Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Confessions of a Medical Examiner | Inside NYC's Most Insane Crimes

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

Confessions of a Medical Examiner | Inside NYC's Most Insane Crimes

New York City had 24 homicides a year, 2400 homicides a year. Now, if you get 400, it's a big deal. So I'd see two or three a day. How long had you been in the medical examiner's office when 9-11 happened? 11 years, I guess. That was absolutely overwhelming. It ruined everything. It ruined my job.

It ruined my mind. It ruined America's sense of safety and imperiality in the world. In 2004, they had this tsunami that kills 238,000 people. What do you do with 238,000 people? Well, for the most part, you put him in trenches, mass graves. He went into one of those hot sheet motels, you know, $30 an hour cash to the desk clerk. The woman he was with, she brought some heroin for them so they could party a little, you know. When I came there, he was overdosed, obviously.

She was long gone. She's in the wind. And sure enough, he had a very high. level of heroin in his system. So we wrote it off as an accidental overdose. About two months later, the sex worker comes into the local precinct and she's found God and says, look, I want to tell you something, that guy over there in the castle motel, I gave him a hot shot. I shot him up on purpose to rob him. He's really rich and I got all the money out of his wallet. Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I am here with Barbara Butcher.

She is a former medical examiner, or I'm sure she'll correct me on exactly what her title is. And she is also the author of What the Dead Know, which is a memoir. And it's super interesting. I've watched several interviews on her. and we're going to talk about some of the crimes that she has investigated and her life. So check out the video. What was the exact title? It was you were the head.

Well, I retired as the chief of staff at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. For the first 11 years of my career, I was a medical legal death investigator. And that is the person who actually opposed to what you see on TV. goes to the scene of a death and investigates it. You know, you see on television they have an ME that goes and stops an autopsy right in the middle, puts a knife down, runs out, sticks her finger in a bullet bone, and says, yes, that's a 45 caliber, Matt. It's not true.

I know. I saw one of the videos you were mocking CSI, which is, you know, it's always funny. I'll get into these conversations with people and they'll say, well, you know, like, you Like, if they have your picture of you in the bank, weren't you worried that they would connect it with? I was like, it's not CSI. They're not running it through the system and finding out he's got 14 IDs in three states. And I'm like, none of that's connected. Like, it doesn't work like that.

Yeah. Maybe it does to a degree now, but. So I wonder. So, but yeah, you were talking about how there's all these procedures and all these things that you have to do. And it's a lengthy process. So, and you every once in a while indulge in CSI, but it's hard to watch. Yeah, yeah. I mean, no, it's a fun show.

It's meant to be fast-paced, fantastic in that there's a lot of fantasy stuff, and colorful and lively with good music. So, yeah, it's like watching a video, a music video. And everybody's young and good looking. Oh, yeah, yeah, but only with one of them always has a pierced lip or nose and short haircut, black leather jacket. Because you've got to have, yeah, very trendy, very edgy scientists. Look, in real life, most scientists are just regular, very young, very boring. No, they're not that boring. They're fun people, but a lot of them are just, you know, they're totally dedicated to science.

They don't go running around on motorcycles with nose rings. Right. Most of them. So were you born in New York or born raised in? I was born in Brooklyn. And then as soon as things, I was born in Park Slope, which is now a very wealthy neighborhood. Back then it was a working class Italian and Irish cops, storekeepers, firemen. And then all of a sudden, Long Island opened up.

developments, houses, where you could have room and yards and stuff like that. So they all moved out there. And my parents dragged me screaming onto Long Island, where I was terrified of the fact that the sky was wide open. You could see everything around you. I wanted the city. So I went to school out there and then got back to the city as soon as I could. Were your parents and law enforcement? My dad. My dad was a cop. He, uh, he, uh, he, uh, he. He rose up from patrolman to deputy inspector by the time he left the job. Yeah, real cop's cop, you know, just a hardworking, conservative kind of kind. What is deputy inspector?

I don't know what that. That's, let's see, it goes, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, deputy inspector, inspector, chief. Okay. So he was, you know, upper management. Right. Okay. So, okay. And so you graduated, you went back to the city, went to school. How did you end up in the medical examiner's office? You had a series of jobs, right? By being a drunk. By being a drunk. It's funny because that my dad used to say My dad was in you know

A for I don't know 20 some odd years and he was It's funny How just that's exactly how he would He would say he would say he's like I'm a drunk What do you mean? And people would get upset my mother Oh George you have an alcohol bar

You know what are you talking about like He's like what I'm not going to be ashamed That's what it is Like he's like I'm not going to sugarcoat it No sense getting fancy about it A drunk is a drunk You can call it a lot of things, but yeah, what happened is I started out okay, and then I started drinking when I was a teenager, and I kind of skipped over a few years. I didn't go right to

college. I kind of messed up. But then, I don't know what happened, but I stopped drinking, and I went to college, and I became a physician assistant, a PA, and I worked in surgery in a hospital in the South Bronx, and I had a great time, and I became a hospital administrator, and I was going up, up, up, and things were going well. And then I started drinking again. And things went right down to the bottom. I went from being a respected hospital administrator and political figure in the Bronx to being a button salesman off the books in a little store and living in a probably 175 square foot studio uptown and I had nothing. My life was in nothing. I didn't even go to the movies. I just drank. Went to work. Drink back and forth. And then one day I went out drinking

and I didn't stop. And when I got home, I was in a blackout. I had fallen in the street. I had given away my money to a junkie. And I woke up in a tangle of sweaty sheets on the floor with a bleeding head, scraped up face. I said, ooh, I wonder if you're a drunk. We're only getting worse. Yeah. So I made a few phone calls and I wound up going to AA. Now, getting sober was fabulous. I mean, I didn't realize just how sick I was every day. But the interesting thing is that when you're a drunk, you get services like EPRA, the employment program for recovering alcoholics in New York State, and they give you career counseling. So they gave me all those tests, Minnesota, multifacic Myers-Briggs preferential, blah, blah, blah.

At the end of the test, counselor said, Barbara, you should be a poultry veterinarian or a coroner. I said, poultry. Why chickens? He said, well, you're good with diagnostics, you're good in medicine, but you get too attached, too emotional. with your patients. So if you had puppies and kittens, you know, your heart would be broken, but chickens. I got beady little eyes. Nobody cares about chickens. I said, I'll take the dead people. Right. He said, all right. So call the one person in New York City who you think has the best job in the world. Ask if you can talk to them. I called Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, and he said, sure, come on in. We had an informational interview, and it was

fascinating. I, you know, me, I could go out and poke around in people's lives and work with cops and find out how people died. This is amazing. I want to do this. And they offered me the job, and I took it. They gave me the try. I had the right background in medicine. Now they gave me the training and investigation. And there I was. Being a drunk, got me my dream job. Sorry, go ahead. I should say that as a child, You know, I had a dissecting kit in a microscope, and I used to dissect little animals to see what they died. So it was kind of like a right from birth. I was kind of meant for this job.

How long did it take before you actually were, you know, going out to crime scenes and, you know, are you meant, were you mentored for like a period of time? Sure. The first three months, I went out with senior investigators all day long. I went to every homicide, every suicide, every accident in town. It was like 10 hours a day, and they just taught me the ropes. They taught me the books. I mean, the, you know, the ropes and they made me read all the books. Everything fits and fissure, the Bible of pathology.

I went to the New York City homicide investigations course. I went to criminal investigations. went to special victims. I even went to the FBI Academy for their course on death investigation. So I learned all the ins and outs, but nothing, nothing can teach you death investigation like actually doing it. So I was out there with the cops and the medical legal investigators day in, day out. Now, this is back of the day when New York City had 24 homicides a year, 2400 homicides a year. Now, if you get 400, it's a big deal. But back then, they were dying every day. So I'd see two or three a day.

I mean, are these overdoses, or are these like gunshot wounds, the bulk of them? Most of them were business, gunshot wounds. That was the 1990s, early 1990s was the height of the crack trade in New York City. And as the drug trade became more and more of a business, they started eliminating competition in the East. manner by hiring guys to just shoot each other. So people were shooting each other left and right. Now, what's causes the rise in deaths is definitely opious. Now they're adding an extra 3,000 deaths a year in New York City alone of drug overdoses. Imagine that.

Isn't that amazing? Yeah, but those solve themselves pretty quickly. You know it's a drug overdose. You do, but unfortunately, according to the regulations or the protocols established by the medical community, you still have to do an autopsy on them. You still have to investigate it. So. Autopsy on it. Even though it's obvious this person.

Needle in the arm, fentanyl on the bureau, foam coming out of the mouth, fentanyl overdose. but the protocols say, according to the National Association of Medical Examiners, that overdose deaths could be accidental, suicidal, or homicidal. So you have to investigate them thoroughly, including an autopsy. And that costs the citizens of New York an enormous amount of money. It doubles the number of autopsies done in New York City. Not quite double, but it's an extra 60, 70%. And, you know, it's, it's time-consuming.

We don't have enough medical examiners now anyway. So now you're making them do every damn overdose in town. Things may change on that. I was going to say that's going to say that's going to change. I mean, if it's that obvious, I was, it's funny, I, I, uh, I wrote a guy's story one time and I ordered the, I was, you know, he, he had a theory. of what had happened in his case and two of the witnesses in his case um both died of uh of um oxycodone you know overdose from oxycodone and i mean like the the you know there's half empty bottles spread around i mean it was almost it was like it was almost

overwhelming how obvious it was and they don't do um they don't do, they didn't do an autopsy. But this was New Orleans. Oh, New Orleans. Well, that's a whole another ball game. Not only, it's funny, too, because like the whole time he's screaming that these two people, both within a few weeks, well, one was probably two or three months before his trial after an indictment. Like, this is a guy who helped get him indicted and get someone else indicted and that guy dies. And then like two weeks before his trial, two or three weeks before his trial, one of his, the female witness, who was a CI in his case, she ends up dying. And he's the whole time saying it's the DEA agent that is setting him up. And of course, nobody believes him.

He goes to trial. He loses. And then the FBI indict the DEA agent for lying in his case and lying in front of the grand jury. The first day of his trial, he, two people get on the one person gets on the stand and just completely destroys him and he knows the second day there's a a CI is going to get on the stand that he had been sleeping with that he had always denied his wife is in the courtroom so that night he goes home puts a gun and puts a gun and he shoots himself and so you know the whole thing like it really this guy really is just such a bad case but I always remember thinking like how obvious is it that there's multiple bottles sitting around Like both of these people had jobs.

They weren't non-functioning addicts. They were functioning. You know, one person had supposedly beaten their habit. The other one had it under control or whatever, the reason, you know, whatever the circumstances were. But it was just such an overwhelming amount of evidence. And it was New Orleans. And the medical examiner wouldn't, I sent a Freedom of Information Act to the medical examiner, which notified the detectives.

no no the medical examiner gave me their their report but the homicide detective contacted the prison and they pulled me in and said why are you ordering a freedom of information act i think how do you know that they were like we just got a phone call from a detective in new orleans who i was like i need that and they were like what are you doing are you writing another story i am writing a story let me tell you what the story is and i tell them the story and he goes okay well i'll call them back and tell them to send it to you, but Cox, this is getting to be a pain. Anyway, they never sent me the hump. They never sent me the investigation of all this medical exam.

But it was very loose down in New Orleans. Things happen a whole different way in New Orleans. Do they have parishes and it's very odd? It's a very different kind of city. And I mean, you see if a thorough investigation and autopsy was done of the initial overdoses, on those two witnesses, maybe they would have seen that. It was overkill, you know, too much of a setup. Right.

I've seen plenty of that, or, you know, they make it look like. In fact, one guy, yeah, he went into one of those hot sheet motels, you know, $30 an hour cash to the desk clerk. And the woman he was with, the sex worker, she brought some heroin for them so they could party a little. little, you know? And when I came there, he was overdosed, obviously. She was long gone. She's in the wind. And I noticed something kind of funny that was a vizine eyedrops on the night table. Now, who's going out for a night with a hooker who brings his vizine eyedrops? What does he want to do? See more clearly? Get the red out? I don't know. But vizine contains scopolamine. And there was a beer there on the table.

If you put a few drops of vizine in somebody's drink, you will make them all woozy and knocked out. Then, if you want, you can shoot them up with the heroin. You can overdose them. Okay. So when we first got there, we thought, I don't know, I guess they were fooling around with the vizine, trying to get high. And he got, you know, he shot up the dope, and he died. And sure enough, he had a very high level of heroin in his system. So we wrote it off as an accidental overdose.

Well, about two months later, the sex worker comes into the local precinct and she's found God and says, look, I want to tell you something, that guy over there in the castle motel, I gave him a hot shot. I shot him up on purpose to rob him. He's really rich. And I got all the money out of his wallet. So you never know. you know never know

had to be a hell of a conversion for me to go into the police station and admit that sure it was but you know once she found Jesus she was just waiting to change her life well that's going to be a change they'll say they're gonna everybody oh they'll take it into

consideration well yeah they'll say up in front of the judge instead of 20 years you're going to get 18 sure you know get a big break but yeah okay so I had another I had another question I you had mentioned on one of the interviews where you said you really liked doing the whole investigation thing and you know poking through people's lives and being able to kind of you know put piece things together and and when you said that I just remember thinking like I had the that was

exactly what it was like is like you know writing true crime stories is, you know, sending off the Freedom of Information Act, getting their docket sheet, getting all the FBI 302s and the DEA sticks is and really putting everything together and the timelines. Like, it was amazing how much fun and enjoyment I would get, I got out of that, that whole process, which is something that I would have never, you know, had I not been, kind of like you had said, you got thrust into this, into this position, your dream job. But, you know, had I not been, you know, locked up writing these stories,

I would have never known that. You know, I was, I would get such a kick out of that. And what's so funny about that is that I've, you know, in a way, not that any arrests have happened. But, you know, I put together stories that literally I'm getting phone calls, honestly, probably three or about three, four months ago. I got a phone call from an FBI agent who had read one of my stories. and we had a whole discussion about how this one person I'd spoken to knew who had killed someone else. And while I'm telling him, like, well, this is what he told me and I'm explaining it. I'm telling him, I wrote it in the story, and you've got to read, there was two parts of the story.

He'd only read one. He didn't even know there was a second one. So he was, at this point, it was a cold case. They had opened back up. So I said, you got to read the second part. And I told him where it was on my website. and so we're talking and and I said but that doesn't mean that he did it this is what the guy thought this is what he was told I don't know and he goes oh no no he did it and I went what he said no

no he's already admitted it he was he admitted it he was trying to get a reduction by admitting it to us and the other and the people that he had the person he had hired to kill him he was trying to roll over on the guy the actual murderer he had ordered it and he had also ordered my subject was supposed to be murdered by the same person, but he wasn't able to do it. He had gotten arrested and ended up going to prison. So we're having this discussion. And so I was like, so I was right? Like this guy said, and I was like, yeah, you know, and I had put it together because I already knew the person had gone to prison, but he had been out during this time when my subject had almost been killed. It was a whole, it's a whole thing. Anyway, so that's

one and the second one is a guy I was locked up with where he had discovered a murder and was trying to get a sentence reduction by saying, look, I'll give you all the information. I even have the phone number of the phone he used to call the person and order the hit while he was incarcerated. And these are all recordings. But when you're incarcerated, you can buy minutes from other inmates, because you only have so many minutes a month. But let's say I have, I don't call anybody. You might, I might sell my minutes to somebody else. You're not supposed to, but they do.

So he'd used another inmate's phone to call and order a murder. And my buddy in prison knew the phone number. And so he was negotiating with them. And I wrote this whole story and everything. And so at one point, when I got out, I actually called the, I'm sorry, the homicide detective to talk to him. And the funniest thing happened was when I called to say, hey, I need to speak with this detective. The guy said, the guy answering the phone was a little bit, you know, terse initially. And then he said, well, I'll have him call you.

Give me your name and I'll have him call you. And I said, my name's Matthew Cox. And he goes, the con man? And I went, what? I go, are you Joe? And he goes, man, I just watched your podcast. podcast the other day, the one you did with concrete. Listen, my wife and I were laughing so hard. I knew I recognized your force. And I was going, this is insane. Like this was, it was hilarious.

So he was, oh, I'm going to call him at home. I'll call the detective right now. He's just for one of your stories. And I go, it is. And he said, I'm going to call him at home right now. I'll have the detective call. Sure enough, three, four minutes later, I get a phone call. Mr. Cox, I've already been to your website. I've read you. I don't know what your buddy's expecting. You know, I've had this conversation. But it's funny how you can put these things together and lay them out and kind of go, this is the only thing that makes sense. You know, this doesn't make sense because of this. Or if this had happened, this would have been the reaction. That's not what happened. And even just laying out the pieces, which is, of course, thinking and knowing who did it or even knowing who did it and then proving it in a way that can be prosecuted is obviously vastly different. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I loved investigating. It was the most fun of my life. Poking around in strange things is, you know, that nobody else gets to see. It's a privilege. And, you know, for you, it was hearing the stories from the people who actually did the deal. For me, it was being in there and then later meeting the perpetrators. Now, that was crazy. just having a civil conversation with a serial killer, it's a really strange experience.

And just as most con men and grifters, I like the term grifter. It's something I've always wanted to be. If only you didn't have to hurt people, I'd love to be a grifter. But being a con man, it requires charm. And it requires that, yeah, that they have to be likable. right? So, the serial killers that I met, I had to ask them for something. You know, blood samples, pubic hair samples. Imagine telling a rapist, look, I got to pull 30 pubic hairs from you, by the roots. Right. But no, this guy is so charming, this Aaron Key, who killed little girls.

He said, do what you have to do, ma'am, I understand. And now just what a nice, guy and he used that that princess die look you know when you look up at somebody from under your eyes like that and uh the same was george i call that my golly g-wiz officer i wouldn't do that yeah but that's the whole thing isn't it it's it sure is it's charler yeah no so and then the other you said what was the second person you said he was just oh george cobo George cobo was he killed four people and you know he was a con man

he was a sort of an antiques dealer an appraiser of fine objects but then when he'd find somebody with a fine object he'd want to steal it rather than buy it so just easy to kill them and George was very interesting

I told him said I'm sorry Mr. Cobold that I'm going to have to pull 30 hairs from your head and he said heavens, my dear. I'm already so balding. Must you really take so many? I said, I'm afraid so, sir. But I'll tell you what. I'll take them out very evenly so that your head doesn't look patchy. Thank you, my dear. Please call me George. And then we chatted. And it was like being at a cocktail party. Oh, what do you do? Tell me about yourself. This guy was fascinating. And, but all the while that I'm talking to him, and I'm almost laughing, actually, I was laughing. He was very funny. I'm thinking about the throats that he slashed.

Yeah. The way that he'd take a person's head and slashed the throat so deeply that their head would fall off backwards, like unhinging the head. So getting those flashes in my mind at the same time that we're having this delightful conversation, that was a pretty wicked job. So I got to see how people died, but I also got to see how they lived. And, you know, people in New York, probably most of the world,

but in New York especially, people live in all kinds of crazy ways from 5th Avenue penthouses in the sky filled with art and music and golden objects to squatter buildings where I have to crawl under the basement to pull out some poor junkie overdose and a pile of trash.

I saw a lot of things. What about hoarders? Oh, hoarders. I love a hoarder. I love a hoarder. There's a classic hoarder manner of death, and that is that their treasures, their trash, means so much to them that they're afraid people will break in and steal it.

So a lot of them will pile the same. stuff to the ceiling and leave little tunnels for them to go through, and they'll place booby traps in those tunnels, like a wire that when you trip it, it'll pull the trash down on you. That's how the most famous of the hoarders died. The Collier brothers died when there, booby traps went on them, and then a guy that we used to call, where's Waldo? Because we couldn't find the body. I was looking for Waldo all through this apartment. It was to the ceiling. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget.

After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. Couldn't even get the front door open. Had to go in through a window. But he did the same thing. He set up booby trap so nobody would touch his precious trash. And it came down on him and smothered him. How did they even know that there was a death? Just the neighbors complained of the smell.

The smell. Yeah. You start to smell pretty bad in a horde that size, you know, on a summer's day. Yeah. Ted Bundy was, you know, supposed to be extremely. charming. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I watched a documentary on him, and he escaped, like, three times. Yeah. And I just, every time I was, like, I just can't imagine how, you know, but it was back in what, the 70s, 80s, it was just, it was just insane. Like, I just couldn't believe how he kept escaping. Yeah. Yep. It was too nice of a guy.

