Locked In with Ian Bick - I Survived Oregon Prison & Federal Time — It Was Brutal | Bill Barnard

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

Bill Barnard grew up in Oregon raised by his grandparents after both of his parents were sent to prison when he was born, setting the stage for a life shaped by instability, crime, and addiction. In this episode of Locked In with Ian Bick, Bill shares how he started getting into trouble as a teenager, leading to a six-year sentence inside some of Oregon’s most notorious prisons, where he learned how to survive the realities of the prison system. After his release, his struggles with drug addiction continued and eventually led him into selling firearms, resulting in federal charges and time in high-security penitentiaries. Bill opens up about the differences between state and federal prison, the violence, the politics, and the mindset it takes to make it out, offering an honest look at life behind bars and the consequences of the choices that led him there. _____________________________________________ #PrisonStories #FederalPrison #TrueCrime #JailLife #PrisonLife #CrimeStories #ExInmate #realstories _____________________________________________ Thanks to FACTOR for sponsoring this episode: Head to https://factormeals.com/lockedin50off and use code lockedin50off to get 50% off your first Factor box PLUS free breakfast for 1 year. Offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor. _____________________________________________ Connect with Bill barnard: Website: https://www.change.org/BillBarnardPardon Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bbarnard065 _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Shop Locked In Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Near Death Experience — Bill’s Story Begins 02:10 Rough Upbringing & Family Secrets 05:30 Meeting His Mother & Family Complications 09:30 Parental Abandonment & Early Struggles 11:00 Rebellious Childhood & Early Ambitions 13:00 Hacking, Tech Skills & First Scams 15:20 Addiction Begins & Early Crime 16:40 First Arrest & Stadium Heist 21:20 State Charges & First Prison Sentence 25:00 Inside Oregon State Prison — Gangs & Politics 31:40 Violence, Tension & Surviving Alone 36:20 Fire Camp, Prison Jobs & Daily Life 42:40 Preparing for Release & Prison Relationships 48:20 Life After Prison — Relapse & Downward Spiral 54:30 Gun Dealing, UPS Scams & Federal Attention 01:01:00 On the Run & Arrested by the Feds 01:07:30 Facing Federal Charges & Sentencing 01:14:20 Maximum Security — Victorville Federal Prison 01:22:40 Violence, Survival & Mental Toll 01:28:00 Transfers, Prison Jobs & Changing Conditions 01:33:00 Getting Sober & Turning Point 01:38:00 Life After Prison — Rebuilding From Nothing 01:42:00 Redemption, Advocacy & Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Camden Jack is a premium malt beverage with flavors Please drink responsibly Camden Jack beverage company Chicago Illinois Had to make a really hard call I knew that I was looking at 15 years You're better in the federal system And at that point I was so high And I was just so out of myself

I didn't know if I was going to let him take it. If I had the capability to go do all that time, I had a gun on me when I got arrested. And I was standing there in a poker place, and I started hearing the canine bar. It's over. I felt it immediately. I've done step one through 99. What does a hundred look like? Bill Bernard was born while both of his parents were on the run and facing prison time,

and his life followed the same path. In this episode, he shares how he went from growing up in Oregon to doing time in state prison and federal penitentiaries, battling addiction, and what it really took to. survive. Where did you grow up, Bill? Eugene Oregon. What was your upbringing like? Upbring was what most people would call pretty rough. I spent, so first and foremost, my parents were both on the run from the feds for the first

few months of my life. There was a whole scenario that involved theft of a fendron truck, primary chemical and methamphetamine back in the day when that was still a big domestic thing. So when they were on the run and my mom got locked up and all that sort of stuff, my grandparents came out to North Carolina where I was born to pick me up. And then that was at three months old. And then from three months to 16, I lived with them. My grandmother was, for all intents and purposes, the most amazing human, a little

five foot two Sicilian woman. absolutely amazing. My grandfather, not as much, I guess you could say. A lot of varying kinds of abuse and trauma and all that sort of stuff for a little kid that I'm real passionate about other people not having to experience. Physical, sexual, everything, anything you can imagine. Just just a twisted, fucked up time period. And I'm sure that, you know, made its inroads into my, into my psyche and kind of put me on the path of addiction and all that sort of stuff. But not that I don't take full responsibility for that, but definitely, definitely forges you into who you are and what you think is the right move, you know. How old were you when your grandparents told you about your parents?

Because you probably don't have any memory of that happening at three months old. I don't. I don't. Fun fact, until I was 12, my grandparents told me that my dad was a lot. and that he was just busy working, which, you know, in my, in my world didn't mean anything because I didn't know any better. But he was actually in prison during that time. And he started popping up when I was like 12 or 13 trying to get to know me and seeing me here and there. But I mean, we're talking once every handful of months, you know, very little until I got older. Did I actually get to know them? Did your parents stay together while they were in prison?

No, absolutely not. I don't even know that they were together. in the real sense of the word when when I was around them like it was never really a thing I don't think there was ever a time when they could actually stand each other so did your mom end up doing 16 years in prison or uh quite a bit more than that there was a there was a murder involved in the in the driver that was driving that truck um and then at some point and some of this is pieced together based on things I've researched some of this is pieced together just on things that I've been told but the long story short is that uh she disappeared out of the federal prison system. And when I say disappeared, I mean like, disappeared off the website. Nobody would give you any information. Disappeared. None of that had any context.

None of that made any sense for the longest part, for the longest time in my life until, and this is fast forwarding a bit, but until, uh, one point I ran into her in a place in Eugene where I was using. And, uh, she kind of silently tried to give me,

me a hint that I should leave. Now, mind you, I'm skipping around here a little bit, but she didn't recognize me. She had no clue who I was. She tried to say she didn't know who I was when I, when I was like, hey, is your name, Joanne? She's like, why? Got super paranoid, got super weird. I was like, well, it's going to sound awkward, but I'm your kid. Like, I'm 100% sure you're my mom. And she just lost it. And she just got super weird. And she's like, you should leave. you should leave. And I was like, why should I leave? Like, what are you talking about?

This is like a trap house. You know, this is in the middle of my addiction and all that sort of stuff. And I was like, why would I leave? You just should. My hackles kind of went up. My, um, didn't feel right, you know, across the board. And I did leave. And I found out later that the whole place got taken down by the DEA.

Um, like that night. So do I have anything in writing? to back this up? No. Do I have instincts and a whole lifetime of understanding and thoughts about the legal system to understand that she had connections in the world that somebody thought that they could exploit? And they pulled her out of custody to do what she did. And she worked from what I understand, tirelessly to take other people down. You never ran into her again? I did. So when I first got out of federal prison just over four years ago, I did a DNA test because from my perspective, I didn't want to know any of the family that I actually knew.

They were trash in every respect for the most part. And I was hopeful that there was somebody out there that I didn't know that was actually a decent human. And so I was like, I'll do this DNA test and, you know, see what my family tree is on ancestry and whatnot. I was trying to look at my sister at that time and a few other things. And she popped up and through a couple other cousins and some other people, I was able to link back up with her. And I don't endorse her lifestyle. I don't endorse those decisions. It's not how I'm wired.

It's not who I am. But I think there's a piece of every human being that wants to know their parents, wants to know their mother, you know, wants to have some understanding of why they did what they did or who they are. And I gave it everything I had. I was living in Portland at the time in the federal halfway house. And I would, after work, I'd head over. And the first time I tried to meet up with her, we had a time and date set. And she didn't show up. The second time I was supposed to meet up with her.

She showed up a half hour late. And she put on this whole like dog and pony show crying and acting all, you know, happy to see me and all this, that and the other. And she wanted to pretend like the entire time that we ran into each other at that 12th street house when, um, when that whole thing happened I was just talking about she like it didn't exist and it wasn't her. I was like, I was like, we literally talked like what, what? She's like, I don't know what you're talking about.

I was like, well, where did you go? How did you, how did your sentence disappear? Like, how are you even not locked up? You've got a federal murder conviction. Like, what? Anyway, um, I tried to like let that go. I tried to like not fixate on that because like, that's my instinct is to fixate on like whatever weirdness you did or like whatever trip you're on.

But like, I was just trying to know my mom. I was trying to understand. And then, um, we interacted loosely, uh, here and there for a bit. And as I started to kind of evolve and level up and, you know, went from like living in a halfway house to doing fairly well, her car got stolen at random. I had moved back to Eugene. And she decided randomly that I needed to buy her a car and that I was doing just fine and I had plenty of money and I needed to buy her a car. And that did not settle well with me, like remotely. Like this is a person that didn't have any investment or give a shit regarding my life whatsoever.

She's done precisely nothing to benefit herself. But she literally demanded that I buy her a car because clearly I could afford it. And when I say clearly, I mean, just based on Facebook posts. Like that's the most she knew about my life. And not only did I say no, but I was I was just blown away at the audacity and like the weirdness of how you would try to approach somebody. to make them buy you a car strictly because you're their biological mother, like, that's the most she ever contributed to me. There's no parental factor. There's no, like, contribution to my life,

you know? And then thankfully, my phenomenal wife shut that all the way down. She went full mama bear on that and shut that down. It's pretty awesome. When you were a kid and you found out they were in prison, your parents, did you have resentment towards them for abandoning you, especially as you started to go through that abuse as a kid? did. I did. I tried to understand like if this is the place I have to live and this stuff is happening. And mind you, I'm paraphrasing her because like, who knows how I actually constructed the thought when I was a kid. But like, I was like, well, shit, if I have to deal with this, like, where are these people that are supposed to be responsible for me? Especially where like, you see everybody in your social circle or everybody around you that's, you know, got the traditional upbringing.

Those are the hard ones where it's like, like, how do you have mom and dad at home? I have this monster and my grandmother who gets overridden by the monster all the time. Like how does that work? How does that muster in your brain? Yeah, it was exceptionally difficult for a long, long time. Now, young Bill, before the addiction, before the abuse and the trauma, what did you want to be when you grew up? I want to be a Navy pilot, ironically, which was actually shut down before my criminal history

started because I'm six foot four and that is never going to work. But I was always infatuated with aircraft carriers. I was infatuated with, you know, the Top Gun movies, the F-14, wanted to be a Tomcat pilot, wanted to do anything in the Navy that involved a carrier and flying. And flying has always been a huge thing to me, which I still, in an inch I still tend to to scratch a bit. How were you as a kid? How would you have described yourself?

I was a terrorist at every level. I would steal from my grandparents. I would steal their vehicles in the middle of the night. I would disappear. I would, I committed frauds in their name. I was scamming eBay when I was 11. I can tell you that part of the reason that eBay changed its business model when it was younger,

when the company was younger, if you recall, or I don't know if I thought my head of old you are, but some of the earliest models around eBay were you would purchase an item from a seller. and eBay would pay the seller, you would reimburse eBay for that purchase. The seller used to get the queue to ship the item before that process ever happened. So I started when I was that young, masquerading accounts as the seller and the buyer. So that I would initiate an order on a fake item that I had posted.

