Lou Valosi, a retired ATF agent, details his 26-year undercover career recruiting Ray Khan to infiltrate cartels and the Gambino family via sting operations. Valosi alleges Khan's betrayal by corrupt Georgia revenue officers and claims his own OIG investigation was politically motivated racial targeting under an Obama appointee. He criticizes current ATF Director Dettelbeck for shifting focus from violent criminals to paperwork regulation, arguing this fuels black markets and ghost guns while eroding individual rights through government overreach. [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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ATF Informant Betrayal00:11:16
Joining us now is Lou Belose.
He's a retired ATF special agent, and he is a co author of a book about a guy that he worked with on many very dangerous situations as an informant against drug cartels, biker gangs, even the Gambino family.
The name of the book is Ray Khan, The Betrayal of an Informant.
And so we're going to talk to him about what life was like inside the ATF and some of these cases, what that was like.
So thank you for joining us, Lou.
Thank you.
It's an honor to be here.
Well, thank you.
I just want to be upfront about it, where I'm coming from.
And of course, my audience knows that I don't think there's any constitutional authority for the ATF to start with.
But having said that, I wanted to know what it was like on the inside.
And it sounds like you've got an amazing story.
They came after the informant that you used for quite some time, and they came after you as well.
But you were exonerated.
And we're interested to hear the story about what happened to the informant and what the two of you were doing in terms of the investigations of these crime families.
So tell us a little bit about.
Your history there at the ATF.
You were there for 25 years, I think?
Yeah, 26.
And I'd just like to start out by saying my whole life, very pro Second Amendment.
All the guys I worked with at ATF, very pro Second Amendment.
And we enforce the federal gun laws, and there is a need for federal gun laws.
Every law abiding citizen in this country should have a gun, know how to use it, and protect themselves.
But let's just be honest.
Let's face facts.
There is a small percentage of people here in this country who should not possess firearms.
And that is the reason why ATF exists.
Previously convicted felons, okay?
People who've been adjudicated mentally deficient, illegal aliens, right?
It's all the 18 United States Code, 922G, that whole list of people who should not possess firearms.
And that's basically why ATF exists, right?
Because they make everyone else look bad.
Because they're trigger pullers and they're out there doing bad things.
So, you know, basically our job is to enforce federal farms and explosives laws.
And that puts you in front of some bad people when you live in that world.
Those are the ones who are out there on the streets victimizing all the good people and doing bad things with guns.
And, you know, we found, I found personally, that the best way to not only identify, but to stop.
That very small percentage of those people was through undercover infiltration.
What better way to gather real time intelligence and real time evidence than being able to insert your own asset right into the middle of these gangs, these cartels, these criminal organizations?
And that was the path that I chose working undercover.
I was.
And that's one of the things that when I looked at the story, the general description of Ray Khan, that was what really.
Kind of startled me because usually you see informants or somebody who already exists in that world.
They've been a criminal in that world for a long time, but you got a guy who is basically a gas station owner or employee and he had never had a criminal record, never been involved in any of that stuff.
That's the interesting thing, I think, is how he could get involved in that world.
This was a guy who had never, you know, never shot a gun, didn't know what in the bullet came out of a gun.
He had never, you know, never done any drugs, never been in that world, not a gangster.
Like you said, basically a A 7 Eleven owner who made a silly mistake.
He walked into one of my undercover operations and he bought a bunch of untaxed cigarettes, which is a federal violation.
Not a violation that we go after, that the United States Attorney's Office really goes after vehemently or cares about, but he loaded all these untaxed cigarettes into a brand new Cadillac Escalade that we wanted.
Because when we see a conveyance that's used in smuggling, we're allowed to use it for our own purposes.
And as awful as that sounds, We found out that he was also in the country illegally.
So he was arrested, charged.
We seized his vehicle and he was just set up for deportation.
And his lawyer came to me and said, Man, if you can do anything to keep Ray in this country, you know, he has children here, he'll be the best informant you've ever had.
And, you know, I was so skeptical.
I said, You know, what is this?
This guy's not in my world.
How's he going to help me?
And the lawyer who I knew, he was convincing.
He said, Just trust me.
So I did.
I took a leap of faith and we did all the necessary paperwork and all to get his.
Prosecution deferred, which no one cared about anyway with untaxed cigarettes.
And we got his deportation stayed and we essentially paroled him into this country.
And I didn't know what to expect.
I brought him into my next undercover operation.
And let me tell you, he just hit the ground running.
