Speaker 1: 0:00

Today's session for Justice Then. Justice Now is going to feature Leon Ives. I've known Leon for over 30 years and I had the pleasure of working with him at the US Customs Service. He's had an exemplary professional career and he will talk about that and some of the things that he did and I think you'll find it amazing. And he also served as an advisor to the military and he's going to discuss that to the extent that he can.

Speaker 1: 0:38

And, more important, I think and it's not surprising he's written a very thick book and you look at this and when I first read it I was like, oh my gosh, this is heavier than the old phone books, but the content of it is how to protect your children yourself and I think that is the most important. The title says it all Vanished and Missing. Okay, and it's called Vanished and he's updated this. So I think that's the most important thing we get out here is the word on this, because everybody has loved ones. Everybody has children or grandchildren and families, and what better person to write it than someone who's been in the criminal justice system and knows that and has dedicated themselves to writing this? Leon, it's great to see you. It's been a while. You too. My hair wasn't as white last time we saw each other, but that comes with the territory, but you know what can I say?

Speaker 2: 1:48

Well, mine wasn't as thin. What Mine wasn't as thin?

Speaker 1: 1:53

Happens Happens to the best of us. What I'd like you to do, so the viewers get to know you and you can describe where you grew up, what got you interested in the military and law enforcement and all that, and then we'll talk about US Customs experiences and go into the meat of it. But I think it's very important that you talk about your background. So go ahead, my friend.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Okay, thank you both for having me on today. I appreciate it. Yeah, when I was 18, I decided to leave home and find a little more structure. So that was the US Army and I had wanted to be a policeman all my life. So I went into the military police and my first assignment was the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg and I'll stick with Fort Bragg and I was there for several years and then went to several different duty stations in Fort Benning, georgia. I went overseas and while I was working over in Holland I met a gentleman in the Army counterintelligence and he recruited me into the counterintelligence. So I swapped from the military police to become a counterintelligence agent and my first assignment was at the Pentagon and it was a very nice time there wearing civilian clothes and being in the military and having a lot of freedom. And I would join the Friday night keg meetings over at Fort Myers, virginia, with all the federal agents and Army CID, federal agents and Army CID. And after I got talking to a few of the CID agents and the federal agents, I discovered I could triple my salary in about three years. So that's when I decided to become a customs agent.

Speaker 2: 3:57

So back then, as you well know, the US Customs Service Office of Investigations was the premier investigative agency in the world. It wasn't the FBI, it wasn't DEA, it wasn't any of the others, it was us. And my first assignment was the SAC DC office where I started working international drug trafficking. And then I got involved in financial investigations and I kind of felt that was going to be my niche. So I came down to Miami, florida for one of our TDYs, fell in love with it, put in for a transfer and then I was assigned to the SAC Miami and you remember the old Florida Joint Task Group. So we were comprised of half DEA agents and half US Customs agents from OI. So I worked in the airport group for several years and then I transferred over to conspiracy group and eventually went over to the main SAC office where I started working financial investigations. And I'm sure you remember Operation Greenback. So our job was to find out all the smurfs that were laundering the billions of drug dollars around the Miami area on a constant basis. So I worked in the undercover group for several years and then I just continued in the SAC Miami and somebody convinced me to take a GS-14 role as a resident agent in charge. So I went up to Northern Maine and that was a tough three years being a supervisor. I never realized how much I missed being a street agent but fortunately I made it through and I retired.

Speaker 2: 5:55

And then I decided to go work as a law enforcement professional with the US Army over in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I did about four tours with them and our job was to do criminal investigations of attacks upon our soldiers, whereas normally the soldiers would get hit and everybody would roll out and it was kind of forgot about. So our job was to do an investigation of the attack, be it a FIBIB or any other type of attack, and work with the commander advising them of how to catch the groups that were operating in their AO. So I did that for several years. Then I realized I was getting older, so I started teaching overseas for the State Department in their anti-terrorist program and did that for several years and it was during all that time I decided to write this book.

Speaker 2: 6:59

I learned a lot living in Iraq and Afghanistan about children that were kidnapped for reasons I don't even want to discuss and it was pretty horrible. And I think when I came home I realized we had the same situation right here in our country. I guess it's just one of those things you don't really see or think about. So I decided to write that book. So it addresses missing persons, primarily children, and I learned that when you try to get the police involved that can be somewhat difficult. So I wanted to give parents a way to recognize when their children are missing and what they can do to find that child far faster than law enforcement can do it. So that book would do that.

