Chapter 1: What wild situations has Mariana van Zeller been involved in recently?
I'm so happy every time I see you that you're alive and well, because you do some wild stuff, lady. You get involved in some situations.
I do. This past year was crazy.
Yeah?
Yeah. We just had season four come out, and it's my favorite season for many reasons, but also because it was quite the adventure.
What did you get involved with this season?
Well, it ended with a military coup in Africa where my team and I got stuck. So that was sort of a kickoff to all of it. It was in Niger, so it's in the Sahel region of Africa. The U.S. has actually a military presence. Remember a few years ago when there were these four U.S. Marines that were killed in the Sahel in Niger and nobody even knew they were there?
Well, there's actually over 1,000 troops stationed in Niger. And we were there in a little town called Agadez, which is in sort of the southern border of the Sahara Desert. And we were doing a story about gold mining. So the story itself was incredible. We had to, you know, we had a military convoy with us because it's an incredibly dangerous part of the world. You've got terrorism.
You've got ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram. You've got kidnappers, so it's very, very dangerous. We'd gone there with the permission of the government, but only if we had to have a military convoy with us at all times. So we're talking about four armored trucks with lots of trained soldiers that every time we stopped, they'd get out of the trucks and basically point their guns all around.
They were very well trained. A lot of them are actually trained by the American military. And we went out into the desert and visited these gold mines, which are crazy. It was an eight-hour off-roading into the desert to arrive at these illegal, unregulated mines.
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Chapter 2: What dangerous events occurred during the filming in Niger?
And we arrived in Agadez, and we got word that there had been a military coup and the president had been deposed. And he was now being kidnapped inside the presidential palace. Basically, he was stuck there with his family. And that we were about to lose our military compounds and security. And they closed all the land borders and the airspace.
And we were stuck with no way out because you can't travel by road without security in that part of the world. And there were no planes leaving. So we were stuck.
Wow. How long were you stuck for?
It was about nine days. The military coup happened on a Wednesday and we left on a Thursday. Sorry. So eight days. But it was eight incredibly scary days. You know, I've been a journalist covering black markets and going to war zones and conflict areas all my life. But this was, I think, the most uncomfortable and scared I've ever been because... First of all, the uncertainty of not knowing.
There were all these – the West African states were threatening invasion. The Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary group, were saying that they were going to come and protect the new military coup leaders. And so it was a power struggle between the United States and Russia. And that's sort of the last place you want to be, right? Wow. And, again, no protection. I'm there with my team.
I'm sort of the boss in that situation because I'm the owner of the company that produces this. I'm the host of the show. I'm the executive producer. And I felt very responsible for my team as well. And, yeah, the clock is ticking. And they're telling us that in a few days we're going to invade and there's going to be a massive possibility of a massive war.
And we're stuck with, again, no protection and no way out. So it was really, really scary.
How did it get resolved?
That's the interesting part. So the funny thing is that there was an American military base, actually, one of the biggest Air Force bases ever built. It costs over $100 million to build just two miles from our little hotel in Agadez. We were the only foreigners there apart from aid workers that sort of live behind barbed wire and in compounds. But we were the only foreigners staying in a hotel.
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Chapter 3: How did the military coup affect Mariana and her team?
Yeah. And these guys do it every single day for hours on end.
And who are they digging gold for?
They sell it to middlemen. We then went and interviewed the middleman, a guy called Cleakley, super colorful character, who basically then sells it to the Gulf. Majority of the gold goes to Dubai. Really? Yeah.
Dubai loves that bling.
They love the bling.
They love the bling out there. They do.
Have you ever seen the amount of gold that exists on Earth?
No.
The finite amount of gold that exists on Earth is shockingly small. Shockingly small. Jamie, see if you can find that. The amount of gold that exists on Earth. I forget what the exact unit of measurement that they used, but you go, what? What? That's it. 244,000 metric tons of gold has been discovered to date. Most of that gold has come from three countries, China, Australia, and South Africa.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did they face during their evacuation?
It's all the gold. So what we're seeing, folks, is a couple of large trucks and what looks like a half a football field of gold. Is that about right? About a half a football field?
Yeah.
About a half a football field full of gold. And it's stacked up about, looks like it's about five feet high.
Wow.
No, maybe a little higher. Maybe it's six feet high. That's it. It's all the gold.
Yeah, which is why the price fluctuates.
Sort of, but I don't get it. I don't even like it.
I don't like gold jewelry.
I like silver. Silver looks prettier to me. Yeah. It's just like I get it. I get it that people like it. It's rare. But it's weird that it's rare. Not that it's rare, but it's weird that we care. Like it doesn't even do anything. It's not like you can make a weapon out of it.
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Chapter 5: How did the OxyContin Express investigation unfold?
So the way it would work, I'll explain it to people, is that there was no database. So if you got a prescription from a doctor and you went in to get OxyContin, you could go to another doctor down the street and get another prescription. And they clearly had it set up like that so that there could be abuse because that was how to maximize profits. and they have these pain management centers.
