August 31, 2020 • 43 mins
Ned gets too close with a female source, a dangerous move that stands to end his marriage and perhaps even his career at the FBI. Meanwhile, tensions between the U.S. and Noriega ramp up. President Bush calls for an invasion of Panama. The final act in our saga ends with a full blown war.
The first version of Ned’s unpublished novel was written by James Coyne and edited by Andrea McLaughlin.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 the mid nineteen eighties,
the FBI took down a massive drug smuggling ring which
was importing huge loads of marijuana from Colombia into the
(00:35):
United States with the help of agent Ned Timmins. The
three ring leaders were caught and imprisoned. Case closed, or
so it appeared, until one of the ringleaders, Stephen Kaylish,
revealed that there was a silent partner, and he was
none other than General Manuel Noriega, the ruler of Panama
(00:55):
and a top CIA asset. This prompted congressional hearings and
an indictment. Meanwhile, Ned was still busy at the FBI.
Thanks to all of us undercover work, Ned still had
all minds of contacts in the drug world and they
were still paying off. In fact, he was getting even
(01:16):
deeper into the illegal drug trade. These are the people
that would have supplied the drugs to likely rich. There
are the people that controlled everything on the Earth coast
to Columbia. At one point, Ned pose as a buyer
and he busted a smuggler who was bringing in cocaine
(01:36):
and marijuana into the US. So another win for Ned,
and it also opened yet another door for him. Afterwards,
Neddie got a call from the smuggler's wife, a woman
from Colombia. We'll call her Simone. Simone reached out to
(01:58):
Ned because she wanted to help her husband. Basically, she
wanted to get his sentence reduced or get him moved
to a better prison. Simone had information to trade, so
she contact did Ned, hoping to make a deal. She
was connected with the biggest people in the cartels and
talked a good game. She knew what she was talking about,
she knew the right names. Ned was eager to work
(02:21):
Simone's connections, but he was also leary about messing with
the Colombians. I don't think twice at killing you the Colombians.
Anything can happen, you know. Remember you don't know anybody
but yourself. So Ned had his concerns, but he's still
interested in working with Simone. Seeing where her connections might
(02:44):
take him. He decided to ask his wife, Kathy Timmins
for help. At the time, Kathy was busy with her
own work at the FBI and she was pregnant with
their second child. So Ned said, I want you to
come down and meet her so that you know she
has someone that she can call as the backup person
to me, you know, blah blah blah blah blah blah,
(03:05):
as in here we go again. I mean she'd been
through this before, like when Ned came home with Toby Anderson,
the violent country western singer, and now this I always
was being introduced to his his informants or his co
operators as as like the backup person. You know, I
(03:26):
wasn't listed as the case agent or anything like that.
I think it just gave Ned a feeling of you know,
and may and maybe he did it to try and
further show the the co operator you know that here's
here's someone else that you know has got your back.
(03:46):
So despite it all, Kathy agreed to meet Simone, Ned's
latest source at a hotel in Detroit. I went down
to the hotel and then met her, and you know,
she spoke briefly and he said, well, you know, if
you need anything, give me a call. You know that
(04:08):
you're gonna be working with Ned. But on the way home,
Cathy had second thoughts about the whole arrangement. I mean,
she was strikingly beautiful woman and now she's sitting here
with no husband, she's got no other connections. Besides, Ned,
(04:28):
it's not a not a good situation to have your
husband involved in. I mean, you can almost predict trouble.
I'm Jake Albern and this is deep Cover, our final
episode nineteen eighty nine. Yes, hey, is this is Jake.
(05:16):
How are you? I'm okay? Thank you? Can you're hear me? Okay?
That's Simone. There are a lot of details about her
story that I can't share with you. I need to
protect her identity. But here's what you need to know.
After meeting Ned, she started brainstorming with him about what
intel she could offer. She was still hoping to help
(05:38):
her husband, who at this point was in federal prison
in Michigan. Will please started conversations, a lot of conversation.
It was, as I said, a person that you could trust.
But she was scared about ratting on the cartels and
ultimately she got cold feet. It was too dangerous. So
(06:01):
I didn't know want to take one point, and this
meant she couldn't help her husband. But she actually kept
meeting with Ned, and I think one of those days
who were sitting in the restroom, i'll attracted to each other.
Simone says that she trusted Ned more than that that
he seemed like a hero to her. That's the word
(06:23):
she used, whoa because the way he moved, the way
he taught his security, he's self confident, how muchure he was,
and those were things in his personality that I was attracted.
(06:43):
Simone eventually told Ned that she was willing to connect
him with other sources. She knew another Columbian who needed
help and he was willing to talk. Simone even offered
to meet Ned in Venezuela and make the necessary introductions.
They spent a week down there together. Oh, Jake, it's
(07:04):
almost like the two of us were separated from the world.
You know, just sat her own, drank wine and talked
about other stuff. And well, just intelligence is beautiful, you know.
I mean you walked through the airport whether and people
were running into pilings and walls and dusts staring at her.
(07:25):
You know. I spoke with another FBI agent who was
down in Venezuela with them. He told me that Simone
was beguiling. He said, quote, she didn't walk, she glided.
She was quite the beauty and she knew how to
use it too. This agent suspected that Ned and Simone
were getting a bit too close, but he didn't say anything,
(07:46):
in part because Ned was such a veteran at this
type of work. Ned and Simone did have an affair.
It actually started just a few months after they met.
It was like an escape, an escape from what, escape
from drug cases and FBI and and uh, you know,
(08:12):
stress and whatever. It was a release. It was almost
like I didn't care anymore. What do you mean you
didn't care about what exactly? I was totally burned out
with the FBI and the stress of running big cases
like this and dealing with other divisions and other agencies,
(08:35):
and you know, it's very complicated to work big cases
and abide by the rules and and all the legal
issues and FBI protocol and everything. It was just an escape.
I asked Simon if she ever felt pressured or coerced
(08:56):
by Ned. She said no, never, that their feelings were
mutual and her family adored Ned. I was really also
with me, was like, so he was sick. I know. Yeah.
(09:19):
All of that being said, Ned's affair created some serious problems. Obviously,
it was not good for his marriage and professionally well,
Ned was a federal agent. Someone was providing information to
the FBI, and Ned was supposed to be assessing the
value of her intel. Could she or her connections help
the US government or not? Now, NED couldn't really make
(09:42):
that call objectively. There was a conflict of interest and
a power and balance too. It's not too ethical, it
wasn't too honorable, Hannah. It just happened after it started.
Did you have a moment of like, oh shit, what
(10:03):
have I done? Kind of thing? Yeah, I mean you
always had thoughts that it's the wrong thing to do.
It's it's nothing you want to want to become public
er or whatever. You know. It was just kind of
spiraling out of control. I didn't know where it was
going to land. While all this was going on, Ned's
(10:29):
biggest case, the one that helps spark congressional hearings and
the indictment of Noriega, that case was still simmering. The
defendants in the case we're all serving time. Mister beach club,
the gentleman smuggler, and the grocery guy. They're just counting
the days and the weeks and the months until one
day in mid December of nineteen eighty nine, when something
(10:51):
weird happens. On that day, Stephen Kaylish, the gentleman smuggler
says he was thrown into solitary confinement. Well, solitary you
have no access to television, radio, I mean you get
a blanket, pillow, food, you don't have contact with other prisoners.
It's basically for protection. Stephen had been watching the news
(11:13):
for weeks and had an inkling that something big was
about to go down in Panama. You know, they've ratcheted
up this whole, this whole thing about Noriega and Panama.