And he absolutely made, he pretty much made the second half of my career.
Wow.
His uncanny ability to get in with these gangsters who were putting guns and dangerous drugs on the street and bring them to me was unbelievable.
So, what was it about him?
I mean, did he just have a way that he could read people and have a conversation with them?
What was it?
Yeah, even his English is not that great.
Yes, he has a way about him.
When you walk in his store, he just has a way, a little bit pushy, and he knows how to connect with people.
That's his gift.
And he could connect with these gangsters and he could weave his way in and out and find out who was doing what and who would be the best targets to bring to me.
And he.
You know, he could get these guys, and that's basically undercover work, right?
To make people want to be a part of your hustle.
That's the essence of undercover work.
If I can, you know, it's not trying to become someone else, it's trying to sell yourself and get the bad guys to want to be a part of what you're doing, your hustle.
And that's exactly what he did.
And he would tell them about us, bring them to us, and then we would take over from there.
And we're talking about high level cartel members, high level street gang members.
And what was his hustle that they were thinking they were going to join into?
I mean, so at this point, the operations he was helping us with were storefront operations.
These were operations where we would set up phony businesses in parts of America where there was super high gun crime, high violence.
And we would use these stats to kind of justify setting up a business that was owned and operated by the government, staffed by undercover agents.
And Ray would bring these people to us.
You know, we would kind of put out that spider web, and we would end up these are the people who were putting illegal guns on the streets.
These were the people who were putting dangerous drugs on the streets.
And what did they think they were going to get from these businesses that you set up?
I mean, what type of businesses would you set up?
And what were they thinking they were going to get a part of?
I mean, we covered the whole spectrum from tattoo parlors to head shops to military surplus stores with attached shooting ranges.
To international freight forwarding businesses on the port.
And you would never walk into these places and think that it was a law enforcement setup.
They were so well done and well stocked.
And when these bad guys would see, you know, our motto was 90% of our business is 100% legitimate.
I mean, we were actually running these businesses.
But when they saw what our side hustle was, and my side hustle was always that I bought illegal guns off the street and I trafficked them up to New York and sold them for incredible profits, which really happens, right?
You know, down here in the South where I am in Georgia, you can buy a $100 Lorson 9mm.
And you can sell it on the streets of Brooklyn for $2,500, $3,000.
Wow.
And it's a business.
It's a criminal enterprise and it happens.
And we were purporting ourselves to be gun traffickers.
Wow.
I guess that's prohibition markup.
That's there.
Once they prohibit it, it goes sky high.
Yeah, that's what these strict state gun laws do.
They create a black market for weapons.
And for tobacco as well.
They sell, they've got such high tobacco taxes in New York that.
People are selling individual cigarettes.
I think they call them Lucy's or something like that, right?
Let me tell you, the state of New York has created an entire black market.
Yeah.
Notre Dame tobacco.
Absolutely.
Wow.
Wow.
That's amazing.
So, talk a little bit about some of the gangs that you guys are involved in.
You had biker gangs, you had cartels, you had a traditional mafia family that were there.
Yeah.
You know, by far, the cartels were the main ones.
I don't know if people realize it.
The cartels for.
Several decades now, the cartels are embedded in every state in this country.
Even when you go into these rural towns up in the mountains, the cartels are there.
They are now, they totally control the drug trade in America from pharmaceuticals, from the illegal pharmaceuticals, the fentanyl, to the traditional heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine.
The cartels are controlling everything.
And that's who we really were there for guns, but we ended up dealing with so many cartels because when we did deal with the narcotics, we were dealing with.
Large amounts.
We weren't buying eight balls.
Was the DEA a part of this as well, or did you eventually bring them back in?
Okay, so you guys are just doing this for the guns only.
Yeah, for the guns, but the gun and drug world, does DEA buy a lot of guns as well?
Yes, they do.
Do they make gun cases as well?
Yes, they do.
We have kind of an unspoken agreement between ATF and DEA because those worlds coexist.
Where you have a lot of drugs, you have a lot of guns, and vice versa.
Guns are the tools of the trade for the drug world.
And so it's impossible that there's not kind of a cross, kind of a mixing when you're working those.
So Ray would bring in cartel guys to me.
We would buy some drugs from them.
And when they saw our hustle with the guns, they would say, well, listen, if you're into guns, we got shipments of AR 15s we're sending to South America.
We'll just sell them to you here.
And next thing we know, we're buying guns off these cartel guys as well.
Wow.
