Whisper in the Shadows
Welcome to ‘Whispers in the Shadows’, your gateway into the nerve-wracking work of undercover policing. The true stories of a real-life undercover cop. I’m Michael Bates, an ex-undercover police officer, and this was my reality for over two years. If your fascinated by the truth that lies beneath crime shows, if you hunger for the real-life stories that leap beyond the boundaries of fiction, ‘Whispers in the Shadows’ is here to satisfy your curiosity. From infiltrating drug syndicates to living a double life, every episode uncovers a thrilling true story that pitted me against the face of danger. Don’t miss out on the chance to step into my shoes and experience what it takes to walk the thin line between law and crime. Subscribe to ‘Whispers in the Shadows’ and join me, as we delve into the gritty world of undercover policing.
Whisper in the Shadows
Behind the Thin Blue Line - Episode 8, Best of (War Stories)
Ever wondered what it's like to live a double life, constantly teetering on the edge of danger? Join us as we step into the shoes of undercover officers who navigate this treacherous path daily. This special compilation episode of Behind the Thin Blue Line Podcast brings you firsthand accounts from the frontlines, featuring gripping stories that have defined the careers of our brave guests. From Tommy's high-stakes infiltration of a massive drug operation to emotional encounters with the devastating effects of heroin addiction, this episode pulls back the curtain on the unseen struggles and triumphs of undercover policing.
We'll take you through the intense planning and daring maneuvers that go into every undercover mission. Hear about the nerve-wracking moments and quick thinking that saved lives during a fentanyl bust gone wrong, and the unexpected twists when a simple undercover operation revealed a fugitive murderer. These stories aren't just about the adrenaline and danger; they are vivid reminders of the profound emotional and psychological toll that comes with maintaining a hardened persona amidst chaos. Through each narrative, we explore the deep-seated guilt, ethical dilemmas, and the relentless pursuit of justice that define this line of work.
To round off the episode, we delve into the personal transformations and long-term effects on those who have served undercover. Discover how realistic props and backstories can be the difference between life and death, and hear the sobering account of battling PTSD long after leaving the force. Through these tales, we hope to provide a deeper appreciation of the sacrifices made by these unsung heroes and the lasting impact on their lives and families. This episode is a tribute to their courage, resilience, and the rare moments of joy that punctuate their challenging journey.
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Welcome to Behind the Thin Blue Line Podcast. I'm your host, jason Somerville, and this is my passion project Now. Being an ex-copper, one of the things you take away with you from the job is the ability to tell a good war story, generally embellished by the time it gets to 20 plus years after the fact, but still generally a bloody good yarn that you always get asked to tell at parties or barbecues, sometimes even out drinking. Every copper has a couple of them and they usually have their preferred go-to that everyone has heard but still love listening to. Now I've decided to do a best of episode this week of the war stories from the first six episodes. Now, if you've been listening, you'll know that there have been 13 parts or mini episodes, and there's been over eight hours of conversation with current and former police officers. There are definitely some good stories in there.
Speaker 1:Whilst I usually want to showcase things like the impact of policing has had on people who do it, their struggles and how they've overcome them, and even PTSD, in this episode I want to focus on the enthusiasm and even joy that each of the people telling the stories has when they tell it. Now, why is this important, I hear you ask. Well, despite all the shit policing takes you through, there are rare glimpses of pure enjoyment, enthusiasm that each person who has done the job has for policing, and that shows when they tell these stories. All right, so first up, we'll go all the way back to episode one, where I spoke to who is a current UC working in a North American police force. For obvious reasons his conversation wasn't recorded on video, but still the stories he will tell will amaze you. We'll start our look back with him talking about how his wife loves to tell his stories, because he hates to, and then we'll listen to the time he bought eight kilos of meth. Take it away, tommy. Your wife must be very understanding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she, she is totally with me and she doesn't ask a lot of questions because she doesn't want the answers. Um, I mean, she likes hearing the cool stories. But, um, and she'll, I'll tell her what happened at work and then she'll relay it. We'll go to people that were close friends and then she'll tell the story for me, because I hate telling it. My daughter, she's 13 and she never knew I was a cop until last year. Righto, yeah, so she for all these years. And then I went back to General Patrol and she's swimming in uniform and she's like, oh, you're a cop, yeah. And then I went back to General Patrol and she's swimming in uniform and she's like, oh, you're a cop. I was like, yeah, what did you think it was? Oh, I thought you were a firefighter.
