Camp Gagnon - Former CONMAN Owed Gangsters $1,300,000 At 18

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

At 19, Ian Bick was running a million dollar nightclub ponzi scheme, and by 21 he was arrested by the FBI and sentenced to 3 years in federal prison. This is his story. WELCOME TO CAMP.Go to https://expressvpn.com/gagnon and find out how you can get 3 months of ExpressVPN free!Thanks to Express VPN and Morgan & Morgan for sponsoring today's episode!Mark Gagnon is our HostWill Schwartz is our Content Producer and Lead EditorAce Taylor provides Additional EditingSpencer Weinstein is our Com...

By the end of this concert run, I owed $1.3 million with interest to everyone. I thought I was intouchable. This drug dealer that loans us some money ended up getting popped. So he sends his cousin down to the club. Comes in the club, it's me and my business partner. Pulls a gun on my business partner and puts it right at his head. He said, don't say anything slick. He goes over to me.

He says, go downstairs. We had a basement. So I'm thinking I'm dead at this point. My face was turning red. I was just like, this is it. So he brings me to the basement. Then he takes my hand and he puts it on the table. And there's a staple gun right next to it.

So I'm thinking he's going to staple gun my fucking hair. He's going through the drawer and he gets a screwdriver. He takes the end of it, the handle end, and he's whacking each finger until they're like broken. It's like, where the fuck some money? Answer your fucking phone. This is Ian Bick. At the age of 21, he was arrested for a million dollar Ponzi scheme

that landed him in prison for three years. His overly ambitious career as a concert promoter eventually led to a lavish lifestyle of parties in debauchery. Today, we're going to talk about how he made $100,000 by age 16 and lost it all. How his gambling addiction led him to be tortured by gangsters, and how he survived.

his stay in federal prison. Every Monday, we are dropping the most interesting conversations on the internet. So don't miss it. Hit the subscribe button right here. Sign up for camp. Now, enjoy my conversation with Ian Bick. Welcome to Camp. Ian Bick, aka Ian Parker. Ian Parker. Yeah, Ian Parker, the alias, bro. Thank you so much for driving up to chat with me. I really appreciate it. This is going to be a lot of fun. I watched your, I watched the Vice mini doc that they did on you. I watched the HBO doc. I've watched a bunch of your TikToks. and, you know, all these interviews you've done around the web and your story is simultaneously frustrating and fascinating

and sad and awesome all the same time. Like, it's every little, it's like every feeling. Like, I think any person that watches and hears about your story will connect with it in certain ways and also hate you for different reasons. Like, you're a very polarizing person, in my opinion. At least the old Ian Beck. I don't know about the current Ian Beck,

sitting in front of me. That might be a different person. But dude, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. To start, obviously, I think we can just go chronologically. So I'm curious, how and when does all of this craziness that we know now, how does it start? So pretty much like there's this one instance, my end of freshman year of high school that causes everything. And when you think about it, like how crazy it is that this one moment caused ultimately me to end up in federal prison and then sitting here talking to you after that is insane. Yeah. It's weird how life like just one little moment is like, well, everything's different. Yeah, I reflect back on it. I'm like, wow, if I didn't do this one night, then who knows, I'd be at college or whatever. Yeah. And so

basically the one night is I lived in this Jewish community. Growing up, it was a gated community. We lived on the lake. And there was a board of directors. And every time that like I got a dirt bike or a paintball gun. I had a golf cart. My parents caught me when I was 16. The neighborhood would create a rule saying that I wasn't allowed to use it. Like the community couldn't use it.

But you specifically, there weren't like other kids in the neighborhood that were like. No, no other kid was doing it. It was just me. So everyone knew the rules were about me. Yeah. And one night, me and my best friend, Stephen,

go out and take insulating foam. We went to Sears. It was mischief night on Halloween. Yeah. And he's like, okay, he's like this tech, you know, nerdy guy. Did you say mischief night? Mischief Night, you know the night before Halloween? I've never heard of Mishift Night.

Yeah, so it's Mishift Night and we go and we go to Sears and we get this insulating foam bottle and he's like, all we have to do is spray the locks and it'll seal so they can't get into their cars. So I'm thinking, okay, this is all right, like icing their cars, the handles. Yeah. And so we take the foam and like we dress in all black and we have like hoods on or like looking like ninjas. We took our iPhones to like search for cameras.

he was saying like if you put your camera on, you can like search to see if a red lights or anything's recording. And we're driving our golf cart around the neighborhood at like midnight. And we go to the president of the neighborhood and the vice president of the neighborhood. They had like a BMW and a Jeep Wrangler and we insulate foam the handles. Well, the next morning, the guy drives up like in parks because he knew it was us. Yeah. If they're making the rules to be like, yo, no dirt bikes because one kid keeps riding a dirt bike.

As soon as they get their car handles foamed in, They're going to be like, oh, I wonder who it was. Yeah, so the foam. The foam drips down all the handles and ruins like every door on the car. So it's like $5,000 with the damage on each car. And the cops come. Now, we took toilet paper and toilet paper at our house that night to make it look like we got hit. So we were trying to say that, you know, we were hit too.

It was it us. They got us, man. It was just you and us. That's it. So the cops come. And this is my first ever run in with the cops. You thought you were so clever when you were TP in your house. So I'm in my room.

The cops come and they talk to my dad. And my dad's defending me to the end. He's like, no, it wasn't him. They were home. He was the alibi, this and that. So the cop asks, can we search the garage? And my dad thought we wouldn't be stupid enough to leave the canisters in the garage. So he says, yes, absolutely.

Cop opens the garage. What's in the garage is the golf cart and the foam, like six empty bottles. We left the foam on there. And probably toilet paper too. Yeah, there was toilet paper too. And they were used foam. And while this is going on, my friend's getting interrogated at his house. And they used the oldest trick in the book saying, I rat it on him, which is literally

foreshadowing to everything that would happen just on a much larger level. Prisoner's dilemma. Yeah, prisoner's dilemma. And my life was just like, it was just like a series of going from, you know, pissing off the local high school administrators and middle school administrators to then getting to the city level and then eventually to the federal level all because of this. Oh, that's crazy. So I'm, curious, the type of person that would be willing to do that. Like, I was kind of a scared kid. Like, I was like timid when I was like 15, 16. I did not like being in trouble. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So your boy is like, yo, let's go, you know, foam the handles. Are you thinking, was it your idea or his idea? His idea, yeah. So were you thinking like, oh, we could get in trouble? They're going to catch us. This is not going to work. Or were you like, yeah, why not? Let's do it. I was a very cocky, arrogant kid, but I also had no self-confidence in myself because I'm like this chubby, nerdy kid. Right. So like around girls and around friends, I'm not the confident one. But when it came to like standing up to authority and whatever, I'm the first person. Like they banned backbacks in middle school.

So I started a backpack petition walking around with a backpack. Oh, really? I had a Hollister shirt that said, this is what happens when you party naked. I got suspended for two weeks for wearing that and I wore it every day for the rest. Just to intentionally piss off. the powers that be i would wear flip flops i was selling like gum and energy drinks out of my back back just like whatever like i love that kind of attention from it right and i just thrived off of that yeah so like what part of it was the attention from like pissing off authority and people being

like yo that ian kid does not give a shit and what part of it was you like actually not liking authority being like fuck you guys i think i just didn't like people that went up against me i always felt like i was a targeted one so like i could follow certain rules but But then if there were rules that I felt were like didn't make any sense, I was like that, you know, that Robin Hood type figure that was going and going against the norm. I wanted to do everything I could to be different. You saw it as you're coming at me. So I'm just retaliating.

Yeah, exactly. And then like all my friends wanted to go. They were told like you have to get good grades in middle school to get into high school, this and that. So what did I do? I got all bad grades just to prove that you could go to high school by not following the norm. I was very against like the status quo and like what everyone else was doing. So even in middle school, you're like, I'm going to get bad grades to prove everyone wrong that you don't have

to fit in this little box to do it the right way. Exactly. I did the bare minimum like all C's and Ds and I was put on like this naughty list going into the high school. It was like kids to look out for going into freshman year. So when they throw me on that list, what do I do? I go above and beyond to make sure that I'm the opposite of what they're claiming to be. So I got into all AP. classes by sophomore year. I'm top of my class, top 10. I'm like going the extra mile to do all these things. Everything was just like whatever I could to stand out. I was doing theater. I was did the high school play all four years. In middle school I did theater camp. I just like love the attention. I love being on stage. Right. And like I thrived off that like that was my drug. Yeah. Yeah. And were your

are, do you have any siblings? I have a brother. He's four years younger. He wants nothing to do with like my brand or beer or the story. But he's super supportive. Like, super dedicated when like the story broke out he was always the first person to defend me on social media yeah and everything like that when your family's ride or die bro your dad gets questioned by the police he's like not my kid couldn't do it okay your dad knew it was you but he was riding for you anyway he knew the second he when the cop left he's like you guys are fucking idiots how do you leave the canister in the garage yeah I mean that's wild and like were you religious growing like you mentioned you were Jewish but were you raised like going to temple and like bar mitzvind the whole deal

Or was it kind of like culturally Jewish, but didn't really like practice? Our family raised us like very multicultural. So my mom's side's Catholic and my dad side's Jewish, which technically according to that it doesn't really flow to me. Got to be a Jewish box. Yeah. But we grew up celebrating all the Jewish holidays, Hanukkah, Passover. And then like Christmas we celebrated. So we were very multicultural, diverse.

Played a lot of like family board games. Yeah. Went on family vacations, like super family oriented Friday night pizza nights. Yeah. and things like that. And your parents were they, like when you're starting to do these little things in high school, like, you know, spraying the whatever, like disobeying the principal, like just trying to piss off authority.

Were they concerned or were they like, yeah, he's just being a kid. He's like feeling out the boundaries. I think that my dad definitely probably defended me and enabled me at the same time because he was like that growing up very against the authority. He would be teething houses and that was like chalked up to just being a kid. So I got away with a lot like I could kind of do whatever I wanted like when other kids my age were not allowed out past a certain time or getting grounded or Didn't have access to phones or whatever I was like the opposite of that and now I noticed also like in the dock and some of the footage of you like starting to plan some of these early events that we're gonna get to You have like some tattoos on your arms obviously now you're like blasted but like the Harry Potter one's fire by the I just got this one

Really? Yeah, that one's sake a few weeks ago But like how old are when you got your first tattoo? 16. It was the strength one right here. My dad took me and signed off on it against my mom's will. Oh, really? And that was my very first one. So your dad was like, yeah, get it. My dad like pretty much supports me like with whatever. Obviously if it's like morally wrong, like if I went up to him and said, hey, I'm doing this or that. Or like if it was just like, hey, I'm going to go rob a bank. Like he's not going to enable me to do that. Right. And I think a lot of people put blame on him for my situation. But the truth is like they raised. me in the way where to be independent and to make decisions on my own. So I wanted to follow that

route and not go to them for help. I wanted to do it on my own. Got it. And as we'll find out probably some of that like independence and like fierceness of doing it on your own probably led to some problems. Well, then probably it definitely definitely led to some problems. Also it's so funny your first tattoo is definitely my least favorite. Like all the other ones are sick and then you're just like this one means strength. There's no way that even means strength. No, I checked it out. But all my friends tease me in high school, they were like, dude, there's no way. There's no way. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I triple check. But like, to me, I was always like very motivational, spiritual. Like I looked at quotes. I was a kid that was on Instagram every day posting a quote on my feed. I was that annoying kid.

Yeah. My Facebook memories nowadays are all the quotes I used to post back in the day. That's so funny. Is that ironic that you got a Facebook memory and it's just like, hey, believe in yourself, don't let anyone tell you different. And you're like, I should have believe in some other people. Yeah, it's talking about like love. And I was in a relationship at the time.

So it's like 10 years ago, it's like, I love you. So and so with the heart. And it's like you have to learn how to love in order to do this. And you have to fail to succeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're like breaking rules, pushing back against authority, getting attention from it. And the attention kind of feels good. And you're kind of getting, are you getting accepted from the people in like late middle school,

early high school for your rebelliousness? Well, half of the issue with this is that I went to private school after elementary school in like fourth or fifth grade because I was getting bullied a lot. They used to call me like Twinkie and the Chubster and like all these names. And so my parents... Decent for elementary school. Yeah. Decent insults. I was getting in fights like these kids would jump me all the time.

Oh, really? They would do all the, they were very mean. And so I went to private school. I went to Montessori school. Yeah. And that enables independent thinking because you're literally in a room from fourth to eighth grade. All the kids are. combined and there's only like two or three kids in each grade in this one room. So you would have like

an eighth grader in the room with a fourth grader and there's like bunnies hopping around like animals. There's a class turtle. There's no desks. You're sitting on the floor like doing your work. You're making your own lunches, all the stuff. So then by seventh grade I go back to middle school because I wanted to adapt socially into like the social regime going into high school. I didn't want to go from private school to high school. And when I get back in the middle school, I'm trying to fit in like being like the skater was the type wearing the DC shoes, having the heelies. I carried around a skateboard, but I couldn't skate for shit. I had the long hair, but it didn't look good on me. It would like curl up at the bottom. I got highlights. Really? Yeah, but I look like a raccoon. Oh, that's so funny. I'd wear like the hats.

I'm looking at some of the oversides t-shirts and I'm looking at like some of these photos. I'm like, wow but that was just like showing that I was doing whatever to fit in be with like the cool kids and like I started selling weed for a little bit oh really I didn't need the money I was just like I got weed for my friend and I would just sit there trying to flip it and a couple times I got jumped for it because I'm the last person that should ever be selling drugs oh shit so you're like getting into fights growing up like being targeted specifically yeah and that's probably like eroding some of your self-confidence too like you get into a couple fights because people think you're fat or whatever like that's gonna fuck with your head yeah I couldn't fight

at all. I mean, eventually I went to karate and stuff, but I was just like, it just wasn't my persona. Karate's not going to teach you to fight. No, karate doesn't teach me. I think I, the last time I got into a fight in like middle school was I punched a kid in the nose after that my dad was like, next time he fucks with you, just bam, right in the nose. And I did that and they left me alone after that. Oh, cool. Okay. So that part actually worked. Yeah, that was like seventh grade. Yeah. So, okay, you get in trouble in your neighborhood. You're like, you fuck up these guys' cars. You get in trouble rightly so. You definitely shouldn't have done that. Yeah. And then what happens from there?

Do you get sentenced to some type of like community service, right? Yeah, we get sentenced to community service and then the chargers get dropped if we can plead it and we had to pay restitution. So our parents paid the restitution and it's like a hundred hours each of community service. And one day I'm sitting in our English class and our teacher reads an essay on homelessness and then plays the movie for us, the pay it forward movie where it's like this movie about how all these different. people in their life are doing this pay it forward project so if you do one nice thing for someone you have to pass it on to the next person and so and so yeah so whatever it was like those two things stuck together for me and resonated with me and i went home and i started googling like the homeless situation in damberry in my hometown and before i knew it i have this idea to sell like those live strong

bracelets but right fight for the homeless on them i went to like 24 hour wristbands dot com yeah and i print my dad gives me the money to make these bracelets and I launched this this homeless project it was called fight for the homeless the bracelets said fight for the homeless and I'm selling the bracelets for a dollar each um to raise awareness for the homeless shelter and donate this money to the local homeless shelter that's great before I knew it all the local news stations are covering it we sell like almost two thousand dollars in bracelets and the courts gave me all my hours they signed off on it like I was a success story they were really happy about reformed kid reformed kid and like the matter of two or three months. Yeah. And this is the beginning of sophomore year. This is 2011. Yeah.

For 2010. So now you're like not only are you paying restitution and getting being on the road to righteousness so to speak. All of a sudden now you're like, oh, I can make money selling stuff. So like is this the first time that like you actually made money from like enterprising on your own? No, I was always a kid that sold like the lemonade stands growing up. Okay. Very entrepreneurial. We thought we would get a make a candy shop. So we got, like saws and start sawing down trees across the street from our house. And we had this idea to build this candy shop obviously didn't work out because how are we going to build a candy shop as kids.

But you're dreaming big from an early age. You're like, oh, dude, we'll use this wood. We're going to build a store and we'll have a little hut and blah, blah. And then in middle school, I sold candy, energy drinks, gum out of my backpack. Yeah. And I was making good money, a couple hundred bucks a week doing that. Okay, cool. Which was not bad for a kid in eighth grade.

Yeah. But so after these wristbands start selling, I'm thinking. thinking, what can I do to bring this to the next level? Now, I'm not thinking for me. I'm not thinking in terms of how I can make money. I'm thinking in terms of how could I bring more awareness and make more money for the project. Everything was about the project. Like this is my personal goals are, okay, I want to be like an FBI agent or the CIA or something. So I'm doing well in school. Yeah. And on the charitable side, I want to blow up this fight for the homeless project. Yeah. And did you actually like in looking back in like pure honesty where you were at,

Did you really care about the organization you were working with? Or were you sort of like, oh, this kind of like build some good reputation? And I'm like on the road to doing something good. And I'm able to like make money for the organization, blah, blah, blah. So like what percentage of it was it like, oh, I like the attention from? And what percent was like, oh, I really care about like bringing awareness to this homelessness issue? Well, I definitely cared about the cause. But I think my energy and motivation for the cause was getting fueled by the amount of popularity.

I mean, like, you got to look at it this way. I'm this freshman in high school that knows a small percentage. We had a large high school. It's almost 3,500 kids. Right. I'm in the bottom denominator. And all of a sudden, every single kid in the high school is talking about my project. They're saying it on the announcements, that's like every freshman's dream.

Yeah, the school or like newspapers covering it. Your parents are so proud of you. Like, I knew kids like this were like they would do community service stuff, but it was partially because they liked the cause. And like, obviously, volunteering helping people makes you feel good. But a lot of it was because of like that was part of their identity from attention that they got parents, stuff like that. And it really fueled who they were. And so they kept on doing it, even though they didn't like care necessarily that much about the organization, you know? Yeah.

So I think that's a really common thing that have, especially with like young people. I mean, even the kids that like want to or become obsessed with like trying to get into a good college, are they doing it for them? Are they doing it because they want to look good for their parents and their peers? Yeah. Like I would know kids that they're pulling all nighters. to meet deadlines and then looking back on it now they're like wow did that really matter at the time that i was doing that yeah especially if you feel disenfranchised in your school anyway and you're like damn and like you're the oldest of your siblings you don't have like an older sibling that's necessarily like you know this is the sort of the path for you you're just sort of like responding from external

feedback coming from family and school and community and all that stuff yeah great so you're now like okay how do we level this up for the organization what is the next step i the next step for me was i wanted to throw a school dance. I saw that all the school dances weren't the best, and the only times they did school dances were for proms in May, and then the snowball in January, which was like the winter event, and then homecoming in November. So between January and May, there's a big market gap to do a dance. So I wanted to do one in March. This is like December, January, now I'm planning it. I want to do one in March. And I go to the head of the student council, the teacher in charge of it, and she tells me, doesn't really give me the time of day, she just says, go talk to the president

of the council, which was a senior. I go and talk to her after tracking her down like I'm following her around all day. I'm just like this little freshman kid. She had heard of my project. She's like, yeah, no, we plan those things like years in advance. Sorry, you can't do it, this and that. So then when I went back to the teacher, the teacher said, well, whatever she says goes, referring to the student. So that wasn't the end of the road for me. I got a meeting with the principal. It was a new principal that year. And I sat in his office and would not leave until they got me on the calendar. He finally agrees. And it was me, my dad, and the executive director of this corporate center in Danbury called The Matrix, who I had found for a venue. No one had done a

dancer yet. It was a brand new venue, beautiful ballroom. And we all sit down with the student had a student council and the president of student council who were not happy to be there, because they had already told me no. I make this whole. PowerPoint presentation about the dance, about the planning, what the plans were, the budget, how we would raise more money, what the cost of everything was, how we would sell tickets. And I developed this skill because I would watch my dad. He's in catering. And I learned how to plan events through him. I learned the front of the house, the back of the house. I would run parties for him in eighth grade. That was what I did for like work at that time. Did you go bar mitzvah?

No, I never. I had a fake one. What do you mean? So it was a, I wanted the party without like the religion aspect of it. So I had a, it was a 13th birthday bash. We rented the community center in our neighborhood. We got a DJ, a dance floor. I had like a red carpet and security like a bouncer working the door. Everything had to be a party for me. Like if I, the thing with me is when I go all in on something, it's got to be larger than life. It's not like a half ass production. Right. And that just foreshadows. Like it's crazy looking back on it. Because every little thing I did at that time frame blows up on such a massive level, like later on, just like such larger scale. Right. I think it's also significant that your dad is in events. Like he's in event planning.

And so growing up constantly, you're hearing him talk about, you know, DJs and food and like lights. And like you're just getting sort of impressioned about, you know, like how to throw a good event. Yeah, I got to go to the Harry Potter premieres. I went to the Goblet of Fire in New York City. Oh, really? I met the whole cast. I was like nine years old and I had a picture with Emma Watts. And I thought it was like the coolest thing ever. To me, she's like, wow, she's super high. hot. And I'm not this kid. But the like the events, the production. Oh, so he's not doing like little events. No, he was big time. He did stuff for like the Clintons. Like he would come home one night and he'd be like, yeah, I was with 50 cent last night. Just like the Rolling Stones, like big, big projects. Oh,

so this is not like wedding planning. He does that too. But he, but he's not like spending his whole day being like we need more croissants for the fucking bridal party. He's doing like he did 50 cent did like a backyard barbecue in the city like five or six years ago. You know that Haiti thing that MTV did. He catered that like big event. He did large scale things. Gotcha. Okay. So you already like not only you're hearing about events, but like you're getting to go to some of these and like you're seeing how he run stuff. Yeah. Spectacle is awesome. Like all that's getting impression on you and you like the attention and the affirmation that comes with it. Yeah. I'm a very visual learner. So for me like don't give me a textbook. Give me a video. I'm going to study that video.

I mean, to figure out how to do it. I mean, yeah, especially as a kid, put you in an experience. It's like, bro, this is the whole world. Experience is everything. Yeah, exactly. And like, not only are you into events, but you also know how to make them good. Exactly. So now you're planning this school dance that's not affiliated with the school.

Yeah. And what happens? So I plan the school dance and ticket sales are slow up into the last week, but I'm working around the clock. Like, I'm knocking on classroom doors. I'm doing the morning announcements. I'm getting news interviews. Like, I'm doing whatever I can.

Like, it was do or die. like this was my life and by this point i'm like paying kids to do my homework and stuff so i could just focus on this hilarious because i wanted to maintain my grades too because i needed to maintain that image everything was very image based for me by this point i'm wearing a suit and tied at school um i have a suit i got the shoes i'm carrying around a briefcase that had like the papers and the tickets all this stuff and but this was like a well-promoted school dance we got a big banner to hang in the cafeteria like this was they don't even market their proms this good yeah so i do this whole thing and the day of the event comes at the center,

we end up selling like three or 400 tickets, which was really solid. Yeah. And we were going to raise like $1,500 just based off ticket sales. I get to the event center at like 8 a.m. No one's there. So I just start setting the place up. We didn't really have to be there to like 12 or 1.

Yeah. I set the whole place up without their staff there. And the director comes. He's like, who did all this? And I'm like, it's me. I did it. Alone. Alone.

I'm 15 at the time. And later that night, he brings the CEO of the company who was like, like multi-millionaire to come and meet me. He's like, you have to meet this kid. He meets me and he's like, Ian, when do you turn 16? And I'm like, in May, he's like, you're working for me. No ifs, sands or butts, you're hired.

And how does that feel as a 15 year old to get like? I was on Cloud 9. Yeah. Like for the CEO, like he's in leather boots, nice, like thousands of dollar suit, hair slick back. Like this is my idol. This is who I want to be. And he's just the firm handshake.

And he's looking down on me. He's like, you're going to, work for me. Like that's my first corporate job at 16. Yeah. And it feels good. You're finally validated like in the real world. I think to me it was so important to not be like my peers. Right. I wanted to be like I wanted to be the people that the kid that people talked about. I wanted to be different from them because everyone was so obsessed with college and school. And to me that was just like there's got to be a way to not go down that path. And at the time this is when like the Mark Zuckerbergs are blowing up and like Snapchat and Instagram and like you hear all these stories right these young entrepreneurs that

you're seeing and you're exactly I want to do that and it's not like now there's more young entrepreneurs but back then there wasn't it was just the ones you would the mainstream ones that you would hear about so how much of it was about like early on trying to like do these events and I guess we'll learn more about that in a second but like how much of it was about money and like oh I want to be rich and like get fancy cars and like live this lavish baller lifestyle and how much of it was oh I want just the validation of someone that is doing those things. For me, it was never about money. I was always, I would spend my last dollar on my friends. Like in high school, I had my own money. Before I ever took investors from anyone, I had my own

money from doing my teen nights, which we'll talk about and working because I had this corporate job. I would always be the one picking up dinners for my friends because they had no money. They weren't working or if they were, they were, they were making what, eight bucks an hour at a clothing store? Yeah. And I would pick up the dinner bills. I would take them shopping. I would do whatever because that's just the type of person I was. Yeah. And, but the first night, like, I really turned business mindset. And I guess I already had it in me from like middle school and everything, but it didn't click was the night of that dance and I'm sitting on the stage looking at what I accomplished. And I'm like, wow, if I could get

this many people to pay $20 ahead to come here. So that's when my mindset goes from, okay, I want to raise money for charity to, okay, I want to make money for myself and make this a job. But I was never fueled by the money aspect of it. I was always fueled by, I like the fame part. Right. I like the popularity. People coming up to and like girls being like, oh, you did all this? Like, are you getting attention from specific people? I think the most important thing that came out of this was I got the attention from the upper classmen. Yeah. Because that's what fuels my house parties to come. If I never had the popular people that were in the upper classmen, I don't think I would ever have, there wouldn't be an HBO documentary. They wouldn't be a vice documentary. It's all because those popular kids

gave me attention and that's just like a snowball effect and as an insecure young kid that feels like the world when you're like a freshman sophomore and some seniors like dude oh you're the guy that did the thing that's sick and people don't really understand like the dangers of that like everyone wants to be the influencer on social media and do this and that but once you get that attention it's a power that you just don't know it until like you have it especially if you don't know how to handle it and if you're already insecure once you're given those keys like you're just at the will of your insecurities rather than at the will of like your confidence and like knowing how to deal with that attention and power.

Exactly. Yeah, it's a really, really intimidating feeling. So you do all this. Are you bullied for wearing a suit to school? No. I mean, people, my friends made fun of me, but I didn't really care. Like, I walked around like I owned the place. I had a cell phone, middle of the classroom, taking a call, a phone call.

Sometimes I wouldn't even have a call to take. I'd just get up and say, hey, I got to take this. And so I would start getting like suspensions or like detentions. So what I would do is I'd text my dad and I said, dad, I'm in detention. So he would call the school and he'd say, listen, my son needs to go home now, or I'm calling a lawyer. And that worked every time. They'd come and get me and walk right out, go home, no issue. And did your dad ever be like, why were you in detention?

I told him it was for the phone. Like, it was petty stuff. It was the phone. And so he just kept on washing it away. Like, ah, it's fine. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, he was proud of what I was doing. Right.

With the whole thing. I mean, I think that was just part of my persona to, like, be this business whiz kid. I was starting, I had the glasses. I had like the outfit and that was like the angle that they were getting at. Yeah. And you were like, I want to be Zuckerberg. I want to be Snapchat. Like I am a founder.

I'm an executive. That was me. Yeah. Yeah. And so you didn't even, so like people make funny, but you're like, oh, I'm above it. Like you can make fun of me, but like you're still worried about college. I'm building a six figure business. I just believe that you had to like experience like people attacking you and like going after

you in that way. Like I believe that you had to be like hate. hated before like you got like I'll put it this way if you weren't being hated on then you weren't doing anything oh so you welcomed the hate because you were like I loved it I fueled that because it was people there's no such thing as bad press right and I learned that at a very young age so that helped me later on when I'm dealing with these larger than life situations so now you're so like you're welcoming the hate because you're like successful people get hated on so if I get hated on that means I'm successful pretty much yeah oh hilarious I'm taking everything because you have like the nerdy kids

that did not like what I was doing at all, the parties, the popularity, so they hated on me. And then you have the popular kids that hate on me because I'm taking away from their popularity. And then you have my friends that are just like, they're supportive and they think it's cool, but they don't really know what to think of it. And you're also taking calls in class. Like you look like a dork. I didn't look like a dork. And then the teachers obviously didn't like it whatsoever.

They didn't like the parties because rumors started to float around that they were fueled like with alcohol, drugs. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I have to fill you in on a very, important secret. Watching Netflix without Express VPN, it's like going to a buffet and 70% of the items, off limits. You can't have them. You walk in, you go, oh, can I have the shrimp? No, you can't have the shrimp. You got to have this stuff, just the soup and salads. Watching Netflix without Express VPN, it's like going to a nightclub or like a bar and you're like, oh, could I get a beer? No, you get water. Netflix, if you don't know this, has a ton of shows all over the world. In different

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And on top of that, they have servers in 94 countries. What does that mean? That means any that you want to get on Netflix? Hey, if they don't have it in one country, they're going to have it in one of the other 93 countries. You understand? So, be smart. Stop paying full price for streaming services and only getting a fraction of the content. All right. It's not fair to you. It's not fair to your wallet. Get your money's worth with ExpressVPN and get three months free when you go to ExpressVPN.com.com slash Gagnon. That's right. ExpressVPN.com slash Gagnon, Gagin-O-N-O-N-N-O-N. Get control of all the shows that you deserve. Let's get back to the show. start doing more parties. So you have that night for the shelter. You raise a bunch of money for

them and you're like, all right, time to do this for me. The thing with events is you get all this publicity, all this praise and everything up until the night of the show. And then once the show ends, that's it. No one's talking about you the next day. Like, yeah, the photos of videos, whatnot, people will reflect on about it. Right. That lasts for a day though. So that- You don't have any power at that point. No, I have like, I have a Facebook page. So that night I'm getting tagged in amazing job, this and that, whatever, dries up. So I'm like, okay, wow, what do I do from here? So what do I do?

I throw a spring break party at my house. I tell my parents 30 people are coming and about 300 showed up. We turned our kitchen into a nightclub. We had a fog machine. I went to Spencer's at the mall and got like all these DJ lights. We had like a soda bar. We set up an alcohol bar that my parents didn't know about on our patio, charging five bucks per solo cup.

And this is like the party of the year. Like all the seniors are there. Like everyone who's anyone was at this party. Yeah. And this just like asserted that I was like the house party king in high school. And then after that every weekend, I was the one throwing the house parties. I took over like the tailgates. I was doing the big barbecues.

It got so big. My parents would have to put like a circus tent like one of those wedding tents in our yard. They got porta potty. They got the dance floor. They put up lights and everything. And it was just like it was crazy. And eventually it got to the point where it's like, like, my parents are like, you can't do this here anymore. This is too big. Are cops showing up?

Like, I remember going to house parties and it just seemed like cops would come every time. We got lucky with our neighborhood, one, it's a gated community. And our neighbors were never there in the winter or the spring. They were summer, weekenders. So they would come on the weekends or they were very chill. So out of all these parties I've ever done, the cops only came once. And it was on a night where it was literally just my birthday party and we had 50 people. But the music was playing too loud because it echoes across the lake. Right. But kids are taking the boats out they're having like sex in the woods we have a trampoline they're doing drug like it's it's a crazy it's like project x like all the time and your parents know about it so at first i lied and said

30 people are coming i'd hand him a guest list and i'd pay for a bouncer to stand at the gate which never worked kids would break the gate and they would come and um so eventually they knew there wouldn't actually be 30 people so they would be upstairs i'd like give them dinner wine whatever make sure they were good it would always drive my mom crazy but my dad was like he'd rather us at the house where he could control it they never knew that we were serving alcohol right were we yes but they wouldn't have condoned that ever sure um like most parents wouldn't and we're just looking back on it we're very very lucky nothing ever happened like because that could have just went to you hear about all these stories yeah some kid drunk driving someone falls off the balcony but a lot of our friends were always just

looking after each other like my dad would walk the perimeter because we have this big drop off over the lake. So he was always making sure no one was there. He would kick anyone out that had a bottle. He got so upset because of school for the prom as a souvenir gave out these metal bottles to everyone. And he felt like that fueled underage drinking because everyone took the metal bottle and put liquor in it. Oh, hilarious. For the after prom party because I did that. And then our cars were just like our street was lined up with cars. And it was just like this crazy scene. And now by this point, like everyone knows who Ian Bick is at the high school. And do you think in hindsight, your parents were, like, they saw you kind of struggling to fit in early on. And they were

like, oh, this is a great conduit to him, like, being more accepted and more popular. Like, let's just have these parties. No one's drinking. Just all the kids are coming over to hang out with Ian at our house. Did any part of them, do you think they wanted to sort of enable and nurture that environment for that reason? I know my mom was very against the parties. It always like drove her anxiety very high. Good Catholic woman, bro. That's what happens. Did not like that. That's not how she grew up, that's not how she was raised. That was like a whole different thing. Yeah. I think they also wanted to support me and they were happy. I had friends and I was making a name for myself and that the kids had somewhere safe to go because you would go to some shady house parties in high school and

like there's no snacks, there's no food, like no one gives a shit. It's just like a dump. That was like my high school experience. Like because we're about the same age. I remember going to parties where like and so I had like a minivan so I just like whip kids around the minivan. You have like the hippie minivan? Yeah, yeah. Literally like gutted all the seats out of it. And so I remember. I and like put like a mini couch in the back with like a fridge like I was like my favorite shit and then all my friends like we would all just like bust out to like some field far away and uh but like there would be random parties we go to where like we showed up and like the lock on the front door is busted yeah and then we walk in and it's just like kids from every school all over and it was like we walk in the house and there's like no pictures up like it feels very weird and then all of a sudden my buddy's like dude I think this is like a for sale house like I don't think anyone lives here and we're like, oh. So we all immediately like grab everyone, jump back in the car and drive away.

