Ross Halperin: Bear Witness

A gang in a mountain barrio in Honduras terrorized the people there for years. The police claimed that their hands were tied because witnesses refused to testify. An American sociologist and a Honduran schoolteacher devised a plan to protect their neighbors by taking matters into their own hands. Author Ross Halperin tells me the story in his book: Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land.   

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
You see throughout this book just these incredible, anonymous heroes who,
when approached by someone who's not the cops, that they
will step up and do the right thing at great
personal risk.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about what the choices writers make,
both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into
the unpublished details behind their stories. A gang in a
mountain barrio in Honduras terrorized the people there for years.

(01:14):
The police claimed that their hands were tied because witnesses
refused to testify, But then an American sociologist and a
Honduran school teacher devised a plan to protect their neighbors
by taking matters into their own hands. Author Ross Halpern
tells me the story in his book Bear Witness, The
Pursuit of Justice and a Violent Land. How did you

(01:39):
run across the story to begin with? What puts you
on the story?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
So I was working for two criminologists back in like
twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and towards the end
of that period we got really interested in the problem
of impunity in the United States. So this might surprise
a lot of people, maybe not your listeners because they're
on top of the things. But you know, whereas in
other comparable wealthy democracies across the world, maybe upwards of

(02:07):
ninety percent of homicides were solved. Here in the United States,
it's way lower than that. You know, at the time
it was probably sixty percent, and it's very skewed. The
solve rate for homicides in Chicago, you know, at the
time was probably like twenty five percent. And you know,
we care a lot about homicide, obviously, because that's probably
the most grievous crime that we have, But the significant

(02:28):
majority of shootings that happened in the United States are
non fatal, and the solve rate for those is frankly despicable. Actually,
the Chicago Sun Times just came out with a report
showing that of the nineteen thousand non fatal shootings that
had happened in that city since twenty eighteen, only six
percent had resulted in the rest, so almost complete lawlessness.

(02:51):
We were studying this issue very closely, trying to understand
it and think through potential solutions for it. And the
capstone of that project was a summit, kind of a
small conference in New York City that one of the
criminologists organized. And at that conference, Kurt Verbeek, who ended
up being the subject of my book, made a presentation

(03:12):
and you know, it was very, I don't want to
say boring, but not so flowery. It was just a
very kind of bare bones power point presentation. But I
was like totally captivated, both because it seemed like this
guy and his partner had come up with a solution
for impunity and lawlessness and solving more homicides and gun crimes.

(03:35):
Also because I was just fascinated in him, like how
he had made the decisions he made, and like why
he was the way he was and where he was
living and what he had done and the courage and
the bravery and the religion. I was just totally fascinated.
And a month later I was in Honduras for the
first time.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
I think, what's interesting is, you know when you have
people that come up with these solutions. You know, my
father was a law professor, and he talked about how
cyclical crime is, and you know, the way it shifts
with the economy and everything. But to think the nitty gritty,
how do you really make people feel protected? How do
you change an entire system. This is kind of the
first story where I really felt like you have somebody

(04:18):
with those sort of academic chops who actually physically went
into an area, put his life at risk to actually
in practice figure out what this will realistically work in
a very dangerous area of Honduras.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, and like he didn't start there is the other
interesting thing. So he you know, he's a sociologist. He
grew up in suburban Chicago and right after college him
and his wife moved to Honduras. They're very idealistic, they're
very religious, and they want to help the poor, and
they really decide at a young age to commit their
lives to that. And like that's not a terribly uncommon

(04:56):
thing for young people to do. But it becomes pretty
quickly that they're not like the others. And the first
really radical and unusual thing that they do is they
move with their kids at this point to one of
the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in all of Honduras,
the type of place where you know, the rest of
the gring goes down in Honduras, the missionaries wouldn't even

(05:18):
set foot in. And it's there that Kurt really forges
this incredible bond, this best friendship with Carlos Hernandez, who
is a school teacher from Merle, Honduras, and who has
the same mentality, like just totally devoted to helping the poor.
And the two of them spend the first five or
ten years they're there doing all the normal things that

(05:40):
humanitarians and missionaries do, so they're you know, they build
a school, they have a micro lender, they're working on
the water, they're working on the land titling, and it's
all very impressive and they're quite successful at it. But
to what you're saying, they reach a point where they say, look,
this stuff is only going to have so much impact
when there's a gang that is killing people, hurting people,

(06:03):
scaring people, extorting businesses. People can't prosper people can't be
educated in an environment like that, and the police and
the prosecutors and the criminal justice system we're basically doing nothing.
So they say, we're going to shift gears, and this
is really where the book starts, and we are going
to do something about crime and violence and impunity. And

(06:24):
what that concretely means in that moment is we're going
to take on this gang, which is one of the
most notorious gangs in Honduras. And this is a very
daring thing to do. It's a very dangerous thing to do.
But they come up with an idea, a very clever
idea for how to go about it.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
And you know what's fascinating about what their mindset was
is you have Carlos, who lives there and knows this country.
You've got Kirt that comes in with this experience and
also a determination to help people. So it's almost this
sort of perfect storm of people who, you know, two
people who have found each other to be able to
solve this problem. Figure out pretty quickly that policies aren't

(07:02):
going to work, and more police necessarily won't work. I mean,
the things that have been the checkboxes for politicians all
over the world in this moment won't work once they're
living with the terror that the people in this area
are living with. That was a really big tease for
what I want to talk about. But before we do that,
let's go back and tell me what Honduras is like.

(07:24):
You know, I think it gets clumped in with with
other countries, you know, Latin countries, and people don't really understand,
you know, the differences, and of course migrants coming from
some of these countries make headlines with the current administration.
I think it would be good to know exactly what
they're going through in Honduras in this time.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Sure, yeah, I mean we hear so much about the
border and deportations, but I think this book is really
a chance to go inside the country and really get
to see it for what it is and the problems
and the villains and the heroes and the everything. So,
you know, I think the first thing to know about
it is it's sort of has fallen victim to this

(08:04):
perfect storm of criminal forces, and the first one is
narco trafficking. So back in the eighties, this was the
original days of cocaine trafficking. It would typically come from
Colombia up through the Caribbean Sea to the United States.
And basically what happened is the United States spent billions

(08:24):
of dollars stopping that blockading that route, and it was
successful in a certain sense, but it was unsuccessful in
the sense that it didn't stop cocaine. What happened is
the narcos shifted their routes westward to a path with
much less resistance, and Honduras was a perfect place for that.
So manufactured in Venezuela or Colombia, and then it's on

