- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by: Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He spent 25 years as a special agent at the FBI retiring as assistant director of counterintelligence.

He's now a national security contributor for "NBC News" and MSNBC and the author of a new book, "Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers."

He's Frank Figliuzzi.

This is "Overheard."

(warm inquisitive music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

(audience applauding) You've really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving into the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

- Two.

- This is "Overheard."

(audience applauding) Frank, it's so good to see you.

Thank you for being here.

- It's a pleasure to be here and to be in Austin once again.

- We love having you here.

This is a great book.

- Thank you.

- I thought to myself it's the best kind of true crime because it made me unsettled reading it and I couldn't put it down.

But also I was horrified by what I was reading.

You've done something really extraordinary here.

Did you know at the start of this whole process of writing the book that it was gonna turn out the way that it did?

- You know, Evan, I kind of prided myself during my FBI career with knowing all the nooks and crannies of the FBI.

One of my positions in the bureau was chief inspector, which meant I was looking in the nooks and crannies in the FBI.

When I found out, post-retirement, that the Highway Serial Killings Initiative was still going strong, I was floored by that.

So I had to put my investigative hat back on, had to get out in the field and I did.

including riding 2,000 miles- - We'll talk about that.

- in a big rig.

- That's amazing.

- But the numbers just floored me.

The success of the book.

Look, first three weeks it was out Harper Collins had to reprint three times - Isn't that great?

Isn't that great?

- Yeah.

- Well, I think, look, this is the kind of book that gives all of us who don't understand or see or even know about the culture and the subculture in this book.

It gives us a window into this.

And I just think it's unbelievably amazing.

So the basis for this, as you said, is the Highway Serial Killing Initiatives.

- Yes.

- And this specifically relates to more than 850 murders that are assumed to be committed, believed to be committed by long-haul truck drivers.

So just stop right there.

Who knew that there was even such a thing?

- Yeah.

- Right?

- The numbers are what compelled me to write the book.

And they're staggering.

As Evan said, 850 women have been murdered alongside our nation's highways in just the past few decades.

The FBI is certain this is the work of multiple serial killer long-haul truckers.

And then when I asked the Bureau, how many of these are unsolved, the answer was 200 of the murders are unsolved.

And when I asked them how many suspects they had, the answer was 450.

- Incredible.

- Yeah.

- So the clearance on this is not, they're just not being able to clear a lot of these cases.

- It's the perfect crime.

It's the perfect crime scene.

It's an 18-wheel mobile crime scene.

The truckers are exploiting the gaps in law enforcement.

They're taking a victim in one jurisdiction.

They're raping and killing her, sometimes raping and killing in a second police jurisdiction and dumping the remains in a third jurisdiction.

- You point out that it's really a story of three cultures.

There's the culture of the drivers, there's the culture of the victims, and there's the culture of law enforcement.

And it's kind of the kind of coming together of those three that become the basis for the story.

Talk about those one at a time.

Talk about the drivers.

- Yeah, I didn't want to write a book that was just blood and gore and then leave you horrified and scared and walk away.

I wanted to get deep into three subcultures.

The first one, long-haul trucking.

So if you say, "Well, I'm not a true crime aficionado, but I've always wondered what goes on in an 18 wheeler on the highway alongside me."

Then this book is for you.

The second subculture, of course, is the victims, the sex trafficking victims.

And I wanted to dig deeply into how a young person falls into the trap of trafficking.

And in this book, I consult with the top two experts on street-level trafficking in the country.

Two PhDs who are outstanding at it.

And then the third subculture, the crime analysts that specialize in this.

The people who come to work every day trying to connect the dots to stop the killing.

The trucking part of this was fascinating.

Like I said, 2,000 miles in a big rig with a, thank god, a cooperative and talkative trucker who helped me learn the ropes.

I slept in that upper bunk in the sleeper berth.

It's not the Ritz Carlton, I can tell you that.

- Well, it's not, but I wanna acknowledge and give you credit for this, that, you know, a lot of people who would write this book would not have put in the work, in a literal sense, put in the miles.

- Yeah.

- But you thought it was necessary, critical to understanding what you were writing about and the people you were writing about, right?

- I needed some street cred.

Right?

And this is also part of having been an FBI agent for so long.

I learn by doing, I learned by getting out and experiencing what it is I'm studying.

And that's what I needed to do.

And by the way, I came away incredibly impressed with modern trucking.

In part, I dedicated the book to the stalwart American trucker.

- Right, so, again, I wanna come back to those three cultures or subcultures.