It's in the news almost daily. Noriega's waving a fucking
machete around. I mean, I'm watching them just fall to pieces,
(11:33):
you know, but I mean the guy's office rocker. For
over a year, Noriega had been thumbing his nose at
the US, basically saying, you guys want me gone, but
you can't do anything about it. Remember, thanks in large
part to this investigation and Stephen Kaylish's account, Noriega had
been indicted as a drug trafficker, and it seemed like
(11:54):
this indictment was now fueling something bigger, like the US
might actually take action. In his novel, Ned writes about
how big a deal it would be if the US
could take down Noriega. Ned knew the very little of
what he was doing made any real difference in the
drug war. It was a cynicism that came with a territory.
(12:15):
As long as there was demand, there would be people
willing to run the risks of supply. As long as
twenty million Americans were smoking dope, there would be dope
in America. There would be cocaine and heroine, and for
the pill poppers, there would be crooked doctors and false prescriptions.
He knew that, but getting to a guy like Noriego
would make a difference. Down in Panama, Noriego was presenting
(12:41):
himself as the great defender of his country and its canal.
He delivered impassioned speeches, hyping his role as the hero,
almost like pr stunts, the way a promoter might hype
an upcoming fight between two heavyweights. And this is when
Noriega appeared, wielding a machette as he spoke to a crowd,
(13:13):
and eventually all of his taunts they hit home. With
President George Bush Senior. Part of the problem was optics
to the public. Bush sometimes came across as mild mannered
and even meek when he was running for president. Newsweek
even ran a cover story about Bush that would become
infamous called Fighting the whimp Factor. And now here was Noriega,
(13:37):
the uber alpha male, waiving his machete. Gradually tension mounted.
The US issued sanctions against Panama and tried pressuring Noriega
to step down. Noriega just dug in his heels. So
the stage was set, and then a group of Panamanian
soldiers opened fire on four off duty US servicemen. Good
(14:00):
evening every science an American military man was killed by
a Panamanian fruit Saturday night, President Bush and Panama's military dictator,
General Manuel Noriega, have been circling each other from a distance.
Bush addressed the nation and laid out the case for war.
Many attempts have been made to resolve this crisis through
(14:20):
diplomacy and negotiations. All were rejected by the dictator of Panama,
General Manuel Noriega, an indicted drug trafficker. They called the
invasion operation just cause it was a big undertaking, involving
(14:43):
nearly twenty six thousand US troops and three hundred aircraft.
During the fighting, twenty three US servicemen died, hundreds of
Panamenians were killed, maybe more. The exact death toll remains
in dispute. Some estimates are in the thousands. It's a
little stomach churning to think about the number of people
(15:04):
who died to capture a single man. And for a while,
Noriega himself was nowhere to be found, which back in
DC was rather awkward. I've been frustrated that he's been
in power this long, extraordinarily frustrated. The good news he's
out of power. The bad news he has not yet
(15:26):
been brought to justice. US forces eventually tracked down Noriega
hiding in the Vatican embassy. They tried to smoke Noriega
out by blasting rock music deafening volumes. I actually remember
watching this all unfold as a kid on TV. The
(15:49):
soldiers played songs like We're not going to take it
by Twisted Sister. US generals eventually called off the tactic
after a Vatican officials complained anyway. Noriega eventually turned himself
in and that was it. The last member of the
(16:12):
smuggling syndicate was in custody. After his capture, Noriega was
flown to Miami, where he went on trial. He was
found guilty and sentenced to forty years in prison on
eight counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering. Officially,
(16:34):
that was the end of the story, neatly packaged with
a bow operation just cause, a righteous effort to take
down a drug trafficker. But I gotta tell you, like
so many people, I never really believe that this is
why the US invaded. So I talked with John Dingis,
a former MPR journalist who covered Noriega at the time.
(16:54):
He also wrote an excellent book on Noriega called Our
Man and Panama. I don't buy the theories that are
put forward of why the invasion was done other than
a raw exercise of US power. For John, there war
wasn't about drug trafficking charges or our desire to restore
democracy in Panama. I think it was a power decision
(17:19):
by George Bush, the fact that Noriega had defied him personally.
You don't fool around with the US government in the
way that Noriega was doing it. That's it the old
rules of the playground. A little guy acts out, the
big guy puts him in his place. It's a classic
gangster move. In the end, seems like what Ned Timmins
(17:46):
and Stephen Klish helped provide. Wasn't a motivation for war,
wasn't a cause? They just provided a convenient excuse when
we come back. A moment of reckoning for Ned, both
for his marriage and his career. Months before the invasion,
(18:26):
as the whole conflict between Bush and Noriego was still
heating up, Ned was facing problems of his own. He'd
been having an affair with his source, Simone, and he
was still working with her now down in Miami. At
some point he started to worry that his colleagues were
spying on him. Like he remembers this one day when
he was driving around. I was starving, so I whipped
(18:48):
around a few times and pulled into like a burger
king or something, and all of a sudden, here's what
I believe was an agent comes running through the alley
and prep radio fell out of his waistband and I
look and I see him jump in a car and
pretty obvious FBI surveillance. Suddenly the paranoia that Ned felt
(19:13):
down in the Caymans kicked back in. There was a
supervisor in Miami. I strongly believed that, you know, he
when I'd come into Miami for the meetings, that he'd
have me surveiled. I would meet with Simone, but never,
you know, there was never an overnight stuff or anything.
I meet, whether he usually had somebody else with me, whatever,
(19:35):
you know, I think he kind of felt something was
going on. Meanwhile, back in Detroit, Cathy gets a call
from Ned's boss. He'd been in touch with the supervisor
down in Miami. Apparently the guy who'd been watching Ned
and the supervisor in Miami had said that Ned was
in trouble and that they were pulling him in, and
(20:00):
that Ned was having an inappropriate relationship, a sexual relationship
with with the female operative, and that that Ned denied it,
but that they were going to be sending him home.
(20:21):
Kathy says she'd actually suspected what Ned had been up
to for some time. Kathy was an investigator, and a
good one. She'd found hotel matches in Ned's coat one
night and pieced together that he'd been visiting a hotel
where Simone was staying. You know, you can imagine it's
a typical married fight at that point. It's got nothing
really much to do with the FBI or his undercover work,
(20:44):
and I couldn't have cared less about his undercover work
at that point, I just said, you know, I don't
want to I don't want to talk to you about it.
I don't you know, I don't want you near me.
Then there is the issue of what would have happened
to Ned professionally, what the consequences might be for having
(21:05):
an affair with Simone. Typically, what you would do next
in the FBI is you start an investigation to find
out what may or may not have also been compromised.
On that case, I don't believe that they opened one
up on him because he basically came home and said
that he was going to resign. Ned says there was
no investigation. He says he came back from Miami and
(21:28):
resigned on his own accord. At the office in Detroit.
No one knew why Ned suddenly disappeared. Even his partner
Linnis then a Lavish's was mystified. I think everybody was
kind of scratching their heads. It was kind of a shocker, saying, gee,
what happened? Question was you know, I'm saying, literally thinking
(21:49):
back at it, nobody really knew. Was he terminated or
did he leave on his own? No, there was no
real explanation as to why he was there. One day,
when the next day he's not. Officially, the FBI said
it wouldn't talk to me about Ned, but I did
speak with one of Ned's former supervisors from the early eighties.
He wasn't there when Ned resigned, but the way that
(22:10):
it all played out for Ned, it didn't really surprise him.
