00:00:00 Speaker 1: M I hunted men for a living. That's how I looked at it. I went from hunting animals to me and when I captured that was my trophy on the wall. On this episode of the Burglaries podcast, we're going deep undercover in the rough country of southeast Ohio to learn about the secret lives of wildlife poachers and the life of an undercover wildlife agent by the name of RT. Stewart. He worked eighteen years for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. He was one of the lead agents on the largest turkey poaching sting in US history. He's a decorated law enforcement officer known for going deep undercover, even years at a time, and willing to do whatever it took to bust the outlaws. And in his career he never had a single one of his targets suspects not be convicted of crimes. If the bad guys had known him, they'd have feared him, but they didn't because he was a ghost. We'll hear from author Chip Gross, who wrote a book about RT, and will interview Dr Matthew Sharp's of California State University about the psychology of undercover agents and the personal cost that comes with living a lie. In the first episode of this series, yes, I said, series, will meet RT and he'll show us the life of an undercover agent. And on part two we'll talk about his biggest job. You're gonna laugh, be intrigued, and you're gonna cry. I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. Your whole life is lie. Who you talk about stress, but when you're young and dumb, you don't even think about it. But it's stress. Was it worth it? You're too good? Ye. My name is Clay Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Bells Man leads a life of danger. The foundation of a functional society is that the law of the l and is obeyed by the vast majority of the population, and much of this is enforced by uniformed law enforcement that patrols our highways, cities and towns. Enforcing the law secret ass but there is an underground layer of crime that is very difficult for a person in uniform to stop. And that's where another layer of guile or cunning action of the good guys kicks in. At some point in history, the undercover agent arose your courage, Mrs so we a chrene. I admire your luck, Mr Bond, James Bond, Mr Bond, I suppose you wouldn't care to raise the limit. I have no objection. The idea the world famous secret agent like James Bond is kind of ludicrous, typical of Hollywood. They glamorized stuff that often isn't glamorous at all. Dr Matthew Sharp's is a professor of psychology at California State University and Fresno. He studied undercover agents for a long time. Here's what he has to say about old James Bond. Where James Bond and there is Sean Connery back in the day, but the one I like anyway, and there he is wearing his nice tuxedo in a casino, right, and he's like before, it's just taller everybody else. And get two beautiful women on each army, and so everybody else wearing jeans on a T shirt. He's in his tuxedo right, and he's a world famous secret agent. There's an old song, the second best secret agent in the whole wide world, but he's a world famous secretgyent. Well, I wants to ask an actual uh spy and undercover, a man who spends his life deliberately being as nondescript as possible. What would happen to James Bond in real life? He didn't even has it. He'd be done in five minutes. You can't be a world fat of secret agent. There's no future, but you'd like that recognition, and um, you know, the clients and services outside police work must be very, very difficult because you may get medals where you don't even get to take from home and there you are with you know, your the veterans of this and that service. You can't talk about it, and those stresses have not really been addressed, but they're a big problem. There's no future in being a world famous secret agent. That's funny. Understanding the psychology of undercover agents is a brand new field. I guess studying it is an indicator that we're in advanced society. Our needs are met to the point we now have resources to study the people hired as law enforcement that we've commissioned to act as criminals and break the law in order to catch the real criminals. When you start thinking about it, it's a complex space, and I'm not sure if that means are society is advanced. Maybe it's regressing. Undercover work is a necessary evil, one that we're all thankful for, whether we realize it or not, and it lies in an odd philosophical and ethical spot. It takes a special breed of person to do this, and we're learning it often comes at a high cost to the individual, but a net gain for society. It's rare that we get a glimpse into the real life of an undercover agent. In two thousand twelve, the Kent State University Press published a book written by Chip Gross titled Poachers Were My Prey. The book is the real life story of this undercover agent, RT Stewart. It's a tell all book, and it's publishing came with its own share of controversy. But in it, RT tells about his top ten covert operations, busting the ruffican outlaws of Southeast Ohio and West Virginia. Here's off Chip Growth introducing us to our t. It just seems like some people in this world are perfectly matched for the jobs they do, and R. T. Store is definitely one of those people. But first of all, he's a very skilled woodsman. He knows how to hunt, he knows how to fish, he knows how to trap. When the bad guys see that, that is a positive in their mind, you know, Okay, this guy is for real. And uh, he's very congenial. He could get the bad guys to like him and trust him very very quickly, sometimes with just within a few days. He just got that that knack about him. He's a very likable person. Like, what what does it take for a person to to have that, to be able to do that? I'm not sure because I don't have it, and I don't think a lot of people do. But RT does. He's a real chameleon in that he can adjust to a lot of different situations. As he talked about, he can relate to the kind of scumbag poachers, or he can go to Lake Erie and deal with marina owners up there and charter boat captains that are running boats worth tens of thousands of dollars and still slide in and become a member of that group. So I think it's a lot of It is kind of a natural ability, a natural skill, and he's very very good at what he does. He can think on his feet very very quickly. He mentions in the book that in every undercover operation that he was on, the poachers at one point or another accused him or asked him if he wasn't undercover wildlife officer, you know, because they've always got that in the back of their mind. We know we're doing bad stuff. Who's this new guy and they're looking at him? Is this the Is this our worst nightmare that we don't know about yet? And he was able to talk his way out of it every single time. And when I asked him how he did it, he said, I don't know. He said, it's something I prepared for, but I knew I was going to get the question, but every time it came up, I had to work around it in a different way. RTI. Stewart is now in his sixties and he's been retired from Ohio dn R for over a decade. I don't know how to say this without just saying it. When you meet him. He doesn't have the vibe of a career law