Okay, we are live.

Hi, this is William Ramsey.

Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show.

Have a very special guest.

His name is David Tuck.

His last name is spelled t U c h, but it's pronounced tuck.

And if you're watching this on YouTube Rock Finn Rumble ex Twitter, you'll see the title and cover of his new book.

The full title is The Wireless Operator, The Untold Story of the British sailor who invented the modern drug trade.

And I was reading through the book and has some interesting names in it.

He also has an interesting blurb from a guest who I've had on his Tim Tate, who I've had on recently to catch a spy.

And just the blurb that Tim Tate wrote is David Tuck brings it the remarkable story of Harold Derber, refugee, gun runner, ethical people smuggler and revolutionary drug trafficker out of the Shadows, and what a tale.

It is an extraordinary life of adventure and adventure and a rollicking good read.

So that's a great piece of information from Tim Tait, who's a very accomplished author.

But David Tuck, this is his first book.

He's a cousin of the kind of protagonist in this book.

You see his face here.

He was born with a different name, but David Tuck is a technology entrepreneur.

He was born in New York and received his doctorate from MIT in Harvard Medical School.

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, choose since with his wife and four children.

This is his first book.

So, David Tuck, welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Both's great to be I'm a big fan of the show.

Thanks for having me.

Great great.

So for people who haven't heard your name, this is your first book, maybe you can talk about your background.

You have a great academic career kind of background, your research, and what led you onto the story about the wireless operator with pleasure.

Let me begin by mentioning never in a thousand lifetimes that I think I'll be writing about true spies and gun money and drug trafficking.

I'm a science and technology entrepreneur by background.

I sold my company in twenty twenty three, and I was thinking about what's next in life, and I was doing some family genealogy research just out of curiosity, and I was exchanging notes with a distant cousin and towards the end of the conversation, he said, almost kind of off the cuff.

Oh, by the way, he should look into our mutual cousin, this guy named Harold Deerber, who was a drug trafficker gun runner shot down in Miami.

And it was kind of one of those bits of family folklore.

You didn't know whether to take it seriously or not.

And I checked in with another cousin and she said, oh, yeah, he used to run guns for Castro.

You didn't know that.

So that was kind of one of those introductions that was really impossible to turn away from.

And I started off with just an Internet search and there was almost nothing on him, just a few hits, and I thought, okay, that's chantalizing, but not sure where to go from there.

And I started digging into the archives, first the British Archives and the American archives, went through old newscript of clippings, and before I knew it, I was speaking with his former criminal associates.

I tracked down the memoir of his lover.

I was doing freedom of information requests to the CIA and FBI.

I was able to track down the undercover agents who pursued him and the story that ultimately emerged is one of the most insane stories I've ever come across in fact or of fiction, and I became so obsessed with the story I dedicated myself full time to chronicling the life of my cousin, and that became The Wireless Operator, which has been out in the UK for a couple months now and just hit the US shelves this week, so.

It's just been published on Amazon and tell the story of his background.

He was British by birth, right, a Jewish British guy who kind of came out of World War.

Two, right, that's right.

He was born in Manchester, England, in the Jewish quarter called Cheatham Hill.

His birth name was Hymen Tuck for Deerber, so his last name Tuke for Deerber is actually the origin of my name as well.

So he took the British out of the family, took the suffix which was Derber.

He would eventually become Herold Derber, and my side of the family, which is on the German side, took the prefix which was Tuk or Tuck as it's pronounced in English.

So he was born Heimenchuk for Deerber.

In nineteen twenty six, Manchester, England, so Kim of age right at the time of the breakout of the war, and Manchester in particular was a pretty wretched place to be during the war.

So in addition to the Blitz and the evacuation, Manchester also had the British Union of Fascists, so Sir Oswald Mosley and the Black Shirts.

And one piece of information I discovered during my research for this book was they were actually Jewish internament camps in England.

Very few people are aware of that.

So the British interned about eight thousand Jews because they were nominally of German or Austro Hungarian descent, without distinguishing between people that were sympathetic in the Nazis or not.

So although he wasn't interned, members of his family were interned, and so that was the specter hanging over the family.

