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Hi, I'm Dan Jones and This Is History: A Dynasty to Die For is back for a brand new season. This time we meet Edward II, a larger than life character who starts out as the party boy prince and ends up... well, I don't want to give too much away. He's got one thing on his mind: not war, not ambition, but love. And it's a love that will get him in burning hot trouble with his barons, his family and his queen.
The king's affection for his favourite knight kicks off a wild rollercoaster reign full of love and hate, war and grief, famine and just about all the horsemen of the apocalypse. Along the way, we'll meet tiger mums, Scottish legends, murderous cousins, a herd of camels and one extremely hot iron poker. Listen to and follow This Is History A Dynasty To Die For, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Campsite Media. Hello? What is this? What do you want me to say? What is going on here? Oh, it's just a chameleon. Chameleon. Okay. You're listening to Chameleon. A production of Campsite Media. Just a heads up. This episode contains some vivid sexual imagery that you might not want kids to hear. So, as you're probably figuring out by now, this is a story about the FBI, as much as about money laundering diet clinic guy, Emile Bouhari.
For most of my career as a journalist, I found the FBI fascinating. They're at the top of the law enforcement food chain. And FBI guys see themselves this way. They're the guys who went to good universities, got accounting or law degrees. Then, below them, there's the ATF and the DEA, guys who went to unremarkable state schools and community colleges. And then on down to the local police departments, the boys in blue, the ones patrolling the street corners.
The FBI sees them as the knuckle-draggers. Okay, okay, I don't mean that. I'm just describing how the FBI sees itself. And while it's a cynical and patronizing view, it isn't altogether untrue. The FBI's view of itself, that they're the best, is partly why the FBI is mythologized in this country and has been for longer than I've been alive.
FBI agents are the good guys, the white hats, the top cops, the guys who solve the crimes and mysteries no one else can. The Lindbergh baby kidnapping? The FBI solved that by analyzing the handwriting on a ransom note, the first major case for the now-famous crime lab. Gangster John Dillinger? Federal agents gunned him down outside the Biograph Theater, a movie house in Chicago. And the FBI doesn't let anyone forget.
At the FBI Academy, the FBI has built a fake small town, a kind of Potemkin village used for training young cadets. There's a movie theater there called, yeah, Biograph Theater. You can hear how seriously FBI agents take themselves in their own training video. This is one from 1971. A pudgy man with gray hair is wearing a suit as he reads a newspaper. A freshly lit cigar hangs from his mouth. This is a businessman.
His business is organized crime. His products include gambling, narcotics, vice, loan sharking, stolen goods, labor racketeering, and goons for hire. Videos like this one are part of the FBI mythology. Clean-cut federal agents going after the unambiguously evil crime lords of our nation. Justice will be served. But the FBI isn't solely responsible for its good guy image. Hollywood deserves a lot of the credit as well.
There was actually a TV show in the 60s and 70s about the Bureau. It was titled, yeah, you guessed it. The FBI, a Quinn Martin Warner Brothers production, starring Ephraim Zimbliss Jr. The FBI aired back in the day on network TV. You may have actually seen a little bit of that TV show more recently.
in its brief portrayal in Quentin Tarantino's movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a movie about how Hollywood mythologizes itself. I know, I know. A lot of meta stuff going on there. On television and movie screens, the FBI has always been there, protecting us from the bad guys. Like, in the early 90s movie Point Break, Keanu Reeves plays a college football star turned FBI agent chasing after a ridiculous group of bad guys.
They're big wave surfers, financing their sun-bleached lifestyle by robbing banks, all while wearing the masks of ex-presidents. I can't do this. Sure you can. Who knows, you might like it. It's a killer rush. Brody, this is your fucking wake-up call, man! I am an FBI agent! I know, man. Isn't it wild? Hell, if you watch enough TV, apparently the FBI's even been protecting us from metaphysical and extraterrestrial threats.
Remember the X-Files? Yeah, that was the plot line. But once you get past the mythologies, you start to learn that the FBI isn't as unambiguously good, as clearly heroic, as we might want to believe. After all, there are good cops, and there are bad cops, and the FBI has its fair share of both. I'm Trevor Aronson. From Campside Media, this is Episode 4 of High Rollers, Season 2 of Chameleon.