enforcement man. He's got a penful of blue tick coon hounds, and he's got duck boats stuffed under every shed on his place. And his Southeast Ohio draw is surprisingly thick. But that's exactly why he was one of the best undercover agents in Ohio dn our history. Today his hair is trimmed tight, and it looks like he hasn't shaved in a couple of days. But at one time he looked like a guitarist from zz Top. Here's our t I guess as a kid, I used to watch television, and you know, and I always liked the I always liked the idea of a ranger or a game word or something that nature. And he grew up hunting and fishing. Absolutely grew up hunting and fishing. My dad was a major. He went in a gun shop for forty years. And so how did you become a game where in that? What age were you and what was your career progression? You know, living in a small town and got married and I ended up working in a coal mine. You have to live, You've got kids, you gotta you gotta make a living. You know that wasn't my that wasn't my dream obviously, but you gotta make a living, and that's how around here, being uneducated. And so I went to work in a coal mine and then I left there and went to steel mills, and uh got laid off in nineteen eighty one. And I was twenty nine or thirty. And when I got laid off, that's when that first time they ever laid off my life. I remember telling them people that I was going to college and become a game warden. I was thirty years old when I went to gold. You've just learned what are the keys to Artie's success in living a life of an undercover agent. He worked in a whole mine, in the steel mill for over a decade. He'd lived a real life of a rural Appalachian man, which you can't fake. RTIs a coon hunter, a cat fisherman, a skilled deer in turkey hunter, and a trapper. And by the way, Southeast Ohio is considered Appalachia, and as a surprise to me, it's even considered the South by those that lived there. And RT has never ice fished a day in his life, so it passes Steve Ronelli's test R. T was hired by the Ohio dn R when he was thirty five years old as a uniformed game warden. They assigned me to Union County, which was I didn't even know where Union County was because I had never mean much out of this area that was in the that was west of Columbus, which to me, that was the city. And the worst thing that could have done was said, a give a hill billy with a badge and sent him to the city. Well, so I went up there and they put me in uniform, and I was up there for about a year and a half. I was in uniform, and then I was always intrigued because I had worked with friends of mine that was undercover agents with liquor Control, and I was always always intrigued about that. You know. RT told his supervisors that if there was ever any need for undercover work that he'd be interested in the job. He had no training, but he had reason to think that he'd be good at It turns out he was right. Keep in mind, I was thirty five when I went to work as a wildlife officer. I grew up in hunting and fishing all my childhood of life and all my early adult life, if it flew, swam, or walked, I had been involved in it. So with my background in that, and I wasn't always an angel. A matter of fact, they tried to catch me for five years and couldn't. That's why they heard me. Is that right? So I just felt I had the knowledge in the background that I knew how outlaws worked. I just felt that I could do a better job of catching people. Not saying that I didn't have a good career while I was in uniform. I did. I just felt I could catch people that was more detrimental to the population of the wildlife than I could getting you. I was already rough round the edges, and you're right, you were dangerous. As an undercover up, I was feared. Uh, did you have the kind of confidence that when you set out on a target target acquisition? It was like, man, that's a good question. Whatever it takes to get this guy. Yeah. I had the confidence. I felt I had the ability. I felt I had to know how, and I was a pretty good actor. I hunted men for a living. That's how I looked at him. I went from hunting animals to me when I captured that was my trophy on the wall. RT has the right to be confident and call it like it is, because later he'll reveal some of his mistakes. It takes a special person to be successful undercover, and as we're beginning to see, Artis background set him up to be as good an undercover agent as was ever made. And as a matter of fact, he never worked a case where he didn't get his target suspect. That's incredible. If you're an outlaw, you wouldn't want Artie Stewart after you, but like a black panther creeping up on you in the night, you wouldn't even know it was r T. I think with my background, I could talk the language that poachers and outlaws could understand. I knew what they were thinking. I guess I knew what they were after I could talk that, and they knew that I wasn't fake when I talked about it, and I was. I was always good at reading Pepe. I think I was always good at reading people. I always felt that I had a good humorous side to me. People make people like me. And I also discovered early on that if you put this outlaw, put them on a pedestal that's what they like. They didn't want competition, but they want to be put on a pedestal. They wanted esteem from you or anyone. Would that be like a number one descriptor of what you see that's congruent throughout. They all just want to be They want to be put up on that pedestal. They want to be the number one person in their peers eyes. They want to be the great white hunter. The motivations of outlaws are really quite primitive to human nature. They're looking for social esteem and for whatever reason, they can't get that inside the boundaries of the law, so they've got to cheat to get it. I want to underst stand what goes into an undercover operation. In Artis book, I was amazed at the links he would go to to infiltrate these poaching rings. On these undercover operations, you would embed yourself completely inside of these communities, correct. I've heard of operations where like an undercover guy would like live at his normal house with his wife and like drive two hours and show up at a gas station that's playing game boards, that's playing undercover and playing under Okay, well so tell me that's playing. So tell me what you had to do. I took I took it very serious. I was I was. I took it extremely serious. I would go there, and I felt the only way to catch these people, you've got to You've got to be part of them. You gotta be with them. So I'd go there and find a plate and find a place to rent. You want to have a target suspect, have a target suspect. We'd already have a target list, I say, you know, complaints on individuals, and they'll from whatever county the agents put together and give us a packet. You know, I need to look at these guys and see what's going on. So that's what we'd do. So we would we would go in and rent a place in the surrounding area. We didn't want it too close, but we didn't want it too far away either, you know, I didn't. We didn't want it close enough. We're you know, just the walk down the street and walking in in any time, you know, But but we wanted a close enough to make it a