Speaker 2: 8:05

It also gets into kidnapping. It gets into pedophilia. It gets into everything you can imagine that women and children are the victims of, to include very violent behavior, sexual behavior. I discuss rape, date rape. I discuss the issues that are going on right in our high schools where children are being involved in sex against their will. Then when they go off to college, as we can probably remember a little bit, there's a lot of issues with women being taken advantage of and over time that's starting to include boys and men. They're the victims almost as much as women, but not to that level. So this book just teaches you how to prevent all these crimes from being committed and, if they should happen, it tells you how to deal with it. So I also get into professional counseling and things like that in the book, so it will require some thorough reading. It will require some effort for people, but I think finding your child is something that we would all want.

Speaker 1: 9:28

We'll get into that in detail, because I think that's important. Let me just ask you when you joined the Army where are you from, what area of the country? And you know when did you know you wanted to be in the military and law enforcement? How old were you?

Speaker 2: 9:46

Well, my dad was in the Marine Corps so we traveled around a lot but we ended up in Albany, georgia. So that's where I primarily went to school for junior and high school. And my father was a cop at one time and I think that's when the seed was planted and I realized that's something I wanted to do. So I kind of left home a little bit earlier I think I had two months before graduating from high school and I was anxious to get out of home and get into the Army and get to work and I always thought parachuting would be very interesting and I knew a lot about the 82nd Airborne from World War II. So it was just something that was in my blood. And you know, I could say I went through 10 years active duty and 13 years in the reserves and never had a day of regret not one.

Speaker 1: 10:43

That's, that's commendable. The you know and I you know how I feel about it. Any veteran or anything like that, how old are you? I mean, what year did you go in what year?

Speaker 2: 10:58

I went in in March of 1973.

Speaker 1: 11:01

Okay, so that was, was that was post Vietnam, right, or was it?

Speaker 2: 11:08

no, vietnam didn't until 74 okay so the 82nd had just returned from there, so of course we weren't deploying it again.

Speaker 1: 11:19

So I did get the Vietnam veteran status, although I never went over there, okay that's what I was asking and that's to be proud of and thank you for your service. With that time there was a lot of people. I came in, or I was about to go in in 1974 with that, but I got a baseball scholarship and I took that instead and it didn't work out too well because I couldn't hit, but that's another story for another day. Let me ask you this so when you went to work at the Pentagon, that was probably a change from the military police and you explained why you went into the intelligence field. What attracted you to Customs versus the other agencies? Was there a reason or did you know somebody that was an agent in Washington?

Speaker 2: 12:22

Yes, I did. Did you know somebody that was an agent in Washington? Yes, I did so. I knew many of the agents that we would meet with at Fort Myers, virginia, and I did know someone in customs, so it worked to my benefit. As you remember, we had the treasury exam, which was a monster of a test, but fortunately for veterans, you didn't have to take that test, and later on the federal government came up with a system to hire veterans off the regular best qualified list, so it was all just pure luck with timing. I'm glad I did go with Customs. I worked extensively with DEA and FBI, more so in Miami than I did in the Washington DC area, and there's just no finer group of investigators than you will find in Customs, and you well know.

Speaker 1: 13:23

Yeah, I came in off the—I transferred from the Marshal Service in DC to Miami and I often joke that my ex-wife was hired and I was sitting outside for my interview and they just said you're like baseball, you're a player to be named later.

Speaker 1: 13:43

so you know, you're going to be in, but yeah, it was. It was a great experience in that. So when you came here, you were here on a TDY originally and then you went over to the Vice Presidential Florida Joint Task Group, which I was part of too presidential Florida joint task group, which I was part of too. Most of the people don't realize that it started out with Operation Florida. Two of the ATF agents were killed in the early 80s with that and it was a really really, really good group to work in. There was a lot of camaraderie and I came in in the 90s for that. Can you describe your experience in the task force, what it was like and the amount of control deliveries that occurred? And I mean it was like triage, you know, deciding what cases you're going to work.

Speaker 2: 14:41

Yeah, I started off in an airport group so our job was to respond to the Miami International Airport when the customs inspectors made a seizure and after going through one of those you said it was like a triage and it was we had to process the evidence. All the witnesses put everything together, get it ready for a trial evidence. All the witnesses put everything together, get it ready for a trial. But I had heard someone talk about a controlled delivery and I started looking into that and I found out that, talking a person sitting in handcuffs with 20 keys of coke on his lap, it was pretty easy to convince him to cooperate instead of going to jail for 20 years or longer, yeah, or longer, or much longer. So I started doing controlled deliveries and got pretty good at them. I can say 50% of the airport seizures I responded to turned into a controlled delivery. Airport seizures I responded to turned into a controlled delivery. The best one I had and enjoyed immensely, was three people that had smuggled in coke and they admitted it to doing it on numerous occasions. I can't remember the exact amount. We were up to 40, 50, 60 pounds, but they were smuggling cocaine in for the Hell's Angels in Montreal, canada. So, of course, having the luxury of working with DEA at the Florida Joint Task Group, we got country clearance a lot faster than normal with the DEA up in Montreal. So we flew up there with one of the defendants and along with all the coke so it's kind of nice to fly in first class with about 20 keys of coke in your overhead and met with the RCMP and the Montreal police, and the organization they were looking at had a group in Montreal oh, my gosh, toronto. So the Toronto cops were called so they kind of got involved in it. So, short story, the dope was delivered by the defendant. The RCMP and the Montreal cops did the raid on the Hells Angels clubhouse and arrested a whole group of them and most all of them pled out, except for two individuals.

