S1E27 Prisoner Ex

THE BLURB: Having been a prisoner despite not deserving that fate, John is extremely interested in others similarly incarcerated. To that end, back before the 2024 election, we put together an episode of a podcast called "Prisoner Ex" where we told the story of Donnie Reynolds, Jr, a young, ambitious Black entrepreneur who got swept up in the US government's failed attempt to catch and prosecute Mexican drug cartel leaders by supplying them with GPS-carrying firearms. Donnie and his whole family were law-abiding citizens going about their business before the DoJ's so-called "Operation Fast and Furious" forced itself into their homes and lives. SHOW NOTES If you want to help Donnie Reynolds, Jr (and we urge you to join us in helping him), please send him a letter telling him you support him. Please address the enverlope this way: Donald Ray Reynolds, Jr Prisoner Number 32349-074, FCI Cumberland 14601 Burbridge Road SE Cumberland, MD 21502 For more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 0:43John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. As always, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for checking us out. There are a lot of great podcasts out there. We know. We're huge fans of them too. That you've chosen to spend your valuable time with ours means the world to us. And thank you for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast wherever you're catching it. Those things especially have put a thermal under our wings. So thank you for helping us soar. Back on Earth, we're hard at work readying the launch of season two of Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Turned Federal Prisoner Tick. While we work on that, we wanted to share with you an episode of a podcast that we made a little while ago

• 1:27John Kiriakou?

  as part of a series we were developing called Prisoner X. Prisoner X was, it still is, about forgotten people who are imprisoned here in America and around the world, but who shouldn't be. That's shouldn't be forgotten or imprisoned. The podcast's mission, tell these stories in order to help make these prisoners ex-prisoners. We worked on this podcast in 2024, but after the election and the way Washington's politics swung, we decided to stick a pin in Prisoner X. Well, time has come to reexamine that pin. That's in part because the politics in DC seem to be shifting again, and podcasting has grown considerably in its power and influence even in this brief time. In a world where the truth itself is under constant threat,

• 2:12John Kiriakou?

  people are seeking honest, clear, trustworthy voices. Podcasting is providing them. In an environment like that, a podcast like Prisoner X might actually help get some of the people whose stories we want to tell a legitimate shot at getting their freedom. One of the stories we worked on is about a man named Donnie Reynolds Jr., a bright, talented, ambitious, young black entrepreneur who got swept up in the American government's Fast and Furious scandal. That was 25 years ago. And he's still a prisoner of that scandal's corrupt aftermath today. If anyone deserves to be an ex-prisoner, it's Donnie Reynolds Jr. One could almost get nostalgic for the kind of corruption represented by the Fast and Furious scandal. It was truly terrible.

• 2:57John Kiriakou?

  But perversely, it pales in comparison to the corruption happening every day right now. That doesn't reflect well on us. Originally called Project Gun Runner, Operation Fast and Furious got renamed after agents discovered that several of the chief suspects in the case were all members of a car club. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the ATF, ran Operation Fast and Furious from 2009 to 2011. The operation was designed, so to speak, if we torture that word a little, to purchase and deliver firearms directly to Mexican drug cartels. The point was to track every single one of those incredibly dangerous weapons

• 3:40John Kiriakou?

  using GPS devices secreted inside the firearms. Perhaps in some pie-in-the-sky world, that idea penciled out better. But here in reality, nothing went as planned. The GPS equipment, likely purchased from the lowest bidder, was inadequate. The batteries inside the GPS lasted only a few days at best, and the tracker signals were notoriously weak. And heaven forbid somebody put the object being tracked inside a car's trunk. Then the signal would just completely vanish. This lack of technical sophistication, and I'm being kind, and the utter failure of the purchased GPS system as a tracker totally doomed Fast and Furious. From the jump, of the 2,000 firearms put into play by the FBI, only about 700 were

• 4:25John Kiriakou?

  ever recovered. While a number of straw purchasers have been arrested and indicted, none, not one, of the targeted high-level cartel figures was ever prosecuted or even arrested. It's quite a story. That's still happening to Donnie Reynolds Jr., and we're truly happy to finally put Donnie's story out to the world. So without any further ado, here is Prisoner X. Hi, I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Prisoner X, the podcast dedicated to helping turn prisoners who shouldn't be into ex-prisoners. Sometimes people in power signal how afraid they are via their actions.