little effort, you know, for him to come visit. I remember you saying that you didn't want to like live across the street from a poacher because he might show up at a time when you're not needing him on the phone with your boss or so, but but far enough away that he'd have to go out of his way to come see you. But you're still in the community. Correct, That's exactly right. Why didn't nobody tell me that, you know, we didn't have a didn't have a book to go by. I think it was just instinct instinct. So that's what we do is rent a place like that. And my shortest project, I think it was like fourteen months or twelve months, and then so you would you would live there for like years? Yeah? A long was one was four years? Four years? Would you go back home to try to come home? But it got the point where I did not want to come home. I just it was who wants to come back to reality? M hmm. I got the point I didn't want to come home. This is where things get interesting and take an unexpected turn. What I appreciate most about our T is how open he is about his struggles. It's pretty rare to find a person willing to be as honest about himself as our T. At the time, there wasn't much known about the psychological effects of living a double life, but it turns out r tis experience of having difficulty going back and forth between reality and his undercover work is a common issue. Dr Matthew Sharps wrote a book called Processing under Pressure, Stress, memory, and decision Making in law enforcement. He's worked a lot with undercover agents, but it's an under researched area. I want to see what he says about this. We now know that brain cells. If you if a brain cell is active, what other brain cells are talking to these synaps The connections tend to be strengthened. So if you're in the field for a long time, pretending to be a mafiosi, pretending to be a drug dealer, what have you, you're gonna stows. Those habit pattings start to become a relatively automatic you. Okay, So when you go back home to your to your your spouse, your family. Lots of times undercover people will emerge back into the instead of word, emerge back into their undercover persona, and they don't know they're doing it. This is usually problematic. An awful lot of our life is dealing in terms of automated behaviors. It's possible to be so d undercover for so long that the functional mechanisms of our identity begin to become scrambled, and when you think about it, it's really an odd place for a human to occupy. Normal human existence is based on us functioning honestly in a state of reality. But people who work deep undercover have to live a life which, as it turns out, exerts an extreme amount of chronic stress on the body that we weren't designed for. If you think about our ancient ancestors, they were hunters, and hunting presents tremendous acute stress, especially if you're doing it with a spear, or a spear has a magazine capacity of one. Okay, so that's pretty stressful, But it's two or three days of a persistence hunt, or the five minutes of jumping up and taking out a deer, or back in the day in Irish elk okay, it's cute. Now, we had to be able to deal with acute stress because if you couldn't, you couldn't survive long enough to reproduce. But on ex stress, the symptoms of chronics chronic stress don't kill you until you're in middle age or for what them was old age, and so we don't seem to have a good way of dealing with chronic stress. It gets us. One thing is that when you're under stress, you're in the human fight or flight response, and that ups your blood pressure, it ups your heart rate, it ups your breathing rate. All this stuff is wearing on the body. It also produces, aside from those three major chemicals involved, aldosterone, which is to do assault balance, Cortisol that gives you more energy, but it also has an erosive quality on some structures. There's research that indicates cord assault and have some corrosive agency on a structure in the brain called the hippocampus where you actually process your memories. But then you have adrenaline, and that's what it puts your body into this higher state of being. It's just very, very expensive, and because you're using all of these you're doing all of this high stress stuff, you tend to shut down the systems you don't need. Humans weren't designed for chronic or constant stress, were equipped for short term stress. And it all goes back to our hunter gatherer roots. It's easy to listen to our t stories and feel the excitement and James Bond style intrigue of undercover work. But all things come with the cost, and it certainly did for Ourt. Being an undercover agent is a dirty job that enables the rest of us to live normal lives, unaware, even oblivious to what's helping keep things stable. I want to get back to the nitty gritty mechanics of undercover work, and what's a bit mind twisting is that the key to living a lie is telling the truth. The best undercover agent and I think any of them will tell you this, that's been deep undercover or you got to stick to the truth. You tell lies, but you don't tell them in a sense. You may you may have done something. You may just order the time frame, or you just order the name, but you stick to the truth of reality what you have experienced, and you never go wrong because you don't have to remember. And so as an big overview, so you've embedded yourself. You have your personal story, and then you're trying to infiltrate these groups of people or a specific person, and you need them to take you hunting, and you need them to talk about what they've done. Correct, But did you find that these guys wanted to talk once you got the credibility. Usually there was a group. When I say a group, it might be you know, one, two guys to a half a dozen guys that was taking it. Once you got the credibility of some of those lower members of that gring that helped get you to the top band. Really, so you would usually infiltrate by meeting some of the lower tier guys really and they would bring you to the leader. Creig. It took me, uh, on one particular job, you know, I was working, it took me eleven months to meet the number one guy. But were they protective of him? Was he elusive? He just didn't expose himself to many people, know, just to or three people. Isn't that common to mankind of what what you're describing there, to me is like the social hierarchy of just the way that we operate. Correct. There's people that have their spheres and they're kind of the leader, and they have these young maybe younger maybe just the guys that are lower than them on the social and then and that guy top guys kind of guarded in some way. Well again, there you go, the ego, the power, you know, John there he's the top man. But we you know he called all the shots, you know, even and that's the way it works in legitimate social structures, that's correct, and not just with poachers, with any of us anything, racing, racing, sports, yeah, you know, all kind of things. Uh, it all matches the same criteria. So you would infiltrate the groups by being so convincing and being the real deal, and then you would need to be hunting with go hunting with these guys. It would take you as long as eleven months to even meet your