And within like 10 minutes of driving away, cops show up, like lock all the door, sit everyone down. Everyone gets like trespassing citations and stuff. So like I know that level of high school party where it's like disorganized, borderline criminal, like not a good scene. And I can get from your parents' perspective

being like, oh yeah, let's just have everyone here. Everyone's going to be safe. And Ian's going to be super popular. It was always good when the parent was home because we'd go to house parties when the parent wasn't home. cops would come. It's like a stampede running through the woods. That house clears out so quick. Yeah, of course. Yeah. The kid always gets in trouble because there's alcohol and this and

yeah. And so your parents are like, let's keep it safe. And most importantly, like, I even knew kids like that were like their parents would, like we would go to a kid's house and like he wasn't the most popular kid but he had this awesome house and his parents were like not condoning it, but like they were kind of cool with everything, kind of turn a blind eye. And they even knew some bad things were happening but they were okay with it because that meant their kid was getting all this social interaction. Yeah. And they were like, oh yeah, this will be a conduit. He'll make a bunch of friends that we don't have to do as many parties and he'll just have a friend group. So like, let's just let this happen. Yeah, we'd have parents that would like breathalize. They would serve liquor, but they would

breathalize and make sure no one left and take their keys. Oh, other parents would do that. Yep. Parents would serve liquor, have it there. But the rule was you have to hand in your keys when you got there and you're getting breathalized before you left. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. There was some, I mean, that's a neighborhood we grew up in. Oh, that's wild. Yeah. So, okay, so now you're having like a party. you're having multiple parties. You do the spring break thing. Yep. No cops show up.

And now at that point, are you getting social validation? I would say so, yeah, I was very, everyone knew me. Everyone was talking about me. Every weekend it's like, are you going to the Ian Bick party? Are you on the guest list?

Because I started doing like these, back then Facebook event pages were huge where Facebook wasn't controlled by ads. It was if you set up an event page and 300 people clicked attending, then you knew every single one of those 300 people were coming. Yeah. And the people that didn't click attending weren't coming.

It was like so legit. back then and everything like Twitter was big Instagram was just beginning snap was just beginning it's a whole different world yeah there was no TikTok there's no videos like we don't have any footage from these house parties right um but yeah that's how it got started and then when my parents really said you have to take this somewhere else I'm thinking how I can turn this into a business and I'm sitting around my kitchen table after this party one day with a couple of the upperclassmen and we're thinking about planning like this end of the year school event not a affiliated with the school and we get the idea to call like this new company called this is where

it's at entertainment. So if our parties were going to be like where it was at for the night, it would be a play on words. And so I started calling myself, this is, it was this is where it's at productions. So you're forming an LLC just to throw parties. Later on I did. But my first party didn't have a business set up. But I would form an LLC. But this is where it's at productions. Like you had like a name because you wanted everything to be official. I started a logo. I paid for a flyer design. Hilarious. First time I ever ordered flyers, I found some website and paid like 500 bucks, which is crazy

to order for flyers. Yeah. But I'm passing them out in school. I'm flooding them around. We rent out this palace theater that my dad knew the owner, downtown Danbury. And I turned the theater into a nightclub for the night, the lobby. I'm renting bars. It's all.

Everything's non-alcoholic. I'm renting a dance floor. I get the DJ. I hire local police. I hire the EMS. I put together a security team. And this looks like a nightclub for the night. Yeah.

And my market was the marketability. ability on it was okay this is a house party but at a venue so you have to come drunk you can't like drink or smoke there and by this point kids are pre-gaming to the school dances so what's a difference yeah and the biggest upsell was you come to this there's no chaperones so you're not going to get like pushed away for booty grinding or whatever there's no edited music uh because at the day school dances the music's edited yeah so all like those acon songs and and you know all those different songs that's all unedited. Yeah.

And at the time, this is when EDM is first starting to burst. Yeah. Like with the mashups. Obviously, EDM and techno was big back in the day, but not in an area like Danbury. So we're the first, my DJs are the first to play like the mashups where you'd hear rap mixed with techno and that just fueled it because the school dances aren't playing that. You'd go to the school dance and they played the same 50 songs throughout the whole night.

Yeah, like the cha-cha slide and shit. Exactly. So at these events, the music was so on point, which was a hook too. sell like a thousand tickets for the first one. My expenses were really high, so I only made like $1,500. But that's great. I mean,

at 16, because now not only you're getting social validation, you're going to a sick party, and you made money. Yeah. Like this is like, and so far it seems like nothing here is like illegal. You know what I mean?

No, everything's perfectly legit. I mean, if anything like the underage drinking and stuff, but I never promoted that. I didn't physically serve liquor. Yeah. I knew in order to get the kids to come,

I had to allow it and figure out, like, past security do this like i knew i was smart enough to know okay the owners of the building can't know and i can't be the one that's providing the liquor but if i could find a way because the upperclassmen weren't coming to something like this the seniors who are already drinking every weekend and throwing their own smaller house parties unless you know they could get a bottle or whatever so they had like their own little area this and that and the cops were out front so they didn't come they did a walk through in the beginning everything was cool everything was great um that venue didn't

work out because the owner didn't want to keep we there's a couple ambulance runs that night kids that drank too much before make it inside the music everything then they always you know they would have like uh need to get their stomach pumps or whatnot yeah that's what kids did though back then we would have DJ skate night on Friday nights kids would leave in ambulances because they drink so much before gotcha um they drink in the parking lot whatnot so the owner says listening in we can't do this event here anymore so at that point this is the summer of 2011 I go searching for other venues around town because I can't go to my parents' house again. We're doing like a party once a month, but it's not as big.

And I need a way to make money and build this business. And so I meet this kid that's a year older than me who DJs at these local nightclubs. And he brings me the first nightclub. It's called Plasma. And it's downtown Danbury, which is kind of like a seedy area. And I go and meet the owner. And I say, listen, I'm 16 years old, just turned 16. wearing a suit and tie and no facial hair whatsoever.

You look young now. I couldn't imagine what you look like at 16. And so I go to him. I said, listen, I need a date and I'm going to do an event and I'm going to pack it out. And he doesn't even look up at me. He's like fiddling with his paper or whatever. And he pretends to flip through it's like a scene out of a movie,

pretends to flip through his calendar. And it's all empty. It's all white. And he says, I'm booked till December. And then I said, okay, can I have a date in December? He's like, come back in December. and we'll talk about it. So he wasn't giving me the time of day.

Yeah. So we go across the street to this club called Tuxedo Junction. Tuxedo Junction is a famous nightclub in Connecticut at the time. Had like Oasis, all these big names. And it eventually kind of went downhill, started doing rap shows when Rock kind of died out. And it was known for teen nights years ago where when I was like in high or middle school, they were big, the teen nights, but they had died out because the market got oversaturated. And a teen night is.

and under 18 and under party, no liquor. The same thing I kind of did at the palace. And it would have like the rap music and this and that. And that was like the club night. Yeah. So we go to this to this venue and I go up and see the owner in like this little office that's like the size of a closet. And he's this Italian guy.

Like looks like he's in the Italian mob and his name's Al. Yeah. And he looks at me and he shakes my hand. He's pleasant, gives me the time of day. And I tell him what I want to do. Now at this point he had heard of me because he read the news. He knew what I was doing. And we have a good conversation.

And he says, listen, I'm going to give you a shot, but you're not getting the big room because there was a big room that would hold like 1,500 kids. And then it was divided into three other rooms. So the front room called streets, he would give me for 750 bucks and I can hold 200 kids. And he wasn't going to give me a weekend night. He was going to give me this random. It was like a Wednesday or something. I say, okay, and I pay him with a check the whole amount right then and there.

And he was shocked. He didn't know what to expect because I'm, a kid. And you got this money from the other parties you had done. Like you're kind of up. The other parties and I'm working full time at that point at the corporate center. I'm a houseman. I'm putting together the meeting rooms. I'm helping them book proms. I was commissioned based to. I stole every prom from the surrounded areas. Brought them to this new venue because it was a great venue. So every prom I booked for them, I'd get like three grand. Okay. So your net worth at this point. What would you estimate? Probably like 50 or 60 grand. Oh, wow. Yeah, I bought my own car.

I had money, everything's cash. I got money flowing in. Like, I'm in a really good spot. So at 16, you've done nothing illegal. Except tax evasion, I guess, because I didn't pay any taxes. So you're up 60K, you're 16 years old, and you haven't done anything illegal. This is great. No, this is 100% legitimate business.

I'm onto something really good because no one in my area is doing this at this age. Obviously, there's older promoters because this concept has been around forever. Yeah. But now there's a new twist to it. And so he gives me the night and I don't really promote it. I just make a Facebook invite page. Send out some texts and say, hey guys doing this. I called it the end of the summer bash.

Come out, it's five bucks to get in, wasn't looking to make much of money. The expenses weren't that high. And I pack it out with like almost 400 kids. Easy. Al wasn't there that night. His partner was there and Al calls me that night. He's like, Ian, what did you do? I'm like, I told you I needed the bigger room.

He says, come the next night. So I do this event, make a few hundred. bucks. I go the next night and I book out three or four dates for a month each. It was like October, then it was December, then it was February, then it was April. And the big room was $1,500 to rent this room plus a dollar for every person that came in. I said, listen, this deal's great. And it included like the lighting, security, the sound and everything and I would just have to pay the DJs. But here's the thing. I don't want you to charge for soda or water. I want to give that out for free as a hook to get kids to come.

And that's like the concept older promoters were doing as free drinks or drink tickets. He said, okay, but he would sell Red Bulls. And I said, okay, that's fine, but I want to sell soda. So I would go to the dollar store and get the three liter bottles for a dollar,

the knockoff soda and give that out. So I come up with these events and I call them the Halloween rave, the Christmas rave, the intensity paint party, and the MTV rave. We would just say MTV was coming and then we'd have some guy in a badge

and said they were from MTV. Oh, really? Yeah, and that would work. So the first event I do, 750 kids. Now, at this point, it's not just Danbury High School. I'm building a networking team. This is back in the day, street marketing is everything. Yeah.

We're passing out flyers. I'm driving around my car on school nights, meeting kids with stacks of flyers. I finally find a flyer guy where I could get like 10,000 flyers for like $200. Like my network is huge. We're putting flyers in every locker. We're flooding them down. The oldest trick in the book go to the top of the staircase right before.

the bell's about to ring, you drop a stack of flyers down, it floods the hallway. And they can never tie it to me. They just do my name was on it. We would have like our Twitter handles. Oh, you would actually do that? Yeah, the whole school is flooded. And were you doing this at multiple schools or just one school? Everywhere. We had a whole network of kids. What I would do was I'd pick like five or six really popular kids from five or six local schools. And I would say, I'll put you on the flyer, your Twitter handle. And they love that. They would get a free event pass. They would get a guest list. There's a VIP room. They were treated. like Kings. Right. So they were ambassadors for your party. Exactly. It was like affiliate marketing

kind of, but back then what everyone's doing now, but it was a different spin on it. Right. And so that's what we would do. And we made these promo videos on Imovie when they started teaching you I movie. And I look at these videos now. They're so fucking cringe. And they're still on YouTube. I'm like, shit. How do I take these down? So we put a music and we'd call like the Halloween rave. We had no videos, so it was all photos. Put these out and it just, it took off. every event got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now this is before there's no online ticket sales. The only one's doing online ticket sales back then are like ticket master.

So how are you doing ticket sales? Everything is day of at the door cash. So you don't know how many kids are coming. So if God forbid, and this is where I start to realize my luck. And I'm a big believer at this point in luck and fate. Because all it would have taken is one rainstorm and one snowstorm to derail me. And you would have realized how fragile this business is. Exactly.

But I never, on days that a big snowstorm was planned, magically passed. Wow. Our biggest party to date was the intensity paint party. Huge snowstorm hits the day before and supposed to go into the night of the show. Just snows the day before wasn't as big. Roads are cleared up and we do almost 2,000 people.

So at this point, you're throwing parties, getting all this attention. The buildup is probably like fucking drugs for your brain. Every kid from every school is hitting you up. Like, hey, Ian, I'm so-and-so's friend. Can I get on the guest list? Can you guarantee me a ticket, please? Like, blah, blah.

And so like, you're getting all this attention from all these other schools. You're making money from these, which is fire. And then on top of that, you haven't failed. So you must think, like, oh, dude, I'm a genius. I have all these other people. Like, I don't know why they're not doing this. Like, I come into this market.

And you're satisfying something that, like, all these teenagers, you know, kids are looking for shit to do. So you offer, like, a space for it. Like, this happened when I was growing up. We had the similar thing where it was, like, these teen nights. And they would get, it was basically the same exact thing. They would get, like, teen ambassadors from different schools. And then it would be at, like, the House of Blues.

And it'd be like this big teen party and everyone would show up. And it'd be the same thing. You would like your parents would drop you off pregame in like the woods before and then like run in with like a buzz. And like it was just like sweaty kids. Like I never went to them because I remember being like, ugh. Like the idea of like just being like sweaty with a bunch of kids and it was kids from all different schools. It was just like a nightmare. Yeah.

But all my friends went. And it would, it was like this crazy thing. And they would pay like the ambassadors like, oh, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you can get so on so many people in or whatever. And so at this point. you're like, okay, I figured this out. I'm making money. I'm getting attention. I'm a genius. I mean, I'm making some like $10,000 in profit. After it, my expenses were three to four grand. I'm making $10 grand in cash. Me and Al would be in the office counting this money. And my dad wanted to meet Al to make sure he wasn't fucking me. Al out of everyone throughout everything,

always stuck by my side, never fucked me. He was just happy for me. That I was doing this because in his eyes, and this is something I would learn later on, when you own a nightclub, so many people come to you. And it's the same way in the social media age, everyone comes to you with an idea and say they're going to do it. But a fraction of that, maybe 1% of every, you know, 99% of people that come are the ones that say they can do what they said they're going to do. So when I come to him and say, listen, I'm going to pack this place out. I build credibility. And from there, like, we just have this bond and word ever since that point. Yeah. So I'm making all this money. And it just like it brings it to a new level so I'm thinking how do I make this business legit what's

your net worth at this point I mean I was spending it so it probably always hovered around hovered around the same thing like I went and bought an Audi I got played on it I was like an $8,000 dollar Audi the guy switched to check engine light on it the thing like blew up in the wendy's parking lot one day um wait really yeah how old were you about this out of 16 yeah I'm 16 when all this is going on there was one night um I always had like unfortunate events happened to so like the first week I got my license. I had a deer. The deer survived. My dad's car got totaled. While I'm driving that car, I'm in my mom's escape and I bring it to the club that night to do this event. On the way home, someone runs a blinking red and I have $10,000 in cash in the car

with my friend. I'm 16, not supposed to be driving anyone past 11 p.m. or even having a passenger in general because I just have my license. I think I'm getting robbed. So we're screaming while the car spinning. They're after us because we thought they were there for the money. Like we thought it was like a movie and they have it was a drunk driver whatnot my dad had to come to the scene and say he was driving so i didn't get in trouble we switch seats and everything once again your dad comes through bails you my dad bailed me out a lot wow so he came the scene we switched cars um they weren't after the money or anything but like all these things would happen like i always damaged my dad's cars had no appreciation for anything that wasn't physically mine now growing up older i know okay i don't

put a scratch on my car, I don't do anything. Right. So my outlook has changed so much from back then. But like that was the type of person I was. And also at the same time, I'm letting my friends invest into these shows so they can make money because I'm, they have no money. So I would say, okay, put up 500 bucks. I'd give you 10% of the show.

If they gave me 500, they would make like three or 400 bucks on top of it. They had no money compared to you. Having 500 bucks is pretty good as a 16 year old. That is true. So they would throw in, some would throw in 100, whatever. And they would promote it. say okay if you do this you got to make the big thing was change your Instagram profile and your Facebook profile to the flyer image so that was

another way to market it because it back then no one was making videos really like the selfie videos that wasn't the big thing it was flyers yeah back then social media promoted a flyer I could put up a flyer and it would get three or four hundred likes now you put up a flyer and it won't even push it at all yeah so it was just so much different back then right and now everything is going good life is great you're up money you're buying cool shit and at this point you're buying cars. What does your dad think? Is he like, oh, you're doing good? Well, he called me an idiot because I got into two bad deals, like the first car. And then I bought a Honda del Sol,

which is like this little sports car, which was the coolest thing ever, but I didn't know how to drive stick. So he ended up taking the car and giving me his SUV. I'd drive this Ford Explorer around, which is actually another thing we would do as like pranks is we would put like a strobe light at the top and pretend to pull our friends over when they were leaving parties. We would change it to red and blue and we're like, me and my friends would be in the car and we'd pull our friends over on parties we didn't get invited to. That's so funny. Yeah, and they would be like shitting bricks

and everything about it. And we'd get up and pretend we were cops and then they would just like have a heart attack because they're like drunk or a little bit under the influence when they're getting pulled over. And at no point are you worried about like, oh, impersonating an officer.

I'm gonna get caught, I'm gonna go to jail. Like I had no like insight or you know, into any of that. I just thought I was above everything. I thought I was intouchable. I thought like I was doing something big. I was on the right. path. At this point, my mind is, so I make business cards. I'd say I'm like the CEO and this is

where it's at productions. All my bios are CEO. Everything. Like every, I'm passing out business cards. I have flyers with me at all times. Everything's just this grind mode. I have two phones. Did I need two phones? No. But it's just like everything's an image. Everything's this grind. And I was the business whiz kid. And you get, you bought into like that whole social mindset of like hustle, grind, like make your money blah blah blah like were you bought into that i remember that being like an identity in high school like yeah they were like hustle kids well now it's like if you're a four x trader or whatever like that's the yeah exactly back then this was like i was the only hustle kid did did you see wolf of wall street love that movie i read both read both books in prison

fucking knew it no i read i read i read well i mean i watched wolf of wall street in 2013 when it came out. And this is right around the time at the peak of my businesses when I'm living that crazy life. And you saw this movie and you were like, this is what I would need to do. Well, no, when the movie came out, I'm already fucked. I'm already, yeah, so we'll get to that point. But I did read the books in prison and stuff. Oh, shit. Okay. So, but also another thing, have you ever seen the I'm smacked videos? So here's the thing with I'm smacked. I've worked with them. I know Arias. He's like a very controversial figure because he was investigated and stuff. because of ARIA is kind of how I blew up on TikTok,

because I stitched one of his videos. He was going on about how he got investigated by the FBI, but they didn't charge him. And I stitched his video saying, well, I actually got charged and it blew up. And that was like my first big video. But I'm friendly with him. He always paid good money for our venue.

He rented it twice our venue. A lot of crazy stores with that. That's later on in the story. But I do know I'm smacked. The thing with that is, so we're doing the same thing. but on two different levels. So I'm controlling the high school market.

And just in Connecticut, he's controlling the college market. He sprouts off in Rhode Island and he emerges. He blows up into the whole country. I remember these videos. Like, again, same age probably like 2012, 2013 in high school and seeing these like FSU college party videos. We didn't see any of that until I started working with them. Oh, interesting.

And his partners were my partners. That's how I got into the big concerts because I partnered. with URI guys because URI was the basis for all these big shows. That's where everything starts. Gotcha. Okay. So now everything's good. You're making a ton of money.

Everything's great. Yeah. Doing all these events, getting attention. What happens? Two things happen. There's two pivoting moments. One is at the time, Mac Miller and like Big Sean are big. And people are saying, you should start booking artists.

So I go on stage one night during the show and I commit to saying, and I was like, 1,500 kids in the room. And I'm like, guys, listen up. I'm bringing Mac Miller and big. Sean to Danbury. I didn't know how to bring them to Danbury. I thought it was a lot easier because there was like these random booking websites or whatever. So I make this announcement. Crowd goes wild. So I'm committed to that idea on my head. No idea how to do that, but I figured I'd figure it out. That's one thing that happens. Number two is the market's getting oversaturated

because everyone wants to be the next D&Bick. The club is starting to rent out to any promoter. You could be the nerdyest kid in high school with no followers and you go and give the club $1,500, you're getting the night. Yeah, they don't give a shit. So everyone starts biting off my name. You know, they're changing it. They're doing deviations. Now there's a rave every weekend.

Oh, really? These raves. And so. All serving this teenage market. Exactly, but they're all flopping. So no one knows how to differentiate between what are the good ones, what are the bad ones? Had the market not got oversaturated, I'd probably still keep doing it throughout high school. Now, this is junior year at this point.

I'm turning 17. And the mark, I couldn't do anymore because my event started. decrease in popularity because all these kids from different schools would only, they'd start going to every flyer they saw and they weren't good. Got it. And so some of yours started flopping and like not making money. I think the last team that I did did like 500 people still made money. But at that point, like I couldn't do an unsuccessful event. That was a big part of my brand. I was getting no everything, every house parties over the top. I think that would have been. If I ever had an event that did zero people, I think that's probably what I would have quit. Yeah. But I did. But I did.

didn't. Like I had, whether it was luck or my hard work or fate or whatever you want to call it, every single time it just gets bigger, bigger, bigger and escalating. It never goes backwards, ever. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you a story. All right. I'm in the room right now with Shifty. And both of us have survived traumatic car accidents on bikes. I was struck by a bike and then that same car three years later hit Shifty going backwards, which is a way dumber way to get hit by a car. And both of us just walked away. We both got hit by the cars. Our bikes got destroyed. At the time, I was like, look, I don't want to get an attorney because I don't know how to do it. I have to look it up.

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then fuck all this exactly now i'm these kids reach out to me from the town over one's a year older one's my age and they're from Richfield, which is like the preppy area of, they're like the kids that are all doing cocaine when Danbury high school kids are doing weed. They're like the rich all driving Audi's, BMWs, whatever, despised by Danbury kids. Hillars. They hit me up and we meet at a Starbucks. And these kids are everything I wanted to be. They had the money. They had the cars. They had the hot girls. And they had the business mindset. Now these you have to realize are the first kids ever that ever talked to me really on a business level and had similar ideas because I thought I was one of a kind, like I was the only one and I felt excluded because none of my friends in high school were thinking the

same thing. No one was doing making businesses, maybe like a homework business or something, but nothing like I had. So these kids come to me and they have all these ideas and they bring the richfield market to my teen nights. This is on like the last couple ones we do. And we eventually decide to incorporate the business. Their parents are very entrepreneurial, like LLCs, real estate, all that. So they introduced me to that world of what an LLC is. How do you get one started? We paid like 400 bucks to rocket lawyer or whatever to get incorporated. And so we have this company now. And it's me, these two guys and this other guy that I went to theater with who had just graduated. And we formed this LLC. And it's our mission now to book Big Sean or Mac Miller.

That's our plan. We want to start getting into concerts. We're done with teen nights. So we motivated each other. They said, Ian, do you really want to be, you know, 30 years old doing teen nights like what's the next move so they got me thinking bigger than what i was thinking before and so we start planning we don't know how to do it we're trying to figure it out one day a flyer gets posted for big sean coming to damberry and my partners go behind my back they find this guy from uri who i had met with before and kind of blew off he was a danbury high school graduate and they go and they produce a show with him and i bring it to them and i said what the fuck guys what have happen. They said, well, you know, there wasn't any room to invest. Um, so we didn't want you a part of it.

So they had each put in money. These kids are very wealthy. These are the Richfield kids. Yep. They put in $5,000 each towards a show and there's a bunch of other investors. I had nothing to do with the funding of it. And they say, listen, we did try to cut you out and screw you. But now they realized they needed me because they didn't have any way into the high school market. Because a college kid from URI doesn't have control of the high school kids. And the kids from Richfield, Richfield's very small. in comparison. That's all they had. So they needed me to promote it and get it out there.

Eventually, we worked at a deal that my name would be on the flyer as like the host. So I basically got to say Ian Bick brought Big Sean to Dambury and I didn't have to pay a dollar to it, which actually worked out for the better because had I been able to invest, I probably would have put 20 grand into it, which is probably what I had at the time, but the show tanked absolutely lost so much money. So I would have lost pretty much everything. He came to Big Sean. Big Sean came a couple issues.

We only had three weeks to promote. Okay. Three weeks to promote it. They didn't read the rider for him, which said they needed a video wall. So when they were reading it the day before, we told the production company, the production company charges double. Now back then video walls were not, they were on the up and coming. This is 2012. Wasn't as big as they are now.

So instead of paying 10 grand for the video wall, we paid 20 for this giant video wall because he needed the full two video walls, this and that. So we paid 20 grand. So we went from having a budget of X amount to having a $20,000 increase. The break-even point was 2,000 kids that we needed just to break-even. We got, I think, $1,100, which is pretty much all high schoolers. They didn't promote it in the college that well. It was at an off time of the year where they already had, they actually had Mac Miller as they're opening to the school year a couple months prior.

So it was just, it wasn't good planning. We got taken advantage of. But the experience was one of a kind. I got to spend the day with Big Sean's tour manager. He was the nicest dude ever. He's actually very short. I wasn't expecting him to be that short for someone called Big Sean. But so nice, he was feeling sick that day and just like really pleasant, still performed, did the meet and greets.

And what I would learn is like he's one of the very few hip hop artists that actually are very polite. And just like in my experience, he was one of the best ones we booked. Oh, and super professional. Very professional management. was professional. So this is another success that worked against you. Yeah. Because you get Big Sean, he's super professional on time, feeling sick, still performs. And you're like, oh great, you hire people and they come through. Yeah. And so it's in your head. It's like, boom, done. That and I got the experience. I knew that in my heart, like, because I was a big believer and you have to fail to succeed.

So I said, okay, this is our failure. Now we're going to be super successful because we failed on the show. We took the learning lessons. And now we're going to cut out the denominator that didn't work for us, which was this additional company from Rhode Island. He had another entertainment group. And so I said to my partners, guys, we learned from this. Let's not deal with him. Let's go and do our own thing. Great. So we come up with the idea to book Wiz Khalifa in Danbury at the college. We get a connection to the college because of Big Sean, which was another plus from it. We had a great conversation with them. They wanted to start bringing Big Axe. We had just booked Asher Roth, who was signed to Scooter Braun at the time. Oh, yeah. And John, and John,

Justin Bieber's manager. Yeah. And so we had a connection in. That was the I Love College days. Yep. He was big. We booked him for a charity event. The show tank because it was a snowstorm, but he still came.

And we had a couple hundred kids. It was all for charity. Yeah. Really, really cool dude. Like we sat with him the whole time. He was telling us war stories. This is like right before he died out. And, um.

Asherald was fire. That's cool. Yeah. Really cool, dude. And he just came out to sit at this club. We booked about tuxedo. He was on like the I love. kids tour or something like that. I love college. I love kids. I think performing was kids. I don't know.

There was something with the name kid in it. I love kids. Yeah, I don't know what it was. Don't do that tour, though. I don't know what it was. It's something I had the name of kids in it. Oh, that's so funny. And so my partner had booked us Asher Roth and we figured that he would be able to pull through with booking us, WIS Khalifa. Great. And he says Wiz Khalifa is going to cost us like 80 grand. With production venue cost, the show is going to be about 125,000, 100,000. 30,000. We're 17 years old. How the fuck are we getting that much money?

Because we don't have that much money. Like we pulled together what our money was and it would be like 30 grand. And so he says, listen, in order for us to book the show, and this is our friend, our other partner who had just graduated high school, you need to show proof of funds, like all the money in a bank account showing that we can do this, pay for all the costs and do it. So I said, okay, no problem. I'll figure it out.

I go to legal Zoom and I print out these investment agreements. agreements that I had been using for these teen nights because I was just under the impression if you're doing an investment deal, you have to have a contract. Never went to a lawyer, never asked my dad. It was in my mind from TV, for movies, okay, business, investments, contracts, they all go. Printed out, change the wording. So-and-so is going to invest X amount of dollars for a percentage of the show. So to make it simple, if the show was 100,000, if they invested 10,000, they would get 10% of the show. Plus their initial investment back, like whatever the profit split was. I start bringing that around to the kids that invested in me before and I said,

bring it to your parents, whatnot. This is like the first week. Everyone says no. They weren't going for it. They said, listen, you had a lot of success with the teen nights, but, you know, this is a bigger thing. You're asking for more money because at the time I'm looking for a minimum of 10,000 because at that point you would need like 13 people at 10,000. You're asking your friends for 10,000. Yeah, and they were taking it to their parents. Got it. So then after like a week of failure of not getting the money, I'm thinking one night, what would happen if I changed the wording of the contract?

I changed. I had one sentence and this defines the rest of my future. I would guarantee their money back, their initial investment. So I wouldn't guarantee them a profit. But if they put up $10,000, if the show did zero people, they would still get their 10 grand back. At the time, I had no assets to back that up. I had nothing to back that up. all I had was I knew I was determined to win and to make money.

I knew that I had already failed with the last show and I was going to learn from my mistakes. And I knew that it was almost impossible for the biggest rap star in the world at the time to come to Danbury and not sell at least 2,500 tickets, which was our break even. So you're like, I'm going to at least break even. Exactly. Get everyone their money back. I'm going to get the attention in cloud and chival was Khalifa. So I'm good. At that point, I didn't care.

I really wasn't a big celebrity guy. at that point. No, I, Big Sean, I liked one song. So I'm the type of kid, like I'll listen the same song on repeat. Like, if I find a song I like, I'm listening to it all day. Gotcha. Wasn't in a designer clothes. Like, the suit was cheap and the ties were like hand-me-downs for my dad.

But I wore a classic black t-shirt and khakis, which like would come up later in court, which is funny. But that was like my look. I didn't really care for clothing that much. I didn't go the gym. I just, I wore whatever. I threw on whatever. And so what happens is. the money floods in. In like two weeks, we raise $130,000. We have like 30 investors because I

realized I had to take smaller amounts to make the money up so kids were putting in 2000, $1,000, $3,000. My aunt-uncle put in $10,000. My dad put in $10,000. My business partner put in $15. His parents put in money. And we're just getting all these kids from Danbury High School and Richfield to invest. Raise all the money. Bring the receipt, the bank account receipt. Now we're kids walking into this local bank depositing thousands of money. of dollars and they're looking at me like what the fuck is this kid doing but they never batted an eye never raised an alarm never asked questions nothing it's all legit it's all legit everything's legal there was nothing illegal about this whatsoever and um at this point i'm very well documented

i'm keeping an expense sheet i had a business debit card i had my own personal money anything i was starting to learn about write-offs and stuff so i figured okay office supplies are separate business card if i'm going out to dinner personal whatnot everything's separate i'm keeping detailed accounting. Cool. We give the copy of the bank record to our business partner. We hand it to him. And it's me and my other two business partners and he looks at us like he's seen a ghost, mouth drops. He's like, uh, uh, uh, and my other business partner, his name is Zach. He's like very aggressive and he's like the louder one of the group. So he's like, okay, make the phone call, get us, get us, get us Wiz Khalifa. And he's like beating around the bush and he gets up and he

throws the papers at him. And he's like, get fucking Wiz Khalifa. on the phone. We have the money. Let's do this because at this point, it's November. We're promising our investors a January show, money returned by February. Let's make this happen. And how does this guy know was Khalifa? Because he had booked us Asher Roth. So we were under the assumption that because he knew Scooter Braun, however, we were going to get Wiz. Totally wasn't true. Didn't have the connection to book Wiz Khalifa. He didn't even deal with Scooter Braun off the bat. He dealt with like some other company that had a connection to Asher Roth. So that was the whole thing. Had he been dealing with Scooter probably would have been different, but Scooter probably wouldn't have been dealing with some 16-year-old.

And all your partners are all the same age. One's older. Matt's older. Gotcha. And our other one who was at college, but not really involved, was a couple years older than us, too. Gotcha. I was also fascinated with, like, Scooter's story because he grew up the same way I did with the parties and making it. And he had a lot of failures before he found Bieber.

So, like, I was studying that whole thing, too, and that's what was keeping me. Isn't he also from a similar town? Yeah, I think he's from Connecticut. I think it like the Greenwich area or something like that. Gotcha. So you're looking at like this other Connecticut kid. I idolized him. He was your guy.

Yeah. Yeah. And so similar story like failing, like doing the club nights. I'm like, okay, I'm the next scooter brawn. Like this is me. Never cared about artists or music or anything. I like the promoting. I love that aspect of it.

Yeah. And for me it was never about the party itself. I like the hype up into the party. I like planning because I was always bored at the party. I never did drugs, didn't drink. Oh really? You were sober every party. Yeah, I would smoke a little weed to seem cool, but I never drink. We did like Dubra and like sophomore year, like the cheap vodka and that I got sick a couple times and like this isn't for me.

Were you getting attention from girls? So with girls, I either always had a girlfriend. I had a girlfriend for the first couple years of high school. And then I did get attention, but it wasn't like sex or anything. We would just like make out like in the lake or like in the backyard. Right. And that's, it always had to be them initiating. Like it was so awkward. Like we would be sitting there and you could tell. she's into me, but I would never make the first move. Right. I had no confidence with women until the day I got out of prison and got on Tinder for the first time.

