September 4, 2024 • 40 mins
Frank Figliuzzi is a former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the author of "The FBI Way" and "Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.” Frank has a vast level of experience in law enforcement and is dedicated to raising awareness about human trafficking.
Listeners can learn more about at his website and on IG @frank.figliuzzi
In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum, is joined with FBI veteran, Frank Figliuzzi to discuss the grim realities of human trafficking and its intersection with long-haul trucking. Figliuzzi highlights the tactics used by traffickers, the vulnerability of victims, and the disturbing reality of trafficking networks that operate in plain sight. Frank also discusses the importance of awareness, collaboration among law enforcement, and the crucial role truck drivers play in identifying and reporting trafficking activities.
Show Notes:
- (0:00) Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum
- (0:15) Sheryl intoduces guest, Frank Figliuzzi to the listeners
- (2:30) Discussion on the misconceptions about the sex worker trade
- (4:30) The prevalence of trafficking in various industries
- (9:25) “If you've got an intersection of multiple major interstate highways with an active train station and bus station, and you have a hub for interstate trucking and rest stops, you have a trafficking problem guaranteed.”
- (10:00) The importance of recognizing trafficking in local communities
- (14:00) Fact: The number one profession of serial killers is long haul truck drivers
- (17:00) The birth of the Highway Serial Killings Initiative
- (23:00) The role local agancies play on tackling trafficking
- (26:00) The purpose of raising awareness in local communities
- (31:00) Frank on writing Long Haul: Haunting the Highway Serial Killers
- (35:00) Doing predictive analysis of trafficking victims
- (40:05) “Girls lose their lives and their identities when customers start touching them. They are no longer a person. They're a product.”
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you’re loving the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to Itunes and leave a rating and review!
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Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, prac
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Y'all tonight we got the real deal. Now, I know
this is not what he's about. He's not in it
for accolades, and you know, people bragging on him. But
that's exactly what I'm fixing to do because it is
important for all of y'all to know exactly who was
talking to us tonight. We have Frank big Luozy. Now,
(00:31):
let me tell you something. He served twenty five years
in the FBI. He was the Assistant director for counter Intelligence.
He spent most of his time directed all SB and
I across all governments levels. He was the man making
sure everybody was safe. He appears weekly on MSNBC and
(00:56):
NBC News. After the FBI, he headed up security for
a Fortune ten company, not Fortune five hundred, y'all. Fortune ten.
There were two hundred thousand employees in one hundred and
eighty countries. That's a little bit of a job. And
when you're talking about keeping that many people safe in
(01:18):
that many different countries, with different cultures, different rules, different laws,
different ways of policeing, that's a lot of work. He
is the author of the FBI Way Inside the Bureau's
Code of Excellence. Now he's written other books and we're
going to get into those in a minute, but it
is my honor to introduce y'all to Frank Biglouthy.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Cheryl. Thank you for having me. It feels like it's
been a long time coming, but we're finally here.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
We are finally here, and I have been so excited
all week. I just could not wait to get here,
because you know, it's not often that you have got
somebody it knows secrets, keep secrets, knows how to keep
people safe, knows how to work under the radar, and
then is willing to share some of that to keep
(02:10):
people safe. And you know, tonight we're going to talk
about a lot of things, but I'm gonna let you
kind of lead us. You and I have talked offline obviously,
and human trafficking is something that I want to hit
on tonight. It's one of your areas of expertise. And
I think a lot of people don't understand how violence
is used, how false promises are used, how the promise
(02:34):
of romance is used, and manipulation. People just don't get it.
And now with all this controversy about you know, wanting
to call every single person a sex worker, I don't
know how you feel about it, but I think there
needs to be a distinction, and it's not one category.
It's just not.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, I've got some strong feelings on the topic, and
I appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation around this topic.
And you know, let's address the last and most recent
thing you said and the whole sex worker phraseology. Here's
my experience, and that is that it's actually a minority
(03:18):
of the sex for money trade that actually involves voluntary women, men,
and transgender persons and the majority And again this is
my experience where I come from not only twenty five
years in the FBI, but spending over a year of
(03:39):
my life researching this topic, including on the street doing
field interviews of experts and trafficking victims. That's my observation
that we're talking about the majority of that industry is
non voluntary, non consensual, and called trafficking.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Are there people in the sex for money trade that
are individual operators, are voluntary? Oh of course, yeah, of
course they are. But that's not what we're here to
talk about. That's not what my book is about. And
quite frankly, I think we're not spending enough time talking
about as a society talking about the trafficking side because
(04:26):
it's everywhere we live and work and drive.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Amen. So we're going to talk about it tonight. So
what I want to know from you is when you
think about the victims that are forced to work as prostitutes,
forced to be migrant workers, domestic hell factory workers, restaurant y'all,
you've got people that are literally victims of human traffic
(04:52):
and working in restaurant.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah. I can tell you that from personal experience that
Asian restaurant you're going to sometimes a Latin American restaurant,
depending depending on where you may be served, and there
may be people in the kitchen who are literally chained
to the floor at night and thrown into a van
(05:14):
in the morning and driven to work, and that cycle
repeats itself every single day. That is often the result
of human smuggling and paying off your debt, which you
may or may not ever pay off. And so I
think we need to look holistically at all the things
you just rattled off, whether it's human smuggling and trafficking,
(05:36):
drug trafficking, indentured servitude in the restaurant industry. What we're
really talking about is trafficking and to look at that
holistically and go, oh, okay, So trafficking is trafficking, So
similar trade routes are used, and drug cartels don't care
(05:56):
if they're smuggling humans in the morning and drugs in
the evening. It's all trafficking. So I think it helps
from a mindset perspective to understand that we're talking about
the same thing. And yes, of course it helps to
uniquely and specifically understand the nuances of different kinds of traffic.
(06:17):
And my new book is about human trafficking and trucking.
That's something we'll get into, I'm sure. But what I
focused on in my FBI career was only a brief
glimpse on my radar screen of things that I ended
up working or supervising. And I'm specifically talking about two
(06:42):
times in my twenty five year career. One time I
was a young supervisor in the San Francisco Field office
on one of the very first squads in the history
of the FBI to be dedicated to crimes against children.
That was an eye opener for me. Received training there,
(07:03):
but boy, the best training you get is working and
supervising those cases very very young children. And I can
tell you that there was so much child pornography, and
now we use the term for your listeners who may
know this already, So forgive me. The term child porn,
(07:24):
just like the term sex worker is not something that
I particularly like because I think it legitimizes traffic victims.
We don't like the term child porn anymore because sadly,
pornography has become mainstreamed in our society through platforms like
porn Hub and others, and so when people hear porn,
(07:47):
they go, oh, yeah, yeah, okay, porn. So what we
say instead of child porn is child sexual Abuse Material CSAM.
Sometimes you'll hear people say child sexual assault material, but
at CSAM, and that is a far more realistic depiction
(08:08):
of what's happening. The kids are being assaulted and abused. So,
you know, we had so much of it, Cheryl in
northern California, which was my responsibility, We went all the
way up to the Oregon border, all the way down
through Monterey, California to the south. We had so much
of it that the US Attorney's Office said, look, you're
only going to work clearly pre pubescent children in the
(08:34):
images and the missing and abducted and killed the children.