Yeah. What a charming, charming guy. Yeah. And then that's the funny thing is, like, I've sat, like, I've had lunch with guys that have life sentences for you know murdering three people or this guy murdered you know a witness against them this guy murdered three people or this guy's got a you know there are guys that have there may not be they may not be life sentences but you know you get 45 years and you're 60 years old it's life but you're sitting there talking to these guys and and they're nice and they're

joking around and talking and I'm thinking you know you you they convicted you of three murders but you killed nine or ten B like they you talked about when you got off on all these state murders oh I've been I was tried four times in the state and found not guilty and there was just these three people I got caught for and they and it's just like I mean you know but nicest guy yeah like and you think wow because people can like you said it's people um I think you said in the other interview you know it's it's in one of the other interviews it was you know those those scenes show you how they lived how they died you know, the things that happened, the brutality, what really took place as opposed to what someone might tell you. Oh, it was a mistake. We were fighting over the gun. You weren't fighting over the gun. You walked him and shot the guy behind from behind.

Like, you didn't. That's not. Yeah. The, you know, people ask me sometimes, what does evil look like? How do you tell an evil person? You don't. Evil looks like you, me, and everybody else in the house. It's the only person I ever met who.

actually looked evil was George Kobo's partner, Tony Lee Simpson, also, you know, kill four people. He had, his eyes were like a wolf, like they had this sort of a flatness to them where he was assessing everything in front of him and there was no connection in the eyes. He's the only person I've ever seen who had an evil look about him. He made my blood run cold. Everybody else, geez fine nice as you please I mean I remember the guy who and they talk normally to the guy who he was out at a club

he meets a woman and he says to her let's go party back at my place and she said sure he said here's $50 get us some cocaine so she took the $50 and left because you know why not and so the guy got really angry. And he went to her apartment. She wasn't there, but her eight-year-old daughter was. So he took her. The eight-year-old, raped her, killed her, smothered it through her in

the trash, you know, really horrible. But when he sat with the police and they said, did you do that? He said, well, yes, she took my $50. And she was supposed to be with me, but she wasn't. So look what she did to me. I had to take somebody. He absolutely believed that he was correct. He did not try to hide it. This was his entitled right. He paid the money.

Right. And the cops were like, Barbara, you got this one, you're going to believe this guy. He was completely open about it. Oh, listen, I was in prison with sex offenders who would try and justify that, you know that they'd been they'd been um seduced or you know it was it was only because of society's rules that what what they had done were wrong and well you know if we were you know back

in Rome and you know whatever the yeah 800 you know aED it was like what do or if we were and such and such you know like you know no like but you're not so you know um yeah i've had pedophiles explain to me why it's actually to the benefit of the child to be initiated into sex by an older gentle person who will teach them the right way um we're talking about a six year old yeah yeah i was gonna say it's amazing yeah so justify what you know it and you know it's funny it's you know i was you know having been locked up um you know with them you know and learning you learn a lot about them. And I forget what the statistic is, but I mean, it's outrageous. It's like 80, 90% of them say that they were, you know, victims of sexual abuse. Yeah. As a child. So, and it's like,

okay, so you were, you know, you weren't born like this. You were created. But, and that's horrible. And so obviously, in a way, you're, you're a victim yourself. But I mean, but we can't let, you know, but you're, but now you're a monster. And we can't let monsters. And as sad as this is, is you just can't let monsters roam the countryside. I mean, you know, I'm sorry for you and I wish that hadn't happened, but lots of people, it happens to lots of people and they don't turn into what, you know, what you've become. Yeah. But it's amazing, like you said, how people can justify things to themselves. And then, and then look at the other person that you, that you spoke about the sex worker who, who robbed the guy and found God and just said, hey, I can't, I can't live with

this. I have to, I've been burdened myself. I have to tell you guys what happened. Yeah. It's a strange business crime. It really is. It has its own rules and they're odd and especially sexual crimes. It's like talking to a Martian sometimes the way the people justify or the people who kill for a living. The young guys back in the 90s who were hired strictly to shoot competitors. Imagine 18, 19 years old, you're given a gun and position of great authority in the organization. You're going to be the killer. Oh, thank you. Right. I want you to kill Jose and Bill tonight. Oh, okay, great. You're really just a pawn. You're just a pawn. But it's a, it's a, you know, you're a made man now. You're in a position of great importance in this organization.

which is why they have so many young people running drugs. You know, Escobar and all that, that crowd, all the cartel. They get young guys who need to feel like they're important, that they have some contribution to the world, even if it's as a killer, you know? I can understand. I think young men especially want to belong or be, you know, mentored in some way on what a man is.

And if you have nobody, you have nobody decent in your life to tell you how to act, how to behave decently, then the male figures in your life that tell you this is the way you're supposed to behave. You're going to follow that. You have no other example. You want, and you desperately, most people desperately want to be accepted, you know, by society or by people, by older males, especially younger males. Yeah. That's why that's why gangs thrive in urban cities, you know, either that come from a single parent. home or no home or that both parents work and they're just, they're out there sort of running free and they want instruction and discipline. So an older gang member makes them belong to a family, teaches them about loyalty and respect and all these things that make them feel like fine young men. And your job as a gang member is to do terrible things. But hey, you're loyals.

Yeah, well, and then you go to jail for 20 years. And it's funny, the guy when I was in a medium security prison at Coleman, the, it's not an orderly. What do you call it? Are you Catholic? Mm-hmm. Oh, I was raised that way. Right. Well, me too.

I'm in recovery. He was the altar boy. So the altar boy was about 40 years old and had been in prison since he was 17 or 18 years old. He was from Columbia. And at some point, the United States took a bunch of Columbia's most violent criminals and brought them to the United States to house them. So he was going to basically, I don't know. I just know that's how he ended up. I know he wouldn't, he wouldn't speak English. He would say I'm a prisoner. They came, they got me, they brought me here. I should be in my own country. Okay. And maybe he was even, maybe he was on an indictment that was in the United

States. I'm not sure. But he was only, he got picked up when he was like 17 or 18, but he'd killed like 20 some odd people. He'd been killing since he was 14 or 15 for the cartel in Columbia. And he was now going to, he was going to die in prison and he was the altar boy at church. Yeah. And nicest guy. You know, but then I didn't know anybody money and he didn't have a gun. So, yeah. You meet some amazing people, right? That's the nicest way to put it. So you, do you mind if we, if we talk about you had, how long had you been in the medical examiner's office when 9-11 happened? Well, it is, well, 11 years, I guess, 10, 10, 11 years.

And they were good years. I mean, I was certainly getting my share of fabulous investigations and cases. I was having a good time. But at the same time, my soul was all. being crushed. You can only see so much and every, every tragedy you see, you have to detach emotionally so that you can do your work. And I detached too much and was destroying my relationships, my friendships, my friendships, everything. And so I wasn't doing too good. And then the universe said, okay, well, individual deaths are bothering you. Let me smack you in the head with 3,000.

And that was absolutely overwhelming. It ruined everything. It ruined my job. It ruined my mind. It ruined America's sense of safety and imperiality in the world. It ruined everything for whole of us. But I guess the main thing that I learned that I learned. there was that, you know, this is, this is old saying that one death is a tragedy and a thousand deaths is a statistic.

Right. We hear every day about, you know, 5,000 people killed in Libyan, floods, earthquakes, and you go, oh, it's too bad. But when you are crawling through a pile of burning, smoking rubble to pick up little body parts, human remains, a finger, a piece of that, muscle, skin, and you see a calendar. Lunch was Joe, one o'clock Tuesday, or the graduation picture of a fifth grader. Or I found a desk set, you know, the pens and a golf ball from a hole in one, you know, like a memorial thing. Right. I'll move with the guy's name on it. Now you realize, wait a second, each of these people is, is me. We have our jobs and our friends and our favorite coffee mug, and we have our

families. Each person is like a universe with connections everywhere. And just seeing those small pathetic objects hit me so much harder than if I had seen 3,000 bodies laid out, because I've seen that. I saw that in Thailand after the tsunami. Um, just the little homey things that make a person a person. Right. We can make us identify with each other. Yeah, that really, um, that was a hard, that was a hard job. That was a ridiculously hard job.

Uh, and, you know, back in those days, we didn't get help for those things. No, we're too strong for that shit. We don't need no stinking help. We're strong. You know, we're brave. We can do it. And then we realized we couldn't. They started giving us some help for PTSD.

But to this day, I still can't walk past a tall building without thinking, Jesus, I wonder what it's going to take for that one to fall on me. Right. I'm constantly vigilant for danger. But, you know, like then going to Thailand, 2004, they had this tsunami that kills 238,000 people. What do you do with 238,000 people? Well, for the most part, you put them in trenches, mass graves, like in Haiti with the earthquake, 100,000 people dead, dig huge holes with bulldoches, put all the people in, say a blessing, out you go ahead. But in Thailand, they had this big, go ahead.

I was going to say, how did you get to Thailand? How did you end up in Thailand for that? Oh, the government had a problem. And that was that even though they were burying their citizens in trenches, there were 840 European tourists in Thailand. And their governments didn't want them put in trenches. They wanted them identified and sent back to their countries, repatriated to their families. So how are you going to do that when you've got 5,000 rotting bodies out in the sun rotting, laid out at all the temples? That's what we used to smorgs.

So we, the United Nations, the health sector, asked us to go over there and help them out, see if there was a way that they could identify people, even though they had no records, no, nothing. And we did. We brought DNA scientists over, the Europeans sent teams, and we all worked together. They got the dental records of each European tourist. And then we went through each of those 5,000 bodies with forensic dentists. looking for that pattern that would match somebody back in Germany. We did DNA, their family sent samples.

We did anthropology, looking for scars or operative hardware, like from any replacement. So we did it. We did it. And the reason that the Thai people had to spend all this money and do all this work, even though their country was devastated, was because they depend on tourism. Right. You can't piss off the Europeans and then they won't come to your country anymore.

That will hurt your economy. So the Thai people who are fabulously calm and sensitive and kind, they said, okay, we'll do it. Of course. Even though their homes were wrecked and everything was right, they thought, do it. I was going to say, like with the masquer. graves. Like, I mean, it's not like, like, what, you know, like, what else do you do? You know, you know, I mean, I get, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's, it's horrible. It's horrific. But you can't, you know, you don't, you don't have the facility. No choice. Right. You don't

have the bandwidth to be able to identify every one of these people, bury them, you know, acquire the plots, bury them. Or even, like, there's no, it's a horrible choice. But the, you can't not do it. Yeah, there really was no choice. Even cremation, the wood was all wet. You know, everything was soaked from the tsunami, and you can only burn just so many tires. I mean, they tried it for a while, but like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, these countries that have very little to begin with. I was going to say that in the resources to do it.

Yeah. Even if they had the manpower, even if you had the manpower, right, you've got nothing but bad choices. It's like we got like six bad choices, but what's the, what's the? least bad choice we could go with. Yeah. Well, you know, in Thailand, they knew they had to do these mass burials, but they thought, you know, we have to, we have to identify morgue areas. Let's use the temples as morgues. And that way the monks can bless everybody. The Buddhist monks will bless them as they go on their way into the next life, which was, you know, a very nice accommodation to do. So other countries, they just quit dug the whole throne and do what you have to

do to keep living right so it's it's funny in situations like that how quickly your priorities you know get lined up yeah yeah the living come first you know so they did so at how long so how long were you in the medical examiner's office 23 years the first 11 first yeah You look, no, you were you. Now, the first 10, 11 years were as an investigator. After 9-11, I became director of investigations, then blah, blah, blah, director of forensics, director of the academy in the DNA lab.

And eventually I was chief of staff. And so the last seven years or so of it, I was working as chief of staff, which was good in that it pulled me off the streets where I didn't have to see tragedy every day. But it threw me into the hotbed of politics in New York City, where I had to advocate for the agency and try to get our agenda met to get the supplies and services that we need to do a good job. and it was actually fun I came to enjoy politics after a while but politics killed me in the end I pissed off the wrong people

oh well so a new mayor came in and said Barbara I don't like you bye Bill de Blasium six foot five pile and nothing

big pardon big pardon Yeah, I have that personality where, you know, people either, I would say, you know, 50% of the people that mean me either love me immediately, 50% dislike me. And if I focus on that 50%, I can get about 50% on them back. But really, I typically lose about 25%. There's just nothing I can do. So I try and identify them and I realize, okay, it's a lost cause even making an effort on this guy. Yeah. Go with the ones you can, you know, go with what you. you can the ones you can sway sure assess your resources and assign them accordingly this isn't yeah this isn't going anywhere do you have any cases that stand out to you sure i mean i heard the you know i heard the booby trap one the booby trap one is pretty good yeah but um let me tell you a different one.

Yeah, I was going to say, I actually heard you tell that one twice. A couple times. Listen, you go twice. And on one of the shows, you didn't want to say the whole thing, the whole. Yeah. And I thought, well, I've just already heard it twice. Yeah. She got over that, but I thought she did this one of the earlier podcasts.

Yeah, probably. But that was interesting, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. The movie travel one, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, you know, the case that had.

the biggest influence in my life was the case of Aaron Key, a serial killer. What happened was over a 10-year period, little girls, 13, 14 years old, sometimes a little older, 16, 18, they were being raped and murdered in East Harlem, near 106th Street. There was a big, there is still a big housing complex there. So the first time the little girl gets killed, she's 13 years old, and her body is discovered over by the FDR. She's a resident of the housing projects. And on her way home from school, you know, she went to the elevator, but somebody got on with her. And then somehow she winds up over on the East River, just wearing her little, what's that called, the Beastie Boys?

There's some little watch, you know, boys in the, boys in the hood. I don't know what it was, but some little 13-year-old thing. This little girl is raped and strangled and left for, and just thrown away. So back in, I think this was in 92, so they get DNA and some hair samples and stuff, but they have nothing to match it to. And then more rapes happen, and then more deaths happen. And over a 10-year period, there's probably 10 rapes and at least three, maybe four homicides. And from each victim, we get the same DNA and the same hair samples.

So we know it's one guy doing this. Now, have you ever heard of this in the newspaper? Did you ever read about it? No, of course not. Because if it was on Park Avenue, one white girl raped and murdered, you'd never hear the end of it. all over the New York Times, the daily news, you'd hear about this. And there would be a man hunt out to find this evil killer. But in East Harlem, no.

Not one story. Not one. And, you know, they brought in lots of people for questioning, but nothing ever came of it. And finally, the families got together and started putting up posters saying, you know, our children are being raped and murdered. Yep. Let's do something. Let's find somebody. And the police department puts up a reward for $11,000. That's pitiful. That's an insult. Right. So they bring a guy in because somebody calls him with a tip. He says, I think it sounds like a guy named Ace.

And they bring in Ace. And it turns out he was somebody that they brought in 10 years before. But he used a different name. name. So they said, oh, couldn't be him. Now they get this guy in on a charge of stealing a computer part. And they bring him in for questioning. He doesn't know anything. But what they do is they ask him for a DNA sample. He said, oh, no, I couldn't do that. I'm a Jehovah Witness. It's against our religion. Okay, no problem. Is it? No. Okay. But you can claim a lot of things under religion, of course. Now you could, now you could, you could grab your iPhone and go, wait a minute. Yeah.

No. So what they did is they gave him a drink of water, and when he was let go, he threw the cup and the trash. Of course, they picked it up very delicately, took it over to the lab, where they found the DNA on it, and matched to every one of these rapes and murders. And of course, you know, that's when I met him. When I, it brought him in for another sample for taking blood and hair, matches pubic hair to the original 13-year-old girl.

Everything matched. And we went to trial, and I gave my testimony, and he was convicted. And he's saying, not me. No, no, no, he wasn't him. No, as a matter of fact, he said, It was a plot by the medical examiner to steal organs. And we said, well, how does that come? How does that work?

How are we doing it? What do we get organs? His next to the last murder was one of my cases. A 19-year-old girl who was studying computer science. Nice girl. And, you know, he raped her, strangled her, and then set her on five. fire. And I can never, if I live to be 120 years old, I can't forget the sight of that little girl burned up. And a little ankle bracelet on her, her smile, everything about her. And sitting in

court, looking at this guy, and he's crying and he's yelling, you people, what you're doing to me? This is a plot against me. The medical examiners try to steal organs. They did it. They did it. And he, of course, was convicted and sentenced to three life terms plus 40 years for each of the rapes. So something like 400, 500 years. And once he got into prison, his true colors came out. He had been so so aggrieved, so charming, so home, you know, poor little me. I didn't do anything. Once he got in there, he said, I got to make some money.

So he made rape cards. He drew pictures of the girls, and he wrote down detailed descriptions of what he did to each of these little girls and went online to sell them for $25 a piece. He had entire episodes of rapes. But here's the worst part. People were buying them. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Now, of course, quickly the prison, you know, put a stop to that. You can't profit off your crimes, of course. Well, there's ways. It depends on the state.

That's right. That's right. But I learned so much about human nature in that one case, you know, that the nature of evil, the nature of the con, the nature of families and friends, and the fundamental unfairness of the justice system that little brown and black girls who live in poverty don't count right they don't get investigated their murders their families don't count that pissed me off for the longest time and it still makes me angry because it still happens today i was going to say that that's not something that happened 20 years ago that that happens right now yeah i mean that was such a glaring blatant example it was absolutely no excuse. No one could ever say, oh, we couldn't investigate it because we were overwhelmed with

that tragedy over there. No, no, no. There was no excuse, and it still pisses me off to this day. I've interviewed a bunch of guys that have been like wrongfully convicted, you know, on the other side where it's like, you know, you listen to their story and the whole time you're going, how did they convict you? Like, how is this possible? You know, and then, and then, you know, suddenly DNA, they get finally, you know, they were before there was like CODIS, like they had DNA, but they didn't have, you know, is it? CODIS? Yeah, CODIS.

CoDICT. But CODIS, but CODIS. So, codis. And so this one guy had done 16 years and finally the Innocence Project said, he was like, look, all I'm asking you to do is run the DNA they got on the girl, which wasn't his. He was still convicted. It wasn't her. They just said, oh, she was promiscuous. He said run that DNA against, you know, against, you know, run it through CODIS.

And so finally they were like the Innocence Project, somebody, after being turned down three times, somebody said, okay, fine. And they ran it. Turned out it was another guy, two years. So two years after the rape and murder that he was convicted of, he raped and murdered someone else and he was now serving a life sentence for it. Yep. Same guy. That happened all the time. Not the high school student that you said, like the prosecution had said, oh, she's promiscuous.

us. This is the DNA. They actually said it was a DNA from a boy she was dating. Never proved it. Never anything. His lawyer, he didn't have a good lawyer. They were poor. They had a public defender. They couldn't do anything. Although lots of public defenders are good, but let's face it, they're just overwhelmed. They're just overwhelmed. And the other thing is, is that, you know, the police said, you know, he was 16 years old and they had, you know, basically scared him into confessing. Like so, you know, they were telling them they were going to, you know, if you don't confess, you know, I'll never be able to get you out of the building.

These other detectives want to kill you. They're going to be, you know, just do this so I can at least get you out of the building. So he's like, you know, he's so scared after eight hours of being questioned. He's crying. And he was always signs it. That was it. He was done. Then on he was done.

But then 16 years later, find out he was right. He was, there was the truth the whole time. He wasn't there. He was playing basketball with his friends. And his DNA was this other guys. He got let out. He's now a lawyer actually in New York. Wow.

The justice system is fundamentally unjust, but it's, I mean, it's what we have for the moment. It's flawed because humans are involved and humans are flawed and they get emotional and they are manipulative and easily manipulated. And, you know, anytime you have people, as good as the system is, as anytime you have humans running it, there's going to be problems. Yeah. They're just corruption, you know, in every facet. And honestly, compared to probably compare to most countries, we have a pretty decent system. Pretty good. Yeah.

Pretty good. You know, of course, you know, I love Canada's system. Even if you're found guilty, you barely do any time. You know, you can recognize it got like, you're like, I got 10 years. I'm like, oh, man, how much time you do? I did about 18 months in jail, three years in my living room on house arrest while I would say, well, what's that like? Oh, well, you know, you can only go to work, the grocery store to work out, see your

girlfriend, go to church, go out for dinner. And I was like, holy joke, that's life. Yeah, but I got an ankle monitor on. I think, oh. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's church. Oh, wow. horrible.

Yeah. Pretty bad. So, you know, as opposed to the same crime in the United States, you get 20 years. And you serve it. Right. You know, that's why we have to depend on science more and more. The human, you know, eyewitness testimonies hugely flawed. People lie, people cheat.

