John Nores Tells Stories of Gangbangers Hiding in the National Forests | Joe Rogan

But to share that with everybody nationally in my world in the thin green line and for them to start having it happening on the refuges and even just to know this stuff's getting back to their parts of the world and poisoning their cannabis users, you know, unsuspectingly. Horrible information, right? But we need to know it and a lot of guys didn't know it. And so that was one thing to see, hey, we need to have a baseline training. The way we do it here in California is we all go through a really stringent Academy. Everyone gets their basic tools, arrests, control and defensive tactics, you know, and firearms training and all of that and get good at being the traditional game warden and doing all the traditional stuff. And they get, you know, get their feet wet out doing their own thing for a couple of years. And then we start to find the people that have the motivation or want to get onto a specialized unit like our Met team or one of the watershed teams or the wildlife trafficking team. And every seldomly do we put a fresh person there because, you know, I think to really be a good game warden, you got to cut your teeth on all the traditional stuff that's critical of just having to, having to check guys with guns all the time. You know, most cops look at that and go, that's crazy. I mean, everybody you check has a knife or a firearm. Yeah. Well, fortunately, 99% of them are guys like you and me that want to see a game warden and the game warden wants to see us. But for that one felon that's on parole and he's in the woods hiding out and we run across that a lot. And I ran across a ton of that down here in SoCal at the start of my career and I've got some interesting stories about that. But so guys who are like the skip bail and then they go and hide. Yep. And they've got like a no bail warrant. They're wanted on some warrant somewhere. And so they're off fishing. They have an illegal firearm. Maybe they're a felon in possession of a firearm they can't even have. And now they're out in a remote area where no cops going to find me here. And then I'm the new game warden in Riverside County, you know, all fricking motivated, really green. I don't know totally what I'm doing yet. And I'm in that truck cruising and something I got into down here that was just crazy. But I will say this, it was a heck of a learning curve and I'm really blessed. It went out the way it did and it was, I was safe in it, but we would get gang bangers from LA here and they would go over into Riverside County and get into my kind of rural, you know, foothills and on the edge of the national forest and they'd have AK 47s and they'd have, you know, automatic pistols and they would spotlight through these canyons, gunning for everything. They'd kill rabbits, they'd kill coyotes, they'd kill deer. They get to the end of like a canyon that has like a, an outlet of a dam, throw a gill net out and spend all night there just gill net and fish and hunting freely and shooting and killing everything with their spotlights, grab their gill net, grab hundreds of fish, pack up and then head back, you know, back to the LA basin. Gang bangers? I'm not kidding. And the craziest part... Fishing gang bangers? Yeah. Commercial, almost commercial fishing? Does it? It sounds nuts, right? So strange. Oh, they'd eat them, maybe they'd sell them, you know, who knows? Usually with quantities that big, they were getting sold. But the thing that was crazy is I would be, you know, alone. I'd be in my truck. I didn't have a canine yet, you know, and now I just, I just retired with... Well, like you're a marshal. I have Apollo, yellow lab, English lab. She's amazing. Never gonna bite a bad guy, but she's gonna lick them to death and try to, you know, turn them our way. But I didn't even have a companion dog at the time. And I would go and run into these guys and go, okay, this is what I learned in the academy that, you know, that head-on spotlighting stop that you never want to have or getting behind them blacked out and tracking them down. And next thing I know, I got AKs and I got all these frickin' prohibited exotic weapons and I'm going, this is crazy. I'm pulling these guys out alone. I don't have a lot of backup. So it was just you? It was just me. How many guys did you run into? Sometimes it'd be two. One night I pulled like eight people out of a van. Oh, shit. And I was alone. Oh, shit. And they were all armed and it was one of my heaviest, most intense cases. And I had been on one year. So this was 1994. And what we were doing in the Riverside squad is we were just saturating the area because we were getting everybody from over on the LA side here spotlighting all our games. So we're like, okay, let's saturate this. And back then, Joe, the game was to catch a spotlight or red-handed because they're so deliberate. Explain