The Hidden Third

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Sex trafficking survivor Lurata Lyon was kidnapped twice. First, at 17, by a trafficking network in Bosnia while fleeing the Yugoslav Wars. Then, after escaping, by Serbian paramilitaries who held her captive for six months.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Mariana van Zeller speaks with Lurata Lyon about surviving war, sex trafficking, human trafficking, kidnapping, captivity, trauma, and the long road to rebuilding a life after violence.

Lurata was a teenager when the violence surrounding the breakup of former Yugoslavia forced her to flee her home in Serbia. She made her way to Bosnia, where she was kidnapped by a human trafficking and organ-harvesting network. She escaped. But after returning to her hometown, she was taken a second time by Serbian paramilitary forces.

Held in solitary captivity for six months, Lurata survived abuse, torture, and the constant fear that she would not make it out alive. Her father ultimately arranged for her to be smuggled out of the country in the back of a truck. She arrived in the United Kingdom as a political refugee and began rebuilding her life from scratch.

Today, Lurata Lyon is the author of Unbroken: Surviving Human Trafficking. She is an international speaker, public-speaking and presentation coach, and human trafficking advocate who uses her experience to raise awareness about sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, survivor recovery, resilience, and life after trauma.

Sex trafficking is not rare, and it is not limited to conflict zones. The International Labour Organization estimates that 6.3 million people were living in forced commercial sexual exploitation worldwide in 2021, nearly four out of five of them women and girls. In the United States, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received 50,123 signals in 2021, including calls, texts, online chats, and tips from people seeking help or reporting possible trafficking.

Even though human trafficking is often discussed through statistics, headlines, and criminal cases, Lurata’s story helps us understand the human reality of sex trafficking and survival. It also shows how war, displacement, fear, isolation, and the search for safety can make people vulnerable to exploitation.

#SexTrafficking #HumanTrafficking #SexTraffickingSurvivor #HumanTraffickingSurvivor #HumanTraffickingAwareness #SurvivingSexTrafficking #YugoslavWars #WarSurvivor #PoliticalRefugee #TraumaRecovery #LurataLyon #MarianaVanZeller #TheHiddenThird
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Matt Bowyer — the illegal bookmaker at the center of the Shohei Ohtani–Ippei Mizuhara betting scandal — is back on The Hidden Third, and this time he's talking from the other side of federal prison.

The last time Matt sat down with me, it was 11 days before he self-surrendered to FCI Lompoc. His underground sportsbook had handled more than $1 billion in bets in a single year, taken action from roughly 700 to 1,200 clients (including Shohei Ohtani's former interpreter, who stole nearly $17 million from the Dodgers superstar to cover his losses), and helped trigger one of the biggest gambling scandals in Major League Baseball history. Now he's out, released early after six months, and the story has only gotten stranger.

In our conversation, Matt takes me inside Lompoc: how contraband gets in, how the “cars” (prison crews) really run the yard, why a pouch of "carnitas" (shredded pork) is the closest thing to currency, and how he ran a full business from behind bars — concierge service, personal chef, the works. He tells me what he actually believes about what Shohei Ohtani knew — or didn't know — about Ippei Mizuhara's bets. He opens up about how prison changed him, why he thinks Resorts World Las Vegas got off easy with a $10.5 million fine, where he lands on the explosion of legal prediction markets and sports betting apps, and what he's building next now that he's a free man.

This is a rare, unfiltered look at how the illegal sports betting world really works, from the bookie known as "bookie to the athletes."

TOPICS COVERED

• The Shohei Ohtani betting scandal, explained by the bookmaker at the center of it

• Ippei Mizuhara and the $17 million embezzled from the Dodgers

• Life inside FCI Lompoc federal prison camp

• Running a business from behind bars

• What Matt believes Shohei Ohtani knew (and didn't know)

• How illegal sports betting operations actually work

• Resorts World Las Vegas, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and the $10.5M money-laundering settlement

• The Nevada Black Book and Matt's nomination

• Prediction markets vs. sportsbooks vs. offshore books

• Athletes, gambling addiction, and what MLB still doesn't want to talk about

• What Matt is building now that he's out

#ShoheiOhtani #MattBowyer #MathewBowyer #IppeiMizuhara #OhtaniScandal #SportsBetting #IllegalGambling #MLB #Dodgers #TrueCrime #Investigation #Podcast #MarianaVanZeller #TheHiddenThird #ResortsWorld #Bookmaker #PredictionMarkets #Kalshi #Polymarket #Lompoc #FederalPrison
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Hostage negotiator and UN mediator Tom Gregg on Afghanistan, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner exchange.

He has spent more than twenty years in rooms most of us will never see. Tom Gregg is a conflict and hostage mediator — the man governments send when they need to talk to people they officially refuse to communicate with.

He was the UN's man in eastern Afghanistan, the most dangerous corner of the country, when a full-blown insurgency against America took hold. In September 2006 a suicide bomber assassinated Governor Hakim Taniwal, the man he worked alongside — a former university professor who'd come home from exile in Australia to try to rebuild his homeland. The next day a second bomber walked into the funeral and blew himself up among the mourners who'd come to bury him.

He has mediated in Somalia, Nigeria and the Sahel, negotiated with kidnappers to bring hostages home, and run back channels for the United Nations, the U.S. government and the World Health Organization. When Kabul fell in August 2021, the UN sent him in to open the first face-to-face talks between the United Nations and the Taliban leadership.

