Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - How Biker Gangs Actually Work... | ATF AGENT GIVES AN INSIDE LOOK

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

How Biker Gangs Actually Work... | ATF AGENT GIVES AN INSIDE LOOK

On July 18th, get excited. This is big! For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurf my pants. That's a little too excited. Sorry. Smurfs. Only dinner's July 18th.

I didn't, wasn't thinking he's cartel. You know, he's like, I'm not thinking that. I'm nobody. He said, it wasn't until pounds just kept coming and coming and coming. And I kept thinking, I'm on the hook for this. Like, now I'm realizing this. this guy didn't give me 2,000 pounds on my word. He knows where I live.

He knows where my parents live. These guys are involved in stealing oil from the pipelines. They're involved in cargo shipping. They're involving extortion. They're involved in. I mean, these guys aren't everything, and they buy everybody. And they don't buy you. They kill you.

Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I'm here with Ignacio Esteban. And we are going to be talking about biker clubs and the biker wars. So what is the history of Bikers? I actually kind of know the history a little bit. Yeah, Florida's a big state. A lot of rich history there in Florida and I did some cases out there

and very interesting. It's currently, it was when I was there an outlaw state. You're out there in Paso County and Wesley Chapel. But before it was an open state before Taco Bowman, you know, who became the head of the outlaw.

So I'm going to give it a little history. People say, what's a one percenter? You know, maybe some of the audience don't know what a one-percenter is and the history of the biker world. And one-percenter was the term given by the AMA, the American Motorcycle Association, for those who are 99% of those who ride their bikes are law-abiding citizens. They're good people, right? It's at 1% because they're always some maileas and brawls and everything else.

And these outlaws pretty much took it to heart and put the patch on it. This is one-percenter. They like to be outsiders. They like to be outlaws. They like to be hellraisers. It's the 1% that make the 99% look bad. Exactly. Bad apples.

They love being a bad apple in a bunch. They really enjoy doing that. And the Big Five and the Big Six, if you don't know, which are, like, I say the major leagues, right? And then there's a lot of minor league clubs out there. Eventually, they recruit and they become the big leagues. You have the Hell's Angels, right? You have the outlaws. You have the Banditos.

You have the Vogels. You have the Mongols, right? And the pagans. Those are considered the Big Six because they really divide the country and regions. And they fight within themselves to take. take over. And why they're fighting for? It's all about local drug, drug areas, drug territories, where they can sell, make money. And, you know, the bikers really is an American phenomenon that started in this country after the Second

World War where you have War II veterans. We're looking in a way to express in, because, you know, you're in even combats against the Nazis or Japanese, right? You come back to the U.S. and you says, you can't just go back to a normal life when you did that for five, four years or what have you, right? You want to have some excitement. So it starts that way, And then it builds out and gets bigger and then the Vietnam War veterans and it trudges to something else with the 1% of groups.

They involve a lot of violence, a lot of drug trafficking, armed drug trafficking, extortion, murder, and other killings are within or against rivals. And I'll talk about some of that there. And I can talk about the hell's edge, but there in Florida,

you have the outlaws there. It wasn't outlaw state. They have the lower rocker. This is Florida, right? Because the lower rocker says, that's my area. So if a rival biker says they have their lower walker in the back and says that state, that's a problem. That's going to be a big fight that's going to go on there because you see that in California with the Hells Angels and the Mongols.

Both of them claim California for their state and that's where they're always fighting and they're going at each other and it's really nasty, nasty battles. And I'll talk about a little about that and the history there. So let me start with the most popular and probably the face of the Hells Angels, if not of the biker world, Sunny Barger, right? You know, a lot of people say, you know, what's Sondi Bar? He just passed away last summer, by the way. He was a big name that passed away. He had cancer. And so did Mambouchet, Mambuchet, who was the face of the health engine from Canada.

Both of those guys really have atrocious criminal history of these guys. And a lot of people, they have the facade also. You know, this is me in law enforcement, the ATF. We've done the big cases. They're deemed criminal enterprise by Department of Justice, right? Right. Because they tied to toys for tops. They try to do these other things.

make them look good, but in the back end, they're involved in major drug trafficking, they're involved firearms trafficking, they're involved murders in other things that leads him to that where they're at in that culture. So Sonny Barger's an interesting guy. He was born, a little background on him. He was born in the 30s in Modesto, California, from a broken home. His mother left him when he was like a few months old, right? His dad was an alcoholic. He had an older sister had issues in school. He dropped out like in 10th grade and he joined the army underage. He lied about his age. It wasn't 18. I think it was like 15 or 16 when he joined the army. He was there for a year and a half until they discovered he was underage and it was destroyed

from the military. He got involved. He loved bikes. He was like a mechanic. He worked on bikes. And then in the late 50s, he starts the Hells Angels, but the Oakland chapter, right? But there was already Hells Angels before in California that started the 40s by Auto. Friendly, who was himself a veteran from the Second World War. So there were some issues in California and so he tries to set up them bylaws because there are a lot of infighting

and say, who's going to run the Hell's Angels? Well, at the time, it ends up being the chapter out of headquarters out of San Bernardino. Auto Friendly gets arrested and he gets 10 years and Sonny Barger takes over and he moves a chapter, the headquarters to Oakland, never looks back. And then he becomes

the face of the Hells Angels and runs them for years and years and years. I don't know if your audience have seen, he pretty much became the face of the counterculture movement in the 60s and 70s. When you think of the counterculture movie, you think of Sunny Barger, you know, the Hells Angels. They were popular in movies. They became, they held up with celebrities. They were big at that time. They were really big.

There was a huge, if you haven't seen this video, I encourage everybody to take a look at it. In 1969, this was like the Woodstock of the time in Northern California, Monti Springs, California. you had the Walling Stones who were getting a lot of slack at the time for doing a lot of expensive concerts they decided to throw a free concert and all the big names

where their Jefferson Airplane was there the Grateful Dead was there everybody this was as big as Woodstock was but unfortunately their manager security had the Hells Angel do the security for the concert Right And if that wasn't they hurting people or fighting

You haven't seen this videos I mean you got to look at that This starts, this puts the Hells Angels. People see it firsthand. And Rolling Stone magazine dubbed it the concert. It said, let it be, let it bleed. Things get so out of control out there with the melee fighting. Allegedly, they said that their concert going.

People were getting, you know, LSD was popular. Everybody's smoking weed. The concert goers were all day out there, partying, partying, drinking. And a lot of the Hells Angel guys were getting paid with kegs of beer. So they had lots of kegs of beer in the back. their security team, right? They're drinking heavily. Kosagurers are drinking heavily and on whatever drugs they can.

You can see the pictures. You can tell these guys are on something. It's really bad. And they accuse the Kosagorers are pushing, breaking their bikes, right? And all of a sudden, fights being out, they're going at it. Even the singer for Jefferson Davis at Jefferson Airplane gets knocked out by one of the hells Aide. You look at the picture, he gets knocked out. Boom, he's knocked out there.

Allegedly, Keith Richardson, allegedly, said there, Sennie Barger puts a gun to his side that says you're going to keep on playing. So it's really getting out of control and there's one black guy, he's in a green suit. You can't miss it there. One of the Hells Angel guys take a knife to him because he's pushing back and he gets stabbed. You can see the video him being stabbed by the Hells Angel guy. So take a look at that and he gets charged with murder for that and that's really start to put in the reputation of the Hells Angels and that people see for what they really are. These bunch of thugs and goons at this concert. So you haven't seen that Alcamante Speedaway

Concert, take a look at that video. It's unbelievable. So that starts it out. Studi Barger, then, in the 70s, he gets tried for murder, right? In California. Allegedly, there's a drug courier that he shoots in cold blood that stole $80,000.

That's a lot of money back then. It's probably equivalent to a few million today, right? $80,000. He's a lot. Yeah. He's a drug courier that came from Texas. You don't justify murder, right? You don't kill somebody. You know, you have to try to work things out. Right.

So allegedly he shoots him while he's sleeping in the house. They find out where he's in. They shoot him in the head, cold blood. There's a witness that says, testified at trial. The Sunny Barger shot this guy in cold blood, you know, and kills him right there. And then they try to burn down the house. What saves him, in my opinion, this is my opinion, right?

What I've researched and everything else is that there's a Oakland Police Department sergeant that says that, well, Sunny Barger, on their, defense says that he's been working for us for years. Pretty much saying he's a cooperator. Right. I guess the Black Panthers and I guess the underground weather, leftist organizations, pretty much domestic terrorist organizations, giving us weapons and explosives, information where they're at,

what they're doing in exchange for a lesser time for guys that hell's angels have been arrested. Okay. So that was a big thing. So Sandy Barger cooperates for long for years. That comes out during the trial. They're a party cooperation. They're a party cooperation, maybe for himself. I don't know because for a year, people couldn't figure out why Sonny Barger hadn't been arrested.

He would become, he gets acquitted, by the way, for this murder trial. He was looking at the death penalty, California had the death penalty, then it would change. They would not, now it's back again. He gets acquitted, and he would be dubbed, in my opinion, he would become the Teflon Don for the Biker World. Because he escapes a death penalty case, which people thought was a slam dunk. Right. And I think that kind of helped them there. He later gets popped for some other things for drug charges later.

He does a little bit of time in California. And then the Fed's bringing in this massive racketeering case. Right. In the early 80s in San Francisco, spends millions of dollars. And he walks. And he walks on that. A lot of his guys walked on that one. So later it would change.

A racketeering case would get better and stronger, but this was a testing ground. And he walks on that one there. So what happens in the late 80s, one of his guys gets murdered by the outlaws in Louisville, who was the chapter president out of Anchorage. They were in a bar fight and the outlaws killed one of his guys. I think there's a video of the bar fight, isn't there? Is that the one there's like a massive biker fight? No, that's a different one.

These guys are revolved so many. It's unbelievable. But this one here, he gets murdered. And unfortunately, he doesn't realize that the sergeant of ours from Anchorage is working with the feds. Okay. And he comes down there because they're meeting

how to get back, how to plot, how to kill these guys, right? Out of Kentucky. So they get charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with explosives to kill these bikers, these outlaws who kill one of theirs. He gets them off four years.

So that's the most time he gets. You mean, some of the other guys, Taco Bowman, got two life senses, right? Should I'm not bouncing. Something's a little better when I have a little bit. Yeah. Taco Bowman gets two life senses, right, for his cases out of Tampa. Okay. And that's not far from here.

I need a prosecutor in that case. And one of the prosecutors, and they hammered him. Sending Barger dies a free man. A lot of these guys don't die free men. They die incarcerated for life. long, wide stints out there. So he gets hit with that. He comes out, he's changed a little bit.

He changes a lot, and he ends up getting involved with his show, Sons of Anarchy. He writes a lot of books. He's a show consultant. He's even in the show. His character is Lenny the Pimp, if you haven't seen an FX, ever see Sons of Anarchy? I've seen bits and pieces of it, but I don't remember Lenny the Pimp, but I haven't seen watching that. Very popular show, and he changes his persona. Obviously, he has cancer issues.

He suffered from that. He gets involved back into drinking. He did have a cocaine addiction back in the 60s and 70s, extremely bad addiction. He has to fight with a lot of issues he had. And then he gets involved in other things. And then he gets throat cancer. He can't speak anymore.

He has speak with a voice box. So he goes to a lot of issues. Eventually dies from cancer and that. And he's also involved a lot of domestic. His third wife accuses him a serious domestic abuse, and his stepdaughter says that she feared for her life every day. he was going to kill. So that's it.

That's the life, you know, Sunday Barger, I mean, they spread all over the U.S. and all the world, right? Hells Angels. Right. I was going to say they've got organizations all over the place and they're a major problem in some countries. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, especially in Europe.

They're enormous in Europe. The Biker Wars, the Nordic Biker Wars, I've talked about some of the Biker Wars. But if you want to talk about a massive melee, if you want to see the video, you talk about the one in the video, go to a lot from Nevada, right? and Harris Casino and look at 2002 I think that's the one I'm thinking of because there were so many there was video cameras

angles and everything yeah that that was intense and I kind of I know we talked about I think and I don't know your show or other shows about poor police response to mass shootings and attacks and good ones right I think this was a bad one because the police officers stayed outside

on this one and you have the patrons in there cowering fear for their lives while you have the Hells Angels, the model, they're just charging right each other like this. Boom, and it's on. It's on. A few guys get killed from both sides, stabbing and shootings and everything else.

And look at that. That's part of the rivalry between the Hells Angels and the Mongols. It's extremely, extremely intense there. So the book I have there on Sunny Barger, and I've written quite a few books. I've read one on Sunny Barger, full throttle, writing with the Hells Angels, a life of Sunny Barger.

I have one at Taco Bowman with the Outlaws. I have also one on Daakovasis, Mongol Nation, which I'm going to talk a little about him, about his life, and also have Biker Wars, and also have one on the one-percenters. And then I have one that all together that talks about all these two 1-percenter bikers. So, violin bikers. Do you know who Jim, or Big Jim Nolan is?

I've heard that name. Yeah. I think for a while he was headed up at the Outlaws in Florida. Yeah, his name was big there. And, of course, Taco Bowman was with a big face, big name, who kind of had more ambitious. I mean, and he's a different guy. I mean, Sunny Barger, you kind of maybe understand. He came from a broken home.

He had essentially, he dropped out of school. He got involved in this culture and the cocaine, the fame. He just grew, and he had ambitions, right? He had ambitions for the health angels. I mean, these guys make a lot of money with, obviously, he saw the drug traffic angle, 80,000 drug, he was doing pretty good for his time with the drugs, right? And he had other angles and stuff. And then he got involved with the cocaine and the drugs.

incarceration, the murder, and it becomes an eagle thing, right? And these guys get cut up. Doc Cobassels, Ruben Doc Cabossos, he was, he became the head of the Mongol. This one, I understand fully, more than Taco Bowman. Taco Bowman, he was a product of Catholic school education, right, up in Detroit. And he eventually, he gets involved with the outlaws, and then he becomes a brutal, brutal leader, ruthless and killer that he ends up being convicted out of Tampa. But like I said, and he gets two life sentences. He dies a few years ago, incarcerate.

That's how it ends from most of these guys. You know, the life of the culture like anything else, you've seen it. You might have seen some of these guys in where you were at. Yeah, I'm going to say big Jim Nolan was locked up for, I don't know what, he got 30 years or something. He was locked up in the medium with me. Right. He was huge. He was like, he was old, too.

He was probably in his 60s. I imagine, called Big Jim for a reason, right? Yeah, he was like six foot six. He was huge. He's a big guy. And I this guy also used to juice a lot. They juice up a lot because that's part of the reputation, right? Right.

This guy was just big. Naturally. It could be, oh, just tall, tall guy. Just tall, it's just big. Yeah, it was just a big, tall guy. He was just massive. Nicest guy. I talked to him a few times.

Nice guy. It was like, he was like, you know, he's been there. He'd beat multiple murder cases in the state of Florida. Eventually, the feds got him on like a right. It was racketeering. Was it a racketeering? Was it just a continuing criminal enterprise? I forget, but it was a huge case.

And sometimes just good old drug conspiracy cases will get you a lot of time too. Right. Yeah, they'll beat like murder charges and stuff and then get, and then they're like, oh, okay, well, I got convicted of drugs and they'll get 30 years for drugs. Yeah, no, no, no, you get hammered. Federally, you get hammered. And that's what these guys are involved in some of those heinous crimes. And it just continuously.

That's what ends for these guys. it's going to end up just like him, just like Taco Bowman. Sonny Barger was the exception. Sonny Barger was the exception. He was the exception that he only end up doing very little time. And he died at home. He died at home with his family, which a lot of these guys don't get that. I think he learned after doing four years that stint where he realized he was infiltrated.

We had it in a form from within. I think even though he cooperated years earlier, right, with the authorities. I think he realized that that's what he changed, I think. And it seems like he was more what I was reading. He took a back, you know, step and let other people run the day-day operations. And he was more a figurehead where he just go out there, do these movies or do these shows. He did a lot. He became very popular in Hollywood and doing all this stuff in book writing.

So maybe he learned his lesson. Right. So Doc Kvassel's interesting character, always I'm talking about the Mongols. I'm going to give a little history here about them and then go back to them was that that the Mongols and the pagans a scene, what I'm reading, have some sort of alliance

to try to take over Florida against the outlaws. And that's what had been talked about there because currently it's an outlaw state. They're doing that in other places where the outlaws are popular in the Midwest also. So there's a big push to push them out.

So, you know, who are, and they almost have taken I mean, the Mongols have taken a beating. So this guy, Ruben Daqabasa, this is an interesting story there, and this is about Mongol nation of fall of Daqabasis. The Rise and Fall of Da Cavas is in my book.

And he, he, he's a, he was raised East L.A. as a Surrengu. He grew up in a street gang. On a hardened street gang that has maximafitized Thursday. This kind of makes sense. Someone who comes in from this background, you can see them going and doing this, right? The other guys, it was kind of strange I was reading about, but that's her background. It happens. People change.

People may be going to Catholic school. They may be doing this and they become these, monsters. It happens. Unfortunately, it happens. Listen, Stalin was supposed to be a monk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the guys come out and they do the insane, you know, maybe Putin back in this day was a good guy, but my goodness, I don't see it now anymore. There were little angels, their family growing up, but they ended becoming these monsters, and it's interesting how that happens. So he's got a 13 guy. He ends up getting recruited by the models, right? He moves up the rack. He has a good personality.

Why do they call him Doc? He was a radiologist, so they call him Doc. That was his nickname. They gave him, Roman Doc Cavassas. But he didn't respect what he saw. He saw that they were a bunch of drunken old man. He grew up with Sorrengio. Remember, Sorangios are badasses. They're tied with Mexican Mafia. Sir 13. Thirteenth letter of the alphabet is M. Their allegiance

is with the Mexican Mafia, right? This is going to invite him later. So I'm just putting this out. there, and I wrote a book about this, about the history of the Mexican Mafia, the history of this guy here, and anything you see MS-13, Manas-Alatrucha, they have allegiance also with these guys. So any time you see a 13, you know they are allegiance to the Mexican Mafia. So I'm just putting that there because I'm going to come back to in a second, why is important in this, his story. If you bite the hand that feeds you, there's going to be problems right there.

Now he sees himself as a leader of this international organization. He moved up the food chain. He's the leader. He doesn't respect what he sees here. He sees a bunch of drunken old men. He wants more suit angels in there. So he starts bringing his guys in. All the guys he grew up with and everything else,

but these guys don't even own bikes, right? They don't even know how to ride a bike. They don't even know what a Harley is. This is a biker group, right? Right. This is a bike. This becomes comical almost. I'll tell you why.

And so his problem is he just brings in people fast and furious into the organization. Well, guess what happens? Operation Black Rain. ATF Operation Black Rain, that brings them down. Not only the ATF agent, not one agent infiltrate because of his lack of faculty, they do no background checks, but he was just bringing people in. Not one, not two agent, not three, not four, not five, not five, not six, not seven, eight agents infiltrated the organization during this operation. Okay. Okay. Well, true. How many, I mean, how large is the, uh, the, the, the biker gang?

It's, it's, it's a good size in Los Angeles. I mean, the Mongols? Yeah, they're international. Like, they're, they bring people in. I'm wondering, was it, is it, is it 5,000 strong? Is it 1,000 strong? I think the numbers of the book, we took 5 to 800. Okay. And eight of them are agents? Eight are agents. Okay. In the mother chapter, right? You're going to read about operations. and Black Rain, if you ever read about that one, through your investigation, it ends up leading to over 60-some indicted, over 100 search warrants,

right? In 2008, it ends up being, so they're having issues with Cabasso's already with an organization. They suspect different things. I think he's stealing from the organization. They boot him out before he's arrested. So they get rid of him, they ban him from their organization, and then, of course,

these guys are taken down. Normally, the head of the organization, it's the last to cooperate. he's the first on board right he knows better he's the first one on board right and no these guys get life he got 14 years listen being first is best first you get on he cooperate and everything like and he even supported their case excuse me he even supported their case to um to to uh to uh to to to uh to seize the patch where they couldn't even wear their own patch right that that's a big thing going on now to try to take the symbols from the spy corps

because to most people, it's something that they represent that brings fear to the public, terrorize them. People see Hells Angels walk into a room or outlaws or Mongols. They think criminals. Fear, right, right? Intimidation. Here we come. We're going to mess with you, right?

So the federal government is trying to seize it so you can't award us again. If you see it, they can take it from you immediate. The case where the judge it had didn't like it. He had a bad judge, in my opinion, who had it. This is back in 2012. 13, you can look this up, said that the government's picking and choosing what symbols they want to seize and don't want to seize.

And he didn't like that. So, even though the jury supported it, the judge at the end didn't sign a final approval forfeiture to do it. So the government then redid it again, and now it's in court again to try to seize the Mongol symbols. Symbols are their patches

that they wear in their jacket. Watch out for that. If they succeed this time, Hell's Angels are next, outlaws, they're going to keep on going and start taking their symbol so they can't wear their colors anymore that's a big deal that's going on right now okay yeah so so they just switch to another symbol well they can but they keep on going after that right if you're going to keep on doing stuff they're going to keep on after you that that's the thing so you know sure how they can do that i don't

you know i'm saying that doesn't really make sense but it's like freedom of expression it's but it's it would have been if they didn't involve these criminal activities right right and then I've all these shootings and these murders and they wear their colors while they're doing it. It's a here I come. It's not like the mafia who try to be covert or something, right? These guys aren't a covert. They're showing their colors all the time.

They're doing their things. Yeah, so it's kind of crazy. Very crazy what they're doing. So that's kind of the Mongols. I know you've had your talking there and you have the pagans and some of the interesting bike awards that come in. So, yeah, you saw that one there. I talked about Laughlin, Nevada.

That's a famous one right there. Twin Peaks, if you haven't seen the video of that one, that's, Twin Peaks is in Waco, Texas, right? Massive shootout, probably the worst biker shootout where it ends up, the police responds, and they, actually like an active shooting, and they end up killing, I have a number of my book, I think,

eight or ten, involved in the shooting between the banditos and the cussacks. The cussacks are a lower tier, biker group, right? But they were the lower rocker of Texas. and the lower rocker. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. On the back, so they're wearing, that's a big problem. Like I said, man, if you start worrying that, this is bi-state, right?

You can't be worrying the lower rocker. That doesn't sit well with these guys, right? So those are issues they're having with that. They're also having, and then they want to tax them. Then they want to tax these guys. On top of that, then they want to tax them. So that's a problem. So they're in a parking lot.

Wards are exchanged. they were supposed to have a meeting to try to work things out it doesn't work out of all so if you haven't seen that video I don't know if you've heard about or seen it that was a big thing out of Waco

that was probably was one of the biggest shootouts since what happened we talked about on the show with David Koresh and the Bradge Divideans back in 92 well back in I have the exact date of my book

I think 2016 2015 this is a big deal what's happened if you ever seen that video check that out so okay where are we now

what's happening now yeah no no so they keep on so going back to about Florida so where are the bikers now where are we thinking I don't see this is my opinion again based on my what I've done what I've seen my research is there nothing where they used to be right right the bikers now

where are the bikers now that they're about to collapse just like the Italian mafia the Italian mafia is nothing where they used to be And I wrote that my book, the fall of mafia, the rise of the cartels, right? That's the big one, the gangs, the cartels and the gangs are the strongest ever that I've ever seen in all, and just getting bigger and bigger and stronger because of the corruption in Mexico. And it's just feeding, you know, like I said, the mafia at his prime, the Gambino family, maybe with making $500 million in the 80s, these guys are making $15 billion a year.

That's per, that's per cartel group. So the Senate law is making 50, at least. some of the numbers think it even higher because they're involved not just in drug trafficking these guys are involved in stealing oil from the pipelines they're involved in cargo shipping they're involving extortion they're involved in I mean these guys aren't everything and they buy everybody and they don't buy you they kill you right we get all the guns from the United States right gold or lead yes I'm about that yeah so they like one of their in that one of the yeah yeah their ultimatum is look it's gold or lead the

carrot or the stick technique, right? Yeah. I'll give you the carrot or here comes the stick. Right. And it's not going to just be for you. It's going to be for your whole family. I'm going to do it in front of you, which they're payments for. Bring the whole family in front of you, execute them, and they don't kill them with a bullet.

You know, the mafia, you know, they just want to shoot you and be done with you and bury you, whatever. No, they're more sadistic. Yeah. These guys start dismembering, cutting you up, and doing really bad things to you. Did you see the movie, The Counselor? counselor oh tell me about it that's horrific it's a guy who's basically he's a he's a lawyer and he knows that his clients are you know cartel they're they're involved in you know drugs drug smuggling um you know and and but he sees the kind of money they're making and so at one

point he gets into a a drug deal where he puts up the money you know for the whole drug deal and it goes bad well you know the cartel they come after him like they they grab his girlfriend they torture her to death they i mean it's just everything that happens like they they kill one of the they kill i think a couple of the guys people that were involved like all these people that he's involved with yeah he first transaction goes decides hey i'm going to get involved i'm going to get myself a few million dollars and get out i've seen these guys do it off and on for years nobody'll really know that i'm involved first transaction goes bad. Next thing, you know, people are getting

whacked left and right, kidnapped, and they're torturing him to death. Like, they get his girlfriend and they and he knows what happens. Like, they track her down, they grab her and, you know, he's calling up begging, like, let me turn myself in, let me swap. And they're like, oh, it's it's too late. And then they send

him like a DVD, a video of what they did do her. Yeah. I mean, it's just horrific. Like, what does she do? She's dating a lawyer. That's all she knows. And they know that. They know she has nothing to do with it. nobody we're just going to grab this or you know if you don't have kids or i mean if they have kids they'll grab your kids or they do that's a well documented that's and these assassins are

horrible and they start at a young age these cicarios start at a young age like some of these serial killers psychopaths they're they're taught to be desensitized early and you kill that's what guzman when uh i think we said on one of the shows when uh chopper guzman was interviewed by Sean Pan and Kate, you got to see you in the mountains after you escaped the second time. He, you said he himself had killed over 2,000 people to climb up the food chain, right? As you get respect, that's not count all the ones he gave the orders to kill, right? Because life is no value, no value at all. You know, it's funny.

