1341: Lou Valoze | Outsmarted the Criminals, Betrayed by the Government

24:00They might be whatever popular jeans were at the time. We would have thousands of pairs. And a lot of these guys were like, we want to buy a bunch of that. We're going to ship it to South America, make a lot of money. But these guys were also shipping AR-15s to South America. We would get in on that action. And we let them know right away that how we made money was we were buying all these guns down south. I was bringing them to New York and selling them for 15, 20 times what I paid for them, which is reality. Really? Yeah, that makes sense. Because they're illegal there, right? So if you can bring a gun in from, I don't know, even another part of the U.S., it's worth 10 to 20 times more in New York.

24:40Jordan, today I can go to a gun store right now and buy a cheap Lorsen or High Point 9mm for$110,$120. I can bring that gun up to New York. I can go to Brooklyn. I can sell it on the street for$3 ,000. Ray Kahn walked into criminal neighborhoods with counterfeit goods, fake confidence, and federal agents hiding somewhere nearby, like heavily armed stage parents. You, fortunately, just have to listen to this sponsor to pull your weight. Much safer, fewer felonies, better customer service. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Article. Your home speaks volumes. What I mean is when someone walks in, they're immediately getting a sense of your style, your taste, and how you live.

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27:35So if you decide to sign up, please do use our code. It's usually Jordan, not always, so check the deals page. It's a double win. You get a great deal, and you help keep the show thriving. And thanks for your support. So this is probably a dumb question, but how come a hood from New York who has$3 ,000 can't get an airline ticket to go to wherever, Texas, and buy a gun, bring it back, or mail it back? How come they can't do that? Mailing a gun's not easy, but think about it. So how's he going to get that gun? This guy's a convicted felon. He's from New York. Once he gets to Texas, you can't buy a handgun in another state.

28:11You can only buy a handgun in your own state. Oh, okay. I didn't realize you can't just buy it there. He doesn't want this gun in his name with all the paperwork, right? So this is the black market. This is firearms diversion. This is how firearms go from the legal marketplace to the illegal marketplace. His other option is to get his girlfriend or whoever happens to be, baby mama, whatever, to go to a gun store, buy a gun in her name, and then give that gun to him, which is called a straw purchase. Straw purchase. I remember reading about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, now I get it. Yes, that was a dumb question because, of course, you need to show your ID and they go, hey, man, you don't live in Texas.

28:46Get out of here. And that's the end of that. Mailing a gun is hard, but I guess buying the gun in the first place without an ID is the hard part. That's why a gun's worth three grand once you get it to Brooklyn, when it's worth 150. Most of these guys aren't passing the background check either. In New York City, you can't even buy a handgun anyway. It's all supply and demand, right? The demand for guns is very high, and there's basically no supply other than the black market. So to sell this story and the storefront operations that Ray Kahn and I were doing to say, listen, my business, my side hustle is buying guns down here in Georgia, down in the South.

29:23I sell them to my gangster buddies up in New York, which is gun trafficking, which a lot of these guys were into anyway. Everyone knows, especially handguns,$150 revolver that you can buy down here. You're going to get$2 ,000 for up in New York. the massive markup on that is such a tempting business to get into not for me personally i'm talking but i just mean for a criminal like why would you even bother dealing with drug dealers and federal agents storing that because if you can just have people buy guns and get them to you or steal them and then buy them and ship them that just seems almost less risky than dealing with a lot of other, and the markup, 20X, that's almost approaching drug territory as far as the markup is concerned.

30:11That's crazy. So if you'll indulge me, I'll tell you how we did it. We had moving trucks. I would show these guys, some of them would have furniture in them, some of them would have these cigarette cases that we had kind of hollowed out the bottom, and we had traps in our undercover cars where you would press one button on the radio and then hit the air conditioning, and this trap would open up from the back of the seat. I've heard about that. That's freaking cool, by the way. Who builds those? We had informants who actually built them for cartels and stuff. So we would show these guys, listen, here's how we do it.

30:43I have this moving truck. So if I'm moving a family from Atlanta to New York in two months, I buy as many guns as I can. I try to get about 200 guns. I secrete those guns in their furniture. So worst case scenario, Johnny Law pulls me over on the way to New York on I-95. I say, listen, I'm just moving people's furniture. I don't look through the stuff. You know, it gets loaded up and we move it. And these guys would be like, right on, man. Or we would hide drugs and guns in these hollowed out master cases of Newports, where if you open the case, there's real cigarettes in there. But there was a hollowed out portion in the bottom where you could fit dope.

31:20And the smell of the cigarettes would throw off any drug sniffing dogs. So once we would show them our operation, and these guys were like, right on. And they would tell their friends about it. They would just blow up. Wow. Word of mouth. It's like having good TripAdvisor reviews, basically. And are you successfully committing little crimes to get them to ship more things at once? Or is one shipment enough to put somebody away? With drugs, they buy a little and then they buy more and more and more. Do you have to do that with gun trafficking? Or is it just like, hey, you're trafficking in automatic weapons.

31:53That's good enough. Just one single time. Because it's pretty high risk letting a bunch of guns get into Manhattan. Obviously, we weren't actually bringing any of these guns up. they were going into evidence when we bought them. That was just our cover story. So as far as how you would tell when you wanted to stop dealing with someone, when they had done enough, because we didn't want to pile on anybody, it depended on their background. So if a guy had a couple of armed robbery convictions and they brought one gun to us to sell, they're looking at 20 years. So you really didn't have to do much more.

32:23Now, drugs, obviously, it was the type of drug and the weight they were selling and their criminal history you would have to look at. we would take everything on kind of a case-by-case specific circumstance of how many times we'd want to deal with that person. And we're always very concerned about creating crime. That's where I'm going with this. Like, how do you decide to balance where you're just creating more criminals and more crime by making it so, I mean, 20x markup, I would never criminal defense lawyer, but I did a little bit here and there. I'm going to argue this is entrapment because the deal is too good.

32:54There's too much money involved. They got this guy seeing dollar signs and he wasn't thinking clearly, especially if my client doesn't have a criminal record already. Remember, I'm just paying Georgia street prices, right? I'm not paying New York. I'm selling it at New York prices, as far as they know. Entrapment never worked because it's real hard to say I was entrapped when I'm on video pulling up to this place three or four times, and there I am bringing my guns and my drugs in. We would always negotiate down just like if I was really doing it. I lived my life as an undercover agent as if I was a real criminal, how I would really do it if I had chosen that route.

33:31If a guy would bring a gun in and I knew based on where I was, if I was in Atlanta, that gun's worth about 250 bucks. Some of these guys would come in and say, I want a thousand dollars for this gun. Now, our number one rule is we never let a gun walk. We never let a gun walk out those doors. If you let a gun walk out the door and he kills someone with that gun, kill someone later that day, that's on you. When Ray would bring someone in, I wasn't letting that person out unless I had that gun in my hand. So when he came in and wanted$1 ,000 for a gun that I knew on the street here is about$250, that's when, as an undercover, your negotiation skills come in.

