#103 John Nores - The Thin Green Line
John Nores - (Ret.) Lieutenant / Game Warden for California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Cofounder of the Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET), Author of the book Hidden War, War in the Woods, and Where There’s Smoke. With a love for wildlife and our nation’s, John became a game warden for the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife in 1992 after earning BS and MS degrees at San Jose State University. He was inducted into SJSU’s Justice Studies Hall of Fame in 2018. In 2005 John promoted to Lieutenant, continuing his mission to protect and defend our nation’s wildlife resources. Nores has investigated environmental crime and wildlife resource destruction for the last 28 years and was awarded the Governor’s Medal of Valor for lifesaving and leadership efforts in 2008. He’s received several other awards for valor, life-saving, and distinguished service throughout his career and along with his teammates has survived four officer-involved shooting incidents during DTO trespass grow operations.
John’s first book, War in the Woods: Combating the Marijuana Cartels on America’s Public Lands, was published in 2010 with his second book, Hidden War: How special operations game wardens are reclaiming America’s wildlands from the drug cartels dropped in 2019. Nores also recently co-authored a national cannabis environmental issue book, Where There’s Smoke, released in 2018. In 2013 John co-developed the Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) and Delta Team, the CDFW’s first comprehensive wilderness spec ops tactical unit and sniper element, aimed at combatting the drug cartel’s decimation of our nation’s wildlife resources.
Lt. Nores and his team are featured in three seasons of National Geographic channel’s award-winning game warden reality TV series, “Wild Justice,” highlighted in the Sportsman Channel’s Patriot Profiles: Life of Duty documentary TV series, Pursuit Channel’s Modern Shooter and Frontier Unlimited television programs, hosts RecoilTV’s Thin Green Line film series and co-hosts the Thin Green Line and Warden’s Watch podcasts that discuss public safety and wildlife conservation topics and issues throughout the US.
Tune in as John Nores joins Bobby Marshall virtually and discuss cartel marijuana grow operations, impacts to the environment, public lands, wildlife conservation, law enforcement, hunting, mountain life, and so much more.
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John Nores - The Thin Green Line
Our guest for this episode is John Nores. He's a retired Lieutenant after twenty-plus years of service with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. During his career, John helped cofound the Marijuana Enforcement Team, protecting public lands from illegal cartel marijuana grow operations that heavily impact the environment and wildlife on public and private land. John has had an extensive career that he's highlighted in several books. He's the author of War in the Woods and Hidden War, going into vast details about some of the operations he's conducted, raising awareness about conservation and its impacts on the environment in the worst way. It was an absolute honor and privilege to have him on. He's a true outdoorsman and friend. This is a great episode. I hope you enjoy it.
John, thanks for joining me. Where are you joining us from? I know you're all over the country sometimes.
I'm back home for a minute up here in Northwest Montana. It's good to be on your show. Thanks a lot for having me.
It's an honor and a privilege to have you on. I've read Hidden War, for sure. I haven't made it to War in the Woods yet, but it's on my list. It's in my Audible queue.
Thanks for diving in deep. I appreciate it.
I appreciate what you do. Conservation is super important to us here at the mountainside, environmental safety. It was the premise of my starting the show. We've gone down a couple of different roads and avenues, showcasing people from mountain athletes. We've had game wardens in from Colorado Parks and Wildlife. We're located in Colorado. I'm always good at trying to shed a light on as much conservation as we can. I thought it was totally interesting and incredible the amount of stuff that you've been through. The impact on the environment that you've battled, it's hands down probably one of the most sickening and grotesque things I could imagine happening in the middle of a national forest, or even if it's private land, public land, waterways, and all that stuff.
Battling against these hardened criminals or organized crime-type syndicates in the middle of nature is insane. I can't wait to do a deep dive with you on that. For people that haven't read your book or don't know about you, can we dive into your background? We can start all the way from the beginning, from childhood and what got you into being a game warden and working for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
I'll dive in from the beginning. You had mentioned reading Hidden War. I appreciate that you did. This is the first edition, the hardback that you've got. We want to let your audience know that we're down about the last 100 of that first edition. I haven't talked about it to too many people, but I would like to share with you and your audience that we're going to have a second trade paperback with a new cover, a new foreword, a new afterword, and a whole new updated introduction. What's in this book are the original colored pictures and the cool additional graphics in different chapters.
We'll make sure if anybody wants a copy of the originals to gobble them up either on Amazon or through personal sales because they're going quick. The second edition will be out much later before the holidays. You will lose a little bit from the first one and you're going to gain some with the new one. We're going to keep going down there. That has developed not long ago of getting all that into the publisher. You're the first to hear about it. I’m honored to share it with you, guys.
This whole thing started with what you love. Everybody out there, we all love the outdoors and mother nature. We grew up thriving and finding our energy, our solitude, our mental health, stress relief, and all of that in our wildlands, waterways and wild areas. I grew up hunting, fishing and hiking. I was in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, which surprising to many people, the Silicon Valley has a lot of foothills around it. It's full of wildlife. It got the coast over there for fish, abalone, and that kind of thing.
I grew up loving it. I learned to backpack in Henry Coe State Park. I talked about that in the first book a little bit. I never even knew that I could make a profession out of protecting the stuff I loved as a game warden. I never met a game warden growing up. I hunted, fished with my dad, and spent all the time in the woods when I wasn't doing finals and studies at San Jose State in my undergrad work. I was racing back to the suburbs in the foothills East of Gilroy where I grew up getting in the woods.
I recall going back into the book a little bit that you were thinking about joining the military, and then you ran into a game warden or something. That changed your mind.
There were a couple of things going on. I was in a Civil Engineering program at San Jose State. I was also joining up with the ROTC. I was about to go into ROTC right when I started that program to go into a Special Forces background and do my college through military training and all of that. That first semester on a winter break, I ran into a game warden for the first time in my life. It’s 13 miles away into the backcountry in Henry Coe on a winter hike when nobody else was in that crazy park during a rainstorm. I ended up bending his ear for about two hours and keeping him there a lot longer than he probably wanted to be there.
My partner, Jeff Moore, who's my Baja racing buddy in outdoors got me into backpacking. It's his fault. I've known the guy since second grade and one of those close friends. He was the catalyst to putting me in that position to meet a game warden. That changed my life. I came out of that winter hike five days later and went straight to the criminal justice advisory group over at San Jose State. I switched my major from Engineering immediately to Criminal Justice with an emphasis on wildlife so that I could become a game warden. There was no turning back at that point. I knew that was my way to protect America domestically.
Game wardens don't only protect wildlife and enforce all of the hunting regulations, fishing regulations, and environmental regulations, but we do everything else law enforcement generally has to do. We protect the public first and foremost. We're called on to do that a lot more these days. It was the perfect fit. I didn't look back and always had a desire to serve my country in some way. My dad is an Army veteran. My grandfather is an Army veteran. There are veterans all over the family. That's why I was gravitating toward the military.
Thin Green Line: Game wardens don't only protect wildlife and enforce all of our hunting, fishing regulations, and environmental regulations. They also do everything else law enforcement generally have to do.
There was a limited window for non-veteran White males in the early '90s to get the job because there were thousands of applicants with affirmative action and having a veteran preference point. I was 1 of 4 civilians in my academy class of 24 that made the cut. Had I said no to that, I may not have ever gotten hired.
I had to look at what was right in front of me and take that blessing from above and go for it. I was lucky and blessed to be 1 of those 4 off the civilian list. I was 21 years old and did not have a whole lot of life experience. I've been in college and being a probation counselor in juvenile hall and working with some of those problem kids and some that were going to be good kids if they had the right guidance and influence. I got the call and it was Fish and Game Academy. It was a squad leader of a squad of guys twice my age.
How did that go?
When they told me, “You have leadership skills. We're going to make you a squad leader Sergeant Nores,” I went, “What? Some of these guys are state park law enforcement veterans and some are SWAT cops. I'm 21 and they're in their late 30s and I'm going to be their squad leader. Are you kidding me right now?” It was a great opportunity. Everything about that academy dressed me well for my career.
I had some legendary tack officers and mentors like Mike Carion. You read about Mike in Hidden War. He was a mentor and a guiding light for me in the academy. Fast forward to so many years later, having done so much stuff with him as my chief and my friend and my mentor, having enough faith in me and the other guys involved in building this first-ever tactical unit for game wardens, it was a dream come true. I'm glad. Without those leaders and mentors, you know how it is. You're floundering out there, treading water.
It takes some good mentorship to have any career no matter what you're doing.
