Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - FBI AGENT Reveals Bizarre Stories Behind Airplane Freakouts | Tom Simon

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

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Oh hungry, oh Henry! That mother back there is not real. The FBI has jurisdiction for crimes aboard aircraft. So I want to tell you a story that you're not going to necessarily believe at first. And when I told this story on television, I was criticized more than I've ever been in my career. Are you rolling? Hello, Matt Cox. You've got to start with the...

Okay, yes. Hey, Tom. Matt Cox. Did you know that it is... illegal to jerk off on a commercial airline flight. Damn. No, I did not know that.

Okay, so I'm here to ask... I didn't know it was illegal to jerk off anywhere. I'm here to ask you to stop. The flight attendants have asked me to ask you to stop. No, the crime, it's actually a crime. It's a federal crime. It's an FBI crime. It's called lewd behavior on an aircraft.

So what if you're in the bathroom? Well, then I think no one would know, right? And so kind of, I believe there's probably a don't ask, don't tell policy with regard to the bathroom when the urge strikes you. So I want to tell you a couple stories about guys who disobeyed that law. Quite a career. It's a public service announcement for your viewers. Your viewers reach out for me every now and then.

I think they need to know this. So recent American Airlines flight, from Chicago O'Hare to Scranton, Pennsylvania. I had a fellow on it, a 24-year-old guy from Jackson, Mississippi. How appropriate. named James Torres Smith. To this day, we do not know what set him off. We do not know what his inspiration was. But seemingly, out of nowhere,

he took it out and began pleasuring himself in front of all of the passengers around him. Nobody ever asked? Was there an interrogation? Well, he was arrested by the FBI when they landed in Scranton and in charge with lewd behavior on an aircraft. What penalty do you think a guy like that should get for a crime like that?

I mean, I think probably, I think two years probation and he has to have some, he has to see a psychiatrist for six months. Right. It's reasonable. That's weird. I mean, it's pretty disturbing. But anyway, yeah. Yeah, I mean, for you and I, it'd be annoying.

But imagine, like, the child. Yeah, I was going to say, it depends on who's around. The nun. Like I said, next to him going. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Let's just say the seat and the tray table weren't the only things in an upright position, Matt.

That's so horrible. All right. The maximum penalty for lewd behavior on an aircraft. How much? 90 days in prison. Really? Yeah.

Seems low, doesn't it? That's funny. I was going to say, I have a flight coming up. Yeah, three hots and a cot for 90 days. 90 days. Yeah. But again, we don't know what set him off.

And the reason why the FBI cares about this is because the FBI is forced to care about this because the FBI has jurisdiction for crimes aboard aircrafts, period. There's no one else. Because it doesn't fall neatly into any one state. Right. And so it ends up being an FBI problem.

So if I was like the supervisor and this came across my desk, I would be like, who do I not like? Well, yeah. Imagine having to fingerprint the guy. There's a lot of hands-on behavior there. But we don't know what set him off. We have no idea.

But we have a much better idea what's set off 39-year-old Krishna Kunapali. He was an Indian national flying on a half-empty flight from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, a little kind of near Dubai, to Boston. And he sees this attractive woman from behind, seated up in the next section. And she had the most beautiful, luscious hair, and his mind starts rolling, right? There's a seat empty next to her. So he plops down next door. We'll call her Layla. Okay.

He plops down next to her because I think he regards himself as a bit of a pickup artist. And he tells her how beautiful she is. And he begins stroking her hair on the plane and telling her that he's very, very wealthy and that he would pay her $5,000 to sleep with him at his hotel room when they arrive in Boston. Okay. Okay. Layla turns him down. No.

Not into it. Not into it, Matt Cox. She's having none of it. All right. So she's so not into it and so awkward that she goes to the galley in search of a crew member that she can tell to get this creep away from me. He's right on her heels to the galley. There's a service going on. So there's no one in the galley. And again, he corners her and begins stroking her hair, continuing to do this. And she's a little freaked out. And he takes out his cell phone and starts taking pictures of her because he wants to memorialize how beautiful this woman is. Wow. She's losing it. Flight attendant walks in. What does the flight attendant think? That's what? Instagram posts? No, that she's interrupting a couple having an intimate moment in the galley.

She says, hey, listen, you guys can't do that here. Go take a seat. Layla goes back to her seat. He actually goes back to his seat, like a section behind her. And then Layla goes and tells the flight attendant, hey, listen, this is what occurred. I don't know this guy. He did this. And the flight attendant, you know, gives her an appropriate amount of comfort.

Meanwhile, our boy, Krishna, is back in his seat and there's people sitting around him. You know, this is an international flight. So you got the section on the right. You got the section on the left. You got like five seats in the middle. There's a lot of, you know, still half empty flight, but there's people there. Right. Another passenger, a dude looks over and Krishna is taking care of himself, is pleasuring himself there in his seat.

And he's got the photos. The guy's looking right at Krishna. Krishna keeps at it. And then Krishna looks over, makes eye contact with the dude. And then pulls the blanket up over him, but continues doing his thing to himself, right? And so the guy notifies the flight attendant. He's like, it has no context. All he does is see this guy pleasuring himself.

The tells the flight attendant what's going on. The flight attendant, because it's a half-empty flight, clears everyone else out from that section and reassigned them to different seats. And so Krishna can have some alone time. And they land in Boston. they call ahead, some very, very lucky FBI agents get to escort Krishna off the plane. And under interrogation, he confesses to pleasuring himself on the plane. And he's charged with that lewd behavior on an aircraft. Was it the hair?

It was just, in general, he was just, she was beautiful. She must have been radiant. Yeah, yeah. She must have been radiant. Like, he couldn't resist himself. What would you sentence him to? I mean, it's the same thing. You said, the max is 90 days, but I think you have to take into consideration how good looking does this

chick, right? Like, that's got to be like a downward departure, right? He got no time. No time. Pled guilty to lewd behavior on an aircraft, got no time, two years probation, and I like this part, a $5,000 fine. Nice. The amount of money that he was offering Layla to spend the night in the hotel with him.

First of all, he can't have that much money. He's flying, you know, commercial. So he can't be that rich. He's got five grand to spend. Yeah, he says he does. Yeah. Exactly. He was also ordered to have no contact with Leila and to delete the pictures of her that he put on his phone. The thing that people don't keep in mind, though, is that you're also banned from flying on that airline. That airline does not want you back. American Airlines, I don't know if it was them, tells you you cannot come back and fly with us if you are engaged in behavior like that, which kind of boxes you out of some of your travel options. Oh, I feel like all those guys end up on spirit anyway. You get what you pay for.

But things get more serious if you do different other things. Let's talk about 25-year-old Oregon resident, Neil McCarthy. This is a party guy. He liked to party. This guy would like going to a rager. So he books a flight on American Airlines from Portland, Oregon to Manchester, New Hampshire for 4th of July weekend last year. So he could have a rager with his bros.

He wants to party. But you can't get a direct flight from a, you know, Oregon to New Hampshire, so you got to stop in Chicago, right? So he goes to Chicago, and he hits the bar at the airport, and he's just down in, Jack and Coke and Coke and Jack and Coke after another. It was nothing short of a miracle that he got on the plane at all. So he's sitting there. The thing about Jack and Cokes is if you drink enough of them, what happens?

I don't drink. I don't drink either. I don't drink either. Colby, what happens? What happens if you drink a lot of Jack and Coke? You black out? I don't know. I'm sitting there.

Are you serious? None of us? I mean, I have. I know. Three cool guys. We'll cut this part. This is Patreon. Yeah, yeah.

Man, these look like such fun guys. He got to pee, Matt. That's what he had to do. He had to pee really bad. But he's so inebriated. That long walk, either up to the front or back to the plane, just seem like so much. So Neil gets up in front of everybody, pulls it out, and starts urinating on the carpet. One of those peas that is.

like, just releasing, like, so much pressure. The PSI was insane in his P-I-S. And so he's pissing on the plane. He's using the bathroom right on the floor. People are pulling out their phones and taking pictures of him and filming him do this. It's available on the internet.

You could watch it tonight if you wanted to. You know, speaking, if we should play it. Patreon content. And it starts stinking, right? Because it's gross, right? And here's the difference. They need to divert the plane because it was so bad

and just so disrupt. to Buffalo, New York, where it landed. And if you divert an airplane, then the penalties get higher than if the plane's allowed to land. And it's like you're inconveniencing everybody. You're costing the airlines, money, et cetera. So Neil is taken off the plane by airport police and handed off to the FBI, because again, crimes on a commercial aircraft or FBI jurisdiction.

And Neil confesses in a recorded interview. How much time to give Neil? You be the judge, Matt Cox. I mean, they rerouted and... airplane. I still feel like that's super serer routing and having to reroute an airplane is super serious. Right. I mean, I feel like that's like, you know, probably punishable by a year or two in prison, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's going to get that. I don't know. What does he get? Three months? You're good at this. You're good at this. Six months. Okay. For indecent

exposure on an airplane, which somehow is a different crime than lewd behavior on an airplane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's not. And he's not. not allowed to fly American Airlines again, at least until he's house broken. So bad. It's the dad jokes. I reject your dad's joke. I was an FBI agent for 26 years. Seven of those years, I was in the FBI Honolulu office.

And Hawaii had a unique place in the FBI because even though we were a small office for the FBI in a relatively crime-free state, we led the nation in crimes aboard aircraft. And that's because Hawaii is really far from anywhere else. It's probably like the longest commercial flight you're going to take for most people. Is it like six hours from? It depends where you're coming from, right? California. California like four or five.

But yeah, so it's a long flight. And so what happens is this. The common denominator is this. People who are going on long flights, oftentimes they're drinking alcohol beforehand. They're all going on vacation for the most part, right? And we're coming home. They drink alcohol, either on the plane or before or during a layover. and then they take Ambien.

You ever take an Ambien? No. You've never taken an Ambien to fall asleep? No. I'm kind of, I'm more of a square than you probably think. Oh, no, no, no, I didn't, I knew you weren't Pablo Escobar, but Ambien is a, it's a, I've taken Ambien. I'm 55 years old. I fall asleep right now.

I'll go upstairs right now and fall asleep. I understand. I'm your age as well. But sometimes I use Ambien when I travel internationally to kind of get regulated, you know, so you're sleeping at night and awake during the day. But Ambien is a very useful drug. It gives you kind of three or four hours of just a Michael Jackson coma. You wake up and you don't even know the time passed.

It's great. And when you wake up, you're not groggy. This is not sponsored content. It's going to say, it's sounded pretty good to me. Yeah. No, honestly, Ambien's a great drug. The problem is it could become not addictive like you're like Jonzing for it, but for a bunch of former secretaries of the state of the U.S., you know,

Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, you know, all of whom became addicted to Ambien when they were secretary as a state because they're constantly flying around negotiating this or that or meeting with foreign leaders. So then they need to be at the top of their game. And then they can't sleep in their normal day-to-day life without Ambien and they need to kind of wean themselves off of it. Yeah, that suck. The problem is, and they tell you this in the package, but no one reads the warnings, the

combination of Ambien and alcohol is really, really, not dangerous. It's really, it has a, what happens is you black out and you, and for a certain percentage of the population will black out. if they take Ambien and alcohol. And then they do crazy stuff and wake up having no recollection that they did it. And on aircrafts, again,

we saw this like two, three times a week at FBI Honolulu. People would, like, rush the cockpit, punch out flight attendants, like put fellow passengers in headlocks and just like run up and down the aisle screaming things. And then the plane would land in Honolulu,

we've got a call ahead. We would meet them. We'd take them off the plane in handcuffs, take them to a conference room at the airport, and then they would kind of like say, well, and they almost like wake up and say, what's going on? I'm in handcuffs. And you'd say, well, you have no recollection of what happened on that flight. And they're like, no. And I go, well, you rush the cockpit. You punched out a flight attendant. You, you know, put your seat made in a headlock. You ran up and down the aisles like a lunatic. Again and again, again,

this happens. And they're like, I'm sorry, sir. I'm director of, you know, I'm assistant director of human resources for Microsoft Corporation. I don't know what you're talking about. And I go, Did you take Ambien? He goes, yeah, I had a few Jack and Cokes and had an Ambien. And that's what happened, right? So what do you do with a guy like that, Matt? You're the justice guy. The justice guy.

And did we have to, did we reroute the flight? No, no. Flight landed in Honolulu as planned. You got a guy who scared the heck out of everyone in the plane, like trying to burst into the cockpit, acting like a lunatic, disobeying flight attendance orders, made it, like, I've talked to, you know, we always interview the other passengers also. And quite often they're thoroughly terrified at like a madman running around the plane like Conan the barbarian. What do you do?