People tell all kinds of stories to get themselves in or out of trouble. But science speaks for itself. DNA, video, you know, CCTV catches you in the act. You know, this like video cameras everywhere, literally everywhere. Cell phone technology, you know, I wasn't even there. I was buying gas, five miles away. Yeah. No.

Yeah. So, you know, we've got to depend on science. Science, too, is flawed. I mean, there was a DNA technique used. by the most advanced labs in the world in New York City and in London. And that was a, they call it low copy, high sensitivity DNA. And it found every little scrap of DNA on, let's say, the handle of a gun. So they would have mixtures of maybe four different people on that gun.

And then they used a statistical program to determine the likelihood of this little. tiny piece of DNA falling on versus the perpetrator. And it was flawed science. I mean, they stopped using it, of course, but for a while there, it became... Go-to? Yeah, it was a go-to thing. Everybody thought, oh, this is the miracle technique, this high-sensitivity, low-copied DNA. And it wasn't.

And it was also a person in the medical examiner's office. in the DNA lab, who was doing a thing called dry labing. That's when you take the specimen and you open it up and you look at it, but you don't really test it. You just pass it off because it's too much work. And saying, nope, no evidence here. So rapists were getting away with rape and doing it again because this one woman couldn't be bothered to test all the rape kits. It was too much work. Well, and, you know, there was that scan.

and I, where was it? I don't know if it was St. Louis. I forget, I probably don't know the day. I can't think of it. Where there was a woman who was, she was an addict. And she was just rubber stamping everything that went through, not testing it. And she did it. And this went on for years.

And there was hundreds and hundreds of people, or no, sorry, thousands of people where she was saying, yes, this is methamphetamine. Yes, this is this. Yes, this is this. And people were going to jail. and they had to let out thousands of people. But I was going to say, I was thinking about also like, remember, remember bite marks? I don't know the bite mark analysis. Yeah, like, and they were like, oh, it's as good as a fingerprint.

No, no, no, not at all, not at all. And there's also, you know, there's all kinds of tire tread science and fiber science and all kinds of things. Some of it's good. Some of it's not. Some of it's junk science. But all in all, I still put my money on science over people. Yeah. You know, I was going to say I was probably 17 years old one time.

And I remember when they had malls. I actually had gone to the mall and left. And I was getting into my, and was I getting in or was I pulling into part? Either way, I was in my car and I just was in my car. That's right. I got in my car, closed the door. And I started my car and I was doing, I was kind of hanging out. in my car for getting situated and a couple of black guys came over to a car like right in

front of me walked up knocked out the window open the door and I realized they're in the car now and I realized oh they're still in that car and I jumped out of my car I don't know what I was thinking what are you my idiot I know and I was like hey what are you doing and they jumped up and they looked at me and they go what I go I said what are you doing they go man mind your business I go that's not your fucking car and I and I and the guy was like find your business I go this is my business I don't know what I was thinking I was 17 years old that I remember when I when you remember you were 17 years old I remember thinking I would drive fast and they somebody would say what if you get in an accident I'd say oh I'll brace myself against the steering wheel oh yeah yeah I'm that I'm that tough of a guy so anyway so I yell the guy and I start to run towards them and they took off running thank God they would have beaten me like a small child had they stayed but they knew they were doing something wrong and they took off running and they knew you were a lunatic you had to be crazy so therefore they didn't know what you would do would you shoot them would you stab them with you were crazy enough one little kid to stand up to you know you're 17

I did all kinds of stupid things this wasn't the dumbest thing I did at 17 I bet so uh listen I remember by the time I got to the car they had run down the lane and were running through traffic like passing over like three or four lanes of trap. They were just super fair. And so I go into the, I go into the mall and I call 9-1-1. This was before cell phones. Good little citizen.

Yeah, I know. Listen, things went so bad for me after that at some point. Yeah. Until I was like, 30, it was like 28, 29. I was actually a very normal person. Yeah. So I remember the police showed up and the guy was taking, it was a black police officer.

and he was we were taking um he was taking a uh uh you know a report and when he got he's how tall were they was like i don't they were they were tall and he was like well how tall i go i don't know 5 8 5 9 and he goes and he goes that's not tall and i said i said bro i'm 5 foot 6 if you're 5 7 you're tall you're cool i said you're like a giant look at you and he was like he's shaking his head his partner's shaking his and then he goes if you saw them would you recognize him Would you recognize them? And I went, no. And he goes, are you, are you worried?

I said, no, bro, I couldn't tell you. He said, listen, my adrenaline spiked, I said, it could be anybody. I said, you could be one of them. I said, like, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you if you bring me to a lineup. I'm like, they were thin, tall black guys. I said, you could throw a stick and hit five of those guys right now. I mean, and I couldn't tell you if any of them were the guy. Like, I just couldn't, you know.

And it's not that they were black, but had they been, you know, white, two white kids, I couldn't have told you who they were because my adrenaline spiked. And it was in such a rush to jump out of the car and run, and they ran. And so, but can you imagine? That's why it always kills me, these people that walk in and say, oh, it's absolutely him. Oh, I saw him for 30 feet away and I recognize his, his hair. Yes, I know that hair anywhere. What hair?

Well, that kind of hair, yeah, eyewitness testimony is notoriously bad. But we have, like, I'm sure cell phones must come into play a lot more now. And obviously, like you said, video cameras and. You know what happens, though, nowadays? We get one little problem with science, and that is the CSI effect. We were talking earlier about how CSI has, you know, huge video screens that monitor not just one street corner, but no, the entire city. You can trace a man as he drives uptown and cross town over the bridge, and we'll track him everywhere by this huge map. And at the same time, we're going to get DNA results in 15 minutes.

Right. And we also have a satellite that will pick up sound from as much as. 200 miles away. Yes, we'll do it. Okay, so now. Reality. Reality. You're in Times Square, and there's a guy named Tommy standing on the corner waiting

to cross, and we know he's from out of town because he's waiting for the light to change. He's not jaywalking like the rest of the New Yorkers. And then Tommy suddenly looks up, sees a guy he knows, runs over to him, and says, I'll kill you, you motherfucker. and Tommy shoots Bill and brighten the head in front of three priests and six nuns who are on a bus tour from Baltimore. And they are all witnessing this entire thing. And we have video camera.

We have video of the whole thing from every building ground here. In fact, when the police come, the guy is still holding the gun. And there's a receipt in his pocket from Walmart. He just wanted two days ago. I feel like you, this is, I feel like, this is, I feel like, Like you can't get them. I'm waiting for you to sell you. You feel good, right?

Yeah, feel pretty good about this. All right. So we go to trial. Police testify, the nuns, the priests, the video cam, we have everything. One jury member says, what about the forensics? They say, well, I'm sorry, we presented the forensic. What about the DNA? What DNA?

So he's watched three seasons of CSI Miami. He knows what he's talking about. That's right. But this is an honest-to-God thing that keeps popping up in cases and it's driving prosecutors crazy because people say, well, I know that you have to have DNA. And the prosecutor explained, but there was no contact, no physical contact between them. Well, there had to be if they murdered him and there has to be DNA because they don't understand DNA.

So this is called CSI effect. Increasingly, what prosecutors are doing, as they give their opening remarks, they're telling, explaining to the jurors that TV is not real life. What a lesson. Wow, what a surprise, that the things they see on television solve crimes are not necessarily real. And there have been times when, honest to God, people who are covered with evidence have gotten let free because the jurors don't believe that there was sufficient forensics. There was no DNA.

There were no fibers. it happens yeah right so the CSI effect is real and it's a pain in the ass I mean I hate to say this but I mean

people really are stupid like there's lots of dumb people out there is sure but that's you know they're entitled to be who they are but if you put them in a position of authority like on a jury right but you better make sure they know something listen I watched the TikTok the other day

had me just die and laughing. And I hate to keep telling that I watched the TikTok. But I spend all day. Not all day, but I do watch it everyone's while. And there was some guy who was talking about having gotten a jury notice. And he was like, he's like, I'm not going. He's like, first of all, this whole thing is stupid. He's like, I didn't go to law school. Like, I'm not capable of understanding what you're saying he did it. I don't know if he did it. Like I, you know, the lawyers, one lawyer saying he did it. One didn't. I'm here. I'm not a judge. I didn't go to law school. You're expecting me a normal person and a bunch of other normal people to figure this out. He's like, listen, I don't know if you guys have spent any time with normal people. They're not that

smart. If you guys don't know, we're not going to figure this out. And this is a waste of time. And I'm only going to make $24 a day. You know, whatever the jury, the way they pay them, which is ridiculous. And they're trying to tell me, it's a privilege. The woman on the phone told me, this was a privilege. I was laughing so hard because he had, it went on for a minute and a half and it was, every point was, I was like, he's, he's being funny, but boy, he's, he's spot on. You know, he's absolutely right because you're asking them to take someone's life in their hands and make an overwhelming decision based on their knowledge, which is minimal, if not a non-existent.

Maybe we should have professional jurors, people who are scientists, doctors, financiers, you know, whatever is applicable to the case at hand. Let them be the jurors. Then why not? It's a good job. I had a guy, of course, I've known tons of people that, you know, that went to trial. And I had this one guy who went to trial. And during Baudier, they asked one of the jury, you know, they asked all the jury members, but this one particular one, they asked the guy, they said, you know, do you think you have, you know, do you think you can find him, you know, not guilty? And he goes, no. And he goes, no. And he goes, no. And he's like, everybody else is, they lie when they say, yeah, I can, I can look at the evidence. And he goes, he said, why do you say no? He said, why do you say no? He said,

he was he was indicted on 30 counts of wire fraud he did something like and i remember the guy his name was Andrew Levinson actually the guy who was that who had gone to trial he said he said like i appreciated him he was because that's what everybody else was thinking he said but they didn't say they knew that wasn't the right thing to say so they didn't say it is at least he said it he's like of course you know we struck him he said but at least he said it. And, you know, and he, he said, what's so funny about this guy's case is that they spent almost an entire day going through all of the checks that had been written from, from the business, which was, you know, they described it as it was a business opportunity scam. And he had

made, I forget what it was, $20 million or something. And of course, over the course of three or four years, he'd spent a ton of money. And so they just went through, spent the day just going through the different cars he bought, the vacations, all the things he'd done with this, you know, illicit money. And he's like, like, and of course, I'm looking at the jury members. He said, keep in mind when I'm, he was out on bond. So when he would leave, he's like, like, I'm seeing them get into their, their 15 year old beat up Nova or their old, you know, their old Chevy, you know, whatever, or they're, you know, Ford, but he's like, and they're looking at me. And I know that even if they thought, even if there wasn't enough evidence, they hate my guts because I'm driving a Bentley and I live in a

$3.5 million house and they've seen the vacation. He's like at one point I spent, he spent like 400 bucks on a meal for he and his wife. He's like like they talked about that $400 meal, male, oh sorry, that $400 meal that we had, he's like for five minutes. Like they questioned me about it. He's like, I mean, he said, I understand. and how these people could say, you know, I hate your guts. Even if you didn't do anything, you're just such a jackass the way you spent this money. In general, like, I can barely pay my rent. Now I'm stuck here listening to this for the next, for two weeks, I've got to listen to this.

You're going down. Yeah. You've got to do some prison time. And then, of course, the other thing is, which always bothers me about the jury system, is that the jury doesn't really get to know what you're facing. So unless you're facing capital murder, I mean, sorry, capital punishment. they don't get to know. So a lot of juries will say, well, he's probably just going to get probation, you know.

And so then they find out two weeks later or two months later, they read the newspaper, you got 15 years. And they go, oh, my God, I never would have found him guilty. He didn't deserve 15 years. Like, I thought he was going to get probation. And of course, that's why they say, well, that's why we don't, that's not your job. But I think that if you let people know what they were facing, I think that would also change.

You know, sometimes they get deadlocked and they get frustrated and they want to go home. They say, okay, fine, I'll find him guilty on wire fraud. Next thing you know, they don't realize that, well, wire fraud, there's $6 million in loss. He's looking at. It's a big one. Yeah. He's going to hold. So, yeah, it's flawed, but I don't know how much better.

Like you said, if you can do stuff, but science can't fix everything either. Yeah. You can't fix human nature. Right. So. Yeah. But if we had a justice system that was operated on principles of professionalism, if we had professional juries and professional scientists and professional investigators doing everything,

at least we'd have a chance to get it right without prejudice. It was pretty close now. like I just talked to these guys who you know who say you know well there's tons of innocent guys in prison are there you didn't do any right now I don't want these guys living in my neighborhood yeah like I think maybe now here's what I've seen happen and probably maybe maybe 10% of the time maybe over sentenced so you got 20 years and honestly if he'd gotten five years that really probably was enough. Like, this is clear. They offered him three years. Like, you offer the guy three years. He said, no, I'm not going to take three years. I'll go to trial. He goes to trial. He gets 20. Like, what's the justification? You said it when he only does. You were going to give him three. So that's totally unfair. Or, you know, this guy gets 10 years for the same crime. This guy gets 15. You know, there's a lot of that. Or you're living in one area of the country and you get 30 and in this area

you're getting three. There's lots of problems that. That I see. But to be it, listen, I honestly, maybe can think of having seen one or two guys that after looking at their stuff thought, wow, you should not be in prison. And that's, and honestly, I wrote a story on two guys. These are two of those guys. One of them probably should have done five years just for stupidity. And that's not a real thing. That's not a real charge.

But if there was a charge, he should have done five years. years for that. He did 17 because he's like, I didn't do anything wrong. Like he got involved in a Ponzi scheme where, and the quick version is, I think I'm, I think you'll appreciate this. A friend from, a family friend came to him and said, hey, I started an investment firm. Would you be willing to invest? We're doing four X trading. Okay. So the guy ham, you know, he hounds him over the course of weeks, months. His father, it's a family friend. So his father then says, what, you want to you give this guy some money, but we're friends. What's a big deal? You know, you're going to make it that. Okay. So he gives him like $100,000. And two months later, he's got like $112,000. And he's like,

that's not bad. So then, you know, another month goes by and it's like one, you know, 19, 120. It's like, wow. You know what? So he goes and he gives him a couple hundred thousand more. Same thing. So then the guy comes to him and says, look, would you mind if I pitched your dad? and your mom and your brother, he's like, yeah, sure. And, of course, he comes in, he pitches him and he says, listen, you guys, this is what happened with me. Now it's the Ponzi scheme. So he's just going on a website.

His money's gone. Yeah. But the website, the bank statement looks good. So his parents put money in. Then he puts more money in. Then he gets a couple of friends to put money in. So this goes on for eight months or so, 10 months. Well, finally, the two guys, his, his, his, he's, he's, he's, he's, he gets a couple of friends.

his childhood friend or family friend and his partner come and they say, listen, you've done us such a great favor and helped us raise money. We're going to let you in on the company as a partner. If you put in 600,000, we're going to let you go in for 30%. And he says, he said,

I thought I was getting in on the ground, at ground zero. He said, or at the bottom, the first, you know, of Google. Like, I thought this amazing.

These guys are amazing. So he said, I gave him the $600,000. So now he's, by the way, now he's invested a million of his own money. And they said, all you have to do. And it was he's like, I don't know anything about trading. They said, we're the traders. You just have to raise money. So he's going around raising money.

And when he, and they're kind of giving him what, telling him what to say. And one of the things they tell him is, look, the most anybody can, the way we're doing the trades, even if the market went to zero, the most these guys could lose is 30%. Now, that's not true. You can lose everything. He doesn't know any better. He raises $17 or $18 million over the next two years, which of course he thinks they've run that up to 20, 30, 40 million, whatever the number is. And eventually the market crashes. They start getting calls. They start getting calls. from the, you know, from the, the platforms that they're trading through, they can't raise it. That's when he realizes, what do you mean we can't, what are you talking about?

We have plenty of money. We have like $8 million of our own money in this bank account here. And then he starts realizing this isn't what's happening. So he actually goes to the U.S. attorney's office and says, listen, these guys were running a Ponzi scheme, which I can, you can imagine how that sounds. These guys were robbing a bank. How do you know? I'm driving the getaway car. So he says, these guys are running a Ponzi scheme. And while they're talking, he realizes the U.S. prosecutor who is talking to has actually

prosecuted one of the guys before. But he got what's called a pretrial intervention. He had run a Ponzi scheme before and all he had to do was pay back the money instead of being charged. And he did that by starting another Ponzi scheme. anyway so my guy says he'll wear a wire everything they decline no we're we're going to do an investigation first they investigate they come back they've talked to all these victims the victims are all like donovan's the one that told us to invest we don't know these other guys so he's indicted they offer him two or three years he says i'm not going he's not taking two or three years i didn't do anything to go to go to trial he gets 17 years now he's always Right. And it's funny. And then there's all kinds of shenanigans at the trial. And we used to always joke with them. I can't. But when I was writing his story, it's called The Gap. It's on my website. I remember saying they framed a guilty man. Yeah. So mad. And I'd say, he'd say, oh, I should have gotten 17 years. I'd go, listen, you should have gotten five for stupidity. You don't know any. You started the conversation off with, I don't know anything.

anything about trading 4x? Like you shouldn't have been involved in that company period you shouldn't have you're asking people

and this is what they're telling me I'm like a bit sussion that's not what everybody they're lending money on you they brought you in you're a roper

you're a rope it in the marks so he he really that was just pure stupidity the other guy is just what just got set up

just it was it was just the problem with this guy is he the other guy his name is Dennis Caroni. He's so, and I talked to his mom all the time,

and she would die if she heard me say this. So unlikable. Nobody cares that he got like 19 years. Yeah. Nobody cares. She's such an unlikable human being. And I used to say, you know, your lawyer couldn't put you on the stand because you're just unlikable. You're just a horrible person.

And you know, you say that, don't say that. And you would get mad, but it was true. He was true. true. And so yeah, he actually opened up a pain clinic, which it started as a Finfin clinic. Do you remember Finfin? Oh, yeah. So they started that in New Orleans. By the time they actually did the build out, Finfin was illegal. So they already had doctors that were signed up to work the clinic and they said, why don't we just do a pain management clinic? And this was before pill mills. Yeah. There are no pill mills. So he's like, it's not even a thing. He said, so

the doctors come in and you know he's like they start writing scripts he he and by the way he lived in LA he didn't even live he just gave $50,000 to a childhood friend that's all he that's it lived in LA would call every couple of weeks how much money did we make well you need to send me some money you need I mean just just just an irritating person and just you know just and so everybody hated them at the clinic so when it all went down when it all went bad you know nobody had anything good to say yeah anyway Other than those two people, other than those two people, everybody else is guilty. It's just a matter.

Everybody else. How much time they got. It just matters to them. I'm guilty. That was the nice thing about being in prison is that I was like, well, I should be here. I really should be here. What did you do? 13 years?

I did 13 years. Yeah. That's a very long time. It is. The first 10 years is the hardest. Those last three. Yeah. Great.

Soon. It was probably the first three were the hardest. And then, but by that point, at that point I started writing. And then it just became, you know, it was like, what a target-rich environment. Yeah. Like, everybody had a story. They don't all have stories that are, were unique. Does that make sense?

Like, you know, if you're, you know, I would meet these guys that it's like, okay, if you're, you're a black guy raising the projects and your mom was, you know, a drug addict and a prostitute, your dad was in and out of jail your whole life and not there. And everybody that you admired and knew that had money or were successful were drug dealers. So you, you of course, started selling drugs and nobody in your family really told you not to. And, you know, you got arrested a couple times. And then you ended up in a conspiracy and you went to jail and you got 20, you know, 20 some odd years. Like that guy has. an interesting story. It's a tragedy. The problem is it's those, that story's everywhere in there. Everywhere. It's everybody's story. Right. And so I was the nice thing about being in there is that every once in a while I would get that same story. But maybe that guy was working with a childhood friend who ended up becoming a sheriff's deputy and then ended up becoming head of the task force like that narcotic. Then he, he's, started working with him. Okay, well, now, now we've got a different story. Yeah. And so I've, I've had those, or I've had, you know, Ponzi scheme stories or, um, con men stories or counterfeiters,

you know, those types of, and if they had some twists and you hear so many stories, it was easy to chirrhic these, these really great stories. And so my time started flying by because I got to order the Freedom of Information Act. And I got to kind of build these. And it was time consuming doing it through the mail. You know, so you're constantly revising your search. So I learned patience, you know, I learned, you know, which was something I didn't have before. There were all these things that you, I learned over the, over those years. And I remember thinking one of the things I had thought when I realized I was going to be released was I literally was thinking to myself, like,

I don't know if I have enough time here at the prison to finish this story and this one. And I was upset about that. Like I was like, I really, you know, I really need. I need this time. I need to do so good time here. And you do. You get used to being incarcerated. You get used to it.

