July 13, 2020 • 33 mins
As Ned goes deeper undercover with Toby, making busts and infiltrating biker gangs, his wife Kathy begins to worry that things are going too far. But Ned is hooked, hearing chatter about a smuggling syndicate, a massive drug warehouse, and a source nicknamed Shine, who might have intel on the whole operation. Meanwhile, down in Louisiana, an abandoned smuggling barge turns up, and local authorities find a single clue: the name Shine, etched into a notepad belonging to the smugglers.
The first version of Ned’s unpublished novel was written by James Coyne and edited by Andrea McLaughlin.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. In Michigan. In the early
nineteen eighties, an FBI agent named Ned Timmins followed a hunch.
He believed that a drug ring was smuggling massive amounts
of pot into America, and he thought the local biker
(00:38):
gangs were involved in some way. So Ned went undercover,
using a new name, Ed Thomas. He grew a fu
mancher mustache, wrote to Harley Davidson, and started hanging out
in roadside honky talks all the while gathering intel war
ahead sources up in northern Michigan bikers, and they would
(01:00):
talk about the bikers would get their supply of weed
when these big shipments would come in, you know, which
is fifty thousand pounds, one hundred thousand pounds or whatever
would come into the Detroit warehouse. Ned kept hearing chatter
there's this huge deal out there and involved shrimp boats
and barges and airplanes, and so I told my bosses
(01:23):
about it, you know, and they kind of said, yeah,
you know, right, Tim, is what he's smoking. Ned heard
that this pot might be headed to a storage facility
somewhere in Detroit, the El Dorado of stash houses over
at the FBI. Ned's bosses had their doubts, but Ned
stayed on the trail vintel, hanging out with his informants.
(01:46):
Whenever I walked into a house or one of their
houses or hotel or where they were, I always headed
in my head, Okay, what if this happens? What if
this happened? And I would go through a checklist of
what I would do. You know, I had a gun, obviously,
and here I was looking half the time. I turned around,
(02:07):
and those guys had guns and they're not supposed to.
Ned's main informant was still Toby Anderson, the violent, erratic
biker slash country western singer. Toby was a hand garnade
with a pin onw He just just a matter of
time till he's self destructed or just died in a
hail of bullets or something. You just you just couldn't
(02:29):
control him. He's just crazy. He was difficult to manage, yes,
but he was also giving that just enough, you know, crumbs.
He connect him with other bikers. He'd helped him set
up drug busts enough so that Ned could tell his bosses, look,
I'm making progress. Like At one point, Toby introduces him
(02:50):
to another criminal, and together the three of them set
up a sting out in California. Their plan was to
get meth from some dealers way out in the sticks.
There's a big field and there's mountains up each side,
and there's some hail billy there at the gate. And
(03:11):
he meets us and gets us through this gate and
it's you know, it's just a two track sage brush
cactus and just high mountain desert. And we get near
the barn and outcomes this freaking five hundred pound pig,
I mean a big pig. And I said, what the
(03:33):
fuck is it you? Oh, that's the guard hog's woman.
He said, well, he smells people if they're you know,
and the mountains are trying to survey us or whatever hills.
And that's true. A pig. He has one of the
best noses in the world. What really surprised NED is
what these hillbuildings are feeding their prized guard pig. They'd
soak a bug onion sweet onion in math and throw
(03:55):
it to the pig. The pig loved it. I mean,
he's like, you know, he wanted he wanted a fucking onion.
And you know, I didn't really trust him because he's
really fucking big, and he's got tossling shit and this
was Ned's life now and passed a drugged up pig.
Slide open the burned door and it's all Hey, pull
out a bail in the middle, and you can crawl
(04:16):
through the You crawl through the tunnel, through the hay bales,
and you come into a big room. There's thirty stations
set up for when Nick cook, Ned said it was
the biggest meth lab he'd ever seen. He handed off
the intel and a few weeks later the authorities busted
the place, and it also clarified something for Ned. Yeah,
he was a full time undercover FBI agent trying to
(04:38):
figure out if the rumors he'd been hearing were true.
But he also had another, maybe equally important job title
now babysitter. We're driving someplace and all of a sudden,
Toby's in the back seat and pulls out a gun. Well,
he could have just easily popped one in the back
of my head, but I was so pissed at him
(05:01):
the way you pulled over, took the gun away from
and threw it off the cliff. I mean, he knew
he had he had his between his legs. You know
he knew he got spanked. I'm Jake Halbern and this
is deep Cover Episode two. What will the neighbors think?
(05:52):
Ned kept pushing Toby for intel, and sometimes, apparently Toby
would just lose it on Ned, saying that he was
scared their cover would be blown, that word might get
out among Detroit's biker gangs that Toby was an informant
and that they were working together. In ned noir novel,
he depicts one of Toby's panicked rants. Toby tells him
(06:14):
they'll kill us, Bros. We fuck up and they'll kill us.
You understand, no one will even find the bodies, Just
shoot us and stuck us in a Vada ascid or
some shit. You have any idea how fucking dangerous this
shit is? Ned nodded, but Toby grabbed him by the arm,
leaned in close, close enough he could smell the ether,
the cigarettes, and the bo do you bros, you fucking
(06:37):
butter because it's me and you out there dangling right
over the goddamn edge. The dialogue may sound a bit stilted,
but Ned insists the essence is accurate, and that in
a way, the distrust was mutual. Ned was keenly aware
of how dangerous, how precarious their relationship was becoming. You
(06:59):
don't just go out in an hour and do something
and get a fugitive or whatever. We work for days.
Sometimes we're staying at hotels, we're traveling, we're flying together,
we're dry together. You know, if you don't trust that guy,
you get a problem. Because my neck is at risk
and his neck is at risk, and both of us
(07:21):
are at risk. So I better trust him and he'd
better trust me. For the stuff we were doing. Despite
the risks, Ned was increasingly comfortable in his new habitat
not just that he kind of liked it, liked being ed.
Thomas liked riding as Harley, staying out late in the bars,
gathering intel. I must though, because I was doing it.
