Trafficked: My interview with Mariana van Zeller about American stuck in Mozambique prison

Mariana van Zeller interviews Rodney Baldus for an episode of her National Geographic show, Trafficked.

Rodney Baldus thought he was going to leave his daughter an inheritance so she could save the family farm. Instead, the 74-year-old man is sitting in a crowded jail cell in Mozambique with little hope of ever getting out. His daughter, Nicole, is terrified her diabetic father will die alone in Africa.

The story was largely ignored until it was brought to life recently by journalist Mariana van Zeller, host of National Geographics TV show, Trafficked. Mariana then reached out to me, hoping to get even more attention to Rodney's situation. She spoke to us for this very special episode of AARP'S The Perfect Scam.

Four years ago, Baldus was distraught and lonely after the death of his wife and what felt like a fading family legacy. So when an email arrived suggesting his late wife was entitled to an inheritance, he replied. After some back and forth, the email writer invited Rodney to Africa to sign some paperwork. As a measure of good faith, the writer paid for Rodney's plane ticket and hotel room. Impressed, Rodney dug out his passport and went on the adventure, figuring he had nothing to lose.

In fact, he's lost almost everything.

After a stopover in Mozambique to collect some documents, he was handed a package of "candy" to bring with him on the next leg of his journey. But Rodney was stopped at the airport; inspectors found 9 kilos of heroin in that candy. He was convicted in a one-day trial and sentenced to 18 years -- a life term for the 70-something American.

Rodney's story, while dramatic, is alarmingly common. He's the victim of what is sometimes called a "blind mule" scam. Criminals manipulate victims to transport illegal goods around the world without their knowledge. There's no good data on how many blind mules have been persuaded to leave the US and get caught up in criminal activity, but federal authorities have issued many warnings about it in the past. In just one drug mule incident back in 2016, US officials said 144 mules averaging 60 years old did work for a crime gang. The oldest was 87. When they can, FBI agents intercept would-be mules from leaving the country before the crimes are committed. But Rodney Baldus wasn't so lucky.

As conditions at the overcrowded jail deteriorate, and legal appeals seem fruitless, Rodney's daughter Nicole reached out to Mariana, saying the TV show might be her last hope. Mariana took up the cause, flying to Mozambique to interview Rodney. She brought Nicole with her; when father and daughter embrace in the show, you won't be able to avoid crying. You can watch the show here.

Trafficked also tracked down the criminals who lured Rodney to Africa. Mariana met with them, posing as a potential victim, with hidden cameras filming the scene. She wasn't afraid, but she was shaking, Mariana tells me in our interview.

These kinds of stories are so heartbreaking that it's easy to look away; we shouldn't. No purpose is served by Rodney Baldus dying in jail in Mozambique. So I share this today in the hopes this podcast will help get attention to Rodney's situation and the right mixture of diplomacy and mercy will lead to a happy ending.

We also share this as a cautionary tale. I've written many times recently: international crime gangs are becoming more powerful, more rich, and more creative than ever before. Their cover stories continue to evolve; their powers of persuasion continue to grow. The next Rodney Baldus could very well be someone you love. So share this piece with those you care about. Never accept any kind of a package, or even an envelope, from someone and transport it across a national boundary. Your life could change in the blink of an eye.

You can listen to the episode by clicking here, or by streaming it wherever you get podcasts. A partial transcript of the story is pasted below.

----------------------PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT-----------------

[00:10:46] Bob: So eventually you get to the point where you write to Rodney's scammers, and you pretend to be a relative, I think, right? Someone who's, someone else who's interested in the story and you want to pick up where he left off with the inheritance. Do you, what do you think are the odds that, that someone writes back and you, you get somewhere with that?

[00:11:03] Mariana van Zeller: Very little. I didn't think that it was actually going to happen. We decided, myself and my, uh the produ--, my producer, so we decided, okay, we're going to try and reach out to this pers--, to this, we had all the correspondence that Rodney, all the emails that he received and we thought, well let's try and write back to some of these emails and see if anyone replies. And they did.

[00:11:22] Bob: And they did. The criminals who lured Rodney to Africa now think they can do the same thing to Mariana.

[00:11:31] Mariana van Zeller: And so we started communicating with them and then through our investigation we found out that a lot of these groups operate out of South Africa, which borders Mozambique and there is a large community of immigrants, of Nigerian immigrants that live there, and real--, realized that the drug trafficking operation and the, these scamming operations sort of go through many times eith--, either go through South Africa or their South Africans then go to Mozambique to, to traffic drugs. And so when we started realizing this, we decided, okay, we have to go to South Africa. And in communicating with these scammers, while they are still believing that we are somewhat related to Rodney, we told them that we were going to be in South Africa and we'd like to meet them in person. Again, at this point we thought, okay, they're communicating with us, but there's no chance that they will actually say yes to meeting us in person in South Africa, but they agreed.

