Julian Dorey Podcast - 🫢 #98 - The Bullet Changed Everything. | Kevin Donaldson

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Kevin Donaldson is a former police officer and podcaster. In 2013, he nearly lost his life in the line of duty when a bullet grazed his head. Kevin currently Co-Hosts a Podcast with John Gotti’s former hitman, John Alite –– as well as his own podcast geared towards those suffering with Post-traumatic stress. The Mob, The Mafia, And The Man Podcast (John Alite & Kevin Donaldson): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/john-alite-the-mob-the-mafia-and-the-man/id1608464955  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; An executive murder; The Scarfo Daysw in Philly were wild; Cops & Criminals; John Alite story; the Iceman 25:08 - How Kevin became a cop; Stopping a tragedy; George Floyd - Derek Chauvin; Debating the state of police; the problem of “being what you do” 59:35 - Kevin tells the story of the day he almost died in the line of duty 1:21:22 - The aftermath of the shooting and the downward spiral that happened; Kevin recalls not wanting to be here anymore 1:47:28 - Kevin talks about the drinking that consumed his life after the shooting; Kevin’s retirement from the force 2:05:17 - Figuring out what to do with life after being a cop; “Dented”; kevin talks about his partnership with John Alite and tells stories about John; Kevin’s buddy Mike Dowd (of 75th Precinct infamy in NYC) 2:29:04 - Cannabis and Psychedelics; Kevin’s cousin who had to clean up the USS Cole Aftermath; Kevin tells autopsy stories; The importance of humor in darkness 2:41:48 - Political extremes and state of discourse; Julian gives his 2010s political theory; Everybody turns a blind eye to something; Helping yourself in order to be able to be capable to help others ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier   PRIVADO VPN FOR $4.99/Month: https://privadovpn.com/trendifier/#a_aid=Julian Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I get on my knees. I put the gun in my mouth. I feel, I could tell you what the ridges of that trigger felt like on my finger. It's a double action gun. So I put my thumb on the hammer and I cock it back once and I can feel there's little notches on the, on the hammer. Now, once with a double action gun, when you cock that hammer hammer back it's hair trigger. It's right a sneeze you're going I put the gun in my mouth. I can taste the gunpowder. That's because I recently qualified I can feel the metal on my tongue And I just start replaying everything replaying everything, you know the whole incident. I say goodbye to my kids. I I I mentioned my grandfather my grandfather was most important man in my life and i i apologize to him for not being the man that i should be for him and i'm just i'm ready

to go i'm ready to die how long is it in there probably a good five minutes. episode, you can tell this one got very, very intense. About 55 minutes in, we started getting to his story and what happened to him. And you will hear all about that. But I very, very much appreciated not only his openness in this episode, but having some nice humor in there as well. It was just a really, really good conversation. And I hope you guys enjoy. If you are on YouTube, please hit that subscribe button, hit that like button on the video. And as always, we'd love to hear from you in the comment section. If you are on Apple and Spotify, thank you for checking out the show over there. If you haven't already, be sure to follow on either one of those platforms, leave a five-star review and look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory and and this is Who Tried to Buy. This is one of the great questions in our culture.

Where is the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. So how do you want to format this?

What do you mean? As far as how you want to get into it. I mean... I just start talking just like that. We might be on camera right now. I don't know. I might even include that. That's kind of funny.

But listen, man. Thank you for coming down here. Oh, no problem. Thanks for having me. Of course. Very much appreciated. And also, you're from my old neck of the woods up there in North Jersey. Well, I'm from Parsippany.

You said you used to live in Morristown? Yeah, I did. Morristown's a great area. I did for like five years. Yeah, I was never there. I slept there pretty much. What brought you up to North Jersey? I was working at Merrill out of college in the private bank.

So our office, well, one of them because there were two that we our team was out of but our office was in florham park so it was like right there well i went to college at fairly so fairly sits on the border of florham park and madison which now it's totally different they got the jets training camp right across the street oh the jets yeah we were our office was right next to theirs oh you were you were there recently. Yeah. See, when I was there, that Jets facility wasn't there. As a matter of fact, across the street, when I first got to college, there was an executive there that was kidnapped.

What? Yeah, he was kidnapped. He was thrown in a trunk, and these two people tried to hold him for ransom. And they put him in a box, and they couldn't get the ransom and the guy ends up dying in the box no yeah that happened like a dark turn yeah it did really bad that was a jets employee no no that was before the jets facility was even there oh this is something totally separate yeah this was i forget what the old facility was there it was an old he was a he was an executive at something i can't remember what the name of it was why'd they kidnap him they were trying to get money you know the criminal that's to get money. That's it?

That's it. They threw this guy. He was an older guy, too. They threw him in a trunk, and then they put him in a box trying to hold him, and he ends up having a heart attack and dying. And then they still try to get the ransom money, and they ended up catching him and going to jail. I don't even know if they're still in jail. God, I've been out of college almost 25 years. What was that, like second-degree manslaughter?

First degree? It's got to be something there. almost 25 years so what was that like second degree manslaughter first degree it's gotta be something bad probably first degree because they intentionally put them in a box but you know it was so much different around there it was so much different now everything is so built up around there and uh but it's nice to be back in the land of philly fans is this where you're from i'm i grew up in atlantic city i grew up in atlantic city man Is this where you're from? I grew up in Atlantic City. I grew up in Atlantic City. I see, man. Yeah, it was great when I grew up.

It's not so great anymore. You know, I spent a lot of time in Ducktown. So Ducktown. I was just going to say, you sound like a Ducktown guy. I was one of the few Irishmen that were in there. But, you know, it was great. You could run down the street in the middle of the night with $100 bills in your hands and nobody would bother you.

There's still some great restaurants there that I've taken my wife to. There's Angelino's, too, right on George Avenue. So I take my wife down there. It is a few years back. We're walking down the street, and we walk right past Nicky Scarfo's house. There's people out on the street. Senior? Senior.

So it was Nicky Scarfo and philly and eddie lived next door i went to school with the scarfo kids they were a little older to me and then philly and eddie son and i was friends with him now leonetti turned over but he was they used to they used to whack guys at his house i'm pretty sure right pretty much so leonetti's mother was nikki's sister so they that's how he got introduced to it but the funny thing was is his son phil jr i went to holy spirit high school and we were friends and he his old man turns on nikki and i don't see my best friend no more yeah he just goes away like one day he's there and one day he's not but there was more than one time where i know nikki jr was nikki jr and then there was joey merlino and some there was

a kid in school and i don't remember who the kid's name was but his father was tied in merlino didn't live down in ac though right well merlino philly he did but he went to holy spirit he did he did for a short time so his father was chucky merlino chucky merlino was the underboss at one time lived in margate as a matter of fact he got popped it was the stupidest thing he gets he gets caught driving drunk he tries to bribe the cop yeah and that's how he gets thrown in jail it's the stupidest thing for a gangster to get thrown in jail for yeah but um you know there was more than one time where these guys showed up in the parking lot there was some sort of beef or something and the priests had to come out and sort of like get in the middle of everything it was but it was normal that was

normal and then we we we end up settling in apseek in New Jersey, which is right next door. Yeah. But that was just normal life down there. And it was cool. Different time, man. It was. I mean, people don't realize how, I mean, depending on how you look at it, like how recently those families had all the power.

Like the 1980s in Philly, are you fucking kidding me you had the chicken man you had sally testa blown out houses and yeah right anybody's getting whacked out front of his house they got to listen to the uh bruce springsteen song chicken man gets blown up on his front porch right yeah but that that was a good time because although they did criminal stuff atlantic city was much better off than what it is now. Atlantic City is – I was down there for a coaching clinic about three weeks ago, and it's bad. There's junkies everywhere. It's just – it's not like it was.

It's also – in fairness to them, part of it is the complete deregulation of gambling in so many places. People don't need to come down the parkway anymore. They can go to Yonkers if they want to. They can head out to Lehigh or whatever the fuck that place is called. It was a destination. Yeah. Yeah, now it's nothing special. Unless you're going to, like, Harrah's or Borgata.

You know, that's still... Brigantine was always the nice area. Now, you know, there's nothing to come down there for. It's like Atlantic City. You're probably too young to remember this, but Atlantic City, before resorts came in, was a hole. It was awful. And then they started. When did they start?

Like 1980? 77 was when resorts came in. And Steve Wynn brought in resorts. And that's when everything sort of just changed down there. But, you know, there was places like they call it gardener's basin now and you didn't go in gardener's basin after dark okay that was called the inlet you didn't go there where are we talking what part of the city so you know where relation you know where the aquarium is actually no so the aquarium so it's if if you were to take the inlet and separate that separates

harrah's and the water club and borgata yes that section of housing back there so what they did they just started raising the taxes pushing all the all the what they would call trash all the poorer people out and then they put up middle income housing they put up the row housing so everything sort of changed but i took my i take my kids down there they'll go on like a dolphin watch they have they have docks there have million dollar boats there it's totally changed in the sections that were super safe like ducktown georgia avenue texas avenue they're they're horrible now you can't go anywhere it's bizarre it's funny that you say though that like oh there was all this shit going on but it was a better time back then as well because you know when i drive by down set or up 78 right next to

new york and i have that view every time there is a thought that often comes into my mind that is kind of like this it's weird but it's also vaguely true where i'm like every one of those fucking buildings right there the giant dicks pointing up in the sky all of them every single one was built with the permission of somebody with an italian last name who didn't actually you know operate under the realms of the law and i'm like business capital of the world biggest city in the world most important city in the world all this stuff and yet all the fucking concrete goes through the mob it's fucking nuts but you just traded one gangster for another gangster that's true because although the the mob and the mafia was making all that money somebody else is making that money right now yeah so just

because they're doing it quote-unquote legally it's no less criminal agreed if the whole concept the psychology of like cops and criminals which you which you are right on the vertical of that with your life as a police officer and then some of your friends you have now who are on the other side of the law. That psychology to me explains humanity because it's just – it's beyond just someone who's a cop or someone who's a gangster slash criminal. It's also like the realm between where where good and evil starts or not even good and evil but like good and not good i'll even go that simple it can blur right so what we call we put these names on things people will call people a gangster they'll call them a mafioso a thug like all these different things and it's like well what's your definition of that i'm not saying you're wrong about whoever it is you're talking about if they're talking about a specific

criminal and someone who's done some bad shit but i'm like what makes that dude different than the guy in the suit you know like you ever seen the show the wire yeah sure so the famous scene in the courtroom i think about this all the time with the late michael kenneth williams now who's dead but played omar little and he's going in there to testify. And he was a man of the streets who was a Robin Hood on the streets and committed crimes but robbed drug dealers and stuff. And the lawyer who represents all these drug dealers is in there and going back and forth with them, cross-examining.

And towards the end of the examination, Omar goes, you got a briefcase, I got a shotgun. Or I said that backwards. You got the briefcase, I got a shotgun. Or I said that backwards. You got the briefcase, I got the shotgun, or whatever it is. It's all in the game. But what you find out real quick, especially with, and I'm tied into both communities. From the time I grew up to where I am now, I still, I'm blue through and through. I'll always be a cop.

But what I found by my friends is there's a lot more that that brings us together than separates us there's a lot lot more what do you mean so um take John Elite so I'm I'm co-host on the elite show the mob the mafia and the man and can you tell people who John Elite is so John Elite was a hitman for John Gotti who's the hitman he was the hitman right so he was and then he he's albanian so he's outside that that's where they would use the workforce so he because he comes from an albanian background and he could never be a made guy he was the guy who they called in to do the killings yeah just like kalinsky kuklinski like that kind of thing well kuklinski's different kuklinski so i again here's my other side so i know a lot of people that investigated kuklinski's different. Kuklinski, so I, again, here's my other side. So I know a lot of people that investigated Kuklinski.

Oh, really? Yeah, so where I'm from. He was the Iceman. He was the Iceman. So Richard Kuklinski was born in Jersey City. He was a bad dude. But if you listen to him, it'll sound like him and Roy DeMeo were, you know, like best friends. They weren't.

They weren't. So one of my good friends, he was the assistant, he was the deputy chief of the prosecutor's office in Essex County. So he actually investigated a lot of Kuklinski's guy named Bobby Carroll come up Bobby Carroll was the prosecutor he lives in Roseland and Bobby used to he never slept so he would walk around at like two or three in the morning so when I was working midnights I'd grab him because I was always really really interested in in the psychology of kuklinski and I would ask him I was like so what's going on he goes he killed he killed a lot of people you know you kill one person that's a lot of that's that's a lot of people to kill but he didn't kill 200. he's a lot of that's that's a lot of people to kill, but he didn't kill 200 He was doing that for prison credit. That's all he was doing for and he wasn't as tied into the mob He was just he was a stone-cold killer

But there what you find out is there's reasons for everything not to say it not to justify anything But there's reasons why they do everything could Klinsky was horribly Abused as a child his father kicked the crap out of him. His brother Joseph, same thing, threw a, I think it was a 14-year-old girl off a rooftop in Jersey City after he raped her. And then went to prison, in the same prison as Kuklinski, and they would never talk because Joseph liked to get, how do I put this? He liked men. He liked men to enter. So he was constantly in the in the hospital getting

his ass also sewed up could Klinsky couldn't handle that um so it's not always what it appears to be and even even with somebody like John he's not what he appears to be and what brings us together is he did what he did but you don't understand when he goes home and he has to pay the consequences nothing's for free you know there's always consequences to everything right nobody talks about the horrible nightmares the 18 years he sent spent in prison away from his family um he he legitimately has pts i mean he did time in brazilian prison too he was on the run and he got caught and they were trying to extradite him and he was he was fighting extradition but to work with some Brazilians I saw some videos from those places

yeah people well there's there's a big argument going on between junior Gatti and John and it's it's kind of comical still yeah it's kind of still it's been like a deck over a decade yeah it's still going on they just hound him on the internet i i hear it and it's it's really funny we actually just did a show talking all about that because they just released a uh voicemail of john hammering somebody you know come on yeah it's it's it's coming um if you what john has all these different fanboys out there that put up these fake pages and there's this one and it's he's calling him a cocksucker he's saying he's gonna he's gonna pour spaghetti on their on their guinea head and like really bad stuff but what what they did was they it's not nobody can say where it came from

so they mesh a bunch of stuff together and that's that's where they get it but um yeah it's it's it's a comical feud between those two I I laugh at it all the time. But John gets me, he'll get me involved in this stuff, calling this guy out and stuff. I'm like, John. Not about that life. I don't think I should be calling this guy out. At one time, his father was a serious dude.

He does it with Sammy the Bull, too. I know he's an old man and I could take him but it kind of leave me out of this one right I'm just a ringmaster on your show I'm not the guy who did all this stuff and for people listening who aren't totally familiar I mean you're not naming nobodies right here you're naming some of the most serious guys there ever were but John's but what people don't realize about John and this is something that that again goes back to my point where there's more that brings us together. John is right now talking.

We go out and we'll do speaking engagements. I'm the clean cop. He was on the other side of the law. Is that how you play it? Good cop, bad cop. Good cop, bad cop. Right. Well, he wasn't.

No, that's me and Mike Dowd. Me and Mike Dowd is good cop, bad cop. You got some interesting friends. I do have some interesting friends, but I'm also tied into, like, last night I was at this Blue Magazine, which is a police magazine. They hold something for a moment of silence to guard against blue suicide because blue suicide is at an epidemic level. I think we're up to, like, 36 now in 2022, so we're losing, like, 10 a month. I'm tied into that community because what we try to do is take our experiences and put them out to show that John does it in a way where the Mafia is not what you think it is

Like you say when I say that the streets were good, you know, because the gangsters the high-level gangsters They should take care of us. Hey, you want to go get some ice cream? Here's $10, but look at what they were doing They were grooming you right wow that's and kids are kids aren't stupid like they know a serious guy so don't you think that's kind of bad though it's very bad yeah it's very bad so they're grooming them to to look up to them to say hey look this guy's always got money and i don't have anything so maybe i want to be like this guy and they know what they're doing especially the top level ones they know what they're doing they're saying they're you know let's say out of they give out fifty dollars to ten kids well

maybe they'll get two of those kids to do some work for them in the future and when they do work it's not always just like what you see in the depart i go get the go get the food out of the deli it can be other shit they're witness to i mean i just had my friend dan thayer in here who's like the best like literally you would never have known his past life the nicest guy ever they used to call him duct tape dan back in the day he grew up in newark before he went down to florida oh i saw that one yes i did yeah so like that's how he he taught he's very into the psychology of how he ended up like he did for so long he's very very introspective and he's like when i when I was eight, nine, ten,

doing work for some of these mob guys in Newark, you know, they'd go in there and just beat the shit out of someone who did something they didn't like. And so I learned to not practice any empathy, and I learned that, like, oh, people respond to strength like that. So that's what I did. So I never, like, he'd laugh about, like, he'd beat someone up and then try to be his friend right after, and he didn't think anything of it because that's what he did so i know like he'd laugh about like he'd beat someone up and then try to be his

friend right after and he didn't think anything of it because that's what he knew you know it's a crazy lifestyle and they groom if you want to know how they groom kids watch bronx tale yeah watch bronx tales the kids the kids idolized these people and that's a real story the the guy sunny is a is a conglomeration of a bunch of different people but Chaz Palminteri when he was growing up he was collogeno that's his real name so that story is about him and and if you watch his friends they want to get into the life they're going to do these little things to try to impress people and that's how they groom you and so John goes out now and talks to kids and say this is all a myth you don't understand that this is a myth

so if you go out on the street like that and i knew this from a very early age because basically my father just just he kicked the shit out of me to to try to to try to get me on the right path and the more he kicked the shit out of me the the more left i went but um there's there you're gonna end up in jail or you're going to end up dead. There's no two ways about it. You don't retire from that business. What do you got? A handful of guys who are dinosaurs.

