Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Master Thief’s Ultimate Playbook: How to Steal Anything, Anywhere

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Tommy shares his life story that lead him to become a bank robber.Tommy's Channel https://www.youtube.com/@TheLifeBoat/featuredFollow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

And it was a good bank. There was more than one band of cash to one up, so I had 20 grams. So I drive away and I'm maybe a minute, half a minute from the rent the car. I'm going to dump this and I'm going to get out of town and I'm good. Right, look in the rearview mirror and the lights, man. I got lit up and my foot's doing this number, right? It's going back and forth between the gas pedal and the brake. I'm like, you know what, man? It's been a decent run. Eventually everybody gets caught, right? Pull the Durang go over to the side of the road. So I've got three strips of double-sided tape that are just shining like hell on the top of my head.

On the front seat of the car is a microwave oven, right? Makes perfect sense. And where the keys should be is a screwdriver about that long. And he looks at me and he goes, do you know why I'm pulling you over? And I go, nope, I'm trying to work that out. Your gas capsule. You know, in this heat, you're probably losing about a gallon an hour. He's like, for real.

You might want to get out and close that. So I crank this thing down. I said, thank you. He goes, have a great day. Turned around. Right? And I drove off. Hey, this is Matt Cox.

and I am here with Captain Tommy. He is a YouTuber. He runs the YouTube channel, The Lifeboat. I think he will correct me if I'm wrong. And he has an extremely interesting true crime story. So check out the interview. I appreciate you, you know, coming on the channel and telling me you're sure. You just kind of, you know, we just had a kind of a rundown.

And I know we have, we have Tyler in common. my booking agent. Does he book guests for you or is he just booking you? He does not. He just reached out to me. I think probably through the Aeron channel over there on growing up in Scientology. I've been doing a lot over there with them and those two have a common bomb. It's funny. Somebody said in the comment section the other day because I always say, you know, because to me it's like start at the beginning. Like where were you born? You know what I'm saying? But I had a guy in the in the comment section the other day said if Matt Cox was interviewing Jesus Christ he'd start with tell me where you were born you know it's a pretty

decent comment and and i have watched enough of your uh enough of your stuff to know that that was coming i grew up in new england um i was born in uh in the state of vermont small state and uh grew up i had really an idyllic childhood man i grew up uh norman rockwall like really small uh new england town and um just did a lot of skiing a lot of sports my parents stayed married till the very end uh yeah man i had no i really am one of those guys that if you look at you don't go all it's pretty obvious why the student ended up in prison right like everybody else in my family sort of took a different direction uh but i did took a lot of pain medication from the ski injuries um i did did a lot of backflips on skis things like that um ended up uh competing in the red bull big air circuit

and i just beat my body up really badly and i spent a lot of time on pain meds and it sounds ignorant as hell saying it out loud, but I had no idea that when I stopped taking him, I was going to get sick. And I mean, I literally was on him for years because I was just always injured. And you know, a couple of times I would stop taking him and I would get sick and they didn't realize it was withdrawal. Like I just thought, you know what? I had a really bad, bad two week cold there, you know, whatever, couldn't sleep. And then, but once the addiction really got a hold of me at about 18, it just the wheels came off. And I started to, I started to look for every way possible that I could to make money without having to.

to do real work. I mean, that's really what I came to. Real things. Started out with me FedExing, FedExing drugs from one part of the country to the other and smuggling a couple of really large loads of cocaine into Australia. That was the like my entree into the world of crime. I was really, really young. In fact, the day of the Rodney King.

How old were it? Well, it was April 26, 1990. too right it was it was the rodney king riots was the day that i landed in uh in sydney australia with cowboy boots loaded from toe to uh to top with bags of blow sucks sealed um so yeah i was 20 i don't think i was legal 20 21 somewhere in there i was really young really really young if i was legal i was just legal like i was just old enough to drink at that point. And I probably would have stuck with that. I made a lot of money doing it. But I had the most horrific experience on a trip going in there. They didn't want to let me take in cowboy boots because

they were snake skin. And the guy was like, we don't, you know, we have the largest reptile population on the planet. So you're going to need to take the boots off, leave the boots here. We'll just put them in a bag and then give them to you. And I mean, I pull this boot off and it's all over, right? you know, these, they're big, suck-sealed bags. You know, I think, I think on that one, I had 36 ounces, 38 ounces, something like that. I mean, enough to do a lot of time in Australia that probably, and I just got really lucky. Dude walked up as I was looking like I was trying to pull the boot off and sort of saying to the guy, man, you know, these are not real snake skin.

I paid almost nothing for these. And a guy came up and pulled off one of the scales, like bit it until it was flat. And he goes, no, you're good, mate. You can go ahead. Like, I walked out of the airport with my leg, you know. And that was the end of my drug smuggling. That was the end of that, the adventure of going through customs with Blow was enough to talk me out of that real quick. So now I started, got back and started sending a lot of Coke to, from Houston, Texas to Boston, Massachusetts.

And kind of got wrapped up with some bad cats, like the people that I was sending the stuff to were. you know, these, these fellas, or at least really associated with, uh, with, um, with some Irish guys that were, uh, that didn't have a very big sense of humor when it came to business. Um, but I worked with those guys for probably about two and a half years. Never lost in load, never had a problem. Um, it just got to the point where, uh, getting them to send money up front. Everything, everything wanted to be fronted and everything wanted to be. And, you know, every fifth load, there was a story. And, and the story was, and the story was, you know, was somebody broke in last night, they got half the load, and it just became

one of those things where I knew I was going to end up shooting one of these dudes or they were going to shoot me. So I started to, the idea was, Matt, the idea was that I was going to start going straight. And I started looking for something that I could do that would be halfway legitimate. And I couldn't find anything. I really couldn't. I mean, I think I just, I think I was just sort of lars. in this from day one. At that point, I just really kind of, I was abhorrent of any kind of

real work. So I fell in with a group of people that used to go from town to town and you've seen the ads on TV. You know, come to the Radisson on Tuesday and we're going to teach you how to make money in real estate or how to make money on the internet or how to flip houses or whatever the flavor of the month club was. But we would make infomercials. And it became a really huge thing. Like, we made insane amounts of money. And basically, we were able to skirt the laws. And if you looked at what we were doing, at any given point, we were this close to go into prison. But we had a team of attorneys that wouldn't everything fly so that if somebody wanted to take us to court, we had a really

good case. We didn't lie. But I was literally the first person that came up with the concept of the phrase using techniques found within this system. If you watch the old infomercials, a person had to say, all right, I bought this kit, I made this much money. Well, that's impossible because what came first, the chicken of the egg? How the hell did you find the kit? There had to be an infomercial. There had to be a testimonial, right?

So it becomes a very difficult thing to get that first one up and off the ground. So what we did is we just found a group of guys who made money. It didn't matter how you did it. You're selling porn on the internet. Half of the people we had were people that were doing porn stuff because the internet was brand new. But using the phrase, you know, using the techniques found within the system. So we just took the system and put it together based on whatever anybody was doing. It was legal. It was really unethical, but it was legal. So you guys would do what? You do

infomercials, put them on what in the morning? We sell a kit for $39. Yeah, middle of the night, middle of the night, $500,000 a week in media buys. And middle of the night stuff. Every once in while you might get like a Sunday afternoon or something, but for the most part, it's the middle of the night. And you try to get people that are up in the middle of the night. You know, you're not up in the middle of the night because all your bills are paid, right? You know, and we're looking for people that have a little bit of desperation. We're looking for people that, that are not happy with their life. And you charge $39 and believe it or not, we would lose like $10. Right. To sell that kit for $39 was costing us about $49 to put in their

hand. But when they opened it up, it said, call your startup specialist. And the start of of specialists gives you a spiel where we say, hey, everybody on that infomercial had a coach, right? Coach holds your hand, make sure you're successful because we need those testimonials, right? And I walk you through the process of why this is going to be so easy. There's no chance of how you can fail on this unless you're just a blithering idiot, right? If you can follow a roadmap, you're going to be successful and we're going to use you as the testimonial in the next infomercial. And that's 10 grand. And it takes about 24 minutes, 25 minutes, if you're good at it, from start to finish it's a two-part sale so one guy finds out that the person's got money you're

not talking to anybody that doesn't have cash but we put this entire scam together and it got really big really quick like at one point we had a room that was doing a million dollars a week and six and that was one telemarketing room and we had 16 going uh and 9-11 came and as it turned out are you familiar with the concept of the reverse shell merger right this in stock this is the greatest. This makes all of us scammers on the planet look like ministers, right? They find the company that's defunct. They find a company that was publicly traded, say, 1910, before the act of 1930 when all of the stock laws and everything came into place, what they call the act, right? They get you insider trading or whatever. If you find the company that went out of business before

that happened and you acquire that company, that stock is still alive. The stock never goes dead. That's why every stock certificate says par value zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero and then it has that one it's like one one billionth of a penny makes that so that it is an asset it's never going to go away you take the company you put a new name on it right if you control all of that stock so what would happen is we would go find these these companies and you would go and find the stock certificates death certificates find out who used to own the stock um see if you could get made a piece of paper that says that they actually sold that stock to somebody in 19, you know, 42 or whatever the case may be. But we would acquire every single share of the stock. And now you control it completely.

So a guy calls up and puts in a bid, right? Matty says, I want to buy X stock at a dollar share. Nobody fills the bid. They can't. I own every share. Right. So no one's going to fill this bid. Broker calls back says, I'm trying. No one's filling the bid. He says, okay, bump it up to two bucks a share, right? I'll pay too. Yeah, nobody did it. Keeps doing that until he gets to five. I fill the bid, right? So now the stock is trading at $5 a share, and I'm sitting on 250 million shares. Now, there's nothing there. There's no assets. There's no anything. The government has made it so that you can't get away with this. Every single quarter, you have to tell them what your assets are, what your liabilities are, everything that's going on in the companies. It's called you 10 Q's, right?

But if you're pre-1933, you don't have to do that. You actually only have to to fill out those papers once a year. So you just trash the ever-loving hell out of this company. You got 365 days to do a pump and dump. You get the stock up as high as you possibly can. Then you get rid of all of it. Then you change the name, you know, shut the company down, run like hell. Usually the guys at the very top probably leave the country.

But I got very involved with people doing that. And it was great because those guys made, you know, rock star money. That was the first time that I saw money that was just like, unreal. You know, as this was being explained to me, I was a young kid and the guy said to me, you got $100 on you and I didn't have $20 on me. I said, you know what? I don't know if I got one, right? So he takes one out of his pocket and he puts it on a photocopier. He says, I make a copy of this thing, right? And we both had the chance to go into prison. Right. He said, I take this same piece of paper and I can make a stock certificate out of us that we can sell legally for whatever

we want, right? Legally. And, you know, as long as we're done, by the end of the year. So they end up walking into banks and they say, I got 200 million shares of free trading stock in a company that is trading at $5 a share, right? I would like to borrow $35 million. You know, how much of the stock do you need to, you know, as collateral for this?

And it just became kind of manufacturing money. And at this point, my habit just got to the point where it was insane. I mean, like literally insane. I was doing seven or eight grams of heroin a day. um six daily if i was partying uh seven or eight grams and this was in the days when heroin was still really expensive you know so the matter how much cash i was making i was spending thousands of dollars a day and if i made a million bucks in a year i spent a million in uh in 25 i just had that i'd never been a person that could seem to uh to keep it didn't matter what i did

moderation yeah at all if it's if it's worth doing it's worth overdoing you know what i'm saying and that's that's really where it was. So we continued running these scams until one day we got in with a group of people out of Canada who had Celine Dion, Dion Sanders, Emmett Smith, Muhammad Ali, like 70 stars endorsing this deal. And I don't know for legal reasons if I should mention the name of the deal. It should not be hard to figure out. If you type in everything I just said into Google, you'll get it. It was a Canadian company. I don't know what they'll get. are with this thing because the guy that was running it was a he was a scam artist he was a Canadian scam artist he'd already been to prison already done some dirt

but they were right they were bringing in money by selling a soy product and we were feeding meals to homeless kids this is the theory and you know this is pretty much where my conscience actually you got to get at some point there is a line that you don't cross and and that that deal was probably the one that that ended my my illegal, this is what really sent me off the rails. I was their public speaker and I could go into a room with people and get them to donate money and take 10%. Right. So if the, if the room donates 100 grand, you know, I make 10,000 and go all over the, all over the country doing this. And you got big, huge stars to, you know, people would pay unbelievable amounts of money to get a

picture taken with Muhammad Ali. And we went, we went everywhere with them, about to meet the cat. and, you know, really had a very interesting time, but there was never anything about it that smelled right. You know what I mean? It was the way it was set up. We ended up, the thing ended up really exploding epically. Fortunately, I had already gone by that point. I was getting ready to go on stage to speak, and I had one leg up.

I had no pants on, right, because you keep your pants looking greased out before you walk out on stage, right? So I'm just sitting in a pair of boxers in a shirt with a tie and I'm sticking a shot behind my knee, right? There's about the only place I could still find the vein at that point. And a guy walked in and looked at me and went, what the hell are you doing, Tommy? And I was like, insulin? And he said, brown insulin behind your knee. And I said, look, dude, you know, I'm addicted to heroin. I've been addicted to heroin since the day you met me, right?

There's never been a point in which I wasn't on heroin. It's not like I'm walking out on stage for the first time wasted. Right. Just go watch what I do. And, you know, this is not a big deal. I promise. I'll go get help or whatever. He's like, no, man, you're done. You're fired. Like, you're done, done.

And I was like, you're going to go out and do this show? I mean, you know, it is. Most people are not really fond of standing up in front of a group of people. Even the people hire you to do it. I assure you don't want to go out and do it themselves. In a very, very short time, we negotiated a very large one last deal. And I went on stage and did the last show and got 20% instead of 10%. And I got blackballed.

I mean, blackballed, bro. Like, I could not get a job as a public speaker on the planet, like anywhere I went. And this was my gig. I didn't have another skill, right? I was a skier. There was nothing else I could do on planet Earth except sell from the front of the room. And I have a $600 a day heroin have it, right? I'm doing six grams a day.

Now, by the end, it was $100 a gram. It got really cheap. You know, now I think it's probably down to $30. But, you know, I remember when it was $300 a gram. But I still had to come up with 600 bucks a day every day for me. My wife had a habit. You know, we had cars, houses. You know, I had to come up with just under 30K to cover the nut.

And I don't have a paycheck anymore, right? There's no more money coming in. And my wife had not worked in years. You know, I made the money I made, I don't think she understood what I did. You know, my wife had a horrendous alcohol problem. My first wife was, she were just a jerk all day, you know, and not. I mean, she was classy. She was a very classy lady, but she drank an ungodly amount of booze.

So once I was blackballed, I became a criminal. And I became a criminal really quickly. Now it was, now it was whatever I could steal. I needed to come up with this money. And there was no other option. Like, you know, at this point, I really don't have a criminal record. I mean, I had been pinched for stupid stuff as a kid, but I didn't have massive felony. He's hanging over my head.

I jumped a fence at a concert or anything like that. you know silly stuff but now all of a sudden um i don't i don't know how to be a criminal like you know the kind of the crime i did i put a suit on for and now i had to become like a a blue collar criminal and uh i started off ripping off stores and and just stupid things you know what i mean i would steal things and i think oh this is fantastic without realizing that then you had to sell it right like you you you can't just take the uh the DVD player to the to the dope man and say hey how many grams do i get for this right so right um i started i started shoplifting and i started shoplifting big time because i had to come up

with a lot of money so i wasn't i wasn't your average run-on-the-mill uh you know shoplifter i used to go into uh hardware stores and i would go to that little uh door on the back that's got the alarm you hit that that door and it goes eh eh right i would know that expandable foam right off the shelf and i would hit the the speaker and just covered the entire thing and then i'd walk around and fill up a cart and when I'd come back through the second time I'd kick the door open it wouldn't make a sound you know you're covered and then we'd fill up the back of the truck and leave when we finally got poked for this was the one particular hardware store that everyone in the world shops at when it was all said and done who's we who's we well just I had a getaway

driver got a cap of the name of jack who was Jack never got a felony and was there for probably 90% of the dirt that I did um he just but he's a stand-up cat. You know what I mean? He really is. He's a stand-up cat. And he didn't have a felony. And at that point, I had two or three. So, you know, he was a getaway driver if, uh, if I needed one. And for the most part, I really didn't like doing things with other people. You know, they, they tend to screw up every time. And they tend to run their mouths. Um, the FBI had, uh, had Jack for like 30 hours before the idiot realized he literally could say, I'm not talking to you people and I'm leaving. Like, they had him 30 hours. And he didn't give me up. Like, he didn't give up anything to get hell

this mud, which is really kind of incredible for a guy who's never done any time, you know. So when you, when you, so you finally go into this store, you get pinched. How'd you get grabbed? So I go in, right? And I didn't have Jack with me. I was going in to do a deal alone. So I was just going to grab a couple of thousand dollars worth of stuff and she'd walk out the front door. Right. And I got, I have a check in my pocket made out to Home Depot, right, just a case, right? So it looks like I'm ready to go. Obviously, I'm planning on buying this. I'm not went on steel on this like a little a little thought in advance but i pick up these two suitcases full of riobe uh tools or like 1200 bucks a case at that time and i started walking to the front

door and i got i'm not talking about 50 feet from the front door like i'm nowhere near the towers i'm nowhere near anything i just got tackled like a boom dude takes me out from the side like laurence taylor and you could have still paid like six guys on me i was like absolutely absolutely and that's what i'm yelling i'm like what is wrong with you and i'm doing it and I'm, you know, the Academy Award stuff. What are you people crazy? I said, I got to check. I'm inside pocket, man.

I'm here to, they bring me to back, right? They saw you walk in. Right. Seen in the century, right? Seen in the century, I'm getting perp walk to the, to their little back office, and I'm yelling the whole time. My lawyers are going to destroy you. Are you crazy I am?

And I walk in and the entire wall is me. There are pictures, like, top to bottom on the entire wall, and there are pictures of me in different outfits and stores that I know aren't even that store. Like, like this. has been the headquarters of where they're trying to get us, but they've got pictures of me in like six or seven different home depots. And I just looked up and he goes, what were you saying? You got, what did you want to tell me? And I just looked up at the wall and I was like,

I'd like to talk to it. You know, I don't, I don't really want to talk to anybody right now. And that was the first pinch that sent me to prison. That was, they estimated the, that we had stolen two and a half million dollars worth of stuff from them. So, well, they estimated that I did because Jack didn't get pinched in any of that. But in what period? About seven months. About seven months. Wow. Yeah, we were going really hard.

There were five in the neighborhood. I mean, five in the city. So we were just, we were going, you know, every day we'd pick a new one and go in there. And you just had to steal a lot. And, and, you know, fences are the worst people on the planet. Honest to God, like fences and pawn shops. So, you know, but you go to a fence and you bring him stuff and he goes, oh, man, this is awesome, right?

At 2,000 box, here, here, I'll give you a grant. Now, you go back with the same thing, and he's like, man, what am I going to do with this, right? I don't need any of these things. I'll give you, I'll give you 10 cents on the dollar. And you're stealing, you know, $8,000 and you're getting $1,200 and you need the dope. There's not, there's no way you can say no. And I sat down with Jack one day and I said, I'm not stealing anything. I got to sell a bergen.

Like from this point on, I'm stealing money. I'm not stealing anything that I got to convert to anything. I'm stealing cag. And he's like, so you're going to be. a bank robber. And originally, believe it or not, I went the stupider route. And my first, my first foray into robbery, for real, I knocked off a casino. Now, before you think of like Ocean's 11, right, I want you to think of a strip mall. So you've got like a Scaleri store, right? You got a Scalaris store in the strip mall. And like two doors down from the

Escalaries is just another sliding door. And it goes into a William Hill sports book. So it's basically a bookie and where you can place sports bets. And they've got maybe 60 machines, 70 machines that play. But this is a legal casino. It's just a little shitty. I'm in Nevada. Yeah, I'm in Nevada.

This is, this is, but it's just it's, these are all over Nevada now, right? The, the, the strip center casino, the local, you know, like Dotties. There's a whole chain of them. And it's like the local little 40 machines, 50 machines. It keeps you out of the big casinos. But that was my first leg. And the reason I did it is because the got the word the cash register was is on arm's length from the door. Like as I walked by, the thing automatically opened.

And I looked and I saw the cash register. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me, man. What ship for brains would put a cash register that close to an exit? You know, it just didn't make any sense. So I walked by and, you know, went in and the guy was standing right at the register. And I was like, listen, open that thing. I need all of it. You know, give me the cash underneath.

I want every penny. And I figured, you know, being stupid, you know, it's got to be, what, 30, 40 grand. This is a casino, right? It's got to be a ton of money in this. And I got about $5,000, which was a lot of risk for $5,000. Like, you know, that's 25 years. That's armed robbery. And instead, Nevada, if you mess with the casino, like,

If they had gotten me within the seven years, I actually got away with that, that one. I never got caught. So, tried to cut a deal on it later. Have you got a gun or are you just telling them open it? Actually, as sad and humiliating as this is, I would have got charged with a gun because I didn't know any better, but I didn't have a gun. I had what looked remarkably like a gun, but it was not a gun. And the reason was just, yeah, I honestly am not really a gun person, which is funny because I ended up. doing time for a crap load of guns.

But I'm not a gun dude. I'm, you know, I'm never, I'm not much, I'm not, I wanted to hurt people. I just want cash. You know what I mean? Like I wanted, I wanted the money. And unfortunately, sometimes you had to hurt people because it's that kind of a gig. But for the most part, I just wanted to, I just wanted to have enough money to do dope and not to worry about life, you know, get my bills paid.

So after the casino, I was like, that's a wrap. I'm not doing, I'm not doing that ever again. That was way too much risk for not enough rewards. So I started to research bankrupt. And that was the start. And I did my first one and I was absolutely heinous at it. Like, it's amazing that I didn't get caught. What was the first one?

Like, how did that? Like, how did you pick the place? Like, how'd that go? So the first one went like this. I met a convict when I was in, when I was in the state joint, who said to me, how long did you go to the state? By the way, you never said how much time you got for that? They gave me, they gave me 36 months.

And in typical Tommy Schoville, my life is like nobody else's kind of fashion. an inmate fell off of, he was going to get glasses off the top bunk and you've been in prison, you know, the, so he was standing on the bottom bunk and the mattress slid toward the wall. So he came down this way and he hit his head on the silver, I mean, on the stainless steel sink. And it just ripped the back of his head open like it, like that what? It's over. This dude's going to bleed out in like four minutes. And I went in and got him like this and stuffed my hand into the back of his head because the blood was squirt in every direction. So they come in and I got this dude in headlock and there's blood all over the floor.

you know, they're, and they're literally just wanting to kill me, you know, get your hands in the air. I'm like, dude, this isn't what it looks like. If I put my hands in the air, this dude's done, you know what I mean? I'm not. So I got kicked out of prison for saving this dude's life. Nice. Like I got, it took, it took two months for them to do paperwork. And, you know, people had sort of like whispered about it. I thought it was BS. And a guy came to me, I was playing softball. And he's like, they want you, man, you're gone. I'm like, gone where? He's like, you're going home. You know, they're kicking you out. So yeah, in typical Tommy fashion, that that didn't, that didn't last very long.

But once, I met a guy in there that said to me, I've robbed X number of banks and I'm like, you're in a state facility, right? If you're a bank robber, shouldn't you be in the feds, number one? Like, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that you're a, that this is a state, you know, charge. But he starts to tell me about how, how to rob a bank. And sounds pretty legit. Like this dude, this dude's definitely, if he's not a bank robber, he's sure his crap is

thought up a really good story for what a bank robbery should live. look like. And I followed his instructions. And the way I picked the bank, always in forever, the way I picked the bank was first I wanted to know where the police station was, right? I didn't want to because you can accidentally rob a bank that's, you know, a 60 second ride from a police station. If you don't, if you don't start going around in circles, I, I robbed the bank once and I'm not even being funny. This is a gospel truth. I robbed the bank once. And I've never had anybody close. I'm long gone. I've never, I've never had a cop pull up with one of exception. I never had a cop get anywhere close to me, right? There was never, I was always long gone. I was

in and out very, very quickly. But I robbed the bank where a cop car pulled up in front of me and a cop car pulled up behind me, like, came screaming in like this. I'm already in the car. And I thought, well, that's the end of that, right? I put my hands up like this and they run inside. They hop out of the car and go smoking into the bank, like T.J. Hooker. And I backed the car up and drove away. And, you know, shaking like a vibrator. And I would always have a dump car. So I would steal. a black Dodge Durango. At the time, they were like everywhere, right? Every car looked like a black Dodge Durango. And I'm not a car thief, but I can steal a Black Dodge Durango really easily. I can smash a screwdriver into the, you know, into the, and snap the column and get that to go. So I would steal a car and I would do the, I would do the theft in a stolen car. I would steal a plate from the front of a Black Dodge Durango, put it on the back of the one I just stole, right? You never look at your front plate. But that way, if somebody did report the car stolen, I'm not going to be on the hot sheet. Nobody's going to see that plate.

But within usually two miles of the bank, I had the rent-a-car. And I would take, after I robbed the bank, I would go get in the rent-car, take-off, and then, boom, that's it. You know, leave it, leave the first car, the stolen car behind and be gone. And in the car would be, you know, usually a wig, a microwave oven. I used to keep a microwave on the front seat and plug it into an inverter into the cigarette lighter. The idea being that the tracer bill, in most banks, you're not even going to get

the things that people see in all of the movies. You're not going to get all of that crap. 90% of the time that none of that happens. But on banks that do have good equipment, on banks that know what they're doing, they have a bill that if you hold the bill up to the light, there is a mechanical device inside there and it's going to emit a signal and they're going to follow you right to that signal so electronics and microwaves don't get along right so the old man

said just microwave the cash throw it into the microwave crank that thing on leave it on while you're driving away and I promise you will kill that bill he said then you get home and you go through it and and it did you know at one point I had a collection of them it's funny you say that because I I knew a guy named Easter in prison and he used to say he used to do the exact same thing he would immediately throw it while he was driving he'd you know as soon as he got in he'd throw all the cash into a microwave that he had hooked up to the the plug and he'd turn it on yeah if you don't you're done yeah if you don't you're done it it's really funny because it's like you know the first bank I butchered like I was so bad at this I can't even begin to tell you

how bad I was at this what happened what happened I went into the bank and so there's a really good idea you should probably be the only person of the bank right really you're good idea because the guy next to you could be packing, you know, he could have a concealed weapons permit. He could be an off-duty cop. You don't know. And you know what? If they catch you in the act of robbing the bank, they're going to shoot you in the head, right? They're not going to tell you to get on your knees. They're not going to, they're just going to put one in you, right? So I always tried to rob the banks alone. And it looked, I waited. I was out there for like 20 minutes trying to talk myself into doing this, right? And I got out of a car and I went walking in and I got

inside. There was like nine people in there. I was like, with the amount of time I spent outside, there was no way that anybody could have not done their business. And I went in and the place was just pat. And I went to turn around like I was going to leave and I thought, oh, now I'm looking to see what if I turn around and I leave. Like I'm just, I just looked like a rookie who was trying to rob his first bank is what I look like. My palms were sweating.

And I went up to the woman and said, I need you to give me. And I probably should not be telling people how to rob a bank. But there's no money at all. When you go in there and you say, give me all of the money, you're going to get $2,900. Right.

You might get $3,000. If you hit a lick, you might get $4,500, right? Underneath that, right? And they do what you tell them to do. So if you say, give me all the money, they're going to open that first drawer and that's all the money you're going to get. If you say, I want the bottom drawer too right now, right, all of it, right? Give me all of it. Give me the toys, the abandoned money, all of it.

Because that's the other thing. You get geniuses who say, no big bills, right? Or no only big bills. I want everything, man, right? Give me the quarters. I don't care, right? They all spend. I literally want every piece of paper in the drawer.

And the band of money, you're going to get one 10,000 stack, guaranteed, right? If you get the top and bottom drawer, there's going to be a 10 rack in there, at least one, guaranteed. Now, more than likely, the die pack is going to also be in a big banded stack. So you don't put the bag on the table like you see in the movies and say stuff all the money in this bag. You say, stick all the cash up on the counter, right? And you do it yourself.

And, you know, you take a stack of cash and you bend it. And if it doesn't bend, it's because there's a big disc on the inside of that thing that's got paint in it, right, die in it that's going to explode. And it's a proximity sensor. So when it gets far enough away from the bank, right, it just goes bang. And then all of your money turns a very lovely green or a very lovely thread and becomes very difficult to feel good about passing. The other thing is it will burn the ever-loven snot out of you if it happens to be close to you when it goes off. like it's a it's a chemical kind of a process and uh i um i did not find the dye pack in the right didn't really understand the die pack concept the old man did not describe that nearly as

he did the microwave so after getting uh into the car and sticking everything in microwave microwaving the the the die pad right which you would think would kill it i'm taking the cash out of the out of the thing and boom this thing goes off sprays the inside of the car sprays me and this is the kind of stuff that doesn't like to come off of you, right? Like, you don't go into the bathroom and just hit this with some soap. Like, you need two or three weeks to hide at a friend's house kind of a thing. You know, this is, this is, this is no joke. And my money is now, my money is now basically worthless, right? So you're driving down the street. You're driving out the street with the inside of the car sprayed with red. And this is also, so my first attempt,

I didn't, I didn't steal a car, right? The first attempt, I actually did it. I'm ashamed to say this, but I actually used my car. On my first bank robbery, I actually used my own car, which is quite possibly the most embarrassing thing to say out loud for a bank robber. I did, however, put a plate on it that wasn't because I was pretty slick. I taped a fake somebody else's license plate to it. But I parked probably 300 yards away, right? And which is really pretty stupid. But as I got behind the bank and started running to my car, A phenomenon that has happened to me two or three times since where your vagus nerve literally says to your knees, I'm not going to support you. You know, you're so freaked out that as you're starting to run, you get this drunk effect that you literally can't, it's almost impossible to continue to run erect.

And I'm running down this alley, shaking like, you know, there's no tomorrow. Yeah, the first bank was an absolute miracle that I pulled it off. It was an absolute miracle. And then I had to give my boy, Jack took all of the tainted cash and he would go into casinos and he would put two or three of them in a machine along with some other cash and he'd gamble for a little bit and, you know, cash out and go. And then he did that. And we managed to wash all the cash that way. But it took an eternity. It was not, it was definitely not worth the effort.

So I started to try to get better at it. And at that point, that was right around the time I shaved for the first time. So I started wearing wigs. I started doing things to make myself look different. And I started learning some tricks. Like there's a merchant teller, right? And if you get that merchant teller, every once in a while, something really crazy will happen.

Like I did a merchant teller and it was the same drill. I walked in. I said, hey, how you doing? She said, good. I said, I need to give me the top drawer and the bottom during it right now, right? He needed to just put all of it up there. And every single person I ever robbed said, are you serious? I don't know whether it's just something that everybody says or they're trained to ask you

if you're kidding. But every single one of them goes, are you serious? And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm serious. And she put up the 10 rack and I'm like, sweet, right? Got at least 10,000. And then another one. And then another one. And I'm sorry.

Like, if you're a bank robber, if somebody comes on and they tell you that they got $250,000 robbing a bank, right? They're a liar. Or they hit a vault and, yeah, that's really, that's sketchy stuff. That's heat. I never had any desire to go for a vault of any kind. There is a vault directly on the other side of the counter that is not the big one. It's called the manager's vault, and it is in the floor. And I was in a bank, not robbing a bank.

I was in a bank being a citizen, and I've watched this woman lift the top off of it. And I mean, I was like, I was 20 feet away from this thing. And I know there was at least 150, 200 grand than it. It was a hub bank, too. In other words, like, if you've got, there's going to be one Wells Fargo in town that has all the money. And then if a smaller Wells Fargo anywhere needs it, that bank's shuttle. all of the cash out. But it really is, it's astonishing how little you get if you don't know what you're doing.

Like, you know, you were in federal prison. How many times do you meet a guy and say, you know, you robbed, how much did you get? Do you ever hear anybody tell you, 100 grand? I mean, everybody you talk about that. No, it's always like, you know, like the average bank robber gets like $3,500. And you'll meet a guy who got, you know, he got $5,000 one time, 15,000 one time, you know, 35,000, you know, 2,000. You know what I'm saying?

Like, like, it's, it's never. it's never more than an average of maybe $10,000 or $15,000. No, it really isn't. 15 was always literally like that was my threshold. If I hit 15, I thought that was really a good bank. I'm stoked, right? That's pretty much going to get me through. I started liquidating everything.

You know what I mean? I didn't keep the same lifestyle I had. I started getting rid of cars. I started getting rid of watches. I have a watch fetish like you wouldn't believe. But I got, I thinned down. and I became a professional bike robber like that's what I did you know and and it very much became a living and they got when you say you got rid of I don't understand what you say you got

rid of a bunch of stuff like you're now making money why are you getting rid of stuff no I see I have a 30 I had a 30 thousand dollar a month nut as when I stopped my public speaking right so right I'm going to have to do two banks just to cover that and then I got to get and then I got to take care of dope so I started pairing down to the bare necessities you know one one nice watch I started driving a Honda, right? I got rid of two Porsches. I started to make myself look a lot less flashy. I started to, you know, if you don't have a job,

and it's pretty obvious you don't have a job, you're not leaving your house ever. And you know, you got a 9-11 and your middle age, depending on where you live, that can draw a decent amount of heat. But I said, so I had sold off most of that. I got my nut really low. And I got to a point where if I could do one bank a month,

I was good. I was doing more than one a month pretty consistently. I was, and I was, I don't know, I was just one of those guys that was looking for an ankle at all times. You know, I got, I got very, very lucky for a period of time where I was, I was doing one of these reverse shell merger deals that I was telling you about. And I ended up in Moscow. And a waiter refused to take one of the new $100 bills.

He was like, you know, this, you know, it's, we don't know what this is. isn't, it was brand new. I said, no problem. I said, they're changing the 100. I'll just give you one of the old ones. Like, you know, there weren't a lot in the wallet at that point anyway. They were kind of rare. But this dude, like, was in an absolute panic. He said, so wait a sec, all of the old money's going to, they're just going to, what, change all this. So now all the old $100 bills will be worth nothing. Well, every single person in Russia has all of their money in old $100 bills. And they're keeping them in Bibles and they're keeping them under desks and a ruble's worth nothing. So usually they have one, $100 bill or five, $100 bills or

whatever, but that's their life. That's their savings. We through the use of an attorney ran an ad in a couple of magazines that said the United States is changing the $100 bill. And the currency that you hold today someday may be worth nothing, which is absolutely legally true. Right. Now, that's not a very good chance of that. But someday, but someday it may be worth nothing. You know, 150 years from now, there's an excellent chance that will be worth nothing. But We wrote it up in such a way that we, you know, we knew we were, we were covering our, our assets. And we would give you 80 cents on the dollar, right?

We would buy back a $100 bill for $80, for $80. That are still worth $100. Right. Yeah, it's still absolutely worth $100. And we figured it would be if we, if we scored a couple of thousand bucks, like this was going to be great. The ad didn't cost much. And in the first month, like we made probably 10 or 15 grand.

We were freaking out. And I was like, it's hard to believe that, you know, month we didn't run the the ad a second month we had only run it for one month well those magazines like they get passed around people hold them by month two they're coming in with like garbage bags pull of mail every single day and dumping it um we got to a point where there were like 46 people in the room that are full time opening these things and you know setting out cash and doing the math and it got to a point where um the money got insane i mean it literally got insane And it was piles of cash, just piles and piles and piles of cash.

And now it would look really odd. But at the time, you know, we were halfway between the new and the old money. So you were, you know, this was the $100 bill you've been seeing, but you're seeing every single one of them. It's just every time you ripped open an envelope, it was just $100 bills. And it got out of control. Wait a second. So they're mailing it in and you're mailing them a check or just mailing them new money?

No, we actually mailed back currency. And in the ad we'd say put it between two pieces of cardboard. And they were always like it was a stiff, a whole mailbag full of like stiff envelopes, right? The trouble became, how do you police people who open envelopes full of money for a living? Right. Like, how do you do that? There's nobody in the room that isn't ripping off at least one envelope a day, maybe two envelopes a day. And there's no way to tell, right?

It's a very, very difficult process. And we're also on drugs. You know, every day we were doing this in very close to, to Park City, Utah, right? So we would go skiing and we would go over to Wendover and gamble. And we were very rarely in the office. We had a girl that was running it, but no idea how much was getting stolen. And it got to a point one day where it got so big that we couldn't keep up that it was literally impossible. And we just said, you know what? We're not going to mail back anything anymore. You know, F it. Like we're just going to shut this place down. We're going to,

you know, pull the name off the wall and get rid of everything and be done. And that's precisely what he did. Didn't work out exactly how I thought it would, you know, I mean, they didn't, they didn't disappear and they certainly found us. We were in a, we were in a boiler room doing another, another deal, selling some other scam. And my friend said to me, there are two guys walking up the pathway. He goes, and I guarantee you, these people work for the federal government. And I kind of looked out the window and I was like, no, no, they had leather sold shoes. You know how terrible the shoes that the FBI wears.

It's like, you can always tell someone in the feds because they wear the ugliest shoes in America. So I looked down, I was like, no, man, I got beautiful shoes on. That's not a Fed. but he was Interpol and they showed up and they didn't argue that what we were doing was illegal like that was never an issue you know there was none of that what it was was you know the not delivering to the people that gave you money is a real problem and yeah they came up with a dollar amount that was ridiculous and said if you pay this um you know we're not going to we're not going to basically we will there will be no charges this can go away if you reimburse the

people that got burned and I said okay I think we might be able to do that. And the number was, it was a phone number. Like, it was over a million bucks. It was a lot of money. I had to call him, my friend Rex and said, him, hey, Rex, I'm in serious trouble. You know, I mean, like, really serious trouble. If I don't come up with a lot of money, I'd probably go into prison.

And he's like, no, relax, relax. This is the guy I did the infomercial for. I made this guy very, very wealthy. He's like, relax, he's like, how much are we talking? I said, it's probably over a million, you know? And the speed at which this cat changed his tune went from, no problem to. Are you kidding me? But he put up the cash. And in hindsight, I'll bet you that they kept it. Like I bet you, I honestly don't think that went to anybody except those cats

that came walking up the path. I thought about this for years since that happened. But I am absolutely 100%. I handed that money over in a cashier's check, right? Those people, they walked off. But that was their retirement fund for two really old guys from Interpol. I'm absolutely 100% secure in the fact that that was not going back to anybody in Russia. If they were from Interpol. If not, they're the greatest scam artist in history. Like, you really got to tip your hat, if that's the case. So then I get pinched, right?

Now, this is kind of the classic. I actually stopped robbing banks. I hadn't robbed the bank in a long time. And I was, what had happened is I had found a new line of work. This guy could deliver. my drug of choice for on the dollar or pennies on the dollar

so I'm now I'm not considering myself a drug dealer but I most assuredly am selling off product to other people who are doing it I didn't I wasn't looking to to build a customer base I was looking to just stay high

I was not looking to make a whole lot of money I was laying low I had a little bit of cash put up I was kind of actually trying to get my my shit together and this kid that I had done dope with for a really long time got pinched for like a 20 bag or something like literally got pinched for nothing and when he went in he was so afraid of withdrawal that he started saying you know I can give you this I can give you that well he gives up a a dude on a small time robbery or whatever and the guy that he gave up lived in me

with me at one time I let this guy live in my house and he said I don't know what this dude does for a living, but he's got a crap load of money. He never goes to work. And I guarantee he breaks the law. All he does is drugs all day long. And you know, you get to read the discovery. It was lovely. Like this dude did a hell of a job just painting a picture of who and what I was. And they thought I was a drug dealer. They started staking me out, you know, hoping to catch me selling drugs. They found me buying a bunch of drugs. They didn't see me, you know, doing anything remotely like that. And what ended up happening is crazy as crap. They pinch it dude for bank robbery. Same kid, right? The guy that got called with the 10 bank, does a bank robbery, gets

pinched. And they told him straight out. I swear to God, they sat in the room and said to this kid, you tell us that Tommy helped you plan this bank robbery, right? We'll get you a deal and this whole thing will be over. Because they brought me in and they started showing me all of these pictures and I'm sitting there with my attorney and I'm looking at pictures as they're putting them out. I'm like, all of these people are me. That's what you're saying, right? And none of them look like me, right? First of all, it was different heights, different weights. You know, I would never did the sunglasses in the hat, but I always had on, you know, a prosthetic beak. Like, it doesn't take much to buy a decent makeup kit, right? And I never looked the same. And when it came time to

get right down to it, they had not, right? But they had the willingness. to spend the rest of their life trying to make sure that somebody believed that I was the person in every one of those photos. And I was really careful. Like, honestly, I consider myself maybe a little bit smarter than the next bank robber. For instance, if I went out of town to rob a bank, I left my cell phone at my house, right? And my homeboy would not come with me. I told you, I don't, like my getaway driver didn't do banks, but he would go to my house.

He would phone my kid, talked to him on the phone for 25 minutes. send some text messages do stuff so that there's i'm at my house like you look at any kind of favorite trail i am at my house and at the time uh i could basically fly all over the country as my brother which probably wasn't the kindest thing to do but we are almost identical like for for years we were assumed to be twins um so yeah i i i kind of considered myself a little bit a little bit smarter. But the attorney that I ended up with was an older woman. And she was lovely.

She's a very nice woman. But she wasn't showing up. And you know the frustration when you're in jail. And you call your attorney and they say, yeah, I'm going to come up and I'm going to see it. Right. And they never do. And it's the most hollow feeling in the world because you feel like your world is going to end. And there's nobody that's going to help you no matter how many phone calls.

So I start screaming. And they had sent me to paralegals. And I said, you know, this is my life, man. I don't want to talk to some, you know, somebody that just got out of, you know, a 12-month course. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I needed to talk to an attorney. So I walked around the corner and there was just a beautiful girl that had been sent up to see me. And I walked in and I said, you know, I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I'm really made a point about wanting to see an attorney and not a paralegal. Like I've already seen two and she said, no, I'm not a paralegal.

I'm an attorney. And this girl looked like she was too young to be an attorney. And I said, you don't look like an attorney, you know, no hard feeling. She had on a sweatshirt that said sublime. I said, you don't look like an attorney. And she said, you don't really look like a bank robber. To be really honest with you, she said, you don't really match the, the bill of either. I ended up marrying this girl.

And which was, it made the whole process of going to prison really messed up. The judge, obviously, everybody involved got really, really angry. Wait, say, you married here before? No, but everybody knew. I married her about five months after I hit my first federal yard, but everybody, the cat was out of the bag long before my sentencing that the two of us were together. Amazingly, the FBI went to her house to question her about us, and she just like didn't, you know, didn't lie, didn't see me. Right out of the gate, it just was like, I love the dude. But years ago, we dated, and when we

did, there was a huge fight. And, you know, since then, I really, feel like maybe he's got his life together. I don't think that this, you know, that he's done what he's accused of. If a lawyer knew you before, they can't be this barred for anything. That's like the bar. And she told me that in the very beginning. So every, every conversation, you know, usually started with an apology of what an ass I was earlier on in our relationship. But yeah, I ended up marrying her. But, you know, I'm at my sentencing and they're playing phone conversations between me and my attorney and embarrassing phone conversations.

Like, embarrassing phone conversations. I had a year and a half of nothing but time on my hands, and we talked on the phone a lot. And I remember saying, like, I'm like, dude, I'll take the longer sentence, man. Like, seriously, stop playing this. I don't want this on the record. I don't, you know, just stop playing this recording

and I will be more than happy to just take whatever the top deal was. It was humiliating. It was awful. But I definitely got, I definitely got my, more time because of um because of my relationship with her there's no two ways about it and more so the second sentencing than the first because um so i i she wrote with me the entire time i was in prison i started out at fcii phoenix um how much time did you get uh 60 60 months 60 months um which she's about standard on a first uh on a first yeah robbery uh without a gun without a gun if you uh if you use

a gun or you threaten force or anything like that then they they start going going up, but for a standard 2113A or whatever. Yeah, I know guys have got like three years, four years for. Yeah, if you have no criminal history, yeah, yeah. If you have no criminal history, you can be out in 34 months. Like you see some really, really short ones. But I got sent to Phoenix, which was a lovely yard. I mean, it was as far as prisons go.

It was great. And she would come down every other weekend and visit me. And there was just this, this cop that used to just say that like really vile things about her. Like, being there stripping out, like, you know, the procedure. after a visit. And he's like, your wife is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen come through visiting. And I said, thank you, man. I really appreciate that. You know, I said, she's a, she's a great girl. And he goes, I said, no, no, we're from Northern Nevada. He goes,

maybe I ought to swing by and, you know, F the shit ever. I was like, dude, did you really just say that to me, man? You know, like, I've never been out of line with anybody here, man. Like, I've never once disrespected anybody in uniform here, man. Like, that's so freaking out of line. And this went on like three visits. four visits. And, like, I got pissed enough to file. I'm, you know, I had a BPA-8 in, BP9. And the warden called me. He was like, I want to talk to you about this, because this is going to go in his file. I'm like, it freaking needs to go in his file. You know what I mean? Like, and get this guy out of visiting where I'm going to end up hurting him. Like, I'm not

playing with you. I've been really cool. And I get probably five, six weeks. So every other week. So a long time goes by, I don't see the guy in visiting. I figure maybe they pull him. And then she comes down one day and there he is. And, you know, she says, down and said, just don't do anything stupid today, please. You know, Tommy, don't do anything dumb. And I said, you know, if an alarm goes off, it's because this dude said something really stupid because I'm, you know, I'm a pretty laid-back guy.

And, yeah, he's stripping me out and we're going through the same thing. And he hadn't said anything stupid. And I thought, maybe it wouldn't talk to him, right? And he goes, oh, man, he goes, and I'll tell you what, man. He goes, my clock's three times the size of year. She's going to be a lot happier.

And I went, oh, you're not looking at this right, brother. It sort of gave, like I was tugging on my jump. and as the dude looks down I hopped up and I got him I mean right on the point of the chin and I've been in a lot of fist fights right it was absolutely the best bunch I've ever thrown in my life and it just

I got him right here and this dude went like this and then he fell this way and you know how everything in prison is just built like so you can't break it so this is the toilet and that little piece of metal that goes that goes between the two toilets he hit his face on and it just split

him and I went over through the window, right, and knocked the guard came over and I was like, I think your boy's going to need some assistance, you know what I mean? Like a pile of blood's getting bigger and they beat me like a pinata. Like it, my, my, my prison life changed dramatically in five seconds. I spent the next three hours, you know, the little cages that you get stuck in like the Cyrus, the virus cage in con here, those little itty-bitty cages. Okay, well, they had one of those in the lieutenant's office.

They cuffed my hands above the bars on the top like this for three hours. I cannot begin to tell you what that is like. I mean, I cannot begin to tell you. When they took the cuffs off, my hands just went, uh-huh. I mean, he said, put your hands through the food chuck. I got to, you know, I got to lock you up. I could not get my arms. I'm like, and I'm moving, brother.

You're going to have to reach in here. You know, my arms have been above my head for three freaking hours. And I got sent to Lewisburg, man. I got sent to the SMO, the special management unit at, Lewisburg, which was, I mean, hell on earth. I don't know if you know anybody that's been through the smooth, but that broke me, man, like absolutely broke me. So Lewisburg, Pennsylvania was one of the three prisons that they built when Alcatraz got

shut down, right? So they built Leavenworth, Lompoc, or one of four, Atlanta, and Lewisburg. And Lewisburg was the gangster yard. That's where every famous mobster that ever went to prison went. And all of them ended up on Jay Block second floor. So when you see like Goodfellas and he's in there cooking, that's Jay Block second floor in Louisburg. And I happen to be on J Block second floor in Lewisburg. But I was on a lockdown unit. So we were locked down 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You get out one hour a day,

five days a week for wreck. And you're in a cage. And the white boys have a policy that you have to go to wreck 365 days a year. So freezing rain, whatever you're doing, it just sucked and absolutely sucked. And there were no windows, no lie, right? No, all the windows have been broken out, you know, decades ago. So there's no heat at all in the winter. There's no air conditioning in the summer. We would take, we would take extra blankets. They would give you two extra blankets a month, right?

Two extra blankets a month. And we would rip them in the strips this wide. We put it in the middle of the room in a coil and light it on fire. And this was like a daily event. You held out until it was really cold, like when you could see your breath. But poof. And if you made coffee, if you did anything, I mean, you're in a lockdown unit. There's nothing they can do.

you. They can't send you to the hole. They can't do anything. So it, yeah, it'll break you. It was the worst. The cops carry nightsticks, carry billy clubs. The first day I went to wreck, you know the drill. I'm sure you've been in the shoe at least once, right? You know, right foot, left foot, right? And they wands you and all that crap. So the guy goes, right foot, I put my right foot up. He wands it. I put my left foot up. He wands it. Then he takes his night stick from here and hits me in the back of the knees with it. I mean, like the scene from dumb and dumber, right? He just brings it up here. and smacks me in the back of the knees. And I dropped, like, just like I had been shot.

And I got up and I said, hey, boss, if you tell me what I did, I will make a point to not do that again. You know what I mean? And he goes, no, no, you're cool. And I was like, all right. And this happened every day for seven days. And the back of my legs, I mean, we're black.

And I said to my sonmate, I'm like, I'm not going to wreck today. Like, you got to go to tell the homeboys that I can't walk. And he's like, if you don't go to, if you don't go to wreck, I'm going to have to stab you. You know what I mean? Like, that's how it's going to go down. So you're going to wreck. And I got up and I went to walk out and he smacked me on the knees and I went down.

I stopped to the guys. I'm like, look, man, I can't go to wreck tomorrow. I cannot. You know, this is my eighth day there. I'm like, you got to see my legs and I'm showing these guys. And the shot collar is like, nah, headbutt this dude, bite him, do whatever you got to do. But, you know, make sure that they see those bruises. Just do something.

Bite the guy, you know, headbut him because I'm going to be shackled. But when I came back up, he's bringing me up the stairs, right? And I'm the first dude there. I got to wait for my celly. And he goes, turn around. I'll uncuff you. I'm like, now, what are you talking about? You're going to uncuff me?

You know what I mean? Like, I got the doors got to be shut. I'm like, what, I slip my cuffs? Now you're going to, you're going to beat me to death? And he goes, dude, I just found out what cop you hit. He said, he was on this yard. He's like, we ran him off this yard. He said, I know who you hit.

He's like, if you had told us that, I said, well, you didn't even tell me why you were hitting me. You know what I mean? He's like, well, I was hitting you because you hit a cop. but it was eight days of it eight freaking days again that place was more brutal than anything it's not like the bop they i saw them put a guy in a four point harness you know like the crucifixion deal face down for 14 days for 14 days that man did not leave that position they would take they would blend all of his breakfast lunch and dinner into that neutral shake stick it underneath him

with a straw and he urinated and defecated himself for two weeks they took him down the hall up and down like a show said this is what happens if he had a cop and his at his ankles because there had to be like 60 pounds of crap on the most brutal thing you've ever seen in your life red red like just diaper rash for 14 days for a guy you know this they they managed to shut it down there was a group of lawyers called the lewisberg project that managed to get in and actually get them to pull the plug on the smoo there um there were there were no rules you know was there meech was there big meech um right he and i went in on a bus to get He and I were on the bus together, actually.

I think I was actually on three yards with that cat. We kept following each other around the system. I left from Sheridan. That's where he was at when I left. The cat was everywhere. But yeah, the special management unit absolutely broke me. I went from Lewisburg to Florence, Colorado, and that's where I left, right? My attorney wife comes and picks me up.

I'm free. And I'm not going to. I really don't want to smut her up. We had a fantastic time, right? We lived like newlyweds, right? We lived like newlyweds. So we had a really, really good time. And we went all over the country, and it went really well for about a year.

And I just, I'm a criminal. And what happened is a guy came to the door and said, hey, man, I'm in a really bad position for money. And I said, and you want to borrow money for me? Because it's not really my line of work. And he goes, I got some stuff I want to sell. And he had basically the bed of a bronco. Right. You know, the entire back part of the Bronco was filled with weapons. I mean, just filled. And the vast majority of them handguns. So I don't know how many were there, but it was well over 100. I mean, there were a ton of guns there. And I was like, what are we talking about on these? And he goes, first of all, their family. He's like, I took this from my family. This is my family's collection. He said, no one's going to be at a hunting camp for probably six months. It's not going to be reported stolen, do whatever you do with it, because we're just going to claim the insurance money on it anyway. I said, all right, he goes, I'd like to get 16 grand.

And I said, I'd like, and he was like, yeah, I'd take eight. And I, I bought it. The, it was crazy. So I bought, I bought these guns in a, in a basically fed sting. And, and absolutely full on entrapment. And then I sold it to a group of feds, absolutely entrapment. As, as textbook entrapment as you could possibly. So the Fed sent the guy to you to, or he came up with,

I know a guy that might buy these, and he's wired up, so you buy them. And then you turn around and they provide a seller who's a Fed, so you sell them. Yeah, they follow me. I buy the guns from the, from the, the, the, the mark, right? And suppose it sounds like you're the, I couldn't. What sounds like you're, sounds like you're the mark. No question. Right.

So they go, they, okay, so they come to you. and they set you up and then a hundred percent 100 percent and the the crazy thing is so if i'm just keeping this real like if so if my girlfriend or my wife i should say at that point um was a school teacher right this is a completely different outcome right i don't go to prison none of this happens they throw all this out i'm free and and but what ends up happening instead is they come in and they say we'd like to ask you a few questions and uh they lay stuff out on the table. I'm like, you know, I'm married to an attorney. I'm like, obviously, I'm not answering any questions, right? You know what I mean? Like, I would never get late

again. This is my wife and she's an attorney. Obviously, I'm not having a conversation with you people. And he said, he puts out two pictures. And then he puts out an arrest warrant for my wife. And one of the pictures that he had was of us dropping off a load of guns to an FBI informant, right? and my beautiful blonde-haired wife who looks like Britney Spears has got an AR-15 up like this like demoing the night the night to an undercover and I'm looking at the picture and I just went I would really like to make this go away you know what I mean like whatever we got to do and she's and to her credit like she was sitting there freaking out going no no no no I was like right now dude I I will I will make this go away right now we will I'll I'll go down

there with you I will elocution from start to finish you know but nothing happens there no charges no disbarring none of that BS right right you you leave my wife alone and I'll plead guilty to this thing I'll plead guilty to this at the arraignment but you don't arrest my wife I mean they had her dead dad right and hindsight being 2020 I should have said I didn't do anything that chick did it you know if I could do it all over again if I could do it all over again I would have said she's the mastomide um she uh she stole my identity while i was down she ended up uh with a with a drug dealer and she really went off the rails unfortunately because she's a beautiful person and a great human being but she uh i didn't do any real good for this uh for this girl but uh then then a miraculous

thing happened and you'll you'll really appreciate kind of how miraculous this really freaking is because you uh have been to the federal system but what how much time did you get 13 years okay 13 years. The gun thing, and I had a better lawyer for the second one than I had for the first one. My wife hired me the best attorney in the city, hands down, by reputation. He was a huge dog crap. But by reputation, he was the best attorney in the city. And he says, we don't worry about it. We guidelines for breakfast. We got this thing. Don't worry about the first thing in the morning. The San Bernardino shooter, right? That shooting took place the night before my sentencing. I walked into court and literally the first thing, I said to my attorney, you think San Bernardino's going to screw me?

You know what I mean? Like I had a bunch of AR-15s. How about off of mine? And he's like, I don't think that's going to be an issue. He said, he's supposed to keep things like that. Before we get started, right, Mr. Scoville, I have a question for you. I said, yes, sir. He goes, do you ever worry about any of those guns ending up in the hands of people like what happened yesterday at San Bernardino?

This is before anything starts at sentencing. I said, I didn't realize I was being charged with San Bernardino. I said, I'm not trying to sound racist. if your last name was Muhammad, I probably wasn't going to sell you anything, right? You know, right? I said, you're nothing to worry about, sir. I bought the stuff from you guys and I sold it to you guys, right? You know, nothing to worry about.

I bought it from the feds and I sold it to the feds. You know, who's going to get hurt? I'm the only person that got hurt in the entire deal, right? But so while in prison, I got a job at Unicor. And I meant it, you know, this whites and blacks don't spend the tremendous amount of time together at the higher custody levels. And the higher the custody level, the last time you're going to spend talking to somebody of another race. So I'm at a high.

And I run into a black dude who sees me coming out of a cell and he knows what I'm doing. Like I basically went to the trap, right? I was in there picking up a bag of dope or whatever. And he came down and walked right into my cell and said, you're the dumbest, smart person I've ever met. Or you're the smartest dumb person I've ever met. He's like one or the other. He's like, man, and he had a life sentence. He said, I'm pissing my life away in here.

He's like, but you're going to piss away yours and you don't have to. And I said, yeah, really not in the mood for this speech. Like, no disrespect or anything else, just really not in the mood for the speech. I'd like to go down and get, you know, get high and get about my day. And then I just started watching the cat. And he just had, he just had this like Zen kind of piece that I've never seen a human being have. And like, if you got within 100, yards of this cat. There was something that just made you want to understand why this guy

wasn't as miserable as the rest of the world. And he got me sober. And it's been over eight years. And, you know, the lifeboat was kind of a pay-it-forward thing to him. And it started out as, I'm not going to say a joke because it was, but I didn't take it seriously. When I started out, I didn't see this thing taking off at all. And, you know, it's not a fun subject. and having people show up to hear about sobriety, you know, they love to hear about, you know, gun battles and, you know, what banks I didn't get caught for or whatever. I got some great stories of almost getting caught.

People like hearing that. But, you know, for 10,000 people to show up to talk about sobriety is a pretty good thing. And we're aft right now in this country. Like, you know, you know, what drugs are doing to us right now in this country. It's absolutely unbelievable. Like, you know, we've been sold out. And, you know, there's fentanyl and cocaine. But I hope it's fentanyl and cocaine.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You know, they're putting fentanyl and speed. You know, these drugs on the street today are designed to kill. They're not designed to get you high. You know, as a businessman, this is just business one-on-one. If your product kills your customer, you make it weaker, right? You don't make it stronger. But every single batch they catch is stronger than the previous,

and that's a pretty bad sign. So that's what we're doing on the lifeboat. And, you know, it was really kind of an amazing run. There's a lot of really kind of interesting things. that happened along the way, you know, the, I've been, there's a couple, again, it's just some really unusual things that happened along the way. Boom. But I will, I will hit you with my absolute favorite bank robbing story.

I don't, I don't look back fondly, truthfully on most of the crimes that I did. I really don't. I think that, the ones that I didn't hurt people, like, I really justified that I wasn't hurting anybody when I hit a bank. I could, the FDA was going to take care of that. crimes where I realized that the end user got stung, that messes with me a whole lot more. But I got a good one.

I was actually in Arizona and I was doing a bank. And I'm in the Durango and it was a good bank. Like there was more than one band of cash to one up. So I had 20 grants. So I'm already. And by this point, I've robbed enough banks that I don't do this one anymore. Like I know I'm going to get it.

I'm going to get out. I've gotten pretty good at this. So I drive away and I'm, I'm maybe a minute, half a minute from the rent the car. I'm going to dump this and I'm going to get out of town and I'm good. And the lights, I look in the rearview mirror and the lights, man. I got lit up and my foot's doing this number, right? It's going back and forth between the gas pedal and the brake.

I'm like, oh, I'm like, you know what, man? It's been a decent run. You know, eventually everybody gets caught, right? And I knew what it carried. I wasn't going to get 100 years. I knew what I was looking at. So I pull the I pull the Durango over to the side of the road

And I'm waiting for this number right Like the door's about to open Right And this is a stolen Dorengo too Yeah this is a not so picture to see Yeah I just robbed the bank I just yanked the wig off So I've got three strips of double-sided tape

That are just shining like hell on the top I just removed the go tape right So right here is just shining Right the spirit gum makes you look like a glazed donut, right, all through here. And on the front seat of the car is a microwave oven, right? Makes perfect sense. And where the keys should be is a screwdriver about that long.

And I'm waiting for this one, right? He's going to wait for backup. I just robbed the frigging bank. No. Marty Fife comes walking up like this, just do, do, do do, do. And I'm like, holy, I roll down the window and I'm looking at this dude, right? And I am, I mean, I am the picture of a bust, right? And he looks at me and he goes, do you know, I'm pulling.

you over. I go, nope, I'm trying to work that out. And he goes, your gas caps open. And I go, huh? He goes, your gas caps open. Not just the door, like the gas cap. Like maybe someone was trying to trifen or something. He goes in, you know, in this heat, you're probably losing about a gallon an hour. He's like, for real. You might want to get out and close that. And I was like, okay, no license. Can I see your license registration proof of insurance? Nothing, right? Just get out the car and I get out of the car and my legs up doing the spaghetti number to the back of the car trying to keep my legs stiff underneath me and I'm wearing cowboy boots and so I crank this thing down I said thank you he goes have a great day turned around right and I drove off I called jack I said man you are

not going to believe this and I said to him uh I said boy tomorrow when they say you know there was a bank robbery we're looking for a black Dodge Durango I said can you imagine the crap his friends are going to give him when he tells him that he had that car pulled over he goes are you kidding You think he's telling anybody he had that car pulled over? He's like, there is no way he's copped into that. But yeah, that was, I had a couple of, I had a couple of pretty funny ones. No joke, I walked into a bank to rob and somebody was robin it. I swear to you, I walked in there was one person in the bank.

There was one person in the bank. And I watched him walk in and he'd been in there about 15 minutes. And if a guy's in a bank more than four, then he's, it's a loan officer, right? He's talking to somebody because banking is four minutes. You're in and out. So I figure, all right, cool, the guys. whatever. So I go walking in and he's right by a teller, right? So I'm just standing there. So I go up and I'm acting like I'm filling out a withdrawal slip or whatever. And I hear him just clear as crap go,

no, I'm talking about all of it, all of it. And then the idiot says, go to the next drawer. And he moved her down. He did three drawers. So when they get him, and I'm sure that they did, you know, that's kidnapping. Like when you, when you tell the teller to move 12 inches, right, against their will, it becomes kidnapping. And you're never getting out. Those are the bank robbers that are going to do, you know, a whole lot of time. Second best only to carrying a weapon, right? You know, but yeah, you start any of any of the, any of the weapon crap, you really can start, you know, stretching a sentence out pretty good, you know.

Right. I've been, I was very fortunate in that I got a short sentence on the banks. I did not get a short sentence on the guns. They basically maxed me out on the guns. They could have given me, I think the max out was like $1.20. So all together with the previous, it came out to 13 years is what I've done all together. And I think I hit seven yards or eight yards. I did Victorville, I did a couple of the ugly ones.

But I also did Sheridan, which was, I mean, the softest federal, I don't think there's a softer federal prison. If there is, you know, I certainly had it. I didn't see it. But I never hit a camp. As a bank robber, I'm not eligible for any of those things. So I never did any of the doing stuff. You hit camp, correct? No.

No. I avoided. I did, I did three years. No, no, I did three years in the medium. And then I did nine years in the, in a low. And of course, I did a year in the Marshall's holdover. So it was like 13 years. But in the low, so yeah, it was a dorm. It sucked. Like I was desperately, didn't want to leave the medium. You know, you get into a routine. It doesn't matter how rough the place is. Once you're in routine, you're good. And I had a good routine. I'm teaching. I work in the library, you know, but I didn't want to, but by that point I was below, you know, the threshold, like the 20 year threshold. They said, you got to go to the fucking low. So I go to the low and it storms and it sucks. You get used to it. But then I get into a routine there and then they wanted to send me to a camp. The problem was, and I wouldn't have cared honestly, but my problem was that the camp, closest camp, was Miami. And that's like a four hour drive for my mother.

and my mother used to come see me every two weeks. Well, Coleman's only an hour north of Tampa. She can go an hour. She can't go four hours. Yeah. Do you see what I'm saying? She's already in her 80s. Like, I'm not going to make her do that.

So I did everything I could. I actually entered the ARDAP program to, in order to, for them to put a management variable on me. But it took months. So it took like three or four months for for the management variable. So I went, let's say I went like five months before it was on there, five or six months. And then I dropped out. Then I waited.

So then let's say three or four months later, they come to me and they say, look, we're moving you to a camp. I said, what are you talking about? I got a management variable. They said, I know. I said, that's good for a year. And they said, yeah, I know Cox, but they're pushing for people to go to a camp. And you, honestly, that was for ARDAP. You're out of ARDAP.

And I said, listen, bro, I'm going back to ARDAP. I said, I got a problem. I can't leave here thinking the way I'm thinking. I got problems. I got to go back. So I said, I already put in for, I'm meeting with a doctor like next week. I already got an appointment. I didn't have an appointment.

I immediately went and applied and within about two weeks I did have an appointment. They put me right back in. And so I go in again, this time I stay even longer because, you know, now I definitely, now I realize they may fucking ship me. I may get out and two weeks later be on a bus. so I waited until they put me in for for the like I knew I was going to be put into for the halfway house like they didn't have time I knew they didn't have time to ship me so then I dropped out again you know in my I remember the doctor who ran the thing her name was Dr. Smith she

kept saying Cox what are you doing like she's why don't you just complete the program and I say because if I complete the program I said I'll get a year off but I only get like two or three months halfway house. I said, I need the halfway house. I said, let's be fake. I said, let's face it. I said, if I come back to prison, I'm going to need, I said, I'm going to be in my 50s. I'm going to need that year.

And she's like, don't say that. Don't. No question. So I dropped that again. And within a few months, they, they had me schedule for halfway house. And I did like seven and a half months halfway house. You know, that was the, I think probably the strangest experience for me was the was the half I asked the you know they dropped me in Oakland I don't live in California you know but they don't

have at the time I was living in in northern Nevada near Tahoe but there's there's nothing there so it was going to be Sacramento or Oakland and they dropped me in Oakland and it was a very unusual time to drop a white guy in Oakland too you know what I mean like the this is when the riots and everything were going on and I mean I got no I got no political ink I never tipped up I never did any of that garbage so I can usually I can usually fit in but the Yeah, that halfway house was just straight. I mean, ridiculous. I walked in the first day and I'm like, you know, I'm going to be a good dude.

And I'm ready to, you know, I really want to take it seriously. And I'm four years sober. And I walked into the dorm and there's a guy snort in the line like this long off the desk. He's like, oh, I think you're on the top bunk. I was like, oh, shit, you got to be kidding me, man. I'm like, this is just, you know, I honestly, I wanted to go back downstairs and say, I don't think I can be here, you know? Yeah.

I was so terrified to go back. But fortunately, I got, you know, just like you said, man, I think that life is a program, for real. I think that's what I probably learned on the third go around in prison that I didn't learn on the first two, is that if you can actually start programming yourself, you can get, you know, a routine that you do that you stick to that's important to you. You know, that balances out things like your dome and your body and, you know, and paying bills and all of those things. you know, you got a semi-decent chance of actually staying out of prison. The numbers are terrible, man. The numbers are absolutely terrible. Everybody goes back.

Everybody goes back. Well, I think, you know, for me, after 13 years, I was like, honestly, like, living in someone's spare room is, you know, if I have to live in someone's spare room and I can barely pay my bills, like, that's probably, that's better. I'm better off doing that. You know, although the truth is, like, I kind of felt like, look, if I'll do that for a year or so, but if I got no hope of ever getting out of that situation, I was probably going to just commit fraud again.

Yeah. Because we used to always joke like, you know, well, what if you get to be too old to work and you don't have enough money? I go the BOPs always got a fucking spot for me. That's it. So you know POP retirement program. Yeah.

And I knew guys that were in there who had gone in, who were like in their 70s and they went and they just fucking robbed a couple of banks, robbed two or three banks and then literally just waited for the cops to show up. Like they didn't even trying. They know. Who's that? yeah kind of really famous case and he he did forever he was down for like 30 some odd years for bank robbery and uh he was he had been down so long dude that he was going for parole every year still

like he was he was still under awa he was going every year for parole and still getting denied and they finally gave him his uh his parole and i think it was like two or three days and he just went straight into a bank and robbed it and then you know it's it's it's really sad to watch um but it's uh it's really understandable how it happens you know what i mean it really is i i went through um a shock uh getting out this time so much more than anything else because you know prison is a hateful joint like you know they're everything that there's just that's the default setting is hey right there's not a lot of uh there's not a lot of positive energy that goes on unless you creating yourself um but i came out to to a brother who was pretty well known on youtube and i look

exactly like him so like i i i'm getting in the van to be to be sent to the airport to go to the halfway house, right? And I'm walking in, and this is the time of COVID, right? And I got a mask on, and I had a goatee that would stick through the mask. It was like this long at the time. And I'm walking, and this guy comes walking straight up to me, gunned the whole works, and he goes, I know who you are? And I thought to myself, holy crap, dude.

You know what I mean? Like, there's no such thing as freedom. Like, I've been out of prison two minutes. They're going to bust my balls. I'm like reaching for the paperwork. And he's like, you're the dude on the internet that eats the peppers, right? And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's me, man. But I came out to this world where everybody liked me.

And it was a pretty bizarre thing because, you know, let me, let's be really honest. Our former vocations are somewhat popular now to listen to, which is an ironic thing. If you think about it, but it's insane. It is. It really is. You know, that, but here's the deal, though. I understand there are parts of it I really understand. Like what you did is fascinating, right?

Like, like, no joke. I've spent time looking at how you did what you did. And to me, that's fascinating. And there were people in prison who, you know, you would hear angles of how people were doing certain things and you would just go, oh, my God. Or just opportunities. Like, you went through Oklahoma City, right? So you've been, oh, yeah.

So I'm in Oklahoma City and I'm in a dorm. And I'm sitting down late nights that you can, it's a dorm. So you can come in the middle of the night and do whatever you want, right? So I'm sitting out watching the TV at like the middle of the dorm. night. And this dude comes and sits down and he goes, I've just found out I'm going to such and such a camp. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm not going to go to a camp, bro. The two of us were having a conversation. And he proceeded to spend two and a half hours telling me what really happened in Benghazi. And this dude, like, had his paperwork and everything. He was charged with insider

trading. One count of insider trading, it was given 50 years. This cat, they're burying him because of what he knows and but it was so bizarre because you you hear these stories and and you know uh i had um cerebral infarction right and um so i was i had to walk with the cane i i've had enough head injuries from skiing that i've got some issues and and i'm doing considerably better but i used to have to use a cane and um and it uh it caused um it caused some problems getting around on the yard right when i uh when i left victorville um i got stabbed right and was life lighted off the eye because they sent this dude

to go stab the old white guy with the cane right and I was literally like the other old white guy with the cane yeah yeah and it it costs dude it cost dude everything like the guy that the guy that did it you know that was a career ender

you stab their own person and he's a different race like that is an absolute career ender but once I got sent off that yard and they started to look at my head and they found out about the cerebral infarction. They wanted to send me to Springfield. And I'm like, I'm not going to Springfield. You go to Springfield, you die. Like, I've never, no inmate comes back from Springfield. Like, have you ever known anybody that comes back? They get sent there and they die. And I'm like, I'm not going there. And so they gave me

like, they said, but you can go to Terre Haute, the pen. And I'm like, that's a job out. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not, you know, no, I'm not going there. And they're like, well, those are your options, right? Those are the two. So I went through the shot caller in the yard and I'm like, hey, dude, I'm in a pretty weird situation. And he's like, you know, are you, are you a career criminal? Like, are you going to be back? Can you going to spend the rest of your life in here? I'm like, maybe, you know, like, he goes, then maybe, then maybe you shouldn't go, you know, just a buck on this thing and you're just probably going to do the rest of this rip in the hole. And he's like, but he goes, I'll sign off on you going there. He said, but on the last day,

your treatment, right? Whatever, how long they're going to, they're going to be treating you on. The last day, you leave that yard by punching somebody. Like, you go find a freak and you take them out. You leave the yard that way, you're good. And this dude was about as high up as you could get. So I got him to write it down and had the kite and everything else. And then when my last day was up, I went, yeah, I don't think I'm going to hit anybody. You know, but by that point, I had about three years of sobriety in me and I just said, this isn't going to be my career. Right. And the next spot was, you know, was Sheridan and a solid white boy can't walk Sheridan. You know, like all of the rules are so stupid in the feds that, you know, you got to fire on somebody

because this person's crime. And look, I'm not, I'm not a fan of freaks. No one is. Right. But, but they really are getting to the point where they're almost at every institution, you know, they're really, very few that that aren't, that don't have them anymore. But But when I was on that yard, Drew Peterson, you know, that cop, he was on that yard. Right. I was, I had a job as a secretary in the kitchen. And he was my assistant for almost two years. Year and a half, I worked with him, you know, eight hours a day.

And yeah, just really, really funny. Because every day, I just walk in every day and look at him. At the time, there was a girl that was still in my life. And I took a picture of us together. I wrote on the back, what I wrote. It was a marriage counselor. Melodoma said, this is my new marriage counselor. No, I actually heard that cat slip up and, you know, you talk to somebody long enough.

He slipped up and made a huge error and said something about his missing wife being dead. And I called him on it like that. I said, she was what? She was what, true? What did you just say? And he goes, well, that's what everybody says. I go, oh, you're slipping, old man. I'm like, you are slipping.

I said, it doesn't matter. I mean, that dude's, you know his story. Like, once he got caught, he tried to hire somebody. But he tried to hire a prison snitch, a jailhouse snitch to kill the prosecutor. He's never getting out. I mean, unless he escapes. He's never getting out. And he's a, but yeah, who else came through?

There were a lot of famous people that came through that yard because of the medical. Gucci Man, Maine came through there. Yeah, there was a bunch of a bunch of people. Is that where Madoff died? No, Madoff died at Butner. Butner, yeah, yeah, you're right. Butner, and I'll tell you something. The word is, Butner is the sweetest place in the entire world. Like if you could put up with some of the people that are there, like you talk about facilities.

Like they actually have programs. You know how they BS the world and tell them that, you know, we can do all of these things. There are classes ready for us to take and all of this. If there's a class there, it's because you're doing it through a correspondence course or you're, or there's somebody hooking you up in the library. You know, you're working with somebody. But it's amazing how little they do to rehab anybody inside the joint. Yeah, no, it's up to you. Yeah. And then, and the, you know, you, they really do turn people into, uh, into things that they weren't, you know, you show up in the, the concept that put and work in, I know

that this is one that freaks people out every time they hear it. But, you know, I remember hitting Victorville and I was not a young kid, you know, by the time I got to Victorville, I was like 46 or 47 years old. And then again, I'm walking with a cane, right? I've got this, uh, this diagnosis that, uh, it's not particularly good that has to do with my brain and i went walking into the shot call and figured you know i had my paperwork i was clean i figured i'm an old guy right so you know i've done my time you know i've been through the special management unit i'm not going to have to he's like you're fourth in line i said what he's like

the footwork at your fourth in line what to do i walk with a freaking cane he's like i'll send two or three guys with you you know we just want to make sure you're down for the uh you know come down for the team i was like all right dude i have a i have a buddy that like had to you know put in work and he said he was like i got so lucky like we they It was him and like two other guys. And the other guy punched him. Punched the dude, like got into the fight and boom. The guy hit the green, the whole thing.

And he's like, so we, you know, and then we of course immediately, you know, took off. And that was it. He's like, me just standing in the room was me putting in work. He's like, so I didn't. You know, I think a lot of times, yeah, they just want to know that you're not pumping Kool-Aid, right? That you actually have a little blood in your veins. And, you know, like the, when I got to Victorville, the, the, the FCI, I was 45 seconds in my cell, and they just sent the guy in that went, like, you know, came in and squared off and just started to go.

And, you know, a white dude, like, and I'm looking at this guy, just trying to figure out, like, where do I know this dude from? Because obviously, he's really pissed off. You know what I mean? Right. He's, he's getting into position. And I just, I ran at him to, you know, the first good swing I could get. And then, like, an army of dudes came piling in and basically just separated everybody and kind of held us. And the guy was like, hey, calm down, calm down.

He's like, just a heart check, brother. He's like, it's, you know, it's just the first part of the deal. It's just a heart check. You're good. You're good. I was like, no, it's not really the welcoming committee I was hoping for. You know, I was hoping for maybe a couple of ramen soups and some shower slides. You know, you guys are making it way harder than it has to be.

Holy shit, man. It is the dumbest. No, it really is. It is so messed up. I don't think people realize the, the world that you live in, you know, when you get, once you walk into that facility. You know, I've been making the rounds quite a bit talking about this, Danny Mastison, freak, you know, what what this cat is in store for. But can you imagine coming from the life that this dude's been living? And he's going to, he's going to walk into a,

into a Cali prison as a, I was going to listen, if, if he was going to a low security prison, like if he was going to the low security, Coleman, the low security prison, it wouldn't be that big of a deal, you know, but now, now there may be a guy that. might fucking, you know, they may smash him. He's probably not going to get to watch TV. But that's honestly, that also, let's say 50-50 that people give him a hard time, the 50% chance that people kind of see him as a celebrity and don't bother him at all, he's not going to be able to watch TV.

You know, he's not, some things, guys are going to give him a hard time, but he is going to walk the yard. He is not going to, he is going to be able to eat. He isn't probably going to get that hard of a time at a low, but a California. you prison and he's going and he's going to be at a three man i mean with he's got he's got two counts and one with the use of firearm so this cat he's not going to be looking at at a low of any kind like this dude's going to be doing he's going to be on a real yard um but by the way i'm absolutely no disrespect to anybody that's listening there are two coleman's right because you know

i said you know he'd be on a freak yard you there are two coleman's right there's a coleman one and there's a coleman too and they uh they have a uh sex dependence on one and not on the other well they i know you were at coleman i'd want to do okay no they have so they have two pins right one is kind of a dropout pin right like it's kind of you know retirees um yes and then you have the medium and then you have the low you have the low and then you have the camp so the camp used to be women it's now men so they're all male at matter of fact my wife was at the the camp at coleman when it was for women. So, but yeah, I mean, if he went to the low, like at the medium, I don't know.

I don't think he's going to walk, walk the yard. I think he could have, I think he could walk like, I left the last prison I was at with Sheridan. And Sheridan is soft as hell, bro. And it's a white boy yard. It's a white guy yard primarily. And it is soft as hell. But I think he could walk that yard.

I think eventually he'd get cracked. Somebody's going to get him. Because what happens is in the feds, they're going to send somebody to that yard. who's a solid right down peckerwood who's going to walk in and be like there are what here point me to the most famous one right because i'm leaving the yard tonight yeah they don't want to watch that yeah i watched that at uh at you know it happened routinely we had one one row in every unit that was all essays that's just how they did it they would call it chomo row and uh you know a guy would come in and he'd say oh wait a second you got you know you us ex found us on this yard and we'd be

like yeah I'd be like I can't I can't be on this yard you know I'm I won't spit out any of the gang names because I don't want to get anybody angry but he he's affiliated and if he's affiliated with one of the with one of the white you know organizations they cannot walk that yard right they cannot step foot on that yard or they're considered you know that's a career anger they'll kill you for that so um yeah it's uh it's a it's a screwy world it really is it's a screwy world and you sit there and just hear the dumbest things I was uh I was at Victorville, the pen, and the Shaw caller came to me and said, hey, we need you to do something for us. And I said, you know, I really distinctly remember putting work in here. Like, you know,

I did this. Right. And like, I went overboard. Like, I really put work. And I got busy with it. I figured if I made a show of it, you know, and snarled a little bit and maybe spit once or twice, they would, they would not send me a second time. And he goes, no, the thing is, this is, this is your boy like this is your homeboy right this is why you got we're sending you and um and it was a guy did just done a ton of drugs with a really close friend and he just he ran up some debts with some people and he's like we're not kicking him off the yard but he's getting stabbed like that's how you know and you're going to stab him and i was like holy crap so i said yeah i'm i said you got a piece i don't even have one and i'm open to buy myself a day right and he's like yeah don't try hold

Bobby Rick. And he comes back and he brings an ice pick. He's got, he's got a wooden handle that's round, done nice with a little bit of leather. And he's taken the rod out of a typewriter. Right. So there's about that much him sticking out. And it is sharp as hell as point. And I walked in and I said, hey, what's going on, man? And my friend's name was Terry. I'm like, Terry, I'm here to, I'm here for a reason. You know why I'm here? And he's like, hopefully to get high. I was like, No, that's not the reason. I'm like, I'm here to stab you, bro. I'm like straight up and he goes, oh, crap.

I'm like, yeah, I said, so I'd like to hang someplace where we don't hit any vital organs or anything like that. You know what I mean? But I got to do this. And he's like, yeah, I got it. I'm like, how about right here, right? That way it'll look like maybe I was going for your heart, you know, and maybe I'm a killer. Whatever, right? He's like, all right.

So I get this guy and he's leaning up right against the mirror. And I'm like, all right, dude, on three, right. You got this. He's like, yeah, man. I'm like, just take a deep breath. I promise, it's going to be quick, it's going to be over. And I went one, two, and right on two just went in there. And he looked at me, he's like, it all happened to three.

I was like, I didn't want you to move or do anything. But I poke this dude good. Like, I gave him a really good one. And then I walked out and I went back and I handed the dude and it was blood dripping off and he was like, you stabbed him. I was like, yeah, you told him to stab him. I'm like, I stabbed him. And, yeah, unfortunately, he got a really horrendous infection.

We actually really got a bad infection from it. But that's not my fault. that's you know idea but that crap happens more often than you think for real that to everyone watching that happens way more often than you think like i i got disciplined maybe about eight times evictive of but for buying dope from Mexicans they got on this kick that that you could not buy dope outside your race because it had been causing bites and i'm like i got a drug who's the white guy selling dope and they're like there's no white guy selling heroin well then i'm buying dope from this guy and you can kick the crap out of me and the more you kick the crap

I mean, the more dope I'm going to need, because it's a pain killer anyway. So, but they would send somebody down and, you know, about the third time, like, I had a friend who would come in and I'd have it on the table and I'd be like, you know, just get this over with, right? You know, come in there and crack, hit you one in the head and walk out to this one. It's absolutely retarded. What an awkward conversation. Right?

Just to be like, listen, I'm going to have to stab you. I feel bad, you know? Yeah, exactly. This is not personal. You know this, right? We're homeboys. The reason they sent me is because we're homeboys. Right.

But I do have to stab you. there's no there's no getting around this one and then they do the oh look he says if i got a if i got a razor right and if i just kind of like got myself right there he's like i'd be leaking like hell and people would think that you did it i'm like yeah that's not going to work bro i'm like seriously it's not going to work i'm like you know what's going to happen if they think i didn't do this right somebody's going to be coming in going hey rock i want to i'm here for not a good reason you know i don't want someone visiting me the way i got to visit you but yeah i had the to have the dude and that kind of crap happens you know prison was boredom nonstop until it wasn't

and then when it wasn't it was horrifying and you know we uh i saw some just once that spice stuff started to really uh take off in there and everybody started smoking that garbage i'm sitting there playing poker at a poker table and a guy jumped from the top tier onto the poker table and broke his thigh like i mean broke it so it did this number you know what i mean like you could look at it and tell that it was broken and no rhyme or reason like i've absolutely no idea what he was planning on doing like if you know if you just thought he was stepping down or but there were so many crazy things that happened with that with that garbage were you in uh with the with the k2 oh yeah they would run around strip and they would guys would strip naked and run around the

compound at 7 30 at night and you've got 20 guards trying to grab this guy naked and i honestly to god people i honest to god i have seen this i saw a black dude who was was he was bigger than the cat from the green mile right i worked with him at unicorn a gentle giant but one of the biggest dudes you've ever seen in your life and he walked out of the shower dragging a towel like linus right uh just on the ground behind him naked as a j bird and he's just calmly strutting across the entire day room and he's just i mean he's huge and there was uh two cops on and one was a woman and so the the male went up and he goes hey man uh you are right he goes yeah he goes what the hell are you doing he goes he goes going back to

miss elbows and the guy was like oh okay you see him go for the deuses you know like get me some backup um but it happened so often that they just started calling it an incident like they would say incident lockdown and you know these uh or somebody crying and you know in the middle of the day room just sobbing and you're looking around going oh yeah that stuff looks like fun let me let me let me try some of that funny about that is that we wake up at two o'clock in the morning and you've got a guy laying in his bed screaming uncontrollably and then so now like he's been screaming

for like five, ten minutes and finally of course the CEO realizes okay something's going you know they're doing the rounds or something or he finally hears it and he's like fuck I'm going to go check this out so he goes checks it out then they turn the lights on then as the cops are all starting to come and you're just laying

in your bed like waiting for watching the cops walk by now the lights are on it's like everybody's awake and everybody they're screaming staying yourselves and then all of a sudden you hear another guy start screaming and then in the next unit because there's a hallway that connects them the next unit you hear another guy screaming because when the one guy started screaming the other guys realized i have the same batch he has that's the good shit yeah and then they take it it's like

that's the good stuff he's screaming he's on fire he thinks crabs are eating him and now you think oh that's a good stuff let me get some of that yeah it's exactly i'm looking i'm looking for the the satanic panic right this guy comes up i'm playing poker and he's like hey uh i'm maybe here the guy that freaked out yesterday that they had the hog tie i'm like yeah i'm like you want to know him he's like no what uh what was the name of the stuff he was smoking you guys got a name for it i was like i don't know dude so he comes back like two minutes later he's like hey satanic panic is that the stuff i'm like you want to smoke something called the satanic panic you knock yourself out cowboy have a good time um yeah i i watched just the craziest crap in the world and and the guy

will come back and do it again like you see this person normally that would get you to to maybe go clean you know um when we went on they cut the the warden at uh victorville um at the fcii um i was there for it he got them from here all the way to the waist 72 staples it was ugly um yeah really bad but during that lockdown in a five-day period we had four people that there were a bad batch of that stuff came through and we had four deaths in a week and they came in and basically just said we're taking over you know the it was the deuce it was number two because they have two fciis there uh fci i won't an fcii two and the deuce was just so out of control that they came in and just took over like they started moving anybody who was in any kind of authority

out because it just got so so crazy so quick like the inmates took over that yard on Cinco de Mayo that the they went to pat down a serenio and he had told everybody he's like this dude's super disrespectful every day coming back from chow if he does it tomorrow it's on and you know how those boys are right if one of them goes they all go so you know this this cop got rough and uh he jumped on this cop and they came from everywhere it looked like something from the movies dude like they were they were on point ready to go and they came from everywhere and it was the only time in my life I saw guns on a prison yard like they came in it was like the National Guard kind of crap like it got crazy and uh but everybody

got locked down and you got people who are sitting on tons of this stuff and in many cases not mixed so they don't have denatured alcohol they don't have all the stuff they need so they're in there taking the powder right and putting it on a can and smoking it and that stuff turns off people's computers quick as hell. I saw some crazy, like you said, and every single time, someone will go, ooh, dude, who's selling the stuff that just caused Homeboy to jump off of the tier, right? I'm trying to get a hold of some of that. It's bug spray. You know, you know, it's funny when you mentioned, talk about the guy that are putting in work. You know, guys, whenever, I'm sure you get this, whenever some people find out you were in prison,

they're always like, bro, what's that like? Were you scared? Were you worried? Were you there? this. And, you know, I always say, you know, well, I mean, initially I was, I was worried, but you very quickly realized that, like, if you get stabbed in prison, you probably had it coming. Like, they're not randomly, they're not randomly running up, stabbing people. Like, like, they gave you a chance. You borrowed money. You were, or you were disrespectful. You broke your credit card the first time, right? You get all kinds of chances. No question. Right. But, like, they're not just running up and doing it because you glance. answer somebody wrong.

I mean, not that that doesn't happen, but that could happen on the street. It just as easily. The one that always throws me off is that, you know, you, the first question you're right is always where you've freaked out.

How did you deal with that? And the second question is always, you know, did you ever see guys getting raped? Like, that's a question that people Yeah, you're right. And it's probably because of movies,

but, you know, it just isn't like that. You know what I mean? I will tell you, I heard a guy having a pretty bad time. And, well,

I was going to say, too, I've heard that, but that wasn't even in, that was in the Marshall's holdover. Yeah, you're probably as bad off there as you're going to be anywhere. I mean, the feds, honestly, you know, the feds don't give you. There are a lot of things because of the Zimmerman, they took away the weights, they took away the video games, they took away, you know, you can't have Playboy magazines or anything like that.

They changed all of these laws and they made it a little bit more restrictive. But I think you get a different class of inmate, or you used to especially, You used to get a different class of inmate. And you're an intelligent cat. You could get off of a bus and in a very quick fashion figure it out. You know what I mean? But how many times did you watch somebody come in that wasn't that bright? You know what I mean?

Like it's a scary thing to watch somebody come into a system that you know is just going to eat them alive. You know what I mean? Like especially when you get up to the higher custody levels, I watched kids come in and, you know, the vultures would descend on these kids. And they would go over to them and be like, hey, you want to get high? You know, there's everything here, dude, I can get you. I can get you this, that, and the other. And you don't pay for it whenever you want.

You don't have to pay for it now, whatever. And they'll run that dude, $10,000 in debt. They'll do half that dope with them. Then they'll smash that dude off the yard and they'll get the next kid that comes. And there are people that do their entire life. You know, that's their business model is they run up the next young kid into debt and destroy his career, send them to a dropout yard, whatever. And there's also people that get to prisons who live that way. how many times you see a guy get to prison and you know you're like how long you've been down

six years he's going a store to buy a radio you're like yeah that's not good right the last year he left they took him for every single thing he had you know the gambling degenerates there's uh you know when you get in there there's a lot of people that get in trouble gambling there's a lot of people that get in trouble uh with dope if you don't if you're not doing dope and you're not gambling you're right there's no chance you're gonna get staff if your paperwork's cool like you're if you're in for for something that they don't find reprehensible you know what i mean um i was going to say i go ahead sorry well i think i think i think honestly surviving the feds i think it comes down to brain pan i've watched some people um get killed in there that uh that just plain it's just

stupidity it literally is just you know like how dumb do you have to be i watched a guy front uh four sheets of paper this size of k2 right four sheets and you know the for prospective people they're literally selling pieces of paper the size of an eyelash like they're cutting these things that small and he gets all of these sheets and I'm like you know what do you owe on that and he's like 4,000 a page and I just I'm like dude don't smoke one hit of this if you smoke one hit of this you're going to this is going to be the end of your career because you're going to smoke the entire thing and you're going to end up owing these guys and these aren't you know these aren't the kind of guys you want to owe money to you know and he proceeded

to smoke the entire thing and um and they just you know they smashed them off the eye destroyed him but you can watch it it's it's terrible to watch if you after you've done a little bit of time you watch people come in in your life brain wreck you know this kid's gonna this kid is gonna run up that's this kid's going to get his ass kicked and it's it's sad because you know the you you then end up there are guys who were trapped in there for 25 or 30 years and you know in the first three weeks you're there you do something that's going to make you hang out with the likes of, you know, Larry Nassar and, you know, those people, you know, it's a pretty messed up system.

It really is. But, you know, you got to tip your hat to anybody that survives it and gets out and stays out because they really designed it to bring you back in. I mean, they really do. The, you know, my paper just, I just killed my paper less than two months ago. And, uh, how old have you been out? I got out in 2020. okay so you had what four years what's that i had three years i had three years of paper but they

would not let the paper start until you leave the halfway house oh so i had to do i had to do a year a halfway house because if i had lived the halfway house was anywhere near my home i owned the home but i couldn't go to my home because it was in another state you got to be within what 30 miles or 20 miles or something of the halfway house so i had to do an entire damn year there it did 12 months at the at the halfway house in Oakland and then went home. And then it starts running the three-year tail. But I got through a year and a half. I am one of those inmates who absolutely did get them to kill the paper at a year and

a half. It does happen. I did 50% of my street and then got it killed. I'd never failed a drug test. I never missed a meeting. I never missed a payment. There was nothing like that. And on top of that,

I had by the time, you know, they were putting in the paperwork for that. The lifeboat had four or five thousand. and, you know, a quarter of a million people had showed up for a drug meeting, you know, and I think that probably carried a little bit of weight, you know, if you were doing that to get off paper, a thousand one hour videos is a lot of effort to get off paper. I think the, uh, the judge may finally believe that I'm silver. The judge didn't like me.

No, I, the more intelligent you are, the less they care for you. Do you find that? I, well, my, you know, yeah, my judge didn't, although he did give me a great quote. um he uh for my that i put on the cover of my book i put it's uh the quote is uh the complexity what what is it the complexity nefariousness of cox's crimes are breathed or cox's fraud are is breathtaking um and i remember thinking nice you know i know you didn't mean it that way but it's nice right um appreciate your honor thanks yeah so it was five years is I got five years paper.

I'm still on it. Really? Yeah. So at two and a half, you know, you can. Oh, no, no. I'm, I've got, I already tried that. Oh, and they, they shot you down. No, I got, I was $6 million.

So. Oh, yeah, but I mean, no one pays the restitution. No. So, so. Seriously. Like I pay every month. I pay sometimes it's $200, sometimes it's $900, but 50. Yeah.

But, well, but I'm saying when I, at, at three years, I put in for it. And my probation officer said, look, you know, it's, it's, the problem is, is he owes this money. And based on our policy, if you owe money, we don't recommend you get off early. And so the judge said, probation didn't recommend it. Boom. Yeah. And well, and I have been told that it's almost a rubber stamp. If you can get the people at probation to, uh, to do it.

Um, the incredible thing is, so the prosecuting attorney, um, was a lovely blonde woman, almost the exact same age as my wife. the two of them did not like each other long before i ever came into the picture they hated each other um one is a defense attorney one is a prosecuting attorney um i entered the picture and i said some really horrendous things about this woman on a uh recorded phone call that also um got to get played something about um helping everyone in her family uh that's the way from cancer and that her uterus would fall out something along those lines i don't remember exactly exactly the verbiage but it was not it wasn't good and uh yeah the the judge said to me um honestly the

the quote that that i took away from my last sentencing was he said there is not a doubt in my mind that you're the smartest man in the room right now but you've done nothing with it you know every gift you ever got you did nothing with and i said well if you let me out you know like short in my sentence i actually have a plan and the incredible thing is the plan like i described the lifeboat So when the time came that I came back, you know, and I also said to him, and you know what, the day is going to come and it has already happened, you know, where you get a, you get an email from a mother that said, when you described how to tell a kid was on dope, if I had heard this three years ago, my sons would still be alive right now, I believe that. And I just like to send those to the judge, you know, forward those over to them and say, you know, because the blood's on my hands for what I did. But you really threw the book. I mean, like he, he basically. You know how it is. You know what you're going to get before you go in. I mean, within reason, you have a pretty damn good idea what you're going to get.

The judge might go a little higher. My judge might go a little lower. I was walking in there for 34 months. That's what I was walking in for. Like we had all been agreed. Yeah, we had all been agreed to 34 months for all because all I was going to plead to was one count fell in the possession of a firearm. And when we got in there, the San Bernardino thing, the judge was like,

there's no way in God's green earth that I'm. I mean, I'm taking this deal. He's like, there is no way. This is happening. It's not. And there was a, yeah, it was ugly. And I mean, the maximum that it get carried, I think I was like four months. He said, I would like to give you a little light at the end of the tunnel.

He said, so I'm going to run your probation violation at the same time, right? Because I was on federal paper when I got caught. He said, so to give you a little light at the end of the tunnel, I'm going to, which, I mean, amounted to did nothing. So I hit him with a good looking out, Your Honor. Appreciate you. Good looking out, Doc. I really do appreciate you. So what was your hustle inside?

So I taught the, this is funny, I taught the real estate class. Yeah. And, you know, the ace course. Yeah, yeah. And so what I would do, you know, you get 30 guys show up, 35 guys maybe. They show up and, which really, I mean, you know, it was actually I taught a great course. But so they would show up. up and I'd say listen you guys like I know I know that at least half of you don't want to be here

right and I'd say so I understand right now I'm going to give you the opportunity to leave find me later on on the compound or before class or you can wait around for the next 45 minutes and after the class and we'll talk about how to how to make sure that you get your certificate okay so you know and then so they were all I'd say this isn't I'm not fucking with you about being a you know now in the medium half the class would get to leave in the low because there were so many people snitching on each other that they'd stick around but they wouldn't show up the next time you know so like they'd come up to be within the next day or two say bro what was up with that and i'd go look man you know like give me depends on how much how desperate

how many people really dropped out i'd say look give me like three creamers and two coffees you know within the next fucking few weeks and i'll fill out all your paperwork i'll sign you every time. I'll fill out your task. That's it. And then what I would do is then I'd say, and I always tell them show up the last day of class to get the certificate. Of course, they wouldn't. So I'd end up having to track all these guys down, but they would pay me. You know? So, and I knew where they were, of course, because I know what unit, you know, they'd write down their name and their unit. And then they'd show up and they'd give me the stuff. And so I would have my, you know, my locker, which was normally pretty empty was at least for

three or four, at least for a couple of months during that. that, you know, the course, it was packed, packed. Right. So you do that for four months, and then you have about a month between and then you start the next class. I teach it like three times a year. I did that for 10 years. But I also, of course, I also wrote, you know, I wrote guys stories. And what happened was after I'd been there, let's say, well, after I went from the medium, in the medium, I was just a GED tutor. So I'm getting paid. You know, I'm getting like 80 or 100 bucks. But I don't really buy anything. I don't do anything. I don't do drugs. I drink coffee. I eat what they give me in the chow hall. That's

it. So when I went after the three years in the medium, when I was the low, that's when I started writing. But I kept, I also taught the real estate class. I taught it the medium. I taught at the medium and I taught it at the low. So the low was the same thing. But then I started writing. And then after about two years, I got a book deal. So I got some money for that. And then another year or so later, I got another book deal. And that was like 3,500 bucks. That was like, big money. $3,500. That's a lot of money.

No, you're a prison millionaire. 3500 bucks. You are a prison millionaire. And then I got, then the, we got these guys in, I got somebody in the Rolling Stone magazine,

and I got a book deal for that. And then we optioned the book deal. So that was like a little over $6,000. So once again, that's a lot of money. It wasn't Christopher Smith, was it? No,

no, it was a guy named Doug Dodd. I got him a book deal. Well, I got him a book deal. with Sky Horse Publishing. I mean, he didn't write the book. I wrote the book. It's a memoir, but I

wrote it. Right. And, you know, so it says, you know, Doug Dodd and Matthew Cox. And then got him and him and his buddies into Rolling Stone magazine. We optioned the film rights to that. And so what's happened is they've optioned it like three or four times. So what happened was I got

one option. And then a few years later, they optioned it again. Got another nice chunk of nice jet. And then I got to the halfway house, got to the halfway house with 400 bucks. Like the second day I was there, I went and bought $300 with her clothes at Walmart. I'm not sure I'd ever been in a Walmart. So, um, great place to come straight from prison to.

Right. Some two choices to Walmart. Yeah. Yeah. I bought that and then what I remember thinking like I called my buddy and he said, I'll give you a job working at a gym. and I remember thinking, okay, well, and he would pick me out, but I was like, fuck, I got to save money for a car, I got to save money for this. And I hadn't been there a week and my ex-wife, I got a phone.

My ex-wife called me. She said, hey, listen, I got another check or I got another envelope from that law firm. I said, what law firm? She's the one that sent you a couple years ago, they, or they've been sending checks every couple, every 18 months to continue, yeah. Get the fuck out of here. I said, open it. She opens it. She goes, yeah, it's like $6,500 or $6,400.

I was like, yes. So I was able to buy a car, pay for a year's worth of insurance. You know, I was fucking thrilled. Yeah. And they've opted to get into 10. I'm not surprised by that at all, though. They're going to continue to do that, you know, until they get ready to do it. It's a great story.

You know what I did? I had, so I used to run the photocopier, right, when I was at Victorville. The greatest hustle I ever had. I ran the photocopier, and they were really tight, right? So doing sports books for people, you know, the bookies all needed. There's a bunch of people that all need photocopies made. And normally, the people charge and that's how they make their money. What I did was I would take your GED test.

So you bring me, you bring me your ID, and I take your ID. I put it on the photocopier, right? And all I do is I swap out my picture on your ID. So I take down the photocopy of that and I go, listen, I lost my ID. but I got a GED test. I got to take this morning. My name is Smith. And I throw it to him.

And the guy would be like, all right, good, go ahead. And I'd sit down and I rip through it. And the GED test, by the time you've done 10 of them, right, it's not a particularly difficult test, right?

So, and you can charge a ton of money to get a cat, a GED. But I'm sitting in there one day, and this guy comes walking in, and he's like, tell me what's going on?

And I'm testing, right? And I'm not telling me. And I'm like, eh, you're not down. I'm like, you know, getting a little bit more sideways. And, you know, I gave him kind of the head nod.

And he's like, GED, man, you don't have a frigging GED. Come on, dude, you got to have a GED. And I'm like, I'm doing that. Oh, come on, dude. You know, and this cop just completely outed me. And he's like, no, that's not his name. And I thought, I figure I'm screwed, right? I'm not.

But the guy that I was taking the test for, yeah, they took him to the hole. I actually got in no trouble for any of that. But I took a bunch, a bunch of GEDs. That was my hustle. And then when I got to the higher custody levels, the crack law was just coming out. So they were, and for those of you who don't know, the crack laws were like five to ten times to one crack to powder, which was determined to be pretty racist because it was primarily a black versus white issue. White guys were snort and the stuff. Black guys were smoking and stuff.

So they finally changed the law to fix the inequity in it, right? Right. And all you had to do if you had the right case was it's boilerplate. you give me your name i put it on the top i mail it off the next guys is the same thing i just put his name on you know you there's you you changed maybe three places it's really easy cut and paste stuff and uh i had been doing it on a yard and when i went to the next yard there was nobody there that like there was nobody like i got there and said you guys aren't filing to get off of the you know the crack laws and they're like i don't even know what you're talking about and i was like i i mean

i had i had people who were helping me you know like i had people uh helping with the because there were so many people. There were just so many people. I helped the blood on credit because this guy said to me, he goes, look, I'm cut off. He goes, no one will even acknowledge I'm alive. He's like, in here, they literally got to leave me alone. He's like, bro, you get me out.

I'm going to take really good care of you. He's like, just please fill this out. And I'm like, you know what, dude, for what it takes. Like, the guy's not going to give me any money. You know, you know the story. Every time someone's about to do, I'm going to leave it. I'm going to mail you this. But I did it anyway.

and I go and I look at my books in the morning and I got like 3,000 and some change more than she'd be there. And I called my life and I said, hey, did you put money on the book? She said, I told you, I would do it by noon. I'm like, so you didn't do it yet. And she's like, no, I'm like, well, you don't need to. And yeah, one of the brothers came up and said, hey, man, did you get that? Because you were supposed to get. I said, yeah, I got it.

I mean, I was charging 200 bucks is what I was charging people to do those things. So I took, guy was a stand-up cat. like he left and actually the only person by the way whoever left prison that did what they said they were going to do I used to tell people like on the way out the door don't even ask me I'm not doing anything for any of you look at least I'm not going to lie about it right right not doing anything for any of you I'm going to get out I'm going to take care of myself I always hated that stuff dude when I get out

I'm going to put shut up don't you're going to get out and forget prison in two minutes if you're smart interesting I hope that they I hope that that gets made into a film. Yeah. Trying to think it would have played at play you. No, no, not me. Oh, this is the other cats, dude. This is his.

Oh, okay. So it's his story that's options. What was his crime? It was a bunch of clean-cut wrestlers in high school that started doctor shopping. And then several of them got, they got scholarships to other, you know, other to college to different universities and so some of the guys

stayed in Florida and kept doctor shopping and they were mailing the pills to them you know and honestly I didn't even want to do the fucking book

but I had written a guy's book a guy named did you ever see the movie Wardogues? Yeah. Okay so you know so Jonah Hill plays a guy named

Ephraim Devoroli right so the real Ephraim Devaroli I wrote his memoir in prison It was called Once a Gun Runner. And so that got published.

I got a deal for that. And that got published. And so when everybody knew I'd written my book. But I hadn't published it. I had a manuscript. I had a literary agent. And then I wrote Ephraim's book. And then everybody knew I'd written it.

So before it even got published, guys are coming out of the woodwork. Bro, you got to listen to my story. You got to listen to my story. So I'm like, all right, well, what's your story? This one guy, Doug Dodd, he's following me around every time he sees me. Bro, you got to hear my story. I'm like, you didn't even have. have a story, bro. You're like doctor shopping. I can

take a rock and hit sick. I can skim off of fucking five fucking guys here. No question. You don't even know, bro. Yeah, he's like, you don't even know. So, and he's such a jerk off. So I sat down one day and I said, all right, what's the story? And he started telling me the story and I

thought, it's not a bad story. I said, the thing is, you don't have any publicity. And he's like, oh, there's an article. There's one article. This is one article. Okay, listen. I said, everybody's got one article. I said, so one article in a local shitty newspaper, okay, fine. And I was like, that's not good enough. I said, here's what I'll do.

Here's what I'll do for you. I'll write a synopsis of your story, basically like an article. Right. 6,000, 8,000 words. I'll mail it to some reporters. And if I can get one of those reporters to get you into a magazine and that'll give you some publicity, I'll write your story. He's like, you think you can do that?

I'm like, no, I know. I don't think I can do it, but I can try and do it. I mean, I said, I do all kinds. I put effort into all kinds of shit that's never going to happen. Right. So I write this article. I sent it to about eight different reporters. I think like four of them, three or four of them got back with me. Like, three of them were like, look, man, if you can wait six months to a year, I'll get to this. Like, it's a good story. You wrote a great article here. And I used to, I just call them synopsies, right? But they always say there are articles. So to me, an article is published. So, and I'm like, um, One guy came back and said, listen, I can jump on this right away. And I was, okay, well, let's do it. So he ended up, there's a whole thing there. We were, it ended up going to Rolling Stone magazine. And Rolling Stone said, let's do it. And the article was supposed to come out.

I was supposed to be, it was written from him, he and I. And the last minute, he told me Rolling Stone didn't want to have my name associated with the article because I was in prison. Now, I later found out that wasn't true. The editor at Rolling Stone magazine told me, bro, your name was never on the article. Like, I've never seen, I saw your board just did you there. He just fucked me over. But listen, when they optioned it, I was a part of the option. Now, you know, I, I didn't.

And at that point, that made me realize that life rights were valuable. So when I, we optioned this guy's life rights and I got a little check, you know, not a big check. Like these, they optioned it for like 50 grand. I got a small point like 15% and after the lawyer and everything I but whatever that's fine so um no I'm not 15% I think I was 7.5% or something anyway the point is clean themselves brother yeah it does so well then what happened was the next guy comes to me said bro I want you to write my story it was like I'll write your story but you have to sign you have to sign over your attach your life rights to the story that I'm writing and I

own it. Now, I'll give you half of whatever I make, but I'm not doing it for free. And if I'm going to put all my money and effort into this, then I deserve to have something. If I can turn it into something. And let's face it, right now, you've been locked up for seven years. You've never done shit with your story. And what are the odds you're going to? Right. Well, when I get out, I'm thinking about writing a book. Well, great. Good luck. Let me know how that happens. How that works. Did I turn around? Wait a minute, wait a minute. Right.

If you haven't written your story while you were incarcerated, you're not going to write. You're not going to do. Yeah, absolutely. And so I started writing these guys' stories, you know, and so far it's worked out. Like I've gotten out. I've gotten some, there's interest. I don't put a lot of effort into it because I started the YouTube channel and I, you know, and it's taken off.

It's done, you know, it's not huge, but it's paying all my bills, which is great. I'm thrilled. Well, and it's cool content. And here's the thing. If you put up good content, eventually something happens. Absolutely, absolutely right. And when did you start yours? About two years ago.

I started at July of 21, I guess. How often you post? Daily. We do meetings every single day. And it really does, here's what it really comes down to, man. It's me talking for an hour. And there are days that that's very centered on recovery. And then there are days that it could be just about freaking anything because what it comes down to is I could be going won, won, won, won't, what happens is a lot of people get it in the life because I do everything live and people get into the chat and start to build relationships and you get people who have never said out loud, I have a dream problem, right?

People that never would say that would never enter a 12-step program because the idea of standing up in a room and saying, I'm Tommy Schofelma, the heroin turns their stomach, you know, because people are so afraid of public speaking. The entire concept of what they want them to do is retarded. And then on top of that, you've got courts that are making every single person who gets caught with a lousy dime bag have to go to do 90 days of, you know, of A.A. or N.A., right? Anything that you do, the judge is going to make you go to A.A. or N.A. So you've got an entire room full of people that don't want to be there that are wasted. So the people that actually want to get sober, walk in and look around and just go, good God, this is my option, right? Like this or the bar, I think I'll go to the bar. And what we do is a little different.

And when I started it, I thought, I don't want to get high anymore ever. So if I do this and I do it a couple of times a day and, you know, if I start looking like I'm slipping, people will call me on it. And, you know, pretty soon there was a following. And then it was a larger following. And then the following got a little bigger. And now we're at about 10,000. And we're growing by about 130 people a day, which is a pretty good clip. Like I'm into the growth cycle right now.

I feel blessed to beat hell that people will listen to me, you know what I mean? I really do, especially because, you know, I, I struggle with it, bro. I really do. Like, I did a lot of damage. I spent a lot of time really up and up, you know what I'm? And I carry some regrets. I really do. I think some people get out.

Like, I dig this genre. I really do. I love watching Sammy the ball. I absolutely love watching Sammy the Bulls, you know, and I know a lot of people hate Sammy the Bull. I really do. I love the content. But it's a very interesting genre. And if people have their way, it's all I would talk about. I promise you. It literally would be all I would talk about. Because we've done some pretty unusual scams and some pretty unusual, some of the ways that we rip stuff off was pretty funny. But yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to focus really on trying to help. cats and the lifeboat's done that we've been we've been really blessed you know so yeah yeah i feel i feel uh i feel blessed to be out alive and uh and sober you know what i mean if you think about i mean how many of our mates actually make it out and uh and stay out it's uh it's pretty terrifying well you know what you know what's interesting is like literally months before i was

getting out i was thinking to myself like you know you're going to rent somebody's spare room you know you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna write when you can write you're gonna get a job at McDonald's and then maybe you'll get a job selling used cars and maybe you'll get a job you know whatever you're gonna do what you know because I didn't know what YouTube is I'd never been on YouTube it just come out like a couple years before I went into prison and I didn't I don't think I don't ever recall having been on it I've never been yeah I was nearly feel pretty confident I've never been on YouTube it um certainly didn't really know what it was I mean know what it is because you're watching TV and they mention it or something right I don't

know what it is. I didn't know what a podcast. We're a little old. We're a little old, I think, for the, yeah, we're the last generation. The term podcast didn't even come into existence until I had been locked up four or five years. You know, so didn't know what that was. And so I remember laying in bed thinking, how are you, what are you going to do to survive? I had nowhere to go. I stayed every day in the halfway house. Didn't even try and go anywhere else. Why would I? They take 30 percent. I can't live anywhere for 30. percent and they feed me right you know right so you know does it suck there sure would have sucked if i had a wife and a kid and and and you know somebody out there you know who wanted me out there

but nobody did so you know and so i stayed every day i moved into someone's spare room and i started doing you know i kind of figured out youtube slowly not quickly and resisted and then started doing it and i'm making a living doing something that didn't exist that's insane to me. And I used to joke when these guys were like, what are you going do when you get out? I was like, I'm going to figure out a way to make money doing, just being me. And they were like, how's that? I said, I don't know. They were like, what do you mean? I said, I'm thinking just write stories about criminals and maybe I can sell books and maybe I can do something like that. Like, I didn't really know. And people had told me what a podcast was.

Now you got to do a true podcast. What is that? I don't know what that is. And they would show me article and I people tried to explain it that came in no no it's like a TV it's like a like a radio show they but on your phone right I don't have any idea I have no it doesn't make any sense even today it doesn't make sense to me so the idea that that I can post four videos a week and basically talk to people that I enjoy talking to like the truth is I find very seldomly too and i probably shouldn't say this uh it's fine i say all kinds of stupid shit so um the idea that i can talk to a another person and find interest in them for someone who's extremely narcissistic like typically i don't have very much interest in anybody else

i i really appreciate they get out of that kind of honesty i mean that's raw but but do you see what i'm saying like but i get to talk to guys that i'm interested in like i'm sitting here talking to you the whole time. I'm like, right, right. And I'm kicking myself because I'm not asking enough questions, but like, I'm just interested in the story. But if you were an accountant, this would have been a five. This would have been a 10. If I had a lot of discipline, maybe a 15 minute interview, probably five to 10. But if I really was disciplined, I could have dragged it out for 15. But that would have been it. And that would have been me talking half the time. So, so, but no, I, you know, Well, here's the thing, too. I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but, um, so again,

I've been weighing in on the Masterson case a lot and picked up a huge following of people who are ex-Scientologists, got a very large group of people who, uh, who follow my channel who are, who have left Scientology, um, which is odd, but that's how some, sometimes things build on, uh, on, on YouTube, but they, they tend to stick together. Um, and the reason is the, the similarities in language that they speak, because science, I'll just literally speak a different language than other people. It's fascinating. But they lived in such a different world that I think we went through the same thing.

Like you spend 13 years incarcerated and having to having to just live on your wits, right? I mean, people don't really don't have an appreciation for like, I remember an old man saying to me, when you get to prison, you got your word and you got your balls, right? And if your word isn't any good, your balls better be fantastic. Right. Because if you're not, you know, if you give somebody your word and you don't come through, you're going to fight. Like it's guaranteed. And the person isn't going to show up queens of Marksbury rules and stay back to him.

And this one, he's going to come at you with a lock and a sock, right? And doing this number coming in and every time that thing hits you, you're taking six stitches. And the level of violence that exists in there, it's really funny that you said, you know, I'm a bit of a narcissist, right? I don't think that there's anybody that ends up in prison that doesn't have a bit of them, right? Some of us a little more stow than others. And I think sometimes it may be commensurate with IQ for real. I think a lot of times that the cast that you meet in prison who just seem happy as hell to be in there, dumb as a brick, right?

That literally they're just, they're happy to play spades and slap the cards down as loud as they possibly can. And, you know, this is their retirement plan. This is literally where they're going to be spending their golden years. I think I was pretty much in the same place as you were. But I remember very distinctly, and this is so funny because my brother was laughing about it. I was at a party once years ago. And there were some people, Raziness. Back in the day, people, you could get away with that, right?

You could really tear people apart. These days, no one allows that to happen. But everybody was kind of tearing me down for being a bit of a degenerate drug addict and a thief. And one of my friends there said, you know what? They just haven't invented it yet. But someday, they're just going to start paying people for being who they are. And when that happens, Tommy's going to make a fortune. And I remember it like it was yesterday because I remember said it to my brother.

And he's like, how freaking prescient was that? Like that was 35 years ago that this cat was like someday they're just going to pay people for being who, you know, their own personality. And you're going to do just fine. unfortunately I had to spend a little time of the joint listen I'm going to tell you so you know the one thing prison definitely taught me was being to be very honest and and you know because you know like let's say borrowing from somebody you know something like and I'll give you a story like you'll understand it that most people when we were standing in the room and it happened everybody was looking at me like are you insane I was working at the gym and you know you know they give you your bad bag like lunch when you leave the halfway house in the morning. They give you a little bag with like a with like either a peanut butter and jelly or like a bologna sandwich and you get maybe a bag of chips and little packet of a drink mix. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're a little Kool-Aid packet.

And so I go. And so one day and I'd been there, whatever, a month, two months. And I'm just eating my lunch every day. And I can't leave. You know, I can't leave the halfway house, really. I mean, I'm sorry, my job. I eventually figured out I could leave. You know, I trick them into, you know, calling and saying, I have to go do this for my job and whatever.

But initially, I'm still just sitting there. There's a couple months. I'm still scared. You don't want to go back. Yeah. Yeah. So I, and keep in mind, my boss, the guy that hired me, he'll, he'll cover me for anything. But still, I didn't want to pray.

I didn't want to ask it for any favors. So I remember this woman who worked there, her name. Oh, God. What was her name? Damn it. Let's call her Linda. Linda's going to get lunch. And she says, Matt, do you want lunch?

And I made it kind of like a, like, it was a, like a game to try and save as much money as I could. Like, I'm as cheap as possible. I'm eating every day at the halfway house. It's all I eat. So Linda's leaving. No, wait. Her name was Leanne. I'm sorry.

Leanne is leaving and Leanne's going to get lunch. And Leanne says, Matt, do you want me to pick you up something from Jersey mics, let's say. So from Jersey mics. And I went, no, I'm okay. I have my bag lunch. She says, you eat that every day. She was, why don't you get something? And I went, I said, because honestly, I don't have any, I don't have any money.

I don't have money to get, to be buying lunch. It's a luxury I don't have. And she was, I'll buy it for you. And I looked at her. And now, keep in mind, there's four or five people just looking around. They're like, yeah, you know, she's like, I'll pay for it. It's no big deal. And I looked at her and I went, listen, Leanne, I said, if you, I said, let me explain something.

I said, if you're offering to buy me lunch and buy me a lunch. sandwich and you're going to give me that sandwich and you do not expect that it's going to it's reciprocal in any way that at no time in the future will i be going to get lunch and say hey leanne let me buy you lunch today or that you think i'm going to get my paycheck and i'm going to say hey here's that 10 dollars for buying me my lunch the other day said if you were simply buying me lunch out of the goodness of your own heart and at no time do you ever think that i'm going to reciprocate in any way by all means i'll take a sandwich and a diet coke i said Otherwise, I'm good.

I got my bag lunch and I'm okay. And she went, that everybody's looking at me like, Jesus Christ. And she goes, I'm going to get you. She goes, I'm going to get you a lunch and it's going to be okay. And you don't owe me. And I go, okay. And that was it. I love it.

If you were in, had been in prison, you understand that. I'm being clear. I don't want it coming back. I don't owe you shit. Don't ask me. And there is no gray area. There is never any gray area. You lay that shit out like, I used to clock.

too. When I got sober, I ran a punch up. And I ran, so I was in prison, they called clucking. And guys would bring me stuff and I would, I would float them stamps so that they could go smoke K2. That's really what it boiled down to was. I lent money to K2 heads. And they would bring in a brand new pair of shoes, right? You know, brand new pair of Nike high tops in the box or whatever. And, you know, you lend them 10 bucks and they can go buy two hits or whatever. And it's easy money. Unfortunately, you end up having to break a lot of hearts when you say to a guy, no, I'm really not giving you back your MP3 player or your radio or whatever. You know, that's just, you know, you need to get sober or whatever.

But yeah, you would have to lay it out. And I would say to somebody, look, bro, you know, payday is on Thursday. And I will give you until Saturday, because things happen. We're in prison. But Saturday rolls around and you don't have the money. The shoes are no longer yours. You can never refer to them as yours again. You won't say, I got a pair of shoes and in Rocks out because that's not going to happen.

Like, they're my shoes at that point. And I promise you, they're already sold. Like, I got a guy that takes. every pair of Nike's I get at five bucks more than I clock them for so but yeah you're right and if I had been standing in that room it would have made perfect sense to me I ran into something really similar

you get a mentality that you can't leave so apparently I get contacted by a producer who I don't know right but apparently this guy's kind of a big deal but he sends me like four emails it's just one like two words and it's just a very unusual way to communicate and he was like you know if you can get out to Sherman Oaks and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I, so I did you bro, wrote back and I was like, you know what, dude, I'm not trying to be a dick. And I know maybe I'm a Neanderthal or whatever, but like I can't communicate like this, man. I know that talking to people is like, real, like, blasé these days. But if you want me on your freaking show, I probably ought to talk to you first, right? And if you don't want to call and do that, then I guess he'll probably pass. And the funny thing is the dude he called me and he's like, that's the craziest email I've ever had in my life.

He's like, I can't believe you said that to me. I was like, I honestly had no idea why he thought. thought that was odd. You know what I mean? I don't communicate like this, man. You know, it made more sense to me to actually talk. But yeah, you know, I think there are some benefits from the joint, Matt, I really do. I think that you have to be the right person to walk out having received any benefit at all. What you did is you and then changed who you were and you learned to focus in a different way and in a different direction. And that's, that's incredible. It really is because I can't stress enough to anybody that's that's listening to this. Nobody did anything to

help you. Nobody did anything to help you. I mean, that's just not how it works. If you think I got a college degree while I was in, right? Nobody, nobody came and said, here's how you do this, Tommy, we'll make this easy as hell, right? Because we have these grant programs that they tell you about. Okay, somebody's getting money for those grant programs, but they're sure shit not giving it to inmates, right? I went to the smoot and the paper says they take us out of our cell every day and they bloods and crips and put them in the same room so that they can learn how to get along. Like that's it. They literally wrote all that out and we have to take 12 classes per per year in order to get

through the program. I never saw one human being. I got thrown in a cell. They locked the door and that was it. Like till the day I left, that was it. And I remember writing, I, on the 17th of September, I wrote a kite and I said, I have a tooth that has a cavity that hurts so badly. The tooth is viable.

I don't give a shit. Pull it. I don't care. Do whatever you've got to do, but this pain's got to stop. On the 23rd, January, they brought me to medical to do that tooth. And I had been sober at that point,

and I'm buying cocaine from a guy and putting it on the tooth, like literally buying small bags of blow and using this thing just so that I could get through half of the day. And when I went in, the doctor said, oh, yeah, that's a really healthy tooth. You really want me to pull it? I'm like, no, I'd like you to fill it.

And he's like, well, we don't do that on this yard. I'm like, well, then yank it the hell out, you know. But you hear people on the news talk about how, you know, the prisoners get, they get free health care. They get free this. People, if you knew how they feed inmates, if you knew how they take care of you as far as the medicine goes, look, I'm not trying to be controversial in any way. But if you're a doctor in the feds, there's a really good chance you got caught with your hand somewhere that it shouldn't have been. You know what I mean? Like you didn't get that job.

Nobody gets to the top of their field and ends up working in a federal. prison. No. So, and on top of that, we used to always say that medical was the leading cause of death at Coleman. No question. I mean, they would do a long shit. They would let you walk around with hernias.

They would, they would like, listen, I knew guys that went into the medical two, three times complaining a chest pain. One day they walked back and died. Boom. Yep. They tell them indigestion. They tell them it's, you know, come back Tuesday. Drink more water.

Yeah. Get ibuprofen on commissary. Exactly. They sell that on commissary. They sell that on commissary. That's their family. We watched a guy during the lockdown when the warden got cut. My friend had already left the prison, right?

He was out on a day pass, so to speak, for open heart surgery. So the warden gets cut while he's having open heart surgery, completely successful, right? Good surgery. Everything's good. He's 58. They bring him back and make him go to the second floor. this dude after open heart surgery literally cracked his chest he's trying to walk up the stairs and the white boys are banging on the door they're screaming like are you shitting me you're making

this dude well um the following morning he uh you know he was found dead in his cell and as it turns out he didn't get meds like the the medicine that they were supposed to give them he never got and that was when yeah this is when the fed the feds came in they like kicked out everybody they had to take over because people were dropping i mean we lost like six people or it was either five or six people in one week in one week and yeah they don't they don't they don't care people really have a a different idea of what uh of what goes on in there i promise you they do and there's and there's two camps one camp thinks that we are the most baby people in the entire world and that as soon as you go in there they're like here's your

tv here's a very comfortable pillow i don't know look i never got a pillow once i had to buy my I've never got. And every time there was a shakedown, I lost my pillow. Every single freaking shakedown, I lost my pillow. And then I would have to buy another one. We would go to the guys in leather craft and, you know, they'd buy the stuffing to fill teddy bears or whatever or, you know, whatever that. And you'd buy the stuffing from them and you'd make your own pillow and you'd put it in a pillow case. Yeah.

Can you imagine that people? You literally do not get a pillow. Imagine I'm just 13 years of, ah, you don't need a pillow. You can't be too bad for your neck. just sleep, you know, unbelievable, unbelievable. Yeah, it's a, I think it's a testament, man. And it's, it's an awful lot of fun to talk to you, it really is. Okay.

I find myself craving contact from people from the inside. I think that there's, there's something to that. You spend 13 years living in a culture that has its own language completely, right? Its own, its own customs, its own language, its own everything. And then it gets completely yanked out from underneath you. and you're thrust back into a world with a language that you stopped speaking 13 years ago and a code of honor that's just completely different you know what I mean like when you said hey man the link will be sent to you at such and such a time I wasn't tripping usually when

someone says the link will get sent I always think there's a 50 50 chance that's going to be late a convict says that I had absolutely no doubt whatsoever what time the link was going to be sent it's just different and especially the ones to stay out because the ones that stay out are intelligent and I'm not trying to be mean but you know if you continue to go back on the on the installment plan I got I did it three times at three freaking times you know um it's it's not the it's certainly not the pinnacle of a of deep thought right not burdened by deep thought if you're allowing yourself to to to continually get sent back again again and again but um usually I don't know for me for me drugs was a was a huge thing I think for you you're a

creative cat it's good that your creativity is now going in the right direction. I think, I think this is a perfect venue for you, man. You're good at it, you know? Well, we'll see. I'm going to keep working at it. It's working so far. Yeah.

Well, and I think, I think that this is a, I think that we're in a, we're in a genre that's taking off faster than most others, right? There's, for whatever reason, people are really, they're fascinated by those of us that broke the law. But like my friend used to say, like, we'd be sitting. the day room and he'd go look around women didn't dig outlaws this place would be empty it was it was his favorite expression he was about 105 but he would go if chicks didn't dig outlaws this place would be i think uh but there's uh there's there's certainly something something to be said

for the fact that people seem to be fascinated my first day and and i'll leave i'll leave with this thought because i think this is hysterically funny but the first time i walked into prison the first two people that I came across were black. They were sitting down playing chess together. And it was, I was not in a unit. So these guys were outside and they were working basically. They should have been sweeping the hall. And instead they were playing chess.

And I was waiting to get led into my unit. And the guy goes, hey, brand new fish. I go, yeah, I just got here, man. And he goes, you want some advice? I said, yeah, he goes, don't let this place change you, man. For real, because it can. I said, all right. And dude got up to go to the bathroom or leave to go somewhere.

And his friend said, don't you listen to that stupid? I won't use the word again. Because he said, make sure this place changes you. He's like, your goal is to make sure that this place changes you. And I don't know, man. I feel like it took three tries, but the last time certainly changed me. And I think it was a combination of meeting a really fantastic dude who had mad balls. is to be black and work with me every day in a in a level three yard took took mad guts but

um his name is cue and uh he is um i'm still fighting every day to get him out and uh hopefully someday that happens he's a really really solid dude uh one of one of the grades uh one of the absolute grades so i was all right well thank you my friend yeah yeah absolutely uh i appreciate you coming on this went way better than i thought um that's always good you know what you're going to get i didn't know what you're going to get well especially you know i'm captain buzzkill right you know i'm i'm captain tell me and these days i'm i'm the guy you you wouldn't want it to party i've never been anti drug i've never been anti anything i just i'm the guy that doesn't want to see people it's a pretty bad lifestyle right but yeah the light

boat really appreciate you uh you doing this this has been fantastic man it's been an honor Hey, I appreciate you guys watching the interview. Do me a favor if you liked it. Hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. Make sure you hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this. Leave me a comment in the comment section. Check out Tommy's YouTube channel. It's called The Lifeboat.

We're going to leave the link in the description. And I really appreciate you guys watching. I hope you liked it. Thank you. See you. All right. So I'm going to call you Batman. Yes, sir.

All right. So everybody calls you Batman. Well, we have a mutual friend. that calls you Rob, so Batman, everybody called. I noticed when you called me, it said Batman. A lot of people tell me that I didn't even know I was, I don't know how I happened, but. So, okay, so what happened?

Let's start real quick with, basically where were you born? Well, I was born here. Yeah, I was born here in Tampa, you know, I was born in like 267, December, 23rd, Christmas. All right, yeah, I was born in the, in the Seminole area, Seminole High Area. I went to Greco. I went to Slidejian High School.

I went to King for my sophomore year, but I ended up going to Armwood for my, to finish my two years of, I graduated, first class at Armwood. I started working at a roughly young age, I guess. While I was in school, I was in school, I was working also. I was working at Mexico,

restaurant on Del Mabry called Costa Gajardo. I started out there washing dishes, bussing things of that nature. You know, working with work, after that, you know, I've grown up, growing up, I always wanted, I guess, to be my own person. I wasn't really good with people really telling me what to do. Right. I love to learn, but once I figured out I got the job, I'm ready to go, you know, I want to be off on my own, you feel, instead of somebody telling me, hey, man, we need you do this.

And I got kind of like fed up, not being able to move further at Casa Garo in my job. They just wanted to continue to meet busing and watch the distance and think, though. We had a problem. People was getting hired above me. Right. Yeah, people was hired in above me. I had been there like a year and a half or so and just wasn't moving from that spot. End up getting

fired so to kind of quit at the same time because I just neglected doing the things I was supposed to do at the job coming in late, things of that nature because I just was ready to go when I was getting fed up with. So after that, a little venture,

I was unemployed. I was living with my mom. Just hanging out with fellas. was going to the thing. My brother-in-law, we were just, you know, hanging out, doing a little thing,

smoking that way, here and there, things of that nation. I started another job. Yeah, I started another job. This was probably, uh,

92. I was working with my father at Ed Morris Cadillac. At the same time, I was working for, I was working two jobs at that time. I was working at Ed Morris Caledite and I also was working at,

um, Cash and Cherry. I was working, Ed Morris in the daytime, cash and carry at night. Is Cash and Carey still around? No. Okay. I think Wendy Dixie bought out Cash and Carey, something like that back in the day. So I was working at Cash and Carrey at night from midnight to like seven in the morning,

putting stock up, and then like eight, nine o'clock in the morning, I'd go from there to Ed. Moore's Cadillac, and I drove parts. I was a parts delivery. After a while, I did with it. and dabbled in different things. I got out there in the streets a little bit while I was doing the parts going by my cousin's house

seeing how they were making thousands of thousands of dollars a day, you know, just sitting around the house, you know, I was like, man, I was y'all doing this. So he's like, hey, you know, we're doing this right here, this right here came out, which is, was crack. Crack.

Right, okay. I was like, damn, what is that? And he was like, oh, they take cocaine. They made this right here. So I started doing that for a little while he showed me the ropes made some money in that end up quitting the job at ed moors cattle like then when dixie because the money doing the other thing was greater than working both of those right right i was making a lot more money at that time i

think reagan was president and they had he he he made a drug seizure or something and they they was fighting the drugs against uh columbia or whatever the big drug thing going on that year and so it was hard to get cocaine it was hard to get product right you know so it was and i was a small guy i was nothing big or nothing so if the big guy wasn't getting it you know definitely the small guy wasn't getting it so i was spending my money it wasn't it wasn't there it was just going going going i would i had everything going out but nothing coming in so we was sitting around with my brother along um you know we're just talking and i would like i think i said something like man you know what man

I need to rob a bank, something like that. And he was like, man, rob a bank. I was like, yeah, man, I was like, man, look, that's all in place you're gonna go get it and it's there, you just gotta know how to do it. You just gotta, you gotta be able to do it. And he was like, see ya. He just smiled, he was just laughing.

He was just, I mean, there's a quote from a guy named Slick Willie Sutton who was a bank robbery. They asked him like, why do you rob banks? He goes, because that's where the money is. That's where the money. It's not straight to the source. I mean, you know, growing up, you watch the news, people was robbing, like, little grocery stores,

little gas stations and getting, what, like $500 and stuff. I'm like, man, look, you know, why would you take that chance when you can take a chance and do something big? You're going to get basically all at the same time. Look, if I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that. I always been about bigger things, you feel? Right.

Always been about big. There's nothing smaller and petty about me. If I'm going to go, I'm going to go all the way. I've always been like that. I always thought like that. So, um, my brother-in-law, I think, like, maybe two days later or something, he came, and he was like, hey, man, I know this guy, and he wants to rob the bank. I'm like, yeah.

Who is he? Like, oh, it's this white guy, I know, you know, like, damn. So, it's a white guy? It's serious. You know, he was saying, black, I would be. but I'm like, man, maybe he just bush and he might not be, but he said it was a white dude. I was like, well, this guy might know something.

We can probably be able to help, but he might know something. Anyway, look, he introduced me to him. He brought him over. He introduced me to him. He told me he had been watching his bank. And I was like, yeah. It was so crazy, man. This guy can come and take me to this bank.

It's okay if I give address. Yeah. Okay, so he went to tell me to this bank. It's a bank on Hillsborough, Habana. That's my first bank, my very, very first bank. Hated that bank. Reason being because you had to be buzzed in. That was my first thing.

Why would you wrong with bang? Why would you ride with bang you have to be buzzed in? But super. He was like, man, I've been watching. It's going to be easy, man. It's easy. It's going to be easy. I'm telling you.

I was premature. I was like, okay, he's been watching. I'm going to do this. He's like, okay, I got a guy. He's going to steal the car, and we're going to do this. I say, look, we're going to need two cars. If I'm going to do it, we're going to need two cars because, simple fact, on that first car, once they get that making model

that car, they're going to be on it. So we're going to have to be able to get to another car without being seen, leave that car there, and we're going to, that was my whole thing. giving a whole giving a like an obstacle illusion make them think I'm going one way when I went the other way you feel me so what I would do I would get in the car get to my other car have no one see me been the corner when they think you're going north I'm actually going to be going back south or something like that I'm going to get to you right here this I have I said look we're going to have we're going to need two cars he said okay fine problem. No problem. We ended up getting a Mustang. I stole the Mustang. He got from someone with one of his buddy got a less son. We've already

had a maximum. Okay, a Nissan maximum. I had basically got that maximum myself from the Nissan place on Fletcher. Oh Fletcher is crazy. With keys and everything. So I had

been driving that car for maybe like six months or so. So that was going to be our second. car so it was me him and another guy I'm gonna just call him D D was with us we had everything we had the gun we had the mad we had the bags we had clothes I had a change of clothes because I always wanted to go in the bank with one one outfit on but I wanted to be able to change when I'm coming out where I go I want to be able to be changed I only have the same type of clothes on because I know them the first thing People are going to be looking for the officer

are going to be looking for that. So as we're driving up Hillsboro, we get to a mean you. Right. Okay, you know, the bank I'm talking about is the next light, which is a banner. The guy who was with me, the D was in the back,

the other guy who originally, the white guy, he was sitting in the front. As soon as I pull up to the light, the guy just started crying. He said, Rob, I can't do this. I can't do this. And I know, whoa, whoa, whoa, what, what the? He's like, no, me, then I'm on federal probation.

But which guy is this? This is the white guy. Originally who said he wanted it, who I was introduced to, to do this. Okay. All right. So he's on federal paper. He's on federal paper for uttering a forged instrument. I found out that later.

All right. Anyway, we pulled up to the, like, Hill, brother, me, and this guy, like, man, I can't do it, man. I just can't do it. I can't do it. I can't do it. I said, damn, okay, Rob, what are you going to do? I said, just chill, you want to like, just chill, it's okay, it's okay. I said, hey, damn, what's up?

Which, D? Hey, what's up? I said, you still want to do this? You're like, hey, man, whatever you want to do? I said, fuck it, we're going to do it. I pulled over over there to Crystals. Crystal's hamburgers right there. I pulled over to crystals right across the street from the bank.

Right. Dropped him all. The white guy got out. Dana got up front. It's just me and him. I already have the Nissan Maxwell behind the Wind Dixie because

right there on the corner was the bank. The grocery store right there was Wind Dixie, old Win Dixie. I'm not mistaken. Because it's Publix now, but it wasn't public stand. Yes, it was public. It was public stand. So we put the other

getaway vehicle behind publics. So, me and Daniel, he dropped him off, we got in the car, we rode up to it, we go out to the bank. I already know we had to be buzzed in because he told it, but I didn't want to do it because of, you never even know, you never, you didn't even know, you never, you didn't even check it out yourself first. You just thought he had it all things. Well, I went first that night before I went to look in the window. Right, but you didn't, okay, but it wasn't open. No, it wasn't open.

I went in at night just to look in the window. I wanted to see everywhere, the camera. The layout, the layout, you know, where everything hopped up. I'm going to have to run. I did that. But I never went in there before that prior to that. Me and Dana, we pulled up to the front of the bank. We're sitting there in the car.

I don't think I got my mask pulled down. I just got to, like, pull right at the top around in my head. Okay, we're sitting there. I got gloves on that one. I see two old people getting out the car. I know they're going to have to be buzzed then. I say, Dana, you see them two people right there? When they get out the car and they get up there, we're going in and right behind them.

He said, all right, never not knowing that Dana's going to really go behind me, I'm just thinking, hey, when you see me get out, you're behind me. I'm going to go with you, man, always younger, like, old people come out, they're kind of really old because they're, like, leaning on each other. They're taking their time. I think the guy, the older man, he opens up the door for the lady. soon as she started to walk in boom i jumps out the car i go here come dana i open up the door grab the door dana comes behind me i don't even see where dana plates i just know i have to get money

i run straight to the counter i hear in my in my ear i hear the manager say just do what they just do what they want just don't nobody don't do anything just do what they want i'm going i'm over the count and bam i come down i pull it out the draw of them i got a bag on my shoulder right here I'm putting my end up stuff I'm stuff and stuff and stuff stuff I don't think they had a drive through I can't remember they had a drive through but I don't think I hit the drive too

because it was I was just like trying to hurry up hurry and get as much as I can to get out bam I think Dana say time and when he said time it's like 90 seconds when he say time I'm coming back over the counter when we come out

we jump in the car I head out of the bank down to me around behind to public where the other cars that I jump in there. So I'm making them think that I'm going up Havana heading. Wait a second, did you have a gun? I didn't have a gun, he had the gun.

Oh, okay, all right. I didn't have a gun that time, but after a while I started. Right, right. But yeah, because it doesn't matter if you, people don't realize like, I might, if you say he has a gun, I might as well have a gun. Right, exactly, we'll all get talked for the guy.

Exactly. So, and I didn't want me being in the process of doing when I had to do to leave the gun, drop the gun, or something of that nature, so I wanted him to be the one to protect me. Right. You do your job, I'm do my job, we're straight. So, okay, so we came out of bank. I jumped in the car.

We went behind, changed it to the second car. Now, they're thinking I'm heading south on Havana. But I jumped in the second car, came around, came back up to Hillsboro to Armenia, heading east on Hillsboro to our location. So, after that, Dana and me went, the guy who was with me, the white guy, he had called another acquaintance that we know to pick him up. Because I was like, damn, how did I meet up with him? Because I paid him. I wanted him to be a part of it.

Right. I paid him for the car. and to have watched me do the whole thing I gave him money because I wanted him to keep his mouth because I was going to say I wanted him to be a part of it feels like if he's a part of it

there's a better chance he doesn't tell anybody. Exactly. So that's why I did that even the guy who came to pick him up and do about it, I paid him also. I gave him $500 and I gave him $500.

I think out of that first bank there, I got like $24, $2,700. yourself or just total? Total. Because the average bank robber gets like 3,500 total. Or I think it used to be 1,500, I think it's like 3,500. In that range, it's not a lot. It's not a lot because I never wanted, I mean, it was fresh to me.

It was, it was my first, it was my very first. So to get a lot of money, you'd have to do like a takeover. Like you have to, right, you would have to do it. That's super dangerous. That's super stupid. Yeah. You know, I mean, no, we're not, we wouldn't, it's not, it's not heat or nothing like that.

We're, we're not equipped to do anything like that. And it just, even the movie heat, right. It doesn't make sense. But my thing was to just, in a small amount of time, get as much as I can. And on that first one, it was $2,700. I was, I was, pivot better comes to getting away. I was pissed because I was thinking that we were going to get a little bit more than that.

Going by what we had, about earlier, me and the other guy, the white guy, and, you know, I guess from what he'd heard, what he'd seen, I don't know, where he got that information, he was gonna get like 25, we're gonna get like 25, 30,000. Yeah, fuck. Because I guess he was going by what he thought

tellers hold in the teals, but he's absolutely wrong. Yeah. You have to go in like the cash drawer or something. You have, it's called the cash cow, which is behind them, but I didn't know about that until later on in my, my bank robber and Dever or whatever. But anyway, so we get back to my location, I guess I went back to my house accounting all up and divide amongst the people who was involved.

And I was like, damn, okay, that's crazy, man, I can't believe that's all I got. And I relived it. I relived it to see, okay, where did I went wrong? How could I have got more? What could I have done? but and um to stay safer uh super safe there was kind of like nothing i could have done because i didn't want to be in there no longer than i was you know and i hit everything that was there

but this was a small bank they don't really do that much business and that's one thing that i didn't know it depends on the bank and as things went along the money got greater so You know, I don't know, the time period I did them in between. I'm thinking a couple months, maybe like four or five months. I, my second one was, my second one was on, I think down near, like, Bayshore area. It was a sun bank. and it was off like Howard and

me and you down there in the Kennedy area we ride around me and Dana we hung out pretty tight we were just right around we spent the money I had no funds coming in and I thought okay man

we need another bank so I got down towards that area I seen this bank and it was surrounded by shrub brushed trees you know hedges all the way around It was two ways in, two ways out, you know, you could have got into that inches on the back end or as you're going down that main street there you could turn it in right off the road, but it had one there and one there. But the thing about it was it was hidden.

So I like, man, I can do this. It's hidden. So after the bank got closed, I went just to look through the window to look at the layout. and I didn't have the white guy anymore right it was it was me it was all my planning I had to come up with the cars now because he knew people who can steal cars I didn't know anyone who could steal cars I didn't start getting in trouble until I was like 25 years of age right you know I don't have a juvenile criminal record or anything of that nature so I knew the Spanish guy

who I was closely familiar with. He knew people, Spanish guys. We know how to steal a car, and they were really quick with a screwdriver driver. I was like, damn, how do you know they can... A strew driver? That's it. Yeah, man.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I said, hey, whoever gave me a car, I give him $500. Tell them to get me a car. I'd give him $5 a lot. So we had got the car. I still had the Nissan maximum at the time.

I was still using. I already used it in the first bank robbery. Didn't get called or nothing like that. still had it so that was going to be my second car again to use in the second finger already so he got the car for me me and d we got together um i think the first day we went down there we i'm trying to find a good location to sit and wait because i think it was kind of busy that first day as i was trying to find a place to sit i seen a tpd officer ride down the street.

I told Dan, we're not doing it today. And he's like, oh, man, he might be going to lunch. He's going down. I like, we're not doing it today. Right. Anytime I seen an officer in that area, period. I didn't do it regardless. Because everything's on my side.

Timing is on my side. I can pick and choose time to do it whenever I want to. I don't have to rush it, you know. I wasn't, I wait tomorrow. A lot of problems Cause that spooked me By officer That's like it was a warning to me

I don't know I just felt like Hell now I got tomorrow Right We go, leave Regroup Wait tomorrow

Get back together Tomorrow morning Get back We come back So this time Everything was smoke It was good We went in there

Was hardly no cars In the parking area Of the bank Pull the route Pull right into the front of the bank just jumped out when he came right behind me we were in our over the i was already over the counter before the two ladies was in there even knew one it was two black ladies two black females one was over at like um uh uh office desk or something she was sitting there or wiping it down but

i think she had her back to me and the other one was i'm not sure exactly but i remember when she came out but i was already behind the counter getting money So I spent roughly 30, 40 minutes, seconds, 30 or 40 seconds behind there, pulling out money, put it out money. It was not really a lot of money though. And jump back to go to the counter, came out. Now, this was the exciting part. As I'm coming over the counter, come out of the door, we were in a, yeah, okay, we were in a loopler, a Lincoln Town car. stole a leaking town car

that was the first car that we pulled up in the bank in when I got out of the bank I'm pulling off with the bag of money we heard a poof in the car

oh the die pack die pack went off in the car we had all the windows up in the car but it's in the bag did it blow through it all the smoke and everything tear gas and everything is coming out of the bag as we're driving down the street

right we got I'm looking over here I couldn't even I couldn't even I see him that's how much it's in there

and he got blob and tears coming out of his eyes and it's not and I just know it and I'm like man I'm trying to get the window down

we're trying to get the window down because it's a Lincoln Town car before the big window go down that little window had to go down first

right couldn't see it couldn't see that that window was going down we just knew that that big one was going down that big one was going to

open up the door I'm driving down the street where both doors open his door and my door and my door and I pulled around

the corner, we pulled to the second car, which is the Nissan Maximum, get out, toward in part, grab the bay, jump in the other car, we come around Bayshore. I take Bayshore all the way down to like downtown area, jump on the interstate, get off on 50th Street because I stayed over there on 56. When we get to my house, we pulled all the money onto the carpet. A lot of money had read, die all over it. It was burnt because when that, when it's ruined. When it explodes, when it explodes,

the eye gets all over and it's hot, this burning. So some of the money had burn spots all in it. So what we did, we separated the money to get the money that basically didn't hot. They had no burns, no ink or nothing like that on it. And if I'm not mistaken, it came up to like $3,500 that didn't have anything wrong with it. And like $5,000 that had ink.

You need a day on and check this out. It's serious. Dana was young. D. Dana. He was young. And I know that he wasn't going to get into that red money because that would have got us messed up. Right. So I took the $3,500.

I gave him $1,500, and I kept $2,000. I still have the $5,000 that was burnt. Some of it burnt, like holes in the spots in it, but a lot of red. Me and my girl were sitting there looking at all this money with all this red ink on it, and I'm like, we in. I told Dana, okay. After I paid Dana, I said, hey, look, tell this up.

Here right nobody, don't tell nobody nothing. you tell her that you got a lawsuit or somebody left you some money but don't ever tell anybody about anything we do that was with anybody with me I always made sure

I embedded that in their head but I say if I'm able to do something with this money if I can clean it up then I'm gonna break bread with you I'm gonna go ahead and pay you I'm gonna give you what you your percentage out of this

If I can't, I'm going to destroy it and get rid of it. So he was like, okay, okay, he was happy. I could give him $500. He would have been happy. Right. You know, because, you know, he already got away. Yeah, we got away, and he was with me because it was hard to come across money. I don't know if he didn't like working.

I didn't like, we just wasn't working. We were together. We were doing our thing. I gave him that, and me and my girl was sitting there. We were sitting in an apartment looking at all this, money with red dye, and I'm like, me and Tim, man, I don't know. I cannot throw this away. My aunt, granted, worked that chlorox, and I remember, like, the week before, chick it's, God's good. My aunt worked that chlorox, and I remember, like, the week before, I was over her house, like,

doing some hedges or cutting some grass. You know, we did side jobs, cutting grass, trying to come up, you know, and she's like, uh, um, I arrive her. Um, I got a, um, I got a, bunch of bleach and all kind of stain removed and all kind of stuff like that. Now, if you ever need something, if you want something, go ahead and get you something because they give us all them damaged cages. I got, well, she did, now, her utility and she got cases. Chase, the little chase.

I was like, now I don't need nothing right now. I'm straight. I'm good. She said, okay. So I thought about my aunt when I was sitting there looking at this money. I'm like, man, it's got to be worth a try. So I go to my house, I say, hey, gee,

hey, gee, hey, how you know what I say? I say, And, you remember you said you had all that bleach and stain removal stuff? You think I can get some? She said, boy, go on in there, you get whatever you want. So she had, like, three different kind of stay removers and two different kind of bleach. So I got it all, one of this, one of that, one of that. I went back to the house and got a five-gallon bucket, empty, empty bucket. I poured half water into the five-gallon.

I put water into a half. Pulled all the money in there, pushed all the money in there. All the red dye money now. All the stain removal and stuff bleached, I pulled it in there on top of it and I just started swirling around. So I said, hey, I'm going to take like $200 this money and we finish here and go to the grocery store. I'm going to take a shower real quick.

While I'm doing this, I get out of the shower and I come back. I just happen to go and glance over in the bucket and I see like a red film starting to float on top of the water. And I said, damn, this might work. So, fun. Me and my girl, we get together, we go to the grocery store. We spend like $200 come back. We put the grocery up.

I said, okay, now I'm going to get the money. So when I got the money, pulled all the water off, now you know, water and chemical separates. Right. So whichever the money that was in the chemical, the longer, the most of the money that was in the chemical, it was the weakest. The money that was above that was mostly in the water,

it was a little bit better. So when I pulled all the water off, cleaned it all up, and made the bills weak, they were clean. It wasn't no red on it, period, at all. And I told the biz, but I don't see that. So I said, okay, baby, we got to dry the money up. So we put something in the oven. We got, all right, we dry in this money, we doing whatever, you know.

But the only thing about it is the money that was down in the chemical, the longest, you know, when you do money, you do it like, yes. It would just come apart. Okay. So I say we got to go to Egadrylestone and get some tape. So, for a girl, man. This is this. So $5,000, let's say $2,000 of it was really, really weak. Right. It was clean, pristine clean. Really, it was clean.

But the money that was down in the liquid, the chemicals, the longest was the weakest. So I said, you know what? I got all this Scotch tape like wrapping presents and stuff I put here a lot of money one that ripped the week

I put tape all around it right so what I would do I would get like three or four of those bills that had tape right some good bills and I would go get money orders like in a day you know we can get money orders up to $250 dollar money order

so I'm going around all these different stores trying to change this much getting money order and it worked and they did this one store that was on kennedy that we we just happened to go around to it and it's just a bit off track but it's just some apart the story that i was telling i went to this like oriental store and they had money orders i got a 250 dollar money order he was hey my friend what's wrong with they what they money i say my girl wazzy got real though man it's good though

put you, well, I don't, I can't remember how they used to check it then. I think maybe with the plan and then back then, I don't, I can't remember. But he took it, gave me money order. I used the money order with a couple other money orders to pay my rent and my apartment complex for that

month, right? Right. Only that one that one Oriental guy he stopped payment on the money order, and I don't, I'm not sure what he did with the money, but I did a lot of money orders, but that was the only one he stopped payment my rent lady came not done the door

she said rob I said hey what's that she said you remember that money or you gave me to pay the rent I think yeah what what problem she's like they stopped payment on it she's like I don't know I ain't never seen nobody stop payment on the money water I like he just had some issues with the way to turn the money in the bank they wouldn't take it exactly so he stopped payment I said okay cool no problem so I went in the house went in a show Jew box, got out 250, whatever it was, and gave it to him, and it was cool. So that was, that was, that was, that was from, that was from the second, that was from the

second bank. That's when a die pack blew up. On my third bank, I, I, I got how to like, getting the small amount of money. I wanted to get a bigger amount of money. So I said, you know what, I'm going to bring some guys in. I'm going to get two other guys. Instead of just me alone trying to get the money. I'm going to have two guys over the county getting the money. Right. And two guys watching my back. So I go out, I go out,

Carewood area over on Anderson. Right. So it's like a suburb of things. Yeah, yeah, right over there. I think it was Anderson Road over there. They had a, what was that bank? I mean, it really doesn't matter.

We scouted out that bank and you just go get two guys. You just go talk, do you just know two buddies to rob a bank? No, no. They're not just to anybody. It's because Lobby's not robbing them back. Okay, so. I know what I mean, I'm a good talker.

Right. It's some guys that had been hanging out with me and I know they were good for what I needed them for. They had already knew about what I was doing, but I just never brought them in me and I didn't need them. Right. um and it was close people i'm not going to mention any family have friends you know people of that nature that i knew i could trust and stuff like that and um i brought i brought two other guys in

we i had went out to the to the one out there in uh anderson and carrowwood area and i i thought maybe there would be a good chance of me to get more money i'm not sure i think i had went out there one time before and I had to go in there to do some coin exchange, money exchange or something, and they had a lot of money on the counter. And I was like, man, I would like to come back here. I think it was we had just hit a house or something. We got some foreign cars and we needed somewhere to take the money to it. I had just happened to go over there to go in there. And it just was counting money on that back counter. It was just kind of like, but you would. You We didn't know with the face, so there was nothing to be done that day.

I was like, I want to do this. Right. I like this. So I went back out there. I went back out there the next day, and I was like, okay, so I got to find a getaway route. I got to make them think we're going on one way and we're going to go the other way. So I decided, okay, we're going to go down Anderson. We're going to go down Anderson and Roe, make them think there.

And it's apartment complex. Soon you get down Anders and Role, you get out of the frame of the bank, there was an apartment complex. I can turn it up and go through, and then I can come back and come out, good. Man, that's that road, good. I can come back up and come out good. So I say, okay, yeah, okay. Well, you know, by the way,

just the naming the streets and everything doesn't matter because people and they don't know what he'll be. Yeah, I mean, people in Australia. But the people who do, they're like, man, that guy's smart. All right, so you figured out what the, so I figured out the area and how I wanted to do it to make them,

think that um you know we're we're heading back south when i'm i'm actually heading these i came up that night took a peek in to see the layout to see exactly where everything was at um if i'm not mistaken that same day i placed the car so i had it there overnight that was the that was the that was the um nissom maximum always had the keys that was and the one that was used with the street driver that we paid someone to get that was to go up to car so we this is a funny one too so we're we're we're driving up here we're you know we're going towards the towards our location and um i pull up into the parking lot and it also is um uh a grocery store inside that um that area too um so we pull up

pulled around, it's a pretty big parking lot, and I'm looking at from a distance at the bank to see who's there, make sure no officers, it's in the parking lot roaming around, just to see where everyone's place at. So I started towards the bank. Once I got out to the bank, I found a nice parking area where I wanted to be. I'm always wanted to be towards the front of the bank. It's not in the front parking area of the bank, just because it cut down time. And so, As soon as we pull up to the bank, we get out. And I think this one was Astro Minivan. This was an Astro Minivan, and I love Astro Minivan for the simple fact that when I'm

going to the second location, the guy's able to change their clothes standing up in the back of the minivan, sliding doors. It's just bigger, roomier. You can do a lot of more things than, you know, as far as getting ready. So we pull up to it. We left the vehicle running. I run up to it. And it was just great timing that I pulled up at that time

because Wells Farrow wants to just have left that bank because they had thousands of dollars right on the front counter. And normally that's what they do. They have to count the money after the money is delivered. They have to, you know, count to make sure what's on the tag, what's on the receipt is what was delivered.

Right. So it just happened to be so. When I jumped, when I went through the door, there was four of us. Two people was going to go over the counter. two people was going to hold everyone at bay. So when I ran in, I'm the first person. When I jumped over the counter,

I didn't even have to jump off of the counter because all the money was right there. So what I did was squat down and just started grabbing money from the counter. Didn't even have a jump. And my second guy, he jumped on the counter too and he was grabbing money. But from my proof of vision,

I seen he had got off the counter and doing whatever. Man, look, I'm getting this money. So after I get all the money off the third, off the counter and he was doing what he did I felt like I had enough time

I didn't even check the drawers because I had spent so much time on top of the counter and getting the luggage I came down hey let's go

we proceeded towards the door we went out of the door as we get back in the minivan soon as I'm pulling out the one person who went over the counter with me inside of his pants he stuck

a thing of 20s a band of 20s, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, a band of the 20s is $2,000. He stuck it in his pants, and it was a die pack, and it blew up in his pants. He's thinking, you guys, he's thinking, yeah, I'm gonna steal a little bit of not tell them. Exactly what I got, he's actually got a couple extra grand.

Right, but he's also, so it came back on him because he's got true story, true story, diPan. So you have like 30 to 40 seconds after you breached the door for LeBait that the die pack don't go all. Soon as we hit the, um, got in a minivan, I'm pulling out to go on the anis and go to my second car. Boom, blow, I said, hey, I'm driving like,

hey man, hey, what the fuck is that? He's like, oh, no, I know. And I said, get it out, get it out. I already know, I already had a die pack before. Yeah, and I'm thinking, I'm so, I'm so quick. I was like, look at me, he tried this fan. I'm thinking he tried to puff, yeah, $2,000. Put in his pad, it blew up a little.

He pulled at one stack of 20s from the left side of the drawer because it's always going to be a die pack there. I found that out too later. Anyway, so he threw it out the winter, rolled the winter down, he threw it out the window. I read there as we was getting back on the antlers, threw it out the winter. It wasn't that bad as far because I guess he muffed it

by having it in his band, but he had on like two or three bear bands, so he didn't ready to get burned, I guess. But he, a die pack blew up in his pants. I get to my second vehicle This is a crazy thing too I get to my second vehicle We're getting out of the van To get everything

And Dana As I'm leaving I'm asking everybody Okay where's the weapon Where's this? Where's this? Whatever we want He left one of his pistols

In the minivan That was like one of the first Bad things that I could think of That ever could have happened Because now I'm thinking Damn Was there any fingerprints on it Was any of you bring on a bullet,

whether they're disfitting or shit. There ain't no state. For real, you have to be on a point. So, no problem. As we're leaving, because I'm making them think that we're heading south, but we're actually heading east. We see the helicopter heading back towards the bank.

Right. So I'm already in my second vehicle. They're looking for a white-assailant. I'm in a burgundy Nissan Maximum. So as we go on, we see the helicopter going on and, you know, another thing that I also used to do. Underneath the outfit that I went in the bank, I always had a shirt and tie, a white shirt with a tie.

And in the back of the Nissan Maximum, I used to have a blazer, a jacket hanging up there for the guys in the back. I always wanted to be looked like I was the only one in the car. So I had them down on them. ground on the floor in the car. After we got out of the van to get in our second vehicle to get back to the house, they was in the back seat down,

the blaze were hanging up. I'm sitting alone driving with a white shirt and tie on. Make me look, you know, like presentable. Exactly. So I'm headed back to the house after that one. So what did you guys get there, roughly? I mean, I know you did the 57.

Oh, okay, 57, all right. I think I get like 30 out from my personal. 57,000? Right. Oh, okay, now that's a decent. Yeah, yeah, okay, well that's, yeah. I thought you had 57. No, I remember all the money was on the tape.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure how much fell on the floor or anything like that. So as time went, time went by, you know, I did and dabbed and did other little things of that nature and two or three more went by. and to this one that I said, you know, I think I had Tampa hot. I think it was, you know, I had already at this time did like five, six banks. And I couldn't really find an area or a bank that I pretty much can do and had all the things that I needed, you know, the optical illusion getaway route or knew that there wasn't a lot of cops in that area.

so I kind of like did everything I could do on this part so I said you know what I'm going to go across the bridge I want to go to Pinellas County to see what they got to offer over there so we just took a ride and um I went and I seen soon as I got across Gandhi and got um on the 4th street yeah 4th Street St. Pete that over there I I turned to the left and right off Red off Gandy there was a there was a bank I think it was a first national bank or something something similar to that and I was like man this is pretty good this is pretty good because there was a side street also that cuts off from the bank and there was a apartment brand new apartment complex which looked like it had like 500 units so it was kind of huge and um I said um I can come

off the main street boom boom or go off the main street cut down the side street come out there and then jump back on again and take the bridge across from the Tampa I can pretty much I can do this so we waited to that night went back over there and I just wanted to look at the layout

of the banks I mean basically banks are pretty much all set up the same but just you personally just knowing you have that visualization of where you're going what you're going to do is a plus for me

me not being blind. I'm already know where the chairs laid out. I know where the cameras, I know where to counter. You wanna know, you, as soon as I get, I gotta run a 20 feet this way over the thing, not I think I was my thing of looking at night. I could come in a daytime and go on. But then the, I don't want to be seen.

Exactly. Exactly. So I got a layout. I got a few other layout. We got all our tools, everything we need it. We went ahead and placed a second car over an apartment complex. which was pretty cool.

It was a big apartment complex. And when a lot of people, it was fairly new, so was a lot of people walking their dogs out. So I thought that was pretty good. This was a pretty decent bank. We pushed, I think I rolled down

4th Street just to see if there was any cost in the area. I didn't really see anything. I think I did it on the first day. I didn't have to come back to the second day of night. I think it was like the perfect song. Everything was. on my side, I pulled up to the bank. It was just me and Dana.

It was just two people on this one, if I can remember correctly. I put up into the bank, got out of the car, wasn't no traffic, wasn't a lot of people coming out of nothing. The one particular thing that I can remember by this bank that there was a bunch of college kids in there.

and robbing the bank to me because I played sports when I played football is like running for a touchdown. You can hear the crowd but you can't. It's like you're in a silent state you're kind of like focus in on what you're trying to do or what you're doing. And that's the same thing in like robbing the bank

because when I was going after that money I was focusing in what I had to do but I can also hear the baby in the background crying or somebody screaming or yelling or old lady or something on some of that name. nature. But one thing about this bank right here in particular, I can hear the college kids that was cheering us on, they were like, go, man, yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go, go, go. And that was just like one thing that stood out in that bank. So I came across the counter. We jumped in the vehicle,

went to our second vehicle, and came across, and basically that was it on that one. I did like $32,000 on that one. We split. I think I gave him like 17. I always, I know I get him like 12 because I always felt like this was my thing. I'm always going to get majority of the pay. I'm always the one who invested. I'm the one who invested time in. I'm the one who invested the gas. I'm knowing who we invested on the planning, so all that costs. But the good thing about the guys who I ever did anything with, they never questioned what I gave them. Right.

Well, I mean, they're talking about a guy who's getting five or ten grand without making anything. I think the reason being is because they knew just knowing me or being my friend, they're going to always be opportunities for them to make money. So why bitch about something Then he might not need me for the next one Right So they never

Man why did I get this man how much you got That never occurred Right So As time went There was like my last one I was pretty much like Getting out of the bank thing

I was I had me a detail business going on I was Not really hurting for money I think I had just did when I had a substantial amount of money I was pretty good at the time and I think I had came up on a Jamaican guy

who was fronting me pounded the time I was whatever the case was but I was good I wasn't really thinking about banks my girl her friend comes up and she kind of like knew what I was doing but didn't I didn't know what I was doing or didn't want to tell me, but kind of like, she's like, bro, she used to call me bro. She's like, bro, man, I need you.

I'm like, okay, well, then what you need? She's like, well, I was down in E-Bore this weekend, and this white girl, she pulled out in front of me, and I hear her car, and it wasn't nothing wrong with her car, and wasn't nothing wrong with my car, and we thought it was okay. So I just left, and now she got my dad. and put out for a hit and run and I got the chair to call the PD calling me talking about the detective

looking for me and all this but I need to get some money and get my car fixed she's like man I don't know what you do but I'll do anything you need me to do

you want me to drive you want me to do this whatever I'm like man what the hell is she talking about like what you said well what you need

she's like man I need like maybe like a thousand dollars or something so I was like damn man i want to help because i'm always wanting to help people i'm always you know i always thought about you know i like robin hood and stuff you know people like when i was a kid growing up robin hood was my favorite guy who know batman they robin things of that nature helping other people who didn't have you know trying to look out that was kind of like me so I had already seen this one bank that was on Himes in between Hills, Berlin, MLK.

And it was across the street from L. Lopez Park, whatever they call it right now. And it was kind of like hitting away too. You know, it had brushes and shrubs all around. It was kind of like hitting off in the cut. So this girl, she like depended on me. It was like, I was her last, you know, resource, and I was like, I can do this and I can make myself look good at the same time helping her. You know, I could be that big brother she said I would, you know, come in at the cluts. And not only that, I can, you know, put a few more dollars in my pocket also.

I'm pretty good at what I do. So I like, and then she wanted to help. I'm like, what could she do? what could I use her for I say damn I won't have to pay someone $500 I can use her vehicle for the second vehicle

right so that's what we do on the first vehicle I used the maximum I used that for the first vehicle and I use her car for the second vehicle I left the maximum

hidden in the apartment complaints where hers was that right around the corner from the bank on um on on hym's right behind there there is apartment complex and i and i'm thinking that because of the way the apartment complex is set up you turn in and you go and it's hidden off the street they're never going to find the car so i'll come back days later and i get the car but there was a guy up in apartment complex up there when we came back to switch cars after doing the bank right he was up in the third third place floor apartment looking down and that guy right there kind of like told what the second

vehicle was and they were looking for her car and that's how I got screwed up so now they didn't know me they just knew that vehicle was a vehicle that the people who robbed the bank left in right okay so she had took her vehicle and placed it off a street off MLK and North Boulevard, let's say that. DPD, riding all the other places looking for that vehicle because when they came looking, they swarmed that area.

Somehow they knew that they dug this, they just searched by their foot of the first vehicle and they found it and the guy up there seeing all these cops down there. He came down here, hey, I've seen somebody and the woo-woo-woo. A different type of vehicle,

Subaru, whatever it was. So now they're looking for her for that car. Okay. now as I told you before earlier there was a guy who had did other little in and odd jobs with me when we used to like just going houses big houses do little things he had did something without my knowledge and he got a Rolex watch which he waited upon in his name so this is a guy who did like a robbery you were doing robberies right he did a robbery

on his own, he wasn't supposed to. He wasn't supposed to, or if you, you know, you're your own person. Right. You could do whatever you want to do, but don't mention me in anything. Right. You know, and to be honest with you, I think I used to tell him, don't do anything that we did together. Right.

Make us something else. Don't do, you know, people know my emo. Don't do anything. It gives you some wiggle room. Right, exactly. So he took another guy and they went, they got a Rolex watch out of some house or something. He went in a punted in his name.

and that's how they got along to him, got onto him, which he put them on to me. Right. Now the reason why he put, they, he put them on to me because they found a jacket that was in his house. And that jacket was from a squat team member's house that I had went and kicked the door.

Right, so this is another robbery you guys did and there was SWAT team stuff and guns. Just a B&E, right. So we took all the guns, the squat team, he took the jacket, I took like some bulletproof vets, things of that nature. To connect him to that.

And he'll have a question when he goes into that other one and he gets to Rolex, was that like a home invasion? It wasn't a home invasion. It was just like kick the door in like a B&E, breaking an inner. Was someone in another house? No, okay, no, okay. So he's in trouble, he's just not in that much trouble.

He's not in 20 years. Outstate prison trouble. After they finding him with that jacket, that jacket makes him in that, that much trouble. Oh, because that was the gun. As well, Sack, they want them guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, we had Sig Sawyer, 9mm, we had AKs, we had saw all shot guns that came out of there, we had them love. Right, because the SWAT team members gonna be a lot of different. The military, um, automatic weapons, like you see them during that, yeah, we had, I had, uh, so they wanted, so they put the press on him

and he told them about me. Now, my birthday is December 23rd and on December 20th soon no birthday party for you no my birthday my birthday is December 23rd and around the 21st I go to a friend of mine he owns a pawn shop on Hilberr and you know it all right I'm not kind of I go through his pawn shop and this is probably about no, no, 5 o'clock in the afternoon

I go over there because I'm getting ready to get this big bracelet and I'm going to get this Batman charm with diamonds and all that on there and he was going to make it for me so I had stopped by there and we're kicking it, I'm flipping through this book where I'm picking out this bracelet and this white guy comes in You know, I'm always out looking at the book And he said, hey, hey, he's like, oh, I just want to look at some CDs

So, okay, I'm just, he rocked The Parshot guy said, okay, go ahead, look at whatever I'm just looking at the bridge we're looking with Hey, how much this are going to call, how many of them? So a guy got whatever CDs he wanted He headed back up there to be cashed out He went down in there, I'm still looking, he cashed him out So the guy, my friend,

friend who owns the pawn shop he comes down to me he's like man man that guy just spooked the shit out of me i like what he talking about he goes um he told me to be careful well i say be careful i like what do you be careful he like he just told me be careful i like shit he just said be careful so be careful so how much they called so i'm not really because i was smoking you know i was i was i wasn't back really paying attention. Right. You know? I was chilling. It's getting ready to be my birthday. I'm not. So, bam. I pick out the bracelet I want. I leave. I come back. Um, I went to the house. Now, here it is. It's my birthday, December 23rd. That morning, me and my

girl, we already set out that we was going to go out clear water on a double eagle deep sea fishing trip for my birthday, Saltwater. So I said, I'm going to drop my daughter off at the daycare, and then we're going to run by McDonald's grass and eat, and then we're going to come get all the fishing gear. Not knowing that at this time, the FBI is watching me the whole time. When I came out to take my daughter to the daycare, there was this big bread van, white bread truck parked next to my car. I had a 500 series BMW at the time. And they were parked so close to the driver's door that I couldn't get in.

So I'm thinking that it was this. We would have it five rocked the lines laid out. I lived next to the office building at Department Complex. So that's why most of the people who was doing the work, that's where they came up with the office there. So I'm thinking it's one of those people part so close to the BMW that I couldn't get in the door. So I'm carrying my door, and I'm walking all around.

But man, and the windows was so tinted on there, you couldn't even look in there. Right. So I'm walking on around. Went over there by the pool here. I'm looking for some guys that were doing some work with. There was nobody. I was like, man, even my little customer hand on and get on them, you know?

So what I did was when I told my girlfriend, oh, let's go, we're just going to, I'm just going to clam through it on the passenger side. You didn't put her in a chair. I clamped through and got on to the driver's side by going through the passenger side. So as I'm leaving, I'm going to drop her off to the daycare. over off Florida Avenue

which we made it over there dropped her off all this time the feds are following me I don't know it as I'm heading from the daycare I go to McDonald's

we go to McDonald's grab some breakfast you know I wanted to eat some before I go on an official trip I proceeded to get on Hillsboro I'm going by towards my street which is

a band or whatever the street apartment was on at the time I go to make a left they still follow me so i pull up to my apartment till i pull up to my apartment and like i said i'm right in i'm right next door to the office i live on the second floor to the right when i pull up i look upstairs you know i'm getting ready to get out but i just haven't i'm i just always used to try to like be on point and know to around you know i was doing bad thing you know i want to know i know i know there was going to be one day somebody was going to be

looking for me. So I always kind of be, I want to be on point B I need some, like you said, wiggle room, I need time to run or whatever I need to do to try to get away for that day. So I happen to look upstairs and I see these two white guys on the left side.

I lived on the right side. So I like, you know, I wonder what the hell they want. They dressed the same. They had on like two white t-shirt and some wings. I thought maybe they were some salespeople or something. So I think the car is still, I think the car is you're running at this time, put it in part.

I go to open up the driver's door. I turn it off, and before I can get my first foot out of the door, the squat team has me on the ground. So they, that's how I get it, that's how I guess we're going to be that fast. Yeah, I know. And it was like, it was like 15 of them, you know, they geared up, masked up and everything. They're like, all right, you know, when they got me,

they're celebrating, my girls next to me. me she's crying and they got me on the ground and um they're celebrating i can hear the guy saying all right yeah yeah they're like persistent page we've been out here since six o'clock this morning you know and then the guy walks up to me and he goes um hey how are you um i'm in i'm in charge of this right here i'm sergeant macklemyer and um uh how are you first of all let me just tell you happy birthday and um yeah while i got handcuffs i swear to god swear to god and i had handcuffs on you're like first of all let me just tell you happy birthday and um you know this guy you know this guy i'm like man i don't know

you i don't know no guy you're like well oh we think you do and we heard that um you armed in danger you're a menacing society i like man i don't know who told you that man y'all got the wrong guy i was like can i talk to my wife and oh you know you got to talk to her she cried and stuff um then i hear him tell them we're gonna meet back up at um east lake no you're uh Tampa Bay Mall real Tampa Bay Mall was open at that time and that's where they planned the whole thing and that's where they met up at to talk about what just happened

so at that time the feds came they got me um rushed me um downtown because when when you in the federal system. You don't just go to booking. You don't go to jail and stuff like that. Like a state charge or you get picked up by the city guy. They just take you to Orange Road or just take you to the city jail. When you're picked up by the feds, they take you downtown. You have to go to the FBI office. You got to go to the U.S. Marshals. You got to take holdover. You got U.S. marshals take pictures of you, not only that. Then you have to go in front of the magistrate judge and see if you're going to get a bond or not. So there's a lot of things that

take place before you go over to the city jail and be booked in on those charges so that what happened to me so um now i'm i'm i'm booked in and not not really knowing what i'm facing because not really knowing how i got to this point that that guy told you're not even sure what they're arresting you for right exactly i didn't know that guy had told me about this i didn't know about they found the rolex and he had the jacket and this is how this thing all came about so um I'm sitting in there because I'm on federal charges

they have to ship me over to Morgan Street so I'm sitting in Morgan Street you know I think my lawyer can see me and to let me know what I was being charged with

and I was being charged with the armored car at the time I wasn't being charged with no banks because I never got caught

doing any banks he told on me about the banks but they didn't put that on me at the time and it's kind of good for me that it didn't because how it all worked out for me not having them put that charge of me right then I was able to group it

in my proffer agreement now me first time been arrested first time being in jail never knowing what a profit agreement is and how I found out about a proffer agreement is just it's like my first week in Morgan Street

and I know basically things like don't let nobody know about your kids and don't talk to people that try to get on your case and you know try to get time not off theirs so don't talk about your case

just you know make up something so I had this old man just came up to me someone who I never knew I never talked to I didn't even know the guy was in the same cell It's just an old man just came out to me out of nowhere

He goes hey buddy I don't know if you did anything Else beside whatever you ain't here on Out down the street that didn't get called for But if you did you need to ask your lawyer about a profit agreement So I was like I still really didn't talk to the guy I was like well okay

So I'm like damn Oh I did something I better call my lawyer. So I call my lawyer and I go, I had a lawyer that was presented to me by the state, but he was a private lawyer for the fees. And the fees, you don't just get public defenders. You get private attorneys that have their own authors,

but they work for the state. Yeah, there's a federal government. Federal public defender's office, but they only have so many. Right. So what happens is that if they're full, then the court will actually appoint a private lawyer. And that's what happened to me.

And mine was out of Sarasota, Bradenton. And I called him up. I go, hey, check this out. Some old man just came up to me and he was asking me about a proffer agreement. If I know anything, if I have, you know, did anything that, if I know anything about some crimes that was committed

and no one never got called for it. I was like, what's a proper agreement? He's like, oh, a proper agreement. you know, first you have to go over to the state prosecutor and present to them or whatever information that you might have, and they make the last decision if they want to give you a proffer, if they think whatever you got, it isn't interesting.

I said, what if I knew about a guy that robbed Penn Banks? He's like, if you know about a guy that robbed 10 banks, you're going home tomorrow. I was like, I didn't want to tell him me just in case it didn't work out in my favor. I just said I knew about a guy, not me. Yeah, and you're never going home. tomorrow.

No. Unless you know if there's a terrorist or something, yeah, something imminent. Exactly. So he went over and talked to the state prosecutor and federal prosecutor. Yeah, exactly. My bad. He talked to the federal prosecutor and let me know that I knew about some banks that had been robbed that the case haven't been solved.

And if he was willing to do a proffer with him, he came back over and told him. He came back over and talked to me. He was like, I'm not going to make you any promises. But if when the people who I sent over to talk to you, if it's worth being able to do something, then I will. Saying the good thing about a proffer, it's only about things that I've done. You don't got to tell anybody it's things that you've done.

And another thing about a proffer is that it has to be everything that you've done. Yeah. If you give them any room at all to yank the proffer away from you. Like I made sure they knew about everything. Pull us this, but we just found out, once we looked into it, we found out this, you never mentioned this, so we're not going to do

any credit, nothing. Exactly, and they still know about what you told them and they can still use that education. So I made sure that, um, and plus this was an opportunity and a chance for me to get. It's a kid and slaves. It's a chance you walk out of prison not being out. And they were like,

I can never ever be charged in the middle district Florida with anything I've ever done that sounded good at the time yeah so um what were you looking at anyway i think my PSI came back to like 27 years oh i know i've got it has TSA but i'm not 17 off right my so anyway um so okay so after that that, one morning I'm in Morris Street. I'm sitting there and they say, hey, Robert, you gotta go to medical. You gotta go to medical.

Okay, hey, I'm ready. I'm getting ready, I'm getting ready to go to medical. And I'm thinking I'm going to medical, but I wasn't going to medical. They took me down to the chapel. And when I got down to the chapel, there was two FBI agents waiting to talk to me. Well, like, yeah, they don't wanna let the other inmates

know that you're having a discussion with the FBI. His dad, you're gonna say, oh, he's fucking snitching, he's this, exactly, exactly. So it's not in their best interest that- For your safety too. Right, well, yeah, exactly. So we go in to chapel, they introduce me to do. I introduce who I am, so we go in.

And I started out with the very first one, and that was the one I told you the very first one that was in-heeled in. And when it had to be buzzed in and everything, I told her exactly how I happened, what I did, I think that day right there talking with them I got to like three of the very next day

they were back now there were two different FBI agents with there were two different ages age groups the older gentleman he had to be around like maybe I'll say he was like 65 60 something years old he was older

and the younger guy he had to be like maybe 30 32 the next day when they came and pulled me out to come up to the chapel, they were standing in front of the chapel door waiting for me. The officers walking me down in the hallway. I get there. And this is the first thing that happened. When I walked down and I, you know, saying good morning to him. The younger FBI agents, he was like, hey man, did you ever get a chance to see the movie? Did you get to see the video of you robbing the bank? I say, no, no, sir. He's like, man, fuck man. Why didn't you play

basketball or football he's like man soon as you open up the door the first step you're over the counter you're over the counter man you're fucking you're great man you're not playing some type of sport and I'm sitting there thinking like this LPI guy is talking to me like he's a fan right something I've

just done and I'm like he's like telling me how excited he was for watching me robbed his bait and being able to come back and talk to me about what he just seen and it was just crazy why the older guy was standing behind him with his hand in his pocket He was just standing there just letting them.

Yeah, but you got to understand too. These guys, by the time they talk to you, they've been trying to solve this. Right. To you what I'm saying? They've, they've, imagine how much time they've spent trying to find this and then to have the guy. Like, they've spent hours and hours and hours driving around and just thinking about you and who you are and looking for you. So they're super curious about you.

So when they get to talk to you, they already have this fantasy of who you are. They're like, they're thinking you're this person and you're, You find out, no, this is who he is and this is what happened. Exactly. So it's, it's, and that was another. You're saving him a ton of time. And that was another thing, that was another thing cause, like, every, after every bank that I robbed, I used to go to Disney, go down to Orlando just to get away from Tampa

because I was like, emotionally shook up. I was so, so much, so much rush was going on. So anxiety. Anxiety. And not knowing if I made a mistake or something that they might be knocking on my door, so I get the hell away, so I try to put some miles in between until everything comes down. I stay there for the weekend. But every morning I used to get a paper, and exactly what you were saying.

They always used to say, man, we can't wait to get a chance to speak with this guy. We cannot wait to get a chance to speak with this guy. And then they were like having news, people ask some questions, like, what do you think he? And they were thinking that I got it from this movie, that one movie with the surfers. Oh yeah, yeah, um, point break. Right. They were thinking I was getting it from that movie, things from that movie. And, um, I had to watch that movie before.

Were you watching, were you wearing a mask? Oh, the first mask that we wore was the guy did this right here. Oh, did you, uh, huh? Nixon mask. Uh-huh. Well, okay, that's the connection. That's the connection between the movie. You ever seen point break?

You've seen point break? That was one of the first mask. Oh, I got to. I mean, I was. was just wanting to see like yeah point break they wear or they all wear they all wear presidents man right and that were because um and they jump on the counter they immediately they run they jump up yeah yeah and they're wearing the outfits the whole thing yeah yeah they did but i didn't i i really didn't get ideas from them right i had seen the movies but i just knew

that in order for me to pull this all these are the things that i had to do You know, the two-car things, I mean, a lot of things that I did, I can't really say that I got it from a movie. It was just like common sense with me. Yeah, I don't think I'm going down, Dalmabry when really I'm, you know, I'm going south on down Mabry. Not only that. The switch of the cars.

The switch of the cars. I've seen Bain Robberies stay in the same car, try to get to the house in the same car. I would never try to do that. I wrote a story about it. You know, round the place. See, that's not, see, see, that's what, somebody who, like, not so, not impatient, but they just wanted to rob the bank.

They didn't really have a plan. They just, the money was more important than getting away with it. Right. You see? To me, the money wasn't more important than me coming back home. Right. That was more important to me. So I'm going to make sure I'm not worried about when I get in there,

about exactly how much money I get out of there. I'm worried about I go about my plan and I'm able to walk out of it. at them doors without having to have a shootout or being locked up or shot or walking out. It makes with a million dollars and getting caught two hours later is needing them. Silipid. Right.

And same thing when I was in prison, you can sit up here and tell me about all the planes and Lamborghinis you got, but you're able to spend the same $60 a week as me. Yeah. Yeah, I always used to say that he said, prison is a great equalizer. Exactly.

You're a multi-millionaire. Exactly. We were raising the projects. So you get a bunk. You're wearing greens, you're wearing greens. You're wearing greens. We're the same. Yeah.

We're the same. So I used to read the Metro after I did each one just to get an idea if what I did made the paper. And they always made the paper and I always try to see if anything was left or if they spit out some information. It might be good for me to hear what they had to say. Oh, we got a tire track or something or whatever. I just wanted to read what they had to say about the. What happened with, I'm sorry, what happened with the. the armored car one

like you skated over the you guys also hit an own so the armored car was the armored car was like it was in between my six and seventh bank

like and there was just something that these set of guys had already had this armored car set up to rob because one of the brothers had worked on the armor car right and he was no longer working on the So he knew the layout and what to expect and things of that. They never knew about me.

These guys never knew about me. My link with them was through my brother-in-law because my brother-in-law, as he says it, I was the only crazy person he could think that might be able to pull it off because he knew about what I did. So one day I'm sitting at the house. He's like, hey, man, man, I got my head something for you. I said, okay, what's that? He's like, I know these guys with mom, you don't want to do this job. I said, all right, man, what you yet?

I meet you at your house or something, like talking person. So I go to his house and he come to my house or whatever the case was. And we talk about these two guys, two brothers. One of them used to work for the Amhercar. I think it was Wells Fargo. Was it, Wells Fargo? Yeah, I think it was Wells Fargo. And he's like, man, the guy working on the truck, he knows it's going to be easy, man.

It's going to be like $200. $300,000, you know, real quick. They want to know if you can be able to pull it off. I say, shit, I need to go see what it looked like. First, show me the route. Show me where the truck had. Show me where it's going to go down. So they came and picked me up.

They took me over to St. Pete. It was the money store. The money store was an old bank in St. Pete that closed down, and they changed it to the money store strictly for all the armored cars to come pick money up from there to take the banks in stores. Right. So this old bank, they changed it over, converted it over to the money stores just for armored cards to come pick up money. I think they might have brought money there too.

Yeah, they're in and out just for armor cards. He knew about it because that was his route. He used to go there to pick up money and deliver to banks and grocery stores or whatever the case may be. So they came and showed it to me. We set outside downtown St. Pete. I can't remember exactly what street it was. But it was downtown, right off the interstate somewhere. And we sat over in a parking area, parking spot,

while we watched the armored car pull up, the guy get out, open up both doors, go inside the money stores. The money stores had like double doors too because they roll out like laundry bins full of money. And we're sitting there, we're waiting. He finally comes out, reopen up the doors to the, down to the Amher car and he just

started throwing money in the back of the truck I was like, yeah, we can do that. Yeah, so I think I waited like two or three days. We geared up, got all the stuff, two cars and everything. We pull up, we in the minivan.

It's me. He's the driver, the guy who used to be the driver for the West Fargo, me and his brother, we did too. Gunman. Inside the armored car, you have the driver and the messenger. The messenger is the guy who grabs the money out of the and puts it in the back of the armored car. So as soon as the armored car pulls up, we're sitting over in the parking spot. I say, wait, just wait until he

get out and then we'll ease over there. So as soon as the messenger got out, he started open up the back doors. No, no, no, we waited. We waited for him to come in to come out with the money. So he started, I guess he unlocked the bike doors to get it ready Went over to these set of doors here of the building Locked down there whatever They opened other doors he went in there He was in there approximately a minute or so When he started coming out with the laundry bin

That's when I told them, let's ride So we started easing up there We pull right around and pull right along the side of the armored car I'm the first one coming out I had a 44 Desert Eagle When I came out with a gun like this the messenger seen me he dropped everything and ran ran to the front of the truck so i ran to the back of the truck looked down the truck to see where he went he was stooped down by the front tire

on the driver's side i came back to start getting the money to throw into the minivan my second guy went over to keep an eye on him to see what the messenger was doing when i went down to grab the first bag of money to throw into the minivan that's when gunfire the guy messenger started to started shooting and my guy he started finding him I grabbed the money that money was like heavy really heavy it was like um 80 pounds to try to get with gloves on and it's shrink wrap with plastic so every time I go to pick up the money it's this out of my hand I cannot get it out of this bin because it's this big straight money is heavy right when it's that month so then at that time the driver started

started shooting at me. I'm standing from here to where my daughter is. The driver is shooting at me through 15 feet away. He's shooting at you. He's shooting at me. I'm not like,

it's this going so fast, so I grabbed the 44, and when I pointed the 44 is already caught back, and when I pulled the trigger, it just went off, and it just went, boom, boom, boom, I couldn't control it with one hand. No one can control the 44.

Right, unless you, like, the Hulk or something. But it just went crazy. Boop, boom, boom, boom, boom. I drop it. I try to get the money. I seen the minivan leaving. His brother ran, jumped in the minivan. I seen him trying to leave.

I turn around. I'm running. I jumps in the minivan. They shoot out all the windows in the minivan. His brother gets shot in the back of the head. Oh. I see blood coming out of the back of his head because he has on a white bulletproof vest.

I have on a black bulletproof vest. I see her in red. line going into the vest. We make it down to where we have the second vehicle park by the interstate downtown, St. Pete, jump back in it, get on the interstate, come back across town. And so no money and somebody gets shot in the head.

Exactly. But was he out or just like he was okay? He was okay, he had to go through the glass. Right. So it slowed it down. It just grazed them. Okay, I was going to say, and we're talking about a nine millimeter.

I'm not saying it didn't hurt, but I'm saying it didn't penetrate his skull. grazed them so soon as we get back to the second vehicle um they go with me in the second vehicle they jump in their own personal car because he wasn't he didn't know how serious condition his brother was in so his aunt is a nurse in Orlando so he's like man I'm going to rush my brother down here Orlando my aunt's nurse and I'm gonna get hurt or take care of woo woo woo they did that I come back home I'm going through the process of everything that just took place and how did this happened and this that and the other

that night I get a knock at the door it's by Hillsborough County Sheriff Office and if I'm a domestic violence charge that was dropped against me but I guess the state picked it up or whatever and this deal had

a warrant out for me I'm thinking it was for the other so the guy was like no no and my girl was like what do you what do you want him for she like the officer was like he has a worn out for his arrest for a domestic violence charge. She's like, no, I dropped that charge.

No, no, no, no. She started crying and everything, but they went with it. They arrested me that night. That night, because of me robbing or attempted robbery of the armored car, when I fell asleep, everything that drilling, everything that happened earlier that day was playing in my head, in my dream. And in my dream, I kept hearing like a, a, uh, uh, uh, pz. In my dream, I was like, what is that noise? I'm dreaming about the whole shit that took place.

I'm like, I could just keep hearing these. And I come up, I wake up in the middle of the night. I'm like, I'm breathing. I'm in jail. I'm in jail. I just attempted. I had a shootout downtown St. Pete. I dropped the guns.

Now I'm having this nightmare about I hear this noise that I couldn't make out what the hell it was so I said you know what I'm gonna go by sleep I'm gonna go back to this dream I'm gonna slow this dream down I'm gonna find out I'm gonna see what the hell what that what the noise I want to see what it was there by sleep I'm in the dream I'm in the dream I catch bike up I slow it out I'm we shooting and I slow it down and I slow it down and I slow it down that I could see. It was bullets. Now, I check it.

I think I'm bullshit. If somebody's shooting at you from right there, and I'm right here, and you go to the range all the time, and you don't hit me, and I go to sleep, and I have this dream

that there's something passing quickly by me, but I can't. And it was, bullets. Yeah. Well, they didn't touch me, not one bullet.

Now, the bullet that did get me is when I turned around to run, to jump in the minivan, they started blasting the minivan up. One of the guards

shot the ground, and they ricocheted off the ground and went into the hill of my foot. And right now in this shoe right here, in the back of the hill of my foot, I have a little round circle that's healed up now.

But on this hill right here is smooth. But on here, you'll see, a little circle with a little indention where a piece of shrapnel went in the hill of my foot. When I got to jail that night, that's when I found out when I had to

take my shoe and sock off. No, no, no, I found that at home. I had already to, yeah. I found that at home. When I got home, I had to take my shoe off. I didn't even notice that there was a little hole in the back of the hill of the shoe. But when I took my sock off, there was blood all there. I looked at the back of my

hill and there was a little hole where a little shrapnel had went in the hill of my feet. I don't remember pulling it out or nothing. I don't know if it just ricocheted and went in and out or however it's done, but that's the only thing that happened to mean. So let's go back. Your PSI is supposed to be, your PSI says 27 years,

you get 17 knocked off. So what happened was this is how that happened to finish up this right here. I say I can't do 27 years. Right. I can't do 27 years. I'm kind of added up. I think at the time I was like,

okay or 28 or whatever it was I was not being able to do 27 years because I would have got out of like be 60 or something like that so I remember this guy saying in everyone's case

there's something wrong you can't leave it up to your lawyer to do it. It's got to be on you there's something the judge did your lawyer the prosecutor the arrest cop the detective paperwork, something

somewhere is wrong. So I say okay, all right, this is what, okay, man, 27 years, I got my PSI, this right here, they're trying to make me a violent habitual offender. Right. I was like, man, what the hell is a violent habitual offender? I said, okay, I'm signing up for the lie

law girl. I rolled down, signed up for the lie law. So did you already get you just have the PSI? I ain't get sent it yet. Okay, okay. I just got the PSI. I just got the PSI, they just delivered it to me. So I say, you know what? I'm going to the law library. I go to the law library. I look up, first thing,

I want to know what a violent habitual sender is because that's what's giving me all this time, all these extra months. So I want to see what that is. And they say, a violent habitual fender is a person who has two past convictions of violence

or two of drug or one of each. That makes you a violent, habitual offender. I say, okay, okay. All right. What I'm being charged with? So I look at my charges. I have two charges before the charge that I'm on. Right. And one charge after it. Right. But the definition for violent habitual offender means they have to happen before. Yeah, yeah. So it, and the word was consequent.

I don't know. What the hell? Consequent. Right. at that's before so um so i look at my charges and what it is they try to make me a violent a habitual sin i have to pass i have to pass conviction of violence none of drugs but one was before the charge and one was after the charge and you're trying to say not them how was one before and one was after because i had already had one before i got charged with a charge charge that they're holding me on, I bonded out and got another charge. And I pled to that charge, right?

But I'm still being held on that. So one was before and one was absolutely. They both had to be before it in order for them to make me a violent habitual offender. Right. So I called my lawyer up. I say, uh-uh, they can't do that. I'm saying to myself, I ripped out the page in the law library that says that, and I ripped out the destination for a violent, bitch, offender, and I brought it back to myself.

I call my lawyer up. I said, Hey, how are you? I said, hey, man, I think you need to get here because I think my PSI might be wrong. They're trying to meet me. He's like, okay, Robert, I'll be right there tomorrow. So when I came, I presented him with the information that I had.

I showed it to him. He looked at it. He looked at my PSI. He looked at the dates. He's like, man, I think we got something here. He's like, you're right. We got something here. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got something.

I said, so what do you're going to do? He's like, well, I'm going to get to you. I'm going. And one week's time, they send me amended PSI with 17 years knocked off my signals. Nice, just because of that one thing that I did myself. Yeah. No, you can't. I could have been lazy. I could have depended on my lawyer.

I could have just laid down saying, no, man. You can't rely on your lawyer. Like everybody thinks, you know, anybody who's people that have never been through the system always think, oh, well, you get a lawyer. like all lawyers are the same, they're not all the same, they're not all working for you, they're not, they're not always interested in, or, you know, they're not,

they don't always have your interest, you know, in mind. And you have to understand that the law work, that's a lot of work, it is. So they're trying to limit, limit their, the ability. Have a lot of case loads. Right, oh, it's, it's ridiculous. I'm not saying, it's a ton of work. We might not even get an hour worth of their time

on your case, man, because of the simple fact, they just have so many people putting them Yeah, they're overloaded. My attorney, I just knew he wasn't able to do the job for me because the first few minutes, they don't give them anything. He didn't present me anything or he didn't sound like, well, hey, you know what, I'm going to find out this right here. So I said, you know, I remember that guy saying,

in everyone's case, there's something wrong. So I'm feeling to start. I can't do this time. I got to just see what's wrong in my case. And I thought, and it probably was other things that was wrong in my case. Right. But I just found that one thing at that time right there, and that was enough to knock 17 years off my sentence.

So you get 10 years, you did eight and a half, how much halfway house? None. No halfway house? None, because I had people who was, I had a house to come to, and I did no halfway out. Well, I did three years supervised release, but 10 years for the state. Yeah, all right. Okay.

Yeah, it's, yeah, 10 years in federal prison and three years, and three years pay, three years probation. Okay. You got a year and a half off though, right? For a good time. For the, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because yeah, you didn't do 10 years in prison you did eight and a half.

Right, because what were we at? 85% they do I? Yeah, yeah, 80. Yeah, 85 days. So I got my little good time because it was 10 and I did eight on it, eight on it, so. And then I got out with, well, Then I got out with 36-month Supervirus League.

I'm thinking I'm going home, but I had a concurrent sentence. I had a concurrent sentence with the state ran with my feed. And my state time, like, overlap. It was a little bit more, so Florida was waiting for me. They picked me up from Atlanta because I did all my time in Atlanta federal prison because I had to, I escaped from Orient Road one time. So I had to be on a train, a moving train, jumped on a moving train, I escaped from booking.

So I have to be in a maximum security and we didn't have, we only had a medium and low here. Yeah. What's the name? Our federal prison here, Coleman. Coleman only had a medium and a low and they were building the max. Yeah, yeah, the max is built now,

but I was finishing up my time in Atlanta When the max finally got finished, Florida waited for me, I came here, I went to a, uh, uh, Holmes Correction. I did two years in the state and got out from the state with a 10-year probation period time, and I just completed it like a year ago, August 28th.