Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Inside the Dark Underworld Market to Steal Your Credit Card | Trulane Brown • 208

Episode Date: May 25, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~Trulane Brown is an Ex-Dark Web Master Credit Card Scammer as well as a 1980’s/90’s Drug Dealer from Oakland, California. He is now reformed and uses his past knowledge to provide expert financial services. - BUY Guest’s Books & Films IN MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952 EPISODE LINKS: - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/ - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Ajqn5sN6 TRULANE BROWN'S LINKS: - TRULANE INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/trulanezway/ JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ***TIMESTAMPS*** 00:00 - Oakland A’s, Trulane’s Age, Inner City of Oakland, Dad Police Officer 👮‍♀️ 12:03 - Section 8 Homes, Becoming 11-Year-Old Hustler, Starting to Deal 💯 25:07 - Friend Going to Jail & Left Him, Bay Area Drug Culture 😱 35:43 - 17-Year-Old Oakland Millionaire Dealer 💸 42:33 - Jail Mentality, Temporarily Stops, Gun Point Drug Robberies 🔫 50:41 - Getting Gun, Rap & Affect on Kids in Projects 🎤 58:10 - Relationship w/ Father, First Time Getting in Trouble Story, Family Fallout 👨 01:14:53 - Kid Millionaires, Brother Turn to Life, Leaving Home 🏡 01:23:56 - How Much Money He’s Making, Teenage Dealer Life, Home Invasion Story, 3 Year Probation 😤 01:36:46 - Drug Dealer Plan, Late 90’s Boom 😶‍🌫️ 01:44:01 - Burnout Family Indictment, Operation Setup, Good Lawyer, & Showing Off Wealth 👨‍💼 01:51:40 - Disconnection w/ Family, State Prison & Getting Out 💳 01:57:36 - Credit Card Fraud Scheme, Family Breaking Up 😡 02:05:14 - Expanding Credit Card Scam Business, Russian/Ukrainian Scammers, Recruiting People 😶 02:14:02 - Big Ballen, Typical Day, Digital Currency (Bitcoin) Crypto, 📈 02:28:31 - Encrypted Communication, Liberty Reserve Indictment, Friend Becomes Informant, Getting Caught ❗️ 02:39:51 - Trulane’s & Brother Goes Down, 7 Years in Prison, Dark Web Crimes 😰 02:49:51 - Trulane’s Sentencing, Becoming Millionaire Twice 💰 02:59:03 - Trulane’s New Career, Missing Family, Environment Impact 💔 03:10:13 - Still Living in Oakland, Being Shot & Attempted Robbery 😳 03:17:55 - Find Trulane 👇 CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman: https://www.instagram.com/alessiallaman/ ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 208 - Trulane Brown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

you're making 50 60k a month at that age like 50 60k a month 2011 ish some all the way till indictment but how'd you how'd they get you what happened oh my god man like me what my uncle say he's deceased now said boy you got those big kahunas boy you take more risks more chances than anybody i ever met one of my friends he gets out of prison for dealing stuff so now he's getting out he needs to get on his feet so i'm like well let me help you out man this is what i'm doing over here he's like man that don't work that's for those girls like whatever he's doubting what i'm doing so i'll bring him in on what i'm doing first things first and i kind of explained it to him but he was more fascinated with kind of

having control so he used the ukraine work and he was using what it got his own reader writer he was able to press up the cards with a foster do all of his own stuff yeah so he and i we were doing it together he got on his feet quick within a couple months right so he ended up getting in trouble man he got in trouble when he came back and started wearing a wire getting me to admit crimes that i was committing and things that i was involved with so what ended up, he was like, we was getting money. I'm talking about we was making all kinds of money, partying, traveling, drunk.

I mean, we were busting all kinds of moves, right? So what he did was he got in trouble and I guess he offered me or they asked him about me one or the other. So what he did, he started wearing a wire around 2011 and they built the case for a couple of years. What's up guys? If're on spotify right now please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review thank you oakland a's games they were like six dollars oh they're two dollars now

no buy one get one free those those stands are the sorriest things I've ever seen in my life. There's like two people in them. Wasn't there, were they, were the Oakland A's the team that had the two people like fucking in the upper level last year? Did you see that video? I didn't see it, but I'm sure they did because nobody's there. But like the sewage system that runs underneath the stadium is terrible. It just needs a whole tear down. But they're going to Vegas anyway.

Oh, they are? They're going to Vegas. They got approved. they got approved they got approved they'll leave in 2026 2027 another team gone another team goes to oakland as a city has no team now that's kind of honestly that's kind of sad so they they you don't have money to eradicate 6 000 homeless people you definitely can't be giving a billion dollars or half a billion dollars to a sports team. Like they're looking to recall the mayor.

She's been in office eight months, done nothing. It's just all kind of things that affect the city that was already bad and has bad rap. Well, O-Town, I hope to see you come back, too, because there's so much great history there as well. So much great history. But I can't believe you're like 50 years old man you look like you're 35 well see again like i think what helped preserve me was adopting like a stress-free a stress-free lifestyle like if i can't control it i can't worry about it man like my younger brothers they're both completely bald already and they're like how do you have a full hair head of hair what are you taking what are you eating we want to switch our diets i'm like it's nothing to do with that man i'm just like

okay my girlfriend wants to leave bye i mean my daughter when my daughter's mom moved my daughter to missouri it hurt me so bad because i felt like she was taking her away from me i couldn't do nothing about it because at the time i was on probation i was coming out of prison i didn't have my stuff together enough to go to court and fight her. So she was able to take my kid away and raise her in a whole nother state, which was hurtful to me after I did prison and missed part of her life anyway. So I'm like, what worse can happen? So I just don't worry about stuff I can't control. And then you know how most people will always talk about the problem and give only 10% to the solution. So they never get nowhere because they only worry about problems like, okay, we know the problem.

Let's fix it. Let's work on fixing it. We come with three things to fix this problem instead of keep talking about it over and over. My girl right now, she does that because this is wrong in the school. We're going to have to put her in a different charter school. Okay, let's just do it. Find one. Find one because men don't care about that.

Just let me do it. Find one. Find one because men don't care about that. Just let me review it. If I got to pay for it, let me review this new school she's going to go to. I want to meet the teacher. Set some interviews up. Don't tell me they're not doing this. They're not doing that. She should be learning at a faster pace as the kids that live two zip codes away. Okay, how much do schools over their costs 1500 okay look okay let's figure it out she's three years old let's get her what she needs instead of talking about it dwelling on it that's what i admire that man that's gonna make me get more gray hair or it's gonna right it's gonna make my hair fall out right about it right stress-free

living it's hard to do i've been it recently. It's been very stressful around here, you know, and I'm into all that type of stuff, like even reading things about how to de-stress, how to put things on. And honestly, one of the common themes that I'll see is people will talk about perspective. Well, what is the challenge of this situation versus your overall? What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Challenging life. What are the worst things that could happen to you? And you're like, God damn it. And then you think about it and you're like, actually, that's you think about and you're like actually that's that's a fair point that's a fair point that's a fair point but uh i mean i don't like to say what a lot of people are worse off than us but what i do like to say is that um we all choose what the direction we can go we all have a choice

nothing's nothing's um mandatory no more like it's the thing to for me was to do is rationalize which will get into rationalize yes some messed up stuff that I was doing and I knew I was wrong I could rationalize and make myself feel better about doing it and then when other people say something about whatever I was like y'all dumb anyway I mean you dumb anyway what's up I don't want to hear shit from you so anyway yeah your story story from what I've heard of it is pretty nuts. And I was talking to my friend Matt Cox, did a great podcast with you. He's like, you got to talk to Trulane. But you really, I mean, you have multi-levels to your career here.

And it started as a child, like very young. But it wasn't this, you know, kind of typical you would think like okay didn't have any opportunities or whatever like you had two great parents at home a great family they did well they're doing great today as well but you kind of went off the beaten path i guess what like age 11 something like that about age 11 but it was um it probably started around eight because at the beginning it started around eight so at the beginning, it started around eight. So I want to just say this real quick, too. My father was my hero for up until like seven or eight years old when I started seeing other things in my community, what was going on.

And then I'm looking at him and the decisions he made. And then I'm looking at the other guys in the community that are getting money, providing for the family, maybe taking care of the neighborhood. And he supported his family, of course, but he seemed like disengaged with what was going on around him. Because after he got off work, he just came home and he was like in the house. He didn't go around the neighborhood as much as we did. What did your dad do? My dad was a police officer. No shit.

Yes, he actually was a police officer in the city of Berkeley. So not Oakland. You're from Oakland. No, no. It just wouldn't have worked. I'm from Oakland my whole life, born, raised. I mean, of course, I moved in between. But mainly Oakland, moved back to Oakland.

Because I actually love the city. I love the city and everything about it. It's just, look what it did for me almost got me killed sent me to prison allowed me to change my life and help people like right now my whole thing is if we can help a bunch of homeless people just find houses that to me would be a great that that's a great accomplishment as far as I'm concerned or just disadvantaged people that think they don't have a chance to succeed, show them away. Because if all you know is all you know, you would never do nothing but that. You know what I mean? Because in Oakland, you have people, and I'm thinking this in all inner cities,

they hardly even leave their 10-block radius. Yeah. Because, I mean, like I was talking about Santa Cruz before we started. Where Lesley's from. Some people never been or won't go to Santa Cruz and it's just like an hour and 40 minute drive. It's so beautiful there. It's ocean front. They have a boardwalk, the food, the people. It's a lot of amazing things about it, but it's people in Oakland that will never even go that far. And it's so close. So if all you know

is like your corner market, that's where you get your groceries from um the mall is like a outlet flea market style mall you don't know anything about luxury malls you don't know anything about higher end items and merchandise you don't know what's possible to achieve because you're trapped in your environment because so many and it's obviously not all of oakland but there's pockets of oakland where there's people who are living to survive you know they don't they don't make much money maybe they only as kids they have one parent in Oakland where there's people who are living to survive. You know, they don't make much money. Maybe they only, as kids, they have one parent in the home. There's not, and we see this. This is a pattern we see in different places across the country.

There's a lack of hope for some people. So you get so stuck in that world because that's all you know. That's all there is. There's nothing outside that. Yeah, that's all you know. That's all there is. There's nothing outside that. Yeah, that's all you know. So that, again, like that's all they've been shown is the most successful person that they know basically has a job working for like 25 bucks an hour. So to them, if they reach that level, they're winning in life. You know what I mean? It's a lot of pockets of Oakland where it's so much poverty. Like as soon as you walk out your house, people are dealing drugs in front of the building.

People are robbing and like the crime, the burgl the property crimes assaults i mean even myself i was shot there but i still believe in the city we'll get to that that was recent that was recently but i believe that there's still good people around there so if you know like okay so um if you live in oakland they're gonna say either you got shot or you know somebody that got shot for sure if you're living in oakland so that's the thing that there's nothing to be proud of, but these little kids at eight years old, 10 years old are growing up knowing that there's killers in this community. That was one of my things. When I found out that I had to live amongst killers and nobody was doing nothing about it, I was desensitized. I had a-

How old were you when you first realized that? I think I was about 11, 10, 11, because knowing someone that got killed and then hearing whispers of the killer and actually seeing the person yourself, knowing that that's the person and he's walking free, nobody will cooperate with the police. And then if you approach them or say something about them and act you knew you may be next, because in those community in that community, kids aren't exempt. I mean, I know 16 year old kids, 15 year old kids that were murdered for just knowing too much or seeing too much or possibly, you know, drug territory. Get killed. 15 year old kid get killed over drug territory. They told you don't sell over here. You did it anyway. You were sneaking around doing it.

Okay, the person that killed you was a few years older than you, and nobody's going to cooperate the police to help convict that person. Neighbors want no cameras, of course. I mean, the police may have heard whispers of the name of the assailant, but they're not going to actively search for them. So once you know that, once I knew that, I mean, I lost faith in the police. I didn't look up to police. Even with a dad who was a cop? Yeah, that's when about the time when I'm like, well, he's one of them. I became of the belief that this is not my hero any longer because he's one of them. The people who resonate with me and who I can relate to better are the people at the car wash that I started hanging at.

They had nice cars. They were getting money basically off hustling, but they were helping the mothers who didn't have. They would go buy all the kids ice cream. When the ice cream truck came, they'd buy 20 kids in the neighborhood ice cream. Now it's ladies. Criminals. I mean, this is what I saw.

So I'm like, wait a minute. My dad never did this. He's not such a great guy, but he was working to take care of his family and kind of trying to make sure the best for my mother. I didn't understand the concept. Your wife is most important to you, then your children, and you have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about everything else because one person can't save the world. So he did that for just a job. I found out that he wasn't so emotionally invested in it. But as far as I was concerned, he was because you're one of them.

So he was your hero, though. You were saying until you were about eight years old and you started to notice some of these hustlers on the block who would do these things for other people. But when you were young, obviously, you're going to school. Were you doing well in school along that time? I mean, as long as I was in school participating, I did well because school is simple. Read a book, answer the questions, turn it in on time, have good attendance. So I just don't think it's the best, best system anymore. But I was going to school. I went home. I did my homework. He helped me with my homework.

Again, this was my hero. So he's around. Showed me how to ride a bike. Showed me how to ride a skateboard. At one point, I thought I would be a professional skateboarder back when Steve Caraballero, Tony Hawk, and those guys were thrashing all through the empty swimming pools. So that's like 8, 10, right before hustling. I thought I was going to become that. You know what I mean? He's like 8 10 right before hustling i thought i was gonna become that you know i mean he's like make sure you're in on time um you know stop going so fast down the hill

on the skateboard but but once i found out that um it's guys in the neighborhood that are like actively out there on the ground doing things that that people can recognize. Like his contribution over in that city he worked in didn't relate back to our neighborhood. Because, okay, we lived in a house. Three blocks away, it's a Section 8 house. No, it's not. It's a housing authority apartments everywhere where people pay 80 bucks a month rent.

So these same people don't have any food at their house. Mother may be on drugs. Mother may not be on drugs. They're struggling. Most of them had single parents, right? So I'm like, wait, wait, they don't have no food, but we have a refrigerator full of food. I want to bring these kids over here so they can eat. So, I mean, we can only do that so many times before he starts saying, wait, I just went grocery shopping and I'm feeding you guys and all of your friends. I mean,

they can come over and eat sometimes, but not every single day. And then I go outside and I see the neighborhood hustlers feeding people, helping out like, okay, they can say, well, they took the money out of the community. They have to put it back in. However, that's not how you're seeing it at that age. All I'm seeing is that my friends that I go to school with, that I pay $1.25 for lunch, get that same lunch for free. That's right. So it's a disconnect. I shouldn't have to pay if they don't have to pay. But my dad like, nah, we both have jobs.

Your mom and I work. This is just how it is. Let's move on. Don't focus on that. Focus on what you're going to do to not become like them. You know what i mean so i mean once um once i start thinking about it and putting into perspective i wanted to go around the guys more that were actually doing things that i could see like i could see their their contribution i could see how they were helping out and when did

you understand how they made their money like how old were you when you realized oh they're selling drugs um like about 11. 11. About 11 because. Like could you conceive what that meant? Like what they were putting into the community by doing that? Not all the way because I didn't know the story behind it. So what happened was at the car wash, these guys come up to the car wash and they'd be like, hey, you want to make some money? Help wipe my rims off. They have gold rims, spoke rims on these old school classic cars, and these cars were $10,000, $15,000 back then.

So I'm like, sure, sure. So I help them wipe the rims, and they'll give me $40. And as a kid, $20 or $40 is a lot of money for an 11-year-old kid. Are we talking late 80s here? This is talking like 86 86 87 so for me that that helped me buy i could buy a pair of rebox with that for like 27 bucks um you know what i mean oh yeah go go to mervin's get a pair of levi's and and i'm going to school now like i'm somebody so they didn't hand it off at the car washer in front of us but i did see bags getting exchanged okay well something in that bag that's worth something to them so it didn't hand it off at the car wash or in front of us but I did see bags getting exchanged okay was something in that bag that's worth

something to them so it wasn't the physical drugs that I saw but it was bags being exchanged at the car wash what time of day would you be at the car wash uh it was in but after school so it black in between two and five because man is that that young age I was supposed to be at a friend's house. My mom had already told us, don't go near the car wash, don't go near the liquor store, or don't go near the wash house. We have a washer and dryer at our house. What are you going to buy that wash house for? They sell drugs over there. What are you going near the liquor store for? You're not old enough to drink. And then the car wash is where all the hustlers congregated. So I wasn't supposed

to go near none of those spots, But in one day to make 80 bucks, or between me and two other friends, over $100 for sure. Just from helping white rims at that age. So I'm like, oh, there is something going on here. I need to know and I need in. And this is why, you know, because it's between two and five, like you said.

So your mom's still at work. Your dad's still at work. And they just thought you were going to a friend's house every day. And they didn't check on that. Yeah, because they didn't drive home that way. But had they drove home that way and saw me there, I would have been ground. I would have been, it would be bad. But they didn't.

So I was able to sneak around. And you were hiding the money from them, obviously? At that time, obviously, I was hiding the money. But it was just like, I mean, I got allowance and I got lunch money. So I learned saving at an early age. Like, you remember, cassette tapes were like, I mean, I got allowance and I got lunch money. So I learned saving at an early age. Like you remember cassette tapes were like 10 bucks each. So, oh, well, a cassette tape was 10 bucks and I had a Walkman. So what happened is I get 20 bucks in a week from my parents for allowance, but I don't want to spend it. I want to save it. So when I do buy

me a couple of cassette tapes, I don't want to be broke. So it didn't look horrible. It didn't look horrible until I actually start hustling. It was looking like I was having more money than I was supposed to have. But in the beginning, like getting 20 bucks. And then I had cousins that were hustling on another side of town. Like they lived like 20 blocks away, car distance or a long bike ride so when i go over there like cleaning the backyard will get me 60 bucks once a once a week and i'm like wait how can i clean the backyard to clean the backyard and all you're really doing is like like scooping up some dog poop uh run the lawnmower over the grass one time and it's just they have big bankrolls oh yeah peel them off now i needed to know i'm like oh hell no i need to know what's going on and and then i started hearing the word of you know what was going on and i finally saw a transaction myself and it changed my life forever i was like okay where'd you see that it was a area called brookfield it's over in brookfield

this is where uh it's like a pool hall, liquor store, another like four liquor stores, a liquor store on each corner, a pool hall, a laundromat. Again, it's just like close to the airport. They said, if you want to find some bad stuff going on, go a few blocks and travel amongst the airports and you'll find out what's going on in almost any city. So I was over there and I saw a hand-to-hand deal for 50 bucks it was just like cutting butter i said damn it was that easy he gave him 50 for something that looked like like was the person buying it did did they have the appearance to you of like a junkie no back then it was an expensive drug so you had to have like 50 bucks or better to buy it you had to be kind of

a it started off maybe as a rich person's high i guess it's not for the it's like when the prices dropped and it was accessible to more people then the people were looking like junkies because they get they get strung out real quick but initially when i first saw it was um no 20 to 50 was the price of it you couldn't really get nothing for under that. So back in those days, who had that much money to spend on drugs? You had to be doing well, working class person or something like you're not going to just be a drug addict. So something in you click though, during this period where you go from, I'm looking up to my dad who's the law and order guy. He's the cop.

He runs a great household. We have everything we need to – I want to be as rich as possible because that's what those guys do. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. So did you feel like a, because you know, money affects people at young ages a lot, you know, once you become aware of it, but did you feel that that was power? Like, is that emotionally what you were after? Well, initially my first sales, my first transactions were my friends that lived in the housing authority apartments that didn't have money. Like if they didn't do this, then their next money didn't come till the first of the next month. Their mother was

on welfare, got food stamps, not an EBT card. It was food stamps that you have to tear out of a packet. So these guys don't get new shoes. They don't get new clothes. And after the food stamps are gone, it's no more food coming in that house realistically. So I know on the TV, they might show this, but you have kids in East Oakland and all over the country that are starving if they don't do something about it. So we would go to the mall, I mean, to the grocery store and push baskets because if you push a basket back that somebody left in the parking lot, they'll give you a quarter. So you do that for two hours and we get seven bucks. And now they can go buy a little bit of ground beef, some bread, take it home and make burgers for the night. Now we're 10 years old.

