Capturing The World’s Most Prolific Drug Dealer

00:04
Brent Hinson
Between the lines with Virtual Academy. We all have a story to tell. Hello, and welcome to another edition of between the Lines with Virtual Academy, where podcasts going beyond the bads to allow members of law enforcement, public safety, and first response place to tell their stories and also talk about the cases that have impacted their lives. Glad to have you guys along. I’m your co host, Brent Henson, and today we get to hear from a guest who is part of an unprecedented operation that took down a man who at one time was responsible for distributing 20% of the world’s heroin. Should be a fascinating story and one that may be eye opening as well. But before we bring him in, allow me to introduce our host. He is responsible for 100% of the fun here on the podcast. He is Mr. Michael Warren. How are you, sir?

00:49
Michael Warren
I’m doing pretty good. And just so our listeners know, we had a really bad storm blow through Michigan last night, and that took the old Internet down. So we are recording this through a hotspot on an iPad. And so if I sound different, we’ll.

01:03
Brent Hinson
Blame it on, you know, at least it’s not dial. You know, you’ve got some high powered stuff.

01:09
Michael Warren
I miss dial up. I like the sound. When you started hearing those clicks and pops and those noises, you knew the magic was about to happen.

01:18
Brent Hinson
There was something to that.

01:19
Michael Warren
Nostalgia.

01:20
Brent Hinson
But I like the speed of what I got.

01:22
Michael Warren
Speed, but nostalgia. You notice that the older we get, the more nostalgic you become.

01:28
Brent Hinson
Yeah, I guess there’s some truth to that.

01:30
Michael Warren
That’s kind of one of the reasons why I’m excited about the podcast today, because I get to be a little bit nostalgic because our guest, he and I have a long history together, and so I’m excited to talk to him.

01:45
Brent Hinson
Of course, we’ve got it kind of pigeonholed into one particular incident, but a fascinating career, and I’m sure you’ll touch on multiple aspects from that career during the course of the episode.

01:54
Michael Warren
I’m excited to hear his story. So why don’t you go ahead and introduce him, and let’s bring him aboard.

01:59
Brent Hinson
All right. Our guest today has over 30 years of investigative experience in high level domestic and international drug trafficking organizations. He served the US. Drug Enforcement Agency for 20 years before moving on to the Oregon Department of justice as an Assistant Special Agent in charge of in the Criminal Justice Department back in 2019. In 2017, he was featured on CNN’s declassified Untold Stories of American Spies, talking about a subject we’ll get into today, the role he played in taking down one of the most prolific heroin traffickers in the world. It is our pleasure to welcome to the podcast Philip Kearny. Thanks for joining us today and look forward to hearing your story.

02:37
Phillip Kearney
Certainly. Thank you for having me, Michael. It’s good to reconnect with you again.

02:40
Michael Warren
Good to see you again, my friend, and I hope I can call you a friend. I think we’re at that stage for our listeners. Why don’t you tell them where we met and then we’ll kind of talk about what that looked like.

02:53
Phillip Kearney
We met at the Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, as we both were students there in the late eighty s and early 90s.

03:01
Michael Warren
Now, Phil, I don’t know if you know this or not, but when I started college, I was 16. I did a semester. I started halfway through a year and I did a semester. When I came back the next year, they put me in the football dorm. And to be very clear, I was not a football player. You may remember this guy. Right across the hallway from me were two football players. One was Brian Wolfolk and his roommate was Eric Green.

03:31
Phillip Kearney
I remember both of them well. I’m sorry that you were placed in a football dorm. As a former football player at Liberty University. My apologies for what you had to suffer living around us.

03:41
Michael Warren
There was another football player that happened to be on my hall, guy named Mark Thomas. And Mark, what I remember most about him was his smile and the fact that he loved coming down and partaking of the snacks that I had acquired.

03:55
Phillip Kearney
Not surprised.

03:56
Michael Warren
Not surprised at all. But in addition to playing football at Lu, you also were a criminal justice major. And so you and I had several classes together, and that’s where we kind of formed our common bond because we both were looking for a career in law enforcement.

04:13
Phillip Kearney
That is correct.

04:14
Michael Warren
Yep.

04:14
Phillip Kearney
I recall we also went on a law enforcement related field trip together to federal prison.

04:19
Michael Warren
And I have to throw this story out because it’s one of those things that stuck in my mind. We had a professor that was also a Lynchburg police officer, and he happened to show up late one day for class. And I don’t remember if it was you, but somebody, when he walked in, he showed up late for class and somebody gave him a hard time about it. And he looked at them because they were a football player, and he said, yeah, because I apologize for that. I thought we had a jailbreak, but it turns out it was just a football team out for a run. I will say this as a proud graduate of the school, not once, not twice, but three times. I love what Liberty does and their support for the law enforcement profession. I think that it prepared me, I think, as well as I could have been prepared to start the career in law enforcement.

05:09
Phillip Kearney
Yeah, I completely agree with you. They very much love the first responder community and the football team, although maybe a little bit wilder than the rest of the student body when were at Liberty, certainly towed the line and did a good job. There a bunch of good guys who really laid the foundation for where the program’s at.

05:25
Michael Warren
Absolutely. So I’m going to start up with you kind of like I do with most of my guests. How did you choose or what was it that drew you to law enforcement as a career?

05:36
Phillip Kearney
So my father was a police officer in Jacksonville, Florida, for 47 years. I have two uncles who also retired police officers in North Florida. I went off to Liberty thinking I was going to make it in the NFL thanks to a pretty catastrophic injury in my sophomore year that did not transpire. So I decided to take my first criminal justice course because, honestly, I thought, well, this will really help my GPA. I essentially grew up in a police department, and this will be an easy class, and I can get an A. So I took the class, and I fell in love with it. And I knew then that I was called into law enforcement. I called home and told my father that I’d chosen criminal justice as my major and I was going to be a police officer like him. And we lived in Liberty anyway.

06:21
Phillip Kearney
We lived in a very not uptight, but a very closed society where the rules were important. And anyway, I called home and told him that I was going to get in law enforcement and the string of obscenities that was coming from the other end of the phone, because he knew how difficult the job was going to be going forward. So that’s how I got into it. Really enjoyed my time there at Liberty. And when we graduated, my father came up for my graduation, took me to lunch the day before, and I had gone through the hiring process with his department the second semester of my senior year, and I was ready to start the police academy. I had finished everything. I think we graduated, like, on a Thursday, maybe a Friday, and I was to start the police academy in Jacksonville, Florida, on the following Monday.