I wrote a story about a guy named Carrie Woolsey, and he has a buddy named Danny Sweet. Anyway, when they first met their, they're like their cartel contact, you know, they're just selling pot, right? They're like, you know, no big deal. We're just selling pot. And it's funny because he, he buys like, you know, he buys like half a pound or something. And then the guy that is selling him the weed ends up connecting him with the guy he buys it from, which is a Mexican guy. He said, so one day he shows up, he gives me like five pounds and he or something like that. I don't know what it was exactly, but it was a lot. He was like, wow, it is a lot of weed. He said, I sell it right away. He said, then the guy says, hey, I'm going to come and I'm going to drop off

like 50 pounds. Or was it like, whatever, 10 pounds or 20 pounds. He shows up in an RV and he said, you know, we go in the RV and the back of the RV, he said, he like hit something on the dash and its little panel comes up in the middle of the floor. And he reaches under there and they start pulling out one pound. He said, they're just, they're tied together. He said, he just keeps pulling pulling them and pulling them and pulling them got to I forget how many if it was like a thousand pounds or something like that of of marijuana yeah we and he just like he's like I we were freaking out but what was funny I was like he just gave you the weed like that like on consignment yeah and he said well he said I didn't realize it at the time but when I first met him he said he could give it to me on consignment and he said but you know I want to get to know you like do you have good credit what's your credit like and he was like this Mexican guy he barely speak English and he was like my credit I have perfect credit I have like 700 credit scores I'm I'm perfect I'm you know my car's

finance he's like he's like like I thought it was funny he said and then he was like so would you live around here he's like yeah live actually a couple miles away he's like let's go out your house I don't think I'm asking I've been doing a lot of drug deals I don't think I'm asking me for a credit score what he drives by he drives by his his family's house he's like I'm thinking he's talking about my credit he wants to go by my house like I'm thinking we're being friendly

we're friends you know not realizing if I don't pay him now he knows where my mom and dad live now he know but if you knew Kerry he's such a it's just pot Tim it's like it's just pot la la la well then when he thinks he's buying like whatever or he's getting fronted

20 pounds instead the guy shows up with like 2,000 pounds and he realizes how much trouble he's in now. Like if I got to sell and now you're going to sell. Right. You got to work. So it was, you know, when he explained it, he's like, like, the guy was so nice. He's like, like, I'm not realizing.

I don't, he said, I didn't, wasn't thinking he's cartel. You know, he's like, I'm not thinking that. I'm nobody. He said it wasn't until they pull, there's just, the pounds just kept coming and coming and coming. And I kept thinking, I'm on the hook for this. Like now I'm realizing this guy didn't give me 2,000 pounds on my word. He knows where I live. He knows where my parents live.

He knows, I mean, he's like, we spent the day together. But he just, clueless. Now, that guy's dangerous. He's clueless like that also. What was that TV show, which it kind of reminds me of, where the guy was a chemistry teacher, and then he gets involved in... Breaking Bad. Yes.

And he also gets involved in that culture. I watch a few episodes here and there. A good actor is in there. Can't remember his name right now. Norton? I forget his name. He's great, though. He's been around forever.

He did Malcolm in the middle, which is a funny one too. And he's not so many good movies and shows and everything else. But he shaved his head. I'm like, oh, my God. He got really into the role and he had tense. And he was like, he brought his chemistry background to cooking good math. He said, this is not hard to do. What?

I was going to say, I have a buddy named. his name is Pierre Resini. Anyway, Pete, we call him Pete. So Pete actually, it's so funny because we're talking way before that, way before Breaking Bad. Pete

was in Los Angeles and actually started making he was making ecstasy before it was illegal. So they were selling it at clubs as like a 18, 19 year old kid and he was

Pete's super smart. So one of his buddies who's probably five or six years older than him said, look, and these are all rich kids. Well, not Pete, but all of his buddies were rich kids. Sure. That's a good client. His buddy's 25 years old and he's driving like a Ferrari. So he ends up finding a retired chemistry professor from like UCLA and convinces him to train Pete on how to make ecstasy. So they, they, Pete, they figured out, they go back and forth, they reverse engineer, the, the entire process, he figures it out. Well, that eventually, you know, then the, it became illegal. Then the precursor materials became like illegal. Illegal too, yeah.

So then, you know, he's like, but the problem is you can continue to, it just gets harder and harder to make it, but you can continue to break it down through other things. where there was some kind of an oil or something that they needed to extrapolate this certain chemical and it turns out that the Hells Angels had like two 50 gallon drums of it and they said look we need that we'll pay you this much

as they said no no no no we'll give it to you we need you to manufacture this into methamphetamine into ice so Pete's like well that shouldn't be too hard So he goes to the library and they figure out how to manufacture methamphetamine. So now we're manufacturing methamphetamine for the hell's angels. And this is back in the mid to late 80s. Oh, yeah.

They're big at the meth. Anyway, what happens is he, this is continuing to happen, right? He's doing this for years. Maybe they're doing it larger. I don't know. But anyway, they ended up doing it in like a penthouses and there's like some, famous buildings he was doing it out of like the penthouse and uh what so here's what happens is you know they're having trouble of course getting the precursor the materials right and at some point

they find out like they get pseudofed or something from mexico through the cartel well the cartel after he gets it and then they're trading with the cartel they're trading the product through the cartel the cartel comes to um comes to pete and says look come to mexico we'll set you up with a lab We'll set you up. And, you know, he's like, they're trying to convince me to do this. He is, and all I kept thinking is, no, they'll get me down there. They'll kill you. And I'll be a hostage.

Like, I'll train their guys. And they'll just, they're not going to let me go. So he was terrified to deal with with. He's like, because, you know, they are ruthless. He's that there's so much money. No, it's real. And even, even if you have El Chapo now, he's in prison, right? He's looking at life.

And that's, and that's, I mean, I don't talk about it. He already get life. Yeah, he's got life, but I mean, he should have been, Mexico should have handled their problem, right? They tried. They let us, not once, not twice, but three times. You can't keep the guy in? And the last one was in the Supermax where he builds, if you haven't seen this video, folks, look at this video in here where they have the underground tunnel with his little

moped. They didn't put him there. And he even says he's even yelling. They've been documented reports. They said, you guys are too damn loud. Everybody's going to hear you, right? Everybody can't, but he bought everybody. I think over 70 people arrested over the second time. It was a disgrace, an absolute disgrace. And when he seemed being interviewed by Sean Penn and Kid Nick Astillo in the mountains of Sinaloa. Yeah. What the heck? They almost caught him because they tracked her phone. They were tracking her phone. They came this close to catch him. But he is. also known as A Rapido, the fast one.

So he is the master of tunnels. That guy has tunnels everywhere. And he was able to escape and again get away. Eventually they caught him again, and enough. Third time, he comes over here and now he's in the Supermax. If you haven't seen those pictures,

man, he's a tight little cell. He's looking up there and he's unhappy. Now, allegedly, he's fed up with it and he wants to cooperate. It's what's being documented. He's finally had enough of that. The thing is, with him in cooperation,

these guys have such a short lifespan like how much information can he give you he can maybe tell you I bribed this politician I did this but most of this stuff is what 10 years old 20 years old yeah he's out of the game for a while he could just tell who's run well I mean I don't know because

does he know who's running the hierarchy instead of law his sons his family's involved his wife has been arrested his son has recently been arrested right so who's next his nephew his cousin is his I mean he's a huge family Did they ever catch Mayo Zimbada, the father? Has he ever been caught? I don't think so.

I think he's dead. He has health issues. That guy has a major, major. He's old. He's up in there. There's been a day in prison. I don't think he's, some of these guys never do. Like you said, there's guys that do, right?

And the guys that don't. They get away with it. Like I said, or they get killed from within, or he died from health issues, what have you. But El Mentional Cervantes now is the big dog. You know, he's out there in a halisco region in Guadalajara, right? Yeah. But he, but I don't know if I talked about this show or not. up. But he's very different than Escobar, and he's very different than this guy, Guzman.

This guy's loved to live a large life, right? Everybody knew Escobar was in his big palace, right? He was hard to find him. Medellin, very corrupt in Medellin, right, what he did out there. He bought everybody. Everybody knew that this guy was a Sinaloa. They knew exactly his big ranch, right? He had these famous parties. I mean, that was a sick guy. I don't know if you know, I wrote about in my book out there about life. If you like what I'm talking about, Guzman, go read while right about him. But he had the sick parties. Well, he liked to bring underage girls, 14, drug them.

And he said, this was his vitamins. It gave him life to be able to take advantage of these young girls. Right. That's kind of the sickness that some of these guys get involved in. Amundas, he's in Guadalajara, and he's had, and we can talk another show about this, but I'll give you a little background about him. For a police officer from Holiscoe, right? He was in the United States illegally.

DA popped them heroin trafficking. He gets deported. He comes in there, joins the police department in Halisco, turns dirty, becomes assassin for the cartels in policing, right? And then it starts working for the millennium, which does protection work for Sinola. He was an ally at one point. Now he's one of the biggest rivals because he starts his own C.J&G,

right? Alisco new generation. So former law enforcement, he keeps a small circle. He jumps around different houses. he does not live, does not act. He has a small security team around him. Anything unusual, they're always moving different locations. Keeps a tight circle around him.

And allegedly, he himself, he don't know his background, just like this guy, dropped out of school, one of the fourth, fifth grade, semi-illiterate, right? He grew up selling avocados in the streets from poverty. Allegedly that the government says he's worth over $50 billion, billion dollars in assets, 50 billion in assets. Elmenschel You know, the problem is

I mean, I get you're saying it's an embarrassment, but it is. With the exception of simply going and scooping up every single one of these guys and executing them, what do you do? How do you fix

it? They can't afford to house them. They can't afford to... They can't keep them. Right. So, well, I mean, even the low level guys, there's thousands and thousands and thousands. Hell, 90% of your police forces is, is being, you know, is probably on the take. Yes. So what do you do? How do you fix? You don't have the money to combat that. You don't have the ability to house these people. So it's basically, it would have to be just mass executions and you're living

in a 100% police state. That would be devastating. It's a, it's a failed, it's a failed drug state. It's pretty much a failed state that's become a narco state, right? That's what makes it become a narco state. So we don't have a fair partner in the war in drugs at all. Right. So how do you fix it? Yeah. It has to be from within, right?

I know I've said it before and another show to, I get criticized. If you're a non-corrupt politician in Mexico, I agree with you. No, no, it gets fixed here in the United States. People start using the products. then there's nothing they don't no one's going to buy it the game's over if we didn't consume it they don't have the issues there right so america stop consuming it europeans stop consuming it canadian stop consuming it other countries that become popular stop consuming it they'll warn now they're going to do other things but i was like to say they're not going to do that that's not

going to happen so you either make it 100% legal and make it so that the the what the cartel can't compete and tax the shit out of it and then the cartel can't come Pete. Marijuana. I see that happening now, right? I think many states are legalizing for recreational use. It's just not medical use anymore. Many states now, I think like over 25 plus in counting every year a new state adds up to lists where I live. They just with just past it for recreational use, right? So that's to start with marijuana, right? I think people are okay with that now. I guess you have to learn from history. And I read a lot about prohibition, right with how Al Capone and the outfit and all these guys became so rich right right but it took it out of them

once he legalized it right 1933 all changed right right for them so how much can you legalize where can you do there's certain things you can do and have to do but obviously this this path that we're going it's it's not working it's a disaster in Mexico it's a disaster in our country we have fetnal crisis in this country right with addictions destroying family right all this stuff coming in, things have to be working. Do I have the answers? The only thing I can say is, I can tell what that, this ain't working. I wish people wouldn't use it, right? That's a solution. Stop using it. Just say no, right? Nancy Reagan. It's not going to happen. People have just said no. This goes away, right? This goes away.

So we have to really look at ourselves. We have to look at the crisis in Mexico. I think part of it could also be martial law, right? You have to imply, martial law in Mexico. You have to have the United States involved. You have to have us with drones. Maybe they're controlling it, going in there and annihilating these guys. But like anything else with an ant colony, you drop a bomb, you drop something on one, he just keeps on spreading. Yeah. Spreading and spreading. That's what happens. You keep on fracturing these cartel groups, which I see in history, they just spread and spread and spread and they don't go away. They, they Splendor groups after splinter group after splinter group, and they just keep on splintering.

I mean, they were hit hard, but they kept on splintering and splintering. Golf cartels getting hit hard now. They're splintering. These guys are splintering because CJ&G was partisan low with Millennium. They all splinter, and they grow, and they get stronger. So instead of having five, six big ones, you may have 50 or 100 little ones. Right. So problems, harder to deal with, corruption.

So I know we got off topic a little bit with the cartels, but all these guys end up working one way or the other, either with the, you used to be the Italians, they're not, all they used to be, they're almost done, gone, racketeering cases destroyed them. The bikers, going back with them, all the big faces, all the big names are pretty much, pretty much done. New generation, no one wants to do 30 years, right? Right. They got all cooperating. You got RICO charges? You, I, people cooperate with RICO charges, RICO cases. So that's the end of these groups, as we're going to know it. Then why do the cartels can do that?

Because they're in Mexico. It's hard to grab them. If they were in the U.S., I think that'll be different. Now, the only thing I can say is my experience and I'm doing a lot of cases of street gangs. It seems we have a problem with these cycle of violence that continues with these kids that we have to get them out of the street gang culture.

You can't continue to have, you know, the grandfather was in the gang, the father's in the gang. We have to remove them from that culture because it seems like, and I'm seeing it, all the father was ahead of this group. Now, junior, is ahead of his group. Now, this kid's, it's just, you've got to get that generational cycle out.

I mean, I look at L.A. I worked in L.A. for a month, and it was generational. These guys were generational, and the, and they love them. So we have to, that's a problem we have in our country that we have to deal with, is the violence of street gangs, and we have to remove and give them hope. Because we saw with the Mexican mafia, I'm sorry, with the Italian mafia, is that the guys of them off and they didn't want their kids involved, right?

They went to school. Something became doctors and lawyers. Right. They didn't want their kids involved in this culture. They knew this is no end. This is zero, right? But you don't have that mentality with the street gangs. They take a lot of pride.

Like, you know, they have that blue collard. I think education is also a big part. You have to help get education to these people where they realize, you know, this is no future for you. It's going to end up, you say, you know, one or two ways. death or imprisonment, right? So I think there's a lot of things that we looked at. We have a lot of problems. I've studied it for almost 30 years, 26 years, right, in this country. Some things are getting worse. Some things are getting better. I've written a lot about them. I think you see 70-some

books about it, mostly true crime, my own personal experiences, and you can see what they're all about. But I definitely don't see the mafia and the one-percenters as big as problem as I do with the cartels and the street gangs. That is the biggest problem for our country. right now okay what do you think I mean I think legal I think a partial you know between you know look what I think the quickest thing is basically just you know it would practically have to be genocide to go in and just wipe them out and and but they're not going to do that's what I'm saying they're not going to do that but I'm saying that that's the quickest right that's the quickest one is for the military to go

down there and just track down anybody that's even you even think is related to the cartel. I understand. I'm just telling you that that would be the quickest and cheapest. But, so I think the other alternative is

a combination of legalization, of education and of offering drug rehabs. Right? Like, you want a drug rehab? You can go. That sort of And I think, and I think that would, you would, you could pull a lot of that from, you could pull a lot of that from, you know, like the, without giving out these outrageous sentences.

I mean, at this point, you realize that you can basically monitor people on ankle monitors. Like all of these guys that are locked up for, for 30 years for drug charges, you've been giving people 20, 30 years for drug charges. It didn't do anything. So why not give them five years, let them out, put them on an ankle monitor? monitor and cut back on these massive prison sentences and have them pay for their own housing. You see what I mean? Like that's that alleviates the problem. Yeah.

And look, let's face it, with artificial intelligence and every other tracking devices out there, you can track these guys pretty good. And they'll be working, paying for their own food, paying for their own, you know,

um, I think you could put them at halfway houses. It's what really you could just let them stay in society and put on an ankle monitor and let them get a job. you know so there's there's a lot of options out there that we have to start exploring no doubt about that what's happening now is is not working some people say just build more prisons no come on and that's that's that's that's been a failed model for for 30 years shoot for 40 years that's been a failed model let them away I think that you have to do that

with repeat violent offenders who don't want to change we have to protect society those who are nonviolent, want to be rehabilitated, want to improve their lives, I think we have to have different options. But there's hardcore people. You know, and I've, and I've been arrested and I've dealt with, they won't change. No. They won't change. So we have to protect society from these animals, right? Yeah. Prison is just a part of their life. Like going to prison, doing a bid, coming out, that's just part of my life. And the nice thing is, it's not hard to figure out who those guys are. No. You know, come across quickly. Yeah, you realize right away, like, oh, this is prison's part of your life.

Okay, well, then you get 40 years and you'll never get out. So let's go ahead and stop this cycle now. But, you know, those are few and far between the most part. And a lot of these guys, a lot of these low-level drug guys that also go in and out, in and out, they have drug problems, they have no education, they have no choice. They have nothing else they can do. That's why I go back to, you have to educate them. You have to give them a future.

You have to give them hope. And the ones who do take advantage of their choices, I think don't go back in the system. The ones who don't do anything, they're only thinking about the next score or the next lick or the next whatever they're going to do, that's a problem. Because they're just looking to do another score and they just can't wait. What they're doing is some of them is they're trying to become better at being criminals and talk to other people, how to be a better criminal. That's not the, we need to keep those separate from each other. I love the guys, these guys literally, well, next time I want me to do it right.

Yeah. There's a right way? If you think there's a right way, you haven't learned your lesson, and now you're going to get more time, and it's going to be worse for you. And those are the kind of guys we have to incarcerate. You want the guys that want to say, man, I really messed up. And I've been doing a lot of shows. If you like this show, please watch the ones we've done.

I've done a lot of shows out there on YouTube, and guys who have learned, like yourselves, right? Right. You don't want to go back again, right? No, I'm very happy. You're very happy out here. How long did you do? 13 years.

13. I know you did that long. Listen, three, they'd give me five years. I had probably learned my lesson. I'm pretty sure I would have been like, yeah, I'm good. I'm good. What would have been the amount you said I can do it again? Oh, if it had been under five years.

Because when I think, most people think, oh, five years, I don't, when I hear five years, I know that's three. years. I know the drug program. I know time off. I know I'm going to do three years. I might even get six months halfway out. So it's really probably two, two and a half years. So I'd say if you, if they had given me 10 years, which is really what I thought I deserved. I would have never done it again. Five years and under, I probably would have done it again. Five years and under. Because fraud is, my fraud is difficult to detect. And it's extremely. lucrative and I felt it was very safe. So if you said, hey, you're going to prison and I did 18 months and got back out, that wouldn't have been much of a deterrent. Yeah. But if I had done like mentally, like, I mean, not mentally and physically done five or six years in jail, that might have been it for you.

I'd have been like, yeah, man, I'm not doing that again. Like I knew right away, I'm, I'm, you know, you lower your expectations of life and you realize, you know, okay, honestly, I'm happy sleeping in someone's spare room and just being able to watch YouTube and having a regular job. Like, life is too good out here. You missed your late 30s and 40s in prison, right? All my 40s. All your 40s. In late 30s, right? I was 50 when I got out. Oh, so late 30s too. So you missed your late 30s and 40s in prison. Yes. Coleman. You were in Coleman the whole time. I was in Coleman. I've been there a few times doing interviews and stuff like that, But I was on the run for three years, too.

So now that 16 years of that my life is just gone. That's rough. Yeah. A lot of people. So at least you learn your lesson, and he was a white collar. I've seen guys who do, you know, violent crime because they have no education. Yeah. They need to study.

They're illiterate, right? They can barely do anything. This is all they know. So we have to, in my opinion, this, and I've written about this in my book, prison gang killers, and I've written about in other books, you have to get them outside of the street, be it on my street gang. You can't extract them from that, you know, Mexican mafia culture or MS-13 culture or Latin king culture, bloods, or cryptic, you can't get them away from that.

Guess what happens when they go back to the street again? Yeah, that's all they know. They go back to that again. So I can tell you something. I think I might have told you this before. I was actually on the run when this happened. I was building houses, right? Like I was, I owned a development company and we were bought a bunch of vacant lots.

We're building new construction, which sounds funny to be on the run. doing that, but it's like I have nothing to do. I have a bunch of money and nothing to do. Would you have like a fake ID, fake identification? No, it was real. I went to the DMV. I've, bro, I've had 27 driver's licenses in seven different state. I've had two dozen passports and issued by the state department and different names. So different names. Different names. So I was living in Nashville and I had, I started a development company to have something to do. And, and, I remember one time I went to Home Depot, you know, you go in, they order your, you go into Home Depot, you give them your, like a knockdown list of what you need, and they take the plans and they, they come up with a list of all the lumber, everything you need, and they drop it on different pallets on the sites. Okay.

So I'm all, but I'm, it's never quite enough. You're always missing something. You know, there's always something. So I'm always in and out of Home Depot. So I went in one day and I forget what I was buying. but there was this kid that was there and I'd say he was 20, 21, well probably

22, 23 years old, something like that. And they called him New Orleans. And this was probably a year after Katrina. And I remember I'd seen him over and over again. And he was a hustler.

Thin black kid all over the place. They would say, you know, New Orleans, you know, hey, can you get me a price check on this? Or hey, have you seen this? And you'll, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we got it. in this such and such hold on man and he'd literally like almost run down the aisles he was just so

one time you know i saw him and i was like you know you know hey new orleans you know where's such and such and i was in there so much and and he was like hey it's here here and he walked me over there and i said um but why did they call you new orleans i said i was actually in new orleans yeah like two three month before katrina that was there after patrano oh yeah well so anyway he said and he sat there he said yeah he said i was there during Katrina. And I started laughing. I said, really? I said, wow, what happened? He said, bro, he said, I said, man, that's devastating. He is, oh, he was Katrina saved my life. And I went, what do you mean? He said, during Katrina, or after Katrina, he said, they came in. He said, he was living in that dome,

the, the super dome. Superdome. He said, and they started putting us on airplanes and flying us around the country. He said, Home Depot flew me and a bunch of people to Nashville. He said, gave me a place to live, gave me a full-time job. He said, trained me on how to do it. He said, I've worked here for a year now. And I went, wow. And he said, changed my life. He said, before this, he said, I was selling drugs on the street. Both my brothers had been in and out of prison. My mom is in and out of prison. My dad's doing life in prison. He said, my cousin. He said, my cousin. have been shot in prisons. Everybody's in a gang. He said, I was in a gang. He said, I came here. I got a fresh start. He said, I'm never going back. And I mean, he was just like, wow. That's great.

I said, what happened to your, what happened to your family? And he said, yeah, I have no idea. I said, have you tracked him down? He said, why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. I haven't even tried. He said, I'll be honest with you, man. He said, I don't want to know. He said, I'm done. He said, he goes, I got a fresh start. He said, changed my life. I'm not looking back. But, I mean, that's almost what you have to do.

Yeah, oh, those kind of people, yeah, for sure. You're in the gang culture, that kind of street culture. You have to almost start again, which is a great story. But I'm talking about Katrina. I responded with ATF after, you know, after the fact. And they had a task force set up in Baton Rouge. A lot of the problems in New Orleans went to Baton Rouge, right? And we have to deal with that.

You know, ATF, when we respond there, you know, we're there to help take care of, you know, the worst of violent criminals and put those people away and do cases and gun cases and all that. But we also, you know, took a day or two and went to see how New Orleans was looking. It was a ghost tale. I've seen Norland's before. Yeah. And I've seen years later, it was a major city was a ghost tale. They had a few bars open, empty.

It was being martial law in effect. It was unbelievable what I was seeing in New Orleans. And it happens anywhere. But that kind of story, it's, I think it feels good, but you wouldn't want, wish him to help his other family members, right? try to get them out of that same situation right he said he never he said it wasn't till katrina that he even thought getting out or his life not being that he said i never even considered another life he said that was this is it that was it he said i never considered it he said and you know he said honestly he said there was just such a bad environment he said i i just don't want

i don't want anything to do with any of it at all so i mean i don't know what his deal with i you know I only talked once or twice, so who knows what the thing with the brothers is. And as soon you were arrested after that, was it, how did you get caught? Yeah, I got caught in Nashville. I got arrested. Dateline was coming out. They were doing a one hour special on me, so I was planning on going to Australia, and we were pulling cash out of the bank, my girlfriend and I,

and, you know, just over the course of several weeks, we were just pulling out as much as we could so that we could take off. And my girlfriend confided at another girl, a friend of ours, who I was. Loose lips, sink ships. Yeah, she called the Secret Service and negotiated, like, a ridiculous, like, $10,000 reward or something. That was nothing. So she got $10,000 reward for turning you over. For turning me in.

Yeah. And they, you know, they just staked out my house for a few days. And one day I drove home. That's a thing story. Yeah. And I'm not sure your whole story we got. I've not seen bits and pieces. How did you do a Dateline story?

I wasn't familiar with that. You know, I was on the run, and Dateline was doing a story about this guy who was on the run committing all these scams, these real estate scams. Wow. That's not good. When you're on the run, you don't want Dateline to be doing a story. No, you don't. You sure don't. What the heck?

So here's the thing. Like, there had already been, whatever, 30 or 40 newspaper articles, but those are just newspaper articles, right? Like, that's not a big deal because it's there in Tampa. They're in local. Right. But I'm in Nashville. And then I've been in Bloomberg Business Week, had done two articles on me. And then Fortune Magazine did an article.

But I still was okay. Like, I was like, eh, it's not that. It's not, you know what I'm saying? Like, who do I know that reads Fortune? Like, I'm dealing with construction workers all day. Like, I don't know anybody in this town. And, but it's fine. Dayline. Dateline average Joe watches that.

Right. And this is, keep in mind, this is back in 2000, late 2006. Yeah. People watching TV. People watching TV. People watching TV. No, back then. Dateline was huge back then. Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure, for sure. I don't remember all the big names. So they had some big names back there on Dateline. And they were household names. My name's escaping right now. But I remember watching Dayline. There were some good show. And then, of course, the world changes whenever it goes on the Internet. They go in the all the little world now. Now everybody goes into their own YouTube. by this world and that's people this appear to now which is which is fascinating i think i told you

maybe at the first show i told someone else that people you would say you know what are you doing with with the internet 95 when windows came out and i went on and and you're going on there and dial up it's dial up what the hell is this emails what the hell are you doing what is all this stuff mad yeah and i said mom this is going to be the future no way that's not that we have all the stuff on our phones, right? We do everything in power, hey, we can't live without it. How did we have without it? How did we function without it?

