Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Bahamian Prison Extorts Inmates | $100M DEAL GONE WRONG!

Episode Date: June 7, 2025

Try MyHeritage: https://bit.ly/MatthewCox and use the code MATTCOX to get %10 off. And as a bonus, you will receive a free 30-day trial for MyHeritage's family tree history research feature. Just a reminder the legendary Chuck Norris is a whopping 84 years old and yet has MORE energy than most of us — he discovered he could create dramatic changes to his health simply focusing on 3 things that sabotage our body as we age. Watch his method by clicking the link in the description box here: https://ChuckDefense.com/Matt A seemingly legitimate business trip to the Bahamas turned into a legal nightmare when a family-run talent event was misclassified as unauthorized work, leading to arrest, detainment, and a stint in the notoriously harsh Fox Hill prison for Terry Foster. Despite assurances from officials and extensive efforts to follow the rules, the situation spiraled due to local corruption, miscommunication, and systemic failures.Connect with TerryTV Show: https://wvexplorershow.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/wvexplorerFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/terry.foster.714655/about_life_eventsGet 50% sitewide for a limited time. Just visit https://GhostBed.com/cox and use code COX at checkout.Do you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] you extra clips and behind the scenes content?Subscribe to my Patreon: https://patreon.com/InsideTrueCrime Follow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

This was the first $100 million of a $500 million deal. He said, you guys have families. We know people. You were going to regret this. And I have to say they were right. We ended up with a franchise acting and modeling school. What we did, a road show, and this was in the summer of 2011. What happens at these?

You promote them and what people bring their kids in because their kids want to get into commercials or get into acting. So how does you end up in the Bahamas, like how you went to the Bahamas? Right. Like, how does, obviously, we're here on a true crime podcast. So it obviously went wrong. Right.

It definitely went wrong. So the whole family went down. And just to backtrack to the process, I mean, it was like pulling teeth trying to get information about what do we need to do to do this event in the Bahamas? I mean, it's like I called. the U.S. Embassy. I called the Bahamian

Embassy, made a contact there, Bahamian Embassy in Washington, D.C., contacted the marketing company in Miami and ended up working with a company called Carter Marketing in Bahamas. And every one of them was, what do we need to do this business trip and make this event?

Make sure that we're covered, and we got all of our eyes dotted and our T's crossed, that we're not going to have a problem. Well, there was never that satisfaction of, yeah, I got it covered. But the main thing was I was working with the Wyndham Resort in Nassau. I think it was called Cable Cable Beach. And they, I was working with him saying, okay, am I covered? Do we have everything that we need? He goes, well, you know, you need a business permit. Well, no, you don't need a business permit. Well, I talked to so-and-so, and one of the chain emails that I have came from the representative from the Wyndham Hotel.

And, you know, this is a small country, a small island over there. A lot of people know each other, which is also a detriment to what happened to us, was led to it. But when they said, oh, we talked to so-and-so at immigration or traveling tourism, don't remember exactly what the department was. I think they talked to somebody in immigration, and I've got this. in writing in an email, I said, you do not need a work permit. You are doing something to benefit the island and the citizens of the island. All you need is a letter of intent submitted for what you're doing. Well, I had that.

I've been sending that out, literally since the first week, we started booking the event and everything. So it's kind of like, okay, well, I guess we're good to go, but never did feel real easy about it. I partnered with My Heritage to take a DNA test to find out more about my ancestry. My Heritage sent me a DNA kit, and all I have to do is swab the inside of my cheek, put it in the container, and mail it back. While waiting for your results, you can enhance, colorize, and even animate your old family photos. It's like bringing your family history to life.

And I've always been told that I have Native American blood in me. And so I'm curious to know what the test says. You are. Is this me? 33.5% Norwegian, 27% English, 12% Scottish and Welsh.

Irish. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Six more. Wait, okay, six more. Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, I think. Because this is right.

My father was raised in Georgia. Right? My mom was raised in Jacksonville. like this is the general area so this is a specific area of norway pretty interesting the results were pretty much exactly what i what i expected with the exception that i had been told that uh that i had some indian blood in in me and so you know i'm going to have to ask some hard questions you know but i'll get to the bottom of that when you test your DNA with my heritage their technology compares your DNA data with the DNA data of others and identifies possible family members. If you would like to

find out more about MyHeritage, you can scan the QR code or click the link in the description box and use code Matt Cox to get 10% off. And as a bonus, you will receive a free 30-day trial for MyHeritage's family tree history research feature. If you think about this, we're taking our three kids on the first weekend there. Because after the event, we wanted to take them out and spend a day or so before we had to fly back out back out to LA. So everything went okay. I went there, did the event, saw the 120 or so kids or more, and then ended up working with about 30-some, signing them up, scheduling them for classes and the workshops until the agents come back. But the biggest problem that I made was we were getting ready to like the last day there. And my wife there was talking to a

couple of local girls. And she goes, I think we've got our teachers. You know, we basically had to teach acting and modeling. I said, I don't know about that. You know, I grew up in a small area where people know everything that's going on. You know, she grew up in northern California in the Bay Area where, like, you don't even know your next door neighbor. So I kind of had a better understanding about, you know, you don't pull this in with

all this, keep the locals involved in all this, thinking that you can really have. have a quality, you know, acting and modeling coach to train these kids that already know half the family. So I said, we're only a hop, skipping a jump from Miami. We can just fly in the coaches to work with them on the weekends and then they fly by. I mean, very inexpensive flights. You know, we're already into this, you know, several thousands of dollars. I mean, we spent seven or eight thousand dollars just on the advertising alone.

but we planned to do it back in the around 2010 or something we were we felt a show that was successful was about 30,000 or more of gross so and we did try to do about one a month or something like that so if we did 30 35 40,000 we were in we knew that we were going to have a decent profit out of out of that show so but I said I don't think we need to do this let's just bring them in for Miami. I mean, there's got to be, there's some great, uh, uh, it's a great industry over there. There's definitely going to be some good acting and modeling coaches. Let's just bring them over. Oh, no, we're going to save money. They're already here. And this, that, and the other. And I just kind of reluctantly gave in, which I should never have done that because we basically,

we hired thieves. So the process was four weeks. First weekend, everybody, the whole family's there. About two weeks later, I fly back down, you know, make sure everything's going okay, collect cash and collect payments and different things like that, those that weren't paying online or whatever. And then two weeks after that, I come back with my oldest son, which coordinates the showcase, the two lady talent agents from very reputable talent agencies in L.A. and then Andy was the representative for the talent convention that brings people in from all over the world, either to L.A. or New York or Las Vegas,

and for these really nice conventions where they see 70 or 80 agents and talent managers and people and other people in production and stuff like that as well. So that last weekend, go down, get ready for the showcase, and I'm sitting there kind of looking over the payment schedules and the spreadsheets and everything. and had one one of the three girls there was three girls we had hired one of the one of the girls

I said she was kind of like responsible for collecting the money because a lot of people were paying cash for the payments of course we spread them up into payments for them so I'm sitting there and I'm saying okay okay I got this is okay there were about $15, $1,600, $700 short and I said I looked at her and said well where's the rest of the money and I'll never will forget this Matt it was like it's just like these words I'll never forget these words. Oh, we decided to pay ourselves extra. I said, oh, we did. We decided to pay ourselves extra. And I thought, well, that's interesting, you know, never discussed. Not exactly how it works. No, that's not how it works. And not any of that, we paid them well. I mean, they weren't for,

especially for the, on Bahamian standards, there was very good pay, what we paid them. So it's like, Oh, we did. So a couple phone calls. I was back and forth with my wife a couple times. And I said, well, there's no need to, you can't go to the police. You can't do anything like that. So my decision was, what she agreed upon was, okay, we're just going to tell them to leave before the showcase starts in a couple hours and just get out of here. Well, we knew that was, I knew that was going to be a problem.

So I called the hotel management. I said, look, I don't want these girls here. And I mean, I was their customer, not them. So they came and escorted the girls out and they were just like cussing and you're going to pay for this. You don't understand what you've just done. You know, so I was literally threatened as they were being escorted out. And I'm thinking, you know, I'm the one in the right here. They stole for me.

I'm not asking for the money back. I didn't go to the police. That would have been a joke anyway. So we're there doing the showcase. So why not go to the police? Like, are they just that? Oh, I already knew that that was not. I mean, I already kind of got a feel for the island and how they operate over there.

Very lackadaisical. I mean, we were, I mean, we're used to doing these events and we go and we say, oh, we need an extra table. We need another row of chairs. We need, we need a projector. We need a, we need a screen. We need a backdrop. I mean, everything we need. We were just like used to them, especially in the States.

I mean, you asked for it. You'd have it 20 minutes later. Right. Sometimes faster than that. Well, anything like that that you do over. there it's like it's just law was a phrase laissez-faire or whatever where it's like okay when we get to it we'll get to it it could be you know four hours later or not even get it at all or not not till the next day so i just saw how they function and they operated and i started to realize

how a lot of them knew each other and everything and i said you know there's you don't you don't go to the home go on somebody's home turf and then try to dictate what they want to do what how we're going to do it i kind of uh uh the understanding to me and this through the whole process of the months that i was stuck there was they didn't really care for americans but they knew they that we were we brought we spent a lot of money over there right the tourists and everything or either they they were just so unemotional about everything you know i know i know when you go to the beach and stuff like that it's all nice and sweet and everything but when you're doing business there or you have other intentions there that's when

you really run into situations where you never you would never expect never expect to happen so i knew that just getting a feel for the people and how they operated there and everything that i was outnumbered there was no way that i was going to you know try to recover 15600 bucks and and be and go to the police it would just it would be just never worked out well and the way they were talking on the way out is we know people you were going to regret this and i have to say they were right right so we finished up the showcase and i'm sitting there um at the end wrapping everything up kind of putting stuff together putting you know pulling paperwork and everything back together i had a little like a little workstation in the back of the room

um and then all of a sudden a couple there's three or four guys standing around me and one flashing flash on their badge. So we're with the, we're in the immigration department and saying, okay, what, I would like to see your paperwork and your work permit. And I said, well, I don't have a work permit, but I have the paperwork that

I submitted. Right. In to get approved to do this event, which is basically a letter of intent telling us what the event was and while we were there and what we're going to do and how it benefited the country. That was kind of like what our letter intent

was, but that was acceptable through travel and tourism or whatever the name of that department was in the immigration department. So, because when we went there, if I backtracked when my whole family came there on the first event, which I believe was in July, you know, I'm not, I didn't want to put my whole family at jeopardy. So they held us up at the airport. They said, what's your paperwork, passports, and any type of paperwork? Why are you here for?

We're here for business. You know, we're not going to fake it and say, we're just here for a weekend vacation. and when we're going to be there for a month. And so I give them the paperwork that I had prepared and submitted into the legal departments, including the Bahamian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which that was a joke, absolutely no help at all from them. They went back to their office,

came back about 10, 15 minutes later, and handed everything back, and said, you're good to go. And I'm like this. You know, I'm thinking, We're good to go. We're here. Never felt comfortable 100%, but I felt like,

because I'd been through the ringer so much trying to figure out this process, which was really just ridiculous. Right. Because it should have been much more simpler than what it was, getting whatever the paperwork, whatever the work permit or whatever that we needed. So they let us in, but then four weeks later, we're arrested for not having a work permit. Okay.

So they said, we need your permit. Right. And you said, here's my stuff. Here's my stuff. And then what happened? This was stuff. Okay. So we were escorted back to our hotel room.

