell any firearms to Canada.
Americans say, who the fuck are you?
So an American goes to France.
Russia says, we want his extradition.
We want the extradition because he broke our internal laws, he sold firearms.
To Canada of an American.
Right.
France is going to say, no, you're not getting this guy.
Right.
That's your internal laws.
But if this is the United States who is geopolitically the big kid on the block, who sets up this sanction with another country, and one of our quote unquote allies who's a smaller country who relies on us, we can sort of like push and shove, use our influence to be like, look, bitch.
Right.
But that's changing.
And I'll give you examples of that.
That's changing.
And the big stick ain't being held any longer by the United States.
So while I was in federal prison and met Yerushchenko, and he was my cellie, we became.
Very close brothers.
I trust that man with my life and I expect him to trust me with his.
I started understanding all this.
I started seeing this.
And I actually advise some people in the Russian government on certain extraditions.
They've come to me on various.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do it for the French government.
I do it for.
I advise on the Assange case.
I'm advising on.
There's a case called Tbilisi that I spoke of, Yannick, another.
I mean, there's all kinds of.
That are under the scene that aren't as popular here that you're seeing on TV, but there's quite a few cases.
But back to this the Russians had been asking for Boot and Yerushchenko's return from 2008, saying, What you guys have done is illegal, you can't do this, and you're doing it.
Americans say, It they're in our jurisdiction, they have the big stick, we don't give a they're staying here.
So, I'm not sure if you remember with Yerushchenko.
There was a trade, the first trade that Biden did with the Russians.
And that first trade was Yerushchenko for a guy by the name of Trevor Ree.
Right.
The Marine.
The Marine.
Now, I have no doubt whatsoever Trevor Reed didn't deserve a 10 year sentence.
It's my understanding.
What did he do again?
He got in a fight with a Russian cop and they gave him a 10 year sentence.
It probably didn't even exist that fight.
He probably got a little lippy and the Russian cop probably slapped him around.
I have no doubt about it.
But I have no doubt also about it is that Yerushchenko should have been in the United States and should have gotten a 20 year sentence.
I have no doubt about that.
And I also have no doubt, and neither does the U.S. State Department or the Russians or anybody can argue this with me, that Malone team, that he was.
Renditioned out of Liberia.
He was kidnapped.
Now, I can tell you, if the Russians would take an American out of Liberia, take him to Russia, the FSB, it would be all over the fucking news.
And there would be so much political pressure that that guy would have had to come back.
That individual.
Why is international law or even national law valid for you, but not valid for me?
That's how the Russians are seeing this.
Okay.
So for years, the Russians had been asking politely to the Americans, send these guys back.
Send them back.
They were taken illegally.
You know that, and we know that.
So the first situation became with Trevor Reed.
The Russians aren't even doing that.
These people are in their country doing shit.
That's a very good point.
We're flying across the world.
We're flying across the world.
That the Russians knew from day one, she was a basketball player going back and forth with these vape pens.
They don't give a fuck about vape pens.
They really don't.
But they said, this is our only opportunity to force these guys to send him back.
And that's what they did.
My point on this is when you go outside of international law, like the United States has been doing, you open up that door for everybody else to go outside of international law.
And there's a big difference between international law and international norms.
Don't confuse those terminologies because you're seeing Anthony Blinken and all these other guys at the State Department say, oh, we're of international norms.
The Americans, the United States, is no longer in jurisdiction of the ICC, that's the International Criminal Court.
Bill Clinton withdrew them from the International Criminal Court.
Obama was supposed to go into the ICJ.
They said no.
Now, these are Democrats.
They said, no, we don't want another sovereignty.
International Court of Justice, we want no sovereignty of these other courts that rule over us.
Zero.
But they expect all these other countries to be ruled by this ICJ or ICC.
So the United States has been withdrawing itself from all these international courts because they don't want another court to say, you come here, we're going to extradite you out of country A, B, or C, or D. You come here, we're going to sentence you.
Bush for going into Iraq illegally, Tony Blair.
They don't want.
These courts that have jurisdiction over them.
So the United States has been withdrawing itself from all these international courts.
And this has been a long-going plan.
The only international agreement the United States imposes on all of its allies and non-allies are extradition treaties.
That's the only agreement that they'll make.
And there's a reason behind that because it makes the United States' internal laws then become extraterritorial.
Do you understand that?
It makes so, like Julian Assange, for instance.
Fuck, he published articles outside the United States.
It's like any other publisher does in Spain, France, Italy.
Right.
He didn't do anything inside the United States.
How's the U.S. law going to reach outside the United States and snatch him up and take him in?
Right.
But with an extradition treaty.
Was he a U.S. citizen?
No.
He wasn't, right?
Not a U.S. citizen, never put a step in the United States.
Right.
Exactly.
How do we get him out of there?
Well, it's a simple way there's an extradition treaty.
Yeah, we claim he's.
So now our laws apply to him.
Right.
