THE MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN

True Spies, Episode 101: The Manhunter

Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission you’ll hear the true stories behind the world’s greatest espionage operations. You’ll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their secret skills? And what would you do in their position? 

MARC CAMERON: Over the course of almost 30 years, I've arrested something like 600 people, and I've met a lot of people that have done evil things. But I've only met maybe a dozen people that I viewed as ‘eat your soul’ kind of evil people. And Faron Lovelace was one of those people.

NARRATOR: This is True Spies Episode 101: The Manhunter.

MARC CAMERON: The panhandle of Idaho is mostly forested. It is rolling hills. It is emerald hills with blue lakes, and it's absolutely a gorgeous part of the United States. 

NARRATOR: Clean air, blue skies, big country. The mountains of Northern Idaho conjure up a vision of a lost America - a vast and mighty land of fur trappers, log cabins, and intrepid frontiersmen. Close your eyes. Smell the wet pine hanging in the air. And do your best to ignore that tickling sensation on the back of your neck. You know the one. 

MARC CAMERON: So the forest can be like a canopied jungle sometimes with the huge ponderosa pines, and larch, and lodgepole, and spruce. Very thick cover, easy for someone to hide in these rural areas and just wait and watch. 

NARRATOR: In the forest, you’re never truly alone. And whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends entirely on who is watching whom.

MARC CAMERON: We didn't want to get so close that we alerted him. We had word that he had placed booby traps around the entry points to the mountain. So we were very careful, but we wanted to get a lay of the land, so to speak, and see if any of the people up there were ever in imminent danger. 

NARRATOR: In this case, you can breathe easy. We’re on the side of the watchers. Well, one watcher in particular. He’s on the trail of a fugitive from justice, a murderous white supremacist with a criminal record as long as his mean streak.

MARC CAMERON: So in order to effect this arrest without getting anyone hurt, we came up with half a dozen different plans.

NARRATOR: This week’s true spy is many things - a spy, technically, isn’t one of them. But the unique tradecraft of his profession - the fine art of manhunting - would serve you well in most any branch of the intelligence community.

MARC CAMERON: My name is Marc Cameron. I was a Deputy United States Marshal from 1991 to 2012. Since my retirement, I transitioned into writing novels full-time. At present, I write the Jack Ryan novels for the Tom Clancy estate and Penguin Random House publishers, as well as my own series. 

NARRATOR: Well, inspiration has to come from somewhere. And in Marc’s long career, he’s built up a bit of a surplus. The United States Marshal Service is the oldest federal law enforcement agency in the USA. 

MARC CAMERON: It was started by George Washington in 1789. We started off basically just enforcing federal law because they didn't want the Army, military to be law enforcement officers in the United States.

NARRATOR: Today, the Marshal Service’s duties include the protection of federal judges, Supreme Court justices, and foreign dignitaries. And that’s the tame stuff. 

MARC CAMERON: We spend a lot of time hunting fugitives. That's probably the sexiest part of our job. We focus on it and we spend a lot of time on it. And so, we're very good at manhunting if you will. We also handle all of the federal prisoners, making sure they get back and forth to court and then eventually turn them over to the Bureau of Prisons. We also run the Witness Security Program and have a special operations group, which is like a SWAT team but on a federal level. 

NARRATOR: If you're looking for a role that’s light on paperwork and heavy on action, the Marshals might just be for you - not to mention the other perks.

MARC CAMERON: When I was in high school, I lived in a small town in Texas. I was standing around with some friends on the Courthouse Square one day and I saw this tall guy with a hat. He had a gun and a badge on his belt. He got out of his truck and he put a little bag over the top of a parking meter that said ‘Official Business, United States Marshal.’ And I was about 15, and I remember thinking: “I want a job where I can have one of those bags someday.” So I went to college, got a job with the Weatherford Police Department in Texas, a small department, worked there for not quite seven years, and applied with the Marshals. It took me about two and a half years to get on.

NARRATOR: Once Marc was through the door, the real challenge began.

MARC CAMERON: We were the very first class in 1991, in January of 91, they sent us to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy in Glencoe, Georgia. And you go through 10, 11 weeks of training to be a criminal investigator for the government. Virtually all criminal investigators for the government, special agents, if you will - with the exception of the FBI and DEA who go to Quantico - all the rest of us go to FLETC as it's affectionately known, or Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. 

