Disorderly Conduct with Retired FBI Agent John Iannarelli, CSP John Iannarelli, CSP visits Fraud Busting. We’ll chat about the cases he’s worked on including the Oklahoma City bombing, The 9/11 attack and the Sony hacks—there were 2 and you’ve never heard about the first one. He’ll give us his best tips from his book How to Spot a Terrorist Before It’s Too Late and give us some of his most entertaining stories featured in his book Disorderly Conduct. Enjoy!
Traci Brown: John, thank you so much for joining me on Fraud Busting today.
John Iannerelli: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea. We are colleagues in the speaking world in the National Speaker’s Association, but we hadn’t managed to meet. So, now’s our time.
John Iannerelli: We get to meet virtually.
Traci Brown: We do. We do. Tell us a little bit about you. You’re retired FBI. Your history, I’ve been going over it, is impressive to say the least. It seems like you’ve had your hand in a little bit of everything. I’ll let you talk about the things that are most intriguing to you about what you’ve done.
John Iannerelli: Great. I started off as a police officer in San Diego years ago, went to law school, got my law degree, practiced law before joining the FBI. Let’s get it out of the way. I went from one hated profession to another along the way.
Traci Brown: Yea, you did. (Laughing).
John Iannerelli: But in the FBI, I had some great opportunities. I was able to work some major cases, including the 9/11 attack, the Oklahoma City bombing, for those people who remember that far back, the Sony hack, I was on the scene when Gabby Giffords, shortly after she was shot, so I’ve done a lot of different things in the FBI and that’s what I speak on now basically, how to keep yourself safe, your business safe in both the physical world and the cyber world.
Traci Brown: Don’t you have an honorary cyber security degree? Did I see that in your bio?
John Iannerelli: I’ve done a lot of work over my FBI career in the cyber field. I ran cyber investigations for the FBI in Washington. I ran squads in the field and so I was recognized by one of the university’s out here in Arizona with an honorary doctor. That and $5 will get you a cup of coffee, but it’s nice to be recognized and appreciated. I’ve also helped a local university developed a cyber program because the reality is when we think of threats out there, it’s all cyber and it’s going to be more and more cyber in the future. We need to train the people coming up along the way how to keep themselves safe and how to keep businesses safe.
Traci Brown: I want to talk about that, but let’s go back a little bit further because I am really curious about the Oklahoma City Bombing, the reason being is that I grew up in Dallas and it hit home to us because it’s the next city up the street. I went there to see it, and it was very shocking, I guess you’d say. I mean, when I was there, I think they had cleared out most of the main building but the building across the street was still blown. It looked like something you’d see on the news in Beirut, I mean, not in America. Can you talk much about what you did along those lines?
John Iannerelli: Sure. I spent a lot of time there. I’ve been there afterwards as well. The memorial they have is spectacular.
Traci Brown: It is.
John Iannerelli: Anyone watching, if you haven’t visited the Oklahoma City Memorial, it is one of the great museums here in the United States. They did a wonderful job honoring, not only the people killed, but especially there were 19 young children in a daycare center that were killed as well. I worked that investigation pretty much exclusively for a year, myself and 1400 other FBI agents they threw into this case. I, at the time, was stationed in Flint, Michigan which is near the Nichol’s farm, the co-conspirator who helped put this bombing plan together, so I focused on that aspect of the investigation. Tim McVeigh, the bomber, he had actually traveled the country, probably passed through Dallas, looking for targets to attack. One of the reasons he focused on the Alfred E. Murrah Building in Oklahoma was the fact that it did have a daycare center because he wanted to hurt us as much as he could. You kill an adult, we’ll be upset. But you kill our children, we’ll be extremely upset. Terrorists know this. Tim McVeigh was a terrorist, and that’s why he did what he did, to try to get at the American people. Now, I would also add, look at how world has changed. It was Oklahoma City that . . . now, you can’t pull up and park in front of a building. Now we have barricades everywhere around buildings. All of that did not exist before Oklahoma City. We recognize now we have to keep buildings separated and moved back from the street. It changed the FBI. All of our buildings not have what we call blast perimeters around them, meaning if you plant a bomb, it’s going to have to be far enough away from the building that it won’t do damage. Our building in Arizona used to be in downtown Phoenix. We shared office space with other private businesses. We can’t do that anymore. Now we’re far out of the city and a big area of land around us.