I think the problem with my feeling for that is that there was, he had no idea this was going to happen. Do you see what I'm saying? Like I can't make somebody a felon or like I could see you could put him on probation if we could not make him a felon? Could you give him a misdemeanor and give him three months probation? Something silly and pay a fine. You know? Like I can't send this guy to prison. He's just an idiot.

Like he didn't know. Right. Right. Okay. No, I think they, and you're on the right track. So the dilemma we have is that, you know, all those things. The interests of, we don't want to have to have taxpayers pay to house the vice president of human resources who happen to take a pill and drink a vodka Coke, put him into house him in prison. But we also need to send a statement that this is not acceptable behavior. So what we would allow them to do is plead guilty to a misdemeanor of interfering with the flight crew. And, and then in court, in high, Alulu. And again, they've spent the night at the Metropolitan Correctional Center there, the federal detention center. And then their sentence is agreed upon as time served. Yeah. I was going to say, they've been thoroughly humiliated. And they've had a terrible vacation, right? They've ruined the vacation for their family members. What's interesting about

that, and always kind of bothered me ethically, but it's the only way to do it, is that in order to make a guilty plea, and as you know, you have to have some consciousness of guilt when you get up before the judge and you're saying, and you're admitting to a crime. Right. These guys all were being forced basically to lie to the judge about apologizing for this crime they committed because they had no idea they committed the crime.

Right. But I think, and I think the judge has understood that. The prosecutor sure did. The agent, gosh darn did. And the defense attorneys did. But everyone just kind of agreeing to like wink and nod and allow the guy to apologize for his awful behavior on the plane, blame it on the Ambien and alcohol,

and allow him to eat the misdemeanor with time served. It was so commonplace that they didn't even assign like any one agent or any squad of agents to deal with it. It was kind of like you were the duty agent for the day or the week to deal with the airport guys because inevitably there were two or three a week. Wow. And they all had the same insane story. There's got to be a ton of people that fly. I wonder if Hawaii is the most flown to state because, let's face it, you're not driving there. No.

Orlando, Vegas. Really? Yeah. Without question. But there's no other way to get to. Like, it's Orlando or something. You can drive there. You can drive there.

The rest of America can't. Right. If you're in North Carolina, South Carolina, people drive from New York. Fair enough. I promise you that Orlando is getting more visitors per week than Honolulu. Oh, okay. And Orlando Airport is also a hub.

And my point, though, is that you're right. The issue is the length of the flight makes people do things to make the time pass that they wouldn't otherwise do. If you're flying from New York, that's like an eight, nine-hour flight. It's kind of sad. You drive yourself insane. I had a case when I was there in, you know, I was peripherally involved with this one. A 21-year-old guy from American Samoa named Louvalu Sebuoy.

These names. Let's call him Lou. Yeah. Okay. He was a Mormon. Jesus Christ's a Latter-day Saints member coming back from his mission trip. You know, the young guys do the one-year mission trip in the Mormon church. This was in the Philippines.

And he's going back to American Samoa, which is part of the U.S. It's a U.S. territory next to Western Samoa. But in order to get there, you fly through Honolulu. So Honolulu serves as a hub there. His seatmate, 42-year-old woman. I imagine she was attractive. I didn't actually get to meet her or interview her. She's sitting next to him and making small talk next to this 21-year-old boy.

She's twice his age. And then she pulls out some NyQuil, pulls herself a shot in NyQuil, pours herself a shot of NyQuil, swallows it down, and then drifts off to sleep. If you sleep hot at night, you know how disruptive that can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of night or all of the above. That's where ghost bed can help. As the makers of the coolest beds in the world, ghost bed is your go-to for cooling mattresses, cooling pillows, and cooling bedding.

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recommendation. Even better, our listeners can get 50% off, site-war. for a limited time, just visit ghostbed.com slash cox and use the code cox at checkout. Again, that's ghostbed.com slash cox with the code cox at the checkout to save a whopping 50% off site wide. She wakes up 90 minutes later with Lou's hand up her shirt and under her bra feeling her breasts. Whoa. Yeah. Not cool. No.

not cool not cool and Lou what are you doing bro so she loses it contacts the flight attendant they move her elsewhere FBI comes in to take Lou off the plane

in handcuffs during the interrogation Lou confesses admits that he groped the woman aboard the flight he spent five days in custody kind of figuring out what the heck to do with him

and what do you do with him not cool Not cool. Not cool, Matt Cox. I don't know. I don't feel good about this guy. This guy's very close to registering, in my opinion. I feel the same way. This one, I'm thinking that he probably still gets six months. I'd say he gets, what, six months to a year, what, five years paper, something like that. Well, he was, what's the max, the max for groping might be five years? I probably, I would say he probably gets six months or you probably gets a year. He probably gets a year and he does, it gets two, three years paper.

Skin on skin, right? Wasn't even over the bra. I mean, I'm not, it's not funny. It's an awful experience with this woman. It's horrible. I'm not, I'm not, it's wrong. He got the five days that he spent in custody. No.

The judge then sentences him to two years probation and he must perform. 200 hours of community service and then cuts them loose to American Samoa. How did I get 26 years? He apologized at his sentencing. He apologized to the family and to the community, the community that he embarrassed. And yeah. And not a good look for the church either. No.

I mean, again, I mean, say what you will about the LDS faith. They're nice guys. This isn't their thing. It's not their jam. It's not like an epidemic of this among them. And yeah. So terrible. So I want to tell you a story that you're not going to necessarily believe at first.

And when I told this story on television in the newspaper, I was criticized more than I've ever been in my career. And so our story takes place in 2014. A 15-year-old boy living in San Jose, California, is fighting with his dad. They're just not getting along. But that happens when you have a teenage kid. Sometimes they clash with their parents. kid runs away from home

he lived in Santa Clara California on a Sunday what year was this 2014 where were you I feel like I might have because we talked about this already I feel like I might have seen this

on the news but go ahead this was huge news but you had a little bit of a sneak preview about what we're talking about so act surprised how could you've been here before man So, Santa Clara, California, gets in a fight with his dad, 15-year-old boy, runs away on a Sunday afternoon.

He gets to San Jose International Airport. And I probably shouldn't say this on YouTube, but it's out there in the universe. It's not the best security at San Jose Airport. He walks up to a chain link fence and climbs over a chain link fence, and now he's down on the, like, tarmac. 15-year-old kid. He looks at the closest plane, goes up to that plane, sitting there parked on the tarmac, climbs up into the wheel well, which has a little kind of compartment in the wheel well, curls himself up in a ball and sits there. Commercial airplane. A commercial airplane, 747 or whatever.

The plane takes off. The kid had no idea where this plane would be going. Did he realize that he was a stole? away. Oh, he's trying, he's trying to run away from home because he's decided he hates his father. Okay, because you just said he kind of fell asleep, right? Like lay there. No, I mean, he gets up into the plane and kind of crouches down to not be noticed. Curls up. He's aware of what he's doing. Okay. Yeah, no, he's trying to go elsewhere, but he doesn't care where, right? Home life is that bad for him in his perception. Yeah. Right.

What he doesn't know is that this is a Hawaiian Airlines flight destined for Maui. he won the stowaway lottery the plane takes off again think about this 50 degrees below zero at 30,000 feet for five and a half hours. The kid passes out. Yeah, I was going to say, plus it's unpressurized, right? Like, is there air? No, no, no, there's nothing. There's no, the air, it's not pressurized at all. He is, he should have died, like medically, biologically.

Right. But he survived. this thing. So the cold doesn't kill him. The cold doesn't kill him. Neither does a lack of oxygen. And nor does he fall out of the plane when the wheels come down, right? I know that's happened before. Yeah. I've heard that happen. Well, we'll get in some stats here. The plane lands in Maui and and sits there, you know, on the ground. They're unloading one flight, loading up the next flight. And in the ground crew sees him dangle like curious George from the bottom of the plane, hop down onto the tarmac and start walking around.

And they're like, oh my God, what happened? They go and get him, they call security. He's weak, right? He's not doing well. He falls to the ground and then regain some strength, stands up, and starts walk to the front of the aircraft. I watch the video of this. The cops are in the FBI are called.

The kid is interviewed, and his story's solid. Like he was exactly the runaway that he thought he was, you know, 15-year-old boy. So much could have gone wrong. for him, right? As we said, like the, this has happened before, and most of the relatively small number of people who tried this have just died, right? They succumb to the lack of oxygen, to the temperatures that dip to the 50 below zero, or they fall out, like we said, when the landing gear comes down. Did you say 50 below? 50 below. I thought it was 15 below. No, 5-0 below. Wow. 30,000 feet for five and a half hours. Yeah. So this comes out in the news. It was a

big news story at the time that this kid survived, you know, and I was doing the media coordination for the FBI, so I was the guy talking about this in the newspapers and all that. And then NBC has an FAA kind of flight analyst guy who says that I'm full of beans because there's no way someone could survive for this. And thank heavens the FAA came to my rescue and said that they had done a study on this because this happens every now and then where people try this. Right. And what happens is you're breathing, your heart rate, it's called deep hypoxia is the term. It's kind of a state similar to hibernation,

like what happens to a bear. Right. You kind of go into a coma. You're breathing, your heart rate, your brain activity continues, but at a much slower than normal rate. Again, this is for the lucky ones who survived this. Being younger helps one's chance of survival

if you crawl up into the wheel well and you have this experience. Surgeons are... Surgeons have done studies to try to recreate this kind of mental state for surgery purposes is kind of almost an anesthesia. The FAA came to my rescue and put out a press release saying that there were 95 attempted stowaways on 84 flights around the world between 1996 in 2012 using this method.

75% of those resulted in deaths, which means about 24, 23 people have survived, including my kid. That's not great odds. Not great at odds. You didn't have brain damage in the end or nothing? No, he was fine. It was weird. The last known person before him to survive was a guy named Fee's. Adele Maruhi, who in 2000 hitched a ride in a wheelwell from Tahiti to Los Angeles, which is a seven-hour flight.

And that also dropped to the same temperatures along them. Here's the problem I had. The media all wanted to interview the kid. And the media all wanted it. And there were also people saying, like, he should have been charged with a crime. First problem, we'll start with the second thing. Charging him with a crime, the federal system of criminal justice does not have a juvenile Right. Detention, like, you know, apparatus. There's just no crime to charge a 15-year-old boy

with. And also, should we be charging a 15-year-old runaway from, let's say, a hypothetically abusive household with a crime for running away and just being a really, really dumb kid doing something incredibly reckless and dangerous? I thought not. And I could see the only thing I could even think to charge him with because he didn't interfere with the flight or anything else. And that's the only thing I think of as trespassing because you jump the fence, like that's it like other than the as far as the plane's concerned he didn't affect anything right didn't harm anything here's the problem that here's the other problem i had and again people were calling for his head you know saying that he this whole thing was planned or that he somehow punched

his way through to like kind of like the baggage area none of which was true he this was exactly what it appeared to be yeah the problem that i had and i'm happy to say this today even though i did not disclose this 10 years ago is that the kid's name was mohammed right uh you know you Oh, so it would have been even worse for him. Imagine if that was out there in the media at the time when people are calling for his head or saying that he's a liar or saying it was an act of terrorism or something like that. We got a 15-year-old kid immigrant from Somalia named Muhammad who jumps a fence in, what, 2014, you know, and stows away on a plane.

And so, you know, but again, the kid was legit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you vetted the whole story. Yeah, yeah, right, right, exactly. You know, we spoke to his father and all that. And it was just an unfortunate situation. And, you know, but it didn't seem like it was worth my time as a public information officer. One, to out a runaway kid. And two, to throw gasoline on the fire of the story by the fact that he was Islamic.

Right. Can we stop for a second? Sure. I am going to raise this. Am I, do audio in that coming? You're too tall. I'm a human giant. No one has ever seen a man this large.

so all right yeah what are we doing all right um so let's shift gears and you gotta catch him doing this the before and after the the uh the action so got three two one all right so here's the thing so i've flown and got like a professional gig yet that's what it's the closest i have to a professional gig, is getting to drive three hours on my own dime to come to your apartment. Oh, that's right. And then turn around and drive back for three hours. That's right. Remember the first time we talked to you were like, do you compensate for a sudden?

I was like, no. Could you cover my hotel, bro? No. Just wake up early. Be here at 9 a.m., yeah, exactly. So, you know, as an FBI, the party of my job is to fly armed, right, when I was the an FBI agent. I'm no longer an FBI. And so, you know, I've flown probably a thousand times with a gun of my hip. Right. And there's a whole procedure in place that, you know, due to air safety, I'm not going to disclose in great detail. But the bottom line is that you don't go through the TSA, the normal TSA checkpoint. And then mention it.