07:12
Phillip Kearney
Well, while having lunch with him, he informed me that the city doctor that looked at my X rays thought that I had spinal stenosis. So I was not going to be allowed to start the academy until I could see a specialist who could determine if I had an issue with my spine. Well, it took more than two weeks to get in to see the specialist. I had missed too much time at the academy, so they said, don’t worry. Well, the specialist came back and said, no, you’re perfectly fine. You’re healthy enough to be a police officer. So I’d missed too much time at the academy, and they said, don’t worry. We have another class starting in about six weeks. Enjoy your summer. So I thought, well, this is know, just finished four years of college, live here in North Florida. The beach is close. I can really have some fun and start the academy in July.

07:54
Phillip Kearney
Well, they had a special election that summer and a new mayor was brought in. And the new mayor stopped hiring for fire department and police. So I was out of luck. There were no police academies starting, so I went to work part time for that sheriff’s office as bailiff, which I’d been doing previously. Every summer, coming home from Liberty, I worked as a bailiff. So I did that for about a year until the state of Florida opened up hiring with the Department of Corrections. The advantage to that was they would pay me a salary, which was better than what I was getting, and I would get all my law enforcement training for free. So I took that job sometime in 92. I worked at the Florida State Prison where Ted Bundy, as well as 121 other men had died in the electric chair. And we would go work in the prison for three weeks and then go to training for three weeks.

08:42
Phillip Kearney
So while in the prison, I worked death row. I worked the max jail inside. When inmates would get in trouble, I did the visitations when all the family would come in. You had to search everybody thoroughly. So I got a lot of experience working in the prison, started to learn the mind games that you see on the streets. They’re the same games that are played in the prison. And it was quite advantageous for me. I had an opportunity to move to Utah for graduate school. So when I finished my training in Florida, resigned from that job and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, for graduate school. Got out there in 93, fall of 93, started working at the University of Utah, taking classes there, and was quickly hired by the Salt Lake City Police Department to be a police officer. So I started with Salt Lake City Police Department in June of 1994.

09:31
Phillip Kearney
That was an amazing agency at the time. Had an incredible experience working for them. I did patrol graveyards. I was pretty active. Well, I was very aggressive is a difficult term these days in law enforcement, but I was very aggressive. I not only responded to my calls, but if there wasn’t anything happening, I was finding things. I was digging in and being very proactive and getting things done. My captain noticed it pretty quickly, and he gave me an opportunity to move within his division from patrol to our street drug interdiction team. Now, at this time in Salt Lake City, although it’s the world headquarters for the Mormon church, about four blocks away from their headquarters was an open air drug market. At any time during the day, you would have 75 to 150 traffickers, mostly folks who were in our country illegally that would walk the street and sell heroin or cocaine.

10:28
Phillip Kearney
Cars would pull up, not even park. They just stop on the side of the road. Someone will walk off the sidewalk, and within 10 seconds a drug transaction had occurred, usually for $20 or $40 worth of product. So I did that assignment for a year and a half. We could be innovative. We could ride bicycles, we could walk around, we could go undercover, ride in our police vehicles, whatever. So I worked that for a year and a half, and I was introduced to our undercover narcotics team as a result. So when an opening came available, I put in for it, and I was promoted to detective and went undercover for approximately three years. That was a great experience, a lot of fun. Growing up as a police officer’s son, I was always very clean cut, so being able to grow out my beard and let my hair go into a ponytail and get earrings and was really interesting and a lot of fun.

11:22
Michael Warren
You’re talking about Salt Lake City, and you’re talking about this open air drug market in a city that most people, when they think about it as a religious denomination’s capital. And one of our previous guests, Andy Oblad, also worked with Salt Lake City. And when he was on our podcast, he talked about being involved in an active shooter that took place at a mall. And then he was involved in an officer involved shooting the day before he was set to retire. And I guess what I’m trying to bring out is that appearances, that the public, the perspective that they often have of places, oh, that’s a safe place. There’s no crime there. People really don’t have a good understanding of the underbelly of society in many ways. Would you agree with that?

12:07
Phillip Kearney
Yeah, most definitely. I will heap praise on the state of Utah and Salt Lake City. It was a phenomenal place to work. Within the police department, we had a saying, and that was if people only knew what happened in the shadow of the temple. But these citizens really supported us. They were great to us. They wanted a clean city and a clean society there in Utah. So were able to be police officers, which unfortunately is not as common these days. But yes, every city, regardless of its size, has its problems, no matter if it’s the international headquarters for religious organization or not. It was a great time. The five and a half years I spent with that police department, it was a great time, and it was very active, and I got a lot of experience as a result.

12:54
Michael Warren
You spent some time with Salt Lake City, then you made another career move, and what was that move, and then how did that come about?

13:01
Phillip Kearney
So one of my cases when I was undercover progressed past what the Salt Lake City Police Chief wanted us to do with our city narcotics squad. So I was asked by my division captain to take it to the DEA and see if they’d be interested in the case, because it was more of a long term investigation with cartel links. So I did. I went over to the DEA, talked to him about the case. They were happy to take it, but they requested that I stayed and worked it with them. So when I went back to my captain and told him, he told me that’d be fine, just so it didn’t take too much of my time. So I would work my cases and I’d work with the DEA when I got an opportunity. And then they saw an opportunity because of my education and my experience, they saw an opportunity to start recruiting me.

13:42
Phillip Kearney
I had no intent of leaving Salt Lake City Police Department until they explained to me how much money they made. And then I asked them, how do I get an application? The pay for federal agents was quite a bit better than what Salt Lake City was paying. So it was about a two year process to get hired by them. But I went through it and was hired in the summer of 99. DEA’s. Basic agent class 134. So I went from the very nice climate in the summer in Utah to the heat of Quantico, Virginia, in July of 99 and started the I think it was a 16 week academy with the DEA. It was a lot of fun. The academy was great. It was the first time that I went to an academy in which you lived there. So we belonged to the DEA 24 hours a day for the 16 weeks were there.

14:29
Phillip Kearney
It was incredibly physically demanding, which I loved. By the time I was done, they had beaten us half to death. And when you were done and walked across the stage, you knew that you had really earned it. So it was a great time. Went back to Salt Lake City for a couple months until I could get my house sold. Well, fortunately, or unfortunately was in a shooting, search warrant in a meth lab had a suspect that was trying to kill one of our agents. So I was forced to shoot. And then a few weeks later, my house was sold. DEA packed us up and moved us to Wilmington, North Carolina.

15:04
Michael Warren
You’re a brand new agent. You come from a law enforcement family, but was there anybody in your family that was kind of second guessing your choice of DEA? Brand new agent? Go back and, hey, I’m just here because I’m waiting to sell my house and get involved in a shooting. Was anybody coming to you say, hey, I’m not sure this was a great career move?

15:23
Phillip Kearney
No, actually, it was just the opposite. My father and my uncles were extremely supportive. They knew that my experience with DEA would far surpass what I could find with Salt Lake City. It was probably me. Well, it definitely was me. The second guessed my career move after moving to moved to. And that’s not a slight on the state of north carolina. I’ll explain in a minute. It but when I came back from the DEA Academy and was in Utah, there were a bunch of very young agents in Salt Lake City, as well as some experienced agents, but young agents who had all been cops around the nation. And it was like being on a tactical team. We were doing three and four search warrants a week, and it was a blast. I had so much fun. And then I packed up and moved to Wilmington, North Carolina.

16:12
Phillip Kearney
Well, and I should say the office in Salt Lake City was brand new. It was in a really desirable location in the city. We overlooked downtown. We had our own parking. It was secure. The building was huge, and it was fantastic. Well, then I packed up and moved to North Carolina. I walked into my office, a very historic building on the Cape Fear River. Walked into the office for the first day, and I have my big black tactical know expecting to be doing search warrants like I was in Utah walk in the very first day. And I opened the door and I look at this office, and it reminded me of the set of the old TV show Barney Miller. The furniture was falling apart. The paint was peeling off the walls. It was just a dilapidated mess. And the senior agent who was sitting there, who became a good friend of mine later, he looked at me and he asked what the bag was that I had over my shoulder.

17:06
Phillip Kearney
And I told him it was my tactical gear. He laughed, and he said, you’re not going to need that here. And I thought, oh, boy, what have I gotten myself into? So I sat around for a month, tried to be a DEA agent, but realized that office was not functioning the way the DEA I was accustomed to function, and I was very dismayed. I even called my old captain with the police department, and he assured me I could have my job back. Well, lucky for me, we got a new boss. We were without a boss when I first got there, but we got a new boss. He was young. He had 13 years old with DEA. His time had been in New York. He had done amazing things in his career already. This was his first time being a supervisor. I was fortunate that he had amazing supervisors in his past.

17:59
Phillip Kearney
So he came in. He had been an instructor for a short time at the DEA Academy, so I knew him just a little bit. He came in and I went to his office shortly after he arrived, and I told him, hey, I’m sorry, but this job’s not for me. Salt Lake City Police Department’s assured me I can go back, so I’m going to resign here pretty soon and move back, because this is just not what I want. He listened to me and heard why I didn’t like it. And he said, we’re going to change everything. We’re going to make this a great office. And he did. His name is Jonathan Wilson. Goes by Jethro. Everybody knows him as Jethro. And he was an amazing supervisor that really started my career off on the right foot. He came in, he found the strengths of the two senior agents that were there, and he told them, look, you’re going to have to watch over this kid.

18:46
Phillip Kearney
We’re going to do things that you haven’t done here in a while. We’re not going to be an office that sits back and waits for the state and locals to come to us. We’re going to go to their meetings. We’re going to find the best cases, and we’re going to show the folks here what DEA can really do. We’re going to be part of the team instead of just sitting back and waiting. So it turned out to be an amazing five years. Had a fantastic time there. It’s an area of the country which most DEA agents would love to go and retire, but turned out to be my first assignment. I wrote the first wiretap that office had in about 16 years. Had a fantastic time doing that. And then I got a relatively early promotion to Senior Special Agent and competed for a job about 5 hours north of where I was in Northern Virginia.

19:27
Phillip Kearney
It was a job in the Bilateral Case Investigation Unit, and that was a very select group of agents. Out of approximately 5000 DEA agents, there were six people in that group. And all they did was go after cartel heads based outside of the United States under the US law, title 21, USC nine five Nine and nine five Nine had two clauses in it that we used. People had to have the intent to get their drugs to the United States or the knowledge that their drugs were coming to the US. And if they had either of those, then we could focus an investigation on them as if they were living in the US. So when I reported to the Special Operations Division to be part of the Bilateral Investigative unit, I believed that I was going to be going to South America and going after Colombian cartels, because that’s what the unit had been doing for the most part.

20:22
Phillip Kearney
So I moved my family 5 hours north, bought the most expensive home to date that I’ve ever had to buy, and I was still 26 miles away from my office. Went to the office the first day. They let me kind of settle in, found my desk, met everybody. Day number two. I knew I had a big meeting to attend, so I went upstairs with a special agent in charge, a historic figure who’s all over the news these days. Derek Maltz was in his office. I walked in and there were probably 14 people in the office for this meeting. And I was by far the lowest ranking person in the meeting. And I sat down to listen, and I started hearing them talk about historical trafficking routes from Pakistan through Afghanistan into Iraq up into Turkey. How the CIA the dia us. Military, had a source network that they developed through Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the amounts of heroin that were coming out of Afghanistan.

21:28
Phillip Kearney
So probably 25 minutes into this meeting where I had said nothing, I’m just listening to people, I realized, holy crap, I’m not going to South America. They want to send me to Afghanistan.

21:42
Michael Warren
I want to make sure our listeners understand this right here, because we recently had an episode where we talked about human trafficking. And one of the problems that they’ve run into in those investigations is that a lot of these servers, these platforms that are hosting these sites where people can go and participate in this thing, they’ve moved offshore because we have trouble investigating it. But it sounds like that when it came to the drug trade, that were much more proactive and much further ahead of the time by having these things. Say, listen, if you’re bringing it here, if you’re sending it here and you know what’s happening and you’re trying to get it here, then we can take the investigations beyond the borders of America. Because if we wait until it gets here, it’s really too late, isn’t it?

22:26
Phillip Kearney
Yeah, that’s correct. Congress had done the right thing years before, and they had acted, and they had put this nine five nine law into place. Now, about a year and a half later, they also would act and put together another law that really made my job in Afghanistan and around the world easier. They put into place a narco terror law, 960. And that law said that if you are selling drugs around the world and you supply anything of pecuniary value don’t ask me to spell that word to a terrorist organization, then you are guilty of narco terror. Now, they wrote the law relatively broad, meaning that if someone was in Thailand and they were selling heroin, but they bought a bag of rice for a Thai related terrorist organization, well, that’s pecuniary value. You’re feeding terrorists, so you’re now guilty of narco terror under US.

23:26
Phillip Kearney
Laws. So we use that quite a bit in Afghanistan, starting in 2006 when it went into effect.

23:33
Brent Hinson
Now, you still have to have some sort of cooperation with the different countries as far as jurisdiction is concerned, correct?

23:38
Phillip Kearney
Most definitely, yes. So I arrived in Virginia, attended that meeting, realized, oh, man, I’m not going after Colombian cartels. I’m going to war. The war in Afghanistan was raging at the time, operation Enduring Freedom. I looked back, I’m not exactly sure how long, but I think it was three weeks after moving to Virginia, getting my kids enrolled in school, moving the stuff into the house. Three weeks later, I boarded a plane and went from Dulles International to Europe. I think it was London. London to Paris. Paris to Istanbul. Istanbul to Dubai. There were no short routes to get to Dubai at that time. We’re talking at least 16 hours of travel just to get to Dubai. And from Dubai, you could catch a plane to Afghanistan. Well, I got to Dubai. My supervisor, Brian DoD, was with me. He wanted to make sure on my first trip that I could navigate international travel.

