Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - International Scammer Embezzles Millions | Germano Tomassetti
Episode Date: August 12, 2024Get 50% sitewide for a limited time. Just visit GhostBed.com/cox and use code COX at checkout. International Scammer Embezzles Millions | Germano Tomassetti ...
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The reason why I never got caught for anything that I did is because I didn't have a digital
trace. I'm on my way out. I'm a couple of months away from being completely clean. I'm not doing
identity theft anymore. I'm not doing any collections. I have a little bit more money coming in from
the embezzlement. I didn't make too many big mistakes, right? This is the time I did. You know when
you're desperate, that's when you make the most foolish decisions. So my name is Germano Tomasetti.
I was born in Winnipeg, Canada. My childhood was relatively,
normal. I grew up in a household. Up until I was about 10 years old, I grew up with two sisters,
my mom and my dad. And it was relatively normal. I dealt with a lot of bullying when I was in elementary
school, partially because of me just being a little bit different, being one of the ADD kids.
And then also because my sister was kind of popular in junior high and the younger siblings of the
people that didn't like her would pick on me and all that kind of stuff. So I didn't have a great time in
school. I couldn't concentrate. I wasn't interested. I excelled in certain areas, like math I was
really good at, which would, you know, come in handy later on. And I was also good with English,
language arts, that kind of stuff. But if you put like science in front of me or physics or
anything like that, like I would just be, you know, turn into the class clown and, and just ignore
work. Because of the bullying, eventually I started, you know, fighting back quite literally. I got into a lot of
fights when I was in elementary school, junior high, even going into high school. But the big
change for me is when I got into junior high, I started hanging around with you could say the
bad kids. At that time, the bad kids weren't that bad, but they're smoking weed. They're
skipping school. They're getting in trouble in class all the time. I start hanging out with these
guys because I had spent so much time on my own. I had friends, but I was bullied a lot, like I said,
and now I'm hanging out with guys that don't get bullied, if anything, some of them do the bullying.
You know, I didn't partake in that, but I was friends with these guys because they accepted
me. They didn't care that other people didn't like me, and they basically took me under their wing.
And through that, I start to get introduced to crime. And obviously, at that age, it's nothing
really serious. We're stealing janitor's keys and breaking into schools at night. I think the
biggest thing that we did when I was in my teenage years was probably, and I'm talking,
in 13, 14 years old, we broke into a school one night and they were doing fundraising
for, I don't know, it was like Girl Scouts or whatever it was, and we stole an envelope and it had
a lot of money in it. I can't remember exactly, but thousands of dollars. And at that time
to be that age and to see that kind of money, it was a big deal for us. So other than that,
nothing was really going on. Once I get into high school, I'm dealing with the same thing.
Now it's on a larger scale. Now I'm getting in a fight every two weeks and I'm getting expelled
constantly and I was just I was just a problem at the end of the day I had a lot of anger built up
because as I told you I grew up in the household that I did but around 10 years old my dad left
he was in and out of jail constantly and my mother just I guess she had enough and they got
divorced and I didn't really see him much after that and in jail what I mean bites or
drinking or no so his his his thing was armed robbery
So from about, yeah, it was serious stuff.
So when he was 17 years old, he robbed a chain out here called Safeway with a couple of his friends.
They got away with like $60,000, which is a lot of money back then.
We're talking about 45, 50 years ago.
And he was so successful at it that he started doing it consistently.
So between, I'm told between 17 and 19 years old, he did about five or six really big armed robberies,
including like a McDonald's for like eight grand or ten grand or whatever and a couple of other
places but he took off to Montreal for whatever reason I don't know if he was dealing the heat
or whatever it was but the police or the RCMP ended up catching up with him in Montreal when he
was 19 years old or 20 years old and they arrested him and he ended up doing six years this first
stint so like I said from a young age he was into that it's unfortunate too because he was
also very, he was a very hard worker within the construction world. He was a great singer. I was told
when he was like 16 years old that he was offered a million dollar contract in Nashville to sing
because he could sing like Elvis Presley. So he had a bunch of things going for him. And apparently
he always blamed, this is what I'm told. He blamed his mom for not giving him the opportunity
because she was the one at the end of the day that said, no, you're not going. She didn't want
her son to go to the U.S. and get into trouble and whatever else, right? So, but yeah, he basically
moved on from armed robberies in his, you know, later teens and early 20s to doing that time
in jail. He gets out. And as far as I know, up until he was about 30, he was always against
drugs. So he didn't, he didn't even smoke weed or anything like that. He was very anti-drugs.
And then at one point, I guess, his cousin introduces him into cocaine.
He starts parting and stuff like that.
And somehow, I don't know how it connects here, but he gets into heroin eventually.
And once he got into heroin, that was it.
That was like it was no longer about money, like when it comes down to the robberies or whatever.
It was not maybe he liked it for the thrill of it before.
But now he's an addict.
So now he's doing crazy stuff.
You know, we have in, I don't know about your city, but here in our taxis,
We have like this, like, plastic shield that goes around the driver so you can't stab him.
And people told me that in my city, my dad, along with his crew, were part of the reason why they put that in there because he was doing so many taxi robberies at that point.
And it sucks because, like I said, he was a very talented guy, very hardworking, anti-drugs for a lot of time.
Then his cousin gets him into some stuff.
And, you know, the rest is history.
He ends up, you know, I'll jump ahead here just about him.
And then we'll go back into the other dynamics.
but he ended up passing away a couple of years ago during COVID,
and as far as I know, it was an overdose.
So he had been doing heroin probably from his 30s up until almost 60 years old,
which you can imagine takes a toll on the body, right?
Because any of those guys that get heavy into it,
their body just gets completely depleted.
He used to be like, he's like me, he's about 5758,
but he was always a jacked guy.
He always, you know, he had that jailhouse build, right?
All upper body, nothing below.
and but then you know with the heroin he just looked like a twig I saw him once in those like 16
or 17 years sorry twice one was at my mother's funeral and then another time was right before
I got into all the crime that I was doing we tried to reconnect and he was just gone like having a
conversation with him it was sad because I could tell that he it was almost like he had an intellectual
disability his brain was so fried from the drugs and his body looks so weak he's probably 50 or 50 something
at the time but he looked like he was 80 you know what I mean so that's the history with him
your mom so you were get if we go back to the where we were to begin with you your mom had
basically said yeah I'm done with them and and you too moved out or she throw him out like well no
I think he went to jail and then like during that time in jail she probably divorced him or
whatever it was like he was constantly in and out for shorter terms later on like a year or two
or whatever for little robberies and probably, you know, going against this probation or
whatever it was, right? And then the only reason why I brought that up is because as I was
getting to the teenage years and to the younger adult years, I was very angry. So a part of it was
because my dad had left. And then at one point, I just was so, I always had authority issues. I
couldn't listen to anybody. Anybody that was trying to tell me anything, I didn't want to listen to
them, including my mom. So eventually she got fed up with me a little bit. And I ended up spending
about a year doing like group homes. I was in like housing and stuff like that with other teens.
And that was a terrible experience in itself because, you know, I come from a place called
Transcona in Winnipeg. And it's like it's kind of like small town mentality. There's no,
there's not a lot of foreigners. It's like white pick a fence, that kind of stuff, you know.
It's not rich by any means, but it's kind of closed off from the rest of the city. And it's a city by
itself so when i go into these group homes all of a sudden i'm going to the north end or elmwood
and these are the places that are a little bit harder right more poverty stricken and
full of gangs and drug dealing and stuff like that so i mean in a way it did good things for me
because it toughened me up but it didn't do anything good other than that and it made me more
upset with my mom because i'm like you left me in the shithole to fend for myself and now i'm
fighting these kids that are like you know hardened you know what i mean because right get
getting in a fight at school with like just the kid that gets in a fight once a year is
is nothing but the kid that fights like every day in his hood like that that guy's going
to be tough you know what I mean so yeah I was I was not happy with it and when I did go back
home and going into those early teenage years I was just more upset with her and I just
wouldn't listen to anything by by probably grade 10 halfway in I dropped out because I was
getting expelled all the time. And a lot of the fights that I was getting into at that point
were for other people. I always stuck up for other people. You know what I mean? And when I was
in high school, I was the guy that was friends with everybody. So I'd be friends with jocks. I'd be
friends with metalheads, like anime geeks, all kinds of stuff. So some of these guys were
regularly picked on by the cool kids or whatever and I'd end up fighting for them. So I got tired
of being blamed all the time and the teachers looking at me like I was the problem. And
in a way I was sometimes in the classroom not concentrating and stuff but when it came to those fights like I really I wasn't looking for them I just felt like it was my responsibility to stick up for you know weaker people so I drop out around that time and then I basically spend a year or so working just that you know regular jobs I think I probably worked at McDonald's and you know whatever crap jobs you work when you're 16 years old right and then
I eventually get into there was an underage party it was called feel the heat in
Winnipeg it was a really popular thing so like 3,000 4,000 kids would show up once a
month for these underage parties obviously no alcohol or anything like that but that is
where I got introduced to the street life so keep in mind I'm coming from Transcona
white pick a fence whatever else like you know what I mean like there's fights and stuff but
it's not a dangerous place so now I'm starting to go downtown and I'm going to
going to these parties, and I'm being friends with people that are friends with other people
and, you know, et cetera. And I get introduced to this kid that's basically locally famous for
rapping. He was actually really good. If he stuck to it, he would have, he would have been successful.
He would have made money. He would have been a star. I think so. But he was too involved in the street
stuff. So at this time, I'm like 17 years old, 18 years old, and he's probably a year or two
younger than me but he was deep into the game like he was selling probably i don't know over the
weekend he'd sell like four ounces you know what i mean like because that's what it started with and then
eventually just because it was more money and it was more prevalent in the streets but keep in mind this
is like a 16 17 year old kid making thousands or tens of thousands of dollars while trying to
maintain this this kind of this rap career as well and he just he was the one i always credit him
for showing me the street life everything from drugs to guns to you know we'd go to host parties and
we'd we'd have a problem with people because of him all the time so here's the thing a lot of the
gangs didn't like him because he had a big mouth and he and he was very popular with woman so he's a
mulatto guy who was good looking and he was young and he was stealing everybody's girlfriends
including some gangsters so we would we had a crew ourselves but we always got into it
with these much bigger groups and gangs because of him.
You know what I mean?
It was just like, we were so loyal to him and he was such a,
just a, I don't know, just a character that he just constantly had problems.
So, anyways, he shows me a little bit about this world.
And eventually, after a couple of years of hanging out,
I kind of get tired of it.
I dabbled in drug dealing when I was younger around that age.
wasn't good at it first of all second of all didn't like it i was too empathetic i remember that
one time one story that sticks with me in particular is we went to he asked me to come with him to
collect an amount from someone that owed like 4k or 5k or whatever this was a in one of the
you know one of the hoods and we go to collect off this guy and he's got no money and uh you know he's
got nothing really that he can give up because he's already done this he's already gone to the pawn
shop and sold everything that he has so he you know if he didn't come up with something we were
you know something bad was going to happen to him i don't think we would to kill him but he was
going to get a beating so he ends up handing over this piece of paper and it's it's basically like
the slip to his daughter's car so his daughter had just turned 16 years old and he bought her like
a used car or whatever for her birthday and he was about to give it to her the following week
and he basically like rode over the car right then and there
just to take care of his dead and for me like i said growing up up empathetic and poor mind you
because my mom raised us after my dad being in jail all the time was very empathetic to people
going through that situation especially with drugs so that day in particular i said i'm never
doing this again like i don't like the way it makes me feel you guys do your thing i'll still hang
out with you be friends and stuff but i'm i'm not hanging out i'm not doing the late hours i'm not
work in a phone. I'm not doing any of that stuff anymore because I'm just too emotional for
it. So a couple of years ago by, we're hanging out and then we don't. I just kind of get tired
of all of it. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday.
Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine.
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I'm tired of going out to the events. I get tired of being around the hood, the paranoia,
the beef with gangs, all the shit that comes with the street life.
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save a whopping 50% off site wide. And I just want to make it really clear. I've said this in other
podcasts as well. Like, I was not a thug when I was a kid. I did a little bit of this. I admit that,
you know, I was selling drugs a little bit and stuff. But I was not, I was not a gangster or a
game member or anything like that. I hung around with a lot of them. But I wasn't, I wasn't like
one of those guys. So, and that's not to say like, I'm not.
guilty it's just to let people know i'm not trying to you know i don't want you to perceive me as
that i'm not that yeah you're not pretend to be a thug no i'm not you know and like sometimes i might
look like it because i've i got hand tattoos and all this other stuff but like if you hear the
way i talk you understand how i carried myself throughout most of my life um so yeah eventually i
leave that social circle and then i become friends with another drug dealer and he's more of he's a
white boy he grew up in a nice area and he was the other type of drug dealer so there's the type that
are in the streets that are on the hula gang thing that's what we call it and then there's the guys
that are the businessmen and the ones that are quiet and dress nicely and don't hang out at clubs
and just keep to their business so i met this guy around let's say 20 years old he ended up living
like a block or two away from me and in the middle of us was this place called the circle
And that's where Osborne, Osborne meets with a river.
And they call it the circle because that's the spot.
That's where everybody kind of hangs out.
That's where you go to get drugs.
That's where the homeless would hang out, the skaters, everything.
So he used to sell at the circle.
And I live two blocks away downriver.
And he lives two blocks away on Osborne.
So we just naturally, you know, clicked up and became friends.
And I saw the other side of drug dealing.
right i saw that quiet side he lives in a penthouse two two blocks away he's very quiet
he doesn't have any beef with anybody and i was like you know that was the only time i thought
about getting into it because he's doing well for himself too he's probably doing around that time
probably like 10k a month and he's living well and he's also two years younger than me he's like 18
years old and he's living like this i'm like damn man i'm making like maybe 1500 a month from
my full-time job right now and i've seen you make 10 grand like it's not
nothing, you know what I mean? And the addicts were different too. That's important to quickly
quickly talk about, right? So when you got in the hood and then you got like rich white folks
with, you know, buying money, you're dealing with a different clientele that headache is not
as intense. And you know, your phone can be running at three o'clock in the morning, five o'clock
in the morning, three p.m., whatever. And it was more of like a nighttime thing. People do it at
the clubs whatever so i hang out with him and this brings me into the next stage of my life so i'm
hanging out with him one night we're out there late we're at the circle late we're there till like
it's probably one o'clock in the morning and this homeless traveler chick that we had befriended
and she was just a cool little punk from somewhere in the states um she comes around and she says hey
what are you guys are what are you guys doing do you want to come to a party and we're looking at
the time we're like it's one o'clock all the clubs closing winnipeg at two o'clock so we're
like where are you going at one o'clock there's no point it's like no no we're going to go to
this place called a.m. after hours and I was like what the hell is that and they're like I guess
he knew about it too and he's like oh it's like like a rave kind of it's every weekend Friday
Saturday midnight till 6 a.m. or later what and I was like what year is this okay so I want to
say this is probably timeline wise maybe 2009 2010 yeah
Yeah. Um, so yeah, we, they, they tell me about this party. He convinces me to go. I go and, you know, I show up to this warehouse looking place and looks sketchy as hell. You know, there's, and everybody's there. There's goss there. There's gangsters. There's prepees. There's everybody's there. And I'm like, wow, this is, this is crazy. Like, how are these guys all together? Because my last memory of seeing all these people together was high school. And they all.
hated each other and there was fights all the time and then I go into this you know the rave scene
and it's like everyone's on equal ground like nobody's like you know what I mean like they're
hanging out together so I'm like man this is crazy we go inside and like needless to say I had a
great time I didn't do any drugs in my first night I didn't get drunk or anything I just danced
man I had a good time and I met a lot of great people and I eventually fell in love with that
scene which got me into promotions I started doing my own event
It was called the Friday Night Project where once a month we would, I was basically trying to get the club and the rave scene to, to come together.
Because at that time, it was separate.
There was club nights and then there was like the rave nights.
And I wanted to bring it together inside the club, like the ravers into the club because they didn't like to go to clubs.
It was like too, I don't know, too bougie or it was too, you know, we're underground.
We're not going to go to that stuff, that kind of thing.
So I did that.
That was 2010, February 5th, 2010.
I threw my first event, filled the place up.
Hit capacity, it was like 300 people at the time.
Not a lot, but in Winnipeg, that's a lot to bring out.
And then I did that for about a year or so.
And that was probably even up until now, the funnest and most peaceful, less, like,
stressful time of my life was in the rave scene for like those two years.
Great people, made some money, had a lot of fun, didn't have any problems.
And then eventually I stopped doing it.
let's say 2000, I want to say I probably got out around 2013, 2014, a few years later.
And I basically went from from there to homeless.
So.
They're to, yeah.
Yeah.
So.
What happened there?
So I exit the scene and I'm working at a good company.
It's a call center, but they pay good wages at that time.
And I really like the job.
I could never hold a job, by the way, this.
whole time, like all my early teenage years into early adult years, or sorry, late teenage
into early adult, because, again, just the authority thing and not wanting to be told what
to do and losing interest, whatever it was. So I'm working at this. Sounds like, sounds like you.
Yeah, exactly. That's like this guy. Sounds like John Vosiac. So what ends up happening is
basically like, I'm working at this good job. I love it there. And then,
I get involved with someone that's married and it started like it never really progressed into
anything, but it just became an uncomfortable situation for me. She started showing up where I was.
She wanted to be around my scene because I was still hanging out with some of the guys and stuff.
And she had never seen that. She had never been to like clubs or in the hood or house parties
or anything like that. So every once in a while I go out and I was bringing her out as a friend.
But she was going through marriage troubles at the time. And I thought,
nothing of it i thought we were friends she was a really good looking woman like six
foot two blue eyes blonde hair like swedish you know like really beautiful woman so in my mind i
thought i don't have a chance with this woman so i it was always in the back of my head we're just
friends we're hanging out she likes the scene whatever but i guess she she was the type of woman
that was dependent on a man so when she knew that she was leaving the marriage like i didn't come to
realize this to later, but I think when she knew that she was leaving the marriage, she needed
somewhere to go and she needed someone to take care of her. She sees me. I treated her well. I was
nice. She has a good time around me. And she knew how I was with woman as well, because she had
seen me date other girls and, you know, whatever. So she thinks I'm a safe bet. But I had no interest
in that. And it ended up getting like, like I said, really weird. I wanted to stop hanging out with her
completely and unfortunately we work together in the same area she's like right next to me so
every day that i'm not answering the phone or not answering the texts or or ignoring her at the
club i got to hear about it the next day so i asked to be moved around i asked my supervisor and
he just kind of laughs at me you know what i mean he's like you know it's not that serious and i'm
like look man and i showed him i even showed him messages like like 13 missed calls and stuff like that
She's like isn't she married? I'm like yeah exactly so move me like get me out of here
He wouldn't move me so I told him you know I literally told him to go himself and I quit
And that was kind of my attitude throughout the most of my life because we didn't get into this
But there were plenty times where like the system failed me where I was trying to do the right thing
And I ended up getting consequences because of it you know what I mean like I I I could have easily
You know when and gotten in trouble or call the police or whatever whatever I had to
to do. But I was like, no, I'm going to take it to him. He'll do the right thing. It didn't happen.
Happened with me in my childhood too. I was abused at one of my elementary schools. And I went
forward to the principal and I made a big thing about it. And my parents were never alerted,
were never told. And they never called the police. Like stuff like that would happen throughout
my whole life. And this was the time I just gave up. So I walked away from that job and I literally
decided within about a week or so that I was going to be homeless and it was like it's very
strange when I explain this to people because I was not your typical homeless so what I mean
by that is like I could have stayed with other people I could have stayed with friends family
whoever I was not on drugs I had no alcohol problems no gambling issues none of that stuff
not to say that everyone there is going through that but the majority are so I end up deciding I
break. I don't want to work right now. I don't want to take orders from people. I'm tired. And, you know,
I lost my mom a couple of years earlier. My dad's not around. We kind of jump past that. But 2010,
February, when I threw that first event, nine months later, I lost my mom. So that same year,
I lost my mom. My dad's not around. So I was just tired, man. I felt like I'm done with this.
I just want to break. So my goal was to go to this shelter.
And literally just for like a week or two, just like sleep, go to bed at a regular hour, eat three meals a day, take care of myself properly, and just kind of like decompress from everything that's happened to my life.
What ends up happening while I'm there, a couple of big major key events.
So one is obviously I get healthier.
I get happier.
I get focused on what I want to do later when I leave.
And then I also meet someone that changes my life completely.
and with him I enter the criminal world more of the underworld though so he was an Italian guy
from Quebec that was hiding out now I didn't know this when I first met him we just kind of
sparked the conversation because he saw me wearing an Italia jersey or something like that one
day and he started talking to me in his language and I didn't understand it because my Italian's
terrible but he speaks Sicilian which is a different dialect and I can't understand any of that
but regardless just that kinship he's like oh you're Italian
i'm italian whatever so he was an older guy he's probably about 60 years old and i just made it a point
to check in with him every day we would eat together we would talk as much as we could with his you know
his french sicilian italian words that he'd throw in with the english um and we just became good
friends and he was a little bit unhealthy he you know he's had a terrible cough to sound like he was
going to drop half the time he had you know full set of dentures he would even talk to himself a
few times too. So I was, I kind of thought maybe he's not well. Maybe he's a little crazy.
He's definitely unhealthy. But whatever. It helped me past the time having that responsibility of
taking care of someone again, which is what I was used to doing. So I remember some of his stories
weren't adding up when I asked him why he was there. You know, one time he's there to collect money
from an author that owes him money for a book that he wrote. And then another time, it's like a
completely different fabricated story.
So I'm, I'm constantly,
he's homeless. He's, he's in the shelter.
He's shelter, yeah.
But keep in mind, he's from Quebec.
He's from like basically Montreal,
but he's in my city, Winnipeg,
like a smaller city homeless.
So it's like, why are you here?
And he even, one thing he did admit to is
he came here from Quebec and he went straight
to the shelter. So at the time, though,
there was a huge bust on organized crime
in Ontario and Quebec.
I forget exactly what the, what it was called, but you can look it up in, I think it's
2015 from right about the timeline.
There's a huge bust where I think it's called Scope Operation Scopar or something like that.
And yeah, they did a bunch of arrests in Italy, Quebec and Ontario.
And this was right around the time that guy shows up.
So I kind of thought maybe that was it because this, again, his stories didn't make sense.
And but I didn't, I never brought it up.
One day, however, we're sitting at the table, and this story is probably the most unbelievable part of everything I'm going to vote to tell you, to be honest.
I think a lot of people have a tough time realizing that this happened.
This is my opinion of what it was.
So I told you he had dentures.
One day I see him eating, and I would help him with his dentures sometimes.
They'd just, like, fall out and I'd go clean them for him or whatever, right?
It was just that kind of relationship.
