Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - NYC Cop Caught Robbing Banks

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Christian Torres shares his story of being a struggling NYPD rookie who secretly turned to robbing banks to escape financial pressure, only to lose everything before rebuilding his life and finding purpose after prison.⁣ ⁣ Connect with Christian here - https://www.christiantorres.info/⁣ ⁣ Do you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://www.insidetruecrimepodcast.com/apply-to-be-a-guest⁣ ⁣ Shop my merch: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewCoxCollection⁣ ⁣ Get 10% sitewide for a limited time. Just visit https://GhostBed.com/cox and use code COX at checkout. ⁣ ⁣ Send me an email here: [e-mail]⁣ ⁣ Do you extra clips and behind the scenes content?⁣ Subscribe to my Patreon: https://patreon.com/InsideTrueCrime ⁣ ⁣ Check out my Dark Docs YouTube channel here -⁣ https://www.youtube.com/@DarkDocsMatthewCox⁣ ⁣ Follow me on all socials!⁣ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/⁣ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrime⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Do you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopart⁣ ⁣ Listen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox ⁣ ⁣ Check out my true crime books! ⁣ Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCF⁣ Bent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TM⁣ It's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8⁣ Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5G⁣ Devil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438⁣ The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3K⁣ Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402⁣ Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1⁣ ⁣ Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!⁣ Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WX⁣ ⁣ If you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:⁣ Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69⁣ Cashapp: $coxcon69⁣ ⁣ CHAPTERS: ⁣ 0:00 - From NYPD Recruit to Bank Robber⁣ 4:11 - The Inside Job Plan Comes Together⁣ 8:17 - The First Bank Robbery⁣ 15:03 - Planning the $100K Vault Heist⁣ 18:48 - Walking Out With $102,000⁣ 33:35 - Seeing His Own Wanted Poster at the Precinct⁣ 41:35 - The Third Robbery Ends in Arrest⁣ 1:04:23 - Rebuilding Himself in Solitary Confinement⁣ 1:13:05 - Discovering a New Purpose Through Excel & Business⁣ 1:27:18 - Hearing His Father’s Final Words From Prison⁣ 1:34:33 - Starting Over After Prison & Turning His Life Around Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Not available in all states. It was a cop and a bank robber. An ex-girlfriend of mine. She works at a bank. She knows to schedule. She knows who the employees are. And she tells me the whole plan. I got assigned to a precinct.

And I saw my own wanted poster on the wall. What happened once you started being a police officer? Financial problems. Right. I had the privilege of joining the department during a time when the union had not struck a contract yet. So in the police academy, I was making about $25,000 a year. Bills are packing up because I get all the equipment, all the uniform, everything. It's on you.

You have to pay for that stuff. They don't just buy it for you. So I took out a loan. My credit card bills are stacking up. And I'm like, where am I going to get the money? What am I going to do for all this? Which is really weird, right? I'm wanting to do the right thing.

I'm going for something that's noble. I want to improve myself. But all of a sudden, all the financial pressure just, hits me like a ton of bricks. And I don't have any more credit cards to max out. I have nothing else going on. I'm just trying to get by. I mean, there was a period of time where I was living off of, I remember like 25 cent granola bars at the bodega and, you know, ramen noodle soups. I mean, I was living that life. And I wasn't an actor. It didn't make sense to me. I'm over here getting ready to risk my life for people in the city, but I'm living on scraps and something

had to give. What happened? What happened? What happened. Out of pure just coincidence, happenstance, I run into an ex-girlfriend of mine. At this point, I'm single, I'm struggling to get by, I'm getting ready to do this exciting thing in the police academy, and I run into her at John Jay. I didn't even know she attended there. We go, we get lunch, we started talking about, how are things going? She works at a bank.

So she's a new teller. She just finished all the training on what to do in case there is a bank robbery, and she's telling me about all the crazy stories. She's hearing from her trainers, her supervisors, what they tell them to do in those situations. and, you know, we started catching up, and this is how things start building, right? No one wakes up in the middle of the night and says, I'm going to rob a bank. That wasn't like a flash idea.

It was literally little seeds, little breadcrumbs leading up to it. Like, oh, wait, okay, so they tell you that you should just hand over the money. You shouldn't, like, do anything that's going to risk anybody's life. Oh, yeah, they have insurance. Oh, the bank already plans for this stuff. oh, and you start having these thoughts, and the thoughts become ideas, and the ideas become conversations, and the conversations become plans. Next thing you know.

Are you dating this chick? I mean, at this point, are you guys dating, or you just keep, you just schedule, you're now seeing each other in the cafeteria twice a week and, hey, come here, going to, like, wait, I had a question for you. We had history. We dated in high school, if you want to call that dating, right? So we were a thing in high school for a while. And, yeah, we started actually just hanging out outside of school.

So she's come over in my house. I go over hers. But I mean, are these coming over to talk about this? Or you're coming over because we're going to watch a movie and we're kind of dating? Or is it like you're coming over because, hey, I got some more questions? It was more so, hey, let's watch some Netflix. Okay. Let's chill.

Right. And then the conversation would leak into what's going on because she's. was going to school and she also has student loan debt. Yeah, yeah, she's broke. Yeah, you're both broke. Yeah, we're both dumb, broke young kids in New York trying to make it at, you know, a CUNY college, city university. Is there a point when like at some point you two are like, you know, staring each other and you realize like, okay, we're fucking talking about Robin a bank? So she'd come over to my place and we'd be talking about how much money we owed in credit cards and she would tell me about all the upcoming, you know, onboarding trainings that she would be doing

for the bank. I'm telling her about the police academy. We're both. proud of each other, but we both felt the same exact pressure. So she's telling me information about how much money is in the till. She's telling me about the information on how much is in the actual safe, the die packs, you know, all the different things. And we're staring at each other. And it's like we both knew that this is a thing we were going to do, but neither one of us wanted to be the first one to actually say it. Right. Right. So right, all right, like, it would be really, really easy. In fact, that is, I think, the first time that's, something like that even came out of our mouths.

And she said, it would be really easy. You could just come in, give me the note, and I would give you the money. But that's it. Very simple. But you guys had even specifically said it. She just kind of threw it out there. Yeah. Like, oh, this would be so easy, hypothetically speaking.

It's a hypothetical, right? This is definitely not a federal conspiracy at this moment. It was. And so we start talking about. well, how much is actually in the drawer? If I were to do this, it doesn't make sense to do it for, you know, six, seven thousand dollars. And she says, no, because if I know that you're coming in, then I can pad the drawer a little bit more. And they have this thing called like the cow, which is where the money goes into temporarily between the teller box and before it goes into the actual vault.

So she said, I would just take my time and get busy. I wouldn't actually move the money until it's, you know, too late. So she would make sure that her drawer was nice and healthy. Right. So we're talking about all these different scenarios on how it would go if we decided we were ever going to do that, but we still hadn't actually committed to doing it. Right. Yeah. So at what point do you guys, do you start really thinking this is, like, this is, like, what are you thinking if you did do you do you get away?

Like, this is, listen, to me, New York City, I feel like, and every time I've been, which is like, I think twice, it's packed. Like, I can't imagine there's cameras everywhere. Well, wait, this was how many years ago, too? 20, 15. So this would have been about 18. Yeah, there's still a lot of cameras. But even if you said there was not a lot of cameras, it doesn't really matter. There's so many people.

It's so congested. It's not like I could see you jumping into a car and taking off. I mean, it just seems super congested. I'm wondering how do you even think you're going to get away? Oh, we had a plan. So once we actually decided, which it just came out, right? We had been planning so long in hypotheticals. Eventually, we just transitioned into a, okay, hypothetically, but now let's talk about

how we would actually get away with it, because you're right. There's way too many variables. I can't just go in there, get out, and have a getaway car waiting. I'm going to hit traffic. Like you're not going to have that. This isn't like a movie. So I start thinking, all right, that means I need to be able to blend into the crowd. That means I mean I need to have an escape route, right, an exit plan.

What does that look like? So I devised the whole thing. And it was actually even better than what you see in the movies. My plan was I was going to get dressed up dark blue breakaway pants, a long sleeve, gray, like, shirt, a wig, contacts, a hat, totally different person. And what I did was I had a gym bag. So as I'm walking up towards the bank, this is division, and it's actually how it played out. So we get there. You said this is division?

What? This is the vision. Oh, the vision. Yeah, this is the plan. This is how I envisioned it. Okay. And when we went through with it, I said, all right, we're going to do my plan. We're going to execute my plan.

We decide what day, what time. She already has the plan in motion. She knows exactly what time I'm going to be there. She knows she's going to pad the drawer. She knows that she's going to put extra money in there so it's nice and healthy. So it's worth the risk. And the morning of, I get on the subway, I go into Alphabet City, lower east side of New York, and I'm walking around all dressed up with this wig. I feel ridiculous because I've got this wig.

I'm like, people are going to tell that this is not real hair. This guy looks shady as fuck. What's going on? Where is he going? I was sweating in my clothes under my wig. and I walk up to this dumpster, big dumpster next to a project complex, and I drop the duffel bag behind the dumpster with my getaway plan. This is a change of clothes where I'm going to facilitate the escape.

I walk towards the bank. I walk in, I see her, I go to the little place where they have the withdrawal slips. I pretend like I'm filling out a withdrawal slip, but it's not. I already have the actual note that I wrote before ready to go. I took every precaution. I'm talking about, I have, like, you know, the fake Band-Aid, liquid Band-Aid on my fingers for fingerprints. I have different color eyes. I have contacts on.

I've got different hair. I've got everything down. I walk up. I give her the note. She looks at me, and I can tell she's, like, pretending to be scared, but she probably actually was. Like, holy shit, like this is actually happening. I give her the note, and she just puts the money in the bag, slips to me. It was all very, very smooth, which was the weird kind of creepy part, right?

There was no disruption. Nobody noticed anything. This was going on in my head. I'm looking around like, nobody even cares. This is so smooth, so quiet. She gives me the money. I walk out. She didn't act startled or anything.

Like, she just, yeah, she didn't freeze. Like, I'd be thinking they're going to, the FBI is going to look at this. I better be like, something. You know, she played it all smooth because that's actually, you know, but that's actually part of the training, right? They tell them don't make a scene. Yeah, because if you make it seem like something's going on and then your coworkers get freaked out or the people in the bank get freaked out. The guy gets freaked out.

Yes, and now somebody can get hurt. Right. So your job is, just remember, it's not your money. Right. It's federally insured. It's not your money. Just do what he says. Give him the money.

Get him the hell out of the bank as quickly as possible. Before he starts shooting customers. Exactly. So you want to get him out of the bank as soon as possible so that you can actually be safe again. You and the people in that bank. And that's what she did. She hands me the money. I walk out the door.

I bust the left. I go back to that dumpster. I go behind the dumpster. And in one move, I have breakaway pants. I break away my dark blue pants. I pull my shirt over my head, rip off the wig, the hat, grab the contacts out of my eyes,

and I stuff them all inside of that duffel bag. Now I'm wearing light cream-colored slacks, a nice white button-up shirt, short brown hair, brown eyes. I'm a completely different person in about six seconds flat. I grabbed a duffel bag, put it over my shoulder,

and I walk right past the bank. Again, that I just robbed, I walk right past it, and I get on the subway. I get on the subway, I pay my fare, right? Because I'm a law-abiding citizen. I pay my fare.

