Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Thailand’s Most Wanted Criminal Escapes The Country | Louis Ziskin

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Thailand’s Most Wanted Criminal Escapes The Country | Louis Ziskin ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I went from 900,000 in debt to up 2 million bucks. We started moving into private jets and air cargo. We were traffickers. We did credit fraud. We did credit cards and travelers check. I'm the number one trending thing in Thailand. Kingpin turned tech mogul arrested for attempted murder, kidnapped extortion. They offered me as the top dude the first chance to ride. At the street level of dope dealing is highly competitive. At the high tier,
Starting point is 00:00:29 Nothing stops the money train. If one person has a problem, everybody has a problem. I was born in L.A. My mom was an immigrant from Lithuania. Her mother, my grandmother, was a Holocaust survivor. Okay. And they came over. She got over here in her teenage years through a few different refugee programs with my grandmother.
Starting point is 00:00:51 And my dad was from Cleveland, Ohio. His family were immigrants from Russia, though. But they'd been here for a few generations. all right so my dad uh you know was a few years older than my mom he'd just gotten out of the military and uh he met my mom who was uh you know finishing up high school and i was my mother's 21st birthday present nice so uh they met they hit it off um it lasted for about then i had a little brother about a year and a half later Brian um the best uh and then you know about six seven seven years in they went their own way my mom was much more serious you know she had two jobs
Starting point is 00:01:36 she had this and that my dad's head was more in the sky he he's he's very smart he gets great ideas um but at that point in his life like he wasn't able to push through on them and my mom was very pragmatic in the sense like hey there's two kids here i got my mom here we we need to have something you know stable and uh my dad's parents were very supportive of me though my grandparents they love me to death and a lot of people you know over the years have tried to look back and say that oh maybe i had parental trauma that pushed me in this direction i don't you know i missed my dad i remember waiting for him to come visit after he left but you know i love my dad i don't while sure there might be some hidden trauma something
Starting point is 00:02:26 where I don't remember like huge big fights or anybody doing anything horrible to me. You know, I love my parents. They did the best they could together. And, you know, and they both, my mom really did what she thought she needed to do because it was in our best interest. And my dad wasn't around for a little while. And then he was, you know, and he was doing things to his capability, too. Looking back on it, I really believe that. I don't believe there was some nefarious parent out there trying to fuck me up for the rest of my life.
Starting point is 00:03:03 But I also think parents don't have all the answers sometimes. And when you're a problem child, like I was from the very beginning, you know, problem with authority, don't go around the block on your bike, just ride up and down the street. I didn't even ride up and down the street once. I took the first left and went around the block. Right. Right. Like my mom even said, you know, she's like, when you were younger, it was easier because I could tell you
Starting point is 00:03:25 the opposite, right? And that worked for the, but when you got older, you figured that out and you would just do the opposite of what I wanted, regardless what I said. And that kind of went on all through school. You know, I was at Hillel Hebrew Academy in L.A. I went to Gardner Street Elementary School in Hollywood first. Then the busing thing started. And my family sent me, I didn't really understand what that was at the time. My family sent me to Hebrew Academy. Colby doesn't understand what that is either, by the way. Oh, so
Starting point is 00:04:00 Bussie is forced integration of schools. So they move kids around into different areas to make sure that they integrate. That was going to be my guess. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, they sent me there. I like to poke holes at Colby.
Starting point is 00:04:15 Well, he's a youngster. Yeah. Well, it's a youngster. Yeah. Well, it's C4, not bad. So anyway, they sent me there and I was there on scholarship. You know, there's all kinds of Jews, but we were the broke. Right. You know?
Starting point is 00:04:29 And so I'm there on scholarship. I'm there through sixth grade, you know, one problem after another. And then sixth grade, about a week before the end of the school year, I got into a fight with this kid, David Fish. By the way, I'm going to talk shit right now,
Starting point is 00:04:45 but they're a great family, and I got nothing but good things to say about them. But this kid was the rich kid. He used to, With my little brother, he was, you know, but he was kind of goofy. And so I beat this shit out of him, flushed his head down the toilet. The glasses go down the toilet. And then I'm so pumped up when I get back to my class, right?
Starting point is 00:05:04 Like, there was this teacher, Miss Muzor. Like, and she had these big tits, you know? Right. And so I'm in sixth grade. And people have been talking about her tits and I'm up at the board and I'm still like all adrenaline rush. I literally just turned around and grabbed her tits. the whole class is going crazy you know i mean so needless to say i got thrown out of school that was that was the day i got thrown out but those two things happened about 10 minutes of
Starting point is 00:05:32 and then i was off to uh public school i was going to say that makes me think of that movie uh jrc was at 3 o'clock high or 2 o'clock you know where he fights the bully i don't remember well david fish wasn't a bully if anything i would say i wasn't a bully either i wasn't getting into fights there, right? But I would say if anybody was going to say somebody was the bully, it was me because he's not the most coordinated guy. You know, he's the last pick when you pick teams and then he's right. But here I am a financial aid kid and I just beat up the biggest donors kid. Right. I mean, that's not going to go well. And then 10 minutes later, I'm back in class and I've grabbed a teacher's tits. And yeah, so that was that was the end of my career
Starting point is 00:06:16 at Hillel Hebrew Academy. And where'd you go that from there? I went to John Burroughs Junior High in Los Angeles, and then I went to Orville Wright, Jr. High, and then I got thrown out of, you know, a bunch of schools. And I ended up in... For no reason at all? Well, I was the kid, you know, who came to school for nutrition. Right. And lunch.
Starting point is 00:06:40 Like, you know, I got a scooter when I was 16, one of those Honda elites with the pop-up headlight, right? And the only time I saw school was to sell joints and cigarettes. And, you know, I literally would come for nutrition. I'd park and I have to jump over the fence because the school's already closed for me to get. So I was smuggling stuff into school, I guess, you could say. Right. By 10th grade.
Starting point is 00:07:05 And so, yeah, that was me, you know, the skateboard, the problem child, the whole thing, right? And I really just, I wasn't impressed with teachers. I saw hypocrisy right away. And the minute I saw any kind of hypocrisy or inconsistency, I used that as a validation to or a justification to completely ignore anything that anybody was ever talking about. That went on for years and years of my life still to this day. You know, whenever I'm watching anything, I'm kind of looking for that. You know, my wife's like, you're always finding the negative.
Starting point is 00:07:42 I'm like, it's the bullshit that I'm looking for. Everything else who cares, right? And that's been, that's kind of been how I've gone about my life and how now looking back, I realized that I justified a lot of the behaviors, right, no longer engaging. Well, these people are full of shit. Like, they're the ones trying to tell you what to do and they're full of shit. What, what the, why do I have to follow any rules? And, and that's, that's kind of, you know, so it was, well, I wouldn't say that you could have seen that I would become, you know, a large drug trafficker at that time.
Starting point is 00:08:17 You could have easily said this kid's going to, this is going to be problems. It's going to have an issue. There's going to be issues. When, I mean, so did you, so you, did you ever get in trouble in high school or did you graduate high school? Yeah, I got in trouble in high school. I had no high school credits. And my parents sent me to a boarding school in Northern California called Cascade School. Now, these kinds of schools have gotten a little bit of.
Starting point is 00:08:40 Bro, your poor mom. Like, you know, she's struck she's working two fucking jobs. Oh, yeah. You're getting kicked out. Like, you know. Yeah, by now, by high school. she's remarried to my stepdad, David George, so she's off the two job thing. That's even worse.
Starting point is 00:08:52 I got the new husband who's got to take on this responsibility. Like, that poor guy. That guy, I got to tell you, me and him did not get along at all. He's one of these stories, right? Like, salt to the earth, like now looking now today, I got nothing but respect for him. Right. But then here, I'm looking for every shortcut. And this is, this guy is one of these stories, fought in the Israeli War of Independence when he's a teenager, comes over here afterward as a teenager,
Starting point is 00:09:17 has $15 in his pocket and works at a gas station and lives in the back until he has enough money to buy it and he ends up dying the largest ocean front property owner in Venice Beach, right? Like, I mean, incredible success story, the American dream, all that, super, you know, politically conscious, everything, like just salt to the earth. But this dude worked hard. Yeah, yeah. And that was not anything that I was interested in whatsoever.
Starting point is 00:09:49 Like, what do you mean? Why? And that kind of carried on, you know, for a little while, too, right? Like, why? It's easy. You know, but when you're 16, 17, 18, money seems easy because you're going to your grandparents, you're going to your cousins, you're going to your aunts, you're going to a few friends. It's not the same as when you're 18 or 20 or 21 and you're kind of out on your own
Starting point is 00:10:11 and you actually have to pay bills at a certain time, not worry about having 100, bucks if you want to go out to dinner it's a different set of responsibilities and circumstances right and but you know still i was i was not interested in anything that meant hard work nothing absolutely zero and uh this guy was all about it you know and now like when i talk to kids it's kind of the message i give them hard work is actually a shortcut yeah right like and but you know i didn't know that at the time i'm the kid who goes to class hasn't studied at all and i can still get a b on a final exam just from osmosis of what I heard in class while I'm doodling shit or writing notes to the girl next to me. And then so I had no thought ever that I'm ever going to have to work hard.
Starting point is 00:10:56 I'm all. Life's just going to be super easy for me in every aspect. And, uh, but as obviously as time goes by and, you know, you live your life and you have experiences and, and stuff like that, you realize, wow, this guy is just a role model for what a man is supposed to be. Here's a guy who handles all his responsibilities, never makes an excuse, never, he always finds a way to keep his word, doesn't take the easy way out even when there is one to say, oops, sorry, couldn't do it this time. Like all those little things that he tried to instill in me and my brother, which he did a much better job with my brother at that age. those are the things that really matter right like and i learned these things in in more crude ways
Starting point is 00:11:42 like in prison i learned like oh you know people with the workout there's some people that look for any excuse oh i can't work out today because whatever yard recall or this but then there's other guys there they're a much smaller group to find a way to get it done yeah no matter what i to me, that translates out into the rest of the world. So many of the things that I saw in prison or observed in prison translate out into the real world. And that was just one example of it, you know, and it's, I found that to be very interesting. Yeah, I was going to say, my wife and I still wake up at like 4 o'clock in the morning. We make our bed.
Starting point is 00:12:21 We, you know, it still looks like a, you know, you're used to you're in that routine and it's just, you know. Yeah, I wake up super early, but you know what? Before, when I went in, I was 31, and I never, since then, I've never slept more than two hours. Like, even if I don't have to get up to go to the bathroom, I wake up and I'll go right back to sleep. But last year I started cold plunging and that all changed. I'm getting five, six hours blocks of sleep. I don't want to talk about cold plunge because everybody who cold plunges thinks that they're like God with the Ten Commandments and they need to hand that to the next person. But it has been life-changing for me.
Starting point is 00:12:58 So when you graduate high school, what do you do after high school? Do you go to college? Yeah, I go to boarding school, Cascade School. It's gotten a little notoriety these types of schools lately because Paris Hilton's been bringing attention to them because she did the Provo Canyon, you know, same kind of schools as she was talking about. Basically, there's rich kids and court orders and just basically where the parents, you know, couldn't do anything. So I get there in 11th grade, no high school credits. I do four years of high school in two years, finish on a roll dean's list, get accepted to Berkeley, and get an academic ride to USC. So here I am.
Starting point is 00:13:43 That sounds like a good ticket to success. Yeah. And then, you know, 1260 SAT score, never studied for it, never took a class. I know the scoring is different now, but back then 1600 was the max. right um 1260 SAT score the whole thing like you know but really it wasn't intellectually stressful for me to do four years of high school in two years like didn't even think about honor roll or dean's list i just saw my name up there when it came up like it these weren't it was like hey i just got to do this because that's what you got to do here right and it's one of those schools
Starting point is 00:14:16 that's in the wilderness and they basically said hey you're there's miles and miles of wilderness there's no fence here if any of you guys can make it out you have of all the survival skills you need. So I never tried, but a couple of people tried and they failed. And, you know, there's, it's a bunch of crazy shit there. You have rap sessions every three weeks and you're screaming and yelling at other kids. And kids are lying and making up stories about parental abuse because that's the in-click, right? Like, oh, the more abuse and trauma you've suffered, the more attention and pat on the back you get.
Starting point is 00:14:51 Right. The concept was all right. The implementation was bad. Um, you know, they didn't realize the whole idea of group counseling works. It's not like works for some people. It's not a bad concept. But in practice, it was very like they didn't realize some of the kids were getting worse, not better. You know, and what I learned there is that I learned if you said the right thing at the right time and the right tone of voice, you could get anything you wanted. And that led me on, you know, I just went lying crazy after that. It was like, wow, this is like a new toy. It's like almost like a credit. card right like what just you know on crack um anyway i get to usc and uh i spend half a year there and then i leave and uh i really why did you leave just i just you know i was you know rush week comes and everybody's going crazy about the the uh you know getting into the greek houses and i'm selling weed already. Right. So I'm selling weed. I'm going into the sorority houses at two in the
Starting point is 00:15:56 morning, which you're not allowed to do because they're calling me for drugs. Right. So I already have access that the Greeks are promising me. So why would I do that? And I just never really got into class. I was making good money there. Just selling eighths of weed. Like, you know, it doesn't even seem like a crime at the time. You know, you're just like, hey, I'm just providing a service. Right. Just justification. The smarter. you are, the easier it is to manipulate yourself into justifying your behavior, right? At least that's my thing. And, you know, so, and then after six months I left, what was interesting was, is that I didn't
Starting point is 00:16:35 realize for all my intelligence at the time, I didn't realize that my business was tidily locked to the clientele at USC. So if I'm not there, what am I doing? So I ended up sleeping in the Beverly Center parking lot for three nights. underneath the ramp between the fourth and the fifth floor and I have this bag you know I'd obviously I'd burnt out a few friends and few couches along the way before I get here I was pretty proud I didn't want you know I wasn't going to go home with my head between my you know legs I wasn't going to go kiss anybody's ass or you know I kind of I call this like you see
Starting point is 00:17:13 this behavior a lot in people where pride it makes you do like not just dumb things but but things that are counterintuitive, like, that are just not good for you, right? It just puts you in a bad position and where you cut off people that would help you for no reason other than your pride. You don't want to do it. You don't want to be embarrassed. And it put me underneath the ramp between the fourth and flip floor of the Beverly Center parking lot. And, you know, I was stashing a bag there and this and that and all one on third day. day um you know this uh this girl kelly lynch who was a nail technician there decided to take me home
Starting point is 00:18:01 to her house in valencia with her and uh i met you know through her now i'm hanging out with her and meeting friends of hers and i met a gentleman by the name of john kennedy um great guy still friends with him to this day he was the older dude he had the whole you know thing big tall fuck and uh you know living in hollywood hot chicks money all the stuff right so i immediately migrate to this guy right like he looks like he's got shit going on i like that let's what's he got going on over here and so i'm kind of just hanging out with him you know and then i remember him telling me some shit about travelers checks that they used to counterfeit travelers checks and they used to have a stamp and they used to have this and that my at the same time my friend damon kidwell
Starting point is 00:18:49 he's a graphic designer he put himself through school at Cal Arts we went to that boarding school together that's where we became friends Cascade so Damon Kidwell calls and he's like oh man
Starting point is 00:19:02 this crazy machine just came in the Canon color laser copier da da da you know so a bunch of us go down there kink goes in Santa Monica a couple blocks from the beach smoke a joint go see Damon Damon showing us all this stuff you can do with it then he heads over to his little section where he's
Starting point is 00:19:18 got his computer, I take a bill out of my pocket and put it on the machine and copy it. I look at the copy as it comes out. I call, I go, I talked to Johnny that night when I get home. I'm like, hey, da-da-da-da-da-da. He's like, oh, the stamp, this, that. I'm like, dude, we don't need a stamp. He's like, oh, the ink, it's going to get stuck. I was like, no, no, we'll do the back first. And so when you're printing the front, the back has a very small amount of ink. And when you're printing the front, the back won't get stuck to the drum. And he's like, really, you think so? I was like, yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:51 Next morning, I'm at Wells Fargo and Santa Monica with an eraser mate pen. Remember those? And I'm buying travelers checks. That afternoon, I'm at the place where you buy the Kelly Paper. They were over there, I think, on Olympic. Olympic or Pee? No, Olympic. Olympic over by the Bundy area.
Starting point is 00:20:11 I go in there. there's every kind of paper you know so i got these travelers checks out in one hand i'm testing all these papers 20 pound paper 25 pound paper 40 pound paper to finally i sell on the 20 pound paper um and uh so i get the paper and i get these clear plastic mylar um thing you know that they use for presentations that they write on yeah projector so i buy a bunch of those i get a ruler i line up the checks on the clear paper one two three right copy the backside first flip them over a hundred same paper flip it over and then copy the front side and uh exacto knife and boom we were rich 30 000 for every hundred pages you make obviously this
Starting point is 00:20:56 then rapidly expanded into 500 dollar checks right thousand dollar checks and and you know you're going to like good guys or circuit city at that time to buy a tv and you use a travelers check guess what they put on the receipt cash cash cash. So you get to bring it back to another one. Yeah, you bring it back to another one. But not only that, like let's say you got a thousand dollar travelers check or $2,000 travelers check and you spend $1,200 bucks. They're giving you $800 in cash right there on the spot and change. And now you've got the cash receipt to go return the show. Obviously, you end up with clothes, TV. I mean, just everything you can imagine. We got this house and up Nichols Canyon and
Starting point is 00:21:39 in the Hollywood Hills, you know, everything's going. great i'm going to say how long's that last until the business is around there start to figure it out and go wait a second well bro longer than you'd think and it wasn't from the businesses that that we got in trouble you know it was from informants um and actually i did get arrested at ikea um we'd been to ikea the day before and i was there casing out another ikea and i told the guy i was with this dude chris i was like do not use any checks here right like we're just casing this out because they had you know they had like 30 checkout lanes so when you hit an ikea right you got to know exactly what you want you got to have it laid out
Starting point is 00:22:24 because you want to get through four or five checkout lanes yourself right like with full load carts and then you have the stuff that you pick up from behind you know you get a receipt this and that and you got we got the u-haul trucks out there and and we'd go to ikea and pull three you haul trucks worth of shit out of there right and you're getting change every time you spend so you're leaving ikea with like 10 grand and cash in your pocket and you know a hundred grand worth of of furniture brand new you know right and uh so we were like staking it out i was like don't use any checks it sure enough the money uses a check and there's an undercover cop because they'd been alerted to what had happened before and uh you know that was that was the first one anyway down to count
Starting point is 00:23:09 County J.O. That was an eye-opening experience. That, and that was the first real, but actually, the first real bust happened in seventh grade at Culver Jr. High. I left Tillow Hebrew Academy, sixth grade, and this kid stole my Pac-Man hat, which I got from my AYSO soccer team. And Pac-Man had just come out and him and his two friends and threw me in the trash can and everything. Anyway, I grabbed one of my dad's guns and I got my hat back the next day. So that was my first, you know, brought a gun to school, probably not a good thing. But I did get my hat back and I thought that was important at the time. And so that was a success by that metric anyway. And I end up in, you know, Culver City Police Department and my dad and grandmother and everybody, they make some kind of deal where it's not going to, you know, I'm not going to get an official arrest. I go to UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute.
Starting point is 00:24:13 And, yeah, so that was pretty interesting. So then you get arrested then later at IKEA. Yeah, this is years and years later. Now you're printed and everything. Yeah, yeah. Now I'm printed and everything. I'm off to the county, 9500 war zone. Right.
Starting point is 00:24:29 And I have no experience. Like, I'm not from, I'm doing stupid shit, but it's not like I grew up on the street. I didn't grow up. Like, I got no experience with the county. or youth authority i had none of and man if you don't know what the is going on you walk into l a county the first time it's it's a war zone i was smart enough to not talk right right like i and i think i don't know if i want to if we're being honest was i smart or scared i don't know but whatever combination of that it was i just kept my mouth shut and it's kind of funny
Starting point is 00:25:03 because like i was telling you last night that's the same advice when people ask me hey you have my kids going to prison. I'm going to prison. What do I need to do? And I always tell people, I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do, but you're not going to be able to do it. Right. And they go, well, what is it? I'm like, just keep your mouth shut. Yeah. You don't need to know what time lunch is. If you know lunch is in an hour and a half, is it going to come any faster? No, you don't need to know what day laundry is because you don't need to know. When it's there, you'll see everybody carrying their laundry bags to the laundry or putting their bags in a cart. You don't need to know what time anything is because if you're not asking those questions then nobody has a read on you
Starting point is 00:25:42 but if you are asking those questions then everybody knows you've never been here before right well that puts you in in you know path of least resistance category because criminal mentality is about path of least as people believe they've identified it right like so if you've never been there before it's much more likely that you can get taxed you can get you know run over right so especially, you know, in a penitentiary situation or a medium situation, you know, a low in a camp probably, you could probably get by with very little, right, in for knowledge or planning. But, you know, you're going in to do a bid and, or probably in the state, it's worse, I've never been in a state prison other than the county. But I'm sure it's the same kind of thing. You know, you identify yourself as a fish who has no knowledge.
Starting point is 00:26:28 That means, okay, you've never been to prison before. You're probably not. You put yourself in that victim cat like that. Yeah, you're definitely in the, you're definitely in the set of slides that are going to go under the microscope. Right. Like, they're definitely going to investigate this and you're a potential mark at that point. And really, all you're going to do is shut the fuck up. Everything, you know, everything that happens in prison, you don't need to have foreknowledge of it as far as scheduled activities.
Starting point is 00:26:56 The door is going to open. Everybody's going to head to the cafeteria. That's when it's time to eat. Right. Right. Same thing. They bring the cart. Everybody's throwing a laundry bag in the,
Starting point is 00:27:04 the cart hey it's probably time to do your laundry so so what happens you get you get arrested you're in the jail you get do you get out do you bond out like um at first no at first no they help me without bail they have because there's 12 different states that these checks have been passed in now um the feds are interested um in a you've been busy case yeah so you know because then i started selling them really what happened was is when i found out later when i got the discoveries i started selling the checks for like 20 cents on a dollar right so it's just easier right but that was a huge mistake because these dudes are getting busted and kind of ratting so they had background already yeah even that this ikea thing happened it was because of all those people who were being informants that it got caught with these
Starting point is 00:27:49 things um that they had the actual case and were actually on it right so uh anyway you know la county when you go to court right it's not like you come back to your cell at that time you had to process all the way through 9,500, through the fishbowl, again, the 9,000 floor. So then he had, everybody says 9,500, but it could have been 9,000, 9,100, they just mean the 9,000 floor. That's the fishbowl. So you've got to process through all that again every time you leave, right? So they call me for court one day, and I'm like, what the fuck?
Starting point is 00:28:24 I don't have court. This is, da, da, da, da, da, da, I've finally, you know, gotten a cell. Like, you know, back in L.A. County, in that time, you'd have a three or four man cell. and there's a phone in the cell and like you have your own little sense of like a cocoon a little bit of safety right you feel a little bit doors are closed you got a phone right next to you it just you feel a little better than then then just out in the mainline traffic when you haven't been there before so i get to court and uh chris's lawyer john rants who's a great guy out of orange county
Starting point is 00:28:57 he's like hey you know I was like bro I don't have court what the fuck am I doing he's like listen just shut the fuck up and don't say anything and we walk out to court and it's not the normal prosecutor
Starting point is 00:29:13 you can tell it's a kid right like who's green behind the ears and I get bail I'm out on bail that afternoon and turns out the regular prosecutor was out right and he convinced this young kid that doesn't know any better this young kid he told him hey
Starting point is 00:29:32 like i'm doing you a favor right like you know here we'll set bail high on this one right because you know i mean where the original prosecutor was like no bail no bail no bail he's no so he told this dude hey hey no problem you know we're going to get bail like he like jettine mine tricked him basically hey we're going to get bail but i'm going to do your favor let it be a hundred we'll you know we'll have a high bail for you so it looks like you got I went. And the dude's like, okay, great. Right? Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. Hungry now
Starting point is 00:30:27 Now What about now Whenever it hits you Wherever you are Grab an O'Henry bar to satisfy your hunger With its delicious combination of big crunchy salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel
Starting point is 00:30:45 And chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating Swing by a gas station And get an O'Henry today Oh hungry Oh Henry So anyway, we're out I go see the lawyer And he tells me
Starting point is 00:30:59 He's like, listen, I can't advise you this But if you weren't here My job would be a lot easier Right And I was like Okay I go to student union At UCLA
Starting point is 00:31:14 I buy your rail pass Three months, first class Pass So I could take any train anywhere in Europe Dude, I'm gone I'm in Europe with a backpack having a great time running through Europe it's summer and this and that and everything and then then money runs out obviously then the tension between me and mom starts right and and all the friends that promised me hey they're going to send me this or
Starting point is 00:31:42 we're going to do this or we're going to do that none of them came through with anything maybe a couple hundred bucks here and there but oh we're going to do this jeans business you know back then the 501 used was like really big money and actually anyway taxes in Greece were huge so you know I mean I had it worked out if you send me 30 pairs of jeans a month the profit that I can make on that just by keeping the tax money myself right is huge right and so you know but you know how it is um people make commitments sometimes we make commitments and we're not we don't understand how much somebody else is relying on those right and many times um people come up short you know and uh anyway that's just what happened and so then uh anyway at the same time you know
Starting point is 00:32:29 mom sending me a little bit of money here and there um you know i'm kind of surviving in greece and then the lawyer calls and he says okay i got a deal for you um it's a year the 12 other states have agreed to what's called a P.P.T. They'll agree to sentence you to whatever California sentences you need to, you know, that. And we're going to plead you guilty to a couple extra charges uttering and possessing a fraudulent securities, which will create a double jeopardy issue for the feds. But, you know, you have to get through the border. You have to show up to court. You can't get arrested. But aren't they looking for you? Yeah, yeah. So I fly into Vancouver and, you know, make it across the border. And I get to
Starting point is 00:33:13 court and uh sure and so now he's told now the regular prosecutor has told this kid you this is your case now you made this mess so now my lawyer's gone back to him and said hey i'll get him back for you right and we'll plead him guilty to a couple extra charges so it looks good for you right right and i'll get him back so let's just do a deal and and and this this kid prosecutor's like oh you're going to get him anything yeah like this is the biggest mess in his life What he didn't realize is that he, the extra charges that he got on me were the charges that the feds were going to use. Right. So now they can't cite you. Yeah. So now I'm out of the total. I do, I get the year in the county jail. And on day 65, I hit the lottery.
Starting point is 00:34:00 What's the lottery in L.A. County jail because of overcrowding and everything back then is they'd start reading off a bunch of booking numbers in the middle of night at midnight. Could be 10, could be 100, could be 300. And that's the law. lottery. If your name is one of those people, you're getting out. So back then you were doing four months and 20 days on a year. I did 65 days total because I hit the lottery, got the county parole. And I was out. And then I was on informal probation. I don't even remember meeting a probation officer. I don't remember filling out a form. Didn't do anything back then. No drug testing, no nothing. And how old were you? Then I was early 20s. I would have to say, Mid-20s, mid-20s.
Starting point is 00:34:47 Okay. Mid-20s. This happened after, you know, I had a bigger moment, a personal moment where we used to go to the rainbow every Sunday night. What is that? It's on sunset. It's like a rainbow bar and grill. It's like part of that whole rock and roll thing. So they have a little outside area.
Starting point is 00:35:04 And we used to smoke weed out there on Sundays. And we'd be there all the time. And there was this guy, Mario, who owned it, you know, great guy, former Marshall out of Chicago. with that whole Anthony Pelicano crew, right? From back in the day when they were all coming out of Chicago, they were all U.S. Marshals before he became a famous PI. So anyway, I didn't know Anthony at the time that I met Mario, obviously. Obviously, I met him later and put that all together.
Starting point is 00:35:33 So my friends go inside to use the bathroom. At that point in time in my life, like I mentioned to you, I went lying crazy. As smart as I thought I was, I had this huge level of insecurity, just massive. So I was telling the stupidest lies about the stupid shit. And anyway, I see Mario. Anyway, I wasn't the kind of kid or man at that point who all your friends could leave the table and I'm going to sit there by myself. So I got up and, you know, following them in and Mario's there and I kind of slap them on the back. And I said something about one of the girls that we were with.
Starting point is 00:36:14 And Mario turns to me and he looks at me and he goes, you know, I never liked you. You're no good. You're a liar. Your friends laugh at the lies that you tell behind your back. You know, I'm like totally taken back. This is a guy like I kind of look up to. I think I'm cool. I just, you know, put my hand on his back.
