my name is Scott Payne i served in the FBI for 23 years as an undercover agent i infiltrated biker gangs the KKK and America's neo-Nazis and this is everything I'm authorized to tell you we were all worried about my safety we had quick response teams you know like but the bottom line is is if I'm in the middle of a 100 acres and the crap hits the fan what are you going to do for me other than avenge my death unless I take care of it on my own so you know that's kind of that undercover mentality if you're only going in because you're expecting three SWAT teams and HRT to be there for you you probably shouldn't go in there was an opportunity to do the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in Massachusetts out of the Boston office my game plan was to just go in cold i think I went into the Outlaws case around July of 2005 ton Massachusetts was uh what we were going after they had pretty good intelligence i'm like "Hey you know what do you know?" And they were like they showed me "Hey this guy right here he loves to be surrounded by big guys he loves to be the center of attention." So they had that down um and I'm like "Okay cool that lets me know all right I can do I can be me." We knew that they frequented a strip club and for those that don't know in the biker world you have a mandatory meeting every week and that's called church and depending on the club and the chapter sometimes that's where you talk about your criminal activity you know you cut your phones off airplane mode leave them outside go inside you know and that's all always all ways to thwart being infiltrated to thwart law enforcement detection i kind of made some stops at that bar when they weren't there uh you know kind of got to know the crowd a little bit and then one night uh when we're ready to swing for the fences the surveillance is like "Hey they're leaving they're on their way there i'm already at the bar i'm like "Cool." I had asked them i'm like "Hey can they wear their colors in the bar?" And they're like "No we don't believe they can wear them in the bar." And I go "Oh that's good that's an advantage for me because now I'm just a tattooed dude drinking staring at half-dressed women listening to rock and roll." And so was that guy but that part of the intelligence is wrong so I'm in there I'm on one side of the bar and here comes about I don't know 12 13 outlaws all with their colors on and they take the whole back section of the bar well that changes any kind of approach for me right i mean what do you do do you walk up and go "Hey especially this accent in Massachusetts come on." Uh but you walk up and go "Hey you you boys like to ride?" I'm probably getting I'm probably getting smacked at a minimum right you know so I I just started being me trying to ingratiate just getting to know some of the outlaws just shooting the [ __ ] guys at a bar and then they had somebody kind of check me out um in the bathroom that was a little weird this big jack dude named Scott Town uh who I got to befriend and know very very well through that case door swings open and here he is barrel-chested big muscles and then I see him eyeballing me and start to walk up so for that split second I'm thinking I'm getting jacked he's probably going to slam me or something you I'm just ready preparing for anything well he starts questioning me about where I've been this that and the other don't bluff because I did throw out some stuff macau in Texas he'd been to Brownsville uh Greenville South Carolina he'd been to Spartanberg he knew all the places I was talking so had I been bluffing and not knowing what I was talking about I probably could have blown it right then and there for protection and safety I got me i don't have a gun you know I'm pretty sure I wasn't even wired that night because me personally I don't like to be wired in the beginning i mean if we would have started fight it just been me fighting you know hopefully a cover team can hear me uh you you should have a cover team on you if you're out a cover team would be like my case team but they're response team you might have multiple response teams and they may do shifts but for the outlaw case it was basically me for the two years it was it was basically me uh the case agent FBI case agent who was a friend of mine Massachusetts state trooper task force officer and it was a Brockton PD detective and we had a DEA counterpart but for the most part it was those two task force officers the agent and me sometimes gaining trust from somebody takes a long time but I just started hanging and that night that first night I bumped them they invited me to their Northeast Regional meet which was called the Lobster Fest i made sure I came back for that and started meeting more people and I was just hanging around you know but you know what is a country guy doing in Massachusetts i'm going to have to have a reason that's believable i said I was a site survey specialist because I grew up landscaping and uh I started looking for something that I felt comfortable talking about and being able to do for a living but eventually I start letting it be known that I'm not just a legit businessman i do some criminal activity too and then I started doing some things what it turned in for them was in the beginning they would report vehicles stolen they would get their own insurance money i would buy those vehicles off of them at a stolen price and what they believed is that I was moving them to Mexico and then we start gaining more trust cuz we're hanging more and they're learning more about me and I'm learning more about them and then it becomes hey we just carjack somebody so now they're saying text we got a hot car we need to get rid of it i'm like okay I'll get rid of it so take that one i started dropping breadcrumbs about the fact that I did used to be in the dope game and I did have contacts in the cartel but I got out of it because um some of my boys got locked up and the heat was getting too close in the outlaws case there wasn't a part where I was going to get taken down but there were several times during that case I did get stopped by law enforcement as our team surveilling me and I'm getting questioned with outlaws in my car and I'm getting browbeat by a state trooper and I've got to stay in roll and hopefully not go to jail you know kind of thing so uh if that would have happened on a case like that I'd just go to jail i would not I wouldn't break cover i'd let somebody come bail me out and we'll figure it out after that but hell it might even bolster my reputation with the outlaws you know the biggest lick uh we came is a year and a half into the case i'd laid out that I was actually involved in the drug game and we did a deal where we had uh uh a load of dope transfer to another vehicle so we ended up doing 40 kilos of real cocaine 1,000 lbs of real weed what they thought was it was a drug crew selling it to another drug crew and they got paid for