And that's why just recently, the last trip Joe Biden did to Europe was Spain.
With Pedro Sanchez, May of 2023.
Okay.
So, two months ago or a month and a half ago.
A month and a half ago.
You know what was the first thing on his agenda?
Look it up.
Google it.
Why?
He, Biden wanted the extradition treaty to be more fluid because Dave Mendoza's deal jungled it up a little bit.
Biden asked, look it up.
Look it up.
The four things that they agreed on.
I think the number one or number two or number three, one of the three points or four points.
Mm hmm.
Was a make our Spain's extraditions more fluid?
What is the big picture with this?
With the extradition treaties and getting these people to be able to indict them under US law across the globe, no matter what?
I'll give you one other example and that will give you an understanding of what the big picture is here.
Do you know who Wang Wazu is?
Yes.
Is this the document?
Let's see.
Can you zoom in on it a little bit?
Yep, that's it.
That's it.
Okay.
So there's got to be some points in there.
Read out of President Joe Biden's meeting with President Pedro Sanchez of Spain.
President Joe Biden welcomed Sanchez of Spain to the White House today to reaffirm a close partnership between the U.S. and Spain.
The leaders underscored an unwavering support for Ukraine in the face of Russia's brutal war.
Scroll down, scroll, scroll.
Keep going.
They discussed broadening the scope of the coordination.
The U.S. and Spain intended to work rapidly towards achieving the shared goal to address the climate crisis.
Blah, Should talk about extradition in there.
Leaders, science, and technology keep going.
It's probably towards the bottom.
Pardon me?
Yeah, there's nothing in there about it.
Well, they may have, the White House may have kept that one quiet.
There is a.
Maybe just like search it and then search, like type in extradition after that.
Yeah, put Joe Biden, Pedro Sanchez, extradition treaty.
Maybe that'll come up.
But it's one of the four or seven points that they had.
Okay.
Okay.
Same one, huh?
I'll email it to you.
Okay.
He can keep looking.
Yeah.
But yeah, so the big picture.
Okay, so let's talk about that big picture.
Do you know who Meng Wanzhou is?
Meng Wanzhou.
She is the daughter of the owner of Huawei, the Chinese technology company.
Correct.
Okay.
Well, we're talking about sanctions.
The United States has sanctions on Iran.
Right.
Huawei sells switching equipment, telephonic equipment to Iran.
Okay.
Okay.
They're a Chinese company.
Okay.
They don't give a fuck what the United States says about who they can sell to or who they can.
They care if you're a U.S. company or a U.S. citizen.
That applies to you.
Doesn't apply to the Chinese.
Your laws that you pass or your sanctions that you pass don't apply to the Chinese.
Chinese sell switching equipment and telephonic equipment to the Russians.
They sell them to the Iranians, the Venezuelans.
They sell them to us?
Yeah.
They sell them to you guys.
Yeah.
That's right.
Okay.
There was a recent, there was a big recent story that came out.
I think it was last year, maybe, where they basically discovered that all of the big communication towers, like all throughout the Midwest, they're sitting next to your, they're sitting next to the international ballistic missile.
I heard about that.
I heard about that.
All Huawei.
They're using it to spy.
All right.
Well, and that's internally for the United States to say, fuck it.
No, you can't do that.
Get out.
And I agree with that.
Right.
I don't have any disagreeing with that.
Okay.
Chinese Citizen Case00:15:46
So she travels to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Okay.
I get a call that she's been arrested, and the United States is trying to extradite her.
So, they want me to assist with this case to see if it goes any farther down the procedure line.
All right.
All right.
The extradition process is a long process.
The Chinese aren't fucking around.
At that time, there was a guy, Schellenberg, who was sentenced in China for trafficking some narcotic.
I don't know what it was.
I think it was speed or amphetamine or something.
And, uh, Got a life sentence.
He took that sentence and appealed it to the Chinese Supreme Court.
This is a Canadian visitor.
A Canadian man took it to, you know, appealed his sentence.
At the time, Meng got arrested.
Chinese said, We want it back immediately.
Immediately.
The Trudeau government said, Well, we can't really get it, it's not us, it's the Americans.
We have to apply our extradition treaty.
That extradition treaty that I say is so important.
We're obligated to do so by Canadian law.
Because remember, all treaties have to be ratified by your Congress.
So, are we talking about Canada's extradition treaty with China?
No, with the United States.
Yeah.
So, the U.S. and Canada's extradition treaty between those two countries, how does that involve China?
How does that involve China?
It involves a Chinese citizen.
A Chinese citizen travels to China.
The United States says, we have an arrest warrant for her.
In Canada, right?
Because the Americans say, wait a minute, she just arrived to Vancouver.
We have an extradition treaty with you, the Canadians.
Extradite her to the United States.
Why do we have a warrant for her?
The United States says because she violated sanctions.
The company violated sanctions to Iran.
Oh, okay.
You following me?
Let me explain this to you again.
