Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - How Criminals Are Created | Organized Crime In the 90's

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Jeff Crow, a Fresno man who dealt with organized crime in the 90's. Get 50% sitewide for a limited time. Just visit https://GhostBed.com/cox and use code COX at checkout. Do you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7 Send me an email here: [e-mail] Do you extra clips and behind the scenes content? Subscribe to my Patreon: https://patreon.com/InsideTrueCrime 📧Sign up to my newsletter to learn about Real Estate, Credit, and Growing a Youtube Channel: https://mattcoxcourses.com/news   🏦Raising & Building Credit Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/credit 📸Growing a YouTube Channel Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/yt 🏠Make money with Real Estate Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/re Follow me on all socials! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrime Do you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopart Listen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCF Bent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TM It's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8 Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5G Devil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438 The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3K Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402 Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1 Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel! Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WX If you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here: Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69 Cashapp: $coxcon69

Long-Bandie Twizzlers candy keeps the fun going. The fun going. The area that I happened to grow up in around 16 or so, I found out that somebody in the leadership position at my mother's church, if you will, had done something to my younger sister. And they just covered it up. They didn't call the police. They didn't help prosecute them and all that.

He attempted to do something to my sister, and my sister was able to not quite have whatever, have it done to her, if you will. But I talked to other kids, boys, Mexican and white kids at our church, and I discovered their sisters had similar issues. And that made us all really angry. and so the first crimes I started committing, bro, were vandalism against church leaders, cars, and houses and stuff. It was our way, our twisted way of getting back at our religious establishment, if you will, for not following so-called Christian principles.

We would, we knew where they lived, we'd go late at night, we'd throw a spark, broken up spark plugs, the ceramic part and break the windows of their cars. we would we we we started vandalizing spray painting on their fences and all that and we had all been skated borders and all that anyway so we are already used to thrashing stuff anyway so that's that's that's that in a really good nutshell you didn't make a career out of that you're not not you know out of windows like how did i mean what happened did you how did that progress i mean once you start vandalizing and doing stuff to as revenge from there you you've now opened up the door to do the next step of crime, which would be vandalizing people's stuff in general.

You start breaking the windows and then you steal stuff out of the car. You go from there to stealing cars itself. I got in trouble at school. I started smoking pot roughly around 16. And I got, I started selling it pretty quickly because I discovered that a lot of my friends enjoyed it. And I was, I became pretty well connected. by 17 there was a cartel guy in our area we got involved with crank because that was the early

days when mexicans were starting to take it over from the bikers and really turning it into the huge industry would become my my county was ground zero so i became greedy too i just i started making money selling pot other stuff and so it caused me to lose interest in school in sports i was like who cares about school i can make in five years i'll be rich enough if i play my cards right to where I can just invest the money in a way that doesn't attract FBI or DEA attention. And then by the time I'm 25 to 30 years old, I'll have millions of dollars. I don't have to go to high school, college, or none of that garbage. I was like, F that. I'm going to freaking be rich quick. And so Greed kind of took over. Plus, I was angry at the world. And my friends were

already starting to steal cars and stuff. And originally they would just race them around. I live pretty close to where the city becomes countryside so they would take the cars and out onto rural roads and race each other it's not their vehicles so who cares if you burn out the transmission or whatever wreck the car or whatever and then i slowly started getting involved with that i thought it was fun to race stolen cars around and stuff and um i started getting arrested though i got arrested at just before turning 17 and the very first the system made a huge huge mistake with me the very first time that I was at arrested he was late at night we were out in the process of stealing a car we were casing a car that we were going to target and um some mexican dude who

in his mid 20s who looked like he was like a military guy came out with a shot gun and made it clear we're not going anywhere and he called the police on us and they rolled up quick too and so they arrested us and they booked us into the local juvenile hall and the local juvenile hall in my region was the second worst one in the state of california next to los angeles certain parts of l.A's juvenile hall system and we're talking of who's who of future California criminals, many of whom are still in California state prisons or federal prisons today or they're dead. And I was put into the worst unit and it was justified on the grounds that when you're arrested for car thief, car thiever in California, they know that a lot of car thieves

burn the cars when they're done with them because it gets rid of fingerprints. You can burn evidence of other crimes you might have done with those stolen cars. there's a lot of it's a real simple way and I have to admit I've committed arson myself with stolen cars out in the country we we would make Molotov cocktails and like those things up so if you were arrested for GTA back then and the cops knew you were kind of one of those dudes that had been doing them before but they had never really got you then they had the justification to put you in the worst places because arson is considered a violent crime and so they put me into a unit along with the two other boys I was arrested with

with like the 50 worst offenders in my whole county and my county's a big well over a million plus people the city itself has 600,000 people it's like the fifth largest city in the whole state of California so it's not some small spot and I was sold up I was booked into the cell that I ended up bro at like 3 a.m. 4 a.m. or so my cellmate's for both sleeping and this was actually a shoe unit which means secure housing unit it was not supposed to be used for regular offenders this was supposed to be for punishment only but because of overcrowding in california system in the 80s and 90s they were putting people anywhere they could put them so we were literally in this place that's just the size of maybe two closets if you

will there was a pair of bunks and then uh there was a roll-up mat how those county jail mats are matt they're they're like a glorified yoga mat they're not really a mattress right and uh so i get in there my two cellies are sleeping and an hour or two later i got a little bit of rest we woke up 630 something like that and it was a white dude and a mexican dude the mexican dude was a serrano which is Mexican mafia, kind of affiliate gang, and they're not really big in my part of California because I'm in the central part of the state where northerners and Bulldogs, which is a group that broke away from the Northerners, had the majority of the Mexican gangs. And so they're outnumbered in my region. Now in L.A., they outnumber every other Mexican gang, every black

gang. They run the show in L.A., the Mexican Mafia and the Serrainos do. But up where I met, they call them upstate Serreinos. They're outnumbered. They're with whites. We all work together as far as the California system is concerned. We're called Woods in the system. That's the euphemism for white criminals that are in good standing. And so I was there with a Mexican dude and a white dude. When they woke up, they were cool guys.

I got along with them. The first thing I did was say, wow, I got a joke for you. And I told them a really sick joke that really troubled teenage boys would laugh their asses out about. And they thought it was great. They were like, man, we needed that, bro. We've been in this weird to blade, blah, blah. One dude told me he's on his way to Preston. Preston is a youth authority.

They got shut down. Preston at that time was a youth authority worst in most California state adult facilities because it's all youngsters, Crips, bloods from L.A., serenials, Northerners, Nathaniels, the Asian gangs, woods that are like old stoner white dudes, all trying to prove themselves.