You got Michael Francis. You got John. You got Sammy. But Sammy, you know, maybe Larry Mazza or Frankie Pontillo. You know, these guys made it out, but they did long prison stretches. And when you go to prison, you lose everything. You lose all your money, you lose your family, you lose your relationship with your kids. So what kind of life is that? Is it really that glamorous to have that money for a short time? Absolutely not. But I'm still, although I understand where they are now

and their struggles with what they did, did the consequences I know all too well and and PTS and I don't call PTSD just I'm working hard to change the stigma of PTS so everybody knows it is PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder mm-hmm well the reason I dropped the D on it is because it's no longer it's not longer, it's not a disorder. It's not a disorder, something you're born with. Like if you break your arm, it's a brain injury. But if you break your arm, you're not, you're not calcified deficient disorder. You got a broken arm.

Yeah. So with a brain injury, you're, if you do a brain scan pre and post your brain actually changes and it happens with the gangsters too. You know, they see so much stuff over time. Sure brain just is still human yeah it doesn't work that's the thing everybody's human everybody deserves a second chance so when your brain changes there is no way to heal it right now there's no cure so dropping that disorder changes the stigma. So a disorder is, you know, if you, if you were born with, and I'm not down in these things, if you were born with autism or cerebral palsy, that's a disorder that you have to live with for the rest of your life. There is no cure

that we know of. But you're saying with the brain injury, there's no cure too. There is no cure, but it's not something you were born with. Oh, so that, okay. Right. That's the distinction. It's being born with something, it kind of puts a negative spin on that. You know, nobody wants that. Nobody asks for that. But that's what comes out.

And it comes out in really, really horrible ways. But, you know, you got somebody like john is john john did it to himself and he knows it he owns it and that's what i respect about him he owns it he's not saying you know i did this for you know for the better good of the community he was sold a bill of goods that wasn't the truth he's brutally honest yes he is he is like and i'm not just talking like telling the stories and like doing the old wise guy tale thing. We see guys do that. He's like brutally honest about his psychology with it. And like, when you see him talk about the first time he killed someone, and I mean, he can tell that story a million times, but he, he still wears it. You know what

I mean? So in a way I draw a distinction there from some other guys you see, cause there a lot of other guys that are like, oh, yeah, I left it, whatever. They're like, yeah, I did this, I did that. That's the end of it, right? With him, he kind of relives it every time. It bothers him. Yeah. It's got to be torturous. But he's two different people, as we all are.

So there's John Elite that you see on camera. And then there's John that I know where we go out to dinner. And here's a quick story. And God, he got me on this one. We're out to dinner one night at Rail Steakhouse in Totowa. Yeah, yeah, up there. Not a place well. You see it on Real Housewives all the time.

They're always there. Yeah, they're always there. They used to be neighbors of my boss. This was a business meeting we were having with our sound engineer from A&J Media. The girls, John's always dressed in the nines okay he's oh and I'm dressed however I'm dressed I look like an asshole so he's always dressed in the night and there's a table of women behind him and they're looking at him and I see that they're looking at you wearing the sunglasses of course well

they're they're not sunglasses they're prescription glasses this guy can't see you don't understand it they're just tint. They're prescription glasses. This guy can't see. You don't understand. They're just tinted. Kevin, I can't see. Yeah, he can't see. He'll take them off. So the women are looking at him, and he keeps looking back. And so I said, hey, John, there's a $20 bill in it for you. If you just go up to the table, don't say a word. Just take a piece of pizza off the table it was like a pizza appetizer and he goes all right give me a 20 bill i hand him the 20 dollar bill and he goes walking over and back my mind i'm like i just lost 20 dollars goes over takes the pizza eats it doesn't say a word and then starts chatting them up and does one of the biggest gangster moves i've ever seen in my life takes my 20 bill i'm not a rich guy takes my 20, throws it on the table and says, hey, give that to the waitress. And if you could hear liquid hitting the floor from all the women, they just went, oh.

But that's, yeah, so I got this new group of friends now that I found. I don't know how the hell I found them. I was going to say, can you think about that a little bit? How this ended up? I mean, maybe let's start from the beginning. Let's get to you because you've hinted at it and I think mentioned it explicitly a couple times today already. But you were a police officer for a long time, right? I was a police officer for a little over 13 years.

Right. And when did you retire from the force I officially retired in June 1st 2014 okay there was it was not how I wanted to go out it was under some it was not the way that I wanted to retire. Let me put it that way. On July 10th, 2013, I was involved in a shooting. And I loved being a cop. I really loved it. And it wasn't go chasing criminals or bad guys. And we had enough crime because we only were 10 minutes away from Newark. Did you want to do that growing up? Never.

Really? Never. What got you into it? It was a job opportunity. You know, I saw it as a job. I saw it as a career. I think in 1999, my brother came to me and said, you know, hey, look, the state police are hiring. Now, I have graduate degrees. I only even have a parking ticket. I've never been arrested. They just never caught me. And so I was like, all right, you know, I'll take the test. But it was more just a whim type of thing.

I get a letter back saying that I don't meet the qualifications. I just wrote it off. I've done, you know, I went to college to be a school teacher. I was a school teacher for a year. And then I bounced around. I didn't like it. I hated teaching. I hated other teachers. I love the kids. I was a school teacher for a year. And then I bounced around. I didn't like it. I hated teaching. I hated other teachers.

I love the kids. I didn't like the other teachers. You go into a teacher's lounge and it's brutal. So I bounced around from job to job. And I'm in the gym one day. And a guy asked me, he's like, well, why don't you just become a cop? And I'm like, I just never really thought of it. He goes, well, I'm the chief of police. And we're giving a test.

Why don't you come in for the test? I said, okay, I'll take the test. You know, just like the state police, I'll take the test. Well, I did very well on the test. Next thing I know, I'm a cop. And this was, I got hired in June of 2001. First question I asked when I'm sitting down, hey, you ever lost it? It's Roseland.

Roseland's a very small. Tight community. Very wealthy, very affluent. There's not a whole lot of crime. I think at the time there was maybe 8,000 nighttime residents and there was big corporate population in the daytime. So I think it went up to like 70,000. So you get car thieves, you get everything, but really no violent crimes.

It's all from out of town too. It's all from out of town. Nobody steals within. There's a couple, but nobody really steals from inside. Then September 11th, everything changed. Yeah. That's three months on the job. I was in the academy.

I sat next to a girl her name was uh kristen kappelman her father worked for canada fitzgerald and you know nobody from canada fitzgerald they lost like 650 or 700 people i lost two people i know who worked at canada fitzgerald who i know personally so everything changed they recalled us to our departments out you know we were sitting in the Academy and I'll never forget a guy this is how clear it is a captain his name was Jack McGrady and in the Academy comes in this is plane just hit the World Trade Center you don't think anything of it cuz I'm the Corey Lidell flew a plane it was the Yankees players planes hit those buildings all

the time you're thinking it's a little cesna right twin engine you know nobody thinks anything of it and then it's then somebody comes in and says second one just hit it's like oh what what's going on here they recall us to our department and at the time we hadn't qualified with our weapon you have to qualify in new jersey in order to carry a weapon i go back to my department. The 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover is responsible for the stance I'm in right now, which is a very high-energy stance. It's very excited to attack the day.

And I say this because I woke up maybe 155 seconds ago at this point. I've been talking for 10, 15 seconds, so maybe like 170 seconds ago. The lights are on. The cameras are rolling. Everyone's winning. I'm getting an ad done because I woke up with energy and that's because I slept about five hours last night and I feel like I slept eight because I slept on my Eight Sleep Pod Pro cover, which goes right on top of my queen mattress and wires in directly to Eight Sleep's proprietary app and then measures my sleep stages around me throughout the night to make sure I sleep the best. What could you not like? So hit that link

in my description. You will see the Eight Sleep link. You go there, you get your own 8sleep Pod Pro cover. Again, it comes in queen or king sizes. And you use the code TRENDIFIER at checkout. That's T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R. Very, very important to get $150 off and change your sleep today. Go check it out. And they give me my gun. And I'll never forget the lieutenant said, just don't shoot anybody. And then i go out and stand post because we had a couple high value don't shoot anybody

that's what it was that's the stupidest thing in the world times were interesting yeah so i go out and i stand post because we had uh adt there which was a high value target we didn't really know what was going on we didn't know if we were under attack we didn't know like the security company yeah adt no no no i'm sorry adp adp the processing company yeah it does your paychecks is adt even a security company or did i fuck that up yeah no it is because i have adt i know so you're right so i go out and stand post and i'm i'm thinking to myself i'm like what the hell did i get myself into this was not the the bill of goods that i was sold everything's changed the whole way police work was done

changed because now you're looking at these these terrorists they live right next door what they some of them have come through our town they were patterson patterson wayne they learned to fly at fairfield airport where john f kennedy jr took off from i used to work at mountain ridge right next to there oh mountain ridge country club yeah i used to know i forget the name of the pro there but i used to yeah um so we were constantly on the lookout for this stuff all of a sudden those stolen cars that we were getting tons and tons of didn't really matter anymore because we're we're thinking what what's this stuff but what i found very quickly is the job the job not about hunting criminals the jobs about making that difference in Somebody's life, you know what nobody calls the police because they're having a good well, that's not true

Some people just they're bored and they Have never done that before You get your frequent fliers like hey, I need a cup of coffee Can somebody come and help me and it's roseland so you go over there and you you it's community policing type of thing and it's good uh it's good pr but most of the time when people call they're in dire straits and they don't know where where to turn so when you show up you're their only hope and it was a good feeling and there's one that sticks out of my mind there's there's really one that sticks out in my mind.

There's really one that sticks out in my mind. We had a... And I want to come back to the 9-11 thing, but stay with this. This is good. So there was an emotionally disturbed woman, and she was going to kill herself, and she had a four-year-old boy.

And I'm going to show you what police work is all about. She had a four-year-old boy. The boy's name was Mason. And she wouldn't let anybody go near Mason. She's sitting on her bed in one of our townhouse complex. And Mason's sitting right next to her. She wouldn't let any of the cops take her away.

She's got a knife. Now, with police work, there's a rule. It's different now, but they used to call it the 25-foot rule. You don't get within 25 feet of a person with a knife because by the time you draw they'll be on top of you yeah I could see this woman was hurt this is one of those times where those rules don't apply because all you're trying to do is just give this woman just listen to this woman she's got something to say she wants to stay with her too she has a kid with her yeah i'm i i'm able to sit down next to her and just talk to her say hey look you know this this and

i didn't have kids at the time thankfully this kid needs you you can't do this stuff and you see this kid mason i'm in uniform and the kids sort of shine away but as i'm sitting there talking to her and this is like a this is like an hour process to hour and a half process. The kid just gets more and more comfortable with me and more and more comfortable to the point where he just starts snuggling up next to me. And you're like, wow, you know, this, this is pretty cool. We're able to get this woman clear, go get her some help. And fast forward, say, 10 years. I'm in ShopRite. I'm in plain clothes, and I hear in the background,

and I hear, hey, Officer Kevin. So I turn around, and there's a kid there. He's a teenage boy. I said, Officer Kevin. I said, yeah, I'm Kevin. What's going on? He goes, well, I'm Mason. This kid was now 14, 15 years old,

recognizes me in plain clothes. He goes, yeah, you were the officer there. You really helped up my mom. And that's what police work's all about, making that difference. And if I did nothing else in my career, that right there would make my career successful. Made a difference in a way that they don't teach in school though, too, like in the academy. I mean, I know they have drills for some of this stuff, you know, hostage situations, talking someone down, but it's, my point is that it's a pure human being relatability thing, which isn't just you understanding the situation, it's how you outwardly are able to respond to it in a way that the other person responds to right so you have a woman there who's clearly in a mentally unwell moment probably the worst one of her life at any second something very bad could happen and your job is to try to make that not happen and you sit down and you become a human being.

Probably after five minutes, she forgets you're wearing a uniform. She's just used to you being there. And so I like hearing stories like that because I don't care what it is you do. If you're a cop, if you're a businessman, you'd be anything. we are craving emotional intelligence and we are create we're craving the ability to interact with other people in a way that makes not not only us make a difference for them but selfishly make ourselves feel good too because we got to somebody you know what i mean like that feeling where it's like oh i really reached them and so to hear you have that as like a leading memory of what you did especially at a time where you know certainly there's been some negative stuff around cops going on around the country sometimes I feel like I'm a little hard on that but I do hold them to a different standard they're supposed

to protect us but to hear things like that it those are the kinds of things that should give people hope and should remind us that a lot of cops who do their job or they love what they do and they're very good at it and they do things that are beyond just being a police officer well it's 99.99 of police officers are good but unfortunately in this country everybody is judged by the lowest common denominator of the group of people that they belong to now that's fair yeah pretty much everything so across the board take police out of it you know i know i some of my nearest and dearest friends are people of color, are black people, and Spanish people, and Asian people. And I love them all dearly.

All right? But then if I go down the street and I get robbed by, say, a black person or a Spanish person, then all of a sudden, in the back of my mind, that's what happens. All of a sudden, every black person, every Spanish person is a criminal, which a logical person is going to know that's not true police officers are no different we have this idiot in minnesota which by the way is amateur hour amateur hour i in the academy well they didn't teach it but i knew 15 different ways to to make my point where you're not going to die you're going to feel it and you're going to feel it for a couple days afterwards and there will be no bruises on you and there will be a camera could sit right on me and i would never be outside the scope of what i can do in the use of force so this guy putting his knee on somebody's neck it's total amateur hours look at me i'm grand

standing i can do this he had a lot of problems too like there were a lot there were a lot of signs on him right but the sad part is is there's one event in the united states that everybody agrees with every this is why i think people just like to argue everybody agrees that that what that guy did was abhorrent yeah yet we can't we're fighting over it it's it's the the the foolish most foolish thing i've ever heard in my life cops hate him you know civilians hate him everybody hates him so why can't we why can't we use that to come and he got found guilty and he got a big sentence you know what i mean like that well you know i'm going to say something that's really unpopular okay so he got a sentence above and beyond what the law requires so the law is there as our guiding light so my kids i've gotten them i've gotten them a couple things for when they get

older i've gotten them um the constitution all right and i've gotten them a compass a compass all right so they can always find their way and the constitution is the one thing that is unchangeable well aside from amendments but that that's the law that's what you need to believe in how old are your kids i have a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old patrick and jimmy so when they get to time when they're going to depart the house they're going to get this stuff and the other thing is i'm going to give them the bible i I'm going to give them, and they're nice copies because I want them always to be able to find their way. I want them always to find a heart because that's important to me. So this guy, he gets a sentence that's heavier than what the law requires.

I have a problem with that because the law is there for a reason. You can't go, you're not above the law, you're not below the law is there for a reason. You can't go, you're not above the law, you're not below the law. This is the law. One law for the lion and the ox is oppression. That's what's written in the Proverbs of Hell by William Blake But still if you're gonna judge everybody by that same law you can't just because this guy did something so egregious You can't change the law because oh well No, he's a really bad guy because then the law becomes subjective not that I am I understand the law needs to be objective and

Slippery slopes or something that's very important to me And so I recognize like if there's going to be a point that comes out of my mouth that rings a little hypocritical i will say that ahead of saying this because it is this is what you're supposed to be able to do talk about exactly exactly but like he was a symbol like for a moment the symbol above all of them for like the worst of the worst of the kind of thing that people complain about from especially from the relationship between like minority communities and police officers over time and there are other people out there a lot of other people who would say well

what about all like the minorities who've been sentenced to archaic sentences for so long this is one guy he's an asshole we saw him kill a dude on camera right and and he had a position of power to do it to make it worse so him he definitely got what he deserved okay he got what he he got less than what he deserved he deserves to be taken out and beaten okay um that being said you still have to stay within the constraints of the law. Yeah. If somebody gets, if somebody is, is convicted of drunk driving, all right, they can't, and they get a sentence of like six months suspended license just because the guy is a total jerk and mouths off to the judge.

You can't give him eight months. You follow me? Yes. I like that. You just said that. Right. That's, that's what I'm saying here. I'm not saying what he did was right by no means trust me if i could get my hands on him just like in every community and i

know this with um i was recently talking to uh her name is uh katya roman so she she came here illegally and in her community she's costa rican she in her community anytime they found a costa rican committing crimes the community would take care of them because they don't want a bad name. They don't want to be judged by that lowest common denominator. Again, slippery slope, but that's interesting. Right. Because if they get caught, now all of a sudden, all Costa Ricans are bad. Derek Chauvin's a moron.

All police are bad. It's an insane way to think. You're not wrong. You're not wrong about this concept. This absolutely does exist across culture where it's the insane way to think you're not wrong you're not wrong about this concept this this absolutely does exist across culture where it's the lowest common denominator i do agree with that right so that's that's the way i i look at that but you wanted to get back to something with 9-11 yeah yeah with with your story again like when people are when people are telling cool stories

i don't like to stop and be like well can we go back but you know once once you're done that kind of thing i if there's something that we were going on that i thought was cool i always love to come back around around to that but you were saying that i guess like a couple days after 9-11 you were handed a gun and said don't use it and you had been talking about how the the entire job itself changed now this was 20 years ago at this point, which is incredible when you think about it. It's just like, it feels like yesterday in a lot of ways. I was very, very little, but I still remember that day so vividly. It was one of the first memories I really have. But you look at what a seminal event it was, and it's easy to forget how shocking that was if you don't actively think

about this all the time i do 9-11 was so critical in my life that it's been talked about on this podcast a bunch and everything but it it may seem a little foreign to some people hearing this who are like wait a second a cop in new jersey getting out of the police academy you know 15 miles away from new york where this thing happened everything about his job changed that day from something that was a a foreign attack that then our military took care of like when people think of that and it's like wait how does that even make sense but it did because everybody changed but particularly like within law enforcement my understanding i don't know if you

were part of this but is a lot of them around the new jersey pennsylvania new york tri-state area or then down in dc in the i guess like del marva area they were called in whether it be to help at ground zero or to assist with literally getting things organized again i mean you had a whole you had the biggest city in the world just stop you know so like what was your did you get called out of town what was what was your whole deal there it was we were we were set that we had a lot of affluent people in town who did work in new york how many people did roseland uh offhand i don't know i don't know but we there was there were several yeah and so you people are calling up the police department like hey did you hear anything

about this did you hear anything about this you became uh something to try to keep the the neighborhood safe to all of a sudden this one place that people would turn to for a little bit of information a little bit of hope and like because again the chaos then the terrorists did their job and what a terrorist's job is is to create chaos so after 9 11 i had an uncle who uh his name was george everybody called him duke he was um he was prisoner of war in germany for 27 months in world war ii in world war ii great stories by the way you want to hear some great stories great stories holy shit so still alive no he died in 2005 but you know i would have had him on oh he's got something he'd tell you about eating cat and how they got drunk in camp and

right he tried to escape five times it's it's a he's got a great story but i went to him and i was like uncle duke i don't know what what's next i don't know what this new world's going to look like and i'm i gotta be honest with you i'm a little afraid and he goes don't be afraid because you gotta remember he was there when pearl harbor was attacked so he was one he was a resource to me and that's kind of why i went and spoke with him he says you can't be afraid because if you're ever afraid the terrorists win and that's kind of why I went and spoke with him. He says, you can't be afraid because if you're ever afraid, the terrorists win. And that's what the terrorists did in this country. They made us all afraid

because we didn't know what was coming next. So they did their job. And that, God, I think about that and I still get the anxiety. I remember finally going home the night of 9-11. I got home at one or two o'clock in the morning and just sitting in front of the TV and watching and watching and watching. Just I can't believe what's going on. And that's why I said it changed the job forever.