34:09You have to get it down to a point where it's acceptable to him and it's also acceptable to a jury. That was a realistic price. Because if you overpay for the gun, then the entrapment argument works better because if I'm offering you five grand for a gun that's 500 bucks, the defense is this was a great deal and he couldn't turn it down and the police made it that way so they could create a crime. Yeah. Okay. Negotiations with criminals, it's dangerous, right? It often ends in fistfights and shootouts, yelling and screaming, and that's just something you got to deal with. But you can't let that gun walk out that door.

34:45So even though he wanted a thousand. I might get away with giving him 420 bucks. He's happy. He's not real happy, but he's satisfied. I'm happy. I know it's a good case now. And he walks out that door. That gun's never going to kill anyone. My job has been done. You mentioned before you never wanted to pile charges onto people. What's the rationale behind that? Because is that also, hey, it looks really bad to a jury when they had this guy commit 40 crimes instead of getting them on the first two. When you look at it, when you step back and look at it, what was the purpose? Why did you commit 30 undercover transactions with this one guy?

35:19So now you got them stacked up. You got so much weight. Let's say it was heroin. You got so much weight and he's looking at a 20-year minimum. That's really not why we're there. If he's selling heroin, we'll buy an amount that's going to get him some good time and we cut him off. There were times when guys would keep coming back to us, but again, we didn't want to pile on. We had enough on him. So a lot of times we would say, listen, man, we're chilling out here. We've seen a lot of cops riding by, so we're chilling out. We always told everyone, hey man, listen, 90 % of our business is 100 % legitimate.

35:50That was our motto. So we said, listen, we're just doing our work right now and we're not playing games for a while until the heat drops. As soon as these guys would hear that, you'd never see them again anyway. Because they were smart enough to realize that if you saw the risk, they should pay attention and go somewhere else. All right. So the warehouse trap, he's bringing these guys into the warehouse to allegedly transport something. You're buying the guns or whatever from these folks. How do you end up arresting them? Do you just find them later? What happens with this? So these operations would go for usually about a year.

36:22You might do a deal with a guy in the second month and never deal with him again. By the time the takedown is going to happen, a year might have gone by. So what we would do is as soon as we would get them identified, we would have a packet on them and we would usually give that to the U.S. Marshals. And so when we were starting getting close, whatever the takedown operation was going to be, and we had some great ones, whether it was hundreds of law enforcement officers going out and banging doors down to find these guys or bringing them in to the warehouse, which was my favorite way to do it, the Marshals would have packets on these guys.

37:02So they'd be putting them to bed maybe a couple of weeks before this. They would know where they're laying their head. They would know what they're driving and all that. And so in the event that they didn't show up or we couldn't get them, we would just turn the warrants over to the marshals. We would delegate apprehension responsibility to the U.S. marshals who are the best in the business and they would hunt them down and find them. You don't want to be hunted by the marshals. Our old scoutmaster was a U.S. marshal. This is 80s and 90s, right? So a different time. I remember he had a gun in the car, just in the console of the car.

37:33He'd be driving us to McDonald's or something after a camping trip. And I remember we would open it up and look at it and he'd go, careful, there's no safety on that because there's a revolver, you know? And we would pick it up and handle it. And he's like, put that down, come on. In 2026 terms, you're like, you just let a 14-year-old boy pick up a revolver in your car while you're on the highway. Times have changed. Now he would be arrested for that. Not even just lose his job as a marshal. He would just be arrested for that. the boy scouts was crazy back then it was like all right shotgun merit badge probably doesn't even exist anymore we'd go shooting and he'd be like all right this is my duty revolver don't keep your finger on the trigger don't aim it at anyone and we do a real gun safety class but it's like looking back we were kids whose idea was this it's a terrible idea but you're here nobody got hurt we respected those weapons and we were all good shot just kind of funny looking back at it because I got kids now and I'm like, I would never, no chance.

38:30My kids are a little too small, but even then I've met teenagers now. No way. No freaking way. So, all right, these guys, they're getting hunted by the marshals or they're going into the warehouse. So do you have like a couple of weeks at the end of the year where it's like, all right, we got our 1 PM arrest appointment where this guy's going to come in and bring, I don't know, some contraband or whatever. How does it work? How does it go down? So these takedowns were insane. Ray would keep everybody's number in his phone. Let's say we had a hundred defendants at the end. We would tell Ray about maybe about a month or two before the takedown.

39:05We would say, Ray, reach back out to this guy. I haven't talked to him in eight months, but, and let him know that we have, and I'm just going to use one of the examples that we used to use. We have a semi-trailer full of flat screen TVs coming in on this date. If he can get here in the morning, if he can be here by 10 AM, we'll give him the pick, we're selling them super cheap. So again, we're just using bait to lure them in. And you can imagine logistically how difficult this is because getting criminals to show up at a certain time. So I did have questions about that because I was thinking, what if they're late?

39:38They run into the next guy? They're the worst, right? Yeah. So we would make it as appealing as possible saying, listen, if you're here by 1030, otherwise these things are going to be gone. We're selling them for pennies on the dollar. We just need to get rid of them. So Ray would do a great job selling. Me and my partners would call some of the guys. Ray always did the lion's share of it. So we would actually stack them up all throughout the day on the day of the takedown. These takedowns, we would run a live feed to headquarters. The brass at headquarters would be watching all this. We would have our SRT team, which is our special response team, the ATF SWAT team in the Southeast.

40:13They'd be in the warehouse hiding up in the rafters and they'd be in the back of the truck that they opened up. They'd open up this truck where the TVs were supposed to be. And it'd be guys with live rounds and beanbag rounds. And these guys would still try to run amazingly. I think I would also run just because I don't know what's going on and I'm a criminal. You hope it's the cops at that point, right? You hope. Right. But then there's a lot of factors you can't control. Sometimes they'd show up with their wife and kids. Sometimes they'd show up with other bad guys. They'd show up in a car that had a couple kilos of cocaine in it.

40:47And you have to deal with all that right on the spot, because the next guy is supposed to come in 20 minutes. Oh, geez. You're cutting it close. There were times when it would overlap and someone would pull in and they'd see a bunch of activity they'd take off. So cover teams would have to follow them and try and pull them over. We would have car chases. There were actually some fatal ones. Car chases, shootouts, shootouts inside of the warehouse. Raycon had to activate a few times. He actually chased some people down and tackled them, which we never heard the end of. So your informant tackled a guy during the operation.

41:21I don't think that's part of the job description typically, correct? No, and if you hear him tell it, he was Dick Buckus. Because as soon as he tackled the guy, the dog got on him. It was a whole scene. Ray, he loved to be in the mix. Most informants, once their job is done, they don't want to be anywhere near the takedown or anything. He wanted to be there. He wanted to be on every arrest. Again, he's just built differently. He should have been a cop. He really should have been a cop. He would have been incredible. Would that dude have taken a bullet for me? Without question. Like you said, he's built different.