(07:44):
There's a lot of adrenal into it. You're out there
on the edge, you know, hanging on to the edge
of the cliff with your fingernails all the time. No
one at the office was exactly telling Ned to go
to these lengths, but he felt that he needed to
be on duty all the time to do his job right.
(08:05):
You know, we did a zillion other drug deals, so
we always had something going on? What does this due
to your home life? Just trays it. You live it.
You live at twenty four to seven, your eyes waiting
for the next call, whether they wreck a car, steal
a car, break into a house, shoot somebody, stab somebody.
(08:26):
It's it's analysts. It's like taking care of juvenile delinquents
that are adult killers. Back home, Ned's wife Kathy was
discovering that her husband's alter ego was taking over ed
Thomas now needed his own room. We had three bedrooms.
(08:47):
One was more like a guest room, and I think
we had a desk in there and stuff like that.
I recall that he said, Hey, yeah, they're going to
put in an undercover phone here at the house. You know,
so if it rings, you know, you're I'm gonna you know,
here's your name, and just you know, answer it and
be cool, you know, act like you're my girlfriend. I go,
why do I have to act like me your girlfriend?
Why can't I just be your wife? Kathy was an
(09:10):
FBI agent in Detroit too, and she'd also gone undercover
just once. I did one undercover thing one time, and
I was not at all comfortable with it. I felt
like everybody can look at me and see that I'm
a cop. Kathy had spent the night at a gambling
joint run by the mob, getting to know the criminals.
Then the cops busted in. Everyone hands up against the wall.
(09:32):
Then they told Kathy you're good, you can put your
hands down now. But I was I just was like, no,
I don't. I'm so embarrassed now in front of these
people who have been so nice to me all night,
and I just found it out of there. I was
just like, yeah, don't ever make me do something like
that again. That's not me. I'm not comfortable in that situation.
I feel like a big fat liar is written like
(09:52):
all across my forehead. Her husband, Ned, he didn't seem
to have that problem. He seemed comfortable with the pressure
and the deception. Or maybe he was more than that.
I think Ned always was what one of his supervisors
gcribed Neda as an edge worker. Ned was always right
(10:13):
at the edge of going off to the criminal side.
And then one day he did the unthinkable. He brought
the criminals home with him to his leafy, upscale suburban house.
Just shows up with Toby and one of his sidekicks.
They all just sauntered up the driveway together. Well, they
(10:35):
looked just like motorcycle guys. The hair, the the you know,
instead of having a belt having belts that are like
chains or whatever. Their jeans are not like fashionable. Their
jeans are just you know, beat up jeans, and and
(10:56):
you know they've got flu Manchu mustaches and long hair.
They're not trying to give an appearance of like good looking.
I thought, oh my god, what will my name think.
I hope they didn't see them come in because they
look like really rough characters. And my neighbors belonged to
(11:20):
Oakland Hills Country Club. No one and I truly mean
no one here would ever mistake Toby or any of
his buddies for golfers. This was like the ultimate intrusion
into my life, into our life. It just is unheard of,
(11:42):
you know, it just was. It was not appropriate, and
it was it was I felt it was dangerous. People
could could have you know, followed them or seen them,
or you know, now they know where we live. Okay,
so that's Kathy the homemaker worrying. But here's Kathy the
(12:02):
FBI agent, and she's also worried. I had a lot
of my own informants, and they would never have come
to my home or I never even would have like
lunch with them or something. I mean, I'm an FBI agent,
I'm a law enforcement person. Why would they even want
to sit down any place and be seen with me.
(12:23):
You've just compromised that confidential relationship. I spoke to a
number of Ned's former colleagues, and they pretty much all
agreed with Kathy. No one brought an informant home with them.
It was too risky. Oddly enough, the one person I
spoke with from Ned's FBI days who had also done
this was his direct supervisor. He told me that he
(12:46):
and Ned were quote unquote rebels. For his part, Ned
defends himself, saying it was a judgment call, the decision
to bring Toby home. It was calculated. Well, it depends
on how much trust you having your sources, and that
also builds trusts with the sources, the sources that can
get you killed any second. Well, I'm curious, did you
(13:07):
do it just out of kind of professional relationship building
or did you do it because these were your friends
and this was your wife. I think to build a
bond with the sources you depend on those guys not
to stand up and say, hey, he's a fucking FBI
agent and you have to build this bond. So whatever
(13:28):
I was doing seemed to work. I wouldn't recommend it
to anybody. I can't teach it. I can't say that's
what to do. But that's what I did. Kathy she
didn't like it, but she didn't confront Ned or overrule him.
And Ned never really asked for permission either. Oh no, no, no, no,
you know no. See, Ned never checked in with me
(13:51):
first on anything. Our marriage was more like, hey, look,
we're going to move to a new house. Come here,
I'll take you and you will look at it. My
marriage was more traditional in that regard that, you know,
he said what we were going to do back then.
I'm going to blame this on the times a lot,
but probably also the way I was raised. It just
(14:14):
did not occur to me to object to my husband.
He has this, he's got this, It'll be fine. But
this wasn't a one off occasion. Ned brought Toby home
with him multiple times. Kathy remembers them all hanging out
on the backdeck Cookenburger's Super Casual. It was kind of
(14:34):
the opposite of the whole undercover stick, you know, like
in Donnie Brasco, where the FBI agent has two completely
separate lives, one as a gangster and one is a
suburban dad with a teflon firewall separating them. It was
almost as if Ned Timmins and Ed Thomas were morphing
into a single being. Perhaps this was inevitable given Ned's
(14:58):
strategy of building trust, but this isn't how Kathy sees it.
