Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - FBI AGENT on Catching Scammers, Bank Fraudsters & Ponzi Schemers

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Tom Simon was an FBI Special Agent for 26 years before becoming a Licensed Private Investigator in Florida.Tom's IG: https://www.instagram.com/simoninvestigations/?hl=enWebsite: https://www.simoninvestigations.comFollow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

He begins to run a Ponzi scheme from inside the prison walls. How was the undercover? What were some of the more interesting cases that you worked? Check hiding is where you open up multiple accounts. Right. And you begin writing worthless checks and depositing them into each account to temporarily inflate the balance on these two bank accounts. I'm here to tell you they do not know.

It's all in your mind. Just be cool and cash the checks. Born in Chicago in 1970. During the course of high school, I decided I wanted to work in federal law enforcement. At the time, I was thinking either FBI, DEA, or Secret Service, and I had a chance to talk to an FBI agent that my mom sold a house to. And I said, what should I major in if I want to be an FBI agent? And he said, well, accounting or law? And I said, okay, well, what does that entail?

And he goes, well, accounting's four years, law would be seven years. And I hated school. I absolutely hated school. I was a very mediocre student. And so I chose accounting. And I went to Clemson University down in South Carolina and majored in accounting with an eye toward being an FBI agent. I had no interest in accounting, no particular aptitude for accounting, but it was just a means to an end for me. What led you, like in high school, did you, you know, what led you to say, hey, that's cool.

Like, do you watch a lot of law and order? Did you watch FBI files? Like, what? It was more, it was more fiction than anything else. I was a real bookish guy. I still am. I read a ton of books. And so I would, you know, I'd read like adventure stories or action or mystery.

you know, and watching movies and stuff like that. And the idea of having kind of an adventurous career jumping off moving trains seemed like it would be very interesting. Of course, when I got the job, I found myself jumping off way fewer locomotives than I expected, but it was rewarding in other ways. Oh, gosh, was it Nelson DeMille that wrote a series of, what was it?

He has a guy, he's actually not an FBI agent. He's like a Long Island cop who's sort of retired. He's retired and picked up by the FBI Task Force or something. He marries an FBI agent. Yeah, yeah. And I liked the Nelson DeMille books before that. His one-off series, like The Charm School and I think it was the... Upcountry?

Upcountry. It was one called, was it North Coast or South Coast or Gold Coast? Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, what a great book. Yeah. And so I grew up reading that type of stuff. And the idea of kind of crime and scams and catching criminals was just so attractive to me because the idea of sitting behind a desk for a living just wasn't.

I was going to say the Up Country. That is probably that book. it was so good that the last 50, 40, 50 pages, I was so into it. I would close it and walk around in circles. I was upset because I knew it's ending soon. Like it was that good. I was like really upset. And then it was so bad that the CIA agent in it when she would do things and he would

catch her and I would have to close the book and get up and walk around. I was so upset with her. I'm like, this is fiction. Like, what are you doing? Like, this is great writer. Man, I'm totally with you. I'm constantly chasing that dragon, right? Trying to find a book that kind of gives me that experience.

And I try to probably read 100 books a year. And so, and I just love it when you find that book that just makes you want to stay up at late at night and compromise your own health and set work aside and just do nothing but read. That's, you know, that book, like I ended up reading five or six other books of his. It never was, they were all good. They're all amazing. He's amazing. He's a great author. So go to college.

So what happens? Like you don't just apply to the FBI. No, right. So I major in accounting, and I find myself, and I learned it pretty well. And I got, whereas in high school, I got, like, crappy grades. In college, I got really good grades. And I didn't find accounting to be particularly difficult or challenging. It's like learning a trade, right?

Like, you know, you talk to an English major, a philosophy major. They're learning how to write and how to think and how to compose. Accounting, you're learning a trade, like if I went to school for a refrigerator repair. Right. And so then the problem is the FBI doesn't hire people right out of college. Right. And so they expect you to go out and get a job. And so I took the CPA exam and passed that.

And it became a CPA for a big accounting firm called KPMG. And it's the biggest accounting firm in the world. And I was an auditor. And I loved working there because the people were great. And you're basically locked in a room auditing for 16 hours a day with like other 23-year-olds. But the work itself was mind-numbingly boring. Now, around this window of time, big accounting firms like KPMG began and realizing that there's money to be made conducting white collar crime private

investigations for their clients and so all these firms begin opening their forensic and investigative services practices that's where you want to be bingo right because this is my safety net if I couldn't get a job with the FBI because all those applications are like buying a lottery ticket maybe you're gonna get it maybe you're not I knew I could be a professional investigator working frauds and scams for KPMG and probably make a heck of a lot more money than I would as a government employee a lot more exciting yeah I mean, compared to auditing.

Right. So I bothered and I harangued and I harassed the partner who was in charge of that practice. And he began putting me on gigs and finding that I was a pretty good investigator. And so I was out there investigating frauds and scams at age 23, 24 for KPMG on behalf of clients. And this would have been in the 90s. Yeah. Yeah. So call it 93, 94.

So I interviewed. Oh, gosh. What was this? Walt Pavlo, uh, with, uh, Enron, who, who, not Enron. No, it's not Enron. I know I was going to get it wrong. Phone company in the 90s. Walt Pavlo's with prisonology, you know him? Yeah, yeah. It's a friend of mine.

Yeah. Who did he work for? I thought it was in. It's not Enron? No, he was, um, it was the MCI WorldCom. Worldcom. Oh, okay, okay. Uh, yeah, I interviewed him.

Was he in your show? Are you, have you ever, listen, he's, I love that guy. He's great, listen, the great thing about his story is, so I'd heard bits and pieces. And when he sat down and told me, told me the story. Yeah. I went, it was like, like, like, I thought, I thought, I thought Walt, head like, oh, we shifted some debt from these books to this company, and we bankrupted the company. And that, you know, like it was just accounting, kind of shifting things around. Listen,

have you ever heard a story? No, I only know Walt as the guy from, I mean, I knew he had a history and I knew that's what drove him to doing what he can with his company prisonology, which kind of helps people be designated to the right facility. And I find that an incredibly honorable thing to do. And so he, he's straight, listen, the first part. Well, I have to watch that episode. Yeah. So I only know Walt in his current life. I knew that he was mixed up in that stuff, but I don't like to open old wounds, you know, with people like you and him. I mean, it's, he wouldn't care. I get, no, I get it.

But we're not, we don't, we're not hang out buddies. He's a client. Yeah. Yeah, he, it was so funny because when he told the story, do you remember when he told the story? He, listen, he, like, I thought it was, like I said, I thought it was just, you're just shifting around numbers. Instead, what it ends up being is Walt was working collections. So he's going to these huge phone rooms where they're selling like, you know, they're selling for like a dollar, you know, a dollar a minute to call Haiti. Yeah, the old phone cards.

Right. The phone card. So he goes in and this company's, this place is $4 million behind. They goes in. And he realizes there's all this shady stuff happening. Right. With the company. And it's only a matter of time.

And what he decides is he ends up with another guy who was retired who had also by. the way seen what was going on and retired so he goes to him and says look this is what's going on right and he's like yeah it's going to be bad it's going to be bad it's definitely at some point i don't know how long they can juggle this and he's like he said you know though you could probably make out pretty good on this because it's going to be chaos and he's like what do you mean he said well we could go open a couple of cayman island accounts and when you go in and these guys are five million dollars behind you can tell them look you don't have the five million i'm going to shut off your phone lines. But if you give me a million dollars, give us a million dollars, wire it to this

Cayman Island account, and we'll keep it going for you. And it will give you another month. So let's say the guy would give him, let's say, two million. He'd give MCI a million. They take a million. And they're doing this for months. So they're getting, I forget whether it was five, 10, 15 million. And when he told me that, I just was like, oh my God. Like, this is what I thought at all. Like, this is a. straight scam. This isn't like, hey, we got some creative, you know, creative bookkeeping here. No, this is like, I'm like, oh my God, Walt. And he's like, I know, I know. Yeah. But eventually it comes down to it, you know, it all comes down and they track him down. They grab him. And he ends up going

to prison. But yeah, I'm sorry. I just, that's, that's funny. That's funny that you say that. So, okay, so these are the types of things that you're investigating. Yeah, but you're not. not that one. I mean, yeah, we were investigating. There were some cook in the books cases. Right. And we were investigating some major corporate embezzlement and some kind of just frauds and swindles, inventory shrinkage, things like that.

I mean, they weren't amazing cases, but it was neat. Again, for me, as a person who's always wanted to be an investigator, being able to do that at age 23, 24 was just an honor. And, you know, I'm flying around the country, conducting investigations and putting these cases together. Now, the end game's different, right? Because when you're an FBI agent, you're putting the cases together, someone ends up in an orange jumpsuit. When you're working for KPMG, the accounting firm, it ends up with a report that gets presented to the board of directors who have to make some difficult decisions about what to do.

And so the payoff wasn't all that as satisfying for someone who has this like thirst for justice, you know, a young guy. So it's not, it's not quite the accountant with Ben Affleck? Yeah, I, uh, is that right, Affleck? Whatever. Yeah, I didn't see that. You didn't see that? I don't, here's the thing. I don't really watch a lot of FBI stories or, you know, not even FBI.

Is it? See, you're making judgments. You don't know. Listen, this guy. This is like taking my work home from me. He's brilliant. No, it's so much better. It's so much better.

Yeah. He's basically, is he, is he autistic? Yeah, he's autistic and basically, so he, maybe he just has Asperger's. Anyway, they would send him in. He'd go over all the books. He'd come back. and he'd say, this is who's stealing from you. You know, this is what's going on.

This is what to the company's doing. And he would present a report just like that. And typically he would do things like that for like, you know, you can't call Arthur Anderson, which I know is, you know, is gone now. But you can't call them and have them come into the cartel. So they bring in this guy and he kind of reviews like, you know, criminal organizations is what he kind of specializes in. Right.

gets paid big, big money. Anyway, it goes bad and he's got to fight it. You got to see this movie. I'll probably like it. I'll check it out. You have my word. You have my word. I'll check it out. Man.

And it's called the accountant. I understand that, but I would think you would run. Again, spending a day investigating white collar crimes, then going home and watching fictional white collar crimes. It's just, it's not, it feels a little bit more like taking my work home with me. Okay. All right. I still like, I still like catch me if you can.

That's a fine movie. So you're doing these investigations. How long were you on the forensic team? It was only like two and a half, three years, because then the FBI, we're in hiring freeze. So the FBI is always kind of subject to Congress. And when Congress decides they want to choke off the FBI, they don't hire new agents. And so from 92 to 95, I needed to find something to do because the FBI doesn't hire 22-year-old FBI agents. But so I turned 25 in 1995, and then the FBI hiring freeze gets on, you know, they lift the veil on it.

And I was one of the first guys getting my application. And so I entered the FBI Academy in August 1995 at the age of 25, which is pretty young. I was going to say for, and you've got, you've got years of experience now. A couple of years, yeah, a couple years. So, and so you just put in your application, they just hired you? I mean, you still. You put in your application and you spend a year doing going through polygraph checks and intelligence. tests and background checks and

writing tests and panel interviews and every step of the way the people you're going through the process with are falling by the wayside and then eventually you're kind of the last one standing and they give you a date to report to Quantico Virginia for the FBI Academy. How long is that? At the time when I went through it was 16 weeks

you live there in Virginia and it's a mixture between like law school and boot camp. Now it's 20 weeks because they've enhanced a lot of it with the foreign counterintelligence and counterterrorism training. Where were you out of initially. Well, I applied through Chicago. All right. So I graduated Clemson, then I went to Chicago to get that job with KPMG. So I kind of went back to my childhood roots in Chicago and set up camp

there. Okay. Chicago's got to be, there's got to be some action going on in Chicago. Oh, it's a great town to be young in, right? You know, young with the disposable. At that time, no kids living in the city. It was fantastic. So what kind of, what kind of cases were you working? From the FBI? Yeah. Okay. So my first case, my first, uh, my first, uh, assignment right out of the FBI, I was put under a bank fraud squad. So I was investigating, you know, the six or seven ways that you can rip off banks. And, you know, and of course, I came out at the academy. I'm like, you know, give me gangs, give me mafia, give me, and my supervisor takes me aside. We don't hire CPAs because you're fun to be around. We hire you because

you might have some acumen in investigating financial crimes, which was a godsend because I ended up falling in love with financial crimes over the course of my life. And I really like those type of cases. And so yeah, so I was working bank fraud, you know, from the lowest level teller embezzlement to check kiting, to mortgage fraud, to, you know, any way you can rob a bank without a gun. I was working in those cases. Secret Service does most of the credit card stuff. We kind of, the FBI sort of gave away the farm with them and gave them the credit card stuff in a, in a kind of negotiated settlement. So they get that. So any interesting cases? Like, how does that go down?

