Grubstakers - Episode 181: Phil Ruffin

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Check out the Texas boy that made money from casinos. a possible Lolita express connection and a grandson who shot up the school. Donald Trump would be his best man at Phil’s third wedding. He really enjoys furloughing staff and seems very drunk during his RNC speech. This one a doozy go grab Gary Busey tune in to Grubstakers!

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop.

In 5, 4, 3, 2... The evil has gone. Hey everyone. welcome back to grub stakers to the covid19 phase two run of it uh we're still coming to you from separate homes as we deal with the the quarantine here. Grubstakers. Yeah, sorry. Let me take that again. Can we catch you in again, Stephen?

Can we take care of you? Sure, why not? All right. Get your head in the game, baby. You got this. I like that intro. Separate but equal rooms. All right, here we go.

One more time. Five, four, three, two. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Grubstakers. We're coming to you live, recorded, from our separate but equal chambers in the quarantine. I'm Steve Jeffries, and I'm joined by all three of my co-hosts. Yogi Poliwal.

Andy Palmer. Sean P. McCarthy. We're coming to you from multiple undisclosed locations. Grubstakers, mansions, north and south, and wherever Sean's recording from. Whichever country. That's a CIA black site in Turkey turkey why does it gotta be black uh we're talking about the billionaire phil ruffin today he's a real estate gambling tycoon uh owns properties on las vegas he's friends with Donald Trump. Donated hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to his campaign in 2016.

He's also known as a shrewd businessman and was a formative influence on Trump before he knew the art of the deal. So we're going to get into all of his shady dealings with unions in Las Vegas, his possible Epstein connection. There's a lot of interesting stories with this guy. He's worth, as of 2019,

he is worth $3.1 billion, according to Forbes. Damn! He's married to a Ukrainian model who's nearly 50 years younger than him. Nothing wrong with that. Just throw it in there. I don't want to be ageist. Right, absolutely the worst thing that casino billionaires do is have age gap relationships. So he's worth $ 3.1 billion today he in 1972 he had a wealth already of 20 million we'll get into the full story in his bio of his source of wealth

of course but i just wanted to go through a mathematical example before we get really started of how unimpressive this actually is if you think about it. But Steve, if you start with a mathematical example, people might turn it off before they get to the Epstein stuff, because you've already blown the really interesting stuff at the front. I'm coming up with 32.33 repeating, of course. stuff at the front so you own a bunch of residential commercial real estate you might also own a stake in some real estate investment trusts or what are called rates and if you mash all that together the average long-run historical rate of return over like over one year is about

nine and a half percent it's uh it's quite a volatile industry but you're generally rewarded if you have if you're especially if you're a shrewd business and like he uh apparently is that five a clip of 9.5 so if you start with $20 million of initial deposit and use it to buy your portfolio in 1972, and then you compound that annually for 48 years up until the present, you wind up with about $1.87 billion. Wow. Right. And so that's with no windfalls um you're just you're merely reinvesting all of the income

from those properties back into what you have you're not expanding so he's worth 3.1 which is obviously more than 1.87 but we're going to get into some instances around mostly around the great financial crisis in 2008 which kind of point to a lot of luck was involved basically and he had some unbelievable windfalls which catapulted him up to a staggering 3.1 over 1.87 billion so sort of his claim to fame is he's like well he's just like this patient businessman who builds up his wealth over time without using crazy debt schemes and stuff and to an extent that's true but i just wanted to put that example out there uh before we get to the juicy epstein stuff and everything uh you're given that figure

of 3.1 billion net worth steve but um it looks like according to forbes website i don't know if this is just covid related but they're saying j 2020, he's worth about $2.3 billion. So he might have just lost some money in COVID because of all the casino shutdowns and that kind of stuff. That makes sense because he's completely shut down right now and there's no income and they probably re-evaluated his properties. The most recent estimate from Forbes, July 2020, is $2.8 billion. I'm guessing, yeah, with all the shutdowns and reopenings and stuff, it's fairly volatile around, I guess, the tune of $1 billion. Yeah, he also owns stock, so there's a downturn in there,

and it's not quite back up to where it was fellas come on what's the difference between 2.2 to 3.1 billion huh a measly 800 million dollars geez it's how much his wealth is larry david it fluctuates by about a Larry David over the course of a year. Right. You know, one interesting thing about this guy is in looking through his backstory and listening to him speak, he's a guy who more or less has it all. He has a self-made score of eight. And he was working in a WT Grant store and he said he saw a man drive by in a Cadillac with a beautiful redhead at his side and said, that is who I want to be. And he became that. This is only goal in life, really.

He became that. And he's just a completely dispassionate, bitter asshole who really like has it all and is just spiritually empty like he there was uh an article in the uh wichita eagle about um a state senator that i'll get to and while he was being interviewed by just some reporter about his his uh relationship with or his like changing relationship with a state senator he just started yelling at this reporter on the phone like what are you doing why are you asking like something where he can't just be like hey i got three billion dollars i gotta go and then hang up like he wouldn't even do that in his office in las vegas he has a chinese carved

mammoth tusk from the ming dynasty uh one of five in his collection there's no indication that he has any interest in chinese history or uh paleontology he just has to own these things for status he's also got a gold chest set um he's got a picture with Mike Tyson. Just all these items to represent status. And then he doesn't seem to enjoy any of it. He's one of the best friends with the president, who is best man at his wedding. His second wedding, possibly third. It's three. I think he's got uh three wives he's been uh divorced twice and now he's on his third wife third being the ukrainian supermodel

but as we all know a billionaire that gets divorced does not eat but ladies and gentlemen i don't make the rules okay i just write them in my mind as i go along so here is here is our enthusiastic best friend of Donald Trump introducing him at the 2016 Republican National Convention. This is a video that is hosted on YouTube by the official RNC account. It's also unlisted. The Republicans weren't that enthusiastic to present this to the world but here he is introducing donald trump uh very secretly it's loading my name is skull ruffin i have been friends for over 20 years and business partners. I can tell you as a friend, he's been unbelievable.

Donald's word is his bond. If Donald tell you something, put it in the bank. He's been my partner and friend. And believe me, his handshake is better than any contract you will ever write now here he is just right off the bat like plainly dispelling everything everyone's saying about how donald trump scams everyone very very subtle in his introduction here he is talking about donald's business acumen he can see things that others cannot see. You look at a deal and make something incredible out of it.

We were in New York on Park Avenue in 58. There was a building called the GE building. I didn't like it. I said, Donald, stay away from it. He bought it, made $200 three hundred million dollars on it. That's what he does. We're in Palm Beach with Robert Kraft. He bought a house on

the ocean. He paid forty million dollars for it. I didn't like it. I thought it was a mess. He sold it for one hundred million dollars. Shows you what I know. Excellent at reading teleprompter. Here he is playing the crowd.

