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The Protectors® Podcast
Welcome to The Protectors® Podcast, where the valor meets the storyteller. Hosted by Jason Piccolo, a seasoned veteran and retired special agent, this series is a must-listen for anyone intrigued by the courage and tales of those who pledge to protect us. Beyond the front-line stories of bravery and dedication, this podcast goes a step further, weaving in the perspectives of those who bolster and narrate the protector's journey—featuring a remarkable lineup including New York Times Best Sellers and acclaimed Hollywood actors.
The Protectors® Podcast offers a diverse array of voices, from those who wear the uniform to the authors and entertainers who amplify their stories. It's a unique blend that highlights not only the raw realities faced by our protectors but also how their sacrifices inspire the narratives we cherish in literature and film. Each episode is a testament to the interconnected worlds of service and support, bringing listeners an unmatched depth of insight.
Dr. Jason Piccolo is a retired federal agent, former U.S. Army Infantry Captain (Iraq 2006), and author.
Past Guests Include:- Sean Patrick Flanery - Andrews & Wilson- Mark Greaney- Stephen Hunter- Remi Adeleke - Florent Groberg - Clint Emerson - Travis Mills
The Protectors® Podcast
#491 | Michael Hearns | The Metamorphosis of a Miami Officer to Master Storyteller
Ever sweated through a shirt just stepping out to grab the mail? Imagine chasing down perps in Florida's notorious humidity. Michael Hearns doesn't have to imagine; he's lived it. A former law enforcement officer turned author, Michael paints a vivid picture of his days before breathable fabrics were a thing and how his real-life escapades in Miami's steamy streets fueled the gritty drama of the '80s cop shows we all love.
Make sure to check out Jason on IG @drjasonpiccolo
Hey, welcome to the protectors podcast and, as usual, we have talked about 20 minutes before we hit the record button. Hey, welcome to the show, michael. How you doing I'm?
Speaker 2:going to give you that 20 minutes before we talk. Hello, hey, Jason. How are you Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Who's this guy we weren't just talking about like St Pete and Miami and Amazon and thrillers and this and that. Yeah, I dig Florida, you know I'm kind of torn, though, because one of my friends has me really kind of getting into the cooler weather. You know, I'm kind of torn, though, because one of my friends has me really kind of getting into the cooler weather, you know, and not so much that humidity, because I tell you, man, the humidity down there is about to go Like well, you know what. Let me hear from you You're like the native Miamian, floridian what is that humidity really like for us? East East coast, you know, North East?
Speaker 2:coast people, you're going to have to just butch up.
Speaker 2:I mean, I was born and raised in Miami and uh, I remember as a child and the girl as I get older, when you're when the summer starts to hit, you kind of go through like a two or three day period of like really sweltering feeling and times and then you get used to it because you're already kind of acclimated to it.
Speaker 2:It's when people come down and get off an airplane and not used to it that they have a trouble. They have trouble with it and also with the advent of technology, air conditioning and such, florida has become a lot more palatable place to be. But what we also see is what they commonly call Las Vegas throat. When people go in and out of las vegas and hotels are causing air conditioning and heat, air conditioning heat, and they get sick. So when you come down and you know it used to be in an air conditioner and it used to be in in the balmy, uh, warm weather, your body's gonna gonna have some issue at first I tell you I um, I always thought about like, because I was I was law enforcement in san diego some years.
Speaker 1:It was it't humid, it was like a really dry heat. Now you're an LEO, it's the 80s and the 90s, we're not quite up to the dry fit generation. You're rolling around with your button-up shirt, you're doing the undercover work. Let's equate the heat into this factor now the heat, and then you've got to carry all this like your pistol, your ammo, your cuffs, and you got to run around and it's just sweltering.