That's when the game changed. All this prison time, you're like, man, women are kind of cool. I should talk to girls. Yeah, like during the club, it was so easy because girls would just DM me or they would snap me like nudes. Everything was nudes for concert tickets or whatever. And they would stab me and they would be like, yeah, where are you? I want to meet the artist.

And they would come and they would just start making out with me. And then they would pull down your pants or they would go to the office. And it was just like this whole thing. You're getting assaulted, bro. I mean, I loved it, but I look at photos. You've got to look at photos, videos. It's like, I wouldn't have gotten girls if I didn't own the club. Like, these are just cloud chases.

You had no game. They were using you to, like, meet people. Yeah. And you were cool with being used because you weren't getting attention otherwise. So you're like, all right. Exactly. So going back to this, the show doesn't happen. We call all our investors.

It's December now to a meeting in my living room. The parents didn't come. they just sent their kids to like talk on behalf of them. So we sit them all in my living room. This is like a funny scene. Instead of like a board room, it's like this living room. And we're all sitting around. And we come clean.

We're like, listen, this is what happened. We have all your money. We'll write you a check right now if you want it back. Or we have a new idea to do a string of shows. That guy that we had done the big Sean show with reached out and said, listen, why don't you divide the money? Because our business partner reached out to him feeling bad. And so he reached out to us.

And he said, listen, why don't you divide the money? into a string of shows in Rhode Island, Connecticut. We learn from the big Sean show also. We have the connections. Let's make this happen. So we bring that to our investors and perfectly clean. Every day I think about, I wish they all took their money out, but they didn't. 50% took their money out.

The other 50% left it in. We restructured the deal so it would be a percentage based off of every show. So it was also less risk. They would still get their money back guaranteed, not a guaranteed profit, just guaranteed money back. But now the logic was if one show'd bombed, God forbid, you would have another show to make up for it. So it was a lot less risk. Now the guarantee for a show to sell out wasn't the same because these weren't big names. Mike Studd, Huey Mack. Like these were the college frat boys while Amshmack was getting big. Yeah. These were those Ash, they were the next Asher Ross,

Sammy Adams, all those guys. Yes. So those were the artists we were booking. We booked Rusco, which was like the first big DJ. Yeah. We did a really big DJ event at URI. and URI is like the breeding ground for EDM at the time. That and UMass are like their budding hotspots for like the Aviches, the Steve Ioki's, all those big names. I remember this whole time.

It's so funny. I grew up in Florida and I remember like all these names. Florida was another big one. Miami, New York City, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are like this budding ground before there were ever DJ Residencies. And I'm exposed to all this and I'm learning the game and I'm learning. and I'm learning how to do these big productions, and I'm 17. This is the beginning of senior year.

And so right after the beginning of senior year, we did Big Sean, then Wiz Khalifa by the middle second semester. At this point, I'd leave high school a semester early. I actually had to sue them to get my diploma. They failed me by 0.5 credits over a class I didn't sign up for. And my guidance counselor kept telling me I was good. I had enough credits. Turns out I wasn't. Now, at this point, the school is starting to cut ties with me.

I had raised them a lot of money with doing homecoming dances, proms, doing all this stuff. But then when I started going into the teen nights and getting that reputation for like a for-profit business and everything and the music and the drugs and the dancing and the house parties and a new principal, new administration came in, I'm cut. Yeah. So they're after me now. They're out to get me. I'm standing up to authority. Like they were, it was always a big thing. This is when I'm budding into them with the detentions and suspensions.

and I'm go from like the super whiz kid to now I'm the black sheep of the high school and the more pressure they put on you you're getting more pissed off yeah probably acting like a douche a little bit to like piss them off more I was a big douche to authority yeah and you ask kids I went to high school with now they they would call me like a bully and like I didn't think so at the time but like I feel bad now they just felt like I was this cocky arrogant like high school like popular kid like I was a popular kid in the movies that everyone either doesn't like or is like a jock but I didn't play sports or anything. Yeah. And I look back at now and I'm like, I didn't mean to come off that way. I was just trying to throw parties. Like you guys could have came. I didn't, I never excluded anyone.

It was never like, you can't come. I wasn't that type of person. You didn't know you were excluding them necessarily. Exactly. But they felt excluded. And that's something I have a lot more self-awareness to now. Yeah. Because when I saw, I didn't realize this until I saw all the press when the, when the days like me getting arrested because it would just flood on Facebook. Everyone was sharing it. When these like vice articles and stuff go viral. Yeah. Everyone from high school. talking about this kid was the biggest tool bag in high school. He was so mean to me, this and that. And like, I read every single comment. And I'm just like, wow, like it really made me self-aware with all that. Right. And do you think you were being a douche? At the time, no.

You don't think you were? At that physical moment, no. But in hindsight. In hindsight, yeah, I would say like I was in, I could get their perspective. I understand back then I never looked at anyone else's perspective by mine. It was my way or the highway. Now, after all this time and maturity and growth, I'm able to look at both sides. I back then I was always when I had something in my mind, it was do it. I never thought consequences. Now I'm analyzing something like something so simple as hey, do you want to do an interview? I'm analyzing, okay, is this good, is this bad? How can it go? Whereas back then it's like, okay, I'm either doing it or not doing it. Right. Very cut or dry. That makes sense. Okay. So now you're doing all the parties. Now you have these smaller events you have to

throw. You're just going to get some smaller acts. They're going to come in, pack it out, pay everyone back their money, you're going to make money, everything's good. That's what was supposed to happen. That's what's supposed to happen. But nothing goes according to the plan and the life of Ian Bick. What happens? So the first night was that Rusco show at URI. That wasn't even on the books to do.

We had a reserve of like $25,000 out of like the $70,000 we had left in the bank account and we were just saving that as a safety net. But three weeks before this guy from Rhode Island calls it said, listen, we have a great opportunity to do Rusco. Now, a normal person would be thinking, Big Sean failed in three weeks. is a lot smaller, why the hell are you doing it? But we got sold on the fact that EDM is this budding concert. Every, they just did David Guetta.

They just did Avici. Every URI EDM events going crazy. This guy's going to be the next Avichy. Let's just do it. Exactly. But I didn't realize Rusco was like the bottom tier for this niche of like the, it wasn't on the same level. Like he never blew up to that level.

He could have been, but he didn't. So they booked the show and it's an expensive show. This is like $100,000. show. We're only a $15,000 investment in. There's multiple partners. So we had a percentage of that show and then we're subdividing that investment to our investors. Great. We're getting ticket updates weekly of how the show's selling 400, 800, 200, 200, shows looking great. They're saying tickets are selling good. We're getting these ticketing reports. Everything's great. So I'm telling my investors, everything's great. We're making money on the first show. I book us a limo and hotel rooms under the

business to go to the show where these high school, obviously the parents didn't come, but we're high school kids in a limo going to a college campus. We're 17 years old. All these hot college girls are around us to get in us bottles, VIPs, backstage passes. We're chilling with Rusco. There's drugs everywhere. Like, this is great. I'm standing in the back of the arena. This is the college stadium. And I'm like, wow, we really pulled this off. Now, at the time, this is when I first learned that looks and image are very deceiving. A room that has 500 people can make it look like it has a thousand or vice versa. However, you needed the room to look for optics like social media influencers or whatever.

So I'm standing in the back and one of the partners on the show comes up to me and he's like, man, we took a fucking beating tonight. I'm like, what do you mean? I thought like, it's great. I got the ticket reports. I pull out the email, this and that. He's like, dude, those weren't accurate. We were getting the wrong numbers the whole time.

They were getting like ticket reporting for another show that another partner was doing. It wasn't accurate information. It was in that moment. This is a defining moment. So when we go back to it, there's two defining moments. One night is the night I phoned the cars where in reality was a blessing because it gave me a great high school business and successful and everything like that. This is where things turn fraudulent is the second defining moment right here when I had the option to either come clean to my investors and say what really happened that we lost money, probably could have settled it civilly or option two was to cover it up because one, I had told them already that it made money. So they might think, they were thinking what I'm thinking, that the show looked packed.

So they're probably thinking, oh, it did well. Ian's trying to cut us out, which at the time, if I got a lawyer, he could have just, this could all be proven. I wasn't trying to trick them or anything. Yeah. Wasn't thinking that. And number two, I didn't want to come off as a failure. And I didn't want to not be popular and lose friendships over this. So what did I do?

When we got back, I sent out fake spreadsheets that the show made money, came up with an imaginary figure. I'm thinking, okay, you know, this show lost, the other shows are going to make money, still plenty of room. Right, it's going to wash out. Yeah, so like with all these shows, it cost about 80 grand, our investment money, 70 to 80. And if they all did well, it would have brought in like 200,000, if they all sold out. Right, and that would make up for whatever you lost on this show. And still give us a cut and everything like that.

Yeah, so everything's fine. Yeah. And I don't tell my other partners involved. Oh. I tell them that, well, so one partner knows it lost money and he lost his investment. He did not know because I was always the guy talking, the liaison with investment. He didn't know I was going to investors and then lying to say it made money. So one guy knows it didn't make money.

The other side thinks that it did. And this is where you officially make, like break the law for the first time. Yeah, it's when I start. When you're lying and you're dealing with money, that's when the fraud aspect happens. Yeah. But I'm not taking on more investors. I'm just like lying to cover up losses. Right.

So now I'm already in the hole. So there's the first hole because I have to pay not only that first initial $15,000, dollars, but I have to pay the imaginary profits, which was like, what, another five or six grand. So I'm 21 grand in the hole off that. I think we got back like three grand from that investment. So say 18,000 I'm in the hole. Right. And you never think, oh, I'm going to go to my dad.

He can help me fix this. Didn't, never went to him. You never think, oh, if I get into a lawyer, then the lawyer can help me smooth everything out, settle outside of court, or I'll just like forfeit on the company or something like that. Didn't think anything. Didn't think bankruptcy. I just figured I was so confident the other shows were going to work. Yeah.

Was there any part of you that thought, oh, the other shows are going to work? I'm not even worried about it. Every other show worked in the past. There was never a snowstorm. There was never anything. Everything worked. And on top of that, I can outsmart these people. I don't know if it was really outsmarting.

It was just so confident that these shows were going to work. But you also have to realize, too, is that I got lazy. So I have an office. The Matrix Center gives me an office for cheap. I have this like $2,000 a month office I'm getting for $500. Yeah. Bringing investors there. I'm going in the office.

every day. I'm working during the day for them and then I'll go to the office at night. Got a nice chair, nice office set up. I'm on my computer. Are you still doing the corporate job? Yep. I was running actually a church's high school's cafeteria for them. So I would cook food for them and do all the stuff. I was very involved with like food prep and everything and I'm booking the proms for them. Gotcha. And I was also getting booked as the DJ for these proms. So what I would do is I would subcontract a DJ and I would get the lighting system. Like I basically figured out a way to put all these components together, event plan it, and still make a profit. And not really have to do anything.

Not have to do anything. So I'm getting lazy because back during the teen nights, I was hitting the streets, promoting this and that. Flyers everywhere. Whereas these shows, I'm not promoting social, I don't have a big social media platform. We have event pages I'm setting up, which didn't mean jack shit for a college kid. And I'm trusting these other promo teams to do the fly because that was our deal. They wouldn't be putting up any money.

They would be doing the marketing for these shows to get 50% of the profits. So there's too many people involved to begin with. We're splitting profits into like three different ways, 50% to the partners promoting, 50% to us and then our shares then getting split again for investors. It's a whole fucking mess. And I'm thinking I'm a hedge fund at this point, taking money and just moving it to other people. That's my mindset. What I didn't realize is in business, if someone doesn't have skin in the game,

they're not going to work nearly as hard because they have nothing to lose. These guys had nothing to lose everything to gain by building up a reputation with artists. in the artist booking world, the more artists you book, the more credibility you're going to get. They don't care if the show tanked as long as you're treating the artist. Yeah, they got paid

and you're treating the artist, right? Yeah. So you kind of structured the deal poorly also to where they weren't as incentivized as you. I would say it's the worst business deal in history of mankind. It was absolutely terrible. Yeah, but you kind of thought,

oh, it'll all work out. So you have five more shows to make good. What happens next? Every show bombs. Yeah. First, second one was Chrisley and EDM artist. No one knew him. Yeah.

The nightclub was like giving away tickets to get people in the door. Show cost us 10 grand. I got back less than $1,000 on the show. Huey Mac, Giant Snowstorm. There was some other random show we did. Giant Snowstorm, too. It was like at February at URI. Didn't do good.

Then the closest show we came to breaking even was actually the show I half promoted. It was Huey Mac, Mike Studd, and Motion Twist, all at Toad's Place in New Haven. and Toads did pretty much most of the promoting. They had a college base. We got like 800 kids. The budget was like 12 grand. We recouped like eight or nine of it.

But it was just, it was a wash. And so now every single chance you have to redeem yourself keeps going away. And I keep lying saying they all lost money. And I mean, they all made money. And so you keep on sending spreadsheets and you keep on committing, you know, fraud basically being like, hey, this spreadsheet's good, spreadsheets good. I'm telling, once you tell one lie, it just trickles to a bunch of, lies and until you come clean, the lies are going to keep going.

So now you're entering into like the last show. And as you're about to get in the last show, you know you can't come, you can't make good on these. So the last show, we invested in this foam party called Electric Flurry. This, you remember Dayglow? Yeah, yeah. So this was a company like Dayglow and Life in Color. So we thought this was the next big thing. It was foam. They had a great business. We gave them $15,000 for URI or, yeah, University of Rhode Island or a Massachusetts show. on that 15 grand if the show sold out we would get back like 45 grand which was going to be great

it was going to fix all the problems is that what you're all in all I was down about 50 but I could have put in some personal money figured out the rest delayed that fixes the deficit that fixes it so I had a stall because our last show was in March and the the Flurry party was in May

so I had to tell a lot of lies in between then I started borrowing from some local drug dealers to pay like interest payments or whatever on people that's when I first start getting involved with people like that. Oh, wow. And so just local drug dealers like selling out of their parents' house, nothing big, no endangers, some white kids that were just doing it.

And they would give me money and I would give them a few hundred bucks back on it. Right. So I'm in debt to, I still owe the same amount of money plus a little interest. I'm just shifting the debt from one person to another just to keep things going. And so this phone party happens and it's packed. Like they sell a lot of tickets. Everything's great. To this day, I've never seen a dollar that much.

They never paid. We paid $5,000 in legal fees with a lawyer and eventually said it's not worth it to keep going after it. The kids just like committed fraud against us, stole the money. And that was it. The company eventually disbanded a couple years later. I still have the kid on Facebook. He's like in real estate now. I'm tempted to hit him up. Be like, yo, remember that buddy? But it's like, it's so minuscule in the amount. It's like, dude, if you really had to like steal 15 grand from us then. But like that was just like everything was a series of unfortunate events. It also doesn't change the fact that you had sent these spreadsheets also. Like that money would have helped, but did like that event still? I mean, yeah, it sucks to get screwed out a bunch of money. But like you had at that point had already fucked up. Yeah, but it would have been fixable if I just paid everyone.

It was still fixable. Even with the lies, I could have just got a lawyer because I wasn't lying to get any money. I was just lying to cover losses. Right. It's a lot different when you're lying to get someone's money. Like if I sat here and told. you will lie to get you to give me money, which is what's later going to become in a few months after this.

But I'm just lying to stall. I'm lying to stall at this point. Right. So totally fixable. And you still think, oh, I'm going to make good on this and everything's going to be fine. I'm going to keep my relationships and I'll be okay.

Well, at that point, I'm fucked at this, at the end of this. Right. So you get to the end, this show, you never see a dime from it.

And now you've had six Ls in a row. I'm about 50 in the hole. Yeah. Anywhere from 40 to 50 in the hole, we recouped like 20 grand maybe from all the shows that goes out to people. So we have like 50 back. And most of that money went back to my business partner because he didn't know I was lying to investors.

So I just, he got his money, whatever. He didn't realize what's going on. He's thinking investors are just taking the loss. But he didn't know I guaranteed them all their money back. He never knew that aspect because on his contract, he was subject to a loss. I only, because he understood business in the game. But these other people,

he didn't realize I had to make that guarantee in order to raise the money. They didn't know that. I kept that from them. All right. So now at this point, you should have came clean. You should have got a lawyer. You should have been like, hey, guys, I lost your money. I'm sorry.

Yep. And settled outside of court or gone bankrupt or whatever. Yep. You didn't do that. No. What happened? So it's May 2013, just about to turn 18. And my best friend at the time, who was just an investor with his sister in the business

in the concerts who had been to the show with me and like, this kid's my best, best friend. Inseparable, we had met. He wanted to, like a few months. prior. He wanted to get invited to this homecoming party I was throwing. So he volunteered to drive his car to get us these tailgate shirts. Like we called ourselves the Hatters Hooters in high school. Yeah. We wore these orange shirts. We drove like a half hour to pick up the t-shirts, yada, yada. While we're sitting in the car, we find out we're both hooking up with the same girl. Like one night she would hook up with him and then the next day invite me over and this and

that. So we find out we're both hooking up with her and we relate and we form this bond over it. We become friends over it. That's hilarious. And like we're inseparable. We're hanging out every day. I have this intern who's a year younger than me who would later become my girlfriend. The three of us every day hanging out. So he's obviously owed money in this and he's under the impression that there's profits or whatever. But he sees I'm under a lot of stress. He's like, Ian, what's going on? Tell me. So this is the first person I come clean to about everything. And he's a very business savvy kid. He was always the ones. He was always into something. He would sell broken. If you had a broken iPhone. He would buy it from you, get it fixed and sell it for more. He would sell a little bit of weed. He would do all these different hustles. He was also like the Scheister type kid. They would steal golf clubs and sell them.

They would do all these different types of things. He was a hustler, though. He was your high school entrepreneurial kid. Very preppy. Always wore like the latest prep clothes and everything like that. He says, listen, I have an idea. This is something I've been doing. And one day he comes over with beats by dry, headphones.

and I open it. I'm not into headphones. I'm not into electronics. All I have is a MacBook, but they're cool. And I'm like, how much do you get for these? Well, he says,

you could sell these for three or four hundred bucks a piece. I was like, okay, what's the cost? He's saying he's getting them for 50 bucks. So right away, my head's spinning, okay, 50 bucks, that's like a three or 400 percent return. This is great. And he's also getting otter boxes.

He's getting video games like for Nintendo. He's getting these pill speakers, beats by Dre Pills speakers, all these different gadgets, phone cases, all this. And the markups are insane. Like I've never seen anything like it. So you, but what do you think that these products are? I'm told they're wholesale items from like off the truck wholesale items that like had a dented box or whatever and that it's great. So this is where I get the idea to form a new business.

We call ourselves W&B wholesale, which is Robill and Bick, our last names. Got it. And you're already in the hole for 50K. you're kind of willing to look past some of the, you know, questions about the electronics. Like, I didn't ask any questions. Are these legit? Is this whatever? Because you got to make your money back. I'm desperate. If someone said, Ian, let's start selling drugs. I would have sold drugs. I just wanted to pay everyone back. Got it. I was so desperate to do whatever. Yeah. And do it quickly because the amount of pressure I was under as a 17-year-old kid, getting all these phone calls daily, telling all these lies. So I start raising more money.

I'm curious by that. Did you feel bad about lying? Oh, I felt terrible every day. Really? It was, it was, these were my friends. Like, this was just like, this was mentally draining. Like, I felt so defeated that I failed, um, that people would find out I wasn't a success story. I just felt like I got to the point where like I couldn't even come clean because I was in so many lies. So like I'd try and remember what lies I'm telling and I'm trying to do this. I'm trying to do that and I'm stalling. I would do fake screenshots, which was like a tactic. I like I would text myself, change the name on it. And I would do like fake fake bank records to show money was pending or are. deposit back then checks don't clear overnight so there was always like a five-day hold or whatever yeah um PayPal was another thing where you know you could send the e-checks or whatever that would take like a week I would find delays not because I wanted to steal from them but because I just needed to delay everything was delay delay delay and are you feeling anxious like like is your heart like I don't know I did anytime I've been I've been in a similar situation where like you tell a

lie then you got to tell two lies to cover it up and blah like when I'm a kid like you know I think a lot of teenagers do this for like they start to realize the boundaries of what they can do when they manipulate the truth. And then always when you tell a lie, you have to tell more lies. And then you have to keep track of your lies. And anytime I did it, like, I would feel so anxious. And I would just start, like, sweating.

And I would just come clean immediately. I would just break and be like, dude, I got to be honest. I'm so sorry I fucked up. Like, I didn't have the aptitude or the temperament to deal with that much anxiety. Now, I, I am thrive under pressure. Like, I can, I can... Unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, I can handle stress. Like, I've been through so much at, like, such a young age. Like, I've been... In order to talk about it, like the situations I've been in like it just these are crazy situations like majority of people would not have come out of this whole thing alive like the worse and worse it gets and so I'm developing thick skin and like it just it's at definitely a heavy weight I'm always under pressure I'm barely sleeping and it just it was it was

really like it was mentally draining to deal with your health I'm sure definitely bad for the health it was just it was a really awful feeling to owe the owing people money is like something that just like until you clear it up is always going to be like over you yeah like that's like the weight I carry every day now so it's just like it's a heavy weight and a heavy burden to carry whether it's intention like people that go out and like steal from people or scam people or whatever whether it's intentional or not they're always going to live with that and and carry that with them yeah they could go out and say they don't feel bad at all or whatever but there's always going to be a part because you hope they feel bad like it would be you'd have to be a true sociopath narcissist to just

not care I mean you meet people in prison that'll rob a bank like the only care they have is that they got caught there is something about robbing a bank where it's like an institution and you can kind of be like they got all this money they're insured it's faceless whatever insured but once you're like you owe a person money especially people you know personally like you hope you feel bad or else you're just like oh you're sick i mean i met a lot of fraudsters like credit card scammers everything like that that just they don't give a shit they in prison you meet a lot of guys that want to learn from you to figure out how they can improve their crime. Oh, crazy. So I was idolized in prison because I was a young kid that so in prison,

you have a lot of people that are rappers and stuff that were interested in the music business. And then the other half are people that guys that like did bank robbery charges and they want a lesser charge the next time or anything like that. So they're learning how did you raise the money like that's what they become fascinated with. And these are probably borderline like sociopath people that might not care how their actions impact other people and carry no burden or things like that. Yeah, they don't they're not self-aware at all. Like they're But you feel bad about all this and you're like, okay, now I'm in this electronics game and I'll use this to and was the goal with the electronics? Because now you don't give a shit about electronics. I hated electronics. I did

not want to be in the business. It was a means to an end for me. Right. I didn't. That was not my passion. Promoting was my passion. I hated any other business. Because there could have been a nine million other businesses I could have got in. I had the business intelligence, but it was only for electronics. I, I mean, concerts. Yeah. My passion was concerts and promoting. You just do this because you're desperate. Yeah.

So I do this and I get some money from one of the kitchen workers. And I set these contracts up as loans because I'm figuring this is a guarantee. When you're buying an asset, we have inventory so we could 100% sell it. They're selling well on Amazon or whatever. This is legit. I'm seeing the numbers. And we're making like 400%. So I could offer 50%.

So I started offering people a 50% rate of return for a loan within 30 days. Because I asked my partner, I said, John, how long will it take us to sell it? About a week, two weeks, another couple of weeks to get the money out of PayPal, Amazon, whatever. So I'm looking, okay, so we could offer 50% rate of return in 30 days. So if you gave me $5,000, I'm giving you $7,500 back in 30 days. That's where the idea comes from. That idea did not form to steal from people or to get them to, give up their money. It was a sound idea where we came up with that figure. I didn't know anything

about usury laws that you couldn't legally give an interest rate that high, structured as a loan. I didn't know about any of this. I just knew that we were making this much off of electronics so we could afford to give it. Now, at this point, in hindsight, the electronics were either stolen or counterfeit? A couple months later, I would find out that they were counterfeit because the Beats by Dre didn't register online. And then this is when Amazon and eBay, they start getting stricter on their accounts and start banning all, like they do those purges where it's not a real account or whatever, and they start banning them all. Was there any red flag in your head?

Like a little thing in the back of your mind. We were like, this shit, there's no way these products are clean, but I'm going to look past it. I knew nothing about electronics, so I couldn't say. I didn't know anything about Alibaba. I did some research, and there was ways to get pallets of, like, cell phones or whatever from overseas. Yeah.

I just didn't know how that all worked. Or whether it was legal or not. But the first red flag was when one of my friends, I gave a free pair of headphones to. And he brings it to me and he's like, dude, this is like floppy. And because the packaging looks great. It's sealed. It looks legit. When you open it, the barcode doesn't register.

And it's like, you could just tell. It's not real. It's not, it doesn't look the right. Yep. So that's when I realized that it was fake and that's when I wanted to meet the guy that was selling the product. Gotcha. But still at the same time, you're getting more investors to help fund this.

Because at this point, do you have any personal funds? No, I'm drained by this point. So no personal funds, only debt. Yeah, and I'm just using whatever money I come in to live off of. Right. Like, dinner's. Like, are you selling any of your assets or? I didn't have any ass.

I just had my dad's car that he gave me. He had the Dell Sol. So the Audi at this point? Oh, that was a loss because I lost the full month. The car blew up. It had like a hundred. I wanted an Audi so bad that I got one with like $150,000. It wasn't worth anything.

I think I got $500 for it. Right. So now you have no assets. You just have all this. debt. Yeah. And who are these other investors that you're getting money from for the electronics? Mostly like sketchy, like drug dealers. Oh, really? I worked with these kitchen guys that were from New York, the town over that all sell weed. And they hooked me up with people. It was cash. I needed cash. They gave me the cash. I gave him a high interest rate, bought electronics, sold them, and we got

out of the hole. Gotcha. So you're selling these fraudulent electronics. Yeah. Getting the money. Yep. And then what? So then. Towards the end, like this month of May, I'm selling the electronics, and this kid comes to me that I'm friends with in high school. And he says, listen, there's someone I want you to meet. And it's this kid named Henry, who at the time just inherited over a million dollars from, he sued a gym, a local gym. He lost vision in his eye.

After a freak accident, the equipment broke, lost vision. Oh, like a cable or something? A cable snapped. Oh, crazy. So he gets a million dollars or whatever after, expenses, yada, yada. And he's over 18? He's, no, where he's, actually, yeah, he just turned 18. Oh, so he has full access to his friends.

Full access. I think some of the money was in an IRA, whatever it was. So this kid brings me to Henry's house and I go into his basement and I tell him what I'm doing. The electronics only. The electronics only. I didn't know he was interested in concerts or whatever. And I said, listen, you know, whatever money you give me, I'll give you a 50% rate of return. He says, well, this kid's already giving me 60% or whatever. You have to do better. Now, I did not know at the time that he was dealing with our vendor for the electronics that I had known nothing about.

So ironically, we're all connected somehow. We just don't know it yet. So he ends up charging me for $30,000 because I still needed another loan to pay off some old investors. I was phrasing as a loan. I said, listen, I need this is the same. situation. I lost a bunch of money on concerts. I need money to purchase more product and to keep my business afloat and I need a loan. It's just a straight loan and he's, he's in the position

where he knows I need it. So for $30,000 he gives me, I have to pay him $50,000 back. That's a $20,000 interest rate. In what time frame? In 30 days. Bro, come on, Ian. I took the deal. come on when you are the things I would do out of desperation yeah and it gets worse and worse like I'm fucking desperate like did you ever consider at this point just straight up stealing no never were you like i always had high morals like what i was doing at the time like i was raised in a good family it was never a thought to steal it was never i knew drugs were bad i knew stealing was bad so when you piece everything together and it kind of like gives this image that i went out and set off the scam and stuff that was never going through my head i didn't know what a ponzi's he skis

scheme was I didn't know about like you I grew up knowing lying's bad yeah I didn't grow up knowing that like lying is illegal when you mix it with money and this and that like I got you it was with the best intentions the nuances of fraud or maybe a little bit more difficult to understand especially if you think I'm going to smooth it all over yeah I mean they weren't teaching you about Bernie made off and in high school so those those initial investors like the people that you owe the 50k to for the they're all paid back by this point so they're all good I get Henry's money pay everyone back with some of that money, but it was just a loan.

He knew it was a loan, and it's a high interest rate. So now all I owe is a new 50 grand to Henry. And what about these drug dealers that gave money for their electronics? They're all paid back. So everyone's made whole. Yep, everyone's made whole. And they're all happy.

And you give them a profit. Yep, everyone makes money. So this is where things get out of control. Everyone makes money. Now all I owe is Henry 50 grand. The crazy part is that you lied about the money they made. Yeah. You could have just said everything broke even.

No, I could have said it lost. And then I would have just got a lawyer. and said, listen, he did promise you their money back, but it's just a civil thing. That's not fraud to promise someone their money back and not, that's a civil case. Yeah, of course. And so you could have settled with that or whatever that looks like. But at the same time, you also could have said, oh, everything broke even. Like, if you're going to lie anyway and be like, everything broke even, just give them their money back. And then you I was so, I was obsessed with the clout. I was obsessed with the popularity. You see what people do

for social media likes and stuff nowadays. That is a danger of doing that. You know, know I'm literally like that cautionary tale of this is what happens when you chase after that and you don't know what this is giving me anxiety if I was in your spot bro I would have fucking broke like I wouldn't even able to hang I would have just came forward and been like guys I'm sorry I don't know what I'm like I would have just crumbled yeah but you were like no I'm determined to see it through and to fix it to the very end I'm still determined yeah you still got to fix it so okay you got a so now you're getting the money from this kid they got a settlement yes a lot of money yes with a crazy interest rate you got to

to pay him back in a month, 20K. Yep. You haven't, like, technically, like, made money in, like, almost a year at that point. So now, okay, so now it's, like, crazy. What are you going to do? So the second I give everyone their money back, even though it was weeks late or whatever, and they were stalling, it just spreads like wildfire. Everyone's hearing I'm offering a 50% rate of return on the money that I'm in a new business

and I'm not doing concerts anymore. I'm doing these electronics. And all of a sudden, like, I have hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing in within weeks. Same people. Word of mouth. Same people. Now it's spreading to URI. The kid that I was doing shows with found out about it.

And I started offering people like a 5% or 10% commission if they brought on lenders. It's like your typical paramed scheme. Yeah, I mean, that's literally the... Yeah, but that's not what I was thinking at the time, you know? And you didn't know about pyramid schemes? You didn't study Ponzi schemes. The only pyramid scheme I'd ever know. known at the time was those energy drinks that was just starting. I had a couple of friends that

started getting into those like knock off energy drinks where you have to buy, you know, 10 cases and a buy-in fee and all this. Which is technically like multi-level marketing, which is shady but not necessarily illegal or whatever. So you kind of are hearing about that. You're like, oh, I'll just do that, but for this. My logic was I'm 17, 18 years old. I can't get a loan from a bank. I don't have credit. But you can always take credit from one lender to pay off another lender. So that's my logic. So you're backing into. into a Ponzi scheme without even knowing. Yeah, like, you know how you could use one credit card to pay off another one, like to refinance?

That's what I thought I was doing. Like if I took loans from you, if I said, hey, Mark, I need $100,000 loan, just a loan. If I didn't use the word investment and our contracts where this loans could be used for business purposes, I figured a business purpose would be if I needed to use your loan to refinance another loan. But that's the Ponzi scheme aspect. Right. So you're just thinking, okay, I'll do this. No one will know about it.

Yeah. I'll beat the system. It was just like keeping a float until I made money. So I get in all this money, which still wasn't really illegal because I didn't raise it in a bad way. I was going to use that money for electronics. Yeah. What happens is after all this money comes in, the electronic business flops. And why does it flop?

It blows up. All the Amazon accounts start getting shut down. Everything like it. We found out the product's fake. This is all in like a two week period of time. But I continue to raise money on fraudulent. pretense is that we have this booming electronics business right so that were you accepting money after already knowing that the electronics were fucked which is fraud at that point right

so that's like mistake number two so I try to pivot and turn it I change it from WB wholesale to WB investments I wanted to be like a hedge fund that was involved in not only electronics but like I invested in a couple shoe businesses a couple websites that I thought would be like the next PayPal I open up my first nightclub I open I do more, I book another string of concerts, whatnot. So all these different things, but people are still giving loans based on thinking it's for electronics. So when they all testified court, they thought the money was for electronics.

Right. I'm spending the money on concerts. That's fraud too. Gotcha. So that's where I'm mixed up in. And before I knew it, July 2013, I raised like $700,000. Henry had given me, he was very passionate about getting in the concert business. He gives me $250,000.

money's coming in from everywhere. Dude, I'm going to meetings at Chipotle to pick up $10,000 from random people. Are you paying, you paid Henry back in the 30 days? I pay him the 50 using other people's money. Using the money from these other investors that think the electronics are working. There's no accounting. Everything's getting pooled together in a business bank account at Wells Fargo. Yeah.

Just getting dumped in there. And money's coming in and then every day I'm on calls. All right, what are the terms? Now I start expanding my terms because there was a period of time when I realized the electronics weren't selling. as fast as I thought they would. We were sitting on like $10,000 a product. Were you keeping everything?

In the office. So you just have an office full of Beats by Dre. It was like this little, we got a separate closet or whatever. Now we should have been buying hundreds of thousands of dollars a product, which was my intentions. But the second I realized the product was fake, couldn't do it. I could go buy more product. Right.

Yeah. That would be dumb. Yeah. So we meet that kid that buys us a product. And at this point, I met me and sit with a lawyer. I do go to a lawyer at this point. I say, listen, this is my business idea. This is what I want to do.