What did you learn?

How should we think about long-haul trucking in terms of what you discovered in the course of this report?

- Yeah.

So thank God we're only talking about a tiny fraction of serial killers that are truckers.

But they're wreaking havoc on our highways, number one, number two, the economic impact of trucking.

Boy did we learn that during COVID?

- Yep.

- We sure did.

$875 billion in earned gross rate revenue last year from trucking.

Grocery stores would run out of goods in three days if trucking stopped.

They are hardworking people.

- Essential.

- Yeah.

They're essential workers.

And we don't treat them like essential workers.

They really don't get respect.

And in some of the big corporate names we see on the emblazoned on the side of the trucks they're not paying their truckers very well.

So it's hard work.

But I also learned there's kind of a caste system within long-haul trucking.

I rode flatbed.

You're very physically and mentally engaged with the load.

The load changes regularly.

We were carrying a heavy rolled steel called a suicide coil.

You have to know points of securement.

You have to know math and physics.

Do we have it too far forward?

Is there too much weight over one axle?

If we fuel up today, are we gonna be overweight?

All of that goes into flat bedding, strapping, chaining, how you secure the load.

Then on the other end of the spectrum, Evan, is what they call dryvanning, the guys and gals who haul the dry goods across the country.

No physical or mental engagement, no social skills necessary.

That's where I started to try to narrow down that 450-suspect pool and say, "Which kind of trucker in which kind of truck is more likely to be the killer?"

- So you conclude, which category?

- This gets tough, but I'm confident that, 'cause there's exceptions to every rule, but I'm confident that the FBI should be focusing its attention on the dryvanners.

- On the dryvanners.

- Yeah.

- And particularly owner-operators or those from very small mom-and-pop trucking companies.

- Where there's not a lot of accountability around them, right?

- Right.

Today, trucking is high tech, and the big companies track their drivers like crazy - Amazing.

Look, the thing about the victims is, any victim, it would be heartbreaking, tragic, and all that.

But this particular class of victims, I thought, incredibly difficult to read about.

This is really a human trafficking book as much as it is a serial, you know, serial assault or serial killing book, right?

It's really a book about trafficking.

- I wanted to get into the humanity of this.

- Yeah.

So talk about these women.

- Yeah.

So a couple of things.

I first started with the experts who taught me quite a bit.

They said, "Look, when you interview these women," and I did, and I say women, by the way, there's trafficking of boys and men and trans persons.

But the FBI- - For the purposes of this book- - the FBI initiative- - we're really talking about women.

- is focused on women as victims.

Okay.

So they said, look for these commonalities when you interview the victims who survived.

And I did interview victims who survived violent encounters with truckers.

They've been trafficked to truckers.

And sure enough, the light bulb goes on.

The checklist is being checked as I'm interviewing these victims, and I'm hearing the early childhood trauma, also often in the form of unwanted sexual touching or worse, early exposure to drugs, starting with marijuana, a tower of trauma in the household.

It could be the death of a parent or sibling, a domestic violence.

You name it.

There's a tower of trauma in that house.

- So there are certain elements that are consistent across- - Across socioeconomic levels.

Race, gender.

It was the trauma.

- I wondered, given, I don't want to paint too broad a stereotype here, but I wondered if in the case of some of these women, one of the reasons that many of these crimes are unsolved, as you say about 200, is because there really isn't a strong family connection where people are worried about them or what happened to them.

I sort of think these are women who go missing before they go missing, right?

- One hope I have for this book is to advocate for the women who have no advocates.

And in many cases, the experts tell me the families have distanced themselves from their loved ones.

You can only bail your loved one out of jail so many times.

You can only respond to so many overdoses of drugs.

- Right?

- Right.

- And then the horror of realizing what your loved one is doing out there on the street causes you to distance.

So these family members aren't pounding their fists at the police station saying, "What are you doing to find my loved one?"

They don't know their loved one is missing.

- Is even gone.

So the culture of law enforcement, the third thing, I mean, you know, law enforcement inside and out.

You wrote a wonderful book a couple years ago about the FBI, inside the Bureau, we'll come back to the state of the FBI now in a bit.

Is the FBI or is law enforcement generically categorized up to the task of solving crimes like this?

Like I wonder is there a systemic problem within law enforcement that leaves so many of these crimes unsolved?

- Yeah.

There is a systemic problem.

Problem number one is this is not the FBI's jurisdiction.

So the FBI's program is a support mechanism.

- They're supporting local law enforcement.