41:51It's just crazy he failed the police exam, but managed a chemical engineering degree. Don't understand this guy at all. I'll tell you what else is crazy is that I ended up getting all sorts of awards for these operations. You know, the U.S. Attorney's Office gave me Agent of the Year and Project Safe Neighborhood, Gang Case of the Year, Drug Case of the Year, Gun Case of the Year, OCDF Case of the Year. I remember receiving these awards and thinking, I should give this right to Ray Kahn. So the arrests that you're getting, I mean, how many arrests does an average ATF agent make in their career?

42:24Do you know? I mean, let's say a 20-year career, 25-year career, a couple a year, usually. So making how many in one operation? You said there was like 100 defendants on these? ATF had never seen results like this. The tattoo shop, which was in Augusta, Georgia, 12 months. we bought 430 crime guns in 12 months, which ATF had never seen something like that. No one had ever seen those kind of drugs. We didn't have enough money to buy all the drugs we wanted to buy. We could have bought drugs all day long, but that wasn't really what the operations were about. We were there to buy guns. We were buying every single one of these operations, three or 400 crime guns off the streets, 100 defendants, 75 federal defendants, 25 state them, just numbers like they'd never seen before.

43:16It's shocking how many guns are out there. It just seems like you have an unlimited supply of contraband that you can get off the street. Do you feel like you're making a big dent in it, or is it just like next week there were 400 more? That's a good question. The answer is yes on the gun side. On the drug side, no. You can pretty much buy drugs all day long and arrest everyone selling them to you, and you're just plugging holes in the dam. I never felt any satisfaction or that I really made much of a difference. With the guns, every gun I bought made a difference. That's how I felt. Every crime gun that I bought off the street that I took out of the hands of some violent dude, that was a gun that would not be used to kill anyone again.

43:57That was a gun that was going to be destroyed after the case was adjudicated. It gets melted and it's not out there anymore. The short answer to your question is on the gun side, yeah, we were making a big difference. And I can tell you, I got a call from one of the cops who was in our cover room, one of the detectives in our cover room on one of these storefront operations. He called me about a year and a half after the takedown. And he said, listen, I got to tell you, he goes, our vice unit and our narcotics unit, they are so bored right now because they can't get anything done. No one will sell any drugs on the street.

44:33No one will sell any guns because they think everyone is an undercover fed. For a while, it makes an impact. Eventually, a new generation comes in and that's over. But on the gun side, we made a big difference. Why do they destroy the gun and they don't just sell it legally through some kind of auction? Because it's already been used in a crime? I don't really understand. There are some sheriff's departments out there who do that. After they take a gun and the case is adjudicated, they'll have an auction, they'll sell it, which I don't agree with. I just feel that if it's a stolen gun and you can return it to its rightful owner, we do that.

45:09But otherwise, I risk my life to buy that gun off the street. It's a crime gun. It's been used in robberies. It's been used in assaults. It's maybe some murders. That gun needs to be destroyed. It doesn't need to be back out on the street. Hopefully it wouldn't be back out on the street. It would be in some orthodontist's home office, Right. But I guess I see your point, too. That's ATF policy. And I think it's because it does look bad. If NYPD retrieves a gun that's used in a robbery and when it gets traced, it's, oh, wow, this gun was in ATF custody three years ago. It's bad optics. That's what I'm thinking.

45:44You get a gun that's been used to kill a bunch of people and then some guy owns it now and then that gets stolen. And then the person who steals it commits a convenience to a robbery. And he's like, hey, this was used to murder people. Are you that guy? No, actually, I stole it from this guy and I robbed this convenience store with it. So it screws up the evidence chain to like the ballistics are the same as this serial killer. Oh, well, they found that guy. And then the guy who bought that got robbed. I see your point to destroying the thing. I don't believe in metaphysical things, but there's also some sort of bad juj with a gun that's been used to kill people in crimes and stuff like that, too.

46:17I'm a pro Second Amendment guy, but I feel that once a gun has been on the streets and passed through hands and been used in crimes, If law enforcement can take it off the streets, let's destroy that thing. If you really need a gun, you can get a gun. There's plenty of gun stores out there. Yeah, they're still making them. I hear they're still making them. But you mentioned before Ray was built different. There's a story in the book about his store gets robbed at gunpoint, and he just gets across the counter and slaps the robber in the face repeatedly. So he doesn't have normal reactions to stress and pressure, right?

46:46He's just fearless, this guy. Yeah, and he tells that story with such matter-of-factness. Again, an Indian cultural thing is a slap because it's not only forceful, but it's degrading. So when he grabbed this guy by the collar, he slapped him. This guy had the gun. It's almost like an insult on top of a beating. He just has this inner feeling that he's invincible. I used to warn him like, Ray, if you're getting them to go to the warehouse and you know they got guns and drugs, please don't ride in their vehicles with them. If they get pulled over, I'm not going to be able to help you. Or if they're getting drugged up and they might get violent, but it would go in one ear and out the other.

47:22and he would do exactly what we told him not to. But the results were always good, man. Occasionally, we would get burned. Some of the guys he would bring in would either sell us some drugs that were so stepped on, it wasn't even worth the charge, or there would be some funny things with the gun and money and all that. He would take it personally and go out there and try and vigilante some stuff on his own. And we would say, Ray, because there's times, even as an undercover, you just let it go. I'll get him on the next round. Criminals aren't going to suddenly turn over a new leaf and get away with everything they've gotten away with in the past.

47:55That does not happen very often, right? My buddy is a cop in San Diego, and I remember he was doing some sort of drug sting, and I was like, hey, let me know when you get a break. We'll go eat lunch. And he's like, yeah, I'm thinking about calling it. I was like, man, you know, isn't it tough to catch these guys? And he goes, no, I have to get lucky one time. This guy has to get lucky every day. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's a really good point. He just has to see you walking out of the house that one time with that one person. But you have to successfully do that every single time you go to work, basically, if you're a criminal.

48:25Man, he's so right. There were times as an undercover to get burned with either a fake gun or fake drugs. Everyone's going to mess with you, right? You don't hear the end of it. It hurts the ego. Actually, ecstasy was really big when Ray first started with me. These ecstasy pills and we would buy thousands of them. And there was a guy who came in, something didn't feel right. He sold me this ecstasy and it said SJ on it. And a lot of times ecstasy would be, it has a lot of custom stuff on it. Like, yeah. And so you get the bear or like a logo, you get the Tesla logo on them or whatever. And you're like, oh, the Teslas are good.

49:03Or like, oh, you got to get the Lego bricks, the Lego bricks of the shit right now. Yeah. You see those or hear about those. This guy had his big bag full of these ecstasy pills that said SJ on them. And at the time, that guy, Sean John, or there was a rapper. I have no idea. It sounds right to me. I'm sure we'll get a thousand emails about it. It's the other way around. Whatever. He was a big at the time. I think his name was Sean John. And he told me that's who it was. They had stamped on there. And I was like, all right, cool. I bought a whole big bag and all that. And they got sent off to the lab.

