This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised.

You see throughout this book just these incredible, anonymous heroes who, when approached by someone who's not the cops, that they will step up and do the right thing at great personal risk.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.

I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world.

On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true crime cases.

This is about what the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories.

A gang in a mountain barrio in Honduras terrorized the people there for years.

The police claimed that their hands were tied because witnesses refused to testify, But then an American sociologist and a Honduran school teacher devised a plan to protect their neighbors by taking matters into their own hands.

Author Ross Halpern tells me the story in his book Bear Witness, The Pursuit of Justice and a Violent Land.

How did you run across the story to begin with?

What puts you on the story?

So I was working for two criminologists back in like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and towards the end of that period we got really interested in the problem of impunity in the United States.

So this might surprise a lot of people, maybe not your listeners because they're on top of the things.

But you know, whereas in other comparable wealthy democracies across the world, maybe upwards of ninety percent of homicides were solved.

Here in the United States, it's way lower than that.

You know, at the time it was probably sixty percent, and it's very skewed.

The solve rate for homicides in Chicago, you know, at the time was probably like twenty five percent.

And you know, we care a lot about homicide, obviously, because that's probably the most grievous crime that we have, But the significant majority of shootings that happened in the United States are non fatal, and the solve rate for those is frankly despicable.

Actually, the Chicago Sun Times just came out with a report showing that of the nineteen thousand non fatal shootings that had happened in that city since twenty eighteen, only six percent had resulted in the rest, so almost complete lawlessness.

We were studying this issue very closely, trying to understand it and think through potential solutions for it.

And the capstone of that project was a summit, kind of a small conference in New York City that one of the criminologists organized.

And at that conference, Kurt Verbeek, who ended up being the subject of my book, made a presentation and you know, it was very, I don't want to say boring, but not so flowery.

It was just a very kind of bare bones power point presentation.

But I was like totally captivated, both because it seemed like this guy and his partner had come up with a solution for impunity and lawlessness and solving more homicides and gun crimes.

Also because I was just fascinated in him, like how he had made the decisions he made, and like why he was the way he was and where he was living and what he had done and the courage and the bravery and the religion.

I was just totally fascinated.

And a month later I was in Honduras for the first time.

I think, what's interesting is, you know when you have people that come up with these solutions.

You know, my father was a law professor, and he talked about how cyclical crime is, and you know, the way it shifts with the economy and everything.

But to think the nitty gritty, how do you really make people feel protected?

How do you change an entire system.

This is kind of the first story where I really felt like you have somebody with those sort of academic chops who actually physically went into an area, put his life at risk to actually in practice figure out what this will realistically work in a very dangerous area of Honduras.

Yeah, and like he didn't start there is the other interesting thing.

So he you know, he's a sociologist.

He grew up in suburban Chicago and right after college him and his wife moved to Honduras.

They're very idealistic, they're very religious, and they want to help the poor, and they really decide at a young age to commit their lives to that.

And like that's not a terribly uncommon thing for young people to do.

But it becomes pretty quickly that they're not like the others.

And the first really radical and unusual thing that they do is they move with their kids at this point to one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in all of Honduras, the type of place where you know, the rest of the gring goes down in Honduras, the missionaries wouldn't even set foot in.

And it's there that Kurt really forges this incredible bond, this best friendship with Carlos Hernandez, who is a school teacher from Merle, Honduras, and who has the same mentality, like just totally devoted to helping the poor.

And the two of them spend the first five or ten years they're there doing all the normal things that humanitarians and missionaries do, so they're you know, they build a school, they have a micro lender, they're working on the water, they're working on the land titling, and it's all very impressive and they're quite successful at it.

But to what you're saying, they reach a point where they say, look, this stuff is only going to have so much impact when there's a gang that is killing people, hurting people, scaring people, extorting businesses.

People can't prosper people can't be educated in an environment like that, and the police and the prosecutors and the criminal justice system we're basically doing nothing.

So they say, we're going to shift gears, and this is really where the book starts, and we are going to do something about crime and violence and impunity.

And what that concretely means in that moment is we're going to take on this gang, which is one of the most notorious gangs in Honduras.

And this is a very daring thing to do.

It's a very dangerous thing to do.

But they come up with an idea, a very clever idea for how to go about it.

And you know what's fascinating about what their mindset was is you have Carlos, who lives there and knows this country.

You've got Kirt that comes in with this experience and also a determination to help people.

So it's almost this sort of perfect storm of people who, you know, two people who have found each other to be able to solve this problem.

Figure out pretty quickly that policies aren't going to work, and more police necessarily won't work.

I mean, the things that have been the checkboxes for politicians all over the world in this moment won't work once they're living with the terror that the people in this area are living with.

That was a really big tease for what I want to talk about.

But before we do that, let's go back and tell me what Honduras is like.

You know, I think it gets clumped in with with other countries, you know, Latin countries, and people don't really understand, you know, the differences, and of course migrants coming from some of these countries make headlines with the current administration.

I think it would be good to know exactly what they're going through in Honduras in this time.

Sure, yeah, I mean we hear so much about the border and deportations, but I think this book is really a chance to go inside the country and really get to see it for what it is and the problems and the villains and the heroes and the everything.

So, you know, I think the first thing to know about it is it's sort of has fallen victim to this perfect storm of criminal forces, and the first one is narco trafficking.

So back in the eighties, this was the original days of cocaine trafficking.

It would typically come from Colombia up through the Caribbean Sea to the United States.

And basically what happened is the United States spent billions of dollars stopping that blockading that route, and it was successful in a certain sense, but it was unsuccessful in the sense that it didn't stop cocaine.

What happened is the narcos shifted their routes westward to a path with much less resistance, and Honduras was a perfect place for that.

So manufactured in Venezuela or Colombia, and then it's on a boat or a little prop plane or even a submarine to Honduras and from there it goes overland to the United States.

And you know, there was a point in the story in the history of this country where I think eighty percent of cocaine that got to the United States was being in Honduras first.

