Crime in Sports - #284 - Tuff Juice & Mountain Dew - The Vindicatedness of Caron Butler

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

This week, we track a story that has been a long time, in the making, and has aq little bit different ending than we're used to. From extremely humble beginnings, he was selling both newspapers, and cocaine by age 11. He ran the streets, sold drugs, carried a gun, and was arrested more than 10 times, even being sent to prison at 15! Somehow, through all of that, he made a successful, and very lucrative NBA career happen. This is is wild tale, and we can't believe how it ends! Sell crack while in the 5th grade, be addicted to Mountain Dew, and make a difference in the lives of thousands of kids with Caron Butler!! Check us out, every Tuesday! !We will continue to bring you the biggest idiots in sports history!!  Hosted by James Pietragallo & Jimmie Whisman  Donate at... patreon.com/crimeinsports or with paypal.com using our email: [e-mail]  Get all the CIS & STM merch at crimeinsports.threadless.com  Go to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things CIS & STM!!  Contact us on... twitter.com/crimeinsports [e-mail] facebook.com/Crimeinsports instagram.com/smalltownmurder See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. Each week on the Mr. Ballin Podcast, now available wherever you get your podcasts, you'll hear strange, dark, and mysterious stories about inexplicable encounters, shocking disappearances, true crime cases, and everything in between. So go listen to Mr. Ballin Podcast, strange, dark, and mysterious stories on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Crime and Sports. Yay! Yay indeed and Sports. Yay! Yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed.

My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I am Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us on another edition of Crime and Sports. We are back, batteries charged, after a week off of Crime and Sports for holiday things. And we usually take Christmas off Crime and sports because it's just, uh, nobody's listening anyway that week. So what the hell?

And we charge up. It helps us come back for more. And another thing, everybody, there's a limited number of criminal athletes. So every time, if we take a couple of weeks off a year, what we're doing is saving.

That's more time for later. And, um, anyway, so thank you so much for joining us we are excited to be back we have a really interesting episode today it's crazy funny and interesting and there's a little there's a drop of positivity to this one um we're gonna have a little bit of holiday uplifting but after much crack and you know things like that it's

gonna yeah plenty of plenty of scumbaggery will be happening. But then it will have a little bit of a positive spin to it, which we don't get often. So that's the thing. We've had about four of those in almost 300 episodes. So let's add to the pile here. It'll be very, very nice. Before we get to that, though, just want to thank everybody for everything you've done for us. We do appreciate it.

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Also, I don't know if everybody here listens to Small Town Murder and don't know if you know, but Italian Grandma died. So she did. She passed away right before that, like when we were going to record it. Two days before Christmas. Two days before Christmas. Yes days before Christmas, yes. That was kind of tough. So we had our first non-Italian grandma Christmas, but we did it up for her with the food and all that sort of thing.

Sarah really, she went all out and made a sauce that Italian grandma would have been proud of. So thank you for that. That's great. So we didn't have Patreon this week, but there will be Patreon again two weeks from now, obviously, and then forever. You're always going to get Patreon. Huge back catalog.

Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. And you're going to get a shout out at the end of the show. Jimmy will mispronounce your name while trying hard to pronounce it correctly, which is always amusing. That's worth five bucks right there. So anybody above the five dollars, five dollars or above, you're going to get access to all the shows, everything we do on Patreon for crime and sports and small town murder. So also if you just want to make a donation and of course get the mispronounced shout out, which is a commodity that you have to have. Especially anything seven letters or above. Oh, forget it. And if it's

Italian, it won't even be close. You might recognize it yeah i'll try to help jimmy out and maybe you'll recognize it but try to find your name that's that's the game you can play in the entry fee five dollars for that uh paypal you can do it using our email address grime and sports at gmail.com that said let's get into this all right let's do it because it's a crazy episode so let's have some fun with james karan butler i didn't know his first name was it was james james huh dropped the james for karan so there you go uh karan butler basketball player if you don't know who he is he um what an interesting life this guy's had he really really good basketball player jesus oh he's a great

player yeah karan played for a long time yeah all-star champion he's done a lot in his career so good for him uh he's born march 13th 1980 oh there you go i thought it was uh later than that but that's fine me and i are nearly the exact same age that's wild. Born March 13th, 1980. Grace. So there you go. Good morning. There you go. Grace. Enjoy.

It's a big day. That's it. I mean, that was pretty much it for him. They were like, well, downhill from here, pal. Oh, shit. Because things were rough for him after that. And then he's going to have rebirths in the whole deal. So he's a very interesting guy. This is almost like a

an upside down crime in sports you know normally we get they get a huge head and too much money and start acting above the law this is the opposite this is once he gets money he's like i got a lot to lose i'm not fucking around anymore very interesting so he's from racine wisconsin that's really where he's from oh absolutely he's uh all sorts of racine wisconsin i didn't i didn't realize what the i mean i knew he had i always heard that karan butler had a tough upbringing and everything like that but not quite to this extent that we'll get into here this is pretty wild his mom is like 14 maybe just turned 15 when he's born so is that right? Absolutely.

Yeah. This is, right away, that's a tough start right there. So I guess his dad went off to join the Marines and that was that. Never really was in too much of contact with him. It sounds like a story from 1962. This is 1980? This is 1980. Whenever I read his story, I keep having to tell myself.

Yeah. While I was doing this. Yeah. I had to tell myself this isn't like, you know, some kid in a cotton field in Mississippi because that's I only say that because that's the next. The first thing we're going to talk about is a chapter of his book called, quote, My Roots, the Cotton Fields of Mississippi. That's the only reason why I use cotton fields in Mississippi, because that's where he's like, this is.

Yeah, this is from this is the 1980, for Christ's sake. This is very interesting here. A lot of this that from his background, we're going to take right from his book because he is excessively and exceedingly honest. He's very honest. He's the type of guy that because of how his life developed later he can be 100 honest it's actually in his benefit to just be honest about it there's no sugar coating won't get him anywhere so he says it the way it is and it's really an interesting read it's called tough juice which is uh t-u-f-f juice which is what a coach nicknamed him at one point.

Really? It's Tough Juice, my journey from the streets to the NBA. And it's fucking interesting. It really is. So that's the thing about Karan, too. He's one of these players that I really like his style. These players don't exist anymore, by the way, because all the guys in the nba now are like in like these crazy aau leagues and all this shit from the time they're they can dribble a basketball so it's not like it used to

be where you could get a guy who was kind of came up fashioned his game on playgrounds and had a street style and then was brought into an organized way and mixed that in. So he knew all the fundamentals, all the plays, and also had kind of a cool, flashy street style. Yeah, had some flair. That's, yeah, you had your Kenny Andersons and your, all those guys, a lot of New York guys, even like, you know, even like Chris Mullen, you'd go, oh, he looks like such a dork, but he's like a New York City playground guy.

So he had a different kind of game than he looked. He had that flat top and dork he looked like he looked like he was from captain yeah he looked like he lived down the street from larry bird where he grew up and then but no he's a when you hear him talk he's like yeah so we was playing in the playground the whole time like you're like chris mullen what the fuck you don't look like you sound like that right you don't look like you sound like my uncle what's going on here so um background on his family because you're gonna hear about his childhood and you're like how the fuck does this even occur and now we have like a background of how this occurs and uh his rough childhood and where they were was actually a step in the right direction from where they came from as step you know up actually um columbus mississippi is where his family's from my word

yeah and uh he says that there's a lot of people in the area he was from it's all uh the they're all farmers everyone in his family they're you know doing all of that and he said that uh it was called catfish alley this area it's between three rivers the tombi oh jesus the tom bigby uh the butta hatchie butta hatchie okay and the luxa poly the butta hatchie it's gonna hatch out of your body which one's more Southern? Luxa Pallalia. Wow. That's a lot. That's a lot. So anyway, Jesus Christ. He talks about his grandmother a lot. His grandmother here, I'm sorry, his great grandmother had 23 kids.

So his grandmother was one of 23. Jesus. I don't even know how you physically do that. His grandmother had 23 children. Great grandmother, 23 children. Her house was literally called 23 and Me. 23 and Me. She invented 23 and Me.

That is unbelievable. How do you have that? 23 times 9 is like, that's a lot what is that it's pregnant from the time you can get pregnant of pregnant it's pregnant from the time you can get pregnant until the time where you can't pretty much there's no there's no time off no time off whatsoever that woman had whatever meal she had she had prenatals with it every day for her that's just that's so rough so long that's i mean back then you figure you know 10 of them will die so you gotta pump a bunch out but still to pump 23 kids out is a fucking spectacle to be pregnant that people

have served less time for murder than she had than she was pregnant that's a worse sentence too yeah i sentenced you to be pregnant 23 times i'd be like fuck just put me in the chair man put me in the chair 23 times months oh my god they're just gonna be walking out by the time we're done isn't it isn't it that long it's a shit load it's a well 20 times 9 23 times 9 is i swear that's 400 well 20 times 10 is 200 first 20 times 10 is 200 it's still way too long it's a lot it's a lot of months it's a lot of months so they they have a lot of family so right away he said like he's got family everywhere and because 23 kids will then make more kids and more kids yeah next thing you know you have 600 cousins that's how it works so holy fuck that's how it is so uh you had to have a lot of kids back then

you know my grandmother's like one of 10 it's just the way it was back then yeah the way it was especially if you're growing something or there's any kind of work to be done it's literally playing the odds and that's playing the lottery and seeing if your shit will come in yeah his great grandmother was 13th out of 23 wow so that is goddamn wild so uh his grandmother worked in the cotton fields and she um she said he said that she had nobody to watch her babies when she had babies and she'd have to work in the field. So she put the kids on a quilt by the gate that led out to the cotton field. She just kind of laid them out there like, I'm going to be in the field, kids, because there's nobody to watch the kids. Laying down a blanket at the door of your job and then just going in.

Just be like, see you in eight hours. Out the door from time to time. I got 15 for lunch be like, see you in eight hours. Just coming out the door from time to time. I got 15 for lunch. I'll see you then, kids. Have a good one. High five when you walk inside. So she said that she would constantly poke up her head to look around to make sure that no snakes had slithered in to attack the babies. You know, that's a hazard when you have snakes around.

She remembered. Wow. in to attack the babies you know that's a that's a hazard when you have snakes around she remembered um wow uh i guess they said that there was just kind of a lot of people lived there they had a big pot belly stove and you know that was kind of the centerpiece of the house and uh at one point apparently she her grandma her or um his grandfather apparently would beat on the grandmother a lot. Like, very common that she would beat her up a lot. And apparently, after a while, she got tired of it, and she started talking about getting a gun to protect herself against him. And she finally went to her daughter, who was Karan's mother, and said, I'm thinking about against him. And she finally went to her daughter. Who was Karan's mother. And said.

I'm thinking about hurting him. I'm thinking about ending this right now. And so at that point. Her mother told her. No. You got to get out of here. Leave. This is a bad thing.

You have to leave. We don't want. You're going to end up in prison everywhere. You know another thing. So she packs up. His grandmother packs up the kids and heads off to racine wisconsin where everybody where everybody goes when you need to get away racine wisconsin that's where kit keller went and won the fucking championship i guess so she did go to racine yeah that's a shame i always feel like i always feel like the Peaches could have had a dynasty,

and I feel like it was broken up prematurely. That's always sad when you have something like that. You lose your starting pitcher. You know, you lose the starter. There was a certain spark there, I feel like. The catcher-pitcher relationship was something. I feel like they really shit the bed on that one. Could have changed the outcome of the whole league is all I'm saying.

That's all I'm saying. That little catcher over in Racine though was bitchier than Dottie was. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. She was just as bitchy. So I don't understand what the problem was with Dottie. At least Dottie knows your pitches. Why is Betty spaghetti?

Dottie knows your pitches. Dottie knows what's up. And let's face it, Dottie was right. Dottie was right dotty was right when she said she's got nothing her arms you know it's it's just a limp piece of spaghetti it's because she knew she's seen kit she knows god damn it god damn mule fucking take yeah nag taking that shit what is up with that i'm very upset with that i'd like to uh explore i literally can't hear a town

in wisconsin now without thinking about that fucking movie any of these southwestern south ben south ben's in indiana rockford indiana all these places all these midwestern towns all this shit i'd like to do an in-depth let's just do this as a bonus episode sometimes sometime an in-depth analysis of the baseball strategy behind a league of their own and that game i feel like i feel like different decisions could have been made maybe tom hanks is getting too much credit for his coaching prowess that's all i'm saying that's all i'm saying maybe we go through the real estate listings of kenosha south bend rockford and racing maybe we should maybe we go through the real estate listings of kenosha south bend rockford and racing maybe we should maybe we should there are only four teams i think there's only four six i think there was

six maybe six maybe four who the fuck knows i mean i could see it being four back then they're like i don't know let's just have these broads playing each other every other day it was the doctor from look who's from look who's talking rattled them off really fast that's true yeah when the chick that couldn't read was looking at the sheets. He read them real fast. He did, and she was like, oh, shit, that didn't help. Can you say those slower? Slower and with more reading.

Yeah. Maybe it'll rub off on me. So apparently one of his uncles was there, and so he had some family there. His uncle Eugene Thornton was the first one there. He left. Apparently, the way Quran puts it, the law was after him, and so he ran. He broke north, basically.

And he says, according to family lore, he was, quote, sleeping with too many white women in the early 60s in Mississippi. And he, you know, that got broke out. Smart move. He took off and he said he didn't have money. He took a bus and he took a bus there because that's all he could afford. He said the police, they were looking for, you know, there was a warrant for him. So they were looking for him. But they were looking for a young black man, not a young black woman.

So what he did. No way. He put on in 1965, Uncle Eugene put on a wig and a dress and some nylons and went on and took the bus to Racine. Yeah. So that's it. Mrs. Doubt fired it. I love it. That's how he did it.

That's genius. Yeah. So that's the family lore. He said, I don't know how much truth is behind it, but that's how it's always told. So there you go. I'll never think twice. That is exactly what happened. I think that's exactly what happened.

Uncle Eugene, good job. You got out. Good for you. That's exactly what happened. Uncle Eugene, good job. You got out. Good for you. So at some point, though, grandma's in Mississippi.

Things are going better. And then one day, about two years into this Wisconsin adventure, grandpa showed back up again. And he wanted her to come back to Mississippi with him. He was like, this has gotten out of hand. So she said, I'm not going back to fucking Mississippi with you so you can beat me up and I can pick cotton, get the fuck out of here. I'm not doing that shit. So he pulled out a gun and shot a bullet through the front door of the house. Um, so no one was standing in front of it luckily, or got killed or anything. So apparently the cops got called and when the cops came he still had the gun in his hand so they were like oh well this is a kind of an open and shut case he said yeah i did

it because she won't come back with me they were like great so hands behind your back and we'll be we'll be taking you to jail now that's not allowed um what they did though they didn't take him to jail because he was there from mississippi and all this so rather than deal with them they apparently took him to they took his gun away and took him to the train station and put him back on a train to columbus you get on out of here fuck out of here with that shit which doesn't seem i don't see how that's true yeah i feel like that no no i feel like maybe they did that after he did like a court appearance this was the 70s this wasn't the 30s like in the 70s in wisconsin if the cops show then again

if a 13 year old filipino boy is running around nude out of your apartment they'll just bring him back to you also so maybe not i'm surprised they didn't bring him back to the house and knock and go he seems sorry he said he was sorry i think maybe you should go't bring him back to the house and knock and go, he seems sorry. He said he was sorry. I think maybe you should go back with him. Like, what the fuck? We took the bullets out of it. Everything's fine now. I take back all of that.

It's 100% true. Judging by Jeffrey Dahmer and his crimes, I'm going to say it's actually true. Can you keep your naked boyfriend out of the street, please? One of those guys retired as a police that's crazy that is that is insanity the second all that came out the as soon as it came out and i you know all of that shit came out whoever was in charge should have just been like you and you are absolutely fired like obviously fired right you don't even have as soon as it came out they should have walked in and said we're fired right we quit is what it should have been we returned a molestation slash murder victim to the to the

killer this is great perfect already in the process of being murdered he was nude for god i could see if he maybe if he had clothes on right if he's nude and disoriented and that age let's let's look into that a little deeper let's just not go you left something outside give him back that's crazy this is getting stale knock on the door looking for someone yeah yeah exactly tell him to put pants on next time. Have a good night, sir. And he walks away. It's cold out here. It's Wisconsin. Jesus Christ.

