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If somebody says the right words, promises the right things, anybody can become a victim. Since the early 2000s, millions of handwritten letters were landing at people's doors all across America. She truly believed that this was going to save her mind from going further.
into the depths of demand shut. I'm investigative journalist Rachel Brown, and I'm going to tell you the story of a scam unlike anything I've ever seen in the shape-shifting mastermind who evaded capture for more than 20 years. We never in our wildest dreams thought that these schemes were at this scale. They'd been without water for two months. All they wanted in return was whatever it was that Maria Duval was promising them.
From ITN Productions and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now, or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, show me what you got. This is Chameleon, Season 7. The Michigan Plot. A production of Campside Media. The Binge. It's October 7th, 2020.
— FBI informant Dan Chappell is face down near his truck in a parking lot outside an empty warehouse in Ypsilanti, Michigan, surrounded by heavily armed FBI agents. — Get your fucking hands off me! — Get on the ground! Don't move! — Adam Fox, the guy Dan has been working with for months to come up with a plan to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, is lying on the pavement nearby. An agent calls out. — Adam! Adam! Slowly get up!
Adam backs toward the agent, where he is handcuffed and put on the ground by the truck. Now it's Dan's turn. Dan, Dan! Slowly get up! Dan, too, is put in handcuffs. Look at the fucking truck. Turn your head the other way. There you go. Stop right there.
They walk Dan over and plunk him down next to Adam, who you can hear asking what he's being charged with. Turn your face to the other direction. Turn your face the other direction. Stay like that and we won't have any issues. Why are you going to be like this? I'm going to be like most of them. Why are you coming for us? You didn't do nothing. Shut the fuck up. I'm being charged. We won't explain this to you. We have everyone in custody. Just shut up.
The other guys who were in Dan's truck, Dan Harris, Ty Garbin, and Caleb Franks, are arrested one by one. At one point, it sounds like one of them yells, "Congratulations, Dan." Adam sits there in silence.
He doesn't know yet that this is the last time he'll see Dan, this guy he thought was his friend outside of a courtroom. - All right, you're back. Get him out. - Agents stand Dan back up. - I'll give you a little shove and stand up, ready? - And one of them approaches Dan to change out his cuffs. - Big meat claws. Here, give me those.
It's one of his handlers in the investigation, FBI Special Agent Hank Impala. Impala walks Dan away from the scene and puts him in the back of a waiting car. Impala can barely be heard saying, is the recorder on? And then Impala reaches into Dan's pocket, pulls out his hidden key fob recorder, and turns it off. Ah!
Nine more men would be arrested that day, including Barry Croft, Pete Musico, and Joe Morrison. The busts were being coordinated and overseen by the man who had led this case from its inception: Special Agent Jason Chambers. From the beginning, it was Chambers, a then 38-year-old Michigan native, who had directed Dan's infiltration of the Watchmen.
He listened to many of Dan's recordings in real time as Dan attended Watchmen meetings and trainings. He'd encourage Dan to bring Adam Fox into the fold, to get Adam into the Watchmen's leadership chat, to get him focused. And he'd push Dan to convince as many people as possible to come on the two recons of the governor's lake house. Overt acts that would ultimately lead to 14 arrests.
Jason Chambers was the man behind the scenes, pulling the strings. But the way he built this case was nothing new. He was following a playbook the FBI had been using for decades to target people who have the potential for violence and find out just how far they'll go. My name is Ken Bensinger. And I'm Jessica Garrison. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Chameleon, Season 7. The Michigan Plot.
Episode 6: To Catch the Devil, You Have to Go to Hell. The following interview is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami-Dade County, Florida. And sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Ronald F. Proud III. In 1976, a man in Florida tells a cop he has a confession to make. Arriving in Miami, I proceeded to do certain things that I considered to be necessary.
But instead of becoming his victim, I became his confidant, one of the people closest to him, as he recounted and was tried for his horrific crimes.
From Orbit Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to My Friend the Serial Killer. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now, or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. It's the fall of 2015 in the city of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Khalil Abu Rayyan, a 21-year-old Arab kid, is getting home from a shift delivering pizzas in some of the more dangerous areas of Detroit.
Rayan was recently arrested for having marijuana and a concealed gun in his car. Now he's out on bail, at home with his parents, and awaiting trial on the gun charge. As he describes in this 2023 interview, he was in a pretty dark mood. I did go to school, but I pretty much really dropped out. I mean, I was pulling Fs. I was going to class high. My mental state was that I was going through a really bad depression period.