You get out and you feel uncomfortable and a lot of anxiety getting out. And I kept waiting for them to come back and take me back. Yeah. You know, like we made a mistake. And I was like, I knew you guys were going to be. I knew it. I knew it you messed up. I knew I should be. I know I don't feel right here. So. Did you, did you have access to the internet? No. No. So that made it really hard to investigate. Yes. But it was all through the mail. Or people on the outside who would do searches for me periodically. But, you know, you really, you know, it's hard. It's. It's. having a relationship or contact with someone on the inside, it's such a one-sided relationship for the person outside. I can do nothing for you, but ask you to do me favors. Sure. And so, you know, it gets to be, I would dread making those calls. They're like, all I ever do is call this person and ask them to do things for me. Yeah. Like if I was this guy, I wouldn't even answer the phone anymore. And I can only talk to you for 15 minutes at a time. So I can't

even really, I don't even really have time to ask you, like, how are your kids? How is, hey, what happened? I know you guys went to, you know, Disney World last weekend. How was that? Do you, what would you all do? I can't even do that. I have still a little time that it's just, you know, and I'm such a selfish prick to begin with. So, you know, I'm fighting it all the time anyway, and it's twice a hard now. It's like, it's all their agony. So, yeah. So, but I feel like, you know, you know, Kind of like what you said. It's, you know, I was thrust into a situation, you know, by my own, you know, of my own making. But I feel like it irrevocably sent my life on a, on a much, much better course.

Yep. It's called a Godshot. Nice. Yep. Yep. It's just a way of somehow fate comes along, smacks you in the head, says, go that way. Yeah. Yeah, it was a hell of a smack, but.

It sure wants. So super happy now, though. Yeah, good, good. And so as much as I would like to make the rest of this about me. So when did your book come out? It came out in June. It's doing well. This book is not about grifters or cons or criminals so much as it is about the life of a woman and a man.

Man's world, doing a strange job of investigating deaths and probing lives and crimes and getting to know the city at its worst, at its best, from climbing through rubble to, you know, sipping cocktails with captains of industry while they told me how much they loved their wives so very, very much. And she was terribly, terribly ill. Bullshit, you killed her. Don't give me this stuff about how much you loved her and how ill she was. Ill with what? What? And it was a fascinating life. It ruined me in many ways. It crushed my soul. It broke my heart. But ultimately, like you, it was the right place for me to be. It was the right life for me to have. It kicked my ass and it put me on an interesting track where I was able

to do a little something in the world. And, you know, when you, you'll see the last chapter is a little bit of a shock. No pun intended. Oh, no, you'll see. Both the first chapter in the last chapters are shockers. But it's ultimately a book about people and what they're really, really like. I'm a strange character, and I worked with strange characters. And it's a funny book, too. I mean, obviously, you've got to laugh all day to avoid crying. And we did.

We laughed all day long. Are you planning on writing anything else? Like this is a memoir, right? Yes, this is a memoir of my life in true crime. So are you planning on? And now you've got to have to have, you know, you got to lay out the book. You got to read the chapters. You got to go, oh, I like, that's good.

You know, you got to do that whole thing. So typically, I don't know a lot of people that if they write their own books, write just one. Because I think once you've done that and you've looked at it and you've read it and it's complete. You're like, wow, now I can do this. Now I want to do this. Yeah. I'm going on doing something else or? Yeah, a novel. I found writing so much fun. I loved being creative. I just really got a kick out of that. And the novel I'm writing is about a con, actually. It's about a true case

that really, really captured the imagination of a lot. of people. And the interesting part about it is that no one really knows what happened to this day. So I can fictionalize it and tell what I think happened based on my knowledge of the case. My only problem is, and I want to talk to my lawyer about this first, is that one of the people, possibly two, involved in this thing, are still living. And I don't know how much I'm allowed to say of my inside knowledge of the case, given that they're still alive. Will it be slander if I'd say, look, they conned everybody? You're saying it's a novel.

I mean, a novel is fiction. That's right. So you're taking... I'm taking a very true story from my experience, and I'm novelizing it, so that I can tell what I think is the real ending. so you don't want to just just say what what you believe like there's nothing wrong with giving your opinion no but it doesn't much fun it's more fun if i tell people what what i think really happened behind the scenes on have these people been convicted that you're going to talk about or no oh okay yeah yeah nope they got away with it well now you probably got a problem yeah probably that's nice thing

yeah no it's nice thing when they've already been convicted yeah no yeah you're fair game now. Yeah. You can't say that. Yeah. That's a hard one, right? I always love the guys that say, you know, that's not what happened. And I'm like, well, you're the factual stipulations that you signed for your plea.

Yeah. Well, that's what the prosecutor said. Yeah, but you signed it. You signed it. You signed it. Yeah. So, yeah. Or if.

Yeah, yeah, you're, yeah, you got a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I've got a TV show. in the works. We're just haggling over terms right now. I've got a Netflix show coming out in the end of the year by Dick Wolf, producer. He's fabulous, fabulous producer. And this, you know, he's got a show coming about, out about major crimes in major cities. So I'm in the New York episodes. And, you know, that'll be fun to see. So I've got lots of stuff going on.

So when I was on the, I have a Dick Wolf story. quick. I was on the run. We used to watch, um, uh, what's the, uh, law and order. No, I grew up watching law and order, but this was, uh, SBU. And we said, yeah. So I was on the run. And I was on the run. And, uh, with a girl named Becky. And so we were in, we were in Charlotte, North Carolina. And, you know, fraud is not a full time job. So, you know, and I, so I, and I, so I, remember I bought like the whole like series yeah and we would we would watch two or three of them a night and at the very end of it you know where it says you know produced by you know dick wolf and we used to every time it would say that we would look at each other and we'd go boy that dick

wolf he does not disappoint does he yeah but not and this was we would say it all so we're saying that all that she's like who is that is it well well what did dick wolf say and I go well here's listen this is what this one's about and I tell our what it's actually good boy he does he's good he's good. And this one's based on a true story based on real events. Oh, y'allie, this is good. He's good. We used to joke about him. It's the only reason I even know who he is because he would show up and we would always say something. Yep, he is. He's a terrific producer. It does great shows. So I'm looking forward to working with this team. Yeah. Well, that's great. And that's, is that the Netflix one? Yeah, that comes out. We already shot that. And it comes out at the end of the year. It's still. being edited now. And then I'm in talking with his production team now about developing another series of true crime. And this would be, oh, okay, true crime. Yeah, so I'll have some fun. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. That's super interesting. It's a hell of a lot better than being a drunk. Yeah. Well, you know, and you're retired now. Like, you know, I always love that when people say,

Oh, if I won the lottery, I would be like, yeah, you could quit your job. But three months, what are you going to do? Three months, maybe two to three months. It'd be like, oh, I've got to do something. Now, I work more now than I did when I was with the city, because now it's my dime, my time. Right. Well, listen, I really do, I really do appreciate you talking with me. Sure.

Do you have anything else you feel like we didn't cover? No, no. I mean, you know, look, what can I say? It's an interesting read. It's a great book. If you're interested in true crime at all or interested in memoir or New York City, it's about all three. And there's a few good forensics lessons and help you get away with murder if you want. So, okay.

So it's called What the Dead Know, Learning About Life as a New York City death investigator by Barbara Butcher. Hey, I appreciate you guys watching the interview. If you like the video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this. Like the video, share the video. And we're going to leave probably for the Amazon link for Barbara's book. I really appreciate you guys watching. Thank you very much.

See you. Well, you were born in Kansas City? Yeah, ironically. Okay. Yeah. So where were you? I'm 49, so born in Kansas City and then moved around every couple years. Right.

Dad worked for the feds. Okay. What do you do for the Fed? DEA. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, DEA. And moved around all the time, went to college at Tennessee, University of Tennessee.

Okay. First place that hired me took me back to Kansas City. So work there in law enforcement. Okay. What did you do? So, you know, started out of patrol and stuff, and then 18 months into it, I would, went undercover and worked in narcotics. Can I ask, why did you want to go into law enforcement just because of your dad?

Like, is that something you always wanted to do or do you get to that point where it's like, I don't know what I'm going to do? You know, I think it was something that I viewed as fun, you know, different every day, exciting, no monotony. I'm not a sit-in-a-desk cubicle person. Right. And I thought, you know, that it would be a good time and it's very diverse, right? So if you don't like narcotics, you can work in homicide or you can work in robbery.

So there's a lot of potential there. Not financially, any potential at all. But so kind of that's how I did it. So I was the first woman there in the unit to be in undercover narcotics. And it was eye-opening, to say the least, street-level. We're talking street-level type narcotics. Yep, buying, not buying, you know, five, ten-pound. We're buying street-level crack, methamphetamine, weed at the time.

Not much weed, mostly crack and methamphetamine. But you didn't have like any, other than being a patrol officer, like you didn't have any real experience or anything like that. Like you grew up what? Like, what? Normal. Like middle class? Yeah. Just normal middle class, suburbia, not exposed to that at all.

So it was pretty eye-opening. You know, I was in an all-black neighborhood. Right. So I kind of stuck out like a sore thumb, and especially being the only female. But everybody I was working with in the unit was white. So it was like, man, they're... Like that's a 50% and they figure you're a white guy, you're probably a cop anyway. Yeah, you're already a cop.

Yeah. So, but their answer to that was, you know, they could grow out their beards and look scraggly and all this bullshit. And it's like, it's a superficial thing, but that's not something I could obviously do. So I had to get pretty creative with a persona and, what I was going to develop myself into to not be looked at as a cop right so when I was doing vice and the prostitution stuff um contrary to popular belief the worse you look the nastier street hooker type thing the more money you make uh as opposed to what people think like you know escort services dressing nice with you know stilettos and all that it didn't fucking work that way

you know we wore dirty ass clothes i put um coconut oil in my hair make it look like you had taking a shower in a couple of days a shower and i use this stuff called blackout i don't know if you've ever seen that it looks like a bottle of nail polish and you paint it on your teeth and it looks like your teeth are missing so it's blackout right so i would do it every kind of fourth or fifth tooth to look like i was a toothless greasy hooker Right. And, you know, that... And they're lining up.

They're lining up. Yeah. It was crazy the amount of dudes pulling up on their lunch break with their beemers and their kids car seat in the back. Asked for a blow job. You know, I got an FBI agent on duty in his FBI vehicle on his lunch break. And he was like 60-some. So it's insane. Like, everybody's thinking, yeah.

I'm sorry. They faces Connor makes. It's like, he's just like... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's just, people have this perception of, oh, only the dirty, lonely guys look for hookers. And it's like, fuck now. It's everybody. Rich, poor, middle class, whatever. Yeah. Guys just come back in general. So what does that make you think about? Like, did you have a certain kind of image of what guys were? And then this happens. You're like, wow, these guys are just derelicks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was like 20. Includes you guys. Yeah, exactly. I was like 23 years old. You know, I didn't know what to think.

think and you know i had the kind of the same perception all this is going to be just fucking you know blue collar scumbags coming home from their roofing jobs and uh i could have been more wrong about who it was and the diversity of who it was well wasn't it um oh gosh what was the guy's name one time um he was huge too he was in uh four weddings and a funeral um hugh was it hugh grant yeah hugh grant like when picked up like a skanky look at Yeah, like you're a multi-millionaire, famous, good-looking guy. Yeah. And he figures, eh, let me swing by here and tap some, some skanky-looking hooker.

It's just like, what are you thinking, bro? Isn't that insane? Yeah. It's more common than you think, and it totally changed my perception on prostitution. And, you know, they were targeting the Johns, obviously. And it's a supply and demand issue. Just fucking regulate it. Yeah.

You know, it's just make it legal and regular. You're never going to stop it. It's pointless. And they would give these dudes $500 tickets with the court date and just let them go. Well, you know, I was going to say, how much more money would you make if you just charge the girls? Tested them, charge them where they say, hey, boom, I got to, here's my card. If you want to know that I've been tested and here's my card. Right.

You know, then you'd make a ton of, it's like marijuana. Marijuana. Exactly. Tax the shit out of it and regulate it. Right. And now you just, how much. have you cut down on on everything else from you know the beatings and murders i was going to say prisons and the arrest and all the money associated with having to you know and then you can

it's just it's the same thing you know you could actually take that money and now you could have you know rehab clinics and whatever totally um you know kind of like uh like amsterdam or something yeah along those lines well there's some there isn't there a maybe one county in Nevada that it's not actually in Vegas like it's right to drive like 50 miles outside of the county where we're county ranch and all that kind of stuff yeah Yeah, so it's clearly working for them, but it's just... You just don't want to be the politician that votes for that and get reelected. Yeah, because they're hypocritical.

Yeah, middle class America doesn't want to believe that. No, but they're buying them. Right. They just don't want to put it out. Same thing with marijuana, right? They don't want to... Probably why that's probably why the actual, it's just a, because they know it's so prevalent. Yeah.

They don't like, well, we can't, we want to throw these guys in jail. Yeah. Let's just hit them for $500 on a court date. Right. embarrass them a little bit. But let's face it. If you really thought this was a serious, huge problem, well, then you would, these guys would get in six months.

Of course, exactly. Of course, that was so funny, too, is like, when you do something like that, people don't even realize, like, people like, oh, he only got 90 days or six months, but get up and go to jail for six months. Your stuff, everything's gone. Yeah. Like, that's devastating. Yeah.

You might as well give me five years. Yeah. You get 66 months. You're done. Everything's gone. Well, most of them, their wives didn't even find out, or their girlfriends. Because they literally got a ticket in their hand, and they were home for dinner. they didn't miss a beat there was a thing in on the uh the bop in the bureau of prisons

where guys were getting a shot if they were caught having sex in prison they were writing shots and mailing them home to their families so that your this was when uh HIV was just kind of coming out this is like the 90s what is writing shots mean oh I'm sorry it's a disciplinary action oh okay this man you know this inmate was caught have in a sexual action with another inmate and then they would send it home to like their family so that they would know by the way that your husband went to jail your boyfriend went to jail for five years he's getting out and he might have HIV right right they don't do that anymore but that happened for years selecting labor results on probably yeah he's been known to cure insecurity just with his laugh

his organ donation card lists his charisma his smile is so contagious vaccines have been created for it He is the most interesting man in the world. I don't typically commit crime, but when I do, it's bank fraud. Stay greedy, my friends. Support the channel. Join Matthew Cox's Patreon. So what happened with the, then you went undercover. Did you go from that to narcotics?

Yeah, so I was kind of moonlighting with Vice every, you know, once in a while doing four or six hours shifts. because it's overwhelming. It's like having the, you know, 7-Eleven and telling everybody it's freak ass. That's how fucking the lines were. It was insane. It was like nothing I've ever seen before. So there was like four of us, two of us on one corner, two of us on another corner, and we couldn't keep up. Just people pulling in one to buy drugs?

A fucking drive-thru. No, the sex. Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about the narcotics now. No, so then I kind of segued over to narcotics. and that was same thing, you know, fish in a barrel. It was just, it's simple. You know, you're going in the projects and you're buying, you know, crack or methamphetamine

and then trying to build a case against somebody or, you know, sometimes you would do some street level bust at the time, buy and bust, buy bust. We called it by bust. Right. But most of the time it's at a case level, you know, you're buying repetitively from the same person. Yeah, so you're buying and leaving. They don't even know, they don't even know, there's a case being built on them.

No, and by the time that they get arrested, they've sold to probably 200 people, they have no idea who it is. Right. And I never had to really testify to protect my identity. So, I mean, when you go in those neighborhoods, did you ever pull up and they go, nah, she's a cop, she's a cop. They did at the onset when I was kind of really developing a persona. Right. So I have an aunt and uncle. that were born mentally challenged.

And they have a certain way of speaking. And I was so used to it as a kid that I was like, that's it. The grease in the hair, the blackout in the teeth, talk like you're mentally challenged. And that was my persona. And it fucking worked. After that, not a single person questioned my identity. They just thought I was, you know, some fucking loser on the street. another homeless mentally challenged person

that the fucking government threw away, you know, essentially. So you're not driving up in a car, sometimes in a car? Sometimes in a car and these cars are pieces of shit, just shit that they seized. So I'd rotate him. Right. And sometimes I'd go with a partner. And we would just kind of do together.

But I'd try to stay away from the white guys just because that was kind of an easy beacon for a cop. I was to say, I read an article when I was locked, up. I read an article that was, have you ever heard of Don Deva magazine? No. Well, there was a, was it, Don Deva, there was another maximum. I think it was a maximum. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's not around anymore. Yeah. I don't think it is. Anyway, I don't think so. This was back when they had actual physical magazines. And there was a girl that was a professional, like she had a boyfriend, right? So, she was a black chick. She was a, and she was a black chick and her boyfriend was a drug dealer.

He got arrested and went to prison, federal prison. She went to the DEA and said, look, I want to work on cases to get him out of prison this happens a lot right it's called a third party rule yeah and they were like look the problem is he went to trial we're not going to we want him to do the 20 years like we're not no matter what you do we're not going to let that credit go to reducing his sentence it's not going to happen okay so they said but if you are willing to do this we'll pay you yeah snitch it was a professional snitch right she would fly around they would literally the DEA came and they were like we're going to fly you here for a week and they'd give her three or four thousand dollars for a week and she's funny because she was in college she had like a gold tooth so and she was raised in in

like in like in the projects but she's also smart yeah so they were like and she they go she could switch like she had some tattoos she had the gold tooth she said so she could pull up in a car and all the drug dealers want to fuck her like they're they're ready to they're dying to sell to her and hit her up and they were like so she could pull in up in a car get and just She'd build a bunch of, get a bunch of buys in one week and then jump on a plane, fly back with her money. And there's like every month or two, they're flying her back all over the country. She was like a professional. She did for years.

Yeah. And then eventually she stopped doing it. Wow. She never got made. No. And this was a big thing. They were, they interviewed like the DEA agent in the article. And he was saying the problem was they could sniff us out.

Oh, yeah. She fits in. Like we can't. They were like, it's very difficult. to pull in a neighborhood cold and have them trust you and sell you something. They say they can just tell, this person's not a drug addict. Yeah. This person doesn't fit the mold or the, you know.

But Jay said she was amazing at it. So, I mean, it takes a certain talent. It does. But, you know, we had a bunch of snitches that worked with us and stuff and that would do the introductions and get us into places that we normally wouldn't be able to get into. So they trust you. Yeah. But, you know, it was one day I was like, I had to pay her.

and I'm like, she's fucking making more than I am. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, what the fuck? And I'm the one that's at danger here. I changed my tune, though. I found out a couple years ago that she was murdered. So, yeah, they finally probably made her. But she was, you know, living in the projects.

She wasn't a drug user. She was just like, this is more money than I'll fucking make working at Dollar General. That's how this girl was. The great thing about her was she had, never been arrested. They said a lot of the professional sisters, they said they've been arrested multiple times. So if she had to go and testify, they were like, she can get on the stand. They'd say, well, what do you do right now? Well, this is what I do full time. Oh, so you're a professional this? Well, I do this because I'm in college full time. It's like, ah, have you ever been

arrested? You know, no. Oh, are you a drug here? No. Oh, there was just like, she was perfect. Yeah. So she made bank, I'm sure. She was articulate. And she could do the switch back and forth from, you know, Did she have to testify a lot or do they protect her identity? I think she had testified once or twice, like she was where guys were going to court. Wow. And she did actually, I want to say, I feel like, I can't remember the article related, but I want to say that she did testify because I remember them saying the great thing about her is she doesn't have a drug history.

