Hidden War, 2nd Edition: How Special Operations Game Wardens are Reclaiming America's Wildlands from the Drug Cartels

By Lt. John Nores, Jr. and Jack Carr

DANGER On Your Public Lands!

 

Death stalks America's wildlands. Indiscriminate destroyers of people, wildlife, and the environment, cartel marijuana growers will do anything to supply the black-market demand for weed. HIDDEN WAR, 2nd Edition, exposes this threat, give you a rare, inside glimpse into the operations of specially trained tactical teams with the California Department of Fish & Wildlife to infiltrate and take down these groups. 

In this updated and revised second edition of his popular 2019 book, Lt. John Nores, Jr., provides a sobering look at crimes against people and the environment on public lands as clandestine crime organizations and special forces game wardens go to war in a struggle that cuts across political ideologies about marijuana legalization. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caribou Media Group
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781959265061

Lt. John Nores, Jr.

Lt. John Nores, Jr. (ret) worked as a California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW) game warden and co-developed the Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) to combat cartels operating in California. He has appeared on Fox News, NBC, National Geograpic's "Wild Justice," and numerous podcasts, including Jack Carr's Danger Close and the Joe Rogan Experience. 

Book preview

COPYRIGHT

Copyright ©2022 Caribou Media Group, LLC

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio, television or the Internet.

Published by

Caribou Media Group, LLC

5600 W. Grande Market Drive, Suite 100

Appleton, WI 54913

Telephone: [phone]

ISBN-13: 978-1-951115-33-3

Design by Jeromy Boutwell

Cover by Gene Coo

Edited by Joe Shead

Printed in the United States of America

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DEDICATION

For my brothers on the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET). It is an honor to work with the most selfless, relentless, loyal, humble and dedicated team of special operators a man could ask for. Thanks for your constant fill-and-flow attitude and commitment to strengthening our thin green line.

PRAISE FOR HIDDEN WAR …

"Hidden War is a riveting expose’ of the egregious environmental catastrophe caused by drug cartels producing black-market marijuana. John Nores documents the unsung heroes who risk their lives to take on these well-armed, vicious groups."

LT.-COL. OLIVER NORTH

USMC (Ret.) Host of American Heroes on NRATV.Org

Hidden War chronicles the development of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET). Most people have no idea why game wardens are involved in this battle to save the environment, but once you read about these encounters you will realize the total devastation to habitat and wildlife associated with illegal marijuana grows. Wildlife officers are uniquely qualified to work in this remote environment, and Lt. Nores details the dangers, excitement and rewards that go with the job.

MICHAEL P. CARION

Retired Chief, California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife — Law Enforcement Division

Gripping and gritty, Hidden War is a real-life thrill ride. Nores captures the dangers our wildlife law enforcement officials face every day. A compelling must-read on a persistent headline topic."

BRIG.-GEN. ANTHONY J. TATA

U.S. Army (Ret.) National bestselling author of Dark Winter

"I had the pleasure of meeting Lt. Nores and his team during the filming of our documentaries; Reclamation: The Battle for Terra Firma and War in the Woods. Our team followed these professionals into America’s backcountry and saw firsthand the carnage and devastation inflicted upon nature, wildlife and waterways by those involved in the illegal drug trade. Nores and his team of elite tactical operators dedicate their lives to public safety and the preservation of our most precious resources on a daily basis. Hidden War is masterfully written by a decorated thin green line warrior who has risked much to lead others under the most difficult circumstances and austere environments."

RICK STEWART

Host and Executive Producer Patriot Profiles: Life of Duty and American Patriots: Unsung Heroes Magazine

In the tradition of such courageous and legendary muckrakers as Upton Sinclair and Rachel Carson, Lt. John Nores exposes the story of illegal marijuana cultivation by the powerful drug cartels and the catastrophic effects they have on the environment. This gripping and incredibly researched page-turner is a must read for anyone concerned about the survival of our planet.

TOM GREENE

Writer, Producer, Director and Sportsman Thunder in Paradise, Swamp Thing, and Magnum PI

From the mist-laden haze of the Great Smokies to the Ozarks of the heartland, from remote reaches of New England to California, illegal cannabis cultivation has reached epidemic proportions. That’s a travesty, a threat to the natural world we hold sacred and a mind-boggling intrusion into our country by drug cartels. In this carefully documented and well-written book, we get a microcosmic view of this appalling situation as it exists in California and what the ‘thin green line’ of wildlands law enforcement is doing to combat it. For those who care about the good Earth and harbor deep respect for the legacy of icons such as Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, this book is at once a clarion call for continued action and an eye-opening must-read.