So just think about the value of that criminal activity and how poor and small that country is.

So that's factor one.

Factor two is the Maras.

So a lot of people have heard about the MS thirteen.

They're still in the news today.

What they may not know is that that gang, as well as its chief rival the Barrio eighteen were founded in Los Angeles by Salvadoran refugees in the eighties, and there was a big bipartisan deportation effort in the mid to late nineties where the United States deported a lot of people with criminal records.

So you had thousands of these gang members from Los Angeles being shipped back to Honduras, l Salvador and Guatemala, and in pretty short order those gangs spread and as of the time this book starts, pretty much every poor neighborhood in Honduras, poor urban neighborhood is controlled by one of the two.

Funny enough that the neighborhood Nuevasuyapa that I write about was controlled by a third gang which sort of carved out their own fiefdom at the time.

And then the third is just a criminal justice system which was incapable of administering justice.

And part of the problem was poverty.

You know, you go to police stations down there are prosecutors' offices, and you'll see deaths without computers, printers without ink.

You'll see a homicide department responsible for a million person city which might have three cars and one of them might be broken and one of them might not have any gas, so lack of resources.

And then there's obviously the problem of corruption and criminality in the police force.

This was a police force that was involved with narco trafficking, murder for hire, carjackings, and then there was just the more mundane forms of corruption like letting criminals pay you to let them go or escape at prison and all of that.

So you had narco trafficking, the maras and lawlessness, and that contributed to a situation where you had a very violent country and a lot of impunity.

Tell me about the government.

We've talked about the police and you know, the vast corruption that's there.

The government must have been culpable with the cocaine trafficking.

I can't imagine they wouldn't be.

Or do you have factions of the government that are fighting against each other who truly want Honduras to you know, not be corrupt, to help the poorest people.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely don't want to paint with too broad a brush.

And all of these institutions, ranging from the police to the prosecutor's office to you know, the highest level of politicians.

There are obviously good people trying to do a good job.

But you have to understand.

I mean, if you're someone running to be president of a country like this, you need to raise money to run a campaign.

And in a super poor country where there's not a lot of people with wealth, the people who have money are often people who are involved in narco trafficking in one way or another.

So there's been this infecting of the highest echelons of the government and politics by narco trafficking.

Let's talk today.

The last president of Honduras is currently in an American jail cell and has a life sentence for being a narcotrafficker.

And when the witnesses testified against him, they also made allegations against the prior to presidents.

The current president's brother in law, there was a video of him recently released where he appears to be negotiating a bribe with a narcotrafficker.

So it really did touch a lot of different people.

Some of them have ended up in prison, some of them might end up in prison.

It's just a lot of money for a country that poor and small.

Who can help in this situation?

Before we get down to your specific story, I mean, is there any intervention that can happen outside of a Honduras that can change this.

Yeah, I mean I wish I knew the answer.

And there's a lot of amazing people, including the two guys I write about in my book, who are trying very hard to improve the country, and despite there being a sense in some circles that it's kind of a hopeless situation, I don't think it is one thing that will probably have an impact on presidents presidential candidates taking money from narco's or participating in narco trafficking themselves.

Is extradition, which is a very powerful tool where by the United States takes someone who's has committed a crime in another country and brings them here and puts them in a jail cell here in an American court where justice actually can be done.

So I think that's a powerful tool.

And then look, I mean, USAID was supporting a lot of efforts in Honduras and other countries like it.

Some of them are pretty small sounding, like helping people get through droughts and different programs to help teenagers avoid the pull of gang life.

But I do think a lot of that stuff was helping and doing good.

Some of it, I'm sure was nonsensical and kind of bs, but I think there was a lot of really great stuff going on and churches, charities, missionary there are people doing good stuff down there that I'm inspired by.

So Kurt and Joanne, did you tell me they had kids?

I'm sorry, I couldn't remember.

They didn't when they first moved there, but by the time they moved to Nuevasuyappa, which was the super dangerous neighborhood, they had two.

What year do Kurt and Joanne move to Nuevasuyapa?

Tell me kind of about their family situation, and also, gosh, you would just think self preservation would kick in and say this is not a good idea to move to this incredibly dangerous area, but some people can ascend that.

I guess.

Yeah.

So they moved there in nineteen ninety eight, and I think there's a few impulses behind that.

So the first thing to know is Kurt and Joanne are very religious.

They're members of the Christian Reformed Church, which is a Calvinist tradition, and he and Carlos as well, in a different way, have these contrarian but very strong ideas about Christian theology.

And one of Kurt's big things is, you know, Christians see Jesus today, he says, and they see this almost delicate, little adorable guy floating up in the clouds.

But the real Jesus was this wildly brave, audacious guy in the desert who was willing to put his life on the line for what he believed in.

And the same goes for the people who were his earliest accolytes and were a part of this religion which was illegal for three hundred years, and were getting killed in the most barbaric ways for proselytizing it.

And he says, those guys were wildly brave, and I want to resuscitate that.

I want to bring that back into modern Christianity, that sense of courage and just because something might get you hurt or even your kids hurt, that isn't necessarily a reason not to do it.

And the second is, you know, he's a teacher, he's a sociologist.

He earns a living by teaching study abroad students, and he tells the students that if you want to help the poor, like there's all these missionaries and people coming down to Honduras for two weeks, three weeks to build a sc school or build a home, but we don't believe in that.

We don't think they really understand the problems, and if you want to help the poor, you should live alongside them.

And they eventually say, you know, we're kind of we did that a little bit when they first got to Hunduras, but at that time they were living in a middle class neighborhood and they kind of felt like hypocrites.

So they said, if we really want to do this, we have to live like the poor alongside them.

And those are the two things that really contribute to that decision, which is criticized there by their friends and family.

Well, start from when they moved to this area and describe, you know, we talk about the most dangerous and poverty stricken area.

Kind of describe what that means, just for anybody to be able to understand.

Does that mean people barely eat or what are their living situations like?

