Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Oprah Made Me a Billionaire & Then I Became a Fugitive

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

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When that thing hit on Oprah, it blew our phone banks up. So we raised $13 billion. I get a call. Our office is being rated by the FBI. If I ever wanted to escape, he had a guy that could make me disappear. And we chose to leave. So one of my training partners in Dean Witter, he asked me if I had heard about these people that had AIDS that were selling their life insurance policies. He said, they're making a market on this deal.

And he said, what do you think about it? And my first blush was, I think it sounds morbid. Yeah. And I never really thought any more about it. I stopped the conversation. Doesn't mean it's not a business model. No, it doesn't. So does life insurance sounds morbid, but yeah, there's a huge benefit.

Yeah, there is. So I really just kind of compartmentalize that conversation. And I went back to my great cubicle and, you know, smiling and dialing. And then a couple weeks later, I had another guy. that was an entrepreneur, he had a water filtration company. It was really cool concept. So it was a machine that went inside of a grocery store and you push a button and it filtered water through this machine and it put it into a paper carton, flame sealed it and you open this compartment up, grab the carton, the paper carton. And it was really novel because there's no paper shelf life. That's

why you see so many plastic containers in grocery store. So, but he had a problem. And the problem was that he had oversold his stock. And he came to me with this problem saying, I need to raise more cash, but we've already sold her stock out. You know, is there a way you can fix this? And I said, let me think about it. So I got back with him in a couple days and with an idea. And it resonated in me the conversation I had with Chris earlier about the policies. And I realized that these people were being, they had a real need that were selling their policies. So, you know, I looked into that a little bit more and realized that there was no FDA-approved

drugs. All their stuff was, you know, after markets and no insurance is going to pay for that. That's why they're selling the policies. That and living costs and, you know, rent and everything else. So I can see that being a great service for these folks that desperately needed it. Yeah. It's an end of life quality of life issue. And I don't think people, you know, understand that.

So I just want to get, because you have to think are the people, 80% of the people to watch this are between the ages of 25 and 55. So they have no idea. So listen, in the early 80s, you know, AIDS, HIV started to show up, right? And it was almost in just kind of the gay, let's say, population. Now, of course, it spread to heterosexuals, but very little. But the media basically said it was all, it was homosexuals were getting the disease. So by the mid-80s, it's an issue because they're fighting it. They're dumping money into it.

I mean, listen, talk about the amount of money. They dumped into AIDS or research. We're talking about like five, ten times what was being dumped into cancers. Now, by the late 80s, they're trying to come up with some vaccine, not vaccines, because there's no vaccine, but they're trying to come up with, they're really just trying to treat it, right? Because you can't, you can't stop the virus. There's no vaccine to stop this. So, but they're trying to treat it. But regardless, people are getting, are getting HIV. Some of them are having it for five or six years, 10 years. Some of them are getting it. And within six months, they're dying in a hospital. And so the problem is that a lot of these, not a lot, but let's say,

Some of these people have life insurance policy. So you're 25 years old. You work for a company or you're 30 and you get a life insurance policy for half a million dollars. And you're paying your premium of $80 a month. And then five years in, you get, you have HIV. A year later, it's full-blown AIDS. You're dying in a hospital. Or you're just sick.

You know, you're sick and you're being treated and you're living at home. But you don't have a job anymore. You're not, trust me, people are not letting you come. into they're firing you this guy's got because you keep mind there was also initially probably for a year or so the the media didn't want to say um they didn't want to say semen what they wanted is so what they didn't want to say that in the publication so they said bodily fluids so people thought oh my god sweat if i rub up against somebody if like i grabs the door handle and i grab the door handle I could get HIV.

Yeah. I could dot. And it's like, and then heterosexuals are getting it through blood transfusions or in many other ways, right? They're just having sex in general. But they're showing up. So people are thinking that the, that the homosexuals are giving it to them because they grabbed a door handle or they sneezed near them.

Like it's just complete bullshit. Like it's not how it works. But the media is not helping. So these people are being fired or they just can't work because they're too sick and they're at home. They're being evicted. they can't pay their medical bills. But they have an insurance policy.

So I've got a $300,000 insurance policy. I can't even afford to pay it anymore. So what companies were kind of sprouting up, and they would go in and they'd say, listen, you have a $300,000 life insurance policy. We all know you might make it three years. You might make it six months. I'll give you $100,000 right now

because he's about to not be able to pay his policy, by the way. He can't even pay his policy. He's being evicted. I can give you $100,000 right now for your quality of life. So for $100,000, you could probably live back then. You could live for four or five years easily. Well, you know, people with the average person is making $18, $20,000 a year. $100,000 helps you for four or five years.

So we're going to give you $100,000. I'll take over the policy, the premiums. I'll make the premiums. You get the $100,000. And upon your death, I'm going to cash in on the $300,000. Is it morbid? Yeah, it's morbid. What's the alternative? He can't make the policy. He can't pay the policy anymore. And so it just lapses and the insurance kept company gets the last five or ten years of premiums that he's paid in and nobody ever gets a payout. Okay, well, that's that's horror. That's even worse. And you don't get the hundred thousand. You get evicted. Now you're living in your mom's spare room or maybe you're living on the street or maybe you're living in a homeless shelter. I mean, so. Yeah, the service was life for death. I mean, it was a much needed service. And it saved a lot of lives.

You know, it was a great service for folks. And they desperately needed it. Right. So, I mean, I remember, because I remember hearing that this was going on because there were news, there were news programs that were covering these, these businesses that were sprouting up that were doing this. Right. And it was always the same thing like, oh, it's, you know, they'd always try and throw a kind of a morbid spin on it. But, well, you know, what's the alternative? Like, what, like, what's the alternative?

Exactly. These people are desperate to sell the policies. They want to sell them. It's like, they think that. oh, well, you should just come in and pay them. And what do you, what are you talking with what? With what money? Exactly.

Like, this is not, that's not a business model. I can't, the government wants to come and take care of them. Right. But as a private business, they're out on the, they're out on the street without me. Exactly. You know, I mean, it became a form of health care for that. Yeah. It really did.

And, and so, yeah. And so, but, you know, like you said, there was a stigmatism to it. They tried to paint it negatively. And so when this guy came to me with this water filtration, uh, problem and wanting, you know, to raise money, I married the two. I thought, well, I can get these people money that are trying to sell policies and get this guy, you know, an asset that he can loan money again. So I married the two. I told the water filtration company, I said, look, if you give me, you know, 40 cents of every dollar you raise from your investors, I'll guarantee

them if anything happens to you, they'll be paid back. You're going to buy these policies. You're going to put them in a trust and then you're going to sell bonds and raise the cash for your company. And that way, they've got a guaranteed return back. So I sold them the policies and brokered the policies over to this guy. He took it to his board and the board was like overwhelmed. And, you know, that's when I knew we had something because I got on the board, on a phone call with the board and told him this idea. And at the time, there wasn't a sound. there wasn't a peep. So I'm grabbing a map out, looking at, you know, thinking Guam's a good place to move to

because I'm done. It's like the stupidest idea I've ever had, you know. And so what happened was, and back then we had the old receiver phones. You remember those? You stick the receiver down in the cradle. So I would get off the phone. I would stick the cradle thing down in the cradle, and the phone would start ringing. And I'd pick it up.

And it was just one right after another. It was all these board members calling me saying, look, It's a brilliant idea. Can we do it for ourselves? And I said, sure. Yeah, we can do that. But let's get the company covered first and then we can do that. Right.

So that's when I knew this thing had traction. And I went back to Chris. And I said, hey, Chris, you know, the idea you brought me a couple weeks ago about, you know, these people needing cash that they're selling policies and all. I said, look, it's a great service. And I said, I want to run with it. And I want to, you know, start a company. and I'll give you 30% of the company.

And he said, what are we going to call it? And I said, I don't know. My last name's Keller. Yours is Conway. How about Kelko? Right. And that's how the name got stuck. And that's how we started.

Okay. So do you quit your job and? Well, we could afford to quit her job then. Okay. So we continued staying there. And I had a virtual office set up back then and used another buddy of mine. It was a CPA. and his secretary would answer the calls for us, for Coco.

And how was that many? How are you finding these people? It's not like you ran an ad on Google. So I called up Google and I did a bunch of Google ads and right now. Nothing like that. No. So we had one lady that acted as a broker that had a reach into that community and she was advertising directly to those folks as an outlet to sell those policies.

and she would bring us to policies. This is like magazine, like your magazines, direct mail, or you say it's word of mouth? A lot of us word of mouth. It got to the point where there was a lot of ad prints in magazines that went to that community. And that community was very organized, and they were very attached.

This was before we had social media and all this stuff we have today. So it was incredible the communication they had and the ties they had. for that sector. So it was, it was, you know, pretty pinpointed on the, the marketing and the ads and stuff to get there. So what are you paying for a policy? Somebody has a $100,000 policy. What are you paying for it? So there is a underwriting procedure for that. So dependence upon how the life expectancy, we hired a third party life expectancy firm. It's like an actuary firm. And they would tell us, within reason, what the mortality looked like of that person, how long they're going to live. So honestly, the shorter the life, the more monies that the person could get.

Right. So it would be anywhere from 25% all the way up to 80 some, you know. Okay. And you, as a company, are you reselling these policies to investors? Or are you just holding on to them as a company and just waiting for them to kind of come to fruition? Well, start now with, we use the fund. funding of the water company that what they raised to buy the policies. And that's how we started out. And then this started bridging out to independent investors that wanted to invest.

So they're holding the policies. They're not reselling. Right. Do you ever get to a point where you were reselling them on a secondary market to raise more money or no? Yes. But not for a while. Not for a while. So this went on for several years. And then You hit on earlier that there was a time in that industry where there was a cocktail drug came out. The cocktail drug was perceived to be a cure, which it wasn't. Yeah, it was just kind of extended their life a little bit, right? Yes. It maybe helped find it.

It extended the life, but everybody was touting this as to be a cure. Right. And you understand now you get HIV. It's like having herpes, like you're living forever. Yeah. Like they've got the drugs are so. amazing now. These guys are living 45. They're dying for natural causes before it. Exactly. Some of them are living so long that their body's actually curing the disease like like,

Magic Johnson. You didn't even have it anymore. Exactly. It's completely gone. Because he took it for so long. Eventually his body just wiped out the entire disease or maybe maybe the drugs, you know, I'm sure the drugs helped, you know, obviously. But yeah, it's amazing. Some of you you would have never thought that back in the late 80s, early 90s. Oh, exactly. So. So yeah. So. So. Yeah. So. So when that happened, it greatly changed the industry. And at that point, I had a lot of employees. Yeah. But as many other companies did, a lot of companies went out of business during that era.

And I saw this coming. And about a year prior to this change of business, I had hired the largest actuary firm in the world. We immersed her out of Canada to see who else wanted our services. And I came up with the life settlement industry. what it's called today. And that's the 65 years and older, just not necessarily terminal, just older people that wanted to sell policy.

So that's how that came about. And right during that time, I was running the first commercial that was ever done in this industry. And it costs a million dollars to produce this commercial. And back then, I didn't have a million dollars. Right. So I went to one of my largest funders.

at that time, an independent company that were buying the policies and sell them to investors. And I told him, I said, look, I've got a way to get more policies in for us, but it's going to cost some money. Right. And he was like, how much money? I was like, it's going to cost a million dollars. And he was like, are you kidding me? I said, look, we're going to do mainstream commercials in New York, Las Vegas, and California

in primetime TV. Right. This is what I'm, this is expensive. This is expensive. And this is a quote I'm getting back. This is what it's going to be. So, you know, and another thing back then, you're talking about stigmatism in the market and kind of the non-acceptance of the problem there with the AIDS market and all.

You know, one of my biggest obstacles in trying to market this to their patients was doctors. The doctors were getting paid, you know, for services they rendered, but they didn't see the need to help pay for rent, help pay for food, living costs. You know, these people once they left their office. And it was just driving me up the wall. So when I made this commercial, I made a point to shoot this in a hospital and with, you know, doctors in the commercial. So I had them to advocate it to whether they want or two or not. So we shot this commercial and did it with this.

two nurses walking down the hallway talking about one of them's father had cancer and they didn't know how they're going to pay the medical bills and how they're going to pay the living costs and all. And the other one said, have you called Kelko? You know, here's the number. Right. So that's the way that was. So right in the middle of that commercial, we had perfected the life settlement product, 65 years and older, all right? And I called the ad company up and I said, look, I've got a new product, I want to roll out, but I don't have another million dollars. Right.

I said, could I just put a tagline in the bottom of that commercial that says if you're 65 years or older, you can sell your policy call or a company? Yeah. They said, sure, we'll do it. So back then, there was a very famous talk show host named Oprah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Everybody in her mom shut down today to watch Oprah. Yeah.

Anything she said went. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So this thing aired right in the middle of Oprah's show. And I had hired 40 people to man our phone banks in Lexington. And we had an overflow in Kansas City for the phone company to handle the calls. And when that thing hit on Oprah and I aired out for the first time, the 65 years of an older process, it blew our phone banks up. It jammed them up in Kentucky and it jammed them up in Kansas.

It's a problem you want to have. Yeah. I didn't know what to think about it. And what was happening was it wasn't necessarily so much people wanting to sell their policies. It was life insurance agents learning about this new business. And they realized they had a 20 or 30 year book of business. And they knew the problem with these policies lapsing. Right.

You know. You understand, Colby, that what's happening, is these people have been paying on their policy for 20 years. Now they're 65. As soon as they're 65 and they retire, their income drops, their income drops, they have to pay $110 policy or $80 or $40, whatever it is, but it's worth a million dollars, not until they die. And it's like, you know, they still have to live, right? Like they say maybe you're older and you're like, it'd be great to get $300,000. I could go see the Grand Canyon. I could buy an RV. I could drive around, but I didn't I don't have that money but I can get it now granted when I die my kids aren't

going to get a million dollars but fuck them listen I listen I've had this conversation you know what's what's funny is um when I was in prison I remember this guy came up to me one day and he said he said uh hey Cox I got to ask you a question I said yeah what's that he said you know what anything about reverse mortgages and I went yeah yeah and he said yeah he said my mom she's 70 years and she wants to get a, she and my sister want to get a reverse mortgage. Yeah. And I went, okay. I said, well, what's her house worth?

And he's like, oh, it's paid off. It's been paid off. I went, oh, okay. He said, yeah, it's worth like $200,000. They're willing to give her $150,000 to reverse mortgage over the course of, let's say, you know, 15 years. And I went, all right, he was in it. I said, right.

