860: Mitchell Prothero | Cocaine, Murder, and Dirty Money in Europe

24:58When you start listening to the Sky ECC and EncroChat hacks and stuff like that, you do realize these dudes are sociopaths. These are encrypted phones that have been cracked. Yeah, that were cracked. And they were like murdering each other for business reasons. But then they were also like sending each other photos of it. There's a couple of podcasters I'd take out if I could get away with it. I get it. Right, you know what I mean? But like sharing the photos of it, like that was the weird stuff for a lot of us. That is weird. What somebody told me in Amsterdam was, and I thought this was really interesting, is back when it was hashish, if there was a problem, and I have a theory about this, is like if you're a major cocaine trafficker built around Morocco, Spain, Italy, your grandfather was a tobacco smuggler, your father was a hashish smuggler, and you're a cocaine smuggler.

25:47Like it's the same route. It's the same business. It's just developed money-wise over the years. And this dude was telling me basically it was like, man, when it was hashish, if something went wrong, you could get a loan and fix it. Like how much hashish can you really lose? Yeah, 25 grand, 50 grand, maybe 100. Right. Like 100 on a huge deal. You lose 100 deal. Nobody's going to kill you of 100 grand. They know that you can probably come up with that. And that you'll be able to work it off or whatever. But what if you lose 15 million in cocaine? There's no cops and there's no court. So as somebody put it during the podcast, I have to break your spine.

26:32And the reason why I have to break your spine is to make sure everybody knows I broke your spine. it's not about you. It's about making sure everybody who does business with me knows I will do that if there's like a loss of money. So when I was talking to guys that were sources of mine for this, you know, a lot of them were fairly low level. And I would ask them like, what's your plan? And one guy I knew he was making pretty good money, but he'd stayed more or less retail. What's pretty good money in the industry? For this guy, this is where it'd be a shock is consistently six figures. Wow. No real arrests, goes on vacation.

27:09He's like 28. They'll send you a menu on the messaging service. And like you send in your order for cocaine and there's a running joke in Amsterdam. It will always be 50 euros a gram. It'll always be pure and it'll always arrive in 30 minutes. From what I understand, pretty reasonable pricing and good service from the sound of it, if I can phrase it like that. I mean, that's interesting. It's very developed. From a history of buying drugs on the street, I would say probably 10, 15 years ago, it would be a lot easier to get ripped off and buy bad drugs and stuff like that. From what I could tell in Amsterdam, there's so much cocaine flowing through the ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp, and even some of the fruit ports that are around Amsterdam itself, even La Hara in France, there's no incentive to rip you off.

27:58It's just easier to give you the drugs. Right. Okay. Are they cutting it? Every year it gets more pure. And this is one of the problems that I had with this story is when I started out, I decided that there was absolutely no numbers that you could trust. Like the government, like, okay, what we know is how many metric tons of cocaine have been seized trying to come into Europe? Okay. It's democracies. They're probably not lying. You know what I mean? Like we've got a rough number of how many metric tons of cocaine have been intercepted coming into Europe. You can also, for the most part, tell what the retail price of a gram of cocaine is.

28:34You can kind of check the availability. Like if you're a decent cop or narcotics detective, you should be able to tell whether or not people can just find it whenever they want or whether it's getting increasingly hard. And then the last thing that you can check is the purity. When you seize drugs, how pure are they? Other than that, we don't know anything about the cocaine trade. And I just spent 15 years, 15 months on this, off and on watching for five years. And I got to tell you, I've had European officials put the trade at eight to 10 billion euros a year. And then off the record say, we don't have any idea.

29:07We just use that number because it sounds good. Wow. And that means that it's probably far higher because you wouldn't want to exaggerate in the upward direction. Well, maybe you would for funding. I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. This is where I get confused. If you do the math, last year Antwerp took 110 metric tons of cocaine at the port. And that's all pure cocaine. Even if you cut it, you're stomping those into container kilos. And container kilos become like three street kilos or two street kilos at least. But back in the day, they became four or five. It's really become a lot more pure.

29:45And this is on the record from the head of Belgian customs, who I think is probably one of the most articulate and candid members of law enforcement working in the EU. It's just the guy who's in charge of customs at the court, Christian. I said, okay, you guys took 110 metric tons. This was before they had taken it, but we knew they were going to set a record. They were at like 90 at the time. What do you think you get? And he said, it could be as bad as one out of 10. But then I did the math. And that means like 70 % of what they estimate is the world cocaine production is going through rotterdam and antor so that's not that can't be right yeah that can't be right the u.s and europe are split like 50 50 europe has passed the u.s in terms of consumption but it's not by a big really i had no idea the eu is the world's largest market for cocaine in the last two years wow but not by like a massive margin we're talking like 52 48 i would have thought you were going to say the cocaine market in europe is the same size as the cocaine market in Florida, not counting the rest of the United States.

30:49I didn't realize it was the same slash actually larger. That's incredible. Since 1990, since 1995 or whatever, like since the wall came down, remember, there's like a million new middle class people every year in Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Ukraine, who can afford 100 euros on a weekend. Like not everybody can, but every year more and more people have that kind of money because you're not talking huge amounts of money. You're talking 50, 70, 100 euros for a night out with your friends. Guys in Poland can afford that. Guys in Romania can afford that. Probably not on a widespread level. Romania is pretty poor, but they definitely have people in Bucharest again.

31:31So this is where the market keeps expanding each year. The more you build out a middle class and an upper middle class throughout the rest of Eastern Europe, the market keeps getting bigger. But when I went back and did that math, I realized that that was like way too much cocaine production. So I started questioning the numbers that were given on what are the estimates of cocaine production? What are the estimates of what's smuggled? Because honestly, nobody can tell you. And that's the one thing I learned. Even the street value, when they say like we took 100 kilos with a street value of whatever.

32:03I've asked every law enforcement agency in Europe, more or less, where they get that number. And they either won't say or have a different formula. Like, How do you really explain the value of 100 kilos on a container from Antwerp? Yeah, interesting. Right, you go with the street value, which is - Like, what's the value? Yeah. For me, what I learned is at each step of the way, they're worth about 4 ,000 euros each. The kilo? Yeah. A kilo of cocaine for 4 ,000 euros sounds cheap. No, no, no. Your value for it moving through you is 4 ,000. I see. Okay, gotcha. So at each step, while the kilo moves, and one of the things I learned is that a kilo has about a two-year shelf life.

32:46It's about two years from production to consumption for a kilo of cocaine. Oh, interesting. I thought you meant it went bad, which, you know. No, it never goes bad. This is why it's the most pure capitalistic product. In fact, there's a running joke about it. It never goes bad. It's easily carryable. And anywhere in the world, you can sell it at a relatively understandable value price. Like there's a transparent market price. You have a kilo of cocaine. You can find people who will buy that from you at a fairly understandable price, like a reasonable commodity. It's like the purest commodity. You can hold it for three or four years waiting for the value to go up.

33:23The only stressor about a kilo of cocaine is that somebody might find out you have a kilo of cocaine and a risk you were taking. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Other than that, it's literally the perfect capitalist product. And that's one of the things that we learned because the value is understood worldwide as a commodity.

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36:56The course is all about improving your relationship building skills. And it's not cringy. It's down to earth. It's not awkward. It'll make you a better peer, a better friend, a better connector. I'm so tempted to make other jokes in here, but I think you get the point. It takes just a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course for free at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now back to Mitch Prothero. That's interesting. Why so long? Because it seems like it's produced in South America, shipping takes a week.

37:31I don't know how long production takes, but it can't be that long. And you're talking about from production to consumption, so that's negligible anyway. Where is it sitting for a long time and why? I think it's a long route, you know, like a month in the jungle, a month getting moved to a place, a month getting organized into a thing, getting put onto the container. When the container's ready to go, it might have to sit and wait for the proper opportunity to get on the boat. gets on the boat, gets offloaded on the boat. It's got to get moved because the vast majority of the cocaine, particularly in Antwerp and Rotterdam coming into Europe, it's feeding all of Europe.

38:07So like, yeah, Antwerp and Rotterdam have really cheap, high quality cocaine, but most of what's coming through the ports going to Berlin, to Hamburg, to France, you know, it's moving out. It's too much. This is not serving the local market at any means. So there's a distribution cycle that goes through that entire thing. And people will hold on to cocaine. Like I said, it's a commodity. So if you are a retail drug gang in Paris, you're trying to move out as much as you can. But maybe their wholesaler holds on to some kilos and waits for the price to go up. It's a commodity. And it gets treated like a commodity.

38:46So that's the estimate researchers came up with. But that came up during COVID. And that was the first time they were able to really track. There was such an interruption in the cocaine supply that you were then able to really track the half-life of a kilo as it went throughout the entire system because there wasn't anything coming after it. And so researchers were able to figure that out. But there's a money aspect to this too. And it's all quite regulated. You have to understand there's law firms and businesses and accountants and all the stuff that sort of arranges the world cocaine trade. But one of them is, you know, if you sell a kilo to the United States and it goes through the Mexicans who mostly control the routes into the U.S., you get paid in about six months.

39:29You send off your kilo, about six months later, you get your money. With Europe, it's a year to 18 months. Wow. Those payment terms are terrible. I thought podcasting payment terms were bad. It's net 540 or whatever from invoice. I feel like I made this joke just recently, but I'm not sure if it was about drugs. Yeah, here I'm at all net 60, net 90. They're really screwing us, guys. Meanwhile, 18 months later, you're getting paid for your drugs and you could get killed and or thrown in jail for it. I don't know. Maybe podcasting is not so bad. This is where things get wild in the cocaine trade economically, particularly for the European guys.

40:03You know, I'm convinced that there's a financier level above them who simply make cash liquid available between those moments. Because a lot of the guys that I've studied, and we've seen this with Tagi and we've seen this with other guys from intercepting phone messages, we can kind of put together what they've got to do for the people that are under arrest. Like they've got huge organizations they've got to support. Ridwan Tagi is frequently on the record saying he's got to work deals from prison because he's got to pay dudes that are already in prison for him. He's got to pay family members.

40:36He's got to pay family members of people who are in prison for him. So even though he's in jail for life, he knows he's never getting out, but he's still also got to try to get deals done because he's got to try to shove money into the business, the corporation that he's got. So one of the things that we learned is that if you go down for a drug crime, let's say in Antwerp, working for one of the major cartels, and you get thrown in prison, you just shut up and take it. Your family gets about 2 ,000 euros a month while you're in jail. And then when you get out of jail, you get a cash bonus based on how long you were in jail and kept your mouth shut, which is a very reasonable, capitalistic, human resources way to look at things.

41:16But what it also does is puts tremendous liquidity pressure on the dealers. Every month, they got to get that money. So this is where things start getting weird and tense when shipments get lost. I was shocked at how not liquid your average cartel dude is. He's worth a lot or she's worth a lot in some cases. but like they always need cash. You know, by the end of this project, people kept asking me, so who's the biggest drug dealer in Europe? Who's the biggest cartel in Europe? And you're like the last one to get one through. Huh. You think of cartels as having rooms filled to the top with money and everything like that, but it sounds like that's not quite the case, especially when you're talking about these European smugglers.

42:04Yeah, just in general. Like, I mean, there's a middle manager at the, you know, Kali cartel or any of the Mexican cartels who's got a budget and is stressed the fuck out about whatever. You know what I mean? And he's going to his boss all the time. I've worked for more than one company that's like got a billion dollar valuation that had some rough spots where suddenly expenses slowed down when they were getting paid. You know, it's the same thing. But these guys have incredibly volatile cash situations. If it takes even six months from the US, think about that you got to kill people, you got to bribe guards, you got to pay people to drive the stuff, you got to support the people that are already in prison for you.

42:47These guys are rich, but they're also cash poor in a weird way. At one point, I was told, and I don't know if this is true, but it's a shocking number because it's so high, I wonder. But if it is true, it really gives you perspective. So the Kinahan Organized Crime Network, who are partners of Ridwan Taghi. Is this the Irish guys? The Irish guys who we thought last were in Dubai. Everybody indicted them, and then they still haven't been picked up. We all thought they were going to get arrested like six months ago. I still don't know why they haven't. But in any moment, they're all going to get busted.

43:21But they were running Ireland's biggest heroin and cocaine organization. They were running it out of Dubai. And I was told by a cop that they had to get about 20 million euros into Ireland every month. Every month to pay for the network. To pay for the network. Buying real estate in Dubai off your cocaine money isn't that hard. You know what I mean? But like every month you got to get millions and then distribute it throughout Dublin. How do you do that? Mules, watches. One thing I've been told is that's pretty popular is you go into a jewelry store and let's say a shady one in Antwerp and you go, I need 5 million in watches.

44:04Do you have a cousin in Dubai that can pick them up? You give the guy for 5 million and then you carry the watches over the border. You go into some guy's shop, you hand the cousin of the guy you bought him from the watches and he gives you 4.9 back. Got it. Right. Okay. There's a lot of different ways to do it. But once you start doing it into Dublin, and once you start doing it into Ireland from Dubai, is when the cops can really start messing with you. And that's when they start chasing your money trails. The fall of the money part is, it completely disrupts these networks. So I think the guys that are out of Dubai that work Amsterdam and Antwerp and Rotterdam, they've got it a little easier because of the diamond borses and stuff like that.

44:49They can move the watches, they can move rocks, They can move gold. But when you look at places like Ireland, it's really hard, man. Think about the logistics of moving 20 million euros in cash every month. That would be extremely tough to do. And like you mentioned, the diamond market. I mean, if you're moving 20 million precious gems in and out, yeah, that's still a lot of money, but it's a business with a lot of expensive stuff going to a lot of places, major cities across the world. Dublin, not necessarily known for that, gonna stick out way more. It's like moving contraband or money out of New York.