Speaker 1:Fair enough. I was going to say that must have been fun when they had take your father to school days and things like that. Yeah, I was never invited.
Speaker 2:I was talking about my father's career. I was never invited to those.
Speaker 1:Because you were the drug dealer. Yeah, all right, look, let's get on to, I guess, some stories about what you've done. I guess, similarly, you've had to listen to some of the episodes I've done in relation to this. So some of the things that you've done that you think people listening might be interested in, you know, just telling those stories that you obviously hate, telling that your wife does loves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Just kind of a brief of everything. I mean I've purchased anything from, like you know, 0.1 of a gram of, you know, cocaine, fentanyl, all the way up to eight kilos.
Speaker 1:How does that work and how long the eight kilos talking by, how long does it take to plan that? How long does it take to get to an eight kilo buy and how does that work?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, this is not an anomaly for the UC world Like this file I was a part of was a part of a homicide I think it was a double homicide file related to a group that eats tacos and lights Corona, okay that kind of started involved in those and then we had an operator the one operator come in and try and purchase drugs in this group and that happened to be me and I kind of started off small and before I know it the file just got bigger and bigger and they're utilising more of it. I think I did like 10 meets with this person and on the 10th meet he was able to sell me 8 kilograms of meth. At the time and I hadn't even exchanged money or anything until he got busteded and took down.
Speaker 1:How does that work? The take-down, if you can give, I guess, a little bit of insight into you? Know, you see it on the TV, where you know the undercover is bundled up and taken away and sat in the car and then complaining about the fact that, hey, I haven't done this, or I haven't done that, or I need to do that and it's all. No, it's all for your safety. Um, we had one undercover boy with me where I was locked up. Um, how does that work at something at that height, at that level, rather, with that size drug?
Speaker 2:um, with that one it was uh like our kind of SWAT team. That was kind of like a big, big big file. I mean they took him down pretty hard. They took him down when I wasn't there, okay, just because of the fact that he was armed, yeah, and there was a big consent for them. A lot of things behind the scenes that I wasn't made aware of, do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing? You weren't aware of them. I mean, I always like to know. I always assumed everyone's armed anyway. So I mean, to me it would have been the same as if I had known or not known.
Speaker 1:Do you?
Speaker 2:carry when you work About 95% of the time. Okay, yeah, just for the fact where I'm at and the danger that we kind of face. And there's been a few instances where it was very fortunate that I wasn't at the time, but there's been times where I wish I had have been.
Speaker 1:The question that always comes up when you're a cop, or the kids always ask you, or idiots always ask you have you ever shot someone? I'm not going to ask you if you've ever shot someone, but have you ever been in a situation where, having your firearm with you working undercover, you've technically had to use it to make sure that the threat of you using it was seen as real?
Speaker 2:There's probably about three times where I probably would have used it if I had it.
Speaker 1:Can you elaborate on any of those?
Speaker 2:yeah, so the first one was actually weird because when I my, when I was doing my undercover training, uh, my first drug buy was I just bought like a dime bag or weed or whatever from this guy. Uh, yep, fast forward about a year later, the same guy I was buying crack from and, um, he obviously hadn't been busted in between. No, it was kind of like a training thing, so he was let go. Okay, so for the year I was buying crack, Small amount like $20, $40 worth of crack.
Speaker 2:It was just taking too long for his guy to turn up and he wanted to chip off my crack as kind of a fee to bring in his dealer. Yeah, and it got to the point where it's just taking too long and I got the signals going yeah, end it. So I tried to end it and he was having none and basically went from no, you rip me off, I've done all this work for you. And then, yeah, then he tried to stab me over 40 bucks, basically, gave me money, get my cell phone and see you later, I'm out of here. And then, yeah, he was swinging for Did he get picked up relatively soon?