Speaker 2:And let's talk about this before the dry fit generation yeah, before the dry fit generation, I really didn't carry a lot of gear. Um, we were, we were pretty deep under. We had like hardcore stand standing rules that you did not enter the uh stand standing rules that you did not enter the uh, our uc locations with um, any gear, t-shirts or stuff. And I remember, like teaching at the dea and they would always give me a polo shirt as I was leaving here. Here's a polo shirt and I'm like I can't wear this. I never can wear this. But, um, you just kind of dealt with it. You know, I was younger man, you just have a better proclivity to handle and all that.
Speaker 1:I don't think a lot of people understand. True undercover means being sans any thin blue line, looking like a cop, feeling like a cop and get ready all that generalization. Having the undercover warehouses, having the undercover storefronts, undercover locations. Now you started off as a regular police and you don't just start off undercover. So how did you get into the undercover?
Speaker 2:Actually you know my career path is a little different than most, and not because I was different, it's just that's how circumstances worked out. I came out of police academy like everybody else. But I I tell people when I teach classes that I was raised with money lauders and drug traffickers and sometimes the road you choose to avoid your hit your future you find on that very same road. You know that's where your destiny lies. And I had a clean. I had a very keen understanding of the drug culture, the drug world, drug mentality and money laundering. So my agency kind of tapped into that.
Speaker 2:When I was even in the police academy I was actually being pulled out of the academy once or twice to meet with people and talk to them. So I came out of the police academy, I did my mandatory three months of FTO training, field training, officer training, fto training, field training, officer training. I did one day on the road and then I got pulled out to a plainclothes street narcotics task force. I did that for about eight months and went back to the road for like another six months and then I got put into vice intelligence narcotics and been in it for 10 years and then after that I was back and forth between the roads and supervising and and uh actually in the last five years of my career in a desk doing uh grants and acquisitions.
Speaker 1:so now you mentioned vice and you mentioned miami, so I mean, obviously we have to talk about that.
Speaker 2:We got, we got to get the elephant out of the room right now yeah the best, the best 80s cop show out there, very realistic realistic, very realistic, because he had great training people and technical advisors. They had some really good people on that show in the first couple of years. People don't realize that, like the first year of Hill Street Blues, all of those plot lines are from Miami stories and Hugh Peoples was a Miami-Dade police officer. He was a technical advisor for Hill Street Blues. That's why in the opening credit you see the Chicago car kind of skid on the ice and says take a call and people strive. That's a little homage to him.
Speaker 2:So when Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich came down to Miami to do Miami Vice, we already had a mechanism of good people on hand to help out and get that series off to a good rotten start. It was a highly stylized version of what we did. There are some similarities. Art and life do imitate each other from time to time and we found ourselves many times in an atypical Miami Vice situation. But it's once again it's a highly stylized version of what we were doing.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people don't realize like the drug game is. It's a game you know. In a way it's like you have. It's like, I should say, more like a puzzle and pieces of the puzzle and putting them together. There's so many different pieces of it, so many different people involved with it on both sides of the law. Now that must have really worked into. Like you know, you're deciphering these cases, You're doing these cases, You're building these cases, You're living them, You're learning them, You're learning how to do the affidavits, the subpoenas, the this and that and everything. So later on, when you start writing, it must have been a lot easier than just a regular layman picking up a pen to write about a protagonist like Cade Harkin Taylor. I had to read that real quick, I mean seriously, Kate Taylor. I mean obviously you know the undercover cop who's the main protagonist, but he has real life experience based on yours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, there's the old adage you write what you know. A lot of people wanted me to write a tell-all type book and I just didn't feel like that was something that was going to be in my wheelhouse.
Speaker 2:That was something that was going to be in my wheelhouse, so I wrote a fictional character, Cade Taylor, and he's currently in four different novels now and we follow Cade as he navigates and maneuvers his way through this murky underworld of drugs and cocaine and money laundering. In Miami and people seem to like Cade Taylor quite a lot. There's quite a growing legion of Cade Taylor fans. The books are written in the first person, so many people feel like they're right with Cade as he goes about his daily activities. The thing I do with these four novels and whatever future Cade Taylor novels there are, is I don't put him to rest. You wake up with him. You go to bed with him, you get up the next day. The books are very descriptive. I think we're living in a world now where many readers and many other people looking for entertainment mediums are very visual now. So the books are very descriptive, they're very accurate, they're geographically and chronologically accurate to South Florida and it seems to be a fun journey and a good ride.