45:22If you wire 20 million out of New York, it's a lot of money, but it's going in and out every day. If you wire 20 million in and out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, somebody's going to go, why the hell is there 20 million dollars moving out of Albuquerque every single month? Or Mobile, Alabama, or something like that. It's going to be a different look. If the Irish police are desperate to arrest you and know you live in Dubai, they're going to watch. Yep. You know, and so this is why money laundering and what to do with the money turns out to be the biggest thing in a lot of these. So the way I look at a lot of these cartels, from what I can tell, is these are guys who are pretty brutal, but are also really organized and good at logistics, good at managing, good at planning and stuff like that.

46:05But they're pretty replaceable cogs. One thing that I kind of figured out, it's definitely true for the Italians, although they're set up more in a family thing, which is like, we can lose a couple of nephews if that's what it takes for the rest of us to, you know, we can lose them to the prison system and take care of them or whatever. With the Moroccans, I always felt like there was a bit of a like steel cage grudge match going on in Antwerp and in Amsterdam where the guys who wanted to control it on that level were allowed to fight it out to see who got to be the guy. But at the end, the money's still going to the same place and still probably going to the same people.

46:44And they aren't the people that we automatically think of. Interesting. Because you've still got to do something with the Europol number of 8 to 10 billion euros a year. We don't know if it's 14. We don't know if it's six. But it's a lot of money. That money's going somewhere. And it's entering into these different economies. And that's one of the things that I'm the most fascinated about now that I've kind of figured out the logistical violence side of the cocaine trade, there's a different level, which is a lot harder and a lot less sexy to go through, which is like, how did the Calabrian mafia, the Andrangheta, end up with a GDP that Europol estimates is the size of Croatia's?

47:25Yeah, that's incredible. They're not doing that from drug deal. Do you know what I mean? Right, yeah. Your podcast, Gateway, which we'll link in the show notes, it talks about Taghi. You've mentioned Taghi a few times. Tell me who this guy is, because this guy is not the type of criminal Europe was used to dealing with in many ways. America really hasn't had a guy like this either for at least a really long time. Ridwan Taghi was a guy who, you know, he's in his mid-40s now. He was born in Morocco. He came to the Netherlands as part of the guest worker program. His family had moved in. And as a young kid, he joined like a little scooter gang and, you know, was known for like dealing some hash, small time stuff.

48:08We have a cliche now. It's like a kid on a scooter in a North Face jacket selling like grams of cocaine and small bags of hash. And this is like a bit of a drug dealing cliche across Europe. So he's like one of these kids. And for whatever reason, there were some family connections. Nobody's really sure why he kept low profile. Suddenly he just goes back to Morocco, gives up his Dutch citizenship, and he goes back and forth. And what it turned out is that, again, like I was saying, is if you look at a lot of these families, the way the networks or the route lines, or as the Mexicans call it, like the platza, the route, these are developed over generations.

48:46These aren't like new things because of cocaine. This is how you smuggled tobacco back in the day. It's how you smuggled washing machines and dishwashers and shit that you didn't want to pay taxes on. Between Morocco and Spain and France and Holland, there's always been this stuff prior to the EU. Taggi's family had had one of those setups. They'd been known for tobacco and hash. He got into hash when he was young, smuggling it basically between Morocco and Spain. He kept his connections to Amsterdam. It was always going back and forth between Holland in both. Over time, he started turning these connections into moving cocaine.

49:27And this was right around the time of a Moroccan mafia war that had popped up around 2012 as the Moroccans had become more and more powerful in the ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam, Laharve. They kind of pushed out the Italians and were like shoving with the Serbs and the Albanians. But basically, they were the immigrant community that was like living next to the ports and all had jobs at the ports. There was a natural thing. And so the Moroccan community had been famous for if you needed a guy who knew how to get something out of the port, this was your guy. It's not nefarious. It's just it's every port that's ever existed.

50:04And so this is where these guys had come from, kind of. And so over time, they'd been the guys that you'd pay to get cocaine out of those containers, like I was describing. And at some point, somebody started paying them in cocaine instead of cash. Paying the dealers? No. Instead of basically getting three or four thousand euros per kilo for getting it through the port of Antwerp, they were giving you kilos of cocaine because it was cheaper for them. Yeah, it makes sense. You're selling something that has a lower cost for you, but you mentioned the cash poor thing. Now you've got one less guy to pay because you have the product in your hand.

50:38You don't have to wait 18 months, so you might as well hand them what you were already holding. And that's what they were thinking, but what they didn't consider was the part where it's crime. And so what you just did was you exponentially grew your employee and made your employee now not need you. Right, because now they're a drug dealer. Right. They're not getting three or four thousand. They've got their own kilos and they have the route. So now they're putting their own kilos into the fucking containers. And now they're asking other people to put it in. And suddenly they're the wholesalers and you're a client.

51:14And that's what shifted primarily. since 2012. And that was a process that had been going on. And that's why we saw what they call the macro mafia. And I mean, there's a lot of drama and cliche and like anti-immigrant stereotyping behind it. But, you know, there is a legitimate, you know, loosely knit criminal organization in the Moroccan community that pulls drugs out of the containers and has taken over moving them across Europe. And this is how they forced them out. Are the Moroccans dealing directly with Colombians or they are? Okay. This is what changed after 2016. One of the reasons why we saw an explosion.

51:52And I'm no expert on this. You can bring back somebody who really understands the North and South American cocaine trade. I'm a Europe guy. But my understanding was that for the longest time, the Colombians paid the Mexicans to get it into the United States. And so they made the best money and the Mexicans got paid like$3 ,000 or$4 ,000 per kilo, as I was saying, to move it across. until the Colombians started paying the Mexicans in cocaine. And that's when these guys blew up. And that's when you started seeing the cartels and the Zetas and Chapo. And these guys prior to that, and in fact, Narcos does this.

52:26If you see Narcos Mexico, it's an entire plot line where the guy negotiates getting patent cocaine instead of money from the Cali cartel. And this was setting the stage for basically the Mexican cartels taking over and they control the American cocaine trade. So a very similar thing happened is in 2016, when the Colombians cut a peace deal from their civil war, and they basically disbanded the FARC, which was the Marxist left-wing organization, and they disbanded the AUC, which was the hardcore right-wing paramilitary groups. The AUC had supplied Europe, and they had supplied Europe through the Calabrian and Drangina, which is still overwhelmingly the most powerful organized crime group in the world.

53:06This is colloquially known as the Italian mafia? Well, there's three Italian mafias, and one's from Sicily, one's from Calabria, and one's from Naples. It's Camorra, Andrangheta, and Locosanos. And the Andrangheta is by far the most powerful of the three. They're the most low-key, and they don't have movies made about them, but they have a GDP the size of Croatia, according to Europol. And so those guys had always been the people that you had to go through if you wanted to import cocaine into Europe. You had to basically make a deal with the Andrangheta, and the Andrangheta would hook you up with their Ock guy, and they would broker the whole deal, and you would get a decent percentage.

