Guardians of Chaos Inside the World of Private Security

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Welcome to another episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast, where we explore the dark side of storytelling. Tonight, prepare for spine-chilling tales featuring original horror stories, eerie supernatural encounters, and real-life crime that reveals the darker aspects of human nature. Each story is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat long after it ends. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your most chilling moments by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. More haunting stories are coming, so keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams… if you can find them!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
My name Sean and I'm from Ireland. To cut a
long story short, I used to take part in amateur
boxing fights, hoping to break into the professional circuit, but
to keep protein on my plate in between bouts. I
used to work for a private security firm in my
home city of Dublin. I thought it'd all be on
the doors, like being a bouncer, but as it turned out,

(00:35):
there was more to private security than throwing drunks at
of bars. That was a lot of what the job
consisted of. Don't get me wrong, but every so often
we get a job that was a bit out of
the ordinary. For example, I had to guard a place
of worship at one point because some absolute tools were
camped out trying to intimidate the people going in and out.

(00:56):
We got hired to guard a nursery once too, if
you can believe that, because some mental case had come
around threatening the kids and the guarday couldn't get hold
of them. But without a doubt, the most memorable and
most unusual event I was ever asked to provide security
for was a funeral, But not just any funeral. It
was for the boss of one of Dublin's biggest crime families.

(01:19):
I'm not joking. This was back in nineteen ninety one
when I was just twenty three, and by that time
I'd gotten used to getting the occasional weird job. But
when my boss told me that we were to guard
a funeral one Friday morning in September, I couldn't help
but ask him for more details. It wasn't just me either,
Everyone had their questions about it. Then when our boss

(01:41):
filled us in, we could barely believe our eyes. I
doubt anyone listening to this would recognize the name. But
if you were alive in Dublin around then and I
said the Fitzies, then You're definitely going to know who
I'm talking about. Anyway, Big Fits had kicked the bucket,
as you know, and he was going in the ground
that Friday morning. And since the family was quite easily

(02:03):
the wildest in all of Ireland, the Big Man's funeral
needed many security guards. I believed it too. A family
that mental and violent, with all that booze and grief
in them, it had probably looked like a five card
Vegas fight night by the time the buffet opened up.
At least that was the joke we were all sharing
at the time. We just didn't know how right we were.

(02:26):
We were told we wouldn't be needed at the church service,
only at the Fitz family home, since that's where the
alcohol would start flowing properly. Then on the morning of
the funeral, we arrived at around eleven at this big
mansion on the outskirts of the city. I'd never seen
anything like it in the flesh, only on the television, maybe,
but not up close. It was like someone's dream home,

(02:49):
all castle on the outside with modern living on the inside.
They even had a maid that showed us surround the
place before the family got back from the church service,
and we had to put on our professional hats to
keep the place secure. The first black range rovers began
turning up outside around half eleven, and now came a
steady stream of weeping older women, supported by their sons

(03:10):
and nephews. It looked a lot like any other funeral.
I suppose on this one had outfits some people's whole
salaries might not be able to cover. There was more
Gucci and Prada than an Italian fashion show, and I
couldn't tell which reflected the sun's glare brighter the fancy
leather on their shoes or the fancy watches on their wrists.
Don't never tell me crime doesn't pay. The mood was

(03:33):
very tense at first, as you can imagine it would
be among a family full of violent gangsters, possibly even murderers.
But aside from that very large aspect of the job,
it was much like any other funeral for the first
couple of hours. In fact, one of the hardest jobs
I had in those first few hours was refusing all
the drinks that fits family was offering. They were a

(03:55):
wild bunch, but they grieved like any other Irish family,
which meant that after all the tears, eyed tributes and
hugs among the bereaved, the party started. By about two
in the afternoon. Spirits were high, music was thumping inside
the house, and me and the lads were starting to
wonder what we'd been worried about. We pictured some intra
family disagreements descending into mindless violence, but in reality we

(04:19):
were in more danger of getting hit on by drunk
women in their fifties than being part of any sort
of brawl. We had four more hours to keep guard,
and these four hours seemed like they'd be some of
the easiest we'd ever worked. But then it happened. The
homes back garden was massive, and I mean truly massive.
There was a big lawn, a football pitch and tennis

(04:41):
court's combo toward one side than the big pond, and
a gazebo on the other. We had four fellows surrounding
the house myself included, then two inside, which we kept
on cycling to give them a break from all the
harassment at the hands of the men. Apausal cougars I
was round the front talking to a guard when we
both suddenly hear the lad round the back talking over

(05:03):
his radio. Someone had started banging on the backyard fence
pretty hard too, and then the next thing we hear
him swear before all went quiet. We ran around back
of the house to see what the issue was and
then arrived just in time to see a man wearing
all black and a balaklava smash his way through the
fence using a sledge hammer. He gave the fence one

(05:27):
last bash to really open it up, and then in
streamed about a dozen identically dressed fellas, all carrying the
likes of baseball bats, hammers and clubs. Aside from the
odd cash or pair of brass knuckles we were carrying
on the sly. None of us were armed well enough
to defend against an attack like that, so instead we

(05:48):
focused on getting everyone inside and securing the homes back
doors behind us. But since one of those back doors
was a big glass sliding one, you can imagine how
well that went for us. The mass men simply smashed
their way into the home as we were getting everyone
either out the front or upstairs to safety. But that's
where the second problem came in, because many of those