So if she has to testify. So to me, I feel like she testified. Yeah. But I don't remember exactly. But they were like, she's ideal. It's very difficult to find someone like her. But that was also why they were protecting. they were flying or out of the state they were flying and it was the DEA so it was national

you were a snitch and you're in a small city like yeah that's dangerous yeah very dangerous yeah I wasn't in a small city but I was required to live in the city that I worked which posed yeah that's a dangerous some danger to me and uh it just became one of those things where I was like what the fuck am I doing right I'm putting my life at risk for $40,000 a year and this is never going to make a dent on the drug trade like who are you fucking kidding here right you know um us spending three six hundred dollars a day they're gonna do shit yeah so it was one of those things i'm like what the fuck am i doing and even if you went even if you went through and you picked up every drug dealer in that city and removed them all at once within a month they've completely

been replaced and it's up and running again within two months it's exactly the same way and you can change a fucking thing exactly except for spent a whole bunch of money right created a lot of chaos, maybe taking some drugs on the street for a few weeks. It's a waste of money for the government, waste of our money for the government to put money towards stopping drugs. It's never going to happen. It really is. And it's, like you said, someone will be replaced literally 10 minutes later. Right. It's fucking, it's never going to go away. You know what's funny is like, because I mean, obviously I was, you know, I was locked up and like, and I know people that are on drugs, right? And I've seen, you know, the,

tragedy of the of the whole situation and I've actually like never done any drugs like I've never smoked pot I'm actually never smoked a cigarette well never drank and my father was an alcoholic and I just at a young age I was like yeah I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do that for you like he's a he's a great guy when he was sober and then when he was drunk he was such a scumbag and I was like well I'm I'm a borderline asshole yeah sober all the time like this isn't I know this is not the way to go right but having been through the system it's like absolutely like it wouldn't be a great situation to have drugs legalize because there'd be you see more drug addicts probably out but in the end there's no perfect there's no perfect

there's no perfect solution the best solution is legalize it pay for it open some rehab centers for those people that want to get help and at least you can make enough money that you can clean it up enough yeah that it's safe well and it's kind of survival of the fittest too right you get rid of the ones that are never going to get sober they're never going to stop it just give it give them easier access speed up the fucking process i mean let's be honest and and and and but i mean honestly too think about all the violence that's associated with it too that's true that's a ton of violence yeah you would um so what so how long did did that go on until i did that for uh year and a half two years that was year and a half two years too long right and i was like i got to come up with a

fucking business here and uh we we shared an office with um the undercovers were in the office with the uh we called them snootak street narcotics tactical unit so when we would go build our case they would run the search warrants so we it was like a big giant bullpen and uh every time we had a meth case they were fucking suiting up like spacesuits right with fucking respirators and all this stuff and I'm like, wait, what are you guys doing? Oh, well, we're going to bust a meth lab. Okay, so it's okay for my ass to go in there with nothing and buy it, but you fuckers get all fucking suited up and protect it.

Right. You see what I'm saying? Like, come on, man. You know, so it's a matter of time before, you know, I gave birth to a kid with four fucking heads because I'm going into all these goddamn meth labs, right? So that's when it was another trigger for me that I'm like, this is not sustainable.

right there's no way if you go bad at some point yeah this is gonna there's a time limit on everything that's why nobody lasts in narcotics for more than a couple years because you either get made or you're forced to do something you didn't want to do okay yeah I'm I'm missing something forced to do something such as what like crack well okay yeah oh you were putting a position my partner was put in a position where he was like smoke the crack or you're gonna get a bullet in your head. Right. Yeah. So he smoked the crack. Um, so, so, so, so you're going through this whole thing and you're already thinking, how do I exit? How do I, how do I get out of that? Just not just, not just the unit or not, but just the whole thing. Like there's, there's just no,

there's no upward momentum for the, I don't want my life to take this trajectory where I'm, no way, I'm a police officer for the rest of my life. But yeah, but people do and people. Yeah, teach us up, but, you know, I'm not into being in poverty for the rest of my life. So it ain't going to happen for me. So I'm racking my brain and I quickly realize I have no fucking transferable skills to get a job anywhere else. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like that or security. I can buy dope.

You can be a security guard. Like, I mean, there's no private people, you know, buying dope. No. Well, there are, but. Yeah. Yeah, not for salary. So I was, you know, just trying to figure out what am I going to do? What am I going to do?

and I'm like, fuck it. I think I have to go back to school and get my MBA. I've got to diversify. I've got to get away from this because I'm essentially branded myself, right? All I had done was law enforcement. Right. So I needed to kind of diversify myself. So I'm in, you know, getting my MBA at night while I'm working during the day.

And I'm meeting all these people that are, you know, fucking bankers and financial advisors and all this other bullshit. And I'm like, I don't fucking want to do that. And, uh, I go to work one night and this woman asked me when we're coming back to clean up the blood from her son that was murdered. And I was like, oh, we don't do that. She's like, well, then who does? And I'm like, uh, I had no fucking idea. Nobody had ever asked me that, ironically. I'm working in the worst neighborhoods, tons of homicides, tons of suicides, and no one had ever asked me that.

So I started asking around, and everybody basically said, we don't know and we don't care. Right. It's not our fucking problem. We go in, we investigate it, we're out. So I started kind of researching it and looking into it, and I'm like, okay, I can do this as a side gig. Let's see where this goes.

Right. So it just started out kind of as a side gig, cleaning up crime scenes on my off time. What was the first one you did? Like, I mean, did you go out and get some business cards, set up a website, or just you just... Yeah. I mean, I had no money, as you can imagine.

I was making $40,000 a year. I had a roommate, so I couldn't even pay my bills. So I found this training school in Dallas, Texas, and I called this fucking guy up. And he was basically doing what I'm doing, but teaching other people how to do it, too. So I said, hey, I want to come to your training school. And he said, okay, it's $2,500 for a week. And I'm like, fuck, that's all I had in my account. Right.

Literally all my savings. So I'm like, fuck it. I'll take my only week of vacation, the last bit that I have in there. And I went to his training school in Dallas. I was in Kansas City, so I went too far. And I met these two guys in there. There was like 20 people in there. And I met these two guys that were from Oklahoma.

And they were partners. And they were like, we're going to start doing crime scene too. We're nurses by day. So they only work like three days a week. Right. And I said, well, how did you get the money to do your startup? And they're like, we walked into a bank and asked them, for an SBA business loan and they gave it to us.

So I'm like, no fucking way. Dude literally gives me his exact business plan, tells me take it, change the name on it, and go do the same thing. I did that. I got denied at every bank I went into. Okay. Yeah, because I don't have a dick.

I was going to say, are these two white guys? Yeah. Two, okay. Yeah, two white guys. So I call them up and I go, dude, I did exactly what you did. And he's like, I don't get it. And I'm like, of course you don't.

So I go into a fifth bank and I lied to him. I say, hey, I need a home equity loan. I need new windows on my fucking house. And they're like, okay, give me a check for $15,000. Right. I'm like, well, that was fucking easy. Why didn't I do that? You know, the beginning.

But it's that extra, I had to lie to him to get them to do it. You know what I'm saying? But whatever, I don't have any fucking regrets. I paid them off whole bit. First job, $15,000. Nice. Double homicide. so how did you did you i mean i went door to door i printed my own shitty little business cards

that had the perforations on the bottom right uh i had the worst website on the planet i don't no one found it ever right uh i had no idea what i was doing and i just went door to door apartments funeral homes hotels people people that you knew had had no i just fucking went to everyone in an area particular area on every day off that i had knock on the door Or, hey, if you ever had, you know. Horrible strategy. It's horrible, but it worked. Right.

It worked because kind of the word of mouth got out and I couldn't afford to hire anybody, so I was doing all my own shit. Right. I was doing the marketing. Oh, 5. Oh, okay. So social media is just kind of, well, no, geez, yeah, I guess it's just kind of starting out, right? I don't remember there being a YouTube because I remember on my first job,

there was a ton of demo, and I was like, how the fuck do I do this? I remember thinking, how do I do this? And there was never a YouTube, so I'm like, you know what I need to do is just basically hire somebody part-time to help me that has skills I don't have, which was construction. Construction? Yeah, because you have to take out baseboards, pull up tile flooring, replace sub-flooring. Like, there's a lot involved. And that was something that I was like, oh, shit, I didn't realize that. Right.

You know, if you've never taken somebody's subfloor before, you probably should learn how to do it before you do it. Right. So when you take that, are you replacing it? Yeah, you're supposed to. So when you're done, when you walk back out, it looks like. It never even happened. Oh, okay. So the first place, 15 grand. Yeah, double homicide, 15 grand. And then the next place was like a Salvation Army where people. Yeah.

I guess just lower income people live and the guy died from whatever and decomposed in his recliner. And in the Salvation Army? Yeah. It was one of those not where the homeless people live, but it's like a transition, almost like a halfway house. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I mean, I was in the Salvation Army runs them, but I was in the halfway house.

It was a goodwill, but it's the same thing. Right. So that you have your own little like apartment, right, that's furnished? Well, I didn't. But yes, there are people that have them. And there's actually, I think the one here, they actually have like a bunch of single-wide trailers and stuff in the back where people also can- Well, this was like a high-rise. Okay.

So how long did he sit there before they found? He was probably there for a week or two. So I don't think there's, it was independent living. No bed checks, I guess. No bed checks there. So, and he was older. So it's probably just, you know, a heart attack or something like that. And he just was there.

But I was thinking, how the fuck am I going to get this recliner by myself? out. Well, at least you show up after the body's gone, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. I couldn't show up if the body was there. Yeah. Not that there's not a bunch of stuff left over. Yeah, you know, you get part of their brain and maggots and all that kind of stuff there. But that was the second job. And then, um, how'd you get that recliner out? You just take it apart? You know, I created, we were talking about this yesterday. I created, I took a furniture dolly and I slapped a piece of plywood on top of it and then I put some piping around it and screwed it in and it was like a dolly cart right and I put it on there and pushed it out and just did that I still have it to

this day that's why we're talking about it we were reminiscing about the good old days of uh moving dead guys on a furniture dolly what was the next one or next interesting one uh at that point the department gave me an ultimatum and said, hey, we were all right with this, but now we're not. At the second job? After the second job. I had only been doing it maybe a month or two at the point, at that point. It was a control thing. Right.

They wanted to be able to not only control my income because we weren't allowed to work off duty, they were controlling everything. So I was like, well, I'm not working off duty because this isn't in a law enforcement capacity. Right. I was going to say. So that's why they initially approved it. And then after that, they were like, you know, we changed our mind. And I was like, yeah, I did too.

Fuck you, I quit. Right. So I was out. I literally put all my shit in a garbage bag and I was like, I'm out. And then I'm like, well, wait, why am I fucking staying here then? I hate living in the Midwest. So I packed my shit up, rented my house out, and moved to Florida. Okay.

After just a few jobs? Yep. Like, that's another gutsy move. Yeah. To move across. Just to pack your shit up and just move. Yeah. already are you married no single nothing no kids no nothing so i had no obligations other than

that house right um that mortgage and i put some tenants in there and uh it was one of those things where if i don't find a fucking tenant whatever i'll short sale it forecloth i didn't care i had to get out of that shit hole right and uh moved to florida where i went to high school so i still had friends here they let me stay with them found a job in sales teach me how to sell And then I did both of those things. And then you started what you started, did you go to the police, local police department? Yeah, I went everywhere, man. What do they say when you walk in and say, hey, here's what I do?

Thanks, but no thanks. No, were there other people there that were doing it? No, because the cops aren't allowed to refer any for-profit company. Okay. So unless you're saying, hey, I've got free clothes for everyone, they ain't going to fucking, they don't care. So what about opening up a non-for-profit? hey we do this you could still charge for an option yeah you can there was just the regulations for

it were way beyond my capacity at that point okay so I'm like okay so I pivot right do the same thing that I did that work for me in Kansas City the apartments the hotels um assisted living of course there's a shit ton of 55 and older communities here yeah so I went to all those yeah and then the phone starts ringing because of course I didn't have any money for a well website or, you know, any type of ad words or traction or anything like that. So I was kind of doing them both, building them. And then in 2008, two years later, it was enough to where I could quit my day job. Okay. And, but now, but now you're doing stuff, it's not just like retirement homes now. It's, it's for the, the, the police, like, they don't call you, but so the,

the victim's families or landlords or owners of what they, they call up as a, hey, listen, And there was an issue, you know, this is what happened. We need somebody to come clean this up. Right. But the cops don't. No. They still won't to this day. Like bullshit.

Yeah. But, okay. So, and you don't contact these people, do you? They're just finding you. Yeah, I mean, there's no way for me to know that if you had a suicide in your house. Well, it could be, I was going to say, newspapers. They don't post it, suicides. What about police reports?

How do I get them? How do I know where to go? I mean, can't you go to, you can, I mean, it's public information, right? Well, the problem is, is it's so dynamic. Right. It's happening so quickly. Right. It's impossible.

You can't wait two weeks. No. You can't wait two weeks. And if it's an open case, they're not going to give you the freedom of, no, they're going to wait until it's, it could be, it could be months. Yeah. So the sense of urgency is there. And the way to get that is when people are freaking out, who the fuck's going to

clean this up? Yeah. Where are they going? The internet. Yeah, yeah. So we had, I had to basically suck it up and bite the bullet and put all my marketing efforts on the internet. Okay. Any, are any cases that stay out to?

Yeah. Oh, God. There's just, there's so many. And, you know, the thing is, is I've been doing this 17 years now, and there's no two that are ever the same, which is crazy. And, you know, the suicides are always sad in some cases. but a lot of suicides are because they've been diagnosed with maybe a terminal illness and they're just like fuck it which can't say that I blame them right who wants to rot right away you know who wants to live like that so and then there's some where you know it's like a 16 year old

kid and it's like fuck those are heavy are the so the parents call you and you come in and you and and I was just thinking I had a kid on here who um um his name what kid he said that was 30 years old uh his name was uh Ethan and Ethan had got on a phone call from his mother and she said and he said we grew up with guns yeah and he said you know he got a phone call from his mom and his mom goes Ethan you know you got to come home right now your brother shot himself and he thought yeah he thought I thought accidental discharge like he was like oh is he okay and she was well I don't think he's breathing And he was like, oh shit

So he drives home and he walks in And he said, I mean, he was my brothers He said skull Brains Everything he said Bodies on there are all over the back wall And he said he was just like He said half his head's missing

Like he was like he stuck a gun I guess in his mouth And blew his brains out Or maybe the side of his head or something But yeah And they had no idea it was coming And that's the odd part Is I can't tell you how many people say

we have no idea why or you know we didn't see this coming and it and it makes me wonder did you not see it or did you not look right because it rarely in my opinion happens we just ignore the the warning signs like you didn't realize it was big of a deal or you're so busy in your day to day right you don't realize that your your kid's suffering and suffering in silence which is even worse so the homicides like there's yeah you know we the cleanups for the homicides are about 12 13% of what we do so thank god they're not a lot not that homicides are down by any means what that means is essentially it's happening in public places streets right parking lots things like that

that they're not getting cleaned up um so so you have to remove so somebody get shot. Somebody shoots themselves in the head or does whatever or this decomposition over the course of a week or so. So you're taking up like anything that you're, are you, what happens with the walls? Like are you just repainting the walls? We'll clean them. We'll clean them, disinfect them.

If there's bullet holes in the wall, you know, we'll pull the shell casing out of there, repair the drywall and, you know, paint over it, make it look like it never, it never happened. We had one recently, well, that. not recently maybe a year or two ago and he was a veteran so a lot of veterans are coming back with fucked up shit and um he went into his bedroom he set out a ton of food for his cat and water and he wrote never forget on the wall and then shot himself there and uh you know the never forget part wasn't you know a biohazard we didn't have to clean that but i'm like like, I don't want them to fucking see that.

So I washed it off and painted over it. I found some extra paint and painted over it. And then, you know, we ended up having to take his floor part of his wall. It went into his walk-in closet. Like, he just laid against the wall and shot himself. So, of course, it, you know, liquid takes the path of least resistance. So it's going to find its way. I had, I don't know if this just made me think of that.

So there was a guy named Derek. Nolan that I wrote a book about and he was in prison for a pain clinic that he was running he uh his father this is his father when he was younger I think he was like three years old his mother was having an affair his father ends up in the middle of the night she didn't come home two o'clock or something in the morning puts him in his little underroos, you know, brings him in the truck, puts him in the truck, drives to the guy's house, walks the son, him with his father at 2 in the morning, walks up to the window, sees his mother laying in bed or laying on the couch with this guy naked, father kicks in the

front door, grabs a knife, and stabs the boyfriend to death. And then she runs, he chases her down, stabs her. her to death in front of Derek in the driveway takes Derek drops him off at um was he just fucking screaming and he's he's a baby at that point he's just he said I just he said I remember driving off staring at my mom and thinking he was like I knew I was never going to see her again like I knew I knew kind of what had happened like I understood um because I remember it but you know he's he's a dark guy I bet I don't I want to say, kind of dark, disturbed, you know, a very serious.

Well, actually, he laughs all the time. But anyway, I've got a dark sense of humor. So he gets dropped off at his uncles. His uncle raises him. His father turns himself in, goes to trial. In New York, in New York, I want to say New York State, is found not guilty due to insanity. Insanity. Yeah.

goes to like a for like two years goes to some hospital right mental hospital gets out starts his life over again marries another woman they have two kids Derek's stepbrother and um this is now Derek's like 20 something years old 21 22 years old the new stepmother decides she wants to get a divorce the father goes when he served with a divorce papers he goes and he gets a shotgun and when she comes home he walks into the i want to say she was in the master bedroom closet walking closet he walked in with a shotgun and shot her in the head blew her holy shit then walks out to the cabana by the pool waits for the police and when the police come he pulls his little 38 or 22 out shoots himself shoots himself the bullet goes through his eye

his eye sockets and now he's blind he drops passes out he loses the he had to search around to find the gun and shoot himself again in like just behind the ear

this time and kills himself holy shit like I was saying suicide yeah I was thinking to myself I was like I'm wondering like how many of these guys are able to do it the first time

a lot we do a ton of murder suicides and it's weird because it's always wealthier guys wow you know it's it's um did you ever see that that there's like there are these guys what do they call them um there's a name for guys that kill their like like they lose their job and they realize we're gonna lose our house we're gonna lose it and fatalists fatalists or something they kill like their whole family their three kids their wife and then they kill themselves because they can't imagine their family going on without them yep I can't believe how much it

fucking happens we had a big high profile one up in carrowood it was all over the news and uh it was so fucked up so basically the guy was divorced had a daughter that was in college at the time and the girlfriend and him were like fucking oil and water you know it was one of those love hate relationships lust to the whole bit

and uh they're both heavy ass fucking drinkers and uh good combination yeah right and they're living together in this nice ass house and he is very high up with a big fortune 500 company and uh i guess they're fucking fighting they're drunk the whole bit he takes a rifle and shoots her in the bed and then he's like oh fuck what do i do so wraps her up in the bedding pulls the car back to the front door wraps her like a tortilla puts her in the back of the um

the uh it was like a not a four-door sedan but like a small SUV but the windows like it wasn't a trunk is what I'm getting at. So he's trying to get ready to do whatever. I'm assuming dispose of the body. Right. Well, somebody had called a check the welfare. And the cops show up. Because they heard the gunshot? No, because they hadn't heard from her. Okay. In a while. It's been a day or so. So he'd been a day or so. So he shot her and she was still. Yeah, he's trying to figure out what is he going to do with her. He didn't have her in the trunk of the car within an hour. This is a day or so. Yeah, a day or so. He puts her in the trunk of the car. And the cop. show up, you know, just check the welfare. He gets ready to walk to the door to knock on the door

and he sees the wrapped body in the SUV and he's like, holy fuck. So they all back out, right? And now they're surrounded the house. And this guy has his own gas mask ready. So he's got a gas mask. He's set up armory of guns in there. And he makes it well. known he ain't coming out and uh so they're like fuck they start shooting tear gas in there doesn't even phase the fucking guy because he's got the respirator on he must have been the entire time writing this letter i did this because of this like he explained the whole fucking thing and then ends up shooting himself so they crashed through the front door uh with the you know the battering rams and the whole bit and he's he's dead in the bed so the letter basically said lover to death

but that bitch is toxic as fuck and she sounds like she's the yeah yeah yeah yeah really the problem exactly but his problem was i could he couldn't walk away from her yeah and uh i leave everything to my daughter and uh the personal representative that i want to handle this is a friend like he had everything and then what he did was fucking smart instead of writing one letter he made like 12 photocopies and hid them around the house so in he i guess he was he was afraid that somebody would hide the letter or misconstrue it

so we put it so we actually found the actual letter unbeknownst to us right because he had made so many copies of it it was crazy I mean this happened just eight or nine months ago the level of narcissism yes to

to plant not only do I you know I want to have complete control of my life but even after my death after my death after my death I want to have 100% control of I want to have to have the last word. That's how I read it. Right. Is I need to have the last word. Yeah, I loved her, but we were toxic for one another. She, uh, it said something like she was forcing me to not see my daughter, forcing me to choose her over my daughter.

So they both were just fucked up. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, yeah. So he left a hell a mess. Let me tell you. Oh my God. Yeah, hell of a mess. We're a horrible species. I know. Like, yeah. Humans are fucks, man. The worst predators on the fucking planet, yeah. I mean, so after seeing all of, like, just everything that you've seen, like, it's just a little look on your face. I mean, I know what you're going to say. Like, what is your opinion of just humanity in general?