You know, you don't have to choose that path. You
don't have to choose to work a case in that way,
you don't have to choose to go deep cover. You know,
it all evolves. And but I know for him, he
felt like it was just spinning into the next, into
(15:21):
the next, into the next, And he told me that
he felt like he didn't know how he was ever
going to get out of it. In the midst of
all of this, Ned's game plan paid off big time
when he gets the break you've been waiting for, and
it involved, of all people, Toby's little brother, a guy
who went by the nickname Shine. One day Ned got
(15:55):
would seem like a big lead from Toby, though on
its face it seemed a bit far fetched Toby says, Hey,
I gotta tell my brother is into something really big,
but he won't let us near it because he's afraid. Now, Robert,
so what is it? He says. It has to do
with airplanes and boats and chapter trailer loads of dope
(16:18):
coming to Detroit. And Toby knew he was into something big.
Ned didn't know exactly what to make of this. Planes, boats,
tractor trailers all filled with weed. Was it possible that
Toby the Walking hand Grenade really had a brother who
was a big time criminal orchestrating all of this? If
(16:40):
this was true, how had Ned not picked up on
this sooner. Toby's brother went by the name Shine. His
real name was Clinton Anderson. He died in the late nineties,
so I had to kind of piece together a picture
of who he was. I don't have the background as
(17:01):
to why they called him Shine. About my uncle Clint.
In my memories of him, he was a ted. This
is Jesse Anderson, Toby's son. Shine was his uncle, and
Jesse loved his uncle, adored him. I talked to a
bunch of people who knew Shine well, and they all
(17:21):
described him pretty much as this big, lovable guy. One
person said he would have made a perfect Santa Clause.
Another said he looked like Wilfred Grimley, you know, the
grandfather of the actor who started all the Quaker Oats commercials.
When things got rough at home for Jesse, he actually
went to live with his uncle Clint for a while.
He loved being there. Geez, just like anywhere else, right,
(17:45):
kids running around playing football in the front yard, you know,
watching football, watching baseball, you know, life in the seventies
and early eighties, gambling, playing dart, shooting pool, you know,
normal way of life. Little Jesse had never seen a
dad who could be depended on before. I guess I
wanted that for my dad. And that's that's what I
(18:07):
always appreciated about my uncle Clint was you know, he
was I recall him always being there, and I recall
him always um, you know, never having to worry m
like I did with my dad and my immediate you know,
a line of sight and what I recall. And maybe
I was blinded by that because I was just so
happy to be with my you know, have a family,
(18:28):
have a bad wake up, go to school, not necessarily
have to worry about anything, right. It was. It was great.
Jesse says the men and his family tended to be
hard and have a short fuse. But I don't remember
my uncle Clinton like that at all. I mean, again,
for me, you know the way that I look at
my uncle Clint was it was much like it was
much like a savior. Shine had a son named Adam.
(18:54):
He was Jesse's older cousin. It took me a long
time to track him down. One night he finally agreed
to speak by phone. All right, Jake, give me a
second here. He says that Shine was a jack of
all trades, a salesman and sold cars and boats too.
Though Shin didn't talk about his work a ton, you know,
(19:17):
his work and his family's subarate. He was a good guy,
but he had an edge. Shine was a striver. He
was always looking for something beyond the working class suburb
where they started out, a place called Melvindale, a town
dominated by the nearby Ford, GM and Chrysler plants. Melvindale
(19:40):
was I fall it a factory town. Pretty much everybody
there worked and worked for the Big three and was
working class, good people. But he was kind of like
taking me out of that environment, showing me that there
was more like you know, you can't achieve more. No, no,
you don't have to just be a line worker all
your life. Adam had a lot of memories from that time,
(20:03):
like when his dad came home with a new gadget,
a mysterious briefcase filled with meters and electrical wires. The
device was known as a p SE, which stood for
Psychological Stress evaluator. It was an alternative to the traditional
lie detector, and it could be used discreetly, so it
didn't require hooking the subject up to any wires or anything. Supposedly,
(20:27):
a skilled operator could use it to pick up on
micro tremors in your voice. I spoke to a lot
of people who knew Shine and remembered vividly him showing
up with his briefcase and testing them. Oh yes, everybody
took a test. Everybody. There was a guy that always
(20:49):
carried around this sort of big boxy briefcase. As I recall,
Oh yeah, he could scarely on it. Sure he was
a good bullshitter, you know it all a little nervous
spot taking this Dagone thing he asked your questions. I
guess it works. Ask you what your name is and
you tell him. Then you tell him a lie and
so it gives him was a distinction of between the
(21:11):
truth and lie, whether it works or now, I'd scare
the shit out of you. So I imagine it would
keep people straight. And I'm sure he was one of
the most valuable tools they had, you know, in doing US.
Shine had graduated from a special course and now he
was a trained PSC operator. He took it seriously, and Adam,
(21:36):
like any kid, was curious. So there was something different.
It was interesting. I didn't know why he's doing it
on cool. Dad got a new job, you know, and
the job came with perks like this. One time his
dad took him on a business trip. They flew down
to Houston, Texas. Together. They stayed at this cool hotel
that was connected to a big shopping mall, and at
(21:57):
some point Shine tells his son, He's like, hey, I
gotta go out for a little while, you know, don't
don't leave the room, don't answer the door. Alone in
his hotel room, Adam watched TV. Minutes turned to hours,
and he began to think about what his dad had said.
Don't answer at the door. Why not? Who was it
(22:18):
that might come knocking. Adam wasn't worried exactly, but he
began to wonder what was his dad up to. But
I think maybe whoever he was working with, they had
another room in the same hotel, so they could have
been just down the hall. I don't believe he left.
I think he just grabbed his machine and you know,
(22:40):
went to another room. Adam didn't ask any questions, and
he didn't give it too much thought at the time,
but eventually he started to think back to moments like
this and wonder maybe what his father did was not
entirely on the op and up. I mean, who was
paying him to carry around that briefcase anyway. In fact,
clues began to surface that Shine was much more than
(23:01):
just a suburban dad with a mysterious job. One of
these clues turned up a thousand miles to the South
Way down in Louisiana and a lonely by you very
far from Detroit. As Ned continued to investigate the bikers
(23:38):
in Detroit, detectives in Louisiana, we're looking into a big
smuggling job. It all began with a guy named Dave Ware. Yeah,
I was a helicopter pilot on the sign to Louisiana
State Police in our region too southwest Louisiana. One day,
Dave gets a tip about an abandoned barge, so he
(23:59):
goes looking for it. Flies up a lonely stretch of
a Vermilion River, a seventy mile long by you in
southern Louisiana. It's flat, You've got agriculture fields and then area.
