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The Darkest Web： Inside the internet’s most hidden corners to save kids - True Crime Documentary · The Evolution of Evil - True Crime Stories

0:24
Speaker 1: Now he's on that's convenience. We're probably almost exactly twelve
0:35
Speaker 1: hours away from meeting him for the first time. It'll
0:39
Speaker 1: be really real tomorrow knowing that, like what happens tomorrow is.
0:46
Speaker 2: Essentially at the end of his freedom, you know, his life.
1:05
Speaker 3: All right.
1:05
Speaker 1: Good afternoon. I'm Greg Squire from Homeland Security in Portland,
1:10
Speaker 1: and thank you in advance for helping with this case. Particularly,
1:14
Speaker 1: I'd like to thank our teams are here from Brazil,
1:16
Speaker 1: Australia and Europe. I just really appreciate you guys coming
1:19
Speaker 1: all this way to help. It's been a very long
1:22
Speaker 1: time coming five six years that Cassie and I have
1:25
Speaker 1: gone through it.
1:27
Speaker 3: This is him.
1:28
Speaker 1: Today, kind of easy to spot, but we have a
1:30
Speaker 1: couple other pictures in the ops plan. He's going to
1:34
Speaker 1: be charged with enterprise and what that does is basically
1:37
Speaker 1: highlight what he's been doing in what the four hundred
1:40
Speaker 1: thousand people on his website are responsible for the distribution
1:44
Speaker 1: of millions of images and videos of child sexual abuse.
1:49
Speaker 1: I've been doing undercover a long time and the trust me,
1:51
Speaker 1: these aren't just for one of the milk pedophiles. There's
1:53
Speaker 1: some of the most advanced the criminals on the planet.
1:58
Speaker 1: This is the target's apartment most relevant to the three
2:00
Speaker 1: who are going to be an inside. We're gonna take
2:03
Speaker 1: him inside almost immediately. If he has his backpack with him,
2:07
Speaker 1: we'll take that into custody. Same with the phone, but
2:10
Speaker 1: that's the exit there. Our three eyes in there will
2:15
Speaker 1: be in comms with Cassie. Cassie's gonna be online early
2:18
Speaker 1: if he decides to get online before he goes to
2:21
Speaker 1: his big appointment, and Cassie will be able to engage,
2:24
Speaker 1: confirm he's in the apartment, confirm he's online. So it's
2:27
Speaker 1: a big day for crackers. There's a lot of foot
2:34
Speaker 1: traffic out of this door. A lot of kids move
2:36
Speaker 1: in and out of here. There's a lot of adults, families,
2:38
Speaker 1: so it's not just.
2:39
Speaker 3: College kids here. It's a pretty good mix of people.
2:43
Speaker 1: Our three interior people will cover here, here, and here.
2:47
Speaker 1: He's gonna have to walk past you. It's up to
2:49
Speaker 1: the three of you how you want to do it.
2:52
Speaker 1: As soon as they see him and begin to kind
2:54
Speaker 1: of get an indication with door, he's going out, they're
2:57
Speaker 1: gonna call us and we'll hit it up over the radio.
3:01
Speaker 1: The central location will be my vehicle and the few
3:04
Speaker 1: people who are with me getting into the building. It's
3:10
Speaker 1: gonna be just the apprehension team and my car team
3:14
Speaker 1: five check in please, So we're gonna roll up in
3:16
Speaker 1: the building with maybe six to eight total, no more
3:19
Speaker 1: than that. Let's get a quick radio check like, get
3:22
Speaker 1: to where your vehicles are, get your gear on, whatever
3:25
Speaker 1: you're gonna have for tactical gear. Again, just to reiterate
3:29
Speaker 1: the primary objective here is server access.
3:32
Speaker 3: Any questions.
3:35
Speaker 1: Stand by target is a building. Hey, how you doing?
4:18
Speaker 1: Hey doing budd Hey, Greig Squire, well Man Scarity.
4:22
Speaker 4: Alright, alright, good buddy.
4:24
Speaker 3: I gotta have a little chat with you.
4:25
Speaker 4: All right, stuff, second job?
6:05
Speaker 1: Okay, good boy, good boy. A bit of a morning
6:16
Speaker 1: routine for the dog and I get out into the woods.
6:20
Speaker 1: Let's no houses, no lights, very little cell phone coverage,
6:24
Speaker 1: which is kind of a bonus. You know. The problem
6:30
Speaker 1: that we work with never goes away. What do you see?
6:34
Speaker 5: Huh?
6:34
Speaker 6: What do you see?
6:36
Speaker 1: When I started my career, I didn't really realize how
6:41
Speaker 1: deep and dark things we're gonna get. In two thousand
6:53
Speaker 1: and seven, I wasn't working for the Postal Service. I
6:56
Speaker 1: had two kids at that point. My kids are the
7:02
Speaker 1: most important thing to me. But I spent seven years
7:06
Speaker 1: delivering letters and I was pretty much in my wits
7:09
Speaker 1: end at that point. I applied for Homeland Security. Basically
7:17
Speaker 1: they said, hey, you know you're going to be assigned
7:19
Speaker 1: to the cyber group, and I said, okay, great. I
7:24
Speaker 1: was just ready to start working. Crimes against children was
7:27
Speaker 1: the bulk of what we did in that group. You know,
7:31
Speaker 1: I didn't have a really have any idea what world
7:35
Speaker 1: exactly I was walking into. Yeah, the first video that
7:45
Speaker 1: I saw that really opened my eyes to what child
7:48
Speaker 1: sexual abuse was was in two thousand and eight. So
7:54
Speaker 1: we moved in here when the kids are both pretty little,
7:58
Speaker 1: like maybe into something.
8:00
Speaker 3: To that effect.
8:02
Speaker 1: And it was just such an amazing spot to get.
8:04
Speaker 1: We had a swimming pool, great big yard, and you know,
8:11
Speaker 1: we would spend our off time and just letting the
8:13
Speaker 1: kids run around out here.
8:14
Speaker 3: It was just a really nice piece of land to have.
8:18
Speaker 1: I think it was a Sunday morning and the kids
8:20
Speaker 1: had been playing up on the deck there by the windows. Oh,
8:23
Speaker 1: I got my work laptop and I had recently gotten
8:29
Speaker 1: a whole folder a hole basically of results from an
8:32
Speaker 1: email search warrant that was when I saw the one
8:34
Speaker 1: email from the suspect and I noticed there was an attachment,
8:38
Speaker 1: so I saw the attachment was a video. So once
8:41
Speaker 1: I clicked and opened the video, I just saw a
8:45
Speaker 1: bedroom basically. The camera kind of panned around, and there
8:48
Speaker 1: was a little girl in bed, like in an adult bed,
8:52
Speaker 1: a large bed, and she was laying there. There was
8:55
Speaker 1: a book, a big picture book, kid's book, next to her,
9:01
Speaker 1: and then I could see an adult male coming into
9:04
Speaker 1: the coming into focus.
9:06
Speaker 3: He started to read the read the book to her.
9:10
Speaker 1: And like for that, for that thirty seconds, it looked
9:16
Speaker 1: like something normal, and then he undresses her and then
9:20
Speaker 1: the abuse starts in the in the girl just it
9:24
Speaker 1: looked like her soul left watching watching it, watching it happen.
9:28
Speaker 1: And him, I was reading a murder him, you know,
9:34
Speaker 1: like just watching him do this and watching her like
9:41
Speaker 1: just endure it, you know, like that's what it looked
9:44
Speaker 1: like to me. And yeah, for that to go on
9:47
Speaker 1: for so long, you know, I think it was probably
9:50
Speaker 1: four full minutes of him raping her. A long time.
9:58
Speaker 3: I mean, I'd never seen anything like like that.
10:00
Speaker 1: One more, you know, now I have an unfortunate library
10:06
Speaker 1: of that stuff in my head.
10:08
Speaker 3: And so do all the other you know folks to
10:10
Speaker 3: do it. But that was definitely the first time.
10:16
Speaker 1: And while it like takes from you, it also it
10:19
Speaker 1: also gives like you're not going to find a better
10:23
Speaker 1: fuel to go hunt someone down than that. If it
10:27
Speaker 1: doesn't get any more passionate than.