Speaker 2: 17:14

So that case lasted well over a year. So the defendant was locked up in Pennsylvania. So every time I would go up to Montreal for a trial or anything, I would have to stop in Pennsylvania and pull him out of prison and go up there, and then I handed him off to the police. So I had the opportunity to testify in a Canadian court, which was kind of interesting calling a judge his majesty, but the case was very, very successful. Not only did they end up indicting probably a dozen or two, yeah, I'd say almost two dozen people, but they also ended up getting some of the Montreal police who had been working with the Hells Angels. Wow yeah, so that was a bit of a shocker. So then they kind of moved me over to Toronto to work that in. So we started an undercover case up in Toronto and again for about a year or two I would constantly travel up to Toronto to work with their undercover group investigating the Columbians, and I think I did some drinking a few times that night.

Speaker 1: 18:36

Really With the RCMP. I'm shocked, can you imagine?

Speaker 2: 18:44

So it was a great. Two years I've been working with Montreal and working with the Canadians in Toronto. It was just a fabulous case, highly successful. It was a classic example of what customs agents could do, because we weren't too satisfied with just taking the seizure at the airport and writing down that stat. We wanted to take it further, and that's what we usually did.

Speaker 1: 19:14

That's amazing and, as we found, things start small but they mushroom out, you know, and they develop into bigger conspiracy cases and that. So you were there and then where did you go? Where did you go at group after that did you go to?

Speaker 2: 19:35

That's when I went to the Sac Miami to work with Greenback, the money laundering group.

Speaker 1: 19:39

Okay, and that was Dave Warren's group right at the time.

Speaker 2: 19:44

Yes, it was Dave Warren. There were two groups, yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:47

Okay, and why don't you explain to the viewers what Greenback did? Because you know the origins go way back, even before the money laundering statutes in 86. It goes back to IRS and Treasury agents working together, separate from the US Attorney's Office, which was located downtown, and explain what that was and what your role was as an agent in Greenback.

Speaker 2: 20:17

Okay, well, we were actually co-located with the US Attorney's Office and IRS had a group working right around the corner from us. But, based on the Bank Secrecy Act, we have all these currency reporting laws and I'm sure people are hearing a little bit about them today with the Suspicious Activities Report. But anytime you make a cash deposit or withdrawal of over $10,000, the banks had to fill out a form. So the drug cartels were stuck with people that had duffel bags full of drug money and I mean literally millions of dollars of drug money and they would have to try to get it into the bank. So we had undercover accounts where we could deposit that money and send it down to the bad guys in Columbia. So they thought we were professional money launderers and we were of a sort. But they would turn the money over to us and we would, in turn, watch the person that was handling the money and he would typically lead us to the person who was the owner of that money. So there again, as opposed to just making seizures of currency for millions and millions of dollars what some people refer to as a rip and run we wanted to start building cases against the Colombians in South America, to start building cases against the Colombians in South America. So we found a way to deal with the money handlers and get them to cooperate with us on the same premise as I was telling you about the drug couriers, rather than to go to jail again for 20, 40 years. They were willing to take the risk. So we would build up cases. Some of them were successful, without saying too much.

Speaker 2: 22:19

As you know, we had certain undercover agents in the SAC Miami who met with probably some of the biggest drug cartel members that have ever existed in South Florida and you got to give kudos to those people. We had situations where the bad guys would call us up and want us to meet them in the Bahamas or Aruba or anywhere else. That's where customs shined when they asked to meet with us in an undercover role, excuse me, we could get country clearance in a matter of hours, whereas, as you recall, dea and FBI would need two or three days to do that. We never had that issue and it kind of upset some of the other agents because we wouldn't postpone them, because that's why the bad guys wanted to meet us and set short notice is they knew federal agents couldn't do that. So we had a very high reputation for traveling all over the world in undercover roles, meeting with these people, and we were just very quick about it.