I like the embezzlement. I always thought it was, those are kind of more interesting cases to me where, you know, where some employee figures out how to, you know, write loans to fake, fake borrowers. And when they're actually receiving it, and then they begin doing loan lapping

where they have to write new loans to new fictitious borrowers to pay off the old loans. It is a Ponzi scheme, but it's a loan lapping scheme. So it's kind of the opposite of Ponzi. But yeah, you're robbing, you're continuing to steal money to pay back the previous one. And so those were interesting. You know, vault thefts were always interesting to me.

And what happens, though, is that I wasn't working giant, big Enron-style cases, but I was working 20, 30, 40 cases at a time and getting good at doing these investigations. They weren't huge cases at all. And the one thing you got really good at is interview and interrogation. Because every single one of those cases, as soon as I had the evidence, I would go approach the subject and get a confession from them. And so you became very, very good at the methods that the FBI teaches to get people to confess to crimes. So if you're investigating, do they know you're investing in it, you know, like, is it typically the ones you worked on?

Were they people in the bank or was it possibly? Well, we worked insiders and outsiders, right? And so this is sort of the check fraud era, right, where people were counterfeiting checks. The home computers were now a big thing. We're talking to late 90s. So people are getting home computers and printers and scanners. And there was a lot of check fraud rings happening in Chicago also. And so I preferred the insider stuff, but there was enough outsider fraud involving check fraud that was interesting to me.

So we were dealing with physical evidence. We were lifting the fingerprints from paper checks to see whose prints were on them. But mostly it was just following the money, right? Who was this person who walked into the bank to cash this counterfeit check? And there was undercover operations. And so it was a little bit of everything. But looking back on my career, I've honed my skills, those first six years working high volume, kind of low impact bank fraud cases because I got very good at interviewing witnesses and I got very good at interrogating subjects because it's just that 10,000 hour rule. You do it again and again and again and you just figure out what works.

What psychological maneuvers can you make to get someone to tell you the truth about something, even when it's against their self-interest. So if you go in and you talk to someone and they already know you're investigating, what are the chances they're going to confess? The thing is, I always think to myself, like, white collar guys, like, what choice do you have? Like, typically here's pictures of you in the bank, here's pictures of the ID, here's pictures of the wire transfers, here's when you open the account. Like, you've got so much evidence typically where it's like, what am I going to do? I'm counting on that. I'm counting on you understanding that the evidence in this case is overwhelming. And from like a personal ethics perspective, I like the fact that my evidence was fairly irrefutable in these cases, right?

Because, you know, my nightmare situation would be to send someone away for a crime they didn't commit, right? But in white-collar crime, that doesn't really happen because the evidence is pretty clear. And I'm going to make the case with or without the confession, but boy, oh, boy, does that case get supercharged through the criminal justice system if I can land that confession? Right. So what are the chances that they confess? Does almost everybody confess and say... Well, I mean, some people choose... Some people choose to invoke the right to an attorney, and that point is game over.

I don't get to talk to them any further, and then I just have to make the case based on the, you know, the evidence alone. But most of the time, if people are willing to talk to me, I was able to get the confession after I got good at interrogation. Okay. And then what happens later, and we can get to this as we're kind of walking through, is that I became the go-to guy for a lot of other agents when they needed to get the confession in much more difficult situations because they understood. that I was a very good interrogator. But all that was built kind of in the groundworking, tiny little bank fraud cases. Right. How often does somebody say, I don't want to talk to you and then call you two days later?

I would get a call from their attorney two days later. I don't want to talk to you. I'd rather talk to an attorney. And I go, that's fine. Here's my card. Have your attorney give me a call. Do you know who you weren't going to engage? Because I knew all the defense attorneys in town.

And so oftentimes I would get a call from the defense attorney. And I would say, you guys got a problem. I'd like to sit down and talk to him. And he goes, well, I don't really want him talking to you. And then we get into kind of negotiating a proffer deal, which you're familiar with. For your viewers, a proffer deal is a deal where the defendant is going to sit down and tell me what they did, but I'm not allowed to use the statements against them in court. And the reason they do that, what's in it for me is I get to understand the crime and I get to understand what happened and work one step closer to getting this case resolved.

What's in it for them is that their attorney can later go into court at sentencing and say, when push came to shove out, my client told the truth to Agent Simon and confessed what he did, you know, under the umbrella of a proffer agreement. And so it's a win-win for both. And I got good in understanding criminals and people or people who committed crimes and what the rationales were. So do you, did you ever have anybody come in and they, you know, they cooperate and you, you know, and they say, look, yeah, it's me and you say, look, I know there's four or five other people involved in this. You know, I just don't know who these other guys are. And then they say, okay, and then you put a, you wire them up all the time. And that's, that's something that you did. Or do they bring in an extra team? Well, it depends what they want to talk about, right? If they're, if, if, let's say, I caught a guy named Martin. I don't want to destroy the guy.

His first name was Martin. He was doing a check hiding scheme. And, you know, got away with a couple hundred thousand bucks. Right. So what, what is that exactly? Like what's this? Check kinding is where you open up multiple accounts. Right.

And you begin writing worthless checks and depositing them into each account to temporarily inflate the balance on these two. bank accounts. Let's see there's $0 and zero cents in each, but you just keep writing bouncing checks. The bank accounts are artificially inflated, and you keep doing it. And the checks are bouncing along the way. But while that's happening, there's a balance in those accounts. And banks often, back in the day, less so now, would give you provisional credit for money that you deposit into your bank account. You deposit $10,000. They're going to say, okay, you can withdraw $2,000 of that. And he keeps banging the money out. And then what happens is it all collapses

in both accounts end up having overdrafts in the amount of, say, 50,000 each, and he's walked away with a ton of cash. Right, but by now he's got a chunk of money. Yeah, right. Like even now when you do direct deposit, they give you like $400 bucks up front. Right. They'll hold $800 for a couple days until it clears. Exactly, exactly.

And so that's a check kiting scheme. Banks over the past 25 years have put in software to kind of detect check kiting. So it's way less of a crime than it was back in the day. But it was very common in the 90s. Catch this guy, Martin, on that case. Martin comes in and says, okay, listen, he got me. You know, he confesses to the crime and says, but listen, I want to give you a much bigger scheme. And so he would tell me about a scheme where I used to work for this car dealership. And what this car dealership was doing is broke people

would come in to buy cars who would not qualify for a loan and we would doctor up pay stubs. We would doctor up W-2s. We would create false income for them so they could qualify for car loans that they would not otherwise get. We got the car sale. We put these people into a car they can't afford, that car is going to get repoed down the road, but we don't care at the dealership. That's not our problem. We'll get the car back and sell it on the use lot. And he goes, and what we would do, when we would doctor up information, we would make it the deal bag, the file with the deal, we would write the words hokey pokey on it. And so, and it would go in the files. And so therefore when we were reviewing it later, for whatever reason, we just had to look

for the files and said hokey pokey. And our finance department knew that this was filled with fraud. And so we sent in an undercover to go be a purchase of her a car. It was a female agent. And she had, her undercover had like good credit, but no, yeah, she had like good credit, but no income. Her job was terrible. And so they created false, they did all this stuff. And she walked away with a car. The FBI bought a car.

And so that gave us the probable cause to do a search warrant at this dealership. And we all we had to do was go and pick out all the files and said, hokey pokey. and then we got like, you know, a couple million dollars in bad deals that ended up costing the banks and in, you know, GMAC and lending companies a fortune. So Martin gets a deal for flipping on someone else. Right. So I got to be case agent on both cases, working Martin as a subject, and then working Martin as a cooperating witness. Right. Now, if Martin had come to me and said, you know, I got a big drug dealer or a drug, you know, importing operation from Columbia, and then at that point I'd probably hand him off to a drug.

agent because I'm not a drug agent. Right, right. I was going to say, why did Martin start doing the check-kiding scam to begin with? Did you ever, did he ever say? Yeah, I mean, it's always some extraordinary need for money, right? He had his own debts or his own, you know, vices or demons or whatever. Okay. And I mean, he was a bit of a mystery because I never really had a great understanding as to his motivation, but money's often its own motivation. Yeah. Well, I mean, sometimes I would meet guys and, you know, guys who had done, you know, minor scam. You know, minor scam, AMs, especially like, and it was like, okay, but you, you knew this was, like, in their own name. Like, the bank accounts were in your name.

Like, you didn't even use a fake ID. You didn't use somebody else. Like, and it, those tended to be like, like, drug related or something, you know, in my opinion, just from talking to guys in prison because they were doing something that was so irrational that they knew was going to catch up, but they just, they knew they could get a few more months. Right. You know. And a lot of them, too, were like, and I figured if I got arrested and I went to jail, then I'd get clean. And it was like, okay, well, it's all upside. What were some of the more interesting cases that you worked?

We had a situation in Chicago where the first Chicago bank, which is now Chase, was just getting killed by what they call on us checks. And what that means is that a guy walks into a bank and says, I want to cash this check. The check is drawn upon Chase. But the guy who wants to cash the check doesn't have an account at Chase. Right. Chase at the time, again, for Chicago Bank, would honor that check because their, you know, their account holder has written a check. They do the signature comparison. The signature comparison's fine. It's a valid check, valid routing number, valid account number. It's got the name and address of the guy. The person wanting to cash the check shows his ID, no big deal. Walk away with the check for three or four thousand bucks. They later find out that that particular check is counterfeit. Right. Right. Times that times hundreds and hundreds of checks. scattered throughout the Chicago suburbs and from different people coming in.

And so it was this super anomaly. And then we begin doing an analysis on who are these people. And every single one of those people was a homeless person in this giant homeless shelter in Chicago called the Pacific Garden Missions. And so it was a real question as to what's going on here. Why are all these homeless people going to affluent suburbs and cashing counterfeit checks? And the account holder doesn't know that they've been ripped off until they check their account balance and see that they're missing, that a check was clearing their account for $4,000

that they never wrote. But their signatures were perfect on it, perfect facsimiles. A real mystery on our hands. So we found a guy who was kind of a common denominator, one of the check cashers, and his name was Joe. He was a ticket scalper. Joe was the guy at the homeless shelter who would wrangle like 100 homeless people to stand in line first back in those days before the Bruce Springsteen tickets went on sale.

So the first 100 people in line were homeless people buying the maximum amount of tickets with money that Joe would provide and that money would go to one of the scalpers in town. The tickets would go to the scalper. So Joe was a mover and shaker in the homeless community, a real entrepreneur among them. So we grabbed Joe, bring him into the office and explain to Joe that he is in a ton of trouble for this check cashing scam. And the only way we tell Joe that he's going to not go to prison for a long, long time is to tell us the story. And so Joe tells us a story that there's this guy named Ali, A-L-I from a Middle Eastern fellow, who, and what he would do is he would pay money to Joe

to get homeless people together because that's what he did for a living and then who had valid ID he would put them in his car and Ali would drive them from bank to bank sending them into the banks to cash these checks, these counterfeit checks. And then the homeless guy would get like 50 bucks

and then like 3,000 money of the money would go to Ali. And then he would drop them off at the end of the day. So we said, okay Joe if this is what's happening we want you to introduce an undercover in on this operation. And, you know, you're going to vouch for me, the guy. And I was the undercover.

And so, you're the homeless guy? I'm the homeless guy, right? And so, so, you know, it was young, right? I was in my 20. So I grew up like two days of a beard. It was pretty lame. But the backstory is that I was just one of these, like, white color guys who got addicted to pills and his life went down to toilet.

And I was living in the homeless shelter and trying to stay clean. And, but I had a baby mama who worked at Blockbuster video on the expressway in North Avenue. And so Ollie was excited because he loved the idea of having a white guy do the scheme because he's going to be less scrutiny. Right. So I went out there and he introduces me on day one, day two. Ali says he wants to pick me up. And Ali picks me up. And it was just Ali and I that day because we told Joe to beg off. And we're driving around from bank to bank and every bank we go to, Ali is giving me a counterfeit check written to my undercover name, Tom Peters. And I would go in and cash that check. I literally went into banks and spent the whole. whole day ripping off banks, probably ripped off banks for 40, 50,000 bucks that day.