So what does it pay her? And he's like, oh, it's going to pay her. I forget, like $1, $1,200 a month. And I was like, okay, she, on a fixed day. income? Yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, you should get social, you know, he didn't know what a fixed income means. He's like, you know, she gets social security. And I looked at him and I went, okay, I said, well, that sounds, I said, is she struggling? And he was like, what do you mean? I said, financially, is she struggling? He's like, no, she ain't rich. Like, she, you know, she don't do nothing. I was like,

okay, but would that money help her? He said, yeah, yeah, no, she could use the money. Definitely. She's like, my sister has to go over there and help her and pay, help pays for some of the bills. And as where he's talking, I'm like, he's like, but, you know, I heard these. things are bad. I said, well, why are they bad? I said, your, your mom is 70 years old. The likelihood, and you're saying she's not in great health, the likelihood she's going to make it to 85, it's, it's, it's, it's almost 100% she's never going to make it there. I said, so, and even then they can't foreclose on her. They're not going to take the house at 85. Right, right. They have to wait. So for her to be deceased, I was like, so that means that

for the next 15 years, she's going to get $1,200 a month. She could really use that $1,200. She can use that to pay medical bills. She can use that for just a better quality of life. I said, so with that in mind, I said, in her situation, it's not perfect for everybody. You know, some people are already like, oh, no, I'm not struggling financially. Well, then there's no reason to do it. Yeah. But she's struggling.

And I said, so she, and your sister's struggling to help pay bills. So I said, absolutely. And he's like, yeah, I understand, bro. But, but when she passes, but when she dies, then they're going to take the house and sell the house. And I went, right? I said, yeah, but just to recoup what. they've got in it. And he goes, he said, yeah, but that house, that's my inheritance. And I went, oh, okay. And my fight, well, my first thought was, I forgot I'm in prison. You're just a piece of

shit. You don't give a fuck about your mother. And that was the truth. He didn't, as he's talking, I thought, you don't give a shit if your mother suffers. As long as when she dies, you get your half of that $200,000 house. And I thought, And I went, bro, I said, what are you doing, man? And I had that conversation with him. I said, you don't want your mom. So once I started explaining that to him. Right.

And explained to him like, this, it's not a benefit to everybody. It's a benefit. Your mother is what this is designed for. Exactly. And so I explained it to him. And then you could tell he, as much as he could feel bad, he started feeling a little bit bad. He's like, oh, yeah, no, no, you're right. You're right.

You're right. But I don't think really deep down. He felt that way. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'll call my sister. Yeah, yeah, and he walked off. I doubt he ever told his call his sister.

But anyway, but people don't look at it right. They think, oh, they're going to take the house. Like, stop thinking about that's irrelevant. That's the incentive for that company to give your mother $1,200. And you're right. They may give your mother $1,200 a month for six months and they get the benefit of that. That's right. Yeah.

But that's the cost of it. Or your mother can lay in her own, you know, her own piss until your sister gets off work and goes and helps her get out of bed. And, you know, like your mother can have a horrible quality of life for the last few years while her son's, her drug addict son is in prison and he should be out helping her. And the other sister's working her ass off. Right. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you're not thinking about this.

Otherwise, $1,200 was, this was 15 years ago. Right. That was, that's a huge benefit to her. And all this guy was thinking about was his inheritance. Like, you're a 40-year-old man. You can get out and work, bro. What are you doing? Yeah, I mean, she gets to use the asset in living costs, you know, now.

Yeah, but he's trying to say that this company, they're the bad guys. Yeah. Really? Yeah. They're the bad guys. Your sister sounds like a saint. Your poor mother, you're in jail. You're a scumbag.

You should even be having, I don't even know why they're asking your opinion at all. You're just a drug dealer. Exactly. But anyway, yeah, yeah, but I always look at those. I'm not saying that it's the right thing for everybody. So you hit up on a good point. the, you know, the home is an asset. And your life insurance policy is also an asset.

Right. So just to give this away is assamine. Right. Why would anybody do that, you know? So it's just like buying a house and you moving and give your house to me because I'm your neighbor. I mean, who does that? Right. So you need to have the same thought process on insurance policies as you do a house or car or anything else.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I feel like it's a quality of life. issue for the last few years of your life. These people are 65 or 70 years old and an extra few thousand dollars a month would be a massive improvement for their life. And statistically, 98 to 99% of the policies lapse. Oh yeah, the money's just gone. Yeah, 200 billion a year lapse. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Yeah. So most of these people are just they can't because they can't afford it. They can't pay.

Well, yeah, the insurance company is incentivize the people to not pay. So they'll increase increase their premiums later in life when they're on a fixed income. And it's a no-brainer for them. They can't afford it. So they let it go because they don't know about this option. Or give them a cash value. Right. Like, hey, you could just cash it in right now. And they think, ooh, I get 100,000. No, wait a minute. I'm going to get $40,000 in cash. Wait a minute. You've been paying in 25 years. Right. You know what I'm saying? Trust me. If you went to your family, they would rather pay those premiums knowing there's a massive benefit. But that they kind of incentivize them to let it to just let all that go.

Exactly. Yeah. Because they obviously don't want to pay the $300,000 value of that policy. They'd rather you take the $20,000 to walk away now. Exactly. And some policies, I mean, they don't even have any cash value in them. So there's that. Oh, yeah.

No, there's tons of policies. Yeah. Especially I always kills me when people buy the term life. Right. My term life. Like, trust me, I promise you that the actuaries that calculated this. are 99% 99% sure that that term, you're not going to die during that term. So you're just giving them a bunch of money for 10 years.

Exactly. In what? The hope you get hit by our car. Like, come on, what are you doing? Yeah. So get a whole life policy. I get asked all the time, you know, can you buy terms? And the answer is maybe if they're convertible.

Some of them have a conversion over to a whole life or universal. I didn't know that. I didn't even think about that. And most people don't know. Because I always thought after the term, it disappears. there's no value at all. Depends on how it's written. Some of them have a conversion feature and some of them don't.

Okay. And the ones that don't, they can't be purchased because nobody's going to risk somebody outlive in their policy. Right. And like you said, that's usually what happens. So you go, the phone bank is blown up. People want the policy. People want to figure out, hey, I have this huge book of business that I can, you guys, or what, the agents are thinking I can now contact these people. either contact information I can contact these people,

or are they trying to sell you the leads to contact those people? They're signing up right and left for brokers. Oh, okay. For Kelco. They want to broker the policies and get paid. These are independent. Independent agents. Okay, yeah.

Because if you work for State Farm, they're not going to be okay with that. Well, back then it was a new industry. So I think everybody and their mom was signing up for this because there was no stigmatism. There was no company saying you can't do this. Right. They didn't know about it. Right. And so they were signing up right and left.

I mean, as fast as we could sign, we were signing them. And we ended up with 30,000 agents within a few months. In two months, or actually within two weeks of the ad, I had $9 billion hit the door. Jesus. In policies. How do you handle that many agents? You're not set up for that. Like, you must have had a hiring.

Oh, the company was growing like a dot com. It was out of control. And like I say, I started out in the trunk of my car. At the end, we had over 100 full-time employees at the company within a few years. And we were, it was long hours. We were all young. That helped to keep up with this growth. But after the $9 billion hit the door, the whole Vianical market only did $2 billion a year.

The whole what? Vianical. That's the term. That's the AIDS policies. All right. It's called Vietical. What is that? I've never even heard of what does that mean?

It's a Latin term. It's preparation. for a short journey term. Did you come up with that? No, I don't know. Actually, I don't know who came over that. Never heard. So that was the industry in the AIDS market.

And then the 65 years in order is the life settlement. Okay. Live and well today. So my staff came to me after the $9 billion hit the door. And they said, Keller, said, we got a problem. I said, what problem? It looks like we're doing okay. And they said, no.

I said, we got $9 billion in the door. we can't possibly fund that. The whole market can't fund it. You know, what are we going to do? We're going to drown. And I said, there's only one thing to do. And they said, what's that? And I said, Wall Street.

So that took me to Wall Street after this. So these are policies that, or you're saying in the door, these are people that are saying they want to sell their policy. And you're saying, we can't fund all these policy. We can't purchase all these policies. Exactly. Okay. So you have to raise money.

Yeah. So, which is the worst kind of failure I think there is. If you purport to do something, you can't back up, then you're not going to get a second shot. So I go to Wall Street and the first firm I met was Lehman Brothers. And which was back then was the oldest investment banking firm in Wall Street. And I went to them with this idea and they loved it. And they pushed me back and they said, Keller said, we cannot. do this. They said, nobody's going to invest in these policies, waiting on somebody to die to collect their money. This is Wall Street. We do like bonds, you know, there's a interest rate on them. There's a finite maturity time on them. And they said, so you're going to have to get some kind of insurance on this. And I said, you want me to insure the insurance? They said, yeah, pretty much. I said, okay, I'll be back. So I went back to Lexington, Kentucky. I got a hold of Louise of London. I flew them down to Lexington, Kentucky for a three-day working seminar. Okay. Or meeting, not seminar, but, and we did this. So there was a...

But you have the actuarial timetables, right? Like, they understand that, or what are they thinking these people aren't going to pass away? Well, what if people start living forever? Yeah, well, okay. Yeah. So, it's not going to happen. I mean, there's a lot. I mean, there's a lot of a lot of thought process on their side of this because they were like, how are we going to reinsure, you know, the longevity of somebody, you know, like these actuary firms, you know, they're basically ensuring that, that they're going to be right. Right. And if they're not right, you know, how wrong are they going to be? And how long are they going to have to keep the policies before they get their money back? So, but they love the product. Right. We spent three days

working through this and created the first reinsurance for this market. And when they got ready to leave, I contacted one of the guys from Lloyds. And I said, look, you know, we've worked our ass off here for three days. You know, what kind of coverage are you going to be able to offer my company? And he looked at me with a smirk and he looked down to the ground. He looked back up and he goes, Steve, let me explain it to you like this. He goes, you have another asset in Kentucky that we insure that has four legs, our horse industry. And he said, guess what happens when that asset doesn't perform or we have to put it down? And I said, you mean, when you shoot it, he goes, yeah, he goes, it's gone.

He said, there's no recovery for that. And we lose money. He said, your product, we emphatically love. Right. Because when we're wrong, we get the policy back and eventually we get our money back. And he goes, we love this. And he said, with that, he said, we're prepared to extend you $5 billion line of credit. Okay.

Nice. So my jaw immediately hit the ground because I'm thinking like, you know, five million was a lot. Right. But $5 billion put us into another orbit. So then I went back to Lehman Brothers. And I told him, I said, look, we got the problem fixed. All right. And here's the deal.

Here's our line of coverage. I said, but you're not going to be able to do all the volume yourself. It's going to take a lot of banks to be able to cover the volume that we anticipate coming in our doors. And so what happened was the growth of my company at that point was not per. They weren't looking at me as this little company from Lexington, Kentucky, any longer. They were looking at Lloyd's backing us for five. billion dollars right and it thrusted me in orbit through for growth you know then then i could raise you know hundreds of millions of dollars instead of just a few million million that we were going for

previously are you continuing to run these commercials so much or did you stop that or are potential customers still coming in the door or did you stop running the because of this problem did you step back and say oh let's hold hold off on this? No, no. You were you getting it solved so quickly, it wasn't really affecting the, um, the marketing. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, uh, like a cyphering gas out of a car.

Once the gas starts coming out of the holes and then, you know, there's no reason to, uh, go through the process again. So we actually, uh, stopped the commercial. Uh, and we had all these agents coming to us. So we had the flow. Okay. We didn't need to do another outreach because we couldn't handle what we had coming in the door. Okay.

But now you can. Well, the industry's handling now. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm saying, no, I'm saying in at this time. Oh, you had fixed the problem. You could now handle the flow that was coming in.

So we still had a, I mean, it wasn't like overnight. Yeah, yeah, no. We had to work with the investment banks and get that job started. And then we met with a lot of banks. And over the course of time, in the next two years, I dealt with 280 banks or knocked on their doors anyway and had 80 contracts and we raised $13 billion. dollars. So these people are coming and saying, hey, I have a $300,000 policy. You're saying, hey, we'll give you, is it low, what, 40%? What's the percentage they're getting?

Well, again, it depends. It depends on the actuaries because you got the cost of insurance that the premiums you have to carry for so many years. Right. So it's reverse engineering. So you have to figure out all the costs in there and reverse back into a number that you offer somebody. Right. And again, there's a range. You know, it could be from 30% all the way up to 80 some. Right. So the problem, though, one of the, there's, there's, there's multiple problems. One problem is if these people were 20 years old when they get a half a million dollar policy, they're paying $80 a month, you know what I mean? Or $60 a month. Like it's a very small amount for that half a million dollar policy, right? I said half a million, right? Yeah. But if they

get that policy when they're 50 for half a million, they're paying $400 a month because the insurance company doesn't have that that 30 years to invest that amount of money right so you've got to take that into consideration when you're calculating you all because now you've got to make those payments right those 400 payments and then you also take into consideration that you know how old is this person what is their health like right do they smoke do they skydive do they you know what I'm saying like there's all these because I remember I was getting life insurance and they were like I had a sign a because I had skydive before I just sign a policy a waiver saying I would never skydive again yeah I was like, well, how many skydivers are we losing here?

That seemed relatively safe. But so you have to take all, you have some actuaries that came in and did a whole calculation to figure out what the boxes to check. And then you come up with, we're going to give you 25 percent or we're going to give you 80 percent. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So how long does this, I mean, how many years does this company run and do other companies start popping up to in competition. Yeah, once the product hits the street, then it wasn't long to other people started gravitating towards us, you know, and certainly we reached out to our broker network and said, look, we want you to focus on these senior policies.

Right. You know, start bringing those in the door as much as possible. And then that led to a feeding frenzy of a new market because everybody was desperate at that point. The AIDS market was basically shutting down, you know, to a large. large degree. It wasn't like we're making widgets. So we're trying to provide a service and service needed in certain areas. So in the senior market was huge. I didn't anticipate it being that large when we created it. We were just trying to service other people and trying to keep our,

our company intact. And that was it. That was the process. But never realized we were disrupting the entire life insurance market. Yeah, you've no idea how upsetting this is to State Farm and and all of these other insurance companies that are are um who are the big ones the big life insurance uh lenders uh or lenders sorry insurance insurance insurance companies who are the big i mean you got new york life you got uh prudential trans union you know there's there's there's there's a lot of big players out there okay and you so you have no idea what's happening what they're thinking at this point you're that's not even you're not even taken into consideration you're no you're not none of the actuaries have come to you and said you realize

is this is going to be an issue for these guys, right, at some point? Well, I didn't think about it because I knew how big that market was. I knew how big they were. Right. And I didn't think, honestly, that we were putting a dent into, you know, what they were doing. And there's still not today. I mean, it's that much money out there. But, and we're just a minute piece of that, you know, it's.

If a corporation, you are where corporations don't like to lose money. That's true. In any form. Yeah. Even though even a small amount they're going to try and, and, you know, cap that leak, you know, in any form if they can. Yeah. And they do a good job at that to try and suppress this market because they spend $1.3 billion a year trying to market and suppress this market that people won't know about it. Right.