So this sounds like everything is working fine according to what the ATF wants out of this, but then something happened and they came after you as well, didn't they?
Tell us a little bit about that.
Crime Family Competition00:15:32
They investigated you and you were cleared of all charges, but what was the reason that they gave and what do you think was the real reason behind it?
Boy, that's a long one, but I'll give you the Reader's Digest version.
I worked under cover probably for too long.
It's a.
It's one of those aspects, you know, less than 1% of law enforcement actually works undercover.
And when you do it, it's probably best, I would say, now looking back on my career, to maybe do it for seven or eight years and get out.
I did it for 20 and I was doing these deep, deeply embedded long term undercover operations.
And, you know, it's a gray area.
After a while, you start believing in your own bull and it's hard to turn it on and off.
And, you know, you're surrounded by bad behavior.
You're living in that gray area.
And, you know, eventually it gets to you and that it's a blurred line between who you really are and your.
You know, who you're portraying yourself to be.
I went years and years and years without ever carrying a badge.
You're kind of, you even distance yourself from the whole law enforcement community when you're deep undercover.
And, you know, for me, that led to some personal bad behavior, that led to excessive drinking, and it led to infidelity.
And, you know, unfortunately, you know, for me, it was with a federal prosecutor, and she was working on some of these cases.
And, you know, obviously that's where my trouble started.
And when they came after me for that, but the real reason was the United States Attorney's Office at the time was not liking the, trying to word this carefully, they weren't liking the racial makeup of the defendants in this operation I was working on, which to me was utterly ridiculous because You know,
if you tell me to work on an outlaw biker gang, right, if they're committing violations of federal firearms laws and I go after the Hells Angels, if I'm successful, I'm going to have 50 white defendants and nobody complains about that.
All right.
This case was being worked in an urban environment.
All right.
So the victims of this community are going to be black, right?
The perpetrators are black.
And it would have been the same if it was a Hispanic community.
Yeah.
And so.
Because that, you know, that was, and this was a U.S. attorney at the time who had been appointed under the Obama administration, who seemed to care more about, instead of fighting crime, you know, the racial inequities.
And again, I've locked up more white guys than any other agent, probably, but this particular case, he didn't like the racial makeup of the defendants.
He had even asked me about it.
And, you know, that, in my opinion, is the real reason that they came after us.
And, And, you know, eventually, as you said, you know, the OIG did a two year investigation.
They put more effort into this than they do a homicide and came up with absolutely nothing and, you know, no findings against me.
But it essentially ruined my undercover career, which probably was a blessing because it was time to stop.
So because they're coming after you, that kind of exposed what was happening.
Is that why it ruined my career?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I spent my, you know, I was invisible for my whole career and all of a sudden now it's on the internet and in the newspapers.
Yeah.
So now you're a victim of the DEI police.
Exactly.
And so then you got cleared with all this.
And so then your book is about the betrayal of your informant, Ray Khan.
What happened with that?
What happened with Ray?
All right.
So, yeah, and I don't portray Ray as an angel.
We don't find our informants in church.
But, you know, as a law enforcement officer, you have to look at what's the greater good for the community you're trying to protect.
And, you know, Ray and his entire crew there, that culture of the 7 Eleven owners and all that, you know, they're always looking for ways to get around the taxes and all that.
That's their culture.
Okay.
Well, I mean, everybody's looking for a way to get around the taxes.
Absolutely.
There's tax avoidance, which is part of the game.
There's tax evasion, which is, again, the thing they come after you for.
But when you look at that, your case kind of reminds me of Joe Bannister, I've interviewed many times.
He was a criminal investigator for the IRS and he asked some questions about some of the tax code and he got on their bad side and they came after him.
And he was exonerated, but still, you know.
It's that type of thing.
When you look at the institution, it can be something that's kind of a side issue or minor issue as it was with you.
Yeah.
Well, so they had come after Ray, unbeknownst to me, while we were working.
You know, they just, and it was actually the Department of Revenue here in Georgia that just, you know, Ray was, for whatever reason, they were actually helping us with these operations.
And behind our backs, they were working cases on Ray.
Again, for silly, silly, you know, things that, Really, this guy's bringing in dangerous drugs.
He's bringing in cartel members, machine guns, sawed off shotguns.
You know, as a law enforcement officer, I don't care if he's not paying taxes on the honey buns he's selling at his 7 Eleven, right?
You have to look at what's important.
And so he was actually arrested a few times during these operations, and I had to get him out.