It certainly made a difference. That's how I became a game warden and spent the first fifteen years of my career. I was down in Southern California. For those that are familiar with LA, Riverside County and Inland Empire, I was a Temecula game warden and did everything down there. It was the Wild West, no joke. It was gang members coming over from LA to spotlight for anything that crawled, shoot anything that fly, and gillnet fish. I talked to brother Joe Rogan on this subject on his podcast. He's like, “What? You had gang members poaching animals? What's going on with that?” Sometimes you're better off not knowing what you don't know.
I probably wouldn't have been as aggressive as I was to take on some of those folks. I quickly learned where to get support. I learned tactics, ground tactics, arrest tactics, vehicle tactics, off-road, all those different things you don't think about game wardens having to know. There was a learning curve down there that was probably five or tenfold what it would've been had I got dropped right in my Silicon Valley suburbs where I grew up.
I spent three years down on Riverside and then I got the opportunity to come back to the game warden position, which was my home area. I was like on the fence. I was honestly considering not coming back home because I bought a house. My career was booming down there. It was exciting. There was so much stuff going on. Like getting hired, when you get a dream position and you don't take it and someone else comes in there, you may not get another good opportunity to go to a good position that you consider a dream for 5, 10, 15 or 20 years.
Your career might be over at that point.
It might be. I was already halfway done with my Master's degree in Criminal Justice. I had started my Master's program because I was working part-time at juvenile hall, waiting for the state to decide if I was going to make the cut. I had a seven-year window to finish that degree before I have to repeat classes. It was a no-brainer. I could go back home. I could work where I grew up. I had a lot of common sense, learning experience, and applicable skills that I learned on the speed run and the bullet train down in Riverside.
I jumped right back into going to night school after patrol every day to finish my Master's. I made it before the deadline and got that degree. Things blew up in Silicon Valley on every level, all the way up until 2004, when I found my first cartel grow. The first book goes into that in great detail, but Hidden War, the latest, does some references. That changed my career focus indefinitely up until retirement.
That was one of my questions. When you first were going to school to be a game warden, wildlife biology, and all that stuff, what did you think you were going to be doing? Do you think you were going to be out checking hunting and fishing tags and mentoring young hunters? That’s what I envision as a game warden.
Honestly, you hit it on the head. I wanted to do that. I wanted to bust spotlighters at night. In the game warden world, that was the big case to make. If you got somebody that’s spotlighting deer at night, everything about them is wrong. They know it's wrong and it's dangerous. Usually, there are drugs or alcohol involved. There might be some felony warrants that they've been avoiding and hiding out. We get into that. My thing was I want to go out. I want to bust spotlighters because they're one of the worst environmental criminals.
I wanted to check fishermen and anglers. I wanted to validate a kid's first deer and go through that experience that I went through with my dad and be a friend of the conservationist. One cool thing about doing uniform standard patrol is 95%-plus of everybody you contact that has a gun is an ally. They're completely legal. They’re diehard conservationists. They had never taken too many animals. They had never hunted past time. They do everything by the book. They're our eyes and ears. They're an extension of the game warden force.
We say we’re the Thin Green Line. I know you've heard that term. You've seen me talk about it. You've probably read it many times, but when I say Thin Green Line, we're all part of that. It's not just me but it's also you because of the conservationist you are. Kudos, I appreciate everything you're about and what we're talking about on this show. All our audience are part of the Thin Green Line. We're a force multiplier. It's one big Thin Green Line because there's so much pressure, destruction, and poaching going on in the world right now that this Thin Green Line is tenuous. It's fragile.
I tend to agree more with you.
It takes you helping broadcast it. It takes the public being out there, seeing violators and calling the 1-800 CALTIP line that turns in a poacher line, whatever state you live in. We couldn't do it without everybody. I wanted to do all that basic stuff. I did and I loved it. The other thing I wanted to do, and I didn't realize this about myself, but there were some leadership tendencies that my academy mentors and cadre saw, hence making me a squad leader early on, but I was good at it. I was always there for my guys. I wanted to be that kind of leader and not a supervisor.
My dad and my uncles and anybody that serves said there's a big difference between leadership and managing. If you're going to lead, you're going to lead from the front. That means you're not just going to send people out to do jobs. You're not going to do the bean counting and cutting the paper and watching policy. You're going to go out and lead from the front. You're going to support your people. I wanted to be that guy. I was becoming a firearms instructor and a defensive tactics instructor. I was becoming an instructor and a mentor for the Becoming an Outdoors Woman program. That was a nationwide program that was started in the early ‘90s to bring mothers, daughters and aunts that had been around hunting family's men maybe but had been left out.
It used to be a guy's thing. "I and the boys are going hunting. You stay home and watch the kids." Now it's turned into more of a couple's retreat almost.
That's history going in the right direction. It’s unifying everybody, and not segregating anybody. I was one of the youngest and first guys to build that basic shooting program and that basic honor education program. That was all in my first three years down there. I enjoyed it. I honored it and appreciated it, but that was happening early on in my patrol career. Indirectly, unbeknownst to me, it was leading up to what we would do with MET and what we would do at a much more extreme level as far as tactical capability, snipers, advanced canines, and helicopter operations. I was a long way from that but innately, it was the building blocks to help build that team and run it effectively and safely, for sure.
I want to dive into more of that. It's super interesting. I'm sure that you have some incredible stuff to tell us, but bringing it back for a minute to the Thin Green Line that you mentioned and hunter's education and sportsman in general. I don't feel like there's anybody, and sometimes we get a bad rap with the grip and grin photos or all that stuff. There's nobody that cares more about wildlife than those people that are out there interacting with it, getting something out of it, some sustainability, or maybe some provisions.
I pretty much eat wild game for every meal. I prefer to. It makes me feel good. I like the process. I like disconnecting from nature. Where I learned firearm safety, which is hugely important and overlooked, not even if you're getting into hunting, the hunter safety course is a great way to learn firearm safety. That's where I picked it up. I didn't grow up with a dad, but I had some great mentors, grandfathers and uncles that were all hunters, archery hunters and stuff like that. They gave me my first gun and I was responsible for it. I took mine in the State of Colorado. I learned so much about firearm safety at that point and how to be safe.
My son is turning nine. I need to get my son lined up and get him in the course, but I think that we could be doing better with maybe teaching some of the ethics of hunting a little bit. I feel like that's the only part that might be a little bit overlooked. We've talked about it before on the show. I was wondering, is it a Federally composed curriculum? Is it state by state? How are the literature, the test, and the different protocols for what has to be a passing grade and not? Do you know much about that?
That's a good question that no one has ever dove into and I appreciate you asking it. The International Hunter Education Association is what it's called, but I could be wrong. There is a national group that has a general guideline of things we see. That is the basics of however many sections you have under hunter education now.
Each state has some latitude as to what additional stuff they're going to put in there. Some states are putting in actual marijuana grows that could be a cartel, public land, or private land trespass grow and what to do if you run across it. Ironically, my own home state of California where it's cartel central and we expose that issue through our work doesn't have that in the book. I've been working with the hunter-ed coordinators up and through retirement and after and go, "What is not happening here? Why isn't this in hunter education?"
It's so important now.
It makes no sense. I don't know what's going on there. I don't even want to assume or speculate. The bottom line is ethics are covered but to your point, they're generalized, which is fine. They need to be addressed much more personally. I know when we were doing a lot more in-person face-to-face courses before the pandemic, and we went mostly to online courses, where I got most of my ethics in hunter education, especially when teaching those face-to-face classes.
My thing was all my hunter safety instructors say in South Silicon Valley where I was the squad board and then later the lieutenant. What we have to do as patrol wardens is to do a minimum of ten hours of hunter education a year. We’re coordinating classes, mentoring instructors, and certified instructors. I would teach or co-teach 3 to 4 classes a year. I would always teach wildlife conservation and wildlife law, and I teach ethics. That's what my instructors wanted me to cover because it was a good fit on the game warden side. They would cover all the others and we tag-teamed it.
You get the most responses when you talk about the ethics of things and scenarios.
You get the most responses when you talk about the ethics of things, and you talk about scenarios where somebody didn't technically do something illegal, but they had a negative connotation toward respecting wildlife through how they practice that particular event. I agree with you. I'm glad you brought that up. Not many people catch that, but it's relative to the class that's being taken and who's instructing it in every state, how much ethics are covered, even though it's going to get covered. There are going to be some questions on it in the test, but are you talking about situational scenarios and how much are you dedicating to that? That's all relative and different.
