YouSaid · the spoken record

Evan Ratliff

lines on the record: 100
first: 2019-02-06
most recent: 2019-02-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know if I'm going to start something. I'm doing a new project. It's more like a story. Than it is a business for sure.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that's concerning because it's very clear that we haven't found the answers. So the idea that no one's asking the questions anymore, making those efforts, or everyone feels so burned out that they can't do that.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, briefly, I think I'm a little perturbed at the state of sort of new organizations in journalism. I feel like when we started Atavist, there was a real flurry at that time of people trying all sorts of things. Some of the things which have become very large, like Vox and some things which stayed small, like Atavist, a lot of things went away. But it felt like there was a lot of experimentation happening and it does not feel that way to me right now.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get out immediately or serve 20 years or 30 years. But he took a plea deal in which he admitted to a lot of things but only is charged with a very small number of crimes.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This guy who's out in the Philippines, he was already trying to restart his call center business. So he'll be sentenced sometime the first half of this year. There's what's called a control date set for March, but I'm not sure it's going to hold. And he could get anything from 10 years to life, or they could throw out the guidelines and give him time served because he cooperated. So it's really down to the judge as to whether his cooperation was valuable enough for him to.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, Paul. Well, Paul Roux is in U.S. custody. He's actually in Brooklyn right now, I believe. Yes, I doubt they are housed right next to each other. Although, interestingly enough, I found out that LaRue was housed with a hacker who had been put in prison for swatting. That guy is now out, and why they allowed Paul Larue to be housed right in conjunction with a hacker is sort of surprising to me. I don't know how that happened. So they discovered already this came out at a trial last year that Luru was already trying to rebuild his business with”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a lot of things start with criminal application and then find their mainstream application. I mean, that's the hope of the blockchain is that the uses that we're finding for it now are not going to be the uses that turn out to be the most enriching for humanity. That's the story. But certainly the uses that are being found for it now are... Are criminal”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is, I mean, cryptocurrency for all of its ups and downs, the one thing that has proven absolutely useful for is laundering money, like 100% great place to launder money. Yep.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That looks like similar to what LaRue did. It looks like something that's distributed around the world where there's, yes, people are located somewhere, but there's no sort of like central focus of it, that it's able to adapt very quickly. So if you shut down one avenue, they just open up another one because they're not entirely dependent on sort of like cocaine that's grown here and brought here and then taken across the border. They're actually operating in all corners of the world and that they're able to participate in any number of illegal ventures all at the same time. So, I mean, LaRue was kind of unique in that he kept it all in his head. Like he was just one guy. Usually you would need a larger organization to do all of the projects that he engaged in.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm sure there's a kind of next revolution around the corner that you can't quite see, but I mean, what I think is that there is clearly a market for an internet-driven cartel. And not just that.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do have technology. I mean, there is technology focused at the border. It was pretty interesting because they, you know, these investigators that I mentioned, Kimberly Brill, they basically taught themselves, like they taught themselves how this network worked and how to unravel it. Like, what's ICANN? How do we subpoena ICANN? Like they learned all those things themselves. But then there were, and then, of course, like encryption experts that can be called upon by the DEA. But when they caught Paul Rue and they wanted to use him as an informant to then help them catch other people, and they needed to get inside his encrypted email system, they had to ask him to do it. Like they said, hey, can you sit down and mirror your email into this other email because we need to keep all this for evidence? And sure, I'll do it. They really.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Travel technology because you know this is being brought up in this whole immigration debate, like this idea of what we need for border security, a lot of it is around drug interdiction. At least that's what it's supposed to be about.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that type of operation can only really be run by the DEA. Like no one has even the purview to travel around the world.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, FedEx was later, they attempted to prosecute FedEx, actually, and they ended up, the trial was a fiasco, and they dropped the charges. UPS agreed to, I think, a $40 million fine for their part in illegal pharmacy shipping. To your question, they did coordinate with agencies around the world, but really only the US has the ability to track someone who's as sort of international and as sophisticated as LaRue. So Australia was trying to get him, but they just don't have the resources to put into it, particularly when he's in a place like the Philippines where the US would show up and say, hey, can you put surveillance on him? And he would just turn around and pay the authorities.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She and another investigator, they're not even agents of the DEA. They're called diversion investigators, which means they investigate drugs that are diverted off the legal market onto the illegal market, so prescription drugs that are being sold illegally. So they actually figured out that there was a pharmacy in Chicago that was shipping a lot of illegal drugs, illegal prescriptions. And when they went in there, they found a FedEx account and they subpoenaed FedEx. And when FedEx sent them these spreadsheets, they saw that there were hundreds of pharmacies distributing drugs on the same FedEx account.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he sold them elsewhere, and then when they set up a sting operation for him, they told him that the drugs were going to New York. And that's all they have to do under this provision, federal drug law provision called 959 provision. All you have to do is be attempting to distribute drugs in the United States. So when he heard that they were going to New York, that's what roped him into U.S. charges for distribution.