Richard Baker
speaker
1,143 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Richard Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Briefing · Aussie accuses IDF of sexual assault + Going inside a $1b cocaine sting · 24 May 2026
podcast
And the other thing I thought was I wonder how many users, even semi-regular, ever think about all the little stories that go behind one white line, like so from where the cocaine's produced from to how it's transported from there to the ports in Ecuador where a lot of the shipping is and talking to people or hearing about
how the amount of money that's involved in the trafficking and the selling of that drug affects people's lives all the way along the food chain or the supply chain.
Where are they coming from?
Why are they risking...
long time in jail for relatively little reward.
And so we were able to follow them in their journey as well.
Well, the DEA is one of the world's, I guess, best resourced and connected to specialist police force that operates in, I think, over 60 countries.
And what's interesting about the DEA here in Australia is it causes a lot of tension behind the scenes.
They have access to the best intelligence on drug trafficking and
criminal enterprises and really powerful legislation that allows them to reach criminals and bring them back into the American justice system from just about anywhere.
So criminals are shit scared of the DEA.
So what they do is they get intel on, let's say in this instance, a big importation in 2.4 tonnes of cocaine on a boat coming across the Pacific towards Australia.
And they'd seized that and they realised that the cartel and the Australian end of the criminal enterprise didn't know that the stuff had been seized and they were able to get the phones and devices of people involved and just continue the conversations between each end sort of thing.
It just so happened that the DEA guys in Australia had a really good relationship with the West Australian Police Force, as they do with New South Wales.
The intelligence they had was that half of these drugs were going to be dropped off in the ocean just off Perth.
So they said to the West Australians, do you guys want to use this as an opportunity, run a sting?
Let's make 1.2 tonnes of fake cocaine, package it, drop it out in the sea, and then you guys be watching with drones and helicopters and shit.
See who turns up.
They were going to let the coke run across to the eastern seaboard, you know, and roll it up the chain and see how much intel they could gather, all the while knowing it was fake cocaine.
Unfortunately, I never fully got to the bottom of it because, and that's part of the story, is that this particular operation, it was called Operation Beach, caused the biggest stink between the West Australian Police, the DEA and the Australian Federal Police.
Showing 1081–1100 of 1,143 · page 55 of 58
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