Traci Brown: Interesting. Did you find any pertinent evidence in that case? What was your job, so to speak?
John Iannerelli: My job was to go out and do all sorts of things. At the time we were looking for the unidentified person number two that people had said existed. We literally had thousands of leads on that. I went around the state interviewing various people. No evidence of whatsoever. That’s one of the things, witnesses see something, you have to vet it out. The media kind of ran with it that there was another person. I went around and talked to oil distributors throughout the state to see where they may have gotten their supplies from because he built the bomb with ammonia and other material to try to create this bomb which you would get from like an oil distributor, not an unusual entity in a farming state like Michigan where you would need to run tractors, etc. One of the big issues was why did Tim McVeigh get Terry Nichols to help him? Why would anybody commit such a crime? These two had a close relationship in the Army. They were buddies. It looks as if that Terry Nichols had done some criminal things to assist Tim McVeigh and vice versa, so this was just another of many acts that these two losers essentially were engaging in.
Traci Brown: Wow, wow. That is crazy. Yea, that was . . . I think I might have been in high school, towards the end of high school I think. Man, that stuck in my mind. Okay. Moving forward. I’m glad you’re on the case. I’m glad we got . . . because those guys are . . . are they still around there in jail, are they not?
John Iannerelli: Terry Nichols is in super max in your own Colorado.
Traci Brown: Yea, we’ve got it here. You bet.
John Iannerelli: Where he’ll be the rest of his life. Tim McVeigh actually received a death sentence and was executed back in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
Traci Brown: I wasn’t up on that, but glad we’re rid of him. Moving on. What are some of the more interesting things, like the Sony hack? Because that was with the North Korean film.
John Iannerelli: Right. There were actually were two Sony hacks, so I had exposure to both of them. The first Sony hack was about five or six years earlier when everybody in the world was on PlayStation and somebody enabled a hack into Sony and shut down the abilities. This gaming that goes on around the country with various people, it’s big money. You pay fees every month. You buy the equipment. We’re talking billions of dollars.
Traci Brown: It’s bigger than the movies. The gaming is bigger.
John Iannerelli: Somebody was able to hack in and shut the system down, causing chaos and losses of a significant amount of money. We worked that investigation and were able to track the culprit down to some college kid in Arizona.
Traci Brown: Really.
John Iannerelli: We showed up at his classroom one day at college and was able to arrest him there and take him away. After that we had the hack again involving Sony, that filmed the interview which involved North Korea. What’s interesting there is most people think this was some sort of sophisticated attack by North Korea and that they were doing these intrusions into our computer systems. Sony wound up losing probably about $3 billion in losses, not to mention people were fired. You may recall that they were able to dig into emails and find exchanges that were inappropriate from the CEO.
Traci Brown: Oh man.
John Iannerelli: Never put anything into an email you wouldn’t want the world to read. But at the end of the day, that cyber hack, like most cyber hacks, are not terribly sophisticated. It’s referred to as brute force if I was to target your computer and try to hack into it by finding a backdoor. All Sony did was they clicked on a link from an email that was sent out by North Korea and that link had malware. Somebody at Sony clicked on it. It spread malware throughout the computer system. It gave North Korea access to their computers and they were able to go in and basically mess with the company because of the movie they had made which was derogatory towards North Korea. Still, it was a hack. It cost Sony a lot of money, jobs, etc. You may recall at the time that North Korea right at the same time lost their internet access for a couple of days. That was cleared with the U.S. government firing a shot over the bow letting North Korea know if you mess with our people, we can mess with your people. But let’s put it in perspective. That’s North Korea. Sony lost $3 billion, maybe seven people in North Korea couldn’t get on Facebook. It’s very disproportionate of what happens in each country. The important thing is protect your own system so that places like North Korea can’t get into your computer system.