It changed how we patrolled. It changed, you know, you looked at people different. Again, judging people by the lowest common denominator you had Indian families up there who were putting in the window I am Indian American that's how crazy it was it's like it's like some of the Ukrainians now putting in the window I'm Ukrainian not Russian and we're yeah it's fucking nuts right because everybody just says oh well they just lump them in and it's one of the most dangerous things we do in this country we do it regularly year after year after year and we've been doing it for 500 years you know when the irish came

into this country it was no irish need apply all the italians they were grease balls every polish joke that you've ever heard yeah has was an italian joke yeah because i remember coming home from school telling my grandfather a polish joke. And he goes, oh, yeah, I heard that one 50 years ago as an Italian joke. And so it's nothing new, this division or this attempt at a division. The question is whether you buy into it. I have a good friend who is Pakistani. And he is, if you want a profile, he fits the profile perfectly. He comes from a very wealthy family in Pakistan.

So he understood this. And if you're in there and you know you fit the profile, I mean, he was young. He's professional. He's well-spoken. He was educated in his country. Probably thought he funded the whole thing. Of course. People walking around.

I break his chops all the time about it. Fucking nuts, man. People forget. It was something else so he understood that he was going to be looked at differently his entire life so he went through a lot of different steps in order to assure that when he because every time he flew he was getting a finger up his ass it was happening every single time so he had to go through special security clearances in order to get this badge because he understood now people like that i always felt bad for because i would be so mad at those terrorists like buddy he screwed it up for me like i'm i'm just here

trying to live my life and you screwed it up for me and that's what that's how i look at chovan you just screwed it up for me yeah or you did thankfully um i still have a lot of friends who are officers and again they're they're there's another uh marquee event that has changed the way police do their business yeah and it's kind of wild too because it was you know it was a one not to just discount it at all but it was it was a one death thing and we can in a way compare it it not apples to apples but we can compare it on a spectrum as far as like social division to like a 9-11 or the the post of 9-11 but yeah i mean it's i don't like when people make money off of it that's the problem i have like how they they capitalize on it they capitalize on the division oh yeah so everyone yeah everyone yeah they capitalize on that

you you would drive through i don't know if you know where mountain lakes is no mountain lakes well okay so mountain lakes is ultra wealthy yes you have people standing down their boulevard is the main road that goes down there you had people standing there with black lives matters signs i'm like like when did Black Lives not matter? They always mattered to me. So why are you holding up a sign? Are you trying to remind me? Or are you trying to remind yourself?

Because you want the optics of being a social justice warrior. And that's where I have a problem. I have a problem. Before George Floyd, did Black Lives really matter to you? Part of it was also where people were at the time, too. They were at home. Yeah. You know, they'd been at home for three months.

I mean, people— Was that during lockdown? Yeah. It was? Yeah. So, like, people were getting—you know, everyone wants a purpose, no matter who you are. You could be the homeless guy on the street. You could be Jeff Bezos.

You want a purpose and so when you when we had this unnatural thing where we're all separated we're all at home fucking jerking off and doing nothing and then suddenly you see a video and it's a video right like i always say and this is a lesser example but you remember when ray rice when that video came out oh yeah when he would in the elevator yeah oh yeah oh yeah so if you remember there they got some shit for too short of a suspension like two weeks before but people got past it because they're like wow that's awful what he did but all right you know it wasn't it wasn't until the optics came in that he got really suspended came in and then people were like that's the worst thing i've ever seen in my life and it was horrible i'm telling you absolutely by the way never never

use that as a halloween costume it doesn't get received very well what do you mean never go with your girlfriend or your wife or anything where you know put black black eye makeup on her and wear a ray rice jersey who the fuck has done that somebody i might know they should be sued for stupidity somebody somebody i know that is uh that's that's not good but yeah like you, the point is you see a video and it makes... Video doesn't change what happened, but it makes it worse because now you have something visually to respond to. So everyone sees this video of Chauvin and it's fucking nine minutes and 47 seconds of him sitting on a guy's neck.

You get pissed off. Well, that's Rodney King too. And that's before your time. I know it's before your time. I know Rodney King's story well. So Rodney king too yeah and that's before your time i know it's before your time i know rodney king's story well so rodney king was rodney king was a junkie he was high on pcp going 90 miles an hour through a residential neighborhood now taking i see both sides okay and again my opinions aren't always popular but they're they're the truth the cops show up they finally get this guy they're telling him to get down because you're only seeing a small snippet that's the problem i have with video they show the whole thing you got to show

the whole thing they're telling him to get part of what made the show then thing right pretty good because that was a long one they they're telling him to get down ronnie king is a big dude he's like six foot six six foot seven he's a big dude he's well known around that parts too so the cops are all amped up from a chase, because if you're ever in a chase, your adrenaline just is through the roof. You're not thinking as clear as you should. They get him down.

They took a couple bonus shots. They took a couple extra shots, because once they're down, and you have to very quickly de-escalate the situation. They took a lot of bonus they took they took bonus shots so it looks it looks awful it looks awful but should there be been riots over rodney king the cops should have went to jail because they they or they should have at least lost their job because they they did something wrong you know i i've been in a lot of different police chases

i've been in chases where the criminal had rammed my car. And there was one in particular, he rams my car, we get him up the road a little bit. And one of my moves was, I'm not a violent guy. One of my moves was put the handcuffs on him as quickly as I could. And then yell out out because we were always on camera too at this time you can yell out cuffs are on game over game over i've been in situations where some people took some extra shots i've been it because their adrenaline's going they're mad they're they're they're they're amped up it's not the right thing but it's reality it's reality that's how people get really hurt in fights. Somebody's adrenaline's going. They take one extra shot. It's that one

extra shot that maybe it's lights out. Again, this is where it's a higher standard though too. And I appreciate you bringing that up because this is exactly where the issue can get drawn and where you'll get people to legitimately give criticism. It's like when you're a police officer, you are – your job is to uphold and protect the citizens by – or to protect the citizens by upholding the law. So when someone is breaking the law, your job is to arrest them and make sure that they can't keep doing that, to hurt other people and get victims. And I understand that. And I also understand that there are human being elements of adrenaline and things like that. But in the same way that I'd say this about any job, like if I were, and I'm not, if I were like a great basketball player, I would do nothing but basketball. I'd do nothing but training. And this is where I would live every

day. And that's why you see some of these great players in the NBA who can be 000 people on their on their feet with two minutes left and they feel nothing because this is what they do right i think that standard needs to be there for police because there is like you talk about the story of the woman who was having an awful mental breakdown right there's a lot of criminals who are having an awful mental moment you know as much as they you know have to be punished for their actions they also need like what's supposed to be true rehabilitation because something's off something has gone wrong so when you are going to arrest them your job is to get them safely into the custody of the town the city the state whatever and then get on with the process legally just like you said you know not be subjected with the law legally, just like you said, you know, not be subjective with the law. And so when people see someone, oh, he got a couple extra shots in, they go, fuck that. Because

what then what about the next time? Then he takes three extra shots. That's because and this where it comes into play, where you asked me, is this something I always wanted to do? And I say, no, it wasn't something I always wanted to do. This is a job to me. I loved it. I loved it. It was a fulfilling job, but it wasn't something I was driven to do. This is a job to me. I loved it. I loved it. It was a fulfilling job. But it wasn't something I was driven to. So there's a couple different people who become police officers. There's those that are service-driven, that really see this as a purpose in life. Because once I got the job, I realized that, okay, this is my purpose.

And then there's the other ones who are shoved in lockers, who get this authority and go on a power trip. And you learn really quick when you get on who those people are, people that should have never been police officers. And those people, a lot of times, not every time, but a lot of times those people, police work becomes their primary identity. Yes. So their primary identity is,

your primary identity ideally should be So their primary identity is, your primary identity, ideally, should be something that's unshakable. If you're a religious guy, your primary identity should be God. If you're a family man, your primary identity should be your family or your kids. If you put your primary identity in a job, that job has an expiration date. One day, it is going to end like it did with me. It's to end now you're left out in the dark and you're looking around going oh my god what do i do now my primary identity was just taken from me and that's where it comes in import it comes in very important to me that this is not who i am it's what i did see you make that distinction and that's and that's that's great of you by the way

and it seems like through your actions especially like on the job like you you live that distinction and that's great of you, by the way. And it seems like through your actions, especially like on the job, like you live that and live that out. But like the people who can't make that distinction because I think people are human. I'll bet a lot of those guys, there's some of them who definitely are aware of that and still do it anyway, which is kind of their problem. But there's a lot of people who don't realize it's not just cops. It's like anything they don't realize that their entire purpose for being has become the thing they do and they don't realize the pitfall that that can have over the long term i'll even be selfish for a second and talk about this right like i'm in the shit building this right now these are the three to five years where it's like yeah you work every fucking day i don't have a life this is what i do you know but i enjoy doing it i'm building it i love it but i constantly remind myself and i have to remind

people close to me as well when they try to talk to me about this i'm like i signed up for this part of it if i'm like this 10 years from now we got a problem like if this is all i do and this is all i'm about podcast podcast podcast we got a problem there's a difference you know what I mean but did you ever hear that David Goggins speech where if you want it's a little snippet that's on Instagram if you want to be the best at whatever you are you're going to be the most misunderstood person on the planet people are not going to understand it people are not going to like you he's 100% correct because like's right about that. Because like you with my show, with both of my shows, I am fully committed. I have a family.

I have a wife. I have two children. I am fully committed to making this my new life. I like talking to people. I like hearing their perspectives, their point of view. It's something that gives me purpose, my purpose driven to get the word out that you need to embrace your suffering. That's important to me. And i'm not giving that up and you know people are going to constantly there's always going to

be the naysayers hey why are you doing this is it really worth it for your purpose in life yes it is it's not my primary identity i'm a lot of different things on you can step out i can step out of it but i'm going to work if it takes 40 hours to be somewhat to make a living I'm gonna work 80 hours to be the best at what I what I choose to be the best and that's okay By the way, I don't want to be misheard That's that's okay But you know if you are the guy who then has the family that you never see for 20 years. That's a little different That's a little different. There's a problem there. It's where the line goes, but you know, for 20 years that's a little different that's a little different there's a problem there it's where the line goes but you know he also says that balance balance is great

and it's important to a lot of people but balance isn't going to make you the best it's also subjective it is it is i see my kids i you know i i spent a long time away from my kids working that police job you know i missed a lot of different and they were young i was gonna say they were they were young when i when i was in my shooting but i missed stuff you know i missed the the things in preschool the stuff that i really wanted to be i couldn't either i was sleeping or i was working or i was doing a road job because i was the sole income of my family at that time and when i retired i said that's not going to happen nowadays because i'm involved in so many different things uh i i have to schedule those times i'm very i'm much more conscious that i am going to be there for 90 i can't be there for

everything but i'm going to be there for 90 of the things but there was a time in my life where i didn't think i was going to be there for any of it and that was that was after my shooting so and what happened because we talked about that a little bit as far as like just hinting at it but this was in june 2013 you said july july 10 2013. and um so had you ever been in one before no no you've been in some hairy hairy things chases You know you had your gun drawn several times Never this this was different. This was different. It was something and believe it or not I'll go through the shooting incident, but it's it's not even the story like this story is not the shooting incident

so, you know it whenever something bad happens in the police world, it's always the slowest night because I've said this so many times, that everybody loves Raymond. The older brother was the cop. He defines police work so perfectly by saying it's mind-numbing boredom interrupted by brief moments of horror. The majority of police work,

whether you're in an inner city or whether you're in a suburban town, there's nothing worse than silence there's it's it's horrible i remember this particular night uh it was a wednesday night and i pull up car to car with my partner that night and you know we're having a cup of coffee and i just say to him i said god i wish we just get an alarm call something i'm dying i wish i wish i just get an alarm called something to get me out wish i'm i wish i'd just get an alarm called something to get me out of the car that deer's hit i got to put a deer down not that i

like shooting deer but something to do let me go inside i'll do the paperwork i'll smile while i'm doing the paperwork i don't care so we we depart and we used to have to do uh plaza checks um little strip mall checks to pull on doors and stuff. Again, small suburban town. You're not doing this stuff in Newark, but Roseland, you do it because it's more community police driven. As I'm pulling into the lot, it's about 1045. Crack of the radio and everything changes at the crack of the radio. Crack of the radio comes over and says, start heading to this address.

It's an open 911 call. What's going on? we don't know so in new jersey anytime 911 is called we have to respond whether it's a missed dial whether it's an open line because sometimes people will dial 911 they'll throw the phone on the floor what about that thing maybe this is unrelated but you know on like the iphone it has like the emergency call thing that's that'll dial 9-1-1 fuck I bought dial that like and the cops show up right now. They don't know it because I like it I'm like fuck no shit. They're supposed to they're supposed to in myself reassuring So yeah cell phones cell phones you're supposed to there's they'll give you a GPS on the printout on what's called an alley screen

And it'll it'll give you latitude and longitude and then you can triangulate where the it's coming from now if they can't pinpoint an area they'll check the area nothing's showing off they go they can't pinpoint it so this open 911 call we start heading down there and i can tell you the route that i took i was doing it was 10 45 at night there's not a whole lot of traffic i'm doing 70 miles an hour no sirens but lights you're not on bloomfield have i close to bloomfield i was on passaic have you're doing you want passaic doing 70 miles an hour sure there's nobody around okay that's that's what those flashing lights are for you know many times a law cop yes i did yes i did i should be held to a higher standard i'm looking at all the fucking cops sitting there in the speed trap on that right i used to drive on that road every goddamn day.

Well, you know, those flashing lights kept me, they got me out of looking like an asshole more times than I can tell you. It's late at night. I'm pulling out of a road. I'm not paying attention. I almost T-boned somebody. And they hit their brakes. I quick hit my lights and just take off. It's like, yeah, I was going to a call.

That's one of the perks of the job. Yeah. There's a lot of downsides. We'll let job. Yeah. There's a lot of downsides. We'll let that one slide. There's a lot of downsides of the job. That was one of the perks of the job. So we're going down this road. My partner's right behind us.

And one of the things you've got to realize about police work is you have a very short time to come up with some sort of strategic plan. So we're going car to car over the radio. We don't know what's going on. It's a townhouse complex. How are we going to go about this? Where are we going to go? Where are we going to set up? Do you want to pull down the street?

So in an abbreviated time, we're literally talking three, four minutes. We come up with somewhat of a strategic plan. We pull up at the residence, shut our lights off. We don't want to make our presence known. There was a third, one of the supervisors showed up there as well my partner goes around the back me and the supervisor go up to the front so our plan was we're going to breach the door when you say breach the door we're going in like are you are you using one of them battering ram things or so we we we initially walk up and we can hear yelling so when you breach a door it's not like the movies

you don't kick down doors you maybe kick down fbi open up no no you don't if you hear yelling and there's something going on in there we don't know what's going on yet but we know somebody we could hear a woman screaming and we know there's something serious that we have to get to there we don't kick open the door you kick open a closet door or a bedroom door but these are steel doors so uh we're equipped with something called a halogen bar a halogen bar there's like a fireman's crowbar so there's a way to do it you know if you put that that crowbar is it called a halogen bar i want to see what this looks like it's so the halogen bar if you put it into the lock and you pry it and you pry it open oh yeah I've seen one of these things I'll stick that in the corner of the screen for people to say

right so yeah the Halligan bar if you put that in the proper way you can pop it but first you have to bang it to create a little bit of a gap to get in there so on a on a signal I take the end of this Halligan bar because there's like a on a signal i take the end of this halogen bar because there's like a hat there was like a flat end on it and i start hammering the door and all of a sudden as i'm hammering the door i hear pop pop pop holy what the just happened this is rose land excuse my language this is rose land this shit's not supposed to happen where is this in roseland it's a townhouse complex between passaic avenue

and harrison avenue um i won't give the name of this street because i i believe the i think i know what one you're talking about i think i think the the victim still lives there so i there there's a little porch and i'm off to the side and i'm sitting there with the supervisor i go over to radio because i'm now i'm concerned about my partner who's in the back i didn't hear anything coming through the windows is it just the two of you there in the front at the front and my partner's around back now it was a middle unit so the only way in or out is the front. At the front and my partner's around back. Now, it was a middle unit. So the only way in or out is the front or the back. Yeah. It's not like they can come out the sides.

Yeah. I get over to radio and he says, shots fired. It's an ongoing domestic situation. So there's a guy by the name of Anthony Vocatoro. Oddly enough, John elite knows for people that are listening I just did this with my head yeah you picked up on that right so John elite knows him and it's not Anthony vocatore the dentist he lives the gentleman lives in Florida and he it broke up with this girl came all the way up from Florida

and he's gonna to kill her. So the situation was, is he was raising his gun to kill her. And my partner shot through the rear sliding glass door to stop him. He struck him once in the back. And then once gunfire was exchanged, he disappeared. We couldn't see him. Oh, did he shoot back at the cop? Yeah, he shot.

