From Ministry to the FBI, Eric Robinson on Faith, Pressure, and Purpose

What if your calling took you from helping people spiritually to protecting them physically?

In episode 32 of The Influence Exchange, J.V. sits down with former FBI Special Agent Eric Robinson, who shares his powerful and unconventional journey, from 12 years in Christian ministry to 24 years serving in the FBI.

Eric opens up about why he left ministry, the unexpected stress that led to that decision, and how stepping into federal law enforcement changed his perspective on life, pressure, and human behavior.

This is not a highlight reel conversation. It’s real, raw, and insightful.

You’ll hear:

What it really takes to become an FBI agent

Behind-the-scenes experiences from working gangs, terrorism, and crimes against children

A powerful counter-terrorism case that could have ended very differently

The truth about human behavior, both good and evil

Why is resilience stronger than most people realize

How to rebuild identity and purpose after major life transitions

Eric also shares insights from his upcoming memoir: “Irreverent: From Saving Souls to Chasing Sinners in the FBI”, a story of transformation, purpose, and real-life experience on both sides of humanity.

Eric's Book coming soon: Preacher to Breacher with Eric Robinson: https://preachertobreacher.com/

Eric's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_eric_robinson/

Eric's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-robinson-9220053a4/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What if your calling led you from saving lives to chasing criminals? Today's guest has lived that exact journey. Eric Robinson spent 12 years in ministry before becoming an FBI test to agent, where he went on to serve for 24 years working cases involving terrorism, gangs, crimes against children, and much more. Eric seen the best and worst of humanity. And through it all, Eric learned what it really takes to face pressure, make tough decisions, and keep moving forward. Today, Eric shares powerful insights from both sides of his life, faith and law enforcement, and how those experiences shape his purpose. Please join me in welcoming Eric Robinson. Let's get into it. Hello, Eric, and thank you for joining the Influence Exchange today. How are you, sir?

SPEAKER_00 1:06

I'm doing well, JV. Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Eric, when doing research about you, I've learned that you spent 12 years in Christian ministry before you decided to join the FBI and then spent 24 years as a spESU agent before retiring. Talk to us about that journey and why what made you either stop ministry and decided to do your path, your journey to the FBI.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Well, my body made me do it because uh I was enjoying my time in ministry, um, having progressed along the way from youth pastor, assistant pastor, and then planting my own church off of where I was an assistant pastor, we were very successful in reaching out to people. And this is this was ministry the way I wanted to do it. I was glad for it. But better people have had found out ways to manage the stress of folks coming to them with their problems. I couldn't. And so for two years straight, when people would come to me and do the the very usual, I wasn't unique. Hey, Pastor, I've got this issue. I would then go home and it just it weighed on me. And that effect came out in stress-related headaches that I had every single day for two years straight. And I came to a point where I told my wife, I have to find a job with less stress, and that's why I joined the FBI.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Ah. And you considered the FBI being less stressed?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

It absolutely was. It was, I mean, obviously there's stress in the job, but it was different. I didn't care. I cared, but it didn't it didn't bother me, it didn't burden me if if we couldn't make a case, if bad guys got away, you know, if cases got turned down by the prosecutor's office, you know, it's fine. Rolling on moving from there. I wasn't invested because this is just some criminal in the distance. It didn't matter. And even working with the victims, I could find some solutions by bringing them some type of justice. So I found resolutions there as opposed to in the ministry, it's just it continued on and continued on.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Sure, sure. And Eric, you worked in so many different fields, and when I say that, it's as an FBI special agent, crimes, white collar, counterterrorism, crime against children, gangs, drugs, and public corruption. Let's talk about what was one of your most challenges when it came to be um an FBI agent.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Well, the the first challenge was coming in through the academy and not just changing careers. I was someone who had never handled a gun before. I had no deep knowledge of law enforcement. So I'm I'm learning that, but also I'm stepping into this century-old vast agency that is the premier law enforcement agency in the world and trying to understand how everything works, not just the computer systems or carrying out investigations, but how you know who do I talk to for this, the administrative process. And after 24 years in the FBI, I will estimate that I learned 75% of how things work. I mean, there's there's positions that would pop up, and I would like, I've never heard of that. I didn't know that was there, and I've gotten around pretty good too. So it just having that that huge idea of I'm on this massive vessel and I don't know necessarily where to go. So even to the end of my career, I was the guy that people came to because I had experience, but I was going to new agents the same because they had come across people who could help me. They had you know websites that could be useful, tools that the FBI used that I had no idea of. So all along it was that learning process of what what do I have access to along the way.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Sure. And Eric, for someone that's watching or listening to this episode, what does it take to become an FBI agent?