Traci Brown: The thing that I noticed about that is that I would have never seen that movie, but now with the hack happening, because North Korea got so upset, I had to go see it. It wasn’t anything spectacular by any stretch. It was funny, but I guess they don’t like anybody making them look second best.
John Iannerelli: Yea. Clearly North Korea doesn’t have a sense of humor. Had they not drawn all the attention to it, far fewer people probably would have seen the movie but then it become everybody needed to see it. Sony actually made it available very inexpensive online if you wanted to watch it at home, so North Korea did wonders for advertising that movie in the long run.
Traci Brown: Oh, absolutely. Now, let’s see, there’s so much we could talk about. Because I do want to get into what people can do to protect themselves. You’ve written a couple books. I’m so curious about this because I’m a body language expert and I think being aware of your surroundings is vital because most of us are just asleep at the wheel. We don’t even know it. This book, How to Spot a Terrorist Before It’s Too Late. I haven’t read the book, but the title is so intriguing that I’m going to have to buy it now. Tell us, what are some of your main points in there?
John Iannerelli: First of all, let me tell you, the reason I wrote the book was for years and years in the government we’ve had that, if you see something say something, but I’ve never heard anybody tell us what we should be looking for. Now as a law enforcement officer, I know, I understand what the warning signs are. I wanted to be able to write a book to help the general public because terrorism is alive and well her in the U.S. There are people who want to commit acts and there are always telltale signs. If we had a warning, we’d be able to take action and prevent certain things from happening. For example, disguises. Terrorists will pretend to be mailmen, a UPS delivery person, etc., so that way they can gain access to a building to case things, check out locations, going back to what we were talking about with the Oklahoma City Bombing, Tim McVeigh did the exact same thing, casing buildings, walking hallways. We had a case in New Jersey where terrorists dressed as pizza delivery persons to gain access to a military base and go in and be able to stop out the base and decide where they wanted to carry out attacks. They were able to get . . . one person got a job at a pizza place. He got pizza boxes. He got uniforms, the shirts they wear, and gave them to the other terrorists. We’ll see similar things with the theft of security guard uniforms, theft of police uniforms so that terrorists can pose as these people. If you see somebody who appears to be a certain type of person, but maybe doesn’t know what they’re doing. We’ve picked out police officers that were really terrorists because they weren’t wearing the uniform properly.
Traci Brown: Oh.
John Iannerelli: The wrong side, nametag not properly displayed, things that any office would know but maybe the new ones. If you think there’s something amiss, report it or look into it. If it’s legitimate, nobody’s getting arrested. It’s not like we’re going to run out and snatch somebody off the street. But it gives us a chance to question, find out, maybe do a little digging. That’s just one of the many tips in the book of what we look for. I also want to add that no terrorist attack just happens. They always do a dry run.
Traci Brown: Oh, really.
John Iannerelli: At the place. So, 9/11 this was very prominent in that all the terrorists on that day had taken many plane flights, checking out the routes, the procedures on the airlines, etc. One of the stories in my book involves the actor, James Woods. He was flying from Boston to LA on one of the very flights several weeks before, and he reported to the cockpit during the flight, we have about four people on this plane acting very suspicious. The FBI went back and looked. Sure enough, it was the hijackers, had booked flights on that same flight weeks before, doing a test run to see how the crew responded.
Traci Brown: Now, what were they doing? Can you reveal that? Because we’re all starting to get back on planes again.