New York. Where's New York? He is in New York. You know what he does in New York. And then here's a segment clearly he's um he had some he had a good time in the green room before this um here's a story that starts out good enough and then uh just falls apart donald does not give up he says let's go forward with this project. We'll put the money in.

We will make the damn thing work. And he did. By the way, we put in $30 million apiece in four years. He didn't squawk and buy the money in. I believed him. I always have believed in him inspiring words we didn't squawk

worth of money in what a fucking mess here's his story about our beautiful president telling his best friend that he's running for president when he first told me we were in Mar-a-Lago he first told me he was going to run for president when he first told me we were in mar-a-lago he first told me he was going to run

for president i said donald are you sure you want to do this you're king of the world you have everything you want why are we doing to do this he said simply i love this i love america our system is broken and i am going to fix it. That's what America needs now. A fighter, an innovator, someone that knows what the hell he's doing. And believe me, Donald can do it all i know him like i knew a brother i love the man he will make this country great again go donald see and watch a tsunami is coming his name is donald trump thank you man barely standing could barely make it through a six minute speech

on a teleprompter i like to imagine he went backstage after and and accosted somebody and went it's your fault you put every word on the teleprompter twice he starts he starts crying. He said, Donald's my only friend. That entire video could have been a Johnny Walker Black commercial. This is how fucked up we'll get you, buddy. I love how he's like, Donald, where's New York? You know what he did in New York. Like as if he's a fucking natural disaster.

You know what Hurricane Trump did in New York. You know what he's capable of. It is true, though. That's like when you're having a political argument in the bar and you like start speaking and then you forget your points. So like you want to be like you know trump he brought he fixed the ice rink in new york and like you know he he called out the central park but you start saying it and then you're like i forget what my points are so you you know what he did in new york you know the things

i like how he he talked to it like he brought up like Robert Kraft's like house or something for a bit yeah I thought I thought it was a bad idea I didn't like it he did it anyway shows what I know I thought it was terrible

he brought up Robert Kraft's house he's like and then me and Donald and Robert, we went down to the massage parlor. Donald Trump's giving him the cut it off motion. You got the sandman with the fucking cane coming off the side. Yeah. I told him to do a bump before this. And he said,

no, I'll have a private massage. as was the style at the time 1992 donald trump said you lost your wife in a messy divorce because you ignored your family and emotionally destroyed them i got a ukrainian wife for you yeah he so wikipedia says he's been married three times but i tried to look up his first wife and oddly enough she has the same name as an actress who was uh 10 years older than him like a uh child actress and it's not clear if someone just like the only sources i could find referring to his first wife were wikipedia and other websites with the word wiki in it so i'm not sure he refers to his

current wife as his second wife so either he was married to a hollywood person when he was a guy who owned grocery stores in kansas or um he was married to someone with the same name as a hollowed person or someone on wikipedia had some fun yeah the the the wikipedia person uh the first wife he's referring to is mary louise miller and uh the second wife is lynn ruffin uh later not ruffin obviously um but i believe that the way he puts it is that since he has kids with lynn and he now has kids with uh nikola yannick yanko that that is actually a family like even though he divorced uh mary louise miller his first wife well they didn't have a family so it didn't really count you know and i just want to say for any msnbc viewers listening like a good reference point is uh he

has a ukrainian wife so just like the president his wife is a kgb agent so you do have to keep an eye on him they still exist man um yeah and when he when he's asked about his flaws, he says that his workaholism shortchanged his first three children and his first or second wife. And he regrets it deeply. And what I read from that is that he basically just set three emotionally damaged rich kids loose on the world. And then Yogi found something that maybe we'll get to now, maybe we'll get to later, that really reinforced that idea. Yeah, I'll tease it right now. Let's just say Phil Ruffin's grandson, Dylan Ruffin, was arrested for because he was shooting bullets at a school and then in a gunfight with the police later on. But I'll cover that a little bit later.

And I just want to say, you know, it's a lot of progress to see a Dylan shooting up a school without needing an Eric to provide emotional support. Anything else before we start the bio? He's a friend of Bill Cosby. He said that when Cosby would play Vegas, they'd eat chili dogs in his house. What? Really? Yeah. They're taunting us chili dogs pizza come on man this is also while we're talking about his family he uh he actually bragged in one profile of him um uh he has a he has a fourth kid from his uh second or third from his current wife and uh he he bragged in the one profile he said i'm not above

changing the occasional diaper which means that he's probably changed about one diaper and did it resentfully can we go back to him shooting at a school though yes like what did he think he thought it was like the outlook hotel where the school was haunted it wasn't the people in it who were bullying him it was like i have to destroy this educational building i will get more into this story there is like you know for incidentally the local news affiliate was at the residence where the shooting with the cops occurred and they had a camera up on the door while the shooting happened so uh i i i looked into it and i will cover it extensively in a moment but uh it is um at the end of it you don't learn anything you just feel sad i'll let you guys know that up front

and edit it so that i say the overlooklook Hotel instead of the Outlook Hotel. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'll do that for you, Sean. I got your back. In the Outlook Hotel, Clippy's the one who says the N-word. Did you mean to type murder? One last thing we can mention before we start his kind of chronological biography is I gave a shout out earlier to our possible MSNBC viewer listeners. Donald Trump made to Moscow, during which the allegation is that the pee tape was recorded, that Russian intelligence videotaped Donald Trump ordering two prostitutes to urinate on each other in a hotel room. During that 2013 weekend trip to Moscow, he flew on Phil Ruffin's plane, and Phil Ruffin joined him because they were supposedly looking at

setting up a hotel in Moscow at the time so it should just be noted that this is a man who has watched Donald Trump be urinated upon and I think we can say that without any risk of lawsuit

whatsoever and that's how this went down right hey there but it's like you know and uh regardless of whether or not the tape is real um i think we can all agree that as long as we just believe hard enough the tape will be real um it's still real to me exactly but uh regardless of that um a lot of people have pointed out some kind of interesting financial connections between phil ruffin and donald trump so we'll get to those and also phil ruff in fact he uh they uh presumably if it was his plan they flew in a 737 because uh uh regular business private jet uh needs to refuel on its way to Europe.

So they were in, I guess, a real big hurry to get peed on. Really? Yeah. Wild. Yeah. Svetlana was on the phone like, Donald, I can only hold it for three more hours. I drank so much water.

You need to get here now. Now, Donald, you gave me your handshake. You told me I'd watch you get peed on today. If you wait another eight hours, it'll technically be tomorrow. I'm sorry, but can you imagine how yellow Phil Ruffin's pee is? Just with the amount of Jack Daniels this guy drinks. Dangerously dehydrated.

He's like, he just pees on his sex worker and then she dies of alcohol poisoning. They have to cover it up like the Godfather 2. To get into the biography of the man himself, Phil Ruffin was born in Potter County near Amarillo, Texas.

