John Nores, a California game warden since 1992, reveals how cartel-run marijuana grows—70-80% of out-of-state sales—poison waterways with carbofuran, endangering wildlife like steelhead trout ($20K–$30K each) and golden eagles. His team, including K9 Phoebe, faced six gunfights in five years while battling 10,000+ armed growers using panga boats to smuggle $18M worth of tainted cannabis. Legalization’s lax penalties and federal inconsistencies fuel the crisis, linking cartels to human trafficking and meth production. Now advocating for unified conservation efforts through books (War in the Woods, Hidden War) and a documentary (Altered State), Nores bridges law enforcement and cannabis growers—dubbed "Earth Warriors"—to prioritize environmental safety over ideological divides. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I heard you on Meteor Podcast, and it blew my mind.
I mean, I could not believe.
Let's just let everybody know what this is about.
Right.
is like you know you find a guy and he's got three trout when he's only supposed to it's normal stuff like catching people doing something they're not supposed to just make sure people follow the rules right along the way you guys started discovering these illegal grow-ups where cartels were growing marijuana And you turned from being a regular game warden to essentially, well, why don't you let us know how it worked out?
Yeah, Joe, it was a crazy journey because you don't think of game wardens doing the type of work we were doing when it come to the trespass gross and the cartel issue.
What do everybody think?
They think game wardens check fishing licenses, check your deer tag or elk tag, look for too many animals, poaching, spotlighting.
And honestly, when I started the job, I got hired back in 1992, That's what I dreamed of doing.
You know, I grew up hunting and fishing and I got my hunter safety certificate with dad's help at nine years old.
So I was all in the woods.
You know, the woods are my church.
I just loved it because three generations of family, my grandfather's career Navy, my dad, you know, as an army guy.
And, you know, we just had conservation in our family, you know, for generations.
So I got the job, did it, and I did all the traditional stuff to start.
Came down here to Southern California to start my career in Riverside County.
So I was just over the hill, you know, from LA here, and working all the traditional stuff.
Fishing regulations, night hunting, you know, working deer openers.
It was really cool to be a deer hunter for all those years and then actually go, you know, talk to guys on the other side and see all the good guys out there and some problems.
And then in 1995, I got to go back home toward the Silicon Valley.
That's where I'm originally from, born and raised.
So I live in the suburbs, kind of the foothill areas of the Silicon Valley, south of San Jose there.
And in 2004, I stumbled into my first cartel, what we call a trespass marijuana grow site.
And, you know, to specify this stuff now, now that we're regulating, you know, the last couple of years here in California, these are not sanctioned marijuana sites.
This isn't the legitimate industry that's doing it by the numbers and trying to.
This is always illegal.
These are always here, you know, on public lands, destroying our environmental waterways and our wildlife and on private land as well.
And on that situation, I had a good friend of mine that I grew up with that was doing his master's thesis at San Jose State University, both of our alma mater, on steelhead trout, endangered species, red-legged, yellow-legged frog, and all the aquatics in these two creeks.
And this was right below Henry Coast State Park, where I really met my first game warden that was an inspiration to get the job.
So these waterways are really sensitive.
Headwaters coming down through this stretch for like three miles.
All these endangered species in it.
Black-tailed deer.
You know, all these other great animals we like as conservationists.
They're thriving on this creek.
And he called me one day in April and said, Hey John, this is weird.
One of my two creeks is bone dry.
And all the fish, the steelhead fry are dead.
You know, everything living on this creek is dead.
There's a bunch of like debris and plastic lining and looks like camping stuff that's down at the bottom of where this creek feeds out.
So I get them in the truck and I figured, I'm thinking, okay, someone's diverting water up there.
It's probably a rancher needing it for cattle operation, whatever.
We go to the top of the hill, Joe.
Then we start the hike down.
And I'm by myself.
You know, I got my rifle, got my gear, don't have any radio coverage, don't have any cell phone coverage.
And I have an unarmed civilian, my partner, biologist, with me.
And we're expecting to find something very predictable that I'd seen up to that point.
And that would have been a normal water diversion.
And when we found the water source in a beautiful canyon, I mean, crystal clear water, Trout Creek, the whole nine.
We start hiking down it, following this, we see the dam, we see the waterline.
We go about 100 yards down this beautiful little Grand Canyon-like creek, and there's a bunch of marijuana plants.
And they're short because it's early in the season, they're only about two feet tall.
And we see two growers.
And they're not the growers that I would have suspected.
These guys are, you know, they got rifles, they got handguns, they got knives, and they're kind of cruising, working their plants, coming toward us.
And that was that, oh shit, moment.
You know, if something crazy goes down right now and I got no backup, I got a civilian with me, these guys are armed, they're not your typical poacher that I've ever encountered.
And we didn't get seen.
We kind of hid out, you know, he's a hunter, I'm a hunter.
We stayed, you know, using our stocking and stand to the creek bank and just watched as these guys worked their plantation and went on up the hill.
And I looked at this and went, what did we just walk into?
This is crazy.
We got out safely.
And that's when I started to bring in other agencies, narcotic groups, task forces, the sheriff's office.
You know, started to learn other agencies in my area.
Well, we got a team together as fast as we could safely, and usually it takes a couple of weeks, and I want to say within a month we were back there.
Now, the interesting part was game wardens aren't known for doing this type of work, just like you said at the start, right?
So they're like, well, you guys know the area, you went in there.
Help us find it, get us into the area, but we're going to lead the raid.
And we'll say, of course, this is your jurisdiction.
We don't normally do this type of stuff, so go for it.
So we were the bird dogs.
We kind of guided them into the area.
We had like 20, 30 officers.
We kind of led them down to the canyon, got them in there safely.
We found the two growers.
We spooked them.
They didn't get caught that day.
They ran down the canyon.
Nobody pursued.
Some of us wanted to, obviously because of the environmental damages.
But The biggest thing that changed the game for me that day was seeing the environmental damage.
So that was a 7,000 plant garden.
And at the time, we didn't know about these banned toxic substances, these insecticides, carbofuran, that they're bringing up from Tijuana and transporting, actually smuggling from across the border to put on these plants to keep everything living off of it, not to impact their cash crop.
And that was out there in some extent, but it was so early, we weren't really aware of the level of toxicity to this stuff and how damaging it is.
So it was all new.
But we eradicated that garden.
And then when we were done eradicating it, we had all this mess in the creek, right?
We had camp trash, we had fertilizers, pollutants, propane tanks, all over in this beautiful channel that's now dry because it's been diverted.
Unbeknownst to us, all that water was totally poisoned, that they were diverting to water the plants.
That's why that creek was so dry.
And we eradicated everything, and then it was like, okay, we're out of here.
And I looked around and went, wait a minute, man.
I know we got the illegal marijuana out, but what are we going to do about all this environmental damage?
And nobody was reclamating the damage or cleaning up any of this mess.
So the first thing I thought was, we have a resource issue that's crazy.
I mean, I've spent my whole career up to this point protecting wildlife, preserving waterways for all of us to enjoy.
You know, conservationist, enthusiast, whatever side of the fence you're on.
And nothing was getting done on that.
So kind of the light bulb went off a little bit that we need to do more to this if we're going to get involved and we need to get involved in these type of grow operations because it was the biggest environmental train wreck I'd ever seen.
And I'd worked a lot of traditional game warden stuff to protect those resources.
And that's exactly what really, really kind of upset me.
And again, we were new at the game.
We were the game wardens.
Nobody really thought of us as mainline law enforcement or narcotics task force guys or anything like that at the time.
So I wasn't going to make waves.
We just wanted to integrate and work together.
We wanted to unify these teams.
And what I really wanted to do at this point is...
Get back with my command staff and my bosses and go, hey, we got a big, big problem out there, man.
There's more of this going on.
And we need to be involved, even though it's not traditional, because we're sworn to protect our resources.
Well, besides everything game wardens do that you think of from the wildlife standpoint, we're mainline law enforcement just like every police officer, right?
We go through the same training.
And then what people don't realize is we go through two more months of additional training in a really long academy that's all wildlife specific, wildlife forensics, wildlife ID, weapons identification, all the things you really need to do the game war inside of it with wildlife in the backcountry, so to speak.
But we needed to integrate with other agencies and kind of bring them into our world if we were going to participate.
So that one case started the change in me to try to build those relationships and get into tactics and tactical circles with some of these, you know, SWAT and special operations units that would go in and do this job.
We would have got with him, and it's what's called a streambed alteration violation.
And it's 1602 in our Fish and Game Code is the section, and it's a very common section because water's diverted for a lot of reasons.
And you can divert water with a permit in certain circumstances, but you can't completely denude a creek that has wildlife thriving that's a waterway of the state for everybody to enjoy, which this one was.
And if normally the case would be that they would have to just have the flow come back to exactly how it was before, to remove the dam, and that would be up to the rancher?
And this was, you know, one of the first grows, I think, that any of us had found throughout the state of California as Game Horns.
I mean, there were other guys finding some things and working, but being from the Silicon Valley and being inspired by those wildlands to everything I became later and what I stand for.
It was home, you know, and it hit home.
But seeing that and getting to meet certain guys from the sheriff's department in my first book goes into this whole learning experience of, you know, ad hoc jumping in with other agencies and doing it.