(08:45):
a boat or a little prop plane or even a
submarine to Honduras and from there it goes overland to
the United States. And you know, there was a point
in the story in the history of this country where
I think eighty percent of cocaine that got to the
United States was being in Honduras first. So just think
about the value of that criminal activity and how poor

(09:06):
and small that country is. So that's factor one. Factor
two is the Maras. So a lot of people have
heard about the MS thirteen. They're still in the news today.
What they may not know is that that gang, as
well as its chief rival the Barrio eighteen were founded
in Los Angeles by Salvadoran refugees in the eighties, and

(09:27):
there was a big bipartisan deportation effort in the mid
to late nineties where the United States deported a lot
of people with criminal records. So you had thousands of
these gang members from Los Angeles being shipped back to Honduras,
l Salvador and Guatemala, and in pretty short order those
gangs spread and as of the time this book starts,

(09:49):
pretty much every poor neighborhood in Honduras, poor urban neighborhood
is controlled by one of the two. Funny enough that
the neighborhood Nuevasuyapa that I write about was controlled by
a third gang which sort of carved out their own
fiefdom at the time. And then the third is just
a criminal justice system which was incapable of administering justice.
And part of the problem was poverty. You know, you

(10:11):
go to police stations down there are prosecutors' offices, and
you'll see deaths without computers, printers without ink. You'll see
a homicide department responsible for a million person city which
might have three cars and one of them might be
broken and one of them might not have any gas,
so lack of resources. And then there's obviously the problem
of corruption and criminality in the police force. This was

(10:33):
a police force that was involved with narco trafficking, murder
for hire, carjackings, and then there was just the more
mundane forms of corruption like letting criminals pay you to
let them go or escape at prison and all of that.
So you had narco trafficking, the maras and lawlessness, and
that contributed to a situation where you had a very

(10:55):
violent country and a lot of impunity.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
Tell me about the government. We've talked about the police
and you know, the vast corruption that's there. The government
must have been culpable with the cocaine trafficking. I can't
imagine they wouldn't be. Or do you have factions of
the government that are fighting against each other who truly
want Honduras to you know, not be corrupt, to help
the poorest people.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, I mean, I definitely don't want to paint with
too broad a brush. And all of these institutions, ranging
from the police to the prosecutor's office to you know,
the highest level of politicians. There are obviously good people
trying to do a good job. But you have to understand.
I mean, if you're someone running to be president of
a country like this, you need to raise money to
run a campaign. And in a super poor country where

(11:43):
there's not a lot of people with wealth, the people
who have money are often people who are involved in
narco trafficking in one way or another. So there's been
this infecting of the highest echelons of the government and
politics by narco trafficking. Let's talk today. The last president
of Honduras is currently in an American jail cell and

(12:04):
has a life sentence for being a narcotrafficker. And when
the witnesses testified against him, they also made allegations against
the prior to presidents. The current president's brother in law,
there was a video of him recently released where he
appears to be negotiating a bribe with a narcotrafficker. So

(12:26):
it really did touch a lot of different people. Some
of them have ended up in prison, some of them
might end up in prison. It's just a lot of
money for a country that poor and small.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
Who can help in this situation? Before we get down
to your specific story, I mean, is there any intervention
that can happen outside of a Honduras that can change this.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, I mean I wish I knew the answer. And
there's a lot of amazing people, including the two guys
I write about in my book, who are trying very
hard to improve the country, and despite there being a
sense in some circles that it's kind of a hopeless situation,
I don't think it is one thing that will probably
have an impact on presidents presidential candidates taking money from

(13:10):
narco's or participating in narco trafficking themselves. Is extradition, which
is a very powerful tool where by the United States
takes someone who's has committed a crime in another country
and brings them here and puts them in a jail
cell here in an American court where justice actually can
be done. So I think that's a powerful tool. And
then look, I mean, USAID was supporting a lot of

(13:33):
efforts in Honduras and other countries like it. Some of
them are pretty small sounding, like helping people get through
droughts and different programs to help teenagers avoid the pull
of gang life. But I do think a lot of
that stuff was helping and doing good. Some of it,
I'm sure was nonsensical and kind of bs, but I

(13:55):
think there was a lot of really great stuff going
on and churches, charities, missionary there are people doing good
stuff down there that I'm inspired by.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
So Kurt and Joanne, did you tell me they had kids?
I'm sorry, I couldn't remember.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
They didn't when they first moved there, but by the
time they moved to Nuevasuyappa, which was the super dangerous neighborhood,
they had two.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
What year do Kurt and Joanne move to Nuevasuyapa? Tell
me kind of about their family situation, and also, gosh,
you would just think self preservation would kick in and
say this is not a good idea to move to
this incredibly dangerous area, but some people can ascend that.
I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
So they moved there in nineteen ninety eight, and I
think there's a few impulses behind that. So the first
thing to know is Kurt and Joanne are very religious.
They're members of the Christian Reformed Church, which is a
Calvinist tradition, and he and Carlos as well, in a
different way, have these contrarian but very strong ideas about
Christian theology. And one of Kurt's big things is, you know,

(15:00):
Christians see Jesus today, he says, and they see this
almost delicate, little adorable guy floating up in the clouds.
But the real Jesus was this wildly brave, audacious guy
in the desert who was willing to put his life
on the line for what he believed in. And the
same goes for the people who were his earliest accolytes

(15:20):
and were a part of this religion which was illegal
for three hundred years, and were getting killed in the
most barbaric ways for proselytizing it. And he says, those
guys were wildly brave, and I want to resuscitate that.
I want to bring that back into modern Christianity, that
sense of courage and just because something might get you
hurt or even your kids hurt, that isn't necessarily a

(15:43):
reason not to do it. And the second is, you know,
he's a teacher, he's a sociologist. He earns a living
by teaching study abroad students, and he tells the students
that if you want to help the poor, like there's
all these missionaries and people coming down to Honduras for
two weeks, three weeks to build a sc school or
build a home, but we don't believe in that. We
don't think they really understand the problems, and if you

(16:06):
want to help the poor, you should live alongside them.
And they eventually say, you know, we're kind of we
did that a little bit when they first got to Hunduras,
but at that time they were living in a middle
class neighborhood and they kind of felt like hypocrites. So
they said, if we really want to do this, we
have to live like the poor alongside them. And those
are the two things that really contribute to that decision,

(16:27):
which is criticized there by their friends and family.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
Well, start from when they moved to this area and describe,
you know, we talk about the most dangerous and poverty
stricken area. Kind of describe what that means, just for
anybody to be able to understand. Does that mean people
barely eat or what are their living situations like?

