Mariana van Zeller recounts surviving Niger’s 2023 military coup, stranded eight days as Western and Russian forces clashed, while her team negotiated evacuation in Portuguese. She exposes gold mining’s deadly tunnels in Niger, diamond cartels’ Amazon violence (30 miners killed), and Congo’s ape trafficking—where $80K hits target gorillas after entire families are slaughtered. Investigating Morocco’s hashish trade, she interviews assassins like L.A.’s 10-kill contractor and South Africa’s Jojo, who kills for $1.5K per hit amid cartel-fueled black markets. Van Zeller links these crises to systemic exploitation: fake Mexican drugs (20M Americans reliant), Epstein’s unpunished sextortion network, and China’s Bodies Exhibit—preserved without consent, including a rumored pregnant dissident. Her work on Trafficked reveals how desperation fuels organ trafficking, like "The Wrecker" cartel’s coercion in Colombia, and highlights governments’ failure to protect victims, even scamming Americans like Rodney Baldus into 17-year prison sentences. Powerful elites profit from broken systems while the vulnerable pay the price—her reporting forces uncomfortable truths about global corruption. [Automatically generated summary]
We've got kidnappers, so it's very, very dangerous.
We'd gone there with the permission of the government, but only if we had to have a military convoy with us at all times.
So we're talking about four armored trucks with lots of trained soldiers that every time we stopped, they'd get out of the trucks and basically point their guns all around.
They were very well trained.
A lot of them are actually trained by the American military.
And we went out into the desert and visited these gold mines, which are crazy.
It was an eight-hour off-roading into the desert to arrive at these illegal, unregulated mines.
We're going down these tunnels, and it's, you know, 100 meters down, hand-dug tunnels with nothing to buttress them, no safety precautions or anything.
But we filmed it all, and we get to the end, and there's people basically...
Mining for gold.
And again, constantly with the idea that the military is telling us, okay, we have to film fast.
We have to do this fast.
We can't be out at night.
So we went to a sort of safety, more safe location to sleep that night under the stars.
And then the next day it's time to come back to Agadez, the town, which is about 100 miles but takes anywhere between like 3 to 12 hours to get because lots of things can happen along the way.
And we arrived in Agadez and we got word that there had been a military coup and the president had been deposed and he was now being kidnapped inside the presidential palace.
Basically he was stuck there with his family.
And that we were about to lose our military compound and security.
And they closed all the land borders and the airspace.
And we were stuck with no way out.
Because you can't travel by road without security in that part of the world.
The military coup happened on a Wednesday and we left on a Thursday, sorry.
So eight days.
But it was eight incredibly scary days.
You know, I've been a journalist covering black markets and going to war zones and conflict areas all my life.
But this was, I think, the most uncomfortable and scared I've ever been because...
First of all, the uncertainty of not knowing.
The West African states were threatening invasion.
The Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary group, were saying that they were going to come and protect the new military coup leaders.
And so it was a power struggle between the United States and Russia.
And that's sort of the last place you want to be, right?
And again, no protection.
I'm there with my team.
I'm sort of the boss in that situation because I'm the owner of the company that produces this.
I'm the host of the show.
I'm the executive producer.
And I felt very responsible for my team as well.
And yeah, the clock is ticking.
And they're telling us that in a few days we're going to invade and there's going to be a massive possibility of a massive war.
And we're stuck with, again, no protection and no way out.
So it was really, really scary.
How did it get resolved?
That's the interesting part.
So the funny thing is that there was an American military base, actually, one of the biggest Air Force bases ever built.
It cost over $100 million to build just two miles from our little hotel in Agadez.
We were the only foreigners there apart from aid workers that sort of live behind barbed wire and in compounds.
But we were the only foreigners staying in a hotel.
This hotel, interestingly enough, was actually built when Gaddafi came to visit in the 90s or late 80s.
And it was a rundown hotel.
We were there, again, no protection, nothing.
And the military base is just two miles from us.
And we'd tried to get inside the base to film, and we'd been denied access to the base.
But when the coup happened...
We managed to get a contact inside and started asking them, we're here with no security, can you guys come and help us and figure out, you know, take us into the base, something.
We're all American citizens, except for our fixer, our local guy, who was actually from Mali, but everybody else was American.
And they were stuck in the situation that all the other countries had started calling this a coup, but the U.S. government did not.
And because the moment they called it a coup, they would have to remove...
Possibly remove military, remove their aid from the country.
And that's the last thing you want to do.
So they didn't want to evacuate us.
They didn't want to call it a coup.
They didn't want to get us out of there.
Their hands were sort of tied.
That's how they told us.
And we started seeing slowly as the days started passing and the situation was deteriorating.
We started seeing, you know, the French were sending planes to take all the French nationals, the British, the Portuguese, which is where...
I'm a double nationality where I'm from.
And I'm on the phone with the ambassador for Portugal telling me there's a plane for you.
There's like seats for you in the capital, but the capital is eight hours away or 12 hours away by land and we can't go because it's too dangerous.
No airplanes would take us there.
And eventually we realized that the only way that we'd be able to get out is if we took matters into our own hands.
So actually my team in LA found an evacuation company willing to fly a plane in the middle of the night to get us out.
Have you watched the movie Argo with Ben Affleck about the guys in Iran and how they don't know until the last minute if they're going to leave or not?
It was exactly that situation.
So we get to the airport in the middle of the night.
So they told us that we had to be at the airport at this time, that we had to take security with us because the pilot was refusing to land unless we had security there, police.
The police were supposed to show up, they never did.
We arrive at the airport, it's sunrise, and the military is there waiting for us.
Yeah, it's one of those.
And they start creating all sorts of problems, saying we don't have the right paperwork, they're not going to let us leave.
Meanwhile, there's this amazing man, local man, who worked at the airport that I'd met a few days before when I went there to try to see if there's any plane leaving, let us know.
And so I stayed in touch with him.
And I had told him that it was my son's birthday, which was partially not true.
It wasn't his birthday, but he was about to leave camp.
And I've got this tradition as a working mother who travels all the time.
We have this tradition that I always pick him up from camp, and it's performing arts camp.
And so I told him, sorry, this is a very long story.
So I told him, you know, so he was there to help us, but the military was also there and they didn't want us to leave and creating all sorts of problems.
And then we see the plane land and we see the pilot come out and we see the military start walking towards the pilot to tell them that we didn't have the permission to leave.
And my fear was that the pilot was immediately going to turn around because he had told us that we had 20 minutes.
He was going to spend 20 minutes on the ground.
And if we couldn't get into the plane, he's going to leave without us.
And they get there and he starts talking to them.
And I'm on the phone with the team in L.A. and I'm freaking out and telling them this is horrible.
This is happening.
They don't want us to leave.
And then my husband's on the phone with me as well.
He's telling me I see the pilot's name and I think he's Portuguese.
Run to him.
And I ran to him at the same time as a military.
And I started speaking to him in Portuguese and telling him the situation and that do whatever you can to get us out.
And the military can't understand Portuguese.
So there was a secret communication happening between me and him.
And he was Portuguese, and he decided to take the risk of getting us on the plane, and we managed to get out of it.
But the guy from the military was still yelling as the door closes.
But so was the guy that I'd met at the airport, who turns to me, yells my name, and I look back, and he says, Hey, Mariana, say happy birthday to your son.
So in the midst of the craziness, it was also a beautiful moment of connection and humanity.
Obviously, that was a moment of a lot of uncertainty, but still when we spent a week on the ground and we still kept on reporting on the story we were there for, we kept, we're stuck in this dilemma.
Do we stay closed in our hotel or do we go out and continue reporting on the story we decided to keep reporting?
But it is, you know, there's a lot of sacrifice that goes into it, but it's what I love to do.
You know, we had, when I was, one of the first stories I did with my husband back in the day, when we were still traveling and reporting together, was actually in the Brazilian Amazon.
And it was about this, one of the biggest diamond mines they've ever found.
And it was on Indian land and white miners came in and the Indians decided to revolt and killed and tortured and cut off the penises of 30 of them.
And, you know, they killed 30 people, massacred and tortured lots of them.
And it was horrible.
And we went there and started investigating this.
And we weren't married.
He was my boyfriend at the time.
We were planning on getting married.
But we were in these little tiny, you know, wild west towns in the Amazon.
And the amount of people that we had come up to us and actually with little paper bags, like rolled paper with little diamonds on the side, asking us if we wanted to buy it for nothing, like close to nothing.
Well, that's also the story of cell phones, right?
I mean, Siddharth Kara was on and he discussed his work in the Congo where they were investigating these cobalt mines.
And in everyone's cell phone is a piece of cobalt.
And there's a very high likelihood that was pulled out of one of these artesian mines by people who are working For basically slave wages, women with babies on their backs while they're doing it.
They're hand digging this stuff.
So you're inhaling these toxic fumes from this cobalt.
It's so...
I mean, I want to say that we're capable of better, but what we are as a species, that is like one of the best indicators of how twisted we are.
The very height of technology that is carried by all these social justice warriors and all these virtue signaling people online, you're literally doing it from a device that's made by slaves.
Well, it's also weird that we don't even manufacture a single cell phone in America with all parts sourced and put together in America.
That's totally possible that you could buy a phone that is completely ethical, that's made by people that were paid a fair wage and they work normal hours and they have great health care and all that stuff.
That's possible.
And you would think that a device that is literally owned by every single human...
There are more cell phones in this country than there are human beings.
I mean, even places like China where they make the cell phones, where they have the Foxconn factory that's covered with nets to keep people from jumping off the roof.
So the pygmies, you know, they've sort of lost their home, which is the forest.
The Congolese government says they can't be there, and they have no money and no schools and no education and nothing.
Desperate situations.
So these people come out and say, if you get us a baby chimp, we'll pay you $10.
$10 for a baby chimp.
And they go out, and the problem with baby chimps is that until they're five years old, they live at the hip of the mother, like always next to the mother.
It's the way their family is.
And so to be able to take and kidnap the child, they have to kill the whole family because the estimate, the average is like 10 chimps have to be killed in order to be able to take away one baby.
I'm sure you know about that lady in Connecticut that had a full-grown chimpanzee in her home, and then her friend came over and the chimp decided he didn't like her friend, so he ripped her face off.
I went to a tiger sanctuary in Thailand with my family a few years back.
The beginning is kind of cool because the beginning you're around the kittens and the cubs are like super energetic and they're jumping around and attacking things these little tiny tigers they're really cool but it's just like wow and there's a lot of people in the room make sure that the tigers don't go crazy and they're little and then it gets to a slightly larger tiger and there's men with sticks and you could sit there there's like a picture of my daughter when she was 10 she's like sitting there smiling she's sitting next to a tiger A small tiger.
It's like 40 pounds or something like that.
Then when they get bigger, they're drugged.
So these people go in the cage with this massive tiger, and the tiger is just like...
They're just all fucking heroin-ed out, and these people take selfies.
One, the typhoons come in and people die and they drown and they wind up in the river and the tigers eat them.
And then two, there's an issue.
300 people and 46 tigers have been killed since 2000 in human-tiger conflicts in the Sundarbans.
They've done a lot to mitigate it.
That's only one of the last...
That's since 2000. That's over the last 23 years.
It used to be a lot worse.
And also the problem is that the water is brackish.
And so the tigers are drinking salt water...
And apparently it irritates them.
It's like very painful.
So you got these angry, pissed off tigers that actively hunt humans.
And so these guys that go out to try to survey, they're always trying to figure out how many tigers are there.
They have to wear these helmets that protect the back of their heads, and the helmet have a mask on the back of the head so that the tigers like to sneak up on you.
And if they see your face, they're less likely to attack.
They like to attack you when your back is turned.
So they have these helmets with a mask on the back to confuse the tigers.
We did a story on tiger trafficking in season one, I think.
And we spent a night in Thailand in one of these jungles where the last remaining tigers in Thailand are.
And I mean, we were camping out with hammocks, and I didn't sleep at all because we'd been spending the day, they're showing us videos of the camera, the little cameras that they have.
Activated all throughout the park, the jungle, so that when they step on it, it activates, right?
So you see the tigers in the wild, and they're beautiful.
So it's the first drug I tried, the first drug that any of my friends in Portugal tried.
And, you know, back then, when I was a kid and trying hash for the first time, I always sort of wondered, where does this come from?
And we knew that it was Morocco.
Everybody knows that the majority of hash in the world comes from Morocco.
But now I thought, wow, the unique opportunity to actually go and try to figure out how it gets here.
And so we started in Portugal, and I reached out to a bunch of my girlfriends in Portugal and said, hey, let's meet at this time in the rocks where we used to, like, hang out and hide and smoke hash.
And, uh...
And we'll film a scene of us talking about while we're smoking.
So I actually smoked on camera for the first time, did drugs on camera.
caught using any drug, even hard drugs, nothing happens to you.
But you're not allowed to traffic or sell it.
But if you're caught, they basically give you the option.
If you're caught smoking or doing heroin, they'll ask you, you know, instead of they realize that they will pay much more by putting somebody in prison than they will by actually giving them treatment.
So if you're, if they see that you're using heroin, they can go up to you and say, look, we'll give you the Do you want to go to prison or do you want to go to treatment?
The vast majority of people will say treatment.
And the government actually pays less for treatment than they do for incarceration.
Well, the problem with America is the system is...
It's so deeply unjust that there's privatized prisons and there's union guards.
So the guards union, the prison guards union, actively campaign to stop drugs from being decriminalized and made legal because that would take them out of work.
And how many lives did they ruin because of the abuse that they suffered and wound up having this tortured existence and they went out and committed more crimes and ruined more lives and this one fucking judge.
Yeah, there's definitely a bunch of organizations.
We spent time with one called Conserve Congo, a local Congolese man who's trying to sort of investigate and stop it.
We also spent one of the best days of filming was spent when we went to see the gorillas.
We spent time with these park rangers.
This guy is incredible who's basically devoted his life to trying to protect these gorillas.
So they go out with AK-47s every day up in the mountains and go up and spend time with this family or these families of gorillas to try and make sure that No one is coming and hurting them.
But it's really dangerous work.
It takes resources.
The hope is that they can sort of turn a little bit of this area of the Congo to what has Rwanda nowadays.
You can go to Rwanda and you can go to Uganda and see gorillas.
And as tourists, you can pay a lot of money, but it provides jobs and helps the local economy.
So basically the idea is that you dissuade poachers from coming in, right?
And you give up jobs to people who would otherwise perhaps become poachers.
And so, yeah, that's being done.
And, yeah, it was actually incredible when you – we spent, I don't know, like three hours hiking through very thick jungle.
And then suddenly – and you're seeing the signs that the gorillas are there.
You're seeing they – you know, their poop is there.
They nested here.
And he's telling us along the way, but you're still unsure if you're actually going to see a gorilla – And suddenly they're completely nonchalantly say, oh, it's right here.
I was like, what?
And there's this huge silverback gorilla just sitting there.
And the whole family is there.
They had had a baby.
The mother had had a baby just the week before.
And this is, you know, animals that are being pushed to the brink of extinction.
So it was really special.
It was a week of celebration at the park.
And we saw the little baby.
And there was a moment that we're filming and my producer and my team is like next to me and then another huge gorilla comes jumping and rushes right by them.
We went up to the, it's the Kif Mountains in Morocco.
They basically, it's these like farmers and they beat these drums so that the resin and the little seeds come out and then they mix it all into like this paste.
And yeah, it's actually a beautiful process.
Very dangerous because obviously when there's a lot of money in black markets...
Well, I mean, unfortunately, because of our prison industrial complex, I just don't see a mass decriminalization akin to what's happening in Portugal.
Despite what's going on on our southern border and the fentanyl trafficking and the fact that it's propping up These cartels, and they're worth billions and billions of dollars because of that.
I mean, obviously, it's a subject matter that I've wanted to do for a long time.
It's almost an impossible one to do for many reasons, as you can imagine.
But we actually found, all started with an interview that we did with an assassin in L.A., Yeah?
About 15 minutes from my house in L.A. And we have a contact in L.A. that whenever we're looking at the black markets, we contact him and ask him, hey, do you know anyone who's basically making meth or drugs or guns or whatnot?
And the off chance that he knew an assassin, we contacted him.
And he said he actually did.
He knew a guy.
He didn't think he was going to talk to us, but maybe he did because he was close to him.
And eventually this guy agreed to talk to us.
And we met him in the corner.
And as we're driving there, so we're driving there with our local contact that's taking us to meet this guy.
And he told us, hey, be very careful.
This guy is like, the way he said it is like he's bipolar, kind of.
Like he acts as if he's bipolar.
One moment he's happy and the next he can just freak out and nobody knows why.
He's really hard, difficult to deal with.
And I asked him, are you sure he's an assassin?
Or is it possible that he's just boasting if that happens sometimes?
And he said, no, no, no.
I've seen this guy being offered $80,000 to go and kill someone.
And I know this is what he does.
Everybody knows this guy in his community, in his group.
And he, yeah, as soon as I met him, he took out his gun and he said, you guys, if this is a fucking setup, you guys are all, it's going to be really easy to kill you all right now.
And it was me and three or four other people.
And my fear, we told him, it's not a setup.
He says, I just came here because I trust my buddy, but, you know, you don't fuck me.
If the police shows up, you guys are all dead.
So we're in a corner of L.A., close to downtown, and I'm constantly looking at the end of the road thinking, if the police shows up for any reason, he's going to think it's us.
And all those stories that you can go on the dark web and find an assassin, most of that is bullshit.
So that was my fear.
But I do trust this contact.
And we actually then ended up going to South Africa that has one of the highest assassination rates in the world and spent time with a bunch of different inkabi, which are, as they are called, in South Africa.
And that was fucking crazy as well.
So we spent time with one, his name is Jojo, young guy, and his story is insane.
