Miami, Florida.

On this farm they're killing with sledgehammers,

and butchering alive.

I think one of them saw me in the area,

They patrol this area on ATVs.

Threats have been made for the past 13 years on my life.

I'm not too popular in these areas.

When they weren't chasing me with sledgehammers

and axes, I would be getting phone calls,

I would be getting emails,

I would be getting messages on social media.

An undercover operation

sheds light into the cruel treatment of animals

at a West Palm Beach farm.

The animals behind us residing in this torture operation

have a voice today.

When people would be arrested

in interrogation rooms, they would tell law

enforcement that guy, Kudo, had better watch his ass

because there are bounties on this guy's head.

He's the only one taking this industry down

and no one wants that person breathing anymore.

So Richard Kudo is an interesting guy

to say the least.

So right now, we are in Area 97.

We're just going over some mappings

of some slaughter farms and animal fighting farms.

He sailed on the America's cup team

like extreme sports guy.

He was also a property flipper in Miami, in South beach

in the 2000s when the market was quite high.

And it's where I blossomed financially.

It's where I made my money and made my nest egg.

But I had a void.

I had a void of doing something more important with my life.

So Kudo was volunteering

with the SPCA back in 2008.

Basically mucking stalls,

doing whatever work they needed around the barn.

And they got a distress call one day from the police

because SPCA would often help relocate

animals that the police would find in distress.

So, you know, I went out there driving my Range Rover

leaving South beach.

And they came across some butchers farm

that the police were at.

They came across this horse, beautiful horse

brown with white on his nose.

He had a broken leg, he was emaciated.

And I walked up to him and he put his head

in my arms and he just put all his weight on me.

And right then and there, I started falling for this animal

But underneath the horses lip

on its gums was tattooed a code.

And they were kind of curious to know what that meant.

It turns out that these horses are tattooed

on their lips to show where they're from

and what their pedigree is and they belong to.

And so this horse, this horse is named Freedom's Flight.

The horse had broken its leg during a race.

So I tracked his lineage and it was shocking

that I learned of his bloodlines, that it came

from some of the most famous race horses on the planet.

How could this horse end up at an illegal slaughterhouse?

It boggled my mind.

He ended up adopting him.

Freedom Flight still lives at his compound in Florida.

Sort of got him going into this world

of underground horse butchering.

These are slaughter horses here.

And we have a mayor down here.

She's clinging to life right now.

The SPCA was not an organization that was geared

towards me or anyone else going undercover

and investigating these people, which is

the only reason why I started the animal recovery mission.

The animal recovery mission

taped and exposed the property

while conducting an investigation.

We basically go undercover where no one else will.

And the public sector and the private sector,

if they're disregarding something

as far as animal cruelty ARM will take it on.

It's something that is so incredibly important

and it's become my life's mission.

He's so skinny.

I would just cut checks and rip out my bank accounts

to fund it without thinking about it.

The guy right here, his wife who sort of up.

And to be honest I don't know how much money

that I've spent, but it's close to the seven figures over

and

it's been worth it.

I'm dealing with the USDA right now on a horse meat buy.

Basically they're embedded with some horse killers.

So horse meat internationally is a pretty commonly

eaten food, not on the level of beef or pork

but it's popular in a lot of cultures in Japan,

central Asia, France, and in Cuba.

And a lot of Cuban-Americans live in South Florida.

And many of them still want to eat horse meat.

They're eating horse meat for medical purposes.

They think that it cures blood disorders

that it helps with side effects from chemotherapy.

But all horse meat, whether it's imported

or horses are slaughtered and butchered

in this country for human consumption, it's illegal.

This is roughly 30 pounds of horse meat purchased

in Palm beach County.

They've actually cut this horse meat

into small steak-like filets.

In Florida, the problem is that many times

laws geared towards protecting animals are not being upheld

by law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and juries.

And that's extremely, extremely frustrating.

The laws in Florida are still too weak.

If you are a first time felony animal abuser

it is unlikely that you will get prison time.

You may get County jail time

but that even would be in some cases, a stretch.

There's really not a whole lot I can do with them

whether they plead guilty or they're found guilty

because most judges, even in the most horrible crimes

do not put them in jail will not put them in prison.

So they're placed on probation.

