Belize's Gangster Politics and Ukraine's Battle for the Donbas
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It's the late 1990s and a team of Belizean gangsters are piloting a boat off the coast of Honduras. Ordinarily this kind of trip, a couple hundred mile hop and a skip past Caisen, the Caribbean Sea, is for coconuts or timber. Or maybe, at a stretch, the killer weed the Belizeans are known for growing in their jungles so dense that soldiers of foreign armies use it for extreme training. But in the late 90s, Central America is on fire.

Civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala have decimated civil society, emboldened vicious street gangs and flooded the region with guns. And it's that cargo that these makeshift sailors are after to consolidate control of Belize's underworld under the auspices of one man and his ragtag band of local enforcers.

Now, I can't say that man's name, nor the name of his gang in the show, because this is a tale that came to me direct from a guy who'd be killed if I did so. But let's just say this guy is big, really big. And he is the connective tissue between the Belizean streets and massive regional cartels who want to use the tiny nation of 400,000 people to ferry contraband direct into the United States.

And the guns, this quote, whole boat full of guns, all kinds of guns, is going to help this one tiny gang push out all the others and bring control of Belize City, the country's podunk commercial heart, into the hands of just a few criminals. Only this guns for cash deal is not going to run so smoothly.

Having picked up the weapons, the boat's just a couple miles off the coast of Honduras when a massive storm strikes, pushing the gangsters back onto the shore. The next morning, they head out again, but this time, when they're not far from home, another storm hits. Quote, the whole sea just get angry and mad, my man says. We'll call him Sonny. Captain says we've got to turn back, so we turn back.

Except, there ain't no turning back. The storm's too fierce, and the boat's getting tossed around like a dog toy. I've never been in a boat with the sea like that in my life, says Sonny. And he has seen plenty. As a major lieutenant in Belize's gang wars, who's killed over a dozen men, mostly with shanks and machetes, which he notches up via tattoos on his arm.

Before anybody can do anything, the boat capsizes, sending its crew and hundreds of guns into the surf. It's just off from one of Belize's most popular tourist keys, and as the gangsters swim for safety and the storm subsides, they're met by American vacationers heading out with scuba instructors for a day of fish buying. It's a pretty wild sight, but of course, the authorities do nothing.

This is a country in the pocket of oligarchs and drug barons. Not even the sight of half a dozen gang members floating about besides tourists, and, by the way, tons of AK-47s and other assault rifles, will spur the government into any action. That's probably a mistake. Just a couple years later, Belize's biggest local gangster is locked up in the US, and there is a bloody power struggle for his throne.

The oligarchs go upstairs, missing out local gangs altogether. And almost two decades later, as I'm being told this story at a Rasta beach bar outside Belize City, Central America's smallest nation faces an underworld pincer action. From cartels in the north and MS-13 in the south. No wonder some people think it's on the verge of a quote, all out gang war.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Hello and welcome to the show where we tell you all about organized crime all around the world because we've actually been there and we've actually seen it. I'm Sean Williams, a journalist in Berlin and I'm joined as always by Danny Gold, a journalist based ordinarily in New York. But right now you're on a brief R&R in Kiev on the way out of Europe, right?

Yeah, I don't know what R&R means. I'm just staying here for a day or two and then going back home because it takes like three days of travel to get to the airport now in Poland and then back to New York. But yeah, my time here is finishing up and I should be back in the States relatively soon and hopefully we can get you guys some more regular episodes. Oh yeah. How long have you been out there? You've been out there a while now, right? About six weeks. Holy shit. Okay. Well...

That goes halfway to explaining why we've been away for a while. So sorry about that, guys. So for those of you sticking around with the Patreon, first, massive thanks. And second, we're back on the case. I've got a couple of top interviews. I'm putting together a mini episode today.

