Episodes
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Run by the Venezuelan regime and military, the Cartel del Sol is currently the largest transnational criminal organization in the world, earning trillions of dollars per year from drug and human trafficking, and other crimes. The name derives from the fact that the Venezuelan military wear suns on their uniforms in place of epaulets.
In fact, this cartel oversees better-known criminal groups, including the Tren del Aragua (recently, Colombia's Cali cartel, and Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. Ex-CIA Operative Gary Berntsen lays out the facts: The Cartel del Sol's origin, leadership, and administration—as well as its partnership with Russia and China, both of which help launder drug money in the U.S. and around the globe.
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com -
Shot down October 1965, Lt. Commander and naval aviator Porter Halyburton, who was part of Fighter Squadron 84, was helped by local villagers and then taken into custody by the North Vietnamese Army. He was then imprisoned in the infamous Hanoi Hilton and moved to other prisons throughout North Vietnam.
Initially declared dead, Porter describes how he and his fellow POWs forged friendships and developed unique mental exercises to help them cope and survive the deprivation and torture during their years in prison. In 1973, after eight years in captivity, Porter was finally released. The day he left Vietnam he decided to forgive his captors. In his book “Reflections on Captivity” he shares his philosophy of forgiveness and rising above hate. He and wife continue to visit Vietnam.
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com -
Missing episodes?
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Shot down October 1965, Lt. Commander and naval aviator Porter Halyburton, who was part of Fighter Squadron 84, was helped by local villagers and then taken into custody by the North Vietnamese Army. He was then imprisoned in the infamous Hanoi Hilton and moved to other prisons throughout North Vietnam.
Initially declared dead, Porter describes how he and his fellow POWs forged friendships and developed unique mental exercises to help them cope and survive the deprivation and torture during their years in prison. In 1973, after eight years in captivity, Porter was finally released. The day he left Vietnam he decided to forgive his captors. In his book “Reflections on Captivity” he shares his philosophy of forgiveness and rising above hate. He and wife continue to visit Vietnam.
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com -
While patrolling the waterways in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta as Operations Officer, Bill Retz nearly lost his life. Doctors advised him that his navy career was over yet—defying the odds after a difficult recovery—he ultimately rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. Among his commands were the destroyer USS Stump and the Naval War base at Pearl Harbor. As Destroyer Squadron commander he was closely involved in anti-submarine warfare and in early tests of the Tomahawk cruise missile system.
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com -
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Special Forces legend "Tilt" Meyer is back in a special two-part episode, sharing stories from his new book “On The Ground!”
If you joined MACV-SOG–-the Studies and Observations Group—in the 1960s for America's "Secret War" in Laos and Cambodia, the first thing you did was sign an oath to never speak about what happened for 20 years. Now able to speak freely, Tilt shares the sheer adventure and reality of jungle combat. Each SOG team was named after a U.S. state, and they were comprised of both American and local Vietnamese soldiers.
HBH is thrilled to have him back to describe the friendships, firefights, and fortitude of this remarkable fighting group.
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com -
Retired CIA Operative and government whistleblower Gary Berntsen continues to share insights and details from the results of a four-year investigation into election tampering.
Cold Case Western Australia
His team’s conclusion: Enemies of the United States including Venezuela, Cuba, China and Serbia have been determining the results of elections in the U.S. since 2006 through the use of electronic systems that they have developed. Using these systems, they now manipulate the results of elections in 72 countries around the world.
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Retired CIA Operative and government whistleblower Gary Berntsen reveals the results of a four-year investigation into election tampering. His team’s conclusion: Enemies of the United States including Venezuela, Cuba, China and Serbia have been determining the results of elections in the U.S. since 2006 through the use of electronic systems that they have developed. Using these systems, they now manipulate the results of elections in 72 countries around the world.
Gary Berntsen is arguably the most decorated CIA operations officer in modern times. He is the man who recruited and led the combined CIA-Special Forces teams that helped overthrow the Taliban after the attack of 9/11 and had Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda fighters trapped in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. He also served as a CIA Station Chief in three counties; led the Hezbollah working group; investigated the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998; and stopped various terrorist attacks around the world.
