Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Cop Says Kamala Harris Cost Him His Career | Corruption, Betrayal & Prison

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Steve Tanabe, a former Bay Area police officer, recounts how he was wrongfully targeted in a massive criminal investigation, charged with multiple felonies, and ultimately served prison time—despite significant evidence of misconduct by federal agents and witnesses. His story reveals a deeply flawed justice system that, he argues, pursued him relentlessly over fabricated bribery and extortion claims tied to DUI arrests, ultimately costing him his career and reputation.⁣ ⁣ Check out the book based on Steve's story⁣ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940363314?ref=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cso_cp_apan_dp_TRZZWES25G951V9FK3WG&ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cso_cp_apan_dp_TRZZWES25G951V9FK3WG&social_share=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cso_cp_apan_dp_TRZZWES25G951V9FK3WG&bestFormat=true&previewDoh=1⁣ ⁣ Contact Steve [e-mail]⁣ ⁣ Steve’s IMBD⁣ http://www.imdb.me/stevetanabe⁣ ⁣ Get 50% sitewide for a limited time. Just visit https://GhostBed.com/cox and use code COX at checkout.⁣ ⁣ Do you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7⁣ ⁣ Send me an email here: [e-mail]⁣ ⁣ Do you extra clips and behind the scenes content?⁣ Subscribe to my Patreon: https://patreon.com/InsideTrueCrime ⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Follow me on all socials!⁣ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/⁣ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrime⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Do you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopart⁣ ⁣ Listen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox ⁣ ⁣ Check out my true crime books! ⁣ Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCF⁣ Bent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TM⁣ It's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8⁣ Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5G⁣ Devil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438⁣ The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3K⁣ Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402⁣ Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1⁣ ⁣ Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!⁣ Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WX⁣ ⁣ If you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:⁣ Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69⁣ Cashapp: $coxcon69 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The biggest police scandals in Bay Area history, Kamala Harris, she revoked my license for life. I didn't do anything wrong. She starts crying and goes, that's what the FBI told me to say. Oh, so what happened with the case? So I'm back out on patrol now, and I'm busy. I'm going, you know, I'm working patrol, graveyard, weekend graves, Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 6 p.m. to 6.30 in the morning. And I go into work one night. It's a Friday night, walk in the backdoor of work. And, well, I come in and I notice that something's, something was odd like the chief was still walking around this is on a Friday at like six o'clock there he's gone at three o'clock right and i noticed he was there walking around at six o'clock which like

that guy's never here past three o'clock on a Friday you know so this is kind of weird like what's going on so we go into lineup and as soon as we clear lineup i load up my car fire up the uh mdc you know the terminal the computer and right off the gate i got a call all the way across town for a like obstruction in the roadway. So I'm like, okay. So I drive out there, you know, 15 minutes to get out there. I get out there. Of course, it was a bogus call. They were just trying to get me away from the station so they could set up. So there's nothing, there's nothing out there, of course, right? So I cleared the call, you know, 10-8 and immediately get a phone call on my cell phone. And it's, and lieutenant's asking me, hey, can you come back to the station? Need to talk to you

real quick. Sure. Okay. So I drive back to the station. I walk in the back door, and I'm greeted by like, I think it was a total, ended up of like 14 guys, agents from the Department of Justice, uh, internal affairs, people from the DA's office, DA investigators. And I'm jumped out, you know, like, freeze, motherfucker get on the ground. Like, whoa, whoa, what is going on? I've, like, I'm totally shocked. Like, what is happening? So they pat me down. They, um, they, you know, they take all my gear away. They pat me out multiple times. Are you sure you don't have a backup gun on you? I'm, no, you got your knife. You know, they already had my knife, my duty bell. and everything. First, they throw me in an interview room, never, never Mirandized me, never gave me

the Liebarger reading, which is a thing in California, they have to, it's like a Miranda, but for cops. And they never did either of those things. And immediately go into questioning me, telling me, oh, we just, we just want to ask you about some things about how you know this, this private investigator. And I'm like, okay, I tell my friends and family this all the time. If you get stopped by law enforcement, just I want an attorney, don't ever, ever talk to them without an attorney, because their only goal is to try to hem you up. They're not your friends. They're not trying to help you. Right.

And I always tell people that, like, just ask for an attorney. Don't say anything. What do I do? The complete opposite, right? So I sit there and I give a two and a half hour statement. And I basically tell them how I know this guy. And, you know, we used to be caught. The private investigator, he and I were cops together in Antioch years ago.

And anyway, long story short, I basically tell them what they want to know. And they're asking me, you know, a bunch of questions. And the one thing, I will say the one thing I did wrong through this whole thing, because you're going to hear a bunch of charges. They charge me, but they're totally bogus. The one thing I did wrong was I had an AR-15 that wasn't California legal. It didn't, you know, in California, you're supposed to have this thing called a bullet button, which you can't release the magazine.

It's like a fixed magazine. You have to have a special tool to release the mag to drop it out, and it can't be over 10 rounds. You can if you're a police officer, but you have to have a letter from your chief or your sheriff, you know, an authorization letter allowing you to buy. I passed the law or whatever. I didn't have the letter, nor did half the department. Literally hundreds of guys, 700 plus deputies in the department. I knew hundreds of deputies had AR-15s that were not compliant, you know. Right. And anyway, so it was no big deal. On the SWAT team, I would take that gun to SWAT practice and shoot it. And it was a shorthy, too.

It was a short, you know, short-barreled AR, and so, which is illegal in California. So anyway, I'd have it at the range. And the SWAT sergeants and stuff would say, like, hey, man, you better not ever shoot anyone with that gun. I go, no, no, this is just a, you know, like it keepsake. After the two and a half hour interview, they arrest me. They go to my house. They search my house.

They find an AR-15. They charge me with possession of an AR-15, transporting an AR-15, or I'm sorry, transferring an assault weapon, possession of illegal assault weapon, all these charges. They charged me with, they asked me. So I guess I got to back up a little because it's a very confusing story. So when all this happened, they thought that I was involved in this larger ring of cops that were doing some bad stuff. They were stealing drugs from the evidence room. They were stealing drugs on, they would go out on search warrants and steal drugs, money, cash guns from, you know, during the search warrant and not logged them and just pocket it.

And so, you know, it's probably a pretty common thing I would imagine. or super common, but it happens, right? But my case had nothing to do with that. So there was this private investigator, and he was friends with these cops that were doing this, right? So the private investigators, the common denominator. He's in the middle. I'm over here.

He's got asked me to help him with a DUI case. And then they got the dirty cop ring over here, stealing dope, and doing all that, and he's reselling it on the street for them. That none of that had anything to do with me. The only thing they had to do with me was that that he, this same private investigator, it tipped me off about several DUIs. And I worked in, and mind you, after all the years in police work, right, I'm now, I'm older. I think I was like 47 at the time.

I've been running and gun in the streets for years. And so now I'm like, I'm in this cushy little upscale town of Danville. There's like literally no crime. There's nothing going on there except DUIs, right? And so the, the private investigator, when you say he was, you know, just tipping you off. So he just happens. He's in a location where he sees some guy who's drunk. It's in a car. And he says, no, no, no. So that's where the story gets weird. So what, what, and I find all this out later. But at the time, what the time he tells me that he's doing a surveillance for

a family court and that he says that there's these, uh, this case going on with a guy who's, uh, the wife claims he's a heavy, heavy drinker and it's a child custody battle. And the judge and the courts want to know, hey, does this guy really drink and drive is what, as much as she says. It's kind of weird because I've never heard of a judge ordering that. And he didn't say that they ordered it. But he said he was doing a DUI, I mean a surveillance for a child custody case. And he says, so this guy's a heavy drinker.

He drives through your town drunk. And mind you, there's no, like I said, there's no crime in this town. So they press us for DUI stats constantly. Got to get the DUIs. Got to get the DUIs, right? Every weekend. They want a DUI every night. On the weekend grave, Friday, Saturday, they know Sunday's going to be slow.

But Friday, Saturday, they're like, you got, Every officer's got to get a DUI. You have to get one. And they flat out said that the chief, who's really the lieutenant, like I said, would say, if you can't keep up with these requirements, you know, you can go back to North Richmond or Bay Point, which are bad areas, you know, and you can work out there if you don't want to stay, you know, if you don't want to perform, right? And so in California, having a quota is illegal.

It's actually illegal to have a quota. It seems like it should be. Right. Right. So, but they do it anyway. I'm sitting there thinking, what if there are no DUIs? What is just a bunch of really, really upper class, nice people that don't get drunk. Well, we can get into that later.

There's a lot of shady stuff with the DUI. But basically, because it's illegal, they call it a performance objective, which I always thought was funny. You call it whatever you want. But if you're telling me that I don't make my two DUIs a weekend and you're going to kick me out of this little cushy spot I got, I'm pretty sure that's a quota. Right. So this performance objective we have to have. So they're constantly pressuring us. So this guy calls me and he's like, hey, I'm doing a surveillance in your town where you're working. And, you know, I've got my kid, my son at the time was a teenager and he's going to high school in this town. And you know, I don't want drunk strut. My wife's pregnant with our soon-to-be daughter coming. And it's like, I don't want, you know, people, somebody who's driving through our town wasted out of his mind, right? And so he said, so he says, you know, would you be interested in, you know, taking a look at him? I said, I'll take a look at him. said, I won't stop anybody without probable cause, but I'll take a look at him. So anyway, he texts me one night. I'm working. And he says, I forget how he mentioned it, but he said, basically, are you working tonight? And I said, yeah, I told him what time I started. And he said,

I'll call you later, whatever. So I'm, so I'm working and I get a text message saying, you know, that he's outside the vine bar, it was called in Denville, and that he's doing a surveillance. So at the, I forget what time it was. I think I got down there at, like nine, well, the stop, I think occurred at like 950. And I think I got down there about 9.30. So I sat there a total of 20 minutes. And that'll be important later because I sat there for a total of 20 minutes, right? So he basically, I'm sitting there and finally, because I had met with him, we, you know,

pulled all our cars up next to each other. And he told me what's going. He goes, hey, I've got operatives inside the vine bar. They're watching this guy. He's had like nine. glasses of wine. He's fucked up. They've been in there for hours. And, you know, when he goes to leave, you want to stop him. I say, yeah. So I said, I'll take a look at him. So I parked down the street, like a half a block away, I back into a driveway. And I sit there. And at some point, I text

him, and this will come into play later too. My text messages, I texted him. I said, hey, man, I can't sit here all. It's a Friday night. I can't sit here all night. And mind you, I was 10-8, meaning available for service. Dispatch could have sent me to call at any minute. It wasn't like I was telling dispatch, hey, I'm busy. Right. And, you know, I'm available. Right. I'm available. Right. I'm available for calls. And I know it's a Friday night. You're 930. Something's going to pop off, right? So I'm sitting there. And anyway, the, so he responds. That's what my first text was. I can't sit here all night. He responds back, says he's up and heading for the door. That was his response. My second text was, what kind of car does he drive? He responded, a white truck in the north lot. And I just sent K, just the letter K for okay, right? And so sure enough, this dude comes out of the bar. A few minutes later, stumbled. to his car, drops his keys, he stumbling all over. He gets in his truck. He backs out. He turns out, he goes on the main street. I pull in behind him. We're not a block down the road. He almost takes out a parked car. I mean, literally his passenger side view mirror almost takes out the side of

that car. He swerves back in the lane, blows through a red light, and then he's going like 50 and a 25. So I light him up. Hold things on dashboard camp. I light him up. Guys wasted. Can't even touch his nose. I mean, he can't touch his nose. He's all over the place, right? So hook him up for do you. The following week he calls me, hey, are you working? Yeah. And he goes, oh, I got another one watching this guy at the vine bar. And now I started to think, well, that's kind of like, how do you just happen to know where these guys are going to be? Yeah. Right. I'm thinking, that's kind of weird. Like, how do you, how do these guys just go to the same bar? Right. And what, what? And so I thought it's kind of weird, but whatever in my mind, I kind of justified it because I'm like, well, I mean,

he's tipping me off about a drunk driver. What am I doing? And I always say, think about it this way. Imagine if he tips me off about a drunk driver and I do nothing. I say, you know, kind of weird that I know you, so I'm not interested in your DUI report. You know what I mean? And then the guy goes down the road and kills a pedestrian. Then the headlines would have been, you know, like, you know, the dereliction of duty, you know, someone dead because this officer wouldn't do his job. Well, the other thing is I was thinking to myself that it is odd that he knows the people, but the fact that he's sitting outside of a bar and people are walking out of a bar drunk, that seems reasonable. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like you know, if he didn't know the guy at all,

He just happened to say, hey, I'm sitting here, and I just saw a guy come out of the fucking bar, get into his car. He looks very drunk. Like, obviously, that's a good place to be sitting. That was you. I would be sitting across the street with the binocular to that guy's drunk. Yeah, right. So, so anyway, so it happens again. The second week, I arrest another, a second guy.