Like Adam Fox, Rayan smoked a lot of weed. He was lonely, angry, and disaffected. And he found an outlet for his anger on the internet. While Adam found the Boogaloo movement, Rayan gravitated toward a different extremist group: the Islamic State. For months, Rayan had been posting and retweeting some pretty vile things from the terror group ISIS.
Images of beheadings, people being thrown off of roofs, a Jordanian pilot being burned to death. And where in his daily life, Rayyan was poor, in trouble with the law and powerless, on the internet, he could pretend to be someone else. If somebody portrays himself outwardly in public, you're not going to do the same in social media. So that was kind of, I guess, my second identity type of thing. Rayyan was posing as a sort of ISIS wannabe, and his posts were getting attention.
And that's when a Pakistani girl named Ghada slid into his DMs. Ghada said she was a college student living in Cleveland, that her family had tried to arrange a marriage for her, but she wanted to pick her own husband. She said she felt an immediate connection with Rayan. Talking about, you know, wanting to be with me, that she felt like God brought me as a purpose and I'm her savior and all that type of stuff.
In high school, I've never got a girlfriend. So when she slid into my DMs, I figured that this was the one that I finally not only got a girlfriend, but a potential wife. Over the next few weeks, Rayan texted with Gada constantly. He felt like they were falling in love. And then, just when Rayan was planning a trip to Cleveland to meet her in person, Gada disappeared.
As quickly as she had shown up in Rayan's life, Ghada was gone. Rayan was sad, but he wouldn't have to stay sad for long. Because almost immediately after, a different girl started DMing Rayan, a 19-year-old Sunni Muslim widow named Yana. Our conversations were pretty much asking questions, getting to know one another at first. But things kind of started to turn when I've noticed that she really wanted to talk about things revolving around ISIS or terrorism or to commit violent acts.
Rianne wasn't much of a romantic. She said she wanted revenge against the coalition forces who had killed her two cousins and her husband. She said she wanted to martyr herself in a terror attack. Rianne tried to talk her out of those plans. "Don't do anything that will hurt you, yourself, or other people," he wrote. "Depression is real, but don't let it run your life."
But Yana was single-minded. She only wanted to talk about jihad. I did not want to lose her. So I did entertain some of those conversations to keep her— I mean, what guy does not talk shit to a girl in a sense to impress her? Eventually, Rayan joined in. He talked to Yana about fantasies he'd once had of shooting up a church. Not long after that, Rayan showed up one day for his shift at the pizza shop. Right before I unlocked the shop,
literal, like a whole cavalry of people just pulled up, had their guns drawn, got me to the ground, arrested me. I wanted to believe it was a mistake until I seen somebody's vest that said "FBI." Rayan had become one of the thousands of Muslim men targeted in FBI terrorism stings since 9/11. In the end, he pleaded guilty to a pair of gun charges. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
Rayan and Adam grew up in different worlds, but there are important parallels in their experiences with federal law enforcement. Like Adam, Rayan was pursued by someone working undercover for the FBI, someone who built a relationship with him and tried to talk him into discussing criminal activity. And there was another connection between the FBI investigations of Adam Fox and Khalil Abu Rayan. They shared an investigator, an ambitious FBI agent named Jason Chambers.
Jason Chambers grew up in Michigan, the eldest son of a Baptist minister. He got an engineering degree and after a few years in the private sector, joined the FBI in 2009. In 2013, he caught his first big case, investigating the fallout of the Boston Marathon bombing. And after that, he returned to Michigan, where he worked counterterrorism cases for the Detroit field office, including the investigation of Khalil Abu Rayyan.
He would go on to work more terror cases like that one, targeting Muslim men using informants and undercover agents. And ultimately, he would apply everything he learned over those years to fighting a new threat the FBI was facing: domestic extremism. And that would lead Chambers right to Adam Fox and the Wolverine Watchmen.
By the time FBI Special Agent Jason Chambers was working terrorism cases in the Detroit area, the FBI had been conducting sting operations for more than half a century, and in many cases, turning violent words into a prosecutable crime. You know, you can go back to the Hoover era, and the FBI was using informants in similar capacities, like using them to, you know, spy on people, but also using them to encourage crimes. And so this has been going on for a very long time.