You know, I never had a good opinion to begin with, but now it's just, you weren't a big fan. It's in the fucking sewer, you know, it really is. Law enforcement often questions him. not because he's suspected of a crime but because they find him fascinating he is the most interesting man in the world I don't typically commit crime but when I do it's bank fraud

stay greedy my friends support the channel join Matthew Cox's Patreon when you do what I've done for as long as I've done it you really people people just don't value life

You're expendable And it's obvious It's day to day, you know Oh man, man Yeah People are so cruel to Like some of the shit That I've seen them do to one another

It's just brutal You know And you can tell The hatred in a person By the way that they kill somebody You know Because there's a lot of easy ways to kill people Yeah.

But when you want to blast their fucking head off with a shotgun, that's a hatred right there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think I've done more murder-suicide cleanups than I've done homicide cleanups. Jeez. And dudes just can't stand to be broken up with, I guess. Yeah, that's... They're just like, you know what?

I don't want anybody else to have you, so I'm just going to kill you too. But don't kill the fucking dog. Come on. Is that what happens? They kill the dog, too? Sometimes. And she loved that dog. Yeah, but I love the dog.

So that's why. say don't kill the dog you know it's just i can clean up eyeballs brain did you see the thing did you see the commercial danny did from concrete yeah you know who danny is yeah oh have you done danny show no but i saw his show on concrete oh you should do dany's yeah um he's right he's right yeah that's what i've heard julian told me about him yeah yeah he's great yeah did julian put you in contact yeah i think so uh he did next that we were coming here first and we're Oh, okay. Oh, today? No, no.

I was going to say, that's not what my fucking schedules are. I just have to reach out to him. Oh, okay. He was like, yeah, he wants to get her wrong there. Yeah, yeah, he's great. He's way better at this than me. Like, he'll answer, like, ask, like, because trust me, in the comment section,

people will be like, bro, like, you could have asked her this, could ask this, and she'll be like, I didn't even think about that. But was, oh, Danny did a commercial one time. This is whole, it's hilarious, where the guy, his girlfriend gets deployed, because he makes commercial. You can leave all this in here.

It's like, Danny, his girl, I showed you this commercial. Do you remember that's hilarious? It's in such a sick, sick. Like, I died laughing. I died laughing. Some people are like, oh, my God, it's horrible.

I'm like, oh, well, you're too serious. So where Danny, there's a guy and his girlfriend. Like the commercial is the guy and his girlfriend and her Labrador. And they're watching the movie. They're sitting on the couch, watching the movie.

They're running on the beach. They're in love. They're together. You can tell she loves. She loves her dog. Yeah. So then one day they're laying in bed and the phone rings and she gets a phone call and she's like, and she looks at him like and he's like, oh my God. She's packing up her stuff.

She's in the military. Oh. Packs up her stuff, puts on her bass, puts on everything as her bag or duffel bag. He drives her with the dog, drives to the airport. She's telling the dog goodbye. It's a beautiful. It's very romantic. Like you're like, this is so sweet.

Like this is the music. And then so then he goes and you can see him with the dog at night, sleep with the dog. walking the dog he's alone she's gone yeah then he drives back to the airport dated in tampa international like had to get a permit and everything and they're in the parking garage and he's sitting there with the dog waiting and all of a sudden she comes out and there's this massive like six foot four black guy who's carrying her and she's with him and she's all hugging him and he's and he's also in the military and she's walking and he's like what uh-huh and he sits there and all of a sudden he pulls out a gun

and he sticks the gun to the dog boom and shoots her dog and he sticks the gun to his head and i was it's the funniest thing you've ever seen you're like soft don't judge me um he shoots the dog and then himself she's her dog does she see it yeah she's there she's there like like screaming and then he shoots himself and then so he did that commercial for a jewelry store oh fuck so he but then he had an all but he has an alternate that's just his own alter he said because when we were talking about putting it together he and his buddies were like wouldn't it be funny she walks out with another guy and he shoots her dog yeah but how does that correlate with a jewelry company he does that he made a separate oh a separate

one okay spoof because he's like we're already here yeah we have the like it was it like it's easy to shoot her going and she she turns to him and she runs and she runs and they hug and he no she hugs the dog yeah yeah and then that's it he said we ought to go ahead we'll take a gun yeah you know so he did the separate one he he goes to he when he pitches it to them yeah they have like 20 people in a boardroom holy and he shows that one the one where they all freaked out and he said i think they're going to die lap realizing it's a joke oh no he said bro crickets i bet and he said they look at them they're like they were horrified um read the fucking room, man. Danny, we

really don't. He said, I realized right away that they're not thinking. He's okay, that was a joke. There's a joke. Hold on. I got that. He said, and then I play the other one. They're like, oh, okay, that's, uh, yeah, that's much better. Okay, okay. He said like, no sense of humor. No, of course not. It was. Read the room. I will show

you the video. You're going to be like you just don't see it coming. Yeah. As I'm sure many of these people didn't, I'll get back. Sorry, I'll be serious again. No, it's okay. Then it'll be muscle memory for me and I'll just pick up a mop in a fucking bottle and I'll just start cleaning it. I'm like, oh, whoa, wait, this is a commercial.

Hold on. Yeah, this is a commercial. Hold on. Yeah. Oh, my God. Have you seen Breaking Bad? Yeah. You love it?

I've seen, everyone I've seen was good. So you haven't seen it through and through. No, no. No. When that series was huge, I was locked up and it's hard to watch. There's no excuse now. There's Netflix. There's just fucking no excuse, you know?

I just got through Game of Thrones. Oh, I couldn't do it. I'm working on, you know, we're working on Westworld. I think it's the language. Really? Why? Like, I don't want to have to pay attention that much to understand what the fuck kind of English are you speaking? What did I watch? What did we watch the other day? Oh, you know what? Did you ever see? Not, what's the name of it? Um, you? The series, you? Yes. He's a serial killer? Yes. And he stalks these chicks and. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great. That's a great one. It is. But, you know, there was like three seasons.

and then I think the new season's coming out in like a month or something. Uh-huh. That's a great one. He's constantly cleaning stuff up. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, he's the one who's got him locked in a cage, right? Yeah, because he's always trying to fight the urge to get rid of it.

And he'll argue. He actually does let, like, he ends up letting one guy go. And that guy ends up being, like, a huge confidant of his who's, like, helping him. No, shit. I missed that part. He was already, like, a criminal anyway. Oh, okay. So instead of turning him in, he's like, hey, man, I like your stuff.

style. You know what's so funny about that? I want to kidnap chicks, too. Well, you know what's funny about it? The whole time he's talking to this guy and he's locked up in the cage, he's like, you don't understand, I'm in love with this girl in Thailand. And I've sent her $30,000 to get a surgery. And he's sitting there going like, there's no girl in Thailand.

Are you crazy? Yeah. But eventually he lets him go. There is a girl in Thailand. He goes to Thailand. He's living in Thailand, and he's remotely, like, helping him. Shut up. All right, I miss that season.

I got to watch that shit. But it's a dark, super dark show. Oh, I mean. I would think that, you know, like, yeah. My life is dark, so it's okay. I like it. How often do you do this, the cleanup? Like, is it pretty semi-consistent, or do you have weeks when you're doing nothing?

No, it's consistent. But, you know, we have other services, too, like meth lab cleanup that we'll clean meth labs, you know, that don't involve. I love the way you say that. Yeah, it's just kind of, you know, like, hey, pass the broccoli. Like, you know, we also wash cars. Yeah. Yeah. Only if there's blood in it.

Right. So, so meth lab cleanup. Jesus. Yeah. So that's why I said if you'd see him breaking bad, because out of everything that I've seen, that is the most accurate in terms of why we clean it, the PPE that he's wearing, the whole bit. Like the storyline is brutally accurate. Right. Every, every meth guy I knew in prison had a burn mark on him. Oh, I'm sure. All of them have. Did they all have fucked up teeth? well not all of most of them that was at the level like when the medium you know the guys I met that did meth in the low security prison like probably I'm as silly as this at the age of 53 you know my best friend which is a guy named Perry Rossini who when you were mentioning rolled the guy rolled her up like a tortilla that's what he did he's disposed of two bodies and and he said you know we put him in a sleeping bag you know like a tortilla yeah and and and he said you know we put him in a sleeping bag you know roll like a tortilla yeah

And we, you know, dump the bodies and, you know, these dumpsters. Why do people use dumpsters? I don't know. When you have perfectly good alligators. Oh, I told you. I was like, I was like, like, dig a hole, bury the body. Why? Burn it.

Or do some get rid of, like, don't throw in a dumpster thinking. One of them was. Don't make yourself sweat. Give it to the alligators. Let them do it. Well, there's no. He was in L.A. Well, are there alligators in L.A.?

No. No? Okay. No. But anyway, he, uh. But like, this is prime spot right here. But he was in, he, he, he ran meth labs. But, you know, they weren't like double wides in the bathtub.

He ran them, like, they rented penthouses. Yeah. This was a high end. This was when crystal meth, like, so they were making, they were making ice. Yeah. And he was, he's a chemist and was taught by a chemist. Right. But he does have, he does have a burn mark.

I've also met the guys who have half their face melted off. Oh, I'm sure. You put, mix the fucking lithium in the wrong order and that shit's going to wear on you. But, like, he made meth and never did meth. He's like, I've never done it. That's the way to go. That's like Walter White. Right.

He made it, but didn't do it. The fatal errors when they do their own product. Yeah. Because then they get sloppy. Right. He, yeah, he was super, and super successful at it, too. Like, hired, had FBI agents that were on his payroll. This was back in the, back in the 80s.

Like, they're tipping them off. They actually, he's been arrested multiple times. And they literally. Did they find the bodies? Did he buried? Well, they found one body in a dumpster. One body was also thrown in a dumpster, and it just, they never found it. Obviously, it was thrown in a landfill somewhere.

So he never got charged with that? No, no, he was charged with both of them. Oh, he did. Okay. You know, and they were both FBI informants. So they were, so that's why they accounted, equated the murders to him. Of course, it's such a, it's actually wrote a whole book on it. It's called Devil Exposed.

Oh, okay. But it's such a horrible case where he was convinced to testify. or cooperate in exchange for a reduced sentence that um and accept a plea because everybody else in the case was even though they had all taken like polygraphs and failed them multiple times they were all going to say he was the one that first they all said he killed the guys then once they failed the polygraphs they said okay he didn't kill him but um he told us to kill him yeah and you know they failed them again then they said okay okay well what happened was And so then they stopped giving, when they finally got the story they wanted, they stopped giving them the polygraphs.

And now you've got seven guys, we got like three guys ready to say you did it. Yeah. Seven other people ready to testify. So he's like, I have no choice but to plead guilty and tell what really happened, which was that these guys decided to kill him. I was there. I did know what was going to happen. Anyway, and he said, and I disposed the bodies, which was funny because I can't tell you. This is going to be horrible.

It's like walking in prison. Yeah. and like I forget like he I owed him like some sodas or something I'm supposed to buy him on commissary and they didn't have soda for like three weeks and I went to commissary and I'm like hey by the way I don't have the sodas you know I'm like they they don't have them again and he goes my god he's like I feel like one of your victims like that I go hey bro my victims are alive he's like you know damn well all I did was move the bodies and I was like and I remember stopping thinking this isn't a normal conversation no no not at all this is not your typical guy conversation but is it true what they say is that you know you go into prison with a high school diploma and you come out with a Ph.D. You've heard me say that. No, I haven't. Have I not said that exact? Well, listen. I was in law enforcement, so that's the kind of the common thing. So it is true. Oh, absolutely. So do you believe that there's a perfect crime where you can't get caught? My, so my, I mean, I believe there is as far as, let's say, let's say, um, fraud. Yeah, white collar. Yeah, white collar. There's definitely is. My only problem with

saying that is it's like with me like i didn't get caught it's the fly in the ointment that throws everything off and i give you an example i would use this example is i had a girl one time who we rented a house transfer the deed into somebody else into another name a stolen identity we have a perfect we have a perfect we have everything's perfect we refinanced the house twice we've got about half a million dollars coming to us she goes into a title company to get the check signs everything the picture on the ID is her yeah the woman the title company has her sign everything looks at the ID and says this doesn't look like you and it is her it's her yeah and she goes it's me she said I had darker hair in the picture but it's me looks at it another woman comes in

and says I think it's her it's her and she goes I don't think so and she says listen you've signed I'm not going to give you the check she said what I'm going to do is I'm going to make some phone calls if everything checks out I'll mail you the check or you can come back and get it I'm sorry I just feel like something's not right now there's nothing

that wasn't right it was the only thing the police said the only thing was that the picture didn't match I said but the do it did match and they go we know it's just weird that she felt that way and even she said I just didn't look like her like how do I account for me doing everything out perfectly

Right, yeah. You fucked up. Right. And stumbled on to my crime. Damn. Like, that's what happened. She starts making phone calls. And eventually she finds out that the warranty deed, the person that we bought the house from, didn't sell the house.

He's like, I didn't sell the house. What are you talking about? You're borrowing money on my house. You know, and no, it's in my name. No, here's the warranty deed. He's like, that's my tenant. Oh. So it unraveled.

Had she not made that mistake, it would have been, the crime would have been fine. Like, I was running a crime that was, I was running a crime where I was making synthetic identities. Yeah. And I'm buying houses for 50 grand, recording the sale price at 200. So now the houses appear to be 200, buying them all in one area. Right. And then I'm borrowing money at the $200,000. So now I've got appraisals that say the house is worth $200.

The comparable sales are $200. Right. I'm borrowing $180,000 on a house I bought for $40 or $50,000, pulling out over $100,000 per house. So each person bought five or six houses. So each person's borrowing a million dollars. There's a profit of six or seven hundred thousand. Right. And then we'd make a few payments and let them all go into foreclosure.

And the banks are foreclosing on the houses, not realizing that they just lost. They realize, of course, when they resell them, we made a mistake. Like we lent too much money on a house that wasn't worth it. Right. But the comparable sales were there. Exactly. And this happens. Legitimately in a real world scenario, it does happen.

And because you bought in the same neighborhood. You elevated the appraisals. Right. Right. So the reason that whole thing imploded was because that person didn't recognize the thing. And that sparked an investigation that got to somebody else arrested. And that person cooperated. And they started a task force.

And they said, this is what he's been doing for almost two years. Now he's borrowed over $11 million. Yeah. And then they come to arrest me. Fuck. So the whole thing fell over. So is that the perfect crime? To me, it was the perfect crime because I'm stealing from you.

I'm telling you there's a loss. And you're saying it's perfectly legal. We'll just take the hit and move on. And I was spreading it out. It was working. So is it, yes. But the problem is that, like, to me, committing fraud is something that I could very easily pull off. What I can't account for is the fly in the ointment.

Yeah. And I can't, at my age, I don't have another run in me. Right, right. I can't go back to jail. I can't five years. I'll be lucky if I can put myself, if I can get myself together enough to retire at 65 or 70. Right, right. Like, think about it.

Start your life. over at 53 years old. Yeah. No, I mean, when you talk about that, but the drug game, that's a short lifespan, man. These guys are, and they're insane to take that risk. Right. Yeah. For nothing.

They're cutting each other. But by the time that that, you know, 100% pure ice hits my level, it's been cut so many times with fucking baking soda and sugar and everything else that it's so diluted. It's like 20% of product. What is the fentanyl? Fentanyl. Now. Yeah.

So you know what's interesting about that is, you know, everybody's like, like you were saying, it's all different levels, right? I know a guy who owns several title companies in this area. He's hired me several times to do promotions for him. I didn't know that he had a drug habit. And he died from fentanyl about a year ago. Shit. Didn't even know it until like six months ago. I called up just to catch up with him.

Yeah. But is he one of those guys? that was using fentanyl or using other stuff that was cut with fentanyl apparently he had like a heroin habit he would get clean for a few years right super successful did he was he aware though that the fentanyl was in the heroin I don't think so see that's happening a lot right right that from what I understand is the guy I talked I ended up talking to an ex a friend of his was they were friends yeah former friend you know so they were friends I ended up talking to him because he's the one who who told me right right had tried to contact the one guy his name is Kevin

I reached out to him, hey, what's going on? Right, right. He calls me, he's like, hey, man, I'm, and he's like, I'm fucked up over Kevin. Like, I'm not sure you've heard. I'm like, heard what? He's not returning my tax. Like, that's why I reached out to you. Yeah.

Oh, wow. He's like, yeah, he would get clean for four or five years. He'd, you know, he said then he'd, you know, he'd go on a bender or whatever for, you know, three or four months. His sister would call me. I'd fly down. We'd get him in rehab. He just been going on for 20 years.

Yeah, yeah. He was super successful guy. Right. And he said, yeah, he said he started doing heroin, and apparently he got something that was laced with fentanyl. I don't understand why they're lacing it unknowingly. I don't, what's the benefit?

I mean, I, if I knew more about. You're killing the guy, so there goes your sale, future sales. Right. It doesn't make sense to me. But we just cleaned up one, two Irish guys, literally relocated to Tampa from Ireland, didn't even have their fucking furniture yet. Right?

So these two guys, you know, big guys doing steroids the whole bit, E.D. pills all over their fucking apartment. They don't have anything in their apartment yet. And they're like, hey, first day in Tampa, let's go party. They get some Coke, not knowing that the Coke was laced with fentanyl. They fucking snored it. Both of them. Bam, died right there.

No one found them for two weeks because their family's in fucking Ireland. Yeah, they just figured. Yeah. So apartment comes in. knocking because it stinks they find the fentanyl coke there and then they decomposed on the floor so it's like I just don't get it why you're putting fentanyl unknowingly and giving it to people when there's plenty of people that would probably buy it as is I mean I'm assuming that maybe it simulates the same kind of a high and there and these guys are putting too much in it like

I'm sure people could do it. It's laced with fentanyl, and they don't die. It's so minuscule what it takes to kill you, though. Really? Okay. It's a granule, like, of sand. We could put a granule right here of sand. And it'll kill you.

It'll fucking kill you. Yeah, I don't... I just don't get it. Those guys bought Coke. They didn't know that, you know, that it had fentanyl in there. This just doesn't make any fucking sense to me. People aren't... Drug dealers aren't, you know, they're not rocket scientists, you know.

any means and it's a risky risky business and my opinion is too much risk way more risk than the reward forget I read a book about a former it was a retired like drug enforcement agent and there was a filthy rich like pastor that ran one of these mega churches and his son had been caught smoking pot and he brings in the DE agent who works for him a security and says, you know, what's going on? Like, I give money to drugs, all these drug things and all. He's like, I mean, this isn't, it's not even, it's not making a dent. He's like, what would make a dent? Yeah. And the guy says, well, in the DEA, we used to shoot the shit. We used to say, you know, well, you know what? Like, if you poisoned a good portion of the drug,

drugs that are out there, people would go into rehabs. You'd kill a lot of people, hardcore dealers. It's actually not a bad idea. Well, if he ends up going to, like, Columbia or something he gets some um a mushroom yeah that that shuts your liver down uh-huh but you have to take it over a long period of time he's like that way you can't just poison the drugs because very quick quickly it'll kill 12 people right and they'll realize this is what it is and it'll stop you have to do something that you can get out there in the whole community where hardcore drug users will be hit over time and then people won't know whether they're using it or not and eventually it'll hit the news. It'll still be out there. People won't know. And they'll clean up because they'll be

scared because Jimmy died, Tommy died, and so-and-so's in the hospital. And I need to get clean because I've been taking some of the same stuff. So they do this. The whole book is designed. It's an amazing. So maybe this has been done by the U.S. government because they're the ones that are benefiting from it, right? But these guys are dying right away. Yeah. And then they're scare out there, like you were saying. That's a really good point. But I mean, does the government even want to shut down, you know, drugs. Like, why wouldn't you, like, just like you said, why wouldn't you just regulate it? Charge, regulate it. Like, they regulated marijuana. I don't see people jumping off buildings. Like, I don't see this as being a horrible thing. No, no. This isn't

changed. I think it's just put a ton of money back into the, end of the government. So, you know that it works. I mean, other countries are doing it. They're regulating the prostitution, too, you know, Amsterdam and even here, you know, one county. So I don't get it. It doesn't make much sense. Yeah, I was in the middle of, when I went to Amsterdam, last year, it was the middle of COVID, like everything across the board was shut down. But yeah, didn't look like a horrible place. No. Look, reminded me of Venice. Yeah. It's very nice, very cool. I mean, everybody seemed nice. I didn't see a real issue. Yeah. So. I bet they have low violence. They do have low violence. Considering the, they have low violence, they have low crime. Yeah. Of course, everybody's relaxed. Everybody's

Happy. Relaxed. Yeah. I don't have to break into three people's houses to get enough money to buy my crack. Exactly. Just get some weed. Yeah. I agree. I think you're on to something. Yeah. Yeah, I'm the first person to say that. Yeah. That horse is indeed. Yeah. Yeah. So anything, any other things that you can think of that? You know, there's the stories of what people do to one another. You know, we had this, this chick once, her dad. put a pillow over his head and shot himself in the head to just mask the sound you know and we're in there and we get there and she calls us to for the cleanup and she insists on sitting in there and watching and I'm like that's fucking weird you know and I'm thinking well maybe it's closure for her right she needs to see it and stuff so she sits there doesn't say a word just like kind of a creepy sits there in the corner watches watches us clean it up and then you know I'm pulling the bedding back and stuff, and I find part of his jaw with a tooth in it. And she sees me grab it, and I'm getting ready to throw it in the red bag.