spotlighting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I should have done that. But spotlighting is where you use an artificial light, whether it's a handheld spotlight, a flashlight, whatever. And you go into remote areas and you look to find animals at night because they freeze, they're really relaxed, their eyes glow. And then you shoot them that way. You kill them illegally at night after dark, which is never allowed. It's usually in or out of hunting season because anyone's going to spotlight a deer nine times out of 10. They're not licensed or they're not going to do it during season like we do. So they're doing that. So in our world as game wardens, that's the ultimate wildlife criminal because they're going to kill does that have that unborn trophy buck for good genetics. They're going to kill a trophy deer way in the rut that needs to go another year or whatever. So that's what we focused on. That was like, if I can cut my teeth and become a reputable game ward and I'm going after the hard course, that was the game then. So it was 94. And I'm pulling these guys out and calling them out on loudspeaker. I've got my weapon on them. And I'm like, oh, man, there's a lot of guys out there. I can't get them to jail. I'm calling back up. I got Riverside County coming in. I mean, we even had the sheriff's office helicopter come in several nights. Once we got to know each other and they realized who is this game warden and what are these game warden's Riverside County going out into just crazy areas by themselves. They'd monitor our traffic and they'd come in on the helicopter and light it up and call them, you know, call these bad guys out on loudspeakers just to make sure we were okay. And it feels good when the Calvary comes on those nights, man. Let me tell you, it's crazy. So in those sort of situations, they just didn't know that you would ever run into someone that's that armed that many guys in the van or what have you. And people, right? So the reason why you're patrolling by yourself is because they didn't anticipate anything like this. Well, and we didn't have the bodies, right? This was one of the things that was crazy. We get back to the thin green line concept and realize that one game warden is responsible for 200 to 250 square miles, give or take. Whoa. And you know how big Riverside County is on the inline empire. 200 square miles. Maybe more, you know, depending on what part of the state you're in. One game warden? So a squad of seven game warden's to put it in perspective. Check this out, brother. So when I was supervising traditional patrol before we started the special ops met team in Santa Clara County, we always had vacancies because we always low on bodies. We couldn't hire game warden's fast enough. We weren't funded for it or where the case may be. So we might have four or five game warden's for seven positions. And we had to cover all of Santa Clara County, which is everything from the city to all those foothills. And there's a lot of it in Silicon Valley. People don't realize all of San Benito County, which is huge Hollister, Gilroy, right where I'm from in Gilroy, that whole area down to the south. That is just massive mountain country full of wildlife. And then like part of Monterey County and I had five people and myself as a lieutenant. That is insane. I can't believe that. So to go out on a spotlighting patrol to that point and have a partner with you, just one other game warden, that's tough. You know, you're basically pulling a whole other area. You can't work night hunters. So is spotlighting that common? It is still going on in the state and it's going on a lot. Back then here, because there had been so little presence here in Southern California, it was off the hook. It was crazy. One week in 1994, I remember I was a, I had a really good ride along with me, a wildlife biologist, such as a savvy hunter, great eyes. He became kind of like my right hand man, Brian. And we, I said, we're going to catch a spotlighter every night this week. He goes, you think so? I go, it's that crazy. Let's see if we can do it. And so we went and worked all night long. We started on Monday night. How do you catch them? Do you look for a spotlight? Like, would you get to a vantage point and glass? It's yeah, it's just like glass in a big basin for elk, right? You get in a really good overwatch that you get the most visibility, you know, hide the truck and you watch and you find areas where it's likely to happen. And it takes a while to learn where that's going to be just because you got this huge district and you could have 20 places where guys spotlight. But until you get into the areas, a new warden and really get to figure it all out, you don't know where to be and it's a trial and error. But you know, it took me six months, give or take, just going out there and scouting hard and seeing where this road goes and