“Narco HELL!” - Hunting Cartels: Occults, Mass Graves & Spiking Heads | 391
Julian Dorey · 3 Mar 2026 · 2h 30m
Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
This conversation traces the winding path of a man who went from a chaotic childhood, crab fishing in the Bering Sea, and an aborted plan to hunt al-Qaeda operatives from Russia, to becoming a bodyguard and tactical operator for a Mexican state general fighting drug cartels in Zacatecas. He describes losing custody of his daughter in Russia as the emotional catalyst for quitting a well-paid aerospace manufacturing job and talking his way into Mexican law enforcement, first as a martial arts instructor and eventually as part of an elite escort unit trained by former special forces. He lays out the fractured structure of Mexican law enforcement and military branches, the constant proximity to corruption and cartel infiltration, and firsthand accounts of gunfights, a mass grave discovery, and being offered a route into cartel work himself. He also recounts finding a family member tortured to death inside the house he now lives in. Later the conversation turns to policy: he argues that decades of prohibition and militarized crackdowns have failed, that killing kingpins like El Chapo creates dangerous power vacuums, and that economic and educational investment is a more realistic long-term approach than drone strikes or invasion, while acknowledging skepticism about whether cartels could ever be persuaded to go legitimate. The episode closes with a lighter exchange about him waterboarding himself at home to test a claim made in another podcast.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Background: sobriety and plan to hunt al-Qaeda
- Learning Russian, life in Bashkortostan
- Losing his daughter, divorce, and custody fight
- Quitting manufacturing job to pursue Mexico
- Structure of Mexican law enforcement and military branches
- Getting hired by a Mexican general, training with Delta-trained instructors
- Cartel omnipresence and being approached to work for cartels
- Discovering a mass grave in Valparaiso
- Firefights, getting shot, and gear details
- Debate on drug legalization, cartel economics, and a 50-year plan
- Waterboarding himself to test another podcast's claim
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“When you realize that the cartel is so omnipresent, no matter who you are, if you're not willing to capitulate, you will right. I worked for the secretary of public security and the entire time I was hunting cartels in Mexico, several of my brothers have been murdered.”
“There's body parts sticking out of the ground. This is when I started realizing what Mexico was about.”