So anyway, what was that? That was like January of 2010. So I hear in, I think, February. end of February, I hear, oh, shit, so-and-so, you know, this guy, Chris Butler, the private investigator, he's him and Norm Welsh, the commander for the state narcotics unit. They've been arrested with 29 felonies each for like, they're stealing drugs from the evidence room, selling it, all this stuff. I'm like, oh, my God, like that's crazy.

And then right away, I thought like, oh, I think the news, the news article actually said, too, like, investigators are going through all their phone records and computers and stuff. And I thought like, oh, great, they're going to see the phone call about the DUI stuff. And it looked kind of weird, but I still was like, I didn't do anything wrong. But yeah, it looks weird. So I assumed internal affairs. You know your name's going to come up. Yeah, I assumed internal affairs would be probably, you know, coming to talk to me at some point.

So that's another. So, I mean, this thing just, it's spiders out in some of the directions. So when I heard that, I thought, you know, I want, you know, if they think I'm involved in drugs or something, I want the internal affairs to come to my house. I want to be like, open the door, go ahead, take a look. I got nothing. I'm not involved in any of these. You look through whatever you want, right?

And so, but the one thing I did, I had the AR-15 that I knew was not legal in California. So I gave it to another cop to hold on to and said he was a reserve. And I said, hey, the guy was a friend of mine. And I said, hey, can you hang on to this for me? And he had one. He had an illegal AR-2 that he had. So he goes, yeah, he tells me, yeah, I'll put in the attic with mine. I'll stash him both in the attic.

And I go, okay. So later, the guy, about a week later, the guy goes to Internal Affairs. This is before I ever, even on the radar, he goes to Internal Affairs and says, hey, I think Steve was involved in that whole cop ring of the guys stealing drugs and doing all that. And he gave me something to hold on to, but I have no idea what it is. So where is it? It's in my house. And he says, he told me to hide it in the attic. I never told him to hide.

He told me he was going to put it in the attic. So he leads the investigators to it. They find the gun. Now they're thinking, oh, for sure, this guy is totally dirty. He must be involved in the whole thing. So that's when they swoop in and arrest me at work. God, where do I go from here? So that's, so you want to go back to when you were questioned?

Oh, yeah. So that night I end up, they questioned me about, you know, have you ever, these guys were taking drugs, you know anything about that? No, and they're really focused on the DUI stuff. And I'm telling them openly about the DUI stuff because I didn't think I did anything wrong. I'm like, yeah, you tip me off about some drunk drivers. But, oh, what it turned out was that he was being paid by the wives of these two guys that were arrested for DUI.

The wives threw their attorney, which was a, that was a common denominator on that side. They had the same custody, a child custody attorney. And she was paying the private investigator. I don't even remember how much it was. It was like some amount of money, hey, make sure these, we want to make sure these guys get arrested so the wives get custody of kids. So that's where the setup was. They were creating a situation.

And that was the other thing. So Butler had these young girls working. He called him decoys that worked for him on some of his PI cases. So he paid his decoys to go in there and flirt with the guy. Like, oh, come on, let's have another round. Let's have another drink. You're right? And in fact, one of them, one of the people that was running the operation in there was a guy

named Carl Marino, who basically later became, you know, testified for the state, maybe ratted everybody out or whatever, but on the drug side, but he was actually selling drugs himself. The guy was in the right in there dealing drugs, but of course, you know,

he went to the state narcotics and said, I'm willing to testify and they used him. Of course, so now he's a witness, no longer a co-defendant, right? Right. Better to be a witness. Yeah, yeah.

But so that guy was, in the one case, was telling this, the guy that I arrested in the white truck, the one that I said walked out to the white truck. Yeah. He was telling that guy, he was an A&E television producer, and they wanted to do a story on his winery because this guy owned a winery, a local winery.

And so this guy's falling, hook glint and sinker for this, you know, this BS story. And they set the whole thing up. You know, of course, the government later tries to say that I was the mastermind and I didn't even heard any of this stuff until my, you know, it was in my discovery. But the, uh, uh, so this guy, you know, claims to be a, Carl Marino claims to be a, a any movie producer, sucks a guy. Come on, let's have another flight of wine, another flight of wine. So that's why the guy had nine glasses of wine because they kept ordering more flights, which Butler was paying for, right? And it's just, it's so, the thing so convoluted.

And ironically, this guy, just about maybe two years ago, this winery owner was killed by a DUI driver just after all this stuff. And, of course, you know, when I, the night I arrested him, he was charged with DUI. That case was obviously never even filed because right shortly after, I was arrested. So they never even filed charges on him. He sued. That's a whole other story.

He sued after I got a, well, we'll get to that. After my criminal situation was over, it went civil. And we can get into that after. I'll tell you the criminal side, though. We should probably talk about that. So, so, yeah, so. You'd been interviewed. You answered all their questions.

Answered all their questions. They charged, they end up charging me with seven felonies that night, right? They take me to jail. My own two guys from, I'm handcuffed in the back of the detective's car. It's a charger, unmarked charger, and they're so tight the back of a charger is, and I'm in handcuffs. And it's just, I'm a big guy. It's killing me. You know, my wrists are just like in those hinged cuffs. It's just digging in my wrist. My hands are going numb. I'm like, dude, please, can you guys loosen this? You think they give you

some kind of, you know, leeway being a cop, right? The guy says to me, one of the guys says to me, oh, they're not built for comfort, sir, and they all start laughing, which is exactly what they tell the suspects all the time. Or they say, oh, they say, what's the other one? They always say, they'll just give them time, they'll loosen up or something. You know, something stupid like that. Like, yeah, these are hard metals not going to loosen up, right? But anyway, I just thought that was just something else.

Like, really, dude, I work with you guys. They were both on the SWAT team, sergeants on the SWAT team. And they were also detectives, you know, but I'm like, really, I work with you all the time and you're going to do me like that, whatever. But I think part of it too is because I was SWAT and a DTAC instructor and, you know, in a martial arts or whatever, they thought, I think that's why they came at me so heavy that night. They had this huge presence. They're like 14 people there.

I'm like, all you, you had one guy call me in to answer questions. I would have, I'm not going to fight you. I'm not going to attack anybody, you know. But anyway, especially because I don't think I, I didn't think I did anything wrong. Why would I? You know, I just want to explain myself. So I ended up giving them a two and a half hour interview, which they later, you know, at trial, we wanted to, a motion to suppress because they never Mirandized me. And the judge, the federal judge said that I should have known better. I've never heard of that. I've never seen that in Miranda where, you know, you have the right to attorney and all that, blah, blah, blah, blah, unless you know better, you know. I was going to say

that Tom when we interview Tom Tom was like he wouldn't Mirandize anybody because he's like but they're free to leave you can leave anytime but I was thinking to myself if I'm being questioned by an officer I don't feel like I'm free to leave

Yeah no I was I was in the My chair was backed into a corner And I had four cops around me And I semi-circle right Just grilling me with questions And I'm backed into a corner There's no way And they remember they had taken everything off

Me including my wallet my car keys, you know, everything on my can of chew. I mean, they took everything off of me. So there's no way anybody would feel that they are free to leave at that point. I mean, I totally felt like, you know, I'm not free to leave. So you went, did they bring you down the police? They processed you? They processed you? They processed me. My bail's $260,000 in the state case. That was a state. But that, so that was, they, I had to, so, I mean, this thing just, it's so crazy. So I get, so I basically, they, then they're ordering me within a, so I post bail, right? I get a bondsman. I post bail at the 10%, right? And then I'm out in like, I think it was like a little over a day,

36 hours or something. I was out. After I bail out, they asked me to come in and give a statement, right? And my attorney's like, don't give a statement, dude, these people are charging you with crimes. Like, why would you do that? So they say, if you don't give a statement, we're going to terminate you. So then I'm thinking, well, then I'll have a show that I'm fired on my record, right? So he goes, yeah, it's probably better if you just resign. So I resigned, right? So I resigned. So that way, I never had to go back and give them any more statements or whatever.

And so the year goes by in December of 2010, this all happened on March 4th is the night I was arrested. My daughter was born March 10th, like just six days later. It was just so crazy. But in December of 2010, my attorney tells me, hey, this state dropped all seven charges against you, but the feds took over the case, and they've just indicted you on four counts. 20 years, each one's a 20-year, you know, max,

you know, like the feds are almost everything's 20 years, right? So I'm just like, what the, like, what? I'm like freaking out, right? So they say the U.S. attorney and the FBI want to interview you. They want to talk to you if you're willing to talk to them. He goes, I don't normally advise clients to talk to them, but that's up to you, if you want to. And I'm still, in my mind, I'm like, well, I don't think I did anything wrong.

So I'll go in and talk to them. So I go in and talk to them at the federal building in San Francisco. And it was just like such a hostile. These people were, it's just, it was so weird. Like, how can you, they're acting like they're mad at me? Like, how can you be angry? You don't even know me. Like, I thought this was, you want to ask me questions, but they're just so, just nasty people, right?

And so it was a female assistant U.S. attorney. and there were two. There was a guy there too, and then there were two FBI agents and then myself and my attorney at that time. And so they are asking me, they started asking me about like,

if I'm, oh, the allegations came, we're saying that, well, I guess we should back up. The guy says the private investigator, right, when he got, he was looking at the 29 felonies with the other guy that stealing drugs and all that,

they basically said, if you testify against those other cops, we'll give you time off your sentence. So he was in the process of, working off his case and that. Then they said, if you testify as me, Tanabe, you know, we'll give you more time off your sentence.

So that's when things got died. That's what brought this all about. So he starts telling them that I like basically, you know, the story morphed from, the very first version he gave was the truth. The very first version he gave to the state investigators was that he just knew a cop that was working in Danville. That's where he wanted to do his little sting operations.

So he called the guy he knew he worked there, which was me. and he didn't pay me, he just tipped me off. The first version was the truth. Well, they basically told him, that's not going to get you any time off your sentence. There's nothing illegal about that. That's not going to get you time off your sentence.

Now, if you paid him, and I still have the discovery, I have 18,000 pages in my garage. And he says, now if you, if you paid him or bribed him, that's a whole other story. And I shit you not, you can see it in the paperwork. He literally goes from saying how he didn't bribe me. Yeah, he just tipped me off.

As soon as they tell him that, He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, now I remember that, no, I gave him money. I gave him money. So anyway, during the investigation, the FBI went through all my finances going back five years. They had, of the 18,000 pages, 6,000 pages were nothing but financial transactions. Every credit card swipe, every ATM withdrawal, every check I had ever written, going back five years, a 6,000 pages they couldn't find a dime unaccounted for. And I had one job, and I had direct deposit through the county, right?

So my paycheck goes in, and then I use my car. card and write checks and whatever. They couldn't find any influx of money that came in. And so, they couldn't find the $3,000 bride that you deposited in cash on this day. Exactly. And they couldn't find money that, like, how did you buy this? Because after his check, he didn't have, you know, enough money left over to buy an expensive watch or whatever, you know, whatever it would be. So they go back to him and they say, yeah, we can't find any money that you would have given him. We can't find any evidence of that. Right. And he's still trying to get time off of his case. He's desperate to do anything. So then he changes a story.

to, oh, that's right. Now I remember it wasn't just money. It was blow. So he says, I gave him some blow. He wanted some blow. And investigators who knew me were even like, Tanavi doesn't do blow. Like, like, you sure, he wanted blow from you. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's a big, you know, fiend for that stuff. Right. And so they were like, looking at each other like, yeah, I don't know about this. They were skeptical. You can see it in the, in the interview. Anyway, that's what he went. with. At the end of the day, those charges were later dropped in federal court, and we'll get to that. But getting back to the story. So the feds indict me on four counts in December of 2010. That was on a Monday. On Thursday, they're already telling me, just plead guilty to one felony,

and we'll give you 18 months in federal prison. And I said, it would plead guilty to one felony, 18 months. And I said, I'm not pleading guilty. I didn't do anything wrong. Much less a felony. At this point, I know I'm not going to be a cop anymore, right? because almost a year's gone by, but I'm like, you know, give me, I'll take some misdemeanors or something, so at least I have a life afterwards, right? And you can, I'll even do whatever jail time you need, but just give me misdemeanors if you're going to do that, because I wanted this nightmare over. This thing's dragging on almost a year now. So they said, no, felony or nothing. I said, well, then, no, I'm not, I'm not going to plead guilty to a felony. And the U.S. attorney,

this woman says, if you don't take our deal, we're going to supersede and double your charges. So now I'm thinking, okay, these people are nuts. They're really grasping at straws here. Like, if you could charge me with eight, why wouldn't you have done it in the first place? You know, why would you charge me with four and then threaten me with four more? You would have just charged me with eight to begin with. So anyway, they, so I don't take the deal. A couple months later, my attorney calls me, hey, man, we got to go back to court.