I think you, Danny, are working on some really exciting stuff there too, right? Yeah, I've got a couple of really good interviews, I think, lined up that are going to come out over the next few weeks. I also think we're going to do a Q&A about just all the recent stuff that we've done. You know, Sean has been in Belize and working on this Chinese fentanyl thing. That's crazy. I've got St. Louis and Philly and Ukraine and all that. So if you're a Patreon member, we're going to do a Q&A for you guys soon. So if you have questions, feel free.

Definitely be on the lookout for that. Yeah, man, all over the world. It's kind of crazy work. But we're going to get into Danny's incredible reporting from Ukraine in a little bit. But yeah, let's start off with Belize, because if you haven't read my profile of Shine Barrow, he's the rapper turned convict, turned Jewish convert, turned politician, and

You should give it a read. It's out Rolling Stone now. It's really, really well written, thorough journalism, brilliant stuff. And I mean, that guy was an interesting person to profile. Prickly AF.

Did not enjoy our time together, I would surmise. And yeah, I'm going to get a call from him later on, actually. So it's going to be an interesting chat. He definitely does not like the fact I was hanging around with gangsters and drug dealers, even though that was pretty much the whole point of the story.

Who wouldn't enjoy being forced to have a conversation with you about themselves? I just, I don't wait. So has he been like on your, on your case recently? Uh, since then, you know, I, I don't want to, I don't want to get too into the private emails have gone back and forth, but, um,

I think that he's been a little bit annoyed. I tell you what, I tell you what, here's, here's how I would boil it down. The guy essentially thought he was getting a music profile piece and I was there to do a political profile and somewhere in between the two, there was a bit of cross wires. And when I started asking him some difficult questions about his past and kind of what he's doing now and,

some of the corruption that's kind of summing up what's going on in Belize. He didn't like that. And, uh, got a little bit pissed off. Um, and since the story, yeah, he kept saying, actually this, this is kind of inside the story, but he kept saying at the time when I first met him that he wanted to show the world Belize tourism through Rolling Stone. And he kept saying his phrase, like I'm going to use Rolling Stone, uh, to, to kind of like promote Belize to the world. Um,

And that was a bit weird. I was like, I'm kind of here for a proper political piece. But yeah, so we will see how that goes. No disrespect to Shine, who actually I listened to his music when I was younger. I enjoy his music, but he's not really making any music anymore. So how could you be writing a music profile? But anyway, yeah, the story came actually from an episode that I did, I think in December a few months back. And

And then genius, brilliant editor Noah Shackman, who's now the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, he took over a little while ago, reached out. He wanted me to go down there and do what would essentially be one of my dream stories. And of course, I couldn't do it because I make bad life decisions and had another thing I had to handle. So I kindly gave it to Sean. I'm glad. Yeah, I'm glad that I could be in the bullpen for this story.

Yeah, apparently Shine did not hit hard in rural England or wherever the fuck Sean grew up. So I had to explain to him what it was like when Bad Boys dropped in, like, what was it, 99 or 2000? Yeah. What up?

Yeah, I'll always be jealous and hate you for getting to that story when I couldn't. Yeah, I mean, the guy's impressive, right? Like, he's a businessman. It's a wild life, man. It's a wild life. Insane life. And he knows so much. He's got so much information. But the kind of disconnect between meeting him in some fancy-ass whiskey bar and then heading out on the streets in his constituency, which is called Mesopotamia, because it's kind of between two streets called...

Uh, like Tigris and Euphrates. It's kind of like, it's just two different worlds. Right. And it kind of sums up what's happening in Belize at the moment, which we got into in your like episode, which kicked this all off. Um,

And really my takeaway from the whole trip there was how precarious this all is. It's kind of hanging on a knife edge in the South. I mean, like to put it in context, Belize is this tiny little place on the Yucatan Peninsula on the North. You've got Mexico on the South, you've got Guatemala and it's pretty much stayed away from the worst of the cartel and drug violence of the region for the last like 10, 20 years.

But in the South, you've got MS-13 encroaching on ground from Guatemala, El Salvador, obviously. And in the North, you've got this increased activity from the big cartels, especially Sinaloa cartel, who are using the jungle and rural roads to just land drug planes with the consent of politicians to ship cocaine into the US. So, yeah.

