The Hidden Third

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Nine years after a chance encounter on a flight to Las Vegas, Niki Burke is just two weeks away from reporting to federal prison.

Her story begins in 2017, when Niki boarded a flight from Florida to Las Vegas with two friends. A well-dressed man from Indiana sat next to them, and midway through the flight, they struck up a conversation. He offered to buy them drinks, paying with $100 bills, and they kept in touch after landing. Over the course of the trip, he paid for limousine rides, expensive dinners, gambling and extensions to their hotel stay.

The friendship continued after Vegas. Eventually, the man told Niki he was starting a home-goods distribution company and offered her the opportunity to help build and run it. The business would source inexpensive products from Mexico and distribute them across the United States.

Niki accepted. She moved to South Texas, found a warehouse and began operating the company. The man financed the venture, but most of the business was put in her name. Niki says she spent her days managing operations, solving problems and learning how to run a business. She was proud of what they were building and believed it could become her future.

Then, one day, she received a call.

A semi-truck registered in her name had been seized at a checkpoint. Inside, authorities found more than 20 kilograms of cocaine worth approximately $1.5 million.

Niki says the man and the truck’s driver suddenly stopped responding to her. She later learned that federal agents believed the man had connections to a Mexican cartel.

More than a year later, Niki received a text claiming someone had found her friend’s missing purse at a mall. When she arrived to collect it, federal agents were waiting. Niki says she was placed in an unmarked vehicle, interrogated for approximately five hours and taken into federal custody.

She was charged with conspiracy to traffic narcotics. Federal prosecutors characterized her as a recruiter because she had introduced the Indiana man to two of her friends. According to Niki, she faced a choice: accept a plea agreement or go to trial and risk a potential sentence of 10 to 20 years.

Niki was initially sentenced to three years in federal prison. That sentence was later reduced to one year and one day, and she expects federal time credits to reduce the amount of time she actually spends inside.

In this episode, we talk about Niki’s childhood growing up around crack addiction, losing the grandmother who raised her, the breakup that preceded her trip to Las Vegas, what happened to the two friends she introduced to the Indiana man, and why she believed the distribution company was a legitimate business.

We also discuss the moment she learned that the truck had been seized, her interrogation by federal agents, the pressure to accept a plea deal, the years she spent waiting for the case to end, and how she now looks back on the decisions that brought her here.

Niki is preparing to report to FPC Alderson, a minimum-security federal prison camp for women in West Virginia. Often called “Camp Cupcake,” it is the same facility where Martha Stewart served her five-month federal prison sentence from October 2004 to March 2005.

Rather than enter prison consumed by anger, Niki says she wants to make the most of her time inside. She even hopes to produce a podcast from federal prison, interviewing incarcerated women and sharing stories that rarely reach the outside world.

This is Niki’s account of how a chance encounter, a business opportunity and a semi-truck registered in her name led to an alleged Mexican cartel connection, a federal cocaine-trafficking conspiracy case and a sentence in federal prison.

🎙️ 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.

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He was a College World Series champion, a pro baseball prospect and a relative of Tampa mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr. Then a gambling addiction drove Sam Favata to run a $32 million Ponzi scheme that sent him to federal prison.

In 1979, Sam hit .418 for Cal State Fullerton, a national college record that stood for 16 years, and scored the winning run in the school's first College World Series title. The Milwaukee Brewers drafted him. Two years later, in Modesto, an 87 mph fastball hit him in the head. He needed surgery for three brain bleeds, and doctors weren't sure he'd survive, let alone walk or talk again. Nine months later he was back on the same field, and almost 5,000 fans gave him a three-minute standing ovation after his first hit.

But Sam was already hiding something. He placed his first bet at 19, at a Las Vegas craps table on a road trip with his Fullerton teammates, and lost everything his father had given him for the weekend. On the drive home, he realized he was more upset about losing at the casino than losing at baseball. He kept that secret for 26 years.

Gambling ran in the family. Sam was born in Tampa, and his second cousin was Santo Trafficante Jr., the mob boss who ran Florida and pre-Castro Cuba for the American Mafia. Trafficante was later tied to the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro and long rumored to be connected to the JFK assassination, which he denied under oath. Sam's father ran bolita numbers for the organization before he walked away and moved the family to California to give his son a different life. Sam talks about growing up close to that world, and about the secret Trafficante is said to have revealed about Kennedy on his deathbed.