NARRATOR: After FLETC, rookie Marshals undergo a particularly hands-on training program unique to the service.

MARC CAMERON: Post our FLETC training, then the United States Marshals Service has its own training right there on the same grounds. But we're trained by a different cadre of instructors who are all marshal service. So we stay there for six weeks and that training involves surveillance. We have a lot of vehicles that are fleet vehicles that we check out and surveil, role players around Brunswick, North Georgia, and all that area.

NARRATOR: That’s all fairly involved work, true. But when we say ‘hands-on’, we do mean ‘hands-on’.

MARC CAMERON: Marshal Service is kind of known for having a big fight at the end among ourselves where we're paired off with someone in a fight called a ‘Kumite’ and many people hooked on the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center come and watch our final Kumite. And they always make sure they do it after we've done the final firearms qualification and our final fitness test because a lot of people get hurt, but they want us to know what it's really like to fight because the marshal service is a boots-on-the-ground agency and service. So once we go out, we're immediately tasked with going out and doing the job. They really want to show us the reality of it. 

NARRATOR: Believe it or not, some criminals really don’t want to be caught. And when push comes to shove, a deputy marshal needs to be able to handle themself.

MARC CAMERON: We talk about the stories of when we got into a fight, but 90 percent of those fights are people trying to get away, and maybe even a higher percentage of that. And that's not really a fight. You can get hurt. They can get hurt, fall down, or whatever. And they might throw a punch or something. But the ones that we really trained for were the true fights where someone turned and came back at you and said: “I'm going to kill you to get away.” And that's what we really, really trained for - that moment. 

NARRATOR: The story you’re about to hear details a joint operation between the Marshals, local law enforcement, and the FBI. 

MARC CAMERON: We used to joke, when I first started back in the day when Hertz - and I think Alamo rental cars - they had a commercial. One of them had a commercial that said: “We're number two, so we try harder.” And that's the way the Marshal Service has always sort of been with the Bureau where we're number two. And that can be a very healthy competition. As long as you also coordinate. So this story takes place in the northern part of Idaho and the Idaho Panhandle from Coeur d'Alene, all the way up to the Canadian border. 

NARRATOR: The scenic town of Coeur D’Alene is nestled between wooded mountains, winding rivers, and sparkling lakes. 

MARC CAMERON: So I transferred to the Coeur D'Alene office of the United States Marshal Service District of Idaho in the summer of 1994. 

NARRATOR: A dream posting for a nature-lover like Marc Cameron.

MARC CAMERON: I've been an avid outdoorsman my whole life, out fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking. And so I already had some basics in tracking without any actual training. 

NARRATOR: Unfortunately, when Marc arrived in Coeur D’Alene, US Marshals were persona non grata. Two years previously, Federal Officers had attempted to serve an arrest warrant to Randy Weaver, a Christian fundamentalist and self-described white separatist. You might have heard the story. Weaver and his family, who embraced a survivalist lifestyle, had opted to remove themselves from society. They lived an isolated existence on Ruby Ridge, around a two-hour drive from Coeur D’Alene. The attempt to arrest Weaver escalated into an armed siege of the family’s remote farm.

MARC CAMERON: The FBI was present, ATF was present, the United States Marshal Service was present.

NARRATOR: During the 11-day standoff, Weaver’s wife Vicki, and 14-year-old son, Sammy, were killed by law enforcement. The event sent shockwaves through the rural communities in the region.

MARC CAMERON: It was very rural up in the mountains of North Idaho, and there was a lot of mistrust against the federal government because of perceptions of what happened. And that's the situation that my partner and I went into a couple of years later when we were transferred. 

NARRATOR: A Deputy Marshal was also fatally shot by an associate of the Weavers. The incident at Ruby Ridge raised questions about the use of deadly force by the US government and, for some, stained the reputation of the Marshal Service in Northern Idaho.

MARC CAMERON: And so the powers that be in the federal government Department of Justice in the US Marshal Service decided that they should staff the Coeur D'Alene office, which was 400 miles away from the main office down in Boise.

NARRATOR: The higher-ups in the Marshal Service decided that a friendly presence in Coeur D’Alene would be a good first step toward building bridges in the region. Marc was encouraged to enroll his children in a local school and become part of the community.

MARC CAMERON: And so we were - myself and my partner - were transferred to North Idaho in the midst of quite a bit of extremism and white supremacy and that sort of thing. 