We were working, and you're only going to work distribution
and production. So possession went to the police department and
the District Attorney's office. That's how much we had, and
we couldn't handle all of it. Then the second time
in my career where I really got into the issue
(08:57):
of trafficking was I became the special Agent in charge
in Northern Ohio. So I had the Cleveland Field Office
in all of northern Ohio, including a satellite office, a
resident agency in Toledo, Ohio. Ware of all things, Toledo
was recognized as a hub for nationwide trafficking and particularly
(09:20):
of underage victims. Why Toledo What I learned, and this
is true everywhere you live. If you've got an intersection
of multiple major interstate highways with an active train station
and bus station, and you have a hub for interstate
(09:40):
trucking and rest stops, you have a trafficking problem guaranteed.
And I can tell you that we saw and we're
able to take down large trafficking organizations based in Toledo
that were trafficking. They're victims across the country to include
traffic picking them into special events like the Super Bowl,
(10:04):
the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, large college
fraternity alumni functions right out of Toledo on my own.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Let me just tell everybody just one statistic that blew
my mind. In twenty twenty two, the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children had a tip line that received
eighty eight million reports of child sexual abuse. Eighty eight million.
(10:41):
I mean, that's a number. I can't even comprehend answering
that many calls for help.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It's everywhere. And I have to tell you when I
had that squad, and again it was an early squad
for the FBI. The only other one at the time
was in Dallas, Texas. I had young children at the time,
and it was it was traumatic for me to see
what was happening and realize, wait a minute, I had
(11:09):
two young children, and it got to the point where
I take them to the park and I was able
to spot the pedophile on the edge of the park yep,
you know. And then we had a task force we
were a part of there in northern California whose job
it was to follow recently paroled or probationary inmates who
(11:33):
had a you know, we're registered sex offenders against children
follow them around, and I can tell you it was
not hard at all and didn't take long to violate
their parole or probation. So if they're if the judge
said you can't go within certain feet of a school
or a playground, or have a computer your possession, we
could violate them in forty eight hours.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Type in your address on the sex offender registry and
wats those little dots just pop up. And keep in mind,
those are only the ones that have been convicted at
a report where they live.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
That's true. The other thing we'd find in that task
force experience was when you finally did violate them and
the parole officer would put them in handcuffs, you'd look
at the odometer on their car and it would have
extraordinarily high mileage for that year of car, meaning they
(12:31):
spent their waking hours driving around looking for victims.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
You know, sir, I say all the time, there ain't
no such thing as a part time pedophile. It's what
they do, full time, hunting talking to children, trying to
figure out what job can I get to be near them?
Can I be a malsanna? Can I work at a
water park? Can I be somewhere in a kindergarten classroom.
Can I be a middle school football coach? They will
(13:01):
seek out jobs that put them in a position where
the victims literally come to them.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, jobs and proximity. The other thing that's amazing here
is this straddles all socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Doctors, lawyers,
you name the profession, and we've arrested people in that profession,
(13:30):
or pedophilia, assault on children. The other thing is, and
this sounds you know, this may sound strange, but this
can be extremely dangerous work for FBI and law enforcement.
And I'll tell you why. And it's sadly it hasn't
really become clear to the public or to many law
(13:52):
enforcement agencies, but it has at the FBI because we've
actually had agents killed during service of arrest or search
warrants for child porn. Why is that Because when you're
talking particularly about a professional, a doctor, lawyer, some a minister,
someone with upstanding status in the community, and you're knocking
(14:15):
on that door and he knows it's over. But it's
not just over for him legally, it's over for him
in terms of his career, his status, his whole life
is crashing down on him. And they either. Sadly, we
actually had a form in the FBI. This applied to
(14:37):
all programs and violations, but we had a form to
fill out for suicide by the subject you were investigating.
They would either kill themselves or they would kill the agents. Sadly,
we lost two agents just about four years ago in
Miami who are simply trying to gain entry to a
(15:00):
subjects home.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
I remember that that was a horrible day. And you
know another thing that want to point out, speaking of
people that gravitate towards certain jobs, some of these folks
are also serial killers. And the number one job of
a serial killer is a truck driver.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
A lot of people don't know that that's a stat
you just gave out that shocks people. But there's no
other profession even close by far. The number one profession
of serial killers is long haul truck driver.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
And let me brag all the FBI minute. In twenty nineteen,
I was able to take the FBI's h SK and
BAU training ALTHEA Duncan was the unit chiefs there, I
think it was Unit four, and they came to Atlanta
and did this big conference. And the thing that I
took away more than anything is. Every single facilitator from
(15:56):
the FBI ended by saying anything I can do, here's
my name and number. If you need help on a case,
call me. And that was one of the things that
I appreciated more than anything, because, especially with my police department,
I love being able to get somebody on the phone
that is smarter than me, that's got more experience than me,
(16:18):
and that can help me put a case together better.
And that's what y'all are all about, if people will
call you. So I just wanted to say that because
I know you were instrumental in the Highway serial killer
and how you combatd that truck driving issue.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Well, first, I'm always thrilled to hear that an FBI
program was presented well to the law enforcement community. My
intersection with the HSK. By the way, for those wondering, hey,
what's that HSK thing, that's the Highway Serial Killings initiative
at the FBI started in about two thousand and four
by the FBI in response to a need at the
(16:59):
state level, particularly Oklahoma. That and we'll tell I'll tell
you that story briefly, but you know, Cheryl mentions that
the FBI is there to help with the HSK initiative. Yeah,
that's the whole point of this database and the crime
analysts based at Quantico, Virginia, who aren't necessarily smarter or
(17:23):
more proficient, but rather they got the thirty thousand foot
view of things. So what does that mean. It means
that Back in two thousand and three, a crime analyst
with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation named Terry Turner
started to notice that young ladies were turning up dead
(17:45):
around the country and they were all from Oklahoma. They
had another thing in common, which was they had a
history of traffic, being a trafficking victim sex for money.
So she kept telling her leadership, Hey we boss, we've
got two two bodies from Oklahoma. Hey we've got three,
We've got four. This all happened in just a few
(18:07):
months toward the fall and winter of two thousand and
three and into two thousand and four. So it got
to the point where ten bodies were found, all from Oklahoma,
around the country, and her leadership finally appeased. Terran said, Okay, okay,
we know you want to have a meeting. Send out
a teletype to homicide detectives everywhere and ask them if
(18:28):
they've got similar cases. Go ahead, you can do that.
Similar cases meaning a female body found by the side
of an interstate highway might be involved in trafficking and
it was last seen alive at or around a truck
stop or interstate highway. Well, a lot of detectives responded,
(18:49):
a lot, and she thought, you know, we'll have a
handful of people if I get a meeting together here,
we'll serve coffee and donuts. And well, a crowd showed up.
And then Terry Turner went to the FBI field office
there in Oklahoma and said, you got to come. You've
got to send somebody from behavioral analysis, and they did.
(19:10):
And once the FBI saw the facts of these cases,
they said, you do have serial killers poral and we're in.