And so with all of that terrible stuff going on, besides at the very tender age of sixteen, to enroll in the Wireless College to become a radio officer in the British Merchant Navy and then he ships out, serving first with the Dutch Merchant Fleet and then the Norwegian Merchant Fleet.

During the Battle of the Atlantic, and so you have to imagine just how wretched that experience was.

So the Merchant Navy ships were, you know, if you imagine like the worst dive bar you've ever been into, just really really deprived conditions, and then you're with a bunch of you know, two meter tall Dutch sailors out in middle of the Atlantic and people are firing torpedoes at you on top of it.

So that was his first encounter with radio craft and he would become a highly highly accomplished seaman.

So he became a radio officer at the very young age of twenty two, as well as a master mariner and a certified navigator.

He who claimed he was the youngest sort of navigator in either the British Merchant Navy or the Royal Navy, and the British Merchant Navy with merchant navies in general had an extremely high fatality rate.

I think that one of the main unsung heroes of World War Two.

So the Norwegian Merchant Fleet which he served with, had the highest fatality rate of any service, even though it was a civilian service.

So they actually even had a higher fatality rate than the RAF pilots.

I think one in six Norwegian merchant semen parish during the war, so really just tough going manages to survive the Battle of the Atlantic and then from there embarks on a very interesting career in arms smuggling and other illicit adventures which I'm sure we'll get into.

He was kind of like the international man of mystery, like moving around different countries Israel, America, Cuba, with this kind of maybe super national connections too.

Right, Yeah, absolutely had this amazing knack for finding you know where the next global flashpoint was going to be.

So after World War Two, the next state conflict was the Arab Israeli War.

So in forty eight, when Israel the cleared independence, he signed up to serve with the Israeli Navy as a radio operator and later as a boat captain.

So at the outbreak of the war, the Western Powers imposed a arms embargo against both Israel and the neighboring Arab states.

The idea was to create a level playing field and hopefully drive warn parties to negotiated stalemate, and Israel embarked on the largest illegal arms smuggling campaign in world history, so many thousands of tons of arms were procured illegally illegally from the US and from Nazi surplus actually in order to illegally arm the fledgling Israeli military.

So he was part of that illegal arms smuggling campaign, and in particular taking some of the Nazi surplus that Stalin had sieved in Czechoslovakia and secretly redirecting that to Israel against the embargo.

And it was also kind of crazy because the arms embargo was manned by the British Royal Navy and the American Navy to a lesser extent, and also the Arab nations.

And so he had this right in Congress situation where you had British sailors trying to run through the blockade manned by other British sailors that they were, you know, they'd been fighting shouldered and shoulder with just a few years ago.

And this was really his first foray into illegal arms smuggling and it didn't stop there.

So after the war he took advantage of this loophole to whitewash German arm sales through Israel onward to in this case the dictatorial government of the Dominican Republic under Raphael Trahillo.

He had a forty one million dollar line of credit from Trahillo.

So this is in nineteen fifties dollars, so that would be about half a billion dollars today in order to procure arms for the Dominican Republic.

And that was really his first sort of stepped into illegal arms trafficking, and so we talked about how he was really adept at finding the next global hotspot.

So he continued to do illegal arms smuggling and did like a career rotation in illegal ventures, you know how when you're in high school and they let you sample different careers.

So he did that across the whole spectrum of different illegal trades including stock fraud, corporate espionage, smuggling, contraband oil into the Soviet block.

And then the next destination was New York.

So he served in the Merchant Navy until the mid nineteen fifties and then moved to New York with a friend he had met in Israel during the Arab Israeli War, and they set up shop in the Bronx.

Actually, and there's a funny side note here, which is that the two of them befriend the young films student who recently graduated from Hofstra and they produced this young film student's first two movies one was a softcore porn film and the other one was a cowboy nudy film.

And that young film student was Francis Ford Coppola.

So they produced Coppola's first two movies and so, yeah, so they're hanging out in New York for a while and.

Then said Dementia eighteen or whatever was.

That was that the one?

So one was yeah, So one was the softcore porn film is called The Peeper, and the second one, which was his first sort of major debut, was called Tonight for Sure.

