Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Borderlands | 5. The Informant

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Recently arrived federal agents Dale and Kelly team up to finally get Robert Chambers — then find an unexpected source of help. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Damn, sir. Damn, sir. Dale Stinson was a veteran DEA agent, and he'd worked some pretty dicey assignments. Not that he would ever put it like that. I never considered the job dangerous. Why? I... I don't know.

Positive attitude? I can do this. But from what Dale told me during our conversations, and there were many of them, he'd been involved in some high-pressure, high-stake stuff, sometimes working undercover to set up some pretty serious drug traffickers. Not to mention being partnered with fellow agent Kiki Kamarena, before he was kidnapped and murdered by the Wadala Hara cartel. So positive attitude or not, you can understand why, in 1990, Dale

was ready for a change of pace. He was in his mid-40s. Had a bunch of kids. And Alpine came open, and I talked to my wife and said, you want to go to Alpine. She says, yeah, need to get away from the big cities. So I applied for the job. To be frank, Dale was overqualified for small sleepy, outpined taxes. His boss told him so. Sending him there, it was a waste of a good agent. Little to no action. Certainly nothing like Dale had experienced in Wadalahara.

But when Dale walked into his new DEA office on the first day, he realized this posting would suit him just fine. Ah, the office, it was one of the best offices you could ever find. I mean, it was absolutely terrific. It was on the second floor of the hotel. We had four hotel rooms that were joined together. We had two bathrooms, one in each of what used to be a hotel. The beds were gone, desks were in there.

It was kind of, can I say, rudimentary. It was like working in the 1940s, 50s. So it was to say the least, not a normal DEA office. From campsite media, the first season of witness. This is Borderlands. I'm Rob Domingo, Chapter 5, the Informant. Dale arrived in Alpine in early 1991. There were no big cases on his desk, no pressing issues he needed to deal with. So he went around the big bend region and got a lay of the land.

deal with. So we went around the big bend region and got a lay of the land. A lot of that involved talking with local law enforcement, picking their brains for useful sources of information, getting recommendations on who he could trust. It wasn't long before a familiar name was mentioned. Some people had suggested the Robert Chambers would be great confidential informant for us. So the Robert Chambers would be a great confidential informant for us. A local border patrol agent set up a meeting for Dale to talk to Robert. So he could assess this potential informant for himself. Robert picked the location. It's sagebrush, it's yellow dirt. I drove 10 miles down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

There was no houses, there were no people, there were jack rabbits. So the only witnesses to Robert and I meeting back then are a family of jack rabbits. Because he didn't want to be seen talking to me. As they talked, Dale was puzzled. It was very nebulous what he could offer. He said, I know a lot of contacts. I can do this, I can do that.

I can get you loads of marijuana. I'm thinking working overrun with loads of marijuana that the US Board of Patrol was doing a very good job of catching. I don't know how much more marijuana we need. I'm interested in cocaine and heroin. Dale was used to the big time, high dollar stuff. That's what he was interested in. Definitely not what Robert was offering up.

And Chambers' whole act seemed well suspicious. I came away with that thinking, yeah, this guy's a good target. Not an informant, a target. But the DEA didn't have an open case against chambers, and Dale didn't really have anything concrete to go on. Then he met another federal agent who was based in Alpine. I think Kelly and I met through our wives.

He had kids about the same ages hours, and they were in school. Kelly Cook, in his late 20s, a couple decades younger than Dale. His father was a local game warden. He knew all the local law enforcement folks, the DPS guys, the Texas Rangers, the Border Patrolmen. So he was acquainted with all those people and if they'd come to the house or whatever, I always thought it was kind of neat.