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To deliver drugs Getting to the door of the user. I mean, that part of it, I think when it came to the prescription drugs, Paul Roo was kind of a genius. But when it comes to, he was relying on the apparatus that everyone else does, which is, you know, there are drug dealers in every city. And if you can get to the top bulk importer, the wholesale importer of that area, that's who you want to sell to. So he was not distributing cocaine on the streets of the United States. In fact, he studiously avoided hard drugs selling hard drugs into the United States precisely because he knew he could get in huge trouble.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And drones, like airborne drones, obviously are our big way to get over borders and around surveillance as well. So that's another thing that LaRue was spending a lot of time trying to figure out.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Send them to meet a boat and they could drop something off at a buoy. The idea is like you don't lose men, nobody gets caught. I mean, you could lose your big submarine if they were able to stop that, but like most Coast Guards in the world are not going to have that ability.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have your own submarines you fill with drugs either they're sort of like one man small operated submarines or or drone submarines even better that you can fill with drugs and then just send them ashore or”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, in terms of delivering sort of bulk amounts of drugs, I mean, there's the traditional Mexican border type of stuff, like tunnels under the border and that sort of thing. But actually submarines is, if there's a trend, like submarines is one of them.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some sense. Right. And what about what people are selling and the way they're delivering? Is that change technology? You talked about drone delivery. You talked about lots of ways to get drugs. Is there any top trend now?”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it just shows that even though they did successfully catch LaRue, that as a model for stopping the problem is, as I think a lot of people have known for a long time, is just not sustainable. There's no way that you can catch enough people to solve this problem. So, I mean, I think I'm not a drug policy expert, but some mix of treatment on the end of users in the United States.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I mean, if you have the money. And he generated the money also from scratch through the prescription pill startup and then used that money. He could go anywhere in the world and basically get anything he wanted.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drug cartels in which you could set up and operate somewhere from scratch, I think is what LaRue showed is that you can build it all from scratch.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would try to stop the drugs at the source in Peru or Colombia, and they'd spray all the plants. But now you have a sort of distributed model for.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's probably space for many, many Paul Russ around the world. I mean, especially because one of the things I learned, I mean, they went through a lot of effort. The DEA went through a tremendous amount of effort to catch this guy and then to catch the people that worked for him because he had these mercenaries, ex-military mercenaries who were working for him as kind of hitmen. So they went around and used thing operations to round them up. It was all very clever. That amount expenditure of effort is just not possible for most of the drug dealers around the world. So if you have people popping up like LaRue, which I think you will have, who are technologically savvy and can control distribution from a place like the Philippines where they can control their environment, then it's just very, very difficult to get to them. So you still have the same interdiction efforts of trying to keep people inside, you know, from drugs from coming to the United States. But it used to be that, or maybe it still is the case where, you know,”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What if it was ridiculous? Is you know Increased heroin usage So Yeah, that would be the right answer. That's the correct answer. Or maybe not making people's lives so miserable so they need to turn to drugs. But drugs have been with us forever. I'm not saying that. But what does the modern illegal drug market look like after Paul?”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they can't get payment processors. That carry was ridiculous. But that is part of what I was saying about the confusion around it is, you know, you've got a whole apparatus for legal distribution, but there's still these kinks in it because there are these questions about the broader legality of it across the United States. So you have that, and then you also have, so you're still going to have illegal drugs being brought into the rest of the states. And then alongside that, you have the opioid crisis. So you have prescription drugs leading to the importation of heroin, you know, the increased heroin usage when people are then weaned off of Oxycon or forced to go off Oxycon. So you have this, what we have now is like a crazy mix of what's going on. And so it's sort of, to be honest, it's difficult to see how that all gets worked out other than that treatment feels like it's the only answer. Yeah, that would be the right answer. That's the correct answer.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just in mad men in Los Angeles. I was doing research. And I bought something and I could not pay for it with my credit card still. And I was like, still, but they won't accept. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, they can't get.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I have a friend who declined to join a startup because he, when sessions was brought in, you know, it's not worth the risk.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's a jump yell at by his boss every five minutes, but he would have had he been supported in the style he thought he would be, he would have made a big deal of it. It would have been a real, I was waiting for the fight between California and...”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in the US, it's gotten complicated because you have legal, if you take pot, you have it's legal in some states and not in others. The federal government still doesn't declare it legal. and like threatens to crack down depending on who the attorney general is well now they're not the new one”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, today. But where do you see it going, both the illegal and the legal one? Because presumably as things become, because I've written a lot about, you know, they're looking at LSD and some others that were on scheduled drugs that are trying to remove them from them in microdose and things like that. Where is the drug trade going? I mean, obviously you're going to always have the El Chapos and the boatloads of cocaine and that world. But where is it moving towards? How do you look at it going forward?”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, I mean, the legal drug industry has, in some ways, has sort of shown what the alternative Paul LaRue Avenue was, to a certain extent, you know, you've got pot startups in the Bay Area who are, a lot of them will end up going away in the way that startups always go away. There's too many of them. But at the same time, they're applying the same principles, whether it's the sort of like seamless of pot delivery, you know, all of that sort of stuff. Ease, exactly.