So a 10-year-old kid with a mother on welfare is going outside trying to figure out a way to bring bread and meat in the house. So when we got the opportunity, because the older guys always told us, you guys can't do this. We're not putting kids involved with this thing because it's terrible. We know kind of the dangers of it. You don't understand it. You just want some money. So he was like, um, that's fascinating that they were like that. I mean, they actually, it's actually like kind of honorable. It was, I mean, if you can say honorable related to this type of thing, however, they wouldn't let us, They didn't invite us in. But my friend Starvin, he's begging them to work for them. And they know his mom. His mom really has a $60 rent and then may get $400 a month total. And that's it to raise three kids. So he got the okay green light first.

Okay, you can come out a few hours a day. You spend $50, you make a hundred. That's it. You go home. We don't need you out here constantly, or you can just work my stuff for me. I'll pay you by the day or by the week and you go home. I wasn't allowed to do it. I had both parents at home. They knew that. They was like, you live in the houses up the hill, which is only five blocks, four blocks away from the actual transactions happening nah you gotta go matter of fact get out of here go home so they they brushed me off for months until one day a guy older guy brand new um mustang gold ones and everything he had somewhere to go and he asked me to hold his stuff while he uh went and did whatever else he had to do and sell it while

and if anybody came you hand them this. They're going to give you $40, $50. That was how I started. So once he trusted me. How old are you now? I'm 11. You're still 11? I'm 11 when I make my first transaction.

I'm 11 years old. So this is like after school. After school hours, yep. He was at the car wash. I took the stuff and I had to just go a block away to the space where people come. So I was finished way before he came back and I had all the money straight without $1 being short. And he kind of like, okay, so you get it. He's the word, oh, you down, huh?

You down? I'm like, yeah, I told you just months ago. And from there, the trust kind of came. But you're only 11. You're a little pipsqueak. I know. I wore Converse tied up real tight. You weren't worried about getting hit or something like that?

Not at that point. Because it was simple. Like, okay, he left me about 200 worth, 300 worth. Gave me 60 bucks. It was so easy. I was finished long before he got back. So now I'm waiting around, waiting around. More people came while he was gone. I told him that I was like, I needed more because more people came.

But he was like, no, no, it's still not for you. Right on for helping me out. But he didn't give it right back to me. And then I had to still prove myself after that, which I don't know why. But again, I'm a person that didn't have to do it. These other children did it for survival. And we're kids outside, like almost like a third world country, I guess you could say, because nobody's coming in to save us. Nobody seemed to care. I mean, the neighbors knew what was going on. What I can say is that every single household wasn't affected by it. And it was kind of a selective thing.

They knew about it, but they weren't involved with it. Like a lot of those houses had nothing to do with what was going on in the community, but turning a blind eye to what's going on isn't healthy either. Because now you're not contributing contributing and you're just watching this whole community go downhill i guess so yeah so you you do that first one they say no we don't want you doing this but you keep going back hanging around these places every day you're hooked because you see you felt that money and you're like oh my god i gotta have a part of this so you start cutting school at this point too or um well well so next thing that happened is um i i one of my friends the friend who initially started with me he got

arrested for having some on him and i was with him i had a little bit on me he was trying to help me get on my feet because the older guys wouldn't give it to me so he'll give me a couple pieces and say all right just sell this and you know make 30 40 bucks but don't let them see you basically but he got arrested and went to juvenile hall and um he he was there three days five days and he got out and then when he get out he's like uh man it was kind of fun in there i had a good time it wasn't that bad as i thought man you remember the one kid that we know from frick oh he's there and what about the other kid that we knew that went to matt mcclellan um mcchesney right he's there too all these other dudes we haven't been seeing they're in juvenile hall they won't get released because they they don't have a fit home they don't have a solid

home so they're going to foster homes oh yeah yeah so if you don't have a if they don't if social services deem that you don't have a safe house to go back to, they keep you in juvenile hall till they find you a placement. So I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, because his mom's on drugs. His dad is not there. And if he goes back home and gets caught selling drugs, they can take the housing authority away from his mom. So she can't let him back. He's going to a foster home.

So he starts telling me about what he realized that he can't stop doing it and I don't have to do it and I'm just choosing it. So he kind of didn't want to hang with me no more. So he's like, I got to go full fledged because if I don't do this, we don't eat at my house. You have both parents at your house. I don't really want to hang with you because you kind of like choosing something that's really might not be right for you. So he went away from me we separated it's strange how they how in these types of situations and i've heard this before with with some similar stories but it's like they resent you for having it but they want you to protect the fact that you have it exactly you understand it's so and this is

my friend i went to elementary school with this kid but since we have so much different home lives lives at home he went off and went full-fledged but now at this point i'm wondering trying to figure out what i'm gonna do in this one og i just won't say his name because he's still probably doing the same kind of stuff still this long later he uh he trusted me enough man and and said, all right, it's on you. I want you to help me out with this. It was like he had a little duplex. The front one was all hustling, and then the back one was for living. So it was rolling.

It was traffic there. Business in the front, party in the back. Yeah, party in the back. So it was nonstop booming. So I was able to get over there and really catch the hang of it. So getting away from it. And you're still 11. No, I'm going on 12 now because now once I had a birthday, 12 is almost.

I'm a man now. I'm a man now. Like I know more. Don't call me a little boy no more. Don't call me. I'm not a little boy no more because I'll fight. You know what I mean? I can stay out to 9 o'clock now at 12.

Excuse me. I can stay out to 9 o'clock now so no one can rush me in the house. It's not when the street light come on at 6 anymore. It's not when the street light come on anymore. So I'm good now, right? So I'm getting my own packs now. I'm getting my own bundles now. Like it comes in a little package.

I can get my own package, which was what it comes in a little package. I can get my own package, which was what changed my life forever. And this is all crack? All crack, yeah. At the time, it was booming. This crack, like a person can make a thousand bucks a day easily in 89, 88, 89. Okay. NWA era right now. Yep, yep. Hardcore. You can make $1,000 a day as a kid. Only about $300 of it would be profit, but still, at 12 years old, I start making $300 a day at 12. Verifiably, like $88, $89. And now it's everywhere. Everybody knows about it.

It's flooded, the community, at this point. Now they're selling $10 worth and up. It's no more $20 and $50 like it was in 86 community at this point. Now they're selling $10 worth and up. There's no more 20 and 50 like it was in 86, 85, 86. Spring is here and you can now get almost anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken parmesan delivered.

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19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. At first, it was just like a straight rich man, rich guy thing. I don't know how much you know about this, but this is one of those that's come up sometimes, and I've looked at it before, but I don't know a hell of a lot about it. What's the whole thing with the idea that the CIA flooded these communities with crack? Because obviously it's like you have cocaine and crack, and it's just marketing.

Like one they market is, oh, you got to pay $110 a gram for this because that's a rich people drug. And the other one they market as, oh, you can get it for five bucks and, you know, get strung out for a second. And like you said, it diverged there somewhere in the 80s. What happened there? Do you know anything about that? So the story I heard and what I kind of did my best to verify is that the big Coke dealers were down in Los Angeles, and they had Colombian connections to get multiple kilos to supply entertainers, actresses, wealthy people, as you said, doctors, lawyers, everybody used the cocaine. So somehow they formulated a recipe to make it into a base rock, but they brought it to Oakland to perfect the recipe. The recipe wasn't written in Oakland, but somehow this is where the origin of the drug allegedly

was formed. They said the first crack rock was sold in Oakland. Okay, who verified this and how could we know this for a fact? Okay. And they traced it back to about 84. One person was like one person that had it and he got well rich as hell selling it. And then he told people they told another person and they start sharing the recipe. So how else did it get there? OK, we can say that they could have put a lot more money into the schools and then it would have had a lot more educated young kids growing up. That would be very smart. Right. They could have gave us the education that young Chinese kids have or young Asian kids, I want to say. I don't want to say Chinese. Young Asian kids.

So here it is, is that this drug pops up and then all of a sudden the communities all around Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco, and inner cities. It's not going to the suburbs. So who has the power to do something like this? I mean, black people, as intelligent as we are, we don't have the capacity to know how to go become a chemist, make a recipe, inform a drug that's going to be a quick high, get you strung out for 30 minutes, and then you're going to want another hit. Let me correct that. Civilians don't have that. Civilians, okay, okay.

Period. Don't have that ability. Thank you for that. However, they'll accredit black people with forming and developing it if we don't look past that fact and say where could it have really come from. So the CIA, they knew that people move for money. Okay, we offer these young men in between 17 and 25 millions of dollars to promote this and spread this out as widely as possible. And then we'll make them seem like kingpins, arrest them and give them 30 years and act like we're cleaning it up. We look good. They look horrible.

But then it's almost a problem that won't be able to be corrected if that makes sense yeah because i don't know how rough the crack is now because i heard a lot of other drugs came in and took over well we all know we hear it's also all infested with i mean half these drugs are infested with like fentanyl and stuff so now that's that's why i'm like like is is crack as prominent as it used to be based off the fentanyl crisis the uh heroin the opiate uh even prescription drugs like now i'm hearing like almost one in five kids in high school are addicted to a a prescription drug opiate of some sort or another have you seen any of those documentaries or miniseries that have come out about like theacklers and the opium boom that they caused? I saw it, but I don't watch them in their entirety because I participated directly in the drug trade.

So the effect that that has on me is this. I live this, right? They're going to paint a narrative of how they want you to believe it, but me being able to participate directly in the crack era knowing that it's like like it's no way you give us okay a kilo is a thousand grams you give a 16 17 year old a thousand grams of cocaine and just let him run around in the urban community it's no way that they'll end up with a positive so myself as well as a few other guys that were doing it at that level at a young age,

I mean, we thought we were doing something, but the damage we were doing was just so much worse than the contribution of us even giving back to disadvantaged families. You know what I mean? So Snowfall, BMF, these series, and even the documentaries they make about this drug, I don't watch it now because I'm going to use my time to kind of try to do something to help people who are affected by it, which is so hard. I met a girl, 30 years old, addicted to fentanyl. She didn't want to hear nothing. I was talking to her. She was looking through me and just wanting money to go get some. And she's like, if you don't give it to me, I'm going to end up in the hospital. Please give me money so I can go get some and she's like if you don't give it to me i'm gonna end up in the hospital please give me money so i can go get that i do think there is a huge difference though between i personally between the two and i'm not i'm not legitimizing any form of drug dealing or

anything like that it's wrong it's a horrible thing what drugs do communities is disgusting but there's a large difference between drug dealing that comes out of say poor places where people don't have opportunities and they end up turning to the thing that might be able to make them money which is completely wrong obviously don't support it but the difference between that and being a wealthy legalized cartel like the people were the sacklers were for the opium trade and what they did and how they used their money to buy influence and to buy politicians and to lie to the american people in the world for that matter about what they were doing to them and and and cause an era of pain which is what they're ironically what their drug was supposed to take

away it's it's there's something about that that's a little extra disgusting to me. Again, not, not saying that any kind of drug dealing is like, okay, I'm just saying that to me is on a whole nother level. I mean, back to your initial point, how did it get there? Cause we didn't go seeking it. It kind of was dropped off there to some chosen people. I remember when I was about 11, 12, it was a dude in our community that was a millionaire at 17 years old. 17. He had 10 crack houses. In the 80s. In the 80s.

You can look him up. You can look him up. What was his name? Oh, my God. I don't really want to say his name. I just don't want to say his name. But if you put it in there, 17-year-old Oakland millionaire, 86, 88, I bet you he'll come up. But see, my thing is that if you allow this to happen, he has workers almost twice his age, 10 crack houses at 17, still graduated high school.

I mean, $100,000 birthday party for his 18th birthday, indicted at 19 and gave 35 years. Was that the coldest setup ever? No, 20. Let him do a ball hard as you can for two years, indicted him, and gave him 35 years at 20. So it started around 16. He was able to ball hard for three years. I'm talking about Corvettes and Mustangs and Mercedes-Benz,

whatever you can have. I want to think he had a Porsche 992, whatever the best Porsche was at the time. We knew him. He came to the car wash, had every kid out there 40 bucks just for being there. You know what I mean? He didn't even barely want his car wash, but we saw this. So it's like, how could this be? Who set him up and he didn't recognize this?

The cartel came directly to him, of all people, and allowed him to make this kind of money. So he was the new hero. They just chose him. He was the new hero. Like, my dad making $45,000 a year. What? You're not having an effect on this community. You don't even know these people. And then he actually one time said, I don't want you over there at those dirty people houses.

You know what I mean? I don't want you hanging with them because you come here and your clothes smells like smoke and you're looking all dusty and dirty like you're wrestling in the mud. How old are you when he's telling you this? He was telling us that about eight, nine years old. Because again, our friends are our friends. This was before you're. This was before. So he didn't like our friends.

So I was like, why you don't like my friends? These are cool dudes. They're cool with me. We climb trees. We pick plums. We throw rocks. But then now we're hustling together. Once he saw that, he wanted to keep me away from those guys however he could.

You know what I mean? So your dad being a law enforcement officer i would imagine he can spot some things a thing or ten oh yeah how long how long did it take not before he approached you about it but how long do you think it was before he had a serious suspicion that like you're hanging around the wrong people not even dealing but you're just like, oh, he's definitely going places he shouldn't be. It was a few months. Like once I got a pager and I got a pager and what? It was a few months.

It didn't take long at all. His law enforcement, his intuition. And the father knows his son. Now I'm not asking for lunch money. I messed up by. I mean, kids believe we're brilliant, but we're really not. My father saw through me. So what happened, this is how it started, honestly, too. And you were the oldest brother of the kids? I'm the oldest of three, yes. So I start skipping grabbing my lunch money off the table. By this point in junior high, you get like five

bucks a day for lunch because you want the chili fries and some soda, whatever, right? Five bucks a day. Now that I'm having three, five, $700 of my own money, I stopped picking up the money off the table. You keep it, mom. He didn't say much at first. And then after like, I was like, oh, I forgot to grab it. He was like, you didn't eat at school. No, I waited till I came home and I just ate at home. And then he was like, wait a minute. And then one of the church members said they saw me hanging at the wash house. Now, oh, if I hear you at the wash house again, if I hear you at the liquor store, wash house or any of those areas that you know are forbidden, you're going to have to get out of my house because there's nothing you could be doing there.

You're like 12. We have 12 going on 13, yes. So he warned me, and I had a pager that I had to hide because now, I mean, he had a pager, but it was work-related. He had a pager. What does a 12-year-old need a pager for? There were 100 bucks. 100 bucks for a pager and 20 bucks a month. He's like, that's what he said.

You're not that important. You don't need a pager. There's no way you need a pager. When he finally found out about it, it went off when I was around him. I was like, it's my girlfriend. We'll call her right now. Call her.

You know what I mean? I tried to tell her I was so smart. He was like, that's not who paged you. You're dealing. If you covered yourself, would you be willing to tell your dad oh dad i'm gay i'm sorry uh back then back then oh my dad is that type of man that if you gay you getting out oh he's he's not he wasn't about it to this day he's not into that wasn't an option either do

what you want to do but not here you're not doing that around So that wasn't an option either. Do what you want to do, but not here. You're not doing that around here. I'm from Mississippi. I'm from, he's an old schooler. He believes that that was an agenda, but that's another whole conversation. But if I were to try to cover with that, you definitely leaving here. You're not going to live under this roof and be doing that kind of stuff. So he knows that wasn't your girlfriend. He knows that wasn't my girlfriend. Now, he worked long hours, so he became more strict, like calling home to see if I was home at those hours he told me to be home.

Because now I have to go to school. I hadn't started cutting classes yet. So he's calling, and if I'm not home, he'll have my brothers who weren't hustling to go outside and get me. Oh, go find them and tell them to call me as soon as you get there. How much younger are they than you? Three years. They were twins? They're twins, yes.

Oh, okay. They're twins. So they would come, hey, dad's on the phone. He said, come get you now. You need to be home in 10 minutes or he'll leave work. So I have to stop what I'm doing, go home. Okay, I'm here. Where were you?

And I was like, oh, I was at Willie's house. I was at this person. Okay, okay, okay. Well, you know you need to be in by 7. I'm not able to stay out till 9 now. Not anymore. You had a pager. I saw someone said you were at the wash house.

We have a washer and dryer at home. You don't go to the wash house, period. You know what I mean? Nothing good's happening. Nothing's good happening there. He knew that. So he kind of started having an idea. And then one day he woke me out of my sleep

um he said if you bring anything illegal in my house i will arrest you myself no warnings if you bring illegal any anything illegal like anything so with the firmest look ever that a father can give a son so i was was scared. I even stopped hustling for a man. I'm like, man, I just don't want to go to jail. I don't want to like. All right, cool. I can. I got like a couple thousand so I could stop.

Like I might have twenty five hundred at this time so I could stop hustling. Whatever. I got a couple dollars. I don't want to go to jail because the scariest thing is a person that has never been to jail. So if you've never been to jail, you never want to go. But if you go to jail and you know what jail is all about, you're not as scared about it because you know you can handle it. You know those stories about people being taken advantage of.

They probably wanted to do that anyway. No one just walked up to them like, hey, you come on in my room and we're going to do something. If you want to go there, you're going to know you don't think anyone gets like turned out against their will not after a certain year or two i mean has it happened before probably but never at any place i've been i've never saw a person that didn't want that get that i mean i just never saw it and it doesn't happen i'm sure, but I don't know where. Like, how bad does the place have to be? Pretty goddamn bad.

Yeah, like, okay, I'm thinking a level four maximum security prison where the coldest of the coldest killers are housed. You don't normally put a low-level offender with them. In a federal prison, in a USP, where most of the 90% of people are lifers you don't necessarily put a person with three years with all lifers that has you know I mean they have nothing to lose so it's easy for them to probably take advantage of a person but you're also like to this point like when you're thinking this you're also a

kid so of course you're like terrified of what that would be like you're a kid I'm a kid yep never wanted to go to jail so i stopped temporarily i stopped and then i don't know my friends like man you're a punk man look what i made and they having like big bankrolls like these bankrolls when they fill with fives tens and twenties they look like more than they are yeah but they're enticing they look it made me like what oh? Oh yeah, man.

We got a new little place too, man. We don't have to stand in front of the liquor store. We on a side street. Now this lady that smokes, that uses it. She's letting us do it out of her house. Now she has traffic in there all day, nonstop. If you come over there with us, nobody gets to see you and we can do it outside of their house.

A trap queen. A little trap queen. I mean, for real, right? I mean, it's real. I'm like, what? Unless he's like god damn it he's like uh he's like he's like how much uh i was like how much uh how much she won't he's like uh we can give her like 10 bucks each a day and it's gonna be like 60 bucks if it's six of us there and she'll be happy and then when we cook it up we can just give her a piece like we can give her give her a piece. It's good. I'm telling you. She gets what she wants.

You get what you want. There it is. Man, when I saw that, the door never stopped opening and closing. And you're still, like, 13? I'm 13. I'm talking about this is when I said, I'm going to take this serious. These dudes are hustling for survival. I'm going to take this serious.