There is not a lot holding the violence back from Belize. And most people in the country that I spoke to, they pretty much knew this. It's quite a scary time. No one's really talking about it. And it wouldn't take a lot for it all to fall apart in Belize.

Really? I had no idea that. I mean, I knew that in the city itself, there was that Bloods and Crips gang war brewing. We talked about that. Oh, yeah. I just didn't know. I didn't know the situation was that delicate. And I'm sure being on the ground is where you can kind of pick up on that sort of stuff, which you did. And yeah, I mean, the profile itself, I think it's really, really well. I mean, you did a much better job than I would have.

But when he tells you that it's not a therapy session, that's just such a great thing to tell someone profiling you. It's incredible. Can you imagine driving two and a half hours to meet a guy in the middle of the night and that's the first line that he comes out with, like when you're sitting there having a beer? That's awesome. That was pretty full on. But yeah, I mean, his constituency, Mesopotamia or Messup, people say that because it rhymes with bless up, which is what all the rest of us say around there.

It's kind of, it's this old sort of podunk, wooden slat, colonial town, like part of Belize City. And you wouldn't know it if you walked around it during the day. I mean, it's beautiful. People walking around the streets is completely fine. But when the sun goes down, every corner is up for grabs. It's mostly weed there. Local gangs are scrapping around for nothing.

And the higher level, like the white collar drug crime going on, that is the politicians. That is these handful of oligarchs that kind of ruled the country. And the two worlds are kept very, very distant. Even though when I was there, there was a shooting one of the nights I was there. I think it was just before I met shine for the second time.

There was five shootings in the same night. I mean, this is a place of 60,000 people. That's pretty insane. So the next morning I get up, I get a call from a guy and he's like, we're going to call a sort of parlay, all these gangs in the region. We go to this weird water park place where all these American tourists are like drunk and high and taking pills. And there's like Drake and Lil Wayne playing in the background. And then in this straw cabana, there's all these like,

real tough and gangsters having it out in front of this guy who's the head of the police. And there's police with like submachine guns standing by the door. It's pretty, pretty febrile. Um, and then you just get a sense of just how long these feuds have been going. Like you said, it's a bloods and crips feud. It came over in 81. Um, when the country got its independence from, from us, of course, Britain is in there somewhere. Um,

And since then, it's just this cycle of violence that's been continuing on the streets, but it really is kept away from the big stuff, which is these planes and boats coming in. Like I said in the introduction, like the boats, these big gangs working with the cartels, that's kept well away from these guys, but it's no less bloodthirsty. And it's a bit of an eye-opener, and no one's really got any solutions for it. That's why it's pretty scary. And...

This guy, I think you kind of took the piss out of him in the episode, actually, and rightfully so for some of the wonky stuff that he was saying. Okay, okay. No, no, no, no, no. I did not take the piss out of him. I just was making fun of academics, but I cited his work like 15 times because it's really good work. But, like, come on, it's funny. It's funny to read, like, gang slang written in academic papers. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, taking the piss is very light. I mean, like...

Adam Baird, yeah, he's a researcher from the UK. He helped me a bunch with contacts when I was out there, and he's actually written some stuff this week on how on that edge this country is right now. So first, there's tons of cash for vote shit going on in the gang areas of the city where Shine's constituency is, and I'll let him take it from here. He sent me this this morning, actually. So, quote,

A former government official told me that politics is a very dirty game. Buying votes is just a part of it. The UDP, that is the United Democratic Party or shines kind of center, right? I don't know. They're all kind of center parties. So the UDP has come to perfect its political practices on South side. That's the South side of blue city. Having rarely relinquished their seats in almost 40 years. This is not a sign of political legitimacy though.

It tells you all you need to know about a political regime when you take a walk around neighborhoods like St. Martin's and Backerland on Southside. Don't worry too much about these names, but basically anything south of the Belize city, like the Belize River, that is where all of the gang crime is happening. So it's all called Southside. These areas lack basic infrastructure such as drainage systems and asphalt roads in what is a middle income country.