Starting point is 00:36:33 Like this is up for me on multiple levels, not to mention the fact that he hit bull's eye dead bang, right? like so you got all that going and there's this pause right and then he looks at me and he says but your friends still like you imagine what you could be if they could trust you this me up for like the next three months i couldn't think of anything else anything like i didn't change anything mind you but it was something like that just weighed super heavy on me one because it was 100% true and two you know it was really kind of the first time that I had an insight into myself, right, that wasn't generated by somebody else or wasn't somebody telling me something. Like I had my own clear insight. And it wasn't really, I guess clear
Starting point is 00:37:24 is not one, but I figured out kind of a hack for myself. And I understood, wait, I got to stop this. I also understood that sometimes I was lying when I wasn't even thinking about it. And I realized that if the one thing I hated more than being irrelevant was being humiliated. So after three months, I call this girl Nancy and I say, hey, Nancy. She's like, hey, she's like, how are you doing? I was like, fine. Remember when I saw you at the club last week? She's like, yeah, I was like, I just want you to know that I lied to the two guys I was with
Starting point is 00:37:58 and told him I banged you. Humiliation. Right. It took two years, but that's how I broke that habit is I would force myself into humiliation because I hated that more. Right, right? Like, I still hadn't come to grips with the fact that I had an insecurity problem. I still hadn't come to grips with the thing, but it was, you know, it was an insight. It wasn't a full insight, but it was the first time.
Starting point is 00:38:27 And later on in my life, because of that, I was able to have deeper and deeper insights into myself, why I did the things I did and understanding the difference between me justifying them to the rest of the world and lying to myself that actually that's cool, right? There's a huge difference in that. And those things started to come from there. And that's where it started where I really started looking at my behavior and why I did the things that I did. Because at this point, I also realized I'm like, I don't have a job. I don't really have any job prospects. I'm hustling, I'm scamming, you know, popping mailboxes, you know, credit cards, the Travelers Check thing like I told you, like I, those were the things that were going on in my life.
Starting point is 00:39:16 I was like, why am I doing that? Why aren't I doing this? I'm looking at friends of mine from high school or college who are like suit and tie every day and seem like they have the things that I want, right? But I wasn't ready to accept the fact that, you know, the reason why I was what I'm. was is because of a very big insecurity problem and until I was able to, and that's where I started to get a grip on him. Anyway, within, you know, three, four years from there, you know, you're talking early mid-20s, things started changing. And by the time I was 26, 27, actually things that Mario had told me were true. People thought I was smart. So they'd come to me.
Starting point is 00:40:02 me with problems or they'd come to me with their businesses or they'd come to me with what you call deal flow now, which I didn't know the name for it then, because they trusted me as far as my brains went, right? And the ideas that I might have. So that also is information. You know what other people are doing and how other people are doing that. And I, you know, and then 27, I end up in business. But if these things hadn't happened in my early 20s and hadn't straightened me out to where my word had to mean something, then I probably would have been dead as the end result of my foray into drug trafficking
Starting point is 00:40:39 rather than into prison. And, you know, I mean, if those things hadn't have changed by that point, I mean, you can't, when, it's one thing you're selling a gram on the street corner and you lie and there's only eight-tenths of a gram in there. Right. It's another thing when you're international drug trafficking
Starting point is 00:40:59 doing real million-dollar, out deals and you're lying. You're expected to hold up your end of the business. And if there's a problem, you've got to be the first one to let everybody else know. And you certainly don't color it in any way, shape, or form. It's just the facts. Otherwise, you've got a huge problem. So when I look back on all that and then the lead up into getting into the drug business, I find that fascinating because, you know, all I have is myself to judge it against. But self-realization was, has been a central key throughout my life and the different evolutions that I've been through.
Starting point is 00:41:38 Okay. So how did, like, how did you, like, how did the, the ecstasy thing start? Like, what's the introduction of that? Hey, real quick, just wanted to let you guys know that we're looking for guests for the podcast. If you think you'd be a good guest, you know somebody, do me a favor.
Starting point is 00:41:58 You can fill out the form. The link is in our description box. Or you can just email me directly. Email is in the description box. So back to the video. Yes. So there was this cousin and two cousins that I knew through a friend of mine. And they were like, hey, I want to.
Starting point is 00:42:14 Your two cousins? No, no. They were two cousins. And they were like, they were mulling. Body carrying, you know, five, 10,000 pills. From where? From Amsterdam. They were going to Amsterdam.
Starting point is 00:42:28 And they were doing it for somebody. Is it legal in it? Amsterdam or they were just somebody with manufacturing or there. You know, that's the funny thing about everybody thought, and I thought too, that they manufacture the shit in Amsterdam and Belgium and all these things. No, that's not what happens. What happens is, is actually the Chinese, they make this oil. And what happens in all those places in, in, you know, Belgium and the Netherlands is a refining
Starting point is 00:42:56 process. You're just crystallizing, adding bonding agent, and pill pressing. right like it's not they're they're not actually cooking from scratch there um and the reason for that is is that when the soviet union fell you ended up with all these chemists who were no longer paid by the state right so now they're driving taxis and yeah they got no way to make that kind of money and yeah and so but a lot of them ended up doing this type of shit right right like they but they weren't you know they knew that they could order certain chemical compounds out of China, just like all the ephedron comes out of there, all the fentanyl comes out of there.
Starting point is 00:43:37 You know, people who think that the fentanyl crisis is a fentanyl crisis don't understand what's really happening. The Chinese, who the Asian mentality, they think a long way in the past and they think much further in the future. And if you look back to the opium wars and what round eyes or guilo, what they call us, They don't distinguish between English and American, right, did to them and forced them to make opium legal and addict their population. They feel justified. It's a terrorist attack. Right. I mean, you do not, number one rule of dope dealing, do not kill the customer.
Starting point is 00:44:18 It's a lifetime revenue stream. You do not kill the customer, right? So people say, well, it's the dealers doing it. And I was like, well, if the dealers were killing the customers, the cartels will be killing them. I said, so who can afford to pay a Mexican drug cartel to kill its own customers? Because that's what's happening. Right.
Starting point is 00:44:37 And there's only two places in the world that have that kind of money, Asia and the Middle East. The Middle East, that's not their style. That's not their export. Right. But for China, it absolutely certainly is. And that's what it is. There's no other way to explain it. But, again, I believe the government doesn't want to create.
Starting point is 00:44:58 panic so they're lying about it but all the fentanyl comes out of china in fact now there's four fentanyl factories in syria right yeah we just did we just did a whole podcast on all of our enemies are are making this stuff to flood us with it there's other countries don't have this problem if it's just by accident why is it here that's what fidel castro said was the easiest way to weaken america's resolve is through drugs um so so so back to back to so anyway they were they were packing and uh i had a dude who was uh who could get them pills right so they came to me i'm like dude i'll hook you up with my guy i'll get you pills and i was just like cool i was i'm always been like hey let's do the transaction right everybody's
Starting point is 00:45:45 always worried about chopping up the pie before there's a pie right and everybody's killing it with these insane margins just like in anything you see in the weapons industry and p p p.e and any free-for-all situation, the low-level people, stop transactions from happening just because they kill the deal. Everybody thinks they're going to get a beach house off every transaction, right? It's a vault. Drugs is a volume business. No different than selling paper clips. It's a volume business. That's why the money's there. It's not, you don't make a million dollars off one, you know, until you get to that size, right? Um, so they were, so I hooked them up and I was like, look here's my guy go over there hook him up anyway they go over there they buy 30,000 pills
Starting point is 00:46:29 and they come back and they want me to sell them for them and I'm like well what are you guys giving me for the hookup? Oh well we're going to let you sell them so all right there's money on the table I'm not going to cut off my nose to spite my face I can sell them I can make a couple bucks on each so I make some money right and that's now the thing is floating around in my head A friend, and then this guy, Judah Hertz, calls me. He's a big property developer down in South Beach. I gamble Sunny Khan. They're basically the ones who turn that whole condo conversion thing in the 80s.
Starting point is 00:47:08 You know, that was there. They made a killing. Anyway, he's got this building at, I think it was 13499 Biscayne Boulevard. It was called Sailboat K. He's got a hard money loan on it from Yale Mortgage, you know, some crazy amount of money like millions dollars and he's like look it's the project's going to crash fly to uh miami i'll put the building in your name collect the rents rent out all the vacant units collect the rents don't pay the mortgage i'll give you a hundred grand for burning
Starting point is 00:47:39 your credit basically that was the so anyway i get out there and uh i i'm looking into all that and I found a Venezuelan guy, Maricio Vivas, and he said, I'll buy. So the law in Florida at that time was once you've sold a certain amount of units in a condo conversion, then the developer has to start paying the HOA for the unsold units because now you've got people who bought. They're paying in the HOA. It's not fair that everybody's not paying in. So the developer would have to pay the HOA fees for the unsold units once you hit
Starting point is 00:48:14 a certain percentage of sales. So that was also in play right here, right? And so I found this guy, Maricio Vivas. He wants to buy the remaining 97 units. And he's going to cash him out. So there's going to be no need for bankruptcy, nothing, right? Like, everything's cool. And I hook him up with Judah and they have a problem.
Starting point is 00:48:37 It's this successor developer thing, right? So I start reading. I asked this lawyer, Rob Bollinger, who was like, wanted Judah's younger lawyers. He had older lawyers, but this was a younger guy who worked in their office. So I used to hang out with him and I asked him. I'm like, dude, well, what about where's the successor developer, like subchapter, send me the stuff? Let me read it. And back then there wasn't like computers and internet. So he's like, bro, you come to my office all you can read the books. You know what I mean? Like, so I went in there and I read it and I was like,
Starting point is 00:49:07 so wait, if this dude makes, if there's 91 units and he makes a bunch of corporations and only takes five units per corporation, he doesn't become the successor developer because he doesn't own that, he doesn't own enough units to be that, even that each. It doesn't appear that he owns, yeah. Found the loophole, right? I did, not the lawyers, not anybody from an afternoon in Rob Bollinger's office. Anyway, he goes back to L.A. They make a deal.
Starting point is 00:49:37 He's buying the units. And Judah totally f***es me. He gives me nothing and he tells Mauricio, after they've already made a deal, oh, you got to take care of Lewis. So I got no leverage. The deal is already made. Da-da-da-da. Maricio, to his credit, is like, look, here, I'm going to give you a hundred and I'll give you, you know, $1,000 every time I sell a one bedroom and $1,400 every time I sell a two-bedroom, right? And on the closing statement, I totally paperwork, everything, right? Give me a lien, everything. So I was cool. He's actually a great guy. Right. So anyway, I did all that.
Starting point is 00:50:14 End up buying a Porsche Guerrera 2, drive back from Miami to L.A., stopping every strip club I could. Took three weeks. Had a great time. And I'm back in L.A. And the kid, Omar, calls me, who I'd hooked up with the two cousins. Okay. He calls me and he says, what are you doing this summer? And I was like, dude, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:50:36 He's like, bro, come to San Trope. And I'm like, fuck off. I'm never going to Central Pay. All I'd heard about is $80 for a ball of. water go fuck yourself dude if anything let's go to the greek islands where it's cheap you know and he's like he's like no no bring some of the because he met me out in l.A right he's like bring some of the girls you introduce me to in l.a and i'm like dude i'm not a pimp i can't promise you that any these chicks are going to you and he's like no just bring some hot chicks and and just you don't
Starting point is 00:51:06 them but we got a house you have a car and you can any other chick you meet right okay i'm thinking you might say, God, these dudes are retarded. How they know I didn't fucking on the plane on the way over? Like, what do they care? Actually, that was always a funny thing to me that guys would worry about what a girl had done before they'd even met her. Right. Right.
Starting point is 00:51:27 Like, I always found that to be, like, retarded. Right. And kind of their problem, if your dick doesn't get hard when there's a hot chick in front of you, that's not her fault. That's your fault. Right. So I was, and that, you know, that that's just a huge thing that you know the whole men thing and the girls and all that right anyway
Starting point is 00:51:49 so i go okay we go to sancho pay gets his ticket so we get everything da da da da we're there having these guys had a beautiful house i got a red Porsche convertible that i'm driving around in santero pay 500 bucks in my pocket right because i've blown all them you know i'm getting money monthly or every time he sells a unit from closing but the bulk money i bought a Porsche I spent, you know, 10, 12 grand on strippers driving cross-country, you know, hotels. It was cheaper then. Obviously, now it would be a lot more expensive. And then, so I'm there, I'm having a great time.
Starting point is 00:52:23 We're going out every night, bottles, spraying champagne. This is before anybody even knew any of that type of shit was happening here. This is in 1996. And great time. Anyway, this guys are coming up to me. You know, there's loaded people there that I just hadn't, I just had. seen rich people before but not condensed in this kind of space where everybody's showing off and everybody's got money and everybody's got car and champagne is crazy and you know at the bill at the end
Starting point is 00:52:52 of the night there's no bill the when you ask for the bill the waiter just takes out a pad and writes down a number and hands it to you and nobody nobody so i'm looking at this shit all happening right and guys are coming up to me like hey you know this one wants to meet you that one wants to meet you know whatever you know this dude uh comes up to me and he says hey the Sheikh wants to meet you. Now, I'm like, okay, I'm a Jewish kid. I'm in, I'm in Santropay. The shake wants to meet me.
Starting point is 00:53:22 Great. You know, so I go up to him and, and he brings me over the table. He's like, hey, hey, you want to drink? And I was like, sure, I ordered a vodka cranberry. And they all start laughing at me. That was the last vodka cranberry I ever ordered, by the way. They're like, that's a fucking girl drink, you know. Have some whiskey like a man.
Starting point is 00:53:41 so you know he pours me a glass of whiskey and i'm slam the whole thing right because now my manhood's been challenged you know and uh he's sitting there he's like why don't you bring the girls over here and i was like what are you talking about he's like oh everybody knows those girls you know are following you around and da da da da and this and that right it was actually was brook mueller the girl who married charlie sheenelle bennett the bisonine eye girl that used to do the commercials, you know, this thing. And then, and another girl who wasn't famous, but nice girl. I mean, but they made a scene, right?
Starting point is 00:54:20 And so I'm like, dude, what kind of person do you think I am? He's like, what do you mean? I was like, bro, they're taking good care of me. Why would I, even if what you're saying is true, why would I f*** over those people who are, oh, oh, we didn't mean it like that, da, da, da, da, I got off and left. Right. So his little minions, like, followed me. round for a couple days, right?
Starting point is 00:54:43 And he's like, well, how about this? How about if after you're done in San Trope, you come to London and meet us there? And then you're not, you know, doing anything wrong. Just stop on your way home. And what are they saying? And bring the girls? Yeah. Like, what is, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:54:57 Like, they can't get girls. Like, you can't have, you can't like. Well, if you look at pictures of them from back then, right? Dude, there was a lot of hot chicks, but actually, you know, these girls were 18 and 19, you know, we were all young at the time and, you know, top flight, right? And more importantly for them, they hadn't been on that hooker circuit because, you know, that circuit is constantly replenished with fresh talent. Right. But, you know, people know, like they, to them, they want to bang somebody that none of their friends is bang. Right. Like, that's their ultimate status, right? Like, that's their thing. So anyway, I'd ask the girls. I'm like, hey, you guys want to go to London, this, that dollar thing right? And I'm like, and I'm like, they're like, well what's the deal i was like listen these these dudes over there they got money you know i don't know what the deal is but uh you know if there's any problem we'll just take off like uh and i don't care whatever you guys want to do and they're like oh yeah let's go we're having a great time you know
Starting point is 00:55:55 da-da-da they're having fun so i tell i tell his little minion i'm like cool yeah we'll do it we'll come he's like okay the next day i see him and he brings me an envelope it was like 50,000 French francs or something, right? I don't even know, like, I think the exchange was like three or four to one at that time, right? So probably around 10, 12, 15 grand. And enough to buy tickets. And he says, okay, we'll be at the Dorchester Hotel at Mayfair, just, you know, come and a few days later, we get there. We get to the front desk, you know, hey, da, da, da, da, da, Luis Ziskin, any, oh, we don't have anything.
Starting point is 00:56:36 I'm like, oh, we're supposed to meet Rosh at all. all have tour. All of a sudden, their whole thing changed. Oh, you're his friends coming from South of France. Yeah, we got four big, beautiful rooms. Russia shows up a couple days later, right? We have a great time. Treated us just amazing. Girls had a great time. Shopping, everything. It was none of the nightmare stories that you hear about, right? Like, which I was kind of on guard for, because I didn't find anything bad to happen to anybody. No nightmare stories, no forcing, no rapes, no drugings, just a bunch of fun, clubs, restaurants out. Anyway, but, you know, they're bored of those girls after a week, right?
Starting point is 00:57:17 So they're like, hey, you've got any other chicks, this and that, da, da, don't. So I bring out a couple other, you know, called a couple other girls I knew, and then they start coming out, and then they go back. Now, I'm not involved in any transaction. Right. I'm not making any pimp money. To me, that was just like, hey, wait a second. Like, you know, like, that wasn't my thing, right?
Starting point is 00:57:38 And what I didn't realize at the time is because of that, the Arabs treated me as a friend rather than an employee. I didn't understand the significance of the fact that I was eating dinner at the table with them rather than one of the other tables for their, you know, less close associates or security or anybody else. I didn't realize the significant of them taking me, you know, to Georgia Armani, this and that, right? I was hanging out with them, not being funded by them through a third party as if I would have been an employee or something. So anyway, now the girls start going back and because I'm not taking any money, they're telling their girlfriends, oh my God, Lewis ain't taking any money. Like, I really didn't even know that transactions were happening at the very beginning, right?
Starting point is 00:58:28 Like, and but now I got these chicks marketing for me, basically, right? I can't take credit for it because it just, that wasn't the plan. You know, but that's just what happened. And so then after a couple months of being in London, Rosh said, why don't you come to, come to Dubai? I said, okay, great, dude. You know, he always says, what are you doing? I was like, oh, I got no plans.
Starting point is 00:58:53 I got to go home. You know, I'm running out of money. This, that other thing, right? It was no point in trying to act like big willy with dudes like that, right? Like, it's just retarded. And he's like, oh, you know, what are you doing? What are you doing for work? This is the first time we're having like a life discussion about me, right?
Starting point is 00:59:11 I'm like, oh, you know, I really got nothing going on. I just did this condo thing. You know, maybe I'll get back in real estate, but whatever. I got to get home. He's like, listen, man, I'm going home for Ramadan. Why don't you stay here in London for the next month? It's my guest. I'll leave a couple of my guys here with you.
Starting point is 00:59:27 Just go out, meet girls, you know, get a list. And so for next time we're in London. And after Ramadan, I'll fly you in. to Dubai. Okay. Stay in London, stay at the door, Chester out every night. I got a dude with a briefcase of cash following me around everywhere I go.
Starting point is 00:59:48 You know, but I'm not going shopping. I'm not like, you know, we're going out to the clubs and we're meeting chicks, like the instructions, right? Like, but I'm not,
Starting point is 00:59:55 I wasn't doing anything stupid with their money. I didn't realize I also wasn't clear how much access I had to that briefcase. Right. Right. But it was there all the time and it covered everything that we did for the next month. And the next thing, you know, I'm on a plane, Emirates Airlines, first class to Dubai. I land in Dubai, and it says on the landing card, religion at that time, I put Jewish.
Starting point is 01:00:23 I get to customs, and they stop me. They say, wait over there. There's a pay phone over there. I got a call, like, I'm so broke. I've got to call home collect. to get them to call Rosh it. Like, I didn't even have the amount of money for a pay phone, right? To get them to call Rosh it.
Starting point is 01:00:43 Next thing I know, I'm being whisked out, like, back the way I came. I think, oh, shit, something's wrong. If I get into a car and I'm driven out of the airport to the Metropolitan Hotel, which they owned, right? Get a, get in there. Great sweet. Chick, bath, blowjob. you know treated like amazing nobody ever treated me like that before i'm like wow this is great you know you're jewish you're going to an arab country you're like a little bit scared like hey you know
Starting point is 01:01:16 because you just hear the bullshit but even back then you know 1996 97 bro super treated me amazing never never been extended like that kind of welcome right um you know later when you know I had a little bit of a name or I was a big drug trafficker or whatever. People went out of their way to kiss my ass. But these were just, this was just their Arabian hospitality, right? And then there's a knock on the door. It's the dude from customs. And he's standing there with my bags.
Starting point is 01:01:52 I don't even realize that I didn't have my passport. He's still in my passport. He's staying there with my bags and passport and apologizing to me. And I was like, wow. these dudes are really somebody right so you find out like all hubtur construction builds all those big buildings like they have you know rose royce aston martin bentley they have the licensing for it metropolitan hotels they have licensing for it the dad caliph al abtur runs the dubai national investment corporation this was not just a rich arab family this was like you know i mean these dudes were real players and i i meet the brothers and um um rashid mohammed al ab tour then they had a younger brother also meet the dad i mean they just treated me like amazing and uh had a great time over there and then i i end up back in london now i'm back in london without rosh it on my way home and i bump into omar my the dude i gave the connect to the two cousins to he takes me to a
Starting point is 01:02:54 party we're out of a party and they're passing around yellow now i'm a little bit feeling myself because i've just been living the arab billionaire life for the last three months, right? So I'm talking shit. I'm doing this and that. And I'm like, yellow. Yellow. I mean, shitty. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm like, dude, you guys are supposed to be running shit. What the fuck is this? Dude, this is
Starting point is 01:03:15 what? And these two Asian brothers look at me, like, oh, boy, you're taking the piss, mate. You can do better. I'm like, yeah, of course I can. I'm from L.A. I don't even have a connection, right? Of course. Anyway, I get back to L.A.
Starting point is 01:03:32 I go to Raxal. I buy a little fire truck that kids play with. A fire truck and about this big in the box and a police car. I cut, I get a kilo. I cut it in half. I open up the cars. I stuff it in there. I put them back together in the boxes. And I had another friend who had met in London, who I knew was going to be in Jamaica at that time. And she had a full service building on Abby Road, actually very close to the famous studio. And I knew she's out of town. So I sent it there. without telling her nothing right she's not there it's not in her name but i sent it there right and that's how it started and it really for me started first was and that became the answer to a
Starting point is 01:04:18 very severe problem the problem being if you're sending to london and you're getting paid in english pounds how do you get those english pounds back to america and then how do you change them into greenbacks because the Mexicans weren't take this is before you're a dollar Mexicans weren't taking anything but dollars for so now you got money from and you got you've got you've got two problems you got to solve so that really came in because it was floating around the back of my mind as the solution to that problem one no free felonies right like that's criminal 101 the first thing they should teach you is friends don't ask friends for free felonies.
Starting point is 01:05:00 You don't do free felonies, right? That's number of, so if I'm smuggling cash back, I could lose it just as easy I can lose anything else, right? So that's a free felony. Well, if I bring it back, then I'm making money on that risk. Right. And then when I sell that, I'm getting paid in dollars. So it solved two problems with one stone.
Starting point is 01:05:22 And so everybody thinks it was like, it was actually a case and helped us launder the money. You know, it gets, it was more cocaine, right? And then, you know, it just boomed exponentially. I mean, there was a few hiccups in the beginning. One of them was, you know, I was losing a bunch of going there. They're just catching it. And they're catching it. I wasn't sure because I wasn't educated enough.
Starting point is 01:05:50 I couldn't tell if it was excise, if it was customs, if they were looked. I just thought they caught the shit. Like, I didn't have the education. yet to break down their processes and where it might have fucked up. But that came in relatively quickly. Anyway, I end up, you know, I end up with debt. I'm 600 grand in debt. You know, I know I've got a working business.
Starting point is 01:06:10 It's a little different than when you go out and you're looking for money for a business and then you hope it's going to work. Like I'd already seen the other side. I know this works. I know people will buy the, I know people will buy the X. I know all these things, right? So like my and why I'm so comfortable getting. in so deep as it's not an unknown on the other side of the money, right? And anyway, I'm in
Starting point is 01:06:34 600 grand in debt. The Kinect comes and he's like, hey, what's the problem? Where's my money? And actually, they came by my house. I don't know. And I was like, look, I don't have the money. I'm not going to have it. I'm thinking I'm going to have to tell the dude about my business and he's going to want a piece. And I'm like really butt hurt about all that. Right. And anyway, so. And this is this is who cartel or who's oh he said he was cartel he turned later on many years later he turned out to be a rat like i got in a huge fight with him like two years later threw him out of the house and my friend was like you can't do that he's cartel i'm like him dude he's a if he's not a rat the way he's talking all of a sudden because this when he would come around
Starting point is 01:07:16 the way he talked and the way he acted had totally changed i'm like this dude's been busted bro like people don't 40 year old men don't just change their idiomatic expression like that over night and certainly don't start clearly articulating shit that they used to obfuscate in conversations right i mean pretty easy threw him out of the house and my boy simon's like wow what the you know that's an interesting story too part of this simon so anyway uh he he he you know i'm like hey listen you know he's like are you getting ripped off are you getting this i tell us we'll help you right and i was like no you know i've been sending the shit to london and it's been getting caught right and he's like what you're sending the shit on the front that i fronted you did like
Starting point is 01:08:10 he doesn't want a piece of my business he's like that's how um misguided my thoughts were i was thinking oh this guy's gonna want a piece of my business that's what i worry he's pissed period that i'm double fronting his shit right so he's actually pretty decent at that point in time and he's like, look, man, you don't run, you're here, this, that, here, here's 20 of them. And I'm like, okay, he's like, bring me back every dollar. We're going to give you a discount. We're going to cut out money for your expenses and living, and we're going to work this off. Okay.
Starting point is 01:08:45 Oh, before that, he says, well, what do you want me to do here? And I was like, give me 10 more. And everybody's shocked, like, that that was my, I could see the tension in the room rise. This dude smacks me across the face. What the fuck is wrong with you? Who do you think you're talking to? Right? And anyway, a little bit more talking.
Starting point is 01:09:04 And then he says, okay, we're going to give you some things. You're not going to send them. You're going to bring back every dollar. We'll get your discount. And along the way, we'll cut out your living expenses so that you can, you know, you need to have a house and food in a car. Nobody's trying to take that away from me. They actually treated me better than I might have treated somebody years later.
Starting point is 01:09:23 I've always heard that, you know, like they'll, if you, you up or you've lost like they they there's their first notion is not to kill you your first notion is how can we fix this like if they want it fixed because they're businessmen they don't killing doesn't help them in any way you know yeah other than maybe teaching a lesson and everybody's already scared it doesn't matter right it's stupid so first they're going to say how can we work this all yeah and what the key though key that they're looking for is that they don't have to chase you down if they have to chase you down it's a very high percentage they're just going to whack yeah right if they don't have to chase you down to them that's like the Asian way of saying you have face, you have a little bit of honor like, you know, that you're not running away, right? Like, so that's a really, if you do that, if you just man up, if you answer the phone. And I think this is a good thing in general, right? If you owe somebody money on Friday and it's Monday and you know you're not going to have it, you can string that out and you can avoid the phone calls and you can do whatever or you could call that person on Monday and say hey this is up yeah this is what it is I don't owe you until Friday but I know that already now that
Starting point is 01:10:29 I'm not going to have it well nine out of ten times when you treat people like that at least in my experience they work on something with you so that by Friday you're halfway back to being even rather than waiting till Friday and avoiding somebody for months and then still having this huge dead. I find, like, in my experience, anyway, that that has just worked better. Yeah. Right. And I've had hard money. I've had a hard money guys where I knew I owed a money. I didn't have a deal didn't close and whatever, for whatever reason was. And I just called them up and look, man, I'm not going to have, I know I said I was going to have your payment and probably
Starting point is 01:11:04 be able to pay you off or whatever it was, but I'm not going to have it. And here's why, this deal didn't close. And they've actually, because I had paid so well in the past and been so transparent in the past, the guy was like, listen, how much? cheating. I'm like, uh, like 30 grand to finish. And he goes, well, let's just amend the contract. Come get the 30 grand. I know you're good for it, but because I've been paying for so long. And so I was like, I didn't even, that didn't even occur to me. And then I show up. He gets me a cashier. I got a check for 30 grand. We amend the mortgage. He files it. He says, we're good. I get the job done. Two weeks later, he gets his check for the whole thing.
Starting point is 01:11:40 But yeah, had I not called and just tried to dodge him. Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, because you lose the trust at that point. Now, I'd been in situations where, you know, I owed multiple people money. Right. And I couldn't answer questions about what I was doing at that time to get their money back. But I was in the middle of that and I might have dodged phone calls for a period of time specifically because I couldn't answer questions at that moment. But then immediately, you know, as soon as that got handled, I was right there and doing that. But with these guys, you know, that was a little bit of different. story and I didn't know these things at the time again it's not something I could take credit for it's just I learned them over the course of time a lot in in hindsight and retrospect right um but then you figure it out and it becomes a system so bro i don't even have taxi money i'm in the middle of silver lake i got this adidas bag and it's heavy and i got to call my boy johnny you know collect get taxi money this
Starting point is 01:12:45 that the other thing right like he meets me at the house you know it's to pay the taxi this is pre uber smartphones all that shit obviously so he's like what are you gonna do and i was like i'm gonna send him and he's like dude you you can't send them you're you're gonna die and i was like you can't lose anymore i was like bro i'm sending them and he's like and he's like no well at least just send five and i was like no if i sent five and they get there i'm gonna be pissed that i didn't send to all of them. Oh, bro, I can't be a part of this. Da-da-da, a big fight.
Starting point is 01:13:19 I'm kind of on my own. And, you know, it's funny, I've noticed this over the course of my life. When shit's not going good, you're always on your own. Right. And then when shit is going good, everybody's like, oh, bro, I knew it all the time, right? So, like, guys that we're going to at this point in time for five and ten grand for investment, obviously, nobody's got nothing. Everything's, da-da-da-da. Anyway, I send, I, instead of sending 20, I send 10.