So I came back for the dentures on the table.
he's eating and then I start looking at his his fingers his hands and I noticed like something's
wrong with them like the way that the way that your fingertips are on your finger it's pretty like
easy to see a pattern and everything like that and it's like his was missing it was almost like
it was just like bone like on all of his fingertips and it looked like a burn mark or something
like that so I in my mind I thought that he had them dipped so there's guys that I don't know if
you've ever heard of this in all of your stories but like with other guests but
some people to avoid being verified or caught will get dentures, obviously plastic surgery,
everyone knows that, but then also burning the fingertips with like acetone or whatever it's
called because it helps with the fingerprints.
So my mind went to that.
I don't know where I saw it.
I don't know if I saw it in a movie or something when I was younger or what it was or if I
heard it in a true crime story, whatever it was.
But I remember, we got this weird story.
It's like he's on the run.
It feels like he's on the run.
And then the dentures and the fingertips, so whatever.
Whoever he was, whatever he was, he did end up being somebody.
So I never confirmed whether that was the case or not with the fingertips and the dentures.
But I still think that's what it was.
So five months goes by, five or six months.
I'm not really doing anything at this point.
I think I was looking for work.
I was hanging out.
I was just, you know, relaxing.
And I'd spend my time at the shelter hanging out with people like him.
And one day I bump into him while he's walking down the street and he tells me he's going
home.
And I said, you know, is everything okay?
Like, did you, did you get what you needed?
And he's like, everything is good.
Thank you.
He just said thank you for taking care of me.
Thanks for putting up with me.
It's kind of joking.
Thanks for not making fun of me every time.
my dentures fell out and and just listening to this old no-no.
He calls himself a no-no, right?
Like grandpa, ramble about, you know, everything.
He's like, I'll never forget what you did for me.
So we exchange information and he says, you know, you're a loyal, loyal guy.
You've got a good heart and you're a bravo ragazzo, which means you're a good boy.
He's like, I'm going to have work for you in the future.
Somebody's going to reach out to you, somebody from back home for me, so Kweb.
back and it's up to you whether you want to go forward with it but it'll change your life
you'll make a lot of money and you'll be a part of something bigger than yourself i said okay
and keep in mind i'm still homeless at this time this is probably around september 20
yeah 2014 or 2015 one of those two years and i eventually get out of homelessness i think i got a job
and I got an apartment set up for myself
and then a month or two later
in November, around my birthday,
I get a phone call
and it's from someone with a Quebec accent
with a French accent, French Canadian accent.
He tells me
that he's a friend of the old man
that he knows it's around my birthday,
happy birthday,
and that he's going to be at Winnipeg Airport
you know, three hours from now.
He was at the airport in Montreal.
He's heading to Winnipeg.
It's about a three hour flight.
He's like,
meet me at this place and he says this place that's probably two or three blocks away from
the airport so I immediately knew this guy knows my city because where he said specifically
only the locals know to go to this place so he's obviously spent time there now I end up going
and I meet him I take a taxi over there get out the taxi pay the taxi driver let him go the guy
shows up and he introduces himself as a friend of the old man hands me two different
envelopes he says this is for this is for your birthday and this is for everything that you did for
the old man just a little gift okay no problem hands me the other one he says this is this is like
your get what he said exactly it was like your employment letter or something like that right
i was like okay so he's like take that think about it get back to me i'll be here for a couple
days let me know what you what you decide say okay i get into the i call another taxi get into the taxi walk
up a block, get into it. And then I look inside the envelopes. I look inside the gift
envelope. It's a few thousand dollars. I think around 3,800 bucks. I always to this day say
there was probably five grand and the guy took 1,200 for himself, because that's what typically
happens when people hand out gifts like that. And then in the other envelope, there was just,
it was almost like scribble. And it was like a list of names, phone numbers, addresses,
and amounts, dollar amounts. So some of them were as small as like,
thousand bucks and some of them were like 10 15,000 and I kind of already knew what it was but I
when I met this guy this this was the first time that I met like at the time I didn't know this
but he's like a real mafioso I mean we have we have we have wise guys in my city but this was
like someone from Quebec or from Ontario they're a little bit different Winnipeg is a small
city it's quiet you don't have loud guys like that you
know and just his presence was something else well why was he in a homeless facility if he had
this kind of money like why wouldn't he have gone to a hotel or rented someplace or why is he there
yeah so keep in mind the the guy that i met later on like at the airport or near the airport
that's his friend that's not him personally no no i i understand yeah i'm saying the old man why
was he in that sorry i thought i thought i said that yeah yeah why was the old man like if the old man can
give you provide you like obviously old man gave him money gave him all that like if he's in
that position to have a guy fly in and give you cash why was the old man in the almost facility
because he was on the run so i found out later probably five years later six years later
through contacts that i made later on that he wanted to make it appear to the authorities
that he left from the east coast on a boat okay so
they basically set it up because when they did that sweep he was one of the people that they were after but they never caught him so he made it appear as if he went back to italy or something like he leaves from like halifax nova scotia or whatever and he and he's on uh they they had a ticket with his name on it and everything like that made it look like he he left so they they don't think of him anymore so then he goes i don't know why he didn't go to ontario probably because that there was heat there too winnipeg i also learned
this later on was a place that a lot of Canadian gangsters were hiding out. Not specifically
Winnipeg, but my province, like my state of Manitoba, it's actually got a long history of people
hiding out there from other parts of Canada. And I guess because it's central and because it's
quiet and it's kind of away from the coast and the real strong arm of the RCMP and everybody else.
So that's the reason why. And keep in mind, like a lot of these old
school guys i'm talking about the 60 year old 65 year old italians and stuff they're like really
when it comes to like hiding and stuff like that some of these guys like hide out in caves
and and like underground bunkers and like they'll live in the mountains with like with nothing you know
what i mean so i don't think this was a big deal for him to stay at the shelter and add on to the
fact that probably a lot of people saw him talking to himself in cecilian and stuff like that they probably
he thought he was a nut too you know what i mean so at the shelter it's like he was covered there
okay anyways this this this guy i end up contacting him back and i basically say like you know
once i made my mind up i call him from a pay phone and i say is this what i think it is he's like
yeah he's like can you handle that can you take care of it i said sure and what is it's a list
of people that owe money that's yeah so i didn't know what it was for in the beginning
specifically what the debts were
but I guess some of these guys
had some business in my city
so they might have dropping off a couple packs
it was different some guy would owe for a loan
that he you know he borrows 20 grand
and he's paying two points every
every week or whatever it is
and then you have people that are
like obviously Quebec is like a hub
when it comes to cocaine right
so a lot of the good stuff comes from the East Coast
so there'd be guys that would buy you know a couple
kilos in my city or whatever else i wasn't i was never told exactly what it was it's not like
this guy owes for this but i you know i would ask them sometimes so i got into it and it's nothing
like the movies it's very you know it's it's not exaggerated like that i never beat people up
i never had a gun with me i was most of the time i wasn't even knocking on doors um i would give
someone a phone call say you know you owe 15 15 gs you have
paid for two months i need something right now like i need to go tell these guys that you're trying
at least sometimes i would collect all the money sometimes i'd get you know a little bit most the time
i collected something though there's only a couple of times where we had to call somebody else
and these guys were always dealing with bikers right so they were the muscle most of the time the
italians that i was dealing with at least unless it was a personal beef or a vendetta or something
like that they're going to outsource to either a street gang or the bikers typically especially in
canada bikers are always been known to be more of the enforcers especially for other groups right
so i don't know if it's like that in the states but they're they're the guys that they're like
more of the facilitators and the distributors out here i don't know how it is over there but yeah
i didn't spend a lot of time in the states but anyways so i get into these debt collections
I'm doing it a couple of times a month.
I'm not doing it.
It's not a full-time gig.
It's whenever they accumulate a list, they give it to me.
And at that time, I'm taking 10% of everything I collect, right?
So if I collect 100K over the month or whatever, I'm making 10 grand.
I do that for about, I want to say about a year.
And then I start feeling...
I don't know what's called maybe paranoia because I get a lot of people telling me that like
I'm doing a good job and that, you know, I'm going to start moving up soon and and maybe
they're going to start asking me to do other things.
And at the same time, some of their guys that were collecting in Quebec were getting robbed
by like Haitian drug dealers and stuff like that.
So they told me that they wanted me to carry a piece, which I had never done the whole time.
I wasn't comfortable with that
and I wasn't making nearly enough money
I was making good money
like at least between $5,000 and $15,000 every month
just doing a couple hours of work basically
but I wasn't going to go to jail
or somebody for that low of an amount of money
I mean technically I'm still extorting
and I can still go to jail for stuff like that
but in my mind I don't know these things yet
I'm not that well versed in in law
and stuff like that at that time
so I'm thinking like man the minute I carry a gun this becomes a different thing so I wasn't
interested so before they came to me I was also told that they were going to ask me one of my friends
told me that they're probably going to ask you to start moving weight they were going to probably
start getting you to put you know flood the streets with the stuff that they have over there
which I've told you I did not like I was not interested in being a drug dealer at all I didn't like the
violence I didn't like stress the cops everything else that comes with it
So before they came to me, I decided to get out.
So I basically told the guy that I connected with originally from Quebec.
I said, listen, man, like, I've been doing this for about a year or so.
I've never been anywhere before.
I've never traveled.
I've, you know, I'm 20, at that time, probably 26 years old, 27 years old.
And I've never really left the country.
Like, I want to go travel and just basically, you know, have a good time.
So I get the permission.
More or less, I decide to start traveling.
And in those travels, the following year, every once in a while I get hit up,
hey, man, do you want to, you know, I got a big one for you.
It's like a quarter mill.
You want to go make a quick $25 grand.
Okay, so every once in a while I would do it, maybe once every couple of months.
I had saved a little bit of money because that year that I was doing it, I made about
$150K, which is more money than I'd ever seen in my whole life.
right so i saved a little bit of it and then i would do these little odd jobs every once in a while
and i was also doing these little stupid scams man like you coming from what you come from
and what you did you're going to find this so stupid but the way we started was with blank envelopes
cashing blank envelopes so we'd pay like homeless guys to go this was really stupid and really
petty but it's how it started so we'd take a blank envelope get someone to go cash it on their
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bank account and then at that time you type in like whatever's supposed to be on the check
thousand bucks 1300 bucks or whatever they'd pull it whatever it was we'd give them like
a hundred bucks 200 bucks more than happy to take that 200 dollars we take the rest we're doing
like little stupid things like that throughout the year every once in a while just get a couple
bucks but i decide at the end of that year i went to a couple places i was in mexico
Puerto Rico, Chile, and New York.
But nothing's really happening out there.
I'm not doing any crimes.
I'm not meeting any real serious people or anything like that.
Not during that year.
Keep in mind, this is 2016 now, just for the timeline.
2017, January, I decided to go to Italy.
That's where I get introduced to a whole completely different world.
So in that trip, I tell the guy, we'll call him Luigi.
I tell Luigi, I'm going to Italy.
and you know where should i go what should i check out who should i connect with you know i'm very
excited for this because i have an italian background i've never been to italy this is the whole
you know roots trip so i call him and he's like listen when you get there go to milan
and contact this guy make sure that you get a phone already knew about burner phones and stuff
like that out there he told me where to go get one blah blah blah i call this guy after a few days
with him and that was probably the most even going forward up until now most intense meeting
of anybody that I've ever had in my life so I end up meeting with this guy again I don't know this
at the time I think this guy is just like a friend of a friend he's going to show me what nice
restaurants to go to whatever else I meet up with him collaborating guy stocky it's probably
about in his 40s leather jacket nice cologne gold rings like just you know this guy smelled like money
and and danger you know what i mean so i'm sitting there and he's like he just starts drilling me
like a drill sergeant you know he's like where are you from like who are you with how do you know
him what are you doing for him what do you know about me what are you doing here in milan all this shit
man and it was intense and you know luckily i i just i told myself
As soon as he started asking questions, I said, just answer truthfully.