But once I got jammed up and I could no longer protect him, they really went after him.
And I mean, it's a crazy story.
But as soon as I got jammed up, he went and became an informant for Homeland Security.
And when they indicted him on state RICO charges for these taxes, he was advised to run while his lawyers worked on it.
He was advised by law enforcement officers who knew his value.
Hey, man, you know.
If I was you, I would get out of town for a while.
And he did.
He became a fugitive up in New York City.
Wow.
And now it's a lot easier to be a fugitive when you have a lot of money, which Ray did.
It's tough to be a fugitive these days if you have to live under a bridge and you don't have any money.
But Ray had cash and he survived for a long time up in New York.
He even had to run around in New York when they went up looking for him a little bit.
But his lawyers, and this is the craziest part of this whole story.
It eventually came out through the hard work of his lawyers that the main revenue guys who are law enforcement officers here in Georgia who were coming after him were taking bribes from Ray's competition.
Oh, wow.
The Indians who he was in competition with down here were giving these guys bribes to go after him.
I'm talking about $10,000, $12,000 watches, plane tickets, round trip plane tickets to Europe.
And it all came out, and these guys were arrested and perp walked.
Down here in Georgia.
And Ray was able to, after six or seven months of being a fugitive up in New York, he was able to triumphantly return to the state of Georgia.
Wow.
That's amazing.
Yeah, it is.
You know, we see that so often, not usually to that criminal extent, but so often businesses will use government to take out their competition.
It might just be something that's pretty mundane, like extra regulation or extra barriers to competition or people getting into the business.
Usually, it's competitors who are pushing the kind of regulations that we all complain about being excessive.
But yeah, to basically stick the revenue on him because he's their competition, that's pretty amazing.
So it's interesting you say that.
I learned that early on in my career.
You know, I actually started in Los Angeles as an ICE agent, but back then it was called INS.
And all of our greatest tips in the employer sanctions unit, you know, when we would get a tip that, you know, this company was hiring, you know, 500 illegal aliens and all these violations, those tips always came from another company that was their competition.
What better way, you know, and free to get rid of your competition?
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah, it is a rough world, isn't it?
That truly is amazing.
So, tell us a little bit about your book.
I mean, do you go into the details of the different cases that you guys were looking at, whether it's cartels?
You mentioned one of the first ones you did was the Gambino crime family.
On day two of a Cleveland operation, he got involved in the Gambino crime family.
Do you go into detail with what is happening in each of these individual cases to some degree?
Yeah, I do.
You know, all these cases have been adjudicated, so I can talk about them.
You know, that was just one example of we brought Ray up to Cleveland on this Gideon operation.
And kind of we would just set the informants free and tell them to, you know, bring us, you know, go find out who's doing what and bring it to us.
Who's putting guns on the street?
Who's, you know, who's selling fentanyl?
Who's doing the bad things?
And the first day Ray came back to me and said, sir, have you ever heard of the Gambinos?
I said, are you talking about like the Italian crime family?
He goes, I believe that's him.
I go, yeah, of course I've heard of them.
Like everybody has.
He goes, Well, I have a meeting set up with them tonight.
And this was the first day we cut them loose.
And these guys wanted to get into trafficking untaxed cigarettes.
And it was unbelievable.
And that was just what he would do.
And I do.
I go into these cases and I talk about how he would find these low level cartel guys who would come in.
And then we would kind of just climb up the ladder.
And we would go to their supplier.
And once we would ask for higher amounts.
That they couldn't handle, they would bring us the next level guy, and Ray would help all along the way.
And before you know it, maybe we started out buying an ounce, now we're buying 10 kilos from a high level member.
And it was all facilitated by Ray.
In my career, people don't realize how valuable informants are.
Are they a headache and can they be a lot of trouble?
Yes.
But as an undercover, I would say throughout my 20 year career, 95% of the time that I was able to get into a criminal organization, It was because a confidential informant was able to, you know, to make the introduction and walk me in.
So they're super valuable to us.
It's just, you have to know how to handle them.
Well, that's interesting.
Now, your experience at the ATF was really looking, investigating organized crime.
And of course, your hook into that is the gun side of things.
But when the rest of us look at the ATF, what we typically think of is somebody who is auditing and looking at the little minutiae of, You know, how long is your barrel?
Do you have a pistol brace on it?
That type of thing.
Or what we saw with the Biden administration, I don't know if you were still there at the time, where they started going after gun stores and basically shutting down completely if they had a paperwork violation.