helping protect it but the big issue uh in that case that most people like to talk about is the night before the the OP was supposed to happen Joe Dogs who was the president of the Taon chapter said "Hey man I want you to come over to the clubhouse." They were having church that that meeting I was talking about and clothesline the enforcer who's supposed to be my good buddy says "Hey Tex you got a minute?" And I said "Yeah I'd been in that clubhouse teen times man who knows how many there's only one door I'd never been in." And that's the door he opened and we went down a tight stairwell to a basement but I'm being generous when I say basement northeastern home split level more like a seller you know i couldn't stand up straight i mean I'm 6'4 and I could probably touch the wall on both sides well they brandished their weapons and he's got me down there and I just walking down into that dark tight area one outlaw in front of me one behind me i'm like "Something's not good man this is not good." And everything starts slowing down in your head cuz you're having an adrenaline dump he walks me down there and he says "Hey there's a lot of going on it's my job to protect my brothers i need you to take all your clothes off i need you to write down your full name your address your kids' names your wife's name and and I start gold bricks at that point I'm like "Oh hell." Um because being stripped in a basement at gunpoint is not a big deal if you're not wired you're just naked it's uncomfortable it's cold when you're wired it's a big deal and uh I I went to write my name down Scott Callaway and I couldn't remember my middle name it's because I was having an adrenaline dump i couldn't remember nothing everything I I'm having the I'm having the auditory exclusion everything's going woof woof real slow uh you can feel your heart beating your hamstrings get rubbery um and I was trying to remember i was going Scott Callaway Scott Callaway Scott Joseph Callaway and I'm like "Nope that wasn't my middle name that was another alias." And I'm going through my I'm just going through this rolodex in my mind and then I do something that we train i had no idea I did it though and it's basically a distraction technique but it's also me trying to get information must have been my subconscious doing it right um and I say "What else do you need?" And he says "What?" And I'm like "My name and what else?" Then I hear them yell up to a probate and say "Hey what else do you need for that website?" So now I'm doing active listening i'm like "Oh okay." They're I'm gathering intel i'm like "Okay they're going to Google search me." Back then there was a huge thing called who's.com you go on that anybody that was like locals that get popped if they can ID the narc and put a picture they put it on who's.com i took my jacket my shirt off i took my boots off and I dropped my pants and underwear down around my ankles and I did remember my middle name finally and I wrote that down but the whole time I'm doing things that we teach i'm like I'm talking i'm looking at clothesline and I'm like I didn't say it but my eyes were saying tell me everything's going to be okay what the hell's going on i look for plastic if I'd have seen plastic on the floor I probably would have tried to fight my way out of it but I mean what the hell could I have done i don't care how tough you are 13 Outlaws you're downstairs you got to get upstairs get out the door so I'm talking but in his look he's kind of looking back and he says at one point he tells me he goes he goes "Trust me man if somebody accused me of being a fed I'd smash them in the mouth." And I looked at him and I said,"I'm not happy." That was true i was not happy and he said 'I wouldn't be either so I think we're done then he grabs a piece of clothing and he says "Hey I'm not going to find anything in here I don't want to." Right like some naked pictures of old my old lady and he laughs he My laugh's like this because without giving too much away there was something in that piece of clothing and he starts needing it he starts looking at it and he's going over this whole piece of clothing and he looks right at it but doesn't see it and I pass and we immediately go back into business now several things to be learned from that a lot of people ask me "What would you have said if he would have found it?" And to this day I remember it like it was yesterday i got two responses one would have been to buy myself some time if he would have said "What is this?" I would have said "I don't know some naked pictures of you old lady." Because he already threw that bone the only other line I had was "The gig is up i'm an undercover FBI agent i can walk out of here and we can see each other in court or all hell's going to break loose." However that would have been a bluff on my part because to my knowledge every time I was in that clubhouse the the cover team really couldn't hear me that night when I turned in my equipment to the case team what I found out was Sergeant Higinbottom Higgy was the Massachusetts State Trooper and Joe was the Brogden police guy that first exchange between me and Joe Dogs at the door made their spotty senses go off or if you're me and you're a believer it's the Holy Spirit talking to you divine intervention uh what Higgy and Joe did is they suited up vest and everything ready to respond but because they knew how fortified that door was on the clubhouse the cinder block wall around it their plan was to drive the vehicle into the cinder block wall to breach it there because it would be easier in their opinion to breach that door i can't tell you how many people in my law enforcement career or even today that I would know and I'd say they would have pulled the trigger they would have went in there they wouldn't have waited but Higgy and and Joe knew me enough to listen to my voice and I and I was in control enough to where they didn't and we passed the test the case was very successful i will tell you there's a whole another side to that three-year period i had been going at a pace for three years where I'd stopped taking care of myself i'm a workaholic so in order to work these cases I would I would take my days off i would be undercover in Oklahoma over the weekend come back not take a day off go right back to work because I wanted to make my bosses happy in Macauen so I could go do the undercovers and be on SWAT and do all this other stuff I was doing um and it eventually caught up to me by the time the case was ending I was a zombie i was on antihistamines decongestants i was taking hydroxy cuts after drinking three cups of coffee it's a cocktail for anxiety and uh and that's what happened to me i I crashed physically and mentally i probably slept like an average of 16 hours a day for a week but I bet you the first two days I was close to 20 hours i wasn't depressed or sick i know what they both feel like i was just that dagum tired the case