The American Captive Inside Venezuela's Deadliest Prison | The Hidden Third with Mariana van Zeller

Join The Hidden Third Patreon today! patreon.com/thehiddenthird Watch on Spotify. Spotify subscribers get fewer ads on my video. Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at http://square.com/go/hiddenthird! #squarepod James Luckey-Lange has been everywhere. The Arctic Circle. The southern tip of South America. Haiti, where he sold fruit at a roadside stand. Nicaragua, where he taught martial arts. He'd adopted a husky in Alaska, buried him in Patagonia, lost his father shortly after, and kept going anyway. He was the son of Q Lazzarus — the singer behind "Goodbye Horses" from The Silence of the Lambs — and after losing her in 2022, he hit the road and never really stopped. There was just one country left in the continental Americas he hadn't visited. Venezuela. Every warning sign was there. The U.S. government had been telling Americans to stay out. The regime had a track record of grabbing Americans and using them as political pawns. James knew all of this. He crossed the border anyway — on the back of a motorcycle taxi from Brazil — and was detained the next day. What happened next was unlike anything he could have imagined. He was accused of being a spy — his military-style hiking boots were the evidence. He was chained, beaten, starved for four days, given a sham trial online, and transferred blindfolded to Rodeo I, one of the most violent prisons in the world. When they made him kneel in the dark, he thought that was it. It wasn't. Inside, he met a cellmate who couldn't read. So he scraped the alphabet onto the wall and started teaching him. And when he realized he might get out before the others, he carved their names into a bar of soap — one by one — so he could find their families. He smuggled that soap out in his underwear. His release came only after something massive happened on the outside — something he didn't find out about until six days after the fact, when news trickled through the prison walls and the guards served everyone chocolate cake and Pepsi. The U.S. military had captured Maduro. And James Luckey-Lange was about to find out that, while he thought the world had forgotten him, his story had already made the front page of the New York Times. 0:00 - Intro 0:23 - His mom was Q Lazarus — the voice behind Silence of the Lambs 7:37 - Alaska crab fishing for $60K, then backpacking South America 16:10 - His dog and his dad both die the same week in Patagonia 26:46 - Crossing into Venezuela and arrested as a suspected spy 41:36 - Blindfolded, transferred to El Rodeo, and beaten on his knees 52:02 - Meeting his translator and cellmate in prison 59:02 - Lie detector sessions and show trial 1:17:27 - Finding out Maduro was captured and the delusional cellmate who claimed credit 1:28:12 - Teaching his illiterate cellmate to read on the prison wall 1:34:27 - Carving prisoners' names into a bar of soap to smuggle out 1:37:47 - DEA rescue — and learning the truth about Maduro's capture 1:42:56 - First night free: tracking down prisoners' families on Facebook 1:50:28 - Nerve damage, parasites, and already planning the next trip 🎙️ From Emmy and Peabody Award–winning journalist Mariana van Zeller comes THE HIDDEN THIRD, a weekly dive into the underground markets that quietly power a third of the global economy. Every episode, Mariana sits down with people who know these worlds firsthand - the hustlers, smugglers, scammers, kingpins, and those trying to shut them down. The series reveals how they function, why they endure, and the profound ways they impact us all. 🔔 Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday. THE HIDDEN THIRD: YouTube: @marianavanzeller Instagram: Instagram: thehiddenthirdpodcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3n1BBoj... MARIANA: TikTok: TikTok: mariana_vanzeller Instagram: Instagram: marianavz