• 5:09John Kiriakou?

  They do things that defy explanation and logic and human decency. That's what people in power have done to my friend Donald Reynolds Jr. In November 2007, Donnie was 29. He was a successful, young, black entrepreneur who owned and ran several different businesses. He bought and sold old cars. He was in the music business, live events, and he bought and sold antique weapons, all very legally. In fact, Donnie was one of a small group of African-Americans to have something called Class III federal stamps. Having and keeping those stamps meant Donnie could keep silenced, fully automatic firearms, in other words, machine guns.

• 5:52John Kiriakou?

  In order to have and keep those stamps, Donnie passed an extensive, multi-federal-agency background check. The federal government knew about every weapon Donnie owned. In fact, those weapons all sat in a federal database that allowed federal agents to browse such weapons as if they were shopping on Amazon. Stick a pin in that database, we will come back to it. Donnie Reynolds kept his records spotless in order to maintain those stamps. As Donnie himself put it, "They knew I was 100% legitimate." So was the rest of Donnie's family. His dad, Donald Senior, worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 40 years in security. He served for two years in the Army.

• 6:34John Kiriakou?

  His wife Janice, Donnie's mother, also did national service. The Reynolds were a respectable, respectful family. They were the kind of Americans we want all our kids to be. And yet...

• 6:48John Kiriakou?

  On June 19, 2008, federal agents led by IRS Agent Brian Grove and Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Plowell, along with local Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department, swarmed Donnie's home looking for drugs. They were sure they'd find a mother lode. They invaded Donnie's parents' house, too, and turned it upside down. Grove and Plowell didn't find any of the evidence they insisted they'd find, but that wasn't the beginning of it. As you'll soon hear, not only is it unacceptable that Donnie Reynolds Jr. sits in prison, the prison he's in is even more unacceptable. For the past decade, Donnie Reynolds Jr. has been held at the Communications Management

• 7:33John Kiriakou?

  Unit, or CMU, in Terre Haute, Indiana. Created by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2006 as part of the George W. Bush Administration's counterterrorism framework and shrouded in secrecy, these prisons are meant to isolate and segregate certain prisoners from the rest of the federal prison population. These are supposed to be the hardest of the hardcore. Think El Chapo, John Gotti. Currently, there are two CMUs for men and another for women. Donnie is being held at the CMU in Terre Haute. Strangely, that's also the location of the federal prison system's death row. Donnie being at that CMU makes telling his story

• 8:18John Kiriakou?

  especially tricky, but then, that is the point. Inbound communication is severely restricted, so's outbound communication. Prisoners get two 15-minute phone calls a week, unless the people running Terre Haute change their minds. Mail moves at a Pony Express-like pace, explanations for why or for pretty much anything else are few and far between. That we can tell Donnie's story at all is a testament to the fearlessness and tenacity of several individuals who defiantly resisted these attempts to crush Donnie and themselves. For four years, Marty Gottesfeld was also an inmate at the CMU in Terre Haute alongside

• 9:01John Kiriakou?