Starting point is 01:13:44 they get busted. The next morning, now I know I've got like, you know, 10 days, about a week to two weeks, you know. So the first thing I do is I break off a corner of one of the remaining 10 kilos. Sell it. I get some cash to pay the rent. I pay all the bills.
Starting point is 01:14:06 I load up the refrigerator and buy a couple ounces of wheat and just make myself as comfortable as I can. Because I think if I do that, then I'll be able to figure out an answer again self-justification for spending somebody else's money um anyway did that I was dating a girl at the time sent her home um you know and she'd been very supportive of me in the beginning you know she'd maxed her credit cards everything you know um went to new york to dance a couple weekends you know like she was super supportive um anyway i was like listen you gotta get out of here done or not and uh i'm just stoned for like two
Starting point is 01:14:44 days and watching TV at three in the morning and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I'm going to the FedEx office at 5 o'clock by Robertson and the 10 freeway in L.A. And I don't know if you remember, but back then before FedEx had all these automated pickups and boxes everywhere, the line out of the FedEx office at the cutoff would be long because everybody's trying to drop their package off for the cutoff for delivery to next day. Well, I'm standing there with the FedEx envelope and a piece of paper. I'm copying down their account numbers and the names of their companies. So I'm not even paying for the shipping.
Starting point is 01:15:21 But I'm spending 400 bucks, 500 bucks back then to send 20 pounds overnight. And I'm declaring zero value. All right. And there's a thing on the forum. All you got to do is check box, charge VAT to FedEx account number. So again, no money out of my pocket. But because I didn't know how customs worked, and this was also something that was a self-realization, because I didn't know how customs work, I didn't understand at that point, oh, shit, you're spending four or five hundred bucks to send this, and you're claiming it has zero value. Right.
Starting point is 01:15:58 And I thought, oh, it's probably the taxes people that are looking what it is. I had no, nobody gave me this. This was just through trial and error and constantly thinking about it through a haze of tons of good marijuana. And then I go down there, nine and three quarters the next day, charge taxes to FedEx account number, value 800 bucks. We owe you, you know, 175 in taxes or whatever, the rate that it was then. Charge taxes to FedEx account number, and it sails through. Okay.
Starting point is 01:16:32 Sales through. I'm on a plane to London. Right? Now, back then, it wasn't an optimized system. We didn't have the trades. The oil, this isn't kind of in the beginning. We didn't have the trade for the oil. worked out. We didn't control any refineries. We didn't, you know, this is, I'm selling, I'm getting
Starting point is 01:16:48 cash. I'm taking that cash to Amsterdam to buy pills, which I'm paying a ridiculously high price too at the time, which I thought was a great price. You're paying two bucks to three bucks a pill, depending on how many milligrams of MDMA is in it. And, you know, and I'm getting, and I'm getting 20,000 pounds per kilo, which was about $30,000. And the price on the street was, you know, 12, 13 back then. So I'm taking that, buying pills. Take that. I buy pills, right? I got 220,000 pounds English, close to 300 grand at the time. I buy 150,000 pills. Now, they're going for 10 bucks apiece at that time wholesale. I get back. I sell, um, a million dollars, you know, two-thirds of them.
Starting point is 01:17:39 I got a million bucks. I can pay the 900 grand I-0, right, and everything's cool. And I got, you know, we got, uh, uh, half a million left, uh, or 50,000 pills left, sold 100,000, got 50,000 pills left. And, uh, so we, I go, instead of paying the guy, I go to his competitor, and I buy 30 keys with his money. I ship them all. ship them all i mean you just you just want to get killed ship them all in three boxes well i figured it
Starting point is 01:18:12 out i i i got one like you figured it out at my head i think in my i'm going to tell you the justification oh i just got one through i've got to figure it out oh yeah and now i'm going to put ten in three different boxes so as long as two get through i double my money and if all three get through it's insane and if one gets through i'm going to break even right so i'm there i fly to london them land i get a better price on the on the pills this time right i end up with you know a little bit over 650 000 pills right right come put them all in boxes drive uh from from amsterdam to dusseldorf cole bon frankfort now i've mapped out all the fedex and dh lychel highway between from when you come into Germany all the way down to Frankfurt. So there's two
Starting point is 01:19:11 at each one of those cities. Okay. Drop all the pills off, ship them. They all make it. So in the end, it took me 20 days. I went from 900,000 in debt to up two million bucks. Anyway, now the funny thing is, is all the dudes who didn't have five or ten grand to loan us. Oh, bro, I got 50 back, bro. Can you turn this over for me? When you're drowning, nobody wants to come. It's when you reach the shoreline that suddenly they run out and help you. Yes, and contemporaneously, while all this is getting started, I have a friend of mine, Simon, great guy, Bulgarian guy, roommate, you know, took me into his house when I was broke at different times, you know, gave me a bedroom, was there for me, got me the first keys that I ended up losing. He was, you know, I had a bunch of ancillary debt besides the big debt, right? and so there's these other guys too who are running around at the same time tamer and al
Starting point is 01:20:08 who end up being my co-defendants later they're operating totally separate from me we don't know each other right like i'm looking for them they're looking for me because of price control right and uh bro you want to hear the funniest thing by the time we finally find each other right we realize tamer now we're living in my girlfriend's building we've been past in the building for like a year while we're looking for each other right so that was pretty funny anyway uh so simon just a little side thing because this becomes relevant later simon is a dealer he buys a kilo and he grams it out and he puts he puts 10 grams of in he doesn't sell eight balls he doesn't sell two one gram you want three grams you buy three grams you buy three
Starting point is 01:21:01 grams at the price right he sells them for 60 bucks puts him in little bags he doesn't cut it so every little bag has a little like fish scaly pearly looking rock you know 60 bucks a gram so he's turning 15 grand into 60 000 every three weeks that's his thing when he runs he takes 10 grams with him when he done those done with those deliveries he uh you know comes back home gets 10 more drives around in this porch does his thing right anyway we both move into this building uh third street Sam Sennie, high rise right across from the Beverly Center, and the police end up coming to raid his house, right? The police raid his house. Well, he lit his balcony. If you is, you can see the pool. He has two keys there. He gets them while they're banging on the door,
Starting point is 01:21:51 and he throws them. They miss the pool by this much. By literally, they're right on the edge. So on the edge that Simon said when the cops came in and looked, they started. laughing at him right like it was like because if it hits the pool you're dead you're you got nothing so anyway they lock him up now this is before we get to the smooth part this all the stuff i told you about happening the debt the shit losing is happening at the same time right so i don't have money to bail them out it's like 200 grand you know and plus there's this constant competition between business funding and and everything else right and so anyway just uh oh old lady, dear old lady, her name was Andrea Marcus.
Starting point is 01:22:35 She was dating this guy, Andrew, who was, you know, and I was friends with him at different points of my life, but real scumbag. He's dating this older woman. She's taking good care of him, da, da, da, da. And Andrea was like, I guess she was like 50 then, but she was in great shape still, just a fun lady, cool lady. She liked to be around younger people, this, that, another thing. And so Andrea's like, you know, well, I'll help.
Starting point is 01:23:01 with the, you know, the property for the bail. I'm like, oh, great, you know, da, da, da, da, this, that. Anyway, I go over to pick her up in the morning to go over the lawyers and do the bail bond and get Simon out. And, bro, she's standing there in the doorway in one of those like Rocky Balboa tiger silk robes, right? And I'm like, oh, Andrew, we got to go, you know? And she's like, yeah, yeah, come in, just want to smoke a joint, da, no, no.
Starting point is 01:23:26 Anyway, we used to sit in her bedroom. She's got a couch in there, you know, with Andrew and everybody. Andrew's not home and so not unusual we're sitting there she rolls up a joint she takes a hit she hands it to me and then she undoes her row sitting there and uh she's like well and I'm like well and she's like well so next thing you know I'm going down on a 50 year old I'll never forget the blue vein oh my god bro Never forget the blue plane on the inside of her thigh. And she's like, and she's like, well, afterward, you know, we're going and we're in the car.
Starting point is 01:24:08 And she's like, Lewis, you know, I mean, you're the only one that's potentially going to make any money out of this whole group of friends. So, you know, if anything happens here, you owe me, you know. And I was like, I thought we were just even. She's like, oh, no, that's for my signature. I'm talking about I'm putting up $200,000 property bond right now for Simon. Like, okay, so she does it. I mean, and God bless her, dude. I mean, she's great, good for her.
Starting point is 01:24:33 And other than the blue vein, I mean, you know, it wasn't, there's worse experiences that can happen to you, right? But it's traumatic when you're in your 20s. Anyway, so we get Simon out and I put him on plane to Amsterdam. And I'm like, dude, go work over there. So anyway, now things are going really good. You know, we got packages coming back and forth every day. me and Tamer are working together, you know, Al's kind of a dick, and Simon's over there. We still kind of got our own operations running separately, but now we know each other.
Starting point is 01:25:10 We hang out. We, you know, we're doing some stuff. I tell Tamer about the cocaine because me and Al, Al, Al Maiman. He has him and Tamer partners. He rents a car. for driving and dropping off packages. I go, Al has to leave, run back to his chick. That's a whole other story.
Starting point is 01:25:39 Remind me, we should come back to that, because that's pretty funny. So anyway, we, we, he goes home, and I drive their shit with Tamer, right? Do all the drops, and the next day we're going to do mine. And Al tells Tamer, oh, fuck that, don't let Lewis use the car. And Tamer's like, ow, Lewis just did your job.
Starting point is 01:25:58 right like you had to take off for some girl louis did your job for free he's going to use the car right and and uh so anyway me and tamer got real close on that trip so i told him about the and i told him you should start sending and we kind of became you know partners not more than partners but less than partners like we weren't in each other's money but we ship each other's stuff we we exchange contacts like we started to be helpful right strategic allies i guess would be a better way to put it but we weren't chopping the money between us equally or percentage base so i was still doing my thing he was doing his thing but we got pretty close and obviously i was making some money off him off the you know how it started originally before we got to that is these dudes got caught with 800 grand in
Starting point is 01:26:49 the airport in germany and i said dude you're paying x amount of money right for for for You're smuggling this shit over there. Pay me that here. And I'll give you the pills over there because I'm going to take that money by Coke with it. Right. You know, for me, it's, and also my pill price is actually cheaper than there's by magnitudes of order at this point. I'm paying like a buck apiece, you know. And if you calculate the, I'm paying like, you know, 30 cents a piece for 120 milligram pills, right?
Starting point is 01:27:20 So anyway, maintainer get close. Simon is now in Amsterdam. things are going well. I literally hit the $5 million mark. I'm like, my fiancé at the time, Kristen, was like, okay, we got enough money. Let's go.
Starting point is 01:27:39 And I'm like, are you crazy? Like, there's nothing's going to pull me not from the lifestyle, not from the money. You know, I think I'm on top of the world. I still don't know shit. Like, looking back now, I got lucky at so many steps of the way if you're being honest about it, right?
Starting point is 01:27:56 Like, you know, the luck that I had to be able to do all these things is just insane. And as you, you know, later on when you're fighting your case and you're looking back and you've learned more and you're more seasoned and you've been around these kind of people and know how the game really works. You know, some people can lie to themselves. Well, I understood that I'd gotten very, very, very lucky. You know, we were in over our heads. We weren't, this wasn't like a lifestyle thing. I mean, you're having a great lifestyle, but this wasn't our. We weren't born to be, you know, career criminal, gangster, this type of shit, right?
Starting point is 01:28:30 None of the guys involved in it. But we were good as far as, hey, we gave people the best product at the best price. We took over the market. By 1997, from 1997 to 2000, the DEA actually testified and made a report. 85 to 95% of the MDMA and all the United States was a direct result of me and Tamer. I mean, so, I mean, for these purposes, it's impressive. That's not, that's not something that's impressive during the, during the case. No, no.
Starting point is 01:29:00 No. No, bro. I mean, you're like, your honor. What can I say? Yeah. Prolific. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:29:08 And, you know, the feds, a lot of things that people don't understand about the feds, they watch this, like, TV shit. And they think, oh, the feds only want the big guy to rat. That's not true. They want everybody to rat. It's about body count. Yeah. It's no different. They'll take a little guy that will rat all the way up.
Starting point is 01:29:24 They'll take a big guy that'll rat. They don't care. Their thing is just convictions. The little guy leads to the next guy. The next guy. You know, they've got the big guy. Yeah. But, you know, the way they make it seem, right, is like that that's how it always.
Starting point is 01:29:37 But sometimes the big guy rats. Yeah. Right. It's not, they don't care who it is. Right. They always make it seem, oh, we're using the little guys to get the big guys. But I've seen at least half the time, they use the big guys to get little guys to. Right.
Starting point is 01:29:49 Or under the guise of maybe we'll get. other big guys or whatever. Right. But yeah. And we did also, we didn't realize, like, I didn't realize that I could have walked into any law library and looked at something called the sentencing guidelines. I didn't know what the fuck it was. I wasn't properly researched. All these things that you learn later in life when you're going to go about business or do something, you know, you do your due diligence, you do recent. This is one of the reasons why I say we got lucky. We just literally fell into this. Like it, nobody did any research. Nobody did any background. Nobody knew how much time we were looking at. No, we were just kids.
Starting point is 01:30:20 kids having a great time, right? Yeah, I was a joke that they should, in high school, they should teach a class on the federal sentencing guidelines to know just how, just how horrific they are. And I think a lot of kids would be like, you're telling me I could get 15 years for this and for that or the, and they're going to add up all of it and never have to catch me with anything? Nope. You know, like, you start hearing that and you start going, oh, my God, like, I already could do 10 years. Yeah. You know, and I've been selling some little dime bags for the last year and a half. And they'll add that up and I'm going to get a call with two kilos and now I'm going to go to prison for 10 years.
Starting point is 01:30:57 Yeah. You don't have to catch anything. And then if you paid one of your friends, you two grand to drive some of your stuff one day, that's another enhancement. And then every touch point, you know, I mean, and people don't realize there was a great book actually called three felonies a day. Oh, yeah. It's really good. I mean, because it applies to normal citizens and not criminals. Anyway, hit the five million mark, you know.
Starting point is 01:31:17 all the crazy shit ever feeling myself you know basically have that rocky uh belbo attitude the white guy who goes to see rocky and now thinks he can fight like that's me right i'm i'm super drug trafficker super gangster suit this that the whole you know kiss my ring right like all the bullshit you learn on tv right um and uh simon gets kidnapped what simon gets kidnapped well that happened People aren't getting kidnapped? What's going on? Yeah, so he gets kidnapped. We're not those guys.
Starting point is 01:31:50 So he gets kidnapped by these other Bulgarian dudes. And I told them, like, listen, a lot of the things I freely admit, I had no idea and I got lucky. But some things to me were common sense did seep through. And I told them when I'd heard about these Bulgarian guys, I'm like, don't show them what you got. Don't give them money in advance. And, you know, build up. Like, I always tell people, why are you trying to sell a million pills first? Same thing in P.P. Why do you want to do a million masks? You're not going to do a million masks. There's too much anxiety. At a certain point, somebody has to cut a check for X amount of money. It's just not going to happen. Let's do 10,000 first. Right. And build up to it. And you can build up to it super quick. And that's how I used to do it. Even when I was selling pills. Somebody wanted 100,000 that I didn't know or I hadn't done business with before. So let's do 10,000. And we did 20,000. And we did 50,000. And you're done with 100. It takes an extra hour. But everybody's anxiety levels low. Greater chance is.
Starting point is 01:32:43 success and no mistakes right like um so simon uh gets you know doesn't do what i tell them they rob the he shows him the stash house they robs over 100 000 pills over there and they kid them and uh so and they ask for five million how how close are you with simon oh super close five million close like can't we get another simon well to me like i don't know i have my if you ask friends of mine, they'll tell you that I have a weird sense of morality and integrity, and it has nothing to do with the law or other people's morality or integrity, but this guy has taken me into his home when I had nothing and gave me a bedroom and a car and didn't, and, you know, it's still $5 million.
Starting point is 01:33:31 Yeah, I know. I mean, I appreciate that. But, I mean, isn't there a line? I don't know. To me, the problem was is that I had it. Like, if I don't have it and I'd just gotten it, it's not, it's not a. problem right like i don't have it now we give him a million and only get some assignment back well it creates i mean created sim sim sim is is a dear dear friend and it had always be yeah and he was
Starting point is 01:33:56 working for me when this happened yeah but if he's not around nobody knows that we don't have to hear about that but it didn't matter about anybody else it mattered to me oh i've been good like you know we have a different we have a different morality scale yeah but bro you like we were talking about last night. I can't get another Colby. And I like Colby. Colby's a lot for me. But five million? But we have a different, we have, you're not asking Colby to do anything illegal. Look, it's even more of a reason not to get the $5 million. When a person does something. I'm going to give his wife some money. I'm going to help Colby. I'm going to, we can get another Colby. To me, it was, I got to get my dude back. Oh, geez. Okay. So I call the Chinese dudes in the United Kingdom that I'm selling them blow to.
Starting point is 01:34:42 And we're doing great. And I'm like, I ask them. I'm like, hey, listen, we give you guys this money. Can you get, you know, handle the exchange? And they're like, what? What the fuck? What are you? Who?
Starting point is 01:34:54 What? Five minutes. Give me the number that they have. So I give them the number. Simon calls me 20 minutes later. He's like, dude, I don't know what the fuck just happened, but they just let me go and apologize to me. Right?
Starting point is 01:35:12 So I'm like, wow. I mean, last thing I was expecting that day. The first people you owe money to was the Chinese guys. Why do you owe money to now? Like, I just give them a little like, look. Even if they said, oh, no, we just made a call. No, big deal. I said, no, bro.
Starting point is 01:35:26 Like, you need a new Porsche. Like, I need to take care of you. Listen, I obviously offered them whatever they wanted, but they said, no, no. And I learned something there too. At the street level of dope dealing is highly competitive. the mid-tier's less so because all you're doing there is protecting connects right at the high tier nothing stops the money train if one person has a problem everybody has a problem right nothing stops the money into the point where you know we used to do accounting every shipment
Starting point is 01:36:01 you know and and then it's like well we'll just meet once a month to do accounting because we're not stuck just keep sending it and we'll keep sending it you know like there's no it's not like hey i put all my money into 10 kilos i need to get that back right now you know like or have an accounting like once you're at that level dude you stop you know you meet and marbea for for a weekend and and you do the accounting oh i owe you 40 keys or you owe me 300 000 pills or whatever it is but nothing stops like the daily shipments are happening and anybody that even threatens that in any way, shape, or form is, is enemy of everyone. Now, I didn't understand at the time.
Starting point is 01:36:43 These guys are underneath a family in even that they're Asian. They were working in conjunction with the family, you know, the Adams over there, right? I was going to say, my buddy Pete, who's, it's funny, you watch a movie or something with them about your drug deals. And he's like, all these guys with the guns and everything, he's like, I've, I've never been to a drug deal. and he was selling millions and millions of, you know, of dollars worth of ice. I mean, these guys are showing up with duffel bags with a million dollars. He's like, never been to a drug deal where people were bringing guns.
Starting point is 01:37:14 Yeah, me either. He's like, you know the guys, you know who you're dealing with. He is, it's super beneficial for them, for us. He's like, he's like, why would you go to the meeting if I thought I needed a gun? He's like, then I'm not going. Yeah, you know these people. And he's like, I mean, a lot of the stuff you see in the movies, he's like, that's not, like the whole, you lost a hundred keys. He's, they're going to kill you.
Starting point is 01:37:34 No, he's like, they're going to say, how can we work this out? He is because you've had a lot of success. They know bus happen. You know, if they think you were involved in the bus, you got a problem. Or sometimes if you can't prove that you were involved. That's another thing. He said, like, literally one time some vehicles got grabbed that had were stuff with stuff. And the DEA, like, there was a big thing with the truck driver who's saying, like, I need something.
Starting point is 01:38:00 You're taking the trucks. I'm not involved, you need to give me something for those trucks. I need proof that you took these trucks. So they gave him a card. They came like a receipt. True. Because he's like, I don't give a fuck that you took the trucks. What I care about is I can't show up without them and not have something to show these guys.
Starting point is 01:38:16 100%. So, yeah. No, I agree 100%. It's a big thing. Now, obviously, you hear drug violence everywhere, right? Yeah. But these, if you look at it, and I mean, even down in Mexico, these are not, don't want to disrespect anybody's organization.
Starting point is 01:38:31 or anybody, but these are street closer to street level people, right? The most of the violence in the drug business happens at the street corner level, right? It's just so you get to that higher level and, do you're, listen, we're sending packages. There is no exchange where I'm bringing cash or for pills or this or that. There's no guns because, hey, I'm receiving a package, you're receiving a package. And when you see each other like that, it just wasn't necessary. But I noticed, you know, and later, when. when there was a dude, Monier Deary rat, who was going to rat?
Starting point is 01:39:06 At this time, he'd just jump bail. And they, you know, they told me, they're like, dude, this dude's got to go. And I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, you don't understand this business. This dude's got to go. And I was like, no, no, there's plenty of money. Nobody's dying over the shit, right? If you guys do that, I'm out.
Starting point is 01:39:25 And they're like, let me tell you something, Lewis. You run around with your $100,000 watch and your chicks and San Josepé and Corchival and Geneva and Lake Cuomo and all over the world and nobody bothers you. That's not because of you. That's because of us. And you don't understand how this business works and we're going to handle that for you. And I was like, no, dude, I cannot. I'm not going to be involved anymore.
Starting point is 01:39:53 And anyway, they were right. They were right. everything they said was going to happen happen yeah you know and uh um but that was that anyway so get simon back now he's shook he's done in amsterdam he moves to london now he's you know on the side of rather than the side he's there he's safe and that's why i told you about simon that was an interesting thing and then ultimately after i got busted simon continued trying to do the business which i have no moral quandary with unfortunately he went back to that guy that I told you turned out to be a rat a
Starting point is 01:40:33 couple years later who I owed money to in the beginning and he was a rat he did record him and he busted him and Simon ended up doing 12 years and in the UK one of longest drug sentences they ever had and then he got out you know but his kid was already 12 13 it was a tough tough one for him you know he had a beautiful wife obviously that kind of ruined their relationship You know, but it is, I mean, there's, it's not all milk and cookies. Not all money is good money. Sometimes it's hard money.
Starting point is 01:41:09 Then the Chinese guys, they didn't, you know, they were just, that's where I learned that. Like, hey, nothing stops the wheel. Right. Right. You don't need to give us anything. The wheel has to keep turning. And then that was the first time that I understood that there's mechanisms behind the mechanism of what we're doing that are earning from this also and once the wheel's going at that
Starting point is 01:41:37 level it's just if there's one enemy to any part of that wheel it's an enemy to everybody and so that was kind of where I was like man this is oh wow well this is pretty big you know the real people like you you've heard names like like you know these family names from the UK or whatever oh man You know, like, wow, this is like Godfather coming to life in modern day, right? So I was like, you know, okay, cool. And then I tried to act a little bit more professional after that, actually, you know. I tried to act a little bit more professional. We got, we had multiple houses.
Starting point is 01:42:13 We started getting into security. We started, you know. You're also making, at this point, you're making big, big money. So you have to start taking it seriously, right? You have to start realizing, like, this wasn't a one-off. every month I'm making bringing I'm making hundreds of thousands of dollars every month so you know we were making millions like we'd be sitting I'd be sitting in my house in the
Starting point is 01:42:33 Hollywood Hills I actually rented a house from I think one of the Baywatch girls I think it was I don't know it might have been Donna Deerico I never met her but it was her husband rented her house up in the Hollywood Hills and it had like you come down the stairs into like this little like I guess man cave there's a couple bedrooms but I had TV video games everything down there and there so the stairway and I'd be sitting in there smoking weed with my boy Shannon every day and and people would just be coming by dropping off bags and you know and we'd be talking about how many stairs are going to be because they drop them on the stairs and how many stairs are we going to fill today like and just literally sitting there
Starting point is 01:43:09 smoking weed playing PlayStation and then you know we'd get bored and we'd go play with the money counter and count the money that came in that day right and so then I you know got to the point where what actually happened is where do you put it right you know at first it's like oh I got a million dollars in the safe. Oh, I got two million dollars in the safe. I got, oh, I don't have any room in the safe. I got to get a bigger safe. And then there was this guy who had a cell phone store. His name was Cameron Siegel. And I used to go in there to get, they had rental phones back then, right? So I was buying the rental phones. This is before prepades came out. But I had a deal with him. I just trade rental phones all the time. Again, for me, my guys, everything, right? So we were
Starting point is 01:43:50 rotating phones every week and one day I'm you know I'm giving this to thousands and thousands in cash way more than he's you know entitled to right or normally charges you know probably 10x what he normally charges for a rental phone and uh I say hey let me get one of those car chargers and dude he's like arguing with me over 17 bucks I'm like dude just give it to me he's like no it's 17 bucks I'm like dude you're cheap bastard man and he's like and he doesn't know what how what i'm doing right like he doesn't he doesn't know anything you know he's he just knows i'm a guy that comes in for the rental phones right and anyways arguing me for a long time and finally i paid this dude the 17 bucks and i said to him i'm like look bro um i need someone like
Starting point is 01:44:40 you watching my money right and he like laughed like uh you're i'm a nobody right he's got a cell phone store. And at that time, dude, you sign up somebody for a cell phone. They were cutting a $1,500 check. These dudes were making a ton of money. And so, you know, he had his little attitude in this and that. About three weeks later, I'd gotten, I'd gotten $675 grant from somebody, and I went over, I went back home, I put another $325 with it. I took a million dollar bag over to his store. I left it on his desk and I said, we're in the real estate business now. right and because he'd been you know we'd seen each other out a couple times and this and that and then i guess he'd heard who i was so we started being you know hey real estate this that the other
Starting point is 01:45:28 thing i was like oh okay cool no paperwork no nothing dropped off i'm like where in the real estate business two days later he calls me he's like hey bro listen i don't want to work for you i need to have my own skin in the game also so i said where's your million i said well i did one better I said, look, dude, I'm going to give you 200,000 pills at Amsterdam prices. I basically, at 50 cents a piece I charged. Right. And they're going for, I was getting five bucks for $200,000, five bucks a piece of $200,000. If it wasn't a million dollars by this point, I didn't care.
Starting point is 01:46:04 I wasn't doing the deal. And I was the kind of asshole. It was like, dude, I remember I sent two soft-sided suitcases back that had $20s in it. And I was like, fuck off. And it's one of the things I look back on, like, oh, my God. God, what the f*** was wrong with you? Right. How stupid is that, right?
Starting point is 01:46:22 Like, and so anyway, we're, we're, he, I basically give him a million bucks. You know, he didn't have to pay the cash up front. I ended up selling the pills for him, you know, but he's got his million. Didn't care. Like, didn't care. I wanted, that's what I thought where the future was. And so he started buying up a bunch of properties and this and that. Okay, cool, cool, everything's going great.
Starting point is 01:46:44 And, uh, then a kid gets busted. um and uh he needs bail so want to bail him out go tell cameron cameron like puts together a bail i said dude we need properties like you know put together a bail package did so cameron puts up a few condos and this and that we don't get the kid out they still denied it and then uh later when mike gets busted the main rat he gets busted and he he told the feds three things that turned out to be not true about money. And what those things were is that I used my Merrill Lynch bank account to send money to Europe.
Starting point is 01:47:27 I never had an exit wire from Merrill Lynch. He said that the money, the real estate that was put up for this kid was mine from drug money. But it turns out Cameron didn't use the units that we bought together. He owned units from before that. And he said that, you know, my family. Keeps all my money. You know, he dropped money at my family's house before for me, but he gave the wrong address and I wasn't even close in the area, you know what I mean? So he said that's important because, you know, later on when we start to talk about the bust, that's that also drove a decision by the government to use to Pinkerton construction and basically present a lie to the jury. I got found guilty anyway, but that is what allowed me to open up my appeal later on. during the second case.
Starting point is 01:48:18 And so, you know, that's interesting when we get there. But so now we have basically a three-year run where, you know, you're banging playmates and, you know, driving sports cars and, and doing, you know, I could tell you hours and hours of misogynist stories, you know, that could be a whole episode. Right. And there was one day, though, we were having a party at my house. It was like a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I go upstairs to my bedroom.
Starting point is 01:48:44 and I looked out, my bedroom had where a balcony to the pool and a balcony to the front street. So I look out to the front street through my window. I see Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, Ferrari, Porsche, Mercedes. Like, my friends are all over there. Those are all their cars. And it was that moment, I said, we're going to prison. Right. I remember it.
Starting point is 01:49:07 Like, there's tons of things you forget or you forget the year or you conflate stuff. You know, the 20, 25, 30 years has gone. by in some of this time, right? Even 10 years since I've been home from prison. Like, I don't remember every, the name of every unit and every join I was in, right? Like some of it, but I will never, ever, ever forget that day. That was the day I realized. I was like, oh, we're all going to jail because I got, you know, tanning salon in Beverly Hills.