Yeah, Hidden Wars, the brand new one that just came out, and they're basically 10 years apart.
And the cool part about that, Joe, is when you look at the differences, we do some major comparisons, and what War in the Woods covers is that chapter one's that first mission I'm telling you about right now, because that was like, bing, here it is.
You know, we're not in Kansas anymore, so it's crazy.
It was one of those things that it was based on the fact that a conservation group from an agency like Fish and Wildlife, like us, we just weren't involved where we would be looking at those environmental damages, right?
But from a narcotics officer's standpoint, you may see the damages, but it may not register.
There might not be a mandate or even objective to clean that stuff up.
And back at the time, DEA was funding all of our states and all of our county teams based on the number of marijuana plants we eradicated.
So there wasn't any recognition of the environmental damages and any type of funding based on how much reclamation and cleanup you did.
Now, that would change, fortunately.
And we were a big part of making that change, fortunately.
And there wasn't a lot of funding or point kickback or value to catching bad guys, to catching some of these guys that were doing the damages.
So a lot of teams then were dropping in on helicopter lines, cutting plants, getting a big plant count, getting funded for it, taking the weed out.
Like, I would imagine, I mean, obviously I don't work in law enforcement, but I would imagine there would be one person who would, like, detail a plan.
Yeah, it was the start of a big shift in my career because I saw this as a big problem.
I also, up until in 2005, we were on one of our first, second, third operations since this one we just mentioned in 2004. And on August 5th of 2005, the game completely changed because that's when we were involved in our first gunfight.
And that's when my partner, Warden, who I trained in the academy, we were partners in the squad.
I had promoted to be the lieutenant for two and a half counties, the Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, Monterey, part of San Benito, 20 days before this incident happened.
And I had young Wardens that wanted to participate and do some of the stuff I was doing with the other agencies on the marijuana operational front.
And this was, you know, right above the tech capital of the world, right there in Silicon Valley in Los Gatos.
We were in really steep, arid country, you know, August, right before the A-Zone deer opener.
We were all gearing up for that.
And it was three game wardens, three sheriff's officers, good sheriff's officers that we met on that first operation in 2004. I just gave you the story on.
And they were in harvest time.
They were fortified.
They had heavy weapons like SKSs, the AK-47 derivative, sawed-off shotguns.
And they had the grow setup where they were basically defending it.
And when we came in, there was an ambush shot from one of the growers, and that was the one shot the bad guys got off.
And unfortunately, that's the shot that hit my partner through both legs.
And that bullet went through the right thigh and tumbled through his right leg, then kept going through his left.
So he's down, and we're trying to keep him from bleeding out of four holes for the better part of three hours waiting for an air rescue.
And we didn't, you know, nobody in the country from the standpoint of a law enforcement team had ever been counterattacked by these growers.
We'd, you know, we'd chase them around, they'd run away, sometimes we'd find weapons, oftentimes we wouldn't.
But so this was just a real eye-opener, like, what the fuck did we just walk into?
And plus, my partner was real close to not making it.
And fortunately, he did survive, or I don't know that we'd be sitting here telling this story and talking about it.
But that day, when I saw how well they were equipped, the type of weaponry they had, and the fact that I almost didn't come home that day, I went, okay, this is super dangerous.
We can't do this as standard patrol game wardens.
We can't do this doing just the traditional stuff.
We should stay involved in it because aside from being so violent, the environmental damages, Joe, were the worst I'd still ever seen, and they just kept getting worse and worse the more operations I'd work in my home county, right?
So we learned a lot from that.
There were a lot of tactical lessons, there were a lot of team lessons, a lot of things we could have done different.
And that kind of changed the game where we eventually got to what we're going to talk about a little bit later.
And that largely came from what we saw, you know, in those early years, the 2004 first stop down there on Dexter Canyon Creek, and then what we had on Sierra Azul when my partner was shot in 2005. About then, we started to also see the banned poisons in these grows, like the carbofuran bottles.
And just to give a background, this stuff is so deadly.
It was made as an insecticide or adenicide just to kill anything that you put on any type of agricultural product.
And it was made originally back in, I think, like the 50s for legitimate agriculture.
And then they found out how toxic it was, and EPA banned it from use or even possession.
It's a felony to have it in the country and use it anywhere without special licenses through legitimate channels here in America.
And they banned it like 15 years ago because it was so nasty.
But because it does keep everything off the marijuana plants, I mean, nothing can even get near it without dying almost instantly.
They still get it in third world countries.
They can get it in Mexico.
And it gets smuggled across the border with the grow groups, the drug trafficking groups, because it's so effective, regardless how poisoned it is.
And we were starting to see more and more of that stuff as we were starting to ramp more of a specialty to doing this job more, you know, thoroughly and safely and get into the cleanup.
The vast majority, like what was the number that you said, the percentage that is grown in California that's illegally sold through the rest of the country?
So 70-80% of the entire marijuana population or marijuana product that you're buying if you live in a place like South Dakota or wherever it's, I don't even know if it's legal in South Dakota, wherever it's illegal.
And then the other problem is that our state laws, when we made marijuana legal recreationally here, we severely lowered the penalty for an illegal grow-op.
When we started the department's special team, the spec ops marijuana enforcement team that Hidmore goes into...
Part of my job as being the co-founder of that and the team leader was outreach.
So I was speaking to legislative groups before we legalized under Prop 64 and then the tighter medicinal marijuana laws that came about that same time.
And I was talking to anybody, conservation groups that you and I would be part of, preservation animal rights groups, high school kids assemblies, right?
Watch out, if you're using weed, make sure you're not using this stuff because it's so nasty.
And my whole point was, if we're going to regulate guys, we see it coming.
Let's just regulate smart.
Let's not lessen any penalties for the trespass grow that the cartels are doing in our public lands and private lands and also the other gang groups.
And there's other groups, you know.
To a smaller extent.
But unfortunately, when we did regulate, and all that was passed two years ago, they did water it down.
So public land cultivation went to, like you said, a felony to a misdemeanor.
And if you're a juvenile cultivator on public-private land and one of these juvenile cartel members, and there's a lot of young ones learning, it's an infraction.
And that took a lot of emphasis away from that part of the problem and left us out there basically alone with a couple other agencies to fight it.
Then the other problem is, these people that are buying this marijuana in the rest of the country, it's highly likely that they're going to have some of that pesticide on it.
We don't know if it's killed anybody directly, because by the time it gets distributed throughout the country, it does dissipate a little bit, but it's still highly toxic.
To put it in perspective, about three years ago, we had two federal officers back east, not even in California, in a public land grow that had all that toxic on it.
We have them in about 25 to 27 other states to a much lesser extent.
And something we need to look at is California.
I mean, we're one of only six Mediterranean climates on the whole globe.
So we are a great weed growing state, just like our wine industry, man.
We got great weather for it.
So we can grow outdoors and indoors.
I mean, February to almost December, right?
And that's why it's grown here, and that's why the black market, both in, you know, the private land communities and the cartels are everywhere across the country with this stuff.
But they'll go wherever they can to, you know, diversify the network.
So we do have it in other states to a much lesser extent.
And then something we need to remember is, even though about half the country has these grows in them to a lesser extent than California...
These same groups are under the same enterprise that are doing human trafficking, doing gunrunning, you know, to fuel the fight down in Mexico, methamphetamine production, and now the new synthetic fentanyl that's just killing thousands, especially on the East Coast, are coming from these groups.
So it's all one enterprise.
And of course, we focus on the cannabis issue because that's what's affecting our wildlands and our waterways.
It's right at the hub.
So yeah, it is.
It's nationwide.
It's not a California problem.
And we made really, really careful, even though we're talking about a team in California, game wardens, we're trying to tell a nationwide story because the nation needs to know.
It is, but then at the flip side, we're really passionate about protecting what you and I love, right?
Our wildlands and our waterways and our wildlife especially.
So we have a passionate interest in protecting those resources and not to mention keeping our public safe in the same breath.
Because these are in public areas.
I mean, we have a lot of these in national parks.
We have like, not only you'd have the armed gunman that could shoot a hunter or a hiker or an equestrian, anybody in the outdoors that enjoys what the great outdoors have to offer, but you have all the other threats that come with that.
You know, it's not just an armed gunman.
They're putting punji pits, literally Vietnam-era punji pits on some of these trails.
So, back in the Vietnam conflict, what the Viet Cong would do to deter our American soldiers is they'd dig a pit underground on a trail.
It would be about 18 to 20 inches deep and, you know, square to kind of cover a whole trail.
Then they'd cover it up with Bamboo or leaf litter, so it just looked like the trail.
And then our soldiers would kind of walk and they'd step into that, and here's these sharpened sticks out of bamboo that are super sharp.
And they're pointed upwards, so when you step into it, you're gonna shear a shin, you're gonna puncture your leg, maybe an artery.
And they would put human excrement, excuse me, on the points to induce bacteria, induce infection, and basically take our soldiers out of the operation.
What we started seeing in 2015, and the first one we found was actually in a national park up in Shasta County in Whiskey Town.
And it was a punji pit going into a grow site on a public trail.
I mean, it was hundreds of yards, Joe, from the grow, but anybody could have walked in on it.
We were running an operation with Shasta County, and this is when we had our full-time dedicated team.
in the Hidden War era And our point man was about to step into this thing.