Just to, yeah, yeah, I was going to say just to, and also to put a negative spin on it too, right? Exactly. Yeah. And now they're even threatened their agents. If you entertain a policy in this market, we're going to fire you. So some companies are down to that. So yeah, during this time, you're continuing to just kind of stream yard the whole thing and continue on. How long do you, you know, does this go on before you have any issues? Just so I understand the Wall Street banks, they're just buying them and holding them, or are they buying them and they buying them? like and selling these two investors. They're packaged to them up and sell them to investors. Okay. They have institutional investors that are buying them. And then those are they in like tranches and that those are.

They're trunches. But those are insured. Yes. So Lloyds is insuring. Right. Is it just Lloyds or does Lloyds get to a point where they're like, okay, we can't insure anymore and another company comes in or is it just Lloyds continues to insure that? At that time it's just Lloyds.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lloyds does, I don't know if you know this, but Lloyds of London, they do spous. specialty insurance products, right? So they'll, they'll create a product just for you for different types of insurance. Like they'll insure.

Special athlete or something for you. Exactly. Right. I was, I was thinking, what was the? There were some actress back in like that 70s or 80s where they insured her legs or something. Like it's always kind of a silliness. But yeah.

Absolutely. So how long does this go on before there are any issues? Any issues come up or is there smooth sailing for the next 20 years? And no. Thank you for coming by. So the next couple of years, it was frantic. I was in Wall Street in three days a week. Our growth continued going up.

We were able to purchase our own jet so I could just fly back and forth from Lexington, Kentucky to New York. Right. And we dealt with some of the largest banks out there. And Aon was one company that we also dealt with a lot. And they were the facilitator for us to introduce us to more insurance companies, more banks. And we would usually meet them on the 98th to 100th floor of the World Trade Center, where their offices were. And that's where I worked out of for the next two years when I would go up there.

What year was this? So that would have been in 1998. 1998 is when we formally came out with the product, 98 to 2000. 98 to 2000. You're flying back and forth, back and forth. what happens in 2000. So, yeah, the growth was incredible. And I was in the process of buying my largest competitor at the time, which was owned by CNA

insurance in Chicago. Okay. There were another Viatical firm. Very large. That was my nemesis. And I was taking them down. And I was in the process of buying them out. And I had one of my bankers was from France at that time.

There was just a lot of stuff going on over those two years. We had an office in France. We had banks in Canada that we're utilizing to buy the policies in New York. And it was just a lot. I really looking back, I don't know how I kept up with that whole regiment. But one of the things we're doing is getting ready to buy out this largest, our largest competitor. And the banker was from one of our banks. dealt with out of France. And he was housed in New York now, this banker. And on Fridays, he would take off.

I couldn't find him. And so one day I called him. I said, look, Mike, I said, I'm under a time frame to get this deal close. It was a big deal. And I said, you keep taking off on Fridays. I said, I don't mean to be prying in your personal business or anything, but, you know, what's going on? And he said, he started laughing. He said, all right, I got to level with you. He goes, I got engaged and my fiance lost her visiting card here, her visa. And she said, he said, we're meeting in Canada on the weekends. She's back in Australia. And I said, okay, we got to fix this. So I said, meet me and D.C. in two weeks.

And we'll see about getting her some kind of, you know, visa or a green card or something. Right. So six degrees of separation. I made phone calls. Who do you know? and that got me into the White House on a Monday, took him with me, took several people from Calco with me, and we had lunch in the White House. We're here about this guy's fiancee.

Yeah. We need a green card or a visa. This buyout was huge. So it's $310 million buyout. I told this banker, I said, look, I want to keep that company intact because their brokers don't like us. Our brokers don't like them. I want to run it like Basket Robbins.

So it would give me total control of the market and could have been a problem as far as a monopoly, I guess, at that time. That's what I was thinking. I really wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about conquering the world. Right. But anyway, so that was it. And I said, they're going to need operating capital. I asked for $250 million more for that company and $250 million more for Calco because I've said if they have all the money, they're going to kill us.

So he agreed to all of this. So you're looking at a billion dollar deal. which, you know, 20 years ago, that was, that was a lot of money. That's when a billion dollars was a billion dollars. And so. Seems like a lot of money now. So, anyway, that's what was on the line here. And so I was having lunch in the White House.

And you can't imagine how many checks and balances I had to do to get in the White House. You know, I mean, it was unbelievable. So I go from that until Friday. back up in New York. Did you get the green car? Is it a green car? What is it? Did you get the visa?

I mean, it wasn't something they could just print out of the back office to say, here you go. But certainly we were moving in the right directions with the right political influence to do that. Okay. So on Friday, I'm back up in New York. It's hugely involved late nights, you know, a lot of energy, a lot of extracurricular curricular activities in New York and just I'm out with three insurance companies until

3 o'clock in the morning. I get a call. I have 7 o'clock in the morning. It wakes me up. Of course, I was not feeling too good at that time of the morning after being out with three insurance companies at 3 o'clock in the morning. So, and it was my assistant. Her name's Karen. And she calls me and I'm fumbling around the dark to find my phone. I hear it ringing, but I couldn't find it. So I grabbed it and I finally got it. And she says, Steve, she goes, I got some news and it's not good. I said, what is it?

And she said, our office is being rated by the FBI, armed agents. And I said, Karen, I said, look, it's 7 o'clock in the morning. I said, I've been out very late with three insurance companies and my head's pounding. I'm not feeling good. I don't need these kind of shenanigans this time of morning. and I could tell her voice started quivering. And she goes, Keller, she goes, listen. They're coming in by the busloads.

She goes, I've never seen anything like this. She goes, they had the whole block roped off with crime scene tape. Downtown Lexington, Kentucky. We have a nine-story building there. This was a spectacle among spectacles. And she said, there must be a hundred armed FBI agents here. And they're just, they're just keep coming. Well, the picture, the mental picture for me was so overwhelming.

I couldn't digest it. I had no idea what was happening. It was like a bad dream I was in. Had you had any, you know, any idea that the government or that the FBI was even looking into you or had any issue with your business model at all? Like, had this anything ever, had there ever been in an inquiry, had anything along the, had. Anything along those lines? Never, no. Nobody had ever, nobody had ever, no phone calls from the local U.S. attorneys saying, hey, we have some questions.

Nothing from the government at all. We had state audits, state, you know, which was expected. Yeah. Every now and then you have audits and what policies you're buying and all that. And there was a lot of activity there before that, looking back of the audits. And I think they were just preparing certain policies that they wanted to pull aside to make an exception. for the government. That's my theory on that.

But I wasn't worried because in 1998, we wrote the only legislation for the state of Kentucky on our industry. And the reason I did that was because there was a lot of fraudulent players. This was the Wild West. Everything was in a gray area. There was no regulations. If ever there was a true free market, I lived it for a short period of time. Okay.

There was no regulations. It was a buyer and seller agreement, and that was it. And so no regulations. It was great to deal in there for a while. But it did invite some unscrupulous people in there. And I didn't want them around us because it made the whole industry look bad. Right. So in one of the thought processes of drafting the regulation out here was to build a pick

a fence around our company and make the bar so high that a lot of smaller companies couldn't get involved in this business. But it also was a gatekeeper to keep the bank. have people out. So we drafted this legislation for Kentucky that was used to model other states to adopt it. And so I didn't have a concern of like, you know, you guys are doing something wrong. You're caught, you know, whatever. So nothing like that because we wrote the legislation for our state. We knew we didn't break the law we wrote. We wrote it. So what do you think that this is a mistake? Something's wrong. There's a, there's an issue. I mean, I can't even

tell you that the emotions and the thoughts were flooding through my mind at that time when this was going on. It was absolutely overwhelming. I do remember going to the bathroom and throwing up just by the nerves and just, you know, the night before and everything else just compiled and where I was a nervous wreck. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't have any answers. I was in shock. So how far are you away from the headquarters? So I mean, I'm in, York City. You can't jump in your car and drive down there. No.

And, and, you know, things happen for a reason in life. And I don't think it would have been good for me going back there and getting back early. Okay. And so there was things that prevented me from getting back there early. Okay. One is our plane was in the shop. I didn't have a ride back. So I called, we've, I flew out of Teterboro.

They have a private airport there. and I called them and said, look, I need to get a plane ready. I got an emergency. I don't care, you know, what kind of plane it is. I got to get it back now. I'm thinking, I'm back now. I could do something, which was stupid, but there's nothing you could do on this army that just assaulted your entire life. So, anyway, I wanted to get back then and just felt like I needed to do something.

And traffic was bad. There was accidents that happened, getting back from Manhattan. It took us hours to get back to Teterboro, which is unusual. Usually I could get back, you know, within like at least 45 minutes from downtown. So there was a delay there. There was difficulty finding another ride to get us back to Lexington. And I knew somebody at that FBO at the airport that was frantically sourced on a plane for me. Right. Just doing a favor. And she knew that I was frantic. And so she managed to get

another rad for us to go back to Lexington line. So when you get by the time you get there, though, there's, there's nothing. There's a piece of paper with a business card on a desk somewhere. Have they, did they, did they take, are they like taking out file cabinets? Are they because. Yeah. So, yeah, when I flew back to Lexington, you know, the whole time I'm thinking, yeah, I kind of calmed down and started getting a little rational. And I thought, you know, these guys are going to be waiting for me at the airport. And, and, and then I thought maybe they know that our plane's in the shop, you know. Right. And they wouldn't be expecting this. So I flew to a private airport outside of the Lexington commercial airport. And my assistant was waiting on me. And when I got there, she met me.

And she goes, look, we got to go. We got to go now. And she goes, you need to go in the floorboard of the car, the back seat. And that's when I realized this is not good. This is bad. So why does she think that? Like, what are they saying? Like, is somebody, you have to have some reason that you think, because then I would be

thinking, this is a mistake. Yeah. It is a mistake. Like, they've got something wrong that they're looking at my company and that they rated with this. like this is a clear mistake. Well, you got to understand. I flew back from New York, all right?

I wasn't on boots on the ground there. This lady was. Right. She got to experience what was happening there and what was happening there. It was like a head squad. Right. So they're attacking and harassing these people. Right. So they're acting like this is they just broke up the mafia and you're the leader of the.

Oh, you're the one at the very top on the chart. It was horrendous, right? How they were treating these people. And she knew this. I didn't. Right. And that's why she said, you got to hide. Right. So I did. I hid in the back seat. You know, I'm down, I'm laying down. And she's downloaded me on our way from the airport back to the office. Now the office, I mean, not the office. Our office was right across the street from our attorney firm. So they had a parking garage right across the street. We were trying to get to. And that's why she wanted me down in the seat. So nobody saw me because she was proceeding to. tell me how bad that these people had treated our employees and they were drawing guns on these people. They were tearing up our office equipment when they would, my employees would offer them keys like to the filing cabinets and all. They threw the keys down the floor, took drills and drilled out the locks. They did anything they could to destroy what was in their site. And they treated the

people like terrorists. And they were pulling guns on my employee. They were threatened them to put them in jail if they didn't cooperate or didn't, you know, say what they wanted to say or I don't really know what they're asking of them, but it was that bad. Okay. So you get to your, do you get to your attorney's office? I made it. I made it over there. Yeah. She took me up several stories in the parking garage and I got out, went up and met my staff that was waiting for me in this conference room.

And they were waiting for me with answers that I didn't have. And I was as clueless as them. With questions that you didn't have. I mean, no, they were wanting answers. Oh, okay. Questions that I had, that they had, you know, from that day of why this happened. And I had no clue. I was as clueless as they were.

Right. But they were looking for me to be the anchor. Right. Because, you know, I was a CEO. And they expected me to have some concrete thing they could hold onto. And I couldn't give it to them. So I'm assuming at some point some agent gives or some U.S. attorney, you know, hands a business card to somebody and says, you know, you need to call. Like is there, is there, does anybody say that there's an arrest warrant or is this just a, this is just a subpoena to, you know, search the, the property and acquire documents so that they can continue their investigation? This circus started at 7 o'clock in the morning.

And they came with U-Hauls, tractor-twellers, and they proceeded to haul out 600 banker boxes of files out of my building, taking everything they could. Okay. They dumped the whole company. So we had from the second floor all the way to the ninth floor was my office. We owned the whole building. Right. It was our building. And they got it to whole company.

You know, every piece of paper they could. With the exception of, they left one stack of papers, and that was the Konseco. I'm not going to not KSACO, but the CNA insurance company that I was, the company I was acquiring. Right. They left those documents behind. Okay. Why? I have no idea.

Okay. So your attorney, I'm sure, calls the U.S. attorney to say what's going on? Well, I had called the only attorney I knew in that space. There was a friend of mine. I called him, and he was in a meeting in Houston, Texas at a conference. And I told him, I said, what was going on. I said, this is unbelievable. I've got an army of people down there.

And I said, I don't care how you get back, but you got to get back now. So he actually beat me back. And he was boots on the ground there. And he was there with my employees when I showed. up. Okay. So, but no, the, the, uh, the prosecutors, the, uh, the everybody that was involved with this, the postal service, uh, the FBI, everybody was there that day, uh, for the raid. Right. They were all present. So what are they saying? Does it nobody hands over an indictment? Have you been indicted for anything? It's just a search

warrant. It's a search warrant. And, uh, they, uh, they were just doing a, uh, they said they were just doing an investigation. That was it. But during the investigation, they proceeded to, they wanted to shut the company down. Right. That was clearly the tactic here. You know, why would you guide a company if you're doing an investigation? Now, why not do an auditor come in and, you know, talk to the people. That wasn't the case here. Right. Well, it's intimidation. Intimidation and destruction. Right. They wanted it to shut down on somebody else's orders. Right. So what, what do you ultimately find out is happening or why this has happened. Well, again, for months, I went without knowing how this happened or who did it, you know. So it was about six months before I got a phone call from the

watchdog of the industry. And this is a woman that like would make an exception to my company and try to cause me problems, right? She was like a consumer protection company. Right. Companies like mine were afraid of this lady of bad press or anything that she might, you know, come up with. Not that we're doing anything wrong. It's just, that's just the way she operated. Right. But so she called me and it was a very quick, succinct call. And she goes, Steve, she said, my name is Gloria Walk. And I said, I'm aware who you are. And she goes, I have a gentleman that wants to talk to you and you need to talk to him. And he's going to call you right after I hang up. And his name's Dale Barron. Okay. okay and so she hung up and that was it and I was like you know who's Dale Barron and you know I had no clue so sure enough I got a call and it was this guy and he said I said I'm Steve Keller

and he started laughing he goes Steve Keller he goes you must have a lot of questions I said you could say that and he said I have all your answers and I said who are you and he says my name's Bell Baron and he said, I'm attorney in Houston, Texas. And he said, if you send me $10,000, I will give you everything you need or want to answer all your questions. I'll have it FedEx to you tomorrow. So I'm thinking, you know, at this point, I'm desperate. Right. So I sent him the money the next day. I got this huge stack of books in and it looked like a hit list. It was binders four inches thick. Each binder was four inches thick.

