August 3, 2020 • 34 mins
The kingpin of the smuggling syndicate – Leigh Ritch – is safely out of reach in the Cayman Islands. But he’s worried. One of his partners, the Gentleman Smuggler, is in custody. Leigh’s network may soon be exposed. He grows more paranoid, thinking his house is bugged. The syndicate's security guy, Shine, says he knows a guy who can sweep Leigh’s house. His name is Ed Thomas. (Yep, that’s Ned). So, Ned gets special permission to do undercover work abroad and sets off to Grand Cayman with Shine in tow.
The first version of Ned’s unpublished novel was written by James Coyne and edited by Andrea McLaughlin. Voice acting by Walton Goggins.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin previously on Deep Cover. Stephen Kaylish the gentleman's smuggler,
the guy who orchestrates every single detail of operations. He
gets arrested. Let's start walking away knowing something's up, and
(00:37):
I get about. I don't know a quartermall away, not
even that, and I'm surrounded by fete. Stephen was the
right hand man of the big Boss, the top guy,
the guy that Ned Timmins had yet defined. Ned's starr.
Informant Clinton Shine Anderson tells him that the syndicate's top
(01:00):
boss was a guy named Lee Rich. Not an outlaw
biker or a dive bar musician, but more like a
member of a fancy beach club with a sweet house
and a big yacht, and for the time being, mister
beach Club was hiding out down in the Cayman Islands.
Unbeknownst to Ned, Lee was rattled by Stephen's recent arrest.
(01:24):
He hadn't just lost a partner, He'd lost the entire
smuggling arm of his operation, and he wondered what if
Stevens started talking ratting him out. Lee was also worried
that the FEDS might be watching him or listening to
his phone. Calls. What he needed was a counter intelligence expert,
someone who could sweep his house for bugs reassure him
(01:46):
that he was safe. This created an opening for Ned.
He could travel down to the Cayman's with Shine, posing
as Ed Thomas, the badass biker, an ex military guy
with special knowledge of modern spycraft. He would also claim
to be Shine's cousin. That's right, cousin Ed. This would
(02:08):
be It's big moment, his chance to step in as
Lee's night and shining armor. But this plan wouldn't be
easy for Ned to pull off. You see, at the time,
the FBI typically didn't work internationally, and since the came
Ins was a British territory Scotland, yard had to be
looped in. While he waits around for the paperwork to clear,
(02:31):
Ned rushed to get everything in order. He obtained a
passport for Ed Thomas, he got debugging equipment and even
took a crash course on how to use it. We're
ready to go. We didn't get approval. I've got airline
tickets and it was the night before, about three o'clock
in the afternoon. The assistant Special Agent charge calls me
(02:54):
and he says they just ocayed the project. This is
like three o'clock and we're supposed to leave at seven
or eight the next morning. Great, I'm psyched we're gonna go.
So I go out to check on Shine. He's drunk
and he had a three wheeler ATV He had flipped
it and broke his collar bone, and the bone was
(03:18):
almost through the skin. You could see the pointed edge
of the bone protruding where it was broken. If I
tell the bureau he's got a broken shoulder, it's off
time out. So Ned he's got to tell his bosses
and risk losing the whole operation. Either that or come
(03:38):
up with a very last minute plan. Unbeknownst the Bureau,
I had a friend that was a dodger out there.
I said, Doc, I've got to take him in the morning.
I can't tell I got to travel with him. So
Doc tapes him up the shoulder a broken shoulder, and
gives me tons of Perkadan. So just to recap here,
(04:01):
Ned the FBI agent goes to his doctor buddy to
get some major pain killers for his informant in order
to go undercover. And we're in country where there was
no field office and no backup. Just Shine the stars
are never going to align again for this to go.
The next morning, I flew him all with a broken shoulder,
(04:22):
just taped him up and fucking took him. I'm Jake
Halberd and this is Deep Cover, Episode five, A different
kind of animal. When Ned and Shine got to the
(05:08):
kne means looking for this mister beach Club Lee Rich,
he was nowhere to be found. Lee was apparently off island.
Ned and Shine started hanging around at a nightclub, a
place called Look Club that Lee Rich owned. The club
was right on the beach, place where locals, celebrities, and
tourists all mingled, sitting around drinking strong dakeries and eating
(05:32):
Jamaican jerk chicken. And then there was the hostess, the
one girl always had a parrot on her shoulder. The
parrot would you say dirty words to anybody that pulled
up for that parrot would look at some guy in
go small dick, Small dick. That spent a few days
there getting to know the regulars. He wanted to learn
(05:55):
as much as he could, but he couldn't ask any
questions because well, he didn't want to draw any suspicions.
As far as he could tell a few of the
guys seemed to work for Lee, though it's unclear what
exactly they did for him. To Ned, these guys, they
seemed a bit like out of work lumberjacks on skid row,
just biding their time into the next job offer from
(06:17):
Lee materialized. Lee was handling hundreds and hundreds of millions
of dollars. People do a lot for that money. The
trouble is the nature of the business draws killers. Ned
says he was pretty much always on guard. You know,
wherever you were, even if you're at the club, sitting
(06:38):
at the table, you know, you're watching everybody around you.
You're watching what's going on. And then one afternoon he's
hanging out at the club having drinks when some unexpected
guests arrive and incomes the people from the cruise ship.
And I look in the line and here's an agent
(06:58):
that works about two deaths over from me. Yeah, a
guy named Bob from the Detroit FBI office on his honeymoon,
an office made of Ned's who didn't know the deal
that Ned was here not on holiday, but as an
undercover agent. And his wife is with him, and she's
in a little tiny bikini and she's a knockout, and
(07:19):
these guys are all Oakland her and I'm just choking.
I mean, this isn't going to be good. Because there's
like six or eight Ali's guys sitting around this table.
Bob and his wife start heading in Ned's direction. The
wife comes over and puts her bag on a picnic
table and then turns around and bends over to do
something in the bag, right in front of these guys.