And our canine, Phoebe, that I'm sure, you know, we talked about it on Steven's show, a little bit on Meat Eater, and also Mike Ritland, who has a show called Mic Drop.
And he's a SEAL Team 3 veteran and canine trainer.
He really got into the dog stories, right?
We talked about that.
But Phoebe, amazing dog.
She had been trained to sniff these banned poisons so she could smell it, you know, a mile out with that amazing nose our canines have.
And right before our point man was about to step into it, Phoebe alerted.
And Brian pulled everybody back, her handler, my teammate.
And sure enough, he did some digging, pulled back the tarp, and then here's his punji pit.
And it had the band toxics actually on the sticks.
So what would that have done if one of us had stepped into it?
So that was a real aggressive anti-personnel technique.
That could hurt.
That could have decimated a hunter or hiker or anybody else.
Or wildlife.
Or wildlife.
Yeah, some of these pit traps for wildlife and these big wells they're digging in cisterns.
Something like that has to be targeted against people.
But there's a lot of different things for animals, too.
There's a lot of things to keep animals away from the plants.
They'll dig big pit traps that are...
They'll put garbage in them, or they'll use them like when we were in the middle of our...
Really severe drought that we just came out of here in California a couple of years ago, all these mountain streams were just bone dry.
So they would go to the lower lands and we were doing a lot of work, you know, in the Delta region, the Sacramento Delta and the lowlands.
And they, even if they, you know, we're getting water from the Delta and the raised land would dry up, they would dig, hand dig wells, 20, 30 feet deep and they leave them open and they're getting water from them and pumping out water out of the bottom, but those stay open.
So yeah, our big, our big game animals drop into those, or we could drop into them.
You know, it's a real approximation because you only know based on who you catch or who you've been able to debrief.
But like in California, we know from the amount of grows we deal with every year just on the trespass, you know, cartel front, and the number of operatives it takes to run a grow and get it started and then harvest it.
And the reason we say that, and I always go very conservative because it's such a kind of a silent enterprise and it's really hard to get some of this data, but we've just validated it through the numbers of things we run across.
You know, when you look at the fact that it takes two skilled growers that are vetted because they cut their teeth down in Mexico doing it effectively under the Federalist nose.
And they grow well.
And you mentioned this when you had Mike Baker on the show, which was interesting.
And you hit it on the head when you said, man, these guys are really resourceful.
Yeah, in Hidmore especially, we have a whole lot of photos in that book about things we've seen on trail cameras, and they will put felt-lined, lined soft felt on their shoes, tie them up tight, and if they're walking like an old forest road that's got a gravel base, you'll never see that track.
I mean, you've tracked big game, I've done it.
It's the same type of technique, and if you don't have any sign...
I mean, they're really good at disguising them.
We actually found a guy, and I have a picture of this in the book and also in the PowerPoint when I teach to this throughout the country.
Cow hooves actually carved out of wood because a couple years ago, we were, you know, the U.S. Forest Service, a lot of this grow problem is on our national forests.
You know, Northern California, Northeastern California, not so much Silicon Valley where I started, but the rest of the state, even down here.
And what these guys would do is there's cattle leases on those properties where, you know, ranchers can run cattle on part of the forest and, you know, or a joint on private property.
And we were getting tips on a bunch of grows, you know, or you've seen them from the air or a hunter or angler would report them or we'd have a suspicion because of a waterway or we'd see some plants from satellite or whatever.
And we'd go try to find this grow and we weren't picking up tracks.
And we're, you know, we're pretty good at finding these things now.
We've been trial and error in it for a lot of years.
But we're seeing a lot of cattle tracks because we're running around with cows.
And sure enough, they were putting on cow hooves and strapping them on top or underneath their boots, clomping around to disguise themselves as cattle.
Clever, right?
And then once they get way up into a deep canyon where they're going to put their grow, they just take them off and throw them in a backpack.
And then the light bulb went off.
We better look at our tracks a little more carefully.
And then they're finding the water source and maybe they're following it and it's dry or it's diverted like what I found in 2004 that started this whole craziness.
And the thing, now you're talking about a private hunting ranch that's got a cattle lease and all that.
Tahone's huge.
We've done a lot of good stuff with Tahone Ranch and supported, you know, good hunting programs there.
But an interesting statistic, when I retired last year in December in 2018, you know, I mean, we keep stats ever since.
One of the cool things about our specialized team starting in 2013 is...
We solidified all the documentation to be spot on.
You know, reporting was kind of haphazard throughout the state.
We weren't sure what other agencies were doing, but we knew what we were doing now.
And so I'm keeping that data.
And there was a real shift in just public land presence of these cartel growers.
And by the time I retired last year, it was almost a 50-50 split.
So ranches like Tahone Ranch, a private hunting club in the Silicon Valley, one up in Shasta County.
So You know, where they're doing big-time conservation projects to get blacktail and mule deer and tule elk and everything else up in numbers.
And now they've got this presence on their hunting club hitting one of their sensitive waterways, you know.
So it's not just a public land thing, and it's really good for everybody listening to know that.
You could find it anywhere, and you stumbled on it.
And it's funny you mentioned the reporting parties.
The cool thing, after I did Stephen's show on Meat Eater and talked to those guys, we started to get tips.
I actually got a tip, and it's in play.
I won't say too much more about it, but we'll be talking when it's all over and done, but it's going to get handled.
It's so cool to see the guys like you and I that hunt and love it and love the passion of what's out there are out there stumbling on this stuff and getting out safely.
Is there an area where they, I mean, it's all public land mostly, and private land, ranch land, but is there an area of the state where there's more of them?
I mean, you hear about the Humboldt, you know, Trinity, the Emerald Triangle, right?
Just the hub of it.
And I thought it was more prevalent there.
And it's certainly massive up there.
But I mean, from Silicon Valley, where I'm from, you wouldn't think of those foothills in that part of the state, you know, being so overrun.
And during those, what I call, you know, the formative years of learning this and getting involved in it and specializing in it, we were really, I got to give a shout out to the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office and the guys then that took us on as equals.
And my partners that really brought us in as, you know, not only tacticians, but tracking and able to identify sign as wardens doing the hunting thing in the woods, where we could go and really specialize at this and be a lot safer and do it a lot better than when my partner got shot in 05. And we were doing 25...
Public and private land cartel grows in the Silicon Valley at least 20 to 25 a season.
Yeah, and that's in just Santa Clara County as an example.
And when we formed the full-time team in 2013, and we had representatives, and we have representatives on our marijuana enforcement team, our agency-specific team, We have guys covering every part of the state and responsible team members spread out covering every county.
And as of now, and we've been, well, we had six full operational years before I retired.
Now it's in good hands and the team's doing fantastic work.
We've had at least a grow, if not several, in every county in the state, and most counties multiple.
So to put it in perspective, on an average, your team would do 125 missions, if not more.
So that's 125 grow sites that we were responsible for doing the workup, the planning, going in and doing the apprehension, the stalking to catch these guys with our canines and with our tactics.
Then doing the eradication, and 90% of them are all, you know, tainted in that ferdan and the carbofuran, sometimes to the point that it's so freshly applied that we can't touch the plants for a couple of weeks.
We can't even, even with protective gear, with nitrile gloves, face protection, masks, the whole nine.
And no exaggeration to put it in perspective, the two officers on the federal level that were exposed just ingested some of those fumes, and you get blindness, you get nausea, you can't breathe.
They were out of circulation, fortunately not fatally, but they were out of circulation for weeks, sometimes months.
And federal OSHA came down with the Forest Service, and of course working closely from the state level, We suddenly were under a lot of protocol on decontamination, what we couldn't touch, and new basic tactics for our safety, for human safety, came down, and it changed the game.
So these guys putting this stuff on there, we may not be able to even touch the plants or even cut them safely or put them in nets and contaminate all our gear until it has a chance to dissipate a little bit, and that's 14 days.
And kind of what I'm all about, being a game warden, and now in phase two in retirement, I'm really trying to speak more nationally to what the thin green line is.
It's never been thinner.
And the thin green line basically just represents game wardens and forest rangers, border patrol, but from the wildlife and the military, of course.
But from a wildlife protector standpoint, now that we have this cartel grow problem, and you just hit it on the head, brother, look at the resources it takes.
And all that traditional stuff that we used to do that we still do, those problems aren't going away.
So we still have to check, you know, the night hunter.
We still have to deal with commercial wildlife sales and all this, the ivory importation issue and the wildlife trafficking that's just blowing up.
So we're getting thinner and thinner and stretched further and further.
Game ward numbers aren't growing very much anywhere in the country.
Yet the population and the impacts of people destroying wildlife, especially on this cartel front, just keep exacerbating.
Yeah, we have teams now in our agency, and most of the states do, called wildlife trafficking teams.
And it was a good program that came out of the Obama administration that all the states had to do it.
We were kind of already doing it, but we had to formalize a little bit.
And that was an added challenge that happened right after we formed the whole cannabis enforcement program, which started with the tactical unit that I co-formed.
And then all these watershed enforcement teams popped up for cannabis regulation to check the new licensed growers, people trying to do it legitimately, and water use and make sure there weren't abuses.
Then wildlife trafficking became a huge issue.