And giving the money to Ali at the end of the day. And so, and so, and Ali was also like snorting powder drugs. It turned out his later heroin while he's driving me around. So I wasn't worried about Ali killing me. I was worried about Ali killing both of us on the road. He would literally say, hold the steering wheel. And I would hold the steering wheel and he'd be snorting H while we're driving down the road. And it was terrifying. Meanwhile, Ollie didn't know that we had like 100 FBI agents following me around the whole time. I'm under surveillance watching me rip off these banks. So I tell Ali to drive me, Ali gives me a couple hundred bucks at the end of the day. Tell him to drive me to the Blockbuster video that my baby mama worked at. And we had it

set up. So he drives, I go drive behind the building. He asked him, I was available to do this the next day. I said, yeah, absolutely. I opened the door, shake his hand, walk out. I'd forget to close the door. And then the FBI agents come out from behind the dumpster with the shotguns to arrest Ali and Ali got busted for running this check fraud scheme. The way it worked was this. Ali worked at a liquor store on a main road leading up to the affluent north suburbs of Chicago. He was happy to take checks for people driving home from work from Chicago to the suburbs for people buying their bottle of wine or bottle of gin or whatever. So he had in his cash register on any given day the names, addresses, bank accounts, routing numbers, and signature facsimiles of all

these affluent people who would shop at Ali's liquor store. And he was using that data to produce the counterfeit checks that he was giving to the homeless people, including myself. Okay. I was going to say he, um, so I was going to say when you said he had a job, I was like, what does he need a job for? But he has to maintain the job now to have access. You need to be able harvest that data to make the counterfeit checks. Well, I bet the more money he made the harder that job was go to go to every day. At some point, someone was going to be doing a trend study to figure out what do all these people have in common and they all have checks at some point clearing ollie's liquor store but we we got we had the undercover go in before they that analysis had fully been done um i had so i had a friend

i have i have a friend named zach who ran it's the check uh scheme where they walk in and where they cash the checks he did that one he done it tons of times but one time he and his wife same thing they drove a guy he's a homeless guy um but a drug guy addict, goes in, cashes the check. He said, we were going to cash like $30,000 with the checks that day. He was going to get like 10 grand. He walks out with the first check, it's $1,100, $800, whatever it was, walks out, walks out, looks up, sees them sitting in the car, and he's like, oh, here he is. And all of a sudden he goes, he looks both ways and starts running. He's like, he was going to make $10,000. If he just waited a few hours,

but he had $800 in his hand, it took off running. That's funny. Allie gave me the speech. At one point. Because again, I was dressed really shabbily. And before I go in the first bank, he's going to go, he goes, Tom, you're going to walk in the bank and you're going to say to yourself, they know, they know. I'm here to tell you, they do not know. It's all in your mind.

Just be cool and cash the checks. And then he reaches behind and he picks something up and he sprays me. And I thought he was like pepper spraying me or something. Right. He was spraying me with cologne because I smelled so poorly. He was a professional. He was a professional, and, you know, and I hope he got the help he needed to support his habit. And I'm sure he's living a productive life somewhere now.

So what, so I guess my point, though, for telling this kind of long-winded story is that even in the benign world of financial crimes, there was lots of opportunity to do real police work, you know, undercover work, surveillance, arrests, search warrants. And so it wasn't like, at no point was I ever using any accounting skills. No point was I ever behind my desk kind of, you know, dealing with all that. The FBI has forensic accountants to do that. They hired the special agents to actually do special agent work. And so I loved it. It was fantastic. It was a good six years. I was going to say that I, you know, like to me, I mean, that's, listen, you know, Ali, you know, he's making a nice chunk of money, right? Periodically, a couple times a week he's doing this. Yeah. But, you know, the guy who's making, you know, millions and millions and millions, is that guy in the bank that's doing, you know, default swaps and,

you know, those types of things. So, I mean, that's, that's, in the end, that has more, I think, overall effect on the economy on every single individual. Without question. And I would have loved to have gotten those cases, but those cases were generally being worked out of Manhattan. Oh, okay. Chicago, we were dealing with kind of retail level bank fraud. Right. Which to me, it's still fun. Like, I loved it. I loved it. But I hear this a lot. Like, like, why weren't you going after the big bankers who were kind of destroying American's financial system. And I'd love to be able to do that. But those cases

were being worked in the cities that I worked at the time. I think even them though, it's, God, those have got to be so difficult because you're talking about a bank that makes its own underwriting guidelines. You know what I'm saying? So it's hard to say, hey, you guys did this for this reason. No,

we did this to get more loans. Like, no, you know, that's what we do. That's why all of our guidelines shift, you know, periodically. Yeah. But now you're not even asking for income or you're allowing them to do this. Well, some people are plumbers. You know, they're a plumber. And that plumber makes $150,000 a year. And he's telling the government he makes 20. And maybe he's lying to the IRS, but he's got 750 credit scores. And he could pay his bills. Like, why he deserves a house? Like he needs to work that out with the IRS.

So to me, those are really difficult because they have such wiggle room. That's why a lot of people, like, during the financial crisis, like, why weren't more? bankers arrested because they have so much wiggle room. Exactly. Exactly. And that was the downside of those cases to me. Again, the six years on the bank fraud squad were a fantastic learning experience.

I loved every minute. I would not trade it in. But my victims were really unsympathetic. Like Citibank really didn't care all that much. They didn't come and hug me at the sentencing and thank you so much for doing this, right? Later in my career, if we're going to continue with my story, I get into investment fraud and Ponzi schemes

where I have like little old ladies who are just wiped out. But for that first six years, I was just dealing with big financial institutions who were victims of these frauds. And so the one thing that was missing was the satisfaction of having sympathetic victims. Listen, I love being fraud. I would hear this, you know, I would like, near and dear to your heart, yeah. Exactly. And I find it fascinating, you know.

I do find it interesting. And I find it interesting the, you know, the, whatever, the walls or, you know, all these protective measures that they put, the security measures that they put up and how difficult it is to get around them and how people's minds work on how to get around them, you know. So I, you know, and then I, you know, I have a buddy named, uh, name Zach, uh, which I told you about. Mm-hmm. And, uh, one of the things he did, which, you know, you're probably fine, you know, um, deplorable,

but I find fascinating. He, he was running a, the, the, uh, you know, a check, you know, Kydie. Well, I think what they were, they weren't even do that. They were just cashing checks. He had somebody in the bank. And counterfeiting, okay. Yeah, he's counterfeiting checks. He's getting people to do them.

And so one time this guy, he told the guy, he said, listen, he said, I really need to talk to. I'd love to talk to somebody in the fraud department or something. Or maybe even the guy just approached him and said, listen, I got to, you know, I think they were gay. He's like, I got a guy I'm seeing. And he works in the fraud department. You know, and he's like, look, he said, I'll tell him, I give him $1,000 just to talk to me. Wow. And he said, okay, he said, so he goes and he meets him like a, whatever, shonies or something.

And he gives him a great. and he says, I got some questions. So he asks a bunch of questions. Like, if I do this, will this work? I was like, no, no. They'll catch this right away. And this. Okay.

So they talk and the guy's asking him a few questions. Like, well, you know, who's ID? How are you cash these? Oh, no, no, no. I got a guy that makes IDs. I got this. I can do this. I can do it.

So he's telling him what as it wraps up. They go to leave. And the guy goes, wait a second. Do you have another $1,000 on you? And he goes, yeah. And he said, give it to me. He said, I'm going to tell you something. And he goes, okay.

He gives them $1,000. And he says, this is something that happens in the banks, in our banks. He's in several our branches. He said, the employees are probably involved. He said, but they never do it in their name. And he goes, okay. He said, so an employee will have a friend that has an account that, whatever, they've got a few thousand dollars in the account. He goes, well, one day they'll go and they'll put a lot more money in the account, eight or $9,000.

He said, in a couple days later, they'll remove all the money. He said, they'll take their debit card. they'll drive to a and they'll drive somewhere he said typically like a post office or something they'll run it and they'll buy $8,000 worth of money orders right he said they get the money orders then they come in the next day or a few hours later and they come in and they say hey you know I need to get out $500 and they go you've got $200 in your account what are you talking about where's my money they go $8,000 was removed you know last night and oh my gosh so he said we have to give them the money back it's the electronic transfer act or something he said we have to

give him the money back right away. We can do an investigation. He goes, but we don't investigate anything under $10,000. He says, we just pay him. He said, unless it's blat. Interesting. And so he was like... That's really good information for a bad guy to have, isn't it?

Right. Yeah, and so he sat there. He's like, now, I don't know how you could pull this off. He goes, but talking to you, I feel like you can turn that into something. And he got, Zach goes, absolutely. I appreciate you telling me, thank you. And I remember Zach said, his wife was like, well, that was a waste of $1,000. He was, that guy just gave us the golden ticket.

So Zach was like, where do I, like, I can make the fake IDs. He's like, but I don't want to walk in, you know. He's, he's a tall, a bald black guy. He's like, I'm super recognizable. Like, and he sat there, he goes, where can I get guys that will do this? And so Zach went to first appearance. What's that? You know, when you get arrested.

Oh, initial appearance. Initial appearance. Yeah. So he goes to, he goes there, he sits in the gallery or whatever. He sits there. and where the audience is, and he sat there. He said, I sat there for about three hours and just as people walked by, oh, you know, this guy, burglary, not interested.

This guy, not interested. This guy, oh, second time he's been arrested for, you know, using fake credit cards. We caught him with a fake, you know, whatever. And he's like, oh, this guy, write their information out. So when they got arrested, if they didn't get bond or they couldn't bond out, because a lot of them would sit there, they, well, I can't make that bond, Your Honor, can you lower it, whatever? He would send them a letter.

Put money on their books. Have them call him on the jail phone. Tell them, listen, here's what I'm doing. I'll bond you out. I'm going to go to this hotel. I'm going to leave a phone for you. He wasn't concerned about the jail recordings. That's what I always said.

And he said, I don't know them. They don't know me. Yeah. I mean, they're not being listened to in real time, but they're archived for guys like me later. Right. So, but then again, keep in mind. These guys are going to do this scam in a different name. Right.

And I guess the theory is, his theory is that no one's going to. going to catch on to it or care much. Right. Either way, it's not going to come back to him as what he felt. Obviously, I met him in jail. Yeah, spoiler alert. Yeah. So what ends up happening is these guys would come and they would go and they'd get their property.

Well, a lot of people don't realize this, but you can have someone walk in and put something in your property. You can say, hey, my brother's getting out. He's going to catch the bus. Here's his cell phone. Can you put it in his property? And they go, sure. What's his name?

They pull it. Stick it in the bag. Yeah. So the guy gets out, he's got a phone, a little message. Maybe he's got a card for a motel down the street. He goes to motel. He calls the phone number. Zach says, take a picture of yourself, send it to me.

They make IDs. They send them the IDs. Put him on a plane. He flies to Iowa. He goes and opens up three or four banks. He gets like three IDs, opens three bank accounts in each ID. Zach wires money in there into the account. A couple days later, the guy gets his debit card.

The guy scans the debit card, mails the debit cards to Zach in Florida, and they go in and buy $8,000 and $9,000 worth of money orders at the post office. Bam, bam, bam. Calls the guy up and says, hey, go in right now under this name. Here's the bank. Guy goes to the bank. 12 minutes ago in Florida, you know, someone removed all the money out of his account. So he goes in and says, hey, I need to get $500.

And they go, you've got $12 in your account. You just took out $8,000 or $9,000. He's like, what are you talking about? oh, well, that wasn't you? No. And they're like, oh, it was in Florida. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that couldn't have been you. Where's your debit card? I got it right here.

So you go, well, you're going to have to talk to Sally. You know, go and talk to the bank manager, Sally. Sally says, oh, my gosh, this is insane. You know, okay, I don't know what happened. We'll put the money back. He said, even if they said something's not right, he was, by law, they have to give them the money back. Right. So they'd give them the money back.

He said, they would then transfer the money back out of the account. He said, because the first few times he had some guys steal the money. Like, oh, I want it in cash now. you know yeah and uh but this would happen he said everybody all these guys that he did this with he said they were good for one or two he said by that point you know we're making 90,000 they're getting 20 and 30 thousand dollars he's so by the second time they're going they've got 60,000 he's they're no good they're their drug addicts they're whatever right they falls apart but i always thought it was a brilliant scam and and what's so funny about him is that

he can tell you how many times once they got money it would fall apart like They'd be at a hotel he put up at the hotel manager calls and says, listen, this guy can't stay here. Like he's some woman's here with him. She's walking up down the hallway naked or they've sold the car that they were in because he gave them not a lot of money. Crime would be a great idea if you didn't have to deal with criminals. Oh, they're horribly.