SPEAKER_00 5:28

In the practical process? Yes. So you have to be, you know, at least 24 years old, and that's really the bottom edge of it. They want you to have, well, you have to have to be an agent, uh, a bachelor's degree at least, and then three years of experience in the world. That can be graduate school, but the Bureau's gonna want you to have some real life experience. And then it starts out with uh a test that is something akin to an SAT. Sure. And when I took that, I thought, well, I I tried. Because I thought there's there's no way. And then they called back and I thought, okay, great. And then the next stages are uh a written exam explaining you know how you would handle this, and then uh like a hot seat oral exam where three other agents are asking you, tell me a time where you encountered a difficulty that they'll name what you did and what the result was. And by that point, when I was getting to the written and oral, I thought, okay, I can handle this and succeeded in that. Background checks, physical fitness test, and then the polygraph, which is it doesn't matter if you're a good person, it's hell.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it's a process. I live in New York, so you have the NYPD. I have family members that's in the NYPD today, and they always explain to me the difficulty of becoming a special agent and the processes of you need to get promoted, promoted, promoted. You say you need at least three years of experience. Is that as a police officer or or not?

SPEAKER_00 7:11

No, just in the world. So the idea the idea is like you're you're handed a pretty significant job, so they don't want typically a 25-year-old who just came from college and then grad school and doesn't understand real life. The Bureau attempts to, I mean, we we can hire white men all day, and we do. I say we, I'm not in it anymore, but the Bureau hires white men, they want diversity both of uh you know racial, gender, and then also that experience in the field. So you get cops in military easily, and they bring their knowledge, which is great, and it's very useful. They bring connections, but they also, as we work long-term enterprise investigations that span the breadth of uh a criminal group and then the depth where we can root out who all is involved, these are long-term, and so it's very helpful to have people that you can turn to on your squad who have different experiences and can look at things in a unique way rather than that siloed, hey, we're all cops here, and that's all we've ever done, and we just do it like this. Sometimes you get someone from ministry who might have a different opinion on how things could be reached.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Sure. Good, good. And Eric, crimes. I'm sure you have a lot of investigations, crimes, something that you're allowed to talk about, because I know there's cases that you probably worked on that you cannot talk about. But let's talk a little bit about some crimes that you experience and the journey behind it.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

So you mentioned I I I worked just about every violation other than uh cybercrime. And so I I started out working drug cartels in Chicago and then gangs, and then moved to uh Ohio and worked various others and finishing out with national security. And there's so many that along the way, whether these are ones I initiate or ones I'm a part of, um, we had one case that popped up. Working national security meant we worked international terror terrorism and also domestic terrorism. And it's basically someone who wants to bring violence and has an ideology. So we got a call one evening. It had already been a long day for me, and we had a call one evening that there was an individual traveling into our area who was suspected to be looking to bring harm. So the call came in from the driver to say, Well, I've got this passenger. He paid me $15,000 to drive him across country, and he just gave me an address, which was in DC. So uh the driver looked up the address online and it was the Israeli embassy. And the passenger had said, I need to be there by October 7th, which was going to be the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack in Israel.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

So you start putting that together, and the driver's saying, I think he might be Persian. He he speaks very little or maybe broken English, and he always has a backpack that he carries on his front and never lets it out of his sight. So what frustrated us in the Toledo, Ohio office was this call came in from California, and this guy was traveling through multiple divisions, and and everybody said, Well, we'll just let it go until he stops in Toledo for the night.