The commercialization of wildlife is a huge billion dollar industry worldwide on everything from abalone to sturgeon row to black bear gallbladders, and now ivory especially.
Now, because this is now a problem that people are aware of, have there been significant resources that have been allocated to try to handle this stuff?
Are there new programs to train these young officers coming up?
Is there a specific task force that handles that, and then the rest of the guys handle fish and wildlife, or is it just same people, but now you have a whole different level of responsibility?
Yeah, it's really cool in California because we are one of the most progressive game warden agencies.
And it's interesting because I just spoke back in July, I spoke at the NAWIA conference, which is basically the annual game wardens conference for all of us from all over the country.
So I get to work with all the states.
And, you know, Florida has a tactical unit for some stuff.
Texas has it.
And we're the first state to have a dedicated, you know, kind of tactical unit for this cartel growth threat because it's so big in California.
But to share that with everybody nationally in my world in the thin green line and for them to start having it happening on the refuges and even just to know this stuff's getting back to their parts of the world and poisoning their cannabis users, you know, unsuspectingly.
Horrible information, right?
But we need to know it.
And a lot of guys didn't know it.
And so that was one thing to see, hey, we need to have a baseline training.
And the way we do it here in California is we all go through a really stringent academy.
Everyone gets their basic tools, arrest control and defensive tactics, you know, and firearms training and all of that and get good at being the traditional game warden and doing all the traditional stuff.
And they get, you know, get their feet wet out doing their own thing for a couple of years and And then we start to find the people that have the motivation or want to get onto a specialized unit, like our MET team or one of the watershed teams or the wildlife trafficking team.
Very seldomly do we put a fresh person there because, you know, I think to really be a good game warden, you got to cut your teeth on all the traditional stuff that's critical of just having to check guys with guns all the time.
You know, most cops look at that and go, that's crazy.
I mean, everybody you check has a knife or a firearm.
Well, fortunately, 99% of them are guys like you and me that want to see a game warden, and the game warden wants to see us.
But for that one felon that's on parole, and he's in the woods hiding out, and we run across that a lot, and I ran across a ton of that down here in SoCal at the start of my career, and I've got some interesting stories about that.
And I'm in that truck cruising, and something I got into down here that was just crazy, but I will say this, it was a heck of a learning curve, and I'm really blessed it went out the way it did, and I was safe in it, but we would get gangbangers from LA here, and they would go over into Riverside County and get into my kind of rural foothills and on the edge of the National Forest, and they'd have AK-47s, and they'd have automatic pistols, and they would spotlight through these canyons Gunning for everything.
They'd get to the end of a canyon that has an outlet of a dam, throw a gill net out, and spend all night there just gill netting fish, and hunting freely and shooting, killing everything with their spotlights.
Grab their gill net, grab hundreds of fish, pack up, and then head back to the L.A. Basin.
Oh, they'd eat them, maybe they'd sell them, you know, who knows?
Usually with quantities that big, they were getting sold.
But the thing that was crazy is I would be, you know, alone.
I'd be in my truck.
I didn't have a canine yet, you know, and now I just, I just retired with, well, like you're a marshal.
I have Apollo, yellow lab, English lab.
She's amazing.
I'm never going to bite a bad guy, but she's going to lick him to death and try to turn him our way.
But I didn't even have a companion dog at the time.
And I would go and run into these guys and go, okay, this is what I learned in the academy, that head-on spotlighting stop that you never want to have, or getting behind them blacked out and tracking them down.
And next thing I know, I got AKs, and I got all these frickin' prohibited exotic weapons, and I'm going, this is crazy.
And they were all armed, and it was one of my heaviest, most intense cases, and I had been on one year.
So this was 1994. And what we were doing in the Riverside squad is we were just saturating the area because we were getting everybody from over on the LA side here spotlighting all our games.
So we're like, okay, let's saturate this.
And back then, Joe, the game was to catch a spotlight or red-handed because they're so deliberate.
But spotlighting is where you use an artificial light, whether it's a handheld spotlight, a flashlight, whatever.
And you go into remote areas and you look to find animals at night because they freeze, they're really relaxed, their eyes glow, and then you shoot them that way.
You kill them illegally at night after dark, which is never allowed.
You know, it's usually in or out of hunting season because anyone's going to spotlight a deer nine times out of ten.
They're not licensed or they're not going to do it during season like we do.
So they're doing that.
So in our world as game wardens, that's the ultimate wildlife criminal because they're going to kill does, you know, that have that unborn trophy buck for good genetics.
They're going to kill a trophy deer way in the rut, you know, that, you know, needs to go another year or whatever.
So that's what we focused on.
That was like, if I can cut my teeth and get, you know, become a reputable game warden and going after the hardcores, that was the game then.
So it was 94. And I'm pulling these guys out and calling them out on a loudspeaker.
I've got my weapon on them.
And I'm like, oh man, There's a lot of guys out there.
I can't get them to jail.
I'm calling back up.
I got Riverside County coming in.
I mean, we even had the sheriff's office helicopter come in several nights.
Once we got to know each other and they realized, who is this game warden?
And what are these game wardens in Riverside County going out into just crazy areas by themselves?
They'd monitor our traffic and they'd come in on the helicopter and light it up and call these bad guys out on loudspeakers just to make sure we were okay.
Feels good when the cavalry comes on those nights, man, let me tell you.
Well, so in those sort of situations, they just didn't know that you would ever run into someone that's that armed, that many guys in the van or what have you.
Eight people.
So the reason why you're patrolling by yourself is because they didn't anticipate anything like this.
So, a squad of seven game wardens, to put it in perspective, check this out, brother.
When I was supervising traditional patrol before we started the Special Ops Met team in Santa Clara County, we always had vacancies because we were always low on bodies.
We couldn't hire game wardens fast enough.
We weren't funded for it or whatever the case may be.
So we might have four or five game wardens for seven positions.
And we had to cover all of Santa Clara County, which is everything from the city to all those foothills.
And there's a lot of it in Silicon Valley people don't realize.
All of San Benito County, which is huge.
Hollister, Gilroy, right where I'm from in Gilroy, that whole area down to the south.
That is just massive mountain country, full of wildlife.
Yeah, it's just like glass in a big basin for elk, right?
You get in a really good overwatch, you get the most visibility, you know, hide the truck, and you watch.
And you find areas where it's likely to happen.
And it takes a while to learn where that's going to be, just because you've got this huge district and you could have 20 places where guys spotlight.
But until you get into the area as a new warden and really get to figure it all out, you don't know where to be and it's a trial and error.
But, you know, it took me six months, give or take, just going out there and scouting hard and seeing where this road goes and how does that canyon look?
What type of water do I have down there?
What am I seeing at low light in the evening when animals are coming to water?
Ooh, I got a whole herd of elk here.
I got a whole herd of deer.
I got some bucks.
You know, I'm seeing other animals run around.
This is going to be a hot spot because guys can get to it.
And if you just put the time in, you just kind of lie in wait, you know, kind of put your little hide together.
Just like hunting big game, eventually it starts happening.
And by 1994, and I've been in district a year down here, I pretty much had my spots figured out.
My partners and other parts of Riverside did too.
So we'd all be out alone so we could cover more area and talking back and forth.
I mean, and I'm going to date myself here, but cell phones are brand new.
You're talking about enormous pieces of land that you guys are responsible for.
It's hard for people to put into perspective that don't spend any time in the woods that you would be able to even find these folks in this enormous area.
It starts off as a needle in a haystack type thing, you know?
But once you get into it, you get fairly good at it.
But it always is difficult because, again, just the percentages of catching a guy on the right night that he's going to be out there.
And then you got the guys that kind of get savvy to knowing where the game warden lives, driving by his house, looking for his patrol truck to see if he's out that night.
Where's the truck parked?
We start getting into that problem.
So we always kind of maintain as covert as we can.
We're known in the neighborhood.
And the thing is, we live at home.
We work out of our homes.
Home office.
We're closed to our community because if we kept our truck at a field office, we'd have no response time.
All spread out.
So we get very community-oriented in community functions, in conservation groups, and everybody knows us, whether it's a big city or a small little town in the mountains.
So you got guys doing the cat and mouse thing looking for us and making sure, hey, is this truck there or is he out patrolling?
Well, maybe I won't go out tonight.
But that era, Joe, in 1994 was off the hook.
I didn't get a spotlighter every night that week, but I got six out of seven.
The group I was getting into down here, it was recreational.
It might have been to sell the meat.
I couldn't prove that.
Or it was just to go kill stuff.
You do get people that need meat that do spotlight after dark because they need the meat and stuff like that.
It's still a violation.
We still deal with it as such, but if we ascertain that, we're going to be fair about it.
We said, okay, look, you're poaching.
I know you're starving.
It's out of season.
It's in season.
You have a tag, but you just really got to get that meat.
I mean, there are certain cases where you just kind of feel for that person to go.
I see where the motivation was, you know, and a very small percentage of poachers are that way, but some of them are just, you know, they're just trying to feed their family.
And I remember one case down here that was a pretty crazy one.
It was three guys, pretty inebriated, pretty liquored up.
And it was a head-on stop.
And one of them had a $50,000 no-bail warrant for cocaine trafficking out of Mexico.
And that was in that week that we had a crazy spotlight and things going on.