Yeah, So this community came to be in nineteen like seventy four.

There was a big hurricane and the river inundated a lot of shanty towns and at the time this location was the municipal garbage but it was the only place people could go, so they populated it.

It's on a mountain side above the city, and by the time Kurt got there, it wasn't in that state where it was, you know, the garbage flies and sort of disgusting in that way, but it was very impoverished.

So as an example, by then there were water pipes installed, but they only run to each household about one day per month.

So when that one day comes, you spend however many hours it runs, filling up as many tubs and barrels and tanks as you possibly can.

And the rest of the time that's how much water you have for everything, you know, dirt roads, ramshackle houses made of everything.

There's some that are nicer, concrete blocks you know, have finishing on them.

But you'll see houses made of you know, pieces of wood, of signage.

And the roads some are you know, like kind of a fire road, some are like little paths.

It's it's a very poor place.

And in this sort of period before them got to Honduras, there was a different type of crime.

It was a lot of fevery low level fevery stealing, burglarizing, pickpockets.

I mean, at the beginning of the story, Carlos gets robbed at knife point.

But as things progress and the sort of gang methodology of Los Angeles spreads across Honduras.

Things become much more dangerous, and neighbors start getting killed, friends start getting hurt, girls stop going to school because they're scared.

Church services at night get canceled.

It becomes a somewhat scary place, but I don't want to overstate that.

Like both Curt and Carlos have a bit of trepidation when they first move there, but they end up loving it because it's a very communal place.

It's a place where there's just a lot of life, people out and about, neighbors helping neighbors.

There's trees, there's a great top down view of the city.

So there's a lot of good things about it too.

How are Kurt and Joanne as a white American couple, how are they received in Honduras and in this little town by gangs and by just their kind neighbors?

You know, I think to some extent they're like an objective fascination.

You know, when they walk to church twice a day on Sundays, there are these guys outside the canteena who will heckle them with like these fake English words.

And I haven't experienced that myself when I was spending some time in the community.

But pretty quickly they really integrate themselves.

And I mean the kids are going to school across the street at Genesis, which is Carlos's school, with local kids.

Kurt and Joanne are very much part of the fabric of their church community and helping people in every way possible with housing problems and work problems and personal problems.

But you know, there is a stands out.

I mean, for example, he rides his bike to work every morning, so he'll go down the hill with his bike and his helmet and paddle across the city to his classroom.

And there are these things like that which would definitely make him stand out.

And you know, he's tall, he's white, he's got blue eyes, so it's noticeable.

But you know, pretty quickly they really feel at home there.

They feel like this is our home, this is where we want to live for the rest of our life.

And this is where Kurt meets Carlos, right, who will be his partner in this crime fighting enterprise.

Yeah, so they had actually met before then, but they were kind of more like acquaintances.

I would say they had worked in the same offices maybe a decade before.

But yeah, they very quickly forged this truly unusual best friendship.

I mean they're living directly next door to each other, and pretty much every night when Carlos comes home from work, he'll knock on Kurt's window and they have a little chat just about their days, and very often Kurt will invite him in.

He'll sit down at the table and it's one of these dynamics where you just have two people who are so in tune, share the same values, have this amazing conversation chemistry.

You know, they're friends, there's a real friendship there, but they're united by this mission, this sense that we want to improve this place.

We want to come up with creative ideas to improve this place, and we're willing to do whatever it takes to improve this place.

And you know, it starts off as a friendship, but it really morphs into a work partnership.

And you know, we're getting a little bit of a head of ourselves here.

But that's a very hard and unusual thing to do to have a friend become a work partner and then have that work for you know, they're almost on thirty years now of doing that.

Now, tell me about the characteristics of Carlos that make him a good partner.

You're talking about, you know, a sociologist who comes from the United States, I'm presuming has had a normal middle class life in the United States, and then you're talking about someone who is Carlos, I'm assuming has lived in Honduras' entire life.

Yeah, Carlos grew up in rurala Honduras.

His parents were separated at pretty young age age, and in order to be schooled, he basically had a hopscotch from different relatives house to different relatives' house to always be within walking distance of a school that educated kids his age.

So we sort of had this nomadic childhood around this rural area in Honduras.

And you know, he, like Kurt, is at animated by this sort of contrarian religious vision.

And he's an Evangelical Christian, but he can't stand how his church and the Evangelical church in general in Honduras is very kind of head in the clouds.

So we are focused on prayer and scripture and converting others so they will be able to go to Heaven someday as opposed to Hell.

And he says, look, I believe in that I want to do that too, But what about in the here and now, what about the kids who aren't getting educated and the sick people who have tuberculosis?

Like I want to focus on that as a Christian.

And you know, he moves to Tagusigalpa by himself, with no connections, no money, and spends the first few years working for evangelical charities, you know, integrating himself to a church there.

But he reaches a point where he says, like, I don't like what the other charities are doing.

I don't like what the church is doing.

I'm going my own route.

And this place called New Evaso Yappa is clearly the worst off barrio in the city.

I'm going to go there and try to help.

And in terms of the characteristics, I mean, Carlos is really much more of a dreamer.

Kurt is a very orderly thinker.

He organizes his speech, his thinking, his presentations.

Carlos is an idea guy.

He's a people person.

He very quickly.

I mean, he builds a school there, which is this amazing thing to do, very hard to build there, you know, educating kids.

There's a doctor, there's a pharmacist, there's an orthodontist, there's a micro lending organization.

He's just energy ideas, new creation.

And you know he's not a task master's He almost becomes like the mayor of Nuevasu Yappa.

So people come to him for problems, He'll go and deliver construction materials to their house.

Very energetic, very active, playing with kids, sitting down for coffee with women who borrowed from his microlender.

That that type of guy.

Tell me about the churches before we move on to their story and the church's relationship in Honduras with these gangs.

Are they generally left alone or are they the subject of extortion and intimidation just like you know somebody who owns a corner store would be.