53:44Once the 2016 peace deal happened, everything broke apart. And so now, if you had the guts, you could go to Colombia and source your own. The Andrangheta didn't get weaker. They just moved up a step into financing and insuring and money laundering. They're not in a worse economic position because of this. They did step aside a little bit because they knew their monopoly had been cut out. So now anybody who wants to go to Colombia and try to find somebody who can sell them five metric tons of cocaine can try. You might get ripped off. You might get killed. You also might become the new El Chapo.

54:17So that's what the Moroccans were able to do is start sourcing it. The Serbs have done the same thing. is for the first time, I know guys that are actually producing their own kilos of cocaine from the jungles in Peru, smuggling them to Europe and selling them. And that's unheard of in terms of vertical integration. It's like farm to table, but for cocaine. Normally white boys from Europe do not get to roll into the Peruvian jungle and run their own cocaine labs. There's a bunch of Peruvians and Colombians that think you shouldn't be allowed to do that. But the thing is, something's changed. And that's what I don't fully understand.

54:55And I'm a little bit curious about that is there are dudes that are going there and cutting these deals now. And Peruvians are working with them. Colombians are working with them to source. So we start seeing organizations. Tagi didn't last long enough to quite get there. But I'm watching organizations right now that might really be making their own kilos and selling them in Berlin. Hashtag diversity. That's very weird. Again, why he would want to have dinner with Jeff Bezos is to understand how to dominate every moment in the profit and supply line. And, you know, in the past, you could be like a wholesaler, you could be a retailer, but you had to deal with a bunch of people along.

55:35This is why I keep saying the three to four thousand euros per kilo. That's about what you could expect for being a drug dealer, you know, but once you can control the source, you control the port, suddenly you're making$25 ,000. It's exponential. Cutting out the middleman will increase profits in any industry. You mentioned some of the weapons seizures and straight out of narcos kind of stuff that you expect to see in South America where the cartels are fighting each other. I think one of the examples you gave in the podcast was severed heads in front of a shisha lounge, headless bodies, massive weapons seizures, and you said follow the cars, not just the money.

56:11What's going on? How has crime changed in Europe since all of this has gone down? Crime in Europe is not even close to, of course, what we'd see in the United States in terms of gun crime or any of it. And definitely among street dealers and things like that, the levels of crime that you'd see are much lower. There's fewer guns around. So, you know, If a cocaine distribution gang on a corner gets into a thing, let's say the cliches from The Wire or whatever, they're going to solve it by hitting each other with sticks and stabbing. Maybe one gunshot here, one guy might get shot in the leg. But they don't have like seven murders a day and that kind of stuff.

56:50Amsterdam has like 30 murders a year at max. But what I ended up finding was in each of these situations, depending on the gangs, so just from the Moroccan mafia standpoint, since 2012, a third of the murders in Belgium and Amsterdam are directly related to the same community. So it starts becoming intense when you start realizing that, yeah, there was 30 murders last year in this area and 20 of them were involved in the same industry. you know you do get like random crime but it's rare you get spousal abuse but it's rare but you do get you know every month or so somebody's getting killed and found in a burned out car and one of the ways that they've kept attention off of this is by spreading it out because it's schengen again to refer back to the european union you can travel anywhere within the 27 countries without showing your passport so nobody knows where you are you know you can be in Spain, you can be in Estonia.

57:50The cops have no way to really check. But you also have different crime statistics in each place. So you kill three guys in Spain, you kill three guys in Belgium, you kill four guys in Holland. You just killed like 10 guys, but it looks small to each of the law enforcement people that are looking at it. And then you disappear four other guys whose bodies are never found. In the case of Amsterdam right now, there's a woman, Auntie Jamila. I don't mean to laugh, but she was a broker, one of the only Moroccan women who was a broker in cocaine. She factors into Tagi only peripherally. We know it happened to her because of Tagi, but she got involved in some deal as a broker where she was, again, like what the Andrangeta primarily does, like negotiate between the buyer and seller and sort of be the one to promise that everybody does what they're going to do.

58:42You do need some level of trust on these deals. And so she would put these people together. Something went wrong and somebody was very mad at her and she was kidnapped and disappeared. It wasn't Tagi who did it. I think I know who did it, but for legal reasons, probably can't say. And we know what happened to her because she showed up on Tagi's phone being like dismembered in photos. Oh, wow. And tortured. Like, so the Dutch cops know she's dead. They've seen the pictures. Nobody ever found her body. but the only reason we know what happened to her is because somebody thought it would be amusing to forward those photos to ridwan tagi's blackberry he didn't even order the hit it wasn't his guy because we have all kinds of messages from tagi being like kill him kill him kill him blood he was a psycho guy who like probably is responsible for 30 murders or attempted murders easily he's on trial for like 12, but like there's more and he'll get charged with them as they come down or they can't make cases, but he's strongly suspected in dozens of attempted or successful murders.

59:48And so he's yelling about that stuff. But then in the middle of it, there's just like one of his colleagues sends him like, here's what happened to Auntie Jamila. Wow. And they're all laughing about it. You mentioned that you are not that worried, but the mafia, these organized crime groups, they do target journalists. There was one guy that you mentioned in the podcast ran a car through the front door of his office. Another guy had a rocket propelled grenade shot through his window. I mean, that's not low key at all. I mean, two of them got shot in the head. Blogger was killed, Martin Koch, and then Peter DeVries, probably the most famous crime reporter in all of Holland, was murdered by people that are strongly believed to be working for Ridwan Thagy.

1:00:25How do I put this? I'm just a day trader on this stuff. I'm not the guys that We're like spending every day grinding on them, figuring out who they were and revealing. You know, that's why like I joke and I'm not joking. Like if they'll let me into jail, I'll play this podcast for Tagi to his face. He knows what's in it. You know, I don't think that we're terribly unfair. Obviously, I point out that, you know, he killed a lot of people and seemed kind of brutal, but he knows that we've heard the tape. Like we've seen the text messages. Tagi knows he's a murderer. You know, he just thinks it's justified.

1:00:58So in that regard, I think it's okay. But the biggest thing that you have to look out for, and this is why I'm not dismissive of it, because I'm somebody who's worked all over the world, constantly working with local journalists who have so much more skin in the game, who are completely essential to me ever being able to get anything done. And these are the people that it's serious. I kept joking, they're not going to kill me, man. They're going to kill somebody we interviewed. Those are the people that I worry about. These are the people that are there every single day that are involved with them in their lives and stuff like that.

1:01:34One guy was telling me he's got a nickname among the Moroccan mafia. They call him Smeagol because they think he looks like Gollum. He's got a nickname where Moroccan and Afro-Caribbean gangsters, even Dutch gangsters, sit around joking about the physical appearance of these reporters. So they know. That's what's dangerous. You see a guy like Jan in Slovenia who got killed a few years ago. He was investigating local corruption. Daphne in Malta who got killed. Her son, Paul, has become an amazing investigative reporter out of London for Tortoise. Daphne got killed. She got killed investigating local corruption.