So it was just the demographic of down here, where up north it wouldn't be necessarily that felon, but that guy that just wanted that trophy buck and to cheat to get it.
And I'll go into the bottle, the genie right here.
One, we put more game wardens in the field, because we do need more, and we pay them better.
And here's the rub.
Because there's this perception that game wardens just check fishing licenses or they might not be real cops, We're paid about 40% less than a county sheriff, than a highway patrolman, than a city police guy.
We're in a constant, constant salary equity fight.
We've been really pushing that for...
You know, 15 years, plus or minus, something that really started to legitimize us.
And in 2010, when my first book came out, War in the Woods, that's when the Wild Justice Game War and Reality Show and National Geographic Channel aired for the first time, and that was our agency.
And that was the first of what are now a lot of Game Warden shows, and the more the merrier.
Something the Wild Justice film crews really resonated with.
A lot of the guys that are on the team now, myself included, ended up being featured like their main people for the better part of like three seasons because we weren't just bringing them the poaching cases, the traditional stuff which needed to get shown.
And we didn't have our formalized team yet, but I was embedded with Santa Clara County.
Brian and Canine Phoebe were up in Shasta, but we were getting brought together for the show, and he was starting to work down with me in the Bay Area and bringing that Wonder Dog Phoebe into the mix that he had honed for years.
And we started to show this cartel marijuana stuff through the show.
And that's what got the ratings.
That was worldwide broadcast, the number one hit on Nat Geo for three years.
And that opened the door.
We needed that exposure.
And it's the same thing with writing these books and doing the TV I do.
It's a fine line between risking some exposure or getting the message out.
Like I said, we're so thin on the thin green line, we need all the exposure we can get.
We're a little agency, our funding's limited, but we're doing a multitude of jobs even outside of the marijuana stuff.
So that started to help, and now we're starting to get the recognition of the professionalism and the capabilities we have, especially with this tactical unit.
To hopefully help with things like salary and numbers.
It's about mitigating these problems that you have with cartels, because when there is an illegal opportunity to sell something that there's a demand for, then the criminals Exactly.
And has there been discussion, like, to someone to bring this up, like, this is one of the primary problems with having marijuana federally illegal, with California having it state legal, that there is this massive confusion and this, you know, diminishing of penalties in California with growing illegally.
And as long as people aren't hurting themselves or other people, they're not destroying waterways, we're not getting in gunfights over it, great.
You know, no problem.
But for like the, you know, the outdoor trespassing with these cartels, let's take that funding and put more effort into stopping that.
You know, let's not water it down to misdemeanors and infractions and do things like that.
And, you know, it's and even we can even take cannabis out of the equation, Joe, from the standpoint of I remember a few years ago, I was quoted by the Associated Press of saying, if cherry tomatoes were so desired on the black market and were illegal and people were paying four thousand dollars a pound for cherry tomatoes, we'd be having gunfights if cherry tomatoes were so desired on the black market and were illegal and people were paying four thousand dollars a pound for cherry tomatoes, we'd be having gunfights over cherry tomatoes and having banned poisons You know, because of the black market.
So you can take, you know, cannabis even out of the equation and look at the environmental impacts and look at the public safety, but we have to do something to regulate this thing uniformly across the board, and we have to break the black market.
But what I've seen, and I go into the last chapter of my new book, Hidden Work, extensively on this, is what are the challenges moving forward after seeing regulation in play for two years?
Boots on the ground, watching it, and having a great relationship with legitimate cannabis growers.
And I'll tell you a few stories that really opened my eyes and got us unified, right?
Because the whole thing is we need to be unified on this concept.
Not polarized left or right, anti-cannabis, pro-cannabis.
Let's get unified environmental safety, public safety, all of it.
But because of how we've regulated and the licensing fees and the protocol and everything else, we've had all of these black market growers in the 215 days that wanted to get legal and saw everything coming and the cost to do it and being on Big Brother's radar or law enforcement's radar.
And they backed out.
Like in Humboldt County, we had, I want to say, in the better part of 10,000 to 50,000 growers ready to regulate, and we barely got 1,000.
And they went, you know, I can't afford to go through this permitting process.
I can't afford the delays, so I'm just going to go back on the black market.
I'm not going to be on the radar.
And that has to stop if we're going to regulate, right?
The thing that was really interesting, and I never saw this coming, but when we were about to roll out Prop 64 and it had been voted for recreational and the medical laws were tightening up, I was the first law enforcement guy, being from a marijuana enforcement team, to go into these California Grower Association-hosted grower meetings.
And my first one was in Santa Cruz, right over the hill from my place, right?
And I mean, I'm in the, you know, I'm in the BDUs, the camo bottoms, the polo.
I'm going into my, you know, my training attire for Met.
And the look on 500 Grover's faces when I walked into that meeting, just like, what's he doing here?
Yeah, I've got photos in the new book on trail cam with felt on their feet, covering their tracks with these sea bags, 100 plus pounds, and a spool of pipe going up, man.
And they're, I mean, to look at the environment they live in for six months, man.
They're all outdoors.
But I was at this meeting, and I gave the presentation.
I talked about it, and it was crazy to see a look of shock on these grower groups' faces.
I mean, some women were in tears.
Some of the guys were just, like, pissed off and pumping their fists, and they're like, that's bullshit.
We are not about that.
We're not about doing anything bad with our water.
We like our wildlife.
We just want to grow cannabis.
We want to be regulated, you know?
And...
It was such a turnaround, you know, from the traditional relationship between law enforcement and the cannabis world.
And to be the one guy there with all of the growing community there and then go from complete horror that I was there as an adversary or judgment or anything of that or, you know, to...
To do anything negative from an enforcement standpoint, to suddenly having real talks of what was going out.
And I could kind of see the authenticity, the genuineness on some of their faces, the way they reacted to my slides, to the videos.
And so when I left that first meeting, I remember I just got flooded in my patrol truck.
And I had Apollo with me, my little lab, and she's an icebreaker.
I thought, well, it could be an interesting meeting.
I should have the dog for pets, you know?
And she jumped in, and all these growers were coming to my truck, and I'm packing up my stuff, and I'm like, wow, this is weird.
And it was all these farmer supervisors from all over the state, Mendocino County, up in the Emerald Triangle, Santa Cruz, and they're just giving me their cards.
I go, hey, Lieutenant, I have workers.
I have resources.
We will hike in and clean up a grow with you.
Let us help the Met team.
Let us help the cannabis program.
Whatever we can do, and no charge.
And that was genuine, man.
I was really, really taken back by that in a positive way.
And I realized if we get the legitimate farmers on our side, and they're aware of this, they will help market that message.
That's starting to happen, too, because now that we've had a couple of years and we're seeing some of the regulatory funding and the taxes trickle back, I'm in contact with my team all the time.
I still get to see them periodically and train and do things like that and really give them a shout-out for all the amazing risks they're taking and the work they're doing and promote their message of what they're out there doing.
But the money's starting to come back to us now.
So we're starting to get equipment.
We're starting to get more bodies.
We're starting to get overtime funding so the ridiculous long hours our small team works, they're compensated for.
That just happened literally within a month or two of being on the show with you.
I've talked to those guys and worked with them a little bit and they do have some but again they're kind of like where I'm at Montana now Tight little growing window, you know early winters Late thaws so they don't have a very big growing season outdoors The conditions aren't prime like they are here in cali This is a giant issue that is largely undiscussed and it's one of the reasons why I was so fascinated by that podcast is that And this is one more piece of the puzzle when you're talking about border control.
And to that point, you look at the discrepancy and just the inconsistency on cannabis regulation.
Some states, some not.
Federally not.
But when you get to the border issue, you brought up that good point of it's not just that cartel element for this poison cannabis stuff or this toxically tainted cannabis is a better way to phrase it.
It's the smuggling, the human trafficking.
It's all those other crimes that methamphetamine production.
So I get asked a lot.
You had a great conversation with...
With Mike Baker on this was, you know, are open borders going to work?
There's just an insane amount of violence that's going on down there, an insane amount of crime, and so much of it is connected to the illegal drug trade.
And look, you're not going to kill at all if you make marijuana legal, but you would kill a percentage.
At least it would make it a little bit better, and it would stop that.
Yeah, and one of the things we get from getting that regulation, if we can stop that black market for cartel weed, we're going to save a lot of wildlife.
We're going to preserve a lot of waterways, right?
Because all those other crimes are very heinous and very destructive, and I hate to see the human trafficking and all the meth problems and anything that relates to violence or a deterioration of a soul, but...
I love the wild, man.
The woods are my church.
Yours, too.
I mean, what you do for conservation, the elk hunting that you're doing, and all those different things.
I mean, it's just magical out there, and it's just...
I said, look, if we lose all of our open space to a problem like this, and it compounds the problem, and we lose our wildlife and good water, you may not be in the outdoors right now.
You might be a preservationist.
You might be on your freaking digital device all the time and looking at wildlife through a screen.
But if you ever do go out and you get that peace and tranquility and you get centered like we do, run a trail, hike a LA County mountain trail or open space, don't even get that far in the woods, it's just soothing.
It brings us back to our center.
And if the new generations that aren't getting that from the cities can get that or they can get their kids doing it or their grandkids or hear about it, But it's not there to go to.
