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Don't miss out on early access to upcoming episodes, plus exclusive bonus episodes from this podcast and others. Avoid the wait by becoming a Texas Monthly subscriber at TexasMonthly.com/audio. Texas Monthly. By his own account, Gilad Piled was a man who handled problems. He moved to the U.S. from Israel in 1999.
Back in his homeland, Gil had served three years as a tank commander in the army. He trained alongside the special forces, though once he was in the U.S., he liked to tell people he'd been in the Israeli special forces. A little misleading, but he tended to get more jobs that way. In the States, he worked in private security, boasting that he'd negotiated hostage releases and extortion cases. His clients, he said, included a Russian billionaire and the Mexican government.
He also worked as a bodyguard in Los Angeles, including a multi-year stint with Charlie Sheen. Duh. Winning. In 2014, Gil moved his family and his security business from LA to Austin. Soon afterwards, he landed a job providing security at one of Austin's biggest car dealerships, Charles Maughan Toyota. Gil was just supposed to prevent run-of-the-mill vandalism. It didn't require a ton of expertise.
But with the resume he'd built, Gil had no problem selling himself as more than your average rent-a-cop. I mean, people who looked at him must have thought, "Here's a guy who'd spent time in the Israeli Special Forces. He was built like a bodybuilder, with a neck as wide as his shaved head, and protected a Hollywood celebrity who said he had tiger's blood running through his veins." So when Eric Mond had a problem, he knew just the guy to go to for help.
Turns out, there was also a lot he didn't know about Gil Pallet. I'm Katie Vine, and this is The Problem with Eric, an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Anna Wuerl. This is Episode 3, The Fixer. The private security industry in the United States is lucrative, and it's booming. By some estimates, it was worth about $48 billion in 2023, and has grown by $8 billion in the past decade.
And private security covers a wide range of jobs. Some security professionals investigate internal corporate theft or industrial espionage, like if an employee is preparing to reveal, say, the secret recipe for Dr. Pepper. Some are security guards who stand by a door all day, checking badges. Some are private eyes who investigate marital affairs, snapping pictures of the guilty parties leaving a hotel together.
And some are bodyguards for the rich and famous. In the early 2010s, Gil Pallad was one of those bodyguards for none other than Charlie Sheen. It was a tumultuous time for Charlie and for the people who worked for him. There's a drunken, cursing Charlie Sheen getting thrown out of a bar in a headlock, or as he calls it, Saturday. We reached out to Charlie Sheen to talk about Gil.
His team politely declined, but Charlie's former personal assistant, Steve Hahn, who worked closely with Gil, was open to talking.
Steve wasn't Gil's biggest fan. Steve was a paparazzo before he became Charlie Sheen's personal photographer, and eventually his assistant.
He thinks Charlie just liked having him around. In 2011, Charlie was in the news a lot, and Steve still remembers the night they realized they needed more security. Just one day, one night, we were hanging out in the back, backyard, and this guy walks up. Nobody really knows who he is, and turns out that he was just a random fan that drove from Kansas or something to...
The very next day, Gil was hired. Right away, though, it was hard for Steve to take him seriously. He was bald.
Like he bicked his head and he had gigantic muscles. And, you know, he would wear sunglasses and he would basically look like the Secret Service on casual Friday. But Gill did repel unwanted guests, and eventually he hired a handful of other guards to work under him.
Steve just thought his methods were a little excessive. They'd speak into their shirts like Secret Service operatives. They'd speak Hebrew in case anyone was tapping their signals.
I mean, it was smart, it was good, but was it necessary? I don't think anyone's, you know, he's dropping on them to figure out what the next move for Charlie Sheen would be. Bill played the role of bodyguard protecting his client very seriously, but it's like, who is he protecting him from? Like, you know, a soccer mom that just wants a photo? It just seemed like...
having SEAL Team 6 doing the job that the Girl Scouts could have done.
Charlie was more pliable at that time. It was probably easier for Gil to get what he wants during that time. Because it was just a really vulnerable time for Charlie, you mean?