10:29
Speaker 7: That'll keep its fall.
10:45
Speaker 1: You can always go back for seconds.
10:47
Speaker 3: I don't really like diet sensitive Peter.
10:52
Speaker 8: Yeah, I know.
10:54
Speaker 1: About that. I think that's even don't you one, two, three,
10:59
Speaker 1: four five, Yeah, okay, small piece.
11:05
Speaker 8: When I first met Greg, I thought he was very intense,
11:08
Speaker 8: super high energy, hilarious, obviously very dedicated.
11:16
Speaker 1: We just became we became friends, like we really had
11:19
Speaker 1: the same passion about the work.
11:22
Speaker 6: Why doesn't it wan't going to go with out?
11:24
Speaker 1: I don't understand what it wants me to do. It's weird.
11:27
Speaker 1: Have you been here before?
11:28
Speaker 3: If I told you to drive home right now, you
11:29
Speaker 3: wouldn't be able to make No.
11:31
Speaker 1: I would keep working all the time.
11:34
Speaker 8: It seemed like we were jumping from one case to
11:37
Speaker 8: the next, focused on the trading of child sexual abuse materials.
11:42
Speaker 8: Good thing is that you come out like right.
11:43
Speaker 1: In MIDI we had been doing all the conventional you know,
11:47
Speaker 1: email cases and Facebook leads and things like that. We
11:51
Speaker 1: would say, oh, here's this screen name, Let's ask the
11:55
Speaker 1: company who it's registered to, or let's look at the
11:57
Speaker 1: IP addresses that it's been accessing this web site.
12:00
Speaker 8: It was so easy for law enforcement to go after
12:03
Speaker 8: open websites that everybody was transitioning over to the dark web.
13:05
Speaker 1: The first case that really took off on the dark
13:07
Speaker 1: web was a Lucy investigation. In January of twenty fourteen.
13:14
Speaker 1: We discovered this series of photos that you know, was
13:18
Speaker 1: named Lucy, of the same girl being sexually abused. In
13:24
Speaker 1: the images, we could see light sockets, electrical outlets, so
13:28
Speaker 1: we knew it was most likely a little girl here
13:31
Speaker 1: in the US. We had, you know, enough reason to
13:34
Speaker 1: believe that she was actively being abused, and her pictures
13:38
Speaker 1: were being distributed across the dark web. As we gathered more,
13:45
Speaker 1: we learned that she had been abused from a younger age.
13:50
Speaker 1: You know, this girl was probably seven years old in
13:53
Speaker 1: the beginning, and we think she's almost twelve years old now.
13:57
Speaker 1: She was being raped by this man maybe up to
13:59
Speaker 1: five years I mean, it really was. It kind of
14:04
Speaker 1: took us back a breath.
14:07
Speaker 8: The dark web is built to hide your identity, to
14:10
Speaker 8: anonymize your traffic. There's no traces of any information that
14:15
Speaker 8: say well, this is where this person came from. So
14:18
Speaker 8: literally all we had with this Lucy case was the
14:21
Speaker 8: images that we were staring at. But this offender was
14:25
Speaker 8: very good at covering their tracks, you know, consciously cropping
14:30
Speaker 8: out or altering images to remove specific things and be
14:33
Speaker 8: able to hinder our progress for like distribution.
14:38
Speaker 1: Or definitely production. We don't think we don't have that.
14:40
Speaker 8: We won't have that until we get back to the
14:41
Speaker 8: lab and do a deeper dive.
14:43
Speaker 1: We were working this every day for six seven, eight months.
14:48
Speaker 1: We could communicate all through the morning, all through the night.
14:53
Speaker 1: In the photos, like all photos, you know, there's things
14:56
Speaker 1: in the background, you know. We were looking for clues.
15:00
Speaker 8: Watched Lucy grow up basically in an environment of abuse,
15:05
Speaker 8: like of a systematic abuse.
15:07
Speaker 1: I mean, it really took us back, especially you know
15:09
Speaker 1: pde nine, you know, having kids that age. About the
15:16
Speaker 1: eighth month of the investigation, we were able to identify
15:20
Speaker 1: a piece of furniture in the photos. That piece of
15:23
Speaker 1: furniture had far more limited sales than other items that
15:28
Speaker 1: we had already identified.
15:30
Speaker 8: We were trying to make contact with manufacturers and distributors
15:34
Speaker 8: and say, help us out with this. You know this
15:37
Speaker 8: furniture set, Can you give us a customer list. We
15:47
Speaker 8: got a list of about forty thousand people that had
15:52
Speaker 8: purchased the set.
15:54
Speaker 1: At that point the investigation, we're looking at twenty nine
15:57
Speaker 1: states here in the US. I mean, you're talking about
16:01
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of addresses, and that's a very, very
16:05
Speaker 1: daunting task. It was a tough time for the team.
16:15
Speaker 1: Nine months is a long time to look for somebody,
16:19
Speaker 1: and as we're doing an investigation, she's still being abused.
16:27
Speaker 8: There's victims that we have never identified. But you can't
16:33
Speaker 8: give up. If we're not gonna do it, who's gonna
16:36
Speaker 8: do it. Eventually, you're going to get something that will
16:40
Speaker 8: get you there.
16:52
Speaker 1: I can remember clear as day we were talking about,
16:56
Speaker 1: you know, he's been very careful and he's taking things
17:00
Speaker 1: out of the pictures that you know, he feels would
17:02
Speaker 1: help identify the girl and locator and everything else. But
17:06
Speaker 1: the question at that point was like, what what can't
17:13
Speaker 1: you change? Clothing can change, bedding can change. All these
17:18
Speaker 1: things can change, But is there something that can't change?
17:21
Speaker 1: And that's how we came to look at the bricks.
17:27
Speaker 8: How often do you see an exposed brick wall inside
17:31
Speaker 8: of a child's bedroom?
17:35
Speaker 1: So I started just googling bricks and it wasn't too
17:39
Speaker 1: many searches that I found the Brick Industry Association. So
17:43
Speaker 1: I called I just there was a number on there
17:45
Speaker 1: in Virginia and I said, hey, you know, my name
17:48
Speaker 1: is Greg Squire. Worked for the Homeland Security and you
17:50
Speaker 1: know we're working a case of a missing girl. And
17:53
Speaker 1: the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like,
17:56
Speaker 1: how can the brick industry help? I said, well, I
18:00
Speaker 1: have a picture. I want to know if somebody can
18:03
Speaker 1: tell me something about these bricks. She said, we have
18:06
Speaker 1: brick experts all over the country. We can share it
18:09
Speaker 1: with our distribution list. And we were wrapping things up
18:13
Speaker 1: for the day and I don't think I was even
18:15
Speaker 1: at the car before I started getting emails. And I
18:19
Speaker 1: think we all kind of felt like that rush of
18:22
Speaker 1: adrenaline was that, all of a sudden, maybe something could
18:26
Speaker 1: come of this.
18:36
Speaker 9: I worked for the Acme Brick Company. I've been to
18:40
Speaker 9: sale since eighty one. Over the years, I would say
18:43
Speaker 9: I've sold an excess of three hundred specific colors and
18:48
Speaker 9: sizes and styles or bricks. That day, I was sitting
18:52
Speaker 9: at my desk doing my normal probably paperwork or report
18:56
Speaker 9: or something for corporate and it popped up in my
18:59
Speaker 9: inbox and I read the email and I knew exactly
19:02
Speaker 9: what the brick was.
19:05
Speaker 1: I noticed that the brick was a.
19:06
Speaker 9: Very pink cast brick and it had a little bit
19:09
Speaker 9: of a charcoal overlay on it. It was a modular
19:11
Speaker 9: eight inch brick and it was square edged. Immediately made
19:15
Speaker 9: the brick pop out to me that it was a
19:18
Speaker 9: flaming animal. We made that brick from the late sixties
19:22
Speaker 9: through about the middle part of the eighties, and I
19:26
Speaker 9: had sold millions of brick from that plant. So I
19:29
Speaker 9: emailed Agent Square.
19:32
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, this is great, and so in my mind,
19:36
Speaker 1: I'm going, well, you know, would you have sales records
19:41
Speaker 1: of something like that. It's like, we've been selling this
19:44
Speaker 1: brick since the seventies. Then it's all just a pile
19:47
Speaker 1: of some notes and stuff like that. And I was like,
19:50
Speaker 1: and it kind of took the steam out of me
19:52
Speaker 1: a little bit. And he says, I think he called
19:55
Speaker 1: me son. He says, hey, you know what bricks are?
20:00
Speaker 1: And I'm like you got me, sir, I don't know.
20:04
Speaker 1: He goes, bricks are heavy.
20:10
Speaker 9: What I explained to Greg was that brick are heavy,
20:13
Speaker 9: and we can only haul about ten thousand to a truck,
20:15
Speaker 9: so we're not transporting bricks typically all the way across
20:19
Speaker 9: the country.
20:21
Speaker 1: So don't be looking way way out.
20:22
Speaker 9: You need to be looking in this smaller area.
20:27
Speaker 1: He says that brick didn't travel fifty miles out of
20:31
Speaker 1: this plant. What Like, I was so excited at that point.
20:39
Speaker 9: They were looking in twenty nine different states, and it
20:41
Speaker 9: was a needle in a haystack that narrowed it down
20:44
Speaker 9: to possibly one state, one city.
20:47
Speaker 1: We have an extremely small area to look in.
20:50
Speaker 8: Now we're able to take the list from the furniture manufacturer.
20:56
Speaker 8: Just draw radius around this brick factory and.
20:59
Speaker 1: See who in that radius. He riddled down this ten
21:05
Speaker 1: thousand plus list to probably forty to fifty people. So
21:09
Speaker 1: we thought we had a fairly good shot if we
21:11
Speaker 1: looked through social media that somebody on that list might
21:16
Speaker 1: have a picture of Lucy on their page. And probably
21:20
Speaker 1: by nine am we were flipping through social media pages
21:25
Speaker 1: and there was Lucy right in front of us. Couldn't
21:30
Speaker 1: believe it. Nine months of looking and we're sitting there
21:35
Speaker 1: staring at her, and we all looked and said, one
21:38
Speaker 1: hundred percent, this is her, one hundred percent.
21:44
Speaker 8: We literally started with a picture that could have started
21:47
Speaker 8: anywhere in the world, and then we narrowed it down
21:49
Speaker 8: to one house.
21:52
Speaker 1: That was a good feeling. They had also figured out
21:56
Speaker 1: that living in the house was the mother's boy friend,
22:00
Speaker 1: and that that was a convicted sex offender living there.
22:05
Speaker 1: I mean at that point it's ten or eleven am.
22:09
Speaker 1: And our first thought was, how do we get there
22:13
Speaker 1: before she's home from school and eliminate the chance of
22:19
Speaker 1: him having access to her even one more time? And
22:23
Speaker 1: by four o'clock, our whole team was in that house,
22:27
Speaker 1: safeguarded Lucy at start the interview process, and by five
22:34
Speaker 1: o'clock the suspect was in custody.
22:40
Speaker 9: I got an email saying we found her. This little
22:43
Speaker 9: girl now is safe and out of harms away. My
22:48
Speaker 9: wife and I have been foster parents for over twenty years.
22:51
Speaker 9: We've had over one hundred and fifty different children in
22:53
Speaker 9: our home. We've adopted three, so doing that over those years,
22:58
Speaker 9: we have a lot of children in our home that
23:01
Speaker 9: were abused, that were neglected, both physical and sexual abused,
23:07
Speaker 9: and it leaves a mark on you, leaves on a
23:10
Speaker 9: mark on your psyche that that stays with you. What
23:17
Speaker 9: they do day in and day out, and what they
23:19
Speaker 9: see is a magnification of one hundreds of times of
23:24
Speaker 9: what I've seen or had to deal with, So I
23:29
Speaker 9: can't imagine what they have to take home with them
23:31
Speaker 9: at night.
23:55
Speaker 1: After the investigation, Pete and I really began and to
24:00
Speaker 1: focus and become dedicated to dark web activity.
24:06
Speaker 8: The use of the dark Web just expanded, just exploded.
24:11
Speaker 8: The number of users and the number of outlets was
24:14
Speaker 8: just dramatic increase.
24:17
Speaker 1: That was our first glimpse of them creating forum based websites.
24:23
Speaker 1: Those sites just look like a regular forum of people
24:27
Speaker 1: who all had a shared interest. People can belong to
24:30
Speaker 1: woodworking forums and gun forums and car forums. The structure
24:35
Speaker 1: is exactly the same, but for the content. They trade
24:41
Speaker 1: child abuse material all through the day, in all through
24:45
Speaker 1: the night. Each site kind of has their own niche.
24:49
Speaker 1: So this might be only boys, this might be only girls,
24:53
Speaker 1: or only hardcore. You build a community around it, and
24:58
Speaker 1: you quickly find out that there aren't just ones and
25:02
Speaker 1: twos of guys interested in this, but there's thousands, and
25:07
Speaker 1: it just becomes a breeding ground for who can be
25:11
Speaker 1: the more shocking person, who can take things to the
25:16
Speaker 1: next level. We saw the abuse of children getting younger
25:21
Speaker 1: and getting more violent. Probably it was out there, you know,
25:25
Speaker 1: ten years ago, but now we saw it all in
25:28
Speaker 1: one place. And with this anonymous network, they were hiding nothing.
25:36
Speaker 1: They felt free to say whatever they wanted, and that's frightening.
25:50
Speaker 1: We needed to be in there. We needed to try
25:52
Speaker 1: to find out how we could infiltrate these networks, how
25:56
Speaker 1: we could disrupt them, what could be done take on
26:01
Speaker 1: a group of one hundred thousand guys with the resources
26:06
Speaker 1: we had, which you know, to this day remained very small.
26:12
Speaker 1: This was really the beginning of having dedicated online undercover
26:18
Speaker 1: officers that would function full time being part of these communities.
26:26
Speaker 8: A lot of undercover work, which Greg took the lion's share.
26:30
Speaker 8: Of being able to be accepted by such a group
26:34
Speaker 8: is a pretty heavy task.
26:38
Speaker 1: It's like going undercover with the Bob or something. Face
26:43
Speaker 1: to face undercover. There's a lot written about that, people
26:48
Speaker 1: going into gangs and going into doing these really deep
26:52
Speaker 1: undercover roles, but this was brand new. You know, we
26:56
Speaker 1: were entering and working in a borderless environment that was
27:04
Speaker 1: operating twenty four hours a day, we realized the need
27:10
Speaker 1: for some help.
27:55
Speaker 10: I remember my first investigation, my first rule, my first
27:59
Speaker 10: past in this new job, was watching several hours of
28:09
Speaker 10: a kid being raped in a hard way.
28:14
Speaker 11: It was.
28:16
Speaker 10: Really difficult for me, and it changed me as a person,
28:22
Speaker 10: as a man, as a father.
28:24
Speaker 6: It changed me.
28:25
Speaker 3: And that's when Jeff Boy's Gap came online.
28:28
Speaker 1: I think that's the first time we see the Russian sort.
28:31
Speaker 10: Of We established a network with different investigators, and it's
28:35
Speaker 10: easy to send a message to someone like.
28:38
Speaker 6: Greg and all the other Gregs that I know around
28:41
Speaker 6: the world. It takes a network to defeat another network.
28:50
Speaker 1: Globally, we were all trying to find our way, trying
28:53
Speaker 1: to find a strategy so that we were focusing on
28:58
Speaker 1: the most violent offenders, the most agerous offenders. On twenty fifteen,
29:05
Speaker 1: a dark website opened up called baby Heart.
29:10
Speaker 10: Baby Heart was a board on the Darknet dedicated to
29:14
Speaker 10: babies and toddlers, pictures and movies of babies and toddlers
29:17
Speaker 10: being abused. Content the pictures with babies was terrible.
29:24
Speaker 1: A guy named Twinkle was the self professed operator of
29:27
Speaker 1: the site. Naturally, he became a person of great interest
29:32
Speaker 1: to all of us. He was not just the administrator,
29:35
Speaker 1: but a major contributor.
29:37
Speaker 10: Twincoln was the worst person on the Darknet regarding the
29:40
Speaker 10: crime of child abuse.
29:43
Speaker 1: And there was times when he was contributing almost an
29:47
Speaker 1: unbelievable amount of material. I think it was somewhere between
29:51
Speaker 1: twelve and fifteen children at that point that we could
29:54
Speaker 1: attribute to this one guy. And to watch somebody abuse
30:02
Speaker 1: rape a baby, there's nothing human about.
30:08
Speaker 10: It, okay man Tannish, passwords, ra Simpromasasio.
30:13
Speaker 1: That became an instant focus for our online under cover work.
30:19
Speaker 10: We started to work with the interval online security from
30:22
Speaker 10: the United States, Australia, England, Spain.
30:25
Speaker 6: Friends. Everybody was chasing Twinkle.
30:30
Speaker 1: Baby Heart went from a couple thousand to one hundred
30:34
Speaker 1: thousand members, but trying to work on the identification of
30:37
Speaker 1: Twinkle was difficult. The paranoia in this community is ever present.
30:44
Speaker 1: There really is no letting your guard down.
30:48
Speaker 10: Tincoln used several maneuvers to cover the.
30:52
Speaker 6: Tracks on the Darknet.
30:56
Speaker 10: It was writing in different languages like Spanish, Portuguese, English.
31:04
Speaker 6: In those chats that were.
31:07
Speaker 10: Written in English, it used an expression he said, it
31:13
Speaker 10: cost me the eyes of my face.
31:15
Speaker 6: It's a Portuguese expression. It's not an expression that you
31:19
Speaker 6: can use in English. It was the first move about
31:23
Speaker 6: the nationality of Dwinkle.
31:29
Speaker 1: Our Brazilian partners had arrested a guy that had had
31:34
Speaker 1: a relationship online with Twinkle.
31:38
Speaker 10: When this guy was arrested, they seized a lot of
31:41
Speaker 10: evidence during a house sarch.
31:43
Speaker 1: What they found was a link to a Facebook page
31:48
Speaker 1: in Portugal. That is what in fact broke over the case.
31:57
Speaker 1: Some of the pictures that we had of Twinkle abuse
32:00
Speaker 1: and the children, we could see his hand and his
32:03
Speaker 1: hand had a skin condition, and once we started that
32:08
Speaker 1: deep dive on that page, we saw a few pictures
32:12
Speaker 1: of that individual's hand.
32:15
Speaker 6: The pattern, the color of the skin. We had a match.
32:22
Speaker 1: We felt comfortable enough to get a team together to
32:25
Speaker 1: head down to Portugal.
32:27
Speaker 10: Greg was part of the team that was supporting us
32:31
Speaker 10: with this knowledge, with his experience dealing with this kind
32:35
Speaker 10: of offenders. On our way to Twinkle's place, it was
32:55
Speaker 10: possible to fill the tension inside the car. It was
33:02
Speaker 10: six in the morning. I remembered my heart like beating
33:08
Speaker 10: a lot. My main concern it was finding and seizing
33:14
Speaker 10: is our drives because we are not talking about files,
33:20
Speaker 10: We are not talking about digital evidence. We are talking
33:24
Speaker 10: about victims.
33:28
Speaker 1: We approached his residence, pretty country road, farms here and there,
33:36
Speaker 1: and Twinkles house was on the right hand side. As
33:39
Speaker 1: we approached a place you would pass by and heartbeat,
33:45
Speaker 1: we stopped the car. Everybody jumped out of the car.
33:51
Speaker 1: We saw the door and it was the perfect time
33:54
Speaker 1: to enter. In the second room on the right, we
34:00
Speaker 1: found twink On. Twink On was in his bed.
34:05
Speaker 10: Laying with the two kids, around five years In the
34:09
Speaker 10: time we grabbed twink On, he was taking away from
34:16
Speaker 10: the kids to a different room.
34:21
Speaker 6: I remember his face. He was surprised.
34:27
Speaker 10: You can imagine a skinny guy around twenty five twenty
34:32
Speaker 10: six years old, scared and you know, in a certain
34:38
Speaker 10: way freshile like these guys that have a perfect world
34:44
Speaker 10: in the darknet, but in real life they are not
34:50
Speaker 10: that strong. They are weak persons. That's why they do
34:53
Speaker 10: this to the victims, because they are weak.
35:01
Speaker 1: We started collecting evidence inside the house, pretty spartan living
35:07
Speaker 1: quarters despite the size of it all. Twinkle was pretty
35:13
Speaker 1: agreeable to talk to us, to sit next to me
35:16
Speaker 1: and showing me his sight but the forensic team had
35:20
Speaker 1: isolated one desktop computer that they felt was the primary
35:25
Speaker 1: The problem was the hard drive was gone.
35:32
Speaker 10: I asked him, where is the hard drive, and he
35:36
Speaker 10: told me he's not in here.
35:38
Speaker 6: Follow me. It was entering deeper in the bushes.
35:58
Speaker 10: I said to him, slowly, walk slowly, because we didn't
36:03
Speaker 10: know if someone was hidden in here to support him,
36:07
Speaker 10: or if there was something that he can use against us.
36:14
Speaker 10: I told him, don't try to escape, because we will
36:18
Speaker 10: chase you.
36:24
Speaker 6: And then around here we made a turn to the right,
36:32
Speaker 6: he pointed.
36:44
Speaker 10: He grabbed a plastic bag with the hard drives inside.
36:52
Speaker 10: I didn't believe that he was hidden buried here in
36:58
Speaker 10: the middle of nothing and really far away from his home.
37:05
Speaker 1: Question.
37:07
Speaker 10: So it was buried a couple of hours before we arrived.
37:18
Speaker 10: He abused the kids that were in his bed with him,
37:23
Speaker 10: and he took some pictures, made some movies, and restored
37:28
Speaker 10: everything on the on the hard drive. And they came
37:32
Speaker 10: here in the middle of the night and buried again
37:37
Speaker 10: the hard drives.
37:44
Speaker 1: As the search continued and the questions were being asked,
37:48
Speaker 1: a twinkle we went out to look at his car,
37:51
Speaker 1: and when we opened the trunk of the car looked
37:54
Speaker 1: like Twinkles leaving for the weekend. There was some kids
37:58
Speaker 1: toys like some pool toys in the car cameras, there
38:02
Speaker 1: was handcuffs, sex toys, And what he ended up admitting
38:08
Speaker 1: was that he had a weekend planned and that he
38:12
Speaker 1: was leaving that morning to go meet another offender in
38:19
Speaker 1: that they had organized this weekend to bring each other's
38:24
Speaker 1: children to this airbnb to have a weekend of abusing
38:31
Speaker 1: all the kids together. Now, this was completely completely new
38:39
Speaker 1: to me and everybody that was there, you know, there
38:42
Speaker 1: weren't There was a pretty experienced group there and this
38:45
Speaker 1: was certainly the first time for all of us to go.
38:50
Speaker 1: You know, they had a planned weekend to you know,
38:56
Speaker 1: sexually abuse babies. You know, so the team sort of
39:03
Speaker 1: got a plan together. I think it was about an
39:05
Speaker 1: hour away. The guy showed up pretty much on time.
39:11
Speaker 1: The primary police officers went and removed him from the vehicle,
39:16
Speaker 1: and when they looked in the back, his two kids were.
39:19
Speaker 6: In the back.
39:21
Speaker 1: He decided to start confessing. Shortly thereafter told us he
39:27
Speaker 1: was the one that they called the forgotten.
39:38
Speaker 6: Imanity is changing.
39:41
Speaker 10: You can see the sexuality is changing, and the Internet
39:46
Speaker 10: is increasing this type of crime because we always had
39:52
Speaker 10: sexual offenders, but now we have a specific part of
40:00
Speaker 10: the society that wants to share with the others the
40:04
Speaker 10: abuses that they commit and sharing with the rest of
40:08
Speaker 10: the community that you can see what I have done
40:12
Speaker 10: to these kids, and I cannot understand this.