So he writes me this new contract saying I'm waiving the rights to usury that I know that this is a high interest rate and the money is going to be used for business purposes. And I change it from 30 days to 45 days. And in some case, 60 days. Not much better, but it was something. And I also say, listen, I don't want to be held liable if these electronics are fake. So we come up with their agreement with this other kid who was from the town over that,

who I didn't know at the time Henry had put. $200,000 into him too for this electronic business. So he's into two electronic businesses. Yep. Both of them fraudulent. Well, with me with concerts, which was legit. Okay, so he was now giving you money for the concert. Henry's money specifically, this is why there was a misjury or a mistrial on these charges,

was specifically for concerts. And this is the $250K. Yeah, he gives me $250K. Okay. And now that you're getting these big lumps of money, you're up like $700,000. Yeah. What debts do you have? At this point, it's just like there's not really debts.

It's just money coming in, money coming out. Like if loans are due, I would take money to pay off another loan. Got it. And I'm dumping a lot of this money into concerts. I lay out about 300 grand into concerts, all legitimately. Yeah. We link back up with Dave. He comes pretty much crying to me with this business proposal.

He's the guy from Rhode Island. And he says, listen, we really learned from all our mistakes this time. Let us do it right. And he brings me this bulletproof proposal. Like, you put a lot of effort into it. Multi-Excel spreadsheet. Tiga. YG, Chief Keefe, Kiddink, like names that are blowing up.

Yep. And it's all these massive shows. And the budget's like you need like, you know, it's three or four hundred thousand dollars. That's why I came up with that figure for Henry. We didn't need to put all the money down. We needed to put down about half. And the return on that for that much investment, it's a million dollar gross. If everything sold out.

Still naive enough at this point to say they're all going to sell out. Come on, Ian. I don't know what? I was just too ambitious, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. So I'm thinking, and at this point, I'm really sold on the idea, okay, now I know I really failed. This is my time to be successful. Like, we went through all this failure. We got to have

automatic success. And you had no issue with the electronic stuff, even though they were fraudulent. And at this point, you knew they were fraudulent. No one that had bought the products, like came to sue you or there was any issue with those products. No, Amazon just closes the accounts for fraud or whatever, and that's it. So no one ever comes to collect and be like, yo, these headphones suck. What the fuck? We had to start issuing returns. Like Amazon, you just get burned on the product. And Amazon doesn't, at that point, they don't release the money.

It wasn't instant when there's a purchase like Shopify, you get the money right away. Yeah. Back then it was you don't get the money until the buyer gets it and leaves a good review or everything. Gotcha. So we got burned on a lot of that too. And what did you do with all the backstock?

Just gave it out. Every time someone invested, they thought it was cool here. You gave me $5,000 here's some beats. Wow. It was just passing it out, which I guess the optics, which the FBI would later claim, that's how I would enable investors because I'm this kid that has a nice office, passing out product, that's like the hook and the line to get them to come in. Right. But you were just doing it as like a cool thing.

Yeah, I was just, I didn't. You weren't intentionally trying to grease them with fancy items. No, but I understand the optics now that I had a nice car. I bought myself a Mustang with my own money because I'm still working. I financed a Mustang convertible. I have a nice office, which I'm just thinking this is what a business needs. We're going out to dinners all the time. I figured that's a business expensive.

I have an investor meeting. That's a write-off. So you weren't scared from this year of not making any money and being in debt. Once you get money back, all of a sudden, you're back on top. You feel good. Yep. Now, if I was smart back then, would have gotten to real estate or I would have leverage the money to get lines of credit at the bank against that money.

I would have even biggest regret to this day if I had taken that money and reopened Tuxedo Junction, which is what I did two years after that, would have been a success story, would have been huge, would have blown up because my concept was so great. But I didn't do that. I did all this other bullshit. And while this is going on, I'm thinking I'm this big time millionaire. We're going to California trips. We're going to Vegas where we bought jet skis as a business expense.

Why the fuck should I be buying jet skis? I figure it's a write-off because the investors are using it. I only used them like twice. I go to Key West on a trip with other investors. I brought them to Key West. And I'm a big shot paying for everything. We're driving around limos, all this. and I go on a jet ski for the first time and I fall in love with it.

So I called the Power Sports Place to Danbury. I said, listen, have two jet skis waiting for me by the time I get off this plane. Come on. I go back and there they are and the guy upcharges me and I'm paying 25 grand for the basic model. There's no perks about this. Now you get two like decked out ones for that price. Right. But I get it for the basic model.

And yeah, this was the biggest thing about the case. It was all over the news. Ian Bick buys jet skis, you know, like that was the fraud part. So out of all this money, I would say $100,000 of it got totally misproportioned with dinners, trips, toys, that was that. And those trips, like when you went to California with everyone, what were you guys doing? So the week I went to California, man, this was probably like some Wolf of Wall Street type shit. I think all together we spent like across everyone because Henry still had a lot of money at the time and the other kids we were with. it was a $100,000 trip.

We have a hotel. A $100,000 trip? In one week. Yeah, I didn't spend all that. I think I paid like $25 for myself. Never wore Gucci before in my life. We could break this down to a couple different parts. Never wore Gucci before.

Henry goes into Versacee, buys a $5,000 Versace outfit, a sweatsuit. So you're there with the investors? I'm there with the investors, yeah. And then I get the idea to go buy a Gucci outfit. I'm sitting on Rodeo Drive. They're feeding me champagne. I'm 18 years old. And I buy this, you know, five,

or $6,000 outfit. The fucking socks were $100. The boxers were like 100. The jeans were 800. I had never wore designer clothes before my life. And I'm sitting there wearing all these clothes. And I wore them once. And then my business partner took them.

I never got them again. But these are the clothes like I bought to look cool. Where are you guys going to eat? We went to that, we went to Nobu. We were dining at Nobu. I went to a strip club for the first time ever in my life. And I fall in love with a stripper. No.

Yeah, they said, Ian, don't fall in love with a stripper. And I fall in love with this woman named Rosie, sucks me in hook, line, and sinker. And I'm like, dude, I got to get this girl back to the hotel. She brings a friend. Now, she's grinding on me at the club. I'm getting the whole experience. I'm thinking this is great. So I go back to the hotel with them.

And my other friends had other prostitutes and whatnot back with them from the club. And I hit the ATM and pull out a bunch of money, go to a store. and change it for singles or whatever, and they come back with me. The second, the lights are on the hotel, I automatically regretted it. Did you hook up with both of them? So this is what happens.

I'm laying on the bed and they're, like, dancing on me and I'm like fully prepared to like, fuck these girls. And I'm throwing singles around. They keep saying throw more money and I think I had like two grand singles and I'm throwing them all over in this hotel room. In this hotel room. Which hotel is like a nice hotel?

No, this is the embassy suites in L.A. And we got a deal because it was like through Hilton and I had points or whatever. Yeah. And now this hotel is treating us like kings. They thought like we're like these business executives because every time I paid with the business debit card, no one bat an eye. Right.

Because it's set of business. No one's questioning us. No credit limit. Like no credit limit. No, we're drinking, we're doing whatever like kings. And so my friend comes running into the room. I have my boxers on, my shirt off. They're on top of me.

Two of them. They're making out on top of me. My friend comes in. He's like, they're raiding the building. They're raiding the building. I jump off. I throw them off of me. and I look outside the window.

DEA lined up over the road. There's like FBI. The whole streets flooded with cars. We're thinking they're there for us because we have these prostitutes. I'm thinking of breaking the law by doing this. And, you know, we're paying for sex and this is what's happening. So I'm like, you guys got to go. They're like in stripper clothes.

I'm like, get the fuck out of the room. The room's under my name too. So I'm like, we're fucked. So they put on these trench coats and run out the room. Turns out they were doing a drug bust across the street. had nothing to do with us or whatever, but that, like, totally scared me off. Next morning, and I never went to a strip club again after this,

I smelt my pants, and it was the most disgusting thing ever, like their juices or whatever. It was just like... Juice are like slugs? Yeah, I don't know what it would. Dude, my pants, these Gucci pants felt so bad after they were, like, dancing out of all night.

It was the most disgusting stuff. How much do you think you spent at the strip club? Probably like five grand, five or six grand at the strip club. And so how do you feel the next morning? I felt disgusted with myself. So like the thing with me whenever like I drink or do something like I regret and like if I sleep with a woman who I'm not into or I sleep with her when I'm drunk or whatever automatically, you know like the post nut clarity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Automatically either that night or the next morning, I feel like fucking disgusted with myself.

You get regret, shame. Yeah. So that's the feeling I had. And it was just it was not a good feeling. And this five grand that you spend are like all the money that you spent on this trip. Like how much of it is like investor? funds it's all come it's all pooled together all pooled so your personal money and the investor funds are all in just this big account so two things are going through my mind one it's a business trip so anything you get

written off that's going through my mind and number two i'm like a business partner in this so i feel like i should be taking a salary so anything i spent was my salary and i also was thinking okay any money i did spend, whether it could be considered a salary or not, I would make up from the concerts. So I was just spending money that I thought I was making from the concerts months down the road. So you're spending money that you don't have yet because you think it's going to turn a profit because you're so sure that these shows are going to turn a profit. So we're driving around a limo and then an escalade and we're just all over the city. We're going to clubs.

We're meeting people and it's like probably the best week of my life at this point. Wow. And we're just living large. We're going these fancy restaurants. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to every time there was a dinner. $800 dinner business card. They didn't card us for liquor. Nothing.

Looking back, were you being kind of a douche? Like, it sounds like duchy behavior. Like, it's definitely, you can consider it dushy behavior. Do you look back and do you look yourself and be like, ah, Ian, why? I think it's fucking stupid because I was doing it just to impress others. Like, that's not, I don't care for that stuff, you know? Right.

You feel guilty after the circle of anyway. Yeah, like, I need the bare minimum. I'm not someone that needs, like, the finer things in life to, like, get by. And I guess it's different to say that when you, don't really have much. Like if I was making hundreds of thousand dollars or if I was a millionaire right now, like you put it into perspective, like spending $1,000 on a dinner is a lot different to put that into perspective.

But back then, I wasn't that at the time. I was doing it solely just to impress people. Yeah. People that did you even care about these people that much? So Henry really turned, this is always like a subjective topic, but me and Henry were genuinely friends. Okay. And people, he did pass away since he had a drug overdose.

Oh gosh. Um, but I grew a fondness for him. Like we were genuinely friends because I feel like we were both misfits. He struggled with his issues. Like we both had struggles like internally and stuff. And that's kind of like what brought us together. Gotcha. But just like I think this is good that that happened in the sense with the spending.

Because now I know like when I do get to that point where I have a lot of money again, I know what not to do. Well, this is your second time that you make the concert mistake. So you got to not make this mistake again. So now you're, Now you're flying back to Danbury. After they had to put me in a wheelchair. Wait, what?

I got drugged. So we're at the dessert, like this buffet, dessert at the hotel. And I order the brownie Sunday. It's like this big elaborate bowl. And I got up to go to the bathroom. And my friends were all smuggling weed brownies back on the plane. So they take the brownies and they put weed brownies in it. It's like four brownies, three or four brownies.

Because weed is legal out there. Weed's legal. And I eat all the brownies. And this is high-doseed. They put them in the brownie? Yeah, my friends did. They thought it because they knew I wasn't really a smoker. I was declining at the whole trip.

So I take it. I mean, that's fucked up. Yeah, I get back to the hotel room, like an hour later, I couldn't feel my legs. I was so high. I'd never been this high before. Yeah. I'm like saying, dude, like I'm overreacting. I'm like hyperventally.

Dude, someone drugged me this and that. Pass out, driver wakes me up, has to come up to the hotel room because we're not answering our phones. Carries me down to the car. It's just like 4 a.m. we had an early flight and they put me in a wheelchair to get through TSA. Your friends did? The driver, our driver that we were paying.

And did your friends ever tell you like, yo, we drugged you? Yeah, you said, you ate weed brown because I said, I want to go to the hospital. I was like, I got to cancel the flight. I want to go to the hospital. They're like, no. If you're high and you don't even know why, that shows terrifying. I slept through the whole flight. Now, I've been to California a lot for family trips because our family lives in Malibu

and whatnot. So I've been to California before. Never could sleep through a flight. Knocked out and I slept for like a day after. I was so hung over from being high. Yeah, 100%. No, it was such a scary feeling. Were you mad at them?

No, I mean, how could I be mad? They invested a bunch of money into the business and they were like, I thought we were close friends and whatever. And it was just like, I got over it. I was grateful I slept through the plane. So you have this insane weekend in Key West. You have this insane weekend in California. Those are the two highlights of this.

So this whole period of time is only a few months. It's like from May to September is this whole like extravagant thing. And your parents, they just think, oh, there goes in. My mom thinks of crazy that a limo is coming to pick me up at the house because we had a limo taking us to the airport, limo taking us back. I pulled up to the high school in a limo. I just took a two-week summer.

That was a part of the deal with the lawyer to take a two-week summer school class so I could get my diploma. Oh, taking a limo the whole time. Yeah. And are people making fun of you? Like, I feel like the kid that takes the limo to school or like the limo to summer school, people are like, what the fuck is this?

I don't know. I guess I was just like popular. everyone referred to me as a successful business kid. Right. All the kids wanted to be with me. Like, I was just, I was doing me. I was really never home. I still lived at my parents' house, but I was always traveling, always at someone's house.

And your mom was, your mom thought you were kind of crazy, but like didn't try to stop it. I shut them out. I didn't bring them any business ideas. I didn't talk business with them. My dad knew nothing. And you had paid back their investment because they invested early. Yeah, my dad's investment, yeah. So your dad was like, all right, you paid me back.

Like, I guess you're doing good. They thought I was doing good. they were happy for me. I mean, obviously they had their reservations or whatever, but... And you never considered college at this point? No, so the college situation, my junior year of high school, I go to Johnson, Wales for the weekend in Florida. Oh, yeah. And they have a great hospitality program.

And at this point, I'm still on the fence about going to college. And I go for the weekend. And at the end of the weekend, they brought us to the Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami or whatever. Yeah. And they give us a tour. We got to see everything. They're like, this is where we give our students an internship. and I go and I talk to one of the interns

and she's sitting there folding silverware for $10 an hour polishing it and folding it. That was a moment I knew I wasn't going to college. I was already making way more than that in the same field. I knew hospitality. I knew everything there was about it. I didn't know the business aspect. Right.

You thought you knew everything about it. Very cocky in that field. Right. But I also idolized the Zuckerbergs and the Spiegel's and all of them who did not go to college or dropped out. So I thought I could do it too. And at that point, going to college was the norm and not going to college wasn't. Now you have all these people coming out and saying, well, you don't technically need to go to college.

Right. But at the time, it was college, college, college, college. Did your parents care you didn't go to college? My mom did because she grew up with that sense. And my dad, ironically, was a teacher in New York City public schools teacher. Oh, really? Who turned to caterer after retired. He's a lot older. He had me at 50. So he lived like this whole life and stuff. But he understood my thought process. And I did have a great job.

You know, had I never even got into business, it just stuck with the corporate job, you know, I could have been successful. Right. The owner did eventually die from the company and then the company went bankrupt, so I don't know how it turned out. That's like one of those life questions. But I could have probably went off to work for a hotel. Or could you have taken over the company when he passed away? Yeah, there's so many, there's a lot of what-ifs. I didn't necessarily have to get into business, but I wasn't sold on working for someone else either.

Right. So you're in this lavish, Wolf of Wall Street moment. But I wasn't doing any work is the thing. Like I went from busting my ass in high school, working hard being this whiz kid to getting so lazy over the course of a few months. Right. Like even the second string of concerts we book with Henry's money, I'm sitting my ass down taking trips. I'm not doing any promotion. I'm not doing anything.

Right. You have a trip in two weeks in your partying. Yeah. I'm going when I would go to URI to make a payment for a production deposit or whatever the case was, like I'm just hanging out. Like I'm sleeping on college couches. I'm doing whatever. But also at the time, the concerts that were booked for that fall were selling phenomenal. Oh, cool.

On paper, everything was great. Okay, great. So now the concerts are coming up. It's concert time. We're about to make our money back. What happens? It's concert time. This is the fall of 2013.

And I had just taken over the front room of tuxitos and I turned it into Skybar. I made a $100,000 investment into fixing the place up. I'm now an 18-year-old with a nightclub. Right. And this investment, this money that you put into it is investor money. And so technically they didn't know that they were putting money into that. No, they, I mean, so it's still confusing to this day because it the biggest problem is it's on me because of the communication. I didn't say, hey, we're switching from electronics to this big company that's doing this, this, and that.

Instead, the whole pretense was electronics. Gotcha. So they still think it's electronics, but you're putting it into this nightclub. Yeah. And the nightclub is really nice. You make it sick. We make it nice. I have this new idea.

This is when I'm thinking, okay, I was successful in doing teen nights. Why not be the owner? nightclub had gone out of business. Al was staying on as an advisor and having the liquor permit for me. Okay. But I got taken advantage from contractors. A paint job that should have cost $2,000 costing me $6,000. Home Depot scam me with windows. Like all these different things, I had this shady contractor that came in pretty much every time someone saw it because all these news articles are getting published. It's breaking news in Connecticut. Teenager owns a nightclub. Right. You can't even drink and you're owning the nightclub. Exactly. They call me the most fascinating

people in Connecticut at this point. They published an article. I'm getting all this good press. So all these contractors are coming in. I'm saying yes to everyone. I was a yes man. He said, hey, I'll make this cool design right over here. Okay, yes, how much here you go. So all in all, this whole output in this. So you're getting scammed, but you're also letting yourself get scammed. Yeah. And Al's just saying, Ian, you don't need all this stuff. And I'm just trying to go for this different image. So he's saying, okay, you're going to learn, you know, I'll show you the best I can if you want to be.

stubborn because I was very stubborn. But you're in the spending mode where it's like, get the best. This is where I go from pissing off, you know, high school officials to now pissing off the city officials because I'm butting heads now with the mayor, with the zoning officials, because I'm not pulling permits for anything. I'm doing whatever. It's my way or the highway. So that's when the rift starts with now city officials. So we're going up a level in the world. Gotcha. So I do this club. The club never makes money. It just breaks even, can't recoup the investment. it wasn't the right type of club for that area. I went upscale,

wasn't supposed to be an upscale thing. It was too small. And Skyvaca sued me for using their name, SKYY. I thought that would be cool. So they sued me and they offered me $10,000 to change the name. They said they would pay to fix everything to change the name. Yeah, they offered me that.

And the lawyer at the time responded too late. So I didn't get the money and I still had to throw the lawsuit. So instead of getting 10 grand, I had to pay money to get everything changed and whatnot and I dropped it to one Y. Oh gosh. Yeah, they gave me a cease and desist order. I got cert. It was a whole big thing.

So you lose money on the branding. You lose money on the investment. It's a total loss. Yep. It just breaks even every week. So while that's going on, while this is breaking even every week, all the concerts are happening. Now at this point...

And who's running the club? So Al was like the operator, the old owner of tuxitos. And he had done this for years so he could get bartenders and your bouncers and all that stuff. Yep. He was teaching me the ropes and I was promoting it. Wasn't really putting too much effort. We did a Halloween party with this DJ Paris Bloom, which was a great success.

The first, it was kind of cool working with all these up-and-coming DJs that would later blow up a year from now that I would book a tuxedoes as these huge names. So we're doing all this, and while this is going on, I have all the concerts plan. Now at this point,

I'm structuring all the deals, the loan deal, so it's like 60 to 90 days out, funding them through other people's loans until the concerts. Everything is just money from one person to another until either the nightclub generates money or the concerts generating money. The nightclub's never going to generate money. Never generates money in the concerts, which are all slam dunks doing really well. Great. Man, do I have the worst luck in probably human history with these concerts? So the first three, we book kidding for three shows. This is the first set of shows in September of that year. And I'm 18, 2013 in September. The first one, they book at the shitty club

in Waterbury, which is like a really sketchy area, Connecticut. And they didn't promote it. Who's that? This is my other partners, Dave. Our deal was he would do the promoting another deal where they had no skin in the game. 50% they get, 50% we get. And then we would split 25% with Henry. 25% went to us. But you're fronting all the money. Yes, we're funding all the money. They didn't put a dime. We're funding all these shows. There's no third party investors or whatever. Gotcha. And so what if the show's flop? We own responsibility for that. Oh, wow.

But Henry's deal wasn't a guaranteed. It wasn't like invest 250, get 500 back. Got it. There was risk. Okay. And we were taking the risk with them. We learned from our mistakes. This is what it is.

Got it. So what happens is the Kid Ink shows, the Waterbury one, we sold zero tickets, like literally zero. And we had to go to the local mall and pass out tickets. Like, it just, whatever it was, like, like Kidding. It was great on paper with his social media, millions of followers, hit songs with Chris Brown, all this. But the sales in here for tickets just didn't, it didn't equal up. His European tours all sold out, all this stuff, but just it didn't work. It wasn't the Connecticut market for it. So it flops. Lose like 15 grand on that show. You still have two more with him.

Two more with him. Second one, sold out. It's going to be great. A lot of hip-hop shows, you make your money not from ticket sales. You make it from DJ's paying to open up and perform. So if say someone wants to open up for Kitting, they'd pay us $5,000. Yeah. The person in charge of collecting from the openers forgets to collect from the openers. And they all perform before the openers perform. We lose like 10 or 15 grand from that, get played on that. So even though it's packed, people are loving it. People are like, you best show ever. Kidink has a great performance. Yeah. Kid Ink has a great performance. We don't get the opener money. So we're down on that. The venue then bounces the check to pay us back. It was like a shitty venue that only

held 500 or whatever. We didn't get a cut of the bar like we were supposed to. Bounces the check. We eventually like six months later get a check from them for like five grand from the ticketing money. Gotcha. So we lose on that. And why do you keep on getting into business with people that are fucking you over? I don't know what it was. I had no like no no no I mean there was no business mind. I didn't have a good deal, bad deal type census. I didn't care. I was just like, let's book it, let's do it. I was just in the, I was always like, okay, I was super optimistic.

This is the dangers of being like extremely optimistic. And then the third show, we paid for, but it was in the Boston market and there was a third promoter on it. Now, biggest downfall to all this is ticketing was never in our name. So we never got the revenues. We always dealt with third parties. So this show we did in Boston. we put up like 15 grand for it.

To this day, I never saw a dollar of that. Wow, because they just ripped you off. They just ripped us off. They took it and that was it. But you keep on letting yourself get in positions where you can be exposed. If I was a smart businessman at the time, if I knew what I knew now,

I would have the ticketing in my name. If I was funding it, the venue contracts would be in my name. The artist contracts, this is the one good thing that came out of it was in my name, so I was building up a rep with these agents. That's cool.

I was now dealing with ICM, CIA, these big name agents, which would later help me down the road. So I was building a good rap. So all those shows, you lose money on. All those kidding shows lose money. Okay. End of September comes around.

We have Chief Keefe booked. Great. New Haven. One of the hottest rappers in the game, no legal problems yet. Just dropped Sosa. Sell the place out. We got radio ads, money. We got rappers that are going to perform money.

Amazing. You know, 1,200 tickets sold. There is a lot of extra expenses because the city was hearing that he, he's a part of a gang or whatnot. Gotcha. So they're patting it up with police or whatever. Right. I'm on my way to New Haven, which is about 45 minutes from my house.

I'm getting calls that there's already a line around the street. People are getting rowdy, though, but it's a great show. Finally, we're back. Yep. Get a call from my co-promoter on it. And he says, Chiefs Keeps Management just called. They're having problems finding him and getting him on the plane, but he's going to miss the first flight. He's going to be on the next flight.

So he's going to be there a little late. He'll perform later. I knew that was normal in the business. didn't think anything of it okay i get to toad's place in new haven lines around the door everyone's getting rowdy doors are opening like an hour later now and we got the final call that he's not coming they can't find him he missed all his flights his last possible flight to even get them there at a reasonable time we had to send everyone home refund everyone's money the venue still charged us because they had to pay police and everything and get the staff there yeah he said

he would do me a favor on the next show we did. So I paid for everything. So I went there with like 15 grand. I still owed Chief Keefe because I paid him his upfront deposit and then his back end I had it with me in cash. I should have walked home with that, but instead I paid it all out to the venue. Still had to pay flyers. Still had to pay radio.

We didn't get any of the money from the rappers to perform to open for him. Of course. Lost everything. So now you're down on that one again. Next morning he sends out a tweet saying, you know, hey Connecticut, it wasn't the promoter's fault. Sorry. Oh, really?

We try to sue him. Cost me 10 or 15 grand just in the initial lawsuits, and he's just buried in LLCs. Never got the money. Nothing. Nothing. Wow. Okay.

So now at this point, are you starting to get scared? Like, oh, this happened once before. So those, now this is four shows that bombed. Yeah. They added up to out of pocket. I would say each kidding show is about 15. So that's 45 plus another 20, say 60 or 70 grand on that 225. Yeah.

60 or 70 grand plus double my money if it makes. made money so I'm out about 140,000. Yeah. Which is small compared to this million dollar gross that we would have got. Right. So it's not the end of the world. Right. You still got a couple more shows.

October comes around. This is where Amshmack comes into play. We have a sold-out show, Halloween night. Halloween's the biggest party night of the year in college. Great. Amshamak does a show the week earlier. It's a shit show. They sell out.

It's great. All this underage drinking. The town shuts the venue down because of Amshmacked. We lose all of our ticket sales. for Halloween night that we sold and we had booked the DJ duo Cosette which I didn't even know who at was at the time. Yeah.

Lost their money from them. I never got the money back from them. Wow. Lost everything. So I think we used them on a later show which also bombed. But that was another thing. That was because of Amshmach. That was my first meeting with Amshmacht having like an effect on us. That they've got the town angry and then got your shows canceled. Yep. Which then affects our Taiga show.

late the next month in November. Okay. Now, Tyga, that show costs us $120,000 to produce. This is our biggest show to date. The gross on it, it's like $250,000. The dean of the campus calls us and says, we're not permitting out-of-school buses to come on campus because of this Amshamacked event.

Now, if you've been to college, you know that college bus trips are huge for the promoting world for concerts, busing kids because they don't have cars. They want a pregame. Yeah. They're not taking public transportation. Uber's not really. thing at the time. No, Uber's not big and you're using, you'd get kids to pay $5 for a bus seat

and then the promoter rents the bus. Gotcha. College bans it. We lose like 2,000 ticket sales. Wow. We only get 1,200 kids to show up to this Tiga show. Tiga was probably the worst rapper besides Chief Keefe I had to work with. Refused to take a picture. We had a sort through all his skittles. His rider was like five grand. Ace of Spades, champagne sorting through the skittles, like all this stuff. Wow. Refused to take pictures with us. Wouldn't do any means. and greets wouldn't say hello just all around like not nice now meanwhile i'm paying him i paid him 40 grand for the night and he wouldn't even shake a hand or do anything wow so i did that um we had yg on the show too yg was actually cooler than taiga i've heard he's cool yeah we got video footage with him and stuff

the show was a good show like tiger did a good that's the thing all these shows are like are generally pretty good even the good shows are good but everything is losing money yeah but it was going to make money so No, these were, but this is like we genuinely, compared to the first shows, we had the tickets sold. This isn't a case of we didn't sell enough tickets, like the Tiger show, we had the tickets. Right. But the bus trip. But it wasn't enough tickets. Wasn't, well, we lost the tickets sales.

Right. We would at least broke even on that Tiger show if we didn't lose the bus trips. And we would have had more tickets sold because we still at that point when they canceled, we had a few days left of promotion. We would have sold even more bus tickets. So all these flop, you have this. this like basically how much money do you have in the investment before these concerts you probably got like 700 750k yeah we got about 700 750k all day and then that shrinks to next i mean by the end of this concert run i owed 1.3 million dollars with interest to everyone because it had a 50% rate

to return on 700,000 so and you're still kind of floating money to the investors to make it seem like everything's good well at that point i'm stopping to get legitimate investors from coming through because they're getting wind that payments are being delayed. People are waiting weeks. So who do I have to go to to get money? The shady people that I started to meet through the club business. I start associating myself with a local biker gang who they're all connected with drugs. And before I knew it, one day I found myself driving to Stanford, Connecticut with this

promoter who was a part of a gang. And we go to his cousin's house. and I basically say, listen, this is my situation. I need money. I need cash. And he says, okay, I got you. And I had to pay him 10% of whatever I got from the sky. And we go and sit down.

And the short Colombian dude comes out. And he empties a pillowcase of cash. I've never seen this much cash before my life. It's in 20s, rubber banded onto the table. And, you know, it's like $80,000 in cash on the table. And there's no, like, contracts. There's nothing like that. It's this is the money.

You need to pay me X amount of dollars, and it was like 120 days. I had to pay him back like $120,000 on that $80 grand. It was like 40K interest. Yeah. And it's pretty much like alluded to like you're going to get yourself killed if you do not repay this money. So I take the money because I needed the cash. And that put me into a world of dealing with all these, you know, mafia guys, drug dealers, anyone from the underground loan sharks whatever and i'm just taking cash from one drug dealer to

pay another drug dealer and like there would be days where like i'm getting the shit kicked out of me really worst experience was i'm in the club one day now i'm the worst communicator in the world by this point i do not like confrontation my answer for everything was put the phone on airplane motor do not disturb oh really i'm ducking everyone i'm not answering calls now had i been a better communicator, I probably could have avoided a lot of the shit. I put this upon myself. Yeah. It wasn't like I was openly honest, communicating whatever. So my phone would ring so much some days that it would freeze and turn off. I had like an iPhone 7 or whatever, it would just shut down. All these different loan sharks investors calling you saying, hey, where's the money, where's the money?

But they knew where I was. I was at the club or whatnot. So one day they come and I'd given one of them the key to the club so they could get in like as like collateral or whatever, even though that didn't really mean shit because it wasn't really worth anything, just the equipment. But the idea to like, give me the money and you can have a key to my place kind of thing. So this drug dealer that loans us some money ended up getting popped. He gets caught by the DEA or whatever, gets put on house arrest. So I had to go see him eventually or whatever if I ever wanted to talk to him. But I stopped answering his call. So he sends his cousin down to the club. Oh gosh. Comes in the club. It's me and my business partner, pulls a gun on my business partner and puts it

right at his head. He said, don't fucking say anything slick. That's what happens with that. He goes over to me. He says, go downstairs. We had a basement. Leaves my business partner alone because he knew I was the face of it and my relationship was with him. What are you thinking? So I'm thinking of dead at this point. Like sweaty, fucking anxious. I was just like in shock. Like my face was turning red. I was just like, this is it. And so he brings me to the basement. They got guys upstairs guard in the door. And it's me and one of his other guys in the gang downstairs. and he takes my hand and he puts it on the table of the desk. And there's a staple gun right next to it.

So I'm thinking he's going to staple gun my fucking hands. He doesn't staple gun the hands. He's going through the drawer and he gets a screwdriver. So I'm thinking, what is he going to do with a screwdriver? He takes the end of it, the handle end, and he's holding it by like the screwdriver part and he's whacking each finger until they're like broken, like black and blue with the end of it.

And it's freezing. It's like December, middle of winter. and just whacking each hand. It's like, where the fuck's the money, this and that, you have X amount of days to get the money, answer your fucking phone. So by this point, I started answering my phone after this. How much money did you owe them?

I mean, I owed all day like 200 grand to these guys, like with that whole group of people I was dealing with. And that's, so 200 grand of the 1.3 that you owe to everyone. Yes. So this is December, 2013. This is what's happening. The other investors, don't know. No one else knows I'm involved with shady people at all, except me and my business

partner. And still never at this point, are you like, I'm going to tell my dad, I'm going to get a lawyer, I'm going to call the cops. So I do, right after this happens, now I never snitched on these people. Never told, gave up any names, never did any of that. Always close to the best. No one's ever going to know what really happened, like with names or anything like that, never used it to try to benefit me. Yeah. And so, and maybe that's what ends up saving me down the road. Now at this time, all the concerts completely are failed. Are you still living at your parents' house? At this point, I have, there's a, like, a little apartment up above the club that I'm

renting now for like $750 a month. Right. And at this point, I go to my dad and I start telling him the basics to the problems, not everything. He doesn't know about the drug dealers, doesn't know about anything. But general, I'm in debt. Yeah, I'm in debt. He puts me with his lawyer.

This local guy who was like an ambulance chase. or well-known lawyer. Okay. He had promised my dad that I would have millions of dollars in legal support if I ever needed it. Like a fair gesture to her friend. So I go to him. And this is the first adult figure that I tell the whole entire story to. Everything.

Everything. The drug dealers, every dollar owed. He said, Ian, put together a spreadsheet, give me names, give me numbers, give me everything of everything. That's when we finally outlaid every single thing that happened, who's owed money. I tracked down every contract. I bring them every bank record.

also the lawyer that was helping me with Chief Keefe, he's helping me with everything. He then goes, this is in December, and sends a letter out to every investor. Obviously not the drug. I said, let me handle the drug dealers on the shady figures. Yeah. He sends a letter out to every investor. I'm thinking this is a good idea. It looks legit.

Coming from a lawyer, we're trying to mitigate this. And how many investors are there, roughly? About 20. Okay. And he says, don't call them, don't answer their phones, don't talking to them. And what amount of money do they have in it? Is this like Henry? So this is Henry.

and this is the other parents and kids. So their out of pocket is about 500,000. And each one at a different amount, some 50,000 here, 100,000 here. Henry's the most. Gotcha. And the least is like. Least would probably say 10,000. Okay.