Kelly kept up these local relationships when he went into law enforcement himself. He knew everybody, just like his dad had, all the federal guys, local PD, even the famous Rick Thompson, over in Presidio County, who at this point in 1991 was 18 years into his 10-year-old sheriff. So consummate local boy Kelly, with his community roots in law enforcement dad, was pretty different from Dale. Dale, who would come to Alpine as a sort of retirement. He was a grizzled vet from up north. A fed who didn't care about ruffling feathers with the locals, so long as he got the job

done. Dale and Kelly were about to become a buddy-cup odd couple, lethal weapon on the borderlands. Because there was a file in Kelly's office that demanded both of their attention. A file that had been assembled meticulously over the years by another agent. A guy in my office, his name was Dan Dobbs, and he had opened a case. He was already investigating Robert Chambers, but this agent Dobbs, he was a good guy, but he was kind of a renegade. And he wanted to make this case himself. Dan Dobs, that gruff US customs agent who years earlier had investigated all those myths and not

actually myths about Robert, the plane crashed rescue, the money laundering through a funeral home, the shootouts around the big bend. Dobbs is the agent who seized the airplane from Robert. Kelly was the one who inherited his case. It was not terribly voluminous, it wasn't like you see on TV where you got four boxes of documents, it was actually just a small two or three tab case folder because if he got too detailed about drug smuggling then he would have to disclose lots of that information to DEA as per that working agreement. So he

was trying to outsmart the system by going after Robert as a money launderer but just never really took off for Dan because he didn't want to be subservient to any other agency or any other agent. But unlike Dan Dobbs, Kelly had no intention of being a loan renegade. I got this folder and I'm looking at it and I'm going, if this is what Dan alleges it is, I can't do this by myself out of my office. I gotta go get somebody that's willing to help me. So he called up Dale and the buddy cop movie started. He said, let's go after Robert Chambers.

Dale's not a Texan, okay. He wasn't a local. So he had kind of an area of bravado about him, and he was he was experienced by then. So some guys felt like he was very pushy and controlling. Eight. He was because he could be because he had the experience in those type of cases, which turned out to be a very good thing for this case. Nobody had the experience Dale had at the inception of that investigation. Bar none, period. Dale and Kelly got to work right away.

After reading Dan Dobbs' report, they started trying to figure out what Robert was currently up to. We found he's laying low. I hardly ever saw him. So we had to figure out how to do this and one of the ways is he started watching people. So we started watching Robert see what he was up to. Robert was this enigma. He lived on that little wrenchito south of town with the horse stalls and the trailer house that he lived in.

He didn't come to town a lot. If Dale and Kelly knew the scuttle butt on Robert's exploits, that he paraded through the shoot with his pet mountain line, that he might very well have busted a rapist out of jail to deliver his own justice, that he was alleged to have taken pot shots at his enemies. Well, it certainly wasn't the version of Robert they were watching in the spring and summer of 1991. He wasn't flamboyant, he drove an old Chevrolet and he had no pickup truck that he drove around. And you didn't see that much of him. He wasn't getting into barfights at the shoot or some of the other watering holes in town. But there was a lot of smoke.

There was a lot of smoke. And Dale and Kelly, they decided they didn't need to catch Robert in the act. They would follow the money, then they'd try to flip his underlings. Those diagrams you see in police procedures with photos, thumbtacks, and strength, connecting the key players in a criminal organization. That's the kind of thing Dale and Kelly wanted to build. It's what's called a historical conspiracy case. It's where you've got lots and lots of very good circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony

informant testimony where you can go back and show that based on this testimony and corroborating documentation that there was a high probability that this group smuggled, delivered, sold narcotics, moved money back to Mexico without having to actually seize dope. And for their historical conspiracy case, Dale and Kelly were setting their sights much higher than just Robert Chambers. Our outlook was to bring down this massive narcotic smuggling operation, which had originated in Ohinaga and kind of morphed into a Hwata's cartel thing.

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If you go up here and take another ride, wouldn't it like a ride across from the Terry Queen, the Wild Horse? Yeah. Get a ride across from the Terry Queen, the Wild Horse? Yeah, right across from the Terry Queen. Oh, let's see. They came back to town to give me a tour and revisit some of the key spots from their investigation. Where was the hat shop? That's where we set up a camera. And Dunshe's Place? Yeah, it doesn't get dirty. Well, it's down this way here.