A lot of it goes into knowing your gear, knowing what you're hunting with, knowing the situations and training. Especially me being a bow hunter, I wouldn't even dream about going bow hunting if I haven't been shooting my bow for three months straight. I shoot it year-round. I'm not that good even with a compound. I have to put in the work. If I'm not, then I have to range myself to, “It looks like I'm hunting from 40 yards this year,” or whatever. It is more than fine. That's typically what I do anyways. Most of the places where I find elk are deep dark holes. It's hard to get a longer shot than that unless you're hunting birds or something.
The marijuana grow operations that you've been involved with. I feel like we don't see. I know it's happened in Colorado. I want you to elaborate on that a little bit because a lot of our audience is based in Colorado, but all around the US and around the world. We don't quite have the climate to grow marijuana year-round. Water resources can be a little bit tricky here as well. You're dealing with the Rocky Mountains. You're not going to be able to bury pipelines as easily and get stuff. It's a much harder place to grow. Not to mention we're in the middle of the country. It's hard to grow tomatoes here.
A lot of people think it's a war on drugs. You've made it apparent, and I love the way that you share this, it’s the environmental impacts are way more significant to me than the actual busting the illegal operations. They both go hand in hand, but what these guys are doing is smuggle in all these different pesticides and fertilizers that are not approved in the US. That's getting smuggled in and then it's getting put into creeks and waterways. It’s totally impacting an environment to the point where some of these pesticides, as you were explaining in the book, if you were to ingest them, you could die.
This stuff is nasty. What you said was a good qualifier in the beginning. This is not a war on drugs. It's not a war on cannabis. It's a war on environmental crime and threats to our public safety. We have a legitimate cannabis industry and some good farmers that are exemplary in conserving water. They care about wildlife as much as we do. They are stewards of the environment, growing cannabis that are allied with us calling our MET team Earth Warriors. Where could you ever imagine that? You have the cannabis groups, the anti-cannabis groups, the left and the right, the political conservative liberal, wherever you sit, all unified on one basic premise that nobody wants to see dead wildlife poisoned from EPA-banned toxic. That's a nerve agent. That's deadly. It was banned by the EPA in the US several years ago to be used on agricultural crops legitimately.
These guys are nasty. They're giving legitimate cannabis a bad name. They're not only poisoning the water and the wildlife with these poisons, but this stuff is staying on the plant that's getting dried. The bud material is getting sent to the Midwest and the East Coast and all over the national black market with EPA-banned nerve agent toxins on the bud. Kids and medicinal patients and adult recreational users in other states are ingesting this stuff. They have no idea how deadly this stuff is potentially in the long term.
That's what we're trying to fight. I was quoted by the Associated Press several years ago saying anybody that thinks I'm an anti-weed guy or this is a war on cannabis or a judgment and old school ‘80s war on drugs and now we're still talking about cannabis like it's a problem. If organized crime could make $4,000 a pound on the black market for cherry tomatoes, then we'd be getting in gunfights over cherry tomatoes. They would probably be poisoned with Carbofuran. You and I would eat cherry tomato and we would be having lung seizures.
We got to look at this cannabis activity as a catalyst for these crimes. We got to remember these cartels. You mentioned Colorado, it's not a good growing state and you're right. It's not in California. It’s 1 of 6 Mediterranean climates on the globe. We are the weed state like we're the wine state. We grow good grapes. We can have an outdoor season that's ten months long. Identifying the back section or the appendix section of Hidden War, the demographic maps of where cartel grows have been found historically. Colorado has been there.
I have pictures of high-altitude mountain grows that are straight cartels like I would see in California. Granted they're infrequent, but they're out in your state periodically and far less than California, thankfully, but 27 other states besides California have cartel grows in them. They're usually going on in refuges, national forests, game farms or whatever the case may be. The other thing we're seeing is, as I talk about at the end of Hidden War in the last chapter, once the state regulates cannabis thinking they're going to stop the black market. I'm all for regulation if it's done properly that deters criminal groups, the drug trafficking organizations, what they call now, Transnational Criminal Organizations, TCO for short, which is a technical term for the cartels.
We are regulating in such a way in California, and it’s a bad example, that we're incentivizing the black market. The black market has never been worse since Prop 64 passed two years before I retired. Here we are a few years later, I'm going to talk about this in a documentary that military veterans and conservationists work with me on to tell the personal and professional story of what's going on out there.
We're talking about three years after retirement operationally for me, five years after Prop 64 passes in California. Now we have the Asian cartels running rampant in Northern California. I co-hosted Daily Caller's Narcofornia documentary with their host, Jorge Ventura. It was mind-blowing what we saw the week we were in Siskiyou County together. The last raid day, Friday after a long week of interviewing victims, farmers, ranchers, and landowners in the most remote rural beautiful part left of California below almost 13,000-foot Mount Shasta. They're literally being run out by Asian cartels. The water is being stolen from their wells.
Are those grow operations as well with the Asian cartels?
They are. That's a new trend I'm starting to talk about because Hidden War deals with the Mexican cartels primarily. What we're going to do with the new edition is I'm going to update in that introduction about what the trends are now. We've minimalized to a misdemeanor and an infraction for illegal growing in California. The cartels, whether they're Asian or Mexican or Russian or whatever, don't have to go hide in the forest way out in the boondocks as much. They're going to private land, overt. They're remote but you can drive right up to them. They're doing just as much if not more damage as the outdoor trespass growers were in our national forest a few years ago.
We're seeing those still out there. If they're somewhere out in a Colorado national park or forest stretch or California, a pretty good bet, you can say 99%, that's an organized crime grow whether it's Mexican, Russian, Asian gang or whatever. The outdoor incentive is pushing everybody to private land and doing it in plain sight because there's no real penalty if they get caught. That's what we got to think about when we regulate state to state. Your home state of Colorado, my new home state of Montana, my old home state of the golden state of California, we all have cannabis regulation going on.
The only reason you and I aren't overwhelmed in Montana and Colorado is because of the climate. Otherwise, we would have the same problem depending on the structure that California is having. California is the weed state of the world, not just the country. It's failing on protecting the environment or even public safety right now because of how we regulate it. That’s something that as conservationists we all look at and go, “It doesn't matter where you sit on cannabis. If you're going to regulate, we got to regulate smart. We got to still go after the environmental criminals and hit the environmental crimes.”
Thin Green Line: California is the weed state of the world, not just the country. It's failing to protect the environment or even public safety right now.
We're trying to do that. We're fighting an uphill battle in California, my colleagues, my old teammates and numerous agencies. I do a lot of work down there still, teaching, consulting, training, advising, educating, whatever I can do to lessen the blow. It's disheartening to see the amount of damage that goes on when we incentivize this stuff, especially if we love our wildlife.
Not to mention at some point, if we let it go rampant, it could start turning into some turf war type thing between different cartels as well. You got a whole another issue on your hands. We won't dive into politics, but I'm going to bag on California here for a minute.
On this issue, it's hard not to.
Being a sanctuary state, I don't want this to come off the wrong way, but it's important to man our borders. It's fairly simple for people to come across. Your book highlights it well in a perfect way. Explaining how many times have you busted the same guys and taking down the same guys. You arrest them and then a year later you're finding them in another grow operation with the same issues. What you can do on an individual basis, as I said, I don't ever dive into politics, but pay attention to laws, voting, and being conscious. We're seeing it here in Colorado with ballot box biology, certain species that they want to reintegrate, and then predator hunting and outlawing that potentially and all that stuff. It's being educated on the issue and leaving that to biologists.
I feel the exact same way. Even though I'm not a resident of California, California will always be part of me. I have family, friends, ranchers, traditional cowboys, still cowboys in the Silicon Valley foothills, wildlife species and hunting clubs. California is full of good people. It's full of conservationists everywhere. You just don't see that nationally when you look at the political demographic of the Bay Area and Southern California and the LA basin.
It's paramount to use what's going on in that state as an example of what to learn from in other states and even other countries that are researching this issue. I came from a sanctuary state where we were fighting deportable felons. A majority of the cartel criminals that were growing this illegal poison cannabis on private land and public land with guns, putting booby traps like punji pits even in an extreme situations.
That blew my mind too. Imagine your kids stepping into that.
The picture I have in Hidden War is from Whiskeytown National Park in Shasta County. My canine handler, Brian Boyd, and his amazing canine, Phoebe, before she passed when she was in her prime, luckily detected that punji pit or our sheriff's office sniper with Shasta County, great guy, almost steps into that. When you look at that going on in American borders and in a state that is saying, “We're not going to deport these folks. We're not going to work with ICE. We're not going to let you guys as officers work with federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection and ICE. You're banned from talking to them, even though you're Federally deputized to be a Federal agent.”