Speaker 1:Now the current one's Choices and Chances right Current one is Choices and Chances.
Speaker 2:The first one was called Trust no One, and then the second one that came out after Trust no One was called Grasp and Smoke. The third one was One More Move, and the fourth one is now called Choices and Chances.
Speaker 1:Now the big thing. One of the reasons I love talking about authors, especially with, like the realistic background of yours, are the real life background is that transition from you know, living on the street being in a street carrying the badge and gun doing the job. And where does that creativity come from? Where is that spark that says you know what? What I want to create something.
Speaker 2:I think the spark is always there. It's kind of dormant for a while. In Spanish, you know, they use the word chispa for spark, which basically means like an igniter, and I think what happens is, as you transition through your career, through your experiences, through just your age, that chispa, that spark, gets ignited. And once it gets ignited, you have a choice. You can tamper it down and put it out I wouldn't recommend doing that to any type of creative surge or you could let it run crazy and burn everything down. I wouldn't recommend that either. But if you can channel it into a control burn where it's beneficial for growth and beneficial for future development, then I think you're on the right path. And that's where a lot of people come to the crossroads of their life, where they become either an author, a painter or even a musician. They start to pull from those experiences and channel it out to a digestible format that someone else can partake in, enjoy and learn from. And I think I've hopefully done that with these four novels.
Speaker 1:Now that must feel really good to have. It's almost like I always talk about this and I shouldn't always say I always talk about this but like the mission, like your mission now, is like it's a creative one. It's it. This keeps your mind. To me, it seems like it keeps your mind like free of going back and being like I wish I did this, I wish you did that. Now, when you're writing the books, you're like okay, I could fix the past, some of the mistakes I've made and some of the things I wanted to readjust.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I wrote Trust no One and I thought that would be a one and done. And then there was such a human cry for more Kay Taylor that I wrote Grasp and Smoke. And then I started being asked by many people when's the next one? When are you going to write the next one? And the answer is always the same If I think and I want to emphasize the word think if I think I can tell a compelling, entertaining story, then I'll do it. I don't want to put something out there just to put something out there. I want the readers to have an engagement of enjoyment and so far I think we have that. And when I look at various metrics social media, sales and everything else I see an uptick in people everywhere, from England to Australia, canada, united States. Lots of people are really gravitating towards Cade Taylor and Cade has captivated a lot of people and I'm happy for that. I'm happy for them. It's nice to bring an escapism or a reading journey for anyone who chooses to pick up the books.
Speaker 1:It's one thing I'd like to is like you and I were talking before we hit record about there's a lot of military thrillers out there, but I'm telling you, it's really tough to find a cop book, a really solid cop book. I mean, yeah, we have the Reacher books, we have these books here and there, but this genre to me is way underdeveloped and I think we need more. Kay Taylors yeah, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:I think Michael Connolly really opened that door with Harry Bosch. He helped a lot of people with that and the problem not the problem, but the issue at hand is that you would never tell a surgeon how to conduct an operation, nor would you bang on the cockpit door and tell the pilot to level off the trim tabs. You just wouldn't do that. But we've been exposed to law enforcement and the military so much in our lives that we seem to think we know it. And what many people are finding out when they pick up the Cade Taylor series of books is this is a whole aspect of law enforcement they were never exposed to.