It's just fascinating how the world changes this stuff, and that's intriguing. But I want to tell one quick, so I know you liked the True Crime Channel, and I had just finished writing a book on Miami's history with the Mafia. So we're talking about organized crime. Okay. If I don't realize how much entrenched organized crime was, you know, Al Capung died in Miami. He had a, I don't know if you said this picture, so.

you haven't seen this picture, type in 93 Palm Avenue on Palm Island. It's part, is a little island, man-meat Island, part of the city of Miami Beach, beautiful island, expensive homes, expensive homes. You can see Al Capone's old house there. It's been bought and sold numerous times since he died in the late 40s, right? And he died there from syphilis. He had symptoms from syphilis and he died. I think he, at the end of his death, he had the capacity of a 12-year-old. That's how bad things were for him because, and it was treatable for him. But unfortunately he didn't give him in Alcatraz. He didn't get the right treatment he needed and it was too late for him by the time he died.

But at the time, he invested over $100,000 in 1920s, which today, I think, easily, a few or three, you know, two or three million dollars. He built the largest residential pool in the country at the time. Look at how long. You look at the pool. Look at the pictures. It's insane, insane. And he ends up dying there.

And he bought it from, of all things, irony, a founding member of Anheuser-Busch. He, he did what from, he bought it from Anahe, what? He bought a family member from Anheiser Bush. He badly bought. Oh, wait, I don't understand. He, he, he bought the pool from Anheuser, Bush? No, the property, the house. So the property, okay, sorry.

Remember, he was kind of blackballed. The Chicago outfit in Chicago, they pushed him out. He went cross-country trying to find a new home. And he ended up finding it in South Florida because he has contacts and they buy it under someone else's name. And so that's iron because I thought it was funny, especially with, with prohibition and then legalization and we made his money

and now he's buying from somebody used to own it from there and it's a 14 room building 14 room, two or three stories immensely. Now I think it's a company that uses for model shoots and stuff like that, it owns it. So they're really

a nice job with it. It looks really, really good. But quick story here. So this is a book I wrote, Miami's History with the Mafia. A lot of people don't know this story and I think it's a cool storyteller. A lot of cool stories and there with that, the almost assassination of FDR happened in Miami. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, right? We're working in 1933, February 33, FDR just beats Hoover.

Hoover was a very unpopular president. I'm also history, guys. So you don't know, I do history of politics, and I love this. So this is a combination of true crime and history. It's in my area of expertise, which I love. Middle of the Depression. The Depression is horrible. You have, of course, the rise of the Alphine Alcapon.

is going on there. So you have 1933. FDR wins the last slide because Hoover, they thought, is very cruel. He doesn't, you know, you know he had COVID where we had all the money pumping in for people who couldn't have jobs, they lost everything else. Hoover wasn't doing that, right? He wasn't supporting the veterans. He wasn't supporting those unemployment.

Even Al Coppola, which is unbelievable, see his pictures. He even paid for soup kitchens. And he was helping. That's what people thought he was a man of the people. Al Koppel was kind of popular with the people because he helped, you know, that's what Escobar did, building soccer fields. in schools type thing, right? I could apologize with the same thing in Chicago

with stuff like that. Well, Hoover was kind of stingy with the money, very, very Republican, and they thought he wasn't helping the people like it should be taking care of the elite and ultra-rich. FDR was going to change it. A little background, if you like that stuff, if not, you know, you don't have to listen to it.

So you have this little Italian guy named Giuseppe Zangara. He's Italian immigrant. Have you heard this story before or no? Sounds familiar so far. You heard it? I don't know. Let me hear it.

Okay. This is now, we're talking February 33, 1933, right? FDR. It's not presently yet. Things were a little different then. He didn't get sworn in in June. I mean, in January, he would be sworn in in March. Things will change later with airplanes and stuff like that where it would be changed.

The president be sworn now in January. But back then it was March. It was still March because then it was a time where people would take longer to get to different locations, but planes and technology would change that. There's a little history there, and that will be changing why. So he would go to Bimini on a short fishing trip. He came back, and he was going to do a one, two-minute speech to a crowd in Miami at Bayfront Park. Those who know what Bayfront Park is, that's near downtown.

It's in Miami, very popular areas. It's changed a lot. But remember, people don't learn their lessons. We've already had three presidents assassinated. Three, right? Now the secret sheriff, after McKinley assassination, Secret Service came on board, right? But they don't learn their lesson with FDR because Kennedy will be assassinated the same, exact way years later, convertibles. Big problem, right? They are a big problem because the president's

not protected. He was in a convertible. He was up. The mayor of Chicago, Anton Sermak, who has become very popular, people thinking he could be maybe down a running mate with him, was there talk to him about things that were going on in Chicago and give him some some looking what's going on there. A little positive, but it's interesting story here. This guy, Zangar is a little crazy, obviously. Short-telling guy. He gets on a fold of a chair, a rocking chair. chair like this, and he gets this a 32 caliber Ivery Johnson, and he starts shooting over a lady on top of her head at the president, president-elect, FDR, bump, bump, like that, and people start grabbing his arm, and his hands start moving all over. FDR is spared right there in Bayfront,

but Sir Mac gets hit, the mayor of Chicago, and he ends up dying a few days later, and allegedly it's in this plaque, his last words with Mr. President, I'm glad it was me. and not you. Alleged that's one of his last words that were said. I don't know. Right. That's what out there.

So that happened there. FDR came very close. Of course, Kennedy was killed by Oswald. Same situation, right? Convertible. Going down. People are learned their lessons in life.

History tends to repeat itself. And they didn't learn the lesson with Hinkley either. Reagan almost just killed. The crowd got too close, right? He didn't have the protection he needed. So they learned their lessons of that. My problem with this with the mafia, Yeah. This is theorists out there.

People talk about it with Zangara. Zangara was actually hired by the mafia from the outfit because Frank Niddy, at the time was running the outfit, you had Aquapon Alcatraz, right? He's out of the picture. Niddy is running operations out there. The mayor is trying to clean up the city. He has his guys to a search warrant in his office and try to kill him and shoot him, saying he was armed and he shot him.

He doesn't die. and he showed that he was unarmed. The officers that shot and said he was trying to kill him are arrested and they are fired from the job for allegedly lying in the reports and stuff like that. Allegedly, this was out there. Niddy wants payback for

the mayor trying to have him killed through his officers, right? Guess this guy, and he wasn't, the FDR wasn't a real target. It was the mayor that was a target. A little history of Miami. Miami's history with the mafia. So what did, uh,

So Zangara, and just the little Italian guy say, what did he say? He gets the quickest execution in Florida history. His trial was less than a month. He was on death row in Rayford for less than 10 days. And it's executed, the quickest execution in Florida history in Old Sparky. I'm not sure if that's one of the early ones from Old Sparky. Old Sparky's had some good ones, Bundy, right? Zangara, right?

And some other massive serial killers have been executed by Old Sparky. Now it's the moment old Sparky now. Not a lethal injection, but they had old sparky. And allegedly, his last words were, Viva Italia, just like that. We'll copy his, man, I tell you, I dare you do it. Push the button, push that button. They did it.

All right. So, little, my, my sister with the mafia. All right. That's a good story, man. So look it up. If you like those stories, I love that. You put history with true crime.

That's my thing. You know what's funny? Do you have Apple? Apple apps? Yeah, the TV, what are Apple? No, I don't like streaming that much. They have a whole series called something for all of mankind. And it's funny because it's about the space program.

Oh, okay. and so it's following it like almost identical only the Russians land on the moon first so everything like all the characters are the same and everything's off slightly so it's like what if it's like a what if scenario what if or just something like that the Russians had landed first what would we have done so then um now we're like we're going to we're going to the moon and so we do go the moon you know we almost crash but they do make it and so then there's They're planning on doing a, then they find out the Russians are going to put a base on the moon. So now we want a base, Nixon wants a base on the moon. And then you find out, then the Russians land another, you know, another mission on the moon, only it's a woman. So now we've got a woman who has to be an astronaut. Like, it's like we're struggling to keep up. But what happens is it's what if we had just continually dumped money into the exploration of,

of space. So I know that ultimately it ends up like we go to Mars, like there's all of these things. So now it's spinning off into an area where you're like, I don't know what's going to happen now. Because initially I'm watching him like, oh, this is the one where the, you know, this happens. And this, you know what I'm saying. There's little things that you're like, oh, but then, but now it's at the point where it's like, I have no idea what's happening. Like von Brom, they just kicked von Brom out of NASA. You know, they get them in front of Congress and they, They pull up, you find out that he was actually a member of the Nazi, of the SS. I mean, you knew he's a Nazi party member, but they actually, in Congress, they come up with. Oh, yeah. And Chappaquitty, what's his name, Tate, Kennedy? Yeah. Tate Kennedy. Because of the moon landing, for some reason, he doesn't go to.

Chappaquittic. Right. So the woman never die. So now you know he's going to run for president. Now he has to do this. There's all these spin-off. We're going to have RFK Jr. Become president now.

Yeah, I don't know that's, I don't know what's going to have. I think he can be Biden. I think he can be Biden. I think anybody, I think any warm body could be Biden. Yes, I agree with that. Can they beat Trump? Trump and now, I'd be third, for a third time, it looks like.

Not one, not two. Three. You know, unfortunately, having multiple felonies, you know, that really only just kind of, he just went up in my, in my book. So if he wins, can he pardon himself? No, because, you know, somebody was saying that. The other, oh, he'll just pardon himself. He can't pardon himself.

Can you imagine that? He creates that precedent that he can pardon yourself? Nixon couldn't pardon himself. Didn't Ford pardon Nixon, right? Yeah. I don't know that. The question, would DeSantis pardon him if he wins? DeSantis, his whole campaign's falling apart.

He's not going to. Listen, when I found out DeSantis was running, I was like, what are you doing? You can't, like, it's now, it's not the time. You're still young. Wait, wait. But he's in the game. He's in the game.

We'll see what happens. I like R.F.K. Jr.'s chance. I find him appealing. He's a moderate, and I think Biden's in trouble. You don't want Kamala Harris, man, with her horrible cackle, the word, Miss Word salad herself. Yeah. She could be by the worst vice president in, uh, in U.S. history.

Oh, and Biden's just across the board, his race. ratings, you know, the whole administration's ratings are just in the tank. Like, it's, I don't know. But the worst part is to Trump is very likely to, you know, self-sabotage himself. You know, the likelihood that he will self-sabotage himself is. He, that's likely. He does it all the time. Yeah. You control himself. And keep it from Twitter or whatever we're going to use. Stop using that stuff. Don't let you read the teleprompter. Yeah, we can't just. Let's read the teleprompter. No, he's like Biden. When he gets off script, Ooh. He doesn't want to go to. I do also a lot of political books, and I predict the last year, Joe Biden won and done. One term, he's not going to win again. I don't care if Trump or DeSantis or, I don't know, Chris Christie, I don't know, he's kind of going out there. He's interesting character, Nikki Haley, maybe, I don't know, there's a lot of potential out there. There's a lot of people on the field. Trump has a name recognition. People feel sorry. They don't like that he's been indicted. I think two other things,

three, my opinion, are bogus cases. I think paying off the porn star after seven years ago, that's you know, Daniel Storm. Then, you know, Daniel. Ridiculous. The one with Georgia interfering with the elections, I'm not sure how strong the case, but I think the one he should be worried about. This is my

opinion. This is Bill Barr and other people saying the same thing is, why do he have classified documents in Marilago after the FBI said, bring it back, turn them over, we need the back, including invasion plans of Iran. He had operational plans. to invade Iran because they're getting fed up with all their tactics, what they were doing to us.

And because of the threat of having them nuclear, we can't have a round with a nuclear weapon. Obviously, there'll be a threat to Israel and to us. So a lot of things are going on that shouldn't be out there. And I think that is, he's probably looking at over 30 years. It's never going to happen. How can he run the White House? Can he run the country in America? I guess House arrest in Marilagu?

Ankle monitor. They should say AI. Would they give him an ankle monitor maybe? Maybe. How funny would that be? This is the whole system has just fallen apart. It's almost comical at this point. It is comical.

And people say if I wrote that and I said fiction, non-fifixist, stranger than fiction, right? Yeah, absolutely. I wrote that in a book. People say this is garbage. It's just silliness. He's just being silly. We are going to leave all of, well, I think there's one description for all of Ignacio's books in the description. Also, if you want to donate $10 a month to Patreon to help support the channel, that would be much appreciated. Leave me a comment in the comment section. Thank you very much. And I really do appreciate you guys watching.

Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I'm here with Michael Martine Hudson. And I wrote a story. about Mike called Devils of Contraband and which he never really liked the title of. But it's about basically he's essentially a part of the genre that is what's known as Cocaine Cowboys. He was active in, well, he was, he was a part of the dirty dozen. And then he ends up moving into the smuggling operations in Miami back in the 70s. 80s 90s and we'll get into that and so it's going to be a really interesting story so check it out you know i i want to like i typically start most stories i obviously start you know with

something interesting and then i jump back to the origins of like where the person was raised that sort of thing so and you were raised in in in Arizona but your mom but the way it happened was your mom was basically um just a maniac um uh teenager right she got married young had two boys you and your brother and she ended up getting caught smuggling marijuana from Mexico into the United States correct right and that's kind of like to me that's where the story kind of begins because it immediately starts off with smuggling it ends with smuggling it starts with your mom it ends with your mom because you know out of all the cocaine cowboy stories that are out there there's just not many there's almost no stories where

there's basically a woman is running the entire operation and that's your mom but so can we can we start with you know like you and your brother were born in arizona and that's the question prescott arizona right uh 1954 uh i was born in 54 my kid brother uh um 57 and we're about 18 months apart right and um what happened with uh your dad was he around or mother uh my mother left him right and And took me and my kid brother and essentially my grandmother was very wealthy. She married a wealthy minor. She left my real grandfather married a wealthy minor in Arizona. He died and grandma got to mine.

So mom, pretty much, she wasn't so much of a maniac. It was just a product of, you know, of the 60s, 70s, the 50s because they, you know, they weren't hippies then. It was essentially beatniks. That was that era started, and she took me and my kid brother with her girlfriend, Terry, and her Corvette, and drove to Big Sur. And we lived there for a while. I have memories of that when I was really young. And I've been really young, like three, four. And then she came back to Arizona, and we ended up getting taken care of by my Aunt Carol Jean, Grandma Dickie.

We called her Grandma Dickie because Ernie Dickie, because Ernie Dickie. Ernie, Ernest I. Dickey was the CEO of the Cyprus, Bruce Copper Mine. Grandma married him, left my real grandfather, as I previously said. And, you know, she left Grandpa, took my mom and my Aunt Carol Jean with her and, you know. Well, your mom started smuggling, like. There was years later. Right. But the first, she tried to run a couple of keys across the border and no gals.

That was a, that was a few years later. but she uh you know uh you know the pills whatever you know and and and the marijuana back then in the 50s and and the 60s so probably the late early 60s and then she got busted coming through no galas and my grandma had to go down there and with Barry Goldwater he had some connections and he very Goldwater was a very close friend of Ernie's right he built the ha uh and Del Webb. Del Webb built the flamingo for Bugsy Siegel. He was the contractor to build Sun City in Phoenix.

He built the house in Baghdad up there in the northwestern Arizona where grandma Dickie lived with my mom and my Aunt Carol Jean. Right. After Ernie died. So, you know, she was, she was, my mother was, they were pretty, more so my mom was was pretty rebellious, you know. But she got arrested. She got arrested.

They got her back in the United States. And my grandmother said, I'm taking Mike and Doug away from you. And here's the rest of your inheritance and go where you're going to go. When you get there, give me a call. Right. And that was it. Mom went to Miami. Right.

So what did she do in Miami? I mean, she just moved. Miami was really the, it was really the, the, the, the, the, the mecca, you know. as compared to big sur and those places in california she came to miami it was you know it was popular and there's a lot going on down there then and uh mom moved down there and with her and her girlfriend terry came down there and she lived there for and that this is by this time it's what the 60s yeah and uh you know mid 60s late 60s and um my grandmother uh put us in military school in the early 60s and and then we did a year in San Diego at the Southern

California Military Academy and me and my kid brother then we came back to Phoenix and she farms she I was in a wreck with her when I was three years old and she was a grandmother my grandmother she was crippled for life she owned most of the town of Baghdad and a portion of she had a farmer's market it's you know more or less in Prescott and on the way there that evening she had a load of strawberries and she hit a cow at 120 miles an hour and it crippled her for life and threw me through the windshield so she uh after that after she recovered she didn't they didn't expect her to live after she recovered she uh um essentially sold off most of her interests in the mine and moved down to phoenix and bought a palatial home down there and

and a large piece of property and we went to military school from there my mom was leaving us all over the United States with different friends, and we wound up being farmed out to the Mormon Church. The bishop of the Mormon Church lived next door. They got close to Grandma, got her to build a wing on their 16th Ward in North Phoenix at the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and the Bishop coerced my grandmother into having us adopted through the Mormon church to a family there and we lived with them for nine years until mom by this time mom um had lived in Miami all this time and she decided to come back

she was a little more fluent by this time and she decided to come back and look for her sons well I mean at this point your mom went to Miami but like that's where all the drugs were coming in at this like there's no DEA at that point there was no There was, Miami wasn't really prevalent for the drugs then. The drugs were coming out of, the marijuana was coming out of Mexico. The drugs weren't coming out of Columbia until the early, early, middle, late 70s. The Carrillo, I believe, the Lord in the skies, they were running the marijuana out of Mexico and flying it in. Okay.

See? And it was all different than the Neanderthal, um, uh, then the Neanderthal, uh, format that the Mexicans use now with the tunnels digging the tunnels seeing all that jazz they were actually flying it in so the marijuana didn't the Colombian marijuana was a much higher grade than the Mexican marijuana most of them you had good Mexican pot but um mom didn't get into that until the mid-70s she flew us back to to Miami she had a a sugar daddy their way

if you want to call it, you know, essentially a guy that took care of her who was vice president, a lawboy, lawmore corporation. So she, by this time, she's pretty affluent. She came back in 73 and got me and Doug and flew us into Miami because she came back, went to the stepparents' house and says, I'm looking for my sons. And the stepmother goes, oh, well, they're living down there by their old high school. They've got a, and they're, they're running amok. But we were doing burglaries and trade and everything for the burglaries for heroin.

and then, you know, and then slinging the heroin on the street. Just like how you grow up, right? Some of it. Yeah. The detectives were looking for as hard. In fact, the night that Mom and Aunt Carol Jean came and found us, well, actually, it was my uncle Jimmy. He came and found us and said, your mom's out here from Miami.

She's staying out at our ranch. My Aunt Carol Jean took her part of the inheritance and built a 30-acre ranch, way out in the middle of nowhere off of Beardsley Avenue. In a way, it's all developed now. Those areas were essentially pristine when we grew up in, to grow up in Arizona in the 50s and the 60s was idyllic. Right. So the stepparents and we had four uncles,

we, I essentially hunted and fished every square inch of Arizona hundreds of times growing up with them, learned the use of weapons. It was a Boy Scout and had, that was a marksman with a Boy Scout with all the medals, you know, for the sharpshooting and all that jazz. And we hunted winter and summer and fished winter and summer. So all that that kind of a lifestyle was a boy scout.

Like I said, my stepdad was the, he was the scoutmaster. So that's how we learned, you know, weapons. Basically, you grow up with that and he became really adept with firearms. So, all right, so your mom shows up. She takes you back to Miami, right? and you go back to Miami and I mean, what happened? She put you back

in high school. She said you guys are going to be accountants and lawyers. No, school was out of the good picture. We were already, I was already a dropout. Long hair my kid brother, long hair and we are already into drugs pretty much and mom introduced this to an underworld that we had never, it could have possibly

envisioned. These were mom knew some of the most famous, you know. Like the Dixie Mafia, right? Like the Rick Cabrero and his crew. And he's the guys. Ricky and all friends or close friends of hers. We had next-door neighbors that were very dear to me.

And there, I'm not going to mention any names, but they were, a lot of us fell into the marijuana smuggling, flying it in from Columbia. But mom didn't get into that until me and Doug kind of, I was more or less turned off by Miami because I really wanted to ride a Harley. I was still young. I was 17 years old.

So I went back to Phoenix. And my kid brother went first, and we fell off into the same thing, the same lifestyle that we were, that we had, were, you know, involved in when mom and my aunt came and grabbed us and, you know, and mom took us back to Miami, burglaries. But this time, my kid brother fell for a burglary. I fell for one. And my kid brother flew back to Miami and I stayed in Phoenix. So mom didn't really get into the smuggling until around 74, 75. Somewhere around in their mom, you know, negotiated in Bogota with an individual and she was able to mortgage out the house and get a boat and then, you know, and then bring in her first few loads. So, but I was, by this time, I was already in the state of penitentiary in Arizona.

Right. I bought my first Harley with a, with the, you know, smuggling heroin out of Mexico. What were you in the, and what did you go to the state for? Burglaries. Okay. Yeah. how much time you do. Did a couple of years.

Had a couple of five years sentences run concurrent. Did a couple of years. And, you know, the, got, ran prospect for the high wall jammers. My kid brother was a captain in the Aryan Brotherhood. So. When he was, he said everybody knew who the high wall jammers were. And we had a race war with the, with the, with the, the blacks. Right.

And the Mexican mafia had our backs. And we essentially took over to compound at the time. and they put us that were involved in that riot in 1975, put us on death road because they had nowhere else to keep us. And that's where we were on orders from the president of the, they were sanctioned by the area of brotherhood out of California. The high wall jammers became A-B. But we were still high-wall jammers during that time in 75, underground lockdown.

I was, I had to electrocute an individual, set one on fire. We blew one up with the bomb, three different individuals. And I was the youngest high wall jammer, so they split us up. And I got to have, because I only had five years. So I did two years on the sentence. And I was essentially done. Right. They grabbed me first, and then they shot me to a halfway house in Phoenix.

And my kid brother wrote his Harley with a friend of his up to New York. And then he rode all the way out from the, um, from the, uh, me a letter from the Waldorf Astoria on Waldorf-Festoria station area. And then he wrote out to meet me when I got to, got to the halfway house in Phoenix. He convinced you to go back to Miami? No, no, no, no. I stayed in Phoenix. He was, by this time, him and mom were bringing in a few loads. They were making a lot more money than they had, you know, then, then, you know, initially they had been made. Well, she did a million on those first few lows, but she turned around and uh and her and Doug were already bringing in they and she had bought a

shrimper a couple of shrimpers and they were running them down into cardahan and bar and Kia and Doug's uh Doug's captain in the boat and then taking the boat down there and back and uh I stayed in Arizona and rode my question is that you know you're you're in Arizona and um your mom brings in the first load and she's arranges it with some guys from Atlanta right how does that first transaction go well um her friend had set up the uh the indict the uh um stop start over start up the deal yeah a good friend of hers who met these guys while he was in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta right and uh so she he hooks mom up with these rednecks out of Atlanta and out of Georgia and they come down to buy the load and she uh they were in there in one motel room at the old days in on Collins down in South Miami so she uh she she see they get a sample her friend gives them a sample of the of the of the uh the pot right yeah of the the the the Colombian gold back then and then uh

um she gets a she gets a call from her friend and he and he tells he tells mom um and i'm relating the story that she told me yeah and and parts of it my kid brother told me so he says uh yeah they want another sample of it so they moved to another motel room so you know they're ready to you know conduct business and so what do you want to do she says okay so she loads it up in two bands, a couple thousand each van and goes down a couple thousand pounds of each van and drives down there and they, and they leave, she leaves my kid brother down in the parking lot. If I'm not back back here in a certain amount of time, you know who to call in Columbia. And then she goes upstairs and walks up, you know, walks up there all by herself. And they

had moved to another, to another suite. So she's a little apprehensive and she's getting, you know, she's being as smart as she was just the the alarm bells are going off and she walks in the guy answers the door and you know you know kind of raggedy look rednecks from you know i imagine they were moving quite a bit of pot up there but bottom line is they uh answer the door and she she goes in and there's four or five of them around a table i think and uh the the uh the guy that was running everything he's sitting there and she tosses him she got her she's got her uh she always carried a purse that slung over her shoulder about waist height so she hands him the sample and he starts smoking and then he guys telling stories and you know one thing leaves another and she's there

all by herself and they're kind of oogling her because she's you know she's extremely beautiful you know and so they're you know they're talking and kind of you know drinking beer and everything and then he says it's not like the last sample that he had gotten and he's having a hard time getting high and she's been leaning against the kitchen counter for a better part of half an hour, you know, and that's it. So she, he says, I think I'm, I know it's not like the other stuff.

I'm not really feeling like I, you know, like I did on the other sample you brought. I'm not really getting that. getting high and just kind of thinking that they can just you know kind of handle her because she's a woman right and it's the only shit she has it's the same stuff it's the same stuff so she just unzips the purse pulls out her her uh hammerless uh police snub nose uh 38 special and two quick steps and leans across the table and sticks the pistol in his ear and and you you you know what it says and like in devils uh you better start getting high you motherless

cocksucker or i'm going to splatter your brains all over your ugly redneck partner's lap right you know so and that's it and uh he starts he freaks out and uh you know you could hurt a pin drop and he starts screaming pay her pay her and uh there you go she walked out of there with the cash and and uh how much do you remember how much um two million or whatever four thousand pounds something like that i guess and that's it she paid off the mortgage on that she'd taken out the house for the boat the loan shark and all that kind of stuff and walked out and uh you know um nice look and yeah yeah i grabbed my kid brother and they were gone and and and told him they out the keys there they're down the keys are under the front seat and it's in the

parking lot in the days in down there and you know my kid brother had walked you know he had gotten a little worry he's down or he's young he's he's he's all he's all by himself so you know you're doing something like this you don't know right maybe they're waiting for you to pull in figuring you know and then they're they're going to go oh it must be in they might rob him right so he's so holly volatile situation in back in them days and that kind of they kind of stuff you know like walking into a hotel room and uh you know doing a deal for a few keys and you don't know if they're cops right or you know if it's a rip rip off and everybody's everybody's strapped so i stayed in arizona and rode built the show

winning harley i had a cousin that owned a bike shop well-known custom a custom bike shop called cosmic choppers keith warlock and he we built a my second harley another panhead and we uh we won a big show out there and I rode that for like a year and a year and a half and then we built another one I wrecked that and got the insurance money and we built another one actually I bought it from the mechanic a shovelhead and I rode that and then that's the bike and we want another show on that bike the same you know a big show out there in Phoenix at the veterans from a coliseum and then the dirty dozen by that by that time knew who I the dirty dozen by that time knew who I was and they approached me and wanted me to run a prospect for the club and

And I eventually on that, on that, on that, uh, uh, uh, uh, shovelhead, I rode prospect for the dirty dozen for the Phoenix chapter and got my patch. About 1970, 1974. Right. Or excuse me, in 1977, 76, late 76, early set, got my patch for the Phoenix chapter. Well, I mean, so writing prospect for the dirty dozen isn't exactly a W-2 job. What were you doing for a limit? It's not, it's not, I knew a hell's angel that never rode. prospect for the dirty dozen that never made it out of uh but i'm saying what were you doing

for a living though because i know i know i was i was number one harley davidson motorcycle thief for for almost five six years in in phoenix chased by two top detectives for for almost six and a half seven years right what were their names because i never i know uh there was john gyrdano and jack hackworth they were the heads of the uh motorcycle uh theft division of the grand theft left auto, S-I-D, special investigation department or S-I-D or S-I-S, special investigations for, they got me one time and they let me go. They wanted me to cooperate. So I said, yeah, sure, you know, and I got out and I never, and they said, we want to hear

from you by Monday. Well, I think it was a Friday evening. And I went and stole three Harleys up I-10 there in Phoenix, and they never saw me again. They put out a warrant for my arrest because they floated the, uh, They couldn't get the individual whose motorcycle I had allegedly stolen to come back from, he was a guy from Alaska. They couldn't get him to come back and testify. So they had to drop the charge. Well, the judge gave me a probationary term for a few months.