Yep. So without interest. Yeah. But you got to realize some people that have 10,000 out of pocket think they're owed 30 because they would keep rolling it over. Some people, so I got away with this for so long. So say a kid puts in 5,000, right? 5,000.

He's now to 7,500. He says, okay, in 45 days, put that 7,500, that turns into 12-5. Yeah, keep doubling. So the principal is like 500,000, but the-principals 500, interest is going to not including the drug dealers is like at 900,000. And then what the drug goes, that's when you're in the millions. Exactly. So he sent-

This is a big pickle you got yourself into it. This is the turning point on everything. Yeah. So he sends these letters out. This pisses everyone off. Of course. It's a shit storm. They're like, everything was great for,

years and all of a sudden now I'm getting a letter from an attorney and what are the letter said the letter says um we are representing Ian Bick and WB investments um we are analyzing all the documents this and that yada yada yada yada we will be in touch with you soon and they still think they're no electronic business yes so they're like what is it wB investments like i was dealing with wB holding yeah so there's a lot of calls my lawyers dealing with all of it whatever your phone's off again phones off i'm not answering any of them uh then me and henry have a sit down and I come clean to Henry. I said, Henry, listen, all the concert, because I never, I didn't tell Henry they made money,

but I also didn't tell them they lost. I'm just saying, I'm waiting to hear back. I'm waiting to hear back. I'm trying to figure everything out. And I sit down with him and I show them the show reports. And I hand them all of them. I said, listen, Henry, here's every document, here's every email. These shows genuinely lost money.

And by this point, he doesn't believe me. And how do you feel, Wauke-Innis? Are you, like, shaking? Well, this was my only choice because I knew he owed the most amount of money. Yeah. And I felt like I owed it to him as a friendship to come clean. So he's the first investor I sit down with and come clean with. I say, listen.

And how do you feel walking in there? I mean, I just felt defeated and that I needed to do this. Because this is your worst fear. This whole thing was, oh, I don't want them to know. I don't want them to know. I don't want them to know. And now at this point, you know, I have dangerous people after me. Yeah.

And my name's already tarnished because everyone's months and months late on payments. Gotcha. So I come clean with him. Jig is up. He doesn't believe me that they lost money. He thinks they. that you are trying to defraud him. Sorry, everything lost money,

but actually you made a bunch of money. Yep, he thinks I'm buying real estate, whatever I'm doing. Because he sees you probably on these trips. He went on the trips with you. He's like, what do you talk about? He sees the club.

Every kid that knew I owned a nightclub thought I'm making millions. Oh, because they're all going to Skybar. Yeah. They think if you own a nightclub, you have millions. Yeah, of course. Like, you're the only 19 year old thing. They think I own the building, this and that.

So they think, dude, there's no way he's losing money. Yep, I'm 18. But again, it was all about image with you. Yeah. So everything was just like, everything's good. Everything's good. I'm still posting on Facebook, opening up a burger restaurant to downtown.

I'm making everything seem legit. Yeah. So he goes to cops. And he goes to the detectives. He's coked up one day. And he sits down with them. And he says, I was scammed out of $300,000 by Ian Bick.

Cops are red flags going up. Okay, if there's one investor, for $300,000, there's got to be more. Yeah. Henry gives them the names of every single person that he knew was invested in me. because everyone's connected somewhere or another. Right.

You guys are all friends from high school and their parents. They just don't know about the Rhode Island parents or whatnot. Got it. So they call my lawyer and we go in for a sit down with the cops and it's these detectives that it's like your basic antagonist detective that you see in the movies or whatever. This is the dude in the documentary. Yeah. Oh, no.

That's McGarrier. That's a Silver Fox. It's a U.S. Attorney. Okay. But we sit down with them at this point. This is the initial Danbury Police Department detectives. This is like the biggest crime of the century for them.

And they basically accused me of spending all the money at University of the United States. studios and buying real estate. Now, they didn't have my bank records. They didn't know what the whole piece of the puzzle was. That was their initial investigation. Why do they think real estate? They were just throwing it out there. They didn't know.

And you had this night club, I guess. They also thought I was running a drug empire because some kids were hearing I was going back at Fort the California. But this is their initial, like, they're fishing. They're on a fishing expedition. Got it. My lawyer also at the time, while this is all going on, is sending another set of letters to people.

This is what gets the other kids to start cooperating. with the police because he sent the letter saying, we've assessed that my lawyer's team goes through all the amounts. And he assesses, okay, we're only paying your out-of-pocket cost back, which is fair, but not in these people's eyes. They want their interest. So even though the whole thing fell apart, he's saying, listen, this is what happened. We can't pay the interest. We will work out a payment plan in civil court for just your out-of-pocket. Right. So you're not going to be down any money, but you're not going to make the profit that you thought you made. But this is what piss his kids off because the kids that invested, say, $5,000 and were paid profits in the

beginning of this would then get a letter saying they're owed zero when they think they're owed $15,000 or $20,000. Because they were rolling over all of their investments. So as they're rolling over their investments, they, I guess technically they're putting in that money. Yeah. But it's not their initial. So the lawyer traced it back.

And this is what the government would later do. My restitution amount is only for out of pocket. Got it. So people that thought they were owed $100,000. thousand dollars with interest might only be old 20 because people did get now yeah i mean i'd be pissed off too though because i'm thinking oh i'm putting in the money that i'm getting paid out as profit and i think that that's my money because that technically is based off of what you told me i get it no i mean there's multiple ways to look at it but i think when the whole thing unravels and you look at the thing

i would be happy to get my out of pocket that i physically start with at the least at the very least but if you think that that money that you're putting an additional is also yours then you would be like well that's also my money yeah but that money never exists in the first place and never exist in the first place, right? Got it. So that's tough. I get that. This happens, that's how the investigation starts.

While this is simultaneously going on, the drug dealers are after me, and I still don't have their money. Now, my business is now defunct at this point. This is December 2013. No investors are dealing with me. Don't have any contact. Police investigation starting. Me and my business partner come up with the idea to go on up.

Our main priority is paying these drug dealers at 200-10. Yeah. That now we're facing death or severe injury. Yeah. So we get the idea to go fly out and see my aunt and uncle who are wealthy in California. They're doctors, their son's, you know, a writer for the office or whatever. They have money. Great.

They have a house. And but here's a catch. I owe them 17.5 from their initial investment that they invested months ago. They had paid 10 and I lied to them too that they made $7,000 on concerts to show I was successful. When I could have just told them what the situation was. Yeah, it's your family that have been like, oh, it's okay. So now I have zero dollars and at this point I'm taking whatever change we have from the club or whatever and going to the casino. Like I have a real gambling addiction by this point and I'm getting lucky with gambling.

I would go to the casino in Empire City and Yonkers for the electronic casino and because I was 18, I could only go to that one. I couldn't go to the Connecticut casinos. That's 21 plus. And I would play electronic backer at. And there would be some days I'd go with $500 and turn it into $20,000. I remember this one investor, I owed her $120,000, and I restructured her agreement to say I would pay her $20,000 each week to pay that money back. And you're thinking, I'm going to play back her at and pay back this investor. So the first day, the first Wednesday comes along that I owed the money, I go with $500 and I turn it in the $20,000.

So I call her and say, hey, I'll be there at 7 o'clock, no problem. Turn off my phone and I lose all the money. I have like 200 bucks left I kept doubling down and I got it to $30,000 left the casino at like 12 a.m. and showed up at her doorstep at like 130

knocking on her door with a shoe box in cash and gave her the first payment. She never got another payment again after that. Wow. Because you kept going back to the casino and you would lose money and then how did you feel when you lost money? I felt like shit.

Yeah. And the thing I would later learn like this is when I kind of realized it was a problem or this is why am I thinking got me into a trouble because so say I would go to the casino when I owned my next club after that, which we'll get into, and there would be times I'd owe artists money. So for instance, adventure club. You know the DJ adventure club. I booked a show with them and I had to pay them $20,000.

Now, they needed the money up front to perform and I kept getting advances on the ticket. So like my first advance was $5,000 because this show was selling phenomenal. So I go to the casino with the $5,000 and I turn it into the $10,000 deposit I left. But to get to turn it, to turn it. To turn, Any normal person would say, okay, I just double my money. This is great. Let's leave. But I'm a million dollars in debt. And also a gambling addict. Yeah. How do you stop?

You're going to keep going until you, you know, so I lose all the money. I then got another $5,000 advance. And then that happens. And then I get a $10,000 advance. And that happens. I turn it and it's great. Now looking back on it, had I just took each advance normally and let it sit there, I would have enough to pay them the whole $20,000.

Right. Instead, and this is where my luck for, fuels this whole story and my problems. I had booked them the show the week after Christmas. So everyone knows in the music business and the movie business, whatever, agents go on a two-week vacation right around Christmas time. So I sent them a fake receipt or whatever saying it got deposited so no one checked to show that the money made it or not. They didn't notice till two weeks after the new year after the show already performed. And that's when I paid them the money.

So the show was able to happen without them getting paid. but did they come to you and be like hey Ian turns out the money's none the thing you sent us a fake thing were they pissed to you they were pissed they said send the fucking money right now and then you go all right fine I'm sorry I had the money I said it was like accounting error and they got the money now I have more stories for that I'll get to that anyways back to this trip okay um with um the California and my aunt and uncle yeah so we need to come up with our plan is come up with 17,500 to go to California pay them and ask them for $200,000 to pay the drug dealers bam everything's good. That's a crazy amount of money to ask for your family, no matter how wealthy they are.

But we knew they had it and we figured because they're family, they would help us so I didn't die. Now, I didn't go to my dad, didn't tell him anything about this. He knows nothing about the drug dealer aspect. He knows about the other debt and the other business. Yeah. So I find this guy, this Italian former mob guy in Danbury, that had invested $10,000 into our business who we owed money to. And we are going through all of our contacts to raise the 17-5. I go through everyone. No one's giving me money. I said, listen, this is when I start telling the truth to people.

I owe dangerous people. But they're only concerned about getting their money back, which is fair. So they're not going to help me. So we go to this guy, this Italian guy, and we sit in his kitchen, and we tell him everything about the drug dealers. And he looks at us. And he's like, you guys are the two of the biggest fucking idiots I've ever met in, like, the Italian accent. Yeah.

And I thought he was like going to kill us right there, like, pissed about his money. It doesn't say anything about his money. He's like, John, who's my business partner, go over to that couch over there. John goes the couch, picks it up, and he said, there's 10 grand in there. And then he writes us a check for the 7-500. He said, listen, just give me the fucking money back, like this money. Don't worry about the rest of it, you owe me. Just get me this money back and pay those fucking guys that you owe and don't get in any more shit again.

He genuinely cared, genuinely looked out for us, wanted to help us. Wow. Understood the situation because he came from that lifestyle. didn't want to see anything bad happen to us. And he knew that you were in danger. He knew we were in danger. We told him everything. We go to Bank of America, exchange the money, whatnot, write it, this and that.

We then go on the way to the airport. We didn't have flights booked. We figured we'd just get a red eye or whatever at the, which we didn't realize what's going to cost us thousands of dollars at the ticket booth. On our way to the airport, because we only have 17.5, so we have no other money. So we're thinking we need operating capital. So what do we do? stop at the casino on the way.

Bro. Stop at the casino on the way the airport. And I'm thinking, okay, we're going to turn the money into more, so we have spending money while we're in California. And this is an addict brain. This is like gambling addict brain logic. This is not normal logic. Not normal logic.

And this is also, I've had success with gambling. I had won more times than I lost at that point. So I went to what was normal for me. Right, which is part of, I just think it's an important distinction because I think most people are listening to this being like, dude, you can't go to the casino once you got the money from the guy that's trying to help you like you can't do this but you're not thinking like a normal person you have would you do you have a gambling addiction is that I say I would I mean it's I'm good now right I'd work

through all that and I'd not like I could shut it off I'd mean I don't gamble anymore right now back in the day you definitely I think back of the day when you compare at the time I didn't think I would because I was able to turn it on and off but when it was on that was definitely an addiction because the shit I would do I mean like there were times like I would steal from my parents to go like and gamble and when money went, if I just asked them for the money, they would have gave. Where I was doing some crackhead shit, I was selling stuff at the club to gamble. Like what? Like coolers. I'd find scrapyard people.

So this is another crazy story. You know the chain smokers, right? Of course. Yeah, I owed them $25,000. From a different show? So I booked them on Thanksgiving Eve, and this was a great show. He made money. Awesome show. And because of my relationships now with these agencies and because of the partner,

we had started working with this other production company that was very reputable in the industry. And I was able to get away with paying them the bulk of that money after the show. We only had to pay $5,000 up front for them. That's great. And at the time, we paid $25 grand to book them. And that's a great price for the chain smokers.

This is three months before Closer dropped with Halls. Yeah, like they're big. Yeah, they're big because of selfie, but they're not big, big yet. But the show sells out instantly, whatever. And I don't have any accounting when I'm dealing with this club or whatever. So money's coming in and out,

and I'm trying to pay off past that. So I use the ticketing money to pay other expenses. So I owe the chain smokers money from November all the way until like March. And his agent, nicest people in the world, normally management's never CC'd on it. Eventually, like they were CCed on it by like the time March came around.

Of course. But I just kept delaying, delaying, delaying. They were super nice about it. And all these times I didn't pay artists, I never got blacklisted. because I always paid them. They always knew I was good for it. Right.

It just might take six months and a couple, give me some times. They knew I was going to pay for them. And I think they were kind of battling the fact that my concert venue was so popular and the artists like playing there. Oh, really? Blow would comment on the photos. He played there twice. We put on such a good show.

We spent everything on production. We would always take photos with them. They loved playing at my venue. And you took care of the artist. So they're like, yeah, it might take a little to get the money, but it always comes through and we have a great time. Yep, but to pay the chain smokers back, I was selling off coolers. I pawned a car that I had.

I was just doing whatever to give them and I finally paid them back. Wow. I was using ticketing money from other shows. But that was like the closest I've ever became to getting like black, blacklisted. And you know in this industry, you get blacklisted. You're done. Yeah, of course. There's no venue to operate.

Yeah, relationships are everything. So, okay, so now you take the money that you got from this guy. Yep, we go to the casino. To go see your aunt and uncle. Well, we stop at the casino. Yeah. And I lose pretty much everything except for $1,000. And my business partner, he always left me alone when I was playing because he knew I was doing what I was doing.

And he comes to me and he's like, you lost it all, didn't you? And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, you're such a fucking idiot. And he storms off. Now the casino at the time, because this is the end of the year, it's a week after Christmas, they were offering a bonus scratch off special or whatever. It's like some word game. And I go and I buy a couple tickets, put all the money we had left. And I play it.

I won $2,500. I take that money with whatever money I had left and I play, play, play, play. And I end up with like 18 grand. We leave. It's two in the morning or whatever. You feel high. You're like. Yeah, I didn't want to.

I knew to shut it off because we could not afford. We had to get the fuck out of the state because these guys are at this point. My phone's off. I'm not telling anyone where we're going. And once your phone's off, that's when you get in trouble. I told the one guy that was like connected all of us. I said, listen, I'm going to Cali to get the money. Please stall for me.

I got you. I sent the message. my famous thing was because I was so I didn't like confrontation I would send a text and then block the person so I didn't have to see their response because to me that was just like I never like look at you ever send like a email and you don't want to see the answer to that yeah and you just put your phone on the other side of room you're like when you're hitting up a girl or whatever like you don't want to see the response but you straight up would block them I would block them so I didn't get it but then eventually sometimes I would unblock them I get all the text messages and they're like hey you blocked me motherfucker like yeah like at this point you most look back and be like oh that was cowardly like I shouldn't I did some coward ass shit. Like, I was not a man in this situation. Right. So we get the 18,000, which is really not enough what we needed, but we said whatever, we booked the flights,

which are like two grand. It was crazy to go to Cali. We fly out there. We only left whatever that math is like 16 grand, and we needed some spending money. So we said to my aunt and uncle, here's 14. And they were fine with that. You give them 14 to try to make good on their initial investment.

Yep, we show up. Well, their initial was only, excuse me, only 10. Right. So they made four. Got it. So we're there for a week and we're too chicken every day to ask them for the money to say what we're really there for. I think my aunt's kind of suspect about it.

But yeah, we don't ask them for the money and we're staying there the whole week. Like we're doing bullshit. We get a driver again. We're going to strip clubs. Again? We're on cloud nine. We have no money. So like we're calling friends from home for money.

But like you never learn at this point like... I just kept doing dumb shit. Like you're a million in dead. These people are trying to kill you at no point. point are you like, okay, I got to be serious and buckle down. So on the last night when like we were actually out of money, we didn't have money to book the plane tickets. I had to ask like some random friend to buy us the plane tickets on the promise to pay him back. We stiffed our driver for like three grand. And, uh, you didn't pay them?

We paid them eventually like eight months later. But you're like, oh, I'll get you. Yeah, I said we'll get you. We bounced the PayPal e-check to him. Do you feel bad at this point? At that point in time, now or back then? Back then in the moment. Back then I was doing whatever I had to do to survive. I don't think I looked at other people's feelings or situation. Obviously, my opinion's different now. But back then, no, I didn't have any sense of my surroundings. I felt bad people lost money, but I didn't really pay attention to the extremes I was doing. I never analyzed that. So on the last night, we come clean and we tell them everything. My aunt and uncle. We're sitting out on the deck

overlooking the ocean. Tell him the whole story and what the situation is. And what do they say? So he's like, wow. And he looks it over. He said, I'm going to talk to your aunt, which is my dad's sister. We're going to talk to him and we stay another day and we'll get back to you with what our decision is. So we're thinking they're going to help us. Like, okay, they're going to figure it out. I talk to my dad on the phone.

He's like, wow, you guys got yourself into some shit. This is like the first time. that everything. Yeah, I told him more, but my aunt had told him too. So at this point, he knows everything. Yeah, at this point, he knows everything. He's like, I think they're going to help you out. Okay. Because they told him they're going to help me. So we have dinner again the next night, like before we're going to leave. And they say, we're going to give you $10,000 in four months, like when their taxes return or whatever gets back. That was a deal. Doesn't really help you that much. Didn't help us, didn't help us now, didn't help us in four months, whatever. We were fucked. We're dead to begin with. Yeah. So what we're going to say?

They didn't owe us anything. Right. So we flew back. And our first trip home was to the drug dealer's house in Stanford. Because we knew if we went back to like his enforcer or the guy that networked us with him, we needed to win back over this drug dealer that's owed all this money. Right. Because his goons are going to fuck you up.

Or just fuck me up. But if you can get him to kind of chill. So we sat there and we told him the whole story. And we came clean to have everything about him. and are you freaking out telling a drug dealer that you lost all of money? I had given up at that point. I thought we were dead. Like I had owned that we weren't coming out of there alive.

At this point, did you think you had done anything illegal? Not really with like the, I just figured like I lied. I didn't really know what the disparities are that I would later be charged with. And I knew I was like technically money laundering with all the drug dealers,

like cleaning their money because that was a benefit for them. So whenever they wanted to loan me money not to help, me or the interest rate. They wanted to loan me money so I could give it back to them and they can use it. Right. So that's a cost of doing business for them on certain aspects. And you're not even thinking about that through a legal lens. You just kind of know you're like fucking over people, but you're like, it's not really illegal necessarily. And I'm not, in my mind, I'm not intentionally fucking them over because I always had a plan. Right. The plan was always to make everything whole and to be good. Was there ever a point in your mind where you're like, I'm going to pay everyone

back and I'm going to go work at a regular job and I'm going to make I'm just going to live a normal life. Never. I mean, technically I won't say never because like a month before sentencing, I got a job at Whole Foods. Right. But that's after you get. No, no, this is before I got out of prison. I went back to Whole Foods after. Right. Okay. But this is way later on. But no, there was never, because there was so much money. I figured, you know, the only way I'm getting out of this is to do something bigger, which is when I later get the idea to reopen the whole tuxedo. And this is part of the gambling mindset. We were like, I need to do, I need to do moonshots.

Like this little, like, backerack gambling you're doing as a proxy for your whole life at this point. Yeah, I mean, the whole, the idea of chasing popularity, getting risking everything, that's what drove me, like that adrenaline rush. Of course. And that's something that would still later happen in prison and everything like that. Yeah. So we go and we meet with him and we survive the meeting. And I said, listen, you know, I want my dad to come and talk to you. And my dad goes to talk to.

to him and I don't know still to this day what was said between the two. Are you worried? Like you're sending your dad into a drug dealer's house who you owe money? My dad's got some game to him. You know, like he grew up in that era where drugs and whatever, you know, he's got the game and he went in there and he won the guy over and they formed like a father-son relationship after that meeting. Really? And that's what saved my life. Your dad wins over the drug dealer, bails you out again. He wins over all the drug dealers. and my dad saves my life and there's a newfound respect. He said, listen, Ian's not going to rat on you or snitch on you or anything like that.

You know, I can assure you that that's not going to happen. And there was, I think that and also they finally realized that I wasn't intentionally trying to fuck them over. Right. So there's a difference in this game. If I was someone that was trying to fuck them, then you have to prove a point. And they see your intention is to just try to make things whole because you've gotten yourself into this debt through these bad comments. You're not trying to just like take money from them and run. And then when the investigation started and stuff, everyone backed off of me.

Wow. But that's kind of what saved me. And what is your dad saying? Like you go home to sleep in your parents' place and is your dad like, hey, dude, I met with a drug dealer today to free you and save your life. Stop fucking around. I think he just felt terrible. Like right before that was heading up, before my dad knew about everything, I would go to

him on random days and I would say, dad, I need $10,000. And he would give it to me. Oh, really? And over this month, he gave me like $100,000. just to pay off drug dealers. And does he know it's for drug dealers? No, he doesn't know. He's just trying to help his son.

So all of this stuff's going on. And, you know, it's just, that's what happens. So now we're in beginning of 2014, investigation starting on the state level. Yeah. And I'm not talking to the old investors, not bringing any new money, LLCs are defunct, and I get the idea to reopen Tuxedo Junction.

Now. With the thought, I'm going to open this spot. Everything's going to be good. My plan was to open it, build it up, blow it up, sell it, pay everyone back. That was my mindset. And then I'll be good. I thought this was going to be my way out of this.

Don't you already own the Skybar? That folded. But isn't that connected to it? It is. So it's two different landlords. So I just, we combined it everything and turned it all into this name, Tuxedo Junction. But you're in the same area still.

Yeah, it's in Danbury. But the fact that the Sky Bar closed, did you not think, oh, when I buy this new place, it's also going to face the same problems? No, because my mind. mindset was different. One, we weren't doing liquor. So that alleviates that cost. I was able to negotiate rent for free rent because the old owners of this club, who are the original owners of it back in the day, but were now the landlords, needed the place cleaned out. So I said I would clean the place out, clean it out, do everything in exchange for some free rent for the first few months. And I already

had a relationship with the front landlord, who I was still paying on time through the business. And what money are using to revitalize this nightclub? So here's the thing. I open up this big nightclub at 18 years old with no money. My dad helps me, this is what I should have did with Skybar. I'm doing all the work from myself. I'm getting back into that hustler, physical labor. I'm doing the cleaning.

I'm doing the painting. Right. You're not paying some guy $6,000 to paint for you. I have a couple of friends helping me and I do everything. I'm living on a couch in there at this point. Right. I'm working day and night to get this place up and gone. Because this is your ticket to fix every problem.

Exactly. my dad's helping me with a little money for essentials and whatnot and I know that this is what I need to get out. And is there any part that your dad's like, hey, dude, you've kind of caught yourself no problem, give it a break, maybe just try to default on these loans and these investors and don't try to get into some more stuff. So that was the plan, like to help with the lawyer, but then the lawyer sends me a bill one day for $15,000. 15? Yeah, that promise of a million dollars in legal fees. that's what also brought me down the path because at that point I have no money

and he's charging me $400 an hour so then he starts suing me and now I'm getting sued by the lawyer So the lawyer that's supposed to represent you to help you against all these investors that you owe money to. And just talking to the police sues me and cuts me off

Your dad's friend. Yep, calls the police department says I'm not representing him anymore so now I'm going through this investigation with no lawyer And your dad is helping you with the money to open up the club That and the mafia guy he helps me because we explain the story to him.

Right. And he pretty much helps me finance the club when we need to get the acts. Okay. We beg an agency, AM only in New York, to give us DJX. We told them, we sent them a long email. I told them every artist I worked with. And my idea for this club was to book, because we're right in between New York City and Boston,

to book large-scale DJs to this nightclub in a town no one's ever really. heard of and kids would come and pay money for these tickets because they would want to see their favorite artists. Because at the only time you could see these artists were either at shrine at the nightclub in upstate Connecticut or Electric Zoo or the festivals, whatnot, you do and EDC. Yeah. And so we begged this agency. We said, listen, hear the pictures for the club because agents do not like sending an artist into a brand new nightclub. Unless like you're a reputable night club. Yeah, you got to build reputation. So we sold them on it. They charged us like double the cost, but we booked GTA and Congo Rock for the first show.

That's cool. First show with production and everything costs us like a crazy amount of money. We lost a lot of money this first show. Bro, come on, Ian. Stupid money. And this is still your dad injecting money. My dad and this other guy that was helping us. Does your dad know about the other guy putting money in?

Yeah, everyone's connected. We're all working together. And this is all legit. The finances are completely separate. I'm now keeping track of the records of the business. I'm keeping books. I learned how to use quick books. But at this point, you've had like, what, a dozen shows that haven't really turned a profit?

Why do you think this one's going to be different? So I'm going back to what worked for me before. The Teen Nights Tuxedo's was where I started. So in my heart, I felt that if I get back into this nightclub where it all started and I did the work in the promulgown myself, the first show only bombs because the expenses were just way too high. And it was also the first show we've ever done. So we need to prove to our audience that this was legit. And people were finding it sketchy that GTA, who was a big DJ duo, was coming to Danbury at Tuxedo Junction, which had a bad rep. Right.

So we spent a lot of money into production and taking video of it. And that's when we asserted ourselves as a dominant up-and-coming venue. So your thought was, I'm going to take the L on this, but it's going to be worth it in brand equity to then do more shows. Exactly. And Congo Rock ends up going to Rhode Island the next day and does the show with this big promoter called Envy Concepts, who is now a part of like Big Night Live. And he says, hey, guys, I was at this venue last night, which is like, they're awesome. Great hospitality, productions, insane. It's a new upcoming venue.

Okay. They call me the next day, and they become my official talent buyer for the club. And I am now able to book the biggest acts in the world at these insanely cheap rates to Danbury, Connecticut. Okay, so things are working out. Your initial investors, that you still owe all this money to, they have lawyers, they have a letter sent from a lawyer. Yep. And then the lawyer turns on you. They're all just kind of in limbo right now.

dealing with the police because the police are saying we're investigating, you're just dealing with us now. Okay, so there's an open state level investigation with all the investors. Yep. The mob guys and all the gangsters and shit that are, that they're off my back. They're off your back because you tell them and your dad kind of wins them over. Yeah. And then now you have money for this new venture from your dad and another guy who's willing to help you. Yes. And now things are starting to look up. You have a good agent that's helping you book legit acts. Yeah. Everything is you turning around. Ian Bick's going to be okay. Yes, but the problem is. I was still trying to make right on the old money.

So I kept, had I just totally cut off all the old money and, or at least had an advisor step in or someone say, listen, you know, we need to put this to aside. And I was just kept trying to fix everything

because I figured if everyone gets paid back now, the faster they get paid back, the faster the investigation stops this and that. Right. So I'm taking money that should have been used. So say if a show makes 50 grand, you're going to use that to put into a new show or to pay for those artists or whatever.

I'm paying back old debt. So I'm mixing good money with bad money and I'm never getting ahead. To pay back these old investors. Yep. So I just, I start owing new vendors money and then obviously not every show is going to win. So on the on the nights that there was a loss, like the first few months, our production costs were high, our rent was high. There are some really high costs. It's a brand new business.

And I have no operating capital really. Right. And does your dad, does your dad know about the other investors that you want to do? He knows about everything. So at this point is he like, hey, dude, stop taking the money from these investors. investments, let this go to court and we can settle with them. He never said that, no. No.

And I never really asked him. I was just in charge of everything. Gotcha. And he's, you know, dealing with city officials who are now after me for trying to shut the club down, do all this stuff. Right. While this is going on, I get a subpoenae to the Department of Banking in Connecticut. Okay.

I didn't even know we had a Department of Banking. And me and my business partner both get subpoenos. Yeah. And he testifies on the first day. And I was like, how did everything go? He said, good. And at this point, we formed an agreement that I said, I'll take the heat. for everything. Just stay in my corner. You know, I'll take the heat. I don't want you to get in

trouble or anything. Just put the blame on me. But just don't go against me. Just like I'll own up to and say you weren't involved and play it like that. Right. He testifies whatever, nothing comes. Next day I go. I go without a lawyer because I'm genuinely just trying to tell him the whole story. I bring all the documents they request. I go through every single detail, every single investor, minus the shady people. But I piece everything together for them because at that point, they didn't know the pieces. And I testified for like eight hours. To the Department of Banking.

Yeah. Tell them everything. Tell them everything without a lawyer. And at the end of this, they said, listen, there's these two guys I want to meet with you. They bring me to a room. And it's these two guys that show badges that say they're U.S. postal inspectors. And I'm looking at them like, I don't know what the fuck a U.S. postal inspector is. Like, this has to be some type of joke.

They say they're federal agents. Why would you think it's a joke? I don't know. I didn't know what U.S. postal inspectors were. You think it's a prank? You think you're on. punked today. So apparently they were listening to the whole interview.

Yeah. I didn't know that at the time. And they entrapped the shit out of me. And you thought by telling them. I was a 18 year old kid. You're right. Just turned 19 trying to make this right. And that's all I wanted to do.

If I tell them, they can help me make it all go away. Exactly. So I sit with these postal inspectors. They play the nice guy role. They say, listen, we'll help you through this process. You know, you're not in any trouble or anything. We got this. Just tell us what happened.

They knew the answer to every. single question I, they had for me, or at least they, by that point, they had a bunch of records and stuff. Yeah, and they've, and you've admitted to breaking the law. And what they did was, they didn't give me a target letter saying I was under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Justice until after their meeting, which is why I beat this or won this charge at court, because they charged me after this meeting with lying to them. But they never gave me, they never told me I was under investigation, nothing. They were trying to be my friends. They gave me their cards. They gave me the subpoenas and everything.

They said, listen, you're officially under investigation after this meeting. So that's when I was like, holy shit, this is the FBI. Like, I need a lawyer. I go right into my car and I'm in Hartford, Connecticut, and I start Googling good fraud attorneys. I find one, Jonathan Einhorn, and I email him and emails me back right away. We got on a call. I tell him like, this is a million miles per hour because I'm like nervous, sweating bullets. Like, this is scary.

He's like, Ian, calm down. Do not talk to them. now the FBI and the postal inspectors are blowing up my phone and I got instructions from my because they were supposed to meet up with me in Danbury to get all these documents or whatever right and I text him like because he he was trying to guilt trip me that the agent he's like listen I thought we had a deal yeah you know like you're going to help us this and that I said listen I got an attorney and that's when the FBI investigation officially starts I meet with the attorney I tell him everything and my dad's with me so this is the first time my dad's like really hearing like every deal detail because I had to tell the attorney every single detail. Right. And now you're like, okay, I'm in deep shit. I got to come clean. So you talk about the mob guys. I talk about everything. Everything. Tell him everything. I tell him my partner's involvement. He sets us up a meeting with the FBI to do a reverse proffer. He's a very well-known attorney. He's connected with all them, whatever. And you already tell him that, hey, I already

talked for eight hours. Yeah, which I never should have done. Right. Without an attorney because I just gave him so much ammunition. But my logic was a guilty person. would never have done that. I literally went there so innocently. I didn't lie at all during the thing. I just told the story. Because you didn't really know what laws you had broken at the time.

Exactly. So we go to this meeting and this is when I really know shit's bad. We go to this meeting at the U.S. Attorney's Office and we're sitting around this big table like a boardroom table.

There's 30 people in this room. It's me, my dad and my lawyer at one end. And then you have like three or four FBI agents. You have two or three IRS agents. You have the postal inspectors. You have two U.S. attorneys.

You have all the kids interning at the U.S. attorney's office. And then you have like court reporters or whatever. There's like 15 people in this room. There's a lot of people. And they're looking at reverse proffers when you're like snitching on someone or snitching on yourself

or bringing a case to court. This is their get a reverse proffer. They're telling you what they have on you. So they're outlaying their case to us, this and that. They're explaining the whole thing. I don't really give a shit about it. I'm on my phone.

Um, this guy, this, the U.S. attorney, we start calling the silver fox. Yeah. Because he has silver hair. Yeah. The glasses. He's the silver fox. He's like a, uh, very well-seasoned U.S. fraud attorney. Um, he gets eventually promoted to like head of the division.

And this guy is at, he does not like me from day one. He's after me from day one. And what do you mean you're on your phone? I'm on my phone, like promoting on social media of the party. We had a sold out show the next night. So you're not taking it seriously at all. No, I'm in a black t-shirt and a khaki pants. I wasn't dressed up for this.

And what? What did you think was worst case scenario? I never, throughout this whole process, I never thought I'd get jail time. Right. They offered me a plea deal for jail time. And I was, my lawyer and I sat with them,

we said, listen, I will happily plead guilty. We know people are owed money. We don't think it's criminal, but Ian will plead guilty as long as there's no jail time and they wouldn't sign up for that. They wanted jail time in this.