That to me, man, we're just not paying it forward enough.
So this is something I got to stay on and I really appreciate you and what you stand for because of the message.
What's interesting to me, too, is that the allocation of resources, it's so, when you have something that's illegal, you're not getting any of that money.
And if it was legal, there's an enormous amount of money that could go to schools and fix the roads, and we can allocate it to a bunch of different- Big time.
Ways to spend it.
And we're not doing that.
And the reason why is because it's illegal.
And this crime problem is very similar to what they faced during prohibition with alcohol.
The rise of organized crime.
That's where they were getting their money from, because there was such a demand.
It's really a disgusting, dumb way to approach a problem that is, in many people's ideas, a social problem.
That money could go to so many different positive things.
Yeah, and when we're perpetuating it through that reason and many others, we're basically embedding the problem in our country.
And Ed said this, Calderon, we were dialoguing earlier this week, and he said, you know, he's kind of looked at things from the border and south and the issues coming in from the border, from the cartel front.
He said, you know, now I'm getting wind of your book and I'm starting to analyze what you guys are fighting on the ground inside the borders in California and the rest of the country.
He goes...
It's embedded now.
I mean, it's not like it's just coming across.
I mean, the enterprise is embedded here in the nation because they have the pipeline, they have the distribution, they have a market, and they don't have to deal with the border issue.
And they're comfortable because of exactly where we're at and what people aren't aware of.
Now, the saving grace of that is when we get the environmental crimes that we bring from the fish and wildlife standpoint to those charges for these guys, we get it back to felony status.
Because we had an interesting thing happen.
As soon as all that regulation started two years ago, and those trespass grow crimes were watered down to what we're talking about, district attorneys all throughout the state said, oh man, we're not going to be able to prosecute these crimes.
I mean, we're not going to have a jury that's sympathetic to these issues.
Right.
But some sheriff's departments were saying, "Hey, we know how violent these guys are.
We know your team's been in like six gunfights, man.
Your partner was almost killed in '05 in the first one.
You guys take these guys head on.
You wanna protect your wildlife, whatever." But they're not stopping.
And it's a misdemeanor and we can't convict 'em, so we're not gonna play.
So the backlash of those crimes being watered down, Joe, was teams stopped working at except us and like the feds.
And not only that, DAs couldn't prosecute.
So I remember speaking for the California District Attorney Association on this and saying guys there's a solution.
Everybody, no matter where they sit on the cannabis spectrum, everybody hates to see Bambi dead, water poisoned.
Everyone has a little bit of environmental passion in them on both sides of the fence.
And that's where I say here we can unify and not worry about where we sit on the for or against.
And if you take these water code enhancements, if you take the felony and the penal code from the banned toxics like carbofuran, if you take a streambed alteration diversion or dead wildlife or littering close to a state waterway, you stack all those up, you get all these penalties.
And you can convict on that, you know, even in a sympathetic jury on, say, a cannabis issue.
So we started to prosecute these cases and they started to come back.
And it's an arduous end around.
It's more work than we should have to do, but we're doing it.
They'll go to jail here if it's a sanctuary-type state scenario and they're going to stay in our justice system and they will do jail time here.
If we're working with ICE and our feds and Homeland Security, especially ICE agents, and they are classified as a deportable felon, they will get deported.
Especially if there's someone who's high up in the cartel or is making a good amount of money for the cartel, it's highly likely that with a lot of corruption they might go free.
And what you just said, it's like, because of the money involved.
And we know, and I go into this and hit more a little bit, what I can talk about under, you know, just what we learned without putting names out there is, it's $4,000 to $7,000 for these grow organizations in these cartel cells to bring their best growers back across.
And it's a drop in the bucket.
And they don't even consider the border a border.
They consider it like a speed bump on the 405 freeway.
Boats, I was always thinking, like, how the fuck are you going to protect the border when you just get a boat and just kind of like go past and pull in somewhere in California and hop out?
So these guys just pull the boat in, and then, this is obviously one that got busted, and then they just have someone waiting for them, and they unload that stuff into trucks.
And again, ladies and gentlemen, this is all because of an illegal demand.
Because it's illegal.
This stuff wouldn't be profitable if we were growing it here in the United States and if the only way you would sell it at a store was if it was regulated and licensed and you knew that it was tested and it was all grown here.
I mean, obviously, I'm kidding about shoot him, but their situation is just as grave.
I mean, you're living in Mexico, and you're fucked, and there's no way for you to get by legally.
And you're a young man, you get recruited into one of these cartels, and next thing you know, you've been in for 10 years, and you've committed a few murders, and you're involved in drug trafficking.
I said, look, regardless of where you sit on the emotional spectrum on this, against cannabis, for cannabis, let's all look at the issue of environmental purity, safety in America, and really be real as to what's going to help the problem.
And you hit it on the head when you said, well, yeah, there's all that mess stuff going on and this, that.
And there is, but I'm a realist and we've got to do something right now.
And I think if we're going to federally regulate to any type of consistency, we're still many years off from that.
So what are we going to do in the meantime if that's going to happen?
We've still got to deal with this grow mess going on in predominantly California and all this stuff getting out to our public and being tainted.
We still have to deal with the meth issue and the gun running and all of that.
And knowing that it's embedded in our country, we need to have people aware of it.
And not only law enforcement, but bring that thin green line a little bigger with conservationists like yourself and people that are in the know, people that are in the outdoors, and just putting the word out.
I mean, it's crazy that 10 years have passed since the first book and 10 years have passed since we did those three good years of Wild Justice TV.
But in that interim, it's been a specialty of ours.
We built a team that's noticed now for being pretty innovative and progressive and non-traditional, but putting up some pretty good numbers when it comes to the environmental damage and the public safety issue and how much we took out and bad guys we caught and what canines did, especially Canine Phoebe. but putting up some pretty good numbers when it comes But we're only dropping the bucket.
It's one team out of part of the state and other teams are doing some stuff too at the federal level and state level and we're only getting maybe 50% of this stuff if we're lucky.
I'd make the tactical unit, the MET team of the tacticians going just after the cartel front that we formed.
I'd triple or quadruple it.
Have a team, maybe four teams in the state.
Have them all trained together, have them all uniformly committed to tactics and training, because it is quite advanced what some of our guys are doing, from a sniper team to tracking to all the stuff we get into.
Not only for this job, but for anything else we come up with from an American public safety threat.
After 9-11, stuff changed.
And we hadn't gotten into this grow mess yet, Joe, to the level of the cartel front.
But I knew back then, game wardens are going to have to be tactically trained as well as any other law enforcement officer.
And we're going to have to have our own tactical unit because we're doing some pretty crazy stuff for wildlife crimes.
You know, and then Homeland Security on a potential terrorist threat.
You need to have tactical units that are there with every other agency and military teams because we're all thin in numbers.
And if something big goes down, I need to know that the sniper team we built with MET and these tacticians can go in and integrate with San Jose PD SWAT. They can integrate with military personnel, you know, wherever.
Same type of deal.
And we've gone the same direction with some of that good training and found the right people to do that.
The thing that's cool about these dogs, and I can't talk enough about it, man, because no matter where you sit, everybody loves a good dog story.
And, you know, some people say, well, dual purpose, you got to bite guys.
What's with that?
Is it, you know, really aggressive?
And when you look at it, it's a lifesaver for everybody.
It's a lifesaver for us.
It's a lifesaver for the suspect, too, because it usually involves a potential gunfight that the dog basically, you know, alleviated because she or he was there.
So we got our canine program in agency going kind of full speed around 2008-ish.
We have three levels of canine.
We have like the companion ride-along canine that kind of does everything with you.
She's never going to bite anybody and that's Apollo.
That's like my lab, right?
And then we have the detection-level dog, and most of those are Labradors, like Marshall, like Apollo, because labs have such amazing noses.
They really can hold on scent.
They can train to detect many scents, and we certify them in different things.
And then there's the Phoebes, the Belgian Mals or the Shepherds, and really it's become mostly Mals now in our agency.
Shepherds are longer-haired, and we're in 100-degree weather.
We're on long hikes.
We're unsupported, and those dogs might have to sit quietly after hiking eight miles and sit in a prone quietly while we're watching and observing and stalking in on suspects to make an apprehension and arrest safely and hopefully avoid a gunfight.
And we've also found with the mouths, like I said, they just hold up better on average, and there's certainly exceptions to that.
But when we got our dual purpose program back on track, these are dogs that will bite when they need to on command, but they have great noses, so they'll still detect wonderfully, you know, finding evidence, finding tainted weed, whatever the case may be, a firearm, a bear gallbladder.
All of that, but they'll also, you know, like Phoebe was nicknamed the fur missile because when it was time for her to go to work and some guy was going to pull a weapon on us, she was all business.
And the cool thing about a dog like her, and Mike Ritland and I got into this on his show especially, and he was blown away.
He said, I've never heard of a dog in a domestic law enforcement team that's had like, she had 116 apprehension bites in her career.
That is so insane because if you fly over like Humboldt or any of these areas, particularly Medicino, Northern California, the density of the forest, the public land out there, there's a lot of land.
There's a lot of land and a lot of potential we're not seeing.
And that's still thriving.