49:33It turns out it was, I think it's St. Joseph's Aspirin is what it was. Okay. I never heard the end of that. But Ray, when I told Ray, he took that personally. Yeah. he took that personally and I said, Ray, just let it go. He's going to come back. It's cool. We're going to get them. No big deal. The next day, Ray physically had dragged that dude back into the shop. And the guy sold me a couple thousand real ecstasy pills at that time because he didn't want that on his resume, man. That's funny. But the question is that guy's defense attorney probably was like, yeah, they literally forced my client into the store and forced him to sell them real drugs after he sold them fake drugs.

50:14That's not a great case. You know, it's not a great defense either, but it's not a great case. It's not that clean. This guy had prior drug sales convictions. That always helps. So I would say he was predisposed. Yeah, that's funny. You mentioned before drugs were so stepped on, which for people who have never sold drugs, that means when you mix, I don't know, cocaine with baby aspirin so that you have twice as much cocaine now, right? Lidocaine was a big one that they would use. Basically, what they're doing is we call it stepping on it. They're cutting it, the real drugs. They'll take a kilo of cocaine.

50:47And by the time they get done with it, it'll still smell like cocaine. But 60 or 70 percent is now some sort of stimulant like a lidocaine powder. But it's not real cocaine. So only 40 percent. So your purity is down to like 40 percent. We'll be right back after this. And unlike the ATF, our sponsors are actually telling you up front what the deal is before you accidentally become part of an operation called something like Smokescreen Meat Grinder. See you on the flip. This episode is sponsored in part by ButcherBox. I'm not somebody who skimps on the quality of what I put in my body. I'll cut corners on plenty of things, making my bed, folding the laundry, pretending I'm going to organize the garage.

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53:31We are happy to dig up codes for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Lou Velozzi. How does this work? Let's say I get a kilo of cocaine, and I want to make it two kilos of cocaine so I can make twice as much money. I go and I buy a bunch of lidocaine somehow, or I get it from a crooked, I don't know, lab or dentist or something like that. And then I sell you two kilos of cocaine, but half of it is lidocaine. Am I going down for one kilo of cocaine or am I going down for two kilos of cocaine, even though half of it was lidocaine? How does that work?

54:02So in the federal system, you will be prosecuted on how much cocaine you sold me. So we'll get the purity levels of both of those kilos and whatever the total was. And by the time you get into that much, you're going away for a long time, no matter what. But yeah, so let's say it was 50-50 on both. You would be prosecuted on one kilo of cocaine. I know I'm going to face pushback for this in the emails, but at first glance anyway, it seems to me like you should be charged for the amount of drugs you thought you were selling as opposed to the amount of drugs you actually... Like, look, if you sold no drugs, I guess I'm a little sympathetic.

54:36If you sold aspirin, you were a con man, not a drug dealer. But if you sold drugs and they were just really shitty, but you sold a lot of them, I don't know why you get a break on that. I don't really get it. That's a great point. And I'll bring it back to Ray Kahn. So conversely, to the point you're bringing up about the drugs, one time he brought me in a guy who was a counterfeiter. It was a guy from the hood, but he said, man, I can't remember what his points were, but it was pretty good on the points as far as what I would have to pay him for these counterfeit bills. Counterfeit US currency?

55:07Yeah, hundreds. Yep. So I said, let me get three. Give me a sample. Let me get three of them. And depending on how good they are, I'll make an order. So this guy brings me$300 bills the next day. I bring them to my Secret Service buddy, and he looks at him, and he said, Man, these are the greatest counterfeit notes I've ever seen. Unbelievable. So I order a couple hundred thousand dollars from this guy, and he shows up, and I'm not kidding you. He had them in a big briefcase. So the top ones were pretty good quality, but as you went in the pile, it looked like a kid had done it on a Xerox machine.

55:43they were awful. If you tried to pass one of these, you'd get your ass kicked, right? And I told this dude that I was trading, I was going to use this money to buy fake cigarettes off some Russians in New Jersey. And I was like, dude, I get killed if I try to pass these. And he's like telling me, you just take the good one and make it one of a wide and put the bad ones. This is a good way to get killed. Yeah, for sure. But anyway, the point is it didn't matter the quality. He still ate that whole charge for a couple hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit because it doesn't matter what the quality is.

56:13If you're a convicted felon, it doesn't matter if you sell me a little.22 revolver or an AR-15. It's the same charge. You get the same time. But when it comes to drugs, it's different. Yeah. I wonder what the logic is there. Do you know? Yeah. I don't know whether it's right or wrong, but that's just how the federal statutes are written. On the one hand, I guess it doesn't matter because if you're selling two kilos instead of four, you go down for two instead of four, you're still going away for a long time. and drug penalties are pretty insane as it is, I think. I don't know how productive those are.

56:43But yeah, it just seems like, you're right, counterfeiting. It doesn't matter if you draw the crappiest$100 bill out of crayons. If I go to the store and try to spend it, that's a crime. Same crime as if it was, you know, flawless. We have a lot of federal prosecutors and things like that who are listening to the show and defense attorneys. Somebody shoot me an email with the logic behind this. I'm so curious why this happens to be the policy. Okay, so after all this success, why does everything start to fall apart for Ray? I mean, he starts getting these arrests for nonsense, like pirated DVDs, and the Department of Revenue is targeting him.

57:16By the way, what is that again? The Department of Revenue? I feel like I knew all the agencies, but I don't even remember what this is. I'm sure I've heard of it. So this is a state agency, the Georgia Department of Revenue. Basically, the guys who regulate and enforce all the alcohol and tobacco laws of the state. It's revenue, it's taxes. And they were loosely partnered up with us during these operations because we did use them to help out with tobacco licenses and all that, and to help out with the cover team. They would staff one of their agents to help us out. They're kind of partners. Little did we know, this whole time, the head guy, this guy had a hard-on for Ray Kahn.

57:57Now, a lot of the people he dealt with were Indians because of They own most of the gas stations. They sell cigarettes. They own a lot of liquor stores and all that. He had it in for Raycon. While these operations were going on, they had open investigations on Raycon. They were working him and his stores. And Ray had, we would give him a lot of swag that we called it, which was all counterfeit junk to put in his trunk to go out. When he was meeting with these people, he would say, hey, this is what I have at the warehouse. This is part of the bait he would lure him in with. Thank you. And Ray was an enterprising guy.

58:33He had taken some of these counterfeit DVDs and they ended up in one of his stores and he was selling them. Okay. They arrested him for that. During the operation, he gets arrested for that. As an undercover fed, I'm thinking, shouldn't we have some priorities here in Long Beach? Yeah, no kidding. Hey, we're going to take this crucial chess piece off the board for freaking DVDs. For what? It's almost personal, right, with this guy. Because otherwise, why bother? It was personal. And to kind of make it even more difficult, all I was able to do, we were able to stay his deportation. We were not able to get him a legal status in the country.

