July 13, 2020 • 39 mins
Detroit FBI agent Ned Timmons busts Toby Anderson, a violent criminal who also fancies himself a budding country music star. Ned flips Toby and goes undercover as a biker, but Toby quickly goes out of control. He uses the newfound protection of the FBI to commit robberies and perhaps far worse. Most agents would give up, and send Toby to jail, but Ned has a feeling Toby might be his key to the criminal underworld.
The first version of Ned’s unpublished novel was written by James Coyne and edited by Andrea McLaughlin. Voice acting by Walton Goggins.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. About a year ago, I got my hands on
this novel, unpublished but apparently based on a true story.
It was written by this guy, Ned Timmins. The overarching
(00:35):
plot was pure pulp. I mean, you could imagine the
movie starring Steven Seagal and definitely straight to video. It
tells the story of a newbie FBI agent named Ned
from Detroit who grows a Fu Manchu mustache, goes undercover
in a violent outlaw biker gang, and infiltrates a secret
syndicate that's smuggling hundreds of thousands of pounds of pot
(00:58):
into the country, and all that leads eventually to the
invasion of a foreign country and the arrest of a
brutal dictator. Skeptical, Yeah, so, as I see, I'm a journalist,
and my specialty, if you can even call it that,
his stories that seem too crazy to be true, stories
(01:19):
that are on the verge of urban legend. Most of
them turn out to be bullshit, which doesn't bother me.
That's kind of the crux of my job, actually sorting
through the bullshit. So naturally I had to go meet
this guy one two one two, tell me, tell me
where we are. Your office, Like, describe where we are.
(01:40):
We're in a commerce township machine. Yeah, give me a
little bit more than that. How long have you had
your office here? Eighteen years? Ned is now in his
early seventies, walks with a limp. He's bald, but you
wouldn't know it because he likes to wear a weather
beaten camo hat. Nowadays he's a private eye. His office
(02:00):
is beige in a beige corporate park. Totally forgettable except
for the bear. It's the first thing you see when
you walk up a ten foot ground bear taxiger meat
in the classic rearing up to Eat You pose. Ned
tells me you got the bear on a hunting trip
in Alaska. But the real trophy that Ned keeps in
(02:22):
a plastic bag in his desk. Yeah, this is a
bag air penises and wolf teeth, and the Inuits believe
that that will protect you. The bear has a bone
in his penis, and I recovered these, like after you
(02:44):
shot the bear, you would not before I shut it.
Nobody's going to take a bear dick when he's alive.
The Inuits would make a necklace out of this to
protect him. I just keep it in a bag because
I'm gonna wear a bear penis necklace around the office.
Do do you believe in it? It means you believe
in the like it's power of keeping you safe. Yeah,
(03:06):
I do. I believe in it. I've been all over
the Arctic and lived two weeks at forty below zero
and all over Russia and you know where there's nothing
and keep a bare penis with me. I think there's
something out there that maybe it's only in your mind.
(03:27):
If it's in your mind and it works, I don't know.
I'm still here and have had many many close calls,
so here I am right. So at first read Ned's
unpublished novel seemed like a classic airport pot boiler, typical
cloak and dagger X cop kind of stuff, like when
(03:49):
the hero heads it on a case. It reads. A
quick shower and a breakfast of Alka seltzer and aspirin
had Ned feeling three quarters human again. That voice is
the actor Walton Goggins. We asked him to read from
Ned's novel. And in this novel there's some great characters
like the drug addicted pig and this pig he guards
(04:11):
a drug lab while munching on onions soaked in meth.
The novel tells us the dark and well bristled pig
was eyeing them with the disturbing, calculating look that pigs give.
Many of the details in the novel, like the pig,
were so quirky and distinctive they felt like they had
to be true. Other scenes seemed contrived, pure Hollywood. I
(04:35):
kind of felt like I'd gotten myself a guide book
that was about half accurate. There was a true story
in here, a real piece of history. If I could
just you know, extract it, Yeah, easier said than done.
I started making a to do list, like I was
going to the grocery store or something. Only mine went
something like this. One. Reach out to your contact at
(04:58):
the FBI, make sure ned's not a kuk. Two call
the CIA here like they'll tell you anything. Three visit
the guy who smuggled three hundred thousand pounds of pot
into the US in a single shipment, supposedly now lives
in Hawaii. Four track down that long lost mistress who's
(05:19):
living somewhere in South America. Shit. All of a sudden,
the story felt like one of those five thousand piece
puzzles that my kids like to open up on vacation
and just spill across the floor, and then you see
a corner piece and a matching edge piece, and damn
if they don't fit, and then well there goes your vacation.
(05:48):
I'm Jake Halbern and this is Deep Cover, Episode one,
The Masked Man. All that I really remembered about the
(06:21):
drug wars of the nineteen eighties was there was this
huge problem that the government was trying to fix with slogans.
You might remember, just say no. That was the battle
cry of President Reagan and his wife Nancy, distributed all
the way down to our teachers in high school. I
remember these lectures and thinking even then that they were
(06:42):
an idiotic remedy to the drug war. I even wrote
an op ed in my student newspaper just saying no.
Know to just say no, corny, I know, I was fourteen.
A little slogan was not going to kill the demand
for an entire drug market, and it sure as hell
wasn't going to stem the flow of marijuana that was
(07:02):
pouring into the country. And he kind of had to
wonder where was all that marijuana coming from anyway, and
how is it getting in? Historians are still debating this question.
You can find reams of conspiracy theories, like it was
the CIA behind all the drug smuggling. That's still a
(07:22):
hot one. In fact, the CIA will eventually figure into
this story, along with celebrities, politicians, heads of state. But
we're getting ahead of ourselves now, because this story really
starts in Detroit with Ned Timmins at a rowdy roadside
biker bar. The bar was a roadhouse out in the sticks.
(07:49):
The dirt parking lot was full, mostly with motorcycles, nearly
all of them Harley Davidson's Those are the opening words
of Ned's novel, and where we'll begin our story. It's
the early nineteen eighties. Ned Timmins is in his mid
thirties and early in his career at the FBI. He's
(08:09):
working fugitives, just basically going down at checklist and rounding
up wanted men. This was not a desk job. It
was an assignment for guys who wanted some action. As
Ned tells it, he got a tip about a fugitive
who was supposed to be at this biker bar in
the outskirts of Detroit. So Ned grabs his jean jacket
(08:31):
and his three fifty seven Smith and Wesson and heads out.
There was some mean motherfucker was in there. You know.
There was a hard ass, hirdcore biker bar. They're doing
shots and drugs. And it was a scene out of
a movie or a novel. In fact, here it is
(08:52):
in Ned's novel. A single sodium street light out on
the for edge of a parking lot, shone down on
a pay phone from that lonely pool of light. The
darkness of the parking lot reached out a good twenty
five yards before the glow of neon beer sign signaled
the borders of another America. This was the lawless America.
(09:12):
This was the rebel yell. This was easy money, fast
bikes and girls that were easier and faster than both. Nowadays,
it's hard to appreciate just how right our novelist is
about the lawlessness of biker botters in the eighties. Today
we might think of these guys as old graybeards who
(09:34):
putter around and three wheeled Harley's, but not back then.
