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'll never disappoint And he actually started building his own drones to deliver the drug. So he was reverse engineering a predator drone. He was building a submarine and he had all these sort of like warehouses in the Philippines. engineers to build things for him. So that sort of was his business that he was moving into. It was really being a sort of.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, just because he wanted it to be untraceable back to him by presumably the US government, who was a lot of governments were paying attention to him, but the U.S. government was really the only one that he was ever afraid of, and rightfully so. So he started using that money to get into the cocaine business, making contact with cartels in South America. He got into the meth business, working through Chinese triads to buy meth by the ton out of North Korea, where it's state-sponsored manufacturing of methamphetamine.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's been laundered through Hong Kong gold purchases. So he got into doing a lot of strange operations in Africa where partly just a lot of money like timber operations and black market gold, that sort of thing. But then he got into sort of large-scale drug buying.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The federal government set up a verification system to try to stop illegal online pharmacies, and so they basically said FedEx and UPS, you have to verify that these pharmacies are real. It's called the VIPS system. And so they would go to Paularoo's operators and say, look, you have an account here. A lot of pharmacies seem to be shipping on it. Hundreds of pharmacies are shipping on it. You need to provide this VIPS certification. So then they were trying to fake the VIP certification. They were sort of like struggling for a couple of years trying to figure out how to get around that. But LaRue, meanwhile, he'd gotten into large scale other crime. So he had diversified at that point.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Right. One of the things, so eventually he kind of the system was faltering and one of the reasons was like Amazon or any other retailer, he was really dependent on cheap shipping. And the FedExes and UPSs started questioning whether or not this was legal. So they dropped his accounts.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So to them, everything was real. I mean, they were issuing real prescriptions, real patients. And then they mail them out. They show up at your door.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a sort of paradox where both things are true, like both over prescription of painkillers. Opioids is obviously became a tremendous problem, but there is also a problem of insurance. And getting healthcare system and getting the property. And then the pharmacist part.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's one doctor character in the book, and I mean, he actually believed he was doing something of great value, that there were all these people, as you say, who couldn't get their prescriptions for back problems. Their insurance ran out, and he was simply providing them cheaper prescriptions than they would get if they had to go.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then even if the investigators, let's say, went in and rated that There's just another one pops up. There were hundreds of them. And they couldn't get to the network through the doctors because the doctors didn't even know who they were working with”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That happened mostly over email. So he had email and phone, but he actually had call centers in Israel and the Philippines that would recruit these doctors either over Craigslist or work-at-home forums, or they would just send random emails to pharmacists and say, do you want to join our network? But the pharmacist never knew anything about the network beyond the one fake name person that they were talking to. So they're talking to Joe. All they know is they're writing prescriptions and they're making hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars, the doctors or the pharmacists.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was paying for the FedEx account, so then the pharmacist would drop your drugs into a FedEx envelope that he had paid for. He'd ship you a computer if you wanted. It was all set up. It had the software on it.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or even inside the organization, like an operator inside the organization. But then what LaRue did was he created his own email server that was encrypted that they couldn't get to for internal communications. He just made it himself. Right, right. So he was sort of using technology both to insulate himself and to operate his business.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He built his own servers. Oh, of course he did. He built his own email server. So if they did a search warrant, if someone was using Gmail, we just go to Google.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he was like a vertically integrated criminal business. Like every aspect they looked at, it was actually him behind it, including he created his own.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go to any sites, you Google your drug, you go to these sites, you place an order. Now, those sites, there are organizations that try to get those sites taken down because they're quote unquote rogue pharmacies. So if one gets taken down, of course you can put up another one somewhere else. But it takes some effort to do that. What LaRue did was he actually got his own domain registrar. He created his own domain registrar. So official like GoDaddy or Network Solutions got it approved by ICANN as the only domain registrar in the Philippines and then used it exclusively to generate thousands and thousands of domains for himself. So if you took him down, he could just make a thousand more that day.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is someone who's about a bad back, and they're like, can't get their doctor to give, I can't believe in this country you can't get a doctor to give you a prescription for drugs. It seems like it's a relatively easy thing to do. So you can't get that. And so you go to one of these sites.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one example is so when he set up all of these pharmacy websites, he's setting up pharmacy websites everywhere. There are organizations that go.