Chuck Rowe is the FBI agent running the whole Operation Botox sting. He's in the background, calling in from his office or his car or watching from the sidelines. And Dennis Lau is the undercover agent who's doing the work in person. And Chuck and Dennis have a long history together. Unlike cops, FBI agents don't have partners, per se. You know, the fellow cop you go out with every shift. In the FBI, it's different. But agents do get paired up for periods of time,
and they become friends of sorts. They come to know each other, to be able to anticipate how the other will behave in an undercover situation. That's the case with Chuck and Dennis. By the time they launch Operation Botox, Chuck and Dennis have been working with each other for years, all while doing intense undercover assignments. The two FBI agents share a sense of humor as a result. This is one of the recordings from Operation Botox. Dennis, it's on.
You can hear the noise of a Las Vegas casino in the background, and Chuck fiddling with a recording device hidden beneath Dennis' clothes. Chuck then says, "It's on," meaning the recording device. And then, out of nowhere, wired up for sound and about to meet some friends of Emile Bouhari, Dennis cracks a joke for Chuck. "Action!" "Action," Dennis says, like they're rolling on a movie they're producing. It's an audio recording, so I can't see Dennis. But here's what I imagine Dennis doing.
He throws his hands to the side and then up in the air, as if he were jumping on a stage, as he says, action. He's making a joke about the performance of it all, that he's out here in a Las Vegas casino playing the main character in the FBI's own little movie. Chuck and Dennis have no idea that years later, I'll come behind them and make this podcast from their recordings. And I guess that's why I find Dennis's joke, his action comment, so amusing. Because it turns out,
They were recording for me, for you. They just didn't realize it. They thought they were directing the show. But really, they were just starring in a show that ultimately they'll lose control of in more ways than one. You've heard a lot from Dennis already from the FBI's undercover recordings. He's smooth-talking, pretty unflappable, a jokester. Dennis has an athletic build, but he's slight. He wouldn't intimidate you in a dark alley.
Chuck, though, is imposing. He grew up in Southern California and played football in high school. Chuck was a linebacker. Unlike most high school football players, though, Chuck wasn't well-liked by his peers. "I wouldn't say I was popular," Chuck once said of his high school days. After college, Chuck joined the FBI in 1996. He worked his way up to become an undercover agent. So everything that happened with Emil
It isn't the first FBI sting where Chuck and Dennis put together a criminal conspiracy that was really questionable. They've been doing this shit for years, and not even in the U.S. A lot of people think of the FBI as working only in the U.S. They think just the CIA is for the overseas stuff. But FBI agents do operate in countries around the world. Overseas, they build criminal cases that can be prosecuted in U.S. courts, or they try to disrupt global terrorist or criminal networks to further U.S. interests.
So before Chuck and Dennis heard of Emil Buari and his circle of friends, they were among these agents. They were both assigned to the FBI's Asian Organized Crime Task Force. And for that task force, they went to the Philippines. In 2010 and 2011, Dennis and Chuck were regulars in Manila. Chuck's official reason for being there? To investigate gun smuggling. In the Philippines, Chuck's cover story was that he was a gun buyer for a Mexican cartel.
Like all FBI undercover investigations, everything was secret until it ended up on the news. Here's a clip from television about this case. The jury trial of three Filipinos accused of weapons trafficking began in a federal courthouse in Los Angeles this morning. These guys?
They're the ones Chuck and Dennis investigated. But the defense team says there's a bigger fish to fry. They say the agents were actually targeting a big-time weapon dealer. They also allege that undercover agents posing as a Mexican drug cartel weapons dealer entrapped the three men accused, whom they say are just gun collectors, and coerced them to smuggle the guns. So this is our story. I'm going to start with a guy named John Luttrell, who was a federal public defender in Los Angeles at the time.