  Donnie. Now free, but not entirely free to speak, Marty became a kind of legal eagle while at Terre Haute. One of the people whose causes Marty embraced was Donnie Junior's. As for Marty and what he was doing at Terre Haute. In 2014, Marty, who associated himself with the decentralized hacktivist group Anonymous, shut down the Boston Children's Hospital's website and its ability to fundraise. Marty was protesting the care of a patient named Christine Pelletier, a teenager at the center of a high-profile custody battle. Marty's actions cost the hospital tens of thousands of dollars and disrupted operations for days,

• 9:44John Kiriakou?

  but no patients were directly impacted by the shutdown.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  I've been in computer technology since a very young age. My dad was a Apollo program rocket scientist, computer programmer, taught me to code on his knee when I was three years old. I wrote my first program when I was five, sold my first program when I was 12, was a full-time engineer at a tech company at 18, working on network infrastructure and data security kind of topics. So I was intimately familiar with network and data security from the other side, from the defensive side. Before the attack, I was a data security coordinator at a Massachusetts biotech company, and I did business continuity, disaster recovery, planning for health and other organizations right up through the Fortune 500. So I knew what would and would not be a risk to human life,

• 10:31Speaker 03

  and my jury refused to convict me. The government charged me with impacting or potentially impacting the medical diagnosis, treatment, or care of one or more individuals, and the jury ultimately refused to convict me on that account. So they got me for just financial damage, but that was kind of the narrative the government used as a cudgel. You know, this guy risked children's lives. But at the end of the day, they failed to prove that to a jury in a courtroom where they had every advantage, where I wasn't even allowed to argue that I acted in the defense of another person's life. These two prosecutors, David Diaddio and Seth Costo, were unable to prove the ethical core of their case to a jury. When the Pelletier situation came to my attention,

• 11:12Speaker 03

  and it was obvious to me that this girl was going to die if something was not done, I figured I'd rather run the rapids than deal with my conscience if something happened to her and I knew that I could have done something and chose not to do so.

• 11:25John Kiriakou?

  Donnie Reynolds and his circumstances likewise became a focus of Marty's conscience once they met and became acquainted at Terre Haute. Once again, Marty saw an abuse of power and chose to do something about it.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  He had a total, I believe, of four companies. He was involved with trucking, he was involved with some high-end cars. So, it looks like, to me, that through the high-end car stuff, some of the original informants on Fast and Furious came to learn about Donnie and came to learn about his firearms permits. And this was around the time when they were looking for straw man purchasers for Fast and Furious.

• 12:08John Kiriakou?

  Operation Fast and Furious was originally known as the ATF Gun Walking Scandal. Back in 2006, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was under pressure because of its focus on arresting low-level dealers and sellers of unregistered or unlicensed guns. Many of those guns ended up in the hands of members of Mexican drug cartels. So, the pressure was on ATF to overlook those initial gun sales, and then track the movement of the guns up the chain of command to see where they ended up. That's what the Bureau did. They traced the guns' movement, but then didn't really do anything about it. Here are some of the details.

• 12:50John Kiriakou?

  Beginning in 2006, ATF agents in Arizona began allowing licensed gun dealers to make technically illegal sales to straw buyers, hoping to track the sales back to the cartels and then make high-level arrests. By 2011, after the sale of 2,000 guns, not a single cartel member had been arrested, and only 710 of the guns had been recovered. The rest were just missing. To make matters worse, several of the guns were found near the scene of the murder of a Border Patrol agent, and Congress was calling for heads to roll. Without any ability to get to the cartels, ATF and the Justice Department began focusing on the little guys again.

• 13:34John Kiriakou?

  By then, it was all about the Justice Department saving face. Dozens of arrests came out of Fast and Furious largely over the violation of three different gun sales laws and most of the sentences for those offenses were in the range of three years probation up to eight years in prison. By all accounts ATF agents hated the operation from the start. Their job after all is to interdict weapons, not to let them just walk into the arms of the cartels, but that was the order from the Justice Department. In the end, when everything fell apart, when Congress demanded answers, the department began looking for scapegoats. And if that scapegoat could take the fall for the murder of a federal agent, so much

• 14:18John Kiriakou?