- For local county and state law enforcement.

And here's the problem with local county and state law enforcement.

I just described the scenario.

You're a deputy sheriff in a remote county, you find a body along the side of the road, how long has it been there?

Where did she come from?

Who dumped it?

From where?

And think about the detective work involved here.

Do I pull trucking weigh station receipts for the last six months on this stretch of highway?

Fuel receipts?

Do I go and check the camera at the toll booth?

For how long?

Do I contact every trucking company in America to figure out who was here and when?

That is where the FBI comes in and tries through a database and algorithms to actually match your crime scene with something they've seen before.

Think about that underpaid, understaffed sheriff's department or police department.

You tell them to fill out a 200-question questionnaire about their murder scene.

They look at you and go, "I don't have the time to fill out 200 questions."

And, "I don't have the computer that's linked to the FBI database."

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Amazing.

So what I liked about this is that you didn't just create a picture of the problem or tell the story, but at the end you said, here are some things that maybe we learned from this and that we need to do.

- Yeah.

- There were three things, I think it was three things that I took away, at least maybe there were more than three implicitly, but three explicitly that I took away from this one.

One was, we need to improve the pay and benefits of long-haul truck drivers so that we get maybe a higher class of employee.

It reminded me of prison guards.

You know, why are prison guards often so perennially in trouble and why are jails such a mess is because you pay so little and then you get what you pay for in terms of the people you are able to attract.

- You do get what you pay for and trucking is no exception for that.

- So professionalize the industry, say.

- Indeed.

And for those who say, "Look, that would cost a lot more money and would raise the cost of goods."

- Yeah.

Okay.

- Yeah.

It probably would.

We also could spend more time vetting and doing background investigations.

One of the things I found about trucking is there are certain companies who actually advertise that they are second-chance companies.

They strategically hire convicted felons.

I'm all for reentering into society.

I love that idea.

But what felony have they been convicted of?

If it's violence and violence against women, you're asking for trouble on the road.

- Well, you know what's coming.

And then so that was one: pay and benefits improved.

Second thing was a specific emphasis on mental health and other treatment services or opportunities for these folks.

- Yeah, I discovered that truckers often fake their annual physical.

They get some doctor behind the Subway sandwich shop who clears them for duty.

There's no concern about mental health or, you know, your vacation time, recouping.

And I advocate cross training.

So I talked about the different kinds of trucking.

If you have all of that under your company, why not cross train and have them do flat bedding one week or one month, dryvan, do the hazardous material, do the wide loads and oversize loads, do the reefer trucks, the refrigerator trucks with produce.

You'll learn so much and you'll be more mentally fit.

- Yeah.

And then of course, the last thing, which just makes perfect sense, I read it and I was like, "Well, of course," is build education in human trafficking into the licensing process for long-haul truckers, make understanding the trafficking crisis a component, a requirement of being able to get your license.

- Yeah.

Look, a mandatory half hour or hour on the trafficking problem along the highways would go a long way.

- Really smart.

- Who better to serve as the eyes and ears of anti-trafficking than our long-haul truckers.

- Well, it's a great book.

I encourage everybody to read it.

I want to move from it to talking about the FBI.

We are in a moment where, in a country where you back the blue where we're supposed to love law enforcement, respect the service they provide, we talk so badly about law enforcement these days and particularly about your old place, the FBI, right?

I mean the last couple of years, the way we run the FBI down, right, the political system, political actors, the people in the highest offices now just talk all the time in a way that, in my lifetime, I never would've believed.

The FBI was supposed to be this unimpeachable, right, they're there for all of us.

They're gonna do this hard work.

What happened?

- Yeah.

What happened, indeed.

That question caused me to write my first book, which you mentioned.

- Right.

"The FBI Way" - "The FBI Way."

- Right.

- Which by the way, came out the week of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, caused that book to become a national bestseller.

But I had to write it because what I saw happening in the media and the public perception I knew was undermining the mission of the men and women of the FBI.

If they flash their credentials at your front door and ask for help, and you have to pause for a minute and think, "I don't know if I can trust you.

I've heard some bad things about this agency," then we're in trouble as a nation.

But I'm gonna confess to you, you don't get confessions from an FBI agent very often.

Some of those perceptions were unforced errors came from- - Say more about that.

- Came from the senior leadership of the Bureau.

So I think, for example, Director Jim Comey is one of the finest, most upstanding men you'll ever meet.

But- - I'm about to say, I hear a "but" coming.

- Yeah.

Well, he made a mistake.