We're going to help. And that was the birth of
the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, a database dedicated entirely to
female victims unsolved homicides. And you might ask, how many
(19:31):
homicides are there that the FBI knows Of eight hundred
fifty dead women alongside our nations highways in just the
past few decades, two hundred or more are considered unsolved
and active. And when I asked the FBI. How many
(19:52):
suspects are you looking at? They said four hundred suspects.
That's in the long haul trucking community. And I gave
the fdog and I was researching my book Long Haul.
I gave the FBI every chance to kind of be
politically correct. I said, you're not saying that that all
of these are long hauled truckers, are you, And they said, no, Frank,
(20:16):
we are saying that.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
My lord. But again, they're going to gravitate towards jobs
that give them what they need to pull off these crimes.
What better job than being a truck driver. You pick
somebody up that's a runaway from a gas station or
a truck stop. You drive them nine hundred miles. They
think they're just getting a ride. You kill them, drive
(20:39):
them another two hundred miles and dump them. And you're
just moving. You are a moving crime scene. Nobody is
ever going to be the wiser. And you pull over,
toss them out, and keep going.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Exactly right. It's an eighteen wheel crime scene, and the
truckers are exploiting the seam. In law enforcement jurisdictions, as
you said, they'll grab a victim in one police jurisdiction,
rape end or murder her in a second jurisdiction, and
dump the remains in a third jurisdiction. That makes for
an almost impossible challenge for investigators, often RURALD County sheriff's
(21:19):
deputies who are told, hey, there's a body near the highway,
no ide you know, they don't know who it is,
they don't know how you know. The coroner might say,
we think she was there for six months, six months,
six weeks, six days. How long do I go back?
How do I pull all the receipts from gas stations,
(21:39):
from way stations, how about fuel receipts at truck stops?
How many trucking companies are there that I've got to
go pull data from. That's where the FBI comes in
and says, let us help you figure this out.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
And sir, that's that they got victim. That's a fifteen
year old run away, never been fingerprinted, has no idea
on them, and maybe they're already being traffic so they
took their idea. What she's thrown in a river for
two weeks, You're not going to know who she is ever.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
No, And there's a further complication Cheryl, which makes it
even harder to solve because in so many of these cases,
the family members, as a form of survival, it is
a survival mechanism, have distanced themselves from their loved one,
meaning they can only take so much. So many phone
(22:34):
calls from the police, Hey, your daughter's in jail, come
bail her out. So many overdoses, so many fights about
stolen money from mom's purse. They start to distance themselves
so they don't even know that their loved one is missing,
let alone murdered. So that means you don't have any
(22:55):
loved one at the police department pounding their fists on
the desk. What have you done to find my daughter?
What have you done to solve this murder? You know,
and we all know. Sadly, the squeaky wheel gets the grease,
and as you go week after week and have no leads,
no way of figuring this out, the slowly that case
(23:17):
moves to the bottom of the pile. That's all part
of the problem here.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
How important is it that local agencies contact you? I
mean not just for resources, but for knowledge, for even
a mini task.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
For as you well know because you've been through this training,
the FBI is in the sales and marketing business with
regard to this initiative. They know that even the majority
of police and sheriff departments have never heard of the
Highway Serial Killings initiative and couldn't couldn't find the database
if they were paid to the database for HSKI sits
(23:54):
within YCAP which many police farms are aware of a
violent criminal apprehension program. But it's not by gap, it's
inside by gaps. You got to look for it. You
got to know about it to look for it. And
then what I keep hearing from law enforcement agencies is, look,
we heard about it, but now they're asking us to
fill out this questionnaire about our unsolved crime on the
(24:16):
alongside the highway and it's two hundred questions and you're
out of your mind if you think this police department
even has a detective, let alone a crime analyst. Know,
we do road patrol in a rural county. How are
we supposed to do this? But that's a dilemma. And
the FBI comes in and says, look, you know, we
(24:39):
can help you. There's grant money available from DJ if
you've got multiple murders that are linked, we may be
able to come sit alongside you and help you get
that into the database. But you've got to do it.
It's garbage in, garbage out. We can't help you if
we don't know how to help you or why so
people say, wow, what are the two hundred questions? This
(25:00):
gets into victimology, gets into questions like, tell me about
your crime scene, Tell me about your victim. What color
was her hair, her eyes? How was she dressed? Was
she nude? Was she partially nude? Which part was she?
Was she mutilated before death? If so, how? What was
the means of death? Was it strangulation? Was it stabbing?
(25:22):
Was it shooting? Was she strangled with an item of
her own clothing? Which item? Can you give us a
photo of the not used to gag her or strangle her?
When you're done with all those questions, you know, was
she found in or near water? Was she face down?
Her face up? Was she sexually violated or just killed?
You get those in the system, and now the experience
(25:45):
of all those analysts in that unit back at Quanticico
and the algorithms in the database start doing their magic,
and they could say, and they have said, we've seen
this exact scene crime scene three years ago, way across
the country, they start connecting the dots.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
So I'm going to say it again in case any
junior officer, rookie detective is listening. If you heard what
he said, if you have highways that intersect, and I'll
tell you about my own department. We have Highway seventy
five on one end and Highway eighty five on the other,
and what splits our town wide open or railroad tracks
(26:29):
and I can hit a golf ball practically to the
tower of the world's busy as airport. We have trafficking,
and if we're not making a rest, we're flat missing it.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
You always have some hopes when you write a book
like this and people ask me, what do you hope
to accomplish here? So first, of course, on a general level,
it's awareness. But one of the great things that could
happen would be for law enforcement personnel to read this
and say, you know what, I haven't entered my case
to the HSKI, and I need to do it. Another
(27:03):
thing that could happen is victim families who are possibly
now aware that their loved one was murdered, should be
going to their police department and saying, have you entered
this case into the FBI's HSK database. That would be
a wonderful thing. There's lots of things. I had a
you know, I had an interview about this book. They
(27:25):
were the hosts of the podcasts, did some a prison
ministry in their county, and they said, Frank, you know,
we're we're in the jails and prisons every day and
talking to women who are trafficked. And one of the
things that stood out to them was the data that
(27:46):
said between sixty and eighty percent of all female inmates
have been trafficked sometime in their life. That just floored
them to the point of almost disbelief. So they started
doing some research in their own jails and they said,
you know what, you're right, it's like eighty percent. And
(28:07):
then they came back and said, Frank, we also read
for the first time in your book that a lot
of recruitment for trafficking. Sex trafficking happens inside a jail cell,
where one inmate who's probably in for prostitution, recruits another
(28:31):
inmate by saying, hey, do you have a place to
go when you get out? If you don't, come stay
with me and my boyfriend will take care of you.
I'll put some money on your jail account for the phone.
You call us. I know you're just several weeks away
from getting out. We'll take care of it. Come pick
you up. That floored them, so they started asking the
(28:51):
female inmates that they work with, have you ever heard
of this? And the answer was, oh, yeah, it's going
on right now. You know, we can tell you right
now these women have been recruited in the GEIL and
so you know that's a good thing. If that happens
more and more the awareness, I'll be very happy.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Absolutely. But again, just you being here and the officers
that listen to this podcast need to go back and
tell everybody. Put it in your group chats, where you're
on those apps, talking to other detectives. Let them know
this is vital. And I can tell you there's a
whole lot of people that think by CAP is too
(29:30):
complicated and it is just double work and triple work. It
is so worth it. It is the most important thing
you can do. The AHSKI is vital to saving lives.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
It is. There's a track record there because I you know,
I asked the FBI some hard questions, Hey is this working?
