Here we are. We've arrived to Fort Apache.

It looks like a carnival horror show.100%..

There are toilets all over the place.

When we pull up to Dale Varnum's compound, the first thing we notice are toilets, dozens of freestanding toilets, and they're scattered across the ground in front of the compound's high wooden walls.

The walls, which look to be rough-hewn timber, give the place the feel of an old Western fort. But the toilets and the massive collection of other strange objects out front make it feel like it's maybe the beginning of a Blumhouse movie.

What we're seeing here is a bunch of toilets on wooden stumps with signs, hand-painted, hand-written signs with what seemed to be jokes, rhyming jokes that don't make any sense.

No, but they all conclude the word commode.

Here's one. Stupid people drop their crap on other people. Why not drop it in a commode? I'm very confused. Dale is the one who dropped his crap on other people. He ratted out the whole town, right? It seems hypocritical to have a toilet in front of your house that says, Don't drop your crap on other people when you're the one who did exactly that. Maybe.

It's a message to himself.

You mean like a post-it note? In the form of a toilet? In the form, because I lose Post it notes all the time.

And a toilet?

You would not lose a toilet. No, you would not. It's a very significant reminder.

Well, thankfully, one thing we don't see right away is the attack turkey.

That's true. But the toilets were only the tip of the iceberg.

There is so much stuff cluttering up in the front of this property.

It's like you don't want to walk in there. And there's a giant bus that says the crackhead Express, serving Brunswick County. There are signs all over the place. It says, Fort Apache. Pills kill and destroy families. Here's another sign. All leprechauns are welcome. Over here on the right, a municipal bus with a giant nose on the front and ears popping out the side, and a very large shark jettisoning off the roof. And the inside of the bus is filled with mannequins and is being driven by a giant deranged sculpt is what I would perhapsPretty well captured.got that.

Before we even get a chance to knock on the door, Dale Varnum walks out from the compound.

Finally, after all this time, we're going to meet the man at the center of all that happened here.

Did Dale Varnum really do a deal with Pablo Escobar, or is he simply a small-time drug dealer with a big-time imagination? Welcome back to Vardemtown.

Here we go. Okay.

Okay. Let's go and say hello.

Josh. You're Josh.

Dale, I'm Josh.

Josh, I'm glad to know you're Josh.

Nice to meet you.

Yeah. I guess you're all my brothers now because this is definitely my brother.

I like your sweatshirt there.

The Psycho Award, but you're an outpatient, so it's okay.

Yeah, I'm an outpatient.

Good. Very good. He's wearing a sweatshirt that says he's an outpatient of the Alcatraz Psychiatric Ward.

So there's a lot to unpack about these first moments with Dale.

First of all, he doesn't look intimidating. He's about 5'6, 5'7, if you include the spiky gray hairpiece that he's wearing.

And by the way, the first thing he says to us is that we're his brothers? Yeah. I mean, he doesn't know us.

No, I'm not quite sure what that reference is about.

What is he talking about?

Yeah. After we explained that we're there to talk about the history of Arnumtown, he invites us inside side, but not through the front door. Okay, are you going to take us through the side another way?

Kyle, you ready? I'm ready.

Dale leads us through an entrance in the fence into a very strange winding plastic tunnel with a rotting wooden floor.

It's quite a long tunnel, actually. Almost too much. This tunnel, you see how far this goes? This tunnel is probably 50 yards as far as I can That's a long tunnel. Amazing.

Are you brave enough to walk through there?

Well, you first. By the way, let's not get separated.

We're surrounded by all manner of mannequins There's a departure and arrival, like airport board that's talking about arrivals from Los Angeles, La Paz, New York, Sioux City, and large candy canes, and a bottle of sky vodka. Dale leads our audio team away from us, leaving Josh and I further and further behind in the tunnel.

And it's very dark in here.

Yeah, and the tunnel goes on for a good-There's cats walking all over the place. Eventually, Dale comes back.

Why do you have all this stuff?

It's just something with me. I've always been crazy. I help people. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Actually, no. We had no idea what he was telling us.

What is happening here with these commodes? Will you explain this to me?

Well, it's just something I'm half crazy with, of course.

Are you trying to sell toilets? Is this a sale?

People leave me to talk. You haven't seen nothing. Are you going to town?

When you say go into town, you mean we go inside the fork?

Yeah, you fix and go in for the path.

Yeah, okay.

When Dale says go into town, he doesn't point in the direction of Varnumtown. He points deeper inside his own compound, beyond the tunnel. It reminds me actually a little bit of a David Lynch film.

