There's a special type of fixer you can find, often in Latin America, if you're lucky.

Fixers, for those of you who don't know, are generally local press or simply well-connected people who help reporters gain access and figure out stories, translations,

set up interviews, you know, that type of thing.

In dangerous places, there's an added emphasis because they're kind of the ones who are in charge of your safety.

The type of fixer I'm talking about,

usually he does a lot of work for a small local paper, but he's the type of person that

may have a checkered past, maybe he's been on the other side of the law when he was

younger,

and he somehow maintains his connections to both the underworld,

while also now having a ton of connections on the police force and things like that.

The type of guy who knows how to wait next to the coroner's office to find out when they're going to pick up a body who gets tipped off to police operations before the police but can still rustle up some local gangster to answer a few questions, You know, grizzled. For some reason these guys always have a

ponytail and like a really beat-up car that they're fond of driving at speeds that imply they may think

they're already dead or not scared of death that sort of thing.

Yes these guys are my heroes I wouldn't be worth shit without these guys like they are the

bomb. So I'm going to use a change name I don't know how much of this I should put out

there but Felipe was one such guy. So I'm going to use a change name. I don't know how much of this I should put out there, but

Felipe was one such guy. He was working with me and a cameraman producer by the name of

Zach Fanon when we were doing a piece for PBS News Hour on how Acapoco had become the most dangerous city in the world.

This is 2017 late in the year but Acapoco is usually in the top of the most

dangerous cities in Mexico and therefore the world. Anyway, Felipe was driving us around at 90 miles per hour and hooking us up with contacts left and right.

We had just been to a murder scene earlier in the week, which I'll get into a little bit later,

but let me just note that right now because it's important.

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