Have you you have success stories? And they do. Even
just connecting killings years apart could actually solve the case.
It's one thing to say, hey, we we saw this
exact same crime scene. It looks like the same person,
(30:04):
you know, ten years ago. Okay, that's very nice. But
here's what departments are doing with that information. They are
grabbing DNA that from one case and they're going, okay,
you know what, We're going to run this. We're going
to run this DNA again and sure enough, you know
or it matches that ten year old case, and now
you've got your killer. You start doing your genealogical your
(30:28):
genetic DNA, you start finding family members. This really happens
in real life. It's happened quite recently. It does work.
But again, garbage in, garbage out. So I'm sure people
were wondering at the start of our conversation show, how
is it, how do we go from trafficking to trucking. Well,
this is it. This is the connection, which is that
(30:48):
the most vulnerable victims out there for serial killer truckers
are sex trafficked victims. Why it's their job to get
as close as you could possibly get to someone intimately,
to someone who could absolutely end their life and it's
happening by the hundreds. So that was my research for
(31:12):
long Haul Hunting the Highway serial Killers. The book became
so popular it came out at the end of very
end of May. In the first three weeks the book
was out, HarperCollins, my publisher, had to reprint it three times.
It's out there generating a lot of interest. What did
I do for research? One of the things I did
(31:32):
was I rode over two thousand miles in a big
rig with a cooperative trucker just to learn the subculture
of trucking. I wanted, you know, I wanted this book
to be a few things. One. I didn't want to
write just a gory, bloody book about murderers. I didn't
want to elevate serial killers. I didn't. I didn't want
(31:54):
them to be, you know, some kind of cult hero.
I certainly addressed them. So if you're a true crime affectionado,
yes this book is for you. Yet I also wanted
to write a study of three subcultures that operate right
under our noses. The first one, of course, is long
hauled trucking. What is everybody's life like the long haul trucker.
(32:16):
If you've ever wondered what goes on inside that bigre
what's their life like, do they have kids, when do
they see their family, how much do they make, where
do they eat, where do they go to the bathroom.
I did that and I wrote about it, And so
this book's for you sex victims. If you're thinking, ad,
this doesn't happen in my neighborhood, I don't have that
in my town. No one I know, in my family,
(32:38):
in my network would ever fall for that trap of trafficking.
Those people are from the other side of the tracks. Well,
I'm here to tell you my eyes were opened and
I talked to women who have been trafficked. One was
a preacher's daughter. The commonalities are what really got to me.
(33:01):
Just like there's commonalities with serial killer truckers in their backgrounds,
so there are with traffic victims. And the top experts
in the country that I interviewed for the book, they
told me, Frank, when you're interviewing these victims, you better
look for the following commonalities because you're gonna see them.
And sure enough, as I'm talking to these women, I'm
checking the boxes off in my head. There's that early
(33:23):
childhood trauma off in the form of unwanted sexual touching
or rape molestation. There's that early exposure to marijuana, then
the bad boyfriend, then the hard drugs. There's trauma that
stacks up in their household, maybe the death of a parent,
a sibling, a suicide on, a loss of jobs, domestic
(33:44):
violence with the parents. All of the stacks up and
makes a perfect storm. Regardless of where you come from,
and you end up in this trap and you just
spiral downward until you either die or climb it.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Nobody is safe, nobody is insulated. It can literally happen anywhere.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You know. The third subculture, of course, I don't think
I got to that. Where it was to study the
lives of crime analysts, how they work in this particular initiative,
who they are, and that's a compelling story as well.
But part of my field work not only was riding
in a big rig for over two thousand miles, not
(34:32):
only talking to the top experts in the country, not
only talking to the sex traffic victims who have survived
violent encounters with truckers violent, but also I visited a
place in Phoenix, Arizona called Starfish Place. And this place
is run jointly by the City of Phoenix and Arizona
(34:53):
State University Department of Social Work, and a woman named
doctor Dominique Rowe Sepuit. She's in the book. This place
just amazed me. This is a residential campus for women
escaping trafficking who themselves have young children to care for.
And I was very moved by what goes on there,
(35:17):
the life training, the coaching, the kids running around playing.
I couldn't be more impressed, And so I wanted to
end my book Long Haul within a positive note, like, look,
it's not all doom and gloom. There's hope here. There
are resource centers Toledo, the same thing doctor Celia Williamson
(35:38):
does amazing street level work. These aren't just academic PhDs
at universities. They're at the clinical level. They're on the street.
The research they do is astounding. A particularly more recently,
doctor Sepowitz at Arizona State Research that it was so
(35:59):
compelling that the US Department of Defense showed up at
her door and said, do you realize you're doing predictive
analysis of who's going to become a trafficking victim? And
we want in on this, We want to figure this out.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Wow, there's another thing about your boat that I want
to point out that I thought was just stellar of you.
And you make such a point of making sure people
understand that truckers are the backbone of our country. They
bring us food, they bring us car parts, they bring
us clothes, they bring us air conditioning units. We've got
(36:34):
to have them. So you didn't just you know, point
out that there's this nefarious group. You also said, Hey,
there's some really you know, decent, salt of the earth
people doing this job. And I appreciate that too.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that, Cheryl. As we
as we you know, run out of time here, we
would be remiss if we didn't mention that we're only
talking about a tiny fraction of truckers who killed, and
the vast majority are actively contributing to our economy in
a huge way. I mean, last year alone, the trucking
(37:11):
industry earned over eight hundred and seventy billion dollars in
gross freight revenue. Grocery stores would run out of groceries
in three days without truckers. I partially dedicated my book.
You look at the dedication page of my book, and
I partially dedicate the book to the stalwart American trucker.
My experience on the road, I was impressed. I can
(37:32):
tell you I would not want to do that job.
It's hard. I rode flatbed, which meant we were tarping
and chaining and strapping our load. And you want to
talk about economic impact. Every day we were part of
the economy. Our first load that we picked up with
me writing was from a gypsum factory in Illinois that
(37:56):
made drywall for the housing industry. Another time we picked
up and deliver the lumber from the Timber Country and
the Upper Peninsula. I mean aluminum heavy aluminum rods that
we delivered to a DoD ammunition factory that was going
to turn it into AMMO for the military. I mean
(38:16):
it was astounding.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
And you know, my husband works for Home Depot and
during nine to eleven, their CEO said, turn every truck
around and send them to New York City. I don't
care what's on it, give them everything.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Well, they're a tremendous asset. And I'll leave you with
this idea, which is, not only are the vast majority
of truckers an essential part of our economy, but they
are also the eyes and ears and the anti trafficking movement.
So who better to see and report signs of trafficking
(38:55):
then the guys and gals who are out there on
the road every day. So there are private organizations ones
called Truckers Against Trafficking. They know go by their acronym TAT.
