Locked In with Ian Bick - I Went To PRISON For Selling FAKE Sports Memorabilia | Cliff Panezich

Episode Date: March 26, 2023

After multiple law enforcement agencies launched an investigation called "Operation Stolen Base", Cliff Panezich is arrested and sentenced to several years in prison for selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of fake sports memorabilia. Listen to Cliff's story of how he goes from professional baseball player to the Gambling Addicted Ring Leader of Operation Stolen Base. Can Cliff turn his life around and come out on the other side?Connect with Cliff Panezich:www.cliffpanezich.com Connect with Ian Bick: https://www.ianbick.com/Subscribe to our membership program on YouTube to get early access to interviews, see behind the scenes photos & more:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRvVklIft6DMelVW18M0oBw/joinPowered by Q29 Productions, LLC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. What's the difference between Butter?

and butter made from real California dairy. It's the real California farm families behind it. Real people. Real care. Real intention. Why? Because real matters. So whether you're pouring milk, melting of cheese, or just grabbing one more spoonful of yogurt. Keep it real. Look for the seal. Real California milk by Real California Farm Families.

My name is Ian Bick, and you're tuned in. Lockton with Ian Bick. On this week's episode, I interview Cliff Panazic, who ran a multi-million dollar sports memorabilia scam. If you enjoy listening to Lockton with Ian Bick, make sure you like, subscribe, and share, and go grab some Locked-in merch. We all make mistakes, experience failure, and fall down in life. But if you decide to get back up and use it as fuel to your fire, you can choose to not let it define you. You can make it through to the other side and turn it into an opportunity. I went from owning a popular nightclub when I was 19 years old to becoming a federal inmate by the time I was 21. Join me, Ian Bick, as I interview people from all over the country

who have experienced the rock bottom of the American justice system. Cliff, the mastermind behind Operation Stolen Base. Welcome to Lockton with Ian Bick. I appreciate you having me, man. I'm excited for it. Of course, man. So I always like to begin my interviews at the beginning of someone's life. what was your childhood like and how did you grow up? What's your family like? Man, you know, so, you know, I really come from what I would say, your stereotypical background. You know, I got my two parents, my father, Frank, my mother Rose, lived in a normal home, lives in the suburbs outside of Youngstown, Ohio, went to private school, kind of, you know, by society standards, did everything right. You know, I wasn't in the streets or anything like that.

Went to school, got good grades, played baseball. I identify as a ball player. That's, that's I am and that's you know that was my life if I was going to talk about my childhood I'm going to sit here and tell you baseball stories basketball stories I was an athlete through and through that's what my family was that's how I was raised and that that was really my life and that's you know as we get into it you'll see that's what leads into my story and kind of where things went awry as well how old are you when you first started baseball and why was it baseball oh man why was it you know it wasn't always baseball it wasn't always baseball I wanted to play basketball but I started both at like age four, you know, so beginning to end, you know, I played baseball for for 22 years.

It pretty much encompassed my life. Are you very competitive? Like, is it all about winning to you? The worst. I am the worst. Absolutely competitive. And, you know, that's a trend you'll see throughout my life, even beyond baseball and when we get into talking about gambling and everything in my life after professional sports. But it's all competition. And I'm very much, I would say, I'm, I'm, but that's my addiction. You know, at the core, my addiction is competition. Speaking of addiction, are you doing any drugs in high school while you're playing sports? I've never used a drug in my life.

Really? I've never been high. I've never smoked a cigarette, never used weed. Not even a cigarette. Nothing. I've never done anything. My addictions are competition and attention. And that's, you know, baseball fulfilled that for me during my career.

And like I said, as we get into it, you'll see how, you know, kind of gambling and partying kind of took over those addictions for me. kind of led into my life of crime, you would say. You're like the older version of me because you got like 10 years on me, but I never did drugs, didn't drink, didn't do cigarettes. Mine was always, you know, fueled by gambling, fueled by wanting to be popular, competitive, all that. Right.

I already knew that, you know, there were a lot of common threads through our stories. Like obviously the crimes are different in some ways, but it's kind of the same stuff you talk about, you know, being a gambling addict or degenerate gambler or whatever you may call it. And that's the same theme that runs constant throughout my crime, throughout my life. But it all really starts with competition. And just like that, that need for that, like, physical and emotional, like, rush is the competition. So you graduate high school and you get into playing baseball in college. What's that like?

Right. So, yeah, I graduate high school. Youngstown-Uritsland High School is a private parochial high school. What state is this? In Ohio, Youngstown, Ohio. And then I went to a junior college in Pennsylvania, a full-ride athletic scholarship, Mercyhurst College. I graduated from there, transferred to a four-year school in Tennessee, Martin Methodist,

again on a full-ride athletic scholarship and, you know, finished out my collegiate career there. And went straight into professional baseball. And that's, you know, that's where my life kind of started to take a turn due to an injury. How old are you at this point? I'm 22, coming out of college, 22, straight into professional baseball. Now, are you good enough to the point where the MLB is looking at you, scouting for you, anything like that? Yeah, so I went, you know, when I came out of college, I finished my college, my senior season, I was like seventh in the country in home runs. I got overlooked in the draft, but I got signed professionally on a free agent contract, played my rookie season in New Jersey in Augusta, New Jersey with the Sussex Skyhawks.

But I was also on the radar for both the Indians and the Phillies. and I was set up, and that's, you know, not for their major league team, but I was, you know, supposed to have a workout with them for their farm system and hopefully get into their system. And I basically, I canceled the Phillies workout because I had to have shoulder surgery. So after my rookie year, you know, I go see the doctor, to which, you know, at which point they pretty much tell me my career is over, which is a hard pill to swallow. And it really wasn't the end of my career. I hung on and, you know, basically played until the wills fellow. off but more or less that was that was the end of my career and where you know my life really ends up taking a different turn so you're in your early 20s your childhood dream of being in the

professional baseball league comes to a stop unexpectedly because of this injury how's your mental health at the time yeah right you know so even you know it didn't really happen all at once at age 22 so at age 22 you know I get diagnosed with the with the injury and I have to have surgery and rehab and everything like that. But in my mind, I feel like I can overcome it. So I'm still going through the process of the rehab and the training. And, you know, it really probably hits me when I'm like 20, 25, like three years later down the road. When I'm, you know, I'm still playing.

I'm still in professional baseball at a low level, but I just, I can't compete. Like, my body's not the same. My body's broken down. I'm not the level player I was. You know, before it was I would walk on a field and know, you know, I'm the best player out there. And now it's, I'm just another one of the guys. Is that paying the bills or are you doing something else for work too? So, yeah, that's, you know, that's how everything starts.

Baseball at the lowest level, not even the lowest level, but all minor league baseball is not paying the bills for anybody. My rookie season, which I played at a high level of minor league professional baseball, I was getting paid $800 a month. Wow. Right, $800 a month plus expenses. They cover expenses. But that's also only for the season.

So it's only for the four months out of the season. You know, you go into the off season. You know, you have your bills. You know, you have your expenses. But I also have to train, right, so I can try and progress in my career. You know, so I have a personal trainer, a hitting instructor, a baseball facility, a gym membership, like on and on and on. That you have to cover these bills on your own. And that's really, you know, where, no, the crime didn't start here, but it's where I call it athletic connections, sports cards, and memorabilia.

is what the business originated as. And it started legitimately. And that's how I was paying the bills, was hustling autographs on the weekends, you know, chasing down players, paying college players, you know, before there was the NIL deal, the name image likeness,

you know, paying college players underneath the table and flipping all this stuff on eBay. And that's how I'm paying the bills. That's how I'm funding, you know, my professional career that's actually costing money to even partake in. So what kind of memorabilia are you selling and what's like the profit margin on it?