So there's way more fighting. not as much control amongst the inmates the way a state prison or a federal prison is where you got leaders that sort of keep some of that in line to some degree and they're that kind of thing we were sold up across from three black dudes

that had committed a murder a homicide during Christmas they shot a Christmas shopper at one of the local malls in the suburbs right in front of his baby sister and I had read about the case in the newspaper before that, they were being held awaiting hearings

to be determined whether they would be tried as adults or not. And out of the three, two of them got tried as adults, ultimately one did not. But during that time, they were still in that juvenile unit right across from us. And one of the first things that my

bro said to me in the cell, my zellies or whatever you want to call them, after we did some small talk was, hey, we got a problem with those and they used they didn't use the N word there's a different word that whites and Mexicans

use for blacks in the system in California they refer to them as toads they said there's we had an issue with these three toads are down the cross I know with that man and they said you down because once the once they unlocked these cells it's cracking and back then

this was one of those old time juvenile halls mat that was built in the 50s it didn't even have electronic locks like yet they had to manually open it up. It was freaking super unsafe. Lots of blind spots. They were right across from us. And as soon as the staff walked away, it was on. We went out

they were only five feet across from us their cell. And it wasn't some knock down drag out fight thing, bro. It was only 10 seconds rough. It was really short. The staff wasn't stupid. They're all big, like, football player looking guys. They know how these kids are. And they knew there was a problem so they ran right back over there and tossed us back in our cell tossed them in theirs and then they opened up one of ourselves first to go eat breakfast and when we were done then they let the next

that kind of thing but again it wasn't like a oh i get in there i freaking one of those stories it just was back and forth just squabbling right and it but it did help me out though because a month or so later when i was out of that unit and out on the street there was a group of there a lot of Mexican and Asian gangbangers in that unit. And they watched as this went down and later on I had a Mexican dude that recognized me

was like, hey bro, weren't you one of those dudes that was in a unit? That was the particular unit. This juvenile hall was declared unconstitutional years ago like in the 2000s, so it was tore down so it's not there anymore. The new one looks like a high school campus or a college

campus. The kids say they have no clue how good they have it. But the unit, the juvenile hall units that were around when I was younger in the 80s and 90s, bro. Those were built in like the 50s. They looked like seeing Quentin or Alcatraz. And so they were dingy, cockroaches on the floor, bro. One of the filthiest places I've ever been when it comes to like basic taking care of stuff. And anyhow, the dude that recognized me, he was like, hey, man, I saw that.

Salute to you, bro, for standing up for yourself or whatever. I mean, again, Matt, I'm not, this wasn't one of those, yeah, I freaking gladiator is it. So I'm not fronting like that, but not, but in California, bro, if you at least show that you're going to defend yourself and that you're not, you're not just going to, please, let's talk this out. If you're throwing punches back and forth, even if you lose, you'll get respect. So that ended up evolving to where, um, I, it helped my drug, my marijuana business. I started getting hookups to some of the gangbangers and a lot of those gangbangers

Mexican gangbangers they all have older uncles and dads that are connected with guys down south of the border and once you start getting connected with those guys your prices go down your ability to get more product that once goes up

and hence your profit margin goes up and so I was a business oriented kind of kid as it was and I just I started selling pot bro and it evolved from there to to bigger amounts just eights and quarters to

ounces to quarter pounds and that kind of stuff of Mexican brick button. How old were you? How old were you? I started I started a little bit after my 16th birthday. So my first arrest was in early

1992 because that Christmas shooting was in December, I want to say December 3rd or 4th of 91 and they were, those black dudes were still being held. So I want to say, I remember it was raining that night. I want to say February to March of 1992 was my first time being booked into there. And then I caught another case a few months later for burglary.

I got snitched on by an Asian gangbanger. I was trading marijuana for stolen stuff, which is a really stupid idea. And when he got caught, he ratted me and some others out. And rather than talking to the police, I just said, whatever you guys got to do, you got to do. and I just cut a plea deal to where I took the rap for two burglary kennels, even though I hadn't actually stolen anything. I did the trading of it, but I didn't believe in talking to the police at all and just said, hey, charge me with whatever you got to charge me with.

And when I got to court, the DEA dropped three of the charges in exchange for not fighting them at trial. And I got put on juvenile probation and that kind of stuff. So I was on probation for a good portion of my 17th year. And I ended up just taking a test to get out of high school early. I was selling weed and I viewed school as getting in the way of my drug business. And so, yeah, since I was smart, bro, I went into like one of those studies programs that's intended for like good kids that can barely read at a fifth grade level. So that a piece of cake for me.

I'm freaking like I did like my whole senior year in like two months or something. And then boom, I got it. So half of my senior year, Matt, was me sleeping in until like 10 or 11 a.m. And about noon, my friends from high school tried to my house, drop me off some Taco Bell, and buy some weed from me. And then I just smoked pot all afternoon. If you sleep hot at night, you know how disruptive that can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night. or all of the above. That's where Ghostbed can help. As the makers of the coolest beds in the

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mattress quiz. You'll answer a few questions and get a personalized recommendation. Even better, our listeners can get 50% off sitewide for a limited time. Just visit ghostbed.com slash Cox and use the code Cox at checkout again that's ghostbed.com slash Cox with the code Cox at the checkout to save a whopping 50% off site wide I did try going to city college the first semester after high school which would have been 1993 fall but I didn't bro I didn't do squat all I did in college my first year was mac on chicks sell weed to high college kids all that were from suburban areas, because all of a sudden, I mean, I'm not, I went to a high school that was more in the inner city. All of a sudden, I got all the rich kids going to the city

college with me, and I was well connected, and I looked like them, so to speak. They'd rather deal with me than have to go into the ghetto, so to speak, and I just sold pot, maked them and I used to drink, and I dropped out. The one thing I did do, though, that enriched my career I became connected with a local cartel guy by then named Marcello. He's passed away now. He was an old Mexican guy at that point anyways. And I got connected with him through one of the Mexican gangbangers that I had known from my area. And so you got us dirt cheap prices.

