00:00:05 Speaker 1: They were taken by total surprise, and at that particular time, it was the largest turkey poaching ring in the country. On this second episode in our Secret Agent Man series, we're going deep into the trenches of the dark Side with undercover Ohio wildlife agent Artie Stewart to get the full story on Operation Redbud, which at the time was the largest turkey poaching sting in US history. RT is gonna cruise us around in the poach coach while video and over one hundred illegal turkey kills. How would you like to see that on a VHS tape. He'll talk about the incredible al hooting of his number one target and take us right into the courtroom where defense lawyers tried to discredit his character with accusations regarding drugs and alcohol. Well, here from Darth Vader, Bill Clinton, and get the details of the coordinated bust involving twenty six men and over two hundred and seventy five wildlife violations in Morgan County, Ohio. If you skip this story, you're just playing Yeller. I really doubt you're gonna wanna miss this one. He was laying on her back, leaning up against that tree. Pieces you one of my best friends of their rare and I'm going and I knew it was getting close to the cop to the end, you know, and I'm thinking, Oh, 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 made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. It was in the early nineteen nineties and the wild turkey hunting revolution of America was in full tilt. As bird numbers skyrocketed, with one hundred year peak population numbers across the country, Game call companies seemed to be rising up out of the ground. Every home had a VCR, and like never before, you could rent in twenty four hour segments turkey hunting videos that showed unprecedented excitement. America was hooked on turkey hunting, and as the cultural value of the turkey went up, it caused a quake, a philosophical rift, a division in rural communities across the country, splitting fathers and sons, putting neighbors against neighbors. It caught good men and bad men alike, and many turned to the dark side, which is always looking for recruits. Many became turkey hunting outlaws. It is useless with all combined strength we can bring order to the galaxy. These outlaws began to cheat the system, hunting before season, trespassing, killing exorbitant numbers of turkeys. They weren't just cheating others, they were cheating themselves, causing a disturbance in the wildlife galaxy. There are varying degrees of lawbreakers, and law enforcement is dedicated to stopping all levels. Our beloved North American model of wildlife conservation only works if we a the law. In Morgan County in southeast Ohio, numerous informants had reported to the Ohio DNR about a gang of turkey slaying ruffians who touted killing unbelievable numbers of turkeys. They didn't know if the numbers were true, but if they were, they had to be stopped. There was only one thing left to do, and I'll give you one guess who they sent into the ring of fire. RT. Stewart, also known as Bob Thomas, the number one suspect in the case, was believed to be killing over fifty turkeys each spring, and the second suspect, who was thought to be his protege, was probably killing just as many. In the early spring of nineteen RT infiltrated this ring to see if the informants information was correct. Little did he know that the operation would have him living full time undercover for fifteen months. They called it Operation Redbud and RT was the lead man on the case. Here's how it started. I want to make one note about this episode. You're gonna hear a lot of bleeping. It was very difficult in this interview to not use the actual names of these guys, but we didn't want to put it in the episode. So there's lots of bleeping. So Old Phil Taylor had to do what he had to do. Bear with us we were given. I was given two individuals that was notorious for taking multiple turkeys, and the intelligence provided to us was that it was a hung out and was a manager of a bar and he lived up over top of it. I drew around there. I have a band at the time, and I had it stuff for all kind of turkeys, props, spurs and tales and had him hidden obviously. So I went there one in there one afternoon and made a tactical air right off the bat. But it helped in a sense. I always try to go to if you got a name of a local person that sent you to him, that helped. If you just come out of blue knocked on their door or something whatever, however he did your approach and you just knocked on the door and say so, you know, and introduced yourself, it's kind of suspicious. So I'd always go to yard seal or stuff like that in the local area. I'd even pitch you up pick hikers. If somebody pitchhiking, you just get me a name with somebody in that community. And if they knew him, I wasn't even better, you know. But I would go to these yard seals, get a name and ask him, you know, get talking and they say, you know, something like yeah, yeah, he lives right up there, you know, And I was like, what's your name? So if I had a gold knock on the door, I said, hey, Jim down there, what's your name. He told me he's a big hunter, he knew gym. Yeah, So that broke topping into a social connection, even if it's a distant Yeah, this particular day that how coincidental it could have ever been, I do not know. But at the time I've seen an ad. A guy in Mcconnellsville was selling tools. So I called him up, told him I was gonna be down there and looking replacing the hunt. I said, I've stopped by air and look at your stuff. And he said, well, I can't say afternoon, I'm gonna be busy, and I said, okay. I said, well, maybe I'll stopped by some other time. He said all right, and he said where are you from? And I said, I'm from Marysville, you know, for a portrayed to be from. So I go in this bar and all the locals come through the back nbeknownst to me, I come through the front tactical air, you know, because everybody comes through the front. Everybody in the bar automatically looks you know, you know, ain't from around here because he's coming in the front door. That was a bad move. But anyhow, so we're sitting there talking. I'm at the end of the bar and I got a hat on, got a turkey on it. Camouflage and it was a bartending and we get to talking