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available on Amazon and Audible. Tell me the story about, I mean, I know there's a bunch of stories, but tell me the story about stealing the guys Harley twice. I had a friend who was a junkie named Pat Grafe. Pat essentially told me one day, I would give him 50 bucks on any Harley I would grab that he would bind. So Pat says, man, there's a guy out there in Paradise Valley that's got a bike, and he leaves it out in his backyard in front of his tool shed, but he's got a great dane.

and the Great Dane sleeps in the tool shed and he just parks it right there on a concrete slab in front of the tool shed I said okay so we drove out there and looked at it and it was a real nice shovel kind of customized so I went back there

and this is the wintertime in Phoenix it gets down to freezing I went out there and took the he took the Great Dane in the house and it was so cold and I went in the backyard and I took the bike.

It took me a while. I kind of got stuck trying to bring the bike between the shed and the fence that ran adjacent to the street there. It was about a four foot, a three and a half, four feet width. And I miscalculated. And once I got between the shed and the chain link fence, I realized that I'd had enough room to get it out of there. It took me at least 45 minutes to back the truck out.

Or excuse me, we'll have to, back to the, I'm thinking in terms of trucking, to get the motorcycle between the shed and the chain link fence to get it into his backyard and roll it out to the alley and then down the street and into another alley and hotwire it. The bike wouldn't start. I had to kick it over.

Most of those motorcycles that I was stealing back then, a lot of them were electric start, but this one was a kick and I couldn't get to start. But to back up, when Pat and I came out and looked at the bike, he says, by the way, I saw the bike where it was parked, was daytime. He goes, this guy's about six foot, freaking 11. Six foot 10. He carries a 44 magdum. And I just kind of, and Pat's, Pat was a skinny little guy. You know, he had a Harley two and he says, he says, he says, I don't know. He says, I've never, I can't imagine how

you're going to get that bike. He keeps the dog in the shed. Well, he took the dog in that night. You know, you walk by there about three in the morning when they're in their rims sleep. Toss a pebble at the shed no dog comes out you turn around you wait a little bit then you go back and you you know you hold your hold your uh your nuts and you walk up in there and you try to get the motorcycle without getting blown away so i got that bike took it to a buddy of mine so you did get it started though oh yeah yeah i had to hot wire i had to go to a papa the hood on a guy's uh uh uh um a car that was parked over there at another house along the side i had to pop the hood, you could tell the car wasn't running like an old Chevy and take the wire

from the solenoid going to the battery and about four feet long and run that from the battery to the solenoid on the motorcycle. And she finally started. I had overloaded the carburet I flooded it. But when it ran, it ran like a raped ape. And I took off and took it up to a buddy of mine named Dave, who was fencing on most of the motorcycles for me. And unbeknownst to me, Dave was under surveillance by the Phoenix Police Department, the same two detectives. Who were already looking for you? They were looking for, no, they had no idea who I was. They were looking for Dave.

They found Dave, and I went back to get paid for the bike. I called him, and he, for my cousin's bike shop, you just come by tomorrow morning, I'll have your money. As I rolled, I had an old Polaris, 64, a Dodge Polaro, and I rolled through there coming by Dave's house and looked, and I saw about six or seven. Phoenix police cruisers, a couple of unmarked detective cruisers, and a couple of tow trucks. About 20 bikes out in the front yard, and Dave and his girlfriend were cuffed. So I lost the bike. I kept going. So my buddy, I tell my buddy, Patty thinks I'm lying to him.

I says, no, man, my guy got busted. So about four or five days later, I get a call at my cousin's bike shop. My cousin, Keith, he had a pay phone inside the bike shop. he says you got that's it that guy pat is on the phone i walked right i said yeah he goes this guy got another motorcycle i said what guy he's the guy that he stole the one from last week he's got a brand new 80-inch lowrider a black one i said you got the insurance money so i rolled up there we took pat's little nova and drove over there and the motorcycles are we pull up to a dairy queen right across the street and i like the guy lived on a corner and i looked over there and

the residential neighborhood. I looked over there and I saw two motorcycles and the driveway or actually on the front lawn. And me and Pat were sitting there and I got a chilly dog. I'll never forget and a tasty freeze. It was a tasty freeze or I think it was a tasty freeze. And I'm sitting there watching it. We smoked a joint. Pat's looking over there and these guys came outside and were walking around. The guys knew his biker buddy. His biker buddy was almost as tall as he was. you know so I'm watching them and Pat's looking over at me and going man he says you'll you'll never never get a brand new 80 inch low rider they had just come out so it's broad daylight they went back in the house then the one individual's buddy came out they they stood there and talked he fired

up his bike and left the uh individual that owned the you know that owned the motorcycle that had taken one previously about four days before he went back in the house front doors open I looked over a Pat and I go, watch this action. Pat's jaw dropped and I walked across the street up to the corner and just walked right up on the grass to the motorcycle. I could see the guy's feet up in the ottoman watching Beverly Hillbillies or it's a big valley or something like that. I walked up to the bike and very carefully and quietly picked up the kickstand

because they make a noise if you don't know how to pull it. It's spring-loaded, pulled it up a lot, you know, put it in neutral and froze because he got up one second they changed the channel to a Gilligan's Island a little buddy and then flip it back over to whatever he was watching and I backed it out and rolled it down the street and then cranked it up

on about two streets down in an alley and I went down that alley and realized that I had hit a dead end because that street I rolled out on I went to make a left and it says dead end so I had to make a U-turn and the only way to get out of there was to ride right past his front door

So I come down the street, crank coming out of second gear into third about 60, 70 miles an hour. The guy was standing out on his porch. He had a 40, he had his 40 for him, his jaw was down on his belt buckle. And as I ripped past him,

the only thing in my mind is I'm thinking, all he has to do is step out in the street. If he's a good shot like I was, he could put one right between my shoulder blades. Right. But it's, you know, and as I went past, I looked to my right, looked over at him standing with his jaw hanging.

and out over there in front of his door. I looked to my left and I looked at Pat's jaw is hanging on his bell buckle. As he watches me, I look over a Pat, and I ripped by about 70 miles an hour. And Pat's jaw, you know, he's like, he couldn't believe it. It was crazy. Pat had to look like he was having a heart attack. As I looked over a Pat, and I finally got to the next street and made a right and rode to Pat's mom's house. The guy didn't fire the gun?

No. And so I got over to Pat's mom. said he was following me and i got there my pat's mother had come home for work and she opened the door by the the gate by the pool and she looked over me and she says oh hi michael they go hey mrs grave how you doing and she goes but you have a different motorcycle every week she goes that's a beautiful bike i said thank you and it's a friend i'm just working on it i'm working on it for a friend so i parked it by the pool and then pat pulled up and he walks up to he was white as a sheet he looked at me and he says man he says i cannot believe that i just saw what i what i just saw what i just

saw he says you had the biggest set of balls to anybody I ever met in my entire life so I just said look you know because I was still building that chopper that we were I was still building that bike that me and Keith had uh essentially I had bought that motorcycle and Keith talked me to stripping it down they're going to completely rebuild it for the show that was coming up in about five or six months so right there you go so I was still I was doing everything I could burglaries motorcycles, dealing drugs in order to pay for the bike. And, uh, yeah, your cousin, didn't you say your cousin said it was only cost a few thousand dollars and it just kept every time you walk in? Yeah, he says, oh, it costs about $12,000.

And at that time in the early, in the mid, middle 70s, that was a lot of money. Now, I was living with my stepbrothers. So but it kept getting, I can't believe I, you know, and higher. Oh, it got it. Yeah, it got into the end of the mid 30s before we finally finished the motorcycle and entered it into that show with the Veterans Rememorial. coliseum when i won first place got a big check got a big trophy keith put it in the showroom and at cosmic choppers and he and i had to sign the check over to him because i was into him by that time for about 15 to 17 000 always had a huge balance there well whatever what happened with uh keith he passed away keith died yeah yeah when i got my patched the dirty dozen i've been with a dozen

for about a year and went over there dupe was his partner at the painter right and uh went over there And he told me that Keith had died. So, you know, it was a rough time. It was a rough time that we were very, very, Keith and I were extremely close. I loved him like a, you know, like an older brother. Like why I love my older brother, who's a Vietnam veteran. Greg still lives in Phoenix, the stepbrother.

Right. From the, you know, so. So when you met, you, you got married. Well, I didn't get married. It was a couple of years later after I got my, we remember that I had a wreck on that panhead. We got the insurance money and Big Tim, the mechanic from my cousin, he had that shovelhead and he had it up on the workbench.

When I came in there one day, I looked at it and it was out of this world. I go, what do you want for that? He goes, I'll take $6,000 in cash. And I said, I'll give you $5,000. I'll give you $4,500 in cash in my motorcycle. and he said deal because you wanted around 15 for it that was a lot of money then for a chopper you know you might pay seven eight grand for a real nice motorcycle uh uh a stock holly davison out of the dealership was 2,300 bucks sportster sportster was my 1800 you might pay as much

as three grand for a for you know a limited edition bike like it may be a low rider of 2,800 somewhere out in there so I we put that in the show again and it won first place big trophy you know so I rode that for I had a really close friend named Lumpy whose brother had rode with the dirty dozen Bob Bob Hennessy Leo Hennessy we we called him Lumpy yeah and he was he was he was 11 12 years old and had his Harley when we were he he went to a a Catholic school next door to where I went to went to grade school in Desert View in North Phoenix we used to see him riding by on his on his chopper and he was a pretty

you know he was a pretty well-known individual we became very very close and lived together so so what was happening with your mom like at this point your mom was was actually was sending up um was shipping up um marijuana right for the for these guys to sell mom and dug were going to columbia by this time on shrimpers Doug was they were taking they had a They had a couple of other other individuals that they were working with, but they were either flying it in or, you know, but most of the time it was coming in on boats. And Doug was bringing in loads from Cartagena, from Bar and Kia. And I'm still out west on the bike. Right.

So I didn't get, I didn't ride prospect on that, on that third Harley for the dirty dozen until around 177 and got my, got my patch in the Phoenix chapter. So I didn't, I didn't, I started going to this popular college bar called the squeeze box. And that's where I met, well, I walked in there one night with a member of the club that had gotten busted down to prospect named Turtle. And he said one night, I took him away from, you know, when you're a prospect, they'll keep you up for days. And it's, it's brutal. I got to tell you, it's brutal. A boot camp ain't nothing compared to being a prospect for the dirty dozen back in the 70s. As I said, I knew a Hell's Angel that never made it.

Met him years later. And a dirty dozen minimum prospect is 60 days. If you don't have your patch in 70 or 80 days, something's wrong. They're either going to beat your ass and take your motorcycle or just run you out of town. And this Hell's Angel obviously, I forget his name. He essentially realized he wasn't going to get his patch and he took off. and Hells Angels prospect period is a year. And so he ran prospect for the Hells Angels.

I forget if it was the Burdue chapter or the Daily City Boys or up there in Oakland. But the Hells Angels used to come to Arizona and we were real tight with them. And I knew quite a few of them. So me and my president years later and one of the warlords and our vice president, we used to fly over and stay with the H.A.

in their, you know, and party at their clubhouse in Oakland so so I have had at this point like by the time you meet your wife had you already gone to federal prison because you already went to state we talked about state I did the state time no I hadn't gone I didn't go to federal the federal prison until uh 81 and 82 oh yeah yeah okay okay okay so um I met I met her and that's for stealing like like massive like tractors and right well it was a couple of million interstate transportation we would take a truck like i drive now with a flatbed or we called a low boy you'd go to a job site find a brand new case grader or a or a backhoe put it on the

flatbed and run it across the state line before the contractor and owned the the the equipment would come to work and realize that someone had a broken into his yard and stolen you know what it is usually we would take his prize kenworth or peterbilt and use that to go grab some Sometimes the contractor had had the equipment on the back of his trucks at the, at the yard where he owned his business. So I had to cut the locks. And this is after she and I had split up. Right. So I'm, well, let's, well, let's jump back to.

So you meet, you meet, what's your name? Chris. Chris. Chris, you meet Chris. She was engaged to someone else. Right. And, you know, I was pretty much. Was it like a pilot or something?

Yeah, he was going to an air college at Bisbee, and she was dancing down there at that club. And the mother had married a wealthy guy who had a million dollars. It was called Sun Valley Ani, I think, as I recall. And, you know, so, but she wasn't having anything to do with me. Right. But I was essentially smitten, you know, so. But at the time, I was living with a, I had, like, a lot of the brothers in the club had prostitutes, if you will or massage parlor employees that, uh, that, uh, that, you know, that, that, that, that's, that's,

it's, it's almost like the Italian mob. He got prostitution drugs. Right. Uh, you know, when sunny barger bonded out in a million dollars, that's when the Rico statute came out and they knew they, wait a minute, they have a million dollars cash and then the sunny barger got bonded out. And, uh, you know, they, they put, um, the Italian mob first under that RICO. statute and they and they and they and the and the feds put in outlaw motorcycle gangs as the second highest priority for investigation so when they realize these just aren't regular just outlawed greasy bikers they're they posted a million dollars cash bail yeah it's obviously it's a it's it's an enterprise yeah by the time i was gone i was in miami uh sunny barger had throat cancer

he moved to cave creek because of the the dry climate and then they allowed of the dirty does and my old brother in the message chapter chico robert more he died but uh by this time i was in miami and so chris well back to chris so you you meet chris you get married she leaves she leaves the fiance right we we meet the mother we meet them the mother-in-law um you know chris chris has me go over to their expensive uh uh town home or they're living for dinner and uh by this time i had to go fast jet bike. I stripped down the shovelhead to put an S&S kid in it, you know, essentially born stroke it. And I turned around and I'm driving it riding a jet bike. Right. And I remember

Hells Angel looking at that thing. We were building rice rockets and putting them into rigid frames like a chopper. But it was a, it was 1,100 Kalasaki, you know, and he told me, he says, man, you're, Harley's going to get back at you for this. And a guy turned left in front of me a few months later and it was a bad wreck and this time I didn't get any insurance money like I always did when I wrecked when I dropped one of my one of my motorcycles so anyway yeah we got married and then moved into a house and she kept dancing and I got in that wreck and then we flew back to my mother I called mom and she started sending me quite a bit of money through Western Union every week to by this time mom moms and she she had told me you

You know, we learned basic seamanship when we had lived there in Miami for a year. You and Doug. Yeah. Right. As best of my brothers, we knew basic seamanship. She wanted me to come home. She wanted me to see, me and Chris got married, 79, 80. We flew to Miami for a honeymoon.

And that's when, you know, flew into Miami. And I was pretty, I needed an operation. I was pretty messed up from the wreck. And she and I got married and flew into Miami. And then mom had a home on the ocean. And, you know, we had lived in another, essentially another property that her Sugar Daddy years before when we first came to Miami in 73 in Miami Shores. And this was still Miami Shores, but it was right there on the intercoastal. So then I kind of realized when I came to, it came in the house, there were 80 pound bales of, you know, four car garage, three four car garage of 80 pound bales stacked up along the walls.

And I had told my wife it was fertilizer for her, her botanical, you know, garden that she had out back and all this kind of stuff and you know a few days that yeah we parted for a good better part of two weeks and you know a lot of coat right back in the old days pablo stuff griselda stuff you know that and uh back in the day when it was 93% in you know ether the the good stuff so we're and and and i had been in arizona for for so long since I had come back in 73 by this time it's 79 and my mom had pulled me aside and she says your brother listen the heroin you know Doug had by that time

was it was a multi-millionaire when he was 18 right so you know they 19 so the she says you got to come home you got to you got to come home she's afraid he was going to kill himself right like he was going to end up overdose or something and they bring in the lows and some Italians were coming down from New York or wherever, and they would take the load. You know, they would, mom would flip the load to them. And the Colombians were front of the load.

They were front the mom to load. And then, you know, she would, they'd come down. She'd flip it for a percentage, for a nice profit. And a few million, two, three million, whatever, five. And then she would pay the Colombians. And she was getting pretty cheap, of course. You know, and then that's the way it was running. So, but I told, you know,

But Chris wanted to go back to work in Phoenix. So she flew back before me, and then I stayed in Miami. And me and my kid brother and some real close friends, we took a little, Doug says, let's go out in the boat and go to the Nassau. So we went to Nassau and gambled, you know. And those days were pretty decadent. Had a pound of Coke on the boat. It was the friend's father's sport.

fish, a Hatteras, or excuse me, a Bertram, a 53-foot Bertram. And we took that to the Bahamas for about a week and a half, two weeks around the, you know, at sea. So it was a nice vacation for me to get away. But Chris, using forgeries and bogus identities, Matthew B. Cox, one of the most ingenious con men in history, built America's biggest banks out of millions. Despite numerous encounters with bank security, state, and federal authorities, Cox narrowly, and quite luckily, avoided capture for years. Eventually, he topped the U.S. Secret Service's most wanted list and led the U.S. Marshal's FBI and Secret Service on a three-year chase, while jet-setting around the world with his attractive female accomplices.

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I'm back to Phoenix so I didn't follow her for a couple of weeks and then you know a few things went down and I had a little bit of cash and I flew back in to Phoenix and you know by that time I had quit the club

and because the motorcycle the injury from that wreck I've been down about 50 or 20 times and during my tenure riding all those years but I had three major wrecks and the third was a charm like they say in Vietnam three in a match the third one was the worst

and it was pretty debilitating and I needed an operation so mom volunteered to pay for it but you got to come home to Miami I want you to and I told her mom Chris doesn't like Miami and my mom's essentially my mother's exact words dump that flaky bitch

and mom mothers know and gets your ass back home and get on the boat so she basically wanted you you and your brother to captain the boats to go pick up marijuana so mom could live her her uh her um luxurious lifestyle exactly hey listen she was the brains

mom the feds were never ever the DEA the FBI they were never able to outsmart her never so that's the bottom line while she was alive you know we had a lot of heat you know years later they had a lot of heat and you know they were I would sit there at the house at night you know high you know high on on blow and sit there and watch a car go she had a boyfriend that that she met a younger kid and his father was a boss in the Gambino family. Joe Paterno. So you'd see a car go by a couple of Joe's button guys would drive by. Then you'd see another car go by about an hour later with a undercover vehicle with

the shortwave aerials. And you see another one like that one go by at about an hour later. I don't sit there at night and watch four or five cars go by in a five or six hour period. So, you know, we were under heavy surveillance that mom just said, no, we're going to take them, we're not going to offload over here at the warehouse where we're usually You bring it up here into the inner coastal here in Miami. We're going to bring it down to the keys, you dumbasses.

We're going to offload it there and bring it up in trucks, right under their noses. And we got another warehouse. And so, you know, we were never, never busted for any load ever by the, you know, although they tried to get mom. They did come in the house, which I believe when we were in Coleman, you pulled, you got that indictment. mom was indicted for uh cocaine in 1975 in in in in Miami she got it quashed or she brought her the way no she took it to the Supreme Court yeah and there was a corrupt judge named Ellen Morphonius yeah yeah she tried to extort mom for 10 grand and then mom was a little has said some derogatory things about Morphonius and the phone was tapped yeah on the phone yes

So on the phone, she says, she's mouth, she's, they had a, uh, well, it was a bail bondsman, right? The bail bondsman came and said that Marphonius wants, detectives. Oh, okay, they want, they gave the tape. They gave the tape. They wanted 10,000, initially they wanted 10,000. And then, um, mom was pretty upset about that. And then she said a few derogatory things about Morphonius. and she said it on the phone like she knew the phone was tapped and she still called up what

she was talking to one of her gangster friends right and she's yeah so yeah some wise guy and it came back and the detectives came back over and played the tape for it says now morponius wants a hundred thousand dollars my my kid brothers out in california at this time dug had dugie had to help raise the hundred Gs to give to Marfonius because Morphorne has said it's a hundred thousand. Now, remember, this is the 70s. Yeah, yeah. That's a lot of money in the mid-70s.

That's a lot of money now. But you can imagine back then, that's like half a million dollars. So they raised the money and gave it to that corrupt piece of work and, you know, the invective vernacular. Anyway, so make a long story short. court or before the detections initially told mom it's a hundred grand or you're going to prison so she she quashed the case but mom took it to the Supreme Court and that's what you pulled up when we were in Coleman right and you know Marlene Hudson aka the

lady the lady yeah so versus the state of Florida um so I was what at this point so when is that well this that's 75 but we were up to about 79 when When did Doug get grabbed? Because he got grabbed twice. Doug got grabbed in the Bahamas on a load. And he got grabbed the first time. And the Bahamians took Doug into the Fox Hill. Right.

And they, I was still in Arizona then. But I didn't, you know, so. Fox Hill was like an infamous prison, right? In the Bahamas. Like horrible conditions. Yeah. Yeah, probably just as bad, if not worse, as Columby and Adel del Este, where Doug wound up in prison in Cuba in 83.

Right. When I had already came home from that federal prison camp for the $2 million in interstate transportation. So what happened with, so he's in the Bahamas? Mom calls the Colombians and says Doug's in the, in Fox Hill. The Colombians go to the, essentially the story that was given that Dougie gave me and mom, they, the Colombians went to the jailer. I got to a jailer in the Bahamas and said, we'll give you a 50 Gs, 25 now and 25, you know, when the kid comes home, we'll have a cigarette sitting down there in the, in the marina. So sit there, so they put a cigarette boat, the Colombians put a cigarette boat in the marina and the prison guards let him out.

Like they let him escape. They leave a door open. Apparently one individual that they were able to get to. Right. And, uh, but this individual decided he was going to keep the money and his job and gave, gave up Doug. And when Doug got in that, in those days, you had to open, you had to run the blowers. You had to open up the, the, the blowers on the boat to get all the gas fumes out of it. Otherwise, you could go up like a, like a, like a Roman candle.

All right. So Doug's in, Doug got down in the marina, got in the boat. And, uh, here comes, uh, could have been a hatteras or a bertram that they had confiscated, converted with a 30 caliber or 50 up on deck with a 5,000 counterpower searchlight and you know so Doug just took off he didn't even know and he took off didn't even run the blowers for a minimum three minutes and took off and uh they opened up on him and there was quite a few holes in the vote Doug made it to Fort Lauderdale and you know that was it and from to my knowledge the Colombians found out that the jailer had double crossed him and he never had

had a chance to spend that money. All right. So, you know. So then, so basically you come, so what happens with you? You come back, you come back to Miami. What happened with Chris? Well, Chris, I came back home and we were together for about a year. And it got to the point where mom told me finally, listen, you're coming home.

I need, you need to come home and get on the boat because Doug is going to kill himself. He's going to OD. So his heroin problem had gotten a little out of hand. but listen, I had had the same, I had done the same thing, but I had essentially kicked it back in 73, you know, when I bought that first Harley. So he, you know, was really giving Mom fits. And the whole operation could, you know,

because they would get $100,000 up front as a captain's fee before he ever got in the boat. You know, the people, the Italians that were buying the marijuana were given Doug a captain's fee, and that would essentially cover any expense. that may they might incur in case he got interdicted you know the the Coast Guard boarded him or he wound up in a foreign prison somewhere right so they could get him out like he did winding up when Castro got him so um my then I told mom Chris hates

Miami she doesn't want to go back there and then you know she said get rid of her so but I wasn't I was I loved her I didn't want to leave right now and so mom essentially had and sending me quite a bit of money and I still needed to get that operation so she kind of cut me off right so we wound up just living together and she was still dancing at that club and I was doing a few things I was still stealing Harleys here and there and doing a burglary here or there and I put together a score um her mother her the mother-in-law was a quite the quite the hater and the fact when Chris came home from her honeymoon they never got a lawn together And Chris had told me one time that they had gotten a fight

and put each other in the same hospital room in separate beds across from each other. And I was like, Chris was a beautiful, beautiful woman, but she was tough. It's about 5'9, you know, fine. So she was definitely a 10. So anyway, we would fight on occasion. And I put together a score that my good friend Lumpy

had run across. He was a carpenter at excellent. I used to hammer and nail with him and frame houses years before when we were younger. And he said, yeah, he did a room edition for this real wealthy Jewish guy that owns a jewelry store, and he's building a bigger

jewelry store. So all of this inventory is in an alarmed part of the property, you know, about 5,000 square feet. And he essentially gave me a layout of the and we went over there and I sold a little bit of gold to the guy and I got a and I did a little recon you know and I saw it was heavily alarmed proximity you know LEDs on the doors um tape on the windows and as we're driving away in lumpy's porch he says to me and we're smoking a joint I'm just staring out the window and lumpy looks over me he knows what

I'm thinking he goes no there's no way there's no way you're going to be able don't even think about it I go you know there's he says I says to him I says you know there's got be about 17 or 18 pounds of gold. Gold was at $550 an ounce then. It was the highest it had ever been. And hanging on the walls, just in chains and diamond pendants and, you know, displays, you know, and, you know, Cardier, Rolex, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the diamond rings. So Lumpy goes, forget about it.