Speaker 2:after that, yeah, my covered team kind of intervened, kind of not identified himself as a police, but kind of intervened so that I could get away. And then you know, 20, 30 minutes later then General Patrol picked him up and arrested him for robbery and we got the money and the cell phone back.
Speaker 1:How long were you a police officer before you went into the covert work?
Speaker 3:I volunteered for it and I started it two months before I turned 22.
Speaker 1:Okay so five years.
Speaker 3:No, I was sworn in at 19, so almost three.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why did you want to do covert work?
Speaker 3:There were people dying in droves of heroin overdoses in the late 70s and early 80s.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:Right up to the late 80s I think. But heroin was being brought in through pretty unprotected borders. So you talk about corruption, a combination of corrupt customs officials, unprotected borders, corrupt police all through the country and the heroin trade was out of control. It was really down to a guy called Terence John Clark Clark with an E. He was a New Zealander who ran?
Speaker 3:a major international drug syndicate. So the quality of heroin that was coming from the Golden Triangle was killing people every day. Yeah, I don't use the term junkies, I use the term addicts. You know, I've seen high-functioning addicts in every walk of life, but these young people predominantly young people and they were middle class. So heroin use wasn't a lower-class drug, it was a middle-class drug. We were finding bodies in toilet cubicles, sometimes on the street, et cetera, in houses and just horrible. So I was fairly idealistic and naive and I thought working undercover would be a good way to do something concrete about the drug trade. And essentially, you know, at that age you think you can change the world and that's what I tried to do.
Speaker 1:Fair enough.
Speaker 3:I didn't realise how much it had changed me.
Speaker 1:What was the most difficult thing of working undercover for you?
Speaker 3:I, in spite of my upbringing, I was actually a nice, nice guy. I was empathetic, I cared about people. I was actually a nice guy. I was empathetic, I cared about people, I was polite. If I had to react on the street and take someone down in a violent blitz, absolutely I would, but the core of me, I was just a very nice guy. So one of the hardest things was changing that personality and adopting the personality of a mid-level dealer.
Speaker 3:And so I portrayed myself as a mid-level dealer. And so I portrayed myself as a mid-level heroin dealer, and mid-level heroin dealers don't have the manners and the niceness that I'd had normally, so I had to learn and adapt and adopt the mannerisms of others. I had to speak in a certain way that wasn't the norm for me. I had to treat women like crap. I had to assert a position, even at the age of 22, that I was a shaker and a mover, I suppose in the drug scene. It's all that stuff. One of the hardest things that I ever did was watch a 14-year-old kid be shot up with his first hit of heroin. I thought he was about 17 or 18, but I still couldn't have interfered anyway. And I found out later, about four years later he died of a heroin overdose and I carried that guilt for quite some time and probably still do.
Speaker 1:How do you address that guilt? It's never going to go away, okay, but how did you address that guilt?
Speaker 3:Well, when I had my breakdown, I suppose a lot of things had compounded on me. That was one memory that came back. I suppose a lot of things had compounded on me. That was one memory that came back. And I've just understood through research and self-awareness and therapy that you can't change what's happened in the past. You just need to, as best you can, accept it, understand it and move through it. And that sounds simplistic and it's a lot more detailed than that. But you know, know, I just look back on it and think, well, what else could I have done four years? When I think about that, I would think about I should have, could have, would have. But it's over and done. You know, it's just been a an impact on my life.
Speaker 1:That's um one of many trauma and I guess look may, partly because I've been there. But the first question that comes to mind is if you'd intervened, then put a woulda shoulda, does that necessarily mean one a week later? He wasn't going to take a hit some other way. Two what would the outcome have been for you, even though the action was noble, so to speak?
Speaker 3:Well, I was in the middle of a heroin operation and I'd been in this particular region for about three months. The operation went for six and I was working by myself. There was no backup, so I don't know what it was like in your time, but in my time you worked one out and that was it. There were no mobile phones, there were no pages, I didn't wear listening devices very often at all and I was in a house where no one knew where I was. So had I intervened, it would have been completely out of character. As I said, I thought he was about 17 or 18.
Speaker 1:It would have been completely out of character.