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what he's doing is he's actually using technology sort of for secrecy, for controlling his communications. And then you have Paula Rue, the character that I wrote about, who's sort of, he's a kind of new type of criminal who he actually came from being a programmer. So he's actually bending technology to his will in all these different ways. We're talking about that”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. So you have sort of a few kinds of intersections between sort of like tech and the large scale drug criminal world. You have the dark web, which is the sort of Silk Road. I mean, that's really selling people drugs over the internet, drugs scheduled drugs. Illegal drugs. Cocaine, whatever, where they're using cryptocurrency and they're buying their individual thing and it's being shipped to their house or dead drop or what have you. And then you have the El Chapo situation where you have a sort of traditional drug lord who's come up through a cartel in Mexico.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These drugs that they were distributing actually went the other way, which is that they had chosen their three primary drugs, all of which are painkillers, were non-controlled. So it wasn't like oxycotton, it was tramidol, fiorset, which are big-time painkillers, and they are addictive, but at the time they were not controlled by the US government. So by the end of the story, the US government finally does put them on the control schedule, and that's sort of how they part of how they are able to roll up the...”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, well, it's legal in California now. I'm like, yeah, but it's not legal on the plane between. It was like literally, and so that's how I feel about drugs. I find them exhausting. They should have just given you.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They being the DEA, beginning with the DEA in Minneapolis is actually this one agent, or she's not even an agent, she's an investigator, Kimberly Brill, which was like an almost rookie investigator who figured out that this network existed and then unraveled it almost entirely on her own. She had a partner for part of it. That part of the story is kind of incredible. But it's tricky, the question of whether or not it was legal. It's clearly illegal in the sense that the doctors were not writing prescriptions for their patients who were coming to see them.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of his head. The pill business, it was a really tricky thing when they tried to prosecute it because, first of all, they couldn't get to him, so they chased him for many, many years. They started chasing him in 2007, 2008.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many things, yes. First, drug trafficking, but also eventually violence, murder. He shifted, he used his proceeds from the prescription pill network to get into all manner of international crime. He's probably the most prolific criminal possibly in history. He got into arms sales, he sold arms to Iran. He was buying meth out of North Korea. He was shipping hundreds of kilos of cocaine and yachts across the world, across the Pacific Ocean. So he was actually becoming a real kind of like.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Originally, I think it was because they have decent infrastructure, they have a call center kind of culture. So he needed customer service call centers for the sites. But eventually it became more that he could buy off almost anyone in the government or law enforcement and did so.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the masses. And yeah, and opioids, literally opioids. So in about 2004, he basically started building this network. And the idea was they would recruit local doctors in the United States, local pharmacists in the United States, and then a customer could go online, Google a drug like Tramidol, painkiller, and they would go to a site that was controlled by Paul LaRue or one of his affiliates, then their order there and their little survey that they filled out would go to a real doctor in the US who had signed on to be paid by the prescription to write prescriptions. Then that prescription would go to a small town pharmacist who was trying to compete against big box retailers. They would get $2 per prescription for issuing it. And in doing so, the whole actual distribution of the drugs was contained within the United States. He, Paul Rue, was operating from the Philippines behind layers and layers of technology. And so why making hundreds of millions of dollars?”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he was trying to participate in the spirit. I get that. Of the times, still today, of the open source sophomore movement.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. But what he did was he gave away Enchristian for the masses for free, part of the open source movement. And then he got very frustrated that he never made any money on it.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, one of the things I would say about him is if everything he did had been done in the straight world, we would be sitting here talking about it. He would be on the cover of fast company magazine. Right, so he's the billionaire”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was actually a very, very talented technologist. He created a piece of software called Encryption for the Masses in the late 90s, early 2000s, which was the precursor to TrueCrypt, which is one of the most infamous, one of the most famous pieces of disk encryption software. So he did that, but...”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was a computer programmer named Paul Lerue, Paul Calder Leroux, born in Zimbabwe, but also raised in South Africa, so people call him South African sometimes. And he”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, go ahead. Similar in some way. So, yeah, so I wrote this as originally as a series of articles. I wrote the book, was originally a series of articles for the Atus magazine. Right. And the reason that we did them the way we did them was it was a big story that I had stumbled across about this head of this cartel.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was great fun. That's a good place to start. Was sort of surprised. That's why you're here because I'm like, what? He's doing what?”