I want some money out of this. A business. Now, this is not for survival for me. I'm going to make a business of this. I don't care what y'all say. Your brothers now are 10 years old, so they're still young. Did they have any inkling of this? Did you talk with

them about it at all? Not yet, but my brother, he was turning 11, playing softball, and he needed a pair of cleats. So he's like, hey, I know you've been hanging out at the liquor store and the wash house, so I need 40 bucks for some cleats. he's like hey i know you've been hanging out the liquor store and the wash house so i need 40 bucks for some cleats i'm like no go ask mom for it go ask dad tell them

he's like i already did they saying next week but i need them now he played actually for mc hammer's uh baseball team no shit mc hammer had a community softball t-ball all levels yeah so uh so i'm like he's like yeah i need 40 and i'm like i'm not giving you shit he's like well he's like uh come on man i need it i need it and i'm like all right here man take it when i hand him 40 bucks oh so you are dealing you are dealing oh oh oh he said you are dealing yeah and i fell right i'm like oh shit you going to have to put me on. You're going to have to put me on. You're going to have to put me on. Like now he's on my head.

I'm like, why did I do that? I wouldn't have said put me on. I would say, you know, owe me $10 a week or $20 a week. But I said, no, no, no, no, no, bro. You good at baseball. You guys get to travel up to Fresno. You travel all. So like the big, the big tournament might be in Los Angeles.

They get the ride. I'm like, there's no way you can do this. And I'm like, you know, you too young. Because sometimes I get sweated by the older guys still, especially the ones that's fresh out of prison. They don't want the kids out there. When the guys that came out of prison realized we were dealing, they came in tripping like, man, what you doing out here?

I want everything you got. So they were taking advantage of the kids by taking all your product and making you start over. Making you start over because they're telling you you shouldn't be out there anyway. So I'm like, damn, man, I mean, it happened to some friends around me, but I fortunately was able to get away. Not to say I didn't get robbed at gunpoint at a young age. You know what I mean? What happened there um you gotta think of now a strung out crack addict catch you outside at nighttime and they come up acting like they want to buy and they make you

go in your bag and they see you have a nice size bag they just pull out a 38 and say give it all to me man and don't move wait till i wait till i leave before you move so that happens to you out there they don't want to kill you they just want the rock how old were you the first time 14 13 14 i was like it was early shit yourself i didn't because i knew kids at that point that have been shot by this point i knew people that have been murdered like at 14 years old i knew over five people that have been killed in our community and nothing happened to the person that killed them so at that but i mean if you get killed you're dead so when it gets pulled on you everyone wonders what they'd how they'd react i mean i was nervous as hell no i was nervous as hell scared but i know the look in

a crackhead's eye by now that he just wants to get high if he shoots me then the ogs find out you shot and killed a kid over a crack he may may get it from them, not the cops. Right? The cops, for killing a kid over a crack, the community might take care of you for that. They don't want to see you in jail. How often did the cops even solve these cases when they had them? Oh, wow. Oakland still to this day has the lowest murder, the lowest rate of murders solved. Yeah. Still to this day has the lowest murder the lowest rate of murder solved yeah the steel to this day

so not many and so that also i'm wondering here correct me if i'm wrong i'm just trying to fill in a blank you're seeing around you a failure of law enforcement not just because you're out there doing whatever you want you're like wow they're really letting this happen but also because you're seeing the worst of the worst you are seeing people you know get there doing whatever you want, you're like, wow, they're really letting this happen. But also because you're seeing the worst of the worst. You are seeing people you know get killed. And as you said earlier, you are walking amongst the killers. The cops aren't doing shit about it. And you go home and your dad's a cop.

Did you quantify those two and say, well, he's a cop, like they don't do shit? Like I said, I told you, he became one of them. He wasn't my hero anymore. So our conversations were far and few. I hardly ever saw him. If he was home, I would leave. I would intensely try to follow, see better friends house. Cause I knew he had to get up real early and go to work. And I knew he would come back late. So to me, he was just one of them. And I never trusted officers. I didn't trust no police officers because you roll by and then you're aware of what's going on. You ride by and you do nothing about it.

So when that gun got pulled on me, I gave the shit up with no resistance. So the person just wanted my stuff and he ran away. However, if it was a real threat, it would have went a little differently. It comes, they come and he'll shoot first. So when a person wants to kill, they shoot first. Like we don't have nothing to talk about. I'll shoot you and then take it. It was just more so like you need to learn how to be a little sharper than this shoot first like they we don't have nothing to talk about i'll shoot you and then take it it was

just more so like you need to learn how to be a little sharper than this because i asked you for 20 you pulled your whole bag out in your hand you're looking down in the bag grabbing it not paying attention to me you look up the gun is in your face give me the shit i walk away you learned a lesson youngster that's what that's really really what it Now, this shouldn't be normal for a 13-year-old kid. However, I accepted it, and I got my own.38 at that point. So now once I get my own.38, I let it be known amongst the community I'm strapped to. So it could go either way. Where'd you get your gun?

A hundred bucks from another dude I went to junior high school with. You buy it at school? His name was Dog. No, we didn't buy it at school, but he told me at school that he had a couple of them from house burglaries he said oh uh well you know i don't like drugs but i'm breaking houses man we kind of go to the richer areas and we breaking those houses and all those houses have guns in them i bought a 38 for 100 bucks he had them all the time so you gotta think he was making money from burglaries, like VCRs and jewelry. He was a burglar. Where'd you stash that.38 at home?

Uh-uh. We went to the back of one of those housing authority apartments and stuff. It's always open areas or little cuts. We call them little cuts where you can find a bush, wrap it in a bag, put it under a bush. California, Oakland, the Harley Rains. Hope it's there the next day. Yeah, hope it's there the next day. And people found mine before.

People found my stash before. People found my gun before. I mean, it's just a dark dog-eat-dog business. There's nothing really good involved in it, so you have to expect the unexpected. I mean, man, I went over there trying to grab my stuff, it wasn't there. Well, as we're moving along the timeline

though, so you were 13 in 1989? Mm-hmm. Is that what you said? Okay, so now you're getting into the era too, one of my favorite eras, the gangster rap era and everything, which was a lot of it centered in O-Town. You know, how much did that play a role in glamorizing favorite errors the gangster rap era and everything which was a lot of it centered in otown you know how much did that play a role in glamorizing what you do i mean we are what we consume right

tupac is one of my favorite rappers favorite people i looked up to him and my dad hated him till this day you can't watch a movie with Tupac at his house. You can't listen to a Tupac song. He said Tupac directly contributed to destroying the youth because the youth, he became a hero to the youth up until he died. So my dad hated him. But to me, I had everything he ever made. I listened to it over and over all day. N.W.A.

Easy E. Ice Cube went solo. I listened to America over and over all day. NWA Eazy-E, Ice Cube went solo. I listened to America's Nightmare. I listened to him talk about Once Upon a Time in the Projects where people are displaced, people are disadvantaged, welfare, teenage pregnancy. I listened to all of those things that I saw every day. So who did I resonate with? Them or my dad? Them. Ice Cube was like a hero for me. Tupupac like seeing him in oakland one time like passing

through oh you saw all thugged out and everything like that man i mean man it was just amazing to just see him physically because he was with digital underground oh yeah yeah so they were so that was the start of it i'm shocked g the one who put the satin on your pants. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Straight up. See? So with that, I was like fascinated and I wanted to know more. So that basically did contribute to what we were all becoming because hearing Tupac shot at off-duty police officers and got away with it. Like, look, he's standing up fighting against a system that's trying to continue to oppress us, and he's winning.

So we can win too. He was so many contradictions though too. He was such a man. He was ahead of his time. And, I mean, he's my favorite artist of all time. I know everything about the guy. But, you know, I think about it when I think about that era and I think about some of the influences more towards, say, like the hustle culture, I do think a little more about, say, NWA, Snoop Dogg, things like that because Pac was so all over the place.

You're right. He was a challenge to the system, but you're talking about somebody – and I'm not exaggerating when I say this – who was one of the smartest people to ever walk this earth. He was a brilliant brilliant man incredible artist and it absolutely like if people knew some of the stories that i've heard about him behind the scenes and what he could do and how he could literally and i mean this literally shit out music that was brilliant like he was on another level but he was also this he was this in a way he had he had multi he wasn't multiple personalities he was one personality that encompass all kinds of personalities and he had the one side that could be the machismo almost like i'm hard i'm a gangster whatever dude and the other side was

almost this like flamboyant softly spoken soft thought poet right and and he could be these things at the same time. So it's interesting to hear your dad has that opinion. I guess I understand why, because he's kind of looking at the whole era the same way. But, you know, Pac was, that's not a guy you could ever put in a box. No, but law enforcement could.

A person that believes in systems and processes will save you or create a life you deserve. They do because he was telling us we could be what we want to be, do what you want to do, believe in your dreams, follow your dreams. But he also did speak about social injustices. Oh, yeah. He spoke about his mom being on drugs or him being directly affected by the drug epidemic because Pac never sold drugs. He didn't sell drugs. He did when he was very young.

When he was like 10? A little bit after that. He was like 14, 15 before he moved out west. So he was out on the east coast. Well, no, no, no. He was in Baltimore with Jada and then he moved out to Marin County. Oh, in the jungle. His mom became heavily addicted to drugs. They had nothing at home and he had to support his sister oh yeah

so he slung that i do remember that got him i remember that story okay yeah okay then digital underground took him away from that and he started traveling okay but my thing about it was he still was was telling people that you know whatever dream you have you can achieve it because like I said I had every album like from the strictly from my to trapped I mean I'm a um two pox lips now I had that so um I listened to it religiously in my pops just like this is what's influencing my children instead of me I don't want it in my house understand too short too short Oh. Too short. Oh, the disrespect for women. He said, oh, hell no. He calls every woman a bitch. You're not going to be around here listening to that.

Your mother is here. If I ever hear you using that language around here, you're out. Like, that was his biggest threat. You want to go live with your aunties? Like, they lived in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Some of my aunts did. So that was a threat. Like, hell no.

We got heat and hot water over here we got our own beds like over my auntie's house you might have eight kids sharing one room at least six let me say six kids sharing a room at one of my auntie's house so he's threatened they'll take you over there you could you could be over there too or you could be here your own room your own video game your own bike like all those in a good home all those kids shared a bike like all those in a good home all those kids shared a bike we all had our own bikes my brothers and i we had our own bikes skateboards scooters anything that came out every gaming console that came out so i mean he did what he

could to support us it was just my rebellion yeah that caused that divide and it was it's i'm trying to put myself there though too because you're at that age like you know I was a 13 year old kid right in different circumstances I guess but with everything our parents say we want to do the opposite right and your parents not only have like a good background your dad is literally a cop but he's still like he works every day and there's just enough space between you two that you could go do act on these rebellions you know what i mean and so you then that compounds and that's clearly what i'm just listening to your timeline here that's clearly what happened no that's clearly what

happened so my dad okay so so they says uh do as i do don't do as i say i looked at it like he should have taught me what to do and which would allow me to not listen to outside influences that weren't my father. So, excuse me, we had a house. He was a homeowner from 1970. I was born, he was a homeowner in the 70s. Most people were renting houses or apartments on low income. He decided for him and my mother that wouldn't work. So he was a homeowner. I should have known, okay, I want to build up and do anything it's going to take to be a homeowner, which means work hard, endless hours. I mean, have weekends off, but maybe want to work overtime for extra money. Don't allow parties, kickbacks, people in the house, no cigarettes, no liquor.

My mom and dad, they don't drink. They were church people. We never had a party at our house. We never had a kick. The Hot Honey McCrispy is so back at McDonald's. With juicy 100% Canadian-raised seasoned chicken, shredded lettuce, crispy jalapenos, and that completely craveable hot honey sauce. It's a sweet heat repeat you don't want to miss.

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pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. He never had his friends over sitting there drinking booze, watching sports. We did that as a family. We ate dinner together. We all ate dinner as a family until we start rebelling. But that was a thing. Finish your food from the table. Excuse yourself from the table. So we actually knew what was going on. However,

when I go over to my auntie's house and I go over to my friend's house, you get to eat in front of the TV. You can go eat and stand up at the counter and eat your food. That wasn't allowed at our house. We could go over there like they smoked weed in the house. They actually could light up a joint in their house. They can drink liquor in front of their moms. Their older brothers were drinking 40 ounces of beer. My father called that scum of the community because it makes all of us look bad. Hey guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show and it allows us to grow and

survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that, and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. You know what I mean? But he didn't actually tell me – well, he did say, okay, if you want to be like those people right there, go do what they do. Look at them. They're winos. They're drunk. They look like they're barely making it. You know what I'm saying?

They don't have much. Look how we live compared to what they live. But I don't think that was a lesson enough to teach me that thinking it has to be an express way to success. I'm thinking that at that young age, I'm already seeing like a 16 year old kid has a car and he's paying his own bills and he's doing everything on his own. I want that. Yeah. You know what I mean? So it's crazy that you're, that you are, well, it it's it's not like as a kid you can you can think that you can get the things that other people may do by working hard as they get older you you think you can get them faster because you see that and you want to have that even though you know maybe they're 20 30 years older than you right and so if you see that

path that can get you there you might take take it. And that's obviously what you did. I mean, with the wolves, you can't let the impalas, I mean, the wolves, what do they like to eat? They like to eat rabbits and small animals, whatever they can catch, right? You can't keep letting those walk by wolves, those rabbits and those little muskets and squirrels or whatever they eat. They can't keep walking by a wolf before the wolf is going to go after it and eat it. So you showing me things that I desire but telling me I can't have it. Oh, yeah, you can see it. Just look at it, though.

Don't look at it. Don't touch it. Don't touch it. Oh, this guy right here, he's three years older than you, and he has $30,000 already. No, you can't say that. And then you go to a friend's house, and their older brother has a Nike shoebox filled with 20s and 50s. And you know, like, wait, that might be about $30,000. And he buys new shoes twice a week, three times a week.

And then after he don't like them no more, he'll give them to the younger kids. Like, here, you guys take them and wear them. You know what I mean? I'm going to go buy some more so to me that was a definition of doing well i guess when did you first get in trouble when did it when it start to chickens come home to roost i think i was 14 man um 14 i was slipping. I was. Oh, wait. Yeah. First time I got in trouble is I seventh grade. I was 13. One of my friends got beat up at school after school at the bus stop. He got beat up by a kid a couple of years older than him. And he came to my house and asked me for a gun, I had a 38 at the time, he came to my house, he's like, hey man, that guy punched me in the face over at the bus stop, I need a gun, I'm like, nah, nah, nah, you don't need a gun, I'm like, what you gonna do, I'm gonna shoot him, man,

he punched me in the face, look at my eye, he blacked my eye, man, all because we was joking around and it went bad, man, let me borrow your gun, I'm like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. So he's like, ain't I your boy? You trust me, right? You trust me? I end up giving it to him. Like, here, take it, man. I don't care. Whatever.

So in my mind, I gave him a.38. I gave him one of my.38. A.38. My only one, actually. So what happened? We go to school. Like, he don't even do nothing because he has a black eye. He didn't even come to school until his eye went down.

But when he came back, I didn't really think much of it because, of course, by then I've known people that got shot. I've heard about people get shot. It wasn't a big deal. What's another one? Yeah, I mean, it's not a big deal no more, which is like a 13-year-old kid should be totally. You're desensitized. Petrified about a kid getting shot because this kid that punched him was, if we were 12, 13, this kid was 15, 16 that punched him in the face. Oh, he's a little older.

Yeah. Picking on him. Nah, this dude was a class clown kind of taunting that guy's girlfriend and pushing her around. And this dude just did that in protection of his girlfriend, whatever. So we at school and the campus supervisors come and get me out of fifth period and ask me to come to the office. I'm like not paying attention to them because what would you want with me in the office? It's like Spanish class.

Like I don't – and I get there. He's sitting there and the gun is on the desk. So he went around telling people what he was going to do after school at the bus stop. And somebody told the campus supervisors. So they stopped him, got the gun from his backpack he gets to the office you imagine this today and pictured me yeah oh this is terrible he he got to the office and told them he came to my house three days before and i gave him the gun so we both went to jail for that we got arrested at junior high school and i got expelled from school for that whoa yes that was my first time going you get

like a felony charge for that whoa what happened was it was kind of his word against mine they was like he might have came there and took that i got out of jail who's to say it's your gun expelled from school and i didn't even i got a truancy program like they came to my house twice a week couldn't go back to that school, continuation until the next school year when I went to a charter school. And I got off by the grace of God on that, but I was in jail for about four, five days. What did your dad say to this? Oh, he couldn't believe it. When they called him at work to come to my junior high school because I gave another student a gun. He told them they were

lying. This couldn't happen. Not my son. Like they like, no, you need to come now. We have the gun. So he, you know, rushed from his, the city he worked in over to Oakland, the junior high school. And he walked in there and saw the gun on my desk. He could have passed out on the teacher's, the principal's desk. And, um, he asked me, did you give this student a gun? And I just wouldn't say nothing. I just didn't say nothing. And the kids looking at me like, tell him, tell him the truth. I already told him everything.

I didn't say anything. What's the Miranda rights? Anything you can say will be used against you. I just didn't say shit. I never signed a statement. I never did anything. So he ended up getting caught with a gun. So he got the felony.

I didn't. Oh, he got a felony for it. He got a felony. I didn't. It's like you saying this, like we can't really prove he did or not. caught with a gun so he got the felony i didn't oh he got a felony he got a felony i didn't it's like you saying this like we can't really prove he did or not but you spent four or five days in jail i mean it was it was a weapon involved yeah yeah and they asked my parents like you guys have guns laying around how could this guy have access to a gun it was a big old big deal oh we know

you're an officer so do you leave your way are your weapons secure we we might need to go check like it was a big deal who picked you up from jail my dad what was that like the most silent i ever heard like nothing it was just silence it was just silence i don't know if he didn't know where to start i definitely didn't i think he probably commended me for not incriminating myself. I mean, because I never admitted giving that kid that gun. He said, tell him everything. I already told him. That's my boy. I already told him everything. Didn't you give it to me?

I'm like, I just sat there. But it shouldn't have happened because even if he was going to go shoot that kid that I knew, I didn't even care. I didn't even think twice about it at that age. He could have actually killed that kid over punching him, and I would have contributed to it. But I don't think I would have missed any sleep. I wouldn't have missed any sleep about it either. Because you're desensitized. Already, man.

I mean, at this point, I saw police beat up people. I know murderers are walking amongst us and they're not going to jail at all. Mothers are living off $400 a month with two kids. Now, we can definitely look at them and what they're not doing, but the government, local or national, decided that $400 would feed a family of three. But after they run off of that, after they run out of that middle of the month, they're done. They don't have anything. Now, the corner markets, thankfully, gave local people credit. So they knew you were, you know, government assistance. They might give you a $40 credit where you can get some hot dogs, some ground beef, some bread, onions, tomatoes, something to make spaghetti with, right? Because they know you're not going anywhere.

You're almost confined to your community. Is that like a mini prison or what? I mean, you're stuck. In some ways. In some ways. You're not going over to the Andronico's. To the what? Andronico's is an upscale market.

You're not going to Andronico's where they have fresh meat and these meat brought in every day. They got halibut and sea bass. No, you come here, we got hot dogs, hot link, chicken thighs, chicken wings. We got some stuff that'll hurt you later. Shitty food. You'll be full though.

That's interesting. He'll front people like 40 bucks. So was that by design or not? I wonder if that's by design. That feels very much by design. I'm just saying, though. We go San Leandro, San Ramon, Danville, and the meat market smells different. I'm talking about you walk in these meat markets. It's no dust, no dirt, nothing anywhere, no flies.

It's no flies. You walk in our meat market that's three blocks from our house. It stinks like they slaughtering the cows in the back. Separation by taxation. I'm just saying, though. So they front them $40 to make it through the month, but they don't have a choice because where else is the money going to come from? It's not no payday loans back then. I don't remember payday loans back then.

So I'm like, nobody cares about this community at all. Why should I? If I don't do it, somebody else will. I mean, that's it. I could either take advantage of this or I could just be a victim of it and complain like everybody else. I had choices now. After the silent drive, did you have a talk with your dad about this? He asked me, did I want to end up in jail like some of my older cousins, one in particular?