So it's a cowboy nudy film.

So his so his really friend actually has a movie credit on IMDb, but he kept his name secretest.

So from there, the next global hotspot is the Cold War in the Caribbean.

So after the Pigs invasion, he heads down to Miami, Florida, and because tourism essentially collapsed during the Cold War, he was able to secure a charter on a luxury cruise ship for a deep discount and ran a floating casino that ran between Mammy Peer three and the Bahamas.

And at this time that he meets the love of his life, a woman named Sorry Leslie whose real name was Sorry Cohen, and she and her identical twin were recruited to be entertainment directors on his boat, but she had a secret so she was secretly contracted, most likely to the CIA, and she was using his cruise ship as a cover to run cash and corporate documents out of Havana, using his cruise ship to get back into Mammy.

And they embarked on this passionate, mad cap love affair, and you know, tourism.

When the Keeper missile crisis struck, tourism just you know, absolutely created, and he lost his first boat, was able to secure a second cruise ship.

And many people forget this chapter of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

But after the invasion force was captured, eleven hundred members of the brigade were held in prison in Cuba and the Isle of Pines, and the Kennedy administration secretly negotiated through back channels to free the Bay of Pigs prisoners and have them freed to America.

But the key thing is they wanted to have separation from the White House, and so they put out a call for anyone with a private ship in close to the Gribbean that was willing to transport back to the Bay of Pigs prisoners, and my cousin wrote a telegram to JFK, you know, as one does, volunteering a ship to transport back to the prisoners, and it's accepted.

And then, for some reason I haven't been quite able to figure out, they renegged on the deal.

I think Castro might have changed his mind and wanted to transport the prisoners by air.

But they said, okay, you're off the assignment.

You can't transport the prisoners.

And he said, well, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and do it anyway.

And they said, well, you can't do that because of the travel and bargo, the trade embargo with Cuba.

You can't conduct business with Cuba.

And he said, well, actually that only applies to US nationals.

I'm a British national, I'm not a US subject, so the Kennedy travel in Barko doesn't apply to me.

And so I'm going to go ahead and do it.

And he signed an exclusive agreement with the Cuban government to provide the only transportation out of Cuba.

Amazingly, Yeah, so he's right in the thick of all that stuff, right right, this is right, you know, right after the missile crisis, and this is when the full weight of the CIA and the State Department come crashing down on him and he's harassed and brutalized and suppressed all across Bahamas, that Caymans, and eventually sets up operations in Jamaica because they had separated from the British crown in sixty sixty two, and he does a test ferry operation with two dozen Cubans and he's successful to bring them to America and they can't forget what to charge him with.

So the situation was there were a quarter of a million Cubans with visas.

They were legally allowed to enter the US, but because there was a travel embargo, there was no practical way for for them to come in, and so the government had been sort of trying to play both sides of the issue, and so they charged him with some completely bogus charge of failing to give the port twenty four hours notice, which is just absurd, and the jury's hung.

But then they eventually deport him as a national security risk and he's deported back to England and this is when his traffing and smuggling career takes on a completely new dimension.

He'd had all the experience of smuggling people and guns and things like that, so probably it must have been being in Jamaica must have opened his eyes to maybe some new opportunities with their own harvest, so to speak, a green hat.

Yeah, that's right.

So he's deported to England in nineteen sixty four as a US national security risk, and you know, he hadn't seen his folks in twenty years since he left to fight in World War Two, and doesn't stay there very long.

He ends up spending time in Canada trafficking and stolen or fraudulent bonds, finds his way to Surinam, and then spends time in Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Columbia.

He's variously jailed in all of those countries for months at a time, and then something really remarkable happens in nineteen seventy.

So in nineteen seventy, Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Sumses Act, which was an attempt to rationalize all of America's drug laws into a single, coherent framework.

And as part of that, they nullified all of the previous drug laws.

And they screwed up royally because they canceled the law that made it illegal to have drugs in international waters, and they forgot to replace it, so it was just an administratives grew up, and because of that, it became legal to have drugs on the high seas for the first time.