They would pay me for selling the item. I would never pay them for purchasing the item. And I was doing these scams. And I wasn't even old enough to do anything at that point, but I had the entire account and everything in my grandfather's name. And he would get these checks. I would steal them out of the mailbox and masquerade this whole thing to get these checks cash. But for over a year, I was doing this crazy elaborate eBay scam back in the day.

Where do you think that devious side to you came from? When did that first start? The when, I'm not quite sure why, but I can tell you the how. When I was super young, I had a skin condition that made it where I couldn't really get in the sun and I couldn't really do anything outdoors. And I would itch and I would just, I would, it lasted until I was like 13 or 14. And I had a really hard time like being outdoors. And my grandparents solution to that was to buy me a computer.

That piece right there literally changed the course of my entire life because I spent every day all day into the wee hours of every night tearing apart these computers, rebuilding them, figuring out how they worked, deep diving on every single component and trying to fill my entire life with technology. and it built a love in my life for it like I've never experienced, you know, which exists to this day in so many different ways. But if it wasn't for that, I mean, I could tell you I would be in a whole different income bracket today. I would be in a whole different, you know, world of hurt for sure. But that's how it started for sure.

And I just, I started looking. I'm like, well, in my, the back of my brain, I was like, well, how do I get enough money to where I don't have to live here? and I you know regardless of the fact that you know I'm still a kid like I can't just just having the money is not the only hurdle to like living on your own at that point um but that was the back of my brain like I could just have a bunch of money and I could just not live here and then this weird shit wouldn't happen I'll just figure out how to get money and eBay at that time was bonjour compadre it's the price line negotiator how do I negotiate so many great travel deals my greatest gadget the price line app it's got hotel deals flight deals

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When does addiction start for you? Is that before your first arrest or after? Before. Right around 13 years old. I was smoking weed in school, which is, I'm not one of those people that's like, oh, the gateway drug trip and all that. I'm not that guy. But it definitely allowed me to be around different people that brought other stuff

in my life to a degree. And I take full responsibility. I made all those decisions. I consciously did it. Met a girl. That was her thing. obviously I was trying to get with this girl. They're like, oh, I'll give that a shot.

Why not? And I was a meth head. I was a meth junkie to the wheels fall off. And just because my brain is wired a little different and a little faster, it was the only time in that part of my life where I could soothe my thoughts and I could level out. And going fast was my love. language like I was I was using needles by the time I was 14 and I did that all the way through until I caught my first prison sentence um it was just a it was a point of of tolerance and a point of contentment that I never uh never thought I could I could experience based on where I'd

been in life what led to your first prison sentence um I did a commercial burglary um at the University of Oregon football stadium, Otson Stadium. I lived across the street at one point and used to kind of go in there and just always a huge Oregon Ducks football fan. I used to hang out there and just try and see it, try and be a part of it. And for some reason at one point, I ended up in a ESPN media office where somebody had left their Simmons access card on the desk. I was like, there's no way that still works.

I mean, nobody would have left this behind. And sure enough, it worked, but it only worked for the door to the ESPN offices at Austin. And I took it. And I got to thinking, like, well, you know, and this is several years, many years ago, obviously. But I was like, you know, if it works and I could figure out how the key is coded, I could potentially make this key work in other ways or for other access levels or for other doors. It took me over a month,

but I ended up changing that card basically to an all-access card for that building, not just for that building, but to every dorm, every single thing on the University of Morgan property. And it just, it ran away with me at that point. I used to use it to get into parties. I used to use it to, I mean, I was out of control.

But then I got in a hard spot with the situation. I wanted to move. I wanted a bunch of money. I kind of wanted just to come up. And I was feeling that itch. And I put together a group of guys. And we ended up hitting them in the middle of the night for a semi full of electronics and liquor and big screen TVs and Phil Knight's personal skybox, which is the CEO of Nike.

We loaded out a 53-foot truck and ran in the middle of the night. How do you get caught? That's a, that's a far less, uh, flattering story. But I was, I was, I was off clear. I had no ties to the scene whatsoever. I was, I was, I was totally golden. I had a girlfriend that left me. Uh, she ended up with a buddy's friend.

Uh, I would not leave the situation alone. I was feeling pretty, uh, pretty, pretty slighted, pretty wronged by the thing. And I wouldn't leave her alone. And, uh, in my addiction, and acting like a fool. We had bought a car together. I still had a key to that car. And I was like, well, I don't want the car,

but I don't really want her to have it either. So I know I'll park it in her living room. So I fired up in the driveway, put a brick on the throttle, dove out the side, launched that bitch right into the front of her house with him. Because my thing was with him and I felt like he did me wrong.

Listen, I'm not going to, I'm the last guy to like try and make it make sense like what I did in an addiction or like what's a rational thought and what's not. But in the moment, it seemed like a great idea. And so that's what I did. And her determination at that point was that I was probably going to do something horrible to her or him or both.

And so she called the cops and she's like, hey, I know who did Austin Stadium. I was with him when he did it. We were dating at the time. He lives in Portland now. Here's his address. Boom. So a couple of detectives from Eugene Police came up, one of which I still work around and with to this day, which is a trip.

but came up and served a search warrant and I had a life-sized Joey Harrington bobblehead doll in my living room one of three and that was pretty much the beginning of the end of that

had you sold most of the equipment at that point? Tons. Broadcast equipment from ESPN cases upon cases of liquor from all the sky bars and all the different skyboxes more stuff than you can imagine but there was enough

where they were able to determine where it came from and what it was. They didn't have a good camera system back then? They did. I shut it off. Yeah. Anything tech, I have a pretty deep fundamental understanding of. And during those days, especially, I would use it to my advantage. Even exterior ones, everything? Like, if they were on the street, the cameras or anything? During that time frame, there really wasn't like public, maybe out here, but like in our area, there really wasn't, like public surveillance systems, like street cams and all that sort of stuff. Really wasn't like that.

How old are you at this point? What year? I went to prison for that in 2010, I think. I'm horrible with years and months. They blend at this point. 2010, I think, is when I went away for that. I did just under six years. And how old are you at that point in 2010? Yikes.

And also basic math. Another thing I'm terrible at. I'm 41 now. I was born in 85. I was like 18. And did you graduate high school or no? I got a GED in prison in the feds, actually. So you never graduated?

Never. I left traditional high school in my sophomore year high school. And that was just into the streets and using. Well, straight from pretty much right before my grandparents passed or before my grandmother passed away, I just stopped going. Like there was so much, my grandma had really severe Alzheimer's and dementia. And it got to the point where like if I'd come home late or if I'd like, have a girl come home with me or something.

Like every time I came into my own house, she would call the cops and say that we were being burglarized or that there was a strange man in the house and like it just got to be so, you know, she had no idea who I was. And it got to be such a thing that like the cops would show up and, you know, I'm trying to commit crimes at this time and I've got a whole other thing happening.

And the cops are shown up at my house every other day because my grandma called because she didn't know who I was. I just had to get away from there. And when I got away from there to do my own thing, I was like, why am I going to school? What's the point of this? So I just stopped. Lately, I've been trying to dial everything in, gym routine, staying consistent,

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Offer only valid for new factor. customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with factor. Do you think if you had gotten busted for something earlier and arrested, you would have turned your life around? I've thought about that, and I've got to be honest with you, no. I really don't. Consequences for me during that point in my life were mainly irrelevant. To be honest with you, the first and only person I've ever respected in a long line of consequences was a federal judge. That,

something about the United States of America versus right around the time that drops. I don't care where you're at in life. Like that sentence and statement alone brings it back. Like, it's not the state of Oregon. It's not Lane County. It's not this, that,

and the other against me. It's the entirety of the country. And that, that realness and that intensity changes, changes the whole game for me. So now this first case that you got arrested for the stolen items, that was a state case. Yeah.

Okay. Do you have bail pending trial at all? Oregon doesn't have a bail system. You can get released in your owner of cognizance if you have like a job or things you can, you know, attest to. I had none of that. All we had during that time was what they call CBR, which is capacity-based release. And so you could literally stand in the window and the deputies would tell you like, oh,

we're full, right? And the second that they got full, the next, if you were, if your name, moved up the list and you could watch the Sally Port down below with somebody getting pulled in to get arrested, you knew you were next to get out. So they would still take those new arrests, but they would kick people as your name came up. And that happened to me probably six or eight times in like four months where I wouldn't show up for court. Never in life if I showed up for court. Like that that's not my thing. If you're letting me go, you're going to chase me back down. I have more failure to appears than probably any other count, any other charges in my history,

which is like what we call, you know, you didn't show up. Condem of court, a lot of places call it, but we call it very true here. I'm like, if you're letting me go, that's on you. You will absolutely have to chase me down. I'm never showing up to a place where you're going to put handcuffs on me. You'll come find it and you'll earn it. You'll do your job. And then we'll go from there.

So they'd kick me out and I wouldn't show up for court and they'd come, on me down again or some other thing would happen. I'd get picked up. And that just went around and around until they finally were ready to sentence me. Could you have avoided prison on the? sentence if you follow the rules, you know? No. No.

No. As a first time offender. No. Our area specifically is very passionate about the University of Oregon, duck football in particular. My sentencing judge, Lyle Valour was a U of a law school graduate. My city prosecutor or county prosecutor was a UO law school graduate. It took it very personal.

Anything against that school in that town is considered. like a treason level offense basically. So you get six years or that's what you end up serving after? I got six. I did 58 on six, 58 months on six, I think. So that's almost, what is that?

Just shy five years. Okay. Yeah. So you get a little over a year shaved off. Right. You get 20, you're supposed to get 20 percent. You can get a little,

you can get demerits for behavior or you can get extra for like programs completed and stuff like that during that time. This is a long time ago. But, um, yeah, I did 50. on 72 or whatever that is.

So now this is your first time in prison. You're in your early 20s and this is Oregon State Prison. Right. What's that like? What's that experience? Oregon. God. I'm sure you, I think you and JD have talked about this.

Oregon is a cesspool of bullshit when it comes to the prison system. There's like 14 prisons in the state. A couple of which are like, you know, 2,500 to 3,000 people. And then a bunch of them are like 300 people, like different. minimum camps and stuff like that around the state. But the premise is this. You have the gang members. You have everybody else and you have the fucking weirdos and the creeps.