These were dangerous men, drugging, partying and fighting. Here's ned
novelist again. The smell was the first thing that hit
old beer piss, bo reefer smoke and puke. The second
thing to hit was a cover charge two bucks and
(09:57):
a guy demanding it was the size of a freezer.
Bikers seemed to come in one of only two sizes,
big and really fucking big. Probably smells like sweat and
beer and Jack Daniels all mixed up together all the time.
(10:21):
That's Kathy Timmins, also an FBI agent in the Detroit
office and Ned's wife at the time. She remembers going
to one of these biker bars with Ned on another
night just to serve as cover, you know, his actual
wife pretending to be his girlfriend. And then if people
actually need to breathe, they go outside because the smoke
(10:42):
in the bar would be just that thick that even
a smoker couldn't tolerate it. You know, I mean people,
you know, the big fight going on over here, and
everybody else over here just sitting and talking. Other people
are shooting pool, just chaos. On this particular night, Ned
says he was looking for a fugitive named Toby Anderson.
Toby had quite a rap sheet. Apparently Toby's file was
(11:05):
about six inches deep and a lot of real violent stuff.
You know, someone guns down on Kentucky and you know
this guy was a crew of criminal. He also happened
to be a country western singer, and his band supposedly
had a gig that night. This was one of their hits,
snitches that Rivol must die, Vol Must Die. I've been
(11:32):
called the sucker, but I killed the pick. Motherfucker that
tries still something of mine. As Ned tells it, the
bar was crowded with outlaw bikers. Ned knew that walking
in here as a plainclothes agent was extremely dangerous. Everything
was about the brotherhood, the code, your fellow bikers, even
(11:53):
the music. So Ned had his eyes on the band,
looking at the singer. He knew that Toby was supposed
to make an appearance on stage tonight. But could it
be that the lead singer of this band, the guy
up on stage right now, was his guy. There are
a lot of good people sitting in jail, Mom, punk
(12:15):
to the pigs, what they've done, well, we get in
all of that. If it took our ball math start
killing the snitches for fawns, So Ned says, He saunters
up to the bar, takes a seat on a stool,
and just waits for his partner to show up. It
wasn't his regular partner, just a guy providing backup that
(12:38):
particular night. In the novel, Ned describes him as a
blue blooded preppie who arrives at this biker bar dressed
in penny loafers and to tie. The two of them
watched the stage together trying to find their fugitive, figure
out just who Toby was. All they had was one
(13:01):
flimsy clue, a picture that was six or seven years
out of date. There wasn't really any mark, scars or tattoos,
which is nice if the you know, the guy's got
a swashtick on his cheek or something that. There was
nothing we could look at other identifiers. We just we
weren't sure. Ned waited for the band to take a break,
(13:22):
and then he went to suss things out. I followed
him in the bathroom and um, you know, I was
taking a piss beside him, and I said, hey, aren't
you Toby Anderson. He goes, nah, yeah, okay. I was
down in the keys with Toby and I swear you're Toby.
(13:42):
You just canna know, man, you get the wrong guy.
And UH said, don't you remember Sow and Sow his
boat on Big Pine Key. H We partied down there
and he was yeah, Oh yeah, I'm Toby. You know
what the fucks that to? You said? We just you know,
had a good time the night. Will I reach out
(14:03):
to shake hands with him, and I and I get
his hand and I'm shaking hands with him, and I
just lean up to his ear and said, Toby, FBI
and nine. He goes, fuck you and he starts to swank. Okay,
let's freeze frame right there in midpunch, because this is
not exactly textbook or rest protocol. I mean, there were
(14:26):
other ways to handle this, like waiting until Toby headed
out to the parking lot, or even just following him home.
But this is the first thing you need to understand
about Ned, and it's also the first thing that Kathy
ever knew about him, going back to when they first
met as smalltown cops. If somebody was in a foot chase,
you know, you might you know, we got his ID,
(14:48):
we got his car, you know, we can pick him
up tomorrow or whatever. Ned would chase that guy down
until you got him. She tells the story about Ned.
Before they even started dating. Ned knew where her family
would be celebrating Saint Patrick's Day, so he just showed
up and blended right in as if he were some
long lost cousin, chatted up her dad got along famously
(15:09):
with everyone. Most people don't have that level of confidence
to be able to just walk in and just immediately
become a part of the crowd. So cornering Toby in
a bathroom aggressive a bit reckless, classic Ned okay, back
to the biker bar, and I just lean up to
(15:32):
his ear and said Toby, FBI and he goes, fock
you and he starts to swing, and right then Ned's
partner comes into the bathroom. We kind of overwhelmed them,
so we get him in cuffs. We're going through the
bar and everybody's starting to realize he's in handcuffs and
he's like they're superstar and people are pushing a Shelvin
(15:55):
and Ned says, he and his partner Frog March Toby
threw a bar of drunk bikers and out the front door.
I had Toby on the hood of the Bronco and
he's still wrestling around, but he's handcuffed behind himself, behind
his back. So we had told I actually can't be
(16:17):
sure if this story at the bar is one hundred
percent true. I talked to Ned's partner from that day,
and he didn't remember it. I talked to another biker
who knew Toby very well, and he remembered hearing some
version of this story at the time. Unfortunately, I can't
ask Toby himself since he died back in two thousand
and four. But I did track down Toby's son, who
(16:40):
gave me at least a better sense of who this
guy was. I remember right on the motorcycles with him,
with me on the back. He was just kind of
reckless and dangerous. I was screaming, holding on for dear life, right,
and he just thought it was funny. Today, Jesse Anderson
is an executive in the auto industry. Back when he
(17:01):
was a kid, he got out real close view of
all the madness and chaos that his father was in. Yeah.
I was afraid of my dad. Everybody's fraid. Yeah, so
yeah he was. He was reckless, which is what everyone said.
The friend of Toby's told me that Toby would cut
you or even shoot you without hesitation, and this gave
Toby's street cred in the criminal world. He was the
(17:23):
real deal, which appealed to Ned. When we come back,
Ned interrogates Toby the prisoner. Look at Toby here fucked. Okay,
you've been, You've done time in seven fucking federal pens.
This time you're going back for life for a long time.
So what do you want to do? Snitcher the rebolse
(18:02):
must die. Snitchbols must die. It's squeal all friends, so
they golf just should die. This is Toby Anderson singing
one of his hit songs with the legendary chorus Snitches
(18:22):
and rip Offs must die ned. Timman still remembers going
to question Toby. He brought him breakfast pancakes and he
ate him with his hands. He had syrup all over
his face and all over his fingers and probably hadn't
eaten in a day or so. You can see he
was just I mean, he's just like totally burned out
and weak. Now I didn't have all those buddies that
(18:44):
we're going to help him. Let's look at Toby. You're fucked. Okay,
you've been, You've done time in seven fucking federal pens.