And she goes, no, no, no, no. I want it. I'm like, wait. What's going on? You want that? Nobody's asked me for that. So I was like, fuck, what do I do? And I'm like, okay.

And I give it to her. And she grabs it and she walks off. And the next day we get back to the job, you know, It was a decent-sized job. Come back the next day, and she's fucking wearing it around her neck on a necklace. That's how you keep daddy with you, folks. I mean, Jesus, wow, that's... Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, people are very, very strange. People are fucking weird. Yep, weird, weird, weird. That was the first time and last time that that's happened that somebody wanted to wear it. But, you know, you got, like, Angelina Jolie. when she's wearing like a vial of blood. A blood from Billy Bob Thornton. Yeah, Billy Bob Thornton.

They both wore. Yeah. So maybe that's a thing. I don't know, but a jaw and teeth that's going to literally decompose on your, hey, babe, what's that new perfume? Decom. So it wasn't, so there's like still stuff attached to it? Yeah. It was a piece of the jaw with the tooth.

It would look like an incisor. Yeah. And she had it on a, on a rope, like a chain. and she was proud of it how old is this chick 27 28 wow yeah she's younger

yeah she lived in the house no oh she didn't live in the house but he put a but she was there when he well she's the next to kin no no I'm saying she was there when he tried to kill himself no okay

no she was there when I tried to clean it I guess he wanted to mask the the sound or whatever by putting a pillow there but um yeah she was eccentric to say the least yeah that's a polite way to say yeah um man so how how often are you doing this every day every day every day there's there's something um is it just you oh well yeah yeah yeah it's grown you know we've got about 48 locations across the country now

oh yeah yeah because i franchised it back in 2016 okay so um Tampa is like our corporate headquarters, so it's one of the largest offices, of course. Right. You know, we've got media team and marketing team and financial team. You know, it's definitely grown from where it was. You know, I started out being by myself. Yeah, yeah. And now we have like 21 employees in corporate and there's about 95 employees among the other locations. When did you open the, when did you start your YouTube? YouTube channel. 2019.

Okay. And that was a risk. Right. What's the name of it? Sorry. Crime scene cleaning. Crime scene cleaning. Yeah.

And it was a risk to start it out. Why do you say that? Well, basically, you know, long story short, I was getting contacted back in 2012, 14, from all these reality TV show companies in L.A. Yeah. Hey, we love this business. We want to make a show out of it. You know, and I'm like.

Okay. And we'll follow you around. We'll make a sizzle. Yada, yada, yada. And they all kind of came back and said, everybody loves the concept, but they think it's going to be very difficult for sponsors because they're not going to want to advertise on something that grotesque. Right. So my response was, why the fuck are you pitching it on cable? Yeah. Like this is not a lifetime movie. Yeah, yeah. This is Netflix, HBO, you know, Prime. So I finally, in 2019, I said, fuck.

it we're going to do it ourselves uh you know youtube was starting to you know get some traction and a lot of people were doing well on there and my entire staff was like that's a bad idea and i'm like why that shit's going to come off callous it's going to be insensitive and i'm like no no no no you don't understand we're literally going to have a videographer follow our crews around just a day in the life yeah we're going to make it educational what we do why we do it and yeah i don't have to be in the middle of the crime scene making jokes and cracking jokes like no no this is how the process right is what happens like I can so I said I think it's a chance we take yeah so we did it and within the first two months we had 100,000 subscribers I'm like fuck right yeah should have done this

five years ago I should have done this five years ago exactly and not listen to you fucks so we did it and you know now we're almost at a million right subs we're at four and a half million on TikTok. People love to see this shit. They love the gore. Right. They love, I mean, as gross as it sounds, they want to see what it looks like when you blow your fucking brains out. Right. And I'm pulling your eyeball out of the drywall. So what's happening with the, what's happening with advertisers? Like, I mean, the videos are, you're monetized. So people are monetized. So people are advertising. Oh yeah. They are advertising. And, you know, I find it hypocritical, kind of what how YouTube formulates their algorithm because obviously our content does not meet their

guidelines but they're like hey those motherfuckers have have viewers yeah so instead of giving them the normal split which you know I don't know 70 30 70 them 30 they just fucking reversed it they take the 70 we get the 30 and they call it limited ads yeah yeah you know so but they're still advertise oh fuck yeah there's tons of advertisers we're doing sponsorships for people uh that don't necessarily need to be aligned with cleaning or restoration. You know, we've done headphones, for Christ's sake. You name it, Hoover gave us a sponsorship with their vacuums and stuff. Right.

But, I mean, the AdSense, the thing about the AdSense is that, that YouTube's, that the advertisers that are connected with AdSense, they don't know where their videos are showing up. If you meet their demographics, it's different than you getting a sponsorship. That's if they know it's on your show. True. I'm saying the ad sense, if it's ad sense, like it could be like they're, all they're saying is look. No, they're looking for demographics.

Right. We're looking for demographics. If she meets this demographic, exactly. They're putting on there. We don't care what it is. And our demographic is ironically 75% female. Really? Yeah, between the age of 35 and 55.

And that's the, remember we were talking about, like that's the thing is that like true crime is like 80% female. Yes, correct. But it's 80%. female when it's connected to murder, serial killer murder, you know, blood and gore. Right. But if you have things like fraud and con men and scans, they're not interested. That's why mine is like, it's like 95, 96% male.

Right. Women are interested in the story too. So what I had to do was not only say, we're going to clean this up and this is how we do it, we need to give them the story right what happened to this guy what kind of life did he live why did he do what he do that's what women want they want to know the story behind it men are more like show me the fucking brains okay right which is anyone really surprised by that no look at like you know horror movies that's probably majority male because there's really not a theme there all right okay you know but if you look at like a lifetime channel that's real that's all female yeah it's more

about the story than it is the ultimate murder or whatever and that's what women want and that's why these true crime channels they're doing so well because women are tuning in and paying attention yeah man almost a million subscribers yeah since 2019 yeah so man we should have been at a million last year and i'm no you're not no you're not you're not at i mean yeah yeah it's and it's it's it's Connor and colby's fault it is it is it is you know I probably fire them immediately yeah he's like I just got here like I've been here like a year have you been a year almost a year how'd you find him um he's uh same colby he contacted Colby and said hey I want to get into this Colby Tyler found

I just one day said to Tyler look I want to interview people but I want to do like three cameras like Annie does right right you know I want to do that like that's like the thing and I was like but I can't work the cameras I can't do the cameras in the switch around us and that and I can buy the equipment right he said I'll find somebody for you yeah and like two weeks later he said okay I can you meet this guy for breakfast at this time yeah sure bam yeah oh and Colby like Colby quit his job Jesus Colby was making like a hundred thousand dollars a year as a working in a in a warehouse as a coordinator in like a warehouse like no way you know the truck doing the trucks and everything and but but

But he's just, he got to a point after so many years, he's got a daughter. He's a daughter. He's a daughter. He's a daughter. He's a daughter. He's a daughter, young guy. And he's just like, I got to that point where I was like, he went to his wife and said, look, I don't want to do this rest of my life.

Yeah. Like, it's good money, but I'm at the point now where they're starting to kind of like elevate me and I'm going to get stuck making so much money that I can't back out of it. Golden handcuffs. Yeah. And he said, so he said, I want to, this is what I want to do. I want to do YouTube. and she was like, okay, well, can we survive on that? And he said, well, let me look into it.

So as soon as he kind of looked in, started looking into it, he had a buddy that was going to hire him to run his channel. He does, has a sporting good store. He's going to, I'll, you, we start something with the sporting's good. And then at the same time, Tyler came in and said, hey, here's my buddy. You know, you got to talk to Matt. So now I think he's making, he said he's making way more than he was making before. After, what's like six months to a year? He's making more money now than he was making at the other job, doing what he's doing what he's. likes to do. Yeah. So good for him. Exactly. I love stories where that's the perfect scenario when not only you're doing better than you were financially, but you're doing what you love. Yeah. You know, like just doing the YouTube and everything in general, like I said, when I was in prison, I was

perfectly happy living in someone's spare room, just being able to do things that make me happy. Yeah. Instead of spending the rest of my life chasing money. Yeah. Doing something that sucks that I don't really, that's a struggle to get out of bed to do. Right. And, you know, the thing that I really like doing, you know, is bank fraud. But the judge was very serious. The judge made it clear. You can't even work for a title company or anything. You can't do that again. Yeah. And so, yeah. Can you even work in the financial sector? No, I can't work in finance. I can't work in real estate. I can't work in construction or development. Damn. But, you know, so now that what what I love doing is just talking about. Like when somebody hires me to do a speaking engagement, and, you know, one, you get to fly across the country.

You know, that's always funny. So you fly somewhere and then you go and you give an hour-long talk. And, of course, there's usually like a dinner after or something beforehand. So it's a few hours. You get to talk about all the things that I've done. And especially if I talk to people in the industry, then they have stories and we can have the stories. Right. And I don't have to, there's no chance I'm going to jail for that, which is a plus.

And then I get to write true crime stories and I get to interview people like you, which is, you know, super interesting because, you know, if you wanted to interview Jordan Peterson, for example, that might be interesting, but the truth is there's 5,000 videos on him already. Yeah. But there's not 5,000 videos on someone in your line of work. Right, right. There's not somebody that, like, that to me is unique. Even in prison, when I was writing guys stories, like a lot of these guys have trash. Like, you talk to some drug dealer who's in there.

and you talked to some guy who's like, I was raising the project, my mom was a prostitute, my dad was in prison, I started selling drugs. Of course. And the problem with that story is, it's a good story. He's got snitches and bad cops and double crosses, and he's got a great story, but it's not unique. I can sit there and listen to, there's a thousand other guys on this compound with that story. So what I would focus on is what can I, who can I talk to that has a different story. It's still a crime store. So it's, it's Ephraim Devoroli.

It's the gun runner. Yeah. It's, you know, it's a guy who's, maybe the meth lab who's, but he's doing in penthouses in Beverly Hills. I find that fascinating. Right. All of their different histories, what got them to where they went. I just, I find it fascinating.

Yeah, that's me too. Like, I love talking to those guys. Yeah. It's not that the crack dealer doesn't have a great story, but it's not unique enough for me to, I've heard it a thousand times. Yeah. The difference, I think, is when the empathy that I actually had for these drug dealers, these street-level drug dealers, it's like when you give them no education, no path to do anything else,

they don't know any different. What did you think was going to happen? Of course. I would do the same thing. Yeah, this is what's available to me. Everybody I know is doing it. Everybody I knows in drugs. It doesn't have a horrible stigma in my neighborhood or my family.

Right. And if I go to prison, people will put money on my books and they'll come. come visit me and this is yeah yeah it's it's a cycle and I think they're focusing on the wrong problem let's go after drugs drugs no it's way before that like wire it's a supply and demand issue right just like any business so why aren't we focused on what's causing the demand to begin with right yeah I think that's that's the problem and you know the stigmas wow if you're a young black male and you're poor you're choices to work at the 7-Eleven or deal drugs and actually be able to feed your family right

yeah who wouldn't choose that i mean come on well you and i aren't going to fix the problem right this second so we should though we'll work on it later um all right so um so you've got the youtube channel yep you've got i said no idea you were you had franchise this thing and you were all over your yeah what do you do for the franchise what do you do you train the people Do you provide them with all the... Train them, provide the marketing, the call center, you know, just the infrastructure in sense. Because what you're doing is people are buying business in a box.

They don't want to go through the shit that I went through, starting out, you know, printing your own fucking business cards with perforations on the bottom. So they want a business in a box and we're giving it to them. We're saying here, here's the system in the process. Follow it. You will be successful just like we are. Right.

And that's essentially the secret sauce to every franchise in the world. So you're McDonald'sizing it. Exactly. So do they pay a franchise fee or? They buy a territory of 500,000 people. So you say you got a city like, you know, L.A. That's a big city. You probably got 10 franchisees that could be in that particular area.

And then they pay us a royalty on every, a percentage on every job that they do. so do all of them do the same thing do they all do like the meth lab cleanup they all do they all do they have to do all of the services that we provide okay and to do the like do they have to go get certified themselves we train them okay so you have a training like a training school yeah we have a training school right there in Tampa ebore oh okay we actually have simulated crime scenes too oh okay so we created like a 10 by 10 room with drywall. We put carpet sometimes. We put LVP, you know, the plank flooring sometimes. And we use pig's blood. And we just simulate a normal crime scene. And that's how we teach them

how to clean this stuff. Okay. Do you do you have like a thing on your YouTube channel? Do you ever you kind of go through the whole process and everything? We record the whole thing. You know, we really want to see what their reaction is to being in that environment. Do people not do well? I mean, you know, most people do very very well we've had one guy that puked right that he was just like man but you know you're supposed to wear a respirator that's that's the whole point so you don't smell the stuff yeah huh i was just thinking um but it looks freaking realistic right you know we've got couches and beds and living rooms and sometimes we do vehicles we'll get vehicles donated to us and i'll go get this gallon of pig's blood and i'll sit it in the sun and i'll let it start coagulating

These guys are like, yeah. And it looks like a human fucking liver when it's coming out, you know, and I'll let the flies get in there and lay their eggs and the maggots. And, you know, we let it. But you get desensitized to this, right? Like at some point, like, if you walk into a, yeah, if you walk into it, you don't, you're just like, eh. I can do a hamburger right in the middle of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That needs to be the clip. Yeah. Yeah. There can be rotting corpses and blood and guts and everything. and I'm sitting there eating

and I can eat a birthday pass me the five guys yeah I'm good yeah I'm good yeah yeah it's horrible you know what

what's funny is it was there was I read like an article about um psychopaths and what

what businesses psychopaths go into like what has a the largest percentage of psychobot like it was CEOs was like one of the largest

yeah CEOs well they also fall in like you know so anti-s social behavior in general follow up, but yeah, but narcissists. So, so sociopaths and narcissism, a lot of times goes hand to hand. So you have, it was CEOs. And then the next one was like surgeons, like doctors and surgeons. Oh yeah. To be a surgeon. Oh yeah. But to be a surgeon and cut into

somebody to cut into something. Like to me, if you said, Matt, I'm paying you to cut into me. Here's your scalpel. I would have a hard time physically cutting into somebody. It just would freak me out. But, and I'm pretty much a sociopath. Anyway, but I'd have a hard time. So in general, like that, it's funny. So I'm wondering, like, people that say, hey, I'm going to go into this business, you know, they might, I wonder if they're going into it because they're like, it won't affect me. Or they're saying, no, I can easily handle this. Are some people just easily handling it?

No big deal? Yeah. But I think it's, it's, everyone has a morbid curiosity. So we get. People slow down at car accidents. Yeah. Like they're rubber neck in it, looking at, you know. That always kills me.

I'm like, how. Hey, what happened? They're like almost stopping. Yeah. We want to see an arm. We want to see, you know, a decapitation or something. Remove the blanket, please. But I think, you know, we get a lot of messages from followers and fans on social media that are,

how do I get a job with you guys? This looks amazing. Like, who does that, you know? Like, I look at a lobster commercial. I'm like, now that looks amazing, but I don't want to fucking work there. Right. But these people are like, hey, I'm enamored with death. Yeah.

and destruction, and I want to work there. And I'm like, hey, you're hired. Yeah, you need to start a franchise. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or, you know, work with us. But a lot of people, it's not, it may look glamorous. I can't imagine how it would look glamorous. But in reality, it's fucking hard work.

You're wearing a Tyvec suit, a respirator, which is like breathing through a straw. It's 110 fucking degrees in Florida. Right. you're sweating your tits off and it's not it's not glamorous by any means you're you're miserable while you're doing it and once they get into the reality of it they're like oh yeah it's a lot of work i'd rather you know go and eat a big mac than then sit here and and sweat my tits off yeah well i think that's most things the glamour like you you see the best part of it you realize oh wait a second this is a lot of work yeah but i think it's it's all mindset so what i do

is I look at it as a mess. For me, it is no different than if somebody just took a cord of motor oil and poured it in your living room, I would treat it exactly the same as I treat blood. It's just a mess to me. Because remember, the human is not there. They're gone. I mean, maybe some parts are left. But for the most part, I don't know who you are.

I don't know what you look like. I don't know anything about you. I don't know your name. Sometimes I don't even know your fucking gender. Right. You know, they won't even tell me. They'll just be like, hey, you know, clean up on aisle nine. Okay, we're in there cleaning it up.

I don't ask questions. When you're done, you probably have a feeling of satisfaction, right? Huge, huge, because I'm a big kind of before and after person, and this is kind of why I love flipping houses and remodeling because I want to see a transition. And the best satisfaction to me is for somebody to come in and go, where did it happen? Yeah.

That's perfect for me. so it's funny because like when I was on the run I had plenty of money I was still flipping houses I would still buy a house clean it up fix it up you know do the whole thing it's like well why are you doing that it's like well I have to do something like yeah but of all the things you could do why would you do that I'm like I like it like I would go in I can pay someone to hire to lay the wood floors I like laying the wood floors right I could pay someone to put in the French doors but I like that

yeah like so there were certain things I'm like no no I'm going to do the tile work And they're like, okay, are you sure? Like, have you ever done it before? I'm like, yeah. Like, I enjoy doing it. So I would do those things. And I was talking to Danny one time. He was talking about painting.

Like, do you like painting? I was like, yeah. And he's like, so you like it. So you like, what do you like about it? I'm like it when it's done. Yeah. Like the actual going through the process of it. I enjoy that the process.

Do you find it therapeutic? I do. Very calming. Like time goes by. I feel the same way about writing. Yeah. Like I'll start writing. I'll wake up before in the morning or something,

and I'm down here and this and that. And I feel like I haven't done anything. And all of a sudden, I've written a couple paragraphs. And I'll look, turn around. Jess is making coffee. And I'm like, what are you doing up so early? And she's like, it's 545.

Like you've been up for almost two hours. Wow. I go to the gym soon. I'm like, I feel like I've been here 10 minutes. Yeah, yeah. And it's the same thing with painting. Like three hours we'll go by like that. People say, how long do you to take you to do that?

And I'm always like, I'm not you know I can't really even tell you because the time passes so quickly right right but I was explaining that to Danny from concrete uh-huh and I and he said I go don't you have anything like that and he goes he's not really and I went wait a minute I go do you mow your own yard he goes yeah and I go when you're done mowing your yard and it's done and the mower's off and it's put up and you walk out I go and you look at the yard do you have a feeling of satisfaction he goes I love that yeah and I said I feel that all the time exactly all the time yeah And he was like, he goes, do you know what I do? And I go what? He said, I actually watch TikToks of people mowing yards. And I go, no, you don't. He goes, absolutely. Yeah.

So, well, probably once a week, he'll send me a TikTok of some guy that's completely finished a yard. It's like a time lapse. It's so satisfying. And he does. He's like, he's like, I love this. Yeah. I love, look at the lines. Yeah.

What do you do with the wines? Even ironing. Everyone hates ironing. I love it. Yeah. But when you're done, yeah, it's great. It's like that. That's awesome.

I did that. Yeah. Yeah. It's satisfaction. Yeah. I get that. I don't think most, I think if you work in the, if you work in the warehouse in Walmart or you're a cashier, I don't think you ever get that satisfaction. And maybe they don't need that satisfaction.

I don't know if everyone needs it that what we have. Right. When you find it, like your painting is my cleaning or remodeling. Right. That's why to me, like what I was saying. And like, I'm okay if if I wasn't making a living doing this enough to have a nice house and a nice car, whatever, you know, and like I said, you know, like I said, you know, like buying a couple tickets and going to, you know, like Hollywood or Hollywood horror, um, uh, uh, Halloween horror nights or something. Like, yeah, like, you know, that would like, like I'm lucky. Like I feel grateful. And I'm, I'm right that I'm in a position like if Jess said, hey, let's go to dinner tonight. They'd be like, I'm not going to be like, I don't know. We're sure. Like, I can go. Right.