John Iannerelli: Sure. What they were doing was they were looking at the procedures, how the flight crew interacted. Back then, remember the cockpit door, they used to leave open, you could look in, all those things. There had been cases of them getting . . . first of all, many of them were just sitting there doing nothing on a 6-hour flight, not reading, not eating, just observing. That’s odd in itself, and that’s what caught the attention of people. We had one case where two people running a test run, they got up from the back of the plane, walked all the way to the front, tried to get into the cockpit, claiming they thought it was the lavatory. The plane actually made an emergency landing where the FBI came on board, took the people off involved and interviewed them. It turns out they had been on like 40 flights previously, so clearly, they knew where the lavatory was versus the cockpit.
Traci Brown: Right.
John Iannerelli: But that’s not enough to arrest somebody. This was pre 9/11. We suspected it might be somebody planning a hijacking, so the thought was to keep an eye on them. They actually moved to the Middle East shortly afterwards and did not return. They probably were removed from any operation that were going to take place because they had been identified. Things like that, we want people what they see to let law enforcement know so they can take a look at it.
Traci Brown: Wow. Because people actually have to be caught doing something wrong to be arrested. You can’t just arrest on suspicion. I mean, other countries will do that, but we don’t do that. What’s your thought on that? A good practice, a bad practice? Should we ramp things . . . Law enforcement is under so many scrutiny right now. Some of it’s justified, but some of it is like, you know, we still need to protect ourselves here, so what’s your thought on that?
John Iannerelli: Let me be clear. First of all, with everything going on with law enforcement, I’ll go on record and say right now, we have the second worst system in the entire world.
Traci Brown: Really?
John Iannerelli: Yes.
Traci Brown: Who has the worst?
John Iannerelli: Everyone else. It doesn’t get any better than it is here. I’ve traveled the world. It’s just amazing how law enforcement operates. We have a Constitution. Even when you go to places like England which is a very nice first world country, they don’t have a constitution. You don’t see the protests over there that you see here in the U.S. because they can just arbitrarily say, we’re not going to have any protests today. You’re not allowed to protest or you’ll be arrested. I’ve got to other countries, taught at foreign police academies where they’ll say, one day I remember hearing, when you’re interviewing somebody you never, never, never torture the person you’re interviewing, but if you have to torture them. That’s how they do business.
Traci Brown: Oh my gosh.
John Iannerelli: This is the reality of what’s going on in the world today. There are problems here in the U.S., but it’s such a complex problem. It’s very easy to go out and protest. How many people protesting actually understand the operations of the system?
Traci Brown: Zero.
John Iannerelli: We have 850,000 police officers in the United States. We have 18,000 police departments in the United States. When you talk about retraining police, you have to actually re-train 18,000 departments with 18,000 separate policies. We don’t have a national police force because we didn’t want to be Nazi Germany. We purposefully designed our system so that it’s separate and independent. The other thing I would add is for anybody watching, while people are upset with police departments, police departments don’t make their policy. The city government and the state make the policy. When you hear talk about various things you’re unhappy with, people need to be protesting their government because the cops can only do what each city empowers them to do and decides is lawful. A lot of times I see cowardly politicians standing by, and they’re the very ones that made the policies you’re unhappy with. Then finally, not to get on my soapbox here, but when you talk about defunding the police, the next step then would be to go out and hire security guards which won’t have nearly the training, level of education, etc. You may be going from the frying pan into the fire in the process. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, but we have to have a discussion about it and just arguing the point is not going to fix anything.
Traci Brown: Oh, exactly. Yea. That defunding the police, I’m not a fan. Let’s get back to how to spot a terrorist. You’ve named off a few things, but what else can we be looking for, like walking down the street everyday? Where is a good place to look? Tell me more.
John Iannerelli: Acts of sabotage is another thing. When you have the experience that somebody has done something purposeful, it may be an attempt or a practice for terrorism. For example, in California on 09/12/2001, there were power lines cut throughout certain areas of the state.
Traci Brown: Really?