24:37
Phillip Kearney
Very nice man, very helpful in moving me forward in these cases. So we’re there together. Our local DA office, it was a two man office in Dubai. They met us at the airport and said, we got good news and bad news. Bad news is your plane going to Dubai is having mechanical problems. It’s not going to leave for three days. Good news is your per diem here in Dubai is like a day, so enjoy yourself while you’re here. So it was a very large per diem because it was expensive there. So we needed some more supplies if we’re going to hang out in Dubai for a couple of days. Because everything we brought was to endure the harshness of the upcoming winter in Afghanistan and being in war. So he took us to a local. I think the place was called Care For. I think it’s like a Walmart, but a French company.

25:26
Phillip Kearney
Brian Dodd, my supervisor, went one way getting some supplies. I went the other way. We came back and we paid for our stuff, and were taken back to the hotel. And the hotel was just very grandiose. And we agreed that we’d meet down by the pool in a few minutes and just enjoy being in Dubai since we’re going to war in a few days. So I show up at the pool and Brian shows up. Wouldn’t you know it? Without being together in the store, completely separately, shopping. We purchased the same bathing suits, but the same color. And so they treated us like were a couple, which was very funny. We hung out in Dubai for a couple days, and then we finally were able to board the plane to Afghanistan. So the flights from Dubai to Afghanistan, the companies that ran these flights, they came up in many investigations later.

26:26
Phillip Kearney
And the planes were not the best planes ever. They were very old. They never would have been allowed to fly in the United States. I’m boarding this plane and I’m looking at the condition of the plane, and I thought, I’m not even going to make it to Afghanistan. This thing’s not going to make it. So made it there the first day or the first trip. And as I go to exit the plane, an explosion occurs at the far end of the airport. And then I see the Afghan soldiers. Very interesting culture shock. The Afghan soldiers in full uniform with rifles were holding hands. Just not something you would see. Every day in the United States. So big culture shock. So I was on the ground there for about three weeks. We lived in steel containers. We would travel around Kabul. We met with different political figures, really trying to get the lay of the land.

27:20
Phillip Kearney
And I did this trip well over four years. I deployed ten different times, but for the first year, I probably made three or four trips to Afghanistan, long term trips and getting to know people. And I also, in the four years, worked in 15 other countries where Afghan heroin was going, trying to gain the support of other nations in our investigations. So the first year, we’re trying to figure out really how we wanted to do these cases. Let me back up just a second and tell you why DEA decided to go to Afghanistan. Around 80% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan. Yet a very small amount of heroin seized in the United States comes from Afghanistan. So what is our purpose there? If we don’t have a lot of Afghan heroin coming to the United States, why were we going there to work it?

28:12
Phillip Kearney
Well, these traffickers were making so much money, billions of dollars, selling heroin around the world, and then they were supplying money. Our estimate was 25% to 35% of the money they made. They would supply it to terrorist organizations, to al Qaeda, the Taliban Hakani network, and others. And, of course, those terrorist organizations were waging war around the world against the United States and killing our troops in Afghanistan. So DEA’s mission was to save US. Service personnel in Afghanistan and US. Citizens around the world by going after these folks who were assisting terrorist organizations. So the first year, it took a while to come up with a plan. Other than my supervisor, I was essentially on my own, working with members of the Kabul country office. So that was our office based in kabul, Afghanistan. When I first arrived there in 2005, it was the old embassy, the embassy that we had abandoned when the Soviet union invaded Afghanistan.

29:13
Phillip Kearney
And it honestly was like walking into a museum. Nothing had changed since we abandoned that embassy in the early 80s. Whenever the Soviets came in, I had to get a lay of the land. I had to figure out who the biggest traffickers were. I spoke with military, CIA, anybody who had been there longer than me, trying to figure out who I should target, who were the big players. And one thing that kept coming up no matter who I talked to and no matter who I interviewed that first year, I may focus my investigations on someone that someone always had some connection to, a man named haji bacho ghul. So it took me a little while to realize it, but he was kind of the man in the shadows, and he turned out to be the man who was the big guy everybody worked for haji.

30:06
Phillip Kearney
Haji had distribution organization that was well connected around the world. He was supplying heroin all around the world. One of the first breaks I got was information that came out of our Tokyo country office that they had hajibacho entering Japan and working with people in Japan. So I flew tokyo, worked with our office there, met with the national police and some of the local police agencies, and I got to tell you, that was a lot of fun working with the Japanese police. It was very enlightening. Also, a country that was so technologically advanced, you essentially don’t go anywhere in Tokyo or the surrounding areas without being recorded in some manner. Yet their laws were almost archaic compared to ours. You could not make a drug investigation, couldn’t make a drug case without seeing a hand to hand buy. There was no conspiracy or anything that we would utilize in the United States to build a case.

31:06
Phillip Kearney
Yet they had all this intelligence from their video and comings and goings of haji and the people who worked with him. So I was able to gather all that. After building trust with them, I was able to gather all that and bring it in as evidence for our case. A quick, funny story. My second visit there, I took A-U-S. Prosecutor with me matt stiglitz, phenomenal prosecutor, did great work for the United States and is still doing so in his current capacity. We went over, we spoke to not only members of law enforcement, but prosecutors, and ultimately got all they had faith in us to give us what we asked for, but we realized weren’t certain that they understood who were. They knew were in law enforcement. But one day, they invited us out for a luncheon, and went to one of their ports, and we’re put one of their big navy vessels.

31:58
Phillip Kearney
We had a catered lunch on the deck. It was a beautiful day. They were all in their dress uniforms. They were really treating us like dignitaries. They took us out into the pacific, showed us a great time out there. And as we come back, there were a couple other vessels that were waiting, and they had their water cannons shooting, and we came under the water cannons, and we had people stand and hold umbrellas over us. So I looked at Matt and I told him, I’m like, I don’t think they really understand. We’re just working guys. They think we’re something special. But it was pretty cool anyway. So it took about a year of making mistakes to figure out exactly how to target this was something had never been done before. It was absolutely unprecedented working with the Kabul country office. DEA at that point started standing up what they called their fast teams, which was foreign advisory support team, or the US.

