International DEA Ops: Pakistan, West Africa, and the Cartel Pipeline | Dan Dobas | Ep. 394

The Team House

dee takos

History, Government, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2026

⏱️ 127 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan is a former U.S. Army airborne soldier who later became a DEA special agent, working everything from wire-driven investigations to high-risk takedowns. He shares how he went from law school and a Wall Street legal job to federal narcotics enforcement—covering LA task-force work, Bridgeport gang cases, and deployments to Quetta, Pakistan and West Africa that put him on the front lines of how trafficking networks operate overseas.
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0:00 Start
1:22 Bridgeport Roots: War Movies to Service
4:50 Law School + Wall Street (Why He Quit)
7:09 Decision to Enlist: Starting Over
12:10 Airborne Life: Training + Early Army Years
19:26 82nd Airborne Stories + Leadership Lessons
27:45 Leaving the Army: The Road to DEA
28:55 DEA Academy: Guns, Raids, Informants
38:28 DEA LA Ops: Wires vs Door Kicks
44:33 Deployed to Pakistan: Quetta Mission
57:55 Connecticut: Bridgeport Gangs + Big Takedowns
1:23:13 Cartel Raids: “Iraq Vibes” + Air Support

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with today's guest, Dan Dobis, who served in the Drug Enforcement Agency, had a good long career after a stint in the Army, college education, and then was sent all over the world with the DEA. Thanks for joining us today, Dan.
0:17.8	No problem, Jack. Thanks for having me.
0:20.6	This interview was supposed to be in studio,
0:23.5	originally, but it's just as well that that didn't happen. Dan has a new job. He's starting.
0:30.3	Our producer, Dmitri, would have had to drive through some kind of crappy conditions in the
0:34.2	city. And I'm getting a cold, so I apologize if my voice sounds a little rasty
0:38.9	during this interview. Dan, tell us a little bit, if we begin at the beginning here,
0:47.0	with your origin. Tell us about, you know, how you grew up, where you grew up, and kind of how
0:53.2	that took you into the next phase of your life.
0:56.5	Sure.
0:57.1	So I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and we lived there until I was about five in the same
1:04.0	house that my father was born in and his family lived in since the early 1910s.
1:10.3	And then we moved to Trumbull, Connecticut, which was the
1:13.2	suburb north of Bridgeport. I grew up playing sports. And it was like football in the fall,
1:21.8	basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring, baseball in the summer, swimming in the summer,
1:26.1	but also playing war in the woods
1:30.5	with my friends and my brother. We got toy guns every Christmas, everything from like Tommy guns
1:39.1	that made noise to sawed off shotguns that shot, you know, rubber darts.
1:46.4	But my father had been in the Army Reserve in the mid-60s, and one of my uncles was in the
1:53.7	Marines during the Korean War.
1:55.4	But other than that, nobody in the family was in the military.
2:01.6	And so, I mean, was the military or government service sort of like on your mind as you went into high school?
	...

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