He's deceased now. He said, do you want to end up in jail like some of my older cousins, one in particular? He's deceased now. He said, do you want to end up in jail like him? You know how many times he's been to San Quentin? They know him by name. Every time he comes off the bus, he's back and forth there. You know he can't get a job. You know he's never going to be nothing. Do you want to be like that?

You need to straighten up right now or you will end up like your older cousin. I mean, when you were young, he was a hell of a guy. But look at him now. And i think he's using crack therefore he's right on cue by the way the uh cops outside but sorry therefore if you want to end up like him keep doing this dumb stuff that you're doing man and you will end up like him man other than that tighten up stop i couldn't associate with that kid anymore of course yeah he snitched me out in front of everybody he asked where the hell did that gun come from how are you having a gun at this age and i'm like i'm like that i'm like 80 bucks 100 bucks in the hood like come on man like i can get another one today he was sick he talked to my mom i heard them arguing he told her she's

not keeping much of an eye on me while he's at work. She told him he works too many hours. They're boys. I can't control them. What did your mom do again? My mom ended up opening the janitorial service. Oh, shit. She worked at a bank.

Okay, so she worked at a bank. It was an accident at her job where someone threw some keys across the bank and it hit her in the head. It was Crocker Bank her job where someone threw some keys across the bank and it hit her in the head. It was Crocker Bank. Never forget that. She got lightheaded, blacked out, and she took a leave of absence, which led to a miniature lawsuit. And she never went back to work for anybody from there. She opened a daycare center and then she started janitorial service. Daycare center was about two years.

Janitorial service went on until currently, like, my brother and one of my cousins took it over. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Started it, you know getting contracts and um so she was busy she was busy she was busy and then she never went back to work for anybody i don't want to say the settlement was more than about 15k which back then was a lot of money 15k in the early 80s yeah and um so she was an entrepreneur she didn't work for anybody else after that. It was her own business. But my pops worked, and that was considered a government job, right? Yeah. So he brought home that bacon with the extra overtime hours.

So you get expelled from school when this happens. You get out of jail because you didn't incriminate yourself. Your dad is freaking out, doesn't think your mom is watching you. They're worried about you going the wrong way. You're 14 years old, right? Yeah, at this point. So you said, I think you said this earlier, you ended up in a charter school or something. So they sent you to some sort of, you were able to get in there?

For money. It was a $600, $700 a month ticket on it. One school year though, one school year. Because other than that, a continuation school is worse than a public school. Public schools are pretty bad. Now, you go to a continuation school where none of the teachers want to be there. Right. Now, the education, take this packet, go fill it out, turn it in.

Get the fuck out of here. Get out of here. So my dad was like, nah, that's not going to work. You still have to get a good education. Went to the charter charter school did well. I'm talking about A's and B's You it's no cutting school here. It's nowhere to go. You're going to class. It's why the bus there every day 200 student I had to get dropped off there every day even worse parents have to drink. Yeah Getting dropped off there. So now what does this make me look like in the neighborhood a Buster getting dropped off there so now what does this make me look like in the neighborhood a buster what you going to that school over there that's what a uniform and it's a paid school oh we really don't want you around us we don't want you around us man you ain't cool

you're not one of us you pay to go to school so i'm being made to look like a culprit for having parents that are doing well you know what i mean yeah who pays four to six hundred bucks for a school we go to a public school and we get free lunch yeah it's not even six hundred dollars coming into our house at all and that's gotta hurt that there's something about that that's you know it's gotta awaken some sort of pride in you in a fucked up way because you're like, oh, fuck that. Like, you think I don't belong? I belong here. I found myself trying to prove to them that I was still one of the guys. Like, come on, man.

Look, man, you know I don't want to go there. I hate that school, but the girls are better. Won't y'all come up there and meet some of these girls because I can't. Right. I'm trying to make it where they're like, oh, yeah, hon, because those girls do come from better home. Yeah, yeah, you're right. So that was a little way to kind of gain favor amongst my peers

because they wasn't messing with me. They was like, nah, man, you on some, we don't even know if we can trust you, man. And your dad, you know what I mean? And he's a cop. You know what I'm saying? I'm like, man, but you know I'm not with that. I'm not with that at all. You know me, man.

Come on, man. We done did stuff together. All right, yeah, you right. You right, right. But that was just one school year. One school year of that. And I couldn't wait. And by high school, I was back.

Oh, because now you were kicked out of the middle school. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So you got a charter. So I went to the school board. And then you come back. Went to the school board. They couldn't prove I gave that kid a gun. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So you got a charter. So I went to the school board. And then you come back to it. Went to the school board. They couldn't prove I gave that kid a gun. That kid got caught with that gun.

That's just what he said. It didn't happen on school premises. If the gloves don't fit, you must have quit. Who else saw you give this gun to this kid? Nobody. That's just what he said. Yeah. So I went back to public service.

And your dad's pumped he's not paying every month now for school. Oh, yeah, because I got two other brothers, two younger brothers, man. And that money needs to go back towards the house. Sure. he said you know so i went back your dad's pumped he's not paying every month oh yeah oh yeah because i got two other brothers two brothers man and it's that money needs to go back towards the house sure that money needs to go back towards the house so but now so now do you go back to the neighborhood back in the neighborhood full-fledged now because all the guys at that school they were ahead of me that one year at charter school set me uh set me far back oh on the pecking order yes because i at at 14 in the ninth grade because it was a middle it was junior high then high school now it's middle school right sixth seventh and eighth then it was um seventh eighth and ninth so by the time i got to the

ninth grade at at at this uh castlemont high these dudes were driving Cutlass Supremes, Caprice Classics, Acra Legends, Sterlings. They're a part of the crew of the 17-year-old millionaire. They're part of his team. And now you want a piece of that. So looking at a guy like I cut class then, so go to the dice game it's five thousand dollars to be won or lost in a dice game for high school students now since i'm charter school not hustling under close monitoring for my parents i'm almost like i'm not really having money at this time i won't back in i don't care i won't back in i'm ready to run away i'm ready to do whatever it takes to get

back in this and your brothers have still stayed straight this time nah one did one that i ended up um kind of putting him in it he he did it with caution because he couldn't let my parents find out that's wild though that they were twins and only one of them got involved yeah the other one was just didn't like the idea of like you could see what it's doing now as you said earlier when you asked about people looking like junkies now people are looking like junkies yeah it's not looking like a rich person's drug no more it's looking like yeah they scratch it they're dirty they're stinky it's looking like minister society snatch it and run type of thing get beat down excuse me it's looking like that now because this is 91 92 so these this story told in that movie was pretty on point like like it's a great

i do anything for a hit like women doing sexual favors for crack guys like selling anything they have anything for just a hit take this this gold chain. Take this, man. Use my car for a week, man. Just give me one hit. Knowing damn well that that one hit not going to do nothing for you. You're going to need another one in 30 minutes. You're going to need another one. So this is about the time I was full-fledged.

It was too late. Nobody could bring me back. I realized that I'm— Even after a year away from it. It's temptation. Just sucked you right in. I realized that even after a year away from it, it's just temptation. Temptation is the worst. It's one of the worst things.

Like, again, like you better off giving. Never given a bear honey. Just don't let them try it ever. They'll never know what it is. If you give it to them and tell them they can't have it, they might go crazy, become violent, aggressive. Did you have any friends at that charter school i did have a few friends there because they're not involved in this stuff um a couple of them did like one dude i remember he he ended up there for getting caught with weed

at a junior high school so he got expelled because we was terrible hell horrible back then and he ended up there but i knew him and and he he ended up there, but I knew him. And he ended up going crazy. Like far as he started balling though. He was from a different neighborhood where they were more welcoming to let him do what he wanted because his older brothers and cousins were directly involved.

He started balling like, and all that means is having money, having a car, $10,000, $20,000 at a young age, able to do what you want, no struggling, and you're able to help people. That's all that really meant. But he was ahead of me. And then he got out of that charter school one year, too. He got right out of there. So you go back, and now you want back in.

You get back out on the street. You start dealing. Full-fledged. And you're making a lot. You're older now. I would imagine Full-fledged. And you're making a lot. You're older now. I would imagine you're dealing a lot more. You're making a lot more money. A lot more money at this time.

And your dad didn't have any inkling that you were doing this. Things start falling apart because now he's still working more hours. My mom is gone all the time. I get up to buying ounces. So once I'm buying ounces, one ounce, two ounce, I'm able to make my system where it's three to five hundred profit a day for a 14 year old kid. Right. So 14 year old by 14, I'm making three to five hundred profit a day for sure. And I couldn't hide it at this point.

So one night I come in. He's like, I want your pager. I want your pager and all the money in your pocket you're gonna have to have a curfew now it's six o'clock or you have to leave today so what ended up happening was um he like put me on the spot like give it all up now or go i chose to go so i left home i left home you're 15 no i'm not 15 yet i'm still 14 i'm still 14 years old i left home and... You're 15? No, I'm not 15 yet. I'm still 14. You're still 14. I'm still 14 years old.

I left home to go live with a friend. So he gave you a choice. He gave you a choice. It wasn't like you were kicked out. He gave you a choice and he said, I'm out of here. He gave me everything. Stopped the dealing today. But by now, I was having almost $10,000.

I had my own money at this point. It got so... Think about it. 500 bucks a day don't take long if you if you if you putting it up if you stacking it up just shoebox money shoebox it don't take long so he said give i want everything you got from this and your pager and you're done today you're gonna be in the house on time we're gonna start looking for a new house we it's over it's over for you or you gotta leave now so my mom's arguing and pleading with him to let me stay um he's telling her no stay out of this he has to go now did you ever have a separate

talk with your mom my mom just followed my dad's lead and she like you guys know right from wrong so it's no excuse and there's no reason like she's one of those like no nonsense women but then she didn't want me to go out in the streets because she knew i would only end up in the worst predicament you're 14 exactly so my god from there i went to go sleep at like those 18 20 night motels motels yeah yeah they're prostituting and dealing drugs out of there all day every day and then i found a friend's house who his mom let me stay over there for 200 bucks a month but i couldn't get a key wait wait the mom was charging 200 to stay there they live in low income 200 bucks a month he can stay here he can stay here did she ask why you were why you had to stay there even care didn't even care you don't get a key the door is mainly unlocked uh

being at a good enough hour um sleep in his room that's it wow so i can't live there i mean it didn't last long but still i had a place to stay where i wasn't sleeping in the streets you cut in school i'm cutting school now i'm not living at home doesn't that sound like a drone officer yeah it does but they said i was a runaway my parents had to label me a runaway or they would get in trouble. So now if I run into a cop, I'm probably going to go to juvenile hall. But had he reported that? Had your dad reported you? The school did.

The school did. No, but had your dad reported you as a runaway before he claimed that? He did. No, no, my mom did that because she saw me out in front of a liquor store hustling. And she's like, get in the car and come home. And I wouldn't. I wouldn't. So she reported me as a runaway.

Because if not, what happens is they're liable for anything I do. That's messy. It got bad. It's very messy. But all I saw was the money. All I saw was money. All I saw was- How much are you making during this time?

Right now, like I said, you can make $1,000, $1,500 in a day gross, which is $300 to $400 profit. I mean, the way we were doing it, it was like $400, $500 on a great day profit. Where were you selling mostly? Where? Yeah, like where? Did you have like a main, did you have a corner? Oh, no, no, no, no. We had either in between a house, a rock house, everything's going on there.

Or it's like one liquor store where it seemed like all the crackheads came to giants liquor oh my god they're gonna come there if you stand by there or near there they'll come you you they will come you got anything you got anything they don't care who they buy it from they don't even care who they buy it from you just stand outside the place and they'll buy it outside you. I mean, they're going to know it because what you're standing here for. It's nothing good going on here. This is just not a place you want to – no, no, no. So right there, between there and then we had a house that we can go in.

And then I had a pager. So my pagers start doing enough money where I can just kind of drop off in a 5, 10 block, 7 block radius on a bike, ride around, drop off, pick up, drive. It was, this was too easy, man. I don't know. Any kid that wanted to get involved could get involved, man. It just don't make sense that it was that simple to get involved in that kind of stuff. How long was it smooth sailing? Like how many years?

Nah, I got caught with some stuff within a year. I got caught hiding my second time juvenile hall. A neighbor called the police on me because he saw me hiding drugs in the back of an abandoned house. And he called the cops. And as I was going back there to get the drugs they were already back there looking for it so they grabbed me it was like oh we got a report that you're hiding drugs back here and they knew right the area where i was hiding it so they grabbed me cuffed me up found the drugs i got arrested for possession right then and there so now what did

you get like a felony how much was then i got felony. That was about almost two ounces. Whoa. Almost two ounces of cooked, processed. So that got me, well, that's enough to get you sent to youth authority. Because you know it was a law related to one ounce of this is equivalent to three kilos of that. Yeah. So that one, that whatever i had was due to get me like three years but i hired a lawyer and went through the changes went through all this stuff and i ended up getting like a a boy's home i ended up getting a boy's home what was that like

it's terrible they just put you with a bunch of wayward boys that are terrible they love to fight they love to do other mischievous stuff it didn't help me at all it didn't help me only how long were you only requirement was to go to school a year i went there for a year so you they'd let you leave for school and then they'd pick you up from there pick you up on time you couldn't leave the house but we would sneak out anyway and we threatened the staff and i'll have somebody come here and do something to you you better shut up i I'm from Oakland. You don't know me.

You don't know me. I'm from Oakland, man. You better shut up. You scare the staff there. They just want to do their job. You know what I mean? Were you still able to deal during this time? Hell no, because I couldn't leave.

Well, you just said sometimes you could leave. Yeah, but I had money, though. I had money from dealing. I had money from dealing. I was doing from Dylan. I had money from Dylan. I was doing cool. But where'd you keep it? How did you keep the money? Like, where'd you keep it? So at that point, a shoebox and that kind of money, easily compactable.

You go hide it somewhere. Gave it to somebody I trusted, really, really, really trusted, that I knew had money, too. They wouldn't even look at my little stash and shit because who do you trust? Somebody that got way more money than you. Way trusted another cat like hey bro i mean whatever so uh i was doing good enough to not have to deal until that was over with you know i mean then we went back to court for an evaluation i got released from there way right back in it again though right back are you 16 17 now, I'm about 16 now. But this is when I just started selling weed.

I was like, you know what? Oh, you left the crack game. Uh-huh. What drew you to weed? Who? What drew you to weed at that time? Oh, because at that time, different strands of weed became more popular. And then The Chronic.

The Chronic album changed everything. God, I wish we could play that right now. Man, everybody wanted to smoke weed. So now when I'm out of the boys' home, the weed game is like, wait a minute. Smoke weed every day. Everybody at Hustle smokes weed. And then the people who don't hustle they come from all other towns surrounding oakland to come buy weed so now my cousin and um they're doing it i'm like oh shit

i'm i won't eat and they like come on let's go um pounds were pretty high but where were you getting it from my older cousins yeah but where were they getting it from? Oh, Humboldt County, the mountains. They had plugs out like Mendocino, just white boy growers. The white guys grew the best weed. So you befriend them. They start trusting you. They'll meet you halfway or you could drive up there, one or two people, and bring it back down. Multiple pounds. And then it was about strands.

Had to be chronic, green, light green, sticky, icky, whatever. Because I used to smoke it, too. So I made sure if it was good enough for me to smoke, I knew I could sell it fast. And, man, that shit turned me up. Man, that shit turned me up. I was having $50,000 before I knew it. Like, out of that boy's home, I ended up making so much money, man. I bought a Grand National, an old school Chevy.

I bought, like, the— Where you living? At this time, my— Okay, man. I bought a Grand National, an old school Chevy. I bought like the— Where you living? At this time, my—okay, so let me rewind a little bit. Like after the boys home. So what ended up happening is this was the final straw between me and my dad. I don't know how I skipped over this. So the final straw between my dad and I was hustling every day, doing my thing. And I told one of my friends,

so-called, that I came up, I was like, yo, bro, I'm good now, I got a couple workers, I've been getting like nine ounces at a time, breaking it down, man, selling it, bubbling up, he like, what, I can only afford like one or two, you got how many, I was like, I got nine of them, he's like, you've been stacking up your money i'm like yeah man i got like 20 20 000 almost i'm going towards 30 if i clue my account money my um cop money and i told him that he went and told other guys in the neighborhood about what i told him that i was getting a nine which is for a kid that's a lot of cocaine that's a lot of cocaine for a kid 250 grams basically that's exactly what it is 250 grand that'll do that'll do it so one night i I was on my way home the one night these dudes

They was like um hey, we saw the police sitting down the street, and they're watching man look come on Let's just get out of here for the night man nobody so nobody goes to jail So I like you right you right so I go on my bike about like five blocks away From where we hustling that and um it's a guy standing across the street from my house and he's like um hey he asked me that i know where address is at and i'm like nah i don't know what address is it but now i'm trying to hurry up and get in my gate so as i get in my gate it's another guy behind the gate already with a gun he slaps me over the head now i'm in the middle of a home invasion so they bring me in the house and the first thing they asked for is the

nine ounces and twenty thousand so it's like what the hell he told somebody what i told him so they were in there invading they was ramshackle in my room they were looking for it they it was just you're living back at home i was living back at home because how did that happen because i told my dad that i would give it up i told my dad that i wanted to act yeah i told my dad that i wanted to act. Yeah, I told my dad that I would act right. I told him that everything would, you know, I'm telling him that I'm going to be a better son to him. And I was just lying because I knew my house was more comfortable than living from pillar to post. So home invasion. My mom is home. My little brother, my younger brothers are home.

So after that, it just went bad, man. The cops came. They ran away. It was a chase.. The cops came. They ran away. It was a chase. Helicopter involved. They caught one. Helicopters get involved with the guys. Man, it was on the news and everything.

So what happened was my dad came home. I had to go to the hospital because of that gun in my head. It split my head open that wide. I had to get staples and all of this and wear this dumb-looking crown thing for a while. So my dad was done with me. He was like, you're not welcome in my house ever again. You endanger my family. You told me you was going to give that up.

It's over. Just go wherever you're going to go. You're done. Like, you're done. You can't come back here no more. He sold the house in Oakland and they moved to the suburbs. That was it. Like that week, the house was on the market.

Sold within a month. They were out of there. He never went yeah he was gone how old are you i'm four four fourteen going on fifth no i'm about 15 i'm about before the boys home about 15 yep so where are you at after the boy all right because we skipped around there so after you leave the boys home you've already had a complete fallout like twice with your dad and family where Where'd you go? Where'd you live while you were dealing weed?

Oh, I just lived in Oakland. At that point, I was getting so much money. Apartments was $600 a month. I just met a girl that was 18 years old, and she put an apartment in her name for me. Yeah, I had my own apartment after that. When I knew I couldn't go back home, and it was over, and I'm going to have to do whatever I have to do. So I met this girl. She was a little older and I was talking to her and we was cool.

That's how it starts. Huggy, huggy, filly, filly or whatever we was doing. We was huggy, huggy. And I got my own apartment, man. And 600 bucks a month. That's cheap for a two-bedroom. That's pretty good. Pretty good.

What year is this? 95? Yeah. 95. Yeah, I'm trying to put that to the... 94. 95 yeah 95 94 94 94 95 because it was right there we walked one block to a liquor store and that's where we sold weed at the apartment we got was one block away i mean in the black community yeah i don't know if they think that's what we need the most of or what. Is that what we need?

Interesting. Urban communities, period. Because I'm just saying wherever it's low income, they believe people probably are more depressed. They'll drink more liquor. They put more of them. You're right. Therefore, it was the pink store. I'd never forget, man. I live one block away from there in this apartment complex, man.

All I had to do was put on my backpack, go right down there by that store store and we could sell as much weed as you could have like nobody had enough and when was this up when did this go wrong this didn't go wrong for years i did that for i did that from damn we stopped selling weed about okay 97 97 i stopped selling so several years several years what made you stop um we'll stop with that i served the undercover i served the under that'll do it and i went to center i went to the adult jail for the first time what jail santa rita it's an adult adult jail that no that's that's an experience i sold to an undercover officer fifty dollars worth of weed and that's not that i got probation for. Sold to an undercover officer, $50 worth of weed. That's not that much.