(07:41):
And I mean, the bikini was barely covering anything. In
that one second, like clockwork, the gaze of every guy
there shifted to Bob's wife bent over her beach bag,
except for Bob, who finally sees Ned. And I just
went to my throat and had the look of death
on my face. And he caught on right away. I mean,
(08:05):
he caught in a split second. And so Bob steers
his wife away and catastrophe is avoided. But after this encounter,
Ned is really on edge. In his FBI reports from
the time, he notes that Lee's guys seem to be
on high alert. One of them keeps telling Ned that
(08:28):
US law enforcement is putting intense heat on the whole island.
Ned isn't sure what to make of this. But what
he does get is that this guy is paranoid, which
isn't good, right, because that means he's looking for plots
and conspiracies, and here's Ned basically conspiring against him. The
stress is unbelievable, the mental stress. You don't sleep, You're
(08:51):
worried about your daughter getting kicked in any minute. You
have no weapons down there, You have no backup. And
if all of a sudden, want of Lee's guys get
jealous or gets drunked up or coked up and decides
to go fuck you up, you don't have much to
defend yourself. There's no backup. You're not gonna really hit
(09:14):
the radio and call nine one one. You're nine. You're
not gonna be able to call for help because nobody's coming.
Ned had little to do other than sit around and
wait for Lee to show up, but he never does.
So Ned heads back to the US and then returns
to the Caymans ten days later, and this time Lee's there.
(09:37):
His guys tell Ned Lee wants his offices at the
club swept for bugs. Immediately presto Ned was in business,
So Ned and Shine they do their sweep. They don't
find any bugs, and then Finally Ned gets his chance
to meet Lee face to face. Lee looks like well,
(09:59):
a guy who owns a beach club, tans, smiling, with
a mass of brown, curly hair. Think David Hasselhoff on Baywatch,
only not quite as Ned and Lee. They get on well.
They grabbed dinner that night at a local Spanish restaurant,
and the next day Ned sweeps Lee's house for bugs.
It's also clean. Things are going well. It seems like
(10:21):
Lee's slowly letting Ned in and Ned he seems to
almost admire Lee. That's what it sounds like in his
novel anyway. He was a handsome man, his features strong
and well formed. Ned knew from shine that women loved him,
and it wasn't hard to imagine there was quality in Lee.
He was a wholly different kind of animal. When we
(10:48):
come back after the break, Ned gets his big chance
to really know his man of mystery, and so do I.
When I pay a visit to Lee rich myself and
we go window shopping for smuggling boats. I track Lee
(11:17):
reached down a few months ago in a small coastal
town in Florida. He didn't want to meet at his house,
so we took a drive. Lee wanted to give me
a tour of the area. We passed a bunch of
boat marinas. You see that boat right here, the big
blue Hall Hunner with the two masts over here on
the right, straight straight down the dot. That's an old
(11:39):
golf Star forty four. That's the first boat I ever
went on, just identical to that. Lee tells me that
he grew up in Tampa around boats. Both his father
and his grandfather were sea captains. He himself built boats
as a teenager, knew them inside out, and that's why
when he was around eighteen, he was offered a job
as a smuggler on a golf Star forty four, just
(12:01):
like the one that he's currently pointing out to me.
They had a big Perkins engine in him that you
could motor sail, you know, you just run a real
low rpm and you'd still get a couple of extra
knots out of it. Was it a good smuggling boat. Yeah,
Look at that thing. It's like a tank that hold
twelve thousand pounds twelve thousand pounds of marijuana. So yeah,
(12:23):
that's a serious smuggling job. But Lie says he didn't
initially get into the marijuana business to get rich. He
started off as a teenager selling dimebags here and there,
just making enough cash to support his life as a surfer.
Like I said, my dream was to go surfing every day,
make ten grand, selling some bags of pot, and get
out of it and that was it. But it didn't
(12:45):
pan out that way. By the time that he was
in his early twenties, he had his own smuggling boat
and he began making runs down to Columbia. So it
was an opportunity to make easy money. Who wouldn't have
done it just about in those days. Eventually he connects
with a legendary supplier down in Barankia, Columbia named Julio
(13:07):
Caesar Nasser David, who went by the nickname the Old Man.
He was to marijuana what James Dole was to pineapples.
The big grower. Lee and the Old Man they got close.
Lee was a great smuggler. He was very successful. He
hung out with celebrities and rock stars, but his real
(13:29):
talent was finance, specifically moving cash. We're talking about huge
loads of crinkled fives and tens. All those buys from
stoners across the country. They added up. Lee would often
personally move the money from the organization's safe house in
Tampa down to the Canans, and here he relied, at
(13:50):
least in part, on a pilot named Shelley Levitts. Shelley
was not a smuggler, She was just someone who fell
in love with flying as a girl. Oh it was magical.
I remember rolling down the runway and that the feel
of lifting off like it was yesterday. She gets her
license when she turns eighteen and starts flying for an
(14:11):
aircraft charter operation out of Tampa. One day she gets
a referral for a new client, Lee Rich. I just
thought he was a successful businessman, or just a successful
guy and a successful family. He was very dynamic, very
easy going, laid back, handsome guy, real friendly. She started
(14:36):
flying him all over the place, Louisiana, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Texas.
It was a little while before I had any suspicions
that there might be something beyond just a businessman. Her
suspicions about who Lee really was came to a head
one night when an airport employee tipped her off that
(14:58):
the FEDS had put a transponder in her plane. They
were watching her, and I remember saying, oh, well, thank
you for the information. I appreciate that Shelley did have
a hunch about why the FEDS might be tracking her plane.
Shelley flew Lee Rich to the Caymans regularly. He would
bring these heavy briefcases. So I kind of put two
(15:22):
and two together to figure that, well, there might be
money in there, because Shelley knew the Caymans were famous
for one thing in particular, banking, lots of banks. Small island,
a few houses, and a lot of banks downtown, a
small island with a small airport, just a few buildings.
Lee would get off the airplane or grab a bag
(15:42):
or two and literally just kind of walk right into
customs and right through it to the other side. And
Shelley says that they could do that in part because
Lee Rich was so well connected in the Caymans. He
knew everyone on the island, including the customs officers. Plus
he and his associates looked so clean cut and well
put together. I would have considered them very polished executives.