Dale and Kelly told me when they'd started working the case together, they'd realized the first step was just to watch Robert Chambers. See where he went. See what we talked to. And watching him, one thing they noticed was, on the rare occasions Robert Chambers left his property just out the town. He traveled to payphones to make calls. So Dale and Kelly started video taping those payphones.

OK, right. Big Ben Salary is still here. OK, so go a little bit further. I got it. Yeah, that was the wild horse right there. The door on the far right went into the bar, and this other part was a convenience store. We had a direct shot from that satellite

place right there for the cameras. The deal was that there was a telephone on one of these walls. I think probably this one right where the game processing is. And that was one of Robert Chambers' phones. Main, main phone, yeah. There were actually two phones Chambers used for calls. This first one was on the outside wall of a bar called the Wild Horse. There was a saddle shop across from the Wild Horse, a place that locals called Dunshees. And Dale and Kelly, they got the owner, Mr. Dunshee, to let them place a camera inside a saddle box in his shop. Then pointed the

lens at the window right at that payphone by the Wild Horse. The other payphone was in downtown Alpine. That's not an ice cream parlor. Well, how do we surveil that? Well, there's a cross from the ice cream parlor is a hotel, so we went in, we bought three months' worth of one hotel room in general, and we set the camera up, and we had to go in and change it three times a day.

The camera was running all the time so that we could get a time stamp on it, so that we knew when somebody was using that phone. Same thing at Dunchies. The reality of this by-work was as tedious as it sounds. Days worth a grainy video footage that someone needed to sort through. I remember watching a lot of that and you know it's like everything else. It's like all other law enforcement police work. You know you're gonna have about 98% of nothing for 2% of something. And that's? Robert Chambers making a call. If that happened, they

knew things might be about to go down because there had to be a reason for those payphone calls. He had a home phone after all. Robert was more of the paranoid guy that didn't like to use home phones. He would if he had to, but he didn't like it. He preferred a pay phone. Just because generally, it helped him cover a little better. They didn't have enough evidence to ask for a wiretap of those pay phones. And this was the 90s.

So they didn't have some kind of flashy high-deaf camera that could allow them to read Robert's lips either. But all they needed to know was when he was making a call. We go to the phone company and says we've got a phone call going out at this time. What numbers are going to and who's the subscriber receiving? And so then we get those names which would take weeks and we'd run them through our databases and find out if any of them were people that had been involved in some way in illegal activities.

So that then gave us an idea of who he was working with, who was members of his organization. This operation, it went on for a few months, but it wasn't getting Dale and Kelly a ton of good leads. Their suspicion was that Robert was laying low, and their funds were valent showed. They were right. It looked like an organization that was in its shutdown mode for the time being that nothing really was going on, but maybe they were taking a break. Getting such a little traction, some agents might have lost confidence in their investigation and backed off. But instead, Dale and Kelly changed tack. If surveillance wasn't going to make their case, they needed to plan B. Known in the business as a snitch, somebody that has access to a large criminal organization,

and this was a large criminal organization, and this was a large criminal organization. A good cooperating individual. So we're looking for that loose person, the person that is mad at Robert Chambers and is willing to talk to us. But how do you get an underling to snitch on their boss? Well, you find a low-level player who's been arrested and offer them a deal to flip. But Dale and Kelly didn't have a complete picture of the organization, or who all the low-level players were. So basically, they needed to get lucky. They needed someone to come to them.

And if not them, then a colleague. Because the Alpine DEA office was small. But that didn't mean that Dale was the only agent. There was another guy there named Bob Mueller. Bob had been an Alpine for a while. Everyone knew Bob. Bob was a real character, you know. Bob was a very social drinker maybe, let's say, all in the name of cultivating informants. Bob liked to hang out at the wild horse in Alpine. The bar where Robert would make his phone calls. And guys who did work for Robert came there too.