I sit on the subway with a duffel bag that now has a trash bag, a small plastic bag inside of it with money. Not much, about $18,000, but more than what normally you'd get from a teller box. Yeah, that's a nice lick. I think the average used to be like $3,500. It's probably $5,500 or something now.

Yeah, because if you just randomly, if you don't have somebody on the inside, that's what you're going to get from the actual just a teller. Right. And I'm on the subway. I get to my house. I am freaking out. I'm like, okay, this is either the smartest thing I've ever done or they're going to come kick down the door any minute now.

Nothing happens. It was like six hours before she finally text me and says, okay, I just got out of the FBI's like office because, you know, they do a debrief. She's a witness in her crime. They got to ask her all the questions. Do you know this guy? No, describe them. Blonde hair, blue eyes, you know, exactly what I looked like.

She comes over and we celebrate. Oh, I wouldn't have had her come over. I'd be worried. Oh, I know. I'd be concerned. Like, I'd be like, don't call me afterwards. Like, don't, we're not going to see each other for a week or so. We'll bump into each other.

Oh, believe me, we did plenty of stupid things along the way because, you know, you know, mastermind criminals, we were not. But it worked. It worked the first time. She came over. And if you've never had sex on a bed full of a bunch of money that you got from a bank. I have. Okay.

Okay. Well, then you know that it's kind of exhilarating, right? I mean, literally, these things are banded money. And we're just like, we just did this. All of a sudden, everything feels lighter. The world feels like, oh, all right, my problems are solved. My bills are paid. Like, all right, I can do this.

And everything is cool. I got my share, she got her share. I think because I took the bigger risk, I got about 10K, she got 8K, we split it, then we go wrong way. At that point, we're like, all right, we need to not hang out so much, we need to go our separate ways, but we wanted to split the money and then put some distance. And that's what we did. I go back to the academy now.

So now my uniform's paid for with bank money, right? Yeah, I'm set, my bills, no more worries. I can finally move into the life that I want. I start the academy. Everything's going great. I mean, money is not an issue anymore. I'm learning all the things about the new job I'm going to have. And then about halfway through the academy trainings, right?

So the first one, I'm a police cadet getting ready to go into the academy. Now I'm halfway through my training at the police academy. And money goes by really fast. Yeah, stolen money spins very quickly. Yeah. In 10K, that's nothing. Yeah. So my bills are paid, credit card, done.

But now I'm back to square one. I'm not in the hole anymore, but I'm level. I broke even. I'm good to go. You know what you need? You need at least one more. At least one more. Okay.

That's what I need. But I can't do another one for another 10K because you saw how quickly that went. Yeah. So we've got to go bigger. Yeah. We had to go to the vault. Yeah. No, that's insane.

Go into the vault. That's insanity. That's insane because you've got to be in the bank a lot longer. Listen, once you do the first one, the notion of insanity, the line moves back a little bit. What you consider to be insane is no longer the same thing you thought a few months before.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, how do we get... How do we get more? She says, we have to meet up. You can't rob her again. No, no. No. Well, hold on.

Not the same way. Oh, you're bad. You see the FBI. You again. Yeah, so this is part of what's crazy. Was the problem. I think they're targeting it. That's what...

You guys need to look into this. I think I'm being targeting it. You're right. I can't target her the same person alone again. She says, all right, we need to talk. We need to meet. Because surprise, surprise, she also ran through her 8,000 very, very quickly. We go when we meet. She bought like a new Ford runner or something. We meet at this like shady. No eyelashes, makeup, nails. It's expensive being a hottie. She loves her new life. She got the it's right. She got a taste of the money, the quick fast money. And she says, but we can't meet somewhere public. So we go to White Stone Cinema up in the North Bronx, North Bronx.

We meet in a parking lot at like 2 a.m. I'm like, this is... It's not suspicious at all. No, I'm like, this is shadier than if we were just met at Starbucks. But we do it either way. So we go there and we start realizing you had to do another one. He'd say, yeah. But it has to be bigger.

It has to be worth it. There's a lot more in the vault. How the hell do we get to the vault? Well, the only way you're going to do that is if we show up early before the actual patrons walk in before the doors open for business. So she says, here's how we're going to do it.

She has all the inside scoop. Now that's just training. She knows exactly when it's open. Yeah, not just the training. She knows the schedule. She knows who the employees are. She knows who the managers are. And she tells me the whole plan.

It says, you're going to walk in at 8 o'clock. The bank opens at like nine. But the employees get to like an hour before. And what's going to happen is one bank manager will go in by herself She'll disarm the security system. She's going to walk out. She's going to put a piece of paper in the trash can at the corner. That's the signal for the other employees that are waiting outside to walk in because they know that it's safe after she's deactivated the alarm.

When they walk in, they're all going to converge in the vestibule, in the place outside where the ATMs are. At that point, it's just three employees. The security is disarmed. That's when you come in. I said, okay, I guess that's where I come in. So that's my cue. I go. So as they're opening the door,

are these on buzzers or something? Yeah. Well, the first, the manager goes in and she deactivates everything and she just gives them the signal, the piece of paper and track.

So you're just going to follow them as they walk in. I got to time it. Yeah. So I was going to say, if they're waiting to go into the door, is it locked? Like, you have to wait for they,

see them open the door, and then you swoop in, like, so I'm standing about a block away. I'm pretending to be on a phone call. So I got a phone with my ear. I'm, at this point,

I'm dressed up now. Now I'm like, I got to put on more of a show. First time was just like dark clothes I can rip off. Now I'm in a suit, a nice cream-colored suit that I bought with the previous money. And I'm standing about a block away with my phone and I'm watching. As soon as I see the paper drop, I start walking casually, phone to my ear, as if I'm just another business person in Manhattan having a conversation and I time it so that I'm crossing in front

of the bank as the two employees are walking in. At the last second, I hit a 90 degree, and I walk in right behind them. Now, immediately, they're like, oh, the bank's not open, the bank's not open. I said, no, it is. And I show them that I have the back end of the pistol in my waistband. Right. I pull my jacket back and I have it there. So, yeah, the bank is open.

Right. So at that point, they're like, okay, like they have to comply. They're not going to do anything. There's nothing to do. They're not close to any silent alarms. There's no buzzers. There's no customers. No one's going to know the difference.

And the bank doesn't open for like another hour. What are you going to do? So you just comply. Right. We walk to the back. go to the vault. I tell everybody sit down,

you know, give me your phones, keys, everything, just has a precaution. And I just tell them, sit down. Didn't lay a finger on

anybody, right? I didn't touch them. I didn't threaten them with violence. I just walked in and said, I mean, it's implied, right? Yeah.

It's the things you don't say. So, I got a gun. No, the bank is open. Okay, you get the picture. Yeah.

We walk to the vault. We go to the back and I have my person, you know, my inside person, she goes in, and I have her. I select her

out of three people, and that's three of them, randomly. I say, you know, you get the money from the vault. Her job, her only job, is to look scared. Yeah. And not slip me a die pack. Right. That's the only reason why I picked her. I got to make sure I have no diapack because I'm not trying to have this blow up in my face,

literally, you know, five minutes after I walk out the door. She puts the money in the bag. $102,000 now. Nice. $102,000 in cash in a duttle bag. everybody's there. I give them the instructions. I say, wait, five minutes.

After five minutes, when I'm gone, you can go ahead and, you know, call the cops. Right. Take the money. I walk out. I was like, okay. Shit. That was just as easy as the first one. A little riskier.

Do you do the whole, the whole stripper. Oh, no. No, no. You're going to laugh your ass off of this. You go all the way to the police academy and change it in the locker in the police academy? No. I held a cab. Nice.

I held a cab. I walked out. Better and better decisions all the time. Yeah, I held, I mean, I walked out. I'm all dressed up as a nice businessman and I just walked to the corner. I held a cab and the cab just gets on the Queensboro Bridge, goes back into Queens and I'm literally looking at a duffel bag full of money at my feet in the cab and just go home. At this point, I'm like, I'm a pro at this. This is, you're getting sloppier. Yeah, I got this. No, no, I got this. It's all good. Did she and I I know these things because I have extensive knowledge because I've watched the town, the movie The Town, multiple times. So I know all about it.

I know all about this. Are there places in the bank or did she tell? Because to me, you know, you watch basic movies. You think at the teller counter, there's a button, right? But in the town, they have a button like in the corner on the angle. And so the person like reaches their foot over and hits the button with their foot. But does she tell you, listen, there is a panic button here? There's a panic button here.

Like, they're all over the bank. So do you know so that you don't take these three people? Like, she's going in the vault. You got three or four people left over. You say, here, go stand over here so that you didn't just send them against the wall that has a panic button. Like, so you know where they are. I know where everything is at. So single file line, stay away from the walls, direct B line to the vault.

And when we get to the vault, everyone is sitting down on the floor. in the middle of the floor, right, right, in the middle of the vault. So there is nothing for them to touch, nowhere for them to reach to, no phones, nothing. It is very much a controlled process. These people, how much money do you make working in a bank anyway? See, I need to make a lot of money. If this shit's going to happen, even if it happens once a year, I don't want to be at a job where some guy with a gun's going to walk up and tell me walk single file into the vault.

And it's going to go bad. And how do you leave them? Like, what do you tell them as you're walking out? Yeah, he said, he said, wait five minutes. Okay, I must have missed that. And you can call the police, like, you know, as if they're going to wait five minutes. No, no, I knew that I didn't know. I probably wait.

I mean, they said, I'm not fucking doing anything, bro. I'm waiting five minutes. Yeah, because I'm not risking it. Yeah, this guy, for all I know, he walks back in in two minutes. Yeah. Now, I do believe that there was something else said, right? The paper reported on it. Apparently, I said, don't, you know, don't call the cops yet, or I'll be back.

Right. Now, did I say that? Probably. Right. You don't even recall. But your adrenaline, what you? Do you remember saying it or your adrenaline shot through the roof? No, shot through the roof.

I am literally in like a totally different mode. I am acting out a role. Yeah. And that's the thing people don't realize is that when you have to do something that's really scary or really hard, sometimes you have to tap into a different version of yourself. Right. The type of person that normally doesn't show up, the person that you hold back when someone says something and you want to tell them to go fuck off.

Or when you're at a dinner party and you just want to walk out, you want to punch somebody in the nose. That person you usually suppress them. You keep them in check. When you're doing something like this, you have to let that person out. You have to just kind of like be the person that would actually do this. So I was playing a role. So me saying like, yeah, or I'll be back.

Okay, sure. Again, an implied threat. And it was really weird that I started rationalizing all this. In my mind, I was like, okay, no one's getting hurt. the bank is insured. This is a rounding error for them. They're not going to miss $102,000. They literally plan for this stuff.

On any given day, they probably lose $100,000 to some random robbery in some part of the world. Like, this is not a big thing for them. And all the employees have a story. Really? I'm really, really helping them, honestly. These are great stories for them. Yeah, remember the other bank robbery? Remember the other bank robbery you said?

He's like, he's like, you know, whatever, whatever, don't move. You know, have a good story to tell your friends on Facebook. Right, yeah. I mean, it is true. They did have that. But to be fair, now, looking back at it, I do recognize and realize, oh, shit, that was really scary for them. Not for her. She knew what was going on.

Yeah. And she knew that they weren't going to get hurt. And I knew that they weren't going to get hurt. But they didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. They didn't know. They thought I might not see my kids today. And that's a real fear.

And that is the actual pain, right? They didn't lose any money. The tellers themselves, I didn't take a dime from their pockets. Their paycheck didn't change. I didn't keep their phones. I didn't steal their cars. I didn't do anything to them except for I really could like, you know, fuck them up mentally where they went home and maybe they quit their job.

I don't know. Maybe they're like. I'm sure they were fine. Maybe they're like, this is not for me. But you just said it. They don't pay me enough. Like I don't know what the consequences are. And that's the thing.

Our decisions have consequences, and those consequences, they ripple out way beyond what happens to you. They ripple out across other lives, and sometimes you find yourself paying the price for them 10, 20 years later. And so it's not just, oh, I robbed the bank, the cops got involved, a police report got written up. They went home at the end of the day, nice little bow at the end of the story, wrapped up, done. No, this thing could have impacted so many lives, like a butterfly effect, and I have no idea. Listen, listen, I had a home invasion one time. They kicked two, they happen to be black guys. I'm going to throw that out there.

It means nothing. Two big black guys kick in the door, grab the chick I was dating and her son, bring us into the bedroom, throw the blanket off the bed, throw it over our head, tell us they're going to fucking kill us if we move or scream or do anything and ask us like, where's the cash, where's this? Stole a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash, stole a bunch, stole all my watches and everything. else, took our vehicle, took off, and that guy, I'm fine, bro. I'm fine. It's not a big deal. I slept like a baby that night. It wasn't a big deal. These people are fine. I hope. I really hope you're right. Maybe not everybody's built like you, but. No, I'm kind of, you know, but whatever. Yeah. All right. So now, I just say, don't lose any sleep. You're fine. I've come to terms with you. I had to, I had to endure my own hell after that, believe me.

So I paid for it dearly, as I should have. But, you know, put it. So we'll get there. Two robberies under my belt. I'm in the academy now. Are you now a cop, though? I'm about to graduate the academy. So this is November, and I'm graduating in December. This is six weeks before I graduate.

And really quick, how does the money get the $100,000, how does that get split? Does she have to talk to the FBI again? What do you guys? Oh, yeah. Yeah, same thing. So FBI, NYPD Joint Task Force come in. They interview her. Same thing.

She's a victim or witness, both. But this time there was other people involved. So, you know, she just happened to work at the bank. And this was months apart. So could. There's not really, there's not really suspicion on her. No. Or at least they're not, they don't accuse her of anything.

No, no, nothing at all. She files a statement. She does everything normally. It's a horrible bank to work at, by the way. Yeah, exactly. It's horrible. No, honestly, any bank in a major city, New York City, I mean, Boston's terrible. Boston is the worst.

That's when I was in prison, every, like, you know, every single bank robber I met was from Boston. Yeah. I was like, man, okay. I, you know, I think it's a bank robber. capital of the world. Listen, that was the only thing. I'm a Yankees fan.

They're Red Sox fans. I was like, if you weren't a bank robber, I'd fucking punch you in the face. But, you know, we're kin, right? We're both bankrupt. But everybody was from Boston. It was really weird. And so we go back, we split the money.

60-40 again. We always split it 60-40 because I was taking more of the risk. We split it. You know, I mean, that's a pipe. Yeah. Really? I mean, did you vote, like, in the end. Yeah, is there a contingency plan?

Like, if you get caught, it's all you? What about the code? Yes. Did you talk about the code? Yeah. Well, the code was, or at least I thought it was, right? Right. It doesn't really play out that way when shit hits the fan.

Yeah, yeah. The code was, if I get caught, then it's just me. Yeah. It makes sense that if it's just... Why would both of us go down when, like... I'm already, yeah. Yeah, they already got me. Now at this point, why would I fuck her over when she's the one that opened the door to the

opportunity to begin with? I can think of a reason. Well, anyway. Yeah. It starts with a five and through a K. Yeah, got it. So, yeah. This might be a silly question.

Listen, do you know how furious people are going to be in the comment section that we keep interrupting? They're going to be like, this is like watching Johnny Mitchell. Like, sorry. We're two bank robbers in. We got, we got a lot of thought. I just want to say, and it might be a silly question, like, what's your relationship with her at this point? Are you like, man, like me and her are going to be doing this for the next 10 years? Or you keep telling yourself this is the last one.

Is it like a relationship? Like stress? Are you realizing like, okay, we need to be really careful. You're getting sloppy already. What am I talking about? Well, in our mind we weren't getting sloppy. We were just getting better. So we didn't have to take as many precautions because now we're pros.

And no, we were not together. We were not in a relationship. There was no vision where we were going to be Bonnie and Clyde for the rest of our lives. That was not the plan. This was, okay, we need to do one more because the first one showed us what was possible. The second one was supposed to be the thing that just set us up for life. And then we could be done with this. Right. Done. At this point, she's dating some guy, like I'm

talking to some girl. We're living our own lives. This is not a joint venture. This was just like, yeah, we're going to align to do this plan. We're going to execute it. And then we're going to go our separate ways like we did last time. Right. Except that now, because we're pros, we start, like, you know, really enjoying the fruits of our labor. And I go and buy a brand new car. I deck out Bachelor pad. I mean, I'm talking about brand new. carpets, beanbag chairs, like new I home studio, I just go crazy. The beam bag chair balling?

Well, when you're a college kid, when you're a little 20-year-old, you're about to be 21 living in New York City, like, yeah, I got the beamback chairs, I got the pull out futon, I got the temper seat of temper. Yeah, you need to start with the futon. Temporceal, the mattress, temporepetic, the memory foam, you're the nice one. I just, I'm just living life. I'm buying everything. Any new phone that comes out, I got new, uh, cool.

car, new suits, everything. Are you realizing like, you're not putting the money in the bank, right? Like, you're buying things. Okay, just making sure how that this is. No, no, this is terrible. There was a point where I was so afraid that I was actually carrying some of the money, still banded in my bag, like my police academy bag. So I'm going into the police academy with banded money in the bag for me to report for training.

And then, while whenever I breaks for lunch, people are going eating brown bag or McDonald's or whatever. I'm going to like the local steakhouse, sushi restaurant, eating like nice meals and paying from with like $100 bills that I slip out of the band. Totally warped and crazy twisted like, you know, chapter in my life. This doesn't even feel real. At this point, I didn't care. I'm like, all I've got all the money that I could need. This is, this is like, fuck you money. Yeah, this is two years. You're at 60,000. You're at two years over. Yeah. This is two years of your salary. Yeah.

That you've got over two years of your salary just sitting. Yeah. Do you have to be careful on how you spend it as far as like, do they know like, okay, these serial numbers are now missing? I doubt that. No. No, no, wasn't worried about that. And remember.

And this is 20 years ago, too. Yeah. I'm a criminal mastermind. I'm a genius in my own head. So I'm not worried about that. But I was smart enough to know that when I got the car, I can't pay for it all in cash because, you know, $10,000 and so I put like, seven or $8,000 down cash, and I financed the rest.

Am I worried about financing? No, because I got plenty of money. So I'll figure it out. I'm using money orders. I'm using all kinds of ways to, like, clean the money and pay off dead. And I'm just trying to be smart. Right. I build a whole new life for myself, whole new identity.

I've got everything. I'm taking the boys out to the bar, Johnny Walker Blue Label, off the shelf, you know, everything. We're just living life to the fullest. Then I graduate. now things get real. Now I'm actually walking around with a gun on my hip, a badge on my chest. And the funny thing is, I actually really loved my job. I loved helping people.

Some people cannot understand that. They will think, no, you're just psychotic. There's something wrong with you. You're a sociopath. Or you were corrupt to the core. You were looking for somebody to hurt or rob. No, actually, like there are plenty of times where I did some real. good in the world while I was working, it just happens to be that I found the way to finance my life

in a way that didn't match those values. Makes perfect sense to me. Perfect. No, it does me. I mean, it does. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I mean, yeah, I don't mind, I don't mind going into the bank, giving a bunch of fake documents and having cut me a check for $200,000.

Like, I had no problem with that. But then, you know, I'm also going to pick up garbage on the side of the street if I see it. I'm not going to throw garbage on the ground. I'm going to put it in the thing. I'm also letting people, you know, I stop and say, oh, I open doors for old ladies. I'm nice to children and small animals. Like, I'm a nice, normal, decent person. I like helping people.

But I am willing to go ahead and commit fraud for two or three million dollars. You know, is that making me a bad person? I don't think so. I don't think so. People that I know today that know my story still laugh because they're like, you would never like. You're such a rule follower. Like, I won't take a puppy into one. Walmart because it says service animals only. Like, it's ridiculous. But I could justify or rationalize

what I did at the time back then. And people talk about how money corrupts, power corrupts. And listen, they say it because it's true. After a while, you just stopped caring. And after the second robbery, the other thing that got really, really weird was I got assigned to a precinct. And I saw my own wanted poster on the wall. I saw it on the wall. I stared at it. For weeks, you know what I did? Bro, have you heard my story? Have you at all? You understand?

I looked at right at my wannaboster in a police station. Fuck it. But this is taken from a camera 30 feet away. Like, it was, right? Like, you've got a disguise kind of, right? And there was some from the surveillance footage in the bank itself, but it was grainy. It wasn't good quality. Yeah.

Well, that makes you feel better. Yeah, I didn't think they were going to figure it out, but I know who it is. I'm like, that's me. That's an eerie, surreal feeling, right? Like. I grab it off the wall. No, I would have left it. I grab it off the wall and I tape it in my closet right next to my police uniform.

Right. So now imagine waking up in the morning. Can imagine what the cops said when they eventually raid your house. Yeah. There was a lot of shit changed actually in the academy after everything happened with me. So that was my last act of public good was I upgraded their screening procedures. Yeah, you're really doing it for them. Yeah, exactly.

And so imagine waking up, brand new bed, bachelor pad, not care in the world, open the door to your closet, and you've got your police blues, and then your wanted poster right next to it stuck to the wall. Seems reasonable. It was so weird. But so fun at the same time, because at that point, everything was just like, this is the movie. I am above everything. I've got this figured out. I'm watching movies like Ocean's 11, and I'm like, Danny Ocean ain't got shit on me. You know, I've got this thing planned out.

I'm good. Then I meet a girl. Is this another chick? Different chick, yes. Okay. Like, this is not the one from the bank robbery. Yeah. We were just associates.

We were just working on this stuff. I meet a girl. We met online, some chat room or something, and we go out to lunch. We hit it off. She's a pin-up model. She's doing like 1930s pin-up and this and that. She's going to school for nursing. Beautiful.

I'm like, okay. okay, like, this is great. And now I've got the confidence, right? Because I've got the uniform, I've got the power, I've got the authority, I've got the money to back it up. I can date a pin-up bottle, right? I've now got all the information, all the energy I need. And at the least I'm going to try. Yeah.

So it goes great. We fall in love, right? She introduces me to our parents. They're so proud. They respect what I do for a living. We start thinking about what we're going to do in the future. We get engaged. Mind is the second one I've been engaged to now.

Right. So apparently, you know, every girl I meet, I had to ask to marry me. It was flaw. But I... You need a ring. Yeah, I need a ring. I need more money. I want to move out of the apartment that I'm in, that I'm renting, and give her the life she deserves.