and uh, he was very approachable. Now did you know this was your target? Yeah, I knew this was my target. He was easy to connected. He said, to go buy something from that. I went to the bar. I went to bright. I went to the bar to hang out. That was my goal to go there to hang out. Well, based on the information he shared that day, I was pretty sure that we're on the right track. And I used to teach it Hawking College and we're not very far from Hawking College, and I know some of them people from Morgan County went to Hawking College. So here I am, you know, knowing that there's allowed to be people there might know me. Well. Guests, what the shift changes? Guy comes in and uh he said, oh, he said, I know. You said your artis story and I said, yeah, I'm going, oh, my land, this is in front of your target, guy target. This guy uses your real name. First day bad and now I'm going no, but I should Uh, I think you might be mixing up somebody else. I said, was he handsome, had a lot of money? And he goes name handsomebody wasn't didn't ever much? What ain't me off, well, did you recognize the guy? Okay, but I would. He knew who I was, and he said you were a turkey bow hunt for turkey and I did, yeah. And I used to teach archery one of the things that taught. Apparently I hadn't even archer class. But anyhow, the thing that saved me that day was when I told that I said, my name Bob Thomas, and this guy set beside me says, you have a Marysville I want. Yeah, I said, I talk to you on the phone today. You're donna look at some tools. I said, yeah. I said, you told me he was gonna be busy. Here you are you drunk sitting in the barrow with it? Just it is perfect? Perfect? I mean, how else? I mean? You know this guy basically was a local confirmed I wasn't who the bartender thought it Wow, at this talent. I had his stuff like that, stuff might work out like that and it and from that day on I was never questioned. Arties deep Dives Undercover were full of wildly close calls with resolutions that will leave you scratching your head pondering your philosophy. On Quinci DNS. On this first meeting, with Target number two. His fake identity was confirmed by a complete stranger, which solidified his almost blown cover. The meeting with this guy went so well that that very night they went groundhog hunting together, and before you know it, a few mornings later, Target number two invited r T or Bob Thomas as he's known, to go turkey hunting, and it was long before the season opener in Ohio. Operation Red Bud was on. We go hunting that next morning and his raining. But we're driving around road hunting as we're coming down this road and we turned left and it's probably about fifteen or twenty turkeys on the left hand side the route, which means you've got to shoot time. We get to him. Dad ran on my side road and he gives me a gun to shoot him, shoot him. I just pulled up. I aimed at one, but off of it, but the overspray hit at one in the back, so I just ant out with truck, went and got it and thrown the back took all. You know. That was the only time they ever killed anything illegal, really, and uh I was in like flint oh Man, because he'd seen you kill one right out of the truck and had it had the estate on that try, and he would have shot it, you know, but when he run across the road. You know, I'm supposed to be a poacher too, so he was good. He handed it to me. What you gotta do, You gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah, I shot it, killed it. That was the beginning of the relationship right there. This was the only illegal animal Art ever killed himself. And once you see how many illegal hunts ARTI was on, you'll see how hard he worked not to kill. He said. This was the beginning of their relationship. If you remember, from the first episode in the Secret Agent Man series, Art got extremely close with one of the outlaws. This was him. This is Target number two. Many of the outlaws RT chased. He despised them because of their despicable actions and the wider dis capability of their lives and character. He lived with these folks and saw how they treated their families, their neighbors, and strangers. But Target number two would prove to be different, and later Urt would become so close to him that he wished he could warn him that he was an undercover agent. We also learned on episode one that this is fairly common amongst undercover agents that they begin to empathize with the people they're chasing, and hey, I want to take a minute to bring up something to you. On these episodes, I'm only able to cover a very small section of Artie's career, and in this case, he's basically busting a band of recreational turkey poachers. However, many of his cases involved the commercialization of wildlife, involving the illegal sell of enormous amounts of fish caught on Lake Erie and the illegal selling of large quantities of wild game meat to restaurants in Cincinnati. These are extremely serious crimes that required extreme measures to bust these criminals. Don't think for a second that these undercover stings were on rinky dink wildlife violators. You've got to check out the book about Urt called Poachers Were My Prey by Chip Grows. Once Urt and the guys knew their leads were legit and they had the makings of a case, RT rented a residence and took up living full time in the community. When you're that deep into these communities, did you were you surprised at how much I legal activity was going on or was it kind of isolated and there were a lot of like law abiding people around. It was just these like tight little groups, tight little group, a lot of a lot of law abiding people that didn't really like it, and they may have been some ones that called in complaints. There was a lot of people there that did not agree with water. They didn't know that it was going on to a magnitude of that level, I'm sure work, but they knew stuff was going on even when it was some of them guys. When somebody come rent, don't say that he don't like what we do. So they knew that the society wasn't all four them. But yeah, they thought society was. Most of the society was okay with what they were doing. That's a very interesting point to consider, what is the socially acceptable amount of law breaking in a nation, of region and a