So anyway, the grandmother would occasionally go down to Mississippi and visit relatives and shit like that. But then she would go back during the summer to take the kids to see the father who came over with the gun. So she would stay with him all summer and then go back to wisconsin so it's very very weird um so then when she would go back he didn't want her to leave and that's how that ended up happening so very very strange i can see where the confusion comes in then yeah the whole thing is confusing gunplay a little far but um i could see maybe knocking on the door saying hey come back with me you, you know, but I don't like it there without you. I mean, I see it now. Yeah, you can see it.

But especially a guy who, you know, would would beat somebody like that also might not have the best judgment. Certainly off. Yeah, his his compass might be fucking pointing in the wrong direction once in a while is what I'm saying. It might wiggle in there. Karan's mother and father met at a rec center, just a neighborhood rec center in Racine, when she was 14. They dated briefly and broke up after that, but she did end up getting pregnant. So she didn't find out until after they had broken up. And, you know, so and anybody who knocks up a 14 year old, even if it's another 14 year old, probably not the most responsible father to at that point as well.

Yeah. So Quran says that his mother told him, quote, We were both young. I wasn't trying to get pregnant. He wasn't trying to get me pregnant. It just happened. That's the story of most human beings. You've just told the story of 92% of the world. I was going to say it's probably 90%.

It's a lot. Maybe better. It's a lot. I'm going to go with 92% of the world would say, I wasn't trying to get pregnant. He wasn't trying to get me pregnant. It just happened. That's how kids are born. I mean, shit. Thanks, Karan. trying to get pregnant he wasn't trying to get me pregnant it just happened that's how kids are born i mean shit thanks karan next he's gonna go into you see there's an egg that sits in the

let's go into the whole reproductive process did uh is his dad around the same age as her yeah i think so yeah he's not like 26 or anything so that's good but i think he's a couple years older i don't think he's 14. So, um, she at first didn't even know that she was pregnant. Couldn't figure it out because, uh,

you know, she's 14. So she didn't really know the signs that well, she said she was, you know, not feeling too well. Grandmother took her to a doctor and doctor told her, yeah,

you got a bladder infection. Take these pills. You'll be fine. Cause she was 14 and they didn't even think like, Oh, maybe you're pregnant. They didn't even ask her, yeah, you got a bladder infection. Take these pills. You'll be fine. Because she was 14. And they didn't even think like, oh, maybe you're pregnant. They didn't even ask her. So eventually they, you know, fucking went to get, you know, a real doctor here. An OBGYN of something.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, they I guess the father wanted to marry the mother at first, but she said she was too young to get married because she's 14. And so she said, I'm going to stay with my mom and do all of that. But thanks. Appreciate it. And so, you know, she said that, you know, just she wasn't didn't have any experience. This was her first sexual experience and she got pregnant. So that's a that's some luck right there. So, yeah, he was born and Racine, like we said, and his dad left to join the Marines.

And he said he didn't talk to his dad. His dad never talked to his mom for years after that. So he didn't really grow up around his dad. He nothing. He said he saw very little of him over the years. Still never really had not much of a relationship. So they lived with his grandmother. Now, he says about twelve hundred square foot house with three bedrooms and a basement.

And she says that his grandmother lived there. All seven of her kids lived there. Oh, my God. And then, you know, other their kids too so he said full house james yeah he said he had his aunt and uncles and everything and he was like the little brother because the mother was only 15 so he wasn't considered like next generation he was kind of in that generation uh he said that then everybody else started having kids and then it was a shitload of people in the house.

Um, uh, eventually his grandma, her grandma, his grandmother moved out of her own house. Too many fucking people in here moved in with somebody else. He said that he had an uncle Richard. It was just in and out of prison all the time. Always like bringing women around and shit like that. Like, you know, all sorts of stuff like that she said that he said his grandmother had her own bedroom and everybody else just slept wherever they could find it was kind of how it worked uh he said there'd be two three people in a bed with

him others would lie down on the couch in the living room or there's like a pull-out bed or they'd put a sheet on the floor so it was uh said it was tough he said he didn't ever had his own bed until he was eight. He was sleeping with somebody. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's kind of it's very old school. It sounds like it's 1938.

You know, I slept with all my brothers and sisters when I was a kid type of shit. And pre eight years old, you pretty much fit in every bed. If you fit anywhere, you can. Well, wherever there's an opening, you can just kind of an eight year old. You can kind of. There we go. He's yourself in fold up and fall asleep he's like a helpful puzzle piece you know like oh look at that that one fits right there perfect it's an edge i was looking for a small one that's good okay yeah so school he said that he had um his said he had long hair when he

was younger and his mother would send him to school and what he called a blowout perm what so i guess kind of like a i guess it would be puffy like a big fro type of thing and he said that a lot of people thought he was a girl and it used to make drive him crazy when he was little because he had this big perm yeah like snoop dogg's long hair yeah because this was the 80s also so you know as a boy's had shorter hair i guess in the 80s i don't fucking know now his grandmother helped keep the family afloat because as he put it she was very successful while gambling on horses and greyhounds that's called lucky she's apparently he said just very successful you can chalk it up to skill or luck, Jimmy. I'm not going to fucking tell you how things happen in the universe.

But I will say that apparently she would win, as he put it, the majority of the time. She's the only one ever then, because there's a reason those businesses exist. And that's because nobody wins a majority of the time except for them. That's it. That's insane. I guess she did well enough, he said said to buy a cadillac at one point yeah she bought a cadillac and that was the family's transportation was this cadillac she bought he said for the horses that's what i mean he said when they didn't like other people they

knew didn't have money for food they come over to their house and the grandmother would have food extra food and shit like that because she was what was she doing that's what i'm saying i feel like she's like this is this is what gangsters say i got lucky at the track you know what i mean like even in goodfellas you remember after luftan's a heist paulie when they give him the tribute he goes a lot of money for a kid like you anybody ask you where you got it you got lucky at the you got lucky at the tables in vegas all right all right and he smacks them in the face. All right. Yeah.

That's what you say when you did something illegitimate. You tell everybody, yeah, I won it at the track. When you do something where there's no taxes involved. Well, it's the only thing where you could say, where did you just get a lot of money out of nowhere? There's no other place on earth. You can't say, oh, I just worked for six years. You can't tell somebody that. Well, in the last three days that's not gonna work i got lucky at the track and they go holy shit yeah it was wild you know they haven't paid me at my job in 12 years so now

they just lump sum me they just lump sum me man it was awesome that's pretty they said balloon payment and they were right this is good i'm gonna buy going to buy a Cadillac now. So he said that the way he put it, quote, there were times when I didn't have anything to eat, but my aunts and uncles would always give me a piece of their portion. So he said everybody ended up getting what they needed eventually. But, you know, he said it was difficult. He said, though, that philosophy has kind of shaped his life. He said when he has successful moments, he says, when I sign a new contract or something, I try to incorporate my whole family into the celebration because that's how I was brought up. So he's got that with him. And somehow a lot of guys that have that attitude have no money by the time they're still playing.

Somehow he's still doing well. He said that everybody talked to him very frankly as a kid. He would hear they didn't like a child. Well, if they couldn't afford something, they'd go, hey, this electric bill, they're going to shut our electricity off. They wouldn't go in another room and whisper. He would hear all that kind of shit so uh he said his uncle richard went back to jail all the time he apparently was facing a lot of time for drugs here and there he said it was it was tough he said eight nine years old he said um uh the attitude was quote

quote we speaking on this shit and everybody's's gonna learn from it if you're learning from it now good if not you'll go through it yourself so that's that's a good good attitude he said um he learned early that they just couldn't afford a lot of things that he wanted and um you know that's that he said i you know i i understood that early and knew not to ask for shit that was too expensive and stuff like that. He said that his family, you know, they complained about Mississippi a lot. He said all they ever heard, all he ever heard growing up was, you know, about how shitty Mississippi was and how corrupt everything was down there and everything like that. and everything like that. He says it was funny because he'd hear from his family that in Mississippi, you know, literally they'd said, you know,

there's so much racism down there that it was hard to get anywhere. Yeah, he said it was fucking unbearable. He was talking about even the lawyers down there and all this type of shit. You know, he's talking and he said, he said, quote, now some of it was certainly justified. I was here. I would hear that we had to march for this or that because white people were denying blacks and basic rights in our society and nobody can argue that wasn't true he said again tv showed me the difference between the two societies it was white people i saw driving the new cars owning the car dealerships and other businesses and having perfect families like the one I saw on the Brady Bunch.

I also watched Mork and Mindy, The Honeymooners, and I Love Lucy. All I saw were white people in all the major roles, white people everywhere. I didn't see any program starring anyone of color until 227 and the Jeffersons came into my living room. So, yeah, he was trying to figure out the world. So, yeah, he was trying to figure out the world. You know, when you're a kid, that's the only prism. It's the only thing you have to the outside world is TV. You don't get to, like, oh, well, I was traveling through France,

and I noticed that. The wait is over. So far, you're not losing. The only thing you're losing is my patience. Quickly, I see that. Bing! The queen of the courtroom is back. I didn't do anything.

You wouldn't know the truth if it came up and slapped you in the face. I see he's not intimidated by anything. I can fix that. New cases. She wanted to fight me. Leave her alone. Okay, so, um... This is not a so. This is a period.

Classic Judy. Did you sleep with her? Yes, Your Honor. You married his cousin. His brother. That's not him. Yes, ma'am. I would make a beeline for the door.

The Emmy Award-winning series returns. How did I know that? I have a crystal ball in my head. It's an all-new season. It's streaming. You can say anything. Judy Justice. Only on Freebie. If you don't know when Crystal Pepsi was discontinued, what was in Al Capone's vault, or which famous meteorologist is Lenny Kravitz's second cousin,

then you haven't spent enough time on Wikipedia. But that's okay. I am here for you. I'm Darcy Carden, and I'm inviting you to listen to my new podcast, WikiHole, from SmartList Media. Discover the craziest rabbit holes on Wikipedia with me and my funny friends

as we bring the cyber frontier directly to your tympanic membrane. And if you listen to my podcast, you'd learn that that's the science sciency term for eardrum. We embark on a hyperlink rollercoaster as we start out on a Wikipedia page and go from link to link to link to link, careening through trivia, oddities,

and unexpected connections until we collectively shout, how the hell did we get here? Follow WikiHole on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to WikiHole ad-free by joining W WikiHole on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to WikiHole ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. You're an eight-year-old in Racine in a poor family. Like, there's nothing you can do.

So you hear shit from your family and then you see things on TV and you try to form your own like vision of the world and what it is. So that's that's interesting. He said his mom would take him shoplifting basically here. He said, quote, I didn't realize what my mom was doing at first. During a period when all of our options for clothes had temporarily shut down, she took me to the mall and into a dressing room at one of the department stores. She told me to wait there and then came back with four pairs of pants and five shirts. She said to put them on, all of them at the same time. We're getting out of here.

When I looked at her with a quizzical expression as if to say, what are you doing? She replied calmly but firmly, just put these on that mom shit uh then i'd walk out of the store that was back to school shopping for me he said one time they wound up running through the mall after a security guard realized what they were doing and uh he said my mom hoped i would have blocked out that uh blocked that incident out in my memory by now, but I remember it clearly. One of the security guys yelling out, ma'am, stop. My mom pushed me aside and ran in the opposite direction, hoping they wouldn't associate me with her.

See you at home, motherfucker. She ditched him. You're on your own, bitch. You're on your own. Run, motherfucker. I don't know can you can you imagine trying to run with five pairs of levi's you're like oh jesus christ you can't move your arms because you have five shirts on that all fit they're all your size it's not like they got you a bunch of not like you're layering bigger as you know it's not a fucking russian doll outfit it's a they just put shirts that fit you on it's not a fucking Russian doll outfit. They just put shirts that fit you on.

It's very tight. They're all size medium. This is a bitch. They're all twisted different ways in your arm. It's very uncomfortable. That'd be goddamn terrible. Five pairs of underwear. Five pairs of the same size Levi's trying to run through the fucking mall.

That's the best part is he says, quote, somehow I made it out of of the mall worn out and sweating from running with all those layers of clothes on me yeah it affected him it was tough he realized you get fast enough to play in the nba i was just gonna say then he realized that's the way you do cardio and now from then on all of his off-season workouts encompassed wearing five layers of levi's and those little crocodile polo shirts from the 80s that the kids had. Lacoste. Lacoste. There you go. A little crocodile.

So he said that I found our car and waited there, scared they had caught her and taken her away, leaving me alone with no way to get home. They didn't catch my mom that day. She showed up at the car, quieting my rapidly beating heart, is what he says. But he says another time his mom did get caught. He said they arrested her and took me into protective custody, which is probably why she was trying to,

she wasn't ditching him. She was saying if I get caught, they're going to put him, CPS is going to take him. So I'm not with that kid. Yeah, that's what I thought immediately. But it was funnier to say that she was ditching him. That was just funnier. get caught they're gonna put him cps is gonna take him so right i'm not with that kid yeah that's what i thought immediately but it was funnier to say that he was she was ditching him that was just funnier but it's fantastic i figured i figured we'd circle back to it and

and say that she was probably just trying her best so i hope she said something like get away kid i don't know you yeah this little motherfucker tried to steal my purse. And then she runs the other direction. They tackle him like, God damn it. So, man, what do you steal? Yeah. So he said the family came to get me, but she went to jail when she got out. She promised me she would never do that again. Well, that's good. And he said that she didn't. So that's helpful. that's good um and he said that she didn't so that's helpful um he said uh yeah she didn't do any of that she said that she instead turned into um because you got to understand for a while here this is she's not even 18 yet so she's a kid still so yeah that's the crazy part he said when she was 18 and could hold better jobs, she started. His mom's nickname was Overtime, apparently. Everyone called her that because she had like four jobs and she was always working constantly to put food on the table. So she did a good job of whatever.

They moved out of the house. He said she rented a place for them and uh worked in all different kinds of jobs she worked at wendy's also uh she worked at western publishing uh color art some other place the chicken factory where she plucked chickens that's the second player's mom who was a chicken plucker that's right we've dealt with and also at insinkerator that makes garbage that makes i'm sure look in your sink if you have a garbage disposal it's an insinkerator. Is that right? That makes, I'm sure, look in your sink. If you have a garbage disposal, it's an Insinkerator probably. They all are. I put it in.

There you go. Apparently, eventually, the Insinkerator became her full-time job. She was on the assembly line putting garbage disposals together on the graveyard shift, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Yikes. She said she'd work 80 hours a week. A lot of times, anytime anybody needed a day off, or any time off, she would cover for them. And she'd just stack as many hours as she could. He said everybody at the factory didn't even know her name.

They just called her Overtime. That was her name. Everyone just called her OT. So he said, one co-worker said i've never seen a woman work as much as you do every time i turn around you're here it's like you live here that's how she was uh his mom was tall his mom was 5 11 so uh tall woman yeah karan ends up being six foot seven so that's he's got to have some kind of tall genetics there. After a while, she earned her way out of government benefits. So that was apparently a proud day for her to be able to make too much money to not get any benefits.

So she was excited about that. That was a big deal for the family. She said, though, it was still hard because they didn't have a lot of money. He said sometimes the landlord would come over and they'd have to all be quiet and hide and pretend they weren't home. Yeah. He said it wasn't that simple because while we had the shades or blinds on all the windows, they were so thin that if anybody stood up, their silhouettes could be seen moving around from the outside. So my mom put sheets up that covered all the windows.

So that's what she did. She put sheets up so when the landlord came, you couldn't see him doing that. So, yeah, he said that she was always something behind the rent. She's always owing him $100, $150, I'll pay you this, that, next week, all kinds of shit like that. So Karan, he said that he saw how hard his mom works, so he had that as an example, but he also saw that she never had any money for rent or anything like that.

And then he said he saw the other side, which was, you know, he saw fucking guys running around with beepers and gold chains and the shoes he wanted and have new cars. And they don't seem to be working 80 hours a week. They're not going to the insincorator factory. So he was like, what's going on here? As a kid, like I said, you're trying to figure out what your world view is. So he said one point he said that there was a spot she had to go cash a check at a check cashing place. And she he noticed a lot of like activity going on in the street, as he put it.

He said, quote, there was drug dealing and quote, there were women on the street who are not fully dressed. Yeah. I saw guys with beepers hanging off their waists and gold chains hanging around their neck. I saw cars with gold rims around their tires. There were no cell phones in those days, but I remember seeing guys at the various pay phones on the block. And I saw people who were broken down, pathetic, seemingly withering away. Those were the dope fiends. When my mom got back in the car and saw me peering out of the

window she told me stay away from here don't you ever come back to the street she was like this isn't for you so uh but he put it in his memory bank because this is where you go for shit like that and um he said one time he's in the living room of his mom's house and his mother's boyfriend was in the kitchen there. And he apparently the mother told Karan to stay in the living room and stay out of the kitchen. So he was like, OK. And then she went in her bedroom and shut the door. So he said there was no way I was going to listen to her. Obviously, I had to go see what was going on.