1:02:13Those are the people that really are at risk. When you're revealing corruption among your police and politicians in your local community, that's like what I do. You know, you got to be careful, like, you know, stuff like that. But I'm not messing with them in their homes. And I'm usually wrapping up something that some local kind already did. You know, I'm not like, not so high on my own supply to think that like, I'm revealing the world of Erdogan Tagi to our podcast listeners. What I'm doing is really like curating a bunch of different reporting and going through and figuring out what mattered, you know, over a 10 year period and trying to put my own spin on it.

1:02:50But like, I didn't discover anything about this guy's business that people didn't already know. And so that's a difference. You know, like, again, it's a business. If you're gonna kill a journalist, it's really got to be worth it. And it's rarely worth it. Or it's an emotional decision because it's local. Like with Martin Koch, it was definitely personal with him and Toggy. This is a journalist who was murdered. Martin was a blogger who was the first person to print Tagi's name, but he'd also been a criminal. He'd spent like 16 years in jail. He was really well known. He committed two murders he was proud of.

1:03:23And he was a blogger who had made a good living basically blogging about like the cocaine milieu of Holland. And so he started messing with Tagi and started messing with Tagi's partner at the time, Noful. And, you know, making fat jokes about Noful and referring to Tagi as looking like a Muppet. then printed their names for the first time in public. They tried like four times. It was like Keystone Cops. The first three times they failed, it was amazing, but they did get Martin. And, you know, they killed him because he was the first guy to print their name and he was from the criminal world too.

1:03:58When you talked about the RPG was shot into the newsroom of a friend of mine at night, and to this day he goes, well, I don't know why they did.

1:04:34Well, he's being humble. for it. It just really doesn't look great. You know, he had semi-threadened Peter when Peter was just a journalist covering it. And Tagi put out this amazing statement saying, I'd never heard a hair on your head. But then Peter went to work for a crown witness that was testifying against Tagi. He changed sides on some level. And at that point, he became fair game and they killed him. Just like they killed the same crown witness's lawyer prior to that. And so this is what makes Tagi really interesting is that he's one of the rare European or even American, you know, Americans don't do this either, to actually go against the state, to actually attack the institutions of the state in order to intimidate it.

1:05:17And Tagi tried. He killed lawyers. He killed bloggers. He killed journalists. The crown princess couldn't go to university last year. Why? Because she's in protective custody. Tagi was going to try to kidnap her, apparently.

1:05:32this is the jordan harbinger show with our guest mitch prothero we'll be right back if you like this episode of the show i invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors all the deals discount codes and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals and you can always search for any sponsor using the ai chatbot on the website as well over at jordanharbinger.com thank you so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Mitch Prothero. Oh my God. See, this makes it sound like Mexico type narco stuff.

1:06:07Yeah. I mean, I don't know how serious the threat was to the crown princess, but it was taggy and it's serious enough, man. Like she couldn't go. She's living under protective custody. Two lawyers I interviewed, they've since quit the case over reasons that I don't really know about. But for two years, they lived in safe houses with 24-7 protection from cops because their predecessor had been killed and their colleague, Peter DeVries, had been killed, who'd been doing media for the Crown Witness. You know, the Dutch have this amazing gimmick where the prime minister rides his bike to work every day.

1:06:45It's their populist thing. And I'm sure that he rides his bike to work a lot. But it's a political populism thing. he's got to take a car, man. They found guys following him, like checking his route. They found that Belgian police, this is probably not Tagi related, it's definitely cocaine from the ports related. Two or three kids got arrested following the Belgian justice minister around with face masks and a Kalashnikov in the car. Wow, this is crazy. They were at least considering a hit on the Belgian justice minister. They didn't try. They got intercepted, but it happens all the time. Like this is really on the edge.

1:07:28So when you look at the murder numbers, yeah, man, Amsterdam's a really safe city. Go visit, you know, but like don't traffic cocaine. When I was there, somebody got stabbed outside our youth hostel and I was like, oh, this is not a safe place. You know, I mean, compared to what a Walmart now? I mean, you know, I mean, touche. Okay, exactly. But seriously, it's like when you realize, it does kind of seem like this chill utopia when you're hanging out in Holland. It's one of the wealthiest countries on earth. It's got one of the best gaps. I mean, the rich people are very rich, but the poor people aren't as really poor as you see in a lot of different places.

1:08:06Inequality is bad, but it's not as bad as you'd see in the US or UK or even France. But at the same time, there's this undercurrent of like darkness that's running through it. And part of it is just Dutch history. They're a bunch of drug dealers, man. I say this with respect. The Dutch and the Flemish and Torp and Rotterdam did not become the biggest ports in Europe, among the biggest ports on earth by making people shit late. Like they get the sushi and the fruit off the port and out to decline. They don't mess around. These are the people who've basically invented modern capitalism. They invented the idea of futures, insurance, stock, international trade on some level was all organized by the Dutch in very early times.

1:08:50These guys are experts on it. And so when you start looking at this stuff, a friend of mine joked is like, the Spanish took over South America and they exploit, you know, Central America and they murdered everybody and they stole everything. But they told them they were converting them to Catholicism. So at least they were saving their souls. he's like we showed up in Indonesia shelled the locals and started an opium market we're not here to save your religion dude we're here to make money and then they follow this up with the legalization of cannabis or the semi-legalization of marijuana and cannabis so one of the things I learned is that if you take remember our 8 to 10 billion in cocaine each year coming through Rotterdam and Antwerp it's also 8 to 10 billion for cannabis running through Amsterdam because like it's decriminalized there.

1:09:38But like, if you want to buy 10 kilos of marijuana and you live in Berlin, go to Amsterdam. It's probably the place to meet the guy. So it's an eight to$10 billion industry for that. And then what I think people don't realize is like, ecstasy, LSD, speed, every complicated club drug you can possibly think of, virtually all of the world's supply is made out of labs on the border between Belgium and Holland, in Limburg. And they're made in rural labs. So they've got the club drug thing locked down, which is, again, worth eight to 10 billion euros each year. I say this out of respect to their capitalist tendencies, but when you look at Holland on some level, they've got like a recession-proof, diversified drug-dealing economy that's like the envy of the world.

1:10:26Weed will pick up if cocaine goes down. Let's put a bow on Tagi, and I've got a couple more general organized crime questions. So Tagi has caused prosecutors to resign without real explanation. His lawyer, I think, is jailed because she was passing messages to his network. She has not been convicted of that. OK. She has been jailed, but she was let out. She is currently free. Her name's Inez Wesky, and she's actually one of the more famous human rights lawyers in the world. She's repeatedly argued cases in The Hague, but usually on the side of the defendant. She was Charles Taylor's lawyer. The dictator of Liberia, yeah.