You're not going to, and he'll never get. He says you could try going up in the attic and crawling across the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the home into the guest house where everything was being kept under, you know, the whole, the whole property was heavily alarmed and, uh, you could jump through the drywall. And I thought about that for a minute and then I tried that one night, you know, I would, I would scope the, the, uh, the residence and the individual was gone. You know, there were two cars of driveway, a new Mercedes, diesel and a, and a El Dorado. So I knew he had a wife and a couple of kids and I went back there and tried that, tried to move the attic

enclosure up about two inches and the alarm went off so i told lumpy oh listen you idiot there's this is proximity so what i did was eventually get a schematic of the of the uh alarm system and i went back there the guy went on vacation i just happened to get lucky so i went in and it took eight hours it was one of the hottest nights in arizona history it was 108 degrees at uh eight or nine o'clock at night. It was like 1001, 102. I had a young kid whose girlfriend worked at the squeeze bog with Chris, and I went in there, and it took about eight hours. I cut the alarms. I essentially, you know, disengaged the external system, the audible system, the striker, and had special tools, and then cut the glass like Jack Murphy did with an India Star-Sypire.

the long ruby and back of the day but mine were a little my entry was a little more professional and I tied off the alarm system this is the tape and I got in

and I told this kid listen it was a cul-de-sac so you had an alley and then you had to run around the side of the home had a pool had a it was about 5,000 square feet

had a big swimming pool I says tap on that side window if you see any police coming down there's only one way to get in right coming down the street it was at the end of that street at a cul-de-sac off of glendale avenue and 12th street so uh as i stepped up to the room where all the inventory was i could actually feel this it was glowing red and feel the the almost a hum an audible hum from all the service that

was being running there and i you know had a ski mask on and you can see the LEDs across the doorway on the two feet up a foot up and then from you know so that the light emitting diode would it would trip the alarm so you had to dive between them so i threw the duffel bag in there dough between them stood up and uh as soon as i stood up they had a backup system that wasn't on the schematic and the damn thing would the alarm system was sold out it woke the dead right so it had to have woken up at least five square blocks but you're already in the kid left me It scared him to death, but I was in, and I wasn't leaving. And in Arizona then, burglaries were prosecuted for, you had had a window of maybe five to eight minutes before they were, they were the Phoenix Police Department.

Burglaries were heavily prosecuted. And I went away on. And you've already been. Yes. So a second offense carried a men and man of 15. Yeah. And I had been doing them all along when I built the motorcycles. You know, so, you know, I had the, I had the, the butterflies the whole time I was doing burglar.

I did some high-end burglaries when I was building the first, the second panhead, you know, and that Keith conned me into building. So the alarm went off and I stayed in there. I looked at my watch. I was in there for nine minutes. I got every last bit of inventory and got stuck coming out the window because there was just this tiny pain

that I had cut to open these windows cranked open but I tied off the alarm you know with the alligator clips and all that kind of jazz and it didn't matter because all that time I took you know it was immaterial

because I set off a backup system right so by this time you can hear voices of the neighbors in fact the neighbors did come out outside one time when I was on a two-story ladder that I used the neighbor that the the individual that that owned that property I used his two-story to go up and and and disengaged the audible system with the bell and the striker I took that all apart but there was another one inside the attic anyway I got out of there and made it back to the

we had parked across a main a main thoroughfare Glendale Avenue and an apartment complex parking lot right there and i went and uh walked back through and got and this kid was sitting in his jeep and i had about 30 pounds 40 40 pounds gold diamonds you know and watches you name it and i threw it in the back of his jeep he never knew i had it and i got it and my little brother wanted to kill him when he found out because my little brother this in my they had essentially helped me with how to tie out the system because i was not a cat burglar per se right i did burglaries but i was the more of the Jimmy the door with a crowbar, vice grips, you know, get in, get out. And, you know, so, but this one was a little different.

So we waited and about 20 cars come up with the lights flashing. And the helicopter is already over the property with the search light. But it was, but the, I watched the helicopter go across this property was West Abyss. And I noticed it went across 12th Street, which we were sitting on facing north. And Glendale ran east-west. And we were right there on the south, eastern corner of 12th Street, right on the street. And I'm watching, and the cops were making the left as they went up. There was a canal that runs around Phoenix, and they had made a left.

And I'm looking over with this kid. And I says, they went the wrong way. So we just sat there for a while and waited. Then they finally came back across 12th Street and went the right direction. And I said, let's get out of here. So that was it, you know. I went back home, woke up Chris. You know, she, and then, and this kid, you know, I was a little upset that he left me there.

And I says, where's all the tools they had all my prints on them? Right. Snap on, you know, a rollout police, you know, belcro that I used to, you know, the glass cutter, everything had my pre-kills. I threw it in the alley. I had to go back there early the next morning and find the toolkit that had all my prints on it and get that. So, you know, we fenced off the stones, just the stones. alone. I went and hit right down 12th Street and went to a culture Cadillac and bought a

brand new Seville cash and rolled back up. You know, this is 1970. Yeah, yeah. 1979, 80. And then, you know, and then we moved the gold. It took a while. But Chris had come home on our honeymoon a year and a half before and had told her mother everything. Because one morning in miami she woke me up he says i want now helped your mom do the laundry and oh we smoked some of that fertilizer so um and i and i said oh my i says oh shit i says look i that we better we better have a talk so i told he his mom's a smuggler i says what do you mean i says she brings in you know large amounts of marijuana on boats from columbia so chris went back and she never got along with her mother and they essentially hated each other and she liked to

really just get under her mom's skin so she told her everything no michael you think you're wealthy her mom she says michael's mom cleans house and a nine-carat marquee diamond so you think we're wealthy so her mother's threatened to go to the police and i had to call my mom and tell her who left the call back and left the message on our answer machine when chris and i came back from the club one night because she'd go dance and I'd just go in the club and you know drink play foosball right galaga you know and uh sit there and watch her dance and then we would go across the street to uh to uh to like a denny's was called a carols have breakfast and go home and uh she says uh my mom says michael it's your mother she says uh tell your tell your wife that if her mother goes to the police

I'll have her killed. And that pretty much put the kibosh on her mom going to the cops. Right. So, and it kind of, our marriage was a little, it was just, look, you know, the mother-in-law, she was right in the middle of it. She just, she couldn't help, but just try to just disrupt the whole thing. And we loved each other, you know, but I feel this way. Chris did the right thing because she, when we did, when I did that score, it got a

on our feet you know she turned around and she went and told her mom and she says the cops are going to come in that condo that you two live in and when they're going to take you to jail along with him but she and i started arguing about something and then she eventually uh you know she eventually uh took off right so by that time i had uh i you know i ended up meeting johnny patterson and we started stealing the heavy equipment and i moved out of the there real quick to try to cover my tracks into a luxurious condo, bought an El Dorado to match my silver Seville brand new, and that's what I was doing. Right.

And I dropped, you know, by this time I went underground, you know, and started doing the disco thing. So, you know, we're doing the disco deal, and that's, that's, that's essentially what, how my lifestyle then. It was discos and Phoenix and cocaine and discos, you know, and flipping a pound. of coke here and you know a couple of pounds of pot there was your mom still moving oh yes just marijuana or had she switched to coke no they didn't start they didn't go to the cocaine until i came home you know yeah because the there was a lot of heat with the federal government

on the marijuana when they when they uh you essentially think of the terms think of the movie scarface when Tony's telling, you know, Alex, he's telling, hey, you know, this is not a cakewalk anymore with the new, you know, spy in the sky technology. The feds had the floor, the forward looking infrared radar, the look down, shoot down radar, which is essentially the same technology that he had in the F-14s in the Tomcats then. Right. That looked down, shoot down, you know, the infrared signature of a boat, the wake signature would give. give it away. It's running hot. They could see it. It's bright red. They knew it wasn't, you know, that it was low in the water. And they would contact a Coast Guard cutter and say, you might want to check this boat out. Here's the coordinates. See? So you had to really know where the, where the Ghost Guard

was at. Mom knew. They had the grid system. They knew where they're pretty much where they ran and what times of the year, you know. Remember, you got a window. You got a window to go to Columbia. you got hurricane season. Any kind of storm out there. We had a friend that named Doyle that got lost out there when a kid that Doug grew up with in Arizona. They went to grade school together. They were best friends.

He brought him out to Miami, put him on the boat. And Hurricane David caught him. Right. And they were never seen again. So. And this was running a load for your mom. Yeah. Yeah.

And I was still in Arizona then. I was still, me and Chris were living together and I was still in the dozen. And I had to go convince the kid's mom not to go to the, the feds or go to the, I said, well, it's his mom's trying to find out where if they got interdicted and they're in a foreign prison someplace. Right. So, you know. But you think it was a hurricane?

We knew it was a hurricane. Right. Yeah. But that was the story we had to give the kid's mom. Right. You know, she knew nothing about the boats unless he had told her. But she never did the poor, she was a junkie herself. The kid was a junkie.

Right. But Doug got him out to Arizona, got him out to Florida to dry him out and took him from Arizona to Miami. And I guess, you know, like the impact of Doug pretty, pretty tough because the kid wound up. That's, that's a, you know, that's not a good way to die going down in a hurricane. You know, think of the movie. What is the name of that movie? It's a great movie. It's a great movie.

Yeah. Oh, man. The perfect storm? The perfect storm. Perfect storm. Think about that. yeah going down like that you're you're fighting for what a day it might take a day it might take eight hours no tell how long it takes for that boat to go down to davy jones so that's it so i uh

i'm sorry for me the the references are i can see the boat going up you know and i am as soon as you said davy jones i immediately see fires the caribbean with davy jones where he's got the the squid sorry there you go so you know so me and johnny patterson started stealing the heavy equipment two brothers that i had known when i was an outlaw biker i got in a lot of fights in north phoenix and they were bouncers at a club called the the foggy bottom and i beat a guy up in there pretty bad so i had 50 or 60 hand-to-hand combats and uh when i was a dirty dozen and uh you know i got in a lot of fights before that because essentially the dirty dozen i started hanging out with them they would call you a leaner you know

and the ones that weren't in the club because the dozen owned Arizona and they had ran 15 or more outlaw motorcycle gangs out of Arizona killing them and shootouts you know you name it when I was still in grade school the dirty dozen took over and owned Arizona like the HAA owned California

right so you know you were boosting trucks or the yeah we were we were uh these two brothers were bouncer at this club and they introduced me to john at a party one night they lived in a nice pretty much a nice home pretty much like you know like like you ran here right i came in there and i said and that one's driving a new corvette and i was got a new four-wheel drive truck and i'm thinking they're not doing too badly right and it was a high-end neighborhood they're not doing too badly for being bouncers because i'll still ride my bike right and uh we went to a to a party and uh a kegger

and there was this guy in there another guy the and his brother were terrorizing all these two or three hundred kids there one guy the the the the taller of the brother was a of the two brothers was about six foot 10 six nine if he was an inch and the other one was about six four six five and uh went outside with some dudes got in there in there a van to do a bump and we were in there and we heard a bunch of noise and they were going around pitching all the girls and he asked and they were across the street and under a street light and had these three or four guys out there backed up you know across the street and then this guy says hey man that's them two guys that are you know walking around the party so I went outside and I

said hey man calm down everybody be cool and I'm just starting to come on this blow and anyway the one of them come I just kind of touched him on his elbow and he kind of swung back at me and he had these were sidewalk commandos these are the guys that are wearing harley uh uh jackets but they don't have any motorcycles my bike was parked right on the on the front lawn of that kegger and i was wearing my patch right and uh um i just you know i lean back you know and i was trained by a by golden gloves champion in the state prison in arizona named bobby golden out of Oregon so i was pretty really really good with my hands and i leaned back a little bit, but the tip of his zipper caught me in my lip as he's as he backhanded at me.

Get your hands off me, man. So I ran him down and knocked him out. Had to run him down. He tried some karate stuff and all that jazz and I just, you know, you know, blocked the kick, you blocked all of his kicks and I ran up on him and knocked him out with a hook. Well, the brother run up on me. I heard him running up. He left these other four guys and ran up on me and I hit him on an overhand and he went right down and I thought you know I heard a little noise

like you're pouring a beer out slope and by that time we could hear the sirens coming and the Higgins brothers ones that years about a year and a half later ratted me and Johnny out well see they got busted for for coat twice

and they had been stealing the heavy equipment with John that's how they're able to afford that house they've been with John stealing the heavy equipment they got busted and they're both snitches right So I had thought about coming back to Arizona and killing them both.

Years later, but Mom said put a stop to that. No, no, we don't need that kind of heat. But it would have been simple because we were, you know, we were highly trained in that kind of thing because, you know, all the guys, all the gangsters that Mom knew and all this kind of crap. We knew how to get rid of somebody. They were never seen again. So I turned around and we ran to their house and the cops came and not to get off on a tangent,

but about that two years. later had a buddy names names i'm not going to mention his name but he was coming out to miami getting a getting a couple of pounds of coke and taking it back to phoenix we went out there by this time chris had left and i was oh living you know over there in that in a in a luxury condo we went he bought a new jeep we went out to the river went four-wheel so these guys we saw some of guys doing four-wheel and they had another one of those kind of vans and hey you want to come in and have a drink and hey nice jeep blah blah we went in there so we're sitting there or five us in there, and my buddy was very, very clandestine. He was very close-lipped and very

professional. He was rather well to do with the operation he was running between Miami and, you know, and Phoenix. And one of these guys pips up and says, hey, you were at that party with the Higgins brothers. You knocked those two brothers out because everybody came out in the front lawn when it happened and started clapping. Right. So then we hear the cops coming and the, and the, because we'd better get out here as we went to their house and hid even though the cops knew where they were at they we saw them driving by all night so we essentially sat in there and did coke all night and just peek to the curtains and watched the cops coming back and forth in front of the house he goes I said no no no you got me missed because my hair was cut was you know and the beard

the you know the food man chew it was all gone and clean shave and he goes no no it's you I go no man it's not me Scott's you looking over at me going hey man whoa hey and I said listen now you got you got me messed up with somebody else the guy goes no man it's you so finally i go okay okay i says yeah it was me he goes man you're in the dirty dozen i says that that was a while back not anymore so i says by the way i said scott goes i think we should leave you know because he was really close-lipped and he didn't want any kind of notoriety at all i go look i said so what happened with that guy goes he says you cut an artery in his cheek he almost bled to death he lost like three quarts through his cheek but before they got him to the emergency room

in the ambulance so i was i was just like you know but uh that's a bullet yeah so that's the kind of you know that's the kind of that's how it was in the club it wasn't a week didn't go by it seems i couldn't avoid it so that's what was going on when i when i when i spotted chris at that club and i kind of started getting away from from by the president of my chapter got really upset. I was his protege. He was gruey to become a warlord. But I didn't, after a couple of years of that, Matt, two years or three years of it, I really didn't want to do that anymore. I really wanted something different. When I saw her and got to know her, I had this wild, I had this hooker that was bringing me $500 a night. She worked at a massage parlor, a girl, a lady named Paul,

a little older than me, a couple of kids, but we lived together. And me and Rabbit, the president of the Tucson chapter, he had a girl that worked with her. And we were, me and Rabbit, but we're really, really, really tight. And we had a little safe house in Phoenix nobody knew about. So that's where we were in Sconsed, and that's where we lived. But at the same time, you know, I really didn't, that dozen lifestyle, it started to get, there was only a matter of time before you wound up going back to state prison. Right.

For something that I had a roommate named Big George and another one named Hillbilly, they got in a fight at a bar, and it happened to turn, it was under surveillance. and an undercover Cobb got in the middle of it. And Big George, he was about 6'10. And he broke the guy's jaw. Big George and Hillbley wound up doing five years in the state of prison in Arizona. At that time, that's when I started wanting to distance myself

from the club. So you got, so you started, you started stealing, like, the tractors and stuff like that. How did you get caught for that? Well, the Higgins brothers got busted for COVID. cocaine twice in one month. That was the story I got later on, but they came out in the discovery. And they flipped Johnny to an FBI agent named Hank Webb out of El Paso, FBI Special Investigations, El Paso, head the equipment thefts, the head of the whole investigation, Hank Webb, an FBI agent.

And they introduced Johnny to Hank Webb under the guys. He went under the, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, alias cowboy. The Rolex, the cowboy hat, the boots, the gold. Right. The bling. And we started meeting this guy at a, uh, at a famous restaurant in, in Phoenix, um, uh, called the green gables. So one, now, by this time we're making, we're making a lot of money.

They're, they're flipping, giving us 30, 40,000. to pop for each piece of equipment that we're running across the state line. We'd go to Gallup. We'd run, run from Phoenix to Gallup. We'd steal one in New Mexico and run into Las Vegas. We'd steal one in Las Vegas, bringing down to Phoenix. So it's like a triangle. Right. So me and Mike

and we had a kid named Mikey Liner that was hot wiring the vehicles for us, the equipment. So we had to make sure we got out of Arizona. By the time the sun came up, we wanted to make sure we were across the state line. Before the identifying the plate number and the serial number,

on the heavy equipment and whatever it is else we had taken, you know, came up on the NCIC. Yeah. That's all they had back then. So, you know, the Higgins brothers gave up Johnny to the feds in order not to go to jail for these are pretty, these kids were half-ass tough, but either I could have whooped either one of them. Right. You know, and in fact, the guy that I beat up one night and I came back a week later when the dozen had gone in there. there because of all those Ohio bikers. We'd see about 50, 60 bikes from Ohio with Ohio plates. So one night at a meeting of the dozen, my president, fat Al says, we're going to go in there.

Don't anybody wear any dirty dozen paraphernalia go in there undercover, no bikes. We're going to find out what's going on with these Ohio guys. So we went in there and I got in a fight with some guy, some big biker that, and I was really young too. I was still 22, 23, clean shaving. looked awful young with the, you know, didn't realize I was what the dirty does. He knew a couple of them, but he got mouthy. You know, one thing led to another,

and I lit him up in there and knocked all the teeth out of his mouth, put the boot to him once he, once I kicked him under the bar. But when I went back a week later, the owner of the bar goes, that's that guy that was here a week ago and told the Higgins brothers throw him out. And they go, you throw him out.

Now, then we met, we went outside, we talked, and that's when we started, we got pretty friendly, and they invited me to their house. You know, I started going in the club. I told the owner, listen, man, I'm alone. That what happened last week, it was just a flute thing. Listen, the guy tried me and look, that's what happened.

So he goes, okay, I says, I'm not coming in here with any brothers. We're not coming in here in force. So that was it. And then when the Higgins brothers got busted about a year later for the Coke, they turned around a year and a half later because remember that during that interim, I married Chris, went back and forth, went to Miami. And so that was it. they gave up Johnny Patterson to the feds.

We sold a bunch of heavy equipment to the feds. And you? No, it didn't give me up. They wanted to get me away from it. They gave up Johnny only. Johnny kind of wanted to be the spokesman. How did you go to prison for the heavy equipment? John would meet our buddy, our Hank Webb, the FBI agent, cowboy at the Green Gables restaurant once a month.

We would go there in a limo, or we would meet together. I'd drive his Corbett. I would go over there. We're going to meet Cowboy, 5 or 6. And you go in this place on a Friday or Saturday night. You got people stand. It's a gazillion degrees outside. You go in there.

And when I would notice that we would be sitting at a table like this, and there would be people all around us. But four or five of the tables, and one of the, you know, he had to have a reservation. They're not occupied. And then you had some upraised diets where there were tables and booths, pictures on the walls. It was done in a Green Gables done in an English Tudor type of style. Right.

They had a guy sitting outside on a horse wearing a stude of armor in Phoenix. I used to walk by the guy and look over. I goes, man, you got to be cooking. I says, man, are you alive? And you hear him mumbling obscenity under his suit of armor. I said, man, this guy's got to be, I don't know what they were painted and sit on that horse wearing that suit of armor. But anyway, we would sit down there and cowboy, Hank Webb would walk in and we were talking. John did all the talking.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We can bring in and we're going to bring up a dump truck next week. We'll meet you in Vegas. We'll meet you in Vegas. We'll meet you in Gallup. We're going to bring a greater on a, we're going to steal a low boy and a Peterbilt or a Kenworth and bring it to Gallup. You would tell him essentially what we're going to grab and where to meet us. I never said a word.

four or five clandesta meetings with this guy and the last meeting that we had the Fed looks over it meaning he goes you know Mike I got up to leave I was pretty roared out by then I was cutting those big railroad locks with a set of special boat cutters bolt cutters excuse me to get you know Mikey Laird would cut a hole

we would cut a hole in the fence he would go in there try to get the Dobermans out hotwire a couple of trucks move them out of the way to get the guy's prize tractor and then we would he would call me on the radio So in Patterson, being the chicken shit that he was, he would sit down the road about a block where he could kind of keep an eyeball on us, you know, eyeball the whole deal. I would tell him, I'd tell Lider, you got to get the air pressure up to 100 pounds.

Once the air pressure was up to 100 pounds, he would let me know it. I would cut the lock, roll the gates back, and he would come through. I would shut the gates and then put another lock that matched the one that I cut to when the contractor, his key wouldn't work on the lock. It would be just a... Give you another hour or so, yeah, give me another, yeah, a little more. more of a window to get across the state line. So in that last meeting, I get up and I shake, I tell John, I'll see you at the club later,

and I would, you know, and I looked over at the Fed, cowboy, and I said, uh, well, nice seeing me again. And he goes, you know, Mike, he tried that little cowboy, that, that hick, freaking accent. He was actually from El Paso. He goes, you, uh, you never say nothing, do you? Like, oh, well, whatever. I says, no, I ain't got nothing to say. He says, Patterson here, let John do all, I let him do all the talking.

I left. Well, he goes, I'll pick you up in the limo. He yells over at me as I'm leaving. He goes, I'll pick you up in the limo tonight, as usual. And we were going to a bar, a club called the store. The biggest country Western bar in the United States at the time was Gilles in Texas. Right. In Houston, Dallas, I forget.

But the second largest was the store in Phoenix. And that's where we would go. And millions of girls, blah, blah, blah. And he picks me up in the limo. Urban cowboy was shot in Gillies. There you go. Yeah. You know what Urban cowboy is?

No. Travolta. Travolta. Yeah. It might be before Colby's time. But anyway. It was massive. Yes, it was.

So I would go through all that. But I didn't, I would essentially get up and I would go after that, that, that, that, that thing at the store, John, it was, it was a, it was a deal. with him he you know all the girls were all over him the blonde hair the buck teeth the skinny body the jordash jeans so we would i would go i would go there and hang out with him for an hour or two drink and i said i got to go right so i'd had the limo take me back to order to my uh to my condo and i jumped my car and i wanted to go to the disco right a lot of close friends that were in there so you know i was flipping a lot of coke in there anyway john getting that that last meeting he

says to me he says man you really embarrassed me in front of that cop i mean excuse me he you're really embarrassed me in front of cowboy you know he really embarrassed me i said let me tell you something man i said you dumb ass don't you think it's weird to every time we go in there on a weekend or a friday or a saturday that there's nobody sitting around us what are you saying i said i don't know i said i'm just saying i got a bad feeling about you know i he goes now man everything's good they've given us two 300 000 already for all the stuff we are we all the heavy equipment long you know long story short um they waited for us in gallop we went to las vegas took the uh hit tab construction the largest non-union construction company in

las vegas in nevada and took his prize pewter built and went to a job site took a grader and took it into gallop and they were tailed us the whole time they they i would be me and liner would have the chase truck a big duly with a snap on toolkit we could change a tire on a tractor that's how much equipment we had air compressors and everything we would go to a motel and wait john to get paid and we'd come back and grab him and then you know and so we went back to about an hour or two went by and i saw and i said usually he was back in like 30 minutes and i told the kid liner he goes i said something's not right i says we're going back to phoenix well we drove back over there the feds had grabbed john when he pulled in there when we dropped off the uh you know the heavy equipment the the

the tractor of the low boy and the greater and uh they'd grabbed patterson from jump street the web came they swooped so they wouldn't know they didn't know where we're at but we came back through again and i decided to uh stop on the interstate at a somewhere just i said i got to get something to eat so i went to a burger king to get two uh uh you know two double um watson and then we're going to, I said, we're jumping, we got enough fuel to make it to Phoenix. And liner was dumbfounded. He was just the kid, the hot wired equipment. And he, Patterson would only flip him 5,000 in a pop, you know, so being, I knew Patterson was probably skimming off the top on me, you know, but we were, you know, by that, at that time,

that was, that was the lifestyle. And, uh, you know, so when we finally, they, they caught us, They had tailed us, and they grabbed us at the Burger King. We ended up in the jail in Gallup. We were taken to Albuquerque a week later, federal court arraignment. We had this flim flam attorney named Frank Lally that wore the same jacket with the same swayed elbows on his jacket. Same jacket every day that had us signed $50,000 promissory notes. So we turned around, and I looked at Patterson, and Patterson goes,

just sign the promissory note. I says, I'm not giving this guy. I says, I don't, dude, do you see that he's wearing the same, same clothes every time he comes? He's a paid-for attorney and this guy's a bum. And it's a small town Gallup and they're all telling him, you got some big shots now. You're going to make some money off these guys. Right. So we went to Albuquerque for arraignment and they had a highway patrolman that was essentially, you know, driving us back and forth, cuff us up and take us.

to Albuquerque, me and John made bond. Mom came in, mom came to Albuquerque, sent her bondsman in from Miami and we got bond. They bonded me out. John put his house up and everything and that was it. And then it came

out on the discovery. When we would go to that restaurant, there were telephoto lenses and there were shotgun mics in the pictures, in the booths that were unoccupied in the restaurant. And I told Patterson. So when it came out in court, the judge, Enrique Campos, a federal judge,

they had nothing on me. I never said a word. Patterson did all the talking. The judge gave him five years. He wanted to play the, essentially the ringleader, but we were partners, right? But the judge loved me. And he says, he says, Mr. Hudson, I'm going to give you two jeers in anywhere you want to go. I said, he goes, I go, he goes, he goes, Now you know you're pleading to misprision of a felony. Do you understand what that means? I says, Your Honor, it means that I had knowledge of a crime being committed. It was a lesser included offense from the interstate transportation.

I said, I said, yes, Your Honor, that means that I had knowledge of a crime being committed, but I didn't report it. He goes, exactly. I go, but Your Honor. I said, if that was the case, I'd be on the phone all day long. So the whole courtroom starts laughing, blah, blah, blah. The judge starts laughing and goes, hey, I really enjoy our conversations, Mr. Michael. He says, I'm going to give you two years. And I says, I want to go to Stafford Federal Prison Camp.

Okay, two years. You got a 90 days to clean up your affairs. You self-surrender. I said, okay. So my Aunt Carol Jean brought me up in my Cadillac, one of my cars. Right. Patterson got five. Right.

He cried in front of the judge. He literally cried. so why should I get and the judge hated him and the judge hated John Patterson just hated him he said yeah five years for you you just went to prison you get out I self surrendered you self surrendered you're there for what

a year or two years I did 14 months total so I wasn't 17 months you did on two years okay so I did 14 months there and they and got a halfway house in Miami Mom flew me in, chartered me from the federal prison camp to Tucson, and I took American Airlines with a two-hour layover in Houston and flew into Miami to the halfway house. Mom and Doug and Aunt Carol Jean picked me up.