Starting point is 01:49:33 I've got a restaurant in Beverly Hills. I'm pushing money through there, right? Like, I'm a millionaire on paper. I'm donating to the policeman's ball, all this shit. Because as I got more and more into it, I got smarter and smarter. Like I said, I started to understand there was an apparatus of organized crime that was eating out of this, even that I didn't know any of them, right? Like, there was, all these things were happening. And I, you know, then it started to be, you know, okay, I'm a business owner, a Chamber of Commerce, City Council, all this stuff, right?
Starting point is 01:50:04 You're going to events and this and that. I'm putting out a suit. But the thing was is that because I wasn't a gangster, like I didn't grow up as a gangster. I just operated on the basic premise if I give people the best stuff at the best price. If they're making more money with me than with anyone else, it makes sense that they're going to protect me. So at this time, 98, 99, 2000, the height of everything, I'm able to go out with my fiancé without any security. You know, like go out without an entourage, just me and her. Like, I didn't really have any of those type of problems.
Starting point is 01:50:42 that people have, I guess, now, or, you know, we were pretty loud. You know, everybody knew we were in all the clubs. We're doing, you know, crazy shit, spraying bottles on people. People are freaking out. I got a dude there standing with hundreds for every crybaby guy here. Here's a hundred bucks. I know it's worth more than your shirt, but it'll cover the dry cleaning. So stop crying.
Starting point is 01:51:02 Right. And there's nothing you can do about it anyway. I mean, we go to the, we go to a nightclub the gate one time. This doorman gives us a hard time about getting in. We wait, 2.30 in the morning. We grab them. We throw them in the. trunk we drive him up to moho and strip him naked and tell him he can walk down this time
Starting point is 01:51:17 next time he won't be able to that never happened again in any of the clubs now like oh back door side door VIP area you know I mean we're terrorists like stupid shit kind of funny you know and in a weird way like I feel bad about some things I did but I don't feel bad about those things just that door man he fucking him he's a nobody he's got a little bit of power he's up nobody right like I don't feel bad about that because I seen how many times, you know, when I was a kid, dude's girlfriend's inside the club, not this particular doorman, but doorman knows and says, fuck you, you know, and leaves the boyfriend standing outside, like, because they have a little bit of power
Starting point is 01:51:55 and, you know, whatever, right? So I didn't have, I still, to this day, like, don't have any sympathy for doormen, dude, just don't like them. There's one I catch this cock sucker. I really, like, my wife was actually there for dinner a couple years ago in this piece of shit wouldn't let me in when they weren't crowded anything i'm like i get home that night i called the investigator i'm like run a make on him this that though and my wife's like calm down what are you going to do to this dude and i was like it took a minute i had to breathe it was like
Starting point is 01:52:26 it's still i hate that right i just hate that shit and uh because to me it's it's no different than a bully if you're abusing power that you have over another person just because you can for no actual reason And maybe it's my own personal shit, but me and Dorman just don't get along. I never found anything redeeming about any of them. Actually, I met a couple of them. There was a guy, Steve, who was the Dorman of Bar One back in the day. He ended up being a pretty good guy. This dude, Bob Bidjick ended up being, but for the most part, you know,
Starting point is 01:53:00 other things you look back on, and, you know, I mean, one of the things I realized when I was locked up in the shoe when I was in prison for a while is that I was the main realization I had was that I was a bad person, actually, who did good things once in a while, not a good person who did bad things once you realize that, that was very discomforting thought for me, because again, you know, you justify things in your head and you think, wow, I'm this Robin Hood character, I'm doing all these things for all these people. But the truth is, dude, you ain't paying no family bills in the strip club. Really, I was doing everything for me. Right. Right. Okay, so there was some ancillary spending that I had, but I would justify that. I was like,
Starting point is 01:53:39 I'm a good person. I got 180 turkeys for the mission this year for Thanksgiving. I'm a great guy who could say to me about what I'm doing, you know. So anyway, we go through this whole run. And then the problem that really started was we were in such a hurry to get back and spend money and show off that the shipments, as we were able to do bigger ones, we started moving into private jets and air cargo and shit. like that right like the the bust in 2000 was 2.1 million pills on an air france flight which is a funny story in and of itself but like they got up to those numbers and to this day i don't know where all those pills went but they went i mean it didn't matter how many we brought they were
Starting point is 01:54:26 gone and um instead of systemizing that it was kind of you're working once a month twice a month you're out you know i was going to every five-star resort all around the world you know i I just wanted my biggest decision every day to be beach or pool. Right. And I figured if that was my decision today, if I was in a resort where the only decision I had was beach or pool, that everything was fine. So we're, we, so also when we used to take loads, we would take loads and there would be a truck and, a lorry that called it, a little truck, little, it looks like a U-Haul truck without the writing. And then we'd have a car in front and a car in back. And so if anything, threaten that lorry, like a police pull over, anything,
Starting point is 01:55:13 you have these two cars that could make an accident. And on this particular day, I was behind the whole caravan and like that hairs in the back of my neck just started standing up. So we get into France from Amsterdam, we cross the border. I'm like, okay, everything is going into, let's get all this shit into storage somewhere. let's dump all these cars and we're taking vacation. So we went down to Monaco, took the whole team down there. But before we went, we go to London, we go shopping at Herds. We went in there with pillowcases full of cash because the dudes in London dropped off cash to us.
Starting point is 01:55:54 Right, right. So we put it in pillowcases from the hotel and we go to Herod's in London. And at the end of the day when the store closed, they kept it open for us. and like six trucks of Herod comes to the Lanesboro, right? And we're like, okay, hey, can you send that shit down to Monaco? So everybody's got new clothes. Everybody's got everything. We're on our way.
Starting point is 01:56:18 All this stuff's in storage. We get down to Monaco and, you know, we get rooms. It was the Lowe's Hotel then. Then it was later, it was called the Monte Carlo Hotel. But it's the hotel that the Formula One goes underneath. You have the balconies and everything. So we're staying there, casino, black tie, playing super, James Bond shopping, chicks, insane.
Starting point is 01:56:38 Like, just the debauchery was, I sent Andrew back, spent 60 grand for him to jump on a helicopter and a train in order to get weed when we ran out. He flew back to, 60 grand is what that little thing cost to get two ounces of weed between the helicopters. And the train was even a nothing, nothing price. But, I mean, that's, I bought a Lamborghini, Diablo. roadster my other buddy drives in with a Ferrari we're just having a great time it was actually the first time i met paris was uh there she was there that summer and uh great time girls table VIP room everything fights we're at jimmies which is the stuffiest club in monte carlo and we get in a fight with some other dudes who are mad about the chicks because i'm kind of an asshole at this point
Starting point is 01:57:32 Like Prince did this to me when I was a kid. I got into bar one and got a table for dinner at like a 7 o'clock seating, which is like it's a nightclub, dude. Nobody even wants a table until 10. But the only way for me to get in was to take that early seating. And I got a date and this and that. We're sitting there and it, you know, hour and a half later, two hours later, right around 9 o'clock, right? I'm milking everything. This is before.
Starting point is 01:57:58 This is when I'm a youngster, right? Like milking everything because I don't have a lot of money. And Prince comes in, and the manager comes up and says, hey, Prince is taking your table, but your bill's been paid. But your girl's welcome to stay. Right. Right. So when I, you know, made some money, I became that kind of asshole. Like, that's what I would do.
Starting point is 01:58:25 I was like, hey, this table is ours. Even if the club wasn't involved in it. I mean, hey, we just paid your bill. You're going to leave, but your chicks can stay. And most of the time, they stay, right? That's horrible, though. Horrible, right? Like, one of the things when I look back, I say, God, what a asshole.
Starting point is 01:58:43 But, you know, you're young. It gets done to you. And you think, like, and at that point in my life, I thought it was a cool move. You don't have perspective, right? You think you're cool. Like, everybody's chanting your name. You can do no wrong. You got tons of money.
Starting point is 01:58:57 And nobody wants to admit that it's all because of the money. It's got nothing to do with you. Like, you know, so you're thinking like, yeah, I'm the coolest thing in the world. You know, we're doing this. So we're in a fight of Jimmy's over that. Jimmy's in Monaco hasn't had a fight in there in forever. Right.
Starting point is 01:59:13 Forever. So it's like a huge brawl. I mean, all my guys are there. These dudes friends, soccer players. I mean, just madhouse, right? So now we're out in front. They threw us out of the club. And the cars have been pulled up.
Starting point is 01:59:29 Somebody went and got the cars. So you got my Lamborghini, the Ferrari, and then we had a Mercedes station wagon for like all the overflow, right? So they're there and we're outside and the police come and they're like right in front and now there's a big thing. And riot police in Monaco, like that just never happens, right? And so there's this big security guard. He's got to be 6-5-66 and he was part of the problem because actually he's what kicked it off because he was just taking their side. in my mind now looking back on it actually he was taking the club side he wasn't against me he was just doing his job but that's different in hindsight right when you're full of yourself and you're
Starting point is 02:00:09 super arrogant and super stupid at the same time you think everything's a personal affront to you right right anyway that's that's how it all kicked off and and so now we're standing outside the cops are standing between us and them and this dude says something right about something and i jump up using the cop's shoulder for leverage and pop this guy right in the face. Boom. They lay us all down. We're going to jail. We're in jail in Monaco, right?
Starting point is 02:00:39 And five minutes after we're in there, the cop's like, hey, do you guys want a sandwich, cigarettes? Like, yeah. They like just take money from your thing and they go out. That's how you eat there. You get a fresh French forget, turkey, ham, whatever you want. They bring you cigarettes. On July 18th, get excited. This is big!
Starting point is 02:00:59 For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurf my pants. That's a little too excited. Sorry. Smurfs. Only dinner's July 18th. It's Monica. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:01:13 So I was like, this ain't so bad, right? So then the next morning we get out and they're like, well, we're going to have to find you. And I'm thinking, oh, shit, dude, this is Monaco. This is going to be, you know, six figures. Right. But whatever. You know how much to find was? 50 francs.
Starting point is 02:01:32 Not even $50. 50 francs. Right. That was it. Right. So anyway, this is like, that was the life we were living. We were doing all this retarded shit all over the planet. And, I mean, that was the Monaco.
Starting point is 02:01:47 And then they end up suing me. So on the lawyers in the States, oh, you got a lawsuit. You know what the lawsuit was worth? $7,000. Like, their system over there is completely different than our system over here, right? So anyway, we're done two months of that, spent two million bucks. Over to Santropay, over, you know, Italy, Sardinia, Santa Margarita, all along that coast. They're just racing these cars on these, like, six-lane highways on the beach cliffs,
Starting point is 02:02:23 like just having a great time, you know, and, uh, and then we got caught up in that. So we want to do that like instead of systemizing things, we just want to keep doing that. And so we did all right, but, uh, you know, things went good, but it could have been much, much bigger. And as far as the sentencing guidelines go, it wouldn't have mattered because I was already in off the chart 360 to life. So there would have been a hundred million more pills. It wouldn't have mattered.
Starting point is 02:02:49 They ended up changing the ecstasy guideline scale because of that. because of us. It didn't matter for us. We were still off the chart, but it went from like 35 to 1 to like 500 or 50 to 1 and then like 150 to 1 against weed. That's how they calculated. Right.
Starting point is 02:03:05 So that was interesting. It was a lot of fun. But, you know, it's, again, one of those things where you look back and you're like, God, I was such a asshole. I could have done this so much better.
Starting point is 02:03:14 You know, same thing with like the older guys, like Teddy Fortsman who owned Gulfstream or all these billionaires in L.A. you know, I should have been friends with them. They hated me because I was banging the same chicks as them, right? And the chicks didn't matter. I could have easily given them chicks, but I was just so full of myself.
Starting point is 02:03:33 I fought with everybody about everything, everything. And, you know, didn't end up serving me well. You know, it's another thing you realize when you have time to look back and be introspective about this type of stuff. Right. Yeah. And, yeah, I was not, not, I made as many enemies as possible and some just by being an arrogant little prick. And I thought I was entitled to that because I was a legit millionaire in my 20s.
Starting point is 02:04:03 And most of the guys that I'd looked up to in my early 20s who I thought were millionaires because they had the big house, big car, this, that other thing. Once I made money, I realized they were all frauds, dude. Back in L.A., back then, $4,000 a month, you got a big house. $500 a month, you got the brand new Mercedes on a lease, you know. And then you spend $1,000 every weekend when bottle service meant they write your name on the bottle and bring it back to you the next time you come to the club, not what it is today. Okay. So what happened? Well, I mean, I'm kind of curious to know how it all kind of unravels.
Starting point is 02:04:37 But, oh, okay. So the major, there was a few different things, right? But the major unraveling happened in December of 1999. We were using FedEx at a certain point in all this. And the reason for that is, and it is that FedEx's insurance will not allow their drivers to participate in a controlled delivery. I should have mentioned that earlier, but that was the reason why it's centered on FedEx because I did know that. And the reason for that is, okay, all you got to do is watch your shit get delivered. and if it's your normal driver, it's not a controlled delivery.
Starting point is 02:05:16 If it's a driver that is not your normal driver, but continues delivering packages, then that's okay too. If it's a driver that's not your normal driver who drops the package and then breaks all the traffic laws going four blocks away to a parking lot where there's a bunch of black suburbans, then that's a controlled delivery. Right. Right. So you kind of had a fail safe there, right?
Starting point is 02:05:44 So as long as you're not lazy, you're all good. Well, anyway, they'd sent some three boxes, I think about 120,000 pills, FedEx in the end of 99, to this hair salon out in Riverside. Anyway, the packages were late. They shouldn't have been picked up, and they should have just been left. And that's the whole reason why you use a package. A package doesn't need bail and it doesn't have a mouth. So the money and it doesn't need a lawyer. So the money you save on the bail and a lawyer goes to re-upping.
Starting point is 02:06:20 And the fact that it doesn't have a mouth let you sleep at night. Right. So that's the whole concept of packages instead of humans. So anyway, they, these two girls who work for Mike go and pick up the package. They're driving along the 10 freeway. They stop at a shopping center. They open up the box. It's got a fucking.
Starting point is 02:06:40 bug on it now the but they open it up and when the cops find them they were stealing stuff out of the boxes oh okay right and that's important because there there was a growing accounting rift between me and mike at this time right and tamer you know was kind of like he was kind of caught in the middle because mike was kind of his guy at first he was a best worker ever he was a grinder had no problem cutting him in for more because he kept perfect paperwork he he had the answers for everything he he wasn't scared of anything right and so i made a mistake i brought him in a little bit closer and and upped him basically i guess you call it i gave him a promotion and uh anyway and things were great for a while but then this happened and uh he's like oh yeah
Starting point is 02:07:29 we picked up the boxes now we all lived on the wilshire corridor at that time me because i'd moved out of my house in the hollywood hills um and the new house i was moving into and Brentwood wasn't ready so i rented a penthouse in a building called utamo royale right around beverly glenn and wilshire well tamer lived in the sterling international towers al lived in the sterling international towers also beverly glen and wilshire on the other side of the street and mike lived up the street i think at the diplomat building i'm not sure but he lived you know a few blocks up so when i hear that they picked up the boxes i tell my boy andrew i'm like dude go drive by mike's house and tell me what you see and he's like okay um because mike's like hey the girls are coming can you meet them
Starting point is 02:08:11 you know now i'm not operating with them anymore right like i'm i'm kind of doing different stuff i was like no no he's like oh they'll drop it off da da da i was like why why he's like oh we got him i was like tell andrew go look andrew jumps in his car drives down the street calls me he's like dude it's no good it's surrounded here i call mike i tell him don't go home he doesn't believe he doesn't go home but he doesn't believe me either right he thinks i'm like butt hurt for some reason because he picked up the boxes right i'm like dude don't go oh it's no good so mike doesn't go home but he lets the girls still go and they leave the stuff downstairs in one of his cars in the parking lot that already has 200 000 pills in it so of course the
Starting point is 02:08:57 feds raid that place they find tons of cash they find tons of pills upstairs they find everything And what had happened was is Tamer's cousin John had gone over to meet the girls at Mike's building. So he walks two blocks up the street. They see the Fed see John walk in to meet the girls and go downstairs and da-da-da-da. And then they watched John walk back. So they watched where he walked to. So they know he went back to that Sterling building. So anyway, they wrap up at Mike's place.
Starting point is 02:09:26 They got the girls. They do everything. No, Mike, because he didn't go home. And then they go over the Sterling Internet. National Building, and they show a picture of John. And they say, oh, yeah, he lives in this unit. And the other guy, Al Maiman, lives in this unit. So they go upstairs.
Starting point is 02:09:45 They knock on the door at Tamer's unit. And John freaks out, right? And he takes all the cash you can find, like $4,500 grand. I forgot the exact number. And dumps it out the balcony down to Alex's balcony, Al Maimon's balcony. so now the feds have a reason to go in there right so first they come in they get in now me and tamer are sitting across the street at my penthouse smoking a joint while all this is going on right in front of our eyes we're watching the ferrari's get towed out the porches get towed out they're taking all the shit
Starting point is 02:10:17 da da da done me and tamer kind of laughing at this point like you know okay you're going to lose a few hundred thousand pills and a few hundred grand who gives them right like and tamer knows another dorm man who's coming on shifts so we're waiting for that because that dude's kind of like in pocket right so you could get a cleaner look on it anyway they get tamers place and in tamers place these dudes had storages for the pills john and mike used to keep the storages right and they got them in fake names and you know 10 12 bucks a month back then for each store and these dumb cock suckers kept the receipts okay because for for you know expenses 12 bucks a month right And you need to keep a receipt.
Starting point is 02:11:03 They keep a receipt. So now this dude gets on. It's right back to. So, yeah, so now this dude gets, obviously they go down to Al's house too. This dumb cock sucker, right? He's got a book that shows, that says it's titled, How to Hide Your Assets, right? A book. And in the back pages of this book that he leaves in his house, he writes down all his foreign bank account and routing numbers.
Starting point is 02:11:31 okay bro in trial when they brought this like you're embarrassed to be around somebody so stupid right like who you actually have to be kind of nice to because he's your co-defendant what a idiot right and you know I should have known this dude was an idiot because in the beginning we'd be going to Vegas he was hitting on this chick Andrea nice girl she's stripper at Olympic Gardens she wouldn't pay any mind to. Then when we hit and we're making like tons of money, he's like, you know, you're handing out hundreds with the pills wrapped in it. All of a sudden, the bitch who wouldn't even go to breakfast with you is like, you know, coming to L.A. Right. And then they're engaged.
Starting point is 02:12:14 And he calls us one day to come over. He's like, oh, look at the present that my, that my fiance just got. My wife just got me, brand new Porsche convertible. And me and Tamer looking at, I'm like, dude, that's your money. Yeah. And he's like, but it was in the joint account. She could have spend it on anything. And I was like, dude, that was 70 grand. There's 200 grand in the joint account. I bet he's on the other 130s gone too. Right? Like, this is the kind of duty. This was the girl you had
Starting point is 02:12:38 to race back for. Right? Oh, okay. Now the mom's coming and they're getting buried. And I... Shit. The writing was on the wall. And that was something I realized later, too. If I was half as smart as I thought I am, I should have seen all of this coming because
Starting point is 02:12:54 as much as I blame the informants, I mean, I called the plays. I brought them in i i mean right the more i blame them the more i'm actually belittling myself so so anyway we're we're al al's uh book with the uh how to hide your assets all the account numbers and then all of a sudden the dude who tamer knows comes on and we see them all start running out right like with a purpose so tamer calls after they're right he's like oh they found something about some storage So now our party on my balcony in the penthouse from smoking joints and taking shots and laughing at the fence, right?
Starting point is 02:13:35 Where that we're watching right across the street turns into panic. You know, Tamer's like, you know, now he's going to be hit. And, you know, a million and a half pills in there. It's 10 tickets. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's a hit. So anyway, they get there, they get the storages.
Starting point is 02:13:56 And this dumb cock sucker, my. Mike had kept from the beginning of time since he had these storages, maybe after the, for, you know, once we started rolling, you know, after the first few months, once we started rolling from that point, he kept every empty FedEx box that had the label and weight on it. So not only do they have 1.5 million pills. They have weight for another 4 million, 5 million pills in this storage. They have weight for another 7 million pills in this storage. And they know that that's not the only shit. You know, like, so they freak out, you know, they arrest Hamer's cousin, they arrest his girlfriend, oh, anybody there, like, whatever, right?
Starting point is 02:14:37 Like, and, and, but they really got nobody, you know, they got a bunch of cars. They got a bunch of cash, but they got none of the real players, right? Remember that because then in 2000, summer of 2000, they bust the 2.1 million pill shipment that's on Air France. Okay. The interesting thing about that is, is we had a dude, Tamer had a dude in Korean customs, who could access Korean customs. And so we would send shipments at that time from Amsterdam directly to L.A. through Korea. So it goes into a bonded warehouse in Korea, right?
Starting point is 02:15:17 Doesn't clear customs there because we would add stationary to shipment. Papers heavy, dense, da-da-da-da. and into the packages and then and then we come here but what this dude could do is he could strip the paperwork in the bonded area and make it look like the shipment originated in Korea never was in Amsterdam okay so the shit was sailing through as long as you got a customs broker you're good to go right like just they don't even need to know everything they just need to know a minimum amount so that's that's really what's going on at that time right so anyway they bust that and then Oh, and a couple months before that, I see the Gravano gets busted with pink pentagons.
Starting point is 02:15:58 I'm like, how the fuck did this rat get our shit? You know, like, anyway, there's like three levels down, and there was this dude. So Mike's on the run since December. There's this dude, Andre Wagner, they call him the white boy. He's the dude that ratted on Gravano. He's also the, and his crew, he's also the dude that ratted a Moner Deere. right Mike Deary um he ran up a big bill with him and then rat it on him right so Mike's on the run everything they bust that they got the 2.2.1 million pills and then they're uh you know
Starting point is 02:16:38 they're starting to look they're investigating there's a internet international task force interpol D-EA every everybody because right now this is a thing right like um so tamer takes off they show up at his house he lives in the building on ocean in santa monica decaprio lived there then i was like a super building rooftop pool right on the beach it just opened tamer lives there the fed show up there and one of tamers boys is happens to be in the lobby and calls him hey it's no good down here dude you got a problem so tamer jumps with a bag of cash out the balcony into a tree from the 12th floor right pretty good jump tis He jumps down, gets in our, another friend of our car into the trunk, out to Mexico, and off to Egypt.
Starting point is 02:17:30 So, Tamer's good, right? He's still got money left. He's good. And for me, I'm confused at first when this shipment gets busted, because our shipment is not supposed to be there for another week. Okay. Well, what happens is, is that old man Gilboa, who was over there setting up all the customs, docks, and the pallets for the shipment, he has to send the paperwork for Tamer to check. So he sends it to Kinkos in Santa Monica.
Starting point is 02:18:07 Same Kinko's as Damon with the Canon Color Copy are funny. Okay. Irony. Again, this Kinko's comes up in my life, right? And he, uh, they sent a fact. Well, Tamers in bed with two fucking homes. two blocks away bang him right by the time he gets over there it's six hours later the feds have already been there got no warrant got a copy of it the shipment's d oa but what they did was
Starting point is 02:18:32 is they brought it direct from paris our shipment was supposed to go to korea and then to l.A so actually later on that was one of my arguments i'm like actually the dea imported that shit we were sending it to korea you didn't even know that we were going to if we were going to send it on to l.a or not right You guys imported that. That was when I, that came up later, right? So anyway, they show up at my house one evening. I'm saying this is like the day after it's on the news, right?
Starting point is 02:19:01 One evening I'm sitting there and I'm dating this girl, Kristen, Christian family. Like, so we keep an apartment for her that she can say is hers because she's living with me, right? But her family is like old school from Texas, had a lot of respect for her mom and dad. think the world of them salt of the earth people amazing people and so we did that for appearances right and truth be told you know if you have a relationship sometimes you have a fight with your partner it's good that there's another place that one of you can go right so anyway cool but this is going to be the first time that her mom and her stay in my house so a friend of mine who manages my account at merrill lynch who's a VP of there he gets a subpoena they want all my
Starting point is 02:19:49 records from my Merrill Lynch account he comes by my house that evening he's not supposed to they told him he's not allowed to tell me he brings me a copy of the subpoena and he says look they were in here da-da-da-da-da something with drugs something with DEA did this that other thing you know and uh you know and I knew at that point he was like they were looking for wires and he was like you've never wired in or out of Merrill Lynch like Merrill Lynch got checks from my businesses like it was all clean like it wasn't just that I wasn't firing out to buy like Mike had told them who's in and ratting at this point right right because andre wagner busted him just like he busted gravano um so mike's ratting and uh and so he you know
Starting point is 02:20:33 that's that's what's going down and they uh so i'm like freaking out you know i go back in my office smoking weed and and finally like 10 o'clock at night i tell Kristen i'm like you got to get your mom out of here you gotta go no that's a little bit weird for you know yeah it's 10 o'clock at night yeah christian family you know mom what the fuck do you mean what's happening at 10 o'clock at night wait so i'm upstairs i'm you know grabbing all the big shopping bags neemate marcus louis vaton whatever and stuffing cash and guns and everything right so christin's mom's getting her shit together thank god she wasn't standing right there when this happened but then i bring it down to christ and i'm like take this shit get it out of here
Starting point is 02:21:17 right i got clothes on top of it right so you know it doesn't look obvious and then of course the bottom of the bag breaks and there's guns and money all over the floor and we're both racing to like put it back together you know before her mom sees it so now instead of it being too nice shopping bags it's a big hefty trash that i'm dragging out to the car and putting it in her trunk anyway they take off. Come up, up, up, up. 4.30 in the morning. These people came beat down the door.
Starting point is 02:21:51 That's saying a few hours later. They really got nothing. You know, I had a little weed in the house. And, you know, they took my computers. They took some stupid shit, right? But the crux of the thing was, is like, hey, you know, talk to us. And, you know, we know what everybody's doing. And, you know, you're obviously, they offered me as the top dude the first chance to rat.
Starting point is 02:22:19 Right. You know, I mean, so anybody thinks that that's not the case where big people rat on little people, I can tell you personally, that's absolutely a fallacy. Big people rat on little people all the time. And the feds don't care. All they care about is the body count. So, and I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And Bill Linahan was the head DEA agent when we ran into each other.
Starting point is 02:22:41 He was like, look, man, uh, if you're the real deal. And I'm not saying that I'm not conceding that you are. But if you are, what do you think these dudes that we got locked up downtown are going to do? And I was like, oh, I don't know. No, so I don't know what they're going to do. Right. Anyway, a few months goes by, uh, Thanksgiving 2000. Are you still locked out?
Starting point is 02:23:08 Are you locked up? They didn't find anything, you know, I'm not on, phones they didn't find anything i'm not i'm a multi-millionaire on paper from taxes everything like you just have people saying you're the guy yeah have people saying i'm the guy also about a year before that i stopped doing a lot of different deals i had this my two best customers there was a drag queen out of miami and that was hilarious this guy was the past and these two gay dudes up in in San Francisco. And they're great, cool.
Starting point is 02:23:42 And they were my biggest customers. And what had happened was, they said, well, we want to get these things at four bucks. And I was like, okay, you pay in advance. Two weeks later, you get your things at four bucks. So I'm going to take their money. I'm going to buy. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:23:58 And I'm going to end up at this point, I'm getting the pills super cheap. I'm getting the oil, conversion rate. It works up to 32,000 pills a kilo is what it works out to. after all expenses, right? So they're all free for me now because I'm using somebody else's money. So, you know, let's say they give me, at four bucks a piece, they want 100,000 pills, they give me $400,000.
Starting point is 02:24:20 I pocket $100,000. I buy 10 kilos. I end up with, you know, 300,000, 320,000 pills. They're paid. Right. Right? Like, they're 400,000 for, what is, 400,000? thousand, $10, $4 a piece, 100,000 pills, 400 grand.
Starting point is 02:24:41 So I've got 320,000 pills, 100 grand in cash. I pay them their 150,000 pills. I got 170,000 free pills. This is after everybody's been paid because I was doing shit like at this time where I'd send you and your wife to Europe for three weeks. You're going to go there on a private jet. You're going to spend two, 300 grand shopping, this, that making a big scene at the George sank or the ritz in Paris where everybody knows you're just disgustingly rich you came in with
Starting point is 02:25:11 all these louis baton trunks and you're going to go back on private da da da da with all this shopping and everything now you get to keep the shopping and you make 200 grand but every one of them trunks is filled with pills on the way back and the reason for that was is that we used to fry private to Vegas all the time so one of the and we would pay cash the dudes would give us deals so one of the dudes pulls me aside one day and he says hey listen shall Shows me aeronautical maps, shows me refueling stations, and he highlights the customs offices. And he says, theoretically, if you're flying back from Europe and you land in Maine or Minnesota or any of these places to refuel, which you have to for any of the private jets back then, unless it was a full size. He said, what happens is two hours before you land, the pilots call into customs to tell them who's on the plane.
Starting point is 02:26:02 Remember, this is pre-September 11th. Right. So, bro, if you look, the customs office here at this airport is four hours away at 100 miles an hour from the airport. So if they want you, you're going to have two and a half, three hours on the ground before they get there. So all you got to do is have somebody there who's willing to overpower the pilot and take the shit, which is no problem, right? I mean, there's no security at these private airports. Right. And that never happened, but that's what we were doing.