  the better. And that is how Donnie Reynolds Jr. showed up on the Department of Justice's Fast and Furious radar.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is, the war on drugs is what made these cartels powerful. I think it was two Customs and Border Protection and one Border Patrol agent and untold numbers of civilians south of the border. And the Mexican government's still looking for answers. In terms of like how this all kind of happened, the Obama administration asserted executive privilege to quash a legislative subpoena from the House while the House was investigating the operation. Biden was potentially involved because he was there at the time in the Obama administration. You know, Donnie, if he gets his Brady material, his discovery material, potentially there are some very interesting answers in that material that Donnie's defense was owed before trial to talk about the credibility of some of these witnesses who testified or produced

• 15:09Speaker 03

  a trial to testify against him were some of the same names and same surnames that we see mentioned in some of the very limited Fast and Furious stuff that has since surfaced. And it looks like Donnie was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They needed people who would look authentic to the cartels as the people to pass off these weapons. And now you have Donnie, he's got to deal with Universal Records, right? He's an antique firearms collector. He's in the high-end cars, right? He's a great guy potentially for the Justice Department to try to put undercover to the cartels as the source for these weapons. He's got a great story, a great front that they would not have been able to build otherwise

• 15:53Speaker 03

  with a different person. But Donnie refuses to play ball and so they bury Donnie.

• 15:59John Kiriakou?

  Now, just a reminder. What Marty is saying is conjecture. We don't have notarized receipts that say this is what the Justice Department did. We just have the end result. An innocent man, a trial where Donnie Reynolds wasn't given the opportunity to defend himself adequately, and a sentence that defies explanation. Unless you factor in corruption. Let's dig into each of those end results and point to the corruption. First, Donny's innocence. Prior to this moment in his life, had Donnie Reynolds ever been in trouble? Or even been in trouble with his parents? Donny's dad, Donald Senior, is unequivocal.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  No, he was, he never gave us any problems at all in school or anything. In fact, he was an athlete and he did everything he could do to run the business.

• 16:51John Kiriakou?

  Marty got us filled.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  And I think they assumed, you know, black hip-hop mogul with guns, they were going to find drugs.

• 17:00John Kiriakou?

  Which they didn't. Funny thing, as these law enforcement officers tossed the Reynolds houses and violated their privacy and their rights, they did so without a search warrant. Oh, they had a search warrant with them. It just wasn't filled out. Or signed by a judge. Or legitimate, therefore. Donald Reynolds Senior.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  The search warrant wasn't signed by a judge. And later the search warrant was signed by a judge. They made the search warrant up at my kitchen table. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know much about that. But I would think that if you gave me a search warrant at my house, that search warrant would be the same as if I went to pick it up at the Fordhouse. A day or two later, I went to get a copy of the search warrant. My search warrant was different from the search warrant they had on file. I mentioned earlier, I was in the military and I grew up taught to respect authorities,

• 18:08Speaker 04

  the government and everything. And one of the things I did was went to the military. I was, I was really surprised that the government would use such tactics as, as gone. And I'm getting more surprised as, as, as time went along.

• 18:24John Kiriakou?

  Then there were Donnie Junior's guns, the ones the government knew would be there because they were all permitted and legal.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 19:10John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's

• 19:54John Kiriakou?

  a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.

• 20:24John Kiriakou?

  Because Donnie Jr. had kids, his parents had bought him a large, heavy gun safe. The law enforcement officers made Donnie Jr. open it for them. Donnie Jr.'s mother, Janice Reynolds.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  And when they found the gun, he had opened the safe. And they looked and they opened it up. All the certificates there. And they went and laid it into the garage where he kept them. He kept the safe because it was too big, get upstairs, kind of hard. It was really heavy. They put it on the ground, went through it, and they took whatever they want out of it. And they loved what he had. He had some, he had, he has seen it, I gave special, special color like gold to it and everything. And they fascinate all the, all the guns, you know? He's doing just like most American whites do it.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  And they move more than we do. And but he did it by law. He took the class and got it done. And he said he got the stamps and stuff. He was real proud of himself. Because it's, I think it was great for him to doing stuff he was trying to do. And show, uh, show people that everybody can live within the law and make a difference. And we worked hard for what we got.