And that he was a lot nicer, a lot more approachable, but has killed like over 30 people and gets paid $1,500 per hit.
And, you know, thousands of people have died in just the past few years at the hands of assassins in South Africa.
We go through a lot, you know, to make sure that we protect their identities.
But I think Jojo, this assassin, is a good example of why they talk to us.
So we spent an hour and a half, more or less, two hours talking to him.
And he tells us a story of how he became an assassin.
His parents were killed when he was young.
He was nine years old or something.
He felt like he was left with no protection.
He started carrying a knife.
And his parents were killed by an assassin, by the way, as well.
And then eventually he got involved in the drug business.
And then eventually people were paying him to go out, paying him much more money to go And he says, yeah, at the beginning I had to get drugged and drunk to be able to do it.
But now I'm used to it.
I'm cold-blooded and I'm used to it.
And we started talking about the cycle of violence, right?
Because he also said he doesn't kill women and children.
And I asked him, but do you realize...
That you are traumatized from the experience that you had that your parents were killed.
And now you're doing the same thing to other kids.
It's like, I actually never thought of that.
And then he started talking about, hey, he really wants to quit.
And he's been thinking, but he doesn't have, he can't get a job and all of that.
So I think people talk to us for a variety of reasons.
I think there's a lot of boasting, a lot of people that want to just talk about what they do.
Sometimes their families don't even know they do what they do.
I think in places like Sinaloa, where I've spent a lot of time with a cartel, it's impunity.
They don't see a downside because the authorities aren't really going to do anything, even if they know who they are.
Actually, I sometimes feel in certain countries, say for—in Sinaloa, for example, if you've been given the green light to go into the cartel, the territory controlled by the cartel, to talk to cartel members, and it takes weeks, months, sometimes years to get that access— Once we're under their protection, we're under their protection.
Like, we have their protection to be there.
But, you know, then certain things happen.
Like, we were filming in Sinaloa once, and we were filming these Sicarios, and they had their walkie-talkies.
And so they're communicating with the whole group, and they know everybody that comes in and out of their territory.
And suddenly they started panicking because the Marines had a helicopter coming their way.
And the Marines in Mexico are known to shoot first and ask questions after.
And funny story, my director of photography, Fred Manu, who was the director of photography for Bourdain on Parts Unknown before.
And he got, we were filming the scene and we'd driven into the Sierra Madre mountains and then we had to walk for...
A mile or two to a place where they felt comfortable showing us their guns and they were going to start shooting and they were going to give us the interview.
It was the story about the American guns flowing down south and how they're used in the violence.
And we're walking there and suddenly Fred basically turns to us and says, I don't feel good.
And he had a massive case of, what is it that you call it?
And then it wasn't actually a very good idea for us to stay with them for so long.
It was a learning lesson for all of us because that night we were filming with them in a bunker where they kept a lot of their guns.
And one of them had been snorting cocaine all day and basically pulled the trigger on the floor and the bullet came out just like two inches from Fred's head because he was in the bunker right in that hole.
And if you make it legal, you're going to have more people doing it.
We're not accustomed to things being legal.
If you made cocaine legal in this country, a bunch of people would try it that wouldn't ordinarily try it because they wouldn't know who to get it from.
They wouldn't know how to do it.
If you could just walk into Walgreens and buy cocaine...
I guarantee you we'll have more overdoses, more addicts.
But I do think that we tend to look at the problem the other way around.
I think that we tend to look at how to try to stop the problem when it's already a problem without actually tackling the root causes of what is happening and why it's happening.
Yeah, we've talked about that many times in this podcast.
If you wanted to solve the root cause, you would clean up inner cities.
That's what you would do.
You'd take these crime-ridden, drug-ridden, gang-infested communities, and you'd invest a massive amount of money and resources into fixing and rehabilitating them.
And the money that we have spent just in the Ukraine war could have done that many times over in this country.
And they've not lifted a finger to stop it.
It's almost like there's a formula to ensure control and power, and you need a certain amount of crime and violence.
You need a certain amount of people in prison.
You need a certain amount of despair in the inner cities to ensure that people don't rise up and figure out the system and realize they've been screwed over.
But even outside of the U.S., I mean, these black markets, you know, so much of it, the lesson for me has always been when reporting on these black markets, it's all about inequality, right?
Your choices are only as good as the opportunities you're given, right?
If you don't have those opportunities, you're going to become, you know, first like a watcher for the cartel and then eventually climb the ladder and become a sicario.
And if your family doesn't have anything on the table to eat and they offer you $10, which will feed your family for a week to go and kill the chimp, you're going to go and kill the chimp.
But one of them, another one, cartel involvement, is about fake pharmaceutical pills.
It's really interesting.
We spent time with a group called La Union in Mexico City, where 80% of their job, of their money right now, comes from fake pharmaceutical pills.
Yeah, I mean, they're making these pills.
And then we went to Wendy as well, which is another source of pharmaceutical pills.
You have like 40,000 online pharmacies that you can go to and buy prescription drugs without a prescription.
So a lot of Americans are doing that because it's much cheaper.
I think it's something like 20 million Americans are using the black market for their pills, for their drugs, because they can't afford them here, which is crazy.
And people that can't afford, that need these medications to survive, and they can't afford them here because we have the highest drug prices in the entire world.
And in that case, you know, the good luck of the buyer is that it was just calcium, but in many cases it gets mixed with cement and rat poison and all sorts of things.
And even worse is the cartel in Mexico we found out.
There's a great LA Times investigation on this, and then we sort of started doing our own investigation.
but they're mixing these drugs with fentanyl and meth.
So I think it was something like 70% of the drugs that they bought and tested had actually had meth and fentanyl and Americans were crossing the border into Mexico to buy these drugs and then dying.
It's insane.
But it's all, again, it's like easy for us to blame the cartel and other people for doing this, but it's all our It's the broken system that we have in our country.
Why are we paying, you know, why are we, this woman that we filmed with, she was paying $700 for this medication that she needs and she couldn't afford it.
Her health insurance wasn't covering it.
So she would go across the border and pay $60 for it.