target guy, and then you'd go hunting with them, you'd go drinking with them, you'd go to their family events and all of it everything you just mentioned, you know. Or you try to find good intel and you find out where these guys like to hang out or eat, and you try to embed yourself into those locations. Sometimes you'll meet some guys lowder you know so and so, Yeah, I know so and so, And next thing you know, you're you're with a lower guy that knows this guy. And then if you can do some things or convince him that you are an outlaw, and then you do a few things with him, then that's you're building your credibilities of them. The web keeps getting bigger, but yet the circle keep getting smaller. Who It took me eleven months to meet this guy, and after I met him, one week of hunt with him. You're in in So they're vulnerable once you get up to the top. Yes, because I feel that they feel that you have met the credibility of everybody, and you've been around for a year, you know, and everybody else's vouching for you. Just like a good hunter, putting in the time and having patience is very valuable. And RT understood human nature. He was good with people and had a natural instinct for how to gain trust. In some ways, it's kind of scary how good he was. I'm actually beginning to wonder if any of my friends are real. And I've said it from the beginning. I suspect Brent Reeves is a double undercover agent sent in to bust me. What a great cover to say I used to work undercover. What they're after I don't know, and who they are I don't know. I don't know who they is, they are, who they were, I don't know who sent Britt Reeves. What I'm trying to say, I don't know. But it's typical of the Mountain people to be suspicious of flat Landers. Anyway, back to the nitty gritty with r T and keep your eyeland, Brent Reeves, you had a legitimate new name, new documentation. So what what was the name that you used? Well? I had two of them. First one was Bob Thomas and the second one was Bill. Was there any strategy in those like Bob Thomas sounds like such a generic name. No, okay, did you make that? You just made it up. I made it up. I guess they were probably like man, no way undercover agent would be Bob Thomas, right right, right, right right, So you had you had, I d That's another thing that we we did not know at the time, but I told I got in trouble, got rifted going to go take me to jail because I got captured speeding in a schools zome one time was going thirty mile an hour in a twenty mile zone and I didn't have the proper identification. So you're working undercover. I had a driver's relations but that's all I had, you know, which was easy to acquire, was a driver's license. And you couldn't tell this officer who you were. Absolutely not. You just took it. Absolutely yeah. It come back not in foul, would they run to the licensed flates? Not in foul? I mean, could mean a lot of things. So you went to jail for that? Yeah? Yeah, well that and a lot of other things. Yeah, we'll just stick with that, okay. Uh. And they thought I was caring drug. You know, I was pretty rough looking, was in a town that I shouldn't have been in, had a trail truck and said farm use route on it. And I was in a high dollar out you know, hide dollar town and looked like scum. But you were working under coach. I was working under cover. It was legitimate what you were doing. And so this guy was like, man, I just I just got me a dandy. Well it was it was a female, and I never had good luck with female when they rest pulled me over, so I didn't have good luck with her either. Be anyhow, you got out of jail. I got out, but it took me. Did you call? I keep I keep going down these rabbit trailers, but they're just too interesting. Who do you call when you're an undercover agent and you've been arrested? No one, no one? You just kind of write it out, which, you know, how far do you go? You know? How far do you write it out? You know? Finally I got to a point to where and I was not in the town that I was working. So I finally asked for a supervisor, and so he come back and I was locked up the back of the truck. Well, they thought I stole the truck. But when they run finally done a search on it, I can hear it come back over the radio. Belongs to a high division the natural Resources. I'm going, holy, what if I was sitting here with a bad guy in the back of car with me? So it was a good experience that happened with no bad guy with me. I told him make a phone call, and he made a phone call and finally got ahold of him. And I found this out later. He said, we got a guy here claims to be one of yours. Pretty roughly, they didn't give me dad. Yep, he's mine, that's our, that's mine, he's mine. He's one of our good ones. Yeah, yeah, I'll claim they let you out of jail. So through that you learned that you needed to really deep cover everywhere everywhere. So what they did from men on when they purchased a new vehicle, when that truck come from the factory. It went to our undercover name. R T was pioneering undercover work in Ohio. This just hadn't been done to this scale here, and they were learning a lot the hard way. I keep going back to the isolation of this type of work. Who do you call when you get arrested while working undercover? The answer is no one. I think we take for granted the social networks we have and probably wouldn't realize how important they are until they're gone. Are our social networks give stability to our lives, and their absence and deep undercover work adds to the chronic stress. And hey, speaking of vehicles, I want to ask Bob Thomas about his specialty hunting rig. You had on several operations. You had a custom van that was decked out with video recording equipment. And this is back in the nineties, so it wasn't like we got cameras on phones today. No, we didn't even have cell phones. Yeah. Well, on my very first operation, we were out spotlighting and shooting deer and having a great time, and all of a sudden, red light starts flashing, you know, and off we go the car case. You know, I'm not driving without the gun, out to win and the gun goes off. This is when you're undercover with a poacher, under game warden comes after you. Well, we didn't know. We never knew. We never did find out who it was because they never caught us. I don't know who it was. A game Morgan, Sheriff's department, or a local farmer, don't know who it was. We took off and this guy was going to Hunter a mile an hour on these roads. I mean, I don't think of Hunter mount out but very you know, accession dangerous and that scared me. That's scared. You're out of control. I was out of control. So therefore I decided I need to drive. I can control the situation. Yeah, And how can you control the situation if you just got a pickup truck with a cab, you didn't have all you have with a single cab. So if you got a party at a bar and you've got four or five guys participating in that bar, you know, and you know, get together whatever it is, and all you got to pick up truck and hold free people that it breaks the party up. So I come up with the idea of a van. I thought a van you know, everybody can participate and I'm driving. Man. That was just that instinct of just knowing what you needed to do. I