So he said that, you know, I'm a nosy guy is what he said, basically. So he headed right there. He said he peeked around the corner and he saw a needle sticking out of the boyfriend's arm. Oh, my God. And and he said, but he didn't look like he was in pain. Like at first he was like, oh, no, he hurt himself. But then he was like, oh, he's just he was some kind of nodding out. You know, he just shot himself up with heroin, and now he's fucking nodding.

He said, so I figured out what he was doing instantly, but I thought, damn, why is he shooting in his arm? That's not how they do drugs. This must be a new way. He said, I didn't get it. In movies, you see people snorting cocaine. So he was like, why is he shooting drugs in his arm there? He said, though, you know, now he knows what was going on. But he thought, wow, that must be some that must be real powerful.

He said, I'm not going to do that. So he said he never wanted to shoot himself up with anything after that. So that's good. He said that it was quiet for about 20 or 30 minutes. And he said, OK, I guess I'll go back. And he said he went back in the living room and watched TV. He was like, I guess that's what the adults are doing. That seems like fun. That looks like a great time he said you know when he's very young

here he said his friends started smoking weed and uh that's the first thing he did he said his friends would get bible paper um and fucking yeah and and you know, smoke it up. So there you go. It's a free rolling paper. It's the same thickness as rolling papers. So he said, after we went to the neighborhood center and got our free lunch, we would often head to a nearby lake. One of my friends handed me a piece of that rolled up paper and said, now, mind you, this is like 1992 when this is happening. So we were alive in 1992 i remember stuff this this phrase has not been said since roughly 1954 all right okay by like a jazz musician somewhere he says quote smoke this quote it's a reefer now yeah it's a reefer. Now, it's a reefer, see?

You're not going to smoke it, see? What goddamn kid has used the term it's a reefer since the late 40s? Honestly, let's be realistic here. It's a reefer? A reefer. Not even it's reefer, which is still outdated at that point. It's still bizarre. Still would be bizarre, but it's a reefer?

Yeah. I think in Back to the Future they said that. That's crazy. That's like really, really old school. Here, smoke this. See, it's a reefer. It's a reefer, see? His friend did have like a pork pie hat on and a, you know, a little short sleeve shorts with a suit on and suspenders and yeah,

a little vest on. He was like, yeah, smoke this. It's a, it's a reefer. Say a reefer. A reefer.

He said that, um, they'd go down there by the lake and he said the older kids would be down there shooting off handguns. He said they, they'd sit on the rocks and shoot into the water, pulling like a Marlowe. This place is fucking reckless, man. Oh, it's very reckless.

92. He said those were the cool things to do. Smoke pot and shoot bullets into the lake. I mean, yeah, that's fun. It's not a bad day. You are going to have fun. If you're smoking weed and shooting bullets into a lake just indiscriminately, that's fun. You are going to have fun, but it's not safe or good probably if you're a child.

If you're an adult, I mean, I guess go crazy. There's nobody else around. Don't go crazy, but have a good time. Have a good time out there. He said, that's what I did as a nine-year-old. Good Lord. Along with my buddy who lived next door. We'd shoot pistols with the older

dudes that was some crazy shit we were doing it was bam bam bam then we go play basketball or bounce around on the swing set that was the way we grew up so this is what i'm saying he's growing up we're spending a lot of time on this for a reason because it's really the you have to know how he came up to understand what happens later and how remarkable it is it's it's wild so that's fascinating to me because at this time i was walked i was getting up early in the morning to watch like zoobly zoo do you remember that show that was my favorite shit i never watched kids shows when i was really i don't like zoobly zoo was great it was just like adults dressed as as animals and i loved it that sounds pretty good and it was like a little community and there was plots and problems there was plots and problems i love that show there's

issues god damn it wasn't a cartoon either it was fucking no live action oh that's sad low budget low budget adults in fucking costumes oh that's some sad shit and they had to like act out like fucking it was a cockatoo and those poor bastards as an adult you're looking back they want to be actors jimmy think about that that's their gig that's their gig yeah those people went to went to hollywood with a dream and they ended up dressing like a cockatoo they're like i mean yeah i'm dressed like a cockatoo now now yeah but the producer of this cockatoo show says he's working on a project about cleopatra and i really feel like i could get a big part in this it's a lead role it's gonna be a big budget uh dustin hoffman's attached at this point i really think we could work this out nope not happen nope she's a cockatoo forever

that's fucking terrible no i was i was a weird kid i didn't like i'd like to know i hope there's a book about that show or something i gotta find out what happened to those fucking people you have to well imdb if it was on tv it's on imdb so find them and hunt them down and i'm curious you know what that's what we're gonna do we're gonna hunt them and hunt them down. And I'm curious. You know what? That's what we're going to do. We're going to hunt them. And we're going to find these people and ask them about it. I would love to interview these people. Zoobly Zoo.

What was your passion? Because I don't think anyone's probably brought it up to them in years. So they'd be like, oh, Jesus, I did do that. Yeah. Pretty fucking embarrassing, if I'm being honest with you. But no, no, no. Don't show me a clip of it. Don't show me a clip of it. No, no a clip of it no no no i'm just saying i remember it there is a child somewhere that says my dad was on

zoobly zoo oh no there isn't because he hides it he has the he has his costume just all alone in a storage unit it's just in like a light up glow box and that's all it's in there in case it's time to don it again at some point well karan butler's shooting bullets i'm watching that well he's bucking shots off so uh his mother said about him quote karan made good grades raked leaves and shoveled snow without prompting and got a newspaper route at 11 at age 11 he's also it's also when Quran began dealing drugs though he said I was a paper boy and at the same time I was selling crack may as well crack slinging paper boy enter June bug into the picture okay there's a June bug he said that this was like he was the superstar of the

neighborhood June bug he was He was running shit. And he said he knew him personally and would brag about that and everything. His real name was Jimmy Carter, which is funny. And he's Junebug, running the neighborhood. He was dating his Aunt Kathy, apparently, and was dealing drugs with his Uncle Richard. So kind of involved with him. So he was all tied into it. He said that he was the biggest drug dealer in the neighborhood.

And he said that Uncle Richard made so much money selling drugs that his nickname was Daddy Rich. So they did well. He said, but Junebug, though, he was the guy. He was very famous. They said he had three or four cars

with rims on them, gold rims, one car that cost $50,000 that had gold rims on it. He had tons of jewelry. He had 20 to 30 people working for him, and all of them were driving Cadillacs. I mean, he said it was quote, he once won a BMW

in a dice game. He was very high stakes. His guys were betting beamers in dice games because they were rolling. I've never heard of so many successful gamblers before. Right? Everyone in his family is lucky. Why is he playing basketball?

He should be on the World Series of Poker or some shit because I feel like it's going to go down there. Pokerstars.com, sir. You're about to crush it he said that one day he shut down the local foot locker and bought most of the merchandise in the store so he just said close the store said he'd throw money around he would give it away he'd walk into a bar and buy everyone a drink he'd call himself the santa claus of the ghetto that's a good way to get yourself audited it's a good well it's a good way to get yourself robbed is what it is also, unless you have tons of respect and everybody's either afraid of you

or afraid of the repercussions of doing that. You're about to get robbed one way or another, whether it be the government or the street. He said one time Quran asked him if he put all his money in a bank, and Junebug said, man, in this town I am the bank. So he's got cash buried in the walls and shit. Probably. He said he would stash money under floorboards or in planks in his attic, in drain pipes or in other hidden spots around his house, his mother's house, his grandmother's house, his sister's house and our house.

Then if he wanted to buy a car, he'd go around the neighborhood picking up $10,000 in cash from one hiding place, $20, twenty thousand from another and he'd do that until he had enough to go by the car this is not a way to sustain for long term this is a very temporary arrangement here this is fleeting success yeah um he said in in his neighborhood that's who everybody wanted to be like there was fuck mike fuck be like mike it was be like j Junebug is the way he said in his book here. He said that he was way bigger than anybody that they watched on TV. Everybody was way more impressed with him. He said that Junebug was very good. He had good organizational skills, said he had.

He was very good with his employees and had a good setup. You go here and do this and set this. And he gives the money to this guy and gives it to that guy. And that's the thing about drug dealing. Whenever we watch Love After Lockup and someone was in for drug dealing, I'm like, they have a chance. Because... They're enterprising.

Yeah, if they're patient enough to not say I need to do this immediately, they have the skills and the mindset to be able to run a business that's what that is it's running a fucking business you just if you can if you can payment plan your your restitution and figure out your fines enough to understand what you need to pay per month and then get that schedule down into some sort of a word document you can probably that's something yeah word but you know what i mean yeah you can you can

work that out you can you can work some shit out with that an excel sheet yeah there you go there you go get that paper clip working so that's what i mean so whenever i see that i'm like love after lockup every time i'm like you know what maybe that that dude could be all right because you know he was he's just trying to make some money so So that's a skill. So far without fail, James, every person that's been in for just drugs has figured it out. There's only been two. Well, just dealing drugs, not doing drugs. Yeah, that's what I mean. If they're a crackhead, all bets are off.

You never know. All bets are off. They disappear. Look at Christiana there. Yeah, no fucking idea where she is. No, none. Goodbye. See you.

She's married somewhere she's just in the wind in iowa somewhere fucking smoking crack i'm sure that's the other thing yeah i'm sure she's smoking crack that's a positive two guys that that sold drugs uh are successful well so far one so far well there was the one guy yeah he was like at his own place remember he's having his mom over for dinner and all that and then i think the eyes and i think i think ray's gonna be okay that's the one yeah that's he's gonna be fine i think ray had it tough and i think he's gonna be all right if you didn't watch love after lockup first of all you're fucking up but second of all you don't know anything about what we're talking about he was so young when he went in james he was like like 17. Right. And I always say that about, she's very hard on him, and I'm always like, this is this guy's first adult relationship. And every time he's like, man, like, fuck, I guess this is what it's like.

And it's like, that's not what it's like. Run, Ray, run. Run. This is the man's first adult everything. Adult, yeah. And she's making it awful on him. He's trying man um so he quran said about june bug that june bug would bring in kids that he knew around the neighborhood to work

for him that's how it was i mean that was that's where the work was he said that he recruited players from his basketball team that quran played on telling them quote hey forget basketball it's cool but i need you to come with me and make some money some real money so telling kids to forget basketball is not good at all um he said that you know first he ended up with like 15 people under him and then it would kind of blossom from there he set up a drug house where it sounded really like a an organism an organized thing. You'd have a guy come into the hallway. You'd check out what they had.

It was like going into a fucking dispensary the way they had it set up. But you buy Coke, and then you'd leave, and one person in at a time, and the whole deal. So she said that it was so successful. At one point, there would be lines going down the block like wow like they were getting into a club and um so he said that uh they you know they they asked junebug about that like hey aren't you worried and he said i could have a thousand people in line and only be serving dinners what do the cops know which is eventually they figure shit out he said uh most people don't line up for salisbury steak

not usually and on just some random residential street and some crack house right is the other thing oh that's a crack house i bet they have great fucking pork chops in there that's what i hear anyway said that uh yeah the only way the cops could you know he said they would need a warrant and they need an informant to go in and shit like that. And he said that they were very thorough in their investigation of new customers and shit to make sure they weren't cops. He said that they had a bucket of acid there to throw all the coke in if the place got raided. Wow. So he said he tossed it in there and it would be gone in the acid. He said that, you know, this was when he would be selling powder cocaine he said

but eventually it turned into crack and he said that was made june bug more worried because it was harder it wouldn't just dissolve immediately in acid so that was difficult but you had to you had to have crack that's what everybody wanted so i mean you got to give the people what they want jimmy that's the thing supply and demand james when demands one thing you got to give the people what they want, Jimmy. That's the thing. Supply and demand, James. When demand's one thing, you got to get it. Yeah. If people want crack, you give them crack if that's what you're doing. That's it.

So, he said, he told me, quote, I always said when I, this is Junebug talking to him, when I made $50,000 or $100,000, I was going to quit. But I'm an inner city kid, so to me, $50,000 was a lot of money. But when you get it, and it comes so quick, it seems like nothing compared to what you could get. You might spend $50,000 on a car and some rims, and it's all tax free. So now you want $100,000. You want a million. Suddenly you got

garbage bags full of money. Fast money coming at you hand over fist. It was my way out of the ghetto. You're thinking, man man this is the life yeah i would say that's yeah that's yeah why everybody would think that but i would never think about garbage bags full of cash i'd be fucking petrified with garbage bags full of cash i'd be like oh my god this is so frightening jesus oh man i i. I get worried when I've got $200, $300 in my pocket. Yeah.

Oh, shit. Someone's going to roll me. He said Junebug inspired him to become a drug dealer. He said when he saw him bringing in garbage bags full of money into the basement of his house and splitting it up, he said, well, that looks good. Fuck, I could see that. He said one night he was 11 years old. He had to get up at three in the morning because of his newspaper route three in the morning and uh he said he was delivering the

Racine Journal Times and he said a stack of papers would be tossed onto the lawn around that time and he'd have to pull them in and pull out the different sections and put them together to make up the full newspapers like the kids have to do. And he was wrapping rubber bands around them so you could throw them on people's in their yards. So he said the crew came upstairs laughing about the big haul they collected in the streets. One of them saw me crouched behind a pile of newspapers in awe at the stacks of money the guys were carrying. He gave me a big smile and tossed me the bag of crumbs he was holding. He gave me a big smile and tossed me the bag of crumbs he was holding. And he says, crumbs is the term used to describe the residue of cocaine, what's left after it's cut up.

So just the odds and ends. He said, it may have been crumbs to Junebug's gang, but to me it was the mother load. It was 17 grams. It's a shitload of coke. Wow. It's a good amount of coke. He said, so from there, he knew what to do with those crumbs. He said, they tossed that to me. And he was like, okay, I know what to do with this.

He said, so I divided that bag up into smaller bags and he would sell 20 bags and he made $20 bags. He made 600 bucks off of this. Wow. So, uh, he was like, yeah, this is the shit. He said, uh, on, on the first deal, he made $40. I thought I just got $40 on this paper route. I get $100 for three weeks of work. Ouch.

He said and I just made $40 for walking up the damn street. He said, oh, yeah, I could make a career out of this shit. Like this is the jam. He said I skipped school the next day. I really partied it up. Yeah, he's like, no, he said he stayed on the streets to sell the rest of his coke he's like this is fucking great i'm not going to school this is nuts which the problem is if a child is selling coke in the middle of the day it stands out because it's like it does yeah you don't think

why is he selling coke you think why isn't he in school right then you figure out oh because he's selling coke probably that's bad so he said uh he did all that he said i wound up making about 400 i spent uh half of it on some nike shoes uh i was a dope man wearing my dope man shoes that's what they used to call them on the streets i also bought a fresh pair of levi's a white t-shirt a gold plated gun belt and a kangol hat the furry type worn by the old school drug dealers. I felt official, a real drug dealer. I was doing it. You're making money now, I told myself. It's on.

He's 11. Yeah. He's 11. What the fuck? Wearing Forrest Gump's dope mans. Yeah, he's 11 and he's dressed like Dolomite and he's fucking walking around. What is happening? Unbelievable.

He's got a Kangol, James. He's got a furry Kangol, Jimmy. might and he's fucking walking around what is happening unbelievable this is Kangal James he's got a furry Kangal Jimmy this is fucking silly he said once my mom went to work or sleep I would hit the streets and start hustling I was turned on by the material stuff the gold chains the fancy cars seeing garbage bags of money it was mesmermerizing. Whatever I had on me, I could sell. Making two, three, four hundred, or making two, three, four thousand, it didn't matter. Like, if I had it, I could sell it in a matter of two to three hours.

That's the traffic you had out there. Sick. Wow. He said, you can take a kid to school all day. He's in school for eight hours. He doesn't see the immediate impact. But you could stay out in the corner for four or five hours and make fifteen hundred bucks.

That's an impact. So not shockingly, he is arrested 15 times before the age of 15. Is that 15? Fifteen times for different things. And it's it's runs the, you know, the whole gamut from shoplifting to drug stuff to disorderly stuff to shit kids do. 15 times by 15. That's some Tyson numbers. Those are Mike Tyson numbers.