We need a house. She's really her fault. That you rob the third thing. It's really. She's living with her parents. I'm just like, hey, listen, she's going to be saving lives. in the emergency room and I'm going to be saving lives in the NYPD. We deserve a nice house.

It's almost like you're owed the money. Really? Yeah, yeah. The weird part there was I was so close. I really wanted to tell her. I wanted her to know what was going on. Thankfully, I did not, right? Because that would have made things very weird for her when everything blew up.

You never know how a chick is going to react to I'm a bank robber. confession. Yeah, I mean. Sometimes they're cool with it. Yeah, that's hot. Yeah, sometimes it's like, I really need to call the police. Yeah. So I left her out of it, but I was doing, I was setting things in motion.

I reached back out to my co-conspirator. And this time I say, okay, we got sloppy. I'm realizing now in retrospect, I can't hit the same bank a third time. That would just be stupid. Yeah. She says, okay, well, I know how the bank security works in other states, too. Like, it's very similar. So you can just do a different job somewhere else.

We negotiate the terms. I'm like, okay, but this time you're not there, it's going to be a lower cut for you. Right. I go to a neighboring state, Pennsylvania. I'm at this point working as a police officer. I'm on my day off. So this is like my normal scheduled day off. You can't do it on your lunch break.

Exactly, yeah. So I... That'd be crazy. That would be crazy. I don't do crazy things. I drive out to Pennsylvania and now this is going to be the third one, which again, I convinced myself, this is going to be the last one. Three times and I'm out. That is what happened. Three strikes and I was out. But I wised up. I said, I need to make this money work for me. I can't find myself six months from now in another position where I need to rob a fourth one. So I'm going to put this money to work. I stop at Barnes and Nobles, and I buy two books on investing. This is April 2008, which means that if I hadn't been caught, I would have lost all of it in the stock market because I had no idea what the hell I was doing. So either way, I was going to be, like, just screwed. It didn't matter.

There was just been a fourth bank. There would have been a fourth bank. Yes, because I would have put that money into the stock market. I would have lost my ass on it, you know, in the 2008, 2009 recession, all that stuff. And then I would have been, you know, broke again. but I buy the books, still in the bag, put them in the passenger seat, I'm in Reading, Pennsylvania, and I know exactly what to do. So I stand outside, I wait for the manager's signal, same thing, I'm timing it, I'm going to walk in, ask some generic question about like a mortgage. You're going to say the bank is closed.

I'm going to pull my jackback, say, no, it's not. Yeah, I got this. Same exact plan. I walk up to the bank. Everything happens exactly as it shouldn't be. Where is this bank? Reading, Pennsylvania. Redding, Pennsylvania.

How far away is that from? About two hours. Okay. Two hours. So far enough that nobody's going to recognize me on a wanted poster. Far enough, I'm not going to run into like my co-workers or anything. But you have a disguise, right? Are you wearing a disguise?

You're going to love this. At this point, now I'm just wearing a suit and like reading glasses. Yeah, I know. I was bound to get caught. I was bound to get caught. It was just I stopped giving a fuck. Right. So I go there.

I'm in a black. suit now and I have just reading glasses on. I walk up to the teller that's going in to report, you know, to open up the bank. They comply. Same exact thing. Literally, I show them, you know, nope, the bank's open. We're walking in, single file. The only thing that's strange is that the door, she didn't have to use the key to open it this time. So I'm like, okay, I just take note of that. We walk in. We're walking towards the back, towards the vault. And I, look in the back and I see someone sitting at a desk. Like, who the is this? Why is there somebody else in here? I have everybody accounted for.

We walk to the back and I tell her, stand up, stand up. She stands up, you know, hand it in the air. I bring her over. All right, get in line. We're going to walk back to the vault. Now I know there's a chance she could have hit that alarm. Yeah. But I'm already here. I'm already inside. So let's make this quick. We go to the back. We go to the vault. They put $113,000 in a bag. Same exact thing. It's a system. It's repeatable. Same thing. Sitting in the middle of the vault. Phones, keys, call the cops after I leave. No one gets hurt. At this point, I'm a lot more confident and more comfortable in doing it. So there's not even like aggression. I'm not, you know, acting irrational. I'm just like, okay, listen, this is

what we're going to do. Go here, do this, do that. I walk out. I get in my car. I pull out on two street. I'm in my car, my personal car. My personal car. I pull out into traffic and immediately see a police cruiser pulling up behind me. Just start following no lights. It just starts following me, like right out of the parking lot. Eventually, I stop at a red light. They turn the lights and sirens on. And the first words that just came to my mind, well, my life is over. That's it. Very simple. There was no chase. There was no shootout. There was no like. Like, just make it worse. You're not getting away.

No, I'm stuck in. Even if you get away, he's got your fucking tag. Yeah, just, they'll be at your house before you get home. Exactly. I'm stuck at a red light pinned with police cruiser behind me, two hours away from home. I'm in a Toyota Sion. He's in a, you know, Crown Vic or an Impala. Where am I going?

Right. My life is over. So they put me in handcuffs, put me in the back of the, you know, police cruiser, take me to jail. I lost my shit. I don't know. I don't know. what's going to happen. I just start crying because it's like it's everything. Your entire life just fell apart in a moment. It's like years of planning, preparation, schooling, scholarships,

everything you built your identity on. Gone in just one moment. I see those lights turn on and everything vanished. Everything went away. And that's when I, you know, started my second chapter, which was incarceration. Right. Well, so when you get to the police, you get to the police station, right? They fingerprint you, they photograph you, they process you, DNA, the whole thing. Like, when he pulls you over too, does he say like, does he pull a, sir, did you just go out of the vehicle or yeah? Yeah, do they pull, do, do they pull, do, do you just, do you just, he just says get out of the car, you know what's going on, turn around. I mean, is it no big deal to him or is it? No, it was, if it was one car, one cop, so he does come out weapon drawn, right, because this is a felony stop. Yeah. It's not like a traffic stop. It's a felony car stop because I'm a suspect and a bank robber. So he does come out, gun drawn, you know, tells me to get out the car. Eventually two more cars show up. So backup arrives.

But he was just responding to a silent alarm. Yeah. And what happens is those go off quite often, sometimes by mistake. So they don't send the cavalry when you hit the sign alarm. One car shows up, you know, whoever's closest by, you go check out, see what's going on. And then the rest of the cars arrive. So, yeah, gunpoint tells me to get out the car. It says, you know, I just saw you pulling away from the bank.

We had a sign alarm. At this point, it's not even proven. But it's not going to take long. He's going to look in the passenger to see a bag full of money. You know, as soon as they bring me back to have the witnesses identify me, I know it's over. So they, yeah, they put me in the back of the car, take me to the precinct. They fingerprint me. I have my badge in my wallet.

Like, I have everything on me. So they're like, okay, what the fuck? Yeah, they question you? I mean, they saw it, but it didn't mean anything. It doesn't matter. Like, they see that. They're just thinking everything could be fake for at this point. It could be, absolutely.

So once they realize that it's true, now they have to call the feds in because this is no longer a local, you know, this is serious. So they call the FBI in. The local office sends over an agent to interview me. Of course, I'm like, I want an attorney. And, yeah, they processed me and threw me in Berks County Prison. Prison or J or J. Yeah, Berks County Jail. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, when you get to your lawyer, What's your lawyer say? And this is Reddington, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Like, I'm thinking this is a big deal in Reddington, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Like, this is not a huge city, right?

Yeah, Reading. Redding. Yeah. Oh, Reddington. What am I saying? Reading. Oh, yeah, Redding. Yeah.

Raymond Reddington? Yeah. We're in that moment. Yeah. At Reading, Pennsylvania, my girl, my fiancé at the time. She's gone. Yeah. Well, no, no, she finds me the best attorneys from New York.

So one is from, one is out of. Philadelphia and one is a federal defense attorney out of New York. These two guys drive out to Reading, Pennsylvania to meet with me. And of course, first thing is like, okay, you didn't say anything to anybody. You didn't, you know, talk about anything. No. Okay. This does not look good. Yeah, yeah, I got that part. A public defender could do this job. Like, there's not, like, it doesn't matter who shows up. There's just not. There's, yeah, there's no, you're falling within the sentence and guidelines, and that's not much they can do. Yeah, there's no getting out of this. There's no probation. At this point, I'm just,

just hoping, like, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in jail. And what was that phone call like to your fiancé or your girlfriend who had no idea? You're not going to believe how bad the cops fucked up. I'm just taking a drive. Innocent bystanders. No, I tried not to give her a lot of details. I just said, look, I'm in Reading. I'm at this, you know, precinct.

I need a really good attorney. I'll explain everything later. I wasn't going to go into the details. One, because if I started going into it, am I also incriminating myself in that conversation? Yeah. So I'm just like, get me a lawyer. You'll, yeah, she'll figure out everything later. Everybody would.

Did you tell her what you were charged with? Like, hey, they charged me with. Nope. Nope. Nope. I'm here. I need a lawyer. Send a lawyer.

That's it. So she went online, Googled, who's the best attorneys or whatever, and she, and two people showed up about like maybe six, seven hours later. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So they show up. They say it's not good.

Nope. This is not good. Yeah. I'm looking at anything from, like, like, like seven to 60 years, depending on where it falls and all that stuff. But at this point, it's just one bank robbery. Correct. Yeah, it's supposed to be. And that's exactly what the plan was, right?

I'm just one bank, and what's even better, she doesn't even work there. It's great. It's perfect. Until they go through my phone. And then they do this nice little fancy thing. It's called cross-referencing. Right. So they see that in my phone, I have phone number and text messages with somebody that happened to be the victim and witness of two other banks of the same, like, you know,

company, the same type of bank in a different state from where I live. And they put, you know, two and two together because, you know, and they talk to her. They have more than one brain cell. And she said, when they talked to her, she said, fuck you coppers. I'm not telling you shit. Oh, no. You'll love this. When they called her in, she said, he made me do it. He threatened to kill me and my whole family. He was stalking my paraplegic father. He said he's going to murder my whole family if I didn't help him. You're a horrible person. Yeah.

Yeah. So my lawyer tells me this. My lawyer says, yeah, she's throwing you under the bus hard. She is saying that you threaten her life, her family. Do you force her to do this? And I said, okay, I really don't want this to come out in court. So can you call her attorney and ask her attorney if they would like us to say, submit into evidence, a home video.

You have a home video of what, talking about the bank robberies? The celebration. The celebration. The celebration with the money on the bed. Yeah. So it's going to be really hard for you to convince a judge that I was threatening to kill you and you were doing this under duress when I have a video of us having sex on the bank money.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a tough one. Yeah. That's kind of like the chick that said, what's his name? The rapper guy or whatever. The one that they just had the trial and like the day or hours after she said she was, you know, assaulted by him, she's doing a little, doing a dance and she's got text messages.

Like, yeah. Yeah. It's not good. It's a bad look. So I almost, you know, got some extra charges from that. Terroristic threats and, you know, attempted murder, whatever they were going to try to hit me with for trying to convince her or manipulate her to doing this under the threat of her life that I was going to, like, execute her family or something. something like that. So we squashed that pretty quickly because then once the attorney told her that, it's like, okay, we're just going to not. She still rolled on me. She said that I planned everything. She's fair game. Are you kidding me? She's fair game. I was trying to live by the code.

Oh, my God. I was just trying to, this is just on me. Nobody else has to go down. Nobody else's life has to be ruined. That's silliness. It is. But what she was charged? Yeah. So she did about 36 months. I got sentenced to 11 years. She did 36 months. Yeah, because she cooperated because she, not the one that held the gun. Well, you could have been at five years. You probably could have been down to four, five or six. No, I got 11.

She got a drug program. No, you had a weapon. Yeah. No. And the weapon automatically gives you seven. So 924C. Seven, okay. Yeah, seven mandatory minimum.

I wasn't going to get less than seven no matter what. Right. So I ended up getting seven plus two out of charges. It would have been three years. True. Yes. Notes are great. They're the best.

As long as you're not like super threatening in the note. You just say, hey. It's just a withdrawal slip, right? Yeah. It's a cleverly worded withdrawal. It's a very rudimentary. Yeah. I need all the money in that drawer.

Are you saying this is not a proper withdrawal? Could you imagine making that argument? Oh, I didn't sign it. I'm sorry. Here, hold on. Does that make it better now? Yeah. everything happened according to the system, sentencing guidelines.

She got 36 mums. They called me in. And of course, they want to know, is there anybody that you can roll on, anybody that you can cooperate against? I'm like, no,

I don't know. This is why you always have a co-defendant. I like to keep a codefended on the side. You know, just have a conversation with him and make sure there's some text messages. And that way, when it comes down to it, you can say,

he planned it. Yeah. Jimmy planned it. And no other code defendant? No, No, no, but it's just us. It's just the two of us. And she already rolled on me and tried, she tried to, you know, throw me deep under the bus.

That didn't work out. So now we're just stuck basically facing whatever's going to happen during sentencing. I had a very, very weird moment when I go to my indictment. So this is a local indictment, the magistrate in Reading, Pennsylvania. Right. I'm facing my indictment on these federal charges. They read all the paperwork. They concluded the two from New York.

So it's like a, what do they call it, a Rule 11 where they can. No, no, because different. You have to face it. Mm-hmm. I had sentenced twice. That's why I had so much time because they only ran it partially concurrent. And the reason was because Pennsylvania didn't want to give up the gun charge, but New York had the other two. So Pennsylvania said, no, screw you, New York.

We want to charge them. We want our piece of flesh. So they kept it separate. I go there to the local magistrate, and he reads off the charges. My attorney says, stay quiet. don't say anything, yes, sir, you know, yes, your honor, I swear, whatever. We're not pleading guilty yet at this time. At the end of everything, off the record, the judge says,

Mr. Torres, can you come up here, please? I walk up to the judge's bench, and he says, I don't know what the future holds for you. Obviously, this is very disturbing. What's even more disturbing is the fact that the victims, the tellers, were just in here a few minutes before you walked into this room, and I spoke with them. And they said that you were a perfect gentleman. There's no reason to be rude.

That must have helped, right? My mind went in all different directions. I was like, so I'm free to go? It was the weirdest thing because I'm just like, well, yeah, because I wasn't out to hurt anybody. And I knew that nobody was going to care. It didn't matter. but it was, that was like a very interesting little nugget that I took with me. And I'll remember to this day, he said, they said you were a perfect gentleman.

Nice. Oh, okay. Cool. Hopefully the next judge, the one that actually is going to send to me, the federal judge, will see that and care about that. They sent me back to the hole. And that's when things got really hard because they were not going to put me in GP. In the general population, I'm a former cop.

Right. And they are, they know that I'm about to get transferred to the feds. You think they want me getting killed, like on their watch? No. Doesn't look good. Yeah. So they keep me in quarantine the whole damn time. This whole time, by the way, have there been multiple, like, newspaper articles?

Yeah. Yeah. Front page of every, I was on the front page, the New York Post, Daily News. What were they calling? Like, like, cop bank robber or something? They have a clever name, no? And it wasn't very clever at all. It was like, he's a cop and a robber.

Like, it was lame. I was like, I could have done better. You know, the quality of journalism was really fallen. The really good one was actually before I got caught. This was after the second one, and I was wearing that cream-colored suit, the one where I got $102,000. This was not front page, but it was Daily News. And it's like dapper desperado, donning a matching suit and tie, holds up downtown bank. Oh, like that.

That's nice. That's a guy, you know, like, yeah. That should be on your book. You should use that as a quote on the book, in the back of the book. It's in the book. It's not like a quote on the back. I listen. Some of my best quotes came from like the law enforcement.

My judge, my favorite quote, which I'm sure my judge loves the fact that it's on the cover of my book, is the scope nefarious. No, the scope, complexity and nefariousness of Cox's fraud is breathtaking. Wow. Someone had a thesaurus. That's crazy. Fucking brilliant. That was before Chad. DBT too, right?

Oh, it was amazing. No, it was perfect. I saw my front of my book. That's great. That's a great quote. You know, I read that. I was like, yeah, you don't put that. You don't waste that.

It's good. Yeah. The same things that they say in the newspaper and at sentencing about you, that in that moment you're devastated by, you can't believe. Once you serve the sentence and you write a book and you're publishing the book, you read them at that moment and it's like, this is great. Like the St. Petersburg Times called me a mastermind. Wow.

Like I was so devastated. All these times they're calling me, the prosecution is calling me a con man. And I'm like, I was devastated by it. Now it's like, that's great. These are great quotes. I have great quotes. Now. It's bad then.

I learned that the police academy upped their screening process because when I got arrested and everything went down, I was offered the opportunity to resign. know why that's the thing. Right. Yeah. They could have just fired me. No, here's your opportunity to resign. Sign here. I'm like, well, yeah, no shit. Do I have another choice? Can I stay on the job? Like, no, I have to resign. So I fell out the paperwork. And they went through all my social media, which back then was MySpace. Right. My space is live.

Yeah. And they looked at my MySpace. Well, I had gotten so cocky. My MySpace looked like I was a criminal. Right. I mean, it was, you know, there was like angry, aggressive music. There was a blood splattered, like, you know, decorations, whatever. It was like this angry thing. My status, it wasn't loved or motivated. My status was wanted. Like, people want me, but they, you know, figure out what that actually meant. And so they freaked out.

And now everybody that went through the screening process, they did a, you know, rectal exam, basically on their social media after that. And it was like, we're going to, no, we need everything. We need all your social media. We need to go back and see all your posts. like your face can't be private. You know, it can't be private. We need to have access to it.

They went deep now with everybody else because I passed every test on the psychological screening, on the intake, everything. It was nothing. So they up their standards. So, you know, you're welcome. Yeah. You said you got 11 years and then you said that they, when you went back to New York, they threw you in the shoe, right?

Was it the shoe or the hole, whatever they call it. Yeah. So in the federal system, they don't call it the whole. Yeah. They give it a really nice place. pleasant sounding name. It's called the special housing unit. Now, when somebody first told me that I was going there, I was like, oh, it's like a segregation unit. It's like a special unit for places for people that they don't want to get hurt, which means that you get everything everybody else does. You're just

like on a different part of the prison. It's the hole. Yeah, it's the hole. Yeah, it's the whole. It's 23 and 1. You are locked in 23 hours a day. I like the box. Because that's really what it is. The box. It's the box. It's a box. It's a box. And what really, really sucks about the box is that, and when you're in 23 and 1, that one hour, which only happens Monday through Friday, right? So really, then the weekend you're locking 24 hours a day, they take you, they handcuff you, take you from your box into another box that just doesn't have a bed or a toilet or a sink has nothing. And it's just empty, like a cage, where you can walk around. There's no basketball court. There's no handball wall. There's no toys, no pull-up bar.

there's nothing there for you to do except to pace around in a space that's not the box that you live in the other 23 hours of the day. It's miserable. Yeah. It completely broke me down. That was honestly the hardest part of the entire sentence. Once I got to my facility and I was able to get out of the box, it was great. You know, you'd play softball.

It was work programming. There's a factory job. You can actually sort of, you know, keep your wits about you if you decide that you're you're going to use that time and not just melt your mind watching Jerry Springer. You can do some pretty cool things. When you're in the box, you can't do anything. And that's where I started. Did you read?

I mean, do they give you books and stuff? Yeah, that was the best. Like, I couldn't imagine. So everybody always complains about segregation. But, you know, if I didn't have, if I wasn't able to read anything, it would have been horrible. You know, like that that would have been the worst. Luckily, they were constantly bringing the card around to read and I was able to read. Because other than that, then I could imagine it being.

Not that it didn't kind of suck anyway, because obviously it's better to be able to walk the track and be able to have stuff to do. But, but, um. Yeah, we could have our people would, like, send us in books. They would check them and screen on it. No, they wouldn't see. You couldn't send anything. No.

Not in Coleman. But I was already in prison when I, I would have the shoe like, like three times, four times. One time, I'm going to count it. But it was like a day. But I'm still going to count it. because I didn't know it was going to be a day. You know, it's funny when I was in the detention center waiting to go to prison, it killed me because all the guys who had been to prison were walking around there. Bro, I just fucking, I mean, I just want to plead guilty and go to prison.

And I was thinking to myself, like, bro, like, prison's worse than this. Like, you want to go to, it's going to be worse than this. It's like, oh, no, no, no, the county jail, which is the detention center, you know, in the federal system. It's really just the county jail. You're just locked up with federal guys. Yeah. So in the county jail, you're, it obviously, it sucks. But I thought that this was better than going to prison.

But so many people were like, well, I just want to go to prison. And this one kid, I've told this 10 times. This one kid, I would never forget. His name was Jeremy. He was a young kid. He'd been in prison a bunch of times. And I said, I was like, bro, why do you keep, why did everybody keep saying they want to go to prison? Isn't prison going to be worse than this?

He goes, are you serious? He's, bro, prison's like, they're like, they're like, like little cities. He's listening. You can get, he said, listen, I'll get on the compound in the morning. He said, by count, and we all already knew what count was. He goes, like, by count, I'll have an ice cream.

I'll have shower slides. I'll have, you know, I mean, he was like, I'll have a radio. He just started naming. He goes, I'll walk the track. I'll be on a, I'll be trying to figure out how to join a softball league. I'll be, I mean, he was just naming. He's like, it's like, it's like a really shitty kind of summer camp. Yeah, summer camp.

He is just a shitty summer camp where the counselors are assholes. But he said, you can, bro, it's going to be great. You can play games. You can get it. Listen, he said, trust me, Cox, it's you want to go to prison. That's why all these guys want to go to prison. Yeah. I was just like, fuck, I want to go to prison.

I like the ice cream. It was. That's exactly how it played out. But some guys, they spend their time in the detention center, at least in a unit with other people. It's still so. Oh, yeah. So you don't know.

Yeah. You're not having these conversations with other guys telling you anything. No, I went from the county jail to the shoe, from the shoe to Oklahoma City to then go to my designated facility. And then when I got there, it threw me in the shoe again. But it was not like that at all for me. They did not want me to get hurt. That was their thing. Protection.

I don't need a fucking protection. But they don't want to take a chance because it's liability, lawsuits, newspaper coverage. So they threw me in the box. and I was there until I got sentenced. And I had to get sentenced now in, you know, in New York. How long is that tight? Oh, man. Good 15 months, maybe.

Oh, that sucks. That's a long time. Yeah, altogether. Do you have a cellie? They wouldn't leave me with anybody. Who are they going to trust? There was one. Oh, there's some soft-ass crackers in there.