In 2021, I, that's Adam, spoke to a gang member there who had spent the last few weeks digging a drainage ditch around his house in preparation for the hurricane season. At another time, spoke to a youth worker who complained as we walked through the areas one night, nothing has changed here in 40 years, no fucking thing.

He wrote that in local Patois, but there's no way I'm doing that accent. And like I said, give it a shot. Absolutely. F all chance. It's working for Chet Hanks. I mean, that guy is, he's everywhere. And I really, no, wait, we're not moving on. So you just give it like a little bit.

Give it a shot. Come on. We need to start doing reels, right? And like TikToks, we'll just, we'll cut this part out. It'll go viral. I'll just save myself from, from the woke gay and say that I'm going to read it like verbatim and say that nothing has changed here in 40 years. No fucking tin. That, that is as close as I'm going to get. That's a, that's a weak effort. Yeah. We're not going to make anything on TikTok. Yeah.

Like I said about the street gangs and high crime being kept pretty much apart, only 36% of people in Southside, Belize City, say they've ever used cocaine, crack, or heroin.

Yeah, that number seems pretty high to me. Like, I don't know what the stats are, but I wouldn't be like, oh, only 36% of the people here have used crack cocaine and heroin. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, I know. And I think, and I agree with you, like having looked at it again, and I think what he's done is he's speaking to gang members specifically. So like, even among the gang members, only about a third of them have touched those drugs. Yeah.

In the city, it's like all about weeds. The coke, that's just coming in on the planes. Anyway, here's Adam Baird again, quote, Transhipment in Belize began with former village fishermen and tight-knit trafficking families, meaning either kin or small secretive groups stretching along the coastline from San Pedro in the north to Punta Gorda in the south. That's right on the border with Guatemala.

There is a culturally attuned, very Creole form of omerta around drug trafficking, that's the Sicilian word for silence, where everyone in the village knows who the traffickers are, yet say nothing. A magistrate in a coastal town explained that wet-drop cocaine bales are collected offshore, passing unperceived through popular tourist resorts en route to Mexico.

We should do an underworld sponsored vacation tour that is like fishing for cocaine in Belize. Wait, what are they called? White Lobster, right? Isn't that the... Oh, yeah. Yeah, I didn't think of this like cottage industry that we could build around this podcast. Awesome. Sponsored vacations to... Anyway. Oh, man. Yeah. And Baird continues, quote, However, increasingly, small drug planes are landing on the country's inland highways.

And there is a feeling that drug trafficking is ramping up and becoming more sophisticated. One government official said there is an open secret that quote, big drug trafficking takes place among big politicians and business people. So,

Essentially, the trans ship drugs, the white stuff that really passes through Belize City itself where the street gangs are actually located. And so this one academic tells Adam that, quote, thank God they only smoke weed on Southside. If they start doing other drugs, it's over, man. It's fucking over.

Well, actually, I think it's worse than that because it doesn't really need the local people to start taking the drugs. They just have to start getting involved in the transshipment. They want a piece of the pie. It could all break down very quick. There's a really, really fragile piece. And it's not even a piece. Like we just said, it's like thousands of shootings every year in a city the size of like, I don't know. I was trying to think of a place in New Jersey, but I can't even think of one now.

But the local gangs don't... I mean, this is a thing that you saw in El Salvador too with a lot of MS-13 and 18th Street. I think it's moved on from how it was, but these local gangs don't have the capabilities usually to get involved with that large-scale drug trafficking. And it's not like the cartels and the associated middlemen are going to welcome them in with open arms. You know what I'm saying? They would have to make serious moves to...

Um, or simply just try to get paid off as protection in these areas where it's moving through. But then it's like, you know, these street gangs in Belize, I don't think they have the same, um, you know, amount of manpower and firepower that the cartels and the heavily involved drug trafficking organizations have.