Yeah, No, the churches aren't extorted by the gangs.

And I mean, the the VMO I think even to this day, is that the only way to leave the MS thirteen or the Baru eighteen is if you become a true believing Christian and part of the evangelical church.

So, I mean, I've never heard of them explicitly being targeted, But now that I'm actually thinking about it, there's a point in my story where the gang the Puco's raids Kurt's pastor's house and pins him to the ground as they basically ransack all of his belongings.

So, and there's another instance I'm thinking about after I've said that, where the gang robs all the kids from the church after they sold a bunch of T shirts at a concert.

Maybe the bigger gangs have that line, But the gang that Kurt and Carlos take on, which is just brutal and sort of almost nihilistic seeming, I can think of a few instances where they cross that line.

Well, let's talk about when things start to get bad.

So I've heard the good things, you know, we've heard about the poverty, but we've also heard the good things about the beauty of the place and how everybody is friendly, and how well they've been ingratiated themselves to this Mario.

When do they first start encountering the things that Kurt has been looking for, this violence, and when his wheels and Carlos's wheels together start turning about how to solve this.

Where does it begin.

It starts with a failure, so they kind of have this in the back of their heads.

And then one day a woman who's the mother of two of Carlos's students comes to him, Well, her husband was killed.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that he was shot on the street, like a normal guy doing work leaves one morning and was shot and robbed on the street.

And a couple weeks later, his widow goes to Carlos and says, hey, I need your help.

I want to get these guys arrested.

And like you know, to your ear, to my ear, that might not sound terribly unusual, but in a place like Honduras and Nuevasuyapa in particular, where maybe ten percent of serious crimes across the entire country were even investigated, let alone solved, she was doing something a bit unusual.

And what she said was, hey, I know who did it, and I have spoke to witnesses who saw it.

She had done a little mini investigation herself.

But then she said that wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was the next part, which is she went to the police and said, hey, go arrest the guys who killed my husband, and they said, no, we can't do that unless the witnesses come give formal statements directly to us.

And that's where you see the logjam, because the witnesses when she went back to them, refused to do that.

They did not trust the police for all sorts of reasons you can imagine, and weren't willing to take that risk because they were obviously scared.

And ultimately she asked Curtain Carlos to help, and they said they would, but they did nothing, and they kind of call some friends for advice, and they do nothing because they're scared, and the alleged killers ended up getting killed themselves, and Curtain Carlos reflect on that experience and they say, the next time this happens, we're actually going to do something.

But but from that you can see what the key insight is.

It's really the reason there's a lack of justice is because the witnesses are unwilling to testify in a formal criminal proceeding, and that is how you know a homicide case is typically solved.

So the idea that they developed is really focused on bridging that gap between witnesses and law enforcement.

So how, I'm just curious, how did this woman's husband's killers get killed themselves by another gang?

No?

So the police, you know, the police MO at this point and for a few years thereafter, is like they do very little policing, and then they'll do a huge raid with a lot of cars and cops and helicopter support.

And in this case, that group of guys allegedly killed the cop a few months later, and that was what sparked the response.

So at that point they swept in there and did a very aggressive operation.

Yeah.

I had wondered when you said that ten percent were seriously investigated.

I had wondered if the ten percent probably were from the or echelons who had been murdered or robbed or whatever, and that was what it would take to get an investigation.

Yeah, in a place like nuevasu Yapa, the numbers were probably way lower than the average, because you know, it's just on the one hand, the cops were probably scared themselves to go there for good reason.

I mean, I just told you about a cop who was killed there when he was I think he was on his like first week on the job in Nuevasuyapa.

And then the cops also probably noticed some extent like they're not going to get help from the witnesses there, so maybe they focused their resources elsewhere.

I don't know if you've seen this on Netflix, there's a really good series out of India about the small village that was terrorized by a gang, just terrorized by one particular gang leader who had sexually assaulted women in the village and it was just awful.

And they eventually got together and all these women at the same time while he was in court and open court, and they stabbed him to death, all of them, and the police couldn't prove who had done the fatal blow.

I'm sure there were many fatal blows and so none of them.

I think there were some that were arrested, but that was in it.

I'm not sure if it cleared out the gang problem, but they basically cut the head off the snake.

He was the one controlling all of these other people.

So you know, that was the only way this really, really impoverished village was able to take back some control.

Was they had to do it because nobody else was helping.

And so that's where I was wondering, if this is where this is going to go, how do you empower people who probably don't even have enough personal belongings for gangs to extort from them, let alone have police protection.

Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is when you see it a lot of crime and violence and impunity in your community, and you want to take it bettern matters into your own hands.

The natural impulse is violent vigilanteism, kind of what you just described, and there's a lot of that in Unduras.

There's a lot of that in my book.

People whether they're members of the community or members of the police force, who just say, screw it, I'm done with these guys.

I'm going to go kill them.

And there's lots of problems with them, you know, Curtain Carlos say, we don't like that.

We think that is evil and problematic as well, so we're going to come up with a different solution.

And what they do is say we're going to solve homicides and gang crimes, and like, you know, that doesn't sound like something private citizens could do.

When we think about solving murders, we think of that being something that the government should do, and probably only the government should do.

But if you actually look at the mechanics of how that happens step by step, you realize that private citizens can do a lot of it.

And it's actually probably interesting within the context of the true crime community because we've seen that with these very salacious serial killer cases a podcast or starts investigating, finds evidence, finds witnesses, and helps solve the case.

But what Curtain Carlos were doing was basically applying a little bit of that concept to ordinary street crime.

You know, a popular culture, we're used to seeing the murder being solved by the genius detective or the CSI tech finding the clue.

But in reality, like most cases are closed because of witnesses, someone knows what happened and is either willing to testify about it in court under oath or isn't.

And you don't need a badge to figure out who the witness is to convince her to testify and to keep her alive.

And then you know, a private citizen obviously can't make an arrest, But the clicking on of handcuffs isn't really what was inhibiting apprehensions.

