Via The Tom Sumner Program: Author and Hall of Fame trial attorney Mike Papantonio joins the program to discuss the importance of using his books to tackle important issues. This new legal thriller is called, Inhuman Trafficking, and lays out the complex business of human trafficking, from truck stops to Wall Street.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Tom Sumner: Hey, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the show. I’m Tom Sumner. We got a good one in store today. Coming up in the third half of our three hour tour known as The Tom Sumner Program. We’re gonna talk about a new legal thriller from a previous guest on the show, Mike Papantonio. I think I’m saying that right, but he goes by Mike and or Pap and he joins me by phone. Good morning, Pap, welcome to the show.
Mike Papantonio: Tom, Good morning. How are you today?
Tom Sumner: I’m doing okay.
Mike Papantonio: Good.
Tom Sumner: As I recall, from the last time you were on the show, your, your legal thrillers always have an issue that they’re trying to tackle.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, the whole idea was to, when, when I start, first started writing these, we handled, we handle kind of the big cases all over the country. We, we’re the people who launched the tobacco litigation and my firm launched the opioid litigation. We’ve launched probably 60 of the biggest pharmaceutical fraud cases in the country. So right now our, our attention is on human trafficking. So what I, here, here’s the problem with what has happened to the media, Tom, the media has become dysfunctional where it comes to handling a story for more than 48 hours. Once corporate media took over, it’s, it’s all it, it’s kind of wham bam, who’d do the story, the story disappears and people forget about it. So what we found is part of lawyering nowadays is not only to be able to, to, to launch the case and, and actually try the case and adequately take all the discovery, but you have to keep the story alive.
You have gotta be able to talk about opioids, for example, the one that we’re working right now, it’s very, you know, we’re making real progress. We’re probably gonna have a global settlement on this project before long. But in order to make that happen, what we had to do, Tom, is we had to let, we had to get the media away from their low hanging fruit, their laziness and low hanging fruit. And we had to actually feed the story to organizations like the, the Washington Post that did a wonderful job covering this project, but we had to get ’em that information. And so, so these books do the same thing. I mean, hopefully you read Inhuman Trafficking and you say, well, gee, I knew thinking was a problem, but I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand how it worked. I didn’t understand that corporate America is very much involved in human trafficking. And now we’re settling a good many of those cases with organizations that I, I, I’m not, I can’t disclose to you, but they’re some of the biggest organize, corporate organizations in the country. So, yeah, the.
Tom Sumner: Well, and, and Mike, I kind of, I kind of jumped right over it when, when I introd you, because I wanted to get right to talking to you, because it’s been a little while since we’ve spoke. That you don’t just, you know, play a lawyer in your books, but you’re a lawyer in real life and, and this, this new thriller is called Inhuman Trafficking, and plays in the world of, of human trafficking, as you were just, just saying, Mike. What do you mean inhuman trafficking?
Mike Papantonio: Well, you know, the point is there is no, there is no humane way to traffic. But I think, you know, that’s, that is probably just hopefully an attention getter, you know, which, which is very necessary in this business right now, of human trafficking. You know, the, as I say, if you were to go to the
Tom Sumner: And Mike, Mike, I don’t want, I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought, but I, but I do want to go back and pick up a definition because I think the phrase human trafficking means something different to everybody who hears it.
Mike Papantonio: Mm. It does. And that’s very well put as a matter of fact, Tom. If I were, the first time that we started seeing trends with trafficking, you know, we, we get, we, we’re sent cases from all over the country from California to New York, to Florida. We get cases, lawyers that we work with in various projects and we started seeing a trend, okay. We’d get a call from Washington state and they would say, Pap, we’ve got a case that looks like truckers are involved. Same thing would emerge out of LA and then New York and Miami, Florida. And so what we, when we first started taking a look at it, we took a look at it from the, the trucking industry that was trucking girls in 18 wheelers from the West Coast to the East Coast and all along say I-10 or any of the major, major interstates. They would make calls and they would say, we’re gonna be at truck stop number 32 at 10 o’clock and they would have their own code. And so they would show up with an 18 Wheeler that had 10 girls in it and people would come have sex with those girls and the truck would move to the next truck stop.