I doubt that they knew, for example, there was fentanyl and meth mixed in with some of their other medications because that creates a huge problem for them.
So this woman that we followed, she goes there, she buys her medication, and I asked her, do you know what's in there?
Oh, no, but my friend told me that it's a legitimate pharmacy.
Of course, she has no idea that this is happening, that the cartel is actually threatening them to death if they don't stock their shelves with their fake pharmaceuticals.
The LA Times, again, did an amazing investigation where they did test it.
And again, I think it was something like seven or eight out of their ten that they tested had fentanyl and meth, which was crazy, out of two pharmacies, I think.
And yeah, in our story, we sort of looked at how it ends up in the shelves and who's making it and how it's being produced.
There's an amazing doctor in Mexico City called Dr. Loco, who we spend time with, a doctor, a crazy doctor, Dr. Loco.
Who was a chemist himself, a doctor as well, and his father owned a pharmacy, so he sort of knew how to, and he showed us, he's putting the little silicone pouch inside, and the cotton ball that goes inside, and it looks exactly the same.
But she keeps saying that without that expense, without that money, they wouldn't be able to look for all these new drugs.
Which is also BS because I think it's something like 34% or 35% of the money that was spent or it was 35% more money spent on advertisement and trying to sell the drug than it was on actual R&D research and development.
And I think part of the exposure from your work led to them changing the laws because they had no database.
So the way it would work, I'll explain it to people, is that there was no database.
So if you got a prescription from a doctor and you went in to get OxyContin, you could go to another doctor down the street and get another prescription.
And they clearly had it set up like that so that there could be abuse because that was how to maximize profits.
And they have these pain management centers.
And I used to see them when I would do stand-up in Florida, where you would go and it would be called a pain management center.
And it's essentially You would go to a doctor, and all the doctors there is to write a prescription for OxyContin.
And then you go right next door to their little pharmacy that they had on site, and all they had was OxyContin.
And you had just a parking lot filled with zombies.
So my husband did an amazing follow-up documentary.
If you remember the OxyContin Express, do you remember that we were investigating this one pain clinic called American Pain?
And the owners were identical twins, born identical twins, and they owned this pain clinic.
And they followed us down I-95 because they saw us filming outside their door.
And they followed us down I-95.
And, you know, I'm at the wheel and I'm seeing that we're running low on gas.
So I stop at the gas station and they park right behind us.
And these two big guys with...
You know, big muscles come out and start yelling at us.
And so I take off.
And they follow us and keep following us.
And at one point, I run out of gas.
And I go to the side of the—and we're on a freeway on the I-95.
And I'd been calling—contact in law enforcement, DEA, that we'd been talking to.
And she said, call 911 right now.
I know these guys are bad news.
Call 911 right now.
So we called 911, told them what was happening.
being chased down the freeway, eventually run out of gas, park on the side of the freeway.
But they were so dumbfounded as to why we're parking on the side of the freeway that they just park behind us and don't get out of the car for a few minutes.
And then the police shows up.
And then they come up with a silly story that they thought I was an ex-girlfriend stalking them.
And then we took down their license plate.
And my husband started looking into them They ended up in prison at federal time.
Part of it they were using, the surveillance tapes they used was part of our conversations.
They were talking about us and our investigation into them and the OxyContin Express.
But my husband stayed in touch, basically wrote them a letter when they were in prison.
And we were deciding on whether he should say, hey, I was the guy who directed OxyContin Express, but he didn't.
And he just said, hey, my name is Darren Foster.
I'm a documentary filmmaker.
I've been fascinated by your...
They ran the biggest prescription pill operation in American history.
Like they were the Pablo Escobar of America, basically.
They were making millions and millions of dollars out of a couple of storefronts in Florida.
And so he contacted them and they wrote back and said, yeah, I'm interested.
And by the way, say hi to your wife.
So they knew full well who he was.
And he ended up doing an amazing doc.
It's called American Pain.
You should watch it.
But it's about them, the rise and fall of these twin brothers, but also the complicity of the pharmaceutical companies.
And they full well knew exactly what was happening and did nothing about it.
And then you see the trail of devastation everywhere these pharmaceutical drugs went.
And all these communities that got hooked on the pills and then when they changed the regulation and made them more difficult to get, then these people started doing heroin.
We did another documentary called Death by Fentanyl where we looked at the fentanyl and we investigated this one pharmaceutical company called Insys Pharmaceuticals, or Insys Therapeutics, where they were selling subsys, which was a fentanyl product.
And they were doing the exact same thing that Purdue had done just, you know, a few years before, where they were paying doctors for fees to basically prescribe.
They were prescribing fentanyl to people with headaches and, like, shoulder pain.
And we got a whistleblower to tell us exactly how it was happening and how they were, you know, calling because the pills or this product was really, really expensive, so insurance companies were paying for it.
So she would call insurance companies and say, oh, and they would ask, but, you know, this is only supposed to be prescribed to cancer patients.
Does this patient have cancer?
And they knew how to answer in a way that the person would believe they did, even though they didn't.
They were making millions of dollars.
It was the only executive that has ever gone to trial and been found guilty.
Funnily enough, I worry more when we're going after people in high positions of power than I do after, you know, months of trying to get access to the cartel, for example, and when they say yes, it's a yes, it's a yes.
But in some situations, yeah, I mean, I've gotten lots of...
Hate emails.
And the guy that owned that in CIS Therapeutics, for example, threatened to sue us.
Because we compared him to El Chapo and said basically he saw an opportunity in fentanyl just like El Chapo from the Sinaloa cartel saw an opportunity in selling fentanyl.
And how they were sort of the same in different parts.
I mean less, but it's like these black and gray markets.
And gray markets can be anything from people selling counterfeit goods or anything that's basically not – or like gray markets basically.
Cash in hand and you're not actually working in an office.
Yeah.
So yeah, so it's a lot.
And no one knows anything about these worlds.
And I'm fascinated not by the pointing of the finger of these guys are the bad guys and we're spending time with the bad guys, but more about what is the motivation and why, how is the system broken that got us to this place?