Starting point is 02:26:32 So anyway, back to the bus, the Thanksgiving, my lawyer calls me. He says, hey, there's an indictment. And I was like, okay, tell him I'll self-surrender and I'll get bail. And he's like, all right, they make a deal. I'm going to self-surrender December 1st. Dear friend of mine's birthday, we'll call him Suzanne, just because he doesn't want his name associated with this. But he's the best. And he comes over, and he has a little bit of experience.
Starting point is 02:27:02 with this and he says you don't want to go in you want to take off you want to be the last guy you you don't want to be now you got to take off and i'm like dude i'm not taking off i'm not running from nothing um but he was right and wrong as as i learned later right um if i would have run they would have come down heavy on my family and everybody it would have been a disaster And also a lot more people would have ratted Than you know kind of stopped when I got there who they had they had but then once I was in They didn't really get any new people like right right everybody was like people had taken off because once I go down Everybody scatters not saying that they develop morality overnight I'm just saying it was a lot harder to find rats in the United States that could rat on this after I was in jail
Starting point is 02:27:54 So anyway Get to court the first day self-surrendered, mom's there, fiancé's there, everybody's there, lawyer's there, and, you know, going to get bail, and they unseal a second indictment for continuing criminal enterprise kingpin. And I got my first law lesson that day. In the 1996, omnibus crime control and prevention act, our Democratic president, Bill Clinton, gave us a very special gift that circumvented the Constitution and the Supreme Court allowed it to. and it said for the purposes of bail hearing then this is the exact wording for the purposes
Starting point is 02:28:34 of bail if you're looking at a maximum sentence of 10 years or more you are presumed guilty for the purposes of bail hearing so you're not getting bail think about that for a second yeah and that's right there and and the supreme court upheld it through all kinds of intellectual dishonesty gymnastics won't get into that we'd have a legal podcast one day that would last a week but that that was my first legal lesson was that day and uh so anyway i end up blocked up and uh they're going to take me to kern county which is totally right like i'm in the tanks and learning this as the dudes are talking everybody wants to stay at mdc if you can't be at mdc then san brindino's closer it's much better but nobody wants to be in
Starting point is 02:29:18 kirk county the water's brown it's disgusting everything's horrible like so i fake a kidney stone in the tank because I find out I'm due for Kern County right like the San Bernardino bus is left they got chained up already the MDC people have already gotten walked back across the street all this left is Kern County and they're starting to chain us up I fake a kidney stone
Starting point is 02:29:38 how do I fake a kidney stone I've had them before so I know there's there's piss in your blood that's really the only way that they can tell initially that there's something wrong blood and your piss blood in your piss yeah piss in your blood whatever good good catch maybe I have a little dyslexia
Starting point is 02:29:53 Anyway, so I bite my corner of my nail here so it's bleeding. And I go take a fire. I've had it before, so I know how to mimic the pain, right? Now they've got to take me to the hospital. Two marshals take me to the hospital that night. I missed the Kern County bus. I end up at San Bernardino. Guess who's locked up in San Bernardino now?
Starting point is 02:30:17 Al-Maman. Mr. I can't get the chick to go to breakfast with me for a $20 tip, But if I give her hundreds, then her mom loves me and she wants to marry me. That out man. Right. So he's there. He's locked up in there, right? And so he's going to court the next day.
Starting point is 02:30:36 I'm like, dude, we don't have court. What are you going to court for? He's like, oh, man, I'm just deal this, that, the other thing. He comes back that night and he's like, bro, you know, I got to tell you I was supposed to rap. I just couldn't do it after I saw you, da, da, da, da, this, that. Right. So I don't know if that's true or not.
Starting point is 02:30:51 Right. I would imagine that he was supposed to rat, but the price they were asking is too high. I certainly, but since I don't know, it's an unknown of why he didn't do it at that time. He certainly did it later, but at that moment he didn't do it. So we're in MDC, and then they move him, I mean, we're at San Bernardino. They moved me to a different part of San Bernardino. Al moves to MDC. And finally, before the trial starting, the first trial that went to speed trial, they moved me to MDC about a week before the trial starts.
Starting point is 02:31:22 So I got the two lawyers, two million bucks in, investigators, this, that, everything. We go to six-week trial, get found guilty. And, you know, now it's time for PSR. And I got this second indictment and everything else. And, you know, PSR comes back. It's 360 to 1640 months. Ringleader, organizer, established the thing, everything, right? Well, dude, I can't go to sentencing.
Starting point is 02:31:52 absolutely cannot get sense for that so do you know those dudes who are doing like the straw man the corporate USA yeah the sovereign citizen kind of thing yeah so I'd read that stuff and it appeals to you on an intellectual level sometimes until you realize you need a judge to agree with you yeah but what I found fascinating was the UCC financing elements of those things so I did I wrote the judge a letter certified mail. And I said, I've copyrighted my name. And you're using any unauthorized use of my name in commerce is, um, we'll, we'll start the process of a self-executing UCC one financing statement for $100,000 for every violation. So I sent him the letter, right? To his chambers. And this I kind of appreciate it comes out, you know, next time Ziskin, Ziskin. Like he's trying to rub it in, dude,
Starting point is 02:32:49 But because he never responded, he's stuck the same way the Columbia House, when they used to send you, you know, 10 CDs for a penny, and then they send you one every month for 14 bucks, twice the price in the store, right? And you have to tell them, no, you don't want it or return it, right? You have to take an action. If you don't take an action, you owe that money. Well, the judge was so arrogant. And this is what I was counting on. I was betting with dudes in MDC. I was like, he's not, if he just responds and says, I don't accept this or I can test anything, just scribble on a piece of paper.
Starting point is 02:33:26 There's nothing I can do, right? But I was like, this dude is so arrogant and hates me so much. He's not going to respond. And he didn't respond. So, bro, I take the transcripts. I take the letter. I take the registered mail. I have my wife go up to Sacramento file.
Starting point is 02:33:44 You used to see one financing statement on him for millions. dollars and the reason why i want to do this is this judge had denied every motion i made granted every motion the government made he's known as a hangman judge like you know i got to get rid of him right so i said okay your honor you have a pecuniary interest now that involves me so you have a conflict you need to be recused oh my god that's set off a firestorm in uh in the hole system over there. So they take me to this other court, you know, civil judge, federal judge. You're not entitled to a lawyer and they're trying to bury me. They're actually validating it for a second by trying to beat me in court on it. Right. And so I did the same thing
Starting point is 02:34:36 to that judge. Okay. Right. He also didn't respond. I filed the UCC financing statement. So you got all that going on, right? Now that's going on. That ends up. kind of like stalled. They don't know what to do because they don't want to validate it, right? Because why would you want to? But at the same time, they're stuck. I got these things recorded. Right. Right. After we got the UCC one financing statement in Sacramento, I had my girl go recorded it downtown. Now I'm trying to find investigators who will go looking for these judge's assets and none of them will touch that. Right. I'm like, listen, man, you know, I ended up getting his gas card and a condominium that he owned. the valley and i you know i was gonna lean those so anyway we're we're uh i'm doing all that right
Starting point is 02:35:23 and then uh tamer gets in he's extradited from amsterdam for the second indictment the other case that hasn't started right right so that's going on for a while this you know i don't get sentenced for like a year year and a half right by the time i finally get sentenced and so tamer comes in they put him on a different floor than me at first and um anyway finally the day comes you you know, about a week, about a month before my sentencing. I say I wanted to represent myself. I wanted to do my own closing argument. I was like, I was so out of my mind.
Starting point is 02:35:58 My closing argument was going to be, hey, yeah, two, three tons of gold. You say we shipped to the UK or into Europe. Well, I just want you to know that I got more off the streets than any DEA agent ever did in the history of America. Because that was drugs that was already here that had already beaten customs in the DEA that were already on our streets and I traded that for something like which is like that's how out of my mind I was bro like it's a bad argument but it's the funny thing is right it's true there's no DEA agent anywhere in history that is responsible for removing more from American streets than me and Tamer I don't think that's going to keep you for getting 30 years but that's the insanity you're
Starting point is 02:36:44 going through right you know when you're in MDC You know everything and everybody knows everything. And it's that the other thing. But nobody knows what the government knows and the panic and the anxiety and the the whole thing. You're just out of your mind by design, right? Like you're just going, oh, did they find that out? Did they find this out?
Starting point is 02:37:03 Did somebody overhear us from the balcony? Did this happen? You know, it's just nonstop. And you start living with that for years. Oh, is this dude ratting? Is that dude ratting? You're panicking at every little thing, right? Oh, my cellie, my cellie left.
Starting point is 02:37:18 Why, why, you know. So you're going through all that, right? But that's how out of my mind I was. I was like, oh, this is the best closing argument. I wrote it out, everything, right? Lawyers talk me out of it, right? Everybody talked me out of it, right? So anyway.
Starting point is 02:37:34 You know the filing of the UCC and filing the judgments or the liens against the judge? You know, there's a law now where they can, I've actually met a guy who did it and got sentenced. they got three more years for filing a lien against the judge. He was like a sovereign citizen and did all the filings and everything. And one day they pack up, bring them back to court, boom. Indicted, came back like a year later after fighting with three more years. Yeah, yeah, I believe it. Because it was getting so bad that these guys were doing this.
Starting point is 02:38:05 So much of these judges are getting their houses leaned. Like you're getting a lien on a judge's house. Yeah, yeah. No, it's crazy. It's crazy. It was crazy what was happening. But then like, you know, a lot of that. like the dudes who were pushing that shit and they had this book cracking the code and this and that
Starting point is 02:38:20 dude i have my wife i mean my my my fiance go meet them give them a bunch of money right and like they were helping me now i knew i was trying to get rid of them recuse them create by creating a pecuniary interest right right like i knew that there's no judge that's going to say oh yeah you're right you're not a corporate citizen and we have no jurisdiction over you and But you've got to pay lip service to it while you're trying to get this done, right? Because you want the judge to not even respond is the whole thing. Right. And so anyway, that's going on.
Starting point is 02:38:56 And finally, I'm about to get sentenced. It's about a month before sentencing. And, you know, the second case is starting to start, right? And me and Tame are on the same floor. We're fighting the case together. You know, I, and at this point I wanted to represent myself, and I'm going to represent myself on the second case. I fire, you know, my attorney, so I'm going to represent myself on the second case. And then two nights before sentencing, this, I mean, horrible attorney Louis Palazzo,
Starting point is 02:39:28 who still takes credit for winning the case even that I fired him and represented myself, right? Like, idiot out of Vegas. him and Ron Richards another scumbag piece of shit Ron Richards is out in the hallway while me and Tamer in court and he's
Starting point is 02:39:48 our paralegal overheard him saying oh yeah yeah get as much money as you can from them because they're dead milk them for everything right and the paralegal is the one that told us right like Diana Kaiser beautiful woman I mean just amazing woman
Starting point is 02:40:04 and so she I mean just scum of the earth people, right? So anyway, two days before my sentencing, I get all of Palazzo's files finally come. And my counselor stumped Taylor's like, look, dude, there's boxes like, you know, I was like, I need it. I'm representing myself. And he's like, man, I'm supposed to look through every one of these. He's like, let's just open them up. There was notebooks, three ring binders. And he's like, oh, man, just keep them, you know, like, which was a no-no? Because, you know, which was a no-no? you can make knives, everything out of the shit, right?
Starting point is 02:40:41 There's stealing them, everything. But you let me keep them in, um, I happen to have a single cell. So I get a bunch of those gray boxes. You know those gray boxes they give you for your legal shit? I'm buying them from people. I'm asking for more. I'm getting them from, I got four rows of them stacked to the ceiling, and I got them on the top bunk, stacked to the ceiling.
Starting point is 02:40:59 That's how much discovery I had for just that case, right? So, uh, I'm in my own cell. And I start reading it. And the first notebook, the very first notebook I pull out is wiretap transcriptions. But in the jacket, the little pocket on the front, there's an index. And what I know on the index is all the call numbers are not in orders. These are just the ones they translate and transcribed, you know, little whatever it is, the wiretap, the phone number, everything.
Starting point is 02:41:30 But the last entry is the last modified date. All of them were before. my first trial. And the government said that this wiretap wasn't relevant to my first trial. So I've got the trial. They've with, they've withheld evidence. Yeah. So I've got the trial transcripts and I'm comparing Mike's phone calls.
Starting point is 02:41:54 Now remember, there's 1,800 hours of phone calls with all these boxes of discovery. And, you know, I had like eight boxes just for the trial transcript. But I just got out of his testimony. His testimony was like this. It was two days. I was like, you know, so. I don't have a computer. There's no, like, you know, you're manually, like, reading,
Starting point is 02:42:12 and then you've got to find and read and find and this. And after time, I got much better at it because I remembered where everything was, but I'm just starting now. So I find three lies. And I go to court for sentencing, and they have 31 A, B, and C, which is a motion for new trial, new evidence, whatever, da, da, da, da, da, I know that already. And I'm like, yeah, I want to represent myself for sentencing. The judge is like, no, no, no, here.
Starting point is 02:42:38 No, closing arguments, oh, reason. I was like, I know, Ferretta, you got to let me do it. I understand the charge is against me. I'm doing this in my own free will, and I understand the consequences of a guilty verdict. So you got to let me do it. It's not up to you, Judge. Judge is like, I'm going to let you speak, but you're keep your lawyer. So I tell him, I'm like, hey, Your Honor, look, here's government generating material, wiretaps,
Starting point is 02:42:59 shows of witnesses we're lying on the stand on direct examination. Judge is like, okay. I was like, Your Honor, are you saying you won't even like, look at these. He's like, the record will stand on its own four corners. I said, Your Honor, this is government-generated bait stamp material that shows that the witnesses were lying on direct examination. And now I know he's being an asshole. And so I have three. I said, there's hundreds of these. Because I know he's being an asshole. Right. He's not going to look. But that's grounds for, you've already found guilty. That's grounds for an appeal.
Starting point is 02:43:35 Yeah. So, well, it's interesting. That, that interesting. part is very interesting actually and it's one of the things we can explain without spending 10 years on the legal background so anyway that the judge said you were in this court for the last year explaining to me why the rule of law doesn't apply to you i find it ironic that you want me to apply the rule of law to the government today when it suits you as i said the record will stand on its own four corners. So the appeal go, I get sentenced 30 years. The judge is like at sentencing, he's like, he's denied every motion I've ever made. Granted every government motion, everything, taking their word down the board. I didn't realize why he did this then, but this is what he did.
Starting point is 02:44:19 He said, sentence to 30 years, he had to give me 30 because if you have to stack the counts, you can only go to the low end of the guideline. And my counts were only 20 years each. You could stack them, but if you have to go over the statutory maximum to meet the guideline range, you can only do it to get to the low end of the range. So 360 was the sentence. I knew that going in. Three hundred sixty months. I'm 30 years.
Starting point is 02:44:41 So he, so then the appeal goes, he, oh, so he gives me 30 years and he says, and now I got a, I got a CC case that I'm looking at life down the hall with Judge Snyder. And he knows all about it. And he's like, on my own motion, I'm going to give Mr. Ziskin three years of supervised release instead of five. because if he gets out, he'll be of such an age, I think three years will be appropriate. And he did that just to protect his record. So he gave me two years off supervised release on his own motion. To protect his record, he had to give me something.
Starting point is 02:45:17 Otherwise, he's got a problem with a bias claim, right? Right. So he did that just for that to make that statement. My mom is crying. Like, it sounds like a, like an animal just has been stabbed through the, like, I'll never forget that, right? And I'm, you know, I'm like, this is bullshit. I'll be back on appeal next year.
Starting point is 02:45:38 I mean, loud talking shit. Even the LA Times article was like saying how disrespectful I was to the court just insanity, right? So anyway, the appeal goes in and the government, you know, my appeal attorney says, hey, this has got to be part of the record. Here's the wiretaps. Here's the lies. Duda. The government says, hey, those aren't in the record.
Starting point is 02:46:00 Mr. Ziske needs to wait for 2255 to argue this. You can argue on direct appeal. The reply from my attorney is, hey, the government lied, and they're looking to get a windfall because the standards of review for 2255 habeas corpus is much harder to breach than direct appeal. Right. Right. And so the government's getting a windfall for lying.
Starting point is 02:46:23 Right. The Ninth Circuit said, you're both wrong. By clear error analysis, the judge made clear error. when he refused to look at the evidence and make a finding. So we are giving a Rule 10-E remand back to the district court to put, now they already know what's in the transcripts and the phone, because we attach it as an exhibit, to put that in the record so that we can adjudicate that when the appeal comes up for argument. And they were powerless to do anything else unless I agreed at that point.
Starting point is 02:46:56 They had no jurisdiction to do anything else. well at the same time that I won that appeal that that was probably a year later after after I got sent a year and a half later after I got sentenced I've been fighting this other case representing myself and around the same time as the appeal ruling comes out I'd gotten and evidentiary hearing granted and what I did was is I was you know when I got in and I started representing myself the reason why was is I started asking people about these lawyers I said there's no way they're not going to the same Christmas party. There's no way they're not doing this because when you get a lawyer, they tell you shit like, hey, dude, if you hire me specifically because of me, I got this hand. I play golf with the judge. You know how many guys I've talked to where they're like, bro, I hired this attorney. Like he literally, he's friends with it. He plays golf with the judge and the U.S. attorney. It's like every single prosecutor or every single federal defense attorney out there must be playing golf. I don't know when the judges or U.S. attorneys have time to do
Starting point is 02:47:58 anything but play golf i mean that's how many i mean almost every one of them it's like bro that must be a running joke with these guys well that's why they're called dump trucks so anyway they tell you that right and then there's a system there's actually pattern and then you hire this dude and he comes in and he visits you oh you know we got this we're going to get this under control i got your check everything's great i got your discovery coming to me da da da da you you did the right thing i'm going to get you got a great case then then oh you know i was reading through their discovery. So there's a couple things I wasn't anticipating, but I'm going to have a come to Jesus
Starting point is 02:48:35 meeting with the prosecutor and let them know that I'm going to smash them if they don't give you a really good deal. So now from beating the case, you've just slightly transferred into getting a really good deal. And they basically string it all the way out until five years down the road, all your appeals are lost, and you're, and you've been dumped by a dump truck into prison, and you're acclimated to it already. And they were the ones that held your hand through the whole acclimation. process, knowing exactly what they were doing.
Starting point is 02:49:01 My scum of the earth. So anyway, I fired their attorneys. I'm representing myself now, and now I won an evidentiary hearing. Oh, so I wanted to know about them and their social things. So I asked, was there any paper, magazine, anything, and they had the Daily Journal. L.A. lawyers, this, that, social happenings cases, this said. That was worthless. But what comes in the Daily Journal every day, five days a week, is something called the Daily
Starting point is 02:49:27 Appellate Reports. I was reading all the appeal cases. I couldn't tell you procedure in court, but I can tell you what wins. Right, right? So everything in my mind is based on that, right? So anyway, and I'm watching and the other, so I went to the judge and I said to the judge in the second case,
Starting point is 02:49:47 I just basically wrote out an indictment the same way they do to us, right? And I said, but I used the best evidence rule. I said, Your Honor, based on the best evidence rule, I want to call the United States Attorney's Office to the stand so that they could tell us when they decided to tamper with a wiretap to protect witnesses to secure an illegal conviction against me. This is my first case. Right. I'm fighting into my second case. Government's first objection is, hey, he's fighting his appeal.
Starting point is 02:50:18 You have no jurisdiction here. That's an appeal issue. Da, da, da, this, that's everything. Judge looks at me and Mr. Ziskin. I said, Your Honor, no doubt about it. certainly helps my appeal, but the government is overlooking one thing. Those same witnesses are bringing brought as witnesses here for two of the three predicate offenses required for a finding of guilty on CCE.
Starting point is 02:50:38 She said, yes, and I said, and had these wiretaps been given to us in the proper amount of time, before they got on the stand, you would be instructing the jury that they'd already been found to be impeached before they testified one word to the jury. Now, all you're going to do is the standard Ninth Circuit jury warning to the jury. review their testimony with greater, greater, greater caution right before you give the case to the jury. So while this obviously is inconvenient to me, it appears to me that the government is trying to hoodwink the court by bringing disrepidable witnesses into your courtroom and packaging them as reputable. And that's why it's relevant to this case. The judge looks at me,
Starting point is 02:51:21 takes down to the last testimony. Okay, Mr. Ziskin, this is how this works. I am going to give you, you have to make a prima facie showing of these things. I'm going to give you the head of wiretaps, John Rakowski, and your case agent, Bill Weinhen, and we are going to have an evidentiary hearing, and you're going to do this step by step. Now, at the same time, I've been hitting them with the wiretap because I found a discrepancy on the, when they get a wiretap from a judge, they say, hey, Judge, we want to tap Matt Cox's phone because he's selling dope. And so they got, after they get that warrant with 30, 60, 90 days, whatever it is, they've got to make a 10-day report contemporaneously to the judge. Hey, judge, first 10 days, we had eight drug calls, and this was a total amount of calls,
Starting point is 02:52:10 and here's a summary of some of the drug calls, and we're making progress, right? So then when the wiretap's done, right, they have an optical disc, they hand it to, you know, they seal the original recording supposedly, according to Title III, and they give you a copy, and now you've got the wiretap, you have the 10-day reports, which are part of discovery, and you have something called line sheets, which are synopsuses. And then later you get the transcripts like I was talking about that I found in that notebook. Just so happened, they had all those transcripts before my first trial, so they knew that, right? So I'm telling the judge, look, Your Honor, here's what they told the judge,
Starting point is 02:52:44 and here's what we have in the actual wiretap on eight different days. There's 21 more calls minimized than there was during the 10-day report. Title III says you can't have equipment that can add, edit, alter, delete, or array. So, what's up? Now, I couldn't identify. I knew which calls it was, but I just know on eight days, there's 21 more call. I can't tell you which ones they f***ed with. But there's a problem on eight days with 21 calls, right?
Starting point is 02:53:10 So that's also happening at the same time that I make this motion, best evidence rule, da, da, da, da. So the government needs to be disqualified. Special prosecutor needs to be brought in because I intend to call them to stand under the best evidence rule. So it says, okay, evidentiary. So we get John Rakowski. we get a bill line ahead and we have an evidentiary hearing and uh we get the night before i'm in mdc we're in mdc we and tamer and tamers walking back and forth on the top tier i'm watching the game drinking pruno with the black dudes right because my cell was right there you know got along
Starting point is 02:53:43 with them good my boy joker from nutty block and and whack and tune and all these guys like they were fun guys i like sports right you know like that and it wasn't like die hard racism there time it was like a pretty lightweight floor compared to that i'd heard other stories but you know i was kind of you know my boy uh maurice brown dear dear friend of mine he's home now we used to play pinnuckle together win all the tournaments all that his black friends would get my pain with the white boy why you ain't win in the back for us and uh white dudes would be uh why you play it with the black down be like dude we win that's why i want the back you guys suck we're trying to win and he basically had the same attitude right he's home now and uh great guy anyway so and and he was actually helpful with
Starting point is 02:54:31 some other things that i did there as well um so anyway so we're in the evidentiary hearing and and uh and we get them on the stand and so night before yeah night before we're playing ball they're playing a game we're drinking prune own tamers hey bro i'm like what tea what's up and he's like bro are you going to write down some notes or questions or study or anything because we got our big day tomorrow right right right And he's, I was like, oh, I got a can't follow a cup of prune on my own. I was like, T, don't worry, dog. I'm going to shoot this one from the hip.
Starting point is 02:55:04 And like everybody knows, you know, because everybody in your unit knows when you have a big, everybody starts busting up, right? And he's like, storming back and forth. Anyway, next day we're in court in the morning. Now, I get unhandcuffed because I represent myself. Like the first time that happened, they didn't unhandcuff me. The judge came out and was like, why isn't he unhandcuff? You got leg orange, you got waist iron, he's representing himself in the market. Oh, he's a high security threat, da-da-da-da-da, king pen, all this bullshit, right?
Starting point is 02:55:35 And she leaves the bench. Her clerk comes out, and I heard this. You're going to take Mr. Siskins' handcuffs off before the judge comes back to the bench. And every time from here on out, when the judge comes to the bench, Mr. Siskins' handcuffs must be removed before she arrives, unless Mr. Siskin's does something to obstruct that and we're never going to have this conversation again and i'm sitting right there while she's telling the marshal that right like so they unhandcuff me and judge comes back and uh tamer's attorney's like hey do you want to go over these questions and da da da da da david chesnoff he's uh he was the mayor of Vegas's partner big time dope attorney he's
Starting point is 02:56:16 all right guy um anyway he he says hey questions that i go i go dav i don't have a pad. I'm shooting this one from the hip, but I need you to ask a couple questions. He's like, oh, I don't ask questions. I don't know the answer to him. I'm like, dude, you're going to fucking ask them. They're set up questions. I'm not telling you shit. Just to do, oh, what do you mean? I have to go after you to clean up whatever mess you make. Like, Dave, you work for Tamer. His family paid you. You're going to do what your, what my co-defendant tells you to do. You're the employee, not him. Well, Tamer's scam. this is the moment of truth up until this point it was all like you know oh yeah i'm riding with you
Starting point is 02:57:02 you know like t didn't rat he told me hey if there's a 1% chance that we legit i'm gonna ride with you if not kind of let me off the hook all of his family and and attorneys and everybody was like dude he's got 30 years right he's finished i'm a bad bet at that point i totally get it right like we talked about before i'm a horrible bet i'm never coming home that's the smart money And so Tamer gets in And if Lewis is really your friend He'll let you rat on him and go And you can go home
Starting point is 02:57:31 You can do more for him on the street So anyway Tamer one time Talk to me about it And he's like dude if we have a legit shot I don't care if it's one person I'm gonna ride with you But if you're just banging your head in the wall Because you're going out blaze of glory
Starting point is 02:57:44 And making your last Global statement Dude let me off the hook I promise I'll be here for you the rest of your life I was like T we got a shot and the thing that was really impressive about it from from tamer's perspective is tamer didn't have the experience like he'd worked with me like he was actually the one who said let's count the 10-day reports versus the minimizations let's see if we can nail this down a little bit let's
Starting point is 02:58:09 this thing because i'd i'd be excited six o'clock door would open i've been up all night studying i'm down at his door waking his ass up look what i found look what i found look right you know but that's the extent of it he hasn't had a lot of hearings he hasn't had anything right like he he doesn't know the law like i do it he hasn't been studying it he's been in a concentration camp old concentration camp in vux prison being held there for you know while he was fighting his extradition by the dutch and he said i said dude we got a shot and he believed me and rode with me and uh so anyway but this is the moment where you know right so and tamer's kind of handcuffed and he's kind of hunched down right he's at the legal table he's not behind the bar you know he's
Starting point is 02:58:51 He's there, right? He's kind of hunched down, and this is the moment. And Tamer, like, kind of, you know, yeah, yeah, Dave, just do what he says, da, da, da, da, da, right? And so I asked Dave to ask a couple questions about firmware, software protection, shit like that, right? So anyway, we get into a little bit more, a little bit more. Finally, it's time. Government's up there, you know, John Rakowski, head of wiretaps for the DEA. And he's, hey, hey, questions, is that the other thing, right?
Starting point is 02:59:18 And he asked the questions I wanted to ask. And then he really didn't get anything out of him. And I was like, okay, I'm cross. The judge lets me up there, right? I get up there and I'm kind of just beating around the bush. I'm like, hey, you know, software protections, like, you know, you can't add, edit, alter, delete, or erase. He's like, yeah.
Starting point is 02:59:37 I was like, Title III says you can't have equipment that can add, edit, alter, delete, or erase. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the hardware is capable, but the software isn't? that the software is like a firmware that protects against it being used like that, right? He's like, yeah, that would be accurate. So I'm making a note in my head, that's already a problem for Title III. You can't have it. It doesn't matter if you have a software protection.
Starting point is 03:00:00 You can't have it. It's clear as day. So anyway, I say, now, I'm running around MDC for the last year, and everybody that has an Arabic wiretap around the same time as this case. And I found a few people, believe it or not, I'm buying their line sheets. that that's the line sheet is the summary of the call the date and time of the call if the call was minimized who the monitor was and and where the time of the minimization was plus a short synopsis so I'm buying their line sheet so I'm like oh yeah so software protection like you can't add at
Starting point is 03:00:33 an altered delete or erase yeah yeah yeah I was like oh yeah here can I approach and I bring him some evidence and I was like yeah like you know monitor I was like what is that he's like oh this the line sheet. I was like, oh, what's that? Oh, that's the day. Oh, what's this? Oh, oh, that's the monitor code. Oh, does each monitor have a different code? Yeah. I was like, oh, so that's part of like your software protections. Like, you know, monitor can only listen to one call at a time, right? He's like, yeah. And so then I said, oh, can you look at these? He says, yeah, I was like, what's the monitor code on those? Can you look at the date in time? So is that a monitor listening to more than one call at the same time? It appears
Starting point is 03:01:14 so well i guess your software protections ain't working dude right pandemonium it's like a scene government's objecting right my dad i heard him like all our friends family news is there right this is a big hearing my dad i hear him like about four sentences before he's like i know my son something's up he's tricking him right now like i can hear him right so i say so i guess that software protections aren't working da da da da pandemonium government's objecting questioning whether it's real or not me, when all this is going on, I turn around and I went like this to the audience and stuck out my tongue and my mom's like, turn around, turn around, everybody's laughing. It's like going crazy, right? I do a little bow. I turn around. The government's like,
Starting point is 03:02:02 Your Honor, we don't even know that this is real. I was like, Your Honor. She's like, okay, okay, we're off the record. We're going to continue and I'm like, Judge, I'm willing to plead guilty to the sheet if that stuff's fake let's just continue the hearing and if that's fake i'll be guilty of everything at the end of the day right judge is like i already made my ruling we're going to have a you know we're going to give the government of continuance to validate the veracity of the evidence that you've provided right but they're smashed at this point i mean not only for my case but potentially other cases that they use this t2s machine on and and we could spend six hours just talking about the defined mechanics of how this all came to be.