1:11:03Yeah, the Liberian. She was his lawyer. Inez is like a legendary defense attorney, but she has been accused of passing messages from Tagi to his family from maximum security and possibly leading to him being able to partially run his drug empire. She denies the charges very emphatically. I've had other people tell me that there's a possibility that she was so threatened that maybe she thought it was the way to go. but it also came on the heels of the revelation that taggy had convinced the courts to allow his cousin who was also a lawyer and to visit him despite the fact he wasn't serving on his defense council he had to be let in because he was a member of the bar got it okay but really you know they're in the preliminary stages of the investigation the question is whether or not she can continue to represent him and whether or not he gets a mistrial because like we're two thirds of the way through the trial and his lawyer got thrown in jail.

1:12:01Yeah, this is crazy. Is there any danger of this guy? Because he's dangerous, dude. There's a lot of money. Another kingpin will either pop up, but I assume he wants to escape. Is there any worry about this? How feasible is any of that? They worry he'll try because he's really tried about everything. When he was talking to his cousin, one of the intercepted conversations was him explaining where the$3 million was that he had saved to pay the mercenaries to break him out of prison. He had a rainy day fund for like what he thought was going to be like ex-Seal Team 6 or Spetsnaz guys like crashing a helicopter into the prison to rescue him.

1:12:39And as a result, you know, Dutch special forces had to sit on the top of the prison with Stinger missiles because it's Rydwan Tagi. I mean, we can laugh at how preposterous it is because on a level it is preposterous. But if anybody was going to try that, it would be Ridwan Tagi. So you got to put the dudes up there. And this is why joke is in 2012, a Belgian gang might have stolen 200 kilos from another Belgian gang. It set off a completely inexplainable gang war that ended 10 years later with Dutch special forces on the roof of a prison with Stinger missiles waiting for a helicopter. The cocaine market in Europe doesn't seem to be calming down anytime soon.

1:13:23And so I think we're going to hear more about this. What do you think? Well, what I'd say is part of why we're seeing such a heavy amount of drama is that in the past, it had been more spread out to different places. Right now, it's an industrial flow of cocaine coming through Antwerp and Rotterdam, Laharve, even Hamburg a little bit, what I call the northern ports. And so these are all controlled by the same gangs, and the money is so incredible. the traffickers that i've spoken with none of them are fans of ridhwan tagi for drawing this much attention like they really could have gone without killing all the lawyers and the bloggers and just kept their mouths shut you know and kept working and there's guys that are in dubai that know they're going to get extradited to belgium eventually they're trying to stock away as much money as they can you know they're not trying to kill people if they don't have to because they know it's bad for business.

1:14:15Whereas Tagi was kind of special. He really did go Pablo, you know, where he thought he could intimidate the state into leaving him alone and it didn't work. But, you know, there's a lot of people who resent that because like a guy like me wouldn't come sniffing around their business if it wasn't for him. And I bumped into that a lot, you know, like you're here because of Tagi, aren't you? You would have left me alone if it wasn't for this asshole. Right. No, true. You mentioned Dubai a few times. Why does Dubai have so many criminals in it? Not that the United States doesn't. I don't want to get 87 emails about that, but it seems like per capita, we're talking about a concentration of criminals here.

1:14:54Look, if you're wanted for a murder in Belgium and get caught in the United States, it's not a question. You're going home for trial. There's extradition treaties. There's a rule of law. Dubai doesn't really see it that way. They just don't really care. It's strange. If you don't commit crimes in Dubai and you bring in lots of money and buy lots of apartments and invest things and pay for your visas and don't cause a huge stink, they're not going to extradite you. There's not treaties with Belgium and Holland. If the US wants you, they'll probably give you up, but it's got to have something to do with like terrorism or like iran like those are national security things to the emiratis so they take that pretty serious but like a cocaine trafficker from antwerp i mean they don't care and like they're the uae they're not really worried about belgium being mad at them yeah it's interesting because the uae is a police state so it's a little counterintuitive that they don't care about crime they care about crime in the uae yeah right yeah and also like let's face it i mean i don't want to disparage all of the uae security forces i'm sure they've got some innocent guys over there but like when these drug cartel guys whether it's the kinnahans or tagi or you know a handful of other people whose names i won't use that i know are there right now yeah they're all eventually going to get killed or arrested and deported like they're not going to get away with this forever.

1:16:26And then like the UAE security services are going to like move into their apartments and take over their investments. You know, one of our characters, Scarface, he owned a mall in Dubai. Well, he got murdered in Spain in 2014. I'm pretty sure the mall didn't get turned over to his family. Right. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. You're paying a high price to live there in a weird way. That is interesting. And if you run out of money, you're done. The reason why they're not extraditing you is you're paying. Got it. Okay. So you're essentially paying an extortion to be protected by the state from another state so you can continue generating revenue from your criminal activity as long as there's no victims in Dubai.

1:17:08Who cares? Or UAE. Yeah. And the second you can't deliver any longer, they'll send you back to Belgium and take all your stuff. Wow. So it's not a life I'd want to live, man. What do you think? It's really not cool, man. Like this is one of the things I keep telling people is like, it's really not a fun business. Most people don't get up there. Like the only person I've ever met who's actually legitimately content as a drug dealer is the Dutch guy I was telling you about who like does retail for a handful of clients. He can't really get caught. He's never really got a ton of drugs on him at any time.

1:17:41It's only going to be a year or two or whatever if he does get caught. and his aspirations are so low in a weird way that he stays safe. Because I asked him, one of the things we'd encounter is what we call the 25 ,000 euro thing, which is that a certain number of these guys, as we say, North Face jacket and scooter guy, selling grams of cocaine. A lot of these guys are saving up 25 ,000. And the reason is so they can buy what we call a kilo from a container. And then they can like stomp that twice, sell three kilos retail buy two kilos stomp that and then in two years they're living in dubai you know by growing got this investment so i jokingly said to this guy one time are you saving up 25 000 and he looked at me like i was the biggest idiot on earth and said yes because last year somebody stole my ducati motorcycle and i want to buy a new one and i was like so and he was like, no, man.

1:18:38And he was like, the minute you start doing that, you have to start storing kilos. You have to start asking people to protect kilos. Now people know you have kilos. He's like, it gets out of control too fast. Interesting. Different game. Yeah. He's like, it completely goes out of control. You end up having to be a murderer or something. You know, you're terrified somebody's going to kill you. He's like, what I'm doing right now, nobody's going to kill me. Nobody's going to care. The cops aren't even looking. He's got a lifestyle business instead of a growth company. That's what it is. And my man goes to like Barbados and shit for two weeks every summer and has a decent scooter and a nice car and a hot girlfriend.

1:19:15Works five hours a week, plays Xbox all day. Yeah, I think it's like a little higher end than that. He's a grinder. He knows that if he goes a step above where he is, he's entering the cocaine melou. And that is a completely different freaking world compared to what he's doing. So, you know, that's like the one guy I met that I was like, all right, you kind of have it figured out. Right. Yeah. Do you have any suspicions about where the money goes? Does it go back to Morocco? Is our palatial estates being built there? What's going on? I think like shopping malls in Eastern Europe, I think beach resorts in Albania, Italy, and Morocco, hotels, infrastructure.