I got probation for that, though. Yeah, that's not that much. I know, but it's possession for sales is the bad part about it. Yeah. And that's part of why they went back now in the city of Oakland. And if you ever got a felony for weed and weed-related crimes, they kind of take that off your record and then offer you a lottery where you can get in and try to get a legal uh legal license a license to sell legally it had like a lottery system after that because since we became so legalized and so accepted and so many people were arrested and got felonies for that they did go back and and let allow you to get a marijuana felony off your record that's what

they did in alameda county in alameda county i know i don't know about other counties but you sell this guy and then after you go through that you get probation all that you don't stop i tried to straighten up my act because now adult jail is serious now that's an actual felony on my adult record which if i when i did oh so you did get a felony for that? I got a felony for that. Possession for sales is why. So they don't care about possession. You were using it, but if you sold it for profit, they care. That's something that we can't tax. And, you know, what if you give somebody bad? I don't even know why, but it has to be something. So I was on probation for that three-year felony probation

actually so i kind of tried to straighten up and this is around the time my first daughter was about to be born so i didn't want to be like i'm like man okay did you have a plan like what you wanted to do with your life not really but mind you i had i had a i had a cool savings i've been always a good saver enough where I wasn't necessarily struggling. I was like, now, if I don't do something fast, I'll spend all the money. But the plan is always, so for a drug dealer, I want a kilo. Once I get a kilo, I'm good. I'm straight.

I'm going to be able to make 50, 70, 100K, and I'm done, right? That'll never happen. It never happens. With the weed game, I'm like, well, I'm selling so much weed. I got my cars. I got money. With the weed game, I'm like, well, I'm selling so much weed. I got my cars. I got money. I got a little bit of jewelry. Again, 100K, 150K, I'm going to be all right.

I can go do anything that I want. That's the thought process, right? But it just never works because every time you reach that goal, you just move the goalpost. You just move it a little further. Okay, well, I can do 250. I can do 250 i can do 300 so once my daughter she's um my my my girl at the time told me she was pregnant i was scared as ever like oh my god i'm not ready to be a father i'm a i'm a drug dealer i'm like 18

she was when i was 19 this one's 18 so she 18 going on 19 because young because um how do i know this is because um i was about to be 19 i was like i don't want to be in jail i don't want to be in jail when my babies is born and then even though i don't know anything about being a father i just don't want to be absent you know i sure i see what single parent homes do to kids. I'm like, all right, I quit. I'm cool. It just didn't last that long, though, because now living off the money I had, spending it rapidly, trying to get ready for being a father, that took the money down substantially. Yeah. It took the money down substantially. And you're not working at all. I'm not working.

No, I'm just spending. I take that back what i start doing is some um telemarketing for some company called excel it's some something something like that i did try that just sounds like a boiler yeah but it but it but it wasn't it wasn't lucrative at all it was like they talk to you crazy you gotta make these calls you have to try to recruit recruit recruit like it wasn't for me the margins in the drug game are pretty good man my um this this is this is crazy oh i went and worked at a warehouse for like four months man it was a walgreens distribution center warehouse because i'm like wow wait wait i'm down i'm down counting the money in the shoebox looking thin now the shoebox starting to look i can see the bottom of it i'm like oh wait wait this shit ain't making no sense my shit was full right and um um what happened is um what happened how'd it go oh oh i asked the boss for a raise because the baby was born and i'm like hey i'm gonna need a raise

man i wouldn't mind staying here but you know i know all positions just give me a raise and he's like okay i'll give you a raise 25 cent an hour. And I got my booster pay up, extra 25 cent. Man, pretty soon you'll be manager. In two or three years, you'll be manager. I was like, man, I'm never coming back here. I'm off. I said, tomorrow and the next day I'm off. I'm never coming back.

He's like, you'll be back. Ha, ha, ha. What are you going to do? You just had a kid. He laughed in my face when I told him I wasn't coming back. He laughed in my face. Mr. Martin, older black dude, laughed in my face that I didn't have another choice but to come back to work and accept that quarter an hour raise. I went back outside.

My cousins, my brother now, my younger brother, my cousin, they full-fledged and they get money. I'm talking about they full-fledged. They just switched drugs again. So one of the two twins goes that way. He's full-fledged. I run up on him. Is he in your parents' house anymore? Uh-uh. He's living with a girlfriend. He's 16. He's three years old. He's about 16.

So he's living with an 18-year-old girl. Go get an older girlfriend. Get an apartment. And he's just living in there with her. She had a kid. He pulls out a bankroll. I'm like, damn, bro, what's going on? He said, just come outside with me. You will he didn't want to explain to me i go out there it's booming we back from weed back to the hard shit we back to the crack back to the crack yeah we back on it again late 90s now

now late 90s but it's booming i'm talking about i'm like where's the surge of money coming from like what the hell is going on? Didn't even care. I was back in the game that quick, back hustling every single day. That's all I did. Wasn't looking for no job. I wasn't looking for no way out. I didn't even care, man. I mean, again, mind you, I feel like I've been through enough leading up to this where I have a child now.

I just need to make money. It was only money motivated now. I didn't even care about helping people. Just let me get my money and don't get in my way take care of my that's all i wanted to do at the time my daughter was a baby so she don't remember any of that she don't remember any of it so uh i mean ultimately nothing good could come from it however i just did what i had to do i did what i had to do man every single day no had to do, man, every single day. No days off. Sunday, no days off.

You were a hardworking drug dealer. But I was able to stack my money back up, man, and kind of like provide for my new daughter, you know what I mean, to the best of my ability. And when did this go south? Man, this only, okay. At this time, things in the city start changing so my cousin okay you how do i want to say this i i never claimed to be the biggest drug dealer no kingpin status i didn't make it to as high levels as some of the people who I know. But a person that I look to, I guess he was like a drug dealing mentor to me. He was kind of guiding me through how to do it, what he was doing and what would work. So what he did was he created a system where we're going to kind of make this thing into a into a machine kind of process. We're going to have lookouts. We're going to have lookouts. We're going to have lookouts.

One person collect the money. One person collect the drug. This is not going to be a freelance area no more. We're going to put all the money in, work it as a team, and in turn we're going to have organization and we're going to make more money. So that right there is what changed the game forever because the systemization of it

i mean when i tell you man it just it blew up man it blew up and i'm like what gave you this idea well of course he saw somebody else do it and he tried it in his own way with a few slight changes so we took control of a neighborhood and all the drugs being sold in that neighborhood all ran through us. Now, it wasn't my operation. I just was a significant player in the operation that happened to be able to make good money from doing it. Was there any—I keep thinking this today, but was there any gang affiliation going on with any of this, or was it a total separate entity? Not until later down the line so down the line the gang did this is what helped get the whole neighborhood 26 people

indicted which this is you could look this up and made the news was one of the biggest um drug slash gang indictments in oakland they wanted to call it that. They wanted more, but they did shut the entire operation down entirely. However, we just was getting money, man. It was like a burnout family. If you put that in there, the burnout family indictment, it'll come up. Burnout family indictment? Burnout family indictment. It took all of them.

Everybody went down. Everybody. So what ended up happening, though, we just we just we just. One look out on each corner. Everybody gets a walkie talkie. Everybody played a part in the in the operation. So nobody felt cheated. All the profit being made was dispersed through everybody that played a part. So it might be six to eight people per shift. Whatever gets made, pay for products, split the profit. Everybody gets paid. So me moving up the ranks and shit,

I was able to play a significant part in it and make enough money where I didn't have to be outside no more. Are you working directly with your brother doing this? Nah, it was a couple other players, like the people who organized it. My brother was we all were there we all were there so when the indictment when the feds came they knew everything i'm talking about every aspect of the operation and i want to say the indictment came around Oh, 2011. Yeah, we just saw one 2012.

It came up here. And this is long after you were... Yeah, yeah, but it was going for that long. Yeah, yeah. It was going for that long with multiple... Yeah, feds, Oakland Burnout Family Mafia. Yeah, okay. That's when the article came out.

How many people did it say? Yeah, see? 18-month-long investigation conducted by the U.S. So this is a neighborhood that I was... I mean, this is an indictment that took everybody I know. And you had been a part of this long before. The whole neighborhood went down for that. So look, look, corners selling heroin and cocaine on three corners in East Oakland controlled by burnout family mafia gangs. So we controlled that whole neighborhood.

No one else could come there and sell drugs and when they try is when the gang and when violence occurred when the federal agents and dea got involved and wanted names and players and surveillance and sitting there for days and days and watching houses and addresses and locations and was there any bloods and crips no no bloods and crips it's just like none of that burnout family in another neighborhood they're not affiliated the mini park or it would be a it would be a it would be more so like um okay it was like gangs would name themselves like something some person would come up with a gang one big one was nutcase case gang nutcase gang they they were big they were one of the biggest gangs in oak. Even still exists to this day. Burnout Family became a gang because we were making money.

And then the younger guys that came in after us wanted to be tough. So what they did is they start making enemies, which we knew drug dealing and violence never mix. So therefore, it just started going downhill. I tried to disassociate myself from that. But me, like I said, playing a position in that, it was lucrative enough. Yeah, you're making a lot of money. You can make two, three grand a day profit. It's hard to turn that off.

It's hard to turn that off, man. It's hard to turn it off. I think that's around the time I made the first million dollars I ever made. I was about 21 years old. Two to three thousand dollars profit a day every day Hustling hustling hustling not really having much of a life outside of that But doing that for month at the month month after month and I wasn't the highest paid member in the operation It was other people that was in it. Also that we're making more than me. It just was like

Okay, here it is. Uh You take care of this right here. This is what we solely want you to focus on. Just focus on this, man. Stick to the script, and this is what's going to happen. Then another person, okay, you only focus on everybody. You hire people. You find people. You make sure they're straight. Nobody can steal. We don't want to take no losses. If anybody lets the police penetrate us they gotta go we cannot be so for years and years we never got busted for years years i mean you just keep lookouts i mean you don't it's only one person dealing and they don't really know where he's at he's behind a gate he's

secure you can't even reach him you can only he's only hand and they have one person care kind of like protection holding the gun i I mean, that's what it was. Unfortunately, though, that just don't last long because they got hip to the starting with the lower members. It led them up to higher end members, which got my name across their desk. Like, I want to think. Long before these indictments. Long before those indictments. Long before those indictments. 40 before those indictments. Long before those indictments.

40 rivers. So when did you go down? I went down. Okay. So I went to state prison in 2003. No, no. Okay. This is what happened.

This is what happened. One day I get caught. I had like in the house. It was cocaine and a gun in the house that I was at. They were watching this house for another reason. DEA? No, it was the state. This is regular cops.

This is the Oakland Task Force. So they were watching the house for something else, and I was going over there kind of like processing and doing shit. And then when they came in that house and I was in there, this is what got me sent to san quentin back in 2003 so that was my first time you know no no no wow was that my first time well you said you went to you went to adult jail then i wasn't arrested for the week i got right out right you got right out on that right out you got probation so this is your first time doing a hard time yeah yeah but it really wasn't a hard time because i got a lawyer he argued that it wasn't my house yeah it was drugs and a gun there they wanted to know why i had a key to the house they ended up i played out to two years man did eight months and was back on the streets man so fast just from having the right

lawyer man but again i'm on a new probation so now the cops know if they get me again oh i'm on probation we can hold him he can't bail out he won't be able to have much of a fight that's right you know what i mean so you still went right back to it so once i got i went right back because there's not no time for a person making hundreds of thousands of dollars and at this time like i said oh three like i didn't even know how much money i was making i just was putting it up hiding it at multiple places and then the og who who told me who put me in it and told me how to do it he the one that told me like bro um basically you know you i i know you got a million already

and i'm like hell no no i'm getting there i'm getting there i know i got six four five six hundred k and whatever whatever he know how much he was holding. So in turn, he knew that I had to be doing the same because we were on the same program. But my point is I'm like, that didn't even seem like a lot of money. And I wish he never told me that because at the time it went to my head, I thought I was bigger than I was. I started spending money crazy. I was going to clubs, drinking champagne, showing off that I had money. I was buying Rolexes and buying flashier cars I just did all of the stupid shit that just didn't it didn't contribute to my growth in like I probably could have stayed really low-key and not focused on that and then transition better without this bigger case where in 2004 when I went to jail, just when I got that big time, like I said, I did 12 – I got 12 years straight state.

But you only do half of that. But if you go to fire camp, you can do a little less. Right. So you ended up doing five or six or something. Yeah, yeah, about four and almost five. But that's the time when I got caught. I think they caught like, what, 250 cash. They came in the house. I had

about almost 250 cash, had a kilo, maybe a kilo and a half. Was this state again? State again. Yeah, state again, because they associated me with the burnout gang as being a supplier, and they start following me around. And it, excuse me, they arrested me on a state charge. And yeah, that's when I had the, I was like, I sat down for that. During this whole period, do you have any contact with your parents and your family? Like, do they know their grandparents? My kids? No, no, no.

Like, your parents at the time and during this time period. Like, did they know your life at all? Did they know you had a kid? They know I had a kid. So the kid, the mother of my kids was able to communicate with them and they were able to be a part of my child's life me i was full-fledged running the street so my mom and dad they were totally against that and i didn't i didn't i didn't we didn't deal with each other so much so no no i never really never had a conversation i I saw him. He was so short with me to show his disapproval.

Like, I won't, we don't, you can't give me no, what? Not here. We don't want your money. We don't need nothing from you. You're a part of the problem. Like, oh. I've seen these movie scenes. You think you're hot?

You think you're hot shit out there just messing up the whole community, huh? You think you're so special? Like, nah, we don't want nothing to do with that. We're good upstanding people over here. That's why we moved over here. You stayed in Oakland, you stay over there. That was his exact words. You stayed in Oakland when we cut, you stay over there. We're over here doing

something different. What about your third brother? Or the second brother, I should say. He dibbled and dabbled. And the crazy part about that is man, he ended up getting indicted with me when I went to the feds. No, no, no. not that one the one who didn't get into that life yeah he got indicted with me for doing me a favor oh wait so the third

one ended up getting he got indicted with me man with the feds he never been in trouble before never been in trouble before into 2013 when i went to federal prison i asked him to do me a favor one time and he dropped off work to a federal informant. I fucked up so bad. I fucked up so bad. My third brother never been in trouble. We're going to get there. I didn't realize I was tied into that because that has to do with the dark web stuff and the credit card stuff. So you end up, you get rolled up again with the $250,000 cash and all that. You end up with doing close to five years. You're getting out 08, something like that?

08, yeah. Okay. So you come back into the streets, but you decide, I'm done with drug dealing at this point. while i was in state prison while i was in state prison i was considering myself a sociable so i was talking to people who um that normally probably wouldn't talk to inner city youth these dudes that's basically coming from east oakland richmond to ghetto so this guy he was telling me that he didn't think that I was making smart decisions about dealing drugs. He's like, man, that's just such a waste of time, such a waste of money. Was it worth it? The margins aren't that good.

How much is the most money you make? I told him I made over a million before. That's not a lot of money. You were really happy, huh? But you don't have it now. You spent it, man. How much of it were you able to save? And I told him about the case. So 250, the cops took on that case, took the drugs equivalent to about 50.

And then my one of my fake family members broke into a different stash house and stole another 200 K worth of drugs out of a stash house that only he knew about he knew about this stash house because he helped me get it it was a private stash house he broke in there when i was in county jail and by the time i called home to have somebody go move the stuff it was already gone oh my god my fucking fake family member backdo me he backdo took the shit so this took me down this took me from a place where i was pretty good pretty straight to almost a place of panic my last 150 200k to my name i was all scared i was nervous i felt i felt like kind of lost you're still in prison yeah while i'm yeah so i still you know you got nothing to come after all of these losses i'm knowing that i'm practically starting fresh when I come over.

Like I got some money stashed, but it's not like significant enough. That's like it's not life changing money. But I did have a cool stash. I had a cool stash. So this guy I meet in prison, he's like telling me about a different way to make money. But he didn't invite me in it, though. He's just telling me about it. Like, oh, you guys are crazy. I would never do that like how dare you i mean how's a prisoner

we're in prison and he's telling me i'm not shit but he's in here with me but anyway i didn't i wasn't there to fight him me and the guy actually were cool he was a different nationality and we were able to eat together because normally in prison you don't eat with other races. That's just a rule. Blacks eat with blacks. No, you're not invited over here. So his race could have got mad at him for even embracing me and so could my people. But everybody was pretty cool at that place

we were at. We was at Susanville. So it's a level two. Level three, no tolerance for level three So it's a level two. Level three, no tolerance for interracial mingling and all that. Yeah, I hear that from so many people. They just stick together. Stick together. We might go to war with them any given time, so don't intermingle with them. So while I was in there, we talking about this and he's like all right since we were really cool while we

there he's like hey when you get out um uh send me a picture some letters and show me how you doing man i want to know the after story right and then um if you could bring my um sister a few cans of bugler some cigarettes and shit man you know i like to smoke and whatever the case may be she's gonna smuggle it in here whatever i mean it's big business cigarettes in jail is like well i want to say three bucks per yeah it's a good trade good trading three dollars three dollars per one so uh i did it i did it because i wanted to keep my word i'm like i told him i would do it i'll do it so he in turn introduced me to what he was doing by way of okay so firstly when i got out i knew i didn't want to deal drugs no more i'm like man that shit is just terrible i would have to i would have to

start all over and come up man and they still doing it in the neighborhood you know i'm saying but if i go jump back in that i don't know how much heat they got i just convinced myself that that wasn't for me. But once this dude offered me the opportunity to kind of do the white-collar stuff, I had never known nothing about this, by the way, never. And I didn't even believe the kind of money that was involved. And what was he telling you specifically? How was he doing? Because we know you got into credit card fraud, different there's different ways to do this i i had i was telling you before i had john boziak in here who was very and i mean he was a big time credit card scammer for years back during this era and he was doing it more where he he ended up becoming a

printer of cards i believe but he also he was getting like mass supply from russia and ukraine through the dark web and then shipping it out. There was a lot of different things he was doing. But when you were in prison, this guy was explaining to you, here's how it's done. What was the methodology he had? He was telling me that they were able to get stuff. Okay, so what he did tell me was they got so much. It started off like he didn't even probably know how much he can trust me.

He started off saying, we have a lot know how much he can trust me he started off saying we have a lot of merchandise whatever you want and i'm like what do you mean like at the time flat screen tvs was really popular and there was expenses like i think we got a crate of flat screens we got a crate of laptops um iphones had just came out he said we have 30 40 iphones so he's like if you want you pay me this amount for them and then you go sell it but i'll always leave you room so wait that's selling straight all right and so not following okay so first things first he brung me in on the merchandise side his crew was going out doing the frog getting the stuff and selling it so his crew was going out getting all the shit he didn't

bring me right into the how we get it he's like so i got out i did the cigarette thing talked to his sister again he put me with one of his main guys so he's like all right yeah man like basically give me 8 000 right here right so i give him 8 000 it's like a container in this container if you might say the retail was close to 40 35 40 i wouldn't sell that container for 15 16 000 where the next person had room or room too so this might have been laptops all laptops and flat screen tvs that they were carding they were carding for this stuff yeah hey you think this is can you explain carding to people again john explain this but also carding is that they get um they get information from the dark web probably through russia ukraine or some people got they cut those

uh russians and ukraines out and then installed skimmers on all payment processing systems and then they put them in all of these stores that that kind of stuff works the best because it's unique to the area so i believe my guy how he had control of what they can make exactly he was a skimmer guy because he didn't like the russian ukraine ordering off the dark red i kind of like discovered that and ran across that but the quality of stuff you get from there is iffy because it's like seven out of fifty seven out of fifty sometimes but you can and you will make money off of that at that time this is before chip cards so his stuff mainly probably came from skimmers that he was collecting the information and he controlled it. You're saying skimmers?