(16:06):
They just happened to ultimately be involved in smuggling. This
is how Lee moved his money, posing as a perfectly
respectable businessman with his briefcases and a few coolers. I
mean literally, you go into the airport. You had one
of those big hundred court coolers as stuffed with hundreds
or fifties or twenties. We'd always pack some steaks or
(16:27):
something on top of it or something. They opened a
thing or something. You give him a couple of steaks
or whatever and smile and walk on through. From the airport.
Lee would take his coolers of cash directly to the
Bank of Nova Scotia. He was tight with one of
the bankers there who would arrange for the cash to
be counted. The bank would take a one or two
(16:48):
percent cut, and then Lee's money was clean. For a
long time. This system worked very well for mister Beach Club.
He was the man down in the can ins. In fact,
in nineteen eighty three, when Queen of England visited the
(17:10):
island on her tour of the Western Hemisphere, she took
a ride on his yacht. It all came to a
screeching halt when Lee's right hand man, Stephen Kaylish, the
gentleman smuggler, got arrested in Tampa. With Stephen in jail,
Lee now had all kinds of problems for one. He
(17:32):
was worried Stephen might start talking to the Feds, you know,
revealing secrets. But also they were logistical nightmares. They had
one million pounds of marijuana just sitting in Columbia waiting
to be moved. Lee had committed to selling it, but
without his master smuggler, how exactly was he going to
do that. I usually built people around me that I
(17:55):
could trust, and then by me trusting them and them
trusting me, I trusted what their word was. I had
lost one, Kayliss, who was a guy that did everything
for me, whether you tell him to do it or not,
and a couple of other people. I was vulnerable at
that time. Even before Stephen Kalish was arrested, Lee had
(18:18):
big problems. The US was starting to take a closer
look at offshore banking hubs like the came An Islands.
Lee still remembers the day his man at the Bank
of Nova Scotia broke off their relationship. He flat out said, Lee,
I'm not taking any more your money. Lee Rich was
stressed and a bit desperate, and that's when Shine called
(18:42):
offering the services of cousin ed the counterintelligence expert. Well,
that was an opening. He needed somebody that he could trust.
Ned played that role to the hilt. He swept Lee's
house for bugs, but then stuck around ready to pitch
in when needed, because well, Lee needed all kinds of help.
He soon asked Ned if he could get him fake
(19:04):
documents a birth certificate, passport, and driver's license. Said he'd
look into it gladly. So trust was building, But then
there were these other moments when it seemed like Lee
might just be a little bit suspicious, like maybe he
was having doubts about who Ned really was. More on this.
(19:27):
When we come back after the break, Ned remembers this
one day on the island when Lee asks him to
come on a little trip to the bank. He starts
(19:50):
talking about a rumor he'd heard that federal agents were
snooping around, and then Lee turns to Ned and says,
one of these agents looks a lot like you, So
you know, I didn't know what was going to happen.
We got to the bank and he just says, wait here.
So I'm sitting alone in the car and thinking, Okay,
this is it. You know. Lee walks back out of
(20:12):
the bank and nothing, but Ned can't shake the feeling
that Lee might beyond him. Even a little moments seemed
like they could have sinister implications like this. One day,
Lee suggests that Ned should go fishing for conk with
his butler, a guy named Burtley, so they can make
(20:32):
a dish called sea pie. This all seemed kosher until
he and Burtley walked down to the shore to a
small skiff, just the two of them, and get in there.
You know, Burtley throws his three foot my chatty through
it in a boat and I'm like, oh, this isn't
too cool. So they paddled out into the mist to
this site where Bertley supposedly knows the conk are. When
(20:55):
they get there, Burtley points at the spot where Ned
should dive to get the shellfish. Ned eyes the machete again,
and he looks at the oars, and then he looks
down at the water, and then he glances at Burtley.
That's thinking house is going to play out. Finally, he
just jumps in the water and dives for the cock.
He sees the cock, grabs it, and all the while
(21:18):
he's thinking about his next move. He was planning this
out in my head. If I come up and he's
got the machete. He ready to chop my head off.
I'm thinking, okay, I'll rock the bolt and then reach
over the edge and try to get hold of this
or to defend myself. When he surfaced, there was Burtley smiling, relaxed,
(21:39):
perfectly friendly. But Ned was spooked. It was very tense,
and there was always tense minutes like that that that
Lee hadn't said, Hey, Burtley, get rid of this guy. Well,
you'd be eaten by the sea life, you know, sharks
and crabs and snappers and ship would just eat your body.
(22:02):
You'd be gone. In Ned's mind, it began to seem
like it was just a matter of time before he
was outed. He started anticipating the would be assassins, especially
(22:23):
when he returned home to the condos where he and
Shine were staying on the island. Recently, I went down
with Ned to the Caymans and he showed me around. Okay,
well I don't see where Arabic. I think they've changed
the numbers around. But we retraced his steps and we
visited those very condos. Ned pointed out a set of
(22:45):
stairs that led up to a room where he slept,
or actually didn't sleep, No, you're always half awake waiting
waiting for the door to kick in, you know, and
you don't have a gun, you know, you couldn't have
a gun here, so no, you're pretty vulnerable. There was
hardly any people here, so we wanted to know if
(23:06):
somebody was coming in the night. We would some beer
cans on those steps here, so they hopefully stumble over
and when they came up and make a bunch of noise,
you know, a bunch of beer cans on a dark
and stairwell. That's where Ned was at. While Ned and
I were in the Caymans. We had a few quiet mornings.
(23:26):
We just chilled out in the living room of his
rental condo and talked. Being there seemed to stir up
all kinds of memories for him. He seemed more open,
and so I just kept asking questions. Let me let
me go back. I have some more earlier questions before
working on this case, before kind of arresting Toby, had
(23:50):
you ever gone undercover before? Not really, not with the FBI.