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, So this community came to be in nineteen like
seventy four. There was a big hurricane and the river
inundated a lot of shanty towns and at the time
this location was the municipal garbage but it was the
only place people could go, so they populated it. It's
on a mountain side above the city, and by the
time Kurt got there, it wasn't in that state where

(17:08):
it was, you know, the garbage flies and sort of
disgusting in that way, but it was very impoverished. So
as an example, by then there were water pipes installed,
but they only run to each household about one day
per month. So when that one day comes, you spend
however many hours it runs, filling up as many tubs

(17:29):
and barrels and tanks as you possibly can. And the
rest of the time that's how much water you have
for everything, you know, dirt roads, ramshackle houses made of everything.
There's some that are nicer, concrete blocks you know, have
finishing on them. But you'll see houses made of you know,
pieces of wood, of signage. And the roads some are

(17:51):
you know, like kind of a fire road, some are
like little paths. It's it's a very poor place. And
in this sort of period before them got to Honduras,
there was a different type of crime. It was a
lot of fevery low level fevery stealing, burglarizing, pickpockets. I mean,
at the beginning of the story, Carlos gets robbed at

(18:12):
knife point. But as things progress and the sort of
gang methodology of Los Angeles spreads across Honduras. Things become
much more dangerous, and neighbors start getting killed, friends start
getting hurt, girls stop going to school because they're scared.
Church services at night get canceled. It becomes a somewhat

(18:33):
scary place, but I don't want to overstate that. Like
both Curt and Carlos have a bit of trepidation when
they first move there, but they end up loving it
because it's a very communal place. It's a place where
there's just a lot of life, people out and about,
neighbors helping neighbors. There's trees, there's a great top down

(18:54):
view of the city. So there's a lot of good
things about it too.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
How are Kurt and Joanne as a white American couple,
how are they received in Honduras and in this little
town by gangs and by just their kind neighbors?

Speaker 2 (19:11):
You know, I think to some extent they're like an
objective fascination. You know, when they walk to church twice
a day on Sundays, there are these guys outside the
canteena who will heckle them with like these fake English words.
And I haven't experienced that myself when I was spending
some time in the community. But pretty quickly they really
integrate themselves. And I mean the kids are going to

(19:32):
school across the street at Genesis, which is Carlos's school,
with local kids. Kurt and Joanne are very much part
of the fabric of their church community and helping people
in every way possible with housing problems and work problems
and personal problems. But you know, there is a stands out.
I mean, for example, he rides his bike to work

(19:54):
every morning, so he'll go down the hill with his
bike and his helmet and paddle across the city to
his classroom. And there are these things like that which
would definitely make him stand out. And you know, he's tall,
he's white, he's got blue eyes, so it's noticeable. But
you know, pretty quickly they really feel at home there.
They feel like this is our home, this is where

(20:15):
we want to live for the rest of our life.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
And this is where Kurt meets Carlos, right, who will
be his partner in this crime fighting enterprise.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yeah, so they had actually met before then, but they
were kind of more like acquaintances. I would say they
had worked in the same offices maybe a decade before.
But yeah, they very quickly forged this truly unusual best friendship.
I mean they're living directly next door to each other,
and pretty much every night when Carlos comes home from work,
he'll knock on Kurt's window and they have a little

(20:45):
chat just about their days, and very often Kurt will
invite him in. He'll sit down at the table and
it's one of these dynamics where you just have two
people who are so in tune, share the same values,
have this amazing conversation chemistry. You know, they're friends, there's
a real friendship there, but they're united by this mission,

(21:05):
this sense that we want to improve this place. We
want to come up with creative ideas to improve this place,
and we're willing to do whatever it takes to improve
this place. And you know, it starts off as a friendship,
but it really morphs into a work partnership. And you know,
we're getting a little bit of a head of ourselves here.
But that's a very hard and unusual thing to do

(21:25):
to have a friend become a work partner and then
have that work for you know, they're almost on thirty
years now of doing that.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Now, tell me about the characteristics of Carlos that make
him a good partner. You're talking about, you know, a
sociologist who comes from the United States, I'm presuming has
had a normal middle class life in the United States,
and then you're talking about someone who is Carlos, I'm
assuming has lived in Honduras' entire life.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah, Carlos grew up in rurala Honduras. His parents were
separated at pretty young age age, and in order to
be schooled, he basically had a hopscotch from different relatives
house to different relatives' house to always be within walking
distance of a school that educated kids his age. So
we sort of had this nomadic childhood around this rural
area in Honduras. And you know, he, like Kurt, is

(22:20):
at animated by this sort of contrarian religious vision. And
he's an Evangelical Christian, but he can't stand how his
church and the Evangelical church in general in Honduras is
very kind of head in the clouds. So we are
focused on prayer and scripture and converting others so they

(22:42):
will be able to go to Heaven someday as opposed
to Hell. And he says, look, I believe in that
I want to do that too, But what about in
the here and now, what about the kids who aren't
getting educated and the sick people who have tuberculosis? Like
I want to focus on that as a Christian. And
you know, he moves to Tagusigalpa by himself, with no connections,

(23:05):
no money, and spends the first few years working for
evangelical charities, you know, integrating himself to a church there.
But he reaches a point where he says, like, I
don't like what the other charities are doing. I don't
like what the church is doing. I'm going my own route.
And this place called New Evaso Yappa is clearly the
worst off barrio in the city. I'm going to go

(23:27):
there and try to help. And in terms of the characteristics,
I mean, Carlos is really much more of a dreamer.
Kurt is a very orderly thinker. He organizes his speech,
his thinking, his presentations. Carlos is an idea guy. He's
a people person. He very quickly. I mean, he builds
a school there, which is this amazing thing to do,

(23:47):
very hard to build there, you know, educating kids. There's
a doctor, there's a pharmacist, there's an orthodontist, there's a
micro lending organization. He's just energy ideas, new creation. And
you know he's not a task master's He almost becomes
like the mayor of Nuevasu Yappa. So people come to
him for problems, He'll go and deliver construction materials to