So that's a different group inside of the ATF that I guess, how did you guys view that?
I'm sure that was two very different cultures inside that institution.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, we were the criminal investigators, the special agents.
Those are the.
Regulatory, that's the regulatory side.
They're not gun carriers.
But here's the problem with ATF and with every federal agency.
They've become political, right?
So every time a new president, a new administration comes in, they put their guy in charge, okay?
Their man or woman in charge, right?
So if you look at who we got under Biden, right?
We got this guy, his name was Dettelbeck, I believe his last name was.
He was Obama's roommate in college.
I guarantee you he had never shot a gun in his life.
Yeah, I can't imagine he and Obama going out to the shooting range together, right?
Yeah, no, I don't think so.
I don't think that happened.
And he had no business being the director of it.
He'd never held a law enforcement position.
So, when you get, I'll just say it, probably an anti gun guy and put him in charge of ATF, he made the decision.
He decided we're not going to go after the bad guys.
We're not going to go after the trigger pullers on the street who are sticking guns in people's faces downtown at night.
We're going to go after the gun dealers.
It's their fault.
So, that's what happens when you get these activists.
Placed in charge of a federal agency.
Everything changes and our mission changes.
And you see it with the U.S. Attorney's Office because they kind of direct you have to sell them on your case, they have to accept it.
So when you get these certain U.S. Attorney's Office, U.S. Attorneys who are placed by these more liberal administrations, they don't want to prosecute the hardcore criminals.
They want to go after gun dealers, they want to go after federal firearms licensees.
You know, it must be their fault that all these guns are on the street, you know, involved in all these shootings.
Can't be the bad guy's fault.
Yeah.
So, so I don't think people understand that.
And those are the ones who are making these decisions and these really bad rulings, you know, that that ATF has come out with.
But, but it's not the ATF agent, the man or woman who's on the street going after the trigger pullers.
You know, it's not us.
Now, I don't know how long you've been out of the ATF and this.
Possibly wasn't even on their radar at that point in time, but we heard a lot about ghost guns, and so there's a lot of regulations going down the pike about 3D printers just in general now because of that.
They're using that as the wedge to basically for other purposes, I believe, to get rid of 3D printers.
Um, did you, uh, was the Gambino crime family creating ghost guns with 3D printers?
No, I mean, the crazy thing about the ghost guns, and I was kind of at the end of my career when they started popping up, is that.
You know, we weren't seeing that with the big organized crime, and we weren't seeing that with these, not even the cartels or the American street gangs, you know, that are pretty well established and organized, you know, the gangster disciples, the Latin kings, and all that.
It was these nerds, you know, in their apartment who were making these guns and selling them, you know, who were making some good money selling them on the dark web, you know, on the black market.
Ghost Guns and Extremism00:04:27
More of an individual thing than any kind of organized movement.
And, you know, of course, the government doesn't like these guns because they're untraceable, right?
We don't know their origin, you know.
And part of our gun laws is that a gun has to be stamped with the serial number, you know, and traceable.
And, you know, even as a Second Amendment guy, I don't think that's unreasonable.
I don't think it's a bad thing.
I think, you know, and again, the problem is now it's created a black market for guns as well, an even bigger black market.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what prohibition always does.
We kind of joke about it in my family.
We say, you know, look at what has happened with drugs, for example.
We saw it back even in alcohol prohibition, how it went from people drinking mostly beer and wine to people drinking hard liquor and other things like that.
And it seems like that's always the case when you've got something that's prohibited, you wind up getting a much more intensified form of it because it's more profitable for the black market to deal with that.
And so we've talked about it.
We said, if they prohibit guns like the Democrats want to do, you're going to see some pretty wild technology coming out there, I think.
Well, look at every city.
You know, every look at Chicago with the strictest gun laws.
You know, there's guns falling out of the trees in Chicago.
You know, it just doesn't work.
That's right.
Yeah, it's got a lot of adverse effects to it.
I think all prohibition does, as a matter of fact.
But it's an amazing story.
And it's where can people find the book?
Is it available everywhere books are sold?
I know you've got your own website.
Yep.
Amazon is definitely the best place, the easiest place.
If you just, you know, you type in my name, Lou Valosi, or Raycon, you'll find my first book, which is Storefront Sting, which.
Has just been purchased by a major network.
And are they going to make a movie out of it?
They're going to make a series out of it.
Yeah.