He's the son of Blanche and Roy J. Ruffin. His family is of Lebanese descent. So his paternal grandfather immigrated from Lebanon to Oklahoma. Phil was raised in Wichita, Kansas and his dad eventually set up and started running a grocery store there. So he's Lebanese.

Yes. Originally his surname was Rufan. R-U-F-A-N. And then either the all-powerful immigration officer changed it for him, or someone decided it just needed a new country, a new name. Right, sure. He has four siblings, Elaine Ruffin Namer, Roy Ruffin Jr., Pat Ruffin, and Pam Ruffin Jr. Pat Ruffin and Pam Ruffin. In 1953 he graduated from Wichita North High School where he was a wrestling champion and in a preview of him neglecting his own children to an extent emotionally a Forbes profile

said that after he won the state championship in wrestling his father who never attended a single match asked him if he was the one they were talking about in the newspaper wow yeah so he actually had i mean he had some sports prowess also um his his old high school uh north high school in wichita has apparently repeatedly tried to honor him in person at their annual gathering for the High School Hall of Fame alumni. Right. And he has refused to attend. Wow. It is interesting how everybody in this family has been running an experiment on how to turn your children into school shooters.

Yeah. And then finally that has recently paid dividends name them dylan yeah after a multi-decade investment that it's finally paying off the uh they just real quick the school in question that dylan shot at supposedly was the elementary school that he went to growing up oh okay we're teasing you with little bits of the story as we go that's right and there was um there was another tragic uh story part of his upbringing in wichita kansas was his mother died when a house fell on her that's right yes. Yes. Yes, precisely. Steven, do you say his mom's name is Blanche? Yeah.

Am I pronouncing that right? I have no idea, but Blanche. What a fucking- B-L-A-N-C-H-E. That sounds right, but what a rustic name. Yeah, that's my mom's Blanche. Gone with the wind ass name. Right. It's just like, you just hear that name and you're like he didn't

get hugged as a child now fill up if you want to be hugged you have to win at wrestling become a billionaire and your grandson needs to become a school shooter but if that doesn't happen we're not gonna love you and you need tusks from the ming dynasty how many times do i have to tell you this so after high school he attended washburn university in topeka kansas for three years and he also he transferred over to wichita state university the um the shockers and never got his degree though. He dropped out. But all the while though, he was starting up...

Imagine the foam hands for that team. Yeah, that's right though. They're the Shockers, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two in the pink, one in the stink. That's their slogan. No, literally that's their... I have no idea, Steven.

I'm just saying two in the pink, one in the stink. Are you telling us you don't know the Wichita State football team? No, for their basketball team. They're really good. Oh, really? Get it in the hole. Two in the pink, one in the stink. That's what they say.

Yep, they are the Sharkers. But so are they named after that? Two in the pink, one in the stink? Or was it like... I don't know what a Sharker is other than that. Actually, it's basketball terminology. You see, when you're outside the three-point line, that's the pink.

Then it's... Inside the pink, that's the stink. Hard in the pink. They're named after the electric fence that keeps all the kids in practice. You actually can't leave when you're on the basketball team. Any Wichita State University listeners can explain to us that. Actually, before he started these businesses, he got a job working at wt grant which is a now defunct department store and according to forbes he was once tasked with

repossessing a monkey that customer stole or didn't pay for i don't know if there was uh like a payment plan for this monkey and a customer just fell behind you know maybe i don't know academia is rough and maybe ross was having some trouble with the bills but uh he said it was a low point in his life and uh a quote from him is i had to go pick the damn thing up it's as low as you can get repossessing monkeys kids were hanging all over me don't take the monkey terrible and it bit me on top of everything else what oh yeah and he said that the monkey experience this is his origin story taught him to take his father's advice and work for himself so he bought a convenience store in Pawnee in 1958 I see but what he's not telling you is he actually had sex with the monkey and started the AIDS epidemic

right actually I think he maybe just prior just prior to WT he was working with it for his dad for a bit like as his first job at the grocery store okay so yeah so he got he got his first like

kind of for real job with his dad at the grocery store and then he worked at the department store repossessing monkeys apparently and then using the knowledge from those business ventures he started the hamburger joint i don't care that it's an actual monkey he has taken but the fact that a part of this guy's origin story is he's taken monkeys away in what the 50s that's when this is going on it's yeah that's that's why you can buy monkeys from just like a convenience what does the roughing boy do? Oh, that boy, he takes the monkeys away. Oh, wow. Well, someone's got to do it. There was a department store in Wichita in the 50s that sold monkeys on layaway.

Hmm. He's like, he's like, repossessing monkeys is the hardest part of my job. Yeah, but like, you have to understand, in the 1950s US, filming monkeys smoking was a multi-billion dollar industry so they were very valuable so it like this is 1958 50 57 58 59 when he's has some

of these early business ventures after wt and like he's doing the hamburger convenience store um there is a story that he'll tell in an interview and it's also comes up in a few other articles like through Forbes that he got a loan from his father for anywhere between 500 to 5,000 dollars um he himself said it was 5,000 isn't that right Yogi yeah and from from from some speech honoring him for some business award, he says that he got a $5,000 loan from the bank. In other articles, it said it was $500, and then from the Las Vegas advisor, it said that he got the loan from his dad.

And just to clarify, his dad owned a convenience store or multiple convenience stores? I just saw a convenience store, a grocery store, actually, not a convenience store. Okay. So his dad owned a grocery store, at least one in Wichita, Kansas. Right. And when he would receive the loan from the bank or his dad, he would uh 24 years old at the time right so if it i mean if it came five thousand dollars in today's dollars is worth about 45 000 which is pretty pretty typical for a small business loan that you would get if you do qualify sure i mean it'd be hard to qualify for small business loan for most people if it came from his parents um i didn't hear any i didn't read any story about him ever having to pay this back sure if it came from a regular bank all right

well more power to him uh he probably he's able to pay it back but um yeah yogi one thing i read was that these gas station convenience stores that he was opening were the first self-service gas stations in kansas so previous to this that they'd have a guy that would take care of the taking of the uh gas you know wiener and putting into the car vagina uh but he would be like no people can do that on their own and the oil industry was like, what? Men in suits and women won't be able to do this task. And he's like, nah, we'll figure that out. So he finagled the oil industry to change the law

so that he could have a self-serve gas station. That law changed in 1972 in Kansas. And prior to that, he had used some of the money that he presumably acquired from buying a few of his small business ventures. He sold his stake in one of the early ones with the undergraduate friend that I told you about. He used that to buy a convenience store with a gas station. Gotcha. This was prior to the lot to the law change and it was a

bit um there had been there's already been there'd already been a bill attempt to do this to legalize self-service at these gas stations and um he bought he had already had a few convenience stores, and then the law change happened, and he was able to not have as many employees because you don't have to have a guy out there to pump gas for everyone. So suddenly his properties became a lot cheaper to run, and he was making a lot more money from them. Yeah, I mean, potentially you have a guy behind the counter and then one guy that's doing all the work in the gas, pumping the gas into the car. So you get to fire 50% of staff, potentially, and now you just have the guy behind the counter and then that's half the money back.

Right. So eventually he's able to amass about 60 convenience stores um in kansas and he did so with very little debt well uh uh he has the you know he has the business loan from either his father or the bank depending on who you're listening to. But otherwise, it's pretty much just all on a cash basis. Sean? And we've kind of talked about this running theme with these various boomer billionaires in the U.S. is they all started their companies during the greatest period of economic expansion in U.S. history.

So, you know, that's kind of an advantage that's not available to everyone who wants to follow in their footsteps. But also something we mentioned on the Walmart episode that I think is worth bringing up is that Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was also kind of starting these five and dime, these discount stores. And in the U.S., the minimum wage was created in the New Deal, but actually didn't apply to cashiers in these discount stores until John F. Kennedy signed an expansion of the minimum wage early in the 1960s. So, you know, I mean, I can't say for sure, but it is likely that, you know, himself and his father benefited at least throughout the 50s into the early 60s from underpaying people working for them. Yeah, from that same Las Vegas advisor article, it says here that the from the money he borrowed from his dad, according to the article, into a tri-state empire of 61 total branded convenience stores and self-service gas stations kansas oil wells office buildings warehouses industrial parks a bank a dairy and

at least 14 hotels spread across five states his harper trucks grew to encompass one-third of the u.s hand truck market and that's just a partial listing of ruffin's non-gambling ventures so he he enterprises uh one business into several others and i mean really just buys up the town and becomes like you know when you see like those old-timey movies where they're like oh who's that oh mr ocelot he owns the town he became one of those characters uh in various uh parts of these the these five states so between 1959 and 1974 or so he's amassing a small empire of convenience stores um the hand truck business he's generating quite a bit of cash from this uh given this given its scale and he he's also getting into real estate and in particular um a couple hotels like he buys his first hotel which he turns into a

marriott in wichita and he also makes an important what would become a pretty important venture for himself by purchasing a greyhound racing site and i think andy you had some more research on that yeah yeah so he he got the wichita greyhound park and he had his site sets on turning it into uh like a dog torture park and casino and so he um his plan was to invest with actually donald trump and install a trump tower and gillies in wichita uh so he made a bid to install slot machines in this Greyhound park. But he has repeatedly the problem with putting slot machines in this Greyhound park is that it's not yet legal in Kansas to to have these slot machines. And so it had to be approved electorally. So in 2007, he made a bid to install them, but he lost in Sedgwick County by about 200 votes.

And he closed the park afterwards, and he claims that the slots bill was actually a job bill, and on the results of the vote he said, people were crying, people who worked for me for a long time. The only reason I pushed for it was I wanted them to keep their jobs. And the loss of the park cost him almost nothing but he laid off 250 people so you know um i think they were doing the his employees were probably doing most of the crying there but what's what's particularly

interesting about this story is his relationship with this uh woman susan waggle who uh is his former arch nemesis she is the president of the kansas state senate and she was the biggest opponent of the slots bill uh in 2007 and it might have been related to her and her husband having extensive holdings and bingo halls before she ran for senate but um she actually publicly criticized ruffin's efforts to hold a new vote in central county to allow slot machines uh and according to waggle those of us who oppose gambling don't have millions of dollars to fend off mr ruffin every time he wants to push a ballot initiative and then that ballot initiative uh came up again in 2018 and she turned on a dime according to a waggle campaign spokesman her position changed quote after meeting

with mr ruffin and other leaders in the wichita business community and after learning about the uneven tax treatment that had been leveled on the industry. Tax fairness and tax equity is a top concern for Senator Waggle. Wow. But Andy, you know, let's not judge politicians and call them flip-floppers. You know, sometimes your thinking on an issue evolves when somebody opens a briefcase in front of you and you see things from ways you didn't before, before you heard that click of metal. Well, it's funny you should say that because, you know, I'm willing to believe that the president of the Kansas State Senate has complete ignorance of Kansas State tax code. But it turns out on further digging in October 2017, Ruffin gave $1,000 to Waggle's state Senate campaign. And then the vote failed anyway but then in 2018

waggle expressed interest to the trump administration and serving as an ambassador to ireland belize and belgium saying that her cat uh as a catholic she wanted to serve in a country with a strong catholic faith and as a reference she listed ph Phil Ruffin. Oh. You know, basically saying... So this is how you become an ambassador. It's always confusing. She was saying, hey, Mr. President, I'm friends with your buddy. And she was actually never nominated. And a former Trump administration official was quoted as saying,

about every state senator in the country thought they should be an ambassador um and uh this year actually waggle also ran to become a u.s senator uh to which ruffin has donated a the federal maximum of five thousand six hundred dollars um the result of that was that uh waggle consistently pulled in single digits and withdrew in May. But when asked about his changing relationship with Waggle, Ruffin said this to a reporter from the Wichita Eagle. What are you trying to find out, young man? What are you trying to do? I've answered your goddamn questions. What's the reason for this call?

I told you I was supporting her. Goodbye. You know, I don't know what you people are doing trying to dig up you say you people are dishonest for god's sake i told you i support her what else can i say goodbye and then he hung up uh and the reporter uh printed that in full i do like that phil ruffin's life is basically just let me just finish this rum and coke and then i'll take this call from this reporter so uh this is this park closed in 2007 in 2018 roughen purchased the land for the dog park which he had previously been leasing all this time while it remained closed and i guess he was expecting the gaming bill to pass but uh it didn't so on google it's actually listed as permanently closed with a single one star review to think the next generation of phil ruffins had to come and

seize all those greyhound dogs repossess them oh i should mention um in 1994 ruffin so the the 60 that sort of army of convenience stores that i mentioned he was able to lease them out to the uh the french company total and for about 2.2 million per year is what he was getting from the deal. And so he used that money to get more into real estate. And in 1995, Ruffin acquired the Crystal Palace Casino Resort in the Bahamas. And from there, he's kind of sort of snowballing out the empire. He's mortgaging. So he mortg out the empire. He's mortgaging.

So he mortgaged the casino and he used it to after in kind of an interesting case of union activity. He was able to purchase the new Frontier Hotel and Casino, which we will get into right now. Yeah, yeah. So he, in 97, of course, he made his move into Vegas. And the new Frontier was a casino in Vegas. It was opened in 1942 as Hotel Last Frontier, and it was formerly owned by howard hughes um so i i guess uh the next owner margaret had to spend a good chuck and change cleaning out the piss jars but uh in 97 roughen was actually able to buy the casino for 167 million which is a steep number it seems kind of cheap since in the 2000s these things were selling for the billions. And it was $167 million for, I guess, it was relatively cheap for, I guess, a couple of reasons.

It had a kind of an unfashionable for the 90s cowboy theme. And it also at the time was the source of the longest strike in the nation with the Culinary Union, Bartenders 165, Teamsters 995, Operating Engineers 501, and Carpenters 1780 having struck for six years, four months, and 10 days. Yeah, and it's not clear. It's referred to by the Las Vegas Sun as the nation's longest strike, and it's not clear if that meant at the time or in american history uh initially 550 people walked out for this strike initially um the strikers were joined by postal workers teachers and state country and municipal employees um and actually a local doctor named elas Gahnem provided free medical services for the strikers, delivering 107 babies to their families during the duration of the strike. I'm just going to hazard a guess based on the history of American labor unions since the 1990s that a six-year strike in the 90s was the longest strike in american history and remains such yeah yeah it it the result of the strike is is kind of bittersweet because so ruffin was able to kind of settle the dispute with the

culinary union in a way that ended up drawing praise from the unions uh though my i speculate he was just able to strike a deal with them so that he could buy the property for cheap. He tried to spend it in 2009 saying, let's face facts. $10 per hour is $400 a week before expenses. It's very hard to live on that. You have to get wages up so people can make a living and of course the actual terms of the agreement he made with the union at the time was he agreed on starting wages of 750 per hour for food servers 950 per hour for hotel maids and 12 an hour for cooks um also paying 3.5 million in

back pay as ordered by the ninth circuit court of appeals uh in order to uphold an NLRB ruling, which is kind of chunk change for a billionaire, obviously. And it was celebrated as a big victory for the strikers. There's a block party that was thrown once it was resolved that was attended by Harry Reid, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer, now President Richard Trumka, Governor at the time Bob Miller, and Jesse Jackson. And it included a ribbon-cutting ceremony that involves both Jackson and Ruffin, which I don't really have any comment on that other than it's weird. Just strange bedfellows.

And he hired back 280 of the original strikers who were willing to go back to work there of the original 550 who walked out and in order to do that he laid off more than 100 other frontier workers so again kind of bittersweet and then two years later roughen announced plans to raise the hotel and casino so to him you know it wasn't really this grand thing you know he was saying ten dollars an hour is really difficult to live on and his deal was 750 an hour for food servers um and uh his plan was to build the las vegas trump tower on part of the property um and then he sold the rest which he did he owns half of the las vegas trump tower and uh he sold the rest for 1.24 billion in 2007 which was a las vegas record at the time

yeah i would i reading through this story um well you learned that the the donors at the time before before roughen they had they'd been courted by potential buyers before but they were scared off by having to deal with like this protracted union fight and it kind of the way i would characterize it is that was like a huge he just saw it as a huge bargaining chip. And like, listen, I will cure the entire union mess for you. I'm just going to make this problem go away. You'll get a decent deal in terms of cash as well, considering the aging material of the property and

stuff and so uh it was less motivated about like let's get the union their deal and more is just like this is this is a steal basically right like you'd be you'd be an idiot not to just immediately say like yeah okay i'll deal with the unions. You don't have to. Yeah. And he basically got rid of them as fast as he could, tearing the thing down. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's been the great accomplishment

of labor unions in the longest strike in U.S. history was getting somebody a great deal on a casino. Of course, his love for the working man um uh can probably best be seen in how he's handled covid uh at the outset of covid he laid off 414 employees um which according to bethany khan the director of communications for and digital strategy for the culinary union. He says, many gaming corporations are owned by straight up billionaires like Phil Ruffin at Treasure Island, Alex Morello at Sahara and David Siegel at Westgate.

Those are three billionaires who are not paying their workers anything during closure and have left them to figure out food banks and fend for themselves. It's shameful that they abandoned their workers during a global crisis um so yeah he as soon as covet hit he he just kind of threw the workers out on their asses um uh and in contrast uh caesar's entertainment and mgm resorts uh offered two weeks pay to furloughed employees and wind resorts committed to paying full-time and part-time employees through may 31st and uh circus circus another one of his current properties in las vegas has actually permanently terminated 262 employees as of july uh treasure island another one of his properties reopened on june 4th and despite like treating his employees like absolute shit ruffin is also currently suing two insurance companies that have denied claims of his for

covering the cost of financial damages from the pandemic wow yeah apparently ruffin has has bragged about the fact that he has the funds to stay closed for 20 years, but he still furloughed all his employees without pay. And not only that, he furloughs them all without pay, and then he offers them loans at a 3% interest rate during the lockdown. What a fucking mook. His whole, like, one of, yeah, one of the stories he tells about himself all the time is how like i don't

i'm not like those other real estate developers i don't take out a bunch of debt and then like have to go into default later i just do everything on cash like i could stay closed for 20 years and then when it comes time to um allow you know those 280 workers for example at the frontier or or wherever to have pay for like five or six weeks or something and have health care he's nowhere to be found of course yeah and he he actually said, quote, I hope they get a $1,200 check soon. Wow. Referring to the first stimulus check the federal government had just handed out at the time. Yeah, well, it's not like he can call anybody about that.

He's a personal friend of the president. And if you're holding onto any hope that he has any empathy for the working man, I hear a couple quotes from him. When I hear recession, I ask, what have you got for sale? And he's also quoted as saying that in a recession, you pay less in taxes, you buy other people's stuff, you make more money. So people are just numbers to him he's just a bitter asshole who uh just takes and leaves people on the street yeah he said um he had in addition to all of his terrible quotes about

but well saying the quiet part loud he had like a kind of an interesting one that threw me for a loop but it's also very true and kind of illuminating he says um so i'm jumping ahead a bit but in his negotiations for um treasure island um he's trying to buy it from mgm mirage resorts for 600 in cash and 175 million in secured notes and help getting into debt a bit more um he said so he ends up buying it and 10 years years later, it has a huge payout. It's appreciated a lot. And he got a couple screaming offers to sell it from a Chinese firm. And he said of the deal, quote,

there isn't any price they could throw at me that would interest me, he told the Review Journal. Quote, money is not that valuable. Assets are valuable, especially when they're irreplaceable. And that kind of seems like an odd little quote, but it's kind of illuminating in that we talk about billionaires and you get the impression that all of it is in cash and liquid assets, but so much of it is tied up in fixed real estate

and other things that you can't immediately just sell anywhere you want and uh he's right uh most rich people hold less than 10 percent of their assets in the form of cash and so uh it's just that he's been like amassing all of these real estate assets over time that real people have to go and work at in order for them to be profitable. And that's how he's getting the cash that he is so proud of. Right. I would just add an addendum on who he is as a person. He doesn't even do kind of the bare minimum billionaire thing of giving to charity. He claims that he doesn't give to charity because he counters that his businesses have accounted for a great deal of public good.

And his Forbes philanthropy score is one. Wow. And they're really trying to help you. yeah with that score right that's like probably he's probably the guy that they use to calibrate one on the forbes philanthropy score but it is like yeah like andy mentioned at the beginning he has an eight out of ten self-made score from forbes just sitting right next to his 1 out of 10 philanthropy score it's almost like forbes is going to him like buddy we're trying to help you here could you just like write a check for 5 000 or something the for the forbes uh like the forensic accountant

assigned to figure out how much he's worth is like listen you can't take it with you you know that right yeah and one of the profiles he's like yeah i give to like cancer or diabetes or something like he he didn't even like it was just like some stock answer where he's like i'll say something but i don't care right he was a cancer i guess he was reading the surgeon general's warning on his uh jack daniels bottle and he was like yeah i give to uh prevent low birth rate low birth weight in babies and i wanted to back up for a second though uh. Steve, you mentioned at the beginning this $20 million that he turned into $2 or $3 billion over time. And the basic story, as far as I've understood it up to now, is that he had these convenience stores, these 60 convenience stores, and then he used that to buy strip malls and office parks and hotels. And then he used that to buy a casino in the Bahamas and then used that to buy casinos in Vegas. And I guess I just wanted to ask where that clarify where that 20 million figure comes from.

The 20 million is what he's estimated to have been worth in 1972 after he has purchased at least 60 convenience stores and they've been running for several years okay so he has that and then it also comes from the hand truck business and um yeah so basically the convenience stores the hand truck business and all the stuff that he owned just prior to getting into real estate for the most part right yeah hand trucks like i believe he actually owns the largest hand truck company in the united states or is the largest one of the largest producers i think he's actually the largest producer of hand trucks yeah and um you know as somebody who worked in a grocery store the hand truck truck is the device that brings the Budweiser from the basement up to the shelf where you buy it. It's pretty indispensable.

So Ruffin, we said, is good friends with Trump. We played a tape of him drunkenly praising him at the rnc ruffin met trump for for the first time about 30 years ago at the trump tower in manhattan and they were cooking up a casino real estate deal one that didn't they that ruffin admits didn't pan out. But they, according to a Forbes article that kind of traces out their early relationship, they became pretty fast friends. And Ruffin also notes that they, quote, were both single.

And so they were, and which kind of sets up a story about Ruffin in 2005 was invited he invited trump to dinner in las vegas and afterwards ruffin brought the brought trump and his entourage to see a vacant lot he still owned behind the old frontier resort and casino And he suggested it would be a good location for Trump's hotel. And that's sort of like the genesis of their business and personal relationship. So they decided to build this 64-story golden glass tower on the strip. And eventually it was completed as 1283 units since the trump

international hotel so but the like he mentioned they were both single he's kind of like um looking for a new wife and the relationship between the two billionaires it was kind of forged through business but it became personal in 2008 ruffin married alexandra nikolayenko who mentioned is about 50 years younger than him his former miss ukraine trump was his best man at the wedding um ruffin would let trump use his jet to go visit enrique pina Nieto who was the president of mexico at the time um he does say that he won't trump won't let him play go golf he says he won't play with me because i'm not that good and he said he wants me to be on the women's tees and i refuse to be insulted said roughen yeah it's hard to hard to manage the uh

the golf club when your hands are shaking from delirium tremens but um this is like this kind of brings up so they're both they're both kind of dating around and that's an interesting story because they they have this connection to russia and them like the miss ukraine pageant and there was an interesting possible Epstein connection that Sean did some looking into. Yeah, I mean, it's so there's a lot of smoke and no smoking gun around this. But we mentioned Donald Trump is Phil Ruffin's best man at the 2008 wedding to his third wife, Oleksandra Nikolenko. She was the former miss ukraine uh i believe in 2001 maybe yeah but so the relationship between them and i'll just mention a couple other things about

the closeness of this uh aside from the 2013 trip together to moscow um there have been a lot of allegations regarding the Trump International Las Vegas hotel, which we mentioned Ruffin owns 50% of and Trump supposedly owns the other 50%. But basically the allegation you can see going around on Twitter and Congress has investigated this and is that the $25 million settlement for the Trump University fraud claims were apparently paid out directly to Trump by Ruffin shortly after the election. And the way Ruffin explains this is that, as we mentioned, Trump supposedly co-owns the Trump International Las Vegas hotel.

So Ruffin says, yeah, I just owed him $28 million. And this was just all for money owed. So he pays out this $28 million shortly after Donald Trump wins the election. And then almost immediately, Donald Trump turns around and pays out $25 million to settle the claims with the students that he defrauded at Trump University. This comes up in Testimony of Michael Cohen. Right. And then there's also this Twitter thread from a Twitter user, at The View from LL2.

And they just kind of go through how in 2017, Trump's Vegas hotel had some seriously strange money flows. The too long didn't read is that even though Trump co-owns the hotel with Phil Ruffin, the money was being diverted to LLCs that Trump alone owned. So, you know, again, these are like close friends, but it seems clear that Phil Ruffin is lobbying his close friend directly by paying him out millions of dollars. And I believe Phil Ruffin is like sitting on one of the COVID reopen the country committees along with Jamie Dimon, or at least advising on one of these things.

So he's clearly a businessman that Trump goes to for advice. And that's a very profitable place to be. And it's worth noting that after Vegas reopened in, I believe, early June, cases have skyrocketed in Nevada. And to get to the not fully established but existing Epstein links, there have been some Daily Beast articles that talk about a guy named, a Ukrainian-born man named Peter Listerman. And the gist of this is that in 2016, New York Post writes an article

about how since Jeffrey Epstein got out of his first conviction, he could no longer groom underage girls from American high schools. So he went to Eastern Europe eastern europe you know he got like these guys like peter listerman is like a very shady creepy guy who would just go to these ukrainian or russian or wherever modeling events especially in ukraine after the war broke out there's a lot of desperate people you know who like if they can go and do prostitution.

Yeah, fucking old guy for money. That's what you're describing. Yeah, right. And so, you know, the New York Post says in 2017, a recent visitor to Epstein's mansion says that the house in Manhattan is full of young beauties. Half of them are from the Soviet Union and the other half are a mix of American and European. And the article references this guy, Peter Listerman, as a, quote, procurer and reported that he or someone who looked exactly like him was spotted entering Epstein's mansion

January 2016. And this guy, Listerman, is a very shady character, but the stories in the daily beast uh in the daily beast mentioned phil ruffin in a kind of um roundabout way to him where basically they interview in 2019 the daily beast interviews tatiana sevchenko is the founder of odessa's first modeling school and odessa in the ukraine has been you know kind of devastated by the civil war. So they talk about a different Daily Beast article talks about how made desperate by war, Odessa's women look to model Cinderella story. And they talk about how models in Odessa actually look to Alexandra Nikolayenko, of course, the wife of Phil Ruff. And they actually look to her as a success story. Like she got out, she married a billionaire, and of ukrainian models are trying to emulate that story

but uh tatiana um sevchenko the founder of odessa's first modeling school she gives a quote to the daily beast about this creepy guy peter listerman and this is of course after epstein's been arrested again it's in 2019 2019. She said, I have heard him approach women at our agency with his usual, hey, beautiful, I have a client for you. It took a lot of work to keep him from tricking our teen models in his traps. And the thing is, like, again, this is after Epstein's name is all over the paper and everyone is trying to distance themselves from Peter Listerman. So you don't really know if she's telling the truth there. The article also talks about how, like in 2019, Peter Listerman tried to go to a different modeling event in Ukraine.

And he was, you know, he wasn't allowed to enter. Whereas basically before the Epstein scandal broke, he was able to kind of go in and out freely. And so why that's just a little bit weird is that tatiana sevchenko again the founder of odessa's first modeling school according to a different daily beast article was actually the one who introduced phil ruffin to his wife you know so like it's just a little bit odd where this guy who's like a creepy epstein-like guy who's hanging around modeling agencies is, you know, condemned by the founder of one of these modeling agencies after the Epstein stuff comes out. But this founder also admits she's the one who introduced Phil Ruffin to his wife.

So it's a little bit creepy there. And the one other link that I wanted to point out is in the New York Times in 2019, they make a calendar girl competition. And George Horaney was a Florida-based businessman who ran American Dream Enterprise. He organized it at Donald Trump's request. And he arranged to have 28 girls come in for this calendar girl competition. And he asked who's coming tonight. And it was just Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Wow. So these 28 girls fly in to like, have a calendar girl competition judged. And it's just Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump in 1992, which I mean, you can only imagine how, let's say creepy that is, or what would be suggested or offered for the winner of such a competition and then you can take or leave this particular source because it's just some random guy on twitter but uh opc ghost uh in july 10 2019 actually responds to this story by saying quote trump did the exact same quote-unquote beauty pageant thing with Phil Ruffin at Phil's Treasure Island property in Vegas. It was 50 girls and the two

of them. Was I there? No. Downstairs, one of my customers handled the NDAs, the non-disclosure agreements, for the girls and came down to join me in the bar afterwards, unquote. And so you can take or leave that, but basically Phil Ruffin has admitted that, according to the Daily afterwards, unquote. And so you can take or leave that, but basically Phil Ruffin has admitted, according to the Daily Beast, quote, that as single men, the two friends had been on double dates together in Florida, unquote. So it's not at all inconceivable that, you know, they're flying out to Russia together together uh they're you know meeting various eastern european models they're doing these kind of allegedly doing this kind of creepy calendar swimsuit contest where it's just the two of them judging

very possible that they were involved in in this kind of stuff and and i guess the last thing is that uh sevchenko again the founder of this beauty school she tells she's asked by the daily beast uh whether or not ukrainian cinderella which is the nickname they give to phil ruffin's wife whether or not she's helping her country and the people suffering um and she sighs and she says, quote, many people, reporters have tried to build a bridge or find out more hot news about Trump from me or Alexandra. Again, Phil Ruffin's wife. Right. But that but that door is closed. Both Alexandra and Ruffin are extremely careful and closed from all contacts. That is what I tried to explain to all the TV crews bothering me, unquote.

So so basically, like, yeah, there's a bunch of smoke. That is what I tried to explain to all the TV crews bothering me, unquote. So basically, like, yeah, there's a bunch of smoke. It sure looks that way, but there has been no smoking gun. But, you know, if I were a betting man, gun to my head, I would say absolutely. I'm going to say Phil Ruffin confirmed pedophile. Can you add and post a, like, a Counter-Strike sounding confirmed pedophile? It's the mid-2000s. He is probably a billionaire at this point, but he's not worth 3.1 billion or 2.8 billion, depending on what source you look at now.

He still has some ways to go to that. So how does he... If he just stopped here, he would be roughly at the level you would expect if you just followed the math experiment that we did at the beginning of this episode, if you listened to it or not. So how did he catapult himself to 3.1 billion? so how he really did it is the new frontier hotel and casino that he ended that famously ended that um strike and bought for extremely cheap um he had several attempts where he tried to he announced but then later walked back attempts uh to develop it demolish it and develop it into other projects until one time he was finally able to partially demolish and develop part of it so in April 20 in April of 2002 Ruffin was proposing an $800 million, 1500 room resort to be erected just north of the New Frontier with an unspecified hotel company as the partner.

That didn't go anywhere. He tried to get the hotel company Harrah's to purchase it that didn't work he tried again in march 2005 announcing a 1.3 billion dollar 3 000 room mega resort eventually dubbed montreux after the french resort or the hostess jazz competition um but 13 months later ruffin was still trying to put a deal together um now at this time there was a there's a construction boom going on uh for las vegas and there was a glut of projects and the strip had driven construction prices so high that he eventually had to table montreux as the budget had would have reached

about 2.7 billion if he had chosen to build then so he just kind of scrapped it now two years after that in 2007 on the eve of the greatest real estate crisis uh in the u. for almost a hundred years. Um, it's now that he's able to get a detail, uh, a deal together. So he told the Las Vegas sun, he was quote dickering with L add properties to sell the new frontier site for a mind boggling 40 million per acre. Um,

and this was double what Ruffin himself had said the land was worth a couple of years earlier. He eventually sold the property for $1.24 billion, or $36 million per acre, for which Ruffin had paid $4 million an acre in 1998. It was the high-water mark for the strip real estate market just before the great recession so and oh and right after that ill-added um demolished the entire place only to find that

it couldn't raise capital to build on the site oh wow so that's just that's basically what i meant by okay he's basically doing as good as you would expect of a real estate developer if they just reinvested whatever they had in what they owned in 1972. Right. The whole time. Until this great windfall that was just, I mean, he had no idea what was coming, so he just happened to sell at the right time. So that's pretty crazy and um yeah i mean so much about what he does is just like he likes to think it's just genius plugging away at you know amassing cash not doing any crazy dead deals and that's how he did it but i mean really he's just waiting for this to appreciate and he happened to be lucky.

Yeah, basically. So to help round this episode out, we thought we'd share a few pretty crazy stories that we teased earlier. So his grandson, Dylan, was involved in a shooting of some type with law enforcement and it's a pretty crazy story.