During this era, this is before the cartels really had communities all over America they could hide within. Most drug and organized criminals, whether they're Italian, Russian, Armenians, Albanians, Mexicans, whatever. They try to blend in with the local community that looks like them. And at this time, there was mainly Mexicans in Texas, California, in Arizona, states like that, border states. Nowadays, it's a different story. So they needed us. They needed whites, blacks, as well as Mexican-American kids that were Americanized to help them. out to sell stuff. Now they don't need us. They could sell street level stuff and traffic

it and make the biggest money possible. So I would sell. I did this and that and the during that the one thing I did do that Marcello told me to do was read the police manuals that are at your college because there's a police academy there. And at that time, keep in mind, folks, this is 1993, there wasn't even really dial-up internet, let alone high-speed internet and Google and all that. In order to really get good information on how the cops operated, if you had access to a college where there was a police academy, inside the library, I couldn't check out the books, but I could go in the library and read them. So the one thing I did study, Matt, was these how-to manuals that the police had for their trainees and all that

on how they set up drug operations, how they set up a drug sting, where they choose to put surveillance vehicles. You name the type of crime, scams, robberies, whatever. They had a manual and a book for it. And it was meant, though, for future police officers to learn how to catch crooks. Well, I read all the drug-running ones

and the drug-dealing ones at Marcello's encouragement. and it turned out to be one of the best moves I ever did because I learned I learned the ways that the police do things like if they pull you over and you have a passenger they separate you both and then they start asking you questions looking for inconsistencies in your stories

and if there's an inconsistency they'll say all right we need to bring a dog out to start sniffing this car because you're saying one thing as far as where you're traveling he's saying another there's something wrong here So I learned I learned a lot

And I just dropped out of school I got If I was to show you my college transcripts I have two BA degrees now And I have associate's degree now But if you look at my college transcripts You'll see my first semester It's like F F withdrawal

Withdrawl F Because I just wasn't going to school I just was showing up there To freaking talk to girls Drake Smoke Pot and study what the cops are doing.

I mean, how long, I don't, so how long does this, how long does this go on and, and, before, when it takes off with the mob stuff. Yeah, yeah,

that's what I, yes, let's do that. All right. So, and I, well, I was also thinking,

it's funny, I have a, I have a buddy who, who talks, who, he says a lot, some of the stuff that you've said, where he was talking about,

like, um, as a, as an American with a passport, he was like, like, as a guy who looked, like an American with, they've had a passport.

He's like, you were worth a lot of money to the cartel. But that was 20-some odd, you know, 30 years ago. Yeah, this is the 90s. Yeah, absolutely. And that was another thing for interstate drug trafficking, bro. Yeah, you'd rather be white, quite frankly, than most other racial groups. Asian too. Asian kids can fool cops in other states and just pretend to be like, oh, yes, I play chess.

And I'm a straight A. you want me to talk to you about math? I can tell you all about calculus officer, an Asian kid you get away with it. And then Mexican kids that look clean cut can play the role too of just some hardworking kid moving back east. I'm trying to start a job.

So you have to have good cover story. So the way that I got connected with the mob map was, so one of my friends here had lived in Michigan off and on. And keep in mind about California. in those days it's not it wasn't like it is now where a lot of our cities are messed up but uh they were messed up in a different way but we had a lot of out-of-staters who moved into neighborhoods because california in the 60s 70s 80s was growing at that time so we'd have people who moved in from

a cold weather state much like people moved to florida right and they set up guys the people leave new york to move to florida for lots of reasons now taxes and all kinds of stuff but in california at the time, it was like Ronald Reagan territory still. And so it was a place where people moved to. So I had friends that had lived in Texas and other states. One of them was Michigan. And one of the kids that I was involved with sales with, and he knew Marcello as well, was from Michigan.

And he moved back to Michigan. He was two years younger than me. And so this was a little bit after I turned 18. He moved back there. He was approximately 16, maybe almost 7. something like that and a few months after he moved back he called me up saying that his aunt is looking up with basically he was like the side girlfriend or girlfriend of a mobster back there his aunt was like a really hot looking middle-aged chick like 40-year-old chick back then

uh there's a certain term for them now that we hadn't heard of back in those days that rhymes with milk. Yeah, it rhymes with milk. Yeah. And that's, I'll be all Hey, Daniel, if you're watching this, let's just be honest, your hand was pretty hot, bro. And so, the,

she was hooking up with a mobster, a mob associate, right? And when he got back there, he ended up meeting the guy, right? And he told him, oh, man, our guys in California can get Mexican brickweed for super cheap.

And the mob was already scoring pot in Texas. They had a crew in El Paso that they would get weed from and then they would take it up north into the Great Lakes region. And they saw that as an opportunity to either get better prices and or make it less risky because how it is you've been in the system. If you keep doing the same pattern over and over and over again, eventually the FBI, the DEA or local law enforcement. One of them is going to figure out, and then if you're doing the same thing all the time, once they put you under surveillance back then, they just have to fill you enough times and catch you doing the same thing enough times, and they got a court case. So he reached out to me about scoring pot out here, and he had told me, look, man, these guys are going to on big amounts, though. We're talking, we'll start off at maybe 10 or 20 pounds of Rick Budd from Mexico as a starter to kind of develop. the relationship and get to trust each other, but ultimately, we want to be moving hundreds of them a month, 250, 500,000 a month if possible. Now, I never got past 250 for the record. I was never

able to get, that's the most I've ever moved interstate, to be honest with everybody. But they certainly wanted me to try to get as much as possible. And initially, I brought it to Marcello and Marcelo told me no way. And he said the mafia is under mass surveillance by the FBI. Keep my, this is 1983 and in 1994. John Gotti had been arrested in 92. The FBI was all over Italian dudes back then. They were being literally, you could almost say, systematically targeted based on ethnicity. And they were hot as a potato. So you didn't really want to be dealing with them. And he told me he's an older Mexican. Mexican guy. He was

smart. He had been, he's connected south of the border and Tijuana and all that. And he was like not vetoed it, right? And so I told Daniel the dude that moved back there, I said look, Sellow don't want me to do it. And

I'm, in fact, I'm doing just fine with the local sales. So I don't think so. Anyhow, a few months or something later, they get a call from him and he says bro i need your help i sent them out there for to connect with somebody else and that fell through so i got a mobster sitting in a hotel room near the airport and he's been there for like two days and he's pissed off and i know what that means it's like oh you wasted the

mob's money and you've written and that becomes a conspiracy charge even if you don't score pot or drugs in another state if the DEA or the FBI sees you hop on a plane that's enough for a conspiracy charge because you attempted to do it and that means Daniel could have been handled like that by them so I said yeah I'll I'll help you out and I did meet up with the guy he was cool I got along with him pretty well um and at least it developed a relationship I started looking into it more there had been guys near cello who it kind of hinted to me that if solo won't do it they be all you know how much do your italian friends want um and we didn't get that time what they wanted but i was able to take care of

them enough with what we did to satisfy that what you're the real deal jeff um we like you you're cool bro um let if you want to do this let's do this and i i saw the money they they showed me the cash he showed me the cash he brought out here i saw 800 dollar bills and it it got me started looking elsewhere besides cello um yeah so yeah so yeah so yeah so basically that's how that the relationship started from there i right i liked them they were a lot of the mob dudes are cool they they got and now the family just to clarify that i was doing this for is i of Detroit um they deal with chaldeans though too and a lot of the times caldeans those are middle easterners that were catholics and some were muslims but most were catholics and they fled

like saddam hussein's iraq they fled syria basher assad's father's old syria so they weren't soft core guys that by any means bro you gotta be pretty freaking smart like cia level smart to maneuver in Saddam Hussein's old police state. It's not like you can go into Saddam Hussein's courts and please say, hey, I have a Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure. Hell, your lawyer probably could get executed for even arguing something like that, right? But the Italian dudes there also have a requirement. You have, in order to become a made member of their family,