But he's not mean-spirited. He wasn't hurting people is the thing. He was just trying to survive. He's trying to make money. Yeah, he sees the money. Trying to make money. Yeah, he sees the money. He says that at 12 or 13, I was deep into my drug dealing and gangbanging, but the days were still reserved for basketball. With all that some of were also there so we played every day the older i got the better i got becoming one of the stars of the neighborhood so uh he said that sometimes we'd have to temporarily interrupt our games right in the middle when duty called we would play at bryant center from one to three in the afternoon

then then head over to steven bold to play from four to six but if the buzz of one of our pagers broke through the sounds of bouncing balls uh we would call a time out go make a drug sale then come right back to the center of the playground and pick up where we left off like we just taken an ice cream break unbelievable hold on time out yeah hold on all right game on i sold the crack serve the fiends gotta do it he said the people started to notice how good he was, and they were telling him that he should join this traveling AAU team. And he said, I was playing so well at that time, some of the older cats at the Bryant Center started paying attention to me,

started seeing my potential before I even did. He said, man, you need to go do something with that game of yours, they would tell me. You need to get on one of those small fry teams or get on coach Rudy's traveling team that goes around the country. You need to get out of here so people can see you. So, um, I guess he had a connection through his uncle. Luckily it's one part of good about having a lot of family is you have a lot of connections and they got him a place on a traveling team. And he said, once in uniform, I proved that I deserved a place on the roster.

Playing with and against kids my own age, I was a dominant force on the floor. I think that's because I'd been playing against older kids in my neighborhood most of my life. To prove I belonged, I had developed an overly aggressive and physical style. Yeah. He's crushing kids his own age. And he liked basketball. thought he said shit he said quote i thought damn this is fun i don't have to worry about looking over my shoulder i don't have to worry about someone shooting at me or somebody you know shooting me or shooting at me i'm with white kids and black kids everybody's acting nice

showing love and a lot of camaraderie this shit is all right i can do this it's easy now i've got to go to this school a little more to remain eligible so he figured out well fuck this is better than they treat you nice right everybody's nice to each other nobody's fucking shooting great shit he was at racine case high at the time uh when he was a freshman and he's like i'm gonna start doing more basketball but he's also still dealing drugs i mean that's not you're not gonna just stop making money because basketball's fun you know let's be honest here so uh he says at one point and this is from his book so who knows but he says he gave his locker combination to a friend that day he said police found drugs and an unloaded pistol in his locker oh no yeah um so he was also carrying 1200 bucks in cash which was a lot for a freshman

1200 drugs and a gun i wonder what you're doing it's a lot in 1994 for a freshman. He said that to protect his friend, he told the police that the drugs and pistol were his. Because he didn't want to rat, he said. So he said that his family tried to get him to tell on his friend, but he said, quote, I couldn't see myself doing that. He said, I wasn't going to tell on anybody that I was rolling with, so I had to man up. I was hustling i was doing what i was doing so when i got caught up like that i had to bite the bullet when you're out there selling poison it's gonna come back that's karma man basically what he said is it's all in the game and uh that's it fourth down that's i mean fuck what are you supposed to do

punt nothing else you can do here that's it so um he says uh well you know what let's give him and we say it in their own words for quran here let's give him an in their own words about his whole deal in their own words quote as the legal process played out i made five appearances in court the prosecutor made sure he got all the time he needed to present my entire criminal record and believe me that took some time even i was surprised how much they had on me yes there was the assault and the battery charges carrying a weapon and attempts to deliver drugs nothing new here it seemed like i'd been everywhere i shouldn't have been but what blew my uh blew me away was the number of times my name was mentioned in other cases anytime a guy got arrested for selling drugs on a racine street corner the police would ask him where he got the stuff hoping to get a lighter sentence the person

in custody would give them the name of the dude who supplied him with the dope that dude's name was then put in police paperwork and it seemed like i wound up in everybody's paperwork perhaps he is the the gambling and the luck it's definitely playing in his favor because there's no reason in the world that I should know this kid's name. That's what I'm saying. With this kind of rap sheet, by the time he's 18, there's no reason that I should know who Caron Butler is. I know people who've had this sort of similar thing and they did not play in the NBA. You know what I'm saying? So he is very, very lucky. very lucky yeah for an hour a day

that's all they were allowed so that's what i'm saying so uh butler is found guilty here at 14 and sentenced to you sir you little sir you youngster, youngster, you may fuck off two years in prison. He sentenced to this. So, yeah, he was like, God damn. He said, quote, That hit me hard because I didn't expect anything that harsh the first time I went in front of a judge. But they had thrown so much at me. I guess a sentence that had been more lenient would have seemed soft two years might not be that bad to a hardened criminal but when you're 15 that's one-eighth of your life yes that's a lot good no shit yeah good job see he's too smart for

this shit well he's a drug dealer he's got math skills are on point he said in my eyes i wasn't guilty of anything really bad but listening to uh a reading of all the things I had done, I realized I was living a life on the edge. Still as scary as that moment was, a part of me, the gangster part, thought it was also pretty cool. bars, there was an element of society that cheered them on. The respect they got when they got out of jail made it seem like they were returning more veterans. They were heroes. The guys in the hood celebrated them. They were honored from the time they spent away. People would help them get back on their feet financially.

Everywhere they went, people would stuff bills in their pockets, 200, 150, 100 bucks, whatever people could afford. We salute you for doing your time. So he said, that's what those released from incarceration were told. So he said, I didn't want to go to jail. But he said, I smiled as I imagined the admiration that would be shown, showered upon me by the community upon my return. He had something to look forward to. This kid, one thing I'll give Karan, and this is something that I don't think I have, and it's maybe why he's so successful, is he can take any situation and he's very good at assessing it and then figuring out what's bad and then finding out in his brain how there's also a silver lining.

Right. Which is like, that's a certain mindset that people have. It's magic. It's magic. It's great. Because otherwise you get hung up on shit. And he's fuck i'm in jail for two years oh but when i come out yeah they're gonna fucking love me i wouldn't think of that i'd be like i'd be thinking about in five minutes when i have to figure out how to deal with this prison shit that i have to deal with i wouldn't also he's doing somebody else's time in in their eyes because he's taking the rap for somebody else

which is yeah even more noble and brave well i mean in his mind he's like if it was another day it would have been my shit in there so who cares you know so yeah he looked at it as all in the game you know so taylor swift is soaring high her every move captured in the news cycle and devoured by her devoted fans she's broken billboard records and made Grammys history, not to mention becoming a billionaire in the process. But along the way, Taylor has had to wage war, first by taking on a very powerful, very famous manager, Scooter Braun, and then by going up against the biggest live events company, Ticketmaster. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery's show Business Wars. We go deep into some of the biggest corporate rivalries of all time.

And in our latest season, Taylor Swift will shake up not only the music business, but Hollywood and the NFL. Follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. So he said he spent the first two months of an 18 month sentence because that's what he ended up what he was going to have to do at the racine correctional institution which is an adult maximum maximum security prison oh my god for a 15 year old he says quote it was survival people were getting raped you got murderers in there that was a bad environment for a 15 year old fuck yeah so for anybody he said after the first two months he was transferred to the ethan allen boys school for boys where they

taught him furniture design and yeah i'm sure you know this was in wales wisconsin beautiful place beautiful country up there he said it was uh but it was like maximum security for juveniles he said it was razor wire there was kids in there who were convicted of murder and drug dealing and all that shit he said his mother followed the prison bus when they went there in the family station wagon um she said he was with me ever since birth. So she said to have your child taken away from you. It was devastating. I almost went crazy. And he ends up spending doing his time here.

Within his first month at Ethan Allen, he got into a altercation with a rival gang member from back home. So it goes to there. He is sentenced to 15 days in solitary confinement for that and uh forced to do the you know 23 hours a day in the cell that whole shit in solitary and he said that was really hard on him he said quote when i got incarcerated i think that was an opportunity for me uh for me away from everything to be away from everything for so long and just be out of my everyday norm, my everyday environment, and learn a lot about myself. Once I was placed out of that environment, I wanted to do better. I wanted to not be in the same cycle I once was.

So he said at that point, he decided that he's going to change his life around and figure it out for his mom. He said that he felt like a huge disappointment to his mother. And he said that, you know, he felt bad about the whole shit. And so he felt like he was hurting his mother. And he said, she was working all this overtime being selfless and he's out making her

fucking sad. So he is released from the Ethan Allen facility in August of 1996. And he told his mom he wouldn't get in any trouble, anything like that. And less than a month after he's released, because he ends up doing about nine months in prison. Oh, boy. About nine months, and just the week he's released, a daughter is born that's his. I wonder, how the fuck did he do that? He had a going away party, I feel like. And they named this child Camry.

Not Camry like the car, with an A. Camry. Okay, that's Camry. It's Camry. So little Toyota Camry Butler here is born. little Toyota Camry Butler here is born. So his mother moved after that. And he said that, you know, they moved out of the neighborhood because that was a big part of it.

He said eight days after he moved, he was on the hair on the porch, getting a haircut when a friend of his came over and asked him if he wanted to go hang out at the park. He said he was wearing an ankle monitor at the time, just got out of prison, couldn't go. So he said, no, sorry. He said two hours later, his friend got shot and killed at the park that invited him to

come. So he's lucky, man. He said, quote, almost didn't hear of him several times, several times. I mean, the fact that we, the possible outcomes are like 99% we'll never hear of this guy and maybe 1% this, what it turned out to be. The luckiest man on earth. He really is. And he made a lot of his own luck, too, as we'll tell you.

He's lucky to be in the position to be able to make his own luck later. You know what I mean? He said, if I wasn't on that bracelet, I would have been right there with him. That stuff, it takes a fire out of you, makes you you say this is not for me no more so yeah he got a job at burger king in his first step to try to you know be straight here gets a job at burger king and um he said that his friends would fucking stop by and heckle him make fun of him for mopping the floor and all that shit. Nice onion rings, posse. Yep. He said, quote, they'd see me with heat bumps and be laughing at me,

and I'd say, I ain't got to watch my back out here. He said he was setting the example. He said it took time to adjust. He said, quote, I saw guys rolling around in new cars, having new clothes, new Jordans, reminders of all the things I couldn't afford. Old friends would come in and make fun of me because of my uniform, but I knew I couldn't go back to jail, no matter how tempting the lure of quick money was. He said at Bray Community Center in Racine, where I first started playing basketball, there's a photo of 21 black men, many of whom I used to run with.

All were under the age of 25 25 and they are now all dead. I knew I had to turn my life around. This guy, everybody he talks about is like a neck. I got killed later and that guy got shot this time. Like he every one of his stories ends with. But that guy's dead now because he was murdered. You knew that Racine was such a fucking war zone. I had no clue Racine was so shitty until this.

I really didn't. There's a lot of these little fucking smaller cities that have fucking huge problems like this. Just hard dudes, yeah. It's a big deal. Yeah, it really happens. He said that this is when he really, he said that he would play basketball at Ethan Allen

when he went to jail, and he said he played They Would Bet, and he would win Little Debbie snack cakes and frosted donuts oh yeah playing basketball um so he goes back to high school to washington park high school and he also ends up playing for an a an aau team as well he's uh he ends up doing three summers with the aau team and um his coach at the aAU team said that he tried spent countless hours trying to tell him that this is what you should do not that like I get that now this that seems good but you in a

couple years this will pay off you know like this this has a payoff to it and he said it was hard to convince him the coach said the coach says, he was still very influenced by his environment and those individuals whom he hung around with. His mentality was still in the streets. Fair enough. I mean, yeah, what do you want? He, at one point, and this is some dumb shit during all this, he went to a dance party at the high school.

He went to, you know, homecoming or whatever the fuck it was. Now, think about this. He's trying to get his life together and all this, but he's still carrying a gun to the school to go to a dance. He's got the gun tucked in his waistband. So, at some point, he's dancing, having a good time, until a huge boom goes off. His fucking gun went off in his pants, a la Plexico Burris. Wow. Yep.

Just like this is a total Plexico Burris thing, except it didn't happen in a nightclub. It happened in high school. Tight cummerbund. Tight ass cummerbund. And he said that it went off and shot him in the leg. It got him. Oh, it shot him off and shot him in the leg it got him oh it shot him and hit him in the fucking leg he said luckily the bullet didn't hit his knee it just he like went he had a flesh wound and then it went and lodged itself in the floor so he has a he has a flesh wound though

he has a fucking gunshot wound in his leg so uh he said at the same time there were like rival people that he used to be against gang type people in the uh gang type people that's an interesting phrase at the dance as well and he said uh the sound of the gun going off caused them to react so he caused a chain reaction they heard a shot so everybody else who has a gun in the whole place pulled out i'll say there's gunplay here one of the guys apparently pulled his gun out and got it caught on something awkwardly i don't know if these like formal dances are the best places to have your guns you're not used to pulling it out of these weird arrangements leather leather uh holsters under their shoulders yeah it's easier those suits are a pain in the dick man

well apparently one guy pulled it out and fucked up and fumbled with it and shot himself in the chest in the chest oh my god in the chest jimmy how do you shoot yourself in the chest by accident while pulling your gun out that's the worst gangster i've ever heard in my fucking life think about that i hope he's alive because that's hilarious that's the worst gangster i've ever heard in my fucking life think about that i hope he's alive because that's hilarious that's the equivalent of taking a swing at somebody and taking too big a swing and coming around and punching yourself in the face that's the same equivalent like what are you doing sir this is not for you you dumb motherfucker that is so dance dance boom ow my leg another guy pulls out oh god i shot myself in the chest so no no shots fired in in anger that's the thing these are two and worse

no innocent bystanders so far just themselves just themselves so apparently this kid almost dies because he shot himself in the chest at close range that's where a couple of your vital organs are at james you know there's a lot in there in that general region he said i was scared because i was i was leaking blood all over the hardwood when everybody in the gym hit the ground after hearing the two shots i took my gun and slid it across the floor then i got up and limped away jesus christ the police started checking everybody as they walked out but i had already made my escape when my friends saw my uh saw blood splattered down my right pant leg they were naturally

concerned well no shit there's gunshots you're limping and bleeding you know but i told them i'm good right now my concern is I've got an electronic monitoring bracelet on, and if I don't get home by 8 o'clock 45 minutes from now, I'm in deep shit with my parole officer. I can't go to the hospital. Listen, I'm going to be bleeding one place or the other. It's either going to be bleeding as I walk home or bleeding in jail. So either way, I've got to bleed.

Still bleeding. Yep. He said that was the got to bleed. Still bleeding. Yep. He said that was the time the curfew started. He said sometimes the officer would allow him a little leeway to get in the door 10 minutes or so. He said, I made it home by 8 o'clock. Good thing, too, because if the police officer had seen my wound, breaking curfew would have been the least of my problems. Yeah. Think about Plexiglas bars.

As I walked into my bedroom the wound was bubbling and swelling up yeah it's a fucking gunshot wound jesus christ he said looking like a real bad burn in addition the bleeding hadn't stopped i knew i should go to the hospital but with the electronic bracelet on my ankle if my parole officer was monitoring the signal he would know where that's where i had gone and if the doctors there told him I had appeared to have a self-inflicted gunshot wound, I'm sure the parole board would have ruled that I violated my probation and would soon be back on my way to Ethan Allen. No shit. Oh, what do you do? He said, nope.

I was going to have to handle this one myself. Jesus. What? I put a needle in alcohol and popped the expanding bubble of blood. Then I treated the area with Neosporin. He rubbed Neosporin on it? He put Neosporin on an open gunshot wound. It was like, that ought to do it.

You just pour it on there and smooth it out like fucking spackle. Did it go through his fucking leg, James? He just put it on like, just a flesh wound. I mean, it took a chunk out of him, it sounds like. He shot him and took a chunk of meat out of his leg okay so but that's you know that's still pretty bad you don't just close that you don't put put it on like putty you don't spackle it up with neosporin and expect it to be fine now that's crazy i've never heard anything like that before it's not like drywall where you just rub mud in it and let it harden. If you put toothpaste in it, no one will ever notice.

That's never been said about a gunshot wound. Neosporin doesn't turn into muscle and skin. Just fill the area with Neosporin. It'll regenerate the muscle and the tendons from the inside. So that's what he did. Just spackled it closed? Spackled it shut and done and done that's it all right moving on karan's the toughest man alive tough son of a bitch this karan i like this guy you cannot help but like him you really can't you can't help but like this dude the other thing is you can't kill him either so no and even if you tried he's so

goddamn lucky he would he's so goddamn lucky. He's like fucking Mr. Magoo. Something would fall. A safe would fall right behind him and a car would swerve in front of him. He'll just spackle it up with Neosporin and be fine anyway. He's fine. I got my Neosporin on me. I just keep it on me in case I'm shot in the head or stabbed in the chest or anything.