It's a heavy marsh and thick jungle type area. So
they were just choppering along. We looked down and we
(24:20):
see this huge barge tied off with some rope next
to some trees. And we're like, well, that's odd. And
we were kind of scratching our heads what to do.
And I said, well, I'll just land on the barge.
I mean, it's like landing on aircraft carrier. So they
land on the barge, they get out of the chopper,
they start poking around. Sure enough, they find a sealed
(24:42):
hatch welded into the deck, hidden beneath some coils of rope.
And so I went to the cargo hole of my
aircraft and dug it my little two bag I always carred,
and got a screwdriver and started digging at this rubber
ceilant and you gotta menage. The sun was out and
it was hot. And when I've popped that ceiling, the
(25:03):
spew just you know, morstar had come up and the
smell of marijuana. And we looked at each other and
smile and said bingo. The barge itself was quite large
and basically empty. All that remained with the dregs some
psyche bales that had somehow gotten a wet at the
bottom of the boat. Apparently the rest of the load,
totally a few hundred thousand pounds, had all been unloaded,
(25:27):
successfully dry and ready to smoke. A narcotics agent named
Roy Fruget took up the investigation. So we walked on
the barge and we saw marijuana sees all over it.
We looked through some drawers. We found a Panamanian flag,
we found a Colombian flag. Well, you don't have to
be Sherlock Holmes to realize that we stumbled up on
(25:50):
something that was large and scale and that it was international. Eventually,
the agents figured out that a local marine contractor had
been hired to move the barge up the river, and
as luck would have it, the contractors had a receipt
with the customer's callback number on it, trace the hallback
number and it went to a small grocery store in
(26:13):
a rural area in Judice, Louisiana, and the name of
the store was the Country Boy Grocery Store. So we
went to the Country Boy Grocery Store, and I'm talking
about a small building. It had a couple of gas
pumps in front, had a small meat market inside. They
specialized in Cajun food like stuffed chickens, buddha and cracklings,
(26:35):
that sort of thing. So we talked to the owner
because this guy's first language, which Cajun French, and he said,
with his accent, he said, you know, in the last
three months, there's been a lot of foreigners in my store.
What do you mean by foreigners? He said, you know,
he said, out of towner's people with blonde hair and
blue eyes, and ten he said, you know, Florida looking people.
(27:00):
So turns out these Florida looking people had rented a
couple of houses nearby. The agents got search warrants. There
was a three bedroom, two bath ranch style house. It
was close to the Country Bar grocery store, and when
we hit it, it had lots and lots of bunk beds,
lots of beer bottles, lots of cans of beer, some'm
(27:22):
half empty, half eaten sandwiches on the floor. I remember
one of my guys said it looked like a scene
from Animal House. Roy starts poking around in the living
room and on the coffee table, I saw a large
red book and a hard bound New York Times World Atlas.
I opened it up, started looking at it, looking actually
(27:44):
for the Gulf of Mexico. Saw that there was a
chart with a pen marking places through the Gulf of Mexico,
and then I backed it up and it went down
to barn Kill, Columbia. It was quite literally mapped out
in front of them, evidence of an international syndicate with
rats for smoking tons of drugs into the United States.
(28:07):
But everyone is gone. They don't have a single suspect.
Roy and his partner, Harvey Duplantis, continued to search the house.
We found a yellow notepad with lines on it like
you would use in school, and it didn't have any
writing on it, but it had indentations where somebody had
written on the page above it and then tore the
(28:28):
page off. Harvey remembered from grade school. He took a
number two pencil out of his truck and he scratched
over the indentations and we found a note. Of course,
we didn't have the whole note, just whatever came up
that Harvey could scribble out there, but it basically said
he was bringing more people. More people were on the way.
Harvey kneels over the table, carefully rubbing a pencil over
(28:51):
the pad, deciphering this cryptic note word by word, the
whole thing right out of a Hitchcock movie. This is
exactly what carry Grant does in north By Northwest, and
it works. At the bottom of the pad, there's actually
a signature. Someone wrote their name as if authorizing these orders,
and slowly the letters of the name appear S H,
(29:16):
I and E. Shine. Back in Detroit, Ned had no
idea what had gone down in Louisiana. He was back
at the office doing a bit of good old fashioned
detective work, following up on that tip that Toby had
(29:38):
given him about his brother, and the deeper Ned dug
into Shine's life, the more he found. We're looking at
what he has, a house and cars and everything, and
no source of income. And then we're pulling phone records,
bank records and everything, and huge deposits of fifty to
sixty thousand at a time, and we're getting travel records
(30:01):
from credit cards, and Ned says that those travel records
were suspicious. For instance, Shine its spend some time down
in the Cayman Islands, which was known as a money
laundering hub. So might Shine be his guy, the one
Ned had been looking for the key to it all.
If Ned was right, he had found his link to
(30:22):
a distant, shadowy drug network, But it didn't seem like
he had quite enough to go on. Ned believed if
he could just sit down with Shine, talk to him,
man to man, he might be able to work him,
maybe even flip him. He was starting to strategize, even
though he didn't have much to threaten Shine with except
(30:43):
maybe his badge. It sounds like you were doing some
serious bullshitting of your own. And also you could be
barking up the wrong tree. You don't know for sure
the magnitude or the right part of the game. Yeah,
the FBI knows a lot, but a lot of it
is a game to try to ferret out the information
you need. When you throw down the FBI badge and credentials,
(31:10):
it horrifies guilty people. They think the FBI knows everything.
(31:31):
Next time, a deep Cover, Ned goes to flip Shine.
Shine had a family, and it was really a devoted
family guy. You know, I just I'm gonna take every
penny they got. I'm gonna take the house, I'm gonna
take the cars, I'm gonna take the bank accounts. Everything's
gonna be gone. And that struck a dagger in them.