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're very active in trying to penetrate those markets. But you can already kind of see it shifting. I was reading this very interesting story. I don't know if it was written by Matthew Green, who's at Johns Hopkins, or he just pointed me to it. But it was the way those dark markets are now shifting to where if you went onto the dark web and bought drugs, typically it would be shipped to your house. That's a very easy way for it to be intercepted or to discover who's doing it. Now they're using dead drops where it's left somewhere and you pick it up. The market keeps changing. The procedures keep changing. But there's no question that every single layer now has technology. There's no... Viable drug operation that's not going to be talk about the legal drug.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think to a certain extent, law enforcement has started to get a little bit of a grip on the internet in terms of understanding. I mean, Silk Road was a big thing for dark markets and the exposure of that. And now, you know,”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah And you sort of start with one just a little step, and you say, okay, well, I'm going to do some, and then it's so easy. And then now you're doing a thousand a day. And if I was a...”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, are speaking out. Yeah, so it's interesting. It's an interesting question. But the idea of getting pulled into this is not a surprise to me at all. You know, people do get pulled into little bits like the pharmacists and others, especially as their businesses are getting crushed online and getting crushed in lots of ways by either bigger pharmacies or just secular changes in retail, for example. Business or a doctor, like, how do I? This seems Of course, I'm going online and doing these snap decision making on people's opiates rather than see people and stuff like that.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and now those employees who have even nothing to do with that thing are speaking out. Yeah, so it's interesting. It's an interesting question.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Or, you know, we were talking specifically about Maven at Google. Some people just didn't want to work on it. Now before, there were lots of companies where they just were like, they made one little wing tip on a missile and they didn't pay attention. And you're one part of a bigger, bigger problem that you don't notice. And the connections being made are really hard to make, but now not so much.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, of course not. And I think you get pulled into. I was just talking about this little people involved in little pieces of things and they don't realize they're part of a bigger thing. Yeah, I mean, you say this.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are, but I think we tend to look at these people as sort of like good and bad and not people who are on a kind of spectrum of moral choices. No, of course not.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, sure. Yeah. I mean, now the conversation around that is much different than it was. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute. But so that attracted me to him. And then I think the other thing in the book I read about a lot of the people who were pulled into the organization, and I'm just really interested in the kind of moral choices that people make when they, like the doctors and the pharmacists and even some of the people worked at the call center why they decided to join and what it felt like to be pulled into something that was much, much bigger than themselves. Right.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think partly this particular character, Paul Ru as a person, embodied the entrepreneurial spirit in a way that you just don't see In these large scale criminal organizations in the same way, like the technological, the modern startup founder, like he was that guy. He was a teenager who was interested in computers and kind of like fell into a world of technology in the same way you read about Zuckerberg, in the same way you read about Elon Musk. If you read about their childhoods, it matched up so perfectly. So the thing that so fascinated me about him was that he just took that in a slightly different direction and almost succeeded. I mean, at a certain point, he was making as much money as Facebook was making at the same time, at least by one DEA estimate. They don't really know how much money he made. But that sort of mirror image of the modern startup founder that we hail all the time or that people were hailing up until very recently. No.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But. So tell me what got you interested? What was the thing? Was it this use of technology? What did you think was unusual about it? Because again, El Chapo is an interesting, like these stories are similar and the same. Do you know what I mean? The idea of what it is. And then in the next section, I want to talk about where the international drug trade is going and the uses of technology in it. But what attracted you to this story?”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brazilian citizens are very hard to extradite. It's not quite clear if it would have worked ultimately, but it's certainly might have tangled up the system. I mean, he did succeed in having a child, but he actually was not arrested in Brazil. So then another side of the DEA, then the one that had been tracking him, sort of stepped in called the 960 Group, which does a lot of big international operations. And they created a Sting operation using an insider from his organization to lure him to Liberia for a big drug deal. And that's where he was arrested.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he partly gets into trouble because he's been on the US radar for a long time by 2012. But he had sort of one of the wrong people killed in the Philippines. He had a number of people murdered, but one of them happened to have connections to the president. So his sort of protective layer was potentially fractured a little bit. So he actually left to restart his business in Brazil. So he moved to Rio. And one of the strangest parts of the story is they're engaged in a process of trying to impregnate women who he hired to have children for him so that he could avoid extradition if he were ever arrested in Brazil. So he's in Brazil.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah. And to go to a place that's relatively lawless was his idea where he felt like he could control the environment. I mean, it turns out Somalia is very out of control in other ways that were difficult for him to even use his money to get around. But yeah, he under the guise of starting a tuna fishing operation in Somalia, he showed up there, his men showed up there and launched this whole operation.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drug lord of the world and arms he was moving, he was doing big arms deals around the world, he was working with Eastern Europe on that. He started his own militia in Somalia because he wanted to set up his own kind of self-protected little kingdom there where he could grow drugs. So that's a big part of the book where he's building this operational. That's tradit”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT