Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - KINGPIN FLIPS ON THE FEDS | How Crime Works

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

KINGPIN FLIPS ON THE FEDS | How Crime Works

They called it a 12-year ongoing criminal enterprise. Do you have the key to the safe or the key to the warehouse? If you don't have one of the others, introduce me to the guy that does. If you can't, I'm not interested. I tied her to an anchor and threw a rover board alive. All the guys are in jail, the plane's confiscated, the wits gone. Also, we get a phone call. I'd like to work for the DEA.

It's not about who is a rat, it's about who hasn't rated. Everybody in here's a rat. He is your clinging to mores and values that died a lifetime ago. Because I was born on a farm in Wayne, New Jersey in 1957. So it was Norman Rockwell, if you know that, John. You know, it was simple America. We had a farm, and I was born. My grandfather had the farm.

I lived on a house on the farm. My father worked in New York City as a corporate guy. So he'd drive back and forth. And, you know, we had horses and cows and horse shit and cow poop. You know, it was kind of cool. And then in 1969, I moved to New Orleans. Okay. So here I go from, you know, that to basically the Sodom and Gomorah of the South.

Right. You know what I mean? I remember walking out one time and seeing a guy with boobs, like halfway through a sex change. And I'm like, wait a second. I remember when my friend was trying to explain that to me, I go, wait a second. A bull dresses up to look like a cow. How does this work? I'm so naive.

Right. There's no internet. No, I was 12 years old, you know. My friend, my best friend was Frank Montalione. Have you ever been to New Orleans? It's like the largest hotel in the French Quarter of there. It's like a billion-dollar family. And he's taking me under his wing to show me New Orleans, you know.

So it was an awakening. What year was this? In 1969. So this is the age of Aquarius riots in the streets. Hippies, I never saw hippie. You know, there were bell bottoms. And I'm a 12-year-old kid. Shortly after that, my dad passed away.

We moved there for him to run a part of the family. He worked for another part of our family's big corporation, a big department store. And he died. So now... How do he die? He just had a fluke heart thing, and, you know, instantly. Like one day, he was with me, and next day they wheel him out, and it's the last I ever saw him, you know. So that's traumatic as a kid, right?

So Frankie turns me on to smoking weed. and then the next thing I do is take a quarter hit of orange sunshine because you know it's a gateway drug so you get the next drug was acid you know what's it I don't even know what orange sunshine was acid oh okay yeah there's like there was barrels and you know I'm sorry yeah yeah that was acid so you take a quarter hit it was four-way on orange sunshine okay so um you didn't know that I'm glad to be there for you yeah so um and then that was the start of it. Frankie's dad and him, we were just two kids on the streets with really

wealthy families, very wealthy families. And one time Frankie goes, he was a child diabetic. And he goes, let's go down to the quarter. I'm going to trade a needle to these junkies for a joint or some needle for some. And I walk back and I'm in the back of the French quarter and this dingy 300-year-old building. And there's a guy laying on a table and his shirts off. He's got a pair a bell bottoms on nothing else and the piece a piece a piece belt buckle the old peace signs back in the hippies days and he's got a burn on his chest from a cigarette because he's kicking him and the hot they took him to the hospital the hossom kicked him back into the alley there was no understanding of you know he's a junkie yeah there's no rehabs right the guy goes to light him another cigarette i'm 13 years old and i'm looking over going this isn't kind of end well yeah there's a woman walking around with nothing on but a pair of underwear and a little wife-beater t-shirt with her boobies movement. I hadn't seen boobies yet. I mean, I saw National Geographic.

I didn't even seen Playboy. And Frankie trades the needles and all that. One needle for one joint. As we walked out of there, I go, he isn't the business mind here. You know, I may be naive, but, and that was the start of my entry into the seeing the seedyer side of the world, the drug world, you know. And we move. So my mother decides to move us from.

Orleans to get it for whatever reason she was from New York there was more New Yorkers in Florida she felt that Florida was a better place to go for against you know drugs and crime she moves us to South Florida in 1973 that was exactly out of the frying pan yeah so the next thing I learned about is marijuana and smuggling and people you know the whole world just exploded right at my feet you know drug the drug business just exploded right underneath us it was as if you took us to, you know, the San Francisco Gold Rush or Palo Alto, you know, in the 70s, it was just everywhere. You know, I went from a kid that could roll a joint to seeing bales and, and the rest, you

know. At that point, what did you, like, how were you, you're saying you were introduced to it, but like, how, like, how was that introduction? It was like, you, you knew a guy that knew a guy. Well, so here's what happened. So me and my brother, my little brother, my father had passed. We were a little entrepreneurial. And, you know, everybody was started selling drugs in high We would literally had it down to if we knew it was tourist season or concert season. We'd buy, you know, a pound of weed, a quarter ounce of blow, a bunch of quailudes, and just start selling to all our friends. Everybody knew they could come to me and my brother to get drugs.

We even had two different offices. He had his bedroom and I had my bedroom. So people would come and go to him and say, well, his prices were a little high. They'd come to me and get a better price. But we were actually partners. It didn't matter. And this went on for years while we were in high school. We were, I had long hair, you know, we were the local high school drug dealers.

Among everybody else, I mean, everybody was, imagine small town America, Hollywood, Florida, which is next to Fort Lauderdale's where I lived at the time. It was a sleepy little beach town. You know, I mean, nothing big ever happened. The police blotter said that somebody's oranges got stolen off their tree, a car stereo or a bicycle. So my uncle had on, I forget the name of the lake there, in Hollywood, Florida. He had a summer lake on Hollywood, Florida. And every summer, we used to go down there and we would play in the lake, go skiing.

We would jump off the bridge. There was a bridge you could go across and jump off. The old Hollywood bridge right on North Lake is where you probably probably high also. Actually, the first. It's completely dried up. Not completely, but it's dried way, way. the water level has gone down dramatically. Anyway, it was old.

You know that. How old are you? Me? I'm old, bro. I was born in 1969. Okay, so you know that. You were in Hollywood. That was the old Florida.

They had a beach. They had the brick walls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, you'd run up the, like, listen, I have tons of huge fond memories of that little town. It was definitely a little sleepy little town. And that was 19, that was probably in the mid-70s. Exactly when I was there. It was a sleepy little beach town.

Me and my brother were from... My brother probably bought him from you. Well, I probably did. Or one of my friends, anyway, I'm sure. One time my older brother and I, when we first moved there, he goes, let's go out and take a little ride around, see what it is. And my older brother's very straight-laced.

We drive around, I mean, imagine being in New Orleans. So in New Orleans, it's a night town, right? 11 o'clock at night starts popping. Kind of like South, you know, Miami or whatever. And it was dead. Dead. Dead. My mother says, don't worry, it's coming. It's going to happen. Thirty-five years later, it still didn't happen. It's a sleepy little beach town. So anyway, I start selling drugs and we're selling, you know, grams and, you know, ounces. One time my mother has enough. We tried to cut her in and say, hey, mom, you want a little piece of the action? She's like, no. So she found four pounds in my brother's room. So she flushed them all down the toilet. And we're like, why did you do that? She goes, It was a lot of work. I had to use, like, four toilets, how to borrow a toilet from the neighbors.

And I'm like, Mom, why don't you just throw it away? Or better yet, why don't you just leave it? You know, so it was a setback, but we kept selling. And I always assumed, I think all of us always assumed, you could go to juvie back then, right? If you got caught, you'd go to juvie. You wouldn't go to jail. Like today, they'll put kids, 16-year-old kids in prison. You know, it's the business of, you know, prison.

Back then, they actually maybe had a little more heart or, little more common sense. So I figured, well, when we turn 18, I'll stop, right? Because I don't want to go to real jail. Right. And that's why I call the book one step over the line. I'd always figure. What was that a self, was that a plug for the book?

Not yet. No. Well, I mean, it tells my story. I just said back then in my 20s, actually, I was older. I said, what am I doing? I've taken this one step over the line. and if you read the book at the end you realize I come to the realization it wasn't the one step over right it was the failure to take two steps back when everybody else did right you know to say I'm going to go to

I went to college was there about a little bit and said I'm going to go sell some weed and went home you know so um and that's that was the start of my drug dealing you know learning the business so getting a job was not I had jobs right I had little summer jobs because you know I would um I would sell drugs to the pizza guy. I worked at a pizza parlor. I was a cab driver. But once I was 18 or 19, no, I ended up meeting. So Frank Montalione, his father, very powerful, wealthy guy. He had a friend that was, they were going to buy and sell yachts together. So Frankie came down with the guy because he was going to try to, you know, dad wanted him to have a summer job. And he introduced me to him. And the guy's name was Sanford Harlan Perkoff. Sandy, if my dad taught me how he was,

right it was to be good. Sandy taught me how good it was to be bad. Right. He was an ex-aluminum sidding salesman. Have you ever seen the movie Tin Men? Yes, that's a great. That's him. Tommy Sikorsky, all these guys he introduced me to as a kid. Those were the guys on trial for the Tin Man story. And so he was a con man from day one. He was married five times or four times at the time. One of them was he remarried his ex-wife so she couldn't testify against him in court. You know, I mean, this guy, and he was, looked like Paul Newman. He, a poor man's Paul Newman, but girls loved him. He was, as they say back in the day, pardon me, a coxman, you know, he was always had a girl under his arm. He always, and he loved me because I was

honest, smart, and he put me under his wing, and I was his protege criminal, you know, and my mother actually got, you know, confronted him and said, listen, what are you doing? He goes, listen, I'll make sure your son never is in a place where you can get in trouble. So he was a yacht broker. So he ended up meeting a lot of smugglers that wanted to buy yachts. So he, in turn, and all my friends are growing up as smugglers. By the time I was 1920, I had friends that had died in plane crashes in Colombia, were murdered, you know, shot.

You know, we were growing up in little sleepy. Hollywood, Florida, to all be drug dealers. Right. You know, I mean, that was the business of the time. A good friend of mine, Randy Lanier, who, you know, he did 27 years, famous guy, says the same thing, he was doing construction, and he had some weed, and all the construction workers wanted to buy from them. Well, you know, if you can, you know, it's a natural progression.

You're going to do it. So, Sandy ends up using me to do things like fly Learjet some money to the Cayman Islands for big smuggling groups and I was 19 years old. I remember me and my girlfriend one time. We have a Learjet and we get on, we're dressed up like rich kids, you know, going to the islands.

And we used to always, when Sandy and I would go alone together, you know, eventually it got too hot. They didn't want to go to run the money. So if it let the kid go, if they arrest them, what are they going to do with the kid? You know, we'll bond them out.

They pay me $1,000 to fly $1,000 to $1,000 to the car, to the Cayman Islands on a Learjet. And if you're 18 or 19, you're like... A ton of money. It's like five grand. It's a chunk of money now. Right. But not only that, you're in a Learjet.

Yeah. You know, how cool. So... What are you doing? It's just in a... A suitcase. Yeah, a couple of suitcases. So I'll tell you how it went.

So they offer you, go, do you want a bottle of Dom Perion? You know, your boss always gets one. And I've drank in a bottle of two of 1969, Dom Perion by that time. I mean, you know, we knew what good. was but I'm a kid I would have been happy with root beer right it's like 1130 in the morning I got do you have any concept of what it costs no and they were pissed off when I didn't

pay for it I turned out I was supposed to pay the guy for it I didn't know I don't know so we get as an example we get to the Cayman Islands and they pick us up in a we go through customs so there's like Air Florida or one of the airlines walking the people all diving I get off the Lear jet what they would do is the bank would need us and they'd walk us to a special customs guy. Mr. Smith was his name. I remember he had gray hair, perfect, you know, pop the suitcase to see the bundles of money go,

welcome to the Cayman Islands. Right. And off we go to the bank. And then I leave the money. I remember one time they were pulling all the money out, and I looked down, I see a seed rolling along in the suitcase. So I wet my finger go like that and ate the seed because not that the bank would care, but let's keep it clean.

Right, right. They make, I don't know, so anyway. So that was like kind of my introduction, you know, flying lear jets with millions of dollars. And at the same time, I was still building my own little drug empire, you know, selling quarter ounces of Coke and then ounces of Coke and eat. So, I mean, at some point, obviously it switches from marijuana to Coke. Well, kind of in the beginning it was always, it was always Coke, it was always marijuana. Oh, okay. But most of it, you know, I wasn't a big Coke dealer.

You know, I was a marijuana guy because all, in the beginning, in the 70s, there wasn't that much Coke. Right. As an example of the explosion of the cane business, when I was selling coke, even in grams, whatever, you know, a kilo of cane was $57,000. People used to ask me, it's, the gram was still $60. And he goes, is it cut? Oh, my God. Of course it's cut. the guy bought a thousand grams and he's selling you one for 60 is cut four to one five to one

but back then think about it you could buy a kilo game for 57,000 cut it in half and sell it for 57,000 you know and make 57,000 dollars a kilo it's a lot of money I mean that's but in the end the last when I finally you know at the end I would pay 11,000 a kilo now again I'm getting it from the sources or there about but in the the marketplace in Hollywood, Florida, in the, you know, the drug exchange, you can make a thousand a kilo and you had to be somewhere about between 11 and 12, 10 to 12,000 to, or you wouldn't have a buyer because the guy would find it somewhere else, you know, when I first, so the marijuana explosion happened, right? I was working for Donnie Steinberg and they were bringing in hundreds

of thousands of pounds at a time. So once I, oh, so I'll tell you what happened. In at the same time in the 70s, I had a partner in high school, this guy, Terry McDonald. And me and him were selling ounces, buying half pounds, buying pounds of wheat, along with my brother, you know, everybody, everybody was doing it. And Terry moved back to Ohio because of the construction collapse in Florida in the 70s. He's got a job working at the Ford plant. And he calls me up and he goes, hey, I can sell up here. And he had a black, he looked strangely like Bert Reynolds in a strange kind of way

even won a Bert Reynolds look-a-like contest walking through a mall he wasn't in the contest and they voted him in but he were you know so he had a black transam

he was taking it all the way all the way right just smoke in the band yeah and he says well what do you want to do he goes I said I'll tell you what if you can come get it now he's in Ohio

I'll give you two pounds you know I got got a couple pounds here so he drives from ohio down to fort lauderdale i throw him a couple pounds now he's off of work he's got like a three day it's only got a couple days it's a 19 hour drive which i've done many times after that so he drives back to ohio and he sells the two pounds he calls me up he goes man they sold fast i could do that happens yeah i go all right i'll tell you what Donnie, another friend of a good time, Charlie, he had a bail that Johnny had given him. He's trying to sell it to somebody to make some money.

I go, tell you what, Charlie, give me the bail. I call Terry up. I go, listen, come down, I'll give you a 50-pound bail. I got one on the front. So he drives down and the train sale again. And then we go to put it in the trunk and we realize, wait a second, the bail doesn't fit in the trunk. So we're pulling out his luggage, the spare tires. the jack we squeezed the bail right now we're doing this right in the street you know squeeze the

50 pound bail in the trunk and off he goes calls me back that sold really fast in the end we would send between 1,000 and 1,500 pounds up at a time and we did that for years how are you moving that so what I did was local kids from high school got them I bought three or four trunkers you know what I would call trunkers like a big bonneville or Caprice classic we didn't do Cadillac's or Lincoln's too fancy, but something like that, you know, the kind of thing that could hold three or 400 pounds, you know, or two golf bags and the two golfers, you know, that kind, it holds about big. And we put these kids in it, 20-something-year-old kids and what looked like grandma cars, and then we put air shocks on them. So the air, you know, air shocks basically,

you put air in it and levels the car off. Right. Because you got three or 400 pounds. I don't want a guy driving down the street. Dragging the ass of the car, yeah. So we put those inside the wheel well so people could pull up they'd fill the car drive to the local gas station you know put a little air in secretly like they're filling the tire and we did that so much that we had to rent cars we didn't sometimes we didn't have enough cars so i would go to national rental car hurts rent a couple cars put the air shocks on them load them with feed and send them up so we just had them going back and forth back and forth you know three 400 pounds you know thousand usually what i try to do back then was a pound to eat for me was $240, $245 a pound for Columbia. I would try

to get a thousand pounds, put down $70 or $80,000 and, you know, secure it. I had a good reputation of a guy that can get it done. And then we'd run it up. Terry would sell it all. We'd pay the guy off and then go find another load, you know, because remember, it's not like you can go to Walmart. You had to wait for a different smuggler. You know, every smuggler is trying to do his trip they plan it it fails you know there's you know there's no it turns out uh there's no organization and organized crime right you know did anybody ever get pulled over and searched because back then they weren't really doing that right they weren't we were worried about it but no one time we had my friend's sister driving she blew a drive shaft the cops came up to see what was a

matter she told them they helped her tow it to a shop which had a drive shaft put in um i had another friend of mine, dude Bob, who's in the book, and he's still working today, you know, out in Oregon, though, in the legal market, but he got pulled over twice and he used to drive a Volvo, like a 240 Volvo.

Grateful Dead T-shirt, hippie with a Grateful Dead sticker on the back, and both times he talked his way out of it. You know, like if it was me, I'd go, wait a second, what's, you know, where's this guy headed? I got pulled over and got busted. I don't know how everybody else got away with it, but, you

So, anyhow, that's how it kind of started, just moving, moving the weed. And then, how long did that go on? Well, so when I got busted, I got busted in 88 for, but this is still, we're still, we're still in the late 70. Yes, late 70, early 80s. So when I got indicted in Ohio, they called it a 12-year ongoing criminal enterprise. So I got finally busted for the last time in 92. And I got charged with Rico. Right.

Well, let's go back, let's take that in the early 80s. We're in the early 80s, right. How much money were, what were you making? Well, on a thousand pounds, I make about $40,000. Okay. So, you know, I try to do, but here's the thing that a lot of people leave out. Marijuana is a crop. They harvest in October.

So we'd have four or five good months. And then in the summertime, all that was there to sell would be the weed that didn't sell, you know, or the dry stuff or the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, It was always, you know, in the summertime, it was always weed. It wasn't the good stuff. It wasn't fresh. Right. So we'd end up getting to a point when we had no weed to sell, right? It just was, the country was dry.

Florida was dry. Florida's dry. The town is dry. Yeah, well, it's dry, you know. And Coke started becoming more and more prevalent because it's cause and effect, you know. If they never made, as I say in the book, what if they never made, as I say in the book, what if they never made drugs illegal. What if they just had a sensible approach like cigarettes and alcohol, right?

Because they had to know. They had to know that just 50 years earlier that Prohibition built the mob. Right. Right. I mean, there was blood in the streets. Vegas would not be here today if it wasn't for Prohibition. Right. There's no way the mob would have been able to make as much money as they made without prohibition.

So now you go 50 years later, you've built a, a civil. Right? Where the lawyers are making money. The politicians are bitching and moaning about it to build more support for themselves. You know, the money, everybody's running it. The banks are making a fortune. Every businesses in South Florida were built on drug money. I know many of business. I know guys that were smugglers, got out, bought real estate. I ate in a restaurant the other night with my wife on Hollywood Beach. And I said, this used to be owned by a guy I know. He was a smuggler. He made a bunch of money and bought the whole strip and then got out. I've heard that, you know, that they talk about that in, uh, King Cowboys. Yeah. You talk about like half the city was built. Oh, it's true, true. Yeah. True.

I'm telling you. Even if you just went, I used to go in a sub shop with a couple thousand dollars in my pocket and order lunch and try to find a way just to pull a 20 out. Right. Everybody had pockets of cash. So what happened is it just, as they put the blockades up, as they made it harder and hard to get in, became a much more profitable thing. And for people like me that are,

basically, you know, weed guys that are selling blow to them. Imagine like ants, right? We were all little ants. And if we weren't selling weed, we were selling blow. If we weren't selling blow, we were selling, you know, we were trying to do something. Every day you're trying to do a move, trying to make some money. Even as big as I was, you know, there was times I didn't. I just said, well, there's no money around.

I'll just go jet skiing. Right. You know, but we're always trying to do another smuggling trip. Everybody's always taught, hey, I got this here. I got that there. can you get a boat and you know it's all a lot of planning and nothing happens so when it does happen everybody jumps in but there were times in the heyday of pot smug and i go into a room to be 40 50 000 pounds i take my pocket knife i have one pocket knife i cut open the bales look at the

mark what i wanted leave send my crew back to load the cars and we'd head out of town i mean it was there was we that was everywhere and then it just slowly started turning it into cane. The weed was still there, but the cane was just prolificating America, right? There was crack. In the end, there was crack. But, you know, so we, the Coke, like I said, it was 57,000. I started coming down to 30, 20, started becoming a product where, you know, people are, it's becoming mass, it's becoming big enough where it's becoming a, a marketable product in bulk. So, back to what I would make. So I'd make about 40, $30,000 a run, you know, and on kilos, I, at one time we ran 10 keys up to Tennessee

with a friend of mine, I front on the keys, we moved them up there, I made $10,000, I made $1,000 a key, you know, which doesn't sound like a lot today, but in 1980s, dollars, that's a lot, you know, I mean, I used to go auto racing, I used my money to go raise cars, it was $6,000 a weekend. It's like, I'm looking back going, boy, if I only had that money now, right? Right. And it's like, and think about the future value of the money today, 30,000 a week and 25,000. Right.

And you're saying this wasn't regular. Like, so you're saying that there was a seat. Like you said, there was seasonal. It's not like every book you're making this money. Right. It's seasonal. Yeah, but you're always looking to make a buck, right? So here maybe I'm selling, you know, half a kilo to breaking a kilo down and selling it, you know, to some friends, you know.

But most of what I did was try to load as much as I could in the cars and get them to Ohio. Or do a smuggling trip, you know, like. The time I got busted with the 1,400 pounds in mass, a friend of mine had smuggled 40,000 pounds into Canada, and it was just there. They couldn't sell it. So one of my other friends says, hey, we're going to smuggle this wheat back into America from Canada. And I remember thinking, what?

They smuggled meat into Canada? And what? You're smuggling it from Canada into America? I was like, that makes no sense. But they're going to pay me. on that deal we um my friend had a sea plane and i'll tell you the story about the canadian thing because we're on it and what we did was we loaded the wheat in a seaplane about 200 pounds at a time because

the plane can't hold that much and fly it down from one lake to another lake and i'm sitting on the side of the bank you know reading a book and a pickup truck and he pulls the plane up and i go out we load it into the truck i drive it to a stash house and we're We just kept doing that, and we had about 1,400 pounds. The reason we did that is we were trying to get enough in to see if I could take it to Ohio or Buffalo or one of our other markets and try to sell it. Right. So we needed enough to make it worthwhile. Right.

So we did that. It took a couple bales. I just couldn't sell it. It just wasn't selling. It was garbage. It turned out that it was, the reason it was in Canada in a freezer for two years is it was garbage. Right. Summertime weed, the stuff that, you know,

and as the market got more sophisticated, you couldn't sell that stuff, right? So I decide to drive up there. We agreed to take it to Washington, D.C., where there might be a market, a friend of mine. The guy actually, the pilot said he might know somebody. So I fly up there, load the lead into a U-Haul, driving back down,

and I get pulled over in Massachusetts because the guy's looking for fireworks. He legally searches the truck. And next thing I know, me and my friend are in jail, the guy. And here's the, in that story, my friend had gotten out of the business. And I called him up. He was working in New York as a legal guy. I go, do me a favor.

I need to move this truckload of Wieda. I'll pull it out of Mass. I just don't want to drive it the rest of the way. I'll pay you a thousand bucks just to take it from, like, meet me in Mass, and then drop me off in New York City. You take it to D.C. And he was going home for two weeks to see his family. And I go, and then I'll fly you home, you can have a nice vacation, I'll fly you back. We get busted.

The guy spent two weeks in one of the worst hellhole jails in America. I mean, I really fucked up his life. And we ended up beating the case, though. Okay. Because we both kept our mouth shut. He was one of the guys from high school that was a pro and worked a lot of trips for me. It was an illegal search. Yeah, we finally proved that, you know.

We were tried in the oldest working courthouse in America in Salem, Massachusetts. We had to do with, it was, so I had to get up on a stand and tell the truth. So, yep, I loaded this weed because, you know, we had to tell that I did it and that tell how he served, pulled me over, threatened me with a gun, you know, lied about it all. And the judge went for us, but it was, it was pretty funny because my lawyers go, listen, while you're testifying, there might be. be a tour group come through because this is also, you know, the oldest, this is where they hung the witches, you know, this is where. Yeah, Salem Witch. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he goes, you might find out, I'm testifying going, you know, there's a tour group, guys, it was. I was like, shit. So that was one case, that was one case, but it was kind of funny because he spent his time. When he got back to work, they said, man, you look horrible. What happened? Do you have no tan, you've lost weight?

That was the vacation. Yeah, that was the vacation. And it was a hell hole. It was built in the 1860s. They had no air conditioning. They didn't, you didn't have uniforms. You had to have your own clothes and somebody had to come, wash your clothes and bring them back. It was not like, you know, federal prison or even stay prison like you would think.

It's funny. You talk to these guys that were locked up in like the 70s and 80s. Like they had money. Yeah. They had cash on them. They had, you know, they're smoking cigarettes. They have cash. They have their own clothes.

They have. you know yeah cigarettes right like like in the movie said oh yeah there's no cigarettes yeah there's no cigarettes they're all non-smoking you get to trade two sides and you know for a main kind of thing we used to be able to trade candy stamps envelopes so you know food but you know there's no cigarettes so I beat the case in 88 we beat the for illegal search and seizure and we're in this little courthouse right and you know I've got my high-priced lawyers from Miami I I, you know, you know, $80,000 worth of lawyers. And again, so people understand in 1980, today,

that'd be a quarter of a million dollars worth of a ton. Yeah. And, um, oh, and like an idiot, I actually paid the $80,000 in cash. Right. Yeah, because I said, oh, you know, so here, here's, here's a story I'll tell you. I'm in jail. It's so funny that, by the way, that the lawyers would even accept that. Like now, listen, like when I went to pay my lawyer, I had to pay, like, the first time I got

trouble paid like 75,000 and I mean he was like listen like I can't write you know I had a fraud case he's like I if this is illegal money I can't so I was like no no he's like because if this gets linked back to anything illegal he's like I can't touch it I was like I'm going to have my father write you a check right from his money you know and and when was that what year was that yeah this was in 2000 I was like I pay my dad back right in the 70s I know guys that traded kilos and And bails to lawyers. I had a lawyer call me up saying, listen, I got an issue. I go, what's that?

He goes, I got a closet full of a deed that this client gave me. Can you sell it for me? And I go, no, I don't want to, I'm not getting into the middle of that. So here's the story. I'm in this jail in Massachusetts. Massachusetts. I can't say it well. And it's a hellhole.

It's built in 1863. The cop is taking us from the court. You know, we bond, we got arrested, we left for five days on a roadside. So, just so not to go back, but the name of the chapter in this book is why I never work on a holiday, because I always had a thing where I wouldn't work on a holiday or my birthday. Why? Because I don't want to equate Fourth of July or my birthday with being in jail if I get busted. So it's Fourth of July weekend, and these guys go, Kenny, you got to go up and move the load.

I said, I don't want to work on a weekend, but I'm a team player. I get bused at July 1st, me and Ricky in this driving down the highway in Massachusetts. Fireworks. Yeah, fire. He was searching the truck for, it turned out Massachusetts had made fireworks illegal, but New Hampshire hadn't. So the cops were looking for people transporting. Anyway, so we're in this jail. And I mean, it's a hellhole.

I mean, there's, it's hot, you know, it's, it's, the cops driving us there. He goes, hey, guess what? Where you're going, there's no flushing toilets. You have to shit and piss in a bucket and take it down and, you know, dump it. I get there. Thank God, the stainless steel model I just got in. You know, the one, the sink toilet combo? Yeah.

Nice, right? In comparison. Comparison, right? And I go, man, and I'm in a cell that's for two people and there's four people. And I'm the new guy, so you know where I'm at, top dunk, right? New guy always gets the top bunk. So I'm sitting there, and the ceiling's like right here, and right here is a big rat hole. Shit, anyway, and a light bulb.

And so I'll never forget about several days in, Jose, my cellmate, who was the toughest guy on the block. And he goes, hey, Ming, hey, Florida. He goes, you ain't taken a shit since you've been here. I didn't think about it. So in the middle of the night, I kind of sneak over to the new stainless deal. and and I hear Jose yell like half a man, man, you know, like Gracia, Sr. So that was the big event kind of, no showers. I don't remember ever seeing a shower that I was there for two weeks.

I don't remember that they had a shower. And finally, one day, my brother comes with the bond. I make bond. We have to go to court and they bring us down to some little place. And this is AIDS. This is when AIDS was hot. They go, you guys better shave. The guard goes before you go to court.

This is your one chance for bond court. And they give us these disposable bick razors that belong to somebody else. And we're like, nah, I don't want to do it. And the guard's going, dude, you're going up for your bond hearing. You've one chance. So me and Rick shave with some other guys' razors. And we go to court and we get bond. I call my brother.

I go, I got $80,000 bond. 40 for me, 40 for Rick. Go get the cash and come up here. I'm sure they don't take a check. So what happens? He goes to Florida. He gets $40,000. He goes, I got that right now.

I can get you out. I said, no way, man. It's two men in, two men out. I promised Rick, when we got in trouble, that I would make sure he was safe and that he was getting, we were getting in this trouble together. We're getting out together. He goes, I can get you out right now. We'll come back for Rick in a couple days when I get another $40,000.

And I was worried about them saying where the money come from. And it was coming from my living room. But my brother's a financial guy. He could, you know, so my brother races up literally at 100 miles and out to get the courthouse on a Friday afternoon to bond me out. They call me upstairs and he's on one side of the bars. And this place looks like something out of the Wow, Wow, West. This isn't a modern, I mean, I can imagine, you know. They didn't have sliding doors until, you know, they actually had a guy, the screw come with the key.

They finally got sliding doors. And for those that don't know, you know, in prison, we call the guy screws, right, the guards. It's because they screw you in, right? The theory is, is every time they turn the key, they're screwing you into life's little hellhole. And so my brother's there, and the guard goes, oh, we don't take cash. We only take checks. And I'm going, what? I thought I'm getting out, you know.

And finally, because he finally got me 80, and it was Friday after night. And they go, I go, and there's a guy next to me and his wife and his two little girls are on the other side next to my brother. And they're all wearing matching sun dresses. And I guess they're trying to see their dad or maybe they're going to get, I don't know what. She looks, they're like seven or eight, maybe 10, you know, I don't know. And she's a young, made mom. And the guy drops to the floor and has a heart attack right there.

He's curled up in the fetal position. foam's coming out of his mouth, and the guard's going, there's nothing I can do but give him an aspirin man. And as that's happening, I'm ashamed to say, I don't give a fuck. I see my brother on the other side of this door, and he's supposed to have him exit. And I'm literally jumping over the guy as he's dying, stepping back and forth, going to the guard's desk, pulling on the damn door, you know, climbing basically the metal thing, going to my brother who's on the other side,

get me out, get the money, can't do it. And finally the guards just grabbed me and bring me back to myself while this guy's laying there. And I had lost my dad as a young kid and you look back at some of the things you do and you just go, man, you know, what kind of animal was I turned into? You know, I mean, there's a man dying

in front of his family, you know, and I always wondered, I hope he lived, but, you know, and so I get back to my cell. And I remember Jose, and I'd lost my, again, you know, I had a lot of loss in my life. My grandfather died and my mother, my grandmother, you know, friends. And I remember one time me and Jose, right around the same time, we were sitting there with the arms through the bars, you know how you do that, you know, and he says, hey, Florida, I go what?

He goes, people die every day. And I don't remember the chronological events of this. Right. But I know that that advice has helped me a lot. your life to just realize that we're finite you know the clock only ticks one way but it was pretty poignant there you know so anyhow bond out we go back and forth to trial we stall about two you know the thing about a drug case is you want to stall as long as possible right you want to stall two years if you can right so how am i going to pay for the lawyers selling drugs right so my friend uh bob silver boy

had brought a load into Washington, D.C. I don't know, 10, 20, 30 keys. I don't know how big his load was, but he offered me the opportunity to sell it. So I would literally put on my suit and tie, fly to Tyson's corner outside of D.C., have one of my delivery guys or one of my customers or one of my transport guys meet me there,

had two warehouses, one for the blow and one for the cash. I would hand the blow out, jump back in the plane, go to D.C., get up in court, and go, yes, Your Honor, you know, whatever this stall tactic was, jump back in the, whatever I took, you know, from Boston back down to D.C., get the, you know, do another deal. So I was literally going back and forth to court at one point, in the middle doing a cane deal.

Right. Deals, you know, and I remember looking at Bob Silver Bullock, do you know what's going to happen to me, if I'm out on bond for moving 1,400 pounds and I get busted moving some kilos? It's going to be bad. It's going to be bad. But I had to pay the lawyers. I had one lawyer when I was a kid.

I got in some trouble, and it was not exactly putting me in jail or anything, but I knew I had a case that they were looking at me. I said, I don't know what to do. And the lawyer looks at me and goes, seems like what you're doing does pretty good. I just wouldn't get caught. I'm thinking, I'm trying to get out of this. And you're telling me that I should stay in it.

Just make sure I keep him as my, you know. So I go, I was thinking to myself, I walked out. I go, no, no, I see I've taken one step over the line. I'm trying to learn how to come back, you know. And I came from a good family. My brother's a big lawyer, my older brother, you know, my younger brother's a big-time financial guy. But I had learning disabilities as a kid, you know, I had dyslexia. Right.

And nobody knew. I failed first grade. I mean, how do you fail F in first grade? I failed first grade. You're right? Right, but I have dyslexia. Yeah. And here's the thing.

20% of the people in the country have dyslexia. 50% of the people in jail are dyslexic. because, and I mentioned this to you the other day, you're not one of the blueberries that fits into the conveyor belt. You can't learn the same. So what ends up happening is you start feeling disenfranchised and outcast. And I remember when I was a kid, like I'd go to school and they put me, you know, all of a sudden like day one, I'm good.

I'm thinking it's going to happen. It's going to happen. Finally on like day four, okay, Kenny, you go sit in a little roundtable with Johnny. I remember one time, I swear to God going, that kid is an idiot. Right. You know, I'm a smart kid. I just don't understand. You know, I'm smart.