NARRATOR: Two years into this sensitive posting, Marc and his partner received an assignment that echoed with the memory of Ruby Ridge.

MARC CAMERON: So sometime in early 1996, I received an assignment to work a warrant on a fugitive, a parole violator by the name of Faron Lovelace.

NARRATOR: Faron Lovelace: confessed racist and white separatist. A member of the Aryan People’s Republic, a white supremacist organization whose members had been responsible for a spate of robberies and murders in the mid-90s. Escaped federal custody during prisoner transport.

MARC CAMERON: His original crime was an armed robbery, and he had fled parole and was on the run. 

NARRATOR: Now it was up to the Marshals to track the fugitive down, serve him with an arrest warrant, and put him back behind bars.

MARC CAMERON: And we had some information that he might be hiding out in a trailer in North Idaho.

NARRATOR: Lovelace was holed up somewhere in the mountains. 

MARC CAMERON: And so my partner and I, along with some agents from the Coeur D'Alene office of the FBI, began to work the case. 

NARRATOR: Where Randy Weaver had - his supporters argued - simply wanted to live apart from mainstream society, Faron Lovelace was an active menace to it.

MARC CAMERON: What we did know about Faron Lovelace - and we knew very little in the beginning - but, what we did know, is that he had a record for armed robbery. We believed that he had kidnaped a couple over in Spokane because of their… They had a Jewish name and he had basically dressed up in camouflage and befriended their dog. He spent a lot of time surveilling them, then snuck into their house, kidnaped them, and held them for a number of hours overnight. 

NARRATOR: After speaking to Lovelace’s victims in Spokane, Marc and his team began to learn more about the fugitive.

MARC CAMERON: Basically, we thought of himself as an assassin or he was training to be an assassin, and so he had this hit list and wanted to, by his own words, lay down his life for the white race. And so we were sort of ramping up our search for him as we found out a little more about that.

NARRATOR: After knocking on doors across Northern Idaho, the Marshals made a breakthrough. 

MARC CAMERON: Our informant on Faron Lovelace actually came to us. Whenever you look for someone, you obviously turn over a lot of stones, open a lot of doors, and talk to a lot of people. And so it was well known in North Idaho that the marshals were out looking for Faron Lovelace. 

NARRATOR: The informant had credible information about the whereabouts of Faron Lovelace. Suffice it to say, getting there would be no easy feat.

MARC CAMERON: He told us that Faron was holed up on a mountain in this Pack River area, very remote logging roads and trails going up, places where you couldn't even get a vehicle, you had to walk. 

NARRATOR: But what motivated this informant to give Lovelace up to the Feds?

MARC CAMERON: It's hard to tell what somebody's motivation is as an informant but this particular informant cared about the people that were up on the mountain. He didn't seem to have any particularly great love for us, but he did want to take care of the other people that were on the mountain.

NARRATOR: No, Lovelace wasn’t alone. During his time on the run - a period of more than a year in total - he’d fallen in love with a woman who lived on the mountain. She shared his hyper-conservative views on race and religion and had become his common-law wife. She was some 20 years older than Lovelace - around 60 to his 39 - and shared her cabin with a teenage grandson. Like the Weavers on Ruby Ridge, the couple chose to live as far away from other people as possible. Their cabin received no mail, had no electricity or running water, and was rustically adorned with Harley Davidson posters and religious iconography. They lived on preserved food and had little contact with their distant neighbors except to replenish their supplies.

MARC CAMERON: And they spent an entire winter up there, hiding in this little - it's a part of a national forest - and they just squatted on it, if you will, and built their little cabin and tarp lean-tos and that sort of thing. And so, obviously with the issues of Ruby Ridge, there was no way that we were going to be able to go up and actually make an attempt to make an arrest on a rural mountain like that with innocent civilians involved. 

NARRATOR: A guns-blazing approach was off the table. Remember, part of Marc’s mission in Coeur D’Alene is to restore trust between the federal government and the locals. But the informant was wary of the effect Faron Lovelace’s presence might have on the woman and boy who shared the cabin. He knew that Lovelace was a dangerous man who associated with dangerous people. This was a powerful motivation to assist the Marshals, despite his personal distaste for the Service. Able to travel freely between the trailer and the town below, the informant became a vital source of information on the fugitive’s movements.

MARC CAMERON: There is no doubt in my mind that he risked his life going back and forth and helping out - getting information back and forth. 