Speaker 2: 23:33

I remember one case I had a cop from London come to me and they wanted to meet some people from the NRA and I asked them why they weren't going to the FBI and they said well, we were told to come to customs because you guys could do it quickly. And I said how quickly? And he says we need to meet them tomorrow. And I says so what do you need from us? And he says well, we need a million dollar flash roll. So of course I went down to Bill Rosenblatt, told him what was going on and we called the feds and we went first thing in the morning, picked up a million dollars in a briefcase and gave it to the cops from London Scotland Yard and they went and met with the IRA guy and showed them the money that they had and everything worked out. I don't know of any other agency that could get their hands on that kind of money to do a flash roll in 24 hours. I met maybe you met him, I didn't.

Speaker 1: 24:46

Let me ask you this for the viewers you mentioned the term Smurf. Could you explain what a Smurf is, because you know they'll think it? This for the viewers you mentioned the term smurf Could you explain what a smurf is, because you know they'll think it's a cartoon character, some people. But what was a smurf to somebody involved with money laundering investigations?

Speaker 2: 25:04

So the person in Miami who was a financier, he was the man who collected the drug money from wherever it was being sold. It could be right there in Miami. A lot of times it was up in New York and other states. All that money would eventually come back to the financier in Miami and his job was to get that money back to the Colombians in South America. So you've heard of bulk money smuggling. So sometimes they would just pack it in containers of a billion dollars and ship it to Colombia. But those were prone to be intercepted so they prefer to use bank accounts. But it was kind of impossible to open hundreds of bank accounts. So they would hire a smurf. So that would typically be of any age it could be from 18 to 80, a man or a woman and they would give them a percentage of the drug proceeds. And those people would have to go open up multiple bank accounts all over the city and if they deposited over $10,000, then the currency report would be made. So they would structure that money. So they would go to the 10 bank accounts they own and make $9,000 deposits and they would have to do that all day and eventually the money was so huge that that even became a problem to move. So that's where Operation Greenback came in. We were able to move that money to the Colombians and it not only helped us identify the financiers in Miami but it helped the Colombians identify the people in their area Pablo Escobar, rodriguez brothers, all of them. So we had vetted Colombians that worked with us, that worked with our agents at the embassies in Colombia, and it was a very good operation. I guess it lasted 10, 15 years.

Speaker 2: 27:14

But for us the Smurfs were the key to everything, because that was just like the drug courier. Even though they were just operating with money, it was drug money, so they faced the same penalties as any drug dealer did. So rather than go to jail they would work with us and oftentimes we would stage a takedown where we would take that Smurf down and seize the money from him and then just the Smurf would just have to report back to his financier what happened. And it was fine. They didn't get punished for it if the cops made a seizure.

Speaker 2: 27:56

But I do remember once, down by our office, we were following a money courier, a Smurf, and we followed him back to an apartment near what was the famous golf course in Miami. Durrell Durrell, yeah, durrell Durrell, yeah, yeah, durrell Country Club. And when we knocked on his door, you know he consented to let us come in and search the house. And we walked upstairs and every bedroom was full of cardboard boxes and by the time we finished counting, it was over $25 million in that one house. And by the time we finished counting, it was over $25 million in that one house and that was the responsibility of just that one person to try to get rid of that money.

Speaker 1: 28:47

So those were the SMURs, and they were the ones that helped us make our cases.

Speaker 2: 29:00

And in this undercover operation, what kind of fees did you charge the Colombians to do this? How was that worked out? The undercover operation was self-sufficient. It was an undercover case certified as an OSADEP, an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. So the proceeds that we were making and the money that we were seizing came back to the group. So that enabled us to rent our cars and enabled us to have the latest technology that you know. Law enforcement was always way behind trying to get the funds. So it was a considerable amount of money. And even the SMURs you had to look at them. They may get anywhere from one to two 2%, but when you're talking about handling a million dollars a week or a million dollars a month, 1% is pretty high.

Speaker 1: 30:01

So when you were there, you went. From what group did you go after that? Did you stay in there before you went to Maine, or what?

Speaker 2: 30:10

Yeah, I stayed in the financial group until I got that promotion to Maine. Okay.

Speaker 1: 30:17

Let me just ask an obvious question. You're in South Florida, you know, and you're going back. You're going to the cold weather. Did that bother you a little bit? And I realize it was very competitive in South Florida and we have mutual friends that that did the same thing to get the promotion and it was an earlier in my career with the marshal service. I did that, I moved around and then finally, after what 15 years, 12? I wore them down and you know that I was the poster child of management, but I'll leave that alone. But you know that's a big change. Did you think that out or what when they offered it to you? How did it come about?

Speaker 2: 31:12

Yeah, so I lived on each end of i-95. I was in miami at one end and I ended up in i-95 on the other.

Speaker 1: 31:20

I thought about that.

Speaker 2: 31:21

So I got a phone call from, uh, some people you remember. Uh, I don't know we're supposed to say names on this podcast.

Speaker 1: 31:29

Well, there's certain names that I'd like to say, but I'm not going to.