So we brought that case, you know, and it took us, took us a while to see the pattern and more importantly, when we tried to talk about the case to the media, this, one of the trucking industry that we’re involved with is, is a big advertiser. So if you talk to MSNBC or CNN or any of the big networks, they’re not willing to do the story because they, they make so much money from advertising. The same thing that we ran into with, with opioids. The opioid disaster would’ve never happened, but for the fact media was so lazy and they were so tied into those advertising dollars that they wouldn’t advertise what CVS or Walgreens or, you know, what any of these companies were doing because that’s their money. So we found the same thing was happening with trafficking and we, so we launched it based on, based on a couple of cases and the first one was the trucking case. Oddly enough, you know, a TV show emerged about the same time. The, the, a wonderful writer by the name of C.J. Box. I don’t know if you’ve read his stuff but he’s an incredibly talented writer. He.
Tom Sumner: Yeah, the, the TV show, Big Sky.
Mike Papantonio: Big Sky. That’s C.J. Box’s stuff, yes.
Tom Sumner: Yep, is based on his writing. He’s been on the show.
Mike Papantonio: Oh yeah. He’s a wonderful writer and he, he gets it. You understand the, the, I don’t know that Big Sky does justice to what he was trying to say in his books, but the point is, you know, the, the idea is you have to stay out there with the story or the story disappears. And so that’s why we, I do a show as you may or may not know it’s called America’s Lawyer. I’ve been doing it for seven years. It shows all over the country.
Tom Sumner: Right.
Mike Papantonio: You know, we, we are, we’re, we have to have a media arm of what we do. So we have Ring of Fire, which is hugely, hugely followed in this country. It’s a political show. So, so the point it’s not.
Tom Sumner: Within and without.
Mike Papantonio: I’m sorry, say again, Tom,
Tom Sumner: Within and without. It’s not just in this country, but it’s got an international following.
Mike Papantonio: Yes, it does. It does. But I, you know, Tom, what you do for a example, you know, with this show, you touch on things that you won’t even see the corporate media get near. They, it, it’s, and that’s part of the problem. That’s, that’s why we have a trafficking problem in this country that is a $48 billion industry, $48 billion every year in human trafficking. And so
Tom Sumner: It was a long time before I realized that prostitution was considered human trafficking. I was thinking it was, you know, all about, you know, capturing people late at night in an alley in San Francisco and putting ’em on a slow boat to China.
Mike Papantonio: Very, very common kind of belief.
Tom Sumner: From, from the movies.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Tom Sumner: I mean, that’s where, that’s where we get these impressions.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right. That’s right.
Tom Sumner: And, and that’s why I wanted to, to peel it back a little bit on what human trafficking is and what it involves, because it’s everything from illegal immigration to slave labor in, in bars and restaurants around the country, prostitution is a part of it. There are a number of things under that umbrella.
Mike Papantonio: Tom how many stories have you seen, how many stories have you seen corporate media cover on the immigration issue, the border issue of how many of those kids end up trafficked? Curious. I, I, I can tell you, we follow it every day. We follow it.
Tom Sumner: I’ve seen, I’ve seen some because, because there is a lot of activity around this in Michigan and we had an attorney general who went after it.
Mike Papantonio: Yes, yes.
Tom Sumner: A few years ago.
Mike Papantonio: Yes, yes.
Tom Sumner: And so I have seen some. But I, but I take your point that you don’t see it often.
Mike Papantonio: No, it’s, it’s, it’s politically incorrect to even talk about it because of political policy or, you know, everything’s great about, about the immigration issue right now. You know, it’s a kind and gentle way to treat people who wanna come to this country. Well, they tell you the kind and gentle side of it without telling you the ugly, ugly underbelly of how many of those kids end up trafficked all over the country. And, and so, you know, there’s another iteration that people don’t have any idea how this ties up, but, you know, we found one of the cases that we’re handling is a, one of the biggest pornography, I guess central homes comes out of Canada. They, they’re kind of a clearing house for all of the pornography that takes place all over the world. It’s called, it’s a, it’s an organization called MindGeek.