That's what's fucked up about this whole process and how this is creating an outlawless.
The United States has an extradition treaty with Canada.
So if Dave Mendoza's on the fly and hides out someplace, and I decided, you know, I wanted to go to Canada, they find me in Canada.
They found out Dave's living in Canada.
They look up, oh, you got a warrant in the United States.
We have an extradition treaty that obligates us to send Dave Mendoza to the United States to be tried.
Okay.
Okay.
Same with Meng.
She flew into Vancouver, they arrested her on the spot.
They said, there's a warrant for you.
By the Americans.
It's not us.
We have no problems with you.
We're the Canadians.
It's Americans who want you, and we have an extradition treaty that's obligating us to process your extradition.
So they're, in a sense, an American proxy.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So the Chinese said, listen, we don't give a fuck about what the Americans want or not.
We're telling you, return her back, or there will be consequences.
They waited for 30, 60 days.
The Schellenberg.
Who had his life sentence appealed to the Supreme Court?
The Chinese Supreme Court said, You're correct.
It's not a correct sentence.
You're getting the death penalty.
Boom.
That was a sign to the Canadians.
So then the Canadians said, Wait, You need to fix that.
Chinese gave the Canadians the same response.
They said, We can't get involved in our judiciary.
We have to let it run its course.
And it's ran its course.
Just like you said about Meng.
Then about 30 days later, There was an ex diplomat and a businessman who were arrested in China for spying.
Canadians.
And they were quickly sentenced.
One was, I think, to 11 years.
The ex diplomat, Sparval or Sparoff, I forget the name, I forgot it written down here, Kurig and Spavor.
And the Canadians were furious.
Chinese said, that's it.
They're getting sentenced to a hard time.
Well, guess what happened?
About 60 days later, Meng hence back to China.
And the U.S. was cool with that?
The U.S. was getting so much pressure.
It's not that they were cool about it, but they don't hold the big stick anymore.
The Canadians were begging the Americans, get this resolved.
Stop the extradition because we got three individuals.
One's going to be dying here shortly, and the other two are doing a hard time.
One's an ex diplomat.
And so, what I'm trying to express to you, Danny, this.
Whole thing that's going on creates an outlawlessness.
The United States used to hold that big stick before.
Now it's no longer.
Now, don't think for a second that Britney Griner was guilty really of anything, certainly not a 10 year sentence or a 20 year sentence.
I don't know what she got for a vape.
No, not even the Russians believe that.
But they did it because they had enough of the shit that was done to their citizens.
And the same thing is going on with the Chinese.
In Assange's case, Julian Assange's case.
He was given.
Julian Assange, first of all, created no.
So let's, for Julian Assange, let's go back.
So at what point, where was he in his case?
I know it's been a long ongoing thing.
Right.
But at what point did they, did his legal team reach out to you and what were they, what were they asking you for?
Okay.
That's a good question.
He, Julian Assange, when he first got arrested, he got pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy.
He went to his first.
Hearing in British courts.
And that first hearing denied his extradition to the United States.
Denied his extradition, saying, because remember, I told you that the European courts require that you be sentenced close to your family.
Okay.
And the draconian ness of the American judiciary system or penitentiary system.
Okay.
They denied it at the first level.
The Americans, before they even appealed it, the Americans then, when they saw that decision, it's a final decision.
The Americans sent a diplomatic note saying, Oh, we'll agree that he can spend his sentence in Australia if he's convicted.
And we will give him the adequate medical care and he won't be put in a CMU.
CMU in the federal prisons is a communication management unit, which is basically isolation.
Victor Boot was in one.
Is that like the ADX place where Chapo is?
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's a CMU.
They have one.
There's four or five of them in the US federal prison system.
At any rate, well, when they sent those guarantees, some attorneys started looking up something on the internet.
That's when I got the call.
And they said, hey, dude, we know your case.
You were promised promises by the Americans.
They sent a diplomatic note saying they would agree to this, this, this.
And we need you.
We need your help to explain exactly how you did this.
So I went there and I explained it to them.
And I said, diplomatic note doesn't mean shit.
What you need is a deed of surrender, a contract that he actually signs.
Because I explained that whole process I just explained to you, how they diverted from that.
If you're not signatory, they're going to say, fuck it.
Britain needs to fight for your return.
Or Britain needs to fight for you to go to Australia.
And another trick that these diplomatic notes are very dangerous because another trick is what they'll do.
And I've helped a lot of Canadians who were extradited out of Canada to the United States with the guarantee the United States say, we guarantee, and they'll write it down that you have a right to.
Serve your sentence up in Canada.
Well, I've got a case I'm working with right now.
Guy got a 20 year sentence for marijuana, cocaine trafficking, got extradited.
The Americans gave him the guarantee that he could serve a sentence up in Canada.
He's got 13 years on a 20 right now.
They're not sending him back.
You know what the reason is?
Because Americans tell the Canadians, remember, all three parties have to agree.