He said, it took time for that wound to heal, but I was able to function function while avoiding limping so the incident remained a secret to all but my close friends he just didn't tell anybody that's fucking crazy he shot himself and didn't tell anybody oh man so there's another incident here see when he decides to turn it around he decides to turn it around but there's still a lot of incidents of fuckery because he's a teenager he said that him and a bunch of his friends bought a shitty car okay they bought a shitty old car to drive around in nobody has a license the car's not on the road they just bought a car to drive around in so he said they spent eight hundred dollars for the car and another chunk of money to put a sound system in it that same day yeah so that's what the car was for driving around listening to beats so he said we'd ride around loudly blaring the sounds of nwa and other groups you're a little late for nw who's blaring nwa in

1995 yeah not me i was around i wasn't fine that's when i was driving around with beats. I wasn't fucking. That's when I was driving around with Beats and I wasn't fucking NWA. No. Fuck no. That shit was old and corny by then. You know? Yeah, I suppose. It was old. 95 is all the Wu-Tang shit, Redman, fucking, you know, Tupac, if you like West Coast shit, Biggie, Jay-Z's coming out the next year.

Like, there's a lot of good shit. Nas, like, there's a lot of good shit in 95 to where nwa sounded like it was from another century it had that but this is we're seeing james yeah but still they would have heard 95 even like bone thugs was out in 95 you know what i mean like they would have heard that shit that was midwestern yeah that's true you know they would have heard that but why would you yeah nwa was like at least you can understand the lyrics of NWA in 95. Yeah, I guess. Couldn't understand a fucking word Bone Thugs was saying.

I remember you'd respect NWA, but they were still old school, even though they were six years old. They were all on their own by now. Yeah, it wasn't a thing anymore. Ice Cube was Ice Cube, and and dre was dre and all that shit and nwa was like it had that drum that old school that old school drum beat with the you know it's just it wasn't what was good at 95 you try to make it with your mouth though the 1987 drum beat what do you got you got anything better for an 87 drum beat well and don't talk any shit let's check it out it's fun you do better jimmy you do better there was a west coast whistle

that went with it though you gotta be that's it no that's it we're having a fucking 87 nwa drum beat throwdown challenge right now jimmy I'll do the beat and you go. You do that shit. Yeah, you do all that whistle shit they had. I'm a bad whistle. See? So anyway, they're riding around bumping shit. Yeah.

He said, one night I borrowed my mother's Isley Brothers cassette. That's a good choice, by the way. And popped it into the player as we rolled down the street. With Tay-Tay behind the wheel, we pulled up at a red light. We were rocking the car pretty good from side to side to the beat of the music when Tay-Tay looked in his rearview mirror and saw two cops stopped four cars behind us. He said, police behind us, man. Looking around franticallyantically we all started

screaming at him to turn down the music we were so nervous because we were all carrying drugs nobody had a license and there was no license plates on the car not no just none so at a glance you're definitely getting pulled over that is a that's a christmas gift for a cop with a quota oh four children with no license plate okay here we go yeah talk about a fucking gift he said not too clever but we were just foolish foolish kids none of us even in our teens uh this was when they were you know younger here here they were in their teens at this point he said that's when tate panicked he wasn't a good driver even under the best of circumstances and this was hardly that he tried to make a smooth but quick turn instead he hit the gas hard

then the brakes so he went panicked hit the gas i'm going too fast hit the brakes quick so we all went to the hospital with whiplash. It doesn't look suspicious at all, Tay. No, no one will notice that fucking smooth move. Whatever you do, do it smoothly. Do it casually and like you meant to. Don't look like you're fucking going crazy. He said, throwing us all forward violently. Then he says, quote, it unraveled quickly after that we hit the curb drove up on the sidewalk

and kept going straight toward the brick wall surrounding the sc johnson wax building oh my god we smashed right through that wall before stopping bricks flying in the air some of them crashing down on our car and smashing the windshield jesus christ we sat there for an instant, stunned, the Malibu half in and half out of the wall. When the police swung around and shined a big spotlight on our car, it snapped us out of our collective daze. We fell all over each other trying to get out of the vehicle while making sure we didn't leave any telltale drugs behind. We all made it, but then a frightening realization hit me. Damn, I've got to get my mother's cassette out of the car. There's fingerprints on it.

She's going to be pissed I took her Isley Brothers tape. Where the fuck is my Isley Brothers tape? Karan, get in here. Where is that shit? There's fingerprints on it. She said, so while everybody else scrambled in all directions, I turned around, leaned back in the car, thankful I had long arms, and got the tape out of the cassette by the length of my fingertips and took off again. He went back for the Isley Brothers. Had to get the Isley Brothers tape here.

So January 1998, 17 years old. He was, I guess he had the flu and a broken hand from a basketball game at this point this is when he's playing organized ball and everything he's 17 he said he's awakened by sirens and a crowd gathering outside his house and he's like what the fuck so he said he'd stayed out of a trouble this is a year out of jail and he stayed out of trouble and everything and he didn't know what the fuck was going on so he said he just pulled the covers over his head and hoped it would go away so uh apparently uh the police end up breaking down the door which they don't go away usually and they found him you know in the bed they handcuffed him and he's got a broken hand

so they're trying you know he's like ow ow, please be careful. They take him downstairs, put him on the couch. Apparently, there's this cop named Richard Geller. And I'll say his name because Karan gives him a lot of credit later on. He said this cop and a bunch of other cops scoured the whole house, and they found about half ounce of Coke there in the garage. Now, he said it was about half ounce, about $1,500 there in the garage. Now, um, he said it was about, you know, half ounce, about 1500 bucks worth at the time.

He said, quote, it wasn't mine, but it wasn't a surprise to me either. There were always people going in and out of that garage from the street hiding stuff. I understood that that was the code of the street. You never denied your friends and neighbors access to a safe Haven.

All I knew for sure was that the drugs did not belong to me. Now, the Geller guy is the head of the drug investigation unit for Racine's police department, and he heard a tip that there was drug activity in the garage. So, you know, all by the way, too, he shares that his mother lives there. His younger brother lives there. He said that the cop said, to be honest, I had no idea who we'd find in the house. They said since he was the only person in the house, Karan's alone in the house. He's got the coke.

Oh, no. So the cop said, you know, I could obviously arrest you here. You have possession and you're the only one here. You know, you could get 10 years in prison for this because of your previous record. And literally, you get 10 years if i take you to jail right now and uh quran said it would have been a bad uh would have been bad for me period so the cop said i sat down with him i saw tears well up in his eyes like he can't believe this is happening i also noticed that he had burns all over his hands and i said to him where'd you get all those burns on your hands and he said from the fryer at burger king yeah he was crying i've been making so many tacos

he said i don't recall ever coming into contact with a drug dealer that was also working at burger king which is that's you quit burger king when you're drug you're wasting your money your time there so he said butler's mother arrived while the two officers were deliberating what to do with him. Shocked to find police in her home after a trip to get flu medicine for him. So the cop says he pulled the mom aside and she begged him. She said, please, I promise you, if you give Karan a chance on this, you'll never look back. You won't ever have to worry about him. And Geller ends up saying

quote I'm not saying that Quran might not have been involved in something at that point but in my gut I was pretty confident that the dope wasn't his I'd done my homework if this had been a situation where I knew that Quran knew going in that Quran was the guy selling the dope that he was the responsible party I'm not gonna lie to you he would have been escorted out of that house but he said he eventually decided to let him go and not arrest him and he said i thought it was the right thing to do uh to see if he had a chance to go on the right path so yeah again never should have heard of him if he go how many times does this happen you're there you go in he's on fucking parole done that's it doesn't matter whether he's guilty not guilty parole violation he's going back to the he's going back period it's unbelievable that's it

so uh uh geller said that he left you know geller and his supervisor left butler with a warning butler said they told me if you get in trouble again anything to do with narcotics again you're taking this case too so he's like then we're going to say that it was yours because you're going to prove to us that you weren't you were full of shit here and you were doing something so butler said i was like you don't have to worry about that so yeah don't have to worry about that truly unbelievable i'm yeah it's it's fucking crazy so um he ends up by the way uh during this time period, he has his daughter that we talked about. He ends up having a son during this time as well.

He has two kids. Two kids. Two kids. Before he even graduates high school? Drug busts and a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Yeah. So, of course, he'll make millions of dollars in the NBA, right? Who the hell would have thought this is possible?

His son, by the way, Karan Jr. You betcha. He's doing everything to make sure to set himself up for failure and somehow he succeeds. It's amazing. It's amazing. So, he goes to the main, he wants to get into the Main Central Institute, which is

a private school. I don't know where, I think it's in Maine. Main Central Institute. I don't know. I think it's in Maine. Oh. Yeah, Maine Central Institute. I don't know where the fuck it is here. Oh, no, no. Yeah, I guess it was in Wisconsin.

Hilarious. Maine, Wisconsin. There you go. He asked a local drug dealer for the money to pay for tuition because they have cash. Nobody else does. So he said he needed...

It was about $5,000 tuition. And he said he needed it was about five thousand dollars tuition and uh he said this is butler quote uh the drug dealer said quote get off these streets and give it uh and give it to me no strings and he gave it to me no strings attached just told him get the fuck out of here he said first i asked a cousin who was hustling in the streets and doing quite well bringing in the kind of big bucks i used to make he said to come over to his house and he would give me the money. I went over there several times, but he was never home. Was he ducking me? I didn't have time to find out. So I went to another drug dealer, a guy named Jamie Harris, and told him my situation. He knew me, knew my story, and was a friend of the family. I told him I needed $5,500 but could really use a little

cushion, maybe $6,000 or $7,000 just to be on the safe side. I got you, he said. When do you need it by? I told him, shit, I need it like yesterday. He drove me to his house and gave me the money that quick. Wow. So, yeah, he ended up being able to play there. In his one season, 97-98, where he played for Park, he earned first team associated press all state honors

that year so on the court he just he's awesome 24.3 points 11.1 rebounds a game so not bad and the his team went 19 and 3 that season and they were 4 and 17 the season before so he's a great addition quran makes a difference now in addition to him check this out slide your chair over I'll move because otherwise you're not going to be able to recognize him this fucking I found in this newspaper here didn't realize this look at somebody else they're talking about oh no kidding yeah Tony's from there Tony Romo is apparently from there because that's definitely him that's his name and with an average of 24.8 points per game romo has a higher scoring average than even butler um he says that tony romo played basketball

apparently so they talk about he's also uh all state and football as burlington's star quarterback so there you go he uh collection on him he really suffered jesus 8.8 rebounds 4.7 assists and 3.1 steals per game for him no by the way yeah tony romo was a bad motherfucker on the evidently court apparently yeah so he said at this point um in high school he started doing well and people started looking at him and colleges started looking at him and then he had options to go to big schools and he said i started replaying the journey that had brought me here i thought about how far our family had come from the cotton fields of mississippi i thought about the decades my grandmother had put in working at a tractor manufacturing plant in racine

to help my mother and her other children i thought about my mother working one two three shifts a day piling up so many hours her nickname became Overtime, all to make sure my brother and I would have a better life. So, he's very happy. He ends up choosing UConn, University of Connecticut. Is that right? His final schools that he had to choose from were

UNLV, DePaul, Georgetown, St. John's, and Kentucky were his main choices. Are you shitting me? It's all the big ones. And he ended up with UConn, who had won a national championship a couple years earlier. So they were a powerhouse. When he first gets there at the pre-college summer program, he meets a young lady named Andrea Pink, who ends up becoming his wife in a few years. And I believe they're still together.

So he met her here. So the girl that he ends up marrying doesn't have his children yet. No, they'll have three later on, but not now. He's got two from earlier. So 2000-2001 for UConn. They go 20-12. They don't go to the tournament. It doesn't look like here.

20-12. They don't go to the tournament. It doesn't look like here. Caron averages 15.3 points a game, 7.6 rebounds, 3.1 assists, 2.2 steals. Does great as a freshman. He is the 2000-2001 Big East All-Freshman team he makes.

Yeah, so there he goes. 2001-2002, they do better. The Huskies are 27-7 this year. Not too shabby. This is when they get a cup. They get Ben Gordon in there. Amika Okafor comes in.

They got some future NBA talent to go along with Caron here. They win in the first round. They beat Hampton. Then they beat North Carolina State. Then they beat Southern Illinois. And then finally they lose to No. 1 Maryland that year. At 6'7", is he playing center or is he playing power forward? He's playing small forward.

He's a three. Is that right? Yeah, he's a three. In college he might have gone, you know, maybe back and forth because they'll move guys around. But in the NBA, he's a three. He plays small forward. Yeah, because 6'7'' is not huge in the NBA.

But in college, that's pretty big, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would say7 is not huge in the NBA, but in college that's pretty big, right? Yeah, I would say, yeah, absolutely. Back then especially. I don't know if – You're not center 6'8". I mean, hopefully not. Hopefully you're center 6'11", 7'0", but it doesn't happen very much anymore. Yeah.

So that year, 36 minutes a game, by the way. That's what he's averaging. That's almost the whole damn game. The whole damn game, yeah. 20.3 points a game, 7.5 rebounds, 3 assists, 2.1 steals is what he does. He is the All-Big East first team, the Big East player of the year, the All-Big East tournament first team, Big East tournament MVP, and 2002 NCAA tournament all-region team as well.

The most successful in deep drug dealer ever. Huge. Hugely successful. So before the draft, he said some of the agents were trying to use him to boost up their own clients. Like, you don't want him you should pick my guy because he's a drug dealer and look at his criminal record and all that shit better watch your mouth yeah right i shot myself i shot myself what do you think i'll do to you he said those agents would tell me we respect how you made it through all the hardships you've

endured selling drugs and the gang activity and now that's going to work in your favor because team officials are not going to worry about you getting millions of dollars and messing yourself up no they'll figure you've been through all that already uh they're going to worry more about the kid who's never had any real money when drafted he's going to get exposed to it for the first time he said that's kind of the strategy his agents are going to take as far as like he's had money. That's old for him. He just wants to play basketball now. So the 2002 NBA draft, I think they're in the Felt Forum.

As he said, Cher had a concert in the garden that night. So they're in the smaller venue, which is probably Felt Forum. He said it was a nice, intimate setting. Very good. He said his mother was there. His grandmother came. His fiance, Andrea, his brother, Melvin, his agent was there. His AAU coach was there. All of his people were there that he wants to have with him. He said it was the first time my grandmother, who was born and raised in Mississippi, had ever been to New York. So that's pretty funny. She said that he said, she born and raised in Mississippi, had ever been to New York.

So that's pretty funny. She said that he said, she said, quote, people don't ever go to sleep here. Every time you look out the window, somebody's moving somewhere. People got to do things all night long here. Which is fucking funny. He said he was told that he could expect to be drafted anywhere from third to twelfth, which is a big difference, but still great. So now he said that he invited his fiancée's mother because his fiancée's mother didn't really approve of their plans to marry and didn't really understand what he was doing or that basketball was a thing okay i don't understand how a person in 2002 doesn't understand that someone who's going to be drafted into the nba is going

to make a decent living and we'll have a job you know what i'm saying like paycheck for your girl she didn't get that yet somehow mike didn't notice the gatorade commercials and none of that shit that all flew right over her head i guess space jam Space Jam. She's never heard of Kobe Bryant. The Dream Team. The USA Dream. Never heard of it. No idea. So Andrea, he says, quote, I need to bring my mom, Andrea told me, because she needs

to see that this is real, that this is something that can secure our future. Otherwise, she's not going to let me leave with you. In her mind, you're just some boy without a job he's like i'm at the job fair though this is fucking great she needs to come to the job fair and see there's actual employers interested in employing you before we're allowed to get married this is hilarious she couldn't have read like a pre-draft report or something. So, yeah, she said that her later Andrea, you know, conceded that she even said Andrea to her. She said it was the unknown. Andrea said, quote, I didn't understand it. I know there are plenty of talented players who don't even get drafted. I was listening to Karan say that he was going to be in the top 10, but I didn't know what the hell the top 10 meant. I'd never even watched a draft before. So she said that that day, though, it was different. Her mom noticed that like all the people in the in the crowd, all the cameras, all the media and everybody writing down anything anybody says. And she said her mom said, oh, this is something

serious. OK, yes. She didn't notice that the nba was a serious thing it's on like five channels look how many suits are on people here there's not a person here in a t-shirt it's it's on so many channels jimmy like it's so much michael jordan had come and gone by then how did you miss that how the fuck did you miss basketball michael jordan matter of fact is sitting at a table right there uh writing down who he's selecting because he owns one of these teams. He owns a fucking entire team. It's fucking crazy. So here comes the draft number one pick in the 2002 NBA draft.