And I think Yogi has some more on that. Yeah, this is from March 7, 2019. This is the Shawnee Mission Post. The article is, Police responded to report a Ruffin firing pellet gun a day before shooting near Highlands. So you have this guy, Dylan Ruffin, who is about 26 years old. And I don't know if

he's the son of Chris Ruffin or Phil Ruffin Jr. It isn't said in any of the articles. But from all of the articles I could pull together, what they basically describe is in November 2014, police responded to a report of a disturbance at the address. Dillon was in an argument with his mom, and Ruffin bent her key to her Toyota and threw eggs at the kitchen window inside the house. Ruffin also had broken two dishes in the sink. In 2016, police responded to a report of domestic battery on the property

with Ruffin's mother listed as the victim. And in 2018 of June the police received a call at the address of the corner 62nd street and row avenue where Ruffin told police he found a couple of gun magazines and bullets very odd but what occurs in 2019 is a dare officer at the uh fairway Kansas Mission Elementary School. The elementary school Dylan Ruffin would attend growing up is told that they heard gunshots, and the D.A.R.E. officer goes to a window

and sees a bullet hole in the window and a few bullets. Now, this is around 1 p.m. on March 1st. And then, after that, at around 2pm, the cops are called in, and the mother of Dylan says, my son has a gun, and so the cops show up at the property,

and they ask Dylan to exit the house, which he refuses to do. At this time, the local news affiliate had set up their television camera on the door of the house so what i'm describing is eyes in the sky it's actually eyes on the ground but yes there is an eye in the sky in this case but you can see for like about eight minutes uh for about four minutes the police saying dylan come out of the house dylan come out of the house

he comes out of the house brandishes a gun at the house. He comes out of the house, brandishes a gun at the cops, and if you watch the video, he fires the weapon, but no bullet comes out of the gun, and the cops shoot the glass door and then shoot his leg and his back, and he goes down, and the cops take him. He, like, misfired, right? He pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. Well, he pulled the trigger, but there was no there's there were no bullet came out why the police would later say in the report that no he there's no bullets in his

gun he had an extended magazine for this weapon but there was no bullets in it sean you had something to say well that's an example of a billionaire privilege is that if you shoot at the cops they'll actually aim when they fire back at you. It is like a Star Wars fucking stormtrooper's aim from the cops in this fucking video. Because it can't be more than like, you know, 15 or 20 feet. And listen, I'm not going to pretend like I know what it's like to be shot at.

So I'm not going to pretend like I could fucking aim to 20 feet if I was fucking getting shot at. But like, it is interesting to think that they're not that far and they are trained professionals. We will know soon enough the way things are going so um i just like so i'm imagining the police radio where they're like uh yeah suspect is a grandson of a billionaire so you're gonna actually have to aim this time guys well so like god damn it we can't just unload 50 rounds um the the mother had told the police that her son had a drug addiction problem he had been abusing oxycodone xanax and heroin and noting that he had just returned home

from the methadone clinic uh later report from the police would say that he was on a cocktail of drugs and had some serious firepower when he exchanged bullets with the police but see i don't know if that's fucking true. Because the cops would later say that the narrative is that this was a suicide by police, and that Dylan wanted to kill himself, and so he set up this whole thing. But the only evidence they really have is that Dylan has bullet holes in his bedroom, and they're towards the direction of the school but I looked up the address of the house and then the school

and there's like a church in between the whole thing I'm not saying that a bullet couldn't travel however far it went or that he didn't do this crime but it's pretty thin if you ask me. What's that movie where you like you twist your wrist where there's like these lead assassins who can spin the bullet around a

church? Is it Wantage? Oh he practices gun kata your wrist where there's like this lead assassin who could spin the bullet around a is it wantage he practices a gun kata i mean listen i there are a lot of holes in this uh uh police case as well as this incident i don't know exactly what happened i'm not saying dylan didn't shoot at the school and it was framed but i am saying that this is a grandson of a billionaire who, at this age, the billionaire would receive a loan from his dad. This guy has to see that his grandfather fucks around with Trump and potentially Epstein, and this man lives in a one-story house in Wichita and has nothing to show for it. I mean, you know, the Dylan Ruffin case, be it suicide by police, just a guy that was on drugs, or a guy that wanted to cause some harm, I can't really say. I just know that if you told me my grandfather is a billionaire and i never see him because he rather would fuck his ukrainian supermodel wife and take fucking jets to russia with donald trump instead of be my nice grandfather

i'd say i maybe start doing oxycodone and and meth as well i mean you know the man is a psychopath and i'm not talking about dylan ruffin i I'm talking about Phil Ruffin what type of individual goes fuck my family I just want to make cash instead fuck my kids creams what life's all about so you know if you look into the Dylan Ruffin shooting story from last year

it doesn't say what happens to him afterwards his bail was set at $500,000 half a million dollars and uh they believe that uh billionaire phil ruffin bailed him out his uh home that his mother also lived at is is now sold uh i mean listen dylan ruffin got fucked before the shooting and it was by the fact that there was no real family system that was going to take care of him in terms of who we wanted to be as a human being.

Donald said I should talk to my kids. I didn't like it. I thought it was a bad idea. Yeah, I don't know, man. It would be nice if this episode begins a long downward spiral for Yogi where he becomes convinced that Dylan Ruffin was a Patsy and there was a second shooter with CIA training. I mean, I'll send you guys the fucking footage and the articles I found. The fact that his gun had no bullets,

you can see on the video footage that he shoots at the cops, but there's no bullet that comes out because you can hear when the cops shoot at him. And also when the cops shoot at him and the glass breaks open, you can see him like flail like he's never he never realized he was going to get shot at and the fact that like he was shooting a bb gun previously i don't know this kid just sounds like a misguided youth and you know to be moderately fair most school shooters are but with this kid it's not necessarily different but the fact that his grandfather's a billionaire and he's not better taken care of just shows you the level of narcissism required to amass such a massive fortune you're not just uh taking money from your family and investing it in things fucking over employees or flying in women from other countries to

essentially fuck with your friends, you're also legitimately going, oh, my family? Yeah, they don't fucking matter because the only thing that matters to me is these fucking greenbacks. And what about your point, Yogi, about you were telling me earlier

he's the same age as he's the same age as phil ruffin when he was getting a loan from possibly his father to start a business that's right he's he's about the same age that his grandfather was before his grandfather would become the fucking entrepreneur he became and i mean it's like it's just a kid that just has nothing to fucking do. Did you know that before the shooting, the elementary school was planning to withdraw its exchange students from Vietnam? They had to silence it. It's just a patsy. Yeah, the officers said they've also found bullets on the school property so like what this guy rolled up to the school shot at the school rolled back home

and then shot through his wall i mean it just it's i'll put it to you this way a few years ago there was a incident where a guy doxxed another person and said that i'm calling from a two-story house and i have my wife and my mom and i got a gun to them in the back kitchen and they gave him a fake address right because it was some sort of like a fucking cell phone prank or something and the cops go to a house that's one story and a guy comes out of his house going why are these cops out here and they murder that man right and that man's kids now don't have a dad because the cops showed up and decided we're gonna shoot this guy so i am less um complicit with the fact that police facts are law because i don't think that this went down at all the way they say it did but also it's like you know i just don't get why this country continually fails its children,

both in terms of education, but then also forcing their misguided youth to just fucking flounder until they end up in prison or the military or the police force. It just is, it's disgusting. And on that uplifting note, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Yogi Pollywool. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. and on that uplifting note this has been grubstakers i'm andy palmer i'm yogi paluel uh i'm sean p mccarthy phil ruff and if you're listening to this it's not too late you can still

talk to your grandkids i'm steve jeffries thanks for listening