Mom took my, took my, we sold the Seville, and she brought that, that brand new elder roller and parked it in the garage at the house in the shores. Okay. Then she, her, and they drove down, picked me up from the airport. We went back to the house. and I had to report in by 10 o'clock. And that was it. I drove myself to the halfway house.

Okay. With Arizona, my Arizona drivers lives with Arizona tags on the car. So I went to the halfway house in Miami and pulled in there at 10 o'clock at night or a little earlier and the guy goes, where are you from? Who are you? I'm Hudson. He goes, well, you're the only American Caucasian American in here. The rest of Cubans and Columbus.

and you're upstairs in rooms such and such you know on bed number right and uh that was it i drove myself in there and uh the halfway house then in 83 was essentially almost that we're under the old law see so um like the federal prison camp in safford had no walls or no fence you know if you wanted to walk off that camp you walked i there was a mexican that was in there that got indicted and he found out ahead of time and he just walked you know if you wanted to walk off that camp you walked i did i there was a mexican that was in there that got indicted and he found out ahead of time and he just walked all the way to Mexico yeah yeah he walked right past as i worked in the boiler room then i remember him grabbing one of our rakes and walking out in the middle of going out towards the desert i go hey man you can't pick that rake up he just kind of

smiled at me and grinned and where you going with a rake and then he just threw that rake over his shoulder to make it look like he was a worker you know working with us and but that there was only i was you know there was only 90 100 men in there at any one time How many guards, one or two? Oh, maybe a dozen, maybe more, but still, maybe 150 guys total, somewhere in there, but there wasn't very many. It had to be a million-dollar crime or more white collar to get into Safford Federal Prison Camp then. The only other inmates we had in there that were not in there for a white-collar crime

were the Indians because they're under federal jurisdiction. Right. So we had a couple of Indians in there, a patch, he's the one killed his neighbors because he thought they put a curse on him with a hatchet and uh yeah he used to god yeah so um so you went back to Miami like how long were you in Miami you started what captain a boat no we got back to my I'm still in the halfway house right I mean when you left the halfway house yeah I went I moved out to Miami Lakes and I lived with a pretty famous smugglers in the estates around the corner from Don Shula.

I moved into his house. He had separated from his wife. So his son, Wayne, I moved in there with Bobby Casal's kid and his ex-wife, Audrey, and their daughter lived there, the palatial home in the estates. And that's where I lived for a while before, you know, Dougie got, before we put together a load, Dougie gone on a boat to go to Jamaica and that's when he was interdicted by the Cubans. Oh, okay. By Castro.

Right, right. And so he wound up in prison there. And Bobby, the informant on my federal indictment in 2006, he was already there. He was already there since 79

with a kid who was the son of our next door neighbor. He was the younger brother of of the individual that had gotten um that got overran by hurricane david so bobby was doing or was uh he was he got arrested doing a a load or bringing in a load for your mom right so he was already there once he was already there with those guys or with the other crew members and just one just one yeah and then doug got caught with what two guys two guys two Cubans, two Cubans.

Yeah, two Cubans, an old man and a younger kid. Okay. And the kid was a naturalized American citizen. He was Cuban. But the old man had to escape from Cuba. Under Batista? Yeah, under Batista. And they grabbed him.

When they grabbed Doug, they knew they, you know, interrogated everybody. And they put a gun, my kid brother told me, yeah, they put a gun to the old man's head in front of the kid. So we're going to blow his brains out unless you tell us what the Gringo Capitan was, what's going on here because they found weapons on the boat. Right. Found an AK and, you know, uh, um, alley sweeper and, you know, some handguns

and that was it. They, uh, they, uh, essentially put a gun to the old man's head and told the kid you're going to tell us what's going on or we're going to kill him. And, uh, he said that we were going to Jamaica to pick up a load. So they had, I believe it or not, they, they hit Doug with a conspiracy

charge, which is, essentially under a communist regime that's kind of hard to believe that they need a charge like that. Right. They even need that law. Exactly. So you know, the Doug wound up in there and then he walked in years later and there's

there's young and that kid Dana in there. A kid Dana tried to kill himself three times because that's how bad that prison was. They had a 15 year sentence. They didn't think Bobby had a shootout with the Cubans when they got high and passed out on the boat

and drifted into Cuban territorial waters and they got interdicted by the Cuban Marines and Bobby went on deck with an M16 and they yeah they shot him up and then you know he was they were there for four years before Doug wound up almost four years before Doug showed up so and Jesse Jackson ran for

for president a few years later and got him out wait a minute so he was there your mom was going in every month or so bringing bringing food I did a score in Miami right and uh because I was essentially left alone at the time and so when Dougie never came back with that load we were with this me and mom and my aunt Carol Jean and uh of course she had her boyfriend the uh you know the uh the Italian kid Joey right return and uh you know so that basically we and so I I uh we only had one more boat and we didn't

You know, and we had one boat. We needed straps who was up on straps. In other words, it was in dry dock. We had no way to get it in the water, so make a long story short, that's, I went on the street. Right. So for about two years there, I was on the street, hustling, you know, and doing crazy stuff on the street. And a couple of scores, and I gave mom, like, one score for quite a bit of cocaine. I turned around at the King Cole over there in Normandy Island.

and I gave my mother the uh the drugs and she she she uh you know she got rid of them and this is the grisal de blanco one right uh i'm not sure yeah they were they were zips that that were we call the sicilians yeah yeah yeah but but the but the old man was the one that the joe paterno one of his soldiers named tommy they're the ones that that turned me on to these guys and he just wanted he just wanted to he just wanted a piece of the action so that's what i did i went in there and you know and uh went in there with a mini 14 and a high power 9 millimeter browning and but of course it was what i i would i do essentially i any kind of this anything like that i try

to set it up so there's i i really there's a 90 percent chance hopefully that i won't have to right discharge my weapon right so i went in you know and i got and i got lucky i got it you know walked out with with a with enough cocaine to give to mom that she could continue to pay her 25 thousand dollars a month nut that she had to come up with every month on the properties and everything that we owned and she could fly to Cuba

every month and feed those guys 50 pounds of freeze dried food that she could have only 50 pounds because basically these guys would starve to death in that Cuban prison. Yeah it was it was uh yeah it was pretty rough Doug was uh and they apparently they used Doug

and and I guess some other white guys that were in there as kind of as like jailhouse guards to watch over the other Americans that were in there. Kind of like a cool hand loop thing. Remember cool hand Luke? Essentially they had inmates in the movie

and they're also acting as like prison guards. But Doug was in there for a while. I guess he used a baseball bat or whatever. But whatever they kept them in line. and and then Jesse Jackson ran for president and you know the rest is history that he brought them all out right so you know who Jesse Jackson is right sounds like president to me no so wow so Jesse Jackson is um Jesse Jackson was a preacher he he had actually studied under or was under um Martin Luther King right like in all the marches and stuff he was in that whole organization well at some point

in the, is this the 70s or 80s, early 80s? Let's see. 60s, because when was Martin Luther King assassinated? No, no, I'm talking about when he ran for president. Oh, 84. 84. So he ran for president and one of the big problems with, with, he got an American downpilot out of, he got an American down pilot out of Russia? Yeah, I think so. So one of the problems with him is that a lot of the candidates were saying, He has no, like, international experience. Like, this is a civil rights leader.

Like, how's he going to run for president? So he goes on this mission, and he, like, gets, like, a downed pilot, like, out of Russia. Then he goes and negotiates to get, is it, 22 or 23? 22 Americans. 22 Americans gets Castro to release 22 Americans that are being held in a Cuban prison. Two of those. One of them was. Um, was, um, uh, Doug, uh, Doug Hudson, Mike's brother.

And the other one was, uh, Bobby, what's Bobby's last name? Young. Bobby Young, which is the guy that ends up, is the, of the guy on his case that worked for his mother. So they actually, um, so he, he flies in there on his private plane gets, convinced his Castro or let these guys go. They load them all up and fly them into Washington? Where did they fly in? Flew him into Dulls International in Washington, D.C.

Right. And we find out about it. Joey was the one that come to me. Because when my mom and my Aunt Carol Jean had a... The RV. The RV? Largest RV at the time. Fleetwood Pace Arrow.

She took that with a diesel. She took that motor home. And she drove it to Mexico with my Aunt Carol Jean, and they, and they, uh, they loaded it up with pot to the gills and drove it to Boston. And another friend of hers, a famous, pretty famous gangster named Walter Abraham Mets the 3rd, aka Howe. Right. Hal was, how was, uh, he was kind of like, kind of like a father figure, figured to me for a while there, you know, because when we were all, when Dougie was still locked up, you know, Hal and I did quite, did some things with Hal. So, Howell's in Boston, the mom and Aunt Carol Jean took the pot up there.

And then Joey came and woke me up one morning because we were living in the house. It's just me and Joey in the house and the shores and says, hey, the Jesse Jackson's in Cuba. And he's negotiating for the release of the however many Americans are there. And your brother's coming home. So I called mom and or she called and I let her know. So Joey. And I remember they were flying in when they finally, the news media finally let us know when they were coming in. I called Channel 7 News and I said it was at night.

And I said, this is a brother of one of the Americans that Castro released to Jesse Jackson. And, you know, I like to know when he's going to, you know, some of the details. And the lady there said, this is a night. crew there's nobody here so but the day the day crew the reporters and blah blah blah they'll be here I said okay she goes

I never gave her my name period anything they must have gotten the phone number but she turned around she says what's your brother's name is the Douglas Allen Hudson the next morning I'm in the shower they knock on the door with a camera crew and Joey let them in

which really didn't go over too good with Joey's dad right And the lady they sent over there was there was a Cecilia Fernandez, their crime investigative reporter. And Joey led them in the house. And once they walked into my mother's home, you know, jaws dropped. And I kind of steered them into the family room and sat them down. And, you know, because my mother, it was rather decadent the furnishings. And he's my mom.

Yeah. So the Lali Crystal and all the John. giant brass figurines, the shrimps, and, you know, eight feet, eight foot long brass shrimp and the vestibule in front of the, you know, the windows facing the street, the circular driveway, all kinds of, but you know, these, they were literally, uh, kind of blown away by the, you know, by the, uh, they kind of got a gist of what, you know, they had to know drug dealers. They knew something. They already knew. She was the crime investigator reporter. And so I did an interview for just to kind of, well, by that time, and joey let them in so you know i did an interview for which the tape which uh i got uh years later from a reporter there named sally fits they all used to frequent a club in north bay village which was called uh the runaway bay club and um i saw the her sally fits was a was a reporter for channel seven and i got her to get the tape they had taken that tape and they gave it to cnn so i guess it was

CNN for a couple of weeks or whatever after they came in so who so did your your mom and your aunt carol jean went and went and picked him up in the RV they went they left boston and went and went to dulls international and picked up Doug and uh then brought him home to miami and bobby was no bobby was what bobby was on on federal he had a federal warrant he had a federal warrant um or was on uh or was under indictment when they when he when he was on the boat

and uh so they grabbed they they kept bobby but naturally uh the rat you know he somehow he worked out a deal with the feds and probably told him uh you know all kinds of crap and and uh they they said yeah because you were locked up down there they were they were pretty uh lenient with them because he'd spend that time and prison of Cuban and so eventually he shows up at our door a few months later but um okay so so this is a second time your brother's escaped a prison sentence that probably should have killed him yeah um so at i mean so now but at this point like you guys are are he comes back

you guys start bringing in you know larger and larger loads right now like now you kind of go full tilt into into bringing in loads from what from Jamaica and and Columbia the kid the kid my doggy brought in another load

from from his release it was well it was a little while after his release a load came in We brought in a load and then, you know, he, uh, we purchased a condominium over there on the ocean and then, you know, and then, yeah, there was a, and there was more, uh, you know, some more, um, uh, mischief. What? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Once Bobby, once Bobby came down and him and Dougie, we, uh, put together a few deals here. in there you know and uh and then wound up with a problem with a guy and then right all right so um so we fast forward right past all the smuggling the the guy would turn out to be a problem right and it's it's it's it's it's uh public knowledge so this guy winds up dead right and uh but this guy

was also talking about uh possibly like you guys figure out that he's talking about he's talking about he's he's he's been he's been targeting he was targeting known drug dealers well this that individual you're referring to uh let's not come you got it did not come come come into the uh equation until years later when i ended up in a state prison in florida see okay this is after me and bobby and duggie ran for a while and we're indicted by the in the Miami City of Miami homicide cops were starting to try to sweat us on a homicide

right and we uh yes is this the guy okay is this the guy that shoots at the car like you guys get get to an argument he shoots at the car I set up a I set up a deal for a couple of keys in the in the in the lakes right and and and Doug and Bobby essentially blew the whole thing they wanted to go themselves instead of me going

and the guy they brought this guy with him but they didn't take and he he essentially blew the whole the whole deal and almost got my brother shot right yeah and by the individual that they were going to do the deal with

and then when they got rid of this guy the guy that they brought in that they should have never because mom said stay away from him he's you know he's he's no he's no good so you know I don't trust him. The guy turned around and when they dropped him off at his rental car, he took a shot

because he had a flat tire and they wouldn't help him, you know, fix it. And he took a shot at my kid brother. So that's they were driving away. Right. So he took, and that was it. So they, he got, he went to jail and that's it. He got out, they got, he got out of jail and they got him to, they got him over into a certain location in Miami. and the guy wound up, they found him an alligator alley.

Right. So that's what, that's what, that's what, that's what, that's what, that's what, that's what, the city of Miami homicide, uh, investigation, right? The two detectives, Nelson, Andrew and John Spear. John Spear was ahead of the city of Miami homicide. City of Miami relegated that entire investigation to them and them only. Nelson Andrew was the, was the, uh, the, uh, the city of Miami, uh, cop. That was the head of the investigation when Grisel de Blancel killed all those, killed those guys

down in the at the day Land Mall at Crown Liquors that was Nelson Andrew was Cuban he was the one that investigated

that isn't he is he the detective on on the documentary cocaine cowboys the same detective

those guys are rats so I don't know about Nelson was Nelson was on a documentary about Griselda oh okay yeah yeah

not the cocaine cowboys yeah so I remember Fabio Chola coming to me many a few times after i guess it was mens illustrated article came out about that about that cocaine cowboy uh movie and all that he goes who is this guy mike calling me babito i says i don't my knowledge nobody calls you fabito right he goes well i don't know who is this guy i says he's a

snitch uh this john rober's guy he's a rat so you know and the other guy that was you know so i says yeah whatever i says you know and he because he had read the he had read the article He didn't know who this guy is. What this guy is telling him, you know, they're telling this wild bullshit story about Fabio. You don't know Fabio, Cho. You don't, yeah, so, you know, you're not, yeah, but I was, and I read it, and he had asked me about it.

When, when we're in, in the pen in Georgia. Right. So, I have a quote, what, do you remember when your brother, doesn't your brother get, doesn't your brother get left? in the mountain somewhere is it oh that was years before when i was still in arizona when i was in the federal prison camp what happened they flew up this time they decided to take a dc3 and fly it

down there with uh down where columbia okay and where else and uh and they the the the the the house that i when i moved into the estates when i got out the federal prison camp that was bobby cassal he was a pretty famous smuggler in miami and his own right. They took a plane down to Columbia and apparently from my kid bro told me that they had a partner, a guy that lived

in Arizona named Chris. And he was partners with Doug and Mom and Bobby on that load that they're going to fly in from Columbia. Well, the federalities didn't get their protection money. And

when they landed the plane, apparently Doug went out in the jungle and Doug had to take a piss so as soon as the plane landed he goes off into the fucking jungle to take a piss and they run up on the uh on the and and and do uh you know Doug heard shots being fired and everything and he stayed in that jungle and uh you know according to my kid brother the the pilot and the copilot we both killed yeah the federalies pull up so they pull up these guys landed on a on a plant on a strip in the mountains on an air strip up there right to load to basically load up cocaine or is it marijuana marijuana yeah marijuana and it's like they didn't pay and so they pull the pilot and the co-pilot out you know the plane they're standing there they're like okay you guys didn't pay and they execute them well Doug just happened to be taking a piss in the jungle so he then takes so he takes off and wait you said that the people the guys loading the plane took off too you said the indians those wahitos took him up in the mountains in columbia and

And he stayed up there for three weeks, four, three or four weeks. And mom doesn't know what happened to him. My mother was pretty stoic. Even when he, when Doug wound up in prison in Cuba, we never knew where he was at for 30 days. Right. 40 days. I'm like, I'm, I'm a little worried, but mom was like stone-faced. You know, she was just, and eventually he would get a letter from, from Colbynado del Este in Cuba.

So anyway, Doug gives one of those Indians a runner, a note, and he runs, they, you know, it's like the Pony Express. Right. He does five miles and then it gives that note to another Colombian Indian, and he runs five miles, and they get it down to Raul in Bogota who gets the calls my mother and says, Doug's up here in the mountains close by where the airstrip was, you know. and she got a plane in there to get him out. So he's up there. He loses 10 pounds.

He's having a ball, though. He's chewing coca leaves and, you know, like the Indians, you know, and he's up there, but he's got 2.45s, one under each armpit. You know, my kid brother's up there, you know, just waiting it out. And like I said, that's how they got him out. Mom flew a plane down there and got him out. Where the Zips got, where I robbed the Zips? Yeah.

Well, that was while Doug was incarcerated in Cuba. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. This happened before Cuba. Yeah, you kind of touched on it. Yeah, so. Bailout is a psychological true crime thriller that pits a narcissistic con man against an egotistical, pathological liar. Marcus Schrenker, the money manager who attempted to fake his own death during the 2008 financial crisis, is about to be released from prison, and he's ready to talk.

He's ready to tell you the story no one's heard. Shrinker sits down with true crime writer, Matthew B. Cox, a fellow inmate serving time for bank fraud. Shrinker lays out the details, the disgruntled clients who persecuted him for unanticipated market losses, the affair that ruined his marriage, and the treachery of his scorned wife, the woman who framed him for securities fraud,

leaving him no choice but to make a bogus distress call and plunge from his multi-million dollar private aircraft in the dead of night, the $11.1 million in life insurance, the missing $1.5 million in gold. The fact is, Shrinker wants you to think he's innocent. The problem is, Cox knows Shrinker's a pathological liar and his stories of fabrication. As Cox subtly coaxes, cajoles, and yes, Khan's Shrinker into revealing his deceptions, his stranger-than-fiction life of lies slowly unravels. This is the story Shrinker didn't want you to know. bailout the life and lies of Marcus Shrinker available now on Barnes and Noble Etsy and

audible okay in the state prison in North Florida and they robbed the banks and the cops come to see you yeah but but what I was thinking is what got you you you ended up doing a stint in the state of Florida and was that for the fight no I'm sorry So we're on the, when we're on the run from the homicide cops, the city of Miami, the homicide cops put the Miami Beach narcotics on me and they went through an undercover form and tried to step in there for five keys. Right. And mom knew it stunk.

He didn't like the way it's, and she says, if we got plenty of money, there's no need for you. But I like to walk around with a big, you know, you know, back then it was just, so I wanted a little extra cash because they had to go to mom and, you know, you know. throw me 50, 20, 30, whatever. And she turns around and says, no, it stinks. And I go in there anyway, and they were cops. So. Right.

But you didn't, but it wasn't even, you weren't even going to sell them Coke, was it? You were, it was. Yeah, because in the old days, a lot of times, what Dougie and Bobby used to do a lot, what we did was we would call it, we would gaff, you get a couple pounds of sugar and gaff it and, and, uh, you might throw an A ball in there and then you know right where it's that so you throw it you you you scoop out the the eight ball and if they want to test it they can test it yeah make sure they're not yeah this way this way we're 99% of it's sugar but you've got you know the spot where the ape where the where the coke is so they scoop it up

and you gaff it so this way it's anything anything crazy goes down you'll know they're not cops you might and you might say hold on don't freak out but just wanted to make sure you guys were you know who you say you are now after the cops coming to and hold themselves out to be drug dealers right and they're not so you did that to this guy when and when he pulled out a syringe to test it that's when i the alarm bill went off so i just put my pistol and right up under his jaw and he had a heart attack they thought it was going to be a slam duck but i scared him to death so that was it and then uh i pretty much robbed them for the cash right so and but you know they uh but just

didn't work out. Well, of course. Yeah, you want, so I wound up and, uh, undicted for possession of cocaine, uh, they, they, they threw it out there as a kilo because we're going to do a kilo up front first. When I wanted, you know, I wanted to count all the money for the five keys, but they were hedging on that. They didn't have. They couldn't get, they couldn't get city of Miami Beach to give them that much money to bring to me to count. So we came in. We said, well, I said, well, we'll do two then. See, so. So, Let's, you know, and then they, then they, they, uh, they, uh, essentially got me down to, to, you know, and I said, okay, you know, and so, uh, that was it.

They brought the cash for a keg and it was, you know, almost 30 Gs. So that was it. So I, you know, um, Janet Reno prosecuted me on that case, personally. So how much time she yet? Well, we were already on the homicide investigation. The city of Miami homicide came into that house where that individual essentially was, we killed him. What they did was they came in looking for forensic pathology, blood, brain matter, blah, blah, blah, and they found a large cache of weapons.

Some real exotic stuff, and it took, you know, my kid brother and me years to collect. Mostly my kid brother, so they got my prints on a sawed-off shotgun. Right. And that was it. They were able to get a warrant out for. from my arrest for the two sawd-offs. They found me in Tampa in a safe house. While Doug and Bobby had jumped,

jumped Florida and had gone to Tennessee to another safe house while we're being investigated and followed all over South Florida by these two homicide cops and their crew. So make a long story short, they got me in Tampa, here

at Tampa, and I went to the Hillsboro. They found me in the safe house, the Hillsboro County Jail, Mom bonded me out, and I'd met met a young hooker up here and I took her back to the condo we had on the ocean in Miami and then, you know, hung out there for a while and just kind of, she said, cool your heels for God's sake. And I had an attorney, Mark Krasno, that represented me in that case.

And then they tried to set me up for the, for the narcotics. And then, you know, of course. And then they saw those two charges, they lumped them together and ran a concurrent. It was attempted murder, a police officer. possession of a kilo, trafficking, possession of, trafficking in cocaine, possession of, you know, you know how it is. Yeah, they're a little shotgun.

See, I hope one of the pellets will stick. See, so make a long story short, we, that's about the time that, you know, I started going, my attorney was Jewish. And that's when I, you know, started down, and I couldn't get a, I was on bond on the shotguns. I made bond in Hillsborough County Jail. So I was on bond when I, flew back to Miami with that with that girl and then kind of you know kind of laying low but

you know and everything you know with Doug and Bobby being out of state now where there's a lot of heat you see plus we're with she my mom still with the with Joey the uh the the Gambino captain's freaking kid so you know so we got a lot of heat so calm down trying to take it easy don't do anything crazy. But, you know, I was a little unbalanced at the time. You know, so I went, went for the, for the, the, the, the street drug by and there were cops. Right. So they, they ran them concurrent, the shotguns with the other charges, they ran them concurrent.

And about that time, I started going down to the, to the chapel and started, you know, going down there with a guy named Willie, who was a Cuban, he got busted for two kilos. So he took me down the chapel. and I went down there and I heard the gospel and they got saved. Simple. And then wound up, then my attorney's, and Janorino's trying to give me 40 years.

And every month they come with a little bit lesser of an offer. 40, 35, 28. And I'm flipping out and they're thinking, you know, and my attorney's going to attempt a murder on a police officer. The cop's going to test it by. you, you know, you put a load of pistol up under his neck, put in his belly or whatever, you know. So their little slam dunk investigation didn't quite go the way they had planned it. So they had a little vendetta.

And these guys, look, they try to steal my Rolex when they had me cuffed and all this kind of stuff. So to make a long story short, the attorney comes to me and he goes, we're Jewish. We don't believe in Jesus, but something's going on here. She kept coming down, you know, because he, he initiated an entrapment defense. And back then, here you got these cops hold themselves out to be drug dealers or undercover narcotics agents. And so what he did was he raised that entrapment defense. And Reno still trying to step to us with an offer that was just, for me, it was just, you know, 20 years. They got down to around 20.

She takes a vacation, tells her subordinate, Sally at Weintraub, offer them, don't offer them less than 12. They'll think we've got no case. What Weintraub did was she came to me with five and a half years. Right. Now, I'd already got a year in a county jail. And they dropped some of the charges, and I had to plead to the bin man for the pistol.

So I told my attorney, I got a year in a county jail. I do two more years for the men, man for the pistol. After that, the back of the sentence, I says, they're telling me they're giving everybody in the state of Florida 120 to 150 days consecutive gain time every month because of the overcrowding and that judge and had signed that order to start releasing inmates. So I said, he goes, no, we got this case beat.

Five and a half years, they don't have a case. I said no you never know I said no that's not that's not that's not that's not what God's telling me man I said I tell you right now that's not what I'm hearing from the Lord I'm telling you right now I'm taking the deal I told your mom that uh you're going to be home in two weeks we're going to trial well a famous gangster from from Canada also another friend of Joe paternal's named Willie O'Brien also known as the meat packer he was a Jewish mobster and a heavyweight he loved me and we were all locked up in there together at that time.

Joe got arrested on a murder indictment. Then they got Obie, O'Brien, Willie, they got Obie, and they got a couple of Joe's soldiers. So we're all locked up in there together. And then Obie went to the Jewish attorney and says, give Marlene back most of that money you gave her. Mike's going to plead out. So the most of that money she gave you, you give it back to her.

but he initially told this a Jewish attorney from Jump Street months before, make sure you do a good job with Michael or otherwise I'll. Right. So he's coming to me. When he comes to visit me in the Dade County Jail, he's all hyped up and really just a real gun shy and skittish. And I asked my mom, what's going on? And that's when she came to visit me.