(32:11):
Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by
Karen Shakerji. Our story editor is Jack Hitt. 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, Heather Faine, Carly
(32:36):
Mcgliori Lee, Tom Mullad Mayakining, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland,
Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Special thanks
also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. I'm Jake Albern
Pushkin Previously on deep cover. In Michigan. In the early
nineteen eighties, an FBI agent named Ned Timmins followed a hunch.
He believed that a drug ring was smuggling massive amounts
of pot into America, and he thought the local biker
(00:38):
gangs were involved in some way. So Ned went undercover,
using a new name, Ed Thomas. He grew a fu
mancher mustache, wrote to Harley Davidson, and started hanging out
in roadside honky talks all the while gathering intel war
ahead sources up in northern Michigan bikers, and they would
(01:00):
talk about the bikers would get their supply of weed
when these big shipments would come in, you know, which
is fifty thousand pounds, one hundred thousand pounds or whatever
would come into the Detroit warehouse. Ned kept hearing chatter
there's this huge deal out there and involved shrimp boats
and barges and airplanes, and so I told my bosses
(01:23):
about it, you know, and they kind of said, yeah,
you know, right, Tim, is what he's smoking. Ned heard
that this pot might be headed to a storage facility
somewhere in Detroit, the El Dorado of stash houses over
at the FBI. Ned's bosses had their doubts, but Ned
stayed on the trail vintel, hanging out with his informants.
(01:46):
Whenever I walked into a house or one of their
houses or hotel or where they were, I always headed
in my head, Okay, what if this happens? What if
this happened? And I would go through a checklist of
what I would do. You know, I had a gun, obviously,
and here I was looking half the time. I turned around,
(02:07):
and those guys had guns and they're not supposed to.
Ned's main informant was still Toby Anderson, the violent, erratic
biker slash country western singer. Toby was a hand garnade
with a pin onw He just just a matter of
time till he's self destructed or just died in a
hail of bullets or something. You just you just couldn't
(02:29):
control him. He's just crazy. He was difficult to manage, yes,
but he was also giving that just enough, you know, crumbs.
He connect him with other bikers. He'd helped him set
up drug busts enough so that Ned could tell his bosses, look,
I'm making progress. Like At one point, Toby introduces him
(02:50):
to another criminal, and together the three of them set
up a sting out in California. Their plan was to
get meth from some dealers way out in the sticks.
There's a big field and there's mountains up each side,
and there's some hail billy there at the gate. And
(03:11):
he meets us and gets us through this gate and
it's you know, it's just a two track sage brush
cactus and just high mountain desert. And we get near
the barn and outcomes this freaking five hundred pound pig,
I mean a big pig. And I said, what the
(03:33):
fuck is it you? Oh, that's the guard hog's woman.
He said, well, he smells people if they're you know,
and the mountains are trying to survey us or whatever hills.
And that's true. A pig. He has one of the
best noses in the world. What really surprised NED is
what these hillbuildings are feeding their prized guard pig. They'd
soak a bug onion sweet onion in math and throw
(03:55):
it to the pig. The pig loved it. I mean,
he's like, you know, he wanted he wanted a fucking onion.
And you know, I didn't really trust him because he's
really fucking big, and he's got tossling shit and this
was Ned's life now and passed a drugged up pig.
Slide open the burned door and it's all Hey, pull
out a bail in the middle, and you can crawl
(04:16):
through the You crawl through the tunnel, through the hay bales,
and you come into a big room. There's thirty stations
set up for when Nick cook, Ned said it was
the biggest meth lab he'd ever seen. He handed off
the intel and a few weeks later the authorities busted
the place, and it also clarified something for Ned. Yeah,
he was a full time undercover FBI agent trying to
(04:38):
figure out if the rumors he'd been hearing were true.
But he also had another, maybe equally important job title
now babysitter. We're driving someplace and all of a sudden,
Toby's in the back seat and pulls out a gun. Well,
he could have just easily popped one in the back
of my head, but I was so pissed at him
(05:01):
the way you pulled over, took the gun away from
and threw it off the cliff. I mean, he knew
he had he had his between his legs. You know
he knew he got spanked. I'm Jake Halbern and this
is deep Cover Episode two. What will the neighbors think?
(05:52):
Ned kept pushing Toby for intel, and sometimes, apparently Toby
would just lose it on Ned, saying that he was
scared their cover would be blown, that word might get
out among Detroit's biker gangs that Toby was an informant
and that they were working together. In ned noir novel,
he depicts one of Toby's panicked rants. Toby tells him
(06:14):
they'll kill us, Bros. We fuck up and they'll kill us.
You understand, no one will even find the bodies, Just
shoot us and stuck us in a Vada ascid or
some shit. You have any idea how fucking dangerous this
shit is? Ned nodded, but Toby grabbed him by the arm,
leaned in close, close enough he could smell the ether,
the cigarettes, and the bo do you bros, you fucking
(06:37):
butter because it's me and you out there dangling right
over the goddamn edge. The dialogue may sound a bit stilted,
but Ned insists the essence is accurate, and that in
a way, the distrust was mutual. Ned was keenly aware
of how dangerous, how precarious their relationship was becoming. You
(06:59):
don't just go out in an hour and do something
and get a fugitive or whatever. We work for days.
Sometimes we're staying at hotels, we're traveling, we're flying together,
we're dry together. You know, if you don't trust that guy,
you get a problem. Because my neck is at risk
and his neck is at risk, and both of us
(07:21):
are at risk. So I better trust him and he'd
better trust me. For the stuff we were doing. Despite
the risks, Ned was increasingly comfortable in his new habitat
not just that he kind of liked it, liked being ed.
Thomas liked riding as Harley, staying out late in the bars,
gathering intel. I must though, because I was doing it.
(07:44):
There's a lot of adrenal into it. You're out there
on the edge, you know, hanging on to the edge
of the cliff with your fingernails all the time. No
one at the office was exactly telling Ned to go
to these lengths, but he felt that he needed to
be on duty all the time to do his job right.
