1341: Lou Valoze | Outsmarted the Criminals, Betrayed by the Government

1341: Lou Valoze | Outsmarted the Criminals, Betrayed by the Government

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Lou Valoze: He's been scheduled for deportation again. Now I have to jump through hoops like you can't even ima- We literally got him pulled off the tarmac as they were loading him up. Literally. Had an ATF agent get him and bring him to a hotel in Atlanta. He had been in the ICE detention facility for like three or four months, and you'd think he'd be bitter about this, about his treatment and all that.

Shows up the next day, smile on his face, jumps right into work, and starts killing it.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, imagine this. You're an immigrant running a gas station. You're grinding, hustling, trying to build a life for yourself here in the United States. And then you get popped for what sounds like small time cigarette nonsense.

But suddenly, the federal government is standing over you with the world's worst career counselor speech. "Congratulations. You either work for us or you get deported." So now you're not just selling gas and Slim Jims, you're walking into gang neighborhoods, making friends with violent criminals, pretending to be shady enough to earn their trust while federal agents sit safely behind the curtain, hoping you don't get shot, stabbed, robbed, exposed, or all four before lunch.

And Ray Khan, not his real name obviously, turns out to be shockingly [00:02:00] good at this. No law enforcement background, no criminal pedigree, no formal undercover training, just charisma, nerve, street instincts, and apparently the kind of survival mechanism you only develop when life has been trying to kill your dreams since the opening credits.

He helps build some of the biggest cases in ATF history, and then after all that risk, all that cooperation, and all that danger, the system leaves him hanging. Today, we're talking about one of the most effective and most controversial informants the federal government has ever used, a guy who could walk into any criminal world and somehow make himself useful, believable, and incredibly hard to kill.

Here we go with the agent who ran Ray Khan, Lou Valoze. So I read the book, and it sounds like a movie, man. And it gets messy, but it's real, which is pretty amazing. So tell me, Ray Khan, not his real name, but who is this guy? He comes out of nowhere kind of.

He was just a, like a 7-Eleven owner who happened to walk into one of my storefront operations, [00:03:00] just total happenstance.

And when he saw that we were selling cigarettes that weren't stamped, that we hadn't paid tax for, he knew we were selling them at a discounted rate, and we didn't even think about it. We would sell a pack at a time to some people just to keep business going, keep people coming in. He wanted all of them.

He said, "I'll buy all of them. How many master cases do you have?" That's not what we wanted to do. That's not why we were there, but when he pulled up to the store, he was driving a brand-new Cadillac Escalade, and so my mind starts working right away.

I don't think people know what a storefront operation is.

You mentioned unstamped cigarettes. I haven't smoked a cigarette in a million years, but the packs have a little weird sticker on them to show that they paid the duty entering the United States or something, and then if you don't have to pay for that, whatever, $3 stamp, you can sell the cigarettes cheaper.

Is that the thing? Is that the scam here kind of?

Lou Valoze: Yeah, so that stamp on a pack of cigarettes, it's actually a state tax stamp for every state, [00:04:00] and it just shows that the taxes have been paid by that state for them to be able to bring that, those cigarettes to a retail business and be sold. And those taxes are heavy on cigarettes.

When you see, like in New York, people selling loosies, usually those are traffic cigarettes where the taxes haven't been paid. So the storefront operation, which is just a fake business that we would set up by law enforcement, owned and operated by law enforcement, all of the owners and employees are undercover agents.

We do these for different reasons. With ATF, it was almost exclusively for guns. Lot of drugs, but to get crime guns off the street. We set these storefronts up in dangerous areas where there was high gun violence.

Jordan Harbinger: How does selling unstamped cigarettes in the hood help you guys get guns off the street?

Walk me through this. I think most of us are like, "Wait, what? You're not selling guns?" I don't get the nexus.

Lou Valoze: It's just bait, brother. Depending on the business we would open, my first one was a [00:05:00] tattoo shop. Uh, this, this second one, where Ray Khan had come in, was a head shop. We sold some cigarettes. We sold rolling papers.

Pretty much drug paraphernalia, basically, that you see in any head shop you walk into. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: and it says, "For tobacco use only," on the case, right? Yeah. Correct. That's right.

Lou Valoze: So cigarettes were on the shelf, and most people would never see that there was no stamp, because people just aren't looking. But as a 7-Eleven owner, this guy saw it right away.

So when I saw that Escalade, here's the law. Because the government's not really taking cigarette trafficking cases. It's not a big thing. But if you have 10,000 plus one untaxed cigarettes, it's a federal felony, okay? So if you have 9,999, you're good. 10,000 plus one, it's a felony Back then I knew exactly how many cigarettes were in a master case, so it had to be at least two master cases for it to be a felony.

So if those get put into a vehicle, a conveyance, and that conveyance is used to transport [00:06:00] this contraband-

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, you can seize it.

Lou Valoze: Yeah. Exactly. So that's all I was thinking, is we're going to get this brand-new Escalade from this guy. So we sold him a couple cases of untaxed cigarettes. We even helped him load them up into his Escalade.

He drove away, and that Escalade just became seizable at the end of the case. And we never dealt with him again for the case, but once we found out who he was, we also found out that he had overstayed his visa and he was here illegally. We kind of had to arrest him at the end of the case, which we did. He got hit with a very unimportant violation for cigarettes, but he was illegal, so he was put into a detention facility.

Jordan Harbinger: We'll explain why that's a shame, really, in my opinion, as we go along here, because this wasn't just a guy who went to 7-Eleven and bought some untaxed cigarettes and overstayed his visa. Sounds like from the book, he paid his debt not only to society, but he pulled his weight more than most of us Americans tend to do.

Lou Valoze: Listen, he pulled his weight more than most federal agents or law [00:07:00] enforcements ever do, law enforcement officers. He paid his debt a thousand times over. He paid his debt on the first gun deal that I did because of him. So when we arrested him, you know, I never really thought much about it, but his lawyer came to me.

Jordan Harbinger: You arrested him for the cigarettes, you mean?

Lou Valoze: Yes. And obviously, had he been here legally, he would've gotten a bond and he would've been out, but because he was illegal, he was put into a detention facility and deportation s- proceedings were initiated. And his lawyer came to me and said, "Listen, if you can do something to let this guy stay in the country, get these chicken shit charges deferred and let him stay in the country, he'll be the best informant you've ever had."

I'm like, "Man, my world is guns and drugs and gangs. What is this Indian guy who-" Runs a convenience store, yeah. Yeah. He had never shot a gun, never done drugs, was not in that world. How's he going to help me? But the lawyer was so convincing, I decided I'd take a chance, and it was a lot of work. To stay [00:08:00] someone's deportation, to get their charges deferred, get them out on the street, the paperwork is overwhelming.

So

Jordan Harbinger: this guy, Ray Khan, he's just this immigrant with a ton of hustle from India, and it sounds like he wanted to be a cop when he was in India. Didn't quite, I don't know, make the cut somehow. Moves to the United States. But this guy becomes a crazy informant, and he's not a criminal. The cigarettes thing, okay, fine, overstaying your visa, technically having committed a crime.

But this is not the kind of criminal that you have working with ATF. This guy's not trained. He's not a Crip or a Blood or something like that, or in a mafia. Why does this end up working? What did you see in this guy that made you think, "Oh, this guy can infiltrate crime organizations"?

Lou Valoze: I didn't see anything in him.

I just took a leap of faith based on his lawyer. His lawyer was so emphatic. But it turns out, yes, he had taken the, uh, test for the Indian National Police three times. His father was a big wig with Indian National Police, and he failed it all three times. And this is a super smart guy with a chemical [00:09:00] engineering degree.

He just couldn't pass the test for whatever reason.

Jordan Harbinger: But not big enough to get him a job, even if he fails the test. A medium wig, I guess, unfortunately.

Lou Valoze: The answer to your question is We just happened to find a natural, a Michael Jordan, a Mike Tyson. He was made to do this. He exceeded all expectations. The average ATF informant is either a hardcore criminal who's trying to work off charges, doesn't want to go back to prison, some kind of gun nut who has been caught making machine guns or whatever it is, who's trying to either make money or stay out of trouble, stay out of jail.

I had never had an informant like this. Didn't know anything about what we do. He couldn't talk guns. He couldn't talk drugs, because he didn't know the terms. You know, he knew nothing about it.

Jordan Harbinger: So you said he can walk into any criminal world, which is nuts, but meanwhile, he walks in and he goes, "Hello, gentlemen, I'd like to buy a bunch of these drugs," you know?

And they're like, "You... How much you want?" [00:10:00] "I don't know. What, is this measured in pounds, ounces? I need Drugs 101, pal. Uh, here's the cash." I'm just imagining this guy walking in, in these criminal gangs going, "He has to be legitimate because there's no way the cops would send this fucking guy in here to buy drugs in this quantity."

Lou Valoze: I mean, that's a great call. Here's why it worked: because his job was not to buy drugs. It was not to buy guns. His job was only to introduce these guys to me and my team. So he really didn't have to talk the talk. He just had to be able to present himself in a way as a shady businessman, which was not a stretch, to present himself in a way to make these bad guys want to be a part of his hustle.

And he would explain to them that, "I don't know about kilos of meth. I don't know about kilos of coke. I don't know anything about machine guns." My guys, that's what they do. Here's what I do, but my guys, that's what they do. He would make those introductions. He would bring these guys to us. It [00:11:00] was on us as soon as he brought them through the door, but he's the one who got them through the door.

Otherwise, none of this would've happened.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and he's not afraid, which is crazy. He just seems to not be worried about any of this. Clearly, he can generate enough rapport with criminals to get them to leave the safety of wherever they are and go meet strangers and talk business, which is really an interesting skill set.

Lou Valoze: I called him the Indian daredevil, the man without fear. He would walk into the lion's den. He would go places where I didn't want him to go for his own safety, but there was no stopping him almost. And the other part of this equation was these storefront operations that we were setting up, man, they were so good that I would challenge anyone to walk in there and ever think this is some sort of law enforcement operation.