Starting point is 03:02:45 But the legal stuff is probably boring. But anyway, so a bunch of different things happened. And that's what happened. And that's what broke the case wide open. Then we go back a week later, right? And we're done with Radkowski and we get Bill Linehan, the case agent on this. And same shit. Same argument with Chesnov, even after that.
Starting point is 03:03:06 Like, he's embarrassed now that I did that. And it wasn't him, right? So anyway, he's like, hey, it's a. Like, hey, I go, dude, you're going first. Just leave me alone. At this point, I'm just like, you know, get away from me, right? Just do your job because that's all you're good at and you're not good at it, right? But that's your strong suit.
Starting point is 03:03:24 So go ahead and do that. Anyway, he gets up there. He gets the guy to admit that he didn't sign the affidavit on one of the affidavits. I'm like, that doesn't mean shit. Right. You're allowed to telephonically authorize. Yeah, I got him to do it. And this is what lawyers do all the time.
Starting point is 03:03:38 They act like you've got an issue when they know full. that you have no issue this is the dump truck thing they just keep stringing you and walk even the best ones right so anyway i get up there and i'm like taking rec i'm trying to take uh bill lina hana part as like being just unprofessional right i'm looking towards trial now i'm not even thinking that i'm gonna score any more points in this evidentiary hearing right now i'm like oh you know oh you train this you don't take it seriously oh oh do you do you do you You are current on your training? I really had nothing for this dude.
Starting point is 03:04:15 The case agent really didn't have while my meet was with the technical wiretap. And so anyway, I'm done. And the government says redirect. The judge looks at her and says, maybe you want to leave it alone. The judge can't help. Like what the fuck, dude? And she says, no, no, no. We want to redirect.
Starting point is 03:04:40 And she gets up there and she's like, oh, and you do this. And you listen to the calls and you do that. I listen to all the calls. And I, that is that. Dude, Chesnoff misses it. She's not even done. I'm like, recross. You know?
Starting point is 03:04:54 Just like, we'll get to you, Mr. Z. Anyway, prosecutor's done. It's Chesnov's turn. I'm recross. She's like, Mr. Zesnoff. And he's like, no, no, I'm okay, recross. Like, I'm like, welcome back Cotta with my hands. I'm like, I got to get in.
Starting point is 03:05:10 there right so anyway i get up there and i'm like beating around the push for them again i'm like oh yeah so you do some training you do target training you're you're a federal officer right you have arrest powers uh that means you're also an officer of the court by definition right i was like didn't i see you somewhere before like you were on you were in my last trial he's like yeah yeah yeah i was like what were you doing there he's like well those are my witnesses i have to make sure that everything's good and i was like oh oh so you're watching their testimony you're like yeah i was like i was like did you have any training around that time Are you current with all?
Starting point is 03:05:39 I kept going back to that because that was really the only thing I had to push them to the left, right? Like, objection, badgering the witness. I'm like, oh, so you listen. So as part of this case, you listen to some of the costs. You're like, I listen to all the calls. 1,800 hours? Here's where I got. I said, so you are a currently trained and certified federal agent in good standing with employees that fall.
Starting point is 03:06:08 your direction underneath you and you listen you're the lead case agent in the large sexy case in united states history and as part of your investigation during your investigation you listen to all the calls and as as part of your continuing job you were in trial with uh you were at my last trial where i suffered a conviction watching the witnesses on the stand and he said yeah now by now all these lies had come out because i've had time i found you know 53 solid lies between their trial transcript and the wire time. So I looked at him and I said, well, I just don't understand why an officer in good standing with arrest powers didn't arrest them on the spot for lying in court if you listen to all the calls.
Starting point is 03:06:55 Right. Well, they were hit. Objection, objection, objection. Judge is like, I wasn't expecting this at all. I couldn't believe the dude said he listened to all the calls. If you listened to all the calls, how did you let them testify to that? They were lying, more than 53 times. And, you know, he's stumbling, and the judge is like, you'll answer the question that government's objecting and da-da-da-da-da-da, and this and that.
Starting point is 03:07:19 Anyway, then the judge says, well, I'm going to ask for a brief on sanctions. I'm like, oh, I want a brief sanction. She's like, Mr. Ziskin, you can brief sanctions. Everybody gets to brief sanctions. Okay, so I get to do my own brief on sanctions. Yeah, I don't even know what. Right. I haven't studied the sanctions part yet, but I'm like, this.
Starting point is 03:07:38 sounds good you know so anyway then uh the government um comes over and they're like hey let's talk and i was like okay i tell tamer's attorney and the friend the judge had appointed a friend of the court attorney who i wouldn't let anywhere near me this whole time so comes over and they're like well uh you know we should talk about a deal and da da da da da do you give you you know and i was like i ain't talking to you i already got 30 years right they're like no no we can work out some global thing da-da-da-da-da-do this that the other thing and anyway so my appeal attorney chuck sevia i had him talk to them and they offered me 20 for everything remember i already got 30 i'm facing life and then the appeal comes back like literally crazy like in the same week period these
Starting point is 03:08:21 evidentiary hearings are happening the appeal comes back to tennie remand right so i'm i'm back in court on that i got this going on we're putting this smash down and uh so anyway they're we'll give them 20 for everything no 17 i have for everything no 15 a half no further prosecutions didn't want to take it chuck sends me some case law one of them where the misconduct's not as bad as mine credit fraud the guy got dismissed with prejudice never spent a day in jail the other the other two cases were big drug cases where the misconduct was worse than mine believe it or not and those dudes are still in and he's like look you still have to win an appeal and two trials yeah you and no further prosecution so i'm
Starting point is 03:09:04 I'm like, I finally take it. How long have you been locked up at this point? About three years. So I'm doing the calculation drug program, good time. I'm thinking I could go straight to a camp. Okay. I was going to say, you're under 10 years. You're about nine years.
Starting point is 03:09:17 Yeah, right? Yeah, eight and a half is how I had it calculated, right? Like, I don't know if I was counting the seven days that they were, that they've been giving us forever, right? Did you guys have that same shit? Like, oh, they're going to count it. The 54 days is not really, we're getting those days back retroactively. That started from my first day in jail. I heard that all the way up to my last day in jail, right?
Starting point is 03:09:38 So that was happening. You know, so I calculated at one point I came up with eight and a half years. Okay. Take the deal. I'm out on the rec court again and Tamer comes outside and he's got this horrible look on his face. I'm playing basketball. He's like, hey, bro, they're trying to take me to trial. They're not giving me the deal.
Starting point is 03:10:00 And I'm thinking, okay, 15 and a half no further prosecutions. that means tamer's getting the same thing right right anyway they said no we're taking you a trial we're going to give you you know 20 30 40 50 years whatever we can't right like they're they're taking them to the box so i get on the jail phone i call david chesnoff his attorney and i go look you know they have that they have a four-digit code on the phone yeah i'm on this phone at this time so they can look it up if they don't give tamer the same deal i'm not going to plead guilty next week now i had moved i had moved i had to withdraw all the pending motions that I had when I took the deal. And I read enough appeals.
Starting point is 03:10:38 I was like, listen, I ain't having two sentencings. You're moving my CCE case to my first case judge. I'm getting one sentencing. That's only one criminal history, by the way. They can't make it two cases now. And also, I'm not getting stuck in an appeal where some judge didn't agree with the deal. And we're going to do this one time, right? And so we'd had to do that, right? Now, I couldn't move the first case over to Christina Snyder because she didn't have jurisdiction. That was back on appeal only to Judge Liu. So my second case went over to Judge Lou. And so I'd withdraw on all my motions.
Starting point is 03:11:11 I had a motion about the Global Millennium Copyright Act. I had a motion about, hey, the government can't use a computer if I can't. And the government equal playing field, this, that, all kinds of shit I was taking apart on getting better and better. So anyway, they take my deal. I have to reinstate all my motions. And I had one motion that was a real, real, real problem for them. And it's according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the hard drive in their T2S2 system is the original recording.
Starting point is 03:11:42 The optical discs that they make copies of all the different wiretaps on is a copy. Title III requires them to bring the original recording of any wiretap to the judge for sealing. They didn't do that. Well, they didn't bring the hard drive. They brought an optical disc, which is actually according to their own law in two days. thousand digital million copyright act that is a copy right it's not the not the original recording so they got a problem right so anyway um after three weeks they cave they gave same or the same deal and but you know i couldn't leave my boy he didn't rat on me i couldn't leave him there i
Starting point is 03:12:17 couldn't right you know so we kind of saved each other we beat the prisoner's dilemma together i mean he's you know without him there's no me you know the prisoner's dilemma is Who came up with the prisoner's dilemma? It was a guy in the movie, Beautiful Mind, right? Isn't it? Yeah, I think so. I'm not sure. Yeah, it's where, like, if you have two prisoners and, you know, one of them cooperates,
Starting point is 03:12:42 he goes home right away, and then, but if you, but if they both go, like, to trial, they get this much time, but if one of them doesn't cooperate, then the other one gets, you know, there's a whole dilemma, but the really, you know, the fact is, is, look, let's face it, I have to be scared as a prisoner. whole time. He's going to cooperate. Yeah. But I can talk right now. I go home. He's going to do. Right. He's going to do four years. Whoever rats first goes home first. Right. And if you don't rat, there's no guarantee that you're ever going home. Right. And if you don't rat, the only way that you could potentially
Starting point is 03:13:15 go home is if the other guy doesn't rat also and then you win. Right. And that's a lot of faith to take. Yeah. A lot of faith to take in someone. And there was a movie called A Beautiful Mind where the guy, the guy who did that Russell Pro. player to mathematician, super famous mathematician, the Nobel Prize or was it? And it also has schizophrenia and it's an amazing movie, but he has all of these, you know, these different, you know, theories that they come up with, right? All these different, you know, mathematical problems. And that's the one like he wins like the, I think, whatever, I don't know if it's Nobel Prize or the yeah, he ends up winning it for that one.
Starting point is 03:13:59 It's actually kind of comical when they come and they present him with, they explain what's happening and everything. He's like, you like that one, huh? That's the one. But they use it for game theory, too. Like,
Starting point is 03:14:10 that's the big thing is that the calculation or the, the equation is used in all kinds of different game theory, you know, for, you know, playing, whatever, for playing video games and all kinds of stuff.
Starting point is 03:14:23 Like, it's super amazing, which it's kind of a basic, simple thing. But anyway, so, all right. So anyway,
Starting point is 03:14:29 I would have failed the, I mean, there's just, the amount of trust that you have to have in someone, fuck. I've seen, I just see too many people roll over on everybody, everybody. Of course, you're in the same jail, prison with him. He's telling you what's going on. Well, they kept us separated at first. They tried to have a separation order. They didn't want to put us together.
Starting point is 03:14:51 They were really pressing him. You know, and they offered him to sign 20 years when they extradited him. He landed at LAX with the marshals. offered him 20 on the spot and then in the end after a year and a half of contentious fighting do you know how it was for the government to have him to give him 15 and a half when he offered to sign 20 and they said no when he landed he said I'll sign it right now they said oh we want this this this this and this and he said no but he offered him a flat 20 right so he got the same exact thing you got he got the same exact thing I got now
Starting point is 03:15:29 I thought last night you said he had gotten like a little bit lower got less. But he did less because what happened was is when they raided his house, these dump there's a bunch of cash. And dump a federal dump a, he says it was X amount of money. Then federal dump B says it's this amount of money. So these two dumps right, right? They gave him a k, he ended up with a quorum nobis and and it was funny because Chesnoff, his lawyer, the whole time when we're telling me, hey, they temper with a wire.
Starting point is 03:15:59 tap. They did this. They did that. When he's representing Tamer in court, he's always saying, oh, my client, he's distancing himself as much as he can. And when we brought this issue up to him, he said, oh, Tamer, I'll let you know when they decide to give Arab dope dealers back their money. Until then, this is just a waste of time. So Tamer gets this jailhouse lawyer, Pete Haller, another great guy, big dude out of Canada, nice guy. He helps him. You know, when we're in lawpock, and they file it. Eight years later, you know, he finally gets the answer and they bring him back to court and they had to let him go. So they, you know, they dragged his court out for two years.
Starting point is 03:16:38 He's back in NBC again, right? And so they got to let him go because otherwise they got to cut him a check for 400 grand plus interest tax free of the cleanest money in the world. That's not going to happen. Right. Right. So they got to let him go. So he got out a couple years before me because of that. Okay.
Starting point is 03:16:55 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and then you, you got out. Then I got out, and I got out in 2000 and actually right out of here, out of Coleman. Oh, yeah, yeah. I did the drug program there. 2000. When did you get out? 2012.
Starting point is 03:17:12 Okay, I was going to say, yeah, because we figured out that we were actually at Coleman the same time. He was in the drug program, and, you know, because I had heard, um, um, I, I, I, I, I, I, We have a mutual friend, and I just remember Ziskin, Ziskin, right? Like, the name's suck with me. I don't know. I've never met anybody else with that name. But the other thing is that when Lewis sent me an email, no, or maybe it was Instagram, I checked his Instagram, and he has a big, a Jewish star right here on his chest.
Starting point is 03:17:52 My buddy, my buddy Shannon, they call him Turk, has the same. Yeah, yeah. He was in my unit. Right. And I was like, I was like, man, Turk's the same, same thing. And then I went, and that, you know what? I said, Turk has told me about that. That's where I remember.
Starting point is 03:18:11 That's why I remember the name. I wouldn't be shocked if I actually did meet you. Probably. Turk was big on, let me introduce you to my buddy so-and-so. I know one time I actually went, they snuck me in the drug program for a going away party. And I went in there, they were having pizza and everything. And these guys, like, they're like, bro, he's not supposed to, guys are, he's not supposed to be in here. He's not.
Starting point is 03:18:31 And the guy's like, it's all right, calm down. It's fine. It's fine. Like, but to me, when I was in the drug program, oh, so many people would have snitched you out. Oh, yeah. I was at a really good team because they, they didn't. Nobody got in trouble for me going in there. But anyway.
Starting point is 03:18:44 Yeah. But that's where I must have, that's where I kind of put it together. And so I, and then he told me, oh, I was there at the same time. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then, you know, come home. I mean, you can get into all the stupid shit parole.
Starting point is 03:18:57 this that what probation whatever um you know had a couple friends of mine gave me jobs i was able to do you know i was like i was going to cochella was in the halfway house oh yeah yeah i was going to europe you know i mean i was because it was work i actually got a paycheck there so they had to honor the you know they're they have a problem when they have a big fine on you if you have a legitimate paying job even if it's out of the country if they refuse to allow you to earn if you can prove that it's valid, they can no longer collect on a fine because they're stopping you from making money. Yeah, I had to get special permission to go to Amstram. Because, and that was their argument was, our argument to the judge was, look, like, one, they had to let me get a passport,
Starting point is 03:19:40 and two of my charges are passport fraud. Yeah. And I've had false passwords. And so that's, my provisional officer was like, I don't think he's going to let you. Like, that's a big deal, you know, you. And the, and then she's like, I'm going to make the argument for you that this is how you're paying your restitution. It's for work. It's legitimately for work. And he let me go. He let me go to Amber. Well, because they open the fund to collateral attack if they stop you from earning. See, I didn't know that. I didn't know all that. And in that case, I wish they'd stopped me. Yeah. She has stopped me before from going to one of my probation officer stopped, didn't allow me to go to Atlanta one time. Only time I've ever never not been allowed to travel. So the probation officer
Starting point is 03:20:21 doing that is not enough to collateral attack the fine. You would have to be-to-the-court. Everything the probation officer does, you can take to the court. You can go to the court yourself and say, hey, I need to go. Now, if the court stops you from earning a legitimate living that gives you the ability to pay the fine, then the fine is open to now collateral attack. Okay. So they're just never going to fuck with that.
Starting point is 03:20:45 Yeah, yeah. Oh, she's always told me, she's like, I'll let you go anywhere for work. Yeah. You know, it's always like when I got married, I was like, yeah, she's going on a honeymoon. I was like, yeah, she's just let me know where. She said, because I have to, you know, and I was like, oh, I like to think about going out of the country. And she's like, yeah. So.
Starting point is 03:21:03 So then, you know, I'm off to prison. I think I'm going to go to camp after I finally get this deal. And, you know, they sentenced me. I'm on the bus really quick. They wanted me out of the building. Like, the whole building is going crazy at this point because we. represent i represented myself with they considered a win yeah even like i could do 12 years still 13 years whatever it's going to end up being but like the building's going crazy there's a rash of
Starting point is 03:21:30 people now representing themselves like it's you know they wanted me out of there like we'd be on the elevator you know you're on the elevator and it opened on other floors and people would see there as this can like they just you know there was there was another story that was pretty funny like when I was representing myself sys comes around for the inspection every week right and they tell me they're like hey you know you got them we're gonna open a room for everybody's legal stuff and it'll be locked in there and the cop will get it for you anytime you want and most people just take their legal shit they got lawyers whatever they don't care right you know it's kind of like you know how the government takes freedoms now it's such a small thing each time that everybody
Starting point is 03:22:11 doesn't say anything right like until one day we'll wake up and it's not america anymore um but anyway so i'm like no you know i'm okay you know i've said whatever right next week comes i hadn't done it he's like no you're you got to do this we're going to write you up they write me up still anyway woodring this cocksucker a w and i forgot the there was the sys dude who actually i mean he's an asshole but he wasn't bad you know what i mean like there's some that are just viciously They want to fuck with you. Like, this dude was just a general asshole because of his job.
Starting point is 03:22:51 He was desensitized. I think it was Temez was his name. But he wasn't actually a bad dude. Even the morning I was leaving, he was like, he was down in Arndy. And he's like, look, man, you're going to the pen. That was the first time I heard I'm going to the pen, right? He's like, so, you know, you're white. You click up with the white, da-da-da-da, this, that the other thing, right?
Starting point is 03:23:08 Like, almost out of, like, concern. Like, it was legitimate, like, hey, you know. what because what happened was there was a few cops in mdc who were like nice job man right anyway so this they come by the third week and it's woodering into mez and they're like uh you know if you don't put your stuff in there then uh you're going to shoe and i got a cell right in front the black tv everybody's sitting around you know da da da and i go i go i don't care but i'm notifying you now that i intend to call you witnesses to back up my opening statement which is going to be that when I chose to represent myself,
Starting point is 03:23:46 that the federal government separated me from my legal work and put me in the shoe because I wouldn't give it up. So maybe you want to call whoever the fuck it is you call and see if you want to do this. This is the AW and the headless IS dude. In the unit, loud enough for everybody to hear.
Starting point is 03:24:00 Now they push me out in the hallway. Right, I'm handcuffed. They pushed me out in the hallway, but I see them on the uniform. Two minutes later, uncuff me, put me back in the unit. All right. That was, I mean, so like the legend
Starting point is 03:24:13 in prison started to grow from like that kind of shit you know like actually the whole time i was in i was doing that they put me in the shoe oh you can't get magazines because people put them over the lights oh no actually the policy statement is that you can't put them over the lights and if somebody does put them over the lights you can give them an incident report and punish them but you can't deny magazines because something might happen you have a disciplinary protocol that you have to perform so they had to give everybody in the shoe magazines right i did the same thing with visits. I did the same thing with, hey, why is the commissary list so restrictive? There's no security reason for it. And actually, I'm in administrative detention. And you have
Starting point is 03:24:52 to do the minimum, not the maximum. So why can I only get Snickers and Butterfinger? I should have a choice of every candy bar. Right. And they had to do that, right? Like, so every time they, by now, I'm really good at this shit. So everywhere I go, right? Like, it's like that. Anyway, later on, out of T.I. And Woodring becomes the warden there. And, uh, and, uh, you know, he threw me out of there. And they totally changed the points on my thing. They put me up. They sent me to Victorville Medium 1, which was crazy. Um, well, anyway, so when I first get to prison, I get to the lawn park. I'm on the bus, right? And when you get to Longpock, the camp is right across the street. Like here on this side of the street is the camp looks real nice, no fence, people walking
Starting point is 03:25:33 around. And then the other side is the pen. And it's like these concrete, buildings with like rusted out bars over the windows looks like a nuclear fallout shelter the grass isn't green in between the building and the fences i mean totally different thing over there nice green looks like a park almost over here looks like nuclear fallout shelter and the cop on the bus is like don't look over there is this skin you ain't ever going there you're going here so anyway now i'm scared to death right because you know when you're at mdc for three years you're hearing all these stories from dudes in the pen this one this this one that da da you're Dude, I was scared fucking shitless.
Starting point is 03:26:10 What did I get myself into? So I'm walking in, going to R&D, da, da, da, da, da, right away, I see a Mexican kid. Now, when the Mexicans had had a ride at Terminal Island with the blacks, like, I don't know, a few months before, a bunch of them ended up in MDC, and one of my ex-cellies was there. So he asked me to send him cigarettes through the toilet. So I got him a bunch of cigarettes, send him cigarettes, and a bunch of shit through the toilet. Well, I see that same kid, Prime from 38 when I, when I, when I. gets a wampock. He works in R&D. So he's letting everybody know that I'm there.
Starting point is 03:26:41 I don't even realize how many people I know there, but three years of people who went locally to the pen, like, I know a ton of people there. So I get into the unit. Oh, first I'm telling the counselor, I'm like, at intake, I'm like, oh, you guys have made a mistake. Are we good? I mean, that'll be in the background a little bit.
Starting point is 03:27:01 If we wait, we got to wait for, we wait five minutes, it'll be going to three minutes. It'd probably be gone. No problem. They drive these little models. I didn't even know what I sound was just, yeah, rambling. Sorry. No problem.
Starting point is 03:27:10 I feel like they mow every day. That's what I was saying earlier. I was like they, they're mowing something edging somethings every single day. Yeah. You know, and then what's even funny is that when these kids get home probably three or four days a week, the kids get home next door, they have a trampoline. And they're little kids, a little eight, seven, eight, nine-year-old little girls. And on the weekend, it's in non-sight. It's like, oh, my God.
Starting point is 03:27:36 This is insane. I mean, it's just, when they got that, it, listen, for the first week that they got the trampoline, it was, I don't know how these kids, I don't know how they did it. I mean, it was like 15 hours a day from the early in the morning all the way until like 10.30 at night. You could walk in the back and see them, boom, boom. And their balls. Trampolines are fun, though. Yeah, they've got, but I mean, the exhaustion, like, but they're little kids. then the balls are constantly
Starting point is 03:28:07 they're constantly throwing with balls over the fence so Boziac every day is throwing at least one or two balls back over the fence he's like I feel like they're fucking with me I feel like they're doing this on purpose you know all right they're not this guy, look he's just
Starting point is 03:28:22 no I'm just saying it's like he's coming up to the window on purpose it's purposefully directed at you well it's funny is Hillmo and then in 10 minutes from now somebody now somebody's going to edge that's why I'm so ready to go get like a
Starting point is 03:28:42 house on like an acre and just build a studio it'd be nice and quiet you know either your next your nearest neighbors 500 feet away or something I thought a friend of mine does like this stuff for like
Starting point is 03:28:56 art stuff right and he got a storage unit and soundproofed it and that's where he does all his recording Oh, for, oh, yeah, I don't know, you need AC, you need, I mean, I could get it off-site. Well, in L.A. It's not the same as Tampa. No. You could get by without climate control there, right?
Starting point is 03:29:17 Yeah. Except for a couple months in the summer. Yeah. No, yeah, you couldn't possibly hear. But, yeah, well, it doesn't matter. We're going to look. I mean, I'm either going to sign another lease in six, five, six months from now, or I'm going to, we're going to start looking. As soon as they get a probation, we've decided, like, we're just going to hit it for,
Starting point is 03:29:34 two, you know, whatever, hit it for a month or two, and we'll know, can we get a place or can't we? If not, I'll have to sign at the lease, and then a year from now, the entire economy will have collapse. Things will be more reasonable. Maybe. If there's no World War III.
Starting point is 03:29:50 Maybe. And there's a bunch of ifs going on, I know. There is a bunch of ifs. But there always is. Yeah, I know. That's what you noticed, like, nothing stopped. Nobody's hoarding or anything like that. It's, we were closer to disaster, you know, probably four, four years ago that we were, you know, now when it was, um, well, now I think the big problem is everybody's in their credit cards at a record rate.
Starting point is 03:30:16 Yeah. And the debt ratio is just worse than it's ever been. And, and failures, like in the last quarter, there was like, they were like, the failure rate for, you know, like late payments, 60, 90 days late, are starting to soar. Yeah. And so you know something coming. I just, you know. of the banks are in trouble too they're covering it oh yeah it's a mess there's issues what is this guy doing he never stops i don't um um but yeah we can do a little bit about prison keep in mind we
Starting point is 03:30:48 still have you still have to go over the the covid thing yeah yeah yeah yeah so let's just do that a little bit we'll move into the COVID I'll move into after prison drop in houses and then COVID. What's the last thing that you're just talking about in person? That would be nowhere to pick up at? Well, I told you guys the tangent story about the AW and how I got kicked out of terminal line and then I pulled back to you know, hey, I got to the pen and I'll tell you how we navigated through that and then and then we can jump into post-prison shit and should be able to wrap up maybe even a little bit early. What time is? o'clock and then we'll probably need I mean at least
Starting point is 03:31:35 probably 15 minutes of the Patreon stories with the out and the back horse chick and AC and Thailand I've knocked down from prison to prison well and there's he's got a story about driving a truck load between where they pull him out so that could be part of that story yeah truck load there's a truck
Starting point is 03:31:51 load a couple times did it was actually a car station wagon that was the trip without the the three stories worries something will probably be another 20 minutes or so yeah every time they go I'm like okay this is like Monday it's like they must just know on Mondays but then it's like yeah the problem is they'll tomorrow they'll rate road they'll come it'll be his yard and then the next day it'll be his yard oh it's Florida it's tough to
Starting point is 03:32:25 convince people to be green you should tell them to get an electric mower The biggest scam ever The electric car scam Powered by coal plants Yeah But it's clean energy What do you think I think we'll be good
Starting point is 03:32:42 Okay So then you know I'm in the pen Right away when I get there I have my first shot of white lightning You know before I even get my bunk I'm supposed to move in with this white dude who's a junkie And I see Big Joe
Starting point is 03:32:58 From Allie Boys Who's you know he's a big dude in the Mexican hierarchy thing and he'd actually taught me how to play pinnacle because we were held in Glen Helen, San Bernardino together and we get taken to court together and the first time we didn't say anything to each other the second time he's like man you must be somebody
Starting point is 03:33:15 I was like what do you mean he's like what you get the same security as me right you're what's up and then we started talking and then he taught me how to play pinnacle and so we were playing pinnacle together and there and then you have a CC the CCE, right? Yeah, yeah, but then I have both cases.
Starting point is 03:33:35 Like I was going to court on the first case at that time. Anyway, so, anyway, I get to the unit in Lompong, and I see my friend Little Man from Bryant Street there. He was with me at MDC. I see a bunch of other guys. Prime brings me over, you know, Marlboro Reds, right? Which is like, dude, they sell them still at the store there, but people will buy Marlboros for $7 a pack versus everybody else
Starting point is 03:33:59 that's buying the plane wrap ship for two that's like a thing in prison right and for them to be giving it as a gift is like so people are looking now like wait who the fuck is this dude right right and then I know all these people and like everybody's like cool with me and I'm like just starting to relax and
Starting point is 03:34:15 and little man walks over me and goes hey dude the dude they want to put you in the cell with is a dope fiend you know you want I got a boy over here little Joe it turned out to be big Joe's brother he's got an open cell.
Starting point is 03:34:31 I think he should move in with him instead. You don't want to live with a junkie here. And I was like, okay, so I went to a white dude who had the unit, Frenchie, and I was like, hey, you're cool with this, da-da-da-da-da. And he's like, yeah, bro, if you know what you're doing, I'm cool with it. I mean, you know, hey, teach his own. I mean, thanks, you know, for showing the respect and asking.