40:19
Speaker 1: Twinko's material was brutal to look at and equally brutal
40:24
Speaker 1: to listen to. Any video, especially with audio of the
40:35
Speaker 1: infant abuses. The hardest stuff to watch.
40:43
Speaker 10: Someone else from another country dealing with this crime. You
40:47
Speaker 10: know that that person have the same issues that you have,
40:52
Speaker 10: and Greg have that issues for sure, because it's too much.
40:58
Speaker 6: It's too much every day, every day.
41:02
Speaker 10: It's not a bad week or a bad day at
41:06
Speaker 10: the office, it's a bad life.
41:13
Speaker 1: The problem is the availability of it. Right if I'm
41:17
Speaker 1: an undercover gang guy, like I have to put on
41:21
Speaker 1: my like you have to like kind of get ready, right,
41:25
Speaker 1: Like there's there's a there's a ritual to it, right
41:29
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't have that barrier. So all I
41:33
Speaker 1: have to do is turn on my computer and I'm
41:35
Speaker 1: that other person. And each time you flip open the laptop,
41:42
Speaker 1: you're in that world and you're having conversations with people
41:46
Speaker 1: about just the most horrible stuff, and then you can
41:54
Speaker 1: close the laptop and they got to get to the game.
42:00
Speaker 12: You didn't yet with men.
42:07
Speaker 1: So in a matter of moments, you can go from
42:11
Speaker 1: really really evil human to cheering for your kid at
42:17
Speaker 1: their game or going to their school, or going to
42:21
Speaker 1: get ice cream and watch some guy hug his daughter
42:24
Speaker 1: and be like, you know, it's it certainly came with
42:31
Speaker 1: some collateral that we didn't see in the beginning.
42:43
Speaker 6: I go to some special places.
42:49
Speaker 10: When I came there, I can switch off my mind
42:53
Speaker 10: from the daily job, from the everything that I saw
42:58
Speaker 10: during the day, and it's easy to be a different person,
43:02
Speaker 10: or at last to try to be a different person,
43:07
Speaker 10: because in the end, the ghosts, they will always be.
43:14
Speaker 1: In our minds.
43:15
Speaker 10: It's impossible to send them away.
43:20
Speaker 13: The challenge is living with them.
43:31
Speaker 14: Oh sorry, ah, yes, yeah, yeah, okay.
43:58
Speaker 11: I'm back.
44:06
Speaker 1: After the arrest of Twinkle, we thought maybe at least
44:10
Speaker 1: it would give pause to Baby Heart. You know, that
44:13
Speaker 1: was the objective, right to take this kind of site offline.
44:17
Speaker 1: But when we asked Twinkle, how do we take it down?
44:20
Speaker 1: How do we shut it down? I mean, I can't
44:23
Speaker 1: do that you know that's Lubasa. And so we pressed
44:27
Speaker 1: him a little bit, you know who's Lubosa, And you know,
44:29
Speaker 1: he just said, I just know him as Lubasa. He's
44:32
Speaker 1: not a guy who talks a lot. He just is
44:35
Speaker 1: the big boss Lubosa. His name had been around for
44:41
Speaker 1: a number of years. We knew Lubasa to have up
44:46
Speaker 1: to six different sites kind of under his overall control,
44:50
Speaker 1: maybe half a million users. We had been compiling little
44:55
Speaker 1: bits and pieces on him to build kind of a
44:57
Speaker 1: dossier up through that, he started to get closer and
45:01
Speaker 1: closer to him. The break came from another agency and
45:06
Speaker 1: that they came to the working group and said, hey, listen,
45:09
Speaker 1: you know, we think we know who it is. We
45:17
Speaker 1: ended up going to Brazil. We flew down there with
45:21
Speaker 1: maybe ten or twelve people, the US law enforcement folks
45:24
Speaker 1: from the UK. I was there to offer an undercover's
45:28
Speaker 1: viewpoint on how the sites were operated.
45:32
Speaker 15: I think sid always and on Shiggolubas Kisinkus, my artist forums, dajipueb,
45:42
Speaker 15: I think Chatava, Awunz, mises Nesi, Vishiga song Helsen in
45:47
Speaker 15: numerous jas. They should say Nomilubasa was.
45:54
Speaker 1: On a whole other level. If we get to him,
45:58
Speaker 1: we would have access to whatever is happening for him
46:01
Speaker 1: as kind of overlords. It would give us, for the
46:05
Speaker 1: first time a glance from the top down.
46:19
Speaker 11: You think.
46:33
Speaker 6: It's a ban.
46:37
Speaker 1: The boss was asleep when they went in. They roused him, uh,
46:41
Speaker 1: and he was a little uncooperative in the beginning was what.
46:46
Speaker 14: Does a question?
46:50
Speaker 16: These are hell of some sim don't do that, but
46:54
Speaker 16: get that's a nice what does he.
47:00
Speaker 1: He was a young guy, you know, under thirty years old.
47:04
Speaker 1: The type of person we are arresting are now getting
47:08
Speaker 1: younger and younger. You know, they grew up with the phone,
47:17
Speaker 1: They grew up with a laptop. They grew up with
47:19
Speaker 1: a computer more often working in the IT field, web developer,
47:25
Speaker 1: software engineer. I mean that's a total that's a skill
47:29
Speaker 1: set that we never saw even ten years ago. They
47:33
Speaker 1: spend forty fifty sixty hours online. This was life for
47:38
Speaker 1: this guy. Don't you sick?
47:42
Speaker 16: Suchiche Nivogi dot ape.
47:52
Speaker 12: Diffuse Scrivi think he's sugar.
47:56
Speaker 1: Shiita on the dark web. Blosso was a master puppeteer,
48:02
Speaker 1: sort of say, But in reality is day to day
48:06
Speaker 1: life somebody living in basically the squalor it moved in
48:11
Speaker 1: cousin family, and yet here's this couple of thousand dollars
48:16
Speaker 1: machine running the abuse of ten thousand or more you know,
48:24
Speaker 1: child victims Hui.
48:33
Speaker 6: We call it's a person.
48:50
Speaker 17: Did you fish?
49:16
Speaker 6: Moving out?
49:23
Speaker 1: Thousands of leads were sent out to locate and arrest
49:28
Speaker 1: individuals who had been part of the boss's network. No
49:34
Speaker 1: individuals on his sites, they're viewing child abuse material and
49:43
Speaker 1: even if that person has not had their hands on children.
49:48
Speaker 1: They are the reason the sites exist. They're causing the demand,
49:52
Speaker 1: they're encouraging those who have access. They are as big
49:57
Speaker 1: a part of the problem byving others to commit offenses
50:02
Speaker 1: on their own children. These offenders know everything about security,
50:08
Speaker 1: They are technically savvy, and they're always going to be
50:13
Speaker 1: making changes to try to do law enforcement. But thanks
50:17
Speaker 1: to our online under cover work, we were getting things
50:20
Speaker 1: done that years before you wouldn't have thought possible. Making
50:25
Speaker 1: arrests and you know, just making a huge difference. You know,
50:29
Speaker 1: that's an adrenaline rush that it's hard to match. You know,
50:41
Speaker 1: at that point, my kids were a bit older, and
50:43
Speaker 1: you know, very independent, very successful young people, and you
50:47
Speaker 1: know that almost enables you to push harder. Like I
50:51
Speaker 1: work ten hours today, I bet I can work twelve.
50:56
Speaker 1: I bet if I get up at three this morning,
50:59
Speaker 1: I can surprise somebody online and I can get something
51:01
Speaker 1: else done. You just push yourself and push yourself and
51:06
Speaker 1: push yourself, and you're rewarded because that shit works. It
51:10
Speaker 1: is effective. But meanwhile, personally, you know you're kind of
51:21
Speaker 1: losing Who was I Who's Greg? I don't I don't
51:29
Speaker 1: even know what he likes to do. All of your
51:36
Speaker 1: friends all during the day, they're criminals, you know, they're pedophiles.