This is Trevor Aronson, a journalist covering the FBI's counterterrorism practices. Aronson says the FBI has long used informants to go after groups it deems dangerous. And it often deems groups dangerous based on their speech. The FBI historically has viewed any sort of extremism or kind of political thought on the fringes as being potentially violent for most of its history.
— This predominantly affected left-wing political movements and Black Power movements, you know, COINTELPRO being the most significant example. — From 1956 to 1971, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover used a secret program called COINTELPRO to infiltrate, surveil, and sabotage American political groups and public figures.
Informants went after movement leaders like Martin Luther King. They even participated in what amounted to political assassinations, like the murder of Black Panther's leader Fred Hampton. When news of the existence of COINTELPRO came out, the public was outraged. A congressional committee in the '70s tried to rein the FBI in, with some success. But in the '80s, the use of informants would get a glossy makeover and a major boost in public approval, thanks to the war on drugs.
In the '80s, there was this moral panic over drugs. Billions of dollars was flowing into agencies like the DEA and the FBI, and they had to show results. And that's where you see a big explosion in the growth of the number of informants and also in the role that informants play in what you could argue is manufacturing crime.
And that's when the FBI adopted a strategy that would change the way it conducted investigations forever: the Sting operation. You've probably seen it again and again in TV and movies. — You'd have an undercover informant who'd have this briefcase. — You alone?
Just me and this. And it'd be empty, but the guy he's handing it to thinks it's full of cocaine. And as soon as he hand over the briefcase, the FBI storms in and arrests the person. Miami Vice, you're under arrest. Turn around and put your hands on the bar. You're a cop? April Fool. The drug sting was more than just a fun setup for cop shows. It got results and headlines for the FBI.
Headlines meant promotions for the agents and prosecutors and the prospect of high-paying jobs in the private sector. It also meant more funding for the Bureau, and that meant more informants on the payroll. Some viewed these stings as entrapment, as the FBI tricking people into committing crimes they otherwise wouldn't.
But on the other hand, the FBI was getting drug dealers off the streets. — These sting operations that the FBI was using in drugs, which overwhelmingly targeted people of color, Black men in particular, were seen as all right. It's okay that you set this guy up in a crime because we're really worried about drugs.
While the drug war raged, the number of FBI informants ballooned. But then, on September 11, 2001, America was attacked. And the FBI would turn all the infrastructure and know-how it had built during the war on drugs to the war on terror. After 9/11, you have this enormous explosion where it triples to about 15,000 informants.
They are looking for people who are sympathizers, ready to step over the line to operators. Their job is to find them just as they're making that step over the line.
— The FBI would attack the threat of terrorism the same way it attacked drugs: by using sting operations. — They would send informants into mosques, for example, looking for the loudmouth who was complaining about U.S. foreign policy. And that informant might say, like, "Hey, do you want to do something about it? I can make that happen." And then if the person is receptive, they then wrap them into a plot.
An informant could play a big role in pushing and shaping a terror plot. And the FBI would provide all the resources the target of the investigation would need to move forward, like money, contacts, and even dummy anti-aircraft missiles or bombs. They are creating and making possible crimes that are terrorism in the same way that they did with drugs during the war on drugs.
So instead of an empty briefcase, it's a bomb that doesn't go off. And then when they go to detonate the bomb, that's the bust. But there was one pretty major difference between drug stings and terrorism stings. If the FBI busts a drug dealer trying to buy cocaine, the dealer probably could have gotten the cocaine elsewhere. But it's very unlikely that the suspects caught up in most terrorism stings would have met someone willing to provide all the resources to carry out an attack.
That just doesn't happen that often. — There was never a case where someone was, like, building this bomb in his garage, and then the FBI comes in and runs a sting and stops that bomb from going off somewhere. — Aronson has reviewed the over 300 terrorism cases that used informants in the first decade after 9/11. Cases where the FBI claimed to have stopped a plot already in motion. But that, he says, wasn't exactly true.
In most cases, the defendant didn't have the capacity to commit any significant violence on his own and didn't have any connections to real terrorists. These were cases that the FBI made entirely possible. The war on terror really begins to wane starting the fall of ISIS in 2019. The FBI still has all of these powers and these tactics that have been refined and courts have upheld. And so what do they do now?
Around the time Trump was elected president, it was clear that Congress and the public at large was increasingly upset about the rise of right-wing and far-right extremism. Donald Trump's presidency coincided with a dramatic rise in right-wing extremism. There were neo-Nazis marching in the streets of Charlottesville.