Yeah, right. Oh, yeah. By the way. Yeah. It might be something in that bag. Well, it's on your hip. You can't even, you can't even put it in your bag. They don't love, you're not allowed. You have to, you must be carrying the gun on your person if you're flying. You can't, like, put it in your, like, carry on and stow it above your head and fall asleep. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so... Well, I know that people, like if you want to... This is what I had heard. That if you actually want to travel with your gun,

you can call beforehand or something and go and turn it in. And then there's a procedure for them to take it and they do something with it and then you get it back. Right. That's for normal people. You're going on like a hunting trap or you're like a target shooter and you want to your special gun for the competition in, you know, Minnesota or whatever. But for me, you know, I think the airlines would look at us as kind of an additional level of security. on the plane during that window of time.

So you can't drink alcohol on the plane or take Ambien and, and God. But you can doze off. You know, there's no rule against that unless you're flying Alaska Airlines, which is why I hate Alaska Airlines. So what happens, you get on the flight, especially in Hawaii, you know,

it's a long flight to anywhere, and you would sit down and maybe you'd fall asleep in your plane. You're sitting there like this, your eyes closed, and the flight attendant would come up to you and shake you, because the flight attendants know

who the armed people are. are on board, whether it's you or an air marshal or another police officer from another agency. Before the flight, you all get together and kind of like make eye contact with each other and meet each other. So if something should go to hell on the plane, you know who's allowed to have a gun and who's not. Right. So it's important that you know, and the flight crew knows also. And but Alaska Airlines had a rule that you must not, that if you're flying armed,

you must be awake at all times. And they would grab you and shake you awake if you happen to fall asleep. And so as a result, I stopped flying on Alaska Airlines, because I'm looking to get some Zs. I mean, if a terrorist takes over the plane, wake me up and I'll deal with the situation. When I'm asleep, and I'm armed, you may have a problem. Some of the agents, what they took to doing is wearing giant sunglasses on the plane, like inside, which looks corny, but then it's up to the flight attendant to figure out if you're actually asleep or not. And after the 9-11 attacks, I was occasionally getting upgraded to first class,

which the idea being to put the guy with the gun near the cockpit. So if anything should go sideways, I could be there to defend the plane. I'm here to confess today, Matt Cox, that they did not get their money's worth out of putting me in first class because I fell asleep. Bin Laden himself could have been spooning with me grabbing my gun and I would have been, I would not have noticed. There's other funny little rules like Southwest Airlines. You would think, you know, that whole pretense that the exit row is, you know, you want someone like big and burly and strong. who can, like, open the exit row. They wouldn't allow the agents flying armed

who have to pre-board on Southwest Airlines to sit in the exit rows because that's for their, like, premier passengers who, like, pay extra to kind of board in group one. Right. Okay. In my mind, I'm like, well, this is crazy. Like, I'm exactly who you want in the exit row. I mean, all I cared about was the leg room

because I'm a tall drink of water, Matt. But the airline wanted nothing of it, so they're hypocrites in my book. Now, I'm curious, you know, having flown that many times with a gun, I never, ever in my career, transported a prisoner as part of my job. You know, it just never came up for me. But I'm wondering when you were a prisoner, were you ever transported on a commercial airline flight? And I know you also flew as a fugitive probably more than once. And I'm just so curious how that worked.

I mean, I was never, I was transported, but not on a commercial. It was like con air. What was that like? It was horrible. I mean, at least, was it first class? It wasn't as... First class. I mean, they give you, like, peanuts and stuff?

Was it a hot flight attendants? What was it like? It wasn't like the... Was it like the movie? It wasn't as bad as the movie, because it's a normal commercial jet. Does the U.S. Marshals run that jet? Yeah, they run. Okay.

They own it. I'm sure they have a few of them. And so it's a normal, and it's a big one. It's not like it's a little one with two rows. It's got the big one with the three. rows right in the middle row and you know you pull up in your your van and you're locked up with eight other guys and and there's hundreds of inmates already there on the tarmac just staying in there waiting all of them in shackles and you got u.s marshals standing around the perimeter

of the plane where were you going from where to where i was going from memphis tennessee to Oklahoma City, because that's where there's a transfer or a, what I forget what they call it, whatever, it's a, something, they call it something. It's a, it's a facility where you actually, you, you, you land at the airport and the, that arm that comes and connects to the plane, like the, the raised, whatever, walkway, right? They call it. You actually, when you get on that, you actually go directly into the prison. You never leave that. Okay. I mean, that's like, that's pretty insane.

But, yeah, when you, when we got on, you get on and you sit down and the last- Was Oklahoma City serving as a hub for the U.S. Marshal Service to dispatch planes around the nation? They call it a transfer station or whatever they call it. I used to know the name of it. Like Atlanta is a hub for Delta. Oklahoma City is a hub for Conair. Yeah, exactly. Oh, interesting.

Exactly. So I got on it at, in Memphis, we get on. they load the whole plane up and then the last thing they do is like the first few rows are the women. They come on last because they're so few female prisoners.

And then so, you know, you just get there and you are you handcuffed while you're in the air? You're handcuffed, you're shackled, right? So you've got the shackles on your legs, the handcuffs, and you typically have, I'm pretty almost positive. We had the, do we have a chain? And I'm pretty sure, yeah, you have the rope chain.

So you have the rope chain. For the duration of the flight. I'm not that's serious I'm like a water landing If you guys need to like deploy stuff And guys will see like What if we crash in the water? And it's like

I don't give a fuck if we crash them on water You're not curious It makes such a big deal of that stuff When you're on a commercial airline I'm wondering if none of the same rules apply No none of those rules apply You're not you're no longer You're exempt from all those

Do they bother doing the pre-flight announcements About like the The cup falling with you put it on your The child next to you first trying to think of that. It's funny when you sit down and you've got the thing. So the heart, the worst thing is when they,

if it's long, and this is typically buses, I don't remember them doing this. Somebody told me they did this on Conair. I don't remember this happening, but it's possible. They give you a bag lunch. They give you a bag with like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

or ham sandwich or I'm sorry, baloney sandwich or something. And you have to try and eat it. So you're doing this trying to eat the food. I mean, it's pretty bad. Yeah. Anyway,

we all load up. Then they come on. And the marshals are in there with shotguns, you know, and they're yelling. On the flight itself. Yeah. And they're yelling. Then they get, you know, if somebody's like, hey, man, I go to the bathroom, set out. You'll go to the bathroom once we're in the air.

Like, they lie to you the whole time. The guys on the tarmac waiting, they tell you they'll, when you get on board, they'll give you a bathroom. Then they sit you down. Then they say, we'll give it to you when you get in the air. Yeah. Once you're in the air, you get to a certain point. Then they start doing it row by row. Well, I mean, guys are, it's are known.

Like the whole plane smells like pissed Because guys start pissing their pants Because you've been standing there for an hour on the tarmac And then you get up, you know And guys get up there And now it's been trying to hold it for three hours. Do they let you use the restroom on the plane? They do let you use the restroom on the plane?

But they're dismissing you row by row to use it And if you don't have to go at that point. Right. And who knows how long you were in the van. Right. Because you get on the van, that could be a 45 minute drive To an hour drive, whatever, two hour drive.

Then you get here, you're standing on the tarmac for an hour and a half. Right. Then you get in the plane and it's 30 minutes to get. get in the air to the point where it's try and hold it for three hours were there flight attendants or just marshals with guns just marshals with guns yelling at you no movie no movie no snack this is the funniest thing this is i mentioned this the other day uh because i actually had this conversation

the other day on a podcast where you don't realize those those commercial jets that they they can not straight up but they can they when when you take off from the airport right and it's nice and it's and it's okay, it's going, and it's slowly going. They don't have to do that. A lot of that's for the sake of the passengers to make them comfortable. They're not trying to make you comfortable. And this thing there, I mean, it is, it's like, it's like, it's, it's going almost straight up until it, and then it levels. So when it levels off, you're like, like, you guys are like, fuck.

Like, you know, what the, like they don't give a shit. And you're going, like, this is terrifying that this thing, because you keep thinking, like, I'm thinking like the wings on break off or something. And that's how dramatic. But that's when you also really realize, like, these things are put together. Like, you can't believe these planes. So anyway, yeah, they fly the whole time. Then when they come down, they hit hard. Yeah.

You know, they land hard. That's how to land, actually. It's for when they're teaching, you know, people how to fly, the best landing is kind of a hard landing and let the wheels kind of take the brunt of it. But they're doing it right. Right. But now, the smooth landing that everyone enjoys is done for the sake of the passengers. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Which I love.

I love it when you, when I barely. Yeah, it's a sweet, nice little landing. Just a little kick forward. Yeah, no, these guys are, bam. Yeah, but the airplane is built to be landed like a, like a thud. Yeah. Oh, and I, listen, every time I'm taking off or landing, in my mind, I'm telling myself, these things are built by amazing engineers.

They're super smart. They know exactly. They're built the last 50, 100 years. Like, I'm telling myself this to make sure I'm so that I don't freak out. I heard a turbulence stat that an airplane, like a 747, can be. built to so the wings will actually touch themselves if they were bent up above the plane and below the plane like those wings are that flexible they will i mean it'll never hopefully never happen but but that's why turbulence should not be a concern to you to you but it's also why you should have

your seatbelt fasten because sometimes turbulence will pop up and every now and then every couple years there's a story about people getting brained on the ceiling and like getting brain damage or dying just because they're just sitting there like you know watching a vin diesel movie i keep my seatbelt on all the time yeah yeah you should i'm not i'm not you know i i look like the uh the picture of of uh you know of of um mental health and and but i mean you know in calmness but inside i'm going i'm like oh my god there's nothing you know jess will look over it me i'm like it's fine it's fine we're a little bump it's not my chicks here you're going to be cool yeah i'm so yeah but anyway so yeah we come down bam we land the arm comes out it takes you away they take

the handcuffs off real quick and they literally I would say this like the BOP could or the marshal survive I don't know who's taking these things off modest but when you walk in to that through the hallway thing I forget what I should know what they call it but you get up there they have a they have a they have a it's actually like a wooden box yeah that's like three people high and you walk up there and the guys that work it are sitting on stools they literally like hit your keychain i mean it's like boom boom oh they're that good they're that good of a shot and then they get it's like bam bam bam and it gets yanked off you're like is it normal metal handcuffs like the kind of yeah but they're that fast and they do it so quickly and then you march

off and they put you in a room that's got diamond plating around it and they throw you a sandwich actually you know that's true that's not true they actually had a bin where you could get they had two different kinds of bags which i thought was nice it's like peanut butter jelly or hand or um bologna sandwiches something for the vegetarians yeah so it was nice but yeah that's it so i've done that now when you were fugitive and you're actually on the run you had to fly at some point yeah how do you manage that with all i mean was tsa in place at that time or was this pre-9-11 or after 9-11 no this is this is after 9-11 so how did you manage the flying i mean i feel like i get a proctology exam now as a private citizen every time i get on the plane with the

number of IDs and and and the facial's the facial recognition and all that did and was that ever an issue for you. I don't know about facial recognition. I had an ID that had my name on it. Like I, or I always had. I've had like 26, 27 of them from like seven different states where I went into the issued by the DMBs. By the DMB. And I've also got a passport issued by the state department. So if I'm, let's say I was flying to, you know, Italy. I mean, when I go through customs, you know, when I'm walking through or really coming back, but when you're going there or coming back, I've got a passport issued. So they see. scan it and they ask you, what are you doing?

God, this is not something you made in your bathtub. This is like a government issued thing. The ID supporting it was the nonsense. Correct. So if they were to run it, I would think that they would be okay because they're probably going to run it against that passport. And keep mind, this is back in 2006. I think it was probably tighter than it is now, although the facial recognition stuff

was less applicable. I'll tell you, the, here's the story, I think, that we're looking for is what? Did I tell you about coming back in the ninth date? No, share that with me. Okay, so what happened was when I first got on an air, when I first got out, for a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants.

Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. And I got on an airplane and I had to fly to, I wanted, well, first, you know where I flew? The first place I flew was Puerto Rico. Okay. Had to get permission, of course. I was going to meet with some investors who wanted me to basically be entertainment for them while we ate. Tell them a story for my story. It's been two or three hours under the guise of education.