Gary and his team are now going public with a criminal investigation that will shock the world. The evidence they have assembled is described in a new book by Ralph Pezzullo titled "Stolen Elections: The Plot to Destroy Global Democracy" published by Skyhorse Publishing.
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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An Inspiring Reprise Episode From Season One:
Cold Case Western Australia
Human trafficking is a $150 billion-a-year business that thrives in war zones and is arguably more lucrative than arms sales. Lurata Lyon joins HBH and bravely tells her unimaginable story of survival during the Balkan Wars across Eastern Europe in the 1990s.
Lurata was kidnapped into human trafficking as a teenager when the war engulfed her home country of Serbia. She was destined for a life of sex-trafficking and organ-harvesting. Miraculously, she escaped, only to find further horrors waiting for her in the same war zone.
Lurata is a profoundly inspirational person. Beyond her heroism to survive, she continues to speak out for those who were not as fortunate.
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Mikael Cook served as a U.S. Army engineer in the reserves. He was sent to Afghanistan in 2019 helping to build out infrastructure for U.S. military camps, working with local translators and other workers. He befriended his Afghan co-workers, especially an interpreter, Muhammad, and his brother Abdul.
Following the Trump administration’s decision in 2020 to withdraw from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years, it fell to the Biden administration to execute the withdrawal which they did very abruptly in August 2021, creating administrative and civil chaos and abandoning our allies and billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment.
The scene at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport were horrific with thousands of Afghans, who had worked for the U.S. and feared Taliban reprisals, desperate to escape. With no helping coming from the Biden administration, it fell to an ad hoc coalition of U.S. civilians and military members – later dubbed “Digital Dunkirk’ – to help rescue as many Afghans as they could. On August 26, 2021, in the midst of the chaos at the airport, an ISIS-K terrorist suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt that killed 13 U.S. servicemen and over 169 Afghan civilians.
Mikael Cook tells this tragic and dramatic story from various perspectives in his riveting book, “Life and Death at Abbey Gate: The Fall of Afghanistan and the Operation to Save Our Allies.”
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Former Florida police investigator James Byrd-Williams, Sr. recounts the story of his son's murder in 2020. 44-year-old Michael Williams was an African-American man living in the mostly White college town of Grinnell, Iowa, to be near his ex-wife and kids. Occurring just weeks after the George Floyd incident, Michael Williams’ body was found strangled and burned in a ditch outside of town. Three people were later convicted.
J.B. expresses his frustration with the thoroughness of the investigation and the fact that officials and the NAACP—eager to avoid any media attention of the type recently seen in Minneapolis—denied it was a hate crime, and avoided the word 'lynching' in describing the homicide. UK newspaper The Guardian asked, “When is a lynching a lynching?”
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Becky Ellis was one of her father’s eight children by four wives, and the chaos of her childhood, dominated by a haunted and difficult father, marked her and all her siblings. As a child, she suffered through her father’s paranoia about Nazis attacking them; trips to the dentist without anesthesia; and other irrational behaviors.
Only at age 89, when Becky was a grown wife and mother, did her father Staff Sgt. Louis K. Boswell finally share his wartime recollections as part of the legendary ‘Timberwolves’ – the nickname for the 104th infantry division. The ‘Timberwolves’ were deployed in northwestern Europe and saw almost 200 straight days of brutal fighting through France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and western Germany, including participating in the Battle of the Bulge. The group saw an extreme level of casualties, and Becky’s father described how he survived and how it felt when he returned stateside, with what was then an undiagnosed case of severe PTSD.
This compelling account is a glimpse inside military families who must welcome home a traumatized parent. Personally liberated by finally solving the mystery of her father, Becky shared her story in her book, “Little Avalanches,” and continues to work with military families coping with PTSD.
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Admiral Robert Stiles Harward, Jr. grew up in a Navy family, living overseas, and eventually joined up himself as a means to pay for college. Adm. Harward ultimately went on to an amazing career and leading the U.S. Navy Seals, and the Naval Special Warfare Group Task Force KBAR. He explains his amazingly positive view of the world and philosophy of team collaboration and information sharing, which he calls "The Gouge," with our host and in his book of the same name.
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Did you miss it? One of the most popular episodes we ever released from Season One is back for an encore listen:
Cold Case Western Australia
Russian and Chinese-backed rebels were making deadly headway in Oman during its Civil War of the early 1970s. In support of the Western-allied Sultan, the British Army secretly deployed nine operators from its most elite unit, the SAS. HBH is honored to have our guest, Pete Winner, with a special appearance by Sekonaia ‘Tak’ Takevisi, two of the nine SAS heroes who took on over 400 Omani rebels at the Battle of Mirbat.
At stake on July 19th 1972 was more than just a single battle for a small town on the Gulf of Oman. Due to Mirbat’s geographic significance, had the SAS fallen the communist rebels would have taken hold of the region – and controlled the global shipping routs for Middle Eastern oil.
Statues of individual soldiers are rare, but due to his heroism at the Battle of MIrbat, there are not one but two statues of Sergeant Talaiasi Labalaba. One unveiled in 2009 at the SAS headquarters in Herefordshire, and another in 2018 by Harry and Megan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, in Fiji - which at the time of Labalaba’s enlistment was still a British colony.
Pete Winner is the author of his bestselling memoir "SOLDIER, I," which he wrote with Michael Kennedy.
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Mark Paul’s outrageous adventure,“The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told," is the hilarious story of two buddies who won't give up on their stroke of luck. While the horse is the real hero of the story—a filly who broke the odds when she won the Kentucky Derby out of sheer heart. Mark and his friend Dino determine to try, along with a third gambling buddy, to go collect their winnings of over a million dollars from a racetrack in Tijuana owned by a cartel...
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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David Crow had a childhood like no other—with a mentally troubled mother and a criminally sociopathic father who raised his kids on a Navajo reservation, despite not actually being Native-American. David describes how his father tried to train him to be his criminal accomplice, until as an adult David broke away and ultimately built a successful life as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.
David's book, “The Pale-Faced Lie,” describes the scrapes and adventures he experienced.
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Bobbie Myers served for years as a Florida policeman, de-stressing from his first responder experiences by living at the beach and surfing. Suddenly, after dramatically saving a drowning boy, his PTSD was triggered. He sought help and found a unique way to heal himself—repairing the headstones and tending the gravesites of fallen heroes, soldiers, and others whose resting places had fallen into disrepair and whose remarkable lives had been forgotten to the mists of time.
Cold Case Western Australia
Now he devotes a portion of his life every year to travel across the country, visiting different graveyards and cemeteries to help maintain these resting places. Bobby shares stories of discovered heroes via social media at “Our Heroes' Headstones.”
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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When he started playing video game “Red Dead Redemption 2”, (which has sold over 64 million copies) Professor Tore Olsson from the University of Tennessee was inspired to use the game's setting in the American West to inspire his students and provoke a conversation about the real history of this romanticized era. And his curriculum has been a wild success.
Tore explains how even though the game isn’t perfectly historically accurate, it does raise themes and ideas that are critical to a real understanding of a critical period in American history.
Cold Case Western Australia
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Previous HBH guests, private security contractors Dean and Alana Stott are back—this time reporting on their work last October, after the terrorist attacks in Israel. Charged with helping Americans and others get their loved ones home, Dean describes arriving in Israel for the first time ever, and how they navigated operating on the ground in a country in crisis—solving for airline cancellations and price-gouging, and making local friends quickly to identify possible land routes out of Israel for fleeing foreigners.
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
Cold Case Western Australia
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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Three lives collide and transform in wartime: The Japanese fighter pilot, Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor; the U.S. pilot Jake DeShazer, who bombed Tokyo in retaliation and became a Japanese POW; and Peggy Covell, an American woman who felt compelled to help the Japanese-Americans interned in the U.S., despite her missionary family having been murdered by the Japanese military.
Cold Case Western Australia
Though the two men never met Peggy, her generosity of spirit inspired both of them, and they ultimately became lifelong friends both publicly decrying the morality of war. DeShazer went on to write a book about his experience as a POW who befriended his jailer, and his unexpected love for the Japanese people—which became a bestseller in that country. Fuchida also wrote two memoirs, “For That One Day” and “From Pearl Harbor to Calvary.” Martin Bennett shares this unbelievable true story, as detailed in his book, “Wounded Tiger.”
Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com
They're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
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