The supervisor told me that back then, in certain situations,
agents did sometimes just resigned to avoid a big, messy investigation.
He also told me that six years was a very
long time to do undercover work. At one point, I asked, Ned,
why didn't you just walk away before things got out
(22:32):
of control, like back when your first son was born.
I don't know if if you want to call it
an addiction, adrenaline addiction, or you know, whatever it was.
That's all I lived for was I mean, you know,
I love my kids. I talked to him every day.
(22:53):
Yet you know they're on separate size of the US,
but I can you know, I can't spend a lot
of time with them, but you know, we we talk
every day. I don't know what would happened. Maybe if
I could pull the throttle back hand, all things would
have been a lot different, But it didn't happen. So,
(23:17):
Cathy says she respects what Ned accomplished as an agent,
but it's all overshadowed by the cost that it exacted
on both of them personally, And she still wonders how
and if it might have all played out differently, if
somehow Ned had been able to walk away from the
undercover work, if he had just been working cases. You know,
(23:38):
you don't have those opportunities. You can't go sit at
a bar all day if you're working cases. You know,
you can't go off on these. You can't create a
whole new persona of yourself. You are who you are.
You're just an FBI agent. You're not God, You're not
some movie star, you know, having dinners with fancy people
in fancy places, and you know, you're just an average person.
(24:02):
If you remove the undercover work from the equation, might
our marriage have failed over time because of alcohol and
fooling around the stuff. Maybe, but we will never know.
In any case, After he stepped down, Ned's colleagues at
the FBI did throw him a little goodbye party. It
was at this restaurant in Oakland County. Some people from
(24:24):
the other law enforcement agencies, from our old police department came,
so it wasn't hugely attended, but you know, there were
enough people there, and you know, they gave him a
plaque and wished him well, and you know, we all
had lunch, and you know, he gave a little talk
about how he'll miss the FBI, and you know, but
this is what he wants to do now. And he
(24:48):
worked so hard and that's all he ever wanted to be,
was an FBI agent, and he just threw it all away,
literally threw it all away. Looking back, Ned says at
the undercover work, it kind of slowly wore him down,
(25:09):
and that's why he resigned. I'd just had it was
out of gas. I wanted to do something different, you know,
I had just exhausted with the FBI. And I'm sure
he was. But the way he talks about it, it's
(25:29):
clear to me that these were his glory days. And honestly,
I think part of Ned is still stuck in nineteen
eighty nine. He talks about everything that happened like it
was yesterday, boasting about the role that he played in history.
And there is a certain logic to his conviction. Ned
flipped Toby, which led him to shine, which perhaps more
than anything else, led to the downfall of Lee Rich
(25:52):
and in a way, Stephen Kalish too. Without them, there's
no star witness to testify against Noriega, and without that, well,
there's much less of a pretext for invading Panama. A
bit of a stretch, maybe, but it's not crazy. When
(26:24):
I was done reporting this story, I went back and
reread Ned's novel. What struck me most was how and
where it ended. The image that we're left with is
of Ned at the very top of his game. Ned
was back to the less glamorous, if more direct work
of hitting the dealers where they lived. He'd gotten so
used to undercover work he would literally walk from a
(26:45):
courthouse where he had been testifying and make a buye
in his suit and tie. He didn't give a fuck anymore,
and it only made him even better at the work.
In the novel, Ned doesn't resign from the FBI. He
just goes right back to work chasing bad guys. And
in the very last scene of the book, Ned is
(27:07):
down on Louisiana. He's just finished visiting Lee Rich in jail,
and he's at some hotel, sitting at the bar. The
lighting is very dim, and mysterious, and he meets this
woman who's clearly simone. It's their first encounter. He's just
having a drink and she walks in. Using the mirror
(27:27):
behind the bottles of booze on display on the top shelf,
he watched the figure of a woman moved through the
dim light. He turned as she got close enough, and
found himself looking into the face of one of the
most beautiful women he had ever seen. She put a
newspaper in front of Ned. It was an article he
had read, an article about the case and ultimately about him.
(27:50):
Are you this agent? Ned turned to face her fully.
The fuzzy edges of perception given to him by the
whiskey started to straighten themselves as he scanned the room
to be sure she was alone. Columbians were known to
use women as assassins, or maybe she was just marking
him for another. But apart from a few the drunks
in the room given her the once over, no one
(28:12):
was paying any attention to him. Who's asking? The woman
goes on to tell Ned she knows someone down in
Columbia who's in deep trouble. Ned took her by the
elbow and guided her to a seat next to him.
What is it you need, he asked. She looked back
at him with tears glossing the surface of her eyes.
(28:35):
We need your help. And that's how it ends, kind
of suddenly. I guess you could call it a cliffhanger
or a teaser for a sequel, but you get the
basic idea. Ned is about to go off on another
adventure to help this damsel in distress. While he never
(28:59):
directly admitted it to me, I think Ned spends a
fair amount of time thinking about how this all might
have played out differently. In addition to his novel, he
teamed up with different and cranked out two screenplays, one
called Dope and the other called The Came In Connection.
Like the novel, they read kind of like alternate versions
of history, parallel universes, with the same characters but different outcomes.
(29:27):
He had some guy that was writing some screenplay or
something out in La and and and I said, Ned,
the whole story doesn't make any sense unless you tell
the end. It's really not a success story at all,
you know. I mean, sure his cases might have worked
out great, but you know it is not a success
(29:48):
story at all. And no one knows them better than Ned.
Later on, I told Ned what Cathy said. That's that
could be looked at that way. You know, well, I
mean it took a toll. You take a psychological and
(30:10):
a physical beating for all this stuff, you know, so
everything you pay a big price for. It's almost like
I was on a rocket and as no matter how
high is that rocket going to go before it turns
around falls back to Earth. I don't know. Would you
know that rocket was going to run out of gas
one day? So maybe it did, you know. It's been
(30:40):
about thirty five years since Ned Timmins made his big bust,
sending a whole host of criminals away to prison. Mike Vogel,
the distributor, the grocery guy. He stayed in the Detroit area,
in that quaint little town right out of a Norman
Rockwell painting, kind of the last place you might expect
(31:01):
to find a former crime boss. Mike also served ten
years in prison. His old life on the outside gradually
fell apart. When you get out, or actually when you
go in, there's a realization you don't control a fucking thing.
You don't control anything in your life except maybe when
you breathe and when you don't breathe, and I was
(31:24):
aware that gone that long, no marriage could survive it,
none whatsoever. By the time he got out, Mike's ex
wife had remarried, and when Mike went to pick up
some of his old furniture from her house, he saw
that his kids had posted some of their artwork in
the kitchen on the fridge. When he took a closer look,
(31:45):
Mike saw that his kids had changed their last names.
They'd taken on the stepdad's last name. Mike confronted his
ex wife, said, what the fuck are you doing? This
is Oh well, that's the way it was. You can't
hold blame for people that believe they're doing the best
(32:06):
for other people. Mike told me that he later reconnected
with his kids, that he developed a relationship with them,
but it took time. Sadly, just before this podcast was released,
Mike passed away at the age of sixty nine. As
for Stephen Kaylish, he told me that he had to
(32:26):
come to terms with the past. Over the years, a
lot of stories have surfaced about Noriega and how brutal
he was that he'd had a rival executed. Stephen claims
that this wasn't the Noriega that he knew back in
the early eighties. Still, it was a moment of reckoning
for him. I wish ashamed. It's probably the best description
(32:53):
ashamed that I would. I had done so much and
tied myself so closely to a man that was capable
of such atrocities. After getting out of prison, Stephen started
a telecom business that made cards, you know, the ones
he's swiped. He says that his business did very well,
(33:13):
and he ended up moving into that big mansion out
in Hawaii where I visited him together. He and his wife,
Faby run a horse ranch that offers equine therapy, you know,
peace of mind through horses. The reality is, in the
years that I've been here with Faby, I've learned a
(33:35):
great deal about myself and a great deal about many
things I was not aware of. And you know, quite frankly,
I never expected to be in a place where I'm
at peace. Well, I feel safe, truly safe. As for Noriega,
(34:00):
he served seventeen years in federal prison in the United States.