A skimmer is like when you swipe your card at a payment processor, they're in the background getting your information, including your PIN number. How did they do that? So they – They hack it? Every system is made to be circumvented. They found out the person who makes the payment credit card processors, and then they build them. And then now you can go in the store and put your device on top of that. Oh, my God. You put a device on top of the existing one, or what you do is you could possibly hack into it, but I believe to localize, to make it better, you want specific – you want region-specific work.

And that's a big problem with Russia-Ukraine because they don't – they're not familiar with the regions and stuff around here. So you could get like the wrong zip code and – Yes. Okay. So region-specific work, that's how he controlled it. So I think I told you this off-camera. Like, if he had a card, he knew that that card would be able to spend $20,000. I'm like, yeah, but it's not a $50 card. If I'm telling you, and if you don't spend $20,000, I'll get you another one until you spend $20,000.

So my thing is all I needed was some people to help me out with my play. Once I got over buying his stuff, reselling it, making some money. I'm like, this is way more money than I made off drugs because I spent $8,000 to make five profit. When you went home, is your girl and your kid still around too? No, my girl left by then. I mean, five years in prison. I couldn't expect her to stay um because this is like i didn't even know i couldn't even fathom doing that i couldn't even fathom that actually so um she left i had a new girl when i came home i met a new girl i reconnected with the girl who

i knew before and we ended up getting together so um that's why i came home and i was your daughter's away my daughter's out of the house which still defeated the purpose of me wanting to be a father there with my child. But prison ruined that anyway. But the great part from all of this is my parents embraced my children where they know nothing about any illicit activity, any circumventing systems. So even when your girl, like, did she move far away? She didn't move far away. She moved on to another guy and had kids with another man. So they they're around we were we were done like the my first daughter's mom

and by then i do have another daughter that i had in between that prison sentence but then i'll explain to you like the relationship yeah i'll explain that too so um so now once i get – I find out that this is a way to make way more money and easier and less risk, I mean, again, I rationalize that. What's the harm? The bank will pay them back anyway, but I knew exactly almost what I was going to make, and it was – it turned back into a $30,000, $50,000 a month. You're financially inconveniencing. I mean, yeah, yeah, a little bit. I mean, I didn't do it. I didn't do it.

They're going to do it anyway, even if I don't do it. Yeah, it's not a crime. These big banks don't care about us anyway. Yeah. They got billions. They're insured. I came with every reason to make it. Hit the insurance hours, come on.

Yeah, to make it make sense. But he gave me an opportunity to kind of go on my own and not deal with him. However, that's when I was like, OK, I can order this dark web work and I can order this dark web stuff in bulk for way less. But it's like much harder. It's much more footwork. So I still needed him. He made sure I still needed him, even though he gave gave me the game he kind of put me in it again like i'm like how the hell this fool knows this he's walking around with dusty sweatpants on in a prison yard dirty shoes he's brilliant i'm like if those dudes on the yard knew i just think he knew some some people he must have knew he didn't ever tell me but who do you know that can make skimmers i mean i don't know anyone that can do that like like i couldn't even i even looked online and

tried to learn it and figure it out but he he never told me that but obviously a person that can extract um credit card information personal information and and then from there you do a like background check and you find out all the information needed on a person i mean it's infinite possibilities of what you can do and this is for part of the reason why i don't deal with people's personal and financial information to this day i just won't do it man i mean it's a real real touchy thing iffy kind of deal that people are it's hard to trust somebody who you know may be capable of doing these kind of things but i don't even care to do that because i don't ever need my name coming back up and some shit

like that again so so um what ended up happening was uh i knew what i could get from him and and he wasn't gonna deal with too many people he had milked this obviously it made millions this guy who on the prison yard he still stayed there another two years before he got out and got deported so he oh he got deported deported where did he get deported to back to the europe somewhere back out of here he got he got kicked out he gave he never i never saw him when he got out i never saw him in part i am going back to my country yeah he went back but he had made millions he had made me yeah. I'm like, damn, but nobody there with him, no. And this is the peak of that era.

You are in the peak of like when dark web credit card scamming was like the vibe. Oh, yeah, and it's people running up and down state to state doing it, all these news stories, everything you hear about it. All right, real quick, I got to go to the bathroom, but we'll be right back all right we're back so we were leaving off with getting into some of how you were doing this so like we said this is this was kind of the peak of this period and everything but what what was the after you started like moving product initially right so you're basically taking the iphones laptops whatever you can sell based on what they were able to scam off of what did this end up turning into like how did you expand the business I basically started I started my own operation where I got I recruited a couple people to work directly with me as with a profit share instead of saying oh you work for me bring

me back all the money no we're going to share the profit off of this. A true businessman. I mean, mixing in some of that Ukraine, some of that work, giving it to them, letting them code it, letting them write it, code it, go out and use it. What do you mean write it, code it? So once you get the information, it comes in a certain format. They have to put it on a magnetic strip card. They have to either that or you have to order. You get the complete credit card information and all other personal information where you can order online.

You order stuff online. Like since you have all information, they'll deliver it anywhere you want. Security wasn't as tight back then. Like you said, it's the peak of it all. And so many things happen. They don't even know how to attack that. So I wouldn't have to do it. I just kind of formed a team. So I got like three people that I could trust. And then I explained it all to them. Like, okay. And of course, well, now that I'm giving you everything, you can do it on your own. However, your, your management skills aren't like

mine's. You'll make more money with me instead of going off on your own. One or two people went off on their own and tried to do it, but they came back. Were these people that you knew from your drug dealing days? One was, but then in this industry, it's easier to work with women. They're not suspected to be doing what they're doing, and especially if a middle-aged or older woman that dressed professional. So it was a system that— Where were you finding these people?

I would find people who may have— Monster.com? Felt like a friend of a friend, a referral of somebody. If anybody asks to borrow money, my question is, why do they need to borrow money? What's wrong with their situation? What will fix their situation? I will.

She's in between jobs or her husband left or they broke up from a relationship or she's behind on bills. Oh, okay. Well, actually, do she want to make some money? I don't have a problem helping her make money rather than giving her $250, $300. Tell her to talk to me. Let's go eat. So I recruited some good people like that main older women a couple older guy not young hipsters sagging jeans true religions no i didn't want my crew to look like that so they went in unsuspectedly and did what they had to do

it because i just didn't want to be involved with that directly because now after the jail time i'm like i don't want to go back i'm just like no you're on probation i'm on parole i'm on parole state parole which which coming in contact with the cops back in for a year like oh they say you were suspected to be doing something like you were in a uh uh you were in the scene of you in the vicinity of a crime so let's just sit you down for a while until we figure out what's going on it's just too easy to get violated on parole rather than probation it's just no tolerance so um did you get like a real job because you have to i actually i actually was working through a family member like uh that that cleaning service actually was working through that and then i also

like your mom's thing no no my mom gave that up in like uh 99 2000 my brother and my cousin took the business over and you were working and they just kicked her back money my brother and my cousin so they got three vans they're doing um upholstery carpet they're doing um towel janitor they doing everything this is the third brother yeah yeah they're doing they're doing that they're there that it's rolling it's doing doing it. It's moving. And I was like, okay, hire me. He was like, all right, cool, cool, cool. But after that, I was like kind of selling cars and just whatever I can do to keep my parole officer off of me and show him that I was getting a legal check.

And then on the side. On the side. After losing my money, after being like, okay, so everybody believe all they have to do is make a million dollars that's going to change their life forever or just make way more money than they have but it's not because whenever you do most people aren't ready for that i mean the pandemic when everybody got money that didn't have money they kind of showed you that they weren't supposed to have money because all they did is spent it and gave it right back into the economy. None of them hardly saved it, but you got to think 85% of the people did nothing with the money. So no matter what you're

doing, you have to be the top 10% because most drug dealers will never make it to a kilo. Most drug dealers will never make a hundred thousand dollars. I had read this book while I was in prison. It was kind of, I think what the dog saw by matthew gladwell he says malcolm gladwell malcolm gladwell what the dog saw so what the dog saw that most prostitutes they prostitute for survival only very few less than five percent of them will end up being successful in transition from prostitution to whatever else they're going to do same thing with drug dealers most drug dealers live with their mom. He did a study and got all of the statistics that says most drug dealers only make enough money to survive. The ones that will become lucrative, the ones that would make it to a lucrative business is so far and few in between. You can

go do anything else and make more money than a drug dealer. But they see they're coming up they see the main guys because most people only make it to like one ounce and then they'll do it every single day and never have ten thousand save same thing with financial crimes fraud or any of that to do what some people did that i know become a millionaire from fraud scam and financial top ten percent then a top 10% of that because the money will come in fast like 60k 50k months were normal for me but I didn't do nothing because I've had money and I lost money so all I want to do is put that money up and put that money up I didn't I didn't want to shop spin ball out now okay a birthday are you talking about like when you had 50 60k with the credit card stuff 50 60k a month start coming from credit card stuff after paying my crew and then not being directly involved.

Still can make 50, 60K a month back then. So it's just the way because. It's a lot better than we're doing here. I mean, listen. I mean, I thought it would serve me. But again, it didn't because I kept going at one point and I'm holding $750,000, $800,000 cash. I wouldn't have bought a Bentley. I bought a motherfucking Bentley, man,

of all the things I could have did. Now, here I am being a stereotypical black guy. As soon as you get money, why do I need this car? It was $170,000 at the time. I wouldn't have got it. Was this like 2010? Yep, and it was an 09.

It was an 09. It was an 09 in 2010. I had that. So here I am. Why did you feel like you needed to buy that? A few people started doubting me. The chatter and the whispers was that I fell off and I lost it all. And I'm in the same community.

Instead of me getting out of that community completely, I was gravitated right back to where it all started in an environment nobody's doing anything different than another and they was like yeah he used to be oh it was a time when he was that dude but look at him now amongst us and i got what i had a gto a silverado and then um my girl at the time i think she had a um a regular bmw6 series so with this chatter here it is i know i'm hold more money than these dudes that's talking shit about me i went out come with the black bentley big rims coming through pulling up and they all shut up right they all shut up they were like wait wait what that's almost a 200k car and we were just whispering that he's not the dude oh shit now they're asking me how to get on this is 2010 they asking me how can i get on

with you i know you're not putting together they know i'm not dealing yeah the the the the burnout family mafia they're going that burnout family they're going it's up it's still going but it's different players but the game is still the same i just couldn't go implement myself directly in that so now they asking me questions. I'm that dude. I have the answers because all you have to do is look a little bit better than the student. And then you could be a professor, right? The professors now just look a little better than the students.

Although they're not that much smarter. They're not that much smarter, but they look like it. Depends on the professor. Depends on the – you know what I'm saying? Because – so I do that. And then now I do back and forth to Miami, Vegas. I'm balling. I'm gambling.

Start cheating on my girl, messing with random women. You know, it's expensive to be a player. I don't know what these dudes make it glamorize. They glamorize it on social media. But to be a player and have four or five, three different girlfriends, that is expensive. They don't come cheap, especially when they know you have a girl. It's interesting, though, because like you've moved was there something in you that that designated this as above and better and i'm this is the wrong word to use but like

more upstanding than drug dealing so you rationalized it to yourself and said all right i might be breaking the law but i'm not really breaking the law like that uh i tried that and it only works when i'm drinking or smoking weed i mean you know what i mean because ultimately if you get caught with this this is a uh a secret service it's a federal offense when you you get caught with this so i knew it carried time. We just had one of those investigators in here. I'm just saying. That'd be Ron Porras, yeah.

See what I'm saying? So the rationalization is only to make me sleep better, I guess, but I kind of knew it was messed up. But one of my things I used to tell myself was, well, I didn't steal their information. I didn't do it. I just came up. I just found it. I just came. I have to do it. I just came up. I just have to use it. And then the people who I

was talking to, nobody was rooting for me to be great. It's like, what do you mean? I surrounded myself with people where it was like always some sort of competition of who can do it better. Like had I been around people who I ended up meeting later down the line, that'll sit there and tell you you're wrong, dude. It's nothing right about that, man. So you're going to sit here and try to convince yourself that that shit is cool because it might have forced me to take a step back. But all of these, the people who I'm around, go, go, let's go, let's go. Ball hard, ball hard.

They like, you know, you go to a club and a bar you standing on couches and everybody got a bottle in their hand and you feel like you're celebrating a championship it's good feeling you know what i mean and then more liquor more you know i mean weed you want some molly you want the pill you want to it just turns into so much more toxic behavior i mean so i tried to rationalize it but but that shit didn't work. That shit just didn't work, man. I just was hoping I was able to get enough ahead to jump out of it, like to jump out of it, which never happened. What did a normal day look like for you? Back then? Yeah, like what was a business day?

A business day. A day at the fraud office. A business day at the fraud. So how did it go? Wake up anytime I wanted, but I still would get up early. Nice to be the boss. Yeah, don't have to rush anywhere um find out the play for the day like uh who's gonna be on like i already know who's gonna do

it like if two people one person and exactly what the job will consist of and what what might a standard job be a standard job would be like okay uh we're not dealing with this Russian-Ukraine stuff. Three carts, two people, get close to $70,000 worth of stuff. 60 to 70,000. Different stores. Different zip codes, different days. It was all case specific. So we want to go to affluent areas that won't blink an eye at what you're doing though because it like you're gonna be going and it basically so it's not every day though because on a Monday or Tuesday nobody's

going into one store to spend 12 5 like it on a Saturday or Sunday like a busy shopping day those are the days so some days all I would do is just kind of like chill get my shit together um work on a plan try to gather as much stuff as i can that i know will be used in the coming days so that's what a typical day will be preparing for those work days because you gotta think every day scouting locations scouting locations gps system who's on it um car that can't be traced mind you so that's some of the hard stuff that goes in there you can't use the same vehicles back and forth at all of these different stores. You can't do it.

So changing the car. Where are they going to put all this stuff? At a cargo van? Buy one? Rent one? Rider? I'm using assumed identities to rent vans that won't link back to an actual person. So you're getting fake IDs for some of your guys.

Because they weren't actually running the driver's license at these locations to even know if they were valid or not so you can send a person into a location to rent a cargo van with an id now they do but then you can just go in there you showing the driver's license and stuff like that especially if it says out of state they don't even know how to use international, I mean, interstate systems. They don't even know how. So he's from Arizona. He's about to go and rent this cargo van for a day or maybe two days. Nobody ever checked. So planning. So I planned that, but I may not do nothing but on a work day. So we get the routes to them, give them a GPS,

get them going, kind of have a list of what we want. And my buyers already kind of tell me what they want. So at one point, Apple products was just really, really, really popular. Who were your regular buyers? Wow. Well, if I had to say, it'll be… It's just you and me? There's no cameras?

International. It wasn't our people. It was more like Asians, Armenians, Indians, like people that keep large amounts of cash. They may be doing some export-import. They might be having their own store to go sell at retail, like at higher margins. I just actually had some Asians. I had some good Asians with a lot of cash. And they were very, very private and personal and stuff.

And how would you communicate with them? Actually, you go get a – it wasn't a track phone. It was not a – Burner phone? Burner phone, like a flip, a little flip, little phone. They don't want to – or like one guy in particular, particular he owned a cell phone shop so he would give me phones and then swap sims will you give me here take this phone take this phone you know i mean and he he he gave me i learned good lessons from him also because um he taught me that sometimes being greedy is the main thing

that's going to destroy you and i'm like what do you mean what do you mean and he's like, you know, you bring me all of this stuff. You're not the only one that brings me this stuff. I take far less margin off of each item, like 30, 50, 60 bucks, but I can sell as much as I want. I know how you guys get this stuff. And here it is. You're making three, four, $500 profit. You're making thousands of thousands of dollars, but you won't make more than me because I do business different than you. He's basically like you kind of you guys are greedy, but I don't care because I make my money off of it. Let's just keep this going until it plays out, because you got to think if he's a guy that can buy 100 iPhones a day, he has the cash on deck to buy them and he knows how to sell them to his network over one or two day period to make 50, 60 bucks per and just keep this going, then ultimately his weekly, monthly income margins are going to be pretty high because

he's just quick in, quick out. Me, I'm like, nah, I need 75% of retail value for these products. That's it. You know what I mean had no problem playing paying that much for it And then I had other people who I would take stuff to mainly stuff that they ordered How did you initially connect with those buyers like you just found him online? people know people and then also a Forms forms were real big then like right. I don't know how cool no it wasn't even google it was that uh that onion browser tour tour that tour back then so this is what people were using to get on silk road yes were you doing some of this through silk road i didn't do silk road but on tour you can

find a form for anything so on those on those forums people that are looking to sell buy items this that then you tell them what area you win and this is like around a time when um cryptocurrency and digital currency was all popping like i said i i knew about um cryptocurrency digital coins and tokens like before bitcoin is like perfect money was liberty reserve it was like so many other forms of payment that we used to use before Bitcoin came along. Then Bitcoin, of course, took over. Like I had Bitcoin at –

$2? No, hell no. It was like $89. I got some – anyway, I had it. You still got that? I had it in – that's what saved me when I came out of federal prison to some Bitcoin. But it was like $89. $89, like in 08.

How many Bitcoins did you have? I had, back then I had thousands. I had so many of them because I think when it was popping, I had $20,000 and $30,000 at the time, but it was all going out. It was going out, but I wasn't able to save

but eight or ten of them and as yeah go ahead at the um peak like when it blew up i was only able to save like eight or ten like so you at least you at least still had that when you were coming out of prison that's the only thing you still have that now that say well i had to liquidate some of it and then i had to liquidate what year that? That was 2018, 2017, 2017. Well, actually, 2017 wasn't as bad. It wasn't as bad, but I didn't think I would even have it. Like, I just didn't tell nobody. I was praying.

I was hoping. Like, I knew then it would be worth way more than what I had. Like, I was like, damn, wait. All I needed was getting this computer, getting this computer, and it was there. I was like, damn. Did you have it on a hardball? I had it on a hardball. Yeah, it was good. damn, wait. All I need to do is get in this computer, get in this computer. And it was there. I was like, damn. Did you have it on a hardball? I had it on a hardball. Yeah, it was good.

It was good. I was so fortunate to go back then. So people, I didn't tell a bunch of people either. I didn't even tell a bunch of people about it. Yeah, you don't want to tell them about that. Hell no, because they were like. Alessi, when was your dad buying this? Like how early?

2016, 17. All right, so he was later okay that's it was big money because you gotta think uh i got in i can go look back on my phone and i know exactly where i was getting in at 89 119 a coin but you gotta think some some weeks i'm spending 10k 12k 15k because if this dude is coming with some heavy work like he like all right it's a package deal with 150 worth of work 150 spin he's gonna guarantee me i could spend 150 or replace the card until i spend 150 yeah so everybody's gonna be oh you're a scammer you're a fraudster okay say what you want i've been called, but I had a guy who can give me dedicated amounts like on cards. Like so it's $150,000 I can go spend.

Well, he wants 27.5 cash up front and he's going to assure me I can go spend a 150. Now, what I do with this 150 when I spend it, I have to go get 75, 80 percent of the value because I have to pay my crew recoup the investment and then move on to the next deal these guys though that you were buying for that you found on these forums were they did you know their identities not really they never wanted to tell you that no i didn't i didn't you meet a person in between i met a person in between. I met a person in between. Don't bring your workers with you. Like, nah, don't bring them. Like you'd meet in person with a go-between guy? I would meet before.

I have before. San Jose. He knows where San Jose is. San Jose. Milk Petus. Every now and then it's a random person at a coffee shop hands me an envelope of cash. That's it. Wait, they would – so people from other countries will send

over people to send you cash during an era where you're doing everything transactionally online with digital currency but but they have people here anyway like it could be a family member they have some people here because i'm not the only one they're communicating with like this is a guy i met in person that russian ukraine work that that shit, it hit. There's some people that made money off of that. I swear it's a bunch of people on YouTube still giving tutorials and still milking that. That shit been over with, but they're still milking that about how they ordered 1,000 credit card numbers for $2,000

and they were able to go sell them and distribute them, which I tried some of that work too, but the problem with that was people were going to come back and be like, yo, only two out of those ten work. I want a refund. I want a refund. So it's a hassle. It's almost like curb serving.