He's a dummy. And, but there was no way to fix, right? So, so I, you know, I didn't, I failed algebra seven years in a row. Although I tried to go to college, you know, and I was in college in Tampa. Was it U.S. What do they call it? U.S.S.? Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, but there was drug dealing, you know, going down in South Florida. And, you know, I just kind of gravitated back to. You know, the pot thing was expelled. I was in USF in 78, 77. So, yeah, so I mean, it was exploding. So I ended up going home and selling pot and, you know, working for smugglers.

And so I ended up getting, at one point I got in some trouble with Frankie Montlione. He actually got busted. Here's an example of what the government, they're stupid and what they do. Here's a kid that's probably worth, family's worth half a billion dollars. He's a diabetic.

He's a Coke head. He's using his needles to shoot Coke. He's using the thing to keep him alive is going to kill him, right? What's in Coke? Sugar. Cokes cut with an acetyl baby laxative, which is basically sugar. So he's killing himself.

He comes down, he's coming to visit me, and he goes home and he gets busted trying to sell the DEA, a gram of coke, or a gram and a half. But the DEA agent says, can you get me a couple ounces? And again, this is a big deal back then in the early, late 70s. He says, sure, he can't. He's just trying to sound big.

He ends up getting a year and a half in Club Fed. And his family had a lot of power. But I think they figured let him go to Club Fed, dry up, play tennis, get away from drugs, come out and he'll be the heir to a lifetime fortune he'll never have to work again. Which would probably kill him. He ended up doing

10 years because he'd get out and get violated. Get out and get violated. He was a drug addict. Right. Not a criminal. He never would have convinced ever, ever, ever done anything

as a crime to society. I remember one time he got violated. I had to go back up to the probate federal marshals to get my bicycle he was riding. He was in Florida hanging out with me, you know. And after one of the times he got out of jail. And I said, buddy, there's judges, lawyers, cops doing co-partying every night.

They go, yeah, but they're not on probation. Right. I go, right, but he's not a criminal. And at 44, he died in a dentist chair, finally, got out of paper, finally. And, you know, he was a child diabetic. He just, so there's an example of, and in the book, I go over more than one example of how the drug laws killed the people. or left families without fathers, families without kids. It's funny you say that because we're actually doing a podcast after this podcast with a buddy of mine, Pete,

who basically explains like, you know, the detriment that the drug laws have caused to the country. Absolutely. But, and he's got a whole thing on it, you know, so. Well, you know, the first go, I go into a little bit in the book. Right. Shameless promotion. About what started the drug wars. Well, in marijuana, there's no such word as marijuana.

It was made up. There's cannabis, there's sativa, there's indica, there's hemp. Back in 1930s, some politician wanted to build his bones on cannabis. They actually came up with the word marijuana to make it sound like it was Mexican because they wanted to hang it. They wanted to say, oh, these immigrants, Mexican sounds familiar, right? Blame the Mexicans.

Then in 73, Nixon had a problem. There was the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, the riots in the streets, right? The hippies, the anti-war movie movement was starting in the late 60s, 70s. So Nixon and this damn bomb wrote this book, Smoking Mirrors, where he goes into, and most people may not remember, but Nixon's right-hand man was a guy named Ehrlichman. and he interviews Ehrlichman towards the end of his life, and Erlickman admits Nixon started the war on drugs and the DEA to take, to villainize the hippies in the streets

and to, you know, put inner city brown and black people as addicts. They made the no-knock laws. They made the search and seizure laws. They changed our freedoms in order to take the political heat off of Nixon and help them get, you know, try to get reelected, which he didn't. But the Pentecon papers, for those that don't know, was a study that was done by the RAND Corporation that proved through five presidents that we had no reason being in the Vietnam War.

We were never going to win it. And then some guy came out and leaked them. And then the Washington Post or one of the newspapers printed them all. Yeah. So Nixon needed to get the heat off of that. And that's why he started the DEA and prolificated the war on drugs. Because I'm going to tell you something. Before the DEA, well, in the beginning I was making $5 a pound when I do a deal

because there was so much feed and so much demand, right, and whatever. Once Reagan got into power and he really cracked down on, you know, they put blockades up, they started really trying to crack down on the importation of lead. I was making $40 a pound. Right. It was a lot better for me. And that's when McCain became more prevalent because, it was a smaller package that was just as profitable, if not more profitable.

So a guy's a pot smuggler, and you can only fit, as an example, you can fit 5,000 pounds in the DC3, let's say, right? It's a plane, big plane. And there's only, all right, so 5,000 pounds of marijuana, you might make, you know, half a million dollars on it or a million dollars, whatever, you know, if you own it for 100 in Columbia and sell it for 250, it's about a half a million dollar move. Plus, you have to pay off the pilots and all this. in 5,000 pounds, and you're, you know, you're going to make millions of dollars.

Right. You know, I'll tell you a funny story. I was in college. I'm in economics. And the teacher, I'm sitting in the front row, and the teacher says, what would happen if they made prostitution and marijuana legal today? Theoretically, I guess he was saying that the price would go up because demand would be, you know, you can market to demand.

You'd build demand through marketing, right? and I raised my hand, I go, no, the price would plummet on marijuana. I go, look, well, you don't have to pay a pilot $20,000. You don't need a chase boat. You don't need, you know, some, you don't have to get, you know, lawyers, this, that. All things that us college students shouldn't know. Right, and all of a sudden he's going, how do you know that? I look around, and I just put my hand now and go, never mind.

I know a guy. Yeah, I'm talking about, I know how much each boat captain, you know, you need two guys in each guy's going to get captain gets 20 loader gets 10 you know now you just drive it in through mexico you could just drive you could just bring it in and well containerized shipping yeah i was going to say you bring it on a ship you could just be massive they they they don't do it the same way anymore i mean i'm surprised when it's i see that there's they're not smell and here's an interesting thing most people don't smuggle marijuana anymore why because it's grown in america you can buy it you know there's no they took the market away they collapsed the market on

Well, and nobody wants commercial weed anyway. You want indoor, you know, high, you know, the good stuff. Right. So, but, so that was, that was the prolification of the drug business. And as you, the more violence they brought, you know, the more laws they brought, the more people. If you're going to, my friend Scooter got busted one time on the ground crew, unloading a plane. He did three years in Club Fed, you know, in Eckland Air Force Base, where they, you know, there's no, there's no bar. you play tennis, you know, it's a camp, you know, there's no cells. And he went to ground school there to learn how to fly.

I mean, you know, because the pilot kids, what are you doing on the ground, kids? You should be a pilot. You make more money, you have less chance of getting caught. So when they made then, but in, you know, at the time, seven years later, you get 15 years. So what are you going to do? You're going to shoot your way out. Yeah. You know, why do these, all these, you know, these gun violence in the streets of Tampa?

I went to college down here. They didn't have murders. Back in the 70s, they just had bodies. You wake up every day to the newspapers, some bodies. I go, in Miami, at least they, you know, there's a murder. You know, there's some violent car chase. Tampa, they just threw the bodies in the bushes. So it was the prolification of the drug wars.

The drug wars, like all war, begot war. They made their own, the government built what the government, you know what I mean? It just prolificated. If there was less law, I'm not saying the answer is to let everybody do and do coke and fentanyl. I don't have that answer. Right. I'm just saying that's kind of a cause of effect. Yeah, so I end up getting out of that court case, you know, beating the case in Massachusetts, 1988.

So what do you do? Go back to work. I mean, that would have been a good time to quit. Right. Right. I'd already been in trouble when I was a kid and had to leave the country. Earlier, we didn't talk about it, but I had to leave the country. When Frankie Montlione testified, he did testify against court,

blame me for giving the Coke deal that he ended up going to jail for it, but I had nothing to do with it. The prosecutors just wanted a guy from Florida in the story. Right. Right. They wanted to get their Florida guy. So I heard about it, and my mentor, Sandy Perkoff, said, you should leave the country go down to Jamaica and stay with this guy Al Lipton who we all knew

who was a big king got smuggler and he goes he's got a place down there called Sam Sara it's a hotel in the grill you can go down there and live nobody's going to charge you anything Sandy kind of wanted to drive me out he knew I was doing a lot of blow at the time I was 819 I think this is in the middle of whatever I was about 19 and the other thing I found out later later on was that Frankie had been involved with Sandy's daughter in running some drugs out of Florida or something. So I think she might have thrown my name in, you know, whatever, whatever happened, I think Sandy knew enough to say, Kenny's my right-hand man.

I mean, you know what I used to do? They'd buy a boat for a smuggling boat, and I would do all the title work. I was 18. I'd sign, I'd forge all the names. Let's say they bought a boat to do a trip. This would be like Donnie Steinberg, who was one of the, the biggest smugglers in the world. They named Marijuana, Inc. And that's who I was also moving the money for. They wrote a book about them called The Underground Empire. Big-time

smuggler at the time. He was on national television talking about them. So they'd buy a boat. They'd set up a corporation, either an offshore corporation or whatever they could do it. That's what Sandy would do. We had, you know, fake phone numbers, fake corporations. I would sign all the titles. I'd forge all of it. I had a talent. It turned out at a young age, I had a talent for forgery and then i'd go yeah i'd go down they'd say and i'd go down and do all the title work one time they flew me to louisiana to bring the the paperwork for a shrimp boat that was going off shore to meet a freighter you know because the freighters would hold about 200,000 pounds and then they'd send cigarette boats cigarette a cigarette 36 sig would hold about 2,000 pounds a 54 50 set hatterer

let's see you had a 54 hatteras or a 57 strike or whatever those sizes they could hold about 5,000 pounds, you know, and a yacht, like a big yacht, like, you know, a motor yacht, you maybe get, you know, 20,000. It's hard, you know, unless you gut the whole inside of the boat, you know, you don't want to, you know, that, you don't forget, you still have state rooms. They'd pack the, the bales all the way up, but they would literally, what we used to do is change the water lines. Like you'd have, the water line would have several stripes.

So when the boat was in the water, it looks like it's still in, you know. So I had to go to Louisiana and give, so I fly up there. I drive out to the middle of the sticks where the shrimp boat is. And these guys, they go, oh, man, thanks for the paperwork. So they can go, they didn't even know what they were doing. They go, we're going to get us some oysters. I go, no, no, no, you're a shrimper. Right.

You know, you know, the rest of these people around here are going to figure out quickly, you don't, you're not a real guy. if you don't even know what you're supposed to be here for yeah what you're supposed to be here for so um i was doing that again and so i ended up leaving the country who's stepping back a little bit to the 78 i think it was and going down to jamaica and i started to learn a lot about life you know like the world doesn't revolve around america i'm just another guy on an island you know learning about how a lot of times

if you graduate a high school your family let you go to Europe for a year or you know you get a job I went to Jamaica on the run from the feds and you know and I'm down there

and I'm meeting some people met this lady Brenda who was trying to America and a lot of them there's expats right you know and Europeans and expats is term for ex-patrious

Americans and you know You know, this guy, Hank owned a hotel like Stabi, Al owned Sam Sara, and there was Rick's Cafe, and I'm just learning the ropes. I mean, it's, you know, the 70s. And at one point, I'm like, I've been down there about six or seven months just drying out and staying low, waiting for the case in New Orleans to kind of come to some sort of fruition where I don't have, hopefully I'm not going to be extradited to New Orleans to, you know, stand trial for something.

like stupid like and um a couple friends of mine come down bob silver bullet and a guy named big jeff and we all start talking and they're going to do a trip you know they're going to they've lined up bob has a plane and he had his own landing strip in central florida you had like a you could buy a house on an air strip so bob had you know been a smuggler for a while used to live next door to me bob was my next door neighbor for a while we used to live in these trailer parks in downtown fort lauderdale me and bob each had a trailer next to each other and like donnie would pull up to trailer in a Rolls-Royce convertible or a Ferrari to come talk to me about something that I had to do for him.

I'm like, this isn't going to be, no, don't pull up to my trailer in a Rolls-Royce convertible, you know. But, um, so we all start talking, they go, listen, we're going to smuggle a load of out of here. And I had been, you know, trying to, you know, find something going on down there. And I go, cool, I'm in. And I go, I said, I'll put up part of the money. I'll put up $4,000.

And when it gets there, my end will be, I'll sell it in Ohio to my partner, Terry. And, you know, you go, all right. So we do the trip. I leave, go back to America, hoping that I, you know, can make it through customs. You know, I don't know what's looking, you know, I don't know what they're looking for. So we end up flying to the Bahamas first. They get on the plane, you know, we separate. You know, I've got on like a flowered shirt with a Mai Tai drink trying to go through customs.

I used to have this one bright red flower shirt. So I figured I'd look like an average tourist. And I got back, we got the trip in, and I took it all up to Ohio and sold it. So I did my first 600-pound smuggling trip at age about 19. And I was like, all right. But I never wanted to be a smuggler. Everybody says, because smugglers get busted. There's too many moving parts.

You know, you have no control over the customs, other pilots, other people. Most of what I like to do is stay within the fingers of the glove, as the mafia calls it, you know, kind of. Do you know I'm like, you know, your brother? Most of these guys, we went to high school together. Everybody we were working with, you know, they were friends of mine. You know, my drivers, everybody I sold drugs to. There was nobody really from the outside. Occasionally it happened, and sometimes I got in trouble, I had problems.

Like one time, a friend of, a good friend of mine, one of my good partners, a friend of his says we should go to Miami and buy some weed. There's a guy down there. And at this time, we, summertime, there's no weed. So I go, all right, let's go down. up a trunk. I get down there. I have like $80,000 and the laying on the ground. And four like Colombian type guys are standing there. They're all wearing dusters. And I look down, I opened the bales. I go, no good man. I'm not buying it. And the guy looks at me and says, you know, and he looks at his friend. His friend pulls his jacket open. And there's an AR-15 or an AK-47, one of those two

things and he smiles and then the other guys open their dusters and there's a punch and they goes basically lets me know you don't have to take the lead but the money's not leaving right right so i have 80,000 dollars worth the wheat in the trunk of a car that i can't sell so you know what did i do i lost a shit ton of money so that's why you don't want to step out of your normal but you know you have to in a sense to find product because you know you might someone say hey a friend of a friend So I got to the point like this People would say to me all the time People were coming up to me because they knew I was the guy

To move the product I got a load of weed I got this I got this I go listen Do you have the key to the safe Or the key to the warehouse And they go well no my friend No no listen I have both

I have the money I have the key to my safe And I when I do a deal If I'm selling it I have the key to the warehouse If you don't have one of the others Introduce me to the guy that does If you can't, I'm not interested because I don't want to be sent down that same path

that cost me. And I knew this. I stepped out of that, you know, but that's the key. So getting into smuggling, you don't have those things, right? You start losing the ability to have control of you. So this pot smuggling deal,

we got in Jamaica, we did because Bob was the pilot. Hank loaded it. You know, me and Big Jeff, you know, I sold it. And we did the deal. So that's why I was willing to do that. But normally I tried to stay away from smuggling.

Having said that, I started getting into auto racing. And auto racing cost a lot of money. And other friends, you know, so one day a friend comes to me, goes, hey, we're going to, we're going to kick, I think it was 80 kilos out from Bahamas. I go, all right, I'm in. And it's like, why? Because, well, the guys are doing it. You know, hey, would you jump off a bridge? What would your mother say?

What would you say? Well, if you lived, you know, if your friend said, you know. Yeah, yeah. If your buddy was jumping off a bridge, would you do it? Yeah. The answer is supposed to know. Right. Right.

But, you know, most of us guys would go, eh. Does he live? I'll give it a shot. So we, I live in this townhouse community. Actually, it was right next to Crystal Lake, which is not there anymore, but that might been to lake, but, and there's a golf course behind me, which happens to be right west of Fort Lauderdale Airport. So there's a couple ways you can smuggle drugs. One is, obviously, you bring a ship in and try to just slide it into port or a plane, fly it in. Or you can take,

the other way we used to do it is the plane would fly over the outside of Fort, like outsoft the beach, you send boats out there that kick the bales out, you catch the bales, you know, you put callium sticks on them, the glow sticks. And then you pick them up and, you bring them in well as customs got smarter you couldn't do that stuff anymore right because they just looking for planes coming from south america columbia you know it just got harder the first guys used to throw shit out in the everglades if you watch um the barry seal story with tom hanks made in america he flies into louisiana and throws it out into the woods and then his you have many friends i know went out with airboats and picked up yeah al's apartment so yeah so we're uh we did this one

deal where there's a golf course right behind my house. So what you do is you bring the plane in from the Bahamas, you get ready like you're going to land in Fort Lauderdale Airport. You call the tower to say you want to do a fly around, which means you're not comfortable landing. You want to take another shot at it. You know, you're not lined up right. You're not comfortable.

The tower's always going to give you a fly around if it's safe because what you're saying is you can't land or you're having an issue. What you do is once you do, once you do, you're going to do. drop down now you're below radar so you just keep going a little bit and we just kick the kilos out onto the golf course and my two of my friends are leaning up against leaning up against the trees dressed in black you know because when you're kicking out a package from a plane and you know it's landing at like 150 miles an hour that weighs like 80 pounds you don't want to get hit by it yeah you know it'll break it'll get killed even leaning against the tree because it'll break the tree branches and

all this stuff and you know I now we're about a mile and a half from my house so Nate jumps in his Mercedes he's you know got a big fancy Mercedes I drove and jump in a pickup truck one of the trucks that I had or my friend had and we drive down the two guys grab the packages out of the golf course the plane comes up turns around and goes land's legally empty and uh we take the two packages the two we have the two vehicles I have the one guy in the back of my truck with his big duffel bag and the other duffel bag and the other guys in Nathan's Mercedes we go back to my house pull in rip them open I get a plastic bag cut a kilo open get a big bag of blow lock it all up in the trunk and get the hell out of there

because we had an eight o'clock Eddie Murphy concert right and we didn't want to miss it so we literally went to Eddie Murphy and he's up there dancing around and is you know doing his act and Nathan turns to me, goes, you think we should get out of here? I go, well, it's a great show, but you left like a million dollars worth of blow parked in your trunk of your car in front of my house. It might be the thing to, you know. He goes, yeah, all right, let's go. So we did that one, and that went good.

So I went back, you know, but I was spending so much money auto racing at $6,000 a weekend, and I'm racing with the richest people in the world. Right. And I'm not. I'm a guy that's making a buck blow. and a buck yeah you know and then you have things happen like 80,000 dollars to lawyers you know guns put to your head I got armed robbed in my house tied up and you know you know you know I gave them they didn't know I had two key I had so many hidden compartments in my old house

that either I couldn't find one right I had a buried safe I had another safe in the front that had that was open so if you robbed me he would steal what was in the safe right I had a secret compartment and had two kilos in it. So, you know, the, so we decided to do another trip. So this time, we're going to, Nathan comes to me and goes, hey, do you know anybody that can load me in Columbia with like 300 kilos of Coke? And I had a friend of mine that had done a couple years in a Colombian prison and for running

some, and I go, yeah, I'll call him. And we end up going down in Miami, eating with this Colombian guy. And it wasn't a Viva Sepada, you know, like. and cowboy kind of wild guy. Most of them aren't. Most of the people. This is a sophisticated businessman. Well-dressed, sitting in his hotel room.

He's looking for someone to move a load out of Columbia. And we're offering our services as a pilot crew. And, you know, sometimes you buy your load and you leave with it. Sometimes it's a split. The guy goes, I'll give you 400 kilos. You have to give me 100. You know, if you're moving, I'm going to pay you 100. You know, there's a division.

Right. And that's almost better because if the Colombians have a vested interest in the load, it's going to be better Coke, and it's going to be more likely that you're going to get in and out of Columbia. They have their own money in it. So it's not a bad deal. It's the way I prefer to do it. Like in Jamaica, I never give anybody money other than bribing the cops and buying fuel because maybe some a little bit upfront for the load. Because if you pay for it, nobody gives a shit whether you make it out or not. so we go to do that deal and Nathan lights up a big fat joint in the room maybe to make the guy feel

like you know we're cool you know whatever but I think to myself no this ain't good this is not the thing to do here this is a businessman in Colombia in these countries only the peasants do these drugs right you're not you know not you know not professional people and we get out I get a phone call and they said now the guy decided not to use us. So I'm like, shit, that could have been a pretty good commission, right? So I get a phone call a little while later. Nathan's like, hey, I got a load and I'm bringing it in. Do you want to do the part of the offload?

And I'm not, I'm, I got my own business. I don't, but all the other guys were doing it. He says, we'll pay you $20,000 for the night. And I go, that's kind of bullshit money, you know. He goes, but I'll let you buy his money. loads of keys as you want in Columbia and you know a couple not as many obviously because they want and I'll give you as much as you want to sell at wholesale price for being on the glan crew so I said oh that sounds good so we go do that again not far from here a road in

northern Florida somewhere and but we're up for days doing speed like this is what they did they used to like get the crew whacked out and jacked up and we go out there we end up unloading 300 kilos on an abandoned road in the middle of Florida, and we pull it off. We pull it off. We, you know, we get out of there. But we're jacked up. And one of our guys is related to a guy who's Special Forces Green Beret. And we end up trading a bunch of blow for Laws, Rockets, hand grenades, Claymore mines. One of my friends actually got busted with all of it behind his refrigerator in Hollywood. The police come, you know, can you imagine the sensational story that was you know they had you know the attorney general the police you know i mean they have big white

boards maps you know you know um they'd be domestic terrorist now oh yeah yeah but uh and so we're saying laying on the runway with hand grenades law machine guns i'm not a i don't i've never carried a gun in my life i'm not that's not the way i started this and and jacked up on speed and I'm like, how do fuck did I get here? You know, but I'm cool. You know, I've got my job. My job is to lay down the runway and drive the load out. So we get a little, a couple clicks on the radio, a couple more clicks.

Time to go, you know, like one click, click, click, click, click, click. Right. And then, you know, the code was hang fire. So it was a song, part of a rolling song song, song. hang fire. So the joke is Nathan, so then we have callium sticks, you know, the glow sticks

tied to fishing line. And we have these other things called fireflies, which are super bright. And then we have the things that you use if you fall overboard. They're like watertight strobe lights. So me and my buddy's on one end

of the abandoned road, not a dirt road, but a road to nowhere I call them. They're all over Florida. Right. Someone was either going to build a development that didn't work out or somebody decided to build a road to smuggle a bunch of weed or loads in. There's roads to nowhere all over, you know, because projects that failed or whatever. So he starts running this way and I'm running this way.

And we're stretching out the callium stick, you know, line with the fishing line every end. And we're throwing the fireflies. What is the fireflies is the little thing about this big hooked up to a nine-volt battery that's flashing also. and then we put out the strobe lights. So Nathan turned to the co-pilot and goes, buddy, there's MIA and I know customs, let's go. And he said when he turned the plane down

and, you know, click, click, click, the road just went, boom. And he said, buddy, it looked like MIA. You know what I mean? What is Miami International Airport? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah, I mean, we just built an entire runway in the middle of the night in like seconds. The plane lands and the plane's got.

the Coke in it, but it's got six jugs of fuel, six big, 20 gallon jugs, because you have to have enough fuel to get from the middle of Columbia to the middle of Florida. Right. And what they do is on the flight, they had rubber hoses, surgical hose, the brass pipes. And as the plane tanks run out, you know, or they take the two, the co-pilot has to run back, pull the brass out and stick into the next jug. And it's feeding the fuel off the jugs through the wing tanks, through the tank, into the engine. So at any point, if any of that had failed, the plane would have crashed.

Right. But they pulled it off. I come with, and I can, at this point I'm almost blinded from all the, oh, I had to run about a football field down and a football field back to get to the car to bring the car back to load it because you can't have the car on the runway. Right. And the plane would hit it. And I'm jacked up. I feel like on speed and we, I load the car, but I can barely see because I've been blinded by the lights. And I'm just, and it's, it's dark and it's like foggy.

And I'm flying down this road. And all of a sudden I go, I don't know where the plane is. I can't see. I go, you know, don't run into the plane. Right. You know, and I just at the last second, I just slow the car down. And then all of a sudden through the fog, there's the fucking plane. I mean, props going, everybody's standing around, lights, you know, back the car, and we load it up.

And then what they had to do is the other crew had to take the jugs, put them in the back of a pickup. Because you can't fly, you can't land somewhere with rubber hoses and, you know, fuel drums. So we had brought fuel. We crank, hand crank fuel back into the wing tanks to get the guy enough fuel to land at a proper runway. and then we leave, you know, and I had switches on the dash of my car so I could literally shut off the taillights. It's kind of like an old trick

that Moonshiners used to do. If the cops were chasing you, you want to be able to shut off the taillights and more importantly, the brake lights so they couldn't see any, you know. I was like the thing in Chinatown where he breaks the one tail light so he can follow the person he's following

from extreme distance. I didn't know. I know the movie, but I don't remember that part, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's a, he, um, he, he, he just goes up to the one tail, that way, this is the only car that has one tail light. And it's not broken, it's just he, he breaks out the, so that it's, the bulb is still there. Right, I got you. So it's a bright white light. Right, right, right.

It's easy to follow this. I can follow, I can be 10 cars behind. I'm not going to lose them. Yeah, that was smart. Yeah, well, um, unfortunately, so we did that trip and, you know, I only, I don't know, not my thing, you know, but I did it. Because all my friends were doing it. And then we had went back six weeks later or so, four weeks later, to do it again. And it didn't end up the same way. Nathan crashed in Columbia, Ball of Flames, you know.

So I lost my good friend down there that day. And we got a radio. We were sitting in the woods and we finally got a radio contact from the Colombians. The plane had crashed and, you know, there was nothing left. So, you know, another one. You know, you know, it's, it's, it's, I had a good friend dying in DC3, you know, right out of high school. And in Jamaica had this lady Brenda who was older than me and kind of always looked at me like I was chopped meat, you know. You know, it's like, like Brenda's eye raping me again, you know, and she had a young daughter who I actually ended up dating a little bit, you know, and she was more my age.

But Brenda got a finally got a load out in Jamaica and I was in Fort Lauderdale waiting, not for her. I was just, you know, hanging out with her daughter and some other friends. And it turned out that, I guess, probably Brenda had a way of, like, being unreasonable and, like, being, she could, you know, had some personality explosions or whatever, but I guess they got offshore. She had demanded to get on the sailboat with her load. She didn't, she was not supposed to, but she demanded to get on. And at some point, they just tied her to an anchor and threw her overboard alive.

Whoa, yeah. And I had to spend time. I was with her daughter because I was kind of hooked up with her. Right. You know, see, it's not a harmless business, you know. I mean. Yeah, Mike Scott, it's the same types of stories. I have a buddy Mike Hudson, who he did a podcast here, but he didn't, he didn't.

I don't think he talks about this story, but he had, there was like a, they had like a shrimp boat that was full of, and it went down. And he's like, he's like, one of two things happens. Like, you don't know what happened. He's like, they either went down in, there was a hurricane or a storm. He's like either went down in the storm with some of his good buddies on it. Or he said, when they met up with whoever they met up with, he's like, it went bad. Or he said, there were even times where they'd give you the, they could give you the load. And there were guys that would, they'd know that they would give you the load.

And then they just follow you. Or not them, but somebody else would come up. They'd pirate it. And he said, and they killed the crew. Yeah. He was all kinds of, you know, there were all kinds of little things where this guy ended up dying, this guy got dying, this guy. And he's like, you know, you hang out with these guys on and off for two or three years and you think you're good buddies. And then you find out, oh, you know what happened to so-and-so.

Yeah. And it's like, fuck. Yep. There's a lot of, you know what happened to so-and-so. That's true. And then you never really know. You never know. Right.

And that's, there's no closure. Like, you know, right. You know, that's the problem. The thing with Mike and that story is that the mother of one of the guys that went. down like she never like he's like literally 10 years later she's still talking she was at that back then she was still talking about it what happened did you ever find out do you ever heard anything he's like they're all like it went down in the storm like they didn't find the boat it went down the storm but of course she knows it could have been something else yeah and i mean that's the thing

about the ocean you know there's a couple stories in my book about me being out in the ocean and it's not you know the ocean is very very unforgiving i was just thinking to say that unforgiving it's not It's, you know, it's just very unforgiving. Let me go to you. Yeah. I'll tell you an interesting story. You know the Adam Walsh story. Yeah.

Okay. Well, Adam, I've actually met John Walsh. Hold on. Do you know the Adam Walsh story? Nothing, bro. Nothing. You've heard of America's Most Wanted, the TV show. No, but really, have you?

No. I knew he was like, because I did the same thing with my audio engineering. He said the same thing, yeah. So, John Walsh, his son, he was married, his, he now does, well, I don't know if they still have them. He still do, yeah, yeah, it's on another channel. Yeah, Americans or America's most wanted criminals. And so before that show was even a thing, John Walsh's son, Adam Walsh, was taken one day, just gone, right? He was abducted, yeah.

Abducted, he's out playing, whatever. They think they know the guy who did it, right? you know they eventually it's a lot i can go yeah yeah i'll tell you the story in detail if you like oh okay do you want me to go into it in detail because i can i mean it's very i or just broach it um yeah just just go over the basic for yeah okay but for the camera yeah for the camera yeah not for cold so um at the one one point in hollywood so anyway the tragic story yeah so let's say that exactly a tragic story in hollywood florida and a place where i grew up where i used to say like you know the biggest thing that happened was somebody

bicycle or an orange got stolen. One of my friends was close friends with John and Revei Walsh. What had happened was Adam was in the Sears Mall, which is the little mall in town. Everybody hung out with. It was like six or seven years old, right? Yeah, he was six or six years old

and he was abducted and eventually found dead decapitated. I was walking into the mall that day. A little boy. Like the cutest little boy just just like just so fucking innocent, such an innocent, you know, not that anybody's got it coming, but I'm saying like, you know, just doing what every kid anywhere does. He was playing with this video game or something. His mom had left them for a minute. And I won't, I know there's a lot of detail to the

story. It's another show. But, um, so anyhow, we're in the mall, me and my friend Lee. And what we're trying to do is go buy one of those planes, which again, if you're not our age, you wouldn't know. But planes were, they didn't have remote controls. They had like a string and you would fly it like on a, like a kite, and it had a little engine and just go around in circles. And they were impossible to fly, impossible to start, which was perfect from what we wanted to do. Because there was a road, what I'll call, a road to nowhere in the middle of Florida. We wanted to use it for a landing for this, no, for a key trip out of Jamaica. And me with my friend Kelly.

And Kelly and I, you know, through the years we partner up, like me and Kelly were partners for a while. and me and Terry were partners for all the guys from high school would do different you know Terry Kelly actually introduced him in my first wife Karen so um we're going to do this trip and Kelly somehow comes to me and says my uncle Ralph wants to he's a pilot he's got a twin engine plane he wants to smuggle a load out feed out of Jamaica and I was experienced in smuggling and around smugglers a lot more than they were you know even though we all you know I literally work for the big smugglers and I go buddy this isn't an easy thing you know this isn't like going down and getting a you know

pound to eat from some place it's a big thing it's smuggling trips have a lot of moving parts you know that's why they're dangerous to get busted and dangerous you know for many other reasons so anyhow he says no my i said uncle ralph is like 65 years old he goes yeah i go really okay so me and lee who's one of our offload guys lee's guy went to high school with did a bunch of trips he was offloaded a did a bunch of smuggling for with people we go down to the mall to buy the plane the decoy what we're going to use to justify while we're sitting on the runway scoping the runway out or the road just we can make it into a runway and i run into ravey walsh and some um a few other people i know and they go have you seen adam and i go no

and they go well he's missing in the mall and they're all come this is before cell phones i believe even they're all in the mall looking for different things And I go, can you go to David Park, which is right across the street, and see if you can find Adam? I said, we're going to go into Sears to try to buy this plane. Let's look for him. So we go in, Sears doesn't have one of these planes, probably already outdated at that point. And we get in the car and drive across to David Park, which is right across from the mall. And there's like a tennis courts and, you know, a little room.

So, like, you know, you can drop your kid off to get tennis lessons or basketball. It's a very small little community. Right, center. Exactly. Nothing big. But I said to myself, I don't see a five-year-old kid walking across, it's not, you know, like I-95, but really, nobody's going to say, boy, you know, where's your, you know, walking by himself?

So we don't find them. We come back to the mall and we tell them we didn't find them. Go back to the car. And I remember saying to myself, things like this don't happen in sleepy little Hollywood, Florida. Right. This is going to change everything. and after that John Walsh

Of course Adam was found Decapitated in the Swamps John started America's Most Wanted John went in front of Senate 27 times More than anybody He's been in front of the United States Senate more than any

Private Citizen in the history Of this country at that time And he created the missing You know you see NCIC or whatever that show That was created Basically by him To track you know, missing kids

and then he got the show. So anyway, we don't find the plane. And we didn't decide that the road the road that we're going to use to smuggle the load has got a problem. One of the problems is while Lee's out there dicking around, he sees a car pull up with some antennas on it

and he gets spooked because Lee still left on the road to scope it. We just didn't have a plane, a prop. Right. So he comes back and they decide, Uncle Ralph and Kelly decide, they're just going to land in St. Pete Airport, where his FBO is. If you know anything about planes, and FBO is fixed based of operations, right?

A plane can go anywhere. So where's its home, right? That's where his hangar was. And I'm like, what? You know, but this time you got the blam. That's a hell of a flight. Oh, yeah. It's 15. Where you think you'd want to, you want to land and get this shit off my plane as quick as far. Well, we will. But the thing is, is you're going to, you're now 19. 1980s, you're flying, there's AWACs, there's the blimp was up there, there's U.S. Customs, there's the DEA, there's jets from Homestead Air Force Base that are drug introduction jets. That's a risky deal, but that's what they're going to do. So I said, all right, I'm in, let's get the load in.

I'll take it to Ohio and sell it to Terry, right? So it's all, it's Scott, my friend Scott, who had never, high school guy, never been on a set before that's what we call the landing the set you know like a movie set that's our set and uh he's never done anything there's me lee who's ex super experienced and there and then there's the off of the drive crew my guys are going to move in the cars they're parked outside of town you know i'm in the playboy club on like the ninth floor with a pair of binoculars and a walkie talking so i can see down at the runway and uh kelly is parked somewhere else and lee and scott are sitting at the runway. So the name of, I think this chapter is the one that got away. So what happens?

The plane comes in. I get a radio. I'm looking through my binoculars. The plane's landing. The crew's pulling up to offload. And they have a pickup truck with a camper top, about 1,100 pounds. That's what about a pickup truck with a camper top will hold usually. That's what's in the plane. It's Jamaican. And the Jamaicans have a tendency where the Colombians would have big bales, 40, 50, 6, and 55-pound bales. Jamaicans usually use smaller bales. They compressed it more and made it into smaller bales just the way it is. So they were able to fit 1100 pounds in the plane.

Now, Ralph, a 65-year-old guy has to fly from St. Pete. He goes, you can't, you know, he needs fuel. He goes down to Haiti, fuels the plane. And the other thing is, anytime you're in Jamaica, Columbia, fuel is, like in Jamaica, When I was living down there, if they saw you with a 50-gallon drum of fuel, they'd arrest you and keep the fuel. The fuel's worth a lot of money because why? It's what you need to fly a plane now.

So if you had 50-gallon drums of fuel in the back of a truck, you were obviously on your word to do a smuggling trip. You were somebody that the cops. So will you make small purchases? No, they would find it. But moving, it's difficult, right? You need at least a couple hundred gallons. Right.

So Ralph flies to Haiti. I think it was Haiti, loaded refurb. fueled in Haiti. He's, oh, I said, Ralph, you really need to take a co-pilot. I go, you know, it's just a long trip. Anything can happen. He insisted he wouldn't.

Now, if you take a co-pile, you have to take less product because the plane can only take so much, especially getting off at some clandestant dirt runway with trees lining. Nathan didn't make it. You know, my friend Nathan crashed either too much load or something happened and hit a tree line blew up. So I try to convince Ralph to bring a co-pile.

He says, no. I said, all right. So he flies to hit, he loads the plane up with fuel, lands in Jamaica, they top them off in Jamaica, he still needs fuel, and he loads to eat, and he starts, now this man has been in the air for like 24 hours, you know, he's 50, it's 15, you know, the mile, I think it's about 11, in the book I have all the math, but, you know, it's, it's all day of flying by himself. Loads to plane comes in, lands at the FBI in St. I'm watching everything. Next thing I knew, I look down and on the street below, which I think is, I forgot the name of the street, I see Uncle Ralph's old 240 Volvo, you know,

this most conservative car, which, you know, and it's hit, every time it crosses an intersection, it goes airborne, right? And behind it's five cop cars with their lights going. And every time it lands, sparks fly out of the car, then the five car cop cars go in the air. And I'm like, right? I mean, it looks like a scene out of Blues Brothers.

Right. You know, and I have to tell you, between the sparks coming off the cars and the lights going, really kind of cool, you know. But I'm like, holy shit, this ain't good. Yeah. Right. So I have 20,000 bucks I brought up. You know, you know, Kelly's like, hey, you think you should bring some cash? Yeah, I'll grab 20 just in case we need it, you know.

And I grabbed the 20 and I run up like three flights of stair, wrapped the walkie-talkie in some paper and stuff it into something. I don't care if they find a walkie-talkie. But what I don't want is to be walking out with the $20,000 and a walkie-talkie. Because even though it was happening like that, the chances of anybody known who I was is probably, you know, but you never know. And if I would have been caught with the 20,000 in the walkie-talkie,

I'd have been charged the same as the pie. I'm part of the smuggling. Yeah, it was conspiracy. Conspiracy. Thank you. And as I watched the car go by, I see Lee, he's in the passenger seat, try to jump out of the car. I see the door open.

I see Scotty hanging on with the steering wheel. I mean, that's not only, they're going underneath me. I can see the hand on the steering wheel. Lee open the door and I go, I'm like, don't do that because you know, you're going to get a run over by five cop cars. Right. Turns out, so, oh, we had, so we had one of the load cars that. that belonged to a friend of mine, his grandparents had given it to him to go to college.

So we used to use them. I call him up. He was going to school in Atlanta. I used to call him Doc. He was in medical school. I go, Doc, you want to make a couple grand? I got a load to go to Ohio. Come down, pick up the load, and I'll pay you to drive it to Ohio.

And kids in medical school, he needs money. He goes, all right. So we have his car parked downstairs with the keys underneath the seat. And I said, we all knew if anything happened, that was the getaway car. right so i run downstairs throw the money in the back seat and jump in the get a car get away car and get away what is lee do is scotty actually makes a couple turns lee jumps out of the car runs runs through the park back to get the car it's gone it's gone yeah to this day he still yells at me why did you take the car and go what guy gets out of the way gets away and then goes back yeah

you know how did i know you were coming back right so fuck you know everything Everybody got busted, right? You know, Lee, you know, got, as far as I know, I'm going out to now, we're driving out to where we stashed the rest of the crew who complained that they were sitting in some roadside shitbox hotel while I'm staying, everybody staying at the Playboy Club in downtown St. Pete, you know. So I get to the room, Kelly's already there. The other guys are there.

And we were all high school friends where, you know, we're like, you know, we're done. All the guys are in jail. The planes confiscated that. gone also we get a phone call now i want to point out that uncle ralph even though i didn't think he was the guy to you know to do this he had a little bit of swagger he was the latin guy tall kind of looked like george hamilton you know again he won't know what george hamilton is you know sharp gray hair dark tan ralph had swagger what lean and scottie had done was unloaded the entire plane in less than two or three minutes because when you got adrenaline going you will move

thousand pounds in about three to five minutes they throw it in the truck um the cops come so they jump in an uncle ralph's Volvo and leave oh so that didn't get the load right leaving uncle ralph with a pickup truck full of weight and no way to get out of the airport so he says he jumps in the pickup truck i mean if he had been more experienced he may not have done that but since he knew nothing else and drove it right out of the airport called us something said i got the load where do you guys so we brought it back loaded the cars shipped it all to ohio and uh made the money the only person that got busted was scotty bailis for driving the car they they got a year for alien smuggling they said he did so he had to do one year alien was the who's i guess they thought alien was the lee was

lead who was trying to jump out of the car yeah okay they they had to charge him with something yeah yeah yeah they didn't reckless driving yeah and but and so what uncle ralph did was he knew the guys at the fbo so he called up somebody over there and goes listen the DEA had stickered the plane they didn't realize there was a cargo door in the back you know throw luggage and they didn't sticker it so the the guys at the FBI went in behind vacuumed out the whole plane cleaned out everything they should have no seeds no stems you know anything like and no burlap left over and closed it all back up. So when the DEA came and searched the plane, there was no drugs.

Okay. So, yeah, so there was 200 pounds that we couldn't fit in the car. So I threw it in the back Uncle Ralph's Volvo and I headed for Ohio. I normally didn't do the driving at that time. But, you know, there was 200 pounds and there was a car and I had to get to Ohio to collect my money. So I drove it up. That was one of the last times I'd ever, you know, and, well, other than the 300 kilos.

I did drive that out too. I try to have other people do this stuff, but every now and then, it happens. So years later, and this is 1992, it has scaled down a lot. You know, I mean, weed was going from thousands of pounds to people were buying $1,000,

not $245 a pound. They're buying, you know, indoor, and, you know, they're looking for the green, you know, the good wheat, not the old commercial stuff. used to bring in from Columbia. You know it was excellent. That whole market had dried up.

So, Kelly and I had tried to do a trip out of California where he got busted. Oh, so going back. So after that, Kelly and his uncle went to do a cane smuggling trip, and they got busted. Everybody got busted. Uncle Ralph got busted. Kelly got busted. A bunch of other people. Kelly went on the run.

He got a bunch of fake IDs, and he was traveling the world, you know. And Kelly was a really good. looking guy. I mean, shamelessly good luck. To the point where I remember, we went into a bar one time. We were going upstairs and the girl looks at him and goes, hey, if you don't get lucky, the hostess who was

smoking hot goes, hey, if you don't get lucky up there, I'll be waiting for you when you come back down. I'm like, oh. It's not even fair. Yeah, and I mean, he's tall on the size of his armpits. You know what I mean? Like, I remember sitting in a bar one time and some girl looking up going and I'm like,

I'm right here. You know, I'm right here. I mean, then your height, well, a little shorter, but, you know, I'm up, you can put me in your purse and take me home. So, and, uh, so Kelly gets busted, he goes on the run. And he comes back and we do this trip out of California. We're going to move like, just like high in. Now you're talking like expensive stuff, but he goes, look, help me out.

I need to make some money. I'll fly out there. We'll put 20 pounds or 40 pounds, whatever we can do together. I'll pay for it. You'll take it to Ohio. Sell it to Terry. and we'll make a, you know, I'll do the trip with you. And if this works,

then we can start doing, building bigger loads. Right. Kelly gets caught for speeding in like Nebraska with a fake license that's expired. Like, dude, I mean, and we went through all. It's not good at all anyway.

I mean, and we did things like I changed, I used to change the, we rent the car, changed back then, the car had a door key and a trunk key. So we changed the key so that he can't open the trunk.

Right. So if the cop pulled him home, say, look, I just rented the car. He had clothes in the back, like a salesman, a fake pair of glasses, a suit. He had it going on. But he got pulled over, and the cops, he calls me up because, dude, I'm arrested. They got me. They don't know who I am. They opened the trunk finally. They couldn't open the trunk.

They had to tow the car, get a locksmith. He goes, call Gilletti, who is our lawyer. He goes, get me out of here. It's $20,000 bond. So I run down to Gilletti. I call him up. I drop $20,000 on him. he bonds Kelly out

and then the FBI fingerprints come back and they realize he's an international smuggler of like you know came on the run for seven years or whatever he's been doing. So they grabbed him before he got out? He got out. He got away.

Oh, nice, nice. He got away. So I got him out. Move forward a couple years. I'm still moving. So he's still on the run? So he was still on the run the whole time?

He was on the run in middle of that. Right, okay. He got arrested one time for pinching some girl's ass in Fort Lauderdale and bought it. This guy's a jerk off. Read the book. I do call him a jerk off.

He says he's a hard working smart, you know, not the right. So anyway, I'm now, just got married. I have a newborn baby and I'm going to do

another trip from, now we're getting out of Texas because the Florida, you know, we need, that's what we're doing now. All the way coming out of Texas now

from Mexico. It's high end now. They're growing decent. Because it's got to be, it's got to be good. Got to be. you know, like $1,500 pound, $1,800 a pound, not $300, $400 a pound wheat.

That's just not selling anymore, and it's not coming in. So I go down to Texas and I load up about $100,000, about 80 pounds, I think it is. And I'm going to run it up to Ohio to Terry's. What I don't know is, and even though Big Jeff, one of my crew would call me and said, hey, Kelly's back in country and he's running up to Terry. And Terry, they called me,

wanted me to come over and pick up some. I'm telling you, Kelly's working with Terry. And I'm like, Kelly's an accident waiting to happen. A couple of things. One, he was doing a lot of, he was a man without a country. You know, he's on the run, hadn't seen his family, drinks and drugging a lot. And just, you know, he'd already fucked me out of the load in Nebraska. You know, I got lost that from him speeding with an expired driver's license.

He said, I call Terry. I said, Terry, I'm not doing anything if Kelly's involved. You tell me right now, whether he goes, no, I'm not working. with Kelly, nothing. Of course, he's lying to me. He actually, Terry actually came to my wedding, where I showed him my wedding ring, had my little daughter. He'd already been working for the cops at that time. He went to my wedding, probably wired, or I don't know if the cops from Ohio were down there. I left out a part of the story. I apologize. Kelly was running a thousand pounds up to Ohio. The market wasn't there for that. You know, the market wasn't there

anymore. I used to him on a thousand pounds every two weeks. It's not there anymore. It was for high end quality. My partner had to go out now find a market for his thousand pounds. What happened? He got busted. He went, somebody above him got busted, you know, and it trickled down and they busted Kelly. They busted Terry. Terry literally, like I said, came to my wedding. Right. You know, working for the cops. My best friend, you know, I mean, his wife. You know, I was the godfather to his kids one of his kids you know you're preaching the choir my best friend was cooperated with that well that's well this is what happens and this will go into now i'm going to the dea part when people say oh you're a snitch dude when you're looking at rick at rico and 25

years everybody is yeah yeah you know when they put you you know you think that you're going to keep your mouth shut you're not you know you're not and i think we can spread some of this around there's 30 years here right jimmy can do five Todd can do I know guys that made a grease. Listen, I know guys that said, listen, we're all going to work. They did it. That's what they said. I'm not going to do all.

Let's take, share it. That's what they did. They each got three years. So what I don't know is, and what Kelly doesn't know is Terry's busted. So I leave Texas and I've got my, I have a driver in front of me. We have a special truck with secret compartments. I'm in the rent, I call the chase car. We drive up there.

And as I'm driving up to Ohio, I see a carload of these guys look like, football players in a small car. Something hits me. Something just doesn't agree with me in my stomach. I just think something's not right. Me and Terry always went to his house. He had built this big house. He goes, and now he's telling me to meet him at a hotel.

There was something, you know, everybody, usually everybody says they got busted, something in their inner gut told them something's wrong. Their intuition. Your intuition said. Right. So I tell Paco, my driver, go Paco, head for this, go to the, over there, and I send them to, we park

the vehicles on the Lake Erie, you know, behind a Taco Bell, like just staring at the lake. I go, I don't know, man. All right, let's go. We go to the hotel. I check in, and I go downstairs to use the pay phone to call Terry to tell him, I'm here. And I go to the girl at the counter, I said, can I buy some quarters? Because at the time, you know, you'd have to buy, like, you know, rolls of quarters. to put in that there's no pay phone they work and i can see she's acting weird i don't think anything i

go upstairs i see this good looking gal kind of in the room next to me dark hair you know you know whatever you know and i go in the room terry knocks on the door he comes in he's wearing a raincoat all right i light up a roach as soon as i light up a roach the door comes blasting in and it's the it's the cops i'm on the ground terry's on the ground paco's on the ground and i look up and i go You motherfucker, you just set me up. Like, they're arresting him. They're arresting everybody, but I know better. Yeah, yeah.

You know, you did me. And that night, I'm being processed, you know, shower, fingerprint, clothes. And I look through the glass, there's Terry. I mean, there's Kelly. So he set Kelly and me up on the same night. And I know, I figured out it got me for 80 pounds. He, I know, is on the run for big cane smuggling charges. I know he's in big trouble.

and you know they put us in separate pods each of us they don't put the defendants together and that's you know I thought well you know they wouldn't give me bond they wouldn't give me bond and I go what's going on I'm trying to go to court finally I get called out of my cell one day and there's this guy in a brown suit and you know when you're in jail everybody's got security blue security green what's with the guy with the brown suit right right and he goes you Kenneth, Stephen Baer. I think, yeah, who else would I be?

You just pulled me out of my cell. And he hands me these papers. And the guard at the time was this guy, Bill, who I kind of was friendly with. And I open up the papers, and Bill looks at me, goes, we're going to put you on suicide watch tonight, kid. I go, suicide watch, for what?

And he looks at me, goes, kid, you're looking at 50 years. And I go, what? I don't like, you know. And I look at the papers, and there's three pages of indictments, and I just look at Bill, I go, I'll be all right. It's not necessary. I'm fine. And I walk back and I read my indictment.

It's RICO, 12-year ongoing criminal enterprise. And I know it's, you know, I'm looking at 25 to 30 years, you know, at least charged with. And how old were you? I was 30, 36 maybe. no yeah 33 33 and um had a baby that was a one and a half i had that's a long time at 30 for tv i i had literally got married i had a bait my we we had my daughter then we got married my wife didn't want to walk down the aisle pregnant right so i said i so a year and a half after my daughter was about a year and a half old um we went to on the honeymoon come back and uh we took my daughter

on the honeymoon. We went to, like, Aspen and Santa Fe. We're just traveling around visiting some cool places. And I said to my wife, I'm going back to work. And she says to me, please, you're married. We have a baby. Don't go. She goes, we'll eat white bread and mayonnaise sandwiches. You'll get a job. I'll get a job. Don't go. I'm a drug deal. It's like, you know, scorpion and the frog, right? That's what I do. So I go up there and I get busted and now I'm looking at 25 years and I'm like fuck so it took me three months to bond out because they didn't want to bond me out because they know you know once you get out you can't fight a drug case from jail you know so anyhow I get busted in Ohio I finally make bond and you know I don't

know what to do you know I know oh it remember how I know and I was in uh Lawrence house in in In 88, I got busted, and my brother comes up on a Friday to get me out. Right. And then they say no, and you have to spend the weekend. And I had to spend until Monday until they change it from cash back to a check. I'm supposed to get out on Friday. I finally get Bond after three months in Ohio. I'm supposed to get out.

And at the last minute, they say no. And I'd already given away, note to listeners, if you're in jail and you're getting out, don't give away your shower shoes and your shampoo and all your stuff. because if you don't get out you're not getting it back now so i give it all to my cellmate i'll see you later buddy and i come back i got my the cops go hey call your lawyer's office i call my lawyer yeah you're not getting out tonight there's a problem you have to wait till monday and i'm like you know never good because the beast you know edward alby wrote the book in the belly of the beast about prison and i always call the system in the jail in prisons the beast

you have no control over the beast you know this it can change and bite you in a second no deal's a deal nothing's done because the beast can turn on you so i'm like eff me you know i'm going so i go back to the cell i go hey buddy uh need to take a shower let me have my shower shoes back he goes whose shower shoes those are my shower shoes and i'm like wow you know tell what did you want to trade for him you know you got some and i'm like uh very, you know, Monday came, I go, buddy, I'm taking my shampoo and my shower shoes. I'm going to take a shower. And, you know, and so finally that Monday, I finally bond out.

And I go to the front of the jail and I go to leave and they say you can't leave. I go, what do you mean? You know, one thing you find out, my clothes fit looser. I lost some weight. Who would have known? You know, I've been wearing prison clothes. So, and I go to leave. and they can't leave.

I go, what do you mean? I want to go back. They put me back behind the door in the lawyers waiting room, all the glass area or the lawyers meet their clients in that area. That's the way that was set up. And finally, the head of the narcotics department, Dennis Kavanaugh comes in and he says, listen, Ken, he goes, we want to talk to you about something.

I go, what's that? He goes, we, the prosecutor Rosenbaum wants Kelly. Because they had Kelly on a dry case. They didn't have any drugs. They had arrested him, but he wasn't standing next to the thousand pounds. It was hearsay, right? If someone said, Kelly brought the thousand pounds. And he was a smuggler that was on the run for charge out of Florida.

But, you know, it was old, charged like six years old by now. And I said, well, you know, I don't know anything about what Kelly and Terry were doing. Up here, I go, they hid it from me. I purposely called them. And he goes, we know they hit it from it. But we know you and Kelly were partners and that you smuggled a lot of drugs and do a lot of things together. We want you to testify about the history of what Kelly, you know, his character, your history together. And I go, I'm not willing to do anything, you know.

He goes, listen, you're looking at 25 years and they're putting all the weight on you because they want him. And I'm thinking, really, you know, he really wasn't up here that off. He didn't do anything else. But the prosecutor who wanted him because he knew that the feds and the DEA and the U.S. Marshals and all the bigwigs couldn't get him. The state of Nebraska had let him go when they had him. And now that he had him. And he was going to make a, he was going to prove to them that he was the big swinging dick,

that he was the guy that was going to catch this guy. So I go home and I talk to my lawyers and they go, look, you know, you're going to have to testify against Kelly. and I go, you know, I'm not really about that. But then I start to put two and two together. Wait a second. Kelly got me busted. Right. I wouldn't have never, I never would have gotten busted if he hadn't brought that

thousand pounds up there behind my back, you know, in the drug business, when you go to someone's backyard and you start, you know, you get killed, you know, or pay me the commission. Say, hey, I ran a thousand pounds up there. Here's a nickel a pound. Here's five thousand bucks. We'll give it to you for three or four trips. And, you know, I'm all right, whatever.

You know, pay me. But don't do it behind my back and backstab me and then get me busted, right? So I figure out that they had taken my credit card. The funny thing is they gave me back all my stuff, like my Rolex and stuff. I go, you know, wow, cool. I'm leaving jail and I go, listen, can I have my commissary money that I didn't use, you know? And they go, you don't have any. And when you're in jail, you know exactly a penny.

That's all you got. You know how much commissary. I go, no, man, I have $19. And the cop goes, nah, nothing. I go, nothing, nothing. Not even, he goes, yeah, well, oh, you got 48 cents, but we can't make change. So, never occurred to me. I spent three months trying to get out of jail.

I had no way to get home. So luckily, the lawyer had sent me a guy who picked me up, took me to the airport. And when I get back to Florida, I start realizing the cops were trying to find Kelly. They took my credit cards, but I had switched credit cards. And I went back into my credit card, figured out where I had rented the car, and then figured out that Kelly had gotten busted in Nebraska and the name that he had used when he made the fake ID. It was Rod Eckert, right? And I told the cops in Ohio, I go, hey, this is the thing, this is the guy. So I said to him, you know, I gave him that help, right?

But when they said, you're going to testify against Kelly in court, I said, no, I'm not. And maybe they never asked me to. I was never asked to testify against me. He went to court. He took his trial the whole way, which was bad because he got 10 years. He might have been able to make a deal up there. The guys that turned me in all got three years. But I was looking at 25 because I was to Kingpin.

I was the Florida Connection. I was the guy that figured it out, orchestrated it, sent the pot, you know, paid for the weed. It was my gig. It was me and Terry in Ohio's gig. But, you know, Kelly had stepped into my world and got me busted. And I'm, you know, I'm going to go to jail for 25 years with a one-year-old. Remember, we were all sitting in a paddy wagon one time together, which they don't do. They made a mistake and put us all in the same patty wagon and go to court.

And Kelly, this is the very beginning. Kelly goes, listen, don't say anything. Paco, keep your mouth shut. Paco, my driver, who's from Peru, which didn't help things. And, you know, come on, man, Kelly. And Kenny, I'll take care of your wife and your kid. And I remember thinking to him, yeah, you'll take care of my wife all right. Right.

Yeah. And my kid, you don't even know her name. All right, you know, but I still wasn't committed to anything. I said, I'm just getting my mouth shut, you know. So I get back down, and I've already committed to work with the cops with Kelly, you know. And the other weird thing was while I was in jail, all these people are telling me, like, people come up to me, I'm in Ohio, I don't know anybody. And like this guy from the, goes, listen, I know a guy in Detroit. He goes, you're looking at a shit ton of time.

I know a guy in Detroit, I kind of want to get even with. He's got, this is his name. This is his phone number. This is his stuff. If you want to make a deal, and I'm like, buddy, I don't do this guy. I wasn't a rat. And it turned out it was real. So I ended up.

So when I got home, I had all this information. And then people were coming up to me is the weirdest thing. Like friends of mine going, hey, I know you're looking at 25 years. Here's the name of a guy. And I go. Seems like everybody that you know knows how it works, except for you. Everybody else is like, this is what I would do. Well, so here's what happened.

I was in jail. and this guy comes up he was a cell next to me pale white you know the kind of guy like he's been in jail so long as his skin is almost lucent white he's covered in prison tattoos like bad cartoon art right

you know I mean some bad shit and I mean he's a reader and they won't let him out to go to he had done 15 years in Angola he had left Ohio went to Louisiana went to it got arrested and did 15 years in one of the worst prisons in the world. I mean, Amnesty and the Nastry called it one of the worst prisons in the world.

And got out, 15 years later, got out, went back to Ohio and got arrested for armed robbery, was back in jail, and he pulled me aside. He goes, listen, Kenny. He goes, there's four pods. And the pods are all glass, so you can see, like, you can see the other inmates. Not all of them, like, you know, he goes, you're inmate. You're co-defendant, Paco, whatever, the guy over there, I go, yeah.

He goes, he's already ratted on you. Right. He goes, your other guy, he will. He goes, the mores and values that you're clinging to died years ago, look around this jail. It's not about who hasn't, who is a rat. It's about who hasn't ratted. The numbers are inverted.

He goes, you're one of the rare. Everybody in here is a rat. Because you're clinging to mores and values that died alike. time ago. And I remember him saying that. And I remember him saying to me, you have a one-year-old daughter, right? I said, yeah. He goes, when I got busted, I had a one-year-old daughter just like you. You know how many times I seen her in the 15 years I was in Angola prison? I go, no, he goes, once. One time, my parents put my daughter in the car and drove from Ohio to Louisiana. That's the only matter once. Think about that. So when I got home, I'm sitting in

my house and you know at this point i i just paid for a forty thousand dollar wedding went on a honeymoon you know i mean you know got lost 80 or 90 000 on the bust out in ohio because the cops didn't want to pay for the turned out you know when i did you know lost the truck that i just you know built to move the and um you know how to put up bond to get out um i was painting houses i i sold my truck right before I left. So I ended up having a $400 car to drive that I bought from somebody. I mean, you know, it was just, anytime, if you read anybody's books about getting busted, they'll always tell you, they always get busted at the worst possible time. It's like when the money's low or that, you know,

you got response, you know, you have a newborn baby. It never happens like when you, you know. It never happens when you can withstand the blood. Yeah, it never happens at it. Well, you never get busted at an opportune time. Right. Exactly. But, yeah, so you can stand the blow. I was just say I was the guys, I was talking about the guys that their marriages withstand their sentence is the guys that were legitimately multi-millionaires and they'll get five or 10 years. Their wife will come visit them every two weeks, you know, their wife will be there for the five years. Of course, you're still taking care of her.

But the moment your financial, you know, wherewithal, or your financial, your ability to support them yeah sorry as soon as your ability to support them is gone you know they're all like initially it's always i'm going to wait for you i'm going to wait for you but within then when she starts paying the bills herself and you're calling saying put money on my books and you're saying when are you coming to see me the collect call yeah it's it's very quickly fades and within six months it's like i look i can't do this anymore i got to tell you something you and I have said the same thing I put it this way when the came the jet skis and the limos are gone so was the wife I saw the same thing they hang on as best they can but now like something like

or they have to get divorced just to separate themselves from the financial ties to the house and this and that you know that you can't pay no more but I am telling you that's exactly right you know um my i i knew my first wife karen had issues you know she had addictive issues she had issues there was no way she i didn't think she could take care of my daughter and i knew damn well like you do i see i knew it be i saw it growing up remember i was in the drug business my whole life you know many times i've seen people get busted and you know you know once the money and the and the lear jets are gone so was the wife and some people hang on Like, you know, Randy Lanier's story.

He did 27 years in jail. Pam, his wife, they divorced, but she came up. She brought the kids. She really stood behind him. I talked to another guy that wrote a book about it. And the same thing. His wife stood next to him. But rarely, you're alone.

You know, when you're the kingpin, I'm not saying I was a king, but when you're the guy with the Coke and the party and the money and the jet skis and the cars, you're at the party. and everybody loves you and one of my friends once said you know you think these people are all your friends but they're just there for the drugs and the party and the money and I go I know who my friends are they're bought and paid for

joking around turns out one payment and they're out I mean the leasing company will let you keep your car longer everybody turned their back on me when I got busted as I say when you dance when you're at the party you dance but when the parties you know when you leave

you leave alone and usually somebody shoe hits you in the back of the head on the way out all my friends turned on me everybody and then when they i told them i said look i might end up working for the cops why did i tell them that so nobody would do business with right it was it was at least at least i'm not busting my friend right you know i figured if i let it out that you know then i can protect them the cops say hey go talk to so and so i did he wouldn't talk to me right you know it wouldn't help my case but it would make sure that they didn't i said i did that on purpose i i put i i I took a poison pill.

When I got back from Ohio, I told one friend enough to tell, that it was just telling everybody that I might have to work for the cops because I just, you know, what I did. What I'm wondering is, like, at what point do you definitely say, I'm definitely going to do this. So here's the story. So I had this friend, Dave Jackson, who was a yacht broker, who I had met through Sandy Perkoff back in the days of yacht brokering

and selling boats to smugglers. Can I, I'm sorry, real, I mean, And what were they telling you? Like, hey, if you cooperate, were they telling you, like, did they? Let me tell you. Okay. So I'm sitting at home and I'm like painting a friend of mine's house to make money. I'm working on cars like doing oil changes for another friend, you know.

I don't know what I'm going to do. And I get a phone call and it's Dave Jackson, who was a big time guy. He had Lear Jets. He was a big yacht broker, a million dollar homes. He was a yacht and, you know, sold. and Dave Dave had gotten busted It's funny

Dave invites me to his mansion one time This is like six months earlier And he goes, come on upstairs, I want to talk to you And Dave and I were friends, we party, chase girl You know, had the families together once in a You know, that and then Good friend of mine But not somebody hung out with every day, but a cool guy

So before me getting busted about six months earlier So Dave invites me to his house one day He goes, come on upstairs. And we're going to this little bathroom. He's got a 5,000-square-foot mansion. Breaks out some Coke and starts doing, you want to do some lines? I go, he goes, I need a couple kilos of Coke. I don't think, wait a second.

Dave's never done a drug deal. Right. I go, yeah, I don't, I can't get coke anymore. And I don't do blowing, I'm not a daytime sniffer. You know, I'm a nighttime guy, you know, party guy. And I get up and leave. And I remember walking out going, how cute. Dave tried to set me up.

You know? I go, ah, Dave, you know, Dave had gotten busted selling a boat to, I guess, the cops for cash. And back then, big no-no. Yeah, big no-no. Like, we talked about, where'd the cash come from? So he calls me up on the phone, and I'm sitting there and my little daughter's playing, my wife's cooking dinner. And he goes, hey, I go, hey, what's going on? He goes, hey, how'd you like to work for the DEA?

And I'm like, looking around, like, even my wife, I don't want my wife to hear this. Right. I go, what are you talking about? He goes, well, it's kind of like Amway. I go, well, Dave, why are you telling me? He goes, well, it's kind of like Amway. It's like a multi-level marketing thing. He goes, if you, I'll get credit.

Well, he firstly says, I'll get credit for whatever you do. It'll help me in my case. And I say to myself, what it's like Amway? It's like a multi-level marketing thing. And he goes, look, do you want to do it or not? And I'm like, yeah, okay. He goes, come down and meet me. And, you know, so I go down to his offices.

We walk down to this diner called the Floridian on Las Solis Boulevard. I'd been there like 70 years. I'm sure we're not the first or last clandestine conversation to go on into Floridian. Right. Go to the back and he starts explaining to me what's going to happen. He's got this DE agent. And I go, all right. I mean, you know, okay.

So I got to drive to Jacksonville. Turns out his DEA agent is in Jacksonville. So I get in my yellow station wagon with no air conditioning, put on the only suit. When I got busted in 88, in 1988, I was 30-something years old the first time, I didn't have to make a tie. Like, you know, I'm a drug dealer. Drug dealers don't make ties. Someone had to help me to go to court.

My brother had to make my tie. So now it's 92. I'm driving up to Jacksonville. I'm in this car with no air conditioner, sweating my nuts off, wearing the suit. My mother bought me when she worked. at Saxford Avenue at high school and I get out there

and I meet the DE agent and there also were the two cops from Ohio, Dennis Kavanaugh and this other big SWAT team guy that arrested me and in the book the agent's name is

what do I call him I forgot now I'm going brain dead but anyhow it's not his real name but I'll say John let's say and as Captain Bobby. His undercover name was Captain Bobby Burke. And so Captain Bobby brings me on and he has a boat

that he's confiscated. And we take the two cops from Ohio out and we take him out on the boat. Right. And I'm wearing my suit. And I pull up and he goes, look at here. A drug dealer in a suit. Like a pig wearing spats or something like that. I'm like, you know, you know, and I introduced myself as Ken Bear. He goes, you know, tells me his name. He goes, From here on in, your name will be Kilo Bravo. And my name will be Captain Bobby Burke, do you and all you ever meet? And then he goes, and we get on the boat, and I'm a boat guy. So now I'm taking my suit off.

You know, I got my shoes off. I'm unhooking the boat. I'm running the lines. I'm doing all this. And we get out offshore. What he's doing is taking the guys from Ohio out on the boat for a dog and pony show. And they basically make a deal that whatever I do with the DEA, the state of Ohio, I'll get a piece of.

So if I bust somebody and they get $100,000 worth of house, or they get cash, or they get a big load of blow, they'll get credit for it. And they'll get the assets. They'll get a piece of the assets. So we all do this. Then we go eat dinner at the local restaurant. And the funny thing is the DEA picks up my tab and the two cops had to pay theirs. And I go to and he goes, don't worry. I got you, boy.

I mean, I said, a steak dinner on the DEA, you know. I remember one of the cops bitching that he goes, my per diem won't cover this. I was like, oh, you know, I guess like any good sales manager, you got a new salesman coming on the, you know, you want to take them out to dinner. So I go home and what they basically did was they used me as like, so it turned out

Captain Bobby had a team. He had Dave Jackson, who was a yacht broker. He had this guy in the book I call Sabo, who was one of the biggest smugglers in the world and he had gotten in trouble and he had made a little dream team. Saba was from Jamaica. He was a white Jamaican, very intelligent, big smuggler.

Actually brought in what I would say is the biggest load of marijuana in the world in U.S. history, 330,000 pounds in one load. Took him 20 tractor trailers to unload it. They used the Teamsters to unload it. David was telling me the other day, he said we only got 25,000. they couldn't get off the ship.

They had to sink the ship with the 25,000 on it because they just couldn't fit it anywhere. They'd already used 20. Sebo is brilliant, smart, you know, wicked smart. And me, who had the lifetime of experience, Dave, he had a couple other people. So what Captain Bobby did

was make this little team of so, and I, at first he'd be like, you know, he said to me, Kenny, my boss is, you have to produce every day, He goes, snitching is like selling. You miss a day, you look like crap, you know. You go to always come up with, you always got to be working. And, you know, and I was.

I was trying to, but remember, I told all my friends not to deal with me. Right. You know, so I protect, so I couldn't do anything. So, but he started putting me in cases. Like Dave came up with a guy, you know. And then, and so, but Dave's not a drug dealer. So Dave has to give him to me because I'm the guy. They know, I know, you know, the first kilos came in duct tape.

And then they wrapped them in plastic. from casts. And then when the fiberglass, cast material came out, they wrapped them in fiberglass. That way, when you threw them out of a plane, they didn't break, you know, used to get a kilo and the whole thing would be powder because it hit the ground so hard. And then if it was coming from Carlos later, it would have a condor stamp on it. If the bales were in the parliament or marlborough boxes, they were usually really good good good, because that's for some reason those, that supplier did really good job by boxing them in marlborough boxes and then in burlap. I just had history. Yeah. You could put me with anybody and I could talk drug dealing. And the cops can't always do that because they don't have, so they would, so the DEA would play like a role and then he would step away and we would introduce me or somebody like me. So I busted Big Jeff had a guy. And again, people go, I got a guy that, you know, we can do it.

And so I ended up busting one guy. I didn't know the guy. went in, introduced myself, got him to be friendly, went out, brought him on a dog and pony show, you know, flew him in a private plane, you know, took him out on a boat, you know, did the stuff to make him feel like he's in the right place. And we only busted like a small load, but it's okay. Because that guy, here's the one thing I found. I took three months and I was committed to never turning any of my friends in.

Man, they would flip before we hit the ground. Like they do the fake arrest where they arrest me and arrest them. And these guys, I remember one, I mean, let them get the DEA out. I mean, they practice this. Let them get the handcuffs like you, buddy, you know. They were ratting people out before they hit the ground. And that's the truth. Yeah.

That's what really happens. And we were just, you know, like we did one trip where. I see, Celeste, they're talking in the police car. Right. Before, like, the guy driving the car isn't the guy you need to talk to. Right. At least get to the police station. Right.

At least get to someone that can make a decision. like we were trained though me i mean all us kids were trained from young age don't say a word my lawyer used to have a big mouth bass behind his desk and he said uh he would have never got caught if he kept this mouse shut you you know you got to make a deal you know even when they they arrested me in ohio and they had me up there handcuffed and the big swinging dick rozenblom bomb the big prosecutor and all the cops the cops were afraid of this guy and he comes and he's walking up the steps i remember the cop telling me. We were watching

Stephen Seagall movie and I'm telling the cops, you know, ah, he's a shitty karate guy and we're arguing, you know, I'm a handcuffed, you know, like, ah, you know, whatever. And they go, do you know who that is? I go, no, they go, that's Stephen, that's Michael Rosenbaum or whatever's name was. They go, you know, you're going to find out. He comes

in my face. He goes, you better talk, boy, you're going to jail for a really long time. And I looked at him, I go, you got the wrong guy. You know, knowing deep inside, they have the right guy, but I'm not talking. I know they got the right guy. And I kept my mouth shut Because I knew if you're going to make a deal

Whatever the deal is You got to wait till after your lawyers You got a way to, you know, stall them You know, you know, you got to make it To where they want to make a deal Don't give them the information up front Which is what everybody did And they all did time

Out of the 15 or 16 people in my case I'm the only one that never did a day in jail Other than the three months when I did wait in the bond I got probation Nobody else did. Now I did big shit You know there's a case that you read about in the book where we flew up to Canada and took down one of the largest cane smuggling operations. It was the Hells Angels, the Rock, another motorcycle group, the Italian Mafia,

and then this thing called this Irish gang. And it was for 10,000 kilos of Coke or 10,000 pounds, 5,000 kilos. It was a big deal. I was an actor in that. You know, they brought me in to be part of the stage. I wasn't, I did not put those people up. And then there was another bus we did where we, in the book you can read about the whole DEA,

there's eight chapters of how it works, but I started learning how it works. Like they wired me up. One time they wired me up, you know, they put, just like in the movies, you know, I got the shirt off, this tape and all this stuff. And, you know, I'm like, oh, great, you know. But the thing that I learned quickly was it wasn't about the drugs.

It was about the assets. How much money can we take off this? Because more assets, more boats, more south. They have to justify their budget. They're not selling the pot. They're burning it, right? They're not selling the Coke. They're burning it.

What they want is they want the house, the Rolex, the car, the bank accounts. Cash, it would be better. All the cash. And I used to have like 80,000 cash laying in a garbage bag in my closet. You know, but that's what they want. to do, come in and find that. And one time they had me go down to this. He calls me up. He goes, hey, go down to see this guy on a boat. I want to buy this boat from this guy. And I go down there. And the boat, the yacht business had really collapsed. That's what got Dave. You know, with the Iran contra

scandal, gas flew up in price. And there was luxury tax. There was a thing called the luxury tax where there was a 10% tax on any luxury items sold like a boat or a car. It destroyed the business. So I find he sends me down to this marina and it's this old man on a really nice 50-something-foot yacht. And he goes, new engines, electronics, well, my DEA handler loves electronic stuff, flashlights, radios, you know, palm pilots, you know, anything that was electronic he liked. So he probably looked at the listing for the boat and saw it had great electronics on it, you know, like navigation, you know, all the different things. boat has and sends me down this is an old man and his shorts are kind of tattered he looks like

he had money at one time now he's a little bent maybe in the 70s you know some you know old money that never transposes generation because they kind of one person blows through it yeah one generation makes it one generation right you know who said that it's shirts leave the shirts leave in three generations the first generation makes it the second generation builds it the third generation loses it. Thomas Jefferson said that. Oh, okay. That's how many years that's been true. So, um, I'm looking at this guy and I'm wired up and I said, listen, I like the boat. We'll buy it. But I, you know, I just want to let you know, we're paying cash because, you know, my guys are coming from south, you know, off the shore. And I didn't say we were smuggler.

right i implied it right and the guy looks at me and says he's he's he knows my wife is sick i've lost everything all i have is this boat and i need to sell it right away so i don't care who it is or where how i get paid and i just look at him and it was like i was like he committed harry and you know i was a pirate i always say in the book you know i turned from it if they say drug dealers are pirates nothing like the DEA in the government and And we were all pirates. And it was like he took the knife and just shoved it in himself. I looked out of my shirt.

Okay? I said somebody would be getting in contact with you shortly. And I got off the boat. And the way you tape something is you have to preface it and open it and close it. So let's say I was going to call somebody from the DEA and do a phone call. I go to a pay phone. Again, we used pay phones back then. And I would turn on the cassette recorder.

I had a micro recorder in my pocket like this big. and I put a thing in my ear so I could record it. And I go, okay, this is, let's say, Sunday, you know, December 24th, 1970, you know, 19, whatever, 93, calling Ralph. We're going to talk about a 600-pound cane deal and or whatever, and call starts now at 1248. Call Ralph, phone rings, conversation ends. Conversation ends, September, blah, blah, blah, blah.

12, 9, you know, whatever. The reason you have to do that is you have to use a new tape every time. Here's why. You don't want some slit prosecutor to say the tape was already recorded on. Nixon tried that. Nixon tried to say the tapes were already recorded on. And it's, you know, not his voice or whatever. And you have to open and close the tape so they know it's never been edited.

The tape is two minutes and 47 seconds, and there's two minutes and 47 seconds, you know, of conversation. So that's how you have to do it. So when I got off the boat, did the same thing. Conversation was, you know, discussing so-and-so, so-and-so about buying the boat going on, get off the boat, close out the tape. The conversation ended, Bob. So if you're going to get busted by the cops, that's one of the things they're going to do. So I did a bunch of deals, you know, just here and there.

And then finally one day I get a call, and it's Captain Bobby. And he's like, Gilo Bravo. He talks like that. I'm at the embassy. and 17th Street Causeway. Get your ass down here now. I live in Hollywood, which is about a 10-minute ride.

So I drive down there and I go in. And I've been working for him for a while. He knew my wife. He knew my daughter. He knew my wife was now pregnant with my son. And we, you know, you end up knowing somebody, right? We traveled together, you know, whatever.

And he goes, I go in there and he's got a legal pad and a pen. And type A plus personalities that are like the best DE agents in the country, like them, you know, what is the one thing great salesmen hate to do? Paperwork. What, okay. Paperwork.

All right. Am I wrong? No, I hate everybody's, I think everybody hates paperwork. But yeah, I hear you. No, there's people that are paperwork. Oh, but accountants, I guess. But they're terrible salesmen. So.

Accountants. Yeah, exactly. So he's got a legal pact. And he's like, he's like, hey, my supervisors want you to proffer yourself. and you know what a proffer is you know a proffer is you're going to tell everything you know

about everything you've ever done and everybody you've ever done it with and then you're going to have to if they're going to go out and try to do whatever the cops can do and if they ever get the person you're obligated to go to court and testify to the fuck

and if you leave something off and they can prove it they'll charge you with it they'll charge you with it if you say it you can't be charged for the crime and he starts it looks like a therapist

has got the pen of the paper and I go, he looks like a therapist and he's got his pen and paper. And I go, I can't do that, man. And he goes, well, what are you mean? I go, buddy, everybody I've grown up with, I've sold drugs with. Everybody, I can't do that. I'm going to be in jail and my wife and my daughter are going to be here by themselves. I can't do that to them. They won't be hurt, but they'll be ostracized. You know, I can't do that. And he looks at me, he goes,

he goes, let's go to Chuck Steak as a famous place called Chuck Steakhouse gone now. Cross, let's go get dinner at Chuck's. I said, okay. You know, another dinner paid for it by the DEA. Little known fact, a federal agent can't be enriched by a co-defendant or, you know,

so like every time I saw him he had to buy me dinner, I couldn't buy, I couldn't, I could buy my own dinner, but I can't buy him dinner. Right. There was one time I tried to give him a cigar. We did a case up in Canada and I got a box of cigars and I tried to give him one and he couldn't take it. I go, it's a Cuban cigar, man.

I just bought it in the gift shop. Because I can't touch that. You know better. So we go eat and he picks a specific table in the restaurant where I'm facing the bar and he's facing the back of the restaurant. We order this dinner and we eat and he goes and he's a big guy. He goes, see the guy at the bar. with the leather jacket and the red shirt.

And you remember the movie La Femniquita? Mm-hmm. Saying, you know, that's when they take this girl, that's a criminal, and they turn her into an assassin unbeknown. Did she see the remake? I've seen a couple of them, yeah, Jane Fonda. Yeah, yeah, that's a great one, too, I thought. Well, no, not James Fonda.

Oh, no, no, Jane, her daughter. Her daughter, yeah. So I go like this, and I'm looking over, I go, yeah. He goes, I'm going to get up and leave. When I'm out the door, you go over there, and you go over there, and you talk drug deal to that man, get me somebody. I go, who? It gets up and leaves.

So I walk over and sit at the bar. You go, you just tell him, Captain Bobby sent you. So I sit down and I say, the guy kind of looks like a character out of a Martin Scorsese movie, kind of hair, like Dustin Hoffman, you know, one of those characters in like a typical crime movie. We're in South Florida's wearing a leather jacket. Never forget, you had a leather jacket and a red shirt.

And we sit down and we start talking. drove down from New York. Right, right, right, black hair, slick back, facial hair, exactly, like he drove down from New York. And the guys, we're talking, having a drink, and we start to open up each other about drug dealing. And, you know, and I'm thinking to myself, I'm looking around the bar thinking, where's his backup, you know,

who's with them, you know, feeling out conversations to see where I go, you know. Because, you know, you've got to be at a heightened sense of awareness when you're doing any drug deal, especially if you're doing one for the DEA. And he's pretty open. And, you know, and I leave there with nothing. I call him, you know, Captain Bobby.

I said, no, I don't feel this guy's going to work for us. And I'm thinking the guy's also a cop. He's probably a CI, you know, from the customs or something else, you know. And so I never profited myself that day. But later, there was a murder where some friends of mine had gotten involved with the Asletor crime family in Fort Lauderdale. and they had lent some guy money, and they went to the Asatores to collect it,

and they ended up killing the guy because he was going to testify against Asatura's son. The cops arrested him. The FDLE had set up this whole sting where they had the guy, had the people fly up. They set up a whole sting because they wanted John Asatura's kid, Asitore Jr.

And so a friend of mine tells me, He goes, you know, you were here the day that they threatened them. You know, I go, I go, what? He goes, don't you remember the guy got slapped in the back of the building, blah, blah, blah. I go, yeah, I saw him slam with the guy. He was right. He goes, he goes, that's the guy who didn't have believed and got killed. So the FDLE, I reached, he goes, here's the FDLE car.

They had come to the place, a business, you know, because they knew, they didn't know you worked here. Because you weren't, you know, I had worked for a while after my first bus. I'd worked in a jet ski shop for a while trying to lay low. He goes, so the FDLE flies to Fort Lauderdale, and they call me up. They go, we're going to interview you, and we're in this building. And it turns out the building is the building where my lawyer's office is. So I tell my lawyer, he goes, just tell them to come on downstairs. Because they didn't know I was going to have a lawyer.

So they got the two FDLE agents, you know, man and woman, all dressed up, young. They look like they could have been salesman for a drug. company or a corporate you know they were real corporate looking yeah they come down and for the next two and a half hours i tell them everything i ever did from the contract we put on the guy that you know from this from that from this my first drug dealing smuggling trips you know not implicating anybody else just everything i ever did and gilletti's just writing it down at the very end they go what about the guy that you know you know what they wanted to know about was me seeing the guy So I said, yeah, I saw him slap them.

Asitory Jr. were standing there, and I described the guy. And they both go, what? That's not the guy. And I go, yeah, tall, shaggy hair. I saw Asaturra smack him around, turning them, where's their money? You know, they get pissed off. That's not the guy. Remember, if I'm wrong there, I'm useless as a witness.

Right. There's no coaching me. There's no. And honestly, right? before the trial, the guy that was going to testify against him was found in a ditch in Tampa with five bullets in him. So I'm real lucky that my memory didn't serve me that day. Right. Because I wasn't trying to play games. But because of that. You genuinely, so you weren't, you weren't misleading them. You were genuinely. Yeah. Tell them what I saw. All I saw was

a guy slap a guy. I didn't see any big crime. But I'm telling them what I saw. But I put in all my life's history to precursor to get, because I proffered myself. And that's why I can write a book about it. Right. There's nothing they can do. I mean, it's been years, but I'm just saying.

I did end up proffering myself, but not for that day, but, you know, so I got that going for me, which is nice. And in the end, after all I had done, I end up, you know, the day had come. you know I had nothing left I had to go to Ohio and I didn't know what would happen and right before I was getting ready to fly to Ohio um the cops called me up and they said you're going to get probation get the fuck out of here I don't get the fuck out I thought I was doing two or three years yeah yeah and I go what and this is the cops that called you not the US attorney

no my lawyer called me oh okay sorry sorry but this guy Dennis Kavanaugh who was the head arresting officer and Ernestine Bell who was the one who made the case and for some reason Michael Rosenblum, the prosecutor who was the biggest dick on earth, they did it. They said, well, I said, why? They said, I even talked, I talked to Dennis, so I'll finish, so I go up there and I go, this is great, I'm going home. Remember the time I was supposed to get out of jail and they made me go back? And then the second time I was supposed to, I'm in court.

And now there's a new, it's been two years, two and a half years, there's a new. U.S. attorney? Well, assistant prosecutor. The main guy's not there. And when the judge says, well, here's what we're going to do. He's going to get probation. He's going to pay $25,000 in fines. And he's going to have his record expunged after five years after she goes ballistic.

What happened was if I can, and I don't remember exactly, but the judge had one more turn before he was going to retire. And there was some deal made where this, nobody will run against unopposed. They will run unopposed. He'll run unopposed. Nobody will run against them from the Republican Party. Let's say as long as nobody ran against my lawyer was going to run. for a prosecutor, for the prosecutor. So everybody agreed to stand down.

It was kind of like, there was some quid pro quote made, but I was the winner of it. And my lawyer ended up actually running for state attorney's office or local attorneys, it was the, you know. So, and got it, he was for, after I, you know, years later. But anyway, I'm up in court and I'm going home. And all of a sudden, that young lawyer gets up and goes, what?

He's getting probation. He's a RICO charge. And he's going to get expungement. That's for somebody that's caught with a little bag of marijuana, not tons and tons of weed. And she goes, we're not doing this. And she runs out the door. And I'm sitting there.

And I think my lawyer's got this. He's talking, you know. And finally he looks at me and goes, give me a minute. And I have a, give me a couple hours. And he leaves. And I'm sitting in the courthouse going. I'm going to jail. Well, the beast is very unforgiving.

Right. So the longest two and a half, two hours of my life, you know, I'm walking around the courthouse and I had been there many times, so I knew my way around there after all the hearings. You know, the first four or five times I was there in shackles, you know, chained to three other guys, you know. And comes back, he goes, it's done, you're going home. So it was a life gift, right? It was such a life gift that, so here's the, you know, the. end of the store. Two years later, I turn out I end up having some weird heart infection. I get

diagnosed with a disease called endocarditis. And I have, when I finally get to a real doctor, less than two weeks to live. And I have to go into the hospital and have my whole heart rearranged. And they're like some special, you know, like they move my heart valves around. They couldn't even do the surgery. I was too sick. I had my aortic valve had been destroyed, mitral valve had been holes through my ventricles the guy said to me, listen we couldn't do it.

If you hadn't met another week or two, there's nothing we could do. Just let you say goodbye to your family on a ventilator. You were dead. He goes, we couldn't even do the surgery. You were too sick. They had to wait.

So what happens? I'm in the hospital and one of my friends calls up. The guy I had told that I was going to work for the cops. This is my right-hand man. The guy I bought the gold Rolex for, the guy that I had paid for everything.

his family stuff, and he's like, no, I'm persona and everybody, you know, they all think, by the way, they all think I busted everybody in Hollywood. They have no idea, but they never did any, none of that ever happened. Right. To this day, I'll get an email. Oh, you wrote a book. Everybody knows that you turn. I said, read the book.

I never turned in anybody in Hollywood. And he says, well, you know, I know we're not friends, but, you know, I really don't want you to die. And I'm like, you're calling me in the hospital to tell me, like, thanks, man. I wish you wouldn't have called, you know. And I survived the surgery. Years later, my daughter, who would have never gotten, as she said, if I was with mom, I would have been a crack whore living in a trailer park, makes it all the way, decides

to go back to school, get a degree, becomes top of her class, gets accepted to where else, Cleveland Clinic Cleveland, to become a doctor. and she's in Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland. Now, about a year and a half ago, I need open heart surgery again. I go back to Cleveland. Now my daughter's in the hospital and the hospital's taking care of my, you know, and I'm back in Cleveland. So, I mean, what a full circle. If they had never given me the chance to go home, I probably would have died in jail with this disease.

nobody was going to, and they certainly weren't going to do some radical, you know, high-tech surgery to make me, you know, I mean, they did amazing stuff. That was with the number one heart surgeon in America, one of the top ten guys, you know. I wouldn't have gotten that into jail. And then I go back to Cleveland and my daughter gets me a second open heart surgery that keeps me alive. So what full circle, right? And I'm still friends with Dennis Kavanaugh.

As a matter of fact, I went to see him when I was in Cleveland driving my daughter up there. I'm driving back to Cleveland, only this time it's my daughter, her dog, and instead of 300 pounds of feet in the car or a court case, it's all her books and clothes. Right. And I go see Dennis, and we hadn't seen each other. We talk, like every year I call him every, hey, buddy, you made the right decision. I'm a good citizen. I'm still doing the right thing. And I introduced him to my daughter.

And he says, hey, she needs anything. anything up here at all. Here's my cell phone number. You tell her to call me. I got an eye on your kid for you. Okay. Nice. Full circle.

Yeah. And I still talk to the DE agent. We help each other all the time. As a matter of fact, one time we were playing softball in Jacksonville, and my daughter got heat stroke, and I called him and his doctor, his, one of his family members is a doctor and rushed her to the hospital and took care of her. She almost died from heat stroke. So it's funny how those four guys have been saving my life for over 20 years.

But it's so funny that in the end, the only two people I ever talked to from my old life are Dennis Kavanaugh, the arresting officer, and the DEA guy. We still talk. I still see my other friends now and then. You know, we're all cool. It's a full circle, man. Yeah. Well, you got lucky with that sentence.

Like, I don't know many people that don't end up doing sometimes. I even asked him, want him to do some time. I even asked him, how did I get no time? He goes, I asked him the other day. Prosecutor came down. He goes, well, look what all you did. Right. He had 14, you know, different, you know, he goes, you worked on the biggest cane bust in Canada, Canadian history, you know, this deal, that deal, that deal.

But a lot of it wasn't originated from me. It was, I busted 200 kilos of hash from Amsterdam. That was my deal. But again, I didn't. I only met the guy one time. you know but someone called me up and said hey this guy needs your help and i'm like oh christ i wish you never would have called me right you know because now now that you called me you're done and i got to do it yeah you know you know i got to do it but so you know and that fed back to

europe you know so you're in ohio and you know you see international cases they flew me i did another bust where i had a flight at jama one time and which i'd been in jamaama many times because I lived there, I smuggle weed out of there, and the deal went south. And in Jamaica, they don't shoot you. They bring you to a field and cut you up with machetes because they don't have bullets. In Jamaica, they call it a machete party. You know, they take you out and they all, they cut you up with machetes. Yeah, I was just saying in Jamaica right now, it's like, it's just, it's horrific. Yeah. But even back then. So that's my story, man. I went full circle and, you know, I'm a straight-laced guy.

I got a beautiful wife, four great kids. You know, the kids are all doing good. And, you know, I don't regret any of it. Yeah. People read the book and they go, oh, my God, you had this amazing life. How did you ever survive? And I go, I was just having fun. I didn't really, you know.

You don't think about it while you're going through. Exactly. You don't really, right? You don't really think about it. You just think about, well, I got to do this to do that, you know. And one begets the other and you kind of stuck in it. after, well, you know what I mean. Yeah, I do the same.

I do the same thing. I look back and people are like, oh, that's crazy. And I look back and I think, that is fucking crazy. Right. What was I thinking? But in the moment, it's like I had like three choices and this was the choice I went with and it worked out at that time, you know, but I still had to do something. Right.

You know, and once you're in deep, you're so deep. That's exactly. Like, what am I going to do when one day just turn the car around, drive to the FBI office and say, hey, I need to talk to some officers. Like, no, I got to keep going. Once you get in, like you said, again. one step over the line. Yeah.

Now what? And I thought about that when I was in my 20s. Before I knew all this was going to happen, I go, there was a song called One Toc over the line. And I said to myself, yeah, this has all been like, you know, one toke over the line. I just took one step and forgot to take the two steps back to go change my life, which took all that to do it, you know.

Did you do an audio version? Yeah, I did. I did it myself. Oh, okay. I didn't do mine. And I couldn't do it myself. I'm a horrible reader. I am horrible. Of course you are. You're dyslexic. Right. So am I. And it took me like the late. And here's the funny thing. I've been told that the audio version of my book is one of, like people are like, I've listened to a thousand books. I've never heard one better. And people love the audio version. I mean, you know, when I tell the story of my daughter, I'm going to cry. Right. You know, you can hear the emotion in my voice, you know. When, you know, when, you know, when, you know, when.

When Brenda gets thrown overboard on it, you know, or when, you know, people, yeah. Yeah. You know, I was determined to do it myself because I wanted it to be real. Yeah. And it's got the most, you know, the best reviews. I mean, and, you know, it's funny when I always joke around when I closed a computer after writing the book, I looked up and go, wow, what an asshole. All right.

You know, but I, well, so the joke has always been. tombstone's going to say here lies a used car selling drug dealing snitch right and now it says and author you know and there's going to be a toilet seat and a little thing of toilet paper so when people come to visit me you can just you know i mean i mean you go from drug dealer to use car sales there's car salesman you know whatever it's like yeah yeah i think mine's going to say i told you i was sick. Exactly. I love that one.

What's the other one is, hold on, I'll be up in a minute. Yeah. The one I was going to do before was, I always say to people when I leave, call me if you need me. And I wanted to say,

call me if you need me. I hope I can call you back. No, but I mean, you know what I'm saying. As you look at your life and you look back and you go, what have I done?

You know, one of my credits, I was a snitch, a drug dealer, and a car salesman. It's not like I, And I was just to say, I'm going to walk into a bar and say to a girl, so what do you do? And just say, oh, I'm a needlenatal intensive care nurse in the oncology division of the hospital.

And you, what do you do? I have supplied low-income people with basic transportation. It's my company's usautosales.org. You know what I mean? You know, it's like so, but I got lucky I met a great woman and she explained to me my dyslexia, I mean, to the point where she lets me accept it, you know, like, I tell people, I, you've ever been in a meeting and someone says, write something down? Oh, yeah.

And you're like, I can't do this. They're going to, even when people ask me to autograph the book, I, I'm afraid to write anything in it because I'm basically can't spell anything. And my handwriting's terrible because I don't write. Yeah. I just accept it. I mean, I just like, this is the best you're getting. Like, I'm indifferent to what someone thinks.

It's like, this is the best you got, you got. And I'll ask them, you know, they're like, oh, my name's, I'm like, what's your name? Oh, Brian, great. How do you spell that? Me too. And I, and when I do, like, when I'm working in the computer, I'll spin the screen around and tell people, I'm profoundly dyslexic, check, you know, for selling a car, check your name, your address, your phone number, your everything on there and make

sure it's right. I had like a 75. She's 84-year-old woman go, oh, you spell my name wrong in my email address. ago. Thank God you looked at it. I was going to say, luckily, almost, you know, everything on the phone will read it to you. Well, my thing is when I wrote the book, I couldn't get close enough spelling to get the spell check. I've done that. Right, right. So I'm talking to my phone and then I can't get that to work. I have to do that all the time. I'll go to write something and I do it all the time and then I'll say it into the phone and, you know, and then it will come up

with it. I'm like, oh, wow. That eyes and E. that A wasn't either Exactly, exactly Or I started it with an I instead of an E Well, so the other thing is like Thank God my wife's an expert in early child development Someone once said you're her life's work I also have some sort of a little bit of an auditory processing problem

So you heard me try to say Massachusetts Massachusetts I can't get that So I hear words differently So either when I try to spell them I'm starting with the wrong letter Like it's an E and not an eye Like he just said you know I'm not even close in the beginning

You know, literally this morning, I said, my wife said something about one of the videos that come out, right? Like, I'm constantly like, you know, hey, that video did this. Hey, that video did that. So I pull up my YouTube studio. And I'm like, I'm like, you know that that video, it's got like like like like 11,000 views. I really thought it was going to do better than it. And then she says, what video? And then she starts talking and I'm trying to, oh, I was trying to listen.

to a video to see like a certain part that I was going to show her. And while it's playing and she's talking, this is what happens to me because I was told like I have visual dyslexia and auditory dyslexia. It turns out there's a lot of different levels. Yeah. What ends up happening is literally the moment you talk and Colby starts talking to me at the same time, what I hear is Charlie Brown's teacher. All I hear, both of you. Yeah. So she's talking. I'm like, And all of a sudden, I stop and I turn it all, you know, I shut it all. Hit the pause button, like, boom. And I look at her and all I hear her say is, what video?

And I go, I don't know what video. I'm trying to listen to this. What are you talking about? And she's like, I just said this. And I looked at her. I said, I'm going to explain this to you again. I said, and this is probably the 10th time. If you hear me listening to something and you talk, I can't hear anything you.

anything you say. Not only did you just ruin whatever you said, because I don't know what you said. I said, I can't hear what they're saying. So I make an attempt to hear both of you. I hear nothing. I go, now you're frustrated at me for explaining to you something I've explained 10 times. And she looked at it like, she's ready to be angry.

And she's like, yeah, I'm sorry, you're right. Because I have, I've explained it over and over again. If I'm on the phone and she real quick walks up to me and goes, you know you know hey look i'm gonna i love you i'm gonna leave and i'm like well this is all she gets right i don't know what the hell you just said and i now i don't know what colby said on the line so you didn't just ruin your i love you goodbye i now don't know what he said they just don't it's just that nobody else can do it have you have trouble listening to like i try to explain my brother has been writing music and he's i'm proud of him he's in his 60s he's doing something

creative right you know he's trying and he goes listen to the song i go i can't hear it. I can, I can only hear certain words. Right. If you have like the Albin brothers or a cowboy or country music, you know, I walked into a bar, I can hear that. But once it starts going too, like, yeah, too rhythmic, it starts blending together. It's like done. And I, and I, and I remember my ex-wife and I were on a honeymoon and we're driving in Colorado or something. And she goes, listen to this song. This talks about our future marriage. And she played a three, I said, I can't hear it. She goes, what's the matter with you? I said, I can't hear the words.

I can only hear certain songs, but if it has melody or melodity in it, I can't hear it. And, you know, I'm also ADHD, which doesn't help a lot either because my mind's already, my wife will come in and said, I'll start telling a story. She goes, she goes, you're not, you're missing the, you know, you're not, like, oh, oh, oh, I said, you said it in your mind. You know, my wife has a joke. you know what she says to me squirrel right oh yeah yeah i do that all the time where somebody yeah yeah we're off on a oh okay now we're off on a totally different stuff which we've probably done for the last three hours but i've tried to stay on track with you as best i could yeah um yeah no it was good it was good thanks man um yeah thank you absolutely um you any any

any oh yeah sorry colby's like book i feel like we've i feel like we've pitched the hell out of the book by the way we haven't gotten started much first of all here here's what i want to say to this about the book uh why did you cut off the top of your head were you balding back then or did you have a full that's the way well so he we had we had one cover and somebody said you need to put um your picture of you on it so i i said i'm going to put a picture of me and that's the he did it and that's the way it went you know yeah listen because if you had a full head of hair hair i would have i did not have a full head of hair i would have no okay He's going to say, all right.

No, no. But the way the big, you want to hear something funny? You know what this shirt says? Now, remember, I'm going to jail. It's a stick figure shirt, and it says, it's a stick figure. It says, see Dick. See Dick sell drugs. See Dick get busted.

See Dick get 10 to 20. And there's a picture of Dick behind bars. That's the, I wish I knew where that T-shirt was. But, um. Listen, I, I, I, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, but, um, I did the audio. I did this. It tells everything from soup to nuts.

I've got a YouTube channel. I don't know what it is. I think it's one, I have a Facebook. So I have this. I have a YouTube channel, one step over the line. Ken Bear also. And then I have face, you know, there's all this other stuff I'm trying to work on. But this is the thing.

This is seven years of work. Right. Seven years. Well, partially because I'm profoundly dyslexic. And the other thing is I've never written. I wrote the book. You know, I didn't pass first grade. I never graduated high school, and I certainly never did well in English.

I wrote the book by myself, and I tried to hire two editors. The first editor changed the first line of the book. I never even read anything else he did. I just threw the work away. And the second guy was just an older guy. So I just edited it myself. Right. And I mean, there's some spelling mistakes.

There's a lot of, you know, but I just won an award from Amazon top critic choice for top new crime novel, you know, true crime. Nice. I mean, the guys are real critic, you know. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, how can I win an award? I'm, you know, I'm nowhere capable of doing this, but somehow I did it, you know, and I'm just as proud of that as anything else. I mean, you know, I'm not proud of being a snitch.

I'm not proud of being a drug dealer, but I'm willing to put myself out there and let everybody know that's the way it works and that's what I did, you know. I hear you. I could, you know. I have no problem with it at all. I always say I hope it's a New York Times bestseller that nobody that I know reads, especially not my father-in-law. It's out, the cat's out of the bag.

My father-in-law, my mother-in-law know about it, but they haven't read it. Nor has my wife, thank God. Really? Yeah. Oh, listen, yeah, I was going to say, listen, I think at this point, everybody at my gym knows who I am. I've got guys at the gym who have read books. They've listened to my podcast. Like, everybody, like, I don't, I don't ever shy away from it.

No. This is the way I look at it. There are two kinds of people. There are those people that know the person I was and know who I am now are 100% acceptant of the person I was. And there are those people that can go fuck themselves. And that's it. So I'm good with that.

And the great thing is when I tell somebody about prison or about my story, it's a great, it very quickly separates those people that will come visit you in prison and those people that won't. And those people that won't, I really don't want my life. Yeah, I mean, listen, everybody deserves redemption too. I mean, that's the funny thing. I had somebody, like I put this out there a little bit. I'm starting to add some guys, come on, no, you know, you're a, you're a snitch, or you're a drug dealer, you're a piece of shit kind of thing. I go, hey, read the book. Yeah. Read the whole story. You know, read how to how I got in, read how it changed my life around. And, you know, if you don't want to read the book, you know, I don't really give them. Yeah, I don't

really care what you think anyway right um i have a lot there's some haters you know what are you going to do oh listen i don't think i have a comment i don't i don't think i've ever had a video on my channel right that somebody doesn't post a little rat yeah or somebody doesn't say snitch or somebody like listen if you're watching you're a fan yeah i don't care what you think of me just watch it share the video tell a friend right exactly you're a piece of shit tell one of your buddies yeah share the video right right yeah good with it and you know what you're what, you know, walk a mile into my moccasins. Yeah.

Like I said, everybody that said I was a snitch when I worked for the DEA, nobody, I mean, like you said, you couldn't get up, they were on, I remember laying next to the guy on the ground, pretend, you know, I going, buddy, can you let him get the handcuffs on? I'm thinking to myself, you know, and it's always the guy that hasn't done any real time. Exactly. And I never really got busted or was never really facing any time. Exactly. He's always.

Most of the, the guys that I work with, the real guys, they understood. Yeah. And you know what? I'm a good guy. I'm a big heart. I'll help anybody. I've also, I think when you've been to the mountain, when you've seen the lowest and you're in jail, you see people that really could build a rocket ship and fly to the moon.

You know, there's pretty some, you know, but there's a lot of people. You just go, the parents shouldn't have kids. I mean, there's a lot of people that shouldn't be. Nobody should be in jail for 13 years. Okay. Nobody should be in jail for 22 years, for 27. seven years unless you killed somebody in your dangerous society you know the prison system's another fucking problem right get into that well look let let's let me wrap it out all right

all right because we'll just keep going on you called me yesterday if you said hey you got a couple minutes an hour later we were still talking hey i appreciate you guys watching do me a favor hit the subscribe button hit the bell so you to get notified of videos like this please share the please consider joining my Patreon. It's like 10 bucks a month. It does help and leave me a comment and once again share the video. Thank you very much. See you.