I always say that with Colby. I'm like, I have to schedule seven interviews to get four people to show up. I know. You know, because I'm dealing, even when these guys are, even when they have regular jobs, they're just not. They have no appreciation of someone's time. Yeah. But anyway, I always thought that, you know, if you remove the morality and ethics out

of it, who thinks, I mean, he put together, it's a great, it was a great scam. He just. Until it wasn't. Until it wasn't. He went to jail and he was explaining to me. And I was like, that's a great scam. Yeah, well. Two guys are in an orange jumps.

You're talking about how smart they were. Exactly. Exactly. But he's, he's hilarious. Like, he would have great. questions for you. What about this? Did you ever this? We used to do this. But yeah, so

anyway, so yeah, I always find the bank fraud stuff fascinating. It was a good time, yeah. Right. There's so many, they put up so many walls to stop it, obviously, for good reason. And the ways criminals figure out how to get around them if they can. But eventually

you're saying you moved out of that. So what happens is I show up to work on September 11, 2001, to bank fraud squad. It's a bad day. And sit down. I'm getting ready to go confront a woman for running some small bank fraud situation. And planes start flying into buildings in New York. And so everybody just hits pause on their cases and goes 24-7 trying to make sure that planes are not going to be flying into the Sears Tower. And so and then as we're kind of grinding out in the, you know,

weeks following the 9-11, just kind of running down ground balls. work in their cases. We're working 24 or 7 on that stuff. The senior management at my office began looking at, they wanted to put together kind of a special team. And they wanted to bring like an organized crime guy together, a financial crime guy together, a counterterrorism guy together, people from the different disciplines onto kind of one team at FBI, Chicago. And they took a look at the stats because, again, it's the government. So they just took a look and say, well, there's this Tom Simon guy that no one really knew. I was kind of a quiet guy, you know, putting 40 to 50 people a year in prison on fraud charges. And with great relationships at the U.S. Attorney's Office,

the federal prosecutors, because I was dealing with such a high volume of relatively, you know, small bank fraud cases. And she's like, well, this is a guy who knows the system. He's well connected with the U.S. Attorney's Office. Let's put him on this team. And so they put me on this team with five agents. And the idea was this. The FBI and the CIA had identified. two charities, Islamic charities, based in Chicago, who were taking money from good Muslims with the promise that that money would be going to help out the poor and needy of the Muslim world, and then funneling that money overseas. Hungry now.

Now? What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O. Henry Bar to satisfy your hunger with its delicious combination of big crunchy salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating swing by a gas station and get an oh henry today oh hungry oh henry these two Islamic fighting groups including al-Qaeda no shocking and so while this had been something that we had known about as a nation and kind of monitored and had some fiza wiretaps on before 9-11 happens the gloves are off. This is no longer an intelligence operation. This is a dismantlement operation. We're going to have to take these charities apart to prosecute who we can prosecute, deport who we can't, and cut off the flow of blood money to terrorist groups. And so I did that for two years. We shut down these

charities. And I was like the financial guy in the team, right? It was like an old A-team movie where everybody had their own mission. I was the financial guy looking through the bank records and trying to figure it out and going out and interviewing people, flying to Turkey, flying to Canada, of flying around the world trying to make this case to kind of build us up and well you know my partners were doing that as well and so eventually we we do we put some of these charity leaders in prison we've shut down the charities we seized the money we got terrible press for it right because when you shut down share it didn't sound good well the Muslims they felt attacked right they're like you got to work on not saying charity you got to say money laundering or something

right exactly shut down two charities right because again what the what the what i think the Islamic community didn't understand is that this was a fraud case that's the way i was approached it. They're defrauding these Muslims who are doing the right thing, right? They have their version of tithing called Zacotte, where they have to give 10% of their income to a charity to help out the poor and needy of the Muslim world. Their intentions were not to have this money funneled to, you know, to trigger pullers in Chechnya. Yeah, yeah. And so they were being ripped off. I think we did a bad job in the PR department trying to make it clear to them that we are not, I mean, but again, Muslims were on their heels feeling attacked from all sides after 9-11 attacks.

sometimes with validity, sometimes without. And so this was just another bur in their saddle, the fact that now we're shutting down their charity and their charities that they gave money to every week or every month or once a year. But we did it. And so we shut them down. And so that was a great period of time.

And then that was kind of mission accomplished. I wasn't really interested in being a terrorism agent. I wanted to get back to crimes. And so around that same window of time, we had a governor in Illinois named Rod Blagojeviz. who was crooked as a barrel of snakes, right? This guy is super corrupt, right? So I get put on that team to try to, again,

with a bunch of other agents, to try to investigate the governor of Illinois. And so we're working on it, we're hearing all sorts of stories. His whole thing was pay for play. If you wanted to get government contracts, you needed to pay money in donations to him in order to get those contracts.

It was very kind of old-school Chicago way of running it. And he was running the entire state that way. And so we end up getting enough evidence to go up on a wiretap on him. And so for bribery issues, more pay-for-play stuff. That's how egregious of the wiretaps? Wiretaps are great, right? So we go up in, but wait, we're going up around election day when Barack Obama was elected the first time. So that, 08, did that sound right?

Yeah, November 2008. And so Barack Obama wins the election. and we basically turn on the wires. And I don't know that it even occurred to us that Governor Blagojevich, now Barack Obama was our senator in Illinois. He's going to go be president, which leaves an open Senate seat in Illinois.

Oh, that's right. He was allowed to... So the governor got to put someone in that Senate seat by appointment. And Governor Blagojevich was treating that like a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. I remember this. I remember watching this on CNN.

Right. And so, and again, I was a small cog in that big one. wheel. They were better looking and smarter people who were the case agents, but I was managing the wiretap of Bagoia, which is home where most of the wheeling and dealing was happening. And so he's making deals with people. He's sending out emissaries to try to monetize this appointing someone to be senator. And the team would sit around talking about what kind of crisis do we have on our hands if he actually consummates this deal, right? This is something that the U.S. Constitution and Title 18 never even contemplate.

a senator being appointed in exchange for a bribe, does he get to be senator? Do we somehow undo that? What's the constitutional mechanism to do that? And so we ended up taking the case down before the deal was made, before he actually appointed someone. Who was the senator? It was going to be Jesse Jackson, Jr., was the high bidder, but that it never happened, right? He never appointed Jesse Jackson, Jr.

He never accepted the bribe, which made the case very difficult to make in court later. and we were criticized for taking the case down too early, but we did that deliberately to prevent this incredible constitutional crisis and to make sure that the people of Illinois actually had representation in the Senate. It would have, you know, law enforcement's often like kind of weighing to, you know, very difficult decisions. I think even just, you know, I understand that, you know, you stopped it, you know, I stopped it before you had the crime, but still, you know, before the actual event, but still the idea that you would be a politician or be involved in politics and someone would

approach you with that and you would entertain it alone that you're like, well, what about this? He was soliciting this. Let's be clear. This is not him just sitting back and like having bad guys coming. No, I mean, even Jesse Jackson or whoever that person would have been. If they, you know, if your emissary came and said, look, this is what we're doing, this is what we're interested in, Would you be, to me, you know, any ethical person in government would be like, listen, I can't be involved in that. I'll either get it on my merits or I won't. I'm not going to pay $300,000. Like, you would think that anybody in that environment would be very wary of that, even having the conversation, like, well, what do you mean? You know, as soon as they do that, it's like, you shouldn't even be in politics, bro.

And that was our position as well. And so Lagoje gets, you know, we arrest him on all sorts of charges relating to corrupt. option. He goes to trial. He has a hung jury. One woman on the trial says can't make a decision. And so the government retries him. Again, at this point, I'm kind of out of it because I was mostly handling a lot of interviews in the case and the wiretap, but I'm following the story. Again, I wasn't the case agent. And so he goes to trial, guilty, gets sentenced to prison. Long time. I can't remember that sentence, 15 years, some like that. While he's awaiting, you'll appreciate this.

While he is awaiting trial, either his first trial or his second trial, as you know, like the, if you're not a flight risk or a danger to the community, you can basically chill out at home. Yeah, yeah.

You know, and people think that you're sitting in jail, like, you know, like banging a metal cup on your bars. Right. If you're not a flight risk or a danger to the community, you go home awaiting your trial.

Yeah, he's not going anywhere. He's too recognizable. Right. He can't go anywhere. And so during that window of time, he's got financial problems, right? This was not a guy who had made himself wealthy in government.

And so he goes on a TV show called Celebrity Apprentice, starring a game show host named Donald Trump while he's away. And again, this is when Trump was a game show host on TV. Blagojevich goes on the show while he's awaiting trial, kind of like this weird sort of stunt casting of this governor who had this cloud over his head. And then Blagojevich, the show ends. Blagojevich goes to prison and sits in prison. While he's in prison, America decides to elect this game show host, Donald Trump, president.

And Donald Trump ends up commuting Blagojevich's sentence and letting him out early. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah. Again, he still sat there for a, he's telling me there for four, five years. His sentence was very long, and he served, I think, two-thirds of it, maybe three-fourths of it. And it was a commutation, not a pardon. But, and, you know, like Trump, hate Trump, it's none of my business. I don't care either way.

But it's a guy who rewards loyalty. His whole thing is loyalty, right? And when he needed to cast someone on his show, Blagojevich stepped up. He was loyal to Trump, and Trump repaid that loyalty with a commutation. But meanwhile, so after the Bogoyevich case, really kind of during it, because I wasn't involved with the trial too much, I transferred to Hawaii. Okay. Was there, I mean, was there an opening? Did you want to go to Hawaii?

I mean, I was sick of the cold weather. I mean, it was that simple. And I had two little kids at the time. And Hawaii, you could stomach Hawaii if you had to. Yeah. I mean, Hawaii is actually not a very desirable office for FBI agents to get because cost of living is high. The schools are less than satisfactory. And the proximity to extended family is a big stressor for agents. So it's not a desirable office for the FBI. And so they have to canvas every now. And they say, like, hey, is anyone willing to go to Hawaii? And I come home to the wife and I float the idea, fully expecting her to say, no, we're Chicago people. And she's like, well, that seems really cool. And so a couple months later, we're kicking it in Hawaii. How long were you there? Seven years. Oh, okay.

What were you working there? It's got to be vastly different. It was financial crimes from the jump. And so it was fantastic. I get there, very young office. But at this point, I had 13 years in. And so it was terrific. I was a very senior agent in a office filled with high energy new agents.

But I was the guy who had the experience. And it was during the mortgage fraud era where the FBI was just cranking out. mortgage fraud cases again and again and again. There were two other guys working financial crimes and they were like, jump on board. We can do all these mortgage fraud cases. I didn't find mortgage fraud all that interesting because in my mind I had sort of moved past. Do you think it's sexy? I think the people who do mortgage fraud are handsome and charming and the great and black t-shirts, but understand where I was coming from. I had done six years in bank fraud and I wanted to work a different kind of fraud. And so I said, listen, while you guys are doing all this mortgage

fraud stuff, we have a giant stack of unanswered complaints of investment fraud, of people who were out there offering Ponzi schemes and fraudulent investments. Let me take that. You guys can do the mortgage fraud. I'll do the investment fraud, and we're just going to make a ton of cases. And these were young agents. I was happy to kind of explain to them how to shepherd a case through the system, tricks and tips. And it became a resource for the division, interview and interrogation, things like that. And so it was a fantastic window of time for me where I was working these, I got to work tons and tons of investment fraud cases with actual human beings who are victims as opposed to kind of cold-hearted banks and be the big fish in a small pond,

you know, enjoying wearing Aloha shirts every day instead of business suits and making big cases. It was fantastic. What were, you want to throw out one of the cases? I worked a lot of major embezzlements and I worked investment fraud. Okay, had a case. I don't bore you with too many details because I did a whole episode of a, another podcast talking about this one case. Okay.

What episode was that? What podcast? It was the Jerry Williams' FBI retired case review. We talked about that. We love Jerry. We love Jerry. She's great. She's so nice.

But when you called me to be on the show, I called Jerry and said, does this guy okay? She said, do it. So I wouldn't be here to work for her. And everybody loves her, too. If you read the comments. She's a delightful lady. Everybody's, you know, she, you know, they're like, every time she laughs, I laugh. I can't help it.

You know, she's super nice, super funny. I'll give you the very short version of the long story I told on her show. And I think you'll really appreciate this. A guy goes to prison for running a Ponzi scheme. His name is Perry Griggs. He gets assigned to Lompoc in Las Vegas. It's kind of an Air Force Base work camp. Lompoc is it?