He was eventually extradited to France, where we spent about
a year incarcerated on money wandering charges. Then he was
extradited again, this time to Panama, where he spent roughly
another five years in prison. He died at the age
of eighty three. Lee Rich, you know, mister beach Club.
(34:29):
He was supposed to do thirty years in prison. In
the end he served ten. His sentence was reduced after
he cooperated with the congressional hearings. When I caught up
with him in Florida, he broke out a photo album
that included pictures of him in jail. Lee showed it
to me the way he might crack open an old
high school yearbook. This is prison, this one. This is
(34:52):
all of us in Lafayette, Louisiana in prison. That's the
main players and all those trials with Bogel, Kayalus and myself.
At one point he actually came very close to trying
to break out of prison. Week, if you can believe it,
Lee left prison to get dental work done. He was
(35:14):
escorted by a transportation officer named Gene. Minute I got
into van, should give me the key, I don't do
my handcuffs in the back and always brought me food.
And then I got the no, Gene all right, and
we would have our little thing on the side going
to the dentist. I actually spoke to Jeanne. She told
(35:36):
me that little thing on the side. He was just
a friendship anyway. That's when Lee hatched his plan. He
had a pilot who was going to land a plane
not far from the dentist's office. Just swoop down and
pick him up. But first he'd have to get away
from Gene steal her car. Basically, just tell you you
got to get out of the car now and take
(35:57):
the key from the van. Just leave her standing in
the parking lot. So the big day comes, He's sitting
in the car with Jeane. He's about to make his
big move when he realizes there's no gas in the car.
It's almost empty. Okay, I would have got down the road,
made me three miles outside the road and no gas,
(36:17):
out of gas, no money. I would have inbusted escape.
So I left alone. I went back to to jail
that night and cried my sorrows. And Lee also says
he couldn't do that to Jeanne because he really cared
about her deeply. In fact, he and jean they ended
up getting married Kathy Timmins. She and Ned got divorced.
(36:41):
Kathy raised her kids two sons, almost entirely on her own,
and she went on to have a really distinguished career
in the FBI. After nine eleven, she worked under Director
Robert Muller to help set up an office that shared
intelligence and worked with state and local law enforcement. She's
retired now, never remarried. She still stays in touch with Ned.
(37:04):
You know, people were always surprised at, you know, how
much we always still talked over the many years because
I think he you know, we had so much that
we knew about one another, and you know, at the
core what that's like being a police officer, being an
FBI agent, working these things our families. Back in two
thousand and eight, Ned and Kathy actually worked a case together.
(37:26):
Ned had been hired as a private eye to solve
a particularly vexing murder down in Georgia. Ned knew he
need help from a really good investigator, so he asked
Kathy to help him review the case, and briefly, once
again they were a team. He's still never been able
to actually leave that undercover role. He's never really replaced
(37:49):
the people that he knew, the people that he was
close to. It's like he'd never moved on. He never
moved on from it. It stayed with him, and it's
like he's still trying to find the end of it.
It is. It's like he's still trying to find the
end of the story. Ned Timmins still lives in the
(38:14):
Detroit area. He's a successful private eye, runs a company
called Legal and Security Strategies. He's handled security for local
media outlets and right now he's trying to chase down
the guys in China who are counterfeiting American tobacco products.
He also specializes in jet ski fatalities, investigating how and
why people died while zipping around on their jet skis.
(38:38):
After leaving the FBI, Ned and Simone were together for
about two years. Ultimately it didn't work out. They still
stay in touch. In fact, Ned says that he periodically
sends her a few hundred dollars to help with the bills.
Over the years. Ned He's also stayed in touch with
Lee Rich. In the late nineteen nineties, Ned built a
(38:59):
house down in the Caymans. Two of them actually got
a big boat, and he started hanging out with Lee again.
At that point, Lee was out of prison and the
Caymans were still his home. Even though he was no
longer the island's Robin Hood. Lee Rich and I were
friends undercover, and we were friends when he got arrested,
(39:19):
and we still talk once a week because our personalities
congealed or whatever you want to call it. I love
that he used the word congealed. The two of them
remained close friends to this day. Recently, Ned planned a
(39:40):
trip down to the Caymans. Lee was supposed to come too,
but he had some health issues and he couldn't make it.
Ned went anyway, and I tagged along. Down in the Caymans,
Ned he seemed to be some in his element. Sure,
he was now in his seventies and walking with a limp,
but he seemed to love reprising his role as a
man of mystery. At the time, he was working on
(40:01):
a bounty hunting deal to locate a highly sought after
a US fugitive. He had a driver taking him around.
Big guy almost looked a bodyguard. At one point we
headed over to the house of Lee's old butler, Burtley.
You may remember him. This is the guy who took
Ned fishing for conk back when Ned was undercover, and
at the time Ned thought Burtley was actually going to
(40:23):
kill him. Later on, when Ned lived in the Caymans,
they actually became friends. Burtley passed away a few years back,
and now Ned was visiting his widow. Hey, who's there?
You remember me? Ned ye talking? They sat down and
(40:46):
reminisced about old times, back when Burtley was still alive.
Ned seemed genuinely happy, caught up in all the memories.
And as we were getting ready to leave, Ned very
discreetly took out his wallet and slipped the widow some
money to help out, make sure that she was all right, okay,
(41:07):
get run all right, thank you okay. Then he shuffled
back to the van, and for a moment I had
this strange sensation that I was watching a play, and
(41:29):
in it, the role of the Islands Robin Hood was
being played not by Lee Rich, who was out sick,
but by his understudy, a man who knew the role,
had memorized it in fact, and played it well. Deep
(41:58):
Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by Karen Shakurge.
Our story editor is Jack hit. Original music and our
theme was composed by Luis Gara and Flown Williams is
our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines, Mia Lobell as
Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's novel is read by Walton Goggins.
(42:19):
John Custer is Pushkin's art director, and our show art
and character illustrations were drawn by Victor Kurlow. You can
see them on our website, deepcoverpod dot com. The site
was created by Tyler Adams. Special thanks to Julia Barton,
Heather Fain, Carl mcgliori, Lee to Mullad, Maya Caning, Eric Sandler,
(42:39):
Aggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, zuwek Gin and Jacob Weisberg at
Pushkin Industries. The first version of Ned's unpublished novel was
written by James Coyne and edited by Andrea McLaughlin. Lee
Rich has just published a memoir. It's called In Too Deep.
It has the full story of his life. Stephen Kaylish
also has a memoir on the Way The Last Gentleman Smuggler,
(43:03):
so please check them both out. Additional thanks to Sophia Kiafulis, Twi,
La Gore, Scott Vieira, Nathan Saunders, Elizabeth Ostman, and James Baxter.
Tape sinks this season were by Elizabeth Eads, Barbara Sprunt,
Robert Jamison, Audrey McGlinchey, Greta Weber and Sean Cologne. And
a very special thanks to Jeff's singer at Stowaway Entertainment
(43:27):
who uncovered the story and thought I should tell it.