One of them was a dude called Sam Thomas. He was, I would say maybe six foot one, kind of rugged gruff guy, smoked all the time, drank a lot, divorced, pulled no punches, you know, he told it like it was and it didn't really matter who you were. Sam's dad was the old county judge in Brewster County, the county in which Alpine is nestled. And to the town's Vokunu, Sam, he had a reputation for two things, drinking too much, and being conspicuously smart. Sam might have been a bad seed in some ways, a narrowed-to-well politician's son who now helped out a drug runner.

But he also talked to local law enforcement from time to time. In fact, Kelly's predecessor, Dan Dobbs, he knew Sam well. I was just about to ask you about Sam because I'd forgotten to ask you. So how, explain how you cultivated Sam. I talked to Sam because you know it's, you know, one day it's all blow jobs and lollipops but that can change real quick, you know. I said when it goes down, I said, do you think Robert's going to go out his way to take care of you or do anything for you or or pony up money for you in a turn or you're going to have to have a quarter point of the turni?

Can you kind of outline how this came about that you were talking to Sam though? I'm just from knowing that he was with chambers or Well, he was an in his back pocket all the time. You know, you'd see him around town or if you know, I saw his truck and we're 45 miles south of town and it's almost dark hell I'd hit the lights and pose ass over and talk to it you know so I'm not going to arrest him what's he going to do complain I'm already at the middle of nowhere Texas you know. What kind of guy was Sam what was he like? He was a pretty bright guy but eventually he saw that there's like only one path to Jesus. Bob Mueller and Sam, they knew each other too. We'll see each other on nights out, including a very fateful night in mid-1991.

Bob actually stumbled across a very irritated Sam Thomas at the Wild Horse Bar. Sam was fuming, and vending to the other drinkers at the Wild Horse Bar. Sam was fuming and vending to the other drinkers at the Wild Horse that night about the source of his anger, Robert Chambers. Robert accused Sam of something and Sam popped off and Robert Colcocked him. Didn't hurt him too bad, hurt his feelings, really pissed him off. They parted ways that incident and Sam just said, you know, basically screw this. I'm not here to be Robert's whipping boy,

you know, kind of like a kid, couple of kids that get in the fight, you know. I'm telling, I'm telling mom, well, his mom was Bob Mueller. I'm gonna go tell Bob Mueller and tell him I'm tired of this shit, I want to help him. And that's how it started. I guess for us it was very fortunate that they had their little tiff because it's what sent Sam to us. tiff because it's what sent Sam to us. The next day, Bob came into the DEA office on the second floor of that hotel in Alpine

and told Dale what he heard. He says, hey, this guy hit me up at the bar and he said he had some information about some big transactions. So I said, okay, have Sam give me a call. Don't come to the office, have Sam give me a call. So a couple of days later Sam calls me and I said, okay. Let's get together, we'll meet in Fort Stockton. So Kelly and I got a hotel room up in Fort Stockton.

Pretty much as soon as Sam sat down, Dale and Kelly realized they had found the guy who was going to make their case. He met us up there and we started some of the longest debriefings I've ever been involved in. been involved in more after the break. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man.

I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. I'm a man. Everything that was presented to me, I just swallowed completely whole. We are one of the richest families in the world that could never change. We're Steinbergs, like we are Steinbergs. Women?

The family was drawn together by the money. I was so aware of this could come to a screeching halt. You think I would have stopped? And then all of a sudden, the volcano erupts. I'm Aria Levy, and this is the just enough family. Ben Joel episodes now on Apple Podcasts. By the fall of 1991, when Dale and Kelly began to dig into the workings of the chamber's organization,

the larger war on drugs, it was raging. President Bush had created the Office of National Drug Control Policy and appointed America's first drugs are. The U.S. had invaded Panama, an extradited its leader, General Manuel Noriega, a longtime CIA asset in the war on communism, who had transformed his country into a narco state. Mexican police had arrested Miguel and hell Felix Gallardo, the godfather of the Guadalajara cartel, for the murder of Kiki Camarena.