NARRATOR: But second-hand intelligence is never as reliable as the information you collect yourself. And Marc had a variety of means by which to gather first-hand intel on Faron Lovelace.

MARC CAMERON: So during our investigation and the fugitive hunt for Faron we used everything in our power. We had aerial surveillance. We went up the mountain on foot several times as far as we dared without... We didn't want to get so close that we alerted him. 

NARRATOR: The mountain was Lovelace’s home turf. The Marshals had to be extremely careful to avoid discovery but that wasn’t the only risk.

MARC CAMERON: We had word that he had placed booby traps around the entry points to the mountain. So we were very careful, but we wanted to get a lay of the land, so to speak, and see - if any of the people up there were ever in imminent danger - that we at least knew our routes to get up there.

NARRATOR: So, think about it. The man you are hunting is hiding in a dense forest. You can’t track his movements from the air. You can’t get closer to his encampment on foot without risking life or limb in one of his jerry-rigged booby traps. Heavy vehicles are out of the question too - a show of force like that, so soon after Ruby Ridge, is unthinkable. Firearms? Likewise. Too much risk. So what can you do? Well, you could fight booby traps with booby traps.

MARC CAMERON: Faron, we knew that he came on and off the mountain because in a lot of places you just couldn't get a vehicle. He would sometimes come down for supplies or whatnot, whatever reason to come off the mountain. He had a 10-speed mountain bike, and he kept that hidden about halfway down the mountain - kind of, cached under some logs. And so, one of the plans we came up with was booby-trapping the mountain bike and getting him there. 

NARRATOR: You might be wondering: How do you booby trap a mountain bike? Cut the brake line? Let down a tire or two?

MARC CAMERON: It's been a long time, but I feel like we were going to put a ‘flash bang’, like a concussion grenade on the bike, so that when he moved it, it would stun him and we would be able to affect the arrest at that time. We sent that up the chain to Marshal Service Headquarters and the Department of Justice. And they 'ix-nayed' that because they were afraid that the grandson might be coming down with him some time and we might put them in danger.

NARRATOR: Again, the Marshals can’t risk any collateral casualties. So think outside the box. If you can’t get to the man on the mountain, you need to bring the man on the mountain to you. But how do you bait a person like Faron Lovelace? He lives in a cabin and survives on tinned food. Clearly, fine living doesn’t motivate him. Nor can you appeal to his better nature. He’d need to actually have one.

MARC CAMERON: I can't speak to his mental state, how sane he was or was not. But he certainly did some horrible, horrible things and seemed to do them without compunction. In fact, he looked for and sought out people to try to harm. 

NARRATOR: Lovelace’s hatred was specific - and a negative motivation is still a motivation. That can be exploited.

MARC CAMERON: We knew that Faron was extremely racist. He had very strict, very strong views about the white race and anybody that wasn't white. 

NARRATOR: Marc and his colleagues got to thinking of how they could exploit Lovelace’s bigotry to their advantage.

MARC CAMERON: And so, we came up with a ruse to get him off the mountain by getting him information that there was a Hispanic arms dealer/drug dealer in Priest River Idaho - probably the nearest town to where he was hiding out - who had some girls with him, some white women, that he was basically recruiting into prostitution. 

NARRATOR: The story - to be delivered to Lovelace by Marc’s informant - was scientifically calculated to push as many of Lovelace’s buttons as possible.

MARC CAMERON: Our ruse was to play on Faron's hatred and to get him off the mountain to come down and stop this drug and arms dealer. That person did not exist. In fact, we kind of, as a little Easter egg between ourselves, we named the person after the director of the Marshal Service, whose last name was Gonzales at the time. And so we had this drug and arms dealer. It was all in our operations plan. 

NARRATOR: The plan was sent up the flagpole to the Department of Justice. This time, it was approved. Before long, Marc’s informant had fed Faron Lovelace the fake intel on ‘Gonzalez’, a fictional arms and narcotics dealer sowing discord in Bonner County, Idaho. Never one to turn down the chance to act out a racist revenge fantasy, the fugitive took the bait hook, line, and sinker.

MARC CAMERON: So the information was relayed to Faron. He was incensed, of course, which meant that it was time to begin preparing for the final phase of the operation - arresting Lovelace. A team comprising members of the FBI and local law enforcement moved into position on the mountain highway.