This time you're going back for life for a long time,
So what do you want to do. We spent several
hours with him, you know, and finally says, well, there's
probably a couple of things I can do. So they
(19:05):
started working together. Toby knew better than anyone the dangers
of working for Ned, of becoming an informant for the FBI.
They had to be careful. Ned says. They spread a
rumor that the charges against Toby were dropped because no
one wanted to testify against him. This story would keep
any of his biker buddies from thinking that he'd flipped.
(19:26):
Even while cooperating, Toby tried to maintain his own kind
of biker ethics. He would not write out friends or
members of his own gang, but he willingly betrayed his enemies.
So he and Ned would find a target, for example,
a drug house we'd set up undercover surveillance, sent him
in there, and you know, we had vans and different
(19:47):
stuff with high tech cameras and stuff that we're on. Periscopes,
just little pariscope comes out of the top of the van.
Oh the good old days when the drug dealers didn't
know what every TV writer knew. Unmarked vans with periscopes
meant trouble. So then we'd develop a raide plan and
get a search warton, kicking the doors all the way
(20:12):
up to the nineteen seventies, the Bureau wasn't really focused
on drug suppliers. That had been the job of the
Drug Enforcement Agency, the d EA. Now, the DA did
have some big investigations, but they were mostly one off busts.
You know, they'd seize the drugs, lay them out on
the table, big photo op, busted, end of story. But
(20:35):
by the early eighties this approach wasn't cutting it anymore.
President Reagan's Attorney General empowered the FBI to get involved
in the drug wars. After all, the Bureau were the
ones taking down the mob. Something big had to be
behind all of this. The feeling was this couldn't be
just a bunch of local, mom and pop drug dealers.
Here's what the Attorney General, William French Smith said at
(20:57):
the time. Quote The popular notion that the syndicate or
traditional organized crime stays out of drugs is simply not true.
Many of the syndicates families have developed elaborate drug network works.
Virtually every one of them is involved in drugs in
one way or another. End quote. But that's not all.
Smith also told Americans precisely who was distributing all the
(21:20):
drugs for the syndicates. Quote. Over the past decade, some
eight hundred outlaw motorcycle gangs have developed around the country
and in foreign countries, and drugs represent their primary source
of revenue. The strategies of the Attorney General and Ned
Timmins had what you might call synergy. As Ned saw it,
(21:44):
Toby was his way in and up the ladder. So
the FBI came up with a plan Ned would go
undercover and become a biker. Ned's wife, Kathy, remembers how
quickly things changed. I didn't like that. He of course
(22:05):
started growing his hair out and he had a Fu
Manchu stash, and when we would go out, we'd always
people look at us and we'd get seated like way
at the back of a restaurant, you know, like like
we were creepy. The mustache was just the beginning. Ned
knew he needed to up his skills as a biker, so,
(22:25):
like any good FBI agent, he went to school the
Ontario Provincial Police Motorcycle School. Ned says he learned to
ride his bike upstairs and lay the bike down at
high speeds. I rode a bike a lot for the FBI,
and you're very vulnerable and after you've been to school,
you realize just how dangerous a motorcycle is. After graduation,
(22:51):
Ned went back to Detroit. He created a new persona
and carefully chose a new name, Ed Thomas, because you
wanted something that was close to Ned. A couple of
times I was undercovered an airport and old colleagues, buddies,
Tarryann and Tolman, they're going, hey, Ned, and it's an
(23:14):
awkward situation if you're with a bunch of bikers, Ed Thomas.
It was close enough that you can stumble through it.
Ed Thomas a badass biker with money and connections. If
you wanted the chemicals to make meth, Ed Thomas is
your guy, and the ruse worked. Ed helped the FBI
(23:35):
take down other outlaw bikers on at least one occasion.
Ned told me that they cuffed him as well at
the arrest, made sure it look like he really was
a criminal. The FBI wanted to protect his cover because
Ned he was really good at this. You know who
was not so good at this whole undercover thing. Toby,
(24:00):
Ned's wingman. Toby was still living the biker life, and
increasingly there were problems. Like the time that Toby was
out at a bar and watching another band play. The
lead singer was playing this fancy and very pricy less
Ball electric guitar, and Toby liked it a lot. What
(24:21):
happened next is kind of a legend. I heard it
from a few different people, including another biker who was
there that night at the bar, So out of nowhere,
Toby screamed FBI at the top of his lungs, whipped
out his gun and started shooting. He snatched the guitar
and bolts out of the bar like he deputized himself
(24:41):
as an FBI agent or something, and then totally went
rogue and for a while he got away with it.
Toby now has this sweet Les Paul electric guitar, and
right away he started touring his local haunts with it.
Not a worry in the world because that's Toby, and
because it's Toby, that's not the end of the story.
(25:02):
A few weeks later, Toby's performing up on stage and
he gets shot. We don't know who did it for sure,
but everyone I spoke to said it had to be
the guy he robbed and stole the guitar from a
few weeks earlier. So Toby he's shot and bleeding out
on stage across town. HiT's bedtime at dad's house when
(25:24):
the phone rings and I get a call again, like
ten o'clock at night, So you'd better get down to
this bar. Toby's been shot, and so I raced down.
It's like a forty five minute drive. He's still laying
on the floor in the bar shot. I get there
and say, look at you gotta go to the fucking hospital.
(25:47):
It's okay, I'm going of if you'd go with me. Well,
I got a call from somebody in my family to
say that my dad has been shot, and that was
that it was pretty severe. That's Jesse Anderson again, Toby's son,
and that day, the day his dad got shot, it's
always stayed with him. On the way to the hospital,
(26:12):
they got stopped by a train and he almost bled
out in the ambulance because the train was so long.
And at this time I now think, I think I'm
about twelve years old. But again, for me to hear
that my dad was shot, it's like going to the store.
I mean, it's the stuff happened all the time. Something
(26:34):
like this happened all the time. Toby recovered from being
shot and just kind of carried on. As crazy as
that sounds, this was normal life for the Anderson household.
In fact, hearing Jesse talked about his dad like this,
it helped me understand what life was like in Toby's world.
(26:55):
Mayhem just seemed to follow this guy everywhere. Everything was
topsy turvy. Even jumping in the car to pick up
a pizza became an event. All I remember is pulling
up to a stoplight and up in front of us
is a guy mugging another guy, and my dad's like, well,
I'm not going to stand for this, puts the car
(27:16):
in park, sets his beer up on top of the roof,
gets out, beats the living crap out of the guy
who was mugging the other one, stole all the money
that he had, split it with the other guy, got
back in the car with me, grabbed his beer, and
just drived on. And you know, Son, looks like we've
(27:37):
got some dinner money or something like that, and just
no big deal. Didn't say another word. That's my dad,
a little vigilante justice. That was a good night. But
it could get darker with Toby, a whole lot darker.
Let me come back, ned wades deeper did Toby's world.
(28:18):
He had that dark look you know what I'm talking about, Yeah,
that crazy look in your eyes that you think this
guy is a psychotic person. I better not push his button.
Ned's wife, Kathy met Toby on a number of occasions.
I remember telling Ned that he resembled to me Charles Manson,
(28:41):
and Kathy knew the telltale signs of a dangerous guy
at the FBI. She works street gangs in Flint, Michigan.