He shot first. Oh, no, the cop shot, and then he shot back. So it was an exchange of gunfire. And you're still out front. I'm still out front. So other cars are starting to show up. So they relieve us up front, and we go running around the back. And at this time, some more officers show up.

And your heart rate's pretty jacked at this point. Yeah, because somebody just shot at us somebody just shot at a cop but again it's it's everything is very calm like oddly calm so if you know anything about a townhouse deck it's about nine by nine all right with if i'm looking at the sliding glass door the openings on the left we're looking in the sliding glass door i can see the victim she's she's sitting on her on her rear end with her knees tucked up and you can see she she's she's a mess has she been shot she has not been shot but she has been terrorized over and over again for a long time but we don't see this guy so we come up with again abbreviated plan we're going to go on the deck and we're going to get in there because our job is to get

and save human life at all costs. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to go through that sliding glass door. We're going to throw something through it. We set up on the deck. Now, I'm looking at the deck and thinking, again, very clearly. I see the right side because if I'm standing in the right side of the deck, puts me in a corner, I have a little bit of patio furniture,

but what I think is some cover, and I can see everything. But I can't see the guy. I don't know where he is. Guns are drawn, and he's not communicating with us. On a cue, somebody throws a chair through the sliding glass door. I thought you were going to say I threw a grenade. Jesus Christ. Shit got real.

Maybe I would have saved it. So once that chair goes through the door, I'm standing up with my gun drawn. Now he threw it from the inside. No, no. We throw it through to get through, to get in because the door is locked. A flash. Like that's a flash a bang and particles hit in my face so he was he was right behind the wall and what he did was he just put his gun like this i happen to be at the worst place possible.

The bullet goes, like I can feel the gunpowder from the gun. When you shoot a gun, you'll get what's called blowback. You'll feel the little grains of gunpowder hit your face. And actually, if you take a paper towel or something and wipe your face, you'll see the gunpowder on your face. I feel the grains of gunpowder hit me. I feel the heat of the flash. I hear the bang, but when you go through a stressful situation, your auditory responses change. Physiologically, they change. When you're in a range, you're supposed to wear hearing

protection, but when it happens for real, your body goes into a fight or flight mode and it protects itself. Although I heard the bang, it didn't deafen me because if you're ever in a shooting range just i don't suggest this but i used to do it occasionally just take my ear and lift it up just to hear what the bang was like now it's loud and it'll make your ears ring it'll give you tinnitus it's loud with the things on i mean it's fucking loud so but this didn't make my ears ring. And so I'm very calm. You'd think you'd panic in that. I stay very calm. I hit the deck hard, like I go down, and there's broken glass everywhere.

So from the sliding glass door. Your eyes shut? No, no. Still wide open? As a matter of fact, here's how calm I was. So police will take our key rings and put it on our antenna of our microphone. When I hit the ground, those keys fell off. I saw it.

I slowly grabbed them, put them back on. Now, the other officers who were on the deck were able to retreat because they were right by the exit. What I thought was a good strategic position turns out to be the worst place in the possibly you could end up being i got still stuck behind furniture right and i'm i don't know whether i'm shot because you always say if you're shot you're going to be the last one to know it i don't know whether i'm shot i see a lot of blood because i landed on glass i see blood everywhere so where'd you land i landed on my forearms and i still to this day have some glass embedded in my forearms they weren't able to get it all out but i i remember my shoulder hurting and i must

have hit something on the way down i remember people asking me behind me are you shot i'm like i don't know i see a lot of blood and my shoulder hurts it's all i know but i but i did feel the bullet the bullet they they suspect the bullet went an eighth of an inch next to my ear it actually wiggled my ear so he shot he fired a few rounds and one of them just one just one just one he just held it out the window kind of like this like almost blind and it went grazed your ear my my left ear my left ear it actually you could feel I could feel it wiggle two inches from less than two inches it was like an eighth of an inch from what they suspect because it hit a flower i think it hit a flower pot behind me so i'm on the ground and i know if i go to the exit he can shoot me i'm stuck i know this guy shot at cops this is this i'm just reeling off the things that i know is he a wise guy, he's just, he was a guy that was heartbroken. That's what he was. I know he shot at cops twice. He's not talking to us. He was going to kill this

woman. He's obviously, he's obviously serious. So if I go to leave and this is how I'm thinking, this is how it's playing on in my head. If I leave, he's going to shoot me. I'm dead. Yeah, all reason and logic has left the building. I'm ready for him to just come out blazing. Like, I'm thinking to myself, this is it. I'm going to die. And instead of going through the panic, I just, everything slows down. I get real calm.

I accept it. I said, if I'm going to die, I'm going to die. How long is that going on for? Or do you really not even know? It feels like an hour, but in reality, it's probably 30 to 40 seconds. And no shots are being fired? No shots are being fired. Can't see him because he's behind this wall. He's right there, but he's behind this wall. My gun is out. It's ready to go. In my mind, I have a seven-month-old and I have a three-year-old. I start thinking of them. My seven-month-old will never know me.

My three-year-old will remember bits and pieces, but he's really not going to know his father. My wife is going to be left for the rest of her life having to take care of these kids. And financially, she'll to take care of these kids and financially she'll be taken care of there's there's very good things in place for police officers who are who are killed in the line that's going through your head that's what's going through my head literally financial part financial she's going to be taken care of i'm ready to die like i'm ready you know i feel bad but what am i going to do i got no choice so i get into what's called a prone position prone shooting position i get on my stomach i can't get out so it's going to be him or me i said if i'm going to die and it's my time motherfucker you're coming with me so i'm ready to

go did you say that out loud uh i might have i might have sometimes my inner voice comes out yeah i mean it's not like you can i'm sure there's parts of this you're never even going to know because you're just like totally locked into the worst situation in your life. But I'm just, you know, it's a very accepting of it. They always say that, you know, if you're going down in an airplane, very few people panic because they just accept their fate. They realize, yeah. Who knows that? But that's what I've've read before and that's how I felt I'm holding down waiting for this guy

to come out waiting for this guy to come out now the thing with the townhouse deck is it's got this little like four foot wall and there's a raised thing behind it so what happens is the other officers were able to hold that opening. One guy was covering the opening. So if he pulled his head out, he was going to get shot. And how many officers are there by this point? So there was three of us on the deck, and then there was a supervisor standing behind. Now, again, people who shouldn't be officers, the supervisor, I think he's still running.

He left me for dead. Like, he really left me. You know what he did? He went back to call the chief. I'll never forgive the guy. He's a supervisor. He left me for dead like he really left me. You know what he did He went back to call the chief. I I'll never forgive the supervisor. He's gonna manage I will never forgive this guy in my life because he left me there to die He ran all the way on the side of the building and the other officers in the department know what he did But two of them thankfully stayed one of them was a sergeant Terry West The other one was Jason Heider who was the guy in the back who initially exchanged gunfire they were able to grab me by the back of my belt now i'm not a small guy and getting up from a problem how tall are you like i'm like

six four but you know getting getting up from that prone position when i'm bloody and stuff was a little tough so they were able to grab the back of my duty belt and sort of assist me and i was able to get out. And very quickly when I get out, I'm like, okay, that's over. He retreats upstairs. Once he retreats upstairs, we're still covering to make sure he's not going to fire back at us. We're able to get the victim out. I was going to say, where's the woman? She's still downstairs in that prone position. She's sitting in the living room. With her legs out. Yep. We're able to get her out. She's able to come out. We're able to get him distracted enough to get her out.

She comes out. Now I don't give a shit what he does. He could stay in there for 10 years. I don't care. We did our job. We did what we were there to do, which was protect life. Is there a feeling once you have her out, and you're out, right? So now you're not in a dangerous,

I mean, you're still close to a building where there's an active shooter, so there's some danger. But on the level of danger you just had about two minutes ago, it went from 100 to 10 miles an hour real fast. Is there a weird euphoria of like, oh, we're good.

All right, let's just chill here. We'll wait them out. It's almost, euphoria is actually a good word for it. Years ago, I've jumped out of a couple different airplanes. And when you hit the ground, your adrenaline's pumping so much. And then you go from 100 miles an hour to stop. You sit in the ground and you're just like, junkies will shoot for it. People will snort for it.

Some people drink their way to it. That's the feeling. Like that's a drug coming down off of that adrenaline it was it was a great feeling but i had to figure out whether i wasn't shot so i figure out real quickly i'm not shot but in in uh july now mind you again my arms are all torn up we had the whole perimeter for two hours he's still in there he's still in there there. We had to wait for the hostage negotiation team. We're holding down perimeter, fully expecting this guy to come out and do what's commonly referred to as suicide by cop. He obviously wants to die.

He shot a police officer, so he's not talking to us. All right. Did you try talking to him before the hostage negotiator got there? We were yelling occasionally, occasionally like show your head show me your hand drop the weapon come out just trying to talk him out did you did you guys try to look because i'm just thinking back to your original story with with the woman it's a different situation obviously this guy's a murderous criminal but i'm saying like is there a part where you start trying to have a conversation or is it just direct orders like that a couple

different things and he's not giving us any response, so we know it's not happening. So we just hold him in there, make sure he doesn't get out. That's all we care about. Just our job's done. Hostage team comes up. We're relieved. Like, we actually had to walk out a certain way. And I go to the ambulance because I have to start getting some medical attention.

My arms are burning because I'm sweating, too hot was it July it was July it's you know 80s 90s humidity and what time this was at 10 30 a night now we're talking probably 12 30 1 o'clock in the morning see how the thing this it's dark this whole time yeah so we but that that drop in, I remember turning to my partner going, holy shit. Holy shit. I cannot believe. You can't even register what just happened. Did you have a cut where your ear was? No, no, no.

Nothing? It never struck me. It never struck me. It just moved it. That's how close it was. It's like a breeze. So I get into the ambulance ambulance and i realized very quickly i never carried my cell phone with me and it was different time i never carried my cell phone with

me it was always in my said i never carried myself home with me no no no i never carried my cell phone with me it was always in my bag in my car because i didn't i i just never did this is like the 2013 so it's iphone days at this point. Yeah, there's iPhones around. They're like iPhone 1. Yeah. So the only thing I can think about is all the wives, you know, they're all connected and stuff. So I just need to call my wife because she's going to hear it. I grab one of the EMT's phones.

Now imagine sitting at home and getting a phone call from your spouse saying, honey, I was just in a shooting. I'm okay. I'm not shot. I have to go to the hospital, remove some glass from my arm. I will be home as soon as I can. Imagine getting that, I got to go from a strange number. Imagine being that person sitting on the other side. So that's why I say the spouses take every bit of the brunt of what police work does to a person because they have to see this person coming home that's all you said though that's all i said and then you hung up that's it that's it you didn't like have a minute to like fill her in a little no no there was i was surrounded by a bunch of different people and and there was people asking me questions about what's going on. And I, I tried to be as brief as possible. Just let her know I'm alive. I'm okay.

Cause she's going to hear that there was a shooting. Somebody's going to call. Oh, your husband's working tonight. There was a shooting. You might want to reach out to him. I just want to let her know that I'm alive. You know, so I go to the hospital, I get bandaged up and they take most of the glass out and then i go home and when i go home my adrenaline's still high like what time are we talking i probably got home about 4 30 ish so your shift ended because you were just in a shooting and they're like all right yeah they're like well i'm injured at that point so i was so amped up that i couldn't go to bed i go out for a. It was actually one of the better runs I had in my life.

And just to clear my head. Some people will take some drinks. I wasn't a drinker at the time. That changes. That changes a lot. And I go out for a run. I go home. And I'm able to lay down.

And I get like three or four hours of sleep. It's no big deal. I was off. So that week I was working Wednesday, Thursday. And they said, oh, you can have Thursday off. I'm thinking in my head great i got four day weekend this is fantastic this greatest thing ever shooting every week i'm getting a yeah right how about we plan our shootings on wednesday nights when i'm working wednesday thursday i wake up to like 50 different phone calls because police went like a sewing circle everybody wants to know what happened

especially in small towns. Everybody's heard about it. I answer as many of them as I can. And that Thursday night, obviously my wife is thrilled that I'm home. And she wants to go out just to get away. We get a babysitter for the kids. We just go out to a movie. And we go see a Seth Rogen movie called This Is The End.

This is when Sethh rogan was funny this is back when this was back when he was funny it was called this is the that's mean yeah he's horrible now i can't let's just let's call it turd a turd um we go see this movie and there's nothing really rare in its head but there's a scene it very early on in the movie where there's there's a loud bang and some bright lights and they all get taken up to heaven or something like that it's kind of a dark comedy type of thing well when that bang happened i i nearly shit my pants like my heart started pounding i started sweating and i really started become so anxious that i i don't want to alarm my wife She's she's been through enough at this point. I

Say listen, I'm gonna I'm gonna go to bathroom I'll be right back. I go out to the bathroom and I don't go to the bathroom. I just sit in the hall and I'm I'm hyperventilating What the hell's going like I don't know what's going on this is this is bizarre to me I thought just I I didn't I didn't get it I couldn't go back in the movie theater was this like a like a full-blown panic attack type situation yeah but worst worst the worst one I've ever had in my life I've had panic attacks before but this was like it was almost paralyzing what used to we used to trigger it before that um having to see my having to see my parents that's the best one i can tell you having to see my

parents it's it's that's a well that's not life and death that's like a wow you didn't grow up the way i grew up that that's like another like three hours which i don't think we're going to be here we'll wrap back around to it yeah the um so something's like finally my wife comes out and she says are you okay i'm like yeah you know what my stomach hurts i don't feel very good because you don't want it you don't want your partner to see you weak because when when you're a police officer most police officers are type a personalities we're not going to go to anybody for help we don't want to show anybody our weaknesses we we want to be that strong person who gets called on to fix things well when you're broken who's going who you're going to call to fix if you're not willing to ask for help so we go home that night and that night the nightmares

start and it's usually a stupid nightmare like i'm back in a shooting except instead of a gun i got one of those those uh those guns where the bang comes out of it the flag quick i'm sorry to cut you off just quickly i want to make sure i understand this you so you it stopped like what made it stop the panic attack yeah breathing just calming down trying like uh faking i guess i guess would be the most apt word i can't allow my wife she's been through enough i can't allow her to see me in this because i'm just going to scare her and so once you just got your breath at least back you're like all right i'm gonna go sit this one out just relax in there and then well she left later she left oh she left no she left the theater she's like i I'm not, you know, I said, my stomach doesn't,

my stomach doesn't feel good. I'm going to hang out here. She goes, all right, well, let's just go. I think she knew something was going on. She just didn't want to tell me. Probably, yeah. I'm guessing. So we go home and the nightmares start.

Now, the problem is, like, again, you got all these different things going on that you don't understand. Nobody's ever prepared you for this stuff. And we're supposed to have critical incident debriefings after something like this my department um they're less than proactive so they didn't do it you're supposed to have it within 48 hours i think they had one on the following monday um because some bad stuff happened at least somebody to tell you hey look look out for this look out for a b and c but we never got that there's also not a ton of shootings in roseland it's not standard they they they still need to come out

and tell you know because unfortunately oh sure i agree yes it was more of a of a pride thing than anything else it wasn't it wasn't it was like well my officers don't need help come on suck it up rub some dirt on it we're well my officers don't need help come on suck it up rub some dirt on it we're taught that from a young age rub some dirt on it you'll be okay so it continues so that weekend my wife wants to go down and see my parents down down by atlantic city oh yeah which now i got double anxiety so we put we we pack everybody in the car and we're like hey you know what just let's get it she's trying to get me away from that area to try to calm me down because again i think she knows something's going on on the way home my three-year-old spills chocolate milk on his car seat

it's no big deal right it's a three-year-old i lost my mind i started yelling at him like I would yell at somebody who just punched me in the face. I really just started berating him. And then my wife jumps in to try to protect him, and then I start yelling at her. And that ride home, there were several times when my wife was begging me to pull over so she could get out with the kids. She just wanted to get out of the car. I was a monster. I changed like that. Were you in any way aware of that?

I had no control over it. So you know how you have, when you start to feel that agitation coming up inside of you and a normal person who hasn't had gone through this there's always that that thing that little buffer zone that says yeah you don't you just calm it down it's not that big a deal where it's like a voice of reason that's gone i don't have that no more i just go i see something that aggravates me and i take off that night was the first time i i said to myself, something's really off here. Something's really, really off. And I don't know, I'm having, I can't sleep anymore. Like the Thursday night, Friday night, this is Saturday now. I haven't slept in a couple of days, so I'm exhausted

because every time I go to sleep, there's another nightmare about something stupid. I wake up so wet. I'm not sure if I piss my pants. I mean, my whole body, I change my shirt three or four times at night. And all these bad things are going on. I have to go to the doctors to try to get the rest of the glass removed out of my arm on Monday. I'm supposed to go back to work on Monday. And just to review, you have this trip with your wife, you go home and then, she's saying anything yet? I mean, she wanted to get out of the goddamn car so i gotta think she she was already worried now she's got to be like holy she knew something was changing she she i don't know whether she said i can't remember if she said anything to me she probably did but she never verbalized it

not that i can remember it's also scary for her, too. She just almost lost her husband. Yeah. So Monday I go to this doctor. They're picking glass out of my arm. They're still picking glass out of my arm. And I remember the doctor asking me this question. He says, are you okay?

And I said, yeah, you know, I just got a little glass in my arm. It's no big deal. She goes, no, that's not what I'm talking about. And she's like, are you okay? And I'm not a guy who cries very easily or I wasn't. I start bawling crying. I mean, the only time prior to that was when I lost my grandfather, that I cried that hard. I was 22 years, as an adult, I was 22 years old. I never cried like that in my life and she goes okay well I'm gonna write on the chart we gotta get you some help that day the department held one of those critical incident debriefings and I go in there and and the department took our shotguns out of the cars for some stupid reason I've been shooting a shotgun since I was five years old I know how

to handle shotguns but they took them out of their. Now all of a sudden we find out they're putting shotguns back in the cars. I'm like, okay, good. That's good. That's a good thing. Then I'm shooting and we got the shotguns. Right. So then I find out they're only going back in the supervisor's car. I, I lose it. I I'm lucky I didn't get fired on this one. Cause it was a Lieutenant who told me and I start screaming at him. You tell my wife, I want you to tell my wife that only you get the protection of a shotgun. And to the point where other guys saw this was going on, they pick me up. And we had to walk downstairs. Walk downstairs and put me outside.