Jimmy. 2002? Shit. I got this one. Dirk, was it Nowitzki? No, it's not. Amari Stoudemire? He's in that draft, but not first.

Yao Ming, number one. Was it Yao? Yao, number one was it yeah yeah number one they had so much buzz around him fuck yeah so great he goes to the rockets yeah jay williams from the from duke remember him what yeah jay williams from duke the point guard goes to the bulls second mike dunleavy jr to the warriors jason will Williams? Is that what you mean? Jay Williams. Not that one. No? No idea.

Drew Gooden. He was around for a long time from Kansas there. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, we got DeJuan Wagner. Nene's coming up here. Chris Wilcox from the Clippers here. Number nine, Amari Stoudemire. There you go.

To the Suns. And then number 10 overall, so top 10, Karan Butler goes to the Miami Heat. Right. Absolutely, going to the Heat. And the rest of that first round, not a lot going on here, really.

You're telling me a man who sold drugs in Wisconsin is going to be dropped off in fucking Miami? Drop him off in Miami. Oh my them off in miami yeah here you go how can this go bad there's no cocaine and nobody hangs out outside here so you should be fine everything should be good oh my god yeah maybe maybe like uh you know put that man in utah yeah i was gonna say something like that. Salt Lake City, Sacramento maybe. Not a lot going on there. It's pretty quiet.

Pretty quiet there. Maybe Portland. Get that man to fucking Indianapolis. Well, he can figure out the Midwest. Yeah. Miami's the worst one. Yeah, Portland. He'll just get a dog and sit outdoors and eat at restaurants.

Go eat at sidewalk cafes. just go eat at a sidewalk cafe pet strangers dogs but yeah miami's where they're gonna send him instead so he's drafted by the heat this is my fucking favorite as he gets up to the commissioner here he says to him this is what david's turn then he says congratulations how do you feel uh-huh Quran says fucking great which is the most human thing ever what would either of us said yeah I said fucking awesome I feel great brother what are you talking about so he said his eyes opened wide he paused then he started laughing and I repeated fucking great man mr stern i've been an adult as long as you have yeah this is crazy i was selling newspapers and crack at the same time years ago like before jordan won a title like i was selling cracking newspapers so uh he said back home in racine apparently cars were

driving around honking horns and all that it was like a hometown celebration that he got drafted so 2002 2003 with the miami heat pat riley is the coach they finished 25 and 57 this year yikes not very good i'm looking at this team travis best lafonzo ellis brian grant eddie house yeah yeah poor eddie yeah poor eddie eddie jones was on this team and he was i mean this is not a stacked team at all uh they don't do very well and because of that he plays in 36.6 minutes a game as a rookie so that's huge as a rookie. Yeah, that doesn't get fired. Yeah, 15.4 points, five rebounds, 2.7 assists, 1.8 steals. Not too fucking shabby. Even better, he makes $1,678,800.

That's unbelievable. Boom, that's a lot of newspapers and French fries right there. That's changing lives. That's huge. 2003, 2004, they go 42-40 that year, go to the playoffs, beat the Hornets in the first round, and then lose to the Pacers in the second round there. Stan Van Gundy took over as coach this year.

Caron, 29.9 points a game. I don't know what happened here. He's only in 68 games. He had an injury here. I'm not positive. 9.2 points, 4.8 rebounds, 1.9 assists, 1.1 steals. So I'm not sure what the deal is with that. He does make $1,804,680.

Very important to this team. That's good. Yeah, that's not bad. Now, I guess we have to talk about his straw thing, right? What? His straw obsession. He's got an obsession with chewing on straws. Really?

It's a big... Have you ever seen him on a bench? He's always got a straw hanging out of his mouth. He takes it with him to the bench? He's like an old hillbilly whittling and chewing on a fucking wheat fucking stalk. That's what he's doing. But not straw like that. It's a drinking straw.

A drinking straw. Yeah. He's known for it. His favorite straws were McDonald's straws. He said they had the right bounce to them and fat. He said that in 2010, the NBA banned him from chewing straws during games because he'd have one. He'd chew them during games, have it in his mouth like gum.

While he's playing? While he's playing, he'd have it. Wow. Yeah. Chewing it like gum. The NBA said it was a safety issue yeah um he chewed plastic press he chews these plastic straws for years and years since he was a kid he chews up to 12 a game he would cut them up like little coke straws yeah

and pop them in that's what he did he'd get these straws cut them up in a little coke fucking tubes and then he'd chew them that was his whole deal deal. He said he started doing it as a teenager. He said, it calmed me down. Then it became one of those things you keep doing. Just kept it like a habit. So July 14, 2004, the Heat decide they need to trade him. He is traded by the Heat with Brian Grant and Lamar Odom all going from the heat and a first-round draft pick the next year and a 2007 second-round draft pick.

All of this for Shaquille O'Neal. Shaquille O'Neal. Oh, is that right? That's when Miami got Shaq. Yep, that's how they got Shaq. They traded two first-rounders and three garbage times for him? One first-rounder, one second second rounder, so that's nothing. And then they traded Caron, Lamar Odom, and Brian Grant.

And where the hell did they go? Miami. Or LA. LA. They went from Miami to LA. LA got Shaq went to Miami. So this is in the Tough Juice Caron Butler's book. Kobe Bryant writes the foreword on that thing.

Yeah. And I'll tell you what he says here. Quote, when we got Caron Butler in a trade prior to the 2002-2003 season, which is not true. It's the 2004-2005 season, as a matter of fact. You're way off, Kobe. Bad memory, Kobe. Yeah, that is Jesus Christ, man. I guess, I mean, when somebody enters your life isn't near as important to Kobe at that point.

But I don't know, you can really mark every bit of success based on who was around Kobe. I just had to bite my tongue on about the meanest joke ever that I cannot say because people will definitely get in trouble for it. So remind me after the show to tell you what joke that was because me and you are going to cackle like fucking children he should definitely know times though i would say so he said that laker general manager mitch kupchak gave karan my phone number and karan called me right away uh kobe said great to have you uh ready to go to. And he said that he was ready. He said from the moment he stepped on the court at the training site, he was totally focused. He was competitive. No nonsense. You know, Karan was just what they needed. He said, that's all I

needed to see. That's all I ever need to see from a teammate to appreciate him. He said, Karan and I bonded on day one, and that bond remains as strong today as it ever was, even though now he wears a different uniform. Once I heard about Karan's background, where he started from, the obstacles that have been in front of him, the danger all around him as he grew up, I marveled at how far he had come and how much he had accomplished. If I were going into a battle, if I were going into a game where everything was on the line, I would want him with me. He's not afraid of the big moment, not afraid of an altercation, and I have tremendous amount of respect for him because of that. He was only 24 when he joined us, but he had already been

face-to-face with potential disaster and death more times than most of us will confront in a lifetime. That alters one's perspective. A lot of players, when they deal with crisis on the court, they believe they're experiencing the ultimate pressure imaginable. But when you go through real things in life, when you're tested time and time again with far more at stake than just victory or defeat, your view of what constitutes pressure changes. So he goes on to talk about how Karan taught him that, you know, how to deal with real pressure and that if he could deal with that, then basketball is not hard. And he said that to tell a teammate that he's not working hard to challenge people at practice is nothing to Karan. He's challenged people who were carrying weapons. That's interesting.

He said we were usually together on the road going out to dinner or just hanging out. He said he became close with Karan's family and Caron came close, became close to his family. They'd go to their kids' birthday parties and shit like that. He said when the Lakers were in Milwaukee for a game, he invited everyone on the team to his mother's house in Racine for dinner. So Kobe went over there, big cookout,

lots of food, good music and all that kind of shit. So he says, quote, I clearly remember the day when the Lakers traded Caron. And he said he was so fucking pissed when they traded Caron. So was happy to get rid of Shaq, but really fucking pissed when they traded Caron Butler, which is funny as shit. So 2004, 2005, the Lakers finished 34 and 48.

So maybe Shaq didn't. I think they won three championships in a row before that so maybe Shaq wasn't maybe he wasn't the issue there just a thought um so this team is Kobe and Vlade Divac still on this team Devin George and um Lamar Odom was there before he got traded this is just not whatever this isn't the greatest team. Now, Caron. This is Pilates' victory lap of retirement because he was at the Kings for quite some time too, right? Before he came back to LA? He's an executive within two years of this. He's somebody's GM or some shit.

So Caron that year, 35.7 minutes a game. He starts all 77 games he plays in. 15.5 points, 5.8 rebounds, 1.9 assists, 1.4 steals. Not bad. Makes $1,930,680 that year. Not too shabby. He went from Miami up to L.A., the two biggest Coke markets in America. Two biggest Coke party.

He's fine. Doesn't bother with it. Doing great. No, no Coke. Marries and goes to L.A. vegas and marries andrea they get hooked up here they're gonna eventually gonna have three daughters together so that's nice august 2nd 2005 is when he is traded by the lakers with chucky with chucky atkins to the washington wizards for kwame brown yeah and lauron prophet wow so 2005 butler starts visiting incarcerated children here so really kids in jail at the

oak hill youth detention center uh located in dc there he says to to provide his life story and you know help the kids out with some encouragement. And he also helped organize some community outreach event, urban dialogue, stop the violence in Racine. And, yeah, he also chose to sponsor the Cops and Kids Legacy Project. It's a unique initiative that strives to bring new life into the community by encouraging communication and strong relationships between kids and law enforcement officers. So, yeah, that's what he's doing there. He also does the Bike Brigade, which distributes new bikes and helmets to youth in Racine and D.C. That's awesome.

So he's doing every bit of charity that he could possibly fucking do here. 2005, 2006, he's in Washington. Like we said, they go 42-40 and lose to the Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs. So, yeah, this is the Gilbert Arenas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That team there. And within proximity of Baltimore. Yeah, oh yeah. And D.C. You think there's no Coke in D.C.? Jesus. That's for all the politicians that love it. He could make so much more money. He's selling Coke to these people. Just sitting on Capitol Hill.

That's what I mean. 36.1 minutes a game. 17.6 minutes a game. 6.2 rebounds. He does make $2,461,617. So maybe playing ball is better than the Coke. Even there. 2006, 2007. They're 41-41.

And they lose here, get swept by the Cavs in the first round. You don't want to get swept by any Cleveland team. No, bad. This is LeBron's Cavaliers, though, right? Yeah, this is them now. Now, 2006, 2007, because he he was 2003 draft LeBron. Was he? So, yeah, LeBron, not LeBron.

I'm trying to say Quran, and I got LeBron coming out of my mouth. He plays in 39.3 minutes a game, so that is up there. 19.1 points per game, 7.4 rebounds, 3.7 assists. He's crushing it. And he is an all-star that year, as a matter or 19.1 points per game 7.4 rebounds 3.7 assists he's crushing it yeah and he is an all-star that year as a matter of fact so he makes the all-star team and he makes as well as the all-star team 7 million 438 thousand dollars that's his payday year gee that's his year yeah this is his contract year he also does something incredibly fucking cool this year. He goes to a surprise birthday party for a 16-year-old kid named Anthony Fidel, whose parents just invited him. They don't know him at all, but he was a huge fan of his.

The kid lives in Washington, D.C., huge fan of Butler. And they were like, I don't know. They just sent an invite to the deal. And he went. and they were like i don't know they just sent an invite to the deal and he went and it was not reported at the time because he told the wizards not to do anything don't send anybody don't take any pictures because he didn't want it to be covered in the press because he said it would kind of take away from the sincerity of it and he didn't want the kid to think he was going there for a pr stunt he just thought it was a cool thing to do. I'm doing this for this kid.

And that's exactly what he did. No one heard about it until years later. That is awesome. It was like, until the family was like, that motherfucker's awesome. He came to our birthday party. That's crazy. Do you understand that? He just showed up with a-

He showed up to a Ninja Turtle party. This guy- He showed up with just a rap twister game, ready to go. He held the string for the pinata. He held the string. He's tall. held the string he's tall our beams are too it's the only way we could do it that's amazing what a guy nice guy so 2007 2008 wizards 43 and 39 and guess who they lose to in the first round of the playoffs again calves goddamn calves now uh Quran 39.9 minutes a game he is 20.3 points a game so he hits that 20 mark that's magical 6.7 rebounds 4.9 assists that's a career high by far he raised his

assists more than a whole assist a game this year which is awesome and uh 2.2 steals a game too which is a shitload of steals he's uh nasty He's also an all-star again this year. Two years in a row. He makes $8,218,990 that year. And there's somebody that saw him on SportsCenter and was like, that dude sold me rock two years ago. I shot myself in the chest because that guy shot himself in the leg. I handed him a reefer.

Because of that guy, I shot my aorta. I shot my aorta. Barely survived. Lucky to be here. 2008, 2009. Again, he averages 20.8 points a game this year. So over 20 points again. 6.2 rebounds, 4.3 assists.

I don't know how he doesn't make the all-star team again this year but he doesn't uh consolation prize he does make 9 million 249 980 dollars so all-star small star who gives a shit i'll fucking stay home and watch that shit on tv and order some shit on from offline there. So now my giant house and watch it and just, yeah, happily I'll buy furniture. So I'm more comfortable, my giant house.

Now Butler's main addiction, uh, some people it's cocaine and you know, he's seen that a lot. He has an addiction to straws and to Mountain Dew. Oh, he's highly addicted to Mountain Dew. He said he calls to Mountain Dew.

He calls it an addiction. He said in the summer of 2009, he blogged on NBA.com that he lost 11 pounds just by giving up his daily addiction of soda. He said he was drinking like six bottles of Dew a day. So those are like those 20 ouncers. Yeah. He was drinking like six of those a day, which a shitload of soda that's a lot of soda that's obviously 120 ounces of soda it's a lot um he said that he was doing that he said quote i was going through withdrawals when he quit you know we'll talk about it he said honestly those first two

weeks without do were the roughest two weeks of my life. The man's been to prison, James. He's been to prison. He's been to adult maximum security prison as a teenager. He's had his friends murdered in front of him. He's shot himself. He's fucking seen his mother struggle. Hardest thing of my life, man.

Most difficult weeks of my life, he said. That's wild. He said, I'm talking headaches sweats everything yeah it's caffeine withdrawal is what you got going on there he said he used to drink it uh before practice and he would knock back two of them before games just to get extra jacked to have all the sugar and caffeine a lot of guys do a big sugar load before games yeah but not mountain dew well sugar sugar load before games. Yeah, but not Mountain Dew. Well, sugar, sugar. It really doesn't fucking matter. But like, have you ever heard... But Mountain Dew, James, it's so heavy in your

stomach. No, that's... I wouldn't drink 40 ounces of any carbonated liquid before I had to go run around. You'd think it would be swirling around, but I'm... Sugar Rush is a... Do you ever hear what David Letterman would do before shows? No. He'd get like five Hershey bars. They come in those little rectangles.

He would sit there while they were doing the stuff right pre-show and break apart all the Hershey bars while he was doing it into the little rectangles and stack them up in the little stacks of rectangles. And then he would pop all these stacks in his mouth as he's doing the show. And then by the time he's done eating the last one, it's showtime and he's fucking sugar high and ready to go so he's got energy because you don't want to come out flat you don't want to come out looking flat you got to come out hey everybody don't change the channel i'm david letterman fucking shit jay leno sucks look at me commercial yeah that's what it is so i figured it was that big cup of goddamn coffee he had every day no it was a fucking he'd eat five six hershey bars before every show that was his thing that he did so he said at one point quote i'm a mountain dew addict there's a lot of sugar in mountain dew but

it's so good it's just so good he says he loves it that's what's funny he doesn't even hate it he's like it's just so good i just want to drink it it's like frank the tank with booze yeah he said during his years in the league many players have encouraged him to quit said what the fuck is wrong with you broke his balls about it like yo you're like a top tier athlete you can't be sucking down mountain dues like that shit lebron does commercials for sprite but he's not drinking the shit stop it no shit he's never drinking any of that he said though you know it's just something he couldn't totally cut out he said quote you're sitting in the back of the bus and eating the right thing and guys will be like why are you drinking that and i'm like what's wrong with mountain dew

and guys are just shaking their heads they've got a water and those special crushed juices and I'm drinking a big Mountain Dew just down in it frozen and stuff and they're like this guy he's not going to make it that's what they thought of him at first he's killing himself in front of us he said he tried to hide it when he played with Kobe Bryant because Kobe was real yeah real big about diet and would break guys' balls about what they were eating. And he said he'd just shake his head at me. He said, so when he was on the Lakers, he went to extreme lengths to try to get Kobe to not see him drinking it. He said, quote, I tried to slide it under the chair or something.