But if it was, if I was strapped and I had to stay in someone's spare room, I would still be doing exactly what I'm doing. Yeah. Like, because this is better than all that other stuff. Yeah. I mean, they say, you know, if you enjoy what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. And eventually the money will come. I agree.

But, you know, I would rather do what I love for $20,000 a year than do something I fucking hate for a millionaire. Yeah. I just. I think that's what Colby. That was the problem of what Colby was doing. And luckily, it's worked out. And it's something my dad always said.

He said, look, you know, don't do it for the money. Yes. Because if you're good at it and you love it, the money will come. It will. So don't focus on that. You know, and he was, he was right. I agree with that. He was a duchab in a lot of ways.

But in that sense, he was right. Yeah. Yeah. Is he still alive? No. No. He talked when I was in prison. Oh, did he?

Okay. Would he visit you in prison? He visited me a few times in prison, a few times. My mom came every two weeks, but he came maybe three times. Wow. Your mom came every two weeks. every two weeks for uh when i was at colman for 12 years well oh you're at coleman yeah okay yeah i was in the county jail for a year so she didn't do that at that period i came a few times but when i

got to colman it was every two weeks no i think she missed a month one time when she had her stroke oh wow that's a good mom right there yeah yeah she was she was a she was a gangster wow yeah my mom was a thug what was the worst part of prison um because you were a lot of years in there so you had time to adapt yeah um it's you know it's it's funny because like probably the worst things um i heard the food's great you know so but here the problem of the the food is that um you know it wasn't great but i never expected it to be great like like when we did like but i mean oh you'd be shocked how these guys complained are you serious you fucking believe they were serving us this shit.

It's like, well, wait a second. Like it's a fucking Michelin, you know, a restaurant. Yeah, I was like, bro, well, like when you were selling crack on the corner, you were robbing banks, did you think, well, if I get arrested and go to prison for 10 years, at least they'll serve me good food? Like, no, I thought I'd saw Shawshank, swap. Like it's gray, it's a gray thing that you're going to eat. Maybe it has some maggots in it. You'll get used to it.

Yeah. Pick them out. And that's what I genuinely thought. So when I first got there, I was a big. I'm amazed at how good the food was. Wow. You know, and the problem is it's very repetitious. Oh, you get the same thing like every Monday?

Yeah, Tuesday. Kind of like there's more like a three week cycle. Oh, okay. So you do get a lot of the same stuff. And there were some meals where you're like, eh, I used to say they'd be like, this meal, this fucking sucks. And I'd be like, that's a challenging meal. It's a challenge.

Was it enough, though, to fill you up? It was enough. So, first of all, I'd say 30% of the meals were not only acceptable, they were good. like fried chicken pizza yeah you know like they had hamburger day wow you got french fries you know look where they're like summer camp guys right were they crispy french fries from McDonald's no they weren't but you're in prison suck it up yeah um you know but so there were and then there were some meals where it was like like I didn't like this meal but like it was you know rice and beans like I don't like it but the Mexican guys love it right you know so it that wasn't my meal right sometimes

they served liver, guys would have tons of liver. I can't stand liver. But there were guys like, bro, liver, you're going to eat your liver cock? Oh my God. Yeah, like here, take it. And there's the thing, you can eat out of your locker. Like you go to, well, you can go to commissary, so you can get a soup. Okay. You know, you can buy soups. You can buy some stuff from commissary if you have a job, if people send you money or something. So if you don't like it, well, then you say, well, bro, go it out of your locker. So it's not just candy bars at the commissary. No, no. There's other stuff. Oh, no, there's other stuff. Okay.

So anyway, you know, I would say that the food was much better than I thought, much better than I thought. You know, it's not perfect. But, and listen, and this is another thing that killed me. Like, they give you, they call them holiday meals, right? For like Thanksgiving. Yeah. This is like, this is like your mom made Thanksgiving. Turkey stuffing, the whole bit, yeah.

Sick to your stomach so much food that it's insane. Same thing with, you know, Christmas, same thing with, you know, listen, they, it was so funny for like Halloween and stuff. Yeah. Like, I'm not Halloween for, I think it was like New Year's. Like, they would literally close up the unit's down and they, they have you come out in a line and you go and you get cookies and you get hot chocolate. Holy shit. And I would sit there and I think, and guys would be like, man, you're going to go get your hot chocolate. Man, that's a bullshit.

I was like, bet you're going to be in the line. Yeah, exactly. And they're like, first of all, it's humiliating. but secondly you don't deserve that yeah yeah exactly yeah you know what I'm saying so it's like

this is insane they give you a Christmas bag they give you a you don't know what a Christmas bag it's a bag and they give you like potato chit little different types

of potato chips you can't buy yeah and they'll give you different stuff and guys would complain oh my God when I got first got locked up we used to get two of these they were twice as big

and then it would go down to one now the bag's half as big it's like bro you're all big cropper yeah exactly They're giving you a Christmas bag They have a Christmas tree in the unit

Oh my God Listen one time One time they didn't put the Christmas tree up in the unit They weren't going to And so I said to the The head orally was a He was a biker Yeah

He didn't want to do it And I went Bro where's the Christmas tree He's like yeah we're not doing I ain't doing that shit And I went what do you mean you're not doing it? He was like I'm not doing them And he was why

he was in prison I went first of all I said you're leaving in a year I said I'm going to be here a long time I said and guys used to do this too where I'd say hey well where do you live and they'd be like well I live in Tampa

bro you've been here 10 years you got another five years to go you live in B3 yeah like you could tell yourself that oh you say my house listen I lived in B4 yeah so I'm like I live here

I want the Christmas tree yeah I got I went to the counselor and I said look I want the Christmas tree up why don't we have a Christmas tree and they'd be like well they don't want to put it up. I go, who? Billy? Yeah. Billy, the jackass with the, with the handlebar mustache. So can I put it up? Yeah. I said, I live here. I want to see

the Christmas tree. Right. And she goes, fucking cocks. She said, listen, you get as many people. She's, I'm leaving in an hour. You have as many people in the unit want. And if there's enough people that ask for it, I'll put it up. I had like 20, 25 guys go and knock on the door and go, Christmas tree. Nice. Guys are like, I'm not doing that. I go, bro, you ever want anything from me. Yeah. You need to go to that. Right. fucking dick.

Yeah. And then they'd go and they'd knock on the thing. Listen, we got the Christmas tree. Yeah. Good. It's stupid. Right. Not really.

Yeah. But it's, you know. That's your home right now. They have MP3 players there. Yeah. That cuts, I swear, that cuts 30% of your time off by having music. Yeah. You get to walk the track.

You get to listen to it. The problem is too. What do you check it in and out? That type thing? No, no. You can buy it. Oh, okay. They sell you music for $1.33, a download.

for your music. Well, that's what we fucking pay on iTunes. Oh, is it? Yeah. Oh, but this is, I would say it was expensive because they always say that it was like It's expensive when you have $5 in your fucking account. Yeah. Yeah, then it is, yeah.

Yeah. So you did that and you could listen to the music and that's, it's big because it's so loud in prison. People are always like, oh, it's lonely and it's quiet. No, it's not. Yeah, it's low. For loneliness. You know, I was shocked to find out there's a whole dating online thing with inmates

and people outside. We actually had a fucking employee, a cleanup tech that sought out a guy at Coleman. Okay. Ended up marrying that motherfucker when he got out, had a kid with him, and then, of course, now they're divorced. But she was like 47, and he was like 23.

Yeah, that could see that happening. I didn't know that you guys could do the dating thing online. Yeah, well, you have somebody else kind of do it. You write a profile. somebody else puts you on there's like pin pal whatever yeah and then they get on core links and so corlinks is the email system so you basically send it's almost like a text message like you know you send an email then they go on the they get it then they can type something and they can send it back to you and um they can come and visit yeah she did that yeah she came and

visited eventually they got married she put money on his book a lot of guys will pretend yeah just to get the money super interested right uh in some woman so that she did she's putting a few because let's face it. Let's be honest. What does it take for a woman that's in the free world to seek out a guy that's incarcerated for many, many years? Yeah. What is she really looking for? I mean, it's probably very safe to her. Like, you know, she's got it. She can say she has a boyfriend. He doesn't take a lot of time. She needs her. You know, it's semi-companionship. but there's also just weirdos where there are women in prison

who are contacted by guys that literally want to date a woman in prison they're fascinated by their crime they're fascinated by that she's locked up the prison panty thing I found out about that too they love that shit there's a lot of shit man you know that more than anybody

people are weirdos they've got some crazy fetishes it just seems like you know these women are so desperate for a relationship and they're tired to getting fucked over so they feel like a guy that's incarcerated is safe. It's not only safe, but has their undivided attention.

Oh, and no doubt they do. That's what it is. And then think about it too, and then they get out and they think they're going to be loyal. Oh, yeah. And they're not. Fuck now. This guy's a comeback.

Yeah, he's his comeback. He was a drug dealer. You know, what's funny is, so I was on a program called American Greed. Uh-huh. This is what you do. I love that show. Okay.

You've been on that. Yeah, they did a one-hour special. Shut the front door. I love it. And it's all here in Tampa. Yeah. Because it was Ebor City. No shit.

I bought 109 houses in Ebor City. Oh, love it. You probably bought some that I own now. Maybe. I've owned a bunch on Columbus. Yeah, that's where mine is. Columbus and ninth. Yeah.

I owned like five or six houses on Amelia Street. Mm-hmm. So you've never heard this one, Connor. You're going to like this. I had a guy. So first of all, let me tell you. SIS is like the FBI inside prison. Like they investigate the other officers.

They investigate more complex crimes. So I, after I've been locked up, I'll wrap it up. After I've been locked up, I came out on American Greed, did a one-hour special. I started getting letters from a guy. And he said his name, Ted Underhill. Well, I don't know if Ted Underhill is a famous character by Chevy Chase. It's just, it's ridiculous, right? Okay.

Underhill and such and such, you know, law firm, whatever. So the guy writes me a letter and says, Dear Mr. Cox, he said he was a lawyer. They've taken up my case. They've appealed to the, you know, everything about the letter was wrong. Yeah. The district court has said, okay, well, there's no district court. Yeah.

And the DA, there's no DA. It's a U.S. attorney. Everything's wrong. And he just, for two pages, he went on and on about how he was going to getting my, how they were going to have this a model that was that it was in factuary waiting, she was going to be waiting in a limo when I got out.

It was so just stupid. So I read the whole thing and I'm kind of like laughing about it. And then in like the last paragraph or two, he says, you'll no longer have to eat food where the inmates have masturbated into the food and you're eating toenails. You'll no

longer have to be subject to rapes. And don't worry. Don't worry. The model loves the fact that you look like a monkey. And I, and don't be, don't be offended by that. He said, lots of people look like monkeys. It's not a big deal. Like, he really, like,

what the fuck? But I'm reading this letter. Like, it's already ridiculous. Yeah. Here's the funny thing about it is I take letter and I'm like, this is ridiculous. Yeah. You know, I put in my locker.

Yeah, yeah. About a month later, I get another letter. From the same guy. Yeah. Good news. Your appeal's going well. We've spoken with the judge. he's agreed to knock off this much time, blah, blah, blah,

writes that letter. You'll be released. Your new release date is next year. We're trying to get you into a halfway house now. Once again, starts talking about toenails in the food and, you know, I put the letter up. A month later, I get another letter. And it says, unfortunately, they've charged me with another crime and they've added an additional 50 years, although my sentence was reduced.

They've added. This goes on for. You know, he did miss a month or two. Yeah. Two, three years. I have like, I end up with like 30 letters. Wow. So one day I get a call to S-I-S.

And I go there to S-I-S and I knock on the door and it's a guy named Sacon. I remember Sacon goes, he said, Cox, we got a really disturbing letter in the mail. And he has it and he goes, it looks like this guy may have been writing you. who this is and I go Underhill that's Ted Underhill and he goes Do you know him? And I went no no I don't know him I assume he saw one of these programs

He talks about my victims and how they're going to At this point he's gonna they're going to kidnap me And there's a plot to kill me Yeah yeah yeah they talk to the FBI for me And I'm like you know it's Ted Underhill And I go through the whole thing and he goes I mean he's talking about you being hurt And them kidnapping you and doing this he's like

And he goes you have other levels letters like this? I go, yeah, I have about like 20 or 30 of them. I've kept, I've kept almost all of them. And he went, you don't, like, Socoma's a really cool guy. He goes, you don't have to put up with this. And I go, nah, bro. I said, it's okay. I said, it's like we're doing time together. I said, he's down for me, right? Like, it's like, we're, I said, it's good. He goes, he goes, do you ever write them back? I said, no. I said, the, it's different addresses. There's obviously, the letters come back. Because I did write him one time and the letter came back. I said, but I said, this guy's doing time with me.

Uh-huh. Like, we're, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, like, are you crazy? Uh-huh. And I'm like, no, I said, it's funny, because I get the letters. Right. Read the part about the monkey. Yeah.

And he's like, he said, you look like a monkey. I said, I know, it's funny. And he's like, the cone's like, okay, I don't, can I have the letter? I'm going to add it to my collection. Yeah. And he's like, I, yeah, if you want the letter. So you never found out who it was. No, he eventually.

he stopped writing one time for six months. I probably had, ended up with 20 or 30 letters. Wow. I don't know what happened to letters either, but they were hilarious. But there are weirdos. Yeah.

Oh, I got letters from girls that had seen. Oh, I'm sure. And wanted to communicate with me. I never wrote them back. You know, I had a, I did have one guy who said he wanted me to draw something for him. Uh-huh. And said he'd put money on my books if I did. Ooh.

He put, he ended up putting like 50 bucks on my books. And then I sent him. a picture and he came back he said could you do another one in color i said yeah the problem is you need colored pencils yeah and he said how much would that be i said i'd be a couple hundred bucks so he goes okay he put two hundred dollars on my books and um would you draw for him i drew a picture of uh i drew a picture it was kind of a kind of like um did you ever see um oh god it's it's faith actually i have a picture over there it's a metropolis uh metropolis yeah yeah the robot from Metropolis.

Okay. A couple different designs. Like, it wasn't anything weird. That's what he requested. He wanted that. Okay. And then he think he wanted a picture of Madonna.

I think he was gay because he mentioned Madonna like three times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he loves Madonna. Uh-huh. It's a little odd. Um, and when I read the letters mentally in my head, I could hear a lisp.

Um, nice guy though. Put the, put the, uh, put money on my books. And I remember I had a friend who, uh, in there, he's like, bro, what if this guy, like, wants to come see you? And I go, he can come see me. Yeah, it gives a shit. And he goes, yeah, but I go, he's putting money on my books. I got a lot of time, bro.

Yeah. And he goes, what if, what if he, like, wants, like, like a hug or something? And I go, it's just a hug. I got a lot of time. He's putting money. He goes, what if he wants a kiss? And I go, I mean, it's just a kiss. I mean, he goes, what if it's more than, what if he wants, like, maybe to make out or something?

I go, I got a lot of time, okay? That's awesome. He was just like, you're a sick, sick. That's awesome. But he eventually, he dropped off, too. Yeah. Well, they all do. They can't do the time for that long, right? No, no. They can't do my time in their living room. My God. And, you know, everybody thinks that rapes are rampant. Oh, in prison? And my experience, which is not, you know, which is limited, they're not. No, no. Not at all. No. It's also like that you have to join a gang. Yeah. And you're going to get stabbed and you're going to stop it. Stop it, man. And look, there are prisons. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. Yeah, I think federal might be safer than... Definitely.

Federal space is way safer than state. And every state is different. Like, California state prisons are horribly notorious for extreme violence and gangs and rapes. I think the differences, and I always say this, like, the problem with most federal prisons is that if you get stabbed in federal prison or in prison in general, like, you had it coming. Like, they didn't just randomly stab you. Like, you ran up a debt. you didn't pay yeah um they probably came to you said look you owe you owe tom 400 bucks you you've been gambling you rent you own 400 bucks you have to either work out a deal to pay it somehow

or make payments or you have to check in and go to another prison and guys go to fuck you me ain't going to do nothing okay now he's not going to sue you yeah you're going to get stabbed he's going to stab you yeah you know and the other thing is like and rape like there's tons of gay guys in prison yeah they don't need to rape anyway you need to buy the guy of new pair of tennis shoes. Right. He's now your boyfriend. Right.

Like that's it. It's not a big deal. So. How many of the guards are dirty? So when I was there, I would say not many. Not that there weren't some. Look, you don't, to do some real damage, they're going to be 50 guards that if two of them are dirty,

they can be bringing in cell phones and drugs. Like it could really make things a problem for the rest of the institution in general. Problem is after COVID, they went through and they asked a lot of the guards that have been there for a long time to please retire. So they retired and they hired new guards at a much lower rate. The problem with those guards is the senior guard in Coleman Lowe right now has like two years experience. He doesn't know how things work the way this guy who's been doing it for 15 years. Right, right.

So he's not on top of it. And they're not making very much money at all. Well, that's why I find. Well, they're, yeah, they're ripe for. supposedly there was a shakedown at the low a couple months ago they pulled like 200 phones this 1800 guys they got like 200 cell phones wow 1800 guys it's insane my buddy pete said oh if you want a cell phone he goes you can get a cell phone like this it's not it's not a joke you could you can make a call you can get a call you can text you think that they would block the cell towers though

around the present then that interferes yeah with the guards yeah it's you know so cell phones drugs easy to get yeah yeah yeah so obviously there's guards bringing those in yeah yeah yeah so now it's worse than worse than ever when i was it but then again i don't you know i wasn't trying to use a cell phone yeah yeah yeah and i had multiple times guys offer me if you both if you need a cell phone or if you need to use one no i'm good yeah i don't have anybody i want to text or call i'm not interested in getting tied up in that and then of course you've got your number in the history now now they check it against your phone record like oh you obviously somebody's calling somebody on your you all go to the for 30 days or 60 days or but um back to you you're way more interesting no

Connor hates me like like everybody like guys people come on the show and they think I'm entertaining and funny everything and half the time I'll glance at Connor he just he's disgusted by me Connor's not easily impressed no he's not he's not he's over me at the I think the first month or two he thought hey pretty interesting guy yeah after a year he's like he's like I've heard all these fucking stories I'm over it a douchebag yeah it's like my girlfriend she's not impressed anymore yeah she's like okay you're something different then you got about 10 hours of entertainment in yeah and then it's just I'm over it yeah at this point um yeah so that's it or unless you can you think of

anything else you want people to go to your channel not that anything anything anything anything say um I know you want to bring up maybe talk about the um this is much more You don't want to get more involved in it, I think it fixed them. Oh, yeah, like the training stuff? Yeah. So it's much more relaxed than these guys thought, I think. This is interesting. There's definitely different.

Danny will be better. Danny will be better. Danny's more professional. He has like a real studio. He's got real stuff. He's like a, you know, he's better at it. He's like. We got two black, two black,

tarps and we used to run the podcast Talking Deacon Yeah We have two black tarps And then these and these mics That's it we put it up Take it down

That's it. Oh okay Yeah It's amazing how professional This comes off Totally Like when you go to the channel And look at it

You're like wow Like they're in a studio They're in my living one Yeah it doesn't matter It's what you make it look like Yeah this is way more than we had Mm-hmm So you want to talk

People getting involved Yeah so like you know Not everybody wants to a franchise. Maybe some people just want to learn how to do crime scene cleanup and do it as a side gig or do it on their own. Like you did? Yeah, just like I did. So what I did is I created courses online. They can just take the course and I teach them how to do everything that they need to know. It's, you know, crime scene cleaning.com. That's it. Dot what? What is it? Thinkific. That's a teaching platform. Okay. Um, you can put any courses on there. You can, hey, how do you do

mortgage fraud? Right. Make a course on that. Probably fucking sell out. So can you get certified? Yeah, so there's no like national certification for this type of thing. So we give you a certification that same we give our franchisees. Yeah. And, you know, contracts, how to market. This business is hard to market, which you can imagine. You buy one, get one free, dead body.

Yeah. Yeah, so, okay. What about the, it's the same, you don't get a certify? To clean up like meth labs, you don't get like a certain. There's not a national. thing. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You have to have a license to give a person a mortgage, but you don't have to have a license to clean up a meth lab. To properly clean up a meth lab. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? It's all about the money. Yeah.