32:50
Phillip Kearney
Navy seals had a different name for it. They made fun of our fast team, but it was a group of DEA agents who went through a lot of training to become a tactical team around the world. So DEA was standing that up. Around the same time, I was working with the Kabul country office, working with the office in Peshawar, Pakistan, istanbul, Turkey, budapest, Romania, Tokyo, Paris. So I finally devised with special agent Jason Sandoval, who joined the team. About a year, 14 months after I got there, we came up with a plan. And that plan was to focus on three or four of the world’s largest heroin traffickers and really make an investigation, make a case like we would in the United States, a big historical conspiracy, finding the players all around the world. And we worked that for another three and a half years and became very successful with it.

33:46
Phillip Kearney
As I said, I was interviewing people all over Afghanistan and all over the world, and this name, Haji Bacho Ghul, kept coming up. And ultimately, I realized that he was, as I said before, the man in the shadows. Everyone was working for him. Anybody who had a name, a reputation in the drug world, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, they honestly were working for Haji.

34:09
Michael Warren
You had said that the estimates were that 20% to 25% of the proceeds that he was receiving that he was paying to these organizations. Why did he have to pay money to these organizations that we have deemed to be terrorist organizations?

34:23
Phillip Kearney
It made it easier for him to operate as a criminal in his country if he supported the Taliban, the Haqani network, and Al Qaeda. Rather than having to build a military force of his own to protect his heroin organization, he could rely on the terrorist organizations for protection, and it became more cost effective for him to pay them rather than compete against them. And at the same time, he also wanted to commit jihad against the United States. That’s some of the evidence that we’re able to bring into court later. So if he was caring for these terrorist organizations and they were killing our personnel or other military personnel from around the world that were in Afghanistan, he was fine with that, because in his eyes, were an invading force, and were taking money and food off of his table.

35:12
Michael Warren
Enemy of my enemy is my friend type thing. Yes. Vicarious results of that relationship.

35:19
Phillip Kearney
Yes, exactly. So I started traveling the world. All the leads that I came up with took me around the world, interviewing different police agencies, working with different police agencies. I traveled back and forth to Afghanistan on a regular basis. I had my mission, my case, or cases. I was running a couple different cases at the time. But Bachagul case was by far the biggest. Some of the interesting things that occurred, not only the travel from Dubai to Kabul, but it was difficult for the US. Embassy to get cash, and they needed cash. Very difficult for them to get it. So just about every occasion that I would travel over there, I would travel with at least $50,000 in cash, upwards of 100,000. I’m going all across the world with all this money in my backpack. Obviously, I can’t carry a gun because I’m in other countries.

36:14
Phillip Kearney
I was on high alert at all times while traveling, thinking that I was going to be kidnapped or robbed.

36:21
Brent Hinson
Did they run out of targets to put on your back?

36:24
Phillip Kearney
Yeah, and they were big targets, too. I had a lot of money on me. DEA wasn’t truly prepared for doing this. We didn’t have our internal bank at the Special Operations Division because we had never done anything like this. So I had to travel to DEA headquarters, would pull $40,000 from DEA headquarters, and then would drive up to Baltimore, pull money from the Baltimore office. We were pulling money from anywhere we could to travel over to Afghanistan. Sometimes I would stop in different locations and drop a little bit here, a little bit there to help out other investigations. But most of the time, it was going all the way through the country of Dubai or the United Arab Emirates was very helpful to us. When I started going over, things got tighter at the end. But I would take a lot of my equipment with me.

37:13
Phillip Kearney
No firearms, no ammunition, but a lot of equipment that I would need, because I’m not going to US. City. I’m going to war. So I would take my equipment with me, would have several bags I’d travel with, and one day in my hotel in Dubai, I was going to be there for a few days interviewing some people in Dubai before getting to Afghanistan. I noticed there was a tracker that had been placed on my bag. So I thought, oh, boy, I don’t know if this is from a trafficking organization, if this is from the police, I have no idea what’s going on. So I was always looking over my shoulder. And then my next trip, I was actually followed through the airport. Turned out it was by their security service, who took me into a room off the main thoroughfare in the airport. And I thought, this is it.

37:58
Phillip Kearney
This is how it ends. I’m not getting out of this one. I have no clue what’s taking place. I’m by myself. Nobody knows I’ve been pulled into this room. Well, what I didn’t realize is that country of Dubai had essentially outlawed bringing military equipment through their country. So they could have imprisoned me if they wanted to, because I violated their laws by having empty magazines for the pistol I’d be issued when I was over there. Empty magazines for the machine gun, three or four knives that I’d attached to the body armor, all these things. They could have imprisoned me, but they decided not to. Thank goodness they held on to all of it while I was in the country. And then gave it back to me. Just before I went over to Afghanistan, a very similar incident happened in Germany. I was actually treated much in a much more rough manner by the Germans than I was by the Emirates.

38:44
Phillip Kearney
The Germans were yelling and screaming at me in a room because I had empty Glock magazines. They were basically accusing me of trafficking weapons through their country and trying to explain to them. The person who was interviewing me did not speak English very well, trying to explain to him that I was a federal agent with the United States. And these are not weapons. They’re just empty magazines that I would fill up with ammunition. When I was in Afghanistan, I didn’t even have any bullets on me, no gun on me. It was getting pretty intense. I was in the room for about an hour when all of a sudden, captain from the United Airlines flight somehow came into the room. I have no idea how he knew that I was in there and I was being debriefed in such a way. But he came in, he talked to somebody in German and took the bag full of my Glock magazines and looked at me and said, they’re going to release you in just a minute.

39:29
Phillip Kearney
I got a seat for you on the plane. Sure enough, they released me. He was able to get me in first class. And just before the flight took off, he came and dropped the bag full of Glock magazines in my lap and said, sorry that they did that to you. Appreciate what you’re doing for us. So some very interesting circumstances since I’m going down this road, reminiscing on interesting times. Myself and Special Agent Jason Sandoval were flying to Afghanistan. On one occasion. We had just taken off from Dubai on, I think it was Cam Air, another horrible airline in which were praying the entire time that we would actually land and not blow up. We were probably 45 minutes to an hour into the flight, smoke detectors, and the plane started going off. I’m wide awake. Jason’s asleep, and I thought, oh, dear God, we’re going to die.

40:25
Phillip Kearney
This plane’s not going to make it. I’m either going to die of smoke inhalation, we’re going to start plunging down, and I’m going to die from being burnt up by fire. We’re going to crash, and I’m going to die. Or option number four could be worse. We’ve been in the air 45 minutes to an hour, which means we’re over the country of Iran. I’m going to crash and live and be taken hostage by the Iranians. So I woke up, Jason. I was pretty frantic. I’m like, Dude, we’re going to die. We’re going to die. He’s like, Couldn’t you let me sleep through it? Turns out that there was a group of Afghanis that were being deported from Dubai back to Afghanistan. They didn’t know how to use our type of toilets. So in their attempt to use our toilets, they missed. So the bathroom was a disaster, an absolute disaster.