But so they fly me in. And I remember thinking as I'm walking through the airport one, super cool, right? Like I was just in the halfway house, not long ago, prison, the whole thing. So that was like exciting. But like the whole time I was thinking like, are they going to let me on the plane? like like why wouldn't they well because when I was on the run there was like a red notice like arrest this guy immediately you were worried that you yeah no that's exactly like so you were worried that the Interpol red notice had not been cleared correct so and I'm flying yeah I mean the FBI

literally has to fill out of form to have that cleared right I'm sure I've forgotten well so so I had to fly to and two the other problem is I'm not flying to you know to Alabama I'm flying to Puerto Rico, which I understand still in the United States, but I didn't know if there was an actual layer of coverage, whatever. So I don't know. So when I go and through TSA and I, you know, give them the thing and they scan your driver's license and give it back and I'm waiting like, and I left extra early, like, what if there's an issue, make sure?

And boom, I go through and they put me on the plane. I was like, wow, super cool. And you're not handcuffed and there's, you know, new experience. So I fly there. I come back. Same thing. Coming back, maybe I'm wondering, okay. I come back and I'm like, oh, I'm good.

I'm good. This is done. It's a done deal. So that happens. And then, so then I start flying all in the United States because I'm doing these, these banking conventions, right? Speaking gigs. Thank you.

So I'm doing, you know, the whole keynote speakers, I'm going back and forth, different, you know, whatever, cyber conventions, banking conventions, whatever. They're flying me. So I feel like I'm good. Well, then when I'm, after maybe a year, about two years, I get approached by a company, a production company out of Amsterdam. They're doing a TV show called Inside the Mind of a Con Artist. And they've interviewed a bunch of different famous con artists.

And so they say, hey, we want to fly you out. You know, I argue with them on what they're going to pay. We negotiate, whatever. So I get a nice check, what I was thrilled with, by the way. So I go get on the plane. I fly in. I'm thrilled. I'm in Amsterdam.

It's during COVID, right? Yeah. Wanted to go to Anne Frank's house. apparently it's it was like a six like apparently if you want to go even when there's not COVID it's like a six month to a year waiting list so you can't you're not showing up and getting a ticket yeah and then you know in the end I heard like it's just a house yeah I mean it's not like they're bawling out of control back then so um and so you know and I went I kind of hung out and walked around a little bit but it just wasn't thrilling uh everything's closed but

it is super cool wasn't there some story about when you were a fugitive on the run and someone left a car at the airport or something like that i'm trying yeah yeah i've done i did that like one time when i was um well i've done it twice one when we were in georgia we left the well that we left the car in the police substation and then second one we did was when i was in nash charlotte north carolina we left it at long-term parking and we left We went to the bank and got, I forget what the currency is for like a Spain or something, like Lira or something. I forget what it was called. And we left a couple of Lira coins.

Like we got like a dollars worth and threw a couple in there. And we printed out like a brochure for like a hotel and then like wedged it under the seat, you know. So to throw anyone off the scent. Right. And like six or eight months later there was an article where they said, we, you know, we believe he's in Italy or we believe he's in Spain. or something like that. And I was like, oh, that was the such-and-such, I knew it. So I thought, oh, that's so cool.

But so what happens is I end up flying to Amsterdam, hung out there for a few days, flew back. And when I flew back, I flew into Atlanta International Airport. So I fly in, you know, I got a, I got another flight. I get there and I'm walking, you know, come in, you know, you come in and there's the line. There's eight people in front of you. And that first person, you know, you walk up and he checks it out. such and such, oh, okay, thank you, click, boom, welcome back again, and say, click, you know,

oh, what were you here for, whatever it was, you know, whatever they say, boom, boom, he gets to me, scans it, you know, oh, what were you here for? I was like, oh, you know, I think I said like vacation or something or I, or maybe I said, you know, business, I forget what I said, the answer was, and he went scanned it and he looked and he goes like this, looks at the screen, looks at me, takes the passport and puts it to the side. Ooh. And then he goes,

he starts doing the whole, he's scrolling on something, right? And I, and he's, because these other people went right through. And I'm sitting there. I must have been a white knuckle moment for you. And I'm sitting there like,

well, you know what I'm thinking. I'm like, I know I'm thinking. I'm like, I got a flight. Like in this state, they didn't give me a ton of time.

Yeah. And I hate Atlanta airport. And I'm not used to it. Right. You know, now I can go to Atlanta and I know the whole thing. I'm fine.

But then I'm like, I'm like, I'm nervous because I'm being told you've got to go to a completely different wing. You got whatever. It's very linear. Yeah. So he's sitting there and sitting there. And I sat there for while he's doing it. And he looks up.

He keeps glancing at me. And I go, how bad is it? And I go, how bad is it like that? And he goes, well, you're definitely going to have to talk to somebody like that. And I thought, holy shit. Like I'm kind of joking, right? Yeah. And I here's what's so funny is like, and I never saw him do anything.

Like it literally he had taken the passport, stuck it over here. Yeah. And then just started doing this. Like focusing on his screen. Right. I never saw anything. But while I'm talking, he's facing this way to the screen, there's a hallway. Like you have to think it's all of these different, all of these different stations. And I'm way down.

You had to walk by all these stations because his was the one that was open. Like maybe two or three of them are open. But there's like, there's like a dozen or there's more like two dozen and there's maybe four that are open. So we had to walk all past. So way down this hallway, way past the thing, I see a door open. And some guy's walking and walking. And you start to realize and he's walking and walking. walking and walking.

It's all the way up. And he's got, he walks up and he leans in and grabs my passport. Of course, you know, you're aware of where your passport is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as soon as he grabs it, you know, I immediately look, he grabs it. You know, he grabs it and he sticks it into this, a thick, clear envelope. Uh-oh. Right?

Boom. That's evidence that needs to be preserved. That's what I think of. I'm like, oh, that's not good. So he drops it in there and he goes, Mr. Cox. And I'm like, yeah. You know, I'm like, yeah. And he's like, follow me.

And I'm like, oh, okay. So then I follow him and, you know, I'm looking at the other guy. He's sitting there like looking at me like I'm like they didn't catch Hanover Lecter, bro. I promise you this is a mistake. You bring you like a secondary screening area? It brings me to another area. He's got a whole other little cubicle thing set up a couple doors down. Yeah.

Into another area where it's clearly like this is another whole section here. I even know this was in back here. If I go there, I sit down, he, he's got my thing and he sits there and he started looking. Now he's doing the scrolling, scrolling. and I'm like, what's going on? And he's like, give me a minute, looking, looking, looking. And finally he goes, okay, because what did you do? Is it like a Ponzi scheme or something?

What did you? And I looked at him and I went, I'm, I'm, I'm, it was bank fraud. It was just bank fraud and, I mean, you know, wire fraud and this is some bank fraud related charges. Yeah. He goes, um, okay. And I said, what's the issue? I said, I'm paid your debt to society. Yeah, I said, what is the issue?

I said, I should be fine. I said, I'm on probation, but I said, I got permission to, you know, to fly. And he looked at me and he goes, he said there and he goes, well, there's, there's an expired. And I don't know what he said. I don't know if he said red notice or whatever it was. He said, you know, but let's say, that's what I said. He said, there's an expired red notice on you. And I go, well, it's expired.

And he goes, still. You know, and the look on his face. Well, imagine what a boring job it is to finally come upon someone with your stature. Like, come on. It's, yeah, I get it. You know, and I was like, it's expired. And he's like, yeah, still. And he sat there.

He goes, okay, what, what happened? I said, look, I'm allowed to fly. And he goes, okay, he goes, do you have anything that says that? And he said, he goes, you're on federal. He knew I was on federal probation. He goes, you're on federal probation. And I go, yeah, but I got permission to fly. He goes, do you have anything that says that?

And I went, yeah, yes, I do. And I luckily, I had. I carry on, and I had it with me. And I said, oh, and I got something from the judge. He actually had to get the judge to give me something. So I had both of them. And he goes, okay, well, you should have started with this. I said, well, nobody told me anything.

Yeah, they freeze you out. Yeah, you didn't tell me what this was. I mean, I kind of knew. He's like, okay, and he looks at it and he flips around. And he's like, okay, he's like, what did you do? Like, what kind of? And I said, well, I gave him a quick, boom, boom, you know, this, you know, made some fake people, was borrowing money and did that as I went to prison.

You know, like, I just got out. I'm on probation. And he's like, okay, okay, what were you doing over? And so we're talking. And now he's just asking questions. And I was like, listen, is this going to be? I said, you understand, I have another flight. I said, I don't know if I'm going to miss my flight.

He goes, when is it? I told him, he's like, oh, wow, okay, yeah, hold on. Let's get you going. And then he, oh, he already had, while he was there, another guy, so they had like a tram behind him. Yeah. And so another guy, well, whatever, the tram came, and another guy picks up my bag from the tram and walks it over and so he's they've pulled my bag oh yeah they've got everything right there and you know he didn't have to go through the bag or do anything like that so he grabbed

the bag grabbed me walk me straight through security straight through everything there's a bunch of back doors and then and basically set me free he said okay good luck you got to go that way and that secondary screening is no joke it's it's nerve wracking but i keep mine i don't even have anything like i don't i got it something from and that's the only time i've ever had that problem by the way. Interesting. In Chicago, we had a, back in the day, I don't even know if it's still the case. People would, are Cuban cigars still like something you can't own in the U.S.?

It was a big deal back in the day. I mean, it was a big deal at one point. I think they said that Cuba was making more boxes. So people were shipping like the boxes over here or there was something with the boxes. Back in the 90s. You know, it was a really big deal to have Cuban cigars. I mean, or, you know, it was a fine, I guess, if you were caught with those in there. So what happened is at O'Hare Airport, when I was an agent in Chicago, people would go on vacation to, you know, Colombia or Venezuela or some vacation and buy Cuban cigars because it's perfectly legal down there to buy it.

And they would bring it back to Chicago with them. No big deal if you were caught with it, it would be like a $100 fine if you got caught in your bag search. But what often happened with these Chicago fat cats, exactly the type of people who would get Cuban cigars is that they would tell the customs guy, you're not allowed to have these, and I got a righteous citation. Many people would offer the customs person a bribe. Anything I can give you to make a go away? And the customs guys were ordered to look over their shoulder to the left, look over to their shoulder to the right and say, come with me.

And they take him to the room. And he goes, all right, what do you got? What were you saying? He goes, let me keep the cigars. Like, you know, I'll give you 50 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever. And he's like, all right, so you're telling me that if I give you this cigar, if I let you keep these cigars, you're going to give me 50, 100 bucks cash? And the people are like, yeah.

And the reason he brought them to the room is that was that was the room where they would be videoed and audioed. And then those people were arrested for offering a bribe to a federal agent at the airport. That's so horrible. It was just like an SOP thing. You could count on like every week or two, somebody being like being brought to the video room because they offered a bribe, you know, after their golf trip. But you were talking earlier about transferring air. Some poor guy. You're like a dentist or something.

Yeah, and there's always that guy, right? Some guy, he's a stock options trader on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and he wanted to have his cigars. But especially in Chicago, where everyone's bribing everyone there. It's just kind of the nature of the beast. And so, but I want to talk to a little about transferring from prison to prison because were you familiar with a program that the Bureau of Prisons had where for kind of low-risk, minimum security prisoners, they would actually cut them loose on furlough to take a greyhound bus

from prison to prison so they're not taking up a space on Conair. You ever heard of this? My wife was released from, you know, I should know she's talked about it enough times. Virginia or something. I forget where she was in some prison and they put her on, no, no, that's right. no no she was she was so she was whatever virginia anyway she they put her on a her and three or four other girls they put them on a greyhound and they went through i want to say they went through whatever they came all the way down here to Coleman to the low so you have to be at a camp custody you have to be out with it's called out custody yeah so they put them on they gave them vouchers and some money did they wear civilian clothing or were they in their like prison jumps no they're like in prison

jump i think they were in prison jumpsuits they're in like prison well Not jumpsuits. You have, you have, you either are in khakis. Top and bottom. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, they put them on the bus and they drove all the way down. They were allowed at one point they get off the bus. They get some food.

They get back on. It's like, you've got to be here. And yeah. Right. And they meet you at the bus when you arrive. Pick them up and bring them to prison. Yeah, I had a guy named Perry Griggs. I told his story on my first appearance here, I think, and maybe it was my second one.

And he was one of those guys, one of those camp guys, but he's also a very accomplished con artist, you know the type. and he was going from, like, El Paso to, I can't remember where. Some were really far, like a four-day trip on Greyhound Bus. And so they cut him loose. And he, you know, had his prison outfit on, and they dropped him off of the Greyhound Bus Station. They're like, all right, Perry, we'll be there four days ahead. Well, you'll be meeting you at the bus.