MARC CAMERON: And we had a person watching as he hit Highway Two, coming into Priest River. 

NARRATOR: Once the lookout had eyes on Lovelace, the net began to close in. From the West, an FBI agent drove his Jeep at a safe distance behind Lovelace’s push-bike.

MARC CAMERON: I would travel eastbound and we would trap Faron on his bicycle.

NARRATOR: The arrest team, comprising several members of the FBI, local law enforcement, and one cool-headed US Marshal, planned to close in on Lovelace at a strategic point in his journey.

MARC CAMERON: There's a bridge that crosses the actual river, the Priest River before he gets into town. And it's quite a long bridge and a place where we get him away from other traffic and with no people because we knew he was going to be armed. 

NARRATOR: Well, no self-respecting, assassin-in-training goes pedaling around without some firepower.

MARC CAMERON: He was always armed, and our informant said that we could count on him being armed. So he did come off the mountain. He’s tooling along on his bicycle. By radio, we were informed: “All right, he's got a backpack.” The FBI agent that was following him - right behind him - in the Jeep saw that he had a revolver in his back pocket and looked like the barrel or the butt, the stock of a rifle sticking out the top of his backpack. You wouldn't necessarily notice it if you didn't know what you were looking for, but it was a small folding stock. I think Mini-14.

NARRATOR: A Ruger Mini-14 is a tactical semi-automatic rifle. And you can be sure that Lovelace knew his way around it. So far, everything seemed to be going as planned. What happened next, Marc doesn’t quite remember. But something went badly wrong.

MARC CAMERON: I think Faron noticed the FBI agent. And so the FBI agent went ahead and forced him off the road as I was approaching right before he got to the bridge. And so there was a Bonner County deputy right behind me, me, Faron on the bicycle, the FBI agent facing me, and the Bonner County, a deputy with Faron kind of squeezed in the middle. So Faron fell off the bicycle, tumbled into the ditch. There were guns everywhere. It looked like a very violent fall. 

NARRATOR: There’s only so much you can plan for. A good manhunter needs to be able to adapt to the situation at hand. There’s no time to reflect on what could have gone differently. If Lovelace manages to draw his weapon, he won’t hesitate to fire. The priority now is containment.

MARC CAMERON: When we bailed out of our car, the FBI agent was supposed to be ‘contact’ and he had enough experience that he didn't do the ‘magnet’ and run right towards. So he jumped out with his firearm, the Bonner County deputy and I were the ‘contact’ officers. So the FBI agent was ‘cover’. We were ‘contact’. 

NARRATOR: As the FBI agent drew a bead on Lovelace, Marc and the local policeman raced toward the fugitive’s prone body. It soon became apparent that he wouldn’t be going down without a fight.

MARC CAMERON: We ran up to Faron, got control of him. He wrestled with us quite a bit. I had a hold of him. The Bonner County Deputy was actually a big, huge dude, quite muscular and he just yanked him away from me and flipped him over. So we were able to get him handcuffed. 

NARRATOR: Lovelace was secure. 

MARC CAMERON: But I will never forget when I stood Faron up. He's handcuffed. He's got grass stains on his shirt and there's still guns being secured on the ground. It happened very quickly and he looked up at me with his eyes kind of blinking surprised, and he said: “It is obvious to me that you are more racially pure than I am, or you never would have won that fight.” 

NARRATOR: Those words, spoken with quiet but total assurance, remain with Marc to this day.

MARC CAMERON: When I met Faron in 96, I had been in law enforcement for well over 10 years. I met murderers, rapists, child abusers, and whatnot. And I would get sad, or despondent, or whatever. But rarely was I actually chilled. And Faron Lovelace had the effect of chilling me when I spoke with him. 

NARRATOR: With the operation at an end, Marc and his fellow officers could take a breath. Lovelace had been captured without any collateral casualties. This would not be a repeat of Ruby Ridge.

MARC CAMERON: It's hard to say what Faron Lovelace wanted as far as a stand-off or an arrest. It seemed to me when we arrested him that he was armed to the teeth, ready to take down this fictitious arms/drug dealer that we had made up. But there's little doubt in my mind from talking to him that he would have had no problem at all shooting it out with the police. So he ticked all the boxes for somebody that wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. And we have to keep that in mind when we do plan operational plans for risk because we - contrary to books that I write or movies or whatever - really want to get out of this with the least amount of violence as possible. We want to be prepared for violence, but certainly, we want to get out of it with the least amount.