They do great work training long haul truckers. Every year.
They give out awards every year to hero truckers who
have reported and rescued someone from trafficking. You may even
(39:18):
pass the truck on the highway that says TAT Truckers
Against Trafficking. They do great work, so you know they
are part of the solution. Of course.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Well, Frank big Losy, I cannot tell you what an
honor it was to talk to you. I appreciate all
the information, and honey, I didn't get to everything. I'm
just going to have to have you back.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Well, I'd be happy to do it. If people want
to check out the book, it's Long Haul Hunting the
Highway Serial Killers. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere.
And if you want to know more about what I'm
up to, you go to my website Frankfiglouzy dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
I'm going to end zones Heaven the way that I
always do with a quote. Girls lose their lives and
their identities when customers start touching them. They are no
longer a person. They're a product. I'm Cheryl McCollum and
this is own seven
Y'all tonight we got the real deal. Now, I know
this is not what he's about. He's not in it
for accolades, and you know, people bragging on him. But
that's exactly what I'm fixing to do because it is
important for all of y'all to know exactly who was
talking to us tonight. We have Frank big Luozy. Now,
(00:31):
let me tell you something. He served twenty five years
in the FBI. He was the Assistant director for counter Intelligence.
He spent most of his time directed all SB and
I across all governments levels. He was the man making
sure everybody was safe. He appears weekly on MSNBC and
(00:56):
NBC News. After the FBI, he headed up security for
a Fortune ten company, not Fortune five hundred, y'all. Fortune ten.
There were two hundred thousand employees in one hundred and
eighty countries. That's a little bit of a job. And
when you're talking about keeping that many people safe in
(01:18):
that many different countries, with different cultures, different rules, different laws,
different ways of policeing, that's a lot of work. He
is the author of the FBI Way Inside the Bureau's
Code of Excellence. Now he's written other books and we're
going to get into those in a minute, but it
is my honor to introduce y'all to Frank Biglouthy.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Cheryl. Thank you for having me. It feels like it's
been a long time coming, but we're finally here.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
We are finally here, and I have been so excited
all week. I just could not wait to get here,
because you know, it's not often that you have got
somebody it knows secrets, keep secrets, knows how to keep
people safe, knows how to work under the radar, and
then is willing to share some of that to keep
(02:10):
people safe. And you know, tonight we're going to talk
about a lot of things, but I'm gonna let you
kind of lead us. You and I have talked offline obviously,
and human trafficking is something that I want to hit
on tonight. It's one of your areas of expertise. And
I think a lot of people don't understand how violence
is used, how false promises are used, how the promise
(02:34):
of romance is used, and manipulation. People just don't get it.
And now with all this controversy about you know, wanting
to call every single person a sex worker, I don't
know how you feel about it, but I think there
needs to be a distinction, and it's not one category.
It's just not.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, I've got some strong feelings on the topic, and
I appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation around this topic.
And you know, let's address the last and most recent
thing you said and the whole sex worker phraseology. Here's
my experience, and that is that it's actually a minority
(03:18):
of the sex for money trade that actually involves voluntary women, men,
and transgender persons and the majority And again this is
my experience where I come from not only twenty five
years in the FBI, but spending over a year of
(03:39):
my life researching this topic, including on the street doing
field interviews of experts and trafficking victims. That's my observation
that we're talking about the majority of that industry is
non voluntary, non consensual, and called trafficking.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Are there people in the sex for money trade that
are individual operators, are voluntary? Oh of course, yeah, of
course they are. But that's not what we're here to
talk about. That's not what my book is about. And
quite frankly, I think we're not spending enough time talking
about as a society talking about the trafficking side because
(04:26):
it's everywhere we live and work and drive.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Amen. So we're going to talk about it tonight. So
what I want to know from you is when you
think about the victims that are forced to work as prostitutes,
forced to be migrant workers, domestic hell factory workers, restaurant y'all,
you've got people that are literally victims of human traffic
(04:52):
and working in restaurant.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah. I can tell you that from personal experience that
Asian restaurant you're going to sometimes a Latin American restaurant,
depending depending on where you may be served, and there
may be people in the kitchen who are literally chained
to the floor at night and thrown into a van
(05:14):
in the morning and driven to work, and that cycle
repeats itself every single day. That is often the result
of human smuggling and paying off your debt, which you
may or may not ever pay off. And so I
think we need to look holistically at all the things
you just rattled off, whether it's human smuggling and trafficking,
(05:36):
drug trafficking, indentured servitude in the restaurant industry. What we're
really talking about is trafficking and to look at that
holistically and go, oh, okay, So trafficking is trafficking, So
similar trade routes are used, and drug cartels don't care
(05:56):
if they're smuggling humans in the morning and drugs in
the evening. It's all trafficking. So I think it helps
from a mindset perspective to understand that we're talking about
the same thing. And yes, of course it helps to
uniquely and specifically understand the nuances of different kinds of traffic.
(06:17):
And my new book is about human trafficking and trucking.
That's something we'll get into, I'm sure. But what I
focused on in my FBI career was only a brief
glimpse on my radar screen of things that I ended
up working or supervising. And I'm specifically talking about two
(06:42):
times in my twenty five year career. One time I
was a young supervisor in the San Francisco Field office
on one of the very first squads in the history
of the FBI to be dedicated to crimes against children.
That was an eye opener for me. Received training there,
(07:03):
but boy, the best training you get is working and
supervising those cases very very young children. And I can
tell you that there was so much child pornography, and
now we use the term for your listeners who may
know this already, So forgive me. The term child porn,
(07:24):
just like the term sex worker is not something that
I particularly like because I think it legitimizes traffic victims.
We don't like the term child porn anymore because sadly,
pornography has become mainstreamed in our society through platforms like
porn Hub and others, and so when people hear porn,
(07:47):
they go, oh, yeah, yeah, okay, porn. So what we
say instead of child porn is child sexual Abuse Material CSAM.
Sometimes you'll hear people say child sexual assault material, but
at CSAM, and that is a far more realistic depiction
(08:08):
of what's happening. The kids are being assaulted and abused. So,
you know, we had so much of it, Cheryl in
northern California, which was my responsibility, We went all the
way up to the Oregon border, all the way down
through Monterey, California to the south. We had so much
of it that the US Attorney's Office said, look, you're
only going to work clearly pre pubescent children in the
(08:34):
images and the missing and abducted and killed the children.
We were working, and you're only going to work distribution
and production. So possession went to the police department and
the District Attorney's office. That's how much we had, and
we couldn't handle all of it. Then the second time
in my career where I really got into the issue
(08:57):
of trafficking was I became the special Agent in charge
in Northern Ohio. So I had the Cleveland Field Office
in all of northern Ohio, including a satellite office, a
resident agency in Toledo, Ohio. Ware of all things, Toledo
was recognized as a hub for nationwide trafficking and particularly
(09:20):
of underage victims. Why Toledo What I learned, and this
is true everywhere you live. If you've got an intersection
of multiple major interstate highways with an active train station
and bus station, and you have a hub for interstate
(09:40):
trucking and rest stops, you have a trafficking problem guaranteed.