• 21:48John Kiriakou?

  At trial, Donnie Jr.'s case was further complicated by a trial unusually biased in favor of law enforcement. Judge Dennis Inman had worked for the Knoxville Police Department. Marty Godisfeld.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Donnie's judge used to represent the Knoxville Police Department. The same police department that was part of the federal task force's house. Prior to that was a state level attorney who represented Knoxville Police Department. When they would get sued for police brutality. So his job was to cover the ass of the police department when the police department did bad things.

• 22:22John Kiriakou?

  Judge Dennis Inman refused to let Donnie tell the jury anything about his legitimate businesses, like the live music business, to explain why he had large amounts of cash on hand. Instead, the prosecution leaned on other witnesses, drug dealers and gun runners who'd also been caught up in the Fast and Furious investigation. Most of them were actual criminals who understood that when law enforcement wants to bury an innocent person like Donnie Reynolds, with your help, you help. Because putting Donnie Reynolds on the hook got them off the hook. The truth has no place in it. Donnie's case wasn't helped by his legal representation either.

• 23:05John Kiriakou?

  For a while, Donald Senior paid for the best lawyers he could afford, but they too seemed to think Donnie was guilty.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  I've paid the lawyers to do a job for me. I paid lawyers. And they told me at the time that they were experienced in the type of case that my son was doing. But yet, when the trial came, it was obvious to me that they didn't, hadn't done their homework and that they were collaborating with the government. I kept pushing the search warrant, and they did not want to go that route. So that, to me, was saying, okay, if you guys don't want to push the search warrant, you're not trying to help side of this case. Harrison and Schwartz, were they now?

• 23:56John Kiriakou?

  Why do you think it is that these lawyers, not just the ones that you've paid for, but, but a string of lawyers, have been either unwilling or unable to provide Donnie with documents from his trial, including transcripts? Now, these are, these are documents that should be freely available to the public. You go to the courthouse, you pay 25 cents a page or whatever it is, and they should give you copies of these documents. For some reason, these documents seem to either not exist, or they are not available to Donnie to try to, let's say, launch a, an appeal. Why is it that the people who are supposed to be on his side...

• 24:42John Kiriakou?

  Have been so unwilling to help.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  That's been a mystery to to us also. Uh, that cause we've been reaching out to people ever since this began. And the story remains the same that he is, for whatever reason, not able to to do that. I don't know. You can't. Yeah, we hadn't they hadn't told us. When this thing started, it just kept getting bigger and deeper and deeper. And as it as it progressed, we are where we are right now.

• 25:15John Kiriakou?

  It it did get bigger and bigger and bigger. And in part, it became bigger because Donnie would not flip. There was nobody to flip on. Right? We all we all believe he's innocent. They kept saying, well, we'll give you a deal if you flip. He didn't flip. And then the prosecution made a recommendation of something like fifteen years or twenty years. And then he gets essentially a life sentence. And in the federal system, there is no parole or probation. You you get fifteen percent off for good behavior, but fifteen percent off seventy five years. Big deal. Till be a hundred years old. How did that happen? And why do you think that happened?

• 25:59Speaker 04

  One, I'll tell you one thing that happened in the court. Uh, she mentioned the court. They, we didn't get to hear a lot. We weren't right up front with the testimony because they said she had said something to Donnie or something. And we had to go outside of the courtroom during part of the trial. And I think that was uh uh by design. Uh, so we couldn't hear and see, you know, the gestures and everything that was going on. And and that's one reason I can't answer your question to a point.

• 26:34John Kiriakou?

  Life plus 75 years. Why on earth did Donnie Reynolds, with no previous offenses of any kind, no record whatsoever, get such a staggeringly harsh prison sentence? Life plus 75 years.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, longer than El Chapo.

• 26:53John Kiriakou?

  Marty Goddard has felt.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  But they never found any drugs on Donnie and there's no accusation that he ever hurt anybody. He's more dangerous to them than El Chapo in some ways because he stands to implicate them. If his stuff comes out, people in power are going out of power, potentially going to prison. So they view Donnie as a bigger threat than El Chapo. And they're just desperately hoping that the whole thing doesn't bust open and all of the scandal come out because like Donnie's case is not the only case there that stands to implicate some very high up people.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  When the police came, at first they attempted to kick the door in, but whoever was attempting to kick the door, I guess they didn't know what they were doing. And didn't get the door to open up. So then they, when they proceeded to enter the home, they had my father lay on the ground. And the agent proceeded to put his nine millimeter handgun to the back of my head.

• 27:49John Kiriakou?

  That's the voice of Adonis Reynolds, Donnie Jr.'s son. He might be this terrible story's most heartbreaking victim. Consider the repercussions of being eight. Eight! And having federal law enforcement point a gun at your head while barking at you to get on the floor. When you're not the son of a drug lord, not living the life of an actual crime family, it can be pretty shocking when the authorities crash into your house looking for drugs that aren't there. Had his father's trial been fair, it still would probably have impacted young Adonis.

• 28:26John Kiriakou?

  They pointed a gun at his head. But nothing about the trial, or anything surrounding it, or anything since the night they raided his father's and his grandparents' houses, has been even remotely fair, not to Donnie Reynolds, or his parents, or his children. Adonis went from a future filled with athletic promise to a future filled with uncertainty instead.

• 28:48Speaker 06

  Before they came to the house, my life was amazing. I've always been into sports. Like, I ran AAU track. I was in multiple different tournaments. I was doing things with football tracks, soccer, growing up. So, my dad never missed a beat when it came to that. Any type of organized sports, or any type of school activities, or anything that he could be present for, he was there for. I have four championships. I have four state rings. I have this jersey right here from the SCF championship in my XFL tryouts with the Orlando Guardians. I've had an excellent athletic career since. Different circumstances prevented me from excelling to where I wanted to be.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  With everything that happened with my father's situation, it pulled a lot of my college scholarship offers off of the table. My dad and my grandmothers really kept the family, like, close-knit together. On a daily basis, I know that my family is struggling mentally with having to deal with this. But I just feel like sometimes I have to try to carry the weight on my back to absorb a lot of the stress that was going on. It's hard for me to find meaningful employment to keep myself afloat. McDonald's won't even hire me. So, it's just like, I work specific jobs that I can work as long as I can until they terminate.

• 30:14John Kiriakou?

  The nightmare continued and got worse. Suddenly, Adonis found himself attracting the undue attention of local law enforcement because of who he was.

• 30:24Speaker 06

  I've been beat on by the police on multiple different occasions. From incarceration, from getting pulled over at traffic stops. I've been pulled over by undercover police officers in Knoxville. That's one of the main reasons why I left. Because I value my safety and I value my life a lot. And I'm not going to allow myself to be unalived by a police officer in Knox County.

• 30:47John Kiriakou?

  Unalived by a police officer. That's a chilling way to put it, don't you think? Donnie and I are in pretty regular touch. He'll send me an email and sometimes it'll take a day to get to me. Sometimes it'll take 10 days to get to me. He'll send me mail. Sometimes it arrives. Sometimes it just disappears into the air as though he never sent it, even though it has a tracking number on it.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  And sometimes it's emails. We don't get them and his phone calls are just most of the week. Sometimes twice a week. I don't know if they have privileges or whatever anyway, but it's really restricted on his phone conversations and stuff.

• 31:37John Kiriakou?