When you start hearing that, you start to realize that politics, money, or whatever is motivating that decision doesn't seem in the best interest of the nation's public safety. When we open the border up in this administration, I was already seeing the problems with a border that was trying to be strengthened right after retirement. You go to my YouTube channel to see the pilot film from our Thin Green Line film series that I host and produced for RECOILtv and RECOIL magazine Caribou, the publishing brand that I'm connected with.
There we were on the Southern border. We're hunting mature aoudad rams. We're doing long-range ethical conversations with AllTerra Arms, my rifle sponsor, myself, and captain, Mark, from Fish and Wildlife's cannabis program, one of my right-hand men and buddies for our entire careers. We are down on the border with an outfitter group filming this amazing hunt on a 55,000-acre canyon, like a mini–Grand Canyon in Southwest, Texas, bordering Mexico on the Rio Grande, which is in a river. At this point, it's a creek that you can walk across. It's 4 inches deep.
While we're hunting these magnificent animals, we are literally having on the other side of the ranch, human smugglers trafficking people, running backpacks of tainted weed, dope, meth and all that stuff. They were moving through and being interdicted by border patrol air assets, helicopters, and ATVs. They have mistaken us for tripping sensors in camo with big precision long-range rifles in our backpacks, and a helicopter landed on us thinking we were cartels. We're seeing cartel caves on the ranch with all the same camouflage and paint to subdue things where they hide out on their way to make it into America, whatever they're going to do, whether they're trafficking humans, whether they're moving contraband, narcotics, tainted, weed or whatever, and literally no protection on the border.
We get a border patrol pilot who lands and finds out who we are. He and I hit it off, given our mutual work history. He said, “You can tell the story I can't, John, with what you're doing. One little Alpine County section here of Texas, the numbers we are putting up and overwhelmed from the smuggling, the amount of tainted weed, the meth, the guns.” He said, “It is unreal.” We're only one little sector in this part of Texas. That's when the previous administration was trying to firm up a wall and get enough guys down there to make at least a dent. Now it's a wide open free for all to cross.
You can imagine the frustration that my marijuana enforcement team partners have. Anybody who’s working in wildlife protection is naturally frustrated. They're still doing a great job. They're still working around the obstacles and trying to at least hold back the tide. You got to stay motivated and fight the fight even if maybe laws and politics are against you. At the same time, you got to realize that for every criminal you stop, even if it's for a minute, you might have saved five lives in that stop. You might have saved 200 steelheads migrating trout from being in a poison creek, and you might have saved I don't know how many kids experimenting with cannabis from ingesting some toxic Carbofuran-tainted bud that came from one of these cartels' grows because you eliminated it before it made it to the market.
We try to win each battle and not think about winning the war, knowing how policies are against that. All you can do is try and illustrate the errors that you're seeing in how those things are being run, which undermine America as a whole, our health, the integrity of our wildlands, unity among political groups, and all agreeing that we have to have some pride in our country. We have to worry about our borders first and make sure we're safe and sound here and healthy before we start dabbling in other parts of the globe. This is a debate I'm sure you and I hear all the time with colleagues. All we got to do is watch any news channel any night and know what craziness is going on at the Capitol and form a relevant rational opinion from those events transpiring. It's discouraging sometimes.
I couldn't agree with you more. You hit the nail on the head with that. At the same time, I want to commend all the men and women that are out there trying to combat this thing and what you guys do, and you especially for telling the story. That's important. That's why I was excited to have you on. I thank you for taking your time out and your service and all that. It's important to me. I'm hoping that we're reaching some audience too that will pay attention to it.
With that being said, how is this funded? This is something that you guys didn't anticipate or division of game and fish didn't anticipate having a MET team with helicopter extracts, not to mention all the gear that you guys need, the training, and having dedicated people to go and combat these cartels. I know some game wardens here personally, and some close friends and great service members. The vast amount of area that one guy covers is mind-blowing. They have a lot on their plate here. I can only imagine.
How is that being looked at now, especially with these different cartels coming in from not only the Mexican border or from Mexico, and some of these other countries? Is there a plan to ramp that up? Is there more funding? Is there Federal funding? Are there some conservation groups that are getting behind you guys and helping with some stuff?
The one positive thing about cannabis regulation under Prop 64 is that there has been some revenue that's come back to the enforcement agency, helped buy equipment and pay for overtime, and led to new positions in the cannabis enforcement program.
We're getting some help. What I can say that’s one positive thing about cannabis regulation under Prop 64, and it's probably the only positive thing honestly, is there has been some revenue that has come back to our enforcement agency to help buy equipment and pay for overtime and lead to new positions in our Cannabis Enforcement Program, which is called CEP within the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, my alma mater agency.
Right now, out of 450 or maybe 500 game wardens statewide doing all the diverse jobs we're taxed with doing, approximately 70 or more of those officers are dedicated to cannabis enforcement. That's the private land Cannabis Enforcement Program watershed teams that are doing primarily private land, enforcement, and compliance checks. You have the quasi-elite tactical team that we formed, the marijuana enforcement team that is the tactical unit of the whole agency going in and doing the outdoor trespass cartel stuff, but also helping on the private land as well because they become dangerous as well.
Many of these cartels and transnational criminal organization groups have moved over to private land because now they don't have to go way out in the forest. That might be the only other potentially positive. I want to say that with a caveat. Certainly, getting these guys out of our national forests and remote pristine waterways is a win, but they're going to move to private land and they're going to do just as much environmental damage. It has the exact same impact. It's not going to be out of sight.
What we saw with the Hmongs, especially in the Chinese cartels in Siskiyou County is they're there in a rural pristine tract of land that they buy and they own legally, but they go in and put up a completely unregulated cannabis farm. They cut down 200-year-old growth trees. They dig an illegal well. They start getting water not only on the surface, but they're stealing water from underground. They're poisoning it in these Doughboy pools with pesticides and Molotov cocktails of who knows what's in it.
They're pumping that into the greenhouse. They're depleting underground water and competing with water for cattle, water for crops, and water for drinking in these communities. They're doing it in such a concentrated area that the remote wilderness outdoor trespass growers are spread out more. They're having an even more drastic impact on the amount of water being stolen in a state like California under a massive drought.
When you start hearing figures like LA County, Riverside and San Bernardino County for unregulated greenhouse grow in the Northern deserts of Los Angeles County, San Bernardino and Riverside, somewhere between 6.5 million to close to 7 million gallons of water a day are being stolen just in those three counties. That's not even encompassing how many billions of gallons of water are being ripped off by these illegal growers and the environmental damage they're doing all over the rest of California in a regulated state.
That's a severe problem. I was down in San Diego, recording down there on a remote location for our 100th episode. Every time I was driving down the 5 or whatever, all the billboards don't say like, "Report drunk drivers." It says, "Conserve water." It's mind-blowing.
We're under drought restrictions from our government in California on limited water use and yet we're letting this happen in NorCal as an example. It was a complete contradiction. It was oxymoronic. We highlight that in the Narcofornia documentary.
It's what I was getting at with politics and states. We deal with the same thing here a little bit in Colorado, because the majority of the population lives in Boulder or Denver or some of these bigger cities, and then you get on the Western slope and it's all ranchers and farmers and outfitters. A lot of times, those guys go hand in hand. They're voting on stuff that's important to them that's affecting their livelihood.
Diving back into the MET team a little bit, because this is super interesting to me. I've always had a fascination with operators. I've been fortunate in what I've done in my past to get to hang out with a lot of those guys and incredible people. Diving into that, you guys had to learn on the fly because there weren't any tactics that were set up like an inner-city SWAT team that is using structures and stuff to hide behind and create barriers.
You guys are in the middle of the woods with no cover going into some booby traps, all kinds of different stuff. Were they punji pits? It's like from the Vietnam era. The Viet Cong used to do that. They're nasty stuff. With some of these tactics and you implementing the training, can we dive into a little bit of that? The special tactical operations, your training operators, and SWAT team members. It's MET members, right?
Yeah. When we got the green light to hand pick the right people for the pilot program in the summer of 2013, a lot of us throughout the state or the guys that ended up being on MET permanently, especially, since we were already doing this with other agencies. We were linked in with tactical units, whether they were SWAT, snipers, whatever, from different sheriff's departments. Brian Boyd was working extensively with that fantastic canine of his, Phoebe with Shasta. I was immersed with my brothers and the guys that had brought us on board as equals with the Santa Clara County Silicon Valley Sheriff's Office. We had the Fresno Central Valley groups working with the captain that cofounded this thing with me, Nathaniel Arnold, now Deputy Chief, overseeing a lot of good stuff at the old state.
We were already working on this for many years before MET happened. A lot of our guys, retired Navy SEAL, that comes on to the team gets another operational chance to be an operator and do something like that, that they didn't even anticipate. We had that conversation when I recruited him. It was great to have people with that level of experience. We all had a lot of experience doing this from a tactical standpoint. We'd either been to SWAT schools. We had become snipers. I was a sniper instructor with the sheriff's office already at that point. We had a lot of small unit tactics on how to move quietly, how to conceal and cover, how to set up ambushes, and how to do it safely and quietly with a small unit, which is a derivative of land warfare that the Navy SEALs were trained on but with an even tinier unit.
Something small, tight spec ops unit in the military would do in cutoff from support in extreme outdoor situations and brushy mountains, desert, and high altitudes. We did it all in California as diverse as California is. We had all the right people. Everybody had some experience. We just had to come together. We had to be formalized and then we had to train together. We had to refresh ourselves. Just as a SEAL special operations team, a Delta team, a Marine Corps team or whatever, everybody has a certain specialty.
Anybody that comes in that's good at technology is probably going to be our radio, our surveillance or our tactics guy. We're going to have a good trauma medic. Those of us that have been on snipers are going to have that long rifle capability. Fieldcraft, camouflage, and all those things that we even teach our cadets at the cadet level to learn that stuff because of the nature of a game and having to be stealthy even on patrol to hide and make observations.
It was a challenge, but it was an exciting opportunity at the same time. The amount of energy and motivation and utter commitment to one another and the job was nothing I've ever seen in my career. I've had a great career. I was blessed in the 28 or so years that I did this job to always work with great people and have great support. When I became a supervisor, I always had good people working with me. I don't say for me but with me. We were always a team. I always supported them to the end. That transcended to MET.
The cool thing about being a lieutenant as a game warden in California is you can still be in the field if you choose to be. My thing with being the Lieutenant of the MET team and forming it was I get to help build it. I get to do all the outreach and advertisements for it and network everybody's message, but I get to run missions and I get to be on the ground with everybody. There's nothing better than doing that, the rewards to it. Everything I learned and those six years and everything the team learned together. I still keep in touch with my old teammates when I break bread with them.
The lieutenant that replaced me, codenamed Shang in the book, is a great friend. He's been the lieutenant since I left. He's the lead sniper on the sniper team. He's Delta 1 now. Hearing his experiences in leadership and as politics have evolved in California, as COVID 19 has hit, how that has affected all of our law enforcement assets all over the country, catalyzed and incentivized the cartels because we went into chaos and the cartels went, “It's open season. No one is going to mess with us." They were right. They got a free pass in some parts of the country. In California with my MET brothers, they got a free pass for to whole grow season in that 2020 year.
All those challenges were big, but they were great. We integrated quickly. We were already good at it because we had worked with other agencies to hone how to apprehend like in the first book. When you get a chance to dive into that, we go into light running that I helped co-develop. We didn't have dogs. We would have to creep up on these guys and have two riflemen cover us with ARs. I was a marathon runner. My partners that I was an apprehender with were runners as well.
War in the Woods: Combating the Marijuana Cartels on America's Public Lands
There we are with Camelbacks, light body armor, a handgun, and a taser. If that guy doesn't have a gun and he tries to get away, we're going to run him down and we're going to arrest him ourselves. If it does look like it's going to get violent, we're going to peel and let our rifleman take care of the problem. That seems insane, but it worked. We had a structured, safe way to do it, understanding that we had to dictate our own limitations. I talk about that light running concept in War in the Woods. We then met Phoebe and then my friend, Brian, whom I helped train in the academy that's been a brother from another mother forever. He's become the super handler with this amazing dog. I'm watching her interdict guys and bite them.
It saved your life multiple times and some of your operators' lives. I love how you incorporated that into the book. One of the cool things about it too is when you were talking about the sniper command fire, that whole training element, and how you guys were implementing that a little bit too.
There are a lot of tactics I don't talk about in the book. For operational security, I can't go into it. Some of the stuff we do that other domestic law enforcement special operations groups do or the military or snipers in general that everybody knows you do it. It's been on TV. It's on the internet. It's been in Hollywood, whether they do it right or wrong. It's completely inconsequential. Believe me, a lot of times they do it wrong. That was a fun thing to talk about because it's something I taught in sniper schools and it's something we had to do for all the right reasons. I know that a lot of us in the long-range precision, precision rifle, sniper world, everything is about as perfect as you can be. You got to be a little bit of an OCD freak to be a good sniper.
I'm one of those guys maybe to a fault. I'll ding myself. It was my mentor, John Spagnola, that you read about in both books. We went through sniper school together. Looking at my SEAL sniper buddies like Frog. You got to run it a certain way. When you do that, when you can shoot that proficiently and you can shoot all at once, it's like a dance move because you practiced it. You're mentally prepared. There's a good feeling of I can do this, but most importantly, I'm doing it with a group of teammates that have elevated my game. They've made me push harder as a leader.
Operators are constantly trying to prove themselves to their fellow men without trying to compete with their guys. It's a unique part of a law enforcement role that not everybody gets to do. I had a great time. It was a privilege and a blessing. Those are brothers forever. Fortunately, I get to still see how they're doing, see how they deal with the challenges in California, support them, and more importantly, be able to tell their story because they can't.
What is your role now in training future operators or helping consult for certain situations? What are you doing now?
A lot of what you said. I teach some academic classes on gross safety, poisons, reclamation, and officer-involved shooting debriefs. Out of the six officer-involved shootings we were involved in during my tenure before right up to the end of MET, that second to last chapter, the Sierra Azul Part 2 was the last gunfight any of the MET guys were involved in and I was with them. When that happened, everything went our way, but that was after a lot of years of training together, developing tactics, and not having the equipment or the support or the knowledge to do it as best we could.
My role now is to work with other agencies. I do work with other Federal and other state agencies on building their teams, doing the drills, and avoiding the pitfalls we had to get their learning curve up to keep them safer sooner. It's always a treat when I get to work with teams that have a dog. Right now, I get to work with a state agency that's got a canine. That agency is working closely with my old MET team. I am still a side guy to go help them part-time and do a lot of teaching and speaking all over the country like we're doing now, talking about Hidden War content, doing PowerPoints on this stuff.
For conservation groups like Safari Club International, I'm an annual speaker. I do an annual seminar series at their national convention. They're moving out of Vegas and Reno for the first time in 40 years. It's in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s coming up. I got called out to come. It's going to be cool. It's going to be a different demographic. We had our National Game Wardens Convention at NAWEOA Conference there. It's my first time in Nashville. I'm going to say, Tennessee is an all-American state. They are wired for conservation. They are all about patriotism. The fact that we're doing SCI in Nashville, and I'm going to do seminars there, we're going to have the second edition of Hidden War to drop on people.
More importantly, it's amazing how many public members when they hear this story and they see the pictures and the videos that I talk about in Hidden War, how outraged people become, regardless of where it's from. It's a California story, but it's going on in every state to some level. It's not cannabis you're dealing with these criminals. It's human trafficking going through your state. It's drug running and narcotics. It's synthetic fentanyl killing hundreds of thousands of people now, kids, the counterfeit prescription opioids. These cartels are in a business model of multiple activities that all prey upon people. Indirectly, they prey upon our environment.
It is a domestic terrorist assault on America. I know that's a powerful term but literally, they're here for business and they don't care about humanity and water purity. They just want to make a buck and they're destroying us from within. It's my job to take the hidden war that we have on the domestic home front and emphasize that problem. The fact is that it's not a national priority to be handled like a massive wildfire campaign or a terrorist attack.
I know we have a lot of bigger problems. I'm not negating anything out there, but having been on the ground, fighting this thing directly, and seeing the true effects, there's no way any American that knows what's going on doesn't see this as a major problem. They all do when they know about it, but how many people know about it? We got to keep broadcasting the message and make sure people know and they're aware at least, and then we'll go from there.
You have a platform here anytime that you want. You're doing an outstanding job of what you are putting out there. It was helpful having Nat Geo involved. I wish they were still following you, guys, doing some of that because it was exciting TV to watch too. It was super cool. You brought up wildland fires. Shout out to Brandon Dunham for setting us up and connecting us both.
I was going to mention that, but you segued perfectly.
After I had Brandon on, he was like, “You have to talk to John.” I was like, “I would love to have him on.”
Brandon and I had a great conversation on The Anchor Point podcast. Wildland firefighters as a whole are so close to what we do in the game warden front and me working with Cal fire wildland guys all the time in my career. My sister's a retired fire captain on San Jose who ended up immersing in wildland fires too. The whole thin red line thing is near and dear to me. Brandon, as cool as he is, when he reached out and we got connected through another firefighter friend, it was a great conversation like we're having now. It’s similar to this. Shout out to Brandon for putting us together. Thanks for doing that.
Great guy. Great podcast too. Check that out if you want any information on wildland firefighting and what some of those guys go through. It's that whole quite professional industry there. In some of these cartel grows, I'm sure that there are fire hazards. These guys are doing all kinds of different bad environmental stuff. I'm sure some of these chemicals or pesticides got to be flammable. That's another reason to combat it, especially with the drought situation and where we're at with wildland fires these days.
We've seen a lot of propane stoves go awry with the wind. They have started numerous massive California wildfires in the dry summer because that's when people are camping when harvest time is going on.
We've seen a lot of their propane stoves go awry with the wind. They have started numerous massive California wildfires in the dry summer because that's when they're camping when harvest time is going on. We do get a handful of fires caused by these guys. Certainly, when fire moves through an area like that, you have 5-gallon compressed propane canisters and all kinds of flammable pesticides. It's a real train wreck when the fire burns through there. They get rid of them, but what are the remnants of that burn? We've seen a lot of that. Brandon and I talked about that. Being a Cal fire guy, he sees it all the time. It's another added problem that we have to deal with on the environmental crime front and public safety front anytime you get into trespass grows on the cartel side.
Diving into being a high-level game warden and not only going after cartels, can we talk about poaching a little bit too? That's important to me. Some of the stuff that you've experienced there. These cartels go hand in hand because they're out there taking animals illegally and poisoning them. You have poachers on top of that, whether it's for the black market. One of the things I remember was you guys busting people on the black market that were selling sea turtles and all kinds of crazy stuff.
The black market wildlife trade is second only to the drug trade in the world. It's a billion-dollar industry, and people will pay for wildlife in different countries. You hit it on the head, everything from abalone to sturgeon roe to black bear gall bladders to the ivory trade now, African rhino, elephant ivory, whatever the case may be. It's a hot mess. People have always capitalized on wildlife for profit. When you start making money on wildlife, like you start making money on illegal cannabis on the cartel front, everything suffers, public safety, the environment and numbers of species. That's a big important focus. It's a national priority now. Every state agency that's a conservation agency under the Obama administration was mandated to make a wildlife trafficking team.
We built a good one in California because we already had all that in place with our special operations groups and undercover units which were amazing. That was all happening right after MET got formed. We were getting tasked with the international black market of wildlife trafficking, the cartel tactical problem, and now we're immersed in that, and deep internet crimes. It's gotten more complex on the game warden front because of all the different ways we're attacking and depleting our wildlife resources, the dark web, and internet sales. Wild Justice highlighted a case we had where a Federal US Fish and Wildlife Service agent sent me a notice, a digital ad or a Craigslist ad that says, “I'm seeking a black bear hide. I want a deer head.”
That was my personal black bear that I spent three and a half years harvesting. We used that for the case. That's why when my uniform guys did the buy busts with the suspect while I was hanging back to make the bust, I told them, I said, "Guys, as soon as things exchange hands, don't let that bear even fall on the ground." That is a 7-foot California black bear that was made into a beautiful rug by my good friend, John Hayes, who's my taxidermist. I'm wearing his hat now. He's living here in Montana. He was on our Thin Green Line. He's also MeatEater and Steven Rinella’s taxidermist now. He was on MeatEater. John had done nothing but art and TLC on my first California black bear. We had to use that bear because we had nothing else to use for the buy-bust.
That shows how passionate you are about your job.
Or dumb. It's one or the other. There is a funny story to this case. You mentioned Nat Geo. Here's a behind-the-scenes no one's heard. It's funny that we're on it. They seized it right back. We put it away. We stored it in evidence. The case went fine. It was 8 or 9 years later that I was still working and running MET back before my retirement in 2018. I got a call from our CALTIP coordinator. She's like, "I got a weird call. This guy's watching Wild Justice rewinds. He's watching the bear sales case on that guy up on the peninsula in San Mateo. He's saying, 'That bear that was stolen out of my shop ten years ago, Lieutenant Nores found it. That's my bear. I recognize the white blades, the face. I had a rug like it.'" She said, "I don't know what to tell this guy."
I go, “Let me call him because I'm pretty sure unless I've suddenly had amnesia, that was a bear I harvested personally.” He was adamant that this was his bear. He suddenly found it and he wanted to get it back from the department. I had to converse with him and say, "Sorry, sir, I harvest that myself." He said, "It looks like mine." It was a freaky thing that brought that whole story back into play. What was funny is because of the black market high dollar for black bear gallbladders in California that our undercover team would work heavily for a long period of time because they bring so much money on the black market overseas, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 for a gallbladder to be ground into a powder. That's an aphrodisiac in some of the other cultures.
Of all the animals he advertised he wanted, we had a sample of everyone, but he was fascinated and wanted the bear. There's this fascination with buying bears in states where they're not legal for whatever reason. This was one of those unique cases, but it showed you how much somebody will go to get an animal. We're talking a lot of money. To turn right around and triple or quadruple to profit probably somewhere back Eastern, maybe overseas is where my black bear was headed without a doubt.
Thin Green Line: There's this fascination with buying bears in states where they're not legal for whatever reason. It shows just how much end somebody will go to get an animal.
That's a constant problem. That's still going on. We still have all that stuff that when I was brand new, in my early 20s, inexperienced, ambitious young game warden who wanted to catch that first spotlighter. That's still going on as well. It went on a lot more during COVID when everybody knew there was not a law enforcement presence in the woods very much because we weren't open to contacting people yet.
People were a little bit freaked out. Look at the increase in hunters. It's a 30% increase or something. It's insane. It's not funny. We had a muzzleloader shoot an archery hunter. He blatantly didn't know what the hell he was doing. It's crazy. A lot of people were pretty freaked out by this pandemic thing. I had many people reach out to me that had never owned a gun or never hunted that wanted to get into it. They knew that I was a bow hunter and ate elk all the time and I had a surplus. They were offering to buy it from me and all that stuff. You dove into some of the laws. If you can get $20,000 for a black bear gallbladder, if you legally take an animal with a tag and everything, you can't turn around and sell that gallbladder for $20,000. That is illegal.
It's yours. You can keep all those special parts that have a huge black market value. It's the second you try to monetize them that it becomes a felony. In California, bear sales are felonies. It's one of the few felony code sections we have in the fish and game code. I've never made this analogy, but it makes total sense that we're in real-time talking about it. Once you monetize cannabis on the black market, look at what you incentivize. Anybody will destroy streams. They'll tear apart a forest. They may go to guns with law enforcement or a hunter to protect their financial interest because there's so much money in cannabis. Now you've turned this thing into something deadly and environmentally destructive because you've monetized it on a black market for massive amounts of money.
Take a gallbladder. Take abalone going out on the black market, sturgeon roe. It's all the same type of thing. When you don't make penalties and put enforcement emphasis on making an example of people that are doing that because of the lasting impact it's going to have on a grander scale on a much larger market because of the money involved, you're doing the people and wildlife an extreme disservice. When it comes to mainline poaching crimes, we do a good job of it. We make felonies when you start to commercialize like bears. Interstate, when you take something over the state line on the Lacey Act, it becomes a felony with US Fish and Wildlife Service that we as state wardens are deputized as Federal agents to enforce as well.
When it goes overseas, you start to get all these things. If we make that round circular argument right back to prohibited cannabis, and then we look at all those environmental crimes and make those felonies and put the bite into the issue, not the cannabis, but the effects, then you’re onto something. We have to treat anything that destroys the environment as poachers, whether it's an illegal unregulated cannabis farmer, a black market black bear gallbladder, a poacher, an ivory trader or a poacher in Africa incentivizing purchasers here or vice versa.
It's a really good way to look at it and what the dollar sign and what money and greed will do and how our wildlife will suffer. We're seeing it in every level of politics and policy from cannabis all the way down to wildlife in California as an example. It's a really good analogy to make of what happens when you turn to all about the black market dollar.
That's one of the most sickening things to me, the disrespect for wildlife. I don't think that any real outdoorsmen or hunters are out there poaching. That's my opinion. It's a different level of sick humans. Let's talk about all the different stuff that you got going on. You have the second edition of Hidden War coming out. You also have the book out, War in the Woods. You have The Green Line podcast, is that correct?
I co-host Warden’s Watch and a podcast called the Thin Green Line, that's with Lieutenant Wayne Saunders, retired Lieutenant out of New Hampshire, also a veteran of Animal Planet's North Woods Law. Wayne started the Warden's Watch podcast interviewing game wardens for game warden's stories right when he retired about the same time I did. I was a guest on his show 4 or 5 months after I retired. In COVID, he said, "If you've got the time, would you co-host with me? You're on the West Coast. You've got to reach out with some of the podcasts you've been on. The unique special operations side is what most game wardens don't do." We got both ends of the country covered.
There's a diversity of stories there, but something we realized in COVID was we want to go past just interviewing fellow game wardens. Those stories are great, but what about military veterans? What about guys like you? What about other hunters? What about other biologists, musicians, and patriots that were in politics that are big conservationists? We started the Thin Green Line together. I roped in Ed Calderone and Jack Carr.
I love Jack Carr.
Jack is amazing. He's a brother.
Have you been on Danger Close yet? His podcast is great. I'll have to go back and download that.
When you bring in thin green line conservationists outside of game warden circles, it's magical.
It was a good conversation. We had Jack on our podcast. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. He has so much conservation history in his family that he passes it down to his grandkids. I get the chills thinking about it. He doesn't do too many podcasts, but he endorsed it more. He was one to read it because his cinematographer and my cinematographer are retired. He’s a good friend of mine. He was working with Colonel North on his series and said, “Colonel, you got to read this book. John's a friend. If you have time, endorse it. You'll be blown away by it.” He took the time. That was an honor. He spent over an hour on our podcast from his home on the East Coast. When you bring in Thin Green Line conservationists like that outside of game warden circles, it's magical.
I become close with the band, Shinedown, because all those guys are so into the outdoors. They plant trees every year worldwide. I was a joint guest with my buddy, John Silverspear. He's our security director. He had Barry Kirsch, their drummer on together. Barry's hunting on a tree stand. He's an outdoor culinary cook. He's picking my brain. We had Barry on our own podcast. We had to make it a two-parter. We went down the rabbit hole.
That's what we need. We need to get guys like you, these other podcasters, musicians, athletes, and conservationists whether they come from a political background or military background. It's a combined effort. Again, expanding the Thin Green Line outside of the traditional law enforcement officer game warden. That's what I'm doing a lot of now in retirement. What's cool about phase two is we can talk about these issues freely. I'm not under any gag orders like I would be. It's the way it goes. I'm not digging on anybody.
We're doing those two podcasts. Once a year, I host the Thin Green Line film series. It's got to be the right conservation hunting story where there are also public safety issues involved, usually cartel related. The first one was down in Southwest, Texas on the Mexican border, which is the pilot program. It's up on my YouTube channel. You can see all my content, Wild Justice stories, commercials, documentaries, and investigative news. That's all on the John Nores YouTube channel. Everything is free. I don't monetize and charge. I don't do private stuff. Anything I put out there, we want to help educate. I'm grateful that people that view it if they like it, they'll share it.
We did that pilot film in February, and three weeks later, we were in lockdown from COVID. We didn't know it was coming yet but thank God it happened when it did because we got the first pilot episode out. The next episode is going to be filmed on Afognak Island with big mature brown bears, the island bears. We're going to talk about some of the crimes that are going on up there. That's a dream bucket list hunt, but more importantly, we're going to get into the furthest reaches of the most remote islands of Alaska that are affected by these cartel groups on some level.
That's going to be our next film. I've got a couple of blades. I know you may have seen them. I merged with Mike who started Spyderco. You got the old Thin Green Line, serrated or non-serrated, drop point for skinning and gutting, glass breakers, and seatbelt harness. I got an OD green version for the tactical types, all serrated. This is my skin and hunting carry knife. We are on our second run of those. I finally have some in stock. I'm doing personal sales and personalized blade packages with books. Reach me through my website or direct message me on Instagram if anyone's interested in any of that.
Outside of product, if anyone has questions about being a game warden or experiences, anything I can do to help the next generation get through some of the hurdles sides and anticipate, I'm more than glad to. I want to encourage as many folks to be part of the Thin Green Line and how critical it is. On Instagram, I'm @JohnNores. Same thing on Facebook. My email is Trailblazer413@Yahoo.com. You can get to me through everything, and see everything I'm doing on my website, which is JohnNores.com and it has it all.
That's incredible. Being a mentor for other people that may want to serve as you did is awesome too. We need more of that in this country, for sure.
Amen to that.
By the way, we need to talk after this a little bit when you have some time over the next few days because I got some awesome guests for the podcast for you. We've been super fortunate here. It's all about networking and helping each other out.
I'll throw it right back at you.
You're up in Montana. Are you getting to do some hunting up there? I know you're an outdoorsman yourself. It's incredible up there. I used to spend my summers up there as a kid. I have an uncle that lives outside of Kalispell still. That’s god's country up there.
You know right where I'm at. You know the remote part of Montana.
I'll tell you a Libby story. One of my fondest memories is it was the middle of summer and we went to like a rodeo or it was a bull rider's only thing or something. I'd never experienced anything like that. Anyways, it got dark and the arena had no lights. These guys were riding bulls in the dark. I thought that was the wildest fucking thing. You could barely see him them. It was a dark night too.
I know my community in Libby won't quit for darkness. That doesn't surprise me, but I can't speak for any injuries or collisions that were induced from that. That's typical when the power is out. Northwest Montana is magical. My grandfather settled here a few years ago after a full career in the Navy. I haven't told this story publicly much at all, but he was set to deploy and join the Navy right as World War II was ramping up. before he did, he brought some friends from high school up here to the Libby area. You can imagine what it was like back then.
He was hunting our hot spots in the yakking cabinets and they were stacking massive whitetail and elk and black bear. He said, "When I retire, I'm going to buy a plot. Whoever wants to come from the nine kids in my grandparents' family can settle." That's what happened. He felt he was in Pearl Harbor. He was on a cruiser that got half sunk but survived it. He had a full decorated military career all over the world and in several wars. He settled here. Thankfully, he set the family up. My dad set me up before he passed in 2013 to have a plot on the family spread. That's home, but it's one of those things where I'm not home a lot. There's a roadshow going on. A lot of it's back in the golden state but it's in other states as well.
I'm here as much as possible for the majority of the year and certainly to get off the grid and decompress. “The woods are my church” is my motto and my dad's motto. We need it. I don't get enough of that. Even when I'm in California, I still got to get to my buddy ranchers' places and get behind lock gates and clear my head and chase an animal or whatever. I just enjoy it. You know from everything you do. You feel it too in the great state of Colorado. You know Montana. I'm surprised to hear that. That's super cool. It's a good balance. Certainly, where I do most of my writing and revisions and magazine articles, I like to write in this space more so than in other places. It comes more natural when you're in your element.
Thin Green Line: Get off the grid and decompress.
I couldn't agree more. It's beautiful up there. I was planning on making it up there in the summer, but I haven't yet. I'll let you know the next time I'm up there and we'll do this in person and bring the kids.
Please do. We'll make something happen for sure.
The town of Libby was named after General Custer's wife or something. His wife's name was Libby or something.
I believe it was.
That's the only history I know about Libby and going through there.
I got to get my history down because I'm not 100% sure about that, but that sounds about right.
One thing I wanted to touch on, and we could go on and on, but we're going to wrap this thing up here pretty quick. I ask a lot of our guests a lot of different questions about what they're experiencing and what they're seeing in outdoors that people could be doing better. Where I want to hit home with you on this is if you're an outdoorsman, what can you be looking out for when you run across a cartel grow or something like that? How do you report it? What's the best way to handle it? What's the best way to keep yourself safe? Generally, people are out recreating with families, friends, pets, stuff like that, unless you're in the backcountry hunting on your own or something.
Our public lands are becoming limited and reduced. They are our sanctuary. They are diamonds out there, so let's utilize and protect them.
