Hi Paul. Hi Ardly. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm so good. It's so great to have you on Small Town Dicks. Oh I am so happy to be here. So we want to know how did we persuade you to join us here on Small Town Dicks. Oh it was it was a lot of arm twisting. Not the truth.

Well what has always impressed me about Small Town Dicks is the professionalism. First you have your authenticity. You know Dan and Dave, myself we come out of real crime. We've had real experiences. And so the audience, the listeners are getting from Small Town Dicks. What actually happens out there. Not something that's been glamorized. But also you guys don't exploit the cases. You're empathetic to the victims. And this is what I'm all about. And I know that people who know me from

other projects, they will truly see that when they start listening to Small Town Dicks. That's an incredible endorsement. Dan and Dave tell the fine people about some Patreon. Where Paul Holes also joins us on quite a few nuggety nuggets. For just five bucks a month you'll have access to an assortment of bonus episodes, outtakes, listener questions, special series.

All Town Fam you get everything Dave said and your hard earned money goes to support our incredible staff behind the scenes to give you this podcast that we all love. So please join us at patreon.com slash Small Town Dicks.

Hey Small Town Fam, it's yardly. So this is part two of the players. There are a lot of moving pieces to this case. So I'm going to refer to the audience.

I'm going to refresh your memories as to where we left off in part one. Police get called out to a shooting on Chestnut Street. As they approach, they end up pulling over a white SUV that's obviously fleeing the scene.

This SUV stop in a nearby neighborhood that's about a hundred yards from some railroad tracks. As police start to arrest the occupants of the white SUV who are all members of the players gang, someone start shooting at them from the direction of the train tracks.

No one is killed, but now the need to apprehend the shooter who is bold enough to fire multiple rounds of police has ratcheted up the urgency 50 fold.

Our guests for this two part episode are detective Scott and his colleague, Sergeant Chris. At the time this case was going on, both Scott and Chris remembers of their police agency's task force called CIT, which stands for the crime impact team.

They're directive as a specialty gang unit investigating gang crime also involved hands on community outreach. And while Scott and Chris are on this CIT task force, their police department decides it's time to bring the hammer down on the local players gang.

Because in addition to the shootings, the players are wreaking havoc on the city with chop shops, drugs and sex trafficking. The police set up a wiretap on key gang members' phones who have names like Thumper, Criminal, Snoopy, Piaso, and Creeper.

In hopes that they can get the gang members talking and figure out who shot at police near the railroad tracks and how the shooter managed to get away in an as yet unidentified dark getaway car.

The players gang begins to feel the squeeze like never before. Will someone break? This is part two of the players.

When a serious crime is committed in a small town, a handful of detectives are charged with solving the case. I'm yardly, and I'm fascinated by these stories. So I invited my friends, detectives Dan and Dave, to help me gather the best true crime cases from around the country, and have the men and women who investigated them, tell us how it happened.

I'm Dan, and I'm Dave, where identical twins from small town USA. Dave investigated sex crimes and crimes against children. He's now a patrol sergeant at his police department.

Dan investigated violent crimes. He's now retired. Together we have more than two decades experience and have worked hundreds of cases. We've altered names, places, relationships, and certain details in these cases to maintain the privacy of the victims and their families.

So we ask you to join us in protecting their true identities, as well as the locations of these crimes out of respect for everyone involved. Thank you.

Okay Scott, so you have the wiretap in place on several of the player's phones, and they're gossiping to each other. But you've never dealt with a wiretap before, and you said in part one that you all needed some guidance to get this case to the next step.

I am assuming this is when DA Phil joins the case. Yes, so we were approached by Detective Adam who handled the assault of the Daily Weapon style cases, so he was helping direct some of the evidence during the CIT case.

And so he mentioned, hey, I think you should take this case to crimes against police officer section. Their prosecutors are quite frankly not every day running the mail prosecutors. They can handle court very well, and they're like the cream of the crop. I'll get us a meeting where we can pitch this case so that this special prosecutor could direct the rest of it and make sure we're going to get some of these things filed in court.

Right, because we're still young, we're flying by the shooter of pants, we're hungry, and we want to stop this. This gang is terrorizing the city, and so we really had that mission.

And so we got all this stuff lined up for a sales pitch, in essence, and we went down as a group from our lieutenant on down to the officers that were handling the case up to now, and we walk into DA Phil there, and all his clan.

...