And depending on what group you're in, you've got either different privileges or different things that are available to you. I had a really rough go of it. Like one of my very first prison, which was Snake River Correctional Institution, the biggest in the state out on the Idaho. a whole border. I get there. I'm a young-ass kid. I don't know anything about anything. I'm not pretending to know anything. I'm always willing to learn. But like, when something feels wrong to me, I can't just square that away. I can't just turn it off and I can't just ignore it. So I get there

in a 10-hour bus ride from the west side of the state where I'm from to get out there. I've been black boxed all day. I get out there. And my very first time walking in, I come in the units, like after seven o'clock. I got a brown bag, bag nasty lunch in my hand. And all I can think about is just trying to get some rest and trying to get my head squared away because it's been a long fucking day. And this dude comes up to me. And I want to say he's, we have this, we have this, um, the prison gangs of my state are wild as fuck. But we have this one called IPS, which is the insane peckerwood syndicate, which is utterly retarded in my view, but whatever. Uh, I call it I pick second because generally speaking most of their, and I can only be.

imagine somebody who are going to talk shit to me about this. I don't even care. They're going to I call it I pick second because so many of their dudes are second rate and just rejects from other places. But this dude comes up and he goes, hey man, just so you know, the cell you're going into, he's a child molester, but he belongs to us. And so you're just going to live in there and you're going to deal with it. And I said, I'm sorry, what? He said, yeah, that's our punk. That's our dude. And so that's our money. You can't fuck with that. And I was like, wait so I have to be in a 10 foot by 10 foot box with some kind of weirdo because you're making money off of it so I'm not doing that you know we don't have any option like you know basically

we we run the place it is what it is just go bunk in and my dad was a uh was just a phenomenal human being like in a lot of ways and one of the things that he always pounded into me in the limited amount times I was around him in my life was no matter where you're at in life or no matter what's going on you make one decision that necessitates how you act in a situation. And it's you can be the hammer or you can be the nail and you don't ever want to be the nail. And I've always like, I've always ground that into my psyche like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. I want to be the hammer.

You know what I mean? Like the hammer hurts less. The nail sucks. And so this dude's telling me this. And I was like, I was like, well, shit, I'm not living with, you know what I mean? Like, especially with my personal history and with everything I've been through, like, I have a, I have a real challenging time around people that choose to, to hurt kids. People that can't defend themselves, kids, seniors, um, people disadvantaged, not,

not with it, not with it at all. I'm also not necessarily trying to go to war with this fucking random ass wannabe gangbanger from an Oregon prison, you know? So I'm like, I'm trying to figure out in my head, like, what this balance is and how to make this work and, like, how to make sure I'm good, but not put myself in a situation where, um, I'm going to cause a drama. So I couldn't come up with a good solution.

I really couldn't, you know, and I was like, fuck, this is, this is going to go bad. I can feel it my, like, I know this is going to go bad. So I go in my cell. Nobody's in there. I set my stuff down. I start making my bed and I was like, I was like, why am I making my bed? Like, I'm not staying here. I'm not going to be in a situation where, A, I'm going to be looked at as that guy that

live with a child, Leicester, or B, I'll just deal with anything and somebody's going to tell me how I have to live. I'm going to start my sentence on this kind of ground, like where I'm going to, you're going to dictate to me? That's never going to happen. I'm not wired that way. I'm not that guy that's ever going to be dictated to, especially during that time of my life. It's not, that's not real. So they did a yard recall. Dudes come in from the yard, door pops. I go out there, I get some ice, I get some water. And I'm just kind of watching my door because I'm trying to put eyes on what the situation was and here comes this older dude um older at that time 20 something you i mean so he's he's bright in his late 40s whatever and uh he comes walking and he's looking around

and that same dude goes up to him and then he points at me and he pats him on his shoulder like you know he don't worry about it we took care of this kind of thing like i don't know what they said but i could see it from across the room and i'm like i'm like this dude's literally telling this guy that he's good based on what he did to some some poor kid out there he's good because he told me to stand down right he told me that he's protected and that that that that's still the deal for me like I couldn't see the words but I was looking at that conversation and I would bet any amount of money that I could tell what was being said there and I was like no we're not doing this we're not fucking doing this fuck it here we go so uh I got on the phone I tried to make a phone call my phone wasn't

turned on yet because I just transferred that day so I couldn't let my people know what was going on couldn't talk to anybody i was like well fuck it here we go so they call they call uh day room closed i had i head inside and uh the guy sticks his hand out and like tries to introduce himself and just tries to chat it up like it was nothing and uh i was like well fuck this you know what i mean i didn't want to wait for the door to close because i didn't want to be trapped in there with this fucking weirdo i didn't even want any part of it so i just jumped i went for it um i started swinging and he started screaming for help. And next thing I know,

I was getting pepper sprayed and drug out of there by a bunch of COs. Come to find out later, I'm not the first person that's done that. Everybody that moves in with this dude has done that kind of thing. They were absolutely waiting for something to go bad

because they had people who had the door. There was four or five COs at my door in 25 seconds. What did the gang do to you? There's a whole, there's 24 months plus with a story that ended up with this. But I went to the hole that night.

disciplinary segregation unit at DSU. Next morning I already start getting getting shit fished underneath my door telling me that I'm not welcome to walk mainline and that I fucked with their money and I'm not welcome here and I better just ask for protective custody and all this kind of thing. And I was like, you can beat my face in as often as you want. You can threaten me, you can do whatever you want.

You will not disrespect me in person and you will never get me to ask anybody to keep me safe. I've always been responsible for my own safety. I've always been responsible for how I live my life and you are not going to force me off of anything. Every time I'd get out of the hole, I would say probably five to six times over the course of four or five months.

I'd get 14 days here, 28 days here. I'd walk out there, get to my unit. Some fucking third-rate jank that they send on a mission would be like, oh, are you Bill? Yeah, what's up? Oh, yeah. Boom, they take off on me.

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I box with them. I do my thing. Back to the hole. How did you know you had to, I guess, act this way in this situation? Or was that just you as a person? How did I, to deal with him initially? Yeah. How did you know?

I knew that I couldn't stomach or tolerate anybody that was willing to hurt a kid. That was the base level thing. As far as the convict mentality, I met this old timer at Lane County Jail that was back working on his appeal. And he'd already been down for 18 years. And I used to eat lunch with him every day. And I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot just about how people should conduct themselves. What being a man of your word is like in prison.

how important that is, how you care yourself applies and how you'll be judged on everything you do for the entirety of your sentence, either positively or negatively. And I just learned from him like, you know, gang life is not for people that have control of their own faculties who are who are not confident in who they are and who are not just as capable to act solo as they are in a group. I also learned that for my dad. My dad was big. on that. Like if you've got to be in a group to be about something, then you're really nothing. And I don't say that to put anybody down that's in that life. I just say that to say that it's not for me. It was never how I'm wired to each their own. I don't have any, you know, bad thoughts or

feelings for those guys. It's just, and I've got lots of friends that are gamers. It's not, it's, there's nothing against that. It's just not my gig. But I learned a lot of really positive stuff from him. And one of those things was like, listen, if you're willing to go into that cell and you're willing to cohabitate with somebody that's done that, you'll carry that label the entirety of your time. And that was, I had a long time to do, and that was not something I was willing to be judged by. You know, the prison politic aspect is so interesting that, you know, you have these guys that anti-sex offender, anti-chomo, they all got to die, this and that, but then they'll let them stay if they pay.

Right. Go extort someone that isn't that vulnerable, you know, be who you say you are, get them off the compound. Right. And if you're going to, if you want to extort someone, then go try extorting someone that's going to put up a fight. Right. Right. And that's, that's been my principal, like, thing as I got more familiar and I went to other places, you know, throughout my, throughout my bid.

Like, wait a second. Like, this is, this is, this is scum in the earth. This is a person that victimizes children, but they're good and they deserve your protection for a bag of coffee a month. Like, this $20 thing just makes them invisible and they're just good to go now or because they'll assault somebody because you tell them to. like they deserve your protection. Yeah, because it's almost like you're doing them a favor because they want to stay. You absolutely are.

And a lot of these guys do have money or support from a family too, unfortunately. Because generally those folks have a more traditional upbringing. They have people around them and they're like, oh, they just made a mistake. No, they didn't. They're fucking sick. There's something wrong with those people.

And they're just fine. Everything's just okay. They always put me in cells with sex offenders. Like when I was in the shoe all the time. Right. And I wasn't a fighter, you know? Right. But that just,

the reality event. And the prison system shouldn't do that to begin with. Right. Well, in fairness, whether you are, you or not, like, they put the Department of Corrections, Bureau of Prisons, whoever you want, they put you in that situation of liability. They're literally putting you in danger, at least in the federal facilities I was at for sure. If I would have allowed that, the entirety of my rest of my time, I'm in danger. I'm literally on the knife edge of being a victim at any given moment if I were to allow that. That's a no-go. Hard stop.

Yeah, it's just, it's backwards. Yeah. Now, when I think, you know, Oregon State Prison, Two Rivers, like it feels like a real, like, you know, it's a desert-type prison, you know, scary. Right. I can't believe you said two-rub. It's crazy you know about Two Rivers.

Well, I've heard it from guests. I've heard it from JD, Delay. Two Rivers is who you know. Wild. But you just hear that. It seems like a prison name and like Prison Break or something. I don't know. Does the name match the description or?

It's a weird thing. We have like, I think, are they all rivers and creeks coming to think of it? They got, we got Oregon State Penitentiary, which is our built in 1866 old school cell block style penitentiary. OSP. OSP, yeah. I did about 18 months there. We have Snake River, Mill Creek, two rivers, Columbia River, Warner Creek, all the, I think they are, they might all be rivers and creeks coming to think about. I don't think I've ever made that connection before.

But, yeah, two rivers in the middle of nowhere, directly parallel to the Umatilla chemical weapons depot, which is interesting, because once a month you do a drill where the orderly in the unit runs out with PVC plastic and duct tape to tape the seals of all the doors in case there's a chemical weapons lead next door. That's super fun to know that you're confined in a place next to the place that the United States government sends every chemical weapon munition to be deconstructed and stored. place is wild. So now do you end up joining a gang or anything like that? Never. You were able to stay solo independent in there. Yep. Even in the feds where there's a ton of pressure and a ton of, you know, push to go that direction. That was never me.

Is there pressure in the state? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Especially with a big dude that looks like he's able to take care of himself and, you know, has been an attitude and all that. Like, oh, you're high on the roster poll list. people are coming at you left and right hey man you you you know you ever thought about prospecting me and my brothers would love to have you like absolutely not you know who you

kind of look like uh the pennsylvania senator was it john fitterman or fetterman oh my you did not put me with that's hilarious don't you look like him a little bit i come on you can't say you don't he's tall he's got the same exact beard he's bald wow just profiling the shit white bald beard that's it you guys it's a fair point there are similarities Fetterman, right? Yeah, John Fetterman, yeah. Yep. That's great.

That's hilarious. That's funny. So how long are you at two rivers for before they transfer you? I think I only did, I only did like 30 or 40 days at two rivers and I went there to go to minimum because they have a minimum security dorm outside the fence. So when you go there to go to minimum, you have to go inside for just a hot minute until your number comes up and then you go outside. So they send you to a violent place just to send you to a minimum? No, no, I started at Snake River. The place I was just talking about was Snake River

and that's out east on the Idaho. How long are you at Snake River for? Two and a half years. Something like that. And that's just in and out of the shoe. In and out of the shoe for probably 18 months of it, close to two years. And then I ended up on Complex 2.

There's three complexes and they each have their own chowall. They each have their own everything. You never overlap really with any of those guys from another complex. And I ended up Complex 2 the last time. And this dude comes out and he's like, he's like, hey man, can I talk to you? And I was like, at this point I'm programmed, like everybody that wants to come up to me the second I want to walk out of the shoe,

we're going to fight because, you know, these janks have a fucking hit out on me. And I was like, yeah, what's up? What do you want to do? He said, I just want to talk to you. I don't trust anybody because at this point, like, I'm already, I'm already known I'm going back to the hole. And he goes, hey, man, I know this has gotten out of hand, but like, I have the complex for us.