I did a lot of undercover work in the army
in Korea with drugs buying and penetrating drug organizations. This
was new to me. Ned had mentioned serving in Korea before,
(24:12):
but never in any great detail. Now he went on
to tell me that for a while he was investigating
North Korean agents who were sneaking down across the border
and selling drugs like heroin to US servicemen. In order
to stop this, Ned teamed up with his counterparts in
the South Korean Military Republic of Korea Criminal Investiga ANITY
(24:33):
Detachment and their boss his name was Tiger, and Tiger
he wanted to be on his good side because he
was a mean son of a bitch. So Ned goes
under cover to make some buys and bust these North
Korean agents. Did you have any dicey calls or dicey situations? Yeah? Yeah,
(25:00):
I had a North Korean crack off, a forty five
round of the pistol and an alley that hit about
six inches above my head he missed. Ned arrests this
North Korean agent and then turns him over to Tiger
and his men. Over there we had when it got cold,
they had oil burning heaters. As you're close to him,
there as hot as hell, So they put him in
(25:23):
a push up position in front of that heater and
just a ball cook him and then kicked the ship
out of his rib zoom beat him and did you
witness that? Oh yeah, he got burns on a skin.
I never checked his skin, but I know as hot
as hell. So I mean he's swatting and quivering. You know,
(25:46):
he knew if he if he broke the push up position,
he was going to get his ribs caved in. So yeah,
I can get real ugly, you know. In the end,
I don't know what they were did with the guy.
They took him away, so I don't know what they
did to him. Does witnessing something like that change you?
(26:10):
I don't know. You know, Um, I guess I was
always around a lot of violence, starting with the army,
and and I guess I didn't think about it at
(26:31):
the time. Let me ask you a question. You watch
this so you're and some of this is making you
aware of what people can do to someone if they
fall into the wrong hands. Is this crossing your mind
at all when you're basically the one that's behind enemy
(26:51):
lines in the Caymans. I mean you've witnessed what can happen, right, Yeah,
And you know you don't want to be taken prisoner.
I have to believe in your mind that you're you're
not going to be taken captive. When Ned told me
(27:17):
all this, I've been talking to him for over a
year on weekends, early in the morning, often several times
in the same day, and honestly, he could be very guarded.
There were some places he just would not go. And
now I kind of understood why. As Ned is struggling
(27:37):
to hold it together and the Cayans back home in Detroit,
Ned's wife Kathie rarely heard from him. She had to
rely on Ned's handler at the FBI to get updates,
and he would call me like once every couple of
weeks and go, oh, I saw Ned, and he gave
me the signal that everything's okay. And that would be
about as much contact or even knowledge that the bureau
(27:59):
had of where he was, whether he was alive, whether
he was well, you know, So that really started wearing
on me. But she does recall at least one occasion
when she did manage to talk with Ned. He told
her about a fancy dinner that he'd had with Lee
and some celebrities. He told me, oh, I had dinner
(28:19):
with Ringo Star and Barbara forget the lady's name now,
who he married who's ringo star married too? She was
one of the Bond girls. And I said to him,
how on earth do you think that I can compete
with the kind of people that you are I'm sure
running with, because I'm confident she wasn't the only woman
(28:40):
at that dinner table. You know, everybody else is in
sitting there as couples, and Ned is sitting there alone.
That doesn't even make sense, of course, not, of course not.
Cathy thought that Ned had always been very good at
playing Ed Thomas, his fictional persona, but maybe he was
too good at it. If you're going to do an
(29:01):
undercover assignment like that, you are going to have to
completely absorb yourself in that life. And in order to
do that, you have to lose this life at least
for a while. And to think that you can you
(29:22):
can do that like an actor does in a movie. Oh, I,
you know, immersed myself in the role of so and so. Yeah,
but in this life, no one is yelling cut. You know.
Cathy voiced her concerns to Ned, and he didn't object
or argue with his wife. Just you know, listen to it,
(29:42):
and and uh, who's saying is really true? That when
you get that deep undercover with a bunch of gangsters,
drug dealers and murders and bombers and whatever, that you
know you're you're losing track of reality of what you
really are. This possibility was not entirely lost on Ned's
(30:06):
bosses at the FBI. The b RO eventually decided to
send another agent named Lynn Stonebridge down to the Caymans
just to check on Ned. I mean, they knew where
he was, but who knew what was really going on.
There was nobody else sort of on his side that
was there. And then it also gave him a little
(30:26):
stress released by telling me what's going on. And you
could see he was worked up about some of the
stuff too, So he just needed someone to talk to
that he could trust. She was only on the island
for a few days, and even she sensed the danger.
You've start getting paranoid and watching everyone around you. It
sounds like a pretty wretched existence, but Ned was still determined.
(30:50):
It's not like you can call it time out and
get out of the game. You know, they say you're
in it to win it, not to play armchair psychologist,
but like do you have to push your real self
and your real feelings like down and kind of bury them.
On some level, I think he would become hardened, you know,
(31:12):
just like the rock Cid beating the hell out of
this guy. I mean they heard him. They broke his
ribj getor the ribs break. You know, this is the
North Korean that was tortured. You have to suppress your
feelings and go for the greater cause. And you know,
(31:32):
and also it's a challenge, it's it's a challenge. What
made it worth it for Ned was that slowly he
was making progress. He was climbing up the ladder, way
up the ladder. He'd started off at a roadside biker
bar Detroit with Toby. Then he got Shine, who vetted everybody.
(31:52):
He had a line on Mike Vogel, the Detroit grocery guy.
And now here he was in the Canaans. He'd found
Lee Rich, the big boss, mister beach Club. Not just
that he'd earned his trust, Lee had told him that
he was in the process of setting up a second
base of up rations in the Bahamas. The scope of
(32:13):
Ned's investigation was expanding exponentially. It seemed Ned had learned
who Lee's supplier was. The old man done in bearing
Kai at Columbia. But what was he supposed to do
with this intel? Anyhow? Officially legally that was none of
Ned's business. This was way beyond his purview as an
FBI agent. But still he had questions. He wanted to
(32:37):
know where was the money going if it couldn't be
banked in the Caymans. He wanted to know where did
this all end? Next time on deep Cover, Ned's undercover
(33:03):
identity had been compromised and they had to put a
hit on Ned and they were going to lure him
to a location and give him a hot shot of
drugs and kill him. And they also knew where we lived.
(33:38):
Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by
Karen Shakerji. Our story editor is Jack hit. Original music
and our theme was composed by Luis Gara and Flawn
Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Mia
Lobell is Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's novel is read by
Walton Goggins. Special thanks to Julia Barton had their fame,
(34:03):
Carly mcgliori, Leeta mullatd Maya Caning, Eric Sandler, Aggie Taylor,
Kadija Holland, zuwek Winn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.