it's the only family in America where you have to have a college degree and be Italian and or Sicilian. So you have to have a four-year college degree to join. join the Detroit mob and I'm of Irish descent so there'd be no way I would have ever joined and what I have wanted to I didn't I was quite happy I love being Irish and Scottish and I certainly have never dreamed of being Italian not doing itch I love my Italian bros but I like I love myself too but I enjoyed working with them they're cool guys and we were all I liked it too that they were smart and they had a lot of good ways of doing things very effective stuff

how to be you have to be very subterfuge and you have to have good cover stories when you're trafficking marijuana or other drugs in today's world it's obviously legal so pot's kind of out of the question for the for the most part but back then if you're traveling with it and the police pull you over you have to have a good read let's say why you head to michigan stop do you know how fast you were going i'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie the naked gun Liam Nissan buy your tickets now

and get a free chili dog chili dog not included the naked gun tickets on sale now August 1st and I we'd have like fake made resumes the mob would tell me

the names of actual businesses in Dearborn Livonia Gross Point the suburbs around Detroit and we would make fake resumes like we're applying for those jobs and I'd be like hey

if I I have never been pulled over vehicle with marijuana but I had numerous times on greyhound buses and on amtraks because it's where state troopers and local cops board the buses demanding to see everybody's tickets and they can make you open up your carry-on luggage believe it or not this is in the 90s this is before the Patriot Act and all that they it's a really uh the first time that you see cops boarding a bus that you're on where you're carrying a felony like a 20 year level amount of pot it gets your heart racing and it really separates the men from the boys so to speak

if you can keep your cool under pressure with them so they ask why they see my ticket let's say you're going to michigan what you're going to michigan for i'm applying for some jobs and stuff and i've talked to a few companies oh really like where oh here i'd have this stuff in a bigger package let's say under the seat or we would load it in the cargo area yeah i'd open up my basic carry-on that had my shaving stuff or brush here's some of my resumes uh for this business in michigan that one and they oh okay all right but if you say yeah i'm applying for jobs there and then they say oh really where and you're like uh uh uh my mom uh uh literally uh uh uh let's uh the uh The Lake Michigan Boathouse, the club Detroit.

You're just naming stupid stuff that they know is BS. Like, no, no, no, no. You're going to come with us and we're going to have a discussion with you and everybody else gets to leave. Same thing with Amtrak. They're allowed to board buses. I've been, I've had the cops in Denver. I've had to deal with them coming at me and others.

I've had to deal with the Vegas metros before. I've had police in Des Moines, Iowa. I've had cops in states that I could have got 25 years for trafficking in come up to me and others and ask for our tickets and asking it's and after the first time or so I started to I the first one really freaking like once it was over and they went to the next person on the bus the sense of relief that I had so bro I went from like as a 16 and 17 year old

running from the cops on the street, so to speak, from theft stuff or being a dumb juvenile, to having to be more of a chess player, having a mental chess match with the cops and the feds. And there was a real big turning point on February 16th of 1994. I was arrested as an 18-year-old, so I was an adult now for grand theft and stuff, commercial burglary stuff. I've never broken into homes. I never, I wasn't into that. I felt like, well, what I do is some criminal broken in my house.

I freaking, so I just, I never went there. I just felt like it was a violation of people's space too, but I didn't have a problem ripping off warehouses or commercial stuff or committing fraud type stuff, if need be. Who cares? I'm robbing the corporation kind of attitude, right? and I got arrested though and I get booked into the county jail and the unit I was in there was actually pretty simple it was level two and level three which is medium and high medium

in California level doors are the maximum security guys and all that so I was in there with some dudes for robberies and and drug trafficking drug dealing and selling crank there was a lot of crank dealers at that time in there and they were cool though they actually were like look uh what do you do i explained to them and they're like look bro you should just bail out and i'm like how come they're all well you can obviously afford it with what you do for a living and if you don't you're going to be sitting in here for two months while it winds to the courts your your arraignment then your pretrial hearings and blah blah and they're going to let you out with time served anyways because it's your first defense as an

adult and they were right i i called marcello he my cartel guy from the i had no choice but to call him from jail and normally that would be a stupid move because how jails are they that's a that's a public phone that's a government own phone they monitor those calls they listen in and they know a number you dialed but i had to meet up with marcello the next day that i was supposed to be at in order to pick up local local pot i hadn't told cello i was starting up with the mob already by then i was scoring my bigger amounts from guys who knew him but didn't tell him they a lot of guys love to break the rules the mob has lots of rule breakers oh we're not supposed to sell drugs because the italian mob would never sell

drugs no that's what half of you guys do actually maybe 75% of you guys break those rules but i wasn't supposed to go around cello so i bought i bought i bought my local 5 pounds, 10 pounds of weed to sell local quarter pounds and half pounds and ounces to local kids and all that from him. But the bigger amounts, 10, 20, 30, whatever, I was getting through other guys or other routes, other Mexican dudes in particular. But I had no choice but to call Marcello because I would have been in jail still that morning. And if I would have missed the meetup, that would have been very suspicious. Aside from that, we had already talked about it before, like, what to do. And so I called him, and, of course, it's

a collect call. This is an inmate with the Fresno County Jail. And the first thing he said to me was, what do you call me for, MF, her, and hung up. That was a signal that we had that things are cool, I know where you are, whatever. You at least let them know that I wasn't going to be meeting up with them. I got out like two days later, someone, I called my parents up and said, hey, just do the bail for me. I'll pay you guys the money. I got the cash. I'll pay you guys for when you come pick me up the 10% bail bondsman fee.

Anyhow, the mob wasn't too happy with that. And I told him, said, look, bro, I got arrested for them. They're like, you effing dumbass, and Sellow wasn't happy either. You effing dumbass, you. And the other, well, the guy I got arrested with was also connected with Sellow. and when he got out later on he got lectured as well we got called a couple of dumb asses

quite a few times and they were like you need to stop this street crime bullshit you're doing my mob bro was like what are you doing this for you're freaking you're going to go steal some crap

from warehouse or from a store or some commercial thing when we're making this kind of money from running weed use your flipping head and I'm an 18 year old at the time and so that's after that date I stopped any and all theft related stuff I stopped trading marijuana or crank or other drugs for that and so it was good for me because and then they also told me once they offer you a plea deal whether you got to go back to county jail for a few months because it's a first offense or whatever probation you take it you don't just

get the case over with by signing an agreement. I didn't have to snitch on anybody. All I'd do is plead guilty. And they, as you get charged with three counts or two counts. And if you agree to plead guilty to one, they'll let you drop the other two and then whatever. So one of my conditions of probation though, Matt,

was I was required to either get a job, meaning 40 hours a week of work, which was, after that, that's going to get in the way of my drug business. and it's going to, and I, we don't want to work at frickin McDonald's. I felt above that already, because the level of money I'm making, yeah, I'm going to make, back then, bro, minimum wage was $4.25 in California.