Speaker 3:As I said, I thought he was about 17 or 18. Yeah, would have been completely out of character for a heroin dealer who was buying high-quality heroin in that area.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it was on the Gold Coast Would have been completely sus for me to go. Hey, what do you think you're doing?
Speaker 4:Because my assumed identity, I was dealing, I was making a lot of money out of it, so could have resulted in some physical danger to me you know, because of my SWAT background and the extension training we had, and it sounds mean, or it sounds bravado or sounds callous, I guess, but every deal I went into I had a plan to kill the guy if it went bad.
Speaker 4:Okay and it's just silly, but and and I had, I believe I had the means to do it and I, so I didn't worry about that part of it. I worried about was he going to call my bluff and then, you know, say hey, you're a cop, and walk out the door, or you know whatever. And then I would just be I'd be a failure at not getting the deal. I really didn't have a whole lot of apprehension of doing the deal. My first undercover deal was you know, I wasn't.
Speaker 4:I wasn't there yet, but that was quite a scary deal, to be brutally honest.
Speaker 1:What happened?
Speaker 4:there, you know. So I had no training. I went to a two-week basic narcotics school.
Speaker 4:When I was still in the gang unit, because in the gang unit we did so much drug work. But when I got to narcotics there wasn't any type of undercover school to go to, or I hadn't seen one yet, and I was just, you know, telling all my crewmates, hey, I want to do an undercover deal. And so, lo and behold, my longtime partner and friend Edie. She had an informant, a Mexican guy who didn't speak English, and he wanted to sell guns. I'm like, well, I'll buy guns. So I go do this gun deal with a guy named Jesus. I figured.
Speaker 3:I was safe.
Speaker 1:You know the Hispanic version of Jesus, I figured I was going to be good to go. He did die on a cross.
Speaker 4:Yes, correct, so he didn't speak English. I spoke very little Spanish and the Spanish I spoke was to tell someone how to get on the ground and put your hands on your back, which wasn't going to help me in a dope deal the informant sat in the back seat of my car, a little two door blazer.
Speaker 4:And anyways, we pull up and he gets in the car and this is a tiny little car to our. If it was two big guys like me, our shoulders would almost be touching in the front seats. And as soon as he got in he is. He's beating sweat, he is nervous as he could possibly be and he keeps looking out the passenger window like the raid team's coming. And I'm trying to tell him hey, listen, calm down. You know tranquilo. And the informant is telling him to calm down. Female informant.
Speaker 4:And so he hands me the gun and it's just a shitty gun, which isn't the crazy part. The crazy part was, as soon as he handed me the gun, he put his right hand back in under his coat. He had his hand on a shoulder. He had a shoulder rig. And I've held a gun a million times and I know what it's like to have a shoulder rig. I know what it's like where the gun is and how you hold it and how it fills your hand and he had his right hand on a pistol the whole time and I'm to his left.
Speaker 4:Well, my left hand is down by my left thigh, which is on my Glock 30. And so here it is, that moment from Good, bad and the Ugly, with the music playing, who's going to move first? And he keeps looking out the window like the raid team is coming and it's like calm down on. The gun was a piece of crap, like I said. And um, so the informer's like well, hey, paul's looking for dope too. You know he needs a new plug for meth and he was kind of nervous about that. He sold me a gun. I don't know why he'd be nervous about meth, but so with it with his left. He never took his right hand out of his coat.
Speaker 1:With his left hand.
Speaker 4:He gives me, you know, a couple of grams of dope. I keep my left hand where it's at and with my right hand I take the gun, I take the dope and I pay him. And it was this, this weird ballet of he's only using his left hand, I'm only using my right hand. Our other hands were on our guns. And he keeps looking out the window like the raid team's coming and I'm thinking, you know, if he pulls the gun out, I'm just going to smash him with my right arm lean into him and then shoot him with my left hand.
Speaker 4:Um, and it just was one of those man it was. It was 10 minutes of tension. I don't know why it even took that long, but it took about 10 minutes. Um, he's then. He's trying to get me to use it to try the dope.
Speaker 4:You know that one's easy to get out of. And I got out of it, um, and he believed me and, uh, so no big deal, he, the deal is fine over, he leaves and again, so that's not that hair, you know that crazy right. But a week later he asked me to buy another gun from him. And I'm like, hell, yeah, I'm in, I love this, I want to buy guns and dope. And she says, well, paul, I'm not okay, what's, what's the? What's the scoop?