[00:12:20] Bob: Rodney's criminals or at least whoever is behind the emails that lured Rodney to Africa, have agreed to meet with Mariana. Suddenly this story is much bigger. Mariana is on her way to South Africa.

(MUSIC SEGUE)

[00:12:39] Bob: When they land, Mariana first heads to Rodney's lawyer and, well the first thing he says is that he basically thinks Rodney's guilty, that only a child would have believed that inheritance story. And as for the $5000 he'd asked for to bribe the judge, well his first reaction is, what bribe?

[00:12:59] Mariana van Zeller: I asked him about, and I have the copies of the emails, so I asked him about this. He denied it and he said that the money was for his fees, but obviously I have emails were it very clearly stated that he was asking for money to bribe uh the judge.

[00:13:11] Bob: And then Mariana and her team turn their attention to getting access to Rodney.

[00:13:17] Bob: Was it hard for you to get in the jail with your cameras?

[00:13:20] Mariana van Zeller: Yes, it took months, and we were told that we were the only camera team that had ever been allowed to this uh high security prison called Nashapa, which is just on the outskirts of the capital Maputo. It's an overcrowded prison. It was built for 800 inmates, and it has about five times that. And you know terrible conditions; the prisoners sleeping on the floor, just awful.

[00:13:39] Bob: But after a while, Mariana and her cameras are allowed into the prison to meet Rodney.

[00:13:48] Bob: And Rodney is, he's in his 70s, right?

[00:13:51] Mariana van Zeller: Yes, he uh, he was arrested when he was around 68, I believe, and he's now 74.

[00:13:56] Bob: What was your impression when you talked in the place?

[00:13:59] Mariana van Zeller: They had um, moved Rodney, obviously he wasn't in his regular cell. They had moved him to a, a nice room, uh air-conditioned room where we were supposed to do the interview with him. And he had a translator with him, another inmate who, who was South African, who spoke English and Portuguese, so it helped him, helped translate for, for Rodney, and was there also to sort of support. Rodney has trouble walking and his uh, he has uh diabetes. He has a, a slew of health problems, and he was not in, you could see his health was deteriorating.

[00:14:31] Bob: It, it's still, it, I feel like I'm just walking right into a nightmare that I, I don't even know if I want to hear the next details you're going to share with me. It's horrible.

[00:14:38] Mariana van Zeller: Yeah, it terrible, terrible.

[00:14:41] Bob: But Mariana does get to sit down and hear Rodney's side of the story from across a prison table.

[00:14:46] Bob: Again from Trafficked.

[00:14:48] Rodney: I did not expect to end up in this situation. But here I am. I admit I'm naive, that's what I'm guilty of. I'm not guilty of being a drug trafficker.

(MUSIC SEGUE)

[00:15:14] Bob: As they talk, something strikes Mariana early on. Rodney doesn't seem all that interested in Nicole's efforts to free him from prison.

[00:15:24] Mariana van Zeller: I think Rodney hasn't been very lucky in his life. I think that he has a wonderful family and that's um, you know I, I think he feels lucky about that. But he's had a hard life. I believe he had, you know he, he was a truck driver, he then fell ill and had to retire. His wife died pretty young, and he's had a bunch of unlucky things happen in his life. And so when this happened initially, obviously, he tried his best to prove his innocence as much as he could, but there was a sense that when I met him that he had just sort of decided that this was his fate. And it was nothing he could do. And even talking to us, it took some time for Nicole to convince him to talk to us because he didn't see an upside to it. He said he had tried to speak to so many lawyers and so, you know, and to the Embassy, American Embassy in Mozambique, and that nobody he felt was really willing or willing to help him. And so he didn't see any upside to speaking to us.

[00:16:20] Rodney: And they said, "You're a drug smuggler, you're a drug runner." And I said, "No, I'm not." But nobody believed a word I said. I will die here. I have no doubt about that.

[00:16:42] Bob: Um, but the, the fact that this, this man is, is so sort of beaten down that he's, you know his, all his hope has disappeared, that's just so striking to me.

[00:16:52] Mariana van Zeller: It is. It's, it's terrible because that the only thing that you have going for you in a situation like this would be hope, right? Hope that things are going to change and somebody's going to believe you. And that um, you know that you're going to be able to be released and and go home. And in his case, I just felt like he's lost all hope and yes, that he's just, he believes he's going to die in prison.

[00:17:17] Bob: But Mariana did not come into the prison alone. Her crew had cleared the way for Rodney's daughter, Nicole, to visit her dad.

[00:17:25] Bob: Here’s that moment from the show Trafficked.

[00:17:28] Mariana: Did you ever think that you'd be coming to Mozambique, you'd actually be here one day?

[00:17:32] Nicole: Absolutely not. It's still not real.

[00:17:37] Mariana van Zeller: Nicole Baldus has made the 9,000-mile journey from small town Minnesota to Maputo, Mozambique.