group of friends in a family. It's really easy for our doctrine to get challenged when we look at our lives without a filter of justification. I think most of us would say our goal is to abide by the law. But do you roll through stop signs on country roads? Do you drive seventy five in a seventy mile per hour zone? Have you ever stept a single toe on land you didn't have permission to be on. Every one of us believes there is some gray in the law, but there also has to be a clear black and white section, and these guys were in the deep black. Operation Redbud was originally designed to catch two men, and at this point Urt has only made contact with one of them, which is target number two. But the web of criminal activity began to grow very quickly. This next story shows that growth and all the different ways that undercover work can get rooted out by the bad guys. We was in there one night in the bar and we ended up meeting two individuals. They just talked about shooting the deer the night before. And now I've never met him before, never seen him before, so they said they just come from the butcher shop picking it up. So we get to talking to him and then we told him we know been hunting with do you know? Yeah? Yeah, I said, where's this big deer at And he sits out the back of truck. So we went out there and confirmed it. You know, they had they post one the night before. Well good, you know. A couple of days later we was in there and he was bragging about how good he could shoot the one guy out law and the other guy was bragging a boy him too. Well, if you're so good, let's go. I'll drive. Got a gain, you got one, so give us two twenty swift. I think it was with one bullet the ware. We go, we fight here and he loses the bullet and we're in the process, I'm laughing at this guy. I mean, I'm dying leaving and you got He said, I'm want to knock you in the head when I slewer up. You know it was this, It's always on videotape. And he ends up killing a deer, so that now we're in good with these guys. And then it just mushroom there with other people bid involved, it just mushrooms. But now it really got interested. We're in the bar the next night. These two guys that we were out with the night before are complaining that somebody called into the game ward and turned to me in and that and their questioning me and my buddy. Oh, thinking y'all turned them in. This is a serious conferenation. This is serious. We know we're the only ones that was with him. Yeah, you know, but y'all hadn't done it and we have done the news to us too. Yeah. Well, this again is how things worked. I had contacted my supervisor and of him. The names of these individuals are supervisor context the radio room to get backgrounds on them. What that particular time, Our radio room just had a divider between the division and Wildlife Parks and sees that nature and Department of Transportation. What do you call? Right, These guys had a relative or kin folk that worked for the Department of Transportation. They heard us on our radios running these guys information. Wow, they heard you. No, No, they heard our supervisor because you called in. I called a supervisor and supervisor does that. And they were running it over the radio, which was a private conversation because he's on the telephone. But this guy in the next booth could hear and he knows it. He calls mourns. It just shows you how tight these communities are. Yes, absolutely, And they told us that that we got a friend that works for the Department Transportation. They have a running our names today and well on the person we've been with is you. Maybe they're talking about the night you shot the dyer before did you do anything that night? We thought about that too. I said, well, it's probably where it comes from. You know, what was the able to convince him? What wasn't us? It was it was could have shot the whole thing right down to two right there. A ground nesting bird can find uncountable ways to die, and and undercover operation it's kind of the same way. It's like a little baby quail navigating the drought, disease, coyotes and hawks. There's a thousand ways to die, even fescue invasion. As a timeline update, RT spends the spring of n hunting with Target number two while gathering an assortment of other outlaws into the operation. All of these events he's filming in the poach coach, his four wheel drive undercover van, and the hidden cameras on his person. Later they'd learned that target number two was killing this many turkeys. Target number one, well, RT was playing his cards conservatively, and the whole spring of ninety five he never even met Target number one. He didn't want to push it. So RT goes through the next eleven months hanging out with Target number two until the late winner of n when in February, Target number two stay with me finally introduces Bob Thomas RT to target number one. Finally we get to to come on, well what me till he go up to his house my land. He that he's got turkey tails and stuff hanging everywhere everywhere, and then in everything, I always consider myself be a good turkey hunter in a pretty decent car. But I had to act like I didn't know what I was doing that much, you know, I couldn't be better than them. Yeah, so obviously I put him on a pedestal right off the bat, you know, with all this stuff. So he said, what do you do on Tuesday? Nothing, Let's go hunt. So you came in and you just you just kind of doted on him and just put the charm on. And I've been hanging with for a year and he's like, I want to take you hunting. Yeah, two days after I met him with hunt. Do you find a lot of a lot of these guys are pretty inviting to have you come hunt with him? I think so after you meet a certain criteria, after you after you confirm or convince who you really are. Yeah, it takes the fear away from him. And I think back then they had no idea that the Division Wildlife even had an under cover unit or cover people. With RT being as instinctively good as he was, and the newness of the task force in Ohio, these guys were like deer in the spotlight, poaching pun intended. You can only imagine, after nearly a year of trying to meet target number one, how exciting it must have been to meet this guy and would two days be hunting with him. Let the good times