Toby didn't aspire to anything other than the moment, when
people only aspire to you know, how am I going
to get out of here in the next fifteen minutes?
And they don't care if they don't think consequence, They
(29:02):
don't think of any of that. Gang kids are like that.
They just do in the moment what they have to do,
and if it means killing you, they'll think about that later.
So why did Ned just walk away from him, let
him go back to prison, move on? Because Toby was, yeah,
(29:24):
definitely dangerous, but also kind of like a dead end.
I mean, he wasn't some kind of kingpin or even
a trusted lieutenant. He was just a violent and unpredictable guy.
But Ned, he just had a hunch he felt that
by slipping deeper and deeper into Toby's world, somewhere along
the way there'd be a payoff. And because he was
(29:47):
spending so much time with bikers, Ned kept hearing chatter
well ahead sources up in northern Michigan bikers, and they
would talk about, Okay, there's a shipman in or whatever.
The bikers would get their supply of weed when these
big shipments would come in, you know, which is fifty
thousand pounds, one hundred thousand pounds or whatever into the
(30:09):
Detroit warehouse. If such a warehouse really existed. It was
the El Dorado of drug houses and confirmed what the
Attorney General had said that elaborate drug networks lay behind
all the small drug busts that have been happening. So
Ned goes and tells his bosses, there's this huge deal
(30:29):
out there and involved shrimp boats and barges and airplanes.
And so I told my bosses about it, you know,
and they kind of said, yeah, you know, you know, right,
Tim is when he's smoking. Around the same time, Ned
says he arrested another biker and tried to flip him,
just like he'd done with Toby, only it didn't work.
In fact, during the arrest, the guy just taunted Ned.
(30:53):
He says, well, he says, you're missing the boat on
one of the biggest fucking deals going out there. You
don't even know what's under your own nose. But he
alluded to this massive deal where there's hundreds of thousands
of pounds of weed and coke coming in and then
basically said fuck you. And that was any wasn't going
to cooperating for Ned. This intel was just too enticing.
(31:17):
His bosses might have been skeptical, but Ned stuck with it,
kept hanging with Toby. It's just I knew he was
out with them all the time. I just until I
would hear from him. I would many many times just
sit there and think, oh my god, something's happened, and
then he'd call, and then I'd be relieved, and then
(31:37):
I'd be mad because because of all distress and the worry,
and it wasn't just Ned's safety that concerned her. Will
you hang around Matt Long with a bunch of bad
guys and fitting in with them, your behavior is going
to change, and your your own personal bars, you know
(32:00):
where you draw the line changes. This would be the first,
but not the last time that Cathy was right to
worry about her husband and where he was drawing the line,
especially when it came to Toby. You know, I was
supposed to meet him or whatever. And I went down
(32:21):
to the house on my motorcycle and pulled up in
the yard and put down the kickstand and walked in
and there's dead guy laying there in a pool of blood.
And I go, Toby, what the fuck? And he goes, Bros.
Masked man came through the door, shot this guy. I
guess he didn't like him and ran. That's all I know.
(32:43):
A masked man. Come on. Really, this was Toby's story.
A strange guy wearing a mask breaks into his apartment,
shoots this guy who's currently lying on the floor, and
then runs away, leaving Toby to take the rap. I mean,
this has got to be the homicidal equivalent of the
dog ate my homework. I later asked Toby's son about it,
(33:07):
whether his dad was the kind of person who was
capable of committing murder. It pains me to say it,
but I don't. I don't blink when I when I say,
you know, could he have done it? Did he do it?
Has he done it? I'm sure the answers ysked all
of them, and I don't I don't think twice about it.
(33:28):
Ned didn't tell Kathy about this whole episode with the
masked man and the dead body. Oddly enough, he seemed
to take the whole episode in stride. So in a way,
if you're one hundred percent certain it was Toby to
kill him, it was just a technicality that you weren't
there to witness it. I'm not a witness. I'm not
in charge of collecting evidence. FBI doesn't investigate homicides. It
(33:53):
wasn't my job to investigate a homicide. Just don't kill
somebody in front of me. That's it. Yeah, pretty much.
Ned says that he did call the police, and so
when De Tray police came and told him the same story,
and they didn't really give a shit. You know, it's
just some shit head biker. Ned now had his line
(34:15):
in the sand. The trick was keeping Toby on this
side of it, which you don't make progress. And unless
you're dealing with sociopathic, homicidal crazy people, that's who are
in the inner circle of drugs, violence and whatever. So
(34:36):
this is just part of the deal. It's part of
the deal. Yeah, so what are you saying to him
in that situation? You know, I just thought him would
be advantageous not to continue to have bodies laying around
(34:57):
in your house or in your yard, And I said,
tell the fucking mass man to stay away. After listening
to Ned's story, you know, in the shadow of his
ten foot stuff bare, I still just didn't know what
to make of it. When I got home, I reread
(35:19):
his novel. Ned and his ghostwriter were giving me everything
they thought I wanted, with all the film noir settings
and Raymond Chandler dialogue. In the novel, Toby's like that
two dimensional villain depicted on a target at a shooting range,
you know, lone bad guy with a gun drawn. But
what struck me most was what was missing from the novel.
(35:41):
There's no mention of Jesse the Sun, or what it's
like to grow up with Toby as your dad. And
Ned's wife and colleague, Kathy, she doesn't even make a
single appearance in the novel. I guess her Midwestern accent
and by the book thinking didn't fit into the hard
boiled narrative. It became clear to me that the truth,
(36:03):
if I could extract. It was way better. But this
wasn't going to be easy. Honestly, I didn't know if
I could fully trust all of Ned's memories. Part of
the problem was time. All of this happened thirty five
years ago. I mean, memories fade and then those same
memories had been taken off the shelf and reworked into fiction.
(36:25):
But I was all in, and so for the last
year and a half, I've been trying to put all
the pieces together. I've been to dive bars and horse farms,
to back water swamps and pirate museums. I've poured through
FBI reports in court transcripts. The story is taking me
to North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, and the Cayman Islands.
(36:47):
I've talked to agents from the FBI, the d e A,
and u S, Customs, to US attorneys, pilots, ex girl friends,
Detroit felons, and a bunch of big time drug smugglers,
and all of this to find out whether a rookie
agent from Detroit could really make a random bust in
a biker bar one night and set off a cascade
(37:08):
of events. The discovery of a gigantic drug warehouse, the
collapse of a nationwide smuggling ring, a war in Central America,
and the overthrow of a brutal dictator. Next time a
(37:38):
deep cover, you know, you don't have to choose that path.
You don't have to choose to work a case in
that way. You don't have to choose to go deep cover,
you know. But I know for him, he felt like
it was just spinning into the next, into the next,
into the next, and he told me that he felt
like he didn't know how he was ever going to
(37:59):
get out of it. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob
Smith and edited by Karen Shakerge. Our story editor is
(38:19):
Jack Hitt. Original music and our theme was composed by
Louise Gera and Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking
by Amy Gaines. Mia Lobell is Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's
novel is read by Walton Goggins. Special thanks to Julia Barton,
Heather Fain, Carl mcgliori, Leta Mullad, Maya Caning, Eric Sandler,
(38:43):
Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weissberg at
Pushkin Industries. Special thanks also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment.