And I opened this up and it's got a whole layout of everybody in the industry, pictures of our building, every agent we use, every broker we have, you know, got information on the employees and, you know, everything, every rundown that we have on this company. So I called him back and I said, Dale, I got these books. I said, it's pretty disturbing. What is all this? He goes, oh, those were the manuals that the insurance companies used when they had the meetings. And I said, what meetings? And he said, oh, he said, there was two meetings, Steve. He goes, there was a meeting with some 50 insurance companies.

And they got together in a company in Carmel, Indiana. And he said that they had a meeting to scheme to eradicate the whole industry. They wanted to wipe out the whole industry. And they came after you, the artist, because you're the, you're the biggest. Right. And the most regulated, proactive company out there. And I said, okay. So then they had this meeting and said, you said there was two meetings.

He says, yeah, then there was weeks later, they invited one postal service worker in from each state and had a four-day seminar back in the same headquarters and sold them a bill of goods and how this scheme worked that you all were in this conspiracy with all these agents. And he said the insurance companies drafted the indictments and gave it to the government and said, go get him. And I said, this sounds unbelievable. I didn't believe it. Right. I said, how do you know? How do you know this is true? He goes, I was the lead speaker.

So why is he telling, why is he now talking to you? Good question. Okay. So he had worked for the Department of Insurance at the time that he was the lead speaker. He quit. He resigned from that job thinking that he was going to go into private practice. The government was going to hiring him to lead this bandwagon to come after this conspiracy scheme that they had created. And he was going to make a lot of money doing this, you know. Well, they told him they didn't need him.

Oh, okay. And it pissed him off. Right. And he reached out to me. He's like, okay, if I can't help you and you won't hire me, I'm going to Keller. Right. So that's why he did it. So what do you do moving forward?

I mean, I'm sure your head at this time is absolutely spinning. But how do you move? Do you grab these binders and go to your attorneys? I mean, I'm assuming at this point, you've got a group of attorneys that are, doesn't sound like they know what's happening either. But at least you can sit out, go get four of them together and sit down in a conference room and lay out exactly what just happened. We did.

We did. We had that. And, you know, before this happened, I had befriended the majority leader of Senate's son who lived in Lexington, Kentucky. And he started up a lobbying firm, and I was encouraged one year after the raid to hire him. I was actually, after months of getting to know this guy and on and developing a relationship with him, I was told that I was, my presence was requested in D.C. And I went with this guy and my CFO and one of my attorneys. And we met the chief of staff for this majority leader of Senate.

He came in his private room in the capital, greening familiar to ear like he'd won the lottery. And he looked at me. He said, so Steve, have you learned your lesson yet? And I said, what lesson might that be? and he said, up here, you got to pay to play. So they were wanting me to hire the Senator's son, even though there was no federal insurance laws up there. But I knew this was politically generated against me.

So I was trying to stop it the best I could. So we needed political help. So we brought him in. And when I had the files, when I had the files on my desk, I called all the attorneys that were involved. And I called the Senator's son and his partner. that was involved with the lobbying firm. And we had a conference call with another attorney that couldn't be there.

And my attorney divulged to all the attorneys, including the senator's son of what happened, how this got started and who was behind this whole thing. And behind the hit, if you will, you know, they use the government as their hit person, basically. And everybody was just in charge. shock. And when they got this news, I mean, I just remember all the mouse just, you know, open and just everybody looking at each other just, they couldn't believe this. And, and everybody just kind of pushed away and they didn't know really how to digest it or what to do about it at the time. But I'd reached out to another attorney, a civil attorney,

and I actually sued the company in Carmel. And at that time, the government was, you, you know, moving along with their case too. And at that point, we had indictments handed down to us. On what charges? Conspiracy to commit mail fraud. How so? So their case was based upon policies that we had bought that were under two years old. They were in the contestability period.

The way insurance works, if somebody lies on a policy within two years and the insurance companies takes exceptions to it, it, they can cancel the policy. Okay. Over two years old, you could say that you didn't smoke and you do or, you know, you've got a health problem and you didn't divulge that. After two years, it's game over. Right.

They have two years to get out of a contract. Their only company, the only industry I know in the world has two years to get out of a contract. Right. So what Kelko knew my company, that the insurance companies wasn't doing any underwriting at all. So there's a lot of markets that we got into that were in gray areas or loopholes. And one of them was contestable policies. So we bought some of those policies. We had some buyers for them.

Right. They were very risky. And so at times we had policies that were called that we had to pay back the investors for it. We were losing money on it and we decided to get out of it. So, but you know, you try some things. Some things work. Some things don't. Right.

So this was one of them that did not work for us. I'm not sure how that's fraud. It's not. You paid the, you pay the, the, uh, the investors back. Yeah. They were able to, they were still able to cancel the policies. They have the right to do that. They did it.

Right. Right. So, and the thing of it is, we didn't have individual investors. We never did. We sold ours to third party companies that sold it to investors. Okay. And, uh, they were very sophisticated. They did her own underwriting.

We divulged everything we had to them. There was nothing that was hid. Um, And, but their case was buying these policies that were under two years old that were contestable. And still, there's no laws against that. Right. And you're right. I mean, it wasn't illegal at all.

And, but that was their case. So we bought and sold these policies that people had lied on the applications. And we said, yeah, we know they lied. It's nothing illegal about that. That's the way the insurance market works. Yeah. And they canceled the policy. And I said if they canceled the policy, then we would pay back the firms that bought it from us.

And we did so. Right. And I said, we've stopped doing that business, you know. It was a dead loser for us. It's the only piece of that industry that we ever did that lost money. So I do have a quick question. When they came in and they did the search warrant, did they freeze accounts? They didn't freeze accounts.

Okay. Did your investor, like, did that shut the company down completely? Like all these employees lost their jobs, went home and then you never restarted up the company? or did you rebuild it by getting copies of all the policies, put everything back, and start, continue on? Well, we continued on the best we could. Right. And the government, they have their own playbook when they do this to companies. They call the news media and they make a big spread out of it.

You're actually indicted in the public media before anything ever happens. Right. You know, and when this happened, it shut down Wall Street. It shut down all my banks. Nobody would deal with us to figure out what happened. They think you're under an investigation and you're doing something. We don't want to lend money to this person. He sounds to me like something's going on.

Right. I mean, you can't do a securitization with somebody that's under a federal indictment. Okay. Or the possibility of it happening. So it absolutely shut us down. Some of the banks pulled back. I remember we had even a hard time getting our payroll met, you know, after that happened. And so by the grace of God, I did own a lot of insurance policies in-house that we had bought over the years.

And I mean a lot. And so we got to the point where we were making so much money we could do that. And we were investing in these policies ourselves. And that saved me. No. So it's a fraud. Why are you investing your own money? Yeah.

So I was able to sell those policies, which was met by, a fire sale, because the companies were taking advantage of us, because we were in trouble. We didn't really care, though. We had to have the money. Yeah. And I sustained the payroll for the next year and a half. And I kept all the employees there because I'm thinking this is going to go away. Right.

They're going to find out that we didn't break a law, you know. And I kept everybody together as much as I could. And so we proceeded to work feverishly to sell these policies out to raise monies for operating costs. So back to the pay to play. So it's pay to play. You hire the senator's son or whatever who's started this. So you hire him to hopefully correct fix this. But you also said indictments are coming down.

So people are being served indictments. Are they being arrested or are they just getting like are they, you've been indicted? Typically you get arrested. You go down fingerprinted photographs and released at this level. At this level, they're not, there's not a million dollar bond or $10 million bond. At this level, they're just processing you and letting you go on a recognizance bond. I'm assuming. Yeah.

Right. Because they don't think these guys are fleeing. Right. There's no bond. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, you've done something wrong that you have to prove in court. Right.

But are they arresting people or they've just been indicted? So they're not serving the indictments and saying you're under arrest. Yeah. So we're indicted and then we have the whole, you know, court proceeding after that. and the arraimates and all that stuff. So, yeah, that's coming. But so even after an indictment, you know, we're still trucking along, still selling policies and still staying afloat.

And we had to do layoffs throughout this whole time, though, you know, several different layoffs until we got down to just a court staff. So, yeah, at this point, it was preservation. We'd been indicted. We're going to court. and now we're hustling what monies we have left to buy attorneys. And two companies got indicted, three officers, so we had to have five different attorneys, which was very costly.

Right. It was very difficult to find somebody that would take this on a flat fee basis, and that's what we had to have because you don't want to be halfway through and run out of money. No, and we weren't generated anybody. So there's no way to, there's no way to pay this, you know. Right. And I think that's part of the scheme. team too on the government side is just to run you dry to where you can't afford representation.

So, and I got the point where I wanted to just hire a public defender and the judge said that I couldn't do that because we had too much money. Right. But we quickly were running out of money. So that was kind of an oxymoron. So you, but you, I'm sure you do put together a team, right? Like, we had a team and they came in. And the thing about it is, We're in the business of insurance. The state laws encompass the business of insurance, not the federal government. There's no federal insurance laws.

It's all state. Right. So it was a round peg in a square hole when we went to federal court. And I kept asking, you know, why are we in federal court with an insurance case? Right. And nobody could really answer me. And so I don't think as good as the defense attorneys, were, they didn't have a knowledge base of what we were doing in our industry.

Because they never saw it. I mean, they never see it in the federal side. Is the government coming and saying, we want to, you know, we want you to plead guilty to this and take three years and here's what you did and anything like that? No, I never got an opportunity to do that. And, you know, in preparation for the trial, you know, we hired private investigators. We're trying to figure out, you know, who's ultimately doing this and who this company was in Carmel, Indiana, and, you know, how did this all happen? We were trying to, you know, ferret this out to use it in trial.

And the stuff that we learned from the private investigators was just really disturbing. So this guy that ran this company in Carmel that started all this, that's where the meetings were how. house, you know, in his company. This guy was psychotic. And he amassed all of these former FBI, CIA, postal service people, they worked for him. He had this security department. He had more deputized police working in this company than Marion County, Indiana did, or Indianapolis. And, you know, and I'm thinking as a CEO, why would you need that kind of security?

you know, what are you doing that dictates that kind of protection? And if you run around and you're buying companies and you're firing all the people and taking all the cash assets out of the companies like he was, that's why. So this guy was running around buying smaller insurance companies. He would rate them. They're called. So he would take all the cash reserves and put it in his company, fire all the people out, and dissolve the companies. And he was doing this. And in another, alarming rate. And it was working for him for a while because he was growing as one of the fastest growth companies on Wall Street for a while doing this. And, but what happened during this whole time that he was doing this operation, his lead attorney, who was very tall, he was like

6'10. Right. Good guy. Had a lot of accolades behind him. He was Harvard graduate. I think he was really kept the company on, you know, the straight and narrow. And there was a time that he and the CEO was walking back to the helicopter that they often flew in. They went everywhere on the helicopter. And he veered off the path that the pilots told him to enter the helicopter. He went to the front of the helicopter, which the blades were tilting down, and it decapitated him. Oh, geez. Yeah.

So that was the end of the turn. And so after that happened, they got another attorney named Barbara Farrington that took his place. And Barbara is the one that we've got her interviewed by the private investigator. And she told my private investigator that she went to the CEO and told him there was a problem that they had uncovered that the payables, their insurance payables were going through the ceiling and their receivables were going down. And she told the CEO, she said, all these companies you're buying. Right. All the policies in there, half of them are owned by this company in Lexington, Kentucky. Right.

And that's when he said, I want you to find out this guy's underwear size, find out everything about them. And they started, you know, plotting to take us out. Right. So just for clarification, he's buying up tons of life insurance companies that typically when the actuaries crunched the number, for what the premiums plus profit should be based on to include, you know, a certain amount of profitability. Part of that calculation is that 60% of these of these insurance, these life insurance policies, people get to be, they get to, they get to the point where they retire and they're

strapped for cash. And so they stop paying their premium. So they've been paying for 20 years. they're probably going to be deceased in the next 10 years and their heirs will end up with this or their spouses, whoever will get the policy. But 60, 70 percent of these people when they retire, stop paying the premiums because they're, for whatever reason. Maybe it's 10 years before that. Maybe it's four years later. For whatever reason, they stop paying the policies.

And we just get to keep all those premiums. And we never have to pay out 100,000 or 300,000 or a million dollar policy. and by your company coming in and buying up all of these um these life insurance policies and continuing to make the premiums make the payments on the premiums that would have expired or lapsed or whatever you want to call it um it was costing his company hundreds of millions of dollars let's say or millions of dollars whatever the amount is and as a result of that he decided he needed to get rid of your company to target your company and figure out a way to shut it down exactly this from happening

Yeah. Okay. And the mindset of the insurance was they didn't do any underwriting at all because their business model took care of itself. And it encouraged people to lapse policies. And that's why they have a 98% lapse rate. Right. 98%? It's 98. Oh, what did I say? 60, 70%? Jesus. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You were close. Okay. But it's worse than that. And so they, their mindset was this, this is the way it was and this the way it is and it's the way it's going to be. and he had no idea that our industry, you know, was in existence at the time. So when she told him this and alerted him to this, it became problematic. And on top of that, it was the perfect storm because this particular company, they had borrowed like $600 million between mental management to buy stock options on this company, thinking that it was going to continue the growth that they had realized over the last several years. and they had a lot on the line now,

and he saw this as something that was going to hurt their stock, possibly, and he was at all cost not going to take a risk of anything happening to that investment, the mental management and all these people that were in his company took loans out to buy these stock options. This would make a great John Grisham novel. It's pretty much what I wrote. Yeah. That's what I wrote.

So this is a political thriller. Pay to play. Yeah. And you can't make this up. It's all true. But I wrote this book as a political thriller novel to tell this story. Yeah, because it sounds like, you know what I'm saying? It sounds like you're kind of like almost like the could be the Pelican brief.

Could be, gosh, he's written some great books. Well, I don't know. The King of Torts. I didn't like the King of Torts. But anyway, yeah. Yeah, there, there have been some, some great ones, but the Pelican brief where it's like, you find out that there's this whole thing going on with this dark master of the universe kind of a character in the background. I don't know if you've ever saw it, but he's the one who's actually pulling all the strings. Right, right.

Because he's trying, he wants to go in and drill for oil in the Everglades or something. I don't know. I forget exactly where he wanted to drill. But the pelican, as a result of the pelicans being there, it stopped his ability. So he's decided he was going to kill off some of the judges and get a get be able to get it put through. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.

This is a great. The book was book. The movie is actually pretty good, but the book was phenomenal. Anyway. So, okay, so once you hear all this, are you thinking to yourself, like, is there any way to present this during trial? You know, there should have been. All of it should have been presented in a trial. Right.