finished with the reversal i helped set up the deal to get the cars and then the guy that asked me for that deal when the undercover truck drivers that were working for me on the case were picking up the vehicles he pitched them for the 10 kilo deal they said "Yeah we can get it." And they delivered it to him and and we took it down everybody plead guilty and um I don't know if the Taunt chapter ever came back but it was pretty much defunct after that do I believe that uh white supremacy in the domestic terrorism realm of the FBI is probably the most violent and most dangerous yes based on my experience because the militia groups that I infiltrated and stuff a lot of them are just proun and it goes back to what it's always been if you come to take their guns you're going to have a Ruby Ridge or a Waco then in 2019 we started hearing about the base so the base was an organization considered accelerationist they want to accelerate the collapse of society they don't believe there's a political solution to save the white race they believe that society is going to collapse on its own or from man-made events and they want to speed it up we've got people out there just call in and say "Hey I was on this Telegram channel and there's this guy going by TMBB and man he is saying some crazy stuff." So we start watching and it's just spewing hate and and that's not illegal you know first amendment protection in the United States and we knew that pretty much the leader was a guy named Ronaldo Nazaro his online monikers were Roman Wolf and Norman Spear and then I would kind of post hit them hey man I like what you're I like what you're saying i train all the time blah blah blah and then they might like it back well at the end of all their their stuff they're always recruiting and it said if you're interested email the base_1 at so I answered it and that started a series of questions through emails over probably a week or two and then it got to the point to where I mean they're asking you your ethnicity where you live what's your background what's your belief system and I was instructed to download the app called Wire um kind of like a WhatsApp kind of thing you can do calls on it too and I think it was July of 2019 I did approximately 1 hour and 15 minute uh of an interview was basically a panel i think I remember hearing like five different voices and some of them were really young um but Ronaldo was on there and I get peppered with questions and I'm answering them back about 24 hours later I got a ping on wire and it said "We'd like to have you we'll hook you up with the sale leader closest to you the base wanted three to five man sales all over the world waiting for that call for the bugaloo and it turns out that al-Qaeda translated to English is the base don't know if that was a coincidence or that's why Ronaldo chose it i go down to uh Rome Georgia and I meet TMBB the militant Buddhist and Pestilence now listen they're pretty squared away because even though they're young like 21 and 19 uh they told me where to go in the town they told me where to park they told me to take a picture in the town of Rome Georgia there's a capital line wolf it's the Roman wolf statue they wanted me to take a picture of that and send it to them so I met the case team right before that they want to put a tracking device on my truck because again we don't know who we're meeting technically we don't know where we're going they don't want to lose me i don't want them to lose me i go and meet them and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get checked i mean if they're worth anything they're going to check me out you know so they come up I go "Hey man how's it going?" I go at that point I was white warrior i changed it to pale horse shortly thereafter once I was in the group he's like "Hey man put your phone on airplane mode i need to check you." I said "Okay airplane mode." He pulls out this wand I'd never seen to me it looked like some kind of geer counter i mean it had all kinds of lights and buttons on it and a triangle card and I'm like and he's running it all over me and I'm like "Okay cool." He starts going down the truck he starts getting to the back of the truck which is where they installed a tracking device and that thing starts going nuts and I'm like "Oh I'm like it picks it up." And uh turns out that piece of equipment that kid who doesn't have a job is holding is $500 it's not chump change um and it does detect everything bluetooth Wi-Fi any signal there is it'll color code it make a different sound for it right when he's getting to it i I was on a hill and the power lines were pretty low right there and Pestilence says "I wonder if it's the power lines." And he said "Hang on." And he walks over i'd already dropped my right leg back cuz I thought we were getting ready to throw down i'm like "Here we go." He walks over the power lines and that machine goes nuts that detector goes nuts he's like "Man all right it's the power lines follow us." So now I'm following him and I'm I'm like talking i don't know who's watching me or what so I've got like a cup i got my phone i'm driving with one hand or my knee and I'm going "Hey can you guys hear me?" And they're like "Yeah." And I go "You need to shut the tractor off." They're like "Well we're afraid if we shut it off we won't be able to cut it back on." And I'm like "Well I'm telling you if you don't shut it off it's probably going to be the quickest undercover I've ever done." We pull into an abandoned concrete plant is what it looked like to me and uh it turns out that that TMBB which stands for the militant Buddhist uh his real name is Luke Lane and his dad had 100 acres in Rome Georgia and that's where we start training and that's where I start meeting more members and identifying members of the base as they come down to train so we're out there and it's semi-automatic AR-15s and you got to remember at this time in my career in life I've been the lead tact the the principal tactical instructor for the division forever i've been a firearms instructor i can't go out there and tell them what they're doing wrong i can't go out there and make them better that weekend a 19-year-old kid led firearms and tactical training and it was good as I'm watching I'm going if they really wanted to go bad they're probably going to get the drop on a lot of people because they're doing magazine exchange drills fast firing drills speed accuracy no I did not show my what I consider above average marksmanship skills when I was shooting in front of them i threw some rounds um I I I jacked up some magazine exchanges everybody was always building their kit and by building your kit I mean uh bulletproof vests plate carriers rifle repellent plates uh your they call it battle rattle which be duty belt if you were a cop but you got your battle rattle you got your pistols you got everything they wore fleck tarn camo only fleck tarn because that's the