And my cousin realized that this was the trafficking opportunity of a lifetime, and he is credited with inventing what is called the mothership technique.

So what he would do is he would take a cargo freighter, load it with forty or fifty tons of marijuana, park it in the middle of the Atlantic, and then have the drug transfer happened mid ocean to a speedboat or a fishing trawler, and then that boat would take it to shore.

But that was somebody else's problem.

So he could transport several hundred tons eventually two thousand tons of marijuana per year completely legally.

So if we look at marijuana consumption in the US in the late nineteen sixties, only about five percent of high school students it tried marijuana.

In the late nineteen seventies, that figure rises to thirty or forty percent.

So there's this Cambrian explosion of marijuana use in America, and that's usually attributed to the hippie counterculture sort of per meeting mainstreams society, or the Vietnam Vets coming back and maybe self medicating their PTSD.

But on the supply side and the distribution side, it was made possible by the industrialization of maritime marijuana shipping because of this mothership loophole accidentally created by Nixon, So he was able to exploit this with a fleet of a dozen cargo ships, and in order for US law enforcement to charge him, they had to actually witness the drug trands for happening mid ocean as well as the drugs arriving to shore, which was impossible, and so exploding this loophole, he would eventually become the largest marijuana trafficker in American history, moving roughly on the one of two thousand tons of marijuana.

Where was it sourced?

Where was his marijuana sourced?

Yeah, it was sourced in Barantia, Columbia, so very initially to your earlier point, very initially it was sourced from Jamaica.

So he was arrested in seventy four with three tons of Jamaica marijuana.

But Jamaica in nineteen seventy two seventy three, I want to say, clamp down very heavily on marijuana production.

And in Mexico there was a herbicidal eradication program financed by the US government that and this today, Mexican marijuana still has a very bad reputation because of the herbicidal cross contamination.

And so Columbia during that time arose to become the dominant marijuana supplier in the early mid nineteen seventies.

And I find this so fascinating because in America we tend to have two narratives about the drug trade.

We think of like the nineteen sixties counterculture and then we flash forward to the ultra violent Colombian cartels.

But there was this period from the early to late seventies where you had these innovative, what they called gentlemen smugglers essentially pioneering the marijuana trade.

And now it's such a mainstream staple of American society, and it's very easy to take that for granted, but these were people that realized this entrepreneurial opportunity to basically provide this growing mass market.

So he would to become the largest marijuana trafficker in American history, although he ran into one major snag, which is that as his ships were coming up from Barantia, they would take the windward passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, and there's only a twenty mile wide passage in between those two territories that's in international water, so sometimes they would stray into Cuban waters and they were getting seized by the Cuban government.

So both the ships and the cargo and the crew were getting seized.

So they had a big sit down in Bogata.

It was the Cuban ambassador to Columbia and the major Columbian drug traffickers to come to some kind of understanding, and the outcome is really remarkable.

The Cuban government said, well, good news, we're going to release your ships and the crew and the cargo, and even better news, we want to sponsor you.

So we'll give you a free passage, we'll give you a radar cover, we'll give you naval escorts, you can fly the Cuban flag if you want, and we only have two small requests.

In return.

You have to pay an eight hundred thousand dollars docking fee when you arrive in Cuba and on your return trip.

From delivering all the weed, you have to supply guns to the Marxist insurgents in Latin America.

So this was the first narco terrorism pact of the Western hemisphere.

So my cousin became embroiled in the Cuban Columbian guns for drugs trade.

So he was delivering we'd all up and down the Atlantic seaboard and then on the return trip bring guns to the Marxist Gorillaz principally in nineteen in Columbia.

So it was like a left wing around Contra or something like.

That, exactly exactly.

Yeah.

So one one historian that I respect very much said, all of American history is Iran Contra.

No, it was, It's the vast web.

But these things are like underneath the surface.

So the year is Derber doing that same thing?

And yeah, no, I think there's long.

There's some wonderful books on this, called one book called The Politics of Heroin, an one called the that talks about how the CIA, in many instances has used drug trafficking to finance their off book activities.

And it would not surprise me.