He almost never gives interviews, because almost none of his work can be discussed. This is one of the very few long conversations he has ever done.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Tom Gregg sits down with me to explain how the invisible business of negotiation actually works. We talk about:

The 2014 Bowe Bergdahl exchange: five Guantánamo prisoners for one American soldier, and how a deal that big actually gets done

Flying into Kabul days after the Taliban takeover to open the UN's first face-to-face talks with the new regime

The Haqqanis: how the family America armed to fight the Soviets became the deadliest enemy the U.S. faced in Afghanistan

Washington armed the father. The son now runs the police. How Sirajuddin Haqqani went from a ten-million-dollar FBI bounty to Afghanistan's interior minister

The morning a suicide bomber killed Governor Hakim Taniwal, who he worked alongside in Gardez, and the second bomb that hit the funeral the next day

Why those two attacks were the first sign that America's plan for Afghanistan was already failing

How a kid from Australia ended up as a UN Political Affairs Officer in the most dangerous corner of Afghanistan

The backpacking trip that changed his life, and the time he almost got mugged in Mexico City — the strangest night of his life

Negotiating vaccine access with armed groups, and what it takes to get a nurse safely into a war zone

Private diplomacy at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, and what an NGO can do that no government can

What Afghanistan looks like in 2026, with Pakistan now bombing the same provinces the insurgency once crossed from

How Bono once told him he was against Bill Clinton engaging Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin leader the U.S. had banned for twenty years — and how watching that gamble help deliver the Good Friday Agreement changed his mind about talking to your enemy

Why the most consequential work in the world is done by people whose names you will never learn

His PTSD, how he got better, and why he believes communication is the only thing that ever really ends a war

If you're interested in war, hostage negotiation, Afghanistan, the Taliban, intelligence, diplomacy, or the hidden systems that decide who lives and who comes home, this conversation goes somewhere almost no interview does.

Subscribe to The Hidden Third on YouTube, and follow, rate and comment on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It genuinely helps.

Get exclusive episodes, behind-the-scenes conversations, and unaired footage from stories we couldn't tell anywhere else at Patreon.com/thehiddenthird

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Brad Beeler is one of the most experienced criminal polygraph examiners in U.S. Secret Service history — a 25-year federal agent who has sat across the table from counterfeiters, child predators, killers, and fraudsters, and gotten a remarkable number of them to tell him the truth.

What looks in the movies like pressure, threats, and Reid-technique interrogation is, in his telling, almost the opposite: a science-backed set of trust-building, deception-detection, and interview techniques that he says a parent, a teacher, or a business leader can learn to use just as effectively as a federal agent.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Brad sits down with me to walk through the cases that shaped his career — from a years-long hunt for a master counterfeiter, to child-exploitation investigations, to a homicide confession he still calls the most transformative moment of his life — and to break down what actually gets people who don't want to talk to tell you the truth.

We dig into:

– Growing up in Union, Missouri, and how a childhood best friend who was deaf became the origin of the way he now thinks about communication.– His path into the Secret Service.

– How he became a federal polygraph examiner and ended up conducting more criminal polygraph exams than anyone in Secret Service history.– The real story of how polygraphs work - why people "beat the examiner, not the instrument," how false confessions happen, and where confirmation bias becomes dangerous.

– The King of Counterfeit case: the multi-year hunt for a master counterfeiter, and how the suspect's own ego became the interview lever.– His child-exploitation work with local ICAC task forces and homicide detectives

— the cases that earned him U.S. Secret Service Special Agent of the Year in 2015.

– The homicide confession he describes as "transformative," and how silence, presence, and empathy did what pressure never could.

– Four years on the protective detail of former President George H. W. Bush in Maine and Houston, including what the Bushes did every Christmas so agents could be with their families.

– His final post as instructor and Secret Service liaison at the National Center for Credibility Assessment, the federal government's polygraph school at Fort Jackson.

– The tradecraft behind his new book, Tell Me Everything: A Secret Service Agent's Proven Strategies for Earning Trust, Revealing the Truth, and Communicating with Anyone

— and why the same techniques that get a suspect to confess can also get a scared kid to text his parents at 2 a.m.

If you're interested in true crime, interrogation techniques, deception detection, lie detector tests, Secret Service stories, child-exploitation investigations, or how the best interviewers in federal law enforcement actually get people to talk, this interview goes far beyond the headlines and tells the story in Brad's own words.

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Adnan Alisic is the mastermind behind one of the craziest casino heists in American history — a Hollywood‑style armored car robbery that used a fake AK‑47, a blow‑up doll, bear spray, a motorized skateboard, and underground ATVs to try to steal millions from Casino Arizona.

What sounds like a parody of Ocean’s 11 was, in reality, a desperate, meticulously planned casino heist built on bravado, improvisation, and a deep belief that he could outsmart a system designed to never lose.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Adnan sits down with me to trace how war, trauma, and gambling addiction led from Yugoslavia’s conflict zones to a multimillion‑dollar casino robbery — and what happened when the plan fell apart.

We dig into:

– His childhood and adolescence during the war, and how he helped support his family by selling counterfeit cigarettes.

– The massacre of women and children he witnessed, how he survived it, and the trauma that followed.– His family’s move to Arizona after the war, adapting to life in America, and building a car business from scratch.

– His first time inside a casino, how gambling took hold, and how his addiction spiraled into millions lost and the collapse of his business.

– The day he decided he was going to rob Casino Arizona, and the planning that went into pulling off an armored‑car casino heist.

– What actually happened on the day of the robbery, how the plan unraveled, and how he was ultimately caught.

– His years in federal prison, what changed there, and how he began to confront his addiction and his past.

– His work now in gambling‑addiction awareness and recovery — and why he wrote his book Arizona Dream.

If you’re interested in true crime, organized crime, casino heist stories, scam psychology, gambling addiction, or how people convince themselves a casino can be beaten, this interview goes far beyond the headlines and tells the story in Adnan’s own words.
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