And what happened was none of it was presented. Why? Because of the judge. I have no idea. The attorneys, I had all this information. We spent thousands of dollars on these PI guys, you know, running around the country, interviewing all these people. And the actual PI guy that I hired to investigate Konseko, he had already had all this knowledge when he came to me because he had been retained

by the helicopter company that in the decapitation story I told you. Right. So Kinseko sued the helicopter company and the helicopter company hired his PI guy to investigate their firm. Right. So he came with me with two years of knowledge already and it was telling me about all this stuff had happened, you know. So, you know, in preparation for the trial, we offered a subpoena for Barbara Farrington, the lead attorney that was the right hand for the CEO. starting this. And I guess it was one year after this happened to me that they ran into some serious trouble.

One year after the government raided me, Konseko got caught cooking the books. The CEO and the CFO were going out to one of the largest mobile home mortgage companies which they owned, and it wasn't doing too good. So they were going out that night in Tempe, Arizona, into the building after the employees all left, and were zing out, zero out the loans that were coming in because what was happening was people wasn't paying the mortgages on time. They were really late. Right. And so if they were late, it was going to decrease their stock value.

And it was going to decrease the amount of mutual funds that could buy into this company if it hurt their ratings. So they didn't want that to happen. And they would zero out the loans and make them look like they're all coming right on time. Right. And they got caught. And it took the stock from 60 to 6 in one week. Everybody gets fired. Nobody goes to jail.

Right. Nobody's arrested. Nothing's done on that front. And Barbara Farrington was left without a job. And she was living out of hotel rooms. Sheesh. Yeah. And so my PIs and my attorneys had a really tough time tracking her down.

And they came to me. She said, Steve, we can't find this lady. She's living out of, she's switching hotel rooms every night. She said she's living like in protective custody, you know. I'm telling me, I think you, I think this is a John Grisham. Did you ever see the rainmaker? Yeah. Yeah, the woman who knows everything about their, there's the insurance company's scam.

She's living out of hotel rooms when they finally track her down. down. You've seen none of these. These were movies, Colby. They were movies. They weren't great movies, but the books were great. Anyway, we got to read a lot of books. Yeah. You know, oh, yeah, yeah. The book, the Rainmaker was so good because it's a scheme, you know, it shows the scheme of the insurance company. Right. And it's this massive scheme and all these people are involved. They all know they have the underwriting guidelines. Right. That's what crushes them at trial is that she still has the original, um, a playbook where they had changed it and she still had the original. So they're able to present that at trial. Yeah. That's one of them. That's a great, great movie. Anyway, go ahead.

Sorry. Yeah. So people were going to yell at me in the comment. With interrupting. So anyway, uh, do you track her down? Finally, they came up with a scheme to, to get her. Right. And, uh, she owned a condo in Carmel, Indiana.

And they, uh, she was trying to sell it. And they acted as her buyers. Okay. And so I had my PI guy and one of my attorneys show up. And she came there and met him. And she's going through the kitchen. And she's saying, these cabinets are, you know, this. And I got these kind of appliances and just going on.

And they had to stop her. And they said, Barbara, Barbara, hold on. We're not really here to buy your condo. All right. But we are here to offer you this subpoena. Right. This woman let out this gut-wrenching scream that scared. scared my attorneys. And it just, they never seen anything like this. She went hysterical.

And she, she just almost like passed down over top of this island that was in the kitchen. And she, she put her head down in her hands. She goes, you can't do this. She goes, you can't do this. She said, the big sea will kill me. The big sea will kill me. What's the big sea? That's the firm she worked for. Okay. So, and it scared the attorney so bad that wrongly, they let her out of the subpoena. They said, look, we won't subpoena you if you'll just sign a statement that Kelko didn't do any wrong. You don't know any wrong that they did.

This was just made up. And she did. She agreed to that and she did sign it. But they should never let her off the hook. She should have come to trial. She had everything. Yeah. And none of that was used and it should have been because.

Was it inadmissible or just they just didn't bring it up? They didn't bring it. I don't know why. And I thought they knew what they were doing. because we were paying them a lot of money. Right. You know. Well, not all attorneys are, you know.

I've learned that. Yeah. Yeah. So I would have done a lot of things a lot differently. You know, had to do it over again, Keseko would have been front and center. Did you see the, on the Karen Reed trial? Did you see her attorney, Alan Jackson?

Yes. That's a dude. That's, I get in trouble. I'm calling Alan Jackson. That guy. was gutting these people left and right. This guy, by the end of that trial, I'm thinking the people in the house, dragged him in the house, beat the hell out of him, let the dog attacked him, dragged him, left him in their own

front yard. He was that good. It was that good. Every single cop that got on there was corrupted and incompetent. He was amazing. I was like, this guy is phenomenal. But then again, that's a vastly different case than a corporate case. But still, you would think.

But so, you know, that, you know, you think. if you throw enough money at a lawyer you're going to get a good lawyer but the truth is the more money you throw at them the more money they're able to make by doing less work right you know that's a good point so it's like if you throw like imagine if if you've got a hundred hours of um DEA tapes on your case or your tapes made by whatever the FBI let's say well at 400 about dollars an hour 800 dollars an hour the more time they spend listening to those tapes the more of that money gets They listen to almost none of the tapes. They make a whole bunch more money.

Exactly. You know, so that's typically what happens. The less time we spend really preparing. And by the time we're done with this case, even if we botched the living shit out of it, if we botched a living shit, to be honest, and he's found guilty, he's gone. He's really not much of a problem. He's a phone call twice a week that we can ignore and promise to pay back or take next time or we'll look into this and we'll look into this.

And eventually after six months to a year, we'll wear him down. Yeah. And he'll, and by that point, maybe he follows a 2255, but the law's on our side. Exactly. So it's easier to beat a 2255 than it is to prepare for trial. And so it's really to their benefit if you go to, if you end up, if you end up getting found guilty. Now, every once in a while, they'll, they'll try this shit out of a case and get a bunch of headlines. No, everybody remembers the winners.

They don't remember all the cases that they lost. Exactly. So you have a couple of good headlines. And you're a rainmate. You're amazing. I'm an amazing attorney. And the fact that these 12 guys had to go to prison doesn't matter. Those don't make the front page.

Well, when you're in a game where the cards are stacked against you. And there's a 97 or 98% conviction rate. Right. That's all you have to hang your hat on is those few wins. Because I can't imagine having a job every day where you know you're going to lose 98% of the time. Right. Casinos don't have that high rate. You know, so obviously, the system is broken or, you know, nobody has a 98% rate in anything.

Yeah, I have a hard time believing that or the government's only arresting, guilt, us extremely guilty people. Yeah. I have a hard time believing. So what else happens leading up to trial or are we at trial now? So, yes, and continued the preparation. So I'm with the majority leader a lot throughout this. the majority leader of the Senate, which I changed his name in the book now.

And I'm choosing not to divulge him. Okay. Not that it's that hard to look up. Okay. But so he came to my office and he's sitting across from my desk after the raid, which is unbelievable that a majority leader would do this to a raided company. And he said, Steve, he goes, we know. there are a problem on Capitol Hill, but we don't know what to do about it. And I said, Senator, I said, I do. And he said, what? And I said, did you ever think our forefathers

ever set out to incentivize the police force? And he said, what do you mean? And I said, it starts at the lower rung all the way to the top. I said, at the lower rung, you've got local cops with quotas giving speeding tickets the end of the month. They got to meet the quota. And you go all the way to the top, your guys and the federal side, you got these prosecutors, you got forfeitures, you got, you know, the raids on companies and all. And I said, for all those actions, you give them bonuses, you give them job promotions. And if they forfeit a company's assets, they usually get to keep 25% of that. So they're incentivized to come after these companies, right or wrong or indifferent, and take them down. And I said, they take all that money, and they

buy more people to attack more Americans. And I said, you know, at that time, we had 38 prosecutors in Lexington, Kentucky. And I said, you really think there's that much crime here? And I said, so you keep hiring these people. And if there's no crime, they're going to justify their job, they're going to create the crime. Right. They're going to manufacture something. And so there you go. And then on top of that, they've got immunity. So there's no reason for them not to lie or cheat or steal to make this case stick. Yeah, that's not going to help you. No.

So that might help the system later, but right now we're worried about you. Yeah. What happens are do you go to, you go to trial? You're never made, they never come to you and try and make an offer? No. No, it wasn't about that. Okay. Or did your attorneys let them know he's not accepting any offers?

Like we're going to trial? There was no offer. I think we went to him at one time. And they told me even for $100 million that we're going to trial. Okay. So, and after that, I said, we're going to trial. Right. Yeah.

So, and I didn't care. I wanted to go to trial because I knew we, we wrote the laws in the state and we knew we didn't break them. Right. There's that, you know. So you go to trial. You're acquitted and now you're here. No, I went to trial and it was like Alice in Wonderland. It was all psychedelic.

It was nothing made sense. It was written by, could have been a John Grisham novel in there. It was unbelievable, and it was all set up from day one. There was no insurance laws included in the trial. There was no stories about Konseco. There was nothing that we had uncovered was used. And my attorneys did a horrible job.

They called three witnesses, and one was a maintenance man for Kelco. It had nothing to do with anything. And it was a... disaster. And so how much these guys get paid? A lot of money. We paid like $5 million for these attorneys. Okay. How long was the trial? A couple weeks. Okay. Yeah. So it's really just a slew of prosecution witnesses. That's it. They got the lowest rung of people that we'd ever dealt with. And, you know, I mean, we dealt with thousands of people. Right. So naturally you're going to have, you know, certain people that are lower rung of the ladder.

Right. And just like American Express, you know, I mean, they deal with the same people, I'm sure. Yeah. But it doesn't make the company bad. But they brought these people in and they trained them what to say and they got to understand and talked about selling contestable policies. Right. Which, again, was not illegal. Right.

And every time when the, if they got canceled, you guys paid back the investor. Well, and then the government would keep saying they kept calling fraudulent policies because they analogized that the fraud was by misstatements on the applications and all. But you didn't make the misstatements? No. Okay. No, they came to us that way. Right. But here's the thing.

That same policy, once it hits two years old, is no longer fraudulent. Right. I know it's the same policy. Yeah. But, you know, versus before two years or after two years, that was their analogy. It made no sense, but that's their. their case they brought and it stuck okay and we got convicted has you bought them one day prior or what sorry one day after the policy yeah all of a sudden it's it's no no no no issue okay

you buy them two weeks go by and they you're found guilty yeah how many people were there with you that will go to trial uh there's three people yeah okay you who else uh my vice president and my chief financial officer all right yeah and you know and you know really another thing that it was a major thing that happened during trial is we were on recess and my company was downtown Lexington it was within walking distance of the court and we came back from lunch one day and we were stopped in our tracks at the site of a motor brigade that was in front of the courthouse now Lexington Kentucky is not that big a place right and years ago it was a lot smaller and this would have been a big deal it was the attorney general

that showed up in the middle of downtown Lexington with Motor Brigade and with Secret Service people on the steps and he goes in to talk to my judge gets back in his car and leaves. And after that, the demeanor of the judge changed. We were no longer getting anything we asked for from the defense side.

Everything was stacked against us. And at that point, I think when I saw that, that site, my staffed. Somebody just dropped to the floor and I knew there's not going to be any more due diligence for me whatsoever. I felt totally defeated. So when eventually the jury gets the, they get the case, they go back and they deliberate and they come back, it's guilty. What are the charges that you're, what are you found guilty of? Conspiracy to commit melfright by buying these policies that were under two years old where people lie on

application and we sold them through the mail okay and all right that's that's that's it that's the only charge yeah to the tune of how much money is there an actual dollar amount connected to it yeah so they you know how they do the the government just grabs a a dollar figure from wherever they can yet you know so it's like uh i don't know i think it was like 30 or 40 million yeah so it's put is it was it potential because there's no actual loss right so there's no loss but they're saying potential loss of 30 million Correct. Yeah. And there was no victims for us. And so they went and drug people that had invested in policies with third party firms that we'd sold to. They had them there as victims. And I didn't know these people. They didn't know me. I don't know who they are. And I don't know if they lost money or they still had policies. No one knows. Right. Yeah, I know because I remember the FBI had sent in paperwork saying that, that there had been, there was like $20 million in loss or something. When I first got arrested, they told me that there was, there was $26 million in loss.

And I said, that's not possible. Then it came down to like $22 million. And I said, that's not possible. Like I, and then they came down to 14 or 15 million. My PSI said 9.5 million. And the paperwork that we got was literally like a letter from the FBI that had a, bunch of houses and then at the end of as a spreadsheet in the end of it they said they just had a number potential loss like none of the numbers made sense they didn't go to anything they just

decided that these were potential loss and then they said okay here's the loss amount and like there's just one one one piece of paper and the same thing secret service just had a thing that it was a completely different like there's not even a common a normal form it's just something somebody on somebody typed up and was like uh they had houses that had been bought and sold that there was no loss and then they have a loss like I bought a house renovated it and sold it. Somebody else owns it. They live right here. They're still paying the mortgage.

There was a loss. Where's the loss? What are you talking about? You're just coming up with numbers? And I think that was, they said like 11 or, I forget how much the loss was there. Anyway, my final P.S. My PSI said, my pre-sentence report said, um, 9.5 million in loss. And I said, I'm not signing for 9.5 million in loss.

So there's no, you're fucking, you're, you're insane. There's no such thing. And then they go, well, what do you think it is? That's literally, I'm like, what do I think? What's the numbers? What do you? So anyway, I end up signing. At that time, by the way, that's usually, it was just a number they came up with.

And so I said it's, they go, what's the next? I said, they said, well, because that was the head, the top of the, you know, the graph, right, or the little, whatever you call them, the guidelines. Guidelines. Yeah. Like they have different sections. And then they said, is it below 3.5 to 6 million? And I thought, and it's probably not below that. They said, okay, six million.

It's like, first of all, why we're picking the top end? Why aren't we saying 3.5? They says, okay, so 6 million. You're okay with that? I was like, sure. Yeah. I was like, this is so stupid. And then it's funny, after I was sentenced, they then, now, if they come up with

because it was such, it was so egregious what the government was doing. that finally now when you're sentenced in a financial crime, they now have to go, you're found guilty or you plead guilty, they have to have a separate little trial or, you know, evidentiary hearing or something in front of the judge to explain to the judge where they came up with the numbers and they have to have affidavits from all the people with an affidavit, sworn affidavit,

that this is the actual loss. I don't have any of that in my case. I didn't either. Yeah. They just picked a number. Yeah. What they decided what it was. You can argue.

But, you know, at this point, you're already found guilty. Right. You know, and if the judge isn't having your argument, then he's like, yeah, okay, you're saying it's $2 million and you're saying it's $14 million. I'm going to go with $14 million. I mean, the judge says he's not an accountant. Like, he doesn't know. Like, you can't present any, it's just an argument.

No, he's taking our word for it. Yeah, of course. And you've already lost. Yeah. You're guilty. So I don't believe you. Exactly. So, yeah, so I, the idea that they would just come up with a fucking random number that's bullshit is, you know, absolutely happens all the time.

And it's what they did. All right. And I didn't know how they got the number, but. Did you have a pre-sentence report? Pre-sentence investigation report? There was so much happening at that time. At that point, I didn't know what was happening. So I was relying on the attorneys.