And so law enforcement was incredibly frustrated because here you had this major drug trafficker.

He was openly known to be a major drug trafficker.

He was living openly in Miami, so spending his time between Columbia and Miami.

He was living on Brickel Ave in in Miami Beach, and they could not locate his ship.

They could not It was like this ghost ship.

I've spoken with a number of maritime and Coast Guard officers that described that period and they're like, we could not find And so he was using a lot of very sophisticated counter surveillance to avoid detection and they couldn't locate it.

So one North Carolina customs officer got really frustrated and he wrote a memo proposing that they used military resources to locate his drug ships, in particular ties naval reconnaissance, satellites, and reconnaissance plans.

And this was hugely controversial at the time because this is a clear violation of the Passi Committatis Act, which has come into focus very recently with some of the kinetic strikes that the current administration had taking against drug traffic.

Wow.

Yeah, and so this memo, because it was a clear violation of the Passi Combatatis Act, which prevents the use of military for Law Enforcement on its way to the desk of Henry Kissinger, who was the Secretary of State at the time and nominally head of the Druggn addiction program, and Kissinger approved it in an ultra secret memo.

I say ultra secret because I did a freedom of information request to the DEA for any records about this program, which is called Operation stop Gap, and they said, oh, sorry, we destroyed all the records.

And likewise, Coast Guard officers have testified on the Earth that the program never existed.

So they used hit is H.

So they used the Naval Consistant satellites to eventually locate the Night Train and the seizure of the Night Train, which are they're eventually successful to find after his death was a seizure of fifty four tons of marijuana, which was the largest drug seizure in American history.

Where did they find it?

Where in the ocean did they find?

Uh?

Yeah, So it was off Abaco Island in the Bahamas.

So it was actually an undercover operation where they had a group of undercover agents and civilians actually posed as an undercover transfer pickup crew.

So they were on a pickup book called the Catch a Lot Too and they went out to meet the Night Train.

There's a great sort of account of it in the book.

Actually in the book, I have never before published photos of this undercover operation which yielded the largest drug seizure in American history.

So they went the first location for the rendezvous with the Night Train, and after a day, it never showed up and they couldn't find it.

And then the Navajo plane buzzes overhead and drops two water cooler bottles into the ocean with coordinates for the second rendezvous.

So there's a redirection.

And at the second Mond Devi point, they meet the Night Train and they activate a radio beacon for a endurance cutter called the Dauntless to come and sees the Night Train, which eventually succumbed.

And that's where they found the fifty four tons of marijuana.

And that's like north of Nassau, right, so ye kind of in those Grand Bahama area.

Yeah, exactly what's up there?

Yeah, I mean this is the pre dates all the cocaine trade and all that stuff.

Dude, this is really yeah, I mean, I mean PubL escobars trafficking contravent cigarettes at this point, right, there's no med right, there's no medy in cartel, there's no cocaine, there's no heroin.

I mean I said no, but you know, just miniscrule amounts.

So that doesn't really take off until the right, yeah, late seventies or yeah, you see signs, very early signs in seventy six, seventy seven, and then it takes off on with So fascinating is that my cousin's infrastructure, with the exploding the mothership loophole then became the infrastructure for the median.

Cartel and the model for the medine right.

Exactly, because this is before the submarines.

You know, it wasn't enough for land transport.

The loophole, the legal loophole would not be closed until nineteen eighty with the passage of the Marijuana on the High Seas Act.

But very interestingly, they only closed the loophole for marijuana, so the mothership loopole still existed for other drugs, so they're still able to exploit it.

That's also why drug imports also shifted from marijuana.

Also because more profitable and more had more profit density, shifted to cocaine.

But it was also because of the marijuana, not igh seas that closed the loophole specifically from marijuana.

It's still relevant.

This is all this stuff happening out of Venezuela and stuff.

Is yeah, totally, we take yeah, yeah totally.

I mean we take it such for granted.

I mean, I know there's a very uh, you know, really vigorous debate having now about the legality, but we take it such you know, for granted.

Now even with language about the War on drugs that it's permissible to use military resources and methods for drugging addiction.