And even after the federal government had spent billions of dollars, agents like Kelly Cook knew they weren't winning the war on drugs. Of course I'm not a fan of drugs by any means, but there was a sense of futility in some of the work because there's no trade secret, you know. But the guys running these transportation sales, drug sales, whatever you want to call them, they weren't driving drugs up the road. You know, they were hiring somebody for $100. It was those $100 guys that were the ones getting arrested and thrown in prison. Really a lot of these guys, they wanted to cooperate. These didn't know anything, you know, and that's and that's part of the the game.

And the drugs federal agents were intercepting probably 98 plus percent marijuana. Maybe half a dozen a day for marijuana. Versus one or two a year for coke. marijuana versus one or two a year for coke. I mean I'm telling you if there was one a year in that area that was that was a big deal. Kelly felt they were mainly arresting the gig workers of the drug world and confiscating shipments of weed, which was already in every high school in America and which they didn't particularly care about confiscating in the first place. It was kind of one of those deals you'd never really know how much of an impact you were making. And it would always fall back on the saying, you know, the saying that we used to have or we were used to, we were told a lot was,

in the war on drugs, you can do something or you can do nothing. And something is better than nothing. That was why talking to Sam Thomas about Robert Chambers was so exciting. This wasn't the usual whack-a-mole. They were going after a bad guy, a guy who was doing bad things, and yet had so far weaseled his way out of any consequences. And there was a tantalizing possibility it was even bigger than that, because it seemed very possible their case might not just involve Robert in a couple low level goons.

I'm not going to name names because I don't want to get it wrong, but there were two or three or four law enforcement officers that were always kind of questionable with respect to Robert. Kelly was hearing rumors other law enforcement officers might not be doing everything strictly by the book when it came to Robert in his smuggling activities. Well, when the investigation started, Dale kept it extremely tight. I mean, like four guys, because we thought we were going to have a kind of a long-term conspiracy. And the suspicion amongst law enforcement ranged from border patrolmen to

sheriffs to Texas Rangers to bigger players but there was one name that rose above the others sheriff Rick Thompson we didn't want him to minimize the fact that the sheriff might be involved. So those kind of things you just had to keep it very close, very tight. A lot of people in Presidio County knew the sheriff and Robert had some kind of relationship. After all, they were both ex-marines, both local boys. It was no big deal. And Robert seemed like he funneled information to the sheriff sometimes, to help him make arrests.

So the last thing Dale and Kelly wanted was for the sheriff to catch wind of who they were chasing, and start funneling information to to Robert and whoever else was helping him. But keeping the sheriff in the dark was a difficult task. He had a lot of friends and associates across law enforcement, even Kelly. We were all friendly with him, let's say I wasn't, I wouldn't say I was his friend, but we were very friendly. I mean, we all were. And this feeling that they should keep their cards close to their chests, well, it

became even more pressing once they started talking to their new star informant. Because when Sam Thomas started talking, Dale and the team realized this investigation might be pretty vast. What's amazing is that he's got a bookkeeper's mind, Sam did. And we started writing things down. And we realized on that first day after eight or nine hours that we have barely scratched the surface.

So they kept meeting different hotels, different West Texas cities. It was days upon days upon days of information and he laid out the road map on Robert Chambers. Sam seemed to remember everything. I'll just kind of give you an example okay. Back in I think it was May of 1984 so and so drove a ton of weed up from Cundallaria. We met him at Highway Marker so and so outside of Marfa and me and Robert or me and so and so got in the car and we drove it to Houston and we stayed at this hotel before somebody showed up and took it from us. And I remember they drove this kind of car. And man, he was, he was spot on, 99% of the time.

Sam told them about how Robert got drugs into the country too. They started out telling us about smuggling cocaine up to farm-to-market road 505. You know, Robert told them, meet me at the airport. The airport was FM 505. Straight road. The airport. As in, they landed small aircraft full of cocaine on public highway 505. They moved five or six plane loads of cocaine one night on FM 505.