We were freight forwarders on the port with a 10,000 square foot warehouse with semi-trucks coming in and out, and forklifts, and huge screens all over the place showing where our ships were going all over the [00:12:00] world, and just warehouses full of clothing and electronics and tobacco products. Everything coming...

I mean, it was set up really well. So when Ray would explain to these guys, "I own this freight forwarding business. Come meet my guys," they would come in, they would see this, and man, it made our job a lot easier. It was so believable.

Jordan Harbinger: Again, a tangent, but who's in charge of going, "No, no, no, that's not what a freight forwarder looks like.

You have to figure this out." And this is not Google ChatGPT time, right? So how do you know what a freight forwarding business is even supposed to look like? Do you go down to the port and go, "Hi, I'd like to see a freight forwarding guy about forwarding some freight," and just take some mental pictures? I mean, how do you even begin this process?

Lou Valoze: You can't really do it that way because you can never let anyone know who you are. Right. Yeah, exactly. So this all has to be done organically. Say, "Hey, I'm with the government. I need a license." You have to do this in your undercover identity from scratch with all these things. So what I did was I actually knew a guy who knew a freight forwarder, who was a former Marine, real [00:13:00] trustworthy guy, and I actually shadowed him for about six months because I learned this real quick, like most professions, if you don't know all the customs forms, if you don't know the terminology, if you don't know the shipping lanes and all the tariff laws and everything, no one's going to believe you.

So I just did a crash course in how to be a freight forwarder from this guy. And then we also had another informant who was in the Miami area who actually was also a logistics guy who helped us create the physical setting we had with all the television monitors, and it was actually his ships that were showing on that screen that were going all over the world.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, my next question was, how did you get the video of the, of the ships if they were real? Yeah, so it's just another company's ships. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. So okay, so Ray's really good at getting guys to come down and talk with you. Is it charisma or is it recklessness that he's primarily engaged in when doing this?

Lou Valoze: It's definitely charisma, because he has a way about him, the ultimate [00:14:00] salesman in, in a real pushy way. And amazingly enough, I've seen him do it with cartels, and I've seen him do it with guys who didn't really speak very good English, and Ray himself is very hard to understand. So sometimes we would wonder, like, how is he communicating so well with these guys?

But we've seen him do it with outlaw bikers. I saw him do it with cartel members, with just hardcore street gangs, organized street gangs. He's just able to go in there and make them want to be a part of his hustle. They knew there was an opportunity to make some money, and that's how you appeal to a criminal.

Let them know there's an opportunity for them to make money

Jordan Harbinger: It is a sales job at the end of the day, and this guy was just a master salesman. So the part I find fascinating, I think, is that you send him into these neighborhoods where he doesn't know anyone. What exactly does he do? How is he drumming up even the initial contacts to generate business?

Lou Valoze: So what I learned was there is a huge network in the Indian community of all these store owners, the gas station stores, the [00:15:00] hotels, all that. There's a huge network, and a lot of their business is in the inner cities, a lot of their stores and business, and they know what's going on. There's a lot of crimes going on in there, a lot of drug deals, a lot of gun deals happening on their properties.

They know the place. So he could go into almost any city, get into that network real quick, and find out who the players were. He showed us this in Cleveland when he got into the Gambinos on the first day he was in Cleveland. So he used that network to find out who the players were, who was doing what, and then he used his salesmanship to get them to come talk to us, to bring them into our storefront operations.

Jordan Harbinger: It's crazy that he shows up in Cleveland and gets a mafia meeting on the first day. That's crazy. So tell us that story, because he gets a meeting for what purposes, and these two sort of goons just show up at your place?

Lou Valoze: The mafia is always looking for ways to make money illegally, and everyone wants that way to make money, [00:16:00] criminal organizations, that doesn't involve narcotics, because they know that narcotics is the most dangerous way to make money.

And pretty much these days, honestly, there's no organizations that want to go against the cartels, because cartels are so much stronger than a- any other criminal organization right now. The Gambinos, they were into the cigarette trafficking. There's a ton of money to be made, and they know that it's not a big penalty if you get caught.

And Ray was able to meet these guys through that network because they were dealing with some of the Indians in Cleveland. He was able to meet with them the first day and tell them that he wasn't a nickel-and-dime shop owner with these cigarettes, but he was more into the distribution, and he could get hundreds or thousands of master cases.

And man, their ears lit up when he told them that, and that's how he got a sit-down with them.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So is the cigarette trafficking game largely about having a steady supply? Is that kind of the bottleneck? Yes. Okay. So he knew how to solve a big problem for cigarette traffickers, which is, "Where do we get [00:17:00] more?"

Lou Valoze: Because when you only rely on the black market, the supply isn't always there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it dries up, and the truck that got stolen is out of cigarettes now or whatever. When I was working in Detroit, I was probably, like, 17, 18, 19 years old, maybe 20 by the time I left. One of the things that we did was protect cigarette trucks.

And I remember thinking, "Why do they carry all this cash?" And my boss was like, "It's not the cash. The guys will rob the truck and just take the cigarettes because they're basically as good as money, possibly even better because you can trace certain money if you want to, but it's harder to trace cigarettes unless you're expecting to be robbed," and blah, blah, blah.

And I remember they were trying everything. Dye packs. They had a GPS device in one of the cases, and we didn't even know where that was. It was considered a good gig because you could basically sleep in the truck, and then you'd just wake up when the delivery's happening because the trucks got robbed when they got parked.

They didn't get robbed on I-75. You just wake up, and then you basically, it -- make sure you got your hand on your weapon to [00:18:00] make su- and look through the mirrors, and that's it. But man, I was shocked when they told me there was $100,000 worth of cigarettes, and that's I think maybe wholesale price, in the truck.

There's 100 grand. And this is the '90s, right? 100 grand worth of product in the truck. So that's a pretty good gig if you just have to stick up a driver who doesn't get paid enough to deal with that shit, right? And you just put a revolver in his face and take the truck or take the cases out and load them into yours.

Lou Valoze: It's a great gig. And when you think about it, once again, if you get caught with a truckload full of Fentanyl or cocaine, you're never seeing the light of day again. Cigarettes, you're getting a slap on the wrist, maybe federal probation. So it's a lot safer, and the profit margin is just as good. Now, in our society here, cigarettes, not as many people are smoking anymore, but something always fills the void.

So now the illicit vape market has filled in where the cigarettes have trailed off. The cartels are involved, just like the Italian mafia was, and the Russian mafia. They were doing a lot of cigarettes. Now they're doing a lot of these, uh, illegal Chinese [00:19:00] vapes.

Jordan Harbinger: The vape thing freaks me out because you're putting that in your body.

Like, if it's a cigarette, it's a real cigarette made by Marlboro, it's just not taxed, right? But if it's a vape, that could be made in a storage unit with cheap-ass chemicals that somebody's just buying off the internet and pumping in while he hasn't washed his hands in three days.

Lou Valoze: Even worse, when you go into any vape shop in this country, none of those vapes are approved by the FDA.

All those Chinese flavored vapes that target kids, they're made in some Shenzhen, China, in some factory with God only knows what kind of chemicals are in there, and a lithium battery that's got cadmium and lead, Chinese chemicals right into your lungs.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, it's just so gross. Yeah. I don't even know how that works.

I don't know how the battery would off-gas into the vape, but I'm sure anything's possible. That's crazy. That's really disgusting. All right, so he's lying constantly, acting like a criminal, but he doesn't get exposed, right? Because even, I guess, the other guys in the store owner network, they don't know he got arrested and that he's rolling over on people, right?

They just think he's more of a criminal than them, and they're making the [00:20:00] introductions?

Lou Valoze: The majority of them are not paying the taxes they're supposed to pay. So they're all kind of on the fence. Ray was just portraying himself as a little bit over the edge from most of them.

Jordan Harbinger: This guy is so smooth. I mean, he's basically doing some high-level social engineering, but just for law enforcement.

Give us an example of some of the, the ways he's luring people in. I mean, he's got this sort of violence thing, the warehouse trap. I'd love to hear about that, because I thought that was kind of a criminal justice machine, this warehouse trap.

Lou Valoze: So he knew right off the bat that we were not going after the small fish, that we weren't going after the low-hanging fruit, the guy on the corner selling eight-balls.

He knew what we were looking for. Guns and drugs are very different. We would take the guy on the corner selling a gun, because it's a whole different ballgame, because that one gun can kill a lot of people. So when it came to the guns, he knew to bring in anyone he could find who was in the business of putting crime guns on the streets.

So He might bring us just a lone gangbanger who's a [00:21:00] convicted felon who's making money by selling guns on the street, which happens a lot more than you think. Or he would bring us these organizations of criminals who were doing that, who were trafficking in firearms. And then some of the drug guys that he would get into, and these guys wouldn't come in and announce themselves as members of the Sinaloa Cartel, right?

We would have to do our homework, find out who they were, which is difficult, especially when they're not here legally. And eventually we would find out, okay, these guys are, are part of the Sinaloa Cartel or whatever cartel it may be. And these guys would have a side hustle. Besides selling us the dope, they would be selling guns on the side, which is a dangerous game to play when you're with a cartel, to make money on anything else that they don't know about.

But we ended up buying a lot of guns from a lot of these cartel guys. He just had a way that he knew who was into what, and he met these guys on the outside. Our rule when we were doing these storefront operations was that we didn't go outside. We stayed in the storefront, because we didn't want to take the chance of getting [00:22:00] burned on the outside.

That was Ray's job. Ray's job was to bring them into the spider web. So essentially, there is no operation without him.

Jordan Harbinger: So he's bringing people into the warehouse. What happens when they get there?

Lou Valoze: He'll bring them in, usually under a pretense of, we called it swag. And the swag we had, which were a lot of refurbished, cheap electronic equipment, flat-screen televisions, uh, surround sound systems, and a lot of clothing.