Like, I'm talking to myself, tell him everything truthfully because you don't want problems
with this dude.
So after him grilling me for God knows how long, half an hour, 45 minutes, I guess he liked
me.
And he started opening up and he's like, you know, me and my family, we have this nice
little pocket in this neighborhood.
You're a friend of Luigi.
You're welcome here.
If you have any problems, let me know, go check out this place.
Da-da-da-da-da.
we end up meeting that same year probably five or six different times mostly in
Italy through meeting with him and getting closer with this family I start learning
about everything else okay so keep in mind this time I've left that collections I'm
doing these stupid little scams I've got a little bit of money I'm traveling but I got
nothing really going on now what I end up doing is having conversations with one of his
friends who's a Lebanese guy from Panama. He's got real estate. He's got restaurants. He's
rich. Keep in mind this family that I'm now friends with in Milan, these guys are loaded. So I find out
later on they were one of the biggest distributors in Milan. And they also obviously have roots
in Calabria. The Calabrians are known for being the biggest importers in Europe. And you know,
they have businesses and they do money laundering and everything else. I slowly get to learn some of that.
I don't get to learn specifics obviously because I'm a nobody, but I get the gist of it. So I end up
becoming friends with this Lebanese guy. He starts talking to me about Panama. I've never been to
Panama. I've never been to Central America. At that time, I told you I would went to Chile and I'd
went to like Puerto Rico and stuff, but I never really explored Latin America. So throughout that
year, I'm going back and forth to Europe, maybe four times, spending about a month.
or two there each time. I'm visiting probably that year, probably about 10 different countries,
but most of my time is spent in Italy or London. I end up getting into, towards the end of the
year, towards the end of 2017, I get into identity theft. And the only, I was a broker. That was it.
I wasn't stealing people's information. I was selling it. And that's not to make light of it,
but I don't know a lot of the technical aspects about this.
This job was basically given to me by some Chinese gangsters out here in Canada
that were already making way too much money and this was too small for them.
So I'm friends with one of these guys.
He basically gets lists of credit card information,
just like you can buy on the dark web.
The difference is this information is coming from an actual bank teller.
So this is somebody that's inside the bank that has information in regards to
credit card information banking account information all this kind of stuff so it's solid it's a hundred
percent solid it's not hit or miss it's it's all hit exactly and a lot of people questioned that when
i first brought it up they're like why wouldn't they just buy it off the dark web like well not every time
that you buy something off the dark web it's good you know what i mean and if you buy a list of names
a credit card information off the dark web not all the credit cards are going to work either right
so you wasted your money a little bit.
So I found out that this Chinese guy had connections in London
with Albanians and Nigerians, these gangs that were out there,
really heavy guys.
And these guys had like basically factories inside of apartments
where they were making and printing credit cards
and they were doing stuff with, you know, Bitcoin and, you know,
how the whole thing works.
Now, I basically would do this maybe, well, that year I did it four times
because I went back to Europe four times, but I would sell these USB sticks for around
15,000, like 10 to 15,000 pounds, okay, but it would have a thousand names on it. And it could be
from, it wasn't just one bank that we were dealing with either. We had connections in other banks,
but we went through, we sold the first one. I think, yeah, I got 8,000 pounds, because that's
all I could take with me at the time. It's just like U.S. or Kemp,
You're not allowed to have 10,000 cash on you, right?
More than 10,000 cash.
Right.
Between countries.
Exactly.
So, and I was going back home with cash.
But the good thing was I would always stop in London before I went everywhere else.
So this is why, this is part of my strategy, okay?
I didn't realize it in the beginning.
I wasn't, you know, I wasn't smart or anything, but it did become a strategy later on where
the first place I would go to as I went into Europe was always London.
And the reason why is so that I could drop off this USB stick, I could get my cash, and now I've got that cash for the trip.
So if I'm staying out in Europe or London or wherever else, UK, for a month, I've now got like, you know, 8,000, 10,000, 15,000 pounds on me.
I'm good for the month. I'm good for two months.
I can pay all my stuff with cash, which is what I preferred to do.
one thing I don't want to get too far ahead with this but one thing the reason why I never got caught for anything that I did I believe is because I didn't have a digital trace so any money that I made overseas whether it was in Panama London or other stuff that we'll talk about later on I never had a single dirty dollar from another country touch my bank account here in Canada and I was I really liked to deal with cash exactly how I'm telling you right now it was just it
made things so much easier.
So he tells me, this Lebanese guy tells me about Panama and then I do this year of going
to Europe and I'm doing these little things with the USB and I'm not really making serious
money.
Tens of thousands of dollars, okay, but not hundreds of thousands yet.
I hadn't gotten to that point.
But towards the end of the year, I get control of a CFO.
So basically I was sold some information about someone inside my country in a different part
of the country. There was a CFO and a company that was completely corrupt and just being
used for everything you could imagine. So what had happened is the owners of this company fell
into debt with the mob, millions of dollars. This degenerate brother just ended up, I guess,
racking up some crazy debt that he could never pay back. And the organization started taking
money from it. So they would set up payable accounts. They would make fake sales, bill of sales.
they would do all kinds of stuff.
For me, the reason why I wanted access to this
is because it was a way for me to get clean money, basically.
Because it's embezzling and it's whatever else,
but it was from a clean company and a clean source in Canada, right?
So I could have the money pulled out in cash
or I could send it to another bank account and have it pulled, whatever.
So I pay for this information to get to the CFO.
And what this information is,
I haven't really talked about this before in detail,
but the CFO also used to work in a prison
and was smuggling drugs into the prison.
The prison caught them doing this.
It was a group of them.
And instead of, you know, giving them any time
or, you know, any kind of criminal charges or anything,
they just got fired, which is mind-blowing.
So four or five of them get fired.
And this woman, it was a woman, the CFO, had information
a ton of different information on on other things that were going on inside the jail not really
going to talk about it but it was like it was not drug related or anything like that it was like
some scandals some sexual stuff and with the COs and stuff like that so we had all this
information and we had emails from her to somebody else and blah blah blah ended up extorting
okay we extort her i get an account set up for my account that is disguised as an insurance account
through this account, I start regularly getting deposits of anywhere between $5,000 and $13,000 a week.
So by the end of that first month, I'm doing like around $40,000 just from the embezzlement from this place.
Okay.
And that's where my life jumped ahead because even on a good month with the debt collections, I could make like $15,000, but now all of a sudden I'm up to $40.
and you know like it might not sound like a lot to some people but jumping from 15 to 40
yeah it changes your lifestyle completely you know so then i start traveling even more obviously
because i have the money that was my thing i didn't buy houses i didn't buy jewelry i didn't buy
designer clothing none of that shit i traveled like absolutely crazy all year all the time
so remember i'm i'm introduced this idea of panama so going into 2019
I'm now, I'm in, you know, full force with the embezzlement.
I've got a couple of other little things going on.
I'm regularly making $30,000 to $50,000 a month.
April 2019, I go to Panama.
Okay.
When I get to Panama, the first thing I do is go get a safety deposit box.
So there was a woman that was working inside one of the banks that was a friend of ours.
And she would get you a deposit box.
and you never had to go into the bank.
It was all locking key.
You held on to the key.
She had an extra and you could deposit whenever you wanted.
My situation was a little bit different from other people's
where her nephew happened to work in the hotel I stayed at
every time I went to Panama City.
So what I would do is I would call three days ahead.
Hey, I'm coming out to Panama.
I need to deposit five grand, eight grand, ten grand, whatever.
Have your nephew come up and see me on this.
day so the son or sorry the nephew is working in a restaurant in a hotel that i stay at so i order
room service i ask for blank whatever his name is he comes up and i either take money that i'm
pulling out which i never did i always deposited uh or i deposit so through this i start
saving some money you know just five grand here 10 grand here when i
I'm in Panama which ends up being a lot like Europe I'm there four times a year so I'm
dropping off that amount of money and this is just I don't know like a nest egg like savings
like just in case something happens if I'm in Colombia or wherever else and like you know I'm in
a I'm in a tight jam I have 20 grand or 30 grand 50 grand I can go grab right so now onto
the next part the next stage of the life I meet a girl there
There's always a girl. You know we were going to get there. She's Nicaraguan. She's Nicaragua. She's from Nicaragua. She lives in Panama. I meet her almost immediately going into Panama. I fell in love with her right away. She was just this fun, short, cute girl. And we had a good time. And we end up deciding to stay together and to move to Nicaragua, which I do. About a month or two later, I moved down to Nicaragua. Keep in mind, this is 2019. And
had my whole time out there now in between that i'm still doing everything that i'm doing i'm still
embezzling i have the deposit box and then i've also now met the lebanese guy which i mentioned
earlier who's doing money laundering in panama and he tells me about the sweet system that they
have set up and this is probably going to be the most interesting part for you i think of the whole
story so pay attention to this one you can you can tell right away whether this is bullshit or
whether this is real you'll know he tells you
tells me they have a real estate company that they're using
out there. They've set
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Jack, which is basically
glass house condos.
So they've bought in the land. They've
gotten all the permits and everything.
Everything is good to go.
They start building the foundation, but really this whole thing is a scam from the beginning.
It's never going to go up.
They lay the foundation.
They start putting cement in.
They get all the paperwork done, but it's never actually going to be built.
And everyone is in on this.
People from city officials to some cartel members in Colombia to Italians from Toronto.
There's a bunch of people that are involved in this, okay?
And basically, this is what the setup is.
is there's a company that in ontario that has a good relationship with the bank in panama the global
bank and a couple of other ones and a couple of canadian banks that are operating inside of panama
so there's an account that's basically used to clean the money the easiest way i'm going to say
this the most simple way someone in canada someone in toronto a drug dealer whatever's got a
quarter million dollars he wants sent over either wants it cleaned so he can take out in cash or he just
wants to buy some real estate overseas and and have it go through a couple shell companies.
He goes to this guy in Ontario, a real businessman, takes the cash to him, gets dinged on it,
25% of whatever he's bringing in.
It was usually 25%, whatever it was, $1 million, $5 million, $250,000, always 25%.
Now, what ends up happening is he'll send it over and it'll become,
It'll get turned into a purchase order for one of these glasshouse condos for $125,000, $180,000, whatever it is.
Again, bill of sale is made.
Everything looks legit on the Panamanian bank side, on the Ontario side.
And throughout the process, the guy in Ontario's already got his money, his dirty cash put away, and he's doing whatever with it.
I don't ask.
I imagine they have casinos out there, VLT machines, whatever it is.
I don't ask about that.
but he introduces me to this idea he's like you know anyone in canada that wants to
clean money you can make money off this it'll be just like the debt collections you can get 10
percent of whatever you pull in now 10 percent of 25 grand is $2,500 10 percent of 250,000 and
you know you know the math yeah five thousand dollars but now we're we're not doing anything
for less than half a million or a million so if I do this three or four times a year I'm
getting 50 grand here boom hundred grand here boom I've already got the
insurance company set up. I've got the Canadian company that we're using also to send out,
you know, fake work orders and everything else. So I've got everything set up for myself.