Speaker 4:She's like well, we got some information on Jesus that we didn't know last week. Like, what's that? Well, he killed two people, um, in a cartel hit about three, four weeks ago, um, and so we know he's a murderer. We're not sure if homicide is going to be able to pin the case on him. So we want to continue to buy dope and guns off him to give him the best sentence we can get if we can't prove these murders. So I said, OK, that's cool, at least I know who he is now. And I bought dope and guns from him a couple more times and they were successful.
Speaker 1:Do you have a war story? People love war stories and some people like telling them, some people don't. People love war stories and some people like telling them, some people don't. Do you have a story that you can sort of talk us through? Something, a buy that you did that stands out to you, that you remember to this day, that you either go how did I get through that? Or why?
Speaker 3:did that happen? Oh, many of them. Look, there was a job I did in North Queensland, this time with a colleague, and I went up there as the controller.
Speaker 3:He was undercover for five years he was did in North Queensland, this time with a colleague, and I went up there as the controller because he'd been undercover for five years. He was burnt out at Bourbon and I was supposed to be the controller. I ended up moving in the same unit and just worked with him as a side-by-side UC. We had a list of targets that we'd worked on, we'd bought from you know.
Speaker 3:So it was again a deep operation, but we came across this guy who told us that he told us a certain name which turned out not to be his name. Okay, I told him our names and turned out not to be ours and we got on quite well and he was an ex gypsy. Joker biker didn't know much else about his background and and we were buying a lot of drugs from him. We were setting up a major major, probably about 200 grand in those days in the 80s it was a lot of money and it was going to take place in Kuranda, north of Cairns in the rainforest.
Speaker 3:so all organised and did the job and a couple of things happened and I've written about it in the book as well. I was recognised by someone I'd gone to school with when I was with him and I tapped hands my way out of that. But I remember he looked at me with his evil eyes and I thought oof, you know Jesus. Anyway, end of the job happens. The boy didn't go ahead for a couple of reasons, but when he was arrested he told the investigating detectives that well, you got me.
Speaker 3:I'm an escapee from Yatla prison in Adelaide. He'd murdered two guys in the Northern Territory, cut them up with a knife for a while, then turned them face down and shot them in the back of the head. I think he thought they had a lot of gold with them and they didn't, because they were prospectors. Anyway, he'd been sentenced. He gleefully escaped from Yatla and he'd been on the run for quite some time and he told them that he'd intended to kill me for the buy money. And the detective told me that and I went. Well, that's disappointing because I thought we were mates.
Speaker 2:And we actually got on very well.
Speaker 3:We used to get out and drink and you know, and have an entertaining time together. And the irony is all the time I was planning to betray him and have him sent to jail. He was planning to betray me and kill me and we both gave each other false names. Yeah, that's one of the most ironic ones I've got.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no that's. I think it's a little bit more than ironic. But it's interesting too that Cairns seems to be the place that most pardon the paraphrasing here dead shit end up at the end of the line.
Speaker 3:Yeah, north of Cairns, made up in Cape Troubadour, it's still a good place to hide.
Speaker 1:Yep, most definitely. What's the most dangerous one you've done?
Speaker 2:It was only maybe two years, I don't know. It was about 2020. I got into a car with a fentanyl dealer First time. It was just a random. Is fentanyl a big drug? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's really big over here and I'm sure it's going to be hitting Australia If not already, I'm sure it has. But it's not good, it's a bad one.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're hitting up a fentanyl dealer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so yeah, this is one of the times where I'm not armed. It feels like I was wearing like a wine shirt and slippers and I had no wearer. Oh, miami Vice style, yeah, totally yeah. And slippers, and, and I had nowhere actually. Oh, miami vice style, yeah, totally yeah. So we end up, yeah, we just, you know, I think it was like maybe the, maybe the third buy of the day of different people and pretty relaxed, and just jump in and then, uh, in a minipassional seat with him, I've got my cover team, that's all pretty close. And then I started going through the motions. The next minute he pulls out a big Beretta, 9mm, sticks it into my face and he was only a young guy, I mean, I think I'm quite large, so I think I kind of intimidated him and he wanted to be the alpha male and that was his way of showing me that he was the top dog.
