The Coast Guard Unit That Hunted Drug Traffickers | Giuseppe Weller

**Jack Murphy** (0:01)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. And today we have a episode that I have wanted to do almost since this podcast started. It is a very unlikely and relatively unknown story about the US Coast Guard. And many of you would probably be surprised to hear that in the 1990s, the Coast Guard was down in Central America and South America conducting operations that you would normally associate with Special Forces. Going down there and training local units and accompanying them out into the jungles and destroying drug labs.
Giuseppe Weller, our guest today, was one of those individuals assigned to what was called the DIAT, the Drug Interdiction Assist Team.
They worked hand in glove with the DEA and other agencies. The program went on through the late 80s into, I guess, the mid-to-late 1990s. But we'll get into the whole history of it. But I mean, I think it's a fascinating story, and I think more people need to know about it. So I appreciate you coming on the show today.

**Giuseppe Weller** (1:09)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

**Jack Murphy** (1:11)
So if you could, tell us a little bit about your own kind of upbringing and how that sort of took you towards, eventually, the Coast Guard.

**Giuseppe Weller** (1:20)
So I was originally born in Italy. My father was a US. Army Staff Sergeant. So I met my mother there. I have two other brothers. So I spent 14 years between Germany and Italy on American bases. And then, you know, it's a little status story. My father, you know, Vietnam veteran, got in trouble in the Army. So they separated. My mom separated. The only thing that the Army did was send us back to the United States. So I was never back in Italy. I was pretty much, you know, a soccer player back in those days. When I came to the United States, we bounced around from Maryland to DC and Virginia, and I was going through high schools. And the only way back to Italy was to try to get into the military to go back. And that's what I was trying to do is to go back home. And, you know, I was 17 then. And then my, you know, my mother was like, no, no army. You have got to stay in, you know, something else. And I remember going out to recruit for the Air Force. My brother was in the Air Force, my older one. So I didn't like to be crewed inside of it. You know, I wanted him to give me something like I was going to be on Coast Guard patrol, doing some kind of police work. He wouldn't guarantee. And so when I went back home that day, my mom was like, hey, the Coast Guard called. And so that's what got me to the Coast Guard. So I went to go see the recruiter down in Alexandria, Virginia, and I spent a few days down there. And then I realized, you know, what they did, not just Coast Guard. You know, there was a bunch of drug war pictures that the recruiter had on his, you know, on his, on his, on his board and stuff. So that's what started everything. And then, you know, I just, I enlisted.
I, I forget what they called it, but I enlisted before I came out of high school. So in January, I enlisted in January, my senior year, I was only 17 And then once I left high school, I went to Cape May, New Jersey, did my recruiting there. And I got my first station down in Key West from like 1986 to 1990 I was on a surface effects ship, which was a hydrofoil basically. There was three of them down there, the Petro, the Shearwater and the Seahawk. So once I got down there, that's where my law enforcement piece started to come together and, you know, started to experience how law enforcement worked in the maritime side of things. And, you know, I was a E2, became an E3 there. And then I struck my boasting mate, you know, rating. And I was asked to stay one more year from the billet officer if I could help out because they had nobody come in as an E4. And I did that. And that's how things started to turn around. In my last year, my commanding officer was, Bicombe was his last name. He was a law enforcement detachment team captain for the lead that's down in Miami.
And he had asked me, you know, if I wanted to stay in law enforcement, he could get me to a unit that was very special in the Coast Guard and it was unheard of. The only problem was you needed to be an E5 and above and I was only an E4.