I got the keys. And I just want to let you know, like, this got out of hand. It should have gone that way. I apologize. I was like, what does that mean for me? Your apology means absolutely shit. You're just trying to get my defense down.

Like, catch me slipping. Like, what's up? He's like, no, I'm telling you you're good. And I was like,

and who are you? Like, how am I supposed to trust you? Just because you said so? Like, one of these other fucking janks isn't going to try and snite me or pick me apart

the second I turn my back? Like, I don't, I don't have anything for you. I don't trust you. I don't believe in you. You mean shit to me. And he's like, well, you know,

I'm trying to tell you you're good. five, six times in the past fucking four months. Like it is what it is. Like, I keep losing good time left and right, but if I have to do my whole time down there, I'm never going to be the nail. I'm never going to be a victim. That's just what it is.

But true to his word, nothing else happened. So I ended up getting my first job, working in the kitchen, trying to hustle, trying to live, you know, and just try to get settled in. Why do you leave that facility? Oregon's weird. Like, you don't have to have a reason.

Like, they'll have a bed space issue or like as you, as you're nearing release or as you're signed up for specific programs, those programs don't exist at every facility, so they're kind of bump you around. I moved around quite a bit. And then, like, I'd go to minimum. I'd get in trouble for something stupid.

My custody would bump back up. I'd have to go to a medium. I went to fire camp. I was fighting fires. I was getting caught sneaking off the property at night. They have a fire camp at... In Oregon? Yeah.

Two of them. So tell us that story and the sneaking off all that. Oh, fire camp was wild. You can't just breeze past that. The audience will get mad. Okay, so fire camp was wild. I did South Fork and I did Warner Creek. Warner Creek was pretty cool.

It was out in the middle of nowhere on the California border. And we went out on two fires. And the first night I was out. I'd been in prison like three and a half four years at this time. And the fire we were on was like the edge of this town in central Oregon. And I was like, from where we were camping in these, in these big military tents, like,

I could see like a 7-Eleven. And I'm like, bro, I'm free. You know what I mean? In my brain, like, I'm like, I'm free. I'm going to check this out. Never mind the fact I'm wearing inmate blue jeans. I'm, you know what I mean? I got inmate firefighter on my back.

Like, really what I wanted, what I was trying to do is get somebody, find somebody that would just let me make a phone call, set up a drop, do some, figure something out where I can make some money and try and hustle. And I got three quarters of the way to that 7-Eleven. And the force service pulled up right beside me. And they're like, yeah, what are you doing?

I was like, oh, I got lost. I couldn't think what I was to say. They were like, oh, well, let me help you find your way back. Why don't you get in the truck? And they ship me back the next morning. It wasn't too exciting, but I was definitely, I could not be trusted during that time for him. I'll tell you that.

Like, I was like, there's a 7-Eleven, like within a mile and a quarter of where I'm camped as an inmate? Like, yeah, yeah, I'm going. Were there a lot of fires there? Oh, yeah. wildfire season in Oregon is is pretty intense you don't really hear about it as much as you hear about California everybody likes to talk about California yeah yeah there's a lot there's a lot for sure they don't have the size or necessarily the some of the biggest wildfires like in

recent history in the West Coast have been in Oregon and hundreds of people lost their homes like it's big it's a big thing is it safe for the inmates to fight the fires yeah I think so there's a lot of really good training. There's a lot of, I went on two before I was permanently kicked off that crew, one of which we rode out there in trucks, one of which they picked us up in a black hawk in the parking lot, a for-service black hawk,

which was pretty cool. I was a Sawyer, so like I was the saw guy. But it was fun, man. It was so cool to not be in prison. Like you literally, they come up with a PA and they're like, fire crew alpha, to R&D. You grab your bag, your duffel bag from under the bunk and run for R&D, and all of a sudden you don't feel like an inmate for a minute.

It's pretty cool. They pay you like a buck 50 a day plus your normal like inmate rewards plus like 20-something sense, I think, for like if you're activated or like if there's actually a fire happening, you can make like a couple hundred bucks a month, which is pretty cool. The guys that do it, do they genuinely want to be there or do they have kind of your attitude of, you know, trying to run off? I would say it's probably 80-20. The majority of them, the majority of the ones they pick for that have done a lot of time.

They don't have much left, and so they've got like a lot hanging over their head. But they very much are into it. And then there's the oddball where they can't fill with that personality type where they're like, hey, yeah, you might as well come on. And then, oh, excuse me. And then we end up doing something stupid, you know, and it screwed up. I wish they had programs like that in the federal system. You and me both. I wish they had any programs in the federal system, anything to actually benefit people instead of a brochure or a placard somewhere that's like, hey, sign up for this.

Great with who. it doesn't exist. It's a joke. So where do you go from the fire camps? From the fire camps I went to a Sanyam Correctional Facility. Saniam Correctional Facility or correctional institution was a minimum. It's a pre-release facility. I'm like six months from going home.

It's big dorms. And I was there for three or four months. Yeah, because I had 60 days left. And I got caught in R&D in what, they call a inmate staff relationship in the middle of the night with a lieutenant. A female, right? Yes, 100, yeah, 100% of female lieutenant. And that went poorly quickly, and they threw me in a van in the middle of the night and

drove me to Oregon State Penit injury to Max custody for my last 60 days. How did this come about? What happened? It was super random and unexpected. I was not the only one that was in that situation. I was just the one that got caught. but it was a it was just a it was a weird trip uh i worked with her a couple of times uh around the prison for different things i reported to her a few times and uh it just evolved man and when the option

was on the table i'd been locked up for so long i jumped on it was just it was just a just a weird as weird ass time of life to be sure but i ended up getting caught threw me in a van drove me to osp is like 15 minutes down the road and so they transferred me to max in the middle of the night with two months left which super sucked uh osp is so small like i can stick my arms out left and right and i can't lock my elbows like the walls are that tight in the cell in the cell and there's steel walls and concrete back so like the bunks are mounted to the steel wall so if you're laying in your bunk and the dude in the next cell turns over really hard in the night

like your bunk wants to pitch you out of it because the wall like shimmies and moves. OSP's just old and shitty and tough. But yeah, Sanyam was short-lived. I had a lot of fun there. It was cool. It was good food. It was a nice chill place,

but I fucked that up. Now it's one-man cells in OSP? No. Well, they have, so each block is five stories tall. Two and three, we call them bars, which is levels. Two bar and three bar are, double occupancy and one four and five are single. So, but to get to those, like you're talking years and years of wait lists. Like, and it's a big lifer camp. A lot of people there doing life. A lot of

people, uh, never going home. And so the wait list to get to those bigger cells or those single cells is huge. So now, why are they sticking a guy with 60 days left with lifers? That doesn't make sense. Because there's no other place to, because I'm considered a high security threat because I had compromised a staff member, which is their terminology for the fact that their staff member did something she shouldn't have. Yeah. Because it's always technically the staff members fault. 100%.

I mean, I mean, so to build on that, when I got out, the first time I met with my PO, there was an internal affairs investigator there from the Department of Corrections that wanted me to give a statement on like what she did or like how it came to be or like what she used to do for me.

I was like, about what? Like, well, the relationship you had with this person. I was like, I didn't have a relationship with that person. Like, well,

captain so and so found you doing this. I was like, is there a video of that? I'm not going to cause this person. Like, I'm not going to make a statement on somebody. Like, come on, man. It is what it is. Like, we're both adults. Everybody was making their own decisions and being consensual.

It is what it is. But technically speaking, they call it, um, custodial sexual abuse because I'm in custody of the state so I don't have the ability to give consent. Whatever. Whatever. Stupid. But yeah, they tried to make a big deal out of it. He came to see me twice the first two times I saw my state PO.

And I was like, why are you like, like, Why are you here? Like, you're wasting your time, man. It's an hour drive from Salem. Like, go home. How do inmates treat a guy with 60 days left on your sentence? It depends on the place. I'll say this.

Like, one of that old time I was talking about that I met in county, one of the things he always talked about is like, nobody should know how much time you got left. Nobody should know what kind of support system you have at home. Nobody should really know your life that well. And he's like, it's not that it's bad. It's just that if somebody that is bad gets the opportunity to leverage that against you, they can really damage your program. And again, less applicable depending on the place, but OSP in particular, the last thing you want to be is the guy that's talking about, oh, I got 60 days left.

I'm about to go home or I'm short. You don't want to do that. You really, really don't want to do that. Some of the most infamous killers and criminal cases in Oregon history are still going to at OSP. Did you run in any issues? Never. Never once. I met a ton of people that knew my dad. I met a ton of people that were from my town and friends that I'd run around with over the years. I cruised out there, no problem. Got a good job right off the bat, made a little bit of money. Had my own spot in the chow hall, which normally takes years to kind of earn your seat and a place to sit. But I was golden. Wait, what do you mean explain the seating situation? Seating at Oregon State Penitentiary is a whole nightmare in and of itself. if, and again, I don't know about today or even the last few years, but back when I was there,

like, you had to earn your seat. You either, you've either like put in work or smash somebody off the yard or like, uh, uh, done something to earn your place because, you know, it's obviously very racially segregated. And then you, so you've got the, you got one side of the child hall that's like weirdos of every kind and then, um, uh, different groups. And then on the other side of the Chahall, you've got Hispanics and white boys and all that sort of stuff. And the white section is inevitably very, very small. And so to earn like a seat there, like generally, you're either knowing somebody done something for the cause, as people like to fucking say, I can't stand that fucking term.

It irritates the shit out of me. Because I always want to tell people like, I'm pretty sure your cause is different than my fucking cause, but like, whatever. But I had a bunch of guys that were close with my dad and that knew who I was because of him. And they're like, oh, yeah, come on. So I used to sit at the lifers table, which was kind of prestigious in its own way. But they were just good to me. They were just always really decent to me, which was cool.

Now, getting out of that state prison sentence, what was your mindset? That sentence, when I first left, I was, I was pretty well locked in. I was pretty well dialed in about how I wanted to act and what my future needed to look like. But I didn't have anywhere near the lessons learned that, um, that I was pretty well dialed in. that I did on the second one. I knew I wanted to do good. I had a kid during that time I was locked up. Not with a lieutenant, right?

No, not with lieutenant. Somebody I was with right before it all started. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to cut out here. I'm going to figure out to be a dad. I'm going to get this stuff squared away. I got this, no big deal. And I wasn't ready. I'm going to be honest with anything.

And I mean when I said, when I said that a federal judge was the only person that was ever actually able to get through to me. And that whole federal process, the state didn't have shit for me. I didn't care. It didn't mean nothing to me. It wasn't a threat.

Like, it was whatever to me. But, uh, I left there. I was on my feet. I started a business. I was making good money, uh, doing technical work, uh, cameras, surveillance systems, IT related stuff for myself. Um, got back with my kid's mom, tried to make that work. and it wasn't meant to be.