Yeah, so, I mean, we, you know, it just depended on season, what kind of memorabilia we're selling. And it's cyclical, you know, depending what sport we're in. But it's, you know, it's all smalls, like baseballs, photos, mini helmets, footballs.

And again, like I said, it comes with the season. But, you know, you have a physical store? No, it's all e-commerce, all eBay. And, you know, you would take like a baseball. You could get a Walmart, pay $2 for.

You know, you get a signature on it, depending on who it is. you know, it becomes $20, $30, $40. So it's really just about quantity. But there's a lot of, a lot of expenses incurred in, you know, traveling different places. You know, I took trips, you know, autographed trips, so to speak, from everywhere from Florida to Baltimore to middle of the country, Oklahoma, Texas, all over. So whole country. But it's a lot of expenses and it makes it, you know, relatively thin margins sometimes.

But it's making you enough money to live off of. for the most part. It's making me enough money to survive. You know, at this point in time, at age 22, 3, 4, you know, I'm still living in my parents' bedroom. There's no point in, like, getting a place for myself because I'm still thinking, you know, in the summers I'm leaving and going to play ball. So I'm just kind of treading water trying to survive.

Pay my bills, pay my trainers, and, you know, see where I'm still going with baseball. Because at this point in time, I'm not, you know, the dream's not dead. Like I, I, in my, in my mind, I probably realized like it's deteriorating and coming to a close. But in my heart, like I'm still like I can overcome this. Yeah, that was like me, running the nightclub. I kept going every single day losing money. And it wasn't until the feds had literally dragged me out and sent me to prison that I stopped and gave up on that dream. All right.

Now the question is, how does this legitimate business go into a criminal enterprise? What's the turning point and what makes it criminal? Right. So I can definitively tell you the turning point is December 2009. How old are you? She's going to make me do the math on it. December 2009. So I would have just turned 25. I would have just turned 24. I just turned 24 December 2009. And I have a like a business associate that I'm traveling with. And we go down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And it's right on the cusp of the national championship. So we go down there to graph the Alabama Crimson Tide, which at that point of time is players like Julio Jones, Mark Ingram, Trent Richardson, Craig McElroy, Rolando McLean.

And we go down there and we spend like eight days on campus at Alabama. Mind you, there's nobody on campus except the football team. Everybody's home on Christmas vacation. And we're tracking down these players, paying every player. There's videos, Sports Illustrated had the videos when they did the article, and it's still on their website. I was basically paying all these players under the table to sign these autographs. But that's also where it turned. There were some players we couldn't find, like Julio Jones, like Mark Ingram.

And the turning point really didn't start with me. It started with my associate, Adam Bollinger, who, coincidentally enough, isn't implicated anywhere in the entire crime. But we got to the point where we're like, you know, what do we do? We can't find these players. You know, our items are effectively, I don't want to say worthless, but, you know, it wasn't a good look not having these players. And he picked up the Sharpie, threw the signatures on the ball, and we bounced. So you're forging their signatures.

At that point in time, I was not. Adam was. Now. But that was definitely, that was definitely when the line was crossed for the first time. Was the act of actually paying some of the legit people money, to get their autographs or was that fine? A legal from a criminal standpoint? No.

A legal from like an NCAA sanction standpoint? Absolutely. How much are you paying them? You know, it depended on the player. So the first player we ran into was Marquis Johnson, who was a DB on the team. And we ended up paying him a bunch because he was actually going and getting us the rest of the players. Which funny enough, you know, when the sports ill-suitary article comes out, he claims to have no knowledge of who I am or who Adam was.

was or anything like that. But, you know, Alabama as a school really covered up the whole incident and just kind of said, you know, we kind of made up the story and none of this happened. But all these players took, you know, between $20, $50, $100. But to me, and, you know, times have changed now and now that's legal. These players can take money like that. But, you know, there was nothing wrong with what they were doing. You know, in some instances, these kids were coming out and they're like, you know, hey, you gave me 20 bucks for signing these balls. I can order a pizza tonight. and have something to eat. How many balls are they signing?

If you say, hey, here's 50 bucks. Is it worth it enough for you to get them to sign these balls and then resell them with their names on? Yeah, absolutely. You know, so a low-level player where, you know, like a $20 handshake, we probably have 40 team items we were selling or that they were signing. And, you know, we needed to get 30, 40 signatures on these balls,

but they would be upward, I'm sorry, but they would be worth upwards of $5, $700 if they were complete. But like I said, we got to the point where they weren't complete. We needed these key players. And, you know, that's really where the line was crossed for the first time. Now, once you cross the line, you don't look at it and say, hey, I don't want to go in this direction. You guys double down and make it bigger. So what happens next? Yeah, absolutely. So the drive home from Tuscaloosa back to Ohio is pretty much just this whole devising this whole scheme of taking all the memorabilia we had left from the previous season because every trip you take you kind of end up

with some memorabilia that doesn't get signed team specific stuff and we devise this plan that we're you know adam's going to sign all of it i'm going to sell it we're going to split the profits and that was really like no turning back from that point that was absolutely that drive home was where you know operations stolen base was was created who else is involved with us it's because it gets bigger than just you and him right so at that time it's absolutely only me and Adam. And me and Adam's association doesn't last that long. So we kind of have a falling out at which point, you know, he kind of goes his way. I go my way. And at that point in time, I'm not signing any fortrues. I don't even know that I can. To me, it's a, you know,

when I look and watch him do it, I'm kind of in awe at the process. Like, how are you able to do this? But I'm also already hooked. I'm already hooked to how easy and quick the money was. I'm put in all this work, you know, traveling in these places and getting these autographs, and it's this easy to just turn around and just do it, you know, off cuff. So I start practicing. And at the beginning, at the infancy, you know, it's 30, 40, 50 tries of practice on a piece of paper to do one signature on a photo or a basketball. But that's where it turns. And that's where it gets started. But I'm in it completely on my own. And so this is early 2010. And who do you recruit after that to help you?

Once you start, you're forging it on yourself, your partner's gone, who is now on the new team. Right. So it absolutely goes like that for quite a while, just by myself. And I'm actually, the way I orchestrated it was I was still going out and getting real autographs. So I actually traveled to Miami in 2010 for the Super Bowl and tracked out a bunch of players and would get stuff signed. But what would happen is I would get an Adrian Peterson jersey signed, one of them, but then I would sell 10 of them. And you would copy his autograph. And I would copy his autograph.

But not only would I copy his autograph, you know, I would have a picture of him signing my jersey. And then I would use this picture in the auction to be like, hey, you know, here's Adrian Peterson signing your jersey. Like obviously it's authentic. I would use the picture of the authentic one and then just send a fake one. Are you getting flagged at all on eBay or Amazon for fake memorabilia? Or does this stuff look legit? Yeah. So it's all eBay at this point.

Actually, it's all eBay through the entire operation. But when I ran it like that where I'm using the proof pictures, as they would call it in industry, like, man, it was smooth sailing for quite a while, for quite a while. But how somebody else gets involved is really, you know, through my own fault because, you know, I kind of, you know, you start slacking on. You try and find loopholes and make the process quicker and you get lazy. So now instead of, you know, traveling and getting an autograph and turning it into 10, now I just want to sell everybody. Well, while I'm, you know, selling all these other players, I don't have proof pictures or a picture of a real autograph. And now stuff starts getting flagged occasionally. And that's where I end up bringing in another associate.