I'm Jake Albern
Pushkin previously on deep cover. In the mid nineteen eighties,
the FBI took down a massive drug smuggling ring which
was importing huge loads of marijuana from Colombia into the
(00:35):
United States with the help of agent Ned Timmins. The
three ring leaders were caught and imprisoned. Case closed, or
so it appeared, until one of the ringleaders, Stephen Kaylish,
revealed that there was a silent partner, and he was
none other than General Manuel Noriega, the ruler of Panama
(00:55):
and a top CIA asset. This prompted congressional hearings and
an indictment. Meanwhile, Ned was still busy at the FBI.
Thanks to all of us undercover work, Ned still had
all minds of contacts in the drug world and they
were still paying off. In fact, he was getting even
(01:16):
deeper into the illegal drug trade. These are the people
that would have supplied the drugs to likely rich. There
are the people that controlled everything on the Earth coast
to Columbia. At one point, Ned pose as a buyer
and he busted a smuggler who was bringing in cocaine
(01:36):
and marijuana into the US. So another win for Ned,
and it also opened yet another door for him. Afterwards,
Neddie got a call from the smuggler's wife, a woman
from Colombia. We'll call her Simone. Simone reached out to
(01:58):
Ned because she wanted to help her husband. Basically, she
wanted to get his sentence reduced or get him moved
to a better prison. Simone had information to trade, so
she contact did Ned, hoping to make a deal. She
was connected with the biggest people in the cartels and
talked a good game. She knew what she was talking about,
she knew the right names. Ned was eager to work
(02:21):
Simone's connections, but he was also leary about messing with
the Colombians. I don't think twice at killing you the Colombians.
Anything can happen, you know. Remember you don't know anybody
but yourself. So Ned had his concerns, but he's still
interested in working with Simone. Seeing where her connections might
(02:44):
take him. He decided to ask his wife, Kathy Timmins
for help. At the time, Kathy was busy with her
own work at the FBI and she was pregnant with
their second child. So Ned said, I want you to
come down and meet her so that you know she
has someone that she can call as the backup person
to me, you know, blah blah blah blah blah blah,
(03:05):
as in here we go again. I mean she'd been
through this before, like when Ned came home with Toby Anderson,
the violent country western singer, and now this I always
was being introduced to his his informants or his co
operators as as like the backup person. You know, I
(03:26):
wasn't listed as the case agent or anything like that.
I think it just gave Ned a feeling of you know,
and may and maybe he did it to try and
further show the the co operator you know that here's
here's someone else that you know has got your back.
(03:46):
So despite it all, Kathy agreed to meet Simone, Ned's
latest source at a hotel in Detroit. I went down
to the hotel and then met her, and you know,
she spoke briefly and he said, well, you know, if
you need anything, give me a call. You know that
(04:08):
you're gonna be working with Ned. But on the way home,
Cathy had second thoughts about the whole arrangement. I mean,
she was strikingly beautiful woman and now she's sitting here
with no husband, she's got no other connections. Besides, Ned,
(04:28):
it's not a not a good situation to have your
husband involved in. I mean, you can almost predict trouble.
I'm Jake Albern and this is deep Cover, our final
episode nineteen eighty nine. Yes, hey, is this is Jake.
(05:16):
How are you? I'm okay? Thank you? Can you're hear me? Okay?
That's Simone. There are a lot of details about her
story that I can't share with you. I need to
protect her identity. But here's what you need to know.
After meeting Ned, she started brainstorming with him about what
intel she could offer. She was still hoping to help
(05:38):
her husband, who at this point was in federal prison
in Michigan. Will please started conversations, a lot of conversation.
It was, as I said, a person that you could trust.
But she was scared about ratting on the cartels and
ultimately she got cold feet. It was too dangerous. So
(06:01):
I didn't know want to take one point, and this
meant she couldn't help her husband. But she actually kept
meeting with Ned, and I think one of those days
who were sitting in the restroom, i'll attracted to each other.
Simone says that she trusted Ned more than that that
he seemed like a hero to her. That's the word
(06:23):
she used, whoa because the way he moved, the way
he taught his security, he's self confident, how muchure he was,
and those were things in his personality that I was attracted.
(06:43):
Simone eventually told Ned that she was willing to connect
him with other sources. She knew another Columbian who needed
help and he was willing to talk. Simone even offered
to meet Ned in Venezuela and make the necessary introductions.
They spent a week down there together. Oh, Jake, it's
(07:04):
almost like the two of us were separated from the world.
You know, just sat her own, drank wine and talked
about other stuff. And well, just intelligence is beautiful, you know.
I mean you walked through the airport whether and people
were running into pilings and walls and dusts staring at her.
(07:25):
You know. I spoke with another FBI agent who was
down in Venezuela with them. He told me that Simone
was beguiling. He said, quote, she didn't walk, she glided.
She was quite the beauty and she knew how to
use it too. This agent suspected that Ned and Simone
were getting a bit too close, but he didn't say anything,
(07:46):
in part because Ned was such a veteran at this
type of work. Ned and Simone did have an affair.
It actually started just a few months after they met.
It was like an escape, an escape from what, escape
from drug cases and FBI and and uh, you know,
(08:12):
stress and whatever. It was a release. It was almost
like I didn't care anymore. What do you mean you
didn't care about what exactly? I was totally burned out
with the FBI and the stress of running big cases
like this and dealing with other divisions and other agencies,
(08:35):
and you know, it's very complicated to work big cases
and abide by the rules and and all the legal
issues and FBI protocol and everything. It was just an escape.
I asked Simon if she ever felt pressured or coerced
(08:56):
by Ned. She said no, never, that their feelings were
mutual and her family adored Ned. I was really also
with me, was like, so he was sick. I know. Yeah.
(09:19):
All of that being said, Ned's affair created some serious problems. Obviously,
it was not good for his marriage and professionally well,
Ned was a federal agent. Someone was providing information to
the FBI, and Ned was supposed to be assessing the
value of her intel. Could she or her connections help
the US government or not? Now, NED couldn't really make
(09:42):
that call objectively. There was a conflict of interest and
a power and balance too. It's not too ethical, it
wasn't too honorable, Hannah. It just happened after it started.
Did you have a moment of like, oh shit, what
(10:03):
have I done? Kind of thing? Yeah, I mean you
always had thoughts that it's the wrong thing to do.
It's it's nothing you want to want to become public
er or whatever. You know. It was just kind of
spiraling out of control. I didn't know where it was
going to land. While all this was going on, Ned's
(10:29):
biggest case, the one that helps spark congressional hearings and
the indictment of Noriega, that case was still simmering. The
defendants in the case we're all serving time. Mister beach club,
the gentleman smuggler, and the grocery guy. They're just counting
the days and the weeks and the months until one
day in mid December of nineteen eighty nine, when something
(10:51):
weird happens. On that day, Stephen Kaylish, the gentleman smuggler
says he was thrown into solitary confinement. Well, solitary you
have no access to television, radio, I mean you get
a blanket, pillow, food, you don't have contact with other prisoners.
It's basically for protection. Stephen had been watching the news
(11:13):
for weeks and had an inkling that something big was
about to go down in Panama. You know, they've ratcheted
up this whole, this whole thing about Noriega and Panama.