I can't get any peace from this. I'm obviously not ready to go back to work. I go see a doctor on my own but then the workers comp also sends you doctors who are the worst doctors in the world they they just get paid and they don't give a shit about you one doctor says well you're a cop didn't you expect to get chewed at motherfucker i said do you understand that in this country i think it's i think the statistic is 0.05 of of the police officers get shot at. 0.01.

Shoot. What was that line from Everybody Loves Raymond that you said that the guy says? Police work is sheer boredom interrupted by brief moments of horror. My God. I just keep thinking that while you're saying this. Because it's like how many guys literally put in 35 years on the job and mostly minus you know a few little hairy situations never see shit if they're like a cop in roseland or something it's it's a it's a it's a weird thing in the sense that you take that job to be the important individual that protects people but then you're

protecting strictly by deterrence and clearly not through action, and suddenly you feel unfulfilled through it. That's a great point that I want to jump to in the future. Okay. That point right there. Yeah, because that's going to come into play really quickly. Okay. I go down the rabbit hole. Now, I just want a little bit of peace. Now, the only way I can can get i'm an active police officer some people smoke pot to do it i can't i obviously i can't do that i so i start having a couple drinks a couple drinks turns into five drinks five drinks turns into a bottle i start going down this really bad just to get a little bit of peace because when i'm drunk i'm not thinking about

it and if i get drunk enough i get a little sleep so i'm drinking and i'm not thinking about it. And if I get drunk enough, I get a little sleep. So I'm drinking and I'm really putting it on and I'm bored. I'm not working. I'm not doing anything. So I'm left to my own devices at home. And, you know, there's some people that reach out to you and they try to check on you to see how you're doing, but you don't want to talk to them because what are you going to tell them? Oh, yeah, I'm really fucked up.

I'm bad. So you lie to them. The people who you do talk to, you going to tell them oh yeah i'm really up i like i'm bad so you you lied to them the people who you do talk to you lie to them and i don't know how this ends a couple weeks goes by and there's a there's a picture uh my wife wanted to go down to i i used to be friends with artie lang so artie's playing down in in Atlantic City he's playing in Borgata so he says not friends with him anymore I kind of he got so bad I had to I understand I got he got so bad I couldn't yeah I couldn't in good conscience I did all I could um it's a shame because I love the guy he's great he's a great human being human beings got the biggest heart you've ever seen her life amazing things about him so he invites us down and just

come to a comedy show you know I tell him I just I was talking to him I just tell him hey look I was in this thing he's come down and have a comedy show and brings me up to his hotel room and my parents were there at the time and it was kind of cool because he brought us backstage and showed us everything and bob levy was there and you know who's another insane person and then we go to the comedy show and i just remember sitting in the comedy show and already's really funny but i've never laughed i just sat there and there's a picture that was taken there of my wife and i and you see my face my face there's something wrong like you i just got this like yeah if you're

not laughing at already laying in it but you but the not at the thing there's a picture not at the comedy show but there's another picture and i just saw this picture the other day and you see my face and my face there's something wrong there's something seriously wrong um i end up arguing half the time with my wife because i just don't want to be there. I know she did everything with the best intentions, but I wasn't ready to go out. So we go back home, and I'm seeing therapists, and people are trying to get me through, but I'm just this big giant monster and this big burden. When you paint yourself into a corner like that, there's no way out. And the only way out is, hey, listen listen it's probably better off if i'm not

here anymore so now those those thoughts start going through how far after the shooting are we now in 10 days three four weeks three four weeks of not sleeping of drinking too much of really having no direction sitting home all day um your only your only obligation is to go to doctors the department's not calling you the upper you're on leave yeah the upper management's not calling you because they don't give a shit all they care about is is liability they don't care about your safety these are things that I'll never forgive so when you start thinking that you're a burden and and your family is seeing this man that is changing. You don't want them to see that. So I felt that it was time for me to go.

I make the conscious decision that one way or another, I'm going to die. Do you remember when that moment was? It was cumulative. I mean mean it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't a event there was several events one of them in particular again you're not sleeping and i lived in a bi-level house at the time so i always slept downstairs because when i i didn't sleep in a bed because i was having night terrors and i didn't want to wake my wife up so I would stay downstairs watch TV till 3 or 4 in the morning and hopefully pass out so one night around 2 o'clock in the morning well prior to that actually

actually no you asked a question that was there was there one moment yes here's the moment I couldn't take loud noises noises or anything being pointed at me. And my son, who's a three-year-old, had a Nerf gun. If you are looking to search the web privately and not have all these websites track you when you leave, check out my friends over at Privato VPN. Privato is the VPN company that gives you full privacy while losing you no speed, and it allows you to use the VPN on up to 10 different devices at a time. I use it on two.

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He takes the Nerf gun and points the nerf gun at me i snap the nerf gun there's there's a technique to use when somebody's pointing a gun at you you just sort of you flip it around i flip it out of his hand like he's a criminal i snap it in two and i throw it in the garbage and then i look at his face and he's just standing there with his mouth open staring at me oh my god what you know back of my mind i'm saying what did i what did i just traumatize your kid i just traumatized my kid i walk out of the house and i leave for three days now something else i would you go well i never carried my gun off duty when i was working i just it's a liability i start carrying my gun because i when I was working. It's a liability.

I start carrying my gun because I start getting paranoid. You're not sleeping. When I walked out of the house, I went and lived in the woods for like three days. Just turned my cell phone off, parked my car in a different spot so if somebody finds my car, they're not going to find me. And I lived in the woods, slept in the woods. Are we talking like the woods off Passaic Ave? No, no, no, no. No, I was living in Parsippany at the time a lot of woods back there yeah so i was living it was one of the one of the parks there and i lived there i sat up against a tree i don't think i slept in

three days and what'd you do i just thought that's all i just thought. Like, what is my life becoming? It's, this is not me. I'm the guy that people come to for help. I'm not the guy that goes to anybody for help. So I'm stuck. I can't do anything. I'm this monster. My kids, I scared the shit out of my kids.

I'm yelling at my wife. I would throw things at my wife. I'd spit at my wife. I'd call her horrible names because again, that buffer zone in my brain's gone. I broke about 10 different remotes, throwing them. One of them, which she still reminds me to this day that I actually banked it off the TV and it hit her in the head. And I said, listen, you know, after now joking about it, it was a horrible thing.

I couldn't do that again if I tried. It was like a one in a million shot. It was like a Larry Bird behind the backboard type of swish. But that was me. That was me for quite some time. You lose control and now you lose control of who it affects. And there's no way out. So I'm going to fix this. I'm going to be that guy that i was where i fix things and i take care of things and the

only way i know how to fix this is to take myself out of the equation did you take that gun for protection did you take that because you were hoping to use it uh probably a little of both probably a little both it was a so my off-duty gun's a beautiful gun. It was a Chief Special 38 nickel-plated with lightning grips. It was beautiful. I recently qualified with it. I had an office downstairs. Wait, recently what? Qualified.

So in order to carry it, you have to qualify. Oh, right. You have to qualify under police supervision. So I take the gun into my office and I get on my knees and i write a note you leave the woods you go to your office well i get home this is some time after the woods this with the woods is kind of like the turning point where i know it's time to go and you didn't out there there's no one around i didn't i didn't out there i don't know why because you wanted people to know no no i just don't i don't think it was bad enough yet like there were there were still options you know when you go when you get there to that point where you're ready to do

it it's because there are no options you're in a world of darkness and at that time i felt maybe there was there was an inkling of hope so there was still at least some sort of tree branch you're you're reaching for while you're going down the stream here towards the waterfall you are in the babbling brook walking against the tide chest deep and walking against the current and you can't get out when people along the banks are saying hey just just get out of the water just but you can't get out when people along the banks are saying hey just just get out of the water just but you can't because you're just waiting through and walking upstream uphill so this particular night i get into my office i write this note you know i'm sorry

i'm a disappointment um everybody will be financially taken care of. Police, the survivors of police will get, and this is actually false, but this is what I thought. She's going to get half my salary for the rest of her life, health benefits, a payout of three times what my ending salary is. It turns out that that's not true, but I think she's going to be financially taken care of. So I get on my knees. I put the gun in my mouth.

I feel I could tell you what the ridges of that trigger felt like on my finger. It's a double action gun, so I put my thumb on the hammer and I cock it back once and I can feel there's little notches on the, on the hammer. Now, once with a double action gun, when you cock that hammer back, it's hair trigger. It's right. A sneeze. You're going. I put the gun in my mouth. I can taste the gunpowder. That's because I recently qualified. I can feel the metal on my tongue and I just start replaying everything, replaying everything, the whole incident. I say goodbye to my kids. I mentioned my grandfather.

My grandfather was the most important man in my life, and I apologized to him for not being the man that I should be for him. And I'm just ready to go. I'm ready to die. How long is it in there probably a good five minutes five minutes at the end of it i just pause and like i just have this brief moment where i just have a little clarity and i'm bawling crying like i can't it's two o'clock in the morning so realistically if i would have done it that night everybody would have been woken up

likelihood my kids might have found me down there um did you think about that no no i didn't think about anything you're not thinking about that stuff that you you know the it's it's trying to rationalize an irrational act there's just you're thinking of it as a rational human being and i'm not which is a human thing right i put the i just that pause where i take the gun out of my mouth and i put it down and i stare at it i said jesus christ i i'm i don't know the the pause to this day um i've recently found some sort of faith the only thing I can think of is that was somebody or something telling me I'm not done yet this is not the time to do this after that night I never told anybody about that ever I

certainly never told my wife about that I realized that I was in some real danger oh you didn't tell her I didn't tell anybody I didn't tell anybody I called up a friend of mine I said look I got to get real danger. Oh, you didn't tell her? I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell anybody. I called up a friend of mine. I said, look, I got to get my gun out of my house. That's all I said to him. And they knew. Yeah, they know right away. They know.

But it's a very emasculating thing to have to reach out to somebody for that help. I said, I just got to get this gun out of my house. I don't want it in my house. I don't want it anywhere near me. I put it in a lockbox and ship it off. And no questions they didn't ask anything it's here fellow police fellow police officer somebody who i trusted i said please i can't i can't they didn't ask anything they didn't ask for any explanation

somebody picked it up from me and it was stored away and where i didn't where i didn't know where it was. After that, that wasn't the last time that I tried. I tried to hang myself. I tried to overdose. Wait, you tried to hang yourself? I tried to hang myself. How long later was that? Two, three weeks. And you're still on leave during this whole time?

Yeah, yeah. So you're just alone with your thoughts nonstop. You know, the busy bee has no sight no time for sorrow however the opposite is also true yes I tried to drink myself to death I tried to you know you drive down the road and you think hey if I just crash into this tree your hand slip on the wheel a couple times? Now, the doctors, they prescribed medication. So the protocol is they put you on an antidepressant. They put you on Prozac? Lexapro.

Lexapro and Klonopin. Yeah. I don't know it. People don't realize the horrible side effects that those things have. Oh, it's brutal. It's bad. I never had it, but I've been around. I've had people close to me who have it.

It's brutal. It's like a fog. Your brain's constantly in a fog. There's sexual side effects, which it sounds great to be able to go all night, but it's really not. It kind of sucks. I know I'm making light of it, but the Klonopin, which is the anti-anxiety, I discovered very quickly that if I pop, there were 0.5s.

If I pop three or four Klonopin, take a couple drinks, I become a real cheap date because I can get twice as drunk on half the liquor. Because I'm drinking a fifth a day. Easy. Easy. So one night, I think I probably took eight to ten Klonopin. I just took a handful. How far out are we at this point? Twelve weeks?

Yeah. Twelve weeks? Probably around there. Okay. A handful of Klonopin i just took a handful how far out are we at this point 12 weeks yeah 12 weeks probably around there okay a handful of colonopin wash it down i think it was it was either vodka or jack daniel's something like that i probably wasn't drinking jack daniels i'm i'm i'm not that high class were you already drunk when you did that yeah all right so you're really not thinking oh it's a handful it's just like that doesn't go through your head like oh wow that's a lot no just a handful pop and then i pass out you know i i obviously didn't take enough which okay lesson learned but that you might not wake up from that right well that was that was the hope that's that that was what i was hoping for you know that way

if if at least that again now i got a little clarity about the gunshot okay if at least my family finds me where i'm just in a chair asleep it won't be that traumatic for the kids um so a funny thing happens i never stop drinking i'm going to therapy i get i start getting involved in group therapy when did that start was it just group or did you do solo both I did both so the group therapy I was involved in was also other officers who were involved in in critical incident shootings this isn't the workers comp doctors no no this is a this is a guy named dr. Eugene Stefanelli who's the state PBA doctor who he's a sold Italian from Newark he's you know a lot of them I know I know he's this old Italian from Newark who just works with nothing but police again you need that yeah you need that

commonality understands and the other cops were coming they had already been through the worst times they were going through they went through everything that I was going through and they were able to sit down with me like oh yeah you probably did this and at this time I'm not talking to anybody I wouldn't I certainly wouldn't tell anybody that I just put I put a gun in my mouth a rope around my neck they were like oh yeah you probably did this oh and you probably and they started pegging everything that i did oh you're probably drinking too much do you not to get like too deep into it but i i just always have questions about this stuff because i think all of us are fallible in different situations to lose control of our

thoughts it's a very scary thing i don't think i don't think there's anyone in this world who is above that i don't know it just seems like science to me but i'm not a scientist anyway with all these various like attempts you didn't do it it sounds like probably the closest you came was the time you swallowed klonopin when you were already drunk so you're not even thinking like in a straight mindset. But like any of the other times where you're like a little sober or very sober or whatever and you didn't do it, do you think it's because you had simultaneously resigned yourself to I'm leaving one way or another, but really on the back end you were still holding on to, no pun intended, holding on to the rope of life a little bit and being like,

well, no, I still got something to do here, and you're just not admitting that to yourself? Probably. You probably hit it dead on. But then the other end of that is you feel like a giant failure because obviously you can't do nothing, not even kill yourself, right? You feel like a pussy because if you were a real man, if you were a real man, you would have pulled that trigger.

It's the biggest lie. We tell ourselves some serious lies in this life like the world's better off without you lie shooting yourself in the head is the best way to go lie because i've been there right after people shot themselves in the head they don't die right away there's a death gurgle and it's brutal and they're alive for a while and they're conscious most of them are conscious you've seen that oh plenty of times plenty of times the only one that i've ever seen that has died instantly a guy used a 30 30 rifle and the percussion of that bullet because it's a real large bullet actually mushroomed his head

so he was in a closet laying face down and you could see his teeth from the top of his head so now this one event took me over the edge but I realized now that there was a cumulative thing where you see all this stuff over time and it sort of fills your glass yeah your glass and then you have one event some people never have an event and their glass spills over this one event spilled my glass and I just i couldn't handle it but once i got involved in this group therapy i met other guys who were walking the same path as me i still didn't jump in with both feet i was still drinking heavily i was still drinking really heavily because what do you do with a bunch of friends when you when you get together you go out afterwards and you drink yeah which eventually leads me to another problem where i'm starting to feel better where i'm not

suicidal anymore but now i got a drinking problem now seven days a week yeah oh yeah seven days a week from the time i get up to the time i go to bed is it the kind of thing where when you wake up you are habitually like oh let me go get one yeah because i was i was always really big into working out and i lost my drive to do that that was always that was my one thing that i was able to do to keep my mind calm and i just lost i didn't want to be around anybody i certainly didn't want to go to the gym because if i go to the gym and this is your mindset it's how screwed up your mind gets if i go to the gym people are going to be looking at me and say hey that's the guy that's the guy that was in the shooting as a matter of fact the day afterwards there was a cop in in the gym that went up to my wife and hey i heard there

was a shooting in roseland last night was you your husband involved and she just tears up and says yes yes he was so now i got to go to rehab so he's like my wife my life just keeps getting better and better because i i got to go to rehab now so i get far about how are we uh this is in december so what what is it almost six months out i go down to princeton house in princeton new jersey and um did you have an intervention no it was kind of like check yourself in or you're going to be checked in who so my doctor my doctor your doctor and my doctor again old italian from newark he has a way of putting things to me he yeah he understands he had a way of putting things to me where either you go check yourself in or we're checking you in now were you hiding a lot of this from your wife too all i mean i yeah i was gonna say like she's raising the kids and

everything and i'm sure she's worried about you but you know she's afraid of the person she's afraid to leave me alone so she was at least that aware but you were hiding the drinking and it still affects her to this day i mean she she cries all the time because at that time in our lives she didn't know whether she was going to come downstairs and find her husband dead so she was really she was hyper aware of this. She knew. She knew. She knew more than I told her. Rehab sort of scared me straight because I got there. I get into a room with a guy who's got a drug problem, who's arrested. Now, my brother's a police officer as well. And he got arrested, and he doesn't know i'm a cop and he says yeah i got arrested

by this asshole cop i was like oh okay all right where where were you arrested he says the name of the municipality i was like because that's the municipality my brother works i'm like oh really do you remember the name of the cop oh yeah his name was this. His last name was Donaldson. I'm in a room with a guy, my brother arrested, and he's my cellmate. Oh, no. But I saw some things in there. I saw people who are true alcoholics. Did you tell him any of that?