And it's because I need another eBay account. What kind of celebrities are you signing, making fake autographs for? Name one. All of them. Anyone. Anybody. So if I said, Cliff, I want like a Michael Jordan autograph. You're selling me that? Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's very, it's very cyclical. So it's whatever's hot.

So whatever player, you know, throws a no-hitter, whatever player breaks a record, whatever movie comes out, you know, we're going to Walmart and buying movie posters and putting the whole Avengers cast on the movie poster. It's whatever happens at that moment and, you know, pretty much anything was fair game. And how much money are you making at the time at its peak? What are you bringing in? At its peak, I'm personally myself, I'm profiting, you know, upwards of 20,000 a month. month. But there's also, you know, at its peak, there's also five to ten other people at any one time that are making anywhere from five to $10,000 a month. So when you start adding it up, like the big picture of everybody and what everybody's profiting is, it's just out of control and enormous. And, you know, I really had a moment of realization of how out of control it was was when I went on eBay one day and I searched Aaron Rogers signed photo, which Aaron, Aaron, Rogers was a key player that you know a top whatever 10 NFL player that you know we would sell all the time and I'm going through the auctions and I see my auctions but then I see you know my other

associates auctions and it's all the same photos like of the first 20 auctions for Aaron Rogers like 17 of them are my signature and I'm just kind of had a moment of realization where I'm like this is like this is fucked what are you doing with all the money You're in your mid-20s, racking in more money than most kids your age are making. What's that like? And how are you spending it? Yeah, I mean, so how am I spending the money? Like my life in Youngstown was absolutely crazy.

And you can understand it because you ran a nightclub in a small town of Danbury. But like I was the man. You know, I'm out at the clubs, bottle service, entourage of people. You know, no waiting in line, no all that. club owners. That's what my life was like. And at least in Youngstown, it was, you know, the party nights were only Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So at least my partying was controlled to three nights a week because that's the only time anything was going on. But that also opened up, you know, Monday, Sunday through Wednesday was trips to Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh,

trips to the horseshoe in Cleveland. So you start gambling? Gambling, like gambling has been part of my life pretty much through and through from the beginning. So, you know, I was a card player at age five sitting at the kitchen table with my grandmother playing poker for nickels and dimes and quarters. So I was always a gambler. But as you would know, you know, to what extent, right? And it's all based on what your finances are, right?

So when I'm in high school and I'm betting $20, you know, that sounds rational. But, you know, as I start making $10, $15, $20,000 a month, like I'm just partying and gambling as much as I'm making, you know, and how far the gambling went, depending on how good of a month it was on eBay. Craziest gambling story. We've got to hear it.

I'll give you two. I'll give you the best and the worst. I'll give you the best and the worst. The worst is I was a big time player at the Rivers Casino. I get invited to their inaugural Blackjack tournament, which is their top 40 Blackjack players. And that was your game of choice, Blackjack? Blackjack is my game of choice.

Blackjack and sports betting. So I get invited to this Blackjack tournament, and I want to say it's early. It's like February 2012. And it's been a bad gambling year already. It's like middle of February and I'm down like 35,000 or something on a year. So I go down there with no money in my pocket. I literally go to the casino just to play in this blackjack tournament. First place is 12,500. I'm there all day. I cashed the whole tournament, 12,500. And I walk out the front door. with zero. Three hours later. I actually went down with $20 in my pocket, and I left down $20.

Wow. Yeah. The best of it, and it's funny because the timing of it and how everything occurs, but November 2014, I go on a crazy, epic sports betting run. A 10-day run, I make $110,000 in 10 days,

but it culminated with one day, a $43,000 win in college football. And I'll never forget it was actually Florida State versus Miami. James Winston's junior year. They're down like, I think it was like 17, 177 at halftime. And I'm just locked up by myself in a two-story suite at the Golden Nugget, sweating this game by myself. If you're a gambler, you know, like you just want to sweat by yourself,

leave me alone. I'm watching the game. And it was going bad. And they came back. They won. it covered by half a point. I shipped 43,000 that day, made the grand total like 110,000 in 10 days.

Little do I know. Like my impending fate like two weeks later was I was going to have whatever 12 federal agents and state detectives knocking at my front door. Overall, are you up, down even on your whole gambling lifestyle? Man, it would be a hard guess. I would say at this point in time, down, Couldn't even gather numbers, couldn't even put a figure on it.

You know, because at that point in time, it wasn't just gambling. It was partying, drinking, and it just, you know, the money went out as quick as it came in. And the way PayPal and eBay was set up, you know, anything, any kind of money or revenue that you generated from Thursday through Sunday would hit your bank account on Monday. So Monday, like Monday through Wednesday were like epic parties and, you know, gambling and like and how the gambling went those couple days dictated how the rest of the week went and dictated whether like by Saturday I was broke again waiting for my deposits to hit Monday morning. Now you get the money instantly so it's a good thing you're not involved in that anymore. Yeah right. Yeah now you can hit PayPal and pay for the little instant transfer and yeah

oh that have been bad. Looking back on it now do you think you were a gambling addict? It's not it's not even looking back to that time. Do I think I'm a gambling? I'm definitively in the moment a gambling addict and will always be. It's just how, you know, how you control it, how you deal with it. So right now, like, I'm, I'm not gambling. Like, I don't gamble at all right now. But, like, that's, that's like a one day thing or is it, is it a one day thing? We're on day seven. Day seven. Day seven. We're on day seven. We're on day seven. That's a, you know, it's a start. Well, football season's over. You got some time. Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, it's always in me. So it's always a constant.

battle struggle like and I know at any moment you know could go off the rails so I got you on that I read somewhere that your mom gets involved in this scheme or business how does that happen what's her involvement so her you know her implication by the police by the state and the feds is is really blown out of proportion but you know they they do that to manipulate me into a plea deal and everything like that but she you know she was complicit she knew and she handled a lot of of the shipping aspects of it. But really her involvement happens because, you know, she was the caretaker for my grandmother who was like in her 90s. And, you know, she got involved because I was allowing her to basically quit her job at Walmart. She was a manager at Walmart. She was able to

quit her job and stay home to be the caretaker for my grandmother and my father. So what the business did was, you know, allowed her to stay home. And I was paying. their bills and you know gave her the opportunity to do that and she in turn she helped me out by doing the shipping and whatnot so um like i said they blew her involvement out of proportion just to get to me there are a lot of other people a lot of associates like my age that were making bundles and bundles of money um that never saw the inside of a jail cell did your dad know that your mom was involved in this with you he he yeah my father my father knew um he didn't have any involvement in it. But he, like, he absolutely knew what was going on. But again, like, you know, that's not to

justify what I did. Like, obviously, I went about things the wrong way. But it created a lot of opportunity in the sense that, you know, I was able to allow my mother to stay home to, you know, my father was very ill. He was in bad health. My grandmother was in her 90s. And my mother, you know, was basically the caretaker of both of them. And that's, you know, that's how that happened. And that's how I provided that for them. And again, that's not to justify it, but, you know, the underlying causes, that's a big part of it. Do you think your mom kind of looked past the illegal aspect of it because she knew that this is what you guys needed to do to provide for your family? Man, you know, we never, you know, we never really had a talk about the legality of it.

