A highlight from 117: Part 2: Charles Lutz Takes on Unpopular Causes from Vietnam to DEA to TSA
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Did you ever get any chatter that he was still alive, you know, anywhere? Well we, we, we looked for him. I had information he was actually a fled to Irania Perthet, which is a town on the Cambodian border in Thailand. And so I actually wanted investigative assistance and I went up there and spent a couple of days at a picture of Sukhri and checked out all the bars and massage parlors and whatever, see if we could find him. And, and we never did. But the other case I was going to mention, I think you might find interesting, is while I was doing this undercover thing with Sukhri, the agent who was handling the Herman Jackson, Ike Atkinson case in Bangkok, which is a group of, of retired military NCA, NCOs that were, had been smuggling heroin back to the States. That agent was transferred back to the States. And then in those days, every case had to have an agent assigned to it, if only to write status reports. So my boss, Paul Brown, dumped this Atkinson case on me and I thought, oh man, what, I got enough to do. But it actually turned out to be a blessing because I, I, I guess after a few days, got a call from San Francisco from an agent, Lionel Stewart, and there had been a couple of, of guys in, arrested in Japan, military, US Army guys, and they, one of them flipped and identified his source of supply as the bartender at a bar owned in Bangkok by this Herman Jackson. So I thought, wow, you know, maybe, maybe we can make something in this case after all. Long story short, Lionel came over and we made, he actually made an undercover purchase of heroin from the source of supply. We, we got him to San Francisco where he was arrested and he ended up, I mean, it's a long story, but we ended up being able to, with some of the evidence we got through that case, we were able to prosecute Atkinson in North Carolina. You gotta, you gotta understand, Morgan, this guy's talking about Lionel Stewart. So when I get to Miami and Charles here is the ASAC, we had two associate SACs and one of them was Lionel Stewart. This guy was a shuckin' and jivin' character. I mean, he was hilarious, black gentleman, would not cut anybody's slack. He, you know, he called a spade a spade and he did it to your face, he did it behind your back, but he was hilarious. I mean, he would just entertain. You could see how the guy could work undercover. I mean, he could sell ice to an Eskimo, you know, that kind of attitude. Yeah. Well, in my book, I call him the professor of undercover science. There you go. That's a good title.