Special thanks also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. Additional
thanks to Joseph Betty check out his terrific artwork. If
you ever get down to the Caymans, I'm Jake Albern
Pushkin previously on Deep Cover. Stephen Kaylish the gentleman's smuggler,
the guy who orchestrates every single detail of operations. He
gets arrested. Let's start walking away knowing something's up, and
(00:37):
I get about. I don't know a quartermall away, not
even that, and I'm surrounded by fete. Stephen was the
right hand man of the big Boss, the top guy,
the guy that Ned Timmins had yet defined. Ned's starr.
Informant Clinton Shine Anderson tells him that the syndicate's top
(01:00):
boss was a guy named Lee Rich. Not an outlaw
biker or a dive bar musician, but more like a
member of a fancy beach club with a sweet house
and a big yacht, and for the time being, mister
beach Club was hiding out down in the Cayman Islands.
Unbeknownst to Ned, Lee was rattled by Stephen's recent arrest.
(01:24):
He hadn't just lost a partner, He'd lost the entire
smuggling arm of his operation, and he wondered what if
Stevens started talking ratting him out. Lee was also worried
that the FEDS might be watching him or listening to
his phone. Calls. What he needed was a counter intelligence expert,
someone who could sweep his house for bugs reassure him
(01:46):
that he was safe. This created an opening for Ned.
He could travel down to the Cayman's with Shine, posing
as Ed Thomas, the badass biker, an ex military guy
with special knowledge of modern spycraft. He would also claim
to be Shine's cousin. That's right, cousin Ed. This would
(02:08):
be It's big moment, his chance to step in as
Lee's night and shining armor. But this plan wouldn't be
easy for Ned to pull off. You see, at the time,
the FBI typically didn't work internationally, and since the came
Ins was a British territory Scotland, yard had to be
looped in. While he waits around for the paperwork to clear,
(02:31):
Ned rushed to get everything in order. He obtained a
passport for Ed Thomas, he got debugging equipment and even
took a crash course on how to use it. We're
ready to go. We didn't get approval. I've got airline
tickets and it was the night before, about three o'clock
in the afternoon. The assistant Special Agent charge calls me
(02:54):
and he says they just ocayed the project. This is
like three o'clock and we're supposed to leave at seven
or eight the next morning. Great, I'm psyched we're gonna go.
So I go out to check on Shine. He's drunk
and he had a three wheeler ATV He had flipped
it and broke his collar bone, and the bone was
(03:18):
almost through the skin. You could see the pointed edge
of the bone protruding where it was broken. If I
tell the bureau he's got a broken shoulder, it's off
time out. So Ned he's got to tell his bosses
and risk losing the whole operation. Either that or come
(03:38):
up with a very last minute plan. Unbeknownst the Bureau,
I had a friend that was a dodger out there.
I said, Doc, I've got to take him in the morning.
I can't tell I got to travel with him. So
Doc tapes him up the shoulder a broken shoulder, and
gives me tons of Perkadan. So just to recap here,
(04:01):
Ned the FBI agent goes to his doctor buddy to
get some major pain killers for his informant in order
to go undercover. And we're in country where there was
no field office and no backup. Just Shine the stars
are never going to align again for this to go.
The next morning, I flew him all with a broken shoulder,
(04:22):
just taped him up and fucking took him. I'm Jake
Halberd and this is Deep Cover, Episode five, A different
kind of animal. When Ned and Shine got to the
(05:08):
kne means looking for this mister beach Club Lee Rich,
he was nowhere to be found. Lee was apparently off island.
Ned and Shine started hanging around at a nightclub, a
place called Look Club that Lee Rich owned. The club
was right on the beach, place where locals, celebrities, and
tourists all mingled, sitting around drinking strong dakeries and eating
(05:32):
Jamaican jerk chicken. And then there was the hostess, the
one girl always had a parrot on her shoulder. The
parrot would you say dirty words to anybody that pulled
up for that parrot would look at some guy in
go small dick, Small dick. That spent a few days
there getting to know the regulars. He wanted to learn
(05:55):
as much as he could, but he couldn't ask any
questions because well, he didn't want to draw any suspicions.
As far as he could tell a few of the
guys seemed to work for Lee, though it's unclear what
exactly they did for him. To Ned, these guys, they
seemed a bit like out of work lumberjacks on skid row,
just biding their time into the next job offer from
(06:17):
Lee materialized. Lee was handling hundreds and hundreds of millions
of dollars. People do a lot for that money. The
trouble is the nature of the business draws killers. Ned
says he was pretty much always on guard. You know,
wherever you were, even if you're at the club, sitting
(06:38):
at the table, you know, you're watching everybody around you.
You're watching what's going on. And then one afternoon he's
hanging out at the club having drinks when some unexpected
guests arrive and incomes the people from the cruise ship.
And I look in the line and here's an agent
(06:58):
that works about two deaths over from me. Yeah, a
guy named Bob from the Detroit FBI office on his honeymoon,
an office made of Ned's who didn't know the deal
that Ned was here not on holiday, but as an
undercover agent. And his wife is with him, and she's
in a little tiny bikini and she's a knockout, and
(07:19):
these guys are all Oakland her and I'm just choking.
I mean, this isn't going to be good. Because there's
like six or eight Ali's guys sitting around this table.
Bob and his wife start heading in Ned's direction. The
wife comes over and puts her bag on a picnic
table and then turns around and bends over to do
something in the bag, right in front of these guys.
(07:41):
And I mean, the bikini was barely covering anything. In
that one second, like clockwork, the gaze of every guy
there shifted to Bob's wife bent over her beach bag,
except for Bob, who finally sees Ned. And I just
went to my throat and had the look of death
on my face. And he caught on right away. I mean,
(08:05):
he caught in a split second. And so Bob steers
his wife away and catastrophe is avoided. But after this encounter,
Ned is really on edge. In his FBI reports from
the time, he notes that Lee's guys seem to be
on high alert. One of them keeps telling Ned that
(08:28):
US law enforcement is putting intense heat on the whole island.