(08:05):
You know, we did a zillion other drug deals, so
we always had something going on? What does this due
to your home life? Just trays it. You live it.
You live at twenty four to seven, your eyes waiting
for the next call, whether they wreck a car, steal
a car, break into a house, shoot somebody, stab somebody.
(08:26):
It's it's analysts. It's like taking care of juvenile delinquents
that are adult killers. Back home, Ned's wife Kathy was
discovering that her husband's alter ego was taking over ed
Thomas now needed his own room. We had three bedrooms.
(08:47):
One was more like a guest room, and I think
we had a desk in there and stuff like that.
I recall that he said, Hey, yeah, they're going to
put in an undercover phone here at the house. You know,
so if it rings, you know, you're I'm gonna you know,
here's your name, and just you know, answer it and
be cool, you know, act like you're my girlfriend. I go,
why do I have to act like me your girlfriend?
Why can't I just be your wife? Kathy was an
(09:10):
FBI agent in Detroit too, and she'd also gone undercover
just once. I did one undercover thing one time, and
I was not at all comfortable with it. I felt
like everybody can look at me and see that I'm
a cop. Kathy had spent the night at a gambling
joint run by the mob, getting to know the criminals.
Then the cops busted in. Everyone hands up against the wall.
(09:32):
Then they told Kathy you're good, you can put your
hands down now. But I was I just was like, no,
I don't. I'm so embarrassed now in front of these
people who have been so nice to me all night,
and I just found it out of there. I was
just like, yeah, don't ever make me do something like
that again. That's not me. I'm not comfortable in that situation.
I feel like a big fat liar is written like
(09:52):
all across my forehead. Her husband, Ned, he didn't seem
to have that problem. He seemed comfortable with the pressure
and the deception. Or maybe he was more than that.
I think Ned always was what one of his supervisors
gcribed Neda as an edge worker. Ned was always right
(10:13):
at the edge of going off to the criminal side.
And then one day he did the unthinkable. He brought
the criminals home with him to his leafy, upscale suburban house.
Just shows up with Toby and one of his sidekicks.
They all just sauntered up the driveway together. Well, they
(10:35):
looked just like motorcycle guys. The hair, the the you know,
instead of having a belt having belts that are like
chains or whatever. Their jeans are not like fashionable. Their
jeans are just you know, beat up jeans, and and
(10:56):
you know they've got flu Manchu mustaches and long hair.
They're not trying to give an appearance of like good looking.
I thought, oh my god, what will my name think.
I hope they didn't see them come in because they
look like really rough characters. And my neighbors belonged to
(11:20):
Oakland Hills Country Club. No one and I truly mean
no one here would ever mistake Toby or any of
his buddies for golfers. This was like the ultimate intrusion
into my life, into our life. It just is unheard of,
(11:42):
you know, it just was. It was not appropriate, and
it was it was I felt it was dangerous. People
could could have you know, followed them or seen them,
or you know, now they know where we live. Okay,
so that's Kathy the homemaker worrying. But here's Kathy the
(12:02):
FBI agent, and she's also worried. I had a lot
of my own informants, and they would never have come
to my home or I never even would have like
lunch with them or something. I mean, I'm an FBI agent,
I'm a law enforcement person. Why would they even want
to sit down any place and be seen with me.
(12:23):
You've just compromised that confidential relationship. I spoke to a
number of Ned's former colleagues, and they pretty much all
agreed with Kathy. No one brought an informant home with them.
It was too risky. Oddly enough, the one person I
spoke with from Ned's FBI days who had also done
this was his direct supervisor. He told me that he
(12:46):
and Ned were quote unquote rebels. For his part, Ned
defends himself, saying it was a judgment call, the decision
to bring Toby home. It was calculated. Well, it depends
on how much trust you having your sources, and that
also builds trusts with the sources, the sources that can
get you killed any second. Well, I'm curious, did you
(13:07):
do it just out of kind of professional relationship building
or did you do it because these were your friends
and this was your wife. I think to build a
bond with the sources you depend on those guys not
to stand up and say, hey, he's a fucking FBI
agent and you have to build this bond. So whatever
(13:28):
I was doing seemed to work. I wouldn't recommend it
to anybody. I can't teach it. I can't say that's
what to do. But that's what I did. Kathy she
didn't like it, but she didn't confront Ned or overrule him.
And Ned never really asked for permission either. Oh no, no, no, no,
you know no. See, Ned never checked in with me
(13:51):
first on anything. Our marriage was more like, hey, look,
we're going to move to a new house. Come here,
I'll take you and you will look at it. My
marriage was more traditional in that regard that, you know,
he said what we were going to do back then.
I'm going to blame this on the times a lot,
but probably also the way I was raised. It just
(14:14):
did not occur to me to object to my husband.
He has this, he's got this, It'll be fine. But
this wasn't a one off occasion. Ned brought Toby home
with him multiple times. Kathy remembers them all hanging out
on the backdeck Cookenburger's Super Casual. It was kind of
(14:34):
the opposite of the whole undercover stick, you know, like
in Donnie Brasco, where the FBI agent has two completely
separate lives, one as a gangster and one is a
suburban dad with a teflon firewall separating them. It was
almost as if Ned Timmins and Ed Thomas were morphing
into a single being. Perhaps this was inevitable given Ned's
(14:58):
strategy of building trust, but this isn't how Kathy sees it.
You know, you don't have to choose that path. You
don't have to choose to work a case in that way,
you don't have to choose to go deep cover. You know,
it all evolves. And but I know for him, he
felt like it was just spinning into the next, into
(15:21):
the next, into the next, And he told me that
he felt like he didn't know how he was ever
going to get out of it. In the midst of
all of this, Ned's game plan paid off big time
when he gets the break you've been waiting for, and
it involved, of all people, Toby's little brother, a guy
who went by the nickname Shine. One day Ned got
(15:55):
would seem like a big lead from Toby, though on
its face it seemed a bit far fetched Toby says, Hey,
I gotta tell my brother is into something really big,
but he won't let us near it because he's afraid. Now, Robert,
so what is it? He says. It has to do
with airplanes and boats and chapter trailer loads of dope
(16:18):
coming to Detroit. And Toby knew he was into something big.