think it was yeah, absolutely, you know, and how do you keep the party going? But if you can take everybody, I'm driving, I got a van, everybody can go. Let's go the way we went. Did your van have a name? Did you call it anything? Poch coach, post coach, the boat now did you say that you use let's take the poach coach? Poach coach? Man? I met you were there, number one guy. Oh, they love me. Everybody knows that to fit in, you gotta have the right ride. Think about the boldness of naming your undercover rig the poach coach. That's almost as bold as Brent Reeves cover, being that he used to work undercover. In Arties book, he tells the details of countless poaching incidents where he was involved in the killing of illegal deer in Turkey. The deer were primarily killed while spotlighting or jack lighting. If you live in the land of the ice fishermen, surprisingly you never had two poach a deer. To keep his cover. He was the driver, so it was hard for him to be the shooter too. However, he would randomly show up with a fresh killed set of buck Antler's turkey fans and beards that were supplied to him by the Ohio dn R that he'd show off to the poachers with a made up story of how he'd snagged one the night before when they couldn't go. On a separate note, Brent Reeves is constantly showing me coon hides, claiming his tree and walker treat him. But I find that odd because we all know that tree and walkers don't tree real Coon's with the van. They agreed that I wouldn't drink, but we're poaching. I don't drink, and I tell him, you know, and the boys and I don't mind getting caught for shooting a deer, but I said, I don't need no d w I I said, so, if we're gonna poach, I'm not gonna drink while we're driving. You were the You were their favorite guy man, You're the designated dry Absolutely put them all up there on that pedestal. It was important for arties and the public safety that there weren't drunk drivers cruising around in the name of covert government operations, and not surprisingly most of the poaching rings involved alcohol and many even illegal drugs, and that poacher pedestal was also very important too, almost as important as video surveillance equipment. Then we decided, well we need a van, which we got a van, and then we need to figure out a way to record this stuff, you know. So there was an agency the they called it the Bad House, and it was it was very it was very uh secluded. All they did was, I think they worked under the Attorney high Attorney general levels and all they did was installed video equipment in vehicles, vehicles whatever. This is a government agency. Yeah, they hooked us up with the great big old VCR boxes, you know, the VCR tape Hi to one of those things. You don't because he had we build a spatial box and put it in the back there. But you had to get out and go around and plug it all in, run off of d C, you know, and had to plug it all in and only ran about two hours, so you had to be you know, know what you're doing. And the sometimes you drop the poacher to off pick up a deer, and what you do. You go down the road and jump out real quickly, change tapes, you know, and then we had an infrared light and over the over the sunvisor. How do you hide a way that we just didn't hit it by being out in the open. It was all infrareded lights, but it was designed like a Confederate flag. Yeah, hung right over top the sunfighters, so pitch black. The guy is shooting down the front seat. You know he's lit up, so the cameras picked him up sea And I'd have guys mentioned to me about that, you know what, what is it? And I'd tell them story about my handicapped son that passed away. He was in the electronics and he made that for me. It don't work, but just senttle middle when I keep it up there, I had a pulled down. Let's assume we fix it. I don't put her back up. Sometimes when you hear about all these governments surveillance operations, it makes you scratch your head. Americans have always valued independence from government and our rights to privacy. All I can say is when you break the law, you lose the right to that privacy in some situations, and there are very strict laws about what type of evidence is permissible in court and how it's obtained. You use that van on multiple operations. Yeah, yeah, that that this will just an old she'll be van at the time. Yeah, what your model and makeing, Oh this is probably a having the sixty eight or sixty nine old van. So it was old. Oh yeah, it was old back then. And then uh that was the first one was but then the then we graduated a little bit. Probably got about a seventies model mid step maybe in the eight eighty five model. But then when they've we've done a full time undercar operation. Kevin asked me, who was my supervisor recent time to get a vehicle? What what? What would your favorite vehicle? B I said, a four wheel drive van. Next thing I knew, I had a brand new, jacked up full wheel drive van. Yeah. And then we had a little modern day equipment, you know where I didn't have to get out and turn the switches along and I could do them by a little switch here by. And I had videos in the front. I had videos in the front seat, videos coming out the side, videos going out the back. Now I'd control to all of that. But what what was your story for why a guy like you would have a van like that? Well, there you go again. You have to have a good cover. You know, like a brand new van specially well I worked in a coal mine and I had been covered up injured, which I had been, and I was on conversation and made it having gotten a major, big settlement, big settlement. So now is that true? Absolutely? Man, I don't even have it. Yeah, I'm confused with reality and the But here's what we did. We had, uh, my boss, he knew of an agency that was a friend of his that was an actual compensation lawyer. So he approached him and he would draw up he had a false foul on me, and he would send me letters into mail of how much you know my claim and everything, you know what was, what it was, and how much money I was getting and think of that nature. I'd leave them paperwork laying around in my house or on the day or wherever. And we found by reviewing videotape later that when I was not present with these guys, they would read it. Wow yeah yeah yeah. If you got somebody in the cabin, ar truck or a van and you go in the gas station and there's some personal letter there, they pick it up and it validates you without you absolutely deep cover mane. So that's how I proved that I had a lot of money to be able to afford it, and that they accepted it deep cover. Everything had to have a story and to clarify RT was covered up in a coal mine. In real life, coal spilled all over him and he was injured. But the lie was that he didn't actually get a big settlement, so he was covered up, but he didn't get a settlement in his real life and his undercover life he was covered up and got a settlement and got money. What about checking in with your supervisors and stuff. I mean, would you go months without talking to him? Well, no, he'd get kind of upset. Okay, my boss, his real name is Dan Schneider, work in a Turkey case and I hadn't checked in with him. I had a phone at the house and had a had a recorder on. And