In new episode Yappa, the bigger issue was that the cops didn't know who the culprits were, what they looked like, what their real names were, where they were going to be at Thursday at five pm, and they often didn't have a vehicle to transport themselves to that location.

So a private citizen could do all of that.

So what Curting Carlos did was they hired a private eye and a lawyer and a psychologist who in secret started doing all the things I just described.

So on the one hand, it was witness cultivation, and on the other it was gathering intelligence about the gangs and delivering that to the authorities.

The third piece, once arrests were made and they were finally was putting a ton of pressure on prosecutors and judges to actually lay down the law.

So I mean that just seems like an enterprise in itself.

Where is the money coming from to pay these people?

Is I know that Kurt was connected to an NGO, I didn't know if that was an NGO that he had set up in Honduras.

Yeah, So Kurt and Carlos around a charity called the Association for a More Just Society.

So this was all done within that organization.

As I said, it was kind of a clandestine division of it.

But it was a small time.

You know that most of their funding at this point came from you know, Kurtwood tour churches around the Midwest and you know, for a month a year and raise fund from friends and family and other members of sort of the Dutch Midwest culture, but it was a real shoe string budget in the early days.

Things changed over time, but at the beginning they did this for, you know, without much money.

So did you say, is it the attorney who is kind of in charge of going to Ross and say, you know you'll be safe, but we need a statement from you.

The only thing that's going to change is people like you standing up.

Is that the person who has to it's like an impossible task.

It really does seem like an impossible task.

Like if you were to ask people before they started, could you pull this off?

I think they would say no, it's impossible.

Like A, you yourselves are going to get killed for poking around and asking questions about this gang, and B nobody's going to do this.

Why the hell would they.

They're just going to get themselves hurt.

So the people who are actually doing that work initially it's the lawyer and the private eye, and you know, they have different personalities and I think they, depending on the person, decide who's the better one to go speak.

Kurting Carlos themselves sometimes get involved in certain of those conversations, but it's really the lawyer in the private eye.

And I think the incredible thing, and this is like a testament to the human spirit, is like over and over again, just when you think you've seen the most intimidating, violent, terrifying gang member and that no one in their right mind would ever testify against them, you see throughout this book just these incredible, anonymous heroes who when approached by someone who's not the cops, someone who kind of has a religious sheen to them, that they will step up and do the right thing at great personal risk.

And I think in many ways this book is like an homage to witnesses.

And I was just so impressed and amazed by these people who did step up and did go to court and testify, because without that, you're never going to have justice, and without justice, you're never going to have prosperity.

I mean, because I have to think, Okay, what are the other tools that you would use to successfully prosecute a gang member who's accused of murder.

Let's say CCTV, no CCTV, and then you know somehow tracing cell phones, you know everything that every technology that we would use, I'm assuming is not useful.

You know.

In this Mario in particular.

Yeah, we're talking about two thousand and five and a really poor part of hondurass so a lot of those things, you know, even to the extent there were cell phones, Like did the police force really have the resources to do those types of investigations and get that information?

But I think even in the United States people would be surprised at the extent to which, you know, like back when we were doing our research into all of this and talking to cops and like reading all the investigations and research that have been done into it, Like, I think it really is true that that in the vast majority of cases, it's like this testimony is the thing that it all hinges on.

And I think it's interesting because like in you know, once again in popular culture, it's usually the detective or the prosecutor who like is the hero in the situation.

But I almost would like recommend shifting the locus of that a little bit to these to these witnesses who are often unheralded and in the case of Honduras, actually anonymous because they were allowed to testify under the cloak of anonymity.

And one of the really brilliant things that Curt and Carlos and their staff did was take advantage of that because the police and prosecutors weren't so like, one very simple thing they did was sewed together these robes which looked exactly like Burka's, and they would dress their witnesses in them when they went to court.

And you know, if it was a person with a distinct body shape, they might add pillows, it was a person who had a distinctive height, they might put them in a wheelchair.

So lots of creative ingenuity to disguise the people.

They eventually were voice disorders into it as well.

So wow, well I want a good example from you.

You said that they weren't able to help the widow and she ended up getting some mondmum justice later on.

But what was the next incident?

They said, the next time, we're going to do something about it.

So what was that next time for them?

Yeah, the next time was the rise of this gang, the Buccos, So they kind of were kids at that point, but then they essentially commandeer this barrio and they are smart, so they systematically confiscate firearms from residents from security guards.

They are brutal.

Their's instance where they kidnap these two sisters who pedal candy on the street and gang rape them down by a brook And it's just terrible.

And not only do they do they do that, but they go to them after and say, don't you dare tell anyone about this.

They're committing all sorts of crimes, extortion, theft, murder, and they're intimidating witnesses.

And the other really infuriating thing about the situation is despite the blatantness of the crime, they're getting away with it.

So one thing I should explain is the leader, who's this guy Chalito, and a lot of his people.

They actually get arrested quite often, so the cops will take the step of going in and arresting them, but they often stay in jail for a very short period of time, a matter of days, weeks, or months.

And sometimes it's just because the cops have no evidence, so the judge says, well, you haven't proven anything, so we have to let these guys go.

Sometimes it's that they escape from the juvenile prison, which is extremely porous.

And it's just such an infuriating situation for the community to see this crime and to see this sort of yo yoing from police custody back to the barrio and people are fed up.

And at this point, Gourdon Carlos say we're going to start this project, and the spark is an arrest.

Chalito and three other guys get picked up by the police, and Kurt and Carlos say, this time, we're going to try to make sure they stay there.

So they hire a lawyer and start recruiting witnesses and that's how this all begins, and you know, they end up having a lot of success, but it's a very difficult road there, with a lot of twists and turns, a lot of collateral damage, a lot of moral quandaries they find themselves in.

But that that's the starting point.

How do you find an attorney that's going to be brave enough to actually go out there and be seen talking to people?

Where did this person come from?

So this is I think one of the most interesting parts of the story is they say we want to hire a lawyer and a private eye.