The calling that press conference and saying- - This is the October 28th press conference into the campaign.

- Quote, "No reasonable prosecutor would ever prosecute Hillary Clinton."

When he did that- - Oh, this is the first, this is the first one.

- Yeah.

No, the first one.

- Okay.

- Well, yeah.

And then of course- - And then the latter.

- Oh, the second.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So, you know, you wanna talk about messing with an election outcome.

Talk to Hillary Clinton about that, which you may have done.

So he forgot he was the FBI director.

He thought he was still the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, a position that he held.

We don't make prosecutive decisions in the FBI.

But he did.

He took it away from the process.

And that, in a second, politicized the FBI in many people's eyes now.

Then, let's bring Donald Trump in, who's done everything within his power to erode the public's trust in the FBI.

- Well, there has been, I'm gonna not necessarily put it at the feet only of the former president, but there has been an effort by a lot of people in office to undermine faith and confidence in institutions.

Again, I'm gonna paint it very broadly.

The courts, congress, law enforcement, the media- - The centers for disease control.

- Right.

Public health.

I mean, so when there's a story or when there's a finding or there's a court case or there's any other kind of action that you don't agree with, you can say, "I told you these people were bad and not trustworthy.

Now this is my suspicions confirmed," right?

And that's largely worked to a degree.

- Let me give you the most recent example.

As we speak right now on this day, Republican senators, in unison, are saying that the recent take down of the Russian intelligence operation to mess with our election is a deep-state strategy to destroy the Republicans.

- Election interference.

- Election interference.

- Right.

- By the FBI.

- Right.

Not by the Russians- - No!

- But by the FBI- - By the FBI.

- for taking them down.

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

So what do we do about this?

And an we get it back?

- It's gonna take a generation to restore trust in our institutions.

- A generation.

- The damage has been done.

And even if Donald Trump and his minions don't win this election, the problem doesn't go away.

We have a significant portion of our population that has lost trust in anything coming out of our institutions.

And that is a monumental challenge.

And the FBI's feeling it.

So what do we do?

Within my old organization, I'm telling you, we need reform.

For example, the FBI director position is supposed to be a 10-year term purposely to straddle administrations and be apolitical.

- Insulate the director from politics.

- Well, supposed to be.

Didn't work with a certain president.

He fired Jim Comey because Jim Comey was investigating the Russians.

So what we need is this codified, codified.

Of course there should be an exception for gross misconduct.

but the decision to fire an FBI director should be spread amongst the White House, the Attorney General, maybe the Senate and House intelligence committees or oversight committees.

This cannot be done lightly.

- In any case, it needs to be reformed.

- Reform is needed.

- Yeah.

I wanna talk in the remaining time we have about you.

You know, we see you on television all the time, but we don't really know about you.

And so I went back and made sure that I understood how you got from there to here, as it were.

Grew up in Connecticut, right?

- Connecticut.

Yankee.

- Went to Fairfield University.

- Yeah.

- Then went to University of Connecticut Law School.

- Huskies.

- Why did you end up in law enforcement as opposed to anything else?

- Yeah.

I get to ask this question frequently.

And the answer is, I grew up in a household where I was taught that there is good in this world and there is bad in this world.

You want to be on the good side.

Very religious family.

If church was open, we were there.

- Wow.

- And then, you know, I grew up in Southern Connecticut, which was part of the New York media market.

What did that mean?

As a kid, we'd turn on the news and we'd see the FBI taking down the mafia families in New York City.

And I thought, "This is pretty cool.

These people are using brain power to eliminate crime threats."

Yeah.

And when I was 11 years old, I wrote a letter to the head of the FBI in Connecticut and I said, "Hey, I'm 11 years old.

I'd really wanna be an FBI agent."

- And they wrote back?

- He wrote back to me.

- Right.

Yeah.

(audience chuckles) - And he said, you know, "Get back to it.

Stay clean, get good grades, stay fit, get back to us in 15, 20 years."

- And your time in the FBI, which I called out correctly, is 25 years.

You actually did a great number of things within the Bureau, kind of through the range of things that you did.

- It's been a wild ride.

And this is what I tell young people who are interested.

I started as an honors intern at the FBI while I was in law school for a summer in Washington.

And I encourage it.

I was head of the, you remember the first anthrax murder in US history at the tabloid headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida?

I was the commander of that hazmat crime scene.

- Amazing.

- We had never dealt with deadly anthrax in a three-story building that had already murdered somebody.

I did that.

I had a piece of the Unabomber investigation headquartered out of San Francisco.