Yeah. Gil worked for Charlie Sheen for three years, until 2014. Then, according to court testimony, Charlie took some advice from his fiancée, who didn't like Gil, and let him go. Looking for a fresh start, Gil and his family moved to Austin, where a few relatives lived.
He and his wife, Jaina, raised their two young sons in a suburb called Lakeway. Jaina opened a hair salon, and Gil went looking for new opportunities. I don't remember the exact year, but it must have been around 2016 or 17. This is a law enforcement officer who got to know Gil in Lakeway. We'll call him John.
He asked us not to use his real name because he doesn't want to be associated with Gil anymore. I was at a restaurant meeting a friend for dinner and saw one of our city maintenance guys there. Anyway, chatting it up with him and he says he was there for some big event with all his friends from California. And, you know, one of those friends was Gil.
You know, I talked to him a little bit. You know, he was in the military in Israel. And, you know, I said, oh, yeah, I was, you know, Army. And we hit it off. And I think it was a good year or maybe two after that, we ran into each other at a daycare where I was dropping my boys off. And he was dropping one of his off.
And my understanding was he still had a security company out in California. But that, you know, he was looking to try to replicate the business he had in California here. And he said he was a bodyguard, you know, for some celebrities. And, you know, my whole thing was like, well, it's going to be a little tough. You know, there's not a whole lot of celebrity protection jobs in Austin as compared to like Hollywood. But who knows?
John didn't see much potential for Gill's security firm in the area at first. That changed, though, in November 2017. All right, welcome back. We're continuing to follow breaking news out of Texas. Multiple people have been shot at a church in Sutherland Springs, located east of San Antonio. That's when a gunman killed 26 people in a church in Sutherland Springs. It was the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history. Then Sutherland Springs happened.
And he reached out to me and he was like, you know, man, with your experience, you know, you could run the investigation side of it. Because I was teaching active shooting at the time, active shooter preparedness and all that. So everything kind of lined up and I started entertaining the idea of joining forces with him. I had no hesitation. My contacts with him were always professional. He's a likable guy.
To John, Gil seemed like a disciplined and accomplished family man. You know, observed his family dynamic and saw him as a father in action. So there was nothing to give any red flags or anything like that.
I assume that he had a really good business, head on shoulders. His wife and him are very successful. I know she has her own salon, and he had his own company out in California. And they really did have a nice lifestyle, and that was very attractive. I've got almost 30 years in a cop, and I don't know that I'll ever have a house as big as them. Not that I want it, but the financial freedom part of it was pretty attractive.
It was attractive enough that, eventually, John agreed to join forces with Gill and help him expand his business in Texas. He sent me pictures to some office he leased out and started, you know, having walls painted and logos. And I was like, man, this is really going to happen. Except John started to have mixed feelings about their business model.
He did feel that shooter training was valuable, but at the same time, he didn't want to rush to make money off of communities that had just been victims of tragedy. There was something really ambulance-chasing about that, that kind of feeling, you know, about that type of business for me. He was the guy that would say, it doesn't matter, you know, how you feel about it. We can, there's money-making opportunity out of this. But my whole thing was like, I don't want to be running these churches or these schools after a shooting. It's just very sleazy.
The job also required more availability on short notice than John was able to give. And so, before they even really got started, he told Gil he was going to have to part ways. And we just, you know, he was cool about it. He was like, yeah, no problem. Gil wasn't finding a ton of security work in Austin. But luckily, around that time, he caught a break. Charles Montoyota had experienced a rash of break-ins. And the management hired Gil to help put a stop to them.
Gil went to work, providing physical security and making sure executives at the dealership knew all about his skills and experience. He had no choice but to wow them. He needed the money. Though John had been impressed with Gil's house and his lifestyle, things weren't all they appeared to be. Gil's security business was, predictably, doing worse in Texas. And by March 2020, his financial situation was dire. He had not one, but two businesses to worry about.