SPEAKER_03 10:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

So my day started a second time at midnight as I walked out the door, and I told my wife, hey, this is going to make the news one way or the other. Meaning we just stopped a terrorist from bombing the Israeli embassy, or the alternative, which is we all go up in a pink cloud of mist. So we spent all night setting up, getting ready. We were in touch with the driver, and there we were. Driver says, I'm gonna meet you at the vehicle at 8 a.m. So here comes this kid out, and he's got his backpack with him. And I was with uh a number of other counterterrorism agents and then a handful of uh SWAT operators like myself, one of them being uh a bomb tech. And we had discussed ahead of time our deadly force policy is if I give you commands and identify myself and you make a furtive movement that could be towards a weapon, then deadly force applies. And we talked about if we give him directions and he in any way reaches to the backpack, we have to we have to use deadly force. Fortunately, he came out, weapons pointed at him, and he went down and complied. Leading up to this, we had taken a um bomb dog and walked it around the vehicle he'd been traveling in, and the bomb dog hit repeatedly. So all of these were coming together, like okay, not only does this look suspicious, but our bomb dog is saying, Yeah, there's been explosives in this vehicle. So we approach, fortunately, everybody was compliant, and get to the backpack, and inside was nothing. It was just it was just like books and his scribblings and a bunch of SIM cards and phones, and they sit down for the interview with him and he was crazy. Sure. He he was told by God to go to the Israeli embassy, and when asked what we're gonna do when you get there, he said, I don't know. I was gonna wait for God to tell me what was next. And the bomb dog hit because he worked uh in California in a mine where they used explosives. So that was on his clothes, and the dog was sensitive enough to pick that up, and which was crazy. But all these things came together to think you know, I you know, kiss the wife goodbye and say, You might not see me again. There might be a crater on the south side of Toledo. And just a crazy thing like that happened, and the results were nothing. So we had no charges on him. Uh it was innocent. We let him go, and we later learned from the driver that at one point they stopped in Maryland because the driver was just he goes, Well, you paid me. Um they get out at a gas station, and the guy sees a police officer and just runs in the woods, and that's the last we saw of him.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Wow. Wow, wow. Interesting, huh? You know Eric, you mentioned cybercrimes. You talk about today, it's a billion-dollar crime industry. You know, in my day job, I would call it, you get a lot of potential of cybercrime that either A, they're this personal people are contacting the finance department for monies, whatever it is. And there's a lot of times that if you don't have legitimate security in your corporation, you can get uh money taken away, your whatever it is. But in the FBI field, uh what does it take to pre to stop someone from such a crime like that ahead of time?

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Well, uh so most of the uh cases that we see coming through or the complaints that come in, agents will take complaints or they'll get these uh forwarded to them from the National Threat Operations Center. And it is the the the human manufacturing of Intel that people often give. It's it's typically not the sophisticated sending a bug and it finds its way in. It's me as a criminal typically overseas. There'll be a criminal enterprise and they'll sometimes have runners or third parties in the United States who can take a hold of what's needed, but often in the cybercrime, it's these criminal enterprises overseas doing research and then fishing until they find someone who is foolish enough or trusting enough to give out information that now can give them access to what they need. And so it it's it's really having your people have certainty and have an understanding and awareness of what these criminals are trying to do to get in. And it's in these cases, it's very easily preventable.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

I had my financial advisor even come to me once to say, Oh, I I I received an email from a client saying I need you to wire you know this much money to this person, and they almost fell for it without checking with the client first. So it's I mean, that's very simple. You you stop that to say always have those follow-ups to confirm, never be trusting emails, don't click on things, hover over the address to see am I reading this right? Is it spelled one letter off, or is it dot net and not dot com, whatever it might be? There are very simple ways to stymie this.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Yeah, it is, and I don't know if it's ever gonna be an end to cyber crimes. It's easy.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