So this guy went into federal court, and the federal court judge said, yeah, Americans didn't break a single promise in this diplomatic note.
They agreed they would.
They didn't say that the Canadians would.
And that's the same shit they're doing with Julian Assange.
They said, yeah.
The Americans say they'll send him to Australia.
But who's to say that the Australians will agree to it?
Right.
You understand?
And I think the Australians and the Americans are probably talking behind the scenes.
Bro, they're like brothers and sisters.
They're like brothers and sisters.
Let me give you another example of a case I just dealt with in these diplomatic notes.
A guy who was extradited out of Spain, Mansur Alcazar, is an arms dealer.
Another person that they wanted off the market because he was sanction busting their sanctions.
He was called the Prince of Marbella, a multimillionaire, lived a lavish high life in Spain.
They tried to extradite him one time.
The Spanish court said no.
Then they put so much pressure on them, on Spain, that they requested a secondary extradition.
They said yes.
Okay.
The guy at the time they extradited him was 65, almost 70 years old, between 65 and 70 years of age.
One of the conditions that the Spanish court said no life sentence.
Remember what my diplomatic note said?
We will give him a determined sentence.
You know how much time they gave him?
30 plus years.
And when he appealed that, said that's essentially a life sentence.
So he's 70 already.
Yeah.
Well, he's 70, so 30 would be 100.
Right.
Right?
Mm hmm.
He would have to spend because in federal court, you do 95% of your time, right?
Right.
So he wouldn't go, he, he, a 30 year sentence is a life sentence.
He's not living to 100.
You know that.
I know that.
Life expectancy tells you that.
So when we challenged that in federal court, you know what the federal judge said?
And I've seen not one, not two, hundreds of cases like this.
We said we would literally not give him a life sentence.
We didn't.
Those words are what they mean.
Life sentence.
We gave him a determined sentence, which was 30 years.
There's another case I was dealing with, a 150 year sentence.
And they weren't supposed to give this guy a life sentence in federal court.
As a matter of fact, this guy's out of Florida.
Really?
Yeah.
Have you ever heard of the name Weiss?
Yeah.
Weiss or something?
He was a developer, property developer here, big time.
The name definitely rings a bell.
Look him up, dude.
I'm telling you, that case is astonishing.
Donald Trump pardoned him recently.
There was no issue over that.
He got the longest federal sentence, I think about 300 or 350 years or something like that.
He was a realtor, a developer.
Shopping mall developer here in Tampa, Florida, all through the fucking Florida Pan Belt.
Yes, I have heard of this guy.
He got extra.
He was rented, ran to Austria.
He lost his trial, ran to Austria because he had a Jewish guy.
He had an Austrian citizenship.
And he ran to Austria, found guilty, cut off his ban, and flew his private jet to Austria.
They arrested him in Austria because he had Austrian nationality.
And one of the conditions was no life sentence.
Can't give a life sentence.
They gave him the longest sentence in federal history.
Over 150 years?
Yeah.
Wow.
But Donald Trump pardoned him.
Probably Donald Trump's developer in this area, probably too.
I suspect his old buddy buddy system.
None of the Democrats had not a peep about it.
And he certainly doesn't deserve that type of sentence.
I don't care what he's done, but he certainly doesn't deserve it.
And I'm going to bring you to one last case that when I was in federal prison, I used to get the Wall Street Journal.
And I wouldn't get it because I don't enjoy that reading very much, but I got it because it talked occasionally about extraditions.
There was a case called the Mastros case.
Have you ever heard of that case?
The Mastros case.
They're out of Seattle, Washington, property developers.
Okay.
This is how small the world is, too.
Their business partners were my parents' neighbors.
So when I read the case while I was in prison, they were in France.
They were asking for it, it was when the boom of the realty boom.
Fell out, you know, and they had all these, they had like 3,000 apartment complexes in Seattle.
And the bottom fell out, and the U.S. attorney was accusing them of inflating the value of them to get these loans because a couple banks in Seattle went tits up because of that.
Anyway, they were arrested in France.
I read this while I was in prison.
So, and they were out of Seattle.
So I called my folks and I said, Do me a favor, find out who their attorney is in Seattle.
Guy named Brown.
I wrote him a letter.
They gave me the address.
I wrote him a letter saying, Listen, I'm so and so and so and so.
I was extradited.
I might be able to help in this case.
He said, We don't know how.
I said, Well, in the future, maybe I read in the secondary article in the Wall Street Journal a couple months later that the French courts said he will only be extraditable.
This couple would only be extraditable.
Michael and Linda Mastros would only be extraditable.
Because since we're at advanced age, I think he was 70 plus, and she was they would only be extraditable.
Yeah, that's the guy Shalom Weiss.
Shalom Weiss, that's a guy who was pardoned.
Oh, wow, there you go.
Oh my god, he was sentenced to 845 years.
What does it say it was for?
Can you zoom on a little bit?