And I used to see them when I would do stand-up in Florida, where you would go and it would be called a pain management center. And it's essentially... You would go to a doctor, and all the doctor was there is to write a prescription for OxyContin. And then you'd go right next door to their little pharmacy that they had on site, and all they had was OxyContin.
And you had just a parking lot filled with zombies. These people that were just like... Completely dying.
Zonked out. Overdosing in the front steps.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of the opioid crisis on communities?
Like crazy.
So my husband did an amazing follow-up documentary. If you remember the OxyContin Express, do you remember that we were investigating this one pain clinic called American Pain? And the owners were identical twins, born identical twins, and they owned this pain clinic. And they followed us down I-95 because they saw us filming outside their door. And they followed us down I-95.
And, you know, I'm at the wheel and I'm seeing that the gas, we're running low on gas. So I stop at the gas station and they park right behind us. And these two big guys with a... You know, big muscles come out and start yelling at us. And so I take off. And they follow us and keep following us. And at one point, I run out of gas. And I go to the side of the—and we're on a freeway on the I-95.
And I had been calling contact in law enforcement, DEA, that we'd been talking to. And she said, call 911 right now. I know these guys are bad news. Call 911 right now. So we called 911, told them what was happening. We were being chased down the freeway.
Eventually, run out of gas, park on the side of the freeway, but they were so dumbfounded as to why we're parking on the side of the freeway that they just park behind us and don't get out of the car for a few minutes, and then the police shows up. And then they come up with a silly story that they thought I was an ex-girlfriend stalking them.
And and then we took down their license plate and my husband started looking into them. They ended up in prison at federal time. Part of it they were using that the surveillance tapes they used was part of our conversations. They were talking about us and our investigation into them and the OxyContin Express. But my husband stayed in touch, basically wrote them a letter when they were in prison.
And we were deciding on whether he should say, hey, it was the guy who directed Oxycontin Express, but he didn't.
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Chapter 7: How does the black market for body parts operate?
And he just said, hey, my name is Darren Foster. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I've been fascinated by you. They ran the biggest prescription pill operation in American history. Like they were the Pablo Escobar of America, basically. They were making millions and millions of dollars out of a couple of storefronts in Florida.
And so he contacted them and they wrote back and said, yeah, I'm interested. And by the way, say hi to your wife. So they knew full well who he was. And he ended up doing an amazing doc. It's called American Pain. You should watch it. But it's about them, the rise and fall of these twin brothers, but also the complicity of the pharmaceutical companies.
And they full well knew exactly what was happening and did nothing about it.
It's a great way to maximize profits. Yeah. And the fact that they were taking these and buying them in bulk and buying them off all these people and then shipping them up north. Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you see the trail of devastation everywhere these pharmaceutical drugs went and all these communities that got hooked on the pills. And then when they changed the regulation, it made them more difficult to get. Then these people started doing heroin.
And then fentanyl. And then the exact same thing happened. We did another documentary called Death by Fentanyl where we looked at the fentanyl and we investigated this one pharmaceutical company called Insys Therapeutics where they were selling Subsys, which was a fentanyl product.
And they were doing the exact same thing that Purdue had done just, you know, a few years before where they were paying doctors for fees to basically prescribe. They were prescribing fentanyl to people with headaches and like shoulder pain.
And we got a whistleblower to tell us exactly how it was happening and how they were, you know, calling because the pills or this product was really, really expensive. So insurance companies were paying for it. So she would call insurance companies and say, oh, and they would ask, but, you know, this is only supposed to be prescribed to cancer patients. Does this patient have cancer?
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Chapter 8: What are the ethical concerns surrounding organ donation?
The other one left. And my husband, Darren, was there. How did one get out? They had different sentences. And I think the other one is still in federal prison. But it's George, Jeff and Chris George, George's last name. And yeah, Darren was there, filmed him the day he came out.
What's he doing now?
They're involved in other businesses. They were involved in real estate before with their father. And then they started a, I think it was a steroids. They were selling growth hormone. And then they realized, wait a second, we can be selling Oxycontin and making a lot more money from this. And literally they had like stash of cash hidden in their mother's basement. It was millions of dollars.
It was insane how much money they were making. Yeah. It's a good, it's a good, it's a good doc. I mean, it really shows you like.
How much do you worry about your safety uncovering all these things?
Sometimes, a little bit. Funnily enough, I worry more when we're going after people in high positions of power than I do after months of trying to get access to the cartel, for example, and when they say yes, it's a yes, it's a yes. But in some situations, yeah, I mean, I've gotten lots of...
hate emails and the guy that owned that insists therapeutics for example threatened to sue us when he saw because we compared him to El Chapo and said basically he saw an opportunity in fentanyl just like El Chapo from the Sinaloa cartel saw an opportunity in selling fentanyl and how they were sort of the same in different parts.
And they threatened to sue you for that for the truth?
Yeah he didn't like the fact that we were comparing him to El Chapo.
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