And I can tell you that we saw and we're
able to take down large trafficking organizations based in Toledo
that were trafficking. They're victims across the country to include
traffic picking them into special events like the Super Bowl,
(10:04):
the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, large college
fraternity alumni functions right out of Toledo on my own.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Let me just tell everybody just one statistic that blew
my mind. In twenty twenty two, the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children had a tip line that received
eighty eight million reports of child sexual abuse. Eighty eight million.
(10:41):
I mean, that's a number. I can't even comprehend answering
that many calls for help.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It's everywhere. And I have to tell you when I
had that squad, and again it was an early squad
for the FBI. The only other one at the time
was in Dallas, Texas. I had young children at the time,
and it was it was traumatic for me to see
what was happening and realize, wait a minute, I had
(11:09):
two young children, and it got to the point where
I take them to the park and I was able
to spot the pedophile on the edge of the park yep,
you know. And then we had a task force we
were a part of there in northern California whose job
it was to follow recently paroled or probationary inmates who
(11:33):
had a you know, we're registered sex offenders against children
follow them around, and I can tell you it was
not hard at all and didn't take long to violate
their parole or probation. So if they're if the judge
said you can't go within certain feet of a school
or a playground, or have a computer your possession, we
could violate them in forty eight hours.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Type in your address on the sex offender registry and
wats those little dots just pop up. And keep in mind,
those are only the ones that have been convicted at
a report where they live.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
That's true. The other thing we'd find in that task
force experience was when you finally did violate them and
the parole officer would put them in handcuffs, you'd look
at the odometer on their car and it would have
extraordinarily high mileage for that year of car, meaning they
(12:31):
spent their waking hours driving around looking for victims.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
You know, sir, I say all the time, there ain't
no such thing as a part time pedophile. It's what
they do, full time, hunting talking to children, trying to
figure out what job can I get to be near them?
Can I be a malsanna? Can I work at a
water park? Can I be somewhere in a kindergarten classroom.
Can I be a middle school football coach? They will
(13:01):
seek out jobs that put them in a position where
the victims literally come to them.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, jobs and proximity. The other thing that's amazing here
is this straddles all socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Doctors, lawyers,
you name the profession, and we've arrested people in that profession,
(13:30):
or pedophilia, assault on children. The other thing is, and
this sounds you know, this may sound strange, but this
can be extremely dangerous work for FBI and law enforcement.
And I'll tell you why. And it's sadly it hasn't
really become clear to the public or to many law
(13:52):
enforcement agencies, but it has at the FBI because we've
actually had agents killed during service of arrest or search
warrants for child porn. Why is that Because when you're
talking particularly about a professional, a doctor, lawyer, some a minister,
someone with upstanding status in the community, and you're knocking
(14:15):
on that door and he knows it's over. But it's
not just over for him legally, it's over for him
in terms of his career, his status, his whole life
is crashing down on him. And they either. Sadly, we
actually had a form in the FBI. This applied to
(14:37):
all programs and violations, but we had a form to
fill out for suicide by the subject you were investigating.
They would either kill themselves or they would kill the agents. Sadly,
we lost two agents just about four years ago in
Miami who are simply trying to gain entry to a
(15:00):
subjects home.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
I remember that that was a horrible day. And you
know another thing that want to point out, speaking of
people that gravitate towards certain jobs, some of these folks
are also serial killers. And the number one job of
a serial killer is a truck driver.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
A lot of people don't know that that's a stat
you just gave out that shocks people. But there's no
other profession even close by far. The number one profession
of serial killers is long haul truck driver.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
And let me brag all the FBI minute. In twenty nineteen,
I was able to take the FBI's h SK and
BAU training ALTHEA Duncan was the unit chiefs there, I
think it was Unit four, and they came to Atlanta
and did this big conference. And the thing that I
took away more than anything is. Every single facilitator from
(15:56):
the FBI ended by saying anything I can do, here's
my name and number. If you need help on a case,
call me. And that was one of the things that
I appreciated more than anything, because, especially with my police department,
I love being able to get somebody on the phone
that is smarter than me, that's got more experience than me,
(16:18):
and that can help me put a case together better.
And that's what y'all are all about, if people will
call you. So I just wanted to say that because
I know you were instrumental in the Highway serial killer
and how you combatd that truck driving issue.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Well, first, I'm always thrilled to hear that an FBI
program was presented well to the law enforcement community. My
intersection with the HSK. By the way, for those wondering, hey,
what's that HSK thing, that's the Highway Serial Killings initiative
at the FBI started in about two thousand and four
by the FBI in response to a need at the
(16:59):
state level, particularly Oklahoma. That and we'll tell I'll tell
you that story briefly, but you know, Cheryl mentions that
the FBI is there to help with the HSK initiative. Yeah,
that's the whole point of this database and the crime
analysts based at Quantico, Virginia, who aren't necessarily smarter or
(17:23):
more proficient, but rather they got the thirty thousand foot
view of things. So what does that mean. It means
that Back in two thousand and three, a crime analyst
with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation named Terry Turner
started to notice that young ladies were turning up dead
(17:45):
around the country and they were all from Oklahoma. They
had another thing in common, which was they had a
history of traffic, being a trafficking victim sex for money.
So she kept telling her leadership, Hey we boss, we've
got two two bodies from Oklahoma. Hey we've got three,
We've got four. This all happened in just a few
(18:07):
months toward the fall and winter of two thousand and
three and into two thousand and four. So it got
to the point where ten bodies were found, all from Oklahoma,
around the country, and her leadership finally appeased. Terran said, Okay, okay,
we know you want to have a meeting. Send out
a teletype to homicide detectives everywhere and ask them if
(18:28):
they've got similar cases. Go ahead, you can do that.
Similar cases meaning a female body found by the side
of an interstate highway might be involved in trafficking and
it was last seen alive at or around a truck
stop or interstate highway. Well, a lot of detectives responded,
(18:49):
a lot, and she thought, you know, we'll have a
handful of people if I get a meeting together here,
we'll serve coffee and donuts. And well, a crowd showed up.
And then Terry Turner went to the FBI field office
there in Oklahoma and said, you got to come. You've
got to send somebody from behavioral analysis, and they did.
(19:10):
And once the FBI saw the facts of these cases,
they said, you do have serial killers poral and we're in.
We're going to help. And that was the birth of
the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, a database dedicated entirely to
female victims unsolved homicides. And you might ask, how many
(19:31):
homicides are there that the FBI knows Of eight hundred
fifty dead women alongside our nations highways in just the
past few decades, two hundred or more are considered unsolved
and active. And when I asked the FBI. How many
(19:52):
suspects are you looking at? They said four hundred suspects.
That's in the long haul trucking community. And I gave
the fdog and I was researching my book Long Haul.
I gave the FBI every chance to kind of be
politically correct. I said, you're not saying that that all
of these are long hauled truckers, are you, And they said, no, Frank,
(20:16):
we are saying that.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
My lord. But again, they're going to gravitate towards jobs
that give them what they need to pull off these crimes.