German pattern and they're white supremacists in the domestic terrorism world if if you got a de if you've got a base member who's predicated and you can open a case on them but they live in California well California LA division is going to have to open that case you got one here in New York New York's going to have to open that case so you got all these case teams and it got to the point to where every Monday was a meeting between like the higherups and they blessed me enough to have me on the phone which was good because I'm the ground level person that can be like "Hey this is what they're doing." And then every Tuesday was a meeting between all the United States attorney the assistant United States attorneys and locals it got pretty big pretty fast there's a couple of different ways that the base was recruiting uh online was huge but the accelerationist groups seem to be really big into what they call stickering or postering or flying it would say "Save your race join the base." And there'd be a picture of the a swastika and a dude with a military hat on kind of thing and then it would have a a QR code so you scan that QR code and it takes you right to Bitshoot to a video and it's a propaganda recruitment video that the base did i was in tons of them we did a lot of filming down in uh Rome Georgia for the bass you know it might be like a voice over it might show it might be some some strong heavy metal black metal song and it would just show us running and like fighting and and shooting and there's always like a magazine dump at the end where all of us on the line just emptying a mag and the rule was every recruitment video had to be better than the last one because we want to be better there's a very powerful recruitment video out there called the Lion of Europe but you can't pull it up i mean you might be able to find it on like maybe a Telegram but if you try to even put it on a Google Drive or anything it gets flagged right away and again you got to remember these guys call your mass murderers your white supremacy mass murder they call them saints they have a leaderboard the leaderboard shows scores and then it gets down and it says "What are you going to do to make the board?" Saints a leaderboard the hell's wrong with you generally you you're going to find somebody that's satanic in that group and there's groups like Order of Nine Angles and there's some other ones that are out there that are I mean the stuff they spew and write down is pretty horrific i mean like mutilation of children and and a lot of satanic stuff so fast forward to Halloween of 2019 we held a hate camp in Georgia probably about 13 base members from all over the country came that Halloween night they stole a ram from a local property we went down and held a pagan ritual um which nothing against pagan i got plenty of friends that are pagans i mean I got vacuum Viking stuff all over my arm but uh they twist it just like Christian identity twist is the Bible um so they kidnap the goat ram we sacrifice it at a pagan ritual drink his blood a lot of the members do acid the next day we did a training and then we had another little hate camp where built a fire down there burnt Bibles burnt American flags screaming f your Jewish God you know f America f Jews that kind of thing um but after that I had gained enough trust we uncovered several murder plots that uh Luke uh wanted to bring me in on um they had found a couple that they believed were an Antifa couple in a couple of counties away and they wanted to murder him luke had already started making a list of lefty journalists and and reporters and I'm like "So you actually want to start killing people who are in the news and on TV and stuff?" And he goes "Yeah." And I go "Okay well it's a good thing we're going to take a run at this family it'll be good practice." Meanwhile the Baltimore uh Delaware crew uh believed that the huge gun rights rally that was going to be happening in January of 2020 their idea was they thought this was going to be the set off of the Bugaloo they had also started getting really crazy talking about like breaking out saints from the prison using that 6.5 Creedmoor with a $6,000 thermal scope to shoot cops at night the big thing for us was try to make this timeline work and get all the evidence we needed to do an airtight case which we had good ones going anyway but you can always like "Hey man if we could find this out," kind of thing i flew to Baltimore on a Friday uh drove up to Delaware was with two of the base members there sighted in their weapons uh hung out all day went got something to eat started having a few drinks i flew to Atlanta on Sunday drove up to North Georgia met with those base members to finalize the murder plot i picked Luke up to take him to lunch i feigned that my truck had had issues and pulled over on the side of the road got out to work on my truck and then uh that's when another truck came over i started talking to that person but while that's happening the SWAT team's coming over the hill in their Bearecat armored vehicle and I jump in the truck drive off they take down Luke without incident they pick up pestilence at his house so by Friday it's starting to come out and now I'm in the main chat i haven't respond i'm not answering anybody but like "Has anybody seen Pale Horse look at this so and so and so and so." And it's going and it's going it's like "Wait a minute this this report says there's a federal agent that infiltrated us." And they're like "Who the hell's the Fed in here?" And I'm going I'm just waiting and I'm waiting and and Nazaro figured it out uh he goes "He attended every training which could be a red flag i should have picked on something like that." And as soon as he started saying that I go "Oh he knows it's me he's figured it out." And somewhere around like 5:15 on a Friday night it was like "Roman Wolf has removed you." So I screenshotted that and sent it to all the case teams and I put and I'm out and uh and that was it we took that one down your story has to be straight your We called it your legend but your backstory in other words especially if I'm planning on going deep undercover it may not work you know but plan for it because if I came in here with crappy backstopping and a name that I don't have anything associated you know what I mean if it's not real if it doesn't look real and it's not real and tangible you can't touch it then all of a sudden something breaks and you can go deep undercover you're screwed because you had a bad foundation so know your stuff because you're going to get tested on it um don't bluff because if you got my luck you're going to get called on it another big one that I that I saw and and personally dealt with uh is you need to be able to you need to be able to see that a situation is deteriorating and be aware of it and get out if you got to or maybe everything was heating up and they're like "Do it do it." And then you