So when you look at Phoebe as a canine and you go, well, let's see, she was in the field doing these type of operations for about seven or eight years.
And yeah, that's great from a record standpoint and numbers and the life she saved, but it gives you like a snapshot of the issue.
How many guys did we not catch that were out there armed that way, that we weren't involved in?
We weren't involved.
And the dogs have just saved lives, man.
They have saved...
Phoebe, I go into this in the new book especially, in 2012, but right before our team started, Phoebe saved my life, Brian's life, and all these other operators in Santa Clara County in Silicon Valley, right where I grew up, because she engaged a guy that was pulling a Russian automatic pistol on me and I was the support for Brian.
I was basically his canine handler or support guy.
And Brian had to deal with this other grower's partner that had a big Taurus Judge revolver on his hip, and he was pulling it.
So he goes for that guy and says, John, just take my dog.
And Phoebe's on the bite, and he's biting this guy in the calf.
And this guy's nose down, and we don't know he's got this weapon.
And I start to see it coming out.
And I get on him and I do what I need to do with some physical control and some strikes and whatnot to get the gun out of his hand.
But had she not been on that guy on a bite show, that gun's turned on me at five feet.
Our team's been in six, and I've been on the ground for four out of the six that our guys have been involved in, and they've all been around this particular problem.
We had a lot less once the team got formalized, and we started using dogs, but we still had two during the window of the team being operational that we couldn't avoid.
And dogs played a big part in that, as I go into the new stories.
I mean, when I was listening to that podcast with Steve Rinella, the Meat Eater podcast with you, and I was like, I can't believe that there's not some sort of another division of law enforcement that gets involved in this and that we're requiring game wardens to essentially become something completely different.
And even though it's an uphill battle with a whole regulation debate and stuff, every grow site we interdict and stop and take that tainted cannabis out of the market or restore that waterway and clean up that grow site.
And we clean them all up now that we go into.
And the other agencies now support us and clean up with their own resources.
Because game wardens have got so legitimate in working with other agencies that are non-conservation groups, sheriff's departments, right?
DEA task force type units.
And they're like, okay, we agree.
We see...
We see the value in reclamating and cleaning up these grows to the point where Obama's drug czar addressed a lot of us when my team was starting up and our group was working heavy.
And it was a real compliment, but finally, more importantly, it got the news out where he said, I want this model rewarded, what Fish and Wildlife is doing with this cleanup.
I mean, you guys are arresting guys.
That's great.
You're taking guns away.
Obviously, somebody's going to be saved because these guys are violent and deadly.
And you're eradicating the plants.
It's fantastic.
Keep it out of the market.
They're poisoned.
But unless you're doing that reclamation component, I know it's dirty and arduous and tiring and it takes resources.
We're not making the biggest dent.
So then funding started to reflect from the federal level through DEA funding, rewards for reclamation.
So when you guys have a situation like the first one you found in 2004 and you stumble upon this dry creek and there's all this debris and there's toxic chemicals, what kind of a cleanup is involved here and how long does something like that take before you can bring that creek back to where those steelhead can run and to where it's supposed to be?
We're looking on an average one full day and we're looking at having to have a helicopter for a whole day and having to have anywhere between, you know, ideally 12 to maybe more officers in there.
And a lot of it will have some volunteer groups coming in.
We have a program in California Fish and Wildlife called the NRVP program, the Natural Resource Volunteer Program.
And when we started our pilot program in 2013, we did an operation called Pristine to test this theory if we could have this full-time team being effective.
And if it wasn't for like 40 of these volunteers that are helicopter trained to go in with us and do the cleanup, we would have reclamated less than half of what we were able to do.
But when we do a reclamation, it's probably more expensive than doing the tactical operation planning and the takedown for the first part of the phase.
because you know helicopters are thousands of dollars an hour in blade time and you're bagging up trash you're getting dirty um some of these water lines like you saw in the spools and i told steven on his show and mike on his show as well with meat eater and mike drop that you know we tracked a water line almost three miles once that was a lot of freaking pipe it It went, I mean, the water source is in Merced County on the Pacheco Pass Highway in my old home district.
And it went all the way down Pacheco Pass onto this private ranch where the grow started.
On an average one, we're going to go a quarter to half a mile at least.
And even though that black pipe isn't poisoning the water directly, once all the poisons are taken out, That water line is an infrastructure piece that it's their black gold.
I kind of use the term black gold when I start teaching to this, that if you leave that water diversion in place and you take out their whole grow site, you know, you take out their camp and all that, but all they got to do is reconnect a water line and put a 10 up and bring in seeds and get their little camouflage system going.
Very small investment to put a grow back there.
And one of the things that really got other agencies convinced that we need to reclimate, too, the way we sold it is not only on an environmental protection standpoint, because other agencies care about the environment, but it's not a mandate.
They're not funded for it.
But it was something like, it's also deterrence.
Because when we debrief some of these guys we caught, these upper levels, and I dive into this in the new book especially...
I finally got to ask the questions to these upper level cartel guys running grows, running meth, running all.
And I said, you know, it's interesting.
We notice that when we eradicate a grow site, traditionally, back before we change this process, and we just take out the plants and we leave, we notice there's a grow like there, back there, next year, or maybe two seasons again, and it's the same group.
And the answer I got was, well, we know how taxed you guys are and how much resources you expend and you can't possibly get all of our grows, so we'll try it.
And 50% of the time, even though it was rated like two years before and it's on your radar, we'll actually get away with a harvest.
And I asked, well, if we start doing this reclamation and we take all your stuff out and restore the waterway and move the tents and just completely sanitize the site, let all the natural growth come back, preserve the creek.
He said, we're not going to come back to that.
Too much effort.
We're going to bring tens of thousands of dollars in new infrastructure.
We're going to have to run a whole other water line.
It's already on your radar, you know, from a couple of years ago when you guys raided it.
That's not a good business investment in a business model for us to take that chance.
And we kind of knew that because we were seeing the trend on the ground, but to hear it from this guy's mouth and validate what we suspected and have it come back as true and all the other things I got to learn, I mean, just, it changed the game for us.
And that happened, I'm going to say about a year to a year and a half right before we started our unit.
So we went in building the Met team in 2013 with this mindset in place and, uh, um, Nate Arnold, who was a district captain at the time, my partner in building this, and I'm going to give a shout out right now to Mike Carrion, who was our chief of the law enforcement division, and one of my mentors and friends way back in the academy in 92. He greenlit us to test this program and take all of us out of patrol in an already depleted force.
So you can imagine there was some resistance.
There was some middle management and executive staffers like, Why are we doing this?
We're not supposed to be doing marijuana work.
It's drugs.
You're cleaning up grow sites, chasing bad guys.
And Mike said, no, I believe in you guys.
Test it, document it, and see what we've got to do with this.
And we were six weeks into a three-month test program, and he is the chief and all the deputy chiefs had talked about what we were doing out there, and we were now documenting these insane numbers of what was happening.
And he said, we're done.
I want it full-time by January 1st, 2014. Get your testing.
Do your interviews.
Get the protocol.
You guys are leaving patrol.
We're going to have this many spots.
And you're going to work straight for headquarters, straight line, kind of like a military special ops team that just works for the top.
They don't really have boundaries of where they go.
And that's kind of the approach we needed.
We needed to do a global, statewide approach.
We had to break tradition.
So, to your point, we like what we do because you said it best.
We're making a difference.
Every little grow we get out of circulation makes a difference.
But it is.
It's an uphill battle because we know we're not getting them all.
And when we formed up the new team, we said, here's how we're going to approach this.
We're going to help agencies.
We're going to do our own missions.
We're going to help other agencies that are doing the work.
But we're going to do it under the caveat that we're going to do a three-prong approach.
We're going to apprehend as diligently as we can and catch these guys through our dogs, through our tactics, because just chasing them around and knowing they're going to get away, there's no deterrence in that.
And yeah, it's risky.
And yeah, it's dangerous.
But at least I know if I take them into custody, even for a day, five days, whatever, maybe they're deported, maybe they're not.
That's one really skilled guy doing a lot of environmental damage that's at least out of circulation for a while.
I mean, it's like I don't want to shoot a deer with a blow dart either and just go, look, I got one, ha ha, and then let them wake up, Jesus, and get out of there.
Well, if they're listed and they're so threatened, the way to keep steelhead fishing going, like in California, is, okay, guys, you can catch them, but you've got to release them.
That they hit the headwaters of the start of this spawning channel that went to a creek called Coyote Creek that actually went all the way into San Jose to the South Bay of the ocean.
So that pollution situation from those banned poisons was just decimating, you know, three to five miles of creek.
And something that's interesting, and we get into this especially in book two, is there's a group called IERC out of UC Davis, Dr. Murad Gabriel and his colleagues.
And they're going in as an NGO, and they're the scientists that really validated the devastation these banned poisons do when the Pacific fissure that was almost completely wiped out as a threatened species in California was linked to DTO grow poisons.
And that kind of came to surface about five or six years ago.
And then kind of the light bulb went off that, hey, this is an outside scientific group of an NGO, a non-governmental organization, that's working hand-in-hand with California Department of Fish and Wildlife and U.S. Forest Service.
But they're showing the devastation of this stuff in the soil.
And in the water, well after the grove's eradicated, it's not just, you know, in and around the plants.