And with all this information, they worked outwards. Started to find other snitches. One night, Kelly got word that someone they'd been tracking had been arrested with a truckload of marijuana. The police had him, but he was over 700 miles away in the city of Monroe, Louisiana. So Dale and Kelly got a late night ride. We employed the US Customs Aviation Branch and they sent a couple of pilots to Alpine in one of their king heirs, and they picked me and Dale up,

and they flew us directly to Monroe to meet with the state police. We get there, and there's this guy Robert White. I think him and his brother or brother-in-law, it was with him. And I said, well, this is your lucky night. I think I can make a heck of a deal with you if you're willing to talk.

Robert White, he ran drugs for Robert Chambers. And he looks at me and he says, okay, what kind of a deal can you make? Well, first of all, you gotta give me the information, then we'll make a deal. Local Louisiana law enforcement initially weren't too happy about losing white. A suspect they had caught red-handed. But Dale and Kelly smoothed it all out. Louisiana State Police are willing to work with us.

Some marijuana hauled from Marfa to Louisiana was going to the East Coast. Chevy Suburban Foll. It was a big deal for the Louisiana State Police. The marijuana wasn't important to us, but the individuals were. So we worked out a deal with the Louisiana State Police, and we had it reported as an abandoned vehicle being found, broken down and found on the roadway.

They made sure that got into the morning's paper. As a former newspaper reporter, I'm offended that you had manipulated the press in that way. Let's just say that we probably didn't manipulate the press as they were a willing co-conspirator. As part of the deal white struck that night, he headed back to Robert Chambers, wearing a wire. And in the scratchy recordings that came back were some crucial details. It was enough to know that they were setting up something. And things were starting to move again.

As in, Robert Chambers was beginning to move drugs again. This meant two things. First, this historical conspiracy case Dale and Kelly were working on. It might not be so historical. Second, Sam Thomas was going to be getting some serious face time with his boss. The guy he'd just been snitching on in such painstaking detail. Sam did like the thrill. You know he wasn't a button down nine to five guy. He was a guy he liked to go out. He liked to kind of a risk taker. He kind of liked

that. And I think even when he was working with us there was a pretty high element of risk involved. You know, either you're gonna get caught because you're a bad guy or somebody's coming after you because now you're helping the good guys. It was on. Then all of a sudden Sam disappeared. No one saw him in town or at the wild horse. Dale and Kelly drove by his house. His truck was still there, but Sam was not. It's like, oh shit. Something bad's happened. Kelly and I were kind of at what's end.

The worst we could think of was that Robert had figured things out and figured that Sam was snitching on him. Man took him out, made him disappear. I thought he had been grabbed up and was going to be taken to Mexico and killed probably, initially, because people don't just disappear like that. And we kept talking back and forth and we constantly, the two of us, came to the same conclusion, something's going on. Something looks like what happened before when they got ready, when they were moving dope, two or three years previously. Everything seemed to look the same. Everything seemed to look the same. He's gone. He's not at his house.

Where has he gone to? The answer was coming very soon. He looks at me right in the face. And I thought, bad shit, that's it. We're dead. He's going to come back and he's going to shoot're dead. He's gonna come back and he's gonna shoot us both. But he had this, for lack of a better word, he had a very wild look in his eye. That's next time on Borderlands. Borderlands was reported and hosted by me, Rob Domingo,

and written by me, Eric Benson and David Waters. Eric Benson is our supervising producer. David Waters is our executive producer. It came side the executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriannis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. Our field producers are Ryan Katz, Travis Pouvenek, and Jesse Basham. Our associate producers are Leo Schick and Lydia Smith, fact checking by Alex Yablon. Special thanks to Rajeev Gola and Ashley Ann Krikbaum. Scoring and sound designed by Ian Chambers and Rod Sherwood is our engineer.

Original music by Julian Lynch. or follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.