Join Delphine Forma, Head of Policy Europe and APAC at Solidus Labs, as she sits down with Jason Sandoval, former DEA Special Agent and VP, Head of European Operations at Asset Reality — for episode two of their special series together.

They go deep into two of Jason's most consequential investigations: Operation Rogue Lion, the multinational case that helped unravel the Syrian regime's Captagon drug empire and contributed to the fall of Assad, and a landmark Italy-US fentanyl and crypto money laundering case that connected a dark web dealer in Piacenza to Crips gang members running a drug operation from inside a US state prison. A rare, unfiltered look at how modern financial crime, drug trafficking, and cryptocurrency intersect — told by someone who lived it.

They discuss:

• how Jason connected a 14-ton Captagon seizure in Salerno, Italy to a trail of over 45 tons linked directly to Maher al-Assad and the Syrian regime — and how that became Operation Rogue Lion
• how the Port of Latakia became the linchpin connecting regime control to a billion-dollar drug trafficking operation
• how human intelligence, sanctions data, and law enforcement cooperation across 29 countries came together to build a case that changed US and European policy
• how the Captagon Act — legislation written directly based on Operation Rogue Lion — mandated an interagency, multidisciplinary response to narco-state drug trafficking
• why organic international collaboration in this case was unlike anything Jason had experienced in his career
• how a fentanyl case in Cleveland, Ohio connected through the dark web to a counterfeiter in Piacenza, Italy — and how Jason's Rome office helped dismantle it
• how recorded calls captured a fentanyl supplier walking a US gang member through the formula for a batch that had already killed a customer — and how that built the distribution-resulting-in-death charge
• how Bitcoin was used to settle debt between the Italian broker and the Cleveland distribution network
• Jason's defining wake-up call in Charleston, South Carolina — a dark web fentanyl dealer selling to 24 states and two foreign jurisdictions from a small duplex, with 150 Bitcoin on five Ledger wallets
• how the US Postal Service's "if it fits, it ships" model and the de minimis customs exemption were exploited as distribution and import infrastructure
• why technology and synthetic drugs are fundamentally reshaping the drug trade — and what that means for investigators
• why predicate offense investigations and financial investigations should never be siloed — and how that integration changes outcomes