Speaker 2:You don't learn cocaine trafficking and money laundering in the police academy. They'll teach you traffic stops, they'll teach you how to conduct an investigation for burglary or something like that, but they don't teach you how to be an undercover money launderer. So the thing with the military thrillers is that a lot of people have served in the military. So you, as a military thriller officer, you really need to be on your game, because someone's going to call you out if you don't have the exact right weaponry, the exact right emblem on your uniform, the exact right number of a unit or brigade. There's a lot of people out there looking to say, aha, you're wrong, and that happens in my genre as well. But very few people have the experiences I have of working undercover 10 years and then made eating and calorie drug cartels as a money launderer. Therefore, I'm able to transpose some of that insight into these books.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about the pucker factor. Then you just brought it up, the undercover factor of going in your first real. I mean, yeah, I'm sure you've done Dubai Bus and you've lot of the um, the smaller time, undercover, leading up to like the big time. But when you started rolling into that, what was that like? What was that pucker factor like? Or was it just like a? You know? Hey, you know what? I've dealt with this before.
Speaker 2:I'm just going to put in the back of my mind you know, I think I think I may have been out of my mind to be honest with you.
Speaker 2:Um, we were working pretty fast and pretty you know we were doing things at a very quick pace and it wasn't a lot of time for reflection, and I oftentimes reconcile it with it's like being in a hurricane when you're in the center, everything's calm. The eye of a hurricane is very calm. It's everything that's swirling around you that's destructive. So it's when you step out of the eye and you look back and you realize, oh my gosh, what a mess, what a destructive mess that was. So we were always.
Speaker 2:When I say we, I had team members with me, we were always in the center and you have a lot of faith in yourself, you have faith in your teammates, you have faith in your equipment, you have faith in your training, and that is what's sustained me. I can't speak for them. That's what sustained me. Some days were high intensity and some days were low energy. It's the ebb and flow of the Kremlin curve and we were not only, you know, lassoed ourselves to it, but we were trying to corral it, control it. It control it, ride it and also, you know, put it down as well at the same time.
Speaker 1:Now how do you put it down? I mean, how do you go from that life of like the adrenaline surges all the time to just like?
Speaker 2:you just have to recognize that, what your role is in that you're not. You're not judge, jury and executioner. Your job is to enforce the law and if you do something and for somewhere down the road it doesn't work out the way you intended it. You just have to recognize you did your part of the equation.
Speaker 2:I lived in miami, florida, and you know there were lots of people you would see from time to time and one of them was I was. I didn't know him, I didn't talk to him, but I would see, you know oj simpson. When he left california, went to miami. I would see him coming out of a restaurant or something and somebody would oftentimes say something about him and my attitude was he was tried by a jury and said you know, you can't get attached to the outcome. You can't. You can't be that person. If you're gonna drive yourself crazy, you can have your personal views, but you can't. You can't be that person. If you're going to drive yourself crazy, you can have your personal views, but you can't let your, your, your, your personal views affect the foundation of what we do as a justice system.
Speaker 1:Now when you bring up homicide. How did you transition from drugs into work and murder cases?
Speaker 2:In the drug world we oftentimes have a very high intensity as I said earlier way of doing things and sometimes it's a little slow. And we had a serial murder case that we had an individual that we thought was a potential serial murderer come through our city and the case fell on my lap and I started working it and I got very close to a forensic psychologist and that psychologist became a mentor and a friend and we worked a case together and I then figured out that this was something I had an aptitude for and I pursued it further and got a master's degree in it and the guy accepted for a doctorate in the UK for it a master's degree in it and the guy accepted for a doctorate in the UK for it. And I just started to parlay my my experience, my abilities and my motivation towards that. So I started working in consulting on some serial homicide cases.
Speaker 1:Really like to know more about that, because you go from working these, these big cases and drug cases, always cases, always have they spider out. There's always more than one, more than one person. But when you're starting to talk about these cases and murder cases, you're looking at one person and it's like you really can look into their mind because, like when you're looking at a drug organization for profit, a lot of people involved with it, now you're looking at you know different of crime, like a crime of passion or crime of revenge or some sort of psychosocial type thing where they're killing people and getting into that mindset. That must have been a neat experience to be able to. Now you're the hunter, you're trying to find someone who's deadly.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know if I'd use the word neat. I think I would just say that it is an experience, yeah not neat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know my words are a little off sometimes. No, no, no it is an experience.