She says, well, Obie told him if he doesn't, do a good job, he's going to kill him. So I said, what are you doing that for? You know, because at the time, I didn't really realize, you know, the way things would end up, and the way things would pan out. So I took the deal and I did the two, I did two more years on the pistol and then I was out in another, when I started, you can't, you couldn't get the game time while you were doing the

men, man. right right after that the two and a half years in the back of the sentence it was gone so and when i and when i when i pled the judge ralph persons was apparently that and you and i both know that this is a real rarity he was a he was a preacher as well as a as a day county judge so he is always ragging those homicide cops don't come in here and disparage that defendant and tell them about how many tell me about tell this court about how many people they killed and stick to the issues you know and uh or oh i'll i'll charge you with the contempt and then uh you know once i took the deal reno she came back from vacation found out what wine truck wine trob had done but i had signed the deal

right it was over with and she could hear her screaming in his chambers they had a sidebar and they went into judge's chamber she was screaming at wine trip do you realize what you've done you know we can't get the mother but you know we we had this guy we had the son but i was home in 89 i was back home in 89 in four years well when you so when you were locked up though some detective or was it FBI FBI came to see you right because ducky and when i was when i was locked up in baker correctional Doug and bobby had split up when they're in tennessee so they got me first right right then Doug was still on the lamb he hooked up with this one of the individuals that was also an informant and in the federal indictment for the for the cocaine the

jumper smuggling yeah that was his that this individual there were two brothers yeah this was the older brother they they killed him in a federal prison in midwest somewhere apparently he was uh i don't know yeah claker claker yeah they found they hung him in his cell he was a rat so uh like the like the kid brother they're you know they're their informants so they make a long story short short, Dougie hooked up with the older brother, whatever the nickname, the jumper, because he'd escaped from a few jails. And they robbed a few banks in Jacksonville. Right. Well, I thought it was because he was jumping over the, uh, he would run and jump over the, I guess, because I never knew the guy. Right. I have, I read the articles. Like, I remember getting the articles. I never knew

the guy. I just, I was already, I was already locked up by then, sentenced and up in Baker correctional. So, uh, they took Doug and put him in prison and, and on that shootout in New Orleans. right so so got shot up in new orleans over that when they were on the run right so they he and he and claker decided to start robbing banks they start robbing banks then they end up it gets hot and the banks are being watched and they're concerned so they they drive 50,000 in cash and they go to new Orleans New Orleans right and then Doug was told to get to fly to Jamaica to stay with a big grower that we knew there right a Jamaican had his own you know he He was a boss.

And Doug, we were real close with him. And Doug, he was going to fly there. Chinny. Chinpo. And, you know, Chinese. Anyway, that very night, they went out and got drunk and called a cab. And Claker got into an argument with the cab driver. And the cab driver took off and Claker cranked off around at him, like an idiot.

And there were two undercover New Orleans detectives across the street having a drink. And they got in a shootout. Claker laid right down. he's no killer right you know see and dougie had 2.45s and they exchanged a gunfire and then and they they they hit Doug and then Doug took off down an alley and they hit him a few more times and then you know this is it this is a shootout on bourbon street on bourbon street in New Orleans he gets into a shootout with two fucking two cops and they track him down in an alley and they shot him a bunch of times, right?

Six or seven rounds, my kid brother's got in and out. But he had a few operations. He had quite a head, two or three. And then when I called home one ninth from the day kind of jail, my mom goes, you better sit down. I got some bad news. Your brother got in a shootout in New Orleans. And I'm screaming, why in the hell didn't he go to New Orleans like I told him?

Or why didn't you fly out of New Orleans to Jamaica? But you could thank that screwball that he was with. See, he said Doug would have, It might have blown over, see, because that's what happened on that, on that homicide. It's common public knowledge, the pans of beckia murder, that's what happened. It blew over. They were never able to indict. Right.

They never, they never indicted any, they had, the city of Miami cops went nowhere with that investigation. Well, the FBI showed up to talk to you about done, right? Years later. Right. And 2006 and seven, and FDC in Miami about the fans of beckia murder. and some other murders. No, no, I meant, I meant you were locked up and they came and showed you the pictures. They came to me about the bank robberies.

Right, right, right. So they called me off the compound and I went in there and there's two FBI agents and they sit, sit me down and go, what's this about? They go, your brother here. They show me glossy black and white photographs of Doug standing there, what an oozy. I said, we're drug smugglers, man. We don't, you know, we're not, we don't rob banks. and he slides the whole photo over to me and it's Doug and I'm gonna and he goes well I says what do you want me to tell you I got nothing to tell you well we want to know about this and

they got I started going off on tangents about some murders and some other stuff and you know and Bobby and I said I can't tell you nothing all right so during my tenure in 89 well I was it'd be just before 87 just before I got out that's when the whole Miami Herald the whole one section in the Miami Herald was about Don Aeronaut being killed. Right. And that's when I remember reading that article because we'd get a Miami Herald like a night

before they would fly a Herald up there so we would get it the exact day the paper came out. And I'm reading it. And small still voice in my ear because it says Don Erano pulled over by a late model Lincoln, dark blue, black, think of Continental or a town car

shots ring out the car makes you turn around Don Arano and his Mercedes and it takes off Well who is Don Arenov's first Most people don't know Well he was the he was the He was the innovator of the go fast boat industry

Right essentially So basically the The DEA had been formed Because there were so many So much drugs coming into Miami at this time And they're bringing in They're using boats that they That they fucking they

They can't catch. They couldn't catch the midnight expresses. Right. And some of the cigarettes, which were modified, they couldn't catch them. So they went to Don Erano. That's when Papa Bush had come down there. And Don Erino built those tunnel holes, those, those cats for the federal government, called the Blue Thunders. Right.

When you say Papa Bush, you mean the dad. Right, right. So Bush, Bush, who was the head of the CIA at the time. They were all in every, they were in the middle of everything. I mean, listen, we all know. We know everything about them. Look, he came down there, nice little, nice little PR stunt. Don Aaron was going to build boats to interdict the GoFast cigarettes coming out of the Bahamas.

Right. That was Willie and Sal. At that time, they were running, they were starting to run. They were running hard. So, you know, these, and I was, I was locked up with Sally with Willie's brother, Gus. So, the falcon. So, and Sal Magluda. but anyway, make a long story short,

yeah, the Aeron O built Aero, no one knew at the time that Aeroon was, had been, either had been flipped, but essentially when he was killed, when I was up there in Baker, we thought it was, you know, we found, well, they got Bobby. I had gotten out in 89. They didn't grab Bobby until 90, I think. and then they grabbed Bobby for bragging to some.

He was under an alias in a prison in the Upper Midwest in Oklahoma and telling everybody that he was a smuggler and a hitman from Miami running his mouth and ended up one of the jailhouse informants went to the sheriff there and says, hey, there's a guy in here that says he's some kind of famous hitman and the sheriff says boy there ain't nobody like that up here going back to your cell well they kept coming back to the sheriff telling him the same story so they sent the prince down to Miami and the city of Miami homicide says do you know who you got there that's Robert Samuel Young and they went up he knows too much about this murder they went up and grabbed him

and once they grabbed him he gave it all up well let's go back for a second so so don Air Nose is building these boats but why was he killed? Like I know you just ran through it real quick for me but anybody watching this doesn't know half of what you see we every week and even at that time

when I was already, I was living with mom and another property that we owned and he called from the county jail she goes it's Bobby. So I got on the phone with him and I said whoa man long time bro. He goes

he goes yeah They got me down here in the day county jail They come up and grab me I was under an alias up in Oklahoma They indicted me on the Don Aerono murder I go you mean the one back in 87 Or uh you know I think it was 1987

And I go I said I said Don't talk on a phone You know it's okay it's good I got a he had some kind of a back Back then they could use They could make a call It wasn't like a cell phone

It was like a transponder That would do the numbers Okay. Yeah, something like the beeps on the, he had some way to get out on the phone and then go to, we had us go two way with his, with his attorney, Don Grant up in Fort Rotterdale.

And Freddie Hadid was also his attorney. So Bobby starts running, telling me about the, they brought Benny down, they brought Ben down from Leavenworth. And, you know, I'm going to take it to the,

they're going to charge me with a hit. Because when you back up, when I read that article years before, a still small voice had almost like whisper to my ear the Holy Ghost whisper to my ear Bobby did it as hey I'm telling you right now and when I read the article

you know I'm reading the article and I'm thinking just just for some reason I get this thought late model Lincoln Continental or whatever you know pulled up next to Don Erno flagged him down his Mercedes and got it right got real close to him I mean, as close as you and I are.

See, that's how Bobby worked. You know, he was not a, a pistilero like me and my kid brother. My mom could skip a tin can in mid-air with a 38. We're all rednecks raised out in Arizona, Texas. So anyway, I just had that thought, you know. Just that all of a sudden it came into my head, Bobby. Why? I just never, never really thought about it after that much until years later.

I'm home and and you know mom says Bobby's on the phone then he starts telling me they indicted him on the murder and then at all I flash flashback and I said holy smoke and I just started you know I thought about that that thought that I'd had years before so he's telling me they're going to take him they're going to give him the chair they're going to do this do that little did I know that the state of Florida flipped them and he flipped on Ben Kramer they whom they brought down okay but the bottom line is Ben Kramer contrary to public knowledge

Ben Kramer never was not a killer he had nothing to do with the Don Aaron O murder right but Ben Kramer was a huge importer or smuggler of marijuana and he was looking he had already gotten like what like a life sentence yeah life sentence right yeah

so Bobby blamed the said that that that Ben Kramer had hired him to to kill Aronos, but that's not the case. It's not the case. Right. And

I had discovery under the federal indictment that Bobby essentially had told he hoodwinked the state of Florida and he also hoodwinked the feds. The feds ran with it and it was all bullshit. See? He ran with that narrative

that Ben Kramer had hired Bobby to kill him. But why did Bobby kill him? An individual whom I won't name was approached by the Colombians who's extremely close to me, whom I love very much

had finally let me know a while back. Listen, this is what really went down. They came to me and they said, your friend tried to rip us off for a couple heart of keys. We found out he was lying to us. Now, we're going to kill him.

You mean aeronos? Bobby Young. Bobby Young. Okay. We're going to kill him. Here's the deal. Some of our boats are getting interdicted on the high seas coming in, coming in from the Bahamas. This guy that we want him to kill has been, he's the bow builder and he's glassing in transponders into the boats. So the Coast Guard can grab them?

Yes. So. There you have it. They said, here's the deal. We're going to wash the 200 keys. We're going to give him a quarter of a million. Not the 60,000 that allegedly Benny had given Bobby to kill Arano. We're going to give him a quarter million.

We're going to wash the 200 keys. And he's going to kill Aronaut. Otherwise, we're going to kill your friend. And this individual that I'm referring to was incarcerated at the time. so he had to reach out and to Bobby and say this is what you got to do otherwise you're dead

and you know and then Bobby waited on Aronos and killed him he killed Aranoe yeah otherwise the Colombians were going to kill him so and this is this is public knowledge the thing that you know like you and I both know

that thing that irks me is that the state of Florida and the feds ran with that with that bologna and put it out there as uh as uh you know as gospel and like it was etched in stone well and there's that the book uh speed kills and then they turn that into a movie with uh john travolta yeah right which was all uh they they brought in some actor and and and and and and erinno had nothing to do with mire lanski yeah yeah any of any that uh any of that that that that that that crap that they were trying to run by the general public that's hollywood Yeah. So, uh, fake ass. So anyway, uh, bottom line, there you go. And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the, that's, that's, that's the, that's, that's, and, uh, and, and, uh, Bobby, uh, was never hired by then.

Well, Bobby goes to, Bobby goes to, Bobby goes to prison. And at this point, your, your, your, your, your mom's not doing real, right? Like, like, your mom passes away. She's, uh, yeah, in 84, uh, she died, uh, uh, uh, the emphysema. So, so. How old was she? Is she? 56. 56. Man, that's young to die. Yeah, you know, we were very close with Sam, the plumber, to Cavalcante. That's the, he's the mafioso. He had his own crew that they modeled the Sopranos after. And Sam and I were having dinner just alone one night.

And I says, how was it? You got, he was in his 70s. You're smoking. He was sitting there at a steakhouse. We were off Fiscayne Boulevard. And we said, come on. come on, Mikey, let's go have dinner. So I'm over there, we're talking.

I says, how is it? You're smoking? And mom, you know, I said, and you got emphysema. He goes, your mother's got the worst kind. He says, she's got the, you know, she's got the real bad emphysema, not mine. You know, I can still, I still smoke and stuff like that. So there were several different types of emphysema that mom just had, my grandfather died of it. He was like, he was a copper miner in Arizona.

He died of it. So the Mayo Clinic had told mom, she spent a lot of money too with the male clinic going back and forth up there. They had told her that it was hereditary. So. Well, so she passes away and Bobby gets out of prison, but you're not doing anything at this point. You're, you're, you're, you've completely. When I got out in 89, I was, I got a job. You know, when I, when I came home, mom goes, it's not like the old days.

you've got to get, you're going to have to get a job. Right. And I looked out and I said, what? You're like working? She goes, pretty much. So I go, okay. So I got a little apartment on the ocean and turned around. And for the time being, I got a job bouncing at a nightclub, pretty famous nightclub.

And North Miami Beach called facade. Right. And I went to a tuxedo. But it was pretty crazy. you know working there okay so as a bouncer right well okay when I when we're locked up and I don't know where it is in the in the story but I want to mention this one story I almost really want to mention it for Colby's benefit um so you so I'm writing this story I'm gonna tell you I'm writing this story right and I'm sure I'm sure I'll fuck it up

but I'm writing this story and Mike's telling me about how he's being trained by who was the boxer that was training you? Well, I came home in 83. In the federal prison camp, you know, we were, I still had a lot of the steroids, the residual, uh, steroids in my system. So I went in there and there's a guy, you know,

I had to sell surrender. So for the 90 days that Judge Compos gave me to clean up my fares before my aunt dropped me off. in the uh the in safford arizona you know i pretty much partied for 90 days i just stopped going to my my the individual that owned gold's gym no no this was in miami i'm talking about the time you're parking your your your jaguar and these guys drive by who was that who was yeah sorry that was there was some you were training with some boxer or something what was it oh let's back up i came home in 83 from the federal prison camp right dougie got on the boat Castro

grabs him and I am introduced to Tony Aiello who was a lightweight champion or a golden gloves undefeated and he lived in North Bay Village and we became through another individual that was a hairdresser Anthony was a hairdresser right he also fought he was Italian from New Jersey and we became very close and I met a lot of great friends fighters to him. I mean, National and Golden Gloves champions. And we are all a little tight-knit group that lived, you know, we, eventually my mom, I wasn't living at home too much anymore. Me and Anthony were training every week. Every day, sometimes. We were running five miles and 30 minutes. So Anthony takes me under his wing and he starts to train me.

Right. So I already knew how to fight, but he really honed my skills. So Mike's park in his, his Jaguar one day. And this fucking, uh, like a four by four with like three guys in it drive by. There was a dump truck. It was a dump truck? I thought it was a pickup truck. This cane boulevard at a mall right there across the Keystone Point Marina. And it was called there was a Kenny Rogers had come out with a rotissory chicken.

He was the first one called called cluckers. They were good though. Yeah. Yeah. I got the worst food poisoning in my entire life twice from Kenny. Roger really they were oh yeah I thought they were great yeah yeah so uh um I would like to grab Katie Rogers by his beard and shake him a little bit but anyway I almost died when the second about a food poison they got from that chicken so there was another

one that came out called cluckers and it was there and I had a good close friend of mine named Ross that had gotten busted cold and boss with 80 keys when I was he was a Valet Parker. When I got out of the federal prison, the prison camp in 83, and he used to watch me and Mom and Doug pull up to the valet at the place for stake, and he really kind of got close to us, because after hours, we would go to a lot, there were a lot of gyp joints up and down that, up and down that, he called it Gangster Row on 79th Street right there, going from Biscayne Boulevard, over two bridges, and into Normandy Island. That little area right there on the Kennedy Causeway had a bunch of real fancy nightclubs and restaurants.

And Ricky Carverro and a lot of those guys, they all frequent in that whole area for years. So, you know, that's where I met Ross. So Ross, when I got locked up, Ross went to, got, you know, became partners with some Colombians. And they owned a restaurant in Normandy Island, and Ross got bus for 80 keys. So fast forward, Ross calls me up and says, let's have lunch. After I got out in 89, when I was still a bouncer at Fassadhi, I got out in 89, he goes, meet me over here at, it was the Piccadilly.

Right. It was, and but next door to Cluckers. So I said, okay, so I drove over there and I'm back in the jagging because it was a European 12-cylinder and it was really, you know, the air dam was so low. You couldn't get a pack of cigarettes under the air dams. so I always backed it in. These guys came whipping around the corner in a dump truck and, you know, got a little close to me going too fast in that parking area

and I kind of put my hand out and one of them flipped me, gave me the gesture with his middle fingers. So Rosson was come walking up. I backed a car and they parked down, you know, six or seven cars down or further where they could get that dump truck and they came walking up, three of them. And I've been partying the night before a little hungover and I stepped to them. say hey man what's up with the uh you know who you're flipping a bird at right and the guy goes hey listen man blah blah blah one thing led to another and they kind of surrounded me and words were

exchanged ross came up ross is no fighter but he was about six foot six right and he's standing in there practically an albino and that's and then one thing led to another and i figured they were all going to try you got three of them and there's just one of me so i knocked out shorthy on my right and then the other two tried to jump me and I banged them up one pulled a knife I took it away from him banged him up a little bit and Ross in the meantime just running around you know he's just yeasting up the whole situation and the one I knocked out another individual and then the third one he ran to the piccadilly and I chased him in there I just you know by this time I'm a little incensed right and then by that time I ran in there I caught him in there and I knocked him out in

front of about, I knocked one of his teeth into a bowl of lentil soup where there was a, there was six or seven Jewish yentils sitting at a table, and they're screaming, Oyve, and the general manager of the restaurants, you know, they watched the whole, the place was packed, but there's an undercover North Miami detective there, but he didn't do a thing. He just came out, he didn't get involved at all. So I walked, Ross ran in and says, Mike, I heard sirens so i headed back out towards the car and i said i'm out of here and ross says i'm on a million dollar bond please mike i'll talk to the cops and they ross taught me into two 20 000 bonds so when they they took me to jail uh two counts of aggravated battery and when i got down there

i called mom she came and got the car and then she says the bondsman's coming down there give him the watch so i so i flipped him the president the roll i flipped in the rolex and then he just bonded me out and that's all right so he tells me this story right that was a longer version but exactly the story that i you know that the part that got me was three guys come up to you on the fucking street on the sidewalk in the park you you smash three guys chase one of them into the piccadilly uh that's when he pulled the knife on you took the knife away from him outside in the parking lot he pulled the knife oh okay i think in the book i wrote that he had pulled the knife inside but anyway takes the knife away from him smashes him in the face right the cops

arrest him take him away and i remember when i heard the story not that this is the most ridiculous story like out of all of them there's tons of stories that are just like that's just insane that couldn't happen but i read this i mean like i i'm sitting there i'm like did he just say he beat up three guys on the fucking that came up to him and i thought and that's that's you know this is it's come on stop it roe like so this is a it's like a clean eastwood movie an old not the old not old man clinics when he was young when he was in his 30s doing these things like and I thought that there's no way that but I ordered the Freedom of Information Act and as soon as I had written that and I was right still writing the story within a week I get the Freedom of Information Act and there's the report on the three guys that approach him that he gets into a fight with and there's a attached to it is a transcript of a hearing where there's a where it's your lawyer is, is deposing one of the guys. Well, he did depositions and all of them.

Okay. Well, I remember reading the one where the guy, the guy, because I remember what the guy says. My attorney says to him, he says, Billy Thomas. In fact, you know who gave me Billy Thomas, Bobby, when Bobby was still in day county jail under the Aerono indictment. Okay. He says, get with this guy here. This Billy Thomas.

I said, okay. And then, uh, not to get off. off on a tangent. So Billy quotes me his fee. And I think it's like five G's. And he already knew. He had an idea. So it wasn't it wasn't more. My good brother for 20 years and one of my, my brother, my best friend, Nick Cotron, who was the son of Vic Cotron from the Cotron crime family in Montreal. And his uncle Frank took over to business. And you see a lot of this on a lot of these documentaries. The Sicilians that came in,

the Katrina crime family, and me and Nikki, Nikki was introduced to me when I came home from the federal prison camp in 83. Nikki takes me to see Jeff Weiner, who was a big drug attorney, and Jeff wanted 20 G's.

And I says, okay, you know, so I went back to Billy Thomas and told him, yeah, I wanted to see that Nikki took me just to get another opinion in 20G, so Billy Thomas jacked up his fee. but to make a long story short so Billy had taken depositions

from all of these guys and they go, they thought they had somehow misconstrued that Ross 6'6 albino was me or they said the guy, so their

descriptions of the defendant were erroneous. Number two he admits to my attorney he admits to Billy but Billy goes, pulled a knife of my client and uh he goes yeah he clocked me he he clocked the one kid first and then he goes there's three you and one of him and you pull it and so he says yeah he he he snatched

my knife right out of my hand then he then he knocked my teeth out yeah that's that's how so i read the whole transcript and it is there's three of them they approach him there's a fight he hits the one guy one guy runs away another guy runs away mike chases him into the piccadilly and then I'm reading the whole thing and I remember reading the whole thing I'm like okay so that did happen like this is obviously this happened and in the very end I'm like it doesn't say anything about him's teeth getting knocked out and then the very last thing is his lawyer says do you regret approaching mr. Hudson and he goes he says of course I do I'd still have my two front teeth if I if I hadn't approached him and I was like oh my god his front teeth did get

knocked out but it was like the last sentence one of them landed in a bowl. It was kind of when I hit him with the last shot and knocked him out. Oh, the one guy that was still, there was two knocked out in the parking lot. One of them got up, the bigger one. And he ran in and jumped on my back when I was, when I had already stepped to the other guy, the guy that ran in. And I pulled him over my back like a little superhuman.

It's adrenaline. I drug him over my back and knocked him out again. And then the other guy was hanging on. There's a, there's a chrome rail that runs through there. you go through a turnstile it's a it's a it's like a smorgas board you get a ticket right and but it's high end uh you know piccadilly and i remember hitting him with that last shot and something in my peripheral vision you know uh in in an elliptical path and i and i kind of in my peripheral vision it's like a plop noise plop and it's his tooth it went right into a jewish lady she had her

hair up up high in a in a high pyramid with a bunch of gold pins in it and um she's screams ae they and the rest of them scream right or rest of the jewish ladies scream oi they and so about that time i hear the ross runs in ross is standing behind me he would yeast he was yeasting the whole thing up and then uh but ross couldn't fight a lick so he goes i hear the sirens and i know when i was an outlaw biker that was the many fights i got to my got to my harley and got to my hog my chopper and cranked it over no lights and took off Every time. Well, guess what?

This time I'm heading, you know, I'm heading towards the jag. And Ross is behind me crying about his million-dollar bond. I'll talk to the cops. And I actually got cut with that knife. So I'm showing the cop, the knife, or the cops got the knife. And I'm going, with the right hands, that can just, that can serve your juggler. You're carotid. I said, what are you talking about?

He goes, yeah, but they're pretty messed up bad. Because I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to charge you with aggravated battery. so there you go then the cop I saw him when I became a roofing contractor I saw him years later did a lot of North Miami police officers a few of them the roofs he's telling me I'd see him at a bar he I feel real bad about arresting you oh it's a little late now so you know so so you come you come back you've got to get a job you end up becoming a roofing contractor right well in order the state of Florida tried to give me seven years for the aggravated battery Okay Mom's going You're going to prison Now this time she's pretty sick

We sold the house in the ocean Now we're over here At another property You're going to prison For seven years for a fight They go mom They're looking at my prior My prior

You know Yeah yeah yeah And I've only been out So that's what That's essentially what they're The state of Florida is trying to run The prosecutor's name was Garcia and Billy kept putting it off.

He kept getting the continuous, getting the continuance. And in the meantime, I'm, you know, pretty much just on the street. I'm on bond. So, you know, I'm waiting for, you know, things to pan out. We're going to see what's going to happen. And Bobby's calling all the time. What's going on with the aggregate battery? So I'm saying, we're just going to wait and see how Bobby or how Billy Thomas handles it.

So Billy Thomas had, on the depositions, had said, you know, you pulled a knife of my client and he goes, yeah, man, he clocked me and he took my, he knocked my teeth out or whatever. Every time I would go to court, they were, all three of them were there. And one of them raised his hand in the, in court and asked the judge, Your Honor, can I, can we, can part of the plea agreement, can we make sure that he can't work out with weights in prison? I'm looking over at this guy. I'm kind of smirking at him. And so finally, Judge Catherine Pooleer, 1992. We go to court and Bobby's sitting in there. And I knew a, when we initially got indicted on the, the, the, the, when Janet Reno

prosecuted me in 84 and I wound up, I met Cuban and a Colombian. and the Colombian, Richard Carrero, he killed a few guys on a drug shootout. And then Tito had killed a kid and his girlfriend over two keys. He was Cuban. But they all got saved at the same time, all of us. So we wound up together in Baker Correctional. And Tito and Richard introduced me to a lady named Judy, who's with the vineyard ministry. So she started giving me some certain scriptures.

and like a psalm that I would memorize. So I remember sitting there reading, I had a little Christian life, New Testament. I'm just reading it, and I started going to a church called Trinity down the street from the other property of Mamo. So I'm sitting there. Billy Thomas walks up to me,

and the courtroom's crowded. He leans over and he goes, oh, hold on a second. I'm going to pull a sidebar. So he goes up there, and I see him go up with that Cuban prosecutor, Garcia, and they're talking. And I hear them,

then I hear the, they're getting a little louder with each other and finally my attorney you can hear them and then finally my attorney goes Your Honor it got three guys against my client

he admits in a deposition to pull a knife on my client there's three of them and one of him he looks at Garcia and he goes I got a he says number one there's three of them number two he admits to pull a knife in the deposition number three I got a classic

self-defense case here. I'm going to trial. And I get the butterflies. Oh, you know, because trials we want to try to avoid. Right. Because if I get convicted, the seven-year plea offer is out the window.

As you well know. Yeah. I'm thinking, oh, man, how much time aggravated battery in the state of Florida carries a life top? It can carry 15 to life or more. I think it's a lifetop where it carries 15 to some ungodly top like 40 or 50 years so i turn around and i'm sitting there and then immediately

the excuse my french but garcia bitched up quick he looks like the judge pooler she's she's looking at him like this and she's kind of smirking at him going well counselor and he looks over a bill and he goes and and he looks at billy and like rapid staccato almost like at first it was like Spanish I thought. And then he goes, will your client do 365 days in the county jail work release? And Billy walks back to me and he says, I go, what do he say? He goes, will you do 364 days on county jail work release? Right.