And so what MindGeek is able to do is they’re able to, they, they know who they know where to get films. Right. They have their own list of, a Rolodex of, you know, let, let me get a trafficker to do A, B or C with kids in a hotel room, and we’re gonna film it and then we’re gonna send it all over the, all over the world. And, and these kids literally talking about 14, 15 year old kids that are put in a hotel room. And, oh, by the way, the hotel where that takes place, major chain, they’re, they’re in the, you know, the suites for two weeks, people bringing in cameras, people bringing in lights, they’re filming this, and then it’s being distributed all over the world. And, and, oh, by the way, that’s a corporation that is, gets support from Wall Street.
The money comes from Wall Street. And so, so in, in order to get to the bottom of it, you’ve gotta follow that money. You have to follow, okay, who is it that props up these companies? How does this whole system work? Because unless you cut the head off of it, you, you don’t, you make, no, you make no progress here. And truthfully, even when we do that, Tom, it’s not gonna solve the problem. It’s we, it, it’s the ugly human nature that’s gonna allow this to happen for generation after generation and all we can do is we can say, while we’re here, while we’re walking around and breathing, our responsibility is to do what we can do and that’s what our, that’s kind of the mission statement of our law firm. This is, we’re not gonna solve human trafficking. My God, it’s thousands and thousands of years old. But we can do something while we’re here.
Tom Sumner: People don’t realize that it’s going on right under their noses. You know, some of the cases that, that were uncovered in, in Michigan and, and, and here’s, here’s just a, a scenario. You might go into a Chinese restaurant and there are a number of Asians working there and you assume they’re all family. That there was, you know, a dad or a mom who came over to this country, started a business and started bringing family members over and it’s all in the family. And what they found when they peeled that back, is that a lot of the people working in some of these restaurants in, in Detroit and Hamilton, Ontario, and, and around Southern Michigan, were actually indentured servants.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The first case I ever looked at was, it was actually even not, it was before we really, really started handling these trafficking cases, originated with Ukrainian women that were being, they, they were interviewed over in the Ukraine and they were told, well, if you come here, we’re gonna give you jobs in the service industry, the guest industry. You’re gonna be working in a hotel and you’re gonna be greeter or whatever that role may be working behind a desk in a hotel. Well, they got over here and then they put ’em in restaurants to begin with. They were working as greeters in restaurants. And they said, oh, by the way, how, how would you like to make more money? Because we also own a strip bar right down the road. And if you’re a greeter there you’re gonna make more money. Then they work there as a greeter and they say, you know what, you might make more money up on the pole. So why don’t you go up on the pole and dance and you’re gonna make more money. And then that goes on for a while. Then they’ll say, you wanna make, you wanna make the big money, you need to meet Bob here, out in the audience and once they meet Bob, they’re gone.
Tom Sumner: Mike, but I, I don’t wanna leave people with the impression that these are all illegal immigrants that have been brought here for that purpose. Some of the people that are subject to human trafficking have been snatched right out of our own cities and, and rural areas and towns. So this, this isn’t something where we can deport the problem.
Mike Papantonio: No, it’s not. The, the idea, it it’s still local, isn’t it? I mean, we had a case, you know, 70 miles from here, couple years ago where there’s a, there’s a process that’s called the Romeo routine and that is where you have two or three girls at a bar anywhere between, you know, 21 to 25. And then they send in a couple, this is very common, as a matter of fact. They send in a couple, you know, movie star quality looking guy, movie star quality looking girl seems that they’re just kind of hanging out and dating and they start chatting up these girls. How would you like to come to a party? And, uh, sure. We’ll go to the party. And then the roofie comes next and then two of them disappear. So there’s all kinds of, I mean, that’s a local, that is a very local kind of problem.