1:19:54I think it's everywhere. Particularly, I think the rebuilding of infrastructure in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s and the late 90s, right around the time the cocaine trade really kicked off, I think that was an amazing money laundering opportunity because infrastructure is really where you want to do it. You know, concrete, jobs, you know, there's a million different ways to pad figures and stuff. And then at the end of it, the cocaine cartel owns a mall, which is a viable asset. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of what we tracked in terms of money is like transfers from Dubai to a Panamanian holding company that then come back to Morocco and end up invested in like a major beach resort.

1:20:34I'm not going to throw a company name out, you know, for legal reasons, but it's legitimate. The biggest question I came out of this podcast with is when does money go from being legal to illegal or illegal to legal? Okay. There's cocaine in a container. That's illegal. The guy who showed up with the half a million dollars to buy the cocaine, that money's illegal. You see where I'm going with this? Yeah. You sell the cocaine, that money's illegal. Okay, but what about a year from now when it ends up in a pizzeria in Dresden? At what point does it start being legal? Because eventually it's legal, it's salaries, it's pizza, it's real estate, it's this, it's that.

1:21:14So what's that line? And I would always ask law enforcement and analysts and stuff like that, and they'd all just shake their head. Europol joked that if I was going to ask questions like this, they were going to have to bring in a sociologist, a philosopher, and a statistician to help. You're a poll, so you're EU-wide police agency. Yeah, exactly. It's not philosophical. When is the money legal and when it is illegal? And this is the problem with the integrated globalized economy is when you deregulate finance to the extent that we all have across the world, that line gets so blurred so quickly.

1:21:51There is no more cutoff where this is drug money and this is proper investment. Nobody seems to want to define it. and I think that's because they like the money. If we follow the trail too far, we have to dismantle a hell of a lot of pizzerias. Also, the very best pizzerias. Yeah, the very best ones. I mean, let's face it, like, these are good pizzerias. There's this Iranian dissident story that seems, it's almost like a non sequitur in the podcast, but it's really interesting. This guy is at a wedding or something like that or a graduation party in a Facebook photo and gets murdered by the Iranian regime.

1:22:25What the hell is that? That's crazy. Okay, so Ali Mahmed, as his name was when he was killed, was actually a guy named Muhammad Reza, who back in the late 70s, early 80s, had been a revolutionary overthrowing the Shah, and it basically was part of a group that had come into conflict with what we call the Islamic Revolution, the guys that are in charge of Iran now. So they were rebels together, and if you ever know anything about a rebellion, rebels always turn on each other when they win. For sure. And he's part of this organization called the Mujahideen al-Khalq, M-E-K. And the M-E-K went violent.

1:23:02They'd been violent against the Shah. And they went violent against the Islamic regime. And in one case, it set off this bomb that it killed like 75 people in parliament. It crippled the current supreme leader of Iran, Khamenei. If you ever notice, he can't use his arm. Ah, did not notice that. He's crippled from an explosion. Yeah, in fact, he's made it to 79. Nobody thought he'd really make it very long because the injuries from that bombing were so terrible. 81 other people, I think 79 or 80 people were killed. And they were all like members of parliament. It was a really big deal. This bombing appalled everybody in Iran, not just supporters of the regime, but it was considered like an act of terrorism against the state, even if you weren't a fan of the Islamic regime.

1:23:44It appalled all Iranians. Apparently, this guy was involved and had fled to the Netherlands. He was probably the bomber. and had fled to the Netherlands and had been living under a fake identity while the Iranians had been combing the earth looking for him. He was working as an electrician in a suburban neighborhood in Amsterdam. He never was on social media except for one photo at his son's graduation. Within a few weeks or a few months, he gets shot dead. A friend of mine, Paul Vutz, who's this reporter for Het Parole, who's a phenomenal reporter in Amsterdam, started looking into it because he just thought it was so weird that this Moroccan mafia had killed this random Iranian electrician refugee guy.

1:24:28And it turns out he'd been living under a fake identity and had been hiding from the Iranian regime from all this time. So once they busted open the phone of a couple of Moroccan mafia guys, they realized that it had been a hit and that it had been a hit from the Iranian government, essentially, and that the Moroccans had no idea who he was and didn't care. It was like$30 ,000. Somebody paid him 30 ,000 euros to go kill a guy. And we even have like Noful, the guy who arranged it. He's in prison now for this, only because they decrypted his phone after he was arrested. But he's like, I don't even know what the guy did.

1:25:01I don't care. Like just go shoot him in the head, man. 30 ,000 euros. Yeah. That's a big contract. Yeah. It took a year, you know, for them to figure it out. And then over time it came out It turned into a bit of a scandal because it was around the time the US and a lot of Europe was pushing for a nuclear deal with Iran. So this is 2015-16 that this is going on. And the Dutch government decided to just let it go with arresting the gun. Like, they got no fault. They got the guys who did the shooting. Case closed. And that's something that I learned a lot and which I found really interesting in Europe as opposed to some other parts of the world that I've done law enforcement is.

1:25:41the Dutch and the Belgians have a tendency, like, if you get caught with 100 kilos of cocaine, you're going to go to jail for like eight years. Wow. But nobody's going to ask you where you got the cocaine. There's not going to be a plea deal. Like, you're not going to get to give up the guy who gave it to you and get a year. Got it. Okay. Whereas in the US, like, you'd be like, we're going to give you 30 years unless you tell us who gave you the cocaine, then we'll let you out and pay you or whatever. Like, it's a completely different milieu, you know, in this regard. Like you can get caught with a gun, a couple million dollars, 50 kilos of cocaine and do like four years in Holland.

1:26:17Probably like 12 in Belgium. Belgium's got stricter laws. But in the U.S., man, you get caught with a gun,$5 million in cash and 90 kilos of cocaine. You're looking at like 30 unless you tell them where you got the money and the cocaine. And that's something they don't do. And one argument that they the reason why they don't do it is there's way less violence. Because people don't try to keep you quiet by killing you? Yeah. They know you're just going to do four years and get deported back to Albania, so you're not going to flip on them. Right. It's not worth it. It's worth just staying in prison, take their little payout, and then go retire.

1:26:49Three years in a Dutch prison just proves you can be trusted in the Serbian, Moroccan, or Albanian mafia. You're just going to come out to a promotion. That makes sense. It's just three years, man. In a northern European prison, you're from Albania? Nobody's scared by that. Right. It's probably better than where you grew up. You know, a lot of 16-year-old Moroccan kids will tell me, or a lot of 16-year-old kids from Rotterdam, not just Moroccans, will tell me that when they do get arrested for occasionally busting into sealed daquilos, you know, and it's supposed to be a$150 fine, sometimes they'll get locked up for like three weeks or something like that.