the deal was that you never calling. If you call and leave a message, you never have say anything about anything. It may take code or something. For example, we had a Spatial bank account and they put money in my bank and Kevin he'd call up and said, hey, I'm gonna give you. I'll give you nine hundred and sixteen dollars and not though in thirty two cents for that dog. That's how I knew how much money he was putting in my bank. So your supervisor would call about buying a dog and leave you a message. So if somebody's if I'm in the restroom or outside and them guys are in the house and he calls and leaves a message, you know, they never have caught onto it. Yeah. Now, I hadn't talked to hadn't talked to him the day any quite a while, and he was getting a little concerned. I come home from hunting one day. We've been turkey hunting. I played the message and he goes it, calling in checking on You see a man eight talked to you wild, just hadn't talked to you know. I thought maybe you might give me calls. So we talked about hunting in the future here or something like that. And he said, oh, by the way, this is Boss Gobbler. This is the boss. He was letting me know. He would let me know he was he's the boss. Better call a better call. So that's what his nickname put. Even to this bay, A lot of people associated with the Boss Gottling, the Boss Gobbler. I like it. I want to get to a more serious question with urt to be able to do what you did undercover, you're living a lie. I mean, you're you're before these people. You're living a lie. It almost feels like you would have to be a good actor like and I don't know if that's the would be the best descriptor perfect description. Did it ever bother you to be so deep in with these guys? I mean living complete deception, Like their perception of you was absolutely false, and you had fabricated that with them, gained their real trust because they're they're in the real world and you you control their future. These were these were human beings that at some level there may have been parts of their life that you respected. I don't know, I'm I'm putting words in your are sometimes even maybe likable people they were. But did it bother you ever to be that deceptive inside of people's world only one time? One time? The rest of the people I had, they were bad people. I wouldn't be around those individuals. Wasn't from my job. I despised some of those individuals, but I had to act like I loved. However, there was one individual and it was Operation Redbud and his name was and Uh he was. I liked that Feller if the only difference between him and me was I was on one side of defense and he was on the other. We were best friends, and I felt bad. There was many times that I would drive home thinking I need to war, I need to tell him. Really like you, you thought about breaking your cover because you liked this guy so much. That's held deep by them. And I felt that I was. I was really forgetting who I really was. I was forgetting that I who I was, forgetting that I was. I was here for the for the for the good. But yet I felt that much attached to that Feller that I felt like I needed warning. Our team never acted on his desire to warn the suspect. And you guys may remember our Genuine Outlaws series. The title was a play on words. The guys we talked about were really genuine Outlaws, and they were also genuine people revered by many in the community. If you're new to Bargrease and missed that series, you should go check it out. It's one of the most intriguing stories we've ever told. Our team brought up a very interesting point about identity. He said he was forgetting who he was and he was finding himself and deared to the criminal, the person he was trying to catch. However, Dr Sharp says that that's not uncommon for undercover agents, and what you're describing here is extremely calm. About half of undercover people do start not necessarily to identify with the target targets or individuals who are in the target population, but they started to feel sympathetic to our them. They started to become friends with him. It makes an awful lot of sense. That's interesting. Half of undercover agents find themselves and deared in some way to the people they're chasing. It's really hard for a human to be all business and override human nature. I want to prod a little harder on our t about identity, and he has something to say. You said that there was a point in your career when you you kind of lost your identity. Talk to me about that. You're so deep undercover, You're you're living, you have your own house, you have your own account. You can't leave Bob Thomas. There was there was I remember in the book there was a time when you said you were like thinking of thought, and you thought that you were Bob Thomas, and it kind of scared you. No, I've told Gyp that was with Redbud. It was a second project, and I was deep. I hadn't been home in ages, and I was deep. Uh. And we were in uh, the state of West Virginia on a hunting trip, and nobody had any clue where I didn't even know. More of that, my boss had no clue. And I'm living in this shack here with these guys. I think it's four of us being in there, you know, about four or five days already stayed in the same house, you know. And I really had no fear that they knew who I was. I mean, I was just that confident that they had new idea who I was. On this one particular evening there was I was out by myself a video on and narrating to myself. You know. On this video, I had two d you video cameras, and I had one from my own personal use, you know that I thought I'd used maybe down the route, and I had one that worked with you know, but on this particular one of talking about being hunting with so and so and move here in West Virginia, somewhere on this beautiful mountain, on this sunset and signing off Bob Thomas, I went, any who I am? I am deep cover here, man, you know, talking to myself. Man, for some reason, that just hit me right in the face, you know that. I guess that was the first time I really alone by myself, talked to myself and called myself that, you know, and I went, man, I'm living. Ever of these guys, you know, they ain't got no idea who I am, and I ain't even sure who I am anymore. Even if you've never consciously thought about your identity. From a philosophical position, it doesn't matter. As humans, we spend our lives crafting identity and our deeply vested in others perceiving us in the way that we view ourselves. The very definition of instability is not knowing who you are. I've always been very interested in identity. The very nature of this work puts a human in a very odd spot. I had a question for Dr Sharps, So would you say that undercover work is a relatively new experience for humans or have people been doing this for generations? Like where they become a chameleon, becomes something different to fit in with a certain group. Two get something back and in this case, we're trying to get justice, law and order. But is this I mean, it feels like this is a human experiment in a sense, and people are doing stuff that they really weren't designed to do. And I am I thinking about that right. It's a very interesting question. If you go back into the Hunter to gather