But it was more so just, you know, she was kind of going to support me and whatever I decided I felt needed to be done. So once it got to that point and I needed her, like, you know, I was able to provide that for her. You know, I made that decision that that's how it was going to go. And she was just on board to help in that capacity. I mean, even looking at it, you know, obviously we relocated from Youngstown to Las Vegas and I took my grandmother and my dad and my mother. And that whole move is only possible because of the crime itself. You know, I couldn't have afforded to do that otherwise. spot for a gambling addict, huh? Yeah, that's why I end up there, right? Where else would you want to go as a

gambling addict in Las Vegas? Had you had stayed with your initial business plan of being legitimate and doing what you were doing when you first started out, would you have been able to make the money you were making with the illegitimate business eventually if you kept at it? You know, truth, be told, the industry as a whole is just fucked. And even the companies that operate legitimately you know, they have some pretty illegitimate aspects to them. They're just kind of operating behind a veil of secrecy. So like when you say, can you make that much money legitimately in the business, the answer is no.

Could I have grown the business, especially in today's day and age with the NIL deals, the name image likeness deals with collegiate athletes? Like that's a big step in the direction of being able to profit more significantly. But, you know, I always say it was basically like I was. printing money out of my printer in my bedroom. So the level of how much money was being made was, you know, it couldn't compare. And even the operation I was running couldn't have grown any bigger than what we were doing unless we took it to the steps of, you know, selling Babe Ruth and

Mickey Mantle and stuff like that, which is we, which is not what we were doing. It was all current players. But it was really maximized to its full potential. Like we couldn't make any more money than we were pushing through on eBay on a monthly basis. How many months or years is this business running for before the police get on your radar? So it pretty, the business, operation of stolen base, athletic connections, sports cards,

and memorabilia, whatever you want to call it, runs from January 2010 through December 1st, 2014. So it's about about five years, just under five years. And what's the gross on that money-wise? Estimate.

What's the growth? Well, they, you know, the feds say 2.5 million. It's always higher with the feds, right? You know, I'm not going to, the truth is I don't even know how they come up with the 2.5 million because I can't even put a number on it. I can't. So it's the life and the scheme became so like overwhelming and constant that there's really no way of knowing.

All I know is the only numbers I can put on it is that I personally think I made about six to seven $700,000 in five years. So why did the police first come on your radar? How did they get involved? So crazy enough how the whole business and operation gets put on the radar. And I say it's crazy enough because as we already spoke about, I've never used drugs. I've never been high, anything like that. But it's still a legal drug activity that ends up bringing the whole operation down. So there's really two different instances that happens. And one of my associates, You know became addicted to opioids and pills and was in pretty pretty rough shape with that And you know all the memorabilia that we were assigning you would just go to Walmart and buy you know so we're buying two dollar baseballs

Signing them selling them for 40-50 bucks So instead of going and buying the baseballs My associates send somebody in the Walmart to steal them and he gets caught and gets busted trying to push out a buggy full of baseballs and basketballs and balls and that kid that gets caught points the finger back into my associates you know they're asking them why you know most people don't go into Walmart to still buggies full of baseballs so they're asking them why and he points a finger back at my associate so that starts the investigation do you know the investigation is starting into you at this point i i catch rumblings of it and truth be told i'm not going to lie that's part of the reason why i moved to las Vegas but you kept doing the business

but i kept doing the business so as you you you can relate and understand once they're too far in, like what do you do? Right? So you keep digging. You keep digging, right? So not only do I have my own financial responsibilities and my family and my bills and everything, a lot of my associates are also living off of it and have no exit plan. So I may have had an exit plan, but no one else did.

So they're paying mortgages and car payments and taking care of kids. And, you know, so that's a very difficult scenario. to be like, hey, I'm done, you're cut off, and you know what? Guys lose houses and cars. And, you know, looking back, that's a big problem. I enabled a lot of it for everybody else. You know, but the weird dynamic of it is that while I was the only one able to sign the forgeries, you know, I was really at the mercy of everybody else because they would always come to me for them.

And I felt like I was in a precarious position if I ever cut somebody off. And it happened. You know, I cut someone off and then they would go and try and do it on their own. And to me, that would bring more eyes on to it because what they were doing looked bad. The Ford G's didn't look good. So to me, it was always a better scenario for me to just do it, make the stuff at least look good, and just kind of keep them at bay. But like I said, it always, you know, there was a point in time where I would dread waking up in the morning to look at my phone because my phone was just going to say things like, hey, I need 200 photos.

I need 50 baseballs. I need this signed. I need that signed. This customer needs this. And that's just what it was, message after message. And I dreaded that. So it's,

like I said, it's funny because I was the only one able to sign the forgeries, but I was really at the mercy of a lot of these other guys because I just didn't know how to tell them no. And it's like you said,

you just keep digging. You just keep digging. Who's investigating you at this point? Who's involved? So, you know, the investigation becomes a joint FBI and state effort. And, you know, like I was leading into, the other instance that happens in this whole situation is crazy because this is really my one misstep.

So that misstep where the guy stills the baseball is like, that doesn't put eyes on me. That puts eyes on my associate. And in the meantime, I leave. I'm in Vegas. So they're looking in Northeast Ohio for the mastermind, the ringleader of this criminal organization. And at this point of time, it's a federal investigation. Did you know it was called Operation Stolen Base? I did not. I didn't know it was called Operation Stolen Base until the Sports Illustrated article dropped. So what's this instant? Right. So in addition to running this

illegal operation and being a degenerate gambler, I ran an underground poker game in my house, in my basement. Pretty high stake game, you know, upwards of $20,000 on the table. And a couple of nights in a little, you know, basement of a house in, you know, Youngstown, Ohio. But what happens one night is a guy owes me like $600. He's good for it. He comes over a couple days later to pay me. And he's like, hey, I got $600 for you or do you want these two $500 gift cards to Walmart? And I know he's buying them off Craigslist from, you know, you can imagine who and what type of people.

But I'm like, yo, yeah, just give me the gift cards because I'm going to Walmart to buy baseballs, footballs, basketball, whatever. Give me the gift cards. So I get these gift cards and sure enough, that's what I do. I go to Walmart, fill up my buggies and, you know, get all this memorabilia. But fast forward a couple of months. I'm gone. I'd move to Vegas and a couple of drug addicts get pulled over in Canfield, Ohio for having a cracked front windshield.

And they have stolen credit cards in the car. The stolen credit cards trace to the gift card. Which trace do you? The gift card traces to me. That's how they get my name, my license plate, my B&V record and all that. And they knew you were in Vegas at this. point. And now, you know, they obviously can track all my records and know I'm in Vegas, but that's how my name gets put on it. Because up until that point, you know, they know my

associate. And, you know, it's, you know, they know my associate and arguably he's eventually going to tell him anyway. But we don't know that. You know, at this point in time, there's just some eyes on him. They can't prove anything. And they don't know who I am. And they're looking in Ohio. And I'm gone. I'm out of Dodge. But this puts my name on it and my face. and it's just, it's a random. Two good and co-coffee creamers are made with farm-fresh cream, real milk, and contain three grams of sugar per serving. That's 40% less than the five grams per serving

and leading traditional coffee creamers for a rich, delicious experience. Whether you enjoy your coffee hot, cold, bold, or frothy, two good coffee creamers make every sip a good one. Two good coffee creamers, real goodness in every sip. Find them at your local Kroger in the creamer aisle. The funny thing about running a law firm is you bill by the hour, you never seem to have enough hours in the day. And most lawyers didn't go to law school to spend their time on invoicing, case management, and compliance.