Starting point is 03:34:49 And da-da-da-da-da-da. So I'm like, all right. Cool. So I move in with little Joe. And, you know, over the next few weeks, So I'm kind of, you know, little Joe really schooled me about how shit works in the penitentiary. And so I'm minding, you know, doing all that. I'm working out and doing my burpees and pull-ups and enjoying the yard because after you've been in MDC for three years to get out where there's actually a big yard and softball and shit, that feels like your home almost, right?
Starting point is 03:35:18 Crazy as it sounds because the amount of freedom is so much higher. And I understood, I saw the economics of prison right away. And you see guys who need Western Union, you see guys who need stamps, you see guys who need dope, you see guys who steal out of the kitchen, you see guys who do haircuts, guys who have stores, guys who do gambling books, this, that, and they all have different money transfer requirements. And the tribute that's paid up by, you know, let's say, a regular Serenio Mexican, when he brings in three balloons of heroin, he's got to kick one upstairs to the old men, right? And so they end up with thousands. thousands of books of stamps.
Starting point is 03:35:59 Stamps are the currency in prison, right? So at that time, it was $5 for a book of stamps. That means it's worth $4 on the yard and goods and services, gambling, stolen tomatoes out of the kitchen, onions, whatever, commissaries that are in the unit that charge 150% of what the commissary charges. These are like, so that's your walking around money, right? So they get thousands of them, but, you know, they have wives and girlfriends and this and that. And so they need what's called street to street money. money cash money on the street going to somebody else cash money on the street that's the most valuable commodity so what we're able to do is we would buy oh you got um bob you got 2 000 books
Starting point is 03:36:40 of stamps black bob was uh black bob and gotto were like the top mexican dudes there and uh say a thousand books of stamp bob's i'll take all your books of stamps uh your you know your girl have the money fedex within two days um but i'll take them for two dollars a piece of piece instead of four bulk discount cash for cash to the right so that margin allowed us to operate everything else somebody needed money on their account we could put it somebody needed stamps we could put it i would take i here's 100 books of stamps that cost me 200 i would give it to my friends and say here's a 300 dollar list and they'd go to the store and ask people hey are you buying stamps today buy these for four instead of pay those for five get me two snickers in this and that but it's a time intensive
Starting point is 03:37:26 It takes a lot of work, but when you give somebody a hundred bucks in prison, that's life-changing economy. So they were super happy to do that. So we were cycling everything through. We basically centralized the banking for Lompoc, no different. Like you got Zell, you got cash app, you got all these different ways of doing money now in the world, right? You got transfer wise.
Starting point is 03:37:47 You got a bank wire. You got, you know, ATM, you got all these things, right? So we kind of brought that all under one house with the same mentality of like the more transactions there are the better for everybody right so once we did that like we became friends with them i i'd be out if gotto or bob came out in the morning which didn't happen all the time you know i'd walk the track with them in the afternoon i used to play back in with carmire persico's you know he's like louis you're so smart if you would just stop putting hurdles in front of yourself you could lead the race from the beginning to the end instead of having to catch up from behind and i'm like yeah but
Starting point is 03:38:23 it's fun catching people when they think you can't and he's like that's your problem you got to stop that shit you know i used to beat that old man's ass and back out no day i love no death he never gave me a bad piece of advice ever in fact when i left lompoc and i was going to turmoil island he told me he said hey stay away from my people they're no good right like he was great guy real nice to my dad in the visiting room when his family would come visit like always when i It was way he made me, you know, he made this pasta with these clams. One time I'd have lobster in it. I don't know how the fuck that happened, right?
Starting point is 03:39:01 Like, it would always send me a bowl, this and that. I mean, guy was a great guy. Had a great time with them. But hanging out with those guys, like, you know, the main Mexican dudes, the main black dudes, the main white dudes, like, that set me up for the rest of my time where I really didn't have problems with anybody else. So I get to Terminal Island, for example. and the AB is having their,
Starting point is 03:39:24 the brand's having their RICO trial, T.D. and Barry and all those dudes they're holding them in the shoe in Terminal Island. So Bobby Ray, who had the yard, I get a kite from Lompoc, somebody comes in, and Bobby Ray, hey, my homeboys are down there and, you know, can you make sure they get cigarettes and this and that? I was like, sure.
Starting point is 03:39:42 What I didn't realize, which I should have at that time, is that meant that I had the yard for the whites. Right. So me and this Scotty Scanlan, the skinhead dude, who me and him were actually He was very smart. I had a lot of great conversations with him. We used to walk the track together. So he explained, you know, it was me and him.
Starting point is 03:40:00 We were running the yard, making sure they get cigarettes, this and that. Anyway, Woodring, the AW from MDC, who I wouldn't put my shit away from, he becomes warden and throws us in the shoe and da-da-da-da. So I'm in the shoe with those guys for like four months, you know, like every day. So you're like talking to them and this and that once in a while. They try to keep you separated. But every now and then one of them still out on the yard. when they take you to yard like for that the dog run yard right so meet them dudes and anyway then i go to long pa i go to victorville one the medium there which was actually the the what the most
Starting point is 03:40:33 rocket spot i was ever at out of all the prisons that the most violent one was that medium one it was more violent than victorville usp even um it was crazy because that was the step down yard for the west coast so if you're coming out of a pen you go there if you're on your way up to a pen because you're a headache you go there so it was just wild at that time i mean it was but whatever you know you get used to it you deal with it and uh but when i got there it was like i was coming there with all these top dudes are like hey our boys coming you know da da da so then those dudes you know there's another couple mexican dudes and and ab dudes in the shoe in victorville made sure they were taking care of smokes and and and whatever right and uh that kind of greased my way through the whole
Starting point is 03:41:20 prison like I never had a problem again with anybody like you know me and tamer were kind of untouchable in that way actually I give the example nobody's nobody can swim upstream but every now and then a few people can swim across stream right and we were able to swim across stream and a lot of it was because you know to them and they say this all the time guys like you rap right like they were amazed and more than you know and for drug dealers when you're a million really doing a million dollar dope deals. All the drug dealers in prison, that's what they wanted to be. Most of them lie and said they were. But in our case, everybody knew it was there. I mean, it's all documented and everything. We really were million-dollar dope dealers. And that is just not that common in federal prison,
Starting point is 03:42:05 no matter what movies say. So we had our little 15 minutes from that. But the thing that really, I think, endeared us to them was the fact that we didn't rat and that I'd represented myself on the biggest case. That was something that was impressive, even to these hardened you know type of dudes and it gave us just the ability to do our time in a very easy manner compared to most people um and uh ultimately then uh you know and they used tell me all the time they used to say louis there's nothing wrong with going home don't get caught up in this shit like where i see that gangs and and they're always trying to entangle each other and like there was really guys in prison who were very high ranking that were very very
Starting point is 03:42:49 interested in making sure me and tamer did our part we didn't rat we fought ourselves like they they they they want us to know that this wasn't our life even that we were here like we we could do more than that they didn't want us to stay in prison right and i really felt that from a lot of them it was very much like they kept us out of a couple jams they made you know there was just a couple things and you know in prison one wrong word one wrong action and now you've got another 10 years right like and so they really i mean i love to take credit for it all myself but i really think like these dudes actually liked us they were cool with us they didn't play the race card with us as hard as they could have they didn't play the rule card as hard as they could have they there was
Starting point is 03:43:34 you know hey these dudes are cool right so you know even gotto told me one day he was like listen man our own people are scared of us and you walk the track with me like it's nothing i was like should i be scared of you i'm just keeping it real he's like no no no that's all you're supposed to do. And he told me the monkey story. He's like, I'm going to tell you a story. This is right before I was going to Termile Island, too. He's like, I want to tell you a story. So, you know, he was getting ready to go to Victorville Penn. They were opening it up at the time. And he said, I want to tell you this story because it's going to apply to your life. And he says, when you get a monkey high on heroin, they'll break the cage to get more. But once you get them off of heroin,
Starting point is 03:44:13 If you bring, if they can smell the heroin in the water, they go crazy and they'll bite you and kick you not to let it come into them again. He's like, isn't that amazing? Humans are the exact opposite. All these people are dope feats. It doesn't matter if they're at the microwave with their men's health magazine measuring their f*** meal. Their mentality is the same.
Starting point is 03:44:35 Always be aware of that. And like when I look back on these things that these guys had told me they were absolutely right you know they these users are locked up for life they're gang members but anybody that says that they're not smart or intelligent is retarded these guys are smart they're intelligent they understand things deeper than what's going on in the forewall so it was really good experience for us in that sense and and that grease the wheels and then ultimately you know you come home in 2012 halfway house home confinement um and we started to building houses for my brother in Encino you know first one was uh first two was a 7,000 square
Starting point is 03:45:19 foot scene one story and the other one was 6,800 two story with a retaining wall in the back and everybody's there's huge houses yeah and everybody's screaming out it's like oh man you haven't even done a kitchen remodel and we're like so and probably made huge record sales for there and then we bought a third one and we're doing that and I was just on a sad Like arguing with people over $1,200 invoices all day long is soul draining one because you don't know which dude is the one that's trying to scam you and which dude is the one that's got four kids at home that really needs it, right? Because I'm inclined, dude, I'll give you a couple hundred more bucks if you got for if you're in that situation. You're salt of the earth. You're working. You're taking care of your family. You need a few hundred bucks more for the door. But if you do that for everybody, there's no profit left at the end. And most people are trying to scam you because they think you don't know what the fuck. Right. So anyway, we're. doing that and then I got the idea for I was at the dentist office and somehow there was the FAA proposed regulations for commercial drone pilots was sitting there like it's something only a convict would pick up like this dense reading material I read it said oh you can't you know
Starting point is 03:46:29 pilot has to have the drone within line of sight you can't be more than four can't go over 400 feet etc etc I figure out right away I'm like okay you don't need to control the drone you just need to control the guy's crawling droer so I call a friend of mine oh over at Samsung, and I say, hey, what's up? I want to do this, that I want to live stream from a drone. So people could see anything anywhere, anytime. That was my initial idea for drop-in. You could order a drone pilot like Uber, wherever you are in the world, and you can see live.
Starting point is 03:46:57 You want to take a tour of the Grand Canyon? Great. Let's do it. Set it up for a class. You can pause. You can take pictures. You can just tell the pilot, fly right, fly left. Then we realized that there was an insurance industry application and all this and that.
Starting point is 03:47:09 But how we got started is I told Noor. And a great guy, and he's like, okay, so what you really want is something called low latency, live streaming. And he gave me all this technical stuff, and I wrote it down. I wish I would have saved it. So I went to my cousin, and he hooked me up with a company called Project 10X. And they were, like, basically a booking agency for talent. And he got to do gut, sorry, he's like 60 grand. I can get you an alpha product, demonstrable, you'll have a demo, it'll work.
Starting point is 03:47:46 You'll have a low latency live streaming via app, and you know, and then you could take it from there. Well, I didn't know if this dude was going to take me for a ride. So what I did to protect myself is I got another developer, and I told him exactly the same thing. And, you know, I had Diamond Labs working on it, and I had a mod-a-a-coosh working on it, and told him exactly the same thing. I didn't tell them about each other, so I got the demo done in half the time for twice the price. So I'm either a genius or an idiot, depending which side of the table you're on, right? And then, you know, and then we realize, hey, there's a cell phone application here as well.
Starting point is 03:48:27 It doesn't just have to be from drones. It's the same tech. We can let people open their cell phones and live stream to anybody like On Demand. I thought, oh, here you're going to have 24-hour on-demand news. Why are we watching a talking head? Tell us what happened three hours ago when there's somebody there with the phone. that could show us live right right and so that was my initial idea oh you want to see if your boyfriend's cars parked at home at 11 o'clock at night you can use drop-in you can order a drone or
Starting point is 03:48:52 a lift driver with a cell phone and see if they're there anything anything you know you for real estate appraisals yeah yeah like but we zeroed in on the insurance space so i'm in the insurance space and uh you know it was slug slug fest and uh my background really didn't help People were very adverse to that risk, obviously. Insurance companies are adverse to risk. And anyway, we just kept our head down. And, you know, I got kind of a little bit sick of the morality argument. So I looked at the tier two insurers that we were after at that time because we weren't
Starting point is 03:49:25 trying to get the state farms or anything like that at that point, you know. I looked at the tier two insurers. And I sent investigators on five of the seven of them. And I found that a couple of them had their own morality issues. And I brought it up to them. And I said, I don't think it's fair that you're making a morality play on me when you're compromised morally as well. And, you know, they thought about it and decided the best thing to do would be to give us a contract. And that's how we got our first contract.
Starting point is 03:49:56 And, you know, it took off from there. And then we got Lyft as a partner. Then we got into Lloyd's of London. And then Forbes took notice, digital, because this Franciscan convict is in Lloyd's of London, stuffiest institution ever and dealing with companies like hisscox and beasley okay it's Lloyd's lab we got accepted to it right like and then we got into their network we were approved as as a utility for their whole network of insurance companies right and uh so that was that went really good and then uh COVID's you know so prison to Forbes in five years got the company going you know fits and starts
Starting point is 03:50:37 because I wasn't the right CEO. I'm trying to find CEOs, right? And they're coming in with their performance pay packages, and I'm not even pushing back. I'm like, dude, you hit those hurdles? You can have everything you asked for. Right. Right?
Starting point is 03:50:49 None of them hit up. Because they don't have skin in the game, too. Yeah. They don't care. Anyway, I ultimately find this guy, Joseph Shemish, through a good friend, Zohar, Loshitzer. He hooks me up with Joseph Shammis, and he says, and Joseph comes in.
Starting point is 03:51:03 He's a CTO, CEO. He's like one of these magic guys with code. He's just never, he's had seven successful exits before this, but he's always the fix-it guy that comes in, fixes it and then gets an exit. He's never had the big, big, big kill. So I make him a equity deal, same thing, package, everything, whatever. But this guy really is about it. And like now, instead of like celebrating a new customer every other month, which we'd been doing for basically five years, like this dude's adding them every week. You know, and after a few months, he says to me, hey, it's better if you're just not a,
Starting point is 03:51:37 around at all anymore because I understood my name was not right for that right like and I didn't care I did it for money I didn't do it to be a CEO right and so you know and things are going great and then you know COVID starts and and we start to get called one of them was from an attorney general and he said hey and we'd been we had a king and spalding was drop-ins lobbyist lawyer because I wanted to do a federal override on 911. So if every, if when you call 911, they use our, 911 uses our technology to send you a text and you click on it. Now your camera's open.
Starting point is 03:52:19 The police presence is in the room. They can see everything that's happening. Also, when the police are on the way there, they can see what's in the room before they go in. So there's less anxiety. Right. I was marketing as poor man's fiber optics. Right. I was also marketing it for parole and child protective service.
Starting point is 03:52:36 services inspections child protective services can't go to every call yeah this is how you have ellie and gonzalez end up dead you know the people had called 10 times and nobody went you know they're just understaffed parole officers also understaffed but here's an opportunity to see every single call cool i'm sending you a text let me see that there's no milk in the fridge let me see that the sheets are dirty let me see that the you know that the kids have a black eye right and now if there's a problem you can, you send actual manpower there. And the CBA ROI is immediate because my platform costs less than gas. So I'm giving you 10x visibility at one-tenth of the price, right?
Starting point is 03:53:15 The same thing with parole. Like, hey, one of the things I noticed is there was a few guys who were in the halfway house and they got jobs at Costco and they got fired. They didn't get fired because they were doing a bad job. They got fired because the halfway house is calling every two hours saying, hey, do you see them? Do you see them? Well, why not automate it?
Starting point is 03:53:32 that. Stop being stupid. Let the convict have a smartphone. We pull the GPS and location from the stream. We know exactly where it's at. You see him. It's live. Right. And you have a record. Cheaper than sending, you know, the randomized deterrent, right? Like, so we were pushing that. We had King and Spalding out of D.C. like, you know, trying to lobby those initiatives for us. And, and then, you know, COVID comes. And one of the Republican Attorney General's that I'd met calls And he says, hey, listen, I know, you know, this is a little bit out of the box, but you were moving shit around the world when we were trying to stop you. Do you think you can help us now?
Starting point is 03:54:12 And I was like, well, what's the problem? He's like, well, we're backed up five, six weeks to get out of China. I don't know if you remember, right? Yeah. And everybody thought that was China fucking them over, right? It wasn't, bro. Like, because I knew about shipping and logistics a little bit from the dope, actually more than a little bit by the time the dope shit was over, right?
Starting point is 03:54:30 and I understood exactly what the problem was. There's a door from FedEx or D.HL or any of these other companies, a door that goes into customs. You can only physically fit so much through that door in a 24-hour period. That was the holdup. That's how much stuff it was. The Chinese wanted it out of there as fast as they could. They want to make more money.
Starting point is 03:54:56 The faster it gets there, the faster people buy more. So I called a friend of mine, and I found out where, you know, which FedEx location central hub that their stuff was at. And, you know, little red envelope, Bakshish consideration, whatever you want to call it, couple grand, and I got their stuff moved from the back of the line right up to the front of the door. Right. So saved them a few weeks.
Starting point is 03:55:20 The other thing I said is I said, listen, everybody's trying to get fastboat from China to L.A. You're going to wait forever. your container price is going to be insane. But you know what nobody's doing right now? Nobody's moving it to Korea and then taking the fast boat from Korea because none of these
Starting point is 03:55:36 idiots who act like specialists in procuring shit know anything about logistics. Right. So we moved the stuff from China to Korea overnight and then you had a 10-day fast boat from Korea because nobody knew about Korean product at that time. Everybody
Starting point is 03:55:52 was just, this was in the very beginning. So logistics is going great. Now, the Korean thing, that's my our old partner who used to strip the documents. He's, he did 10 years also. He get out. He's back. Right? I can get into his story, but that's going to take a son of it.
Starting point is 03:56:07 I'd love to tell the whole thing one day, like, but, you know, we got time consideration. I have to get back to my wife because she's really the boss. I act like a tough guy, but she's in charge. She has 95% control. Right. so anyway we're we're um so he sends me these air queen masks he's like what the he guys doing he thought he didn't believe we were doing some shit like covid stuff he's bro what's in the things i'm like bro it's really shit you know like medical shit he's like
Starting point is 03:56:39 so anyway he gets he's handling all that for us to switch you know because you got to switch boats so it makes a little complicated if you don't know what you're doing you got to get the container off in korea and then get it on another boat most people just want to fire and forget if they don't understand anything about logistics and brokers and how shit works on docs because they don't understand it so they just want to know, I dropped it and it's going to arrive here. Right, right. So anyway, he's handling that for us,
Starting point is 03:57:01 and then he sends us these air queen masks. They have, and the unique thing about them, I don't know if you remember, but remember everything was EUA, emergency use authorization? I guess, yeah. Okay, well, these had an N95K number, substantially equivalent to N95, and they were nanofiber.
Starting point is 03:57:20 So you got 90% more airflow. So super easy to breathe. I could do burpees in them. In fact, I did at Equinox for a while when you had to wear a mask there. You could do burpees in them. You could walk around with them. You wouldn't notice them at all. You'd forget it was on your face.
Starting point is 03:57:36 And it had better protection than any of the KN95, this, that the other thing. But the technicality of it was funny because as we got into the business, we brought a million masks in, we set up a website. We decided we weren't going to go after these million this. million that phone calls because that's got to be all bullshit because at the end of the day somebody's got to cut a check for that and if all the people have only met each over the phone and on zoom ain't nobody cutting a multi-million dollar check to someone whose hand they didn't shake or doesn't have some kind of security guarantee right like so i was like dude these are all bullshit like we don't need to waste any time on that we concentrated on was selling 10 packs 30 packs
Starting point is 03:58:14 and 100 packs well everybody who's buying them they buy them two days later they get their shit oh my god I didn't get ripped off. They tell their friends. They bought 10. Now they buy 30. They buy 30. Now they buy 100. Now we're starting to get calls from like Augusta Medical.
Starting point is 03:58:28 Cedars. All these places. Because somebody's relative had bought them, showed them. And said, hey, these guys really have the stock because everybody's getting ripped off at this point. So that's how we got our bulk sales was from hand not trying to do bulk at all. We just tried to handle the guy on the street and make sure he had his masks. Right. Well, now that leads us into.
Starting point is 03:58:49 respirator hoses, leads us into syringes, gowns, everything else. And we're delivering everything. You know, this is a bunch of extra drug traffickers who are buying these, buying this shit wherever it is, Korea, China, whatever, you know, same process we used to use for drugs. Make sure it's cool. Quality test it, look in everything, da-da-da. And, you know, our logistics is far better than anybody else's at that time. So we're actually delivering. And as we're delivering more and more, we're getting more and more customers. until the nitrile gloves thing comes up. And we ignored it for six months
Starting point is 03:59:23 because we knew there was everybody we talked to told us fraud, fraud, fraud. When the guys we were working with are scared of the deal, it's probably a good thing to stay away from it, right? Because these guys weren't, they would have done dope just as easy as they did masks. So anyway, what is that?
Starting point is 03:59:42 Nitrile gloves. Okay, so that was these blue gloves that they used, not only for COVID, but when you go to the doctors, obviously they put the blue gloves on. They use it for everything. There was another glove boom. There was a historical precedent for this, and it was during AIDS. Before AIDS, the doctor didn't wear gloves. The nurse didn't wear gloves. After AIDS, every doctor visit, every nurse visit, there was always gloves. So that was the first boom. And if you look back, and I wasn't smart
Starting point is 04:00:08 enough to do this then, but if you look back at how the business changed after AIDS, you would have seen what was happening here in COVID. It was the carbon copy of the next explosion. Same amount of fraud, because once AIDS came and they decided everybody has to wear gloves, there wasn't enough glove production to cover that. So COVID comes, there's not enough gloves, right? So tons of fraud we stay out of it. After like six months, we got an Asian friend who's a pretty big deal, celebrity. He's going over to Taiwan to do a shop.
Starting point is 04:00:40 He's doing the quarantine. He's going to do the show over there. I said, dude, if you have a connect, let us know. So he hooks us up with the Emily HSU and this dude, Ted, and David, and they're like, oh, yeah, we got this general in Thailand and da-da-da-da, but I got to tell you this story me, because if somebody would have told me, hey, I'm going to get you gloves out of the factory. I would have known that's bullshit. Hey, we got a general out of Thailand who sees it has a deal with Shritang, da-da-da-da.
Starting point is 04:01:10 He's got a thing. They sent us all the documents, everything. And I did the Doodilly, and I failed. I looked at all the documents, I checked the addresses, the phone numbers, everything lined up. You know, I called, I didn't call to ask about any specific transaction, but I called, oh, this is street drink. Oh, this is Thailand. I looked up.
Starting point is 04:01:28 I asked our customers, are these gloves good for you? Like, yeah, yeah, great. So we're like, all right, cool. We send them $2.7 million. Archie's like, I know this dude from, you know, long time, good guy. Like, send him 2.7 a couple months. go by stories start right we know we're at this point but we're in already like what are we going to do you know so the stories start the delays start the this start what the stories oh you know
Starting point is 04:01:57 there was a fire at the factory well dude i get on google earth there's no fire i look up you know this oh there's this happened oh the factory's closed because i call the factory they're not closed just stuff that you know third parties they're talking about all this nonsense and then finally there's containers on the way three not 14 so you know we got people who've paid money for this right and i got my brother who's escrowing their money and fronted us the cash that we were short you know while air queen was a million dollar business it still needed it still needed to buy its own inventory to keep selling right so while we're doing great we didn't have 2.7 liquid to just dumping this so we did a little creative financing a little bit of escrow a little bit of guaranteed
Starting point is 04:02:42 a little bit of this plus we had some money about half of it so we sent it anyway in uh the first container lands and we know it's but we look inside and it's latex used washed and dyed blue to look like nitriles so it's medical waste so me and tamers sitting there it's a friday i'm not going to tell the customers on the weekend i'm going to tell them monday morning It's their last weekend before they hear about this. And I got to figure, like, I'm just like, you know, I needed a break. So we get slammed, drum. You know, on Monday morning, we rolls around.
Starting point is 04:03:25 And we go, okay, we have to, we told the customers. Then we get notice of the other, there's three more containers coming in. So that Friday, it was a Friday. seven days after the first one came in, we're like, okay, we got to go down to customs and we've got to retract our importer security filing because we know that these aren't nitrile gloves and this is bullshit, it's medical waste. And we're taking a sample of this down there. Then this is a medical device, right? So we're driving down there and we get there in front and Tamer's like, dude, we better smoke a joint before we go in. I'm like, what's up? He's like, bro, we're going
Starting point is 04:04:03 to get locked up for this. These are medical devices. They're going to see who we are. They're going to lock our ass up until they get this figured out. They're never going to believe that we're innocent victims. So we're sitting there smoking a joint in Long Beach 3 in the afternoon on a Friday. I'm like, maybe we should come back Monday so we don't have to spend the weekend in. You know, like that's literally, I'm literally thinking anyway, we get upstairs. We go to their office, customs, we tell them, and they go so. Wait, wait, here's more bills of lading. More stuff's coming in. They're like, okay, well, there's an email address over there on the wall. You can report.
Starting point is 04:04:38 it. So I take my idea out. And I said, run that and get me a supervisor. They run it. All of a sudden, they see, it was a customs case, right? Right. Supervisor comes down. Hey.
Starting point is 04:04:54 I tell him, he's like, yeah, listen, we got this email thing, da, da, this, that, the other thing. You know, just do that. So me and Tamer kind of like, shock. They don't even want to take the sample, right? Right. So we go back to the office. office. We have a hangar at Van Nuys Airport where we keep everything because LAPD's got their helicopter station there. So it's secure and we're not worried about anybody coming to look at our
Starting point is 04:05:20 stuff and then robbing the place because you just can't. It's a secured airport hangar, right? With LAPD right next door. So it worked perfect for us. So a lot of people would want to see it and then they'd pay and leave. Right. And without that ability to show people a PPE product at that time, you just weren't going to either all you're going to do is jerk yourself off on the phone um so so we go back we send an email and there's no return receipt that we've sent like an email so now i call king and spalding they reach out to the FBI they reach out to the uh FDA criminal investigation division and me and tamer write to customs open email because it was a form fill so we don't even have a receipt that we sent them this right right so now we write to their
Starting point is 04:06:05 open email and tell them everything and attach the bills of lading and everything. And two weeks later, when these containers land, what do you think they did? Well, they just accept them and they let them in and delivered them to our hangar. Okay. So now we're like, okay,
Starting point is 04:06:21 like what the fuck? You know, we reached out to the FBI, we reached out to FDA, this, these ones are interested, they're, but then ultimately they did nothing, right? Now I'm screaming and yelling with these Chinese people over there on the phone. in Thailand and they're, oh, fuck you, you, you ain't going to do nothing, you're burnt, this,
Starting point is 04:06:41 that, the other thing, right? And at that time, you couldn't even travel. Right, right. So what me and Tamer do is we realize, okay, this is an airport security. There's cameras everywhere. The chain of evidence hasn't been broken, technically, because it's been on camera since it's been delivered. So we're going to rent another hanger where we put four containers worth of gloves in there
Starting point is 04:07:02 and just locked it. right and kept it there we're paying five grand a month for that for months keep that in the back of your head the rest of the containers don't come they know there's a you know they know that we know now da da everything right so we're uh you know and i've done this under drop in to give our company validity because that people should see hey here's here's an eight figure tech company that does legitimate business that people have known about for years that has big clients partners with lift part of Lloyd's and they're backing this right that's how we kind of got over the hump that we weren't fraud because everybody was fraud in the beginning of PPE right so anyway um
Starting point is 04:07:43 a couple weeks later they set up quarantine program for Thailand where you can go so i start sending all my ex-drug friends in there boom boom boom boom right they're going they're doing the quarantine one i got two teams there one team is for Hey, we really have glove customers. And we got nurses and doctors crying on the phone for real. And, like, they need this shit. And it doesn't matter what side of COVID you're on. If your mom has cancer, they use these gloves.
Starting point is 04:08:14 If your kid goes in for a checkup, they use these gloves. You can't be putting medical waste into our system, right? Like, whatever side you're on, that's just bullshit. And they, so anyway, once they're in, I go. I go, spend two weeks in quarantine, get out. I make the report to the police there, Economic Crimes Division as the CEO of dropping. Hey, we've had this loss.
Starting point is 04:08:38 This is our thing. And they're like, well, you made the deal with someone in Taiwan. And I'm like, well, it got shipped out of Thailand and it's fake Thai goods. And it's a fake Thai company that's been counterfeited and all these things. I already checked. You guys have jurisdiction. But I didn't realize how corrupt Thailand was. Thailand cops will not do their job unless you pay them.
Starting point is 04:08:55 Right. They're actually part of the criminal world. They're used as. criminal assets for pay that if you're playing the game there you're playing with the cops it's a totally different than the ratting mentality here right the i mean everyone if somebody steals your car the cop is not going to take a police report unless you pay him right it's it's like that's how corrupted is right so we get over there we find that out right and then um and then uh we run into this guy i have this these guy other guys over there mercen
Starting point is 04:09:30 dudes, another team. Some of them I'd met once I'm there because they'd been busy collecting for other people that have been frauded. Right. So I got all these mercenaries now. I got a bunch of extra drug traffickers. I got a dear friend of mine, King, who I know from back in the day, right? And he's been there for the last 20 years.