He was the lawyer who ended up accusing Chuck and Dennis, and the FBI as a whole, of entrapping the three Filipino men in a gun smuggling case. Back when I was a public defender, you know, whatever case came in the door, you just handled. We used to have everything. There could be like drug cases, fraud cases, any kind of case. This case was pretty interesting because it was an exotic case. It was overseas, involved weird weapons and guns and explosives and stuff. So it was a pretty cool case. And at that point in my career,
that's what I was looking for is really cool cases. So I actually, it was assigned to somebody else and I asked them if they would just, if they would give it to me because I wanted to see what it was about. Just like with Operation Botox, this Philippines case started with an informant. Chuck and Dennis had an informant in the Philippines named Andy who introduced them to an actual gun smuggler. That guy then sold them some Bushmaster rifles, which are AR-15 style assault rifles.
And so he sold, I think, 16 machine guns to these guys, took their government money and just disappeared. They was never heard from again. In other words, Dennis and Chuck Sting went bust because the bad guy conned them and ran away before they could take him down. This is John Luttrell again, talking about Chuck and Dennis. So now these guys are holding 16 machine guns. They have no suspect and no case.
And so they actually sort of get to their contacts in the Philippines. They say, we need another arms dealer here because otherwise our like half a dozen trips to the Philippines and the thousands of dollars we've spent on various things are going to come to nothing. So we need something to show for this. So Andy, the informant working with Chuck and Dennis, gets the task of finding another arms dealer, a bad guy that can justify continuing the investigation in the Philippines. Andy starts reaching out to people in his social network.
trying to find someone who can sell them guns. That leads to a Filipino guy, Cesar Arvi Herbaldo. I actually had a friend who had a workmate, and his workmate had a cousin, and his cousin had another friend who was actually contacted by the CI. Cesar Arvi Herbaldo goes by just Arvi. He's a nice, laid-back guy who's remarkably open to talking about embarrassing things in life.
the big mistakes he's made. By CI, Arvey means the confidential informant. This guy Andy. This cousin of a cousin's friend arranged for Arvey to meet Andy and Chuck at a strip club in Manila called Area 51. And I got in, there were drinks, and there were girls. Chuck had reserved a private room at Area 51, and he was paying several of the club's women to hang out, just with them. Now, Chuck wasn't using his real name. He was using an alias, Richard Hahn.
FBI aliases are always generic and unremarkable. That's by design. Richard came to me and started talking and all this. So he was looking for weapons. And I said, you know what? Our primary business isn't about weapons. It's actually about defense equipment, armor, and all these things. And he kept insisting that, you know, I need heavy stuff. I need heavy stuff. So I said, I'll see what I can do.
But, you know, I can guarantee you anything. Those little beeps you're hearing? Arvi forgot to turn off his notification sounds as he recorded this interview. Anyway, Chuck, or Richard, called Arvi several times after this initial meeting, asking to be put in touch with someone who could sell guns. Arvi, a bit annoyed and also a bit intrigued by this guy, contacted another guy, Sergio Sayuko, who goes by the name Yogi.
I knew he was in guns, but more like collector's items stuff. Not really the regular, you know, I want to build an army kind of gear. So these are like antiques, you know, things you want to display in your house. So I said, let's give it a shot. This guy's, you know, really bugging me anyway. So Arvi and Yogi arranged to meet Chuck. I mean, Richard, at a hotel in Manila. Yogi had a gun to sell, an enormous, unwieldy rifle.
Yogi said he wanted a ridiculous amount for the gun: $30,000. It was actually a .50 caliber hunting rifle. This was like a big-ass rhino gun. So I was saying, "Hey, you know what? If you can sell it for 1.5 million pesos, so be it." And actually, Richard acquiesced and he wanted to buy the gun. And I was like surprised that, you know, is this guy for real or is he stupid enough to buy this?
The Philippines used to be a Spanish colony. They used pesos there. Anyway, after that gun deal, Chuck got Yogi's number. For the next two years, Chuck was in and out of the Philippines, portraying himself as a high-rolling man of the world. And every time he'd arrive in Manila, he'd contact Arvi and Yogi. Richard became a friend? Again, because Arvi knew Chuck as Richard, he uses that name. He was always acting like a big brother to me.