There was like a week where they might have put like another cop in there. But then they realized like, oh, actually no, we still don't think this is actually good. the deputy, you know, officer or something, came by and was like, no, let's separate them, move them. Because they also didn't trust us. Because they also think that you as a former law enforcement are high risk, not just for being hurt, but they're like, these two plotting together and like they have training. They might plot to take down a guard or something.

They come up with the weird, yeah, all types of scenarios. So it was me and the box. And I got the book cart. I say the book cart sucked. it was whatever was left over that the people in the general population did not want. So there was not anything really good there. You'd see it to be romance novels, broken books that had parts missing of it. Of course, there had to be a Bible, and the Bible was so messed up.

It looked like it needed Jesus more than I did. I mean, it was bad. And so I started getting magazine subscriptions. My people could send me stuff on the inside. That was what I did. I just sat there, staring at the walls, trying to figure out, what the heck am I going to to do when I get out. Obviously, I have no future in law enforcement, right? That's everything I went to school for, everything I had built my identity on. Everything was gone. Had no phone, had no computer,

and I had a notebook. I had nothing. So I'm sitting there, like, what am I going to do with my life? And when your mind is stripped of everything that you can play with, all the resources, all the tools, it actually reaches a really, really dark place where it wants to give up. It's like, all right, I'm just going to check out. This is it. There's nothing. nothing worth living for, or it's going to be like, well, I'm going to start playing out living in fantasy land. I'm going to start figuring out what the future looks like, even though I'm nowhere near that door.

And that's what I did. I started thinking, okay, well, I started a business. What kind of business would I want to be in? What I want to do? What I want to do when I grow up again, right? What I want to do is this next chapter of my life. And I started trying to organize my thoughts and planning it better than the planning that I had done to plan the bank robbery.

because obviously I did a shitty job there. I got caught. I didn't account for all the variables. I did overestimated my ability. I was just criminal masterminds, genius, and instead all I did was ruin my entire life. So I had to do it better. I had to do something else, something legit,

something that could actually get me into a different place and wouldn't bring me back here because here sucked. And I knew that if I came back, it was going to be the same experience all over again. It wasn't going to change. Right. So, and it'd be even more time, right? Because 11 years, that's because first-time offender.

If I come back now and the judge sees me again, oh, they're going to slap me with 20 plus. It's not even, not even a, you know, question. So I sat there losing my shit until eventually I started rebuilding myself. And I'm not talking about push-ups. I'm not talking about calisthenics, which burpees inside the cell. All the guys can do that. But a lot of guys, they just give up. And when they get to their compound, they're really complacent, right?

Like, oh, I got TVs. I can watch movies. I can play games. We got board games. This is what I'm going to do with the rest of my life or my time here. I didn't have any of those luxuries because I was in the box. And so I had to do something way harder. I had to rebuild my mind piece by piece with no tools, just me in the silence.

And if you've ever been in the box for more than like a month, you know that that place is actually one of the most depressing places in the whole prison because there's other people that are there that can't handle it. And so what you hear at nighttime, you hear grown-ass men crying, sobbing, banging their heads against the wall, doing all types of weird stuff. I mean, there was one guy. He'd lost it so bad. He literally started smearing shit all over the walls. Yeah, yeah. There was one guy that every time the female officers would walk by, he was just there like, you know, going in town. Saddest thing, honestly, I had a neighbor and he had been crying for weeks. And I knew that. I couldn't really have a conversation with him. I don't even bother.

You can go fishing, right? You could throw lines across the hallways and stuff like that. This guy had been going through some stuff. And one morning, it was like three o'clock in the morning, and I just hear all the boot running down the hallway. I'm like, okay, something happened. Somebody's like flooding the cell. Somebody's about to get pepper sprayed. It wasn't that. They walked in there and there was no fight there was no commotion they opened door quickly and then all i hear is like dragging he said i had enough he literally just ended it right there he said i'm not going to spend the next 25 years in this hell and he just took his own life in the cell right next to me i wonder if he was he really facing 25 years as low the guys that are they're facing four

years oh yeah yeah that's but yeah i mean honestly I don't know. I just know that I saw that, and that became the thing that helped me kind of keep my stuff together because I said, well, there's an alternative. I'm going to be, I'm going to figure this out, or it's that. And the simple decision was not that. Right. Not like that. I'm not going out like that.

I can't let this place get me to that place that he was in where that was the best option. Yeah. I couldn't. And so I started reading. started reading the Bible, read it through all the way. If you've ever read the proverb, there's a lot of good wisdom in there, right? It's really more about reflecting on who you are and how you make better decisions. So I started reading it, started reading all types of business books, and my mind started working.

I started reading books like Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill. And he had this thing that he would do. He would go into his library, he'd close his eyes, and he would imagine there was really, really smart people all around him, helping him with his plans. Well, lucky for me, I had an empty room. I had plenty of time. So what did I do? I closed my eyes, and I imagined this kind of like roundtable, this mastermind group of people that were going to help me figure out what I was going to do when I got out of that place. And that was a practice that I took with me from that place. One of the few gifts, right, that the box gave me, was that practice of being able to think that way and plan better

than the same kind of shitty planning that had gotten me there in the first place. So I did all that. They finally get me to my facility. I get designated to Mylan, Michigan. Guys used to call it Smilin, Mylan, right? Because the commissary was good. They had softball. They had tennis courts.

Yeah, they had tennis courts. They had the drug program. They had tennis courts at Coleman. Yeah, religious program. It's really the basketball court. They turn into the tennis court, right? They actually pull out the net and they could put it in. No.

And then that's how it was in Coleman. So the basketball court doubled as the tennis court. In Myland, it had its own tennis court. Nice. They had a lot of sand. Is this a low? Yeah. They had beach volleyball.

Oh, yeah. We had volleyball. Of course. I'm like, I don't want to see a bunch of men like, you know, like shirtless playing volleyball in prison. What do they call it? This is not what I thought it was going to be. They called it, what is the Spanish word for your whatever? Dick.

What's the, pina or pinga? Penga. Penga. They call it Penga Beach. Yeah. I mean, there's, when you go to a low, there's also, there's the worst of the worst there, but in a different way. We're not talking about murderers and, like, kingpins. I'm talking about, like, chalusters.

Like, we got some, like, sick. Chomos. Yeah, the chomos. There was so much, like, it was like the twilight zone in that place. So, yes, it was better than the box. There were jobs and recreational activities and games and all that stuff. But it was a weird place to be, especially when before that, I'm like, all right, I was either a, cop or a bank robber. And now I'm surrounded by these weirdos that did some like disgusting things

to children that otherwise, if I wasn't in this place, I would just as easily like knock their teeth out for the disgusting shit they did. But I'm like living here now and I'm going to be stuck here for the foreseeable future. So what am I going to do with my time? Well, I signed up for Unicor. Right. So the prison factory system. I'm going to go get a job. I'm going to go get my dollar an hour. What they make there? Would they make it? Metal furniture. Metal office furniture. So I was making filing cabinet that went to the Department of Justice, Department of Defense, the military. So I was making filing cabinets for them. Our Unicorn made the cubicles.

Okay. Yes. The medical cubicles. And then they, of course, and the fabric, you know, because this made a partially, you know, because this made a partially. Yeah, the installation of the plastic. We made the furniture that went inside of that. Nice. So when doing the layout planning, we were doing the actual pedestals, the kiosks and everything.

It's a good system. Yeah, it was. Slave labor. Cheap labor. Yeah. Great. Very efficient. They had SAP, which is like the ERP system that they use.

They had software. Basically is the same kind of software they use in the real world for real factories and businesses. This was a legit operation. And because I had a computer experience and the chomos were not allowed on computers. Right. And some of the other people were too dumb to use the computers. So I was in that perfect little minority. It's like, okay, you can actually be on a computer.

We will allow you and you know how to use one. Congratulations, you're a clerk. So I got a clerk job. in the warehouse. And they sat me down. I opened up Microsoft Excel, my spreadsheet program, and it's just this blank canvas. I was like, okay, so what do I do here?

Huh? Started just messing around, just playing, right? Playing in the computer. And I started realizing, ooh, I'm kind of good at this. I can start, like, building these systems. And if I change this number here, it changes this number automatically. Well, what if this number connects to this number?

And this number, I nerded out. I literally discovered my passion. in a prison factory because I'd been in the box so long and I learned to live inside my own head with no tools that now when I had this blank canvas in front of me, that became my playground. I was like, oh, I'm going to really have fun with this. And I got really, really, really good at it. So much so that the factory manager was like, oh, you're going to come up and work in the business office. And I learned so many skills while I was there. It was actually, it got to the point where I had my boots were polished in the morning.

I got the Timberlin Pro boots off the commissary. I'm going to Unicor first thing in the morning. Go to breakfast, go to chow. And then I go to my office. I had an L-shaped desk with flat-screen monitors. I had an ergonomic mouse. Right. I'm saying, like, this is, do I get a 401K with this too?

I got a pension or something? It was ridiculous. Everybody else was down there working on like metal, on CNC machines, welding, assembling things. I'm working upstairs with like flat screen monitors. on the system building tools that they would use to save millions of dollars. I'm getting bonuses. I'm getting certificates, programs.

I did the Department of Labor apprenticeship. I just did everything I could to elevate myself while I was in that place. Yeah, it's funny. Like the staff doesn't really run the prison as much as the inmates do. When we were Zach and up, my buddy Zach and I, we were GED tutors. The guy that was ahead of that department never left his office. I don't know what he did. He was playing on his phone.

He was playing on the computer. He would come out every, really almost never, to be honest. He would, and he would, you know, just check like Zach would show him, yeah, yeah, I got this for him. He put everything up. Zach was running the whole place. I said, I remember Zach went to his shoe one time. The guy's name was Harmon, by the way, the CEO, the teacher, whatever. He came out one day when Zach with his shoe.

He goes, listen, he said, he said, I'm hoping that you, you, I mean, you've been under Zach for like six months now. So you can run this, right? And I go, absolutely not. And I said, I don't know what Zach does. I don't know how any of this works at all. And he goes, and I just looked at him. He goes, oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, man.

Like, the idea that he might have to step up and actually. He started filling out the paperwork and keeping the binders, because it's all in binders and shit. You know what I'm saying? He was just devastated by that. It doesn't change depending on the facility. Every facility, their job is to make sure no one's murdering anybody. The product's actually going out on time. They have to do the clearance.

They have the internet access. But the work is all done by the inmates. Yeah, yeah. They're just kind of overseeing, like making sure you're not doing anything fucked up. Yeah, exactly. And I got so good to the point where I got away with some stuff that I actually. should not have gotten away with. They were going to have people from the region coming in, and they said, well, we need

somebody to put together a nice booklet. It's going to have, like, profiles on all the officers here. They gave me headshots of all the COs, so I can put together this nice, like, you know, pamphlet that they would print out to give to the regional director when he came into town. Well, you know, I found the CEOs that were the biggest assholes, and I had some fun. So I ended up printing pictures with, like, one guy had, like, a cock on his face or something. like that. I had fun with that. I get called into the office the next morning. It's a factory manager. That's my direct boss. He calls me and says, close the door. He said, yes. He says,

Torres. Did you slide a picture of Officer McKinney with a dick on his face under his office door? And I was like, yeah? He says, okay, don't do that again. I was like, okay, all right, you can go. Now, anybody else, you would, oh, you would have been in the shoe immediately, but I had made myself so useful that they weren't going to just for something stupid like that. But they give shit the same way that you're supposed to be able to take it. And, you know, the guards there, they eventually start seeing you as like, all right, this is just some guy that works here. He's not a problem. He's not a risk. And eventually they'll start joking with you.

but the moment that you try to push back or the moment that you try to give them some shit, all of a sudden, they're in blue and you're in khaki. You're less than human. Like then all of a sudden, the power dynamics come back into place. But if you're just a regular day at work, it's weird.

It's just like a regular factory. And people don't realize that a lot of the stuff that goes into the federal government is made by inmate labor. That's just how it works. It's efficient and it's cheap. Yeah. That was my life at Myland. That was my professional career at Mylan, Michigan. Did you get like, so you have a gun,

did you get halfway house? Nope. So they, why? Well, because my release address was in New York. Right. They still, 11 years later, did not want to put me in a halfway house in the city where I used to be a cop. Oh, okay.

So I went straight to home confinement. six months of home confinement instead of halfway house with an income monitor. Now, it was the first step back though. There was the first step back. When did you get released? 2017. Oh,

Jesus. First step act hadn't passed yet. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. You did, what, 85% of your time?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, man, these dudes are getting like 60, 55%. That was a fairy tale when I was on the end. Everybody was talking about that it was going to happen. It was going to happen one day.

No, I didn't get that. I got out before all that happened. But school was while I was working at the factory, I've built a name for myself. I'm the most trusted inmate in the place. I run all the operations there. They hired a new operational accountant, and she was this like 26-year-old woman from the outside, first time ever being an officer, walked in there, didn't know what she was doing, was scared to death, but I'm like, ooh, she's nice.

Like, she's pretty, and she knows Excel. She's an accountant. So, like, you know, our nerd side kind of bonded and connected on that. And I'm working for her. We started kind of having conversations that were not about work. And I remember the first time that I decided to test it. I said, I'm either going to go to the shoe again. Oh, you don't know anybody.

Have we have anybody on here who didn't test it? I have an upstanding nice guy, except for this one thing. But they all test it. Well, it was almost Christmas. So we're coming up on Christmas. and she had been really, really nice to me, and I wanted to do something nice for her. I bet.

So I said, I'm going to do a nice gesture. She was going to school for business, working on her MBA. I had my people buy me a business book. It's a book. Send me a book because it was normal for me. I read business books all the time, so I get it, but it wasn't for me. I got no wrapping paper.

So I go find the newspaper, and it had the Starbucks, like the peppermint mocha ad that looked kind of like decorative. I wrapped the book in newspaper as a gift. And I walk into her office, and she had her backpack right by the desk. And I say, all right, just act normal. She's like, what are you talking about? And I just dropped the book into her backpack.

She was like, Torres, what was that? What did you just put in my backpack? I'm like, no, don't worry. It's nothing bad. You can get in trouble for it. It's a gift. Merry Christmas. And I walked out.

Complete gamble. I'm like, all right, there is going to be. You go to the shoe and get shipped. Exactly. Or she's going to think it was nice. Right. She thought it was nice. Right.

So now the conversation took on a different turn. We start communicating. I have my sister set up an email address to communicate via core links, the email system. So my sister sets up a new email address, gives it to her, like actually reaches out there and gives her the email information. So now I'm emailing with this guard while she's at home on the prison email system. So we work together during the day. she goes home at night. I go back to the unit. I get on Core Links and I'm emailing with her. Right. And we're talking about like- Yeah, but her name is Jane or something like that, right?

It's not her name. Absolutely. Yeah. So we start having conversations and we're literally talking about what we're going to do when I get out because we saw some real possibility. A lot of people are going to try to fill in the blanks. They're going to like, oh, like, you know, did you do anything in the bag in the closet? But listen, you don't understand the layout. Everything was glass, walls, all the offices for safety reasons, no offices were completely closed off. They need to make sure that an officer's not getting killed in there. Right. So everything is transparent.

Couldn't do anything. But we were talking with a lot of different things when I got out. Eventually, the inmates, right, they start realizing, oh, these two are a little too friendly. Yeah, something's going on. Somebody goes to SIS, tells them, oh, I think that these two got a little something going on. They open up investigation. They get her computer. They seize it.

They find the emails. And guess what? That same moment of, oh, fuck, everything's now just gone, ruined. I had built up another life for myself in there. I'm the head clerk. I'm getting big money, $1.15, grade zero pay. And I had this really sweet gig going on. I got flat screens, coffee.

I'm drinking out of the officer's coffee pots. Like, you know, the actual real coffee, not commissary, not the kifi coffee. I'm living the luxurious life. And it all went away real quick. self-savisaging behavior. It is. It is. It absolutely is. And I think I learned from that a little bit. I'm better now. I'm better now. And they offer her the opportunity to resign, which is very ironic because you know, that's what happened to me. I was given the opportunity to resign. She resigned. And I go back in the box. So I go in the box. I'm back in solitary confinement. They ship me off

to Terre Haute, the medium facility prison. So now it's different. Yeah. Now this is not a lot. How long have you been locked up at this point? At this point, I'm about, so, seven years in? So seven and a half. A few more years. Yeah, a couple more years you're out of here. Yeah, I could do it. I wasn't worried about me, but everything I had got ruined.

Right. So I go to Terre Haute, they throw me in the box, same process all over. They don't want to put me in general population. And this is a very different prison. Like, I'm now on the other side of a wall from, like, the Fort Dick Six. I'm next to the people that are, like, you know, consider it. terrorists. I'm next to people that are on death row. They literally had still a building out back where they did executions.

That was a weird thing to look out the window and know that when they went into lockdown mode, somebody's getting killed right there. This was a very different facility. I get there. I go to the unicorn. I go to the unicorn. And I'm like, hey, I used to work at the last unicorn. This is all the stuff that I know how to do.

Look, look at my resume. Factory manager looks at me and says, I know all about you. You will never, ever work at this unicorn. Get out of my face. Did you tell me you didn't even hit it? I didn't even hit it, man. He didn't care.

That was weird. He didn't care. But because politics... In Ardap, they would call that he's holding resentment. Oh, yeah. You didn't take Artaxap, so you know, not if you could have told him, like, listen. I could have helped him. You're holding resentment.

Yeah. It's going to burn you up. side. But here's the thing. Politics, they come into play, right? Because the production side and the quality side, just like in every, every factory, production is worried about production, cranking things out. Quality needs to make sure everything's actually done right, not just in volume. The quality manager there, he was like, no, this guy's got experience that I want personally to help my department. He hires me into the unicorn. And he sells me, says, if you're half as good as what you looked like on paper,

I want you working for me. But you're not going to be allowed around any women. I'm like, okay, that's fine. You know, that wasn't part of the plan. I wasn't trying to make a habit of this, right? So I got a job there at the Unicorn. I finish out my last years. And honestly, the worst part of the whole time,

it wasn't the box, it wasn't the shoe, it wasn't, you know, the Unicorn experience. It wasn't losing everything. I'm like now 16 months away from getting released. And I'd been talking with my dad on the outside for years. We've been talking about when I get out, business plans, and I'm thinking about we're going to open up a restaurant together. It was going to be great.

I had plans for the future. And I called him every single Tuesday. You know, 15 minutes on the phone. It's all you get. And I tried calling him one day. And he didn't pick up. Okay, that's weird. tried calling again, again, he wouldn't pick up. Eventually, my cousin picks up the phone.

And she's like, yeah, I'm at the hospital. Oh, do you have a heart attack or something or a stroke? Worse. So I don't know if it was from neglect or if he just didn't know, but stage four, aggressive cancer, like bad, like just completely eating him up on the inside. and she tells me he's on the bed right now. He really can't talk. So she's trying to like prepare me for this. What kind of cancer? Lung cancer.

Oh, gee. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah. So she prepares me. I call back and she says he can't talk, but he can hear you. Now think about this. I'm in a medium facility prison with guys that are there for some real shit. And a lot of them don't even know.

that I used to be a cop. I can't show any weakness. I'm standing there on the phone, and I'm literally listening to my dad die on the phone. I'm telling him, you know, I love him, that I'm proud of him. That was, that was by far. I literally, if I keep talking, I'll start crying right now. It was. I cry all the time.

It was, ooh, God. I cried when I was writing that chapter in my book. I literally cried as I'm typing this stuff out, but I couldn't stop. So I'm just there like, you know, type in this exact scene describing it. I'm on the phone. He's gasping for air. He's like almost trying to tell me that it's okay. He's in pain, like the fluid is building up, everything.

Click. Count time. I go back to my cell. I'm bawled up on the floor, crying. I just knew that that was it. Before count time even cleared, the chaplain comes to the door. Yeah. Yeah, it's not a good, not good when the chaplain doesn't call you for any good reasons. Yeah. So the chaplain came right to my door and they called me out. And yeah, so I literally heard my dad's last breaths through prison phone on top of everything else that had happened. And again, I come back to that thing like decisions have consequences, that same dumbass decision that I made years ago, almost a decade before to go have the bright idea to go rob a bank. And now, because of that,

I wasn't able to be there for him when he needed me the most. Like that, it wrecked me. I was a mess. And so all the skills, all the Excel skills, all the books I read, all the stuff that I had, like, built up in myself, I'm going to be a better man, I'm going to get out. All that stuff just, like, died. It just fell flat right there. And I didn't know what I was going to do because I wouldn't even have my dad when I got out.

That was like my business partner. That was like my buddy. That was the guy. Yeah, he was riding with you. Yeah. I mean, my mom, my mom, too. I had some close family that stood with me. But it was he, remember I told you he left when I was a couple months old.

Yeah. He was going through a similar journey on the outside. He battled with drug addiction. He had a rap sheet. And he rebuilt his life a couple of times, just like me. So he had to start from scratch. And he was doing so good. He was in St. Petersburg, Florida.

he had just graduated college. He was working at a senator's office. He was going to become a paralegal. He was doing great things, and I was so proud of him. And just never got a chance to even, like, you know, tell him in person, which, that's the stuff nobody talks about, right? Is, yeah, you ruin your own life and you end up in this place and there are all types of messed up things that happen. But when you have to experience a loss like that, somebody on the outside, you feel, personally responsible for it. You're like, damn, did I put stress on him that led to this?

You know, how much stuff did I, you want to blame yourself? And also for not being able to be there for that moment. So that was like the, as I'm getting ready to transition out into the real world, that was the final reminder that you'd unfucked up. Like, you ruined your life so bad that even now you're still paying for your decisions. Oh, you'll pay for the rest of your life. Oh, yeah. You know. Yep. So that was like the last major thing that I remember from there.

The rest of it was a formality. The rest of it was paperwork. Now, you know, you have to do your release forms. What the agreement for the ankle monitor, what date, you have birth certificates, Social Security, you know, all that of the stuff. And I got released and ended up going to sleep on my mom's couch or something. If you sleep hot at night, you know how disruptive that can be. When you're not resting well, everything else feels harder.

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That's ghostbed.com slash Cox, promo code Cox. Upgrade your sleep with Ghostbed, the makers of the coolest bed in the world. Some exclusions apply. See site for details. But yeah, that was a really messed up way to end it. And when I talk, like I tell people two things that I remember really, really clearly. I remember the first time I cried in prison, right, when I was put into the shoe, into the box. And I remember the last time that I cried in prison.

And that was when I heard that last sound through the phone. Like, messed me up. but I had to keep going forward, right? You can't give up, just like back then. I heard that guy literally take his own life. And I said, not that. I'm not going to be like that. And then towards the end of my sentence,

I hear my dad die. And I was like, that can't be the end of my story. Like, I'm not going to go out like that. I'm not going to go out with all the regret and the potential that I knew he had that he was never going to be able to live into. I wasn't going to be that guy. So I had to do something else. And when I got out, I decided I'm going to take all those nerdy superpowers, all that Excel and analytics and continuous improvement, all the things that I had the opportunity to learn while I was in there, I was going to put it to good use.

And it was so ironic that the opportunity came from somebody that I met while I was in prison. Not the guard. You know, that had to end there for a moment. But when I was at the factory, they'd called some consultants in to help them with like a certification so they can slap a sticker on their product and say that it doesn't cause cancer or something. Environmental certification. And I was the one that had all the information. So I was like the main liaison with these external consultants. I stayed in contact with them.

And one woman, her name is Wendy, she kept in touch because she saw in me something more than just, oh, here. is a clerk that's good with computers. And when I got out, I reached out to her. And she said, we could really use some of your skills now. This was like now, fast forward. We're out of prison. I'm reaching out to her because I need to figure out what I'm going to do with my life. And we're getting right around the time when COVID's about to hit. She says, we could really use your skills. I said, well, you know, I can do some projects remotely. Okay. And about a week later, she says, I want you to apply for a job. Like a job. This is with a consulting firm. with people with like PhDs and all types of parts of the alphabet at the end of their name.

You know, these are people that are engineers and energy specialists and these people that went to college and actually got a degree. I just got out of prison. And she asked me if I wanted to apply for a job. And I did. And it was the best thing that ever happened. I've been working there and I was able to rise throughout, through the company. And if you've never worked at a company that actually values vulnerability,

right? These people did not care. I didn't tell everybody, but the executives, they didn't care where I came from because they knew. That's where Wendy had met me. They knew that I had this experience, that this was a part of my life, but they trusted me anyway. And they said, look, we're all human. We all make mistakes. But you survived yours. You came out the other side better for it. And that actually makes you more qualified than someone who's had everything just served up for them easy. like you have lived through some real shit. You've come out the other side and you have the skills to back it up. So I went into that.

And the most ironic part of all of it, the work that I was doing, now I finally have a name for it. I didn't know what it was at the time. I was like building Excel tools and data analytics and modeling, all that stuff. It was called decision intelligent. Now, how ironic is that? I get out and I'm helping. helping business leaders make better decisions.

Yeah, you've made some poor ones. But you know what? Isn't that what makes me actually uniquely qualified? Because I know the real cost. And that was the lessons that I had to learn the hard way. It wasn't about the 11 years. It wasn't about losing my badge. It was about like, I lost the woman that I loved, I was engaged to.

I lost my dad. I lost my mind. All these are the real prices. What happened in the model? What happened in the model? I mean, you know, she faded out. She just faded away one day, just stopped answering the calls? Or did she actually give you the, hey, this isn't going to work out?

I got a hey John email. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I got a hey John email. It was expected. That's why it wasn't even like a big moment for me. I was just kind of waiting for it to happen. I told her in the beginning, I was like, listen, just move on with your life. I'm doing over a decade in prison.

It doesn't make sense for you to wait. She said, no, I'm going to wait. That's sweet. Yeah, it was. Nice gesture, but I knew it wasn't going to go anywhere. So when I got the email, I was like, okay, time to go play softball. Like, it was just part of the plan the whole time. But what happened with the prison guard, the chick?

What happened with her? So when I got shipped out to Terre Haute, she was offered the opportunity to resign, and she went her own way. I went my own way. We didn't talk after that. But the whole time, she never reached out? No, we can't. I mean, think about it.

She's already blacklisted. I'm now in a place in trouble for having a conversation with her. So we went our own ways. I get home. I'm now living out of my mom's couch. Right. And I get back on, I get on Facebook, right, which is all brand new to me. I'm on Facebook and I'm on social media.

And I get a message from her. And it says, happy to see that you're finally out. Happy birthday. Because I got released a couple of days before my birthday. And she says, you know, happy to see that you're out. Good to see you're doing well. Happy birthday. I was like, oh.

She was stalking you the whole time. I guess so. She must have been waiting. waiting. But I reach out and I'm like, all right, good. Yeah, thank you. How are you doing? What's going on? So we reconnect. Next thing you know, we're doing FaceTime and talking about the good old days, right? She tells me that she's in a relationship with a guy. I said, okay, cool. Good for you, but it's not really working out. She's not very happy. Okay. Well, why are you still with him? Well, I don't know. Just because, you know, he's safe. He's biding her time. Yeah. He was a nice guy.

All right, well, how about you ditch the nice guy and come to New York and come visit me? I can't leave. I just got released from prison. I'm sleeping on my mom's couch. I mean, I'm everything you're, every woman out there is looking for. Absolutely. All right. How can she resist?

No brainer. She's making some good, this is even a better decision than carrying on a semi-relationship with the inmate. Yeah. So she hops on a plane because, you know, obviously. So she leaves the other guy, hops on a plane, comes down to New York. I get a day pass. So got out of the house for like six hours.

And I take her to the museum, like the American Museum of Natural History. How long have you been locked up? How long? Had I been locked up? Not a total nine years and six, seven months, nine years, seven months out of 11. I'm not thinking you take her to the Hyatt. Um, you know, but I'm living in my mom's. I got to be careful. I don't want to assume things.

So I take her to the museum. Okay. Okay. Uh, we had our first date. Really, really interesting that. that was the first time. I even got a chance to like hug her. Like, right. It was, it was really weird. After all that time, we had never any, any physical contact. And then we had a lot of physical contact. And six months later, we get married. Like six months after I got released. I mean, June 17th,

I'm out of prison. December 12th, we're at the county, at the, at the courthouse in the Bronx, getting married because the only way that they would actually switch me from my current address and let me move to Michigan, was if I had family in Michigan and I didn't have family in Michigan. I wanted to get off my mom's couch and I wanted to go live with her. I didn't necessarily want to get married at the time, but it seemed like the logical choice.

Like, okay, well, it looks like it's going in that direction anyway. We have a good foundation, right? Beautiful foundation. So you got married? Yeah, we got married. So it's a love story. Yeah, yeah, we'll call it that.

The probation offices, they sign off on it. I move to Michigan. and the firm that I work for right now is based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. So it kind of all worked out, right? I went there for one reason. I stayed for another. We were married for about five and a half years. I have a beautiful daughter that came out of it, so no complaints.

I love that little girl to death, and she is a big part of my life. And she's actually my daughter, not my ex. Yeah. A big reason why now I filter even more things. when I'm making decisions because I can't go away. Yeah. I can't do anything stupid. You know, like that is like my life right now.

So that gave me another strong reason to make better decisions. But yeah, I ended up marrying the CEO and then I ended up divorcing the CEO. But I did get my beautiful daughter out of it. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I learned a lot of hard lessons. And now that's what I.

that's what I do professionally. I help businesses make better decisions. I whip up some magic with numbers and systems and I'm basically helping people to plan out and play out these scenarios before they actually waste any money. You know, the kind of things that I wish I would have done before I went through with my bonehead plans to rob a bank. Right. And if I would just played it out well enough and realized this is a bad idea, then maybe it wouldn't have cost me all those things. things that it costs me. And except I just do it now for other people and try to help them. Do you do it as a subcontractor? Or do you still work for that company? How long do you work for that company? I'm still working for that company. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I have two things going on.

So by day, I am the director of business intelligence at this multimillion dollar consulting firm. Okay. And then I have my own company, which I named Stark Analytics. And yes, that's after Tony Stark. I love Tony Stark. Okay. Well, thank you. I love Tony Stark. And, And my two favorite would be Tony Stark and would be Bruce Banner because they're really just rich guys with toys. You know? Like, I'm probably not going to get bit by a radioactive spider had become Spider-Man, you know, and I'm not from Krypton. I'm not going to be Superman. But I could be Tony Stark.

I could see that. I thought you were going to say Loki. Loki is? Yeah, I know who Loki is. Yeah, I can't be Loki. Yeah. You don't have a God complex, right? I do have a God complex.

but I'd like to think I'm keeping it under control. Well, Tony Stark, a man who made his profit from morally objectionable, like selling of weapons, and then found himself imprisoned in a cave where he had to rebuild a part of himself that eventually became his superpower. I know. Yeah, I had to name my company Stark. It's a great movie. Yeah, so Stark Analytics is the name of the company, and that's what I do now for other businesses. So I work for the consulting firm, but I also help other businesses to make better decisions and not, you know, miss the writing on the wall that says, this is going to be a bad idea.

This is going to land you in place you don't want to be, which isn't prison. But in business, isn't that what we're always doing? We're always just trying to make the best decision we can with the information that we have. I mean, I was. I just knew that I was broke. I had money problems. I need money. The bank has money.

put the two and two together. There we go. I need money. Go to the bank and get money. Made sense at the time. It was a bad idea. It was a bad idea. Slick Willie Sutton said, you know, the bank robberson,

they said, why do you rob banks? He said, because that's where the money is. Yeah. All these other guys that had drug charges and conspiracies. I'm like, you got way too many hands in the pot. All it takes is one of them. They're going to roll on you.

Everything comes down. For me, it was a little bit more clean. I was only one co-conspirator, and she did try to throw me under the us, but the shortest distance between any two given points, it's a straight line. I need money. Bank has money. In business, we try to take shortcuts like that too. And sometimes, especially. Not that simple. Typically not. But in business, a lot of entrepreneurs, they are facing financial pressure too. And they're like, all right, I need money. What's the fastest way to get money?

Well, what are you going to do? Custom corners. You know, get some subpar material. Where are you going to shave the money? Where are you going to say, you're not going to pay your taxes? Maybe that's where I'll save the money. I'll just keep some, write off some things. It's the same logic. It's the same thing. You're trying to solve a problem. You do something that you think is going to solve it with like a quick and easy, a clever idea. And clever is the thing that comes back and bite you in the ass. And it all falls apart. For what? I learned that the hardware. Where do people find you if they want to follow you? I tried to make it as easy as possible. so I purchased the domain, Christian Torres. Info.

Right? I mean, you want information about me. You go to Christiantores. Info. And that's where people can actually book me to come in do speaking engagements, workshops, and my new book,

which is called Built in the Dark, right? How solitary confinement rewired my mind and Excel saved my life. The book is actually available through the website as well. So that's where you can get the book, learn more about it,

And if you know, you want something more than your typical boring keynote speaker that's going to talk about marketing or AI or systems, you want a real raw story on how people can actually go through some dark times and come out the other side better for it, then, you know, reach out. Hey, you guys, I appreciate you watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the share button so you share the video with people that are interested. Also, we're going to leave Christian's website in the description box. So go to the description box. Click on that.

It'll shoot you over. You can check out all of his social medias by the book. Check out information on him. Also, if you're interested in being a guest, you can go to our website, which will also be in the description box. And you can go there. You can fill out the form, leave a three-minute video, and we'll get back with you as soon as possible. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you guys watching.

See you.