So Randy and Andy and Jared, my young oldest son and myself were in one room. And they had the girls contained in another one. Obviously, the girls had a separate room. That's the two talent agents. So when we were there and then the one of the head man, Men from the immigration department came into the room and started talking to us. And I remember his last name was Bastion. And it's kind of like just starting, it just kept getting escalated.

You were doing this, you were doing that. You're defrauding the people. He just kept getting escalated worse and worse and worse. Like, wait a minute. That's not what we're here for. I mean, we spent eight grand advertising where we were all over the islands advertising. Everybody knew about this event. How are we here to defraud you when?

And we plastered all over your local media. You know, we're here, a talent search, and everything like that. So then they're coming in and trying to accuse us of all this other stuff that we were not doing. Well, I understood the process later. You know, I'm still, you've got to think I'm still operating in this naive state, you know, just based on my upbringing in West Virginia and everything like that. I'm still, you know, a little naive, a little bit too trusting and everything. And then he would go out and 20 minutes later, he'd come back in and badger us more.

Just uses of everything. You're doing this. You did this. You did that. And you're facing, you're looking at fines and jail time. He'd go out and no, 20 minutes, 20, 30 minutes, and come back in. Well, this went on for like three or four hours, you know, from like maybe 7 o'clock to 11 o'clock or midnight. And I didn't know at that time.

I didn't, I mean, I'm not silly enough or naive enough not to have a sense that, okay, I could probably dish out a few hundred bucks and be done with this whole thing. But I'm thinking on terms as an American in our processing system here in America. And it's like, if I do that, I could be in a lot worse trouble. Well, as soon as he said, you're facing fines, they'd be like, well, how much are the fines I'll pay them right now? That's probably what he wanted you to say. Oh, yeah. well it's a thousand dollar fine well i can pay that right now yeah yeah well i was like a check that was yeah or cash yeah i was and then i was kind of bouncing off of and and

of course jared's young he's 20 21 but it was kind of like well what do you think what's going on here like we're like the first the first couple hour we're just kind of like looked at each other with with with a dumb look on our face like well you know peculiar bewildered look like what in the world's going on here you know so this went on for about four hours and then when bastion realized that i was wasn't going to dig in my pocket and up any cash, then we were taken from there to the jail facility there at Cable Beach, close to where the resort is, where the Wyndham Resort. And so spent one night there, and then after that first, after that night, the next day, they took us to the immigration detention center. And then we spent two or, you know, we spent

too nice there because we were from the time we were arrested until we're sitting in front of a magistrate judge three days I mean how do you have time to prepare anything in three days so is this just you or your whole family no at this point it was myself my oldest son because we're this was this was my third trip my wife and my two other kids didn't come back for the third trip she was actually doing an event in hawai at that that particular weekend right So I went with my oldest son. Again, he coordinated the event. You know, he does like the, he lays it out and does all that.

And then the two LA-based talent agents, we fly in to look at the talent. And then Andy, the representative that was with the convention. So there's five of us, you know, three males and two females. So we were being, we were being interrogated in the one hotel room. And the girls, I don't think they were. being interrogated because they knew it was my business right they didn't really care about the rest of them they knew it was my business so they were basically coming coming after me so we they take us to the jail uh there and we spend the first the first night in the jail then the next night or we i mean the

next day next day they take us to the immigration detention center which was an experience all all in itself i was you say how was the jail the jail was nasty didn't get a bathroom break happened i mean unfortunately had a bottle there uh no water uh hot you know here it is july well at that point it was uh september september in in the in the bahamas hot you know it's kind of like just just kind of not very good right obviously there's three of us there and there was a local bahamian kid nice kid that was it in there with us kind of giving us the wraps a little bit i mean we were looking to try to get any any information that we can and Andy was like kind of a high strung kind of a nervous type and um you know he was always asking everybody questions what are you going to do to us

and I knew from the very beginning that I had to be the I had to have I had to present stability and strength you know and it wasn't going to be it wasn't going to be Andy and you know my son at that point is barely 21 and I'm bigger than both of them and I knew that I was going to have to be want to step up and just just be strong. Have you ever wondered what happened to the legendary Chuck Norris? I recently saw a video he made and I was shocked. He's in his 80s and still kicking butt and working out and staying active. What's even more shocking is he's stronger, can work out longer, and even has plenty of

energy left over for his grandkids. He did this by just making one change. He says he still feels like he's in his 50s. His wife even started doing this one thing and she's never felt better. She says she feels 10 years younger. Her body looks leaner and she has energy all day. Chuck made a special video that explains everything. Make sure you watch it by going to chuckdefense.com slash Matt.

Or by clicking on the link below this video. It'll change the way you think about your health. Once again, that's chuck defense.com slash Matt. Or click on the link in the description box below to watch the video now. You won't believe how simple it is. Just remember, the legendary Chuck Norris. is a whopping 85 years old and he has more energy than me. He discovered he could create dramatic changes to his health

simply by focusing on three things that sabotage our body as we age. Watch his method by clicking on the link in the description box below or go to chuck defense.com slash Matt. And, you know, not show any weakness because we didn't know what was around the corner. so from there and again keep in mind from arrest to court three days so um you know basically in this country in a lot of countries like this you're you're basically guilty and then you're proven innocent or if you can prove innocent but the whole racket is to get you to pay a fine and and um plead guilty right and then it's supposed to go easier on you once you

once you do that. So that's how the whole system works over there in a lot of these foreign countries that people don't understand. You know, your rights aren't there. You're arrested. They're assuming you're guilty and everything is set up that you're guilty. And then they want you just make their process easier. But if you plead guilty and pay the fine, then, you know, they don't really have to put up a case against you because they're not really, pathetically, I was so shocked at how their court system worked over there and how incompetent they were. That's why you never want to go to foreign court. I don't care where it is. I don't care if it's Europe or anywhere else. You do not want to be because your assumptions are going to be

wrong. And I don't care if you get a good lawyer or what your assumptions are going to be wrong. You think the immigration, the U.S. embassy is going to be backing you up. Your assumption. are wrong yeah you mean that you mean that there was a senator didn't jump on a plane and fly down there to try and negotiate and make sure you were being taken care of absolutely not no like what was the what's the ms 13th member in al salmador right now senators are flying down there to have make sure you're okay and it's like this is even an american citizen no you know me guys i've met that have been locked up in other countries and the embassy comes in they'll send Sometimes they'll send somebody to basically, you're an American citizen, you're arrested in a foreign country, you're facing prison time, they might send somebody from the embassy to say, there's nothing we can do.

You have to go through the process. You can't get me out of here? No, no, you have to be tried and you'll be found guilty and there's not much I can do as long as they're following their laws. But their laws are flawed and they're going to give me 20 years for something I'd get five in the U.S. or I wouldn't even face charges of the U.S., yeah, I know there's nothing we can do. But then this guy jumps on a fucking plane for somebody who's not even an American citizen.

Fucking insane. No, no. Our case really wasn't as attention grabbing as a lot. You're still a U.S. citizen. Yeah. But, I mean, wait until you get to my friend Steve then I met there. Wait until we get to there.

Now, you talk about abuse. At least I'm alive. Let's put it that way. I'm glad, definitely. I had to be alive and I've gotten out of there as well as the other people that got out of there because I was given six months and the rest of my team was given three weeks. So they got out in three weeks. But I had a six month sentence. But I did get out early on a technicality. Okay. Okay. So go ahead. So let's just move forward. So you were locked out three days. You get in front of the judge. What happened? Well, first of all, I just want to tell you a little bit about the immigration detention center. Okay. I mean, this was so vivid. I mean, here it is. Now we now it's all. Now it's all.

already it's already dusk it's already getting what's actually by the time we get there they get us there it's already dark you know we have to go through the process of our luggage and everything and taking it to the immigration office and it's kind of like i mean everything is just slow my thought and not even not even it just seems haphazard i mean there's there's no do do do do step one step two step three it's just kind of like haphazard and we all were there we're there on island time basically like okay what's next what's next what's already dark well we we come out of the immigration office i never will forget this because it's just kind of like i mean it's one of those things where you just nod you experience this and you feel like you're in a dream or a movie because there's

you know we got the the fence and the razor wire at the top and everything and there's this this long gauntlet with you know with the fence and razor wire at the top you got to walk down to the main barracks there was there was four barracks breaks back there. Actually, there was three barracks. And so we have walked down this, it was basically a gauntlet. And then all I remember is I remember hearing the crunch of the gravel under our feet, because we're not saying a word. We're just like, you know, we're, we're scared. You know, we are. And I'm like, well, I got to, you know, I got to go shota. I got, you know, I got to stay strong for everybody else. And of course, everybody's asking me questions

because they're blaming, you know, they were quick to blame us for putting them in this situation. Well, you didn't do this. And it's like, well, wait a minute. You, you don't work for me. You were, you were a guest. You work for this talent agent. If there's any, if there's any additional paperwork, that's your responsibility. It wasn't ours. Now, I did feel responsible, but what came down to blame, I mean, we paid everybody's fine. We paid out like $18,000 in fines. And you felt you did your, you felt you approached everybody you were supposed to approach, asked what you were supposed to get you got you got the documentation that you were supposed to get you were told everything was okay now there you need a permit and here we are in

this is this situation well and once again needing a needing a business license or a permit doesn't mean you go to prison like you say like here in in you know what I'm saying if I open up if I go rent a space down here at wireglass uh mall and I open a store and I function for six months selling tennis shoes and one day the county shows up and says hey man you need a license you know what do you mean you need an occupational like you need a business license for this i do yeah oh i had no i'm sorry i signed a lease i thought i could just no you know oh well how much is that well now you got to pay the the three hundred dollars and there's going to be a fine the fine's going to be a hundred and fifty dollars and oh you have three days to come up with that money okay gosh

I'm so sorry, at no point do I think that guy from the city is going to say, I'm calling police, turn around, you're going to jail, you can get two years for this, you can get, motherfucker, that's a fucking fine. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to pay you the $300 bucks plus the $300 licensing fee or $200 license fee and the $150 fine. Like, that's all you're getting. You're not taking me to jail. Yeah, yeah.

Well, we dropped eight ground on advertising plus airfare and hotel and everything. and, of course, renting the ballroom space and everything, you'd think $250 for a business permit would have satisfied any, heck, no. That's what I was trying to uncover all along before we ever went there. So in the immigration detention center, that gauntlet is, you know, we're walking down. We're not saying a word. There's five of us and a few other men, I believe, that we're going to be stuck in the barracks there. that night. So this is, we were arrested Sunday. I was supposed to fly out 6 a.m. Monday morning.

Obviously that didn't happen. So this was Monday night already. We're headed into immigration detention center. So walking down this gauntlet, hear that limestone crunch under your feet. You know, you're in this mist of this humidity in the Bahamas. You're looking around. You're seeing the, you know, the bugs flying and you're looking straight ahead and you see three three barracks and guards with their AK-47s or you know other other rifles and stuff like that and we walked down through that gauntlet and we're headed and there's there's three barracks there's this one on the left there's a one in the middle and the one on the right okay well the one on the right had about 60 70 men in it and they're all curious you know they're like who's the new people coming in here you know and

And Andy being, you know, not the bravest person in the world, he grabs me about pinches my, you know, flesh off my arms, said, oh, my God, oh, my God, you think we're going to get stuck down there? We can't get stuck with those guys because, you know, there's about 50 Haitians in there, you know, and Haitians are pretty, you know, they're dark-skinned people. Right. And it's just the fact that we're sitting there watching all these guys look through the fence and we'd see their eyes and, you know, it's just kind of intimidating. Right.