NARRATOR: Driving away from the scene of the arrest, Lovelace revealed the true depths of his maladjustment.

MARC CAMERON: So once I had Faron in the car, he started talking immediately. It really dovetailed on to the initial statement he made about me being more racially pure. He talked about his own quest. He talked about a hit list he had. Incidentally, he had the sitting sheriff of Bonner County at the time on the list and some judges - and just anybody that he deemed as a threat to the white race, in his words, were on this hit list.

NARRATOR: But the fugitive wasn’t entirely without compassion. He did seem to care for the common-law wife he’d left up on the mountain that day. Lovelace wanted to make a deal to protect her from the attention of the federal government. His bargaining chip? A disturbing confession.

MARC CAMERON: He would confess to a murder that he committed the year before of another white supremacist in the area named Jeremy Scott. We had no idea that Scott had been killed, but he confessed to me in the backseat of that car that he had kidnapped him, held at gunpoint, and knocked his tooth out with a pistol. They spent all night in this cabin praying and reading the Bible. Faron quizzed Scott about things. And Faron has changed his story several times - but when he first told me, he said he was afraid that Scott was going to basically rat out the rest of the white supremacist group that he was a part of. So he ended up shooting him in the back of the head and taking his body up to a very remote area - up in the Pack River country - and burying him up there. We had no idea about it. In fact, Faron, as part of his confession, agreed to take us out to the place where the body was. 

NARRATOR: A year later, Faron Lovelace would be sentenced to death for the murder of Jeremy Scott. 

MARC CAMERON: And I should say that by his own words, he said: “I'm an evil man and I deserve to be destroyed.”

NARRATOR: But at the time, there was only one thing left to do, go back up the mountain. Unsurprisingly, the caution they had exercised earlier in the operation turned out to be well-founded.

MARC CAMERON: At this point with Faron not there, we felt comfortable in calling out the elderly woman and the grandson. We had our informant with us who knew them. He was able to help us call them out. And it went relatively smoothly. There was a lot of cursing going on and hatred against the federal government. But they gave up peacefully. What we did find was quite a few booby traps, fishing lines with hooks hung from trees. We found some small, for lack of a better term, homemade landmines that are basically a shotgun shell stuck between a split piece of wood with a nail at the bottom, and then they're buried. So, if you step on them, then they detonate and blow off your foot. So we found several of those and then some other little items, quite a bit of ‘survivalist’ kind of things. 

NARRATOR: One of the Bonner County Sheriff’s men was alarmed to discover what he believed to be a ‘Bouncing Betty’ landmine.

MARC CAMERON: And I called the FBI agent friend of mine. He was a former Navy Seal and I described it to him. And he said: “No, that's a filter for a gas mask.” Somebody up there, I'm not sure who ended up shooting it, and it certainly was nothing more than a filter, but we had it cordoned off like an explosive for a while. In fact, I still have that on my writing desk. I was able to get that released by the attorneys, and I have that filter with a bullet hole in it for my inspiration on my desk. But we were able to clear it off and come back down the mountain and have some more very interesting talks with Faron.

NARRATOR: Later in his career, Marc transferred to Alaska - as if Northern Idaho hadn’t been wild enough. He still lives there today, writing novels, and taking in the great outdoors.

MARC CAMERON: And so my writing, I love the Marshal Service. I was the chief deputy at the time. I just loved the folks I was working with. I loved the mission of the Marshal Service, but I'd also always wanted to be a writer. And so, when I turned 50, I contacted my publisher in New York and said: “You think we can wrap this up and I can do one book a year?” And they said: "You bet. And so I retired and wrote several more. Jericho Quinn novels were eventually approached by the publishing company, Penguin Random House - which works with the Tom Clancy estate - to write the Jack Ryan novels. And then my own series, the Arliss Cutter series, as well. So I basically was able to retire at age 50 seamlessly. 

NARRATOR: Fortunately, he was able to seamlessly move over into being a full-time novelist and with still many contacts in law enforcement and friends and law enforcement. 

MARC CAMERON: My own son is still in law enforcement, so I'm able to have lots of inspiration for the books. But I have to say that I miss it every day. 

NARRATOR: The latest installment in Marc’s Arliss Cutter series, Cold Snap, is available from April 26, 2022. I’m Vanessa Kirby.