And he was telling me, you know, every time we would drink out, there would be girls and all this. — They'd usually meet at Area 51, the strip club. It was named after the real Area 51, the classified U.S. Air Force facility in Nevada. Some people believe the U.S. government has experimented with alien technology there. But the other Area 51, the strip club in Manila? It was a neon-lit bar with tables inside and out. The dancers working for the club would hang out at the tables inside, for money.
When Chuck, shit, I mean Richard, arrived at the strip club, he had a specific way of deciding which of the women would join him and his friends in a private room. He was saying, hey, here's some drinks. Whoever can drink the fastest gets to be my girl. And I think Richard was building a reputation in strip clubs. He was a big spender. So girls would be like, hey, pick me, pick me. And you know how it happens. Arvi and Yogi said they saw Chuck and his associates drinking.
All undercover agents getting lap dances. As far as they knew, they were also having sex, as the strip club effectively functioned as a brothel. Here's what Yogi said about Chuck. Yogi said Chuck's sexual conquest stories always focused on one part of his anatomy. Well, two particular parts. He'd love to use the word balls.
This "balls obsession"? Yeah, it's funny and all. But I'm not including it here to be gratuitous. Chuck's reported obsession with his balls will actually
be relevant later in this podcast, so take note. Okay, so whenever Arvi and Yogi would meet Chuck, it'd be at a strip club, with few exceptions. Yogi maintained the relationship, and he asked around among people he knew to have guns. If Chuck was willing to pay thousands for a rifle, how much more money could he get out of them? That was Yogi's thinking at the time. He came up with a mortar, and a mortar is like a tube that basically launches an airborne bomb. And it's a military weapon.
This is John Luttrell, the Los Angeles lawyer, again. A public defender at the time, John was appointed to represent Yogi in the criminal trial. He says Yogi was giving Chuck all sorts of stuff. He came up with a mortar that was basically of World War II vintage. I mean, it's probably 50 years old. It looked like it had been through a war, and it I'm sure had. I have no idea whether it worked, but it was busted.
He came up with a rocket launcher that looked like it came, you know, it's something you'd find in Afghanistan in the 70s. There's maybe about a dozen weapons. And Chuck Rowe was looking for hundreds of like actual military grade rifles. He said, well, this is what I got. And Chuck Rowe said, OK, that'll do. Harvey and Yogi didn't know exactly where the guns were destined to go. They figured Mexico, since Chuck, as Richard, said he worked for a cartel.
Arvey had to get another friend, a guy named Arjol Revereza, to help with shipping and customs forms, something Chuck claimed they needed in order to expand the criminal conspiracy. Even though, in fact, Dennis was the one who made all the shipping arrangements. Later, Chuck called Arvey, Yogi, and Arjol. He said his bosses were so pleased with their guns that they wanted them to come to the United States to discuss future deals. The three guys felt like they had to go.
After all, Chuck was with a Mexican cartel. Could they even say no? The cartel could come after them. I think at that point they were really scared. I know that they were really scared because at that point there was a lot of talking between the Yogi, Arvi, and Argyle, who was the customs guy. Here's John Luttrell. They knew that something was wrong. They knew that it didn't seem right. And they were afraid. And I think up until the last minute it was not clear whether they were going to go. But ultimately they did.
So they actually flew to the United States, were picked up, I believe, at the airport by Chuck Rowe, who immediately takes them to a strip club, like just straight from the airport. And then they go out and party. They go to a hotel, spend the night, and I think in the morning they were arrested. So the final strip club had nothing to do with their case. That's the best part. Yeah. It was utterly gratuitous. I mean, as soon as they landed in the United States, they could have arrested them on the spot.
It just sort of reveals everything that they would take him to another strip club. These kids were probably jet lagged and tired, had no real interest in it anyway. But they had to just get one last strip club in there. It turns out Chuck was spending a good part of his FBI career and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars in strip clubs all over the world. More after the break. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.
Hey, Chameleon listeners. It's Josh Dean here, your host of season one, Hollywood Con Queen. And I'm here today to talk to you about food, a thing I love. I also love to cook, but I rarely have time, which is why I love factors. No prep, no mess meals. These fresh, never frozen meals are dietitian approved and ready to eat in just two minutes, which is about as long as it takes me to do this ad twice.