There were mail bombs sent to politicians and media figures by a Trump supporter. Several bombs sent to multiple locations. And mass shootings. There has been a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. After mass shooting. Here in El Paso tonight, a gunman showing up at a Walmart. For years, the FBI had been reluctant to tackle right-wing extremism. But now the public was demanding action.
By 2019, FBI Director Christopher Wray was giving speeches in Congress about the threat posed by domestic terror. We see domestic terrorism as a persistent, evolving threat. The Bureau's focus was starting to shift.
By that time, Special Agent Jason Chambers had already worked on a number of high-profile terrorism cases for the FBI in Boston and Detroit. And in our reporting, we found that he was starting to think about what might be next, a lucrative career in the private sector. In April of 2019, Chambers incorporated a private cybersecurity and intelligence consulting company called Exintel.
In marketing materials he sent to potential clients, Chambers touted his FBI experience and quoted seven-figure fees for Exintel's services. Chambers appeared to be using his position at the FBI to promote his private business, which would be a major conflict of interest. In one email, Chambers spoke of, quote, "...preparing things at my office so that I can leave the Bureau and join Exintel full-time."
But in the meantime, another high-profile case wouldn't hurt Exintel's marketability. And that's when a promising new lead landed right in Chambers' lap. This is the part of the story you already know. A concerned citizen named Dan Chappell came forward with a tip about the Wolverine watchman. Chambers asked Dan to become an informant on the group, and Dan agreed.
Dan attended his first trainings and meetings with the Watchmen, where they said plenty of repugnant things, but weren't breaking any laws or moving ahead with any real plan.
But Chambers wanted to push the case forward. So after just two weeks, he brought it to the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, or DTOS. He wanted to submit it as a terrorism enterprise investigation, which would give him more resources to work with and give the case more attention from higher-ups at the bureau. DTOS denied his request. But Chambers wasn't deterred. In a text to a co-worker about the case, he wrote...
I have pledged to beat them over the head with it until they comply." In a later message, he added, "I am going to be working this as a TEI whether you give me the paperwork or not." Eventually, Chambers got his way. The Wolverine Watchman became the subject of a terrorism enterprise investigation. And the probe became a big deal at the FBI.
The Bureau put considerable resources at Chambers' disposal. There would be hidden license plate readers outside Joe Morrison's property in Munith. Spy aircraft would fly over Watchmen events, taking pictures. Search warrants would be served for phone lines and Facebook accounts. And an ever-growing roster of informants and undercover agents would be injected into the case. But by June, three months into the investigation, the Wolverine Watchmen were still in the talking phase.
They hadn't committed to any plan, something Dan was repeatedly pushing them to do. What's our goal? Are we just training for everything? What's the work we're trying to focus in on? You can train for fucking everything, but if you want to have an endgame, that's what we need to report our resources to. The Watchmen were tough to steer. They just didn't seem that serious. What they needed was a spark. Someone who was serious. Hey, what's going on, brother?
Right on. I can hear you a little bit better now. Ironically, that serious person turned out to be Adam Fox. What Adam lacked in skill, connections, or intelligence, he made up for with his big, crazy, anti-government ideas. He acted like an alpha dog, but the truth was, he was a broke, lonely outcast, desperate for acceptance and approval.
More often than not, the targets of these stings are people who are vulnerable. In some cases, the targets will not have great family lives and not have many friends. And the informant or the undercover agent comes into their life and kind of offers them this social experience that they've craved. Hey man, if you want to come down and train at Joe's sometime with us, that'd be great. No, I can meet up down there with you guys and we can train and all that.
— Agent Chambers in particular seemed to see the importance of getting Adam involved. When Dan met with Adam for the first time in the basement of the back shack, Adam was stoned and rambled about wild and improbable ideas. A few days later, Chambers texted Dan. — Got to get Adam focused. — That's not uncommon where, you know, the person will have this over-the-top idea or just this idea without any real plans, and it's the FBI who helps refine it.
For the next three months, Dan would try his best to get Adam to refine his plan. And in the process, he would become his new best friend. When Joe Morrison and Pete Musico raised concerns about bringing Adam to a Watchmen training, Dan vouched for him. When the guys said they thought Adam was crazy, Dan defended him. And still, after months of work, there was no conspiracy.