I'm Jake albern
Pushkin. About a year ago, I got my hands on
this novel, unpublished but apparently based on a true story.
It was written by this guy, Ned Timmins. The overarching
(00:35):
plot was pure pulp. I mean, you could imagine the
movie starring Steven Seagal and definitely straight to video. It
tells the story of a newbie FBI agent named Ned
from Detroit who grows a Fu Manchu mustache, goes undercover
in a violent outlaw biker gang, and infiltrates a secret
syndicate that's smuggling hundreds of thousands of pounds of pot
(00:58):
into the country, and all that leads eventually to the
invasion of a foreign country and the arrest of a
brutal dictator. Skeptical, Yeah, so, as I see, I'm a journalist,
and my specialty, if you can even call it that,
his stories that seem too crazy to be true, stories
(01:19):
that are on the verge of urban legend. Most of
them turn out to be bullshit, which doesn't bother me.
That's kind of the crux of my job, actually sorting
through the bullshit. So naturally I had to go meet
this guy one two one two, tell me, tell me
where we are. Your office, Like, describe where we are.
(01:40):
We're in a commerce township machine. Yeah, give me a
little bit more than that. How long have you had
your office here? Eighteen years? Ned is now in his
early seventies, walks with a limp. He's bald, but you
wouldn't know it because he likes to wear a weather
beaten camo hat. Nowadays he's a private eye. His office
(02:00):
is beige in a beige corporate park. Totally forgettable except
for the bear. It's the first thing you see when
you walk up a ten foot ground bear taxiger meat
in the classic rearing up to Eat You pose. Ned
tells me you got the bear on a hunting trip
in Alaska. But the real trophy that Ned keeps in
(02:22):
a plastic bag in his desk. Yeah, this is a
bag air penises and wolf teeth, and the Inuits believe
that that will protect you. The bear has a bone
in his penis, and I recovered these, like after you
(02:44):
shot the bear, you would not before I shut it.
Nobody's going to take a bear dick when he's alive.
The Inuits would make a necklace out of this to
protect him. I just keep it in a bag because
I'm gonna wear a bear penis necklace around the office.
Do do you believe in it? It means you believe
in the like it's power of keeping you safe. Yeah,
(03:06):
I do. I believe in it. I've been all over
the Arctic and lived two weeks at forty below zero
and all over Russia and you know where there's nothing
and keep a bare penis with me. I think there's
something out there that maybe it's only in your mind.
(03:27):
If it's in your mind and it works, I don't know.
I'm still here and have had many many close calls,
so here I am right. So at first read Ned's
unpublished novel seemed like a classic airport pot boiler, typical
cloak and dagger X cop kind of stuff, like when
(03:49):
the hero heads it on a case. It reads. A
quick shower and a breakfast of Alka seltzer and aspirin
had Ned feeling three quarters human again. That voice is
the actor Walton Goggins. We asked him to read from
Ned's novel. And in this novel there's some great characters
like the drug addicted pig and this pig he guards
(04:11):
a drug lab while munching on onions soaked in meth.
The novel tells us the dark and well bristled pig
was eyeing them with the disturbing, calculating look that pigs give.
Many of the details in the novel, like the pig,
were so quirky and distinctive they felt like they had
to be true. Other scenes seemed contrived, pure Hollywood. I
(04:35):
kind of felt like I'd gotten myself a guide book
that was about half accurate. There was a true story
in here, a real piece of history. If I could
just you know, extract it, Yeah, easier said than done.
I started making a to do list, like I was
going to the grocery store or something. Only mine went
something like this. One. Reach out to your contact at
(04:58):
the FBI, make sure ned's not a kuk. Two call
the CIA here like they'll tell you anything. Three visit
the guy who smuggled three hundred thousand pounds of pot
into the US in a single shipment, supposedly now lives
in Hawaii. Four track down that long lost mistress who's
(05:19):
living somewhere in South America. Shit. All of a sudden,
the story felt like one of those five thousand piece
puzzles that my kids like to open up on vacation
and just spill across the floor, and then you see
a corner piece and a matching edge piece, and damn
if they don't fit, and then well there goes your vacation.
(05:48):
I'm Jake Halbern and this is Deep Cover, Episode one,
The Masked Man. All that I really remembered about the
(06:21):
drug wars of the nineteen eighties was there was this
huge problem that the government was trying to fix with slogans.
You might remember, just say no. That was the battle
cry of President Reagan and his wife Nancy, distributed all
the way down to our teachers in high school. I
remember these lectures and thinking even then that they were
(06:42):
an idiotic remedy to the drug war. I even wrote
an op ed in my student newspaper just saying no.
Know to just say no, corny, I know, I was fourteen.
A little slogan was not going to kill the demand
for an entire drug market, and it sure as hell
wasn't going to stem the flow of marijuana that was
(07:02):
pouring into the country. And he kind of had to
wonder where was all that marijuana coming from anyway, and
how is it getting in? Historians are still debating this question.
You can find reams of conspiracy theories, like it was
the CIA behind all the drug smuggling. That's still a
(07:22):
hot one. In fact, the CIA will eventually figure into
this story, along with celebrities, politicians, heads of state. But
we're getting ahead of ourselves now, because this story really
starts in Detroit with Ned Timmins at a rowdy roadside
biker bar. The bar was a roadhouse out in the sticks.
(07:49):
The dirt parking lot was full, mostly with motorcycles, nearly
all of them Harley Davidson's Those are the opening words
of Ned's novel, and where we'll begin our story. It's
the early nineteen eighties. Ned Timmins is in his mid
thirties and early in his career at the FBI. He's
(08:09):
working fugitives, just basically going down at checklist and rounding
up wanted men. This was not a desk job. It
was an assignment for guys who wanted some action. As
Ned tells it, he got a tip about a fugitive
who was supposed to be at this biker bar in
the outskirts of Detroit. So Ned grabs his jean jacket
(08:31):
and his three fifty seven Smith and Wesson and heads out.
There was some mean motherfucker was in there. You know.
There was a hard ass, hirdcore biker bar. They're doing
shots and drugs. And it was a scene out of
a movie or a novel. In fact, here it is
(08:52):
in Ned's novel. A single sodium street light out on
the for edge of a parking lot, shone down on
a pay phone from that lonely pool of light. The
darkness of the parking lot reached out a good twenty
five yards before the glow of neon beer sign signaled
the borders of another America. This was the lawless America.
(09:12):
This was the rebel yell. This was easy money, fast
bikes and girls that were easier and faster than both. Nowadays,
it's hard to appreciate just how right our novelist is
about the lawlessness of biker botters in the eighties. Today
we might think of these guys as old graybeards who
(09:34):
putter around and three wheeled Harley's, but not back then.
These were dangerous men, drugging, partying and fighting. Here's ned
novelist again. The smell was the first thing that hit
old beer piss, bo reefer smoke and puke. The second
thing to hit was a cover charge two bucks and
(09:57):
a guy demanding it was the size of a freezer.