What we miss sometimes is that it’s so well organized that it’s, like the case I told you about the Ukraine. The Ukraine comes in H2B workers. Right. So the restaurant that brings them in has complete control over their lives, over their passports, over the money they make. They come in as H2B workers. There’s no oversight by government at all. There’s no follow up at all. Homeland Security does nothing to follow up. Department of Justice does nothing to follow up. And so these people come in and they’re legitimate coming in at H2B workers. We’re about to see a big, matter of fact, that Chamber of Commerce right now is screaming, we need more foreign workers in the country, bring ’em in. And what we’re gonna see is a real uptick of this problem, where they come in, they, they latch onto an organization that looks legitimate and before you know it, they disappear. They’re in Dubai or Argentina where they’re shipped off and we never see ’em again. It’s very, it’s, it’s amazing how common this is and it’s amazing how little people understand the process.
Tom Sumner: Well, and as you pointed out in the last segment, Mike, that the, the media has dropped the ball on this. Some for, out of, out of personal financial concerns because some of the money involved in this are, are the, is the same money that’s helping to support their efforts in the case of some of the big cable networks. But in some cases, because there is, you called it laziness. I, I think in some cases there’s some incompetence involved. But the media is not really shining the spotlight on this issue.
Mike Papantonio: No, the best example I can give you. I mean, I’ve worked in media for 20, 20 plus years. Okay. I, I’ve worked with MSNBC. I’ve been a liberal commentator on Fox. I was around when Air America was launched with Rachel Maddow and Al Franken and Bobby Kennedy, just a whole host of, of, of, you know, of talking talent.
Tom Sumner: You started to mention Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, he’s.
Tom Sumner: What happened to him?
Mike Papantonio: Nothing’s happened to him. He’s simply, you know, right now the, you know, everybody on the left is so angry because he’s talking, he’s, he’s asking people to consider another idea, Tom. Okay. Which has become.
Tom Sumner: Agreed, agreed.
Mike Papantonio: Forbidden in this environment that we have. It’s not that he’s right. He’s a dear friend of mine. He’s, he, you know, we, we practiced law together. He’s a brilliant man. He has an opinion. Okay. So they, they kick him off of Twitter because he has a opinion. They kick him off of Facebook because he has an opinion that varies from what everybody else believes. When we’re at that point in this country where we don’t understand the importance of the freedom to let somebody say what the hell they want to say even with, even if we disagree with them and we, we ostracize ’em and we, we, we, we act like they’ve lost their mind. Bobby Kennedy has not lost his mind. Now I’ve had every vaccination I can possibly get. But does that put me in a position where I target him because he has a position that’s different from celebrity opinion? Of course not. You know.
Tom Sumner: Well, Mike, I, I, I only brought that up not, not because of, of his stance on vaccine mandates, but his recent comparison to Nazi Germany.
Mike Papantonio: It was terrible. It was a, it was a.
Tom Sumner: It was a little over the top.
Mike Papantonio: It was over the top, Tom. I agree.
Tom Sumner: And, and not, and not characteristic. I’m fine with somebody having a different point of view, as you know.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I’ve, I know that. The very fact that, that I’m on this show tells me a lot about that. But, you know, it, so, so the point, the point, my point, Tom, is this, is that’s, that’s an example of what, how we create narratives. Isn’t it? It’s a, you know, his narrative is contrary to the, to the, what we, what everybody considers the objective narrative on the other side. You know, I, even launching most of the projects I’ve launched over the years, you know, we launched the tobacco litigation right here at this law firm. Do you have any idea how crazy the, the attacks that we undertook from the Chamber of Commerce, from the Department of Justice, from the president of the United States. It went on forever because we had an opinion that was a little different. As I’m even dealing with this human trafficking case, I get some, I get, I even get feedback and blow back from the.