2019, I'm in Nicaragua. I'm living there. We rented a house. Everything is on autopilot. I don't
even have to do anything at this point. Now, the relationship is short-lived. So maybe nine months,
10 months. It was beautiful, though. I loved living in a dictatorship country. It was very interesting.
you can imagine just seeing like military police in the streets all the time and but at the same time
I don't know how much you've traveled in those parts of the world these places are beautiful
they're affordable and that people are actually extremely kind so like I had a great time while I was
there even though it was you know short lived now we'll get up going from Nicaragua we go into
let's say November December we break up I go back to Panama I'm kind of fucked up because I'm like
I just spent the last nine months investing in this woman investing in the
you know getting a house all the shit and it just all fell apart i felt like shit i went to panama i
do what most men do turned into a slut went and fucked a bunch of girls in in panama and i was drinking
and i had friends come in from canada and other places to come see me and i'm just living in a hotel
at this point for about a month january 2020 i go back home i'm again everything is pretty much
on autopilot nothing's really going on round march april covid hits and man it was miserable because
Keep in mind, I had just come from this breakup and I still kind of felt a little shitty.
And now I'm trapped inside by myself all the time and I can't go anywhere.
I can't travel anywhere.
And I really tried to hold off on the vaccines.
I'm not going to lie.
For like five or six months, I tried to stay away from getting vaccinated.
And then I was like, man, I need to get to go to the city.
I need to go somewhere.
So I start traveling again.
I won't tell you about the whole year because I can already tell.
I'm going to put you to sleep right away.
No, first of all one, did you get, did you get vaccinated?
So you did get vaccinated?
I did.
Yeah, I had to.
And then you got a little, did they give you the little card like they gave it here in the U.S.?
Exactly, yeah.
And you know what?
I probably in hindsight, I probably could have avoided it because I had friends that were
making fake ones and they were getting away with it.
Right.
So at first they didn't have the cards.
They just had a piece of paper.
And we had like, we had counterfeit guys that could do anything.
So, you know, they were making those sheets and people were traveling with them, right?
So fast forward, maybe halfway into the year, I start traveling.
Mexico opens up first, I believe.
So I go to Mexico for a little bit.
See my brother out there who had, you know, moved there a couple years early and basically settled down.
Spend some time with him.
I go to Costa Rica.
And then I go to Ecuador.
And I'm getting through all this because there's certain places that are just a little bit more important than others.
Ecuador was important because it introduces me to the idea of Colombia.
Colombia is probably the most important part of this whole story for me.
Anyways, 2020, towards the end of the year, December, I'm in Ecuador, I'm in keto.
I get a phone call from one of my buddies in Canada.
And this is one guy that was really struggling with the pandemic.
Like, this is the guy that's sending me articles every single day about COVID in the pandemic.
You know what I mean?
like he's just watching the news constantly and just going crazy you know he's sending me the shit sending
me he's like bro i need to get the out of here do you want to go to columbia he's like where are you right now
i'm like i'm in ecuador and i'd never been to columbia and i heard amazing things about it so i said
yeah why not so we had a friend in winnipeg that was a columbian national and she basically
says hey look i know you guys are going to bogota but why don't you come meet me in cartagena
And if you know anything about Cartagena in Bogota, Bogota is just in the capital city, in the middle of the country, kind of cold, lots of shopping, lots of food and clubs and stuff, but like, not the best weather.
So she's like, come to the coast, come to Cartagena.
It's like Cancun on steroids, like this little town in Colombia.
So I said, why not?
So January 2021, I go down there.
I arrived by myself first in Colombia.
I spent a couple of days in Bogota.
I go to Medellin, not doing anything,
just hanging out, shopping, eating, chilling,
getting to know the country.
Then I go to Cartagena.
I'm there for a day or two.
Then my friends start arriving in.
So the friend that called me,
he arrives first about two days in.
Then I got some other friends from Calgary,
a different part of Canada that come in and meet us.
And then the Columbia National shows up all over these days.
but the second night that I was there
or third night that I was there
when my Cuban friend arrives
this is the guy that was going crazy
we go out because I'm like
let's go check out some spots let's see where we're going to
take everybody so we went to this little
bar slash hookal lounge we had a great
time we got drunk we're dancing
we're meeting people
at the Columbia National
her brother shows up we have a good time
we start connecting with these people from Cali
from Bogota just just by parting
you know nothing serious
regular people now the club or the the the lounge whatever you want to call it it closes at midnight
because it's covid right so even though places are open everything shuts down the whole town
shuts down at midnight so at midnight we go to leave we're all drunk we're all having a good
time nobody wants to go home there's some guy sitting standing outside and he's like hey you guys
looking for somewhere to go it's like obviously we are you know sketchy as hell and no
Normally I would be like, no, but these guys were like, you know what, let's, let's keep it going.
I said, fine, you know, I don't want to ruin your vacation.
So we get in a taxi.
We head to this place that looks like, you know, absolutely nothing, like almost like a storefront from outside.
We walk in and we didn't know this at the time, but those taxis were owned by the club.
So we go inside, we go inside, there's a, there's a madam there.
she's probably about 60 years old 55 years old she greets us we pay whatever the entrance fee is or
whatever then two big guys come and pat us down and i could already tell this this is an intense
place you know what i mean just by the guys that patted us down i'm like hey this is a brothel
yeah you jumped ahead there but yeah yeah it's a brothel so but we didn't know that man we
literally thought we're going to a club because that's what he told us like oh we're going on after
hours okay let's go so we walk in we go through a couple of curtains and down some stairs and through
this maze you know and then at the end there's another curtain we open it and then all of a sudden
it's like this outdoor nightclub like there's no roof to the place and it's got like a swimming
pool in the middle with a catwalk that goes over it and a stripper pool going up the middle
all along the pool side there's these beautiful leather couches and there's sweets upstairs there's a
DJ area. There's a restaurant area. It's intense. You could not tell from the outside that any of
this was in here. And I guess that's the point, right? But yeah, we get in and it's dead. There's
nobody there. So I talked to the guy that brought us there. I guess he's like the promoter for the
place. Like, bro, like what's going on here? Man? Like this is kind of stale. You know, there's a cool
spot, but like no one here. Bro, we don't even open for another 30 minutes. You know, we're just
getting started. He's like, check this out. And he goes over to the wall and he hits what looks like,
you know, like a fire alarm or something and it goes off like the siren and then all of a sudden
like 20 girls walk out. And they're all just like the best looking women you've ever seen in
your life from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, everywhere. And we're just like,
holy crap, you know, because I'd never seen nothing like this. I had traveled and I'd been to bars
and strip clubs and whatever else. But this was like, whoa, I'm in Colombia now, you know?
So we're having a good time. We're talking to some of the girls. The place to
starts filling up quickly like within an hour it's completely full there's probably 150 people
there like within an hour popular spot so you know we're being sent girls right you know come and
talk us up and you know go in with them or whatever but the one thing I liked about this place is
they give you as soon as you sit down in this area like kind of VIP area they give you two security
guards those guys stand in front of you all night now if if there's if you have problems with
another group, they'll take care of it. If the girls come to talk to you, those security guards
are going to ask you first, can this girl come here and talk to you? I love that right away because
it's like, otherwise, they're coming up to you every second and it gets annoying. You can't have
fun. So at one point, there's these two girls that me and, you know, a couple of my friends
thought were cool, you know, one was really hot. Like I call it fake hot, you know, fake tits,
fake ass hair down to the ankles you know typical Colombian prostitute and then the other one was
like kind of quiet shy timid just sweet girl they said you know let them in we start hanging out
with them but the girl the fake one got sent to me because by this time I've ordered a bunch of
bottles I'm tipping like crazy I'm being friends with the DJ meeting the owner of the place
so I'm I'm a target basically for these girls so they send this girl over to me and I'm not
interested you know it's not my type but my buddy's into it so i say hey bro switch with me real quick
i'm gonna sit with the other one the other one is like i described quiet shy wasn't impressed with
anything that we were doing you know like a lot of these girls when they see money they're like
oh okay jackpot this girl's like yeah i don't give a fuck you know what i mean i like that i was
like okay this girl like she's not she's not about that fake shit so we start to talking
and you know i just kind of ask like what are you doing in this place like you don't fit in here
at all you know what i mean she's like i could say the same thing about you i'm like what do you mean
it's like i've been watching you like you're not interested in the girls or anything what are you doing
in a brothel i was like i didn't know i was coming to a brothel uh i didn't know until i got here but
you're absolutely right this is not my scene at all i'm just staying for for my friends
you get to talking she's like look i'm from venezuela before i left i was making five
dollars a month minimum wage i got two girls to feed milk cost 20 dollars because of inflation
and you know I got she got groomed into going there she wasn't told it was a brothel she was told
it was a nightclub and that you know they a lot of tourist dollars and she'll make a thousand
dollars a week and by the time she gets there bro after going through the jungle on her feet
and then by feet and then going in a little shitty boat to get to columbia she's defeated right
so first couple of days she's serving literally serving drinks and then after that you know
the girl says hey look if you want to make money you got to go into the room with this guy you
know what i mean and i honestly believe because of how sweet she was i believe the story
because it was like you could i could see you being manipulated like you're too you're too nice
out here you know what i mean right so anyways prostitute makes for mast it dramatically more
money than a server oh 100% man so just to break down because i i know people like numbers
at the time so this is in 2021 at the beginning of 2021 when you go in with a girl you're paying 300,000
Colombian pesos for 30 minutes that's basically the equivalent of 8090 USD 100 Canadian 110 Canadian
and the girl this is what surprised me about the place so most of the time when girls are
being pimped the pimp is keeping everything in this place they take like 60 or 70,000 pesos
and then the girl gets like 230 or 250 plus tips so this was actually one of the nicer places
where first of all the girls aren't forced to stay there and second of all they keep i'd say like
75 to 80 percent of everything that they make which is unheard of you know so keep in mind a girl
goes in three or four guys a night just making like 400 500 dollars a night coming from making
five dollars a month ridiculous so
From there, we hang out, we have a good time.
I start to like her a little bit.
We get friendly and I go back there for the next couple of days.
Keep in mind, my friends are still arriving over the next few days.
And every night we go back there.
And I just loved being around her, man.
I thought like, man, this girl is amazing.
I don't know why it took me until I was 32, 33 years old to meet someone like this,
in a place like this in a country like this but i i started to grow feelings so um
a couple days in i literally just told her i'm going to get you out of here i can tell that you're
unhappy i know that you're only here for money so what i'm going to do is i'm going to set you up
with some money and get you back in venezuela we'll get a company set up for you like a little
market street market or whatever that you have some money coming in for your girls and she didn't
believe me at all she thought i was just like talking shit or whatever but
I was dead serious.
So by the end of the week,
I'd gotten an email.
I thought I had way more time than I did, bro.
I got an email telling me that they were shutting down flights
between Latin America and Canada and the U.S. as well.
So we basically had COVID for COVID, yeah.
Yeah, because the numbers were spiking again or whatever.
So we basically had three days to get out of there.
And I'm thinking,
at that point of time,
I'm like,
I'm going to stay here for another month.
You know what I mean?
Like before I found out,
I was like, I'm going to stay here for another month and get to know this girl and see where this goes.
I didn't have that kind of time.
So a couple days later, you know, we went on.
I'd say that the day after that I told her that taking her out of there, I went on a boat cruise with the promoter guy, the guy that brought me there in the first place and a couple of the security guards.
They were also Venezuelan.
So I made friends with them and I basically asked them, listen, man, I want to take this girl out of here.
You think it's going to be an issue for me.