It wasn't meant to be. She lived in Medford. I wanted to move home to Eugene because that's where what's always been family to me. It's just a place where I've always been comfortable. So we moved up here, up here, up there. And things started to go sideways. I caught her doing some shit she wasn't supposed to. And this is going to come off like I'm making an excuse,

but I'm just going to be toy blunt. I own everything I did, but I didn't start it. That's the best way I could say it. She started cheating. She was doing a bunch of weird shit. I was working all the time trying to make money. And she was doing shit she wasn't supposed to.

And so I went utterly sideways. I started using again. I had my first shot of meth again the night that I caught her with this random dude in a Fred Meyer parking lot. And I went harder than I've ever went before. I tore myself down. in no time. I sold the company shit. I sold stuff that wasn't mine. I started ripping off everything I could think of. Stop paying all my bills. I went I went sideways. Um, and then I just

started escalating and every new come up had to be bigger and had to be more intense and more risky and, uh, that's how all the federal gun stuff started. Tell us about that. Oh, boy. Um, so there's, there's a bunch of people. pieces here that kind of start at the same time. I've always been a weapons guy. I've always been somebody that, you know, carried traditionally or I was an instructor at one point when I was younger doing like volunteer concealed classes and volunteer tactical courses and stuff. I've always been a weapons guy. Always been infatuated. When I got my convictions for the Austin stuff and for the stadium, obviously I couldn't be around guns anymore. I didn't let that stop me. It was just,

it was something baked into my psyche as basic as putting on your pants in the morning, you know? and couldn't stop. I kept getting fell in possession of firearm charges at the state level and they were just stacking up over time. And I got involved with this guy that wanted to pay me a ton of money. So there's he's dead now. So I mean, there's no harm in discussing him. But this multimillionaire who got into the drug game in my town that wanted to be, he wasn't content with being a leader in his field.

He wanted to be that guy. He wanted to, he wanted to be the one that all the girls want to be around. He wanted to be that guy that pretty much could run the show because he's got all this bread. And, uh, I'm not going to lie to you. I saw Mark, you know, I was like, oh, oh, you're the guy? No problem. What do you need? And I became his, his sidekick for all intents of purposes.

And, uh, you used to do a lot of shit for him. Well, he was also a class three FFL holder, federal firearms license, which means he had flottos and suppressors and short-bail rifles and everything you can imagine. And when he starts having cash problems or liquidity problems, as he always like to call him, he's like, yeah, you know, can you help move this and move that? And we can come up together, you know, and we can keep doing what we're doing. And I can afford to pay you and you help me. And when I talk about a gun collection, like, we're talking rooms on rooms on rooms of

exotic, super crazy high-end. custom-made guns and fallout rifles and everything you can imagine and this guy if you had street smart and this guy in the same in the same room they were like opposing magnets like you couldn't have beat logic into this guy's head with a 50 gal you just couldn't there there was nothing there he was boisterous he was loud he was talkative he put his business on front street uh he had every female with a pulse within 100 yards in his business at all times. And my full-time job with him was damage control, trying to mitigate risk,

trying to keep him out of the limelight, even though his entire job was to make my more difficult. So understanding all that background, I'm selling guns left and right. I concurrently but separately started to steal weapons from UPS. And that probably sounds weird because it is. But what you need to know when a deployed military unit leaves the field or deployed place,

if it's man portable, they ship at home. One of the contracts that I had when I worked from myself was UPS's shipping center in Medford, Oregon, their sorting center, rather. long story short, I had access to their sorting system where I could reroute packages in transit. I used Fort Lewis and their deployment schedule to find Department of Defense billing codes, which allowed me to find tracking numbers for packages billed to that account that were headed to Fort Lewis from overseas. I stole tons of rifles, tons of pistols, 249 saws, no ammunition, know anything, but anything that as man portable, they would ship home.

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And guns, not only for him, but stolen from them, left and right. How much would you make? I mean, more than I could ever even imagine. I mean, I used to do deals with these little, this certain group up in Seattle, 30 to 50,000 every couple months. No problem. they had those little fuckers had more money than than I could ever shake a stick at.

No, it's pure profit because you're not paying for the cost. No overhead. Yeah. No overhead. So what are you doing with that money? Acting a fool. Acting a fool.

I didn't have any, in fairness, I still don't have any money since, as far as that goes, but I had none. I partied. I traveled. I went on trips. I, you know, did shit for people around me, bought loyalty, bought, made sure I had, you know, a good cushion around. me of that sort of stuff, of protection and whatnot. I acted a fool. I spent frivolously

beyond my wildest dreams. Now morally and ethically, how do you feel about selling guns? Were you ever worried about where the guns would make it to? Absolutely. Did it stop me? No. Did I make any of those decisions in any kind of logic? No. I dealt with people that I felt that I knew had the most cash to pay that I thought were more set up organizationally to be less likely to talk about me or put me on Front Street if they would ever go down, which in fairness and in credit,

never did that I'm aware of. When I think about it now, like what things could have happened over the years, what things could be on me as something I would bear responsibility to, that's not a really welcome you know, thought that I enjoy these days. It's not something I'm necessarily proud of.

It's just the reality of what the situation was at that time. But yeah, it is something I think about. It's, it's, I mean, it's been a lot of years, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's not stuff still floating around that I had a part in way back in the day. How long does this go on for before you get caught? And how do you end up getting caught? I never got caught for that portion in itself.

It goes on for a little over a year. The stuff with, with Stephen, that was the rich guy's name. Like I said, I only say his name because he's not with us anymore. He was killed a couple years or handful years ago, maybe five, maybe the year before I got out, maybe five years ago. Stuff with him went on for a while until I ended up going to the feds. I got caught with some MP5s and a couple of AKs and I think a Glock or two in my trunk. There was a series of arrests and a series of things that happened where like I kept catching these cases and the feds would,

would kick me out on, well, no, excuse me, the feds would not kick me out, but the Lane County Jail made a mistake and didn't place my marshal hold on my file. And they filed them as state federal or fell in possession of firearm charges. And so they were like, oh, here's another one. Here's another one. And they screwed up on my last one and didn't put the U.S. Marshal hold on, even though I knew that the feds were involved. And so at that point, I went, I went full tilt.

I was like, I had to pile my cash. I'm gone. It's over with. exiting stage left, bye. I had a friend's house, my friend and her mom, where I was keeping all my stuff. I was living at the time. I had a pile of money there. I was saving to make my exit strategy from all my licks.

And then once all the pieces lined up with the legal system, my whole world came apart. Like every place I would hang out was getting rated by the feds. Lane County Interagency SWAT was kicking in the door. random U.S. Marshals, sleeved out in tattoos with beards, you know, looking everything but law enforcement would show up and be like, hey, I owe Bill this money. You know, could you give them a call?

Could you get him to meet me? Girls would get arrested off the street that are junkies in Lane County. They'd take him to Lane County jail. There was a detective that would hang out there and be like, hey, do you know Bill Bernard? Oh, you do? If you call them, I'll let you go right now.

Can you get him to meet you right now? There was, when I tell you that, like, they utilized every tool in their arsenal and try and bring me down during that time, they really did. They hit that house, took all my money, took everything I had. I was literally living out of a backpack at that juncture after that house got hit. I had no money. I had no anything. I went out to Oak Ridge in the middle of nowhere, 45 minutes outside of town because I couldn't breathe in town. Like, I used to call in fake tips on myself just to be able to get across town.

Like, they spent weeks and months staking these places out. I'm, I don't want to say friends, but I'm definitely acquaintances with one of the detectives that was on that task force today that I work with with my current job that I have some overlap with. And he's like, he's like, man, you don't even know. He's like, I was this far behind you so many times. And I was like, I was like, trust me, I know I can feel it. Like, I can feel it in my bones everywhere I went. And it just escalated and escalated. They were kicking indoors. Like, this girl called somebody else at a hotel in Springfield, Oregon. It was like, hey, if you know, Bill, could you get him over here? We want to hang out.

That I don't know. Me and my friend are here. And they, Springwell cops heard that call and kicked that door in. Like, when I got brought up in a public setting

or in mixed company, like bad shit was happening to people with law enforcement. A lot of people got arrested behind them looking for me, which is fucked up, but I can't control that, you know? But it got really intense.

I ended up on the Marshall's most wanted this for the region. My federal warrant was getting deeper and deeper left and right. People are showing up for me. People are paying people for information on me. My phone's ringing off the hook

with random, the most random people in my whole ecosystem trying to hang out with me or meet me. It just, it got, it got really, really wild. I stayed out in Oak Ridge most of the time. If I had to go someplace in town, I'd call in a tip on myself or I would, I would, you know, do something crazy to change the focus for a minute so I could move. At the end of it, 15 months into my federal warrant, uh, I ended up getting caught in town.

and had to make a really hard call. And I was panicked because I knew what kind of time I was looking at. This is pre-United States versus Johnson, like when the Armed Career Criminal Act changed. And so I knew that I was looking at 15 years or better in the federal system, potentially 25 with the aggravation.

And at that point, I was so high and I was, I was just so out of myself, I didn't know, I didn't know if I was gonna let him take me. I didn't know if I was gonna, if I had the capability to go do all that time. And it's something I really had to work through. I had a gun on me when I got arrested. And I was standing there in a poker place, a video poker place in Springfield.

And I hear, I start hearing the canine bark. And I was like, I was like, fuck. It's over. I felt it immediately. And all of a sudden, like, people are walking out, like, they're leaving. And all of a sudden, I'm standing there by myself. And I've got a Glock 40 in my waistband. And I'm like, okay, what do I do here?

Like, what is, what is, what is, what is, what is, what is, I've done step one through 99. what does a hundred look like where are we at what do we do i'm going to get a shoot out with the cops isn't going to be suicide by cop i plug myself right here do i just cowered out of this whole thing and decide not to not to do all this time the fuck do i do and it felt like it was something i was beating my brain up with for an hour in reality it was probably 60 seconds between when they started doing the pa speaker calls and united states marshals fugitive task force bill i know you're in there just come out hands hands hands hands and i'm around like a little pony wall and they're over here and they can't really have a direct eyes on me but i can see them in the whole place is

flash red and blue and shit and i was like i'm like i'm gonna go away forever and they're never gonna let me go again they're never going to give me a chance to run again every single time in my entire life that they've ever given me a chance i run and i'll never forget the feeling of like feeling that the frame of that pistol against my my waist and i was like i can just I can just shut this whole thing down. Like, I don't even have to, I don't even have to man up and do myself. Like, if I bust around the corner with this thing in my hand,

I'm dead. It's over. You know, maybe I can take a couple with me. And that's a, that's a fucked up prerogative because I don't, throughout the entirety of my criminality, like,

I've never, I've never been that guy that, like, wants to physically hurt people. I've never, you know, you know, fuck somebody just because they're a cop. Like, I don't care about that. They had a job to do. I had a job to do.

Like, I've never had that hatred for, like, for those people like that. but in that moment I was like, what do I do and how do I exit this situation where I don't have to be accountable for my behavior? And for whatever reason, I reached out on my waistband. I drew and I dropped the mag. I cleared and I set it on the program machine and I threw my hands about my head and I walked around the corner. And I'm thankful I made that decision. But it wasn't easy.