It is it's easy and it's profitable, and you and you undersold it with a billion dollars. I'm sure it's more than that.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Probably, probably. Going back maybe a little bit after 9-11, and I was in my young 20s, and a few years later, I was working in Midtown Manhattan, and not once, but twice, the building I worked in had to be evacuated. And there's one story I remember we were 20, the 22nd floor, and the building had to be evacuated. I'm talking about right away. So the elevators were, as you can imagine, stacked. You have thousands of people working. It was 11 o'clock in the morning, you know, the rush. Myself and a few of my co-workers had to take the stairs down. But what was scary about it, I was part of the fire safety team. There was a few heavy set individuals that could not wait for the elevator or had to leave, had to evacuate the building. So myself and a few co-workers had to carry a few individuals on our shoulders taking turns. And Eric, by the time I got to the ground floor, I pretty much collapsed because my heart is pounding. You see the police officers with vests, you know, with big shotguns, and it comes out because it's a few years after 9-11, it's just bomb threats.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

You know, false alarms, but they had to take it seriously. This happened twice within a two-month span. I said to myself, I don't know if I could continue doing this. You know, I suffer from asthma. I could just imagine. It was tough during that time. Um, but again, the agents were doing their job. Let's say if it really was an emergency outrage, what would have happened?

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Well, and this is something the Bureau has been addressing lately because we get swatting reports. That can be a local charge or it can be something that we look into. But I mean, if you if you think about it, you'd have to go way back to like uh the weather underground in the 60s where bombs, if if you're looking to do damage, like Al-Qaeda did not call ahead and say we're going to blow up the Twin Towers. They just do it. And so you have to have a reaction, but if someone is going to cause harm and they want to do damage, they want to kill people, the bomb threat is almost always going to be false. So I'm not sure what the solution is there. There are some practicalities when it deals with businesses versus schools and how this is handled. If I was looking to create the most harm in a school, I would set up outside the school, call in a bomb threat, and wait till everyone comes away from cover and I have access to get away. So some of these things with the swatting, with the bomb threats, you have to consider where the call is coming from what it sounds like. My kids have been off school a few times this past year because poorly typed emails come in and they're from outside sources, clearly. So that's a tough one. But I I would have some skepticism ahead of time that someone is gonna call ahead and say, Hey, just so you know, I'm gonna assault you, I'm gonna murder people. They don't do that.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Yeah, yeah. I noticed that. But again, Manhattan is a threat. Well, I think all the time.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

And you and you're just after 9-11, so how are people gonna act? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

Exactly. Eric, part of your FBI career. I'm sure you dealt with a lot of gangs and drugs. Share with us some of your experiences dealing with gangs and drugs.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Well, this was in Chicago. I started uh work drugs for five years in Chicago from 2002 on. Um we had two drug squads in Chicago, and then ours was dissolved five years later, presumably because we had solved the drug problem in Chicago, and it was all maintenance from there. Um but then I moved on to uh working gangs, and our our mandate was to uh seek out the most violent gang members, and we might be looking to get gun charges on them or working with the locals to get uh a state charge, but whatever it was, if it was a drug charge, we were trying to get the most dangerous people off of the street. So in Chicago, uh we were working narcotics, and these these were the folks who weren't that dangerous. They were just selling heavier weight narcotics, and so now we're gonna get good chart good charges on them. The gangs, now they're gonna be the violent ones selling smaller amounts, but defending territories too. And uh you know what I found is many of the guys there there's two types of criminals there's people who break the law, and so They're going to go to prison. And then there's people who break the law, and they're also awful human beings. And you know, they're terrible. And many of the high-level drug dealers, they're fine. You know, they were they just they saw what they're doing as amoral. They were making a living. Um and they knew it was against the law, but it wasn't it wasn't bad enough that it made them a bad person. And then some of the gang members, you had folks who are, you know, they could justify their actions in that they're trying to survive. This is the best way they could bring in income. Um maybe they were killing people or harming them because those people were threats to their territory. And there was a bond and a brotherhood among the gang. So there were many noble features, but set upon a foundation of illegality and nuisance on top of that. So it's much more complex than just saying gang member, bad person. There's, I mean, there's why they're even in the gang in the first place, seeking identity and and support where they may not have had it.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Yeah. I've been to Chicago a few times. I'm a sports person. I I'm a big Met fan, and I've been to Chicago when the Mets play the Cubs. Sorry, sorry for you. It's okay. And to me, Chicago was awesome. Yeah. But I always hear stories that the south side of Chicago, you have a lot of crime. That is correct. Yeah. Right. And they say don't go if you're a tourist, you know, stay within the city and then don't go to the south side. So I never ventured to the south side because I take uh stuff like that extremely seriously. And then, you know, born and raised in New York, I I could relate. There's places in New York that you do not want to go to. So one thing that upsets me, Eric, is um crimes against children. You know, as parents, right? I'm a dad, you're a dad, and you never want to see a child getting hurt. Can you please share some stories on crime against children and your experiences?