in the v HS tapes role. So they invited me to eventually to go to West Virginia. So we went out the next back up. We went out the next morning. Killed a turkey. He killed one. He killed Were you sitting right beside him? Yeah? Video at audio and I had a video. I had a hidden video in my turkey best it only had maybe an hour of battery time. I still got the best. And I had a spatial compartment back there, and that's where I carry my recorder. And then I had a camera here, so if I took my pot put my hand in my pocket, I can pretty much direct wherever at camera wanted to go. Say. But then I also later on started carrying a little eight millimeter camera for after the with it, not during the event. So every morning when we go hunting. We hunted just about every morning after I met him. I'd always have to go have me a bowel movement, okay, And that was went because if I turned it on before I went hunting, time to get out there where that everything is going on in your battery life, and your machine would go dead. I wouldn't get nothing. So I'd wait till we get to the woods, and I'd always have to go have about movement from during that time, man, I would turn on the Uh, so that way I do. I had a good hour working. Yeah, so you need to kill a turkey within an hour, yeah, and normally we did. Normally we did. Really, so how many turkeys did you film him killing or were you with him when he killed in that time span from February till we shut it down, maybe forty to sixty. Really, you were there forty to sixty illegal kills with this target individual. And it's all preseason. These guys are getting a big head start. And this is only like in two or three townships. So you take guys that's waiting for turkey season legitimately, and you go out there to where you think you got some turkeys, and you go out there and you ain't got nothing. We don't wipe them out. Yeah, that's a lot of turkeys you take out too, or three township? What techniques did this guy used to not get caught? Like, did he did he hide guns in the woods? Did he have people drop him off? Was or did he just drive out in park and go turkey hunting and then come back and throw the bird in the truck and go home above pretty much all the bow depending on our location, pretty much all the boa. We but we never did hide a gun in the woods and pick it up, you know, or anything like yet. But uh, we go out and call and then soon we shot, you know, we'd grab it and take off, you know. So so there was no elaborate ruse of how they were killing that many turkeys. They just kind of way to drive rude and hit the alcohol man he could call alcohol. He al with mouth, Yeah, do you out with your mouth? I can't do that, but he could. Man, it was it was good. I was first more in the herd. I was like, holy, holy, it's really absolutely. I have a deep, deep theory that uh, usually if anybody can barrod alcohol real good, they're probably gonna be a really good turkey hunter. I want to clarify here you can be a good turkey hunter without having a good natural voice. Al hoot. But I've never met someone with a great hoot that wasn't a good turkey hunter. And this is important bear grease stuff from episode number two. I think we probably need to have a national bear grease virtual owl hooting contests. I might work on that. I was interested in learning more about this Target number one. I pride as much out of our tea as I could, and later art would tell me that this guy was suspected in some other very serious, non related wildlife crimes, stuff that isn't worthy of mention on a classic program like this one. The point is these guys were pretty rough, and I'd like to highlight the distinction between Target one and two. Artie spoke highly of the way Target number two treated his family, his work ethic, in his general demeanor towards people. He was just misguided when it came to game laws. But here's RT talking about Target one. He was very good at what he did calling. He was excellent caller, and he in turkeys ah my, but al hoot, and he was I was very impressed and and following him through the woods. I was impressed. He wouldn't walk on the trail. You know how you walk down trails. You know, he wouldn't walk on the trail. It was always off to the off in the brush. That ain't stop because animals walk down him trail sometime. But if you're walking off in the bush, you know, not on them trail, you're gonna you know, you won't be spotted or run into somebody. You can hide. There's a lot of factors that he was had a lot of good wood since which impressed me. But he had no knowledge of how to how I used to do tax drmy work back in the day in the seventies, and I mount I would skin these turkeys out to make rugs, and he liked that. You know, RT was the taxidermist too. Man that and the poach coach. He'd have been a good friend to have around. I wanted to ask RT about one of the most bizarre parts of these stories. On most cases, he openly carried video camera and filmed their illegal hunts, and these criminals were okay with it. Our t must have been a wizard. Oddly, Brent Reeves initially introduced himself to me offering his services as a professional videographer. That is a true story. For years, Brent filmed me when I was doing stuff for Bare Hunting magazine, and I've always been suspicious of it, and those overalls there's a lot of room in there for hidden cameras. Sometimes it's the biggest secrets are hidden in plain sight. You got these guys to trust you so much that you were like, hey, let's make a video. Because that was in the nineties, was when people started getting affordable home video cameras and people were starting to film hunts, and everybody was wanting to film their hunt. And so here you are, undercover wildlife agent and you're like, hey, well, what I mean. How I got him to do that was I had him filmed me for you know what I'm saying, I mean filming the hunt today. But you do the filming, and if I went my way, boy, I want to I want to be in front of the camera, you know, which is that what I wanted? You know. So we've done this several times, but on this particular day, we always narrated her hunt and he was talking about it. He said, said, we had to do Kiki run today because we bust them up in February or early March, and then we call him back. We