And we got all this stuff for free. It was donated to us. There's a lot of agencies and departments who seize all this stuff. Once it's adjudicated, the court, they can't store all this stuff. This stuff was so good you couldn't even tell what was counterfeit and what wasn't, because they would go out and seize everything.

They might be, uh, whatever popular jeans were at the time. We would have thousands of pairs. And a lot of these guys were like, "We want to buy a bunch of that. We're going to ship it to South America, you know, make a lot of money." But these guys were also shipping AR-15s to South America. We would get in on that action.

We let them [00:23:00] know right away that how we made money was we were buying all these guns down south. I was bringing them to, uh, New York and selling them for 15, 20 times what I paid for them, which is reality.

Jordan Harbinger: Really? Yeah, that makes sense, because they're illegal there, right? So if you can bring a gun in from, I don't know, even another part of the US, it's worth 10 to 20 times more in New York.

Lou Valoze: Jordan, today I can go to a gun store right now and buy a cheap lower center Hi-Point nine millimeter for 110 bucks, 120 bucks. I can bring that gun up to New York. I can go to Brooklyn. I could sell it on the street for $3,000.

Jordan Harbinger: Ray Khan walked into criminal neighborhoods with counterfeit goods, fake confidence, and federal agents hiding somewhere nearby, like heavily armed stage parents.

You fortunately just have to listen to this sponsor to pull your weight. Much safer, fewer felonies, better customer service. We'll be right back

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It's a double win. You get a great deal, and you help keep the show thriving. And thanks for your support. So this is probably a dumb question, but how come a hood from New York who has $3,000 can't get an airline ticket to go to wherever, Texas, and buy a gun, bring it back, or mail it back? How come they can't do that?

Lou Valoze: Mailing a gun's not easy. Well, think about it. So how's he going to get that gun? This guy's a convicted felon. He's from New York. Once he gets to Texas, you can't buy a handgun in another state. You can only buy a handgun in your own state.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I d- Okay, I didn't realize you can't just, like, buy it there.

Lou Valoze: He doesn't want this gun in his [00:27:00] name with all the paperwork, right?

So this is the black market. This is firearms diversion. This is how firearms go from the legal marketplace to the illegal marketplace. His other option is to get his girlfriend, or whoever it happens to be, baby mama, whatever, to go to a gun store, buy a gun in her name, and then give that gun to him, which is called a straw purchase.

Straw

Jordan Harbinger: purchase. I remember reading about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, now I get it. Yes, that was a dumb question, because of course you need to show your ID, and they go, "Hey, man, you don't live in Texas. Get out of here," and that's the end of that. Mailing a gun is hard, but I guess buying the gun in the first place without an ID is the hard part.

That's why a gun's worth three grand once you get it to Brooklyn, when it's worth 150.

Lou Valoze: Most of these guys aren't passing a background check either. In New York City, you can't even buy a handgun anyway. It's all supply and demand, right? The demand is, for guns is very high, and the, there's basically no supply other than the black market.

So to sell this story in these storefront operations that Ray Khan and I were doing, to say, [00:28:00] "Listen, my business, my side hustle, is buying guns down in here in Georgia, down in the South. I sell them to my gangster buddies up in New York," which is gun trafficking, which a lot of these guys were into anyway.

Everyone knows, especially handguns, $150 revolver that you can buy down here, you're going to get 2,000 for up in New York.

Jordan Harbinger: The massive markup on that is such a tempting business to get into. Not for me personally I'm talking, but I just mean for a criminal. Like, why would you even bother dealing with drug dealers and federal agents storing that? Because if you can just have people buy guns and get them to you, or steal them and then buy them and ship them, that just seems almost less risky than dealing with a lot of other... And the markup, 20X, that's almost approaching drug territory as far as the markup is concerned. That's crazy.

Lou Valoze: So if you'll indulge me, I'll tell you how we did it.

We had moving trucks. [00:29:00] I would show these guys. Some of them would have furniture in them. Some of them would have these cigarette cases that we had kind of hollowed out the bottom. And we had traps in our undercover cars where you would press one button on the radio and then hit the air conditioning, and this trap would open up from the back of the seat.

I've heard about

Jordan Harbinger: that. That's freaking cool, by the way. Who builds those?

Lou Valoze: We had informants who actually built them for cartels and stuff. So we would show these guys, "Listen, here's how we do it. I have this moving truck, so if I'm moving a family from Atlanta to New York in two months, I buy as many guns as I can.

I try to get about 200 guns. I secrete those guns in their furniture. So worst case scenario, Johnny Law pulls me over on the way to New York on I-95. I say, 'Listen, I'm just moving people's furniture. I don't look through the stuff. You know, it gets loaded up and we move it.'" And these guys would be like, "Right on, man."

Or we would hide drugs and guns in these hollowed out master cases of Newports, where if you open the case, there's real cigarettes in there, [00:30:00] but there was a hollowed out portion in the bottom where you could fit dope, and the smell of the cigarettes would throw off any drug-sniffing dogs. So once we would show them our operation, and these guys were like, "Right on."

And they would tell their friends about it. They would just blow up.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Word of mouth. It's like having good TripAdvisor reviews, basically. And are you successfully committing little crimes to get them to ship more things at once, or is one shipment enough to put somebody away? With drugs, they buy a little and then they buy more and more and more.

Do you have to do that with gun trafficking, or is it just like, "Hey, you're trafficking in automatic weapons. That's good enough just one single time." because it's pretty high risk letting a bunch of guns get into Manhattan.

Lou Valoze: Obviously, we weren't actually bringing any of these guns up. They were going into evidence when we bought them.

That was just our cover story. So as far as how you would tell when you wanted to stop dealing with someone, when they had done enough, because we didn't want to pile on anybody, it depended on their background. So if a guy had a couple armed robbery [00:31:00] convictions and they brought one gun to us to sell, they're looking at 20 years, so you really didn't have to do much more.

Now, drugs, obviously it was the type of drug and the weight they were selling and their criminal history you would have to look at. We would take everything on kind of a case-by-case specific circumstance of how many times we'd want to deal with that person, and we're always very concerned about creating crime.

Jordan Harbinger: That's where I'm going with this. Like, how do you decide the balance where you're just creating more criminals and more crime by making it so... I mean, 20x markup, I would, never a criminal defense lawyer, but I did a little bit here and there. I'm going to argue this is entrapment because the deal is too good.

There's too much money involved. They got this guy seeing dollar signs, and he wasn't thinking clearly, especially if my client doesn't have a criminal record already.

Lou Valoze: Remember, I'm just paying Georgia street prices, right? I'm not paying New York. I'm selling it at New York prices as far as they know.

Entrapment never worked because it's real hard to say I was entrapped when I'm on video pulling up to this place three or four [00:32:00] times, and there I am bringing my guns and my drugs in, you know. We would always negotiate down just like if I was really doing it. I lived my life as an undercover agent as if I was a real criminal, how I would really do it if I had chosen that route.

If a guy would bring a gun in, and I knew based on where I was, if I was in Atlanta, that gun's worth about 250 bucks. Some of these guys would come in and say, "I want $1,000 for this gun." Now, our number one rule is we never let a gun walk. We never let a gun walk out those doors. If you let a gun walk out the door and he kills someone with that gun, kills someone later that day, that's on you.

When Ray would bring someone in, I wasn't letting that person out unless I had that gun in my hand. So when he came in and wanted $1,000 for a gun that I knew on the street here is about 250, that's when, as an undercover, your negotiation skills come in. You have to get it down to a point where it's acceptable to him, and it's also acceptable to a jury that was a realistic [00:33:00] price.

Jordan Harbinger: Because if you overpay for the gun, then the entrapment a- argument works better because- It works better ... if I'm offering you five grand for a gun that's 500 bucks, the defense is, "This was a great deal, and he couldn't turn it down, and the police made it that way so they could create a crime." Yeah. Okay.

Lou Valoze: Negotiations with criminals, it's dangerous, right? It often ends in fistfights and shootouts, yelling and screaming, and that's just something you've got to deal with. But you can't let that gun walk out that door. So even though he wanted 1,000, I might get away with giving him 420 bucks. He's happy. He's not real happy, but he's satisfied.

I'm happy. I know it's a good case now, and he walks out that door. That gun's never going to kill anyone. My job has been done.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned before you never wanted to pile charges onto people. What's the rationale behind that? Because I... Is that also, "Hey, it looks really bad to a jury when they had this guy commit 40 crimes instead of getting him on the first two"?

Lou Valoze: When you look at it, when you step back and look at it, and what was the purpose? Why did you commit 30 undercover [00:34:00] transactions with this one guy? So now you got him stacked up. You got so much weight. Let's say it was heroin. You got so much weight. He's looking at a 20-year minimum. That's really not why we're there.

If he's selling heroin, we'll buy an amount that's going to get him some good time, and we cut him off. There were times when guys would keep coming back to us, but again, we didn't want to pile on. We had enough on him. So a lot of times we would say, "Listen, man, we're chilling out here. We've seen a lot of cops riding by, so we're chilling out."

We always told everyone, "Hey, man, listen, 90% of our business is 100% legitimate." That was our motto. So we said, "Listen, we're just doing our work right now, and we're not playing games for a while till the heat drops." As soon as these guys would hear that, you'd never see them again anyway. '

Jordan Harbinger: Cause they were smart enough to realize that if you saw the risk, they should pay attention and go somewhere else.

All right. So the warehouse trap, he's bringing these guys into the warehouse to allegedly transport something. You're buying the guns or whatever from these folks. How do you end up arresting them? Do you just find them later? What happens with [00:35:00] this?

Lou Valoze: So these operations would go for usually about a year.

You might do a deal with a guy in the second month And never deal with them again. By the time the takedown is going to happen, a year might have gone by. So what we would do is as soon as we would get them identified, we would have a packet on them, and we would usually give that to the US Marshals. And so when we were starting getting close, whatever the takedown operation was going to be, and we had some great ones, whether it was hundreds of law enforcement officers going out and banging doors down to find these guys or bringing them in to the warehouse, which was my favorite way to do it, the marshals would have packets on these guys.

So they'd be putting them to bed maybe a couple weeks before this. They would know where they're laying their head. They would know what they were driving and all that. And so in the event that they didn't show up or we couldn't get them, we would just turn the warrants over to the marshals. We would delegate apprehension responsibility to the [00:36:00] US Marshals, who are the best in the business, and they would hunt them down and find them.

Jordan Harbinger: You don't want to be hunted by the marshals. No. Our old scoutmaster was a US Marshal. This is '80s and '90s, right? So a different time. I remember he had a gun in the car, just in the console of the car. He'd be driving us to McDonald's or something after a camping trip, and I remember we would open it up and look at it, and he'd go, "Careful, there's no safety on that," because it was a revolver, you know?

And we would pick it up and handle it, and he's like, "Put that down. Come on." In 2026 terms, you're like, "You just let a 14-year-old boy pick up a revolver in your car while you're on the highway." You know, like- Times have changed, huh? Now he would be arrested for that. Oh, yeah. Not even just lose his job as a marshal.

He would just be arrested for that. The Boy Scouts was crazy back then. It was like, "All right, shotgun merit badge." Probably doesn't even exist anymore. We'd go shooting, and he'd be like, "All right, this is my duty revolver. Don't keep your finger on the trigger. Don't aim it at anyone." And we'd do a real gun safety class, but it's like, looking back, we were kids.

[00:37:00] Whose idea was this? It's a terrible idea. But you're here. Nobody got hurt. Yeah. We respected those weapons, and we were all good shot. Just kind of funny looking back at it, because I got kids now, and I'm like, "I would never." No. No chance. My kids are a little too small, but even then, I've met teenagers now. No way.

No freaking way. No. So all right, these guys, they're getting hunted by the marshals, or they're going into the warehouse. So do you have, like, a couple of weeks at the end of the year where it's like, "All right, we got our 1:00 PM arrest appointment where this guy's going to come in and bring, I don't know, some contraband or whatever"?

How does it work? How does it go down?

Lou Valoze: So these takedowns were insane. Ray would keep everybody's number in his phone. Let's say we had 100 defendants at the end. We would tell Ray about, maybe about a month or two before the takedown- We would say, "Ray, reach back out to this guy. I haven't talked to him in eight months, but

And let him know that we have," and I'm just going to use one of the examples that we used to use, "We have a semi-trailer full of [00:38:00] flat-screen TVs coming in on this date. If he can get here in the morning, if he can be here by 10:00 AM, we'll give him the pick. We're selling them super cheap." So again, we're just using bait to lure him in.

And you can imagine logistically how difficult this is, because getting criminals to show up at a certain time, very difficult. So I did have

Jordan Harbinger: questions about that, because I was thinking, what if they're late? They run into the next guy?

Lou Valoze: They're the worst, right? Yeah. So we would make it as appealing as possible, saying, "Listen, if you're here by 10:30.

Otherwise, these things are going to be gone. We're selling them for pennies on the dollar. We just need to get rid of them." So Ray would do a great job selling. You know, me and my partners would call some of the guys. Ray always did the lion's share of it. So we would actually stack them up all throughout the day on the day of the takedown.

These takedowns, we would run a live feed to headquarters. The brass at headquarters would be watching all this. We would have our SRT team, which is our special response team, the ATF SWAT team in the Southeast, they'd be in the warehouse hiding up in the rafters, and they'd be in the back [00:39:00] of the truck that they opened up.

They'd open up this truck where the TVs were supposed to be, and it'd be guys with live rounds and beanbag rounds. And these guys would still try to run, amazingly.

Jordan Harbinger: I think I would also run, just because I don't know what's going on and I'm a criminal. You hope it's the cops at that point, right? You hope.

Lou Valoze: Right. But then there's a lot of factors you can't control. Sometimes they'd show up with their wife and kids. Sometimes they'd show up with other bad guys. They'd show up in a car that had a couple kilos of cocaine in it. And you have to deal with all that right on the spot, because the next guy's supposed to come in 20 minutes.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, geez. You're cutting it close.

Lou Valoze: There were times when it would overlap and someone would pull in and they'd see a bunch of activity. They'd take off. So cover teams would have to follow them and try and pull them over. We would have car chases. There were actually some fatal ones. Car chases, shootouts, shootouts inside of the warehouse.

Raycon had to activate a few times, and he actually chased some people down and tackled them, which we never heard the end of.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:00] So your informant tackled a guy during the operation. I don't think that's part of the job description typically, correct?

Lou Valoze: No, and if you hear him tell it, he was Dick Butkus. Because as soon as he tackled the guy, the dog got on him.

It was a whole scene. Ray, he loved to be in the mix. Most informants, once their job is done, they don't want to be anywhere near the takedown or anything. He wanted to be there. He wanted to be on every arrest. Again, he's just built differently.

Jordan Harbinger: He should've been a cop. He really should've been a cop.

Lou Valoze: Oh, he would've been incredible.

Would that dude have taken a bullet for me? Without question.

Jordan Harbinger: Like you said, he's built different. It's just crazy he failed the police exam but managed a chemical engineering degree. Don't understand this guy at all.

Lou Valoze: I'll tell you what else is crazy is that I ended up getting all sorts of awards for these operations.

You know, the US Attorney's Office gave me Agent of the Year, and Project Safe Neighborhood, Gang Case of the Year, Drug Case of the Year, Gun Case of the Year, OCDETF Case of the Year. I remember receiving these awards and thinking, "I should give this right to Ray Khan."

Jordan Harbinger: So the arrests that [00:41:00] you're getting, I mean, how many arrests does an average ATF agent make in their career?

Do you know? I

Lou Valoze: mean, let's say a 20-year career, 25-year career A couple a year usually.

Jordan Harbinger: So making how many in one operation? You said there was, like, 100 defendants on these?

Lou Valoze: ATF had never seen results like this. The tattoo shop, which was in Augusta, Georgia, 12 months, we bought 430 crime guns in 12 months, which ATF had never seen something like that.

No one had ever seen those kind of res- you know, drugs, we didn't have enough money to buy all the drugs we wanted to buy. We could have bought drugs all day long, but that wasn't really what the operations were about. We were there to buy guns. We were buying every single one of these operations three or 400 crime guns off the streets, 100 defendants, 75 federal defendants, 25 state defend- just numbers like they'd never seen before.

Jordan Harbinger: It's shocking [00:42:00] how many guns are out there. Just seems like you have an unlimited supply of contraband that you can get off the street. Do you feel like you're making a big dent in it, or is it just like next week there were 400 more?

Lou Valoze: It's a good question. The answer is yes on the gun side. On the drug side, no.

You can pretty much buy drugs all day long and arrest. Everyone's selling them to you, and you're just plugging holes in the dam. I never felt any satisfaction or that I really made much of a difference. With the guns, every gun I bought made a difference. That's how I felt. Every crime gun that I bought off the street, that I took out of the hands of some violent dude, that was a gun that would not be used to kill anyone again.

That was a gun that was going to be destroyed after the case was adjudicated. It gets melted, and it's not out there anymore. The short answer to your question is on the gun side, yeah, we were making a big difference. And I can tell you, I got a call from one of the cops who was in our cover room, one of the detectives in our cover room on one of these [00:43:00] storefront operations.

He called me about a year and a half after the takedown, and he said, "Listen, I've got to tell you." He goes, "Our vice unit and our narcotics unit, they are so bored right now because they can't get anything done. No one will sell any drugs on the street. No one will sell any guns because they think everyone is an undercover fed."

For a while, it makes an impact. Eventually, a new generation comes in and that's over, but on the gun side, we made a big difference.

Jordan Harbinger: Why do they destroy the gun and they don't just sell it legally through some kind of auction? Because it's already been used in a crime? I don't really understand.

Lou Valoze: There are some sheriff's departments out there who do that.

After they take a gun and the case is adjudicated, they'll have an auction, they'll sell it, which I don't agree with. I just feel that if it's a stolen gun and you can return it to its rightful owner, we do that. But otherwise, I risked my life to buy that gun off the street. It's a crime gun. It's been used in robberies.

It's been used in [00:44:00] assaults. It's maybe some murders. That gun needs to be destroyed. It doesn't need to be back out on the street.

Jordan Harbinger: Hopefully it wouldn't be back out on the street. It would be in some orthodontist's home office, right? But I guess I see your point, too.

Lou Valoze: That's ATF policy, and I think it's because it does look bad.

If NYPD retrieves a gun that's used in a robbery, and when it gets traced, it's, "Oh, wow, this gun was in ATF custody three years ago," it's bad optics.

Jordan Harbinger: That's what I'm thinking. You get a gun that's been used to kill a bunch of people, and then some guy owns it now, and then that gets stolen, and then the person who steals it commits a convenience store robbery.

And he's like, "Hey, this was used to murder people. Are you that guy?" "No. Actually, I stole it from this guy, and I robbed this convenience store with it." So it screws up the evidence chain, too. Like, the ballistics are the same as this serial killer. Oh, well, they found that guy, and then the guy who bought that got robbed.

I see your point to destroying the thing. I don't believe in metaphysical things, but there's also some sort of bad juju w- with a gun that's been used to kill people in crimes and stuff like that, too. [00:45:00]

Lou Valoze: I'm a pro-Second Amendment guy, but I feel that once a gun's been on the streets, and passed through hands, and been used in crimes, if law enforcement can take it off the streets, let's destroy that thing.

If you really need a gun, there's... You can get a gun. There's plenty of gun stores out- Yeah, they're

Jordan Harbinger: still making them. I hear they're still making them. But you mentioned before Ray was built different. There's a story in the book about his store h- gets robbed at gunpoint, and he just gets across the counter and slaps the robber in the face repeatedly.

So he doesn't have normal reactions to stress and pressure, right? He's just fearless, this guy.

Lou Valoze: Yeah, and he tells that story with such Matter of factness. Again, an Indian cultural thing is a slap, because it's not only forceful, but it's degrading. So when he grabbed this guy by the collar, he slapped him.

This guy had the gun. It's almost like a insult on top of a beating. He just has this inner feeling that he's invincible. I used to warn him, like, "Ray, if you're getting them to go to the warehouse and you know they got guns and drugs, please don't ride in their vehicles with them. If they get pulled over, I'm not going to be able to help you.

Or if they're getting [00:46:00] drugged up and they might get violent." But it would go in one ear and out the other, and he would do exactly what we told him not to. But the results were always good, man. Occasionally, we would get burned. Some of the guys he would bring in would either sell us some drugs that were so stepped on it wasn't even worth the charge, or there would be some funny things with the gun and money and all that.

He would take it personally and go out there and, like, try and vigilante some stuff on his own, and we would say, "Ray." because there's times even as an undercover you just let it go. I'll get him on the next round.

Jordan Harbinger: Criminals aren't going to suddenly turn over a new leaf and get away with everything they've gotten away with in the past.

That does not happen very often, right? My buddy's a cop in San Diego, and I remember he was doing some sort of drug sting, and I was like, "Hey, let me know when you get a break. We'll go eat lunch." And he's like, "Yeah, I'm thinking about calling it." I was like, "Man, you know, isn't it tough to catch these guys?"

And he goes, "No, I have to get lucky one time. This guy has to get lucky every day." And I was like, "Oh yeah, that's a really good point." He just has to see you [00:47:00] walking out of the house that one time with that one person, but you have to successfully do that every single time you go to work, basically, if you're a criminal.

Lou Valoze: Man, he's so right. There were times as an undercover, to get burned with either a fake gun or fake drugs, everyone's going to mess with you, right? You don't hear the end of it. It hurts the ego. Actually, ecstasy was really big when Ray first started with me, these ecstasy pills, and, uh, we would buy thousands of them.

And there was a guy who came in. Something didn't feel right. He sold me this ecstasy, and it said SJ on it. And a lot of times ecstasy would be, has a lot of custom stuff on it, like,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah. And so you get the bear or, like, a logo. Yes. You get the Tesla logo on them or whatever, and you're like, "Oh, the Teslas are good."

Or like, "Oh, you've got to get the Lego bricks, the Lego bricks are the shit right now." Yeah, you see those or hear about those.

Lou Valoze: This guy had this big bag full of these ecstasy pills that said SJ on them, and at the time that guy Sean John or, there was a [00:48:00] rapper.

Jordan Harbinger: I have no idea. It sounds right to me. I'm sure we'll get 1,000 emails about it's the other way around.

Whatever.

Lou Valoze: He was big at the time. I think his name was Sean John, and he told me that's who it was. They had stamped on there, and I was like, "All right, cool." I bought a whole big bag and all that, and they got sent off to the lab. It turns out it was, I think it's St. Joseph's aspirin is what it was. Okay. I never heard the end of that.

But Ray, when I told Ray He took that personally.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Lou Valoze: He took that personally. And I said, "Ray, just let it go. He's going to come back. It's cool. We're going to get him. No big deal." The next day, Ray physically had dragged that dude back into the shop, and the guy sold me a couple thousand real ecstasy pills at that time- Oh, wow

because he didn't want that on his resume, man.

Jordan Harbinger: That's funny, but the question is, that guy's defense attorney probably was like, "Yeah, they literally forced my client into the store and forced him to sell them real drugs after he sold them fake drugs." That's not a great case, you know? [00:49:00] It's not a great defense either, but it's not a great case.

It's not that clean.

Lou Valoze: This guy had prior drug sales convictions.

Jordan Harbinger: That always helps.

Lou Valoze: So I would say he was predisposed.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's funny. You mentioned before drugs were so stepped on, which for people who have never sold drugs, that means when you mix, I don't know, cocaine with baby aspirin so that you have twice as much cocaine now, right?

Lou Valoze: Lidocaine was a big one that they would use. Basically, what they're doing is, we call it stepping on it. They're cutting it, the real drugs. They'll take a kilo of cocaine, and by the time they get done with it, it'll still smell like cocaine, but 60 or 70% is now some sort of stimulant, like a lidocaine powder.

But it's not real cocaine, so only 40%. So your purity is down to, like, 40%.

Jordan Harbinger: We'll be right back after this, and unlike the ATF, our sponsors are actually telling you upfront what the deal is before you accidentally become part of an operation called something like Smokescreen Meat Grinder. See you on the flip.

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We are happy to dig up codes for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Lou Valoze. How does this work? Let's say I get a kilo of cocaine and I want to make it two kilos of cocaine so I can make twice as much money. I go and I buy a bunch of lidocaine somehow, or I get it from a crooked, I don't know, lab or dentist or something like that, and then I sell you two kilos of cocaine, but half of it is lidocaine.

Am I going down for one kilo of cocaine, or am I going down for two kilos of cocaine even though half of it was lidocaine? How does that work?

Lou Valoze: So in the federal system, you will be prosecuted on how much cocaine you sold me. So we'll get the purity levels of both of those kilos and whatever the total was.

And by the time you get into that much, you're going away for a long time no matter what. But [00:53:00] yeah, so let's say it was 50/50 on both, you would be prosecuted on one kilo of cocaine.

Jordan Harbinger: I know I'm going to face pushback for this in the emails, but at first glance anyway, it seems to me like you should be charged for the amount of drugs you thought you were selling as opposed to the amount of drugs you actually...

Like, look, if you sold no drugs, I guess I'm a little sympathetic. If you sold aspirin, you are a con man, not a drug dealer. But if you sold drugs and they were just really shitty, but you sold a lot of them, I don't know why you get a break on that. I don't really get it.

Lou Valoze: That's a great point, and I'll bring it back to Ray Khan.

So conversely to the point you're bringing up about the drugs, one time he brought me in a guy who was a counterfeiter. It was a guy from the hood, but he said, "Man," I can't remember what his points were, but it was pretty good on the points as far as what I would have to pay him for these counterfeit bills.

Jordan Harbinger: Counterfeit US currency?

Lou Valoze: Yeah, hundreds. Yep. So I said, "Let me get three. Give me a sample. Let me get three of them, and depending on how good they are, I'll make an order." So this guy brings me three $100 bills the next day. [00:54:00] I bring them to my Secret Service buddy, and he looks at them and he said, "Man, these are the greatest counterfeit notes I've ever seen.

Unbelievable." So I order a couple hundred thousand dollars from this guy, and he shows up, and I'm not kidding you- He had them in a big briefcase. So the top ones were pretty good quality, but as you went in the pile, it looked like a kid had done it on a Xerox machine. They were awful. If you tried to pass one of these, you'd get your ass kicked, right?

And I told this dude that I was trading, I was going to use this money to buy fake cigarettes off some Russians in New Jersey, and I was like, "Dude, I'll get killed if I try to pass these." And he's, like, telling me, "You just take the good one and make it one of the, a wad, and put

Jordan Harbinger: the bad ones-" Oh, man. That's a good way to get killed, yeah, for sure.

Lou Valoze: But anyway, the point is, it didn't matter the quality. He still ate that whole charge for a couple hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit, because it doesn't matter what the quality is. If you're a convicted felon, it doesn't matter if you sell me a [00:55:00] little .22 revolver or an AR-15. It's the same charge, you get the same time.

But when it comes to drugs, it's different.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I wonder what the logic is there. Do

Lou Valoze: you know? Yeah, I don't know whether it's right or wrong, but that's just how the federal statutes are written.

Jordan Harbinger: On the one hand, I guess it doesn't matter, because if you're selling two kilos instead of four, you go down for two instead of four.

You're still going away for a long time, and drug penalties are pretty insane as it is, I think. I don't know how productive those are. But yeah, it just seems like you're right. Counterfeiting, doesn't matter if you draw the crappiest $100 bill out of crayons. If I go to the store and try to spend it, that's a crime.

Lou Valoze: Same crime as if it was, you know, flawless.

Jordan Harbinger: We have a lot of federal prosecutors and things like that who are listening to this show, and defense attorneys. Somebody shoot me an email with the logic behind this. I'm so curious why this happens to be the policy. Okay, so after all this success, why does everything start to fall apart for Ray?

I mean, he starts getting these arrests for nonsense, like pirated DVDs, and the Department of Revenue is targeting him. By the way, what [00:56:00] is that again, the Department of Revenue? I feel like I knew all the agencies, but I don't even remember what this is. I'm sure I've heard of it.

Lou Valoze: So this is a state agency, the Georgia Department of Revenue.

Basically, the guys who regulate and enforce all the alcohol and tobacco laws of the state. It's revenue, it's taxes. And they were loosely partnered up with us during these operations, because we did use them to help out with tobacco licenses and all that, and to help out with the cover team. They would staff one of their agents to help us out.

They're kind of partners. Little did we know, this whole time, the head guy, this guy had a hard-on for Raycon. Now, a lot of the people he dealt with were Indians, because of they own most of the gas stations, they sell cigarettes, they own a lot of liquor stores and all that. He had it in for Raycon. While these operations were going on, they had open investigations on Raycon.

They were working him and his stores, and Ray [00:57:00] had... We would give him a lot of swag, that we called it, which was all counterfeit junk, to put in his trunk to go out. When he was meeting with these people, he would say, "Hey, this is what I have at the warehouse." This is part of the bait he would lure them in with.

Ray was an enterprising guy. He had taken some of these counterfeit DVDs and they ended up in one of his stores and he was selling them. Okay They arrested him for that. During the operation, he gets arrested for that. As an undercover fed, I'm thinking, "Shouldn't we have some priorities here in law enforcement?"

Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: no kidding. "Hey, we're going to take this crucial chess piece off the board for fricking DVDs." For what? It's almost personal, right, with this guy. Because otherwise- Yes ... why bother?

Lou Valoze: It was personal. And to kind of make it even more difficult, all I was able to do, we were able to stay his deportation. We were not able to get him a legal status in the country.

He was essentially just paroled and helpless. So as soon as he gets arrested, ICE puts a detainer on him. We had to finish that operation out [00:58:00] without him. Now, luckily, he had done so much, the wheels were turning. We didn't need him anymore at that point. But for the next operation, we start out with another informant who had made all sorts of promises.

We're going nowhere, nowhere. And my partners are like, "Hey, we need Ray Khan." Now, he's been scheduled for deportation again. Now I have to jump through hoops. We literally got him pulled off the tarmac as they were loading him up, had an ATF agent get him and bring him to a hotel in Atlanta. He had been in a ICE detention facility for, like, uh, three or four months.

You'd think he'd be bitter about this, about the, his treatment, all that. Shows up the next day, smile on his face, jumps right into work, and starts killing it.

Jordan Harbinger: Unbelievable. What happened to his businesses when he was put away for three to four months?

Lou Valoze: He lost everything. Oh, my gosh. His, his rival, which was his own family, took everything from him.

He had to start out again from scratch. Now, this happened twice. He was arrested twice, the DVDs once, and the [00:59:00] other one was for having a video poker machine that was paying out when it wasn't supposed to.

Jordan Harbinger: I see, because you can't gamble in Georgia? I don't know.

Lou Valoze: Now you can. Now the state has made it legal because they're saying that it helps scholarships or whatever.

But at this point, no, you couldn't. So he gets arrested twice during these operations. Now we're starting to realize that these guys are supposed partners. Ray has become Moby Dick to this guy. And when everything kind of fell apart after the last operation, and when I could no longer help Ray, because I was in trouble of my own, they went after him full bore.

They actually indicted him on state RICO charges for tax purposes, right? Tax evasion.

Jordan Harbinger: It just seems like such a waste of resources. And I know us civvies always think like this. Why didn't somebody just call you and go, "Hey, is this guy important to you? Okay, I have 800 other things on my desk. I'm just going to move on.

The end."

Lou Valoze: You would think, right? I always found that this is the Georgia [01:00:00] Department of Revenue, right? I always found that, uh, in dealing with a lot of different entities, which I did throughout my career, the less power some of these guys have, the bigger their badge gets.

Jordan Harbinger: It's the petty tyrant, right? It's the person- Yes

who's got the key to the filing cabinet, and they just- Yeah. ... will never let you have it. You get, they've got to walk you down there during- Yep ... their available office hours to unlock it for you. Yeah, it's always one of those.

Lou Valoze: That's a great way to put it, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: My mom was a teacher, and she would go, "Yeah, Catherine has the filing cabinet key that we have for the student records, and we can't make copies, and she can't leave it somewhere where we can all get it, and she can't leave the cabinet unlocked, and she's got to walk you down there.

But she only works Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she only wants to do it after lunch." My mom would always complain about this, right? Because there'd be eight teachers waiting to get the fricking manila folder with the student's name on it so they could mark something on a chart. It's just unbelievable nonsense.

Lou Valoze: It's amazing, right? The less power someone has, the more they want to exert. I guess it's human nature.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I suppose so. For certain people, it's human nature. I think a [01:01:00] reasonable person would've just left the damn cabinet unlocked. A reasonable person in this guy's shoes would've said, "We at the Department of Revenue have so many things we have to deal with.

Me cleaning up a law enforcement informant who's done more good than harm, I don't care about this at all. Tell him to throw the porn DVDs in the garbage and stop buying cigarettes, and our work here is done. Let's move forward." But no, this guy had to put away a convenience store owner because he got bullied in middle school or something.

Lou Valoze: That's exactly it. You got it. You nailed it. So at that point in my career when I could no longer protect him, what we did was we reached out to ICE. Again, I had to do a memo every month to keep him in the country, but we reached out to ICE and said, "Man, we got a great informant," and they took him right away.

And he's actually-- He's been working for them since and making unbelievable money laundering cases. I'm talking tens of millions of dollars.

Jordan Harbinger: ICE works money laundering cases? I did not know that. I guess I never thought about that.

Lou Valoze: Yeah, they're-- It's [01:02:00] always money laundering cases where it's foreign nationals.

The money leaves America, and the foreign national's bringing it back in once it's cleaned.

Jordan Harbinger: Is that the whole you can't fly in with more than $10,000 in cash- Yes ... and if you do, you've got to declare it and something, something? I always wonder about that, and they're like, "Do you have any precious gems worth over that?"

And I'm always like, "No, man. Do I look like a guy who carries a bag of precious gems worth over 10,000?" But I guess that's the point, right? They want to make sure that it's not being laundered. Okay, that tracks. I guess I just assumed that was not ICE doing that. Nowadays, 2026, when we hear about ICE, it's only one thing, right?

We only hear about that one thing.

Lou Valoze: So at least now he was able to stay in the country. That was his only goal from the beginning. We never paid him a dime. His kids are here. He just wanted to stay in the country.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel so bad for this guy. He worked his ass off, and it's just such a mess. He lost his car, and then he lost his business, then he built it again, then he lost it again.

It's just like this guy, he just takes beating after beating, but he's so resilient. It's really admirable, actually. [01:03:00]

Lou Valoze: Now he's driving a $750,000 Rolls-Royce SUV. That's crazy.

Jordan Harbinger: I don't care how much money I have, I would never buy anything like that. Just the fact that you could have a car that costs that much and then it gets dinged by a Prius in a parking lot Yep.

It's just like, "No thank you, man. No way." I can't deal with that. Shit. I guess if you really love your cars. Even then, I don't know anybody who has a Rolls-Royce. I do, but they're all 80 years old, and they live in the UK or something. Okay, so Ray gets arrested because this guy, like you said, had a hard-on for him from the Department of Revenue.

They worked

Lou Valoze: this huge tax evasion case on him and his son and some of his associates. And again, this is not the IRS. This is the Georgia Department of Revenue claiming that he has not paid millions in taxes. I can't tell you anything about this, not my area, but he gets indicted. State RICO charges, Racketeering Influence Corrupt [01:04:00] Organization, RICO charges on the state level in Georgia.

I believe one of his other associates gets picked up. He gets a heads-up, and he made some phone calls. He called his controlling agent, me, and some other law enforcement he'd been working with, and everyone told him the same thing Get out of town. Let your lawyers see what's going on and get a grip on this.

Jordan Harbinger: So basically just leave Georgia so they have no jurisdiction over you and they can't arrest you? Was that kind of the advice? Pretty much. Wow. That's kind of interesting, federal law enforcement being like, "It's not a federal case. It's a state case, so leave the state."

Lou Valoze: Because we all knew there was corruption.

We all knew something was fishy, something wasn't right. So this is where the story gets totally wild. Now, you've already heard about everything this guy has done. Thousands of crime guns off the streets because of him. Dangerous drugs, hundreds of kilos of dangerous drugs, violent defendants, trigger pullers off the streets because of this guy.[01:05:00]

Stolen cars, counterfeit money, all that. Big-time stuff. Now he's a fugitive. Now he's on the run from this Georgia agency that was supposed to be actually participating in these operations with us. They knew the good he was doing. Now, Ray has built himself back up by this time. He's making a lot of money.

It's a lot easier to be a fugitive when you have money. It's tough to be on the run when you're broke. But when you have money, it's easier. And Ray's learned a lot from me and from my team, so he knows what he's doing. He's very smart with phones. He knows how to be on the run, how to be a fugitive. He does everything right.

He has contacts who are able to bring him cash. He's got people who can shuffle him around. He's able to make his way up to New York City. Once he's up there, he does what Ray does. He gets in with people who can help him using that Ray Khan charm he has. He's right [01:06:00] in Midtown. He's able to get a beautiful place.

Now he's got to do everything with cash. Yeah. No credit cards can be used and all that, because even though he's out of Georgia, there's an active warrant for his arrest. So he's up there, and he's successfully dodged the law at this point. They're sitting outside his house. He's getting information that they're doing surveillance on his house back in Georgia.

Everyone's been arrested. And he has an incredible team of lawyers out of Atlanta who he's paid millions of dollars when this is all said and done, who are working on this case for him While he's up in New York City living in Midtown, I'm not going to say he's having a good time, but he's doing as good as you can do being a fugitive.

Better than

Jordan Harbinger: an, an ICE detention center or prison probably, yeah.

Lou Valoze: Absolutely. He's eating at good restaurants, making friends up there. He gets in real good with the doormen, which is very important in New York to make friends with your doorman, because they know everything that's going on, which [01:07:00] pays off for him big time later.

His lawyers start their own investigation using their own investigators, and this guy who, the main guy who's pretty high up in the Georgia Department of Revenue by this time, who was obsessed with Ray Khan, they end up finding out that he is corrupt, that he's been working with Ray's main competitor, who is actually Ray's brother-in-law.

Jordan Harbinger: Not a criminal gang, just working with another guy who owns, what, convenience stores? Yes. This is crazy.

Lou Valoze: One of his biggest competitors. And this guy has been not only feeding this Georgia Department of Revenue agent bad information, but he's been bribing him $10,000 watches, plane tickets, round trip plane tickets to Europe for him and his wife to go after Ray Khan.

The lawyers are able to uncover this. Then they find out this guy's boss, who was, like, one of the number one [01:08:00] guys over at the Georgia Department of Revenue, never went to college like he claimed he did, had a whole thing up on the wall. Oh, no. Yep, and used that to promote. So they uncover all this, which You know, once you do that, their credibility's gone.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean, if you lie about having a college degree, we've seen examples of this before where somebody has a great career and it's been, I don't know, 10 or 20 years, and everyone loves them, and they find out they didn't graduate from Duke or whatever, and it's just, "You're fired. It's over." It doesn't matter if you've done a bunch of work, have good experience, great connections.

After that, everything you've ever done is in question, and it's just not worth it. It's not worth unraveling all that.

Lou Valoze: It's true, and let alone taking bribes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that too. Yeah, of course.

Lou Valoze: So now six months has gone by, and there was a point where Ray was out in the park, Central Park, and he gets a heads-up, gets a call from the doorman telling him that a couple detectives had come over and shown him a picture of Ray.

"Have you seen [01:09:00] this guy? Does he live here?" The doorman, he did a New York kind of thing that, uh, that a... You know, Ray, of course, had taken good care of this guy, tipped him really well I'm sure, and the doorman covered for him, said, "You know, you're going to have to talk to the owner." He goes, "It doesn't look familiar to me.

There's a lot of Indian, Middle Eastern type guys here. I can't really tell from that picture." Then he immediately called Ray. So now Ray can never go back to that apartment, got to go get a new place. But that was only for a very short period of time because the case against him was already starting to unravel by the time that happens.

Jordan Harbinger: Did the lawyers bring this to the DA? "Hey, by the way." Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay.

Lou Valoze: So here's the end result of his lawyer's investigation. That Georgia Department of Revenue agent, who had become a special agent in charge of that region by this time, gets arrested, perp walked in front of the cameras, and charged under the same RICO statutes for bribery.

Wow. So in this crazy twist, his boss with the college degree loses his job, like you said, fired [01:10:00] instantly. Captain Ahab, who was going after Ray, he gets arrested and perp walked, loses his job, loses his pension. Ray is able to come back victorious after six months.

Jordan Harbinger: That must have felt really good.

Lou Valoze: Oh, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Not only the case fall apart, but the guy who's going after you gets arrested. That's just, like, nothing sweeter than that.

Lou Valoze: So ironically, a couple things then when the dust kind of settles. So eventually the DA's office just drops charges on everyone, even the DOR guy, because this thing is now such a mess, they don't want to touch it, right?

So they dismiss.

Jordan Harbinger: Ray was out there infiltrating criminal gangs with no formal training, no badge, and apparently no functioning fear response. Meanwhile, I need three browser tabs and an emotional support animal to compare toothpaste. We'll be right back.

Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, and/or relationships in under two minutes just about every Wednesday. It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where [01:11:00] you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Lou Valoze.

Did Ray's brother-in-law get charged for this too, the guy who was bribing the Department of Revenue officer? Yes,

Lou Valoze: he did. But again, the DA's office said, "This is so messy, we're dismissing everything." So ultimately, Ray kind of saved everyone else from getting in trouble. And here's the crazy part. When he comes back, his lawyers, they had reached out to the IRS and said, "Please audit our client.

We are asking for an audit of our client. He's been accused of all this tax evasion." IRS does a full audit of Ray Khan, and the results come back and Ray is actually owed money- ... by the IRS. Yeah, he's gone through all of this trouble, right, all the arrests, losing everything, stuck in county jails and then taken to ICE detention centers, while he's making these incredible cases for the ATF.

But once again, I've never heard him complain. He never put his head down through it [01:12:00] all. After this, now our goal at this point, we've got to get this guy a green card. If anyone deserves legal status in this country, it's Ray Khan. We all wrote letters to the federal immigration judge, numerous agents from HSI, from ATF, detailing, my letter was about 12 pages long, where I listed every federal defendant and their criminal history, all the guns, all the drugs, and still got denied.

Jordan Harbinger: What? I'm shocked. That's craz- The government clearly failed this guy. I mean, it seems like a lot of what came at him was, some part of it was the cost of doing business when you're an informant, but a lot of it seems exploitative, right? Because you're essentially asking civilians to risk their lives for the government, which is hard to justify.

But then you go, "Oh, and by the way, we're not even going to do you the courtesy of just letting you stay here and work and run your business that you already have." It's not like this guy came in illegally and then did a bunch of things that cost [01:13:00] us, as a country, money. He actually was massively ROI positive and overstayed his visa.

It's so insane to me.

Lou Valoze: When you lay it out on paper, you look at the big picture and everything he did, it's really impressive. Just one gun off the streets is impressive, but thousands of guns off the street. And for him to be just continuously denied legal status, and I don't think it's being overdramatic to liken him to some of the translators in Afghanistan who helped our special forces units.

I

Jordan Harbinger: was just thinking about that. I had a, a driver the other day that was an Afghani translator, and I was like, "Hey, man, what do you think about some of the guys that you worked with just getting left there?" And then it's like, "Oh, they'll let me in. I just need to apply." And it's like, "Nah, screw you, pal."

Shame on us, really, is all I can say about something like that. Shame on all of us.

Lou Valoze: I'll make this announcement, and you're the first one that I'm telling this information to. All

Jordan Harbinger: right.

Lou Valoze: Last week- Ray Khan got his green card.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God, thank God.

Lou Valoze: Through [01:14:00] no help from the government or anyone else, eventually his son petitioned, paid a lawyer a ton of money, and finally, after 20 years, he was able to get his green card.

Jordan Harbinger: But it's important to note, he got it, what, because his son filed for him and said, "You're dependent." So that's something that anybody can do if th- because his son's a US citizen, I assume, right? Born here. That's great news, but that should not have been the route that he needed to take to get the green card, right?

I think we can agree on that. That's insane to me.

Lou Valoze: The guy, he did more than, I, I'm going to say 90% of the federal agents out there have done in their career. This informant did more.

Jordan Harbinger: Thank God he gets to finally put that chapter to bed, man. God. If somebody out there thinks, "Hey, maybe I could do something like what Ray Khan did," what are they missing?

What was Ray's real gift with all of this, besides his crazy work ethic that he clearly had?

Lou Valoze: Ray had the same gift that an elite undercover agent [01:15:00] has, the ability to make others want to follow him. He could walk into a room of criminals and make them want to follow him, to make them want to be a part of his hustle.

That's the gift that he has. He can do that with anyone, not just criminals. He walks into a room, and he's not even the most likable guy you'll ever meet. There's just something about him where you know you should follow this guy. This guy is successful at what he does, whether that's criminal or whether it's legit.

I want a part of this guy's action. That was his skill, and that's how he was able to bring these people and say, "Hey, look at what I've got going on. Meet my people."

Jordan Harbinger: What happens at that point? Surely informants die occasionally doing this.

Lou Valoze: Listen, his family's not going to get taken care of. There's no monetary sum someone's going to get from the government.

It's, you're doing it at your own risk. It's a very thankless job. But again, you have to look at the motivation for why do people become confidential informants. And over 90% of the time, [01:16:00] it's to receive favor with the prosecutors because you've been accused of a crime, or you don't want to go back to prison.

You violated your probation, and a judge is going to give you a chance to work that off by cooperating with law enforcement. Now, there's a small number of informants who just do it for monetary reasons. So when you get other agencies, DEA and FBI have more money. They generally pay more. Informants for DEA actually get a percentage of the take when they seize.

If they can lead the DEA to a $10 million seizure, they'll get a million dollar, whatever the percentage that was worked out is.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah. There's a movie with Ben Affleck that I saw recently, and Matt Damon. They found some drug house, and the woman who was there at the end got 5 million bucks because it was loaded with money.

It was like a trap house. Yeah, that's a pretty good bonus, right? It gives you incentive to roll over on your cartel bosses.

Lou Valoze: Exactly, but it's a high risk, right? So you can get a good take. It's a very high risk. So 90% of confidential informants are working off charges. [01:17:00] Maybe 8% are doing it for the money.

And then there's this 2% Who are just doing it for the cause. You don't see it often. Ray's motivation was to stay in the country. That was his motivation. But I would say he would fall in that 2% because he loved doing it. He was doing it for the cause.

Jordan Harbinger: You can tell, right? He tackled somebody. If you're not interested in this, you do what you need to do to work off your charges, and you try and stay out of the rest of it.

You don't run back to work every day and over-deliver every single time. He could have worked off those charges a long time ago, I would imagine. Man, this guy's amazing. I'm glad that he got his green card. It seems like he's probably rebuilt his business for the third or fourth time by now. Now his brother-in-law hopefully is out of the picture.

So this guy who screwed up his whole life, tried to get him thrown in prison, tried to get him deported, was his sister's husband. Does she know that she's married to a massive asshole now that he's been indicted or whatever and that the whole thing came out? Because it seemed like before she probably just didn't believe Ray, right?

Mm-hmm. "Oh, my husband says you're a jerk. [01:18:00] He's my husband. I don't know. You got arrested." But now it's like, "Oh, no, I'm married to the jerk. He's lucky he's not in prison." She knows. She knows. But she's still married to this guy.

Lou Valoze: Oh, yeah. And to this day, what is truly amazing, even though now he doesn't have to do this anymore, he's making some incredible cases that are helping America out in different ways now.

And we kind of touched on this before, but he's found a way now to infiltrate these foreign nationals who are laundering tens of millions of dollars of our money.

Jordan Harbinger: I cannot believe he's still at it. He can't become a law enforcement officer, right, because he's got felonies and all this stuff. No. It's kind of too bad.

It reminds me of all my buddies who wanted to join the FBI when we were in law school, and they were like, "Have you ever smoked marijuana?" And they were like, "Yeah, obviously." And they were like, "Oh, you can't work here." And I was thinking, you want to catch criminals, b- boy scout doesn't even cover it. These are guys that have never handled marijuana, and you're like, "Yeah, go find the most dangerous people in America."

And it's like, what are you talking about? These guys have never left their small town or whatever. It doesn't make any [01:19:00] sense to me.

Lou Valoze: Yeah, the FBI, they don't catch a lot of people anyway. I'm not a big fan. But the, uh, hiring process is rough, and anything you've done in your background will come back to haunt you.

The drug thing for me was no big deal. I never touched a drug. You certainly working undercover, you get exposed to a lot of drugs. We lose a lot of good people because of the hiring process, unfortunately.