Okay, okay.
In 2000, Weiss was sentenced to 845 years in prison for racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering, and other charges in connection.
To the collapse of the National Heritage Life Insurance Company.
He and other defendants engaged in an immense scheme that siphoned off $450 million from the company, resulting in what was believed to be the largest insurance company failure ever caused by criminal acts.
His sentence was the longest prison term ever imposed in a U.S. federal court and was the longest ever for a white collar crime.
Weiss fled the country during jury deliberations in October 1999 and was extradited from Austria in 2002.
His sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump in January 2021.
Nobody talked about that.
He was released the same day.
Longest Prison Sentence00:09:59
Sitting in a pool right now.
Scroll up.
Let me see this guy.
Great guy.
Well, let me tell you look up Michael and Linda Mastro out of Seattle, Washington.
Anyway.
So I started reading in the Wall Street Journal, the secondary, that the court ruled that they could not be imprisoned.
They could go on a home confinement sort of if they were to be extradited.
Okay.
Okay, because of their advanced age.
Mm hmm.
And they requested guarantees from the Western Washington Federal Court for that.
Then guess who came checking up on me?
This attorney that I contacted before said, Hey, we need your help.
I said, Who's your prosecutor?
There he is, Michael Mastro.
I said, Who's your prosecutor?
He said, Susie Rowe.
He said, Who's your judge?
He said, Peter Zille.
He said, Well, guess what?
Those are the same individuals who refused to.
Abide by my conditions.
No.
Present that to the French courts.
They did.
And guess where they're sitting at?
In the French Alps, enjoying life.
They're still alive.
But none of the newspapers talk about this.
How to flee the law when you are 87 years old.
Yeah, they make him out as being the bad guy.
Right, right, right.
Not that the United States refused to give correct guarantees.
So that's, see how the news is manipulating how?
Yeah.
Jesus.
So, what about the John McAfee case?
What was the story with that one?
That's a sad case, bro.
I don't know what you know about John McAfee.
People can say what they want to say about him, but I found him endearing.
Did you meet him?
Yeah.
I got a call from his wife, Janice.
And he was not trusting of anybody.
Not trusting of anybody.
He was arrested in Spain for extradition.
To the United States.
And he was literally in complete disarray.
This guy's a commanding guy, you know, and he knows what he wants, how he wants, where he wants.
He doesn't give a fuck.
He enjoys cocaine.
He enjoys women.
He flat out, he was just one of those guys that just, he was a maverick, as they say.
They wanted John for tax evasion.
And John got on CNN and some of the mainstream channels saying, don't pay your taxes.
Use cryptocurrency.
Fuck these guys.
They're using your money wrong.
Right.
He ran as an independent, I think, for president of the United States.
A little bit in himself, out of himself.
Right, right, right.
But I like the guy.
I mean, I could have gone out and partied with the guy.
I don't think my current partner would like him much.
But the guy, so I get contact.
He's a wild looking dude.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What's that tattoo say?
I don't.
There was one that says, I'm not suicidal or something.
Oh, he got a tattoo that said, I'm not suicidal.
Yeah, because then this is the sad part of the story.
You could probably close that out and still see it.
That little box.
Or you just, yeah, you probably just have to go to Google Images, you'll find it.
Yeah, this is the bad part of the story, though.
This is the sad thing.
But at any rate, Janice called me.
His wife contacted me, and she's from Florida.
These guys are from Florida.
I didn't know that.
Or they're from this area, someplace around here.
But they contacted me.
We're a different breed down here.
So far, you guys are treating me well.
So, contacted me and said, you know, there's anything you can do.
We'll pay whatever you want.
I said, I don't charge anybody for anything.
And much less, I'm not going to charge you if I can help you against the US government.
I said, the only thing I will charge is if I have expenses to pay, fly someplace or come back or whatever, I'll charge it.
But other than that, I don't charge for my time or anything.
I was fleeced a lot of money and I don't want that to happen to anybody I can contact and help with.
For me, it's not about money, it's a principle.
All right.
So she calls me and they're all up in arms.
I talked to them on the phone a few times.
Oh, the tattoo says schwacked.
Schwacked.
Yeah.
There's one he has I'm not suicidal or don't kill me or something like that.
I'll never commit suicide or something like that.
I forget what it says.
But at any rate, going back to the story.
So they hired this attorney that was, with all due respect, this guy didn't know what the fuck he was.
He was a business attorney.
He thought he knew extraditions out of spam, didn't have the slightest clue.
I told John, you need to change attorneys.
The best one is my ex attorney, but I'm going to give you two or three options.
So I laid out two or three names.
And another one was Emilio.
Emilio is a very good attorney, very honest attorney.
He doesn't charge a lot.
Not a lot under Spanish, well, not a lot under US quotes, but for Spain, it's a decent amount of money.
Spanish attorneys would cost you $50,000 to handle a case or $25,000.
In the United States, you're looking at a trial like this, a half a million, easily.