Right. They were not taking any deal. They would have saved all the money they used to prosecate me, everything. If, you know, they didn't if they agreed to jail time no jail time but they didn't right so that's when we go and we take it to court and we go to trial my lawyer believe strongly that this was chalked up to a kid that

mishandled money but it was not criminal like it wasn't he didn't set out with the criminal intention to defraud anyone okay did this turn into like a Ponzi scheme accidentally yes right but it wasn't we didn't set out with criminal intent and he felt that that would exonerate you from the charges they had out exactly a big thing at trial was was promoting like my age, promoting that parents were grown adults giving a kid, you know, 17, 18 years old, all this money at this crazy interest rate. Right. I think a lot of the problem is that we're a one-man team against the United States government.

They have 50 people coming to court every day. Yeah. You're up on an uphill battle. I mean, I testified for two days. And you also outlined your whole case against them when you talked to them. And then the biggest thing was my business partner struck, they were putting pressure on him. They eventually got to like his aunt and uncle,

started threatening them. They play dirty the feds. This is what they do. And he takes a deal where he's going to testify in court against me in exchange for immunity. He just had a state charge, a misdemeanor for lying to the Department of Banking about some clothing or whatever that we bought.

So he gets no jail time, comes off scatch free and testifies for two days. My lawyer has a field day with him because we proved like a hundred times he lied on the stand. When these defendants get immunity deals and stuff, they say whatever they need to say. Right. You know, people will say, oh, they'll just get charged with perjury. But rarely, rarely are they getting, it's so hard to prove, you know, because it's just he said, she said.

Yeah. Wow. So now you go through all this, like the case is getting built against you. Is this involving any of the mob guys? This is just the initial investors with the 500,000. I never talked to anyone about, like, dangerous people, never mentioned I was threatened. and I wasn't going to throw anyone under the bus. Wow.

Never tried to save myself. Never tried to say, oh, I know these guys that are dealing drugs. I know this, never that. Right. Never. You know, I'll die with that. Wow. And so while I'm on trial against the federal government,

well, they eventually indict me in January 2015, after a year of investigating. They raid my house, guns blazing, like four in the morning, five in the morning. I had actually just came back from the casino, ironically. And I went to bed for like a,

hour and then they barged in house surrounded cars up and down the street so you were at the casino like trying to make money all the time that's how I was funding the club and its early stages right um because we're booking these big acts and there I would also be getting arrested some nights too um I got arrested on liquor charges because we're selling liquor without a permit just to make money we're selling bottles one night we emptied all the red Gatorade bottles and took jungle juice and poured it in and sold it for five dollars once the cop started uh coming on to us right We do crazy shit like that.

You know the DJ duo dubs? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did a show with them and I got arrested in the middle of their show. The cops raided the place for this liquor charge. So while you're being investigated, you're still throwing shows. So yeah, I ran the club all up until the month before I got sentenced to prison. And so the thought is to try to make money on the shows to then do what? I wanted to sell the business.

I wanted to build the business up so I could sell and pay everyone back. That was my dying goal. And so all these people with the case. against you, are you trying to pay off that debt at all? Or are you just letting that be? Once the investigation starts, I got court orders. I can't communicate with them. That's a condition of release.

Gotcha. So when I get arrested, we had a deal with the government that I would turn myself in if there were charges filed because I knew for months I was getting charged. We just didn't know how many charges or what the situation was. Right. And they didn't honor that deal. They did not like I was still running the club. They raid the place, arrest me, bring me out in handcuffs.

the detective that started the whole investigation comes like a scene in the movie and he's like you remember me mr bick and um like yes i remember you and they bring me down i get arraigned i'm on a 250 000 bond um in federal court you don't actually put up the money um you just like sign like my dad signed for his house or whatever that they could go after him if um they use the house as collateral yeah but they're not you're not like putting up like a lien or anything or whatever like that just like they can go up for it right um and then i had my conditions a bond they banned me from social media because they didn't want me reaching out the victims but they really just didn't want me running the club they were trying to disable me for the club and why do you think that was they didn't like it they didn't like what i was still like taunting like i was still in the news like the second i got released from court i did an interview with mbc and that just pissed them off like it makes sense you kind of wrote it in the investigation's face they did not like is the agency

like concerned about giving you DJs and like giving you acts considering that you're under investigation When I got indicted, my first call was to our co-promoter at Envy Concepts. I said, listen, I'm out. We still got shows to do. Let's do it. He said, okay, and he smoothed everything over with the agents. Yeah. I mean, that's something I'm always curious about to this day.

Like, these are the biggest agents and agencies in the world. Like, what did they see in me or what did, like, why, you know? Like, why didn't they cut ties with me? And I mean, I guess you were paying them. They were still getting paid, yeah. Right. And so, and was there any issue with the shows? Like, were all those shows making money?

Um, you would, you would have some winners and you would have some losers. That's the nature of the game. Not every show is going to win. Got it. After we did the NBC thing, I sold out like three or four shows. Right. Um, I was getting a lot of press, but also while this is going on, um, they kept trying to violate my bond. Because I had changed my name from Ian Bick to Ian Parker. Right. Because you need social media to promote the club. Right. And I had the business pages. So you break the bond order. Yep. They were always trying to violate me. Eventually the judge rules in my favor. Well, you violated yourself by going on social media. But I had, it was something I had to do. Now, at this point... I mean, you could have got someone else, like your business partner, someone else to... No, they wanted me to delete the pages. Oh, wow.

That was the court order. And you felt like that was unfair. I felt that was illegal for them to order to delete the pages. Right. So that was the thing. So probation kept trying to violate it. And once again, authorities telling you to do something. They're making a rule against you specifically.

Eventually, they ruled that I couldn't have my personal pages, but the business pages I could have, but they just had to be monitored by a third party to make sure I wasn't talking to witnesses. Okay. So if you violate the deals of your bond, what happens then? Do you lose that? So they try to violate me like four or five times over social media. I win every time and eventually the court rules I can have all my social media.

Okay. Now, at the same time this is going on, the city of Danbury is extorting me and blackmailing me for EMS services. So by law, they're supposed to provide ambulance services and stuff. well they come up with this idea one night they said I have to start hiring them and paying them privately and now I'm paying them three to five thousand dollars every night every time I do a show which is eating into profits causing me to lose money

yeah by not by racking up these bills so they would stay off my back it was pretty much if I didn't pay for them they were raiding the place they were going to shut it down this and that and are you going to all the shows like are you partying I'm at every show no I don't party no you're not running it you're not drinking No, there'd be nice back-to-back shows. I don't sleep. I'm cleaning the venue because I don't have much operating money. Okay, so you're taking it seriously, though.

You're like, I'm going to get this business out. At this point, you're not doing parties for yourself. I'm not drinking. I'm in grind mode, man. Like, I'm hustling. I'm 19 years old. I'm cleaning the bathroom. Let me tell you, girls that go to raves are the most disgusting thing ever.

I'm like cleaning the bathrooms. I'm on hustle mode, picking up artists, doing whatever I have to do. Okay. And so they keep raiding the place, the city. And at this point, I'm not selling. I'm not selling liquor illegally anymore or whatever, because I have too much heat on me. I can't afford to get arrested or anything because now I'm on federal bond and I would go to prison if I violated that.

And I stopped going to the casino because when the conditions or release is to stop going the casino. Oh, really? So I, so they bring me to court because I start bouncing checks with the EMS service. Because I can't afford to pay it. Like, it's crazy. Eventually, they tried to violate me over that and the judge rules that it was illegal for them to mandate me to pay for the EMS service.

Right. And that's when it stops right there. And I make good on like the last payment or whatever that ends that. Okay. Now this whole time, this whole year of 2015, because the trials end of 2015, I'm just this 19 year old kid running this music venue that's getting bigger and bigger by the day in Connecticut.

Getting legit acts. Legit acts, chain smokers, Steve Ioki, you know, Zed's dead. Blow, dubs, yeah, like crazy shows we're doing after movies all on YouTube like photography, everything. Like these are real world acts. I'm running, it's every kid's dream

to be running a music venue. Right. So this is what you always wanted to do. Yeah. Except at this point you had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And this is what I should have done with that initial investment.

If I had taken Henry's money to form this idea and then somehow got a liquor license on it, it would have been huge. Right. And you would have been fine. It would have been fine. But I didn't.

And I think it always resulted back to to I got lazy. I didn't stick to my roots of what I was good at promoting and working myself and having someone else deal with the business aspect of it. Yeah. And the second I got back to that, things started working out. But it was too late. Got it. Now, by the fall, I'm still in a bad financial mess and I just get found guilty on like half of the charges in court.

And I start going in the casino again. And I'm going against the conditions of my release. I'm sneaking out of state. By this point, my license is suspended to it. in Connecticut, I had a Camaro and a Mustang. Like from a year prior, I kept getting speeding tickets going to New York. Never paid them. They racked up. Licensed gets suspended. So I start taking either the train or a taxi cab for $100 to New York. I put my phone on airplane mode. I wear like all black and a hood and I go to the casino to gamble. Can you leave the state?

No, not legally. So, but this is again, addict mindset. I'm doing whatever, selling whatever, using concert money to go. I would win probably 60% of the time, lose 40%. And you're trying to get this money for the club to put into the club. Yeah. Is the club making money at this point? First year was a loss. We took probably like $150,000 loss the first year. The second and third years were profitable years.

Okay. It was on the up and up. It's a normal business. Yeah, of course. Yeah. You're going to lose for a while. Yeah. I was able, like the first year I was paying like $8,000 for production.

I got that down to $2,000 or $3,000. Like I learned, you know. Your margins get better over time. Yeah. I mean, and like the electric was high. I figured out costs. I mean, like, I don't know if. you saw that video, but I fucked over the electric company at one point. Yeah, that shit's crazy.

Like you have this electric bill, but then you basically take wood and hide the meter. Yep. I put all this wood in front of the meter and people were like coming at me on TikTok saying, oh, they could shut it off or whatever digitally, but I don't think they could back then. I took all this wood, put it in front, got away with it for like six or seven months. Crazy. And what I didn't tell in that story is when they shut it off. I had to go and rent a commercial generator because that was the night of our carnage show. I had a rent and the show had to go on. So I found some electrician that randomly helped me hook up this, you know, it was like a $2,000 a day generator to our building. Because the electricity was cut off.

Yep. And I needed to do the show. So that was just more. I always like when I cut corners, it ended up costing me more money. Yeah, because you were trying to, you would always find a way to make money. And that was an expensive way to get there. So this happened about three times, by the way, this whole electric fiasco where I had a generator and put it in. And then the city would come.

and they said, well, you didn't have a permit, but they didn't shut me, because there's like a loophole with it. If the work's already done, if they come and inspect it right then and clear, it's okay. Obviously, if it's not safe, they wouldn't allow it, but the hookup was fine if it was done correctly. Right. So I would do that. And now while this is going on, while I'm on trial, I get a job at a Chinese restaurant to help fund the club too. I'm this little white kid working in downtown Danbury at a Chinese restaurant. So I'm doing that, and I'm sometimes sleeping on the couch at the club, and I'm walking to the dollar store down the road.

and with a red shopping cart looking like a homeless person, filling it up with like candy, water, soda, gum to sell at the club. And I'm just like, I'm in grind mode, just doing whatever I could. I'm very overweight at this point, like 260, 270 pounds. Oh, wow. Eating really bad. I do have a girlfriend that I met through the club who's like very loyal, like sticking by my side throughout this whole thing.

And I'm just like this kid who the whole outside of the world thinks I have everything when I really don't. And I'm just like struggling. And like I'm very depressed. and like trying to keep it going. Yeah, because now at one point you were like, oh, I'm this whiz kid that's thrown all these events, making all this money.

I used to be up 60,000, and I was gonna be the next Zuckerberg, next Scooter Braun, next whatever, and now you're in like a semi-profitable club with this trial against you, federal agents on your back. Now you're like, you owe money technically to your dad who loaned you money. I owe money to everyone, everyone in their mother. Yeah.

Vendors. And the only thing keeping me going is this idea that I can one day get out of this. Which is that gambling mindset. This is like the idea of a gambler. It's like I'm going to, I lost all this money, but I swear the next spin, I'm going to fucking make it. Yeah, I mean, I just kept taking out the club.

See, the club, I was in a high risk business where I had to keep, it took money to make money. So I had to keep borrowing more money and I keep doing this and it's just this giant hole and it's just a money pit. But you love the high risk. Like that's a part of it. And I also, dude, the popularity and the clout and everything. Like I had, whenever I announced an artist.

people were going crazy they were talking about me on social media whatever yeah like I was I was the king like I was this king promoter in Connecticut and like that feeling like no one to have that like all that energy and popularity on you like it's insane especially to have at that young age okay so now you go to trial are you taking trial more seriously now like before you were on your phone not really give it a fuck trying to promote parties I mean I was fighting for my life at trial like this is literally my freedom like you see it on the table like oh I actually might go to prison No. I mean, we always thought even if I lost, I wouldn't get prison. And I still think to this day I probably wouldn't have. I caused that by going out of state. They caught me. My bond got revoked. It's a gamble. Yeah. So that happens a year after the trial. But we thought even if I lost a trial, I would get probably probation or house arrest. And you plead not guilty.

Plead not guilty. On what grounds? Just like trying to maneuver. Just to all that there's 15 federal charges. I was indicted on 10 counts of wire fraud. four counts of money laundering and one count I'm making a a false statement to law enforcement officers the false statement being that first postal inspector meeting gotcha and altogether if you add up all that time

it would add up to like 125 years in prison but the news media puts that out for clickbait really my guidelines were like after trial like nine to 11 years even that though at 18 that's a long fucking time especially if you are not really sure of what crimes you're committing up until that point

yeah and obviously the wire fraud is from all the investors that thought they were investing in electronics business that was going somewhere else and then paying them back with money from other investors and then the money laundering money laundering so they that's not your typical money laundering of like drug dealing or anything like that that's they were claiming that the wire fraud is the ill-gotten gains like that money and then if I use it to buy a jet ski that's a money laundering because that's concealing the money that's stolen got it so there so technically it's stolen money and then you're buying a jet ski or you're buying a car or whatever.

And that's a money laundering. Gotcha. Yeah, I can see kind of what you're talking about because in my mind I'm like, I don't know if that's money laundering. But then I guess technically you break it down and you're like, oh, no, it is. But not as an 18 year old kid or a 17 year old kid doing this.

Right. I mean, I could definitely see that like using investor funds to buy personal items and toys is wrong. Agreed. But I don't, I didn't see that as money laundering. But now you explain it. I just feel like that was a double charge, you know? Like the wire fraud totally fair,

but the money laundering aspect, I don't know. I see, right, because it's like, yo, I'm already floating the money around. Yeah. But I guess they're going to get you on everything they can get you on. Yeah, all they need in these cases, like when you see someone pled guilty to one count, they were probably threatened with 15.

That's what they do. They'll overcharge, they'll stack up as much as possible. Just to get one guilty plea. They just need one to stick to get the jail time. That's it. Okay. You could have 100 chargers get found guilty on 99. You're still getting the same jail time that you did at 100.

So now you're being sentenced, like all of this image stuff is kind of falling apart. I think it was very defeating. Like, I was very cocky, did not think I was going to prison. And what happened was my friends that were working for me at the club. This was in 2016. I just turned 21. They were the only ones that knew, along with my dad, that I was going out of state to gamble to win money for the club. And did they tell you, like, bro, don't stop pushing it?

No, they drove me. Some of them drove me. And, yeah, they were my drivers. They were loyal to me at the club. We were friends. They were helping me. They knew I generally did not set out. when all the kids from Danbury High School

and whatever were talking shit about me online these new kids, new friends were defending me. I feel like I went through so many phases and life of friends because this whole story elapses over different time periods. But it's all within the same time period

and there's all these different characters everyone overlaps and the only one that pieces it together is me. I'm the middle of this giant web. And so these kids get the idea they thought I was running the club like shit not business minded, which was fair because I was in such a big hole from the past.

So they get the idea to call the FBI. Who? My friends that were working for me at the club. Why? They call the FBI and they tell them, they work out a deal with the FBI that they would give up what they had on me and they can take over the club.

So this was their new plan. So the FBI was thrilled to hear this information that I was going out of state against my bond because they had tried for five months or five different hearings. To get you on the social media thing to get you on anything. Exactly.

So now when the FBI gets this information, they sit on it for like six months. Are they driving you knowing that they're going to sell you out? I think they eventually, so I quit for a while. So when I was driving in like the beginning of 2016 with them, then I stopped until the end. Like I stopped cold turkey. I was like, I can't do this anymore. This is too much stress, too much weight on my shoulders, the lying, probation and everything like that. And so they give this information to them.

The FBI finds out I'm not still going. and they just, they sit on the information because they wanted to, I read the reports later on that they wanted to actually investigate it because they can't go to court and lose again. Right. So my friends, I wanted to take the club, didn't think it was going to take so long. So they're sitting, working with me this whole time that they're selling me out to the FBI.

Whoa. I'm with them. And eventually we have a falling out over something entirely different. And I didn't realize until I went to prison that they were the ones that ratted on me when I got the documents. So the whole time their work snitches are working right under me. against me and I thought they were my friends. That's crazy.

And eventually we just had a falling out over something entirely different. We went our separate ways and that was it. Do you think they have a justification? Like devil's advocate against yourself. Do you think they were like, look, Ian was doing this, this and this to us. So we sold them out because we were going to take over the business and he was being an asshole anyway. Like did they try that? I always tried to help them.

Like I didn't do any. And I'm not just saying this to make me look good. But I mean, I didn't have much to offer them except for like helping them. like the best they could get into the industry. They met artists. They built a career around it. Right. Some of them have successful careers now because of their ties they made.

Like, you know, this industry is all like networking and connections and stuff. And they didn't, I didn't give them a good enough reason to go to the level of ratting someone out on that level. Wow. I didn't screw with their money. I didn't owe them money. I didn't disrespect them. They just, they wanted to take the club. Crazy.

And so eventually what happens is I get a hearing. an emergency bond violation hearing. I go to the court with my dad that day and the judge tells me the party's over. Wow. And that I got remanded into custody and my dad had to go back to my mom and say, hey, Ian's not coming home.

And then I was in a detention center in Rhode Island for three weeks and then three weeks later, I got sentenced to three years in federal prison. Wow. And I was 21 years old. That's crazy. So you were already guilty at that point. You were already convicted of those charges. Almost a year later, yeah.

But weren't sure of what the sentencing would be. you didn't think it would be jail time. Yeah. They get you on the bond violation. Government asked for 70 years at court. Guidelines were 9 to 11. Government asked for 7 to 8. Judge departed down because of my age.

In this sense, it helped me that I went to trial because it understood the judge's mentality. It was a very fair judge. He understood my whole case and everything. Right. But what hurt me was he got pissed that in all fairness that I was disobeying the court's order. So had you never gone out of town? I don't think I would have got you caught for that. Yeah, I wouldn't have got jail time.

Like a fine, you would have to pay restitution. Restitution, I would say house arrest. Right. I don't, or at worst a year and a day. Wow. I don't see myself getting three years. Because if three years and a year of house arrest is a punishment for doing all that disregarding the court, one could only think that had I been a perfect honorary person,

maybe even closed the club, got a job. I mean, I got a job for the last month, but that was just trying to save myself. Right. Chinese restaurant, whole food, like that kind of stuff. But had I closed a club right after trial and said, hey, I'm going to work a job and try to make this right, I probably would have got away from the jail time. Do you get their perspective that like while you're being investigated, you're still like throwing these parties and partying and blah, blah, blah, like even if you were in a different industry but doing the same thing, optically, it probably wouldn't look the same. Like, do you get their point of view? I 100% get their point of view.

But I also, my mindset was that's what I needed to do at the time to succeed. I was going through like the gambling and everything because I believed in. my heart at the time that Tuxedo Junction, the nightclub I was running, was the only way out of this situation and was the only way in my mind to make it right. There was no thoughts of a movie deal. There was no thoughts of a TV deal. There was no thoughts of TikTok or anything at that time. Right. My thought was very, I didn't see down the road. I didn't look at different options. I looked at all I have right now is a nightclub. This is what I'm going to do with it. Right. And that's what drove me to whatever ends if I had to go to the casino to win my

to pay an artist it all led back to whatever it took to keep the nightclub rolling now the victims the people that had invested all this money to you both like the mob people but also like your friends and your friends parents did like did you feel like they knew that something fishy was up considering how their returns were i think a lot of people didn't bat an eye towards it until it was bad until things got bad they get a letter from a lawyer being like we don't know what's going on i think they no one asked questions i think out of all these investors one person actually took the time to sit down with us look at spreadsheets look at all that which obviously we faked right um but everyone else it was just about the returns got it wasn't what

i was doing i could have been selling drugs they just they cared about the money and a lot of that came out in court now who were these people like i don't know obviously you might not be able to talk about them but like were they like old pensioners that gave up their last dollar to you know try to make an investment or were they like wealthy people i'm trying to like get an idea of who they were uh i I would say about half of them are wealthy people that like had the excess money into investments, like them losing. So like the average person lost probably $20,000. Right. Or maybe I think it went from like anywhere from 10 to $20,000.

One person maybe lost 30 to 40 or 50. And then Henry's was the biggest losing the 225. Yeah. No one lost like their life savings over it. And I'm not trying to downplay like what someone's losses. Yeah, you shouldn't defraud people. Yeah. Losing money is losing.

money. Yeah. So I don't really like looking at it like that, but it's not like someone was out on the street because of it too. Right. Like in that sense of it. Got it. But I don't want to like downplay that in any way saying, oh, it's okay because they were like... I mean, $250,000 from this dude, Henry that like got the money from a settlement. Like he got injured and then the money got taken from that fund and like that sucks. The Henry's situation is just like such a different perspective because the problem with Henry's thing is his was a perfect legitimate investment that he going into it, he could lose money, whereas the others were guaranteed money.

Right. The problem with Henry's investment is it's so commingled with all this fraudulent activity that with the electronics and this and that, you know, so it's hard to differy entry to the truth. So like in the court system, that money gets added to restitution because even though I was found not guilty

or a mistrial on it, because it's from the same time period, it can still get lumped together. Right. And you were lumping it all together in that same pool and that same bank account. But like I will always stand firm to this day that Henry's money was a legitimate investment.

He got the concerts he was promised for. It lost money. And, you know, it's fair that he deserves money back because of the lies and not the truthfulness of it. Right. But if there was any other situation, he would have lost his money fair and square. Right.

But you didn't communicate properly what was going on. Agreed. Yeah. And I felt bad about losing the money. So like I'll always say to this day, like I would give him the money back if I had it. Right. Had you just been up front with him,

maybe that money wouldn't have been considered in the restitution. I think they would have counted it anyways. I got you. Yeah, just because of how the court system works and everything. Got you. Okay. So now you get sentenced. You're in prison.

Yeah. Not coming home. It's all kind of finally dawning on you. Like, how do you feel in that moment? It didn't really hit me until probably like a few weeks in. Like the first night, I couldn't really sleep in prison.

I was with like some crack head that was like just coming down from a high. And he was like bouncing off the walls. I couldn't eat. He's like, yo, you're going to eat your cheese sandwich? I was like, here, take it. And you're sleeping on this hard bunk. And it's like what you see in TV. Like you're locked into this cell door shuts.

The first two days, like you're in the cell because you have to get your TV test. You can't get released out into the general population. You're getting processed in. It was a shitty situation. I was in a private jail. And it sucked. The food sucked. You barely fed anything.

Medical sucks. There was no good books or anything. And funny. story is when I got to the pot, I ran into that kid that sold us the electronics. He had got, because he ends up getting charged and indicted for Henry's money in a separate fraud scheme. And he takes a plea deal, gets 27 months in prison. But he's in the prison that I'm in, the detention center, because his bond got revoked for getting like a DUI or something like that while on bond. What do you say when you see him? We catch up and whatnot. Just funny that like

our worlds collide again. And they were calling him, he was like running the joint. They called him Harry Potter. He was running like the gambling tickets and everything like that. Oh wow. Were you angry at this point? Like damn, I got put in prison. These people flipped on me. Like I definitely harbored some resentment towards the whole prison thing. Yeah. I don't think it wasn't until like the end of it or even when I got out that I really kind of like let everything go. Right. And didn't hold like any anger or resentment. I definitely harbored a lot of anger towards my business partner. because I didn't think it was fair that he got off easy when we were 50-50 partners. Right.

And it just wasn't a fair situation. Gotcha. So now you're in this main prison. You get transferred out? So I go from, I had quite the federal prison experience. So over the course of my prison stay, I go from Rhode Island to Brooklyn. I was at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. From there, I go to the Fort Dix Low Security Prison in,

New Jersey. From there, I go to the Danbury low security prison in Danbury, my hometown. That's kind of bringing it full circle. I went from owning the nightclub in Danbury to being a federal inmate. Right. From there, I go to Philadelphia. I then go back to Brooklyn. And then from Brooklyn, I go to Chicago. And then, oh, I go to Oklahoma City first. Then I go to Chicago. And then from Chicago, I end up in Wisconsin, which was a federal prison camp. I did my last year there. And came home in January of 2019. Why did you get transferred so much? So when I made it, it was normal to go from the private center to the Brooklyn Detention

Center. That was in the FBOP's rule. And the Brooklyn Detention Center, is that like a high risk? That's everyone. They're mixing everyone. That's just a Gen Pop. Yep, Jen Pop. You're locked down like eight hours a day or whatever. You do not want to be in a detention center. That's like what you see on TV. And how long were you there the first time? Like a month. So I was a month at the private place, a month in Brooklyn.

Right. You're just waiting there in transit. That's not your designated spot. You're waiting to get designated. And you get designated just a Fort Dix's a low security prison. This is like some Harry Potter shit. They're basically just like, all right, we're going to put you sorting hat. He's going to Fort Dukes.

So I should have gone to a camp, but because of my age, my points were high. I was over the threshold to get to a camp. So I was at a low security prison. That's behind the fence, not a country club whatsoever. You're mixed with sex offenders, drug dealers. There could be guys that were there for murder. It's anyone that's serving 20 years or less. their sentence. Okay.

Is at this Fort Dixlow security prison. Got it. And but when you're at the Brooklyn Center, that's a legit, like, that's, those are people pending trial. Okay. But that could be anyone. That could be anyone. Yeah, they can mix you.

That's why they'll keep like high profile celebrities in like the shoe, a separate unit. And are they choosing up? Like, is there gang activity at that prison? Yeah, there's some gang activity, but it's very like, you don't have, no one has much property. Like there is some commissary. People have hustles, but there's not much you could get into, not really much contraband, not really any cell phones. You're in like a tower. It's like a large tower.

Gotcha. It's like what you would see on like 60 days in like what the cafeteria is like in the middle of the pod and it's surrounded by prison cells. Now is it scary or people like trying to jump you like? I never felt in danger in the detention centers. Oh really? I mean I just felt at an even slate because everyone's fighting their case and whatever. People tend to gravitate towards the people in transit because they want to know what the prison system's like. A lot of these guys in Brooklyn at the detention center are people that are pending their charges. They don't know what a federal prison's like. They want to know what sentence they got.

It's a lot of communication connection. People were like, oh, what prison are you going to? And I would say where I'm going. They said pass a message on to so-and-so, this and that. It's like a connectors point. Because you have people from all over the prison system at this spot. And it's not super dangerous. There's people coming in.

There's people coming out. Yeah. Danger does happen, especially if gang on gang and stuff. But at this place, no one knows me. No one's checking paperwork, which is the concept of proving if you're not a rat or sex offender. So you could be living with a rat, you could be living with a sex offender, you really don't know. And people will just say, nah, I'm in here because I stole from whatever. Yeah, there's no way to check it unless a guard tells on a person.

Got you. And so now, it's called Fort Dix. That was the... Fort Dix. It was an old army base converted into a federal prison. That seems like a pretty good spot to go. Like, low security. Did you get lucky with that?

This was like a college campus. Really? When I was astounded, it's all these different buildings. It's not what I pictured prison to be at all. Our rooms were 12-man rooms. So the whole unit was this three-story building to one guard watching like 400 inmates. You're locked into this building, but you're free to roam around. There's TV rooms.

There's little workout room. There's pool tables. How much outside time do you get? Outside. You could pretty much go out any time during the day during certain moves. They'd call it like a 10-minute move. And you could leave the building on these moves and you could be in the yard either the weight room or at the gym. You could play sports.

So there's movements. Okay. Sometimes they would close the yard. due to weather or they would close the yard, due to an incident or whatever, but it's surrounded by a fence, but you're free to roam around. There's a track and whatnot.

That's great. Yeah, so it's literally like a college campus. Did you get lucky to get sent here? I mean, that's where I was low security. Right. So it's not like you were going to get sent to some terrible high security max. No, not at all.

Lucky would have been if I got sent to the camp right away. But I wouldn't say I was necessarily lucky this first place. I was just where I was supposed to go. Okay. But there's such a mix of people at this prison camp. The cafeteria is like a big, you know, like picture of high school cafeteria with those seating in the chairs. And the food is... Food is a little better than the detention center.

You have inmates cooking the food. You're getting bigger portions. There's like a buffet line. There's like a salad bar. There's fountain sodas, like the knockoff ones, but there's fountain sodas. There's desserts. It's better. You don't get seconds or anything, but the commissary is better.

It's like a big economy. This place has like 5,000 inmates. Everyone's into every type of hustle. People are making hooch. They're gambling. What is hooch? It's like a type of... liquor or wine. It's like a, they're making like, they make it off of like fruits, moldy fruits

or whatever. They put it in the wall in a bag, let it stir up. Just in the wall. Yeah, in the wall. People are selling cell phones. There's a huge cell phone thing. You could walk around, you could rent a cell phone for five. It would be like five or six macrules an hour. That was the currency. What do you mean macros? Is a pouch of fish. Like literally fish. Yeah, fish is worth a dollar each. That's like what a mackerel is. And so that became the currency. That was a currency in books of stamps, which were $10 each. So one book of stamp, basically a page of stamps was $10. And you would convert that, say, like, I was a new kid on the block. And if you wanted cash and I needed macros to, like, get a haircut or rent cell phone or do whatever, I would wire you Western Union

you the money. My peoples would Western Union knew the money and you would give me the books of stamps at like a discount. If I wanted 100 books of stamps, they would sell that instead of $1,000, it would be like $8.50 because the cash is gold. People want the cash. And then you write a letter to your parents or something. No, you hop on a cell phone and yeah. So you would hop on a contraband cell phone and say, hey, I need to send so-and-so X amount of dollars. People are using cash app in prison. It's like everyone has a cell phone. People are doing all this crazy stuff. You could buy a cell phone at Fort Dix for anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000. Wow. iPhones weren't really a big thing because it's harder to get the chargers for that. But people were, a lot of Android's, they would use like boost mobile

phone plans and people would convert like the ceiling lights into chargers you could plug with prongs they would wire up to the ceiling light into the fan and ceos aren't checking on this they are but um so you would have lookouts outside on the top of the building to see if multiple COs were running rushing the building you would have someone checking the office down below because there's two different staircases to run up so when the CO is making his normal rounds and going up one staircase inmates are holding their phones and going down the other staircase. Another guy's hustle was making these pouches for phones to hide in. So they would put the phone in the pouch in your area.

But that didn't obviously work when they were doing the wands, like the metal detector wands. Right. It was just, it was astounding. Like, people, there would be guys making thousands of dollars a week in prison doing their hustles and sending it home to their families to live off of. Wow. And there's probably drugs coming in and out.

Major drugs. K2 was the biggest thing. and people would it would basically get sprayed. It was like a K2 spray. People would get it mailed in and you would smoke this piece of paper and that shit fucks you up. They would put chairs in the bathroom. Did you ever do it?

No, never. I was never into the drugs. I don't trust that. But these guys would smoke it and they would be so fucked up. They had to sit in the chair. Like count time would get messed up because they count you like four or five times a day. And they don't smell the smoke?

They do it. But this is like it's a three story building with one CEO, you know? By the time you know, the CEO's walking, you're out and they can't prove who did it. There's no cameras in these buildings either. Why? The BOP just published an article saying they need to replace or add in their outdated cameras. But yeah, there's no cameras.

Wow. It's not, this is not what you would expect for a federal prison whatsoever. And so are you making friends? I had a rough time in the beginning. Are there gangs? There's some gangs. I mean, people, they're called cars in prison. So, like, the Italians ran together.

That's called the Italian car. that's like who you ran with. It also goes by state. The New York car rides together. There's the New England car. There's different cars. So you would be in the Connecticut car? Yes, but I didn't know how that worked in the beginning.

So my struggle was technically the processes you come in, you get linked up with your people, you find out who they are. And then you would show them your paperwork to prove you're not a rat, not a sex offender. They would give you a care package, take care of you, look after you. I didn't do that. I didn't have any prison experience. I didn't know what to do. So guys right away started targeting me and saying I was a sex offender.

And because I was young and white in prison. And there was no young white guys in for fraud. So there's really no young white kids in federal prison in general unless it's like a RICO case. So most of the young white kids are in because they're sex offenders. Exactly. So I remember the first time I sat down in the chow hall, they looked at me and they said, you can't sit there. And I'm like, what do you mean I can't sit here?

He's like, you belong with them. And he points to a table with all these guys with glasses, older guys, like looking at me like I'm fresh prey. and that was a sex offender table. And that's like the lowest thing you could be in prison is like a sex offender or a child killer or anything like that. Right. And they all thought I was a sex offender.