SPEAKER_00 24:13

Yeah, I worked crimes against children in the Toledo office for a few years, and our mandate there was largely at this time um trying to rescue, and in this case it was all girls, teenage girls who were being uh pimped by usually mid-20s, 30s men. Um and we also worked cases that we would refer to as travelers, and those were men who were traveling to uh carry out sexual assault upon a child, and that could be a willing partner. I mean, obviously underage, so not able to make the proper decisions, but it could be a willing partner. Often it what this has developed into is now online under covers seeking to bring in men who are saying, I would like to assault your infant or very young child. And so they play these roles, guys come in. So working with the the teenage runaways who were prostituting was very frustrating because it's difficult getting through to them because every adult in their life to that point has been either harmful or useless, and so here's an adult pledging like I'm just trying to help you, and there's no difference between us and the others. And it definitely took some time for us to get through to them so they might see, yeah, we we are trying to help you out. Because from their perspective, we're the police. The police try to keep them from earning a living and staying alive, and we're gonna do the same. I've been uh slapped, sworn at, spit on by teen girls because I'm taking away the love of their life. The the one man who's shown affection, the pimp, the boyfriend, that they, you know, they're messed up, they haven't learned what love is, but this man knows very well how to manipulate her to make it seem like this is love. And so that was difficult. On the side of arresting some of the pedophiles, it's fulfilling. Um, it's good to know, you know, working drugs, you think what's the point sometimes? Because there's just more. But in this case, while there are many more pedophiles out there, you know you've done something good by taking him off the street.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

Absolutely. And thank you for that, because we don't need more pedophiles in this world at all.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Yeah. Uh that's a strong limb you just walked out on there to say we don't need more pedophiles. Yeah, at all.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Eric, what are some of the craziest things you saw working in the FBI?

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Well, I'll I'll start with this. There's the craziest thing I ever saw is something you probably don't want on your podcast. And if you do, I'll say I warned you, but it there's it's remarkable to have it's very voyeuristic to be listening to people's phones when they don't know that you are. Um to go into someone's house on a search warrant and they don't expect you. So, you know, so much of it is sexual, and people are gonna do what they do. Um, but the you know, the number of we we pulled out a laundry basket of sex toys from one uh sexual predator, and it makes you wonder like, how many do you actually need? Do you need that many? Is variety that important to you? Um, but otherwise, I remember we were on a uh it this was actually a drug uh wiretap where where the the wife had called the the subject. Sure. And she says, Baby, you know that tape that we made of us? And he says, Yeah. Our boy found it in the the VHS player. He goes, Oh no. Say, Baby, why are you watching that on your own? That's for us. He's like, ah, you know, and so now, like, and so you have this guy who is like selling heavy, like we we got him for 45 kilograms of cocaine. So this guy is selling heavyweight cocaine, but he's having the usual life problems that somebody else might have. And so you you get to learn so much about people when you're digging into their phones and finding, like, oh, I guess this guy really enjoys this type of uh kink along the way. So many, many stories I can get to. Again, you know, usually it's like we had one guy that uh a colleague arrested who was into uh like food porn. Uh it which was unique, like an eating it was pornography dealing with eating, and he would pay people to eat food. I mean, unique things that you go, didn't know that was out there, but here we are. Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Yeah. Yeah. This world is made of unique individuals.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

Yeah. And and then there's the people like you know, I if you talk to any FBI agent, you can ask them, like, what's the most disgusting house you've been in? And usually they've got like a list of five of like, you know, I remember going to houses going, okay, I think this one's probably number three on my list, where we're going up the stairs to the third deck, and by the time I start up the stairs, it hits me, and it's just food garbage everywhere. And you know, I threw my gloves out after that one because we had to we had to search, we had to move things to see if somebody was hiding. And so, you know, I'm touching things like that. So, you know, there's always places where that room is where the animals go to the bathroom and they never take care of it, and toilet doesn't work, so now we do number two in the tub.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

Oh my. Yeah. It's part of the job. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

They didn't they didn't tell you that at Quantico, though. Right. They didn't say, hey, you're gonna see a lot of feces.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

Yeah. Yeah. You learned the hard way, Eric. Eric, and informants, right? I think I'm again they're important when you're probably looking to solve a case that you want to trust. And what kind of influence does informants bring to you or the FBI or the special agent that's um part of the case?

SPEAKER_00 30:48

Yeah, you're absolutely correct that informants are essential. There's definitely individual cases you can have where an informant's not needed, the the child sexual abuse ones you're just doing online, maybe some financial. But the informants are the men and women that we rely upon to bring us possible subjects and targets. They're out there doing the work that we've requested. I refer to them as force multipliers because they can do things that agents aren't allowed to. And then also they can have their fingers out to see be tripwires, to see what's happening, what are people saying? And then, you know, they're also the ones that now we've found a possible target. Now we're insinuating them into that group or next to a person, and we can also seek to recruit from that. So, you know, here's a CEO that we think might be sending money inappropriately. Can we find somebody who has uh access to information and then reliability? So you can find somebody close to that businessman, but they may not be trustworthy because they'll tell, and you got to balance that. You can have you can have guys that are great, you know, very dedicated, but can't you know they're just a Joe Schmoe, but probably my most um prolific informant was just a guy. But that guy worked hard and he had this personality that he could get get in with people, and because of that, he did so much to infiltrate racially motivated, violent extremist groups, the the white nationalists who were looking to do violence, and guys loved him. Yeah, and so he even r rose up the ranks pretty high in in the Klan and got honored by them.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Sure. That's awesome. It's critical to trust someone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Yeah, and and and because I was asking these men and women to do things where they didn't have to, like if I if I approach you and recruit you, like there's no reason why, like unless I've got charges over you, there's no reason for you to work for me. There's no reason for you to help out the government. So I'm asking you to do stuff, like you can just go about your job.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

But hey man, because of your position and abilities, would you consider doing this? Because I'm asking people to do things beyond the normal, I had to take time to show them kindness, show them respect, support them, encourage them, you know, pay them as much as I could along the way, but mainly just treating them properly. They were doing a service for the United States government. So, you know, when the guys text me late at night, I'm like, okay. When I I had a Muslim informant uh a couple years ago, you know, he calls me on Easter, and he's Muslim.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

And he says, Happy Easter. And I'm like, dude, why you call me on Easter? And and I say, I say, buddy, you you don't even believe in this. And we start getting an argument back and forth about it. And he goes, Hey, how about if you just say happy Easter back? And I go, Okay, happy Easter. You know, what do you have? What do you have?

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

That's funny.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

Has your life ever been in danger, Eric?

SPEAKER_00 34:13

Yeah, pl plenty of times. I mean, there's there's definite accounts where I can point to this was dangerous. Uh early on in my career, I remember we did a drugs drug bust, hemmed in the vehicle, the vehicle rammed a couple times, and then one of the guys just sat there staring at us, and then he reached into his pocket, and my buddy said, Man, I was taking slack out of the trigger. And then he pulled out a phone.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

So I mean, there's times like that. Anytime that we approach a criminal, we don't know if he's going to oppose us violently. So inherently it's dangerous. Now he may came out come out and surrender, hands up, and everything's nice and easy, but all those times it has been dangerous. Um, we've had times where I had one SWAT operator next to me uh go up to the third deck, had to go through a curtain, which is extremely dangerous because you can't see across it, pitch black, and he ended up stepping on the guy who was hiding underneath some clothes with a loaded shotgun next to him. So he was just trying to hide, but if he wanted to, I mean, there's there's danger right there.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Sure. Yeah. Eric, I'm sure you've done so many different investigations within your career path. Um, talk to me about any award-winning investigations you have came across.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