But at the time it was, you know, so controversial that the government would keep it ultra classified and swear up and down it never existed.

Right, And how did he launder his money?

Like, I mean, that's that's one of the always the big challenge of these guys who were in the underground kind of dark trades or whatever.

Yeah, that's rick.

It's interesting.

So the DEA estimated he had about three hundred million dollars in addition to his fleet of cargo ships.

Plus he had holdings and a wide number of private companies in real estate.

So to mention million, it's probably about two billion in today's money.

And so he laundered it through a penny stock brokerage called First Jersey Securities, which was a pumping up scheme.

Eventually that brokerage, First Jersey Securities, would eventually go on.

So he actually provided the cornerstone funding for First Jersey Securities, and that brokerage would eventually go on to become the largest securities fraud in American history, about four hundred million dollars, which doesn't move the needle today for you know financial flauts.

Back then, hundred million dollars was you know, serious.

Trillions now banking crisis or whatever.

But so First Jersey Securities was the name of the enterprise when the securities right happened.

What year was that?

What year did they flop or go under or.

So I want to say around eighty three to eighty five through TIGN frames.

Yeah, so that's that's very prominent time.

Yeah, you'll find extensive discussions about First Jersey Security.

So he provided the cornerstone funding for that, and then also he landed his money through First Jersey and his assets multiplied seven times over because the resident was giving him much, was giving him favorable treatment because Cornerstone demon was also investing very heavily, and he was also at this point using First Jersey to launder money for the Gambino crime family in New York and whether or not that was the extent of his interactions with with the Gambinos, I don't know.

He was under investigation by the New York FBI office First Ties to the Gambida family, and then he's the SEC, which was investigating First Jersey, became aware that my cousin was trafficking his drug proceeds through Frest, Jersey, and so they included that in their financial investigation.

I Laundering drug money became one of the investigative topics into First Jersey and he was called to testifying New York into the SEC investigation.

Wow, So I mean it's he really wasn't kind of an international you know, spy operation reader, a person of intrigue, like a really incredible lifelike traveling around smuggling people into Israel, smuggling weed, securities, manipulation, hang out with mob mob adjacent these type of things.

Yeah, it's very sure.

There's a great question in the chat about whether it's legal to have cocaine and international arts.

First of all, I'm not a qualified lawyer, and I would recommend you get a qualified independent legal But the answer to the question is that the loophole for other narcotics wasn't closed until a separate act was passed in nineteen eighty six.

Gotcha, so there was a separate thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And so I mentioned he was scheduled to testify in this SEC investigation into his money laundering, and then the night before he was scheduled to testify, he was assassinated by professional hitmen outside of his mammy condominium.

That seems to be the thing if your testify in front of Congress, like for anything, like that's like a death knell.

Like these people they don't know, like the same thing happened during like the Kennedy HSCA stuff like all those Rosselli all those guys were g and conna like some of them.

Were like scheduled to testify and like that was it.

Yeah, so he was kind of he was taken out right around that time as those guys too.

So yeah, yeah, that's interesting because I don't he had so many enemies.

So he was being encircled by the Columbians, the Cubans, you know, potentially the Gambinos and potentially, you know, very potentially any figures related to the SEC investigation.

So it could be very quincduntal timing or even a cover that he was assassinated the day before the investigation, because it could have just easily been any one of the other groups targeting him.

But it's it's definitely very interesting timing for sure.

Yeah, pro hit and what so then what happens to his extensive estate?

You know?

Yeah?

Yeah, so have him on not a multi billionaire?

It's a good question.

Somebody else got it, I guess.

Yeah.

So there's a very fascinating story there.

So his supposed wife, and I'll explain why I say suppose in a minute, claim the estate and then my relatives sued the estate to get access to the to the funds, and she claimed that they were married in Columbia, but couldn't produce a mariage certificate, so the court ruled that she wasn't the rightful heir.

But when my relatives went to access the accounts, they're all completely wipe the clean.

So all the money in the Panamanian bank accounts, it was gone.

All of the stock certificates in the safety deposit boxes in the Miami banks was gone.

So you know where it went.

I don't exactly know.