Especially when I start talking about corporate America’s involvement, how major hotel chains are part of the problem, how Wall Street that’s pumping money into pornography is part of the problem. You see. But nevertheless, I, I have the right to say it and I’m in a unique situation where I, I really don’t, I really don’t care. I mean, I, I, you know, criticism doesn’t bother me. I’ve moved away from the idea of, as I said, I used to do MSNBC and I would be in a, in a, in a close count. You remember Ed Schultz?
Tom Sumner: Oh yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Ed Schultz and I used to have a show together, big red they called him on MSNBC. And so I’d get ready to do a show. I’d get ready to do a segment and we’d be in the slow count, 10, 9, 8 at seven, they’d say Pap we’re going to another topic because I knew why, because I was getting ready to do it on Bayer or Merck or Pfizer and the producer would come on and say, we can’t do that segment, do constitutional law and they’d kill the segment. So, it’s, it’s complicated out there right now, Tom, media.
Tom Sumner: It, it, well, it is and it isn’t. It’s, it’s as complicated as we let it be. It, it, it seems like we ought to be able to just say right out what’s going on and, and, and talk about these things openly. And I did wanna point out as I, as I did in your intro that your, your books are companion pieces to your legal work. It’s, it’s almost like a multimedia approach. And, and it, it begs the question, Mike, do you think of yourself as an attorney, an author or an activist?
Mike Papantonio: Well, I’m not an actor for sure. I, I certainly am an author. And the, my point being in order to practice law at the level that we practice, we don’t do, I don’t do 1-800 auto crash, 1-800 hurt on the job. The cases that we do are considered legacy cases. They’re huge complex cases.
Tom Sumner: 1-800 call Pap.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah and, yeah, Pap is, is my, but the point being in order to do that, you have to do more than just be a good trial lawyer. You have to have the complete package that promotes the concept that you’re trying to get across to everybody. These books are only part of it. The media I do is part of it. The, the documentaries, I think they’ve done, I think, four documentaries on cases that I’ve handled. That’s part of it. But it’s not because I wanna be in front of a camera, Tom. It is because, or that I want to.
Tom Sumner: No, no, no. I didn’t mean.
Mike Papantonio: Or that I wanna, you know, sell more books. It is because message has got to get out there some way because corporate media is incapable of delivering it.
Tom Sumner: I didn’t mean actor, I meant activist.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, activist. Yeah. Oh I certainly am, certainly am an activist.
Tom Sumner: That’s, that’s what I meant, you know, attorney, author, or activist and, and the reason I say that is because your books, our companion pieces to the work that you do, the legal work exposing these issues and, and some of the crimes within the umbrella of the issue. But they’ve been so well received and critically acclaimed that they stand alone as, as legal thrillers, but yet they’re, they’re part of a multimedia approach to tackle these issues.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm. Well, well, Tom, what you do, what you do there is so valuable because it’s, what it, it’s not just local. What you do has a footprint across the country in so many ways. And if there were more Tom Sumners that would, would, would talk about topics like this, if there was more independents. You realize in 1980, there were 70 independent organizations that ran the media across the board. You know how many they are now? Three, three, they run television, radio, print.
Tom Sumner: I was gonna guess, I was gonna guess five.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, is it five? Well, it used to be five.
Tom Sumner: I, no, I was just gonna say it used to be five, but I think you’re probably more up to date on it than I am.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I follow it pretty closely. Yeah, there’s, I’ll call it three, whether it’s three or five, we’ve gone from 70 to three or five and so, because of that, independents like yourself are the backbone of messages that would never be delivered, but for what you’re doing up there. The reason people want to be on your show, listen to the folks that you’ve attracted to your show, is because they can’t sometimes go on the air and deliver what they want to deliver, but you allow for it just like we do with America’s Lawyer. Like I do with Ring of Fire. Like I do with everything I try to touch. There is nothing off limits, you know, the first amendment still really matters to me. Constitutional concept is still important. And so God bless you, Tom, for what you’re doing, I wish there were a thousand more Tom Sumners out there that would, would replace the void that corporate media has created.