Do you see her over there covered with roaches?

Yeah, this mannequin is covered with roaches.

Yeah, that's about as close of a representation as you can get right there.

There's a patch that it looks like you've sewed on, and then it says in the middle, I solemly swear that I am up to no good.

That's what you might think.

Well, they think that because you got a patch on your shirt that says that.

As we follow Dale into his lair, we just want to ask him questions about Pablo Escobar, but he keeps veering away from us through the twists and turns in this strange plastic tunnel we're in.

And the whole time, we have the distinct impression that we're being watched.

And there's a reason. Glued onto nearly every surface are googly eyes.

Everything has eyes here. There's a googly eyes on the skulls, on wood.

It's great. You feel like you're being watched, maybe?

Is that what you mean? And everybody else thinks they watch when they come in here, too.

So I see these googly eyes all over the place. If you put them everywhere. What do they mean to you? Why are there googly eyes?

For some reason, I do put eyes on everything.

You do put eyes everywhere.

Have you ever given any thought to that, Are you going to look at your eyes? Yeah. Any deeper thought to why you do that? I'm just curious as to why the eyes... Are these your friends? Is it a way of feeling like you have company? So you're not lonely.

Do the eyes scare you or do they comfort you?

No, they comfort me.

Okay, so it must be feeling like they're friends. They're people who are around you.

Are they all the people you betrayed?

Come on, we got to move fast.

When I mentioned the people he had betrayed, Dale walked quickly away.

And that's when we encountered the turkey, an aggressive attack turkey, followed by a posse of thuggish chickens.

There's a turkey. The chicken and the turkey are following us.

Dale's attack turkey is now tracking us.

Are the turkeys aggressive?

So we pick up our pace to put some distance between us and the turkey.

Okay, let's go back this way. We'll go around. Okay, come on. We got to move fast.

We emerge from the plastic tunnel into an acres-wide field packed with stuff.

There is a mannequin here with a baby doll head Here's a propane tank with a devil mask on it. And there's skeletons there. That looks like a baby skeleton.

That was some of my family. Don't worry about that.

There's a pink ambulance, yellow ambulance, two white ambulances. We're now outside of the Hall of Mirrors and have emerged into a sandy field that is filled with vehicles, many vehicles. For instance, you have this Ford Focus here with all the windows blown out and a golf cart sitting on top of it. So what's the meaning of that?

But it's been placed on top.

It's not half-a-half. It's an embellishment.

He's taken a sports car and glued shells all over it. There's your Shelby Mustang covered in shells. That's why it's called. It's a A Shelby? I'm not even sure it's a Shelby, but it is now because it has shells on it.

It feels like the fever dream of a narco trafficker. Speedboats, fast cars, oil drums, and it's all tossed into the sky and left to land helter-skelter in the sand dunes. So when did you start collecting toilets?

I started collecting toilets probably back in the '70s. Yeah, you can ask anybody around here, but they'll tell you, I love commodes. But when I growed up, we didn't have commodes. When the first commode come in-You had an outhouse, I'm assuming.

Do you remember being excited about the commode?

Yeah, I did. It's the way people looked at you. You know what I mean?

Because if you had a commode. It was a sign that you were doing well.

Yeah, great day in the morning. A commode means something.

But to collect that many is a little extreme.

Fort Apache, we learn, was inherited from his dad, Olaf Varnum. Before Dale turned it into the mad house it is now, it was actually just a gas station. That's how Dale and Olaf got into the smuggling business. Olaf would fuel smuggling boats and planes.

In fact, 19-year-old Dale's first smuggling job came from a phone call in in the middle of the night. Smugglers, hoping to reach his dad, asked Dale if he could bring a tow truck and help them pull an 18-wheeler that had been full of weed out of the mud. And in return, the next day, his dad handed him an envelope of cash for his cooperation and his silence.

And that's one thing that got me started into dancing with the devil, I called it.

So you You are an unusual person?

Oh, yeah.

And I'm wondering where you got it from. I got it. Was your dad unusual?

Was your mother unusual? My dad, and not only that, when you come up, like I come up here in a place like this right here, But we've met the other people here, and they're not like you. No, I guarantee you, he ain't all of them. That's why they think I'm crazy.

Was this something that was your dad's influence? Or was your dad crazy? Was your mom more crazy?

My daddy was good. My daddy, if he's seeing you right now, either one of you are right now, his hands were always greasy. They'd tell him everything, and he, Hey, dude, you know what I'm trying to say? He'd show him his part of his life.