That's you know, one of the open questions in the in the book, but yeah, unfortunately it didn't land in my bank account.

And interestingly so he had a Duneman switch, which is a set of secret documents that were set to be released if you met his untimely demise.

And even after he was assassinated, some of the criminals shot at his supposed wife trying to find that secret cash of documents.

Whether or not they were who knows.

It could have been a bank ledger, it could have been a list of informants, you know, account numbers, who knows, So that that kind of yeah, I don't know if that argues against it being the Columbians because what itan just would they have in these secret documents?

But yeah, that's that's one more piece of the puzzle.

Wow, it's remarkable.

It wouldn't be the first time money has disappeared out of Panama or Panamanian banks.

Yeah, so yes, Norega wasah, yeah, I mean they used to trust the banks there, but now it's like, I mean, this is your website too, David, Right, So this is it.

It's really a nice, great looking website.

It's that David Touch dot com.

A lot of pictures there he is right there, so yeah, radio picture so yeah, that was back in the day when you could wear sunglasses and smoke in a courtnum uh yeah.

So yeah.

So Mammy Dad Community College has a film archive from Mammy NBC News, so we're able to source a lot of video, mostly from his Cuban refugee smuggling period.

That, yeah, I was very happy to include.

And that's great.

A lot of great pictures things like that, a lot of pictures of that era and time to the revolutionary era, wasn't this guy Donovan kind of associated with Yeah?

So yeah, So I mentioned that my cousin was responsible where he was assigned to return to the Bay of Pigs prisoners.

So James Donovan was the one that negotiated with Castro for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners.

So we probably know Donovan from the Spielberg movie Bridges Spies.

So he was responsible for the spy swap for the KGB station Chief of the US, but they brought himut of retirement to negotiate with Castro for the Bay of Pigs prisoner and that's what me and my cousin so furious.

So the US government paid forty three million dollars in ransom to Castro to free the Bay of Pigs prisoners, right, and my cousin wanted to transport starting with a few dozen Cubans that had visas that were anti communists, you know, had every legal right to enter the US, and he was harassed, you know, demonized, charged, deported for doing very much what Donovan had done, but on much more kind of ethical grounding.

So in the book I sort of posed Donovan and Derber as you know, sort of counterpoints.

You know, Donovan was this establishment figure working closely albeit secretly, for the Kennedy administration, and my cousin was much more of a sort of a Rabbel Rouser Maverick type, trying to accomplish something that was arguably even more humanitarian.

But you know, face the full wrath of the US government, he could ease.

Derbert could easily asked for a Cuban just at first glance, like he really looks Cuban.

Like yeah, so yeah, this is a great photo.

So the figure on the left, who was one of his close friends and allies, is the founder of the Cuban Intelligence Service.

So this is a fellow named Captain Victor Pina, who was a proto communist prior to the revolution, fought with Castro during the revolution, and then with chayke Evera founded the Cuban Intelligence Service DGI.

He would later go on to become the Minister of Transportation and was the co signatory on this exclusive agreement to provide because of the soul transportation rights out of Cuba.

And I was very fortunate because I befriended Captain Pinia's son in Havana and he shared with me this photo and the other photos and the correspondence between the two.

Uh So, you know, I just love the incongrurda.

You have this British gentleman with a pencil mustache and the bow tie, you know, partying with one of the leading intelligence figures in Havana.

It's remarkable.

This, that's incredible.

He's like James want But do you think that he had kind of left leaning outlook or was he mercenary kind of like do whatever to make the most money.

Or do you think he found sympathy with the Cubans.

What are your thoughts?

This is yeah, such a fascinating question.

You know, I've been studying this guy for years, and I'm not any close to answering the question.

I think his ideology was money.

I think he was very financially motivated.

You know, in intelligence circles they have this acronym to describe people's motivations mice, money, ideology, coercion, and ego.

So I think for him it was probably ninety percent money and maybe ten percent ego.

He had this knack for finding loopholes, So the Mothership loophole was a loophole.

Transporting Cuban refugees as a British subject and avoiding the Kennedy Trade embargo was a loophole.

Having casino gambling in international waters was a loophole.