  Do you get the feeling the Department of Justice and various people in the federal government want Donnie, his family and his situation to be hopeless? Well, we don't believe in hopeless here at Prisoner X. I know from experience that hope and struggle go hand in hand. So what can we do to help Donnie Reynolds other than tell his story? Well, if you can write an email, short and sweet's okay. Then you can help make Donnie Reynolds an ex-prisoner. Marty Gottesfeld.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  I think it would be great if a lot of people just wrote to him and started opening up communications with him so that the prisons or the CMU would know that his situation with his mail is being watched. And if they clamp down, people are going to notice. For the size of the case that he has for what's at stake, right? He's really obscure. He's not really well known. And that's kind of their number one goal, right? As long as he is this obscure individual, they can keep doing this to him and they can keep this evidence from ever being presented in court. So I think one thing would be just to have 1,000 people write him a letter and to have the CMU have to deal with that

• 32:54Speaker 03

  and know that there are people on the outside watching. But even like the cartel people are like, we never knew him. We never met him. Like his trial transcripts are out of this world. And if you've not read the trial transcripts, really, I commend them to your reading. Because that's where they mention some of the cartel people. They mentioned El Chapo. They mentioned the cop killer guns. They mentioned, you know, all this. But then these cartel people are like, no, we never met him. And these cartel people, like one of them ordered a hit on American soil. And thi- this person who ordered this murder, contract for hire murder on American soil, is coming to testify against Donnie, free on bail, and gets sentenced to a lot less than Donnie did, even though he admitted to a higher drug

• 33:39Speaker 03

  weight than they even charged Donnie for. And Donnie gets life plus 75.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  They've got to keep him quiet.

• 33:48John Kiriakou?

  On our website, you'll find a list of email addresses. You know what they say about sunshine and bullshit? In the matter of Donnie Reynolds Jr., they didn't just criminalize a man. They criminalized his entire family. The people behind Fast and Furious are all walking around free today, as they always have. They've got their lives, and their homes, and their relationships, and their wealth. They still have their futures. The same isn't true of the Reynolds family. 25 years after the fact, and the Reynolds family remains as much a prisoner of this madness as does Donnie.

• 34:29John Kiriakou?

  It's just a stone-cold fact. What the DOJ did to Donnie Reynolds was criminal. What they did to his family? That was even worse. Like I said at the beginning, sometimes people in power signal how afraid they are via their actions. The people in power responsible for the disastrous Fast and Furious scandal have blood on their hands. If innocence could bleed, those people would have Donnie Reynolds' innocence on their hands, too.

• 34:58John Kiriakou?

  We hope you found Donnie Reynolds Jr.'s story compelling. We have an update. Donnie was transferred from the maximum-security CMU in Terre Haute, Indiana, to the medium-security CMU, which is now located in Cumberland, Maryland. While that may sound like good news, it actually isn't. As Donnie Senior told me when he updated me about six months ago, the CMU itself was transferred. It's still a CMU, and the level of prison security is... Well, it's pretty much irrelevant. Donnie still has no access to the outside world. And the outside world has limited access to him. But that's why we have got to go at it. Here's Donnie's new address, and it'll be in the show notes, too.

• 35:41John Kiriakou?

  Donald Ray Reynolds Jr., Prisoner Number 32349-074, FCI Cumberland, 14601, Burbridge Road, Southeast, Cumberland, Maryland 21502. On the Bureau of Prisons website, which I'm looking at right now, it says Name: Donald Ray Reynolds. Register Number: 32349-074. Age: 47. Race: Black. Sex: Male. Release Date: And in all capital letters, it says LIFE. We need to fix that.

• 36:23John Kiriakou?

  We need to make Donnie Reynolds Jr. an ex-prisoner. Like I said, Prisoner X is one of several podcasts we're working on. Please let us know in the comments what you thought about it. As if you weren't going to, anyway. In our next episode, fingers crossed, we'll begin the next part of my saga. How my training as a spy prepped me for life in prison. You're about to meet some truly amazing characters, and we think you'll enjoy them. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costar and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.