Speaker 2: 31:34

So, matt, adrie and Robin Avers, you remember both of them. And they said well, you know, as a result of 9-1-1, and I'm sorry, I did leave out one point in between when I went to work at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center as an instructor and as an instructor at FLETC in Glencoe, georgia, my expertise was money laundering. So I rewrote all the courses that involved money laundering and financial investigations to include the two-week advanced course we had AFI Asset Forfeiture Investigations. So I did do that, I forgot. And so, anyhow, matt called me up and he said listen, we had 911.

Speaker 2: 32:22

We're opening new offices all along the northern border and the southern border. And he says I know you talk about retiring in a couple of years. And I said, yes, I'm definitely going to retire. And he said well, wouldn't you like to retire as a GS-14 as opposed to a GS-13? And I think when I said, give me a couple of days to think about it, I think it's because I had to go find a calculator and when I did the calculations, I did want to retire as a GS-14. How do I?

Speaker 1: 32:56

get to 14, step eight. That was the calculation.

Speaker 2: 32:59

And it was that easy. It was that easy. You remember how competitive it was in South Florida getting a 14th and at the SAC office. So I went up there and opened up a brand new office. I mean, we didn't even have a building, we just had to do all that. And that worked out real well.

Speaker 2: 33:18

And at that time, as you may remember, a lot of the customs agents along the border were what I call dog catchers catchers their job was to catch the illegal aliens and get them before an immigration judge and get them out of the country. Yeah, that's right, that can't be done, can it? And you know we would have them out of the country in what? 48 hours. They would be shipped back somewhere.

Speaker 2: 33:46

But you know, my heart was in drug trafficking and money laundering. So, lo and behold, we had a very young agent and he was actually my student at FLETC when I was an instructor there and thank God he was assigned to me. So he arrested someone and we were able to flip this marijuana dealer that operated between the New England states and Canada, because they had much better product than we did. And he flipped and we ended up working that case and by the end of two years we brought in something like 20, 30 defendants. Years we brought in something like 20, 30 defendants.

Speaker 2: 34:37

So, needless to say, matt and Robin were very happy about that, but that's all we did the last three years I was there. We worked the drug cases and money laundering cases. Of course we also worked the terrorist cases, but we didn't have the FBI Joint Task Force up in that area. More or less it was down in southern Maine. So if we got any type of indication about terrorists through our counterparts over in Canada, we would typically call the FBI and they would come up and snatch the person away from us. And they would come up and snatch the person away from us. But it was all good.

Speaker 1: 35:13

It was all good Again, just like I said about the Army there's not one day I regret about my 23 years in the Customs Service. So when you did you retired out of there and then how did you get involved over in the Middle East? On what you did over there and if it's the extent you can describe what you did, yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:39

So one of the other retired, I think he was a customs inspector and went over there as a law enforcement, professional enforcement professional. So the Army CID came up with the concept when these guys keep hitting us with explosives or snipers or mortars, whatever they do, cid just did not have the number of investigators to go back and try to find out who these terrorists were, who they were working for. The basic thing we would do with any criminal element.

Speaker 1: 36:13

Can you tell the viewers what CID stands for?

Speaker 2: 36:17

Yes, that's Army CID. They were the criminal investigators for the Army Very incredible group of soldiers as far as investigations. So we kind of supplemented them. So we would have the left, the law enforcement personnel, assigned to different battalions and brigades and divisions. I was always the left ones. I was usually assigned to a battalion so anytime there was an attack against our soldiers then we would respond to those attacks along with the Army and of course they provided all the protection that we needed when we went out behind the wire.

Speaker 2: 37:05

And there have been a number of books written by the LEPs, I'll be quite honest with you, written by the LEPs. I'll be quite honest with you. When I looked into the income part of being a LEP for the Department of Defense and the Department of the Army and the Marines, it was incredible. So I figured I could take the risk of spending 12 to 14 months somewhere in Iraq with that type of salary. But more so than the salary, it was the commitment that you had, the camaraderie you developed.

Speaker 2: 37:42

I had an advantage being a retired NCO from the Army. I felt I was treated a little bit better than a lot of the other LEPs were. We were totally embedded, we wore the uniform just like they did. We carried a rifle, pistol. We had all the same gear seven duffel bags full of equipment that we never used. Just put them under our beds. So I did the contracting, like I said, about four tours, and I really loved every minute of it. It was hard, it was a hard way of life, but it was very fulfilling and we had fantastic results.

Speaker 1: 38:28

How old were you when you went over there?

Speaker 2: 38:33

I was probably in my early 50s. So I was probably in my late 50s by the time I decided I couldn't do it anymore.