a world. Probably not. But I mean, if you look, you look at the Old Testament, you've got spies entering the cities there. Now we have World War One of Sydney Riley and Matahari, and the American Civil War riattal number of agents male and female in the Revolutionary War agents, so a lot of undercover works been going for a long time. But this is a very old thing and the stresses are very old too, So in bear Grease time, undercover operations are relatively new. Humans have only been doing this for a couple of thousand years. When people started grouping up in cities, forming governments, plant and wheat, and having political interest, that's when they started employing deceit to infiltrate tight knit groups to gain information that couldn't be gotten without guile. I think we could say with some degree of certainty that if a falsome man befriended you hang with me, you could trust him. He may have ill intent for you, but you'd see it coming. If he approached you and wanted your meat, your land, or your woman, he'd just fight you out right. I hope you know that I'm joking, But my main point is that the complexity of society has increased exponentially since our hunter gatherer dates. However, human nature remains the same. And I'm also not saying that undercover work is bad. It's just really interesting that for the greater good of society, we hire men to act like they're bad. I wanted to get some details from RT about these close relationships that he built with criminals. I'm making a mental checklist of all the plays that real friendship Brent Reeves has made at Meat. Do you have friends that you now suspect your undercover agents? Do they wear overalls, have suspicious beards and dark rimmed glasses. There was one time when you said that you felt like you're gonna ask to be a pall bearer at some guys few general like a man's That was my last so like that was one of them. There was another one, I think where you were at Thanksgiving dinner with these people, and like, can you tell me some of those stories? Well, yeah, I'm over referred because he's the only one farty uncle, sirring he got some respect to my respect. He's I can tell some of his stuff. He had a very very loving wife and he had two children that were very young at the time. Uh, and he loved dearly the children. They kind of liked me, and I'd always bring him candy in different things, you know. And I found out another thing is if if you keep the wife happy over one of the outlaws, you're in. If you don't keep her happy, you're out. That's a fact. That's a life tip, right, that's a life tip. Not not even poacher. But if you keep the light wife happy and you and she likes you, you're good. She was very nice, and she would call me up and ask me what what. For example, she'd call me up and say, what birthday come on up? Or Christmas coming up? What what can I getting for Christmas? What can I get for your birthday? You know? Thanks to that nature, I'm thinking, oh man, and the kids, they you know, call us uncle and things like that. I mean, we were just that close knowing what coming down eventually, that was a hard, hard time to deal with that though you were going to Thanksgiving dinners with these people. I never went to Christmas, but I invite me Thanksgiving dinner and things of that nature, and uh, and I'd go because I portrayed not have a family, you know, and if I did have a family, they were far off. I was basically the loner, didn't have nothing, didn't have nobody, and they they felt sorry for me in that sense. Was when it comes to holidays and things, you know, So you'd you'd sit there on kids, play on your lap and sit there in the house with them talk, you know, just like we're doing today. Friends you know, friends friends, good friend and you could you could fake that though yeah, does that scramble your insides with him? It did? Doing only I had to. I had to deal with that demon of knowing that I want to destroy his life, but yet I've become that close to him. Very interesting and kind of spooky. Today, undercover agents are better equipped to understand the potential hazards of going deep undercover, but back then they were just shooting from the hip. But keeping in mind our supervisors nor myself had any experience in this, and we were we were you know, we didn't have any POI we were Lewis and Clark of the Division wild Life undercover. That's correct. So you know we had nothing. Now do you look back at it now you think, yeah, yeah, I was too close, but my boss didn't realize it, nor did I realize it. And we hadn't met the number one guy yet who was after Yeah, so that was the project that took me eleven months to meeting. So I had a whole year eleven months hanging out with Clawk. We drank together. I even helped him moved, he put drywall on his house. We did everything together. Not a lot of gear traveled one hunting trips together. I guess people would just after some period of time you were so deep undercovered that they would it just wouldn't even enter their minds that you were undercovered. Like if some guy showed up at their camp and was like, hey, I want to go hunting with you, you know, kind of bright eyed and bushy tailed, they might be like wait a minute. But like helping them hang drywall and being that close to him, like they didn't have a clue. I don't think they had a clue, and and they were telling you everything, they were showing you everything. You were video in this stuff, doing everything, you were doing it with them. And then I keep going back to the kind of the brilliance of who and I've just met you. But you know you don't come across as a as a shiny Wildlife Officer undercover guy. I mean, I am shocked in a pole. I am shocked in a hold hurt my feeling? What do you mean not a shiny and polish game ward Why you've hurt my feeling? Well, the only the only other game warden to know, how that I know his name, Chip Gross. Well he look at this now you're talking. You're shiny and polish. He wouldn't have fit in with those guys. Absolutely. Yeah. So so Chip Gross is sitting here with us right now. Remember Chip Gross is the author of the book about r T Poachers Were My Prey. You can buy it on Amazon, and he's retired Ohio game boarding and maintains a close friendship with his old buddy r T. While we're giving Chip a hard time, he once almost got our T into some serious trouble. Here's Chip again. RT is undercover and um, I've been wanting to do a story on just the undercover unit itself, not be real specific, but just that we have an undercover unit and so forth. At the time, I was the editor of the Division of Wildlife's magazine is called Wild Ohio. It was a quarterly publication, so I could pretty much put in there what I wanted to. And I thought, well, it's time to do a story on the other country undercover unit. And I went to the law enforcement supervisors and I said, is it okay to do this because I knew it was very sensitive, and they said yeah, I just don't be real specific, and I said I won't. So we did a story about that. The issue comes out and one of the bad guys gets a copy, Yeah, gets a copy of the story, gets he gets the magazine. At the time, the magazine was free. All he had to do was sign up and it went out by the tens of