JIM CASADA, Ph.D.

Editor at Large Sporting Classics Magazine

"If you think we aren’t facing real, serious, threats to our natural resources from illicit drugs and human trafficking, you need to read Hidden War. It reads like the mission debrief from an action adventure novel, but it’s not. Hidden War is the real, first-person story of battles being fought every day to save our wildlands from the ravages of criminals who don’t give a damn about the land, the animals … or us."

JIM SHEPHERD

Publisher/Founder The Outdoor Wire

"This is a fascinating look at a world the vast majority of people don’t even know exists. For most who fish, hunt or recreate in the outdoors, game wardens are the ones who check licenses or issue a tag to someone who keeps a fish or two over the limit. But when vicious criminals steal and destroy public land and outdoor resources, game wardens are on the front lines, putting themselves in danger to protect the public. Hidden War is a compelling, exciting, and interesting look at the great people who do a very difficult job."

JEFF DAVIS

Editor Whitetails Unlimited Magazine

I read books and scripts for a living and Hidden War is a must read. Hidden War tells the amazing and unknown story of a group of special operation game wardens and their never-ending war with the international drug cartels in California. This small elite team of earth warriors is up against an estimated eight to ten thousand cartel members, traffickers, and criminals. Not only do they take the fight to these bad guys, they protect California’s wildlands and wildlife assets and prevent poisoned cannabis from hitting the national black market. Besides protecting the earth, water, and wildlife when taking down these violent criminals, they reclaim and restore the environmental damage done during these illegal activities. You’ll find yourself unable to put the book down as you root for the good guys protecting what America holds dear."

DAVID SALZBERG

CEO and award-winning director and producer Strong Eagle Media

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PRAISE FOR HIDDEN WAR …

FOREWORD

BY JACK CARR

INTRODUCTION

THE HIDDEN WAR…THREE YEARS LATER BY LT. JOHN NORES, JR. [RET]

CHAPTER 1

CARTEL KINGPIN IN SILICON VALLEY: 15 YEARS TO JUSTICE

CHAPTER 2

MISSION CROY ROAD: GUNMEN, K9 PHEBE AND A PACK MULE NAMED STANLEY

CHAPTER 3

GUNFIGHT ON BODFISH CREEK: ALONE AND OUTGUNNED

CHAPTER 4

CDFW’S MET: AMERICA’S FIRST CONSERVATION OFFICER SPECIAL OPERATIONS MARIJUANA ENFORCEMENT TEAM

CHAPTER 5

MISSION EL DIABLO: DEADLY POISONS AND IMPACTS ON THE SAN JOAQUIN RIVER

CHAPTER 6

DELTA TEAM: CDFW’S FIRST SNIPER ELEMENT HITS THE GROUND RUNNING

CHAPTER 7

LIBERTY ISLAND: K9 OPS AND PATRON SAINTS ON THE SACRAMENTO DELTA

CHAPTER 8

THE WILD WEST: ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION IN THE SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS

CHAPTER 9

GUNFIGHT TWO ON SIERRA AZUL: DÉJÀ VU 11 YEARS LATER

CHAPTER 10

CANNABIS REGULATION: ENFORCEMENT CHALLENGES BEYOND LEGALIZATION

AFTERWORD

THE SCARCITY OF LAW ENFORCEMENT ON OUR NATION’S WILDLANDS

ADDENDUMS

GAME WARDEN FAQ

ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF ILLEGAL MARIJUANA CULTIVATION

NEWS RELEASE K9 PHEBE

LEGISLATIVE RESOLUTION HONORING K9 PHEBE AND THE MET

A NOTE FROM MIKE RITLAND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

BY JACK CARR

The Thin Green Line

Whether through television or smartphone, we see police officers, firefighters, and other first responders answering emergency calls daily as they hold the line between civilization and barbarism.

If it bleeds, it leads has been a popular aphorism in the news business for over a century. Attributed to William Randolph Hearst in the 1890s, the phrase was an observation as much as a directive. The more gruesome the event and the more eyecatching the headline, the more apt someone was to purchase that newspaper. Over one hundred years later, we are constantly bombarded with those types of headlines, not as we walk past a newsstand but through a vibration in our pocket; a news alert telling us that something terrible has happened and we need to click for additional details. Those inputs inundate us with one disaster and calamity after another in the form of fires, robberies, riots, kidnappings, and murders, designed to elicit a response, an action, or influence behaviors or thoughts. Even if you consciously try to silence your phone, there are still televisions at hospitals, airports, and bars, news on the radio, podcast discussions, and more traditional magazines and newspapers.

Behind those headlines will be photos of the event in question. In the background of many of these photos, we see police cars, fire engines and ambulances. Those images reinforce the notion that there are always those whose job is to rush to the rescue in a civilized society. Hearing a siren scream past tells us, even subconsciously, that men and women are standing at the ready, trained and willing to put themselves at risk to save lives. They race to the site of a car crash, into a burning building, or to the home of someone who has just dialed 9-1-1. We know they are out there and will come running in an emergency.

We consume information in various forms, the most prominent of which may be in your pocket or charging on your nightstand as you read this. Though, for the most part, the medium has shifted from a newspaper to a smartphone, Hearst’s adage remains firmly in place: If it bleeds, it leads. While we are distracted by this barrage of seemingly endless inputs, there is a group of people serving not just the citizens of the United States but the land and the animals that inhabit it. They are not firefighters or police office officers, or first responders, as most would understand those professions, but they are like all those and more. They are game wardens, and though they may go by different officially designated titles varying by state, one thing remains true and constant; they are nature’s first line of defense. They enforce the laws that protect the land and the wildlife that thrives there. They are protectors.

Typically, these men and women work alone, without backup, out of four-wheel drive vehicles, on horseback, from boats, bush planes, ATVs, snowmobiles, or on foot deep in the backcountry. They are on the job at all hours of the day and night, rain or shine. They are self-reliant, highly skilled and dedicated. They are tasked with responsibilities ranging from hunter education to search and rescue to criminal law. Over the past few decades, their responsibilities have shifted. No longer are the most dangerous parts of the job relegated to arresting poachers or issuing citations to errant hunters or fishermen. A new threat has emerged in our nation’s wildlands from south of the border: drug cartels.

Cartel activity on public and private land has emerged as a threat not just to hikers, backpackers and rural community neighbors who might inadvertently stumble across a grow surrounded by booby-traps and armed guards and not only to the game wardens charged with finding and investigating these sites but to the wild animals that live there. Cartel grow sites are not the eco-friendly greenhouses you may have seen profiled on news programs about the emerging legal or quasi-legal cannabis industry. These are illegal grows, guarded by criminals with rifles and shotguns, using highly toxic and banned poisons and fertilizers such as the EPA-banned Metafos. These poisons do not discriminate, killing everything from rabbits to deer to mountain lions, seeping into the soil and the streams and creeks the growers use to irrigate their plants. That poison kills trout and steelhead as these chemicals wash downstream into water utilized by unsuspecting citizens. It also remains in the marijuana sold to those thinking they are buying an organic, natural high.

The threat to game wardens raiding the cartel grows does not end when the perpetrators have been apprehended. That grow site is an environmental disaster requiring cleanup. Who bears the responsibility for that task? The same game wardens who risked their lives raiding the site. They suit up and begin reclamation operations to clean up the area to reverse the environmental damage — a mission that can be even more dangerous than apprehending the growers.

John Nores led the charge to update the outdated tactics, techniques, procedures, training, and weapons used by game wardens in their fight against cartels in the backcountry. He adapted to a changing operational landscape, developing tactical teams with specially trained sniper elements.

The following pages give you a look into that world that is growing more dangerous with each passing day.

Nores’s gateway to the outdoors was through his father. After his dad’s passing, he carved an inscription into a wood memorial. His dad was fond of reciting a phrase when they were in the wilderness together on the hunt: The woods are my church.

The woods have been John’s church since he first ventured afield with his father all those years ago. Those words have guided him in his mission to protect and preserve the wild places of this great nation for future generations to enjoy, and though he doesn’t wear the badge on a uniform any longer, he is still on the frontlines.

You might not think of them every day, as they operate far from the urban centers that tend to garner the spotlight in the news alerts in our smartphone feeds. And though they rarely grab attention with sensational headlines, they are out there every day for all of us, fighting a Hidden War.

Thank you to all the game wardens who hold the Thin Green Line.

Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL Sniper, host of the Danger Close podcast, and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List.

Laura Nores’ hand-carved wilderness memorial for John Nores Sr. – The woods are my church.

INTRODUCTION

THE HIDDEN WAR… THREE YEARS LATER

BY LT. JOHN NORES JR. [RET]

Just over three years have passed since the first printing of Hidden War dropped worldwide. The nationwide public safety and environmental crime threats engendered by worldwide Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) that I describe from our first six years of Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) operations in this book have not waned. Instead, they’ve intensified throughout the most divided, unstable, and unrecognizable America I have seen during my 54 years.

I wrote the first edition of Hidden War as a California example of the cartel’s impacts on public safety and environmental resource destruction nationwide. Because I was so many years from operational retirement when my first book (War in the Woods) was published, I never had the opportunity to network or speak on the topic east of the Rockies, so most readers concluded that the drug cartel threat was a California problem that did not impact the rest of the country. Having that book drop before podcasts and social media platforms were available to a much wider national audience did not help our message. Fortunately, the gloves were off when Hidden War was published in 2019 as high-reach podcast influencers and other social media platforms began to explode.

Timely and fortuitous for the Hidden War project, my friend and American Zealot cinematographer Dennis Azato catalyzed having Colonel Oliver North review the manuscript. While Colonel North’s patriotism and concern for national security and safety are common knowledge, only those closest to him know him as a staunch wildlife conservationist.

I was honored and grateful that Col. North reviewed Hidden War, was compelled by our story and endorsed and promoted the book from the beginning. Since the Colonel was president of the National Rifle Association at the time, we debuted the book within days of publication in Indianapolis, Indiana at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in 2019 to an incredibly supportive group of Americans.

Given how pervasive yet camouflaged and understated our domestic cartel crime fight remains today, readers quickly related to why we call this issue our nation’s hidden war — as responses of outrage and frustration from so many within America’s heartland began to spread.

After leaving Indianapolis, the Hidden War road show continued gaining public concern throughout the country at worldwide trade shows (SHOT, SCI, NAWEOA, BLADE Show) and numerous podcasts, including Mike Ritland’s Mike Drop, Steven Rinella’s Meateater, Mike Glover’s Fieldcraft Survival, Andy Stump’s Cleared Hot, Jack Carr’s Danger Close, Clint Emerson’s Can You Survive This Podcast and the Joe Rogan Experience.

When Joe Rogan declared to his large and diverse audience that he, too, was part of our nation’s important and fragile thin green line of wildlife conservation and resource protection, I was honored. His new awareness of the professionalism, dangers, diversity, and challenges game wardens face across the nation, and his outrage at the gross pay inequity game wardens face compared to other law enforcement officers nationwide, were validating and appreciated.

With most of 2019 dedicated to Hidden War outreach and education operations throughout the U.S., it was exciting to start our Recoil TV channel Thin Green Line film series in February 2020. The series pilot was filmed just north of Candelaria, Texas along the banks of the Rio Grande and just across the small, cartel-influenced Mexican town of San Antonio Del Bravo. We were filming a conservation hunt for mature Aoudad rams, while also covering the ethics of long-range hunting, extreme long-range shooting, and cartel threats and impacts on our southern border, specifically their presence and activity through the pristine 55,000-acre Texas ranch we were hunting.

Up to this point, I was aware of and reported on cartel activity trends throughout the U.S. but had only experienced these impacts directly in hundreds of arrests, eradication, and environmental reclamation missions throughout California with our MET. Ironically, long-time MET teammate Markos and I were now hunting within one of the widest open and unprotected southern border regions within the U.S. at ground zero for cartel-run human and drug smuggling operations. This time, however, I was part of a civilian conservation outreach film team.

During that production, we explored some of the most beautiful and remote canyon country and wildlife within Texas, evaluated our extreme long-range shooting abilities to make hits on steel targets at over 2,300 yards. We were also there to hunt, and harvested two magnificent rams. But most importantly to Hidden War awareness, we also encountered cartel-trafficking teams smuggling people, tainted cannabis, and other narcotics through the ranch while our team was afield.

During production, we were also made aware that one of our young outfitters had been near fatally shot during a gunfight with cartel gunmen while trying to defend the ranch house from takeover. Our fireside film interview with his father was gut-wrenching and, while our friend survived that encounter, the unremovable bullet fragments lodged behind his heart are constant reminders of the dangers many Americans face daily along our southern border.

We wrapped