So it could be dangerous for them to get involved as well, you know, or to try to play more of a role. It's not an easy thing to do. For sure. For sure. But like, I think what I'm saying with this political apathy or what hasn't helped the people, you know, like I was just saying, there's these, if you go around Mesopotamia, which is right in the middle of Belize city, the streets are cracked to shit. The houses are, uh,

Jim Crack, they don't really, you know, there's loads of stuff that's completely derelict. These are people in a relatively rich nation that are getting nothing from above. And I don't think it would take a lot for them to start sort of, I don't know, this sort of do or die attitude wouldn't take a lot to come out of that country at all. So, yeah, TLDR, I mean, Cheyenne is one thing I heard very little about.

positive ideas about him from people in his constituency. They all think he's much for much near sort of a continuation of political system that has given people very little and is supposedly in cahoots with drug dealers at the very top. And it could go very wrong very quickly and it could get really, really bloody. I mean, essentially you've got MS 13 in the country already. They're committing all kinds of hideous crimes, as you know, pretty well in El Salvador. Um,

And, yeah, like the politicians don't want to do it because they'd lose votes or even worse if they're in on it, lose cash from the cocaine transshipments. So that's a little bit of a summary of what I found while I was in Belize. Check out the Rolling Stone article about all that. I've put it on the reading list for this episode, too, alongside all Danny's stuff from Ukraine. But, yeah, I think it's time to get on to your work because you've been doing some crazy stuff recently. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I've been here about six weeks now, and I'm actually shipping off tomorrow. It kind of got to the point where it felt like the right time to go to take a break, just in terms of decisions that were being made and just the way I was feeling. And it kind of... You know, the last couple of days, today, actually, a French reporter just got killed in the area that I was in, in Sverre Donetsk, which is in the Donbass, which is right around where we were reporting last week. And then two days ago,

There was a crew, I think, of two Hong Kong-based photographers, and they had a shell explode maybe five, six meters from them. The fixer caught some shrapnel in the chest. He had to go to the hospital and have an emergency operation. I think he's going to be okay. But, yeah, things are getting—I mean, things have been hairy here, I think, for a long time. But, yeah, the East is just a whole other sort of battle that kind of differs, I think, from what we've seen recently.

in um or what i've seen at least since i've been here or got here six weeks ago because it's just uh you know the russians have changed their strategy they had an immense amount of failures uh in the north and in near kiev and kharkiv and all that and uh they got pushed out relatively quickly they took a significant amount of losses

They tried to advance too quickly. They didn't have proper logistics. And they just got hammered and lost a ton of equipment and a ton of soldiers. And now they've kind of reconstituted their shattered forces all in this region in the southeast called the Donbass, where they had already carved out some territory in 2014.

And they've concentrated a lot of their firepower there right now. And now what they're doing is just shelling the shit out of these little cities and villages and towns immensely, as much as possible, just leveling them and slowly moving forward. And unfortunately, they have the advantage there, you know?

I mean, for those of our listeners who don't really know the region, like, what is the deal with Donbass, Luhansk? Why is Russia so intently shelling it, destroying it right now? And what is it trying to achieve? Well, they, you know, they had this hybrid war that Russia launched in 2014 with the help of some separatists that were, that wanted to align with Russia in the east. You know, it borders Russia

It borders Russia right there. There are a lot of Russian speakers there. Some people of Russian ethnicity. And they were able to have a little bit of support, though I think a lot of that support in the wake of what happened in February is gone now.

And, you know, it was easier for them to get logistics. It's right next to their border. They can load up very quickly. And they've since pushed out from there since February 24th and were able to take territory little by little. A lot of people think that if they had just concentrated on that area originally instead of trying to go for Kiev and the whole country, they could have made significant progress. But, you know, now they sort of, I think they've kind of learned their lesson and they've pulled back

and concentrated everything there now. So logistically speaking, and everything else, they're well-suited to take territory there. They are facing significant resistance, and you have a highly motivated Ukrainian force, even though they're outgunned and outmanned. I think I've seen numbers estimated at seven to one. But yeah, the Russians also, I mean, these are reconstituted units who...