59:10He was essentially just paroled in to help us. So as soon as he gets arrested, ICE puts a detainer on him. We had to finish that operation out without him. Now, luckily he had done so much, the wheels were turning. We didn't need him anymore at that point. But for the next operation, we start out with another informant who had made all sorts of promises. We're going nowhere, Nowhere. And my partners are like, hey, we need Ray Kahn. Now, he's been scheduled for deportation again. Now I have to jump through hoops. We literally got him pulled off the tarmac as they were loading him up. Had an ATF agent get him and bring him to a hotel in Atlanta.

59:47He had been in the ICE detention facility for like three or four months. You'd think he'd be bitter about this, about his treatment, all that. shows up the next day, smile on his face, jumps right into work and starts killing it. Unbelievable. What happened to his businesses when he was put away for three or four months? He lost everything. His rival, which was his own family, took everything from him. He had to start out again from scratch. Now this happened twice. He was arrested twice. The DVDs once and the other one was for having a video poker machine that was paying out when it wasn't supposed to.

1:00:22I see. Because you can't gamble in Georgia? I don't know. Now you can. Now the state has made it legal because they're saying it helps scholarships or whatever. But at this point, no, you couldn't. So he gets arrested twice during these operations. Now we're starting to realize that these guys are supposed partners. Ray has become Moby Dick to this guy. And when everything kind of fell apart after the last operation, and when I could no longer help rate because I was in trouble on my own. They went after him full bore. They actually indicted him on state RICO charges for tax purposes, right? Tax evasion.

1:01:02It just seems like such a waste of resources. And I know us civvies always think like this. Why didn't somebody just call you and go, hey, is this guy important to you? Okay, I have 800 other things on my desk. I'm just going to move on. The end. You would think, right? I always found that this is the Georgia Department of Revenue, I always found that in dealing with a lot of different entities, which I did throughout my career, the less power some of these guys have, the bigger their badge gets. It's the petty tyrant, right? It's the person who's got the key to the filing cabinet and they just will never let you have it.

1:01:34They got to walk you down there during their available office hours to unlock it for you. Yeah, it's always one of those. That's a great way to put it. My mom was a teacher and she would go, yeah, Catherine has the filing cabinet key that we have for the student records and we can't make copies and she can't leave it somewhere where we can all get it. And she can't leave the cabinet unlocked and she's got to walk you down there. But she only works Tuesdays and Thursdays and she only wants to do it after lunch. My mom would always complain about this, right? Because there'd be eight teachers waiting to get the frickin' manila folder with a student's name on it so they could make something on a chart.

1:02:07It's just unbelievable nonsense. It's amazing, right? The less power someone has, the more they want to exert. I guess it's human nature. Yeah, I suppose so. For certain people, it's human nature. I think a reasonable person would have just left the damn cabinet unlocked. A reasonable person in this guy's shoes would have said, we at the Department of Revenue have so many things we have to deal with. Me cleaning up a law enforcement informant who's done more good than harm. I don't care about this at all. Tell him to throw the porn DVDs in the garbage and stop buying cigarettes and our work here is done.

1:02:36Let's move forward. But no, this guy had to put away a convenience store owner because he got bullied in middle school or something. That's exactly it. You got it. You nailed it. So at that point in my career when I could no longer protect him, what we did was we reached out to ICE. Again, I had to do a memo every month to keep him in the country. But we reached out to ICE and said, man, we got a great informant. And they took him right away. And he's actually, he's been working for them since and making unbelievable money laundering cases. I'm talking tens of millions of dollars. Iceworks money laundering cases?

1:03:14I did not know that. I guess I never thought about that. Yeah, it's always money laundering cases where it's foreign nationals. The money leaves America and the foreign nationals bringing it back in once it's cleaned. Is that the whole, you can't fly in with more than$10 ,000 in cash and if you do, you got to declare it and something, something. thing. I always wonder about that. And they're like, do you have any precious gems worth over that? And I'm always like, no, man. Do I look like a guy who carries a bag of precious gems worth over$10 ,000? But I guess that's the point, right? We want to make sure that it's not being laundered.

1:03:44Okay, that tracks. I guess I just assumed that was not ICE doing that. Nowadays, 2026, when we hear about ICE, it's only one thing, right? We only hear about that one thing. So at least now he was able to stay in the country. That was his only goal from the beginning. We never paid him a dime. His kids are here. He just wanted to stay in the country. I feel so bad for this guy. He worked his ass off, and it's just such a mess. He lost his car, and then he lost his business, then he built it again, then he lost it again. It's just like this guy, he just takes beating after beating, but he's so resilient.

1:04:15It's really admirable, actually. Now he's driving a$750 ,000 Rolls-Royce SUV. That's crazy. I don't care how much money I have. I would never buy anything like that. Just the fact that you could have a car that costs that much and then it gets dinged by a Prius in a parking lot. It's just like, no, thank you, man. No way. I can't deal with that. I guess if you really love your cars. Even then, I don't know anybody who has a Rolls Royce. I do, but they're all 80 years old and they live in the UK or something. Okay, so Ray gets arrested because this guy, like you said, had a hard-on for him from the Department of Revenue.

1:04:55They worked this huge tax evasion case on him and his son and some of his associates. And again, this is not the IRS. This is the Georgia Department of Revenue claiming that he has not paid millions in taxes. I can't tell you anything about this. Not my area. But he gets indicted. State RICO charges. Racketeering Influence Corrupt Organization. RICO charges on the state level in Georgia. I believe one of his other associates gets picked up. He gets a heads up and he made some phone calls. He called his controlling agent, me and some other law enforcement he'd been working with. And everyone told him the same thing.

1:05:33Get out of town. Let your lawyers see what's going on and get a grip on this. So basically just leave Georgia so they have no jurisdiction over you and they can't arrest you. Was that kind of the advice? Pretty much. Wow. That's kind of interesting. Federal law enforcement being like, it's not a federal case. It's a state case. So leave the state. Right. Because we all knew there was corruption. We all knew something was fishy. Something wasn't right. So this is where the story gets totally wild. Now, you've already heard about everything this guy has done. Thousands of crime guns off the streets because of him.

1:06:09Dangerous drugs, hundreds of kilos of dangerous drugs, violent defendants, trigger pullers off the streets because of this guy. Stolen cars, counterfeit money, all that. Big time stuff. Now he's a fugitive. Now he's on the run from this Georgia agency that was supposed to be actually participating in these operations with us. They knew the good he was doing. Now, Ray has built himself back up by this time. He's making a lot of money. It's a lot easier to be a fugitive when you have money. It's tough to be on the run when you're broke. When you have money, it's easier. And Ray's learned a lot from me and from my team.