And they said, you know, honestly, we don't know.
there's different situations for different girls
but you can talk to the boss
and we'll see what happens
so fast forward
a couple days passed by
I have to leave the following day
so 3 o'clock in the morning
the guy comes up to me
he's like you want to talk to the boss
I'm drunk
I'm making out with this girl
I'm not ready for this right now
but I was like okay you know what
this is the only time I can do it so
I end up going talking to the guy
I find out that the place is owned
by one of the cartels right
and one of the, probably the biggest one at the time that was out there in Columbia.
And I was, you know, I was worried what I was walking into, right?
But by the end of the conversation, the guy realized that I was a good guy, that I had good
intentions with her, and that she wasn't making any money for him because she didn't want
to fuck anybody and she didn't want to talk to guys, she would sit in a corner and just not want
to be bothered.
So he gave me the blessing.
I go back to Canada.
I quarantined for about two and a half weeks.
In that time, I sent her to Bogota where I have some friends that will take care of her.
She stays up at a hotel.
She's good to go.
She also meets up with her brother who's living in Bogota that she hasn't seen for like five years.
It was a great little reunion for them.
I do my quarantine in Canada.
I spend a couple days with my friends.
I go back to Columbia.
I meet her in Bogota.
And the same night that I was with her, the first night that I was with her, I ended up proposing to her.
on a balcony outside of a hotel in Bogota.
So this is like three and a half weeks after meeting.
It was crazy how quickly it happened.
But we had obviously talked while I was in quarantine.
We talked every single day.
And I basically said, look, I really like you.
I think that there's something special about you that I've been looking for in a woman
for a long time.
She had minus the place that we met,
her morals and her values and the way she carried herself were,
old worldly you know what i mean something that's missing from the the woman of today and you
only typically find that in a lot of you know foreign countries it doesn't really exist here in
north america anymore bro that's the way i feel about it anyways so i basically told her like look
i really like you and like i want us to be together but you don't own me anything like we can we can
get you on a flight back to venezuela i'll get you set up i'll put money in your bank account you'll be
good for the next year or two you know what I mean and she tells me like I'm not going
anywhere I'm in love with you I want to see this through you're an amazing guy all the
things that you'd want to hear from a woman that you like that you're falling in love with
so that night at the hotel the first night that I seen her after the trip you know I was
worried I'm like hey is this real or is this fake I'm gonna know right away so right when
we met I knew right away you know what I mean I opened the door
She comes, she jumps on me, she's crying, she told me how much she missed me and how long
these two weeks fell and whatever else.
And end of the night I propose.
Later on, we go to Bahamas, about three months later, we go to Bahamas because I'm trying
to find somewhere for us to get married quickly, so that we can live together.
Well, okay.
I mean, are you expecting to bring her back to Canada?
Like, how does that work?
Yeah.
So my plan for that was, I didn't know where we were going to live yet, but I knew we had
to get married. I was not planning on going to Canada because I didn't want that microscope on
me. You know what I mean? I didn't want to apply for her to come and do all this shit with
immigration and have to answer questions and have to, you know what I mean? Finances looked at and
everything like that. Like I covered my shit, but you never know. So it's like if I can avoid them
looking at my life and just being in the shadows, I'm going to do that. Obviously, we're not
going to go to Venezuela because it's, you know, at the time it's a shithole. There's a
dictatorship. She's trying to leave there because it's so bad. So I don't know where we're
going to live yet. I just know we need to get married. So a couple of months later after
bouncing around a little bit, Columbia is seeing some of her family and whatever else. We go to
Bahamas. We end up getting married. It was a beautiful, it was just me and her. We just eloped.
It was a beautiful time out there. And then immediately, like the day after we got married,
I get into like, where are we going to live mode, you know?
So I have a couple things set up for us over the next couple of months.
So this is, we get married June, June 12th, I believe, of 2001, yep.
And 21.
Yeah, 2012.
Sorry, I say 2001.
Yeah.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Yeah, so 2021, we get married in June.
And then we start bouncing around a little bit.
We go see my brother in Mexico again.
We go to Costa Rica as like a little honeymoon or whatever.
And then throughout this whole time, I'm still doing everything I was doing before.
It's still on autopilot.
Every once in a while, I would have to go to Panama just to meet with somebody or to get money or to put money away.
But other than that, I was basically just with her or I was back in Canada, like just waiting to go see her again, whatever it was.
So I finally discover, though, Paraguay.
So Paraguay ends up being the place that we decide to move to.
Here's why.
I'm going to break down why, because a lot of people are like, why Paraguay?
I'm going to say this in the shortest form.
It only takes 70 days to get your permanent residency in Paraguay, which is incredible.
It's one of the fastest in the world.
It's good for 10 years, which is also incredible because most places are three years, four years, maybe five.
This is good for 10.
It gives you, it's part of an agreement called the Mercosur, which is with Brazil and Argentina,
which means if you have PR in Paraguay, you also have it in Brazil and Argentina and can move
through those countries the same way. So what's PR? Permanent residents. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So you're
not a citizen. You got the the residence or whatever. Okay. So it's yeah, it's one of the greatest
and fastest and cheapest in the world to go there. And I like that it gave you access to Brazil and
Argentina because you can buy real estate, you can go to school, you can work there, whatever
you want. And a personal favorite, no taxes on foreign income, zero. That's also something that
is almost unheard of. You're only taxed in Paraguay if you make more than $30,000 in Paraguay.
But anything that you make in Canada, Italy, U.S., wherever is zero tax, right?
So any money you bring in is perfectly legal. I mean, no tax rate, right.
so for me it was paradise but the next thing that we needed to do is we needed to go see how it
actually is great idea but like how does it look how are we going to feel out there so november
2021 we or maybe end of october uh we head out there to paraguay the first day after arriving in
the capital city which is asuncione we fell in love with it and i was i already knew that i was going
to like it because i'd spent three months you know investigating and looking at pictures and all this
other shit but I didn't know if she was going to like it you know because she's she's got to leave
her country she got to leave Venezuela she's going to bring her kids here eventually so I'm really
riding on this to be what she wants and she loved it and she's like this feels like home and I was
like thank God like maybe eight months after our meeting her actually know probably like 10 months
after meeting her we finally find where we're going to live we can stop bouncing country to country
living in hotels, all this other bullshit, and I can walk away from the game.
This is an important part that I didn't bring up.
The minute I met her.
How?
I'll say how.
How do you make money without committing crime?
Doing what I'm doing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I like, how do you afford a wife with two kids on a, you know, what else are you
capable of doing at this point?
You know what I mean?
Well, okay.
So, firstly, I, I,
I just want to say right when I met her, I kind of basically knew that I was going to have to
stop doing what I was doing eventually. And not just for her, but her kids. You got to keep in
mind my whole life, my parents have passed away. I'm kind of on my own. I've got friends. I've got
a little bit of family, but like I'm really on my own. But the minute that I meet her, now I'm
responsible for her and her kids. So I don't want them to go through that. I don't want us to
move to a foreign country. I'm still laundering money or doing identity theft.
or doing collections or whatever, get arrested,
and then they're on their own in a foreign country.
Right.
So I already decided that this was going to happen.
Now, what was I going to do?
I had a couple of plans.
So I had contacts with AT&T inside of Panama.
There was basically, I'll give you the short version of it,
somebody that was from New York,
these Jewish guys that I met in Panama from New York,
they had a bunch of call centers over Central America all over the place.
and the way they broke it down to me was for like a short, you know, investment, maybe depending
where I was going, but in Paraguay, I had it down to $50,000 in investment.
I had to basically get some Dell desktops, get some office space, and they would get us a contract
for a year with AT&T, where basically AT&T was paying you like 750 USD to 850 USD per employee per month,
and you're paying the employees the minimum wage are a little bit better, which is,
like 450 USD. So you're getting like almost half of that wage off of, off of all of them.
Right. The way that we had it planned out for was for 40 employees, 40 workers. So you can see
what kind of money that is. It's in the tens of thousands a month. Right. And that's a legitimate
business. That's not, there's nothing dirty about that. So that was one of my plans. I also,
this one's a little bit more in, you know, it's more intricate, but they don't,
really have any English schools out there, not any really good ones. So I was thinking to do an
English school. I wanted to get funding from the Catholic Church. It's a big long, that one was like
the dream. I was like, if I do this, I'm set for my life. So that probably wouldn't happen,
but I was going to work on making it happen. And then I was going to open up a little hookah lounge as
well. I had an American guy that I met out there that was going to sell me his hookah lounge, his business
for around like 3540K. It was bringing in a couple grand every month. So I already had things set up.
so we're in paraguay we spent about a month there my birthday passes there one of the best birthdays
ever she sets up this whole thing for me and you know like happy birthday and one of the regular
spots that we used to hang up with they decorated and all the stuff and she surprised me and
it's kind of nice you know because just coming from everything that we went from you still you never
know like if this is real if this is true if i'm being used if it's you know whatever so
And a lot of that just stems from abandonment issues when I was a kid and whatever else, right?
And insecurities and all that shit.
So it was nice to see.
So we decide on Paraguay and then we start putting it into play.
What ends up happening, though, is over the next fall, you know, a few months, we get into little tiffs, little fights.
Usually when she's back in Venezuela and I'm in Canada, I'm going out too much or, you know, I'm not responding as quickly as I should like stupid shit, you know, jealous, whatever stuff.
Now, we, we end up getting into a huge fight towards the end of the year because I find out that my ex-girlfriend from Nicaragua had message her and started just harassing her, you know, and telling her terrible things about me, including some of the businesses that I had not quite yet opened up to about with my wife at the time.
So, like, she comes from that world.
So she, it wasn't very shocking, but to find it out from an ex-girl.
friend. It caused a lot of problems for us. So going into 2022, we're broken up. I'm still
moving to Paraguay, regardless, and I have faith in the relationship working itself out.
So I'm still focused on that. But I just kind of go off because we're not talking anymore.
Months had passed, actually, where maybe one day I'd message her or she'd message me and we'd
ignore each other, whatever. So I just go on a rant. I go back to Europe, which I hadn't been
for a couple of years because I was spending all my time in Latin America. And oddly enough,
I always had intuition throughout my whole life, that whole law of attraction, believing thing.
Like, it's not for everybody, but for me it was very real. I envisioned everything that happened
in my life, including getting married to a foreigner, being in Italy four times a year, all this
stuff I imagined when I was like a teenager. And I guess I projected it so much that a lot of
it happened. Something told me that year that I need to go to the rest of the Central American
countries that I had yet to visit because this was going to be my last year of traveling.
Nothing happened other than the breakup, business-wise, money-wise, not a single thing happened
in like six years. Like, I never had a real problem, never really lost money, but something
told me this is it for you. This is your last year, so enjoy it. Maybe subconsciously I was thinking
K because I'm moving to Paraguay, I'm going to stop, but something told me something's
going to happen. Sure enough, it does. So that year, like I said, I go off. I start traveling in
Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, a couple other places. I'm going to Europe. Everything's still
on autopilot, still not talking with my wife. Eventually halfway into the year, we reconnect and we realize
we've been stupid about this. Like, we've wasted so much time. We still love each other. We want to be
together. We want to go to Paraguay. So let's just stop this shit and get back together.
So months after breaking up, we get back together.
I meet her in Colombia.
I decided to take her to Cartagena to give her new experiences.
Basically, you know, we met in this shitty place in a shitty way,
but I'm going to give you some new memories so that you can remember it in a better light.
Spend some time in Colombia, we start working on it.
She goes back to Venezuela.
I go back to Canada just to collect the last of our documents.