And you know, they and their organization are very religious, very focused and dedicated to human rights, but the type of people who will do the work that they want done are not choir boys.

And the first batch of people they approach, say are you kidding me?

Like, no freaking way will I do that?

And then the people that they do finally find who are willing to do this are people with very different values, you know.

So the lawyer is an atheist, he's got a ponytail, he likes heavy metal music, he's brash, he's arrogant, he's disrespectful in the office.

The private eye is a former soldier who's a very tough, militant guy who kind of placed by his own rules and does operations with the cops, and you don't really know what he's doing in the obscurity of that, and it raises a lot of questions and ethical questions as well.

But they're very effective.

So that puts curtain Carlos in this dilemma where they're getting witnesses, they're eventually getting arrests, are doing things that they don't approve of.

So it's a challenge to grapple with that.

What are they doing?

You know?

I think one of the big issues from the beginning is police violence.

So the first big raid that the charity successfully organizes, there's about ten of the gang members who get captured, but the lawyer who's the one there at the time is aghast because once the suspects are already handcuffed, he sees the police beat the crap out of them like one kids so bad that his mandible, his jaw is broken, he can't eat solid food for a month.

He sees the cops threatened to cripple a detainee with aluminum baseball bat.

He sees cops enter homes without warrants, And this is just how the hunter and police did things at the time.

And you know, he's very disapproving of that curtain.

Carlos are very disapproving of that.

But as I said before, or it worked, they got these guys arrested.

So right there, you're confronted with this dilemma.

Do we stop, do we file the complaint with internal affairs?

Do we expose this to the press, and they don't know what to do?

And where I'm getting with this is the private eye who comes in a little bit later.

He's way more permissive of this type of stuff, and he eventually becomes the one who's out in the police with operations on operations.

And you know, when it was a lawyer, you had some degree of transparency and just you know, just like negative reaction to it, but with the operative and I don't really have evidence that he himself did anything, but there's definitely questions that he was getting very actively involved in arrests and the operations, and at the very least was sort of turning a blind eye to it.

And that raised a lot of alarm bells in the charity and it made this a difficult thing to just decide what to do.

Okay, so they had to I think you're saying the book they kind of from idealistic to pragmatic because now they're in an area where they can't really create rules.

They have to play within the rules that they're given to be able to get an optimal result.

So you know, kind of giving me that example where they're holding their noses at both of these guys.

Where does the psychologist come in?

Is that later too?

Yeah?

So the program really starts off with the private eye and the lawyer, and things are going well.

They're building this network of informants, they're recruiting witnesses, they're getting arrests, they're building relationships with the police and the prosecutors.

But then one of the program's closest informants, who's someone who's provided a lot of information and help them out a lot, does something that is very out of character and puts himself in a great deal of danger and is killed.

And it's a real horrible tragedy.

And I think at that point it becomes clear to Kurt In Carlows that solving murders isn't just an investigative and legal challenge.

It's also an emotional and psychological one because it all hinges on witnesses who are human beings, and these are people who have some piece of information in their head.

It might pertain to the loss of someone they loved, it might pertain to the most horrible thing that they have ever seen, and it's all on them, and they're participating in this legal process which might drag on for months or years, and having to talk about this over and over again, and throughout this entire period of time, they have to live in fear that they're going to be retaliated against.

So it's a very emotionally difficult thing to deal with.

So they decided to bring a psychologist on and like the psychologists would provide formal therapy to witnesses and informants, but also just be kind of like a friend and an ear and a person who could talk without legal ees and was just a little bit softer than the private eye and the lawyer.

And I think the trio, the three of them, is what made the program work.

It's all about focusing on what are witness's needs and how do we make them comfortable testifying?

What was a psychologist like?

Was this somebody who was also sort of a sketchy person or is this the angel a lot of the three of them.

That's a great question, you know.

I think the first person who they brought in to do it was an American social worker who was already working in a different part of the charity.

And no, I mean she was not like that, but she couldn't.

It didn't work because she clashed so much with a private eye and the lawyer.

And you know, there were all these really difficult situations that arose when you started bringing those different types of people under the same roof.

Just the personalities didn't fit.

But then they brought another person in and for whatever reason, it worked and she was great and they were able to work cohesively and get these cases closed.

When we last heard about Schalito and his gang, you said he and another one had been arrested, and Kurt and Carlos said, we've got to figure out how to keep them in.

Did they find witnesses who were willing to testify?

Was this sort of the first instance of their plan kicking in.

Yeah, So, as I said, like, they say, we're going to do this, We're going to find witnesses, they get the lawyer hired, and like remarkably, in very short order, they find a handful of witnesses who are like, yes, we will testify against these guys.

And it's like incredible, you wouldn't think that would be possible, but but they do.

And then they go to the juvenile court and testify, and the kids end up the judge ends up ruling that they're going to stay in prison until their trial in however many months, And that's like a huge win because that wasn't happening before.

Usually at that stage, the judge you would have to let them go because no witnesses would show up, there was no evidence, so the case couldn't proceed.

But you know, once that happens, you see the problem with this.

So in a matter of weeks, Chalito and a number of other Pucos escape the juvenile prison, and they immediately take revenge on the people who they think are the witnesses.

So a woman gets killed and someone else gets stabbed, and they actually are not the witnesses.

The witnesses testified anonymously.

But right there, Curtain Carlos are once again forced to grapple with the situation.

So this has to happen.

There has to be justice, We have to lay down the law.

But doing so is going to get people hurt.

There's going to be collateral damage.

Should we keep going or are we in over our heads here?

So what's the next step?

I'm assuming there's another incident coming up pretty quickly.

Yeah, I mentioned the other informant who was killed.

But alongside all of this is progress, and it's really important to remember how enraged and fed up people were with this gang.

And then the other thing I should mention is we talked about this a little bit before, but violent vigilantism was the alternative response and that was happening too, and Curtin Carlos felt this enormous sense of time pressure to prove that their program could work, could get these people arrested, because they didn't want the vigilante response to rise up strongly and for there to be like an explosion of mono amano violence because they had seen that happen before and knew how damaging that was.