Speaker 1: 38:49

That's still amazing. So when you were over there, you mentioned that you came up with the idea for the book and I I want to explore that with everybody because you know it's it's really good and this is something that I think families should have. I mean, I, you know, I don't want to get religious because I don't have politics and religion on the show, but I think that this could be placed nearby with the Bible in your house. So if something bad happens, or to prevent it, like with children or with spouses or other elderly family members, can you come up with the concept and just give us what you covered in the book Not the entire book, because I know you want people to buy this book, but just to give an idea of what areas you explored in it. Leon.

Speaker 2: 39:52

Well, you know I went on. The principle that I learned in the Army at a very early age is planning. People are reactive and when you're reactive to everything that happens in your life, the odds are you're going to react in the wrong way initially. And heaven help us. When a child goes missing, you don't have 24 or 48 hours to figure out what you did wrong. So planning is key in that book. I mean, I could tell you everything in that book and you would still need the book, because the book's got all the tools that I developed for the parents to put together. And it doesn't have to be a parent, it can be a man or a woman who's going off to college and they don't want to be that missing person. So the book has unique tools I developed to help the police find a missing loved one. So I talk about knowledge. So when I talk about all the different criminals that are out there and what they do and how they do it, I don't try to scare the reader, but I just want to make them aware, because if I can make them aware of what is happening, they'll start watching TV, they'll start reading newspapers and I'll start putting two and two together.

Speaker 2: 41:19

I do have some unique stories in there. One is a was a kidnapper that lived up in Cleveland Ohio, I believe it was, and over a period of years he had kidnapped four young women and had held him in their basement. In his basement for two, three years. Two of them, I believe, got pregnant. He even had family members that would come over to his house and eat in the kitchen upstairs while his captives were downstairs in the basement chained to beds. So I tell these kinds of stories just to make the person aware that there is no limit for these psychopaths. There's absolutely no limit.

Speaker 2: 42:08

Your podcast is about justice then and justice now. So one of the hardest things I had to write about in that book and it really, really pained me was when you called the police and you were dependent upon them. The results were not always as you expected, and that's a horrible thing to say. So I addressed the criminal justice system. I addressed the family courts, which are also not your friend at all times. I addressed the social services workers that will come to your house one day and they may not be your friend either.

Speaker 2: 42:53

So when a child has gone missing, depending on the police that handle that case, they can either help you find that child or help you destroy your entire family, and I can't imagine a parent who is a true victim having to go through that second assault by the people they're trusting. So what I want to train you to do in that book is have every tool you need. So when that officer shows up on your doorstep, you'll hand them part of what I call an IPP an Individual Protection Packet and in that biographical form it answers 60 questions that the police should be asking you about your child. And you've already got this sheet filled out and it's ready to go, so you can just hand it to them. Who do your children hang out with? What vehicles do they drive? Who are their enemies? Who have they had problems with? Where do they go? What parks do they visit? That sheet will have all the answers. So, as a parent, you'll have to sit with your child and fill it out. It's not going to be an easy thing. We know children are 100% obedient, but you have that as one of your tools. That is one of your tools. The other thing I'll have is a complete packet on each child to include DNA sample, fingerprints, teeth impressions, various photographs, from facials to side views, to full length views, front and back, a short videotape that you can give to the media. If I'm looking at a picture on the screen of a missing person, if the media can show a 10-second video of that child, it'll have a bigger impression on the people watching the news, because not only do they get to see them, they get to hear them and they get to see some of their mannerisms. So this tells you how to be fully prepared for one of those incidents.

Speaker 2: 45:06

I also talk about how to protect yourself from sexual assaults, physical assaults. Are you familiar with Krav Maga? Having been in the mixed martial arts business, I'm sure you are. Krav Maga is the Israeli self-defense fighting technique. Any child, any woman, any man, even if he's 60, can go to a half dozen of those classes and become proficient enough to destroy somebody in the first three or four seconds and then run. And that's what I always tell. I tell people that's my biggest advice when you're in a bad situation, scream, yell and run. I mean that's the first technique. The problem of God teaches that too. But, as you know, there's certain strikes that you can do, and unlike a karate class where a kid has to go for five years to get his black belt.

Speaker 2: 46:04

In Krav Maga, you can learn self-defense techniques in a matter of weeks, if not months, depending on your pace. So there are ways to hurt somebody very, very quickly and get away from them. I also give them links to go watch some videotapes of children that are actually being abducted and walking along the streets and grocery stores. I, where the film caught the man, just walk up and pick the child up and run with him. Well, the vast majority of your kids won't fight back. I mean, they don't know to fight back. They have no clue what's happening to them. It's totally alien. So I want parents to learn how to teach their kids to immediately defend themselves and the various ways you can do it.

Speaker 2: 47:00

I talk about the different security devices that we have available to us.