His own business account was overdrawn, and his wife was concerned about how COVID would affect her salon. He was facing home foreclosure, and according to court testimony, he had just $11 in his bank account. But then, an opportunity just fell into his lap. Eric Mond, a partner at a huge car dealership, needed his help, and Gil was not in a position to say no.
So Gil met Eric at the dealership, and they discussed what to do about Eric's text. Here's federal prosecutor Rob McGuire. And the first thing for these men to have to figure out is who was extorting them, because the text didn't say who it was. Eric Maughan didn't know Layla Love's real name. So that was the first thing they kind of had to figure out.
Right away, Gill decided they needed to enlist someone else. Gilad Pallad, in turn, then hired another security consultant named Chad Brockway. Essentially works with and for a company that gathers information about individuals that's accessible from public sources on the internet, social media, those kinds of things.
Yeah, so I knew Gil from my brother. This is Chad Brockway. I had met him a couple times just through, you know, visiting my brother in Austin, Texas. You know, Gil would come over to the house. We'd go to coffee. Gil would show up. Always seemed like a nice guy. You know, no concerns or issues, anything like that.
Chad had served in the Marine Corps and worked with the Department of Defense. When Gil reached out, Chad was working at a private security company whose focus was protecting their clients with, as their website says, artificial intelligence, machine learning, military-grade analytics, and cyber intelligence techniques. Their clients are high-profile names we'd all recognize. Pop stars, professional athletes, actors, people who get harassed, stalked,
and sometimes blackmailed. I remember that night Gil called me at home on my cell phone and started explaining a client requirement that he had, which again was normal for the company he ran and the services he provided. But essentially at the time he had said that he had been retained by a family who believed that their daughter was possibly a victim of human trafficking.
Just to be clear, Chad's saying that when Gil asked him to figure out Layla Love's real name, he didn't say it was related to an extortion threat. He said it was because she was missing.
In that same conversation, he was like, all right, just so you know, the family does not have a lot of money. What can you do for me? I'm pricing just to we want to help them. And our CEO is always if we can help someone, we're going to help them. Right. And so I told him, no problem. We'll take care of it. You know, and I think we we discounted those services to about a quarter of the normal price.
Gil was asking for a discount on this work so he could maximize his own profits with Eric. Of course, Chad didn't know this, and he didn't question Gil. He didn't have any reason to. So he got started. All we were provided at the time was a camera picture of a printed-out escort page. And along with that, he also sent me a phone number and said, "We think this phone number is involved."
And can you help us see if there's anything regarding her and this phone number? So yeah, we absolutely said we would. I got a hold of one of my intelligence analysts and we started working on it that night.
And we did some language pattern analysis and we were able to identify other escort pages that she was also utilizing. And then within that, someone had referenced her by her real name in the comments. In going through her social media, we identified her, you know, what we would normally refer to as estranged boyfriend, on again, off again, boyfriend.
And, you know, in her social media, she made several references to domestic abuse, the police arresting him, her charging him with domestic abuse, that he had killed her dog, thrown it in traffic in front of a car or stuff like that. So when we started putting together this intelligence report, the very first thing we said was, if she is missing, you need to make the police aware of this guy immediately.
Because from everything we're able to identify, this would be my first start in trying to find this supposed missing female. In missing persons cases, because the clients are usually distressed and anxious, Chad typically talks with them directly.
But he noticed something unusual about the way Gil was conducting business. I mean, Gil wanted to control the flow of everything, right? Normally, I would almost always speak directly with the clients, at least a couple times, right? To have that initial connection, to explain what we're going to do and how we're going to do it, make sure they understand, see if they have any questions, right?
In this particular case, you know, Gil wanted to handle all the conversations, all the connections. Everything would go from me to Gil to his end client, from his end client to Gil and back to me. Maybe Gil wanted to control the narrative because he needed to keep up the lie that Holly was missing. Or maybe it was because he desperately needed to impress Eric to be seen as the ultimate fixer.