I mean, honestly, it wasn't easy. I just knew I was looking at it. much time. At that point and at that age, I felt like my life was over. I felt like it was done deal. I didn't, I couldn't imagine my 40s at that time. I couldn't imagine, you know what I mean? Like, or even my mid 30s at that juncture. You know what I mean? Like I was like, I'm cooked. It's over. I go into custody. And then from that point forward, it was, it was intense. Like, I was max security everywhere I was going. I was, it was just, they didn't give me no, no change whatsoever. They'd, I'd tempted them and taunted them. And, I'd tempted them.

I got into one of the phone, one of the cell phone accounts for one of the people that were on the Marshall Task Force and forwarded his phone to a porn line. Like, I was just taunting and doing everything I could to, because I thought I was, I thought I was fun. I thought I was playing a game. I thought it was like, catch me if you can. Which is one of my favorite movies, by the way. But I just went too far.

And I pissed them off into a bad place where they pulled out all the stops. It's interesting to hear that mindset of, you know, debating. whether you want to die by cop or, you know, how you want to end in that scenario, because you see the people that do do that and you don't get to hear what they were thinking in that moment. Right. Well, I can tell you, I know what that conversation with yourself is like because, I mean, it was, it was hard and it was intense, but at the end of it, what kept me going was like,

and this is kind of a mantra, a drum I beat on to this day is like, okay, in the criminality world, in the addiction world, in the using, in the criminalism, in the criminal. and the mastermining this, that, and the other and hitting all these licks, I pretty much maxed out here. I pretty much did, at least in my little corner of Oregon and Eugene and my little part of the world, like, I'm pretty, everybody knows who I am. I've done all this sort of shit. I've been in the news, umpteen times. That chapter's closed. I pretty just max this out. What can I do now? What's my next level up? What's the, what's the next face of this going to look like. What does my evolution look like long term for who I can become on the next one?

Did I want to wait a decade to have to have that transition? Of course not. Um, but I felt like in that very moment that whatever version 2.0 of this thing looked like, it had to be cooler than what I've already done. And I wanted that next step and that next thing. So what happens next? Where do they take you? I go to Lane County Jail. Back to your stomping grounds. I have a hundred and um i looked at it the other day i've got a pdf of it saved we've got 138 bookings in that place in my entire criminal career which is kind of crazy um but i go back there it's also a federal holding center um and they immediately uh send me to my federal indictment they read the charges the time of the time i'm looking at uh we go through that whole portion and uh i was like oh got it

yeah great i'm fucked i'm through i'm cooked i'm looking at a whole lot of time this is pre johnson ACCA, Armed Career Criminal Act. And get back to county, sign on my paperwork, did my intake with the feds. Interesting about federal prison, the detention centers, as I'm sure you know, is you don't have to be sentenced to go to an FTC. So they shoot me from Lane County Jail to Sheridan, what we affectionately call Sherrodice, Sheridan Federal Correctional or Federal Detention Center up the road. It's a couple hours from where I live.

And I camped out there for months and months and months, just, fight in my case and trying to see what was happening with the law. The Supreme Court was hearing United States v. Johnson at that time, which was a huge landmark decision for everybody facing the Armed Career Criminal Act, which in layman's terms was basically, if the predicates for your possibly violent behavior were not specific or clearly defined, you cannot hold somebody to armed career criminal. And in Oregon, a lewd, which is the process of running from the cops, is classified as a crime that could end violently. But if your actual issue wasn't violent,

if you didn't hurt anybody in the process, it can't be used against you to enhance a federal sentence. It's a huge, complicated legal thing. Anyway, none of mine, even though I ran, I have nine alludes at that time on my record, they were using three of them to enhance my sentence from 10 years to 15. And it wasn't just me.

There was thousands of people around the country fighting this, primarily Mr. Johnson, who got this Supreme Court decision that said, no, if the behavior, if the original behavior actually didn't hurt somebody, you can't use that as a sentence enhancement because there was no violence. So when that got turned over, my maximum exposure went from 15 to 10. Not just mine, but thousands of people in the country. So I slow played all of my federal time. Like, I kept waving the hearings. I'm not going to, because my philosophy was if I signed a deal and took my 15, it would take me probably five years to do the appeal to get that.

that time back and I'd have to transport all back and forth and it'd just be a cluster fuck. So I just figured I would hang out the detention center, keep waving my speedy trial, keep waving my court hearings, let them get the legal shit figured out, then I get sentenced, and then I just end up where I end up, so I don't have to worry about it. Now is your time in the detention center? Hectic. The FTC was wild because about a third of it was all buddies of mine from the streets, uh, just every variety of fucking weird.

I feel like me and 10 of my friends or eight of my buddies, like we're going to the feds around the same time for a variety of things. It was a different funding landscape in that time. So, like, you know, if you had too many guns, you had too much dope, or you did a bank robbery, or, you know, enough things happen where you pissed the locals off. They do a federal referral on you. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here.

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Actual mileage and range may vary. You and you'd get a federal case and a bunch of us ended up in that situation during that time. And how long does it take to fight the case and figure everything out? 18 months probably. Oh, so not that bad. Not that bad. I think that's pretty standard for a federal case.

Yeah, for sure. But they just, they wanted me to, I could have been sentenced in four months. Like, mine was pretty clear cut where they were just like, oh, yeah, let's just do it. I was like, nah. As long as the clock's counting, I'm good. I'll just hang out here. It was like right at the time when, like, we're getting MVP3 players and like some of that stuff in the feds was getting a little better.

So I was like, oh, okay. well, we'll check this out. And I'm used to the state system where you don't get, at that time, you didn't get jacked shit. So commissary was better in the feds. Bone prices were better. I was like, well, I got to be locked up.

I guess I'll, I guess I'll be here. So what ends up happening? I went through the whole process. I did my status conferences. I did my pre-sentence investigation. Ended up getting a partial enhancement for the distribution portion on the firearms so I got

just over 12 years sentenced. I ended up doing right at 11. Got a year of halfway house though which is cool. Start my entire federal career off at Victorville, United States penitentiary 60 miles north of

L.A. Wow, they sent you to Victorville. Yeah. Yeah. That that was eye-opening, to say the least. I thought politics in the state system were intense. The state of Oregon doesn't have shit on Victimville, USA, as we used to call it. That place is brutal.

All my prison time, everywhere I've been combined, did not touch half of the assaults, murders, decapitations, suicides I saw in person at Victorville. Well, what's the first thing you saw? The very first thing I saw was a Irish dude getting stabbed to death in the Chow Hall by three guys in person, 10 feet away from my table. And it just turns out he was too friendly with the cops. He was just too chatty. They didn't like it.

And what's going through your mind when you see that? my very first thought was what particular behavior necessitated that? Because, like, I'd seen a couple fights before that. I think that was my third day there. I think I saw a fight my first night, just a regular thing. But when I first got there, they had a no-hands policy amongst the white boys. So that pretty much means, like, if they've done something severe enough to warrant some kind of discipline, you weren't using your hands.

You had to use a knife. So there was no, it was, the intensity was ratcheted at a 10 at all time. times every day all day. But I had seen a fight at that at that point, I think, I don't know if it was disciplinary or what the exemption was that allowed it, but it was pretty brutal. It was two on one. Excuse me. But I was like, fuck, that's intense.

And like the cell doors open and like we can hear it throughout the day. Even the cop could absolutely hear it. And they're just, they're so jaded at that point. Like they don't give a fuck about anything as long as they got to go home that night, which wasn't always the case. I was like, oh, wow, that's crazy. And then in the child, when this dude's getting stabbed, there's three dudes punching holes in this dude's throat

with cans and with sharpened metal. And I'm like, I'm like, fuck, is, is anybody going to stop this? Like, at what point do they go, like, run in here and, like, save this dude's life? Like, I'm brand new. I mean, like, I don't know anything about it. And I just remember, like, geysers from, like, arterial bleeds.

And they're just, they're just going. I'm like, you know, 10, 20, 30 seconds. Like, what's happening? I didn't understand at the time, but there's a policy where they're not going to run in. They're not ringing into the chow hall where there's 250 people that are potentially carrying knives

to save anybody. But all of a sudden, they dropped flash bangs and smoke grenades through ports in the ceiling and blew the whole room to shit and then they ran in. But yeah, that was intense. He died that day.

He died right there in front of us. He was blue before they carried him up. And when you see that, do you think about clicking up with someone? I didn't. I will say this about the feds, though, that's different, even though you're not a gang member, you're not affiliated to a group, you're absolutely

affiliated to your race. And not in like a, you know, like in a pro-white power kind of way, not like a extremist kind of way, not like a supremacy kind of way, but your group sticks together. And part of that reason, to give you some perspective, there's 1,550 people on the yard at Victorville. I think I was one of 90 white boys on the entirety of the compound when I got there. So if those 90 are at least not sticking together for your own defense at minimum, you're done. You know, there's hundreds of Pisces.

There's hundreds of serenios and, you know, black hands and all those dudes. Like, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. There's 90 of you. You got to be pretty put together, you know, like there's, there's, now, don't get wrong, there's gangs within those white groups, within the white group. But that, I mean, for Victorville, it's like NLR. and the brand and all that shit. And I didn't want a part of it.

How do you prevent yourself from being a target? Hammer or the nail. I read off the bat, figured out a way to involve myself with being in leadership for our group. And when I say, this is not ganglike. This is just, this is, it's racial politics because that's the way that entire environment is designed, it's just for your own protection.

You know what I mean? It's for your, for your own well-being as a group. But I put in my work and I, you know, smash sex offenders and, check paperwork and helped organize things and all that kind of stuff and just kind of move my way up to where, you know,

as you're, if you're willing to be more active, they're going to ask you to do less. And that was just my way of being the hammer until I got to a point where I was kind of the interface between like dealing with the gang members and dealing with the independent white boys that weren't a fill.

just kind of as a interface between the two groups. Yeah, I interviewed a guy Jamie Fultz, who was in the federal prison system, and he described it similar where he became like the head of the good white boys. Right. Where it's not a gang, it's just a white guy sticking together, and it's not a shot caller. It's just, you know, the COs and other inmates look to someone to be like the spokesperson. Right. And that's entirely accurate.

I mean, it's necessary because there has to be a, single point of contact, there has to be like some cohesive way that like, you know, when there's an issue that they want to dealt with or when they're giving you a heads up, like, hey, we heard this and you guys are getting too loose, you know, we're going to come fuck up the unit or we're going to come look for this or we're going to do that. There has to be a point of contact where you can go, hey, man, they're hip to the head, like, stop or hey, there's this problem happening. You have to have a negotiator too.