Like, we don't want to go in there. Well, here's what they do. this is funny now when you think about it we go through we open they open the gate now we're in the main yard area in front of the barracks each barracks was partitioned off with with fence and razor wire because you couldn't go from barrack a to barrack b but they march us up to the third one and and and he goes oh boy we're going to go in here there's nobody here oh there's no there's nobody here we can't go we if we go up to this third one we're going to be okay they're going to stick us in here all by ourselves and so what do they do they stop us and for us

if we turn we turn from the barracks up on the left we come down to the center barracks they open the door the two girls go in there's about maybe seven or eight girls in there our two girls the two town agents go in and then they march us down to the barracks that has about 70 guys in it and and he about freaks out and my son didn't know what to think and i'm just thinking okay you know i just got to be calm got to be cool got to look like you know i'm in control So we go down there and they open the door and this big Russ meets us at the door. Now Russ is kind of like the resident immigration guy there. Russ is a, I called him a white Cuban, big guy, you know, and he's been real, he'd spent most of his life he'd spent in, in Florida near Miami.

But he went back to the Bahamas. He was from Cuba, spent, you know, several, several years in Florida. Florida, came back to the Bahamas, married a Bahamian girl, she got a little bit, they had some type of spat or whatever, and she turned him in, so they stuck him in immigration. He'd been there like six months because you think Russ was not a U.S. citizen, had no Bahamian paperwork other than the fact that his wife was there, but she had, she held the cards. And then he had no paperwork from Cuba. So he was kind of like there was nowhere for him to go.

He was just waiting for immigration to work everything out that he could at least go back to Cuba. I was going to say, how does that work out? You know what I'm saying? Like you should just stay in the United States. They wouldn't send you back to Cuba. That's just it. It's just kind of like you're just caught between everything and nothing's working in his favor. Great guy, though, and big, you know, pretty good size guy, 6-240 or something because it was kind of like, oh, we want to be his friend.

Right. You know, I mean, we speak. the language and everything you know he was really good with english and everything and he kind told us his story and what his wife had done to him he was stuck there couldn't get out waiting on immigration well you're waiting on island time immigration for them to get to it when they get to it and it's already been like six months so he was like the local resident like the the team leader of this barracks and so soon as we opened the door and they let us in my i just felt big relief because what he did he said one he called one of the guards by their first name

and says, hey, we only got two extra mattresses. Now, we're going to be sleeping on the floor. We didn't get one of the bunk beds. But he said, hey, so-and-so, we only got two extra mattresses. Can you bring us one more over? I'm thinking, well, if he can talk to them like that and that chummy with them, I said, we're got to be pretty, you know, we should be okay here. Yeah.

So we spent two days there, hot, I mean, just nasty hot, toilets didn't work. you know if you had running water you know that was a that was a blessing um and you know this this situation over there is you basically fill up a five gallon bucket if you do have running water to flush your toilet right so showers was just and that was not even thinkable really and then then these guys were transient you know they were living in there for typically a few days russ would just happen to be stuck here for like for like six weeks six months oh yeah you're right six months or more who knows i don't know i got it we got out before he before he did so but that while we were in there the hathians had a little bit of an uprising and there's almost a fight

had almost broke out on the on the second day and you remember there was like 50 Haitians you know so they were like obviously they were kind of clannish working and working staying together but the one guy that they were the one of the biggest Haitian guys there was going to fight was this little little German, little scrawny German dude. The name was Hans. Hans has a story that blows mine away. And Steve's story blows both of our stories away when I get, when I get to that. But Hans almost was like, Andy was like a member I said he's one is like asking all kinds

of questions, trying to get to know the people and trying to predict what's going to happen next, you know, looking from a fearful perspective rather than like, let's just wait and see. So Andy got to know Hans a little bit better than me, and he came to me. He said, you know who he is? You know what he did? He's a German drug runner. I said, really? Really?

So I said, okay. All right. So Hans, we know there wasn't a whole lot to do. So he was like one of the ones would just kind of like walk laps around the barracks. And I got to talk to him a lot, talk to him a little bit. First of all, he's kind of standoffish. But I'd been in the sawmill industry. So in wood, wood products in West Virginia and Tennessee and,

and North Carolina, all that region, Appalachian region, with lumber industry and everything. And I've seen a lot of people, even though I only worked in that industry for about a year, as I traveled with these sawmills, I'd go one week, and I'd come back a week later, and a guy would be, like, missing the hand. And he'd be back at work,

and he's like third generation, fourth generation sawmiller. And he'd like, I'm just back to work. I said, oh, man, what happened? Ah, well, I got a little bit too close to the gang saw, lost my right hand. No big deal. You know, fingers, me. and stuff like that.

Well, I struck up a conversation with Hans, and he had, on his left hand, half of his fingers were, half of his fingers were gone. I said, okay. And I just, this is before he even knew what he actually, he was a drug runner. I said, did you work around, were you in a sawmill or something? He goes, nah, he just kind of walked away.

And then after, from that point, Andy hadn't already made his rounds trying to talk to everybody that spoke English and everything and he came back and he told me that the Hans was a drug runner. He ran drugs from Columbia and he would

rest in the Bahamas and head on into the U.S. or into Europe with his, you know, those big long cigarette speedboats. Yeah. Yeah. So the next day you know, you got to be a little bit more friendly with me and everything. And so

I asked him again about that. I heard his story. So I heard his whole story, why he was, he was coming. He had already served his sentence there in the Bahamas. He was coming out as we were coming in. So he's waiting to be deported. He's waiting to be, waiting for it to be, you know, leave the country, yeah, back to Germany. And his story, well, I'll go by, I'll tell you his story about how he got arrested.

Okay, so he was, Bahamas was basically like his halfway point. he would go 24 hours nonstop high speed, 60, 70, 80 miles an hour from Columbia to the Bahamas. He would sleep 24 hours and get up and complete the trip after he had slept for 24 hours. Well, this particular trip, which was about four, well, at least three and a half years prior, because he got a five-year prison sentence for trafficking, which he only did. three and a half like 30 three and a half years of that if you pay the fine they would reduce to like a third so i didn't do the math exactly oh yeah it's real generous of them except for us we paid the fine and still did the time so anyway so hans he was in this time he had two sons

fairly young sons and his wife came down they were going to meet him in the bahamas he was going to spend a little extra time in the bahamas uh before he finished running his his load now that we're talking about 2006, 2007, when he would have gotten arrested, he was telling me that his load was $5 million-plus dollar-wise, and then he was making about $350,000 every time he ran the load. And he was just like, I mean, money really didn't mean anything to him. He goes, I got money stashed all over the world. I said, here, there, everywhere, and said, I really don't do this for the money.

I do it for the thrill. He told me a little bit later, he said he was 47. I was 49 at the time. He said, and I'm going to probably retire at 50. I said, oh, okay. You're going to retire at 50. What's your pension and your 401K like? You're going to retire at 50.

He said, I, you know, I've probably done enough now. But anyway, his family was there with him. They arrested him. Obviously, they had the evidence on the boat and everything. And they coerced. Tim, just basically like us, you know, plead guilty. You know, we don't want to go through a trial on all this. It's going to be worse for you. Make it easy on us. Just plead guilty. That's typically how they operate. So plead guilty. And then you'll get five years. You'll pay a $25, $3,500 fine. We'll

reduce that to, we'll take a third off, and then you'll be out of here. And he said, and they had they were threatening to include his wife if he didn't just go ahead and take the deal, but they were going to basically arrest her. He said, and they did a dog and pony show with his drugs and stuff that he had on the boat. And he said, yeah, I saw that. And as I heard, he said, you know, that all of a sudden the, the, the, the, the, the, the payload went from like three, like five and a half million dollars to about three million dollars. So the rest of it just surprisingly just disappeared in the Bahamas. You know, under the guise of the police department and immigration and everybody else, you know, you know, just happened to disappear.

He said, yeah, when he said this, we captured so many, so much weight and, you know, they do the weight and the amount. He said, yeah, I was only about half or two-thirds of the load that I actually had, so the rest of it just disappeared. But back to him, him missing his four fingers, he finally told me the story of this. and he said he was running his typical route, Columbia, to the Bahamas, then he was headed in into Florida coast. Well, seven miles is, after seven miles is international waters. So he's running this load into Florida. I don't know exactly what part of Florida he was coming into.

I'm just going to assume probably the Miami area. And he gets out of international waters into the U.S. waters, and here comes the Coast Guard. well empty there's no way they could catch him but with a load he didn't he didn't stand a chance so he's you know pushed it up as fast as he could go but he still wasn't that they were coming after him and closing the gap so he knew he had to do something so what's he started doing throwing the load over throw the load over yeah he emptied his boat threw it over got away they never caught him didn't get arrested or anything but now he owes he owes

the Colombians yes however many millions of dollars worth of or you know worse of uh drugs that are gone yeah and then and and and usually pretty understanding oh yeah they're very understanding hans was like he's just i mean you could tell he was just so entrenched in this in this lifestyle that he's basically tells you a story without any emotion at all he's just telling you a story just like i'm i'm telling you what i'm going to go to the store and pick up in 30 minutes or something just just tells you the story so i said okay Okay, so he said, oh, I kind of went back to the fingers. He goes, well, yeah, so you lost that load.

He said, the only, the biggest problem that I had, he said, if you lose a load, especially coming into U.S. waters, it almost always makes the news. So this was like 2006, 2007. Well, this story never made the news. So he had no proof that he was being chased by the Coast Guard. He had to drop a load into the ocean and get away. So he said, well, I had to go back to Columbia. I said, you what?

You know, I'm like, what in the world? You went back to Columbia? And he said something I'll never forget. He said, there's absolutely nowhere in this world that I can go, but they will not find me. So I just had to go back to Columbia and face the music. That's not his words, but that's mine. So we went back to Columbia, and so whether they believe you or not, you lost a load. You know, you lost five plus million.

dollars a product so his consequences is you know you lay your hand out and whack they chop off your fingers and so he had just stubs on his left hand i'm like okay so yeah i was going to say i the guys that i've known that have lost loads like typically with the cartel they'll first they if the cartel thinks the authorities have taken it and you can prove the authorities have taken it then they'll give you an opportunity to make up the load like i've had guys who have lost money before met guys that have lost money and typically they'll just let you make it up so if you've but he's like like like once they're always like once yeah they're like you know like if the authorities grabbed it then we'll let you make it up but the authorities keep grabbing it

or if you show up and there's a load and it's gone and i got nothing i don't have a business card i don't have a seizure i don't have anything he's like that's that's typically going to be a real problem for you um and sometimes they'll let you make up the load if it's not too much money they'll let you okay well you'll make up that load over the next three loads you have to pay us this much you've got four or five you know in the next you just got to hope nothing goes wrong again because if it goes wrong again twice that's it's over you're done they're going to try and kill you like oh yeah you know and here i am and all this stuff that i'm experiencing now stuff that i would see in movies and TV shows.

Right. I mean, we're just a little small business, family business, making a trip to a foreign country to do a small, you know, business. And not a large amount, you know, $37,000 is probably our gross sales at that event. And it's all of a sudden I'm like, I'll never meet people like this again in my life. Right. It's like, and I hadn't even met Steve yet. Right.

And so here I am, you know, talking. And the guy was, I mean, what was. funny. It's funny who you like when you know that some of their beliefs are just totally against what you believe in, you know, starting talking about his family and Hitler and stuff like that from Germany. I thought, well, you know, okay, but from here, we're going to be friends right here, you know, I'm not going to mean. It's just the environment, the environment that you're in a situation like that creates a whole different dynamic with the people, with the people that you meet, whether they be friend or foe. Sometimes it's going to be a totally,

opposite of what it's going to be when you're, you know, just doing your normal life out in, out in your own, your typical, your typical environment. But I liked, I liked Hans. Hans was a pretty, he was, he was interesting. He was absolutely afraid of nothing. I mean, the big, the big guy that he almost got into it was probably 6'4, 220, 225. He was the biggest one of that, that group of Haitians. And then Hans was, came out of prison, probably five, seven hundred and forty five pounds right he's a small little guy he may have been bigger when he went in but he was telling us all the stories he had randy andy excuse me he had andy just you know about to pee his pants with the stories of what was ahead for us in prison and then he ran he was just

like he was like one of those he was a glutton for punishment you've heard that phrase he wanted he wanted to everything well what's going to happen where you're going to go in here you're going have a cell made and this is going to happen and you better not do this you better not do that you're going to pee and poop in a bucket and you know they're not going to have any time out, you know, and Andy would come to me and do like, oh, you said, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we're not going to be. I said, okay, just calm down. We don't know what's going to happen yet. We haven't been to trial or whatever. But we got away, we went from there and met the immigration, I'm sorry, our embassy. They took us to another facility, some room, and we went,

we went upstairs in this building, and the embassy representative came in and talked to us. We were five sitting around the end of this big long table you know felt like a scene out of a movie and we were like yes we're going to get something accomplished now i mean we're going now we're going to meet with the big bad u.s embassy you know little country big bad u.s and little tiny bahamas you know we're going to get something accomplished here and he came in and talked to us we said well what happened i said well we didn't have a they said we needed a work they said we needed a work permit business permit and then when we came in the country uh they led us in the country without one and now we're arrested and his comments were we sat and talked for maybe 30 minutes and he said

oh i wouldn't even worry about it he said you know nobody i said i've never even heard of this before this is so small of the stuff that we deal with they're probably just going to you know just let you go they may you may have to pay a fine i said well i'm prepared to do that we're prepared you know my companies and my wife was facilitating you know sending the money to pay the fines and stuff like that so we're ready to do that and i said so we we were eased put us at some ease with everything but absolutely everything he said was absolutely the opposite of what happened right i mean it just it's kind of like you had so much faith in the country that you're a citizen of even in a foreign country you think something near the

they would have some type of pull there. Right. And it's like, you said nothing, this was not a serious matter. We were not, I mean, we may pay a fine. He probably wouldn't even go to pay a fine. He'd probably just go ahead and release this and let us go, and catch our flights and get out of there. Huh.

You know, it would then, here we are. That's day two, and then the next day we're going to be in court. Well, on the way back from that trip, we come back. They let us stop and we bought some. candy and stuff because they wanted to help give it out some of our new friends in the immigration detention center bought a few things bought some candy and stuff and um came back and they let us they let us keep a little bit of our money or give us a little bit of our money because we knew they were we were going to go downtown and meet the the U.S. embassy and so I knew with everybody going

back and gone back through barracks and I had to come back a little later and meet with our attorney because we had hired an attorney at this time and met with him and he went over everything and got all the told him about the documentation and we could email him this that and the other and in coordination from our home in l.A we were able to send him all the information told him the story and everything and again he said this was just a small case should not be a problem i think i think his fee was like we paid him like 5 000 to help us to help us out or get us out of that situation. When I was leaving, I looked over, and on the desk, one of the desks of one of the officers

in there, I looked over and I saw the newspaper, the Sunday newspaper. And we were front page of this Sunday newspaper, top fold. In a talent company in California arrested for fraud, blah, blah, blah. I don't remember exactly what the headlines said, but I said, oh, crap. I said, this is serious business. I mean, we made the newspaper at the very, I mean, we were the lead story on the Sunday newspaper there. Right. And so I went back into the barracks and didn't say a whole lot about that because I didn't

want to, I just didn't want to stir up and, you know, get anybody else nervous or excited about it. And then, and then we were talking because our barracks, there was only a fence between us and the, in the ladies' barracks. So the girls would come over and we would go out there and talk to them a little bit. And they know, what's happened? Why are we here? Did you do the right thing? Did you follow the right paperwork and everything? I said, yes.

Did everything we were told to do? Everything from the Bahamian Embassy in Washington, D.C. To all the departments in the, in the Mahamas, to a marketing company in Florida, to the marketing ad agency that booked all of our ads in Nassau in the Bahamas. And then the hotel was a kicker because they said we did not need to have the work permit because they talked to somebody at the immigration department and said we were okay

based on the type of event we were doing, did not have to have a business, business or work permit. I'm using those interchangeably. But obviously none of that worked out and none of that was true. So we go back to the barracks and then the next day we're, taken to the bus to the to the to the courthouse and you know there's cameras you know there's the the perp walk and all that you know and the news is there and the girls that had had us arrested were there yelling at us and we told you you were going to do this we were going to do this

and do that and let's just get in here and get this over with got in there in the courthouse and we were before magistrate level, level judge, and our attorney started, they had a representative there that was, you know, fighting for the state, and then we had our attorney. None of us got to speak at all. And every time he started presenting the case, she just shut him up. Well, we know that I've got this email that he sent and they were told that, you know, that's not, you know, don't want to hear anything about that. And she just laid into us and accused us of everything just like the immigration department had done to us. You're trying to defraud the country.

You're trying to do this. You come over here trying to make us look like fools. And just laid into us, just like, we were just like the worst criminals. We'd come over there and murdered 10 people or something, something like that. So we literally got the, everyone was fined, if 2,500 for every 500 for every, everybody, but mine was 3,000 because I was, you know, the typically, you know, the ringleader or the business owner. And then we were told in immigration, we got a lot of information because a lot of these guys already been in jail and stuff. We said if you pay your fine, you don't,

you won't typically won't do the time. But if you can't pay the fine, you're going to spend time in jail. Well, we paid everybody's fine, but they still sentence us as well. Now, they gave me six months, but I found out later that that could have been three years. for this for this what i consider a small infraction so um so we needless to say we're sitting there in court and like she drops a bomb on us okay you and the calling everybody's name um and the other four three weeks and 2500 fine in three weeks in um her majesty's prison or they call it Fox Hill. I said, they hadn't gotten to me yet.

I'm thinking, oh, Lord, what's up for me? Mine was $3,000 in six months. So here we are, you know, just kind of like, again, again, you feel like you're in a dream. This is like, there's just no way. This is just absolutely crazy. Then I'm looking at, you know, spending, you know, the next several months in a foreign prison, you know, not knowing what to expect when we get in there. Right.

So we go in, from there, we're taken directly. to the prison, you know, and it looks like an old prison. If you ever look at it, I would look up pictures on the internet and stuff like that. Foxhill, they finally, it was considered one of the worst prisons in the Western Hemisphere. And I think they found they either renamed it or they built something new because it was pretty old and dilapidated as it was. So we went into immigrate, in the intake department. And we were there for two days waiting to be assigned to. a cell are waiting for space to be available.

Well, they didn't really care about space. They just crammed in anyway. So, and like all of a sudden, here we are. We're sitting in a small cell, me, the three of us, the three men, myself and Andy and Jared, and then there was another local Bahamian there was in this small cell with us. And I literally thought that I was going to just dehydrate. Because the four of us, you know, whatever, the temperature and the humidity there, outrageous you know and then they give us we had one gallon of water a day the split between between the

four of it so at night I didn't even sleep on a bunk well there's only there's only two bunks anyway and I think there might have been another mattress but I just slept on like a piece of cardboard in front of the the door obviously bars just to get some air a little bit of airflow because I'm a heavy sweater the other guys didn't sweat near as much as I do but I just like I've always just heavy sweat so it doesn't take me long to deplete my whatever water's in my system because I just I just sweat a lot so we were there um in that two days um the embassy made another little visit check on us you know what are we doing there what's it no don't worry you know just trying to like pretend it's one of those situations where they pretend like they're doing something

for you but they're absolutely doing nothing for right we're working behind the scenes we've got calls We're just waiting. Yeah. Well, this should never... This is the prison that FTCS was locked up in the Bahamas. Pomas jail where FTX, Sam Begman-Fried, reportedly heading in harsh, rat-infested State Department. It's infested with rats, maggots, and insects.

I'm pretty sure that Fox Hill is the prison that Mike Hudson's brother escaped from. And when I say escape, they basically paid a guard. to open a door, leave a door open that he could get out in the middle of the night and he got out. And then when he got into a cigarette boat, they had, they tried to catch him. So it's like it was a setup where it's like we got paid to leave the door open. There's a boat that the cartel had left there for him. He got out, got in the boat. And when he's taking off, they already had their little coast guard waiting for him. And so he still gets away from them. They shoot up the back of the boat it's a whole fucking thing

but it was it was that he talks about Foxhill his brother escaped from two different prisons I think maybe is it two or three I think it's two the other one that he he didn't escape from this was a Cuba he was locked up do you remember when Jesse

Jackson ran for president yeah and he flew down and talked to Castro and convinces Castro to release like 30 Americans Mike Hudson's brother was one of those Americans he's been given like seven years for drug running or something he'd been locked up like a year or two and i mean he was like it's horrible like his mother was flying in once a month they would allow you to

bring like 30 pounds of food that you could draw like if you don't have family like you're just you're just oh wow and he was like they would feed you like once a day they came and they they had like a troth where they threw like food in and you had to go and grab food in a bowl and these guys were fighting and he's like they all hated the american and horrible. Yeah. So Fox Hill, not a great place. Not a great place. But I can understand the incompetence of all levels there.

I can understand how somebody could probably break out, especially bribing somebody because everybody had their handout. That's what a lot of people don't understand when they go to these countries. Everybody, especially if you get beyond that safety zone of the beach and the resort, and you know, that's when you can run into situations where you should have no business being there. in the first place. But we were in the intake there and, of course, felt like I was going to be dehydrated there

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which will lead into a horribly horrible situation and a totally unbelievable story when I tell you about what happened to him but we had met Steve we were all in this little common area we're outside of intake and that's when Steve came up said you guys are Americans I said yeah yeah he goes I'm from New Orleans well he actually had been several years back in Indonesia in Jakarta but I was just thinking yeah I didn't think much of it and I said you know just he just was at that point was kind of frail and his clothes were way too large for him and everything i was you know you always try to size somebody up a little bit thinking who is he and

why is he here and everything and he had already been there probably 12 14 months and um i'll get into that story a little bit later as to why he was already just not he wasn't he wasn't sentenced never even completed the trial at this point but he was just sitting there wasting away in prison and he was in the remand area area. So they hadn't even assent them to a cell at this point. Okay, so the next day, the three of us, Andy, myself, and Jared were, they're taking us out of intake and going to take us to our cell. And, you know, Andy being the brave soul that he is, I've already told you about him. Here we go. We go out and he goes, where are we going to take us? I don't know.

Well, where are we going? So they don't tell you anything. They just lead us out. Then we go into like an open courtyard area by the near the entrance and we're walking they're walking us a certain direction to our to a little bit to our left and we look up maximum security it's like and he pisses his pants at that point he's it oh my god we're going into maximum security you know I'm not saying the word I'm just like hey I don't know what's going to happen once we get beyond those doors but I know we got to be got to stay strong and be prepared for any anything that can happen. So they take us into the maximum security. They take us down the long haul. We end up in this, they call it the bulkhead. The bulkhead, what I found out later,

it was, I measured it roughly about eight foot wide and probably about, I'd say 30, 35 feet long. What was the old shower quarters? But they had taken out all the plumbing and everything else. but you walk in there, it's full of, I mean, it already had probably 17, 18 people in that cell. And just you kind of get a grasp and kind of get a look at everything and look down at the end. And you see like a curtain, old blankets stretched out at the end of it, you know, like for some, like a little private area behind there. Well, we get greeted, you know, but it goes pretty well in coming into our cell. Now these, these ballcettles, they kind of reserve these for the foreign. nationals. They try to keep most of the foreign nationals together when they come into the prison

over there. And then we did have scattering Bahamians in there. And one of the Bahamians was a big, good-sized Bahamian guy, ended up being like, he kind of knew the ropes in and out, and he kind of helped us out a little bit, and he liked us and everything. And we found out that, you know, they don't typically come after Americans too bad because they kind of think that we, you know, do have resources and have money and stuff like that. And they'll kind of look out for you to some degree, not that you should ever feel safe. And I found that out a couple weeks before I got out of there. But you did feel a little bit of ease.

And then you realize that this is kind of like a revolving door for the locals. you know, they just stick them in prison and then sort out the situation after they got arrested. Like one of the guys was arrested, he was accused of rape. They just stuck him in the jail. Well, he was just a situation where he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then even his wife had bailed him out. So I only talked to him for, you know, a few hours or maybe a day before he got bailed out. And they just understand that the system is they just stick you, they sort it out after they just get, they'll just stick you in

prison and decide whether you're going to get bail, whether you're going to go from prison to court. Now, us being, us being foreign nationals, you know, we went from immigration detention to court. But the locals, they'll just stick them in prison, and then they'll sort it out after that. But the whole key is they want everybody just to plead guilty, and then they'll get their fines, and then it'll make it a lot easier on their system, because their system's terrible. right even when you tell you about what happened going to the the appellate court that how i got released a little early on on a technicality so it wasn't that it wasn't such a desperate situation as we didn't feel we didn't feel threatened just as soon as we walked in and everything because

you know there were people there from all levels yeah there was murderers in there and stuff like that and people that had been involved in some illegal activities and stuff like that but some of them We really didn't even deserve to be in there, especially from the locals. But, I mean, it was an international holding area because when I first got into there, there was five Dominican fishermen that got arrested for being out of their fishing in Bahamian waters. They got arrested for that. They became really good buddies. And one of them kind of like, they kind of like, we'll pick somebody and kind of like one,

the two or three of them just felt like they kind of like adopt you. And one guy that kind of, I'll say, adopted me was a guy by the name Francisco, Francisco Delva. He was Dominican resident, but he was born on the other, he was originally born on the other side of the island, which is Haiti. But he lived in the Dominican. So he was of Haitian ancestry, but became a Dominican fisherman. But what happened with them is they were caught in Bahamian waters, and then the, the fishing. company just kind of like you're on your own right you know they probably probably might have been their mistake probably was but they just on their own so both they all had a year i believe they

couldn't pay their fine so they all they had they all had a year being in the wrong yeah international waters just being in the wrong spot okay you know i mean it's it's i mean it's a money grab too right pay the fine you know whoever how many was on the boat you know to get it's a nice little money grab for these countries but if you can't pay the fine they're just they're just going to stick in stick in prison but they also know that somebody like me is going to probably have somebody that's going to help them out with commissary as well so that means candy bars and cigarettes and different things like that i'm able to hand out to my my new my new my new buddies so but anyway the francisco was he was just felt like he wanted to look after me a little bit which was fine he wasn't

He was smaller than me, but he was a boxer. I mean, he had more calluses on his knuckles than I've ever had on my whole body in 63 years. But it really worked out well and everything. I tried to take care of him if I got something. And they took care of me because you go in there, you don't have a bed. You don't even have a mattress. So they gathered up some cardboard for us. And then we, you know, with whatever blanket or sheet or whatever,

they had, then they just gathered it up and helped us out a little bit, gave us something at least we could sleep on and lay on halfway, halfway, not comfortable, but at least better than right on the concrete. So now, and after three weeks, Andy and Jared and the two lady town agents, they were released, but of course, I was, I was not released. So they got out, they got out in three weeks, but obviously I was there for maximum four months at that time, but I got out a little bit with a little bit less on a technicality. Because you were appealing the decision. Yeah, yeah.

I'll go ahead and jump ahead to that, but if I can backtrack and fill you a little bit about meeting Steve and them coming into our cell and his whole story. But obviously, if you paid your fine, you were reduced a third of your time. So when I went to court, I didn't hear from my attorney for weeks, and he came back, and this was about almost three, almost three months in. And he said, I'm going to, I got a court date said, we're going to grasp for bail. Well, I even knew that was fishy, because foreign nationals did not get bail. You did not, if you're a foreign national, you could not get bailed out. It's too easy to get off that island.

Right. So, we went ahead and went to court and I said, if it's going to take, if he doesn't set it up within a week, I'm not going to go. I'm just going to wait my time out because I was facing just by going to the appellate court, this is how these foreign systems work. Just by going there, I was risking more time. Three year sentence. Right. So did I want to go from six months to three years? Absolutely not.

So I thought, well, I'll just wait out my last month rather than even go to court. Well, we got a court day. We went. And we're sitting there in court, and they're trying to argue the state, whoever's representing the state's arguing against me. And my attorney's arguing for me. Well, there really wasn't much of an argument because there's three appellate courts, you know, and they're black robes. And, you know, they're from that English system. So they have the white wigs and everything.

It's kind of like, you know, this is kind of weird. but I'm looking at them and one of the judges said well okay and we understand the charges where's the paperwork oh we haven't gotten it yet who your lawyers the judges haven't gotten the paperwork about my case here I'm sitting in front of them in court the magistrate level judge never sent the paperwork to the appellate level judges literally this is basically their Supreme Court yeah this is just how incompetent just said and didn't he send the paperwork so they're sitting there thinking and one of the judges said okay well we're going to delay this and it was delayed about 10 days then i would come back okay they come and get me again

okay you got a court date come to the cell i get up i leave go out and know i'm going to be traveling to court downtown uh then i get there see my attorney go in sit down and uh the uh the appellate level judges uh look at each other and uh the state starts arguing against me already, you know, without even really being prompted or asked. And then what's the charges? And then did they go, well, where's our paperwork? They still didn't have the paperwork. So did my question was, did that magistrate-level judge, was she bold enough trying to appease

her friends that obviously sentenced us because she must have known some of the girls that we had hired to work for us or whatever her string of attachment was? Did she refuse to do it, or she would just, were they just that incompetent that she didn't get my paper, they didn't get my paperwork at all? Why isn't your attorney making sure that the paperwork was forwarded? Like, why isn't he making a call? Hey, we had an issue last time. He's kind of stuck in the same system.

Yeah. Just like we, looks like I am, but he should have known. Yeah. Should have known better. But he, they go into court not knowing what to expect almost as much as we don't know what to expect. Right. So you pay all that money.

And I'm, I feel fortunate that we only paid five grand. Five grand to a bohemian, you know, a lawyer. That's a lot of money. Like for them, that's a lot of money. Well, I mean, I've heard of a lot worse. But anyway, but he didn't hardly know what was going on either. All he had was my paperwork that we submitted to him letters, letters of intent, and different things like that, and email responses.

I gave him all the chain of emails and everything of all of our correspondences and everything. and that we weren't there to defraud the country because we advertised all over the islands and everything with radio and TV so there was nothing we were we weren't hiding anything unlike the typical unscrupulous businesses that come there and try to do business you know under the table and everything like that

so they said okay well what we're going to do was we're going to release him on time served and their their excuse was that my sentence was disproportionate to my cohort, the other four that was with me. They got three months, three weeks, I got six months, and they just said they based it on disproportionality of my length of sentence based on what they had received. So how long were you in, four months at this point?

Three, a little over three months. So I saved about a month and got out about a month early. Okay. Would you hang out for a couple weeks? Oh, no. Not hardly. No, I was under, you know, I was not, not be allowed to go away to do anything. So basically, I went to their holding cell, holding tank there at the courthouse.

And there was a row of cells, maybe five or six cells, and they put me, and there was two other people in my cell. And here, I mean, just like talking about a revolving door for the locals, the local, the local guy was was the guy the guy one of the guys in myself was buying a subway sandwiches for one of the guards oh joe whatever his name was when you go bring me a sandwich i'm i'm hungry i'll pay you i'll pay you back i don't think he had money on him he said he'd pay him back and the guard comes back gives him a sandwich he splits it with me i said yeah that's pretty it's pretty chummy but there was another guy in an american just just to show you why you don't mess around in foreign countries because you never know what's going to happen again i use that

three block barrier from the beach and maybe really only be two if you go somewhere and i'll never bash the bahamas for a vacation or anything like that because most people don't go there to do business where they don't have ill intentions of being there but uh if you stay within that couple blocks three blocks you're going to be pretty good you know you're not going to get into too much situation but But this younger guy was in our cell with me, and he was just kind of like out of his wits, you know, just like I didn't understand, just like my first few days there under those circumstances, he was arrested. He was on his honeymoon, on a cruise ship, and bought a joint from somebody off the cruise ship.

Well, as soon as he got the port, guess what? He was arrested. Right. So he had a $500 fine, had to go to court, and he had ruined his whole honeymoon. The wife flew back to the States, and he was there facing, you know, court in jail time and fine for, you know, buying, literally buying a joint on the cruise ship from somebody he thought was just another passenger. everybody got he was set up um i went to jamaica one time and the girl i was in jamaica we got into a taxi and said hey just drive us around like you know we want to go other places that aren't just tourist places and we drove he drove us through some place you know

and then we were like oh what's the closest you know city or other town over and he was like oh it's such and such and we were like oh let's go there let's go there he's like no we're not going there. I'm not taking you there. We were like, why? Why? And he said, they'll rob you. Again, we will just drive through. We won't get out of the car. He said, no, they'll stop us. They'll rob you. They'll see you in the back. They'll rob you. There are two white people. No, they're going to rob you. Yeah. And it was like, holy Jesus. We're like, how far away is there? It's like, oh, it's like five miles from where we were. And that's, and they's like, you can't go there. He's like, you can't go. I just took you to the few places you're going to be okay.

But I'm not going to bring you there. Yeah. And I'm, well, is there another place? He's like, oh, there's another place we can go, drive through like a little neighborhood, little town. You'll be okay here. He said, but, you know, you just can't go into these. There's too many places in Jamaica.

You just can't go. You need to stay in the tourist areas. They're protected. Yep. It was like, wow. Exactly. Yeah, because I saw the backside of this leaving Fox Hill prison and traveling through those areas and stuff like that.

And I said, this looks nothing like the resort. Yeah. I was like in Mexico. Yes. You know? Yeah. Same thing in Mexico. You stay in the areas that are designated, and if you go outside of that,

well, then you're going to get robbed or bad things could happen. Yeah. That's why, I mean, my warning, and again, I never bash anybody that's, I've known a lot of people that's traveled and vacationed in the Bahamas, you know, they go to Atlanta's and stuff like that. Fine and dandy, but stay within your limits. Yeah. And do not interact too much with the locals in bars and different things like that called

one accusation will put your ass in prison right and then most likely see you as a victim yeah they they see you as a as a target yes somebody who's these are rich americans that we don't really care for that we they have what we want and how can i get it yeah they have they basically tolerate us i don't they don't they don't really didn't like us but they they tolerated us right because we go over there and spend spend spend a lot of a lot of money but that's that's that's my warning you know if anything from this our talk here is that's one of the main things I want to want to get out is you know go and go on vacation but do not interact too much with the locals go out and party with them or do anything by any illegal substance so I know people that got thrown in prison because

they had a casing they forgot to take a like a little 22 caliber bullet out of their luggage I mean it was like five-year sentence for that in the Bahamas don't get caught with a gun But the local hoodlums, I don't know if you'd really say call them gang bangers or not, but they all wanted a gun and they wanted a bottle of Hennessy. That was their thing, you know, party in and I got a gun, you know. So that was their big thing. But what was interesting about the Bahamas, I've got to tell you a shakedown story of how this local Bahamian ended up in my cell with me there.

But it's hard to get away with a murder on that island, obviously. You know, it's very small. It's not a very big island at all. There's, what, 220,000 people at that time. I don't know what the population is now. But I found out that the Haitians are the hitmen. They'd fly them in from Haiti. They'd knock somebody off.

They'd be flying back out the same day. They'd never get caught. So one of the guys was in for murder. It was a Haitian guy that actually a fairly nice guy. I don't have no idea what turned out in his case because I was out before him. But that's how they run the operation over there. If you want somebody to take it out, so you just bring you hire a Haitian to come in and knock them off

and they're in and out in and out in the same day. Does they still have the death penalty over there? I don't know. I really don't know. I didn't know if they did back then or not. I read a book, which is horrible to say. It was Stuart Woods. And it was like Jack Barrington.

or something it's a whole series of novels that are horrible but he talks about at one point he i think he goes to bahamas i think he kind of explains the sentencing structure was like up to one year or a fine could get you out of it and then it was like between then they had it where it was like between five and ten years we actually had to be incarcerated he said typically and then it was anything above that was basically if you were going to get more than 10 years years they basically hung you or shot you or something like he was like a three-tiered system where it's like you know and it was it was funny the way he explained it i didn't explain it very well but he explains what falls into each category he's like everybody's trying to stay

into that middle category because he's like because the the difference between getting 10 years is over 10 years they basically they feel like you're such a burden on on them they're like just hang them yeah and it was for that yeah you know um but it was it was interesting i don't know if it's true or not because it was a stone it was a it was a um stuart ward's book so who knows uh but jack barrington was one of his his he's really actually of a lot they were you know i used to compare those books in prison like you had some books that were basically like um they're almost like sitcoms yeah you know what saying like there were serious books and then they're the sitcoms yeah he had a series of sitcoms

but they were great to read you had to read like five or six of them and then you then you could move and read a serious book and then you jump back to some sitcoms you know yeah so anyway but i was one i was wondering if uh if that was true or not who knows yeah you know one thing i really thought was interesting about their prison system over there is like hans for instance if he was caught in the u.s per se with a boatload of you know five five plus million dollar uh oh he did some serious time yeah and then there five years yeah and then out in three and a half or so one third off of that look what a horrible situation too though yeah as much as they they want to they throw people in in in the prisons over there and everything most of them are given something that wouldn't even come would be small compared to what would happen over here i mean he'd got 30 years here probably for something like that what's funny is uh i had my mom when i was locked up sent me an article that was called bring back the lash lashings for prisoners and they talked about a survey that they had done which was would you rather take like 20 lashes you're like you're cutting through your skin

I mean these guys are like having to be stitched up I mean lashings were brutal and they were like Would you rather do five years in prison or take, you know, 20 lashes? And they talked to multiple, you know, something, I don't know how many inmates they surveyed. And almost unanimously, they were all like, I'll take the lashes. Like, I would rather be brutally beaten and lashed than have to do the five years. And so it's like, yeah, is the Bahama prison horrible? As long as I don't think I'm going to die, I'd rather do the five years than do 20. Yeah.

You go, oh, no, no, but you'll be in a better situation in the 20. I don't give a shit. It's not, it's not the conditions. It's the 20 years. That's the agony. People don't realize that. They'd be like, oh, yeah, but you were in federal prison that would stop it. It wouldn't matter if I was in the Ritz Carlton for 20 years.

It's a horrific experience. You've been removed from your family. You're, you don't, you've never, people that have never had their freedom taken away. They just don't understand. You have no contact. You have no. What doesn't matter if you say, oh, well, you get to be in this nice room suite locked down for 22 hours a day or bed through in your suite.

It doesn't matter that I'm here. I'm locked in this room for 20 years or even if I get out and I can walk the track and it's around a nice area and it's on the beach. It doesn't matter. That's not what matters. It's the time. Exactly. That's why I would say these prison sentences in the United States are just draconian. There's just brutal prison sentences.

It doesn't matter. I would rather get a five-year sentence and stay in a real shit hole or even have to work. You know, like you're working like on a chain gang for five years and have to do 20 years and you're treated well. I know. I'll pass. I'll take the five. Most guys, like I said, guys are saying, no, no, no, I'll take the lashings. Right.

Jesus. Yeah. I mean, it's your perspective on, on, I mean, even like I was looking at six months. Right. And that just seemed like an eternity to me. Yeah. And not only that, but people don't realize that all the stuff that you do on your day-to-day basis, you know, we had a family business and everything we were running.

And all the things that I was responsible for that somehow had to get done. Yeah. Because I'm not there to do it. Well, you know, I would say, like, a lot of people, like, if the problem is, is when someone says, oh, okay, well, we're going to give the guy a year or six months, it's like, okay, well, you have to give him halfway. Oh, he only got a year. It doesn't matter.

By the time he gets out of, in nine months, he's lost his apartment or his house. All of his clothes and everything are gone because your family will strip you dry. People are always shocked. They're like that, you know, something happens and like their own family members will come in and take all their stuff and steal it and sell it. And you're like, are you fucking, like a lot of people do that. So you're getting out. Your car is gone. Your credit shot.

You got bad. So you go, well, I get out and get an apartment. No, you won't. Because as soon as they pull your credit, they're going to be. my God, you've got a 500 credit score. You owe $40,000. You've got a repo. You've got cellular bills.

You've got electric bills. Like all kinds of stuff. Everything's showing up on your credit. Like you have a massive amount of bad credit. And it's not like it's bad credit 10 years ago and it fell off or it's five years ago. No, right now things are still going bad. They're going bad this month because you only did nine months on 12 months or whatever. And you're like, okay, so we have to give them halfway house and give them the ability.

to go get a job and work to put together some money to get into an apartment of some kind. And it's just if you don't have anybody in your life that can help help you and you do even a short sentence, it's a revolving door. You're just going to go back. You're going to end up back in prison.

What are you going to do? Push come to shove. If you're on the street, most people are going to commit a crime to get money to survive. You will, oh, I'd never commit crime. Yes, you would. You've just never been to position.

where you would commit a crime you will yeah under the right circumstances anybody will commit a crime you know oh I'd go to my sister you don't have a sister you don't have a brother you don't have anybody that'll put you up you don't have you're going to live it on the streets you're starving you know and you and you don't know how to live on the streets some guy who's been homeless for 20 years he can survive on the yeah you're starving to death yeah you're now asking this hobo how do I get some food yeah you have to become an urban survival yeah and that's that's tough yeah it's a shitty situation oh man and you what's funny is um what makes it worse is guys that

you talk to that didn't do anything that they go to prison and they didn't do anything they never saw it coming you know what i'm saying like you never under any you never saw a situation where i'm going to end up doing four months or three months in prison like i how would that possibly i can't imagine a scenario i could get myself into that that would happen like for most people yeah absolutely well back to i was i think i did a description of the bulkhead that we were in which is about eight about 32 34 something like that and then had this partition at the end these blankets that were holding over rope well that was our bathroom because we didn't have we didn't have working bathrooms in our in our in our cell so we had five gallon buckets and you know what

one thing i think about and i have thought about over the last 12 13 years about this is the ingenuity like most of these guys were in and out fairly quick especially the locals but what the ingenuity and what's being passed on the like the next generation what you learn to do in there like these guys would they take they they they would get the the plastic bags and they quarter them up they come up in quarters well that was that was literally your bathroom you know you did your business and you tied it up and you stuck it in the bucket that had water and piss in it right you know so And that was, that was like our private area, basically. But one time we had, they brought in like 12 guys in the middle of the night.

So we had like 30 some people in that cell. So we were literally nose to toes. I was turned this way and another guy would be turned the opposite way. And his toes was in my face and my toes was in his face. So we were just packed in there like sardines and everything. The buckets were running over and everything like that. So that was just got to be pretty nasty. We were comfortable with about 15, it started getting crowded about 17 or 18

because there wasn't enough room to sleep for everybody to lay. And, of course, we were all laying on the floor. But that was our bathroom. We were there, 23 and a half hours was in the cell during the week. We had a half hour around 10, 1030 in the morning to go to the shower area, again, if they were working. Again, there were toilets there in the shower area, but the same scenario as in immigration detention. You better have a five-gallon bucket or else it's not going to flush. So that was a flushing mechanism of the toilets over there as well.

And then on weekends, once you came back in after your little excursion out, if you want to take a shower, spend a little time in the yard on Friday morning, then you weren't back out until Monday morning. So the weekend, you're new 24-7, you get to do nothing, never don't get to go out of yourself. And, of course, we all slept on the floor. We were on concrete and we used a cardboard or whatever we had. Now, I want to use that, this transition into Steve. Steve was a guy that asked us if we were Americans when we met with, when we were in intake.

And we met him in this little hallway, like a little court. not the courtyard, but just a little meeting area outside of intake that we met him. He asked, with Americans, he was, had more or less grown up in the New Orleans area and went back, went to Indonesia and opened up businesses in Indonesia. And from Indonesia, he ended up in the prison, the prison there. But again, when I met him, he had already was down to probably 140, 45 pounds, looked pretty, pretty skinny and didn't really even look healthy at that point, but we still had a fair amount of energy.

So we get escorted over backtracking. We got escorted over into maximum security, got in there, got seven. And about two days later, here comes Steve and Yufu and Tanabe. They're two Japanese nationals. And Steve, they come to our cell. so they went ahead and moved him out of remand for you know just that holding area and then went ahead moved them into a cell now the differentiation between whether you were still not sentenced versus being sentenced was you know whether they cut your hair off or not so i finally got my hair cut off to

you know shave basically and steve and them never did get a haircut or they never did get sentenced in like 20 months of being in that prison because they kept going to going to to court. The story with him is, if you backtrack, obviously, you spend three solid months with somebody, you hear a lot. Well, they were born in Indonesia. Their dad was Dutch heritage, so they're Dutch, Dutch and Dutch ancestry. I think his mother was, I think he said his mother was half Chinese. So they were born in Indonesia, which was the Dutch East Indies. You know, So that was originally the colonies there that the Dutch had settled, and they still had plantations up until him.

I don't know if they may even have them today. Well, Steve and his brothers and sister, you know, basically their early years was on that plantation in Indonesia. And then from there, when Steve was probably, I don't know, maybe seven or eight or so, they moved to Netherlands or Holland and lived there for a number of a few years, and they moved from there to Oklahoma. And then from Oklahoma, they settled in the New Orleans area in that area down there.

So he was already a traveler, you know, and already experienced a lot of stuff. Obviously, there was his fluent in Dutch, obviously spoke English because he basically grew up in New Orleans area. So he came in and we started talking, everything. I had no idea. I mean, you just meet these people when he's certain. And what's so unusual, Matt, is these circumstances that you meet these people in, you never will meet people like this again in your life. Right.

Because it's all about the circumstances. And then there's a multitude of other people that have met over there, you know, Canadian guy doing fraudulent credit cards in the Bahamas and just story after story after story is like, good gosh. So, but anyway, Steve, they were doing a business transaction in the Bahamas. Now, Yufu and Tanibay were Japanese residents. Steve was an Indonesian resident with also dual citizenship in the U.S. And a lady by the name of Carol was a banker in Boston that came to the Bahamas to help facilitate this deal.

So a level of that magnitude of $100 million, you have to partner with Bahamian business interests in order to pull that off and open up your foreign accounts and everything. So they'd partnered with a Bahamian business. guy and they were all scheduled to do this $100 million deal. J.P. Morgan Chase bank saw all the paperwork. So I saw the actual draft of that check in our cell. So everything Steve told me, I mean, he could have been the biggest con man and always kind of wrestling in my head. Is this guy for real or is he just, is he just a con? But we were in the cell one time and he pulled out all this paperwork. Here's a copy of the draft. Here's the account that you can draw

this hundred million dollars off of here's uh officials get this he had indonesian officials um legal IDs philippines and japanese he had copies of all their official because all these countries were involved in this deal because it involved a gold mine in indonesia and they were trying to get in on this and steve was kind of facilitating he was like the i just call him the navigator because he spoke all the three Indonesian languages, just a brilliant, just a super smart guy. In fact, his whole family, I've gotten to know his brothers as well over the years. And they were all like the engineering, technology, just really intelligent type of a family that really understood this type of stuff. They showed me all

the paperwork, so I said, dang. And every time I would, you know how you, when you're talking to somebody and you kind of want to, you don't want to offend them, but you want to test them a little bit like you told me something the other day about and you kind of just see if the stories are consistent yeah well every time i ever like you know a little slight challenge of his story and everything everything fell right into line nothing ever seemed fabricated nothing ever seemed you know fraudulent or something that it that was going to be made up so this hundred million dollars um what happened was similar to my situation only on a much huger scale is that they the he got pissed at the Bahamian business guy

Bahamian business guy was trying to shaft him so he kicked him out and said you know we're not doing do business with you I remember Steve was a guy that could speak some Japanese all the Indonesian dialects English so he was kind of like the middle guy for all these all these transaction for this transaction well what happened was his brother brother Jerry was there with him as well and his Jerry ran a business in Indonesia for a few years also. Now, Steve has had restaurants.

He was a chef. So his brother had just left that morning. This was back in probably sometime in 2010. And so he got things got kind of crazy. He said, Steve, I'm leaving. He said, if you're smart, you would just go with me. Let's get out of here. This is getting too crazy.

You know, hang on. Steve was one of those types that he just felt like no matter what he'd get into, he'd be able to get himself out of. You've met people like that, I'm sure. No matter what he got into, he always felt like he could get out of it, no matter we could get in a foreign country or what. So he was sitting in the lobby of one of the banks over there,

and they were supposed to meet one of the bankers or something, and he was there with Carol, the Boston banker lady that was there to help facilitate the deal, and either Yu Fu or Tanibang, one of the Japanese guys, I think it was Taunabay, the younger one, was there with him. And lo and behold, they got arrested in the lobby. I was a Bahamian guy had already told them, you know, you're going to pay for this. And, you know, you should know, you should have known better to cut me out of the deal, however the conversation went.

So he had them arrested in the lobby of the bank. You know what they were charged with? The charge was they were accused. accused of trying to cash a $100 million fraudulent check. Okay. Okay. So how many people do you think ever go into a bank and say, I want to cash this $100 million check?

Yeah, nobody. It doesn't happen. First of all, banks doesn't have $100 million in cash. No, they don't. That's not possible. No. So they were all the, I've got a bunch of newspaper articles and everything talking about how they were accused of fraud and defrauding.

the banking system and all this well all they did was just kick out the behemian business guy which was a crook anyway right and then he was just like the girls that got me in prison and my group in prison because they knew somebody was able to have some weight and carry and to get somebody that's what was going to do them a favor and that's what happened with steve they got arrested in the bank accused of trying to cash a hundred million dollar check and we know that was a joke that was just a that's just pathetic So by the time I met Steve, September 2011, they had already been in there for over a year. What would happen was, and I remember Steve's getting frail and losing weight this whole time.

So what would happen was they would go to court and then some technicality would happen. Witness wouldn't show up. He'd come in back to the cell a couple hours later. Cussing, I can't believe this. They said a witness didn't show. up so they delayed the delayed the court another two weeks two weeks he'd go again there'd be another technicality so they'd delay it again three weeks four weeks whatever then they'd go to court again well he went to court probably about once every week or once every two weeks they could only

i guess i guess they could only fake these delays for so many times well the whole process was waiting for steve to die because he'd already been poisoned something already something already happened to him that what they said was his problem was not even close they said he'd fell he'd fall on a bus and he had supposedly cracked his tailbone that's why he was in a lot of pain but it was dropping weight like crazy from like 200 and when he died he was probably about 117 pounds or something when he finally did die um but what they did they had just they had whatever they did was not very effective so it just stretched out for like 20 months before he died I got out in November of 2011.

He died in February of 2012 on February 9th, because I kept checking the Internet to see any updates on his court case. Because we've become great friends. You know, I was supposed to go to Indonesia. He wanted to do business in the entertainment industry in California. You know, I want to do this. I want to do that. And I was sitting in that what little bit of paper that I had, what a little bit of legal paper and a big envelope I could unfold and write on. I was writing out business plans.

Right. Yeah, we had this, he was called, he wanted to call it Jap Indo Industries, Japanese, and Indonesia, and this was going to be this entertainment system that he was going to, you know, work, no need to go into all the details on that, but since I had, you know, some experience in entertainment at that point, you know, it was, it helped pass the time a lot, we'd set and write these business plans up. And another thing that he did, which I still have this, again, didn't get much paper. So I didn't have, I was able to write, I had about four sheets of paper, like legal paper and then this envelope that I filled up on both sides. But Steve being a chef, we were talking. And I said, you know, I like create, I do love doing creative stuff. It's mostly like house projects and stuff like that. But I said, I would, I would enjoy cooking if it just didn't take a lot of time.

I could do it quickly. So he said, and he gave me about 35, 30, probably about 30 recipes of meals that you can make real quick. And I'm sitting in there writing down all these little details about these meals. I've made some of them since over the years. I've made some of those just quick meals that he showed me that I could make quickly. So every now and then I pull that out and just think about the time that I sitting there was writing down these recipes that he gave me as a chef and told him I wanted to make some quick meals. So we became real close in that time. And he was the only one that they brought, he was so sickly that he was the only one

that they actually brought a mattress in in our cell. And so he came, he was like second person down from the end wall. Then there was the door. And then I literally slept in front of the door again to try to get some air. So he slept on a mattress. I slept on the floor. And everybody else obviously slept on the floor all. way up to the other to the other end but again he was the only one that had a mattress which

was about four inches thick but other they did bring medication regularly he got medication all the time uh the two japanese guys got medication because they were talking about illnesses that they had whether they did or not i don't know but and a few other few other the guys they did try to keep medication but what they'd done to steve they were just fake they faked whatever they said his injury was because when it was all said and done they said he died from prostate cancer um and which was never diagnosed every time he went to the doctor he came back and i knew the whole lowdown of what had happened never diagnosed with anything to do with his prostate so when he died in February 9th, they immediately released the two Japanese guys that was in my cell.

They released Carol from the women's side of the prison. They all got out. And they would not let his brothers or his family bring his body out of the Bahamas back to New Orleans. He had to be cremated there. What, they didn't want an autopsy? Nope. nope no toxicology reports nothing nothing no so that's that's that's how they that's how they hid the poisoning but what did the embassy nothing they were no fucking help at all not at all they're

pathetic i even try to contact them on his behalf when i got out oh there's about a two months a little over two months span between when i got out and his his his his death because we'd already planned i was going to go to me he was inviting us over to indonesia and everything i was just waiting of him to get out and check on his condition and everything. I knew he was sickly, but he was functioning. Some days he was better than others. And when I was talking to one of his brothers

a couple years ago, they said, well, yeah, we talked to him about two days, and he was doing okay, still talking about he's going to get out of here and this, that, and the other, what he was going to do, then two days later we find out he's dead. So evidently, they gave him something that just finally,

finally did him in, rather rather than him suffering for 20 months with whatever they gave him that was probably more than like he was supposed to kill him a lot. They probably didn't want to kill him too fast, but they wanted to process to drag out whatever they did to him.

So it would look more like a natural cause because they wrote, they reported it as he died from prostate cancer. And you think it had something to do with the bohemian businessman that, he told him he wasn't, he told Steve he was not going to get out of their life. already told him he was not going he's not going he would never get out of this prison

unless he was dead and that was that was actually actually the case on that and you have the articles and oh yeah yeah i've got one of the one of the beheming articles even said foreign foreign national murdered in at fox hill one of them even specifically said that he was murdered we all know uh and then just those of us that had that spent the time with him and I immediately started contacting his family, talked to his brothers, and they wanted to know how he was doing and everything. So I'll talk to them for a few while. Then it kind of spread out.

But one thing that really knew that it was a bad situation, now, I didn't find this out until like about a year ago, that that $100 million deal was the beginning of a $500 million. deal on this Indonesian gold mine. And the reason that Steve, and even his brother was involved in this, is because they had access, once they got this account and everything established

in the Bahamas, with the offshore account and everything, the money was going to Europe. Because Europe has a whole different lending process than the United States has. They'll lend seven times what you have on deposit. You can roll

that money over like seven, seven times. So if you got a hundred million dollars, you can literally turn it into like $700 million of operating capital. So his brother, Jerry, told me that, yeah, this was the first hundred million of a $500 million deal. That's why Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, the U.S., you know, and obviously the Bahamas, there was five countries involved in this and not counting either Holland or the European country that was going to be actually be the end up being the banking facility that money once it was established in the Bahamas was going to Europe and that's when they were able to collateralize that money and bring more money back into the system for

their for their project so I said 500 million I thought a hundred million was a lot but we're talking 500 million dollar deal so you can imagine the people that wanted their hands on part of this was brother also told me that several months after uh steve's death that that money did get circulated that hundred million dollars didn't get into circulation and through through another through another through another channel but i saw a copy of the bank that he he he said he called it a bank draft it was a written out as a check for a hundred million dollars j p morgan chase you think jp morgan chase came to his defense at all absolutely not so and I saw the bank account that then some and they'd only the the the the drafts of any like it'd

be like four or five six years the bank account went back to like the 1970s account and there were only so many drafts off of that account and all in all those years so jp morgan chase did not come to his defense the u.s embassy was an absolute pathetic joke that they just let and then in the articles that I have from after his death and everything, they tried to defend themselves. Oh, we did our regular visits. We checked on him regularly. We made sure that he had this and that. I don't know why they just could, they backed off of this just as if they didn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. But I was talking to the brothers about a year after his death and they had already done local news interviews in New Orleans and everything

and other types of interviews and everything and Robert, one of the brother that wasn't in the Bahamas with Steve, had a colonel that he knew from the Army, called him up and said, hey, I saw this story that you did about your brother. He said, I need to meet with you. But I don't want to, we can't talk all over the phone. Where can we meet? Well, they were in the Army together at one point. This guy ended up being a colonel.

And so Jerry and Robert met with this colonel. And met at some restaurant. And he said, look, I know I see what you guys are doing. And my advice, I know something about this. I'm just going to advise that. you just drop it, leave it alone. Don't pursue this. He said, now this wasn't a threat. This was a friendly warning from something that he knew. He wasn't directly involved in it, but he knew what was going on. He said, you guys have families. He said, you do not want to pursue this. You're just

going to open up something and start something that's going to be detrimental to you, and it's not going to turn out well so they were warned advised not to pursue this so this was 2012 you know we're sitting here at 2025 so there had to be about a 10 year gap waiting period before we all had to go ahead and his family was okay with even me pursuing doing this story and getting it out more they said yeah we're good we're good now this is about two or three years ago which we've been about 10 years in he said yeah don't yeah we're saying we want this story to be told and we feel like enough time has passed that it should be should be safe to tell the story so what is so what is your what is your hope for telling that well well i think that

this this story has no closure and i mean i was in a predict myself i can tell i can tell 90% of story, you know, other than what his family would add, because I experienced everything. And my, my objective is I believe I want to see somebody pick up this and run with it and get closure to his death. I mean, I just think it was just absolutely ridiculous and unfair that they were just left alone over there and just like even, even in our situation, you know, all nothing, this is nothing. You'll probably, they'll just probably just let you go. You're not going to have any any situation that has nothing's really going to happen well then and now look at my situation and I can't even begin to compare to what Steve went through and the magnitude of what

they were involved in and everything you know I mean they said we were trying to defraud the Bahamian people but guess what we never had to refund one penny to any of the Bahamian people that we worked with over there you know they just wanted they just wanted more money from us as obviously they did from that $100 million that Steve was overseeing and in charge of. So I just, I would, I believe that this, there's need to be some closure with this because I think that it really will open up a larger can of worms because anything, this is, this is not a standalone incident, you know, and what was the magnitude of how large this could go into other situations, you know, what would this shed light on in itself? I mean, to me,

$100 million or $500 million is a huge deal. But what else is going on that happened either in the Bahamas or these other countries that become foreign hubs for money and business entities to be established and everything like that? But I just think it's just absolutely ridiculous that he didn't get out of their life. and i think somebody needs to pick up with run with this because the story itself is noteworthy but where does it go from here you know i can't i can't give you an ending to the story as far as you know what happened i can tell you that they had a they they had a service from him

at the yacht club there close to new orleans and you know i've got a video of you know the service and everything like that but that doesn't bring any closure to anything You know, here he was living in Indonesia and had a daughter and an ex-wife in New Orleans and a wife and a son in Indonesia, you know, everybody was just left hanging. Just because somebody was bold enough to go out and do something out of the ordinary. I love creative people as people that'll take a risk. My risk have always been fairly calculated, you know, other than me being naive to do. business in the Bahamas and thinking that everything's going to turn out okay.

But, you know, I've just, the type of people that are willing to take these huge risks. Now, another thing, Steve's restaurant in Indonesia also became a, like a meeting point for CIA and other people that they wanted to meet with. You know, he was like an established, before he, earlier I said he spoke all three Indonesian language and Steve was language as he got to know government officials people that come into his restaurant well that became a um a a um a meeting point to interchange and a hub a hub yeah and he didn't go into a whole lot of this but he talked about you know him him uh the CIA coming coming to him and i confirmed this with with jerry that also did business in indonesia said was the CIA

involved he goes oh yeah you know they use they use these places to you know run their deals and and they knew steve spoke all the languages and anything that they wanted him to he could coordinate well you think about coordinating uh philippines into the philippines indonesia japan altogether working on this deal you know that meant and and u.s money was involved in it too so where was all this supposed to go you know who was actually owning this gold gold mine was a gold mine just going to be a front that they could pump 500 million or a billion dollars into some at some capacity there was a lot more there that you would just scratch your head and think you know you know first of all my main thing is he did not he did not deserve to die

over there you know never meet another for the most interesting person ever met in my life by far and you know somebody I thought was going to be a friend with for the rest of my life but in my situation was just peanuts compared to what what he had been involved in. He told me stories of other situations because he ended up in jail in the Bahamas as well, but he was just like on a hold for like three or four months. Well, Steve being the type of guy that would, you know, he's always cutting deals and say, when I get out here, I'm going to do this for you. I'm going to do that for you. I'm going to do this. Well, they knew that he was a chef. So he became the chef for that jail in the Bahamas there I'm sorry in Indonesia and he had free rain to hop on a bicycle

and go down to the market buy whatever he needed come back and cook for everybody as long as he wasn't it wasn't gone too long because he knew that he was going to eventually be it was he three or four months he was going to be out of that situation so but he just they just gave him like free reign of the of the jail because he he cooked for everybody but that was just a typical example of what he did. They called him the charity chef because he cooked meals for a lot of the underprivileged people in Indonesia. One of the biggest things he talked about, which he thought was just super valuable and interesting

to him was the roadside vendors for the food. He said you'd walk down the street and somebody would be cooking something there. They'd come out in the evening and be selling food. He said, you've eaten for, you know, a couple of dollars. you can go down and sample all these different foods from the roadside vendors. He thought that was one of the coolest things. He'd get ideas to cook and everything like that. And he just thought that was great that, you know, so cheap you could go down for,

I mean, probably just two or three dollars. You could buy four or five different plates of food and sample all of them, decide what he'd want to add to his menu in his restaurant. But he had a Dutch, with a Cajun style of cooking mixed with Indonesian food. And that was, that was, that was became his stuff. Yeah, fusion of restaurants. But just to re, we go back to that question,

I just think there's, I think the whole story is, is, is, is worthy. I've actually got a, I don't have a script, a movie script, but I've got a movie treatment, which is like a scene by scene. lists all the characters and it says scene one scene two all the way into scene 63 you know we're just not that we're i mean we're doing a like a reality travel show in west virginia so it's it's not quite to that level and for this for this type of story to be told and it really needs to be in like six different countries you know you did you really you need to go to the bahamas you need to go to the u.s you could in a u.s you'd probably need to be in for my part part of that would be in west

virginia uh steve lived in oklahoma steve lived in new orleans you know into you know like a documentary well either that or a docu series or just or just a movie you know but if it's want to be done right it's not a low low budget project like some of the stuff that we worked on in west virginia you can't get it done for a few thousand dollars because if you do it right you really need to travel and incorporate all these different so you need to be on a plantation in indonesia you need to be in in holland you know you need to be in new orleans it's just it would be a big a big undertaking to put together something like that well and you what do you do now you got a production studio yeah we're working with uh we have the west virginia explorer it's been a uh an online magazine

for 25 plus years and then i hooked up with the the creator of that the writer and editor of that that travels and does the little short videos and stuff like that and we we since we connected we decided to turn that into a full-fledged TV series so we call it the West Virginia Explorer which is a TV version of that show is we're just in the big we're at the past the promo stage in the first year production right now a TV version of that magazine yeah West Virginia Explorer is a TV version of that show yeah well TV version of the magazine West Virginia explorer has been a magazine for 25 plus years and now we're taking those stories and interesting

people and turning it into a reality style travel travel show because steve steve has a personality i've learned enough in in l.a and with acting and everything that you've got to have either a certain type of personality or enough acting skills to pull something off like this and Dave has these capabilities to do that. So he's an acting experience, he's done a few movies, he did drama and everything. And so as the editor and writer and the guy that's been going out for over 25 years doing stories and articles that we decided to develop this into a reality travel project

and should be half-hour segments. geared for TV not just just not just the internet TV like like national like network TV or like network streaming network either either or depends depending on which what doors open first our goal is to produce the first year of at least eight episodes which we should we start in May we can have eight episodes done by the end of the year and then then that we would start streaming but from the streaming we would look to get network cable deal from that so ultimately you would want 12 episodes right because it's every month or well well i mean streaming obviously people binge watch right so we have to we wouldn't draw we

would drop four four at a time for the first year four and then and then four but you know most of what i've heard is is is you can do 10 to 12 episodes and it's not going to air all year long but you know be prepared it'll just run for a season like that but that depends on the network or the cable or you know regular tv network what type of arrangements what type of deals we can get you know something like discovery or a and a there's a lot of different opportunities there's well it just does biographies it does just documentaries is it doc is it I heard it the other day that paid some kind of paid. You pay like $30 a month or something.

It's nothing but documentaries. I don't know the name of it though. Yeah. Talk to you. I don't know. Yeah, we put two years of just development into the rights type of style because we almost went scripted comedy. We felt like we could pull that off with the personalities that we had.

But we need, we were advised to stick with what what we do, what we know and what we would do best. And that's more like reality or documentary style. So I'm pitching this as reality, but, you know, with, it's documentary content. But we're looking for with the personalities that we have, Dave and the other people, we believe it would draw a larger audience than this is your typical guy that wants to sit down and watch a documentary on travel or something like that. A little different, a little different with that. you know with the personalities and the style and the interaction we'll bring we'll bring a flare that

reality flare with that kind of like if you think of the um um um american pickers you know they they get they hop in a van and they go and they look at all these antiques and all these different places and stuff like that i mean i i believe we got a way better concept than they do and they've been on the air for a number of years already there's just they're just two guys in a van and they stop at some warehouse that people's got junk that they haven't wanted to get rid of in 20 years.

They got one girl in the office that's always on the screen or on the phone. She never leaves the office or just set a camera right there in front of her desk or a table or wherever she's at. And it's a little bit similar

to our concept, but we've got the content is not a problem. The interesting people, the beautiful places. I mean, our, our, our burial shots, our drone shots are, I mean, you talk about the New River Gorge and places like this. I mean, it's just beautiful state.

So it's going to open up, and we already know all the travel and tourism, people in the state, and everything like that. So they're all for it. That doesn't mean you get the kind of funding that you really need for. We're going the private route for that. they'll back us up but they're not going to they only have so much allocated you know this this this economic development or this this this regional county travel tourism departments you know they don't have they don't have large budgets to but they support they support us wholeheartedly with it but as far as to do it and do it like the level that we want to do it and the quality that we want to do it

It requires, you know, investors. And with the West Virginia Explorer shows under the umbrella, which I've also placed this prison stripes in paradise because that's what the, my story has been branded as prison stripes in paradise. And then that's also packaged underneath what we call New Mountain Films. So we've got a lot of projects that could unfold

with the right, with the right people, right people getting involved because a lot of the industry is moving out of LA they're not filming as much nowhere near because there's so much the cost to do it there I mean just I think about a commercial music video that my wife did years ago

where you had even they had to have like a full-time fireman had to be on set and they just have everything I mean it costs you know 20 times more to film something in LA than it does in our market in West Virginia you.

So we think that we can draw a lot of people that are interested in doing some quality productions outside of L.A. in a smaller market and take New Mountain Films. Our goal is to take that to a public status where the investors invest in a public film company in a smaller market, but still with huge potential. Right. Because we're a few hundred miles from every, you know, you think Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., I mean, we, we, all these areas are within. That's, that's why our travel show, the reality travel show, you know,

most of Dave's subscribers to the magazine are, our biggest, biggest percentage of them are in the D.C. area, Pittsburgh, and New York. So they're not even within our state. So we, the reach, what we can reach and bring into, into our market, we feel will be, will be very successful yeah i know that oklahoma and um nevada are taking stealing a lot of the a lot of um hollywoods you know studios absolutely everybody's move into those states to start opening up stuff oh yeah phaette bill north carolina Atlanta's exploded i mean it started with like the music industry and hip-hop and music videos and stuff like that but it's exploded

Steve's one of Steve's brothers in New Orleans that I've been in contact with they do some extra work and there's multiple studios in New Orleans now and they've reopened a lot and building that so it's starting to to filter out across the country where it's a lot more feasible the logistics and then even like we were talking about editing earlier before we started sitting down here at the table

so much stuff doesn't have to be all localized. So it just opens up doors that you can really do a quality production, even in a state like we have. Our film guys are really, really talented, and they currently do all their own editing. And you can imagine most of their projects are commercial-based or promotional base, because one of the videos that they did is whitewater rafting,

company, which is huge in West Virginia. So they did a complete probably a three-minute video on that. They edited everything themselves. Dron shots, a whole nine yards. So that's the type of work they're going to bring to our West Virginia Explorer project. Hey, you guys.

I appreciate you watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell. So get notified of videos just like this. Also, we are going to leave all of Terry's links in the description box. You can check out his travel reality TV show.

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