Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

by Daniel Hopsicker
© MadCow Productions, Inc. 
All Rights Reserved

Posted March 28, 1998

A MadCow staffer has been unearthing a major drug scandal in Florida for the past month, and one thing we can say with certainty: the Southeast provides scandal pastureland we could chew on for years.

While delving into FBI Special Agent Terry Nelson for an upcoming Vanity Fair expose called "Gangsters," we’ve been using Chip Tatum, who has proven a reliable source of verifiable information in our investigation.

But there’s been a toll. Here’s an except from a letter we just received:

Several weeks ago Chip Tatum spoke on a West Miami radio talk show. Afterwards, in retaliation, a well-dressedman in sunglasses and an Armani suit made death threats directed at the talk show host and station personnel. A topic discussed on the talk show was the involvement of FBI agent Terry Nelson and drug trafficking activities from Canada to Montana. (Orlin Grabbe has a copy of an interview involving Tatum earlier this month posted on his webpage)

Also during the last few weeks Chip Tatum is believed to have provided key leads and contacts supporting research for an article, widely circulated on the internet, "Miami Vice, Montana Blues" which also implicates agent Nelson in drug trafficking.

That’s our piece, "Miami Vice, Montana Blues." It was posted a tad prematurely so we’re publishing it as another exclusive from The DrugMoney Times.

So, silenced just this week: Tatum has lost his website, the Blackops Reporter. Personable talk radio host Jim Alsis in Palm Beach has been silenced by death threats. And in our inimitable MadCow way, we have allegedly just been responsible for the cancellation of the talk radio show "Ghostriders," which left the air within minutes of announcing our upcoming appearance. From their subsequent press release:

Minutes before the Ghost Rider "derailment", hosts had announced that Daniel Hopsicker would be a guest on tomorrow night's show. Hopsicker is the producer of an explosive two-hour video entitled, "Conspiracy: the Secret History; Episode One: The Secret Heartbeat of America". This important video documentary asks the question, "How will YOU feel when you DISCOVER that the biggest drug smuggler in the country...is the country?" and now can be ordered through MOM (406-847-2735). Was this guest one of the reasons "Ghost Riders" was censored? You betcha. For those satellite listeners out there, you can still catch the interview with producer Daniel Hopsicker at 11 pm (e.s.t.) tonight (March 24th). Please tune in.

And they were kind enough to drop us a note as well: 

Approximately three minutes after John and Keith announced that you would be on the show tomorrow night discussing CIA black opps, the radio station, WGTG, broadcasting out of N.E. Georgia, "pulled the plug" on the show. We did not realize it until Keith got a caller telling him that the radio station had substituted music...Mel Torme's "Come Fly Away." Shortly there after, the station manager called and instructed the engineer that the show was officially cancelled.

Keith was expressly concerned about your safety last night. Made an open announcement that nothing better happen to Daniel Hopsicker because whatever intel he has, he is already sharing it with six other secret points. We trust that this will help alleviate some of the focus and pressure on you so you can effectively do your continuing investigation.

Pressure? What pressure? Mel Torme, he’s the one should be feeling pressure!

So here-- before anything else goes off the air—is a preview from a larger story we’re writing, an interview we recently did with Mr. Alsis during his unpleasantness.

 an excerpt from Gangsters

Here’s where we are now: I’ve just put down the phone after an unsettling conversation with a seriously-shaken talk radio host in West Palm Beach, Florida, who begins by saying: "I’m not going to do the story anymore, okay? I’m mentioning it every time I make a phone call—because I know they’re tapping my phone, cause I can hear the clicking sounds, okay? I’ve sworn off the story."

The talk host, Jim Alsis, has a program on Florida radio station WPBR-AM 1340, reaching an influential audience in the tony precincts of Boca Raton and Palm Beach. He is also the county chairman of the Libertarian Party--a party normally known more for boring tax proposals than for having wild-eyed party officials shakily testifying that they’ve just had their lives threatened twice in one week.

"What’s ‘the story’ Jim?" we asked, fearing the answer.

"Cocaine, the CIA. George Bush, and Bill Clinton," he stated succinctly.

Jim’s apparent mistake, he tells us, has been to conduct an on-air 2-hour interview with a former American intelligence officer named Chip Tatum, a man now fallen into disfavor with his former bosses, and currently taken to vocalizing to all and sundry about his knowledge of Montana smuggling activity dating back to the late 1980’s and involving Miami FBI Agent Terry Nelson and... well, Jim really did say it best: cocaine, the CIA, George Bush, and Bill Clinton.

It’s the same story I’ve been pursuing for what has been--very easily-- the longest year of my life, since producing a 2-hour TV special, "The Secret Heartbeat of America." We hadn’t set out to do "the story"-- we weren’t even aware of it then—but merely to do a 12-minute feature piece on what’s come to be known as "The Train Deaths:" two 17-year old high school seniors who’d stumbled onto a ‘drug drop’ on a sultry August midnight in Arkansas in 1987.

Here’s how naive we were: the first time we heard the phrase "drug drop," we didn’t know what it meant.

And though The Train Deaths are called "America’s most famous Unsolved Mystery," the only mystery to us today is how the killers of the boys still manage to elude justice.

The boys’ brutal murders and their subsequent cover-up have been featured twice on Unsolved Mysteries, as well as on newsmagazine shows from NBC’s Dateline to the UK’s version of 60 Minutes, "The Big Story." The drug drop they stumbled on has led reporters and investigators, in a process as slow and inexorable as Greek Tragedy, to the goings-on in Mena, Arkansas, where Oliver North’s Enterprise was headquartered.

So even if you’re a reporter uncomfortable with a second career as a "conspiracy theorist," the story of The Train Deaths almost immediately catapults one into the murkier precincts of official government (read CIA) complicity (read control) of the importation of illicit cocaine and heroin into this country. Or, put more succinctly:

Cocaine. The CIA. George Bush. And Bill Clinton.

But we’re not quite done with poor Jim Alsis yet. To understand the importance of later revelations in our tale, experience, first, just a little of the full weight of Mr. Alsis’s fear:

"At ten p.m. last Monday night a well-dressed man pulled up to the back of the radio station in a dark green Cadillac, asking for me," he explains. " My producer told him I wasn’t there, whereupon he stated calmly, ‘Tell him to shut up or we’re going to kill him.’ Then he got in his car and slowly drove off."

"When he reappeared a second time last week—the same week I had you on the show," he tells me, "I knew we were dealing with an entity that means business. An outfit that can afford to send a guy dressed in a $1000 Armani suit, with an even-tempered tone and manner, and a Cadillac with no tags, is not an outfit I can afford to be trifling with," he said sadly.

"Right now, as I speak to you, I’ve got a dog at my feet, a gun within arms’ reach, and a cell phone with me wherever I go. And I’ve had four or five friends acting as bodyguards in 24-hour a day shifts... but I can’t live like this forever."

Alsis has seen his share of the normal harassment most controversial talk radio hosts encounter. But this, he says, is different.

"I’ve had run-ins with penny-ante drug dealers before; this isn’t like that. This reminds me of people responsible for the deaths of Jerry Parks, and of Vince Foster. These are the kinds of things that should be investigated... in the country that America used to be."

His voice trails off. "I’m beginning to believe that we’ve become the world’s first narco-democracy without banana trees."

I try to lighten the mood by telling him that we do, too, have banana trees. But his voice doesn’t change.

"Whatever," he says a trifle sourly, and I think to myself: who can blame him for being inconsolable?

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