Either way, in Eric, Gil must have seen a compromised rich man who could offer unlimited work. And work is exactly what Gil needed. So he had to look indispensable from here on out. Gil relayed Chad's information about Holly and Bill back to Eric and moved on to the next phase of the project, making sure the texting stopped as soon as possible.
Perhaps, Gill suggested, someone could approach Bill and Holly in Nashville and negotiate with them. Have a conversation. The encounter would be totally above board. Nothing violent, nothing illegal. It would mostly require more surveillance. This would, of course, cost more money. Gill figured $60,000 for the operation, plus the $15,000 he was already getting paid. Chump change for Eric, who told him to go ahead.
Ground surveillance was not Gil Pallad's area of expertise, so he decided he'd need to put together a team. He wanted the best money can buy, as he later said, a group he didn't have to second-guess or micromanage, an A-team. Gil turned to a friend in Austin named Brian Brockway,
Brian was Chad's brother. They both worked in private security, but since they were busy, they didn't always talk about what they were working on. It was weeks before Chad would learn that this was never a missing persons case. Brian was a slim guy in his mid-forties, fit like a rock climber or a runner, with a bearded face anchored by alert, perfectly almond-shaped eyes.
He served in the Marines for nine years, including four years conducting force reconnaissance, special ops intelligence gathering work behind enemy lines that sounds straight out of Mission Impossible. Key words on his LinkedIn include parachute, submarine, and rappel. His voicemail greeting said he couldn't answer because, quote, I'm currently taking over the world right now.
Ryan's call sign, which is kind of like a military nickname, was Ink because he was a tattoo artist. He's probably tattooed hundreds and hundreds of special forces, you know, GRS guys all over the world. So that's how he got his call sign.
Here's a video of Brian talking about it on his LinkedIn. I recall this one time tattooing one of our boys named Zeb is still just at the end of the war. I started putting in a few lines, got some shading going. All of a sudden we started taking an indirect fire, IDF. Siren goes off and we look at each other like, yep, tattoo's canceled for now, we'll continue later.
As Brian got older, he started to take on a more managerial role in his private security jobs. I would say that the standard process of aging in general, you know, he started becoming a little bit more calm, a little bit slower, a little bit more, you know, I don't want to be out in the field doing the cool guy stuff anymore. I want to be more of the coordinator and, you know, that type of function. And Brian was a good coordinator because he knew everybody.
He could reach out to his network and find guys who were home from deployment and hire them for contract security jobs. Which is why he was the perfect man to stay in Texas and remotely manage the surveillance in Nashville. Brian's first job was to hire two guys to be on the ground. Each one would get a few thousand bucks for a job expected to take around three days. All they had to do was keep tabs on Bill and Holly.
His first hire was Adam Richard Carey, aka Arco. Adam Carey was 29 years old, 6'2" and lanky, with a dirty blonde buzz cut and hollowed out cheeks. He spent eight years in the Marines, including time as a Special Forces sniper. When Brian contacted him, he was working as a firearms instructor and dealer in North Carolina. Brian looked out for Adam.
In Adam, he saw a kid who was eager for action, looking for a mentor. Next, Brian hired a retired Army Ranger, who we'll call Red. That's not what anyone calls him, but the government has asked us not to identify him, for his protection. In 2018, Red was working for the government as a contract security officer in what the Army calls "austere environments," places with little access to clean water and electricity.
Red was 37, bearded and built like an ox, with a ruddy complexion. Red was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan six times, where he'd been, in his words, "blown up by IEDs a few times" and somehow walked away. Brian reached out to Red through a mutual friend. And this was Gill's A-Team. Brian Brockway, Adam Carey, and Red. Their mission: figure out who was blackmailing Eric and get them to stop.
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So the way the surveillance members described the job, it was to go to Nashville to conduct surveillance on this woman, Holly. They had her information and they knew she had a boyfriend and to conduct surveillance on the two of them, find out if they were living together, if they seemed to be in on this together or whether it was the boyfriend. That was really the initial job description.