Don't do anything stupid. And Perry had done a very successful Ponzi scheme. I won't bore you with the details of that today and had a lot of money while he was in prison or his wife did. And so as soon as the BOP guys were out of sight, the wife came, picked him up, and they rented a private jet, like a Lear jet for this four-day period

to go like, they went to Vegas, partied it up, had sex on the plane, had like the time of their lives, like, you know, partying for the entire weekend. And then like 45 minutes before they were supposed to be at the Greyhound Bus Station, they brought Perry there to the Greyhound Bus Station to wait for the BOP guys to arrive.

And he got in there and went about his business. business. So he was... How did they, how do you get caught? How do you know this? I know this because he later became a fugitive. I arrested him for a Ponzi scheme he had committed while inside the prison. It's a whole other story. Yeah. And he was ripping off people from Hawaii. He and his wife were ripping off people while he was in prison. He told people he was this like billionaire bond trader or something like that. And, and so when, as we were piecing together kind of what happened and where he was spending the money, I was seeing, you know, he paid a Learjet. He basically chartered a jet for the weekend while he's in prison, and we pieced it together that that was

the window of time that he was allegedly on a Greyhound bus, and then, you know, the pilot and the, and everyone else, you know, told us exactly how it all went down. Yeah. Not bad. Yeah. Exactly. So speaking of airplanes, I wanted to shift gears and talk about the, um, briefly the 9-11 attacks and the creation of TSA and some of the stories surrounding that.

So 9-11 attacks happened 2001. I was in Chicago on a bank fraud. squad, I get moved over, and everyone just kind of drops everything when the planes start flying into buildings. And one of the jobs we had in Chicago, which is where United Airlines, is to figure out on night one, who were the terrorists, right? Because we knew planes were flying into buildings, and we have these flight manifests, you know, with, whatever, a couple hundred names on it. And it wasn't just like pick out the Muslims. You know, you had to take a look at every single person who was on that flight. It would be for me. Well, we approach these things with an open

mind. And, and, and, and, but, you know, but that's kind of how it ended up turning out is that, you know, Muhammad Atta, like, you know, what, where was he most recently? He was at a flight school and, and, you know, and this is a guy, you know, the CIA tells us that this guy was training at an al-Qaeda training camp. And, and, and so you're kind of putting to, put him that in this list. Yeah, right, you're, you're creating two piles of people. Like, you know, the, the dentist from Des Moines goes in this pile is, is a, a deceased victim, and then everyone else goes there. So that was kind of an interesting experience for me to kind of see how that sausage is made from inside the FBI when there's an act of terrorism and to figure out

who decided to do this, or in this case, many people. So the TSA gets in, people don't remember this, but the TSA was not up and running them. Before that, airport security was done by, where they were employees of the airport, making minimum wage. And they weren't always the most vigilant people there. It wasn't a government job to screen back then. It was just something that it was a job you would get at the airport. I work at O'Hare Airport. I screen luggage and I screen people. And it was really lackadaisical. Like you didn't have to be James, like sometimes they would catch the switchblade in your bag. Sometimes you could fly on with like, you know, 20 box cutters. And so, and no one was really paying too close of attention. And then they decide to make this government agency TSA. But there was this window of time before TSA was stood up because hiring government employees takes time. They're doing background checks on the people who were the TSA screeners and all that, that they had like the military there. They had. had guys in like camouflage with like M4 machine guns standing there at security. And that was kind of shocking. The whole thing was very shocking, right?

And so there was a window of time before TSA was stood up where they had a, right at the end of the jet bridge, before you would board the plane, they had a, what do you call it, like a shower curtain there. And they would grab random people and pull them behind the shower curtain for like a secondary screening before they got on the plane. It was supposed to be random. And so I'm flying armed quite a bit after this window of time because I'm bouncing around on a counterterrorism squad, you know, flying back and forth, the headquarters and other places.

And they, and there was a window of time, I feel like it was like a one month window of time where they were absolutely obsessed with the idea of you bringing tweezers and nail clippers on planes. Like they were, they would pull you behind the, you know, they would ask you like, you know, do you have any tweezers or nail clippers or anything like that? I guess they were worried that someone was going to do something with a tweezers. or a nail clipper. And so, and there was no reconciling for them

who the guy was with the gun and who they were pulling behind the curtain right before you step on the plane for a secondary screening. So I get pulled over for a secondary screening behind the curtain. And they go, do you have any tweezers or nail clippers? And I go, I don't need them.

I go, yeah, yes, I'm saying. I go, I'm an FBI agent. Here's my credentials. I'm carrying a weapon. I got a gun on my hip. And they take a look at my credentials and my paperwork and they're like, okay, but do you have any tweezers or nail clippers?

They were so focused on that one mission of finding the person with the tweezers and nail clippers that it didn't even matter that I had a gun on my hip. I said, listen, if I'm going to do something horrible to the passengers at this plane, I'm not going to be using my nail clippers and tweezers. So I want to segue and kind of even go back further. You ever heard the term social contagion? No. Nowadays we kind of call it going viral, but a sociology doesn't use those terms. And sociology, they have this term social contagion. It would be like panic buying.

This is an idea or a behavior that go, yeah, like exactly. Like it's, there's, there's a hurricane that has a 20% chance of striking like Miami. And then everyone in Jacksonville and Tampa are buying all the bread, milk, and toilet paper they can. And the reason they're doing it is not because they're watching the news, but because their neighbors are doing it, right? It's, it's, and that's the, I would argue that the BLM protests were kind of a social contagion. It was something that happened. People got to the streets and started protesting. and the fact that people were doing it with social media now as an amplifier got more people

out in the streets kind of protesting either because they truly felt this or because they're looking for trouble in the streets. Conspiracy theories are a great idea of social contagions. The 9-11 being an inside job or the faking of the moon landing, these things spread among people and these ideas go viral. And so the reason I'm talking about a social contagion is because I want to talk about a very specific one called skyjacking. What year were you born? 1969. I was born in 1970, so we're roughly the same age. High school class of 88?

Yeah. Yeah, same here. Because I failed. Right. I didn't want to bring that up, Matt, but it's in your permanent records. We can talk about it. So in the years, right around the time we were born, 1968 to 1972, the U.S. was suffering from an epidemic of skyjackings.

There were over 130 hijackings of commercial airline flights and U.S. airspace, during that window of time, sometimes it was one every week, sometimes multiple skyjackings happen on the same day. Do you have any recollection of this or even the aftermath of this kind of growing up? The only thing I remember is D.B. Cooper. Right. Well, D.B. Cooper is a perfect example of a skyjacking at the time where he takes over the airplane in the air, I think with a gun.

And he actually, no gun? Bomb. Well, threatened a bomb. Or did he have a bomb? Do we know? No, no. He opened up his suitcase and he had it. certainly looked like, it looked like a bunch of dynamite with a bunch of, you know, like

it, the woman, the, the, um, the, um, the, um, stewardess was like, it looked like a mom. Right. And it was Portland, Oregon, I believe. And I think they, uh, and so at some point, though, he gets a bunch of cash on the plane, where they transporting bank cash on it or something like that. And then parachutes out with the cash, never to be seen or heard from again. Am I remembering this correctly? I mean, you're doing about as good of a job as the, uh, as the, uh, as the, uh, the FBI did

to catch him. Right. Because it remains an open case and a mystery to this very day, who he was. And every now and then some news story percolates up, was this guy, D.B. Cooper, and it never really gets solved. Well, I mean, what he actually did was he got on the plane. It was half-empty flight. They get up there.

He asked the stewardess to come back. He hands her, he orders like a jack-and-coke or something. He hands her a note, and she said she was very pretty, and she was like, guys were always handing me notes. She didn't even look at it. She goes back. And I think after a little bit, she still, he sees her still, you know, getting people food and whatever, you know, whatever drinks. So I think he comes back and he says, you need to look at the note.

And she opens up the note and it says, you know, this is a hijacking. Yeah. And so, you know, tell the pilot, blah, blah, blah. So she tells the pilot, she comes back. He actually has cards written up. from that a pilot would have that tell you like where to go what what to set the dials at like it's he gives her gives her cards so that's what they think he had pilot experience even as a pilot she goes back these are things that they have they never reveal right away yeah so but since it's so old they've like said throwing everything out there she goes back shows the pilot and basically says you have to land so they first they call in he he wants two hundred thousand dollars i think it's like two hundred thousand dollars and they land. They unload everybody off the plane

except for like the pilot, co-pilot, and I think one or two of the stewardesses. And he does at that, before he even lands, like she kind of is like, come on, is this serious?

And he's like opens his briefcase and see he's like, it's serious. She said he reeked of smoke. I think he did smoke. Everybody did. Yeah, but on the plane,

yeah, he was smoking on the plane. And he showed her the thing. She said he kind of reeked of it. Very, very overly polite. she said yeah um anyway they land they let everybody else nobody even knows this has happened they just know they landed that a lot of people when they got off oh they actually thought they had got because he never stands up and makes them like grand gesture and when they land

people are getting off and people are some people who knew the airport they were supposed to land at are like hey we're not at such it's that other people think they're at their destination like as they get off and they're coming in and they're talking to them they're like what do you talk they're like, no, no, no, you've been, you've been, you know, rerouted. Yeah. Anyway, they take back off and he says, tells them to go to, like, Mexico City or something, right? Yeah. And they tell them, look, we can't go to Mexico City. We don't have that fuel. And he's like, fuck. So he then says, come back. She comes back. And then he's got another city that's basically on the same thing, track, right? Okay. So he's really just trying to get him to go that way. Right. Because he knows that he's going to jump out at a certain point, probably has a vehicle, something in that area. He knows he's got it all down. Same thing.

Oh, they also, he requested the $200,000. He requested three parachutes. They gave him three parachutes. One of the parachutes was a test parachute that didn't have a backup. A rip cord? Oh, a backup. Okay. So he ends up cutting away.

He gets the money. He wraps it in the parachutes. He cuts a bunch of cords from the other parachutes, ties it up because he doesn't want them knowing he's jumping. You really thought this through. Yeah. He gave enough parachutes for. Everybody to jump, right? So I think there must be four, three or four.

He ties it all up into a drop, like a drop thing, right? Yeah. So he's got it, the money tied up, and he's got it tied around his way. So he's got all the thread or the cords and everything. And then that particular plane was the only plane flying at the time where they had a rear staircase. And so while they're flying, he tells them, of course, to lower it, go to fly at this altitude, this way. You know, they're like, it's weird, but whatever, he's got a bomb. So they're doing it.

So then he pulls the pins as they're flying. The staircase goes down. He gubs out and he jumps. They know when he jumps because they, because when he jumps, the staircase, they can hear it. So one, they know when it opens because they get an indicator light. Beep, beep, beep, beep. When he jumps, they know it because bam, the staircase, stair thing when he's the way of him. It's like a diving board.

Right. When he jumps, it. It slams back up. So then the woman goes back and she says, okay, he's gone. He lands. They believe, you know, it was always said like, oh, he must have landed in the river. But what happened was he landed somewhere. I believe he made it.

I got washed enough programs on this. Yeah. So one, he lands and they take some of the money, not a lot. It's like $5,000 and he throws it on the shore. Now they say, oh, it must have washed up. really I think he threw it on the shore and because a little kid 12 years later or something or eight years later finds several little bundles and it's not much it's 3,500 bucks five grand whatever it's not a lot he did what you did at the airport left a false clue behind right

and he he leaves so here's the thing a few months later maybe six months later another airline is hijacked very similar that guy they tracked down. He looked very similar to Dan Cooper. They track him and another guy, I think it was another guy, down to a motel. They have a standoff and I believe he either shot himself or he came out and it was kind of like by cop and he gets killed. For some reason, the police or the FBI has discounted him for some reason, but some people say it's not the case. And that guy also was helicopter pilot. Yeah.

So it seems like a good suspect. Right. But for some reason they couldn't connect him or somebody that they didn't get like the stewardess said absolutely not him. That sort of thing where they said, no, can't be him. It was just because like you said, it was a rash. Yeah. Happening.

Well, it's a ton. I think it probably was him. Okay. Interesting. Because they never found him. They never, there's all these people, oh, it's this guy died and said this. It's such a romantic story, right? Because it's such a brazen thing.

Of course. A way to pull it up. Right. Me being a criminal. I want to believe he got away. but I can't imagine. It's kind of like the guys that escaped from the Alcatraz. Like those guys drowned.

You know, the idea that I want to say it was three guys. The idea that three career criminals escaped, went out and got jobs, lived the rest of their lives, and never got caught, never did anything else again to come in contact with the police. It's just not possible. To hell of a swim. Have you ever been Alcatraz? Yeah, I have. It's a hell of a swim.