Animal abuse here is so under reported

because there simply are not the resources

for the police departments, the Sheriff's department,

animal care and control to go out

and really investigate these crimes.

Right now I'm in the C-9 Basin

a really nasty property

with four completely emaciated horses.

The C-9 Basin is this patch of brushy land

wedged between Miami and the Everglades.

And it's really meant to be an ecological buffer zone.

It's not really meant to have humans living there

but lots of people do live there.

There are the horses.

This is the kill area here.

That's the rug that they're covering the horses with

after they remove the meat.

When I first started investigating the basin

at the beginning of 2009,

law enforcement wouldn't even go into the basin

no one would go into the basin and uphold laws.

Certainly wouldn't go in there to investigate crimes

against animals, which was why horse meat was flourishing

as an industry.

This area is pretty lawless.

A local paper in Miami called it the closest thing

America has to a wild West outpost

and having been there a couple of times

I can attest to that being true.

And then people's pet horses start being stolen.

Usually someone's pet horse, their pony,

they'll come to the barn in the morning

and either the horse has vanished

or a couple of hundred yards away and a trail of blood away

there's a perfectly butchered and filleted carcass

of what used to be your pet pony.

When was my horse stolen, he was butchered.

He was tied into a palm tree.

So all these are bloodstains here?

Yeah.

When I started going in to the basin in 2009,

I was still a developer, but I knew hundreds of thousands

of animals were in there being brutalized

with everyone ignoring the crimes against them.

Animals were killed in really inhumane ways,

being stabbed in the chest or shot with low caliber guns,

their throat sled and tortured, boiled alive,

really horrific stuff.

And to see his videos,

he has a massive trove of undercover videos

is pretty scary stuff.

So this is Kudo Thawn.

I am investigating an illegal slaughter farm.

I didn't know what I was doing,

completely and utterly untrained.

I am armed but I still don't feel that safe.

And I started to infiltrate properties.

Some of them legally, some of them illegally.

And I started to document the crimes against the animals.

See a horse. Doesn't look like he's in great shape.

Before he got involved,

there really wasn't a lot of policing of this world.

The police down there have a lot on their plates

in terms of the murder and robbery and credit card fraud.

And so animal cruelty was not really high

on their list of priorities.

I think that when you have a state where animal cruelty

is way too prevalent, and our laws are way too weak,

it's important to have someone like Richard Kudo out there.

He's someone who's a true believer, who takes risks

and sometimes crossing the line to get these secret videos

out to the public.

I understand his passion behind it

but the way he goes about it, is not the way

one should go about it if you're going to successfully

prosecute these animal cruelty cases.

I investigated the C-9 Basin for roughly six months

and I comprised files of roughly a hundred properties,

illegal properties, and I presented it to law enforcement

but I also collected violations, building violations,

zoning violations, environmental violations

while I was collecting crimes against animals.

Just come out of this one farm now.

And after roughly six months of just about every night

infiltrating every single property that I possibly

could in the basin, I created a report.

And the police, they're shocked

by what's going on in the Basin

not only from an animal rights perspective

but also from a zoning and codes perspective.

And the investigation

of the C-9 Basin actually led to Operation Restore.

And it was one of the largest operations

in history of the state of Florida.

Thousands of agents

tactically hitting the entire C-9 Basin

Just after dawn

an army of regulators and police

deployed to shut down slaughter farms.

It was just a massive take-down

of illegal activity that was going on in the C-9 Basin.

17 cockfighting rings, over 400 illegal structures.

You know, hundreds of citations issued

for dumping and butchering an animal cruelty.

It was the most incredible thing that I had ever seen.

And all of those nights infiltrating these properties,

all of those nights, being chased with machetes

and axes, the danger that I put myself in,

it paid off.

So after the raid, governor Charlie Crist

signs a law that basically increases penalties

for slaughtering horses.

And to Kudo, this seems like it should be

the end of the story, a sort of climax

and it's actually the end of act one in the story.

So kudos on a high,

you can almost hear the happy music playing

as he's awarded citizen of the year by the Miami new times

but he starts becoming more paranoid

about the enemies that he's making.

Butchers do not like him, they have followed him,

they have shot at him.

Kill buyers, people all over the country

who are buying horses to export for meat don't like him.

And so his paranoia was actually quite justified.