I've returned kidnapped children to their parents.

I've run a Crimes Against Children squad where every day you come to work and think you've seen the worst of humanity, but you're wrong 'cause tomorrow is even worse.

And then of course, I started my career in counterintelligence, I've ran an office in Silicon Valley dedicated entirely to espionage in Silicon Valley and I ended my career as the head of counterintelligence.

- Yeah.

Amazing.

You miss it?

- I do miss the adrenaline flow.

You can get addicted to it.

And then there are times when I look at the TV news and I go, "I could have done that better.

I could have said that better."

(audience chuckles) But I also know that you burn out.

When I became assistant director, they sent me down and said this to me, and they tell this to all the operational assistant directors, "We expect you to do this for two years and burnout."

- I mean, they're going into it saying that.

- Yeah, that's your first day on the job.

- Is it because the job is psychologically so challenging?

Or is it physically, social?

- It's physically grueling.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

You're up at 0 dark thirty.

Your overnight briefer briefs you on what happened overnight in the world.

You then brief the director.

You brief all the other assistant directors.

You may brief the attorney general or the White House.

You're running operations, making decisions all day.

And then at the end of the day, you brief out.

And it's dark.

It's dark when you come to work, it's dark when you go home.

It's dark.

- And I actually, and I think it's dark in the existential sense also.

I mean, this is why I said, "is it psychological or physical?"

You're dealing with stuff during the course of any given workday that's just awful stuff to have to deal with.

- Yeah, I mean, if you miss a spy or he escapes, that's a problem.

Making a decision in a terrorist case that we're gonna wait, we're gonna wait.

Yeah, we know they've got the bomb making materials, but we need to wrap up the cell and make sure we've identified everybody.

How long do you wait for that?

Are you gonna watch them blow up something?

Those are the decisions you're talking about.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- How did you get from that to doing television and being a regular, not just being on television, but being on television regularly?

It seems to me that over the last couple years, the number of former FBI agents or former US attorneys, you got like mushrooms after a rainstorm, right?

All of you are on cable television.

- Are are you saying we're basically fungus?

(audience laughing) - I mean... - Is that what you're saying?

- I mean, I guess I am saying that actually.

- I'm a fun guy.

- Yeah.

- But, oh, look at that joke.

That was a good one.

- So yeah, this is surreal for me.

I'm an introvert.

I've lived most of my career in a clandestine capacity doing top-secret things.

- Well, that's the point is that actually you were not Mr. Public-Guy forever.

- No.

No.

- And now suddenly you are the most public.

- But here's what happened.

At the end of my career as the head of counterintelligence.

we unveiled a Russian illegals case, a sleeper cell inside the United States that we had worked for 10 years.

And boy did that upset Putin when he heard we had controlled them for 10 years.

- That was the first time an FBI head of counterintel had permission to go on television and talk about the case.

Robert Mueller was the director.

And he said, "Yeah, go ahead and do it."

The TV folks ate this up.

- I bet they did.

- You know, we showed videos of dead drops and brush passes in New York City.

And they were like, "This is astounding."

So they kept pestering me.

Right.

- Right.

"Come back on."

- And I retired.

I went to the corporate sector and headed up, you know, investigations for a global corporation and they kept calling me.

And then after five years as a security executive, "NBC News" said, "Can you come and tell us about national security?"

And they timed it right 'cause they knew the Mueller Russia Inquiry was coming that I had worked for Mueller, that I had worked counterintel.

And that's the story.

- Well, you know, in a complicated world, we'd rather that the world not be complicated, but in a complicated world, there are certain skills that come in handy.

And being able to process, understand the news of the kind you're talking about and tell you, "This is what is actually going on, and this is what it means," that's a valuable, valuable skill.

- My approach to this is simply to try to explain complex things as if we're having a beer, having a beer and talking about it.

That's how I do it.

I never thought though that we'd be talking about the domestic threat that we have right now.

- I mean, it really is.

It's extraordinary.

- Yeah.

- Come back and we'll talk about that again, I promise.

- I'll do it.

- All right.

Everybody give Frank Figliuzzi a big hand.

(audience applauding) Congratulations on the book.

Thank you for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- Okay.

- [Both] Thank you.

(warm inquisitive music) - [Evan] We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- Casey Jo Pipestem from the reservation was found dead in Grapevine, Texas.

And a great detective there worked that case endlessly to try to bring some justice there.

But they did arrest her pimp, who had also trafficked a girl about 11 years old.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by: Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.