(06:10):
inside didn't realize what was happening until it was too late.
All they knew was that someone had turned up looking
for a fight, so in their state of drunkenness, they
were all well up for a scrap. They just didn't
realize the attackers were armed until it was too late.
But even then that didn't deter many, and what followed

(06:31):
was a blood bath. The men of the Fritz family
put up a brave and brief defense, but they were
all blind, drunk, and had nothing but their fists. One
or two of them managed to land a punch or two,
one of which knocked an attacker clean out, but any
time that happened, the gang of attackers would swarm beat
the defiant man till he was either screaming or silent,

(06:53):
then they move on to the next I suppose they
did what they had to do in a way, making
sure security had the space to evacuate all the women
and kids to waiting cars or safe areas upstairs, But
it was only a matter of minutes before the gang
beat back any resistance and started making their way towards
the stairs. At that point it became a question of

(07:13):
how to keep the gang of attackers from advancing up
those steps. I was freaking out, thinking, there's no way
we're going to be able to hold them off. But
to my surprise, the Fitz family had already planned for
such an event, in that they'd stock their master bedroom
with a couple of unconventional but very effective defensive weapons.

(07:34):
Big Fits, before he died, had been quite the collector
of martial antiquities, including a Samurai sword, two Zulu short spears,
and a broad sword said to have belonged to the
King of Leinster. I didn't know this all the time, obviously.
The first I saw of them was when one of
the granny's upstairs started handing them out to us. One

(07:55):
minute it was Lord of the Dance. The next it
was Lord of the Rings. I'd never held a spear before,
but there's a first time for everything in life, I guess.
And the gang of attackers had absolutely rampaged through the
home by the time we formed that final line of
defense on the stairs. There were unconscious and severely injured
people lying all over the kitchen, including one of our

(08:17):
security team. But the gang wanted more. Yet when they
got to the stairs and saw what they were up against,
they very understandably hesitated. I remember gripping the short spear
called an equa and telling some balaklava wearing scumbag that
if he tried coming up the stairs I was going
to skewer him like a fekin kebab. He looked just

(08:40):
as shocked as I was to see a bloody Zulu
short spear being pointed in his face. But that shakunnaw
worked majorly to our advantage, and no one fancied a
piece of it. There's this standoff on the stairs with
everyone screaming at each other. Then the next thing I know,
the women and kids upstairs with us started throwing things
down from the floor above at the gang of massed attackers.

(09:03):
I'm talking stiletto heels, little marble statuettes, big glass ash trays,
anything heavier jagged enough to do some damage started raining
down on to the attackers below. I remember seeing this
one big ash tray land on this fella's head and
he actually collapsed to the ground, even started shaking and twitching.
His pals started screeching, trying to wake him up, and

(09:26):
then trying to drag him out towards the back garden.
But those missiles kept coming. I suppose that's what saved
us in the end. Having us forming that line of
defensive was one thing, but we were still outnumbered and
out gunned, so to speak. One swing of that sledgehammer
would have smashed my spear. I know the gang could
have taken us if they wanted to, not without a

(09:47):
couple of serious injuries. But they'd have been able to
do it if they really really wanted to. But it
was those screaming harpies above and beside us that won
the day. By the time the gang retreated to the
back garden again, the homes hallway was just a mess
of blood, broken glass, marble, dust, and broken shoes. The

(10:07):
gang had also started to smash things on their way out,
probably as a final f u to the Fitzes, but
that was nothing compared to the damage they'd done to
the men of the family. Like I said before, we
might have done a job in protecting the more vulnerable
members of the family, but those that had tried to
fight back had been subjected to what I can only
describe as a blood bath. There were broken legs, broken arms,

(10:31):
broken ribs, and fractured skulls. People's teeth were smashed, their
fingers were literally hanging off in places, and one guy's
eye had popped out of the socket following a really
severe skull fracture. We had to keep all the kids
upstairs while the e mts carried everyone outside. We could
hide their eyes from the injuries, but trying to ensure

(10:51):
they didn't hear the screams was basically impossible. They only
died down when the small army of paramedics started pumping
pain killers into the victims. But even then, what were
screams became these terrible groans and moans as the wounded
were ferried to waiting ambulances. The guard I had been
there for a while by the time the wounded were

(11:11):
all taken to hospital, and I have expected every one
to give them the cold shoulder. But even though some
of these people had been involved in criminality all their
lives and their whole motto was basically don't talk to
the Gardai, they had zero problem telling them absolutely everything
about the massed gang's attack. I suppose when it suits them,
criminals use the Gardai as a weapon like any other,

(11:34):
not just to punish their enemies, but to identify them
in cases where they've concealed their faces during an attack.
But why attack a funeral like that? And who in
their right mind would target a funeral of all things? Well,
as far as I know, the answers a pretty simple one.
The attackers were a rival criminal family. The Fitzes had

(11:55):
rubbed the wrong way one too many times, and the
why is even simpler because they could. Our colleague that
was wounded during the melee ended up needing about thirty
stitches to put his head and face back together, and
he never returned to work after that. I also heard
something about the guy who was knocked unconscious with that

(12:15):
big glass ash tray. He didn't report to the hospital straightaway,
he couldn't, But that meant the brain injury he'd receive
got worse and worse, until finally he showed up an
A and E begging for help because he kept having seizures. Apparently,
the doctors asked him how he hurt his head, but
then instead of just making something up, he goes to

(12:36):
tell them exactly what had happened. He says he and
his pals rated the fits his property where he'd got
in a balk on the head, and he didn't remember
anything else. The doctors start doing brain scans trying to
work out the damage. Then once they were done, the
cops showed up and arrested him. His gang got him
a lawyer who instructed him not to say another word

(12:57):
regarding who was present at the raid. Then the end,
this poor guy was the only one to go down
for what had happened, and all because that brain injury
meant that he couldn't think properly anymore. His fellow gang
members let it happen too, because he was no use
to them out in the streets anymore. And he had
two choices, keep his mouth shut and do his time,

(13:18):
or they'd have him killed in prison to keep him
quiet for good. That wasn't strictly the end of the
whole affair either, and after about six months of calm,
some of these rival gangsters started turning up dead all
over Dublin. Not all of them, mind you, just the
ones that the Fitzes were sure had raided their house
in the day of that funeral. And not long after

(13:39):
the body started turning up, I handed him my notice.
I came in to realize that some security firms, at
least in Ireland, were Siamese twins with some of the
country's crime families. There was just no separating them without
at least one half dying of death. I asked my
boss if that was the end of us working with
families like the Fits, and he gave me an honest

(14:01):
answer when he told me no. We worked for whoever pays,
and that was that It's just that in our case,
the people willing to pay the big bucks for security
tended to need it for all the wrong reasons. I
ended up signing onto a different firm later on, one that
dealt almost exclusively in providing security guards the likes of

(14:22):
h m V and Tesco. The pay wasn't as good, obviously,
but it was a much quieter life and I got
to focus on my boxing much more too. Although my
career never took off in the way that I'd hoped.
That didn't bother me much, though, because I got to
settle down, live a quiet, peaceful life, and start a family,
all without having to worry about masked thugs attacking me

(14:44):
and mine when we were at our weakest. I was
in the parachute regiment for d just shy of ten
years before I was discharged on medical grounds. I was
gutted at the time, but then once it sank in,

(15:05):
I was pleasantly surprised by how many options I had
available to me. I remember, many years before, a friend's
dad told me all you'll be able to do when
you leave the Army is drive lorries and kill people.
But he was wrong. I got offers from some big
name private military contractors almost straight away, who promised me
good money once I had passed their much less demanding

(15:28):
medical exams. But I also got a few handy suggestions
from some old paratrooper friends. One guy was over in
the States consulting on TV shows like teaching actors how
to shoot and move like they'd been trained in all
of that, and he said the hours were horrible, but
the money was great, and I was seriously considering flying
out to meet him. But then I spoke to another

(15:50):
old friend of mine who had a very different but
very interesting proposition. He was working in CPP, or close
personal protection, which is the fame fancy term for working
as a bodyguard. He'd found a job with a high
profile London based company who provided bodyguards to some of
the world's biggest stars during domestic and sometimes overseas visits.

(16:13):
In so many words, he got to travel around the
globe with some of the world's biggest celebrities, living a
life of absolute luxury outside of his working hours. Not
every job was like that, of course, Even after just
eighteen months, he'd already been to the Maldives, Singapore and
Saint Lucia twice. They fast tracked ex military guys thanks
to their discipline, training and expertise, so I already had

(16:36):
a foot in the door. Then a couple of months later,
during my first assignment, I was like a duck to water.
It wasn't as big of a buzz as being a paratrooper,
but it scratched a lot of the same itches in
terms of executing plans, staying switched on and putting on
a show of force. I felt natural. I was good
at it, and I've been doing it ever since. But

(16:57):
it won't lie. At first, it seemed like proper basic
work compared to soldiering. Teenage girls might make a lot
of noise, and this might come as a bit of
a shock to some of you, but they're simply not
as dangerous as the Taliban. And while the mega fans
can be slippery and quite disturbing with some of their delusions,
they don't mean the subject of their obsession any harm.

(17:18):
They're also terrified when they see a load of ex
army bodyguards marching towards them, demanding they step back or
vacate the area. So for a long time I didn't
feel very threatened by anybody, but that changed with this
one job I worked when I got a nasty lesson
in the kinds of people I should be prepared to
deal with. So for every high profile job we did,

(17:41):
there'd be an extensive risk mitigation meeting, and if we
were providing services for a touring musical artists, we had
to have those meetings on each individual's stop of the tour.
Each city brought a different landscape of risks, And while
those risks took on many different forms, the most unpredictable
and therefore the most difficult to deal with or the people.

(18:02):
Like I said, the vast majority of fans who wanted
to breach our security cordon were only hoping to meet
their idols, and when we caught them, they'd inevitably just
apologize and cooperate with us. One guy cried, thanked us
for not beating him up, and then called his mum
asking her to pick him up from the venue. But
unfortunately for us, they weren't all like that. So during

(18:25):
those risk mitigation meetings, our bosses would often put together
profiles of certain persons of interest. These mostly included the
type of person mentioned above, who, while irritating and unpredictable,
were ultimately harmless. Every so often, though, you got a
different breed of super fan, the kind of person whose
obsession was about as far from amusing or endearing as

(18:48):
it was possible to get. It was fairly obvious the
fellow that I'm about to tell you about was dealing
with some severe mental illness, and maybe he's gotten help
for it and turned his life around. And I truly
hope he has, but we'll just call him Walker, Walker
the Stalker. So we're at the meeting and one of

(19:08):
our bosses brings up Walker the Stalker's power point profile,
which includes his name, his picture, his criminal history, and
a few screenshots of his blogs and social media pages.
He seemed quite the character with his numerous facial piercings
and his bush of rainbow colored curly hair. Someone joked
that he looked like a clown, but there wasn't much

(19:29):
to laugh at outside of his appearance. Walker was well
and truly obsessed with a client we were guarding, and
not even the kind obsessed where it's all worship and adoration.
He was a very negative kind of obsession, as he
seemed fixated on doing our client harm. Walker the Stalker
seemed to think that our client was his wife. He

(19:49):
also believed that her relationship with another prominent artist amounted
to cheating, and for that she deserved punishment. To use
his words, not mine, I won't repeat any of the
graphic stuff he said. It was disgusting, truly stomach churning,
and it's been so long that I'd never been able
to quote any of it correctly anyway, But just take

(20:11):
it from me. I'd seen and heard a thing or
two during my time in the army, and the things
this guy posted on his blog were truly some of
the worst things I'd ever seen written. And that was
before we got the credible threats he'd posted regarding our
clients towards stopping in his home city. They were some
of the most urgent threats to life I'd ever seen
on the job, and I instantly understood why he was

(20:33):
being considered our high priority. This guy had uploaded pictures
of himself wearing what amounted to a ninja costume, along
with the weapons he was planning on using to get
to our client. He had pepper spray, a stun gun,
a pair of gloves with steel knuckles, and about half
a dozen knives of varying shapes and sizes. He also
boasted about getting his hands on the building plants for

(20:55):
the venue our client was performing at, which seriously threw
a spanner in the works for us in terms of
our security plans. If someone's going to hang around the
stage entrance trying to get an autograph, that's one thing.
But if some seriously determined individuals fixated on gaining access
to a venue, it can be very difficult to stop
them without the right amount of manpower, but in those

(21:16):
kinds of cases it doesn't hurt to call him the cavalry.
I'm pretty certain this is the same in other countries too,
but here in the UK, issuing credible threats of violence
to a person is against the law. This meant we
could contact the local police force, share our person of
interests online threats with them, and more often than not,
they'd nip any threat in the bud. On our behalf,

(21:39):
we couldn't do this on every occasion, not even when
the threats were credible, but since we had our person
of interests name, address, in an idea of his criminal history,
we were able to point the police right at him,
and this meant that he was likely going to spend
the night of our client's performance in a cell. They're
not exactly the proudest moments of our career, just picking

(22:00):
up the phone and calling the police instead of doing
any work ourselves, but if it works, it works, so
that's what we did. More often than not. Within a
few hours of making our complaint, we get a call
back from the police saying that the person has been
dealt with. Most of the time that meant having a
quiet chat with them and warning them that they could
be arrested for harassment. Other times, the threats were so

(22:23):
graphic that they'd be taken into custody and charged with
malicious communication. But in this case, when we got our
call back regarding Walker the Stalker, we were told he'd
flown his coup. Police gained access to his property that
afternoon after he failed to answer the door. Walker wasn't there,
and his neighbors said they'd seen him leaving that morning

(22:44):
wearing his all black clothing and carrying a large sports bag.
If that was true, there was a good chance Walker
the Stalker was already in the vicinity of the venue
and was simply waiting for the right time to strike.
Hearing this sent me and my team into overdrive. For
a couple of hours, we scoured the surrounding area, performed

(23:05):
a full sweep of the venue, and secured all the
entrances and exits to ensure nothing had been disabled, damaged,
or otherwise tampered with. I hope you're starting to understand
what I mean when I say those stalker types could
be a proper pain in the ars. All that work
just for one single person, and we still weren't one
hundred percent satisfied once we were finished. In the end,

(23:27):
we had to just do our best, stick to our
security plan, remember our drills, and then just hope for
the best. But then, surprisingly, the entire evening went off
without a hitch. We got the client to the venue
insured a tertiary ring of security in addition to the
venue zoned staff and security, and then once all was
said and done, we got her back to the hotel

(23:49):
safe and sound. Me and two other guys had agreed
to do an all nighter to keep the client's hotel
floor secure. I've been on since midday, but I fancied
the overtime along with some of that fancy hotel room
surface for supper. The client in her cruise rooms were
situated along a VIP corridor on one of the building's
top floors. One man was posted on either side in

(24:12):
a small landing area with a chair and a locked door.
Then the third would patrol the corridor in the wider
hotel to ensure everything was as it should be. Since
the concert had come and gone without incident, we thought
we'd probably be in for a quiet night and for
the most part we were, but it only takes one
hot minute for everything to change, and that night was

(24:33):
no exception. It was around half past two in the
morning when my colleague, who was patrolling the hotel's perimeter,
gave us a call over the radio. He'd spotted the
car parked in an industrial estate across the street from
the hotel. He'd said he'd go and check it out
and then report back on what he'd found. Then a
few minutes later he radioed us again, saying the car

(24:55):
looked empty and it was kind of giving him bad vibes.
Me and my colleague inside started getting a bit antsy,
and I started to suspect our night wasn't going to
be so quiet after all. Next our colleague radio to
say that there was a lump in the back seat
covered in blankets and it looked like a person was
sleeping under them. I immediately start thinking that it's our

(25:17):
person of interest, either hiding after spotting my colleaguess approach,
or getting a few hours of sleep before moving on
the hotel in the pre dawn hours. So when my
colleague starts walking away from the vehicle, I suggest just
tapping on the glass to make sure it's not Walker,
the stalker, and just some overnight driver on a long
journey getting a few hours of kIPS, so they're safe

(25:39):
for the drive again. And right as I suggest that,
the lift dings open in front of me, and a
member of hotel staff walks out pushing a trolley. I
saw a younger man in his hotel uniform with close
cropped hair, so I waved him past as I listened
intently to my earpiece awaiting my colleague's response. The young

(26:00):
man kind of nodded nervously, then carried on pushing what
looked like a laundry trolley towards the VIP corridor. A
second or two later, my colleague started telling us how
he suddenly didn't think it was a person anymore. He
didn't know what it was under those blankets, but it
hadn't so much as twitched when he knocked as hard
as he could on the rear passenger window. He was

(26:21):
also so close that it didn't look so much like
the shape of a sleeping person anymore, meaning the car
wasn't occupied. It was empty. So right away we're in
a bad situation because we had an empty, unaccounted for
vehicle within what we called our primary ring of security.
We had an unknown element in the area, meaning that
we had to switch on and stay focused. Then read

(26:44):
as I'm putting my game face on, I noticed something
about the trolley pushing member of hotel staff in front
of me. Naturally, having pushed his laundry trolley over to
the door, he was now trying to access the VIP
corridor using his key card. Only the key card wasn't working.
I wasn't too concerned at first. I know for myself

(27:04):
that kind of tack isn't always reliable. But what I
did notice was this young member of staffs switched to
a second key card and then what looked like a third,
all to have them rejected by the little scanner. I
start watching him get more and more frustrated and more
and more nervous before asking him if he needed any help.

(27:24):
It wasn't a genuine offer, just something to make him
turn and look at me, and then when he did,
he looked scared out of his mind. I was just
about to ask him if he was a weeb that
star struck at the idea of meaning a big celebrity. Again,
not a genuine sentiment, just something to engage him, so
i'd get the measure of the man, and that's when

(27:45):
I realized who it was. His hair was short, very short,
but poorly shorn, almost like he'd done it to himself
with very little experience. And then once I'd piece that
little detail together, I recognized his face. He'd cut his
hair short, and he'd taken out his facial piercings too,
but I recognized who it was. It was Walker the

(28:08):
Stalker and full hotel uniform, and he was standing right
in front of me. In the UK, it is highly
illegal for personal protection officers to carry any kind of
lethal weapon. It's also very illegal for us to carry
non lethal options too, so carrying things like stun guns,
pepper spray or batons are going to land you with

(28:28):
a criminal record. I'm sure a lot of you are
going to be tearing your hair out at the mere description,
asking then, how are you supposed to defend yourselves? Well, firstly,
bulletproof and stab proof vests are an option we regularly employ,
and since we're not allowed to carry weapons, there's a
heavy emphasis on martial arts training, particularly judo and jiu jitsu,

(28:51):
but there are certain products which exist in a kind
of legal loophole things that are specifically designed to circumvent
the rather strict UK laws regarding self defense, and one
such item was the non toxic dye spray that I
had on a keychain in my pocket. It operates in
an identical manner as pepper spray, but instead of deterring
your attacker via a shower of stinging vapor, it basically

(29:14):
involves spraying and non toxic, fast degrading paint in their
eyes to temporarily blind them. I've used it once before
and it was just as effective as I thought it
was going to be. But like a lot of the
stuff like that, it's only effect of when it works,
and whether or not it works depends on who you're
using it on, as well as the situation at hand.

(29:34):
For example, when I realized it was Walker the Stalker
in front of me, having shaved his head and removed
his piercings, I told him to stop what he was doing,
step back into the lift and leave before I call
the police. But Walker the Stoker didn't like that idea,
and he attempted to argue his case with a zombie
knife he'd clearly hidden in the laundry trolley. He'd somehow acquired.

(29:56):
I don't know if the terms made it over to
the United States yet or anywhere else, but here in
the UK, the term zombie knife refers to large knives
or miniature machetes that are often curved, spiked, or otherwise
unconventionally shaped. Walker the stalker produces one charges me with it,
but I'm ready to deploy my dye spray, and when

(30:17):
I did, I unleashed a powerful stream of it right
into his angry little face. The reaction was instant. It
was blinded, which he clearly found unpleasant, but it only
made him angrier. On top of that, he knew exactly
where I was too, so as he recommenced his charge
and I tried to get out of the way, the

(30:37):
landing proved too narrow, and he connected with a swing
of his knife. If it wasn't from my stab vest,
I would one hundred percent be a dead man right now,
because the blade connected with my chest but slid down
the fabric of the vest after cutting through my shirt.
But what made me doubly fortunate was that Walker's first
strike had thrown him completely off balance. This gave me

(31:00):
an ample opportunity to subdue him. But Walker was slippery.
He managed to twist out of the hold I was
trying to put him in and bring up that zombie
knife again. Under any other circumstances, it wouldn't have been
an issue because I had him from the back, but
the curved section of the blade was long enough to
reach back and cut into my forehead. Another swing and

(31:21):
he could have had my eye out. So I shoved
him forward, backed away, then keyed the emergency button on
my radio to silently call in all available assistance. I
had a colleague come running down from the opposite end
of the hallway, which in turn alerted the light sleepers
on the VP corridor that something was going on. He
came running like a bat out a hell, and all

(31:43):
the corridor behind him started to fill up with frightened vps.
But there were a few grim seconds there where I
was alone with a very blind but still very dangerous Stalker.
He was screaming and waving the zombie knife around, but
the fact that he was temporarily blinded meant that he
kept swinging at nothing and then retreating from nothing and
again and again. This was obviously very good for me,

(32:06):
but his erratic swings in the shape of the knife
meant rushing him would be a huge risk without some
one else present. Luckily, my colleague was at my side
in mere seconds, and after hurling a potted plant at
the blinded Walker, we were able to tackle and subdue
him while isolating the arm that he was carrying the
blade with. Hotel security was there to assist within minutes,

(32:28):
and the police were there a short while after that.
Walker the stalker was taken into custody, and while everyone
was a bit shaken, it all amounted to a job
well done. But what's never been properly explained to any
of us was how he got his hands on that
hotel uniform, as well as the key carts he was
using to access various spaces. Walker didn't talk to the police,

(32:50):
he didn't enter a plea at his trial either, and
he refused to leave his cell to attend to his
sentencing hearing. He never said a single word to anyone
about anything in the only clues to his motivations were
the things he'd posted online. Obviously, he put a lot
of time and effort into his little plan. Touring artists
post their dates eighteen months in advance, sometimes giving creeps

(33:12):
like Walker plenty of time to craft their little schemes,
but how he'd managed to find the exact hotel our
client was staying in was tradecraft even professionals like me
could admire, even if we did so begrudgingly. And if
his key card scheme had worked, god knows how he
managed to program them, he might have made it all
the way to a VIP room completely unchecked. Because again,

(33:36):
radically changing his appearance prior to striking was a deviously
impressive bit of deception. I feel like this is best
ended by circling back to my point about how just
one single person can cause an awful lot of trouble
for an awful lot of people. I suppose I should
take a bit of comfort in that, because if that
wasn't the case, people like me would be out of

(33:58):
a job. But it still I will send shivers down
my spine knowing there's many more out there just like Walker,
and not all of them are going to fail. Back
in nineteen ninety nine, I was a scrappy eighteen year

(34:21):
old kid from rural Ontario, and since I didn't like
the idea of working at a mill or driving a plow,
I decided to join the Army enlisting wasn't too complicated
back then, but it wasn't a cake walk either. I
walked into the recruitment center in Kingston. Then a couple
of corporals asked about my fitness, my grades, and why
I wanted to join. I gave them some stock answer

(34:43):
about wanting to serve my country, but really I just
wanted to get the hell away from Hanover two years later,
I was a private with Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry
stationed in Edmonton. It was early autumn and I was
in the mess hall scarfing down a late breakfast after
our run, when someone yelled out to crank up the

(35:04):
volume on the TV. The screen showed the twin Towers
in New York. Smoke was pouring out of a hole
in one of them. Then a few minutes later, the
second plane hit. The room went dead quiet. Dudes forgot
that they were even eating. Then we watched, totally stunned
as the towers collapsed and ash covered people ran through

(35:24):
ash covered streets. Over the next few hours, the news
kept replaying the planes, the fire and the chaos, and
the mess hall filled up with guys just glued to
the TV. We all knew it even before the CEO
started briefing us. War was coming and it was going
to be bad. The world we'd trained for all the

(35:45):
peacekeeping missions in Cold War clean up was gone. We
were headed to Afghanistan and it wasn't going to be
some un mission handing out blankets either. It was going
to be ugly and we'd be in the thick of it.
This mix of dread and excitement like history was about
to drop the puck for us. But in two thousand
and two, the itch to do more than patrol and

(36:08):
train got me thinking about JTF two, Canadian Special Operations Forces,
the real deal. If I wanted to guarantee a spot
in frontline operations in Afghanistan, that was the ticket. Getting
into JTF two was the toughest thing I've ever done.
I was in decent shape, but decent just didn't cut
it with how brutal that selection process was. They dragged

(36:31):
us out to the backwoods of Ontario for a month
of hell. We got barely any sleep and were subjected
to a constant mix of rock marches or navigation drills
in the dark. But the worst were the psych tests
designed to mess with your head. The directing staff would
scream at you, starve you anything to push you towards quitting.
I saw good soldiers, tough as nails, break down and

(36:53):
walk away. I didn't crack, but I came close. After
that came specialized train, close quarters, combat, advance weapons, parachuting
the works. It took a further year before I was
badged in as a JTF two operator, but when I was,
it was the proudest moment of my entire life. By
the time I deployed to Afghanistan in two thousand and three,

(37:16):
I felt ready for anything. We piled into a Hercules
out of Trenton with a cargo hold stuffed with gear
and guise from JTF two. Then we all tried to
catch a few hours of sleep to make the long
haul flight go faster. The plane droned on for what
felt like forever, and we stopped a brifuel somewhere in
Europe before landing at Kubble International. When we stepped off

(37:40):
the ramp, we saw mountains standing tall against the horizon
and the city sprawled out in front of us in
a cloud of dust. And then and only then did
it actually feel real. Me and my unit ended up
being based at Camp Julian near Kubble, a dusty compound
ringed with Hesco barriers and razor wire. It was all

(38:01):
tense connoxes and the constant hum of generators. We needed
those jennies too, because the heat was brutal. It had
to be like forty c in the shades sometimes, and
the dust got into everything, your rifle, your nostrils, and
other less mentionable places too. Afghanistan itself seemed like a
kind of paradox to me. He had those beautiful mountains

(38:24):
and green valleys and all that rich history, but they
had nothing to show for it, just blown out villages
and kids begging for pens. The people were tough, I
mean they had to be to survive decades of war,
but many were kind and welcoming and would offer us
chi or flatbread with glimmers of hope in their eyes,
thinking that maybe this time things were going to be different.

(38:47):
But as you might know, they weren't. As JTF two
operations were high tempo and high stakes. We weren't doing
foot patrols or handing out aid. We were hunting bad guys,
mainly Al Qaeda, but sometimes Taliban too. Direct action missions
were the core. We'd roll out in gmvs or on

(39:09):
foot with envgs, moving silently through villages where barking dogs
could blow your cover. Then we performed night raids on
al Qaeda safe houses, kicking indoors, clearing rooms, and grabbing
high value targets like bomb makers or commanders. Other times
we do recon lying up in the hills for days,
watching insurgents through optics, then calling in air strikes when

(39:31):
the time was right. We'd also sometimes work with our
counterparts and the Seals and Delta, sharing intel or hitting
compounds together, and every op was a gamble. We were
up against IEDs, ambushes, or sometimes just bad intel that
could turn a clean snatch into a fatal firefight. The
adrenaline was addictive, but the weight of what we were

(39:53):
doing wore us down and sometimes seemed like the more
you tried to change Afghanistan, the more it only changed
e you instead. A few months after the coalition went
into Iraq, so late two thousand and three, my guys
and I were hauled up at a compound on the
outskirts of Cabo. When we got news of a job.

(40:13):
Our CEO said that we'd be linking up with a
CIA outfit called Task Force Saber seven for a joint
operation that involved hitting the suspected hideout of an al
Qaeda bomb maker. We'd done these kinds of ops before,
snatched the target, grabbed the intel in and out, and
JTF two doesn't mess around, so I figured these CIA

(40:33):
boys would be pros, just like the Seals or Delta
we'd run in with before. The name task Force Saber
seven sounded legit, like something straight out of the Tom
Clancy novel, so we geared up, checked our chs, and
then rolled out expecting a tight operation. We met Saber
seven at a rendezvous point just outside the village in

(40:54):
the early morning hours, but right away something felled off.
The task force wasn't what any of us had expected.
Instead of a slick crew of American spooks, it was
three Americans and a mob of fifteen Afghans, all kitted
out in mismatched gear like they'd raided one of Cobble's
many weapons markets. The guy in charge, a loud mouth

(41:16):
calling himself Jack, strutted around in sunglasses and a US
Army uniform and talked like he was auditioning for a
Hollywood war movie. He threw around terms like HVT and
intel stream with this kind of forced bravado. But we
could see it for the performance it was, and the
Afghans under him looked more like hired muscle than a

(41:36):
disciplined unit. They were twitchy, gripping their ak's like they
were just itching to use them, so he had a
bad feeling about them from the get go. Some of
us figured that they might prove us wrong, work their
magic and bag their guy, but the op was a
crap show from the start. We were supposed to sweep
the village methodically, house by house, looking for bomb making materials,

(41:59):
things like wires, chemicals, the usual signatures, but Jack and
his boys treated it like a free for all. He
barked orders at his Afghans and a kind of pigeon persian,
and then they stormed into mud walled homes, kicking over
furniture while screaming at families. We'd been trained to keep
civilians calm, to de escalate high tension situations, but Jack's

(42:22):
unit was doing the opposite. I saw one of his
guys smash an old man's face with a rifle butt
for no reason other than he was slow to do
as commanded and stuff like that is considered a serious infraction,
but Jack didn't blink. He just kept yelling about bombs,
the Taliban and Bin Lauden. It was chaos and it

(42:42):
was clear he didn't know how to run a proper search.
There was no grid pattern, no coordination. He pointed random houses,
claiming Sigant had marked them as hot, but when we checked,
all we'd find were blankets and cooking pots. It honestly
seemed like things couldn't get any worse. But then, and
somehow they did. Jack's Afghan started dragging people out of

(43:05):
their homes and then lining them up in the dirt.
I heard screams from a house down the street to
when I got there, Adima's two American guys were beating
a shop keeper, demanding he confessed to being al Qaeda.
The guy didn't even speak English, but Jack was right
there minutes later, egging them on, saying stuff like break em,
he knows where the bombs are. But there was no evidence,

(43:28):
no bomb making equipment, just a terrified old man begging
and pleading in the dirt. I pulled my sergeant aside
and said something about how the task force didn't seem
like they knew what they were doing. He nodded, tight lift,
but we had our orders. We kept moving, but I
felt sick, like we were complicit just by being there.

(43:49):
The raid eventually wrapped up, but we found nothing, no
bomb maker, no explosives. All we'd done was tear that
village apart. Then, as we were prepping to ex phil,
a couple of the Dema's Afghans came over, grinning like
they'd won a prize. One of them pulled out a
cloth bundle and unwrapped it. Inside were dried, shriveled pieces

(44:10):
of human flesh, fingers, ears, and other parts I couldn't identify.
They said it was from a woman they'd caught, claiming
she was al Qaeda or Taliban, and I wanted to puke.
These weren't soldiers, These were murderers and butchers. My team
stood there, stunned into silence as the Afghans laughed and

(44:32):
passed the bundle around like some trophy. I looked at Jack,
half expecting him to shut it down, but he just
smirked and said something about how that was part of
their war, not ours. Back at base, my sergeant lost it.
He got in Jack's face, calling him out for letting
his men run wild and for letting them take body

(44:54):
parts as trophies. But Jack just shrugged cold as ice
and said something about how he was just helping them
clean house. I've seen some cold mother efforts in my time,
but the way that Jack guy acted was next level.
My sergeant stormed off, radioed our CEO and told him

(45:15):
we were done with those Saber seven clowns. We figured
the CEO would come down on us heavily since they
were CIA, but he came back saying that he couldn't
get a straight answer on who they were. He called
an American officer in Cobble who swore the CIA had
no record of any task for Saber seven, and the
Pentagon didn't know either. It was like d'ema and his

(45:36):
crew had materialized at a thin air, and we started
quietly asking around trying to find out who the hell
Jack really was, but nobody had any answers. Some of
the American guys we worked with said that he'd been
floating around Cobble since two thousand one, peddling fake al
Qaeda videos and claiming he was hunting Bin Lauden, but
it wasn't until mid two thousand four that we started

(45:59):
hearing whispers about what Jack was really up to after
that Fubar raid with a so called task force. We
kept our distance from them, but then one day the
rumors started swirling. Jack wasn't some wannabe operator. He was
running a private torture prison. The Afghan police rated his
compound in July, and when the truth came out, it

(46:22):
was worse than we could have ever imagined. He'd set
up shop in a two story house and cobble, a
nondescript place you'd walk past without a second glance, but
inside it was a living nightmare. They'd turn it into
their own private black site, was zero oversight and no rules.
They called it a mission to hunt al Qaeda, but

(46:43):
in reality it was more like something out of a
cheap splatter movie. Jack Edema was arrested and so were
as two sidekicks. One guy, Brent Bennett, was a former paratrooper,
but the other guy, ed Carballo, was literally just a
journalist former CNN and National Geographic too, who detached himself
to a demon's fake units so he could see some action.

(47:06):
And their scam was terrifying and simple. They'd grabbed Afghans
off the street, just regular folks like shopkeepers, farmers, anyone
they decided was a quote unquote terrorist. Then they dragged
them back to their makeshift torture prison before interrogating them.
Those that gave false confessions were then handed over to

(47:26):
the Americans, most likely in exchange for some kind of
bounty and continued military assistance. Eight guys were found when
the cops busted in, some hanging from their feet, others
bound and hooded, all of them beaten to hell. The
police had makeshift cells, chains on the walls, with all
the blood and feces everywhere, and I heard that it

(47:47):
stunk to high hell. Adema claimed he was interrogating high
value targets for Intel and bin Laden, but it was
all bull crap. Most of those poor guys were just
locals caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Afghan government said it was a straight up war crime,
and they were right too. Adema's crew used methods that

(48:07):
were medieval, like hanging guys upside down for hours, sometimes days,
until their bodies just sort of gave out. Other prisoners
said their heads were held under water while Ademon and
his Afghan screamed questions they couldn't answer. Sleep deprivation was
another favorite of theirs. They'd keep the lights on, last
music and shake their prisoners awake every time they passed out.

(48:31):
There were reports of starvation too, Guys left without food
or water for days in order to break their will. Jack,
whose real name was Jonathan, denied everything in court, claiming
he never burned anyone with cigarettes, poured boiling water on them,
or pulled out their toe nails to extract confessions. But
the survivors told a different story. They talked about being

(48:53):
shackled in stress positions and the constant threat of beatings
or worse if they didn't confess. Jack and his boys
weren't interrogating any one. They were torturing people for fun.
I remember hearing about the raid on his place from
one of our intel guys. Afghan police found blood stains,

(49:13):
ropes and hoods, stuff like that that looked like it
belonged in a horror movie. The prisoners, some of whom
were barely alive when they were found, told the court
that adema's crew treated them like animals, how that it
even taunted and laughed at them as they begged and
screamed for mercy. Adema had the nerve to say that
he was working for the Pentagon, but it was all lies.

(49:35):
The U. S Military had taken just one single solitary
detainee from him back in two thousand two or two
thousand three and had held the guy for a month
before realizing he was a nobody, and after that they
cut him off. He'd conned everyone from Northern Alliance war
lords to journalists into thinking he was legit, and everyone
had fallen for it, hook line and sinker. Sometimes I

(50:00):
think back to that raid that he tricked us into
joining them on and the dried body parts his Afghan
showed us. I'm pretty sure there wasn't a one off,
and Jackadema had encouraged it. And then I wondered how
much more suffering he inflicted before he was caught. He
was sentenced to ten years in September of two thousand four,
and I get a real sense of satisfaction when I

(50:20):
hear that news, but it didn't erase the guilt of
having worked with him, even if it was for just
a couple of hours. He ran that house of horrors
for literally years, ruined some people's lives, and then walked
away with a pardon from President Karzai in two thousand seven.
I know he ended up dying of AIDS in Mexico
in twenty twelve, and while the circumstances surrounding his death

(50:43):
are really shady, I know for certain he never fully
paid for what he did. And it's things like that
which make me wish I was a religious man. But
if by some slim miracle, there really is a place
people like that are punished when they die, then I
know he's going to get far worse down there than
he ever dished out up here. Hey, friends, thanks for listening.

(51:12):
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(51:34):
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(51:56):
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