[00:17:45] Mariana van Zeller: What has he said about you, you coming here?

[00:17:49] Nicole: He was told me, do not come here, many times. But I told him that it's not up to him anymore. I just want to hug him, you know. Feel him, he's still on this planet, you know, it's been so long, four years is a long time to go without being a parent that you're used to seeing almost every day.

[00:18:14] Mariana van Zeller: Separated by thousands of miles, this is the first time that Nicole has embraced her father since the morning he boarded that fateful flight to Mozambique.

[00:18:23] Rodney Baldus: It’s good to see you.

[00:18:27] Nicole: At 42, I still daddy's little girl.

[00:18:33] Bob: That moment, now there are no dry eyes anywhere.

[00:18:38] Mariana van Zeller: You know the moment that we brought Nicole into the prison and seeing her after four years of not seeing her father hugging him, was you know one of the most emotional experiences I've ever had filming this show, or in my life actually.

[00:18:54] Bob: But the reunion doesn't get them any closer to understanding what really happened to Rodney. For that, Mariana is going to have to meet with the criminals and try to get some real answers. They arrange that meeting very carefully. Remember, Mariana is pretending to be a family member trying to collect Rodney's inheritance.

[00:19:14] Mariana van Zeller: And so we organized a whole sort of undercover operation where I had several undercover cameras with me, and we had a, a security team because we'd been told, again and again that these, these groups can be very, very dangerous, so I had two security people with me watching me, and I went into this place to, to meet this, this person that, you know was rela--, that had scammed Rodney.

[00:19:37] Bob: The team wires up the hotel lobby with cameras, installs a hidden camera on Mariana herself, and arranges to sit down with Rodney's criminal in as public a setting as is possible. Private security guards are waiting in the wings but, as he walks in, right away there's a scary curveball.

[00:19:57] Bob: And so you set up all of these safety mechanisms because someone had said to you, whistleblowers are getting killed, there was no equivocation there. So you know this is dangerous, and the first thing that happens when he walks in is he asks you to move to a different spot. That must have thrown you off.

[00:20:11] Mariana van Zeller: Immediately. I mean immediately. I think, I'm not sure if he does this every time or if he was suspicious, but this is where you understand that these guys are not amateurs. They've done this before, they're very good at what they do, and uh, he'd agreed to meet me in a public place, it was in the lobby of the hotel. I told him that I was staying at that hotel, even though I wasn't, but again, another thing he did immediate, first he asked me to move to another locate--, to another table which, yes, threw me off, because we had the whole security team in place watching me at that location. We also had cameras filming me at that location. So moving to a new table was not ideal. And also, as soon as we sat down, he, he asked me if uh, he wanted to see my passport, which also threw me off, because he wanted to make sure that I was the person who'd been communicating with him. And uh, and I wasn't prepared for that.

[00:21:00] Bob: So many of the cameras will no longer work, and Mariana is farther from her safety team than she should be.

[00:21:07] Bob: Were you scared?

[00:21:08] Mariana van Zeller: I wasn't, I don't get scared in these moments. But I was nervous. I wanted to make sure that I was doing Rodney's story justice and that I was going to be able to get what I needed from this person to prove that Rodney was, in fact, innocent. So I was, I was nervous, I was shaking, but I wasn't particularly scared.

[00:21:28] Bob: Shaking but not particularly scared? Okay. As they talk, Mariana makes sure she's talking to the right person.

[00:21:37] Mariana van Zeller: When I mentioned Rodney, he says he knows who I was talking about. He knows that, I mean that he'd been connected, he's been, he'd been one of the people in a group that was emailing Rodney all those times, and he's connected to that group 100%. I have no doubt.

[00:21:52] Bob: And what Mariana learns from the conversation is that there is an entire network of criminals who spend their time luring Westerners to Africa to either get their money or to use them as mules to move around drugs or other illegal contraband. She leaves the meeting with a secret video that should help prove to anyone who sees it that Rodney is innocent, but she needs to do more to understand the crime gang. So she reaches out to other people in the underground crime world there.

[00:22:22] Bob: You start to immediately find some sources and, and one of them says something to you that really sent chills down my spine which is, once they've hooked you in some way with one of these emails, it could be all sorts of stories, but once they've hooked you, I'm the one in charge. I'm controlling you. That just struck me, it's such a dramatic thing to say. I'm the one in charge. I'm controlling you.

[00:22:40] Mariana van Zeller: Yeah, you become a my puppet, and you do everything I want, and that is in many cases, uh what happens. And when they realize they can't uh sometimes, which is what happened, it seems that what happened in Rodney's case, that they then sell, even if they can get some money from you, after they've told, taken away all the money they can take from you, or they scammed you from all your money, eventually a person is left with no more money to give and they then sell them, they sell the victims to drug trafficking groups that then use these victims as drug mules. It's really terrifying.