Tom Sumner: Well, I’d be happy if a few more stations would pick up the show, but that’s, that’s a conversation for another time, Mike. Let me, let’s, let’s get back to the book Inhuman Trafficking. How in this, in this legal thriller, are you able to tackle this issue, demonstrate this issue for people that will take the time to sit down and, and learn something?
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Well, the first thing that is important is that it’s true. Okay. There, there, now, you know, some of the murders are not true. Some of the, the intrigue is definitely all real. The case studies that are talked about that they’re all real. The characters are composites of people I’ve worked with for, you know, 40 years as a lawyer, from all over the country, composite lawyers, everybody, everywhere from Deke who’s kind of the lead character there to Michael, who is this, who’s the, the, the PJ, or what they call a pararescuemen that is working for the law firm or the private investigators. They’re all, they’re all composites. But they, but every issue that’s touched, every issue that’s, that’s the backbone of the, of the book is very real. It really happened. And so, every book I’ve written is like that.
The last book that I wrote the Law and Addiction, it’s all, all you have to do is read the book to understand what the pharmaceutical industry did, how they went about killing 150 people a day with opioids. How did that happen? It didn’t just happen sua sponte, it happened with a plan and it was a plan to make money. And you know what? We still haven’t thrown any of them in prison. Not one of them have gone to jail, 150 people dying every single day. And as I, as I uncover this case, nobody will go to prison. Nobody will spend any time. The people at the top that make these decisions will never, will never see the inside, they’ll never be perp walked, because they don’t look like criminals. They have Armani suits, they wear Rolex watches. They drive Bentley’s, they don’t have a hoodie.
And, and so, so they look different. In our culture that has allowed them to get away, literally get away with murder. Whether it’s the pharmaceutical industry that knows that they’re selling a product that has the potential to shut down your heart or your liver or your brain, they sell it anyway because profits are big. Whether it’s a corporation that decides to destroy an entire ecosystem with polluting the ecosystem with toxins that are so ugly and so vile that you, there’s no way to storm ’em. So they dump ’em in our river. Or whether it’s Wall Street, who decides they wanna steal from mom and pop pension programs because it’s easy to do. You see, they’re dressed up different ,Tom. They don’t look like criminals, but they’re the worst of the worst.
Tom Sumner: The book Inhuman Trafficking. Mike, when, when did that come out? Was it uh,
Mike Papantonio: It came out in 3, 2, 2 months ago. Yeah. Two months ago. Mm-hmm.
Tom Sumner: Okay. So it’s out and available now.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Anywhere you buy books, it’s gonna be there.
Tom Sumner: How, how many books does this make for you now, Mike?
Mike Papantonio: Well it’s four fiction and four nonfiction. The nonfictions are basically about quality of life. They’re, they’re, they’re one of ’em is called Resurrecting Aesop, another one’s called In Search of Atticus Finch. Those are books that are written really for lawyers to tell ’em how they can improve their quality of life by doing the right thing day to day, not falling into the drudgery of doing everything the same way that they’ve been taught to do. It’s been passed down generation to generation. Those books have, are still selling. I mean, they, they were written, God, you know, 20 years ago. But I think lawyers have a thirst for trying to understand what is so upside down about their life at some point. So those were devoted to that. And then I moved into writing these, these fiction books.
Tom Sumner: In, in the process of writing these fiction books and, and you just said, I think the last time we talked, we were talking about your book Law and Addiction and now the new book is Inhuman Trafficking. And, and you said, you know, in the wake of Law and Addiction and your work with the opioid crisis, nobody went to jail. And you just predicted that in the wake of inhuman trafficking, nobody will go to jail. We won’t see anybody doing the perp walk, as you put it.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right, that’s right.
Tom Sumner: So, and, and I think I know the answer to this question, Mike. But why do you do it?
Mike Papantonio: Well, I mean, we can only do what we can do, right? My child, I remember being so moved.
Tom Sumner: I mean, do you think that you’re putting a dent?