Lompoc in, it's not in California? No, I'm sorry, you're right. What's the one in Vegas? What's the Air Force Base in Vegas? He ended up in Lompoc later. I don't know. I know Lompoc. Vegas.

I can't remember the name of it. But bottom of mine is he's in prison. he begins to run a Ponzi scheme from inside the prison walls, convincing the other prisoners, most of whom are from Hawaii, to get their families to get mortgages on, cash out mortgages on their family homes, to invest with him and his wife while inside the Bureau of Prison so he would trade commodities for money. But the whole thing was a giant Ponzi scheme. He gets out of prison, becomes a fugitive.

I need to build the case on a man who committed a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme while inside the prison walls and then catch him after he took off and left and skipped out on his supervised release. So that was my favorite case when I worked there. I was to say, do you go to, do you fly out and go to the prison? Are there still inmate? Are these guys all still in prison? Some of my victims were. But again, the real victims were not the prisoners themselves, but they would call, hey, mom, I met this guy. He's this billionaire commodities trader because as you know, people in prison, they talk about everything, but they don't often like to talk about the one thing in their life, the one mistake they made that put them there to

begin with. And you could tell me if I got this wrong, but it's just sort of a topic that a lot of the people are not comfortable talking about. And you could tell me if I got this wrong, but Perry's whole thing was that he creates an entire legend for himself that was fictitious. He said that he was there for money laundering and he was this multimillionaire, like commodities trader. And he didn't tell any of these guys that he was there for doing an investment fraud Ponzi scheme. Do you find that accurate or possible? I mean, it's what happened. I'm just curious if it's common. No, I mean, often they will alter, you know, you'll alter, because you can look up what someone's there for, right? Like you can have your family, hey, there's this guy here, blah, blah, but that's more of a

Title 18 charge, right? You're going to see that there's, they pled guilty to Title 18 wire fraud charges, but the story behind that. That's exactly what I was going to say. It's like, you can see, hey, this guy's here for wire fraud or bank fraud, but he can alter, unless you had a ton of press, he can alter all the reasons why he ended up doing. It can end up being like, look, I was supposed to file these forms with the government. I'll be honest with you. Look, I didn't do it. Okay, I figured I could get away with it. It ended up this happened. They offered me two years or three years probation. I took him to trial because I thought, I didn't think anybody was going to testify. I ended up getting five years. So suddenly you're like, oh, man, you got screwed.

Yeah, well, you get to create your own legend, right? Because there's no fact checking going on. Right. And the truth is, you ripped off retirees for $2 million. And you deserved 50 years. you got lucky and got five or four. Yeah. So Perry tells Nellis Air Force Base was the prison in Vegas, which had a prison work camp. I don't think it's there anymore. Perry told everybody he was a millionaire commodities trader who went to prison for like some version of money laundering.

The fact of the matter is he was ripping off little old ladies that got him there. And then he continued to rip off little old ladies while inside the prison walls. So that was a case I just loved because it was such an unusual case, especially at the beginning when my phone is ringing. And I would have these grandmothers tell me that they had invested their life. savings with a man sitting in federal prison. And I was like, well, let's say that again. What do you mean? And so I love that case. Did you track him down? Like, when he disappeared, how much did he get first? How much do you get? Um, Ponty schemes are weird, right? Because

there's some returns coming back to you. And so it becomes a bit of a math problem. But I think he Hey, we know you probably hit play to escape your business banking, not think about it. But what if we told you there was a way to skip over the pressures of banking? By matching with a TD small business account manager, you can get the proactive business banking advice and support your business needs. Ready to press play? Get up to $2,700 when you open select small business banking products. Yep, that's $2,700 to turn up your business. Visit TD.com slash small business match to learn more. Conditions apply. Look in a few million, but he netted probably about one million. Okay. So, and his wife's mostly spending the money on the outside. He's sort of funding her

lifestyle much more so than his because he's sitting on the inside. So and then he takes off how long before you guys caught up with him? Well, the first thing I need to do is get an indictment, right? So he takes off and I'm still investigating the case, but I don't, and so there's a warrant for him for skipping out on a supervised release, but I wanted to catch him on the warrant for the fraud. So finally we get the grand jury indictment. Now I have a warrant for his arrest and we begin the nationwide manhunt. I put up billboards all around the city. We had the country. We had cooperation with Clear Channel, radio station company that's also the largest billboard company in the U.S. And so there was a picture of Perry Griggs and his wife up there on billboards around the

U.S. And tips would come in. And eventually we get some tips that lead us to Kingman, Arizona. And we did an undercover to catch him because he was painting houses for cash. At that point, the money had run out. He's painting houses for cash in Kingman, Arizona, using a Craigslist ad. And so we have an undercover call and tell him to come to the motel to see if he wants to paint some motel rooms.

And then the FBI jumps out and catches him, and we bring him in. nice nice how long did that take the whole case took about a calendar year no i meant to catch him oh the manhunt wasn't that long it was probably from the time i got the indictment to the time we caught him probably 90 days oh wow okay that's super fast right yeah well again he you know he didn't have a passport right so he couldn't go far and he'd sort of burned through his money and so you know he makes it from like he's got no fake ideas to arizona it wasn't the most uh productive uh you know running scheme um oh i'm sure and i'm sure he would have started all up again. Once he got a little bit of capital, he probably would have started the whole thing up again. My guess is he was a very good con man. He could talk people

out of their money very effectively. And if he'd only channeled that into something productive, we'd all probably be working for him. What kind of time did he get? It's a good question. For the second go-round, right? He got a ton of time. I'm trying to remember five, six, seven years for the million bucks. But what happened is this, because he had manipulated the prison system so well when he was in. inside at Nellis Air Force base prison. His second run when he went in Supermax in Tara Hote. You can tell the listeners what that means.

Yeah, that's horrible. Like that's, uh, it depends on the Supermax, but most of them have like no contact. Like you're basically in your cell all the time. You get let out. You might get let out like twice a week, but you're basically in a cage. There's no real interaction.

He was bribing Bureau of Prison and the Air Force officials to get super, to get, you know, he would get taken off base. where the prison is to the motel to have sex with his wife and then brought back by prison guards in exchange for bribes and stuff like that so there was a whole kind of corruption scandal happening here and the bop had egg on their face the fact that he was able to do this while in theory he was incarcerated so when he had the second go-round they weren't taking any chance with him it was right to the supermax yeah you're you're i was going to say you're most of a lot of supermaxes too you're like you don't even get your mail you have to read it on a tv screen yeah you got like no it's i mean it's it borders on cruel and unusual yeah the amount of isolation involved with those. I was going to say five years of that. Yeah. He didn't see that coming.

I interviewed a guy. Actually, I had like a uniform where half of it was a CO's uniform and half of it's an inmate's uniform where it's like orange. A gimmick. Yeah. He written a book. His life rights had actually been optioned by Will Smith's production company. It had been optioned twice.

And then they didn't option it for a third time because. because of the will the whole will smith fiasco gary heyward yeah he was great he but i mean he's in riker's island he's bringing in drugs he's arranging for inmates to have sex with female correctional officers wow so he's pimping out correctional it's a dangerous game yeah it's it's um you know and he did that for for years and years and he had a gambling problem uh you know he's got you know obviously he's got you know some excuses on why he needed the money and you know child support and the whole thing. But yeah, the stuff that he did was, so I was going to say, but typically the Bureau of Prisons, I'm not saying it's, I mean, it's not state prison. I can state

prisoners, the guards are brutal, you know, but they're dealing with brutal criminals. And then the Bureau of Prisons typically hires guys, you know, obviously some of them are, some of them are just jerks, right? Like they get, they've got, you know, they're bullies and, but some of them are just there, like, just to do their job and go home. They could care less. So where'd you serve your time, if you don't my name? It's at Coleman. Okay. Yeah, Coleman, which is only like an hour north of where we are right now.

Right. Only four, really probably 45 minutes. So minimum security or? I was at the medium for three years and then I was at the low for like nine years. You know, and I had done like a year in the U.S. Marshall's like the holdover. Sure. But I was going to say like typically I, you know, when I was there, it wasn't that bad as far as like people, guards bringing in stuff. because, you know, they make decent money.

Like, they make okay money. Well, the one thing I know about federal employees is that everyone is terrified about getting in trouble and losing their pension, right? I would imagine that's even more intensified at a job which can at times be unpleasant in the Bureau of Prisons where you're just looking for that 20-year date and I want for you to get out and enjoy your pension and kind of move on with the second phase of your life. Well, in Coleman, I mean, I'm sorry, since COVID, from what I've talked to people that have gotten out and they've said, listen.

during COVID, like, guards were dying. So what happened is, because it was rampant, right? It was everywhere. Obviously, you know, it's funny, as clean as prison is, you know, you always think it's filthy, but it's really not. It's very clean. And the inmates are very clean. It still doesn't matter.

You've got 160 guys crammed into one big room. Everybody's going to get, if they get sick. And the guards are getting sick. So guards are getting sick. A few of them died. And guards start retiring. And so they're bringing in younger guards. So now you're bringing in, the guys that we're making $80,000 a year are being brought in.

And they're starting guys at $30, $35. And for $1,000 to bring in a cell phone, I'll do it. Like, what do I care? I just got this job. I'm making $35,000 a year. I'm making nothing. And I'm at the beginning of possibly getting a pension in 20 years. Like, give me, yeah.

What do you need? Yeah, give me $1,000. I'll do that. $500 for that. Yeah. So my buddies that are in there now, they're like, listen, it is insane. How many cell phones, how much, the drugs that are. in there the and because it wasn't like that that's interesting when i was there but now it's horrible so

you know i don't know i know that was that time frame was prior to covid um but then the camps too there's it's so loose you know you can drive around there's no fence you know there's so so few um cos there'll be 400 inmates or 300 inmates and there's like six there's like five ceos like this this guy peri griggs he had like his wife was bringing cigars to him he was he was he had this whole He had a job inside some warehouse that was being renovated at Nellis Air Force Base. And he was living like a king there. He had a laptop with a Wi-Fi card. He had smuggled so much stuff into that prison to keep this Ponzi scheme alive that it was a rude awakening to me because I wasn't.

Because after one of my subjects goes to prison, it's not like I'm on their Christmas card list. I don't get to hear about what happens or what it's really like. My only exposure to prisons when I need to go in to interview somebody on a case. And so it's pretty minimal. Yeah. I was going to say, look, some of the guys that I've known that have actually worked with the FBI or DEA or what, you know, they actually do call, like they will call them and talk to them. Or they'll, some of these FBI agents and DE agents will put money on their books. You know, they'll say, they'll call them and say, listen, man, I got no money. I'm in here. Yeah. I've got, they're like, hey, I'm going to send you 200 bucks. You know, I don't know if there's like an account or something. They'll send them money to keep them happy. The guy got us 12, you know, he busted a, you know, 12, a conspiracy of 12. people. We put a bunch of, you know, I don't know, I'm pretty sure that that's acceptable. You're keeping contact with a guy that's probably going to get out and work for you. Well, that's the idea, right? Is that there's a decent budget for FBI agents to kind of cultivate

and romance people who are either current or future confidential human sources. And the folks getting out of prison are in a good position to cooperate. Yeah, I met a guy who had been in prison a couple times who had worked consistently with an FBI agent. And, you know, you know, He, yeah, he was telling me, he's like, oh, yeah, I'll get out. He says, I'll get out. I'll get back involved in something. I'll just start gathering evidence. And I'll say, hey, and I'll bring him in.

He's like, I've been doing this. And they can put you on a payroll. They can pay you money. They can, and he's like, there's certain things they'll be like, don't do this, don't do that. He's like, but pretty much you get to go out and do, you get to be a criminal. As long as you're gathering the information, then you go back and you look, here's what I got. And at some point, they go, okay, we're going to wrap this up. Right.

Or try and get to this guy. I don't think the public has a good understanding of how important confidential human sources are to the FBI's mission and to the vast number of confidential human sources working on an ongoing basis to help the FBI in our mission. Every FBI special agent is required to have confidential human sources working for them. Now, that may just be the guy in the street who's keeping an eye on a particular neighborhood and writing down license plates. Or maybe it's someone who did get in trouble who's trying to work off a beef for somebody who's just developed some rapport with an FBI agent providing information. And that is the, those people are the unsung heroes of the FBI. And the reason that the FBI is good at what they do, because they have this intelligence base.