I spent over a million.
Okay.
At any rate, I said, you got the wrong attorney.
He's already done some filings that he should never have done.
We need to make some arguments that may have passed the timeline.
But I said, we'll try and see what we can do.
You know, I'll do whatever I have to do.
And he was extremely grateful.
I said, but there's going to be a ruling coming out.
It's probably getting unfavorable.
I said, don't really, because there are three levels that we can take this in Spain and then the EU court.
So I said, just hold tight.
You know, don't, you know, because I could see he was really kind of.
Jittery.
All right.
Was he a Spanish citizen?
No.
Okay.
No, he was not.
He's a British citizen.
Okay.
And a U.S. citizen.
Okay.
Not a Spanish citizen.
And he was asking, that was one of the arguments.
They sent him to Britain, service time in Britain.
He's a British citizen.
But the U.S. was saying, yeah, but he's never really lived in Britain.
And so those were going to be some of the arguments we were going to use in the second level.
So the day before I visited him, I visited him in Briand's, the prison in Briand's, Briand's one.
And the day before I told him this, I said, Dude, just relax.
I could see he was very nervous.
I said, I'll get you an attorney, the right attorney.
Please do me a favor.
Whatever monies you give that attorney, make sure it's declarable because I don't want to put this attorney, because he had a lot of cryptocurrencies and shit like that in Janice.
And I just didn't want to put somebody I truly trust, an attorney, and then get him in trouble by taking illegal funds or what the government can perceive as illegal funds.
So.
Because he was telling me other things.
Well, I can put this on the side of that.
So I said, no, no, no.
You got to make sure it's all legal.
Okay.
That said, the next day, his ruling came out that he was going to be extradited under the first court ruling that we still had three other courts to do.
Okay.
That they approve his extradition.
That the conditions that he was requesting weren't necessary, blah, The assurances given by the Americans.
Now, Kimberly Weiss was behind all this shit, mind you.
Really?
Yeah.
I saw that on all the documents.
We assure you that we will treat him accordingly and all this shit that evening.
Supposedly, he hung himself in a cell.
Now, we've requested the aisles of those cells are all videotaped.
Same shit with the Epstein deal.
Those videotapes are nowhere to be found.
The person.
Where?
What?
In a Spanish prison.
He was in it.
Briand's in Barcelona.
He was in Barcelona when this happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the cameras were on and recording, but we just don't have the tapes.
We don't have the tapes.
They don't know where they're at.
That's convenient.
Yeah.
And they will not give her the full autopsy of the body.
Really?
Yeah.
And that's very, very unusual in Spain.
Very unusual.
So I'm not one of these conspiracy freaks.
I'm not.
I believe in what I see.
I'm like you in that sense.
You know, you show me the evidence, you put it in front of me, and let me make my judgment.
I'm going to tell you something.
I was part of that.
I saw it.
There's something weird that went on there.
He may have committed suicide.
I'm not saying he didn't.
But there may have been foul play behind there too.
I don't know.
Just like this whole Epstein thing, you know, I don't know.
Put the evidence on all sides, make it as transparent as possible.
Let me make that decision.
But it was a sad story.
And I enjoyed the guy.
He was a character.
So, what do they say to what's his wife's name again?
Janice.
Janice?
What is the reason that they won't give her the autopsy or show any of the tapes?
So, the prison they said they can't find the tapes and the autopsies.
They're saying it's not necessary that he's been defined as uh, he was suicide.
Can you do anything about that?
We're attempting to take that through a judicial process right now, yeah.
Yeah, we are hoping so.
And if the Spanish courts want to play the game, it they know me, they know I'll go higher up than that.
They know me.
Oh, isn't that something, man?
It's like that quote, it's like uh, Nick Cage's quote in that movie, uh, Lord of War.
Missing Autopsy Tapes00:03:57
He's like.
They say that evil only prevails in the absence of good men.
But he said that you just need to get rid of the last part.
The truth is, evil prevails.
Yeah.
It's scary.
It really is scary, right?
And you know, the funny thing, but it's not even funny, the sad thing about all this is that a lot of these people think they're doing good.
A lot of these people in the State Department, a lot of these U.S. attorneys.
As a matter of fact, there was a U.S. attorney, an ex U.S. attorney who represented the Mastros.
Michael Linden Mastro.
And when he read my case, he did an article in The Stranger.
He is quoted at The Stranger magazine.
It was a beautiful article.
He says, You know, I'm an ex U.S. attorney.
This is disgusting what they did to this guy.
Talking about me.
None of them want to.
This Susie Rowe, this Thomas Zilli, this Ricardo Martinez, who's the Chief Justice of the Western District of Washington now.
They were all in on the game.
That fucking building, it's just a building.
That's how they say, Ah, it's just a building.
He probably made a lot more money behind the scenes that we don't know about.
That's how they rationalize this whole game, and they all want to step up and they all want to be part of this fucking nasty system.