Bikers seemed to come in one of only two sizes,
big and really fucking big. Probably smells like sweat and
beer and Jack Daniels all mixed up together all the time.
(10:21):
That's Kathy Timmins, also an FBI agent in the Detroit
office and Ned's wife at the time. She remembers going
to one of these biker bars with Ned on another
night just to serve as cover, you know, his actual
wife pretending to be his girlfriend. And then if people
actually need to breathe, they go outside because the smoke
(10:42):
in the bar would be just that thick that even
a smoker couldn't tolerate it. You know, I mean people,
you know, the big fight going on over here, and
everybody else over here just sitting and talking. Other people
are shooting pool, just chaos. On this particular night, Ned
says he was looking for a fugitive named Toby Anderson.
Toby had quite a rap sheet. Apparently Toby's file was
(11:05):
about six inches deep and a lot of real violent stuff.
You know, someone guns down on Kentucky and you know
this guy was a crew of criminal. He also happened
to be a country western singer, and his band supposedly
had a gig that night. This was one of their hits,
snitches that Rivol must die, Vol Must Die. I've been
(11:32):
called the sucker, but I killed the pick. Motherfucker that
tries still something of mine. As Ned tells it, the
bar was crowded with outlaw bikers. Ned knew that walking
in here as a plainclothes agent was extremely dangerous. Everything
was about the brotherhood, the code, your fellow bikers, even
(11:53):
the music. So Ned had his eyes on the band,
looking at the singer. He knew that Toby was supposed
to make an appearance on stage tonight. But could it
be that the lead singer of this band, the guy
up on stage right now, was his guy. There are
a lot of good people sitting in jail, Mom, punk
(12:15):
to the pigs, what they've done, well, we get in
all of that. If it took our ball math start
killing the snitches for fawns, So Ned says, He saunters
up to the bar, takes a seat on a stool,
and just waits for his partner to show up. It
wasn't his regular partner, just a guy providing backup that
(12:38):
particular night. In the novel, Ned describes him as a
blue blooded preppie who arrives at this biker bar dressed
in penny loafers and to tie. The two of them
watched the stage together trying to find their fugitive, figure
out just who Toby was. All they had was one
(13:01):
flimsy clue, a picture that was six or seven years
out of date. There wasn't really any mark, scars or tattoos,
which is nice if the you know, the guy's got
a swashtick on his cheek or something that. There was
nothing we could look at other identifiers. We just we
weren't sure. Ned waited for the band to take a break,
(13:22):
and then he went to suss things out. I followed
him in the bathroom and um, you know, I was
taking a piss beside him, and I said, hey, aren't
you Toby Anderson. He goes, nah, yeah, okay. I was
down in the keys with Toby and I swear you're Toby.
(13:42):
You just canna know, man, you get the wrong guy.
And UH said, don't you remember Sow and Sow his
boat on Big Pine Key. H We partied down there
and he was yeah, Oh yeah, I'm Toby. You know
what the fucks that to? You said? We just you know,
had a good time the night. Will I reach out
(14:03):
to shake hands with him, and I and I get
his hand and I'm shaking hands with him, and I
just lean up to his ear and said, Toby, FBI
and nine. He goes, fuck you and he starts to swank. Okay,
let's freeze frame right there in midpunch, because this is
not exactly textbook or rest protocol. I mean, there were
(14:26):
other ways to handle this, like waiting until Toby headed
out to the parking lot, or even just following him home.
But this is the first thing you need to understand
about Ned, and it's also the first thing that Kathy
ever knew about him, going back to when they first
met as smalltown cops. If somebody was in a foot chase,
you know, you might you know, we got his ID,
(14:48):
we got his car, you know, we can pick him
up tomorrow or whatever. Ned would chase that guy down
until you got him. She tells the story about Ned.
Before they even started dating. Ned knew where her family
would be celebrating Saint Patrick's Day, so he just showed
up and blended right in as if he were some
long lost cousin, chatted up her dad got along famously
(15:09):
with everyone. Most people don't have that level of confidence
to be able to just walk in and just immediately
become a part of the crowd. So cornering Toby in
a bathroom aggressive a bit reckless, classic Ned okay, back
to the biker bar, and I just lean up to
(15:32):
his ear and said Toby, FBI and he goes, fock
you and he starts to swing, and right then Ned's
partner comes into the bathroom. We kind of overwhelmed them,
so we get him in cuffs. We're going through the
bar and everybody's starting to realize he's in handcuffs and
he's like they're superstar and people are pushing a Shelvin
(15:55):
and Ned says, he and his partner Frog March Toby
threw a bar of drunk bikers and out the front door.
I had Toby on the hood of the Bronco and
he's still wrestling around, but he's handcuffed behind himself, behind
his back. So we had told I actually can't be
(16:17):
sure if this story at the bar is one hundred
percent true. I talked to Ned's partner from that day,
and he didn't remember it. I talked to another biker
who knew Toby very well, and he remembered hearing some
version of this story at the time. Unfortunately, I can't
ask Toby himself since he died back in two thousand
and four. But I did track down Toby's son, who
(16:40):
gave me at least a better sense of who this
guy was. I remember right on the motorcycles with him,
with me on the back. He was just kind of
reckless and dangerous. I was screaming, holding on for dear life, right,
and he just thought it was funny. Today, Jesse Anderson
is an executive in the auto industry. Back when he
(17:01):
was a kid, he got out real close view of
all the madness and chaos that his father was in. Yeah.
I was afraid of my dad. Everybody's fraid. Yeah, so
yeah he was. He was reckless, which is what everyone said.
The friend of Toby's told me that Toby would cut
you or even shoot you without hesitation, and this gave
Toby's street cred in the criminal world. He was the
(17:23):
real deal, which appealed to Ned. When we come back,
Ned interrogates Toby the prisoner. Look at Toby here fucked. Okay,
you've been, You've done time in seven fucking federal pens.
This time you're going back for life for a long time.
So what do you want to do? Snitcher the rebolse
(18:02):
must die. Snitchbols must die. It's squeal all friends, so
they golf just should die. This is Toby Anderson singing
one of his hit songs with the legendary chorus Snitches
(18:22):
and rip Offs must die ned. Timman still remembers going
to question Toby. He brought him breakfast pancakes and he
ate him with his hands. He had syrup all over
his face and all over his fingers and probably hadn't
eaten in a day or so. You can see he
was just I mean, he's just like totally burned out
and weak. Now I didn't have all those buddies that
(18:44):
we're going to help him. Let's look at Toby. You're fucked. Okay,
you've been, You've done time in seven fucking federal pens.
This time you're going back for life for a long time,
So what do you want to do. We spent several
hours with him, you know, and finally says, well, there's
probably a couple of things I can do. So they
(19:05):
started working together. Toby knew better than anyone the dangers
of working for Ned, of becoming an informant for the FBI.
They had to be careful. Ned says. They spread a
rumor that the charges against Toby were dropped because no
one wanted to testify against him. This story would keep
any of his biker buddies from thinking that he'd flipped.