You're being rearranged. They superseded your indictment with four more counts. So now I'm looking at eight counts. Each one's a 20-year case, right? And what they did was remember the text messages I talked about where I, said that. So the three of those new charges were every time I, even though it's the same conversation with the guy who's half a block away from me in a car, they brought in a Verizon wireless, you know, executives to testify that if like, let's say I text you right now, it doesn't

just go from my phone to yours. It goes to a nearby antenna, which it shoots across from California to Kansas City, Missouri to what's called a gateway hub. And then it shoots back to the same antenna and then to your phone. So that little intangible data flying through the air crossed like four, five state lines or whatever it was, right? And so they said that was interstate wire fraud affecting interstate commerce. I'm just like, what? So, you know, it was just insane. So now I'm looking at eight counts. So they asked me again, do you want to take a deal? And this time they're saying, look, plead guilty to one felony will give you six months in custody and six months on an ankle, or six months in custody and six months on an ankle monitor home detention. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to,

you know, I'm not going to admit to a felony. The other thing is they said that, If you take the deal, you have to go on the stand, raise your right hand, swear under oath that you were taking blow, set people. And I'm like, I'm not going to say something that didn't happen just to get a deal. Right. I'm just not going to do it. It's not in me to do that. So I said, I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. And they're like, fine, we'll see you and try.

And the judge even said at the new arraignment, she's like, you realize you're looking at eight very serious counts. And I said, no, I said, no, I get it. And she goes, and you don't want to plead guilty and take six months when you're looking at all this time. And I said, no. I said, I'm not going to plead guilty to something I didn't do. They were like, we'll see you in trial. So, you know, dragged on. Of course, how the feds play their game where they try to drag the thing out so they bankrupt you. Because what they didn't know is that the attorney I hired, I paid him a flat fee.

He wanted to do the case. He thought it was a good high profile case. It would give him some, you know, some. Yeah, so he'd give him some marketing. Marketing. Right, right. So he did it for a flat fee. But when we were attorney shopping,

people wanted a quarter of a million dollars for something in a case that big. They wanted a $250,000 retainer. I didn't have that. Basically, I lost my retirement and everything. I mean, the feds tried to seize my house, but thank God it's in a family trust, and my dad's still alive,

and I'll never forget at trial, at sentencing. They were trying to, wanting to seize the house. And the judge was like, isn't his dad still alive? And he goes, yeah. And he goes, well, I'm going to take the man's house. What if he, and she goes, oh, but Steve's a sole beneficiary. You know, like I said, I have stepbrothers and step sisters, but I'm the only biological son for my dad.

So he says, you know, he goes, yeah, what if his dad, what if they have a falling out? What if his dad decides to give it to charity? He's still alive. I'm not going to take his house. Right. So it's just crazy the stuff they did, though, when they go after you. But, I mean. Oh, they're vicious.

Yeah. I'm still waiting for them to somehow or another try and say, we're going to indict your wife. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's always the, oh, well, well, they're going to do you. That's always the, oh, well, indict your wife, you're like, what are you fucking talking about? I can't tell you how many times they say, you plead guilty or we're going to indict your wife. And the guy's like, my wife doesn't do it.

She didn't know anything. She knew what was going on. Knowing what's going on isn't illegal. Yeah, we, we, we, you know, well, you can prove that in court. Right. That's the whole thing is we'll bankrupt you. Right, right. And you'll, they have such overwhelming power and the, you know, the stake.

It's so, the scale is tipped in their favor so overwhelmingly. that people plead guilty to crimes that they didn't commit, like, you know, all the time. Yeah. I heard stories like when I ended up going in, which we get to that. But I heard story after story that was just mind-boggling. And, you know, the thing is when they, one of the reasons they make you, they want you to take the stand and, you know, you have to say that you did it. Another reason is so that you can't ever appeal it, right? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, of course. He admitted it in court. He said he did it. And then if you say, well, I just said that to get a deal. Oh, so you committed perjury? Right. There's another five years. Yeah.

So. Do you know the, or can you remember all eight of the things that they're trying to charge you with? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's four of them are the counts, right? Like, are the different counts? Right. So, so in it, my charges under the feds were, um, interstate wire fraud, uh, three counts.

Conspiracy to commit interstate wire fraud. Like, I didn't even know that was. the thing, right? But the conspiracies, two or more people knew it was a crime. You did it anyway. But I didn't even know that was a crime, like to text message somebody, right? And then what was the other one? Honest Services Fraud and Extortion. Those are ones I remember. Honest Services Fraud and extortion. And so honest services fraud is something that I think mine was a landmark case. I think the judge said it was the first time it had been used against the police officer. It was a crime that was originally designed to go after like public officials and politicians. Like, let's say you're a

city council member and I'm your brother and you make sure I get the contract to redo the streets or whatever. Right. You know, and then we kick back some money or something. So anyway, but in this case, they used it to go after a police officer, which was unusual. And basically the whole premise of that was that at the time, this was back in 2010, I made $48 an hour of police. officer, right? So they say that for three hours, this is what the government claimed, that I sat outside the bar laying in wait. That was their term. I laid in wait for the guy to come out of the bar for three hours, basically shirking my duties as a police officer in the town. And I should have been out responding to calls, but instead I was just sitting there because, man, I wanted my bribe. You know,

that's how they make it sound, right? So they say that I sat there for three hours at $48 an hour that they have to assign a dollar amount to a fraud to a case. So there's something. There's saying like every crime, you have elements, right? And you have to assign it. So they assigned, it said, $144. I defrauded the citizens of Danville of $144, right. And we're now going to spend $100,000 prosecuting you. They admitted at sentencing that the government spent over $1 million to go over in my case. And it's just like that, I always thought that, that should anger any taxpayer.

You spend a million dollars to go after a $144 crime. Like, okay. But, you know, anyway. So that three hours that they claim that I sat there, part of the thing in trial was that they, so I brought up the fact that, or I'm sorry, they brought up the fact, they says, you know, in part of that discovery, they subpoenaed the dispatch records for the sheriff's department. And so during that three hour window where they claim, and they brought in witnesses, it said, oh yeah, his car was parked there.

He didn't move for three hours. It sat there. And he was just waiting. and it seemed really weird that he wouldn't respond to calls. He's just waiting. Did you get calls? No, no, here's the thing. Their own discovery, which was the dispatch log shows,

and it's got GPS on the car, everything. And it says that I, it shows that I went to, I think it was five calls for service and made three separate traffic stops all over town, all over town, in a good-sized town, during that three-hour window. So I couldn't possibly have sat there. Well, when I wanted to bring that up in court,

of course, And you know how it is with federal, you know, in a normal court, it's like a judge as the intermediary and you have the defense and the prosecution on one side, right? In federal, it's like the judge and the prosecutor like this and you're out here by yourself, right, in the cold. So, you know, every single thing in a three and a half week trial, every single objection my attorney made overruled, overruled, every single one the prosecutor made sustained, sustained, right? And mine, they got to the point where my attorney was like, your honor, can you at least hear my objection before you rule on it? I said overruled. I mean, they're like gods in that little courtroom, right? And it was just, it was crazy.

So anyway, they get this witness on the stand and the guy's saying that I sat there for three hours and he was a reserve that was writing with me the guy I gave the gun to, right? So he was, so that was the whole thing of why he ratted on me because about the gun is he basically, I'm sure they told him you can either be a co-defendant. So you were there on the traffic side as a law enforcement. You could be a co-defendant or witness your choice, right? So he's like, whatever you want me to say, I'll say it. So he's saying three hours, even though the logs and everything say. He's staying three hours. And he's up there testifying.

And I'm sitting there just, oh, my God, I'm fuming, right? And visibly upset. And my attorney's like, dude, relax, relax. He goes, I'm going to eat this guy alive. He goes, we have the dispatch log. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. So he's sitting there going, oh, yeah. And he, you know, we sat there.

And I kept asking Steve, shouldn't we, shouldn't we be out on the road like patrolling and he said, no, I want to get my bribe. Like, actually, like, who would say that, right? I want to get my bribe, right? So he says, and so anyway, he says that I wouldn't go anywhere. The dispatch was calling me and I wasn't answering my radio. If that were true, every cop in the county would be looking for two dead officers outside of the road somewhere, right, if you just weren't answering your radio.

And so he said, oh, they were trying to reach him. Nobody would, we wouldn't answer. He just, he wouldn't do anything except wait for that guy to come out of the bar. So my attorney goes to reference him. And mind you, this guy's part of his whole spiel was that he had been a level one reserve for 19 years. So he goes, I basically can function on my own as a police officer and or deputy sheriff. I can function on my own as a level one reserve. He can make traffic stops.

He can do all these things. And he's got all this experience. He's trying to build his credibility, right? But then when we get to the point of talking about the dispatch log, all of a sudden, so my attorney says, well, let's go. Back to that night, you say you sat there for three hours. However, I have here what is called a dispatch log. Surely you know what that is.

And it shows at such and such time you made an 1195, which is a traffic stop. And it was like so scripted. The guy goes, I'm just a reserve. I don't know what a dispatch log is. And so, and he goes, well, certainly you know an 1195 is a traffic stop, right? And the prosecutor objection, objection, he says he doesn't know what it is. He can't possibly testify to something. He doesn't know what it is.

And the judge goes, I'll agree with that. if he doesn't know what it is, he doesn't know what it is. So move on. So we were never allowed to put it in front of the jury the dispatch log that showed that I was, that I couldn't possibly have sat there for three hours. I mean, that was the government's whole case for the honest services fraud, was I defrauded the citizens out of three hours pay because I was sitting there not doing my job when actually their own discovery shows I was. But they just blocked it. They blocked the jury from seeing it. So how long were you actually sitting there? 20 minutes. Yeah, yeah. I got there at 930. I cleared my last call at like 9.15, all the other side of town. But I figure,

you know, just regular slow patrol driving. It would have taken me probably 15 minutes to get to where I was parked. So I always put, I told them from day one. I figured I probably got down there about 930. Traffic stop was at 9.52. So 22 minutes, you know, but they said three hours. And, you know, and they just, but that's what the jury heard. The jury heard that I sat there for three hours and I think they thought that was unreasonable like you know but that they that's what they heard but it just wasn't true and and it just blew me away that a federal prosecutor like a u.s. attorney would knowingly put someone on the sense she knows what he's saying is not true well she knows it and she just doesn't he's told he's probably told this is how you answer it you

because if you probably you know during that conversation listen you know this may come up if you don't know what that log is yeah then you can't testify to it right you know and then he's wink, not, not. And then he's like, okay. Yeah, I don't know what he is. At this time, during like the court proceedings and things like that, are you thinking I'm innocent, I'm getting off? Like, I'm still going to be able to prove my innocence.

I really did. I really thought I would. And my attorney also thought, he told me from day one, he goes, I don't think they have a strong case here. And, you know. If the playing field is fair, you know what I'm saying? Right. then they don't have a case.

But that's not how federal court works. And that was the issue with this guy was an accomplished state trial attorney. He had just come off two wins where he got in the previous year. He got two guys off for a homicide. Like that were accused of murdering, you know, someone and got both of them were found not guilty. And he doesn't understand how the feds were. Yeah, he had like 50 something, you know, state trials under his belt, like serious trials. And so, but this was his first federal.

And man, I think he was like over his head. So every time the judge says overruled, he must have been like, and the judge hated him. Because what I liked about this guy, too, he was a firecracker. This guy was one of those dudes like, I don't take shit from the government, and I'm going to fight them and all this. Which I thought, that's what I need because they're going after me so hard, right? But the problem is, you know how that works with a federal judge?

That is their kingdom, that courtroom. And if you don't follow what he wants to do, the guy. He just, the guy, the judge hated. And my judge was Charles Breyer, the brother of Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court Justice. Stephen Breyer. So this is his brother, Charles Breyer, who was my attorney,

or my, I'm sorry, my judge in my case in San Francisco. In any event, he hated my attorney. I mean, literally, you could just see it on his face. When my guy would start talking, he would just, like, go back and, like, you know, put his hands over his face and shake his head. I mean, just, it was clearly he didn't like him. And that did not work in my favor.

So anyway, I went to trial on, they charged me originally with eight. eight counts, like I said, the eight counts. And then during trial, this, oh, so here's another thing. So getting back to the Blow situation. So the witness they used in that case, to say I was bribed with Blow. She was, they used this woman who was a prostitute,

who was, so that dirty cop ring that the private investigator was working on, Chris Butler was with that ring of dirty cops, they were actually running a brothel at a house of prostitution and thinking about opening a second one. they had this girl, one of the girls working as a madam. So I had never met her. They asked her when, when they went first to a federal grand jury, they asked her about me, because you know, you get all this stuff in discovery. When she's questioned, she goes, I don't know who Steve Tanabi is, never seen the guy, never heard of him. Do you recognize his picture? Nope, never,

don't have any idea who the guy is. By the time we get to trial three years later, it's like, yeah, that guy right there, I gave the blow, you know, $200 for the blow, Chris Butler to give to Steve, right, even though I was, and it's like, how can you even testify that? Because you gave it to another guy who he claims he gave it to me. How do you know? And I never got anything. That's the crazy part about it. But they, so, so that's where the blow, the two of the charges came for extortion.