Ned didn't know exactly what to make of this. Planes, boats,
tractor trailers all filled with weed. Was it possible that
Toby the Walking hand Grenade really had a brother who
was a big time criminal orchestrating all of this? If
(16:40):
this was true, how had Ned not picked up on
this sooner. Toby's brother went by the name Shine. His
real name was Clinton Anderson. He died in the late nineties,
so I had to kind of piece together a picture
of who he was. I don't have the background as
(17:01):
to why they called him Shine. About my uncle Clint.
In my memories of him, he was a ted. This
is Jesse Anderson, Toby's son. Shine was his uncle, and
Jesse loved his uncle, adored him. I talked to a
bunch of people who knew Shine well, and they all
(17:21):
described him pretty much as this big, lovable guy. One
person said he would have made a perfect Santa Clause.
Another said he looked like Wilfred Grimley, you know, the
grandfather of the actor who started all the Quaker Oats commercials.
When things got rough at home for Jesse, he actually
went to live with his uncle Clint for a while.
He loved being there. Geez, just like anywhere else, right,
(17:45):
kids running around playing football in the front yard, you know,
watching football, watching baseball, you know, life in the seventies
and early eighties, gambling, playing dart, shooting pool, you know,
normal way of life. Little Jesse had never seen a
dad who could be depended on before. I guess I
wanted that for my dad. And that's that's what I
(18:07):
always appreciated about my uncle Clint was you know, he
was I recall him always being there, and I recall
him always um, you know, never having to worry m
like I did with my dad and my immediate you know,
a line of sight and what I recall. And maybe
I was blinded by that because I was just so
happy to be with my you know, have a family,
(18:28):
have a bad wake up, go to school, not necessarily
have to worry about anything, right. It was. It was great.
Jesse says the men and his family tended to be
hard and have a short fuse. But I don't remember
my uncle Clinton like that at all. I mean, again,
for me, you know the way that I look at
my uncle Clint was it was much like it was
much like a savior. Shine had a son named Adam.
(18:54):
He was Jesse's older cousin. It took me a long
time to track him down. One night he finally agreed
to speak by phone. All right, Jake, give me a
second here. He says that Shine was a jack of
all trades, a salesman and sold cars and boats too.
Though Shin didn't talk about his work a ton, you know,
(19:17):
his work and his family's subarate. He was a good guy,
but he had an edge. Shine was a striver. He
was always looking for something beyond the working class suburb
where they started out, a place called Melvindale, a town
dominated by the nearby Ford, GM and Chrysler plants. Melvindale
(19:40):
was I fall it a factory town. Pretty much everybody
there worked and worked for the Big three and was
working class, good people. But he was kind of like
taking me out of that environment, showing me that there
was more like you know, you can't achieve more. No, no,
you don't have to just be a line worker all
your life. Adam had a lot of memories from that time,
(20:03):
like when his dad came home with a new gadget,
a mysterious briefcase filled with meters and electrical wires. The
device was known as a p SE, which stood for
Psychological Stress evaluator. It was an alternative to the traditional
lie detector, and it could be used discreetly, so it
didn't require hooking the subject up to any wires or anything. Supposedly,
(20:27):
a skilled operator could use it to pick up on
micro tremors in your voice. I spoke to a lot
of people who knew Shine and remembered vividly him showing
up with his briefcase and testing them. Oh yes, everybody
took a test. Everybody. There was a guy that always
(20:49):
carried around this sort of big boxy briefcase. As I recall,
Oh yeah, he could scarely on it. Sure he was
a good bullshitter, you know it all a little nervous
spot taking this Dagone thing he asked your questions. I
guess it works. Ask you what your name is and
you tell him. Then you tell him a lie and
so it gives him was a distinction of between the
(21:11):
truth and lie, whether it works or now, I'd scare
the shit out of you. So I imagine it would
keep people straight. And I'm sure he was one of
the most valuable tools they had, you know, in doing US.
Shine had graduated from a special course and now he
was a trained PSC operator. He took it seriously, and Adam,
(21:36):
like any kid, was curious. So there was something different.
It was interesting. I didn't know why he's doing it
on cool. Dad got a new job, you know, and
the job came with perks like this. One time his
dad took him on a business trip. They flew down
to Houston, Texas. Together. They stayed at this cool hotel
that was connected to a big shopping mall, and at
(21:57):
some point Shine tells his son, He's like, hey, I
gotta go out for a little while, you know, don't
don't leave the room, don't answer the door. Alone in
his hotel room, Adam watched TV. Minutes turned to hours,
and he began to think about what his dad had said.
Don't answer at the door. Why not? Who was it
(22:18):
that might come knocking. Adam wasn't worried exactly, but he
began to wonder what was his dad up to. But
I think maybe whoever he was working with, they had
another room in the same hotel, so they could have
been just down the hall. I don't believe he left.
I think he just grabbed his machine and you know,
(22:40):
went to another room. Adam didn't ask any questions, and
he didn't give it too much thought at the time,
but eventually he started to think back to moments like
this and wonder maybe what his father did was not
entirely on the op and up. I mean, who was
paying him to carry around that briefcase anyway. In fact,
clues began to surface that Shine was much more than
(23:01):
just a suburban dad with a mysterious job. One of
these clues turned up a thousand miles to the South
Way down in Louisiana and a lonely by you very
far from Detroit. As Ned continued to investigate the bikers
(23:38):
in Detroit, detectives in Louisiana, we're looking into a big
smuggling job. It all began with a guy named Dave Ware. Yeah,
I was a helicopter pilot on the sign to Louisiana
State Police in our region too southwest Louisiana. One day,
Dave gets a tip about an abandoned barge, so he
(23:59):
goes looking for it. Flies up a lonely stretch of
a Vermilion River, a seventy mile long by you in
southern Louisiana. It's flat, You've got agriculture fields and then area.