fake it and then they're like "All right everything's cool man." That now you know that the situation is back you know for me personally the way I was trained um and the choices I made I always stuck close to very close to who I am i mean it's still me the jokes are the same i just may or may not be married may or may not have kids may or may not have played college ball may or may not be a musician and a singer but I mean I probably ride motorcycles and lift weights is there a danger staying close to the truth uh I again case by case subjective uh because it could be if I've got it way too close you know like you can figure out that I'm married and my kids and stuff but I generally felt better and more secure being close to who I am there's a few rules for undercovers it really goes for sources too we can't be involved in an act of violence unless it's in self-defense right we can't lead and come up with the criminal idea you know what I'm saying that that'd be an entrapment issue right let me say this operational security you should never have anything personal that ties to you i mean of course I'm wearing my personal clothes what if I went and picked up my coat from the cleaners and it says Scott Payne on it and now I'm undercover and somebody grabs my jacket and you know me as tech Scott Callaway and now you see Scott Payne in the jacket so you got to be totally clean one of the things I would do to kind of get enroll for almost all my cases um is I take the cross off I take my cross off my necklace and I put a skull on when I got home i'd switch them back this might be trade craft how would you ever alert your cover team if you were in trouble it's not trade craft um if I It's actually It gets kind of funny because you go and you meet case teams and case agents all over the country and if you've been in there you getting along in the tooth working undercovers and stuff and uh it's always like hey what do you what's your code word what's your safety word and I'm like how about this if I yell help multiple times in a row that's my code word you know and I get it do you want to set them off or not but I've been on at especially at the NARS level that I got so much experience you say okay your signal your physical signal is going to be you're going to take your hat off you're going to tap your head and put the hat back on person's never done it their baseline's never done it but for whatever reason subconsciously it's in there and they don't even realize they do it they're talking to the bad guy they take their hat off tap their head and put it back on it wasn't time for the signal they did it by accident now my go word you know like I we could come up with something like if you want a word where for me to let the team know I got the evidence like for something quicker maybe we're we're doing uh uh crimes against children we're ordering escorts or whatever and once I get that money in exchange for sex thing I can I can come up with something you know bathroom something simple but yeah I I always I always tried to keep it simple people ask me a lot you know what what was it about undercover work that drew me i've always loved connecting with people i've always I'm a people person gift a gab kind of guy but I will tell you this I was always fascinated with undercover movie i don't care if it was the cheesiest undercover movie i I love it i was a cop first from 93 to 98 and for three years uniform patrol two years vice narcotics so I was already certified to do undercover work in the state and then I was applying with the FBI and I got accepted in 1998 it's a selection process every field office has an undercover coordinator if you have a seasoned undercover coordinator they should be sitting you down not giving you things that are going to be in this in the certification course but talking to you about I mean if if you came to me right now I'd be like "Okay so what do you think undercover is what are you picturing you know do you have a family how long have y'all been married you got kids how old are your kids?" Things like that but again the undercover program is completely voluntary even if you're certified let's say you make it through the certification process nobody can make you work undercover they can make you be a case agent but they can't make you they can't make you uh do undercover then at some point you're going to have to go do um psychological testing uh we have something called the safeguard unit so you do psychological test during the day and you're going to sit down with a clinical psychologist that may be an FBI agent that's taken a position at safeguard unit or it could be somebody we've contracted in and then you sit down with somebody like a PON or like hopefully me later on in my career somebody that's seasoned um to talk about things outside of that like man how you doing how's your family doing how's your division do they support you or do you get a lot of grief for being in an undercover program they might run you through a scenario or two and then they're going to they're going to do all their crunching back at headquarters and stuff and they're going to come down with 40 candidates it's a 20 slot school but they have 20 backups just in case somebody falls out and you can slide another one in i got certified in 2002 with the undercover uh certification i think in 2003 I started role playinging at the school and eventually started teaching blocks at the school from 2003 till I retired 2021 i've never seen a 100% graduation rate um that doesn't mean it's hazing i mean that that to me it gives the course credibility you go through that process and if you make it it's two weeks no days off pretty big on sleep deprivation because it really brings out the weaknesses and we want to see that as trainers as undercovers we want you to feel it if you're going through it you know if you're going to if you're going to drink while you're undercover which of course you can and we want to see how you are or do you lose your stuff and start wanting to fight everybody or you know uh do you take all your clothes i mean you know thing is we want we'd want a red flag you know New York City was my first office in the FBI out of the academy and I was already doing some cameos here and cameo is just like it sounds like in the movie thing like I hopped in a truck with a task force guy and we delivered 3,000 pounds of weed to a Jamaican gang that's a cameo i mean I'm not we're just going we're delivering it and then they're going to get it and when they pop the box everybody runs in and arrest them well there's there's huge differences from when I started undercover to when I finished um hopefully you get wiser as far as me as a Greenville County narcotics officer and and the first time they rolled me down the street in a high trafficing drug area and they gave me a $20 bill and told me said "All you got to do is pull down the corner they're going to run up