I was going to say, it sounds like a movie when you start talking about this stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're going to go through every storefront I did being a different season, like the tattoo parlor, the shooting range with the military surplus store, the freight folding business, all the different ones I did, you know, with different undercover crews and all the crazy things that happened in there, shootouts and.
Wow.
Fights and just it was really wild.
And so, who's bought this?
Is this Netflix you said that's going to do this?
I can't say yet.
It's one of the major ones.
But, you know, I knew Raycon was a good follow up because he was such a big part of the second half of these storefront operations.
So, I just wanted to get his story out there to let, you know, kind of let the public give him a little information about informants, how important informants are, and just tell a story of how sometimes the government just gets it wrong.
You know, this we have so many illegal aliens in this country who are abusing our system and committing crimes.
And here we get this guy who is literally a hero who is responsible for making this country safer.
And our government can't even give him a green card.
Oh, he still doesn't have a green card, still doesn't.
Wow, but well, you know, Trump's got those gold and platinum cards.
If he's got one to five million dollars, he can buy if he listens to this, we need one.
You know, again, the prior administration let tens of millions of these people in, and all they're doing is abusing the system.
We have one here who actually helped the country.
I mean, can we get this guy a green card?
Yeah, yeah.
As I look at it, I see the big problem as being the welfare magnet, right?
You know, paying people to come in.
And of course, you know, we see the fraud, networks of fraud that were up in Minnesota with the Somalis and everything.
But, you know, at the same time, I support them, you know, cutting off the welfare magnet.
I'm also very concerned about the way that law enforcement is being conducted.
And I think there was a deliberate extremism to it that was put in there.
So that's my concern.
It's not so much even with what they're doing as the way that they're doing it, I think, is always something you have to be very, very careful about.
I think law enforcement needs to be held to a higher standard than in general.
And so that's my concern with it.
But what were some, give us an idea, since they're going to be doing a, Probably filming some of this.
Gangs and Gun Trafficking00:03:44
Give us an idea of some of your exciting stories that happened.
You said there's a lot of stuff that happened in these storefronts.
Yeah, it was, you know, we would have these.
I'll just tell you, my first one was a tattoo shop.
And that was kind of what we were learning as we went along on this, didn't know what to expect.
But after 12 months running this tattoo shop in the inner city, we had purchased 430 crime guns off the street.
So we knew we were on to something.
ATF had never seen results like that.
No one had ever seen those kind of results.
During the storefront, we had all different gangs.
We just catered to gangs.
Our informant was a tattoo artist who had recently gotten out of prison and had gotten jammed up.
He didn't want to go back.
He agreed to do this.
He had inked all these guys in prison, they all knew him.
And so he was able to get them all to come in.
And he was nothing but trouble.
He ended up doing a bunch of things he wasn't supposed to do, getting sexual favors out back for the tattoos he was giving some young ladies.
I mean, just.
Non stop trouble.
Like, it was like, you know, not only was I the manager supposedly of this place, but I, you know, I had to keep him on a leash.
And we have all these different gangs coming in.
You know, we told them all this, and this is a neutral place.
You know, we don't want any trouble in here.
You can tag all the walls.
You know, we left them blank and all that, but no hating.
You know, we don't want any of that in here.
That didn't last 24 hours.
They're threatening, you know, we actually cut all the drywall out and kept it as evidence because of all the threats.
You know, they were putting on there to each other.
And, you know, they would come in when different factions would come in.
And next thing you know, there'd be all out brawls, like a riot inside.
And we'd have to come out from behind the counter with baseball bats.
And, you know, and this is all while we're trying to buy guns and drugs and, you know, gather evidence.
You know, we're dealing with that.
And they started bringing us stolen cars.
You know, once they found out, you know, what our side hustle was with the gun trafficking and the buying the drugs and all that.
Know that opens up, they're like, Hey, they must be in anything.
We had guys bring us, uh, had a guy come in with a box of puppies once, and turned out he was a security guard at the mall.
And that's this was back when there were still pet shops at the mall.
He stole a whole box of puppies and brought them in.
Uh, had a guy come in with uh prosthetic limbs, he had worked at the Georgia Regional Medical College in Augusta, and he had stolen a box of prosthetic limbs.
And I remember he.
I remember picking up one of the fake arms and looked at him.
I said, Listen, man, we're not a pawn shop.
I said, Who am I going to sell this to?
And he looked at me and he goes, To somebody with one arm, man.
They didn't get it.
So some of it was comical, some was fun, some of it was not comical.
It was deadly serious.