That way you don't get any good time, right? Well, no. That way you don't go to the state penitentiary. You do work release in North Miami at a little work release thing they've got there for a whole year. get good time? You don't get good time. You've got a year. Okay. Okay. So that's what I pled to. I pled to the two counts of aggravated battery. I walked up there. Judge Pooler goes, you report back here for sentencing in 90 days, whatever the date was. She says, Mr. Hudson, if you don't show up, I'm going to reinstate the plea the seven years plus more for

contempt if you don't show up here for the set. She goes, you're pleading to, to, to, The two counts of aggravated battery, the sentence is known in the state of Florida as a mitigated sentence. The sentence was mitigated from the seven-year original offer by the state of Florida to 364 days in county jail, day county jail work release. So I got a job. I had to get a job, be on work release. Right. So that's when mom called, you know, I was, I went back, I'm living with mom again. I went, we're at home.

She says, I got a call from Tony and Spurdy. Tony Spurdy was a famous Gambino soldier. He killed Tommy Altamir and the place for steak 25, almost 30 years before. He's a soldier in the Gambino family. He comes to, he's working for Bob Shepherd at Robert Truffing in Opelaca. He met Bob at the Pompano Beach Halfway House when they got out of the state prison. Tony Spurdy did 25 years. He's the mechanic at all the machines, the blowers and all this stuff,

the motors that run the hot tar of the kettles and everything. and the machine, you know, the outboard motors that pump the hot to the roof. He calls mom and tells her, uh, yeah, tell Mike to come down here on Monday, and Bob Shepard will give him a job. So I go down there and that's, and I got hired by Robert Shoeffing. So that's what I, and so six months later, almost eight months later, Hurricane Andrew hit. So everybody in that halfway house that I was at. at pretty nice place.

You know, you're on a lake, you got a color TV, air condition, Hurricane Andrew hit while I was in there. We went outside on State Road 9, it's right there. We cleaned up all those trees that fell down across State Road 9, chopped them up with saws. And then one day they called us in there and they said, hey, you guys are getting, your sentences are commuted for helping out after Andrew. Andrew was such a bad debacle in Miami. You're getting your sentences commuted.

Whatever you got. that's it so I did six months okay and I walked and I walked and then you started roofing I kept working for Roberts and Matthew I worked for another seven years for at least 25 or maybe 30 roofing companies all over Broward and day County before at mom died 94 and I had to finalized the estate from the uh the essentially from the um the the the scrub that she allowed to become the the uh executor of the estate fought her for for for at least three years but i only got the house and everything me and doug divided up the property and then i i mortgaged out the house and uh became a subcontractor for a big contractor down in south miami in kendall named terry allen

is super and then I went and applied the state of Florida for uh you know to to take the exam but I had to go to a construction college so that's what I did I went to a construction college and in Naples and took the exam about four or five months later and passed the test which is extremely extremely difficult the you know state certified contractor was all calculations and formulas and negative pressures and aerodynamic multipliers and so anyway um how long did you do that uh from 99 late 98 99 i got the license until 06 when the feds picked me up in at my uh at the that two million dollar five acre of state at least with an option in southwest ranches so bobby when but

i got into debt so bad right that's why i got back in the boat with bob because they were the creditors were coming after me for half a million so bobby was really really really he's from Florida State prison for the Aeronaut murder and the first person he comes to look up is you from the feds from the feds sorry he was in colman where we were oh yeah he was he was he was when they let Doug go from Louisiana the the Doug did got 20 year sentence in Louisiana he did 10 of that when they when they bank robberies yeah yeah no he got he did the he did the Louisiana prison time for the shootout see then they indicted the feds took him up the Baker County where I was at

and they indicted him for the bank robberies. Okay. So Doug pledged to the bank robberies and they ran him consecutive. He did 10 years for the Doug did 10 years in Hunt's correctional in Louisiana then the feds came and picked him up so he could do

his Fed time for the bank robberies and they sent Doug to Coleman and Bobby was in Coleman. And that's where they put together the you know, the Aaron is murder. Well, Aaron. Oh, no, no, that was years before.

I'm sorry. They put together the, uh, Bobby getting out. Smuggling operate. Yeah, that get Mike, but we, yeah, Mike, but get Mike. We got to have, you know. So Bobby gets out. He comes to you.

He gets out of federal prison. He comes to you. 89. 89 says, listen. I'm going to buy a boat. I'm going to, I want to start bringing in Coke from. The Colombians are going to buy the boat. We're going to have to go down there and check out the boat and find the right one.

And he took the younger brother of the jumper with him. Okay. And they checked out the, checked out the, uh, a 60 foot sailboat. Um, and a few boats, but they, they, they picked that one. The trimaran and that's, and they went, you know, went down there and the Columbia's, uh, paid for everything. And, uh, you know, um, the first, a load they the columbians would take a percentage of what we of what we owed on the boat from the

back end of the when they paid us for the you know so that's it and uh so you'd bring in the load and then whatever you know whatever the whatever they paid us they would take a percentage out of that so ended up bobby you know had married that stripper from from pure platinum right but that's the that's how they the you know the the the ex hooker girlfriend found out about that that it probably him quite a bit of money while he was locked up and then he dumped her and married the stripper and so she got jealous and according to my attorney uh in the in the federal indictment she had found out where he lived and gave him up let him know let the feds know where he was living well this is when he jumped the parole and at albuquerque right yeah because when bobby got

released he had hepatitis so bad they thought he was going to die of it so they left him alone he got paroled to albuquerque and uh you know that's when he uh when he realized he thought he had hoodwinked the the the uh parole system he flew straight to fort laud and came to my front door and said he needed to borrow 50 000 i said i don't have it it's all wrapped up in the house of the property you know i had i had another house another property at my mom owned had a pool you know and he came he pulled up and i'm out there by this time i got i got a state roofing certification he's looking at all the all the jag was in the driveway he's looking at the uh you know the the brand new dodge four-wheel drives and you know and all this kind of stuff and you know

with the roofing company on logo on the side of the truck and what's going on here i said i got a state license and he needed 50 gs he says i'm flying to callie in a couple of days me and sarah i go who's sarah he goes uh that's the girl i met i don't know he the stripper yeah and uh Anyway, so that was it. They flew down to Cali and put it together. And then they got financed by the Colombians. And you guys start, you start bringing in the boats, right, capping the loads that are coming in and out. How long does that go on?

We're going down to the Caribbean. It went, you know, like probably a better part of a year, year and a half. And then that's it. the uh you know bobby uh during the interim bobby uh you know when we when you make that kind of money uh bob that through some that my roofic i moved out of there moving to her you know so so i had five properties so i sold you know then we went into a uh in oh one they grabbed bobby bobby got wind that the that the the the uh apparently the ex hooker girlfriend whatever she was, this Kathleen Kunzig,

as she had informed, she had found out, she had informed the Albuquerque Federal Probation Office, United States Federal Court there, that Bobby was not, you know, as sick as he made out, and that he was in now in Fort Lauderd. Somehow they got wind, that according to my attorney, that Bobby was now in my. Miami. And then, of course, Bobby had rented a million-dollar home up in Fort Lauderdale on a canal where we could bring the boats in and dock them right there. So we, you know, that house was rented

and she found out that logg, she was trying to, little did he know, that the feds were now, his probation officer, wanted him to come in. And he didn't. And they put a warrant out for his arrest. And I took up with a Cuban girl, the beautiful girl that was a hairdresser. And we were in Tampa. In fact, we came to a Tampa on a big hairdresser thing for three days

in the convention center up here or something like that. And they were shuttle to you back and forth to the airport. And I called Bobby, say, what's going on? Everything okay? And not really, what do you mean? he was doing so much coke right and bringing in four or five strippers every other night and dropping 20,000 a week on on the hookers that uh yeah and um he's uh he's he's getting a little paranoid and a couple of times he's he's uh he's getting so high in the coke he's running around the house with a couple of nine millimeters well this happened on two or three different occasions and And one of the occasions, I'm at a club by the old Fort Apache Marina one night, and I get a call from the stripper wife.

She says, you got to come up here. There's two or three girls in the downstairs of a bedroom that are locked themselves in. He scared him to death. He's running around the house naked with two, nine millimeters. You got to come up there. So I came up there and went upstairs to the loft bedroom and disarmed him. God, he says, is that you? I go, it's me, bro.

Give me the gun. 380. and then they had a balcony. So apparently he's having a paranoid delusion that it's like Scarface. They're throwing a grappling hook up on the balcony rail and they're coming up. So I crank a couple of rounds through the curtain

alongside the sliding door. And he goes, did you get him? I said, I got him. So stay here. We're going to be and Sarah get rid of the bodies. So we make a long story short, about 35, 40 minutes. He's in there so high at coke.

And I come back, it's close and clear. he goes what'd you do with the bison put him in my truck i says come on out and i went to sarah i said get every class a nark you've got in here every everything you've got every zanix uh you know roofy whatever you've got and we i pumped him with ten of them and put him down well you see and and bottom line is she called me the next day he goes can you believe he got up the next morning i said he should have been he should have been asleep for two days at least passed out for two days so this goes on and on so when i'm up there with uh with anna at the hair thing at the in the convention center i call him from the shuttle and he goes i got everything okay no not really uh uh i thought

somebody was outside last night so i ran outside and uh you know some things happened and uh come to find out the things that happened he ran out there butt naked with two nines and cranked him off in that neighborhood as you got further down the street the homes were going for three or four million apiece on that canal that house he would that we were releasing was only a million two million dollar home he banged he goes to a dentist's door bangs on the door butt naked the dentist he says who's out there he says uh it's it's it's he helped me help me help me i live down the street opens the door and and uh he's already cranked off both clips and the dentist calls the cops the cops come and the stripper wife goes out and says we own a charter

business down to the Caribbean and we go down there and we're gone for 35 or 40 or two months how many every many days we're down there and we think somebody's been trying to break in and the cops go okay they took the pistols and um let Bobby go and that weekend that weekend him and Sarah moved out of the whole house he moved into the embassy suites and Sarah went back to her moms the cops printed the pistols and got the prints with found out who he was. Robert Samuel Young jumped parole in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So now he's got a warrant. So, and we continued to bring, you know, we continued to do what we're doing. Yeah, yeah. And that's it. And so they, so he moved, so we went, we went to Guatemala with a, uh, almost two million on the boat to put into a bank into the bank of de Guatemala. And he had a tax attorney,

he started up and paid him 40, thousand dollars and it was all it was all bullshit they took the we went down there took the boat down there hired an hired another captain out of the out of the Caribbean out of the virgin islands to take the boat down there went down there and wait can I stop for a second when he says he he paid so Bobby paid he paid somebody an accountant to tax attorney a tax attorney he paid him 40 grand to set it up so that he could take cash into a bank in Guatemala and deposit it like hey you know we're gonna bring it but don't worry I got a guy give me 40 grand I've set it all up for you you can go down there with the cash but it's bullshit

he just took the 40 grand he never called he didn't know anybody in the bank so then Bobby tries to go in with the fucking money sorry or we flew down there and the captain the the the uh we hired a charter boat captain out of the Virgin Islands flew him in he took the boat down to Guatemala Bobby and I flew down on American Airlines. What year was this? 2001. 9-11. So about two weeks before 9-11, three weeks.

Something like two weeks before it. We got down there and the boat was at a marina on the Pacific side of Guatemala. So we had to take, we were at the intercontinental hotel in suites. Each of us had a private, Bobby and Sarah. And then I had a suite, my own suite, went upstairs and went to the roof. And, you know, the helicopter came in, picked us up, and flew us over to the boat. We took about 400,000 cash off the boat and brought it back. So I put maybe 250,000 in my safe in my suite, excuse me.

And then he says, oh, we're going to go to Banco to Guatemala tomorrow. With the tax attorney set it up, we're going to go down there. and we're going to deposit the money. And so we sat down there in a little cafeteria having a cafe conneche and I had a, I'll never forget, I had a Rancho, Wavels, Rancheros, right? And Bobby's sitting there eating and picking it something that he ordered. I'm eating breakfast because I'm hitting the gym pretty hard. And she goes up there with the $400,000 and then walks in there.

and the vice president of the Banco de Guatemala tells Sarah, signora, you cannot bring these kind of money into these countries. You have to wait here. I have to go get the presidente and the security. So we had her own cell phones in Guatemala City. We had her own cell phones when we got down there. Plus we had a sat phone.

So she called him and he's screaming her at the top of zones, get your ass out of there and get down here right now. called a cab. She barely made it out. She came down. It looked like a like almost like a courthouse. That's what their banks look like like a courthouse. Right. Cranulated steps going up to the portico with columns and Banco de Guatemala. She came down there. We jumped in the cab and we went to another hotel immediately. And that was it. Flew the money back and put it on the boat and sent the boat back across the Caribbean all the way to the island. I,

island of St. Vincent. And we were bumped by them. Then 9-11 hit because I remember being up, we were going out and partying at night and, you know, drinking a little bit. But eating, eating real good, don't drink the water. We both got real sick there twice. Yeah. This and Terry. And they had a, they, the concierre at the hotel, you'd call them. They said, we will send us the doctor up now. They'd send up the doctor and she'd give me a shot. Or whatever it was, she gave me, I was good. in four hours, five hours. So, uh,

American Airlines bumped us. Then I'm laying there one morning out on mute. I'm watching the two towers. I watch the one tower's burning. I watch the plane flying to the second one. And I'm looking at this. And I'm thinking, you know, and I turn up the volume and, you know,

New York City, this is the second plane, a second tower is just a plane is flown to the second side. I ran down the hallway and banged down his door and woke him up and said, you better turn it on CNN. So we got bumped by American Airlines for what? It was six weeks. We were down there.

Yes. Because of the curfew. So we had this. So he, Bobby goes, you got to get us. We got to get out of here. So we turned around and I contacted Hoppage jet in Fort Roder when they lifted the curtain.

And I said, you got three Americans down here in Guatemala City. Can you come get us? He goes, we got one small leer left. the rest of them are out he goes you got the same problem some other people

that we uh that you know that we're going to pick up have he goes where are you Guatemala City he goes I'll be there at 745 tomorrow how much 10,000 so I came down there

and gave him 10 grand they picked us up the next morning 745 and flew us into Fort Lauderdale so and that was October they let's see 9-11 or not 9-11 but yeah 9-11 right September 11th right we got in there in the early the second week of October they had Bobby on the end of October right after Halloween they

grabbed Bobby or before Halloween they grabbed him they came in the house that that I leased up there in in Fort Lauderdale up there in a lighthouse point a pump lighthouse pole a I leased the property for Bobby. How did you find out that he got caught? No, I was going out with a girl named Michelle by then who I had met at a roofing company, the second roofing company I'd worked for. And what a beauty she was.

But anyway, Michelle, a little crazy. But, and I called, she, you know, I was roofing pretty hard. I was getting some pains in my, you know, running down the back of my tricep. And, you know, thumbs and fore. fingers, four fingers and indexed, and the thumbs were getting a little numb. So it was like a pinched nerve in my neck.

So she sent me to a neurologist. And I went to this on Sterling Road in Fort Lauderdale. And while I'm sitting there in his office, he leads, and I get a call. And it's the stripper, the wife. She says the FBI, the DEA, the United States Marshals, ATF, they came in every window of the house. This is a $4 million home right there on the edge of the canal, right there on the water with about 350 feet of dock space. Okay.

And they, we had to grab them, right? Grabbed him, grabbed Sarah. And the rest is history. He started giving it up immediately. He started, yeah, he started snitching from jump right there from Jump Street. And I figured when I walked out to the park and I said, why are you calling me myself? That's the first thing I asked her.

So I called Michelle and said, go to the, uh, call the Hyatt Regency. Here's my credit card number called the Hyatt Regency and Dave who were going to the, the Hilton. I says, we're going to get a room into Hilton for three or four days. Why, Michael? I said, just do it. So she took the credit card number, reserved me a room. I went back to the house, got the German Shepherds, took them to Knowles Animal Clinic,

grabbed all the cash out of the safe, grabbed the gun safe, took all the weapons and all the heavy weapons especially and took him to a buddy's house and we put him in his attic and I took everything else to the safety deposit box in the bank in North Miami

and then grabbed Michelle or she met me up there and then we stayed up at the Hilton for five days and waited and I called my neighbor when I go out in the boat my neighbor was a Cuban named George and he would come over and feed the can He had a key to the house and always had a key.

I said, go over and get the mail. He goes, oh, Mike, you would think I was roofing out of state or something. And George would, you know, I would call him up and say, anything going on. See, he goes, no, why? I go, well, look, I see, if you see any cars or anything, call me in my cell. You see any cars pull up in the driveway? Because I moved both trucks. I moved everything.

The jag, everything moved. I moved that afternoon. And I took him to the church. and part of the church part so then i turned around with big you know right there on the uh big church trinity so i turned around and uh and uh and then i moved them later but you know um i uh went to the hilton and stayed with michelle and waited and uh where they grab you they uh they they didn't i waited three four or five days and then the other next door neighbor the right side she was the mother of the kid that was with bobby when they were in prison

in cuba okay and the oldest son was the one that got lost in hurricane david okay so i they had another son who was a crackhead he'd been a big smuggler too but he lost everything and he got on crack so you know i called i called over there and asked him hey see anything weird going on and he goes what do you mean man what like he he snapped to it immediately i said see any uh anything looks like like any unmarked cars or anything like that he says nah nothing so we waited three or four days i finally went back home when i went back to the house and i had my the foreman of my two crews they were running the roofs and everything i went back to the house and had the call identifier back then and hit it and the first message i got it said right there it couldn't it was it was so long

it couldn't even fill up the uh the identifier it said federal bureau of And I went, holy mackerel, what? And then I tried to call the number back. This number cannot be called back. You cannot call this number, you know, and that was it. And I realized he had called me from the Federal Bureau of the FBI office. He called me from there. So that was it.

Dougie had gotten in touch with me, and I let him know Bobby got busted, you know. So that was it. Doug, Doug said, don't answer any of his mail. I said, I don't intend to. He says, if you writes you a letter, something's not right. And he started writing me a bunch of letters. Want me to go down to the Caribbean, you wanted me to go grab, go over here and he had close to $20 million, $15 million maybe. I don't know, it's scattered around, but I don't know, and wanted me to go down to

the Caribbean to a certain island and grab one of the boats, moved that boat. do this, do that. And he's writing me all these letters. And I know that they're reading his mail. And I know that the phones are tapped. Right. So from there, I froze on him. You know, and Hurricane Wilma hit two years later.

And I did millions. I did millions when Wilma hit. And then Bobby was locked up and he found out about it. He started sniffing around because Sarah's, the stripper's parents called me. They called me on several different occasions And I'm thinking something's not right They're fishing for him He's wanting to know once he found out that

You know, what he did was Essentially, he turned around And just gave everybody up on the house Just out of spite Because he was locked up and nobody else was That's the word that I got Right You know, from the attorney

Well, when did you get arrested? Well, I got arrested before the statute of limitations ran out what was it five years five years november 7th election day 2006 south by this time i was in i was in southwest ranches you know what was the what was it what was the amount of the indictment was the the dollar amount was like it was outrageous it was well yeah they mean they you know what they do they they add them all up they they they they uh they cut it 50 times the feds and then they they multiply it times the amount of grams and a kilo ghost dope right ghost dope yeah so it's some ungodly amount it's like 45 million or something or

oh more that was just the amount that was the amount of money that they never recovered in u.s funds that they thought indictments 45 says like 45 million dollars or something is out it's a fucking ridiculous yeah but they they were talking uh you know when i'm reading when i'm when the the the younger clacker i'm getting discovery from the attorney when i'm reading that it's i'm looking at it it's got to be a A typo, 22,000 kilos. So I'm reading the indictment. And I ended up pleading to the last boatload. So, you know, it was a total of the 2270 keys.

But that, but there was no immaterial of, you know, how many loads were brought in. The feds are usually, they're all an individual account. They will have you plead guilty to one count. right is that that was part of their deal so it was 45.5 million dollars of cocaine imported of a controlled substance into the united states damn um so you know uh yeah what they didn't have a gram of right they never had a grant they listen they didn't have anything but an informant right that's all they had uh based on uncorroborated hearsay testimony with no evidence. This is what, this is our, this is our,

this is our, this is our American taxpayer dollars hard at work. Well, so they, they grab you. You don't go to, you can't go to trial.

No, of course not. You've got, you're going to have, Bobby's going to testify. And then they, then my attorney was, was,

initially with the first one, I cut him a check for five figures, Eddie O'Donnell. He was the attorney that got famous under the, 1980 Miami riot the McDuffie case

he represented the cop that killed McDuffie they killed the black guy on the motorcycle that tried to run the police officer over the police officer hip shot one in a million shot a head shot and then that's when they rioted

when he got when he when Eddie represented him Eddie O'Donnell represented him and got him off and that's when they rioted in 1980 in Miami that was he was that was that that's what catapulted him into the limel Eddie O'Donnell so he represented me initially before I wound up with another attorney for the plea so you took a plea for what I pled to a one count of the one count I mean how much time oh I 17 years but they arm

careered me right see they arm careered me on the guns and they careered me under the career offender act on the on the on the on the uh drugs with with uh that they didn't have a gram of see so they ran it the judge ran a concurrent he hated my case he looked at that at that bum pal the the the prosecutor he says you know this this defendant shouldn't even be in front of me i know all about your star witness see they use bobby to set up a high season interdictment and he tipped them off he got immunity he got immunity on seven or eight homicides going back to the late 70s or early 80s they gave him immunity on everything see there you see and I think about that Benny Kramer all all bullshit right right and now Bobby is think he's going to hoodwink

the government again so he's going to set up a a boat to come in with what I don't know however many thousands of kilos on the boat he's going to set that boat up and then they're going to let him walk now he's got the hip he's not really showing any real signs or symptoms of like a relapse but that's what killed him see the hep C and uh um uh because he never got out so he turns around and has the stripper wife tip him off according to my attorney but the last attorney that i that i uh that you know that i retained uh Charles Craig Stella so this is Stella this bum turns around and tells me he knew all about the stripper wife tipping off the feds and then he

the hooker wife tipping off the feds excuse me and then that bobby had had had tipped off the columbians that the federalities were waiting on them so they never grabbed them so their big newspaper their front their faces on the front of the newspaper never happened yeah never happened so j robert accosta the united states attorney for the 11th circuit that got deposed that they got that had to step down because of the case with the child molester that had the island oh yeah yeah um epstein epstein he was the attorney that allowed him to walk from jump street years before and when and uh i forget what what who appointed him Did Obama appoint him?

I don't know. Anyway, Jay Robert Acosta was a United States attorney for the 11th Circuit, and he was the attorney at the time when this indictment came down, and he went to Roger Powell, and he goes, hey, what happened to the big indictment? I mean, the big high-season interdiction, we don't know. They went back in the phone taps, found out Sarah, instead of just going to a pay phone with $50 in quarter, she turns around and goes and calls him from the landline,

which is tapped. and says, Daddy says, turn around. It's a setup, Federalis. So they found out that she had, and so they jerked his immunity.

So what did he get? He got a 5K1 and a Rule 35 that Freddie Hiddod worked out for him when he started crying about it because I got all the discovery from my attorney and all the letters

that he wrote the judge. I did a good thing and all the, about being a rat. I did a good thing. And now, suffering for it and uh the the government jerked my immunity your honor and and and wah wah wah and oh boo who you know and uh so freddy had dad got him a fight worked out to deal with

the government well will you give him a 5k1 or rule 35 if he gives up his wife and all of his friends there you go nobody was in yeah but he started i got the discovery he started snitching from jump street that very day how much time did you do total 14 17 years I did 14 and a half 14 and a half went to the halfway house got out of Georgia in the pen and uh you know got moved from the low

Gioa Rocha and then who knew Bobby right you got moved from the low for went from the media went from the Georgia pen to Coleman yeah from the pen to Coleman then you were at the low with me then I wrote the story

then you got charged with inciting a riot with me and the Puerto Ricans and this uh yeah this this this this counselor um the day that that senator got shot Scalia and uh and I remember going I worked it uh remember I had the job um a facility facility facility yeah and uh we have fogs we got sent back fog count I fell asleep and um then also i hear everybody talking about a shooting or something like trump got shot they shot trump they shot trump and i wake up you know to go to go to the restroom when i look up as they go yeah trump got shot it was the senator at that ballgame so i come back i fall asleep and then

all of a sudden now they're making everybody go all the latinos go to the computers and then all of us american and the blacks and the whites we go into the tv room and this counselor walks in with a big warden her chin and walks up and wakes me up. I don't even know her. She's on the other side of a C-dorm upstairs, and she wakes me up and says, you've got to go into the TV room. So I'm walking down the, you know, I grab my chair and I'm walking down there. There was a young kid that was about three or four cubes down.

He goes, Mike, these feds, they're, what's going on? He says they're killing all the feds. So, yeah, I make a comment back to him. She turns around and runs to the war. I go in the TV room, she runs to the warden and says, you know, because when I woke up, I heard there was a lot of lockers banging and stuff like this when I was still asleep. And I woke up and I go, what's going on?

It sounds like the Puerto Ricans are rioting in here or something. I hear a lot of, you know, she turns around, makes a bunch of lies like the, like the, you know, the lily-livered little chicken shit fed that she is, right? and goes and tells the captain that I decided to riot with the Puerto Ricans, a ball face lie. They threw it all out in DHO court. Right. And then says, oh, when the kid goes, oh, they're killing all the feds,

and I go, oh, I says, I don't know. I says, it sounds like, you know, it's about time they got around to it. I'm thinking that it was, you know, maybe a terrorist act of some kind. I wasn't really sure what was going on. so she turns around and flips that and then tells the captain yeah he uh you know so they come in the tv room and grab me and they put me in and put me in there with uh you know they they throw it out in d h o court they put me in there with spinelli and then you know so okay mike spinelli he was a lukasey soldier so we uh we knew each other pretty well and then

you know eventually they they uh throw it out and i end up uh they said now we're going to ship you anyway so they see they so i got shipped the azoo so well i mean you got out and you went to truck driving school and now you're driving a truck i ran a rupee company on this in the summer 21 and yeah and then i uh you know i got a good day that that contractor who knew me from the old days right he he did a little prison time so he hired me you know the cherry brothers and he hired me and uh um i just uh he paid for the class b to get reinstated because they had to class B for almost 15 years and then turned around and I decided to get the A so I got the A and then okay we drive a we drive a semi across the U.S. and get caught in

snowstorms and all right listen I'm gonna wrap it I'm gonna let me wrap this up real quick delete that yeah there's some stuff we'll delete somebody all right all right um well one I appreciate you coming by so this is good Thank you, brother. All right. All right. Hey, if you like the video, do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button.

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