1:27:23They're like, it's fun. You get cable TV, you hang out with your friends, play pool. Huh, not a good deterrent, man. One thing that the question that I had when I heard this that I just can't let go. They found this Iranian guy because there's a Facebook photo of him. They must have suspected where he lived or where he was or had some other leads unless Iran is literally scanning every photo on Facebook with facial recognition technology to find people that they haven't seen in a long time. And if they're doing that and they have the technology to find, okay, this guy 30 years ago, he did this.

1:27:58This is what he looks like now. Here's the photo. That's extremely troubling technology. Is that how they found him? Do we know? No, we don't know exactly how they found him, but let's just be completely realistic. They're a nation state. And this was a serious person they wanted. This wasn't just some guy. So facial recognition stuff, I don't know. Basically, my guess would be that Iranian operatives in European countries are tasked with following major people's Facebook pages and scanning stuff like that, just to keep an eye on the diaspora. I know they spy on the diaspora. I've been dealing with the Iranians for 15 years.

1:28:39So they're a really aggressive intelligence service, and they've got people who work for them. I mean, the first secretary from the embassy in Vienna just had to be swapped by Belgium for a Belgian aid worker because the Iranian diplomat was in the process is setting off a bomb in Paris when they caught it. Like, you know, but everybody's got these types of guys in their embassies that are working as spooks. So the Iranians are very aggressive on this. It would be easy to dismiss how big a deal some guy we've never heard of, you know, Ali Mahmed. He's a really big deal. I'd recognized his name just from my years of working in the Middle East when I first saw it.

1:29:14I was like, oh, they got him. So this is a dude that they were looking for. It's not quite on the Osama bin Laden level, but as you can imagine, like, if Osama Bin Laden or, you know, whatever posted one picture on Facebook at his son's graduation, if a nation state was really looking for him, that might get them there. It's kind of like how they found El Chapo, right? Wasn't it they followed a couple of actresses and and or Sean Penn led them to him? I don't know. I mean, I've heard a lot of stories about that. I don't want to speculate on that. But like people underestimate how powerful countries are when they do stuff like that because they can really like dedicate 100 people to it you know that's the thing that you forget like you think is it three hackers in a room man it's the iranian intelligence service they could put 150 guys in a room looking at facebook all day on everybody's page in holland if they want that's true and not even be hard it's not you know like so when you start going up against nation states with their resources when they're truly committed what i always tell the paranoid people who think that the government's always spying on them or whatever.

1:30:19It's like, Google's spying on you. What have you really done today to justify overtime for a bureaucrat? You know, to spy on you. It's just not worth it. But in the case of somebody who had maimed the Supreme Leader, who killed the prime minister at the time, did one of the worst terror attacks in Iranian history, you know, they were going to be really, really looking for them. The Iranians also have a long history of hunting down dissidents and killing them in Europe. So this is an area where they've had success doing it in the past. But that's a whole nother podcast. Mitchell Prothero, thank you so much, man.

1:30:53This is really interesting. Gateway, we'll link it in the show notes. Great podcast. I binged the whole thing, and I highly recommend it. It's really been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. I just want to say, everybody listen. We spend a lot of time on it. The bottom line, I recommend the podcast. Thank you very much. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. There is a world out there, but we don't see it as it is. So this isn't philosophy. This is just laws of physics. So if a tree falls in the wind, no one's there to hear it.

1:31:26Does it make a sound? No. It creates energy, but the sound is a construct of your brain. So the tree exists, the energy exists, but your brain then turns that into something useful, which is sound. Light, all the light that's coming around us, right? It's bouncing off objects and then it's changing when it's an object and then it comes to our eyes right but our retina has no access to the light directly nor to the surfaces all it literally has access to is energy and that's where your brain is actually constructing a meaning and it's that meaning that you're seeing you're not seeing the energy you're detecting the energy but you're not seeing it language is not a construct of the world think about perceptions of pain is pain an illusion Of course it's not an illusion.

1:32:10It's a meaningful perception. But it's not something that exists in the world. There aren't painful things in the world. If we weren't here, pain would not exist. We can't hear the five sounds of A that people in Scandinavia use, for instance. Right, right. We can't see certain shades of red that Russians can see. Really? Yeah. And it's only when you have awareness of why you're doing what you're doing that creates the possibility of doing it differently. Now, of course, if you don't have eyes, you can't choose to see. You still have to function in a world that has gravity, right, that has light.

1:32:43But we have more freedom than we think we do. We have more agency than we think we do. So the world is always changing and complexifying, and we need to complexify with it. And we never could if we always just see it as it really is. For more about how our brains produce vision and the constructs our brain makes to build our world, Check out episode 177 with Bo Lotto here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, before I forget, Gateway Podcast is the podcast from Project Brazen that Mitch runs. Really interesting details about the crimes and the violence and the cocaine smuggling and the ins and outs of the cocaine business in Europe and the scale of the market.

1:33:26It's really something. I'm shocked by that. Many of you are surprised about what you learned on this episode as well. I mean, it's just, it did not see that coming. And the violence is so much worse than what we discussed as well. There's murders back in Morocco because of scores being settled from Europe. Some are botched, they get the wrong guy. Europe really looks like pre-mafia United States, the polite society that they have. They're just not accustomed to this level of violence. It's shocking, it's heretofore unheard of. How they're gonna deal with this is, it's gonna be interesting. I mean, you're really meeting some very uncivilized drug cartel type people being dropped into the middle of really safe and advanced civilized company.

1:34:09It's going to be, man, it's going to be quite a clash, especially over there in the Netherlands, which is traditionally very soft on crime. Criminals fight to stay there when they're in prison because they don't want to get extradited to the US, to Canada, to Morocco, to Albania. They want to stay in the Netherlands, chill, watch TV, get a college education, work out, God knows what you can do there. and then they can operate rather freely inside and outside of prison. It's just, they're gonna have to figure this out, man. They can only scan 2%, if that, of containers daily. So 98 % of the drugs or whatever are getting through and that is battle they can't win.

1:34:44So we'll have to see what happens. Again, check out the Gateway Podcast. All Things Mitch Prothero will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot transcripts in the show notes as well. Once again, a reminder that the Stitcher app will no longer work for any podcast. as of August 29th, 2023. So if you're using the Stitcher app, time to switch. If you're on Android, Podcast Addict is a good one, CastBox. And if you're on iOS, I suggest Overcast or Apple Podcasts. The Stitcher app is going away, folks. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:35:18Please consider supporting those who support the show. Our newsletter is at jordanharbinger.com slash news. Highlights and takeaways from the most popular episodes of the show going all the way back to the beginning. You can reply to that newsletter and I will get your feedback. I would love your feedback. JordanHarbinger.com slash news. Six-minute networking also on the site at JordanHarbinger.com slash course. I'm at, wait for it, JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

1:35:52Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. 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 the cocaine market of Europe or lives over there and might not know about this problem, 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.

1:36:20This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspirituality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

1:36:51An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspirituality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.