On March 7th, with Brian overseeing the operation from Texas, Adam Carey hopped in his truck, Red boarded a flight, and the two met in Nashville. The first order of business was to open a channel with a blackmailer. Here's federal prosecutor Rob McGuire. The men on the ground...
created a what's called a pinger account. They're very easy to create. You can go online and create a voiceover internet protocol account with very little information. You don't even have to give accurate information. You can make up a first and last name, make up an email, you give them some form of payment, and you've got a anonymous phone number
for a month that you can use to call and to text individuals. Adam set up one of these Pinger accounts and anonymously texted the blackmailer, but didn't get a response. Then, through a fake email, he reached out to Holly through her online escort site, Slicksa. He pretended to be a potential client, but all he got was an automatic prompt to make a reservation. Next, Adam and Red drove to Holly's apartment complex in West Nashville.
The property was gated, but somehow they got through. They continued past a pond, up a hill, winding around three-story red brick buildings. Holly's one-bedroom unit was towards the back of the property. Once they reached it, Red concealed a camera in the rear window of his rental car. Meanwhile, Adam walked just beyond the parking lot, into the woods behind Holly's unit, to keep a lookout from a different angle.
And over the next couple of days, they learned that Bill was a frequent visitor, if not a live-in boyfriend. They followed Bill around, tracking his routines, establishing something they called POL, military speak for pattern of life. They trailed Holly's white Acura, which Bill would often drive, and they noticed that he kept late hours, sometimes coming home at 2 in the morning.
Two days in, they knew a lot about Bill and Holly, but hadn't made much progress in terms of talking to them. Back in Austin, Gil was anxious for an update, any update, that proved to Eric the team he hired was doing their job.
So on March 9th, there was frustration at this point because they had not yet been able to make any real contact with Holly. In fact, at that point, they hadn't even seen Holly come out of the apartment. They had seen William Lanway come and go a few times, but no contact had been made. And they felt that the client and Brian Brockway were getting frustrated at the lack of progress.
So Red drafted a situation report, what he called the Tennessee Sit Rep to present to Gill. It relayed what he and Adam had suspected. It would be, quote, professional suicide for Holly to blackmail one of her own clients. So it had to be someone else, probably Bill. The report then laid out options for moving forward. One option was...
They described it as a soft bump to Holly Williams, which was described as going up to her at perhaps a grocery store and pretending to sort of run into her and asking her if she was okay and whether she knew anything about this extortion. There was still no plan for violence at this point.
But Adam had his own ideas about moving forward, though they didn't make it into the report. One time he proposed they force a conversation with Bill by surprising him in Holly's car and zip-tying him to the steering wheel. Adam even went to Walmart and bought cable ties and some burlap. And then another time, maybe he was getting bored, or maybe it had been on his mind from the start,
Adam suggested another option. Adam Carey, during one of their surveillance times, had told him he would take care of the problem, take care of William Lanway for $50,000 to $60,000. It caught Red a little off guard. The surveillance member said he didn't really know if he was joking. He didn't know Adam Carey prior to this surveillance that they conducted, so he didn't know how to take that, but it was concerning.
Red brushed it off and moved on with the job. But he thought Adam was a bit of a loose cannon, cavalier and unprofessional. And soon, he wasn't the only one who thought so. On March 9th, the team's concern that they hadn't made any progress prompted Brian to add a new member to the team, Tony Rapinski, aka Meat. Meat was a nickname Rapinski didn't like, but it did fit.
He'd worked as a stuntman. The Marvel movie Logan, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, John Wick 3. And it checks out. The guy looked like he could flex and send shreds of his shirt all over the room. He was a 13-year veteran from SEAL Team 6, the elite unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden. Exactly the kind of guy Adam Carey would want to impress.
The one thing Meat was concerned with when he signed on to the job? Stupidity. So you can imagine his reaction when he first met Adam.