Because again, it's trying to figure out the root cause instead of the enforcement side of it.
But one of the other things you did that was terrifying was, and just terrifying to know this, was that Los Angeles police were confiscating weapons and then selling them to the cartels in Mexico.
And that you could just go to Mexico easy.
It's easy to go straight across the border into Mexico.
So you can go to Mexico with a trunk full of weapons.
These are the same guns that are being used to create the violence, that create the reason why many people want to leave Mexico and come to the United States.
And that's why when we went to Niger, we only went because we knew that we were going to have military convoy with us and people protecting us because we knew.
But yet, I mean, it was months of planning because we were all, yeah, you don't...
That person eventually asks you to send a photo of yourself, a compromising photo or video of yourself, and they'll send you a photo or video back.
And it's mainly targeting teens, which is really sad, American teenagers.
And then once you do send those photos or videos, the person says, well, I have all the contact information on Facebook of all your friends and your work and your parents and your school, whatever, and I'm going to send this to everyone if you don't send us money right now.
And the really sad part of that is that we spent time with parents whose kids committed suicide.
And within the span of like a couple of days.
So they started chatting online.
There was this kid called Jake in Utah.
So sad.
He was contacted by what looked like a beautiful girl on a Sunday night.
By Thursday or Friday, he committed suicide because he was too embarrassed that his friends and his family would see those photos.
But amazingly, he left behind a letter for his mother and instructions on how to access his phone so she could see what had happened to him and also who he had sent money to in the hopes that she would be able to investigate or send people to investigate.
And the American authorities did.
They found that the people that he was sending money to were in the Philippines, but that was it.
Like, there was nothing else they could do because it was a foreign country.
And so we set out to the Philippines and tried to figure out who it was behind this scam.
And we found the whole community of people involved in the scam and scamming millions out of Americans.
A lot of them, interestingly enough, are actually trans people.
In the trans community, we spoke to a drag queen, for example, who was scamming a lot of people.
And during COVID, what happened is that they usually do drag queen contests.
They make money that way or work at clubs or...
And a lot of them lost their jobs during COVID and they had no government assistance and so they found a way to make some money this way by sextorting Americans.
Yeah.
And that was super, a crazy journey too.
Just one of the scenes we filmed was we spent time in a prison with a guy that was in prison for extorting Filipino women.
And it was sort of the beginning of our investigation.
We were trying to figure out if he was connected to anyone else, thinking he was like sort of small fish just extorting people in the Philippines.
And then by talking to him, he basically admits on camera while talking to me.
Actually, I've done this to many, many Americans, and one of them...
And I asked him, do you know anyone who's committed suicide?
Because it's a huge problem in the U.S. He was like, yes.
There was one man who was married.
He was an engineer, I believe.
And he committed suicide after we extorted him.
And I said, how do you know?
He says, because his camera laptop was on, and we could see it.
I was like, wait, did you not try to stop him?
I was like, no, because we heard people saying that they were going to commit suicide, but they never did, so we thought he was bluffing.
The story was that the whole thing was an intelligence operation and that what they were doing was compromising these people.
You get them to go there.
A bunch of celebrities are going to be there.
A bunch of wealthy people are going to be there.
A bunch of famous scientists are going to be there.
Everyone's having a wonderful time.
And you figure like, oh, look, all these Nobel Prize winning scientists and Nobel laureates and actors and singers.
All these people are going to be there.
This sounds like a great place to be.
This guy, he gets endorsed by all these other people.
Oh, Jeffrey Epstein is this wonderful billionaire philanthropist and he's just very eccentric and he loves to have these incredible parties and all the most interesting people.
And then you go there and next thing you know you're doing drugs and You lose your little inhibitions, and there's a bunch of lovely young ladies.
You don't know how old they are.
And they take you into a room and film you, and now he's got the goods on you.
That she interacted with and that she knows of and that she either had sex with or knows people that had sex with and that knows that they were all filmed.
Well, Michael Badden, the famous forensic doctor that was in that HBO series Autopsy.
Did you ever see that show?
It's a fascinating show that was on...
A while back that it was basically how this guy, Michael Baden, who's this brilliant forensic specialist, would examine these bodies and find evidence of them being murdered when, you know, they'd said they'd fell down a flight of stairs or this or that.
When he examined Jeffrey Epstein's neck, he said that the injuries were indicative of someone being strangled, ligature strangulation, not hanging.
And that it was at the base of his neck, which is not where you get strangled if you hang yourself.
If you hang yourself, all your weight goes up here, and he gets strangled up like near where your jawline is.
But this was down at the base of his neck.
Indicating like someone strangled him from behind.
And his bones in his neck were fractured.
Which is also indicative of someone who's strangled to death.
This is without doubt a bunch of incredibly powerful people who are using their influence to make sure that this information doesn't get out.
Or that the impact of this information getting out is very minimal.
And that it just gets swept under the rug.
And every time more information comes out, there's a brief little burst of outrage, but no one goes to jail, no one gets caught.
Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex trafficking, right?
But to who?
To who?
You have to sex traffic to someone to be arrested for sex trafficking.
And when there's no one that's being listed as the people that you sex trafficked, but the implication is that these people who you're sex trafficking to are the most powerful people in the world.
That these powerful, influential people are the ones that were the ones that were using this, the ones that were there, the ones that were victimized by the scheme.
No, this was post the, look, there was an official autopsy, so he hung himself, and then they brought in, the family brought in Dr. Michael Badden to examine it.
I think it was Jeffrey Epstein's brother brought him in.
I forget who brought him in, but Dr. Michael Badden goes in there and he's like, no, this guy was killed.
But the idea is that he was either, you know, intelligence agency from America or Mossad and that this was a long-term tactic to control people and to get influence over them.
I mean, you take these men and most of these men that are in these positions of power, these politicians and heads of enormous corporations and I mean, look, the guy who was the CEO of Victoria's Secrets donated a $60 million house to him in Manhattan.
And there was another guy who was a big CEO who wound up giving him over $100 million.
There was a bunch of people that gave him sizable chunks of money.