No. You kept that to yourself? I just want to keep it. Because I had to sleep next to this guy. Yeah, you're like, I don't want to get shanked in my sleep. I don't want to get shanked one of us was going to go get stabbed and i was probably going to have to do it first but i realized very quickly in rehab i'm not an alcoholic i got a problem but i'm i'm not an alcoholic you motherfuckers you guys are alcoholics now do you think that part of that like there were people who you said that to

who were like well that's what anyone says to try to try to negotiate with themselves i was you you so i the good thing was i signed myself in so i could sign myself out if you're put there you can't do that you're on like a 30-day hold this one they they call it your 48 signing your 48. so i signed my 48 saying I'm getting out. And they try everything they can to try to keep you in there. Other people coming in and talking to you, they put you in a separate room. They segregate you. You have to eat your meals in a separate room.

I mean, it's really bad. And I'm like, no, I'm done. I'm telling you now, I'm done drinking because this, I don't do very well in confined spaces. Thankfully, I never went to jail because I just don't do well. I'm very claustrophobic. Were you thinking about alcohol in there? Like, did you want it? No.

No. So when I went into rehab, I went in with the best intentions. I brought three notebooks. I brought two books. I said, you know what? I wasn't working out at the time. I'm going to start working out. I'm going to start, you know, I was doing one of those vaporizers right because i

quit smoking well they don't allow the vaporizers in there so then i go back to they allow cigarettes but not vaporizers so then i went back to smoke and that was a whole other thing um but i wanted to use this okay i'm gonna i'm gonna write i'm gonna create i'm gonna read and i'm going i'm going it's like a prisoner going to jail where they're going to use their time. I'm just going to use my time. I'm going to get in the shape. I started doing push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, anything I could do. There's no gym time, so you got to sort of make do with what you got.

I check myself out. I go home. And for a week, everything's great. How long were you there? I was there for three days. Just three days? Just three days just three days just three days i didn't want to be there no more i couldn't take the i couldn't take the enclosures

and here's here's one of the things about rehab they feed you very well but they don't allow any medication they go through all your stuff make sure you didn't bring nothing in everything's got to be alcohol free from your deodorant to your shampoo so you got to buy special special stuff and um i take if they wouldn't allow me i don't know what they put in the food but you can't shit you can't take a shit so you're eating good food but you can't get rid of it and you're really uncomfortable i just wanted to get out of there so i i get out like i i started refusing food like that was my thing i'm going to go on a hunger strike three days three day trip i'm like i ate like an hour i ate i ate the first day and i'm like i i can't hunger strike time they were able to get me out in 24 hours not 48 hours so i signed myself

out after the second day i said that's it i'm not eating because they i just didn't want to do it i get home and for like a week everything's good what'd your wife say uh you're home early yeah that was that was pretty much the conversation because they they the doctors were calling her as i was trying to get out and and i was i become very belligerent when that happens i'm like nope nope i'm getting out it's the irish indian yeah it is it is it was awful i go back and i you know on the way down there, and you want to talk about bad doctors, so the workers' comp doctor is getting back to that. When I went in there, I called the workers' comp doctor on the way down and said, hey, look, I'm checking myself into rehab.

I can't make the appointment because there was an appointment that was supposed to come up. They don't let you have your phone, but you're allowed to check your phone at times. He never even calls me back. I finally get in touch with him. Oh, no, I don't get in touch with him but you're allowed to check your phone times he's never even calls me back i finally get in touch with him oh no i don't get in touch when he leaves me a message i can't see you anymore he drops me because i went to rehab so okay well that's called psychological abandonment the guy actually can lose his license for that but you know you don't press the issue and that guy that guy shouldn't be a psychologist or psychiatrist whatever when he was he dropped you because you went to rehab because another doctor advised me to go to rehab when he should have been advising me to go to rehab

yeah yeah so okay so i go back to group therapy and what i what I found is oh, so you had stopped that No, no, I was I was going all along but well, but then you went for three days Yeah, but I go back to group therapy and then I started Getting some true help because I started seeing the other side. I started seeing these other people who went through it and what kept them Sane was given what they learned going through their darkest of times to other people. And I, I saw them as such strong people because they were able to, to go through everything that I went through and survive it. And I said, you know what? I want to be like that. That's what I want to do. I want to be like that because although they still have their times and I still have my

times now, I wanted to start doing that. So I start, I make it through. I just, I limp along and you know, things are, I almost destroyed my marriage and my marriage did take a lot of damage because of the things that I've done. And there's things that are unforgivable. Is there, is there, were you right back to heavy drinking? No, I didn't drink again. Really? I didn't drink again. Have you ever drank since that day? I think once or twice I've drank. Holy shit.

But the thought of going back into that place, I was like, no, nope. You weren't kidding. And you understand my hesitation. That's rare. I know. In all fairness, I always have to be very, very, I don't know what the word is. It's not empathetic, but I always have to. Skeptical?

No. Well, for the last thing. But I'm saying, like, whenever I'm talking to people who have that chemical reliance on something, you know, I don't think i'm infallible to it i like that's you know i just never did cocaine and stuff like that because i'm like who knows like i could get addicted to that you know it smells good i heard that too heard that too but like when it comes to alcohol and stuff like i love alcohol i'll go six months without drinking it and not i don't have to think about it you know what i mean like i love coffee i'll go a month without doing it the only time like now with the podcast i always like to have it on the table when i'm recording with someone that i'm okay with as a habit and it's coffee right but like i always have to recheck that because sometimes i would

find myself and this this sounds really bad maybe it is but like i don't know five six years ago i'd be talking with people and it's not like i would say it like this but i'd be like why don't you just fucking stop that's that person on the bank that i was telling you about telling you just get out of the water right exactly and and it's not the right thing to do but like what people have to understand is like when you say something like that like i just i didn't want to fuck him it's truck month at gmc tackle the open road with added confidence in a 2025 sierra 1500 pro graphite at zero percent financing for up to 72 months with an available 5.3 liter v8 engine 20 inch high gloss black painted aluminum wheels off-road suspension with available

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and I said this is not the direction I want my life to go so when I went back to therapy and I wanted to be like those guys I started I got through my retirement I was able to retire because there's no way I could be a police officer anymore you made that decision I made that decision right before I went to rehab, which was a tough decision. But I never even thought about it. So a lawyer friend of mine says, you really need to retire. My doctor said, you really need to retire. And he did this test with me.

He did this test with me. So he brings it. And this is a ballsy move. He brings in a gun into the therapy session. It was a 1945 Colt Army-issued, I don't know the make of it. This is the Italian in the movie. Oh, yeah, because he's insane. Yeah, put that in your hand, will you?

Eugene Stefanelli. And that's how he talks, too. I've known a lot of Eugenes, as you can tell. So obviously it's unloaded. Yeah. It's got bakelite. I can still see it's big light handles and he puts it he goes hey look at this gun you know i just found this one in in my collection and i want to show it to you puts it in my hand and he puts the thing in my hand it must have weighed it felt like it weighed 9 000 pounds and i'm just looking at it and he's looking at me. So this was actually very brilliant of him.

He's looking at me and my reaction to me holding this gun. And, you know, it was so uncomfortable in my hand. I just, all I, from the minute it touched my hand, all I wanted to do was give it back, but I didn't want to seem unmanly. Like that's a manly thing to do. Hey, that's a nice gun, you know. He's looking for that.

He's looking for how my reaction is because at that point he he he says it often to this day because he's still a very good friend of mine he goes i knew at that moment you can never be a police officer again so now he tells me he's like yeah you need to retire it's kind of like i'll bet it's like this so if i'm speaking wrong let me know but you know when you see drunk people get pulled over and they try to act sober yeah yeah i mean you've seen this a million times you work out right now i haven't seen it a ton but i've seen it maybe not when people are getting pulled over but i've seen it like when they're walking past a cop like on the street or something like that in the city it's it's like you might as well just hold up a big sign that says arrest me right so when you're holding that gun you're

probably i'm just guessing here looking at it like oh yeah it's fucking nothing man yeah but he's over there watching your fucking shoulder twist you know watching watching you look up and down at it real fast your pupils are dilated and try and be like i'm good bro i'm good i think it's like i think he said i actually started sweat yeah i i started the sweat so he takes the gun away from me and that was it that was it so i get through retirement i retired officially june 1st 2014 listen i'm better than what i was at this point i'm not there yet my wife and i are still fighting horribly because slowly but surely I'm starting to get that buffer zone in my mind and and for the best way I can explain that is is if somebody does you wrong and you see them on the street like or you say in your head if I

see them on the street I'm gonna spit on them and then you see him and you don't spit on him because there's that thing in your head that says, it's not a good idea. That's when the brain injury happens, that's gone. The governor's gone. It's gone. I get through and I have now, again, the primary identity is now what? Now what do I do?

I'm retired. And I sat in front of the pension board thinking that this was going to be a big moment. They grant my pension. You think you're going to jump for joy when you get your pension granted. And it's kind of like, huh, okay. I remember calling my wife and saying, hey, well, I got my pension. She goes, aren't you happy? And yeah, that's what it was like. Because I didn't know what to do. I really didn't know what to do. I have to reinvent myself. Now, hold up a minute. You, this is another thing because you're retiring about a year later, but obviously they're doing tests on you. Like your psychologist where it puts a gun on your hand, in your hand, stuff like that to figure out if you're still fit to do this. And they

figure out you're not, but like you're young. I mean, you've been doing this 13 years, like you're young i mean you've been doing this 13 years but you're what like 35 36 37 39 when i when i retired so you're not even 40 you got your whole life in front of you you have a you have a young family you gotta earn obviously you're gonna get a pension like you have some help but like it's not like you're 65 hanging it up had you thought about what the fuck i'm gonna do with my life no all i knew is it wasn't going to be police work but then you know you get you get the haters too and and when we circled forward to uh you know you get you get your pension and and there were people that came out of woodwork said i was faking that that um said i'm a scam artist. Remember you said earlier that guy works 35 years,

doesn't see much, sees some hairy things but doesn't see much. Well, that's a problem because those are the people, I have a bad taste in my mouth the way I left it because the people who did those 35 years who never did shit in their career, they get the big retirement parties,

they get the gold watch, they get all the accolades, they get the final walkout. I didn't get any of that. And I did something where I almost lost my life, something that affected me for the rest of my life. And that's why I always left with a bad taste in my mouth. So when I separated, I actually had people call me a jerk-off

because they didn't understand. They didn't get it and one guy in particular and I don't wish ill on anybody who said some horrible things about me never to me because they don't have the balls to say to you about me his brother ends up getting in a critical incident and tries to retire and I'm sure his tune changed really really quick that's how it goes yeah they don't you don't understand this and that's a good point though because you don't understand any of this until you have some perspective and you go through it once i was on the other side all i knew was i'm

not going to be a security guard i'm not i don't want anything to do with law enforcement the best thing i did was there's this old marine that that lived around the neighborhood he was a builder and he built a house across the street from me so i knew him he's one of the few people that stopped by and checked on me every single day because as gruff as he was he understood he knew he knew he knew my uncle my uncle who was prisoner of war knew there's a guy drank his whole life No relationships fought all the time that man had PTS killed him. Yeah, literally killed him slowly So this this old marine he goes he comes to me one day and he says

You're gonna you're gonna come to work tomorrow. I said, yeah, you know, I'll help you out You know, he's building a house not too far away from where I lived. He's like, no, you're coming to work. And that's how he talked to me. His name was Bill Taylor. He was like, you're coming to work. Okay. Like at his company? He was a builder.

So as a laborer, just go build houses. Go get out of the house. Just get out of the house. That's all he was doing. He got me out of the house, and I found something that I really enjoyed because there's a freedom to construction. You know, in the police world if i have a disagreement with another officer and let's say we get into a fight well there's internal affairs there's there's you could lose your job in construction if there's a fight on the job there's a fight on the job and then you

get back to work yeah there's so there's that freedom. And that's... I wonder why the mob loves construction. Oh, they love it. Well, yeah. They make a lot of money. That's why. So, but nevertheless, you know, I always continued still staying at therapy. And I always helped those. So once I was through it, I was helping other people along with it.

Because when you're around people of similar damage there's a bond it's kind of like the soldier that that goes through basic training with somebody and they usually stay connected to those people for the rest of their lives because there's brotherhood in suffering so those people that were in that group we we bonded and you know i i just got a text from we were in this group text, and there's some horrible, horrible things getting thrown out in those text messages. Like really, really bad stuff. What are we talking about? Like horrible, horrible stuff that if it ever got out, they'd put us back into the psych ward. But we relate to each other that way.

We relate to each other through really dark humor. And it's a place where we feel normal because we understand each other so fast it's kind of like owning it yeah yeah you you own it hey look you wear it as a badge of honor right and it took me a long time to get there to stop trying to numb my pain with alcohol stop trying to numb it through bad behavior just running running away from it my partner always breaks my chops because my partner Mike Philaeus because he always breaks my chops because I bring this this theory up years ago I read this book she's stolen the job no he so he was also in a shooting my partner Mike he was a Lynn Hurst lieutenant and that's a that's a little bit of a different neighborhood lynn hearst not not still bergen county it's still bergen county they make big bucks there so a year after i retire i

see this guy walk in now the thing with mike is i worked with mike's brother 25 years prior in a different job and i see mike and i knew mike but i didn't know him I see him walking in and I see that look in his eye and I said, oh my god He oh my god as a Mike what's going on? He's like, yeah, I was in that shooting Me is somebody who who who's on coming on the other side of it. I'm starting to see the light at the other side. I Identify that in him that he's about to go on this ride and there's nothing I can say. There's nothing I can do. All I can do is walk alongside of him. See, when we're in our darkest of times, what we don't realize when we're in that dark, dark, dark tunnel, we think we're all alone. We think nobody understands us and there's no help. What we don't realize is there are people

walking alongside of us there, but they got night vision on so they can see we can't you just can't see them it's not until you get to the other side that there you see that there's this group of people that walked alongside of you and helped you through so that's what i did with mike you know and that's and you want to talk about service like i love being a police officer for the service portion of it. This is something totally it's similar yet the feeling is tenfold About how good it makes you feel and that's what kept me on the path to getting better and better and better and I'm still Going at it. Once again, I'm gonna go back to the original story. You told about the woman would with Mason in the room. I

Mean the signs were it like you had a passion for this because again like you weren't as you said you didn't you weren't gung-ho about being a cop it was like oh it's a job and then you're like wow this is serious shit like cool you know what i mean but you you got the fulfillment out of the relation it's very clear to me you got the fulfillment out of the relationship with the community and i'll even say this it also paid to be working in a very very well-to-do Neighborhood in the sense that like it's a true community There's a lot less crime less to worry about so then something like this happens and you're like oh shit And that's why it's like it's not why but it's it's a part of the reason that

It's even more shocking because you're like well We don't we don't deal with this kind of thing too much and now here I am in the middle of it And I'm the guy that had to fucking deal with this kind of thing too much. And now here I am in the middle of it, and I'm the guy that had to fucking deal with it. Well, you know, even in the inner cities, the most successful inner city cops are the ones that connect to the community. Yes, absolutely. Not the ones who are going out there chasing down bad guys.

It's the ones who connect to the people that live inside that community. So suburban, it's a different type, but it's still the same concept. You connect to the community, you're going to be successful. In the inner city, you connect to the community, they may give you some extra tips. You're just going to be a better cop.

That's the name of the game. But walking people through that darkness, making sure they don't go through the same things, they don't think that they're all alone. The worst thing anybody can think is that they're all alone. So you walk alongside them and you bring them through and and out of that you know during the lockdown i said you know what we we weren't having group therapy i said i need to have some sort of group therapy the way we did it so i started the suffering podcast because of that and i know it's not a competing podcast to

yours so don't worry about it. We're very specific. I don't care at all about that. No, I'm just kidding. I have friends on here who have podcasts that are like the same type of topic. It's all love. Well, ours is we take people from all different walks of life. Yes, we do military. We do police.

We do first responders. All different walks of life because everybody's got their damage. Everybody thinks that they're all alone. Everybody thinks that nobody can understand. It's not true. But I try to give them a little bit of joy, the same joy that I had with helping people through their darkness because if they tell their story, and we've had abused women on there,

we had a guy who lost his son to suicide, we've had gangsters on there, we've had dirty cops because everybody's got their own little damage and they're gonna they're gonna talk to people and if if somebody listening gets that one little piece of information to say that i am not alone somebody else is going through something very similar and we've been successful doing that and listen it's group therapy it's i i just can't believe they shut down the group they weren't doing zoom group there at least they were i don't do zoom i'm with you i think it's horrible but like so they were at least like trying though they were they were trying yeah they were trying it's just i need you know i need to

see agreed your your reaction i need to feel your energy i know that sounds kind of new agey but i need to feel all that stuff I'm you are literally preaching to the choir when this show had 20 listeners when I was starting this thing off and I had I had a couple opportunities to get someone in on Zoom who had like 60 million followers I was like respectfully no like we're not doing that we've had that as well and but the our podcast has continued that so I I was just playing around during lockdown you know I had a couple people in and then I bring Mike in Mike Felice and oh your partner my partner and he's gonna he's gonna he's gonna get real excited when I mention his episode it's episode nine I listened to it and it was we know each other for so long and we we relate to each other so well I'm like wow there's

there's something there's something here so I bring him on as a co-host. And from there, we've been doing this now for a year and three quarters, and we've had some really great stories in there. And we've learned a lot. We've given us a lot of perspective on a lot of different issues. We've helped. I didn't care if I reached a million people or I reached one person. If that one person that listened grabbed something out of it, that made me feel good because that's what I wanted to do. All I did was trade one life of service for another life of service. But here's what I've really, really learned. But before I get into that, out of that podcast,

I was able to start a nonprofit because I can always do more. That's how you feel. You can always do more. So Mike and you feel you can always do more so mike and i started our non-profit called dented development project i got the coin over there yeah so we we have their challenge coins i gave dory one our i give a julian one and um so those those coins they're just little fundraisers but they're more than just a fundraiser so dented development project we help first we consider ourselves dented dented dented people because if you see a car going down the street and it's got some dents in it it can still

run it can still function still get you where you're going it's not as pretty as it once was billy mays could get the den out get the ding king get the dead king that's right and who was his partner uh you know the tall guy yeah i know who you're talking now that guy's like they're all he's strung out on some they're all out there well it's not at least it's not vince schlomi who was caught with a prostitute he was the uh that's the guy i'm thinking of that dude was caught with a prostitute yeah that's it and i think it was a guy too but i could be mistaken on that sorry vince um so we started this and this, and all we do is we see different first responders who are going through something similar.