Speaker 2:You know the psychodynamics. I've been very fortunate. I've been incredibly blessed and very fortunate to work with some really really good people. My agency sent me to some great schools. I in turn turned around and tried to parlay that knowledge as best I could back out again as an instructor. But many of the larger for lack of a better term thinkers in the field I've been able to work with, and so I've been able to glean a lot of information from them and work with them.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it's challenging work. It's emotionally challenging, that's for sure. I don't get involved in anything unless I'm directly asked to do it. My wife will ask me something. She'll say what do you think about this, what do you think about that? And I'll say I'm really not keeping up on it. And she'll look at me kind of like well, you know why? Not Because I don't want to get emotionally attached into those cases. When you deal with those type of cases, you're not only dealing with the parameters of the actual homicides themselves. You're oftentimes dealing with surviving, family members and things like that. And it's very hard. It's very hard, and I had one case of a serial murderer who was killing prostitutes in Miami just before a Superbowl and I had, like every city manager, every mayor, every chamber of commerce person breathing down my neck because the Super Bowl was coming to town in 10 days. So there's a lot of political pressure that goes with some of these things as well. There's time constraints, there's financial constraints, budgetary limitations. There's a lot of plates spinning in the air.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine the political ramifications of that, because it's death and, like I said, I shouldn't have said it's not neat, but I'm just saying the aspect of the investigation. But yeah, when you start looking at this is a loss of life, and then you have that whole sphere that goes around with the family and friends and they're putting pressure on the politicians and everybody's putting pressure on you and you're like look, I can only follow the evidence so much. I can only pull as many strings as I possibly can. That's out there. That's one thing I want to get into is pulling these strings. How complex are these cases to really track them down?
Speaker 2:to is like pulling these strings. How complex are these cases to really track them down? Well, I think they're harder now than they were 10 or 15, 20 years ago, because the media starts to get a hold of them and at every turn, every corner there's someone who's an ex-disc, an ex-FBI, ex-something who's telling you pretty much textbook, first paragraph information pretty much textbook, you know, first paragraph information. And the media and the public pick up on that and they expect results. We watch shows like CSI Miami and CSI itself and all these other shows, and people think that forensics are everyone's got a $17 million, a lab at their disposal and everyone has all these tools and these, these great gadgets. And it's not that simple. You still have to go in front of a jury and all that jury has to have is a shred of doubt and the whole case is gone. And the juries now watch these tv shows and they expect law enforcement to come forward with all this compelling evidence. And that's not how it is all the time. So you're dealing with perception and you're dealing with reality, and you have to stay in the focus of your reality, because the perception of what you're doing and how you're doing it is totally different.
Speaker 2:Hollywood likes to make the criminal profiler look as if they have some sort of psychic vision, some sort of keen insight. The behavioral aspects that the average person doesn't have, and do they? Yeah, they do to a point. The behavioral aspects that the average person doesn't have, and do they? Yeah, they do to a point, but we don't get green flashes of imagery that flash across our brain and hear and see things that the average person doesn't see. Actually, the truth of the matter is it's a lot of. It's rooted in the science, it's rooted in mathematics, it's rooted in probability, it's deductive logic. It kind of all has to come together.
Speaker 1:Now that brings us back to Cade Taylor. What kind of crimes is Cade Taylor? We know he's in a drug world, he's in and out of that. Is he going after the bad guys, the serial killers?
Speaker 2:Well, he hasn't. I can't say he hasn't yet, and that's not to be designed as a teaser. It's just meant to say that the door is always open in the future. And these four novels that have come out so far. Kate Taylor is a vice intelligence narcotic detective in Miami, florida. He's working with the DEA. He's working with US Custom Service. He's also working his own drug type cases and he finds himself in all four of these novels vexed with certain different situations. The best thing so far is that if you read these four novels in order, it's great. If you read them standalone, it's just as great. The books aren't spoilers. They can all stand alone. But when you read them together, you see the thread of continuity between Cade and some of the people he works with and deals with. You see the evolution of their relationships a little bit. But if you should read any of these books out of order, you will not be lost and you will not be um. Have the other three books running for you.