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long form, I didn't create the two founders, Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer, created long form as a recommendation engine for long stories. Together we created a podcast. It's called Longform”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we wanted to create a publication to allow you to do narrative journalism and design it specifically for the web. So use all of the tools of the web to make it very web-centric. So that was me and Nicholas Thompson, who's now editor-in-chief of Wired, and a guy named Jeff Rabb, who was our designer and programmer. So we basically set out to create a long-form magazine.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then coming off of that, I was living in New York and interested in. Doing those types of stories like long narrative stories and Sort of finding that there were the traditional magazines where you could do them like The New Yorker or Wired or places that I was writing for, but there were not online outlets that were willing to do that. And it was very much in the time frame of sort of like attention spans are getting shorter and you're starting to get into aggregation and just shorter and shorter.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's understood in certain quarters how much of that data and where it's going. And I was also, I just intrigued with people who fake their own deaths, and that's kind of where it started. And I just thought it's like a version of faking my own death without the severe consequences.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was interested in this is like comical now because this was 10 years ago, but the amount of information that was collected. Even at the time, by not just social media, but all the databases, who could get access to them, how they could be used. And then I was also...”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so someone did that. This guy on Seattle. And so he managed to sort through and figure out which one was mine And they honed it down to New Orleans.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They caught me using, there's sort of two layers how they caught me. They used my IP address. So I was masking my IP address, but then I kind of got overconfident and I had unmasked it for a few things. And at the time, you could build apps on Facebook that would collect all the IPs of everyone who visited the page”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaning not go off the grid, but sort of adopt a new identity and shed my old identity and then try to keep from using aspects of my old identity, my new one, and then sort of leave everyone behind and start a new life.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I moved to New York and I had done this story for Wired Magazine, which typically goes under the name Vanish, which was about my attempt to disappear for a month. And they held a contest for people to find me, and it became a big kind of national story.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite a bit. Pieces about technology. There are some actually very high tech pieces, especially now they're touring the country and they do some very sophisticated stories, but it's still the same. It's not taped. You can't find it anywhere on the internet. If you don't go, you can't see the magazine.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's, I mean, Doug was really the sort of driving founder of it. And it started from this place of, I think, disliking book readings a little bit or just going to book readings and saying, okay, someone stands up and reads a book for a little while. Or you go to a photography exhibit and there was this idea that it really originated with Doug, which was, why couldn't we put these things together? And then we thought, well, why couldn't we do it in a little theater? And originally not taping it, I think was really an accident because we just didn't have the money to be able to do it right where it would look good. And so, but then after the first couple shows, we discovered that was the appeal, a place where you come, you turn off your phones, it's not taped. It's made just for you.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so you started with Doug McGray, who's running California magazine and other things, too, which again was bought by the Emerson Collective. But to talk about, I want to talk a little bit, because how did you think of that? Because one of the things you were doing was sort of anti-you didn't tape it, it just happened, it was live, it was analog. Not that you're like this guy in a bowtie and a Lincoln beard. You know what I mean? Like, that's what you'd imagine something that I would come from. But it's a very alive event, which is really kind of interesting.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct by Emerson. So pop up magazine is a live magazine presented on stage. It's nonfiction like a magazine. A lot of it is journalistic, except that it is multimedia in the truest sense. It's film, it's audio, it's written pieces, sometimes combining all right. You started with Doug McGray.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's how I first got into journalism was at Wired, worked as a fact checker, then became a writer, left the staff. And then I was basically a freelancer for 10 years. And then I started sort of starting up various journalistic type organizations with friends. One of them is pop-up magazine, which I was involved with early on. Yes, sure.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The headache, the dot com heyday. In fact, I credit my career to the fact that the magazine was so fat at that time that they needed, they just needed to fill it. And so I got opportunities.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I worked as a freelance magazine journalist for many years, so I had worked on staff at Wired in the late 90s, early 2000s.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as DB Cooper. Oh damn, I shouldn't have said that, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Evan Latliv, someone I am a huge admirer of. He's award-winning journalist and he's the founder of Atavis magazine. He's also the author of a new book called The Mastermind about the leader of a ruthless drug cartel who couldn't have gotten as far as he did without the internet. Of course, once again, the internet is screwing with us. The subtitle of the book is Drugs, Empire, Murder, Betrayal. Oh my goodness, Evan, welcome to Rico Deco.”
2019-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Mastermind” author Evan Ratliff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT