Wrong Numbers

Hi there, I'm K-Town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio. All right, thank you for joining me tonight for another edition of Mysterious Radio. I am your host, Kay Town, and tonight we're going to be talking about something a little unusual as far as undercover operations go. In the 1990s, call girls worked for entertainment services that were little more than phone numbers, dispatchers, and drop safes. When a mystery hacker started diverting customer calls to one services number, it launched a series of dangerous events that involved the mob, feds, service owners, and the phone system itself. This slice of Sin City history is as little known as it is thrilling, and it's well told by investigative journalist and my special guest Glenn Meeks and crime writer Dennis Griffin. The book is called Wrong Numbers, Call Girls, Hackers, and The Mob in Las Vegas. You can get this book right now on Kindle Unlimited, audiobook and also paperback from Amazon. So let's find out what this story is all about with my special guest Glenn Meeks, here to talk about call girls, hackers, and the Las Vegas mob. All right, my special guest is Glenn Meek, and his book is called Wrong Numbers, Call Girls, Hackers, and the Mob in Las Vegas. And this book is available right now on Amazon and paperback, Kindle. And Glenn, is it available in audio book? I didn't see that. Yeah, we do have we do have an audio book version available. Yes. Awesome. Well, welcome to the show. Oh, it's good to be here. All right. Now you're you're joining me. I want to tell people you're joining me from Cairo's first actually the first interview from Cairo. I've had to have interviewed people from all over the world, really. So tell me how, what, what brings you to Cairo? I mean, why, why do you mind me asking you? Do you mind being a little bit nosy and just asking you why in the world you're over there? No, not at all. I'm semi-retired now. I was a television news and television investigative reporter for more than 30 years. Most of that in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm semi-retired now and I write true crime works and also working on a couple of other projects. And so, as I said, I'm semi-retired. My wife, though, had a job here at the U.S. Embassy here in Cairo. And so, it was a great opportunity. So, we said, you know what, I can pretty much do what I do, which is writing from anywhere. Let's go over there. And, you know, I think it's really important for people in America to get out of their comfort zone every now and then and to go someplace that They've never been where life is considerably different and their approach to life is considerably different. And so that's why we're here. And we've been here about six months and settling in. I'm trying to learn a little bit of Arabic and it's a little bit different. I find in Egypt, let's say that it is in Saudi Arabia and that sort of thing. But everybody makes themselves understood. So far, we're getting along pretty well. Yeah, that's awesome. So so how long do you think you'll you'll be over there? Well, we have a limited, definite amount of time. It'll be about two years. About two years. OK. So have you have you had a chance to go visit like any of the pyramids and things like that? I did. I went to two of the sites before the COVID shut everything down. I mean, things are pretty well shut down here as well. Now they're beginning to open up. We don't have near the numbers that you guys have back in the States. So things are starting to open up a little bit over here. But we did get out to the pyramids. Remarkable. It's really astonishing. And it's one of the last or perhaps the last wonder of the world, of the old world that's still in existence. And it's amazing. And they allow you to get right up there and, you know, stand on the blocks. It's pretty incredible. It's a literal, you know, firsthand experience when you go out there. So it's pretty amazing. I would love to make it out there myself. So I'm very fascinated by that. But thank you for sharing a little bit about where you're at now. So you're semi-retired. So, I mean, what are you doing right now? Before we left, like I say, about six months ago, I had semi-retired. I was doing private investigation work and I was working with a number of local defense attorneys. I did a lot of criminal defense work. Part of my background is I took sort of a mid-career break while I was in the television news business. And from 2007 to 2014, I was a staff investigator for the Federal Public Defender of Nevada. So I worked as a criminal defense investigator on those cases, people charged with federal crimes for seven years. And so I did that essentially, you know, deconstructed police reports, checked all the background investigations, that sort of thing. Looked into what the police said versus what our clients said. Checked out alibis, that sort of stuff. Looked for the evidence that maybe the police didn't see the first time around, that sort of thing. So what about any murder cases? Did you ever do any of that for them? Oh, yeah, yeah. I had a couple of murder. In fact, I had a couple of murder cases and some multiple murders cases before I left Las Vegas. I had a very interesting with the Federal Public Defender's Office. I had a very interesting case involving an alleged murder for hire scheme, which turned out to be not so much that. Let's put it that way. And so I have had some experience in that regard. OK, I have to pick your mind a little bit before we talk about the book. So, OK, so when you're when you're doing this for the defense team and say you, you know, they tell you, hey, we need more information about this guy. And, you know, we're going to have to, you know, be his defense attorneys or whatever. And if you come across something in his background and you're like, this guy is an idiot. Do you bring about your personal feelings about this person if you feel like they've lied or what? I just want to just pick your mind from that end for for a moment. You know, coming from a background in journalism and then going into criminal defense and then actually went back to journalism for a couple of years after that, I got that question a lot. A lot of people would say, well, you know, how can you defend someone that's obviously guilty? And my response to that was the same way I would if they were obviously innocent. I mean, normally people who are obviously innocent are not going to be charged with crimes, but you get the same defense. That's part of our constitutional scheme. You know, I tell this to people, I say, you know, I've had numerous, you know, spirited conversations with police officers, for example. And I say, you know, some of the worst regimes I've you've ever heard of have had very strong and effective police departments, whether that's, you know, Tantan Makuto or the, you know, the KGB or whoever it might be. But when you really want to see an enlightened society, look at their indigent defense organizations. If you really care about making sure that the – what the biblical term might be, the least of our brothers. If you're really concerned about people who can't afford to fight the United States government, for example, how they're being treated in the system and making sure that their rights are preserved. Because that's really what it's all about. It's really about making sure that the government meets its burden and it's the government's burden to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. So, yes, I mean, let's face it. I want to say this right at the outside. I'm certainly not comparing any police forces to the United States because some of those ones that I mentioned before, I'm not making that comparison at all. I want your viewers to know that. It's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying, though, is that as part of our constitutional scheme, you know, the suspect is deemed to have certain constitutional rights. And when you're working for the defense, it's your job to, you know, do the best you can to preserve those rights. Most people that we dealt with, most of them, and you can look at the numbers, the statistics are there for anyone to look at. You know, most of these cases are solved, you know, before a trial. Most people end up pleading guilty. And we have those conversations with the defendants. We did when I was working on those sorts of things. And we want to see where you want to go. Do you want to go to trial? Well, you go to trial. That's your constitutional right. But, you know, if you're looking at the evidence and they've got all this stuff on camera and they've got all these witnesses and they've got your DNA here and there. I mean, we discussed all those different aspects with the with the clients. And, you know, very often they say, look, go make the best deal you can for me. And, you know, we'll work something out. But there were there were times where people said, you know, no, I didn't do it. And, you know, here's what they missed. And can you go find this person? They'll be this was my alibi or they'll say, yeah, yeah, my cell phone was there, but I didn't have it. I loaned it to this guy and, you know, and he took it to that region. And that's why my cell phone, you know, was spotted on records being in a certain location, things of that nature. We would often have to check that sort of thing out. And lots of times we just had to check out what the police had just to verify that what they said in their reports wasn't, in fact, true. You know, let's go take a look at the surveillance video. Let's take a look at the crime scene. Let's do some measurements. Let's see if our guy could have been, you know, been in this location where we knew he was at a certain time and whether he could have made it across the city during rush hour traffic at this particular time of day and got into the place where he supposedly committed the crime. So those are the kinds of things that really have to be done. And that's what I say. The police are doing a job. They are not, you know, to use an old school euphemism, they're not opening up a phone book and dropping a finger down and saying we're going to prosecute this guy today or charge this guy today. They're not doing that. They're basing these off and on things that the police either see or they've conducted pretty thorough investigations, especially in the federal cases because that's what I worked. You know, we didn't do – we weren't doing cases involving domestic battery or liquor store robberies. This was crimes against the United States, and a lot of them were really white-collar crimes and crimes involving organized crime, which is something that involves the book that I wrote. But yeah, I mean that's the thing about that. What you're doing really – you're not – I've heard people say you're trying to put people – bad guys on the street. No, you're not. What you're doing is you're holding the government to its burden and making sure that everyone's constitutional rights are preserved. and what a lot of people I don't think realize is your rights, my rights, all of our rights are almost inextricably interwound in the rights of the people who have been accused of serious crimes because, you know, when that person goes to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says, hey, you know what? Yeah, you have a right to be advised of your rights. You have a right to remain silent and things of this nature. We all benefit from that even though that right was really established in court proceedings involving someone accused of a serious crime very often. But so, you know, this is really about all of our rights and the accused have rights just, you know, just as victims do and just as we all do. Those of us who never never have a run in with police. Right. Right. Very well said. All right. OK, so let's talk about the book here. And I want to know first, how do you actually how did you come across this particular case? Oh, this is back when I was working as an investigative reporter in Las Vegas. And of course, you know, with the history of organized crime in Las Vegas and the casinos and the skimming back in the 70s and the early 80s and that sort of thing, it was very natural for me to be covering cases involving organized crime. And so I was very interested in that sort of thing and it was something that I tried to, I wouldn't necessarily call it a specialty, but it was something that I was very interested in. And whenever those sorts of cases surfaced, people knew I had an interest in, you know, they farmed them out to me. Or I, you know, developed enough sources down at the federal courthouse where if something interesting was going on, someone would say, hey, you know, get down to this courtroom at this hour. There's going to be a hearing in there that you're going to want to be at and see some interesting things. In this particular case, I had done some reporting about organized crimes nibbling at the edges of what they called the escort industry or in Las Vegas, it was commonly known as the outcall entertainment industry. And that is where if you've ever been to Vegas or any of your listeners have been to Vegas, you know, there were these people that stand on the street handing out business cards or pamphlets in the older days that advertised, you know, women to your room or men to your room. You know, it was more women to room in the older days, more frequently or in modern days, it's also men and women, you know, who are the supposed entertainers. and nominally what would happen is that you would call this number from the booklet that you got on on the strip or one of these uh what do you call them um news racks uh that would have a lot of these uh pamphlets in them and you would call that number and supposedly uh someone would come to your room uh generally a woman for a man uh and perform an erotic dance well in fact in 90 you know percent of these cases what it really was was not an entertainer coming to do an erotic dance it was essentially a call girl coming to do what call girls do And so I had done some reporting about how the you know traditional organized crime was nibbling at the edges of this industry which was a huge industry in Las Vegas back when all of this started back in the nineties, in the mid to late nineties is when all this was going on. And so I had been doing a number of stories about that. I got a call from a woman who, I guess I will call her for lack of a better her term, you might think of her as sort of a mid-level mom and pop madam. She had her own escort service or out-call entertainment service. She said she had a story she wanted to tell me. And I thought, well, you know, okay, that's fine. Is there something particularly interesting about this? I mean, why would people be interested in this? Pretty much everybody in Vegas knows that. And certainly the police had alleged that the vast majority of these escort services were nothing but fronts for prostitution. And she said, well, this isn't about that. This is about something underneath that, something a lot more sinister. So I thought, well, you know, this is worth it. I'll come out there. I'll come out to her little shop. And she had a place in a, in like a strip mall, you know, with a roll-up door, the kind of places where, you know, you have small engine repair and that sort of place. So I go in there and it turns out she's got, you know, there's a desk with a bunch of phones on it. And these phones are all these different phone lines for the various escorts. And she tells me this amazing story about how, you know, she's running this small escort service. And one day, a dissatisfied customer shows up and says, Hey, you know, one of your, one of your escorts rolled me in my hotel room. You know, she asked me to take a shower before we conduct any business. And I went into the shower when I came out of the shower, my Rolex was missing. My wallet was empty of money and et cetera, et cetera. And so the supposed madam says, well, you know, when did this happen? He gives her a time of the date and she said, we didn't send anybody there. It didn't happen. And the guy's well, you know, here's my room folio from my hotel room. And you can see I called the number for one of your, you know, coquettish college girls or whatever the advertisement said. And sure enough, It was a number for her business for coquettish college girls. But all of her logs and everything said we didn't send anybody up there. And so she started talking to other people in the escort industry. And it turns out everybody else was noticing the same thing was happening. First off, their call volumes had dropped dramatically. They just weren't getting the calls that they used to get. And second, they were finding out that people were claiming to have had someone come to their room and do something bad. when they didn't send anybody there. And so what surfaced was evidence that what might have been happening is someone was hacking into the phone system in Las Vegas. And then if you would call, say, Sexy Sally's escort service, your call wouldn't go to Sexy Sally's. It would go to Swing and Susie's escort service. Okay? They were actually intercepting the call and diverting it to another service. Okay, so these are the... Let me let me just stop you there for one second. These are this was in the time where, you know, here we had South Central Bell and we would have to call, you know, and we'd have to call and put in some kind or call them and say, you know, can you forward my calls to such and such? You know, back in old days when I had operators sitting there at an actual switchboard and tell them where to where to route the call. Is that kind of how it was set up out there? I mean, how were they actually? Okay. Okay. I just want to make sure. Absolutely. And that was what the problem was. This was back in the mid to late 90s, back when computer crime was just starting. And a lot of the police departments and the FBI, a lot of these law enforcement organizations were just not prepared for this kind of thing happening. And the phone companies were at risk because that was when they were starting to switch over to computers and all the call switching was by computers. And hackers were hacking into the phone system. And in Las Vegas, that was particularly of concern because you may or may not know this now. There's there's a yearly convention from hack for hackers in Las Vegas. Oh, I know there is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know how I know that? I didn't know until because I'm a big X-Files fan and I watch the X-Files and they talk about the they actually are at the convention in Vegas. The hackers go there every year. So, yeah, I know about that. Yeah, absolutely. And at that time, there were actual hackers in Las Vegas, including some of the hackers who ended up becoming, you know, on the FBI's most wanted list. So there were people that had the ability to do this and they were right in the place where you had this this this business, which was, you know, again, semi legal, legal on paper. But, you know, what they were doing was supposedly not not legal. So that's what made it so lucrative for someone who was a hacker to do that. they figured they could get away with it. What are, you know, what are the people who are running these escort service can do? Go to the cops and say my illegal business is being hacked. A lot of them didn't want to do that. In fact, the woman that came to me didn't want her face shown, didn't want her name used and stuff. So I never did. But I did do a silhouette interview with her. I ended up doing a story on it. But I took that to a guy that I knew with the FBI. And I said, hey, look, I just want to run this past you before I run a story on this. I said, is it possible that this is going on? And are you guys looking into this? Because really what was concerning to me is, you know, I can see why you would be doing it in the escort industry because they feel like the people running these escort services really can't go to the cops and complain. But suppose that starts spreading around. Suppose, you know, every other pizza delivery doesn't go to Domino's, you know. Suppose instead of going to Yellow Cab, it goes to Checker Cab. You know, that's going to have a huge impact on the telephone system, which, again, was still being sort of run by these local telephone companies. It wasn't near as automated as it announced. Like you said, you had Bell. I think we had Sprint Centel or something like Sprint was maybe the chief telephone company in that area at that time. But it was. It was a time when computer crime was brand new. And, you know, the phone system was very vulnerable and the phone system was where people were making these dates with escort services at that time. Let me ask you this real quick before I I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm really, really interested in the people that actually run the escort services. So if you don't mind to tell us, like, are these are these were these escort services where they ran by organized crime or individual people or. Well, yeah, some of them were had organized crime connections. Absolutely. Some of them did. And that's why what happened happened, which we get to in the book. And then there were some people who were just, you know, they were just in it for the money. Some were run by former outcall, quote, dancers slash, you know, prostitutes themselves who had noticed how lucrative the business was and how insulated they had the owners to become. Because the owners were virtually never ever charged with anything. They would say, oh, look, we're sending a dancer to a hotel room supposedly to do a dance. Once they get there, what they do with the customer, we don't have any control over that. So they had this plausible deniability that they would use that kept them from ever being charged with anything. Now, the police would actually run stings every now and then. They would put police officers in hotel rooms pretending to be John's. And I went on a couple of those stings when normally what they would do is they'd rent two hotel rooms, one where they had the undercover officer posing as the John, And then in a joining room where they had the thing was wired for sound and they could monitor all all the activities. That's right. Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that actually. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the some of the some of the old cop shows, these reality cop shows did a number of episodes on that. But what would happen when the police would do that is that, you know, these these agencies were all talking to each other. They were either calling on the phone or faxing each other and they'd say, oh, look, one of our one of the ladies we sent over to the room got busted. So, you know, the cops are up in this room in this hotel and, you know, very often the police stings, they get, you know, maybe three or four busks before everybody in the industry knew where they were and they just stopped sending escorts up there. So it wasn't terrible. You know, it made it made for great TV on some of these cop shows, but it wasn't a particularly effective way of eliminating the problem. Okay. Were any of the other escort services like blaming each other? Because what I'm trying to find out is, you know, I want to know were there any behind the scenes conflicts between the mob and these other guys running their call services? Totally. That is exactly what happened. So everybody, it was like, it was like, you know, 1950s paranoia. Everybody starts suspecting the other guy. Well, these guys are doing real well. They're not losing any business. They must be the guys that are stealing the phone calls. They must have employed the hacker to hack my phone calls. And then they would have, you know, the phone company come out and run tests. And the phone company would say, hey, you know, we don't see any problem here. and then say that that's because they're only hacking you know at certain hours of the day and they'll have it on for 30 minutes and then they'll take it off and everybody was suspicious of everybody else but most of the mom and pop operations were suspicious of the guys that were doing really well one of the guys who was losing a lot of business from this who believed that his phone calls were being stolen by the hacker had a connection with a new york mafia family uh either depending upon who you believe the banana family or the gambino family in new york and so he prevails on this guy up in new york to help him say hey look i need some help here i'm i'm getting ripped off and so this guy in new york says hey you know forget about it no problem we'll take care of it i got some guys coming down i got a couple guys from florida i got another guy from new jersey i'm going to send these guys out they're going to find out who's doing this hacking they're going to get this guy he's going to work for us it's all going to be beautiful and then you know you can make some money you give us some of the money that sort of thing so that's how this whole thing gets started that's how the mafia or um you know an organized crime family out of new york allegedly gets involved in this whole thing because one of these guys is and knows someone up there and he's had his calls intercepted and uh rerouted and so they they bring these guys down these alleged enforcers to try to find out who's hacking the phone system and see what they can do about it. And part of the problem, though, is that one of the guys that's, again, he's one of the mom and pop operations. He's from New York. He's also an FBI informant. And he goes to the FBI because he says the local cops have been harassing him. And he believes that the local cops have maybe been compromised by some of these mob guys, some of the local vice cops. And so that's how this whole thing, but the FBI gets started. The FBI, he lets them, this sort of mom and pop escort service owner, lets the FBI plant a guy in his escort service as an alleged manager, but he's really an undercover FBI agent. And so you've got in this one escort service, the owner who is an FBI source and the alleged manager who is an FBI agent. And it's really kind of funny because we actually jokingly thought about calling this book on Uncle Sam's escort service. Because in a sense, you know, the FBI was almost partners with an escort service owner because he was their informant. And they had, you know, one of their agents undercover nominally acting as a as a manager. and my understanding is that is the first time that was ever done and the last time it was ever done because it was problematic they said look you know if these people are really going out and doing prostitution we got to be really careful we got to make sure we avoid any aspects of the of the business operation our guys just got to be a total you know front or what have you but there are people who said you know what in a very real sense the fbi was partners in an escort service. So it was done once and once alone. And that was for this operation. Okay. So you mentioned the cops, the local cops there, did they know what was going on and just left them alone or what are your thoughts? No, they did the, they did the, the stings, they would do those stings. And, you know, and the stings tended to sort of suppress the activity, but it did really nothing to, to get to the root of it, the root cause of it. And anyone who went to Las Vegas back in the 1990s, if you just picked up a phone book, if there's a phone book in your hotel room and you looked at the yellow pages, a lot of people, you know, the yellow pages have been, phone books have been replaced by Facebook today. But in the old days, the yellow pages is where it's at. That's where everybody advertised. And that's where all these escort services advertised. There were between 130 and 150 full page color advertisements in the phone book for these escort services. And people used to joke in Las Vegas, you know, when they say, let your fingers do the walking, they're talking about streetwalking because there were so many of these. And people started to object. They said, look, you know, we get kids in the house. The kids are going to look for a pizza parlor for their birthday And they paging past you know 140 full page ads of these lurid you know coquettish college girls or you know blonde Asian milfs want to meet you tonight, you know, this sort of advertising. And they're going, wow, we got to do something about that. And eventually the Clark County Commission, you know, made them tone down these ads where they couldn't show pictures of actually of the actual, you know, the entertainers, the women, mostly. There were some men, but mostly it was women going out and entertaining men, so to speak. And it would always, all these escorts would always come to hotels or were there any other locations that they would come to? They could, they would go wherever, but generally it was the hotels because that's where the business was, you know, and there was, again, phone book in every hotel room and they had all these guys that handed out pamphlets on the strip. Yeah, they had to make it like room service. Exactly. And some of them actually call their escort services room service because we come to your room. Right. OK, so let me ask you about the hotels. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Glenn. No, you're right. I'm really interested in this story. OK. Did the hotels know about it? I mean, were they were the staff getting kickbacks for looking the other way, possibly? You know, that's a good question. That was beyond the scope of where I got to. there were always those allegations um certainly in the old days there were people who worked in the hotels who would set you know let's say a high roller wanted some feminine companionship and generally that's the way it went there later days it's women they wanted male companionship but mostly it was fairly well-to-do men who wanted female companionship and um you know there were guys worked in the hotels that made sure that whether it was uh you know a savvy bellman or you know somebody who was a valet parker who also had a uh you know black book full of uh hot numbers that he could give a high roller um that that was something that occurred on a regular basis with regard to these phone operations though um they had to know something was going on just by the people that was, you know, the ladies that were showing up and going upstairs to meet their uncle, you know, supposedly, because a lot of these places you had to check in at the elevator, you know, oh yeah, I'm going to visit my uncle or my cousin or my whatever. Okay. And so the, you know, the person at the elevator who worked for the hotel call up, oh yeah, yeah, she's a, she's a friend of mine, send her up. Okay. So did they know what was going on? Yeah, I think so. Did they sort of look the other way, a lot of them? Yeah, I think a lot of them did. Obviously, some of the hotels, you know, cooperated, or many of the hotels, let me put it that way, maybe most, cooperated with the police. And it was not the sort of thing they necessarily wanted to have in the hotel. But do I think a lot of them looked the other way? Nah. As long as no one was, you know, again, causing crimes or rolling people, I think they had no problem. You know, they were less concerned about what people did in the privacy of their own room. I mean, you know, you're talking about a city whose slogan was what happens here stays here. Come on. Come on. So I think they were more concerned about the guys that were handing out these pamphlets on the Strip, because at that time was also a time where, you know, Las Vegas was supposedly get this reputation as, oh, we're becoming a more family destination. Well, that really wasn't true. But that's sort of what the word was going out because they were building, you know, amusement parks and things of this nature. And so I think a lot of the casino companies at that time were very concerned about these guys on the strip hassling people walking up and down the strip by handing them these booklets featuring these escorts. And I'll tell you a funny story. That actually happened supposedly to Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy magazine. I got this story from somebody who worked in the security office of Playboy magazine. And they actually called me because I knew I'd done some reporting on this topic. And, you know, we went and we had lunch and he said, yeah, here's what happened. Hugh Hefner came to Vegas a couple of weeks ago with an entourage of people. And they're walking down the strip, taking in the lights and the fountains and what have you. I don't know if the fountains were there yet, but the lights and whatnot. And these guys with pamphlets keep sticking pamphlets in their hands and whatnot. And so they looked at one of the pamphlets. One of the pamphlets had Hugh Hefner's then wife, I think it was Kimberly Conrad, who was a former Playboy playmate, depicted in one of these pictures as one of the escorts. Oh. Yeah. And see, that's what they were doing. A lot of these pamphleteers, these people that produced the pamphlets. They were pirating the pictures. They were pirating the pictures off the internet. That's right. And that was when the, you know, online editions of Playboy, Penthouse, et cetera, were, again, relatively new. So they would just pirate the pictures. put him in these fabulous oh here's here's the woman who's going to come up and entertain you tonight and Hugh Hefner saw and it was his wife and she's standing there next to him with some of the guests and so you know he told the guy from security go go see what you can find out keep these guys from pirating our pictures and so we had that conversation I don't know whether they just sent cease and desist letters or what they did but eventually the the picture piracy did stop and in fact it actually became something you would see in some of these pamphlets where they'd say oh, by the way, this is the actual picture of the actual entertainer. Well, they, you know, more or less said, okay, we're not pirating the pictures anymore. But yeah, that's what they were doing. I mean, that's how, I don't know how to describe it. Sort of freewheeling the whole business was at the time. But that was what was happening. That's exactly what they were doing. They were just pirating the pictures, a lot of them. Have you ever known a journalist or even yourself that was, you know, threatened when you go digging into stuff like this, you know, that people don't necessarily want you talking about or putting information out about? I mean, has it ever happened to you or anybody you know? Yeah, it happened to me in a, you know, it was one where I was doing a series of reports on a topless bar there that was allegedly connected to some organized crime figures. And I had just done like a two-part expose and I actually got a, uh, a postcard in the mail where someone had actually cut the letters out, you know, like you see from magazines, like watch your ass or something like this. Uh, and they, you know, pasted them onto a postcard and sent it to me. And I'm like, Oh, okay. I thought that that was only something in the movies. Yeah. I didn't know whether, and I, you know, I did turn it over to the police. I didn't know whether to take it serious or not, but they, they, they mentioned a particular person that I had mentioned in one of my reports. And so I think it was someone connected to that person. Whether it was really meant to just scare me or upset me, I don't know. I wasn't terribly worried about it, but I had turned over the police. And nothing ever became of it. But yeah, and then we had guys, and that was pretty minor for me. We had a guy by the name of Ned Day, who was a crusading reporter back in the day. at the CBS affiliate there in Las Vegas. And he ended up, you know, I think he died of a heart attack while swimming in the ocean in Hawaii in the 80s. But, you know, there were always these rumors that, you know, it was something more nefarious than that. But he had actually had, you know, many threats. And someone firebombed his car at one time. And he was one of those crusading reporters always doing stories about the various Chicago outfit and the Chicago mob guys that were in Vegas at the time, you know, backing some of the hotels with, you know, hidden interests. Okay. All right. So during this time, how deep did the mob's roots run in Las Vegas? I mean, were they very involved in like hotel ownership at that time or business ownerships at that time? Can you tell us about that? Not so much at that time. Back in the 70s and 80s, they were hugely involved, especially with the financing and construction of casinos through loans from the Teamsters funds. But then by the 80s, the government had done a good job cracking down these guys. They had a lot of prosecutions going. A lot of people had gone to jail. A lot of the Midwestern mob bosses were going to jail over these things. And so they were really at that point in the mid 90s that essentially been kicked out of the casinos and they had gone corporate. You know, that really started with Howard Hughes. But by this time, the casinos were less owned by any individuals, whether they be mob connected individuals or people like Howard Hughes. They were more corporate owned. And a lot of people believe that's one of the reasons why we started to see the organized crime influence in the adult entertainment industry and escorts, prostitution. strip clubs, that sort of thing. Because traditionally those have been sort of cash cows for the mob anyway. And now they couldn't be in the casinos. Well, this is a perfect, this is a perfect companion sort of place because a lot of these guys come to casinos. They want to, they want to have escorts come to the room. They want to go to tapas bars. They want to do that sort of thing. And so a lot of people believe that is really where organized crime, traditional organized crime moved once they got kicked out of the casinos. So that's your observation, I think, is a very keen one. OK, so can you tell us about I don't want to give the book away, but I just want to get your personal thoughts. I mean, did you run across anything that really just shocked you about this case? Yeah. You know, the whole idea of the fact that, you know, how unprepared everyone was for the cyber crime, you know, because you had this sort of like we talked about traditional organized crime, which goes back centuries. prostitution, which is the oldest, you know, theoretical oldest profession in the world. And now suddenly you've got these cyber crooks possibly involved. And, you know, the FBI didn't know how to find this hacker. The alleged mob enforcers didn't know how to find this hacker, but everybody was looking for everybody else. They were trying to squeeze people until they could get some names to surface. And that's where things got, got kind of dicey. People were afraid that they were going to, you know, someone was going to get killed. One of the alleged enforcers that was sent to help find the hacker was a guy by the name of Vinny Asperins. He got the nickname Asperins because when the mob gets a headache, Vinny Asperins gets rid of the headache. You know what I mean? I mean, he literally got that. One of the most interesting mob monitors. That was a great voice. It was a great voice. Yeah, well, and he had a gravelly voice. It was really funny in the book. I think I said something like, you know, this guy looks kind of like if you needed to cast a generic Italian uncle type and, you know, Abe Vigoda was either, you know, not around or by that time dead, this is the guy you would cast. He actually died in federal prison as a result of this case. But yeah, Vinny Aspirin's Conjuisty was his name. And his deal was he had a reputation of using a cordless drill to either drill into your kneecap or your head in order to get you to tell him what he wanted to know. And so he could theoretically cause a headache to eliminate a headache, if you know what I mean. Yeah. But when they actually busted all these guys, the alleged enforcers, when they busted this group, the FBI did, they actually did find a cordless drill in his suitcase. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody brings the cordless. Yeah. How many people bring a cordless drill on vacation? Right, right. So he was probably really, I mean, did they find any like real physical evidence of somebody having been drilled by him? no no and again that was one of those things where they weren't sure is this something he does his reputation is this something he like you know holds up to their heads and goes he did have a history of putting a gun to a guy said he tried to extort a a business owner down in tampa florida where where he was living uh and almost got caught for that but apparently his connections with the banana crime family got him out of that um when they arrested these guys They found, you know, all the sorts of things you would expect if you were going to snatch a guy and force him to go work for you. You know, they found firearms. They had a rope. They had, you know, gloves. They had accelerants in case they needed to make a firebomb to send a message to one of these one of the alcohol service owners that they thought was benefiting from the hacker because they were definitely paranoid. Right. Right. OK. Yeah. Let me let me ask you about that. OK, so did any of them, did anybody get killed like any of the other escort owners, you know, during this conflict where they didn't know who was actually doing it and they suspected each other? I mean, did anybody get hurt or killed during this? Nobody got killed. There were there were two alleged murder plots. And there were also some threats that, you know, hey, if these guys don't do what we want them to do, we're going to take them out or send a message. in terms of anybody actually getting killed? No. And that's really one of the reasons why this thing remains a mystery today. They had some of the phones of these, of the conspirators monitored, the FBI did. They were getting wiretaps on all these phones. And one of the guys tells the the