Meade was sitting in his car outside Holly's apartment conducting surveillance when Adam Carey jumped into his back seat unannounced and tossed a pistol in his lap. Rapinski was really put off by this and thought it was really unprofessional and was not going to be involved in anything involving a firearm. So he just handed it back to him and told the other people in the surveillance job that he really didn't want to work with Adam Carey after that.
More specifically, Meade said, what the fuck, and threw the gun back at Adam.
Meade sized Adam up pretty fast. This was a guy with something to prove. He told Red to keep Adam away from him. Still, they had a job to do together. And since Adam's messages to the blackmailer were going nowhere, they had to amp up their game. They went with the soft-bump approach to Holly that Red initially suggested in the sit-rep. There were at least two times on March 10th that the team approached Holly's door. They
clearly don't seem to want to be on the camera, but Adam carries the one that takes the step to cover the camera with what appears to be a piece of tape. And they knock on the door. You can hear them trying to make contact with Holly, but it's, they're unsuccessful. And at the time you can hear in the background there's a person, a neighbor who walks by them or comes down the stairs and
And one of the people you can hear making up a story to the neighbor saying, "We're looking for a dog. Have you seen a dog?" So it appears that they want to shield their identities. Even though this is not a murder for hire at this point, they're still being careful. Then, about 40 minutes later, Meat went by himself. This is from Holly's surveillance camera. Hey, Holly. Holly, if you're in there, we've got a couple questions we need to ask you. And just so you know, we just want to talk to you alone, right?
Holly didn't just have outdoor surveillance cameras. She had indoor cameras, too. And they showed that she was there, alone. And you could see that when these men were knocking on her door, she was actually at home and she was tiptoeing around the apartment like she didn't want them to know that she was there. There was one video where she puts a doorstop or a door bar under her door.
Big strange dudes showing up unannounced, calling her name. She was not answering that door. So Adam went back to ping her. He texted her, "Holly, really important I speak to you." This time, Holly answered, but it seems like she thought it was Bill. She wrote, "You need to return my vehicle back to me." Turns out, Holly and Bill had just gotten in a big fight, and a neighbor called the police. Bill had left in her car.
When Adam explained that he wasn't Bill and asked how she was doing, Holly replied as if he were doing a welfare check on her. "The police were already called to my apartment," she wrote. "Thanks for your help and concerns. Everything has been taken care of." Eventually, Red left to get gas for his rental car at Kroger. They weren't getting any face time anyway. And while he was there, what did he see? Holly's white Acura in the parking lot. Red contacted Adam and Mead, who rushed to join him.
They waited for Bill to walk out of the store. And when he did, the team approached. By now, Bill had to have connected the dots. These guys must have been the same people texting him. But he didn't appear intimidated. He just slammed the car door, looked red in the eye, and drove away, maybe not realizing that Adam had just flattened two of his tires. He had...
Basically avoided them and even shot them the bird when he left to kind of say he had no interest in talking to them. Later, Bill filled the tires back up and returned the car to Holly's. He didn't tell her anything had happened. But when Holly drove the car the next morning for a lash appointment, the tires were flat again.
She assumed Bill had let the air out. He actually had flattened her tires before. It was part of a pattern. They'd fight, then he'd break something of hers just so she'd come back to him, asking him to fix it. She texted Bill, just more information to hand over to the police to help build my case against you.
Bill assured her it wasn't his fault. He said, no, no, no, baby, that wasn't me. We can go to Kroger and pull up the video footage. But Holly didn't believe him. She responded, quote, you seriously think I'm going to believe some random person had the desire to come up to a random car for no good reason and let out the air? Bill had to know how fake his story sounded. He told her, on my life, it wasn't me.
I don't know who the guy was, but looked like one of the guys that was knocking on your door. But at this point, the only threat Holly saw was Bill. She told him, "I almost got into a bad car accident. You could have killed me." To the guys on the ground, Bill's middle finger in the Kroger parking lot was a pretty obvious sign he didn't want to talk.