to your car you just tell them you want a 20." I don't know what the hell I'm doing i I mean I I'd bought and smoked weed prior to becoming a cop but you know multiple times but I I didn't know about pulling in you know to those areas and I remember I rolled down there and I was so scared you know the guy comes up and he's like "What you want?" He's in my window he's like "What you want?" I cracked the window just enough to get a $20 bill through it like I'm trying to insert into the vending machine you know i'm like "I want a I'm sure my voice was high because I was scared." I was like "I want a 20." I handed it through he slid it through he rolled down the window so I can hand it to you you know he hands it to me and it was probably a sliver of I don't know it could have been soap who knows you know I'm in New York i'm assigned in New York 911 happens i come back as soon as you could fly commercially and I help cover leads running up and down Westside Highway um and other highways it was uh very surreal but I saw a canvas for some undercover work in San Antonio i put in for it i got approved for 30 days and once that happened I became the primary and they ended up transferring me so I went to the border of Mexico for six and a half years and while I was there as a case agent I'm working cartel stuff and this that and the other i can tell you transparently I can't talk about the case because it was only like one of the only ones I did that was classified it's been outed but I don't want to be put on a box operation Poetic Justice was a public corruption undercover operation uh and it took place man I want to say around like 2009 to 2011 the FBI is looking for systemic public corruption uh which means more than just one person generally speaking and that was the reporting and it had been reported for years and years but nothing was found and so I went in and and you know tried to infiltrate "Gratciate get to know people." I was uh relatively new to the Tennessee area that we were in that was right when the big opioid crisis was happening i went in there to try to give me something to you know some kind of something to be a little dirty and uh I came in with purported stolen cigarettes and those things went like hot cakes cuz out there in the rural Tennessee area they had no problem getting their opioids but man they did not like paying that much money for cigarettes so once that happened I was like oh this is our end and I started bringing in reportedly stolen cigarettes and selling them and I was selling for $20 a carton and and they would give me like two Oxy80s which were going for a dollar a milligram so they just gave me $160 worth of drugs for the $20 carton and then we started trying to wrap in some local law enforcement and we did we did good we got a a constable uh who was dirty we got a guy that was a reserve who became a cop while I was in that case there are a few things a good cop hates worse than a bad cop don't tarnish the badge i mean dad gum it we did get the constable on some dope charges we got the cop and he was still buying stolen cigarettes from me i mean I'd seen him do cocaine and stuff um which is just heart-wrenching when you're a cop when you are blue you know you took the same oath I did the hell's wrong with you you know but we got him um because he was buying what he thought were stolen iPads and stuff from me TVs and stuff like that but most of the charges were drugs uh just from the pills and the cocaine and we did like 51 indictments but most of them went state that was a year and a half case i kind of broke my own rule don't underestimate earlier I talked about you need to be able to tell when a situation's deteriorating and not stay in it if you can get out uh early on in the case I'm at this trailer of Mike and Sherry and there's other people there and I just I guess I wasn't paying attention all of a sudden everybody's gone and it's just me Mike and Sherry and what I had done is to validate my knowledge about drugs i had picked up some cocaine the previous trip there and uh and I bitched about it as a good drug dealer would do you know I'm like that was that wasn't worth that it was stepped on because I knew the purity of it i go that wasn't that wasn't nothing well that was Mike's in he goes well not my stuff try this you're talking to a mountain man with no teeth in his head uh who drinks all day does cocaine and pills all day good guy that I could bond with when he was good but when he was bad he was bad i mean he he would just go off hard hard to trust hard to be around kind of thing violent it's a chess game right you're always trying to think of the next move i missed it now I'm sitting on a couch leaning backwards i got a red bone hound in my crotch growling mean mean dog uh growling teeth showing i'm leaning back as far as I can on the couch as an open bag of cocaine in my face and he's going "Do it do it if you're not a cop do it if I find out you the law you a dead man you hear me?" He also had a uh short barrel doublebarrel uh 20 gauge shotgun with a hammer cocock back sitting right next to him what was going through my head immediately was "You idiot." Like I can't believe I let my guard down and I and now I'm in this position and I'm like "I'm not doing it i mean I've told you man i got heart issues i got I used to do tons of it i was a powerlifter i ain't doing that [ __ ] no more." Well then he's like "Well uh Sherry's on the rescue squad so and so on the squad's had heart attacks he's got a bad heart he did this this morning he's fine." And I'm thinking "Well that's great." But eventually what happened was is he said "Well just taste it just taste it." And he went backing away clearly the situation's deteriorating i did a slight of hand move and I faked the taste test i did not stick it in my mouth and it was fine after that don't want to give away trade crafts right but you don't do dope now if your life's in danger yeah I'll do the dope and then I need to tell the case team and I need to tell the United States attorney's office and I need to get to an emergency room and let them know that I've ingested a drug to make sure I'm not going to OD especially today I mean look at the day with fentanyl and everything hell you can touch that and die let me give you an example narcotics street level i'm a narc and our MO was kind of like you can get three buys from a location that was good enough for a search warrant you know wasn't always the exact but roughly we get three buys out of a house we hit it so I'm going to buy from you and I'm I'm I'm a user i could probably come up with a reason not to do it in front of you two or three times but can I come up with a reason not to do it for two months no it's all your story and it's got to be believable and you got to believe it and you got to sell it myrtle Beach happened because uh I did see a canvas there was a uh a young man who had already been to prison he was