It's in the news almost daily. Noriega's waving a fucking
machete around. I mean, I'm watching them just fall to pieces,
(11:33):
you know, but I mean the guy's office rocker. For
over a year, Noriega had been thumbing his nose at
the US, basically saying, you guys want me gone, but
you can't do anything about it. Remember, thanks in large
part to this investigation and Stephen Kaylish's account, Noriega had
been indicted as a drug trafficker, and it seemed like
(11:54):
this indictment was now fueling something bigger, like the US
might actually take action. In his novel, Ned writes about
how big a deal it would be if the US
could take down Noriega. Ned knew the very little of
what he was doing made any real difference in the
drug war. It was a cynicism that came with a territory.
(12:15):
As long as there was demand, there would be people
willing to run the risks of supply. As long as
twenty million Americans were smoking dope, there would be dope
in America. There would be cocaine and heroine, and for
the pill poppers, there would be crooked doctors and false prescriptions.
He knew that, but getting to a guy like Noriego
would make a difference. Down in Panama, Noriego was presenting
(12:41):
himself as the great defender of his country and its canal.
He delivered impassioned speeches, hyping his role as the hero,
almost like pr stunts, the way a promoter might hype
an upcoming fight between two heavyweights. And this is when
Noriega appeared, wielding a machette as he spoke to a crowd,
(13:13):
and eventually all of his taunts they hit home. With
President George Bush Senior. Part of the problem was optics
to the public. Bush sometimes came across as mild mannered
and even meek when he was running for president. Newsweek
even ran a cover story about Bush that would become
infamous called Fighting the whimp Factor. And now here was Noriega,
(13:37):
the uber alpha male, waiving his machete. Gradually tension mounted.
The US issued sanctions against Panama and tried pressuring Noriega
to step down. Noriega just dug in his heels. So
the stage was set, and then a group of Panamanian
soldiers opened fire on four off duty US servicemen. Good
(14:00):
evening every science an American military man was killed by
a Panamanian fruit Saturday night, President Bush and Panama's military dictator,
General Manuel Noriega, have been circling each other from a distance.
Bush addressed the nation and laid out the case for war.
Many attempts have been made to resolve this crisis through
(14:20):
diplomacy and negotiations. All were rejected by the dictator of Panama,
General Manuel Noriega, an indicted drug trafficker. They called the
invasion operation just cause it was a big undertaking, involving
(14:43):
nearly twenty six thousand US troops and three hundred aircraft.
During the fighting, twenty three US servicemen died, hundreds of
Panamenians were killed, maybe more. The exact death toll remains
in dispute. Some estimates are in the thousands. It's a
little stomach churning to think about the number of people
(15:04):
who died to capture a single man. And for a while,
Noriega himself was nowhere to be found, which back in
DC was rather awkward. I've been frustrated that he's been
in power this long, extraordinarily frustrated. The good news he's
out of power. The bad news he has not yet
(15:26):
been brought to justice. US forces eventually tracked down Noriega
hiding in the Vatican embassy. They tried to smoke Noriega
out by blasting rock music deafening volumes. I actually remember
watching this all unfold as a kid on TV. The
(15:49):
soldiers played songs like We're not going to take it
by Twisted Sister. US generals eventually called off the tactic
after a Vatican officials complained anyway. Noriega eventually turned himself
in and that was it. The last member of the
(16:12):
smuggling syndicate was in custody. After his capture, Noriega was
flown to Miami, where he went on trial. He was
found guilty and sentenced to forty years in prison on
eight counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering. Officially,
(16:34):
that was the end of the story, neatly packaged with
a bow operation just cause, a righteous effort to take
down a drug trafficker. But I gotta tell you, like
so many people, I never really believe that this is
why the US invaded. So I talked with John Dingis,
a former MPR journalist who covered Noriega at the time.
(16:54):
He also wrote an excellent book on Noriega called Our
Man and Panama. I don't buy the theories that are
put forward of why the invasion was done other than
a raw exercise of US power. For John, there war
wasn't about drug trafficking charges or our desire to restore
democracy in Panama. I think it was a power decision
(17:19):
by George Bush, the fact that Noriega had defied him personally.
You don't fool around with the US government in the
way that Noriega was doing it. That's it the old
rules of the playground. A little guy acts out, the
big guy puts him in his place. It's a classic
gangster move. In the end, seems like what Ned Timmins
(17:46):
and Stephen Klish helped provide. Wasn't a motivation for war,
wasn't a cause? They just provided a convenient excuse when
we come back. A moment of reckoning for Ned, both
for his marriage and his career. Months before the invasion,
(18:26):
as the whole conflict between Bush and Noriego was still
heating up, Ned was facing problems of his own. He'd
been having an affair with his source, Simone, and he
was still working with her now down in Miami. At
some point he started to worry that his colleagues were
spying on him. Like he remembers this one day when
he was driving around. I was starving, so I whipped
(18:48):
around a few times and pulled into like a burger
king or something, and all of a sudden, here's what
I believe was an agent comes running through the alley
and prep radio fell out of his waistband and I
look and I see him jump in a car and
pretty obvious FBI surveillance. Suddenly the paranoia that Ned felt
(19:13):
down in the Caymans kicked back in. There was a
supervisor in Miami. I strongly believed that, you know, he
when I'd come into Miami for the meetings, that he'd
have me surveiled. I would meet with Simone, but never,
you know, there was never an overnight stuff or anything.
I meet, whether he usually had somebody else with me, whatever,
(19:35):
you know, I think he kind of felt something was
going on. Meanwhile, back in Detroit, Cathy gets a call
from Ned's boss. He'd been in touch with the supervisor
down in Miami. Apparently the guy who'd been watching Ned
and the supervisor in Miami had said that Ned was
in trouble and that they were pulling him in, and
(20:00):
that Ned was having an inappropriate relationship, a sexual relationship
with with the female operative, and that that Ned denied it,
but that they were going to be sending him home.
(20:21):
Kathy says she'd actually suspected what Ned had been up
to for some time. Kathy was an investigator, and a
good one. She'd found hotel matches in Ned's coat one
night and pieced together that he'd been visiting a hotel
where Simone was staying. You know, you can imagine it's
a typical married fight at that point. It's got nothing
really much to do with the FBI or his undercover work,
(20:44):
and I couldn't have cared less about his undercover work
at that point, I just said, you know, I don't
want to I don't want to talk to you about it.
I don't you know, I don't want you near me.
Then there is the issue of what would have happened
to Ned professionally, what the consequences might be for having
(21:05):
an affair with Simone. Typically, what you would do next
in the FBI is you start an investigation to find
out what may or may not have also been compromised.
On that case, I don't believe that they opened one
up on him because he basically came home and said
that he was going to resign. Ned says there was
no investigation. He says he came back from Miami and
(21:28):
resigned on his own accord. At the office in Detroit.
No one knew why Ned suddenly disappeared. Even his partner
Linnis then a Lavish's was mystified. I think everybody was
kind of scratching their heads. It was kind of a shocker, saying, gee,
what happened? Question was you know, I'm saying, literally thinking
(21:49):
back at it, nobody really knew. Was he terminated or
did he leave on his own? No, there was no
real explanation as to why he was there. One day,
when the next day he's not. Officially, the FBI said
it wouldn't talk to me about Ned, but I did
speak with one of Ned's former supervisors from the early eighties.
He wasn't there when Ned resigned, but the way that
(22:10):
it all played out for Ned, it didn't really surprise him.
The supervisor told me that back then, in certain situations,
agents did sometimes just resigned to avoid a big, messy investigation.
He also told me that six years was a very
long time to do undercover work. At one point, I asked, Ned,
why didn't you just walk away before things got out
(22:32):
of control, like back when your first son was born.