Enter 8am, the business platform trusted by over 260,000 legal professionals that simplifies and automates the business of running your practice. Want to get some of your billable hours back? Start at 8 a.m. Visit 8am.com to see how. incident of two people that I never know. I've never met them that have these stolen credit cards and it traces back to me. But the crazy part is, is that I actually get charged for these stolen credit cards. That's part of my crime is that I got charged and pled guilty to these stolen credit cards that these drug addicts got caught with. Wow. So the day you're arrested, what's that like? You know, so it's, you know, the story is really happens December 1st, 2014 is when

raid my house. And your early 30s or late 20s? I was 29. I was 28. I was 28 December 1st, 2014. I was 28. But it's only a search warrant. So I don't even get arrested. It's a search warrant to come to the house. It's, you know, federal agents, Canfield police detectives. And as I previously alluded to, I just went on this big sports betting run, right, where I made $110,000. So, So in my mind, you know, the best time of year for sales is Christmas, right, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So this is really like my exit strategy finally. I'm like, I'm going to take some of this money, invest it, buy as much stuff as I can, work 100 hours a week for these four weeks through Christmas, you know, run it up. I'm done.

Get out the door. Unscathed, right, is the thought. So when they come to my house, December 1, 2014, it's actually the most. shit that's ever been in my house ever, ever. I saw the photos. Right, right. But they get there and they think they're coming in the house and I'm going to have walls filled with money and like they they just think this outlandish like crazy shit. Like I'm out here driving exotic cars and it's not that. I'm just a degenerate gambler making $20,000 a month, blowing $20,000 a month. That has a hundred footballs in his apartment. Right. Right. But like, but typically,

You know, they would have came in the house and it had been, you know, buckets of baseball, stacks of photos, whatever. But at this point in time, it's literally floor to ceiling, basketballs, footballs, baseballs, like everything, as much, like, literally the whole house was filled. On top of it, I actually bought a legitimate autograph collection off somebody for $20,000 that was probably worth about $45. And the plan was I was trying to integrate that into all the sales to make it go a little bit smoother. and all that stuff was there too. So actually when they raid the house, they confiscate all this real memorabilia that they won't admit is real

and all this fake memorabilia and all this unsigned memorabilia. And they confiscate all of it, call it all fake. But that's a microcosm and a common thread through the whole case and the criminal part of it is that the narrative they want to tell

is that I never sold anything real, which is not true. Right. And obviously, sitting here from me to you, like, I'm never going to say I'm innocent. Like, obviously, I committed a crime and I know what I'm guilty of. But because they couldn't prove what was real and what was fake, the feds dropped a case and the state just goes, hey, it's all fake. And what do you end up getting charged with? Man, do we got time for that? What did I get charged with? I got a first degree racketeering charge, the second degree credit card theft, which is identity theft, second degree adage. Second degree adage. theft, second degree telecommunications fraud, three counts of forgery, and an F3 money laundering. So I've eight felonies. And you're the head of your case? In the head of my case, it's a racketeering case. Are you cooperating against anyone or is everyone cooperating against you?

Yeah, so there's no one to cooperate against. So you're the head. You're the head of it. I'm the head. And, you know, when I sit down with these guys, everybody's already cooperated against me. statement upon statement upon statement. And, you know, that's pretty obvious when you look at the case. And I think there's eight co-defendants, six get probation, two guys get prison time.

They do 18 months. And I do day for day, six years. Was there any opportunity in your mind to go to trial or were you just caught dead the rights? You're going to take a plea deal? You know, so again, am I guilty of illegal conduct? Yes, absolutely. you know, but am I guilty of what they say? The answer is no, because again, the narrative they want to tell is that everything's fake. And really, even to this day, their knowledge of actually what went on is just not true and inaccurate and they don't know to the point that where when they submitted my sentencing memorandum and they put the appendix in the back with, you know, evidence of the crime, they used some pictures of real memorabilia, authentic autographs in my sentencing memorandum and said it's, fake. But that just goes to show like what their knowledge really was. There was no

handwriting analysis or you know authentication services. It was really just these guys, my co-defendants said I did it and they, you know, overindicted me to where I was facing 47 years was my actual charges. So, you know, to me a lot of the story is that they couldn't let me get to trial. And that's not to say I would have beat all the charges because, you know, with a jury. anything, anything can happen, as you know. But they couldn't let me get to trial because it had been a circus. It had been a whole lot of he said, she said.

And it could have went well, could have went badly, you know, would have cost the state a ton of money. So what they do really is this, you know, this is where they implicate and leverage my mother and put her in jail. And that's how they get my plea deal. They arrested her. Yeah. So it's actually deeper than they just arrested her.

she got probation on the case as she should have oh she was charged in the case she was charged in the case yeah um and she got probation on the case just you know as many that my co-defendants did but part of her plea deal for probation was that she had to cooperate against me um which i was okay with and we had discussed and to from me to her it was always just just go tell the truth right you can tell them that I sold X, Y, and Z, that was all fake. But, you know, just also tell them that I went, you know, Baltimore, Miami, Alabama, Oklahoma, and had all this real stuff. Like, just tell the truth. So she shows up back in Ohio to testify at my grand jury indictment. And my prosecutor, Marty Desmond, and this is a name that will come up in my story a lot because he's been implicated

and fired as a corrupt prosecutor. When she shows up to testify at my, grand jury, he tells her, hey, I can't put you on a stand. I think you're going to lie. I'm violating your probation, which is not legal. You can't violate some of these probation on the implication that you think they're going to lie. But sure enough, that's what he did, got her put in jail, never had a probation violation hearing, never went in front of the judge, got the date continued, never reset. And there's actually audio recording that's going to come out in some of my projects I got going on where he goes to her and tells her the only way she's getting out of jail. And at this point of time, he says the only way you're getting out of jail to go take care of

your dying husband is if I plead guilty. And sure enough, like a couple weeks later, I plead guilty. She walks out the next morning. And at that point in time, it was really not just leveraging my mother. It was leveraging my father's health because he wasn't bad health and he was dying and he did end up passing away. What's going on in your mind throughout all this? I mean, it's, you know, it was such a long process. You know, at this point in time, like I said, they raided my house December 1st, 2014. At this point in time, it's October, November of 2016. So it's almost two years of them just pretty much playing games and dangling my fate over my head.

Because I didn't get indicted for 22 months. You know, it was just pretty much empty threats of, we're going to indict, take this plea deal, going to indict and nothing ever happened. So it's a very... And you're on bond during this? No, I'd never been arrested at this point. So the initial search warrant was nothing. I'm just nothing. I'm just living life. But the business is defunct. The business is defunct. I'm working a normal, legitimate job. But it's emotionally, it's very much a roller coaster. And, you know, I'm sure you can relate that like some days you wake up and you might be motivated and feel like,

hey, I can beat this shit. And then another day you wake up and you're like, fuck, I'm going to prison. You know, and it's a very much back and forth dynamic and hanging off of everybody's, you know, soul word. You want advice from everybody. You want to hear what everybody's got to think.