It's also crazy that that is probably going on right now somewhere else.
There's probably another version of that happening, whether it's in other countries or other sort of similar situations.
Look, intelligence agencies have always infiltrated shady groups, and for a good reason.
I mean like this is my argument about where people are saying all these feds instigated January 6th.
I'm sure they did.
But also you would want like legitimate good intelligence agents on the ground January 6th just so that things don't go south so that you know what the fuck is happening.
If you've got a bunch of people that are like some crazy militia group and they're planning on detonating a nuclear bomb in the capital, the only way to find out is to have people on the ground, right?
But what happens is Those people then have a vested interest in getting people to do things so that they can arrest them, which is like the Governor Whitmer case, where the 14 people that kidnapped, or were planning to kidnap, 12 of them were FBI informants, and two of them were FBI agents.
The one who was the fake demolition expert who was going to blow up the bridge, and the other one who was the getaway driver.
They're federal agents.
Like, it's all fake.
The whole thing was fake.
There was two dummies.
They were like, what are we doing?
And those guys were the ones who wound up going to jail.
They got roped into this thing, and the next thing you know, they're being talked into some crazy plan where they're, you know...
Kidnapping the governor.
And the guys who were doing, they were like, we never thought it was really going to happen.
Like they were just losers who all of a sudden they're a part of like some crazy rebellious organization that's supposed to do something that's going to – we're going to stand up against tyranny and we're going to arrest that bitch and what they were really doing was being tricked by federal informants.
But also, there is a sizable percent of this population that has an IQ lower than 85. It's pretty big.
All of which vote.
What is the number?
What's the number of people, I know we've looked this up before, but it's pretty confusing.
The number of people that are under 85 IQ is pretty high.
And if you can get one of them and tell them that you're going to kidnap the governor, the next thing you know, oh god, you have nothing going on in your life, your life is meaningless, and all of a sudden it's exciting, and you think you're a part of a good group, like, we're doing the right thing.
Because you're fucking dumb.
You have an 85 IQ. Right.
You're incapable of seeing big pictures.
You have a 9-volt brain.
There's a lot of people out there like that.
A lot.
And that's the problem with incentivizing people to arrest people.
Like, well, you've got to get them to do something to arrest them.
I do wonder, is there something that we don't know?
Is it possible that the—I mean, what led them to that kid or to those people that were wanting to kidnap the governor?
Like, were there any pre-planning?
Maybe they knew that they were doing something, and in order to catch them, they had to sort of give them a little bit of fuel or— Yeah, they're probably radical.
It is a difficult, I have to say, and I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but if you're a law enforcement and you're constantly being accused of showing up after the crime happens, if you're trying to prevent crime, then that's what you do.
You're monitoring chat groups and trying to figure out how you can stop this from happening in the future.
I fully support the creation of pharmaceutical drugs for the most part.
The problem is you have the people that create them, which are these scientists that are working and doing these studies and tests to try to figure out drugs that are beneficial and help people.
And then you get the money people.
And the money people are not scientists.
They're just like, how can I make more?
You know, it's like the story of the Sackler family.
I don't want to get into politics at all, but it's an interesting conversation about how much do we want the government to regulate more or less, right?
It's all about regulation and so many of these.
And for my investigations, a lot of what happens actually happens because of lack of regulation.
We did an episode on body parts.
Not organs, but this time it was actually body parts.
So most people think that when you die, you have a say in what happens to your body, right?
You can be cremated, you can be buried, or you donate it to science.
But actually, the U.S. is pretty much the Wild West of the body parts business.
And there's people who are chopping up your body and selling them from the back door without any of your knowledge, which is crazy.
And a lot of it is legal.
A lot of it is illegal, and it's being done, and people are being caught.
There was a mother and daughter.
A mother and daughter in Colorado who had a funeral home, and they also had a donation center on the side.
And they had people come in and say they wanted their loved ones to be cremated, and instead of cremating them, they were, again, chopping up body parts and selling them to biogenetics and scientific centers around the world.
And, you know, having surgeons operate on your hip, practicing with a hip, all of that is science.
But that's better, I think, because at least you're aware that you donated the body.
In these cases, they thought they'd received ashes that contained their loved ones, and instead there was like batteries, burnt batteries, and other bodies mixed in.
People would go, this is such a crazy story, people would go into this funeral home, and as they're signing the paperwork for the cremation, they would hear a chainsaw in the back.
We heard of skulls being sold for $5,000, so we met with a funeral director that brought us a pen like this, and inside the pen there was a little human skull.
And he told us all about how it works, like how they were...
Selling, again, instead of cremating the bodies, they were selling their parts.
There was a skin wallet being sold online for $2,500.
And so these groups, you would see the tongues and wombs.
There was one that had a uterus in a formaldehyde, and they're being sold, but it's these secretive groups that you need somebody who's been accepted into the group, but we saw all the listings.
Not only that, one of the wildest stories was there was a mayor in a city in China that was having an affair with a local television anchor.
The wife found out about it.
The woman went missing.
Her name was scrubbed off the internet.
Months later, a new exhibit was in the body's exhibit of a pregnant woman who's exactly the same size and exactly the same amount pregnant that was when she went, lady, when she went missing.
She was eight months pregnant when she went missing.
And the woman, who is the wife, who is married to the mayor who is having an affair, was the manager of the plastination factory.
So she killed the lady that her husband was having an affair with, allegedly, and then turned that lady and her eight-month-old fetus into a fucking statue, which is still on display.
Well, they've done investigative journalist reports on this.
And one of the things they did is they went to one of the plastination factories and you see on the ground they have bodies laid out with pillow covers over their heads with blood on them.
So these people are tied up, they're executed, there's a bullet hole in their head, and they're all laid out.
And then the factory's right there.
So they're taking these people because they have to do this within 48 hours of death.
They take them, they skin them, they put them in this fluid.
I don't know exactly what the process is.
But essentially they use this process to stop the body from decaying.
Von Hagen faces investigation over use of bodies without consent.
Gunther Von Hagen is a pioneer of body plastination, the technique of preserving bodies using saturating them with polymer resin, who was criticized for his televised autopsy in London, is under investigation in the former Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan.