Yeah, I'm going to work 40 hours a week so I can make 160 bucks, and then some of that gets taxed even by the government. It's so I'm not making crap. I can make that much money in an hour with what I do. The other option was go to school. and so I agreed to go back to school and then the judge laid a condition on it though he told me I had to get a B average or better

and my grades could be audited at any time and he said if you're a little B average I'm shipping you to state prison we're not doing the county jail thing with you obviously the DAs they know my juvenile arrest record they have access to all that stuff They knew that it wasn't exactly new to the courts.

I was just new to the adult courts. And so I signed the deal. So I got like three years probation, whatever it was. I was required to go to school and everything. It turned out to be a good thing. The mob actually thought it was a great idea. And so did Sellow. So did others.

They thought it was a good idea to put me back in schools. I only had to take four classes because 12 units is full time. They said I did do full time or more. And 12 units is full time. And so I did actually take it serious after that. I didn't want to go to state prison in my region of California with where I live, bro. State prison means Corcoran. Corcoran is two hours south of me.

It's right halfway between my city and Los Angeles. So bro, Corcoran has all the L.A. gangs and all the Central California, Northern California gangs. The Mexicans hate each other. the northerners and southerners. The white dudes were aligned with the Serrano, so, I mean, I'd at least have an army of Mexicans to help me out, along with a bunch of white dudes. But the black guys hate us in there.

The Asians are not with this either in there. And in my area, there was Lao, Laotian gangs and Vietnamese. These kids were from the Vietnam War era. So for them, bro, they were used to be 52 bombers. flying over their freaking cities for in the late 60s and early 70s so so they ain't even going to wake up unless they hear a tech nine firing those kids were hardcore some of those old school like Vietnamese Asian kids bro they they went they would do a war-torn thing so they're not our friends either in there and so it's not a fun place bro and quirkran had like

sir and sir and manson was in there I'm not really interested in getting Charles Manson's autographed that bad. So I went to school and I did what I had to do. And on top of that, it benefited my pot business because by being in school and not actually dropping out, all the suburban kids that were at the school, they became pot customers. I kept my weed at my next door neighbor's house in case I got searched because how probation is, you surrender your Fourth Amendment rights. you surrender your second amendment rights permanently i lost my my gun rights forever after that um

and then your fourth amendment they can come into your house and say we're going to search your area you search your so my neighbor next door was a video game repairman he was also like a hoarder he had a ton of old video game cabinets in his garage and area and he was an alcoholic that would just drink to like stupor level and so i could just go over there i i stash pot at his house that he wasn't even aware of. And then I'd get a call. I'd go across the alley real quick because there's an alley in between mine and his house and still be able to sell pot and all that. And I did study though. And it got me back, bro, into the mode that I had been in when I was like 14 and 15 where I was sort of a schoolboy athlete kind of kid. And it started

the process of sort of civilizing me again. It started the process of taking me away from being some dude going in the direction of vandalism and then to theft and then to GTA and then to commercial and it reversed that process and I stuck to just business oriented stuff I stuck to drug marijuana really I even stopped dealing crank and stuff I got tired of tweakers I one thing I discovered about selling crank was that tweakers will call you at all hours of the night you cannot get a good night at sleep if you sell sell meth, bro. Fricking, they'll call you a three. I'm out of that R. Can I come out of real quick and knock on your window? You can make good money selling prank

back then, but F that, man. I like sleeping and eating too much and not having my sleep disturbed by freaking zombie-looking meth heads. So I just stuck with the pot stuff after that and did my interstate stuff. And I got that refined. I got really good at that. I learned how to package the stuff up. I learned how to keep my cool around the cops. The other thing you did, too, was it slowed down, with me and my other bros that got involved with this,

it slowed down the descent towards violence. Because what happens, bro, with vandalism, then theft and car to, it moves to, like, carjacking eventually. I saw a lot of kids that did just basic GTAs. We would use screwdrivers, right? And we would bust the steering columns. of like a cutlass or 80s-era cars and then start them up. But I was watching as some of my friends involved were just going into

freaking get out your car. And that became a federal offense under the Bush Senior Administration. Carjacking did. And so I saw how it evolves and they start robbing places. And so it kept me from getting to that level. I never did any violence like that. but by going back to school and having these guys mobsters and others that I respected telling me keep your cool don't start fights at bars and stuff if some dude steps on your feet

at a bar you say excuse me we don't need you risking what it is that we do for some stupid stuff or some ego stuff you get into a fight you get arrested you're going to mess up everything. If you've got to go sit in jail for six months because you smack the guy at a bar, that destroys what we're doing for six months. If you get involved with violence or anything dumb like that, or if you're out stealing shit, you're going to wreck what we're doing. So it actually started to civilize me going to school and having the support, ironically enough, of older organized criminals telling me this is what you should be doing. And, um, It started, kind of became a college kid, bro, that was selling weed and all that.

I transferred to Fresno State in 1996. That's where Jerry Tarkanyan, Chris Heron, lots of, he was infamous there at the time. Chris Heron was our star basketball player. I mean, I hate saying, we got the same fraternity houses. He and I, he got into huge addiction issues. Thank God he's cleaned up now. He does great motivational speaking. I saw him like two months ago when he came.

came back into our area. I went and visited him at one of his speeches. So it, um, I became more partyish, but I wasn't violent at least. When did you graduate college? I graduated. Yeah, all four years. I went without incident. I went, I went, uh, from 1994. Okay, I started back up in March of, uh, sorry, not March. Uh, I was arrested in February of 1984. And by the way, on March 7th of 1984, an even bigger thing happened. The California three strikes law was passed. Pete Wilson did an emergency session, our governor back then. So all of a sudden, my PO called me and my bro in and said,

the moment you slip on a banana peel, we're using this strike law on you. I went to high school with Kimber Reynolds, who was the girl who was taken out by two criminals that were out on parole, whose father, Mike Reynolds, started that law, who made that law, wrote it. She was killed just two streetlights or so from my, house and i had known her we both played tennis in high school she was on the girls team on boys team i sort of knew her a little bit um so three weeks i missed the three strikes cut off date by like three weeks if i had done what i did three weeks later i would have gone to

prison and i would have gone for like five to ten years because it would have been counted as two or three felonies two felonies and then one they they weren't violence but they could have still enhanced them under the seriousness clause, they had violent and or serious felonies. And they would have said, well, it's not violent what he did, but it's serious and boom. So if I had done what I did, I would have gone to prison, actually, three weeks later. But I go back to school in the failure of 1994, all right? That's when the first semester I go back. And I went continuously until spring of 2002. And I have two bachelor's degrees and one associate's degree. So I went to city college initially. And then I transferred to Fresno State in like 1996, 97 when I was 21 or so.