First of all, you didn't make that swim. It's freezing cold. It's choppy water on the best day. There are sharks. You didn't make it. Even if you did. That's why they put it there. Right.

Even if you did, as any of those guys, you get caught within six months robbing a bank, doing something stupid. Like, none of these guys, they didn't all go get jobs in factories. The only thing they were career criminals, they were always going to be career criminals. They'd all been in and out of prison. They didn't get out and go clean or go straight. They didn't do it. But these modern day folktales are so interesting. It is.

It's great. I want to believe that that's what they did. I want to believe that the guy got a factory job. and now he'd be a manager. How can you get even more of everything you love about Porter with the new BMO VI Porter Mastercard? Enjoy more freedom, more flexibility, more rewards, more of all the things you love.

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and he got away with it. I want to believe that. Yeah, he got caught jerking off on an airplane years later. How embarrassing. Anyway, so we got 130 of these guys and as you pointed out from the D.B. Cooper story,

they were not 9-11-style militants at all, right? They fell into two categories. People who were, most of them wanted to be flown to Cuba. Really? Yeah. And so what was happening

is a lot of them were, again, this is 1968 to 1972 or 73. Castro had taken over by then? Yeah. Castro's Cuba. These were kind of like, a lot of them were like left wing hippies,

right? This is the Vietnam era, kind of the hippie era, Woodstock and all that. And they wanted to go live in the socialist paradise of Cuba and this is the way they were going to do it. Oh, I wish I wish they would have all made it.

Castro for this part, though, was like, bring it. And so what happened is, it would get an airplane. Right. That is where I'm going with this. Okay. And so they would fly,

it became so common, again, 130 times over four years. Just think of the magnitude of that. Multiple times a week sometimes. Sometimes there were a couple of day where it happened. And so the FBI and the police were just had, we're routines. What happened is fly us to Cuba. You know, I have a bomb. They didn't have a bomb.

They would pretend they'd fly to Cuba and Castro would grant them asylum, set them up in a little one-bedroom apartment there, thank them very much for their service to to Cuba. Castro would then have the plane. They would arrange for all these passengers who were brought along for the ride to get a free ride back to Miami or whatever. Then Castro would hold on to the plane, though, and he would sell it back to United Airlines, Pan Am or American Airlines or whatever for about $30,000 to $50,000. And it was a fantastic source of revenue for him. Other people These aren't making it. All of these are making it? Yeah. 130 made it? Some of them. Not all of them went to Cuba.

There were a lot of, there were a lot of ransom ones as well, like, like D.B. Cooper, but not as well planned out. And those are the people who had a much tougher time, right? Because they, or some of them would get the ransom and then go to, you know, and then go to Cuba. Some had other plans. Some were shot in the head. So, you know, so there was any number of things happening here. But I guess for me, what was interesting is the idea of the social contagion of this contagion. This was, happened a couple times.

the media reports breathlessly about it, these kind of crazy dramatic stories, you know, filming people like filing off the plane or on the tarmac and all that. And then other people get the idea and it spreads like a social contagion. It was cut off all at once and they stopped it in its tracks.

And do you know how they did that? I don't know. They started searching these guys getting on the plane. Exactly. Okay. Can you imagine they, You just walked on a plane before. It was like, we're going on a Greyhound bus.

They weren't x-raying your luggage. They weren't x-raying you. You weren't going through a metal detector. It was like a Greyhound bus. And then they put in, you know, basic, nothing compared to what we have today, but basic security procedures, x-raying the bags, you know, metal detector for the people. And the social contagion stopped because they hardened the targets, right? And so I look at another social contagion that we're still dealing with today, school shootings, right? You had Columbine, and then, like, you know, the next thousand of them were like Columbine copycats, where everyone's trying to up one another, and the kids get their names in the paper, and there's all these movements.

I just wonder, and you can talk about it or not, but what can we do to the schools to harden the targets using this airplane example as, you know, a social contagion that was a huge problem that stopped in its tracks by hardening the target? What can be done to the schools, or should we? Do you have thoughts or do you care? I'm So what So how I'm curious How did the

I think I'm the bag No no no I want to hear No I know You even care You're the guy You're the guy I respect

Who's opinion I want to hear You're my buddy Well what do you think Colby You're the smart guy How they stop On the airlines

They started They started x-raying Your bags And x-raying And metal detecting The people Yeah Making the target

It's already Before you can Just Before you can just Waltz on board With anything you wanted to

On the plane They don't of an ID and you basically write your name down like that's with a thing with d. cooper like they never saw an ID or anything they just you bought your ticket and that's it you wrote they you you know they wrote your name in a manifest and that was it um yeah i mean there's there's you know you know who knows kids are so fucked up i would yeah we're scanning them but i feel like sometimes i don't know how often it is but sometimes it's like not even like the one in tennessee or nashville it wasn't even it was like an ex student older

student that just walked straight into the, you know, facility. Right. I mean, I guess if you put officers in the, yeah, you don't really expect an answer. Put officers in that in there, right? That's all, what can you do? Like, just make it, you know. You can do metal detectors. Yeah, they do that already.

And there's still, you know, a lot of places like in New York and these big cities, they have metal detectors. Like, I don't know if it's stopping. It's an interesting thought experiment is what I'm saying, that we can draw from the experience of the airlines. A side effect to this whole thing is that's where they invented the Sky Marshall. which are now known as the air marshals that came from that era,

the idea of putting undercover officers to whose job were to do nothing but fly on an airplane from place to place in hopes of stopping a skyjacking. And then, you know, I think the sky marshals kind of fell by the wayside over time and became the air marshals and again, we kind of were resurrected as air marshals

after the 9-11 attacks. That job's got to suck. I knew an FBI agent who was an air marshal. And I go, well, is it kind of awesome. Like everyone's like, you know, you get to see the world. He goes, no, you wake up in the morning. You fly from, you know, you fly from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and then you go have lunch, and then you fly from Washington, D.C. to Chicago, and then you go back. And I go, I don't know, you're kind of like a celebrity with the flight attendants. They go, the flight attendants hate you

because you're not a revenue passenger. You have, they, you know, they're seated in pretty good seats, and that's a seat that they want to be able to sell and to keep the airlines afloat and all that, but now they're required by the law to have a certain number of dudes on board. And those dudes, the air marshals, my understanding, is that they're not there for the passenger jerking off or the guy who's, you know, mouthing off or throws a drink at the flight attendant because he had an ambion. They're there solely to stop the terrorist attack. Right. And there's a theory among the air marshals that when everybody was thinking about what's Al Qaeda going to do next for the next strike is that there would be some kind of incident on an airplane that would kind of reveal who

the air marshals were. And so the air marshals were really disciplined about kind of staying put and just protecting the cockpit. And so, you know, people are getting like fist fights on planes where the air marshals are like looking at Reader's Digest magazine. Yeah. I mean, again, somebody should do something about that. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, I think the, uh, the guy I knew who was a former air marshal who became an FBI agent was a big muscle man. And I go, it looks like you really kept in great shape. And he kind of had to because if you're sitting on your duff for eight hours a day, just flying back and forth between two cities. You've got nothing to do but sit and eat.

I would think that would be something like a job that you would take, like, hey, you have this duty, but it's like a year. Like you can't do that for five years. People would quit. It's a 20-year career for these guys. Are you serious? It's the pension. It's the government pensions.

20 years of just flying back and forth, but oh, fuck out, no. I didn't, I'm not doing it, but guys do it. Yeah, that's insane. And you don't get to keep your airline miles. That was another question. Do you get frequent flyer miles? He goes, no. So what's interesting about airline security in the procedures that they have, when I think about this, is that they always need to be chasing the last attack.

You know, they don't do a whole lot, in my opinion, as a frequent flyer, of looking at like what the next attack's going to be. They're not proactive. Right. Take like that Richard Reed guy, the guy, the shoe bomber. Remember him? A cockamamie scam, right? He packs a bunch of explosives in his Air Jordans or whatever, his Reeboks. And he, like, takes him off and he's trying to, like, light him with fire. And like a hairbrain plan, I don't know if it would have worked or not, or what the level of explosion, he was a French guy, or from France, I think it was Algerian or something like that.

They arrest him. And then now for 20 years, we're taking our shoes off to go have them screened before we get on an airplane. Yeah. Because of one joker. Yeah, they couldn't even pull it off. I think the explosives required like an energy charge or something. It was something like you can't even like the thing. You can't even, they can't even, you can't even ignite them with fire.

Like, it has to be, like, a battery, you know. I think back to December 21, 1988, I went to Clemson University. My best friend from high school went to Syracuse University. And so we got out of school a couple days earlier, and my buddy's like, hey, my, why don't you drive up from Clemson to Syracuse? I lived in Washington, D.C., pick me up, and then we'll go and we'll party. We'll get laid in Syracuse. It's going to be fantastic.

And I was like, well, I can't get laid in Clemsons. Maybe I'll have better look at Syracuse. And so I drive up to Syracuse with another friend, pick him up along the way. We get there. It's December 21, 1988. I think it was a Friday. And we're looking to go out and party. We're going to meet some girls.

It's going to be fantastic. And that was the day that Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, filled with Syracuse students who were coming back from their, like, semester abroad in Scotland. And do you remember that tragedy? I remember it very specifically because... I especially remember the photograph of the portion of the plane that was still slightly intact inside. It was crazy. I mean, so, I mean, selfishly, instead of going out and meeting girls, I had to attend, like,

candlelight vigils and stuff like that. The whole campus was traumatized because everybody knew somebody who was on that plane. But it's an interesting story about, like, how the bomb got on board. It was, it was got on board. There was someone checked a bag from Malta, the island of Malta. That's where the plane had been a couple stops earlier. when it was unaccompanied baggage you were able to back in those days with airline security and again this 1988 put a bag check a bag onto a plane to go on to a flight if you didn't have a

ticket that's nuts absolutely nuts and and there was a cassette recorder colby that's what they had before uh cdies and uh that was packed with explosives on board and uh in a semtex was the explosive and it was it was a had a what you call like a barium switch Basically, it had this really sophisticated switch that when it got up to a certain altitude, it then set off the timer, like, you know, an 18-hour timer. The plane went up and down and up and down with that bag on it, you know, on its way back to the U.S. And then when the timer went off, it was over Locker B, Scotland. Exploded the plane with the radio cassette player in there.

38 minutes after takeoff at 31,000 feet, it exploded 259 people all dead. It was absolutely terrible. And it killed 11 people who were just on the ground with the plane falling on their heads. Do you remember who did it? No. It was Libya. It was Omar Gaddafi of Libya. Actually, like, commissioned this, sent two intelligence agents to kind of build this device.

And in retaliation for President Reagan, who had, like, bombed his compound and killed his two kids. President Reagan, I think, yeah, from a few years earlier. I remember. And he happened to. be, he happened to be sleeping in a tent out in the backyard. It's like a crazy thing. Like, he was nuts. Omar Gaddafi was nuts.

Right. But again, back in those days, there was no screening whatsoever of, of, of, of suitcases. You know, suitcases were never searched or screened who were in the checked luggage. And I don't know if you remember for years later, and even to this day, the flight attendants were really focused on asking you, did you pack your own luggage? Yeah, yeah. And so it all came from that Lockerby, Scotland. That was it.

chasing the last incident as opposed to looking forward to the next one. Little epilogue, in 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for that attack and paid $2.7 billion in compensation to the victim's surviving family members. Wow. Yeah. What do you think happens to these people that go viral for just freaking out on the planes, like yelling, screaming? A lot of those are, I mean, I was going to say, I actually,

saw something that showed that these were people that were renting or they had half of a plane built in a studio. You remember we talked about the one where they have the where they have the they have the high price like a jet that's built but they actually have one that it looks like the inside of... Where you can kind of film a bit.

Right, right. And then so it's a whole thing that they do there and that's why they're trying to. But obviously there's some that are real. And to be clear, people are still behaving very poorly on airplanes. Yeah, I was going to see. Some are true. Yeah, the lighting is just not as good on the real ones. Yeah, but anyway, I've been in your show so many times, and I've kind of told all the stories of any interest from my own career that I just wanted to thank you for letting me come on to kind of tell stories thematically, because that's what I do every day on my social

media, right, as I tell stories. So I'm able to kind of go through and call out a bunch of airplane stories and tell the long-form version of that with you. So thanks so much for having me on. Yeah. Speaking of social media, TikTok with a recent almost TikTok ban, what do you think is going to happen and how does how how is that 12 hours for you offline it was bad okay it was bad because that's when i got the that's that's when he sent this text this panicked text listen i was

thinking maybe i should combine it no yeah no it was bad i mean listen that you know my ticot i have follow i have a hundred and something something thousand on ticot and a couple hundred thousand on instagram so you would be cutting my audience into a third right cutting a third off the top And I use TikTok and Instagram and LinkedIn and to a much lesser extent YouTube to market my private investigative practice. So while I have no real inside information or opinion about the threat that TikTok actually posed from China to the U.S., which just wasn't my area of expertise, as a interested party, I was panicking. Do you know what I did not expect, though, is that Capcut, which is how I edit my little videos that I post every morning, is owned by ByteDance who owns TikTok. So when they took down TikTok for that 12-hour period, all of my videos, which are now stored in the cloud for Cap-Cut for reposting purposes and whatnot, was also done.