So for instance, like for her girl, she needed permission from the father to take them out the country.
birth certificate, a little shit for the permanent residence application.
Something else happens, again, we get into a little fight, don't talk for a month.
This is, again, about stuff that we were just not communicating about.
It was egos at the end of the day.
You know what I mean?
She had a very traumatic life, and in many ways, so did I.
And we had our issues, and I think we took it out on each other, which really sucks.
Because we were the people that were supposed to save each other, you know?
you never had to work at a broth
yeah i know i didn't
i couldn't resonate
you had a bad life but no i did not have to do that that's right yeah
no i think it was just like more of not having family around and stuff like that you know what
i mean i didn't know how to be responsible like i was in little ways for friends and stuff
like i told you in the bullying earlier on but like i never had a real family structure
right and i didn't know how to deal with it and i'm a criminal at the time too
too. That complicates it even more.
But yeah, never had to work at a brothel. Thank God.
Hopefully I don't have to.
We'll see what happens though.
Still young.
But, okay, so yeah, another little tip.
And then we get over it and we make what is our last trip to go to Paraguay.
So this shit is like a movie.
I'm on my way out.
I'm a couple of months away from being completely clean.
I'm about to go into this business that I told you about with AT&T.
I've walked away from, I'm not doing identity theft anymore.
I'm not doing any collections.
I have a little bit more money coming in from the embezzlement.
I got about 100K in Panama in that safety deposit box.
So in my mind, I got a quarter million dollars a little bit more than that coming to me
over the next three to five months and that money is getting pumped into Paraguay.
And a quarter million dollars is not shit in the U.S. and Canada these.
days but in paraguay i mean a condo costs 40 000 dollars the business is costing me 50 000 to
set up right so you know what i mean it's not like i'll have an okay life i'll have it set up for
myself and this is where it all goes bad so we get to she gets to columbia first she's in
kukuta which is the city at the venezuelan border and i get to bogota first so i go from
Winnipeg to Toronto, Toronto to Bogota. When I get to Bogota, my guy in Panama calls me,
this is the guy that takes care of things from me when I'm not there. And he lets me know,
he basically says, your money's fucked. And I said, what do you mean? My money's fucked. And he says,
the woman that was managing the bank for the last couple years, like, I'm not going to say her name,
but she got, she got arrested. I was like, what do you know about it? And he's like, well,
there was a whole thing. What country is this in again? This is Panama, where I had the safety
deposit box and that's where a lot of the money laundering was going through panama as well now
this woman gets arrested and she basically to buy herself out of the situation points at all the
safety deposit boxes that she's been keeping for these guys for several years including myself
now other people had other things in those safety deposit boxes diamonds fake passports whatever
I can only imagine a lot of them were like cartel guys from Columbia that just wanted to stash some stuff in Panama City because a lot of the Colombians would come down to Panama City and set up shop because it was it's very profitable city you know to have a strongholds so these guys were selling women down there they were selling you know drugs they were doing money laundering whatever else you know so I asked him I was like you know do you think that I got anything to worry about you know and he's like no
because she doesn't know my real name.
I had a fake residency card made for me out there.
So I went by a different alias out there.
I had a completely different name and everything.
So she knew me by that.
Go ahead.
How much was in the box?
100,000.
Yeah.
About like 80,000 USD.
Sorry?
Is that all the money you got?
Like cash savings?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wasn't that smart.
You know, like I was.
And my lifestyle, if I'm making like 300, 400, 400 grand a year,
my life was costing me $250,000 a year.
Right.
I'm living in hotels.
I'm traveling constantly.
I'm spending money on my friends, family, everything else.
It was a lot, you know.
So I was lucky that I saved anything, to be honest.
But yeah, so I ask him, you know, like, do you have anything to worry about?
He's like, no, you probably just bailed herself out.
You just, you know, they probably said, you're going to go to jail or you can point at all these deposit boxes.
Now, I found out the reason why she even got caught.
was because she was doing something that none of us knew about at least the guys that i was
around didn't know about this so what she was doing was originally she was setting up safety deposit
boxes for people where you could just meet up with her give her whatever you wanted to put in
the box she would put a fake name down and use a fake idea or whatever and you'd have that there
and only she could access it and one other person that was in the bank and you have your own key as
well if you wanted you didn't even have to go into the bank ever I never went
into the bank one time but I always had my money stashed there now what she was
doing unbeknownst to us was she was setting up actual bank accounts for some of
these cartel guys and they were using fake passports so this stuff all goes
through the global bank and it goes through you know whatever other avenues of you
know to check for money laundering and whatever else and obviously she got flagged
So a few times.
And that ended up for all of us.
She never got caught for the safety deposit boxes.
She got to tap on her phone because of the,
I guess they sent someone in to set up a bank account with a fake passport
saying that they're friends with this guy and she does it.
They tap her phone and then they hear about the deposit boxes.
So I don't even know if they knew about the deposit boxes after
and if they thought it was just bank accounts that she was setting up.
But anyways, it went to shit that day I lost a hundred grand so I get this phone call while I'm in Bogota at an airport right
Uh sorry at a hotel right by the airport and I get this bad news so the next day I'm going to kukuta to meet my wife
It was literally just a layover for a night
So I lose a hundred grand and I'm like shit man like it's not that it's that much money. It's it's it's not nothing though either
Especially with what I've had saved right
or what I have coming to me.
If I've got a quarter million dollars,
you just took away 100,000,
it has a huge impact on me.
So I get there and I get to Kukuta the next day.
And, you know,
I spend the next couple of weeks.
I don't tell my wife,
spend the next couple of weeks just chilling.
My birthday's coming up again.
And we spend my birthday together.
We just kind of chill out.
The plan is still there.
We're still going.
unfortunately a day before my birthday
I got I had a
I told you this already I had a couple burner phones
I get a text message from someone in Canada
with the company CFO tells me
I'm sorry I can't do anything
that's all I get
I'm sorry I can't do anything
and
exactly
the most cryptic text ever
and by the way I hear nothing else for a month
after that but what it happened
is those two previous weeks that I was in Kukuta with my wife, those deposits that
come into that account that I told you about when we were embezzling and I was doing five to
13 grand every week through this insurance account. All of a sudden, there's no deposits coming
through. Okay. And I'm thinking to myself, nothing of it because I'm like, okay, you know what,
maybe payrolls late or whatever. It's just a week or two, whatever. But then after like two weeks,
I send a message out and I'm like, hey, what the fuck's going on?
Where's my money?
Because now we're talking about like 20 grand, 15 grand.
And I need this money right now because I'm in Cuckoootow over here panicking about
the 100 grand that I just lost.
So I get this message and I panic because that's like another 150 to 180K that I have
coming from this account.
I've got maybe 20 grand on me.
I've got some cash.
I've got legitimate money in my Canadian bank account and some pesos and shit.
maybe 20 grand worth I got enough to survive but I'm like then what so another beautiful thing
happens though during this time another confirmation of how much my wife actually loved me and
and really wanted this to work no matter what a day before my birthday I find this out I get the
the message and she she knew that something was wrong with me I was quiet all day and she's like
what's what's going on it's your birthday tomorrow why are you so depressed like you're not you're not
talking you're not smiling like what's wrong i know something's wrong and you know finally i gave in and i'm
like we need to go talk because her daughter was with us and like we need to go talk alone so we went down
to the lobby and probably one of the only times in my adult life i started to cry you know and i wasn't
like pouring but i was you know i was i was i was letting it out and she's like what the
happened and i was like listen like i failed that's all i could muster to say you know i was like i failed
It's like, what do you mean you failed?
I'm like, I don't think I can do this.
I don't know if I can give you what I promised you anymore, you know?
That's the only thing I was thinking about this whole time.
I was like, I'm going to fuck up her life and her daughter's life that I promised to change it a year and a half ago or whatever it was.
Okay.
So the beautiful thing that happens is I think she's going to respond with like, okay, well, I'm going home or whatever, you know, like, or this is over, whatever.
Because I'm stupid like that.
I'm thinking that. And she tells me like, I don't care if we go to Paraguay and I have to work three jobs while you're at home like we're going and we're going to make this work. You know, I was never with you for money and I never asked you for a thing. So you should know that whether you're poor or whether you're rich, I'm going to stay with you regardless. And the truth is, bro, in that year and a half, she never asked me for a penny. Like obviously I was taking care of her well and she didn't really have to. But like she never asked me to buy or anything. She never in a year and a half, bro.
So, you know, I should have known, but still my stupid head.
So yeah, she, she hugs me and she tells me we're going to get through this.
I'm so sorry that this happened, but like, just be smart with what we have left.
Let's take that money to Paraguay.
Let's get set up.
We start planning, you know.
And the next day, it's my birthday.
We have a nice dinner on top of the hotel.
I have this little rooftop.
She sets up another surprise thing for me, which was really great at that time.
and yeah we decide to to play it out see what happens so over the next week or two i get no
contact from canada panama's fucked you know everything is just falling apart and we get into
another stupid fight now what this was about it was just me being oversensitive at the wrong
time basically i told her i thought it was better for her to go back to venezuela i was
going to give her half the money that I had, which was about 10 grand or a little bit less by
then. And I was going to go back to Winnipeg and set something up so that I could start making money
again because I started thinking like strategically, this is stupid. Like I'm going to go over there
with 10 grand. It's going to be gone in like a month or two after I buy, you know, after I pay for
the immigration process, after I buy a bed and couch and groceries and whatever else, I'm going to
be broke right away. This is not smart to do, but she took it the wrong way. So I think that
she thought that I was going to go to Canada and leave the relationship and leave the marriage
and because she thought like that too sometimes, you know, and she was always worried about me
going back to my ex or whatever else, another woman in Canada. So we get into another stupid
fight, but because of the timing of it, I was probably more upset than I should have been.
You know, I should have just brushed it off and said whatever, but I'm like, how the
fuck could you do this? When I just lost everything, I don't know what we're going to do with our
lives and I don't know if we're going to end up doing what we're supposed to do with in
Paraguay. So I got mad at her and I went off on her and we broke up for good. She goes back
to Venezuela. I give her a little bit of money and then I go back to Bogota. I can't go back to Canada
bro. I'm like at the time I was like I just lost everything. I'm I've now left the marriage.
I lost all the money. I'm not moving to Paraguay anymore or I can't at least not right now.
So I go back to Bogota, the capital, and I spend two weeks there and I start realizing we had other options that I didn't think that we had for us.
So for instance, she had a family in Ecuador that was already situated out there.
We could have stayed in Colombia, gotten refugee status for her.
And then because I'm married to her, I'd be able to stay with her because I'm her spouse.
So I started realizing we had other opportunities.
and then this one thing that was a part of moving to Paraguay
was you had to make a deposit for solvency
it was like roughly like $7,000
and I was worried about that
because I'm like hey if I've got 15K
and I got to put $7,000 in the bank for solvency
that I can't touch for six months or whatever however how long
solvency is what to prove you're not broke
that you're not entering the country broke?
Yeah yeah exactly
yeah so it's just like you can
either you have a couple different options for solvency like you could uh show like a bachelor's degree
or you could show like savings like a certain amount of savings or just pay this solvency amount at the
bank uh which was like like i said 7 000 but i was worried about that because i didn't have a lot of
money left and i needed that money right now but then i found out while i was in boga and my mind is
spinning they recently changed the law so it used to be you just get your PR right away now they're doing
temporary residence for two years
and then you can either do another two years
of temporary residence or do
the PR right
and with the temporary residency
you don't need solvency
you don't need proof of funds
with the temporary residency
okay so I find this out
so I'm like oh shit this is good news
I go back to Canada
two weeks later
and I do something very stupid
in so
no listen i know i did a lot of stupid things in the relationship but when it comes to the crime
stuff i i didn't make too many big mistakes right okay this is the time i did and it was because
i was desperate and you know when you're desperate and you know what i mean like you're holding on
to whatever you can that's when you make the most foolish decisions so i go back to canada
i go to vancouver because that's where i have one of the companies set up that we're embezzling
This is where I got about 150, 180K, somewhere in between there, locked in one of these accounts.
And this CFO is not getting back to me, remember?
So I say, I'm going to go see what's happening.
So I go over here to Vancouver, which is where I am now, and I send a biker to the office and basically say that I'm in the city, that I want my money and that they have like, you know, a certain amount of time to get it to me, right?
CFO has a mental breakdown lawyers up gets one of like Canada's top criminal lawyers or whatever
and starts looking at options for themselves I guess and then I get this email that basically
tells me from the lawyer it's like a seasoned desist basically right and it's telling me I know what
you've been up to I know you've been taking money out of this count for years if you don't stop
we're going to charge you with extortion, gangsterism, money laundering, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I knew what it was, though.
I knew that the CFO is at the most of the guilt here from the beginning.
Because keep in mind, this stuff existed before we came into the company.
They were already doing corrupt stuff with it.
So I knew that the CFO didn't want this to come to light, right?
But I also knew that in that moment, they were terrified.
So they were willing to go all the way, lawyer, police, whatever.
So there, while I was in Vancouver, this is like December 2022, just like a year and a half ago, I decide I'm completely out, you know?
I decide that is your last straw.
That is your last chance.
You've just look at everything that's happened in the last three weeks.
You lose the marriage is gone.
The money is gone.
You lose the savings.
That's a sign, right?
The fact that the police didn't show up to where I was staying.
that I'm lucky for that so I had a choice either pursue this money and see where it goes or take a loss and move on with my life
and that's what I decided to do so December 22 I'm in Vancouver I stay here two weeks then I go back to
Winnipeg and I'm completely out of everything that I've done like that I don't do a single thing
between then and now I have I've done nothing illegitimate like I've done I
I did my taxes properly I did you know like I've done everything to a T because in my
mind I was given a second chance that a lot of people don't get I recently found you know
I had my come to Jesus moment recently and I feel lucky that I had it not being in jail
because there's a lot of guys that find religion or faith in jail I
I didn't have to go through that.
I also feel lucky that I got out the game without being caught
because most people need to get caught to get out.
So in my mind, in my mind, I've won.
You know what I mean?
I've taken losses, but I've won for now.
Where's the wife?
Today the wife is in Ecuador.
So she did end up going to Ecuador.
I told you she had some family out there, some options.
We've reconnected over the last two months.
We're talking now.
and we're like just on a completely platonic and friendly level
but it feels good that like we don't we had a lot of hate and hurt towards each other
especially those first couple of months obviously right but um yeah she's in ecuador she's
working full time she's trying to get her life situated there unfortunately though when
she moved there she's about a year ago now that's when all that shit started going off in
Ecuador right with it with the gangs and the stuff in the street and the cartels and
everything i would think that'd be a good thing didn't they lock them all up
well yes yes yes yes and no yes so it's still ecuador has now turned into the new transportation hub right
for a lot of the drugs that are going into spain and europe and like this is a completely different
podcast you know a different interview well i was going to say is it ecuador where they made that
massive prison and just went swooped and swooped up everybody that's el salvador oh i'm sorry
that's what I was thinking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But because of what happened in El Salvador,
the president,
yeah, the president.
All the activity into Ecuador.
Well, yeah, it's a political thing.
Look, there's two big cartels running things in Mexico right now.
You know of them.
I'm not going to say them,
but the younger one will say they have concentrated all of their efforts into Ecuador
because the older one was already in Colombia and kind of had that whole route locked down into
Central America and into the States.
So this new group, this new group realizes that they've got some really great ports in Ecuador
and that Spain is there for the taking because nowadays cocaine, which is the most profitable
of all the drugs and it always will be, the new markets are Brazil.
and England, London, specifically.
Those are the two major hubs right now, bigger than the U.S.
It used to be the U.S. 10, 20 years ago, but now the biggest chokehold is with England and Brazil.
So those guys are also making relationships with people from Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, that younger group,
and they're also moving to Spain.
So a lot of the older generation
are still worried about the states,
still worried about Canada,
still worried about Central America,
the Caribbean,
but this new group,
they're focusing on Europe
and they're focusing on further down south and South America.
So they decided Ecuador's the spot we're going to do this.
And in Ecuador at the time,
there was no cartels.
There was gangs really,
big street gangs that ran a lot of the streets and prison, but they did not have the funding
resources, nothing like that in Ecuador.
So this new group went in there, decided to help them out.
And unfortunately, at the peak of it, my wife, ex-wife, decides to move there because
she has family there.
So it's gotten a little bit better recently over the last couple of months.
But when she first moved there, like the city was locked down.
You couldn't leave your house because they were trying to round up all these guys.
and send them to jail right right so i have a question so what do you think about zumbata getting grabbed
okay okay so it's really funny that you ask because two days ago in my mind this is what i think's happening
the new group that we're talking about right now right i think that they're completely behind that
being politically backed so a guess that you've had recently was kind of going into this
and there's the old group and the new group and the new group has a better relationship
what i'm what i'm told with the new president okay now the old generation which is who
who just got arrested who just got arrested you mean
you mean what name did you just say oh uh zimbada it what's his oldest name is anyway with
sinola cartel it's the and his son yeah yeah well it's choppo's son but it's yeah who was who was
the leader right yeah alleged a leader so it's very interesting that you know there's this
new president in town super conservative and really chinese friendly
and not a fan of the old guard and then all of a sudden these guys get locked up right away
like this could have happened for several years why did this just happen now to me in my mind
this is the winds of change this is the new group showing their their power and both groups
politically and in the cartel world showing their power and everything is about to change
i believe that the landscape is changing now keep in mind that old group
The Sinaloans, they're still going to control everything that they have, right?
They're out here in Canada.
They're in the U.S., obviously in Mexico, Central America, down to South America.
And they even have people in other parts of the world as well.
But their focus is more in the Western Hemisphere.
Now, these guys, this new group, they're really focused on Europe, man.
They're really focused on getting into Asia.
This is all, you know, hearsay, stuff that I hear from friends that are involved in certain things.
but it really sounds like it's it's the new wave it's the new cartel world you know what I mean
yeah well so what else is going on right now what's happening okay so I'll just tell you about
last year because that's and bring you up to where I am today so January I'm in Winnipeg last
year I work a job for the first time in nine years I went and worked at a club I was doing
okay with money, but nothing like what I had had before.
I get completely out of everything, not talking to the X or anything.
I'm staying with a friend when I first get back to the city.
I was going to stay in a hotel and he's like, don't waste your money.
Come stay with me.
I got a free place to stay.
Why not?
So while I'm getting on my feet, this idea comes to mind of writing a book because there's
a ton of other stuff that's happened, you know, throughout my life that we obviously
didn't have time to get into.
And I just felt like I had an interesting story.
you know what I mean and I always wanted to to tell my story because sometimes you don't get
the chance to sometimes you just get locked up and and people forget about you you know so I wanted
to write a story so July of last year I start writing my book took a couple months to write it
I decided independently just to sell copies within my city and to friends abroad first so I
printed and published sorry printed and sold about 600 copies of my book just
Word of mouth, I'd even go stand on a street corner with a little ghetto sign and sell the book like that.
You know what I mean?
Like the way they used to sell tapes and CDs out the trunk of a car.
So I did it like that, which I love that I got to do that.
That experience was cool.
Unfortunately, it was November and it's freezing in Winnipeg in November.
Shortly after, I went to New York, I had an advertising Times Square on a couple of different of the screens.
And then Johnny reached out to me and I went to do my first podcast.
which was again the first time i publicly spoke about anything people in my city knew because i'm
advertising and i got a billboard in my city and i'm selling the book but like the rest of the
world had no idea who i was they don't know my story i'm not in the news nothing like that
so that was the first time i really got exposure was going on that platform and speaking about
my story from there just by luck a director from spain from barcelona saw me and basically
like my story he's like listen man i i think that what yours is is is it's a love it's a life story
it's a human story and it has criminal elements and there's and there's a love a love story in there
and you know i like it so we should do something together i can't make you any i can't promise you
any money or anything like that we're going to do this thing from the ground up but here look at my
resume this guy had worked with shakira he's done music videos for shakira he's produced or co-produced like
20, 30 different movies, including stuff that's been on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, all kinds of
stuff. And yeah, he basically lets me know, like, come down here, man, like, we'll make it
happen, you know, a dollar in a dream type shit. So going into the new year, which is this year,
I'm just focusing on promoting my book, the Instagram. Because last year in July, when I dropped,
when I started writing the book, I got Instagram for the first time in my life. I wasn't on
social media at all for obvious reasons. And so I'm just promoting the book.
and i'm getting ready to go to spain and then in march of this year so a couple months ago i go down
there i meet with the director i spend some time out there i meet some interesting folks some bikers
outside outside there he used to be a part of an organization out there long ago when he was like
in his 20s now he's just a director and a you know a legitimate guy but he has a checkered history as
as well which which i liked about him you know what i mean it makes you more comfortable talking
with people that have been through that kind of life, right? So he took really good care of me,
put me up in a spot in this place called St. Paul de Mar. You can Google it after we get off
here, a beautiful place. Little town on the coast of Barcelona. I stay there for about a month.
We filmed some interview segments and some beautiful locations, and we start to structure the documentary.
So as of right now, the documentary is being worked on. There's other pieces that need to be done.
So I have, my ex-wife is going to be a part of it.
There will be a phone call with her where she talks about our meeting and stuff like that.
One of my best friends that was with me through a lot of the stuff that I did.
And on these travels with me, he's going to speak on there.
My older sister for that family character profile.
And then we also got a guy coming in from Interpol that was a psychological and criminal profiler.
That's basically going to break down the whole story.
And basically say whether I'm full of shit or whether it's real.
and based on his experiences
with some of the people that I've worked with
that he actually knows
yeah just what's what
that's not gonna be out for like a year
I was hoping to get it done in like five, six months
this guy's like you're crazy like
that's not the way it works man
like you'll see this maybe next year
so for now just working on all that
a month and a half ago
after I came back from Spain
I went to Winnipeg my home city
stayed there about a month and a half
reconnected with my sister
who I hadn't seen in years
and then came out here to Vancouver.
This year going forward, my plan is a year from now next summer to move to Paraguay,
which has always been the plan.
Between now and then, I'm obviously, I'm working on a new book.
So my first book is called The Winnipeg Story.
You can look that up on Amazon, just type it into Google, a Winnipeg Story.
You'll see it come up.
The other book that I'm working on is called Year of the Dragon.
If you know anything about the Chinese Zodiac, this year is the Year of the Dragon.
I was born in the Year of the Dragon, and this is basically a year where I set up the next
five to ten years of my life.
So I came to Vancouver because the money is better out here.
I have no distractions.
I don't really know anybody out here.
I don't have family or friends or anything.
So I completely honed down and focused on my book, writing the new one, promoting the older
one that dropped earlier this year in January, working on the Instagram, the documentary,
and then just saving up some money,
getting some i'm doing some other little things like i'm getting a tesel certificate which is like
teaching english as a second language just like some minor little things on the side but the end goal
a year from now is to move to south america and set up shop there hey i appreciate you guys watching
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