And I got my first degree, like 97 or so, 98 was my first four-year degree. And I kept going to get a degree in journalism after that. Unfortunately, bro, I could have been like a lawyer or something bigger, but with my felony record, I wasn't going to risk going to law school and then passing the LSAT and all that and passing the bar exam and then finding out, oh, we're not going to let you into the California State Bar because of your past. So when I thought about things, I got into politics ultimately, and I got into, I used my journalism skills to do political campaign. So I did one political internship in 1998

for a U.S. senator for one semester. I was one of we had two Democrat senators then so one of them was, it was a Democrat. And then in 2001, I did a second internship at a political office for a

Republican member of Congress from my region. And it was the same semester as 9-11 actually. And so one of the first i literally my first week was we got to do a bunch of press conferences related to the 9-11 attacks and i was in the media area of of that i worked underneath his the congressman's media assistant every member of congress has an office in the beltway in washington dc and then they have one in their home district i worked at the home district one because i was in boon school

and we had a main media person in D.C. Then we had an assistant for that person in California, and I worked for that assistant. And so it was during the whole 9-11 thing and all that. I also, prior to that, one other racket that I did get into with the mob was illegal gambling. I set up illegal dice games, and that did pretty well for me, actually. I craps is still illegal in California even at the Indian casinos you can play blackjack and slots and all that kind of stuff but craps and at that time roulette was also illegal so I would set up a few craps games I'd invite business people over like straight and narrow business guys that like to gamble for one night and then another night I'd have like criminals coke dealers from my school Armenians.

bookmakers come yeah you know other marijuana dealers i knew of and yeah yeah come take your drug profits and threw them on my gambling table and uh i discovered that i could take their drug profits pretty easy with the way the numbers and the math works and craps although there was a few nights that i got my uh my ass kicked uh if if they get a lucky streak and they're betting big bro they you could have nights where you do illegal gambling where you're paid out more than your collecting that happened to me once or twice but i graduated in 2002 and i started working for a politician and uh ironically enough bro while working for him he got elected to the state assembly of california on a family values a family values kind of platform right and he

he ended up getting arrested at the same prostitution strip that i grew up near it was so freaking hilarious because i'm working with these family values republicans right and uh i i like tax cuts and that kind of stuff and i i don't i like i hate taxes bro if i could pay zero tax i sure the hells would uh but so i kind of like fiscal conservative right but i didn't give two craps about freaking who sleeps with who or i broke the loss i was a pot dealer, but I have all these family values Republicans. And they're like, oh my God, I can't believe he would do that. He got arrested or cited at a prostitution strip.

And I'm just, to me, it was funny as hell. I was 23, no, let's see, 2000, he was arrested in 2003 or four, I want to say. So I would have been, I would have been like 28 years old, I think, right around at the time. I thought it was hilarious that he got arrested at the same prostitution strip that I used to live by and that I knew that the mob had shook down for years and I had been mob connected just before that, right? So, and I had gotten out of the business by then, by the way, too. What I did was I passed my connections over to other people and I was slowing down my local sales. and I also had been involved with high-grade pot by then too

because that's in the mid-90s going on that's when the high-grade marijuana from Mendocino, Humboldt, as well as BC Bud started to come our direction and a lot of pot smokers in California would buy like Mexican weed to have a good amount for low price and then they'd buy a little bit of the high-grade to have some high-quality stuff. Help them with budgeting their,

their money kind of thing right I have a question at this point you graduated right so you've graduated you got a couple degrees you're working like were you not thinking to get out of this? No I was I was in the process

of during that whole time as I was around the year 2000 roughly I really could start to see man I could have a real future now one of the reasons in the past why

if I had just did things illegal was part of it was what kind of a future can I have where I keep on bike now I can get a decent job and make real money then invest that money right and I was saving a ton of the cash

that I made illegally I used to stash it up in the Sierra Nevada's and that way I wouldn't get robbed I would tell the gangbangers in my community that oh yeah yeah I stash the money up in the area where all the all the rattlesnakes are and california mountain lions and california bears in this way if they ever thought about robbing me yeah yeah yeah come on i'll

take you to where the money's at but if you get bit by a rattler that's not my problem it was kind of a deterrent effect a real easy way by the way to yeah money's up in the mountains come on i'll you want to jack me come on let's go for a drive i'll show you where it's at but if you get bit Hey, you're the one that's going to put your hand down in that hole that I have the that I have everything wrapped up in or whatever, right? Anyhow, yes. I was in the process of giving away my stuff. I started handing customers over to other dudes I knew that was sell.

I had friends at the college that I knew were also involved in the business. There was like four to five of us roughly that I knew of that were pretty good-sized pot dealers and stuff like hey bro i'm gonna send you over to so-and-so just start getting it from him i was basically handing over customers kind of one at a time i was grinding it down slowly and the the last time that i ever talked to anybody mob affiliated that's whether the chaldean guys from back there the italian dudes from back there whatever was right about the 9-11 era writer in fact it turned out to be convenient because after 9-11 nobody was able to get pot from across the border i sell it myself the border for the next six weeks after 9-11 was so secure

that there was a drought in my region and people had to switch to locally grown indoor pot in order to smoke getting mexican brickweed even for me me who was connected at the time my brother's mexican friends were like we can't get nothing nobody wants to do any everybody's worried they think that bush is going to flick and secure the border blah blah well they were wrong there uh yeah but initially ice or whatever it may have been the i ns still back then the border patrol d ea all those guys along the u.s mexican border and seen ysidro and the other ports of entry in it people weren't doing anything so there was a there was like six weeks that you couldn't even get anything and

so it just happened to be a good time to to move out anyways and about just around that time was the last time that I dealt with any of those guys now I did at my local pot dealing still and that's what I started to phase out if you will I had good connections in the triangle that's our phrase for Humboldt, Mendocino, Trinity, and Del Norte County, right at the corner of California, the northwest corner where Oregon and California meet. Very good pot growing region, probably the best in the world. However, even in my area, the eastern part of my county is the Sierra Nevada's. Similar elevation.

It's also a great growing area, too. plus there's lots of federal land. So a lot of these guys were growing pot on federal land. After all, what happens if you get busted? They can't see where they do. Seas their own property. If it's grown on your property, they're taking it. They'll take your house.