thousands across Ohio. So the next time our team meets with him, here he comes with the magazine and says, look at this, the Division of Wildlife has undercover officers. And there again I put Unknowingly, I put Urt on the spot, and he's got us somehow work his way out of that because they're suspecting, you know, is this one of the guys, Is this one of the officers. So inadvertently I put him in a crack and I didn't know that till years later. RT wasn't happy about Chip's article, but later Chip would write a tell all book about everything art Ever did. I guess everything is about timing. I want to go back to something that Artie touched on in the beginning, something actually very serious. It's when he said he didn't want to go back to his real life. And as we go into this section, I want to highlight and commend the vulnerability of RT as he talks freely. I'd call it humility and being well grounded. This might sound ironic, but RT isn't trying to portray himself as something that he isn't, at least not anymore. And you said something earlier to about there was a time when you didn't want to go back. Well, when you come home, you got kids, and you got bills, You've got responsibilities. Who wants who wants that I was living? I was living another life, an outlaw, a rush, constantly doing things. And then when you come home. You know, you go down, stress goes down, your adrenaline goes down, and then your face with the reality. You know, uh, kids need this, the kids need that. You know, we gotta pay this bill. It's passed through. You know, the house needs this. You know what. I'm going back. I don't worry about this stuff. So I didn't like reality. Is that Is that something that you regret? Yeah, there was a lot of things that looking back on it I regret. But now I look back in and going that was that was stupid. It was too incre roosting my job. I didn't play at it. I was it. I never went to my children's events. If I did go to a was home and went to a ballgame or something, always set on the opposite side because you never know who's gonna see. I never went through graduations. I never went to none of that because you never know who's kin folks coming in to see something goody graduate, their grandson or their niece or nephew. And I just never did. I never participated any of that. Dude, I'd look back and miss it. Yeah, I missed a lot of things growing up with my children. But today we have a great relationship. They understood it. They understand it, and I think they're proud of their dad. That's really good to hear our T say that. It's a touch of that bare grease redemption that we all want. Here's our T now getting down to the heart of it all. You talk about stress, it's unbearable, it's unbelievable. How do you tell a lie on a lie detector's test. It's a measured by the level of stress. Your whole life is lie. So you talk about stress, but when you're young and dumb, you don't even think about it. But it's stress. Do you think they had long term effects on you? That's why I had to retard healthy shoe cold stress. Was it worth it? Oh, you're too good? No, No, it wasn't. If I look back at it. If I had to do it over again and I knew what I knew right now, I'd just say no. But at the time is the only thing I knew and the only thing I wanted to do. Yeah, I you know, I'm proud of what I did, proud of what I've done, and I have no regrets in that regard. Would I do it over again? When I do some things different with my family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It takes some guts to say that it was it worth it, and I respect the honesty of that. I think many people might have found a way to lie to themselves about the choices they've made. However, he's proud of the work that he did, and that's a complex place to stand. RT is complex. There's one thing I can guarantee you. It's that if you met Urt in a grocery store, you might be tempted to judge his book simply by its cover. But I'm here to tell you that this man was a brilliant undercover agent and a master of understanding the nuance of the peculiar version of humanity that lives in the rural regions of Appalachia. He dedicated himself to his craft and his work ethic pushed him to be the best, and there's some nobility inside of that. He left it all on the court. I want to ask r. T one more thing. Here's my synopsis of undercover, and you tell me what you think about this is that you're being asked to do something that is incredibly unnatural and goes against everything that should be the fabric of a human that keeps them together, which ultimately is the truth and authenticity. And you are being paid and have to and by choice, I mean, no way made you do this, and and and and for the good of society. It's such a complex space because for the good of society you were serving our communities by doing this, but also at a human level, at the Art Stewart level, you were doing something that was like really unnatural, which is completely living a lie and making it seem like the truth. And it just feels like that would have a tendency to like tear somebody apart. Hey, you're good at what you do. You because you're asking some questions It's rarely been asked, but you're absolutely right. It is something hard to deal with. And I think that's why I decided I didn't want to come home. I didn't have to deal with it. I could just deal with one side of my life, and that was the bad side. They're just saying, and I have it out there hanging out there is uh. One of my real close friends who was an undercover agent, gave it to me and it says the Eagle and the Wolf. Have you ever heard this? The Eagle and the Wolf. The wolf is a luner. He does this, he does all the bad things. Or an eagle is a source high in the air, stands for good and all the good parts. The eagle on the wolf. And the bottom question is who am I? And the answer is the one I feed and that there's a lot of truth to that. Who am I? Well, at that particular time, I was the wolf, That's who U. I eat it, lived it, and did it. But yet knowing at some point in my life I would be that eagle, I'm a bit at a loss for words. This is usually part of the podcast where I wrap everything up that's been said in a nice little bow and we're all happy. But I think I'll just let what RT said sink in. I can't thank you all enough for listening to bear Grease. On the next full Bear Grease episode, we'll be right back here with RT as he tells of his biggest undercover operation ever called Operation Redbud, which at the time was the largest turkey poaching sting in US history. It's a fascinating story that you and your bros won't want to miss, and hey, please leave us a review on iTunes. Keep telling your buddies about Bear Grease and On another note, you can watch Meet Eat season eleven on the Metiator website for free. All you have to do is sign up with your email address and the episodes will roll out one per week until the season is complete. So Meat Eater season eleven ain't on Netflix, It's on thumb meat eater dot com, and eventually my moose hunt is gonna be on there, so you have to check it out. So anyway, have a great week and I look forward to talking with everybody on the render

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