And I think that's why a lot of the Americans, you've seen it in Europe, are saying enough of this fucking bullshit.
Drain the swamp.
Yeah, drain the swamp.
That was one of the best coined terms.
I agree.
Get these fuckers out of there, these Pompeo.
But I always said, well, Trump, you put that fucking Pompeo in office.
That guy's head of the CIA.
Throw his ass out.
Get all these permanent motherfuckers who've been sitting there running this whole system.
But those are the reasons they don't want people like JFK Jr. in there because he's going to do changes of draining the swamp.
He's going to do something, that's for sure.
If they don't do something to him first.
Yeah, I don't know if he can, I don't know what would happen for him.
I think he's definitely going to take some votes away from Trump, probably.
But I'm not picky with presidents.
I just want a president who's not an Epstein client.
That's all I ask for.
Good luck.
Trump, one of the number one Epstein clients.
Robert F. Kennedy, he's got 16 phone numbers in the little black book.
Is that right?
Yeah.
You know, yeah, I don't disagree.
He seems smart.
He seems very smart.
I like what he says.
I haven't heard any good arguments against what he's saying about some of the stuff with pharmaceutical companies and all that.
And, you know, I agree with a lot of stuff he says, and I haven't seen any, I can't argue against anything he says, but that's a deep swamp.
Yeah, I agree with you.
And I can tell you right now, we've only seen one 1,000th.
Of what is really behind that swamp or within the swamp.
Right, right.
Even in my case, and I'm a nobody, Danny, I'm a nobody.
When I talk to a lot of these guys, I'm a nobody.
The volume of what they did to fuck me and to hide the documentation and to do it and everybody kind of looking the other way, right up to the Spanish politicians.
You know, my family went to the Spanish politicians and nobody wanted to touch it.
There's reasons behind that.
The Spanish justices.
They didn't want it.
The federal justices, you know why that is?
I asked my attorney, why wouldn't any of these bastards make it?
You know, the only one who did was a chief justice.
He did it anonymously.
And then he left office six months later and started his own private practice.
But my attorney told Dave, they have a financial grip on these fuckers.
They go do speeches to the United States like Harvard or a lot of these private colleges, they get a $150,000 pay fee.
You think they want to give that up?
Right.
They're not going to give that.
Or their kids want to go to a special school here in the United States.
They get that.
You think they want to give that up?
They're not going to give that up.
Fair Trade Concerns00:05:27
But that's the permanent state.
I don't believe in these deep conspiracies, but there's a permanent state.
What I mean by the permanent state, it's that those people who, doesn't matter which president's up there, they're always, you know, U.S. attorneys are there for life.
Really?
Yeah.
U.S. assistant attorneys.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
U.S. assistant attorneys are there for life.
Judges are there for life.
The U.S. attorney is appointed, usually, I think it's by the senator of that state.
They come and go.
Okay.
But the U.S. assistant attorneys, the FBI agents, all those assholes are all there for life.
You have to do something very egregious to get out of there, to throw your ass out.
Right.
It ain't going to happen.
They have.
It's a good old boy pat on the back, you know.
It's.
It's to me, it's disgusting.
It's evading what our constitution in the United States wanted our protections.
I mean, don't think right now they're not listening to every phone conversation I have.
Oh, yeah, I guarantee it.
I guarantee you they knew I was coming on the show.
Guaranteed, 100%.
And I'm not one of these conspiracy freaks.
I just know the reality.
Have you experienced any sort of like overt intimidation?
Every time I come to the United States.
Really?
Like what?
Oh, they ask me how long I'm going to be here for.
What's my purpose of stay?
Oh, well, that's whenever you go anyway.
Yeah, but I have the goon squad come and get me.
What do you mean?
Yeah, I usually get four or five guys there at the Homeland.
Because they run your background.
Yeah, they see me right on the flight.
And all flight.
Boarding information arrives to the United States before you actually get on that flight.
So they know the moment you're on a flight or you're booked for a flight from Spain to the United States, they know Dave Mendoza's coming.
Do they ever fuck with you once you get inside the country?
Actually, you know what?
I could have had 20 kilos of cocaine in my luggage.
You always, oh, how long you'd be here?
I said, you know, the U.S. Attorney knows I'm coming because I always call ahead of time and say, tell the U.S. Attorney's office, say, listen, I don't want to have any headaches.
I'm coming.
Yeah.
Right?
It's all good.
Don't worry.
Oh, yeah.
Where are you going to stay at?
Who are you going to be with?
Blah, blah, blah.
And then, and then, Fucking, there's a line of 300 people coming off that flight.
Where's your bags?
That's fine.
Okay, you can go.
But I mean, that's the extent of it.
But they don't want people like me making noise.
They don't want people like me assisting these extraditions.
You know, the Russians had asked at one point, you know, the fairness of certain trades.
And I point blank told them, no, that's not a fair trade.
Really?
Yeah.
Like what, for example?