I don't know if if you want to call it
an addiction, adrenaline addiction, or you know, whatever it was.
That's all I lived for was I mean, you know,
I love my kids. I talked to him every day.
(22:53):
Yet you know they're on separate size of the US,
but I can you know, I can't spend a lot
of time with them, but you know, we we talk
every day. I don't know what would happened. Maybe if
I could pull the throttle back hand, all things would
have been a lot different, But it didn't happen. So,
(23:17):
Cathy says she respects what Ned accomplished as an agent,
but it's all overshadowed by the cost that it exacted
on both of them personally, And she still wonders how
and if it might have all played out differently, if
somehow Ned had been able to walk away from the
undercover work, if he had just been working cases. You know,
(23:38):
you don't have those opportunities. You can't go sit at
a bar all day if you're working cases. You know,
you can't go off on these. You can't create a
whole new persona of yourself. You are who you are.
You're just an FBI agent. You're not God, You're not
some movie star, you know, having dinners with fancy people
in fancy places, and you know, you're just an average person.
(24:02):
If you remove the undercover work from the equation, might
our marriage have failed over time because of alcohol and
fooling around the stuff. Maybe, but we will never know.
In any case, After he stepped down, Ned's colleagues at
the FBI did throw him a little goodbye party. It
was at this restaurant in Oakland County. Some people from
(24:24):
the other law enforcement agencies, from our old police department came,
so it wasn't hugely attended, but you know, there were
enough people there, and you know, they gave him a
plaque and wished him well, and you know, we all
had lunch, and you know, he gave a little talk
about how he'll miss the FBI, and you know, but
this is what he wants to do now. And he
(24:48):
worked so hard and that's all he ever wanted to be,
was an FBI agent, and he just threw it all away,
literally threw it all away. Looking back, Ned says at
the undercover work, it kind of slowly wore him down,
(25:09):
and that's why he resigned. I'd just had it was
out of gas. I wanted to do something different, you know,
I had just exhausted with the FBI. And I'm sure
he was. But the way he talks about it, it's
(25:29):
clear to me that these were his glory days. And honestly,
I think part of Ned is still stuck in nineteen
eighty nine. He talks about everything that happened like it
was yesterday, boasting about the role that he played in history.
And there is a certain logic to his conviction. Ned
flipped Toby, which led him to shine, which perhaps more
than anything else, led to the downfall of Lee Rich
(25:52):
and in a way, Stephen Kalish too. Without them, there's
no star witness to testify against Noriega, and without that, well,
there's much less of a pretext for invading Panama. A
bit of a stretch, maybe, but it's not crazy. When
(26:24):
I was done reporting this story, I went back and
reread Ned's novel. What struck me most was how and
where it ended. The image that we're left with is
of Ned at the very top of his game. Ned
was back to the less glamorous, if more direct work
of hitting the dealers where they lived. He'd gotten so
used to undercover work he would literally walk from a
(26:45):
courthouse where he had been testifying and make a buye
in his suit and tie. He didn't give a fuck anymore,
and it only made him even better at the work.
In the novel, Ned doesn't resign from the FBI. He
just goes right back to work chasing bad guys. And
in the very last scene of the book, Ned is
(27:07):
down on Louisiana. He's just finished visiting Lee Rich in jail,
and he's at some hotel, sitting at the bar. The
lighting is very dim, and mysterious, and he meets this
woman who's clearly simone. It's their first encounter. He's just
having a drink and she walks in. Using the mirror
(27:27):
behind the bottles of booze on display on the top shelf,
he watched the figure of a woman moved through the
dim light. He turned as she got close enough, and
found himself looking into the face of one of the
most beautiful women he had ever seen. She put a
newspaper in front of Ned. It was an article he
had read, an article about the case and ultimately about him.
(27:50):
Are you this agent? Ned turned to face her fully.
The fuzzy edges of perception given to him by the
whiskey started to straighten themselves as he scanned the room
to be sure she was alone. Columbians were known to
use women as assassins, or maybe she was just marking
him for another. But apart from a few the drunks
in the room given her the once over, no one
(28:12):
was paying any attention to him. Who's asking? The woman
goes on to tell Ned she knows someone down in
Columbia who's in deep trouble. Ned took her by the
elbow and guided her to a seat next to him.
What is it you need, he asked. She looked back
at him with tears glossing the surface of her eyes.
(28:35):
We need your help. And that's how it ends, kind
of suddenly. I guess you could call it a cliffhanger
or a teaser for a sequel, but you get the
basic idea. Ned is about to go off on another
adventure to help this damsel in distress. While he never
(28:59):
directly admitted it to me, I think Ned spends a
fair amount of time thinking about how this all might
have played out differently. In addition to his novel, he
teamed up with different and cranked out two screenplays, one
called Dope and the other called The Came In Connection.
Like the novel, they read kind of like alternate versions
of history, parallel universes, with the same characters but different outcomes.
(29:27):
He had some guy that was writing some screenplay or
something out in La and and and I said, Ned,
the whole story doesn't make any sense unless you tell
the end. It's really not a success story at all,
you know. I mean, sure his cases might have worked
out great, but you know it is not a success
(29:48):
story at all. And no one knows them better than Ned.
Later on, I told Ned what Cathy said. That's that
could be looked at that way. You know, well, I
mean it took a toll. You take a psychological and
(30:10):
a physical beating for all this stuff, you know, so
everything you pay a big price for. It's almost like
I was on a rocket and as no matter how
high is that rocket going to go before it turns
around falls back to Earth. I don't know. Would you
know that rocket was going to run out of gas
one day? So maybe it did, you know. It's been
(30:40):
about thirty five years since Ned Timmins made his big bust,
sending a whole host of criminals away to prison. Mike Vogel,
the distributor, the grocery guy. He stayed in the Detroit area,
in that quaint little town right out of a Norman
Rockwell painting, kind of the last place you might expect
(31:01):
to find a former crime boss. Mike also served ten
years in prison. His old life on the outside gradually
fell apart. When you get out, or actually when you
go in, there's a realization you don't control a fucking thing.
You don't control anything in your life except maybe when
you breathe and when you don't breathe, and I was
(31:24):
aware that gone that long, no marriage could survive it,
none whatsoever. By the time he got out, Mike's ex
wife had remarried, and when Mike went to pick up
some of his old furniture from her house, he saw
that his kids had posted some of their artwork in
the kitchen on the fridge. When he took a closer look,
(31:45):
Mike saw that his kids had changed their last names.
They'd taken on the stepdad's last name. Mike confronted his
ex wife, said, what the fuck are you doing? This
is Oh well, that's the way it was. You can't
hold blame for people that believe they're doing the best
(32:06):
for other people. Mike told me that he later reconnected
with his kids, that he developed a relationship with them,
but it took time. Sadly, just before this podcast was released,
Mike passed away at the age of sixty nine. As
for Stephen Kaylish, he told me that he had to
(32:26):
come to terms with the past. Over the years, a
lot of stories have surfaced about Noriega and how brutal
he was that he'd had a rival executed. Stephen claims
that this wasn't the Noriega that he knew back in
the early eighties. Still, it was a moment of reckoning
for him. I wish ashamed. It's probably the best description
(32:53):
ashamed that I would. I had done so much and
tied myself so closely to a man that was capable
of such atrocities. After getting out of prison, Stephen started
a telecom business that made cards, you know, the ones
he's swiped. He says that his business did very well,
(33:13):
and he ended up moving into that big mansion out
in Hawaii where I visited him together. He and his wife,
Faby run a horse ranch that offers equine therapy, you know,
peace of mind through horses. The reality is, in the
years that I've been here with Faby, I've learned a
(33:35):
great deal about myself and a great deal about many
things I was not aware of. And you know, quite frankly,
I never expected to be in a place where I'm
at peace. Well, I feel safe, truly safe. As for Noriega,
(34:00):
he served seventeen years in federal prison in the United States.
He was eventually extradited to France, where we spent about
a year incarcerated on money wandering charges. Then he was
extradited again, this time to Panama, where he spent roughly
another five years in prison. He died at the age
of eighty three. Lee Rich, you know, mister beach Club.
(34:29):
He was supposed to do thirty years in prison. In
the end he served ten. His sentence was reduced after
he cooperated with the congressional hearings. When I caught up
with him in Florida, he broke out a photo album
that included pictures of him in jail. Lee showed it
to me the way he might crack open an old
high school yearbook. This is prison, this one. This is
(34:52):
all of us in Lafayette, Louisiana in prison. That's the
main players and all those trials with Bogel, Kayalus and myself.
At one point he actually came very close to trying
to break out of prison. Week, if you can believe it,
Lee left prison to get dental work done. He was
(35:14):
escorted by a transportation officer named Gene. Minute I got
into van, should give me the key, I don't do
my handcuffs in the back and always brought me food.
And then I got the no, Gene all right, and
we would have our little thing on the side going
to the dentist. I actually spoke to Jeanne. She told
(35:36):
me that little thing on the side. He was just
a friendship anyway. That's when Lee hatched his plan. He
had a pilot who was going to land a plane
not far from the dentist's office. Just swoop down and
pick him up. But first he'd have to get away
from Gene steal her car. Basically, just tell you you
got to get out of the car now and take
(35:57):
the key from the van. Just leave her standing in
the parking lot. So the big day comes, He's sitting
in the car with Jeane. He's about to make his
big move when he realizes there's no gas in the car.
It's almost empty. Okay, I would have got down the road,
made me three miles outside the road and no gas,
(36:17):
out of gas, no money. I would have inbusted escape.
So I left alone. I went back to to jail
that night and cried my sorrows. And Lee also says
he couldn't do that to Jeanne because he really cared
about her deeply. In fact, he and jean they ended
up getting married Kathy Timmins. She and Ned got divorced.
(36:41):
Kathy raised her kids two sons, almost entirely on her own,
and she went on to have a really distinguished career
in the FBI. After nine eleven, she worked under Director
Robert Muller to help set up an office that shared
intelligence and worked with state and local law enforcement. She's
retired now, never remarried. She still stays in touch with Ned.
(37:04):
You know, people were always surprised at, you know, how
much we always still talked over the many years because
I think he you know, we had so much that
we knew about one another, and you know, at the
core what that's like being a police officer, being an
FBI agent, working these things our families. Back in two
thousand and eight, Ned and Kathy actually worked a case together.
(37:26):
Ned had been hired as a private eye to solve
a particularly vexing murder down in Georgia. Ned knew he
need help from a really good investigator, so he asked
Kathy to help him review the case, and briefly, once
again they were a team. He's still never been able
to actually leave that undercover role. He's never really replaced
(37:49):
the people that he knew, the people that he was
close to. It's like he'd never moved on. He never
moved on from it. It stayed with him, and it's
like he's still trying to find the end of it.
It is. It's like he's still trying to find the
end of the story. Ned Timmins still lives in the
(38:14):
Detroit area. He's a successful private eye, runs a company
called Legal and Security Strategies. He's handled security for local
media outlets and right now he's trying to chase down
the guys in China who are counterfeiting American tobacco products.
He also specializes in jet ski fatalities, investigating how and
why people died while zipping around on their jet skis.
(38:38):
After leaving the FBI, Ned and Simone were together for
about two years. Ultimately it didn't work out. They still
stay in touch. In fact, Ned says that he periodically
sends her a few hundred dollars to help with the bills.
Over the years. Ned He's also stayed in touch with
Lee Rich. In the late nineteen nineties, Ned built a
(38:59):
house down in the Caymans. Two of them actually got
a big boat, and he started hanging out with Lee again.
At that point, Lee was out of prison and the
Caymans were still his home. Even though he was no
longer the island's Robin Hood. Lee Rich and I were
friends undercover, and we were friends when he got arrested,
(39:19):
and we still talk once a week because our personalities
congealed or whatever you want to call it. I love
that he used the word congealed. The two of them
remained close friends to this day. Recently, Ned planned a
(39:40):
trip down to the Caymans. Lee was supposed to come too,
but he had some health issues and he couldn't make it.
Ned went anyway, and I tagged along. Down in the Caymans,
Ned he seemed to be some in his element. Sure,
he was now in his seventies and walking with a limp,
but he seemed to love reprising his role as a
man of mystery. At the time, he was working on
(40:01):
a bounty hunting deal to locate a highly sought after
a US fugitive. He had a driver taking him around.
Big guy almost looked a bodyguard. At one point we
headed over to the house of Lee's old butler, Burtley.
You may remember him. This is the guy who took
Ned fishing for conk back when Ned was undercover, and
at the time Ned thought Burtley was actually going to
(40:23):
kill him. Later on, when Ned lived in the Caymans,
they actually became friends. Burtley passed away a few years back,
and now Ned was visiting his widow. Hey, who's there?
You remember me? Ned ye talking? They sat down and
(40:46):
reminisced about old times, back when Burtley was still alive.
Ned seemed genuinely happy, caught up in all the memories.
And as we were getting ready to leave, Ned very
discreetly took out his wallet and slipped the widow some
money to help out, make sure that she was all right, okay,
(41:07):
get run all right, thank you okay. Then he shuffled
back to the van, and for a moment I had
this strange sensation that I was watching a play, and
(41:29):
in it, the role of the Islands Robin Hood was
being played not by Lee Rich, who was out sick,
but by his understudy, a man who knew the role,
had memorized it in fact, and played it well. Deep
(41:58):
Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by Karen Shakurge.
Our story editor is Jack hit. Original music and our
theme was composed by Luis Gara and Flown Williams is
our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines, Mia Lobell as
Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's novel is read by Walton Goggins.
(42:19):
John Custer is Pushkin's art director, and our show art
and character illustrations were drawn by Victor Kurlow. You can
see them on our website, deepcoverpod dot com. The site
was created by Tyler Adams. Special thanks to Julia Barton,
Heather Fain, Carl mcgliori, Lee to Mullad, Maya Caning, Eric Sandler,
(42:39):
Aggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, zuwek Gin and Jacob Weisberg at
Pushkin Industries. The first version of Ned's unpublished novel was
written by James Coyne and edited by Andrea McLaughlin. Lee
Rich has just published a memoir. It's called In Too Deep.
It has the full story of his life. Stephen Kaylish
also has a memoir on the Way The Last Gentleman Smuggler,
(43:03):
so please check them both out. Additional thanks to Sophia Kiafulis, Twi,
La Gore, Scott Vieira, Nathan Saunders, Elizabeth Ostman, and James Baxter.
Tape sinks this season were by Elizabeth Eads, Barbara Sprunt,
Robert Jamison, Audrey McGlinchey, Greta Weber and Sean Cologne. And
a very special thanks to Jeff's singer at Stowaway Entertainment
(43:27):
who uncovered the story and thought I should tell it.
I'm Jake Albern
Host
Jake Halpern
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