What better job than being a truck driver. You pick
somebody up that's a runaway from a gas station or
a truck stop. You drive them nine hundred miles. They
think they're just getting a ride. You kill them, drive
(20:39):
them another two hundred miles and dump them. And you're
just moving. You are a moving crime scene. Nobody is
ever going to be the wiser. And you pull over,
toss them out, and keep going.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Exactly right. It's an eighteen wheel crime scene, and the
truckers are exploiting the seam. In law enforcement jurisdictions, as
you said, they'll grab a victim in one police jurisdiction,
rape end or murder her in a second jurisdiction, and
dump the remains in a third jurisdiction. That makes for
an almost impossible challenge for investigators, often RURALD County sheriff's
(21:19):
deputies who are told, hey, there's a body near the highway,
no ide you know, they don't know who it is,
they don't know how you know. The coroner might say,
we think she was there for six months, six months,
six weeks, six days. How long do I go back?
How do I pull all the receipts from gas stations,
(21:39):
from way stations, how about fuel receipts at truck stops?
How many trucking companies are there that I've got to
go pull data from. That's where the FBI comes in
and says, let us help you figure this out.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
And sir, that's that they got victim. That's a fifteen
year old run away, never been fingerprinted, has no idea
on them, and maybe they're already being traffic so they
took their idea. What she's thrown in a river for
two weeks, You're not going to know who she is ever.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
No, And there's a further complication Cheryl, which makes it
even harder to solve because in so many of these cases,
the family members, as a form of survival, it is
a survival mechanism, have distanced themselves from their loved one,
meaning they can only take so much. So many phone
(22:34):
calls from the police, Hey, your daughter's in jail, come
bail her out. So many overdoses, so many fights about
stolen money from mom's purse. They start to distance themselves
so they don't even know that their loved one is missing,
let alone murdered. So that means you don't have any
(22:55):
loved one at the police department pounding their fists on
the desk. What have you done to find my daughter?
What have you done to solve this murder? You know,
and we all know. Sadly, the squeaky wheel gets the grease,
and as you go week after week and have no leads,
no way of figuring this out, the slowly that case
(23:17):
moves to the bottom of the pile. That's all part
of the problem here.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
How important is it that local agencies contact you? I
mean not just for resources, but for knowledge, for even
a mini task.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
For as you well know because you've been through this training,
the FBI is in the sales and marketing business with
regard to this initiative. They know that even the majority
of police and sheriff departments have never heard of the
Highway Serial Killings initiative and couldn't couldn't find the database
if they were paid to the database for HSKI sits
(23:54):
within YCAP which many police farms are aware of a
violent criminal apprehension program. But it's not by gap, it's
inside by gaps. You got to look for it. You
got to know about it to look for it. And
then what I keep hearing from law enforcement agencies is, look,
we heard about it, but now they're asking us to
fill out this questionnaire about our unsolved crime on the
(24:16):
alongside the highway and it's two hundred questions and you're
out of your mind if you think this police department
even has a detective, let alone a crime analyst. Know,
we do road patrol in a rural county. How are
we supposed to do this? But that's a dilemma. And
the FBI comes in and says, look, you know, we
(24:39):
can help you. There's grant money available from DJ if
you've got multiple murders that are linked, we may be
able to come sit alongside you and help you get
that into the database. But you've got to do it.
It's garbage in, garbage out. We can't help you if
we don't know how to help you or why so
people say, wow, what are the two hundred questions? This
(25:00):
gets into victimology, gets into questions like, tell me about
your crime scene, Tell me about your victim. What color
was her hair, her eyes? How was she dressed? Was
she nude? Was she partially nude? Which part was she?
Was she mutilated before death? If so, how? What was
the means of death? Was it strangulation? Was it stabbing?
(25:22):
Was it shooting? Was she strangled with an item of
her own clothing? Which item? Can you give us a
photo of the not used to gag her or strangle her?
When you're done with all those questions, you know, was
she found in or near water? Was she face down?
Her face up? Was she sexually violated or just killed?
You get those in the system, and now the experience
(25:45):
of all those analysts in that unit back at Quanticico
and the algorithms in the database start doing their magic,
and they could say, and they have said, we've seen
this exact scene crime scene three years ago, way across
the country, they start connecting the dots.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
So I'm going to say it again in case any
junior officer, rookie detective is listening. If you heard what
he said, if you have highways that intersect, and I'll
tell you about my own department. We have Highway seventy
five on one end and Highway eighty five on the other,
and what splits our town wide open or railroad tracks
(26:29):
and I can hit a golf ball practically to the
tower of the world's busy as airport. We have trafficking,
and if we're not making a rest, we're flat missing it.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
You always have some hopes when you write a book
like this and people ask me, what do you hope
to accomplish here? So first, of course, on a general level,
it's awareness. But one of the great things that could
happen would be for law enforcement personnel to read this
and say, you know what, I haven't entered my case
to the HSKI, and I need to do it. Another
(27:03):
thing that could happen is victim families who are possibly
now aware that their loved one was murdered, should be
going to their police department and saying, have you entered
this case into the FBI's HSK database. That would be
a wonderful thing. There's lots of things. I had a
you know, I had an interview about this book. They
(27:25):
were the hosts of the podcasts, did some a prison
ministry in their county, and they said, Frank, you know,
we're we're in the jails and prisons every day and
talking to women who are trafficked. And one of the
things that stood out to them was the data that
(27:46):
said between sixty and eighty percent of all female inmates
have been trafficked sometime in their life. That just floored
them to the point of almost disbelief. So they started
doing some research in their own jails and they said,
you know what, you're right, it's like eighty percent. And
(28:07):
then they came back and said, Frank, we also read
for the first time in your book that a lot
of recruitment for trafficking. Sex trafficking happens inside a jail cell,
where one inmate who's probably in for prostitution, recruits another
(28:31):
inmate by saying, hey, do you have a place to
go when you get out? If you don't, come stay
with me and my boyfriend will take care of you.
I'll put some money on your jail account for the phone.
You call us. I know you're just several weeks away
from getting out. We'll take care of it. Come pick
you up. That floored them, so they started asking the
(28:51):
female inmates that they work with, have you ever heard
of this? And the answer was, oh, yeah, it's going
on right now. You know, we can tell you right
now these women have been recruited in the GEIL and
so you know that's a good thing. If that happens
more and more the awareness, I'll be very happy.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Absolutely. But again, just you being here and the officers
that listen to this podcast need to go back and
tell everybody. Put it in your group chats, where you're
on those apps, talking to other detectives. Let them know
this is vital. And I can tell you there's a
whole lot of people that think by CAP is too
(29:30):
complicated and it is just double work and triple work. It
is so worth it. It is the most important thing
you can do. The AHSKI is vital to saving lives.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
It is. There's a track record there because I you know,
I asked the FBI some hard questions, Hey is this working?
Have you you have success stories? And they do. Even
just connecting killings years apart could actually solve the case.
It's one thing to say, hey, we we saw this
exact same crime scene. It looks like the same person,
(30:04):
you know, ten years ago. Okay, that's very nice. But
here's what departments are doing with that information. They are
grabbing DNA that from one case and they're going, okay,
you know what, We're going to run this. We're going
to run this DNA again and sure enough, you know
or it matches that ten year old case, and now
you've got your killer. You start doing your genealogical your
(30:28):
genetic DNA, you start finding family members. This really happens
in real life. It's happened quite recently. It does work.