Ned isn't sure what to make of this. But what
he does get is that this guy is paranoid, which
isn't good, right, because that means he's looking for plots
and conspiracies, and here's Ned basically conspiring against him. The
stress is unbelievable, the mental stress. You don't sleep, You're
(08:51):
worried about your daughter getting kicked in any minute. You
have no weapons down there, You have no backup. And
if all of a sudden, want of Lee's guys get
jealous or gets drunked up or coked up and decides
to go fuck you up, you don't have much to
defend yourself. There's no backup. You're not gonna really hit
(09:14):
the radio and call nine one one. You're nine. You're
not gonna be able to call for help because nobody's coming.
Ned had little to do other than sit around and
wait for Lee to show up, but he never does.
So Ned heads back to the US and then returns
to the Caymans ten days later, and this time Lee's there.
(09:37):
His guys tell Ned Lee wants his offices at the
club swept for bugs. Immediately presto Ned was in business,
So Ned and Shine they do their sweep. They don't
find any bugs, and then Finally Ned gets his chance
to meet Lee face to face. Lee looks like well,
(09:59):
a guy who owns a beach club, tans, smiling, with
a mass of brown, curly hair. Think David Hasselhoff on Baywatch,
only not quite as Ned and Lee. They get on well.
They grabbed dinner that night at a local Spanish restaurant,
and the next day Ned sweeps Lee's house for bugs.
It's also clean. Things are going well. It seems like
(10:21):
Lee's slowly letting Ned in and Ned he seems to
almost admire Lee. That's what it sounds like in his
novel anyway. He was a handsome man, his features strong
and well formed. Ned knew from shine that women loved him,
and it wasn't hard to imagine there was quality in Lee.
He was a wholly different kind of animal. When we
(10:48):
come back after the break, Ned gets his big chance
to really know his man of mystery, and so do I.
When I pay a visit to Lee rich myself and
we go window shopping for smuggling boats. I track Lee
(11:17):
reached down a few months ago in a small coastal
town in Florida. He didn't want to meet at his house,
so we took a drive. Lee wanted to give me
a tour of the area. We passed a bunch of
boat marinas. You see that boat right here, the big
blue Hall Hunner with the two masts over here on
the right, straight straight down the dot. That's an old
(11:39):
golf Star forty four. That's the first boat I ever
went on, just identical to that. Lee tells me that
he grew up in Tampa around boats. Both his father
and his grandfather were sea captains. He himself built boats
as a teenager, knew them inside out, and that's why
when he was around eighteen, he was offered a job
as a smuggler on a golf Star forty four, just
(12:01):
like the one that he's currently pointing out to me.
They had a big Perkins engine in him that you
could motor sail, you know, you just run a real
low rpm and you'd still get a couple of extra
knots out of it. Was it a good smuggling boat. Yeah,
Look at that thing. It's like a tank that hold
twelve thousand pounds twelve thousand pounds of marijuana. So yeah,
(12:23):
that's a serious smuggling job. But Lie says he didn't
initially get into the marijuana business to get rich. He
started off as a teenager selling dimebags here and there,
just making enough cash to support his life as a surfer.
Like I said, my dream was to go surfing every day,
make ten grand, selling some bags of pot, and get
out of it and that was it. But it didn't
(12:45):
pan out that way. By the time that he was
in his early twenties, he had his own smuggling boat
and he began making runs down to Columbia. So it
was an opportunity to make easy money. Who wouldn't have
done it just about in those days. Eventually he connects
with a legendary supplier down in Barankia, Columbia named Julio
(13:07):
Caesar Nasser David, who went by the nickname the Old Man.
He was to marijuana what James Dole was to pineapples.
The big grower. Lee and the Old Man they got close.
Lee was a great smuggler. He was very successful. He
hung out with celebrities and rock stars, but his real
(13:29):
talent was finance, specifically moving cash. We're talking about huge
loads of crinkled fives and tens. All those buys from
stoners across the country. They added up. Lee would often
personally move the money from the organization's safe house in
Tampa down to the Canans, and here he relied, at
(13:50):
least in part, on a pilot named Shelley Levitts. Shelley
was not a smuggler, She was just someone who fell
in love with flying as a girl. Oh it was magical.
I remember rolling down the runway and that the feel
of lifting off like it was yesterday. She gets her
license when she turns eighteen and starts flying for an
(14:11):
aircraft charter operation out of Tampa. One day she gets
a referral for a new client, Lee Rich. I just
thought he was a successful businessman, or just a successful
guy and a successful family. He was very dynamic, very
easy going, laid back, handsome guy, real friendly. She started
(14:36):
flying him all over the place, Louisiana, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Texas.
It was a little while before I had any suspicions
that there might be something beyond just a businessman. Her
suspicions about who Lee really was came to a head
one night when an airport employee tipped her off that
(14:58):
the FEDS had put a transponder in her plane. They
were watching her, and I remember saying, oh, well, thank
you for the information. I appreciate that Shelley did have
a hunch about why the FEDS might be tracking her plane.
Shelley flew Lee Rich to the Caymans regularly. He would
bring these heavy briefcases. So I kind of put two
(15:22):
and two together to figure that, well, there might be
money in there, because Shelley knew the Caymans were famous
for one thing in particular, banking, lots of banks. Small island,
a few houses, and a lot of banks downtown, a
small island with a small airport, just a few buildings.
Lee would get off the airplane or grab a bag
(15:42):
or two and literally just kind of walk right into
customs and right through it to the other side. And
Shelley says that they could do that in part because
Lee Rich was so well connected in the Caymans. He
knew everyone on the island, including the customs officers. Plus
he and his associates looked so clean cut and well
put together. I would have considered them very polished executives.
(16:06):
They just happened to ultimately be involved in smuggling. This
is how Lee moved his money, posing as a perfectly
respectable businessman with his briefcases and a few coolers. I
mean literally, you go into the airport. You had one
of those big hundred court coolers as stuffed with hundreds
or fifties or twenties. We'd always pack some steaks or
(16:27):
something on top of it or something. They opened a
thing or something. You give him a couple of steaks
or whatever and smile and walk on through. From the airport.