And I, and I learned this, you know, you, who would have thought? Extortion, you think it seems like you're trying to get somebody to do something under threat, right? Right. So, it all, the, the definition. of extortion under federal is that you take something of value in exchange for doing some service or act, right? And that was, so there's so, so that was a, that came up at trial where there even, the judge was kind of like, so even, even if, say, Mr. Tanami did take the blow from, from Chris Butler, if he willingly gave it to him, how is he, how did he extort it from him if

Butler did actually willingly give it to him, which he didn't, but that was their claim, right? And she said, no, and they went over the definition, and it said there was nothing about unwillingness to give it. You know, like, it's just in exchange for doing a service, that's extortion. So that was a new one for me. But that's what, anyway, those two charges were dropped at trial because my attorney, he did one thing that was brilliant is he gets her on this witness on the stand. And he says, can you tell me when you committed the felony perjury? And she's like, what are you talking about? The prosecutor's course, I call objection.

The judge, that's the one thing. The judge says, no, let me hear where you're going with this, right? And he said, well, you testified to the federal grand jury in 2010 that you didn't even know, Mr. Tommy, never seen him before in your life, didn't recognize his name. Now, as you sit here today, you're saying that you know who he is. You gave him to Butler to give to Tanabi, right? And so one of those stories can't be true. And that was just three years ago, which falls within the five-year statute of limitations for perjury, right?

And she just, she just like freaks out. She looks at the prosecutor. He goes, no, don't look at her. I'm asking you the question. I just wanted to know which day did you commit the felony perjury. Was it today or was it three years ago at Grand Jury? And she was like, I, I don't know. I don't know.

And she starts crying and goes, that's what the FBI told me to say. Oh. So we were like, oh, game over. This case is over. We, they took a break. We went out in the hallway. My attorney's high-fiving me. He goes, this case is over, dude.

He goes, we just showed the FBI's coer. witnessing witnesses. We already knew they were because they got the reserve to, you know, say that I was telling him things like, I want my bribe. That's why I won't leave. And we knew they were lying about stuff. So we're thinking the case is over, right? Like this is done. We just showed that they're doing all these dirty things. So what do they do? They come back in, they have their little powwow, and they just end up dropping the two blow in allegations. But we still move to trial on the other six, right? In which I was found guilty on all six of the other counts. Even though, like I, like, If me, I just think to myself, if I was on a jury and I already saw that FBI agents are doing shady things and coercing people to change your stories, I would kind of be like, I don't know, man.

I don't think I could go guilty on everything else. If they're lying about these two things, why wouldn't they lie about the other six, right? So I know, that's just me. Yeah. I was served a jury. I got jury duty and I called down there and told me I wanted to get served. Yeah. But I was thinking to myself, boy, if I was on a jury,

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The dog stars, directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters, August 28th. Get tickets now. Yeah, they said, yeah, I couldn't serve. I'll probably the only person on that entire jury that wanted to get their $26 a day and sit in the jury for the next two weeks on a trial. Like, I would have been the only one that wanted to be there. But the problem is, is like someone like me, I know too much about how they,

and now you know too much about how to. This is now you'd be like. Well, now we're felons. We can't even be on a jury. I know that's what I'm saying. I call down there like, listen, I, you know, I'm more than happy to serve. I do have a felony conviction. Like, you know, no.

They say, you don't have to come. Don't come. I said, no, no, but I want to. They said, no, you can't go. Right, right. It's like, oh, man. They don't want people that know the real story. Right, right.

So when they got to the point where it goes to the jury, yep. They go back in the back. Yeah. And how long were they back? back there thinking about it. So this is a crazy thing too. I had the, my trial couldn't have been at a worst time because I don't know if you know the San Francisco Bay Area, but the Bay Bridge was closed going into San Francisco, which leads from Oakland and the East Bay into San Francisco.

The Bay was, the bridge was under reconstruction during that time. The week of my trial, so cars, anybody coming from the East Bay had to be diverted around to the San Mateo Bridge and come north on one-on-one, but all the people who work in like Silicon Valley or, I'm sorry, live in Silicon like San Francisco or Santa Clara or San Jose that work in San Francisco, they take 101. So now that instead of the, you know, the traffic coming this way and this way, it goes over here and now there's double the amount of traffic coming this way. So we had jurors coming from San Jose that were coming to San Francisco and they were saying it was taking three and a half hours a day to get there and just as much, if not more time to get home in the

evening at five o'clock, you know, it gets out right at five o'clock. So they were not happy about being there in the first place. So when they first came out and said, we have a hung jury. And they said, I think there were like four, four people that were four not guilty out of the 12. And so the judge, and I didn't know they could do this. I was shocked. The judge said basically, no, I don't accept that. You're going to go back into the jury deliberation room and you're going to come out at three o'clock with an answer. And I was like, how can he force them to do that? Like if it's a on jury, it's on jury. But anyway, I guess he can. So they go back in there and like on clockwork, man, we're down in the cafeteria of the federal building. I'm with my family, flew in from Hawaii

and, you know, we're all downstairs. And he says, we have a, we have a decision. And so I'm like, well, I'm just having a bad feeling about this. But we go upstairs and I, and you know, you can kind of tell when you look at your jury over time, you can kind of tell which ones are giving you looks like, yeah, I sympathize with you, man. Or you see them shake their head. Like, it's something the state did or, you know, the government did to shake their head. And you know, you know, and like, that's crazy, right? And so I knew kind of which ones of the four were probably the ones that were on my side. So they basically come back up. And when they led the jury in at three o'clock, especially this one guy I knew who I knew was on my side. He came in, he looked up at me and immediately looked down at the ground and just shuffled to his seat.

And I thought, oh, fuck, I'm cooked, right? And so, yeah, they came back guilty on all counts. and it was just shocking to sit there and just say, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. And they said, we're going to bring you back for sentencing. And the prosecutor, of course, wanted to remand me into custody immediately. The judge was like, no, the guy's been out of custody for almost three years. And he's never ran away. He's complied with all pretrial release conditions and everything. So they let me just show back up for sentencing.

So I come back and, you know, it's like this was in August of 2013, and I come back for sentencing in January of 14. Let me ask what is your wife thinking? Are you married at this time? Yeah, I'm married. My wife's solid. She's so awesome. She's stuck by me through the whole thing.

I worry if the sentence would have been longer than what I got. You know, you just never know. I mean, she's just such an incredible person. I have no doubt. She would have stayed with me, but it would have been really hard. What is she saying at this point? Like, holy. She sat through the whole trial.

Oh, yeah. Sat through the whole trial. And I'm sitting there freaking out because, you know, my attorney's telling me, like, you know, they're trying to give you. I can't remember it was like, four to six years or something like that, or something like that. But he kept reminding me, like, remember, you made the government take you to trial and they usually punish you. They want their pound of flesh, right? I made them work. They offered me two deals. I said, no,

now that I've made them go to trial, they're going to, you know, they're going to want some revenge, basically, for making them work. So he said, you know, the judge can give you whatever they want. They could give you 20, they probably wouldn't give you, you know, consecutive 20-year terms, right, but they could definitely run them concurrent and give you the full boat on one of them. And he could give you 20 years. And I'm like, really? I go, really? And so I was freaking out the night before, you know, sentencing.

I'm like laying in bed thinking like, oh, my God, my daughter's like just about to turn three. I may not ever, I may not ever, I may not see her until she's, you know, graduating college or something. You know, who knows? I was freaking out. So I didn't sleep and wink that night. Anyway, go in for sentencing. The judge did let me prepare a sentence. speech, right? I wanted to say something because going back to the trial, I never,

I never took the stand in my own defense. And my attorney said, there's no reason for you to. He goes, he goes, I don't think they proved their case. He goes, this is a weak case. There wasn't much here other than the word of the private investigator who's now embellishing all this stuff to get time off his sentence. You know, they bring this, he was already in custody. They bring him in from Colorado. He was at Englewood. They bring him in from Englewood to testify at my trial. And so there's no reason for you to testify. Yeah, there's no reason for me to testify, he goes, the prosecutor, I think she was Harvard or Yale law graduate, and she's just a shark, dude. And they were like, she's going to just tear you to shreds and make you look like a piece of shit, right? So he's, there's no reason to do it. I don't think they prove their case. I don't think you need to.

So again, you know, I probably shouldn't have taken his advice, but, you know, it's your attorney. I have never been in a situation like this. So I said, okay, I won't do it. I won't take the stand. And I didn't. But so when I was, once I was convicted, I wanted the court to hear my side of the story. I prepared a two-page thing, and I read it. And, you know, I wasn't paying attention because I was so into the reading it, but people later told me that there wasn't a dry eye in the courtroom that people were in the, by this time, the jury's gone at sentencing, right? The jury's gone. And it did, the jury box was filled with, like, interns and, you know, people that worked for the court who were just, like, sitting in learning stuff or whatever, you know.

And there were a bunch of young people in the thing. And they said, dude, everybody in there was crying and stuff. And I basically said, you know, I want you to know who. I am. I said I was a young police officer. I was like, well, one of the top recruits in my police academy. You know, I've always had choice assignments everywhere. I was known as a go-getter. All my quarterly evals are all like above standard. Everything, you know, I've always just been a model police officer. I did all the years I was a cop, which was totaled about, I think about close to 18 years total, because I were a couple different departments, right? I had one

in IA complaint in like 18 years, which is far below the national average, you know, like way, way below. Most people get way more than that. And I had one in like all those years. And so basically, I said, you know, my life was being a cop. This is what I was born to do. I love it. And I've lost my career. You know, I made a bad decision. I said, I listened to this guy and I thought I wasn't doing anything wrong. But as you know, with sentencing, like if you don't take responsibility, you don't get the two-point, right? You get the two-point reduction in sentencing if you show remorse and basically and accept and accept responsibility. Well, I'm not going to still not going to accept responsibility for something I didn't do. So basically, because the government's claiming, the government's claim was that I intentionally and maliciously set up these,

and I basically was the architect of these schemes to set men up to deprive them to their rights so that we could all profit from this bribe money that was coming in. And it just absolutely wasn't true. You know, my motivation for doing it was my bosses were on me to get DUIs. And here, they're handed to me on a silver platter. There's a guy telling me, dude, watching this guy for hours, he's had nine glasses of wine, he's about to drive. Why wouldn't I take a look at him, right? All right.

So, anyway. But, yeah, you know, they basically saw it. My sentencing, I gave the speech and I said, you know, I'm sorry that I embarrassed the sheriff's department and I put the hardship on my family and all that. But I'm not going to say, I'm sorry for. And I'm sorry these men went through what they went through, but again, that was no, not, you know, anything I did, you know, maliciously or whatever. So anyway, I don't think I didn't get the two-point reduct.

You know, he said I didn't meet this standard for being remorseful or whatever. But he still, so still when he goes to give me the sentence, right? So I'm sitting there thinking, like, in my mind, worst case scenario, this guy's going to give me 20 years for making them take me to trial. So he says, so basically I give my speech and he says, he says, so at the end he goes, so at this time, he said basically something like, in essence, I'm in a quandary today because I have to basically sentence a police officer to prison, but for doing his job.

Nobody forced these men to drink. Nobody put a gun to their head. They chose to drink, and they chose to get behind the wheel. They could have called a cab. They could have called a friend, a wife, somebody to come pick them up, but instead they chose to get behind the wheel and drive, and nobody made them do that. And so they were drunk. no question about that. But basically he asked it because I was found guilty of, you know,

bribery. They said, oh, and that's the other thing. So when the two, when the two blow charges were dropped, then they used a Glock handgun that I had in my safe that was registered to the P.I. But all cops, we all trade guns and do stuff all the time. I had a Glock in my safe that was registered to him. So then they went, then when the blow in charge were dropped, they said, oh, it was the Glock. The Glock was the bribe. So they went from cash to blow to finally. a Glock. It's like, it's just like grasping at straws to make something stick, right? But the jury bought it because I had a Glock in my safe. So that one, they got me on that one for, I guess it was like accepting a bribe or whatever. Right. Yeah. I think it was one of the extortion charges. But so I'm

thinking, right, that the night before like, oh my God, I might not see my daughter until she's grown. I don't know what's going to happen. You know, and so the judge basically, after he says, you know, that he's got to send a cop to prison for doing his job. He says, so at this time, I'm going to impose a sentence of 15, and I swear to God, I thought he was going to say years, and my heart just sank. And he goes, months. And I just was like, I turned around. I look back in the, you know, in the pews, and my mom's crying, my wife's crying.