41:19
Brent Hinson
I’m trying to wrap my head around.

41:21
Phillip Kearney
Missing in that part of the world. They just squat wherever they are, so they weren’t accustomed to sitting on anything and having a hole underneath them.

41:30
Brent Hinson
It’s a cultural thing.

41:31
Phillip Kearney
Yes. So evidently they squatted and made a mess in the bathroom. And I guess the smell was so terrible that the flight attendants used a couple of bottles of air freshener, and the air freshener set off the smoke alarms. So weren’t in any danger or any more danger of crashing.

41:49
Brent Hinson
But I thought you were going to say the little match there for a.

41:52
Phillip Kearney
Minute, because were all pretty frantic thinking the plane was going down. So this case with Haji started coming together. At this point, we’re probably two and a half years into the investigation. The Fast team had been developed. They would come into Afghanistan for three or four months at a time. I would travel over. I was going to Kabul every time, but I would stay in Kabul for a day or two, hand off whatever cash that I had brought to the country. And then I would either buy a helicopter or propeller plane, fly to Nangahar Province, Jalalabad, and I would live there with members of the Fast Team that were in country, and we would start doing the investigation on Haji. We had developed sources, and were running those sources in probably a good time to mention special Agent Vijay Namani, special Agent Dick Ma, and Intel Agent Truvina Rock.

42:46
Phillip Kearney
They were all living in Afghanistan at the time, part of the Kabul country office. And when I would be in the United States putting the case together, getting it ready for court, they were running things on their end. Did a really good job of developing sources and revealing people that we would not have known about otherwise. So very much a team effort at the time, keith Weiss was an ASAC. He oversaw what was happening in the country while I was back in the United States putting things together and working with the attorneys. So I would deploy out to Jalalabad. We would live with Special Forces troops that were out there. They would laugh at us all the time because were cops coming to war, trying to do a police officer’s job in the middle of the war. But they appreciated the fact that were trying to do our job to help them and save their lives and reduce the funding to terrorism.

43:32
Phillip Kearney
So they provided us with security. We would go out on the streets in Jalalabad, which was the Afghan version of the Old West. It was wild. Everybody’s armed. The streets are wild, people everywhere. Traffic flow is non existent. It’s just survival of the fittest. But we would go out, we would run our sources, and were able to eventually find a source that was so good he could get into Haji’s compound. Essentially, he was a teacher for some of Haji’s children. He was not treated well and didn’t like what was taking place, so he agreed to work with us. And just like running an operation here in the United States, we put a wire on him and ran him in and he got good conversation with Haji. That allowed us to solidify the case that we had built with the evidence from around the world. Eventually not only got a nine five nine, but a 960 charge on Haji.

44:26
Phillip Kearney
So I went to grand jury in Washington DC. And we indicted Haji about two and a half years into the investigation. So after that, it turned into a capture operation. Well, Haji was well connected and really wealthy. So when we started doing our operations, well, there’s a lot that I missed there. I apologize. We had some operations where we’d come in via helicopter. We invaded his compound. We seized a lot of evidence from his compound. We thought we’d be able to capture him that day, but somebody gave him a heads up and he ran away and disappeared into the mountains. Before we get to him, we also wanted to be able to prove the amount of heroin that he had moved around the world. And one way to do that was to get his books. Look at the financial side of this financial investigation in Afghanistan or that part of the world is very different than how we would do it here in the United States.

45:22
Phillip Kearney
To a degree. They don’t use banks, they use the Hawala system. And the Hawala system is built on trust. So we had to shut down the Hawala market in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and do a search warrant on his Hawaladar. Would you like me to explain the Hawala method?

45:40
Michael Warren
To me? It’s a lot. Like bitcoin. It’s more abstract than it is concrete.

45:47
Phillip Kearney
Yes, it’s built on trust. You have to have faith, a lot of family connections, knowing who you’re dealing with. But if I wanted to send money to you via Hawala, say, deposit 100,000 here locally and then you being based on the other side of the country, Mike, you would pick it up at your local Hawala. That money minus any fees. And then the Hawalas work it out together on how to transfer the money back and forth. It’s a cash based system built on trust. So we had to stop the Hawala market in Jalalabad and do a search warrant on the Hawala that Haji used. We were able to take his records, take the books from the Hawala, and what we discovered was that there was nearly a billion dollars had gone through back and forth around the world.

46:32
Michael Warren
That’s Ilian with a B, not an M, right?

46:35
Phillip Kearney
Yes, that’s correct. Yep. We had to make records, know we’re going through, doing things the way we documenting everything making it very professional for court when someone high ranking in Kabul with the US. Embassy got a call from President Karzai, the Afghan president at the time. The Afghan president told us that we had to return the books to the Hualidar because essentially we had stopped the Afghan version of Wall Street. We had completely shut down the financial operations in Afghanistan, so it was all hands on deck. We used as many copiers as we could at the embassy and back in the United States, and we made copies of everything and returned the books as quickly as we could so that we could continue having a friend in President Karzai.

47:24
Brent Hinson
Well, this is a guy who’s running a multi billion dollar operation. He didn’t use his real name on these ledgers, right?

47:29
Phillip Kearney
No, that’s incorrect. He never believed he would be touched, especially by the Americans. There was no reason for him to protect himself. Now, as advanced as he was running this operation around the world, the ledgers were clear that was his money moving around the world. So between raiding some of his heroin producing compounds and then raiding the Kawalidar in Jalalabad, were able to put together a really solid case. I went to grand jury in DC and got him indicted on several counts, and then it turned into a capture operation. He was very elusive. He had connections all around the world, and he knew were after him after the series of raids that we conducted. So he disappeared. We used our sources around the world, gathered information. For well over a year, I put together capture operations in eight countries, and one was going to be a waterborne operation where if we got him, we would get him out of Southwest Asia and onto a US.

48:31
Phillip Kearney
Ship and bring him back. But we really didn’t know where he was going to be at any night. So we had to be prepared that a foreign police agency or the CIA may call us and tell us, hey, this is where he’s at. We had to go get him, or someone else would get him, and we’d bring him back to the United States. So you have to look back in our country’s history. This is also the time in which the black sites were revealed that our intelligence agency had locations around the world in which they were taking people, and I won’t say torturing, but they were using methods to gather information from people. And it was really frowned upon when it hit the media that this is what was occurring. So we had to work even harder to convince foreign counterparts, as well as other US.