1:06:49So he knows what he's doing. He's very smart with phones. He knows how to be on the run, how to be a fugitive. He does everything right. He has contacts who are able to bring him cash. He's got people who can shuffle him around. He's able to make his way up to New York City. Once he's up there, he does what Ray does. he gets in with people who can help him using that Ray Conch army has. He's right in Midtown. He's able to get a beautiful place. Now he's got to do everything with cash. Yeah. No credit cards can be used and all that. Cause even though he's out of Georgia, there's an active warrant for his arrest.

1:07:28So he's up there and he's successfully dodged the law at this point. They're sitting outside his house. He's getting information that they're doing surveillance on his house back in Georgia. Everyone's been arrested. And he has an incredible team of lawyers out of Atlanta who he's paid millions of dollars when this is all said and done, who are working on this case for him. While he's up in New York City, living in Midtown, I'm not going to say he's having a good time, but he's doing as good as you can do being a future. He's kind of an ICE detention center or prison, probably, yeah. Absolutely.

1:08:06He's eating at good restaurants, making friends up there. He gets in real good with the doorman, which is very important in New York to make friends with your doorman because they know everything that's going on, which pays off for him big time later. His lawyers start their own investigation using their own investigators. And this guy who the main guy who's pretty high up in the Georgia Department of Revenue by this time, who was obsessed with Ray Kahn, they end up finding out that he is corrupt, that he's been working with Ray's main competitor, who is actually Ray's brother-in-law. Not a criminal gang, just working with another guy who owns, what, convenience stores?

1:08:48Yes. This is crazy. One of his biggest competitors. And this guy has been not only feeding this Georgia Department of Revenue agent bad information, but he's been bribing him. $10 ,000 watches, plane tickets, round trip plane tickets to Europe for him and his wife to go after Ray Kahn. The lawyers are able to uncover this. then they find out this guy's boss who was like one of the number one guys over at the georgia department of revenue never went to college like he claimed he did had a whole thing on the wall yep and used that to promote so they uncover all this which you know once you do that their credibility is gone yeah i mean if you lie about having a college degree we've seen examples of this before, where somebody has a great career and it's been, I don't know, 10 or 20 years and everyone loves them and they find out they didn't graduate from Duke or whatever.

1:09:44And it's just, you're fired. It's over. It doesn't matter if you've done a bunch of work, have a good experience, great connections. After that, everything you've ever done is in question and it's just not worth it. It's not worth unraveling all that. It's true. And let alone taking bribes. Yeah, that too. Yeah, of course. So now six months has gone by and there was a point where Ray was out in the park and Central Park, and he gets a heads up, gets a call from the doorman telling him that a couple of detectives had come over and shown him a picture of Ray. Have you seen this guy? Does he live here?

1:10:19The doorman, he did a New York kind of thing that Ray, of course, had taken good care of this guy, tipped him really well, I'm sure. And the doorman covered for him, said, you know, you're going to have to talk to the owner. He goes, it doesn't look familiar to me. There's a lot of Indian, Middle Eastern type guys here. I can't really tell from that picture. Then he immediately called Ray. Now Ray can never go back to that apartment. Got to go get a new place. But that was only for a very short period of time because the case against him was already starting to unravel by the time that happens.

1:10:46Did the lawyers bring this to the DA? Hey, by the way. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. So here's the end result of his lawyer's investigation. That Georgia Department of Revenue agent who had become a special agent in charge of that region by this time gets arrested, perp walked in front of the cameras and charged under the same RICO statutes for bribery. So in this crazy twist, his boss with the college degree loses his job. Like you said, fired instantly. Captain Ahab, who's going after Ray, he gets arrested and perp walked, loses his job, loses his pension. Ray is able to come back victorious after six months.

1:11:27That must've felt really good. Oh, yeah. Not only did the case fall apart, but the guy who's going after you gets arrested. That's just like nothing sweeter than that. So ironically, a couple things then when the dust kind of settles. So eventually the DA's office just drops charges on everyone, even a DOR guy, because this thing is now such a mess. They don't want to touch it, right? So they dismiss. Ray was out there infiltrating criminal gangs with no formal training, no badge, and apparently no functioning fear response. Meanwhile, I need three browser tabs and an emotional support animal to compare toothpaste.

1:12:01We'll be right back.

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1:12:47Get a 110-ounce jug on sale now through June 14th. Shop our selection of TruFuel in-store. And check out our weekly flyer on Menards.com for more great deals happening this week. Save big money at Menards. Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, something that will have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, and or relationships in under two minutes just about every Wednesday. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Lou Velozzi. Did Ray's brother-in-law get charged for this too? The guy who was bribing the Department of Revenue officer?

1:13:27Yes, he did. But again, the Diaz office said, this is so messy. We're dismissing everything. So ultimately, Ray kind of saved everyone else from getting in trouble. And here's the crazy part. When he comes back, his lawyers, they had reached out to the IRS and said, please audit our client. We are asking for an audit of our client. He's been accused of all this tax evasion. IRS does a full audit of Ray Kahn, and the results come back, and Ray is actually owed money by the IRS. Yeah, he's gone through all of this trouble, right? All the arrests, losing everything, stuck in county jails, and then taken to ICE detention centers while he's making these incredible cases for the ATF.

1:14:13But once again, I've never heard him complain. He never put his head down, threw it all. After this, now our goal at this point, we got to get this guy a green card. If anyone deserves legal status in this country, it's Ray Khan. We all wrote letters to the federal immigration judge, numerous agents from HSI, from ATF, detailing. My letter was about 12 pages long where I listed every federal defendant in their criminal history, all the guns, all the drugs, and still got denied. What? I'm shocked. That's crazy. The government clearly failed this guy. I mean, it seems like a lot of what came at him was some part of it was the cost of doing business when you're an informant, but a lot of it seems exploitative, right?

1:14:59Because you're essentially asking civilians to risk their lives for the government, which is hard to justify. But then you go, oh, and by the way, we're not even going to do you the courtesy of just letting you stay here and work and run your business that you already have. It's not like this guy came in illegally and then did a bunch of things that cost us as a country money. He actually was massively ROI positive and overstayed his visa. It's so insane to me. When you lay it out on paper, you look at the big picture and everything he did. It's really impressive. Just one gun off the streets is impressive, but thousands of guns off the street.

1:15:38And for him to be just continuously denied legal status, and I don't think it's being overdramatic to liken him to some of the translators in Afghanistan who helped our special forces units. I was just thinking about that. I had a driver the other day that was an Afghani translator, and I was like, hey, man, what do you think about some of the guys that you worked with just getting left there? And then it's like, oh, they'll let me in. I just need to apply. And it's like, nah, screw you, pal. Shame on us, really. That's all I can say about something like that. shame on all of us. I'll make this announcement and you're the first one that I'm telling this information to.

1:16:11All right. Last week, Raycon got his green card. Oh my God. Thank God. Through no help from the government or anyone else, eventually his son petitioned, paid a lawyer a ton of money. And finally, after 20 years, he was able to get his green card. But it's important to know. He got it, what, because his son filed for him and said you're dependent. So that's something that anybody can do because his son's a U.S. citizen, I assume, right? Born here. That's great news, but that should not have been the route that he needed to take to get the green card, right? I think we can agree on that. That's insane to me.