had these two turkeys. News, yeah, we got to and he holds them. I think it's both Jake's. He's holding them both up, and he said, just get out of here for the game ward to come right on. You know, I think, and I'm thinking, buddy, you ain't got no idea. Archie said in the first episode that chasing meant for this period of his life replaced his love of chasing animals. It was stuff like this that had to be a major dopamine drop. He knew that in court this type of evidence would be unbeatable. All he needed now was a lot more of it, and oh would he ever get it? Here's an interesting part of Arties ruse. What about his choice of weapon. We continued hunting, and I hunted with a twenty two rifle. And my excuse for that one. I had a ten twenty two ruger with a scoope on him. And they said, what come you use that? And I said, COVI, don't crack very loud, and I said, got scoop on and I'll shoot him in hidden. I'll be like a shotgun. Oh, yeah, I never thought about that. But it also helped me miss Ethan, which I did because you you, you hunt with these guys for too long. You don't miss many birds with a shotgun. No, no, And if a bird comes in on your side, you know, shoot it. If it comes in on my side and I don't shoot at it, something wrong with the shot gun. Your chance of hitting that birder if you miss that bird, you know more than once, that's uh, It's like, why is this guy missing this? Right exactly? So I used the torn two for that purpose. Was if I missed, wasn't that hard to explain? And I did miss too the time, but they never questioned me missing. It gave him a good excuse to miss. That's really pretty brilliant. And that's interesting because it sure seems like Brent Reeves misses a lot too. Anyway, the old twenty two and the twenty two mag used to be I don't know if it is anymore the poaching weapon of choice back in the day, so Urt was even breaking the law by the type of gun he was using to kill the legal turkeys. Man. This dude was a bad poacher. But let's carry on with Operation Red Bud, I have a question for it. Do poachers get jealous? So you you hunt with him for as many as forty two sixty illegal hunts over in one spring from February twill turkey se I mean, y'all hunted every day then, and so you were just his buddy, You were his running around with. How did that hurt his feelings? I don't think so. Now I'd go back with him everyone once in a while with him, but I mean, not hang out. Won't you getting jealous? Didn't? It was the mentor as well, So it was kind of cool that you were hunting with the guy and y'all both had this friend and we all had Yeah, and and I hung out with which I did not hang out with. I hung out with in a whole different type of relationship. Again, Artie is emphasizing that he didn't just hang out much with Target one, but his relationship with Target two was different and more personal. So now Artie has let's just say, around fifty documented illegal turkey kills with target number one and another fifty plus with Target number two. So what's he gonna do? Now? They've got to shut these guys down. And I want to hear about the actual bust. You now have all this evidence, you got video, you got your testimony against the guy, You got everything against this target subject. And what what what happens? Now? We have enough on everybody, including a whole lot more than what we had anticipated. Now we now have enough on this guy. We need to shut her down and keep things from getting carried away. We can't. We cannot let it go another year as much stuff as they're killing. And we were able to justify to extending it to the following spring. We were we accomplished our goal. We have him, we have good testament or good evidence. Time to take him down. I think they ended up taking him down like um first of June, right after Turkey Sha, you know May Turkey. They had a oh man, I think they had like forty or sixty game wardens involved in it. Really, So tell me about the actual bust. What did they do? Well, we have a command center and they call you in the uniform personnel. I don't I'm not involved. I'm out of the picture. But I'm at a command center in case they have questions in regards to the search warrants and things that nature. So they send out notication for all the uniform personnel to come to a certain location at a certain time, not knowing what they're getting into, and uh, the day before, that's when we give them the breakdown on what we've been doing. What's going on. This is the first time you've broken cover to these guys and you say, you say, hey, I've been undercovered with this guy for two years. We have this evidence. He's killing these turkeys, that's where he lives, that's who he is. And now does does the bust have to be correspond Like, if you're gonna bust one guy, you gotta bust another guy at the same time. Everything has to be coordinated. So they had a team, you know, the search team, recording team, and he about each team had five to six guys on him, and at seven thirty a m. It was coordinated. That was seven a m. That's when everybody knocked on the door at the same time. During those search warrants, they would get phone calls from other guys and our eyes wouldout answer the phone and then say, hey, the keyboardon is here. Yeah, we know we're here. So our game wardens, our officers was in the house and they would answer the phone and so would would these wildlife poachers usually I guess they would give up without a fighter, and it would it would just be kind of they were busted. Uh, Yeah, they were taken. They were taken by total surprise. Probably. I think we ended up the resting twenty six that day people. That's a major it was, and at that particular time, it was the largest turkey poaching ring in the country at that time. I don't know what's happened since. But yeah, we even had H. J. H the editor of National Wild Turkey Federation. He come up went on the raid with them, did he really? So? They told him about the raid before. They didn't tell him about it till that day, but they invited him up that we're going to have a major turkey hunting event. So they were wanting to make a national spectacle and you were the point man. Man, how many turkeys do you think we're killed in that web of twenty six men people? I don't know if it's all men