Everybody's like, you know, totally like emotional. And I'm just like, holy shit. I'm like, I thought for sure, I'm thinking I can do 15 months. It's not a big deal. Right. So anyway, they send me, that's another thing. send me to, so they let me stay out of custody and they said the Bureau of Prisons will notify you of where you're going to be assigned.

Right. I said, okay. And so I think that was in January. And in like February, I believe it was like a month or so, a month and a half later, I get a letter from the U.S. Marshal Service saying that you are to self-surrender to the ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado on April 15th, 2014. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, are you, so I have a picture of the letter in my phone.

And I, and I go, and I was just like the Pucker factory, like, this is like where Ted Kaczynski and the, you know, the 19th hijacker from 9-11 is there, all these crazy people, right? And so I, so I call my attorney, like, what is that? He's like, I got this letter. There's a camp there. What's that? There's a low security. Yeah. And so they basically said, you just check in there because that was a designated main of the four.

There was a, the ADX Supermax. a USP, an FCI, and then the camp. Yeah, you're going to be, you're going to be mowing the Unabomber's lawn. Right. No, I ended up being a cook in the kitchen. I was a lead cook over there. So, so anyway, so I get to, so, you know, we get that straight now. And I'm like, okay, so I self-surrender on April 14th, or 15, April 15th, 2014.

I fly to Colorado. I get a hotel room the night before. I'll never forget. I bought myself a six-pack of Coors Light and a can of chew. and I sat there just like, I mean, a million things going through your mind in the hotel room, right? Looking out the window at the High Plains Desert. And this place is, this motel is like a motel six. It was like half a mile from the prison, right, just down the road.

And I'm looking out, and there's still icicles hanging from the building in April. And I'm looking out this cold tundra, like, holy shit. This is going to be like my view for the next, you know, year and a half almost. And so anyway, the next morning I go, I take a cab over there. and the guy cab pulls up and I've got my bag. Oh, and they said, you know, the BOP website says that, oh, we have state-of-the-art medical and there's a new nationally,

a board-certified nutritionist makes all the meal prep. Oh, my God. That's great. Oh, this isn't too bad, right? And they have a weight pile there, a nice one at Florence. Oh, do they? Oh, unbelievable. It looks like Venice Beach.

It's an outdoor weight pile with rubber mats. Unbelievable, yeah. And so, you know, the weights are old. A lot of the stuff is old. And I'll tell you a funny story about that. Anyway, so I get there and, you know, I pull him in the cab to the guard shack and the guy says, I got a self-surrender. And the guard immediately just goes to you, get the fuck out of the car.

And I'm just like, fuck, dude. Like, whatever. So I step out of the car, but I left my bag in the car that had my prescription glasses, my medication, right? I had prescription meds. They said you could bring all that for high triglycerides and stuff. So I have my glasses, my medication. So I get out of the car and he goes, you go stand against the wall.

So I go stand against this brick wall. He goes, you keep your nose two inches off the wall and you don't fucking move until I tell you. So I'm just like, whatever. So I'm standing there going, what a dick, right? So I'm standing there. And then he tells the guy, okay, you can leave. So the guy starts to know when you turn to leave.

And I go, whoa, whoa, he's got my medication or my glasses, dude, stop. And the guy says, it's a total dick. He was going to let the guy drive up. So he finally lets the guy get myself. And then he makes me, I stand out there for like 45 minutes in the cold. I'm like shivering. It's standing there facing the wall, waiting. And then finally, a pickup truck comes driving down from the planes. And these facilities huge because there's four prisons

spread out over a massive area. And they, the guy picks me up in the truck and takes me, go through the whole thing, you know, body cavity inspection, the whole bullshit, health, you know, medical, go through all that the first day, getting my clothes. I get the, the, I go to, you know, where you get your bed roll and your clothing, you know, your uniform, the dark greens. Yeah. So I go in there and there's this big white boy and I bulked up at the time I was I went I bulked up purposely because I didn't know what to expect right and so I had worked in the jail before but I don't know what prison's like and so I bulk up I go in at 255 I'm like pretty yoked at too and I walk in at 255 and so this guy one of the guys working in the uniform shop is one of the white boys right like the Aryan

guys right and so he's oh hey brother what's up you know he's like he'd get giving me extra clothes and take this he goes what's size shirt what's that shirt you want I'm like oh X-L. And he's like, no, no, you're like a 4X. And I said, 4X. What are you talking about? You know how they wear the baggy clothes in prison? I never understand that. What is the purpose of that? Like, they wear everything like, three sizes too big. It's just weird. So I'm like, no, I'm in XL. He's like, no, no, you got at least do a double or triple. I'm like, whatever, do you give me a double. So he gives me extra clothes and that takes him. So I go to my, I go, I get to my room and my cell, and I get set up. And I'm in a three-man cell, you know,

when you first get there, you don't, you're in the shitty one, right? So I'm in the three men. They're made for like two, right? So we're crammed in there like sardines. And I unpack, you know, I go to lunch. Because by this time, I checked in the morning, by now it's almost noon. By the time I got through medical and everything. So I go up to lunch, I stand in line, I get my food.

I walk around the premises. I look. I'm like, oh, man, they've got a nice weight pile. There's a big open area, you know, track to do walk around the track. And so I come back to, I come back. back later that night, I go to dinner. I go back to dinner. And so that evening after dinner, I'm sitting on my bed.

I'm sitting on my cot, right? And all of a sudden, I look up at the corner of my eye, and I see somebody in the doorway and I look up and there's three Hispanic guys and they're fully tatted out on the neck, you know, tear drops on the eye. And they're like, what the fuck, man, you're a fucking cop. And I thought, oh, fuck, here we go. So I jumped up and I'm like, you know, I'm ready to go because I'm thinking it's on, right?

And they're like, and I think it surprised them. Maybe they thought they were going to intimidate me or something. I jumped up, ready, rock and roll. And they're like, you're a fucking cop. And I was like, obviously, I'm not a fucking cop now or I wouldn't be sitting here or whatever. And they're like, well, you stay the fuck away from us. You rat fuck. I'm like, fuck you.

I'm not here to make friends, dude. I said, you stay away from me. I'll stay away from you. And I thought for sure I was getting stabbed that night. I didn't sleep a wink. If you sleep hot at night, you know how disruptive that can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night or all of the above. That's where ghost bed can help.

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This is a low? At the low? No, this is a camp. This is a camp. Yeah. And then you, but you wouldn't believe. They had a riot right before I got there. At the camp.

At the Florence camp, they had a riot. And right before I got there, they said that, they said it was so crazy. They said, if you would have been here a month or two ago, when the, when the dorm gets locked down, at night, because they know the guards, they're lazy. They don't come back until like four in the morning. They do their last check at like 10 o'clock and they don't come back to four in the morning or something, right? So they said, this place at 10 o'clock, you know, the second the guards lock up the building and leave, they said, dudes are pulling shit out of the ceiling. There's guys walking around cell phones drinking great bottles of gray goose. They set up poker tables.

I'm like, what the... And so I'm seeing all this shit while I'm there. I'm seeing drugs in there. You see everything. Everybody's got a cell phone drugs. You're thinking, how does this, the guards Like either there's the lamest guards on earth or, I don't know, or they're in on it. I don't know, because how could you miss that? Right. Anyway. They just don't care. Yeah, or they don't care.

It never, it never stops. So if they bust them, throw them in the shoot. It doesn't matter. They'll be doing it again the next night. Like, it's, like, these guys just want their check and go back. Right, right. But coming from a cop background, I'm used to following the rules. So I'm kind of like, I don't know.

It's just shocking to me. But anyway, yeah, so that happened. And then, oh, and then, you know, like a weekend, you know, there's two stories. stories. I'm on the second floor, so I'm leaning over the balcony looking down. But I'm always, normally, I'm always back against a wall, head on a swivel, because I don't, you know, everybody knows. It's spread through wildfire. Oh, I tell you this, the first day that I went out to the gym after lunch, the first day I checked out the gym, I'm out there checking out the weights, right? I just, I plopped down and I put on 225, or, I'm sorry, 315. I put on 315, and I just

start wrapping out 315, too, chung, like cold and put it back. I was in pretty good shape, you know, And, you know, people are all looking. I thought people were looking because they were, like, thinking, like, oh, that guy was kind of strong or something. I don't know why, but everybody's looking at me funny. I come to find out later, it's because I don't have permission to use the weight pile yet. Like, you have to get permission from the guy who, you know, who runs the shot caller for the weight pile was Hispanics at the time at the camp.

Shot caller. This is a camp. Yeah, dude, no, you were. The people said, dude, you're not supposed to just go out there and start lifting weights. You have to get, like, permission. You have to be in a car. and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, anyway, but yeah, it was crazy.

Do you understand that Coleman Lowe, at the low, there must have been four or five cops that were there? Right. Well, I mean, that are inmates. Yeah, there were eight of us. But nobody knew until I came out. I'm the first one who said anything. So that's just what I was getting.

So I'm on the upper tier, like a week later, I'm in, and this big dude comes up with crazy hair and a beard, right? And he comes up and leans out next to me like this. And he goes, And so we're both like this on the thing. And he goes, so you're a cop, huh? And I'm thinking, oh, fuck, here we go, right? This guy's like big dude, like 6-3.

I'm thinking, oh, shit, here we go. It's on. And then he goes, yeah, it's good, relax, man. He goes, so was I. And it turns out he was a cop and a sergeant in Desert Springs, or Desert Hot Springs, PD. Then was Tony. And he was the one who had tasered some woman.

And she claimed that he tortured her in the Sallyport. When he tasered her in the Sally Port, after he brought an arrestee back. And they said that, you know, he was, they claimed he torture. It's just, they go after cops for the craziest shit, you know. But so anyway, once, so I, I, I, it came out the first day. I'm a cop.

I'm not going to try to hide it because everybody's got cell phones. Like, they already know. That's how they knew? I found out later because I was like, how the fuck did they know? So when I worked the jail in Contra Costa, we have these things called head cards. And you carry, the deputies carry around with a rubber band, like 90 cards. And it's got your picture on it. And then when they do count, they come around and they look and say, okay, that Cox, yeah,

okay, he's good. who's the other guy, but they hold on to those head cards. In the federal, they just, at the camp anyway, they just put them in a plastic sleeve that's like on the outside of the cell, right on the glued to the cement. There's a little plastic sleeve, and they put your head card with your picture and your name and everything. And so it tells who, what inmates are in that stall. So I wondered why, because I would see people come up the first day that was in there.

I'm sitting in my thing and I see people come up and look and they walk away. And I was thinking, man, these are nosy motherfuckers, right? What are they doing? So what they're doing is they just go right to their cell phone and they just, they want to see if you're a rat or a chomo, right? So they go right to their cell phone and they Google your name. If you were in Cho, you couldn't be at a camp. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, they definitely, they want to see if you're cooperating.

Right, right. So anyway, they, they, they, I'm guessing that that's how they found out because mine was like all over the news. You Google my name. It's just like, it was back then it was like pages and pages of dirty cop this, dirty cop that. It was, you know. So, so anyway, that was my experience. I mean, it went pretty uneventful. I ended up not getting any fights in there.

I got in close a couple of times or the TV room, both times. It was TV room. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The babysitter. Yeah, like if they got to have, everyone's like, well, they shouldn't even have TVs. If you don't have TVs, that place, those people would tear that place apart. Yeah.

That TV occupies so much of the inmates' time. Right. And they can control them that way. We're going to take away the TVs. Oh, okay, wait a minute. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So how long out of 15 months?

How long? So I was in, I think, 13 months. I got two months off for good behavior. And then I had due halfway house for like, I think it was five or six weeks on the way out. But the halfway house was worse than prison. I mean, just what a nasty place. The one I was at 205 MacArthur in Oakland, like two people had been murdered there. Two of the residents, like people who are you going, well.

They're strafed with the AK-47 on the front steps, like, separate incidents. One of them, I forget how the other guy was killed, but it was funny. You'd be watching TV at night, and the black guys would get up and close the blinds. And it was because they were like, and then there's like rival gang members that come in to get revenge or whatever. Once they're out of prison or whatever. I mean, our halfway house here was just, you know, everybody said that it sucked. And everybody says they do, shouldn't in general because, like, they're constantly counting. They make you clean all the time.

Like, they're on you all the time. day, you can't have that, you can't have this, you can't, like they're just, they're worse than being in prison in the halfway house because you're just monitored all the time. They're on you all the time. You're like, I'd rather do my time in the fucking in prison. I was okay there. I had a routine. Nobody bothered me. I told my wife right away, I should have stayed, I should have just stayed there another like couple of months. And in a prison, at least federal prison, unlike state prisons, in federal prison, you really almost have no interaction with the guards. You don't have to talk to a guard. Except for every one, one, one, one,

it's a year when if you have team, right? Or not they don't call it a team. They call it whatever your year, your annual meeting with the counselor or something. Like if you get 10 years, their guys have gone basically, they'll go like a year. They'll walk into their counselor's office when they get called in for their annual. Hey, this is your annual. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, sign here. Okay, thanks.