And that's not just a foreign counter intelligence base involving national security stuff, but it's criminal stuff. And some of that information doesn't even go to FBI cases. We can package it up and give it to local police to reduce crime in a community. And so, I don't know, I was really good at working with confidential human sources, and I enjoyed it a lot because I understood the value of what they do. Right. Right. I covered that for you? Well, how do you find them? You probably already arrested them at some point, right?

So they are criminals. They're all. Not necessarily. Not all of them. Like, I was going to say, there was an article about a black girl who had been raised kind of in the projects, lower middle class. She actually had like a gold tooth, right? Yeah. Very attractive.

There was an article in, oh gosh, I forget. whatever one of the crime magazines and I had read the article and her boyfriend had been arrested like he was a drug dealer yeah she has no criminal background but she'd been he'd been arrested and the DEA comes in they interview everybody he goes to trial he loses well then she goes to the DEA agent and says I want to get my boyfriend out of prison he gets like 10 years or 15 years she's like I want to work off his time right it's a third party rule 35 right Sure. I've worked a bunch of those. Right. So she says, I'm going to, you know, I know a bunch of drug dealers. And there's this one drug dealer he's interested in me. I can get close to him. And the agent say, look, your boyfriend, you know, he talked to the U.S. attorney. U.S. attorney comes back and says, no, guy went to trial. He had every opportunity. I'm not giving him anything. And so the agent goes to her and says, look, I'm sorry. What you're doing, it would have helped us. I appreciate that. But we're not going to give him anything. And so she's ready to go. And he says, but wait a minute.

we can pay you to work as a confidential informant. And she was going to college. She's on her second year of going to like the university. And she's like, what do you mean? He says, well, let's face it. You can talk, you know, you can basically you can talk the way you need to speak in order to convince drug dealers that you're someone who's buying drugs, you know? And the way she explains it, she's like, because they interviewed her, she's like, because they interviewed her,

like look at me. She's like, these guys see me immediately they want to, they want to sleep with me, date me, whatever. So they drop their guard. I'm absolutely not a police officer. I don't speak like a police officer, although she was able to switch, they said, which was great. They said because if she has to go and be put on the stand, she doesn't have a record. And they're like, and she speaks perfectly well. So what they were doing with her was the DEA would fly her in have her make half a dozen drug buys or get together, get, you know, close to somebody, get some information from him, whatever the case may be, stay for, sometimes it was a few days, sometimes it was a week or so, and then fly her back, you know, to wherever she was from.

Yeah. And they'd give her, she's like, you know, I get, whatever it was, three, four thousand dollars for a week's worth of work, helps me get through school. They end up getting, you know, busting this guy. And if they need to, I can, they can put me on the stand because I don't have, I have no agenda, you know, there's no, but yeah, but the majority of these guys are, have been arrested before, right? I wouldn't even say that.

I mean, certainly not in my, for the sources I had. Some were ex-cons, some were working off beefs. I found the ones who you could recruit yourself and understand what their motivation is. Is their motivation money? Is their motivation patriotism? Are they just people who kind of get off on the cloak and dagger spy stuff? Right. And so once you can understand that, you could sort of tailor the deal to them and tailor their

assignment to them. The most important thing to me was their access. Does this person have access to information? Or if they don't, do they have a talent by being a beautiful woman or being a guy who's just got the gift of gab to kind of infiltrate these groups that we want to know about? It's so much easier for us to inject a confidential source into a criminal organization and get intel out of them than it is to inject an undercover FBI agent, which requires just a ton of paperwork and hurdles to jump through. I read another article. This is when I was locked up about a guy who was working with the FBI. And he, he had, it was something to do with money laundering, but it was for like charities, right? Yeah. And he ended up working where he would, he was, you know, Muslim. He would

get in with different mosques and charities and organizations. And he would gather information and build like a little case. The other thing he was doing was a lot of these, he'd infiltrate these little groups, and sometimes they were like smuggling guns and things. And the difference is what they were paying this girl to do it, 800 bucks, 500 bucks, $200 each, like, he was nothing. This guy was making, he must have made a couple million dollars doing what he was doing. As a source? As a source. And it was in, the money that he was talking about, that they were paying him to infiltrate these different, because he was an extreme. danger even during in the article and this was like a new york in the new new york times

in the new yorker what's the magazine the new yorker yeah it was a big article 30 000 word articles are so long articles but it was the money and i remember talking to my buddy pete who i was locked up with uh and and i was just like this is insane yeah he's like that dude's a lot of danger he's not in the united states like this guy's in he's going to like you know the united emirates he's going to like he's he's in these other countries he's all you know and he's not i don't think he had ever gotten in trouble. So Pete was trying to explain to me. He goes, can you imagine how much of a budget the FBI has for, um, for, uh, um, terrorism? He's like, and this guy is on the inside. Like he, he was putting together and he was like, and you, Pete was also like, look at

the massive, the amount of, this isn't a chick buying, you know, crack rocks. Yeah. These are massive, massive cases that they have no chance of getting. Yeah. You know, so, uh, yeah, it was interesting. And the guy was actually on the, in the article, he was like on the run. Like, he was getting like $350,000 for this, $700,000 for this, you know, a few hundred thousand. And I think he was getting a piece of like some of the pie or something. I forget what he was doing. Right. But it was, it was insane the numbers. And of course, this is just him saying the numbers. I don't know those are really the numbers. But they were, what I remember is it was, it was in the millions. When you started adding it out. When you get into national security sources,

the sky's the limit as far as the budget. Yeah, I couldn't believe. My fraud sources, nobody wants to open up the bank, the wallet's too much for them. So a couple hundred bucks here or there. Right. At what point do you, are we, do you want to get to retirement? Well, no, let's say, okay, so I do seven years in Hawaii. You had been 13 and 7. That's 20 years. You're about right. You shouldn't you be retiring? Well, I mean, I was young, remember? So you can retire once you hit age 50 and 20 years, right? So I was one of the youngest agents in America when I came in at age 25, because the average starting age of an agent's 30, right? And so, and I don't want to, to retire at this point of the story, right? I'm having the time of my life. But I was going

broke because Hawaii was expensive, man. You cannot explain how expensive it is. I was living in a really crummy little house. They don't offset that somehow? You get a cost of living adjustment, but I got two kids in Catholic school. The job market wasn't super robust. So my wife was choosing to raise our kids as opposed to kind of going out and like working at a hospital or something like that. And so I wasn't saving any money. And so, And Hawaii just kind of run its course. I was getting a little island fever. Sometimes you hear about that where you just, you've kind of, you've done every beach,

you've done every hike. The weather's great, but, you know, and your friends are kind of transferring out or retiring. And so I began looking, I began going around the country and auditioning on vacations and business trips, different cities about where I wanted to live next. And I found Jacksonville, Florida and fell in love with it. And then I put in for a transfer to Jacksonville, Florida, and got it. and then transferred there in 2016. Okay.

To finish up my career for the last six years of my career, investigating financial crimes in Jacksonville, Florida. Again, mostly investment frauds and major embezzlements. Okay. So anything specific about- Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's any really great stories out of Jacksonville. I feel like Hawaii was sort of my heyday for great stories. I made cases, but it was, you know, they were good cases,

but, you know, it's the problem with like an embezzlement. case. I could tell you about the false vendor scheme somebody ran to get the money, but it's not really kind of edgy your seat, you know, high-powered, you know, big YouTube-wadded stories. They're just the same story. And you've thought so many of them. Yeah, yeah. It was like folding laundry. I loved it.

And I enjoyed it. And I had an aptitude for it. And I'd rather do that than anything else in the world. But, but, but, you know, then we get, then I turn, okay, so here's, here's a, I think you enjoy process stories. So I turn 51. And it's two, it's the beginning of 2021. So I'm doing some math in my mind here. And I'm realizing that we're coming up in 2021 on the 20th

anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. After the 9-11 attacks, the FBI, the CIA, the military, the intelligence community hired a ton of people, just an absolute ton of people. Like a substantial portion of the workforce. All of those people in the months following September 11, 2021, would have their 20 years and be eligible for retirement. And I was going to be competing with all of those people for jobs and clients if I wanted to sit around and wait. And so I made the decision to tap out at age 51 in 2021 and retire and open up my own PI agency in Florida. And that's what I'm doing now. And with the timing of it was, you know, I felt like I had done everything I needed to do as an FBI agent. I done it for 26 years at that point, which is a long time. I had never taken a

promotion in 26 years. I was nobody's boss. I was nobody's supervisor. All I wanted to do then and now is work cases and financial crimes were my thing. And so I wanted to get out there and see if I could do this again for clients. But I also didn't want to wait around until I was 57, kind of more burned out, more broken down. And, you know, and then with 10,000 other people who had the exact same resume as I did out there hustling for the same clients. Okay. So became a private investigator. Right. And you go and get your license? How do you get your license? Yeah, the state of Florida. They make it a little easier if you're former law enforcement, but you get a license. I got my license. You take a test. You take some classes. There's different, you get a license

to be a private investigator, and then you get a license to open up a private investigative agency, and then you get a third license that allows you to carry a gun when you do it. And so it's a pretty regulated industry. And then I get out there and start hustling for clients. And so the first year, I spent a lot of time leveraging my relationships with former federal prosecutors who are now working in the private sector to see if I could get jobs from them. And that worked out fairly well. I got some pretty big clients right from the jump. You know, fraud cases, civil cases were, you know, frauds were the cases being handled on the civil realm as opposed to the criminal realm. And they needed someone to come in and investigate the fraud and then provide expert witness

testimony at a civil trial. Right. And so my first year, I did a lot of that. But I was also doing the surveillance is, the cheating husbands, the cheating wives cases, embezzlements here and there. And then social media caught up with me and it became a tidal wave of clients, which we can talk about if you. Yeah, I was going to say, because that's how, that's how Tyler, which is, that's my booking agent, he, you know, he'll, he's, I think he spends a lot of time on, on Instagram, because a ton of stuff, he sends me people from Instagram. Yeah.

And, you know, a lot of times he's, he's, it's a constant. argument. Colby's heard this is like, it's like, how is this guy related to true crime? And he's like, he'll send me something like, look at this. Would you like this guy on the show? I've been talking to him like, okay, he's, he's rock climbing. And he's like, yeah, no, he's amazing. He's got a bunch of followers. And I'm like, is that a crime? Yeah. And he's like, well, I don't know, but he's got a bunch of followers. I'm like, listen, let me explain something. Like, it's got to be true crime related. Yeah. You know, and, and then he'll say, it's in the title of the show. I know. Well, then he'll come back.

go, you interview to some guys about UFOs, and I'm like, yeah, well, those are aliens and they're here illegally, okay, so I can make that leap. And so anyway, he sent me yours. And it was just one of your, one of the, one of the, not shorts, it reals. So, well, you might have put it up as a short too, but yeah, so it was a real. And it was you, you know, whoever the guy's name was, I don't even know where you're getting these stories. Because you explained some guy had done this, and he'd done this and this and then eventually he was arrested for this. I almost feel like maybe you're reading articles or people sending you stuff? Because you kind of break it down real quick.

It's a little bit of everything, right? And so what the genesis of this was I was spending a fortune paying for ads on Google ads, Facebook ads, next door ads. And it was bringing me clients, but kind of tiki tack, low-level clients, like, can you do a background check on the guy, my daughter's dating and stuff like that? It's fine. It's an honor of the way to make a living, but it wasn't the cases I wanted to get. And I was spending a ton marketing.

And I thought, well, you know what? I have an asset. And that asset is 30 years of stories of investigations I've conducted and some knowledge about the world of crime and crime fighting, specifically financial crimes. And so I set up social media accounts on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, of course, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And every day I would make a 90-second video talking about either a case I worked, an investigative story, or a case that I thought. It was interesting, and I would try to tell that story with a beginning, middle, and end in 90 seconds, and at the end, put up my firm's logo at the end and put that up there. And it took off. And it took off pretty well on TikTok, and then Instagram has eclipsed that.

As of the day that we're recording this, I got about a quarter million followers on all these platforms if you add them all up. Right. But the important thing to me is, you know, I'm not going to be a TV superstar, but it brings clients in the door for me. And even if being a PI is like being a realtor. You don't need one until you need one. Right. And so going door to door saying, want to buy an investigation, is a bad plan. Reminding people daily through interesting content that if you ever need a private investigator

who knows what he's doing in this realm, give me a call. That has been paying dividends for me. How long are people hiring you for? Like, I mean, is this, like, is this something where, like, if it's a cheating husband, Is that like a two-week? Well, it's a one-off, right? I mean, you know. Right, right.