49:16
Phillip Kearney
Government agencies, that were not part of these operations. This was a fully judicial operation. We presented evidence in court, and when we captured him, were going to bring him back to DC. And put him in the US. Court. There was nothing surreptitious about our operations in regards to his prosecution. We went through a little bit of a quiet time getting information from around the world as to what was transpiring where he may be. Special Agent Jeff Higgins. Tucker coles. John Shannon. These folks were working diligently, as were the other people that I mentioned in different parts of the world. And ultimately, quite to our surprise, in the summer of 2009, we got a call from the Pakistanis, and they had him. He had been not too far away from Afghanistan. The interesting thing here was he had so much money, he was friends with the Pakistanis.

50:13
Phillip Kearney
Something occurred, and we never figured out what occurred. Something occurred to turn him into their enemy as opposed to their friend. So they called and offered him up to us. And it was a very dangerous operation getting him. We had no assurance that they were truly bringing our haji to the Torkum Gates, the largest land crossing between Afghanistan and Peshawar. A lot of terrorist activities occur there. We weren’t sure if were being set up by maybe one of the terrorist organizations because the intel community in Pakistan unfortunately, has a lot of connections with the terrorist organization. So weren’t sure if it was a setup to bring American agents in so they could gun us down or what. So a lot of effort by ASAC Keith Weiss went into planning that operation, but agents flew in, walked to the gates, were met by the Pakistanis. There was this tiny little man there with a bag over his head.

51:07
Phillip Kearney
They were able to get him and bring him back to the helicopter. Pulled the bag off his head, and sure enough, it was our haji.

51:13
Brent Hinson
Now, I saw on the CNN show where he’s talking with this bag over his head. You don’t know if this guy is a suicide bomber. I mean, you have to go on faith alone that this is who they say it is, right?

51:23
Phillip Kearney
Yes. Some very brave men conducted that operation. Lucky for us, it worked out well. But, yeah, a lot of faith. So brought him back to Kabul, and I was waiting there to interview him, since I had myself and Special Agent Higgins had been the two who had spent the most time working him, brought him back, brought him in, had a translator there for him, had a defense attorney there for him. We want to make sure everything was on the up and up. And essentially, he denied knowledge of any heroin. I believe he even said that he had never seen heroin in his life, had no knowledge of trafficking around the world. He was just as innocent could be. The interview didn’t take long at all because he basically disavowed any relationship with any criminals of any sort.

52:08
Michael Warren
Was that like the cartel head version of those aren’t my pants?

52:12
Phillip Kearney
Very much so, yes. Just to clarify, very much so. Big pair of pants, but yes, same thing. When the interview concluded, we took a picture of him beforehand just so that we could show how he looked before the interview started, took a picture were all in the picture with him. Took a picture afterwards to show that we had not harmed him in any way. When the interview ended, I, through the translator, told, you know, this didn’t go as we hoped, but we’re still bringing you to the United States. I’ll see you in the United States pretty soon. I’ll pick you up at Andrews Air Force Base and I’ll take you to jail in Washington, DC. The translator passed that information on, and Haji laughed, and through the translator, said back, my big American friend, you’ll never see me in the United States. He really believed that his political connections in that part of the world were strong enough that he would not come to the US.

53:02
Phillip Kearney
But just a couple of weeks later, he landed in Andrews Air Force Base, and I was waiting for him. Got him, walked onto the plane. He had no idea where he was going. I walked onto the plane with my DEA jacket on, and he saw me, and his face just turned white. He realized he had just landed in the United States, brought him off the plane, got him all handcuffed up, put him in my DEA vehicle, and I took that opportunity. It was the evening I took that opportunity to drive him around Washington, DC. We couldn’t communicate. He didn’t speak English. I drove him around, and I showed him the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, things like that. It was a quick drive, but I just wanted him to see that his efforts to destroy our country had failed, that were still operating. And then I took him to central lockup in DC.

53:47
Phillip Kearney
And I have to tell you, I felt a little sorry for him at that time. He’s a tiny little man controlling an incredible operation around the world. But there were some absolute predators that had been arrested and put in that jail that night. There were some big, scary men who were in lockup. And when I dropped him off and they put him in that cell, that big holding cell with probably 1520 other guys, he looked at me, and he looked like a child in there with those people. So went to trial, and ultimately we succeeded in getting three life sentences on Haji from the drug trafficking as well as the narco terror that we’re able to prove.

54:24
Michael Warren
Just so our listeners understand the scope of this type of investigation that takes three and a half years to come to a conclusion. It’s incredibly complex, and that had to be a very complex case. I hate to use the word to pretty up in order to be able to present in a court of law. The problem we as investigators run into is that we’re intimately familiar with all the people involved. In the case. But now you’ve got to explain to these people that know nothing about the case, and that had to be incredibly satisfying for you as the investigator when they understood it and they agreed with you and they convicted him.

55:05
Phillip Kearney
Very much so. And it actually I’ll correct you real quick. It was a four and a half year investigation, even though we didn’t really hone in on Haji, his name popped up in the very first interview I did in Afghanistan, and I put him into DEA system after returning back to the United States after my first trip to Afghanistan. So it was four and a half years that he was in our system before were able to capture him and go forward with trial. Incredibly complex trial. Incredibly great us. Prosecutors. I mentioned Matt Stiglitz once before. Julius Rostein was the other prosecutor, and they did an amazing job. In fact, brave men, much to their wife’s dismay, they agreed to come with us to Afghanistan one time. It was in January of 2008, they came to Afghanistan and spent a month with us interviewing witnesses in an old home built by the Soviets.

55:57
Phillip Kearney
It had no heat. It gets very cold in Kabul in the wintertime. So we’re sitting in this home with no heat, interviewing witnesses for 1012 14 hours a day for a month straight. There is no weekends when you’re working in Afghanistan or working in a war zone. So it was seven days a week that were interviewing people, bringing them in from all over the country. Again, I can’t thank the team, the Kabul country office and those that were involved, they would travel around using their sources to find these people that would work with us, and then they would bring them in from all over the country. And then the prepping for the trial, the security that we had to bring in to bring these witnesses to the you know, Afghanistan is a country that is not nearly as advanced as the United States. So just getting the permission to bring them to the US.

56:47
Phillip Kearney
Many of these people had no birth certificates. They had no idea how old they were. We had to work with other US. Government agencies, and I appreciate the fact that they bent the rules for us at times to bring these people in. But then the security element, we had to make sure that even though they were cooperating witnesses, that they didn’t run on us, disappear into US. Society. So we had to have a lot of agents that were there with them, essentially babysitting them 24 hours a day to make sure that they would testified in court and then we could get them back to Afghanistan. We did relocate some to other countries because it was just too dangerous, the information they were providing us. If they went back to Afghanistan, they would have been killed. So very complex operation that took four and a half years of investigating, but another year prosecution.