What was it all for? Why was the FBI so keen to get this group of guys to come up with a plan when they weren't interested or capable enough to do it on their own? If you take the most sympathetic view of the FBI, they're constructing this conspiracy for fear that these guys will meet someone who is real and will put this conspiracy together, whether it's to bomb a building or kidnap the governor. And the truth is, if that real person existed...
He's likely not going to put up with these guys who would just take months to do stuff and require constant encouragement. From a cynical standpoint, from our perspective, you're like looking at this case and you realize it's just bullshit layered on bullshit. They're targeting these people in the sting that is entirely a construction of the FBI, right? And it's like none of it is real. It's this carnivalesque atmosphere where nothing is true.
Looking into a case like this, it's easy to take that skeptical point of view. But we wanted to understand what it's like to work terrorism cases from the other side and talk to someone who understands the challenges of fighting the real and present threat of domestic terror. Working domestic terrorism, I've said it, is probably one of the hardest violations to work in the FBI. You have to be so careful that
And you also, you can't miss. This is Tom O'Connor. I am a former FBI agent. I was assigned to the Washington field office joint terrorism task force for 23 years. Think for a second about what you see every day on the internet.
On social media platforms, millions of people say millions of different things. And even the worst of it is protected by the First Amendment right to free speech. People are spewing all sorts of crap online, in forums and on this platform, that platform. I can say the most disgusting things in the world. And as long as I don't use violence to promote that, I'm good.
The FBI has the extremely difficult task of trying to determine who's serious and who isn't. Words are just words. Until they aren't. You have all of these potentials out there. You have to find the ones who actually are going to do something and get in front of that before it takes place.
We have to be right 100% of the time. We have to be able to get in front of that violence every single time. And that is not possible. O'Connor says there are many times when the FBI looks into someone who is spewing hate speech or making threats, but because they haven't taken steps toward an act of violence, there's nothing the Bureau can do about it. That was the case for two brothers living in Boston, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The Russian federal authorities called and said that these Tsarnaev brothers were extremists. The FBI did everything they possibly could. They interviewed them. They talked to friends. All the stuff you could possibly, you checked all the boxes. And at the end of the day, there was nothing there. And then they became the Boston Bombers.
On April 15, 2013, the Tsarnaevs detonated a pair of pressure cooker bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. And then all of a sudden everybody's like, well, the FBI dropped the ball. They knew who these guys were. It is not that easy.
Sometimes, for the FBI, it can be a little damned if you do, damned if you don't. In a way, the Bureau is being asked to predict someone's future violent behavior based on what they say online, which we all know isn't a good indicator of what someone will actually do. That line can be so thin. Between making violent anti-Semitic remarks on a forum and walking into a synagogue with an assault rifle,
O'Connor has dealt with the fallout firsthand. I spent the first day in the morgue with the medical examiners processing the victims of the Tree of Life shooting. You don't have to tell me what violence is. And he says he's had to walk away from a lot of cases where he believed someone was capable of violence. Some of my worst nights were wondering about that next shooting. And that is the scary part.
O'Connor says that no one wants to be the agent who fails to stop someone from hurting people.
At times, that can lead to agents doing everything they can to make a case against someone they believe is truly dangerous. The whole idea is to get in front of the violence. So if you actually believe that this person, the target of your investigation, is someone who is going to go out and do some violent action, it's a positive that agents stick with it to try and get some type of a case built on these people.
The FBI, DOJ, and Special Agent Jason Chambers declined our requests for an interview for this podcast. We can't get inside Chambers' head or anyone else involved in this investigation. But it seems clear that they felt Adam Fox, Barry Croft, and the Watchmen were a legitimate danger.
Still, by the end of August, Adam Fox's plan to kidnap the governor remained in the realm of just talk. For it to become a chargeable crime, people would have to take some action. And it couldn't just be Adam.
— So the FBI, through Dan, organized a recon trip to the governor's vacation home in Birch Lake. Chambers told Dan to try to get as many people to go as possible. But no one really wanted to go except Adam and his acquaintance, Eric Molitor. This was not a very convincing conspiracy. — It just helps the government's case even further, having as many people in it as possible. It seems like it's a really big conspiracy when you've got all these people.
At the September training in Luther, the FBI upped its game. Dan and Steve Robeson convinced more guys to go in the night recon. And Adam was there calling the shots, the leader of what now had the appearance of a broad, multi-state conspiracy. It's only listening to the full tapes from that night that you know that the recon probably wouldn't have happened without Dan, who coordinated everything, dragging a stoned and hungry Adam along.
There's a moment at the very beginning of that weekend in Luther. The guys are sitting around the campfire, shooting the shit. Adam is so high that he's basically catatonic. Adam's not even talking anymore. Dude's just listening because he can't comprehend anything. He's blissed out of his mind right now. He's like, this conversation is like a kaleidoscope. Dan and the other guys make fun of Adam, the guy who is supposed to be the leader and mastermind of a plot they're all involved in.
A guy who can barely string together a coherent sentence. "Kids bringing a fucking tree." "Hey, Adam. Just going back to being a high dude." "I don't think he ever left." "Dude, watch like the fire. Keep yourself occupied."
We know that Adam wasn't much of a leader. But because of the way the FBI works these stings, we'll never know for sure if he was just a big talker looking for friends or a person who is capable of real violence. In the end, the FBI, as it's done countless times before, made that assessment on its own. -Guard, fall!
Less than a month after Luther, Adam and Dan were both facedown in a parking lot with FBI agents pointing guns at them. They'd spent nearly every day for the last few months talking to each other, but on the tape that day, they're silent. You have to wonder what's running through Dan's head as agents help Adam up. Ready? Up. And then lead him away to jail.
Adam's on-and-off girlfriend, Amanda, had been out of town when the takedown happened. The next morning, she had dozens of missed calls and text messages from people trying to figure out what happened. Of course, Amanda had talked to the FBI back in August. She knew this day was probably coming. Adam finally called me after, like, three days from jail. He told me who all was arrested, who wasn't.
We knew Dan was definitely not arrested. Adam didn't take this revelation well. Oh, he was so upset. Like, he cried. He cried. He really thought Dan was his brother. Adam really thought he had somebody.
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Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Chameleon Show page on Apple Podcasts or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Hearing from Trevor Aronson, an expert on FBI stings, I was surprised by how much the Michigan case echoes the terrorism stings and drug busts of the past. But there was one overlap I wasn't prepared for.
On his own podcast, Alphabet Boys, Aronson chronicled an FBI sting operation of a leftist activist group that took place in Denver in 2020. There was this assassination plot where they tried to get these two guys involved in a plot to assassinate the attorney general. And the informant brings in his, like, outlaw biker buddy. He was known as Red in the Colorado sting. But anyway, it's an interesting possible connection. In going through our tape, we discovered something.
The red in Trevor's case... UCE-7775 in Denver, Colorado. ...was the same red as in the Watchman case. UCE-7775 in Cadillac, Michigan.
Red was an undercover FBI agent named Tim Bates. He didn't even bother to change his nickname from case to case. And even wilder, just 18 days after he was in Denver pretending to be a biker, Red was in Luther, Michigan, pretending to be Dan's army buddy with access to explosives. And that underscores a fundamental truth about these investigations.
The FBI likes to do it the same way, over and over, using the same tactics and even the same guys. That's also how they like to use their informants.
There are professional informants. There are people who learn that they can play roles and they can get paid lots of money if they can deliver cases to the FBI. And these are informants who tend to stay on payroll for years and years. Dan Chappell was, by all accounts, a first-time informant with a clean criminal history. But with the FBI, that's not always the case. There's a saying in the Bureau, to catch the devil, you have to go to hell.
It's a saying about informants, and what they mean by that is that informants generally are not people who would be choirboys. Most often they are criminals, so as a result they're convicted felons, they have very limited employment prospects as a result, and the FBI can offer them tons of money. There was another informant in the Michigan case that fit this profile to a T. Steve Robeson. We're really getting things together across the country. United States patriots are going to be just...
Robeson had a rap sheet a mile long, including charges of fraud, assault, bail jumping, theft, and also sex with a minor. His criminal career stretched back to the early 80s when he was still a teenager. In 1985, at age 22, Robeson was in jail on charges of battery and criminal damage to property. He was sharing a cell with a biker who was awaiting trial for murder.
Robeson ended up ratting the biker out. He testified against him, saying they'd gotten high in the cell, and the biker told him he'd bashed a woman's head in with a hammer. Robeson likely got a reduction in his sentence for his cooperation in the trial. For the next decade or so, Robeson would continue to be in and out of jail. Car insurance fraud. Theft. Giving false information to a public official. Court records show he went on to trade information at least a couple more times. Maybe a lot more.
he became a career snitch. In October 2019, he became an informant once again. This time, he was called up to the big leagues, the FBI. And not long after, he reached out on Facebook to a guy the FBI had been watching, a Delaware trucker named Barry Croft. He used Barry's connections to get in touch with disgruntled patriots from around the country and stir up their anti-government feelings.
Together, he and Barry planned a meeting in Dublin, Ohio. It was there that Robeson said that seizing government buildings, taking brick and mortar, as he called it, was weak. He said they needed to target people. Robeson was going to become a major problem for the feds. Because for this convicted felon, old habits died hard.
As the FBI's investigation in Michigan was heating up, Robeson allegedly used a fake charity called Race to Unite the Races to scam a Wisconsin couple into donating an SUV to him. Prosecutors say he sold the vehicle and pocketed the cash.
Robeson also had a problem with guns. As a felon, he wasn't supposed to have them. But after Luther, he illegally purchased a high-powered .50 caliber sniper rifle from a man he met at church, and then sold it for a profit to someone he met on Facebook Messenger. Robeson, a key informant, had become a massive liability.
In December 2020, two months after the arrests, the FBI searched Robeson's house and called him in for a little talk. His interrogators were none other than Jason Chambers and Hank Impala. Here's Impala doing his best Tom Cruise impression. This is Robeson.
I want the truth. I said it was his best. I didn't say it was good. We only have a very small piece of this four-hour interview between the agents and Robeson. But in it, they ask him about his early Facebook messages with Barry Croft. We'll be up front again. Like, we saw...
The agents are concerned how it would look to a jury.
that Robeson was the one who first suggested going after governors to bury. And this is something that we're all going to have to overcome. Somebody reads the conversation between you and Croft from 2019,
There's a portion of you where you're saying like, hey, these politicians are corrupt. You know, there's tyranny. They're not constitutionalists. Correct. And then Kropp like takes up the banner. Yeah, let's go after the politicians. Right. But it quickly becomes from a defense strategy. Well, this was Roby's idea day one. Right. Like that is an option on the table is this is Roby's idea from day one. Right.
Impala says that if a jury sees Croft and Robeson's Facebook conversations, they'll think kidnapping governors was all Robeson's idea. That he planted the idea in Barry's head. And that would open the door for an entrapment defense.
The goal now, Chambers says, is to get in front of what defense attorneys might say. We need to talk about how they're going to try to portray what happened and how they're going to try to twist it to defend their client and to try to blame somebody else. And, you know, they're paid liars, right? They're paid to take the truth and portray it in a different sense.
We asked to interview Chambers and Impala, but the FBI declined on their behalf. But from a defense motion, we know that somewhere during that five-hour interview with Robeson, Impala said something poignant. "We have a saying in my office," he said. "Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." As 2020 came to a close and the trials of the Wolverine Watchmen and their associates loomed on the horizon, the government was working on that story.
It was a story told in the volatile words the men had uttered in chats, in videos, and on secret recordings. A story told by the informants and undercover agents who'd urged the plot forward. A story that threatened to put a lot of them in prison for life.
On the next and final episode of Chameleon Season 7: The Michigan Plot, Adam Fox, Barry Croft, and the Watchmen go on trial. And the stakes could not be higher. Each face life in prison. The stage for the trial is set to be a battle. And the jury hears some surprising testimony. Dan Chappell, he's so bothered by the things that are going on in the chats, he immediately calls the police.
Well, he's a bitch, yes. Sir, I'm sorry, what was that? He's a bitch? If you want to know more about the way the FBI uses informants in sting operations, pick up Trevor Aronson's book, The Terror Factory.
Chameleon is a production of Campside Media in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment. The Michigan Plot is hosted by me, Ken Bensinker. And me, Jessica Garrison. The show is produced by Ryan Swikert. Callie Hitchcock and Henry Lavoie are associate producers. Story editing by Michael Canyon-Meyer. Josh Dean is our executive producer. Voice acting by Levi Petrie. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins.
Additional research by Julie Denichet. Sound design and mix by Ewan Lai-Tremuin. Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Epidemic Sound, and APM. A special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Ashley Warren, and Destiny Dingle. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. If you're enjoying this show, spread the word and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people find the show.
I'm Ken Bensinger, and thanks for listening.