John Iannerelli: Shutting down power to a community. That wasn’t a coincidence. But it was probably lone offenders who supported the terrorism acts on 9/11 and wanted to do their part to help contribute. That’s the real dangerous part with terrorism. It’s one thing to have a conspiracy with so many people involved and try to prevent it from happening. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful. We didn’t have a clue that was taking place, but when you have somebody sitting at their home preparing a bomb who has no plans on working with anybody else, there’s nobody to tip us off. That’s why it’s really incumbent upon the public if you think this guy’s a little crazy. Generally, when we go back through the history of these lone offenders, they’ve been on social media saying negative things, talking about supporting terrorism, they’ve said things to other people at work, it’s that sort of thing. If we receive a call, we’re not going to go out and arrest a person. We’ll probably take their name, run it through the computer system, see if they’re affiliated with anybody that we have a terrorist investigation on. Worst case scenario, we may go knock on a door and say, let’s have a little chat. I have done that before as an agent with people suspected of terrorism who suddenly decided they didn’t want to live in the U.S. anymore, convinced the FBI was onto them, and they disrupted their plans. I had one case involving a person that had moved a large amount of money, about $700,000 on September 10th, 2001, taken it all out of his bank and then on September 13th or 14th he put it all back in the bank. The presumption was because they attacked the financial area of New York for the banking system was going to collapse. What did he know and how may he have been in the loop? That person, the minute the FBI went and gone out to spoke with him, he was gone, out of the country and back to his home country in the Middle East. He probably had some information but didn’t want to stick around. More importantly, what could that money have been used for in further terrorism?
Traci Brown: Oh, yea.
John Iannerelli: That’s one of the things that happened with 9/11. There was a lot of funding. It wasn’t an exorbitant amount of money. It was probably less than $1 million, but still, terrorism takes money. That’s another clue. Are people raising money, and what are they raising money for? To carry out terrorist acts? We see a lot of fake charities as a way of getting money. You’ll see things about supporting children in refugee camps. There are legitimate charities, but you’ve got to check it out. A lot of them are just fronts to raise money for terrorism.
Traci Brown: Oh yea. With the economy down, fraud goes up, and so charity scams is one of the top ones that are really on the rise. Charities will rarely call you. If they do, call them back on the number on the website, and that’s a pretty easy fix on that.
John Iannerelli: You’re right. I get calls all the time from this police charity raising money for the cops. Cops don’t raise money. We don’t sell tickets to a policeman’s ball, like they have on television. All cops’ money is funded through city government, through taxpayers. There are no charities picking up the phone and calling you. If someone is doing that, chances are they’re pocketing the money. Like you said, you have to be very careful on how you give. It’s important to give. You don’t want to stop, but you want to make sure your money goes where you intend it to go.
Traci Brown: That’s interesting about the policeman’s ball and things because I would get calls for that all the time. Is there a way to check those out? Are they all up to no good or what’s your experience been on that?
John Iannerelli: I would ask specific questions. What law enforcement organization does this benefit and you can always call that organization, but I get calls constantly along the lines of we’re raising money to buy police officer vests and stuff. Well, there may be some legitimate things for that, but generally everything, equipment wise, etc., is either purchased by the officer or funded through city government, so be very leery about calls like that, especially whenever there’s a tragedy, whether an officer is killed, there is a terrorist attack, there is a major hurricane, that’s when people get these online charities into gear because, as Americans, we’re wired, we want to help other people. That’s one thing that makes us unique. But criminals around therein, there are plenty of them, as you know, that want to take advantage.
Traci Brown: Oh yea, absolutely. Anything else we need to look for in spotting a terrorist? Then we can get onto some fun stuff.
John Iannerelli: There are some other things. I will tell you we have seen imitation vehicles. Sometimes terrorists will go out and purchase police cars taken out of service, ambulances taken out of service, making them look like a legitimate vehicle with the idea of pulling up at a crime scene where something has already happened and then they have a bomb planted inside the vehicle. If you ever see a vehicle that doesn’t look right, let the police know. They’ll check it out. They’ll know right away. They average person may not think, well, it’s just an odd-looking police vehicle or ambulance, but that happens quite a bit, especially overseas. I’ve seen attempts at that here in the U.S. It’s just another clue to look for. Basically, the test is if it doesn’t look right to you, tell somebody about it.