The same guys who were coming in and dealing with us, selling us drugs and selling us guns, Would come back at night with ski masks on and rob us.
Wow.
You know, there's no honor among thieves.
And it wasn't like we didn't know who they were.
They were wearing the same clothes.
You know, these weren't rocket scientists.
You know, they just, you know, we were burglarized in every single one.
We were burglarized.
We were robbed in several ones by our own customers.
It just, I mean, it was such an eye opener.
Politics in Law Enforcement00:10:40
And, you know, we would embed ourselves in the whole community.
Not just the criminal community, but sometimes the whole community.
Because we had, you know, there were regular people coming in too.
And when we would take these operations down, we would have massive takedowns.
Say we had 100 defendants, we would have SWAT teams, DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, state and local police kicking doors in because we had to get everyone quick because once the word got out there, they leave.
And these massive takedowns would result in car chases and foot chases and shootouts.
And the community would actually be disappointed in us.
We would find out later that, because We had developed relationships and all, and they would feel betrayed.
But I always felt, hey, listen, we just made your community a lot safer because the 100 people we took out in this operation, those are the 100 worst people in this community.
Those are the ones putting dangerous drugs on your streets, pointing guns in your faces.
Wow.
That's an amazing story.
I can't wait to see.
I can't wait to read the book, but I can't wait to see the movie either.
That ought to be a great film.
I mean, it's exactly.
The kind of story that they're looking for, I guess.
And we've seen variations of it, but you actually lived through it.
That's a pretty amazing story.
So thank you so much for joining us.
And again, you've got a website of your own, Lou Velose.
It's L O U V A L O Z E.com.
And we've got that under your name there.
So what do you have there that people can see?
Do you sell the books there?
Yeah, we sell in the books on the website.
And some of my appearances, I kind of.
You know, post retirement, I entered this entertainment world and I found out that it's, I didn't think it could get dirtier or grimier than the federal government, but I think Hollywood has showed me that it actually is.
Wow.
And, you know, I've, you know, I do a lot of podcasts, I do a lot of public speaking, I travel the country, speak to, you know, law enforcement conferences, and, you know, I enjoy doing it.
I enjoy warning young officers.
About what happened to me and not allowing that to happen to them.
And, you know, talking about how important our pension is and how you don't want to just work a whole career and retire and die.
Yeah.
You know, you've earned that pension.
So live a long life and, you know, stay healthy.
And what's your message to everybody about Hollywood?
Let me tell you, like I told you before, I didn't think you could get much worse than the corruption of the federal government.
But, boy, I said, you know, and listen, I've dealt with some really good people, but.
Just organizationally, just as a whole, people, you know, their word doesn't mean much.
I found out never take anyone serious until they've actually written you a check in Hollywood.
They'll tell you anything, but don't believe them until they cut you that check.
It's just a man, and I've never seen a business, an industry that takes off more time.
You know, in October, they'll tell me, listen, well, don't expect anything.
We got the holidays coming up.
No one's going to do anything probably till mid January.
And I'm thinking to myself, we're talking three months here.
They're taking off three months.
Wow.
I never could have made a career in it.
I can tell you that.
That's better than Congress, even.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That's pretty amazing.
Yeah.
You've had some amazing life experiences, and I'm sure these are very interesting books.
Thank you so much.
Again, the book that we're talking about here is Raycon The Betrayal of an Informant.
And of course, you've got the other one.
Was that already out or is that coming out about the storefronts?
Yes, Storefront Sting, an ATF agent's life undercover.
That one's been out now for about, that's the one that was purchased.
It's been out now for about four years.
And I would like to leave you with a parting thought about ATF, if you'll allow me.
Sure.
Go ahead.
So, and I just want to put this out to your audience, you know, and to you.
If you are an advocate of the Second Amendment and you're a proponent of gun rights, you should really love ATF.
And I told, are you familiar with Colon Noir?
No.
Big Second Amendment guy.
He was an NRA guy, a black guy, lawyer.
No, I don't know him, but go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah, I told him this recently on his podcast.
You should be a fan of ATF if you are a proponent of gun rights because ATF is a small, very controllable agency.
We have about 2,000 agents for the whole country, right?
The likeliness of running into an ATF agent is pretty slim, right?
Out there, the gun laws are never going away, all right?
So, if you abolish ATF, the gun laws are going to go to one or two agencies they're going to go to the FBI or Department of Homeland Security.
We don't want the gun laws going to those two behemoths.