Maybe we're able to help them out a little bit financially. They got enough stress going on. Maybe we could take care of a week of groceries. Maybe we can give their kids a scholarship because we open it up to their families as well. Because, again, what my family went through during my hard times, I wish somebody was able to reach out and just relieve a little bit of their stress so that's how we're able to do this but what i what i really got out of this whole different journey was if i sat here and told

you that while i was a police officer i saved i think i have 20-something life saves you get those little ribbons on your badge your badge I count for like what kinds of things used to be bring somebody back to life mmm you save lives I did I investigated over 20 fatal motor vehicle accidents I've seen you know 50-something autopsies. I've saved lives of Mason's mother. I've gotten awards. After that, I've been recognized. I'm in who's who. You feel the distance when I tell you all those things that I've done?

There's distance between us. Yeah, there's been lives. But now let me tell you this. I've been suicidal. I've been severely depressed. I've had a horrible drinking problem i couldn't relate to my family i've had um i've had all these different bad things happen to me now you and the insurance salesman down the street may have some things in common so we impress people with our successes but we connect to people through our weaknesses wow

steve and that's an important thing and that's what our show and that's what our nonprofit does we connect to people now for some reason one of the people that i connected with was john elite so now i co-host the elite show the mob the mafia and the man with john because i found this love for talking to people and i've carried this this new purpose because i get to talk to some really really cool people and people i had a crazy year of meeting crazy year and a half of meeting people that i'd never thought in a million years you got somebody like john i can't remember if we were saying this before the podcast or on it. It's all blending because we were talking for a while before this started. But did you say, oh, I don't even remember how I met him or something like that for him?

No. How did you guys come together? So I'll go out and do speaking engagements. Mike and I will do them. And we were doing something for an organization that we work for called Blue Magazine. That's it. That's what it was. So Blue Magazine is a police magazine, but they also have a nonprofit called Moment of Silence, which is to guard against blue suicide.

So we're giving a speech, and I'm telling my darkness. I'm talking about my darkness. And in the crowd that day, I meet Michael Dowd. At the time, I didn't recognize him. So for people out there, Michael Dowd was the head of the 75 in new york city i know charlie cifarelli talked about him on this podcast but he was the subject of one of the best documentaries i've ever seen called the 75 that was on netflix i think it came out in like 2014. yeah 2014 because i know they were doing press in 2015. yeah and he comes up to me and he says

I'm like this is you want to talk about owning it. I'm Michael doubt. I'm the dirtiest cop in New York City New York City's history Talk about addressing the 900-pound gorilla in the room. That's what exactly what he did He came on to our show and here it is and we My partner and I were real sketchy about having him on because we do cater to first responders and police. That's what we were. Now we got a rogue. Mike calls himself a rogue cop.

But we have a rogue cop on the podcast. But what we realize is the anxiety that he went through while he was doing his bad stuff. And then when he finally got caught. Self-created. Self-created. When he got caught caught the feeling of relief that he had and people won't realize this one of the things that mike says is every cop out there is one step away from where he was all and he talks very clearly about how he started what do you mean one step away just like one bad one poor decision one poor decision so if your family he he got his start because he he took money from somebody in lieu of arresting them it was it was a nominal amount of money all right that's all it takes at the time new york city

police department was making probably 22 000 26 000 living in new york city you're having like nothing right you're having financial troubles so here's this guy that's got a big fat wad of cash in his pocket he's not going to tell anybody and it we're all that one step away one step away from that bad decision that wrong decision the decision you may regret for the rest of your life but you make it and it was a great episode so after mike comes on he says look i got another guy for you if you if you want to talk to him and he's like uh do you know who john elite is and i said yeah i know john is i know exactly who he is he's like well you want to talk to him so i get on the phone with with john and my first conversation was john with john as he starts going off on he him and Sammy the bull got

big problems And which is which is a real housewives in New Jersey. It is It's the real husband instead of the mob wives. It's mob husbands The sad part is is when Sammy got out of prison second time John actually gave him money Yeah, cuz John John wants people to change their lives so he my first conversation with Johnny starts going off on Sammy about something he's like he's such a fraud he's only killed one person I said stop I said stop stop right there and he came in and we had a great time and I got to see the man behind behind what you see on Fear City on network on Netflix all right so my wife and I are watching

Fear City when it came out and here's John sitting there his arms across and he's playing this tough guy and she goes is that the guy is that the guy I met I'm like yeah because he wasn't like that he was he was smiling and laughing I said because this is a character it's not reality it's not it's this is TV they definitely tell them on that on that kind of show they're definitely like all right you know oh he knows yeah yeah he knows but how else is he going to get his other message across because people are tuning into him oh yeah to listen to mob stories people love that and when people ask me about police work they don't want to know about mason's mother they want to know about police chases where i was doing 120 miles an hour in a crown victoria where i'm calling out you're supposed to call out

your speeds like yeah i'm doing 70 meanwhile you're weaving in and out of traffic they want to hear about that stuff they don't want to hear about the good stuff that yeah again it's bringing it they they debase the the real meaning of the job. Why do you think that is? People are trying to live vicariously through, they know they'll never be a mobster, they know they'll never be a cop. They want to know what it feels like. They want to know what it feels like.

I was asked on a show once, what did it feel like carrying a gun? And the son of a bitch used it as a soundbite. Because my answer was, because there's a lot more that went after it it was i said uh i said well it's like having another dick but what you understand real quickly is that gun becomes a liability and people don't realize that the the open carry people are like oh i wish i could carry a gun i said you don't yeah you really don't understand it's it's not it's a big responsibility that you own that bullet when it leaves the gun what are you gonna do take it out i mean like that's what people i don't understand why our

culture has done that where where we've made it because let's call it what it is people make it like a second dick like that's how they treat it it's true but like it's a fucking tool and and the fact of you pulling it out now what happens if you're not justified in using that now you have a one or two pound paperweight that you need to throw as far away from you as possible because when the real danger hits they're going to use that against you yes so i understand and i believe in the second amendment i really do i hate guns i can't stand guns but i have one again yes i do what does it say it stays in a lock box um i believe in the second amendment i believe in your right to own a gun i also believe in your right to not own a gun um agreed you know my thinking with the gun

is there's so many deer in my neighborhood that if i ever go hungry i got plenty of food really yeah really that's pretty much a little bit of like there's not a little bit of that human like protect my family no i had him i had him over the head with a baseball bat so i mean don't bring a bat to a gunfight i mean i keep the louisville right back there don't get me wrong but like pepper spray pepper spray is a lot more effective and it won't kill you if you've never been hit by pepper spray it's that's why they call it karate in a can you know that'll bring you to your knees and you're not going to be able to do anything about it you'll fight john that's what john should have done pepper spray pepper spray well now no now

they paid real fast we just came out with something called the michael dow because john sells baseball bats because he was he was oh yeah he he's go to johnalit.com you'll see him he sells baseball bats because two things he used to be he was a very good baseball player and he was and he used to baseball bat people yeah i think it was more the latter there so on one of the recent shows and it's on my instagram uh can i get my instagram so you can say whatever the you want so i have a couple different instagrams i have one for dente it's on my instagram like uh can i get my instagram so you can say whatever the fuck you want so i have a couple different instagrams my i have one for dente it's at dente development project and then i have one for at the suffering podcast and i also have one at real kevin donaldson so at real kevin donaldson you'll see a live video we just did we just

introduced the michael dowd memorial or uh michael dowd special edition baseball bat it's actually a wiffle ball bat that he signed say the michael dowd like memorial scholarship it's for the cop's child who who is who's done a lot and stolen a lot but i'm sorry go ahead but we just you know that's that's that's the type of people that i hang around now. I have people on both sides, but we all have a common goal. Because bottom line is, you know, life's pretty great. Life wasn't always great. But I had to go through that. And I appreciate going through that now.

Because now I appreciate what a truly great life is. A truly great life is helping other people giving people a hand up instead of pushing them down is is helping people along through their darkness to show that that's going to ultimately become their strength and it's therapy for you too because it keeps you self-aware you know what i mean like if you're if you're thinking about and it's a great selfish thing in something like this i think i think it works both ways like that you're thinking about – and it's a great selfish thing in something like this. I think it works both ways like that you found this. But like if you're thinking about how to strategize and help other people solve their problems without doing it for them, you're then forced to actively think about your own demons and like, okay, well, I told so-and-so to do this because i know that works so wait i gotta do

that too you know it's like this self-fulfilling prophecy in like a great way but i also have a lot of good resources too so one of the one of the things that i've recently gotten involved with is a couple different non-profit organizations like uh so there i have a lot of friends in the cannabis industry and but again you know my my feelings with cannabis is it's not a cure. It's a masking thing. It makes you feel better for a short period of time, like alcohol does, without the harmful side effects of alcohol. But there are some new things on the horizon to help along PTS. There's the ASM Foundation, which helps it through psilocybin.

So psilocybin is the active ingredient of magic mushrooms. Now, when did you start learning about this and get involved with them? I've always explored. I read a lot. I've always explored different alternative methods like Ibogaine. So Ibogaine you can only get in Mexico. It's a psychedelic. You go on a trip.

You walk through with a therapist, and then there's a doctor in the room. The therapist, they call it a guide. But you go on a basic 12-hour trip. When did you start looking at this stuff? Probably shortly after I started the podcast. I started getting people reaching out. Oh, so not that long ago. Not that long ago.

Ayahuasca is the same thing. So it's basically the same thing. As I was coming down here today, I was on the phone with a guy um uh adam espo he was he's a retired new york city cop and um he did ketamine shots so you you get high as shit you trip yeah ketamine will do that yeah you trip yeah but what it does is it kind of it kind of power washes your brain. But with the psilocybin, psilocybin has been shown, there's some studies out there that show that it rewires the brain, and so your synapses during PTS get damaged. Now, with psilocybin, it actually can regrow synapses

and actually start to heal and repair the brain. Same thing with ketamine. And I was just, I have a cousin who was one of the Navy divers on the USS Cole and he's he's he's never been good since and that for people listening that was 1998 bombing and was it Saudi Arabia Yemen Yemen that's it so he was one of the divers he was one of the that was the precursor to 9-11 yes he was one of the Navy divers that went down there to recover the bodies where one of the bodies was plastered up against the side so long that he actually had to torch it out. Now, when he torches out, you burn flesh because the guy splattered up against the wall and fused to the wall.

He still smells that flesh, you know, 24 years later. Can I ask you a question? This is going back a little bit, but I don't want to forget this because it's come up a couple times i'll let it go past you've mentioned specifically the fact that i forget the way you said it was a great visual where you were talking about how your shooting kind of put things over the top but all these other things of just like seeing things adds up over time i mean having to me the only dead bodies I've ever seen are someone who went from sickness. You know what I mean? Like, I've never been to a shooting funeral where there was an open casket or anything.

You know, I wasn't next to a body when any of this stuff happened. Like, is there, do you get a lot of demons from that specifically that are now just sprouting up because you had the shooting and you've dealt with demons from that? Or is it kind of like separate boxes for you? I don't mean to categorize. No, no, no, no. My original definition of PTS was knowing you're about to die, accepting it, and not dying and then having to live with the consequences. And yes, that is true, but that's not the whole picture. So when you see a young officer get involved in a shooting, they're more likely to go back to work because they haven't seen 15 years of junk. So here's a very interesting statistic. The average citizen will see throughout their lifetime one, maybe two critical incidents.

In a 20-year career, police officers will see upwards of 800. So take your worst day and multiply that by 800. That's a lot. So the accumulation of all that stuff, it fills that glass up. Everybody's, I believe, everybody is given a glass at birth. And that glass is how much shit you can take. And, you know, one of your parents dying, a little Wicked Stone in there, and something here happens. You go through financial troubles.

Maybe you get arrested, and shit just keeps filling in that glass. Over time, unless you learn how to empty the glass, which is what I've learned, how to empty the glass from time to time, that glass is just going to spill over. In my event, my glass was probably already half or three-quarter full. And in my event, just right over the top. And I broke down. I broke down and I couldn't handle it. And that doesn't have to be an event.

That can be just over time. And the reason I said my initial definition is you'll see women go through it that are that are raped they think they're going to die they think they're going to be killed so they accept it they try to get through and then they don't die and then they have they have to deal with the after effects but what about that child who was horribly abused when they were a kid and their glasses their glass is almost full by the time they become an adult. And then one thing, one small thing, maybe they're late on a bill, and they go over the edge.

But that's what the Suffering Podcast has done for me, to realize that, to redefine stuff, changing my definitions, changing the way. I no longer say commit suicide because you commit a crime you're lost to suicide i no longer say ptsd i say pts i no longer think that that pts is one event it is a it can be accumulation of events it can be one event but most likely it's an accumulation of events but getting back to your point where seeing all that stuff, it weighs on you. So we, as human beings, even police officers, we're human. Every time we see something like that,

it affects us. I remember my first pediatric death that I lost. I didn't have kids at the time if i wasn't human i would have went out and ate afterwards made me sick to my stomach what i mean was it a violent death or no no it was a kid who got locked in a toy box a homemade toy box they were playing hide and seek and the grandmother was playing hide and seek when couldn't find him for an hour they were looking for him it's not that they just neglected him they They were looking for him, and the poor kid suffocated in there. And, yeah, that's tough. That's tough. But that stuff will affect you.

That stuff, you know, the autopsies. See, the autopsies were different. I kind of enjoyed the autopsies. If you're anybody that's into working out, when you can detach yourself from that used to be a human being, you actually start looking at it as a biology experiment oh wow look at that that's human i don't have that gene it's pretty cool like until they get into the bowel tract then like i'll never eat sausage and peppers

ever again because i've seen what it looks like digested oh by the way worst humor in the world happens in an autopsy room oh i'll bet uh it's that's not surprising the uh there was a there was an elderly couple because when i did fatal accidents so you used to follow the body to the autopsy there was an elderly couple slammed right into a tree and and here's some of the jokes and people this is going to sound harsh but this is how police officers deal with it through very very dark humor so they slam into this tree license plate first and i'm i'm the first officer on scene even though i'm investigating it but i was working that day the the husband is in a spot that's you know a

couple inches he's squished right the wife and it was those old cars with the automatic seat belts and they did away with them because nobody ever put the lap belt on. So she hits the dashboard. And that's what kills her. So I remember one of the newer officers comes with me. He says, I wonder what the last thing went through her mind was. And I said, it's probably the dashboard. That same couple.

Now, we did the investigation. We pulled receipts and stuff. I shouldn't be laughing, but that's pretty good. That same couple. Now, we did the investigation. We pulled receipts and stuff. I shouldn't be laughing, but that's pretty good. We pull receipts, and we find out they were just at Costco, and they had lunch there. It was such a cute old couple, 83-year-old couple. At least they were old. That helps.

Yeah. They had sausage and pepper sandwiches, and it was probably just a nice lunch and they he had a massive medical event slammed into a tree so we're in the we're in the autopsy room there they are there's no dignity because they're naked as the day they were born and um i remember the doctor coming in and i said all right doc this is what we got we know they were costco they had sausage and pepper sandwiches and doctor turns me he goes what happened she asked him to go to walmart and he just said fuck it i'm gonna end it horrible horrible but you're seeing all that stuff and that's yeah you got two dead bodies in front of you that's how you're mangled that's how you empty the glass yeah you empty the glass any way you can i think that's fine listen and and

you know people twist words on stuff all the time but but, like, that's a reality. It's a human thing. Like, this is why comedians are so important. And, you know, you see stuff like Will Smith can't take a joke, and it's like, Jesus fucking Christ, dude. Like, get over yourself. You know what I mean? Didn't he used to make bald jokes to Uncle Phil? Of course he did. I got news for you.

It's probably not him doing that, if you know what I mean. But that's a whole nother thing like you know it that's that's part of what coping with life is is is finding the humor and in the moments where you can't think anything's funny like you talked about going already Lang show like right after this all happened and you couldn't laugh no that was a telltale sign where I was like Jesus Christ this is bad right you can't laugh at anything you know so i i don't i don't think anyone should have a problem with that and i i think i think that's probably like imagine not just being a police officer but being being the doctor who does autopsies every single day i mean the shit you gotta see and you talk about those 800 things that happen like you

this guy's seeing eight a day you know and it's like the the descent the desensitization that needs to occur to be able to do that because he has a job to do to do that effectively it's a lot how about when a child comes in oh yeah you know that's it's the same theory that everybody wants to be a vet because they love animals well what happens when you got to put an animal down oh Oh, it's, you know what? It's funny you say. I was thinking about that the other day. I'm like, damn, there's veterinarians who go to work every day,

and they're, you know, whatever they, I don't know if it's cyanide. I don't know what the fuck they put in there. I don't want to know. But, like, you know, they know we're going to have four today. Yep. And that'll change the way you think about stuff. That's our, on the Suffering Podcast, Mike, again, we were two cops sitting down there, and we're half boneheads.

Actually, he's full bonehead. I'm half bonehead. And when we hear these awful stories, we had a guy in who's a good friend of ours. His name's Artie Dell. He runs 1013 Survivors. And he's talking about being sexually molested as a child. And then he goes on a bus, and some guy hits on him, and he's a about being sexually molested as a child. And then he goes on a bus, and some guy hits on him, and he's a teenager on a bus.

And I said, well, were you kind of cute? Were you wearing the right jeans? Because that's some heavy shit for people to listen to. And nobody wants to sit here and listen to gloom and doom. If you sat here and listened to my entire story, or you just listened to the clip where it gets really bad you're like this is fucking depressing i remember matt cox when we were on matt cox's show as we're telling he turns to me and goes that's really depressing i can see him saying exactly

how he said that really depressing and i said but there's a there's a bright side to it there's a bright side to it and you know matt at one point and, I'm not going to let Matt off unscathed on this one because he starts talking about his own damage and he starts crying. I said, I'm going to let you into the police family. I'm going to let you into the police family. I'm going to let Matt Cox into the police family. I'm going to let Matt Cox. I'm just not going to let him in my house because I'm afraid my wallet's going to be stolen.