It's almost like selling hand-in-hand. I wanted to be a behind the scene in anything that I was doing. I didn't want to give me that spending power. But he wants pretty much $30 cash up front, Bitcoin, $30 in Bitcoin. So this is how much Bitcoin I was buying at the time, but I didn't never know or think anything of it. Who was your source again to actually get the cards? Which one? To get the numbers? It's still the guy that I was in prison with.

Right. It's still him right it's still him it's still him but again once and he's over there now he's over there but we don't we talking all the time we we did we what is icq so back then back then we use an icq um it was uh another what was this other one icq and then it was another one like signal all it was it was a um signal sounds right no no no that wasn't it was icq and it was like peeing it like it was one more app like uh that you can use that was encrypted where you could communicate with people before what's happened all that but icq was the main one where you can communicate with anybody around the world safely encrypted

whatever at least so we thought and that's why that's how we communicated directly and then we would talk through there too once they added a phone feature once they added a phone feature we could talk through there that's it never on a regular communication device but like i said this dude's stacking up so much money so even to this day but anyway we'll get there too but okay he um what happened so oh so so i have to give him that much bitcoin so it didn't mean much to me like before bitcoin liberty reserve their founders got indicted with over 300 million dollars in digital currency of people and that's that week bitcoin crazy. We went directly from Liberty Reserve directly to Bitcoin.

So perfect money lasted for a little while. But the federal government put a warning on the Liberty Reserve site that, yeah, if you have money with this company, contact us, please. Let's figure out how to get you your money with this company contact us please let's figure out how to get you your money yeah right yeah the owners of that got 25 years each you can look that up liberty liberty reserve digital currency founders indicted yes i had about 19 000 and that locked in that i never got out that was 20 wait 19 000 dollars worth of digital currency no no no they didn't use bitcoin that was their its own currency like they made it i was thinking of bitcoin 20 years liberty reserve what year does that say 2016 liberty got convicted arrested yeah it says jailed for 20 oh

arrested arrested shut down the online facility shut down in 2013. It operated out of Costa Rica. Prosecutors in New York said many of its clients had been cyber criminals who had sought to move funds anonymously. Two other men involved in the business were sentenced to shorter jail terms. Two more people will be sentenced 13 May. The authorities are still trying to locate further two suspects. That's what I read. This domain has been seized. And that's when I that's what i read this domain has been seized and that's what they like

yeah that's when i tried to log in and yeah i think that that's like what they had on silk road so i saw that i was like damn everything i have here is stuck and then from then on out i was using only exclusively bitcoin from then on out but actually i want to say that the oldest safest most popular payment process of serving millions around the world yeah you know what i mean wow so many people don't know about that but that's how i would pay people internationally is with that and they was like oh but cartel members use this cyber criminals and terrorists so they went to costa rica to get his ass and he he's gone but um you make it 50 60k a month at that age like 50 60k a month 2011-ish some all the way till indictment all the way until indictment but how'd you how'd they get you like

how did how long was that investigation who was involved so what happened oh my god man like me uh what my uncle say he's deceased now said boy you got those big kahunas. Boy, you take more risks, more chances than anybody I ever met. So now I'm exclusively. Oh, okay. So one of my friends, he gets out of prison for drug dealing stuff, drug related stuff. So now he needs to get on his feet. So I'm like, well, let me help you out, man. This is what I'm doing over here.

He's like, man, that shit don't work. That's for those girls. Like, whatever, man. This is what I'm doing over here. He's like, man, that shit don't work. That's for those girls. Like, whatever. He's doubting what I'm doing. So I bring him in on what I'm doing. First things first. And I kind of explain it to him. But he was more fascinated with kind of having control.

So he used the Ukraine work. And he was using what he got his own reader writer. He was able to press up the cards with an embosser. Do all of his own stuff. Yeah. So he and I i we were doing it together he got on his feet quick within a couple months right so he ended up getting in trouble man he got in trouble when he came back and started wearing a wire getting me to admit crimes that i

was committing and things that i was involved with so what what ended up happening he was like um we was getting money i'm talking about we was making all kind of money partying traveling drunk i mean we were busting all kind of moves right so what he did was he uh he got in trouble and i guess he offered me or they asked him about me one or the other so what he did he started wearing a wire around 2011 and they built the case for a couple years so what he did over this amount of time who was running the case who the feds the feds were secret service no this was this was uh okay so it started off as local uh and then it went to the fed it got bumped up and they was like well what are you guys doing and how are you you doing this? Well, he gave them all of that. He gave them all of that.

And he's like, okay, but how can we get him? Can we get him with it? Can you get him to like, we need him. We need him. And they were trying to discover. Yeah, we need him. He's the leader. How many people?

So they're trying to make it into an operation, right? This shit is crazy, man. This shit right here. I mean, a lot of people question this which i got all my paperwork because i didn't cooperate i didn't get any downward departures no no no no leeway at all plus i had a criminal history so uh so this is just so fucked it's ironic however i made the decision i don't blame anybody even him i blamed him for a while like how could he cooperate against me you my boy i would have did anything for you you could have came to me

we would have got through this together so he's telling him my whole operation my whole plan he has a Bentley he bought man this dude is a millionaire off of this shit i'm telling you i'm telling you they're like okay but we can't arrest him we know all about him we looked him up he was a big time coke dealer can he still get the cocaine and he's like nah he don't fuck with that no more he won't mess with it wanted to try to roll you up he's like we don't mess with that no more bro i'm telling you this fraud little ring that he's doing he's making money he's making money he told him everything he comes around me and start asking me for uh cocaine i'm like bro why would you ask me for that i'm not i'm not messing with that no more bro why we want that bro i just made like 14 000

today like look 14 000 and i'm just waiting on the next work to come in i'm gonna help you out like what about the little case you called he's like oh man they let it go it was a little it was simple man i mean come on man you know it ain't a big deal plus i got what's the name is the lawyer uh eric poe eric this lawyer that's local he keeps asking me over and over over and over about the shit and i'm like no no no no no finally one day i'm like uh he's like well what about a small amount can you get me a small amount of coke and i'm like like what he's like you still don't have red lights going off here in this nah because i said no no no over and over i know again over again and then he's like um he brings a guy around he brings this guy around he's his cousin from wisconsin allegedly oh yeah and we kicking it just dude comes around us over three times we drink we go to the club he's fresh fly, fly. He looks just like us.

And he's like, oh, yeah, man, my boy said you used to be rolling with the soft. That's what they call it, with the soft. You used to be rolling with the soft. I say, I used to, but I won't fuck with that no more, man. There's no money in that shit. It's like, I'm not even fucking with that. He said, he didn't tell you about the other play? Like, we got another play, bro. He's like, nah, because my people want this, man.

Is it cool to try like a halfway? Is it a try? I'm like, nah, I'm just no, no, no, no. One day I run into an old friend that got the shit. And then he's asking. I'm like, okay, this dude wants this. Okay, I'll just do it. They're going to give me $1,000 for just putting it together. Very low margin.

And I fucking gave it to him. I gave it to him. Nothing happened. Didn't think nothing of it. So this dude that he brought around is a cool dude. He's cool. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Allegedly. He's a cool dude. Don't think nothing of it. He don't even ask me no more. It's cool. We still, we doing our thing and shit. So he like asks him for those cards, those pre-made, those. Yeah, yeah.

Right. We want that. if he can get that and he's showing that he has that's enough to prove he has this operation my boy will never meet nobody or talk to nobody but me my person that's applied you can get that ukraine work all day who cares you can go to silk road and you can find somebody yourself to get that in any 16 year old kid could do that but my person he would never ever he that was i'm not talking to nobody but you i don't i'm not dealing with nobody but you i don't even care he's like i don't care we like you can't don't even ask you can't convince me to deal with nobody

i trust you i walk the yard with you not them so uh that was out so he he puts together a deal for five kilos of that cocaine from that same guy. He puts together a deal and he's like, yeah, cuzzo. He wanted he coming back out here, man. Now you are you have already been convicted. Yes. Of moving drugs. Before. Literally twice.

Twice. Yes. It's bad. It's bad. Now, now, mind you you i sold to him already i already sold to this dude eight months ago it's about seven or eight yeah but now we're talking real numbers so he's talking real numbers so i'm like wow so for five keys i know i can make uh i can make a 10k in a day but you're making 50 i know. This is where my greed destroyed me.

This is where my greed destroyed me because he's in a car with me in a Bentley. We driving around. We kicking it. We drinking and driving. We just laughing. Life is good. I don't even know I'm already under investigation. He asked me a question.

He's like, how much this car cost again, bro? Because this shit way better than my Benz. I was like, it was almost 200. It was like 170 something because I left off this and I left off that but it still got everything I wanted in it he's like for real what you owe on it I was like come on bro you already know how we do man you know how we move I let what's the name hook it up and we played like this and I gave him cash and then paid him more and more and that's I got the pink slip already he's like what like so you don't even got a note on this I'm like no I don't know like whatever but that's neither here nor there what we doing about this money he's like dude gonna come through and um he want the five of them so i was like but you know i can't do that

bro he gotta bring you the money we counted up together i take it to my guy he counts it he gonna have somebody else drop the shit off to uh that somewhere else and then i'm out of it like that i don't want to. He's like, what you want off of it? He's like, I ain't even tripping. I don't really got to get nothing out of it, man. I ain't tripping. Just give me $1,000 or $2,000 because I want him to know we serious.

What I did is agree to make the deal on a fucking wiretap. I agreed to make the deal. So that constitutes conspiracy. Mind you, I sold to him already over 500 grams what is this 2012 this is 2012 exactly so i already had sold to him before the undercover dea agent already sold to him which is allegedly well no not even directly though because i didn't hand him i asked my brother to drop it off to him oh because i was busy now did your brother know what it was he didn't know what it was i asked him to meet somebody

and give him a bag. Meet somebody and give him a bag. He got indicted with me. Mind you, he only got just for his involvement, he got three years. He's never been in trouble. It's a conspiracy to commit

a conspiracy to distribute using a wireless device for using a communication device in furtherance of a crime. It's like four charges that me, I got offered 10 years. One of my first felonies, the first time I went to San Quentin, they couldn't use it because it was over 15 years old and that's when i accepted the seven years same day when they said well first because it was a hundred it was um it was a hundred years no no no 120 months that was the only deal because in in a federal government they don't negotiate with facing 100 years 120 months 120 months but oh so no no no, no, no. I agreed to do the deal, though.

I agreed to do the deal. The judge wouldn't accept it. He said, because it sounded a little like y'all tricked him into agreeing to that. But I will give him time for what he did sell. Oh, so the judge saw it your way. Yeah, because they almost, I said no so mean so many times well that's the thing they did we keep looking at this from the perspective of like how could your alarm bells not be going off but like looking at it now the other way they this is kind of textbook entrapment they wanted

to you were doing something else which i guess we're going to get to how they wired that in but like they then wanted to make it into something else that was more we're going to get to how they wired that in but like they then wanted to make it into something else that was more based on your record and they kept sending someone with a wiretap to go back over and over again to convince you to do it yes over the judge wow so he said well because that agreeing to do that could get you 20 years with my criminal history but being that being that i didn't agree i i didn't do the deal like had i showed up with the shit or like okay i'm on my way to get it now because when he called back the day of like like all right i'm gonna call you and we're gonna do the deal well when he called me i was so leery and paranoid and i kind of got a word that is something wrong about this so just just skip it right i got

word that to skip this deal so when he called the day of i just didn't answer and i didn't show up but had i answered showed up or attempted to make the deal like but your brother no no no the other shit we we did a deal almost to verify that the guy who's ordering it is okay. But we did a deal with him before. That only validated that the guy was cool because we did a deal with him. Nothing happened. So he's cool if we ever revisit it in the future, which I just didn't want to do. You know what I mean?

That's the deal where it was an actual actual transaction which is where i got sent but so okay so the day he called he's like we coming no no he said we're gonna do it tomorrow or the next day like everything's gonna be set up but i already got a call from somebody else they'd be like you know what i just don't like this play this play is not looking right man like like skip it skip it. Like, we're not doing this, man. If it's in your best interest, man, don't do it pretty much. You know what I mean? Basically, the call was a little bit more intense than that, man. The call actually went like, that dude was a federal informant.

They already got you under indictment. Don't do this deal, but you already going to go to jail for the deal you did with him. Right. I got that call. That's the exact call that I received that change that made me see a ghost so when he did call for it i just knew not to do it and i fell back and shit but i was already fucked up so now i'm thinking why has nothing happened yet yeah why haven't they come why haven't they come back why haven't they come back if i already sold to their undercover but did they move on completely from the credit card stuff at this point?

Well, they actually still tried to, because I'm like, what the fuck is going on here? I got a call saying that this is a setup, like all of that shit is going to go bad, but this is how I make my money. I'm being investigated for this. I kind of fell back on that thinking that if i stopped doing this right now then i'm i'm in the clear however when they finally came and they did look for me in a communication device and laptops when they came i didn't have none of that shit no more so they couldn't charge me with that but although they brought it up in court and they was trying to

tie in both like okay he's a credit card fraud fraud cocaine dealer right the judge is like we just can't i can't accept that what do you have on that he had a large amount of cash uh he had a large amount a large amount of cash and he had three cell phones like i need something else though more than just this hearsay from this guy so my conviction the seven years that i actually got in the federal prison was more related to the drug thing than a dark web i mean then the credit card thing talk about the dark web thing i could talk about that because okay so basically i was that i um it's a statute of limitation but but basically it seemed like what do you have like um like this dude made all this up we need we still need some concrete evidence we need some

kind where is that computer if we get that computer if we get those communication devices where he was doing any of that like uh uh that silk road guy got caught in san francisco oh yeah of all places man i said how the hell could this GOAT of all times, how could he be so close but so far in how he was looking and how he was moving, man? It just let me know that all the shit that I thought I was doing was very small, breaking the law, committing crimes, circumventing systems, cutting corners. It should just never work, man, because no matter what level you make it to, you'll still do it. He had, back then, $ 200 million in Bitcoin, right? How much was it? It was a lot.

It was going 100 million in Bitcoin in 2013. They took all of it, and then I think there's some that they claim the government was. They claim they've never found. Really? Yeah. Yeah, right. I bet they never found it. But I was in the Federal Detention Center reading every bit of the story about him because the owner of the Silk Road, which he started lacking to when he brought violence into it. And whenever violence comes into anything.

If it was him. If it was him? If it was him. Violence. There's some questions there. That he was a front man, huh? There's not just that he was a front man we know he created it i'm very comfortable with that like i i think it's crystal clear he created but he was he was the dread pirate roberts but

there is there is controversy as to whether or not there were multiple dread pirate roberts people with access i believe that part however they felt like they got a person they can pin it on and again like like case closed then shut up about it but a new dread pirate the the real dread pirate could have still been available but that laptop you see how important it was for them to get that oh yeah open yeah so me for instance getting caught with my laptop would be cooked that laptop which which just so you never got caught with any of that? Nah, I didn't. I didn't ever get caught with any of that. However, some of the members got caught with it.

How are you able to talk about this today? So talk about this today. If this isn't what you really got rolled up on. So talk about this today. Okay. I know a lot about the dark web, financial crimes and fraud, because again, most people that did it, they did, because again, most people that did it, they did it for survival. Most people that did it, they don't really understand the system, because, okay, so here- I understand that, but if you're talking about crimes that you guys committed of like an organization you were running, that then a lot of these things you

didn't end up getting charged for, are we past the statute of limitations? Can you talk about this? Okay, so for a crime like that, that's like a statute of limitation on a financial crime, I want to say, is what, seven years? I think it totally depends on the crime. It depends on the crime, who was affected. Let's hope we don't find out. here it is okay me me giving a a detailed account of what happened it it it's it's it's still um it's it's loose enough for room room to fill in some blanks so so what does that mean like okay so a lot of these things happen and they actually happen and i was directly involved in them, right? However, if you want to go fine-tooth comb this and come with something to say, how are you actually connected to this? Who were these people involved? We're going to need some people to point you out that they actually did this with you. We're going to need some people to really, really verify this because, I mean, I didn't take I don't feel like I put enough of a dent in it to be the on the list of most wanted however I was I participated in something for financial gain that definitely I'm not proud of that I will

tell anybody to not do. My direct involvement in the people involved and how to put the puzzle together exactly, I mean, that's still to be determined. So here I am, I'm here today. My point of even speaking about this is to let anybody know, don't do that. Don't even even try that that shit is watered down and played out but it's still people online selling you the idea of it but you still got so you got you ended up doing like six seven years for it was pretty much all on the drug side all of my stuff came from drug-related drug-related felonies however so my stuff i got arrested for fraud in florida i got arrested for but all they could really get me for was possession of when was this this was in 20

oh my god 2012 yeah 2011 you're at the peak of this. Yeah. Well, I did get arrested because I was inside of a store in Aventura Mall. And a person at Apple said that I looked suspicious. And they stopped me on the way out and said that I attempted to buy something with a stolen credit card. And I had fake IDs on me and credit cards in three different names in my possession. I had that in my possession at the time of arrest so with that being said so i went down they investigated it but this guy racially discriminated against us because when we looked at the camera none of that happened none of that happened none of the things he claimed no suspicious my hired a lawyer over $15,000 in Florida back and forth to court

and they wanted to see where was this guy ever suspicious and he did the same thing everybody else that come in that store do. So you really singled him out because he was black

attempting to buy a MacBook Pro? And so they had to drop everything. Dropped everything, lost the money on the lawyer and the bail, but it was no conviction of it. It was no conviction for that. You know what I mean? Because I actually didn't even attempt to buy the shit. I just kind of scanned the same, but all I really had on me was a fake ID.

And then inside the car, they just found a lot of little different miscellaneous, allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. You know what I mean? Allegedly they found this all this stuff but it looked at bad but talk to my lawyer he's just like we need to take i mean if you did what he said then that is probable cause but if not so back to all stand so um fraud dark web anything of that nature it's just not worth it like like most people won't succeed and make

close to the number of money that i was able to touch off of that. What made you this time, because you've been out six years now, what made you not want to go back to something like that or any kind of scam? Because now you have a real career. Yeah, okay, finally. So first of all, 19 years being sentenced to 19 years doing a total of like 11 years, eight months, close to 12 years across everything, across everything, across everything. That's close to 12 years. Man, I don't have much more. I can't do that again. I can't do that. live for these days opposed to back then it was just like risk it all bet it all win big or deal with the downside which you know how bad could it be so these days i just realized that in prison um meeting people who i probably wouldn't have been able to talk to had i not went to federal prison so i worked my way when i was in prison i worked my way down down from a medium to a low to a camp. So a medium is more hard.

It's a little harder core crimes, more politics, drugs, violence, guns, low, a little, little less of that, less politics. You can interact with different people, conversate, take these ACE classes, learn from people who you may learn from people who you may not have been able to interact with had you not been at the same place they were at the same time. Then a camp. A camp, they call it real sweet because you have mainly criminals who are financial crime, fraud, scammers, insider trading, tax evasion. You have people who created real multi-million dollar companies and did very well for themselves in life that you're able to have access to. So that woke me up that

none of the stuff I did was worth anything. So the max I made from doing illicit activity, even if I made $5 million, which I didn't, a million dollars is not a lot of money unless you never had it. You get it. It's not going to change your life completely. You're not riding off in no sunset because as soon as you spend one dollar, you're not a millionaire no more. So you have to have something beyond that. So me reaching that level twice in my life, once in my 20s, once in my 30s, right? And then losing it, getting wiped out pretty much completely except for whatever else I was able to fall back on. It gave me like I did it all wrong. And then listen to a person that, OK, when you get around a person that's doing stuff way better than you, the best thing to do is shut up.