After baseball, Sam built a career in mortgages and started a family with his wife, Sandra. He talks about losing their baby son, Joey, and the grief that followed. Through all of it, his gambling kept growing: VIP status at Caesars, a $1 million credit line at the Rio, a $985,000 win on a March Madness parlay. Then, in 2005, he bet $1.425 million on a single regular-season NHL game and lost.

To keep chasing his losses, Sam turned his Orange County company, National Consumer Mortgage, into a Ponzi scheme. He persuaded more than 200 people to refinance their homes and invest with him, promising returns of 30 to 60 percent. There was no investment. According to the SEC, he used more than $10 million of their money to pay off his own gambling debts. Some victims lost millions.

We also talk about Dodgers legend Steve Garvey, Sam's friend, who endorsed the company without knowing about the fraud and later testified as a character witness at his sentencing.

When federal investigators contacted his wife in 2006, it all came crumbling down. Sam pleaded guilty to mail fraud and spent 33 months in federal prison at Lompoc. His father died while he was inside, and he couldn't go to the funeral. Today Sam is in recovery from gambling addiction, a quarter of everything he earns goes to restitution, and he'll be paying his victims back for the rest of his life.

Americans legally bet more than $160 billion on sports last year, and there's a sportsbook on every phone. Sam's story is a warning about baseball, the Mafia, addiction, fraud, prison, grief and what gambling can take from someone before anyone around them notices.

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The Hidden Third is a series of intimate conversations with people who have lived inside hidden worlds, from crime and addiction to exploitation, survival and recovery. Hosted by award-winning journalist Mariana van Zeller.

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Disclaimer: Marilyn Manson, whose legal name is Brian Warner, has denied Evan Rachel Wood’s allegations. He has previously said that her claims are “horrible distortions of reality” and that his intimate relationships were consensual. In January 2025, Los Angeles County prosecutors announced that no criminal charges would be filed following a four-year investigation, stating that the domestic-violence allegations fell outside the statute of limitations and that they could not prove sexual-assault charges beyond a reasonable doubt. The DA’s office also said it “recognize[s] and applaud[s] the courage and resilience” of the women who came forward, noting that their advocacy helped bring greater awareness to the challenges faced by survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

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Evan Rachel Wood has spent much of her life in the public eye, from Practical Magic and Thirteen to her unforgettable role as Dolores in Westworld. But in recent years, Evan has used her platform in a very different way, speaking publicly about the physical and psychological abuse she says she experienced during her relationship with Marilyn Manson.

In this episode, Evan shares more about that relationship, including the sexual assault she says she experienced during the filming of Manson’s 2007 Heart-Shaped Glasses music video. She talks about the control and isolation she says she experienced, her use of alcohol and drugs during those years, and what it took to survive and rebuild her life. Manson has denied the allegations.

We also go back to the beginning. Evan remembers auditioning for Interview with the Vampire, a role that ultimately went to Kirsten Dunst but helped get her noticed. She talks about moving to Los Angeles with her mother, growing up as a child actor in Hollywood, and appearing in Practical Magic alongside Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.

Then came Thirteen. Evan was 14 when she made the R-rated film that became her breakout role. She talks about having to kiss a 23-year-old actor and the impact that experience had on her. It was an early lesson in how little control a young actor can have over what is asked of them.

Evan also talks about the backlash she faced after naming Manson publicly, and how speaking out has affected her career, her family and her sense of safety. She reflects on following the very public Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial while dealing with the fallout from speaking out herself, and on the messages later made public between Depp and Manson, in which the two men discussed Heard and allegations of abuse in crude and dismissive terms.

She also helped pass California’s Phoenix Act, which gave survivors of domestic violence more time to come forward by extending the statute of limitations from three years to five. That fight became part of the HBO documentary Phoenix Rising, which follows Evan as she prepares to name Manson publicly and works to create more time and support for survivors who may not yet feel ready, or able, to come forward.

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The Hidden Third is a series of intimate conversations with people who have lived inside hidden worlds, from crime and addiction to exploitation, survival and recovery. Hosted by award-winning journalist Mariana van Zeller.

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Jim Cole spent two decades as a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, working child-exploitation cases.