So I did 15 years working criminal work. I I joined the Bureau when I applied. One thing I I think reason why they hired me was I was trained, uh I studied Islam. I was trained to work with Muslims in a Christian manner as a missionary, and then 9-11 hit, and they hired me, and I thought, okay, well, they're looking at I've got background working with Muslims, we have fundamentalists attacking the United States, and then I was immediately put on a drug squad. So so I worked, I worked criminal, different variations of criminal violations for 15 years, and then one day my supervisor says, hey, they're gonna put you on national security, which is counterterrorism. And I thought, hey man, for 15 years I've been deleting all these, you know, trainings and stuff that had to do with counterterrorism. I don't know anything about it anymore. And my first case that I got up there, you know, may maybe to help me transition smoothly, was uh a case where my buddy Sean already had charged three men who had been providing money to Anwar Alaki, who was a designated terrorist. So you cannot provide money to a terrorist. That's terrorist funding. So he had charged them, and the three were awaiting trial. But one of them, Yahya Farouk Mohammed, had gone to another prisoner and said, I want you to help me kill my judge because if he's out of the way, I think I can get a better judge and he'll release me and then I can go kill people. Because now you know now I'm gonna go away and might as well kill people. Right. So my first counter-terrorism case was a murder for hire. So you know, nice transition. So Sean had said, hey, let's go interview this um jailhouse informant and see what he's got to say. And I remember thinking, dude, I've had many jailhouse informants. It's a hassle because you got to bring them out, you got to make sure nobody knows that they're meeting with the FBI, and wiring them up is is a bigger hassle. And a lot of these guys just lie. They tell you stories so they can have something to do because they're away.

SPEAKER_02 38:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

Might as well have fun. So I was I was maybe 50-50, but Sean was all in, and so okay, if you're all in, I can work with you. We bring him in, he tells us a story, we put a wire back on him, send him back in to record, and he has to go to the subject and say, Hey, you know all that stuff you told me about wanting to kill your judge?

SPEAKER_02 38:31

Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

Tell me about it again. Yeah. And I'll be darned he told him again. He did. And so and so now we had, okay, let's now let's open a case. And along the way, uh Yahya Farouk Mohammed was drawing out plans for this guy to create a terrorist training center. Um, he talked to him about how they're gonna blow up bridges, go to uh the Mall of America and kill as many people as possible, like all these ideas he had. And but he said, But I need a hitman. And so this informant who was just like a redneck, like there's no reason why he would have picked him, other than this guy probably actually did know hitmen based on his upbringing. Right. And so guy says, Yeah, I know a hitman, I'll get the phone number, you call him, use a code word, tell him you want to uh buy some puppies.

SPEAKER_01 39:29

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

Which was just brilliant for the informant to do because Muslims typically don't have dogs.

unknown 39:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

And so it it it kind of added a little bit to it to like you it's harder for you to say you were actually trying to buy puppies when there's this. So so the undercover said, Yep, um have somebody in your family give me a thousand dollars and you tell me where to meet them. So they went to Chicago. I was in Toledo at the time, went to Chicago, and the wife gives this man a thousand dollars. And then the undercover shows him a picture. Let me pull it up here. I get I got this. Shows him a picture of a supposedly killed judge, and that is the picture that we used. So we superimposed the judge's head on my buddy's body and dug a shallow grave and said, Okay, you know, right, killed the judge. Done. Yeah. Done. Uh so and we took it from there. We tried to charge the wife, it didn't work.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Um, but then that guy, our subject, got 26 and a half years in prison for that. And then I and then I went back to my buddy to say, hey, remember when we needed someone to be a stunt double for a seven-year-old Lebanese man? Yeah. And they chose you naturally.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

Right, right, right. Eric, that's great work. Great work. Yeah, that's awesome. Eric, uh, how did you rebuild faith, identity, and purpose after leaving the FBI?