had been shattered over the country. So they're missing a lot of officers. They're not super well organized. And they've shifted their strategy to just leveling and moving in slowly and literally. And, you know, they've taken some territory, but I don't think there's a lot of, I think it's become a popular contrarian thing that I say, like this sort of doomsday prophesizing of the area, but it's still only a couple of kilometers away.

in a week that they've taken and it's taking them a long time. Now, don't get me wrong. There's massive losses on the Russian side and massive losses on the Ukrainian side, but the Ukrainians are getting newer and newer equipment shipped in and they have, you know, a healthy mobilization force. Every day I was there, you saw more and more soldiers in the city and the villages and all that and more equipment being brought there. They don't have the same amount of heavy equipment that

that the Russians do at the moment. And the Russians are dominating in the air, right? That's one of the big complaints. It's just that they're, you know, they could be, Ukrainians could be holding their ground, they're taking territory, and the Russians could just come in with their planes and with their helicopters and level it. So that's a big issue right now. And I mean, there is just...

It's an immense amount of shelling, and the explosions are constant, and it's real army to army. This isn't like wars, I think, that we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan or anything like that. This is just like everyone calls it a war of equipment, a war of vehicles, right? It's just artillery, artillery, artillery, artillery.

You know, there is some small arms fire and some urban combat, but it's mostly just blasting the shit out of each other. And yeah, it's dire, man. I mean, you've got civilians evacuating every day, buildings being hit. The Russians don't seem to...

You know, the firing is pretty indiscriminatory from what I've seen. But it's, yeah, it's hectic, man. This is trenches. This is tanks. This is artillery, mortars. It's not like other battles we've seen in the past 20 years, I would say. It's like 1941 is what all the soldiers keep saying. Wow. And, I mean, you've been spending plenty of time with the guys on the front lines staying alive.

With the soldiers in the barracks out in Kharkiv, you published this story for Tablet. I mean, everyone should read all of the stuff you've been doing from out there. But give us an idea of what it's like to follow these guys around. Who are the Ukrainians fighting this war? Because it's not just like a regular army, right?

No, I mean, you have a regular army. You have a lot of guys who joined up in 2014 to fight in the East, and you have a lot of volunteers and guys who were academics or bakers or factory workers or whatever else it is that feel compelled to come and fight against the Russians. And it's kind of like a mishmash. You have some people with no experience, some people with a lot of experience. It's really hard to kind of get a grasp on some things, right? You have some people that are volunteers who

Or some people with experience, I've met that, that have been unhappy. They want to get to the front and they won't be allowed. And then you have others that have been at the front and say they shouldn't have been there in the first place. It's just the organization, I think, started off very hectic. It wasn't properly divided up. Of course, that's what happens when a massive army invades your country. And now I think it's settling in a bit. But you still have...

or not complaints, but frustrations growing among some people in the East who feel like they've been sacrificed a little bit, you know, because the priorities were around Kharkiv, were around Kiev, the bigger cities and things like that. And they are desperate. They need more equipment. They need more supplies. You know, they told me, a lot of people told me manpower is not a problem. We just need the equipment because we're outgunned here.

And I mean, you can kind of I can kind of see frustration growing a little bit more. People are more likely to to vent that they don't feel supported enough by both the West and sometimes by Ukrainian forces slash politicians, though, at the same time, they will say that, like, they're here to fight and they're 100 percent confident in their victory. But it's going to be a slog.

What was the kind of morale like when you were following these guys around? I think like for people who don't do the kind of work that you're doing and I sometimes do as well, like how much of the atmosphere do you soak in of these guys that are fighting for their homeland? How much of the emotional toll of that kind of, yeah, like osmosis into you?

I mean, it's tough, right? Because you don't have a lot of English speakers and I'm communicating through fixers and we're not even using, you know, sometimes we're just on our own with a driver and a friend that speaks Russian because a lot of them speak Russian. So it's not, you know, and it's hard to tell too, are people giving you the truth? Are they protecting what they're saying? Like wrapping your head, my head around it has been challenging because some guys are super laid back and they're chill and their morale is super high. Others in the same area are frustrated. Yeah.