Traci Brown: Wow, okay, okay. You’ve got another book. You’ve got another book. This one, it sounds like it’s a good time, Disorderly Conduct. Because you’ve got some stories in there that you say they’re the lighter side of law enforcement. Tell us about why you wrote it. What’s your favorite story? Let’s talk about that.
John Iannerelli: Disorderly Conduct is about my 20+ years in the FBI and some of the odd things I observed. It’s going to be coming out this fall. I thought I’d try to time it before Christmas but after the riots, somewhere in there.
Traci Brown: (Laughing). Oh my God, that’s funny.
John Iannerelli: There are a number of things. People don’t realize how odd things can be in the world. I will tell you, cops are the only ones that get to see it. For example, I once had a foot pursuit as an agent a guy who robbed a bank. It didn’t last very long because he only had one foot. He had a peg leg. When he decided he was going to make his getaway, he hadn’t really thought this out. I caught about a block from the bank. He hadn’t gotten very far by the time I responded. I’ve had other cases. I had one person who robbed a bank and he was a college student and he had a theatre major, if you will. He was in a play at the college and when I showed up to arrest him, he was actually onstage and I figured, ah, what the heck, so I had gone onstage and arrested him during the play. The audience was a bit confused. I think they thought we were part of the play because after handcuffing him onstage and escorting him off, they applauded.
Traci Brown: (Laughing).
John Iannerelli: It may have been a very bad play. Who knows? They were just thanking me for ending it. So, there are odd moments during the career. You just never know what’s going to happen.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow. Anything else, just entertaining like that? Did you watch the play a little bit or where you like, nope, that’s the guy, let’s go.
John Iannerelli: We had sat in the audience for a little bit. I was like, I can’t do this. It was awful. It was some student-written Greek tragedy. That’s another thing, if you’re going to rob a bank, my subject was a tall 300-pound African American man who had dyed his hair bright blonde for the play. Well that made him pretty easy to pick out from the surveillance photos of the bank. It didn’t take us long to figure out he must go to the local college here and one thing led to another that enabled us to identify him as part of the theatre department. By the way, he’s out of prison, doing very well. He really turned his life around. It was a one-time thing for him, so glad to hear it. You see crazy things in law enforcement all the time. I had one person who burned down his business because it wasn’t doing well. He wanted to collect the insurance and committed insurance fraud. Part of his insurance claims were that he had a hot tub in the business, storage that had been destroyed, etc. I went out to his house and went through the neighbor’s yard, climbed the fence, and there he is soaking in the very hot tub that allegedly burned down. I took pictures of him doing that, gave him a little wave, and next thing you know he was arrested and off to jail for insurance fraud. Great stories from law enforcement that most people will never see unless you’re in law enforcement. That’s why I wrote the book to share.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow. I can’t wait to get a copy of that. That’s available you said after the riots, before Christmas.
John Iannerelli: In all honesty, the release was supposed to be sooner. With the way the world is right now, not a lot of people are running out to buy books pro law enforcement unless they want to burn them. I encourage you, if you want to buy them and burn them, a royalty is a royalty.
Traci Brown: (Laughing).
John Iannerelli: Feel free to do that. But the release date by the publisher was pushed back a little bit. It’s probably going to be after Thanksgiving.
Traci Brown: Okay, okay. Got it. That will be on Amazon, everywhere you get your books. It’s called Disorderly Conduct. Okay, just a parting thought there. What is the number one thing that people can do to protect themselves these days in light of everything that’s going on, I’ll let you pick your top tip to leave people with.