When I said, I'm here for fraud, they said, that's what they all say. Because that's normally the cover story. Eventually, like after a month of this, I got my paperwork in, my sentencing transcript, and I showed it to everyone. And it showed I wasn't a rat and I wasn't a sex offender.

And I had a much easier time. But there were situations where guys would try to extort, me. They wanted me to smuggle them in drugs. I remember one time these guys said, listen, we're sending drugs to your address. You need to figure out a way to get it in. And it was like this whole big thing. And they were like, we're going to hurt you if you don't, if you don't do this. And eventually I did get lucky. Two things happened. One guy ended up getting caught with a cell phone brought to the shoe. And the next one, I started befriending guys. And I would look after them. Like I would buy them commissary guys that didn't have anything. These are bigger guys that kind of

ran the yard and they looked after me and people stopped fucking with me. And so did they, were they, were they were they were they were a mixture of both. They looked at me as fresh prey and I wasn't, I wasn't riding with anyone. So the fact that I was solo by myself, it was easier for me to get singled out. And it took you a while to ride with people because you didn't have your paperwork to prove you weren't a molester. And I didn't know how the whole process worked. And by the time I had it and stuff, people didn't really want to deal with me because I had already gotten myself in trouble by moving around too much. I was trying to gamble. I was trying to, I was playing dice in prison the game C-Lo. I was doing all these things like moving around because I was just trying to

the hustler mentality in me, the adrenaline rush trying to be involved with everything. Right. And that got me into trouble. You're back to high school. You're like, let me fit in. What can I do to fit in? Exactly. I was trying so hard to fit in. And prison is the last place you want to try to fit in it. Right. So if you could go back to like first month, what would you have done different? I would have just kept to myself. Because that way, no one knows. It's better to not be known what you're going to do than already show your cards and they know your vulnerability. Right. So with me, I technically showed my cards. I knew I was not like a fighter. I wasn't the type of kid that, like,

they didn't know if I was carrying a shank or anything or what I was doing. There would be guys that you would walk around. I remember there was a raid one time and my bunkmate hands me this rod that's like this long and it's a shank. He says, take it. And I'm like, what do you mean take it?

He's like, put it down your pants. Take it. Because of his skin color, he knew I wouldn't get searched and he would. He's a black dude? He was a black dude. And he knew I wouldn't get searched

because I was new. I was there. I looked like a sex offender. They don't get fucked with. And I put it down my pants in that moment. And I didn't get searched. And they would do that in phone situations too, if there was a phone or whatever. Also coming out of the chow hall on chicken days, we'd get a half rotissory chicken.

That was the best meal on Thursdays. Guys would take a coffee bag and smuggle it out of the chow hall. NCOs would guard the doors to make sure you weren't smuggling food out or the kitchen workers would try to smuggle out a bunch of food. So they would give it to me and I would stuff my khaki pants because you always had to wear your green or tan khakis when you're at cali back to your khakis yeah back to the khakis and I would stuff it down my pants I had like multiple bags of coffee bags I'm like waddling out of the chow um to smuggle the kitchens they didn't fuck with me the guards never fucked with me and when you were

helping these people out like you you hide some dude shank is he grateful or is he like oh I'll hook you up well that was my bunk bait like we were in a 12 man room so basically you always do whatever you can for your bunk bait unless you're a sex offender or like a rat they will kick you out of that room. Like you're allowed to sleep there, but the rule is if you're one of those, you're only sleeping there in the morning. You got to get up. You got to mop the floor. You got to clean the room. And that's it. You have to go to the library for the day. You can't hang out in the room all day. Oh, wow. You're sitting in the back of the TV room. You're not getting a good TV spot. There's certain rules. But also at the same time, no one's fucking with these guys because they don't

want to leave the low. The low is a good spot. So they're not going out. And like obviously you hear crazy stories. I heard about guys getting locker socked in the hallway and stuff. Like you put the lock and the sock and just whack someone. Whoa. I've heard about like a rod getting like shoved up a guy's ass before in prison. Like I've heard crazy things. But most people are kind of on good behavior because they either came from a max or they don't want to go to a max.

The violence is very low in minimums. Does it happen? Yes. A lot of it is adjectate. It's not random. It's not just because of your skin color or because of this or because of that or because you looked at someone the wrong way. Right.

People are generally like, okay, I'm in a good spot. Let's just stay here. I don't want to go to a worse prison. I mean, some of the hardest guys that will die on their sword will get to a low and they realize they don't want to leave the low. So then they're just chilling. They're just chilling. Because at that point, you know, say you got 30 years, you're down to your last 10, you finally make it to a low. You want to do your 10 years in peace.

You're not doing the same bullshit that's at the maxes. People will comment all the time, oh, you weren't at a max. You weren't at a medium. Like, that's real shit. I'm not going to hide that. It's surviving at a USP. You know that kid that did the Silk Road thing? Oh, yeah, Ross Oldman.

Yeah. Like, I couldn't imagine. like he went right to a USP because he got life. You automatically go to a USP. And a USP is a penitentiary. And that's the hardest spot to be. Well, if you go to Colorado, that's the max where all like the terrorists go and stuff, that's like the worst ADX.

Wow. But to be at a penitentiary, there's gangs. Like that's the race wars. There's everything. I couldn't imagine to him to be that age, 27, 28 years old. Right. A white scrawny kid. Yeah.

I mean, I at least like had the tattoos or whatnot. Do you think that helped? Like having tattoos? A little bit. Yeah. But I also had like long hair and glass. I look like a sex offender. That way.

I literally look like a sex offender. Oh, that's crazy. And I say that on TikTok now and they always do well. Those are my best posts. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, I mean, you just don't seem like someone that would go to any type of prison. Yeah. I mean, people say that they're like, you went to prison.

Yeah. So. That's crazy. So how long are you at Fort Dix for? About Fort Dix. I'm at Fort Dix for about eight months. And I ended up going to the shoe, which is solitary. Why?

A phone gets caught in our cell. and they crack the phone. At some points, they're sending it out to the FBI or they have passwords or whatever. And they get into the phone and there's a video of me and another roommate or cellmate wrestling. We were just like wrestling for fun or whatever, and I'm in a chokehold.

And they brought our whole room in for investigation. So at the lows, if you get caught with a cell phone, you're going under investigation, you're going to the shoe. Damn. And they normally ship you off to a higher security prison. Did you like your bunkmate? Oh, I had a great guy. I had really good bunkmates.

My room was really good bunkmates. really good. We would play cards together. We looked after each other. It was a really tight-knit room. So you were winning money from or mackerel from other rooms. Oh yeah. We never bet in our own room. It was other rooms. Wow. And they would never like come get you like. No, I mean, I sometimes I would lose and they would get money, but I got lucky looking back on it. They probably could have tried stuff. But a lot of these people did not want to leave there. And whenever you realize in these prisons, when there is a guy that comes from a higher security prison and doesn't adapt to the new mentality quick, other people find a way to get rid of them.

They will set him up. Like I was in situations where like these guys come in because they'll rally guys. So there would be younger kids, right, that would come from say a medium, maybe in their 20s or 30s. And they would adapt to the new lifestyle of, you need to relax.

This is a good spot. You don't need to be all on edge. But then when one of their guys that's older comes from these higher security prisons and they're still in that mentality of like, you know, stealing or attacking someone or doing whatever, that's how they do their bid to survive or running a gang or whatever, it rallies the troops up.

And that doesn't sit well with some of these inmates that have been down there for a long time and are just trying to do their time and peace. So they, like I've seen phones planted on people's beds. There's a lot of snitches. They'll write notes to the COs. They'll get the guy out of there. If you're not adapting to that environment, you're gone. You're fucking it up for everyone.

So we're going to hide something on you. Get a CO to catch you. We're not going to look out for you. like on top of the towers. At Fort Dix, at least in my unit, the Spanish guys ran that building. Really? They were the ones, they were the head orderlies. The head orderly always is, so they're the ones that sit with the counselor all day.

They tell the counselor the drama, they get to do room changes. You could pay the head orderly to get a room change. If you didn't want your bunk anymore, like if you wanted to get out of rooms, go to a top bunk, whatever you pay them like four or five hundred bucks and he'll take care of it. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's a commodity. But he had to do what, 20, 30 years? to get to that spot.

Right. To get that role. They give the head orderlies two man rooms, which was kind of nice. And those are the guys that don't get screwed with. Like the head orderly is never getting searched. It's all politics. It's a lot of corruption.

Gotcha. So the inmates are running the prison and the head orlies are running the inmates. Yeah, pretty much. Wow. And there's corrupt guards. Of course, guards are at the lows. Mostly guards are smuggling in the contraband.

Really? Yeah. Sometimes the campers will throw stuff over the fence because there's a camp next to it. But it's mainly guards. A lot of corrupt guards. guards are sleeping with inmates. It's crazy. It's like a whole underground world. Did a guard ever try you? So a guard when I was at the camp, this guard. How'd you get to the camp? I got to the camp. So going

back to the camp aspect, I was in the shoe at Fort Dix. Yeah, that's tough, solitary for how long? I did a total of six months in solitary. That's crazy. Three months after they cleared the investigation or whatever. Now you're in a cell 24 hours a day. Monday through Friday, you can leave for like a half hour to an hour or rec time when they'll bring you a shower three times a week you're getting handcuffed out of that cell and brought to the shower um whenever your bunk mate has to leave like because you have a bunk mate when it was really overcrowded there was three and they'd put a mattress down on the floor for the third you're shitting and peeing farting whatever in front of this bunk mate and all you're doing is sitting on your bunk all day it's a little tiny cell so you were with another person

sometimes too yeah sometimes with two okay so you're not completely alone no for sometimes i was in But sometimes it's good to be alone because sometimes you get some wackies. Like there was some they'd put me with sex offenders. They were always smart. Like they're not going to put you up with someone they know you're in a fight with. Yeah. But there was just situations like they were weird. Some guys smelt bad, didn't shower.

Like I was sold with someone that did not refuse to take a shower to like get back at the guards or whatever. Damn. Just like crazy shit. Like and you're in the cell all day. I was reading every day. I would read like a book a day because that's all you could do. Right. And I was just like going crazy.

your mind's going crazy. You're losing weight really crazy fast because you're only getting three meals a day. They serve breakfast at like 5 a.m. So I wasn't getting up to have breakfast. Right. And then the other two meals are at like 12 o'clock and 4 o'clock is your last meal of the day. Wow. And are your parents still communicating with you?

You got one phone call once a month. They'll bring the phone up to the door and you have to kneel on your knees and they slip the phone through it and to make the call. And you can get visits once a week in the shoe for like two hours. Wow. So your parents are visiting you? Not in New Jersey. I told him to stop visiting me when I was in the shoe.

They did come to visit me when I was a regular inmate there. They would come in the visiting room. Joe Getus or Gaitis, whatever his last name is from Housewives, was at that prison too. Oh, really? So I would always see like Teresa with her kids in the visiting room. Oh, weird. Yeah, it was always like a big spectacle. They'd all dress up and stuff because this is after she got out of prison.

You ever talk to him? I ran into him a couple times at the Chow Hall. Never talked to him. He kind of ran with the Italians. He was getting big jacked up, lost a lot of weight. Right. seemed nice. What was the first time when your parents visited you while you were in prison?

Was at the detention center in Rhode Island. And what was that like? So that was like your typical movie scene where there's a glass window. They have to answer a pay phone to talk to you. Now at Fort Dix, when they were visiting, you could sit next to each other. You have to face the guard, but you're sitting next to each other. You can hug just when they're coming in, when they're coming out. You're in your khaki pants and your boots.

You get strip searched before you get there. Right. And strip searched after. Wow. and there's vending machines so they can buy you stuff, which is nice. You could get like cheeseburgers and sandwiches and everything. So it's nice when people are visiting.

Oh, it's nice. It gives you a break. It could be an all-day thing. You could sit there for hours. Guys always go over the top. Like they'll have a, so they'll have these identical pair of boots, but ones for visiting, they keep them all polished, they do their hair. But everyone's wearing the same outfit.

But they'll be like some really hot girls like that come to visit some of these guys. And some guys would have a hustle of, you know, being on dating apps in prison, or write a prisoner or whatever, and they would have a different visit lined up each day, sometimes two in one day. So they have girls coming to visit them in prison that they met on Tinder? Yep.

Some girls are just sending these guys money. I don't know what it is. Like girls will cheat on their husbands with a prisoner. There's just something about like that prison mentality, whether it's too taboo of an item or whatever. But then like I kind of see it now, like girls like that bad boy type image. Like there's something about like that, that just gets them.

Were they conjugal visits or were they just? No, no conjugal visits. I guess the feds used to do conjugal visits, but it's not a thing. That's crazy. So girls from Tinder are leaving their homes to go hang out with a guy and go on a date in prison with a prisoner. And they're sending them crazy money. Wow.

That is insane. It's a whole different world. That first time your parents link up with you when you're in Rhode Island. Is it emotional? No, I had just seen them. It was fairly new. Right. But this is the first time that they're seeing you probably like in.

Yeah. Well, they saw me at sentencing, like in the whole suit and everything. What was that like when you got sentencing? Were your parents like my mom cried that was definitely hard. Yeah she was like bawling and they spoke at sentencing Oh fuck sentencing is just like it's tough man like unless you're actually in that position It's so hard to like explain it and feel for that person because you literally like your heart's racing a million miles an hour To get that sentencing from a judge and like hear your mom in there and to look over and see your dad like Disappointed. Oh fuck my whole life is just like my perspective on things have changed drastically like I never want to

to put myself in a position where I lose that much control. Right. Because at that point, you're at the lowest of the low. You have no control. Like, you're literally, your life is out of your hands. Like, you're still alive, but you're not at the same time because you have no freedom. Yeah, it's a weird feeling. No.

To just be like, I can't control. Because you had control all the way up into this point, but then to just be like, there's nothing I can do. Exactly. If I want to leave, I can't. If I want to, like, it's just crazy. Like, psychologically, it's crazy. I mean, regardless.

of like whether people did it, like even people that did worse crimes than you. Yeah. Just that idea of getting sentenced and being like, damn, I got in a fight, I assaulted someone, and now I'm going to prison for X amount of time. Just it's crazy. I think another thing to think about is the parents and the loved ones perspective because you see in the news and it happens all the time, like, someone does crazy things, like severe and the parents have to stick by them and they support them and they show them

like unconditional love. And like obviously the world jumps on that parent and gives them a hard time. Like, why are you sticking in their corner or whatever? Right. And it like, unless you're that parent or that loved one going through it, because they always say like in prison, when someone's in prison that you love or care about, you're doing that bid with them. Yeah. Like you're a part of them and you're feeling that pain of their sentence and going through it with them. Yeah, it must be tough, especially for your parents because it's like, yeah, you fucked a lot of people out of a lot of money.

Like there are people that don't have money because you promised them money and then they didn't get it. And that sucks and that's wrong. But then at the same time, it's like it is money. Like you can kind of justify it in your head and I can get that perspective of like, look, I didn't hurt anyone. I didn't mean to attack anyone. I didn't mean to try to put anyone in a bad financial position. It just happened because I got caught in this web of lies.

I'm addicted to gambling. All of these things kind of converged. And now I'm out of control of my life. I don't know. It's just a lot to think about. That's tough. You just don't realize how many other people you affect by your actions. Yeah.

Like in crime and anything, like there's so many outcomes. Like I couldn't even imagine going through what I did, going through it now where I have more responsibility. I have car payments. I have credit card payments. I have housing payments. I didn't have any of that before. So you'd look at these guys that are like 40-year-olds with families

and like if they're getting arrested or whatever, you're destroying not only your own life, but you're destroying the people's around it. Like they're all a part of this, your kids, everything. Yeah, I mean, I guess you're fortunate in that case. You don't have kids. You don't have... I was lucky to go through it at the age I did.

Yeah. To get that life experience at that age. Like that shit's real. Like that changed me as a person. And it put me on the path I'm on now. I think that whole time I was chasing, going after the fame and the fortune, not realizing that every step I did to chase that was like creating the story.

Right. That what I think it would be definitely like a redemption aspect if that story itself is what brings me to that level I was seeking to begin with. Yeah. So from there I go to Danbury and I'm like, wow, this is great. People know me from Danbury because there would be guys that grew up in Danbury that went to prison or whatever. That guy that I did the electronics was in Danbury.

He actually left the week I got there. Oh, crazy. He was just finishing his sentence. I knew people, I'm not on the yard for 24 hours. It was like 23 hours. And I got called the lieutenant's office. And I get there and they're like, are you Ian Bick, inmate number 22765, I won four?

And I said yes. And they were like, put your hands behind your back. They put me up against the wall. They handcuffed me and they brought me the shoe, which is solitary. Again? Yeah, the shoe in Danbury is like, looks like Alcatraz. It's the old bars that you can like stick your hand through. It's three tiers.

like a window that looks over the prison yard or whatever and um it's three tiers wide like tall like alcatraz and they put me in the shoe they don't tell me what i'm there for alone alone at first i'm asking what's going on they didn't tell me for two days eventually a cool lieutenant comes around he whispers and he lets me know what happened a guard had reported that he knew me from when i was a free person before i dated that guard's cousin he's been over to my house before oh you've like hung out with this dude. I hung out with this dude. He had to report it. They deemed it a contract to influence, so they had to remove me from the prison yard. Was he a CEO at the time when you guys were hanging out? Yes, he was. Oh, wow. But I never was expecting to go to prison at that point.

That's crazy. So he reported it. They put me in the shoe. And that's standard procedure. He just has to report it. Yeah, I actually ran into him at the bar a couple weeks ago. And we had a long heart to heart about it. But I don't hold the grudge. I understand. Yeah, he was just doing his job. He could have lost his job. Right. Because see inmates do use that to their advantage. Like I did meet CEOs working in the shoe that had worked for me as security at the club. Oh, really? They never reported it, though. Wow.

But they put their jobs on the line. They put their job. Yeah. And did they give you preferential treatment? I did eventually become the orderly in the shoe. And they were calling me squint. So my prison nicknames were McLeaven and squintz. And one called me Bieber because I like, they said I look like Justin Bieber sometimes.

Wow. But this one CEO called me squints and he made me the head orderly of the shoe because I wasn't there for anything wrong. I was just like administrative. Right. And so I would paint the cells. They had me repainting all these old cells. Back to painting. Yep.

I was painting. I was sweeping. I was doing laundry for the shoe. All that. So I got to be out of the cell most of the time. And that's after like a month. Yeah. I was sold up with some pretty cool guys.

One guy I was sold up with. It was under investigation for fucking a guard. A female staff member. So they punish both people. So the inmate will never get charged criminally. But the C. can get charged criminally, but it was a pending investigation. Right.

I mean, I guess that makes sense. Like, it's coercive. Yeah. If it was the other way around, like, if it was a male CO and a female inmate, they never would be like, bro, that's crazy. So he was under investigation for that. He was in the shoe for over a year at that point. For that.

For that. Wow. And I was sitting there for three months, another three months. So this is like month six or seven. Just reading the whole time trying to stay sharp. Reading a book a day, writing notes, whatever. My parents came to visit me every Monday. I'm in an orange jumpsuit for two hours.

in the visiting room. And how much time do you have left in your sentence at this point? I still have like a year and a half. I had just lost my appeal, my final appeal, and I had like a year and a half left. Gotcha. So they agree to send me to a camp, but here's the kicker.

They throw me through diesel therapy. What's that? Diesel therapy is where you travel around from prison to prison. They put me on Conair. I thought I was going to a prison on the East Coast, like Oxford or Otisville or a nice camp. Instead, they bring me the airport tarmac

in New York and instead of taking the bus to go to Otisville I go on the plane and you're shackled you're in chains in a shackle and you're like waddling up this little plane and surrounded by marshals with guns and I'm on this plane filled with other inmates that are going all over the country some are going to the maxes some are going to this some are going to that and what's that flight like it's scary because the plane looks like it's going to it's like for the 80s really it's like duct tape on the wing um the marshals are all armed they're like really overworked really overweight older marshals that are like on the verge of retirement their guns are in like these lock boxes attached to them that it's like fingerprinted it's very secure and they're all like

eating fast food in the back of the plane they're kind of like assholes and are you just sitting next to some random dude like so the guy yeah pretty much i mean the guy was they're all inmates um you're all chained up you get like a pb and j sandwich yeah the guy i was sitting next to was coming from the mental prison or whatever in massachusetts he was from the ADX in Colorado. He was there. He got life, a couple life sentences. For what?

So he was telling me he was on his way back to the ADX after a mental evaluation. He was telling me how he is a hitman for the mob in New York. And he was doing this for years, eventually retires and he stops doing it, whatever. He has like seven or eight bodies on him. Whoa. One day he goes to Sears and buys a toolkit for Christmas or whatever. And he goes and returns it. And part of the return policy or whatever to prevent fraud,

whatever the situation was, he had to get fingerprinted. Somehow there was like some fingerprint system that they were enacting to reduce fraud. And that fingerprint got put into this database and it connected him to these seven or eight murders. Wow. So after he tells me this whole story looks at me, it's like, so what are you here for? And I'm just looking at, I'm like, I don't know what the fuck to say to this. This guy's a fucking stone killed killer. Wow.

And yeah, that was an interesting conversation. when we get to Chicago. Are people chatting on the flight? Yeah, people are chatting. It's like the Con Air movie, you know? Great movie. So we get to Chicago. We're stuck on the tarmac for like two hours.

Eventually a bus picks us up. You brought on the bus, a prison bus, chain shackled, and brought to MCC Chicago, which is the downtown Chicago. Did they do flight announcements? No, no flight announcements. Like you just sit there and then eventually the plane takes off. Yep. I think there was a safety thing, but that was it.

I don't think there was a safety thing, bro. We're all chained up. I know. I don't know how they get away with it. That's crazy. The fact that they do a safety thing is hilarious. Yeah. In case of a crash, like you're all dead. Yeah. So that happened with that. And then I got to MCC Chicago. Well, first I went to Oklahoma when I landed. Then I was brought on another flight. It was the second flight to MCC Chicago from Oklahoma. I was in Oklahoma for two weeks for Christmas.

I was a sucky spot. A lot of like Spanish gangs because it's right on that border like down near the south. in Oklahoma yeah in Oklahoma like a lot of cartel people and whatnot got you and then from there I went to MCC Chicago that's very like cartel heavy with people

whoa that's where like what's his name rage or who's a guy that was in that the R&BB and R. Kelly oh wow he's at he was at MCC Chicago oh crazy so I was in that unit

I was finally out of the shoe at that point and I was in like a dorm area where there's bunk beds I was there for two weeks and then they finally put me on a six hour bus ride was that two weeks scared or was that just kind of like a regular keep to myself? Yeah, at that point I've been down for a year and a half now. I know how the game runs.

It's neutral territory. I'd play cards. We'd play Monopoly. I had phone access so I could call my parents. You got a 15-minute phone call. Like every hour you can make a 15-minute phone call. Were you linking up with people that you felt like were similar to you? A little bit.

Everyone kind of tried. You never know people's attentions. People are always trying to kind of see what you're there for. People talk a big game. They say they're running this, running that. And you're dealing with. the papers thing so people can't prove that you're not a rat or a predator. Exactly. So you're like, no, trust me, it's fraud for real. And you can email in prison too. There's like a prison computers.

You pay per per word or whatever. Oh, crazy. So you do that. And then I eventually got brought to the camp after two weeks. And the camp was like, that was the best thing ever. That's like club fed. That was in Wisconsin, Oxford, Wisconsin. Club fed. That's funny. Yeah, that's what they call it. Tennis courts, botchy ball courts basketball court softball field track gym free access all day yep sports games you can go outside all day long on the campgrounds up until it gets dark and what kind of people are here um white collar crime a lot of older men um for fraud and non violent drug offenses offenses there's no sex offenders a lot of camps oh really because that's considered like a dangerous offense oh wow um it's very relaxed no one cares about paperwork. Right, because no one's a sex offender. Yeah, well, no one cares about the ratting.

Like most of the people are rats. They took plea deals, whatever. Everyone stays in their own lane. Cell phones are so easy to get on the compound. I would be walking down the hall and everyone's on a phone. There's one CO for 200 inmates. Now we're in the middle of fucking nowhere in Oxford, Wisconsin. These guards did not give a shit. Yeah. They were like these country guys, very laid back, sat in the office. They would jingle their keys when they're walking by. Obviously, you would have some COs that were like super cops that would try to bang people. Yeah. And on the weekends, food was always getting smuggled in.

There would be runners that would run through the woods. Because on the weekends, the main staff aren't in the building, like the case managers, counselors, anything like that. So that was a time to run through the woods to meet up with your wife or spouse or girlfriend or whatever. Run through the woods? They would run through the woods. They would have a lookout in the building to keep lookout. There's not a wall?

Nope. There's no fence. No fence. a wall and we're in Wisconsin. There's a medium security prison to the right of it down the hill. But you would run through the woods. You would go to a hotel, meet up with whoever, and then these guys would bring back garbage bags full of McDonald's, pizza, tacos.

Every weekend we were eating something different. Were you surprised by this? At first, yeah, and then it just became normal. I mean, that's crazy. There's no wall. No wall whatsoever. It's kind of a joke of a prison, but no one's escaping because they don't want to get. Right.

You're in the best spot. If you escaped and you're back on the run, and most of the people there, how long are their sentences roughly? By the time you're at a camp, it's less than 10. It's 10 or under. And if you're going to spend 10 years in prison,

you're going to want to spend it at a camp. Exactly. And you do not want to get an escape charge for five years, too, on your sentence and then not be at a camp. Right. Then you probably go to a mid or a max. I actually heard a story.

Someone smuggled the gun in, it was in the news a few weeks ago to a prison camp. I think the Bureau of Prisons is definitely looking at all their policies now. Right. Because there's so many weak points. I mean, it really is a joke.

I think there was two cameras in the whole camp. Did they use the gun or do they just find it? They found it. They were trying to kill someone in the visiting room and it didn't go off. It was like a whole thing. Oh my gosh. Yeah, but it's very laid back. I mean, like if I said, hey, I want McDonald's, you could pay someone to get you McDonald's.

Shoes. We had protein powder. We had workout equipment. What's the currency? The currency at the camp was mostly just cash app because everyone had cell phones. Like iPhones. Yeah. Not really iPhones because of the charging situation.

Still the charges are hard. Why is a charge? from an iPhone harder than an Android. You can't convert the iPhone charger apparently into the outlets. Oh, weird. There are normal outlets, though, sometimes, but they're in harder spots or well-known spots. Right. And you never want to get caught with the phone on you or anything.

Right. But people had hiding spots, like underneath people. So there was like a construction crew. Inmates could work down at the shop. Inmates did the plowing. There was a camp driver that would drive to the post office at back. A camp driver, another inmate drove me to the airport when I finally left. They go the electrical shop.

They do the garbage. I worked in the kitchen. I was the baker. Yeah, so I was a baker. Energy, bro. I had a hustle selling cheesecakes. I would make non-cooked cheesecakes. I ran the blackjack table.

I ran dice. We would watch movies. The prison plays movies that just came out of theaters on the weekends. Right. We were living like Kings. I had these couple Spanish cooks. I would smuggle food out of the kitchen. We would make big meals.

I had really good bunkeys. I had one kid my age that taught me how to work out. we set up like cinder blocks and rods. Oh really? They got rid of the regular weights. What did he get in for? He was in for food stamp fraud with his father. Oh, wow.

I was in with this older Indian guy, who was in his late 70s who should not have been in prison at a four-month sentence. He got caught up in like a tax fraud with his old business partner. I started playing sports. I played basketball. I played softball. Now when I started working in the kitchen in the bakery, they have first,

they made pastries from scratch every day, which was nice, bagels, everything, you name it. From scratch? From scratch. They didn't freeze. Nope, they didn't freeze anything. Everything was made from scratch. It was nice.

And the food was the best food I ever had because you're only cooking for 100 inmates, 120 inmates. This is like legit nice food. This is nice food. One celebrity was there was George Papadopoulos. He was Donald Trump's in his campaign or whatever. Oh, really? He got 14-day sentence.

He was there, treated like a king, really hot wife. TMZ was like outside. we were all trying to like take pictures of them to sell the TMZ when he got there. Interesting dude. I had lunch with them a couple times. Now you as like an aspiring like business person, you're obsessed with like these entrepreneurs and shit like that. Now you're hanging out with all these white collar criminals and fraudsters.

Yeah. Are you like getting along with everyone? Are you trading like business tips? I learned a lot about business real estate. There's a lot of real estate guys in prison like tax fraud. One guy was there for burning down his house for to get the money. Yeah. All these different things.

A lot of, but there's a lot of older guys that, like, there's a dog program there, that these older guys would get assigned a dog and they can stay with the dog. I mean, I met a lot of good guys at the camp. I'm friends with a lot of guys from the camp. And you still keep in touch. Yeah. I would say my worst experience, so at the camp, so when I started working in the bakery, they switch COs every quarter.

So at one point, the quarter changes, and this cop, weird-looking dude, like his head shaped like a penis, very tall, like super, super skinny. Like either he was a big runner. His pants, his like polo shirt always tucked into his pants, waist high. And I would get there at 4 a.m. That's what time we had to go in and wake up at 3.30 going at 4. And it would be me and another guy or me and two other guys. And after about like three weeks, one day tells the other two not to come in that he wasn't needed.

So I apparently he told him the day before. he said we weren't working the next day or whatever and I didn't know this so the next day I show up I was like where is everyone he's like oh they're not in today they're not on the schedule so I was like okay and I start going about my business I'm like scooping scones or whatever we're getting scones ready to make for the morning and he comes up to me normally we would just talk in the morning he was always very interested in my life he always like say like oh you don't deserve to be in prison or this and that all this weird stuff now in prison they call you by your last name you do not have a first name so I was called Bick.

And he gets a little closer to me when I'm making these scones, like scooping the scones or muffins, whatever it was. And he stands behind me. And at first he, like, rubs my elbow, like my right elbow a little bit. I'm thinking it's just like an accident. Like he's there because we're having a conversation. Everything's fine. It goes from zero to a hundred real quick.

All of a sudden, he's like grabbing my ass. Like, this guard is standing next to me, grab my ass just like a quick, like some Jeffrey Dahmer type shit. It was very strange. He grabs the ass. and I'm just like I'm stone cold like I don't know what to do because it's one of those situations like if I go to swing on them

or do anything or push him it's your word against his it's an assault charge there's no cameras in there I don't know how he's gonna react this guy's a creepy dude like he smells weird he only drinks water

like he's just like no like he has a big drug no like he's just like I don't know he's like so creepy he has a creepy vibe water's not creepy but I'm with you no I don't know just like the way he went I don't know what to anyways

is he does that and I'm I don't know what to think so I let it go I don't address it or whatever so he's just like standing there and he's just like rubbing my ass and he's rubbing my elbow and that was it I go after that like after an hour later I move around I don't address it nothing we continue the conversation the next morning it happens again and he does it like he'll corner me in the cooler and it'll just be really weird like whenever I walked into the cooler sometimes the CEO would follow you because they don't want you stealing stuff and everything's locked in the kitchen. They always have to go around to unlock it. We would steal like bricks of cream cheese.

We would steal everything out of it. And it was at the camp, so it was easy to smuggle out. We'd smuggle eggs, whatever. He corners me in the cooler one day, and that was kind of like the last straw for me. So he corners me in the cooler and he's touching me again. He forces me to rub past his like chest. Like he's so close to the door that I have to like rub my ass kind of while I'm holding up against him, like against his crotch while I'm walking out.

At that point after that, I told my. my friend or my bunkmate who had witnessing him like he would give me special attention in the chow line he would give me extra servings he would let me smuggle stuff out intentionally he would give me food like here you want this brick of cream cheese like he would do shit like that and we talked about it were like should we ask him to like a contraband in but i didn't really want to give up like i didn't know what i had to do for that shit so i didn't want to approach that topic yeah so we decided to bring it to a ceo we brought that information to ceo and we told them everything that was happening. He then informed his superiors and the SIS, who's like the special investigation

division, lieutenant came up from the medium security prison. That afternoon to sit with me was him and the psychologist. And they sit down with me and they interview me. I'm like, listen, I don't want to say anything because I do not want to go to the shoe. Because normally in these situations, they remove the inmate from the compound. Inmates in the shoe, I was like, listen, I've been the shoe for seven months. I like it here, this and that. They said, no, we're not going to send you the shoe, you know, tell us everything that happened. I told them everything that happened. I wrote a statement, talked to the psychologist, and they start like an investigation. They're interviewing people, but like the case goes cold. He sent to the medium. I had gotten wind. So I wrote to the judge,

and I said, listen, Your Honor, I wrote a handwritten letter. This is what happened. The prison's covering it up. They're not doing anything about it. And he ordered in a court ruling that the U.S. attorney had to look into these allegations. Nothing ever really came of it. I guess like the Department and Justice Inspector General started looking into it. And they were inter... I had talked to some of my friends that were getting interviewed at different prisons because they had got shipped out for cell phone charges or stuff later on after I left.

But ultimately, I found out he was allowed back on the yard as soon as I left. He came back to work in the medium. And they said he was like very retaliatory towards people. But I think what it came down to is he said she said. because there's no cameras to back this up. There's probably nothing in his file that substantiated it. But also at the same time, they never fucked with me. Like the rest of my time at the prison, never searched me, never did anything, let me go home on time.