What's going on?
So some of these sites, if you don't do a complete, you know, soil overhaul and, you know, get all that lining out of the creeks, it's not going to be completely restored.
And sometimes that can take, you know, we might not have the resources to get back in there for a year or half a year.
We always try to get it before the end of the year when the rains come, but it's not always possible.
They dissipate toxicity somewhat everywhere, but they don't dissipate to the point where they're not harmful on some level.
So as a case in point, I have a slide I show on my PowerPoint that actually came from IERC, and we've seen this multiple times.
You have a scientist, and he's in the big rubber nitrile gloves, the long sleeve, the face protection.
The hat, and he's got a gray fox carcass that right next to a plant in the soil that he ingested this stuff, right, on a tainted plant, and the fox died within minutes.
And then there's a golden eagle that comes in after, and it could have been days after, we don't know, you know, and they're carry-on feeders, right?
So the golden eagle lands, starts just picking just on the surface, on the body of this, doesn't even get into the carcass.
And here's a dead golden eagle in the photo, right next to the...
It's like, man, just put a radioactive time bomb in that animal.
I mean, that's a hot carcass.
And that was days after, you know, when the scientists are coming back in.
Well, it's so counterintuitive to people that may be animal rights activists or vegans that hunters are responsible for the reason why we have such large populations of these animals and wildlife protection and How much money comes from hunting tags and then recreational firearm sales.
I mean, that's really the majority of the money that goes to preserve these wild lands and keep these animals alive.
And when you tell that to animal rights people or vegans, they panic.
It's like, listen, the reason why these animals exist, the reason why they're protected is because people hunt them.
It sounds so counterintuitive, but...
You know, you were talking about Rocky Mountain Elk, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation has done an amazing job of repopulating areas like now they have successful populations in places like Kentucky, where they were eradicated at one point in time.
They had been extirpated.
And not because of us, but because of market hunting back in the turn of the century, in the 1800s.
When people, you know, needed food and they didn't have refrigerators.
So you would shoot something and it was only good for a few days and they would go out and shoot some more and they would sell that food and that food was these wild animals and it was completely unregulated hunting.
I mean, we know about it with the buffalo because we've all seen those horrific photographs of these mounds of skulls.
But, I mean, that was the case with antelope and deer, and they've done such an amazing job that now there's more deer in this country than there were when Columbus was here.
It's interesting when you bring up elk because of, you know, being a worldwide hunter myself and doing it for so long.
I've never taken an elk myself, but I've been on these amazing elk hunts where I've guided, you know, people really deserving of getting their first elk as an example.
And you'll like this story being a fellow, you know, an elk guy.
We had a tag in Santa Clara County that was for one bull for a tule elk.
And one thing we have in this state especially is we have some of the best tule elk on the planet.
They're beautiful, smaller species and just a beautiful animal.
And I saw this tag pop up for residents or non-residents, and it was only one tag.
But nobody would put in for it because all our tule elk are on private land and no one has access.
We know it's going to be a private land small herd.
We don't want to take too many bulls.
And we also know that access is going to be hard.
So they experimented with one tag.
And this gentleman that drew the tag was a 70-year-old master hunter education instructor, one of our top instructors for like 40 years.
So he's teaching hunter ed like we do in the warden front.
He's paying it forward.
Draws this tag.
He had drawn it in a similar county, in Alameda County, the year before and could never get to any access to harvest his elk.
So I get a call through the Hunter Education Program, like, hey man, I know you know all your ranchers and friends there in Santa Clara County.
Do you have a ranch that we could set him up on?
I said, I'll work something out.
This guy's awesome.
I mean, how many future conservationists has he raised up?
So I found him a spot, you know, a rancher, me and my sister and family grew up with.
And he had a little cattle ranch, but he had a beautiful herd.
You know, he had a good herd of like 40 animals and some nice bulls, a couple monsters.
So we got him set up to harvest one of those bulls, you know, before he was too old to do it with this tag.
And we had four generations there, Joe.
It was great.
We had Mike, his son, his grandson, and his great-grandson.
And I just have never seen that.
And then I'm helping, you know, guide him with the ranch owner.
And what we thought was the bull we'd been watching for months, you know, and all our scouting was going to be a fairly, you know, not a super difficult hunt.
Turned out to be an all-day affair, of course.
Typical hunt, right?
Murphy's Law kicked in.
He was hiding on another part of the ranch.
End of the day, he gets this bull.
And it was just this magnificent feeling.
You know, he had worked hard.
He had paid it forward in the whole hunting world through hunter education.
And we did an article in Photos where we saw four generations with this beautiful Thule elk in our hunter education magazine.
And I have that picture, you know, to this day.
I just look at it and I go, man, this is what it's about.
This is awesome.
And then the following year, we got that same tag.
And the 17-year-old daughter of a San Jose police detective friend of mine drew it.
And she had been hunting with her dad, deer, antelope, doing her thing, learning to hand load like dad taught her, doing it all.
And she had never shot an elk yet.
And so we did the same thing.
I took her and her dad and, you know, we had, in fact, one of my buddies from the Santa Clara Met team, Hunter.
You'll read about him in book two.
He's a big hunter as well and an elk guy.
So, you know, he was in that circle.
So we all did it as a big kind of family affair.
Same thing as the year before.
What should have been a fairly, you know, couple-hour hunt turned out to be an all-day affair.
And we ended up getting her a nice 5x6 bull at the end of the evening.
are just chilling it's incredible it's pretty wild it's incredible and it's funny you mentioned your kids because i i see it with the nieces and nephews you know and all the all the youth i educate in hunter ed and just to see that go to grizzly island and see a tuli elk yeah for the first time or anything they're just like what is that yeah i don't know what that animal is giant deer a giant deer did i see that uh some animation some pixar movie is that real Well, when you see one in real life and you see one scream, that was to me, I was hooked.
We were, you know, hopeful that we'd get a big reach, especially with book two.
And being retired, I can speak a little more freely and, you know, go more national.
I mean, obviously, when I was working agency, you got to be careful what you say.
And everything's very, very stringently looked at.
But it's been really good because it hasn't just played to the audience I normally work with, conservation and tactics and law enforcement and hunters and outdoorsmen and women.
The cannabis community is really behind this book.
I mean, they're promoting it.
They're flashing on their Instagram page.
I mean, the Northern California growers actually look at the Met team.
They had a term that a couple of grower colleagues kind of coined about two years ago, and they said, you guys are Earth Warriors.
This is amazing.
I like it.
And I went, oh, man, you know, a special ops law enforcement team called Earth Warriors in California.
Yeah, we're actually, it's cool you brought that up because I'm co-producing with a very good independent filmmaker named Lou Doros, a film called Altered State.
And this one's been in the works for about a year.
And it's actually going to be going to be networked and distributed through a new, it's called Planet Cannabis Entertainment Network.
And they're a new channel.
Planet Cannabis Entertainment Network.
They got 40 million viewers.
They're doing main content like other channels are, but they're also doing some, you know, some funded independent projects.
And this is one of them.
And the nice thing is the reason we're agreeing to do it with them is there's no content control, you know, issues.
We're going to get to tell an objective story, not biased.
We're going to tell, you know, we're going to be embedded with legitimate growers that we've worked effectively with all on the environmental issue.
What are the environmental impacts?
What's working?
What's not working with regulation now?
What do we need to do to regulation to fix it?
We're embedded with law enforcement teams again, doing the work I've done with the team and telling their story, and we're in production currently.
So this is going to be a cool process, and I'm going to be involved and on the ground and working with Lou to narrate it and interview folks, and I'll be back in the field all throughout the state for the next couple of months and beyond.
Yeah, he's N-O-R-I-S. But yeah, you can also hit me on Instagram and follow for all that stuff.
Besides my website, it's just J-O-H-N-N-O-R-E-S. And I do put this out that if people want to email me directly and they want a signed copy of the book or they have questions.
And since Meat Eater and other podcasts, I get so many people wanting to be game wardens now, coming out of the military, little kids growing up.
Yeah, thanks for the sentiment, but I've got to give a shout-out to Blake B. and Brian, and Blake's here in the green room with me now, and I've got to give them credit for tuning me into your podcast.
They're big friends, so thank you, guys.
And I'm also doing a cool custom knife with Mike Velikamp out of V-Knives, and we're making the Trailblazer custom folder.
It's like the dream knife, Joe, that I never had 30 years on Ops, but it's an everyday carry, so some stuff there.
And being an elk hunter, you'll appreciate this.
I'm doing some pretty cool stuff with Axial Precision Rifles.
They're a long-range rifle company out of Idaho.
They're just amazing.
And my partner Terry Hewn and I are running that new.300 PRC for everything from long distance, from our tactical experience, target shooting, but also a good elk gun.
And that's going to kind of become my new elk platform.
And my publisher, Caribou Publishing, and this is interesting, I think you'll appreciate how this kind of comes together, but Henry Wu and my friends over at Recoil Magazine and Gun Digest and Caribou and Blade Show and Blade Magazine, they're all the same entity.
And this book with Caribou Publishing was a step out, an expansion book of national issues related to things they hold dear coming from a gun publication, you know, and written objectively not against cannabis.
So it was really, you know, it didn't seem like the right fit when you look at it from the outside, but it was perfect.