Presenting Gone South Season 4
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Hi everyone. Gone South, the award-winning true crime documentary podcast series, is back. Now with new episodes weekly, tune in every week as writer and host Jed Lipinski shares a different story about one of the most interesting crimes that took place below the Mason-Dixon line, usually told by the person who committed the crime, the person who solved it, or both. Gone South not only sheds fascinating insights into the criminal mind, but also into human nature. Enjoy this preview.

In the 1990s, the most popular way to manufacture methamphetamine was the pseudoephedrine reduction method. Basically, this involved getting your hands on a lot of over-the-counter cold medicine like Sudafed, crushing up the pills, and mixing the powder with a solvent to isolate the Sudafedrine inside. You then reduced it with chemicals like iodine or red phosphorus. In just a few hours, you had methamphetamine. But before Sudafedrine came into fashion, meth cooks were limited to what's known as the P2P method.

P2P stands for phenyl 2-propanone. It was the main precursor chemical used to manufacture meth. Meth cooks, whether they were making it in a lab or a bathtub, mixed P2P with other precursor chemicals to make the drug. As meth gained popularity in the late 70s, though, phenyl 2-propanone was classified as a controlled substance, and the common precursors, like ether, were tightly restricted. Chemical companies started reporting suspicious orders to the DEA.

So, in 1983, when a chemical manufacturer in New Jersey learned that an individual in Atlanta with no apparent connection to a laboratory or institution had just placed an order for 15 drums of ether, they immediately contacted the DEA. That's how Steve Peterson learned about it. That's a lot of freaking ether. You've got to be making huge quantities to buy ether in that quantity. You know what I mean?

Not long after Steve joined the storefront, his team spoke with the ether manufacturer in New Jersey. They learned that Darrell was due to pick up all 15 drums from an Atlanta distributor in a few weeks time. So DEA got permission to drop a tracking device, or what Steve calls a beeper, into one of the drums before Darrell picked them up. I call it a beeper because this is before we had GPS. So this thing just emitted a signal, a beep,

And you had to be line of sight in order to receive the beep. And you looked at it on a little screen and it kind of looked like Pac-Man. You know, you followed the little dots. And if we were traveling, you would follow the little dots. OK, well, you must be turning left because the dots are turning left. Looking back now, it's almost as if we were in the Fred Flintstone days, judging from today's technology. But back then, this is all cutting edge stuff.

On the day Daryl arrived at the distributor, Steve's partner Terry was inside the warehouse, posing as an employee. Steve and other agents were parked outside in unmarked vehicles. A small, single-engine Cessna, owned by the DEA, circled high above, monitoring Daryl's movements. Steve watched Daryl pull up in a cargo van and load all 15 drums. Even at a distance, he could tell Daryl was nervous. He appeared very paranoid because he was constantly looking around.

He just looked like an average guy, just some schmo. You know, he wasn't intimidating. He wasn't threatening looking. When Darrell pulled away, Steve and the other agents followed. And we follow him all around the city of Atlanta. He's driving all this different way. I assume he's looking to see if he's picked up surveillance or if anybody's following him. He's making somewhat of a circuitous route. And he ends up at a mini warehouse, a mini storage facility. And he rented maybe a 20 by 30 space apartment.

And he put all 15, 55 gallon drums in that space, closed the door, put a lock on it, and he drove away. Steve and his team followed Darrell to a big house on a sprawling 10-acre lot in Roswell, an affluent suburb of Atlanta with manicured lawns and pristine homes. Sitting in the driveway were a Rolls Royce, a Mercedes, a Porsche, and a Cadillac. He had Harley Davidson motorcycles. He had boats. I mean, he had all kinds of toys, all kinds of toys.

Steve hadn't been with DEA for long, but he knew enough to know that most meth cooks didn't live this way. They usually lived in rundown homes in remote or rural areas, where the smell produced by the chemicals was less noticeable. And Daryl Smith didn't fit the profile of your typical meth cook.

And is it fair to ask like what a more typical meth manufacturer would have looked like at that time? Like it's not a medical student. No. So normally your typical manufacturer is like this broken down, skinny old, no tooth idiot who doesn't really understand chemistry, but understands if you mix A and B, you're going to get C.

They don't really understand the chemical breakdowns. They don't really understand the chemistry behind it. They just, it's like me cooking. I don't know how to make spaghetti sauce, but I know if I put tomatoes in a pot and smush them and I add a few more other things, I can get something I can live with. It's not going to taste like Olive Garden, but at least it's something. You know what I mean?

Exactly. But when we learned about his background, and he's got a medical degree, he's a graduate from medical school, and he's making meth. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is, who is he working for? Back at the office, Steve filed a court order to look at Daryl's tax returns. He wanted to see how Daryl claimed to be making money. So we were able to see that he was claiming a large amount of income as a professional gambler. He played poker. I know he went to London a lot. He went and gambled in England. He gambled in Vegas a lot.

So Steve and some agents in Las Vegas started reaching out to casinos. They learned that Daryl was well known on the local gambling circuit. The casinos keep impeccable records as to who are the winners and losers. So they know. So we were learning that Daryl was, he was a gambler, big gambler, but he wasn't a big winner. Occasionally he'd win a couple hundred thousand, but more often than not, he would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. And the casinos loved him because he was putting a lot of money in them.

Daryl wasn't affording his lifestyle through gambling. So Steve ran a search to see if Daryl or his wife owned or operated any businesses that would account for the home, the cars, and the boats. We found out that between he and his wife, they ran and owned a nail salon just a few miles from his house up in Roswell.

So she had a nail salon that she ran. So when we didn't have things going on at the store, I would oftentimes just go pocket the nail salon in the parking lot. And I would just sit on the nail salon and watch to see how many people would come and go. And by watching the nail salon and realizing how many customers showed up during the day, you would go, man, this guy's only had like 10 customers a week. This doesn't justify depositing $50,000 in cash from the nail salon. That doesn't make sense.

By this point, it seemed obvious to Steve and Terry that Darrell was involved in the drug trade. But the only evidence they had was that industrial-sized order of ether. They hadn't seen him manufacture methamphetamine. They also didn't know where the lab site was, or if one even existed. One afternoon, Steve was staking out the nail salon when he saw Darrell pull up. He was driving the same cargo van he'd used to pick up the barrels of ether months earlier.

So we have not seen this van. This van has been missing. It's not been at his house. We've never seen it at his house. We didn't know where he kept it. But the van shows up. And so I was like, holy crap, the van's here. And I'm by myself sitting in the parking lot. When Daryl and his wife left to grab lunch, Steve crawled under the van with a beeper.

I think I had just stuck the beeper on the underside of the van when I look over and here's these two legs standing next to me at the van. And then the van door opens and it's Darryl getting in. So now I'm like frozen under the van, trying not to move, hoping he's not going to, you know, look underneath the van.

But he gets in the van, starts it up. I'm underneath there and I'm thinking, holy crap, what am I going to do now? He puts it in reverse and he backs out of pocket spot. And as he does this, I just hang on to the drive shaft and I kind of pull myself up, suspend myself under the van and he kind of drags me backwards. And then when he puts it in drive to go forward, I just let go and kind of suck it up a little bit. And he drives right over me. As soon as he drove off, I jumped up, got my car and we started following him.

This time, Steve followed Daryl to a different house, one he'd never seen before. This one was small in a rural area, tucked away in a cul-de-sac. To the untrained eye, this house was totally normal and an unlikely place for a meth lab. But by now, Terry had learned that when it came to Daryl Smith, appearances could be deceiving. For full episodes, follow Gone South, an Odyssey original podcast available now on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.