Lee would take his coolers of cash directly to the
Bank of Nova Scotia. He was tight with one of
the bankers there who would arrange for the cash to
be counted. The bank would take a one or two
(16:48):
percent cut, and then Lee's money was clean. For a
long time. This system worked very well for mister Beach Club.
He was the man down in the can ins. In fact,
in nineteen eighty three, when Queen of England visited the
(17:10):
island on her tour of the Western Hemisphere, she took
a ride on his yacht. It all came to a
screeching halt when Lee's right hand man, Stephen Kaylish, the
gentleman smuggler, got arrested in Tampa. With Stephen in jail,
Lee now had all kinds of problems for one. He
(17:32):
was worried Stephen might start talking to the Feds, you know,
revealing secrets. But also they were logistical nightmares. They had
one million pounds of marijuana just sitting in Columbia waiting
to be moved. Lee had committed to selling it, but
without his master smuggler, how exactly was he going to
do that. I usually built people around me that I
(17:55):
could trust, and then by me trusting them and them
trusting me, I trusted what their word was. I had
lost one, Kayliss, who was a guy that did everything
for me, whether you tell him to do it or not,
and a couple of other people. I was vulnerable at
that time. Even before Stephen Kalish was arrested, Lee had
(18:18):
big problems. The US was starting to take a closer
look at offshore banking hubs like the came An Islands.
Lee still remembers the day his man at the Bank
of Nova Scotia broke off their relationship. He flat out said, Lee,
I'm not taking any more your money. Lee Rich was
stressed and a bit desperate, and that's when Shine called
(18:42):
offering the services of cousin ed the counterintelligence expert. Well,
that was an opening. He needed somebody that he could trust.
Ned played that role to the hilt. He swept Lee's
house for bugs, but then stuck around ready to pitch
in when needed, because well, Lee needed all kinds of help.
He soon asked Ned if he could get him fake
(19:04):
documents a birth certificate, passport, and driver's license. Said he'd
look into it gladly. So trust was building, But then
there were these other moments when it seemed like Lee
might just be a little bit suspicious, like maybe he
was having doubts about who Ned really was. More on this.
(19:27):
When we come back after the break, Ned remembers this
one day on the island when Lee asks him to
come on a little trip to the bank. He starts
(19:50):
talking about a rumor he'd heard that federal agents were
snooping around, and then Lee turns to Ned and says,
one of these agents looks a lot like you, So
you know, I didn't know what was going to happen.
We got to the bank and he just says, wait here.
So I'm sitting alone in the car and thinking, Okay,
this is it. You know. Lee walks back out of
(20:12):
the bank and nothing, but Ned can't shake the feeling
that Lee might beyond him. Even a little moments seemed
like they could have sinister implications like this. One day,
Lee suggests that Ned should go fishing for conk with
his butler, a guy named Burtley, so they can make
(20:32):
a dish called sea pie. This all seemed kosher until
he and Burtley walked down to the shore to a
small skiff, just the two of them, and get in there.
You know, Burtley throws his three foot my chatty through
it in a boat and I'm like, oh, this isn't
too cool. So they paddled out into the mist to
this site where Bertley supposedly knows the conk are. When
(20:55):
they get there, Burtley points at the spot where Ned
should dive to get the shellfish. Ned eyes the machete again,
and he looks at the oars, and then he looks
down at the water, and then he glances at Burtley.
That's thinking house is going to play out. Finally, he
just jumps in the water and dives for the cock.
He sees the cock, grabs it, and all the while
(21:18):
he's thinking about his next move. He was planning this
out in my head. If I come up and he's
got the machete. He ready to chop my head off.
I'm thinking, okay, I'll rock the bolt and then reach
over the edge and try to get hold of this
or to defend myself. When he surfaced, there was Burtley smiling, relaxed,
(21:39):
perfectly friendly. But Ned was spooked. It was very tense,
and there was always tense minutes like that that that
Lee hadn't said, Hey, Burtley, get rid of this guy. Well,
you'd be eaten by the sea life, you know, sharks
and crabs and snappers and ship would just eat your body.
(22:02):
You'd be gone. In Ned's mind, it began to seem
like it was just a matter of time before he
was outed. He started anticipating the would be assassins, especially
(22:23):
when he returned home to the condos where he and
Shine were staying on the island. Recently, I went down
with Ned to the Caymans and he showed me around. Okay,
well I don't see where Arabic. I think they've changed
the numbers around. But we retraced his steps and we
visited those very condos. Ned pointed out a set of
(22:45):
stairs that led up to a room where he slept,
or actually didn't sleep, No, you're always half awake waiting
waiting for the door to kick in, you know, and
you don't have a gun, you know, you couldn't have
a gun here, so no, you're pretty vulnerable. There was
hardly any people here, so we wanted to know if
(23:06):
somebody was coming in the night. We would some beer
cans on those steps here, so they hopefully stumble over
and when they came up and make a bunch of noise,
you know, a bunch of beer cans on a dark
and stairwell. That's where Ned was at. While Ned and
I were in the Caymans. We had a few quiet mornings.
(23:26):
We just chilled out in the living room of his
rental condo and talked. Being there seemed to stir up
all kinds of memories for him. He seemed more open,
and so I just kept asking questions. Let me let
me go back. I have some more earlier questions before
working on this case, before kind of arresting Toby, had
(23:50):
you ever gone undercover before? Not really, not with the FBI.
I did a lot of undercover work in the army
in Korea with drugs buying and penetrating drug organizations. This
was new to me. Ned had mentioned serving in Korea before,
(24:12):
but never in any great detail. Now he went on
to tell me that for a while he was investigating
North Korean agents who were sneaking down across the border
and selling drugs like heroin to US servicemen. In order
to stop this, Ned teamed up with his counterparts in
the South Korean Military Republic of Korea Criminal Investiga ANITY
(24:33):
Detachment and their boss his name was Tiger, and Tiger
he wanted to be on his good side because he
was a mean son of a bitch. So Ned goes
under cover to make some buys and bust these North
Korean agents. Did you have any dicey calls or dicey situations? Yeah? Yeah,
(25:00):
I had a North Korean crack off, a forty five
round of the pistol and an alley that hit about
six inches above my head he missed. Ned arrests this
North Korean agent and then turns him over to Tiger
and his men. Over there we had when it got cold,
they had oil burning heaters. As you're close to him,
there as hot as hell, So they put him in
(25:23):
a push up position in front of that heater and
just a ball cook him and then kicked the ship
out of his rib zoom beat him and did you
witness that? Oh yeah, he got burns on a skin.