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Back in Los Angeles, John Luttrell, the federal public defender, was hearing from Yogi and Arvi about what apparently happened in the Philippines. That Chuck, Dennis, and the other agents were hiring strippers, and in some cases having sex with them, as part of their efforts to entrap the three Filipino men. So John and an investigator with the public defender's office traveled to the Philippines to look into the claims. John and the investigator went to Area 51, the strip club in Manila.
and interviewed a woman named Diane. She was one of the employees. They showed her a picture of Chuck. Diane recognized the FBI undercover agent. She said Chuck preferred a woman named Natasha, whom Diane described as a simple girl, beautiful, who didn't speak much English. Diane claimed that Natasha said Chuck regularly had sex with her at Area 51. When she was shown a picture of Yogi, Diane remembered that he had come to the club with Chuck, and Yogi had sex with a woman named Precious. Diane said Chuck paid for everything.
Between the time that Chuck was a frequent customer and the day that John and an investigator arrived, the Philippines National Police raided Area 51 and found 19 underage girls offering sexual services for a fee. I honestly think this is what this guy just wanted to do anyway. I think this had nothing to do with investigating the case.
I think this had nothing to do with posing as an arms trafficker. I think this is literally, he was just using taxpayer money to just basically support his habits. Everybody knew him. He just picked girls and then basically, all those girls were hired to have sex with whoever wanted to have sex with them. And Yogi went along with it. When John returned to the United States, he told the prosecutors about what he discovered. They didn't find the information concerning.
And they told John that Chuck's activities were nothing more than what he needed to do to establish his cover as an arms dealer. In other words, he needed to act like a bad guy. So what I was always told by the prosecutors is, well, you know, you can't be effective in doing that unless you blend in with the criminals. So, you know, you can't expect Chuck Rowe to just, like, walk up and start asking questions. He's got to blend in. He's got to take on a persona. He needs a fake identity. He needs a credit card.
and he needs to act the way that organized criminals do and that's these are the places that these guys go and i'm like okay i mean that has a certain facial appeal but it was plain it was just abundantly clear that my clients were not organized criminals that they were not otherwise going to go to these places and so there was no sort of operational purpose for him to be taking these young kids out and buying them prostitutes
Digging further, John subpoenaed the credit card records under the name of Chuck's alias, Richard. And much to my surprise, we were able to get those records. And what we found is that this guy is spending thousands of dollars every month on strip clubs all around the world, and not just in the Philippines, but here in the United States, in Vegas. And it completely obliterated this idea that this is an expenditure for a law enforcement purpose.
This guy basically just had a blank check to buy booze and prostitutes for himself, and I don't think there was any accountability for it. The Justice Department ultimately disclosed, in court records, that Chuck had expensed $14,500 to the FBI over just one eight-day period for meals and entertainment while in the Philippines. These expenses included $1,800 for a single night at Area 51. But despite the claims that Chuck had hired sex workers for other FBI agents,
and Yogi, one of the defendants, the Justice Department moved forward with the trial. Chuck and Dennis both submitted signed court statements claiming they had no knowledge of any FBI agents having sex with Filipino dancers or paying for sex. But another FBI agent did admit on the witness stand to having sex with one woman who was working in a club. He said he gave her money but claimed it wasn't for sex. The money, he claimed, was for the woman's sick father.
You know, you look at this guy and he seems like a nice guy, a reasonable guy. He had a long career in the FBI, I think. This is John Luttrell again. And he just got on the stand with a straight face and he said, look, yeah, I met this girl at one of these places. Yeah, you know, we went to her place and yeah, we had sex. And yeah, I paid her, you know, money, but I don't consider that prostitution. And it was preposterous. But I guess that's a window into two things. One is,
It's very possible that these guys deluded themselves into thinking they weren't paying for sex. That's ridiculous. No one who is a law enforcement officer should be that stupid or naive. But two, it goes to the lengths, the way that they've sort of normalized lying about this, that this guy would feel comfortable getting on the stand under oath and giving that explanation was creepy. Because it tells me if he's willing to do that, then what are the other agents willing to do?