I know that's not the one. Yeah, yeah. But like, you know, a company has a major embezzlement, and they bring me in to investigate it and present the case to the board of directors. So it's very similar to what I was doing at KPMG when I was 22, 23 years old, but I'm able to kind of work for myself. You know, a guy in Sarasota hires me because he has a safe burglary and has a million dollars in gold stolen from his safe and the police aren't doing enough, wants me to find out who did it. And so the cases are really. varied. And I'm kind of getting away from the surveillance, one, because I don't like surveillance, too, and they're really

hard to do when you're alone. You're sort of hoping that the guy doesn't look in the rearview mirror and see that you've been following him for eight hours. But now I have investigators who have their own firms who are very good investigators and way better at surveillance than I am, that I can farm work out to. I can project manage it, take in the client, handle all the client relations, and then subcontract the actual surveillance to a former CIA guy who's very good at surveillance, but maybe not the best businessman.

Right, right, right. Yeah, I was going to say, not everybody's good with people either. So he'd probably be better off in a car by himself. So I was going to say, like in a bank fraud type investigation, like how long does it take? I mean, you're going to say, well, it depends. But, you know, to investigate something like an embezzlement, like is that something where you get the, like in three days you can do it? Or it's usually a week, two weeks, three weeks? Okay, well, again, banks aren't going to hire me, right?

Because a bank has an internal investigative structure. So let's talk about the small business who gets embezzled from. They're a false vendor scheme, very typical, where an internal person at the company, usually in the accounting department, begins producing invoices for services, usually consulting services or data processing services or marketing services,

an entirely fake vendor. And funneling those invoices into the accounting system at this small business. And so then the company then pays those bills based on the good word of this employee. But that money is not going to a legitimate vendor. It's going to the employee who doctored up these false invoices. And so what I've kind of got a cottage industry of doing embezzlement cases, packaging them up, kind of quantifying the loss for the client.

And then what I do is I package it up. And if the client wants me to, and so far they often do, hand carrying this to my former colleagues at the FBI and saying, here's a case you need to be working. Oh, okay. And so, again, any citizen can call the FBI and report a fraud. The problem is most people aren't good at presenting that evidence and that story in a coherent way that the FBI is going to take interest.

That's the service I provide to them, as being that conduit between the investigation that I conduct and handing that off. And if I'm the agent at the FBI who receives that, one, I know Tom Simon's going to put this together well, and two, I'm going to put that case in the front murder because it's been worked already. I can take all the credit if I'm the agent for this work that this private investigator did. All I need to do is recreate their investigation, bring it to the U.S. Attorney's Office, and that agent looks like a hero. Right. It's a win-win for everybody. As far as how long does it take, anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months,

depending on how much evidence I have and how in their willingness to provide in the victim's willingness to kind of gather the evidence, right? Because I don't have subpoena authority anymore. Right. Okay. Do you ever go talk to the person that you think in that in that oh you do no i get the i get the confession oh okay yeah i i go out and do the interview and get the confession from the uh the bad guy and um and it's kind of nice because they're not i'm sort of they're not in custody i have no power of arrest and so there's no need to kind of mirandize them or do that sort of that kind of law enforcement dance with them i'm there to hear their side of the story and understand what happened and and also see if

they have an ability or willingness to pay that money back because again i'm working for my client now, not the government. The government's very good at putting people in orange jumpsuits. They're lousy bill collectors. So the victims often never get any restitution. If I get put on the case, I'm going to try and extract as much money as possible from that bad guy before this even hits the FBI's desk. Yeah, I was going to say, I've actually been caught like in the not really, not in the middle of the scheme after I'd gotten the money and actually negotiated to pay the money back with the bank. They said, look, you give us the money back. We won't contact the FBI. Just give us the money back. Yeah. Don't.

come around us don't ever borrow again from us right but we'll if you just pay us back like obviously that they have a fiduciary responsibility you know yeah i mean i've had clients make that deal and you know i got to grin and bear it because i'm i'm here to serve the clients now not not the greater interest of the FBI and so the oftentimes the clients like listen to you get that guy to pay me back we don't have to take this to the FBI and i'll play let's make a deal with the bad guy with that uh with that dangle um so you're going to continue to do you're going to continue to do the the short form content yeah i mean it's it's been great i mean it's produced a ton of clients do you like doing it um i like telling stories i like

communicating i you know i hope i've shown my guy who likes to talk and so uh no listen i started i was like went one to like i started shooting through them yeah it's gratifying i mean you know it's the idea of a quarter million people waiting waking up in the morning and wanting to see what i have to say it's pretty cool yeah it's gratifying right it's it It plays to all the worst parts of my ego. Does anybody recognize you? I've gotten recognized three or four times in public. Once I was with my wife, we were flying somewhere, and the guy looks over and goes, oh, my God,

you're Tom Simon. I watch your videos every morning. That was kind of neat. What did your wife say? She rolls her eyes. I'm constantly telling her how incredibly famous I am. She doesn't believe a word of it. And one time, and this was so gratifying, my kids were there.

And we were at a Florida state water polo game, of all things. and some dad from another university was there. It comes up and goes, I need to tell you. I watch your videos every morning. It's so nice to meet you. He was like a cop in Orlando or something like that. So it happens a couple times. But my audience, as you know, is just sort of spread out among the 8 billion people on Earth.

So it's not like it's clustered in my zip code. I know, but it's still pretty cool. It's neat. Like when I get recognized, you know, it only really counts if I'm recognized and I'm with my wife. Right. Because then I'm able to go, huh? Huh? Yeah, exactly. He said I was amazing. She's like, he doesn't know you. Right. Yeah, yeah. You can't be a hero in your own house. Right. But the other thing, and I suspect you're getting this too, is that other, it opens the door to other opportunities, right? I've been, you know, contacted by different TV shows to audition. I'm doing some expert work for shows on Tooby and Oxygen, where they need that kind of talking head guy who has the ability to explain how these crimes work and shepherding them through either cases that I worked or kind of other cases that are.

in the news that I've taken the time to study, and that's produced a different revenue stream and more opportunities for exposure, which brings in more clients. So it becomes just a big feedback loop. Do you edit the videos yourself? I do. And you could tell my videos aren't that well edited. Well, you know, some people, they can't edit. Like, they'll, they'll hire somebody because they don't, they just don't even want to do it. I just cap cut. It's, again, I'm doing a 90-second video that, so it's four minutes of me talking that gets condensed down to 90 seconds. And so it's no heavy lifting. Okay. And, you know, which is why I think it's so amazing what you're doing, because this

becomes a giant endeavor producing this many multiple hour shows a week with not a cast of thousands here. I don't know how you have time to do much of anything else. I mean, it's my full-time job now, but I mean, honestly, I, like, you know, this is just the easiest job. Like, this is like, because honestly, you know, like, I'm right now talking to you, the only, the only issue I have talking with you is having to kind of stay on, you know, try and structure it in some way so that it's a story that we're telling. But, you know, a lot of these guys, like some of the best conversations we have are they get here and we're waiting for Colby to show up or, you know, we start shooting the shit and we'll have a 30 minute conversation and it's just about anything. Yeah.

And it's amazing. And then sometimes afterwards they'll still staying around for another, you know, 30 minutes or something. And we'll talk again. And that's a great conversation. Like, I'm lucky because the people that are coming here and having conversations with me are not. You know, not that there's anything wrong with the average guy that, you know, went to high school, went to college, got a job, married, you know, married as a, you know, college, you know, girlfriend, had two kids and now works a regular job. That's a great guy. That's like that guy, you know, those are the guys that actually make this entire country run. But he may or may not have an issue.

Yeah. And so he doesn't have a bunch of stories that you can go back and forth and relate to. And so I'm lucky, you know, these guys show up. Some of the best ones, unfortunately, are the guys that are just like, you know, they've had horrible life. Like, you know, they've been, you know, on, you know, in and out of jail, you know, they're on drugs. They're, you know, it's like, this guy's outrun the cops four times. And he can tell a story. Yeah. Some other guys who have amazing stories, but they can't tell it.

Like, this guy doesn't have a great story. He's a drug addict. He's, you know, but he tells it great. He remembers all the funny things that happened. He can, you know, and I love the guys that, like, know who they are. Not the guys that bullshit you, that everything else is somebody else's fault, but the guys that will say, like, no, I fucked out, bro. Like, you can't believe what I did.

Like, I don't know why. I don't know what I was thinking. Like, if they really know who they are, those guys are great. Yeah, no, I think it's great. And so I enjoy your show. And why, you know, again, I really admire what you do here, kind of getting these stories out in kind of a long form, you know, free form, discussion. It's, it's a testament to you and your ability to kind of make people comfortable

and get information from them. So I'm just honored to be here. Not in a position to judge anybody. Yeah, I was going to say, too, I'll talk to guys too. And they're like, what is it like 30 minutes? It's like, bro, you can't, like, if you can't tell your story in 30 minutes, like there's no way, you've got to be able to have it kind of open ended. Well, Joe Rogan really opened the door to a long form conversation, whereas that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Yeah, wouldn't that be great? I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, uh, Lex, uh, Lex, you know, who Lex Friedman is. Sure.

So I did his podcast, you know, like a week ago. I don't, it's not out yet, but we talked. So I told my story, you know, and he jumps in every once a while. Yeah. And it's funny because my story is basically this is my story, you know, and I kind of have a, you know, it's a progression. You tell it, right? Like you have, you seem like you have that down too. You're like, well, okay, here's how it goes.

And you kind of, you know, we might segue way off, but you got to come back because here's what happened next. you know um i don't think lexes are like that so i kept having i kept coming back yeah so it ends up being but because he asked questions you know i thought when we were done if you said how long do you think we've been talking i'd say gosh it's got to be like three maybe maybe four hours i was like gosh is it even four hours that's a long time and we were done he said uh okay okay he said and he had a little he has a little clock and he goes okay he said how long you think we were we did I went, I don't know. He goes seven hours.

I went, seven, no. And he goes, yeah, he said, we stopped twice. He's like, what did you think? I said, oh, man, I said, I'm so sorry. He said, no, this is great. He said, oh, my gosh, you know. Isn't it interesting how mentally exhausting it is, though? You know, I try and tell my wife that, that the equivalent, I heard Jordan Peterson say

that giving a one-hour speech is the equivalent, as far as anxiety, it is the same as working an eight-hour day. Without question. And she, well, she disagrees. She's like, no, no, I'll try to tell her, I've got, I'm under a lot of stress. Yeah, I've done like three episodes of American Greed where you're filming all day long. And at the end of the day, my brain is just mush because you have to be on, right? Yeah, yeah.

I can't, you know, I'm not checking my phone. I'm not, like, cleaning my fingernails. I'm just, I'm thoroughly focused on this conversation. And, you know, I'm going to be driving home for three hours after we get done. And my brain's just going to be mush. It's probably a function of, You're unwinding. You're unwinding. Yeah, yeah. I like it, though. The end product is the thing, you know, the ability to kind of have that out there. I did an American Greed episode. Did you really? Yeah, I was on American Greed. You were the subject? Yeah, I was the subject. That's cool. Wasn't it the same experience you had, I promise. Was your case agent also on screen for it?

Yes, it was, oh gosh, Andrea Peacock. She was with the Secret Service. I know Andrea Peacock really well. Oh, she was, she was very nice. Yeah, we worked cases together. She left Secret Service at some point. point became Treasury OIG. Okay. But yeah, she's great. I like her. Yeah. There was, and my prosecutor at the time, which has passed away, it was a Gail McKenzie. I don't know her. She out of Tampa? No, this was, this was, this was in Atlanta. Okay, yeah, yeah, right, because she was regional for Treasury when I knew her. Yeah, she's a good agent. Yeah, she's very polite, very, look, she's very much, you know, unlike, like I had one of the FBI's, I worked, not work with, and several of the FBI agents that, you know, interviewed me or that worked on my case.

How did you find them as people? Well, were they polite? Were they professional? So all of the Secret Service was extremely professional. Interesting. Very, you know, like, you could tell, like, it's here. I'm here to do a job. Here's what I'm doing. What's going, you know, and very just polite and nice. They were the lead agents on your case, Secret Service? Well, I had, I had been indicted in like three different jurisdictions. So the Secret Service was in two of them. Interesting. The FBI was in Tampa, the Middle District.

So that initially, the case agent was, oh gosh, Candice Calderon. Don't know her. And, you know, Candice did not like me. You know, everybody always says, oh, they, no, no, Candice, if you asked her to this day, she'd just say she can't stand me. I don't know why. Even, matter of fact, did she treat you poorly? Oh, horribly. I'm sorry to hear that.