Well, how do you promise witnesses?

Well, I don't know if they were able to make any kind of a promise.

What would the lawyer say?

If there is a teenage girl who's witnessed the murder of her parents, she's the only witness, how can you I mean, it's obvious the person who's going to testify is going to be her.

If anybody's going to testify, how can you promise somebody like that protection from a gang who's clearly going to know who she is.

Yeah, it's a great point because, like even I could think of some cases where like there was anonymity in the witnessing.

She was wearing the robe, she was in a wooden box, but you could tell who it was because she was the only one who would have known about the crime.

So I think you probably can't really promise that they'll be totally safe.

But you know, in that situation you're describing, the person probably does feel some like civic duty to help take down the gang.

But there's also something personal there, and people feel in need, I think, to at some level avenge their relatives and stuff.

And I wish I could have been there for some of those conversations and how they convince them, but I think it was probably less convincing and more facilitating a desire that was already there and just creating the conditions whereby people could fight for justice.

When does it become clear that this is working?

Does it take months or years?

And tell me how many people are in this area?

I should have asked you this sooneror how is this Mario exactly?

Population estimate it's a little shaky, but I think it's like twenty five or thirty thousand, So it's a decent population, and you know, just like the results, I mean over the span of like three years.

Well, and I should say, there's first the Puco's gang, which we've talked about, but I'm sort of giving away a little surprise here in the book.

But there's a second gang, which is a vigilante gang which sort of rose up to fight the Puchos but ended up being even more cruel and problematic and scary.

And so that's the second group that this charity has to deal with and sort of taking on those two gangs and really taking them down.

Happens over the course of about three or four years, and during that time, the charity helps get one hundred people arrested, helps win seventy convictions, and the crime rate declined substantially.

You know, nuevasu Yappa was and never has been a safe place, but it never has been as bad as it was then.

Okay, so they're seeing a crime rate drop, I mean, is there a percentage?

What's the estimate?

By fifty percent?

I'm just being a little careful because the data that they cite is like shows an eighty percent decline in homicides over that period.

The statistics were a little shaky back then.

But but the good news is after they did the program in new episode Yappa, they expanded it to like five or six other neighborhoods into Gusagalpa and San Pedro Sula, which is the other major city in Honduras.

And that time there was a team of researchers who formally evaluated it, and those results are like really solid, and they showed declines in the monthly average number of homicides per month of like fifty percent sixty seven percent, like huge, huge declines.

So the program has proven to be quite effective.

And this is fully supported at the time or even now by the federal government, by Honduras as president.

No, I mean certainly not the president.

This was all being done very quietly, very secretly.

But but you're actually getting at something really important here, which is the magic of this trio of private eye, lawyer and psychologists.

Wasn't just that they were good with witnesses.

It's also that they were good with cops and prosecutors, because you know, you could imagine a situation where like those people would have felt like these people were encroaching on their turf.

But the private eye, especially who is sort of a cop personality, was very good at bringing the cops onto his side.

And he would do that just by hanging out with them, but also by like giving them funding.

I mean there were police units which had no chairs in their office, so he would buy them chairs.

As I said, gas money was a huge issue.

He would say, look, I'll pay for your gas money if you come to Neufasuyapa and arrest this guy.

Then the prosecutors were obviously very important too, and they let the charity be very involved in developing and you know, obviously not arguing in court the cases, but but in marshaling the witnesses through the many, many months that these trials would would last.

Now, you know, so maybe this is too much of a pie in the sky question, but I'm sure so much of the gang activity as a result of how they grew up in poverty and feeling like there was no other option, you know, the cyclical part of corruption, and how are you going to work within the system when the system's not working and you need to work out of the system.

Was there a way to then be able to turn the tide and say, now that we're trying to reduce crime, maybe we can help with the economy or education or any of the big, big picture issues that we know leads to crime.

You know, there's a point in the book where they've done this program, they've had a lot of success with it, and Curt and Carlos say, look, we can keep expanding this, but it's kind of a micro scale thing.

We can only do it neighborhood by neighborhood, and we want to affect Honduras at a national scale.

And this happens around twenty eleven, when the country is the you know, has the highest homicide rate in the world.

There's just been a coup.

It's a very chaotic and bad situation for the country.

And they really transform their charity from this kind of under the radar, grassroots thing to a very public, very formalized institution which is trying to change Honduras at a national scale.

And you know, one of the things they work on is education.

And at the time, the average student was only getting substantially less than they were supposed to, one hundred days less, and they work on that and it turns out that twenty five percent of the teachers on the payroll nationally weren't even real teachers.

They were just sort of political operatives collecting a paycheck.

And they did this series of expos's about the national education system, and that got all the ghost teachers purged, It got the education minister fired, and then they deputized this almost nationwide army of mothers to go to all schools with a clipboard and keep track of how many days per year the pupils were there in getting classes, and in very short order it got to where it was supposed to be.

Now, where will this work around the world doesn't need to be impoverished countries I'm assuming.

I mean, where does Kurt and Carlos and vision that's going everywhere?

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean they're focused on Honduras.

I mean, there's a lifetime's worth of work to do there.

But I mean definitely, Like in regards to the criminal justice program we've been talking about, I think they see that as transportable, and you know, the issues of crime and impunity and not trusting the police and witnesses being scared to testify is a problem in Chicago as well, and I think they would argue that this model might work there.

And you know, I'm sure there's places in Brazil and Mexico and El Salvador and other countries as well where where that model could be transported, especially now that there's an evidence base to show it works.

And I think that would be a good idea to try that.

So where are these two guys now and their families?

Are they still in the same barrio they moved around?

Yeah, so we've only talked a little bit about the like political efforts that they've done, but that's as dangerous as the gang efforts and Carlos becomes a public figure who's regularly in the news, who's meeting with ambassadors and presidents and ministers, and during that process, his life is threatened.