I could not edit or access videos on Cap-cut. So I panicked, and then I realized there's such a thing as VPNs. And so I got a VPN on my phone, which created the illusion I was in Amsterdam so I could continue accessing my content and editing videos. Colby, as far as what's going to happen, I really have no idea. I mean, Trump, I think, did a real favor for himself with young people by. by kind of postponing the TikTok ban for 90 days, I can't imagine that this is a priority in his presidency with everything else he's got going on.

So I suspect that maybe the whole thing will just blow over. I'm certainly hoping so based on my own selfish reasons. Yeah, I was going to say, it's only 90 days. It's going to eventually lapse, right? Like, I mean, the whole goal is to get them to sell it to some other corporation, right? Like they sell this, like. My understanding because I was following the story pretty closely is that bite dance says that, listen,

And just selling the company doesn't mean much because it's so – our algorithms and all that are so intertwined with what we do here. And so we can't just, like, sell you the URL TikTok.com and have you kind of take off with it because everything are – the algorithm's the thing with TikTok. It's that if you're interested in tap dancing, you're going to see a lot of tap dancing videos. If you're interested in books, you're going to see a lot of book videos. And so they say that that's not something that can easily be recreated by just selling the company. And they're not willing to give their algorithms away, probably for – perhaps for nefarious reasons. So I don't know what's going to happen.

I mean, I think it's a fool's errand to predict what President Trump's going to do because he's an impulsive guy and he thinks differently than other politicians. What do you think? Do you have a theory? Let it stay. We need it. Oh, yeah, I need it too. Yeah.

You got a ton of followers on TikTok. I don't really have much of a theory other than that's, you know, that's what I'm pulling for to keep it. Yeah, we're trying to. Yeah, I was going to say there's other algorithms. You could, somebody could, I think somebody could come in and buy it, use their own out. They could say, we'll sell you everything but the algorithm. And I think that somebody, I mean, let's face it, Facebook, Instagram, what is it, X? Like, they all have an algorithm.

Like, you'll figure, you can figure out. Yeah, I mean, it feels like a natural for Elon Musk. I was going to say, but, you know, how much does this guy? Yeah, we need him to put us in Mars. We, you know, he should be. He should be looking for ISIS beheading videos on TikTok. He should be putting us on Mars. He's out there kicking in towards.

The government buildings right now. Like, I want to see all the checks are cutting. You know, he's doing shit right now. Do you think FBI agents now, I mean, I'm assuming they are, are all over social media looking, like, say, if you were in your position, same position you were 20 years ago. You're searching these people social media, search of their names, related people. It was a 20 years ago? I was an agent 20 years ago, but searching who? So let's say you're investigating a financial crime.

Yeah. And they're probably on their TikTok. Instagram. Oh, yeah, no. Let's, yeah, I'm happy to address that. Yeah, so absolutely, I mean, I was an agent five years ago, so we don't have to go back 20 years, Colby. But, you know, during the advent of social media, I mean, even going back to MySpace, I would

go to each of my subjects, MySpace, and begin, like, taking screenshots because they're practically confessing. A lot of these people, especially the fraud people, are living like kings. You know, they're, you know, I know you find this hard to believe that some people commit fraud, and then you spend that money on living a really extravagant lifestyle and cars and jewelry, and some people like to brag about that on social media. I met a guy like that. It's fantastic.

Yeah, it's great evidence that they're providing to the FBI. So I absolutely was. It wasn't like I'm monitoring like random people, but if I have the subject of an investigation, I'm absolutely doing a social media sweep of everything they've ever touched. I remember a kid that I was locked out with. I've actually talked about him before at Bunny Hop. He had Bunny Hop. Have you heard this?

No. He had the black guy had a, and I shouldn't say kid, he was probably 25, 76, whatever. but he had a tattoo of his name. Not the most fierce street name. No, and he actually got the name. I was like, how did you get the nickname Bunny Hop? He goes, when it was a little kid, he's like, I used to do the Bunny Hop, but I was really good at it.

I was like, yeah, not the tough. Yeah, it doesn't really strike fear into the heart of the bloods, yeah. His mom used to call him Bunny Hop. And he had robbed the bank, and he went home, and he took all the money and laid on his bed and did a bunch of selfies of him with all these. this money around him. Yeah.

But he did not take them out of the bank rappers. And the rappers had some number, had something on it that basically let them know that this was the bank. They was like the bank, whatever. They had a number or stamp or something that kind of let them know it was from the bank, not that the people watching it saw it, but people that knew him in his group also knew that a bank had been robbed. Yeah.

And now within hours, you've got these pictures on Facebook, and somebody called the FBI and said, listen, I think I, you guys might want to check this out. They checked it out. And then when they went to his house or down the street or his buddy that helped rob the bank, they went and they found the car that had been used. It was stolen. And one of them had left a prescription bottle in the vehicle that also had their name. Like, it was just like the breadcrumbs were right there. It's like the equivalent of writing your bank robbery note in the back of your electric bill. Exactly.

And so, yeah, he was in prison with me. But, yeah, social media. Yeah, did them in, yeah. I mean, thinking of street names, I arrested a gangster disciple once named Stinky. I've been using Mando's whole body deodorant. And let me tell you, you can use it anywhere. Pits, balls, thighs, and even your feet. Mando's powered by mandelic acid.

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deodorant stick, cream tube deodorant, two free products of your choice, and free shipping. As a special offer for listeners, new customers get $5 off a starter pack with our exclusive code. You'll get 40% off your starter pack if you use code Cox at shopmando.com. That's s-h-o-m-a-n-do.com. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Once again, that's shopmando.com and use the promo code. Cox. And it was his, like, street name.

No. It was not his Christian name. And I said, well, why on earth are you, you have the name stinky? He goes, when I was a baby, I had the stinkiest diapers. And my parents used to call me that and just kind of stuck. He was like a 24-year-old man. Like, you know, I'm going to go out of my way here and say, is there other? Yeah, he just couldn't shake that.

Yeah. Well, it doesn't help when these guys introduce themselves. Well, yeah, it kind of begs the question. What do you name? They call me stinky. Yeah. Okay, well. Mm-hmm.

Excuse me. It bothers me when I do something. I immediately look at Colby to see if he's going to mark it down and he doesn't. Yeah. That lets me know. That's going into highlight real day. Really? I get it.

I get it. yeah uh stinky i told you there was a guy in prison there was a guy named weewe and a guy named doodoo was the shit were they roommates oh doodoo was the shit and he's the guy and that's my dad joke but that's true and that was funny because the guy had told me because i had met this guy and when i first got locked up i'd wear a few months and i go bro did you know there's a guy here named weewe he goes there's a dude that works in the law library named dudu and i was like i was like yeah you see i know wee he said but i'll be honest but i'll be on honest with you is dude who's the shit and I was just like I'm in prison and he's all like the

worst prison dad joke was bunny hop in that in that prison fight that you broke up yes bunny hop was the guy I'm sure Thomas never heard that story because he doesn't listen oh that's right so bunny hop is playing you know if you're first of all chess is is a game as a game of dignity of kings of the aristocracy without question have you ever seen inmates play it no it is it's boiled all the way down to just street as scummy as you can think i mean they're like talking shit as they're playing chess and you know and they of course fast too they they're they're like oh yeah i got you bitch now what you're gonna do when they they slide the the chest piece flight forward they're like oh i'm in your fucking house i'm in your

house now what you're going to do now i mean it's just like oh my god it's horrible full contact God, horrible. So these two guys, one of them was Bunny Hop, and one of them's a guy named Flacco. Now, Flacco's in there, by the way, for murder. Like, he's, like, murdered people. He's a cartel member. He's a young kid. Yeah.

But he's, well, maybe he's just pushing that agenda, but he was there for, like, murder, right? Some, was it, was that why the, what the federal charge was, I don't know, but supposedly he's connected to several murders on his case, whatever. And he's there, he might have been there for drugs, but there was, there was, and this is all inmate gossip. Who fucking knows. But these guys are, yeah, got you. Are they talented chess players?

Have they kind of learned? These guys are amazing. They played forever. I mean, they were guys I knew who had been locked up 30 years, and all they had in their locker was chess books. Yeah, that makes sense. They could play four guys, ten guys, without even looking at the board. It rewires the mind.

They were amazing. They'll never get out of prison, but yeah, they could play some chess. So these guys are playing chess, and we're kind of sitting there. And, I mean, I'm right there at the table, watching them, just thinking of myself like, What have you gotten yourself into? Look at these guys. And they're mouthing off to each other.

And flaco gets upset with Bunny Hop. And he grabs a pen. And it wasn't even like his pen. It's like he's sitting there the guy's mouth. He's like, yeah, you know, watch it, man. You know, fuck that. I watch me shit, motherfucker. I ain't watching nothing.

You just, you're getting your shit, you know. And they're going back. You said, man, you better stop that shit. And they're going back and forth. And Flacco's Hispanic. Boneyhouse's a black guy. And literally, I think I'm almost positive. Somebody's filling out their commissary sheet.

And every Flacco looks over and he goes, you know, man, can I get that pen? And the guy goes, he goes, just for a second. He goes, yeah, and he hands it to him. He grabs it and he jumps up and stab. Oh, no. I mean, that, that, you know, a couple of times. And it doesn't do much.

It's just a pin. Yeah. But even if I took a pin and stabbed you, with it like it's it's gouging him it's cutting it's fucking them up then they get into a huge it's a fist fight and a whole fist fight i never forget because it's so weird because they they kept hitting the wall and they it's like they were rolling down the wall fighting and kept banging in the wall and slamming and hit me do corrections officers pile in there at that point to stop everything the the movies so the the correction officer he's sitting at his desk at the like

kind of like a podium kind of thing that's a little bit raised up, and he's maybe 50, 80 feet away, and he yells, you know, hey, cut that out you guys. And, you know, he's screaming, and I'm, I jump up. So these guys get in this huge fight and they're punching this and that. And then what happens is the Mexicans run over. Because it becomes a racial thing. And they start beating the crap out of bunny hop.

And I jump up and I run over and I go, hey, that's enough. Right? Yeah. And they stopped. Look at you. No. A black guy that's like six foot four had was in the shower, walked out of the shower, naked, suds dripping off him, holding his junk.

And he walks up behind me like he's about to get involved in it. So I scream. And you think you're having this fantastic impact. I think the great white savior. I actually for a moment, for a moment, I actually thought to myself like, wow, these guys really respect me. Because they stopped and turned around. They're looking at me.

And I really, so you got all the kind of the Mexicans like looking at me for just to say and everything stops. And I realized, then you kind of realize like the closest guy is kind of looking above me. And I turn around and it's this massive guy. And he's, I remember he's holding his junk. And he's standing there like this. And I remember thinking, nah, fuck. Like that's dripping. I was like, ah, too close to this guy.

I'm already like, he's like a foot behind me. It's way too close. So I turn around and walk off. by that point by that point the guards are now the doors are open

they're coming in they're like get in your rooms get yourselves everybody goes back goes in their cells and I remember it's funny

because bunny hop the whole time or after it kind of stopped before the guards were kind of swarming in that moment he starts yelling

at all the black guys is like damn because these guys beat the tar out of for only about 20 or 30 seconds but you get six Mexicans on you for 30 seconds

that's a fucking beating. And so he starts screaming like, damn, you're going to let them do that to me? You're going to let them do it. That's how it is. You're going to let it. It's like, bro, like, what do you think? All from a game of chess. All from a very

disrespectful chess. I mean, all these guys are very disrespectful. And yeah. So, did they have dominoes also? They did. stacking the table? I've seen that in action. Yeah. Yeah. That's horrible, too. The whole thing is horrible. But yeah, so no respect.

I didn't get the respect that I thought I was deserved. It was very disappointing. Well, look at you now. I remember the next day telling everybody, because these two guys are gone now. The next day, I'm telling everybody at our little table. I'm like, you know what was last night? You know, like, do you realize I remember when this sound? They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you remember me screaming? They were like, yeah, yeah. I said, and then they all stopped and turned around. I said, do you understand for a split second? I thought that they, like, I was like, wow, like they stopped because I yelled. They, like, respected me. And everybody, that's the reaction I got. Oh, Cox, you kill me.