I never checked his skin, but I know as hot
as hell. So I mean he's swatting and quivering. You know,
(25:46):
he knew if he if he broke the push up position,
he was going to get his ribs caved in. So yeah,
I can get real ugly, you know. In the end,
I don't know what they were did with the guy.
They took him away, so I don't know what they
did to him. Does witnessing something like that change you?
(26:10):
I don't know. You know, Um, I guess I was
always around a lot of violence, starting with the army,
and and I guess I didn't think about it at
(26:31):
the time. Let me ask you a question. You watch
this so you're and some of this is making you
aware of what people can do to someone if they
fall into the wrong hands. Is this crossing your mind
at all when you're basically the one that's behind enemy
(26:51):
lines in the Caymans. I mean you've witnessed what can happen, right, Yeah,
And you know you don't want to be taken prisoner.
I have to believe in your mind that you're you're
not going to be taken captive. When Ned told me
(27:17):
all this, I've been talking to him for over a
year on weekends, early in the morning, often several times
in the same day, and honestly, he could be very guarded.
There were some places he just would not go. And
now I kind of understood why. As Ned is struggling
(27:37):
to hold it together and the Cayans back home in Detroit,
Ned's wife Kathie rarely heard from him. She had to
rely on Ned's handler at the FBI to get updates,
and he would call me like once every couple of
weeks and go, oh, I saw Ned, and he gave
me the signal that everything's okay. And that would be
about as much contact or even knowledge that the bureau
(27:59):
had of where he was, whether he was alive, whether
he was well, you know, So that really started wearing
on me. But she does recall at least one occasion
when she did manage to talk with Ned. He told
her about a fancy dinner that he'd had with Lee
and some celebrities. He told me, oh, I had dinner
(28:19):
with Ringo Star and Barbara forget the lady's name now,
who he married who's ringo star married too? She was
one of the Bond girls. And I said to him,
how on earth do you think that I can compete
with the kind of people that you are I'm sure
running with, because I'm confident she wasn't the only woman
(28:40):
at that dinner table. You know, everybody else is in
sitting there as couples, and Ned is sitting there alone.
That doesn't even make sense, of course, not, of course not.
Cathy thought that Ned had always been very good at
playing Ed Thomas, his fictional persona, but maybe he was
too good at it. If you're going to do an
(29:01):
undercover assignment like that, you are going to have to
completely absorb yourself in that life. And in order to
do that, you have to lose this life at least
for a while. And to think that you can you
(29:22):
can do that like an actor does in a movie. Oh, I,
you know, immersed myself in the role of so and so. Yeah,
but in this life, no one is yelling cut. You know.
Cathy voiced her concerns to Ned, and he didn't object
or argue with his wife. Just you know, listen to it,
(29:42):
and and uh, who's saying is really true? That when
you get that deep undercover with a bunch of gangsters,
drug dealers and murders and bombers and whatever, that you
know you're you're losing track of reality of what you
really are. This possibility was not entirely lost on Ned's
(30:06):
bosses at the FBI. The b RO eventually decided to
send another agent named Lynn Stonebridge down to the Caymans
just to check on Ned. I mean, they knew where
he was, but who knew what was really going on.
There was nobody else sort of on his side that
was there. And then it also gave him a little
(30:26):
stress released by telling me what's going on. And you
could see he was worked up about some of the
stuff too, So he just needed someone to talk to
that he could trust. She was only on the island
for a few days, and even she sensed the danger.
You've start getting paranoid and watching everyone around you. It
sounds like a pretty wretched existence, but Ned was still determined.
(30:50):
It's not like you can call it time out and
get out of the game. You know, they say you're
in it to win it, not to play armchair psychologist,
but like do you have to push your real self
and your real feelings like down and kind of bury them.
On some level, I think he would become hardened, you know,
(31:12):
just like the rock Cid beating the hell out of
this guy. I mean they heard him. They broke his
ribj getor the ribs break. You know, this is the
North Korean that was tortured. You have to suppress your
feelings and go for the greater cause. And you know,
(31:32):
and also it's a challenge, it's it's a challenge. What
made it worth it for Ned was that slowly he
was making progress. He was climbing up the ladder, way
up the ladder. He'd started off at a roadside biker
bar Detroit with Toby. Then he got Shine, who vetted everybody.
(31:52):
He had a line on Mike Vogel, the Detroit grocery guy.
And now here he was in the Canaans. He'd found
Lee Rich, the big boss, mister beach Club. Not just
that he'd earned his trust, Lee had told him that
he was in the process of setting up a second
base of up rations in the Bahamas. The scope of
(32:13):
Ned's investigation was expanding exponentially. It seemed Ned had learned
who Lee's supplier was. The old man done in bearing
Kai at Columbia. But what was he supposed to do
with this intel? Anyhow? Officially legally that was none of
Ned's business. This was way beyond his purview as an
FBI agent. But still he had questions. He wanted to
(32:37):
know where was the money going if it couldn't be
banked in the Caymans. He wanted to know where did
this all end? Next time on deep Cover, Ned's undercover
(33:03):
identity had been compromised and they had to put a
hit on Ned and they were going to lure him
to a location and give him a hot shot of
drugs and kill him. And they also knew where we lived.
(33:38):
Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by
Karen Shakerji. Our story editor is Jack hit. Original music
and our theme was composed by Luis Gara and Flawn
Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Mia
Lobell is Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's novel is read by
Walton Goggins. Special thanks to Julia Barton had their fame,
(34:03):
Carly mcgliori, Leeta mullatd Maya Caning, Eric Sandler, Aggie Taylor,
Kadija Holland, zuwek Winn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.
Special thanks also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. Additional
thanks to Joseph Betty check out his terrific artwork. If
you ever get down to the Caymans, I'm Jake Albern
Host
Jake Halpern
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!