The last thing you want is to, you know, be in a full-blown race war, you know, or that kind of shit because no matter what or when that happens, every place I was at in the federal system, you were vastly outnumbered. And I don't care who you are, how tough you are, numbers all day. And when you've got like, say, a PISA issue or something and there's 700 of them there and there's, you know, 90 of you, I don't care who you are or what you are. You will lose. That's just the reality. And so maintaining those relationships and staying out of each other's hair and, you know, ensuring respect and, you know, I don't want to say collapse. because really there's none of that, but it's more like, it's more like just intense,

intentional separation. How long do you stay at Victorville for? Three years. That's a long three years. You're telling me. It was brutal. Lots of lockdowns, lots of staff assaults, murders, suicides, super violent stabbings. It was nuts.

When you're in a place like that, do you think you ever sleep peacefully? No, absolutely not. We had a standard where you did not go to the shower by yourself. You had somebody that would stand outside of your shower because that was where people got attacked a lot. You could not walk through the dayroom with your shower shoes on or without, you know, having your boots, your laces laced up. You really didn't go any place by yourself for the most part. Like you always had at least somebody with you just for your own protection just to make sure that you, you're looking different directions at all times. And then before the doors opened in the morning,

morning, you had to be up, boots or shoes or boots on, and ready to go. You were never laying in your bed. If you were laying in your bed when the door opens barefoot, uh, dudes are going to come in there and beat on you just to show you how stupid you're being. So there's no soft sleep. There's no good sleep. There's no, there's no relaxing or kicking back unless that door's closed. And that's only, what, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. It's only time you can actually have, a moment to kind of decompress. And even then with certain sallies, you're never just letting it all the way I go.

When you live like that for three years, a good chunk of your time, what do you think are the effects afterwards? Oh, they're real and extensive and probably never going away. I operate at a pretty high intensity all the time. I would pitch it a little differently that those stressors and those staying fully revved for so many years on end, I mean, a lot more than three, really. But running it 110% for all that period of time probably is the best training I have for being able to function the way I do today.

Because it doesn't hurt me. It doesn't affect me the way some people like, oh, I just can't or I just, oh, it's too much. It's like, your little bullshit 40 hours a week is too much for you. Like, bro, this is just life. You know what I mean? Like it gives me a different tolerance for actual stress and for things that are difficult and things that are challenges. Nothing in my day to day now.

You know, I would argue that my day to day now is pretty intense work-wise, but nothing today touches a day of Victorville, United States, beneditary, not in the least. Where do you go after Victorville? Atwater. Is that? Also, USP, Northern California. I went there for an electrical apprenticeship program to try and get my electricians license,

do a journeyman there. At one point, that's what I felt like I wanted to do. I enjoyed that a lot. I ended up getting like 80-something percent of my hours. I think I've 3,800 or 3,900 hours of my apprenticeship time done and documented, but never pursued it because I went in a different direction. Even though that's a USP, is there less violence because it's a technical school in a way? Well, the school is just one part of, or the program is just one small part of it.

It's still violent, but the component that's missing on our side is, it's way less accommodating to gang members. The white boys there are almost all independent, almost exclusively, at least during this time frame. and there was probably, I don't know, 250 of us on the yard compared to like less than 100. Because if a visual is so violent, you can't even get your numbers up because inevitably somebody does one, you know, low level stupid thing

and three guys are smashing them off the yard. They always bitch about how low their numbers are, but they wouldn't stop beating the brakes off of their own people. Like it was the most round and round mentality of ridiculousness I've ever experienced. But Atwater was definitely better. Had a bunch of buddies on the yard that I ran into

that I knew from the streets that I still know now. I see every day, in fact. That was pretty cool for my hometown. Outwater was definitely better. I was there for, I don't know, almost four, I think,

three and a half four years. And it was pretty chill. Different climate. It's not in the desert. Victorville's in the middle of nowhere right beside Vanderburg Air Force Base. It's just dry and horrible. And the yard looks like the surface of Mars.

It's like full of jagged rocks and red dirt. And it's just, it's bad. Put it this way. If you're out rolling around the dirt or like playing sports or whatever and you get some of it in your pockets, you can't get back in through the metal detector. The place used to be a bombing range. So like if you've got dirt on you and like in your shoes and shit, you can't get through the metal detector, get back in your unit without dumping your shoes out.

Just to give an idea what's in that dirt. The place is horrible. Did you have any type of support system at all on the outside? Very little in the beginning. I had a couple of friends. Well, I had one friend in particular who stuck with me the entire time. It was just nothing but a great friend the entire time. She used to hook me up with money here and there.

She used to write me phenomenal letters and just wanted to be supportive. Just a really amazing Christian woman who was a good friend during that time. I had other people that kind of came on and disappeared over the years. Pop in for a couple of months, write a couple of letters, drop off for a year, pop back in. You know, lots of that. I got precisely two visits my entire federal set, one from a friend and one from each of those friends I just talked about in fact, which was pretty cool, but I would argue that it makes it harder, you know, it gets, gets my brain living outside and I made it my, I made it my world to

to live inside so I didn't have to deal with that pain as much. Oh, wow. You think it's harder to get less, or to get, yeah, to get more visits. visits. Oh, yeah. I would prefer, I prefer it the way I did it. I'd prefer to not have any, almost none, no outside contact. It's easier for my brain just to shut it off and pretend it doesn't exist because then it doesn't have to hurt anymore. Wow. I would rather just have it. I would just rather do it and get it out of the way. Where'd you go from there? From Atwater, I went to Mendota Federal Correctional Institution, which was my first and only medium. That's the lowest you

worked your way down to. Yeah, I only got to medium. Yeah, I don't, everybody always talks about camps and lows and stuff and I'm like I don't know anything about that I stayed I started from us P and went to medium but by comparison like that place was a fucking free for all like it was and it was still a medium but like for me it was great a badass job um it was it was cool what was your job I was a cook in the staff dining that's a great gig not only was it great like it gave me it gave me access to everything I needed like not just on like you know to be able to to eat, but when you're trying to get stuff done with the administration and, like, the warden and associate wardens are always hiding from people and talk to people. Like, I was one cooking for him

every day. So like, if I needed to get shit done or that's how I got my year of halfway house, I was cooking for this dude every day. I was like, man, are you going to sign that or what? He's like, we don't do a year. I'm like, well, the policy says you can. He's like, yeah, but we don't do it. Yeah, but why not? Like, what does it hurt you? Like, who cares? That's how I got a sign. Like, I browbeat the dude every day just because he wanted to get his lunch. But that was a crazy cool gig. I did that for pretty much the whole time. I was, well, I did electrical the first year I was there.

And then my boss left and went out to New Jersey, actually, to a different, to Fort Dix. I was at Fort Dix. Yeah, he transferred there. And when he left, they swapped in this, this fucking weird I couldn't work for. And so I was like, well, there goes the electrical program. And this other guy was like, hey, do you want to come? work in staff dining. I was like, yeah, no, I absolutely do. Yeah, let's do it. So I got my culinary degree, which is pretty cool. My wife gives me a lot of shit about that to this day, because she's

like, you have a culinary degree. I've never seen you fucking cook once. It doesn't mean I don't know how, it just means I don't like to. But yeah, I had fun there, to be honest. Like, Minota was pretty chill. I will say this. One thing that's a big principal difference is it was the first and only place I've ever been to that was a Northennial yard versus a Serenio yard. and doing time around those two groups is very, very different in a lot of different ways, but that was one thing that was interesting about it. They're a pretty intense little group.

Why is it different? How do I describe it? The traditional Serenio is like, generally speaking, and I'm going to get eight up in your comments about this, but it is what it is. I don't care. It's part of the gig. Generally speaking, super drug-friendly. friendly, you know, owes everybody in their mom money, doesn't pay their debts, gets smashed off the line, pretends to be hard for the yard with their crisp white tea. And, you know, I've got this whole image bullshit going on. And they're just, they're just fucking cellos at the end of the day. And at least in the context that I experienced in the North Daniel side of things, they're very militant, very professional in the way they interact. And at least, and technically speaking, they're forbidden to do those things, the drugs and all that.

I'm not saying they don't. They absolutely do. But they hide it well. They conduct themselves in a more professional light. And they're held accountable to a higher level than the other side is. Which was kind of refreshing to be around because a lot of the drama, the pens that I was at came from around Serranos and all their drug drama and all their bullshit and all their unpaid debts. And a lot of, I've been a lot of fucking issues and shit behind that group because of the way they conduct themselves. At least the Northanos, don't make anybody else.

don't make their bad habits to anybody else's business. That's a perk to them in my view. But it made things easier. It really did. How long do you do at the medium? I finished out there. I released there.

So what was that? Three and a four. Something like that. So it's pretty much equal at each spot. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. And it was, I got in a plane at Fresno International Airport

and flew to Portland and went to the halfway house. Out of that time, how much time do you think? you actually would have needed to change your life around? You think you needed that, you know, the full 11 or 12 years? Two years, two years would have absolutely. I could make an argument, depending on, you know, how frisky I was feeling about it.

I can make an argument that I changed my mind when I got sentenced. But I wouldn't say that's 100% because I was still using my first three months of federal prison. I was at the detention center and the last time I used math. I would say that first two years. I think two years was where like where I was just in the, in the monotony of doing the penitently for your life every day and it just wears on you and it just gets to be so tough of like just basic survival. Why did you choose to get sober? Because I'm sure you could have continued

doing drugs. Oh, absolutely. I got really tired. I remember the very specific night. I was laying in bed with my clear Sony radio, the single AA battery one with the analog dial. And it had a broken battery cover because I dropped it umpteen million times. Who knows? And I dropped it again while they were walking to do count one night. And I had a big ass door gap underneath that door. And it's like four something in the morning. And I dropped my radio. The double A battery pops out.

And it's the only one I have, of course. And it fucking rolls right out the fucking door onto the tier right before they walk by for count. And I'm high and stupid. And I roll over and try and pretend like I'm sleeping because they're doing count because I don't want to get you aid the next day. and I'll never forget this dude's cops This cop's name was Walker And he takes the double the double a against the glass of the door

Goes tink, tink, tink Like did you want this back or are you still pretending to be asleep Or like what's your plan? I was like Fuck you know what I mean he rolled out right in front of him I was like yeah if you could shoot it that'd be cool He's like yep not a problem And I just remember being so stressed out that I was

Because at that point I didn't know where I was designated to I didn't know what kind of facility we were going to send me to Little did I know at that point he didn't matter I was going to USP anyway, but I was trying not to get extra points. I was hoping to go medium to start with. That didn't happen. But I was worried about getting a dirty way and having to raise my points up and all that sort of stuff. And I just remember in that moment being like, you know what?

Drugs have caused so much harm in the lives of everybody that I was close to or should have been close to at that point in my life. Why am I going to keep doing the same thing over and over? What is the point? And I was just tired. I was just really tired of it. I haven't touched his heads. What was it like re-entering, you know, going to the halfway house, getting out, not being, you know, a fugitive of the law, trying to start over?

It was intense. I hit the halfway house. This was during COVID. So that was super great because the entire federal system was on this mindset. We're like, well, I wouldn't get into that. But they were, they were ridiculous. They were absolutely ridiculous. So at the halfway house during that time, you could go to work.