1:16:48The guy, he did more than, I'm going to say 90 % of the federal agents out there have done in their career. This informant did more. Thank God he gets to finally put that chapter to bed, man. God, if somebody out there thinks, hey, maybe I could do something like what Ray Kahn did, what are they missing? What was Ray's real gift with all of this? Besides his crazy work ethic that he clearly had. Ray had the same gift that an elite undercover agent has, the ability to make others want to follow him. He could walk into a room of criminals and make them want to follow him, to make them want to be a part of his hustle.

1:17:28That's the gift that he has. He can do that with anyone, not just criminals. He walks into a room and he's not even the most likable guy you'll ever meet. There's just something about him where you know you should follow this guy. This guy is successful at what he does, whether that's criminal or whether it's legit. I want a part of this guy's action. That was his skill. And that's how he was able to bring these people and say, hey, look at what I've got going on. Meet my people. What happens at that point? Surely informants die occasionally doing this. Listen, his family is not going to get taken care of.

1:18:02There's no monetary sum someone's going to get from the government. It's you're doing it at your own risk. It's a very thankless job. But again, you have to look at the motivation for why people become confidential informants. And over 90 % of the time, it's to receive favor with the prosecutors because you've been accused of a crime or you don't want to go back to prison. You violated your probation and a judge is going to give you a chance to work that off by cooperating with law enforcement. Now, there's a small number of informants who just do it for monetary reasons. So when you get other agencies, DEA and FBI have more money.

1:18:39They generally pay more. informants for DEA actually get a percentage of the take when they seize. If they can lead the DEA to a$10 million seizure, they'll get a million dollar, whatever the percentage that was worked out is. Oh, yeah. There's a movie with Ben Affleck that I saw recently and Matt Damon. They found some drug house and the woman who was there at the end got five million bucks because it was loaded with money. It was like a trap house. Yeah, that's a pretty good bonus, right? It gives you incentive to roll over on your cartel bosses. Exactly. But it's a high risk, right? You can get a good take.

1:19:11It's a very high risk. So 90 % of confidential informants are working off charges. Maybe 8 % are doing it for the money. And then there's this 2 % who are just doing it for the cause. You don't see it often. Ray's motivation was to stay in the country. That was his motivation. But I would say he would fall in that 2 % because he loved doing it. He was doing it for the cause. You can tell, right? He tackled somebody. If you're not interested in this. You do what you need to do to work off your charges and you try and stay out of the rest of it. You don't run back to work every day and over deliver every single time.

1:19:48He could have worked off those charges a long time ago, I would imagine. Man, this guy's amazing. I'm glad that he got his green card. It seems like he's probably rebuilt his business for the third or fourth time by now. Now his brother-in-law hopefully is out of the picture. So this guy who screwed up his whole life, tried to get him thrown in prison, tried to get him deported was his sister's husband. Does she know that she's married to a massive asshole now that he's been indicted or whatever and that the whole thing came out? Because it seemed like before she probably just didn't believe Ray, right?

1:20:16Oh, my husband says you're a jerk. He's my husband. I don't know. You got arrested. But now it's like, oh, no, I'm married to the jerk. He's lucky he's not in prison. She knows. She knows. But she's still married to this guy. Oh, yeah. And to this day, what is truly amazing, even though now he doesn't have to do this anymore, he's making some incredible cases that are helping America out in different ways now. And we kind of touched on this before, but he's found a way now to infiltrate these foreign nationals who are laundering tens of millions of dollars of our money. I cannot believe he's still at it.

1:20:48He can't become a law enforcement officer, right? Because he's got felonies and all this stuff. No. It's kind of too bad. It reminds me of all my buddies who wanted to join the FBI when we were in law school. And And they were like, have you ever smoked marijuana? And they were like, yeah, obviously. And they were like, oh, you can't work here. And I was thinking, you want to catch criminals? Boy Scout doesn't even cover it. These are guys that have never handled marijuana. And you're like, yeah, go find the most dangerous people in America. And it's like, what are you talking about? These guys have never left their small town or wherever.

1:21:17It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, the FBI, they don't catch a lot of people anyway. I'm not a big fan. But the hiring process is rough. And anything you've done in your background will come back to haunt you. The drug thing for me was no big deal. I never touched a drug. You certainly work in undercover, you get exposed to a lot of drugs. We lose a lot of good people because of the hiring process, unfortunately. Especially for undercover. I know ATF is always the greatest of all time when it comes to undercover. Even other agencies have admitted to me that if you want to do undercover, it's like, all right, you got to go to the ATF.

1:21:49Most people don't even think about the ATF. I bet you most Americans don't even know what it is. It just seems like you want somebody who has done a lot of stuff, but whose life hasn't been ruined by it. But yeah, it's just a fine line, right? It's just really tough to have. You need a CIA agent that knows a lot of terrorists, but isn't a terrorist, right? I can say with the utmost confidence that the ATF undercover program is the greatest undercover program in the world. And it produces the greatest undercover agents in the world. We're just heads above anybody else because we're out there on the streets doing it every day.

1:22:27We live it. I lived it for 20 years. It happens to be what we do really well. I was able to work with men and women who I was pinching myself that I could work alongside these men and women because they were phenomenal. If you just walked into a room and saw all of us, it looks like it's a prison meeting. Yet, meanwhile, these are some of the smartest, smartest, well-educated, well-spoken people you'll ever meet in your life. It was amazing to be able to work with everybody. I think it would also be fun to my wife to be like, hey, honey, I gotta go get a bunch of tattoos because I don't really fit in with the guys at work over here at the ATF.

1:23:05I gotta gain 35 pounds of muscle and get tattoos all the way from my neck down to my ankles. Sorry, it's part of the gig. It's part of the life. I went through the whole, I grew my hair all the way down to my waist. I had a ZZ top beard. I shaved my head. I had like 15 earrings in each ear and all that. And then I came to a point where I realized that a lot of the top level bad guys that I was going after, they didn't look like that. They look like normal people. So I would say for the second half of my undercover career, my look kind of went back to a normal look because I realized anyone can grow their hair long, grow a beard, grow your Afro out, whatever your thing is.

1:23:45But in the undercover world, you find out real quick who's supposed to be in it and who's not. And if you're not supposed to be in it, it doesn't matter how crazy your look is. They're going to fish you out right away. It's how you carry yourself, how you walk into a room and how you're able to connect with these people who, in reality, you have nothing in common with. These aren't college-educated people who have done right. These are people from a different world from where we're from. But you got to be able to get on their level and connect with them. It's how you carry yourself. Seems like some of the higher level folks, I don't know, is this a stereotype?