He slap you on the back with his greasy hands.

People still talk about all the time. Why do you think he did that?

What was the rationale for that?

It was just good. He was good to people.

He was good to people by slapping them on the back with greasy hands? That sounds like he just ruined your shirt. He is. The smuggling was all pretty small time until Dale decided to level it up in the early 1980s.

And then when it did, it just changed me. Here it was. You could walk up somebody that you know, that you really know. You could walk up to him and say, You want to make 20,000? Help me a couple of hours off load this boat. And it started building, building, and building. And oh, my God, it just started coming in every way. It weren't a greed of money as much as It was an adventure. Some of the happiest times of my life, I'd be laying on a boat 80 to 120 miles off here to the Gulf Stream, just laying there waiting. I'd be waiting on a plane to come over. And if a plane is going to be there, say at 11:00 at night, about a quarter to 11:00, we'd go run out lights. And sure enough, here they'd come. You wouldn't even see who dumped it. And it just got so easy, and it just started growing, growing, growing. I put me a high altitude radar unit in my bedroom. I could sit there in my house at night and watch a plane. If I had a plane coming in at 11:00, like I said, 12:00, 1:00, whatever time, I could sit there and watch it coming in.

You know what? I love this image of Dale lying there in bed with a massive spinning radar unit on his roof, and he's just laying there.

At his fort?

At his fort, watching all his cocaine planes circling the runway.

And he's got air traffic control read out at the foot of his bed. While the entire police force and the clam cops and half a town are running around out there trying to bring it in for a landing, Dale is just kicking back in bed.

Just watching his radar.

And he's just surrounded by piles of cocaine and money. And do you think the Playboy playmates are there? Sure. They're trying to get his attention? And he's just looking at that line rotating around that green screen.

There goes another one.

They would come from Florida to play boy bunnies, would come from Florida. And I had a bunch of them that stayed at the house. And when they did, they'd come and I would let them mow my grass. So they They got there to mow the grass. There's three of them. They got their white little things on in their little bunny tail. Everybody come by. It looked like a car lot in front of my house, sitting to the pool outside the road on both sides. People just sitting there looking. What in the world is that? Who is that? It was just crazy stuff that I used to do. You'll get a kick on it. My Christmas tree, you know I had a big Christmas tree in my house for Christmas. Everybody come down. I had put two kilos of cocaine on the Christmas tree, put it in little bags.

You had separated it out. You had separated the two kilos in the little bags.

I put a like a grand in each bag. And the Christmas tree was decorated with lights and neck and down. And everybody's coming in, they'd laugh. They didn't think it was real.

Were they supposed to take a little monument? Was that a gift for them?

They thought it was just fake. Most people.

That must have been A really white Christmas. Yeah. Let me ask you a question about your father got you into the smuggling business originally, but then in the early '80s-That's when I switched from pot to coke. Well, that's what I wanted to get at. You expanded and grew the business, and part of that was going to meet Pablo Escobar.

When I met Pablo, it was on that one trip when I really got to meet him there.

So I guess this is real. Okay.

Yeah, he just verified that.

To the extent that you can believe him.

I had a question about that. I mean, it seems like a pretty big jump from Dale Varnum to Pablo Escobar.

First time I ever met Pablo Escobar, I remember seeing him, and that was in Nicaragua. I had flew through the shiny path and landed there.

Translating here, Dale is claiming he met Pablo Escobar at a place called the shiny Pass in Nicaragua. We looked it up. There's no record of it. But on the other hand, there is some aspect of this that is plausible, which is that in 1979, there was a huge shootout at the Dadeland Mall in Miami between rival cocaine dealers, and that focused the United States attention on the cocaine trafficking problem. And specifically, it focused everybody's attention on South Florida. So starting at the beginning of the '80s, there There was too much heat in Florida, and the cartels went looking for new inroads.

Yeah, it's a good argument as to why they were searching for places like Varnumtown. Yeah.

Why they might have been open to meeting somebody like Dale Varnum.

Yeah.

Varnum town was laid back, and by having the places it has here on the East Coast, it was great. The Green Swamp was the best airport here, really. And we would fly it in. I got to the place in my life where I was above the law.

Dale claims that he was introed to Escobar to broker a deal that would make Varnum town one of several new waypoints for cocaine on the East Coast.

The introduction was made by a smuggling contact who we'll call Tito, a drug dealer from Nicaragua, who we've confirmed does exist.

According to Dale, he and Tito met Escobar on a private landing strip in Nicaragua.

I've seen human bodies laying there.

On the side of the runway?

No, on the little trail going to the runway, there was human bodies.

So you walked down the path, and what were they doing?

They being Escobar's henchmen, not the bodies.

Making cocaine.

And how were they making it?

They were taking it to the table. They had it piled up right there. They take a shovel, they pour it on the table.

A shovel? There was so much cocaine And they were shoveling.

Yeah, they had a cocaine. They take cocaine in a shovel.

You're saying you're putting your hand up that's like four feet high?

No, probably about the size of the rim. I see.

So that's maybe two feet piles of cocaine.

Dale tells us that he then meets Escobar in his personal compound after pleasantries.

What pleasantries? Can you shake hands?

Does Escobar shake hands? I don't think he shake hands. Okay, you just say hello. Maybe you bow.

Before I left, I went in a room, and Pablo, he looks at me. He said, Mr. Dale. I didn't know how he known my name. And he said, The Americanas, they stupid people. These Americanas, very stupid. They said, Over here, we know what this stuff do to you. We know what it does. You Americanus, you snored it, you eat it, you stick it in your veins. He said, You stupid people. That's what he told me. And on that wall up there was bottles, quart jars. And the first jar I looked at on the wall, it had eyes, human eyes. It looked like they had amalgamite in there. And then I looked over here, on the other wall there, tongues. In their tongues. And those tongues was people that talk too much. And then I looked over there, ears human ears in them jars. They were people that heard too much.

So this is crazy. He is telling us that Pablo Escobar has jars of tongues and eyes and ears on his wall. The first thing that comes to mind for me is, is he traveling with all these jars? So everywhere he goes, he's got the narco trafficker interior designer who's like, Where do you want the ears? Or are you putting all the eyeballs on one shelf? Or do you mix Does he have a truck that drives around with this collection of body parts?

Hopefully, it's refrigerated.

Or does he fly it?

Oh, maybe. In the Ario Speedway.

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We lived with 3.4 million or 3.8 million dollars worth of cocaine.

You bought approximately 3 to $4 million worth of cocaine from Pablo Escobar.

Which would be worth over $12 million today.

Describe what it was like to meet him.

He was all right. To me, he seemed like a good person.

What did he think about you?

He thought I was all right. No, I never hurt him. He never hurt me. You know what I mean?

That's Dale's story of how he became a kingpin. And it's not only wildly implausible, it's also extremely hard to prove.

We've tried to confirm that Dale was indeed out of the country at this time, but he might have flown private, so there's no passport records, no travel records. The reality is, the mystery, really, is that massive amounts of cocaine did end up flowing into Varnum town in the '80s, which we've been able to confirm with law enforcement.

And so what we're left with at the end of the day is just Dale's story. There's an element of mythmaking here with Dale, where he's spinning a tail, whether it's true or not, but putting himself at the center of it. Totally.

Yeah, he's the center of the story. After we finished our conversation about Pablo Escobar outside the plastic tunnel, Dale leads us around a collection of outbuildings and into something I can barely believe.

I'm going go around, open it up into the town.

Into the town. When you say town, you don't mean Varnum town.

No. No. I've always just built crazy places.

We turn a corner and walk into what can only be described as a replica town.

Never seen anything like it.

It's like a Western town with buildings or structures on either side as you walk down.

This is like the okay corral. It's like a Western set. Here's an Old West drug store. Did anybody help you build this? I haven't met anybody before who has manifested the interior of their mind in a way like this before.

We could do this for 24 hours just to describe, and we wouldn't-We would never get to the end. We would never get 10 feet. No, just describing what we're seeing.

A motorized wheelchair. Yes. And a coffin. And a coffin. And a cat, and some devil masks.

Yeah.

It's an old Western town, or it's a town of some sort, anyway. There's a barber shop with a sign that says hair or throat with a pair of scissors, which is not That's not very encouraging barber shop. No. Here's a fake brick building that says, Southern Ladies Whippet House, a great place to get spanked. Why did you build this?

Believe it or not, every day that just snapped together.

Say that again, it just snapped together? Yeah. It's like the replica world that Dale has built here is almost bigger than the actual town of Varnumtown. It has a lot more going on. Maybe Maybe this is his ideal vision for what he wanted Varnum town to become.

I think you're onto something. I think it is his ideal.

It goes on and on. You know what? It's like Westworld meets Scarface meets Willy Wanka, and we just got the golden ticket. I don't think it's a golden ticket, though. It's like a rotten ticket.

Yeah, I'm not sure I wanted. There's the Sheriff's office.Dale's.

Enforcement agent, didn't he?Yeah.

It's a vision of the town where he is the central character. Instead of drug enforcement agency, it's Dale's Enforcement Agency. The part that I can't figure out is, what the hell does this mean? What is this? Who would build an entire replica town of their own town in their backyard?

And for whom? Is it for an Is it for Dale? Or is it like therapy in some way?

It feels like it may not be for anybody other than himself. So you inform on your friends and neighbors, and are they not angry at you because they felt like they did it? And did everybody want to stop the drug trade at that point? Is that why they weren't angry? They're like, You know what? This has gone far enough. It's fine that Dale shuts it down, and we should all move on. Is that why they weren't angry?

Because I was tired of it. I was fed the heck up with it. I didn't need it. It ain't about money with me. I had so much money between you and me. I didn't know what they do. I'm a piece of trash, but you know what I mean? That's how I feel about myself because of my past. Is part of that the fact that you... I'm trying to change my past. You know what I mean?

Is part of that that you cooperated? Did that make you feel better?

Yeah, I had no other choice. I had no other choice but to do what I had to do. It ain't just me. Everybody did.

I wonder if there's any an apology or anything? Did you offer any...

Did you have to apologize?

No, I didn't have to I'm apologizing to nobody.

We're just trying to understand your role in the community.

My role in the community was I was feeding people, taking care of people. I would look out people. I'd go around and put money up in somebody's door that needed it. You know what trying to deal.

So you thought you were doing something good here by bringing this in, bringing money to the community, helping the community. I was.

It sounds like it all just got to be too much.

I always had so many people jealous of me because of money.

According to Dale, this jealousy created tension within the community that perhaps was never there when everybody was equally poor. They're all on the same level. But now there's there's disparities in wealth, and it makes people look at each other differently.

I was dancing with the devil, and you dance with the devil, you got to pay the piper. And that's what I did in my life. I paid the piper.

It's a complicated story. And you're a complicated person.

It is. You know what I mean? And I know that.

Well, why don't you show us a little bit more? We'll go this way, yeah?

Yeah, you got a lot more sick. We do. This is just the beginning. There's even a place right there in the house, right there. I would hide cocaine and stuff and put it in there. And then a horse. And I had horses stuff. And I remember pouring a thing of cocaine out, and my horse went there. This man was buying the cocaine. He would go to a horse.

There was another encounter we had with Dale that was noteworthy. During our reporting, we were driving down the main street in Varnum town, and Dale blows past us in his two-seater Mercedes sports car. The odd thing was that he stays in the lane of the oncoming traffic and does not merge back into our lane. He's driving on the wrong side of the road, fast. Just for fun. Here comes a car. He's playing a game of chicken with the oncoming car.

That appears to be what's happening.

Yeah, he's really going for it here. And oh, he's got poor car, his oncoming car. Just barely... They didn't slow down either. Do you think they know it's Dale? And they're just like... They didn't look very concerned. They did not look concerned. If there was a car coming down the wrong side of the road at high speed at me, I would stop. Yes. Those people did not stop. Again, the logic of this town is hard to wrap your mind around.

In the next and last episode of Varnumtown, we're going to hear from a drug dealer that Dale ratted out, a guy who went to jail as a result. And I think you're going to be surprised about how he feels about Dale now. We're also going to hear from former governor of North Carolina, Mike Eastley, the guy who helped prosecute all the cases coming out of Varnumtown and the surrounding area. Did the prosecutions make a difference? What happened to Varnumtown? What's it like there now? We'll find out together. So stick with us on the next episode of Varnumtown.

Varnumtown is produced by Epik magazine, Picture Perfect Federation, and Full Picture, in Association with Podcast One.

Special thanks go out to the residents of Varnumtown for telling their story and to Betz for her help.

The Epik team includes Harry Spitzer, Josh Levine, Frank Sloodisco, Melise Touserre, Dan O'Sullivan, and Lila Tuline.

Additional reporting by Keijin Higashi Baba.

The Picture Perfect Federation team includes Patrick Waxberger, Ashley Stern, Tyler Nell, and Samena Martin.

The full picture squad is Desiree Gruber and Ann Walls. Frank Reina supported me during production. Original music composed by Jonna Bechtolt and Rob Kieswetter. Additional music provided by American production music, Epidemic Sound, and Premium Beats. Studio recordings took place at Silver Lake Recording Studios.