I usually, you know, even if you don't can't stand someone, you should have a level of professionalism. Well, you know, the other FBI agent that I spoke with, and I spoke with a couple other ones, right? Well, one of them was Leslie Nelson. She was out of the FBI office in Tampa also. Super polite. Listen, when I got resentenced.

And when you're talking to them, is this in the context of proffers and cooperation? Yes. Or was it, like, during an interrogation? No, no, this was, I've been caught. Okay, yeah. And so this is, they're debriefing you to get information from you. And you're cooperating with that to try to get a lesser sentence.

Right. Like, Candace was like making cracks and comments and being rude. And it's just like, like, what's your, and I mean, literally when, you know, when my lawyer literally said on like two occasions during, she said, she's a, she's a, there's no reason to be mean spirited about this. Like, what is your, like, I'm not stealing from old people. Like, I've got, you know, it's bank fraud. Especially at that point, it's game over. You know, we're trying to get information. Right.

Yeah, you're trying. Yeah, you're in your best interest, you know, you're going to get more with, you know, sugar than. Yeah, of course. So, yeah, and it's funny because Jerry, who, you know, Jerry Williams, yeah, which we spoke about on her show, she wanted to bring, she wants to, wanted to interview me and bring Candace on because she's interviewed Candace. Sure. And so Jerry was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to talk to Candace and get you both on. I was like, Candice won't do it. And she goes, she said, oh, no, no, I've interviewed her.

We're very close. She's great. She'll do it, she'll do it. And I said, I said, you can ask. She's, will you do it? I said, of course. Yeah. I said, I'll do it.

I have no problem. I said, listen, let Candice know if she wants to be, you know, mean-spirited and, you know, a jerk to me. Like, I got that comment. I got no problem. Make for good radio. I have to be polite to me. Like, I know it would be, it goes against her nature. And I only say that because the other agents that every time they mention Candice, or they'd say,

who's your original agent or whatever? And I would go, oh, Candice. or they would say, oh, wasn't Candace, you know, your original agent? I go, yeah, they go, what did you think of her? Like, they like laugh about it. And they're like, I'm like, she was tough. They go, oh, she's a tough nut, bro. She's tough.

That's interesting. She has like this reputation. But Jerry goes and talked to her, came back and said, yeah, she won't do it. Interesting. And it was like, well, it's like I, I wasn't, it's not like I did anything that was so underhanded or. Yeah, you know, I don't, but. Farming children or something like that. Yeah, I don't, I don't get it.

But that's fine. But other than that. Yeah, everybody was, you know, professional, you know. Well, people ask me all the time. Are you worried about someone you put in jail coming back to, like, kill you and your family? I'm like, no, because I never lied to them or about them, and I always treated them with respect. Right. And so, you know, they know what they did.

They know that I never, ever lied to them or about them or testified falsely or did anything, you know, I've never treated people poorly. In fact, that was sort of my whole thing with the interrogations is that you treat people well. you try to understand where they're coming from, try to understand how they rationalize their behavior in their own minds, and therefore they get comfortable telling you the truth. And so that's sort of been the whole theme of me for 30 years. So I don't know if I'm ever going to run into one of my subjects at an airport,

but I don't think that they would have a bad taste in their mouth about the way I treated them. No, I can't imagine. To me, I can't imagine being upset with anybody that was involved in, you know, even Candace, I saw Candace, I would be, if she walked up and said, hey, hi, Mr. Cox, because I'm sure she wouldn't say Matt. But if she said hi, I'd be like, hey, what's going on? How are you? How's it going? I heard you're doing this. Like, I know what she's doing now. And, you know,

be perfectly polite. But the way I look at that is like this, you know, I own a bunch of rental properties. I think people, whenever they're like interested in investing in rental properties, they're like, my fear, you know, my fear is that what if somebody trashes the place? And it's like, wait a minute, listen. Like, if I evict someone and they destroy the place, here's the thing about people in general. Yeah. Like, they may just be a messy person.

I get that. They left some stuff behind. They're messy. But the truth is, even when they're belliger or upset that you're evicting them, you know, they'll try and maybe come up with a reason why they shouldn't have to pay or whatever. In the end, you knew you were supposed to pay $1,000 a month. You paid for three months. You haven't paid.

I started the process. I followed the rules. you didn't pay. You know, you can be upset and you can be angry and you can give you a chance and you should let me this and you said, I can't do that. I have to make a mortgage payment. I rely on rent to do that. My, you know, I have to follow these rules. This is how I can get you out as quick as possible. I'm sorry. You'd be polite and nice, but in the end, they're not going to, and let's face it, anybody could destroy your place. You'd give me a hammer. You'd give me a $10 hammer and I'll do $5,000 worth of damage to your place in about three minutes. Yeah, sure. So they don't do it. They just

never do it. And because deep down, they know, I owe them the money. Right. You know, and that's, that's the same thing. You're a criminal. Like, like, if you, if you were someone who was, you know, you set somebody up for murder and I planted evidence and everything, of course. That guy might get out. But even those people don't get out, do anything. They're just so happy to be out. Well, that's the other thing, too, is right, they're just compounding their problems. And when I was an agent, if someone wanted to kill me, they would just get the case reassigned it to some reassign. When I was an agent, they're going to stop anything. Yeah, they're going to get someone smarter and better looking on the case. They were fungible. Right. I was

Yeah, and more diligent now because of the last case agent, something happened to that guy. We'd definitely get in this guy now. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I wouldn't worry about that. Although it's funny, I, there was a, so in Coleman, now just tell you this quick story. Is it in Coleman, they have a drug program, well, Coleman, in the federal prison, they have a drug program called, it's Ardap, right? Residential, you know, whatever, addiction, you know, whatever.

So they put all the inmates in one unit, like 150 guys, and then they go through like a nine-month intensive drug program. Right. Well, the people that run the program are, they're called DTSs, drug treatment specialists. So what's funny is one time one of the drug treatment specialists was at home, right? Like he lives, you know, he lives somewhere in Ocala or something, not far from the prison. And one day he's driving. And again, guy drives by him and waves at him and recognizes right he realizes he's like i think i recognize that guy the guy turned around and is following him beeps the horn flashes his light the guy drives home

and then he stops he just kind of follows him because he's flat the guy didn't pull over the guy follow him he pulls into his to his house soon as he pulls in the guy gets out of his car and the dTS gets you know they both get out of their car the dTS i want to say pulls a gull's on him and tells him to freeze and get on the ground. And then just then police pull up. Yeah. Because he called on his cell phone. So

it was a former inmate who had seen him. And when they grabbed the inmate, he's got his fiance and his mother in the car. He just wanted to say thank you. He just wanted to say thank you. You changed my life. I want to let you know I'm doing great. And he was so excited

to see him. He's like, this was my DTS. This guy really helped me. And that, but the you know, he was concerned. Like, he was like, oh, my gosh, what, you know, what's going to happen? What's this guy going to do? Like, what about, I don't know. I always wondered to me, because to me, I think I would have pulled over and been like, hey, because I don't, because I don't treat people so badly that I think they're going to harm me.

Right. So I wonder, I just, I don't know, maybe, maybe they're told to be weird. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I'm sure you only need to hear one or two nightmare stories, right, before your head's on a swivel and your hands on your hip and your gun holster, you know, and so I get it. I, you know, I, in Hawaii, it was a more insular community. And so, you know, I'd have investigations upon people whose kids went to school with my kids and stuff like that. And so that was never fun. Um, so what are you going to do? We, we talked about earlier, you're, you've got the, um, uh, you've got the agency going. Mm-hmm. You got social media going. A social media

empire. Yeah. And you, you have to, you have to, you have to start. You have to start doing, you have to start doing, because we talk about this earlier, you know, you got to start doing, you do something like what, what, what, um, Jerry's doing. Jerry could give you her whole list of guys to call and you could interview them. Right, but the question is, what do I want to do for living? And this is where I'm going to have to do some soul searching, right? Do I want to be Tom, the storytelling former agent, or do I want to be an active private investigator working cases for clients? And, uh, and so the idea of taking up any more of my time, not working cases for clients, but like working on like a beautiful YouTube show on a set like this, there's just an opportunity cost to that. And I still need to make a living. And so I'm not so convinced. So right now, the social media thing is a side hustle. They're infomercials telling, to explain to people that I'm a credible investigator. And if you need a credible investigator who's not going to rip you off in this slimy industry I'm in, you could call me. Right. And I'll be able to help you solve your problems and answer these questions in your life that you want to answer. And I like that.

But flipping the script and making the investigation sort of a side dish and the media thing, my main hustle is just not where I am at this point. If Discovery Channel or True TV or someone wants to come and offer me like a big money show, I'm happy to have that conversation with them. But the DIY version that you're doing while I respect it, I don't think it's for me. I'd much rather be a guest on great shows like this than actually have to spend a ton of time like interviewing people and editing it and building a set and doing all that because then I'm just not investigating and I'm an investigator right well I was going to say um on a side note just to think

about it because we had this conversation uh is that you know you don't have to have a set like this like Jerry does all audio but um you could always do like we use I do stream yards right and you know you'd say ah those you know they're not they're not really you know that engaging like and you're right they get less views but the cost is nothing it's a couple hundred bucks you know to me it's the time. But you could do one, you do one hour to two hour podcast and put it up once and see what happens with, because the combination of those two, see what happens with your YouTube. I mean, obviously, you're going to do it. I'm just saying, I'll never say never to the idea. And and, uh, and, but right now I'm still kind of jazzed on investigating and helping clients. That's still

what kind of gets me up in the morning. And, uh, and so the fact that I may have a public profile on Instagram and TikTok is wonderful. I like it. It's gratifying. It feeds my ego. But it's a mean to an end for me and the end for me is being able to work cases for clients all right so you're not going to get any competition for me you're going to corner the market on white color crime true crime podcast i'm a big believer and there's plenty of pie for everybody you know you're a benevolent fellow yeah there's some people that like if you've got if you're getting a piece of the pie where you're taking out of my potential pie no the pie's huge no i got it the rising tie lifts all boats exactly exactly i'm going to say i've one my one more question which is you know which is who killed

Epstein. No. But, you know, have you ever heard? Come on, you know the whole conspiracy. Yeah, yeah. And I think you above all people know how difficult it would be to get inside a maximum security bureau prison. But you're not going to be able to convince the conspiracy theories either way, so it's not a good use of our oxygen. I know. I watched these videos. And I've watched the videos where I've been like, and listen, like there's so many things that went wrong, but I'm thinking, and I did this on Danny's podcast. Danny was asking me this. And I was like, he was like, Oh, it's pretty coincidence that the camera stopped working.

I'm like, half those cameras don't work. Right, exactly. Like, and this guy fell asleep. They sleep all the time. I know. So people don't, people who are unfamiliar with the Bureau of Prisons connect all these dots, but anyone who's been inside the Bureau of Prisons knows the gauntlet you have to run through to get in there for any reason.

Right. And so is it believable that a guy fell asleep and the camera wasn't working? That's no problem. Is it believable that two guards or corrections officers are going to set up? sacrifice their sweet, sweet pension by allowing something illegal to happen under their watch while they turn their heads the other way, don't buy it for a second. These guys live for their pensions. Right. So I don't know anything about the case. I intentionally don't follow it because I feel the people who are obsessed with Epstein are the most irritating people on planet Earth. Well, they're not going to be convinced. Yeah. And you're not going to win them over. And they're hearing voices and their fillings and they love the conspiracies. And I have zero patience for them. But you know and I know the truth about how difficult it is to get inside a Bureau of Prisons facility. and the fact that the guard's not going to do anything that crazy. To me, it's the same thing as the flat earthers. You can't convince them.

Right. They're insane. Exactly. So arguing with logic is irrelevant. That's why I don't argue politics. I'm, you know, I'm 54 years old. I'm not going to live forever. I want to spend my time talking about other stuff.

Okay. If any of your viewers wanted to follow me to see my 90-second stories every day, it's at Simon Investigations. My last name is Simon. Simon Investigations, probably TikTok or Instagram. are going to be the best ways to do that. Hey, so I appreciate you guys watching the interview. If you liked it, do me a favor and subscribe to the channel.

Hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this. Also, please consider joining my Patreon. And we're going to leave all of Simon's links to Instagram and TikTok and his YouTube channel in the description box. So you can just click on it and shoot you right over there. I really appreciate you guys watching. Thank you very much. See you.

It's really amazing how, you know, shoddy this whole thing is. And then it looks great on. Whoa!