It's a heavy marsh and thick jungle type area. So
they were just choppering along. We looked down and we
(24:20):
see this huge barge tied off with some rope next
to some trees. And we're like, well, that's odd. And
we were kind of scratching our heads what to do.
And I said, well, I'll just land on the barge.
I mean, it's like landing on aircraft carrier. So they
land on the barge, they get out of the chopper,
they start poking around. Sure enough, they find a sealed
(24:42):
hatch welded into the deck, hidden beneath some coils of rope.
And so I went to the cargo hole of my
aircraft and dug it my little two bag I always carred,
and got a screwdriver and started digging at this rubber
ceilant and you gotta menage. The sun was out and
it was hot. And when I've popped that ceiling, the
(25:03):
spew just you know, morstar had come up and the
smell of marijuana. And we looked at each other and
smile and said bingo. The barge itself was quite large
and basically empty. All that remained with the dregs some
psyche bales that had somehow gotten a wet at the
bottom of the boat. Apparently the rest of the load,
totally a few hundred thousand pounds, had all been unloaded,
(25:27):
successfully dry and ready to smoke. A narcotics agent named
Roy Fruget took up the investigation. So we walked on
the barge and we saw marijuana sees all over it.
We looked through some drawers. We found a Panamanian flag,
we found a Colombian flag. Well, you don't have to
be Sherlock Holmes to realize that we stumbled up on
(25:50):
something that was large and scale and that it was international. Eventually,
the agents figured out that a local marine contractor had
been hired to move the barge up the river, and
as luck would have it, the contractors had a receipt
with the customer's callback number on it, trace the hallback
number and it went to a small grocery store in
(26:13):
a rural area in Judice, Louisiana, and the name of
the store was the Country Boy Grocery Store. So we
went to the Country Boy Grocery Store, and I'm talking
about a small building. It had a couple of gas
pumps in front, had a small meat market inside. They
specialized in Cajun food like stuffed chickens, buddha and cracklings,
(26:35):
that sort of thing. So we talked to the owner
because this guy's first language, which Cajun French, and he said,
with his accent, he said, you know, in the last
three months, there's been a lot of foreigners in my store.
What do you mean by foreigners? He said, you know,
he said, out of towner's people with blonde hair and
blue eyes, and ten he said, you know, Florida looking people.
(27:00):
So turns out these Florida looking people had rented a
couple of houses nearby. The agents got search warrants. There
was a three bedroom, two bath ranch style house. It
was close to the Country Bar grocery store, and when
we hit it, it had lots and lots of bunk beds,
lots of beer bottles, lots of cans of beer, some'm
(27:22):
half empty, half eaten sandwiches on the floor. I remember
one of my guys said it looked like a scene
from Animal House. Roy starts poking around in the living
room and on the coffee table, I saw a large
red book and a hard bound New York Times World Atlas.
I opened it up, started looking at it, looking actually
(27:44):
for the Gulf of Mexico. Saw that there was a
chart with a pen marking places through the Gulf of Mexico,
and then I backed it up and it went down
to barn Kill, Columbia. It was quite literally mapped out
in front of them, evidence of an international syndicate with
rats for smoking tons of drugs into the United States.
(28:07):
But everyone is gone. They don't have a single suspect.
Roy and his partner, Harvey Duplantis, continued to search the house.
We found a yellow notepad with lines on it like
you would use in school, and it didn't have any
writing on it, but it had indentations where somebody had
written on the page above it and then tore the
(28:28):
page off. Harvey remembered from grade school. He took a
number two pencil out of his truck and he scratched
over the indentations and we found a note. Of course,
we didn't have the whole note, just whatever came up
that Harvey could scribble out there, but it basically said
he was bringing more people. More people were on the way.
Harvey kneels over the table, carefully rubbing a pencil over
(28:51):
the pad, deciphering this cryptic note word by word, the
whole thing right out of a Hitchcock movie. This is
exactly what carry Grant does in north By Northwest, and
it works. At the bottom of the pad, there's actually
a signature. Someone wrote their name as if authorizing these orders,
and slowly the letters of the name appear S H,
(29:16):
I and E. Shine. Back in Detroit, Ned had no
idea what had gone down in Louisiana. He was back
at the office doing a bit of good old fashioned
detective work, following up on that tip that Toby had
(29:38):
given him about his brother, and the deeper Ned dug
into Shine's life, the more he found. We're looking at
what he has, a house and cars and everything, and
no source of income. And then we're pulling phone records,
bank records and everything, and huge deposits of fifty to
sixty thousand at a time, and we're getting travel records
(30:01):
from credit cards, and Ned says that those travel records
were suspicious. For instance, Shine its spend some time down
in the Cayman Islands, which was known as a money
laundering hub. So might Shine be his guy, the one
Ned had been looking for the key to it all.
If Ned was right, he had found his link to
(30:22):
a distant, shadowy drug network, But it didn't seem like
he had quite enough to go on. Ned believed if
he could just sit down with Shine, talk to him,
man to man, he might be able to work him,
maybe even flip him. He was starting to strategize, even
though he didn't have much to threaten Shine with except
(30:43):
maybe his badge. It sounds like you were doing some
serious bullshitting of your own. And also you could be
barking up the wrong tree. You don't know for sure
the magnitude or the right part of the game. Yeah,
the FBI knows a lot, but a lot of it
is a game to try to ferret out the information
you need. When you throw down the FBI badge and credentials,
(31:10):
it horrifies guilty people. They think the FBI knows everything.
(31:31):
Next time, a deep Cover, Ned goes to flip Shine.
Shine had a family, and it was really a devoted
family guy. You know, I just I'm gonna take every
penny they got. I'm gonna take the house, I'm gonna
take the cars, I'm gonna take the bank accounts. Everything's
gonna be gone. And that struck a dagger in them.
(32:11):
Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by
Karen Shakerji. Our story editor is Jack Hitt. 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, Heather Faine, Carly
(32:36):
Mcgliori Lee, Tom Mullad Mayakining, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland,
Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Special thanks
also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. I'm Jake Albern
Host
Jake Halpern
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