escort service owner that was working for the FBI he on the phone and he being monitored And he says oh we think we got a guy who knows where the computer programmer who stealing all the calls is. Vinny Asperin's is next door. He's got his drill going. I can hear the drill bit going. I think he's going to make this guy tell us what we want to know. Well, at that point, this FBI informant says, oh, OK, well, great. Get back with me. Let me know what you find out. He turns around, calls the FBI, says, look, they're in this office. They're about to drill this guy. So the FBI said, well, shoot, you know, we can't wait. We can't wait anymore. We got to go in. And that's when they they go in. They bust everybody that's in the in the in the office. They did have a guy in the office and they were grilling him about what he knew about this computer programmer. But they didn't really have the drill with him. The drill was in the guy's suitcase. It was still in his private, you know, suitcase. He hadn't pulled it out. So that turned out to be just puffery talk that one of the other guys was saying on the phone. But they did have a guy in it that they were grilling. And the FBI figured with all the other evidence they had on these guys from the other wiretaps, what they talked about finding this guy and sending a message and banging heads and doing whatever they had to do to whoever they had to do it to. They figured they had plenty of evidence. So they said, great, we're going to go in. We're going to grab this guy. Now, because they did that, they brought down an operation early that they had planned to let go for months and months and months. they wanted to be just really deep into this thing because they had an escort service owner who was cooperating with them and then they had their own agent as that escort service owners manager so they thought they would get really really deep in this make all kinds of different connections and they never got to do it because they were afraid if they didn't go in you know vinnie aspirins is going to drill somebody uh so they they came in and they arrested everybody ultimately all the conspirators ended up pleading guilty to a single federal charge and then And some of them went to jail for, you know, between four and six years. But they never were able to prove whether the hacking was going on because they never got to the bottom of it. And they were never able to. Go ahead. Well, I was going to ask you, like during this whole entire time, they were suspecting each other. And this guy, Vinny Asperins, was just doing all he can to figure out who it was. were the calls still continuing to be forwarded during this whole time? We believe so. People who were the people that I interviewed for the book who were in that business at that time told me they were still going on. And it really only stopped when the whole thing became public, when they when they arrested these guys. In fact, you can blame me for that. I was down there when they, you know, when they made their first appearance as a federal court and i i did a number of stories on it uh and everybody believes what happened once the hacker suddenly realized oh my god we had no idea a lot of people think that these the hacker or hackers were not aware of the fact that they were stealing from mob connected escort services you know right and you would think you know you're not you're not going to do that if you know that but if you don't know that if you think it's just one of your rivals and you know they really can't go to the cops because the cops aren't going to listen to them. Then I guess, oh, we're really sorry that your illegal business isn't making as much money as it was. I mean, that's why this, this sort of thing was able to go as far as it did. But after that, you know, most of the other people say it had stopped. Now there's one guy who says his continues up to this day, that he continues to still lose calls. But there was a pretty significant investigation by the Public Utilities Commission into whether this had gone on. And essentially, the staff concluded, although the actual appointment, the worker bees of the Public Utilities Commission, they more or less said, hey, look, the phone system had a lot of security flaws. that this absolutely could have happened, but we don't have the evidence that it did happen. You know, we don't know what exactly happened. And that was part of the problem. I actually interviewed a guy who was a former hacker. He's a pretty big writer in the tech scene now, and the national security scene. His name is Kevin Polson. And Kevin Polson was a hacker back in the late 70s, early 80s. And he had actually done something very similar to this and got busted for it in L.A. And what had happened with Kevin Polson, and this is really interesting, Kevin Polson had a friend who owned an escort service. Just like in Las Vegas, the escort services did a lot of their advertising in the phone books. Well, the L.A. vice cops had put a couple of these escort services out of business. But in L.A., they only published the phone book twice a year, okay? So if you had an ad in the phone book, even if you went out of business, your ad was going to stay in the phone book for six months. Okay. So the cops have put some of these escort services out of business, but their phone book ads were still in there. However, the phone numbers had been disconnected by the police. Well, Kevin Paulson went in there on behalf of his friend who on the escort service reconnected those phone numbers and then redirected those phone calls to his friend's service. So that if you called the number that was in the phone book from one of these services that had been put out of business by the police, that phone number was still active. Only instead of going to that place that had been put out of business, it went to Kevin Paulson's friend's business. So he actually did something very similar to what was being alleged in Las Vegas on behalf of his friend. Now he was caught and he ended up going to jail and did his time came out. He's now a very respected, you know, reformed hacker and, you know, white hat electronic, you know, security guy. But, you know, he said, yeah, I did something similar to that myself. So I'm pretty sure this could have occurred. Whether it did occur, still a mystery. Right, right. And like you said earlier, you know, the Internet has killed a lot of their business, you know, because now, you know, there's really no need to go through a middleman. Right, right. They're still operating out there. Probably not as many, though, right? That's correct. It is much more reduced than it used to be. How many you think are running? You know, I did prior to the book. I looked at it and there was like 100. I think I said there was like 130, 140 named businesses of this kind in Clark County back in the 90s. There was maybe 40 when I checked before publication. Maybe it's been a few months, probably less than that now. Uh, they're just not, as you mentioned, they're not necessarily so many of the people in the sex industry, sex workers, they're called sex workers now. I mean, you know, that term wasn't really being used back in the nineties, but, uh, they connect directly over the internet or they, there's, there's even apps now on, on cell phones for that sort of thing. Uh, there, you know, I know Craigslist had a personal columns that were, were doing that, that sort of, that people were using, you know, Craigslist didn't approve of it, but, people were subverting some of these online systems. Oh, I've seen it. I've seen it. You know what I told my, this is a true story. This guy that I work with, loving to death, I'm not going to say his name. I told him about the Craigslist deal. I was like, really, he was looking for a little motorcycle for his son. And I told him where it was in Nashville. And he called the guy and he was like, you know what, I'm going to go get that motorcycle you know, when we get off work at like 7 a.m. And sure enough, he drove down and picked the motorcycle up. Next day, you know, he was like, thank you very much, you know, for telling me about that. And I said, have you seen the other little, you know, categories in there where, you know, they've got these girls, these women that, you know, want you to come to their house and they'll host you and things like that. You know, I'm telling you, he never stayed off of that ever. It's like he never wanted to work anymore. All he wanted to do was go through Craigslist and find somebody to meet. I wish I'd never told him that. That's a true story. But one thing I was going to say is that, I mean, personally, I think that the only appeal right now for those types of services is that they are, you know, maybe quote unquote, sure things. and that maybe that these guys are thinking, you know, these women are already vetted and maybe even safer. I would, you know, go so far as to say that. And, you know, I'm saying, you know, maybe they've been tested and things like that. Whereas if you go on Tinder or Craigslist or whatever, you know, you really don't know what you're going to get and you don't know if it's actually going to happen for you. You know what I'm saying? Oh, I think you're absolutely right. I think that's one of the few reasons that any of these places are still in business, especially because in Nevada, prostitution is legal. In brothels, in certain counties, small population counties, it's not legal in Clark County or Washoe County where Reno is and Las Vegas are. but people sort of get that sense of well that's probably just wink wink not not but i think you're absolutely right i think you because you don't know who you're going to meet on the internet but if you go through a service you get well you know at least the cops know where these people are they have an office they have a phone bank you know they have a business license i think you're right i think people do tend to think well i'm it's going to be a much safer hookup or whatever whatever if i go through a service i think you're right i think that's exactly awesome i've really enjoyed this interview with you, Glenn. So before we go, why don't you take a moment to tell my listeners about, you know, anything else you're working on or how they can touch base with you? Yeah, well, you know, like I said, we talked actually at the top of the top of the show, and I want to reiterate that in terms of I don't want to come across, you know, a radical or anything. But I did work for seven years as a staff investigator for the Federal Public Defender's Office and then did some private investigation work. I'm working on a book now about my time doing that and some of the experiences I had and some of the more interesting cases that I had regarding that. And, you know, what it was like to go in there. You know, and as I said, most of the time, most of the time, most of these cases are resolved with a person pleading guilty. Because let's face it, most of these cases, the person is in fact guilty and that's why they plead guilty. But you've got to treat everyone with the respect and with the rights that they have so that when you do come across one where, hey, you know, somebody made a mistake, there's this person is innocent. And we know that does happen. So I'm going to talk a little bit about them and talk about what it was like to go through a lot of these cases and be working on a case where you know that this person did it. and some of those rare occasions where you're working on a case and you go, you know what? I think the cops are wrong. I think the FBI is wrong. And that is so, that's a crazy, crazy thing to go through to say, oh, because you start wondering about yourself. Are all these, you know, smart people, crime fighters, crime solvers wrong? And you're right, you and the lawyer and the client. But, you know, you do on occasion come across those. on occasion. Thank God it is rare in America. But you do on occasion come across those. And so I want people to sort of get a sense of what that is like, exactly what you said, when you're working very often with people that you know are probably going to go to jail. And they really, they just want you to maybe make the best deal for them that they can get, you know, and if they can help out. Sometimes they want to cooperate with law enforcement. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're afraid to. You know, and on some of those occasions, sometimes they're not guilty. So I want to give people a sense of what that's like and also do that by telling them some of the more interesting cases that I had. I had some really fascinating cases. I had, you know, I had an extortion case, which I thought was amazing. I had a murder for hire case, which turned out to be not a murder for hire. Let's put it that way. I had, you know, I had a case involving fake Botox, which we actually, you know, refer to as Photox, you know, and how that sort of thing worked out. But again, some of these things, you know, you're talking about, we have an issue with the attorney client privilege. So I've got to get some clearances on what can be said. But a lot of this stuff is it's in the public record. You know, some of the hearings we had, all this stuff's on the record. So I'll probably tell the stories through those public records, which are already out there, unless somebody doesn't mind me, you know, telling the inside scoop, which is where the juicy stuff is. But, you know, these people do have a right to attorney-client privilege. So we're not even even though the cases are old and done, you know, we would never compromise that. But, you know, they can always they might want their story told. Some of them I know I think would like their stories told. Absolutely. All right. Well, you're absolutely welcome back on this show, Glenn. So please, you know, stay in touch and let us know what you're up to and many blessings. And I really appreciate your time. Right back at you. I really enjoyed talking to you. To find out more about our guest and all others, please visit our website at mysteriousradio.com.