I look at him right in the eyes as he's crying. And I go, stop crying, pussy. Right? And he stopped. He stopped. And he knew I wasn't being mean. He knew I was breaking the tension because that's what we do. We have to break the tension.

You can't listen to gloom and doom all day. You have to have a little bit of humor. I've gotten that back a little bit. Sometimes I get sensitive. I'm not there. I am am not cured i never will be all i know is how to deal with it better and that's a part of getting the laugh out of life is a part of it you know i think you were mentioning something i don't again i don't we've been talking for a while i know if this was on the podcast or before but where you were talking about like the division of people for something and one of the things that

I haven't done it in a while now but several months back I would do this thing where I would go onto Twitter and I would go find left Twitter and right Twitter right So I'd just type in whatever the keywords were to find the people who were the lefties and righties, and I would find the most hysterical tweets I could. So think like Charlotte Clymer to Candace Owens type deal here. And when I would come across them, I'd click the profile. Now sometimes it was a famous person, other times it

was you know just a regular person and invariably every single time they had even if they were different looking people from different backgrounds whatever they had the same profile picture misery yeah their face is this it's beat up or you know they airbrushed it but you can tell like oh fuck you know what i mean and i'm like i'm looking at and then i'll go through their tweets and i'll just see like how does this person get down this rabbit hole every single day how do they convince themselves like this is the way and you just see like they can't they can't laugh at anything i saw this with with the recent elections and I got tied up into it. So I removed myself from politics. Like, I really did remove myself from politics.

We don't talk politics on the show. It's more of a personal interest for me. And I was such a happier person. One of the best shows I recently saw in recent months was, you know who Ben Shapiro is? Yes. And Bill Maher. Opposite ends of the political spectrum. I can't totally say that anymore, for the sake of argument yes well Bill Maher Bill Maher is a decent traditional liberal he's a

traditional liberal Bill Maher and I agree on a lot of fucking things Bill Maher and I agree on a lot more than I like to admit but yes we do however and he's not a guy I like because he's arrogant he's he's yeah I know he's snooty he's probably not like that in person but these two guys who were friends sat down in the same room and i think it was called how to disagree and they had a discussion and they had a conversation this gets back to my point that there's more that brings us together than tears us apart believe it or not they agree on like 95 percent of everything they discuss there's that five percent that causes that division i'll give you a for instance like uh climate change all right they both agree climate

change is a real thing but how to go about fixing climate change that's where the difference is that's where the difference is it's it's like one believes in total electricity electric cars extras well the other side believes well electric cars might not be the best way because you still have batteries going in the landfills you still they're still made with petroleum products and plus it's global warming until you get china and india under wraps it's never going to change so they both agree they just there's that five percent that they disagree on. And if we can sit down and have a discussion, and I have a lot of friends who are on the left, and sometimes they agitate the shit out of me because I'm on the right. Listen, I make no bones about it.

I'm conservative on a lot of things, but I'm not married to my opinions. That's important. I'm never married to my opinions. I'm on the right, but I don't like guns guns but i believe in your right to carry a gun i hey your body your choice go ahead i don't care i know what's right for me when did we get so far away from you do you and i do me and then let's discuss it you know what's crazy and i've've said this several times on the podcast before, so apologies for people out there, but it is important to bring up here. Who were the two – we know Trump and Hillary were the two final candidates in 2016, but who were the two real candidates of that election cycle? Obviously, Trump was one of them. Who was the other one? I think Ted Cruz. was one of them who who is the other one i think um ted cruz no you're thinking a lot i'm gonna stop you who were the two from opposite parties and it wasn't hillary on the other side who was

who was the other person tulsi gabbard no bernie sanders okay oh you know what totally forgot you're right okay so bernie sanders and trump i think what got lost in all this is we look at them as these political brands which is half our fucking problem like that's a disaster to do that but they it's no coincidence that they rose up in 2016 and i say bernie sanders because he really should have been the candidate that year it got rigged against him very clearly i agree on that one and there's with um elizabeth Elizabeth Warren staying in too long and knowing that she had no shot. And was it Elizabeth Warren? I know what you're dead, but you're thinking 2016.

Okay. I think I'm sorry. Twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty. Yes. Somebody stayed in too long. That's that. And kind of push Bernie out because he could have taken whatever state was there. Maybe.

Yeah, I think that's what happened. I'm getting it all. Either way, he got fucked, right? So you look at it and it's easy to just think, oh, these two guys, Bernie and Trump, they talked to these vastly different people and they rose up because they were the populace of the moment. Well, what caused them? They were just a part of the moment well what caused them they were they were just a part of the onslaught what caused them the symptoms had been there for a long time with the wealth gap but in particularly the signs of this were there in 2010 and 2011 when two movements started the

occupy wall street movement and the tea party movement. Now, the Occupy Wall Street movement was all these younger, urban, liberal individuals, right? The Tea Party, and I'm generalizing here, the Tea Party movement was older, say, middle America, conservative individuals. These people had the media convince them that they were opposites and that they hated each other, right? In the way of solutions, yeah yeah they did have some opposite opinions but they had the same exact problems they were complaining about

the same exact things we're getting left behind we have debt we can't make any money our jobs are getting automated away the american dream is dead look at all the corporate interests that fucking self-serve and pay off the government and have their own little elitist society. It's the 1% and the 99%. They were both populist movements. And you had two people come out of that, Trump and Sanders, who the only thing they had in common is they had a little bit of a different twang of a New York accent. But in reality, their constituents all were the same people, and they just found a way to be convinced that they were different. And so you see this society move on and on and on, and you bring up you know in the present day where ben shapiro and bill maher who i will agree they do they do definitely still have a lot of differences i just say like i don't think

bill maher's an extremist leftist or anything i think he's a really really reasonable good liberal but like you see these guys get in a room and you're amazed that they can talk together it's because bill maher and ben shapiro for all their differences and opinions and certain things that people can agree with or disagree with, they recognize that, say, the 10 to 20 core issues that affect the most number of people's lives every day are problems we have and they're problems we need to solve. Our solutions are a little different, but maybe if we came together and had a discussion about it We could find something reasonable that everyone could get behind and I appreciate that You know what a what a really radical idea is what's that and this has never been done and I don't understand it Why don't two people with from each party run together? Yeah, they would be a shoo-in.

And I'm going to give you two examples who are very similar in a lot of different ways. One of them is Dan Crenshaw, and the other one is Tulsi Gabbard. And I appreciate both of their – I don't agree with everything they say, and nobody should agree with everything a candidate says. But I agree with a lot of what they say, and they're very closely associated with each other they're both vets they're both they both have a great base they're both moderates and what happens so their parties tear them apart uh you had hillary clinton call her a communist uh plant

or something russian asset russian asset that was rich and now crenshaw is being called a rhino because he disagreed with trump and they just tear them apart when in reality that is the only way to to be sure that you're going to be elected you take somebody from each party and the only fight would be over who's who's going to be the boss well who gives a shit who's the boss which could be an issue but i in theory dude i couldn't agree more like i like as much as i'll shit on the government and will continue to do so because you know it's a government but i appreciate when the sway happens right like i Like, I'm going to be careful I say this because I don't want to, I don't want to enable, you know, things that are negative. But when I see a blue wave after a red wave, I like that. When I see more of a red wave after a blue wave, I like that because it balances

it out. You know what I mean? I can go home going, okay, well, now they're going to get nothing done, but it's actually going to be nothing that cancels out some shit that would have been bad, right? And it works in both directions, but it is sad to me. But there's no progress. That's the point. It's very sad to me that the only way I see winning now is by losing less. That's not a good place to be. That's a good point.

You're not so much the winner. It's just you're the first loser yeah yeah that's that's a that's a horrible place to be and i don't think we need to be there i really don't because the majority of human beings on this planet we rest somewhere in the middle yes i agree wholeheartedly you know we're not ultra right and we're not ultra left we're we sit somewhere in the middle like i i i i don't know where we got so far away from reason and and my understanding of of studying politics throughout history it's always been this way don't psychologically sure so if you go back to george washington the the media destroyed him to the point where he started his own newspaper. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fucking shot at each other.

Right, and we hawking. Yes, absolutely. And so it's always been this way. But what's the answer? I don't have the answer, and I try not to ever present a problem without having some solution. And my boss has always hated me for this. In police work especially like i would go to you where i'd see a problem and before i presented a problem to you i was like well here's a possible solution because but there are several times in

my life where i say i don't i don't and i'll tell you straight i don't have the right answer here but this is a problem and we need to we need to address it this is something in this country we need to address yeah i don't think anybody, I don't think there's one person on the planet that says everything's perfect, it's all sunshine and rainbows. There's a lot of stuff that we can do better. No, you know who says that?

The guy who doesn't own an iPhone and lives in the fucking woods somewhere and talks to one person. That's who says that. Yeah, but they don't have toilet paper. That's true. That's a convenience I'm going to take full advantage of. Like I'm a meat eater, but they don't have toilet paper that's true uh that's a that's a convenience i'm going to take full advantage of like i'm a meat eater but i don't like hunting all right i hate killing animals i love animals i take full advantage of civilization where'd my

cow come from came from the supermarket you know what though in reality you have to have think about like all the things in your day that you do, whether it's what you eat, where you go, who you hang out with, how you get there, what you drive in, what's in your hand all day like an iPhone, right? Where does that come from? You have to have some level of hypocritical don't ask, don't tell attitude to some things there's unfortunately the world is such a complex and frankly fucked up place in many ways that like there are certain battles that you can't fight you know and and this is not a popular thing to say at all but there you know this guy i never pronounce his name right but chamath palapataya i think is his name i never heard of him he was a high up guy at facebook he's a prominent venture capitalist out in out in Silicon Valley. He made a comment that became a meme because he

said it the delivery was horrible on his podcast like a few months ago where he was talking about the Uyghur genocide in China and he was talking to his co-host and he's like I'm not gonna lie on my list of issues of things to worry about that is below my line right which you're talking about genocide it's like whoa man you can't say that i understand what he was trying to say he was looking at all the guys that he's in there with going all right we're complaining about this shit chance statistically they made some of the iphones in our hands it's 6 000 miles away? Like it's a fucked up country. I can't do anything about that right now.

So let's worry about the things that we can. Now, I wish he would have delivered it like that. He didn't. But that doesn't, as much as I can recognize that, something about that still, like when I force myself to think about it, it doesn't sit right. And I'm like, I gotta get that fucking phone out of my hand.

You know what I mean? So I'm almost like jealous when people can be perfectly like all right this is my lane i don't really know what's going on there but i'm gonna chill right here and it sounds like you know that's that's a place you got yourself and it's also it's notable because you are someone who is so hyper aware of everything around you psychologically because of your own story and like what you've been through it's the the greatest joy i have in life is at night when i go to bed my phone meaning all that information in that little device is in another room we we all need to get back to a time where there's a time to laugh. This is a

biblical thing. There's a time to laugh, there's a time to cry, there's a time to weep, and there's a time to dance. And we need to separate all those things. We can't spend too much time on watching the news, you'll go insane. You can't spend too much time on your phone, you'll go insane you can't play you can't spend too much time on your phone you'll go insane you see people addicted to social media constantly and i'm i'm guilty of it but i do know how to compartmentalize my life because i'm i'm incredibly busy these days where okay 10 a.m it's time for this this time it's time for this and you make time because you make you make time for things that are important yes and one of the things that's most important in in my life and this is going to be very self-serving is i've realized that i am important you are important to yourself you have

to be you have to admit that to yourself yes and anybody who doesn't you're not really living a happy life you can't help anybody else as a first responder you learn very quickly you can't help anybody else unless you get to that call safely so priority number one is yourself for me now priority number one is my mental health and then priority number two is my family and then priority number three is the assistance to others because we're put on this planet for a very short time all right we're not here forever everybody's got an expiration date it's what you do while you're here that's going to define you and and make your legacy that's beautifully said that's so that's so perfectly said right there and i like how you admit that in the order of things priority one you because i look the unspoken thing is that

how the fuck can you help other people if if you can't help yourself like do you think the guy who went out in the woods with a gun for three days was very helpful to other people no no right no well clearly that was a rhetorical question because clearly you understand that but i'm saying like for people listening it's like you have to you you have to hack into where your mindset is so that you can you can be the protector you know like i i try to relate things back to the to the earliest days when we're you know we're going like this and fucking rubbing and getting fire and i'm like so if you were the man caveman and you had to go out and kill dinner well you better be physically fit to go do it so like if you're just so busy worrying about your wife and kid and taking care of everything in there and not saying you know not that they did

this but i'm gonna go out and do push-ups or you know i'm gonna go climb the trees to make sure like i'm good and ready to go well then they're going to starve. And it's the same thing. We all have to get back to that. If you're on an airplane and the plane's going down, what does the stewardess tell you? Put your oxygen mask on first and then put your mask on other people. Oh, that's good. Yeah. I had a really hot stewardess last week.

They always make flights a little bit better. You know what? I've never had a hot stewardess last week they always make flights a little bit better you know what I've never had hot stewardesses never and I was so pumped up and then she like came to do the uh the presentation and everything and she was like handing me the stuff she's like can you hold that for me I'm like yes I can do you know I do you know I'm on trendifier yeah yeah I might I might have dropped the name of the podcast you know but yeah that's i no one's ever said that that's really i'm gonna use that i'll give you credit but i'm gonna use that no you can use it i steal things all the time okay primary identity and primary identity stolen from and uh bringing us together with our successes and weaknesses is stolen from a guy named adam

burt so adam burt adam bururt played professional hockey for the Flyers. He did play for the Flyers. He played for other teams, too. Late 90s. Actually, his big claim to fame was he was in Mighty Ducks when he was playing for, what's the Carolina team? That is no longer a team. But he started hard for Whalers, went down to the Carolinas,

then played for the Flyers. And he's always been a a jesus guy so we have him in on a podcast i know him that because the lady not that was john leclaire oh he played he played with the player got signed this is right after lindros i was like a flyer's head yeah so i was like five years four years old but like he talks about leclaire having the biggest ass he's ever seen in his life more than i need to know yeah well you know you could apparently it was it was quite some it was something but anyway he great he spoke to me and i i take things from him all the time and he steals them too i'm i'm not speaking out of school i tell him i steal stuff from him all the time but there are certain people in your life that affect you. And Adam's one of the people that affected me. And he brought me closer to a faith. When I was a kid, I was very

tied into my faith. I actually went to college for theological studies because I wanted to be a pastor. I lost my faith and I sort of went the other way. I took a course in college called Bible as Literature. And when you read the Bible as Literature, it's a vicious book. It's a really, really vicious book. Yeah. So Adam, we have Adam on the Suffering podcast. And, you know, we want to hear some great hockey stories,

and we did. We heard some great hockey stories. But then he starts doing this thing where he's starting to talk. And then one day he sends me a text message and says, hey, KD, he always calls me KD. Hey, KD, I'm praying for you. And I'm like, motherfucker, why are you praying for me? Like, who the fuck, what?

What do you say to that? And it screwed up my head. Well, it did screw up my head, but I'm like, why is this guy who I hardly know praying for me? But what bottom line is, is he brought me into this community. He brought me into this community that I serve. And when I walk out, I feel better. And that's the bottom line. It's whatever makes you feel. That's what worked for me. I can only tell you what worked for me. And I'm not here preach religion I'm not that's not my thing I'm never do that but in times when we're searching for something searching for purpose or meaning those are the little nuggets of information and people in our lives that are sent to us so when

I was telling my story and when I had the gun in my mouth and I paused. It took me nine years, eight years to figure out that that little pause, that little something to me was my higher power telling me, you're not done here yet. You got more to do. And that's what I've been doing with my life ever since. I listen, man, that's beautiful. And I don't care what it is. I think everyone has their own relationship with whatever the hell is going on out here. And however you can rectify your beliefs with yourself, I think is a beautiful personal thing. And how you lean on that is, it can be the most helpful thing in your life.

So, you know, to relate it to the first or second, depending on which is which, highest stress moment of your life like that where it could have gone really the wrong way. But you found the reason in that. I think that's a great thing, man. Well, where's that challenge coin? I want to see that challenge coin for something.

The challenge coin. I just want to... So this challenge coin. Challenge coins are cool all right on the back is our dented development on the front is the suffering podcast because they work hand in hand and i gave this to you and it's a cool little keepsake right it's got some nice weight to it and you're probably going to put it you know actually when i go right there when i leave you're probably throwing no it's going to go right there i swear to god right next to the what the button

we'll have a prominent place right next to the app that nice what my hope is for challenge coins is when you meet somebody that's that's got that look in their eye that darkness and i've done this several times now we sell these as fundraisers however there are times when we give them to people who, it's a little token. I've handed it to people and say, hey, when you get into that dark place and you feel like you're all alone and you feel like nobody can understand what you're going through, I want you to grab this coin. And I want you to know that there's people out there that are willing to help you, willing to talk to you, willing to walk alongside of you, not pull your hand, because if you tell them what to do, it's a paternal type of relationship and it doesn't work But if you walk alongside them to help them out and then once you're through it

it's your obligation to take what you've learned by your own suffering and Pay it forward and that's where it passes it on. That's a beautiful thing. You said so many great Great nuggets today that are like good symbols of stuff. And you're hyperly self-aware too, which I'm fortunate. I've had a lot of guests in here who I can say that about. And a lot of them, like you and I just technically met today. You can't really know that before people come in. But listen, man, I really appreciate conversations like this.

I'm glad I got to have a police officer in as well. I told you that was definitely an oversight on my part part so we'll bring him mic'd out at some point too that's a different kind of police officer okay but we'll have some fun turn the microphone down yeah yeah but um listen man thank you for doing it and i i hope people listening really got a got a lot out of this that there were there were a lot of good lessons in here and and i'm glad you're here man i'm glad you made it through thank you so much for having me it's been a lot it's been a good conversation too i really hope so i try i try to make sure we we have some fun so i i think we had that today but we'll do it again at some point whenever you want

me i'm here all right sounds good everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace All right. Sounds good. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.