Last time on Gone South.

He just looked like an average guy, just some schmo.

You know, he wasn't intimidating, he wasn't threatening looking.

He's got a medical degree. He's a graduate from medical school and he's making meth.

As soon as he drove off, I jumped up, got my car and we started following him.

We can see he would go months at a time, water no power no water no power and then boom one month

He would fill like five Olympic swimming pools at that point we knew exactly that this was the lab site.

We were going to go ahead and indict him, get an arrest warrant, and go lock him up.

We're going to go get him now.

So we sat down and basically said,

all right, Darryl, how did you get started?

How did this begin? What brought you down? How did you get into making meth and all?

So he told us the story. In our last episode, we spoke with an agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration

named Steve Peterson. Steve told us the story of a methamphetamine investigation he'd worked in

Atlanta in the early 1980s. It focused on a man named Darrell Smith.

Darryl was a brilliant young medical student turned drug chemist for the outlaw motorcycle gang.

After the DEA discovered his lab and arrested him in Las Vegas,

Darryl had escaped from federal prison and nearly shot an attorney to death.

Steve thought Darrell's transformation from a nerdy med student to a violent criminal

may have influenced the writers of the TV show Breaking Bad,

though there's no evidence of that.

As we were working on the episode, I'd reached out to Darryl, to no avail.

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