Speaker 1:What do you do in that situation? Because you're obviously aware of why he's doing it. Most drug dealers would be oh okay, I've got to show myself now and assert my dominance because I'm the drug dealer type thing. How do you deal with that? Because part of you will be shit. What's going to happen? The other part will be do I have to assert myself and where is that going to get me?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean that's the thing you're going to kind of. That's where it comes to training and uh, um, stuff. You've learned beforehand, like I've done a lot of courses where um kind of undercover operator, like kind of picks, fighting in vehicles, shooting from, in vehicles, shooting outside of vehicles, uh, you know, knowing where the door handle is, how to get out quick, where to put your feet so you can fight little, not put the seatbelt on, make sure the door's unlocked or not fully shut. There's like a bunch of things that you just do automatically. And um, I think when he did that, I was kind, kind of I didn't, you know, try to run out or anything like that. I kind of just wanted to talk my way through it. And I was like you know, man, I had a cool gun, why are you bringing that gun to a drug deal? And kind of took my way out of it a little bit.
Speaker 1:Was part of that, say, your team knew that that was happening as well.
Speaker 2:Exactly Like I wanted to make sure they're aware and in the background they're doing their things to you know, weren't to intervene if it went that way, because, at the end of the day, if I had a turn and try to run, you could have shot in the back just as easy. Yeah, I mean, reaction would have been not even close to him being able to shoot me.
Speaker 1:So you've tried to talk him down, and obviously you have, because you were here talking to me. Did you have to become the alpha, or was it like? No, I'm going to let you be the alpha dog?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to let him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, you're in charge.
Speaker 2:This is your show. I'm just here to buy a bit of dope. And then I kind of just, you know, kind of let my team know, hey, there's a gun in play. Yep, you know kind of communicate to them that and then try to calm him down. He's in charge, he's a cool guy. I'm just, you know, the drug addict that's buying 100 bucks worth of fentanyl for a minute, and I kind of made it like, yeah, cool guy, oh, anyway, here's my 100 bucks, Kind of like did that, you know, fell in down a little bit. I'm just here to buy a bit of fentanyl.
Speaker 1:And did he settle down what was his reaction?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know he's like, yeah, cool. And he reaction yeah, you know, cool. Then he puts a gun between his legs and then pieces out my dope.
Speaker 1:and then Did he put the gun with the butt facing towards him or with the barrel facing towards him?
Speaker 2:No, the barrel. The barrel was the seat.
Speaker 1:So I mean, I think, Yep, so someone who obviously doesn't want to have too many kids in the future. If it was accidentally going off, yeah, yeah hopefully, not Hopefully it doesn't. Fair enough. How long did that buy? Take all up.
Speaker 2:It was enough for me. I smoked two cigarettes during it, okay, without knowing how quickly there was that Ten minutes, oh yeah, so I it. Okay, without knowing how quickly there was that 10 minutes, oh yeah. So I was pulling them pretty quick. I actually, at the end of it, I think my incumbent team was more stressed about it than I was- how do you debrief from that with your team?
Speaker 2:It was one of those things where I could tell they were rattled. They were pretty upset about it all, I think. But know, joking and uh being my usual self, they're like I could tell they 'll, they weren't uh very happy a lot of what I was just telling.
Speaker 4:You know, you gotta be, you gotta tell mostly the truth and you have to have um you have to have three steps ahead of them in your planning when they ask you something and you have to sell it and I don't mean selling the fact that you've got this long backdrop story of something that's phony, but mostly what's true. You know, I had a truck that I drove that looked like it was a construction truck, right, A poor and concrete kind of truck. That was my undercover vehicle for a long time and I didn't just use the truck.