They'll take your land. They grow on federal national park property. Those of these parks are huge. And these rangers don't have the ability to control that stuff that well. And they'd have to fly helicopters over it. And then we learned with growing. in the mountains that all you have to do is hide it amongst manzanita plants because manzanita gives off the same heat signature that marijuana does so if they're flying over with choppers

or spotter planes and they're using fleer systems forward looking infrared if they're if they're looking down for pop plants in an area with lots of manzanita bushes and manzanita plants it's going to blend in it's going to be the same heat signature so it's not going to be be some dead giveaway, like if you grow it in an area where there aren't any that stuff. So there was some tricks of the trade. And also, if you grow in the mountains, you can see if a convoy of DEA's, California law enforcement, FBI, if they got to come arrest you, you're going to see them coming. There's only so many routes up a mountain. A lot of them are dirt roads. You've got to look out. You see it. You've got time to run down another hill. One of my good

friends that I've done shows with in the past he was actually arrested in Humboldt or Mendocino by the DEA Black Hawk helicopter he's the only guy I know that can say that he literally had a US military chopper chasing him down the hill and he got the DEA I guess they catapulted out of it with their freeze their stuff but that's how they have to do arrest in those areas bro they got to fly choppers and hope you can hide behind rocks because again infrared systems aren't going to see through stone like that um but i was getting out of the high grade business as well during that time i was slowly but surely moving it away and the the culmination of that was this operation called operation green speaker it's well

documented um in 2005 the fbi the DEA and California law enforcement initiated a major operation against a bunch of my bros. And I mean, they took out everybody. And the way the case started, bro, was the Atlanta DEA office arrested a football player from Georgia Tech named Ruben Houston. He was a cornerback. He was well on his way to the NFL. And much like a guy like me who has the talent to go into the corporate.

world he was greedy rather than he he was caught with 110 pounds i believe of marijuana that came from our region one of my old friends his friend supplier and he snitched everybody out this this guy rubin houston he ratted out he told the DEA in Atlanta look the biggest players are in the central part of california they have access to all the northern california marijuana going south to L.A. and then back east, and they have access to Mexican wheat coming north. Interstate 80 is north of us, and most drug traffic from California goes on Interstate 80 east. Interstate 80 goes all the way into New York City, so lots of drug running, of all types, goes there. And they got to pass through my region.

And so that also makes for good corrupt cops, too, that like to pull those guys over and steal their stuff. But the Rubin Houston toiled on a major distributor in my region. And from there, it just, the dominoes started to fall. My bros from Mendocino and all that. And were being got arrested. A bunch of my friends from my high school and college got arrested. and I was an unindicted co-conspirator in that federal case and the only reason why I was lucky was because I had unfortunately developed an oxycontin addiction about a year and a half before that I was taking pain meds

and a childhood friend of mine that snitched on that also became a snitch and another guy I knew who became a snitch who I was close with that told the DEA that Jeff Crow yeah he used to be a guy used to be well connected but he ain't done but a dope addict he's basically he went from being a kingpin to the proverbial guy that's rolling on the floor puking his guts off from opiate addiction so the DEA and the FBI just assumed that I had fallen off and I sort of had I fell into the I talk about this full it open that I did become an addict of opiates oxycontin 80s

and so for people out there that do reach out to me I typically, I talk more about addiction issues than I do mob or drug trafficking stuff because that's a huge problem now, fentanyl and all that but I know what it's like. I had just a few years where I was hooked before I quit and during Operation Green Speaker I was just, it's ironic that drug addiction

during the DEA, it was like a 19 month long investigation, I want to say. Multi-state with the focus being in California that may have saved me, being worked because all their rats told them Jeff is a, yeah, Jeff was a big phone where, one, no, he's a freaking, bro, he's a nobody now, man, he freaking, he became looked on that shit

and if they tap my phone they would have heard me calling people look you got any OCs you got the OCs they would have heard me saying stuff like that so I got off the stuff though in 2005-ish and all that and I've been away from it since

but that case went down during that time period and quite a few of my bros I talked to one of them the other day who had to serve federal time in this prison called Atwater which is in California

Not a good place Another friend of mine got sent to Longpock Federal did federal time there I had a few friends shipped back east to do prison time And federal prisons that were back east Some of them got hit by the state The FBI had some of them indicted by California Back then California was still very very much enforcing the law

Today's California you can go rob play You could go break the rack at the Nordstroms and run out with a bunch of stuff and Gavin Newsom will slap you on the wrist and don't do that again for your fifth time. But back then, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor and he enforced the rules still. So, but I was out of the drug business completely after that.

In fact, if I would have tried to get back into it, Matt, it would have been impossible because I didn't even have any connections left. They, when the FBI and the DEA getting really do things, bro, they are thorough and they are complete. They will take out, there was like three or four phases to Operation Green Speaker. The first one being Rubin Houston and the Atlanta stuff, then they started investigating the, this really big cartel-connected Mexican guy who he's a Mexican-American, but he was connected down south and he was getting thousands of pounds at once of and and then they go to the next phase they look at everybody's call logs back then and and they get everybody bro

they knocked out everyone so i mean so what did you do when you you're saying you got out like what did you start doing and and you know like what happened i did the old-fashioned go get a freaking job. So I got into, I got into like, so solar was really new in 2006, 2007 in California. And there was just a lot of money to be made in that. And I got a job as like a marketing director for a place. After I was cleaned up, of course, for a while. I did, I had a few months where I didn't work.

I got into radios. I worked for Clear Channel, which is now Eye Heart, I believe. But back then it was Clear Channel. They owned like nine radio stations in my region. I got into sales jobs and stuff. And I, but I got, I was a marketing director at a solar place for quite a while. And then I got other jobs in solar. And I did jobs like that.

And nowadays, I have my own business. I, uh, I do help. improvement stuff. I have a list of contractors that I'm cool with that I'm well that are local that are legit. This isn't one of those mafia contractors. We're not going to run up the tab on your house or nothing and give you shoddy products and none of that kind of stuff. And I do well, Merrill. Now I get to make my own hours and people. I use AI, real estate AI now to figure out who has good credit, who has equity, who just bought a home in the last 30 days, 60 days. You understand because you were in the mortgage stuff, whatever you were doing before you got your issues.

So you understand how real estate AI apps, I'll tell you, bro, it's almost scary the stuff they tell you about people now. I'm saying? Oh, real estate apps. I can, I could, before I even send out a mailer or send out an email to a prospective client, I know more about them than their husband or wife does. What I'm saying? So that's what I do now. I do quite well with it.

And I'm very happy. My daughter was young when all this stuff was happening. And it was a very big disappointing thing that I prioritized drugs, sales, as well as usage and addiction, unfortunately, in her early years. But my wife and I. at the time we divorced around that time, too. Well, about five years later, but she was getting tired of the... She knew that she had known...

