The second season, “Up in Arms,” is a 10-episode narrative reported and hosted by journalist Trevor Aaronson
Season Two Available June 26 - Binge Season One Now Here
LOS ANGELES -- The second season of “Alphabet Boys,” an investigative podcast series from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts, reveals an international arms-trafficking conspiracy that wraps up the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI in a single case. Listen to the official audio trailer now HERE.
Reported and hosted by investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, “Alphabet Boys” is a multi-season narrative podcast that brings listeners inside the world of America’s alphabet agencies, such as the FBI, CIA, DEA, and ATF. The podcast dives into cases that raise a common question: Are federal agents and their informants catching bad guys or creating them?
Drawing from hours of undercover recordings and hundreds of pages of internal U.S. government reports, “Alphabet Boys: Up in Arms” tells the story of how Romanian-American businessman Flaviu Georgescu was approached by a Colombian revolutionary interested in purchasing millions of dollars in military-grade weapons. Georgescu, a longtime cooperator with the FBI, called the CIA to report the arms deal. There was just one problem: Georgescu was under investigation by the DEA, whose agents didn’t know about his call to the CIA.
Told as a single narrative over 10 episodes, “Alphabet Boys: Up in Arms” is a spy thriller that reveals how aggressive federal law enforcement agents can find themselves investigating the assets of other federal agencies — creating an alphabet soup in which it’s hard to determine who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.
“Season two of ‘Alphabet Boys’ goes behind the scenes of a border-hopping arms-trafficking conspiracy involving a mysterious international businessman, a government minister in Romania, an Italian politician, and revolutionaries with the FARC in Colombia,” Aaronson says. “It’s a high-wire act that mixes up in the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA in a case that is as intriguing as it is absurd.”
“‘Alphabet Boys: Up in Arms’ is a total mindbender,” says Western Sound founder and “Alphabet Boys” co-creator Ben Adair. “Trevor’s reporting shows how federal law enforcement seems to take its cues much more from Reno 911! than any Hollywood spy thriller or police procedural. And yet, their misfiring jokes and gross incompetence have real-world consequences for anyone caught up in their comedy of errors.”
Season one, “Alphabet Boys: Trojan Hearse,” revealed how the FBI infiltrated and undermined the racial justice movement during the summer of 2020. The show received significant attention in the national news media, with The Guardian, The Daily Beast, and Democracy Now!, among others, praising the reporting in the show. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon called the FBI’s behavior documented in the show “outrageous.”
Season two premieres June 26, with new episodes launching every Monday and Thursday through July 27.
“Alphabet Boys” is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and will be available on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.
About Trevor Aaronson
Trevor Aaronson is an investigative journalist and host of the podcasts “American ISIS” on Audible and “High Rollers,” the second season of the “Chameleon” series. He is the author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism and a contributing writer for The Intercept. His TED Talk about the FBI’s counterterrorism program has been viewed more than 1 million times and translated into more than two dozen languages.
About Western Sound
Western Sound is the Los Angeles-based podcast studio behind the #1 podcasts Strangeland and Lost Hills. Established in 2018 by Peabody Award-winning journalist Ben Adair, Western Sound creates its own original shows and has partnered with clients like Higher Ground, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Audible, and Spotify. Western Sound’s most recent awards include Webby Awards for its original shows Lost Hills and The Score: Bank Robber Diaries.