Whitewashing German arm sales through Israel was a loophole.

So I think he was sort of this gadfly, you know, UH, operating on the border between legality and illegality.

And he probably did that, you know, because of the opportunity, but also some of the intellectual gratification that came from uh sort of skirting around the law.

But he had a he had a very strong money less So he was very very financially motivated, and I think that's what drove him.

And it's fascinating because during the human refugee operation, he justified what he was doing by, you know, waving the flag for anti communism and fighting Castro, and I think a lot of that was just posturing for the Mammy Herald.

I'll tell you something nuts, which is that there's one US intelligence support which I haven't seen firsthand, but was reported on by the Atlantic Constitution that claims, and I want to stress this is just a claim.

This intelligence report says that Gerber was the kg B head for Miami.

Yeah, and I take that with a lot of salt, because Russia had a negligible intelligence presence in and in Florida because that was largely dominated by Cuban intel and they operated largely separately during that time period.

And there's obviously no consul in Florida, so he would have been operating without diplomatic community and so on and so on.

So I'm expecting I did a freedom of informational quest for his CIA file, which I'm expecting middle next year, so wash the space.

Maybe we'll learn more that question.

His NSA file is still classified, so I'm preparing a lawsuit to get access to his NSA file, because that's the fascinating bit.

So he'd been deported from America twice, the second time as the national security risk.

He had been barred or deported from a dozen countries.

Right, he had served jail time in half a dozen countries, and then he's readmitted to the US right in seventy three, and he's operating openly in Miami as the largest marijuana traffic in America.

So it strongly suggests and the DA very very heavily stonewalled his murdered investigation.

Also, I didn't mention his lookalike.

He had a double.

It was also murdered five months prior to his own assassination.

And the DEA also stonewalled the investigation into his lookalike.

So it's not conclusive yet, but there there's more and more evidence that he is possibly being protected by the DEA or another agency.

Otherwise it's really hard to understand how he could be living openly in Miami as the country's largest drug trafficker.

Right, wow, So he's just playing all all the different people like the triple agent or quadruple agent.

Yeah, yeah, And I think he told his trafficking buddies many of whom I spoke with for the book, that he was actually arming the counter insurgents in Latin America, and so he's playing both sides.

Yeah, and so that that might be wid yeah, yes, protecting him if they said, okay, well, you know, turn a blind eye to his drug trafficking if you can arm some of the pro government militias in Columbia.

Because the pro government militias wanted to the Clembing government wanted to avoid any outward appearance of connection with America, so they would create these bat channels for arming the pro government militia.

So you don't have a completely clear picture on that.

He might have just been saying that to save face in front of his trafficking buddies, but you know, one more piece of the puzzle for sure.

Yeah.

Well, so he's trying to get benefits from both sides.

I mean that would be like the classic black mark where he's getting benefits from you by and the US government by just being whatever he wanted to both them.

Really an interesting, great story.

This is a picture you used for the cover of your book.

We are at the forty minute mark.

Is there anything like that ad or before we wrap it up, where can people find the book and where can people find you?

Yeah?

So, first of all, thanks so much.

This is a lot of fun.

I enjoyd it a lot.

So the book is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

It's available both in hard copy, audio and kindle, So just in time for a holiday present for your loved ones or some holiday reading.

I can also encourage listeners to visit our web page at David Tuck dot com.

Tuck is t u H and you can sign up to our newsletter where we update our readers on new intelligence documents that we find as to become available.

So we just got a document drop from the CIA last month and so we'll continue to work with our readers to unravel the puzzle.

Yeah.

And then these documents, these Foy documents are such an important part of history too, because I've been going through some for other figures.

A lot of the stuff is like coming to the surface recently.

Like some of these documents really open up our understanding of history, much like this book does.

But David, thanks so much for your time.

Really appreciated again the authors, anything else you'd like to add before, It's been great, But thanks a lot.

Cool.

They'll stay here again.

The author's name is David Tuck t u H and the title of the new book is The Wireless Operator and told story of the British sailor who invented the.

Modern drug trade.

So much for your time, really appreciate it, like we thanks for having me stay there and stay there.

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