It's humbling. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, the guy that left that we did a podcast with, he came in and sat down. So first of all, the wall. I told you before when I painted this wall, for like two, three months, maybe four months with Jess, I was constantly, you know, listen, I want to paint this wall red. And she's like, you're not painting the wall red. We're not painting the wall red. She's like, we don't, we don't own this place.

It's a rental. We have a, we have a deposit. I'm like, okay, for a whole, I have a deposit. You came in after the fact. Yeah, they contributed. Plus one to this dance. Right. And I'm like, and I'll paint it.

She's like, no, no, no. Painting's nothing for you. You can do that like that. It takes 10 minutes. Listen, I painted a wall black upstairs for Boziac guy that lives here, and he moved, and I've already painted it back. Like, I mean, he was gone, what, a month? I mean, he was gone, what, a month and just, it's already done.

So I don't have a problem, but, you know, it's constantly back and forth back. So finally, she was like, if you want to paint the wall, fine, you can paint the wall. So I painted the wall. We have gotten so many compliments on this wall. And the guy that came here just before you sat down and he said, listen, he's, I want to let you know. Your podcast is so professional. It looks. It's a beautiful set.

Thank you. I've always liked it. I've said it for the first time I came. I saw it. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to come here and do the show is because it looked fantastic. Right? Yeah. And, yeah.

Thank you. That's what we got in the black shirt controversy because I wanted to make sure I looked visual. Because you've taken all this time to build out this beautiful studio. I wanted to look, I wanted to be visually appealing to your audience. And I misrepresented. Oh, don't get me started. The exchange. Yeah.

Yeah. I misrepresented that. I apologize. You made me look like an idiot. Not true. But, okay. All right. That's enough.

All right. Can we plug me? Oh, yeah, yeah. What? Oh, yeah. the, the, 26, 26, wait, 26 years, FBI, retired. No, no, no, no, no. It's my social media. I mean, yeah, yeah, we'll do that.

All right, cool. But, but now you're, you're a licensed Florida. I always say licensed Florida private investigator. Yeah, I'm a private investigator in Florida, specializing in financial crimes and frauds. But I work in all 50 states because I'm also a forensic accountant. And so that's how I make a living now. I don't know the 50 states? Yeah, I mean, the Florida private investigator,

license has reciprocity in seven other states. But if I need to work in Texas, then I'm working as a consultant or a forensic account. Realistically, you're not going to hire me to follow around a cheating husband in Texas. That makes no economic sense. But you may hire me to confront the guy who ripped you off in a Ponzi scheme and try to get your money back for you. And so that's what I do. I won't leave that part in because you're going to explain it a lot better than links in the description. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's fine. I guess in, as I've said before on the show, do social media on TikTok and Instagram as a means by which to market my private investigative practice by telling kind of two-minute true crime stories every morning on Instagram and

TikTok. My moniker there is at Simon Investigation. So if any of your followers wanted to follow me, I think there's a good synergy between what we do. And you can, uh, and, and those links will be in the description box. Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate it. I love coming on your show. Click on it. Yeah, your stuff comes up all the time. And I hear from so many people. And I hear from so many people. my followers and potential clients who say, I heard you on the Mac, saw you in the Matt Cox Show. And that means the world to me

that you keep having me back. So thank you as a friend. No problem. I do have a question for you. Where did you come up with the catch phrase? Be cool. And be cool. Where did you come on with that?

Did I ask you this before? You never have. Never have. So I was in high school and I had an older, I worked at a comic book store. And there was an older guy who worked at the comic book store.

He used to say, be cool. And I thought he was like the coolest guy in the world. like, this guy was so cool. And I thought, all, well, I'm going to make that my thing. And so I was like 15, 16 years old. And I started saying, be cool to people instead of goodbye. And so when it became kind of my thing. Like, I mean, like, it's so much that I didn't even hear myself saying it. Like, you know, like, you'd see the priest on Christmas morning and he'd shake your hand and say, well, have a merry Christmas. I go, be cool, father. And I would just walk away.

Your mom ever go. Yeah. And so and so when it came time to begin making these social media, videos, you know, ending a two-minute crime story is kind of difficult. You want to have a definitive ending. And so I just sort of latched on to that, you know, have a great day and be cool as my tagline. But it's, you know, it's a goofy thing, but it's a goofy thing that I was doing since I was a kid. What did you come up with yours? Mine? Yeah. Just natural. I couldn't even tell you. It's funny. I didn't even think it was necessarily even the thing. Like the whole, you know, when I go see you. That's good.

I didn't even think that would, like, I don't know what, I don't even know how that came about. I just did it once and then I started doing it because it is. You got, how do you end it? And then I, the other day I was in first watch. And my wife and I were sitting there and this guy walked. I saw him, kept glancing at me. I noticed that people will do that sometimes. They glanced at me and glanced at me and glanced at me.

And as he was, you know, as he was walking by, he was looking at. at me. He goes, I love your stuff, bro. And I said, oh, thank you. And he goes, he goes, see you. Like that. And I was like, yeah. It's fun. Yeah. And I, and that's when I was like, oh, wow. I said, that's kind of a thing. And, you know, of course, my wife's like, do you want the waffles? I know. She's so over me. The wives are never impressed with it. Yeah. Yeah, I've been recognized a couple times. It's always really gratifying. Yeah, it's super. I think that's super cool. because I always thought to myself like what, you know,

sitting and laying in bed in prison thinking about trying to pay your bills and then to be sitting here and have people like recognize you and stuff like cool as thing ever. Absolutely. Coolest thing ever. And here's a little thing.

Everybody glamorizes kind of old school like TV shows. But what you're doing here, and to a lesser extent what I do on social media, we're reaching a larger audience than some deep cable show on investigation discovery. Yeah. And so the idea that you and I should be chasing that dream of going on investigation discovery would actually be a step down as far as the breadth of our audience.

The only reason to do would be for the money, honestly. But the idea that we as kind of Internet true crime guys should somehow be marginalized and be treated as something less than those folks on investigation discovery or any of those other kind of true crime things, we're pulling down. bigger numbers than they are on a daily basis without question. Yeah, I was going to say the, um, wow. Um, I just got a buzzing in my ears. That's weird. So I actually thought something happened with the mics. Are you tasting copper? Is there a shooting feeling up your own? No. Okay. Um, yeah. I can save you live on YouTube. This could really increase my

numbers. He's hoping. You're giving him the kiss of life. Um, So, oh, shoot. Yeah, I was going to, I was thinking, what was I thinking? I didn't even know what we were talking about. How, what we do, what we do reaches a bigger audience than what they do. I was in traditional media. Who was it? We had some guy on who was talking about going on a podcast and getting, you know,

getting 100,000 views is worth more than getting like, paying, you know, half a million dollars to get on, to get on TV and get, get 10 million views because the truth is you've got a, on that TV program, you have 30 seconds and most people click it off. But here, for doing a two-hour podcast, they get to know who you are. It's so much more beneficial to you. And, you know, and it's free. And that's why I started doing social media, right?

I mean, you and I both have the same commodity, 30 years of stories to tell. Right. And those stories are going to kind of tell the audience who we are much more so than, in my case, a Google ad or something like that that's going to pop up. and it wasn't until I started telling those stories on social media that my private investigative agency took off. Nice. What was the name of the TV show?

Real quick, we'll wrap it up. You can cut all this out if you want. Thanks, good. I was just thinking, what was the name of the one, Bruce Willis was in it? Moonlighting? Yes. Yes. Yeah, he was like a con artist, pretending to be a private investigator.

It was Sybil Shepard. Yes. That was his breakthrough role. It was a good show. Yeah, yeah. It was good. Yeah. It's wasted.

Yeah, I haven't seen it. You know what I watched, what I watched almost the entire, or I watched probably two seasons of it, Rockford Files. Solid, solid, solid show. Yeah. Yeah, we'd always have that answering machine at the beginning. Oh, it was great. It was great.

It's not a, you know, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a, it's a pretty bad show. But it's not bad, but it, I mean, but, you know, like the, the, the car chases and the, you know, it's, and the fight scenes. Yeah, we grew up back to back with Magnum PI. Simon and Simon, right? I still get old people asking me about being a private investigator named Simon. Ready? Do you know any other Tom Simons?

There is a guy working in the mail room at my accounting firm who is also Tom Simon. And I guess the other Tom Simon that had a significant part of my life would be Tom Simon, senior, my father. Okay. The reason I asked that is because the first time you came, there's this family friend of ours

and this guy has worked in D.C. like I never really knew what he did, but he works, like I assumed he always was like some type of CIA or something and his name is Tom Simon. And they live in Florida now. Interesting, yeah.

Do you know what he does now? I think he works out maybe the Air Force Base. I don't know. It's a pretty, I mean, it's Tom is, you know, every Tom Dick and Harry's name Tom

and Simon is not an atypical name. I remember one time some friends of mine were at the airport and they were in line talking about what an asshole Tom Simon was, speaking about me. And someone, and this couple turned around and they go, what are you talking about?

That guy was named Tom's. Wow. Yeah. It's funny. I've mentioned that I've known like probably four or five people named Mike Hayes. And then I actually had a guy named Matthew Cox. Oh, yeah? There's several people, obviously, Matt Cox, but there was actually a guy that my buddy Danny,

who was a bartender at the time, he'd actually managed like three. bars and he happened to be working in the bar one day. And this was when I was, was like, on the run or I'd just been a, no, I was on the run, but there were articles coming out constantly on me. And I'd been, whatever, like a year or two. And this guy gave him his, you know, he just asked for his ID, looked at it. He's like, Matt Cox. He said, huh, he goes, that's funny.

He said, I grew up with a kid named Matt Cox and Danny, we grew up together. And he goes, is he on the run right now? And he goes, yeah, he is on the run right now. He goes, yeah, ruined my fucking life. that's what he did and he goes like and he goes oh really he said yeah he said every time i go for a job interview uh i try and date some girl i and he's just started naming off all these horrible things yeah so when i got out i got i tried to get you know matt cox try to get matt dot cox you know at gmail but yeah i ended up going with contact dot matthew

dot cox and the problem is is he actually has the he has matthew dot cox to this day he's still getting your emails He forwards them to me. Oh, that's funny. So everyone's while he would, when I first got out, he would forward an email. Because what happens is people see contact dot Matthew. And they leave the contact out. Yeah.

So he would forward them to me. And I was like, so one day I get this from, you know, Matt Cox saying, hey, I think this is your, you know, I think this is, was meant for you. We have the same, you know, same email, except you have contact. So he said, by the way, here, sent it. And I was like, oh, wow, bro. I said, I'm going to assume that you've looked me up, and I've probably cost you some problems over the years. And he came back. He said, you have no idea how many problems you've cost me over the years. And I send him back and I said, listen, I would love to hear about it. If you feel, if you

would, if you want to talk to me about it, if you want to call me up, if you want to cuss me out, if you want to tell me I'm a scumbag. I said, I totally, because I don't know if it's the same guy. He said, I totally understand, and I am so, so sorry that, you know, that if I've caused you any problems, and he goes, he says, it's fine, bro, I'll keep forwarding your emails. And I've probably gotten 20 emails. It's really nice of them to do that. Very nice of them. Yeah. Well, for all I know, he, for all I know, he's not forwarding me.

What percentage are you actually getting? Right. At this point, I haven't heard from him in years. He's cashing your checks somewhere. By the way, there was another guy named Matthew Cox that was texting me. they contacted me on Instagram and said, yo, bro, we have the same name. And by the way,

he had been locked up. I want to say for steroids. He had a whole steroids. I did like five years for steroids. They had all this, you know, selling him and boom. I got a whole crime story.

And I was like, bro, you've got to come on the show. He's like, oh my God, I want to come on the show. We went back and forth back. We actually scheduled something. Then he came back.

He's like, I can't. Something happened. He couldn't. Like, bro, you've got to come on. He's like, I know,

I do. I will. I will. and then I haven't heard from them since. But I have a number. I should contact him. You should. It would be a fun split screen.

They won't know which one to use the giant muscle man. I think we're done now. We're done here. All right. Is that it? Thank you for coming. Hey, you guys. Hey, you guys.

I appreciate you watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button at the bell so get notified a video just like this. Also, please check in the description box. We're going to put all of Tom's links in the description box. You can go to his Instagram, TikTok. and his website. I'm assuming you have a website?

Yeah. And his website. And contact him if you need a private investigator. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. See you. Let me do this, Colby. See ya.

And be cool. And be cool. All right, real quick.