And in Heidelberg, Germany.
He's accused of using bodies without permission and falsely carrying the title of professor.
Kyrgyz, member of the parliament, Abakan Tashkhtanbeko, accused Professor Von Hagen of having illegally abducted several hundred bodies from former Soviet prisoners, hospitals, and psychiatric asylums.
I mean, there's no way of verifying that it came from the black market, so we don't know where the source is.
And he said, basically, you can judge me all you want, but if you were dying or if your son or daughter was dying and you knew that the only way you could get this organ was on the black market, wouldn't you do it?
Do you know when they do like a liver donation, like say if you needed a liver and you and I were the same blood type, they could take half my liver and give it to you and my body would regenerate that liver to full size in six to eight weeks?
And they came on and they are extremely concerned about AI and the race to sentient AI and who controls it and what happens when it gets released and what it does.
And it also seems inevitable.
It seems like it's just going to happen.
And China is involved in it, Russia is involved in it, the United States is involved in it, and who knows how many other countries are involved in this research as well.
Within our lifetime, I think there's going to be artificial people.
Yeah.
You know, that's one of the big speculations that people have about these aliens and that what we're seeing is an alternative dimension or an alternative timeline and what these things are is us in the future.
But this one, it started with a DM, a direct message from a woman in Minnesota who told me that her father was in prison in Mozambique, Africa.
And that she was absolutely sure he was not guilty.
And it started a huge investigation into Mozambique used to be Portuguese.
They speak Portuguese.
I have friends that live in Mozambique.
So I immediately piqued my curiosity.
Why is an older American guy stuck in prison and his daughter is...
Desperate enough to contact me because she wants to try to figure out how to free her dad.
And so we started an investigation.
Turns out this guy was scammed.
Terrible scam.
He was told he was a retired truck driver, former military.
He was told that his wife had just died.
He was told he had gotten an inheritance and that the inheritance was in Europe.
His wife had connections to families in Europe, so it was totally believable, according to him.
But in order to get the inheritance, he would have to do a pit stop in Africa.
But they would pay for everything, his flights, his hotels, everything.
So it was a free ride to go to Africa, pick up the documents, and then take them to Europe.
And in the bag with the documents were some chocolates that he was to take to Europe to the people he was meeting.
And as he's in the airport about to board his flight to Europe, he was stopped by the authorities, and he was carrying five kilos of heroin inside these chocolates that he was completely unaware of.
And I completely believe he had no idea.
So he's sent to prison.
He's given one-day trial, 17-year sentence.
He's almost 70 years old, so he's probably going to die in prison.
And it turns out he wasn't the only American there.
There was another American from California and a Canadian, all victims of the same scam, and within two, three days, all three of them.
And this is just one high-security prison in Mozambique out of all prisons around the world.
So we went, we visited him, we saw him, we brought his daughter to see him.
She hadn't seen him in four years.
Super emotional.
And then we went to South Africa.
We basically investigated the trail of money and who had paid for what, the hotel, the flights, everything.
And we came face to face with one of his scammers.
We filmed undercover in a hotel in South Africa where I basically confronted this guy who scammed him.
I pretended that I was a friend and I was looking for that inheritance as well and that I had...
You know, that I was willing to travel and do whatever for that money.
I pretended I was what they call a MAGA, which is a dumb, gullible American.
They call them MAGAs.
Like Make America Great Again MAGA? Yeah, it's interestingly the same name, but I don't think it comes from that.
It was interesting because at first we sat down and I was saying that Rodney Baldus, which is this man's name, the Rodney Baldus name, and you have his inheritance.
And I said, I think it's $2.7 million and is that money still available?
And he was like, actually, it's 2.4, 2.5.
I was like, okay.
So he's corroborating what I'm saying.
say.
So I started talking with him a little bit more.
But then he got a little suspicious.
And he was asking to see my ID.
He said, Okay, great.
But in order to be able to continue talking to you, I have to your ID, I couldn't show him my ID, because I hadn't given him my real name, obviously.
So at that point, I decided to get to leave pretend I was going to my room to get my ID.
And then I came back and decided to confront him and tell him, Look, I'm a journalist, I'd really like to talk to you on camera.
And he was like, pretended that he had no idea what I was talking about, that he didn't know, that he had called me Zoe.
And then he was like, no, no, no, I'm here to meet, what's her name?
Catherine.
I was like, wait, aren't you Mr. Wilson, the man that I just spoke to?
And he was like, no, no, no, I'm not Mr. Wilson.
My name is Robert or whatever.
I was like, dude, I have you on camera.
I'm filming.
He's like, We're doing what?
I'm filming.
I filmed this whole interaction.
And then he stands up and left.
And it was a whole thing because, you know, he's part of this bigger group that is a criminal group and kind of scary and dangerous.
But we presented this.
We reached out to the State Department to see if they could investigate because they have done very little for Rodney.
And if they could investigate his case.
And crickets.
Nothing.
They didn't refuse to talk to us.
They say they're doing what they can to help him, but he's in completely substandard conditions in this prison with no real access to good health care.
But it's not, because when you're able to sit down with a cartel member, you know, or a scammer in the Philippines or all these people that I meet around the world, and I'm able to find humanity in them, I'm able to find commonalities between me and him, I'm able to see that if this person in the majority of cases was given other opportunities that he wouldn't be the person he turned out to be.
That shows me that it's not entirely humanity that's broken.
It's the system.
It's the systems that we human beings have created.
But the accountability at the end of the day lies in the people of power, the people that are able to make a difference in that system and not in the drug dealers or the coyotes smugglers or the scammers.
It's amazing that you can maintain that perspective and that just really is an amazing testament to your character that you're able to see that for what it is and not lose faith in Yeah.
Because you're confronted constantly with these scenarios but that is the one thing to have in common is desperate people.
You're one of the real last boots on the ground journalists who goes into terrifying places and consistently exposes these incredibly fascinating, horrific scenes.
And if it wasn't for you, a lot of people wouldn't know about a lot of these things.