So I was able to be quiet around people who I otherwise would not be able to talk to, like high level executives that created fifty, $100 million businesses. And then when I tell my story and what I'm there for, the risk I took for the small amount of return, they're calling me stupid without calling me stupid. And they're like, how come you didn't go learn this? And I'm like, where in my community were they teaching this? Where would I have learned this? The first time I tried to buy a house, when I was rolling hard in the early 2000s, the house was $175,000. I was meeting with this guy who was a realtor and he had access to this house. I brought a bag of money to the meeting, man. He told me, that's not how this go, man.

You're not, no, you're not. What are you doing, man? Are you crazy? Like, why would I think to buy a house I could bring the money there, majority in cash? And then I paid the rest off over a two, three, four month period. I had no clue that that's not how it went because nobody told me. I'm in my early twenties thinking I got

bags of money. I'm about to go buy a house, buy a house as simple as buying a used car. No. So now I'm learning more and more about financial literacy from people who really did it. Well, they're stupid because they're in prison. No, no, no, no, no, no. They got greedy too. Or maybe somebody, maybe some of the things that they're doing prison no no no no no no they got greedy too or maybe somebody maybe some of the things that they're doing that most executives do they just got caught because come to find out that some of these little what's a uh tax evasion get you five years tax illusion get you probation so it's illusion eluding your taxes is one thing but evading them is you intentionally hid money difference What is the difference?

Eluding is just like you might have. Okay, invasion, you ran off. You never planned on paying. You totally never had good intentions. Eluding, like, okay, we see you didn't fill this form out exactly right. The numbers aren't that off but they're off we're going to give you a warning and misdemeanor right because people mess up on it you know you can't blame the tax preparer because they said this is exactly what you told them to do

you get a warning but evasion where you hid millions and millions of dollars intentionally this is prison time they don't want to even hear it you knew what you were doing the whole way this was your plan so anyway high level uh high level executives that i may not have got a chance to talk so they let me know that i never did much as i thought i did although i it's never a bragging so i didn't come here to brag i'm not i'm not acting like i was a kingpin never was a kingpin never wanted was a kingpin. Never wanted to do kingpin activities. I didn't ever want to be on the top of the fraud mountain either, fraud Mount Rushmore. All I wanted to do was make some extra bread, make a better way for myself, thinking that money was the answer.

But it's not. Because as soon as you get the money, you move to goalposts and you're going after another goal. And you're going to continue to try to do something else to get more money like i have no need for me to do a drug deal i was making good money like as you as you just said it was like no means no stop asking me had i not agreed to that who knows what would have happened with what exactly what i was doing but it wouldn't have been as severe as me going to federal prison for, you know, getting sentenced to seven years and then, you know what I mean, losing pretty much everything and having to start over again. You know what I mean? So meeting those people, learning about real business, learning about what really matters, learning about why don't I have business credit? Why don't I have a real business that's doing legitimate business starting from one level, building it up?

If you can build a drug organization, if you can deal drugs, you can build something legitimate. You know what I mean? That's the thing. You look at a lot of, I guess at least some drug dealers, it's like, damn, especially when they get high up, right? If you had used this in the real world, you could have been something. Could have been something because the margins are low. The margins are low, and you're not contributing to nothing good. So it's kind of like that shit wasn't worth it, especially when you, okay,

you're going to go make a bunch of money and have to give it all back. You're still going to start from a place you could have just started from there in the beginning. So I'm telling everybody that don't do what i did like i was a fool you can look at a fool you can look at me and i'm telling you directly what i did was completely out of pocket and i didn't have to do it but nowadays just doing stuff the right way and it's not the same money as doing that but i feel a lot better about it. I'm able to help people. I'm able to really assist people with accomplishing their goals, which means like still people in communities. You're building people's credit scores, right? Well, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm helping,

I'm helping with that. Cause I don't work directly with people's personal information at this point. Like, I just don't even want to get near that, but I have the resources to refer them out and to get them to whatever goal they need to get to with my network my network now is is all legitimate business people so what it is is that um i don't have to be ducking looking over and it's like the money is good enough where i'm doing well for myself i mean yes, yes, I can grow it. Like I'm gonna meet with a couple other business partners while I'm out here. That's showing me how they're killing it, killing it and making higher margin, offering different products to products and services to people who need this. Because in a community where I came from, like a lot of people don't

even know how to form a business entity. It's as simple as going on Google in like a five or seven minute process. But then once you form your business entity, how do you build the business and make it credible? They have no clue. So it's so many people that don't know where to start that I can help them for nominal fee, get started and create something where they can run off on their own. They don't have to stay underneath me. They don't have to work with me or for me, but I can definitely point them to the way. Now, mind you, a long time ago when I was in it, I needed somebody to do that for me. So it's still thousands and thousands of people who need that today. And that's the service that I offer people. So you've been doing that basically since you left prison? Well, I started off trying to do credit repair, which was not my passion.

Credit repair is not my passion, and it just wasn't necessarily for me. Yeah, so what I realized is that helping people get financing, funding, and build their businesses up to become credible. It's just more, it's, it's a industry where, like I said, eight out of 10 people you see anywhere need the service, like a person with a small time flower shop to a contractor, a plumber or a painter, and they have no clue they're working as a sole proprietor. They don't have one business credit card, their bootstrap and everything. But if they had access to 50 K, they would have a better business, a hundred K, you know what I mean? So this worked for people from all walks of life. And I just happened to have a better business 100k you know i mean so this worked for people from all walks of life and i just happen to have a lot of resources to put connect people with what they

need you know what i mean so why trust me don't go do it yourself you know i mean do you have now it's been several years do you have a relationship with your parents and your brothers relationship with my parents became way better once they realized that I was gonna be a different person than all of the rebellion and going against. And pretty much, I wanna say my dad, he just wasn't messing with me at all. My mom, I could talk to her.

We could have a conversation, we could speak, but we got into a better place because, you know, I realized how important family is family is important to me and then everything we do is based off of them based off of family they're older now they're in their latter years like i said they were successful so like oh i'm gonna be the first millionaire in my family and though it was several millionaires in my family however i just didn't want to take their route and it took them a long time they did it they did it the right way the right way the typical way the american dream way so you can accomplish whatever goal you have you're

talking about people my parents not with the highest education they were able to come out buy properties get a rental property and build up enough money and have an income to put them in a position now where they retiring retiring in a good position. You know what I mean? A lot of people will have to work the rest of their life because they're making bad decisions in 20s, 30s, like hustling, scamming, dealing. Like these are things that only get you up temporarily and then take you so far back. Do you have a relationship with your kids?

I have a great relationship with my kids. That's great. How many kids do you have? I have three girls. That my kids. How many kids do you have? I have three girls. That's awesome. Three girls. And I mean, well, I miss the most important years of their lives, being in prison. Graduations, both.

The older ones. The older ones, yes. Graduations. Important moments like liking boys, getting into boys, transferring from middle schools to high. Both. I miss both. For both of those older girls. And it's kind of like some form of resentment there because my decision was to go chase money instead of be about my children because I'm sure they would have took me as a father without making tons of money that was temporary anyway

because that didn't benefit them the money didn't they wanted their dad around they wanted their dad around so i just contributed to the uh separation of a household just by being selfish and here it is i just don't i mean i see things different at this point in life because where else where else and i mean and this is america where anything is possible that's right i mean all you got to do is work towards it and and focus on it like a laser and you definitely will achieve your goals so the people telling you what you can't have like uh um um you can get rich anything that's too good to be true it probably is like i mean i went for it i went for the kool-aid i drank the kool-aid I rationalized in my mind,

oh, I'm doing this and I'm going to help so many other people or I'm going to do this until I get to this level and then I'm going to switch it. It just don't work like that. It's just best to just not mess with it at all, which right now, I mean, I don't know the scams. I don't know what people are doing. I don't keep up with it. However, whatever it is, it's just- It's not for you. It's not for me. And I don't think it's for anybody, really. I mean- But so your daughters, obviously, like you said, they resent the fact you weren't there for that, but there's obviously been forgiveness for that if you're in their life. That's a pretty good thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then the moms didn't trash me.

That's also a good thing. Google though, but Google trashed me. When they were able to go Google the charges or some of the stuff that I was convicted of and, you know, all this stuff, this public information. They're like, so, Dad, they're saying you were one of the biggest drug dealers in East Oakland. Like, I was like, uh, uh, uh. You're goddamn right I was. Yeah, like newspaper articles. Like one time I got caught. They took, I think, like $2.40 and some change in cash. They turned in $1.70, kept the drugs, right, and whatever.

Oh, we got this guy. Finally, we wiped him out this time. He was a distributor for this neighborhood. He was a major distributor. It's a local paper, so it didn't go far in national news or nothing because I was never big time. And I didn't even never think i was big time it's just like a small level in a small fish in a big pond however it's like still took so much from me even with that dumb shit right that shit still took a lot from me but when they found that out i had some explaining to do and i had to just, like, I made a bunch of dumb decisions, man.

I mean, you know, I can't blame environment. Although I was a product of this environment, I can't necessarily – I had a decision to make. Yeah, you had a good house. You know, you had two good parents, and your dad's literally a cop. But you still lived where you lived. And the temptations were there. Everywhere. And again, like, your parents are working.

You got time alone after school where you decide what to do. I mean, sometimes if you're in the wrong place at those ages, that's what happens. You know, you see, just like you said, you see the shiny object, you won't chase that thing. Exactly. And then you got to think, so that's Oakland, Santa Cruz, Gilroy, Menlo Park. Menlo Park, you have. Bougie. Bougie.

You have these affluent areas. That's where he's from. San Ramon. Santa Cruz. Danville, Blackhawk. The kids my same age had no clue of what was going on. Their chances of success were much higher. Not to say it was 100%.

Their schools were different. I don't want to say better. They were different. The environment, they didn't see no one dealing crack on a corner or at a wash house. They did not see that. Had we take those same kids and put crack there where they were. Right there. We don't care what color they were.

Just put it there. Yes. A lot of it too. That's interesting. And that's all they see, right? What's the chances of them gravitating towards that? Sure. Right quick?

I can make $5,000 and I'm 13 years old. Wait, no. You kidding me? Sure. You know what I mean? Some of them would have chose that route. Absolutely. So, I mean, you know know i think that's a fair point some of some of my friends i grew up with that didn't choose that route at all don't know what the inside of a jail looked like yeah

like my same age they grew up on our same street they have both parents roxanne and russell we had gerald and kenny we had uh eric we had it was a lot of other kids my age that lived in the houses that didn't never go around the corner in front of the liquor store. They never did. And I don't want to say I want to be like them, but they don't know jail, pain. They don't know 100 people that's been murdered like me. They don't know the killers. They don't know the killers.

They know they exist, but they don't know who they are like me. In some ways, good for them, though. Some ways, good for them though you know some ways good for maybe they're not as traumatized so i look at myself that i could be traumatized and didn't know how to deal with it but i don't want to use it as an excuse because then they'll be like oh you're looking for an escape and you know some people that see this will all form judgment about me which i've been judged by a judge and sentenced to do 19 years in prison, which is whatever off of that. And I paid my debt to society. That's right. So however, whoever made that judicial system and decided this is what

you get for that, that will probably have to be addressed with them. You know what I mean? It doesn't say like, if you kill someone, you get what you get for killing a person. That's right. But some people get 15 years for it and some people get life depending on the depending on what but but even if we don't agree with the time that's going to be dealt it's already been written so i like come on man um two-thirds of 20 years is what i did so do i deserve another chance to succeed in life or should it just be over with me because when i left out of federal prison my case manager told me that I should go sign up for SSI for $800 a month. SSI? SSI because I'm a disadvantaged minority. Anybody that gets sentenced

to close to 20 years in prison is now a disadvantaged minority. Did you know that? I didn't know that. So for that, I can go get SSI, just take a pill, you know, once daily, and they'll give you $800 a month and $300 on an EBT card. And you'll be fine. So this was her recommendation for me. After I paid my debt to society, this is what society has for me. Fade off into the sunset.

You'll be alright. Most of your people take it. It's a good deal. Most of your people take this deal. You should too. So I told her, fuck you. I'm like, fuck you. I'm going to be way more successful than you. All you got is your job. job however it's just like wow eight hundred dollars after going through so much trauma in my life from a small child small small child which was self inflicted but her recommendation is you can go get some social security yeah california state of california give it to you on the beginning. It's the easy answer, man.

It's the easy answer, but I'm glad you didn't take it. You know what I mean? I'm glad you're doing your thing. She's like, don't you have anxiety? You have a little anxiety, right? Oh, God. You can take a, you know, we got something for you, right? Here's an SSRI.

Go for it. Yeah. Social Security. No, thank you. There's something wrong with that. That's so sketchy to me. It is. Well, I remember.

I'll never forget her face because she was serious. I was hoping she was playing, but she was serious. Had I said yes and signed up for that, they would have sent me to a site, gave me a form, take it to the county office, sign up, and that would be my life. Who knows what's in that pill? Who knows, man? But you stayed in Oakland.

You're born and raised. You're hanging around there now. You're doing your business not necessarily not necessarily well actually so i have i have a family in um well my daughter well i'm not in the same household with my daughter however it's like uh they're in the suburbs so i'm there with them but where i live i like to live where i'm from yeah even though right even though this is the city that they told me and the news tells everybody is the worst city, one of the worst cities crime-wise in the nation right now because the government, local government is failing, the same city that last year, like one year ago to the day,

maybe a year and a week ago, I was shot in an attempted robbery. So I was shot in an attempted robbery in Oakland, leaving out of an establishment. The cops said I was ambushed. They watched the cameras. Those guys were kind of sitting there. They were trying to rob you. They must have saw me in there. They saw the watch.

They saw me come out. And they were like, hey, bro, what's up? And I'm like, what do you mean what's up? He's like, hey, let me get that off you. Let you get that off me. And I'm looking at them. And they're approaching me. And they're looking sketchy. and as they get close to me i see the guns i'm trying to you know comply they start whooping my ass fuck hitting me upside the head i mean i'm not

a bitch how many of those two guys yeah so i'm tussling with the guys trying to get them away from me and he shot bam went in my foot now i'm scared my heart's pumping i'm about to die i try to get away from them and i'm not giving them my shit they threw eight more shots at me eight more shots that's in the paper how many hit february 26 2023 i was shot uh two two of the eight two no two of the ten two of the ten that was february 26 2023 it's in a paper local paper but you still got the bullet lodged in right here yeah we were feeling that before he was holding it up but i still don't believe all people are bad people they just don't know better they look like me i couldn't identify

their faces so when the cops came to the hospital to get me to cooperate and identify these guys they tried to get me to cooperate and identify these guys. I just said, I don't know. And they're like, why are you protecting some people that tried to kill you? I said, I don't know. And I don't know why they would do such a thing, but I can't remember anything about them

and I'm not going to be much of a help for you. Well, we saw the cameras. They ambushed you. They were waiting on you to come out. They do have to know these guys because they kind of were there waiting for you to come out they were they do you have to know these guys because they kind of were there waiting for you i don't know i don't know and this is something that's in me that won't even allow me to cooperate with the cops to help them arrest these dudes that's out there's still something there you know what i mean there's still this but uh they showed

me pictures and they kind of really, really was like, just say anything that you recognize them because in that area, this same description of these two guys have done this. Yeah, so they could do it to someone else. You know what I mean? We made an arrest. Just point him out. And it was took.

I just. You still couldn't do that? I mean. But what if they go out and hurt someone else like that and they actually kill them? They tried to shoot you 10 times, man. They shot 10 shots at me that night. Two hit me. One still with me.

One still with me. But again, everybody's not like that. It's way more good people in Oakland than them two. Or 10. Or 50. Or 100. Or if 1,000. than them two or 10 or 50 or 100 or if a thousand if a thousand bad actors there it's 400,000 people in the city all of them aren't terrible I can't I agree so I eat there I eat

there I participate in community activities I go outside I'm not hiding up under no rock I just won't like I mean good people still exist my My thing would be I should interact with more of them, only them, rather than those. You know what I mean? I just don't. I'm not going to count them out. So, yeah, that happened. I'm here to tell the story. It's a hell of a story, man.

I mean, ultimately, ultimately, I think I'm here for a purpose, man. I just need to impact somebody's life in some way or another. You know what I mean? Do better. Almost anybody can be better than me. Just don't do dumb shit. Don't make irrational decisions. Don't make the left one the right one.

Don't go try to justify bullshit. They're dumb. They'll buy these drugs anyway. If I don't sell it to them, oh, well, you know, I got a way to scam the government out of money and whatever, falsely fill out an application to get money. I'm going to take it because it's going to change my life. No, it won't. It won't. Fraudsters normally, like the biggest ones that I met in federal prison that got 10, 20, like I met a guy.

They said he single-handedly destroyed the real estate market in the whole region. He's 68 years old. They gave him 20 years. I met him at Lompoc Federal Prison. Oh my God. You want to know his name? Lompoc Federal Prison, real estate, 20 years. We're 68 years old. We can find it. You can find it? I'm sure we can find it. He's going to die there for $40 or $50 million that he won't even get to enjoy. Exactly. And he spoke to me.

I'll tell you off camera, but I'll tell you off camera. All right. He told me that he more than likely won't walk out those doors, and I had a decision to make when I get out. I could either be a part of the solution or a part of the problem. He said he met a lot of African-American people in his market and he put them in houses he knew they couldn't afford. He just wanted the loans. He said he let the money fuel him. And for that, and he had like tears in his eyes telling me, a black kid, that how else could I speak to a $50 million real estate mogul? I can't. In prison. In prison. They don't't speak to they don't just walk up to people like me

and just speak to me and tell me funny how it takes that though for a guy like that to have perspective would have been nice if he had that when he was still out there single-handedly destroyed the entire market in california that's fucked and he ends up at one he's still there health was failing already before i left in 2017. It was failing already. 2016 when I left there. So for money, he like, what am I going to do? Just like you said, man. Greed can fuck you. You know what I mean? Like partners in some of the biggest hotel casinos sitting there for doing sketchy activities.

But they made over $100 million. I don't know where I can go talk to a person that generated $100 million. I don't know where I can go talk to a person that generated $100 million. I don't know. Yeah, but guys like that, and I've learned this about a lot of dudes in my previous career when I was around money. I saw dudes that did it the right way, and I saw dudes that did it the wrong way. And the dudes that did it the wrong way, it was always the same problem. They never had enough. Never had enough.

Didn't matter. They needed more. They didn't care who they fucked, who they stepped on, who they killed. Not literally, but you know what I mean. And then there's a lot of people in the world who will kill people. They didn't care who they fucked, who they stepped on, who they killed. Not literally, but you know what I mean. And then there's a lot of people in the world who will kill people. They have murder for hire people in the higher levels. Murder for hires are in the higher levels.

But it's a sad thing to me when people step on other people just for whatever extra gains they can get. But, Jelaine, dude, you got a hell of a story, man. I really appreciate you coming out here from California to do this. I'm happy to see you doing things the right way now. I hope you keep doing that. And, you know, you got a lot to live for. You got a beautiful family and all that as well. So keep doing your fucking thing, man.

And this was fun. I appreciate you also, man. I mean, I watch your content all the time, man. Thank you. I mean, you contribute to people like provoke. I like to say your channel provokes the thinking of of society because a lot of people don't know what happens in east oakland they don't actually know it exists i'm a i'm a living testament that that's existing right under your nose you can be five or ten miles away and never see that that's right so

everything comes out of there isn't terrible but based off of what they're exposed to the chances are Very high that it's not gonna be a lot of success coming out here. So I mean, I appreciate you man. Thanks again, man Do you assume man? Thank you, man. I just I mean man. All right. Thanks for like everybody else You know what it is. Give it a thought get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode before you leave Please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.