51:41
Speaker 1: All they do is talk about the most horrific things
51:45
Speaker 1: all day long. And when that's over, close laptop and
51:52
Speaker 1: you look around and it's just you. It was easy
52:04
Speaker 1: at the time, you know, to pick up the glass
52:06
Speaker 1: or a wall or whatever it was, and you don't
52:10
Speaker 1: think about you. When you're having some drinks, you know,
52:14
Speaker 1: it's easy just to go. All right. The sooner tomorrow starts,
52:19
Speaker 1: the better off I am, because tomorrow I get back
52:22
Speaker 1: to work. You know, I definitely had a time when
52:28
Speaker 1: alcohol was a bigger part of my life than it
52:31
Speaker 1: should have been. Numbing yourself for a number of hours
52:37
Speaker 1: is not a solution.
52:43
Speaker 8: We had been running at a heavy pace. It was
52:47
Speaker 8: no other focus than the job. It's very easy to
52:51
Speaker 8: go to some dark places.
52:52
Speaker 1: I think he's my best friend, you know, and your
52:57
Speaker 1: best friends can see things that others can't, and they
53:00
Speaker 1: can see those little changes. And we had a talk,
53:03
Speaker 1: or maybe a dozen talks. I think I noticed things that.
53:09
Speaker 8: Were obviously affecting him, definitely unfocused, anger at times, that
53:16
Speaker 8: seemed out of place, uncharacteristic.
53:20
Speaker 1: It's just turned into like turned darker. I guess.
53:29
Speaker 8: It's hard when the thing that brings you so much
53:32
Speaker 8: energy and drive is also the thing that's like slowly
53:38
Speaker 8: destroying you.
53:44
Speaker 1: Not too long after, I got divorced, and just a
53:49
Speaker 1: lot of things were happening, you know, in my own headspace.
53:54
Speaker 1: I think the hardest part of that was, I guess
53:58
Speaker 1: admitting it. And I remember calling up my sister Robin.
54:05
Speaker 1: We went out into the backyard of where I was living,
54:07
Speaker 1: and we sat there, and it took me a good
54:12
Speaker 1: four or five minutes to say, you know, I think
54:19
Speaker 1: I think I'm suffering from from pretty bad depression. I
54:26
Speaker 1: think I was ashamed, you know, I think I felt
54:28
Speaker 1: shame that I had kind of succumbed to that You're
54:31
Speaker 1: supposed to be bulletproof, right. You work in a space
54:34
Speaker 1: where horrible things happen every day and you need to
54:39
Speaker 1: stand resolute every day and just be you know, be
54:43
Speaker 1: tough for whatever whatever we tell ourselves. And that was
54:49
Speaker 1: a big, a big step in I think moving forward.
54:54
Speaker 1: I stopped drinking at that point, mostly out of fear.
55:03
Speaker 1: I think my birthday was the last day I had
55:08
Speaker 1: a drink that year, and I just I had actually
55:13
Speaker 1: opened a beer and I remember having a few SIPs
55:18
Speaker 1: of it and then just putting it down and that
55:21
Speaker 1: was it for two full years. I just that was that,
55:27
Speaker 1: and I needed to try to focus on getting my
55:31
Speaker 1: head straight. And a lot of that was from my kids.
55:40
Speaker 1: You know. I didn't ever want to be, you know,
55:51
Speaker 1: someone I guess that you know, they weren't proud of. Yeah,
56:00
Speaker 1: that was a lot of my motivation to get started
56:03
Speaker 1: to get better. He said, you are fearful. Yeah, what
56:21
Speaker 1: do you mean suicide? I just didn't want to. I
56:30
Speaker 1: didn't want to have those thoughts anymore.
56:32
Speaker 6: You know.
56:34
Speaker 1: I didn't want to hide from the pain. I didn't
56:37
Speaker 1: want to run from the pain.
56:42
Speaker 14: I just.
56:44
Speaker 1: I didn't want to leave them behind, you know, I
56:46
Speaker 1: didn't want to end things that way because I wasn't winning,
56:53
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, I wasn't winning by myself.
56:55
Speaker 1: It just wasn't It just wasn't gonna happen. It wasn't
56:57
Speaker 1: gonna be a uh a fight that I was going
57:01
Speaker 1: to win. And if I didn't, if I didn't lean
57:07
Speaker 1: reach out and talk to to Robin, talk to talk
57:10
Speaker 1: to Pete, you know, maybe be in a bad place
57:20
Speaker 1: and I just didn't want to be there. It is
57:31
Speaker 1: funny to think about like kind of diving in with
57:33
Speaker 1: the with the you know, the case of looking at
57:36
Speaker 1: the one am age and then Pete kind of stepped
57:39
Speaker 1: in where I needed them to. You know, I thank him.
57:42
Speaker 1: I'll always thank him for getting me away from a
57:45
Speaker 1: place that was kind of dangerous. And I feel very
57:50
Speaker 1: very fortunate to work with all my friends across the
57:53
Speaker 1: globe and to have them to lean on and say,
57:56
Speaker 1: hey man, it's it's okay.
58:15
Speaker 17: Yapomo Piero god a robot sure districting about usual in
58:24
Speaker 17: Agda jen do a treaty. Uh had creation stayani an
58:35
Speaker 17: am i uh vim Sir Patrice Deli mirro Remo was
58:51
Speaker 17: nat and tell Peminia Company might PROSTA suppose law but
58:57
Speaker 17: no arena, nostalknas.
59:01
Speaker 5: SYMN.
59:12
Speaker 1: One of the worst guys that was not captured after
59:15
Speaker 1: the Boss's arrest was a user that went by LBO
59:20
Speaker 1: or lover boy only. And you know, he and I
59:24
Speaker 1: had had interactions over the years. He was a boy lover.
59:28
Speaker 1: He always loved things more violent, more on the rough
59:32
Speaker 1: side of things, a lot of rape, bondage, things like
59:35
Speaker 1: that than even other users were going, you know, what's
59:40
Speaker 1: wrong with this guy? You know, he's talking about really
59:43
Speaker 1: really violent and extreme things. LBU got the attention of
59:52
Speaker 1: the community right around November eleven. He was making a
59:59
Speaker 1: claim that he he had kidnapped a boy and I
1:00:05
Speaker 1: was online that day and had read some of the
1:00:07
Speaker 1: comments around it, and you know, we read those with
1:00:11
Speaker 1: a grain of salt. It's not uncommon for users to
1:00:15
Speaker 1: talk that way and to get kind of go down
1:00:17
Speaker 1: those paths. And LBO, you know, he was asked, you know, like, yeah,
1:00:22
Speaker 1: I'm sure you did this, you know, stopped around, you know,
1:00:27
Speaker 1: it's not funny or whatever whatever the reactions were. But
1:00:31
Speaker 1: LBO took it upon himself to provide a proof of
1:00:34
Speaker 1: life picture. And this is a boy who's clearly in distress.
1:00:43
Speaker 1: I can see his face clear as day, blonde haired boy.
1:00:47
Speaker 1: That really made my heart start to race. We knew
1:00:53
Speaker 1: Lbo to speak English and Russian. Probably more likely you
1:00:57
Speaker 1: know somebody from Russia or of maybe the Ukraine or
1:01:01
Speaker 1: something to that effect. There was no doubt in my
1:01:03
Speaker 1: mind who you know who I was going to reach
1:01:06
Speaker 1: out to, like straight away.
1:01:13
Speaker 5: A process.
1:01:15
Speaker 17: By one Trivoga. Yeah, we also ena snatch the Grega.
1:01:24
Speaker 1: I gave him a description of the boy. I said,
1:01:27
Speaker 1: you know, maybe six seven years old, blonde hair. I
1:01:30
Speaker 1: would know who he is if he's in fact you
1:01:33
Speaker 1: know a kid that's that's pissing.
1:01:44
Speaker 5: That's a question.
1:01:45
Speaker 17: Because all photographyacha photography pecial clud the district and the
1:01:54
Speaker 17: proposal he should such as vers siem nature. So it's
1:02:01
Speaker 17: always integradda politics, hostibile telephone, well known coat, Golia store.
1:02:14
Speaker 5: Propal, pretty easiest upsta and stuff.
1:02:18
Speaker 1: Uh.