(24:09):
their house. Very energetic, very active, playing with kids, sitting
down for coffee with women who borrowed from his microlender.
That that type of guy.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Tell me about the churches before we move on to
their story and the church's relationship in Honduras with these gangs.
Are they generally left alone or are they the subject
of extortion and intimidation just like you know somebody who
owns a corner store would be.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah, No, the churches aren't extorted by the gangs. And
I mean, the the VMO I think even to this day,
is that the only way to leave the MS thirteen
or the Baru eighteen is if you become a true
believing Christian and part of the evangelical church. So, I mean,
I've never heard of them explicitly being targeted, But now
that I'm actually thinking about it, there's a point in

(24:57):
my story where the gang the Puco's raids Kurt's pastor's
house and pins him to the ground as they basically
ransack all of his belongings. So, and there's another instance
I'm thinking about after I've said that, where the gang
robs all the kids from the church after they sold
a bunch of T shirts at a concert. Maybe the

(25:19):
bigger gangs have that line, But the gang that Kurt
and Carlos take on, which is just brutal and sort
of almost nihilistic seeming, I can think of a few
instances where they cross that line.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Well, let's talk about when things start to get bad.
So I've heard the good things, you know, we've heard
about the poverty, but we've also heard the good things
about the beauty of the place and how everybody is friendly,
and how well they've been ingratiated themselves to this Mario.
When do they first start encountering the things that Kurt
has been looking for, this violence, and when his wheels

(25:55):
and Carlos's wheels together start turning about how to solve this.
Where does it begin.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
It starts with a failure, so they kind of have
this in the back of their heads. And then one
day a woman who's the mother of two of Carlos's
students comes to him, Well, her husband was killed. Sorry,
I should have mentioned that he was shot on the street,
like a normal guy doing work leaves one morning and
was shot and robbed on the street. And a couple

(26:20):
weeks later, his widow goes to Carlos and says, hey,
I need your help. I want to get these guys arrested.
And like you know, to your ear, to my ear,
that might not sound terribly unusual, but in a place
like Honduras and Nuevasuyapa in particular, where maybe ten percent
of serious crimes across the entire country were even investigated,

(26:44):
let alone solved, she was doing something a bit unusual.
And what she said was, hey, I know who did it,
and I have spoke to witnesses who saw it. She
had done a little mini investigation herself. But then she
said that wasn't the hard part. The hard part was
the next part, which is she went to the police

(27:04):
and said, hey, go arrest the guys who killed my husband,
and they said, no, we can't do that unless the
witnesses come give formal statements directly to us. And that's
where you see the logjam, because the witnesses when she
went back to them, refused to do that. They did
not trust the police for all sorts of reasons you
can imagine, and weren't willing to take that risk because

(27:27):
they were obviously scared. And ultimately she asked Curtain Carlos
to help, and they said they would, but they did nothing,
and they kind of call some friends for advice, and
they do nothing because they're scared, and the alleged killers
ended up getting killed themselves, and Curtain Carlos reflect on
that experience and they say, the next time this happens,

(27:49):
we're actually going to do something. But but from that
you can see what the key insight is. It's really
the reason there's a lack of justice is because the
witnesses are unwilling to testify in a formal criminal proceeding,
and that is how you know a homicide case is
typically solved. So the idea that they developed is really

(28:11):
focused on bridging that gap between witnesses and law enforcement.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
So how, I'm just curious, how did this woman's husband's
killers get killed themselves by another gang? No?

Speaker 2 (28:24):
So the police, you know, the police MO at this
point and for a few years thereafter, is like they
do very little policing, and then they'll do a huge
raid with a lot of cars and cops and helicopter support.
And in this case, that group of guys allegedly killed
the cop a few months later, and that was what

(28:46):
sparked the response. So at that point they swept in
there and did a very aggressive operation.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah. I had wondered when you said that ten percent
were seriously investigated. I had wondered if the ten percent
probably were from the or echelons who had been murdered
or robbed or whatever, and that was what it would
take to get an investigation.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, in a place like nuevasu Yapa, the numbers were
probably way lower than the average, because you know, it's
just on the one hand, the cops were probably scared
themselves to go there for good reason. I mean, I
just told you about a cop who was killed there
when he was I think he was on his like
first week on the job in Nuevasuyapa. And then the
cops also probably noticed some extent like they're not going

(29:27):
to get help from the witnesses there, so maybe they
focused their resources elsewhere.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
I don't know if you've seen this on Netflix, there's
a really good series out of India about the small
village that was terrorized by a gang, just terrorized by
one particular gang leader who had sexually assaulted women in
the village and it was just awful. And they eventually
got together and all these women at the same time

(29:54):
while he was in court and open court, and they
stabbed him to death, all of them, and the police
couldn't prove who had done the fatal blow. I'm sure
there were many fatal blows and so none of them.
I think there were some that were arrested, but that
was in it. I'm not sure if it cleared out
the gang problem, but they basically cut the head off
the snake. He was the one controlling all of these
other people. So you know, that was the only way

(30:16):
this really, really impoverished village was able to take back
some control. Was they had to do it because nobody
else was helping. And so that's where I was wondering,
if this is where this is going to go, how
do you empower people who probably don't even have enough
personal belongings for gangs to extort from them, let alone
have police protection.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is when you
see it a lot of crime and violence and impunity
in your community, and you want to take it bettern
matters into your own hands. The natural impulse is violent vigilanteism,
kind of what you just described, and there's a lot
of that in Unduras. There's a lot of that in
my book. People whether they're members of the community or

(31:00):
members of the police force, who just say, screw it,
I'm done with these guys. I'm going to go kill them.
And there's lots of problems with them, you know, Curtain
Carlos say, we don't like that. We think that is
evil and problematic as well, so we're going to come
up with a different solution. And what they do is
say we're going to solve homicides and gang crimes, and like,

(31:22):
you know, that doesn't sound like something private citizens could do.
When we think about solving murders, we think of that
being something that the government should do, and probably only
the government should do. But if you actually look at
the mechanics of how that happens step by step, you
realize that private citizens can do a lot of it.
And it's actually probably interesting within the context of the

(31:43):
true crime community because we've seen that with these very
salacious serial killer cases a podcast or starts investigating, finds evidence,
finds witnesses, and helps solve the case. But what Curtain
Carlos were doing was basically applying a little bit of
that concept to ordinary street crime. You know, a popular culture,

(32:05):
we're used to seeing the murder being solved by the
genius detective or the CSI tech finding the clue. But
in reality, like most cases are closed because of witnesses,
someone knows what happened and is either willing to testify
about it in court under oath or isn't. And you
don't need a badge to figure out who the witness
is to convince her to testify and to keep her alive.

(32:29):
And then you know, a private citizen obviously can't make
an arrest, But the clicking on of handcuffs isn't really
what was inhibiting apprehensions. In new episode Yappa, the bigger
issue was that the cops didn't know who the culprits were,
what they looked like, what their real names were, where
they were going to be at Thursday at five pm,

(32:49):
and they often didn't have a vehicle to transport themselves
to that location. So a private citizen could do all
of that. So what Curting Carlos did was they hired
a private eye and a lawyer and a psychologist who
in secret started doing all the things I just described.
So on the one hand, it was witness cultivation, and

(33:10):
on the other it was gathering intelligence about the gangs
and delivering that to the authorities. The third piece, once
arrests were made and they were finally was putting a
ton of pressure on prosecutors and judges to actually lay
down the law.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
So I mean that just seems like an enterprise in itself.
Where is the money coming from to pay these people?
Is I know that Kurt was connected to an NGO,
I didn't know if that was an NGO that he
had set up in Honduras.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, So Kurt and Carlos around a charity called the
Association for a More Just Society. So this was all
done within that organization. As I said, it was kind
of a clandestine division of it. But it was a
small time. You know that most of their funding at
this point came from you know, Kurtwood tour churches around
the Midwest and you know, for a month a year

(33:59):
and raise fund from friends and family and other members
of sort of the Dutch Midwest culture, but it was
a real shoe string budget in the early days. Things
changed over time, but at the beginning they did this for,
you know, without much money.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
So did you say, is it the attorney who is
kind of in charge of going to Ross and say,
you know you'll be safe, but we need a statement
from you. The only thing that's going to change is
people like you standing up. Is that the person who
has to it's like an impossible task.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
It really does seem like an impossible task. Like if
you were to ask people before they started, could you
pull this off? I think they would say no, it's impossible.
Like A, you yourselves are going to get killed for
poking around and asking questions about this gang, and B
nobody's going to do this. Why the hell would they.
They're just going to get themselves hurt. So the people
who are actually doing that work initially it's the lawyer

(34:51):
and the private eye, and you know, they have different
personalities and I think they, depending on the person, decide
who's the better one to go speak. Kurting Carlos themselves
sometimes get involved in certain of those conversations, but it's
really the lawyer in the private eye. And I think
the incredible thing, and this is like a testament to
the human spirit, is like over and over again, just

(35:13):
when you think you've seen the most intimidating, violent, terrifying
gang member and that no one in their right mind
would ever testify against them, you see throughout this book
just these incredible, anonymous heroes who when approached by someone
who's not the cops, someone who kind of has a

(35:34):
religious sheen to them, that they will step up and
do the right thing at great personal risk. And I
think in many ways this book is like an homage
to witnesses. And I was just so impressed and amazed
by these people who did step up and did go

(35:54):
to court and testify, because without that, you're never going
to have justice, and without justice, you're never going to
have prosperity.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
I mean, because I have to think, Okay, what are
the other tools that you would use to successfully prosecute
a gang member who's accused of murder. Let's say CCTV,
no CCTV, and then you know somehow tracing cell phones,
you know everything that every technology that we would use,
I'm assuming is not useful. You know. In this Mario

(36:27):
in particular.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah, we're talking about two thousand and five and a
really poor part of hondurass so a lot of those things,
you know, even to the extent there were cell phones,
Like did the police force really have the resources to
do those types of investigations and get that information? But
I think even in the United States people would be
surprised at the extent to which, you know, like back
when we were doing our research into all of this
and talking to cops and like reading all the investigations

(36:52):
and research that have been done into it, Like, I
think it really is true that that in the vast
majority of cases, it's like this testimony is the thing
that it all hinges on. And I think it's interesting
because like in you know, once again in popular culture,
it's usually the detective or the prosecutor who like is
the hero in the situation. But I almost would like

(37:15):
recommend shifting the locus of that a little bit to
these to these witnesses who are often unheralded and in
the case of Honduras, actually anonymous because they were allowed
to testify under the cloak of anonymity. And one of
the really brilliant things that Curt and Carlos and their
staff did was take advantage of that because the police

(37:35):
and prosecutors weren't so like, one very simple thing they
did was sewed together these robes which looked exactly like Burka's,
and they would dress their witnesses in them when they
went to court. And you know, if it was a
person with a distinct body shape, they might add pillows,
it was a person who had a distinctive height, they
might put them in a wheelchair. So lots of creative

(37:56):
ingenuity to disguise the people. They eventually were voice disorders
into it as well.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
So wow, well I want a good example from you.
You said that they weren't able to help the widow
and she ended up getting some mondmum justice later on.
But what was the next incident? They said, the next time,
we're going to do something about it. So what was
that next time for them?

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Yeah, the next time was the rise of this gang,
the Buccos, So they kind of were kids at that point,
but then they essentially commandeer this barrio and they are smart,
so they systematically confiscate firearms from residents from security guards.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
They are brutal.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Their's instance where they kidnap these two sisters who pedal
candy on the street and gang rape them down by
a brook And it's just terrible. And not only do
they do they do that, but they go to them
after and say, don't you dare tell anyone about this.
They're committing all sorts of crimes, extortion, theft, murder, and

(39:03):
they're intimidating witnesses. And the other really infuriating thing about
the situation is despite the blatantness of the crime, they're
getting away with it. So one thing I should explain
is the leader, who's this guy Chalito, and a lot
of his people. They actually get arrested quite often, so
the cops will take the step of going in and

(39:24):
arresting them, but they often stay in jail for a
very short period of time, a matter of days, weeks,
or months. And sometimes it's just because the cops have
no evidence, so the judge says, well, you haven't proven anything,
so we have to let these guys go. Sometimes it's
that they escape from the juvenile prison, which is extremely porous.

(39:45):
And it's just such an infuriating situation for the community
to see this crime and to see this sort of
yo yoing from police custody back to the barrio and
people are fed up. And at this point, Gourdon Carlos
say we're going to start this project, and the spark

(40:05):
is an arrest. Chalito and three other guys get picked
up by the police, and Kurt and Carlos say, this time,
we're going to try to make sure they stay there.
So they hire a lawyer and start recruiting witnesses and
that's how this all begins, and you know, they end
up having a lot of success, but it's a very

(40:26):
difficult road there, with a lot of twists and turns,
a lot of collateral damage, a lot of moral quandaries
they find themselves in. But that that's the starting point.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
How do you find an attorney that's going to be
brave enough to actually go out there and be seen
talking to people? Where did this person come from?

Speaker 2 (40:44):
So this is I think one of the most interesting
parts of the story is they say we want to
hire a lawyer and a private eye. And you know,
they and their organization are very religious, very focused and
dedicated to human rights, but the type of people who
will do the work that they want done are not
choir boys. And the first batch of people they approach,

(41:06):
say are you kidding me? Like, no freaking way will
I do that? And then the people that they do
finally find who are willing to do this are people
with very different values, you know. So the lawyer is
an atheist, he's got a ponytail, he likes heavy metal music,
he's brash, he's arrogant, he's disrespectful in the office. The

(41:29):
private eye is a former soldier who's a very tough,
militant guy who kind of placed by his own rules
and does operations with the cops, and you don't really
know what he's doing in the obscurity of that, and
it raises a lot of questions and ethical questions as well.

(41:51):
But they're very effective. So that puts curtain Carlos in
this dilemma where they're getting witnesses, they're eventually getting arrests,
are doing things that they don't approve of. So it's
a challenge to grapple with that.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
What are they doing? You know?

Speaker 2 (42:08):
I think one of the big issues from the beginning
is police violence. So the first big raid that the
charity successfully organizes, there's about ten of the gang members
who get captured, but the lawyer who's the one there
at the time is aghast because once the suspects are

(42:30):
already handcuffed, he sees the police beat the crap out
of them like one kids so bad that his mandible,
his jaw is broken, he can't eat solid food for
a month. He sees the cops threatened to cripple a
detainee with aluminum baseball bat. He sees cops enter homes
without warrants, And this is just how the hunter and

(42:50):
police did things at the time. And you know, he's
very disapproving of that curtain. Carlos are very disapproving of that.
But as I said before, or it worked, they got
these guys arrested. So right there, you're confronted with this dilemma.
Do we stop, do we file the complaint with internal affairs?
Do we expose this to the press, and they don't

(43:11):
know what to do? And where I'm getting with this
is the private eye who comes in a little bit later.
He's way more permissive of this type of stuff, and
he eventually becomes the one who's out in the police
with operations on operations. And you know, when it was
a lawyer, you had some degree of transparency and just
you know, just like negative reaction to it, but with

(43:32):
the operative and I don't really have evidence that he
himself did anything, but there's definitely questions that he was
getting very actively involved in arrests and the operations, and
at the very least was sort of turning a blind
eye to it. And that raised a lot of alarm
bells in the charity and it made this a difficult

(43:55):
thing to just decide what to do.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Okay, so they had to I think you're saying the
book they kind of from idealistic to pragmatic because now
they're in an area where they can't really create rules.
They have to play within the rules that they're given
to be able to get an optimal result. So you know,
kind of giving me that example where they're holding their
noses at both of these guys. Where does the psychologist

(44:18):
come in? Is that later too? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (44:20):
So the program really starts off with the private eye
and the lawyer, and things are going well. They're building
this network of informants, they're recruiting witnesses, they're getting arrests,
they're building relationships with the police and the prosecutors. But
then one of the program's closest informants, who's someone who's

(44:41):
provided a lot of information and help them out a lot,
does something that is very out of character and puts
himself in a great deal of danger and is killed.
And it's a real horrible tragedy. And I think at
that point it becomes clear to Kurt In Carlows that

(45:01):
solving murders isn't just an investigative and legal challenge. It's
also an emotional and psychological one because it all hinges
on witnesses who are human beings, and these are people
who have some piece of information in their head. It
might pertain to the loss of someone they loved, it

(45:22):
might pertain to the most horrible thing that they have
ever seen, and it's all on them, and they're participating
in this legal process which might drag on for months
or years, and having to talk about this over and
over again, and throughout this entire period of time, they
have to live in fear that they're going to be
retaliated against. So it's a very emotionally difficult thing to

(45:47):
deal with. So they decided to bring a psychologist on
and like the psychologists would provide formal therapy to witnesses
and informants, but also just be kind of like a
friend and an ear and a person who could talk
without legal ees and was just a little bit softer
than the private eye and the lawyer. And I think
the trio, the three of them, is what made the

(46:08):
program work. It's all about focusing on what are witness's
needs and how do we make them comfortable testifying?

Speaker 1 (46:15):
What was a psychologist like? Was this somebody who was
also sort of a sketchy person or is this the
angel a lot of the three of them.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
That's a great question, you know. I think the first
person who they brought in to do it was an
American social worker who was already working in a different
part of the charity. And no, I mean she was
not like that, but she couldn't. It didn't work because
she clashed so much with a private eye and the lawyer.

(46:44):
And you know, there were all these really difficult situations
that arose when you started bringing those different types of
people under the same roof. Just the personalities didn't fit.
But then they brought another person in and for whatever reason,
it worked and she was great and they were able
to work cohesively and get these cases closed.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
When we last heard about Schalito and his gang, you
said he and another one had been arrested, and Kurt
and Carlos said, we've got to figure out how to
keep them in. Did they find witnesses who were willing
to testify? Was this sort of the first instance of
their plan kicking in.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, So, as I said, like, they say, we're going
to do this, We're going to find witnesses, they get
the lawyer hired, and like remarkably, in very short order,
they find a handful of witnesses who are like, yes,
we will testify against these guys. And it's like incredible,
you wouldn't think that would be possible, but but they do.
And then they go to the juvenile court and testify,

(47:45):
and the kids end up the judge ends up ruling
that they're going to stay in prison until their trial
in however many months, And that's like a huge win
because that wasn't happening before. Usually at that stage, the
judge you would have to let them go because no
witnesses would show up, there was no evidence, so the
case couldn't proceed. But you know, once that happens, you

(48:06):
see the problem with this. So in a matter of weeks,
Chalito and a number of other Pucos escape the juvenile prison,
and they immediately take revenge on the people who they
think are the witnesses. So a woman gets killed and
someone else gets stabbed, and they actually are not the witnesses.

(48:26):
The witnesses testified anonymously. But right there, Curtain Carlos are
once again forced to grapple with the situation. So this
has to happen. There has to be justice, We have
to lay down the law. But doing so is going
to get people hurt. There's going to be collateral damage.
Should we keep going or are we in over our

(48:46):
heads here?

Speaker 1 (48:47):
So what's the next step? I'm assuming there's another incident
coming up pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah, I mentioned the other informant who was killed. But
alongside all of this is progress, and it's really important
to remember how enraged and fed up people were with
this gang. And then the other thing I should mention
is we talked about this a little bit before, but
violent vigilantism was the alternative response and that was happening too,

(49:15):
and Curtin Carlos felt this enormous sense of time pressure
to prove that their program could work, could get these
people arrested, because they didn't want the vigilante response to
rise up strongly and for there to be like an
explosion of mono amano violence because they had seen that
happen before and knew how damaging that was.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
Well, how do you promise witnesses? Well, I don't know
if they were able to make any kind of a promise.
What would the lawyer say? If there is a teenage
girl who's witnessed the murder of her parents, she's the
only witness, how can you I mean, it's obvious the
person who's going to testify is going to be her.
If anybody's going to testify, how can you promise somebody

(49:57):
like that protection from a gang who's clearly going to
know who she is.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Yeah, it's a great point because, like even I could
think of some cases where like there was anonymity in
the witnessing. She was wearing the robe, she was in
a wooden box, but you could tell who it was
because she was the only one who would have known
about the crime. So I think you probably can't really
promise that they'll be totally safe. But you know, in

(50:22):
that situation you're describing, the person probably does feel some
like civic duty to help take down the gang. But
there's also something personal there, and people feel in need,
I think, to at some level avenge their relatives and stuff.
And I wish I could have been there for some
of those conversations and how they convince them, but I
think it was probably less convincing and more facilitating a

(50:45):
desire that was already there and just creating the conditions
whereby people could fight for justice.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
When does it become clear that this is working? Does
it take months or years? And tell me how many
people are in this area? I should have asked you
this sooneror how is this Mario exactly?

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Population estimate it's a little shaky, but I think it's
like twenty five or thirty thousand, So it's a decent population,
and you know, just like the results, I mean over
the span of like three years. Well, and I should say,
there's first the Puco's gang, which we've talked about, but
I'm sort of giving away a little surprise here in
the book. But there's a second gang, which is a

(51:23):
vigilante gang which sort of rose up to fight the
Puchos but ended up being even more cruel and problematic
and scary. And so that's the second group that this
charity has to deal with and sort of taking on
those two gangs and really taking them down. Happens over
the course of about three or four years, and during

(51:44):
that time, the charity helps get one hundred people arrested,
helps win seventy convictions, and the crime rate declined substantially.
You know, nuevasu Yappa was and never has been a
safe place, but it never has been as bad as
it was then.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Okay, so they're seeing a crime rate drop, I mean,
is there a percentage? What's the estimate? By fifty percent?

Speaker 2 (52:07):
I'm just being a little careful because the data that
they cite is like shows an eighty percent decline in
homicides over that period. The statistics were a little shaky
back then. But but the good news is after they
did the program in new episode Yappa, they expanded it
to like five or six other neighborhoods into Gusagalpa and
San Pedro Sula, which is the other major city in Honduras.

(52:29):
And that time there was a team of researchers who
formally evaluated it, and those results are like really solid,
and they showed declines in the monthly average number of
homicides per month of like fifty percent sixty seven percent,
like huge, huge declines. So the program has proven to
be quite effective.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
And this is fully supported at the time or even
now by the federal government, by Honduras as president.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
No, I mean certainly not the president. This was all
being done very quietly, very secretly. But but you're actually
getting at something really important here, which is the magic
of this trio of private eye, lawyer and psychologists. Wasn't
just that they were good with witnesses. It's also that
they were good with cops and prosecutors, because you know,
you could imagine a situation where like those people would

(53:18):
have felt like these people were encroaching on their turf.
But the private eye, especially who is sort of a
cop personality, was very good at bringing the cops onto
his side. And he would do that just by hanging
out with them, but also by like giving them funding.
I mean there were police units which had no chairs
in their office, so he would buy them chairs. As

(53:40):
I said, gas money was a huge issue. He would say, look,
I'll pay for your gas money if you come to
Neufasuyapa and arrest this guy. Then the prosecutors were obviously
very important too, and they let the charity be very
involved in developing and you know, obviously not arguing in
court the cases, but but in marshaling the witnesses through
the many, many months that these trials would would last.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
Now, you know, so maybe this is too much of
a pie in the sky question, but I'm sure so
much of the gang activity as a result of how
they grew up in poverty and feeling like there was
no other option, you know, the cyclical part of corruption,
and how are you going to work within the system
when the system's not working and you need to work
out of the system. Was there a way to then
be able to turn the tide and say, now that

(54:22):
we're trying to reduce crime, maybe we can help with
the economy or education or any of the big, big
picture issues that we know leads to crime.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
You know, there's a point in the book where they've
done this program, they've had a lot of success with it,
and Curt and Carlos say, look, we can keep expanding this,
but it's kind of a micro scale thing. We can
only do it neighborhood by neighborhood, and we want to
affect Honduras at a national scale. And this happens around
twenty eleven, when the country is the you know, has

(54:53):
the highest homicide rate in the world. There's just been
a coup. It's a very chaotic and bad situation for
the country. And they really transform their charity from this
kind of under the radar, grassroots thing to a very public,
very formalized institution which is trying to change Honduras at
a national scale. And you know, one of the things

(55:16):
they work on is education. And at the time, the
average student was only getting substantially less than they were
supposed to, one hundred days less, and they work on
that and it turns out that twenty five percent of
the teachers on the payroll nationally weren't even real teachers.

(55:36):
They were just sort of political operatives collecting a paycheck.
And they did this series of expos's about the national
education system, and that got all the ghost teachers purged,
It got the education minister fired, and then they deputized
this almost nationwide army of mothers to go to all
schools with a clipboard and keep track of how many

(55:57):
days per year the pupils were there in getting classes,
and in very short order it got to where it
was supposed to be.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
Now, where will this work around the world doesn't need
to be impoverished countries I'm assuming. I mean, where does
Kurt and Carlos and vision that's going everywhere? Yeah, I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
I mean they're focused on Honduras. I mean, there's a
lifetime's worth of work to do there. But I mean definitely,
Like in regards to the criminal justice program we've been
talking about, I think they see that as transportable, and
you know, the issues of crime and impunity and not
trusting the police and witnesses being scared to testify is

(56:38):
a problem in Chicago as well, and I think they
would argue that this model might work there. And you know,
I'm sure there's places in Brazil and Mexico and El
Salvador and other countries as well where where that model
could be transported, especially now that there's an evidence base
to show it works. And I think that would be

(56:58):
a good idea to try that.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
So where are these two guys now and their families?
Are they still in the same barrio they moved around?

Speaker 2 (57:06):
Yeah, so we've only talked a little bit about the
like political efforts that they've done, but that's as dangerous
as the gang efforts and Carlos becomes a public figure
who's regularly in the news, who's meeting with ambassadors and
presidents and ministers, and during that process, his life is threatened.
You know. The big thing that they work on is

(57:26):
purging the police force. So that's something that people have
been wanting to do in Honduras for a very long time.
And Kurt and Carlos gained this amazing, shocking level of
political power and are more or less given the keys
to purge the police force. And that's extremely dangerous, and
you know, through that process, Carlos life is threatened, and

(57:48):
though he really really doesn't want to, he has to
leave nuevasu Yapa, which is a very tragic and sad
thing for him and his family. So he no longer
lives in the neighborhood Kurt does, but they're they're still
down there doing the same.

Speaker 1 (58:01):
Stuff, amazing, and Kurt has to have been threatened. I'm
assuming through all of these years, you know.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
Kurt has always been more behind the scenes. There's been
a few little, tiny, random one off incidents here and there,
but he really hasn't. It's actually been others who've borne
the brunt of it. And I think part of that.
I don't think that's necessarily him like cowering from it.
I think he has this sense that as a gringo,
it's not really appropriate for him to be the outward

(58:29):
facing part of the organization. So you know, in the
New vs. Yapa days, it was the lawyer and the
private eye who were really most putting their lives on
the line. And then you know, there's a in the
second part of the book, which we haven't a chance
to talk about, one of their employees is assassinated, and
that's a different type of work but also very very,

(58:51):
very dangerous. And then in the political side, you know,
once again Kurt doesn't want to be the one in
the news, so it's really Carlos who becomes the face
of the organization.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
I had also wondered if there was a certain amount
of fear of murdering an American citizen in Honduras and
what kind of firestorm that could cause.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
It's funny you should say that, because there's this sense
in Honduras that the gangs like don't touch gringos because
if they do that, they'll be hell to pay. And
some of your listeners might be familiar with the Kiki
Camarina story. He was a Dea agent in Mexico who
was tortured and killed in a terrible way in the eighties,

(59:33):
and one of the people who was accused of orchestrating
that was a Honduran narco trafficker, and the Feds basically
went to Honduras, got him and put him in a
federal prison in Colorado, where he spent his life, and
that has imbued in hunder and criminals, the sense that
you're not supposed to really touch gringos. However, one of

(59:55):
the reasons Calito has become such a famous and notorious
figure in Honduras is because he himself took part in
the noontime killing of a Dea agent in Honduras. And
that really is when his days are numbered. He was
there an accessory to the killing. I don't think they

(01:00:18):
did it because he was a Dea agent. It actually
looks like it was an accident, kind of a botch robbery.
But that's when he becomes this very famous figure in Honduras.
And Lo and behold, the cops know nothing about him,
know nothing about the Pucos, but the private eye working
for Curtin Carlos approaches them the next day and says, look,
I've got all this information. You think his real name

(01:00:40):
is this? No, it's actually this. I've mapped out their
whole neighborhood. This is where he lives. He will be
there tomorrow. This is how you can go in and
sort of corner him. And at that point Chilito is arrested,
and in part because of the charity, the case against
him is successful and he's put into this special sell

(01:01:00):
there's like a tower over it. They compare it almost
to like a Hannibal Lecter type situation because he's monitored
twenty four to seven by this person watching him from
above through a cage, and he ends up spending the
rest of his life in prison.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
Is he still alive. Well.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Part of his legend is in twenty twelve he was
in a prison he had been moved to kind of
a medium security prison called Koma Yagua. It was a
prison with a capacity for three hundred and fifty people,
but there was nine hundred there. Back to the gills,
there were no fire extinguishers, smoke detectors or anything like
that in the building. The guards were outside the gates

(01:01:39):
and a fire sparked and it was the most horrible tragedy.
Three hundred and fifty six people were incinerated. There's a
question was he one of those sort of cremated bodies
there or is he one of the people who got away.
Officially he's dead, but the legend of him continues and
still to this day, people in Neuvcu Yapa will say, no,

(01:02:03):
he's alive, and he's the one who started that fire.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
There's a little l Chapo about him, is what it
sounds like.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
No, his escape artistry is very much part of his legend. Well,
even before that, as I said, people in knevs Yappa,
you'd see him get arrested and then he'd be back.
I mean, he probably escaped from the juvenile prison. I
would guess like four or five times.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
You know, I'm one of the things that I want
to end on. You talk about this book, you talk
about Kurt and his outreach and wanting to help kids
in this barrio, and then he must have just seen
over the years that evolved into you know, gangs, and
I had wondered if there were there was a point
where he was seeing these kids that he knew turning
into predators. Was that the case?

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Yeah, I mean both him and Carlos. I mean, Carlos
is running a school, and so they were very intimately
connected to all of these kids. Even Chilito. Chialito wasn't
a student at Carlos's school because there were only so
many spots, but his mother was a borrowed money from
the micro lene under genesis. The school ran camps in
the summer. Chialito sometimes went to those, So not just Chilito,

(01:03:06):
but a bunch of these kids. Kurt and Carlos knew them,
knew their families, knew their siblings. It was all very intimate.
And even I mentioned that gang member who was arrested
and they beat him up so bad that they broke
his mandible. I mean, first of all, he wasn't really
one of the violent gang members. It seems like it
seems like he was more tangential. But he was very

(01:03:27):
much part of Kurt's church community. He was a student
at Carlos's school, so that they knew him, and even
once he was in prison, I mean, they would visit
him and it was all interconnected.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
Gosh, to see an area of transition like that and
then to try to to be a hand in improving it.
What an incredible story. What are you hoping people learn
from this book?

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
Yeah, I think part of it is just like this
lens into a world which we only hear about in
the back end through the deportations in the border. I
think it's so fully a valuable thing for people to
really get to see a lot of different aspects of it.
But I think there's an element of just like when
we try to take on problems, humanitarian problems, especially like
these are guys who brought a level of creativity and

(01:04:10):
bravery to it which really stands out to me. I
think there's a lot of thinking in sort of the
development world that is repetitive, and I think these guys
really challenge a lot of that. And then I think
on the criminal justice side, I really, as I said before,
I think this book is an homage to witnesses. I
think what Curt and Carlos did there in Neuvasu Yappa

(01:04:32):
was really all revolving around them, and I hope people
come to appreciate that. And I think that's true there
and it's also true here.

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, all about the
Ghost Club, all that is Wicked and American SHERILOK and
don't forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.

(01:05:11):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and

(01:05:32):
Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold
More And if you know of a historical crime that
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