Jordan Harbinger: Especially for undercover. I know ATF is always the greatest of all time when it comes to undercover.

Even other agencies have admitted to me that if you want to do undercover, it's like, all right, you've got to go to the ATF. Most people don't even think about the ATF. I bet you most Americans don't even know what it is. It just seems like you want somebody who has done a lot of stuff but whose life hasn't been ruined by it.

But yeah, it's just a fine line, right? It's just really tough to have. You need a CIA agent that knows a lot of terrorists but isn't a terrorist, right?

Lou Valoze: I can say with the utmost confidence that the ATF undercover program is the greatest undercover program in the world, and it [01:20:00] produces the greatest undercover agents in the world.

We're just heads above anybody else because we're out there on the streets doing it every day. We live it. I lived it for 20 years. It happens to be what we do really well. I was able to work with men and women who I was pinching myself that I could work alongside these men and women, because they were phenomenal.

If you just walked into a room and saw all of us, it, you know, it looks like it's a prison meeting, yet meanwhile, these are some of the smartest, well-educated, well-spoken people you'll ever meet in your life. It was amazing to be able to work with everybody.

Jordan Harbinger: I think it would also be fun to my wife to be like, "Hey, honey, I've got to go get a bunch of tattoos because I don't really fit in with the guys at work over here at the ATF."

Yeah. I've got to gain 35 pounds of muscle and get tattoos all the way from my neck down to my ankles. Sorry, it's part of the gig. It's part of the life.

Lou Valoze: I went through the whole, I grew my hair all the way [01:21:00] down to my waist. I had a ZZ Top beard. I shaved my head. I had, like, 15 earrings in each ear and all that, and then I came to a point where I realized that a lot of the top level bad guys that I was going after, they didn't look like that.

They looked like normal people. So I would say for the second half of my undercover career, my look kind of went back to a normal look because I realized anyone can grow their hair long, grow a beard, grow your Afro out, whatever your thing is. But in the undercover world, you find out real quick who's supposed to be in and who's not, and if you're not supposed to be in, it doesn't matter how crazy your look is.

They're going to fish you out right away. It's how you carry yourself, how you walk into a room, and how you're able to connect with these people who, in reality, you have nothing in common with These aren't college-educated people who have done right. These are people from a different world from where we're from.

But you've got to be able to get on their level and connect with them. It's how you carry [01:22:00] yourself.

Jordan Harbinger: Seems like some of the higher level folks, I don't know, is this a stereotype or have I been watching too many movies? It seems like a lot of the higher level folks would be college-educated potentially, but maybe not.

Maybe even the highest ranking sort of criminal underbosses just grow up in a world of crime and never bother with that. I don't know.

Lou Valoze: Yeah. The guys we were going after, when it got up into the higher ranks of the bikers and the street gangs and the cartels, I'm not saying they weren't smart. They were not college educated, but w- you find out most of them, they didn't have some crazy look going on.

They didn't do drugs. They sold them. They didn't do them. Once I finished doing all the street level stuff, which is how I started, that's how I learned, I'm in alleyways, I'm in shopping mall parking lots getting into some joker's car to buy a stolen gun or wh- once you get those building blocks and you start working into these long-term, deeply embedded operations, you start to realize that how you look doesn't really matter.

How you carry yourself is what matters.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess for the educated [01:23:00] stuff, it's more white collar crime, right? If you're creating shell companies, you probably have a degree, but yeah, if you're just selling a bunch of guns, drugs, it's the school of hard knocks all the way. One of the first things you said at the top of the show where Ray rolled up, bought some cigarettes that were unstamped or whatever, untaxed, and that means you can seize the Escalade as part of the crime.

I'm so curious about civil asset forfeiture. I heard this gets abused sometimes. There's a lot of people that think that law enforcement often will abuse the civil asset forfeiture to just basically confiscate property where it's not necessarily always appropriate. I'm wondering what you think about that.

Lou Valoze: It's human nature, right? Looking back now, I would call that somewhat of a- an abuse, what I did. I saw that shiny Cadillac Escalade and I said, "Man, what a great undercover car that would make. I want that." So essentially, did I kind of engineer that seizure? I did, right? As long as there's contraband in a conveyance, whether that conveyance is a Cadillac Escalade or an ocean [01:24:00] freighter or a horse and buggy, if it has contraband, it's seizable.

You're not going to get it personally, but if they see something that would be a great asset for their department or their agency, you might go the extra mile to make sure that it becomes seizable. So yes, is there abuse? Without a doubt.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Interesting. My police department growing up in Michigan had, I think it was a Lamborghini that they'd painted with police colors, and I remember thinking, "Did I pay for that?

I hope not. I hope they got that from somebody who's selling cocaine out here in Birmingham, Michigan," because that was expensive.

Lou Valoze: I- it's funny, ATF's always been very careful about that, not allowing us to have flamboyant kind of vehicles, because of the optics. It doesn't look good. And we would say, "Listen, how am I going to pass myself off as this high-level international gun trafficker if I'm driving a Buick Regal?"

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, a Toyota Camry with 180,000 miles on it. Yeah. [01:25:00] Exactly.

Lou Valoze: So we would get creative, and we would seize vehicles that we could then put into use. That's one way to do it, but again, when it comes to asset forfeiture, probably, obviously, the DEA is the number one agency out there making huge seizures because of the nature of the narcotics business.

And there have been guys who have gotten jammed up because they got a little overzealous and seizing mansions. Now, I'm not saying it was wrong, but again, sometimes you think, "Oh, man, the agency'll love me if I get this," so you go a little too hard.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I've got a buddy who, he's got a lot of relatives in Miami law enforcement, and he told me that everyone he knows down there, everyone in air quotes, but they have sports cars that lawyers can't afford, right?

And they get it because it gets seized from a drug dealer, and then there's an auction, but it's kind of like, well, who knows about these auctions? Cops. So they roll in there, and you get yours, and then you're off the market for the next one, and then the other guy who missed out on that one gets the next one.

So you get these guys who make, I don't know what cops make, let's [01:26:00] say under $200,000 a year certainly, and they are driving a car that cost twice that much. I don't... Look, drug dealers, if you commit a crime and you use that item to commit the crime, I get why it's seized, but it's a little weird that it ends up in the guy's garage who works with the other guys that seized it.

It's just a little, the optics are not good, like you said. Not great.

Lou Valoze: Yeah, see, the Marshals handle those auctions, and we were not allowed to even go to those auctions for the obvious reasons. Right. But local law enforcement was not prohibited from going.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. Thank you for humoring me on that.

I'm not trying to make law enforcement look bad. I just always had questions about this, and, uh, no one can answer them.

Lou Valoze: Law enforcement is like every other profession. There's always some bad apples. It is what it is.

Jordan Harbinger: Lou Valoze, thank you very much.

Lou Valoze: Hey, Jordan, it was an honor to be on. Thank you so much. I had a great time.

Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview where Dr. Abigail Marsh unpacks why psychopathy is more treatable than we think, how kindness can quietly reshape lives, and why we may need to rethink [01:27:00] labels like sociopath.

JHS Trailer: You know somebody with psychopathy already. So if 1 to 2% of the population has a clinically significant level of psychopathy, and most people's social networks include 100 to 150 people, all of us know somebody with psychopathy.

So that's the bad news. But the good news is that the stereotypes people have about psychopathy are usually a little off, and so the person with psychopathy you already know, you may just not have recognized that that's what their behavior adds up to. Many people who are psychopathic themselves are like, "I don't want to be this way.

I just don't know how to behave differently." No differently from somebody with any other disorder. It's just they can't find anybody who will help them. I fully recognize that people with psychopathy are totally capable of coming up with a code for how they want to live, including a code that dictates, like, what it means to be a good person, even if they don't have the same emotions and drives and motivations as other people do.

So I think that's... It's really important to clarify. However, in that context, people who are psychopathic just don't intrinsically value other people's [01:28:00] welfare that much. They are just much more instrumental in their social interactions. Every interaction is about, like, what can I get? What can I get out of this person?

What can I get out of this situation? So that's why there's so much manipulating and lying and exploitation, is it's because people, most of the time, are just sort of tools to get whatever the ultimate goal is. Every other psychological disorder can be treated, and so why would these be uniquely immutable?

And in fact, the evidence is they can be changed, they can be improved. They're totally treatable.

Jordan Harbinger: To hear the science behind who actually does the most harm, check out episode 1293. It might change how you see everyone around you.

Ray Khan's story is one of those cases where every label feels too small.

Hero? Maybe. Hustler? Definitely. Victim? Certainly at times. Reckless lunatic with Olympic-level confidence and the self-preservation instincts of a rented scooter? Also yes. But the real question isn't just who Ray was, it's what the system saw when it looked at him. A partner? A tool? A disposable [01:29:00] immigrant with enough desperation to say yes and enough talent to survive the assignment? Because if somebody risks their life for the government and helps put dangerous people away, walks into rooms even trained agents wouldn't casually wander into, and then ends up abandoned when the bill comes due, that's not just a messy case file, it's a warning label. Ray Khan's story shows us how charisma can open doors, how confidence can become a weapon, and how institutions can praise your bravery right up until protecting you becomes inconvenient.

So the takeaway isn't go become an informant. Please don't do that. Most of us can barely handle a weird conversation at Costco. The takeaway is this: power loves useful people, but useful is not the same thing as protected. And if somebody calls you an asset, maybe ask whether they mean partner or replaceable cog in the machine.

Big thanks to Lou Valoze for joining us today and pulling back the curtain on one of the strangest, most morally complicated law enforcement stories we've ever covered. I definitely want to have Lou back on the show. This guy's got stories for days, and he's super cool, as you can hear from the show. And of course, all things Lou Valoze will be in the show notes on the website.

[01:30:00] Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm @jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And the show is created in association with PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested in undercover cop law enforcement type stories, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.