how does that Canyon look? What type of water do I have down there? What am I seeing at low light in the evening when animals are coming to water? Ooh, I got a whole herd of elk here. I got a whole herd of deer. I got some bucks, you know, I'm seeing other animals run around. This is going to be a hotspot because guys can get to it. And if you just put the time in, you just kind of lie in wait, you know, kind of put your little hide together. It's like hunting a big game. Eventually it starts happening. By 1994 and I've been in district a year down here, I pretty much had my spots figured out. My partners and other parts of Riverside did too. So we'd all be out alone so we could cover more area and talking back and forth. I mean, and I'm going to date myself here, but cell phones are brand new. So we all had those flip cell phones and we're... How old are you? I'm going to be 51 in November. I'm 52. Yeah. Don't worry about it. Yeah. So we're right there, you know, all that era. So when I started, I mean, it was the flip phone, you know, the Star Trek communicator, call my partner Jerry, like, where are you at? They're great. I'm like, where are you at? He goes, I'm over here in Thomas mountain. I'm like, I'm over here. You see anything yet? I go, I got one light working. All right. I got to go. And then I'll go. But that's crazy. Like you're talking about enormous pieces of land that you guys are responsible for. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hard for people to put in a perspective that don't spend any time in the woods, that you would be able to even find these folks in this enormous area. Yeah. Yeah. Starts off as a needle in a haystack type thing, you know, but once you get into it, you get fairly good at it. But it always is difficult because again, just the percentages of catching a guy on the right night that he's going to be out there. And then you got the guys that kind of get savvy to knowing where the game or lives, driving by his house, looking for his patrol truck to see if he's out that night. Where's the truck parked? We start getting into that problem. So we always kind of, you know, kind of maintain as covert as we can, you know, we're known in the neighborhood. Because we live at home, we work out of our homes, home office, we're close to our community because if we kept our truck at a field office, we'd have no response time all spread out. So we get very community oriented in community functions and conservation groups and everybody knows us. Rather, it's a big city or a small little town in the mountains. So you got guys doing the cat and mouse thing looking for us and, you know, making sure, hey, is this truck there or is he out patrolling? Well, maybe I won't go out tonight. But that era, Joe, in 1994 was off the hook. I didn't get a spotlight or every night that week, but I got six out of seven and one night I had a double. So it was crazy. Wow. And season a ton of guns and, you know, some guys were going to jail, some weren't. But a lot of wildlife was saved that night because they would have done a lot of harm. Now, most of these guys, are they doing this recreationally for fun or they're doing it for food? Like, what are they? The group I was getting into down here, it was it was recreational. It might have been to sell the meat. I couldn't prove that. Or it was just to go kill stuff. You do get people that need meat, you know, that do spotlight after dark because they need the meat and stuff like that. And it's still a violation. We still deal with it as such. But if we ascertain that, we're going to be fair about it. You know, we said, OK, look, you're poaching. I know you're starving. It's out of season. It's in season. You have a tag, but you just really got to get that meat. I mean, there are certain cases where you just kind of feel for that person to go. I see where the motivation was, you know, and a very small percentage of poachers are that way. But some of them are just, you know, they're just trying to feed their family. And they're it's a whole different game. And we're going to be fair about it or we should be fair. But most of them gang bangers or most of them criminals like what is it? Was there a down here? Down here, 70, 80 percent. Yeah. Had criminal histories, had illegal weapons associated with gangs. So it's almost like recreation for them. It almost was. What practice? Yeah. Yeah. And I remember one case down here that was a pretty crazy one. It was it was three guys, pretty inebriated, pretty liquored up. And it was a head on stop. And one of them had a like a $50,000 no bail warrant for cocaine trafficking out of Mexico. And that was in that week that we had, you know, crazy spotlight and things going on. So it was just the demographic down here. We're up north. It wouldn't be necessarily that felon, but that guy that just wanted that trophy buck and to get it cheat to get it.