Like it's booze or contraband. Listen to how he says this next one it's it's like he was instead of selling coke he's had a giant coke problem is what this line sounds like quote guys knew i needed help i still do that's like the battle i can't get away from i can get away from the streets i can get away from all these different things i can't get away from mountain dew i got the monkey i got the green monkey on my back he's hyper as fuck and i can't get him off me he should have saved that shit for an email to pepsi i'm sure they would love to hear him say that as How do you take a giant bottle from your Mountain Dew? I feel you is what I'm getting at, Karan.

I'm not saying this to make fun of Karan Butler, but I'm saying this because I don't drink six bottles of it a day. Karan, James just shotgunned a can of Mountain Dew. Yes. I only like the real sugar Mountain Dew. Yeah, that's a good one. It's not bad. I have a couple of them a day.

But it's a can from time to time. It's not. Yeah, it's a can or two a day. 120 ounces a day. It's not like, I don't do it like when guys get home and they're like, beer me, and then they have a constant beer for the rest of the time. Do me. Yeah.

Do me. Do me. Do me. More love after lockup. Do me. Do me. I love her. Maybe that's what she she meant she wanted him to throw her of mountain dew do me and then karan butler comes over she oh my god jesus christ that's hysterical it takes me like six hours to drink one. I'm being the face of Mountain Dew, James. Oh, God. Two bottles, just bukkake on himself, fucking pouring it over his face.

Oh, God. I love the dew. Do the dew. I'm fucking it. Never mind doing it. I can get away from the streets, but I can't get away from that Mountain Dew. It's great shit. Poor bastard.

Poor bastard. Oh, that's awesome. So summer 2009, he organized Quran's 3D Summer Explosion, a summer-long program that included events almost every weekend for kids. He organized a day of service, a charity basketball game, a free basketball clinic, his annual bike brigade, as well as back-to-school supply drive for kids in the area.esus fucking christ what is he the best guy ever what the hell's going on here man in 2012 he kept going and donated two hundred thousand dollars to the local united way in wisconsin there as well he's this dude is crazy man he's fucking real nice guy so 2009 is the washington he gets traded in the middle of this but this is the gun incident here with Gilbert Arenas. Now, we talked about it from Javaris Crittenton's side last time in that.

I don't think we really talked about it, went through the entire Koran, but we had excerpts from it. But this is the whole incident from the book here. He said that on the flight home after we lost to Phoenix, Crittenton and several other players were in a card game. That's what we heard. It got real heated. Gilbert was dominating. He said he was a dominating presence on his team, and Javaris didn't really go along with it all that much. Javaris, Crittenton. So he said they were facing each other with a pullout table between them, and he said, I was in the seat next to them half asleep as we you know started landing in dc he said my eyes popped when i heard javaris say put the money

back put the fucking money back gilbert said i ain't putting shit back um uh get it the way tyson got the title that's what he said to him get it the way tyson got the title in other words you gotta fight me for it goddamn he said might or fight or whatever you gotta do to get your money back otherwise you ain't getting it so when gilbert put the money in his pocket javaris lunged over the table to grab him antoine jameson seated across leaped up and shoved javaris shoulder down on the table and held him there with his fucking jameson was a stocky guy and javaris was skinny as fuck so he he held him down uh karan said i got up and yelled hey everybody shut the fuck up that's what he says everybody i'm a drug hey everybody shut the

fuck up for a minute here let me deal is he said how much was in the pot and it was 1100 and he said quote he said to gilbert arenas it shouldn't be that hard to pay what you owe him we all make a great living so just pay the money and this gilbert arenas had 111 million dollar contract he's fighting over 1100 dollars um the two of them kept arguing as they were landing they were still going at it when they all got to the airport. They got to the shuttle van. They're still arguing and fucking crumbling back and forth. So he said the team president, Ernie Grunfeld, leaned over and said to him, to Caron, and said, talk to them, please.

You're the adult here. We trust you. You're an adult. I'll give you a Mountain Dew if you fix this. I'll donate so many bikes and I'll give you all the Mountain Dew you want. I'll put a fucking fountain back there. Just a Mountain Dew fountain. Please go make them stop.

Put your cup up. And he said, I did. And he said, but they kept arguing. And he said, everyone could hear them as they rode along. I'll see your fucking ass at practice and you know what I do. And Gilbert said, what the fuck you mean you know what I do? And Javaris said, I play with guns. So Gilbert said, well, I play with guns too.

So that's what they're talking about. They're going to shoot each other at practice now over $1,100. So he said the next day, they had the next day off. But after that, the next day they had practice. Started at 10 o'clock. Said they all came in. They get in and uh he said that he quote i thought i had somehow been transported back to the days of my days on the streets of

racine which is not what you want to hear gilbert was standing in front of his two locker stalls the ones previously used by michael jordan with four guns on display oh Oh, boy. Not needed. Come get $1,100 from me. I have four guns. I have four guns. Javaris was standing in front of his own stall, his back to Gilbert. Hey, motherfucker, come pick one, Gilbert told Javaris while pointing at the weapons. I'm going to shoot your ass with one of these. We heard that he told him to pick which gun he's going to shoot him with.

Oh, no, no, you don't need to shoot me with one of those, said Javaris, turning around slowly like a gunslinger in the Old West. I've got one right here. And he pulls his own gun. Oh, we heard about that. I've got two guns, one for each of you. So he pulled his own gun, already loaded, cocked, and pointed at Gilbert. Other players, who'd been casually arriving, laughing and joking with each other,

came to a sudden halt, their eyes bulging out. It took them only a few seconds to realize this was for real, a shoot around of a whole different nature. They all looked at each other and then ran. The last man out of the locker, the last man out locking the door behind him. I remember that. I didn't panic because I'd been through far worse, heard gunshots more times than I could count and seen it all before. This would have been just another day on the south side. By the way, everybody ran except for Karan.

He stayed around here to hang out with the gunfight. He's like, this is going to get good. Yeah, this shit's about to get real. I've got to stick around for this. Well, if you leave them alone, they're definitely going to shoot each other. Yeah, all right. If Karan sticks around, he at least gets a great chapter in his book. At least he's going to sell another another hundred thousand copies at the very least he said i talked calmly to javaris reminding him that his entire career

not to mention perhaps his life would be over if he flicked that little trigger finger i look back at gilbert he was silent as he removed himself from the scene javaris lowered the gun i know gilbert was thinking i went too far i had a gun pointed at me and it was fully loaded. Yeah, I would say. Somebody outside the locker room called 911. Flip Sanders was the coach back then, but he was too scared to even come in the locker room. I'm not fucking getting shot. Karan's got this. He's very mature.

I feel like he can handle this. No, no, he's going to do it. I made him an honorary assistant coach about 10 minutes ago. So he's going to take care of this. I feel like the president handled him as the spokesperson for the locker room on the plane. That's yeah, exactly. Talk to them. You talk to them. Who signs their checks?

You were me, motherfucker. He said, I was under no illusions that many of us, many of the rest of us were not going to be affected by the gun incident. I knew that this was the end of the Washington franchise as we had known it. With Mr. Pollen gone, a new regime coming in, and the image of the team shattered by guns that weren't even fired, it was time to tear up the Wizards, wipe the roster clean, and start all over again. Grunfeld warned me that that was going to happen.

Quote, we might have to trade everyone, he said, rebuild from scratch to the future all i said was okay what else could i say yeah that's it so uh now gilbert arena's is pissed off at karan butler's explanation from the book he's got a response to karan here which is fucking great, obviously, because this is ridiculous. What does he have to say? He wasn't happy. He went on his Instagram account after the book came out to correct some shit, mostly about who owed who money. He said that, and obviously Caron put it, Arenas owed Crittenden $1,100. Arenas wants to make it clear that Crittenden was not mad at him over money owed, but because he believed Arenas misdealt a hand of cards. Okay.

So it was the $1,100. I'm not a cheater. Exactly. $1,100 over the, yeah, didn't lose the hand. He cost him $1,100 with a misdealt, which is cheating. You don't misdeal. There is no misdealing. There's dealing correctly and cheating.

There's only two options there. I'm not not cheap i cheat there's a difference it's two different letters it's great so here's how arena tells it arenas tells it quote i respect karan butler's book and i got my copy but the guns in the locker room story is false in his book butler and i were asleep and javal mcgee javaris crittenton and earl boikins were playing cards by the time i woke up crittenton was balls deep in losing so i just that's great so i decided to join the game crittenton got booed which means he didn't get back which means he did get one book of spades, so he had to match the pot, which was $1,100. But $800 was his, so he just lost $800, and the pot is now $1,400, and $1,100 of it is his. Javal McGee won the first $1,100 pot, so he scooped the money.

Boykins asked Javal, can I get my my 200 now since you have the money javal said after we land i don't want to jinx myself and crittenden spazzed give that motherfucker his money you just won my money now pay him uh so i jumped in and said damn dog that's between the two of them uh that's between these two motherfuckers he turned to me javaris turned to arenas and said fuck you motherfucker so i responded fuck you you owe me two hundred dollars and i think you owe karam butler three hundred dollars but we ain't saying shit about it what the fuck are you bitching about 200 for that's what he said so crittenden pops off again oh fuck you motherfucker uh you would try and uh you would try to money talk somebody. So now it's my deal.

Earl said, I'm out. This game's getting a little too heated. Boinkins is out. Javal said, I don't need cards. Crittenton needs five new cards. So most likely he was about to match the pot once again. So I said, I'm out, knowing Javal had AKQ, ace, king, queen. So since it was Crittenton's money in the post, there was no need to fight if he was going to get booed.

I showed my hand, and Crittenton got mad. I had three trump cards and didn't fight with him. So he screams, missed deal. Gil showed his hand. And Javal said, fuck that, I win. I have ace, king, queen. We're not misdealing shit. This is perfect.

Crittenden tries to use misdeal as a way of starting the hand over. So I said, you all figure that out. I walked to the back of the plane and they stayed arguing. But Earl convinced them that Javal won. Crittenden yells loudly, fucking misdeal. So I yelled back, come get this shit with your hands if you want a misdeal, he says. So, Jesus, this is hilarious on a fucking plane. So when the plane lands, he walks back talking tough, saying if we were in the streets, I'd pop you in your knees. Talking about Javaris talking to him.

I said, shit, I'll give you the guns to do it on Monday. So it was Saturday. We had Sunday off. I get to the gym at Monday at 8 a.m., and I put four empty guns on his chair with a note that said, pick one. That's a pretty good prank. He's just fucking with this dude. Yeah, he's trolling, and he's doing great.

He's just fucking with him. No one, he's trolling him, and he's doing great. He's just fucking with him. No one saw me touch a gun or put them there. When Crittenden came in, I was in the training room. Crittenden, Deshaun Stevenson, Andre Blatch, and Dominic McGuire were the only ones in the locker room when I walked in. So Crittenden said, what's this shit? I said, you said you were going to shoot me, so fuck, there's some guns. Pick one. Meaning, pick the one you are going to shoot me with like you said he said i don't need this shit and that's when karan now in the room uh and a trainer uh and so that's what he heard he he heard

the end of it karan saying like pick one and i'll shoot you with it gilbert saying i was telling him if you're going to shoot me here's your guns guns. Pick one, motherfucker. I got four of them. Take the one you want and shoot me with it if you're so tough. So that was the point there. So he says, Crittenden takes the guns

off his seat and throws them on the floor, hitting the trainer's foot. He runs into the training room and Crittenden pulls out a little silver gun that Eddie Murphy shot the pinky toe off with,

LOL. I'm not, that was, it's a Harlem Knights reference. Shot Della Reese's toe off.phy shot the pinky toe off with lol i'm not that was it's a harlem knights reference shot della reese's toe off shot off a pinky toe so uh i'm not going to say that it was loaded or pointed at me no need to bash a man who can't defend his name because he was dead by the time this came out let's just say i started laughing and he said put that heart i started laughing and said quote put that harlem knights gun laughing and said, quote, put that Harlem Knights gun away. Look at the shit I'm giving you.

Imagine what I have at home so you can keep those. That was it. He said that was the end of it. He said, Jeval picks up my guns and takes them to my car. Caron hides Crittenton's gun in the locker room. I love Caron. See, he even hid his gun for. Let me hide this for you still.

Because I would do that. If that was you, I'd be like, put, let me hide this for you still. You don't need this. I would do that. If that was you, I'd be like, yeah, we're taking this over here. I don't know where the fuck it is. I didn't see a gun. I don't know. Guns. No, no.

I mean, he had like a pack of Bubblicious. I saw something in his hand. Wasn't metal. It was strawberry. If I can remember the flavor, it smelled good too. Arena said I was in the jacuzzi. So Crittenton comes in with me, and we started talking. And he said, I play too much.

And then I told him that he was just a hothead. We started shooting around. They called Crittenton first to ask what happened. I was last, so the story became, I pulled a gun and wanted to shoot Crittenton. But I owed him money, LMAO. I owe money, but I'm going to shoot you. So he said, if he owed me money, I'd make $20 million, so I wouldn't pull a gun for $1,100.

Yeah, that happened December 21st, and the story was told January 1st. Like I said, no one saw me touch, hold, grab, move anything. The funny thing is, I got suspended 50 games, charged with a felony, and the only teammate Crittenton decided to call when he needed money for his mom was me because he knows I won't hold a grudge against a teammate, and I gave him $60,000 for his mom's surgery. Wow. Crittenton.

I sent money after he just said he was scared for his life, but I said, don't worry about me. I'll take the blame. What do you need? So he said, I regret making fun of him and calling his bluff. just said i he was scared for his life but i said don't worry about me i'll take the blame what do you need so he said i regret making fun of him and calling his bluff the same thing i do i do regret the same thing i've done with matt barnes and derrick fisher uh is the same shit i did with him that day i wish him the best and karan butler's and i wish him and i wish karan butler's book to sell out but what I wrote is the real story.

So I think Karan just wrote from what he saw. I don't think he made anything up. I just think he was on the periphery of it and didn't know the whole backstory. And Gilbert just filled it in the gaps. Karan wrote his experience. That's what happened. Gilbert there was the arenas was the neosporin that that spackled the wound clothes there and just got it all set. So February 13th, the wizards do make trades they uh they trade karan brendan haywood and uh deshaun stevenson all to the mavericks for drew gooden josh howard quentin ross and james singleton so uh yeah he

goes there that year now he does make by the way, Quran this year, $9,780,970. So not bad. He has made so much fucking money. So much. During the same year, he and his wife, Andrea, were also given the Conversation Changers Award by the D.C. campaign to prevent teenage pregnancy. He went to South Africa as part of the NBA Without Borders delegation. Along with several other players, he visited schools, did basketball clinics, talked with the youth about importance of following dreams and making good decisions.

He also, and in his spare time, he also visited injured soldiers at the Walter Reed Medical Center in D.C. What does he do? Anything else he's just going to do that's nice? He's like Superman. And like Superman, James, his kryptonite is green and it's Mountain Dew. It's Mountain Dew. I need it. I need it.

Racine made a Quran Butler Day, and the NBA presented him with the NBA Community Assist Award. In 2008, the National Congress of Black Women awarded Butler the Good Brother Award. That's great. He's a good brother. Most recently there, not much, this is just from the article, Connecticut governor here proclaimed July 20th, 2009, Quran Butler Day. What? And named him 2009 Ro model of the year the the connecticut middlesex county chamber of commerce named him role model of the year

except for what he drinks with dinner yeah i mean you almost because him he's doing so well like you you feel bad for anyone who has his name that isn't him it's different this i almost i feel bad for all these people because they have to go no i'm i'm i'm not him i'm a much less good person yeah these people like karan butler who is an sd at sd i don't know what that is but he's in delhi india so not guy. Karan Butler, field and education manager in Drums, Pennsylvania at Mansfield University. Karan Butler, or more likely Karen Butler, analyst at Fin True in Belfast. Karen. Karen.

and also karen armstrong former customer service rec at manheim fredericksburg auto auction in fredericksburg virginia as well so there you go uh she's butler armstrong is how that works that's why she's on there so uh anyway uh 2010 11 with dallas they're a good team this year. 57-25. They beat the Blazers. They sweep the Lakers. They beat the Thunder 4-1. And finally, in six games, they beat the Miami Heat and become NBA champions. And Caron gets a ring as well. Why not?

Unbelievable. He's a lucky guy. I'm going to say it. Regrace. You bet. Good for you. He made his – he climbed out of the Grace hole all the way to now. This is great. And he stays at Grace is the thing here.