as all men turkeys and deer, I don't know. I'm just guessing. I know I was involved in at least a hundred just in two spring with two people. There are other undercover guys working different people. No, well, I was working on them all. But that's why I say it mushroom. From the spring of one of those to the spring of the following year, I had a whole season there, a whole year to get hooked up with everybody else in the poaching wagon. You were just, yeah, yeah, it was just it was very difficult to keep it all together. Sometimes. Well, I couldn't do it today, but back in the time, I could look at a shotgun. You hand me shotgun and look at it. I can remember that serial number. I'd write it the mud to someplace if I needed to go back later to day or next day or whatever, you know, the night or whatever. Again, I've wrote it into different numbers on different spots in the dust on my van. Once I wrote it down, I don't have to remember no more. I go to something else. In cred Edible talk about falling into a brood of vipers. I have no mercy for intentional wildlife violators taking excess game, and RT didn't either. However, remember that Art is a human, and he's deep undercover interacting with these guys their families, and he's actually developed some respect for Target two outside of his poaching. I want to ask Artie a question, and this shows you just how personal things had gotten. So what if, what does it feel like to work on something that intimately getting involved in these people's lives and then seeing them all busted. I couldn't sleep the night before knowing that in the morning his I know what his future is. It was difficult to just know that, you know, if it's been for a year and a half. Here, I've been hanging out with a buddy of mine that, uh, he's going to jail on the morning, and it was it was difficult. One was in Western and him and I was hunting beautiful, Born and beautiful, probably about nine thirty or ten o'clock to ageting. Some was up someone just shining too was kind of slow. So I had a big globe tree there and he was laying on her back, leaning up against that tree, and he'd land on that side and the land on this side. And he says, you are the best things happened to me in years. You're one of the best friends I've ever had. And now I'm going And I knew it was getting close to the coming to the end, you know, and I'm thinking, man, So there again, I think about telling him it was difficult on that particular case, and that was unusual though for your career to be that close to somebody. Never was that close to nobody. Ever, You're one of the best friends I've ever had, he said. That's tough, especially when you know it's a lie, or at least mostly a lie. RTI said, he and this guy could have been friends in real life, but it was real life for this other guy. I want to step into one of the most interesting parts of this story, the trial, and I'd like to say this overall project was incredible work by RT and the whole team at the Ohio d n R. However, inside the judicial system, catching people doing a crime and convicting them are often two different things. All these guys now have to go to court and they're innocent until proven guilty. Oh man, this is gonna be fun. And our boy RT is the pivotal witness on the stand. What happened to these guys so that the main target we took him. Yeah, we took him down, and they all play not guilty, which is normal. But then they found motion for discovery, which is part of the system. I'm not sure if you know what the courts systems are. You know your initial periance. I found plead guildy not guilty. Whatever, plead not guilty to gain an attorney. Attorney called foul's emotion for discovery. That entitles them to know what we have. That's when we present all the video tapes and to them, not in court, but just like to their attorney. But we wouldn't let them have the tapes. They were permitted to view the tapes with the prosecutor, not with the clients, not with anybody else, and they weren't allowed to have the tapes. So once they've seen all these tapes and all this evidence, they're wanting to make deals. But one guy pleads not guilty and wants to go to trial. So here we go to trial. By that time they make me cut my hair I had. I looked like ZIZI talk. They called me the missing link when it's working with them because I'm pretty nasty and uh, I never will forget it. When I walked in, I'd shaved up and had suit and tie on everything. I walked in and walked right basta defending his attorney, and I heard him say is that him? And he looked and I heard him saying, I don't know I was cleaned up that much. He wasn't sure. He didn't even recognize this is is somebody that he was one of them that telling me about that we his friend worked for the Department of Transportation. Yeah, I hung out. He didn't recognize in court and you had to testify, you have to speak someone the courts witness staff radar. So your covers and all twenty five of them were standing in the courtroom and chairs behind here. Oh wow, so now everybody knows your whole two years being undercover with these guys is busted. Boy, that's an awkward feeling. I bet there was on one side and we had throughout the throughout the courtroom. There was probably a dozen officers. Are our officers in there, and all the bad guys were on the left side and all the good guys are on the right. But we had officers scattered out because we didn't know what was you know, we didn't what would transpar there. You remember all those hunting videos our teammate, Well, it's time for their debut. Get the popcorn out because the judge and jury are about to watch them. You know, that's when the cross cure, you know, had his opportunity to do examine and he's that's when he started presenting some of these videos to the jury. And this is the first time some of their clients, some of these guys had seen the video and they'd heard about him, but they had not seen him. I was watching the video. Whenever I was watching the video of some of this stuff, it was taking place on the client. I can see them talking to each other like we're screwed. So he had a big name, and he was a big timber cutter and had a big name in that county. He thought that and this is what the prosecutor thought or said to us, was