We're good. And you leave. That's it. But you have to have, oh, you don't have to have barely any interaction with the police, but you go to the halfway house. fucking on you all the time, giving you shit, threatening you. Well, what I found interesting was that,

so there was a Japanese guy that was a CPA from like a neighborhood, like where I'm near where I'm from, like a high-end neighborhood. You know, they got a little cool little guy just like very unassuming like CPA, right? And then there was an old mob guy from the East Coast, an Italian dude that had been in the mob.

And I guess he had done like 30 years or something. and he was finally getting out. The reason they were releasing in California because his daughter lives out here. And so he was going to be in halfway house and then go live with his daughter, right? And the dude was old, Ben. He was like in the 70s, really cool old guy.

But, you know, those guys don't use drugs. The little CPA guy didn't use drugs. They know I don't use drugs. The three of us were tested like UA's every freaking day. Like, I'm not kidding. Every single day. Middle the night. Tanabi come down to the front desk.

I'm like, are you fucking, and here's what's crazy. The room I was in, it's supposed to be a two men room. room for two people. We had eight guys or eight of us crammed in there. And it was all, I was in there with the brothers and these guys would smoke rock all night long. And I've thought like, how are they not getting tested? Like they would literally be because my my bunk was by the window and they would sit there like literally this far from my head like just hitting a crack pipe all night,

like for hours on end. And I'm like at the pillow over my nose because I'm trying to filter because I don't want to test positive, right? I'm trying to filter out the thing and I can barely sleep. And I'm thinking like, how are these guys not getting tested? I get tested like almost daily. And I realized, so I quickly realized what was going on because, you know, you know, if you have critical thinking skills, you can figure out pretty quick what's going on. So GeoCorp was the GeoCorp and CCA, the two big privatized prisons, right? GeoCorp had the contract for the halfway house. So they don't, so I thought about it. I thought, why would they not want to catch people? Oh, I get it, because they want to keep the contract from their competitor.

And it's like, imagine if you're a company who runs a halfway house and you tell the federal government every month, oh, we had, you know, 127 dirty tests last month. They're going to be like, what do you kind of show you're running over there? You're fired, right? So they only want to test people that won't test positive so they can say, oh, we did run all of our tests last month and we only had three positive tests, right? Because, you know, you're testing most of the people you're testing are, you know we're going to be clean. Right.

But they can just put it as random. and they don't have to probably log who, write down who they tested. And so it was us every freaking day, but those guys never got tested. That's a scam. Yeah, I was going to say, did you ever get tested when you were at the camp? At the camp? No, never. It's funny.

I don't know if you got on a list or something. There would be times when, like, it was like, I was tested like every two or three weeks within, you know, three or four. Like literally within six months, I'm tested like, whatever, five times or something, let's say. And it's like, what the fuck is going on? And then you'd go three or four years without getting a test. It was just like, and then they wake you up at like four in the morning. And you know, you're dead asleep. And these guards walk up, bam, bam, bam.

And you're like, fuck. And they're like, Cox, you got a UA. And you're like, fuck. You know, and you got to jump down. You got to go. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's nerve-wracking. Well, I meant to tell you that earlier when I came in for the medical on the first day,

first day coming in, I go to see the doctor. And this guy was a weird dude. He wore like an admirals, like a captain, like a ship captain. He wore this white shirt that had these appellets on the shoulder with the stripes. And everybody thought, like he's just a weird, like a weird dude. No, he's from, he's a doctor from the fucking, what, from like the Navy or that they bring him in, right? But they said he wasn't, though. They said, this guy just wore that shit because he's like a weirdo.

He was a really strange dude. And I'll never forget. Like, we sit there and he comes in and he goes, you know, what do you? got super, you know, unfriendly. And I put down my medications that I had for my high triglycerides and my prescription glasses. Like, here's my both prescriptions, one for the reading glasses, one for the, you know, you had to get a prescription just for reading glasses. And I had to show both prescriptions. He literally takes them, just throws them all in the garbage. He goes, yeah, you can buy glasses of commissary. And then the triglyceride medicine, right in the garbage, he goes, yeah, you're not

getting that. And I said, what do you mean? That's for like, I have to have that. I had a heart stent put in a few years ago. But, you know, I have hydro glycer. I like, dude, I need that medication. He's like, yeah, you're not getting that. Just like that. You're not, you're not getting that. And I'm just like, that's so strange because the BOP website says, like, you know, state of the art medical facility with doctors on staff. The guy was never there, too. It was always a nurse that was there. And if you wanted to see them, you'd have to make an appointment. Like, you know, we had a dude that, um, an older guy that kept falling. And then the guy was in front of me in the cafeteria one day,

just went face first into the cement, and the dude was in his late 60s, like cracked his face open, you know, and then we're calling like, oh, man down, man down. And, you know, they just kind of saunter over,

like just totally, couldn't care less, right? Take him back to his cell. This face is split open. Take him back to a cell. You should take him to a medical, dude. No, just take him to a cell and give him some aspirin.

And we're like, and he kept falling down. So he fell another time in the shower, it landed on his chin and bit his tongue right down the middle, split his tongue in half. And again, they did like nothing.

He might have gone to the infirmary for a day or two that time, but then he was back. They did nothing for him. I found out, after I was released, I found out through a friend that was still in there, that that guy died. And it turned out that he had a brain tumor the size of a lemon in his head. That's what was causing him to pass out. And they just, they could care less, man. Here's some aspirin.

I know. Listen, I've seen people then not give people their inhalers. And they end up dying that night from a massive, you know, what do you get inhalers for? asthma yeah they'll have a massive they're like no i have extreme asthma and then yeah well you know you like like a guy gets there and he's like i need my asthma medication they're like okay well you have to see the doctor to get there no no i brought it with me from the other prison it's in my stuff right i need it i could i could die and i'm i'm i need it now and they're like no they're like no tomorrow tomorrow you get it tomorrow or really what they do is they say after count and then do you have count

count and then you talk to that guy and they're like medical's closed right right right talking about it'll be tomorrow they go to the lieutenant lieutenant's like yeah i'm not i'm not in medical's closed nothing we do and then they the guy goes to goes to sleep that night has a uh an asthma attack dies that night and they're like they don't they don't give a fuck they don't give a fuck we should always say that the the leading cause of death in uh in coleman which is the the the low security prison i was in it the leading cause of death was medical yeah because they had a guy one time he went to he went to to the doctor on Thursday, said, listen, I got major heart pains. And they were like, I mean, okay, well, you know, you have to schedule this, schedule that. You'll be Monday or Tuesday.

And he, so then the next day on Friday, he went to medical. And he said, listen, I'm, you understand, this is like, I'm having pains. I'm dizzy. I'm having pains. They're like, go back to your unit. You can see the doctor will be in on a Tuesday or Monday or whatever. He was like, he's like, no, I, I think I need to see the doctor now. Like I need to go to emergency room. That's not happening. So go back to your unit. So he goes back to the unit and he's walking and I'm sitting there getting out my coffee.

And you know, you go to the microwaves and keyed up your coffee. So I'm getting out all my stuff and I see him walking in front of my cell and all right in front of myself. Boom. It's there. I mean, he was a big fat guy. And I mean, he slid forward and, you know, he's kind of went back and forth. And you can just, it's it. I knew instinctively that's not him fainting.

He's dead. The way his body shifts in. Just like a sack of potatoes. Right. And then slid, slid. And then went rocked. And I was like,

there's no muscle control at all there. And I was like, holy shit. Like, he's guy just died in front of me. And of course, I stepped over and went to that fucking coffee because I knew they were going to lock us down.

They called medical. Medical comes running up. They load them on the thing. And on that blue, that orange, you know, whatever it is thing. and they carry him down.

They're all like, everybody, I've got a pulse. I got a pulse. You don't have a pulse, bro. Stop it. And then they said, yeah, he died in the ambulance. He didn't die in the ambulance, bro. They always say that because they don't want to have the guy die on the property. Right, right.

And, of course, everybody calls his family, and they're like, he's been to medical over and over again complaining about this heart thing. Yeah. So after that, six months after that, they made it a rule where if you said you have a heart, a pain in your heart, they take you to the emergency room immediately. They call an ambulance and bring you out there. What year were you in? I got out in January of 2019.

Oh, 19. Okay. So, yeah, medical's the fucking worst. So what did you do? Did you have a job or anything? Yeah, so I started as a cook at the camp, right? Like just one of the regular cooks. And then an opening came available and they said,

if I wanted to be the lead at the ADX at the Supermex, and I thought, well, I just want to get the hell out of the camp. Like, it's something to do, right? Yeah. And so for my, what is it, 12 cents or 18 cents an hour, I can't remember what it was. But I remember my check, they pay you monthly, right? And for an entire month of work, 40 hours a week, my check was $21 and like 60 cents or something like that. Yeah. That's crazy.

But anyway, yeah, I got, so they offered me the job as a lead cook over at the ADX. So they would bus us over there. We'd bus over every day. I have to go through security, you know, go through screening, wandering, metal detector, all that. And then on the way out, they do it again. and my hustle was, you know, everybody's got a hustle in there. So mine was jalapeno's. So I became the jalapeno guy.

So it was funny because when I'd get back to the camp every day from the ADX, I'd walk in, you know, I'd have big, big green jalapeno and red and green jalapeno stuffed down my socks on both sides around my ankles. And, you know, because it doesn't go off from the metal detector, right? I'd get back to the camp and I'd just, I mean, the Mexican guys would be waiting for me to. They'd be waiting up by the office. So as soon as the bus pulled in, I got out there immediately hitting me up for the, to buy the, I remember it, stamps was the currency, right?

Post-ist stamps. Is that the same where you're at? Oh, yeah, of course. Stamps or mackerel. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, they trade stuff or if they just wanted to buy something from you, they would be with stamps. Yeah.

But I thought that was funny funny. I'd get like three bucks for a big hull of menu. Yeah. So, yeah, it would be stamps or mackerel or sometimes just commissary in general. They'd give you a list. Like, I'll give you the list of $20 to go get. Did they have a store guy? Yeah, yeah, a couple of them, yeah.

Yeah, I always remember that. The whole, the economy inside of prison, when I actually got to a prison and really saw how the economy worked, I was just like, this is insanity. He said, they don't even talk about money anymore. It's all mackerel and stamps and commissary. Like, nobody even says, you owe me $15. Like, bro, you owe me, well, it's $15, but you owe me $15, but you owe me $15 in commissary, or you owe me a commissary list, or you owe me this or here. I need four stamps for that. I bought a pair.

What's the name of that brand of boots they give you in there? I forget the name of it. Bob Barker? Bar-Barkers, yeah. They're just crap. Within a week, they stunk because it's like, you know, it's not real leather. It doesn't breathe.

It's just horrible. We're just horrible. I ended up buying a pair of Timberlins off somebody. And they're a really nice pair of Timberland boots. And, I mean, beautiful. I paid $200 bucks for them. So, you know, luckily I had, you know, my wife on the outside, put money on my books.

I think we sent it somehow, He sent money to somebody on the guy's girlfriend on the outside and sent the 200. When she confirmed she got it, I got the boots or something. So I had these boots and everybody would be like, man, those are nice boots. Where did you get those? Where'd you get those? They were tan, not the black bob barkers, right? So I had these nice tan boots and they were good quality boots.

So when I left, I'm like, fuck that. I paid 200 bucks for me. I'm taking them with me. Dude, guys were hitting me up getting mad. Like, no, you need to leave that here. I'm like, fuck that. I paid 200 bucks for these. They're going with me.

And they were actually getting pissed. Like one dude, like wanted to fight me over. We're like, that's bullshit, man. We know we don't get good stuff in here. And now you're going to leave. You're back in the free world. You can buy whatever you want. You need those boots need to stay here.

I don't want to sell them. I want to wear them home. I took a Greyhound bus home. I just needed to clear my head. You know, my family was like, you know, we'll pay for an airline flight if you want to take a flight home. And I said, I just, I need to just, I need to, what's the word, decompressed, I guess. You know, I just needed a little time to myself to just be on the road looking out the window, going across the country. So I wrote a greyhound back to Oakland. So what was ultimately like your job now?