And, but I'm sure they did. Right. I don't remember what that was, but what it looked like. So they are. So they're basically saying you bought these life insurance policies where these people had lied on the application, but it's not illegal. And then you sold them. Well, they haven't done anything. Yeah, yeah.

They're buying the policies that they're within the two years. Yeah. Yeah. And you sold them to other companies that packaged them up and, you know, sold them as investments. And who are they bringing in as the victims, like people who bought those investments? Yeah. And what are they saying? What are they saying?

I mean, they had like three people there. One guy said he had lost money on it. And it was undetermined if he lost money or if he, the policy just hadn't come due yet. You know, I don't know. But I didn't deal with these people. So I don't, I have no idea. Okay.

I was just curious. So there's three people that show up. We don't know that there's actually any loss at all. Right. And what are your attorneys telling you that you're looking at? How much time are they saying? They didn't. Right.

They didn't have. But you know what the pre-sentence report is? Yes. It's when you sit down with the probation officer and he says like, oh, where were you born? Who's this? Have you ever been arrested? Do you have a drug problem? Like they try and come up with a, and then of course they, the government's already told

him this is what he did. And then, but they come up with a report. And then they tell you where you fall on the guidelines based on previous criminal record, whatever. So you know that you're saying you don't know if that happened or not. It didn't happen. Oh, okay. Because some attorneys will tell, when they try and schedule it, they'll say, he's not, he's going to take part in that.

He's not going to be interviewed by you. Fuck you. And then they still come up with a report and the judge gets a report. Yeah. But I've had many, most people that lose it trial that the attorneys say, I'm not, he's not going to take part of that. Remember Red Bull? Red Bull's attorney told him not to do it. Don't do that.

We're not going to do that. And of course, the problem is that that's really an opportunity to maybe throw some mitigating factors in there at least. And then at least you can argue what's in the PSI. You can argue back and forth with the probation officer, you know, and you can put in your objections. He can look it up. And then the government comes back and says, no, this is the reason why we think that. And sometimes a pre-sentence report will go, for instance, in Dittie's case, they're like, he shouldn't go to jail at all. Like they're arguing back. They're going back, no, no, no, no, he should go to jail. You know, like the pre-sentence report was on his side.

He's done. The time he should have spent in prison, he's already done. You should release him. Like, and the government comes back and start screaming and hollering. Yeah. So that's an opportunity that a lot of lawyers, because it's just more work for them. Right. Now I have to argue.

I have to go sit down with you while you're doing it. And then I have to make the argument. So your attorneys, once again, kind of sounds like they dropped the ball. And you didn't even know this was a thing at the time. No. I mean, I had no clue about any. federal system or you know it's worked. So what are they telling you you're

looking at? Because you don't you haven't been sentenced yet. The sentencing happens months later. Right. Right. So they didn't we didn't we didn't even discuss it. So you just lost and you don't say what what's going to happen when am I going to get go to prison? Am I?

Well, the way they do it in the white color crimes is they have a forfeiture department from this woman came from D.C. And her whole reason for being there was forfeiture. Right. And so they actually charged us with money laundering after trial.

So, and I'm like, I didn't know what money laundering. I mean, I knew what I thought it was. I knew, you know, it's like if you sell drugs, you're trying to launder money, then clean it up. That's money laundering. Right. Their analogy is different. No. Any illegal funds that go in or out of a bank you could be charged with.

So once you get convicted with a crime in white collar, if it's $1 and it goes into a bank account with $100 million, their theory is they don't know which dollar is tainted, so they're going to take them all. Yeah, that's okay. So it's a smash and grab scenario. And so that's why they're there. And that's why they charge you with that on top of that.

And I'm so distraught at this point because we've just been convicted for something that we clearly didn't break a law for. And I'm like, you know, how does this all work? know, what do we do? And just, you know, my mind's other places besides worrying about this, this procedure. Right. And, and so, again, nobody's, nobody's at the will attorney-wise. And this, this thing proceeds to move on. And now I've got, you know, that on my label as well. Okay. So you go to sentencing. Yeah. What do you sentence to? So I'm sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.

Okay. Jesus. Yeah. So you get... My vice president got 12 and the CFO, I think he got like seven years. So you go to a low security prison initially, right? No. You go to a medium?

I'm out. Once they sentenced us, we were out pending appeal. Oh, okay. Yeah. No bond, no anything. So I'm out and I'm moving. moved from Lexington, Kentucky, back to my ex-wife's home up in Michigan. Her father had, he had some cabins that he was using as a model to sell these cabins. We went to one of those.

I renovated it, and we moved in there. And I'm thinking if things don't go well for me, that she's got support up there to help with the kids and all. You know, it's probably a good move. Right. And so, yeah, so we did that. And I'm staying up there working on this cabin, and I've got a buddy of mine coming over helping me. And I get a call one day from my main attorney who sounded like he'd just come off a three-day drunk. Right. He sound terrible.

And he was like, Steve, he goes, my worst nightmare is now reality. They want to lock you up right away. And I say, well, why is that your worst? Why is that his worst? How can this be? Yeah, why is it his? It's definitely mine now.

All right. So I'm like, how can this be? You know, we're still on appeal. Nothing's changed. And he was like, I don't know. He just hung the phone up. And so now I'm starting looking over my shoulders, you know, for Carson with cheap upcaps coming up.

And so I am way paranoid now. And I had had had a. meeting, I guess up there. I had, when when Kelko got raided, I had a ghost writer that hired to write a financial book for me. And I was going to market this, you know,

to help, you know, our business. His first day on the job was the day of the raid. Oh, my, okay. So I called this guy and I said, look, I no longer need a financial book. Right. I said, start running around all the employees

and start getting notes. As many notes as you can get, you know, just start taking notes from all these people, the day of the raid and on. So he's there for like two weeks after this happened, just talking to these people, memorializing his story. And so I kept in communication with him, and I had him up there to the cabin one weekend. My ex-wife was away.

He and I just hung out. And by the campfire, he brought up the possibility, if I ever wanted to escape, he had a guy that could make me disappear. And he said, what do you think? I said, that is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. I said, I don't know you want to entertain it. I don't even want to talk about it. Right.

And so that was it. So when I got this phone call from the attorney that said it went into incarceration me right away. Right. All of a sudden, that stupid idea didn't seem so stupid anymore. Right. And I'm thinking back to him, you know. So I made a phone call. I reached back out to him and I said, are you serious about that?

that scenario. And he said, absolutely I am. He said, I got this guy. He lives in Cancun, Mexico. And he said he was a former, like, you know, special ops guy and all this stuff. And he could, he could do this. And it's like, yeah, okay. So the more I set with that, the more reality became to me. And I went to my ex-wife and I said, look, we've got an option. I said, it's a pretty radical option, but there's an option. And here's what I've got. You know, what do you think? And she was like, maybe we ought to get serious about it.

Right. Given what's happened. And she goes, nothing you've tried to do has stopped this train from coming. And I don't see why it's going to stop now. And we just really didn't feel like we had an option. So made more calls. I ended up talking to this guy in Cancun from pay phones. And, you know, I was standing in line with a group of Mexicans at this one pay phone, you know, trying to blend in with it.

Their phone calls so they didn't trace it. And, you know, that's where I would call this guy. And what year is this? So this was like around 2000 and close to 2000. before. Okay. Yeah. And 2003. And so we had a meeting with both of our families. They came together and we told them this option we had and that we're thinking about pursuing this. We're going to. You know, what do you think? And it was probably one of the saddest gatherings I've ever had in my life because, you know, they were telling us that they didn't feel like we had

an option. They wanted us to go ahead and do this to leave the country. And we knew if we did that, we may never see him again. Right. And it almost felt like his massive funeral that night. It was so sad. People were crying and just it was awful. There was not a good option for us at that time we felt. And facing 14 years and having two small kids that were two and five at the time, I wanted to be a father to my kids and my wife wanted us to have some semblance of a family moving forward and we chose to leave. Do you have any money at this point? Yes, we have some cash. I don't remember how I stuck this cash back, but I did.

Right. Throughout all this, I had come up with $300,000 in cash. And also when you, so the guy that is going to change your identity, is he giving you fake IDs or is he, are you getting like I've, I've had fake IDs, but I've also, the best way for me was to I actually got the documents that was able to go into the DMV and get a real driver's license and then get a real passport from the state department. like so that the government so they don't even know they've issued you your fake ID right and it passes mustard we're going in and out of custom no matter what you're good my fear of some guy says okay here's your fake ID is like get the fuck is that is a piece of plastic like if a cop runs it he's going to be like this isn't showing up what is this right you know this is your passport like if you go through passport control you know run it they're going to be like what the fuck is this this doesn't go to anything like it or do you have legit this is legitimate document document What does it work? No, he didn't send us anything. Our job was to get there. So, uh, the fuck is that?

Well, there's a story about him too. But, uh, he wasn't exactly who he purported to be. Oh, okay. So, uh, he had, uh, the ghost writer wrote a book about him and it was all I. Okay. And so, we're going through this guy. So you're trying to get to Mexico? Yeah, I'm trying to get to Mexico.

Yeah. Now, I had my own jet before. Yeah. And I knew how that worked. I knew you didn't go through, you know, you know, checks and balances you do flying commercial. Yeah. You just for the little people. Pack up and go. Right. You know, and there's no checks.

But when we did get to Mexico, we was met with the security there. And as you know, when you go to a foreign country, you have to declare how much money you are bringing in the country. Yeah. And I declared nothing. Oh, got a couple grand. Yeah. Yeah. So we had a, I had all.

all this cash hid in the diapers of the kids and kids' toys and all this stuff we took. We mostly had their stuff with us because we wasn't coming back and we made sure they were comfortable. So, you know, it was like, how do you pack when you're packing for the rest of your life? Yeah. You know, so we took as much stuff as we could for them and had all this hit in there. And when you go to Mexico, I don't know if you've ever experienced this or not, but there is an antiquated, looks like a stoplight.

An old stoplight out of the 1950s. It's three, like, you know, the red light, yellow light, and green light on this podium. And they have a button you push. And this thing fires up like a roulette wheel back and forth. And it slows down to it lands on one light. If you get the green light, you're good to go. You go through, no checks and balances. So I'm going up to this thing, holding a little bit of,

my hand pushing this thing. I'm a nervous wreck to push this button. And this thing starts, you know, going, doing the roulette wheel, back and forth. And it gets slower and slower and slower. And it hits red. Oh, fuck. I start sweating like you can't believe. I mean, I look like a sprinkler. And so I'm putting the bags on this conveyor belt and I've got these Mexican ladies that are checking the bags. And just so happens, the Latino population is, I think they're more family-geared, oriented than Americans are. They're more into, like, kids and families. It doesn't matter if their kids or yours. They just are more gravitated towards family.

And my kids happen to look way different than anybody there because they had snow-wad hair. Right. And they stuck out like a sore thumb. So the kids were running wild around the conveyor belts and around the conveyor belts and around the little room they had there to check the bags. And the attendants that were checking the bags, they became distracted with the kids. So while they were being distracted and fooling with the kids, my ex-wife and I would grab the bags and throw them through the conveyor belts and just start slinging them through there.

Then I would go on the other side and start packing them up. And I got a couple of quick head nods from the attendants, you know, looking at this, but they were so enamored with the kids. They just let us do it. So they never they never searched the bags they never searched the bags and so we we got the heck out of there as quickly as we could and yeah that was our first blush with oh crap. All right. So would you do you ever meet this idiot? Yeah.

It's going to get the fake passports and fake your fake documents. What happens? Yeah. So we go to this guy's house and his. wife was normal. She was a really nice, nice lady. And his son was there and he was normal. But this guy is gone.

And supposedly he flew to Russia. We were trying to get a large tax refund check. We wrote a lot of taxes over the years with Kelko. And at the end of this thing, because we were losing money, we had to recapture back from our taxes. So we were expecting like a $1.7 million. check back and from the government. His idea was going to put this into a foreign bank. So he was somewhere else at the bank trying to do this.

And at a point in time, we realized that the government had confiscated the check. Okay. There was not going to be a check coming. And the way that worked was I was owner in a new bank, a new startup bank in Naples, Florida. It was a bank that we set up. I was the investor on it. And that's where we were going to put the check through. And the president of the bank talked to my wife.

She'd called him from a cell phone to check on this wire. And in a certain amount of code, he told her, he said, look, there's not going to be any checks coming your way anytime soon or any time later. He said, do you understand? And he goes, how's the weather in Europe? Right. And so that was it. And we shut it down. And we knew that at that point, whatever we had with us is what we had.

Right. But we never live very long on $350,000. No. So we realized at a point in time, this guy was in that bag. And he was full of crap. It's just so bizarre. It's just, it's crazy this guy. And so.

we had the leave. And he was making me paranoid. He was getting scared and thinking that people were coming, looking at him because we had us with him. Yeah. And so, and I wanted to get away from this guy. Yeah. And so we opted to go to Panama, which was close by.

It wasn't my first choice, but it was close by with this amount of money. And they, they catered into the, American dollar. They used the American dollar there. So that was good. I thought, well, at least I've got the currency that I'm familiar with that I can start doing something else there and try to make it happen. Because I was going to have to do something. Like you said, I couldn't live on this money for very long. And of course, there was a lot more money back then. It is now. Yeah. But still, you're limited. And I got over there. And I perceived. sued different things, different companies. I called a teak company, teak wood. Yeah. So there's a big market for that over there. They sell the teak to make wood, you know, for ships and different things.

Right. It's a big market. And I called this owner of this tick company and met him and his partner at this resort that we were staying at for a couple of days and told him everything. was leveled with him. And this guy brought me in. And he wanted me to help run his company. Jeez. So I was, you know, entertaining that, doing that.

And they had some stuff happened to them. And that was causing them to be looked at heavily with regulatory bodies. And he felt uncomfortable having me around that. So he introduced me to another attorney that. he recommended I go to to seek help. So I went to my ex-wife and I said, look, I can't do this. She said, what do you mean? I said, I cannot go out here and have no background, no real name, and nobody can check

and see who this guy is and try to create a business or industry or anything else like that. And I said, on top of that, I don't speak the language. Right. So I got three really bad things going against me. I said, I need help. And she said, what are you going to do? And I said, I'm going to go to this attorney. This guy gave me and just tell him everything.

Right. And she goes, it was your call. You know what's at risk. And I said, okay. So I got to do this. So I went to this guy and I told him everything about us, why we were on the run, you know, what happened in the past. And I came back to my ex-wife and she goes, how'd it go? I said, he didn't believe a damn thing.

I told him. Really? Yeah. So I said, we got to go back. So I took her and the two kids, went back to the scene. He walks in the room like Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld. He come in there and just backed up and said, holy shit, gringo, you're telling the truth. And I said, yes, I am.