Mike Papantonio: When she, you know, as seven, eight years old, she would follow me around the courtrooms all over the country. And she said that, what do you do? What, what is it you do? So I could have said, well, I, I handle auto cases and I, I help people, you know, when they’re injured in an auto case and I’ve done it 10,000 times, or I, I clean up ecosystems, I cleaned up the entire Ohio River Valley from a product called C8 that was killing people with cancer. I’d rather tell her that story. Right. I’d rather.
Tom Sumner: But that’s yeah, that’s the other part of my question. Do you think you’re making a difference? Do you think you’re putting a dent in it?
Mike Papantonio: Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. We saved, I, I, I I’d like to think we saved about 70,000 people along the Ohio River Valley from drinking DuPont’s poison called C8, PFAS, and we, we, we got it cleaned up. We’ve, I’ve, I’ve gotten 40, 40 plus pharma drugs off the market that were killing people, Tom. They, they were, you know, causing failure of the liver, failure of the kidneys, killing them, when the companies knew that they were doing that, but the profit was good. So I, I got those problems taken care of and I, you know, any, the, all the people that work with me feel good about that, that we did that. It was an accomplished and we can look back and we can tell our children, yes, we did something that was important.
Tom Sumner: And, and what’s the, I, I think you kind of touched on it. I think you mentioned it. What’s, what’s next, Mike?
Mike Papantonio: Well, we’re working on a book.
Tom Sumner: What’s the next big issue?
Mike Papantonio: I’m working on a book called Law and Terror right now. It’s about the case that we’re handling against the big banks, HSBC and all the big banks that washed money for terrorists and still continue to. The US contractors that were killed by, by the money, directly from the money that was being washed by HSBC. You want to hear a real zinger and I know we’re probably out of time. But HSBC washed, something like a, like $70 billion worth of money for, for terrorists. And so the, the Obama administration, they, they, they caught ’em. They said, we know you’re doing that. They made ’em sign a document that was a seven page document where HSBC admits, we did A, we washed the money. B, we knew it was gonna result in the death of Americans. C, we made money doing it. It was, the document states every criminal element of what they did. And you know what Eric Holder did? He fined them for a billion dollars. Not one of them went to prison. Not one of them was even indicted. So that’s the case we’re handling right now. We’re handling it against all the big banks who are washing money for terrorism. That’s my next book.
Tom Sumner: You know, most of us, most of us regular people think a billion dollars is a lot of money, but we’re talking about levels of, of greed and, and money changing that a billion dollars is just the cost of doing business.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, it was, it was nothing to them. They made, God knows how many billions they made, and God knows how many lives were lost because of their conduct. And Eric Holder thought it was a good idea, hey, let’s just fine ’em and, and then, and then, oh, and then, oh, by the way, he then goes to work for Covington & Burling in Washington, DC, who is the, who’s one of the biggest law firms that handle corporate crime for banks.
Tom Sumner: Well, what happens to agency heads and, and former legislators is a whole nother show, Mike.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm, it is.
Tom Sumner: But we could, we could, we could do a whole two hours on that or three hours. But Mike, we are close to the end of time and as you know, I, the time just flies by when I talk with you, it did the last time and it did again this time. But I always give guests an opportunity to let listeners know where they can find out more about you and your work, past present and future. Mike, do you have a website that you’d like to share?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, they can Google Mike Papantonio and find out about everything we’ve talked about or they can go to the bookstore and buy this Inhuman Trafficking, and hopefully understand how, how serious this problem is and maybe they can help in some small way. I’ve had people that have read the book already and they say, how do I get involved? Every community has a way to get involved. And so it, it, it is, it is a, it’s a process of all us doing these little bits of everything we can do that sometimes converges to kind of a major step forward. It’s those small steps that sometimes converge for results. So everybody can do something. Please begin by reading the book and understanding what’s going on out there.
Tom Sumner: Well, Mike, I hope you’ll come back and talk to us about the next book, in fact, you’re welcome to come back anytime you’d like.
Mike Papantonio: Well for thank you, Tom. It’s always a pleasure talking to you.