But again, garbage in, garbage out. So I'm sure people
were wondering at the start of our conversation show, how
is it, how do we go from trafficking to trucking. Well,
this is it. This is the connection, which is that
(30:48):
the most vulnerable victims out there for serial killer truckers
are sex trafficked victims. Why it's their job to get
as close as you could possibly get to someone intimately,
to someone who could absolutely end their life and it's
happening by the hundreds. So that was my research for
(31:12):
long Haul Hunting the Highway serial Killers. The book became
so popular it came out at the end of very
end of May. In the first three weeks the book
was out, HarperCollins, my publisher, had to reprint it three times.
It's out there generating a lot of interest. What did
I do for research? One of the things I did
(31:32):
was I rode over two thousand miles in a big
rig with a cooperative trucker just to learn the subculture
of trucking. I wanted, you know, I wanted this book
to be a few things. One. I didn't want to
write just a gory, bloody book about murderers. I didn't
want to elevate serial killers. I didn't. I didn't want
(31:54):
them to be, you know, some kind of cult hero.
I certainly addressed them. So if you're a true crime affectionado,
yes this book is for you. Yet I also wanted
to write a study of three subcultures that operate right
under our noses. The first one, of course, is long
hauled trucking. What is everybody's life like the long haul trucker.
(32:16):
If you've ever wondered what goes on inside that bigre
what's their life like, do they have kids, when do
they see their family, how much do they make, where
do they eat, where do they go to the bathroom.
I did that and I wrote about it, And so
this book's for you sex victims. If you're thinking, ad,
this doesn't happen in my neighborhood, I don't have that
in my town. No one I know, in my family,
(32:38):
in my network would ever fall for that trap of trafficking.
Those people are from the other side of the tracks. Well,
I'm here to tell you my eyes were opened and
I talked to women who have been trafficked. One was
a preacher's daughter. The commonalities are what really got to me.
(33:01):
Just like there's commonalities with serial killer truckers in their backgrounds,
so there are with traffic victims. And the top experts
in the country that I interviewed for the book, they
told me, Frank, when you're interviewing these victims, you better
look for the following commonalities because you're gonna see them.
And sure enough, as I'm talking to these women, I'm
checking the boxes off in my head. There's that early
(33:23):
childhood trauma off in the form of unwanted sexual touching
or rape molestation. There's that early exposure to marijuana, then
the bad boyfriend, then the hard drugs. There's trauma that
stacks up in their household, maybe the death of a parent,
a sibling, a suicide on, a loss of jobs, domestic
(33:44):
violence with the parents. All of the stacks up and
makes a perfect storm. Regardless of where you come from,
and you end up in this trap and you just
spiral downward until you either die or climb it.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Nobody is safe, nobody is insulated. It can literally happen anywhere.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You know. The third subculture, of course, I don't think
I got to that. Where it was to study the
lives of crime analysts, how they work in this particular initiative,
who they are, and that's a compelling story as well.
But part of my field work not only was riding
in a big rig for over two thousand miles, not
(34:32):
only talking to the top experts in the country, not
only talking to the sex traffic victims who have survived
violent encounters with truckers violent, but also I visited a
place in Phoenix, Arizona called Starfish Place. And this place
is run jointly by the City of Phoenix and Arizona
(34:53):
State University Department of Social Work, and a woman named
doctor Dominique Rowe Sepuit. She's in the book. This place
just amazed me. This is a residential campus for women
escaping trafficking who themselves have young children to care for.
And I was very moved by what goes on there,
(35:17):
the life training, the coaching, the kids running around playing.
I couldn't be more impressed, And so I wanted to
end my book Long Haul within a positive note, like, look,
it's not all doom and gloom. There's hope here. There
are resource centers Toledo, the same thing doctor Celia Williamson
(35:38):
does amazing street level work. These aren't just academic PhDs
at universities. They're at the clinical level. They're on the street.
The research they do is astounding. A particularly more recently,
doctor Sepowitz at Arizona State Research that it was so
(35:59):
compelling that the US Department of Defense showed up at
her door and said, do you realize you're doing predictive
analysis of who's going to become a trafficking victim? And
we want in on this, We want to figure this out.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Wow, there's another thing about your boat that I want
to point out that I thought was just stellar of you.
And you make such a point of making sure people
understand that truckers are the backbone of our country. They
bring us food, they bring us car parts, they bring
us clothes, they bring us air conditioning units. We've got
(36:34):
to have them. So you didn't just you know, point
out that there's this nefarious group. You also said, Hey,
there's some really you know, decent, salt of the earth
people doing this job. And I appreciate that too.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that, Cheryl. As we
as we you know, run out of time here, we
would be remiss if we didn't mention that we're only
talking about a tiny fraction of truckers who killed, and
the vast majority are actively contributing to our economy in
a huge way. I mean, last year alone, the trucking
(37:11):
industry earned over eight hundred and seventy billion dollars in
gross freight revenue. Grocery stores would run out of groceries
in three days without truckers. I partially dedicated my book.
You look at the dedication page of my book, and
I partially dedicate the book to the stalwart American trucker.
My experience on the road, I was impressed. I can
(37:32):
tell you I would not want to do that job.
It's hard. I rode flatbed, which meant we were tarping
and chaining and strapping our load. And you want to
talk about economic impact. Every day we were part of
the economy. Our first load that we picked up with
me writing was from a gypsum factory in Illinois that
(37:56):
made drywall for the housing industry. Another time we picked
up and deliver the lumber from the Timber Country and
the Upper Peninsula. I mean aluminum heavy aluminum rods that
we delivered to a DoD ammunition factory that was going
to turn it into AMMO for the military. I mean
(38:16):
it was astounding.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
And you know, my husband works for Home Depot and
during nine to eleven, their CEO said, turn every truck
around and send them to New York City. I don't
care what's on it, give them everything.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Well, they're a tremendous asset. And I'll leave you with
this idea, which is, not only are the vast majority
of truckers an essential part of our economy, but they
are also the eyes and ears and the anti trafficking movement.
So who better to see and report signs of trafficking
(38:55):
then the guys and gals who are out there on
the road every day. So there are private organizations ones
called Truckers Against Trafficking. They know go by their acronym TAT.
They do great work training long haul truckers. Every year.
They give out awards every year to hero truckers who
have reported and rescued someone from trafficking. You may even
(39:18):
pass the truck on the highway that says TAT Truckers
Against Trafficking. They do great work, so you know they
are part of the solution. Of course.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Well, Frank big Losy, I cannot tell you what an
honor it was to talk to you. I appreciate all
the information, and honey, I didn't get to everything. I'm
just going to have to have you back.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Well, I'd be happy to do it. If people want
to check out the book, it's Long Haul Hunting the
Highway Serial Killers. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere.
And if you want to know more about what I'm
up to, you go to my website Frankfiglouzy dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
I'm going to end zones Heaven the way that I
always do with a quote. Girls lose their lives and
their identities when customers start touching them. They are no
longer a person. They're a product. I'm Cheryl McCollum and
this is own seven
Host
Sheryl McCollum
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