Uh, Konstantin Yaroshenko, Trevor Reed.
You said that wasn't a fair trade?
No, I said that what wasn't the fair trade was, um, they wanted, they wanted to give, I got to be careful how I say that.
The Americans were only willing to give a woman who was boot, uh, what's her name?
I'm trying to.
Griner?
No, It's a woman, uh, God, Maria, fuck, what was her name?
For Trevor Reed, boot in a cough or something like that.
She was a gun enthusiast or something here, had a three year sentence.
Okay.
Russians said they were considering it.
Absolutely not.
You said no, give them, you need boot.
No, I said, Yurashanko.
I said, well, look at the facts here.
Okay.
Yurashanko has a 20 year sentence.
He had 12 in.
Federal system, you have to do 18 and a half.
19 years on a 20 year sentence.
Okay, he had 12 years.
He had six years left.
Trevor Reed had a 10 year sentence he just started.
I 100% believe Trevor Reed is innocent.
I 100% believe Trevor Reed was probably treated badly.
But that doesn't evade the fact that, okay, Yerushchenko has six years, six and a half years left.
Trevor Reed just started his sentence six months ago.
He's got a 10 year sentence.
He's got to do 10 years.
That can be considered as a fair trade.
No, they wanted to give this girl instead.
That's not a fair trade.
This lady wasn't a fair trade.
She had like six months left on her sentence.
Did you advise at all in the trade of Victor Boot for Britney Greiner?
No, I didn't advise on that.
Okay.
But I talked to Yaroshenko about issues with that.
Okay.
And I have to be very careful because there is a law where you can't get involved in, there's a U.S. law that you can't.
You can't obstruct or, or, or what's the word I'm looking for?
Can a bother State Department negotiations as an individual?
Okay.
My attorney in Spain demanded of me, he said, Dave, open up an ONG, an NGO, an NGO, because that way at least Spain can't go after you in the U.S., Spain will protect you.
Exposing Government Lies00:02:17
So that's why I opened up an organization called ESUS.
ESUS is the acronym for European.
Citizens extradited to the United States.
Okay.
You put those letters together and it comes to ESIS.
Okay.
And then you can do your consulting through this?
Right.
Okay.
And I don't charge anybody a penny for any of this.
And I want to be honest too.
I feel 100% American as 100% Spanish.
I love the U.S. Constitution.
I think our grandfathers on that Constitution, that document, would be astounded at what they're doing to us now.
This listening on things without this.
Sucking up all our information.
I just, personally, I'm, I would, I, the American people I love.
I'm an American.
I mean, I was born and raised and grew up here, went to college here.
I just, injustice to me, that bully, nobody likes a bully, and I certainly don't.
And I found out it's easier to take these guys on straight head first than to hide from them.
When I went into federal prison, one of the marshals, Said to us, and I had guys, mafia guys being sentenced next to me, gangbangers being sent to me.
They just, the marshal looked at, said, That's a stand up guy right there.
They respected me more than 90% of these guys in the sense because 90% of them were cooperating, were trying to work out deals, all these sneaky shit that they're trying to do.
And the marshals in the end treated me very, not well, but with respect.
And I appreciated that.
But My point is this if you try to go with the truth and you try to go forward and expose the lies and the bullying and the cheating, and it's not just for foreigners, that's for you too.
Because what they do to me or what they did to me or Yerushchenko or Julian Assange, someday they can do to you.
When you open that door and allow that to happen to other people, and there's not a voice to be said, they're going to come for you at some point.
Silence Equals Complicity00:01:48
Right.
It may not be specifically you, but it will be, or somebody in your family, maybe one of your kids in the future might get themselves involved with the federal system, unfortunately.
And you might say, Hold on, what do you think that the black community with this whole crack cocaine deal?
I mean, they devastated with federal laws, the black community.
To me, it was absolutely disgusting.
And all the voices were quiet.
I don't know.
To me, you have to, those who are silent are complicit, as I say.
Yeah.
Well, Dave, we just did pretty damn close to four hours.
Sorry, I talked too much.
That was fascinating, man.
That was a really good conversation.
Thank you for coming and doing this.
Tell people that are listening and watching if they want to get a hold of you.
Is there a way they can reach out?
Yeah, you can.
I'm starting an organization called ESIS, European Citizens Extradited to the United States.
I haven't put all of it together yet.
But the best way to contact me is through email.
You can reach me at DaveTheBasque.
So that's D A V E T H E B A S Q U E at iCloud.com if you want.
I mean, or how most people, legal people, contact me if somebody's, if there's an attorney out there that needs assistance on something, I, again, I don't charge anybody, is they can contact me via email or a lot of them do it through my attorney in Spain, Maria Del Mar Vega.
So you can just look me up on the internet.
I come up all different angles.
Don't believe everything you read.
Awesome, man.
Well, thanks again for sharing all this information.
Super important stuff.
Yeah, man.
I appreciate the way you guys have treated me here.