Speaker 2: 47:06

For me, it's floodlights outside your house, having an alarm system in your house that's being monitored with an emergency phone.

Speaker 2: 47:16

So there's so much advice in that 500 pages that you will need to keep a journal and you need to write down what you're interested in and how you want to accomplish that. And I also encourage parents to sit down with their young children and talk to them about these things and there's a missing persons group called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington DC and it's semi-funded by the government, and we've had legacy customs agents work with them and they have all types of material and tools that you can share that are age appropriate. So what you share with your five-year-old and what you share with your 15-year-old are going to be separate things, so they have all those products there you need as well. So it's a matter of the parents sitting down and coming up with this plan and these individual protection packets and all the other tools and just being prepared so when it happens you can find them. I've heard cops even today say you know, the most critical time to find a missing person is the first 48 hours. Well, that's not true.

Speaker 1: 48:32

It's immediately.

Speaker 2: 48:34

You must find them in the next hour because you know the way things are here in the states. I meant they'll. They'll take a child and drive them across state lines and you'll never see that child again. And smuggling a child out of the country is very, very simple. It's just a reverse operation of the uh southwest border. So parents need to be able to find those kids within the first few hours. I mean, that's the most critical time and the police will spend the first two hours just interviewing you. So I have it all put together. You just hand a thumb drive to the cop and he's got everything he could ever possibly dream of to start his investigation or her.

Speaker 1: 49:21

I think this is so valuable to everybody here. As you know, either children or grandchildren and you know I don't think a lot of people, even the cops, have thought of this plan and what to do, just in case but yeah, I mean anybody that's ever filed a police report you're, you're in your house for, like on a break-in, simple break-in, for at least an hour and a half, you know, and just getting the basic information as sitting there with a notepadad and writing it down and transcribing and getting things out on the radio. You know, be on lookout or whatever for this or an ambler alert or something like that. You can get this out immediately with your philosophy and your practice on what to do with this, leon, but I think it's great. And how do they get go ahead? I'm sorry.

Speaker 2: 50:25

No, you're good. I'm sorry. Yeah, and that's one of the things I would address individually. I would talk about physical security. I would talk about the concept of personal security, cyber security. Children love to play with people on these electronic devices and they have no idea who's sitting on the other end.

Speaker 2: 50:47

I teach people as being a private investigator for several years on my own, once I retired. I teach people how to become their own private investigator. They don't need me. It's not hard to find out who is in your orbit and find certain information about them. I talk about blind dating, dating apps but you brought up the breaking in your house.

Speaker 2: 51:17

So I do address, you know, the home invasions and someone breaks into the house and you're in there. That's. That's one situation. Hopefully, people can be prepared to deal with that. If not, I teach them out. But what do you do when it's a home invasion that has multiple violent people breaking into your home and coming in from different doors? So I cover all of that as well. There's one section when I talk about firearms. So the first thing I write in that chapter I says if you are opposed to firearms, just skip this chapter, don't even read it, because of course, you've got to keep certain people at bay, but there's a lot in there that you. I don't know if you read that part about the firearm, but it teaches you about firearm safety. It teaches you how to use a firearm, how to become proficient with a firearm, how to protect the kids from that firearm. So I don't think there's anything in that book I didn't cover.

Speaker 1: 52:24

No, no. And just on a separate topic, with firearms, they recently changed the qualifications from our old agency from quarterly with pretty strict. I mean it was pretty strict, I mean it was very good to once a year. Now it's what I call saving bullets and getting cops killed. That's what it is. Okay, it's saving some bean counter at headquarters figuring out, oh, we can save money, but we're going to get agents killed. You know, because the more you go to the range, the better it is, whether you know protecting your family or afterwards. And you know I won't get into the Second Amendment, which is pretty clear, but the fact is you want to protect your family as long as you have, as you pointed out, the safety of the firearm, that it stays in your hands as the adult in that house. Okay, I'm done with my sermon so I'll go back to you.

Speaker 2: 53:34

But it is very, very important. You know, I think of it like this, and I talk about this in the book Imagine if you played golf or you played tennis and that's your sport of choice. Well, are you going to go out and play golf and tennis once a year and expect to be proficient? Are you going to go out there and really, really train the first year that you're learning that sport? So firearms are no different. You know, I teach people how to shoot without using their iron sights or using any sights, so it's very easy to shoot somebody within 10, 20 feet and you don't even have to aim the gun. So that's something people need to learn.

Speaker 1: 54:21

Yeah, and you hold the gun straight ahead. You don't do the gangster sideways.

Speaker 2: 54:28

Yeah, I always see that in the movies and you get the bad guy like that, which really doesn't happen.