Speaker 1:Each one can stand on their own I really like the time frame, too, of the 1990s, late 1990s, because you don't have the smartphones, you don't have the gps's, you're rolling around with, like thomas, guides and maps and you're trying to find people, like when you don't have satellites and this and that. So I really dig this timeframe as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the books are written in 1998. And, like you just said, the books are very accurate to the times. They're accurate to South Florida both geographically and chronologically. In fact, in the book Grasp and Smoke, at 1. Point, one of the investigators a homicide investigator pulls out her cell phone. And I had to do my homework and realized that cell phone cameras did not come out for another 45 days from when that scene took place. So I had to switch it to a Polaroid camera. So it worked very hard.
Speaker 2:I do a lot of research. I study moon phases and tidal charts and when they order from a restaurant they don't just order an entree, they order the exact entree from that menu at a restaurant. Everywhere they go streets they drive on, places they go, things they do are all truly accurate physical locations in Miami and some people like to read my books with Google Maps open and they can actually see what I'm describing to them in the books. And I think, once again, going back to Michael Conley, I think he did Los Angeles a great service because, as Harry Bosch travels to LA, a lot of those places are accurate as well.
Speaker 1:I love that idea too, and that's a lot of your law enforcement background is showing up in your pages, not just by cases and stuff, but by the granularity. Come up with a word like that the granular nation of notion. You know what?
Speaker 2:The granular aspect.
Speaker 1:Actually we're going to leave this in. I'm not editing that out because, hey, I'm a doctor, right? Yeah, go figure. No, but that's the thing. It's like writing a report that a jury's gonna have to see, that everybody's gonna have to see, and you're gonna be like, huh, okay, it's half, it has to be correct. I love that aspect it's very accurate.
Speaker 2:Well, one of the heart burns we had watching burn notice, miami, vice and such was that we would see them make a left-hand turn on the street and they'd end up six miles away. People who lived in Miami would know that. So I made an intentional aspect to to make these books chronologically and geographically accurate. In fact it was my editor who, after, like the second novel she's like I get it she goes. This is how Cade Taylor processes things as he's driving and going in and out of offices and businesses and restaurants. He's always thinking about stuff and this is how he processes the world. And you see that with him and many people.
Speaker 2:There's always kind of a surprise element with the Cade Taylor novels because people are with Cade from start to finish and then when something hits they never see it coming and then upon reflection they see that all their breadcrumbs have been lined up all along. You just missed it, and that's once again. It comes back to the investigative mind right in the novel, the investigative minds not reading the novel. So many readers have these great aha moments because when it finally becomes crystal clear what's going on or what they're seeing or what they're looking for, they realize that the clues are in front of them the whole time.
Speaker 1:I love it, man, I really do. I'm actually going to pick this up as soon as we get off of here Through your QR code on your website. All right, I'm going to start one of of and I typically never read books because I never have time, always on the audible and stuff like that, but for once I want to just sit down and read a book, take some damn time and read a book. You know that. You know it's. I'm retired, what am I?
Speaker 2:doing. It's hard for people to read books between um taking care of children, taking care of parents, taking care of your job and then all of the electronic I won't say intrusions, I'll just say the electronic things at your disposal cell phones, tvs, ipads, computers. It's very hard for people to keep that attention span. I will say this, and this is not a lecture the Kay Taylor books are designed to like be read. If you try to read the book and put it down and come back until six months later, you'll miss a lot, because there's a lot that's said and done in these books that are once again in plain sight. You're just missing it until it hits you in the head like a hammer.
Speaker 1:I think I'm going to take my own advice and go for a walk. Put my rock on, go for a walk, leave my electronics behind and stop and just read for a bit. You know, I mean, you got to get out there and read these books. But, mike, I really appreciate you coming on the show and I look forward to having you back on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this has been a pleasure.
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