1:24:22Have I been watching too many movies? It seems like a lot of the higher level folks would be college educated potentially, but maybe not. Maybe even the highest ranking sort of criminal underbosses just grow up in a world of crime and never bother with that. I don't know. Yeah. The guys we were going after when it got up into the higher ranks of the bikers and the street gangs and the cartels. I'm not saying they weren't smart. They were not college educated, but you find out most of them, they didn't have some crazy look going on. They didn't do drugs. They sold them. They didn't do them. Once I finished doing all the street level stuff, which is how I started, that's how I learned.

1:24:56I'm in alleyways. I'm in shopping mall parking lots, getting into some joker's car to buy a stolen gun. Once you get those building blocks and you start working into these long-term, deeply embedded operations, you start to realize that how you look doesn't really matter. How you carry yourself is what matters. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess for the educated stuff, it's more white collar crime, right? If you're creating shell companies, you probably have a degree. But yeah, if you're just selling a bunch of guns, drugs, it's the school of hard knocks all the way. One of the first things you said at the top of the show where Ray rolled up, bought some cigarettes that were unstamped or whatever, untaxed.

1:25:33And that means you can seize the escalade as part of the crime. I'm so curious about civil asset forfeiture. I heard this gets abused sometimes. There's a lot of people that think that law enforcement often will abuse the civil asset forfeiture to just basically confiscate property where it's not necessarily always appropriate. I'm wondering what you think about that. It's human nature, right? Looking back now, I would call that somewhat of an abuse what I did. I saw that shiny Cadillac Escalade and I said, man, what a great undercover car that would make. I want that. So essentially, did I kind of engineer that seizure?

1:26:10I did, right? As long as there's contraband in a conveyance, whether that conveyance is a Cadillac Escalade or an ocean freighter or a horse and buggy, if it has contraband, it's seizable. You're not going to get it personally, but if they see something that would be a great asset for their department or their agency, you might go the extra mile to make sure that it becomes seesable. So yes, is there abuse? Without a doubt. Yeah. Interesting. My police department growing up in Michigan had, I think it was a Lamborghini that they'd painted with police colors. And I remember thinking, did I pay for that?

1:26:46I hope not. I hope they got that from somebody selling cocaine out here in Birmingham, Michigan, because that was expensive. It's funny. ATF's always been very careful about that, not allowing us to have flamboyant kind of vehicles because of the optics. It doesn't look good. And we would say, listen, how am I going to pass myself off as this high level international gun trafficker if I'm driving a Buick Regal? Yeah, yeah. Toyota Camry with 180 ,000 miles on it. Yeah, exactly. So we would get creative and we would seize vehicles that we could then put into use. That's one way to do it. But again, when it comes to asset forfeiture, probably, obviously, the DEA is the number one agency out there making huge seizures because of the nature of the narcotics business.

1:27:35And there have been guys who have gotten jammed up because they got a little overzealous in seasoned mansions. I'm not saying it was wrong, but again, sometimes you think, oh man, the agency will love me if I get this. So you go a little too hard. Yeah, I've got a buddy who he's got a lot of relatives in Miami law enforcement. And he told me that everyone he knows down there, everyone in air quotes, but they have sports cars that lawyers can't afford. Right. And they get it because it gets seized from a drug dealer and then there's an auction. But it's kind of like, well, who knows about these auctions?

1:28:07Cops. So they roll in there and you get yours and then you're off the market for the next one. And then the other guy who missed out on that one gets the next one. And so you get these guys who make, I don't know what cops make, let's say under$200 ,000 a year, certainly. And they are driving a car that costs twice that much. I don't, look, drug dealers, you commit a crime and you use that item to commit the crime. I get why it's seized, but it's a little weird that it ends up in the guy's garage who works with the other guys that seized it. It's just a little, the optics are not good, like you said, not great.

1:28:38Yeah, see, the marshals handled those auctions and we were not allowed to even go to those auctions for the obvious reasons. Right. But local law enforcement was not prohibited from going. That's interesting. Thank you for humoring me on that. I'm not trying to make law enforcement look bad. I just always had questions about this and no one can answer them. Law enforcement is like every other profession. There's always some bad apples. It is what it is. Lou Velozzi, thank you very much. Hey, Jordan, it was an honor to be on. Thank you so much. I had a great time. You're about to hear a preview where Dr.

1:29:09Abigail Marsh unpacks why psychopathy is more treatable than we think, how kindness can quietly reshape lives, and why we may need to rethink labels like sociopath. You know somebody with psychopathy already. So if one to two percent of the population has a clinically significant level of psychopathy, and most people's social networks include 100 to 150 people, all of us know somebody with psychopathy. So that's the bad news. But the good news is that the stereotypes people have about psychopathy are usually a little off. And so the person with psychopathy you already know, you may just not have recognized that that's what their behavior adds up to.

1:29:46Many people who are psychopathic themselves are like, I don't want to be this way. I just don't know how to behave differently. No differently from somebody with any other disorder. It's just they can't find anybody who will help them. I fully recognize that people with psychopathy are totally capable of coming up with a code for how they want to live, including a code that dictates like what it means to be a good person. even if they don't have the same emotions and drives and motivations as other people do. So I think that's really important to clarify. However, in that context, people who are psychopathic just don't intrinsically value other people's welfare that much.

1:30:18They are just much more instrumental in their social interactions. Every interaction is about like, what can I get? What can I get out of this person? What can I get out of this situation? So that's why there's so much manipulating and lying and exploitation is it's because people most of the time are just sort of tools to get whatever the ultimate goal is. Every other psychological disorder can be treated. And so why would these be uniquely immutable? And in fact, the evidence is they can be changed. They can be improved. They're totally treatable. To hear the science behind who actually does the most harm, check out episode 1293.

1:30:51It might change how you see everyone around you. Raycon's story is one of those cases where every label feels too small. Hero? Maybe. Hustler? Definitely. Victim? Certainly at times. Reckless lunatic with Olympic-level confidence and the self-preservation instincts of a rented scooter? Also yes. But the real question isn't just who Ray was, it's what the system saw when it looked at him. A partner? A tool? A disposable immigrant with enough desperation to say yes and enough talent to survive the assignment? Because if somebody risks their life for the government and helps put dangerous people away, walks into rooms even trained agents wouldn't casually wander into, and then ends up abandoned when the bill comes due, that's not just a messy case file, it's a warning label.

1:31:35Ray Kahn's story shows us how charisma can open doors, how confidence can become a weapon, and how institutions can praise your bravery right up until protecting you becomes inconvenient. So the takeaway isn't go become an informant. Please don't do that. Most of us can barely handle a weird conversation at Costco. The takeaway is this. Power loves useful people. But useful is not the same thing as protected. And if somebody calls you an asset, maybe ask whether they mean partner or replaceable cog in the machine. Big thanks to Lou Velozzi for joining us today and pulling back the curtain on one of the strangest, most morally complicated law enforcement stories we've ever covered.

1:32:09I definitely want to have Lou back on the show. This guy's got stories for days and he's super cool, as you can hear from the show. And of course, all things Lou Velozzi will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And the show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadis Adlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

1:32:40Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in undercover cop law enforcement type stories, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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