that he thought that he had such a name that the people in that community do you know we had it was socially accepted of what they did, and they would they would they would not find him guilty, really did. He didn't think the jury would find hilty. That's why he went to court. Actually he didn't think the jury. But this is like a wealthy guy and his family, his family was his family. He was. They actually thought that they could discredit me and thought that the jury would find them not guilty, even though they did commit some of this stuff. Unfortunately, having a big name often goes a long way in jury trials and small communities, or sometimes you don't even have to have a jury. Do you remember from episode three of bear Grease, when James Lawrence was working as a game warden and he arrested the county judge's son Spotlight and Deer while drunk, and the guy got off scott free. James couldn't take the silver spoon politics, and it ended up being what pushed him away from the job. Anyway, James and I are still a little bit upset about that. Back to our t though, talk about a tense situation. Can you imagine what is going through these guys minds seeing RT the wild man poacher who drove the poach coach now on the stands shaven with a suit and tie on, showing these hunting videos. It's probably what a buck there feels like when you're at full drawing grunt stop him in the string drops. All these guys were thinking, old man, we're in trouble now, and this first court case would decide the outcome in the future of all these other guys too. This one was big, and the defendants lawyers were gonna try to discredit r. T in his character. All I've got to say is good luck with that. And hey, as a slight warning, there are some drug and alcohol references in this next section. So they had me on witness stand and they's asking me all clinic and they had a jury, had a jury. They said, uh, we'll give you an example. Some of the questions was did you ever buy my client alcohol? Yes, sir? Why did you buy him alcohol? Said? Well, might turn to buy you know, And I'm looking over at them guys, some of the guys on those things, Well that makes sense, you know, you know what I'm saying. I mean, the you know, why is that you buy him alcoholis well, might turn them by. He said, uh, you ever smoke dope with my client? Yes, sir. And see what he was trying to do was catched me in a lie. You know, had I said no to either one of them or some of the other ones that he asked. He had twenty five other people there that he would probably called a cause this witness prove that I lied. So their their defense was to discredit me. That was one of their defense. So you had to tell the truth. So when you when you talked about him. They knew you were telling the truth because you told on yourself that's right and there, and he couldn't he couldn't call anybody or to say yeah, he did do that. We were there. Let me ask you, and if you don't want me to put this on there, I won't. What about now? You said you smoked dope with him. That's kind of comical because when he was putting up drywall and they smoked dope all the time, marijuana, putting up drywall, smoking it, you know, and they handed it to me and I just put it to my mouth, and that's it's comical because I'm putting in hell, did you? I didn't serious, I'm serious. But you told the jury that you smoked dope with him. And I explained myself. I said, they passed it around when I was hanging draw one one day and I put it to my mouth and I acted like in hell and held my breath and I handed it off to him. And you know what their defense attorney says, Oh, he said, you're so like, you're like our president, and hell are you smoked it? Beating in hell? And I said, you got her? That was right? During that time. It was learned something from both slip really and I thought that's the best defense I could have said, was what he just said, Yeah, yeah, so you know things like that. Really didn't, I really didn't. I was the only time I was ever confronted with having to use it because I told him, you know, and being on my age, which was at that time probably been about thirty seven, I told him I I smoked about when I was younger, but I said it. I just didn't. It just don't agree with me, so they didn't question it. Now, if I had been twenty one twenty two, you ain't got enough experienced. But you were just so you were just so believable. You know. What's interesting to me and goes back to the complexity of the place that you had to live in, because it sounds to me like you you were really good at telling the truth too. That was you're good at telling a lie and good at telling the truth, uh the lie. I would usually try to keep my stories of whatever the story may be, was as close to my upbringing and my experiences in my real world. Just maybe change tell the story, you know, but I don't have to give details, you know, as who who when it was or when it was you know how it was. And it was very convincing, because I'm not lie. If somebody else asked me a question, you know, a month later about that same topic, same thing. Yeah, oh man, where do we start from here? For those of you who might be too young to remember, On March twenty nine nine, when the arc tall Governor Bill Clinton was running for president, he lit up the nation in a press conference when the reporter asked him if he'd ever smoked marijuana. This is what he said. I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it and didn't inhale and never try it again. The catchphrase I didn't inhale became a world famous phrase. Make an artis response brilliant and relevant and true, and it worked magic on the jury. If this rt was honest about this bad stuff, we know we can trust what he says about these poachers. And as for the truth of Bill Clinton's statement, I don't know. And this is a true story, true story. Boys. Did you know that my dad, Gary Believer Knewcom, went to high school with Bill Clinton in Arkansas and that my grandmother was good friends with Bill Clinton's mother, But I hope you don't get the wrong impression of the old believer Gary Nucom. He made a living off staying sober from drugs and alcohol in the midst of a wild time, even when he served in Vietnam and the trend was to stay stoned. And he taught me that it's