But I do think the morale is, is very high, uh,

In most places. I do think there is a lot of confidence. These are people that are fighting for their hometowns, for their villages, for their people. And they feel a supreme amount of motivation when they look at the Russians and they're like, do they even know what they're fighting for? And again, it's hard to know too, right? Because I don't know what the Russian troops are thinking. We see various reports. Who knows what's propaganda and what's not. But I do think the morale is quite high there.

But, you know, it's really hard fighting in the East and it's been months and months of it and it's only ramping up. So you're going to have people that are that are worried and that are concerned and that are frustrated. They don't feel like they're getting what they need. Yeah, I would say that overall, though, you know, they're holding the ground and they are confident. And and I mean, happy is the wrong word, but I think they're well, you know, they're they're they're.

Yeah, perfect. Exactly. That's, that's how it feels. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, speaking from Berlin as well, where the government's been dragging his feet over delivery of artillery and whatnot, um, it's been pretty shameful to see from here, but, um,

I think I wanted to focus on one of your stories that you did for Vanity Fair. I think as we're recording this like a week and a half ago about Hostomel and a family that was affected by some of the Russian war crimes that are happening in that region. Do you want to just kind of tee up the story and tell us a little bit about that? I put it on the reading list, obviously, so people can read it as well.

Yeah, it's the story of this woman, Elena, who I met through a friend who works at Doctors Without Borders. And essentially she lives in Hostamel, which is this sort of satellite suburb of Kiev, and

People have heard about Irpin and Bucha where there was, you know, these massive war crimes and mass graves and torture and executions, people that were found bound and shot in the head. It's right next to that. And it's the site of the airport that Russia was trying to land a ton of troops in the TKF and fierce fighting and all that. It was occupied for weeks and it was the site of really fierce fighting. So this woman, you

She was living the suburban dream life with her husband, who's a retired police officer. She's a general practitioner, a doctor. The kids are grown. And this fighting just broke out. They started treating people in their home because there were no other doctors there. So she was treating everyone as the entire city just fell into chaos and anarchy and just violence.

And after a couple weeks of this, when, you know, no heat, no power, and this is like the dead of winter too here, it was fairly brutal. And there was just fighting all over, you know, she's taking out shrapnel, bullet wounds, all that. People are dying. She's having to tell people to bury their loved ones in their yard because they don't want to leave the bodies out for fear of sickness.

The Russians came to the home. They accused the husband of calling in artillery positions and whatnot. They shot him. They took her, her adult son, and him to their sort of de facto base. They kind of tortured her for a bit, and then they ended up letting her go after two days so she could go back and treat people, she thinks. They kept the husband and son alive.

you know, kept them sort of imprisoned, took them to Belarus in these filtration camps, eventually separated them, took the husband to a prison in Russia where he was kept for a month. And, you know, they suffered beatings and all sorts of stuff, but he's a, he's a tough guy. He was actually a Soviet paratrooper who fought in Afghanistan in the early eighties, which is kind of ironic when he's not anyway. Yeah. So he, he's a very tough guy. Um,

He ended up surviving. He was let go in a prisoner exchange a month later. They flew him all around. They let him go in exchange for Russian prisoners. I think it was like a 30-30 swap, something along those lines. The son is still missing. So the story was just, you know, it was that story. I sat down with the

the woman and her husband for, for hours and hours and, and got the full story from both of them about what happens. And they're still looking for her son. They have no idea what happened to him. That was going to be my next question. Yeah. So there's no, there's no word about Dima at all then. No, no, no update. Jesus. It's terrifying. And, and how often do you hear when you're on the road covering this war about these kinds of stories, this kind of war crime stories,

people being spirited away to internment camps or worse.

I mean, that's, I think, a little more rare, but everyone has, you know, a story of something or something happening to them or their loved ones that is pretty dire. I mean, even simple stuff, right? Like someone who hasn't seen their family for three months because they're fighting. Or, you know, I was on the overnight train two nights ago talking to a soldier, and he just starts showing me a video of his car and his apartment that was completely blown up. And it turns out I had taken video of the exact same place. This was in Bakhmut.