So maybe like that is what I got out of it. Right. But either so, like that shit's wrong. Like that's, I'm sure is what inmates deal with on a daily basis. Yeah, that's fucked up. That's wild. And so at that point, after that had been done, how much more time did you have in prison? That happened in like September, August or September, and I was to be released in January.

So you're like, look, let me just do my last four months. I was actually trying to leverage it to go home early. I said give me extra halfway house time. Wow. But they didn't go for that. How do you jerk off? In prison? Yeah.

So. What do you mean in prison? No, I didn't know. You're like, well, go out my house. I just grab the ocean. All right. So in prison, it was actually in prison. Come on, Ian.

The first couple months, I did not know when the time. time or place was to jerk off because you're always in a cell with someone. Yeah. And you don't want to ask because then it's like. And the showers don't have curtains. Right. So there was no area to jerk off. So I'm like holding it in for a couple months. Now when I get to the Fort Dix, it was nice because there was its own private shower stalls and like these brick stalls actually good water pressure. So like I would jerk off in the shower. Even though other people could see you. No, in the shower, the shower stalls. Okay. So it's a close It's an own stall. You could do that.

Some guys would bring phones in to the shower or in the bathroom stall. It's their own bathroom stalls too. Okay. Problem with that is CEOs will hold their keys to come in the bathroom and peek over or hold the mirror to see if you're on a phone. Oh, crazy. So you don't want to risk it just for some porn. No, you would, I mean, I would just use images in my head for past relationships.

Yeah. So that's what I would do. I would always think of like a past hookup or something. So even you were thinking about your strippers in Vegas? No, I was thinking about previous girl. I'm very like an image, like I remember everything. Yeah. Like I have all every detail like these images in my head.

Crazy. So it's just like it's good memory. So you didn't do anything until you went to like a private stall or whatever, but like nothing in the bunk. Yeah. Well, I had a wet dream. Oh, crazy. That was kind of embarrassing because I'm like trying to like, I have this, this wet pedal on the fucking bed in my shorts or state. Yeah.

So I'm like quickly doing my laundry the next morning and stuff. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Okay. So now like your time is winding down. You make all these connections. Like eventually you're like. eventually you're like all right my day is coming what is like that last week like last week i was giving

away i started giving away on my shit like three weeks out yeah i was counting down the days handing stuff out um last night i couldn't sleep at all the the they gave me an airplane ticket the next morning got at 4 a m the camp driver took me to the airport it's like a surreal feeling like that sense of freedom but i was never really free until three years later because i still had probation i still had house arrest i had the halfway house and are you thinking about your reputation on the outside world like Have you read articles about you? Like, have you heard about your story while you're in prison? I read every single article.

Like, I saw what all those people were saying, friends from high school when I got arrested. Like, they were saying some vicious shit. And what did you think? Like, how did that make you feel? I mean, it made me feel like depressed. Like, these are people that I was like close friends with that are literally saying, don't drop the soap. Some kids said, thanks for the Wendy's in high school. Like people, my whole thing was for the longest time.

Thanks for the Wendy's? I used to buy them like Wendy's or whatever. Oh, hilarious. So for the longest. time everyone in my town because it's like a small town only had this one view of me yeah which they knew me in high school and it kind of all went out the window when this case dropped and they only looked at the prosecutor's perspective it wasn't until the HBO documentary came out that it really told my whole story right that it humanized me in the sense where it started off so innocently people are able with

the way media is nowadays to just take the bad and they don't acknowledge a good granted now i'm not standing up for someone that goes and kills someone right or rape someone or anything like that but i'm saying in my situation, I think people were very quick to judge and very say I was very much say I was guilty. Like, it's definitely guilty until proven innocent. Right. And again, not standing up for some of these

people where it's like cut and dry in that scenario. Right. But there does have to be some sense in that. And I just felt like I was brought through the mud. Whether I made mistakes or not, that's kind of irrelevant. Like people that I was close with went to school with who are not owed money, who are not a part of it, did not know the

situation to go out there and like, share those things. Right. Yeah, I mean, they shouldn't have shared it at the same time, you might have made yourself easy to hate. Yeah, I mean, I was definitely, you're running this nightclub, like people are trying to get into parties. You're like, sorry, dude, you can't get in. Like, it's a, it's an image that you created for yourself intentionally that I think might have been unlikable to a lot of people. I just think, though, too, like it's very dangerous. Like, you look at these kids that, say, commit suicide or something because their nudes got shared or stuff. We're not thinking of the ramifications of what happens when you share things about

people like that that may or may not be true or so and so was a slot or so and so did this like in my situation you're sending all these articles that that definitely had a negative you know impact especially on my mental health and stuff right but obviously I did make myself I was a hateable person right yeah that makes people wanted to hate me I gave them a reason to hate me right like I was reading an article recently or it was a video about the Andrew Tate thing and someone made up a good point They're like, you want to hate Andrew Tate so bad that you are willing to hope that he committed these atrocious crimes against these women. Right.

So what is wrong with society in that aspect that you're rooting for him to be guilty of this all because you hate him? Right, as retaliation. So they were rooting for me to have stolen our friend's money because they did not like me. Right. Yeah, they don't actually care about the victims. They care about seeing you get punished because they don't like you. Exactly.

Right. But at the same time, if you're going to create an image that's unlikable, you got to be bulletproof. Yeah. Which Andrew Tach shit's shocking. Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. Like you're creating an image that is unlikable.

You're saying wild things and people will see it. And obviously some of the things that he says people like and so they'll root for him. But if you're saying things that you know will be controversial, you've got to be bulletproof. You cannot create an image for yourself that then can get out of control, especially when you're doing things that might be illegal. I don't know in his case what the ruling will be. But if you're doing things that are illegal, like you can't be. have a target on your back and be doing things that can get you targeted. Yeah, and I definitely had a target on my back then.

I still did more illegal shit, still did whatever, still stuff my face to the court and to city officials. Yeah, of course. So then you get out. Did you ever or have you gotten like professional help for like your gambling problem? I mean, I did mental health therapy that was court ordered for a year. Yeah. But I wasn't really, I just didn't have an urge to gamble. Have I gambled since then a couple times?

But it's nothing like crazy. Where though? No, just like if I did a sports bet for fun. or anything like that. Be careful, bro. No, I have not done that and I would say like a year now. So. Yeah.

I mean, that's good. Like, that's awesome. Like, I'm glad that now that you're out of prison, like, you're like, all right, let's try to reorganize things. Once you got out, you obviously house arrest, everything like that. You're trying to rehabilitate your image. Was there any party that was like, oh, let me get back into these parties. I love events.

I know how to throw them. And now I'm going to do it the right way. Going the whole time I was in prison, I was so, like, obsessed with redeeming myself. I had plans to open a nightclub. I got out. I do an article saying, I want to get back in the nightclub business. I want to do this. I want to do that. And I realized one, that wasn't really going to be feasible because you need money to do that. And the optics of me going to get investors to opening up a new nightclub was not going to work out. It really wasn't until I sat down, did like a 12 hour interview with HBO where I really, that was probably the best mental health therapy for me. Talking through everything.

Talking through. Because that was the first time people asked questions that I was never asked before. Even the therapist. The therapy was more not about the past. It was about the past. It was about the present. We were talking relationships. We were talking, how was your day. It did help me to open up and stuff to things I wouldn't normally talk about. But to have like a director sit down, they knew every detail in my life and sit down and dissect it and ask me questions I was never asked ever by anyone. That opened my eyes. That put, that made me more self-aware. I understood and the more interviews I do and that it helps develop me, I would say, as a person. Right. So very quickly, my ideas of opening a nightclub or getting back into that faded.

No passion for that. I think I get that fix now from the social media. Right. Because I like marketing. I'm good at marketing. I was never good at business, but I was a good marketer. You acknowledged that you weren't the best of business. I wasn't the best.

I was terrible. Listen, I'm not going to take credit for that. But I think now I'm definitely business savvy because of what I've been through. I've learned that. Now I'm very self-aware of like the accounting and doing everything legit. and how to monetize money, which is something I never did before. There were so many ways for me to monetize a club

that it was never even a thought. Now through reading, talking to people doing interviews, I've learned since then. But I get my fix now from the marketing aspect. And you still, I was talking to someone about this and we kind of dissected it.

Me chasing popularity and fame or whatever is what got me into trouble. But that's also a part of who I am as a person. That's a characteristic. And in a way that's a part of certain people, people in general. How do you control that to do good? Yes. How do you do good with that? So now the question is before me, can I go down that path and do good with it? And I think that's what I try to do now. Still contain that and direct

it into a good channel. Because when you're on social media and when you're going out there and you're putting yourself out there, a lot of it's obviously driven by views and your engagement just like back then where mine was driven by parties and people showing up and stuff. So I think now I just need to find the balance of doing it in a good way and not letting it consume me and putting it into driving into bad habits. And I would say like I'm doing a good job at doing that right now. Right. And do you have guardrails up or like things that you are not, lines you're not going to cross to not make these same mistakes? Because like as we saw in the past, like you would have a concert series that would fail, borrow money, try to fix the mistake. Do the same mistake again, fail and like try to cover it up and like you would do it a few times.

So what do you have now to be like, all right, I'm, I have. I'm not going to make these same mistakes. There's a lot of things I've learned. And a few of them are like I'm always assessing the risk factor. So like if I took $10,000 right now and put it into a concert versus $10,000 and buying it and investing it into merch and like a personal brand, that personal brand in the merch is, it's risky, but it's a safer bet than me investing it into a concert where there's way more things that could go wrong.

There's less variables. Yeah. So I'm always looking at the variables. Another thing is every day I get approached by people that I either want to invest money into me because I hear my story and they think I have potential. Really? Which is surprising. Yes.

Ever since HBO documentary get out, I get at least a DM a day. Someone that wants to invest, get back into concerts. And a big question I always pose, this is something I always ask, which is something I never asked before, is what if they're, because these people will start off saying how successful they are or whatever. If they are so successful, why do you need me? Yeah. Like it's different if you're a big podcaster and you want me as a guest.

Yes, that's totally different because we mutually benefit. Right. But someone that is a successful person, why do you want me in business who, one, has a terrible track record? Yeah. There's always something. So I'm looking at that, which is something I never analyzed before. Right.

Before you're like, of course you want me. I'm a fucking whiz kid. I throw all these parties. Everything I do is great. So duh. Exactly. Right. But now you're kind of more aware of.

And I just like, I have no interest in planning. Like, can I plan a concert? Can I plan an event? Yes. But I think in that role, it would need to be a guarantee. Like someone would need to bring me on as a consultant, but even that COVID changed everything. Right. Like that whole business is so different.

And I'm in a lot less riskier business. And I think the more I work towards it, the more it's going to grow. And it's not more so dependent on all these other variables. So I'm analyzing that. And I'm actually building a brand that I never had before. Like when I was doing the clubs, I never had a big social media following. I was well known, yes. But it's not anywhere near.

Like to ever think back then I would have like 100,000 followers on a platform. Right. It's just like that's building tangibility. And like I'll listen to interviews where it's like you have to learn how to build subscribers on your own because you're technically renting from these sites. Right. You don't own them. So it could be taken from you. 100%.

So I'm working on how to develop that. I'm getting into the podcast. I'm trying to build like diversify. So I'm not at first when I started, I was like, okay, I'm just doing TikTok. That's my way. But now I'm expanding to everything. Yeah, of course. Do you miss prison at all? I think I miss, the thing I miss about prison is the lack of responsibility.

You are in your own world. You don't have to worry about anything. But also what comes with that is that fear missing out. I think that's one of the biggest things I struggled with in prison. Seeing your friends having a good time, the whole world outside of you is going at a different pace and you're just like in your own world and like people grow up, people form different relationships. I remember hearing about all the people. that were dating now doing this and doing that. And it's just like very surreal. But I also know that this is what I need to be doing now. And I'm glad I'm not there. And I'm like so like I listen. I feel for people that are going through a situation as may take their charges out of it. But just like going

through that process, going through the mental aspect of it. Like not a lot of people can go through that and come out are right on the other side. Yeah. And I think like the last few weeks I've really dived into what my messages and what I stand for. And it's more towards like you could go through all this bad shit. You could fuck up on like a really big level, but there's still hope to change it around and do good with it. And obviously I'm not sitting here super successful. But I do have a plan and a vision to get there and just be like that inspiration to others that you could go through bad shit. And it doesn't have to be prison or crime. It could be relationships. It could be anything. You could go through that bad shit and you could find a silver lining in it and come out.

on top of that and that's what I want to like get out there to others yeah absolutely do you feel remorse for the people whose money you've taken and not paid back I've always feel bad that people have lost money it was never an intentional thing and you know these people like these are like your friends yeah friends parents that is not something I don't think about every day like every day I will be thinking about the day when the day comes that I pay that back I mean there'll be days I'm sitting in my car and I'm like in tears just like over the situation because it's mentally draining, like to have that weight on your shoulder. People's, like, I'll read comments that are like, oh, just declare bankruptcy, which obviously is an option for federal restitution, but there's ways to duck around it if someone wanted to.

There's people that make millions that aren't paying towards their restitution. That's not my intent at all. And so that's just like a burden because I'm trying so hard to show that I wasn't what I was made out to be. And the only way I prove that is by paying that money back and doing the thing. Right. Absolutely. And so when do you think you would pay that back? Like just hypothetically. I think a lot of it depends on how much I can get my story out there. I think my story I've learned what the value is in my story. I think it's definitely one of a kind and no one else has like a similar exact story as me. So I think, you know, other people have been able to monetize their story on a large platform. And I think I'm like on the verge of doing that. I'm getting a lot of traction

in just a short period of time. I mean, I've done over 80 million views in four months. And I just think I just need that one person to really believe in it and to see the potential of that story. And that'll just catapult me to the level I need to blow it up. So you never know, like, we're talking to studios now. We're talking to people. We're doing different things.

The right people are seeing it. I mean, just you reaching out, seeing the story. Like, I'm stepping one foot in the right direction. You really never know who you're going to meet. And I think the podcast is really going to take it to a, another level too. Right. Do you get hate from people for your story? I get hate all the time. What I've learned about hate is like there's no such thing as bad press. Yeah. And you need the haters to kind of drive engagement. The most hate I get is on TikTok. 50% of the comments are

hate. Either they're making fun of me the way I look. Yeah. Sex offender or whatever. That's whatever. Yeah. And I embrace that and turn it into a funny thing and that drives it. Or they hate on me for trying to monetize my story. I think a lot of those people don't realize why I'm trying to do it. I tell people this. If they gave me the exact amount, say Netflix came to me and gave me the exact amount that I owed, I would be happy with that. I don't need a penny. Just put me at zero. All I want to do is be at zero. I'll figure that I'll go be homeless, whatever. I don't care. I just want to get to zero. I'm not looking to make money. Obviously, like social media revenue I bring it now, like I'm just trying to live. I needed to quit my job to be able to do this full time to have a chance at paying

this back. But I think that once I do solidify a big deal, I don't care. I'm not going to take that money, try to figure out a way to diverge that to me and go buy cars or anything like that. Right. Now, I get the perspective, like, you know, there's the Jordan Bell for like, you know, Wolf of Wall Street example, like he defrauds all these people, takes all the money, has a crazy party, goes to prison, writes a book, makes a movie, it's the best movie of the year. Like, I can get why people are frustrated because it's like, look, you fuck everyone over and then you get out and then you use fucking people over to make more money. Like, I can get why people are frustrated by that. At the same time, though, I'm like, people don't criticize him. Like, I watched the movie. I enjoyed it.

Like, you know what I mean? So there is like a gray area. So I wonder with you, is there any part of you that's like, you know, I don't need to go into publicizing my story. I could just get a regular job and just start paying off this restitution and, you know, every month just basically like a car payment and just kind of live like a quiet life. I mean, I did the math on that. If I was making like, I could have, if I stuck with Whole Foods, I'd make like 150K a year after like another five years. What were you doing a Whole Foods? So I worked my way up from a cook to a manager. And with overtime, like I'm killing myself for this. It was like 100K. That's with the overtime. I left making 32 an hour. That's pretty good at Whole Foods. That's good for a felon with no criminal. I mean,

a college degree. Yeah. I could have got capped out at 40 and then moved on to store managers, make six figures. That's great. So what do I pay? Like, if I lived a modest lifestyle, 10 grand a year, maybe whatever the math is on that, how many years is that? That's a lot of years.

But what are you saying you pay 10 grand of restitution? Yeah, say if I pay 10 grand restitution a year. Right. I mean, could you just like live with your parents' house and just do nothing but work for four years and then eventually give the money and be like, all right, I'm at zero? I mean, I don't know if that would even cover that if you sat there and whatever it comes out to, you still got to live and you got to look at the mental health aspect of it. Yeah.

I don't know. I just feel like for me to live four years at my parents' house, I don't know if that's necessary. Like, everyone's going to have their different opinion on this. Yeah. I just know in my eyes, my perspective is I'm dedicating a year to not working for someone else and trying to do this. And if it doesn't work in a year, year and a half, I figure by the end of this year, I'm going to know whether this is going to take off or it's not going to take off. Gotcha.

Because that'll be the year and a half mark. And if it's not taken off, then you'll pivot. I can always go back to retail. I'm a hustler. I'm a hard worker. I could go to Whole Foods. If I got to start back at the bottom, I'll be, end of this year, I'll be 28. I'm back there.

By the time I'm 30, I'm making six figures again. Right. So this is you kind of taking that shot again. I'm at a good age where I don't have a family. Like I don't have, I'm not married. I don't have a girlfriend. I don't have kids. Now is the time to take a shot.

Not live with that what if at 35 saying, oh, I got a family now. Let me go quit my day job. Right. So let me struggle for this year. You know, I'm doing Uber. I'm doing social media. I'm matching the income I made almost at Whole Foods by doing all these different things. Am I busy all the time? Yes. But I got to try it. Right. Like if I can get this to the level I think it can get to in a year, a year and a half because I started in July of last year. I just need this full one year to do it. Right. And you've already spent, what, three years in prison? Three years and 27 months. So do you feel like you've paid the price for what you've done? No, I hate when people say that. Like, people are like, they comment, they're like, oh, you did your time. You shouldn't have to owe money or you shouldn't have to do this or you shouldn't have to do that. Or like you paid your debt to society.

That's stupid. Like my debt is the money. Like I get the prison aspect and what people think a prison reform is or whatever. But prison did not rehabilitate me. I had to rehabilitate myself. Prison sets you up for failure. Most of the people that come out of prison are going back to the same shit. They don't have a success story.

you know they it's so hard for like a felon to get a job to get an apartment there's so many things and the system's not set up for that person to succeed people in prison are learning how other prisoners are doing crimes and they're going out and committing them right so for me I think my debt is paid when I pay this money back got you that's my plan yeah the prison thing that's a part of the punishment that's my my own actions like that's a consequence got you but the debt part that comes when the money's paid yeah That makes sense. And do you have to pay back a certain amount every month?

So the judge had ordered $1,000 a month once I started probation. Yeah. I paid like $25 to $50 a month in prison. When I got out, I was paying anywhere from $200 a month based on what my income was towards the end I was paying $1,000 a month. Now it just fluctuates based on my income. Gotcha. Wow.

I mean, that's, yeah. I guess if you are able to then pull in income from your new ventures, you could potentially paid off and like what would be like a dream like situation like five years no a dream would be this year i mean it's obtainable look at annelvie's story Netflix gave her 350,000 yeah i think that if you analyze my story compared to hers there and i'm not hating on her but there's no action in her story where's like the drug dealers where's this where's that like there's so much i think my story has a potential i'm not trying to say that to be like cocky or arrogant or anything i just know what I went through and I know that this is the type of stuff that sells and it's my job to monetize that

to pay everyone back. I don't need a profit from that. Do I make money now based on social media? Yes, but that's not just me. I don't really talk about the investment aspect. Do I mention it in the social media? Yes, but most of it's just the prison stuff. That's what's going viral on TikTok and stuff. It doesn't really dwell about I don't really get too in depth. This is probably the first time I've gotten in death about the dynamics and what happened since I did like the mind pump in interview. Very rarely do I sit down and do like a whole long interview like this. It's mostly just short form content and it's about like those crazy one minute stories. Yeah, of course. And with the podcast, it's not focusing on my past. It's focusing on other people to like you were

mentioning earlier about you want to find the stories of the people that no one knows about. I want to do that in the prison world because no one's doing that. You hear about the major crime cases. You don't hear about that person that you did not know about yesterday who went through all this crazy shit, had a drug addiction, robbed the bank, killed someone, whatever, was able to come out from that and whether he did or didn't make it to the other side of that, could he overcome that? Right. People like that underdog story, and I want to showcase that to the world. Yeah, that makes sense.

And your parents' perspective on you and what you're doing now after everything, like, are they kind of like, look, we're going to put training wheels on you, kind of like help you get going, or like, we don't want you to go crazy again, like and start kind of falling into that matrix. Like, what is their perspective? My parents are very supportive. They were super proud of me that I got out, was able to, like, stay pretty much in one piece, get a good job, do well, get an apartment, get a car, build my credit. Yeah.

My mom was definitely like, oh, God, when I quit Whole Foods to jump into this. Yeah. But then she got my perspective. My dad's definitely very entrepreneurial. I mean, I'm still very independent. I won't go to them necessarily for advice. But I'm not making decisions that really warrant that. Like, when I went to go and quit my job, I ran it by.

my dad to get his perspective. Right. But like certain things now, like I'm not going in and picking their brain because I'm not making those types of moves, you know? Like if I'm going to look for an apartment, that's something I can think of on my own. But you didn't think you were making those moves before. It's not a day different. We're talking.

I was taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to this. I have legitimate revenue streams. I'm not in any way taking. If someone offered, you could offer me 100 grand for a piece of my business. Thank you, but no thanks. I don't want it. I will figure it out on my. own before I take someone else's money. I don't want anything to do with it. You'd rather build it

slow and steady, like do it the right way. Yeah. And even if it means going a little slower, but as long as everything's above board and, you know, on the books. I worked hard to build my credit so I could get business loans, do whatever and work on my business and shit, but I don't want to do anything else. Yeah. I mean, I think that's super important. Are you like, have you considered therapy, just like regular? Well, I did the year of therapy and I would have continued with it, but then she had she was like 80 years old COVID hit and she kind of got like pushed out of the of the therapist thing and they paired me with someone else and we just couldn't connect and that was kind of like a turn off it's very hard for me to open up with someone of course um I feel like it would

be good now for like like like I would like to talk to someone just like about like because there's no one that I can really connect with and relate with because everyone's just like really different with me like I struggle and like relationships in that and just like it's hard to like like I just like live this very public life and just like a lot of people don't understand me and it takes someone on the similar thinking level to sit down and actually understand what I went through and understand my situation. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's tough. Like, especially from where you came from, like, think about all of these things you're doing, trying to earn approval from people and you're getting approval and people are fucking with you, but they're fucking with you for the wrong reasons.

Like, they're your friend because you have this nightclub and you get them access to this DJ or you're getting them table stuff. And like a lot of these people you saw turned on you once you got sentenced because they didn't fuck with you really in the first place. They were friends because what you could do for them in this image that you've built for yourself and not like really who you are in your core like who is Ian Bick. Yeah. And that person is worth loving and that person is worth being a friend with a friend to. And when you're creating this image, people will attach themselves to the image that has like no vulnerability and no teeth. And as a result, once the image goes away, then they're just like,

yeah, fuck it. I'm done with it because they never connected to the core. And so it's like, I understand the difficulty and the pain in that, especially once you are like, finally I'm accepted, finally I'm on the in-group, and then they throw you away and sell you out. And you're like, fuck, they never actually even liked me in the first place. So like, I would just caution you, like, don't make the same mistake again of, you know, people fucking with you and like getting tight with you because of your image or because of your story or because, you know, eventually one day if you start doing like a Netflix show or whatever, I would say like, you know, that I don't know, But like that could be a bad thing for you if you're not mentally in the right headspace. And if you haven't resolved like those internal issues that you were dealing with before

You're going to fall right back into it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm definitely very like reserved and now who I not everyone can get my time I'm very reserved. I like to keep a close circle whereas before I need to have everyone around me Yeah, of course. I think throughout this whole experience I'm very comfortable with being alone. Yeah Whereas before I didn't I always need someone around like I have some really good friends that have stuck by me through day one. I And I know all the people that like had my back and were with me. And like those are people that I'll take care of like when that day comes. That really like you for you. Yeah.

And not because of whatever access you have or things like that. Yeah. So now I'm just like very reserved. Like if I'm going on dates or just anything like that like because there's so many people like I'm sure you get it too. Like that just like reach out just because you have like a little bit of fame or a video goes viral or whatever. And they just want to like after the HBO thing came out like everyone from all over the country is hitting me up. Like all these girls, guys, whatever. and you kind of have to weed that out, like what I was getting groped into like meeting people and doing this and doing that.

And it's like they only want you for that. And they don't want to like get to know the real me. Yeah, of course. But I'm very much okay with like I feel like right now I'm in this headspace. Like I like being alone right now. And I'm still young enough where like I can be alone. Yeah. And just like put in that grind.

Once I get in a grind mode, there's like everything else is like irrelevant. Like I just want to do this. Like I think we all like relapse in certain ways. from our demons, there's going to be times where I go make mistakes and stuff, but just have, being able to be comfortable enough to pull myself in, I think I'm at the thinking level where I can look at it now because I'm being more analytical. I'm looking at data. I'm looking at everything.

And now I can pivot and I can reel myself back and not go down that certain path. Yeah. And then especially like the gambling shit. I think that's like, I know people that have dealt with that. Then addiction is a fucking brutal thing. No, I have no like that just like, I was like, dude, I just. need to focus on like my business growing this like I don't want to do any of that yeah so that was a switch for me and also like I found myself like I was going I was talking this girl and like I really was

falling for her and then I started getting into like partying every weekend which is something I didn't do and I was drinking and this and that and I was like this is not what I want to do like I felt like shit after so I just turned that switch off and like I direct my energy into my work and into my grind and what I'm passionate about yeah this is what I'm passionate about this is what I like doing and I think I can really like change a lot of people like I can help people in my position with my story because I went through the worst to the worst like I went through them bad shit and I made it through the other side and I'm still fighting to make it like up that battle well the camp stuff sounded pretty good I'll take that maybe I guess but there are some shitty parts of course yeah just what I'm coming from the way I opt like I think back on certain things I'm like I can't believe I did that I can't believe I spent that money I can't believe I did this yeah so will I make mistakes yes but but it's not going to be on that level that I did. Yeah, of course. We all make mistakes.

It's about how you can pivot and come back from that. 100%. Yeah, I'm totally with you. I just think, like, I know, and AA might seem crazy. I know a lot of people think AA is like for alcoholics and stuff, but like it can be used for all types of addiction. And even just like learning some of the principles might be helpful if you start getting into a position. Because that's the thing, like, it really can possess you.

I don't want to diagnose you. I don't know if you're an addict or whatever. But like if you. Therapist more. I know, but like if you get into that feeling again where it's like, oh man like if I just borrow this I can do this and I can pay my principle and my reputation will be fixed like if you have like you are obviously very intelligent and if you're able to rationalize that intelligence or it rationalize that ability to fix this thing and not dealing with the emotional shit plus maybe an addiction problem on top of that it's not crazy to think that these things go spiral again so creating a framework and a support system around you and I think AA is like part of that if that's something you want to do can help with not falling back into those those holes because I would hate to see you go back through the same shit. Like that would be,

you read an article next week or something. Oh my God. It would break my heart, bro. It'd be fucking, it'd be awful. No, but I think it's good like I meet people like you. Yeah.

And get to connect and talk because not everyone's like, like, are out of, say, 100 podcasts someone does. There's one that's like this where you're sitting down, you're having that conversation and we've been through similar things, but in different ways.

And once you get onto a certain level, you can kind of relate to people in more ways than you would ever expect. Yeah. So it's good to like, make those connections. Like I'm a very big like about networking and connecting and just like good. I know I think for the longest time I didn't have people that were in that like minded mindset. And now like I met these video guys that are doing the podcast with me and they're like very like they're the same age. They're dedicated. They believe in me. And they're like upbringing because they keep me

on track. They hold me accountable. That's like having a gym partner that's accountable. Yeah. Literally is the same thing. Yeah. So like just seeing that and just knowing that and it's just like that reinvigorates my purpose and keeps me going. Yeah. So I like having that. And I never. had that for such a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then what is Big Big Big Energy? So Big Big Energy is kind of like a plan words with obviously Big Dick Energy. Yeah. But for me, it stands for someone that has been or taken major risks, wasn't afraid to take those risks, as failed and got knocked down, but then is able to get back up again and shine and learn from those mistakes and being able to like reinvent themselves. Yeah. So that's like what it is to have like Big Big Big

energy and it doesn't just apply to me as a person but just anyone that's gone through some shit and can come back up on the other side yeah do people criticize the name at all they do but see so the name for me it's not going to be a brand that's like your clothing store it's like it's something i'm the brand it's not the shirt you know it's not that merch i think it looks cool like i got compliments like when i'm wearing a hoodie or whatever because it's a nice looking design yeah it stands out and it's just like it's something that goes with like the persona you know like i called my company like b b entertainment um it's more so about me it's a person behind the brand it doesn't matter about like the name itself i'm not yeah i'm not looking whether you agree or disagree no i'm with you i just feel like big big like big dick

energy playing on it like feels kind of douchey again like again i know your story so i know your intentions but like yeah i'm looking at someone from the outside being like all right so this fucking rich white kid he bars all this money steals from all these people to frauds everyone goes to a camp prison that's like super nice and now he's out trying to sell a story under big dick energy like who the fuck is this guy i got it but now you got to know be it's different yeah of course but now it took me fucking four hours to get to the core of like who ian is and like what you're going through and i'm like i just don't want to give people more reasons to be to write you off but i think the hook is that i'm in it sparks engagement obviously something intrigued you yeah you didn't write me off because

you saw bb yeah of my profile i watched the vice doc and i was like i'm Yeah, I think it engages it. It's just like another engaging feature about it. Like it puts like entreatment. But this is the thing, bro. I was attracted to who Ian was. I was like, who is this guy that's able,

like brilliant enough to like get all this money and create these businesses, but also crazy enough to like defraud people and to lose it and to go to prison and then come through the other side. The big dick energy shit didn't do anything for me. It was who is Ian. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Like it's not about the name. It's about the person behind the brand.

That's true. So I will develop followers who get. to know me. Yeah. Before, like, I didn't start BB and then made a TikTok. I made a TikTok and then started BB. Yeah. So they got to know me. That's a core following of people that got to know me. 100%. And now they know what it stands for. Because Ian is cool. Ian is worth knowing. I like Ian. But like, I would just caution you in the way that you made an image before and you wore the suit to school because you wanted people to fuck with the image of Ian. Yeah. Don't create another image that you can't control or that's trying to paint yourself

in a way that might not be true. Are you trying to talk me out of BB? No, no, no, it's not BBE specifically. It's just like, I just don't want you to be like, oh, now I got to be Wolf of Wall Street or whatever. Like, Ian is worth it, bro. Ian is cool enough. People are calling me the Wolf Iive Street, so I would have ran with that in him. Yeah. No, I like it.

I hope you get the position on Comfort. I'm not coming for you. I'm just saying, like, I think you're cool enough and I like you enough to promote who you are and, like, your story and how it can help people and not create, like, this big dick energy brand or something. No, that's not. I don't know if you read the bio or not, but if someone read the bio and understood it, it's not embracing, like, being cocky or I think it looks,

once you get to know me and then you understand it, it's like, okay, like he was just like this, like this big kind of image, like out there doing something different. Like it's the idea of, okay,

he was 18, he ran a nightclub. He did this. Like it was all like big things. Yeah. It was awesome. Like all the legal shit you did was amazing. Like that's so cool.

Throwing these parties. Like the help in the fucking homeless shelter. Like all that shit is so cool. aspirational and I'm almost like if you had a better directing force in your life that knew what was going on it could point all of this ambition and energy in the right direction fucking who knows like these are the what ifs I'm sure you thought about like by in prison oh I think about what if I just stayed with the corporate job and was just like killing it with them what could have happened like if just a mentor came along I think about college too I could have killed it

at the college game yeah and like a promoter I made a bunch of money yeah and just all legal like gone to the college thing, made college events. Like there's obviously a ton of one-ifs and I don't think it helps to dwell on the past. But then we wouldn't be sitting here right now, which is what I look at too. That's true. That's true. I wouldn't have lived like such an interesting life and I wouldn't have a story. 100%.

So I think going through all of this now, I wouldn't try to change it because it made me, it brought me to where I'm supposed to be now. Yeah, of course. And it made me definitely like a better person because of it. Yeah, I don't think you should dwell on the past, but I do think it's important to reflect on it so you don't make those same mistakes. And I truly hope that that you don't and that. that you're able to kind of learn from where you're at and pay back all those people.

Like that would be so cool. Thank you. So that's my hope for you, man. Well, you'll be with me on the journey. Yeah, man. I'm curious to see where it goes. I know you have a podcast coming out. I'm not sure when this will drop,

but you have a podcast that's dropping the 19th? January 22nd. January 22nd, awesome. That's dope. And that's called Locked in with Ian Bick. Okay, cool. And if you want to check your TikToks or hear more stories from. If they just go to Ian Bick.com,

that links to everything. Okay, cool. Awesome. And I appreciate you coming and hang with me, man. This was great, man. Yeah, I appreciate it. Hopefully, you get some clips out of it. Of course.

And I hope your car's not towed. You're paid for it. Yeah, I know. Let's go check on it. Okay. Thank you, man. Yeah.