cool to stand against the trends. And I'm teaching my sons and daughters the same thing. And I'll also let you in and an odd Arkansas phenomena that we all know. It's not spoken about much, but even if you disagree with the Clinton's politically here, it's taboo to speak too negatively in public about Arkansas's number one son. So I'm not I think it'd actually be pretty interesting to have Bill Clinton on the Burgarase podcast. You never know, But I want to now take another slight side step and ask our t something I told you you'd hear Darth Pader and Bill Clinton. You didn't believe me, did you? In this situation, you on this court stand, and all these guys that you've been that you have video on, that you've been building relationship with years you're busting, did you ever feel h fear for your life. Yeah, not there, not there because I knew that. You know, I was protected with my guys. But boy, looks could kill I was dead. Yeah, you know some of them. Some of them are pretty rough, some of them. Some of them, uh. Giving an example, you know, high the state of a high as long as uh, it's legal to record a conversation as long as one person in the conversation knows it's being recorded. Right, So you can't leave a recorder like in a car and two guys talk. But if you're recording someone, I know it's being recorded. Therefore it's legal. Understood. Well, this particular, one particular night, we got back to the club we've been out shooting deer. We got back to the clubhouse. I forgot to turn the recorders off, and the door was open on the side van and the picture comes out that side van. Well, we didn't know it at the time, and I was inside the building and that two of these guys were outside and they were talking about killing this guy because he's one it turned to be in and we got this. They're they're planning the killing. They're gonna kill the guy. They're gonna kill him. That they're standing outside my van. And I got the video on him. I didn't know I had it on say, I've forgotten all about it. So now we hear this conversation, We're going, oh, man, we can't use this at the court at all because they don't know it's being recorded. But man, here we got a situation where we know about it, the plan planning of a murder to commit murder, and we know about it, but it's not legal. So this was one time we get my boss out of bed, like three or four o'clock in the morning. We this is something that the boss gets paid the big MUCKs to make this kind of decision, and it took the burden off us, you know, took the liability off us. So we called him up, explained to him. We got with him the next day and showed him the tape somewhere. Somehow he goes, well, I don't know what he did. I don't know what he did, but he said, let's let it ride. They were they were serious. They were absolutely serious, and they're gonna kill a guy for turning them in. And here you are an undercover agent who is deep inside there. They'd have killed you. Oh, absolutely, there's no question. The two guys that was talking about it. Absolutely. That just goes to show you the guys he was dealing with were often hardened criminals beyond poaching. And I want to say something here. This really goes to show you how much that we as a society value wildlife. Really, how much Hunter's value wildlife. RT is risking his life in the name of the North American model. It's just an interesting thought. But I'm dying to know what this jury decided. Let's get back to the courtroom with the clean shaven suit wearing civilized truth telling, non in haling RT. Stewart. So the jury or the judge presented to the jury their responsibility. They went in. We figured probably be the next day, you know, before we partything. When we was back in the prosecuting office back there, it was probably seven o'clock and they had they made a decision. We're going to the prosecutors said, that's good that if they made a decision, is certainly that's good in our favorite. We went back in. They found it guilty the next day, all twenty five of them, their attorney at contact the prosecutor, wanting to make deals. Had they have found him not guilty, would have probably had more trial, So I think they were That's why they were all there. They wanted to see what was going on. And they was wanting to see if they found him not guilty, because that meant the If he found not guilty, that everybody, everybody. But when he got so, what was the what what happened to that guy? Did he go to jail? Did he get fined big time? Probably lost his hunting license. Without looking at the records, I did not recall how much jail he went. Pretty confident he did go to jail, fine big time. I think he may have even lost the vehicle. The butcher lost all of these equipment, he had a regular butcher shop, lost these souls, everything because he was cutting up all these dear lost the hunting license for life. And I think we'd put leans on their houses until they paid the fine. Yeah, so they really put the clamp on. Yeah, it's shut them down, It's shut him down. Mission accomplished. Operation Redbud was complete and resulted in twenty six criminals convicted of over two hundred and seventy five wildlife violations. RT and his team's work on this case was brilliant and I can't say enough how important this type of work is in preserving the integrity of the North American model of wildlife conservation. We've got one more episode with rt and it's a due. We're gonna dive into all the wild situations in which Rtie used his instincts to stay out of trouble. It's gonna be good. Thank you so much for listening to Bear Greads. I can't thank you enough, but I will ask of you a favorite. Share our podcast this week with your in laws and outlaws, your friends and foes, with neighbors and strangers. And if you're looking for some great deals on first light gear saving up to off and lots of stuff in the Mediator store, We've got a giant Black Friday sale that starts on November. Everything's early these days, and don't forget to pick up one of those sweet Bear Grease or Believer hats. Hey. We're gonna get back with the old Standard Render Crew next week, and I can't wait to catch up with him. And I can't wait to see what Brent Reeves has say for himself now

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