Like what are you doing now? Like you got out and so I mean you're not a police officer. No, no, it never can be again. You know. Did you ever appeal or consider appealing the whole decision? I filed for an appeal, but right before the time ran out to do so. So I had of an appeal on file. I don't know if they ever expire or not. I just didn't do anything with it at the time. You know, I was so fired up at the time. I mean, I'm still angry to this day because it really think they, did me wrong. You know, it's like if I did something wrong, I'll own it up. Like the, like the gun. Yeah, I had an AR-15. I shouldn't have had. But so did half the department had that too. You know, right. That wasn't, that, that wasn't the feds didn't even care about that anyway,

because there's no federal assault weapons ban anymore. So the feds didn't even care about the gun charge, but at the state level, you know, they made a big deal of. But, um, I'm sorry, what was your question? What is what are you doing now? Oh, question. No, so I ended up, uh, while I was right after all this stuff happened, you know, I had a, uh, I re-upped my PI license. This was going back to 2000, right after I got arrested. I was like, what am I going to do for a living, right? So I, years before had a private investigator's license. So I, I re-up the license at the time because it wasn't now, now, now that I'm convicted, Kamala Harris before she was vice president, which she was still state, a state, uh, state of

California attorney general, she revoked my license. Right after I got convicted, she revoked my, uh, P.I. License for life in California. I mean, they just do, the system does everything they can to keep you down, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's like my PI license had nothing to do with what I was arrested for. You don't make DUI stops as a private investigator, so why would you take that form of me making money, you know? Anyway, so, so I got into, so at the time, I went back to doing that for a while until, until I was convicted, but I also got into television and movies. I started playing a cop on TV on the Discovery Channel. There was a show called I almost got away with it.

And then there were a bunch of spinoffs, wives with knives and campus crimes and all these things. So yeah, so I got into playing a cop on TV. And I did that for years. And then it morphed it. Now I play bad guys. Now I'm always a biker or a thug. You see the facial hair.

But yeah, so I've got like 50 credits on IMDB now. I played a FBI agent in a Matrix 4. That was cool. Yeah. But I mean, I had a like you literally see me. On the big, so if in the Bay Area is different than Hollywood, in order to get cast in big Hollywood movies, you have to live in L.A. Because they cast it in L.A. So even movies that are filmed in the Bay Area, they cast all the main roles are cast in L.A. So when they come through San Francisco, they're just looking for, you know, extras for those.

So the ones I've had lead roles in were mostly, you know, B movies filmed in the Bay Area with local directors and producers and stuff like that. But I have been in some big, bigger, you know, big movies. I was in Jexie. I mean, there's just a bunch of them, man in the wastes, but it's all, it's all, you know, background stuff, you know. And that's what you're doing now? Yeah, I still do that now. So I do that. But I also work for a company.

I'm an estimator. I do for stone countertops, like for, you know, kitchen remodels and stuff like that. I'm an estimator sales manager for a company and Concord. What happened with the civil case? Oh, so that, that's, that's. Interesting story. So when I first went through my criminal stuff, I asked them, I said, you know, when I was in that interview I told you about with the U.S.

attorneys, the FBI, I said basically to them, I said, because they were trying to insinuate, like, how do we know these guys were even drunk? Maybe you just set them up. And I said, look at the body cam, dude. I'm not sorry, body cam, the dashboard cam. I said, look at the dashboard cam. My car had a dashboard cam built in the car. And they all looked at each other like, what?

They didn't, like, they didn't know anything about it. and they whispered, they came back. So later, I think they went and looked at it, and it showed these guys were the two stops. These guys were fucked up. So when I tried to use that in my trial, then I got indicted, and we asked for the body, you know, we want the dashboard camp.

Right. And the blood alcohol, because one guy did a, one of the guys, the winery guy who later was killed by the DUI crash, that guy requested a blood draw rather than he wouldn't blow in the Paz and he didn't want to blow in the intoxicizer. thousand at the station. When he got back to the station, he demanded a blood draw. So we have to call a nurse. She comes down. She draws the blood. She seals it in an evidence, seals it with a evidence label,

puts it in an evidence locker, which I don't have a key to. And I said from day one, I said, if you don't think these guys are drunk, check the guy drew blood. Check his blood, BAC with the county crime lab and look at my dashboard cam. So, you know, of course they whisper never comes up. So later in trial, we're asking, well, I want that. I want to use that in my defense. If you're going to try to claim that these guys weren't drunk and I set them up, let's see the body camp. So this is what they tell me. Oh, your camera and your car wasn't working that night or on those two stops. I'm like, wait, so what about every other stop I've made, the hundreds of traffic stops I've made, you have all those videos, but the two DUIs in question,

both times the camera just happened and not be working that time. Oh, we're not sure what happened, but yeah, we don't have it. And I'm like, hmm. And then I said, what about the blood alcohol report from the county crime lab. And they said, they said, oh, because the guys were, because once you got arrested, those, these guys were never charged. Everything was dropped.

And so we purged the evidence because we didn't need it since we weren't charging them. And I never believed that. I always thought, they were claiming this was like one of the biggest, you know, not my part, but the other part, the biggest police scandals in Bay Area history. I'm like, and you're going to think that

you're going to dispose of evidence before, you know, cases adjudicated. I don't think so. So I never believed that. But basically I couldn't use it in my defense. So now I get convicted. I go to prison. I come out of prison.

And now the civil trial start, right? So now the two guys for the DUI are suing me and the county. And, you know, like we're now co-defendants, right? Me and the county are co-defendants because I was their employees. So then they're the deep pockets, right? And now they're wanting you to testify on their behalf. No, no, no. Better than that.

Now that were code defendants, they send the guy from the lawyer from the county. And he's arguing that, oh, your deputy Tanavi had probable cause for these stops. Like, earlier are you saying, I'm like this dirty cop who did all this stuff off the books? Now you're saying I had probable cause. Like the tune completely shipped did a 180 where they're saying now that I had probable cause to make the stops. And this is the one that almost sent me off my chair. they said, oh, and Your Honor, we have the blood alcohol reports from the county crime lab that show they were clearly drunk. And I literally almost fell out of my chair.

Like, what the fuck? You said that, I couldn't use that in my defense because you said it no longer existed. And now you just magically found it. Like, come on. So, you know, it just shows they were just playing dirty all along. They had stuff. You know, so that's the kind of stuff that really angers me. It's like, you know, they hide exculpatory evidence.

They do so many shady things, right? but, you know, they always say that, that defense attorneys are slime bags, you know, I had, I had a, the U.S. attorneys, attorneys in general are just scumbags. Yeah, well, I had a federal, from the public defender's office from the federal government, the guy told me that he goes, you'll never meet a bigger scumbag than a U.S. attorney prosecutor because they're just, they are just dirty, man, you know, the stuff they do. And it's like, I believe it now. And they can't be, imagine if nothing, if you were allowed. to lie repeatedly and you knew it will never I can lie to a judge I can lie to the prosecutor to the defense I can lie to every single person I can lie manipulate do anything I want and it will never catch up with me I will never be charged or lose my lose my license or lose my job as a result of it then how absolutely corrupt would you be exactly they never get charged

yeah when they when the FBI in the interview the FBI agent asked me with the US attorney one of the FBI agents says, did you, he goes, so the question was, I'm trying to remember exactly how it's phrase. He said, if I, did you participate, or were you involved? Were you involved in these dirt, they dubbed it dirty DUI? That was a media term, not mine, but they always attributed it to me that I said I was doing dirty to you. I've never, never even heard that term until it came out in the newspaper, but they called it the dirty DUI case, right?

and there's a book written about it called The Setup by Pete Crooks. And it's actually about the whole case with the other cops doing their thing and whatever. But the FBI agent says, were you involved in these dirty DUIs to violate men under color of, violate their rights under color of authority? And so my answer was this, verbatim. I said, well, yes, I was involved in the sense that I made the arrest. I'm the cop that stopped them. I go, but I knew nothing about them being set up by the private investigator or who they were

or why this was all happening. I was just tipped off. You know, I didn't know that they were being, the wives had paid the PI to do this. I just thought this was the surveillance he was doing and blah, blah, blah. And so that was my explanation. In trial, the prosecutor puts the FBI on the stand and says, Agent Songsanong, did you have a chance to interview Mr. Tanabi prior to his indictment? And he says, yes, I did.

And he said, what did you ask him? He says, I asked him if he was involved in setting men up for dirty DUIs to violate their rights under color of authority. And she says, and how did he respond? And he just goes, he leans in the microphone. He goes, he said yes. That's it. That leaves out 99% of the rest of the answer. It just says the yes part where I said, yes, I was involved in the sense I made the arrest.

And I just thought, like, it's shady, man. Like, come on, bro. You've got to be better than that. You know, these guys are the ones who were who I used to want to be an FBI agent when I was a cop. In fact, when I was in Honolulu, they almost hired me. They flew me to San Francisco. this is back in the early 90s, and they pay a business class on United and put me up at a hotel to go for the oral boards in San Francisco for FBI. But I ultimately end up not getting that job.

But I always wanted to be a federal agent, and I looked up to them and thought, oh, man, these guys are the cream of the crop. And after I saw the shit they did in my case, just like, man, it's shady. Like they're no different than a street cop that lies about probable cause or, you know. And that's the thing. I've kind of become somewhat of a, I'm not anti-police at all, but I'm more critical of the stuff that they do now. I was on the crypto show.

I don't know if you ever heard of that. I was interviewed on the crypto show with Barry Cooper, the cop-busters, Barry Cooper. And they basically wanted to know about like, you know, police corruption and whatnot. And that was a pretty good show we did. So have you considered trying to get a, I mean, a pardon

from Trump? Yeah, I'm actually in the process now. The funny you asked that because I did the, I request a pardon under, right, a month before Trump went out of his last term, right? Right at the end, I didn't even think about it until the end. I thought, man, I should apply. Well, Trump's still, he's pro-police, you know, whatever. And so I put in for it. And of course, you know, the wheels of the government turn slowly. So I get a letter in January after Biden was already inaugurated saying in 2020 saying that your pardon has been accepted, but it's being looked at by the new administration, blah, blah, blah. And so, as I expected, nothing.

Sat on it for four years. They did absolutely nothing. Four years. This year, January 20th, the day that Trump was getting inaugurated again and Biden was on his way out, the same day that Biden gave pardons to all of his cronies and, you know, his son and everybody else, that same day, I get a letter, January 20th of this year. I'm sorry, not a letter, an email. So on the pardon department saying President Joseph,

R. Biden has denied your request for a pardon, and this decision is final and cannot be appealed. But you can reapply. You just can't appeal it, but you can reapply. Your pardon went to his crackhead son. Yeah, yeah, right. So I ended up reapplying. And I read, I forget her name now,

but there was the lady who was Biden's pardon czar, and she was just fired. Trump fired her within, I think, four or five weeks of him being inaugurated. He fired her and now he's got the other lady in there. But she was, you know, much, very much like politically on the other side, you know, not conservative, but liberal. But they just, you know, they just flat out denied me. But I just thought it was funny that they waited four years to the last day in office and then you just do it on the way out.

She had to wrap her. She knew she had to wrap some stuff up, but she got her over her stay in. out and start denying. Yeah. What? Law enforcement officer? Yeah. Denied.

Exactly. Cutting them in. And that was the problem in San Francisco with the jury I had to. It's like when they did voir dire for my jury, you know, they brought in 100 people. They couldn't find 100 people that hadn't heard of the CNET case. A CNET was that ring of cops that were stealing drugs. It stood for a central narcotics enforcement team. or something.

Right. But anyway, they're basically an arm of the California Department of Justice Bureau Narcotics Enforcement. It's like the state, it's like DEA at the state level. Right. So anyway, this guy was a commander that was involved in that. And it got a lot of attention. My whole investigation resulted from like an offshoot of that.

Yeah. But they knew from day one, I had nothing to do with that. They never even like went down that path. They knew right away. And the guy, the commander from CNET, knew the Norm Welsh. And he's actually a good guy. He did his time. He got 14 years.

And he did. He was released early because of COVID. He's now an ordained minister, really good guy. And he's actually, you know, he fully admits everything he did and says it was wrong. And he made a mistake. And he's owned up to his responsibility. The other guy, Butler, the private investigator, I heard he's trying to get people to write a book about his life, about how we all somehow. you know, forced him to do this stuff.

He was like a master manipulator, but the whole thing with DUIs is like, you know, cops could care less about public safety. They make, you know, in California, they have this thing called avoid the 25. You know, it's a big program, anti-DUI program. And the real thing, like anything, like with the privatized prisons, it's all about money, right?

So the DUI stuff is all, it brings, I think, that average, I want to say they get, for every DUIRS, a city in California gets, they get something like $2,000 from the state, and then mothers against drunk drivers gives them money, and then the feds throw money at it. So it's a huge moneymaker for the cities for DUIRS. That's why they push them so hard. It has nothing to do. They claim, like everything else, it's the guise of public safety, right?

Like, oh, we want to keep the streets safe. They could care less about that. They want, it's a business. Yeah. It's a industry. And they, you know, they, there are standard things they'll put in reports like, they'll say like, God, they'll say stuff like, if you, anytime you read any DUI report, it'll say that the driver had redwatery eyes, slurred speech. Right. What is the unsteady on his, an unsteady gate.