a felon uh he shows up at a Ku Klux Clan rally but he is so radical that he is scaring the white supremacist this guy uh was attracting attention because he was so radical and wanting to hurt people and it got turned over to us i come in as it's a role I like to call closer i don't know if there's a correct term for it but to me a closer is this you want to do something you want to blow something up I'm the guy that can get you the bomb i'm the guy that can get you the gun i'm a closer in this case Benji McDow was his name uh lived about 45 minutes outside of Myrtle Beach in Conway uh so I meet Benji we go down to Myrtle Beach uh meet the hotel room and talk what are you really planning on doing we saw what you posted we've seen what you've said but are you do you have the means to do it how many steps have you taken to make it happen if any those are things we're trying to find out and if any kind of murder or harm to innocent people is going to happen we got to stop it so basically he just kept saying "I got the heart i got the heart i got the heart i just don't know how to do it i need some guidance." Well I'm not going to guide you on how to shoot the synagogue he'd already looked at a synagogue he knew that they were having a like a Saturday family day and I did point out to him hopefully and this kind of slowed things down because he wanted to do it in the county he had been arrested at and everybody knows he's a felon so I was like I talk like a criminal does i'm like hey you know aren't you on the radar here you know yeah you know so day ends I'm sitting at the bar at the hotel because I fly out the next morning i've already turned in my recording equipment my undercover phone rings it's Benji he goes I like what you were saying and you're right and I am too known here i'm going to find another spot a little further away in other words another target another synagogue or whatever a little further away um but until then you think you could hook me up with a 40 i didn't even miss a beat i said "Yeah man what do you need glock sig what do you want?" He goes "I like a Glock." All right he tells me how many rounds he wants he tells me he wants uh a hollow point so if you're a felon you can't have a weapon i was doing some more calls coming up with a gun and then he sped things up because he said "Hey man i'm leaving i'm moving." He was staying with his mom and we were like "Where you going?" He said "Alabama." But I'm like the case team's like "Dude we've got everything written up we can't let this dude hit the road and lose him possibly or him hurt somebody number one." And I drove through the night or whatever to Myrtle Beach and so then we go and pick him up and and I sell him a gun at a the gun he requested at a decent price he wanted to be safe you know i gave him a gun uh the gun was inoperable and then we were both arrested by the by the case team the case team came in and and uh I remember getting my head slammed off the side of the SUV I had rented so like they come rushing in and I'm looking at Benji and I'm like "Be cool be cool don't say nothing don't say nothing." And they grab us and and they get him and actually one of the cops in Myrtle Beach used to be NYPD so it's total New York accent and uh and you know because we connected right off when we met i'm like I was in New York he's like a man you know so he's the one that slams me and then he goes with his New York accent your friends from New York say hello you know something like that and I was like what when did the ad living come in what was that but I will tell you I said you guys need me to stick around whatever they go no we got it Scott thanks as I'm driving back to Tennessee they called me shortly i mean probably within an hour and they said "Listen he confessed to everything." I congratulated the case team because see that was going on while the bowl haircutle church shooter was in trial and he represented himself in trial when you teach tactics we never name the shooters names because that's what they want i'll name the victims all day long i'm not giving him any more any more publicity right mass murders but Benji told me he when he was explaining what he goes I want to do something and he goes I want to do something on a I want to do something in the spirit of Dylan Roof but on a grander scale so don't know how many lives we saved that day but we saved them so the true definition of undercover work is you are forming relationships that you are potentially going to betray and you need to figure out and rationalize in your mind how you can do that without it having an adverse impact on your psyche it's not always easy at least it wasn't for me like that Scott Town guy I bonded really really tight with Scott um even to the point to where you know I'm rocking his newborn daughter at his house we finished each other's sentences love working out all that stuff but at the end of the day if you're breaking the law I mean there's going to be that point hopefully the case agent sits down with you and says you're an adult made a decision to break the law you got caught let's start here hopefully that's what happened but um I will tell you that the last night the last words I spoke to Scott uh he of course he didn't know I was FBI he called me i was actually in Nevada helping putting on undercover training and I got back i always kept my undercover phones on he's like "Hey uh I just heard your two truck drivers and and and Big Timmy got arrested." And I'm like "What?" He's like "Yeah." He goes "I just wanted to let you know." And I said "Well you know they do things on the side." He said "Hey I'm going to get up and take a shower i'm gonna find out what's going on i'm going call you back." And I said "Okay." His last words were to me "Beep i love you brother." And I went I love you too and I hung up and probably within 45 minutes the SWAT team was hitting his house that's the last time we spoke i know he's out now i would talk to him he might punch me i don't know it might be a throwdown we We might finally have the fight we always wondered about you know but uh I don't hate the guy you know he made some decisions hopefully he's doing well that's what I hope i hope he's doing great uh I love a success story have you ever witnessed somebody hearing that you were undercover for the first time in person have you ever seen that yes plenty of times one of the ones that's usually funny is uh you arrest them and maybe the case team's talking it doesn't have to go like this but maybe the case team's talking to them now I'm in another room listening right and they're lying to the case team and lying and lying and lying and no I didn't do this no nothing nothing and then you walk out and you say "Hey how's it going?" And they go "Hey Scott how is it?" And I go "Hey just so we're clear." Boom whip out your creds special agent Scott Payne with the FBI this is what you usually get oh I knew it i'm sorry