Like every word, every attorney says, like you sit and overanalyze and process. And, you know, I may have been free in the terms of I was in society, but like mentally I wasn't free. I was already locked up in prison, so to speak. I mean, you must have a ton of weight on your shoulders, too, bringing this stress onto your family with, you know, your father's health

and your grandmother's health and everything at the time. Right, absolutely. And it's, you know, and they knew that. And they knew that. And that's what they played off of. And, you know, the bigger part of it is, you know, I really tried to accept responsibility for what went on very early on. So when I initially,

sat down with the state prosecutor. They offered a three to seven year plea deal, which in Ohio, you've got to understand how Ohio works. Three to seven years means the judge can give me anything between three and seven, three, four, five, six, or seven, and it's a definite sentence. So it's not a, it's not a range. Like, you know, you get three to seven, you do the three. So she could give me anything from three to seven.

But with no previous record and a college education and no other trouble, nonviolent, you know, my attorney convinced me I would get three. So I'm like, whatever, sign me up for the three. He said I'd be eligible to get out in six months. I'm like, awesome, cool, good deal. I can go sit down for six months and call it a day. But then what they do is it's pretty much a bait and switch. When they go to go to arraignment, the deal's a five to seven now.

They change it from a three to seven, which causes everything that happens in the case. So obviously me and my attorney, we back out from the plea. but then what they do is they go and take my statement that I made for the three to seven year plea deal and they take my statement and use it against me to get me indicted, right, which obviously, again, is a violation of rights and they can't do because that that statement was confidential, you know, based on the plea deal. So when they renege on the plea deal, they can't just use that statement. But that's, you know, that's what happened. And like I said, there's a lot of.

controversy and corruption through the whole county. My prosecutor was fired. My detective was fired. The FBI agent isn't an FBI agent anymore. There was allegations and investigations into my judge with the disciplinary counsel. The entire office was under investigation for corruption and tampering with the grand jury. So there's a lot of nonsense that went on in the county, and a lot of it proves true throughout how they prosecuted my case. And it didn't need to go like that, right? Like, is my case a racketeering case? Like, no, I was not running mafia, mob gang in Youngstown.

Oh, wow, I was selling counterfeit sports member billi. When you get arrested, do you get Bond or are you in jail waiting? So I get arrested, funny enough, my 30th birthday, December 25th. Great birthday present. Yeah, right. It was Christmas, December 25th. I just turned 30. At about 11 o'clock, they come out to my residence in Nevada and arrest both me and my mom on a Ohio arrest warrant calling us fugitives.

They said, so the detective that filed the arrest warrant said we were fugitives that fled Ohio and we were on the run, even though he was just at my house, 23 months earlier, and he gave them the address of where to come get us. So we get arrested. I get extradited back to Ohio. My mom actually got let out. Her judge kind of sought through the nonsense and let her out after like two weeks. I sat for 110 days, got extradited, and got a $100,000 bailed out.

I bailed out. And then like three months later, the prosecutor goes back in front of the judge and is like, hey, he's the biggest flight risk I've ever seen. He's a menace to society. I mean, what were you doing? You got to have been doing something. I didn't do anything.

Nothing. Well, first, I mean, I left. When I got out on a $100,000 bail, I went back to Nevada. Which were you weren't supposed to do? I had no restrictions because Nevada was my legal residence. Like I wasn't just in Las Vegas. I was a resident, driver's license, bills, like, so I was allowed to go.

So I went back. And, you know, the prosecutor played a lot of games, made me show up for a lot of frivolous court dates, like, for no reason. But I always came back. I came back every time. And finally one of the times he goes in front of the judge and is like, you know, restrict his bail to where he can't leave all. Ohio. So now I'm stuck in Ohio, basically homeless. I end up living with an uncle of mine for a couple months. And then they add on the extra charges in the indictment and he goes in front of the judge. I'm the biggest flight risk. I'm a menace. I wasn't doing anything. I was actually not even

working in Ohio. I was volunteering at my old baseball facility where I trained while I was playing professionally. So that's all I was doing was volunteering at his facility. But they knew You know, the way to get to a plea deal was lock both me and my mom up and leave my father in Nevada in bad health. They got to put the pressure on you. Right. That's the way to do it. And again, you know, that's my biggest problem with the whole case and how it was prosecuted. I wasn't a murderer, a rapist, a gangbanger.

I sold forgeries. Like, it wasn't a crime yet. Did I need to go to prison? Sure. Like, do you manipulate my mother and my father's health to get that? No, absolutely not. and, you know, a lot of what they did, in a lot of ways, led to my father's death. Sorry to hear that, man.

Yeah, you know, he passed away 20 days before I got sentenced. And 75 days of my last, like, 90 days of freedom, I was, I spent in ICU, you know, next to my father. You did get to be with him, at least for the end. Yeah, yeah, so I was there. But again, that's like, you know, even the criminal justice, you know, just, you know, just, a whole different conversation, but, you know, prosecutors, judges, detectives, they get blinded. They get blinded by the end game of a conviction by any means necessary, right? And they use tactics that, you know, are there people that need to be prosecuted harshly and swiftly and, you know, the rules kind of don't apply?

Sure, but it's not, you know, somebody that committed forgery. It's not somebody that, you know, fucked off a club. because he was a gambling addict, right? Like you don't prosecute people like that by leveraging the health of another human. Do you think what you're analyzing of their actions gives you some reflection back on your actions of being super competitive

and doing whatever it took to win? It was absolutely a competition between me and this prosecutor. Absolutely. And he wanted his, you know, he used my case as like a springboard to try and get some notoriety to run for head prosecutor. And it was very, very much so a battle of intelligence and a battle of competition.

And when things started to not go his way in the prosecution, they circumvented the law. You know, they circumvented rights and laws to, you know, get me to plead guilty. How much time do you end up getting sentenced to and stipulations, parole, anything like that? Yeah, so I ended up getting, I got sentenced to six years, served every day in my six years. Every single day. I serve five years, died months. I got three months off like a college program or whatever. But that only came from the ODRC from the prison.

From the state, I served their whole time, maxed out by sentence, and they're still hanging three years over my head, which, you know, make that math, math. Which is probation? Right. I have five years probation, and they hang three years of prison time over my head, even though I maxed out my sentence.

So in Ohio, on a six-year sentence, I could actually serve nine. Wow. Now, what's prison like for you? Going in as a, you know, a white 30-year-old kid or adult at this point? You know, I'm never, like I'm not going to sit here and make it sound worse than what it was. A lot of people have a lot of different experiences. My prison time was super smooth, right? The worst of it is the mental aspect, right? you know obviously I just lost my father 20 days prior I left my mother in Las Vegas by herself for six years and that's really the struggle right the mental side of it but what was prison to me like yeah I was a 30 year old white guy that grew up in the suburbs that went to private school but there were really two things

that played in my favor one that I was an athlete and two that I gambled and you know that's you fit in where you fit in, right? So I get a lot of respect very quickly when I can go bang on the basketball court with all the 20-year-old kids, right? The old white guy that can still hoop. Like that, that gains you some respect inside. The other part of it was, you know, prison for me was running a gambling football ticket. That was your hustle. That was absolutely my hustle. That started not, you know, not long after I got in. All right, let's hear about that. What are the ends and outs of running a, a sports ticket in prison, how much are you making? What are they paying for it? Yeah. So a football, a sports ticket in prison, for anyone that doesn't know, that would,

you know, I'm basically the bookie, right? I'm the bookie in prison and we're running parlay cards, so to speak. And it, you know, it depends what prison you were at. But my first prison, Richland, I had a partner, we ran it. And we would book, you know, upwards of $2,000 a week during football season, be about a thousand dollars profit. a week, which is significant, but it's especially in a prison hustle, you know, and how are you getting paid? You know this. It's all, all food, all commissary, soups and macrills and big bags of food all over the compound. But it's really a business. And to me, more so than like it just being a hustle for the food and the money, I'm in there running a business. And that's

how I'm doing my time. And when I say it's a business, you know, you have however many housing units. At Richland, it was six housing units, and you have an agent in each housing unit that's booking the action for that unit, bringing me the place. So they're all on the payroll. You know, you have somebody working in the law library or the rec office to use the copy machine. So they're on the payroll. You know, it becomes an operation that's like, you know, 10 or 12 people are surviving off of off of this hustle. By the end, my last two years, I was at crafting correctional institute. I ran it by myself. The ticket was called free bands. And at this point of time, I know you and Colin here weren't in, but this is COVID time and stimulus money time.