And how can anybody count on anything that they say? Despite the defense lawyer's efforts to show the FBI agent's misbehavior in the case, the jury found Arvey, Yogi, and Argyle guilty. Arvey was sentenced to five years in prison, Yogi to seven years, and Argyle to a little more than four years. All three men have since been released and are back in the Philippines. But Chuck's behavior in the Philippines got back to Washington and captured the attention of a U.S. senator. More after the break.
You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. Before the trial of the supposed Filipino gun smuggling ring began, John Luttrell filed a motion documenting the allegations that Chuck had hired sex workers for himself, other agents, and Yogi, one of the defendants. That filing caught the attention of Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. In September 2012, Grassley wrote a letter to Robert Mueller, then the FBI director,
demanding an explanation for the claims that Chuck had spent thousands of dollars on sex workers in the Philippines. If true, Grassley wrote, this story raises serious questions about the behavior of this agent and the FBI's knowledge of this matter. I'll tell you, it was a real relief, though, when that happened. That's John Luttrell. Because all of a sudden I felt like, man, somebody, somebody cares. Somebody's paying attention. But, unfortunately, nothing seemed to happen with his letter.
As far as I know, that letter went nowhere. And there was no, you know, no accountability. I called Grassley's office, and no one from his staff could explain what happened. It seems to have fallen through the government cracks. So they were initially interested, but that's all. No public accountability, indeed. And that's just the way it seemed to go with Chuck and Dennis. When I talked to John Luttrell, he said he ran into them out in Los Angeles around the time of the trial.
I remember walking into a bar that was just down the street from both the court and the public defender's office and seeing Chuck Rowe and Dennis Lau sitting at the bar. And this was like early afternoon and they're drinking. And I saw them and immediately, you know, I'm looking the other way because these guys are scary. And this, they go from having this conversation and he looks at me and this sort of look comes on his face and it's like a lively, like engaged look.
And it's hard to describe what it looked like other than to sort of describe how it felt to see it. And what it felt to me, he was projecting this air of invincibility. Like, I can do whatever I want to do and there's nothing you can do to stop me. And what's interesting is Chuck Rowe has one way of doing it and it's just sort of like a jovial, it's almost like, look, I'm playing the game and I'm winning, you can't stop me.
But it's cheerful. It's like, you know, I'm invincible. Dennis Lau, on the other hand, standing next to him, he had a much more serious expression on his face. And it was conveying the same sense of invincibility, but it was harder and darker. And look, that could be just me projecting onto them. You know, I'm sure it is. But it really symbolized what was happening. Because every day we were walking into that court, and every day I knew what they were doing, and I think the prosecutors knew it too, and they still knew
The allegations against Chuck, and to a lesser extent Dennis, didn't appear to affect their careers. They both stayed on at the FBI as undercover agents. Dennis remained at the Los Angeles office. Chuck moved to Las Vegas. Then, and you know the story from here,
a Moroccan-accented man named Michel, goes to the FBI and says he knows a local businessman who's willing to launder money. The idea that Michel walked in one day and just talked to Chuck about Amil Bouhari and how he was willing to launder money and that Chuck took up Michel on his offer to be a confidential informant for the Sting, well, I don't know.
That just doesn't seem right to me. Especially after finding out all this backstory about Chuck and Dennis in the Philippines. There's gotta be more to the story about how Michelle came to team up with Chuck and Dennis for Operation Botox. This is High Rollers. In the next episode, the FBI goes after more of Emil's friends.
The FBI guys tell themselves they're the bad guys. And the FBI takes a keen interest in Emil's brother.
Gus. It was like a salesman that keeps calling and you give them the cold shoulder and they're supposed to understand. And the reason why I gave them the cold shoulder as opposed to saying, look, don't call me. I'm not interested in any business opportunities was because they were Emil's friends. Chameleon Season 2 comes from Campsite Media. It's hosted by me, Trevor Aronson. Our executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriadis and Adam Hoff. Alex Yablon fact-checked the series. Margo Williams also contributed to research.
Mark McAdam composed the theme song. Doug Slaywin and Sam Leeds provided production support. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. If you enjoyed High Rollers, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It really does help other listeners like you find the show. And make sure to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Take me to Sin City
Sin City, I know you's confessing your sins