Early in his career, he saw a problem. Investigators were focused on the people making, possessing, and distributing child sexual abuse material. But the children in the images often went unidentified.

Jim helped change that.

In 2010, he founded HSI’s Victim Identification Program from scratch, including the first dedicated Victim Identification Laboratory at HSI’s Cyber Crimes Center. Its purpose was to answer a different question: Who is the child in the image, where are they, and are they still in danger?

Sometimes the answer begins with a clue most people would never notice: a window, a label, a piece of furniture, a blanket, something in the background that can lead investigators to a child.

The program has helped identify and rescue thousands of children around the world, and it continues to operate today. When Jim began tracking victim identifications at HSI in 2011, the agency rescued 262 child victims that year. The following year, after the program’s methods and technology were put in place, that number rose to more than 1,000.

This is not an easy subject for a podcast. But given the scale of this crime, and the people most affected by it, it is an important conversation to watch and share. In 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation. Those reports contained 61.8 million images, videos, and other files.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Jim takes Mariana back to his early years, from his time in the U.S. Army to becoming a patrol officer and then a detective on a Native American reservation in Oregon, investigating everything from narcotics to violent crime. He explains how a series of seemingly accidental turns led him into the work that would define his career.

Jim tells the story of one victim, abused by her father, whose case changed the course of his career and made him determined to focus on identifying children. He also tells Mariana about the schoolteacher who abused children for years before Jim’s team uncovered what he had done.

They discuss the tactics offenders use to groom children and why the people posing the greatest danger are often not who a child or family expects. They also talk about how artificial intelligence is changing this crime, from the creation of new synthetic abuse material to the ways technology can make it harder for investigators to tell what is real, identify victims, and keep up with the volume of material online.

Jim also reflects on the toll of doing this work for decades, what he has carried with him, and why he continues to fight for children who might otherwise never be rescued.

Jim now serves as Senior Advisor for Cyber Strategy and Child Protection at Our Rescue, a nonprofit whose mission is to end human trafficking and child exploitation. He also co-hosts Unlikely Allies: Inside Our Fight with Sonny Von Cleveland, a previous guest on The Hidden Third.

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Jim Cole spent two decades as a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, working child-exploitation cases.

Early in his career, he saw a problem. Investigators were focused on the people making, possessing, and distributing child sexual abuse material. But the children in the images often went unidentified.

Jim helped change that.

In 2010, he founded HSI’s Victim Identification Program from scratch, including the first dedicated Victim Identification Laboratory at HSI’s Cyber Crimes Center. Its purpose was to answer a different question: Who is the child in the image, where are they, and are they still in danger?

Sometimes the answer begins with a clue most people would never notice: a window, a label, a piece of furniture, a blanket, something in the background that can lead investigators to a child.

The program has helped identify and rescue thousands of children around the world, and it continues to operate today. When Jim began tracking victim identifications at HSI in 2011, the agency rescued 262 child victims that year. The following year, after the program’s methods and technology were put in place, that number rose to more than 1,000.

This is not an easy subject for a podcast. But given the scale of this crime, and the people most affected by it, it is an important conversation to watch and share. In 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation. Those reports contained 61.8 million images, videos, and other files.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Jim takes Mariana back to his early years, from his time in the U.S. Army to becoming a patrol officer and then a detective on a Native American reservation in Oregon, investigating everything from narcotics to violent crime. He explains how a series of seemingly accidental turns led him into the work that would define his career.

Jim tells the story of one victim, abused by her father, whose case changed the course of his career and made him determined to focus on identifying children. He also tells Mariana about the schoolteacher who abused children for years before Jim’s team uncovered what he had done.

They discuss the tactics offenders use to groom children and why the people posing the greatest danger are often not who a child or family expects. They also talk about how artificial intelligence is changing this crime, from the creation of new synthetic abuse material to the ways technology can make it harder for investigators to tell what is real, identify victims, and keep up with the volume of material online.

Jim also reflects on the toll of doing this work for decades, what he has carried with him, and why he continues to fight for children who might otherwise never be rescued.

Jim now serves as Senior Advisor for Cyber Strategy and Child Protection at Our Rescue, a nonprofit whose mission is to end human trafficking and child exploitation. He also co-hosts Unlikely Allies: Inside Our Fight with Sonny Von Cleveland, a previous guest on The Hidden Third.

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