And everybody in prison got their stimulus money. So, you know, money is flowing in the prison system at this time and it's it's you know for a lot of other hustles as well but definitely on the gambling side and my last year I ran a football ticket I was booking upwards of five or six thousand on a weekend wow did you ever suffer any crazy losses where you couldn't cover or there were there were a couple of close calls couple of close calls it never got to that no I pretty much I pretty much skated through unscathed but there was uh it's actually that same season like week four three or four. I put something on the ticket where it was pick 10 NFL winners, heads up.

No point spread. Pick 10 winners. It pays 100 to 1. It pays 100 to 1. It should never win. It should never win. But sure enough, this weekend, every favorite covered. And I have like going into Monday night football, there's like $30 out there to win

$3,000 and everybody has the Buffalo bills against the tennis. see Titans and the Titans end up winning. Save my ass. But the game ended with the bills on like the two yard line. So it's like I'm sweating out $3,000 in food and cash that money and Venmo's while everybody else is cheering for the bills and I'm over there running through the fucking aisle of the prison celebrating that like we're still coming out with a ticket tomorrow. Yeah, my bunk at the camp was the bookie and I would just remember there would be long laundry bags full of commissary all over the room, all on the floor, and he would pay someone just to watch the room all day because there was so much stuff. I remember I was never into sports

at all growing up, and I never played a sports ticket until I went to prison. So I start watching the games because I wanted to make money. I ran the blackjack table, and I played C-Lo, made a ton on dice, and one day I put in an eight-pick parlay or whatever you call it. I hit seven of them. all seven and the eighth one was on the phoenix suns game and i picked because i mixed it between basketball and football and i picked the sons to win and i was going to get i had like 200 bucks on it 200 mackerel's i dropped down on it and i was going to win like six or seven thousand it was something crazy and i'm just thinking of like what i'm going to do with the money sons end up getting crushed and it was just like the sons were supposed to win they didn't win and i got crushed didn't play again

that. See, that's usually where you get hooked. When you go seven for eight, then you're hooked. Yeah, well, I was short time at that point. I had like a month or two left to go. Now, a lot of people are curious about this. How do you convert the commissary food into actual cash? Right. So, you know, that last season, I ran the football ticket. It was so big because I had a couple big players that actually didn't play food. They were playing cash app Venmo, Zells, Google Pay, Apple Pay, whatever. Any way you could get money sent in prison, like I took it and probably got paid that way. But selling food bags itself is a big hustle in prison, you know, coming from a storeman. But that's the same thing on the football ticket. So you accumulate food. I don't know what it's like in

federal prison, but in state prison, a lot of people either are put on restriction for institutional infractions or maybe they have court fines and restitution and their books are locked so they can't get money put on their books and shop at the store. So selling food bags is a big hustle. And that's how you would liquidate food. So, you know, you'd bag up a bag full of like $75, sell it for $100. So you're actually profiting on the back end again. Are there contraband cell phones at all? You know, they, they were around. I had one, I had a contraband phone one time during COVID. How much did you pay for it? I paid, I paid $500 for a phone that was the size of my thumb. Oh, the little of the Thumbsticks, yeah.

The beat the boss. Those are the ones you could shove up your ass in certain prisons. Yeah, so, and I can tell this story about how they were getting into prison because it's already, they figured it out. But the last prison I was at was a very low-level prison, so we had a lot of privileges. And especially during COVID, they opened it up to where you could order art supplies, music supplies, whatever. And what guys were doing is they would call, that other people would call and order a speaker, an amplifier for like a guitar, or to play me. music, whatever. But like, if you were in and I was ordering it for you, I'd ordered for you, but have it shipped to me, I'd get it shipped to me, crack it open, stuff it full of phones,

drugs, tobacco, whatever, box it back up, send it back to the company, be like, oh, you know, I'm sorry, I ordered it, but it was supposed to go to this address. The company gets it back, turns around, ships it to the prison, comes into prison, crack it open. And the prison's not even searching? They're not even searching it. Or, I mean, At the time, they weren't searching. Eventually, somebody tells. That is ingenious. Because that's how it happens.

Somebody tells. And this was only a few years ago. So this was like 2020, 2020. I was shocked because when I was in prison in 2016, the feds are already like the federal prison systems. They're not even letting books getting resent back into you or whatever. It has to be wrapped up from Amazon. Right. Well, that's what was happening, though, is I would get the, you know, the person.

on the street would get the package and send it back to the manufacturer. And then the manufacturer would change the address, tape it back up, send it into the prison. It's not going through an x-ray machine or anything? Nope, not at that point in time. It was just coming, it was coming straight in the prison, through the mailroom, going to the rec office, and they were just handing the stuff out. And there were phones everywhere. All the little beat-the-boss phones that, you know, cost, I don't know, $20 at Walmart.

And I got a deal. I got a deal because I was cool with the do. I have 500. They were really going for like 800 for a $20 phone. So overall you had a good prison experience. I mean, I would never say it was good. You had compared to most people. Yeah, you know, my time was very, very smooth.

And I'll always say it's all about routine and staying in the moment, right? So for me, me staying in the moment was running the sports operation because that was a business. And I'm very business-minded. So that gave structure to my day. I also, you know, played sports, ran workout programs, and that just made my day. My friend who did some time would always say I was busier in prison that most people are in society or on the street. But that's how I did my time. Staying that busy was always something.

What's next? What's next? And that made my time go super smooth, super quick. But also on the other side of it is, you can understand this, because I'm so deep in the gambling and, you know, who are the people playing the most money on the football tickets? Well, it's typically guys that have money that are higher up in a lot of the gang affiliations and whatnot. So a lot of the guys that I'm cool with are powerful people on the compounds. And that, you know, that makes my time smooth. Like that's why I'm able to get through and be unaffiliated.

And, you know, I don't need to be because my boys, my friends are the ones that have power. And that makes my time super smooth. That business mindset you have, the entrepreneurial mindset, mixed with having six years, to kind of bide your time and figure out your next moves when you get out. Did you think at all about getting back into any sort of crime or any sort of scheme or anything? So truth be told, well, the answer is no. Absolutely not. There's no amount of money in this fucking world worth going back to prison for, period.

