In this episode of Slave Stealer, Tim Ballard and Mark Mabry talk about the first trip to Colombia that did not go according to plan. Despite this setback, which is portrayed in "The Abolitionists" - coming to theaters Monday May 16th - the team goes back to rescue those kids...and saves even more of them. Tim also explains how the film addresses the misconceptions that people might have about the legality of O.U.R's operations, and he also discredits false claims that others in the anti-trafficking community have made about the organization.     Tim: Welcome, welcome, one and all, to Slave Stealer Podcast. This is Tim Ballard here with Mark Mabry. Mark:         And today is a special day. We are ramping up for the release of "The Abolitionists." "The Abolitionists" is a documentary film executive produced by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Gerald Molen who did things like "Jurassic Park," "Minority Report," "Rainman" and "Schindler's List." He teamed up with FletChet Entertainment, Chet and Fletch, who are brilliant producers who have given themselves to this thing. And they said, "Tim, we heard your story. We want to follow you." He said, "That's great... I can't have a camera crew following me around." They said, "Nobody will notice we're doing it," and that has been the case. So, that movie is coming out May 16th in over 600 theaters across the nation, and we're super pumped because that will exponentially increase the amount of people who give a damn about child trafficking. And that is what we want. Now, what I wanted to ask Tim about today - we'll get more into the movie later - but what I wanted to talk about is the first mission because this thing, it starts out and you're craving this moment of joy right off the bat. And we run into a failed mission and I want to know more about the failed mission, some back story for people that go see the documentary and they're like, "Ok, that was painful." Talk to me about Operation Genesis and why it's relevant to your success today. Tim:           Yeah, it's... You know there's...it's an important story. It's an important story. It's our first operation. It's really the first time we're going in, and there's a lot of pressure on us, right? I mean, people have donated money believing that we can actually rescue kids. Now that's a lot of pressure. Now that we've rescued hundreds and hundreds of kids - possibly thousands if you consider the fact that we have close to 200 people in jail because of our operations - it's easy. We can take a breath and say, "See? We're doing it.  Help us." But in the beginning, right, it's stressful. And we only have enough money as an organization to do a couple of ops. These operations have to be successful or we're done. We're out of business. We're not going to get another chance. So, we go in there, we do everything by the book. We sit down... And this highlights an issue. Our government's ready to rescue kids. Five years ago, Operation Underground Railroad, I don't believe, would even work because the governments that we're working in weren't ready to rescue kids. They didn't have laws in place. And I truly do credit the Trafficking in Persons report for pressuring governments to create legislation to combat this problem. Mark:         That was George W. Bush, correct? Tim:           George W. Bush signed it and Congress created it...and the U.N. and other organizations bringing it to light as well, making it an issue. And countries have just recently - really in the last couple of years - created the proper legislation.                           So here we are in Colombia, testing their laws for the first time. They made the laws, but now it's like, how do you enforce it? So they're nervous. They're nervous and they invited us down. They set the date and here we go. We find the bad guys, we engage the bad guys, they show us the kids, we meet them on the beaches of Cartagena. We've got five, at least five, bad guys. We've got over 20 kids, we'