First and foremost, I don't want anyone to freak out thinking they can't go in the woods and enjoy our public lands because they're going to run into a cartel grow. That would mean they've won. We all know how dwindled, limited, and reduced public lands are becoming. They are our sanctuary. There are diamonds out there. Let's utilize and protect them. If you do encounter something like seeing a waterline, marijuana plants, cashes in seabags or backpacks hidden on a trail but they don't belong to anybody, you could be going towards a trespass grow. You might walk right into one and not even know it and see, in the worst case, armed gunmen walking around.
Don't panic. Use your outdoor skills if you're a hunter, an angler or a hiker. Be stealthy. Don't make a lot of noise. Hide in plain sight. Move slowly when you need to if the threat is looking at you. Memorize or document where you're at if it's safe to do so, whether it's a cell phone picture that's going to have a GPS code on it or a tag, or get a GPS if you have that capability on your phone or your handheld. Backtrack the way you came in and do it as quietly as possible. As soon as you have cell coverage, call 911 and get ahold of your sheriff's office or your game warden. Usually, it's going to be an allied effort regardless of who gets the call first. Report it immediately. Don't let it go.
We've had hunters that saw one and thought about it and were stuck for days behind locked gates and they didn't have cell coverage. You want to get that out as fast as possible because the public safety and environmental threats are obvious regardless of how big it is, regardless of who's responsible. That's the best way to handle it. Ironically, our CALTIP 1-800 turn in a poacher number in California, the last six years I was running MET, more than 50% to 60% of all CALTIPs weren't for traditional poaching cases. They were for illegal grows. Hunters running across them in deer season in our refuges and waterfowl tracks of all places in the central sink of Northern California where our flyway is.
That's so important. A great point to bring up is that we're all in it together. If you see something, report it. Don't question it. It's important, any wildlife violations and environmental stuff. The only way that we can combat stuff like that is by letting the proper people know.
Everybody's part of the Thin Green Line. We are so thin in the area we cover as game wardens without the eyes and ears of our fellow soldiers. That's you guys that are out there, hunting and fishing in areas we're not going to get to because we can't possibly get to those remote areas. It's always the hardcore angler, the hardcore hunter, or the hardcore adventurer that's off the beaten path. They're down on the headwaters of creeks and they stumble upon cartel grow.
They're trying to get away from people so they're going where the cartel is going to hide. They're finding the ones that are most environmentally damaging because they're sitting right on some pristine headwater to a stream. We appreciate that. We don't want anybody hurt in the process. Be careful doing it. If you're situationally aware more than anything else, 9 times out 10, you're going to be fine getting out of it. We've seen given the numbers of people that have encountered and found grows that were active that didn't get hurt because they handled it properly.
What's coming up next for you? I know you're a busy guy and got all kinds of irons in the fire and busy with work and all that stuff. Do you get anything that we need to bring out?
A couple of things I forgot to bring out, maybe because it's recent. Besides co-hosting with the Daily Caller’s the Narcofornia documentary with my friend and co-host, Jorge Ventura and their great producer, Sagnik Basu, we're doing the Callsign: Trailblazer documentary, which is a cinematic complete professional and personal backstory documentary highlighting a lot of the issues we've talked about. We literally filmed the last segments, interviews, tactical shooting and a re-enactment here in Montana. We've been in production since February 2022 and literally in California for a week every month doing field interviews, site visits, a bunch of stuff with a bunch of incredible subjects and folks we interviewed.
We have a reformed guerrilla grower non-cartel that reached out to me wanting to use his powers for good after all the water he stole with his operations, and the trash he put out there. Non-cartel, never used poisons, never was armed to hurt people, but let's say he was operating in the same area as the cartels operate in the Emerald Triangle. We had a heck of a site visit with him on how it goes down in an interview. You won't be able to see or identify or know who he is, but that was a real eye-opener. That has never happened. Nobody from that level of experience wanted to talk.
He heard me on Joe Rogan and then followed me and heard me again on Jack Carr many years later, and decided to pull the trigger and reach out. I’m grateful that he did. He's one of these guys who's part of the Thin Green Line. We have legitimate growers that are being run out by the black market, agency officials, you name it. We have a lot of people we interviewed. We have a lot of experiences I get to share. We filmed a lot of it in Montana. Now we're going into editing, the original score for it, and voiceover.
By the end of 2022, it's going to be done. I don't know if we're going to have it available quite yet because some streaming services want it, but we want to run it through the film festival circuit first. I'm going to see that people have access to it once it clears that no later than early next spring, so people can view it and learn a little bit more about the stuff we're talking about. It was a huge honor to work with a great production crew at a level I've never experienced, with the level of equipment and motion picture-making type documentary. That has been a lot of work and getting everything done on the revision of Hidden War. It's a good full plate. The one thing I do have going on up here that I talk about a little bit is I'm part of a cover rock band called Area 56.
You're into desert racing too or something.
I do a little bit of that. Our band right now are gigging over at Sandpoint Fairgrounds. I got a rodeo thing going on. We're going to be one of the bands wrapping up their three-day event. We're down to our last three gigs of the year. It has been a fun year with the guys and a good way to branch out outside of the typical story and the intensity of the work. They're incredible musicians. They brought me on board as the newest guy. I’m having fun with that and keeping it busy. I’m trying to get in the woods as much as possible like you, trying to highlight fish. I made it into some glacier cutthroat trout fishing by myself. I had a good day and did long-range shooting all the time.
I'm going to be doing some profiles and some products from SIG and AllTerra Arms, my new line of fixed blades, the Trailblazer Thin Green Line fixed blades are dropping within a month or two. We'll have those available. We'll drop the commercial. Never a dull moment, but always trying to keep it in balance. I'm doing a lot of this, hosting our own. Lately, I've been getting the good graciousness of guys like yourself to be asked to come on to the podcast.
It's not an old subject telling the Hidden War story because it keeps evolving, especially after what we saw in Siskiyou County and what we did in Narcofornia and stuff I'm going to go in even deeper that wasn't revealed in that documentary in the Callsign: Trailblazer film. It's amazing how this thing keeps becoming a problem and growing, and how much of a national priority it is. I feel like I didn't leave the job. I just changed roles. People say, “You're not retired at all. You're working as crazy as you were before.” They're right but it's phase two now.
The cool thing about that is I get to see it from a national perspective. I get to talk to people from all over the country, agencies, game wardens, and Federal agencies and get perceptions on what's going on at the border, which even when I was running the MET team and directly fighting the cartels daily, it was from California's perspective. Now I get to see it all over the country coast to coast, North, South, East, West. It's even more overwhelming. It's a real privilege and honor to be able to talk about it with you on your platform and talk to your folks. Certainly, I'm here for questions through my Instagram direct message, my website, and email.
You always have a platform here. Thank you so much for sharing the message, John. Being an advocate, a voice for conservation, and shedding a light on so many levels, my hat goes off to you. I want to help you guys as much as I can. You're welcome here anytime.
I appreciate you, Bobby. Thanks, Gabby, for your help. It’s good to see you guys both remotely. We will talk again. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Go check out John. Read the books, important information in there. Let's support these guys. Thank you.
Important Links
Amazon – Hidden War
YouTube Channel – John Nores
Brandon Dunham - Past Episode
Warden’s Watch - Podcast
Thin Green Line - Podcast
@JohnNores - Instagram
Facebook – John Nores
About John Nores
John, a California native, grew up in a small town in rural Santa Clara County. The eldest of four, he and his brothers and sister (the wolf pack as their mom coined them) developed a love for nature and the outdoors at an early age. He initially began college with the goal of becoming a civil engineer but during winter break of his first semester, he fortuitously met a fish and game warden in the back country of Henry Coe State Park on a back-packing trip and was instantly inspired to become one himself.
Inspiration led to a certainty of purpose and as soon as he got back to school, he changed his major to Criminal Justice and began pursuing a career as a fish and game warden for the state of California.
John has a Master of Science degree from San Jose State University in Criminal Justice Administration (1998), a Bachelor of Science Degree (1990) from San Jose State University in that same discipline and was inducted into SJSU’s Justice Studies Alumni Hall of Fame in November 2018.
Hard work and diligence led John to a diverse career he held for three decades. Beginning in 1992, he was hired as a warden for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and retired in December of 2018 as a special operations lieutenant working directly at the state level, co-developing and leading his agency’s elite tactical unit the Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) and developed the CDFW’s first sniper unit aimed at combatting the most environmentally damaging criminals working within California and impacting the nation. The MET has been featured on Fox News, NBC Investigative Reports, CNN, Dan Rather Reports and highlighted on the Outdoor Channel’s award-winning Patriot Profiles: Life of Duty documentary series.