Plain as day. But truth be told, I could run the same operation tomorrow and not get caught. It's really that simple. it took a perfect storm of, you know, mistakes and people around me that I let in to get the crime prosecuted the way it was and still, even so as sloppy as it was, it took a lot of like underhanded violation of rights and laws to get me prosecuted. It would be very simple to do it again. Like, but I, you know, that's a life in my past. You know, life is very clear and right now from a business mind business standpoint and you know freedom is worth

more than any amount of money and peace of mind is worth more than any amount of money what did you decide to get into for work when you got out you know coincidentally enough I still run an eBay business a legitimate a legitimate eBay Amazon business and this is actually another reason why my time was so smooth is because while I was fighting my case you know like I said I had a legitimate job but I also lost of my legitimate jobs because on my case I got put in jail three different times, basically with no warning, like on a fabricated fugitive warrant and stuff.

I ended up creating an eBay. I ended up creating an eBay arbitrage business, basically reselling from, you know, estate sales, garage sales, goodwill, storage units. And I created that before I went to prison. It operated while I was in prison. My mother ran it. And that's, you know, basically how she supported herself. And since I've been out, you know, I really pushed that to, you know,

a new level, a new extreme to where my first seven months out, I grossed over $100,000. That's awesome. You know, but that's even that's not something I don't think it's long term. But that's, you know, why my transition, why my time in prison was so smooth. Why my transition back in the society was so smooth. But, and you know how it is on social media. You always catch slack for being successful. how'd you do it, who helped you.

But I'll always say that it was only so smooth for me because I started preparing for it eight years prior. I started preparing for my release before I even went in. So when that time came, I was really able to hit the ground running and just take off with it. Do you operate your business now with the thoughts in your mind

of learning from the mistakes of the past so you don't go back down that route again? Because you're in an eBay business, you're in an eBay business back then. It's very easy. to go down that shady path. Right. I mean, there's always, you know,

when I know it's as simple as picking up a Sharpie and signing an autograph, like, to make $100 that quick, two seconds, the thought's always there, right? Because you just know you're capable of it. But, you know, my business now is very structured and, you know, it's incorporated LLC and like everything's buy the books

and that's how I preferred. Because like I said, you know, peace of mind is worth more than any amount of money. Like, I know I can go to bed and I'm not getting a knock on the door in the morning with 12 federal agents standing there. And that means more than anything. You know, but at the same time, you know, like I said, I pushed the autograph business, like, to the extreme.

The most amount of money that we could make selling forgeries we were making, which was like putting in 80 hours of work and just signing stacks of photos. It was no more money to be made. And even when you start talking about making $10,000, $20,000 a month, like, yeah, that's significant to a lot of people. But I really have bigger goals, dreams, and aspirations than that. You know, so a life of crime isn't going to do that. I know early on you said you're still battling with the gambling addiction.

What's your message to others that find themselves in those shoes? you know it's it's it's you just take any addiction really and this you know i don't know what a drug addiction is like but i can understand the behavior and it's really just one day at a time and for me when i can stay away from my addiction life becomes super clear right and the thing i always tell myself is like you know the the goals and the and the things i want to accomplish like are way you know, way more important, have more purpose, and even financially, are way bigger than anything I could do in any one day gambling, right? If I went to the casino and things went ideally perfect, right, how much money are you walking out of a casino with, you know, without hitting a slot jackpot,

right? Like, you could go to the casino and make $10,000. Is $10,000 changing your life tomorrow? Like, not really. Not really. You know, so the things I'm working on, are life-changing. And so I try and stay focused on on those, you know, those aspirations that I have rather than being in the moment of, hey, let me try and win $500, $1,000, 10,000, whatever. That's not life-changing long-term stuff. So I just have bigger goals that I try and stay focused on. And that's what I would say to anybody is, you know, have your goals in mind and, and, you know, play the long game. You know, gambling is very much short-term, you know, quick rewards. It's just It's not worth it. You're also in a really unique position with your story because there's so many

kids that, I mean, I went to school with so many kids that were pushed, push, push, pushed so hard in sports to get to that competitive level. They get to college and they're pushing, pushing, and then it just flat lines. And in your situation, you know, the same thing, you had that injury, it could have went in a really good way and it didn't. And I think it's just like that cautionary tale for individuals and now you have the story and you have the opportunity to put that out there and do good and inspire so many young people that were in that position before. Yeah, it's very much, it's funny you say that because that's what I always say. It's a cautionary tale. And you even see it at the highest level of professional athletes when guys are retiring. Even, you know,

just recently, Tom Brady, like, why did he hold on so long? Because, you know, when that is your life for so long, you know, for me, my life from age five, through 26 was play baseball. When you lose that, especially when it's not on your own accord, when it's not your own decision, you're lost. And like I said, my underlying core issues are really, you know, I'm addicted to competition and attention and baseball filled both of them, you know, especially when I'm playing at a professional level, you know, playing in front of thousands of fans.

And, you know, that fulfills both those needs. So when I lose both of them, really, like in a blink of an eye, what do you do? And I just, you know, I replaced them with the wrong things. I replaced it with the gambling, the partying, the drinking, the chasing women. You know, and it was the attention that going out with an entourage and, you know, the VIP rooms and the velvet ropes and all that. And that's what I replaced it with. And, you know, again, like we talked about the competition was the gambling. It just happens to be when you gamble.

How do you keep score? It's money, you know, and, you know, what does it take to fund those two addictions? You know, a huge income, right? And that's how it happens. So to me, you know, it's kind of a double-edged sword because I feel like I made it so far in professional sports or in baseball in general because I had no backup plan. But at the same time, because I had no backup plan when my time ran out, I was lost. I had no purpose in life. None. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had no career objective. I was just lost. So when I get tied into the crime, like it proliferates because it just

fit because I hadn't, I had nothing else. Even if I, you know, if things wouldn't have went to the way they did and I was able to exit the crime or whatever like we talked about and I had a bunch money on the back end. I still didn't know what I wanted to do. Like I figured, you know, I could have figured something out at that point having enough capital, but I still didn't have a purpose. And in that sense, prison did me a lot of good? You know, because, you know, did it take six years? Did I need six years to figure out what I was doing wrong in life? Like, no, not really. It's probably excessive. But, you know, I have a purpose now. I have bigger goals, bigger dreams. Like, and that's, you know, it's set me on that path. And, yeah.

So like I said, just like you talk about, you know, it matters a lot in showing, you know, what success in life after prison looks like and, you know, portraying that to the next group of guys that comes after us so we can change the narrative. You know, society is much better well served, you know, if guys reintegrating in society become successful. And, you know, to me and a big purpose of what I do now, and as you can see on my shirt, the iconic brand is very important to me. And the slogan I use is turning cons in the icons.

And that's just to go to say that, you know, with motivation and hard work and support, there is no bar of expectations that can't be exceeded even carrying on a felon moniker. Just like yourself, you know, I have big goals and dreams. And just because I have this felon moniker on my name doesn't mean it's going to stop me from doing any of it. And I want other people to see that and support that and know that they can do it as they transition out of, you know, life of crime and in the legitimacy as well. And like I said, so the brand matters a lot to me and the message and the purpose. And, you know, that's an opportunity I get to promote now as well. Cliff, thank you for coming on Locked in today. I really appreciate you sharing your story. I see a lot of

similarities in our stories together. And I think the viewers are going to appreciate that, especially because you're like that older version of me in a lot of ways. Not to say that's a bad thing that you're older, but it just gives it like that perspective. And because we both battled the same kind of addictions, and I'm really rooting for you to come out on the other side of yours. Hopefully, you know, we chat in a year, and you're at that one year mark for it. So I wish you the best with that. Looking forward to your podcast, iconic, to come out.

And yeah, thanks for coming on, man.