what i knew you were undercover i'm I'm getting more country accent cuz the one guy I'm thinking of that's what he said he goes I mimic and mirror i can't help it he goes "Oh hell i knew you was an undercover." And I went "You did?" He said "Yeah." And I said "And you continued to sell me cocaine for a year and a half?" and he's like "Well hell I like you." I always like to have more than one recorder because um there's a chance something can go wrong you want it to be concealed comfortably especially if you're deep undercover these are my personal opinions and I would always have a backup because you know video and audio eats up a lot of memory so you might just be spot-checking but a picture now we're at trial and you're the defense attorney you say "Well how come you only recorded that five minutes?" Why can't we see everything else that was going on were you doing something it's just about creating doubt in a jury's mind and the undercover technique gets such great evidence it's usually so overwhelming that the only thing a defense team can do is they can try to claim enttrapment which shouldn't be an issue if you're a decent undercover because that's like 101 we know we can't ent trap i can't put the words in your mouth that's wrong they can argue entrament or they try to make you look like a piece of trash on the stand that's it because I mean the evidence is like there's that's your client saying it and doing it but I always did backups i've had multiple devices on me and then three days later I go to listen to the recordings and they all crap the bed and I would document in there i would say it should be noted that every piece of equipment died you know malfunctioned i wouldn't say crapped the bed in the 302 but um yeah it malfunctioned i have never had to testify in an FBI undercover case um as I said earlier the evidence is so overwhelming now as a case agent I have but for me as a law enforcement officer I took an oath to the entire Constitution uh not just one amendment or two all of it and if you're breaking the law don't be mad at law enforcement we're just enforcing the law you got caught i'm not saying you're a bad person i'm not saying what you did is wrong i'm saying you're an adult and you made a choice you chose this and you got caught and it's illegal this is the problem with the FBI you have a headquarters level that's disconnected from the field level but at the end of the day we're a law enforcement agency and we need to enforce the law when Mueller came in it seemed like we got further away from working cases they started bringing people into the FBI who had zero law enforcement experience whatsoever and giving them the top three or four positions of the FBI you got somebody from Goldman Sachs coming into the FBI at the top what do you know about national security and law enforcement my personal opinion is yeah I think changes need to be made um I came in under Louis Free and I truly believe that Louisie was the last real director the FBI had but he was also an agent himself and an assistant United States attorney i know that's going to be like really hard to find somebody with that those qualifications to come in to be the director and when Mueller came in the FBI he wanted to push the FBI into more of an intelligence agency kind of like CIA taking almost like a broken model from CIA and applying that to the FBI the bottom line is is case agents uh is what should be important everything else is a collateral duty you want to try out for SWAT you want to be a SWAT operator cool try out you want to be a firearms instructor tactical instructor active shooter instructor undercover coordinator source handler uh evidence response team all those are collateral duties you should be uh an investigator first if you're willing to stay in DC and live in DC or in that area and stay in the Jahuba building you can make rank this you just keep staying and you keep moving up but then you end up unfortunately you end up with somebody with a very high position who has hardly any experience working cases and you end up with a McCabe Peter Stroke Lisa Page situation and and they do wrong things because they did not know what to do because they did not work cases i retired um June of 2021 after the base case i'm sitting in Arizona Phoenix Arizona putting on training uh for online covert employees that do domestic terrorism cases and I just remember sitting there in Arizona and thinking I am completely satisfied with my career i still travel around speaking for conferences it could be civilian groups it could be citizensmies so my book is called Codeame Palehorse and the subtitle is how I infiltrated America's Nazis you learn from each case how my skills got sharpened more and more how do I balance the personal life with professional life mine overlap they kind of overlap that's just the way I work and my family works i've shared a lot with my wife uh obviously if it's classified I can't but the way my marriage and family works it's not like that typical military uh mold where you can disappear for 3 months and say "I can't tell you what I'm doing but I love you." And that that doesn't that doesn't work i can not in mine i could be gone for about two weeks and after that I you know don't get me wrong I'm not trying to bring the bad stuff home there's a whole bunch of training for years and years and years in law enforcement look man they got that imaginary bush or you got a bush outside when you step out of your car and you're getting ready to walk into your house to the family that's been waiting on you all day and misses you take all that from your job and set it on that bush go inside be with your family be a husband be a father uh and on your way back to work pick it up off the bush now I'm going to tell you something very personal in the outlaw's case when I was in the basement that night on the way home I had bought my wife uh everybody knows Miss Burner phones now so I bought her that phone and I'd call her no matter what time it was we were we were we were young in our marriage pretty young you know uh within 10 years at that point and I would call her i don't care if it was 5 in the morning 7 in the morning I'm finishing up i'd be like "Hey babe i'm on my way back to the hotel i just want you to know everything's good i'll call you when I wake up." Sometimes she'd talk to me for a while sometimes she'd say "Okay love you and go back to bed." That night when I called her the first thing she said was "Is you okay?" And I said "Uh yeah why?" And she said "I was driving tonight with the girls in Macallen." And she said "I got this overwhelming feeling." And she said "I pulled over on the side of the road and I started praying for you." So I matched up the time is when I was in the basement hi I'm a producer and authorized account if you enjoyed this video then please subscribe and comment with more topics that you'd like us to cover in this series