And so then we started having another conversation. And he took me in. And I became like the business guru for his firm, when people were to present business deals for him, whatever. He wanted me to ferret out, see if they're fraudulent or they're good deals or help structure them and whatever. So I started working with this guy. And he created corporations for us, created stuff for us to make us invisible there. And they had kids, our kids age, and it worked out perfect because when they would go like on weekend, Jontz or whatever, he would make us with them and really made it happen.

Okay. So how long does this go on? So I was there for about four more months. I was probably about two months of Cancun and four months there in Panama. And I got a phone call one day from my ex-wife. She was deathly sick. And I had the attorney to take me back to the house. I didn't want to drive there because I didn't I wanted a small traffic infraction to bring down the house. All right. So I made a point not driving, you know. So she was begging me to take my son, my five-year-old son to karate class at this little international school we had enrolled him in.

And she said, I can't, I can't drive. Were you taking? And I said, look, I talk to you about this. You know, I don't want to drive. And you know why. And, but I caved in. I agreed to do this. and I agreed to take him to his karate class, so I did.

And the best invention in the world today for me is GPS. Right. I would get lost in a paper sack. So in Panama, the roads were such. They were just crazy and the traffic was crazy. And I took a couple wrong turns to get to there, you know, to the school. And went through karate class. He came out.

I got done with the class and I was going home. I went on a couple more wrong streets by accident, got back on track to where I needed to go. And I was stopped with a police officer on a motorcycle with an AK-47 and strapped to his back. And that was kind of typical there in Panama. Yeah. It's a little startling for Americans. Yeah. But that's the way they operated.

And I had witnessed before being with the attorney I worked for, he got stopped one day. And he pulled out his billfold and paid the guy $20 and went about his way. Right. So I'm thinking, works for him. It works for me. Yeah. This guy had me rode down my window. And I started to get my billfold out there and he looked at the money and he was like,

didn't really pay attention to it, which I thought was strange. And he started in motion for me to go in this vacant parking lot that looked like it had been a parking lot one day for a Walmart or something that was no longer there. Right. It was a big parking lot. So I pulled it. off into this parking lot. And at that time, these cars started showing up out of nowhere.

I don't even know where they came from. Right. But they came and formed a half moon around my vehicle. And as they were coming to a screeching halt, they would throw the doors open and they all had guns that were pointed over top the doors. And there had to be 30 of them. And so there was completely surrounding the truck at that point. Are these officers or these just plain closed or are these just banditos?

I don't know who they are. They're plain clothes. They're coming in every kind of car you can think of, doing this. So, yeah, there was no formal police cars in this whole deal. And so there I am with 30 guns pulled on me. And we all just sat there for, seemed like eternity for a while before somebody come up to my car window, holding a picture of me. and he said, this is you.

And it was a formal picture of me back in the States when I was a CEO. Right. And at this time, I'd grown out of goatee, and I wasn't wearing glasses. And back then I did, and I do now. But, and I looked at that picture. And for a second, I thought, you know, that's a guy I used to be. Right. That's no longer the guy I am now.

And that life's over. and I looked at this guy and I said, that's, that's not me. And, and he looked at this and looked at me. He was real puzzled, you know, he was like, this is not you. And I said, I don't think so. Right. And he got a picture of my ex-wife and then I knew this was, you know. Yeah, yeah.

They have too much. The cars were falling down. Yeah. And I said, look, I don't know what this is about, but I think I need to speak with an attorney. Right. And so, and some guys snuck up behind. behind me as I was talking to these people in that they were like in my side mirror and he snuck up behind me, reached in the truck and grabbed the

car keys and he held him up in the air like he'd won the Stanley Cup and they started cheering like I'm going to try to run right with 30 guns pulled on me you know with your son and your car yeah yeah and so and then I told my son I said look uh if these people come to you and ask you to leave the vehicle or whatever, just tell them you're fine where you are. Right. I said, do not leave me.

Because I didn't know what's going to happen to him, and I didn't know what's going to happen to me, and I knew that if we're together, that, you know, it was going to be strength of numbers with me and him. And so they did. They did. They came to him later and offered, you know, said, some would you like to sit over here? He says, no, I'm good where I am. Right.

So then the embassy came. shortly and they said, Mr. Keller, we think we both know why we're here. And so we want you to come with us. And so I did and we got in one of the, the nondescript cars. And my son was sitting on my lap with me in handcuffs and off we rode to third world country jail. How old's your son at the time? He's five years old at the time. Okay. So do they go pick up your wife? So yeah. So when I got to the holding facility at the little jail they had, if you didn't want to call it that, I had asked for a cell phone there from one of the Panamanians.

Right. And he let me use his phone. And I called her. And I said, look, you know, he's got some bad news. I said, this gig's up. They got me. I'm down here. You need to come down and get my sign. Cole. And so she proceeded to do that. And then so about a half hour she showed up and laid him out of the holding cell with me to my wife. How long does it take before the, is it you asked Marshalls show up or FBI or anybody show up? Like, I mean, a lawyer, anything?

No, actually, the panty mating guys were really nice. And they said, Mr. Keller said, we've been watching you here for like two weeks and, you know, you haven't done anything. All you do is go to work and come back and that's it. Hang out with your kids. Said, we were really sorry about this. This is not us. This is your government. Said it was up to us.

We'd leave you alone. Right. And I said, I appreciate that. But, you know, can you get me out? Right. But their hands were tied. And so there was no FBI. I know nothing there.

just the embassy people that were around there. So strangely, that night, I spent my time in that room. It was just like a storage room. Like they had furniture stored and piled up in the corners of the room and stuff. It was not a holding facility. It was a storage room. All right. And they had a really, really nasty mattress that had so many stains on it.

It was unbelievable. I pulled this out. out and put this underneath a table to shield the light from eyes. And I had a jacket that laid on top of this thing and slept on that that night. So in about 4 o'clock in the morning, somebody came through the door. And this guy said, I have to put a leg iron on you. And I said, okay. And so he put this chain on my ankle and put the other end of it around the table leg. this little table that I could have just picked up. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, what are they doing? They set me up. They want me to run. And he left the door open. So I don't know what that was about, but I had nowhere to go. Right. You know, so it was not even a thought that I had at that time, but I thought it was the most strange, bizarre thing I've ever seen.

So I slept back on that mattress. And early that next morning, I had communicated with my wife the day prior. And she was going to come with an attorney, an attorney I worked for and another attorney to come and try to get me out of there. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen. They're going to hold. Yeah. Yeah.

So they were in the front of the jail. And I had like five guys that were all just dressed nondescript, mostly in dark clothes, all weaponed up. These guys had guns all over them. They had rifles and they had pistols on them. They came in the back, busted through the door, and they said, let's go. Now, I didn't know who these people were. Right.

And, you know, what are you going to do? Say, no. So you're going with these people and they shoved me in this SUV. They're all getting in there with me. And they've got the newspaper pulled up from the day prior. And it has a lot of their pictures in it, apparently, because they were upset about this, because their identity being blown. And they're in the front page of the paper. We're in there.

And it's all in Spanish, so I couldn't read it. But I could see the pictures. And I knew that they were having an argument about this. They were really upset about it. And I didn't know where we're going. I thought these guys were taking me out to execute me. Right. I was scared to death.

and I kept asking them where we're going and nobody would reply. After about 20 minutes, it was just me, just brutally bugging them. Right. and finally one guy, or 10 minutes passed, I saw an airport sign.

So my anxiety went from 1,000 down to 100. Right. And we ultimately pulled up at the airport. that their identities were what does that mean I guess they were undercover people is the only thing I could ascertain for this so this is like the crew that was watching it for the last couple weeks and as a result of this newspaper article about you they had inadvertently identify who these people who are these guys are these Americans no they're just Panamanians yeah that were watching okay as far as I know they could have been Interpol I don't know okay I don't know who these people are I mean did they look how are they brown people are

these white guys? I mean, well, there was a mix of people there. So they're speaking, do they speak English? No. No. Okay. So these are Panamanians, probably. Yeah. Okay. So they bring you there. They put you on what, Delta? No, just talking. What do they, how do you fly back? Do you meet an FBI agent? What? No, listen. Okay. I flew Delta. Okay. Nice. So yeah. So they put me in this secret room in the middle of the airport, that I never do existed. And most people don't. They pass there every day back and forth,

going to their gate, going to the plane. And inside of the middle of this airport was this military operation. And they had a secret wall that opened up and they ushered me in there. And I sat at this desk, like in a 1930s movie with a light over the top of my head, they shoved a paper in front of me.

They said, sign and it's all in Spanish. I couldn't read it. I said, I'm not signing it. Right. And they said, you can sit there as long as you want. We're good. And so I sat there for a couple hours. And finally, a couple of the embassy guys showed up at that time. And they said, you need to sign that paper. And I said, let me call my wife. And so they gave me their cell phone to call her. And she said, what happens if you signed the paper? And I said, I have no idea. And so I asked him why they're, I've got her on the phone. And I said, what happens if I signed this paper? And they said, well, in about 45 minutes, you're going to be flown back to

Miami. And just some kind of an extradition document. Yeah, something. So I signed this thing and they took me to the airport, to a commercial airport, and I sat on the back seat of a Delta airline. With somebody or just by yourself? No, I was with both of these. One FBI guy and the other one was from the embassy. Okay. And they're with me.

And I'm over by the window. So I'm in the last seat of the plane, handcuffed. And the stewardic, the stewardess, she comes up. She goes, what would you all like to drink? And I said, I'll have a bud light. And this guy said, no, he won't. He'll have a water, you know. So, and at this time, my ex-wife did not know I was on a plane or where I was going or anything.

So I asked this guy if I could use his cell phone. And he was trying to refuse me of that call and said it was interfering with the plane system and all this crap, you know, which I knew was bull. And I asked the stewardess, I said, is it okay if I would make a phone call at this time? She goes, sure, you can call. anybody you want while we're on the ground. Yeah. So I looked at him, I said, can I borrow your phone? Right.

And I think peer pressure from her, horse seemed to let me make that call. And I told her that I was going to Miami. Because at the time, she thought I was being flown back to Kentucky. Right. So, yeah, I verified that. And that was the last communication I had for a while, as they put me on diesel therapy for a little bit.

So you go to Miami, they bring you to what, the U.S. Marshals at that point, they lock you up. And then from then on, it's like buses and they transport you from buses and airplanes and everything else. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They get you back to what? They get you back to Kentucky? Do you go through like, no, I went to, uh, I was in Miami for a couple weeks. And then, uh, from there I went to Atlanta.

They flew me to Atlanta. From there, I stayed a couple days. And then, uh, they flew me to Oklahoma City. Right. Oklahoma City is a conveyor belt for prisoners. Right. And all these planes are flying in and they're like, they must fly them in at once because they fly right up to the building and they connect directly to the building. Yeah.

So from this airport where I was, I remember getting off and they got me shackled, you know, the legs, leg irons and the wrist irons. and I stepped down on the tarmac, and I've got like four or five different groups of prisoners. They're like 200 in each coming out of each plane. They're all standing there in different uniforms, different colors. And I stepped off the plane, and my leg iron popped, and it hit the ground. And it made a noise. Right. And it startled all the U.S. marshals.

And they all cocked their guns and turned around and were putting the guns on me. And it was like, freeze, you know, like I swear I'm going to do. Right. And it was a faulty leg arm, apparently, it just came off. Huh. And they thought I was, I guess, trying to escape again, you know. So they came over here and altered that. But that was how I was met at Oklahoma City with, I don't know how many marshals had guns pulled on me again.

So you go into, so how long are you in Oklahoma City? I was there for about two weeks. Okay. Yeah. And then you get back to Kentucky. I flew back to Kentucky and I was in the county jail there for a while being arraigned for leaving the country. And so that lasted for a couple weeks.

And then I got moved to the federal facility where I stayed for the next eight and a half years was the federal medical center in Lexington, Kentucky. You never left there? I couldn't. Why not? Why at risk? Did they charge you with what? Did they charge you with escape or they charge you with absconding or what? Just because you were out on bond.

Yeah. Like I didn't escape. I'm on bond. Well, it wasn't really. I was just out. There was no bond. Okay. Yeah.

So I fled. The way they did it, they had a hearing after I fled, which I didn't show up. So they had a bench warrant for me. And I don't even remember what the charge was, but they did charge me for leaving. Yeah. Did you get additional time for that? I did. But they ran it concurrent.

Okay. Okay. There was that. They even convicted my ex-wife. Oh, for... 80 and a bedding. Eating and abetting. Yeah. Even though I pled out and I said, you know, leave her out. It's just, they just did it to be vindictive of, you know... So would she have probation?

She did. Yeah. Yeah. But she's a felon. Right. Fucking dicks. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't... So what were you at? A medium? So this was a medical facility. Right.

And they had all walks come in there. They had high security, medium, lows. We'd come there to get treatments from other institutions. Right. So it was a melting pot of a lot of different classifications of folks. Right. What did you do in the medical facility? Just scared, did you have like a job or?

That's several jobs. Okay. Yeah. Are you got to pass it? Are they appealing? Are your crackpot attorneys? appealing the conviction at all or no you're just like okay I'm just down for the well we yeah and we hired um my family hired another attorney for Miami to actually put a another

appeal in we hired several different attorneys along the way so trying who was that attorney um Mike Pissano okay but maybe Roy Black is a big attorney was a big attorney down there I know yeah um Mike Pissano I don't know that may sounds familiar um So did he also, did he file an appeal 2255 yet? Yeah. No good. No good. No good.

A lot of money. No good. No. So. But you get that hope. But yeah. So, yeah. So, but actually, I got my, uh, paralegal, uh, certificate in there just, just so I

could fight my case. Right. And I filed. Uh, I think I've got the record of appeals that I filed. Right. And as you know, um, coming from the gray bar hotel, you can always tell if a man's guilty or innocent by the amount of. appeals he files because eventually a guy that's committed a crime runs out of arguments right

i never ran out right i filed to the day i walked out and i kept going i was told it i was the biggest bleep on the radar at the courts down there to say i just wore him out but uh that's all i could do so all right so eight and a half years um um jesus so what we're When did you, when were you released? 2012. 2012. Yeah. Never seen an iPhone.

No. As a matter of fact, when my brother and sister came to pick me up, they handed me an iPhone. I was in the back seat. And they handed me an iPhone. And they said, my sister said, your kids are on there. And I looked at this thing. It already timed out. And it was a black phone.

Right. Black screen. And I'm looking at this thing. I'm like, it's a brick. Where? Yeah. Where are they? and I had no clue what this was.

Yeah. So she had to tell me, you know, how to put it up to my ear and, you know, talking to it. So it was just, I'd never seen everything else that people takes for granted. So what did you, what, so you're, I'm assuming while you were locked up, you got divorced. Yeah. Yeah, that was hard. That was, you know, the whole. The whole experience was traumatic.

But going through that, being locked up, it wasn't like you could walk down the street and go to the bar and have a beer and get your mind off of it. You know, you had to sit with it. Yeah. And that was tough. It was one of the toughest things probably I dealt with throughout that whole experience. I mean, I've always said, Colby's heard we say this over and over again. The guys that have the toughest time are the guys that have a family. Like, you have such a huge benefit if you go in.

And you're not dating anyone. You have no kids because you're, you're in there. And there's just, it's such a one way relationship, like for your, like, all you can do is call home. And, and it's just send me this, do this for it. It's such a one way. It's like you're, you're such a burden to them. And you can't help them do anything. And then these guys that are still trying to be a father from inside prison, it's like, you're a phone call at this point.

Like, you know, they know who you are, but it's, it's a horrible, horrible feeling. And then the guys that are upset with their wives for moving on with their lives, it's like, you know, but, you know, we're married, but, you know, she didn't sign up for this. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a bitter pill to swallow. Well, that's the thing that happened to me was I got hit with a double whammy with, with her. One weekend she tells me she's, she wants a divorce. Right.

Out of the blue. And I'm thinking there's something more to this. And two weeks later, I learned there was something more to this that she had hooked up with some guy and she was now pregnant. And so my family was living. And my dad didn't want anything to do with her. And I said, Dad, I said, look, I'm not in her shoes. She's not in mine.

You all don't have any idea what I'm dealing with in here. I don't have any idea what she's dealing with out there. Right. You know, we came from this, we had like a 12,000 square foot house to living in a 1,400 square foot cabin. And we had all this stuff just got ripped from us immediately, you know, and to survive was just, you know, it was incredible what we had to endure. So I said, look, if you have that attitude against our. I'll never see these kids. Yeah.

And those kids are the most important thing to me. And so I said, you have to forgive, bite your tongue, whatever you got to do. But you just got to let this, you just got to give her a pass. Yeah. No, that's the smart. That's just, it's horrible, but it's a smart, it's a smart move. Yeah. Like, you know, and you're right.

You don't know what anybody's going through. And then you got married. She didn't sign up for this. And now she's, she's everything. She's trying to raise two kids. It's, you know, you're a phone call. Now, you're a phone call. Right.

God, you were in there, too, when 300 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. What is that? That's 10 minutes a day on a phone. Yeah. That's nothing. Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing. And then for her to come see you, they just make it miserable for people to come see you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that was awful. And I look back and I feel bad about, you know, the kids after to endure that because she did bring them and they were there, like, you know, twice a month.

And until they got in sports and got older. And then it was like once a month, but it's better than nothing. Yeah. So at least they knew their father. And for that, I'm eternally grateful for that, you know. It's funny. I'm going to, I'm going to race through this real quick. Okay.

But I remember prior to going into prison, I, this is before, this is before, like, I didn't even know prison was an option. Yeah. You know, I think I was doing stuff and I remember thinking, you know, whatever, maybe you end up there or something. I knew for some reason I remember paying attention to this. It was an old, like, back when Steve McQueen made movies. And it wasn't Steve McQueen. I forget who it was. I would die.

I'd love to see this. I'd love to see this scene. But it was the beginning of a movie where there's a guy in a cell, like somewhere in New York. This is in the 70s. And it starts off. The credits are rolling. He's in there. Cop comes up or the CEO comes up.

And he's like, hey, you know, Jimmy, get your stuff and go. You got to go on the bus. He's like, what are you talking about? I'm not getting released for fucking six months. He's no, it's prison overcrowding. They're releasing you. You and a bunch of guys. He's like, holy shit.

He jumps up, grabs his stuff. And he's like, you know, there's no time. He's grabbing it stuff. He tries to go and make a phone call, but there's a line. Right. And so then they're like, the bus is leaving. He runs. They run him through the prison.

He gets on the bus. He gets dropped off at Greyhound, at the Greyhound station, whatever. He goes to use the phone, pay phone again. There's a line. But there's a taxi there. This is back when you had, back in the 70s, you had cash, right? And this is a state prison. Yeah.

So he jumps in the taxi and he goes and he gets home and he gets out. He goes up. stairs. I mean, he goes up the elevator. This is a downtown like Manhattan. This is like a 40-story building or something. He gets up there. He puts a key in. He goes to open up the door and he hears his wife say, sweetie, do you want some wine? And he stops. And he looks in and he can see through the kitchen and through there. And there's a guy sitting at the fucking table. And his wife walks over and she, or he turns out, he's like, yeah, I'll take some wine. And he's, and he's, and he's, he's like, eating about to eat dinner. She's making him dinner. And for a second, you can see this rage on his face.

And then he stops and he's like, he closes the door. He locks it. He gets in the elevator. You see he's crushed. Goes across the street to the pay phone, picks it at the pay phone and called. And she answered the phone. She's like, oh, hey, sweetie, what's going on? And he said, wanted to let you know, I was released from prison. I'm in the city and I'll be, I can be at the house and about 15 or 20 minutes, but I wanted to let you know in case you needed to clean the place up. If not, I can stay at a hotel. 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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the makers of the coolest bed in the world. Some exclusions apply. See sight for details. I can go to my brothers and she's like, no, no, no, no, no, 15 minutes. That's all I need. Just give me 15 minutes to clean up. Is, are you sure? And she's like, I'm, I'm sure.

He's, okay, hangs up the phone. He's standing there outside across the street. She comes, listen, whatever, 10 minutes go away. You know, she's dragging this guy's brief, I mean, this guy's fucking suitcase. dragging him out. He's holding a suitcase. You know, the clothes are hanging out the side, you know, the whole thing. And he's going, I don't know, and she's throwing all the stuff in the back of a taxi. And she turns in and she says, you know what this was. You knew this was coming. It's over. And he gets in the back of the taxi. And she walks off and he's standing there and

drives all the taxi drives off eventually. And he waits until a few more minutes. He gets in, walks across the street, gets in the elevator, goes upstairs, walks, goes to put his key in the front door. She opens the front door. Oh, my God. Hugs him. I love you so much. Oh, gosh, I can't believe this. He's like, yeah.

He walks. She's, I got dinner made for you. Walks in, sits down at dinner and says, honey, would you like some wine? And he says, yeah, I'd like some wine. And that's kind of the opening, well, the credits roll. And I remember thinking, that's the best you could hope for. Right. That's the best you could hope for if anything ever happened.

Right. Because American women are not, oh, they're not, you know. If she was from South America, she's going to stick with you. She's going to be in misery her whole life, but she's going to die with you. That's it. But she didn't sign up for this. No. No.

And that's the thing. You can't hold that. You know what I learned through this thing is you just can't judge people. You're not in their shoes. You don't know what you would do. You know, what would you do if you were in that situation? Right. And it's like people ask me, you know, they ask me all the time.

If you had to do over again, would you leave the country? And I said, that's the wrong question. question. The right question is, what would you do if you're in my situation? Would you leave the country? Yeah. I, if I did, I definitely would left the country. No, definitely. That's where I messed up. So I don't know. It didn't work out too good for me. No, yeah. I have a different skill set. You have a business skill set. I also didn't have the kind of, you know, what didn't have the business, you know, knowledge that you. You know, knowledge that you. you had acclament or whatever the word is. I can't remember. Acument. Is that it? Acumen, I think.

Acumen. I don't know. So I was educated. I was educated in the South. So, um, okay. So you get out and, you know, what are you doing now? You, what, you know. Yeah.

You're working at McDonald's for a while. I went to you funny story though, uh, going through this system is, uh, when I did get out, I was in a halfway house for a while. Right. All right. And that was a, that was a whole other deal. you're still locked up, but you're not. So they had a lot of rules there.

And I operated in circles most people read about. I had mowns yet. We were worth, you know, $13 billion at the time. It's what we raised on Wall Street. And it was a different world. And so now I'm into a world that was totally foreign to me. I didn't know how to operate. In the halfway house, one of the things,

that I was able to take advantage of was the RDAP program is the drug program to get a year off, right? So in doing that, I had to go to these ongoing once-week meetings. T-DAP. Yeah. So it was away from the halfway house, and I had to take a bus. They wouldn't allow me to do any other transportation. I had to go with the metro system bus, which I'd never ridden in my entire life. And that's its own, like, the economy of travel.

You know, they've got maps and they've got all this stuff and connectors and all of it was foreign to me. I didn't have a clue. But they told me, said that if you're not back here in a certain time, you're going back to prison. Right. A little motivation. Yeah. So I go to this meeting and I get out. and I'm waiting at this bus stop

and the bus pulls in to get me and it never comes to a complete stop. It just swerves into where it should have stopped. Right. And the guy punches it. I don't know if he got a call from home or what. Something happened, but he floored this bus and took off.

And I go to this restaurant behind me. I've been waiting for this bus and it just did a slow and go. Right. It's gone. What do I do? Is there another bus coming? coming. They said, no. And I'm like, what am I going to do? You know? Right. So they had all these rules. Like if you rode with somebody else or something, you know, you're in trouble. And so some

guys in there, he said, where are you trying to go? And I said, well, I'm trying to go to a halfway else. That's where I'm saying. But if you could take me to the bus station, I think I can figure it out. Right. He said, okay, I'll drive you there. So this guy, I get in with him, he drives into where the buses are, all right? Apparently, there's not supposed to be any cars going in there. It's all the bus lanes. And this is like a major no. Right. We go into this lane into the bus station, where the buses are, and here come the cop cars. I'm talking three or four deep. Lights everywhere. And I'm freaked out. And I know, I didn't know what happened, but I know it's not a good situation. And I need to leave, like now. So I get out of the car and I just, I start,

mingling with the crowd and trying to just get in with them so they don't recognize who I am. And I did kind of blend in with the crowd to disappear. And my heart's just papitating out. You know, one thing after another is happening. So then I'm trying to go to the bus people and say, look, how can I get back to the street where the halfway else is? All the buses have left. Right. So I thought this is actually, this is asinine.

So I reverted back to the life that I knew, the only way that I knew to get around. So I walked down the street to the Marriott. I went to the concierge. I had 20 bucks in my pocket. Right. I gave it to him. I said, I need a ride back to this halfway house. And so I went to the concierge.

He got the car and got me a ride back there. And they dropped me off a little bit before that halfway house. So they didn't see me get out of this car. Right. But that's how I got back and made it. But yeah, it was a total different world for me. How long were we in the halfway house? I mean, I was there for six months. I mean, I was in home confinement, but I still had to report to them after a point of time. And I stayed in the halfway house for about probably a month. Okay. Yeah. What did you for a job? So getting out, my family owned a,

salvage yards and my brother had a satellite salvage yard in in Lexington and I worked there. It was under outside management and also my family wasn't directly there for some. But still I didn't advertise that. Yeah, yeah. You know, it was part of the family, but I worked there for a while. Okay, so once, I mean, once that's done and you're on supervised release, did you start a company or did you go to work for somebody else, early or what happened? Actually, a firm came to me that was in the, they had an IT firm and they had created this online bank. And they came to me with this idea. And they said, look, we don't

really understand everything that happened to you, but we know what you built. We want you to do it for us. And so they offered me a job working with all these kids are half my age, creating this internet bank that they were trying to launch and they wanted me to head that up and create that product and help them, you know, pursue this. So I did work for them for, I guess, the next six months or so. And it ran into hurdles with the credit card companies. And we understood that that was very controlled market. They were not going to be able to do this at a certain point in a time. So I stayed with them for a while, doing, different projects and learning that business.

So coming from getting in a car and not knowing what an Apple iPhone was to being in an IT firm was kind of, it's kind of surreal. Right. So what are you doing now? I've written a book. I wrote the book while I was in a Grey Bar Hotel. Okay. I learned how to write in there. I couldn't even address an envelope when I started.

But I wrote 7,000 pages by Penn & Ake while I was in there. and I read books on how to write, how to become a writer, Stephen King, John Grishams, and we read a lot of books anyway. And it's Malcolm Gladwell as a book out called Outliers. And in that book,

it says you have to put 10,000 hours into anything to really be proficient. And I've got over 10,000 hours now. Right. And I've been blessed to have some really talented editors and collaborators. and came up with this story, and I put this story into this book. It's called Pay to Play to Play, obviously. And it's a political thriller, novel written book. So that just came out a couple

weeks ago. It's number two right now on Amazon and white-collar true crime new releases. It's doing very well. Who's number one? I think it's the Murdoch story. I heard that's trash. Yeah. And, you know, I can't compete against the documentary. This would be number one. That's the other one's trash.

We've got 65-star ratings right now on Amazon. So that's a good feedback. But, you know, when I came out with this book, it took me for years to come out with it because I was fearful of my life and my kids and just everything it's involved with this story. There's a lot of repercussions that could have come out of it. And, and, but I, I reached a point of time where also, I didn't feel like the public was ready for the truth before. And I think now they've seen enough transparency with the corruption and everything has happened with Trump and everything has happened in just the world that they know that this is now, you know, the way it was. And it is truth. Because back then when this happened, we didn't have Instagram.

We didn't have Facebook. We didn't have all this stuff, you know, that would have made this story. or my outcome a lot different, I believe. Right. Now. So when I brought this story to market, I got to introduce to what's called the white color support group. It's an internet based like a Zoom nationwide where all these guys got on there and they're

talking about their backgrounds and what's going through or seeking help. You know. Who runs that? Jeff Grant. We had him on. Yeah. Okay. He started it. He was a lawyer, right? Lawyer, was it? What was his thing? COVID? He was a, no, it was a PPP loan? I think PPP. Yeah. Yeah. So great guy and started this and it really has gotten a lot of traction. There's a lot of people involved in this thing.

Right. But when I got on there, I started hearing the same stories, the same blueprints that happened to me years ago. And it was like a kick in the gut. And I realized this was no longer about me. It's not longer about my book. It's about using the book for a story of how this pay-to-play system works, how business intersects with politics and how it really, from the inside out, works. And it gave me a motivation to do something else. And I'm like, why is all these white-collar guys, why have they not done anything all these years? You know, all these AAA personalities that once up to have done yesterday.

And I was thinking, you know, maybe I'm the person to start this. And so one thing led to another, and I started beating other guys that had interest in doing something. They just needed a direction to do it. And so we've created this nonprofit organization called Justice Restoration Foundation. And I've got all these different background people coming to aid this company and work in it from, PR people to IT people to ex-attorneys, you name it. We've got a diverse group. I joke and say, you know, if we had these guys on payroll now, it would be a million

dollars to pay these people. So, but they're coming because they want change. And none of them voluntarily signed up to or thought they'd ever be doing this. You know, they, I would rather be running companies than I would run into a nonprofit to change things in the government. But something's got to be done. we got to stop attacking our innovators, entrepreneurs, doctors, professionals in this country that are the backbone and the threat of this country.

It's just an oxymoron what's happened. Hey, you guys, I appreciate you watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you get notified of videos just like this. Also, if you want to check out Steve's book, we're going to put all of his links in the description box to Amazon. You can click on there, go there, buy the book. We're also going to put all of his social media links and any websites that he's got.

so they'll be right there in the description box you can click go follow check it out i really do appreciate you watching this if you know anybody that's interested please share the video please share the book share all those social medias thank you very much i really appreciate it see you