So that team, Jason Kidd was on that team. Sean Marion, Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Terry. That's a great team. Great team with a great salary for him as he makes $10,561,960 that year. You bet. Goddamn. Signs with the Clippers that offseason as a free agent. Let's see.

They lose to the Spurs in the playoffs in 2011-2012. Vinny Del Negro the coach there for them. For real. Chauncey Billups on that team. It's that whole fucking Kenyon Martin. You know that team. So Eric Bedsoe blake griffin um that's the one yeah that's the guy that year he scores 12 points a game

3.7 rebounds 1.2 assists he's playing about 29 minutes a game uh he makes eight million dollars wow not too shabby that ruined uh alonzo Bowden's joke that he used to wander around L.A. being tall and just tell people, I play for the Clippers. Because even I can't name five dudes that play for the Clippers. Yep. I remember that joke. It's a good fucking joke. So he makes $8 million that year. Next year, 2012-13, he starts all 78 games he plays in, 24.1 points a game.

So they're kind of platooning him, though. 10.4 points he scores and 2.9 rebounds. $8 million, though. So we'll take it. July 10, 2013, three-team trade. The Clippers give Caron and Eric B bledsoe to the phoenix suns right and the clippers trade a second round draft pick to the milwaukee bucks the bucks get give jj reddick to the clippers the suns trade jared dudley to the clippers and the suns trade a 2014 second round

pick to the bucks so played with He played with the Suns here. No. August 29, 2013, about a month later, he's traded by the Suns to the Bucs. So, yeah, he never played with them. But they do pay a salary this year. Got it. It feels like the Bucs were like, no, no, we wanted Caron, too. And they're like, all right, you can have him.

All right, fine. We'll throw in this. Give us one of your foreigners. I don't know. So, this year with Milwaukee and Oklahoma City, because he got traded in the middle of that whole deal, he scores 11 points a game for Milwaukee, 9.7 for Oklahoma City. So playing in the mid-20s for minutes. Eight million bucks for him, though, there.

2014-15, he plays for the Detroit Pist pistons so now he's on the pistons they go 32 and 50 with stan van gundy coaching who coached him back in the day so he's coming full circle here um let's see this year he uh for detroit 5.9 points a game yikes plays 20.8 minutes a game i don't know what the hell's going on with him he's not starting i know that 2.5 rebounds one or yeah 2.5 rebounds one assist per game i don't know what's happening here but uh in february years in the nba james he's i guess yeah plus he's doing all his goddamn charity work you can only do so much you're going to south africa worried about people getting knocked up worry about your fucking points per game dude it's a lot of time zones you traveled through that's what i mean so in the

middle of the season in february he's waived by the bucks so they just shit can him by the pistons by the milwaukee oh no he's waived by the bucks because that was 2014 okay yeah wrong year 2014 15s with the pistons yes he signs a two-year contract with the Pistons. That's right. In 2014, he did all the things I just told you stat-wise. Discount otherwise. Now, makes $4.5 million too. Not bad.

Now, he starts owning Burger Kings at this point. May as well. Since he worked at a Burger King, he said, quote, I once worked at Burger King in Racine. I know the business. I know it from the janitorial spot all the way through the management side. I know that game inside and out. So he bought six Burger Kings around the country.

So he's got those. June 11, 2015, traded by the Pistons with Sean Williams to the Bucs. So June 30, 2015, two weeks later, he's waved by the Bucs again. They just love waving him. Crushing his dream. Nope, never mind. July 21, 2015, so about a month later, he signs with Sacramento, though. And also in 2015 is when he releases his autobiography,

Tough Juice, My Journey journey from the streets to the nba and in 2019 mark walberg signed on as an executive producer of the biopic of the the tough juice movie i hate that but good for him but it'll be a studio movie it won't be like you know four of his friends making it anyway so that's. He'll get paid, I would assume. So, 2015-16, playing with Sacramento, 33-49. They suck. George Carl's the coach. Vlade Divac is in charge of the whole operation.

He plays in 17 games, starts one. 10.4 minutes a game, 3.7 points per game. Not good here. It's over. $1,499,187 bucks. That points per game. Not good here. It's over. $1,499,187. That's not over.

That's a pretty sweet payday. That's not over. That's pretty damn good. One of his main things that he does now is he's trying to end solitary confinement. He's got a big thing. He's very active in this. He supported a bill that requires almost all inmates to be allowed six and a half hours out of their cells and limits on use of certain restraints, which was ended. This bill ended up being signed by Connecticut by Connecticut's governor. He talks about him being thrown into solitary and spending 23 hours a day there.

into solitary and spending 23 hours a day there. And he said that, uh, uh, none of the violence or other trauma in his life prepared him for the despair of that situation. He said, being in those four walls and those four corners, it does something to you mentally and spiritually. It takes away a lot. It dehumanizes you. He said, my life up till that point seemed destined for failure. All the male role role models in my family went through

the penal system incarcerated for drugs or guns or gang related charges they were all locked up at some point in my early years i often wondered if everyone from my inner circle would be killed in the streets or die in prison so um yeah he said uh about this other thing he's talking about he says quote this is about interactions with the police. He said, uh, quote, I'm going to tell you like this as someone arrested more than 15 times in my

life, I almost never had a positive interaction with police, not just coming up either. Shit. I got pulled over when I was in the NBA already. This was the early 2000s, still living in Wisconsin. I got pulled over on a fucking bicycle at an

intersection because they said i ran a red light riding a bicycle you get what i'm saying and they tried to diminish me and embarrass me in front of the community by having me out there for more than two hours i was like just give me the ticket and they're like yo where else do you have properties at just using their quote authority to give me the third degree the whole nine of seeing just how much they could make this a public embarrassment for me wow so it's understandable yeah nobody that's wants that shit so 2016-17 he's done playing basketball now that was his last year in sacramento but he still makes 517 220 bucks for They waived him, but they still got to pay him. That's the problem. So he also that year participated with global mixed gender basketball,

which he is the first, which is the first professional basketball league to support unified play between men and women. So it's co-ed basketball by being the color commentary for the games. He also owns a team in the league known as the wisconsin cheeseheads he owns them uh he joined 2017 he joined espn as a full-time college basketball and nba analyst the next year he went to fs1 uh 2017 18 he made 517 220 bucks from the nba while doing all that other shit. That's awesome.

That's not bad. 2018-19, he made $517,219 again for nothing. Oh, wow. Bringing his career total to $84,676,523. He's so rich. Boom. Karan Butler, man. Talk about turning that fucking life around.

Unbelievable. And in 2020, he got hired as an assistant coach for the Miami Heat, where he still is. So he's doing that there. Yeah, he's doing really well. Can't get enough of LeBron, of Karan. Watch Space Jam. Watch Space Jam. Watch Space Jam. You can go on eBay.

They have a, I found a Miami Heat Butler jersey for 20 bucks, a Lakers one for 40 bucks. You can find them. Yeah, they're on there. Or look into the Vera, V-E-R-A, Institute of Justice, where apparently if you look at anything and inquire and enter your email to go in there and be able to look at their stuff, Karan Butler will email you back. Is that right? Apparently. Want to hear what he says?

Yeah. He says, it's Karan Butler here, trustee at the Vera Institute of Justice and assistant coach for the Miami Heat. I want to tell you a personal story about how interactions with police have affected my life and then ask if you will donate to Veraa ahead of the end of year deadline the first time i was picked up by police i was 11 years old and in the wrong neighborhood literally on the wrong side of the tracks in racine wisconsin i didn't have bus fare so i walked home from school and i had to pass through a white neighborhood to police i didn't look like i belonged as As a teenager, it continued. I was arrested more than 15 times and detained countless others. Can you imagine the impact that has on a kid? Even in my second year after joining the NBA, the harassment continued. He said I'd get most of the time from traffic stops. They'd say there was something wrong with the car or I was or I was in or they would find something even more frivolous. I had bought a nice foreign car to celebrate and was pulled over because the police wanted to check it out. They had never seen one like it before.

That gave them all the cause they needed to detain me. As an individual story, one might say it's benign. But after you experience it that many times, you know that it isn't. It made me feel dehumanized. As a kid, I felt I should just run from police. I knew I would always fit the description. I was getting stopped, searched, and detained frequently for trivial reasons. Needless police stops for minor violations can be deadly. That's why Vera is working to eliminate these unnecessary traffic stops.

For example, Vera partnered with John Choi, county attorney for St. Paul, Minnesota, to enact an important new policy. Choi's office will no longer prosecute cases against people who are stopped by police for minor infractions like driving with expired tags or dark window tint. I joined Vera's board because I could see that the work the organization is doing, researching and talking to communities about what needs to be done, really mattered. I hope you'll join me in supporting Vera's work and mass incarceration and the legacy of racism in this country by making a donation today. Thank you, Karan Butler, trustee. Great points. Thank you, Karan Butler, for making such a crazy story. And that, everyone, is the story of Karan Butler.

That, like we said, totally different than what we kind of usually do. He turns out to be a great guy you know once once he said i'm done he was done and he was really put his head down and did nothing but good things i figured you know what there's a lot of crime rather than just making it all later and talk about his nice childhood and then his basketball career we'll do this and we'll try to have a nice uplifting story for the holidays for once everything we do is terrible and negative and we love that don't get us wrong but we thought maybe you might want uh just a nice story where you go you know what maybe good things can happen in the world sometimes that too the quran was quran's been hassled uh when he doesn't have drugs but

when he did have drugs they left him alone now he's got nothing they're like listen here pal like now let's have a talk now let's have a talk otherwise you can just run away with your isley brothers tape and nobody got you so that's karan butler crazy story like we said much different we're very much rooting for karan butler and uh he's doing fucking great good for karan butler and uh all of that shit so uh i guess stay off the do would be the only thing you could tell him but i mean you know what sometimes you gotta grab a do grab one hey karan the real sugar ones i'm telling you brother better they're so much fucking better you're gonna love them so try those for father's day just have a cigar and

a do i'll buy you've got a pool i guarantee you've got oh he's got a pool yeah yeah he's definitely got a pool no matter where he lives he's got a pool he's got some kind of pool here so there you go if you enjoyed that story let the world know tell everybody give us five stars on wherever you're listening and by the way you can give five stars on spotify now as they now allow ratings on their podcast. So please do that. That really does help drive us up the charts. Thank you for everyone who has done that. Head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com.

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your, your faith in us. It's unbelievable means the world. So thank you for that. And of course, thank you for your $5 too. Thank you so much. And some people give more and thank you for that. You're amazing. Even people will give a dollar. Thank you for that. And, of course, thank you for your $5, too. Thank you so much. And some people give more. And thank you for that.

You're amazing. Even people who give a dollar. Thank you for that. Anything you do for us, we are more than grateful. So thank you. And if you want to just donate on PayPal, you can do that as well using our email address, crimeandsportsatgmail.com. And what you get for both of those things is a shout-out. You're going to get a wonderful shout out.

Jimmy, do me a favor. Hit me with those names. Do it. Hit me with those names like you're pulling a gun on me because I misdelt you. Hit me with them. Frozen Mountain Dew. Like a frozen Mountain Dew. Right now, Jimmy.

This week's executive producers are Kevin Hoydall in Portland, Alicia Johnson, Goodwin and Gabe. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Jen Visconti, Nilou Rapsonjani's around still. Hey! Hello. She's in San Francisco. She's gotta be doing

well. She's great. She was gonna move from there. I don't know if she did. Also, Jordan Bennett, suffering in cold fucking Canada. Jennifer Schaefer, Michaela Jarrett, I think, Nolan Betterman, like Ice-T would say it, I guess. Betterman.

Betterman. Betterman. Detective Betterman. Corporal Carl Kirchner. The real one died. Did you see that? No, I didn't. Corporal Kirchner died?

Yeah, the real one. Wow. I didn't know that. He died this weekend. Oh, wow. He was a big star in Japan, too. So now we only have one. Well, you're the one that. He died this weekend. Oh, wow. He was a big star in Japan, too. So now we only have one. Well, you're the one now.

Pick up the slack. Also, Peyton Meadows, Rabbi Shmulalovich, and his wife, Sheda Perlman, Mitch Kumstein, Burgermeister and Meister Burglar. Wait, Burgermeister, Meister Burglar. That's what it is. James Marder, Larry Butterfast. Happy birthday, buddy. Hey, happy birthday.

Good to have you around. Kimberly Cooey, Joan Arndt, Kayla Lyons, Frank the South African Birdwasher, happy birthday and happy new year. He's a new year baby. Oh, well, happy both to you. Happy everything. Chelsea Carver, Mike Baumunk, Erwin Lopez, Dorte Lundforschnick, what? That can't be a real name.

Is it? Maybe. Joseph Seipt, Laura Koch, Cockle, I don't know. I don't know. Catherine Wilczewski, Janice Hill, Erica Tavecchio. In Como, Italy, James. I called you Jamie. Oh, well then.

Why would I do that? Appreciate that. Bree Stewart. Charlie with no last name. Allison with no last name. John Jenkinson. Ralph Freilich. Tammy.

Tammy Covert. Benjamin Swanson. Leanne Finlay. Alana Salmon. Roussert. No last name. Emily Grillo. Grillo.

Claudia Lukenbach-Bowman, Kehlani Wisdom, Andrew Colkert, Chris Kelly and Chris Riley, Jeremy Clausing, Melody Hogan, Modern Viking, Tina Alwyn, Alexander Lee nordman nordman brent chandler savannah steffi uh reese jimmy wiss man jeff no last name ali warnham uh ryan bergen vanessa maria bello becky with no last name emily daniels. Julie Rose. Rose. Stephanie Lee. Byron Einerson. Jesus. Annette Boyer. Brooke would know last name. John or Jean Johnson. Joni Knight-Viverito.

Martha. Martha Pickle-Keeveny. Sounds so confused. This is exhausting. James Ray. Taya. Taya Wingert. Tracy Davis. Billy Newman. Theo would know last name, Diana Hedges-Mayer, Michael Brumley, Liam McNamara, Jared McCoy, Larry Creek, Stephen Perrin, Eddie Nix, Zach Russell, I guess Terrier, Jermaine Jones, Audra with no last name, Cynthia Karaginidis, Paul Lopez, Hannah Brown, Tom S., Noah Jude, Andy Stanford, Aubrey Lynn Chibata, Dane Green, Sarah Cullen, Kelly Hodges, Anna Teresa Rodriguez, Latourne Lanson, Lansden, Jennifer Hancock, Andrea Nelson, Quentin Eldridge, Kristen Butcher, Chris Johnson, Nicholas Jules, Stephen Adams, Michael Johnson, TJ Hillis, Hills, Emma Ward, Jeff Shepard, Michael Mollie, Emma Ward, Mary Patton, Brandon Cole, BK2K, Teresa Rodriguez, Amy McKay, Bethany Scholten, Susie Lalonde, Parth with no last name, Brianna with no last name, Simon Chug, Rebecca Gardner, Megan Condello, Tina Armstrong, Bobby G, Garrett Simpson, Kedrick Patterson, Andrea Minow, Christopher Vinton, Jason Forrest, Margaret Shields, Mackenzie Kelly, Becky Visser, Don Carlton, Izzy Mendez, David Payne, Jess Estes, I know, I know, Casco, what, Caskey? kyle kyle carlson matt nelson nicole kypker kipker uh david with no last name kate benny uh

terry brock maggie ziel zielkowski stephanie cordova amanda with no last name andrew patrick david l mccall ella l mccomsky charlie p i think it's charlie m's brother charlie p charlie fucking m you made me pop your fucking eye out for Charlie fucking M Jackie Banks, Stephen Tresp Brian Smith, Alexander Michael Franson, Daniel Johnson and all of our patrons you guys are fantastic thank you

thank you so much everybody from the bottom of our hearts honestly we really do appreciate everything that you've done for us and continue to do for us and thank you do for us. And thank you. We will continue to try to give the best shit we can to you and hope that you enjoy it. And thank you for everything you do for us. Jimmy, what if they wanted to thank you or tell you anything?

Just say, hey, Merry Christmas, Jimmy. How could they do that? You have found me online and you can continue to do so. If you Google the show, you'll find both of us, correct? Yes, that's all you got to do. Google Crime and Sports Podcast. There's only one and it's us. If you see another one with two other assholes,

tell us because I'll hunt them down like fucking Javaris Crittenton owes me money. It's a fight on sight. I will find on sight. That's happening. So do that. Follow the show. Do everything.

Tell your friends. Thank you for everything you do. Have a happy goddamn new year. Live from the Crime and Sports early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.