You know.

The big thing that they work on is purging the police force.

So that's something that people have been wanting to do in Honduras for a very long time.

And Kurt and Carlos gained this amazing, shocking level of political power and are more or less given the keys to purge the police force.

And that's extremely dangerous, and you know, through that process, Carlos life is threatened, and though he really really doesn't want to, he has to leave nuevasu Yapa, which is a very tragic and sad thing for him and his family.

So he no longer lives in the neighborhood Kurt does, but they're they're still down there doing the same.

Stuff, amazing, and Kurt has to have been threatened.

I'm assuming through all of these years, you know.

Kurt has always been more behind the scenes.

There's been a few little, tiny, random one off incidents here and there, but he really hasn't.

It's actually been others who've borne the brunt of it.

And I think part of that.

I don't think that's necessarily him like cowering from it.

I think he has this sense that as a gringo, it's not really appropriate for him to be the outward facing part of the organization.

So you know, in the New vs.

Yapa days, it was the lawyer and the private eye who were really most putting their lives on the line.

And then you know, there's a in the second part of the book, which we haven't a chance to talk about, one of their employees is assassinated, and that's a different type of work but also very very, very dangerous.

And then in the political side, you know, once again Kurt doesn't want to be the one in the news, so it's really Carlos who becomes the face of the organization.

I had also wondered if there was a certain amount of fear of murdering an American citizen in Honduras and what kind of firestorm that could cause.

It's funny you should say that, because there's this sense in Honduras that the gangs like don't touch gringos because if they do that, they'll be hell to pay.

And some of your listeners might be familiar with the Kiki Camarina story.

He was a Dea agent in Mexico who was tortured and killed in a terrible way in the eighties, and one of the people who was accused of orchestrating that was a Honduran narco trafficker, and the Feds basically went to Honduras, got him and put him in a federal prison in Colorado, where he spent his life, and that has imbued in hunder and criminals, the sense that you're not supposed to really touch gringos.

However, one of the reasons Calito has become such a famous and notorious figure in Honduras is because he himself took part in the noontime killing of a Dea agent in Honduras.

And that really is when his days are numbered.

He was there an accessory to the killing.

I don't think they did it because he was a Dea agent.

It actually looks like it was an accident, kind of a botch robbery.

But that's when he becomes this very famous figure in Honduras.

And Lo and behold, the cops know nothing about him, know nothing about the Pucos, but the private eye working for Curtin Carlos approaches them the next day and says, look, I've got all this information.

You think his real name is this?

No, it's actually this.

I've mapped out their whole neighborhood.

This is where he lives.

He will be there tomorrow.

This is how you can go in and sort of corner him.

And at that point Chilito is arrested, and in part because of the charity, the case against him is successful and he's put into this special sell there's like a tower over it.

They compare it almost to like a Hannibal Lecter type situation because he's monitored twenty four to seven by this person watching him from above through a cage, and he ends up spending the rest of his life in prison.

Is he still alive.

Well.

Part of his legend is in twenty twelve he was in a prison he had been moved to kind of a medium security prison called Koma Yagua.

It was a prison with a capacity for three hundred and fifty people, but there was nine hundred there.

Back to the gills, there were no fire extinguishers, smoke detectors or anything like that in the building.

The guards were outside the gates and a fire sparked and it was the most horrible tragedy.

Three hundred and fifty six people were incinerated.

There's a question was he one of those sort of cremated bodies there or is he one of the people who got away.

Officially he's dead, but the legend of him continues and still to this day, people in Neuvcu Yapa will say, no, he's alive, and he's the one who started that fire.

There's a little l Chapo about him, is what it sounds like.

No, his escape artistry is very much part of his legend.

Well, even before that, as I said, people in knevs Yappa, you'd see him get arrested and then he'd be back.

I mean, he probably escaped from the juvenile prison.

I would guess like four or five times.

You know, I'm one of the things that I want to end on.

You talk about this book, you talk about Kurt and his outreach and wanting to help kids in this barrio, and then he must have just seen over the years that evolved into you know, gangs, and I had wondered if there were there was a point where he was seeing these kids that he knew turning into predators.

Was that the case?

Yeah, I mean both him and Carlos.

I mean, Carlos is running a school, and so they were very intimately connected to all of these kids.

Even Chilito.

Chialito wasn't a student at Carlos's school because there were only so many spots, but his mother was a borrowed money from the micro lene under genesis.

The school ran camps in the summer.

Chialito sometimes went to those, So not just Chilito, but a bunch of these kids.

Kurt and Carlos knew them, knew their families, knew their siblings.

It was all very intimate.

And even I mentioned that gang member who was arrested and they beat him up so bad that they broke his mandible.

I mean, first of all, he wasn't really one of the violent gang members.

It seems like it seems like he was more tangential.

But he was very much part of Kurt's church community.

He was a student at Carlos's school, so that they knew him, and even once he was in prison, I mean, they would visit him and it was all interconnected.

Gosh, to see an area of transition like that and then to try to to be a hand in improving it.

What an incredible story.

What are you hoping people learn from this book?

Yeah, I think part of it is just like this lens into a world which we only hear about in the back end through the deportations in the border.

I think it's so fully a valuable thing for people to really get to see a lot of different aspects of it.

But I think there's an element of just like when we try to take on problems, humanitarian problems, especially like these are guys who brought a level of creativity and bravery to it which really stands out to me.

I think there's a lot of thinking in sort of the development world that is repetitive, and I think these guys really challenge a lot of that.

And then I think on the criminal justice side, I really, as I said before, I think this book is an homage to witnesses.

I think what Curt and Carlos did there in Neuvasu Yappa was really all revolving around them, and I hope people come to appreciate that.

And I think that's true there and it's also true here.

If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinners, all about the Ghost Club, all that is Wicked and American SHERILOK and don't forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.

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Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi.

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This episode was mixed by John Bradley.

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Artwork by Nick Toga.

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