1:02:18
Speaker 5: You seen similarly in that rachelsa Damus cola what abus
1:02:32
Speaker 5: NaSTA post the native schooler, he said, it's.
1:02:38
Speaker 10: Dolph.
1:02:42
Speaker 5: We Provlinius would see a start that you would be partial,
1:02:51
Speaker 5: will see to this this this shoe always called the
1:03:04
Speaker 5: only shoot at the scan.
1:03:07
Speaker 18: She term said, yeah, roses NonStop ideas more three one
1:03:16
Speaker 18: pacietally criminalist, the open kim.
1:03:22
Speaker 6: Lock.
1:03:26
Speaker 18: You pad, there's.
1:03:39
Speaker 1: A real boy missing. The description lines up, timing lines up,
1:03:45
Speaker 1: and you just go, Holy, this boy is somewhere with
1:03:50
Speaker 1: this monster, the boy that had been missing for over
1:03:55
Speaker 1: fifty days at that point. It's a terrifying thought. Levonn
1:04:03
Speaker 1: had told us that they had called off the search
1:04:05
Speaker 1: October eleventh, and that they were just looking for for
1:04:09
Speaker 1: the boy's body. And you know, now we had called,
1:04:12
Speaker 1: you know, relatively out of the blue and said, you know,
1:04:15
Speaker 1: we think he's alive. While we breathed life into the
1:04:19
Speaker 1: investigation there, we also knew just how dangerous LBO was
1:04:26
Speaker 1: and that was nerve wracking for me and I think
1:04:36
Speaker 1: for everybody was the incredible pressure to try to find
1:04:40
Speaker 1: him as fast as possible.
1:04:47
Speaker 17: That's she's leaving us Toilina. I'm stopping Milona tonight us
1:04:52
Speaker 17: More so, you.
1:04:54
Speaker 1: Know, Levon doesn't work dark web cases. He's a street cup,
1:04:57
Speaker 1: you know, he's boots on the ground kind of guy.
1:05:00
Speaker 1: We knew we were going to need some serious resources
1:05:03
Speaker 1: to get this done, and you know, those resources certainly
1:05:06
Speaker 1: included large data sets large databases that Interpol holds. And
1:05:12
Speaker 1: you know, one of my favorite people in the world
1:05:14
Speaker 1: is Gordona.
1:05:18
Speaker 19: I received message from Greg asking me for help. I
1:05:24
Speaker 19: know Greg long time, we work together Greg.
1:05:29
Speaker 11: Now that I speak Russian.
1:05:32
Speaker 1: Gordona is an analyst and has worked you know, many
1:05:37
Speaker 1: many child abuse cases in the past. It was too
1:05:41
Speaker 1: easy to pick up the phone and get her involved.
1:05:44
Speaker 3: Can you tell me what information you had to start.
1:05:49
Speaker 11: With love it boy? Only lbo user name.
1:05:56
Speaker 19: I have only user name information that this user name
1:06:03
Speaker 19: may be kidnap the boy. I start working on this
1:06:10
Speaker 19: case and nothing else except the work. Everything disappeared because
1:06:19
Speaker 19: I know that the probably life of this kid is
1:06:24
Speaker 19: in our hands. I check our database and interval. We
1:06:31
Speaker 19: have a huge amount of digital files shared by Brazilian
1:06:36
Speaker 19: police when they arrest Lubasa, and I found more than
1:06:43
Speaker 19: thirteen thousand digital files connected with lever boiling for those
1:06:49
Speaker 19: links messages post on forums. So I was reading all
1:06:55
Speaker 19: the comments, searching anything that can lead us to this guy.
1:07:03
Speaker 5: Yeah, alys it in.
1:07:05
Speaker 17: Four months, so ya. So it's just a little salladium.
1:07:12
Speaker 1: You know, from an undercover perspective, a lot of our
1:07:15
Speaker 1: job was doing kind of a round the clock observation,
1:07:18
Speaker 1: observe the community and see what occurred. We were in
1:07:23
Speaker 1: literal constant contact twenty plus hours a day. I'm not
1:07:27
Speaker 1: sure Godana was even sleeping, to be.
1:07:29
Speaker 11: Honest, all of us was in different time zones.
1:07:33
Speaker 19: But even if it's a night in the US and
1:07:37
Speaker 19: Russia and I sent a message, I get reply immediately.
1:07:40
Speaker 19: So because of that, I realized we are all not sleeping.
1:07:44
Speaker 19: We didn't even think about sleeping.
1:07:47
Speaker 5: Not done as I delayed.
1:07:48
Speaker 17: Yeah, Greg Pastor and Akian no changed about children. Community
1:07:59
Speaker 17: is Gardani.
1:08:01
Speaker 11: I just think we must find him. We must find
1:08:05
Speaker 11: him because he will kill him.
1:08:10
Speaker 1: We weren't under the illusion that LBO would do anything
1:08:15
Speaker 1: but kill this boy. He'd been talking about that stuff
1:08:19
Speaker 1: for years, kidnapping and killing a boy.
1:08:30
Speaker 19: These users, they very care about security. Because of that,
1:08:36
Speaker 19: was very difficult to find him. But they made mistakes
1:08:42
Speaker 19: and we are hunting for these mistakes all the time.
1:08:50
Speaker 1: Gordanna built a profile on this guy and there was
1:08:53
Speaker 1: three little nuggets of information that were really interesting. The
1:08:58
Speaker 1: first one was that LBO seemed to suffer from schizophrenia.
1:09:03
Speaker 1: Now in Russia, people that have diagnosed schizophrenia actually are
1:09:10
Speaker 1: entitled to a pension some compensation every month from the government.
1:09:15
Speaker 1: That would be something that Von and their team could
1:09:18
Speaker 1: look into. The other point that they found was he
1:09:23
Speaker 1: talked quite a bit about his brother's occupation and it
1:09:27
Speaker 1: was an occupation that probably could be checked in databases
1:09:30
Speaker 1: there in Russia. And then the third point was Lbo
1:09:36
Speaker 1: had a conversation with another person about his mother being
1:09:40
Speaker 1: killed in a car accident and actually had a date
1:09:45
Speaker 1: a year rather that that car accident had occurred.
1:09:51
Speaker 17: Starlett excussion partsc pultion in for a month specimis subway.
1:09:56
Speaker 5: He was almost pisk of.
1:09:59
Speaker 17: Being to Patricia nikodriven god Residinia naso Piora usually a
1:10:11
Speaker 17: one mapasan national calagan. Yeah, you put reduce to di
1:10:15
Speaker 17: district in the word brad rabut it patris DeLine set
1:10:23
Speaker 17: new style Sniak Samianish lich nest pull elbow and at
1:10:29
Speaker 17: olandas also a prosily managed relinius that choosed to fuck
1:10:40
Speaker 17: the proper di t what Ani character as a consco
1:10:45
Speaker 17: it's smeartrbonnamim bull posts mid.
1:10:55
Speaker 5: Ubesq primester returns to cool.
1:10:58
Speaker 17: You would best when uh Re met her nose that
1:11:01
Speaker 17: killing after the doorm was a glociering my shoe and
1:11:03
Speaker 17: there I'm stop up the stupid.
1:11:05
Speaker 1: You can get social.
1:11:05
Speaker 17: So it's did you get your list of bar and
1:11:07
Speaker 17: you visual see at the barter at w M chee
1:11:10
Speaker 17: hops h wool shot what.
1:11:39
Speaker 5: Do you read you watch the morning? H Yeah, I'll
1:11:47
Speaker 5: like to find you with do that moming?
1:11:49
Speaker 14: What?
1:11:49
Speaker 7: What what's doing?
1:11:50
Speaker 10: I do?
1:11:51
Speaker 6: I might?
1:11:53
Speaker 10: What do I do?
1:11:55
Speaker 6: Oh?
1:11:56
Speaker 5: Yeah that's what that?
1:12:03
Speaker 1: But that was as.
1:12:10
Speaker 17: God, stop, that's.
1:12:20
Speaker 14: What you.
1:12:29
Speaker 8: Look?
1:12:30
Speaker 6: What this is?
1:12:31
Speaker 5: Accord cheer?