(19:26):
Even while cooperating, Toby tried to maintain his own kind
of biker ethics. He would not write out friends or
members of his own gang, but he willingly betrayed his enemies.
So he and Ned would find a target, for example,
a drug house we'd set up undercover surveillance, sent him
in there, and you know, we had vans and different
(19:47):
stuff with high tech cameras and stuff that we're on. Periscopes,
just little pariscope comes out of the top of the van.
Oh the good old days when the drug dealers didn't
know what every TV writer knew. Unmarked vans with periscopes
meant trouble. So then we'd develop a raide plan and
get a search warton, kicking the doors all the way
(20:12):
up to the nineteen seventies, the Bureau wasn't really focused
on drug suppliers. That had been the job of the
Drug Enforcement Agency, the d EA. Now, the DA did
have some big investigations, but they were mostly one off busts.
You know, they'd seize the drugs, lay them out on
the table, big photo op, busted, end of story. But
(20:35):
by the early eighties this approach wasn't cutting it anymore.
President Reagan's Attorney General empowered the FBI to get involved
in the drug wars. After all, the Bureau were the
ones taking down the mob. Something big had to be
behind all of this. The feeling was this couldn't be
just a bunch of local, mom and pop drug dealers.
Here's what the Attorney General, William French Smith said at
(20:57):
the time. Quote The popular notion that the syndicate or
traditional organized crime stays out of drugs is simply not true.
Many of the syndicates families have developed elaborate drug network works.
Virtually every one of them is involved in drugs in
one way or another. End quote. But that's not all.
Smith also told Americans precisely who was distributing all the
(21:20):
drugs for the syndicates. Quote. Over the past decade, some
eight hundred outlaw motorcycle gangs have developed around the country
and in foreign countries, and drugs represent their primary source
of revenue. The strategies of the Attorney General and Ned
Timmins had what you might call synergy. As Ned saw it,
(21:44):
Toby was his way in and up the ladder. So
the FBI came up with a plan Ned would go
undercover and become a biker. Ned's wife, Kathy, remembers how
quickly things changed. I didn't like that. He of course
(22:05):
started growing his hair out and he had a Fu
Manchu stash, and when we would go out, we'd always
people look at us and we'd get seated like way
at the back of a restaurant, you know, like like
we were creepy. The mustache was just the beginning. Ned
knew he needed to up his skills as a biker, so,
(22:25):
like any good FBI agent, he went to school the
Ontario Provincial Police Motorcycle School. Ned says he learned to
ride his bike upstairs and lay the bike down at
high speeds. I rode a bike a lot for the FBI,
and you're very vulnerable and after you've been to school,
you realize just how dangerous a motorcycle is. After graduation,
(22:51):
Ned went back to Detroit. He created a new persona
and carefully chose a new name, Ed Thomas, because you
wanted something that was close to Ned. A couple of
times I was undercovered an airport and old colleagues, buddies,
Tarryann and Tolman, they're going, hey, Ned, and it's an
(23:14):
awkward situation if you're with a bunch of bikers, Ed Thomas.
It was close enough that you can stumble through it.
Ed Thomas a badass biker with money and connections. If
you wanted the chemicals to make meth, Ed Thomas is
your guy, and the ruse worked. Ed helped the FBI
(23:35):
take down other outlaw bikers on at least one occasion.
Ned told me that they cuffed him as well at
the arrest, made sure it look like he really was
a criminal. The FBI wanted to protect his cover because
Ned he was really good at this. You know who
was not so good at this whole undercover thing. Toby,
(24:00):
Ned's wingman. Toby was still living the biker life, and
increasingly there were problems. Like the time that Toby was
out at a bar and watching another band play. The
lead singer was playing this fancy and very pricy less
Ball electric guitar, and Toby liked it a lot. What
(24:21):
happened next is kind of a legend. I heard it
from a few different people, including another biker who was
there that night at the bar, So out of nowhere,
Toby screamed FBI at the top of his lungs, whipped
out his gun and started shooting. He snatched the guitar
and bolts out of the bar like he deputized himself
(24:41):
as an FBI agent or something, and then totally went
rogue and for a while he got away with it.
Toby now has this sweet Les Paul electric guitar, and
right away he started touring his local haunts with it.
Not a worry in the world because that's Toby, and
because it's Toby, that's not the end of the story.
(25:02):
A few weeks later, Toby's performing up on stage and
he gets shot. We don't know who did it for sure,
but everyone I spoke to said it had to be
the guy he robbed and stole the guitar from a
few weeks earlier. So Toby he's shot and bleeding out
on stage across town. HiT's bedtime at dad's house when
(25:24):
the phone rings and I get a call again, like
ten o'clock at night, So you'd better get down to
this bar. Toby's been shot, and so I raced down.
It's like a forty five minute drive. He's still laying
on the floor in the bar shot. I get there
and say, look at you gotta go to the fucking hospital.
(25:47):
It's okay, I'm going of if you'd go with me. Well,
I got a call from somebody in my family to
say that my dad has been shot, and that was
that it was pretty severe. That's Jesse Anderson again, Toby's son,
and that day, the day his dad got shot, it's
always stayed with him. On the way to the hospital,
(26:12):
they got stopped by a train and he almost bled
out in the ambulance because the train was so long.
And at this time I now think, I think I'm
about twelve years old. But again, for me to hear
that my dad was shot, it's like going to the store.
I mean, it's the stuff happened all the time. Something
(26:34):
like this happened all the time. Toby recovered from being
shot and just kind of carried on. As crazy as
that sounds, this was normal life for the Anderson household.
In fact, hearing Jesse talked about his dad like this,
it helped me understand what life was like in Toby's world.
(26:55):
Mayhem just seemed to follow this guy everywhere. Everything was
topsy turvy. Even jumping in the car to pick up
a pizza became an event. All I remember is pulling
up to a stoplight and up in front of us
is a guy mugging another guy, and my dad's like, well,
I'm not going to stand for this, puts the car
(27:16):
in park, sets his beer up on top of the roof,
gets out, beats the living crap out of the guy
who was mugging the other one, stole all the money
that he had, split it with the other guy, got
back in the car with me, grabbed his beer, and
just drived on. And you know, Son, looks like we've
(27:37):
got some dinner money or something like that, and just
no big deal. Didn't say another word. That's my dad,
a little vigilante justice. That was a good night. But
it could get darker with Toby, a whole lot darker.
Let me come back, ned wades deeper did Toby's world.
(28:18):
He had that dark look you know what I'm talking about, Yeah,
that crazy look in your eyes that you think this
guy is a psychotic person. I better not push his button.
Ned's wife, Kathy met Toby on a number of occasions.
I remember telling Ned that he resembled to me Charles Manson,
(28:41):
and Kathy knew the telltale signs of a dangerous guy
at the FBI. She works street gangs in Flint, Michigan.
Toby didn't aspire to anything other than the moment, when
people only aspire to you know, how am I going
to get out of here in the next fifteen minutes?
And they don't care if they don't think consequence, They
(29:02):
don't think of any of that. Gang kids are like that.
They just do in the moment what they have to do,
and if it means killing you, they'll think about that later.
So why did Ned just walk away from him, let
him go back to prison, move on? Because Toby was, yeah,
(29:24):
definitely dangerous, but also kind of like a dead end.
I mean, he wasn't some kind of kingpin or even
a trusted lieutenant. He was just a violent and unpredictable guy.
But Ned, he just had a hunch he felt that
by slipping deeper and deeper into Toby's world, somewhere along
the way there'd be a payoff. And because he was
(29:47):
spending so much time with bikers, Ned kept hearing chatter
well ahead sources up in northern Michigan bikers, and they
would talk about, Okay, there's a shipman in or whatever.
The bikers would get their supply of weed when these
big shipments would come in, you know, which is fifty
thousand pounds, one hundred thousand pounds or whatever into the
(30:09):
Detroit warehouse. If such a warehouse really existed. It was
the El Dorado of drug houses and confirmed what the
Attorney General had said that elaborate drug networks lay behind
all the small drug busts that have been happening. So
Ned goes and tells his bosses, there's this huge deal
(30:29):
out there and involved shrimp boats and barges and airplanes.
And so I told my bosses about it, you know,
and they kind of said, yeah, you know, you know, right,
Tim is when he's smoking. Around the same time, Ned
says he arrested another biker and tried to flip him,
just like he'd done with Toby, only it didn't work.
In fact, during the arrest, the guy just taunted Ned.
(30:53):
He says, well, he says, you're missing the boat on
one of the biggest fucking deals going out there. You
don't even know what's under your own nose. But he
alluded to this massive deal where there's hundreds of thousands
of pounds of weed and coke coming in and then
basically said fuck you. And that was any wasn't going
to cooperating for Ned. This intel was just too enticing.
(31:17):
His bosses might have been skeptical, but Ned stuck with it,
kept hanging with Toby. It's just I knew he was
out with them all the time. I just until I
would hear from him. I would many many times just
sit there and think, oh my god, something's happened, and
then he'd call, and then I'd be relieved, and then
(31:37):
I'd be mad because because of all distress and the worry,
and it wasn't just Ned's safety that concerned her. Will
you hang around Matt Long with a bunch of bad
guys and fitting in with them, your behavior is going
to change, and your your own personal bars, you know
(32:00):
where you draw the line changes. This would be the first,
but not the last time that Cathy was right to
worry about her husband and where he was drawing the line,
especially when it came to Toby. You know, I was
supposed to meet him or whatever. And I went down
(32:21):
to the house on my motorcycle and pulled up in
the yard and put down the kickstand and walked in
and there's dead guy laying there in a pool of blood.
And I go, Toby, what the fuck? And he goes, Bros.
Masked man came through the door, shot this guy. I
guess he didn't like him and ran. That's all I know.
(32:43):
A masked man. Come on. Really, this was Toby's story.
A strange guy wearing a mask breaks into his apartment,
shoots this guy who's currently lying on the floor, and
then runs away, leaving Toby to take the rap. I mean,
this has got to be the homicidal equivalent of the
dog ate my homework. I later asked Toby's son about it,
(33:07):
whether his dad was the kind of person who was
capable of committing murder. It pains me to say it,
but I don't. I don't blink when I when I say,
you know, could he have done it? Did he do it?
Has he done it? I'm sure the answers ysked all
of them, and I don't I don't think twice about it.
(33:28):
Ned didn't tell Kathy about this whole episode with the
masked man and the dead body. Oddly enough, he seemed
to take the whole episode in stride. So in a way,
if you're one hundred percent certain it was Toby to
kill him, it was just a technicality that you weren't
there to witness it. I'm not a witness. I'm not
in charge of collecting evidence. FBI doesn't investigate homicides. It
(33:53):
wasn't my job to investigate a homicide. Just don't kill
somebody in front of me. That's it. Yeah, pretty much.
Ned says that he did call the police, and so
when De Tray police came and told him the same story,
and they didn't really give a shit. You know, it's
just some shit head biker. Ned now had his line
(34:15):
in the sand. The trick was keeping Toby on this
side of it, which you don't make progress. And unless
you're dealing with sociopathic, homicidal crazy people, that's who are
in the inner circle of drugs, violence and whatever. So
(34:36):
this is just part of the deal. It's part of
the deal. Yeah, so what are you saying to him
in that situation? You know, I just thought him would
be advantageous not to continue to have bodies laying around
(34:57):
in your house or in your yard, And I said,
tell the fucking mass man to stay away. After listening
to Ned's story, you know, in the shadow of his
ten foot stuff bare, I still just didn't know what
to make of it. When I got home, I reread
(35:19):
his novel. Ned and his ghostwriter were giving me everything
they thought I wanted, with all the film noir settings
and Raymond Chandler dialogue. In the novel, Toby's like that
two dimensional villain depicted on a target at a shooting range,
you know, lone bad guy with a gun drawn. But
what struck me most was what was missing from the novel.
(35:41):
There's no mention of Jesse the Sun, or what it's
like to grow up with Toby as your dad. And
Ned's wife and colleague, Kathy, she doesn't even make a
single appearance in the novel. I guess her Midwestern accent
and by the book thinking didn't fit into the hard
boiled narrative. It became clear to me that the truth,
(36:03):
if I could extract. It was way better. But this
wasn't going to be easy. Honestly, I didn't know if
I could fully trust all of Ned's memories. Part of
the problem was time. All of this happened thirty five
years ago. I mean, memories fade and then those same
memories had been taken off the shelf and reworked into fiction.
(36:25):
But I was all in, and so for the last
year and a half, I've been trying to put all
the pieces together. I've been to dive bars and horse farms,
to back water swamps and pirate museums. I've poured through
FBI reports in court transcripts. The story is taking me
to North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, and the Cayman Islands.
(36:47):
I've talked to agents from the FBI, the d e A,
and u S, Customs, to US attorneys, pilots, ex girl friends,
Detroit felons, and a bunch of big time drug smugglers,
and all of this to find out whether a rookie
agent from Detroit could really make a random bust in
a biker bar one night and set off a cascade
(37:08):
of events. The discovery of a gigantic drug warehouse, the
collapse of a nationwide smuggling ring, a war in Central America,
and the overthrow of a brutal dictator. Next time a
(37:38):
deep cover, you know, you don't have to choose that path.
You don't have to choose to work a case in
that way. You don't have to choose to go deep cover,
you know. But I know for him, he felt like
it was just spinning into the next, into the next,
into the next, and he told me that he felt
like he didn't know how he was ever going to
(37:59):
get out of it. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob
Smith and edited by Karen Shakerge. Our story editor is
(38:19):
Jack Hitt. Original music and our theme was composed by
Louise Gera and Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking
by Amy Gaines. Mia Lobell is Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's
novel is read by Walton Goggins. Special thanks to Julia Barton,
Heather Fain, Carl mcgliori, Leta Mullad, Maya Caning, Eric Sandler,
(38:43):
Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weissberg at
Pushkin Industries. Special thanks also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment.
I'm Jake albern
Host
Jake Halpern
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.