Speaker 1: 54:38

What are you looking for in the future? You know as far as what you're personally going to do and I know you love this job. You stayed with it a long time and you still do, and I'm the same way, you know, with this. You know there's people we know that went off the job and never heard from again, for two reasons One, they were incompetent and two, they were just assholes. As I write in my book, or Pete Throne's book, the butt snorkelers, which is a term for South Florida and I, you know I love that term. When I came down I think I helped invent it with a few other guys. But what do you see in law enforcement and that in the future?

Speaker 2: 55:41

You know I told you I was revising the book and you paid me a nice compliment. You said I don't know how you can make it any better, but I'm going to try to make it better. I'm going to try to update some of the modern technology that parents have access to now that didn't even exist when I wrote that book. So that's the second revision. This will be the third revision. After that I'll quit with the book. A huge mistake I made and I did not market the book like I should have, and there's plenty of marketing plans out there that you can just Google and pull up and it tells you exactly what to do. I never did that. I just let the book run by word of mouth and it does good. If you go to Amazon, you can just Google my name, leon Ives. You don't have to Google that extremely long title and it'll take you right to the book. And it's got about 20 reviews that are all five stars. It's got people who wrote reviews for it inside the book. So anybody who goes in and just opens the book up and looks at it is going to know that's what they need. That's what they're going to want in their house, like you said, and I recommend getting the hard copy, not the Kindle copy, because the hard copy I give you spaces to write down notes that you need to know that's unique to your children and yourself, and keep that book somewhere in the house where there's easy access to it. So I will market the book this time, but pretty much that's it.

Speaker 2: 57:26

I love to travel. You know. I spent a month in Italy and then I went and spent three weeks in Greece and I'm getting ready to go to Ireland and I'll probably stop in Scotland and Wales and UK. I'm going to Liverpool to find out if the Beatles are still there or not. So I want to spend a lot more time traveling the world. I've been to 43 countries in my life and it's just amazing. And I think the most beautiful thing I found about being in all these countries was when they say everybody hates America. It's just the opposite.

Speaker 2: 58:07

They love you Everywhere I go. Sometimes I'll reach out and hold my hand and after about 10 minutes I'll have to kind of pull it away from them. People love Americans. They respect Americans. When I was in Iraq I was helping to train some of their soldiers, especially the ones that gave personal security details, and whenever I would walk through the it was their compound I lived on. It wasn't an American compound, it was theirs. When I'd walk through there, some of the young soldiers would come up and hold my hand and just sit there and talk about their family and talk about their lives and what they wish for the future. But I could say 90% of everybody I met over there just loved Americans. So it's not true. We're not despised as people want to paint that picture for their own agenda.

Speaker 1: 59:06

I got one last question have you been to Ireland before?

Speaker 2: 59:10

No, never. So I'm going to both the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Speaker 1: 59:14

You need to call me going to both the Republic and Northern Ireland. You need to call me. I've done a few pub crawls in Belfast and down in Dublin and all that. So that's the mother country for me, but you'll like it. I actually I'll fill you in. But Belfast is very, very interesting, very the history behind it and, um, you know the rest of ireland I I've been a couple times, um, quite frequently the people are nice but, like I said, don't get in a beer challenge with anybody over there because they're professionals. They're professionals, they really are. The natives used to be first time I went first time I went.

Speaker 1: 1:00:02

I got in a cab and this guy goes. He hears me talking and, uh, he goes. I was with the guard and I go that's the police over there and and I hired him as a driver and he was a good driver and, like I said, he knew all the places to go. So we'll chit-chat on that, but I wanted to thank you very much for coming on. I think this is great. We have all the extremes of everybody on here. We have former inmates, we have agents, we have police officers that are shot and killed people, we have inmates that tried to escape and drug dealers that got life, and it's just a real good blend.

Speaker 1: 1:00:55

I said, as I said in the beginning, jeff has been wonderful with this and that and we want to make this basically real life with real people involved. This isn't the major news networks with talking heads or head of agencies for six months, or people that have never been to the months, or people that have never been to the border, or people that have never done anything offering their opinions, because in my opinion which I take lightly sometimes it doesn't mean shit. You can't comment on something that you don't know about or experienced. Okay, it's like me cop talking about a medical operation or something like that that I I know absolutely nothing about. So that's that's what we're doing, and uh, conveying it to the viewer, and uh oh, that's great, it's uh, it's real life from people that have lived it.

Speaker 1: 1:01:54

Yes, exactly. So take care of my friend, we'll be talking, and thanks for coming on today, leon.

Speaker 2: 1:02:03

Thank you. All right, buddy, thank you, and thank you too, jeff.

Speaker 1: 1:02:07

I'll go wake him up.

Speaker 2: 1:02:09

It's happy hour, see you later Bye Leon. All right, buddy, bye-bye.