And, you know, his livelihood now is gone. So it's even like little things like that. And these cities are getting pretty destroyed. You know, this country is going to have to go –

Through a lot of rebuilding, both for, you know, simple things like buildings and whatnot, and psychologically as well. It's going to be a tough, tough process. But, you know, thankfully, I think they've cleared the Russians out of a significant amount of the country that they once held. But, you know, there's still occupied cities in the south and fighting, really tough fighting going on there and in the east. So it's a long road ahead. It's not going to be quick. Yeah, man. It's pretty awful. And you are on your way out.

But what are you, what are you gathering so far? Are you working on anything else at the moment? Yeah, I've got a couple of stories going about what happened, what I saw in the East, the Donbass and what's happening there. You know, just, just some dispatches and then one about the overnight and trying to wrap my head around, around all this stuff. So this should be out soon.

This airs tomorrow. It should be out hopefully in the next couple of days and then another one, maybe a couple of days later, but we'll, uh, we'll see how that goes. I have a lot of travel coming up in the next two days, which is not going to be fun. No, not at all.

Um, okay. So yeah, I think we'll leave that there for now. Uh, we're probably going to come back to a lot of your work in Ukraine at some point, especially on the Patreon for people that have stuck with us. Cause I think, uh, we've got loads and loads of stuff that we need to put there, but yeah, there's a couple of other stories as well. I mean, I've got a story coming out this week about Switzerland's most notorious prisoner. Um, that's more of a human rights story. That's going to be the guardian in a couple of days. Um,

And then we've been working on something together about China and fentanyl. I mean, there's no news there. Fentanyl comes from China. But I think what was really interesting in researching a story is that in 2019, Beijing actually issued a load of really stringent controls on the substances being used to create fentanyl under a lot of pressure from the international community. And since then,

shock horror uh chinese nationals and chinese chemical producers have just been getting a lot craftier about the way that they ship chemicals into mexico which is the main uh place where the stuff is being packaged up and sent north of the border so yeah we have this i think it's going to be out this sunday or next monday that story and it's about how in the last three years um

uh, Chinese nationals and Mexican nationals have been working more closely to capitalize on this hugely profitable, uh, synthetic opioids trade. That's obviously ravaging parts of the country that you've done a lot of reporting in. Um, and a lot of stuff on how Chinese nationals are using the very opaque banking systems in place in China and Hong Kong to wash a load of money that is coming out of Mexico from the fentanyl crisis. Um,

That is something that I've kind of followed on and off for years, really. Stuff with the Nigerian gangs and gangs around the world. I mean, even the Italian mafia, they use Chinese banks to wash money because it's so dense and a bit of a black box for especially U.S. authorities. There's stuff in the casinos, in the Golden Triangle. All of that's going through the Chinese banking system, too. So we've got that in a week. And that touches on a lot of your stuff in Philly and St. Louis, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we should do, I mean, we've talked about it for a while, but there's that great, was it Ben Westhoff's book about fentanyl? Um, yeah, yeah. We spoke to him for the story. Yeah. Westhoff. Yeah. We should, we should, I think his book and then the stuff that you're doing right now, sort of maybe a two episode arc on fentanyl. Cause people always ask us about it and I've done a lot of work. Um, if you guys saw my channel four doc that went up about fentanyl in St. Louis and even in, uh, in, in Philadelphia, how it's contributing in, in, um,

in kensington how gnarly that is but uh yeah unfortunately um curfew here shuts down restaurants at like eight so i gotta run and uh and grab a bite before we head off but uh yeah so look look forward sorry this we're all over the place right now you know things have been a little little messy but i think we've got some some good stuff coming up soon and uh thanks for for bearing with us for sure for our listeners and especially the uh

patreon folks yeah man we'll be uh we'll be back next week with a regular episode and we'll we'll be knocking them out every week thereafter all right until then folks uh take care