1:12:34
Speaker 1: Is that number straight?
1:12:38
Speaker 17: Eat too proud number straight?
1:12:43
Speaker 3: Margine?
1:12:44
Speaker 16: No, no suka do why black party march?
1:12:49
Speaker 6: What's on it.
1:12:52
Speaker 13: Right there?
1:12:53
Speaker 3: Yeah?
1:12:56
Speaker 1: What's you're like?
1:12:57
Speaker 3: What you mushed down?
1:12:58
Speaker 17: Black as? It's another creak noally announced milchiphon musicals to
1:13:08
Speaker 17: mile Chick.
1:13:19
Speaker 5: Nor kraw but something.
1:13:25
Speaker 1: Armand stop stop?
1:13:36
Speaker 7: You know?
1:13:38
Speaker 17: Yes a trunk panically cheer is oknam rast motion because
1:13:45
Speaker 17: also a couple of midas.
1:14:03
Speaker 5: Yeah, but the show is the only one Ark Fresher ye.
1:14:13
Speaker 17: Had at my mentors room. Yeah, Neli's and not a
1:14:22
Speaker 17: bully swimming? Can you just know it's torquatable radies left
1:14:30
Speaker 17: Maglia told what that is said? If she is the
1:14:32
Speaker 17: right slaws, He's yes, Tony is Raser, he is steal
1:14:37
Speaker 17: Greg Gardan.
1:14:41
Speaker 1: It's really easy to remember every single piece of this
1:14:44
Speaker 1: because it was such a such a wild, a wild
1:14:50
Speaker 1: minute in my life. Von sent me a message and said,
1:14:56
Speaker 1: we have we have the boy. He's safe. Awesome. You know,
1:15:03
Speaker 1: it was just just the just the best news that
1:15:09
Speaker 1: I think I had received, you know, and just staring
1:15:13
Speaker 1: at my phone looking at that message, I looked at
1:15:18
Speaker 1: p there and I said, if I found it almost
1:15:22
Speaker 1: took your breath away, you know that, that's how intense
1:15:25
Speaker 1: it was.
1:15:27
Speaker 11: It was maybe.
1:15:30
Speaker 19: Three in the morning, and I just wake up in
1:15:34
Speaker 19: a little bit panic. I grabbed my phone, take a look,
1:15:41
Speaker 19: and I see my colleague holding the boy.
1:15:50
Speaker 11: Yeah, no words to explain this moment.
1:16:02
Speaker 6: Pretty and.
1:16:06
Speaker 17: Yeah, I need prostels quila.
1:16:12
Speaker 1: Block it, you know. And seeing that picture of his
1:16:17
Speaker 1: parents hugging him, m.
1:16:23
Speaker 14: It's just.
1:16:26
Speaker 1: Mm hmm kind of makes you think of like when
1:16:28
Speaker 1: you hug your own kids, you know, and you you
1:16:31
Speaker 1: it just brings a totally different value to that, you know,
1:16:34
Speaker 1: and too, to know that they're safe and to know
1:16:36
Speaker 1: that they're.
1:16:36
Speaker 12: In your arms.
1:16:37
Speaker 1: I mean, those parents were told a month earlier. That
1:16:43
Speaker 1: that their son was dead and that you know, there
1:16:48
Speaker 1: was no more hope and there they were holding them
1:16:52
Speaker 1: on the train. Maybe the most special moment you know
1:16:56
Speaker 1: in my career as this.
1:17:18
Speaker 17: Well the treacher says this no cause there are stacking
1:17:23
Speaker 17: trip the tumper, but he is really too ministers this
1:17:29
Speaker 17: kindest why you know, as I said, Nesta pros, the
1:17:35
Speaker 17: prosersl Chuda, Nika can and cheate and a wit nyamongo.
1:17:44
Speaker 6: Wh ne par deal in what is in it?
1:17:56
Speaker 1: M I know I've come like a good distance like
1:18:13
Speaker 1: from where I was at any given like dark moment.
1:18:18
Speaker 1: You know, I spent years hiding how I was feeling
1:18:23
Speaker 1: like I'm pretty decent at why and telling being you know,
1:18:31
Speaker 1: wearing a different mask. And then hey, everything's fine. I
1:18:34
Speaker 1: think's cool, you know, no big deal, Like let's go
1:18:36
Speaker 1: do something I'd kind of come to terms with or
1:18:42
Speaker 1: peace with, Like this isn't something you carry by yourself,
1:18:47
Speaker 1: This isn't something I care about myself. There might be
1:18:50
Speaker 1: some super soldier out there that can do it, it's
1:18:53
Speaker 1: just not me today. I have a conscious effort about
1:19:05
Speaker 1: recognizing what's going on. That's good. It's so beautiful, Like
1:19:12
Speaker 1: every moment with my kids. I'm truly thankful for that stuff.
1:19:20
Speaker 1: I believe in this mission beyond one hundred percent, and
1:19:24
Speaker 1: I believe in the people, and I believe in you know,
1:19:26
Speaker 1: we can make a difference. But I want to be
1:19:29
Speaker 1: able to continue making a difference. What little sacrifices I
1:19:37
Speaker 1: feel like I've made over the years, I would do
1:19:41
Speaker 1: it again over and over again. I couldn't see myself
1:19:47
Speaker 1: doing anything else. I feel honored to be part of
1:19:51
Speaker 1: the team that can make a difference. Instead of watching
1:19:56
Speaker 1: it on TV or hearing about it and going, shit,
1:19:58
Speaker 1: that's awful, I'd rather be right in there in the
1:20:04
Speaker 1: fight trying to stop it.
1:20:32
Speaker 3: I told you a little bit about the bricks, the brick.
1:20:35
Speaker 20: Thing, known about the brick thing since the beginning.
1:20:38
Speaker 1: You did.
1:20:38
Speaker 13: Yeah.
1:20:40
Speaker 1: Like the whole idea of even being able to have
1:20:41
Speaker 1: this conversation sub day is still like feels super surreal,
1:20:46
Speaker 1: Like it feels like a miracle in a way.
1:20:48
Speaker 20: I am incredibly lucky to have a good support system
1:20:51
Speaker 20: right now while I am dealing with this. I have
1:20:54
Speaker 20: more stability. I'm able to have the energy to talk
1:20:58
Speaker 20: to people, which I couldn't. I have done this even
1:21:01
Speaker 20: like a couple of years ago.
1:21:03
Speaker 3: No, you just don't move on and deserve to live
1:21:05
Speaker 3: like a I would love.
1:21:07
Speaker 20: To be work on being a functional person. Memory loss
1:21:11
Speaker 20: is a big part of these things, and I just
1:21:15
Speaker 20: don't remember a lot of it, which is fine with me.
1:21:20
Speaker 5: Yeah, but like at that.
1:21:23
Speaker 20: Point, I was praying, praying actively for it to end.
1:21:30
Speaker 20: I had been at that point for years. But not
1:21:34
Speaker 20: to sound cliche, but it was a prayer answer.
1:21:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, sounds weird, I'm sure, but like you wish there
1:21:39
Speaker 1: was some telepathy and you could reach out and be like, listen,
1:21:42
Speaker 1: we're coming.
1:21:43
Speaker 11: Yeah.
1:21:43
Speaker 1: Like like it does sound cheesy, but like that's the
1:21:47
Speaker 1: genuine feeling when you're in the middle of those things
1:21:49
Speaker 1: and you just want to like reach out and go,
1:21:52
Speaker 1: we're going to get there.
1:22:07
Speaker 12: I don't know behind. I'm going to him. I don't
1:22:35
Speaker 12: need him, I don't know behind. I'm going to him.
1:22:58
Speaker 21: A step into a world of secrets.
1:24:00
Speaker 1: With BBC podcasts, you know, people don't want you to
1:24:03
Speaker 1: do a story when they come at you with a gun.
1:24:05
Speaker 20: For years, no one believed as Thank goodness the BBC
1:24:09
Speaker 20: gevice that platform.
1:24:10
Speaker 1: It is no wrecking going up against someone is so powerful.
1:24:14
Speaker 21: World of secrets, listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts,