Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - CATCHING THE FBI'S MOST WANTED WOMEN | FBI AGENT FRAUD STORIES

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Stop leaving yourself vulnerable to data breaches. Go to my sponsor https://aura.com/matt to get a 14-day free trial and see if any of your data has been exposedTom Simon was an FBI Special Agent for 26 years before becoming a Licensed Private Investigator in Florida. On this Episode Tom and Matt breakdown Women Fraud stories.Tom's IG https://www.instagram.com/simoninvestigations/?hl=enToms Website https://www.simoninvestigations.comGet 50% sitewide for a limited time. Just visit https://GhostBed.com/cox and use code COX at checkout. Go to https://www.Qualialife.com/true for up to 50% off and use code true at checkout for an additional 15% off. For your convenience Qualia Senolytic is also available at select GNC locations near you.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 📧Sign up to my newsletter to learn about Real Estate, Credit, and Growing a Youtube Channel: https://mattcoxcourses.com/news 🏦Raising & Building Credit Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/credit 📸Growing a YouTube Channel Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/yt🏠Make money with Real Estate Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/reFollow 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

Girls Gone Wild, Matt Cox style. She steals $108 million. How much time you give her a Matt Cox? I bet she got 10 because she's probably a cutie. I mean... You saw the photo. Yeah. So Matt, it's Women's History Month.

No. It is. It is. And I'm here to help you with your female demographic. Which is low. I have stories. It's like 8%. This is spring break.

Girls Gone Wild. At Cox style. I have a series of stories today about federal crimes committed by women. I love it. Okay. Throw them in prison. All right. Let's get rid of these chicks.

Christy Falcons of Nevada. Sick and tired of her ex-husband. Real pain in the ass. So she did what all frustrated ex-wives do. She goes on the dark web to hire a hitman. And she finds the BASA Mafia website. And she immediately is recontacted by someone on the other end. They're playing, let's make a deal.

she sends them $5,000 in Bitcoin for the hit. Okay, okay. And it gives them the address of the ex-husband in Chico, California. I'm hoping that the five was just a down payment. There's more to come once she gets insurance. I always hate it when they're like, it's like, here's $3,000 and some jewelry. It's like, what? Who's doing this?

Who's working for this? Well, you get what you pay for, right? Yeah, as we're about to see. she did offer an extra $4,000 on the back end if the hit could be expedited and she told the killer that she didn't care if his new girlfriend

was killed in the process. You throw her in for free. So Christine and the hit man go back and forth planning the murder in great detail. How do you want to do it? You want it this way? You want it that way. Christy said she wanted to make it look like a mugging. And so there was a kind of a reasonable reason why

he was getting mugged and the police would just write it off as another mugging. and she still had a large life insurance policy on the guy. So there's a payday for her also. It's not just revenge for Christy. Okay. Do we know how much? The life insurance payout?

I don't. I don't. But it must have been enough for this to be worth her time. But she may have done it for free. She doesn't like the guy. There's a problem here. Okay. She has a trouble in paradise.

She's holding resentment. Yeah. That's the problem. Exactly. That'll kill you. It'll turn your hair gray. It'll make it less desirable, not more desirable. So bad news.

for Christy. The BASA Mafia website is fake, and it's run by a government informant who does work for the Homeland Security Illicit Digital Economy Task Force. I'm going to work on that name. So he gets this, he hears about this. He's been talking to her. He calls the FBI and says, hey. Well, no, I mean, again, this is not an FBI case. This is a Homeland Security case. They get angry when the FBI takes credit for their work. This is the HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, Digital, what do we, illicit digital economy task force, really rolls off the tongue. Yeah, so he calls, he calls them and says, I got one.

Well, he's an informant. That's his job, right? This is what he does. He's put up this website to lure people in. Okay. How much money do these guys get? The informants? Yeah, like, come on.

I used to pay my guys. I paid my guys quite a bit. But I was always very generous. I know other agents don't pay their informants anything. Is it up for, up to the agent on what to give them? Kind of. Well, it's a, yeah, some combination of up to the agent. and what the agent supervisor is going to kind of allow what the budget is, right?

Like something like this is probably worth more than them identifying some like Nigerian scam or something like that. Right. But basically the... You're not going to tell me how much, though. You think you got a couple grand? How much? How much? 10 grand?

Oh, you're asking. Yeah, I think this guy probably gets 10 grand per target. 10 grand per successful prosecution, right? Makes me want to set something. The informant also needs to testify, right? That's part of the deal. Like, they want witnesses, not the... I'm ready.

Okay, all right. Let's do this. Hey, you got Colby here. Colby's a web genius. He can put up a Matthew Mafia website. You already have the credentials. So are there rules? Like, you can't advertise.

They have to come to you? Well, I think that's, I mean, obviously you can't entrap somebody, but I don't think putting up a website on the dark web is necessarily entrapping. Yeah, that's not advert. I meant advertisement like you're going out looking for people. Like, hey, if you know, anybody's got a problem. It's a fine line. It's a fine line.

I think my guess is that they've road tested this. and that the website's cool. Like you put a website up there and just wait for the suckers to come in. So filed a criminal complaint against Christy. She got busted. Ex-boyfriend, fine. He's still living quite largely.

Matt Cox? What? How much time you give Christy? You got hacked nine months ago. So why are you just hearing about it now? That email about a data breach? It's way too late. The bad guys already have a head start.

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Matt Cox? What? How much time you give Christy? You know, I don't know. To me, I'd have to see the reaction because you know what they do. Here's what she looked like. That was a reaction. They have the ex-boyfriend lay down.

They pour some ketchup on them. They take some photos. And then they send the photo. I'm sorry, they take some photos. Then they have the cop show up with the photo. And he goes and says, I have some bad news for you. And they show her the photo. That's the way we used to do it at FBI Chicago.

Right? For sure. Yeah. I'd have to see what her reaction was, really, because that makes it much worse. If she does a full-blown... Let's say she jumped up like a leprechaun and clicked her heels. What is that? Like, she was happy.

Yeah, of course. She got what she paid for. How much time you're going to give her, Matt Cox? I don't know. And she threw in the girlfriend, too. Yeah. Extra. More like, hey, if the girlfriend gets caught in the crossfire, no harm, no foul.

It wasn't like kill the girlfriend. Right. If she is, if she's home, like don't feel you need to come back. The extra $4,000 was for expediting it. She didn't want to wait around. Yeah.

She wanted priority shipping. How much time you give her, Matt? I feel like because it didn't happen. Uh-huh. And for some reason, not that she didn't want it to, I don't know,

I feel like. No criminal history, right? None? This is her first rodeo. First time she got caught. Yeah. Um, I mean, her ex-boyfriends turned around to tell their tales, at least.

Between, I'd say, 15, 15 years. 15 years? Yeah. You're a hanging judge. Really? I was going to say between 10 and 15. She got five. Five?

That's it? Mm-hmm. Yeah, five years. And this was federal? Yeah. Yeah. That's not right. All right.

Okay. You want it to be more? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Because I feel like I'm on the other end of it. I'm on the other end of them. I feel like I'm on the other end. of that argument.

All right, let's go on to our second story. Okay. 52-year-old Stacey League walks into the Comerica Bank in Irving, Texas. I'd like to see the manager. Manager comes out. She says, this is a bank robbery.

Give me your money. So the bank manager fills a courier bag. Stacey pulls out a 9-millimeter pistol, points it at the bank manager and says, you're coming with me. I need a hostage. Oh, my God. She's up to like 15 to 25, 20 years.

The manager is freaked out, but he's got a gun pointed at him. He starts walking outside. She's marching him. And they kind of get to her car. And he is like, F this noise. He takes his chances, turns 90 degrees, and runs to the McDonald's next door. She does not shoot him in the back. Good for her.

Good for her. This goes toward her potential sentencing later when I ask you. So she drives away with the cash and the pistol. She's making her getaway. Stacey feels terrible about what she's done. She feels awful about it. She drives past a firehouse. She pulls into the firehouse and with the gun and the bag of money and says,

Fireman, I just robbed a bank. I feel terrible. I'd like to turn myself in to the fireman. Fireman call the cops. I feel like this is a I feel like this is a theme to a porno like

Right Exactly Bum chika bough they come Four four shirtless firemen

come down the pole Right So she feels terrible She turns herself in I would ask What would you give her But you need to know one other set of facts

Okay She'd done this before Okay My God Stacey's a frequent flyer Stacey back in 2019 robbed the same Comerica bank

that time with a rifle got guilty and turned herself into the local police department she has some she has mental problems you think so man

you think so wow I'm gonna say how much time are you gonna give her well you know we have a tick talk about this I was gonna say she she moves the guy she told him to come what that's the big the guns are what all of these are problems

clearly, but every one of them's an enhancement. She moved the guy under threat. Yeah, almost like kidnapping. That is kidnapping. Okay. I'd say a minimum. If it was a guy, I would say 20 to 25 years.

If he pled guilty. Right. Stacey pleads guilty, obviously. Yeah, but she's a woman. And I'm going to go out of my way here and say, women get much lighter sentences than men do. so bitter we're out to see we're trying to bring the women

demographic to the table here and she's a felon in possession of a firearm right she got problems she's crossed the board she's got problems on top of problems it's just 25 years minimum you think 25 is what she got yeah no okay okay so I know that you would give her 25

I need to calm down I need to calm down what do you think she actually got 10 did she get 10 is that your guess final answer Matt Cusses deserves 25 I bet she got 10 because she's probably a cutie or she cried I mean You saw the photo

Yeah I mean Any port in a storm But But not my time Okay Not my time 13 years

13 years Yeah That is such bullshit Here's the question Do you think she's one of these people Who just got like In love with the idea of institutionalized

Being you institutionalized Like she wanted Like How long had she been out? Well I mean we could do some math So in She got three years for that first robbery in 2019.

And so that puts her at 2020. I think she hadn't been out that long because the story happened in like 2022, 2022, 23. So she's still locked up. Oh, yeah. Today she's still locked up. But if anybody wants to write Christy a letter,

will find an inmate be it out there. You can meet the girls online and form a relationship with them. You can go to BOP.gov and find out where they're at and write them a letter. Stacey League. She just needs some,

she needs some commentary money. She needs a guy. Yeah. That's what to set her straight. That's the problem is she didn't have a guy to say, hey, what you do? Bad idea? Yeah. Do you know people, though, who kind of like kept going back to prison on purpose because that's all they knew and that's where they made themselves at home?

Absolutely. My buddy, Zach and I talk about a guy. Oh, gosh. Palmer. His name was Paul. I can never remember his name either by, because I've said that had this conversation. I think I've told this story twice. Okay.

And I typically can't remember his name. Name was Palmer, though. Palmer, white guy. I don't know why that means anything, but I'm going to say it. It is good. You know, when you say the race, it does good for TikToks. I knew this guy, white guy. I knew this guy.

Because people in the comment section hate me. They go bananas. What you have that matter? What are you saying that? Oh, trust me. When I told that story about the Indian guy who beat off on the plane, we'll buckle in. So, so Palmer, thin white guy, and he literally, he had robbed a bank. Okay.

With a note. I think with a note. spent went out and met a couple girls got a couple girls blew the money over the course of three days and then turn himself in okay goes to jail for i want to say three three years four years he gets out gets the job um can't make it just just can't pay his bills can't do it and he decides to go ahead and rob another bank second time i want to say he got six or seven years uh got out went to halfway house, tried desperately to make a living, couldn't do it. And which is what's so funny is Palmer was a smart guy, smart, clean cut, white guy, spoke well, educated, could not function.

He just could never, specifically, he told Zach and I this, where I was like, what are you doing, bro? Like, what are you doing? And he said, I have never been able to. get a job that pays my bills he is and I'm talking about I live in in like boarding houses I take the bus I have no bills he's I've never been able to get a job that has paid me well enough to actually take care of myself and you know it is weird it's just odd right so and and I'll never forget this too one time I've told this story before Palmer was an interesting guy one time he decided he wanted to escape okay and this was I think the first two were like state prison bits

Right? Like he'd rob like a credit union or something. So he didn't get federal. He ended up, he put, he wanted to get out of the prison. He put like three layers of sweatpants and clothes on, three or four layers, climbed through the barbed wire. Right. Over two fences. Allowing it to rip him up, but just ripping the clothing up.

Right. And he said, by the time he was done, he said, I'm literally, I had half a shirt left. And he was in, like, his boxer shorts. Because that's how many, that's how bad it had shredded. The razor wire, just taken in apart. Right. Got down. He said, got out, realized I'm standing outside the fence. I'm in my underwear. There's no way I'm getting out of here. There's no way I'm getting to the street. I'm not, I don't have enough clothes left. Like, this is this whole thing's gone wrong. Sat there for a little bit. He said, I'm looking up at the tower, waiting for the truck to drive around that drives around the prison, waiting, waiting, nothing happening. Finally, he says, he goes up to the tower and he bangs on the door of the tower.

and the guy in garden the tower you know they're tilted the windows are tilted out slides the window out looks down and he's standing up he's like hey and the guy gets on the phone and hears him say I got a naked inmate down there you know trying to get in outside the fence and then it was like what

they come get him and grab him I don't know how much time he got for that but that's literally kind of things that he did he didn't even try to run for the horizon no he didn't do it no he's just you know like I said he was a he was a nice guy yeah I don't remember him as being stupid, but I also don't, he was also kind of an idiot.

Perhaps there was some poor judgment. Yeah, there was some, I think there was something, some mental illness there. But what happens is, goes, gets out, gets out, gets another job, can't do it, goes in, robs the bank again. This time I want to say he got, same thing, I want to say he got around nine years, under 10, and that's when I met him at Coleman at the, at the medium, at Coleman, at the media makes we think he did use a gun so he was at the medium this was the third time and you know he just so so yeah there was that guy and the other one other guy real quick quick is it was an older guy named um oh gosh

what was his name because there was two of them oh gosh it was like I want to say this is his name I I like one of the guy's name was bill and one was Billy but that wasn't their name but it was that kind of a name, right, like Bill, Billy. Anyway, Bill was the older guy, because his roommate was named Billy, and that's not their name. Oh, that makes me mad. So anyway, Bill was an older guy, probably in his, probably close to 70 by the time I met him. He had robbed a bank in the 80s when federal prison was nice. It was club fed. Like, you got, you went to, practice your golf swing. Exactly. You went to the chow line. It's like, yeah, I'll take the chicken and give me a piece of that steak, too.

Like, it was like they fed you really well. Like, the guards were polite to you. The guards used to wear jackets. Like they had collared. Like, they looked like they were businessmen. You know, like, that's how they looked. They didn't have guards uniforms. Right.

All inmates were called by their first names. They were like, Mr. So-and-so. They had a whole thing about trying to be respectful to the people that were in federal prison because they thought that would help acclimate them to be professional people when they got out. Whatever. Didn't work. So he went there. He was taken care of very well after the bank robbery, got out, went back into society,

started a painting company, and he painted for the next 30 years. Now he was 66, 67 years old, divorced, no kids, has two sisters, and he needed a heart transplant. The problem was no insurance. and he's like, I could have the heart transplant, or not transplant, but like surgery. He's, and his sisters were too old to take care of him. They're in their late 70s. He's like, I have nobody to take care of me. I cannot afford the surgery.

He goes in, he robs a bank. So the Bureau of Prisons would do the surgery on him and he would have the health care he deserves in his mind? Turned himself in. He said, hung out for two or three days with the money. He said, stole like seven grand, six grand, three grand. It was nothing, whatever the amount was. Yeah.

And then turned himself in. He's a little old man. He's in his late 60s, robbing him back. I made that money. And, yeah, he went there. He said, they gave me the surgery. They took care of me the whole time. He said, this is not what I thought I was coming back to, by the way.

He's like, I thought, he said, I didn't know this was the, if I had known prison was going to be like this, he's like, I'm remembering it back from the 80s. Working on his tennis game. Exactly. He's like, oh, this sucks. He said, I probably would just let myself die. Anyway, and that was it. And he got, he still got a ton of time.

And even though they explained it to the judge, the judge were like, yeah, he still got like six or, even though I don't think the criminal history affected him, he still got like six or seven, because I think he did have a gun. So those are the two times where I know guys that were just committing crimes, specifically bank robberies,

because there are many other guys that do this. They'll get out, sell drugs, use drugs, get caught. Like, they're reckless. They don't care. They know that prisons are perfectly okay staying in prison. And I would have guys that got out of prison that used to say, well, if I ever really can't take care of myself, I mean, I do know the Bureau of Prisons will take care of me.

So I'll just go commit a crime. I'll go rob a bank or do something nonviolent and I'll go back and don't take it. What's wrong with this picture? Yeah. Yeah, my very first arrest is a brand new FBI agent in 1995 was a guy. I wasn't there. I mean, I wasn't at the scene of the crime. But the dude walks into a bank, little guy looks exactly like Emmanuel Webster.

Emmanuel Lewis, the guy who played Webster. Oh, yeah. Like a manchild. Yeah, yeah. walks in, hands a bank robbery note, the teller flips some kind of alarm or makes eye contact with a security guard, shaky old guy in his 70s,

comes up behind him with a gun, puts the gun in the back of his head, and says, you're under arrest, and the bank robber puts his hands up, cops come, take him away, hand him off to the FBI, hands him to me. And the dude would not talk at all. Like, would not answer questions,

wouldn't give us his name. So we run as Prince, find out who the heck he is, case he's got no idea on him. It turns out he had gotten out of federal prison that day for bank robbery. And I should have noticed this, but I was a new agent, and I wasn't keen to it. He was wearing the blue Bureau of Prison sneakers on his feet, the canvas sneaker that that prisoner's always worn.

So literally just marched him right back to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. And, you know, he ended up getting eight years or whatever. But it was clear that he didn't want to go. out. He had nothing for, there was nothing for him on the streets. Yeah. No, I, I, I get that. I do have, I have two more quick stories. Just real quick. That's your show, dude. Comical, by the way. There was a guy when I was at the medium. When I first got there, he had been there for a few months. So I, it was in my unit, so I saw him. And really remember him because he was a white guy. And he was actually, like, you could talk to him, right? Like, most of these guys are maybe out of 1,800 to 2,000 inmates in

the medium. Well, no, I think it was more like 1,600 in the medium. there's maybe 30 white guys, 50 white guys, and almost all of them are there for meth. Like they're all missing their teeth. Like you can't have a conversation with them. One of my favorite phrases

I ever heard as I was walking by a conversation with two guys, two of the white guys, I was just walked by and caught this glimpse of a conversation. And then one guy goes, I'm telling you, guys are a fucking genius,

fucking genius, best meth I ever had. I was just like, I can't keep all at it. Chemist. Yeah. Breaking bad. But this was a guy who was like kind of like a biker guy, right?

Like he had a goatee and stuff and you know, but tall guy like six four or something like, you know, so really kind of stuck out. But I talked to him a couple times. Nice guy. Got out, got out, went to the halfway house. And he was telling him, it was like, what are you going to do? He's like, man, I'm only interested in doing three things. He said, I want to.

He wanted to. What were they? One was get a piece of ass, right? Naturally. Two was he wanted to, and these may not even, these say, I feel like I'm making it all, I remember all three. One was get a piece of ass. One was go to like the dog track and one was have like a steak dinner. Okay.

So. Three lofty goals. Yeah. That's all he wanted. That's all he cared about getting out. And keep in mind, this guy had been locked up for like 25 years. And then prior to that, he'd been out for a few years and was locked up like five years before that. Like, his whole adult life from the age of like 16 to 18, he'd 95% of the time he'd been in prison.

A lot of people like that. Right. So he got out. He comes back. I'd say a year later, he comes back. Same prison. Yeah, same prison. Yeah, came back in.

Like, I want to say, he might have even been back in my unit. Like, I mean, literally, it was like, saw him one day. And I think people, people had mentioned, by the way, you know, so and so he got a, like, I had heard he got arrested. So he comes back and I see him, I'm like, hey, what's going on? how's it going? And he's like, yeah, what's going on? And there was a couple other guys there.

And so they all kind of go up to him and we're all kind of talking to him. I'm really kind of standing there. And one of the guys goes, bro, so what happened? He said, yeah, he goes, he robbed the bank. And something, the same type of thing, he had like the shoes on or whatever. It was like the, he had only been in there for like a week. Yeah. And he robbed the bank and practically like went, robbed the bank, hung out for the day, went right back to the thing.

And blew his, like, he wasn't supposed to leave. Like, a whole thing is bad. Like, you weren't supposed to leave. You left because you can walk right out. Like, we were already looking for you. He went, robbed the bank, and then went, screwed around for the day, came back. And they're like, what are you doing? Like, we're going to call the police.

Like, you're violated. You can't just leave. He's like, call them. They called the, called him. But by that point, within a day or two, after they grab him, they realized he's the one that robbed the bank. And one of these guys goes, so did you ever get to do the three things that you wanted to do?

he goes well i did two of the three and he went he said you know two out of three that's not bad man that's not bad and i you know which which was he had a steak dinner he went to like the dog he didn't find a woman he didn't find a woman who was down for the guy ran out of prison no and uh so that was that was one the other one was my old roommate his name was stew stew had an 80 IQ could not read Okay. I'm going to say it again. I'm sorry to say this, black guy. But, and they called him Dr. Feel Good.

Uh-oh. He would give guys massages. That's what his hustle was. All right. You have to be. I mean, these massages, a good massage, you got to be strong. He worked out all the time. And he would, you know, this is one of these guys that he would make potions, right? Like, you're sick.

Oh, I got some for you. And then he'd go heat up some water and they would pour like, like he put like um they they they yeah they make like um what was it uh like they take vix that you rub under your nose you don't you don't you don't you're not supposed to be ingesting right yeah he would put it in there and they heat it up so much you don't really know it's necessarily in there and and then he put something at whatever coffee or whatever else you think they thought was and you guys would drink it look what are you doing you're drinking a petroleum product what are you doing and he would I'm like absolutely not I'm not drinking that

I'm not that sick. That's funny. So anyway, Stu had been in and out of prison, his whole, like, Stu's this one. You've heard me say this. He'd been shot three times twice by himself. Two of the three. That's an ADIQ.

Yeah. He would go to rob drug dealers, right? And he'd grab the bag, and he'd have the gun and like, and he'd go to grab him. And if they ate back, he pulled the trigger. He shot himself once here, once here. Another time he shot himself, I think once was in the forearm, once was in the hand.

And another time, he got shot because he kept robbing drug dealers over and over. And everybody knew him at that point. Yeah. So these guys would see him coming down the alley. They just pull their guns out and start shooting. He said, one time he turned around and round, he got shot in the back of the leg. He could show you all of them. Like, this is one.

You'd see the scar. The other one, and the other one, like he had the bullet still in his leg. Anyway, Stu goes to halfway house, gets there. He's there a weeker. This is after he's been in prison, out of prison, in prison. And Stu also, by the way, told us stories about when they would, back in Atlanta, when it was a pin, it was super violent back in the 80s and 90s, where they would take, they would get a shank and they would duct tape the shank, and they duct tape it around their hands. So it couldn't fall out of their hands. So it couldn't slip out.

He said, because, you know, that blood, blood is slippery, it's very slippery. It's not like, okay. I mean, terrified talking to two. Okay. So, so. Can I tell you about my check kiting scheme? Yeah. So exactly. I know what you're saying. It's the same thing in mortgages. Yeah. So he,

so he gets to the halfway house. He's there for a week. A couple of the other inmates convince him, you know, where you messed up last time, dude, you didn't rob a bank. You rob the bank. And they're like, why don't let's go rob a bank. And he's like, they're like, well, I got a car. We'll take the car. We'll pull up. You go in the bank, get it. We'll be ready. Jump in. I know a perfect. They're like, yeah, yeah, he's like, yeah, let's do it, let's do it. So they takes a few days, they get the car. I would think everyone's on their best behavior at a halfway house, no? You would think.

And so they get, get Stu, they go to the bank. And of course, these guys have set Stu up, obviously. So they've already called their FBI agent and said, so listen, there's this guy in the halfway house. He's talking about robbing a bank. And they look into him, they're like, oh, this guy, he's spent his whole life in prison. he's shooting people. He even shot three times himself. Twice by you.

I don't feel like two of those count, but this is a violent guy. This guy's in and out all the time. And they're like, yeah, this is the bank we're going to bring him to. He says we want us to pull up in the car. He's going to run it and rob it.

And so they close the bank down. They're waiting for him. So they pull up, the door opens. He runs in the bank. They're get on the ground. He gets on the ground. Straight back to Coleman, 25 years. And by the way, he's out now again.

Oh, really? This guy out of being, he's probably. 65 or 70 years old he has probably spent over 50 years in prison have him on the show he would be

he listen he maybe don't let him use the bathroom unsupervised he'd be he would he's terrifying like he's one of these guys he's like hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey cocks and he's not just me by the way he'd do this to anybody

wasn't just me but he'd be hey hey you look you're bad on you no why come in here, lay down, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me rub that, that, all that tension. I can see that you got tension and let me rub that out of you. No, Stu, I'm good.

You know, they call me Dr. Feel Good. I know they do, Stu, and I know you'd love to get your hands on. Was he gay for the stay? I don't know what you'd call it for him. Like, I'm so, I was so terrified of this guy. And it was so funny is how many guys, you'd walk by the cell and you'd look, in because literally stew was my celly for all of it took about two or three weeks for me to get out of the cell because because my counselor wasn't he was like on vacation so I couldn't get my

cell moved but I I tell you I slept on my back the whole time and you know Stu's like you want to bottom up nope I'm good up here I'm you know up top safer I'm saying I don't need to be laying down sleeping um let me say this way you ever hear the uh there's nothing more, was it, nothing more romantic than, um, than kissing someone while they're, uh, you know, or waking up and feeling someone kiss you while you're asleep, you know, and they say, unless you're in prison, whenever I hear that TikTok or that little thing, my first thought is my three weeks in the cell was two. I'm glad he brought up romance. I have two romance stories for you. Okay. Okay. First one,

34-year-old Sarah Beth Clint Daniel of Maryland. Sarah Beth. Lonely white power lady looking for love. White power? What'd you say? Like a white supremacist. Oh, okay. I was going to say. I missed that. Yeah, no. She's a white supremacist. But that's a turnoff to some dudes. Some dudes aren't into it. So she goes online, but she finds a guy. Orlando, Florida,

not far from here. A need. Nazi group called Atomwaffean, run by 28-year-old Brandon Russell, and they become online text buddies. It's a little romantic. It does sound romantic. She's in Maryland. He's in Orlando, so, you know. We got to get her over here. Not insurmountable. But in their text messages, as they're talking, they begin to plot away for Sarah Beth to shut down the electrical grid in Baltimore, Maryland, a predominantly black city. The idea is that... I feel like I've had this whole conversation myself. The idea is that if they could plunge Baltimore

into darkness, it would make the black people of Baltimore begin rioting, which would then spark the race war that they've been waiting for. That's the plan. This is the Turner Diaries. It's the plan. Not saying it's a good plan. Not saying I approve of this plan, but I'm saying it was the plan.

But their planning was no joke. They actually take the time to get schematics of the electrical substations, kind of surrounding Baltimore, taking a look at what the vulnerabilities are. and the idea was that Sarah Beth was going to start shooting at them with high power rifles to disable the infrastructure and go from one substation to the next until Baltimore was plunged into darkness.

And what's the guy's name? Brandon Russell. What's Brandon do? He's managing, was he directing from Orlando? From afar. But what Brandon does, Brandon loops in one of his trusted Adam Woffin lieutenants, who happened to also be in Maryland,

to purchase the ammo and the rifle for Sarah Beth because she was a felon and couldn't buy a gun for herself. Oh, wow. Okay. And so he assigned the same lieutenant to be her driver for the attack. Bad news for Sarah Beth. That lieutenant? What? FBI informants.

Right, yeah. FBI informant. FBI knew of Adam Woffin, knew that there may be some problems with this group and made sure they had a trusted informant there as, Brandon Russell's right-hand ma'am. Oh, Brandon. Oh, Brandon. Oh, Sarah Beth. And so... This could have been a lifetime movie.

So the source notifies the FBI about the plot, of course, and the agents begin monitoring all the conversations and the activity and the planning, and they arrest Brandon and Sarah Beth before they could actually, like, spark this race war that they had planned. So Sarah Beth pleads guilty to a conspiracy charge as well... Do they wait for her to pull, you got to, do they wait for her to pull up in front of a substation with the, with the weapons or, like, how they grab it? They just knock on her door. My understanding is that they let it go far enough to get the evidence they needed, but not so far that there was ever a gun placed in her hands. Okay.

Right. That's how I would have done. That's probably an issue. Well, Danes could go horribly sideways when she started giving people like live rifles to go start to race war. All right. So you give her a bunch of blanks. Could you imagine you give her a bunch of blanks, you know? And then she, you wait for her to get out there.

These things are tough. So Brandon just had his trial. Okay. Sarah Beth did not testify against him. Get out of here. She's a gangster, huh? True love, dude. True love.

It's so serious. Okay. True love. Now, Sarah Beth pleads guilty herself. And to a conspiracy charge as well as being a felon in possession of a firearm. Loverboy is awaiting sentencing right now. I have no idea what's going to become a him. probably nothing good.

How much he gives Sarah Beth, Matt Cox? We don't know, but Sarah, she hasn't gotten sentence, you said. No, Sarah Beth has been sentenced. Oh, really? Yeah, because she didn't, she wasn't testifying, so she's not waiting for her deal. Convicted felon. I will say that she, at her, at her sentencing, she told the judge, listen, I'm still a Nazi, but I will never, ever act upon it again.

He's learning a lesson. Yeah. It's as much to step in the right direction, Judge. It's all we can ask for, Sarah. We can't control what's in our heart. um oh my god what does sarah look like um i'm a big believer in a downward i give her a four i'm a big believer in a downward departure if they're an eight or above that should be like no no she's she's never seen an eight never seen an eight um i mean not terrible i mean you've done

worse, but not, not terrible, man, gosh. I mean, not terrible. I mean, we could look up, you know, Colby can splice photos in. This is all publicly available information. Kind of mousy. Oh, we got to see Sarah. Let's see Sarah. Come on.

Sarah Beth Glenn Daniel, C-L-E-N-D-A-N-I-E-L. Never again act on. How much time did she get? Okay, let's what I'm asking. I know, let me think about that. Answer the question, how much time do you get Sarah? She's got to get 10 years at least. Ten?

And I'm going down. If she was a man, she's going. getting 15 to 20 years you think she gets 10 you give her 10 yeah she and only because she's a she gives you 15 to 20 what she get stop don't tell me she's in love and the judge feels bad for 18 years oh 18 years that's reasonable reasonable she's a convicted felon with felon with a firearm with a firearm she's trying to plot a race war yeah extensive frowned on frowned on even in today's society extensive planning yeah right yeah that's reasonable No doubt she would have gone through with it.

It's not like, hey, no, at the last minute, she might have changed her mind. No, no. We got the schematics down. We got everything. We got the guns. We got that. All right.

Let's talk about another romantic story. Okay. I think you can have some insights into this one, some real insights. This is a story of love. Okay. It's a romantic story. This one I actually did investigate.

Okay. So, by way of background, and we don't need to get into the whole background. Abu Muhammad was there during the Assyrian, from Syria. Not that it matters. Well, I mean, the name's Abu Mohammed.

He's not from Dublin. He was an Afghan Mujahideen in the original Afghanistan war against the Soviet Union, was tight with Osama bin Laden, was there during the founding of al-Qaeda, came to the U.S., opened a Islamic charity that was actually funneling money

to terrorist groups overseas. After the 1911 attacks, I was in charge, I was on a team of people who investigated him and locked him up. So while he pleads guilty, he's awaiting sentencing, but he's cooperating with us. He's meeting with us.

During the course of his cooperation... Wait a minute, wait, wait, hold on, wait. He was funneling money. He had a charity that was funneling money to... Al-Qaeda and other groups. So you guys catch him doing that. Yeah. Okay, then he cooperates.

Right. He pleads guilty and he's cooperating. But here's where the story begins with the lady. Okay. Because this is ladies' night. We're doing girls gone wild. Stay focused. While he's during the course of his cooperation, which wasn't all that great, honestly.

You feel like he could have done more? He was underperforming as a cooperator. How is it the Metropolitan Correction Center, the federal jail in Chicago? Let me give you the architecture of this. It's a 28-story high-rise in the downtown business district of Chicago. It's an MCC. It's 28 stories. And you can serve up to 18 months there of your sentence,

but mostly it's a jail awaiting people as they're coming and going to court. It's like a couple blocks away from the courthouse. Okay. On the roof of the MCC, again, a giant, huge building is an exercise yard on the roof itself, on the 28th floor, which has like chicken wire above it

so no one can do like a helicopter escape. Right. Right. But there's lots of nooks and crannies, can run. I don't know if there's weights or how that works, and probably not. But, you know, I never spent any time there. Oddly enough, the FBI in Chicago used to have their parking

lot there at the MCC, and so the prisoners could look out from their windows at the exercise yard and see the FBI agents who parked on the roof of the parking lot, which is only like four or five stories. And oftentimes we would park their cars when we'd seize their cars right there, and they would see the FBI just like getting in these cars

and driving around. And you'd hear them yelling from up top. That's my car. Right. Right. So, but there was an interesting architectural phenomenon that I want to know if you've heard of this, where at the MCC, it was boy floor, girl floor, boy floor, girl floor. So obviously men and women weren't housed together, but there was a lot of women prisoners because it was also an immigration jail while you're awaiting your deportation. And so at this prison, you could get into your hands and needs at the toilet and scoop the water out of the toilet and put your head in the toilet, and put your head in the toilet, and yell, can you hear me? And then a woman who was doing the same thing on the next floor. It's like, yes, I hear you. And you could carry on a phone conversation through the pipes with a romantic woman looking for hot, hot prison action.

This is very common. Listen, I can tell you right now. You've heard of this. An ACDC, Atlanta City Detention Center, it's the same setup. There were guys that would, literally they're hugging. the toilet. Yeah. Like they're leaning against the toy,

hugging it, and they're having, they're in there for hours. Yeah. And what was really funny was the guys that would say, what time is it, man? Well, you go,

I don't know, it's like 745. Okay. Remind me at eight, bro. I got a date at eight. And be like, a date. Yeah, yeah,

my girl's going to be talking to me. Like, she's in room such and such. And she'll go to this room and I'm going to this room and we're going to empty out the toilet and we're talking. And they'll go in there for hours and talk. Yeah, for sure. And so that's what's what happened with Abu Muhammad. he had a woman on the next floor.

He had a woman on the next floor. He didn't know, I don't know how much he knew about her, but she was a Thai woman whose name was porn, which is an actual name in Thai. They don't pronounce the R, but we'll call her porn. Okay. And they would have, like, phone sex through the toilets as they're talking to each other.

He never laid eyes on her. She never laid eyes on him, but they were in love with each other, man. They were in love. That's true love. That's what that is. Here's where it gets weird. This is where it gets weird? It gets better.

Okay. Right. So the women at the MCC to pass the time were allowed to crochet. Do you familiar with crocheting? Of course. I've seen a lot of the gangsters in President Crochet. Okay, right. You see a 60-year-old guy with tats all over.

Yeah. Yarn and a big kind of like benign plastic hook. And you can make stuff out of it. So the women at the MCC would crochet underpants. for themselves, wear the underpants, get themselves worked up in the underpants, and make arrangements to hide their crocheted yarn underpants at the exercise yard of the MCC in a certain nook, cranny, or corner. So their toilet boyfriends could then find the gift that they left them, and they could enjoy the aroma and the sensation of, in the connection.

this is horrible this is horrible as if being in prison isn't bad enough these guys have just gone it brought it down to it the heart wants what the heart wants mattie cox i mean don't be so judgy none of this was a problem until abu mohammed asked her to leave one of the crochet hooks up there and uh and she did and then he is found kind of recovering and gets caught recovering the crochet hook the theory we had at the time is that he was going to try to sharpen the crochet hook and maybe hurt somebody with it to mount an escape. We never really found out. Or maybe just wanted a shank. These guys will make shanks out of anything. Right. So, you know, we had to be a good one. We interviewed him. He didn't

want to talk about it. I interviewed porn, the, uh, the, the, the, the Thai lady who was awaiting deportation. And, uh, and it was, uh, and it was, uh, star cross lovers. Um, neither of them really got punished. She was on our way out to Thailand, uh, anyway. And he was on, in his way to a long, stint in federal prison for material supportive terrorism and fraud charges and stuff like that. So anyway, but I'm just surprised that you had heard about this phenomenon. I was fascinated by this. Again, you know, I'm a guy, you know, I'm boring, right? I don't have any toilet girlfriends.

Sure, this is fascinating maybe, but not exciting or anything. Not exciting. It's just fascinating to me. That, to me, it says something about the human condition that you're willing to debase yourself so much to like scoop the toilet the water out of a toilet so you could just have a connection with a woman of the opposite sex oh my god yeah they they'll make all kinds of stuff into it they'll make fires in the to you know they're they're they're made well in there they're probably I don't know if they have the stainless steel ones but and in Coleman they have the porcelainless steel ones

but some of these if you have the stainless steel ones these guys will start like entire fires they'll heat stuff up they'll i mean it's a hibachi yeah it's it's it's amazing they'll um they they would steal oil or grease or whatever you do i don't even know how it works but they'd steal out of the kitchen little bits and pieces at a time and they would take the trash cans you were here this they would fill up the trash can with oil and they would take a um they call it a stinger you know a stinger you plug it in the wall and it's it's two pieces of metal with an piece of metal in between it, and if you put it in water, it boils your water. So they would take that and they'd boil the oil, and then they would deep fry, like they'd take

wraps, like they'd take the, what are those, those, I call them wraps, I don't know what you call them. A burrito? Like a burrito wrap. Yeah, that's what I would call them. Yeah, tortilla, yeah. Yeah, tortilla, thank you. Tortilla.

And then they would put meat in it, and they'd roll it up and they deep fry it, and then they'd wrap that up and they would make, these guys would make on like a Friday night, they'd make like a hundred, two hundred. Yeah, and then they, you'd have order. You come, hey, man, can I get to them? Bro, if you're not on the list, man, Cox, you know, you're not on the list. Come on the list, come on, man, you got, give me one of them. You got a hundred of them up there.

You're arguing like that they, but, man, I've got $3 right now, $3 right now, bro, right? You got $3 in stamps on you? Yes, $3. All right, give me the three. But they were amazing. Like, it was like free world food. I think it's like romance. People have that much of a desire for deep fried food.

Just like they have that desire for human contact with a female. You would be shocked at what these guys come up with in there. Here's my question. Where are the guards during all this? There's 150 inmates, 180 inmates. The guards, they just want to sit in their office and play on their phone. They don't want, you know, as long as you guys aren't stabbing each other, like, leave me alone. Have all the phone sex in the toilet as you want.

Yeah, that's fine. Deep fire churros in the toilet all you want. Clean up after yourself. And then they know that they have to, they walk the perimeter. say once an hour. Well, guys are looking out. Even if the guards were diligent, you're not going to catch me.

There's 180 guys watching you while you're watching us. As soon as you walk out of your office, they're going to get. Everybody just straightens up. Hey, the guard's coming. Give me five minutes. You just stand there. Guard walks by you.

Stop. He walks by. Hey, baby, what's going on? Let me put you on hold. All right, let's do another one. Matt Cox. What's an affinity fraud? And then infinity fraud, affinity.

Affinity fraud is when you take advantage of, I think of it as your family members or your close friends. That's what I think of it as. Yeah. I mean, it's people, the affinity group can be anything. And so a lot of times it's a church, you know, Mormons ripping off Mormons, Baptist ripping up Baptists, ripping up Baptists. People you're in your kind of, you know, close to. And the reason affinity frauds work is because there's a implied sense of trust. with people in your social circle, right?

That the idea that a Mormon ripping off other Mormons is just so unthinkable to Mormons that their guard gets down. Like, you know, there's no way this guy would rip me off. He's in my CrossFit gym. Yeah, right, right. Suzanne Angway of Hawaii, this was my case. She ran an investment company called Money Sense.

And you knew it was legit because the S and cents was a dollar sign. Right. So it's clear that she knew a lot about finance. She was a pop Warner. football mom. You know, Pop Warner football? It's kind of a West Coast thing.

It's peewee football. I mean, I don't know who Pop Warner was. I imagine he was some historical coach of youth and all that. But the Pop Warner football, you know, the 85-pound team is from Venice, California, is going to play the 85-pound team from, you know, Irvine, California and all that. But in Hawaii, they had Pop Warner football. And, you know, and that would be kind of a feeder system for the high schools, and then a feeder system, and then the high schools are feeder systems for University of Hawaii.

That's the way that kind of the football thing. But she began offering other football parents the opportunity to invest in her real estate flipping business, promising them returns of 13% to 30% per year. Seems excessive. But again, she's a Peele's football. She's a pop Warner football mom just like me. She brings the popsicles for them to eat after the games and stuff like that. She's driving a Mercedes. Her kid was a football prodigy.

She's clearly making money. She's doing well. $800,000. $800,000 they gave her. You know what she invested in? Who gave her $800,000? The other football parents. Cumulatively.

Cumulatively. Okay. It's like, how many? Dozen. Okay, so roughly, okay, roughly 80,000 a piece on average. It was a massive case, but this is kind of what I did. I did smaller cases. And you know what she invested it in?

She said she was flipping houses. You know what she actually invested in? She invested it in fuck all. She spent it a hundred. herself, right? Paid down credit cards, bought some stuff, well, you know, increased her lifestyle. Nothing, nothing substantial, nothing to seize on to, but just pissed it away, 800 gram. Did she pay anybody back or start to? No, no, there was, it wasn't even really a successful Ponzi scheme. I don't think anybody got returns. A successful Ponzi scheme? I'm not sure

there's a success. Well, they'll have an end point, but. For a while. Yeah, I don't even know if it was technically a Ponzi scheme because a Ponzi scheme would pay some returns. Yeah, this is just theft. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. So it lands on my desk. You know, I work it up. These cases all work pretty much the same. You talk to all the victims. You know, what did you think you were investing the money in? Like, oh, she said she was flipping houses. Then you look at her bank statements and like what's actually happening. She's spending money. She's spending money like a drunken sailor. And so I go to her house on the west side of Oahu to interrogate her, hoping I'm going to get a confession because I'm real good at that. And I can't even get a audience with her because she has like a fenced in perimeter around her crappy little house with like just crazy mad dogs just like but there's not even a doorbell i couldn't even ring a doorbell i'm like standing there like on the perimeter of her house trying to out yell her dogs suzette suzac come out come out where you are and i just want to talk to her and um and she didn't eventually we heard from

a lawyer that he's representing her she lowered up i never really got an audience with her um she pleads guilty really easily and uh and then to an information yeah is you familiar with an information like information's like an like you don't have you don't take it to the grand jury it's like an indictment without a grand jury all right well she agrees to she agrees to be charged you don't have to indict me you charge me we can just kind of like expedite this process right the problem that I had and um was that she refuses to show up to her own sentencing and so is that that's a tactic yeah well it's what would have happened is it would be time for her sentencing and um she'd delay it and the her attorney would say that

she's really really sick she's really really sick and she's like bedridden she's got some kind of cancer they produce a letter from this right naturopath goofy doctor um not saying there's any he was a goofy doctor independently of that but he was also a transsexual so the doctor was biologically a man but became a woman bless his heart but but but there was just a but he wasn't really a MD he was really a DO, he was just, he was a naturopath and he diagnosed her with cancer and she's like, you know, unlike tea leaves and poy to like, solve the cancer problem. He said, if you get, I have a treatment, it's $800,000. Right, right. And I'll cure you. He's, right, he's boiling water and putting Vicks in it and stuff like that to cure her cancer. Um, but we can't, this is going on forever.

She's too sick to come in for sentencing. I was skeptical. No. No. I was. I was. So I put a surveillance team on her and to basically follow around, take some pictures. Let's see what's going on. She is leading the most robust life you can imagine for a woman who's allegedly on her deathbed. She's shopping. She's like, you know, carrying lumber. She's retarring the roof of her house. And our surveillance team is like, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. She's doing cross fitness. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. She's doing the Scottish games. You throw the phone pole. And so we finally, went to the judge and said, and said, judge, you know, please force the sentencing to happen. And at the next night,

we had a status hearing. And the, and the defense attorney, she's really sick. She can't come. And then we just, like, lay it all out for the judge.

And it's like, she's fine. And then, and then the judge said, you get her ass in here. And she, and she somehow found the courage and the strength to come in.

So $800,000 bucks. Pleads guilty. No criminal history, but kind of ran the judge and made, made a monkey out of the courts. How much time? you give her a Matt Cox.

Matt Cox. What does she look like? Very frail Hawaiian lady, 50 years old, 40 years old. Nothing special. Nowhere, no downward departure there. I'm all about productivity, feeling energized, and staying strong.

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you to qualia for sponsoring today's episode um let's see I want to say 800,000 I don't still it's not a lot of time not a lot and only a dozen victims I mean you're looking at

I think three years not bad not bad 46 months so between three and four yeah you're good you're good at this

and honestly you should probably got an extra 18 months for you're screwing around right I'm saying just for being a jerk about it it's clear that the judge was annoyed

once he learned that he was being played I think the judge was filled with compassion until the surveillance pictures. Did she get the high end of the guideline? Like, was there a range? Yeah, otherwise. I can't remember. I can't remember. It was a while ago.

All right. Let's talk about the Gucci goddess. Yeah. 57-year-old Janet Mello. No. 57. I know. We have photos?

They're out there. They're out there. The Gucci goddess. The Gucci goddess, Janet Mello. She was a financial program manager for the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston. in Texas. This is recent. I've heard this a couple years ago, right?

Is this like a year or so ago? This is less than that. Oh, really? Okay. Less than that. So without telling her employer, she incorporates a fake children's charity and awards herself an Army contract.

The Army contract was for, and tell me if you can figure out what this even means, positive youth development through providing opportunities for military dependent children to engage in intentional learning experiences. Approved. U.S. Army approves this children's charity that has that as their mission and description. I feel like if she hadn't been busted already, Elon Musk would be mentioning. Yeah, yeah.

This should be in the Doge's crosshairs. But again, she's also in a position to kind of approve these grants because she's in the department that does this. Right. Right. And it's a totally fake nonprofit. There's absolutely nothing for children, military dependents. seven-year period, she steals $108 million from you and I, the taxpayer. Wow.

Just let that sink in, $108 million in grants, allegedly for military dependence to have intentional learning experiences. All of it goes into her pocket. I would be happy with the interest from that theft. Yeah. Just the interest. Not a dime of that money goes to the kids. It's all going into her bank accounts.

She spends the money. 31 different homes in Colorado, Maryland, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington. She has problems. One of her places was an eight-bedroom house sitting on 58 acres of land and 55 garage spaces. So let that sink in. 55 garage spaces. So she's just an idiot. She bought 80 motor vehicles, four Duccotties, 16 Harley motorcycles, and two Aston Martins among them.

And the packages were arriving every day from high-end retailers. Coach, Louis Vuitton, the UPS guy is the one who gave her the nickname, The Gucci Goddess, because they were constantly delivering these high-end items to this McMansion that she bought, you know, one of her several McMansions. The Army eventually learns of this fraud. Gee, how they put it together. Well, they loop in the IRS because she was not claiming any of this on her taxes. You really couldn't, right?

I mean, that might raise a red flag. She pleads guilty to tax evasion and mail fraud charges. Metcux? What did she get? What do you give the Gucci goddess? First, I'd like to say, this is what bothers me. You could have taken, she could have taken 10 million of that. Yeah.

Over the course of, what was it, seven, eight years? Yeah, seven-year period. And hired some people to make sandwiches and run a youth camp or something. She could have anything. You could have done. Teach the kids out of dribble a basket. You could have done any silly little thing and spent a fraction of that money and there ain't nothing.

Well, I'm not saying there's nothing they could do. The conflict of interest probably, but other than that, but other than that, we did take the money. We did run this, we were running this camp for these guys. Hundreds of kids went through it. Am I great at the, at, you know, how we spent the money? Do you agree with it? Probably not.

But we have brochures, a website. Like, clearly there is an organization. Did we misappropriate some of the money? like maybe we didn't spend it in the way you thought. Administrative costs, Matt Cox. Yeah, but that's the way it is. Did I pay myself too much of a salary? Maybe.

Yeah. Maybe. I'm not good at this. Yeah. I mean, I need 30 homes. Yeah, you would have some wiggle room there. This is just absolute excessive greed. Now, you the taxpayer got some of the money back through forfeitures.

Right. They're seizing the houses. They're seizing the cars, seizing the purses, and forfeiting those. So some of the restitution is going to get paid. paid back because she was buying hard assets and wasn't just gambling it away. So depending on the market, maybe they get back. Penny's on the dollars. Yeah, I was going to say not even half. 30%. Let's say they get 30, 40 million, 30 million back. Yeah. She's, well, no, man, maybe 50. A lot of real estate, a lot of real estate, maybe 50%. Maybe it increased in value. Maybe we made money.

So 60, 70. It's, it, you're still looking at, this is, this is, there's no only one victim, though. But you get an enhancement because it's the federal government, by the way. I know that because I got that enhancement. Two points it. Um, Matt Cox, you're the sentencing judge. What are you going to give this girl? And what do you think she actually got? No criminal history. No criminal history. She's a choir girl. She's a patriot. Works for the Army. She's still, she's 15 years. Damn, you're good. How much? Fifteen years. No. Yes, nailed it. Really? Full-eye, Matt Cox. You nailed it. I can't, I, yeah, and I can't, I didn't even see where it was. I do see now, I see 15 here, but, yeah, nice, all right, 15 years, I'm getting good at this.

The Gucci god is 15 years, 15 long years coming out into nothing. Oh my gosh, I remember Ron Wilson got 19 and a half years for 57 million in loss. Well, I don't know if ultimately it was 57. That's why I kind of figured, okay, but he also had like over 100 and some odd, 100, 200, 300 victims, too. She didn't have the victims, though. My favorite kind of cases to investigate are embezzlements. I love it when an employee steals money from their employer and I get assigned that case.

As a private investigator now and as an FBI agent there, I would just be so tickled by watching the way that people would steal from their employers. I love those cases. Right. Okay. So, in fact, next time I come, I'd like to do an embezzlement episode where all just the various type of schemes that people do to rip off their employers. By the way, hers wasn't bad, starting the other company.

She was on the right, like, that wasn't bad. Right. So I want to know what you think about this next one. Okay. This is my next embezzler. 65-year-old, Patty Mavrakis, Pennsylvania. She's a branch manager at a credit union. She's on a long weekend, three-day weekend, she goes into the vault, steals $400,000

cash that's in the vault. good amount of the good amount of cash in this credit union you don't have to sell me on her and long holiday weekend the next day let's say that happens

Friday after work next day maybe Saturday maybe Sunday I don't know which day was but three day weekend she goes back into the credit union and she stages

a fire in the vault where the cash was making it look like a loose alarm wire started the blaze and claims that the missing cash burned up in the fire

just burned up not here anymore see those ashes that's where the cash was okay imaginative imaginative right fire marshal local fire guy goes to talk to her he's not getting a good feeling for fatty

he's just not he's just not getting a good feel for her something's hinked up so the fire marshal calls the FBI and says you may want to look into this right and so and so the FBI has the case and you know these cases take time right you know there's fire stuff going on there's physical stuff. Patty's not, Patty's sticking to her story, burned down. But then they, they take a look

at the, someone decides to check out the records, one of the agents, at the casino down the road. Okay. And they find out in the weeks following the fire, Patty has lost $400,000 gambling at that casino. She's not a very good gambor, Bacock's. And what they're not seeing is Patty withdrawing any money from any accounts that they know about where she's taking out 400 gram. Encyclopedia Brown. Tell me, where did that money come from? I feel like Patty has something to do with stealing 400 grand.

It's like a forensic accountant's wet dream, right? There's $400,000 mysteriously missing in a mysterious kind of like fishy fire. Then you got the lady spending $400,000 with no other source of income, losing 400 grand gambling. It's a strong circumstantial case is how I think they. It is. And so they bring charges against Patty. She pleads guilty.

Metcox? How much time you give him, Patty? She's going to get like a year, right? Like a, well, oh, wait, wait, she did start a fire. She did. I mean, it didn't burn the place to the ground. Caused some damage, though. They don't like fires.

I'll tell you right now. Every arsonist I ever met, every arsonist I ever met, got a ton of time. They frown on that? Yeah. But once again, she's a woman. 65 years old? 65. You don't want to want her.

Probably a grandma. Don't want her to die in prison. Yeah. Probably walked in with an oxygen tank. A walker. Yeah, Walker and oxygen tank. Blue hair. I didn't know what I was doing.

Four years? 30 months. A little less than three years. Okay. I don't feel bad about that. That seems reasonable. When she gets out, she'll low restitution. Yeah.

They'll garnish her nickels and dimes. Her social security check. Yeah, whatever. Can they garner social security check? I don't think so. I don't know. Probably not. Once the sentencing happened, I was always just sort of done with it.

I wasn't involved in the collection of restitution except for the forfeitures that you could do. Yes, she's so old, bro. Yeah. She's old. Yeah. All right. So let's switch to city council. City council.

City council in Las Vegas, 54-year-old Michelle Fiore. She served in the Nevada State Legislature and the Las Vegas City Council. She lost an election to become the governor of Nevada. She lost another election to be treasurer of Nevada, but she's kind of a staple in Nevada when it comes to local politics there. She's going to say losing elections. So there was a tragedy in Nevada, and I don't know a ton of the background on this.

There were two Vegas police officers killed in the line of duty. Their names were Alan Beck and Igor Soldo. And so Michelle, because she's a very civic-minded lady, incorporates a charity to raise money. for a memorial statue for Alan and Igor, who were killed in the line of duty. And she just kind of, I don't know if it was officially a go-fund mirror, but, you know, she took in $70,000 from donors. She'd make the statue out of paper mache, spend the rest of it.

Build the statue. You'll be surprised to learn that instead of actually building the memorial, Michelle stole all the money for herself. She used it on plastic surgery to make her face prettier than it was. and to pay for her daughter's wedding. Reasonable? Totally reasonable. Although I think she should have saved the receipt for the plastic surgery.

I saw the before and the after. No, boino. Yeah, you would think that you would, I mean, how much is a statue anyway? There's a problem with her crime. What? People start noticing that no statue. Where's the statue?

Patty? Michelle. And, yeah, so, FBI opens an investigation, and her reckless spending is uncovered by the FBI agents and forensic accountants working the case. Federal grand jury indicts her on fraud charges. Michelle wisely pleads guilty. It elects to not go to trial. Oh, no, I take it back. No, she did not.

Now that I'm thinking about it, she went to trial. She took it to trial. It's hard to go to trial when there's no statute. Yeah, yeah. And you see the spending in the forensic. 70,000. No statue. 70,000, no statue.

Right. No statue. And the financial record showing exactly where that 70,000 went, right? Government's case, as you pointed out, was airtight. Right. The jury goes out. They didn't even stick around for their free lunch. They come back guilty on all the charges.

She's asking for a new trial right now, even after she was found guilty. She's awaiting sentencing. And she's claiming ineffective assistance of counsel. Like, my attorney who did a really. bad job at the trial. Okay, so we don't know what she got. Hasn't gotten it yet. What are you going to give her, though?

Problem is $70,000 doesn't really move the needle too much in the sentencing guidelines. Right. Here's my problem is the enhancements are it's a charitable institution. You create kind of a charitable institution. People are giving it giving because it's charitable. It depends on how many victims. Let's say there's a couple dozen. Two dozen.

Whatever. I don't have that number. It might be over 50. people are given $100,000, I mean, that's $70,000. Like, unless people are given $10,000 apiece, if everybody's giving $200, that's way over 100 victims. Yeah. Her daughter was called upon to testify, I believe she pled the fifth.

Okay. It's sophisticated means. It's, there's a, you know, I would say she's looking at three, and she went to trial. She did. So she doesn't get acceptance of responsibility, which is a discount on your sentence. Yeah, that's two, federal guidelines. And she also doesn't get where you plead guilty quickly. I forget they call it.

Yeah, I know what you mean. But you're not putting the government through the cost of like litigating this thing and dragging it out. So that's three, that's three levels off that she typically gets. Had she pled guilty, I suspect she wouldn't have seen a day in prison. No, no. I would think she would have gotten probably three years paper. Yeah, but she got cute. Yeah.

So I'm thinking she's getting three to four years in federal prison. Oh, you think that high? She went to trial. You're an asshole. I mean, I don't know. You know what I'm saying? Like you get a certain amount of time just for being an asshole. You could have played guilty and gotten probation.

If I'm a betting man, I think she's looking at 18 months to two years. Okay. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. We'll know in a year and a half. Yeah, yeah. No, in 18 months. Yeah, exactly.

Let's go to Mississippi, Matt Cox. Nonprofit organization in Mississippi. Enhancement off the brat. You got an enhancement. Sorry, go ahead. That's assuming she's guilty. She's guilty. She's guilty. I feel like she's guilty.

They make a 50, this nonprofit makes a $54,000 donation, a grant to the city of Jackson, Mississippi to allow the city to invest in artists of color. Okay. You're an artist, Matt. I mean, okay, so the, the, the charity gives the city, right, gives the city $54,000 bucks. Okay. Make me a black mural, that type of thing. Okay. So you got 54-year-old Keisha Sanders.

You could Google a picture. She was the constituent service manager for the city of Jackson. And it was her job to disperse that $54,000 grant money to worthy black artists who were going to make the city of Jackson, Mississippi, so goddamn beautiful. Your eyes would spin around. Okay. So you go get some graffiti guys. You give them checks for $7,000 a piece, a bunch of them, have them give you. you would kick back for 50% of it, it's a good scam.

If only, if only, if only she had thought that through. Instead of seeking out the most promising artists of color in her town, Keisha began submitting false invoices to the city's fiscal manager. She begins filing false invoices to the city causing the disbursement of the $54,000 to her and into her own bank account. Bad idea, Keisha. It gets it worse because Keisha's no artist. Well, my better idea is doing exactly what I said.

Yeah, yeah. Her embezzlement was caught by government auditors who noticed that there was no black mural in the town. And they call on the FBI to investigate. Kisha was charged with federal wire fraud, pled guilty. The federal sentencing guidelines are, of course, are driven by criminal history. And I don't think she had one. And the dollar amount of the loss. If she pled guilty, she's not going to jail for that. What do you think she's getting? I think she's getting 24 months probation. And she has to pay the restitution, which she'll probably be. barely ever even come close to paying. Yeah. Five years, probation. Probation. Oh, okay. Five years, paper, probation, and order to pay restitution for the $54,000. Worst of all, she lost her sweet, sweet government job. Yeah.

And that means the world to a lot of folks. What I don't get is like, well, why couldn't you have just gone? It would have literally, for me to take, it would have taken me 20 minutes in phone calls and a couple of meetings with some, with three guys to figure out how one, we're going to do the mural, we're going to get graffiti guys who are doing free work anyway. We're going to give them. Here's this, these two buildings, these guys have donated their side of their buildings.

You can paint there. You guys can do a spray paint thing. Just let me take a look at it. It can't be anything vulgar or anything. And submit that to me. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to give you money. I'm going to go buy the paints and everything, do whatever. I'll give you money.

And you're going to cash the checks and give me back money. and they'd be like absolutely you're telling me i have to help you launder you're going to be four thousand dollars with a paint with a spray paint and you're going to give each one of us 25000 we're going to cash the checks and give you back 20 you're going to make 26 25 26 thousand dollars yourself absolutely let's do it where were you when kisha needed you i mean i don't you know i think the real crime here is that the people of jackson were ripped off in the sense that they don't get a beautiful mural to look at oh yeah there's in that too yeah that upset me too but that's i don't to say that because that's just, you know, off the rip. I get it. I feel bad about that. I don't

like talking about it. I get it. You know. All right. So let's go to Lily White Little Falls, Minnesota in a baby store called Babies on Broadway. Owned and operated by 40-year-old Adele Starin. The store was awarded the women-owned business, small business of the year award by some local business publication, right? Nice. No one understood at the time, though, that the store was basically a fraud, and Adele was a prostitution ring? A very prolific scammer. Nothing that's sketchy. It's a financial crime. Okay. You could put yourself in your, put your fraud shoes on.

So the stores are total failure. It's not making any money. No one wanted to buy Adele's shit, and she's drowning in debt. So Adele establishes a relationship with a Canadian lender, a money lender called Liquid Capital to fund inventory purchases. Right. I'm going to, you know, buy a bunch of ear thermometers for babies, give me the money for the inventory, and liquid capital would wire her the money to buy that inventory. And then she would, in the perfect world, buy that inventory, sell it at a profit and then pay back the inventory financing company. That makes sense? Yeah. Okay, got it. Um, I feel like she didn't do that, though. Right. So, but so what she did was she established a company, a fake company that did nothing called Sunshine Medical. And liquid capital would, and so she was invoicing, Liquid Capital for alleged purchases from Sunshine Medical, and Liquid Capital was then funding that. That makes sense. Nice.

That's a way to do it. Right. But there's no actual real inventory being provided. It's a false. But at least she can show them where she purchased it from this company. So they can see the invoice. They can see the wire. Look, I've already given them $14,000 or $10,000 or $5,000 and didn't go to me and went to

this company and this is a manufacturer and they send me this stuff. And then so to them, it looks legit. That's why they fund it. Well, what's the problem with the scam? Well, you don't, it's a Ponzi scale. Ultimately, you can't pay them back. You have to keep borrowing money from additional. Bingo.

Right. It's not a Ponzi scheme, though. It's what we used to call the FBI a loan lapping scheme. Oh, you have to keep borrowing more and more and more amount. Right. So, so the next set of invoices to liquid capital is using to pay off the previous set of invoices or inventory that doesn't exist and the new inventory doesn't exist. Yeah, exactly.

Meanwhile, she's lining her pockets. At some point, it collapses. stuff. Over a two-year period, Adele receives $9 million from liquid capital. She was good at this. Yeah. And a second lender also with the same scheme. And she's using, basically it's a loan

lapping scheme like we talked about. It's akin to a Ponzi scheme, as you pointed out. And she's basically using the money, though, to keep her stupid baby store afloat. She's not like making any real money? She's feathering her own nest a bit, you know, paying herself a generous salary for this dumb store, skimming money. So there's $9 million that takes in, but again, some of the money is going to pay them back, the lenders, right? Because that's how a Ponzi scheme or a loan lapping scheme works.

The shortfall, once it all collapses, is $2.3 million. That's the amount of money she enjoyed from this scam. Okay. And that's the loss that the lenders had. That makes sense? Yeah. So $9 million goes out the door. She basically gives, what, $6.7 million of it back, creating the illusion that she's paying back.

the loans, but she's just paying them back with their own money. The net loss to the Canadian lender, $2.3 million, which is how much she enjoyed keeping her store afloat and feathering her nest. Okay. Okay. Please guilt. Not a horrible person. Pleads guilty. Awaiting sentencing now, but I ran the guidelines. What are you going to give her? I don't feel like the other guys, the other people are victims. So I feel like she's got one victim, right? I'd say this right. Yeah, the lender. I mean, Just two lenders, but the same. So two lenders, okay.

So whatever, two people. Both in the same, yeah. Under five. Right. Two, it's definitely sophisticated. Two. Two year period. And she was able to pull this off.

Under, I'd say three, under four years, about four years. Yeah. I ran the guidelines. I got four years. Oh, okay. I got 48 months, exactly. I mean, the judge may decide to go above or below that. It hasn't been.

It depends on how she behaves, when she's caught, how she behaves. And she has the argument of I wasn't making, I was, she's probably making enough money to pay her bills and keep the store afloat. And it's like, look, I didn't do this because I'm a greedy person. I wanted to keep my store afloat in the hopes that someday it would become profitable. And this is what I love to do. Right. Not the fraud part, but selling by little babies.

And that's a difference in my mind between a loan lapping scheme. A loan lapping scheme is much easier to lie to yourself that like, Hey, as soon as these, like, strollers start flying off the shells, everything's going to be right because I got a high margin on that. A Ponzi scheme, on the other hand, I don't know how, I mean, again, and I've arrested dozens of Ponzi schemers. None of them can really describe me what the end game was. Yeah. Yeah, for her, the end game is just, I need it, once it's profitable. Right.

The store's just going to take off, and the people of this tiny town in Minnesota are really going to dig her baby store. Yeah, yeah, she's not, like, that's not a horrible person. and that's somebody who gets himself into a situation. That's not greed. That's not done out of greed. You think so? Yeah, I don't think that she makes her a whole. And she's not,

it's not like she's convincing people to give them or give her their life savings or this is. So you see a moral difference between an institutional victim and human victims. Yeah, absolutely. I think there should be two separate guidelines for that. I don't think that you should consider Bank of America the same as Betty Johnson. and you steal a million dollars from Bank of America, nobody leaves an ounce of sleep. If you sleep hot at night, you know how disruptive that can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night or all of the above.

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Stop. And then Betty Johnson, you steal a million dollars of her life savings. This is a difference between now she's living in her daughter's spare room. If she's lucky and she's living off of Social Security, you just wiped out an entire lifetime of savings for retirement as opposed to nobody bats an eye at Bank of America. So I think considering them, like I had over 50 victims, but you just. have to think 51 of them are like our banks yeah like there's like three people or no four i think there's three or four people that are um actual individuals but even then you say oh oh you stole from individuals no i didn't what happened was i you rented your house to me i then satisfy the loan on

your house i borrowed money in your name not even using your name really just i had an idea i didn't even have your social security you can constant money just screwed their credit right i i screwed well not their credit because it didn't it what it screwed up was the title to their home so then you start getting foreclosed on by a couple of different banks you go to the you go to a lawyer and you and the lawyer says look I know what the guy did he borrowed three mortgages on your house the I've already talked to the FBI or the Secret Service whoever it was I can I can go to the court and get the get the foreclosures held off I can fix this give me 10 grand I'll do it and you give them 10 grand so I didn't steal from you directly.

You spent $10,000 on a lawyer to fix what I did. It doesn't make me a decent person. But the difference is I didn't go to you and say, look, give me $10,000. I'm going to invest it. I'm going to give you back the money. I'm saying? Like, I never had that. No, I mean, I spent the first near decade of my career investigating bank fraud.

So all of my victims were institutional victims. And, you know, I enjoyed those cases. You know, the victims weren't like in a fetal position crying. You know, the bankers didn't really care. Not their money. And then like the last decade of my career was mostly Ponzi schemes where it's actually little old lady who's getting ripped off. And so and I liked those cases so much better, right?

Because I felt like I was kind of trying to be a champion for these like crime victims who were stupid and greedy at times and all that. But but they appreciated it. They appreciated the fact that there was someone out there advocating for them in court trying to solve this crime and put this bad guy away. The banks didn't really give a shit. Yeah. Yeah.

I was going to say the other thing is too, you get to definitely know like like to me this woman's like you got yourself over your head and you made some stupid mistakes but you're just stupid you're not a master criminal you're not a horrible person yeah but if that same woman was running a Ponzi scheme and she had 300 victims and you knew that half those victims had given her their 401k or IRAs the pop order football lady right and then you're going okay you're a horrible human being like I want you to go to prison for 10 or 15 years. You deserve to go. But the other person, you're like, probation. That's interesting, though, that you distinguish between that. Because what I,

as I learned early on as an agent, and I was also training agents, a lot of young agents over the course of my career. I would tell them, don't get yourself emotionally wrapped around the axle about the sentencing. You go to the sentence, you make sure that the probation department, the judge and the defense attorney, and you're the prosecutor, all understand the case, understand what the losses are. So you're all in agreement about what it is. But does a really matter to you if this person gets 36 months or 42 months in that guidelines range. And I go, don't get yourself emotionally wrapped around. You don't get to keep the license plates they make in prison. These people aren't going to be your pen pals. And so to see the

case through. But once the, what your job is, what you should really focus on is getting that guilty plea. That guilty plea is an affirmation that your investigation was so lock solid that they're not even going to go to trial to test, to test the quality of your work. And I was always really proud of myself that I had very, very few trials because I could put these cases together so locked solid, oftentimes getting a confession from the bad guy, whether it was a bank fraud case or a Ponzi scheme, that the cases wouldn't even bother going to trial. And to me, that was where my victory was. It didn't really matter to me how much time they did. Well, I think I think as a law enforcement, you know, versus prosecution, I don't think it's really, it shouldn't be the,

it shouldn't be the person investigating the case concerned with how much time like to me it's like my your concern should be putting together a solid case that can be prosecuted but i think a lot of people in law enforcement kind of came from the world of athletics they were like high school or college athletes and they see the the sentencing as points on the board and you got to get away from that you got to get away from that because i don't think you'll ever be i don't think that would make you happy anyway in general i don't think that's that's that's a fair assessment because i can i can imagine that going to trial sometimes somebody gets 10 years and you go just like with juries.

A lot of time these juries, they listen to the whole thing. They say, yeah, yeah, he's guilty. And then when the guy gets sentenced four months later, they read the newspaper and they go, he got 12 years. Yeah. And they're devastated. They're like, I can't believe he got 12 years. I mean, I said he was guilty, but I thought they'd give him a year or two.

Because during the trial, you were not allowed to discuss what the sentencing might be or what the ramifications is. The jury is only allowed to know about innocent or guilty. They're not allowed to even consider. what would happen to this person, unless it's a death penalty case. I was going to say, unless it's death penalty. Yeah, in which case the jury needs to weigh in on that. The jury has no input whatsoever as to what the sentencing will be.

In fact, half the juries I've been in, they didn't even understand if it was a criminal case or a civil case. I mean, you should be frightened about juries. Did I tell you that I got jury summons? Did I tell you that? No, what happened? Did I say this? I've never been summoned. What happened to you?

This was, I don't know if it was a year ago, a second. probably six or six or no maybe maybe a year ago i was no i know i was still on probation um i want to say i i definitely think i was still in probation so i called them i wanted to go yeah i thought this would be great registered voter this will be great um i'm not a registered voter you have to be is that where i mean maybe from still from 30 years ago in in florida maybe i thought the where they got the voter that's what i thought too i'm thinking maybe my registration a car like motor voter type thing right i guess i don't know but it showed up it was a jury summons

and i thought i'm gonna go you know voir dire right like they're gonna look through the whole thing they're gonna talk to everybody i thought this will be great even if i don't make the jury because when they if they do end up saying but but then i thought do i go down there only to be told yeah you can't you're you're a convicted felon you get i thought you know what i'm gonna call just to just to find out so i called it's funny thing too you call like that number the clerk somebody answers the phone i talked to somebody yeah and i'm like hey uh you know got a jury summons they're like oh okay what does it say and you know i said oh supposed to show up this time they're like yeah okay so you know be here at such i was like yeah no no but i understand that and i said and i want

to serve by the way i want to come but i also want you to know that i'm i'm a convicted felon and i didn't know if that excludes me. She said, yeah, yeah, you don't have to come. Right up to bed. The clerk, the clerk just forgave it. Right. She knew that you were going to get it. And I told her too. I said, um, I said, um, I said, well, listen, I said, if I can serve, like I will come down. I want to serve. Yeah. And she's no, no, no, no, she said, that's going to, it's going to exclude you. Yeah. She says, don't even show up. I said, well, do I do anything? She said, no, you don't need to do anything. I went to Clemson University in South Carolina. And I, but my family lived in Washington, D.C. And I was registered voter down

in Clemson. And so summer of 1991, I was an intern for the FBI at FBI headquarters. And I used to forward the mail from my PO box at Clemson to my parents' house in D.C. And I get a jury duty notification for South Carolina. But the mail system, because it was being forwarded from South Carolina in my parents' place, I get it like, I was supposed to be at jury duty two weeks earlier. Oh, okay. I'm 21 years old. I've never been in trouble in my life. I'm an FBI intern. What'd you think? Oh my gosh. I thought I was terrified. I didn't know what was going to happen if you just don't show up at all to jury duty. And so I brought it to my supervisor. He wasn't my supervisor directly, but he was the guy who ran the internship. His name was Jimmy Carter. And yeah, and supervisory special agent Jimmy Carter. And I take it to him and I'm like, close the door to his office. I explained the situation. I give it to him. He goes, let me get, let me see that. He takes a look at it. Picks up the phone, calls the clerk down in Clemsons. He's like, this Jimmy Carter, special agent from the F. FBI. One of my interns received, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, okay, you'll take care of it. He hangs up and goes, taken care of. And I was like, oh, my God, I want to be an

FBI agent. He probably just shrugged it off anyway. He probably wasn't even calling. He was a deadline. But one other thing about sentencing that comes to mind, since we're on that topic, is that somewhere along the line, I don't know what year this happened, but I think it was after 95, that Congress passed a law allowing the victim, of crimes to speak at the sentencings and provide a victim impact statement, right? And so, I mean, and I think they're probably thinking like kidnappers and stuff like that where, you know, a victim could get up there and at the sentencing, explained to the judge how this impacted their lives and the judge can consider that in their sentencing decisions.

Yeah. And so for the first half of my career, I know it well. Yeah. The banks were very uninterested in coming to court and providing a victim impact statement. And when they did come, it was never, you know, I think it was just water off a duck's back. The judge didn't really care if, like, First National Bank of Chicago got ripped off in a $50,000 hour embezzlement that I was investigating. But on the Ponzi scheme side, again, I wasn't hung up on seeing the person get a large sentence,

but I was very hung up on making sure that the judge was fully informed of the facts of this case. And so I would egg on and cajole the victims. You come into court this day, and you can either write it out and make sure that it gets to the judge or if you're willing to get up there and speak in the microphone and provide that statement about how this impacted your life, the judge deserves to know that while he's making a decision about the defendant. So I would cajole and get these people into court. And I had a good track record as far as getting the victims to get up there

and cry to the judge about how this ruined them. And I think it probably impacted the sentencings. I had two people show up at mine. Really? Like identity theft type victims or bankers? One was a banker. really what he was a hard money guy okay so it was like his money yes the one guy showed up and he said he spent he was a CPA that we had rented his house i didn't actually rent his house like so when i

tell the story sometimes i'll i'll say well you know went here boom and i rented a house from this guy but i actually didn't rent the house it's it's one of those things you shave off to shorten the yeah shorten that you know saying like to the story yeah because the whole story is six and a half hours long as opposed to, do you want the two-hour version? You know, the two-hour version is. So I go there and I rent this guy's house. The truth is, I went there and the girl I was dating rented the house. The point is, is that I moved in the house. I assume this guy's name, right? Like I get a social security number issued to him for a child with his name. I then get a couple of credit cards. I go downtown. I satisfy all the loans on his house. And then I borrow three mortgages

worth about $150,000 a piece, so it's around $400,000. And then I put that money. in the bank, pull the money out and leave. So he, this was a rental property for him. He owned a CPA firm. He had like a dozen guys working for him. Did he go on camera for the American Greed episode? No, that's the, that's the home, that's the, that's the hard money lender. Okay. So this is the owner. Got it. So the owner of that house goes to Atlanta to my sentencing And he says, now keep in mind, I rented the house, we ordered, we bought a $20 or $15 or $20, you know, the metal bar thing on your bed, you know, the frame on the bed. So we bought like a $20 one. I put that in the, in his bedroom, bought a two nightstands and a mattress and box strings.

That's all the furniture I have. Okay. Only in that house, never walked into. a one of the spare rooms and the house is basically just like this right it's like a four bedroom three bath right two bath two two two two two uh two car garage never really walked around but you're just using it to flop in this one room that's is that's it yeah i have a i do have a fax machine some people who that's how old this is i had a fax machine on the kitchen plugged in uh and that that's all that's all we had so we live there while we satisfy

because it took time for in fulton county when you sat down satisfy a loan or you record something, it took months for it to show up. That's how far behind their public records was. So we had to wait around for months for his loans to get satisfied. That's also why I assumed his name instead of changing the warranty deed into somebody else's name, right? Right. So because I didn't have another two months to do that. Like you can you file the you would file that and then a few days later or months later you would file the satisfaction. Like I didn't have time for all that. So I just did the satisfy the mortgages on his house. And we're just sleeping there waiting. So we're doing mountain climbing, working out, jogging, going on

vacations. Like we're just waiting around for these things to show up. So then I borrow the money, pull the money out, leave. When it comes time for sentencing, he shows up his sentencing. And the prosecutor's questioning him. And he ends up saying he spent six or eight thousand dollars on attorneys. Keep in mind, while I was there, I made a paper mache statue of a guy about my size, whatever, and he's like screaming. Now, there was a movie called Night Watch or something where the guy makes a paper mache statue and it's reminiscent of Edward Munch's The Scream. Mine was more realistic. So I make this statue. And I never really finished it, right? Like, by the time the scam's going, like, I'm at the end of it, but, you know, I figure

I'll finish it at the next place, right? Yeah. So when we're packing up all our stuff, we go to put this into the vehicle that we have, and there's not enough room. Yeah. And I've removed the, we removed the back seat. We've tried desperately to get this in all. I've spent hours. I've spent, you know, a hundred hours making this thing. You're an artist. So we end up leaving the backseat of this little vehicle we have. We leave the paper mache statue. We take the bedding and everything. We take the bed apart. We put everything in the two-car garage.

Okay. All of the files for the three mortgages that I borrowed, I leave in the kitchen right next to the fax machine. So the carpet, we had the carpets cleaned, even though it was just in the one room, right? You're the best squatter in the world, yeah. Right. Like we made all the payments.

Probably consider it. Yeah. We were there like three months. But when the guy comes to sentencing, he says, I hadn't, didn't receive my payment, went by the house, checked the mail, saw a ton of mail for me in his name. Yeah. He said, so I open it. He said things that I don't lenders and things I don't know anything about. He said, and there were payments for mortgages that I didn't take out.

He said, I go to the front door, I open it, walk inside. And he said it's, and now it was, it would have been empty. He says the place is completely destroyed. Really? He lied. And he said, and in the middle of the living room was a paper mache statue of, he said, what he felt was him. Screaming and that there were. Like, that was, like you were mocking him.

Yes. It was all about mocking. And then all the loan documents were spread around the, the floor. to torment him to torment him exactly and the place was completely trashed and i'm sitting there like like it's bad enough what's about to happen i don't need you making it worse throwing gasoline like i'm not sure what you're thinking here that you're thinking they're about to give me three years you're trying to get me three and a half because that's not what's about to happen and i was just like that's not what hey no i'm trying to talk to my lawyer she's like yeah don't say anything don't say anything

And I'm like, and every time I look at the judge, he's staring at me. You know? Anyway, so this guy leaves, the next guy that comes up is one of the hard money lenders.

He gets up and the prosecutor says, her name was Gail McKenzie. She's like, you know, Mr. Cox did this and this. You can see he ruined that man's life. Like, ruined his life.

Like he paid $6,000 to an attorney that fixed the issue, you know. But whatever, that's fine. You know, doesn't make me a good point. person. I'm still a comeback. The point is, is the next guy gets up and says, I'm a hard money lender. No, she says, you're a hard money lender. She didn't say card, she said, you're a private lender.

And he's like, yes, I am. She's like, you're lending your own money. He's like, yes, my money and friends and family's money. And she's like, and you lent $150,000 to Mr. Cox, didn't you? He's like, yes, I did. And she's like, and you couldn't afford to lose that money, could you? And he's like, no, I, no, I couldn't. I couldn't. You could tell he's like, no, I couldn't. I couldn't. She's like, that was a lot of money. And you didn't get any of that money back, did you?

And he went, keep in mind, the other two lenders didn't show up because they've been paid back. Right. But it has been months since she's talked to him. And he goes, um, and they start whispering. And they're right here. You know how they're right next to you. So I hear him say, I actually did get paid back. And she goes, she's like, you get, how much did you get paid back?

He's like, everything. She's like, everything? Why'd you pay for parking today at the courthouse? And she's like, he's like, yeah, yeah. And she's like, well, and so what's on the transcript, they're whispering, you can't tell. But then she's like, well, how much, well, did you hire it? Did you have to hire anybody? He's like, no.

She's like, did you hire an attorney? And he goes, oh, I did hire an attorney. She's like, well, how much money was the attorney? He was a, it's a friend of mine. He said, it's like $1,500. box. She says, well, $1,500 is a lot of money. She's trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat here. And you couldn't afford to lose that money, could you? He's like, no, he's like, no, it was

a lot of money. Yeah, I couldn't afford to lose that. And, you know, the judge had to be going, the fuck are we doing. But, and so she's like, yeah, so that's a lot of money. And this was very upsetting to you. He said, no, it was very upsetting, very upsetting. That's one of the guys that they talked to on the program. And oh, it was very upset, very upset. And so that was his whole thing. That was his whole, where she really wanted him to have lost the 150. We had a judge in Chicago that would always, on my cases, give the low end of the guidelines. I mean, they were like bank tellers. I mean, again, I wasn't hung up on that. But if I brought in, but later when I started investigating crimes where humans were the victims, it would still be

low end of the guidelines. But if I brought a victim in for a victim impact statement, she would add three months to it. So if they were going to get 48 months at the low end of the guideline, she'd give him 51 months instead. It was clear that she was like, like just a for the hat to the victim who bothered to come and testify at the sentencing. You were able to say, I was going to do this, but because the victim was so compelling. Yeah, yeah. Well, again, they never explain it, right? Because they don't want to be appealed.

Yeah. It was just, so funny because like that guy, the 150, my restitution, it's 150. He's on there for 150. So I'm no doubt he's still getting a $62 a month payment hurts every quarter of whatever he's getting. Are they still garnishing your income? No, because I'm off probation. So I have to make an arrangement with the federal whatever. And my probation officer said they were going to contact me, you know, to make an arrangement.

And, like I said, I'm going to, I'll make that arrangement. Once they contact me, which they never have, I actually talked to my buddy Pete. And I was thinking about it. And he was like, you got to write the judge. Because I'm actually going to write the judge a letter to say, just that, you know, look, like here's, I know you know my case is. One reason I know he knows my case is because my probation officer, when I first got arrested, sent in the paperwork to have my case transferred from the Northern District of Georgia to the Middle District of Florida.

Right. She said, I sent it off three times. They never responded. So finally, she called the clerk and said, listen, I have so-and-so. I have a parolee. His name is Matthew Cox. And she's like, I know who Mr. Cox is. And she's like, okay, well, I've sent in.

paperwork she's like yeah she said the judge isn't going to transfer it and she is he has a personal interest in seeing the case through he would like he wants to keep an eye on mr cox so he's not going to transfer it you're trying to do a rule 20 where the case the case itself got moved or the the probation so typically if you're if you're if you're prosecuted let's say the northern district you typically are from the northern district and you end up being you end up going on supervised release in the northern district so they but if you go to another district which I did. I went to the northern, you know, I'm from Florida. Right.

The reason I just steal in, in, uh, in Atlanta, in Georgia, like, so they had to transfer it down here for my supervision, but they're supposed to transfer the case. So you have a local judge. Your federal probation officer was in Atlanta? No, no, my federal probation officer is in Florida. Uh-huh. She contacted the judge. I was prosecuted out of Georgia.

Yeah. To get the case moved so they give a local judge. Is the judge have much involvement with the, no, but it's just what they do. Supervised release? It's just what they do in case you get, in case you end up getting violated. They can send you to a local jail. You get a local judge. And it's already set up.

Yeah. Right. So, but he wouldn't do it. He's a real fan. He's a fan. Yeah. So I wanted to write him a letter because I know he knows who.

I also know from my previous, um, uh, public defender. He called her in the office one time and talked to her about me like, hey, what's going on with this guy's case? I gave this guy, he's even told her, he said, I gave a white collar criminal 26 years. Yeah, that sticks in his mind. Yeah, he's like, I wanted, what's happening with this? Like, I didn't think he was going to get stuck with 26 years. Yeah. Which in and of itself is wrong. He shouldn't have taken that into consideration, but he didn't. That's, they're human. So I wanted to write him a letter

and say, Your Honor, got out of prison. Here's what I'm doing. I'm all, you know, everything's good. Whether you want to know or not, I want to let you know that, you know, that thank, Really thank you for giving me, listen, twice, we filed two 2255s. Do you know how many 2255s result in relief for an inmate? Out of every 3,500 that are filed, one actually result in the relief of an inmate. And that's a motion for reduction in sentence? Right. Well, 2255 is where you're saying, you're basically saying your lawyer was ineffective.

But your goal is obvious to get your sentence reduced. I filed two and got my sentence reduced. And the government fought both of them. Yeah, sure. So, and that was as a result of the judge letting the government know, listen. Overset it's this thing. We need to fix this. Like, this is the avenue.

And he even told Millie, my public defender, when he called her in, he's like, what's he doing to get his sentence reduced? And she's like, what can he do? He goes, I can't tell you what he can do. Yeah. He said, I can tell you he needs to get himself back in front of me. So the judge did you a solid on the back end. He did on both ends. Now, he, when he gave me the seven years off on the first one, you know, could he have given me more.

Yeah, he could have given me more. But the truth is, the way he looked at it, like, honestly, what did you fucking do, bro? You were interviewed by a couple of people. Yeah. There's no arrest. And he said all this. There's no arrests on your case. You know, and I'm giving you, for getting a reduction for no arrests, he said,

seven years is pretty good. And he's right. I was upset at the time. But he was right. And then I come back. I get another five years locked off. Like he did me some solid. So I just want to let him. And I know that he paid attention. No, this was like two weeks ago. I was not only going to write him, but I was going to write him. I was also that I wanted to bounce this off of a buddy of mine to say, look, I was told I was going to be contacted by this, you know, I want to pay. Yeah. I'm willing to pay. I'm more than happy to pay. But nobody's contact to me. And I don't really know who to contact. And when I asked my probation officer about it, she said, because I asked her about it, and she said, don't worry, they'll be in contact with you.

Like, relax. Wait for the, you've got, you've got, you've got several months where you don't have to make a payment. They're going to be in contact with you. But I also know, I've talked to other people that have been on since. And they've said that they've, some of them have never been contacted. And some is, they waited a year. Like, I don't want to wait a year. I mean, I want to make the payment. Look, said, I don't want to die. I don't want to make a car payment every month, but I want to pay a few hundred bucks. I explain it to my clients all the time. A lot of my clients

in my private investigative practice have been ripped off in frauds and I have steps that I take to try to recover their money with the last one being to refer this to the FBI for an investigation. But I always tell them, I go, listen,

you may get the mental satisfaction of seeing the guy who ripped you off in an orange jumpsuit, but you cannot rely on the federal government to be your collection agency. They're just not good at that. No. And honestly, and they have to balance.

So the federal government has to, a lot of people, he should pay this back and liquidate this and do this and work every day and he listen listen the government has to balance like you have to be able to pay your bills right you have to be right like there's a balance there i understand this guy might be making five thousand dollars a month but he's not giving you four right after rent car payment insurance health insurance you know they you like he needs to be able to sustain a life so he can maintain a job to pay you back right wages that we're garnishing from his uh but a lot of people don't

they don't they don't understand that they get so emotional they stop realizing they start you know So getting a few hundred dollars, paying in a few hundred bucks a month, makes me feel better. It gives them something. They're never, well, first of all, the individual victims that I have, I owe less than 30 grand to if you total all of it together. There's a question for it. In the charging documents, did they identify the victim financial institutions by name or do they try to mask their names? No, it was all. It was, you know, First Union, Bank of America.

Yeah. It's interesting because the U.S. Department of Justice doesn't really have a guideline. So every individual prosecutor gets to decide the extent that they're going to include the victim names and the charging document. When that's true for whether it's a business, a bank, or a individual. Sometimes they put initials down. Sometimes they'll say First National Bank of Hawaii, but sometimes they'll say, you know, a financial, you know, victim A. And so I do these daily crime stories on my Instagram feed at Simon Investigations. And I always throw in the victim's name, even if they're trying to, not the individual.

individual victims, the people I don't want to out a person, especially if it's a sex crime or something horrible like that. But if it's a business that had an embezzlement from it, it's interesting to me and to my viewers to know that this was a snowmobile rental place in Colorado or a, or a, you know, a small business of some kind. Or, you know, not saying the victim did anything wrong, but it makes my story better. And but a lot of times that's mass and you can't see it in the charging documents. But they don't understand is that I can just go to the last serial on PACER in the court filings and look at the order of restitution. And they always list the names of the people who are due restitution in this case,

whether it's Joe Bob's snowmobile rental or, you know, Susie Q. I'm not going to out, you know, I'm not going to out Susie Q, but I'm happy to out, you know, out the snowmobile rental place. I'm sympathetic to them and all that. So it's interesting the way they try to mask those things. Yeah, I mean, it should be public. To me, it's public records. Yeah, I mean, it's there.

And if you were sitting in court, you'd know. And it's not like they did anything wrong anyway. No, they're victims. Right, right, right, exactly. I mean, a lot of what I'm trying to do is also in part to small businesses about the internal controls you can put in place to not be ripped off and say an embezzlement. And so having an actual business that I can use for that war story ends up hopefully being helpful to my small business viewers.

I was going to say, I was watching one of years, you're like, it's amazing how much these small businesses will go out of their way to secure their inventory. you said, but they'll leave their checkbook laying around. I mean, that's the number one. Again, we'll come back and have an embezzlement episode, but the number one embezzlement out there is just some accountant stealing a check and writing it to themselves or to their creditors

and then, like, covering up in the accounting records. Again, businesses like you quoted me at will move heaven and earth to protect their inventory, but they'll leave the checkbook just sitting out in the unlocked drawer. It makes no sense. What was it? Did the Kellogg's one with Zach

where they were stealing, checks out of, you know, these industrial parks, right, where they have these massive businesses like Coca-Cola or whatever. Like, this was back when they were mailing out checks. Like, some wheat factory or wheat farm somewhere is billing Coca-Cola $400,000 a month. And they're mailing out the checks. They take these checks and they, you know, they've got the community mailbox and they're going, they're just putting the checks in it. So they would reach in there and grab checks and then they would wash the checks and they'd go open up a like they go get it like an occup-this is 20 years ago an occupational license and they'd put like you know

Joe's wheat farm of Tampa Bay and then they go open a bank account and they could deposit it the check or either wash it or they were just deposit the actual check yeah and then the checks would go through it was like oh my god yeah you can do with incoming checks or outgoing checks you I had a mailroom case when I was an FBI agent. I was a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites. You ever deal with them? No. That's a whole thing.

That's a whole episode unto itself. But he was diverting checks coming and he worked in the mail room of a hospital. And he opened up a bank account with the name of the hospital and data processing on the end. So like Rush Presbyterian data processing. And so the checks would come in from like an insurance company. He would just deposit the money. And eventually got enough money together that he can move to Demona Israel, where the black Hebrew Israelites settlement is. you were saying though you wanted to write your judge a letter for for what to thank him for

being such a swell guy you know i hate to put it like that but but yeah i mean you know like i i am i am irritated at the length that that he in any manner in any even though i get the guidelines and all that crap the fact that he felt in any way that he that he that he that I deserved 26 years and four months, you know, if he had really looked at the case, which, of course, he doesn't really get to, right? Because I pled guilty. Everything he knows is from the probation pre-sentence report. Correct, right.

And I get it. That's where I fall. And I'm sure in his mind, he thought anybody who's got, is scaling or scoring out at 26 years and four months is a scumbag. You know, so I'm sure he looked at that and said, oh, this guy's a piece of garbage and gave me 26 years. Was that the low end of the guidelines? It was a low end of the guidelines.

I pled guilty. Okay. But, you know, and then sometimes, listen, sometimes I look at it and I think, imagine what he looked at. I got like four different jurisdictions. I've been on the run three years. There are over 50 or 60 newspaper articles, right? This is the internet's just now starting, right? This is 2006, whatever.

And he's sentencing me in the middle of the financial crisis. Not in the middle. That's not true. It wasn't 2008. It was late 2007. So this is like December of like 2007. That's from the beginning of the when things are starting to melt down. So the last six months, all every single newspaper.

Because it happened for six months before 2008, which is when they did the Dodd-Frank. I'm sorry, when they did the Tart. So that's why they call it the 2008 financial crisis. So in 2008-2007, all he's saying for six months, banks failing, banks failing, banks failing, banks failing. So he's this. And he finally has a face to associate with this social problem. So I get it. You know, sometimes I get irritated.

Like, I'm like, no, bro, you didn't do it. And then I think, yeah, but he doesn't know. He doesn't really know. So, you know, so, you know, so yeah, kind of I thought, you know, write him a letter saying, hey, like, not sure about 26 years. I don't even know how to say it. That's the problem is I don't even know how to start the letter, but I want to say, look, I get it. Here's what happened in prison, you know, I'm, I don't know if you've looked into it or not, but I kind of rehabilitated myself in prison. Here's what I'm doing now.

Wanted to let you know, you know, see, like me saying no hard feelings. He's like, he's a federal judge. He's like, I don't give a fuck if you have hard feelings. I think it's instruct. I think he, I know enough judges. You know, the ones who are former prosecutors going to be judges, I still stay friends with them. And that's the type of thing that gives them a sense of comfort that the system can work, that people are rehabilitative, and that no one should be judged by the worst thing they did in their lives.

Right. It doesn't define you as a person. I think that's the kind of lesson bringing that to a judge who all day long just seeing scumbag after scumbag after scumbag might help. might help him be more reflective for other defendants. You know, and this is the, and I agree, which is everything you just said is why I want to write the letter. The problem is probably like the hardest letter I've ever had to write. And I'm a guy who clearly doesn't have a problem talking.

You've written books. You could write a letter. I know, right? But I've been, it's literally, it's been churning in my head. You know, my wife, Jess wrote a letter to her prosecutor, her prosecutor. He wrote a letter Basically said listen You saved my life

I've met Jess I've had dinner with Jess With you Delightful person I've never asked what she did She was a drug addict Okay I didn't know Yeah she was a drug addict

She's selling drugs Under a guy named Wildman Like a biker guy Like a former And I always say like a former truck driver He's a huge guy Supposed to like 61 or 62 Whereas overall

very Okeechobee, whereas overalls, a wife beater, six, probably in his late 50s at the time. Was she, were they in a relationship? No, no, he's, no, she was, at that time, she's in her early 20s. Yeah. So she's not, well, that's not true. She was probably 27, 28.

So she is a drug addict and she's selling drugs, like a lot of drug. What was her drug of choice? Meth, because that's what Okachobi basically has. They have dairy farms and methamphetamine. And so she's, she's selling. drugs to support her habit, yeah. Of course, you know, when you listen to her tell it, she's also selling like half a pound here, half a pound.

And that's a lot of meth. Yeah. The problem is, is that, you know, the way she explains it, like those types of things fell in her lap where some guy comes to her and says, look, can you get rid of this for me? She's like, I'm not trying to sell that much, but this guy's trying to get rid of it. She's on Pablo Escobar. Right. Yeah. But, yeah, so she's hooked on drugs.

try gets off gets back on gets off gets back on she's but either way i sold the whole time she said because the truth is i just there was no job i could get that would help she had three slowly had three daughters she said there's no job i can get to help me support these kids yeah she's like other than selling drugs so she's able to sell drugs well this goes on for a few years and she's working under wild man and and this case is insane too because this guy's trying to have people murdered who were cooperated like he's they're active trying to get him and he's sending people off to like kill people like this is a serious guy but to her she's like he was always cool to me like you never had any problems yeah of course she didn't

cooperate against him so but the point is is that at some point the after following him for so long they eventually um they eventually bust him and 50 other people she's one of 50 and she's ranked like in the top five or 10 right underneath him she was agency. Is the DEA or FBI? It was, it was DEA, FBI, Okachobi task force, which is just a local task force, or local counties.

And yeah, and that was it. Of course, so, you know, and then they busted everybody about her and Wildman. She was on the run for like a month. Did they pay it as a drug conspiracy? So she had to, she had to basically eat the time for all the drugs that she never used or saw or anything. Correct. Correct.

And half the people went to state, like 20 of them went to state, 30 of them went to, went federal. She got, I want to say, six years. She did the drug program. Good. So she ended up doing almost five years before she went to the halfway house and met me. And it's funny, too, because like, like, she doesn't, she doesn't hang out with, like, including most of her family, you know, basically, because they're all still on, not all. all of them, like her sister's, her sister's great, her dad's great. But the rest of them all have drug problems, in and out of prison, all of her cousins,

nephews, everybody, in and out of prisons. Since I've known her, probably three of her family members have died. Oh, my. All drug-related. And she just doesn't, it's like, it's like her and I, and that's it. Yeah. And no relapses? No, no, nothing like.

It's funny, too, when she tells stories, when she'll tell me some story about something that happened, and I'm just, I look at her. her like like I don't even know who that person is she's this beautiful delightful lady she's smart really well-spoken sweet everything about it is just delightful I cannot the things that she'll tell me I can't I'm like well it's not hers the drugs I know I'm looking at you like who are you she's like I know I know you have to understand it was like what are you talking about like outrunning the cops like not once but like three different times ever had her on the show to tell her story yeah she made us take it down she's super shy she hates it

Luckily, she did Ian Bick, and Ian Bick ain't taking it down. So her story is up on Ian Bicks. And I wrote her story. I actually wrote a synopsis of her story. It's on my website. I get focused for telling it verbally or, oh, you just did it for yourself? Did you do it to ask this to her for interviews and stuff? No, no, I did it.

I have a website that has probably, I don't want, maybe 15 or 20, true crime, true crime stories. They're like synopsies. You're like large articles. I'm actually scrolling through her. page right now looking at some of the photos. Yeah, it's great. So she's comfortable having that out there in the universe. She just doesn't want to be the one telling the story. Oh, no. It was up to her. She'd make me take that

down too. Um, she's fully she had some pull over the editor. Exactly. Oh, it's she only, we took her we took her off this website, off of YouTube. Yeah, YouTube. Um, because she swore she'd redo it. She's never redoing it. Um, but luckily I don't mind because

Ian Bick has it up. Uh, and I have the story. I actually pitch the story. Uh, we've pitch the story and I have a production company that's interested in pitching it and trying to get it turned into some kind of a series or something. Let me cut it. Listen, because it's a fascinating story, but yeah, you talk to Jess and she's delightful. Like I said, she's great. And my wife and I talked about her. Like, what do you think she did? I go, I have no idea. She's like, I mean, she's tat it up. She's very girl next door. I mean, works hard. It's super, you know,

nice. So I'm like, it had to be drugs. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's Okachobi. And not just that, listen to this, every time we go to Okeechobe, like, we'll go to Okeechobee to see her sister or see her dad or something. As we enter the county, I'm telling you, something happens. She gets, she gets. It's like severance, you know, whereas. Yeah, exactly. It's severance. Exactly. Develop an accent. Oh, listen, it's as soon as we go over, we'll be driving down a road. And she's like, she's like, oh, yeah, she's like, yeah. Right up here, she said, this is where so and so did. So and so did. such and such we got into her car accident she says oh she says and she was talking shit she she says I tell you makes me want to and I look at her like what the fuck just out like her just like I'll look at her and she'll go what's happening she's like I she's I'm just saying she's a shit talker that's all I'm saying anyway and I'm like what like shit like like who are you right now and she's like I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm like every time we come in this place you start you can

take the ok chobie you can take the girl out of ok chobie but yeah every time and listen as soon she's like oh yeah and that over there oh she's like we we killed a such and such over there and this and the cop showed up right so here's what we did and i'm thinking what do you're telling me stories about like this right here i out around the cops right here and i pulled it and i'm you're like outran the cop what what happened well i mean hell fairness he met in a halfway house yeah all that was gone by the time but yeah she wrote her prosecutor prosecutor wrote her back uh everything i interviewed her prosecutor for the story nice i interviewed her prosecutor the head of the task force the okechobe sheriff i've interviewed um uh was

it only one of her, um, co-defendants. I interviewed a bunch of people about her story. Nice. Um, but yeah, her prosecutor, her prosecutor was funny too, because he was the only, he, he said, you know what's funny? He said there was like, he said out of all those girls, he was, she was the only one that I thought, he was her and one other girl that I thought, you know what, like, she's got a chance. They're savable. Yeah. She's, she's got a chance. And that's when she ended up writing that letter saying, telling him, look, you saved my life. Yeah. Well, it's good. Was the prosecutor out of Miami or Fort Lauderd? I think he was out of Miami because, you know,

drugs. There's nothing out there. Right, right, right. There's no judicial district there. Yeah. You said, with your letter to the judge, would that be where you would ask to pay the victims back first? I thought about that.

That's another thing I had thought about was if at, see, but, you know, there's only so much interaction a judge can have with you. Yeah. And now, once you're off probation, I don't know if that changes. It may not change at all, especially if I, and I can't, you can't ask a judge for legal advice. They're going to be like, yeah, I can't. I can't tell you. He can't give me any illegal advice.

So I can't hire a lawyer. Yeah. It's like I got to go to a lawyer. How much do I dump into a lawyer? I really could probably just file it, you know, on my own. And what I'm interested in doing is saying, look, first of all, two things have happened since I got, since I was sentenced. One, about 18 months after I was sentenced and went to prison, they changed the law. So the law used to be you just agreed with the prosecutor on what you owed and then they determined who you owed the money to. After that, if in financial cases, there's now two sentencings. One is your sentencing and one is a sentencing based on who you owe the money to and how much. In that case, the... That's not stipulated in the plea agreement? What, it is how much you owe, but not...

Interesting. At the breakdown. Right. Okay, so you're supposed... Here's what's supposed to happen. Those... Now, I'm not... I think it may be before you plead guilty.

Right. where they, to try and let's narrow down. Because a lot of times they'll arbitrate, let me put it this way. My PSR, my pre-sentence and report, says I owe 9.5 million. So when I got it, I was like, I don't know 9. There's no way I owe 9.5. I never had that. Right.

I've never seen 9.5, you know, we start arguing. Yeah. And they, so then they drop it down to the next one, which is below 6. Now, in my opinion, I don't owe 6. Right. You know, I owe less than 6. So, but that's it. But they said 6, and that was it.

Like, there's no more arguing. You're just trying to get as little time as possible at this point. So at that point, I could care less how much money it was. But now you look back and you're like, okay, well, wait a minute. I'm paying back $6 million. I don't owe $6 million. Like these other people got a ton of money. You sold a bunch of property.

So here's the thing. The way it works now after I was sentenced, of course, and you can't go back, you know, is that they go to all the banking. And everybody that's a victim has to provide a written account of what you owe them and an affidavit. saying, look, that I so-and-so say this is what he owes me. Here's why. Like the math. Show your work. Correct. And they send it in. I know many, many guys sentenced after me where the government saying, you owe $10 million. Turns out it's 2.1. Yeah. You know, because a lot of these

institutions, they're just not interested in going through the process. They don't want to put somebody on it to pull the file. Are we accruing interest? There's a lot of variables. And they're not interested. Like, they don't have anybody scheduled even to say this is what you exactly own. They don't want to file, sign the agreement, and they don't want to lie to the federal government, like they don't know. So you end up getting a reduced sentence or reduced amount of money. So I never got that. I didn't have that. So that's one issue I have. I'd like to know, like, what is the real amount? It's not $6 million. Okay. So let's, the other thing is by the time I was sentenced, and within a six months to a year after, maybe within a year after, 80% of those

federal institutions are gone. Yeah. There's nobody's Washington Mutual. They're gone. Yeah. Nobody's there to, even if you bought it, those, the files are gone, the record's gone. There's no way for you to determine whether I owe you $350,000. There's nobody in the accounts receival department saying, when are we going to get this money? Right. Well, and the other thing is, too, you know what they would do? Like, if you look at the amounts, it's like Bank of America lent you on this loan, $118,000.

And what do I owe? $118,000. It's like, wait a minute, I bought a house with that. Yeah. Did you sell the house? How much did you get back for the house? That they don't do any of that. That was the bitch of the mortgage fraud cases I worked, is that you have to, you

But sometimes the house is even appreciated and value. Exactly. And so the sentencing guidelines were always super low on my mortgage fraud cases. You're a weirdo because you got so much time. Because by the time you actually liquidate the asset and the foreclosure process, it kind of pays back the loan. Right. Sometimes. Yeah.

Yeah. Or there's potential loss, right? Right. Intended loss. Yeah. Intended, sorry, not potential. So what ends up happen? So that's the other issue I have.

And so the other one is, too, I'm never paying off. $6 million. Let's say it stays $6 million. I'm never paying off. It's paid down. It's like 5.7 now. So I'm never paying that off. But also no one's really trying to collect it actively, right? Right, right. But I want to pay. I'm not out of paying. But here's my problem is that look, what I might pay is in the next 10 years or however long I'm paying for the next 10, 15 years, I might be able to pay off 50 or 100,000. But right now, I don't think anybody at Bank of America every quarter when they get a payment for $120 is excited. What I would like to do is can we restructure this so that my payments go to pay off these four victims first?

The humans. The humans and then pay off these institutions. Like, can we do that? And then I wouldn't have a big problem paying two or $300 a month. So those are the things that I would like to figure out. I can't do it in the letter because the judge can't, he can't advise me. I think there's a U.S. Department of Justice Office of Financial Litigation that owns your case right now. among hundreds of other cases.

It's supposed to be trying to collect. Agreed. Agreed. So that's, I mean, if you're truly looking to write a letter to the judge saying, thank you for letting me out a decade early, that's cool. I don't think the judge is the one who's going to restructure who gets paid first. I think the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Financial litigation, is the ones who you would need to write to.

Well, I would think that the judge would have to make it a court order. Because as of right now, I'm paying into them and they're divving it up. yeah um equally i know this because one of my victim's son reached out to me and yelled at me on instagram and said and i and when he explained he's like you know he said made some crack about why aren't you paying well i get i get nine dollars he said how why don't you tell everybody how you haven't paid back your restitution i said well wait a minute now i said i have an agreement with the federal government. This was when I was still in probation.

I said, and I, every month I pay, I pay restitution per my agreement. And he came back and he said, those little, that little measly check that my dad gets every two or three months, doesn't, isn't shit compared to the, you know, the amount of money that you owe him. And I was thinking, I don't know how much money I, I don't owe anybody more than eight or 10,000. Do you think they chop it up equally or do you think they prorated based on the amount of you are? I don't know either.

He was irritated. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I don't think he was hurting. I would always tell my crime victims. They were like, well, when do I get paid back? You get paid back. It's going to be an embarrassing amount when you get money back after this guy gets out of prison

because it's earning potentials severely diminished after he's done time. It's not like this guy's going to be living like a baller. Yeah. Yeah. And I can't commit fraud anymore. The judge was very clear about that. Yeah, they frown on that. Yeah.

So, yeah. Although I do know one guy who got, who was found guilty for running a Ponzi scheme and started a second Ponzi scheme to pay off the victims of the first Ponzi scheme which he did. I'd get like that. I'd get like that. Yeah.

Which he did, by the way. Now, the second Ponzi scheme he got caught for, of course. Bummer. Right? So it didn't work out. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Yeah.

What are we doing? All right. How many views? What's the highest amount of views on a short from this episode? What do we hit? 10 million. Listen, so right now on the channel,

well no not well on our our shorts channel which we have shorts on the main channel too but on our primary shorts channel the the highest viewed video is 20 at this moment 24 million views and who was on that video with you man really i don't i wouldn't i think at one point they have a quarter of a second screenshot where i'm like look at the camera and other than that it's all you thank you baby it's the cash register and then after it got i don't know it was 18 million or something or 20 i started getting i get a text from you saying i'm basically the face of your channel when am i getting my royalties you still again you're paying for my hotel tonight no you paid for the three hours of gasoline i used to get here no what's funny is the first time

we asked you to come on you said so what kind of compensation do you provide i was like no compensation. You're just coming or we could do a remote. You think you're Rogan. Well, in any case, I'm glad I came and it's worth my time because I truly enjoy coming on your show and talking to you. I regard you as a good friend at this point. And so coming out and seeing you every six weeks or so is a pleasure. And I'm not looking to shake you down for money. And I hope you make a million dollars off of my stories. And I still wouldn't be paid back, would be able to pay back the money I have. Yeah. All right. We're good? Can I wrap it up?

Because I've had to do the bathroom for about 45 minutes. All right. Do your magic. All right. Hey, you guys. I appreciate you watching. We're going to leave all of Tom's links to his Instagram, TikTok. That's all you have.

Instagram. I got to YouTube, but no one watches it. And new clips channel. Oh, yeah. I got a hot new clips channel. Remixes. That's right. We're leaving, and his hot new shorts channel on YouTube.

So we're going to leave all the links to his. His stuff, very good. I wonder we should add it up. I guess probably, I'll bet all of them. So some are the other, it's not just that one. There's other ones that have like millions, right? If you, you mean from your, your feed or? From our stuff, right?

Yeah, you should sort yours, like, as far as like popular views. See who the top 10 are. Oh, my God, something tells me. Right here, right here. Hundreds of millions of views. So check out his content. He speaks in, what is the term? Clipponese.

Clipponese. So the links will be in the... So racist. The links will be in the description box. Click on them. Go there. Subscribe, follow. Once again, really appreciate you guys watching.

Please consider joining our Patreon. It's $10 a month. It really does help Colby and I make these videos. Thank you very much. See ya. See ya.