57:32
Michael Warren
I was assigned during my career as a task force officer with DEA Detroit. And my partner there was an agent named Sam Rahi. And we happened to be sitting around the office one day, and were talking, and all of a sudden he says something about this Phil guy. And I said, Phil? Yeah, Phil and I went to the academy together. And the more he starts talking about Phil, I’m like, Is his last name Kearney? And he looks at me, yeah. He goes, how do you know? Said went to college together, and Sam and Phil had actually gone to training together. I bring that up because Sam and I worked a case where one of the interdictions that we did, we stop a couple of guys in Michigan, and they’ve got over 800 grand in cash in a case behind the driver’s seat. And of course, they say, yeah, it’s a rental car.

58:22
Michael Warren
We didn’t even see that thing back there. We don’t know whose it is. I recently did a class with one of our previous guests, Kyle Volwinkle, and Kyle was FBI. HRT had deployed many times, kind of like you had. Well, Kyle and I are over at my house, and we’re talking about different things. Well, it turns out that Kyle was involved in a mission here in Michigan where they had gone to service search and arrest warrant for an imam. And the imam ended up shooting and killing one of the canines, and there was an exchange of gunfire, and he was ultimately killed. But in the same indictment where he was indicted was his son. And his son happened to be one of the two guys that we had arrested with over 800 grand in cash. And the whole thing behind that is I don’t think people have a true understanding of how the illicit proceeds from criminal activity goes to fund other criminal activity, and in a lot of cases, terroristic activities that brings danger to Americans and other nationalities around the world.

59:29
Phillip Kearney
Yeah, you’re exactly right. I’ve been out of this for a while now, at least on the Afghan side, but I know that when I was in the midst of it, DEA could show that the largest revenue source for terrorist organizations around the world was drug trafficking. So I believe there are even a couple of commercials and public service announcements that went out in the late 2000s encouraging US. Citizens to not use drugs because they were supporting terrorism.

59:55
Michael Warren
As a result, it had to be challenging, but both satisfying. Also for you. When you’re putting together a case here in the US. You have to deal with other police agencies and that type thing, and it can be troublesome at times, but you’re dealing with entities from around the world. And to be able to bring all that together and put it in that cohesive package, you not only impacted American life, but you had impact on the quality of life from people around the world. And there are very few people that can say that they’ve had a global impact.

01:00:30
Phillip Kearney
And you have, well, never anticipated being in that position or doing those things. And honestly, I just learned the skills that I developed in the prison in Florida streets of Salt Lake City, what my parents had taught me, what my coaches at Liberty, professors at Liberty living up to our word not over promising telling these other countries that we’re there to help, showing them what our laws would allow and gaining friends in these other countries with other police officers. And it worked out quite well. We were received really well by other countries. There may have been a time in which we had to prove ourselves. We had to do that in France one time, another investigation of another very high level drug trafficker. The French had seized 500 kilos of heroin. We believed it came back to this trafficker. Haji Juma Khan, myself and Jason Sandoval went to France on a mission to convince them to give us a representative sample of the heroin, bring it back to the United States, have it tested in our Ta lab, and see if it matched the heroin that we had already previously seized that we knew came from his organization.

01:01:37
Phillip Kearney
We had only intended on being in Paris for a couple of days, but it turned out were there closer to ten days because we would interview or would be interviewed by a member of their police agency, their national police agency. The next day, they’d bring someone else in. We just kept having to prove ourselves over and over again, and in the end, finally, they agreed. We went back to the US. A couple weeks later, we received our representative sample. We had asked for a couple ounces. They sent us five kilos of heroin. But sure enough, our DA labs tested it, and it was a perfect match for what we had already seized from Jumacon. So it was building those relationships around the world. It was cop to, like, you know, someone from Flint, Michigan, may drive over to Detroit and build those relationships. It was the same.

01:02:23
Phillip Kearney
It was just on an international level.

01:02:25
Michael Warren
It was a lot more traveling and bad airlines involved with your cell.

01:02:30
Phillip Kearney
There was definitely bad airlines going to Afghanistan. My travel to the other countries was a lot of fun. Going to the places that were safer, working with the national police forces, that was a good time. The biggest issue was I left my family. I was essentially gone for four and a half years, and it was quite difficult being away from everybody. I was happy to do it because I was never in the military, and I have a very long history of military service in my family. I wanted to go in the military after leaving Liberty, but my football injuries made me rendered me ineligible for military service. So being able to go serve my country in this way and protect our military was something I was very proud of and happy to do. But after four years of it just became too much. And I asked for a transfer.

01:03:21
Phillip Kearney
Got that transfer about six months later and went up to the US. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and started doing the same investigations in Canada. That’s when I came down to Detroit and saw you and Sam, worked with the Canadian police forces and did nine, five, nine cases that connected the US and Canada to Europe. So learned a lot from my time working in the Special Operations Division and carried that into the next phases of my career.

01:03:46
Michael Warren
As we’re wrapping things up here, I just want to point out to our listeners that this case was highlighted by CNN on a Declassified Untold Stories of American Spies episode, which we’ll try to include the link in our show notes. You also personally were featured in the Liberty Journal, something I’m jealous of. Never been featured in the Liberty Journal. I did make one of the yearbooks one time when I was a student there, but I have not been featured in the Liberty Journal.

01:04:17
Brent Hinson
Come on. Liberty journal. He is the host of almost podcast.

01:04:21
Michael Warren
We’ve never been nominated, but I’m sure if were nominated, we’d at least be considered. Just say it as we wrap things up. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for your service. Because again, being able to say that you have made the type of impact that you have is something that good people should aspire to. And I always tell people, listen, we may not be able to change the world, but if we work hard and we do the right things, we can change our world. But you’ve actually changed the world. So thank you for what you did. Thank you for your service.

01:04:53
Phillip Kearney
Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I will conclude with it was a team of people. I’ve mentioned their names. I’m sure I’ve failed to mention some, and I apologize to them for that, but it was a team of folks who did it. I’m very proud to have been a part of it.

01:05:05
Michael Warren
Point out something here as we close several times throughout this episode and right there at the very end, he talked about the team and he talked about some brave men that carried out some of these operations. But he never took credit for the bravery and courage that he showed throughout this. It had to be incredibly dangerous, and he downplays his exposure to that danger. But I think that we have to say that he’s one of the bravest people we’ve had on so far.

01:05:37
Brent Hinson
Yeah. And I encourage folks, we’ll put links in the show notes, read up more about this whole case because it’s very detailed. There are a lot of facets that we couldn’t get into today just to realize how much danger these folks were in and the situations they had to go through. Really go back and watch the CNN special, read some of the articles. It’s really intriguing. And again, just fascinating case all around. We’ll have all that stuff for you right there in the show notes at between the Lines@virtualacademy.com, but a great guest today. Thank you so much, Phil, for recounting your story and thank you for your service.

01:06:10
Phillip Kearney
Certainly. Thank you, gentlemen.