John Iannerelli: You know, people are, you’re right, they’re sort of not aware of their surroundings. I think you have to be aware of your surroundings when you go and leave the house and maybe we notch it up just a little bit. However, when we’re home, safe in our office, and we’re on the computer, we tend to let our guard down. That’s when you have to be careful. If you’re going to become a victim financially, chances are it’s going to be on the computer. Just some very basics, have a good password, make sure you have a different password for everything. That way if one password is compromised, nothing else is compromised. Make sure you never click on a link that you don’t know who it’s from or what it is for sure. Have all your software and patches up to date. Whenever you get a notification that, hey, we have a new patch for Microsoft, that’s because they found a vulnerability that somebody can get in, just taking those basic steps. Here’s probably the biggest tip I’ll give people today, and you as an expert probably already know this, but if you’re going to use a credit card, don’t use a debit. Use a credit card. Now, a lot of people like to use debit cards because I don’t want to run up credit. I want to pay my bills. Just pay your credit card bill in full at the end of the month. Compromise your credit card, it’s the bank’s money. Chances are you’re not going to get a loss. Compromise your debit card, it’s your money. Now you’ve got to argue with the bank to just give you money to replace what was stolen from you. A lot harder to do. The other thing, finally, I use two credit cards. I have a credit card that I use every time I go shopping outside my house. I have a second credit card I use online because, believe it or not, the one that’s most likely to get compromised is the one I use out of my house.
Traci Brown: Oh yea.
John Iannerelli: Skimming and all sorts of things like that. When you turn your credit card over to the waiter or at a restaurant, you don’t know who’s looking at that credit card, etc.
Traci Brown: That’s true. That is a big one.
John Iannerelli: Online is pretty secure. What happens is if one of my credit cards is compromised, it doesn’t disrupt everything. Think of all the automatic payments you have set up on credit cards or for your newspaper and various things. That I call my online credit card. If I use my one in the real world which gets compromised about once every two years, I don’t have to worry about changing the credit card number for all the other things. Don’t use a debit card and have two credit cards, one for the real world, one for the virtual world.
Traci Brown: Oh, I love that tip. That’s a good one. You do keynotes all over the country. You’re probably virtual a lot, like me right now.
John Iannerelli: I’m getting back fortunately. I’m getting booked quite a bit for 2021. I think people have confidence we are getting behind this.
Traci Brown: I think so. I actually had a live event last week which just made my heart soar just to see people again in a conference room. What kind of groups do you speak to? How can they get a hold of you?
John Iannerelli: I speak to a lot of corporate America, financial groups especially because of cybersecurity. If you’re using the computer, you probably want to hear from me because it’s not just about me. It’s about keeping your family safe, keeping your business, keeping your kids at home. I’ve done a lot in the world of predators, just like the Dateline shows you see on TV, I did that in the FBI for years and years, and I’ve written another book on that, W.T.F: Why teen fail – What to fix, about the issues of keeping your children safe. If you have access to a computer, I talk about that, but I also talk about active shooter and terrorism. I don’t know if it’s fortunate or unfortunate, but I seem to have been on the scene of a lot of active shootings. I was called in within minutes after Gabby Giffords was shot, the congresswoman down in Tucson.
Traci Brown: Oh boy.
John Iannerelli: I flew into Las Vegas to give a keynote, arrived about an hour before the shooting at Mandalay Bay.
Traci Brown: Oh.
John Iannerelli: So, I wound up covering that for the national news for three days. As a police officer, I responded to active shootings at schools in progress. I come in with a very different perspective on active shooter. I have videos and audio recordings to put in the middle of one, and I teach you what you should do during it to keep yourself safe and also how to spot the warning signs in advance to hopefully prevent. With that said, I’m an easy guy to find. FBIJohn.com. My phone is 866-FBI-JOHN. Or you can email me at John@FBIJohn.com. Finally, follow me on Twitter because every single day I put out a tip on how to keep yourself safe at FBIJohn.
Traci Brown: Oh, I love it. John, thank you so much! You are just fantastic!
John Iannerelli: That’s for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Best of luck to you. I hope ya’ll have me back someday.
Traci Brown: Absolutely.