Yeah. Right. The definition of probable cause. Right, right. They're always going to exaggerate that. And, you know, that's what I was getting with the, with the thing about where I was talking about where I do like, you've been on the radio. show, crypto show and stuff, we talked about that. And, you know, people, they were all about asking me about our cops racist and our cops corrupt. And I always say when people ask me that, well,

what's your definition of corruption? You know, if your definition of corruption is cops are on the take robbing drug dealers and, you know, doing this and that, then, you know, that, yeah, that's very few, very, very, that percentage is very small. But if your definition of police corruption is a cop committing any felony or any crime or federal crime, then they're all corrupt. They do it on every single day. I mean, I worked for, what, three different police agencies and everywhere I worked for, they do the same stuff.

They lie about probable cause. You know, like nowadays with body cameras, I think it's changed a little bit because there's a little more accountability. But before body cameras, I mean, you think if they, some cops up some three Hispanic guys in a car at 2 o'clock in the morning in a CD neighborhood and says, You know, the, always the questions, the first two questions are, you got any guns, got any dope in the car?

Do you mind if I look, right? There's always the first couple questions. And, you know, if you say, yeah, we don't want you violating our Fourth Amendment rights, we don't want you to search our car. You think the cops, oh, okay, guys, we'll have a nice night. Right. It's like, get the fuck out of the car. They just tear that shit afar.

They find a gun under the spare tire in the trunk. They're just going to lie. They can't say that's where they found it. So they're going to write in their report that, you know, came up to illuminate the area around the driver for, officer safety because I stopped him for speeding. And while I was talking to him, I noticed what appeared to be the butt of a handgun protruding from under the seat by his right foot. And really, it was found in the trunk. They do that with dope too all the time. Oh, it was in the center console.

Right. Somebody left an eight ball of blow in the center, just sitting in the center console when you pull them over. Right. One of the hardest things for me through this whole process is the reputation standpoint. It's like, you know, when it comes to like, like, like, enforcement or military or something, you know, your, your brothers in arms that you work, it's so important that you have their respect, right, and that kind of stuff. And in this case, what was really hard for me is like, you know, a lot of guys don't know the whole story. They just know what the newspaper said, which sensationalized everything and just they would

say stuff as if it were fact, like, oh, the dirty cop was taking blow. And it's like that was fettered out in court to be bullshit. In fact, the crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, this guy, Justin Burton, When my attorney asked him, we went home that night when the woman basically admitted on the stand that, oh, the cops told her to say this. And she also admitted that the blow she actually got was for Butler because he was setting a guy up in a totally unrelated case. In a child custody case, totally unrelated to the DUIs. It was just another child custody case he was working on. That's what the blow was for.

So it wasn't for me after all. So we went home that night. And I thought, oh, thank God. Like, all my cop buddies thought I was taking blow or something, you know. So this will, this, you know, thank God they're going to finally air this. We watch the evening news because every night of the trial there was like the day's highlights, right, and the 10 o'clock news. So we get home, I'm watching nothing, crickets.

And so my attorney asked him like a day or two later. He asked the reporter, like, how come you don't mention that, you know, that turns out that they dropped the blow charges against him because the woman basically said it was for somebody, something totally different. And he goes, oh, that's not even newsworthy story. He goes, who wants to hear about the dirty cop who wasn't taking blow? And I thought, what a Seister, man. They're not a journalist, dude.

Anyway, but so the respect thing and reputation is a big thing for me. You know, I sometimes I'll see guys that I used to work with. And it's kind of 50-50. You know, some guys will be, oh, it's a hobby, what's up, bro? And give me a hug. And other guys are just stone cold, one of it. You know, they'll just look the other way and not acknowledge me, you know. Like, those are the guys that didn't know me probably, you know, because they did.

Well, there's this, it is funny. You only really learn that lesson once you've been arrested and charged with a crime that you didn't commit. That's when you learned the lesson and then it's too late. And then all those other people turn on you. And now you realize, wow, I was one of those guys. Right. And you learn who your real friends are. You know, I have 700 plus deputies in the sheriff's department.

There were like five that ever, you know, kept in touch with me and wanted to see how I was doing. Or after I got arrested, checked on my wife. Right now you've got a you've got a part. request. Right. And with the Trump administration, correct? Correct. Yeah. The first one was denied by Biden, and then I reapplied under Trump. Okay. How long ago did you, did you apply? Like, I mean, is there like a time period or something? No, no. It's actually confusing on the, on the parted website. It does say, on the one hand, it says that you have to wait two years to reapply, but then later like 50 pages later in the thing it says that you can apply it anytime it's really weird so i just

went ahead and and reapplied um and uh right yeah so it took a few weeks maybe almost a month to get in the system once you apply it it it just shows nothing and then you just keep checking it and then one day it says pending so right now as of now it's pending pending meaning okay meaning that they're going to look at it you know like i had mentioned before last time It sat there for four years, and the Biden administration, they did nothing for four years until the day he was going out of office. And he gave immunity to his friends and family members that same day he denied mine on January 20th of this year. So, yeah, I know the process is slow. It's probably a take a while.

What I'm hoping to achieve through this pardon is, you know, it just gives me some sort of redemption of my name. I realize it doesn't erase the conviction. So you still have the conviction on your record. But it would give me some sort of redemption, you know, in terms of like, you know, maybe even just closure for myself, really. I don't know if anybody else would care. But it just, I feel what the government did to me was so overboard, so unfair that it would give me some kind of closure personally. But I also think it might allow me to gain, you know, get better employment.

you know, with a felony conviction, it's so hard to get a job. And this may allow me to then get a better job, provide for my family. I used to hold multiple licenses in California, real estate license. I did executive protection. So I was licensed under the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. You know, I did armed security and whatnot. So it might allow me to get back into those fields where I could make more money than what I'm doing now. And then, you know, thirdly, it's, you know, I spent almost two decades of my life putting away bad guys and being a cop, you realize how fucked up the world is, right?

And what a bad place it is. There's some bad people out there. And it does, it keeps me up at night thinking that I can't even own a firearm at home to protect my family, you know, and it would, and what I understand, it could restore your Second Amendment rights with a pardon. Was I a perfect cop? No. But did I, do any of these things that they're saying I did, absolutely not. And it just was mind-boggling how hard they went after me. The night I was arrested at the state level initially, they charged me with possession of a controlled substance, which was steroids. They charged me with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, possession of a firearm, I'm sorry, possession of assault weapon, transferring an assault weapon. I mean, you know, I had AR-15, they issued me a full auto mp5 submachine gun for when I was on the SWAT team I carried that in my my personal car all the time you know on duty I carried an AR 50 or an M4 in the car and you know and and it's because I owned an AR 15 at home

that didn't that had a magazine release button on it which is illegal in California they have to be a fixed magazine and so because I had that they basically charged me with the assault weapons charges and the drug charges were that when they interviewed me, and like I had mentioned it before, when we met, that I, you know, I should have just said, I want an attorney and never given them a statement, but I really didn't think I did anything wrong. So I gave them a two-hour, over two-hour statement the night I was arrested, and they asked me about Chris Butler, you know, the PI and any steroids that he had. And I said, you know, at some point he had showed me at his office once he showed me a little paper bag that had a couple vials of,

you know, liquid in it that said testosterone, something, something on it. And he asked me if I knew what it was. And I said, I looked and I pulled one out, looked at it. I said, I don't know it looks like it says testosterone, but it could be anything. They sell this in the back of like Maxim Magazine. They sell fake stuff, you know, that says, oh, it boost your testosterone, 600% and it's totally fake. So I don't know if it is or not. And anyway, I should have realized what they were doing when they questioned me. They said, like, oh, and so you were holding the bag with your left hand and you reached him with your right hand. I'm like, yeah. And then you pulled it out and looked at it. Uh-huh. And I put it back in the bag. And then what did you do with the bag? I gave it back to

him. I, you know, and basically they asked me, oh, what did he want you to do with it? And I said, he did ask me if I knew anybody that wanted to buy some. And I was like, you know, I was a cop at the time. I'm like, dude, no, I'm a cop. I'm going to walk around my gym saying, anybody want to buy this. I said, I don't want any part of that. And he says, well, what about your bodybuilder friend Alan, who was a mutual friend. And I said, what about it? He said, ask Alan if he wants to buy some. And I said, why don't you ask him? You have his number. And he said, well, when are you going to talk to Alan again? I said, probably he was my workout partner. I said, probably sometime tomorrow, today or late tonight or tomorrow. And he goes, well, tell Alan to call me. So I just said, yeah,

yeah, whatever, man, I'll tell him to call you. So when I saw Alan, I said, yeah, call Chris. Chris wants you to call him. Didn't even say what it was about. Just Chris wants you to call him, right? And Alan never did call Chris, but they said that that right there constituted a conspiracy to distribute steroids. And they wrote in the PC, the probable cause declaration, which holds me over and sets a bail. They put in the probable cause declaration that I admitted to be a steroid dealer because of that. Because I said I told a guy, I said I tell Alan to call him. And Alan never did, but that makes me a steroid dealer. So, you know, the state charges were all dropped, especially the gun charges too.

I mean, no jury's going to convict me. They issued me a full auto, you know, MP5 and a select fire M4, and then they're going to try to hem me up for owning a semi-automatic only AR-15 at home just because a magazine can come out. I mean, it was crazy. So anyway, those charges were all dropped. And, but, you know, they did some really shady things besides like lying in the PC deck. they when they search warranted my house i remember i had been a cop for like 18 years i've been on three different swat teams i had a plastic bend in my closet literally you know one of those ones that's this tall just stuffed with uh swat gear and like badge holders magazine pouches holsters for various

guns i mean i had so much equipment in the in one of these big plastic bins and uh after they search for my house there was all kinds of stuff missing and and and you know Coincidentally, it was the holsters and magazine pouches that were missing were for six hours, which was the issue, a gun of the sheriff's department. So those guys, you know, they stole stuff from my house. It was never listed in the search warrant return. The only thing on there was my Garmin GPS. It shows you how long ago this was like 10 years ago, right? I had Garmin GPS, my cell phones, computers.

They took a few guns from my house, nothing that was illegal. I don't know why they ever took them. I ended up getting those back. But those things were all listed on the search warrant returned, but all the stuff they wanted to keep for themselves wasn't like, you know, badge holders and magazine pouches and holsters and stuff. And I just thought, it's so shady, man. They're accusing me of being a bad guy as they're stealing from my house.

It's too funny. And we knew they did it because later they denied they had any of those things. And then later, one of the holsters turned up in federal property, which was never listed on the search for or return. So we knew they took a lot of things they never listed. Just, you know, shitty stuff. Like when they arrested me that night, they seized all my swat gear. I had a big swat bag with all my gear in it.

And on my tack vest, I had a leatherman tool in there that was given to be my late brother who passed away, my stepbrother, who I've known since I was five years old, we were really tight. And he had given me as a wedding, as a groomsman gift in his wedding, a leatherman with my initials, S-R-T on it. And so I, you know, after they seized all my stuff back, I called the sheriff's department after I bailed out of jail and asked if, hey, could I get that back? It means a lot to me. And they just blew me off. Nobody ever returned my calls. I left multiple messages. And I thought, it's just shitty stuff like that, you know. Who prepares your pardon paper? Oh, I did it myself. I did it myself. Yeah, it was, and it's a

lengthy process. It's, they said, supposedly they've streamlined it because I, like I said, I did it the first time it was denied. The second time, it was a little more streamlined, but it's still a lengthy document you have to put together with a lot of supporting documents they require. Is there any place you want people to contact you or anything you want to meet a, anything you want to mention other than? Yeah, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a big social media guy. So I don't have, you know, websites or anything to mention.

I did want to tell, if people want to find out more about the case, there was this book written by Pete Crooks. He's a Diablo magazine writer and the most knowledgeable person by far on this case. It's called The True Story of Dirty Cop, Soccer Moms, and Reality TV. It's called The Setup by Peter Peek Crooks. And, you know, in it, and I have nothing to do with the book, by the way, other than I'm in it. you know, a small portion of me is in it. But it really is an in-depth look at how convoluted this whole case is. And I think it, you know, people can see why I was sucked in.

It's because there were so much peripheral stuff going on with these other guys that they, they just thought that I must be somehow involved in it. I must be guilty just because I know them. And, you know, I think that's, I think that's really the basis for why this all happened is wrong place, wrong time, you know, guilt by association. I knew these guys and they thought he's got to be working with them. And they knew right away that I had nothing to do with any of that part of it. It was never even questioned about it other than maybe the first.

Hey, you guys, I really appreciate you watching. Do me favor. Hit the subscribe button in the bell so you get notified videos just like this. Also, we're going to leave the link that Steve was talking about in the description box. You can go in the description box, click on the link. It'll shoot right over to Amazon so you can buy the book. Once again, I appreciate you guys watching. Thank you very much.

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