So that was it. The sole face-to-face interaction, and it went nowhere. They had no success, basically. And they were never any closer to stopping this extortion threat than they were when they had landed in Nashville. By the morning of March 11th, four days after the job began, the team's time had run out. Red was off to the airport, and Meat had to leave the next day.
But Gill didn't have any progress to prove to Eric the money he was forking over was going towards something. So Brian Brockway decided to leave Austin and go to Nashville himself. He flew in, rented a car, and met up with Adam Carey. Meanwhile, Adam had been using Pinger to text Bill. Talk, he'd say. Call back. By now, it seems, the messages had finally aggravated Bill enough to respond. He texted back, assuming that Adam Carey was Eric Mondt.
He said, "Well, if this is Eric, I have great information your loved ones would love to know about your extracurricular activities." Bill set a deadline. He wanted the $25,000 by 8:00 p.m. or he'd talk. Then, maybe because he was so ticked off by all of Adam's texts, Bill tried a new tactic. William Landway calls Eric Mon's house, and that's when things really start to turn. Eric Mon picked up.
Apparently he was very freaked out by this. This was a new line that was being crossed. Eric hung up the phone. The clock was ticking as Eric waited to hear how Gil was going to handle this. Gil was waiting for some sort of resolution from Brian. The ground team kept waiting for Bill to back down. And 8 p.m. came and passed.
Bill texted Adam Carey, "You lied to me, Eric. It's 8:00 now. I will follow through with everything. Thank you." It had been a long four days, and rather than de-escalate the situation, the A-Team had somehow escalated it. Bill was now on the brink of carrying out his threats. Adam and Brian were busy coming up with new solutions, but meat was getting out of there. Just before midnight, as he was packing to leave,
He decided he needed to warn Brian about Adam's tough guy banter, like his offer to quote, "take care of this for $60,000." This whole operation, he thought, could go south. He asked Brian to meet up in his hotel room, and Brian agreed to come. But when Meat opened the door, Brian wasn't alone. Standing next to him was Adam Carey. Brian and Adam told Meat they'd been working on a new plan that would solve Eric's problem for good.
They asked if he could stay another day to help, but Meat wanted nothing to do with them. He said no. So now, Adam and Brian were on their own. Brian called Gil Pallad and suggested their new plan. For $60,000 each, a mere $120K total, Adam and Brian could take Bill out. Gilad Pallad then takes this offer back.
to the meeting that he has with Eric Mond in the driveway of Eric Mond's house. They get into Gilad Pallad's car and they're talking about all of these things. Mond is telling Pallad William Lanway has called his house. Pallad said that Mond was freaking out that they needed to do something. Pallad is telling Mond about this deadline that's now come and gone.
Everything is at a fever pitch. And that's when Gilad Pallad says, the guys on the ground have offered to take him out, talking about William Lanway. Gil didn't think Eric would consider it, and he waited for Eric's response. But there was no moment of reflection, no weighing pros and cons. The money wasn't an issue either. Really, Eric just didn't want to get another call from Bill in a few months, wanting more money.
So Eric asked Gil, "How much does something like that cost? $500,000?" "Yeah," Gil said, "something like that." The Problem with Eric is an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Anna Wuerl. Our executive producer is Megan Kreit. The show is reported and written by me, Katie Bein, and written, produced, and reported by Anna Wuerl. It was produced and engineered by Brian Standifer, who also wrote the music.
Story editing and production by Patrick Michaels. Additional production is by Aisling Ayers. Additional editing by Karen Olson. Jacqueline Colletti is our fact checker. Studio musicians were John Sanchez, Glenn Fukunaga, and Pat Manske. Artwork is by Emily Kimbrough and Victoria Milner. Our theme is Entrance Song by the Black Angels. News coverage of the Sutherland Springs shooting is from CNN. Archival tape of Charlie Sheen is from TMZ.
See y'all next week. You can listen to the next episode now by becoming a Texas Monthly subscriber. Go to texasmonthly.com slash audio to subscribe today.