And that's it. If you weren't at work, you had to be in the house. house. You couldn't visit your family. You couldn't have passes to go home on the weekends. You couldn't do anything but be at work. So in my brain, and this is something I want to highlight here, like, just to be clear, my criminality has not changed at all. I think the same way. I act the same way. I just don't act on it. But I plan and try to figure out, like, what I have to do to live in a way that I can, you know, function within the law and legitimately, but to find that edge, right? And so in my brain, I'm like, oh, I have to be at work. Okay. So I start looking for jobs

with either travel involved or longer shifts or commission where there's no hourly restrictions, and I found one. My third day out, I went to DMV, got my driver's license, reinstated, and got all that taken care of. And then I went to this third-party company called Temco Logistics, which has a contract with Home Depot. to deliver appliances. And on my, my fourth day out, I get my job,

and I was a helper on a truck. And all I was due is deliver refrigerators and stoves that day. And we drove from the Dow's, Oregon to Florence to Newport, hundreds of miles, all over the place.

But you could work 16 hours a day, sometimes 18 hours a day. The halfway house's restriction was that you cannot work more than 18 hours a day. I'd work 17.5, 17.8, 17. 14. All, every day of the week.

And I'd run, I'd go ahead. out with friends, I'd go see people, I'd go hang out with my wife, who wasn't my wife at the time, but I'd go hang out with her in one of our trucks. I used it to my advantage, like, oh, okay, I can't do anything. Great, I'm at work. Screw it, you know. But I did really well there. I liked it. It was, got in good shape, made me crazy strong, carrying refrigerators all day. I did that for six months. I was at that boy house. And I enjoyed it. I mean, it was cool. I had one of my boys with me that I was in prison with, got him a job there.

He was my, and then I got promoted to have my own truck in like two weeks, which I thought was crazy. I'm like, he was going to give me this big ass truck and I'm just going to whip this thing all over downtown. Like, okay, fuck it. Let's do it. See, you know, something like what you are doing is it, in the BOP's mind is criminal, but in the real world, it's not criminal.

Right. So it doesn't, you're working within your set of criteria. Yeah. So it doesn't really prepare you for that real world experience. or just so many, you know, I think once you get out of prison, they should just let you go. Right. You would think. Maybe a case-by-case basis on if they need extra supervision.

Right. But just having those additional rules just doesn't make sense. Right. And it forces people to do that. I mean, there was a lot of things I did on supervised release that weren't necessarily crimes, but they were a violation of the supervised release. I didn't get caught for it. Right.

But, you know, it still made me feel like I was committing crimes, but it wasn't a crime, you know? Even if that way else, like the principal thing is, I bought a car, like my fourth or fifth week out. They probably gave you a hard time about that. They had no idea. I hit the motherfucker. Yeah, because they gave me issues with mine. Right.

So they were losing their mind. They're like, you can only have a vehicle here if we have our own key. And I was like, okay, well, I bought this, what was it, uh, 2013 BMW 328 I. And I was like, I don't, I don't have another key. They're $500 a piece and only came with one. I bought it used. Like, oh, you can't, you can't drive a car then. I'm like, okay.

Sure. No problem. So I parked at the hotel next door every day. And they used to give me extra time out because I had to commute on the bus to fit into my schedule. And I used to have to check my stuff in when I got in there at night. So I used, I had a, a key, or a DeWalt battery for my drill for my work that I emptied out.

And I had a little compartment for my key fob that went in an empty DeWalt battery that I modified at work so that they couldn't find my key fob. It was in my tool bag. Because I had to check my tool bag into the control room at night when I got back. So I had a key fob built into there. the whole time I was there. And I'd leave and walk up to the bus stop and loop around the block, hopped my car and drive to work.

That's great. I did that the entirety of the time I was there. Never once today. I ever have it become an issue. How have you been able to rebuild your life since leaving the halfway house? So what are we four years? We're just over four years. This last October was four years.

Life today is radically different in every good way. Um, first and foremost, I'm married to someone I knew from back in the day in addiction, uh, happily so, in fact. Um, she's, uh, she's, my best friend, my biggest cheerleader and absolutely my other half. Um, we've, uh, she has, uh, three kids that are just as much mine at this point, uh, that I absolutely take credit for, not credit for, but take ownership of in, in their own way. I love them to death. Her 15-year-old daughter still lives with us, Lily.

She's absolutely amazing. I may, in all fairness, end up back in prison, though, in all honesty, because there's going to be some kind of dude in her life that's probably going to put me in a bad situation just to be totally, totally upfront with you. But I've got three little dogs, a beautiful home we bought two years ago. I love my work. that I do today more than anything. It brings so much value in my life and like,

soothes my soul and who I am compared to like how much harm and how much fucked up shit I've done over the years. Beautiful things, beautiful life, addiction free. I couldn't ask for more. You know what I mean? Like I go into prisons. I go into jails.

I go to schools. I speak at law schools. I talk about redemption. I talk about. the things I have and the things I work for, not in like a way to like gloat and like, oh, look what I did, but really to show people like, hey, listen, you're no different than me. You can do these things. If you buckle down, you make different decisions, you decide to forge a different path. You can literally do the same things I did. I'm not special.

I'm not unique. I'm not different. I just decided to put in the work. I've spoken a couple recovery events and some things like that with my wife's work and in those places where I tell people nothing is off the table. And I think that that's such a huge problem that we get into as a society where we we hunt down a thing or a reason why we can't. We don't talk about what we have to do to succeed. We don't talk about what step two is in a five-step process. We talk about, ah, you know, I would have done that, but I can't because I'm a felon. Or I would have loved to have done this, but I'm broke. Or my parents did this, you know,

X, Y, and Z fucked up thing and so I'm just, I'm just fucked up. I don't get behind that victim's stance. I'm not with it. I have a fundamental problem with people that make exception to their own life to justify their lack of effort over circumstances,

over taking accountability and saying, yeah, you know what? I'm sitting right in this chair and I've told you about all kinds of fucked up shit that happened. But I want to sandwich that by saying, look at what I did after that because I've believed my whole life

if it's not getting hit in the mouth that, you know, passes judgment. It's how you stand up from that hit and how you recover. And I hate that we do that. I hate that people are so quick to, to forge those opinions rather than figure out how to make the next step to improve their life, how to help somebody else, how to step outside of your own shoes and go, you know what, this bad thing and this bad thing happened? Sure, what can I do to recover?

What is my next step? That's what's important to me. Life today is about taking care of those that I love, improving the lives of the people I work with and for, figuring out how to do more with less and solving creative problems for an agency that helps thousands of people a year in my town. And I couldn't be proud of that.

It's a big deal. I can make, in fairness, a whole lot more money in the private sector than I do. And I've had numerous jobs offers since I've had this job. And I've turned every one of them down, because what I do now has such a net benefit, not only to the community,

but to my personal piece and to my soul, because I could never begin to make right all of the wrongs I've done to so many people over my whole life. I can never even find them. I could never even, you know, find a way to a tangible thing to say, hey, I'm sorry for this and this is what I did. Here's how to make up to that.

I could never do that. But this is a way that lets me work towards getting square with the house. This is a way that allows me to, try to improve that situation. What do you think redemption is for you? For me personally? Yeah. Redemption for me personally is, most importantly at this point, is checking the last

box that is hanging over my head from my old life. And that's my, so I've, I've kind of worked in sequence. I fought my ass off to buy a home. We got through that. I own a piece of, I own a home, I own property. I figured that out. Me and my wife figured that out together. Then I wanted to go into prisons and jails and I wanted to be able to go into places that I'm not allowed to go in to help people learn from not only what I've accomplished and what we've what we what have done, but to inspire them to do so.

That was like the next huge checkbox in my life and I've gone to I don't even know how many now over the last year. But every one of them has been awesome and phenomenal in their own way. Then it was my state convictions of which there's 30 of got the vast majority of those knocked out. I've got a couple more to go, but it's only because there's a certain, another time limit to wait. Inevitably, that'll be completely squashed. But the last piece of my personal redemption story is my federal conviction, my weapons charge. I want more than anything to check that final box and remove that from my record, where I can actually be square again, right? I feel like I've put in enough work and I've done enough to get to that point.

What's frustrating is in state. and municipalities, you could see a judge and go, hey, I've done these things. Here's my petition. I want to do this. Can I, you know, can I, can I file to have these charges removed? And eight times out of 10 these days, unless you're particularly atrocious, they all get wiped. It's not a big deal. But in my case, because it's a federal charge, there's precisely one way to make that happen. There's no law. There's no mechanism. There's no anything for relief other than a federal pardon signed by the president. So in my case, what I've been advocating for,

what I've been lobbying petitions online for, social media campaigns around is just to find support to, even if I didn't get a signature, even if I didn't get one, to have the ability to tell my story in a way to show that I deserve a chance. I just want to be like anybody else that didn't make those mistakes and didn't have those convictions

to be at the same level, to have that final piece off of me where I can actually not say out loud, I'm a convicted felon. I went from 31 total to less than four at this point. I have three that have a time, a couple of months left on their time limit that it'll go. But that one federal case, a felon is a felon is a felon, right? You have one or you have 100 charges. It doesn't matter. That last one, I just need a signature on a piece of paper from one human being.

and I don't know how it's going to happen. It may or may not. I've got just shy of 4,000 signatures on my change. Dot org petition, which is pretty cool. A lot of people have been incredibly supportive of that. I talk about it a lot on social media, trying to just advocate. But at the end of the day, like,

if you don't meet somebody or you don't know somebody that can tie you in or you don't have some kind of outlet to the political spectrum in this country, which I don't, who knows what will happen. But I'm not going to give up hope. I have to keep trying. I have to keep pushing. And if it happens, it happens.

And I would be beyond grateful. Do you think you're more powerful without the pardon, though? I don't know if I'm more or less powerful. I think it's more impactful with because it's the entire gambit from Marshall's Most Wanted to no longer, not only not a fugitive, but time served, conviction vacated. I think that is the bookends of the story. story. I feel like I'm, I'm, I'm constantly living right here on this extreme edge, this knife edge of, of having it dialed together and, and doing all this, this great work and having

these wins. But it's like there's just this one last piece. And I'm so mission motivated and like my brain is so linear and like ABCD that like I need that next step so bad to feel like, okay, I fucked up. I spent many years fucking up. I've spent years trying to put it back together. I've done well. I've looked out for those that couldn't look out for themselves. I've tried my best to be a good human being. Now let me get square with the house.

Let's check this last box and have me be square with the house like it didn't happen. That to me is the ultimate goal. What would you tell your teenage self before the eBay scam and any other, you know, nefarious thing you did?

What would you say to them today? I would say, stop taking your hurt out on other people. no matter what good I do today, no matter what I've done, it doesn't alleviate any of the harm I've caused. It doesn't take away any of the victims I've had over the years. I would tell the teenage version of myself to find some kind of traditional help or to find somebody you could actually talk to. Don't take the hurt and pain that you bottle up every day out on people that don't deserve it. Bill, I appreciate you coming on the show today, man.

This is great. I'm glad we can finally do this. This is amazing, man. I appreciate you having me out. and I appreciate this opportunity. It's been a blast. Yeah, and I wish the best for you in the future. Thank you, man.

Appreciate it.