SPEAKER_00 41:11

Well, I'm I'm three months out, and I I just look back at what I've learned along the way. So much of what I believed and followed in ministry in some ways was broadened and also confirmed in the FBI. What I saw is the people who would come to me in church were many of the same people we'd investigate. The difference is this person would say, Pastor, I made a mistake and I want to change. And the criminal would say, Yeah, I'm all in. I mean, they would go, they would have the same poor choices, but purposely doing it and then just continuing down that path where people in church do wrong. Like we we not just make mistakes, we purposely choose to do what we know is the wrong thing. And then it's a matter of, I need to repent, I need to turn around from that. But the criminals say, I am invested in this and I'm gonna fully go down this path. So it has a lot to learn about human nature of what it takes for someone to become a criminal, which is very little. It's just it's just taking one step in front of the other instead of instead of evaluating is this who I want to be.

SPEAKER_01 42:33

Yeah. I want to shift things, Eric, a little bit and congratulate you because you will be releasing your first book very soon, which is a memoir of your career. Let's talk about that if you're allowed to talk about the title and a little bit about the book.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Yeah, so the title is Irreverend from Saving Souls to Chasing Sinners in the FBI. So the idea behind it is uh I was a reverend and we did some irreverent things along the way. And it my memoir tells a story, not just of some of the crazy adventures and remarkable things that I got to initiate or just be a part of, but it's from the idea of here's a Baptist pastor who's got no experience, and all throughout, this is the Baptist pastor who is now 15 years on a SWAT team, you know, being a leader, being a part of taking helping to take down mass shooters, you know, preventing harm, uh, bringing justice to some of the victims, and what that was like for me in that position. So I think it is something that a reader can identify with because that's that's how I took it, that I never lost the fascination that this is this is amazing. I I'm in the FBI.

SPEAKER_03 43:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

That that was cool. Um, and even though there's plenty of days of tedium or frustration at work, then there's those punctuated moments of this is awesome.

unknown 44:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

And I remember near the end of my career being on the SWAT team, and we've got our headsets on and communications, and I'm just holding perimeters, so I'm not doing anything important. But I'm hearing the traffic of my buddies operating inside the house and their calm call-outs of movements. And I remember thinking, if someone could listen in, they would think this is so cool. Like this sounds like a movie of professionals doing their job. And that was me too. Wow. So I I always had that fascination and respect and awe for being in the FBI. I think that comes through in the book, and so people reading it can go, yeah, that did sound pretty cool. And that would be, you know, just amazing to be a part of as well. I see how this guy experienced it. Maybe that could be me.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

Right, right. That's great, Eric. Thank you for sharing that. And when the book is released, I will be sharing it with my audience. So I'm looking forward to reading it and showing my audience your book. Eric, before we drop and conclude this interview, I'd like to ask one final question. What are your final thoughts or message you would like to share with the world?

SPEAKER_00 45:28

So for me, um now having gone through many years in experience in the FBI, um, I look back to when I was in my early 30s, late 20s in ministry, and then those two years of fighting against making a change. And so having gone through poor decisions I've made, uh, mistakes, difficulties, traumas, human beings underestimate the resilience of our souls to overcome those things. Mistakes we make or harms people bring to us, choices that are poor. We underestimate the resilience to reconnect, recorrect, and get back on a new path. And we overestimate the harm that will come if we make the wrong choice. So looking at me back in the late 90s and 2000s, fighting against needing to make a change, I was afraid of, but what if it's not right? This is what I was meant to do, I I can't change. And I had overestimated the harm that would come if I made a mistake. And looking back, I know I can get through these things. And the end result is in everything I've faced, I'm undefeated. It it may have brought something different in my life, but I'm here. And so anyone else who's gone through difficulties or is facing a challenge, you will be undefeated. You will get through. It might damage your life, and you'll just recenter into something new.

SPEAKER_01 47:15

Eric, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Well, Eric, my friend, it's been a pleasure talking to you today. I want to thank you for joining the Influence Exchange, and I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Thank you again. Thanks so much, JB. Take care. Before I go, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for pressing play. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching on YouTube. I truly appreciate you taking the time to be here with me. And if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you hit the subscribe button. And if you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other platform, follow the podcast so you don't miss out on the next episode. Because we're going to keep having real honest conversations like this. And remember, your influence grows every time you choose courage over comfort. I'm JV. Stay curious, stay consistent, and keep influencing others. Thank you and peace out.