Those, you know, you think the FBI was bad under the last administration with, you know, the authority they have now?
Give them the gun laws and see what they do.
Yeah.
So, you know, ATF, again, is easily controlled.
It's underfunded.
And that's exactly who you want enforcing our gun laws.
You don't want the FBI or Homeland Security enforcing our gun laws.
So, you know.
Yeah, that's what we'd always say when people say, well, you know, the problem is just got to make government more efficient.
It's like, no, actually, I don't want to make government more efficient because I don't like what they're doing to start with.
Yeah, I don't use.
I don't use the term government and efficient together in a sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Only in Doge do we get that.
That's kind of a head fake.
So, yeah, I'm afraid government isn't going to get a lot more efficient with artificial intelligence.
That's my real concern.
And I think that's where this is going.
And that's something, you know, not necessarily your agency, but all the different government agencies are going to be able to audit everything that everybody does and find the simplest process crimes.
And it's like, bring me the man, I'll find the crime type of attitude.
And so I think that's really going to happen.
We've already had a situation, as Harvey Silverglade said in his book, Three Felonies a Day.
He said, We got so many laws on the books that people are typically creating three felonies a day and they don't even know it.
Well, you're going to know it when you get a call from the people who are representing the artificial intelligence that's gone through and audited your life in so many different areas.
That's what I'm concerned about is the overregulation.
You are absolutely right.
And to me, it all started with traffic cameras and these license plate readers.
That's where it started.
Yeah.
It's just going to get worse.
Oh, it is getting worse rapidly through flock.
We got the flock cameras out there.
And they, you know, you create this mechanism where you have these private companies that are basically doing the surveillance and the law enforcement work.
And they're just passing it along to the official law enforcement, which is just collating and doing the process work of this stuff.
And they do things because they say, well, we're private.
We can do whatever we want.
We're not governed by the restrictions that would govern us if we are the government.
And yet, In reality, they really are.
They're just not deputized.
They're not official, but they have all these police state powers of surveillance and other things.
That's really my concern.
And we have seen.
And the money they're making is ridiculous.
Yeah.
And so it gives them more incentive to do more.
And if you look at one of these tickets, because my wife and I have gotten them from these traffic cameras, you're absolutely right.
There's just one police officer who signs it, everything else is done by this private company.
Yeah, that's right.
And frequently, it's not even in America, it's another company.
That's running these automated toll things.
And after we moved from Texas, we got several tickets.
We were not even in the city that purported to have been a violation of a toll or something.
And you waste a lot of time fighting this stuff.
You win, obviously, if you fight it, but you waste a lot of time doing it.
And if you don't respond right away, they start rapidly multiplying the fees that are on it.
There's a lot of issues that are there, and none of that stuff is being addressed by people in government.
They're really late to the game if they're ever going to do anything about it.
I'm skeptical that they ever want to do anything about it because I think it is the kind of structure that they really want that is out there.
But the part of it that, in terms of the ATF and things like that, I guess, really, when you look at it from our perspective, it's really the The people who are pushing through the regulations that are there, and how, as you pointed out, it's very political.
And depending on who is in charge of it, they can really weaponize those regulations against people.
And they've got an agenda where they want to see all of the guns disappear.
So I think that's the real concern about it.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
Politics.
Yeah.
Politics has seeped into law enforcement.
Yeah.
And that's not a good thing.
That's right.
For the people, for the citizens.
That's right.
Yeah.
I was just talking to Sheriff Mack.
Who is about the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association?
Big guy on pushing for local control of law enforcement, having sheriffs that are elected by the community.
I think that's important.
And I think the more distant and more bureaucratic everything gets from us, the more dangerous it is.
And it's getting rapidly distant and dangerous from us, I think, all the time as we look at it.
Well, just take a look at the police chiefs that we currently have in the big cities here in America.
And I can tell you, it's a bunch of clowns.
And they're not elected by the people.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
So, yeah, that's a real warning for everybody.
But your story is truly amazing and a very interesting story, I'm sure.
And I'm sure it'll be very entertaining.
I can't believe they would not make it into a movie.
It's exactly the kind of story they're looking for.
Thank you so much for joining us, Lou.
I appreciate it.
Lou Velosi.
And again, you can see his website there under his name.
He has a website where you can find the book.
Of course, you can find it on Amazon or where books are sold.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It was an honor.
You have a great show, and it's an honor to be a part of it.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
Glad to have you on.
Thank you.
Tracking the Common Man00:01:07
The common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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