She didn't know all the mom's stuff 100%, but obviously she knew I was a pot dealer. I mean, I met her from her friends coming over and buying weed off me. My future wife was hung out at my house and decided to burn a few with me and decided to lay in the bed with me after that for a while. so um but so i i have a nice house now and it's a nice real estate trust and uh so i'm doing pretty well are what about uh aren't you running a podcast or yeah well i've been doing

i've been doing some side stuff with that the i'm i'm in the process of writing a book about all this uh back in 2021 i met dennis griffin he passed away, unfortunately, but he was an an investigator in New York. He was a sheriff back there, and he wrote a number of mafia books about Frank

Calada, the guy that was played by Frank Vincent in the Moby Casino. The mafia versus the law of the Battle for Vegas, I think, is one of his books. Anyhow, I did sort of what you call a debriefing session with him. If he

had been a cop, it would have been debriefing but this was for the literary world and so I told him here's all my stuff um here's how we did things I showed them proof of uh indictments I had him speak to some of my bros who were hit in operation green speaker and they're say oh yeah he's not lying he's telling you and they were going to he was going to help me uh he was going to have me do a book with him but he passed away uh later in 2021 um and so what I'm going to what I'm doing right now I have mob truecrime.com where my information is but I'm going to be authoring a book and I've been doing some YouTube stuff kind of on the side and even without trying

bro I got two monetized YouTube channels and one has like 3,000 subs and one with 1500 but I only drop a video once a month if that I am going to make it more of a steady thing though but I don't want to tell too much of my story on that stuff i i'll save it for interviews like yours other big channels like yours and and and uh soft white underbelly i went on there that kind of stuff um but i'm going to i've been i've interviewed guys from my region as well as others who were involved in the coke business and other stuff freeway rick ross is one of my bros um one of his right hand guys named CEO Rod Johnson is from this

area. He was a major co-trafficker. He got indicted by the FBI in like 1990. He did 10 years federal time for it. He does shows with me. We'll interview guys, stuff like that. But I am going to make it more of a

regular thing. But even without even trying, bro, just a lot of my subs are just from people who've seen my interviews elsewhere. Then they find my YouTube channel and they sub do it. but I definitely should do. I want to stick to interviews, though, primarily for the time being, because what good is a book on the sales end

if you tell your whole damn story for free on YouTube? Again, I tell my story. I tell my story all the time, and I sell books. Right, you know, you got a good point. Maybe I need to... You're never going to be able to tell that story as good as you can once you've written it down. You know what I'm saying?

Like, and some people want to. read a book and they want to hear the audio version and you know i mean they or they get interested they hear my story over the course of a couple hours and then they think i i'm going to read the book and they read the book and they're always you know it it i mean you're still going to sell books you know you're holding it off but at the very least start doing the interviews once a week or twice a week you know that if you've got monetized channel then it might you never know what's going to take off a good point and and like with you i've i've seen some sometimes you've had guests on that like I know Mike Dow and a few others Wade Hollywood Wade he's a cool dude and some

others and yeah you're right and uh because when I watch some of your stuff your abilities by the way if you had been around back in my day in my region I would have recruited a guy like you in five minutes bro your ability to change your look and your ability to bullshit let's just be honest back then because you had to do what you did you did some pretty decent level freaking your mortgage or whatever you you're able to how to handle paperwork as well well a guy like you in front of the cops you could have can you could have had them ass you could have had them saying hey can i get your business card they go up to you to search you right and by the time you're done talking they're like uh matt can i get your business card i might need to refinance my house you would be able to

turn the situation around to where they want to go back to their captain you know No, really this Matt Cox guy is involved with the weed business. In fact, you're going to show you do your loan paperwork. When you're in Europe, I saw some of the pictures of where you had, where you had your IDs, you know, this longer. That master of disguise thing, bro, you wouldn't have done really freaking well. It caught up with me eventually. Yeah, it always does.

at all. Hey, I thought I was invincible. I thought I was, I have a high IQ and I thought that I was smarter than the cops and the feds. And they'll catch all these other guys, but yeah, but I'm going to slip through their fingers. Yeah. And no matter what, even though they didn't get me on any big like, let's say marijuana cases, look, I still ended up in the courts for theft stuff. You don't, you know, you don't do any kind of dirt. This is our last. lesson for the kids for today or any people watching. You don't do dirt without ultimately having some consequence. It may not be the biggest thing you do you get got for, but they will catch on to something. And most of the time, especially with today's technology, but being

doing stuff in the 90s where the cops had to actually surveil you from a distance or the FBI would have to set up cameras and buildings far away with high powered lenses and all that. in today's world you got the ultimate snitch it's in your pocket they don't have to they could tap they can turn your own phone into a wire tap like that yeah kids with today's AI today's technology believe me you no matter what your IQ is you will not outsmart Google I can outsmart the AI that federal and state investigators have access to. Let's put it this way. Some of you are watching Matt Cox's video right now because YouTube's algorithm determined that you're likely to like this issue. And chances are

you're watching it because you're like, wow, YouTube was right. I do like this video. Well, guess what? Investigators have similar AI that predicts what you're going to do next. If they know you're a crook or you have a specialty of some type and it puts you into their app okay he did this this day did this this day that day what does the what does the what does the i say he's likely to do next okay we'll make sure we're there to and sure enough their i will probably predict with pretty damn good accuracy what's going through your head and what you're likely to do and on top of that they use these things in court and if you don't let's say you want to you think you're real smart i'll just not take my phone

with me when i go do this stuff well then the fbi is going to say it was a red flag every time he goes somewhere else non-criminal related he's got the phone in his pocket but every time we've noticed him doing criminal shit the phone is in the same spot at his house for that two hours so guess what You still stand down. They'll go into court. Yeah. We know he doesn't take his phone with us. Every time he leaves his phone on his nightstand and leaves without it, that's your pattern.

Albarism. What about that kid that killed those college students, he put his phone on, he had driven by the house over and over and over again. And then the night he goes to kill him, he puts his phone on airplane mode and leaves the house. It was like, okay, this, you driven by, first we got you driving by, back, forth, back, forth, back, forth. The day you commit the crime, you shut off the phone because you don't want anybody to know you were even near the house. And that right there is, is conscious of guilt. Boom, yeah. And that's, that's circumstantial evidence.

And that's just going to make them look into you more and more and more. And if about the only thing, yeah, the only thing I could think of that would remotely work and even this wouldn't is leave your phone at home. and then but you got like attach it to your dog's caller so when your dog's running around the house right google's going to assume that you've been going around your house with your phone but then the FBI's going to say wait a minute he's got a dog and then they're going to say hold up you mean to tell me that he was running up and down his stairs 20 times and into the area where his dog house is at with his phone for this one hour you would have to have you'll have to have somebody else holding your phone and moving around with it.

But again, there's cameras, ring cameras on every door. Then there's also surveillance cameras. So they'll be like, okay, let's look to see where his phone was taken. And then they find one camera that happens to catch an image. That's not him with his phone. That's his girlfriend walking with his phone. And then they turn her into a snitch. Hey you guys if you like the interview

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