Speaker 4:I had all the equipment in the truck and I would have bid sheets on my dashboard and I I had a guy come up to my window once who my informant was going to nurse me to and I found out later that he was a former informant for a different agency and his name was Phil. It's like, hey, what do you do, paul? I said I'm in, I'm in concrete work. He's like bullshit, you don't do concrete. And so, because I had pre-planned Jason up on my dash or above my visor, I pulled down a bid sheet and I handed it to him and I wrote that bid sheet that day, had the date on it and the address and it was my old address. So I know the address and it was my old address so I know the address and I could describe.
Speaker 4:I could describe the driveway I was going to pour and all the dimensions and I know a little bit about concrete. So I had all the, had the numbers under the measurements and the cost and the and the, the labor hours, and I handed him the. I handed him the, the bid sheet, and said f you, and he looks at it for about a minute he's like oh, I guess you do concrete and I'm like get out of my face punk and I ended up buying dope from him a couple days later because he believed my story.
Speaker 4:And I think that's where some guys fall short is that, you know? And that was me the first couple times that somebody asked me what I did. Oh, I'm a welder and I don't know shit about welding.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And I could tell there were times where they wouldn't believe me, and so like I can't use that story anymore because I'm not a welder, but I know concrete and I know some construction, so I just I let them know that they have to kind of be backstopped themselves, since our department doesn't do it. You know, have the, have some props to come with. You, have some things they can see. I used to put pictures of me and my buddies who weren't cops on the on the sun visor of my car, or especially if they were friends of mine that had passed away. Yep Cause I get, there's a picture of this guy and there's a picture of someone else. You know, they're wearing construction outfits you know, it just sold it.
Speaker 4:you know that this is what I do, and that's when I got better. I you, and that's when I got better.
Speaker 1:You know, originally it's the little details.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I look like this big, burly biker. I used to wear my Harley Davidson shirts cut off and the goatee was down to my belly button and I acted like a biker and I'm not a biker and a lot of the deals that I had that failed. You know my boss would say later like I think you scared the crap out of that, dude you look too mean.
Speaker 4:He thinks you're going to beat him up or you're going to rip him off. When I finally went to that undercover school, the guy's like, yeah, you look too mean, dude, you're scaring people. Change your look, you need to smile more.
Speaker 1:So I went from the biker.
Speaker 4:Look to a construction worker.
Speaker 1:Look Instead of being the tough guy, I was just a dude.
Speaker 4:You know, that was it and that's what I pass on to these guys is you got to just be the dude, you got to be an everyday nobody.
Speaker 3:Eleven years after I resigned I had a major, probably a breakdown or very close to it, major anxiety attack, quite crippling, and I started seeing a counsellor. I had no idea about counselling and that was 2006. So you know, I went through a stage of seeing counsellors trying to find the right one, knowing full well that I had issues not understanding what they were all of that. So you know, off and on for the next probably 10 years or so, in and out of counselling offices, no regularity, trying to probably fix myself, I guess, through you know, exercise and as much research as I could, not having a great deal of success, because I still drank way too much.
Speaker 3:I was angry, I was withdrawn, I was all of the classic symptoms of PTSD. I started writing a couple of chapters to give to my daughters, because they were then older. They'd grown up with me in that whole world of post-traumatic stress disorder and it's a disorder for a reason. It's named a disorder for a reason. If it affects your life longer than four to six weeks, it's a disorder. So I wanted to write something to them when I was getting better.
Speaker 3:I have to clarify I was never physically violent. I was never mentally abusive. I was just withdrawn. I was just, you know, had anger about little things that would flash to the surface.
Speaker 1:I think that's the thing with PTSD that most people will see it as outbursts of anger that become violent, whereas for a vast majority of people that suffer with it it's small things like snapping at the dog or that sort of thing which, yes, is a violent reaction, but it's seen as in society, it's probably seen as okay, well, that's just an everyday reaction and that's what it's put down to. Things have just gotten too much on that particular day, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's no understanding across that a number of these little things add up to maybe something like PTSD.
Speaker 3:Yeah, look, and again, book number two. I've written about how someone told me I might have PTSD and I didn't believe him because I thought that was only for people who've done really dangerous stuff and in hindsight have been in gun battles I've lost a mate, you know all of that stuff which is really dangerous stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does.
Speaker 3:So I started writing. I wanted to give the girls something to help them understand why I had been like I had been for so long.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:So,
