The Hey guys and welcome to a bonus underworld podcast episode. I'm Sean Williams in

Wellington you know that already because you're the best people on earth and you subscribe to the show of course.

And I'm joined today by reporter Trevor Aronson, a contributing writer at The Intercept and creator of Podcast, Alphabet Boys, which is about Stings and the so-called

alphabet agencies of the US, that's CIA, your FBI, DEA, ATF and so on. And Trevor's second season, and we'll get to the first one later on,

it's all about an arms deal, the FARC, government in-fighting, the mob in Vegas, and

a Romanian fixer named Flavio Georgescu.

I mean that sounds just like right in our wheelhouse doesn't it?

So first of all welcome to the show Trevor.

This story is pretty crazy. You follow a lot of stuff about sort of government, over-reach government agencies, the alphabet boys of course. Where did you come across Flavio and what kind of peak your interest about this particular guy?

I imagine you speak to many, many sources of a kind of similar ilk, I guess, with stories

about the government in various ways.

Yeah, so I remember very vaguely hearing about Flavio's arrest,

you know, in large part because I follow terrorism prosecutions and have alerts set up for a

Justice Department National Security Division press releases and I think my

first introduction of Flavio's case was seeing a press release about the arrest, which at the time, based only on that, seemed very serious, right?

The idea that this Romanian guy partnered with another Romanian, as well as this former Italian politician,

were brokering this $14 million arms deal

for the FARC, the Colombian rebel group

that at the time was a US designated terrorist organization.

And I just kind of made a mental note at that and I didn't really pursue it in any

substantial way and as it happens on the eve of Flavio's trial his his wife at the time Andra had reached out to me because she had seen that in the past I had written about cases involving government entrapment and they felt that I would be a good person to talk to.

And so at that point is when I really started diving into

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