Starting point is 04:09:50 He's like, oh, yeah, this is that the other thing, right? So really right now, what I'm really doing, what my prime focus is is getting gloves for customers so that we can keep our 100% delivery thing intact because from a business point of view customer service and uh anyway we run into the dude vincent vincent when emily hs u's buddy buddy um dave and ted's buddy buddy and he's in thailand and uh he's trying to give fake shit to other people so this guy mike green sets up a meeting with him like acting like he has a legitimate buyer he's it all on camera and did it on basically extort them and uh then then what happens is uh they made a fake case against me they said that i was in a restaurant where this guy got abducted from they did this
Starting point is 04:10:44 whole filming thing and security camera and cc tv and i'm not in the video right i'm not in the video it's not me i'm not there i'm not anywhere near that at that point in time and and and whatever if something did happen it didn't happen on that day right because actually i had a picture of that dude from another place that he was at right with with the metadata on it um that showed him having drinking and uh whiskey and eating at eight o'clock at night in a restaurant when he was supposedly abducted beaten to within an inch of his life had a cattle prod stuck up his ass and a gun pointed at his head and and attempted murder on this date that they're saying but i had this picture of them because we had investigators right i just picture of them that showing none of that could be
Starting point is 04:11:32 true either for that particular day and uh so they they king comes over and uh we're me and tamer in the condo that we rented there and he's like look man um they got a warrant for your ass it's a bullshit case it's murder attempt to murder kidnap extortion and rape in Thailand in Thailand yeah and uh they're gonna arrest you their passports blocked but i can get you out So, like, the inertia for me is, like, getting up off the couch, right? Like, to start packing and, right, hiking through the swamps or whatever the f*** idea this dude has, right? And he says, or you can get arrested, I'll get you bail, and we'll turn this thing around. Now, for the three months that we've been there already, the Fed's taught me how to build a case.
Starting point is 04:12:19 So I'm buying pen registers. I find a dude in the phone company. I'm buying the pen registers of all the people associated with this scam. There's Thai generals involved. There's a military base that they're keeping the fake shit at once they have it packed up until it goes on containers. Container companies are supposed to bring the container and say, hey, this container was loaded at this place. And da-da-da-da-da, that's part of their security protocol. These guys are picking up containers from the container company, which is a no-no, taking them to wherever, which is a no-no.
Starting point is 04:12:52 And then bringing them back and then the container company is acting like it was all good and kosher, right? I mean, everybody's in on, everybody, you know, and the SkyMed. I don't know if you heard of SkyMed gloves during PPE, but it's the biggest scam. The whole company was a fraud. There was Air Force Captain, Captain Compi. Anyway, I built the whole case. I know where everybody is. I got everything, like tons of information.
Starting point is 04:13:18 I got shipping records. I've talked to shipping companies. I got, like, I know how bad this is me and Tamer do. And it's what Thailand was doing during this time is they were shipping more than their annual global glove production, annual global glove production to the U.S. every month, more than their annual production capacity. So they're bringing all these used medical waste gloves from China into Thailand, into the Bangkok port, which is a free port. And if you don't bring it into Bangkok from there and you stay in the port and you rebox it there, it can be a product of Thailand now. That's right. So that's how people were getting around terrorists.
Starting point is 04:13:59 What I didn't realize when we got in this is, yeah, the gloves was one thing, but they were circumventing terrorists on this same line. They're using, these are the same people that were sending fake epipens to kids in Africa, right? I mean, just human trafficking drugs, just total. You know, these guys were the scum of the earth, right? So the epi, I don't have a problem with the drugs, just to be clear, but fake epipence to kids is beyond my. right my pale like to me that's somebody that just needs to die um and uh so anyway we didn't realize that that it's like you kind of walked into something much bigger than you right so um tamer jumps up when king says that off the couch that he can get us bail and this and that he could jumps up how can
Starting point is 04:14:42 you say that that's my boy da da da da da this place is so corrupt you can't do that and king pulls out a picture of his grandkids and he says you guys didn't rat on me 25 years ago I got you the same way you had me. King leaves. Me and Tamer get drunk. We're talking. You know, I'm going to get out of here. The next night, we're drunk again.
Starting point is 04:15:04 And we had this conversation. And it was what we did with drugs was at a huge scale. I can't count that. I can't balance the score. But here was a situation where we were a small fish. This stuff was getting sent to our country. Whatever disagreements I have with the FBI or DEA, I'm a American. my family's American my whole family lives there my friends live there you know we're in the middle of a
Starting point is 04:15:31 pandemic and you know i've never operated against american interests like you know i don't sell guns to foreign countries that aren't allowed to have them because america's like that's like that's like my thing okay we were drug traffickers we did credit fraud we did credit cards and travelers checks and shit like that but when it comes to america i'm a american dude so i've traveled all over world i could tell anybody that's listening, if you guys think America sucks, you need to travel more. I mean, America is the best thing going, period. There's not even anything close to it. And if you're going to talk to me about socialized medicine in Europe and how that's better,
Starting point is 04:16:11 let me explain to you the reason why they have socialized medicine is because we have the biggest army. Because if we didn't, the USSR would have never fallen apart and there would be no more Europe. So while they're sitting over there in Spain and all these places talking shit about us, And Ireland, they shut their mouth because what they have is directly because we don't. Right. That's the bottom line, right? So, anyway, we're like, okay, you know, we got, we built all this. And so me and Tim are talking, scale. Hey, maybe we can make a difference here.
Starting point is 04:16:43 This is really a bad problem. Right. You know, too drunk guys. Oh, bro. Yeah. But we decided that night, like, hey, you're going to go home. If they can do this to me. they can do this to you also.
Starting point is 04:16:56 You're going to go home. If you're home and I'm arrested, I don't have to worry. Because I know that there's someone who knows everything and is doing everything. Just like if it was me for him. I mean, that's how close we are.
Starting point is 04:17:08 After beating the prisoner's limerries, my brother, I would rip anybody's heart out that he didn't. And he would do the same. Like, anybody that did anything to him or his family is the same as doing it to me or my family. And same for him.
Starting point is 04:17:21 I love Tamer to death. like I say all the time. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him, right? And I never, ever, ever forget that. And so we're like, okay, we're not counting on King. What we're saying is if an American
Starting point is 04:17:36 gets arrested in Thailand, the embassy has to come. Right. And I've got all this evidence. I'll hand it to him. And, you know, they'll whisk me out of here on a black plane with no tail number
Starting point is 04:17:46 or some shit, right? Like, that's what I'm thinking. Again, you know, when you don't know, the problem when you're smart sometimes, is, is you think you're smart in every subject. Yeah. And until you learn that there's a baseline knowledge in every subject, it doesn't matter how smart you are, you're an idiot, right?
Starting point is 04:18:02 If you think you know when you don't know. Well, this has been a common theme throughout the course of my life. Many of this has come up more than once. So I'm a double idiot because I've made the same mistake more than once. But anyway, I'm thinking U.S. Embassy's going to come. And that's going to be that. This day, the embassy still hasn't come. Right.
Starting point is 04:18:21 And the cops, when we're locked up, me and the mercenary dudes and my boy Jay and everybody and a couple ties when we're locked up because they scooped us all up using a riot team. I was like, I'll surrender. You know, like, oh, we don't want, you know, they wanted, they had the press already set. They had everything already set. They wanted to make a big thing out of this, right? So anyway, we're in jail and the cops are like, it's Saturday and Sunday, Monday morning, you know, waiting for the embassy to come. We're supposed to be in court Monday. Sunday the cops come.
Starting point is 04:18:54 And they're already being cool with us. They're already buying us cigarettes. They know you got money. They go buy cigarettes, buy sodas. You know, when you're locked up in a Thai jail, it was crazy. Like, we were four cells. And they put us in our own cell. And they were coming to take pictures of us every hour.
Starting point is 04:19:13 And I think this is because somebody, we had a big friend somewhere. And I realized this as this was going on. Well, we didn't have anybody who was putting their hand out. for us. We had a big friend somewhere because the reason why they're taking pictures of us every hour is to make sure nobody's beating the shit out. Right. Right. So taking pictures of us every hour. It's sweltering hot. And, you know, there's no beds. There's no bunks. There's no bed roll. There's no pillow. There's no toilet paper. Dude, what there is
Starting point is 04:19:38 is a hole in the ground and a faucet and a bucket and you're using your hand every time you take a shit to wash your ass out. And that's also where you're supposed to wash yourself and take a piss and take a shit and everything else, right? So we're in there. I've started doing burpees. Right. I'm like these dudes. I'm not going to let them know that they're bothering me at all. I'm doing burpees. But when you're tired, this is the crazy thing.
Starting point is 04:19:59 There's one fan and it turns like this. So for about 15 seconds out of every minute you get a relief. So everybody's like in the corner of their cell and you can see us all right because it's just bars in the corner of their cell like this trying to catch as much of that fan
Starting point is 04:20:16 as you can. Right? And the cops come in and they're like, oh, You guys are very bad. If you f*** little boys, embassy come immediately. But embassy no come for you. You must be very bad. That's what they were saying to us.
Starting point is 04:20:32 Right. Yeah. And, you know, then the main cop, the fucking, uh, Super Chai, Tongloor. He's the dirty cop that this lawyer, Sir Shai, Pierre Paul put together to put all this together for the Chinese dudes.
Starting point is 04:20:45 Why I didn't realize this, this was a dude who was the front man for all the, the human trafficking. epipens all the dudes they got chinese they got busted in thailand used this cock sucker right so he sets up he's got the dirty cop they make this whole case against me and the hit the cop comes and he says uh you know i can help you but 450 000 um and it needs to be before your court tomorrow otherwise i won't be able to help you and i was like dude you don't know anything about me i'd rather do 20 years in a Thai prison than give you $20 and by the way when this is
Starting point is 04:21:20 over you're going to be the one in jail not me all right oh shit right hey sorry to interrupt the video just want to let you guys know that we're going to have an extra 15 or 20 minutes of content on my patreon it's $10 a month for about an hour's worth of extra content every single week back to the podcast anyway I'm like you and your corrupt buddies trust me now I don't know anything that's going on outside I haven't told my wife I'm figuring, okay, I'll get bail and then tell her, right? I'm expecting the embassy to come. Like, they never show up.
Starting point is 04:21:58 Monday rolls around. It's court. They're not taking us to court. And my boy, Peter Loprimo, who was with me the whole time, he was my sounding board, my ace, you know, every, I'd sit there with him for hours at night, you know, and talking to him about, hey, what do you think about this? It just, you know, sometimes you need a sounding board, right? And it helps if somebody you're talking to is intelligent,
Starting point is 04:22:20 because they can bounce the shit back to you. So anyway, he comes in, sees me in the jail. He told them that he was my, this is how crazy. He said, oh, I'm an assistant to his lawyer. They don't ask him if he speaks to tie or anything. He gives them $20 and they let him in to the jail to where he could talk to me through the bars. And I was like, dude, he's like, yeah, King's got it, dude. Don't worry about it.
Starting point is 04:22:41 Just don't say nothing to nobody. Like, you guys are going to be out of here late. I was like, what? Late. He's like, I got it, bro. I was like, okay. So anyway, if they finally take us to court. at like five o'clock now dude i'm from america five o'clock there's no more court you're getting on a bus
Starting point is 04:22:56 you're going to a tie prison right you're or the county version over here right so anyway they do take us to court we get to court we're sitting down in the tanks after about two hours six 30 at night turns out oh we got bail they put bracelets on us and uh we all have ten thousand dollars bond which is the lowest bond for attempted murder you could get right and the ankle monitors and dude we're out we're out all of us are out and it was king not the embassy the embassy still doesn't know anything about the evidence i have i even write the head FBI dude um there and i say hey listen i don't know what you guys think but you need to see this shit because this shit's got to stop right like forget about me like do you even want to look at this
Starting point is 04:23:46 evidence and now i'm the number one trending thing in thailand They released this all over the press. Drug Kingpin turned tech mogul arrested for attempted murder, kidnap extortion. It's all a lie. They've got press releases everywhere, news everywhere. My wife's, you know, my friends are like telling my wife, oh, have you seen the news? Like I made the front page of Apple News, right? Like, dude, it was crazy.
Starting point is 04:24:13 I don't know any of this is going on yet, right? Until we get out, then I find out right away. My wife is obviously like beside herself. She's like, hey, what the fuck, dude? We're married and you're playing games with our future. Like, you know, what the fuck? She's like, I married a dude who got out of prison and reformed his life and and runs a tech company and this was your past.
Starting point is 04:24:36 And what the fuck are you doing in Thailand with mercenaries and dope dealers and kidnappings and attempted murders and extortions? What the fuck is that? Like, she was like, I was like, babe, and none of it's true. That even made her more mad, right? she's i don't know something happened right like why you know this press this is this what the and i'm not the press the last thing i'm worried about i'm worried about my you know my freedom my livelihood at this point and uh so anyway we get into now we're into fighting a case so i move us
Starting point is 04:25:08 all into a waldorf it's one block away from that u.s embassy and the reason why i picked the waldorf is because it's the highest security hotel there politicians from foreign countries stay there. Now it's Thailand. Everything's corrupt. But if you're going to with the tapes at a hotel, the Waldorf is going to be the one that's going to be the most expensive, cost the most favors, and has the greatest chance of saying no. Right. Right. So I move everybody into the Waldorf. And also it's during COVID. So, dude, we have like an Astoria suite with a golf course view for 140 bucks a night. Right. Including six pieces of laundry, free breakfast and, you know, a $25 a day credit on food. Now, we're eating all.
Starting point is 04:25:49 all room service, and even room service in Thailand at the Waldorf steaks and lobsters and everything else, is cheaper, super cheap the food than here at a regular place, even it's room service at the Waldorf. So it doesn't sound as bad financially as it might have been. And we're fighting the case. Now I'm like, I got investigators. I got a lawyer. I got this.
Starting point is 04:26:11 I got that. You know, they call my lawyer. Say, oh, the king's involved. You shouldn't take this case. And Pee, one of the greatest people I've ever met my life. I just that, dude, taking the case. And, you know, we started taking it apart. Like, hey, I wasn't in the restaurant.
Starting point is 04:26:26 I was not. None of these things are true, this and that, and another thing. Grant Peck from the AP, I forgot this, AP, L.A. Times, Daily Mail. All these things wrote me on Instagram, Facebook, email, whatever they could find asking for comment. I responded to all of them immediately. this is the day I got out. I responded to all them immediately. Yeah, I have comment and I have evidence.
Starting point is 04:26:53 I had that picture of the dude. This is that the other thing. Right. And to show that his story was not true. And they say they ran with hit pieces anyway. Right. They never asked me for my comment. CNN was the only one that was like interested in what I had to say and aggregated the evidence.
Starting point is 04:27:13 And I was sending them weed transfers and tons of shit. Like they couldn't believe it. now the problem was it's not going to be an immediate story it's become an investigative report which is going to take several months so they come they interview me in thailand everything right but i'm still there fighting the case anyway um king brought the uh supreme court justice of thailand to my hotel room at the waldorf after after about two weeks out on bail and uh and he says uh oh um you're going to be fine So now I know this already.
Starting point is 04:27:50 Like I know like I'm cool, right? Like have every reason to believe this king has come through on everything so far. Like I got this in the back of my head. I'm trying to tell my wife, family, everything. Like my brother's like, what do you need? I'm like, I don't need anything. I got this. Like it's cool.
Starting point is 04:28:05 We're fine. Everything's fine. Right. And 84 days comes and goes. So anyway, we prove we proved a bunch of bullshit. After 84 days comes and goes. they had no evidence for the court. The judge releases me from the case.
Starting point is 04:28:25 That gives me back my passport. I'm allowed to leave. Done me, Jeremy. And so we leave. After we leave, CNN comes out. After CNN comes out, all hell breaks loose, right? Like, DHS is involved now. All, yeah, you know, all these people.
Starting point is 04:28:41 Remember, I told you we put this stuff in the hangar? So when Tamer goes back to America, when I'm still in Thailand, I get arrested. Through another one of our ex-drug convicts, he finds friends, co-conspirators, he finds a campaign finance dude who is friends with a dude in DHS, Homeland Security Invests, HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, and he is interested in the Chinese angle because he's in counterproliferation. Okay. So their first thing is, is, wow, we want to see the gloves. So they come down and they're, and they're look at the hangar, tamers showing them. that was the same day that CNN came down to the hangar. So those two things happen at the same time, right?
Starting point is 04:29:22 So now DHS is fully involved. The DHS dude from Bangkok reaches out to me. We talk. I give him everything to do it on. I'm telling him, I'm like, listen, I don't need your help on my criminal case. I don't want any of your help. In fact, what you're going to do since you didn't, since you didn't listen to me the first five times I told you this, and since I've had to be personally jeopardized to get this
Starting point is 04:29:45 information to help you, you're going to treat me as a asset and you're going to wipe off my fine for this assistance. Okay. And they're like, okay. And they got an AUSA and they had a case number and da-da-da-da. And they picked up the gloves and put them in a storage. And then all of a sudden, after I'm back and CNN comes out, right, which just destroyed FDA and and customs, because it showed all the letters from my lawyers that they'd just ignored.
Starting point is 04:30:18 It showed, you know, 300 glove cases, 300 fraud cases are referred from local FBI offices to FBI in Thailand. Do you know how many cases they opened? No. Zero. Why? Right? So now they're, FBI's mad that DHS opens a case.
Starting point is 04:30:39 Da-da-da-da-da, this stuff. Anyway, I get back. The CNN thing comes out. the FDA immediately starts seizing all of our incoming products. Our whole medical supply business, right? Over total bullshit. No reason. They said, oh, that's a nanomask.
Starting point is 04:30:57 Nano means antibacterial. You're not cleared for antibacterial. I'm like, dude, nanomask, nano does not mean antibacterial. Here's the definition, medical definition, Webster's definition, Oxford definition. And while Congress grants you wide latitude in interpreting federal statutes, it's specifically prohibits you from changing the definition of words to suit your purposes. And that's what you're doing. So a big, huge fight with them.
Starting point is 04:31:20 But they've got all our inventory. People are ordering masks. We've got no masks. People are ordering this. They're holding everything. And then, because they know it was bullshit, after the business is dead. Now, and a week before the expiration date, they release everything to us. So they killed that business over it.
Starting point is 04:31:37 And they no longer pursued the criminal case against. these people, Vincent, all these people who made these complaints about me, by the way, have Interpol warrants now, right? They're looking for them. They're hiding in China. Hong Kong, actually, is where they're at right now. And when have you ever heard of the Fed stopping a case once they start? Right.
Starting point is 04:32:02 Never. Never. In fact, that's one of the things. Once the feds are coming for you, they're coming. There's nothing you can do about it. They stopped. Now, why did they stop? I can't tell you for sure, but I guarantee you there was a dirty cop in that FBI office in Bangkok.
Starting point is 04:32:18 And if this thing came out, that would have come out because they could never explain why 300 referrals from the U.S. FBI field offices that went to Bangkok never got followed up on. And why when we tell them, hey, this is happening, they let 82 more containers from the same company. after we notified them. And, wow, are you really telling me that the FDA and customs didn't do their job, allowed this poison into our thing, even when they were told, and it's a bunch of drug traffickers and mercenaries who actually stopped it? Right. That's a tough one for them to swallow appearance-wise, right?
Starting point is 04:33:05 So they just, you know, they did nothing and it just ended, it just died, and that was that. And, you know, I mean, it is what it is. So you didn't have to rot in a tie jail. No, no, didn't have to rot in a tie jail. And, you know, but they didn't do anything to help me come home. Right. Right. And so anyway, get home.
Starting point is 04:33:26 We're home. And then, you know, kind of just chill for a little bit. We had a vacation booked before I left. Me and the wife went on vacation for a couple weeks just to get away from everybody. And then we came back and it was like, bro, I just laid down for about. eight months. I just did nothing. Right. I was just going to the gym, you know, having a smoothie, smoking a joint, just, you know, I was so beat down from, you know, I'd lost my company. You know, everybody talks crazy tech valuations. We had an offer for $22 million. That's the
Starting point is 04:33:58 valuation I go with. Now, that was before COVID and the spike in usage. My CEO gets hit by a car taking his Saturday morning walk, right? Did it kill him? Well, it made him bring dead and they died a few months later in his bathtub he never logged in again right so that happened so i offshore everything to our to our ukrainian dev team but i have no u.s. asset to manage them but i'm like okay whatever i got to go to thailand so i do that right and and they're doing it everything's going you know okay but then the press comes out when i'm in thailand we lose 60% of our customers overnight and the rest of them pretty quickly after that as word spread and you know when i talked to when I got back, they're like, Lewis, listen, man, you know, hey, first of all, I hope you did
Starting point is 04:34:45 what they said you did because you did the right thing. Those kind of people are scum of the earth. But our company avoids that publicity whether you're right or wrong. We just, that's not, it doesn't matter to us whether you're right or wrong here, right? Like, bottom line. And, you know, that was a tough one to swallow. And, and, you know, then we had different people reach out, Fox, this one, that one wanting to do an expose on this and they talked to me and they get a bunch of info and then all of a sudden they just ghost. Like
Starting point is 04:35:16 somewhere along the way they were making sure that that story didn't come out in that way. I had to just be a criminal who escaped a trial in Thailand, not somebody that had stopped
Starting point is 04:35:32 this and you know they there's they arrested the dude from SkyMed Captain Compi all of that was from from as an extension of what had what they did to me and then solmchatlum siari the head general that is keeping this dude look fey yang yang also known as patty the room in his house in his military compound with his fake gloves in a military you know base they killed him the day after i left he was dead geez okay it's not good well it means there was a lot of bigger it's like
Starting point is 04:36:08 I mentioned you before, like when I was selling the dope, I realized there's much bigger mechanics going on behind that's eating off that. Right. In Thailand, I understood that because of right away, there was a huge apparatus behind this. This was state-sponsored medical terrorism. Them were in on it. The cops were in on it. The military was in on it. And the U.S. was doing nothing.
Starting point is 04:36:31 Then when I get home, come to find out, we're putting a military base in Thailand. And that's why Biden didn't do a thing. right right like okay i get it that might be more important than me but is that more important than the whole american public where they're sending this poison everybody else who had the gloves and cnn even when they did their article they they clipped it there was lines in there like hey you're the only one that still has the gloves everybody else sold them so are you telling me that the only thing stopping this stuff from entering our medical system was the integrity of two convicts they cut that out right
Starting point is 04:37:08 They didn't want to, like, really co-signed to me. Yeah. And then all the other news agencies disappeared. And then their very next article, when they talk about how their miraculous investigative reporting led to the arrest of Copt-and-Compi and the exposure of SkyMed, they jumped on this other dude who I introduced them to because I told them, look, these are all the victims, here's the shipping documents, here's the import genius, here's this, here's that, here's the codes, here's, gave them everything, right? You could talk to these other victims. to verify this and that. They might not even know their victims or I might have sold the gloves. Anyway, this guy said he disposed to the gloves.
Starting point is 04:37:43 I don't know. I don't know. I can't comment one way or the other. But CNN gave this dude all the credit in the next article. They didn't even mention my name. Okay, fine, whatever. But the other interesting thing is I'm the number one trending thing in Thailand. They didn't put my, they didn't tag my name in the metadata.
Starting point is 04:38:00 Aren't you after readers? All right. How can you not tag my name in the metadata? Maybe it's an oversight. I don't know. It just seems there was like a lot of that, right? And it was a disaster. It was a horrible disaster for me. So I lay down for eight months and, you know, then I get back up and the mercenary dudes who I got out call me and they're like, now, you know, I'm trying to nurse drop in still. And I have the offshore tech team in Ukraine and the Russia war starts. They disappeared. They went after all the computer programmers in the beginning. I don't know if you remember that, but that was like in the press. So now we got no dev team.
Starting point is 04:38:44 And now I'm trying to find other developers, right? And they're like, bro, it's going to take us six months to understand the information and the paperwork and the shit here. You're going to need updates before then. This platform is going to die. It's going to be offline for three months. Couldn't afford to like put it back together. You know, and we lost all our customers and everything. And, you know, we had this super call and drop in auto and super call now.
Starting point is 04:39:08 There's a company called Intro, paid FaceTime, celebrities, whatever. Also, we did gift calls where you could send a text to a kid in the hospital and you can do and make a wish for nothing for five minutes and they can have a recording of their FaceTime with you, right? Right. All those companies, you know, video collaboration for cars. The number one question people have when they're looking for cars is, is the car a see? in the ad on the lot. Right. There's companies that transcribe these calls into car lots so GMs can read them.
Starting point is 04:39:40 So, okay, let's answer that question here. Click right here. You can see the car yourself. You can start to develop trust. The person, you know, you cut them out line. You know, the salesperson that has this has a competitive advantage. Standard now. Drop in LiveGenic, my other competitors, multi-100 million dollar companies.
Starting point is 04:39:58 Still don't do what we did three years ago. Still don't do drones. still didn't have the feature set we had still more expensive than we were um you know it's it's tough watching all your ideas become somebody else's hundred million dollar baby all right um and so you know that was really what happened and you know drop in just couldn't survive and and i didn't have the money to back it up again because we just had a ridiculous amount of expenses you know i got you know still owe some money from what thailand cost me you know um and overall everything lost everything basically had to start from zero again and uh i just didn't have
Starting point is 04:40:40 the will for it at first i needed some downtime and then uh the mercenary dudes who um i was with in ukraine i mean in thailand i got them out right like i didn't leave them like any other person would have left them right they said and so they you know i didn't realize this but like it's a small community and so they were super you know everybody knew about it in that community the former military community. And, you know, there was a couple of active duty dudes there that were on leave, that, you know, they were worried they were going to get ratted on. And I was like, dude, ain't nobody ratting.
Starting point is 04:41:12 Don't worry about it. And, you know, they're fine. So, you know, good vibes with those kind of people. And, you know, not leaving people behind is a big thing for them. So then they called when Ukraine started, right? On one hand, the last breath of drop-in just died, right? Because, you know, we don't have developers there anymore that we can reach. And then on the other hand, Jeremy Manchester is calling me, former Marslaught Marine, who got arrested with me in Thailand.
Starting point is 04:41:40 He's like, dude, listen, man, we know where all this shit is, right? All these countries play all these games. This is that the other thing. Put on your suit. Come with us to Ukraine. Be our face guy. And let's make some money. So I looked it up.
Starting point is 04:41:56 I realized I couldn't have a license because I'm a convict. I couldn't control transport because I'm a convict that would be constructed. possession i couldn't negotiate price couldn't be in a control position but i could certainly make introductions so we go to ukraine with uh veronica mudra she's she's a very big anti domestic violence ukrainian girl really you know good head on her shoulders good human being right and so she agrees uh you know we're going to do a humanitarian mission which is lead gen for profit business right and so it was her thing and and and then we led that you know for her and she took us there and introduced us and we got right to the top and you know they offered us
Starting point is 04:42:36 they offered us uh internal monopoly on air cargo if we'd move their dope and drugs around and uh you know learned a lot about ukraine and and the thing that people don't understand about ukraine is the third of the population is pro ukraine um you know nationalists third population is pro russia and third population doesn't care and the thing that binds them all together is money and it is like the corruption is insane and the real reason why we're there it's got nothing to do with russia um in the sense that like oh we're fighting russia it's got to do with the fact that democrats and republicans have been laundering campaign finance money through ukraine for the last 25 years and they got a gun to our head trump tried to play that
Starting point is 04:43:22 juliani wasn't the right dude to play it and he got burnt right right like they weren't ever going give that info up that info is there but it's not just democrats not just it's republicans and democrat trump didn't have to wander campaign finance money through there right but that's that's the reason why we're there then the multiple layers of lies that come i saw this in prison too you the reason why one dude gets hit um in the top you know when the top dudes are deciding is what it is but then there's layers of stories that go out to the public and the regular person in prison and doesn't know why that hit really happened. And it's the same thing in real life.
Starting point is 04:44:01 Like the American public or all these people on the internet, it's like they're arguing over the news. And I'm like, dude, they're all lying to you, bro. Oh, no, I'm CNN. I'm Fox. Dude, they're all lying to you. Let me explain something to you. The news is free everywhere all over the world, right?
Starting point is 04:44:19 And they're like, yeah, I'm like, it's in every language, right? I'm like, that's not cheap to do, is it? I mean, water's not free everywhere, but news. news is you can get a 24-7 in any language you want. I'm like, do you think that's because there's some cabal of people that have decided that it's important that normal people like us know what's really going on? Or are they all part of another crowd control mechanism and layer of lies in order to manage the public?
Starting point is 04:44:44 Which one makes more sense to you? Right? To me, it's very clear. It's crowd control mechanism. They're all full of shit. Right. And you see these people arguing on the internet over this. And I'm like, God, you guys are lying about, you guys are arguing about lies.
Starting point is 04:45:01 And none of you have any clue of what the is really going on. Because none of you have ever been to these places. Right. And the ones of you that have, like when we were in Kiev, for example, dude, there's a little booth right there. And it looks like a little blown out thing. And there's press lined up, right? And they put the hell. on and do the report standing in front of this set and then they hand the helmet to the next guy
Starting point is 04:45:31 and he stands in front and they look like it's like a combat area right it's not it's not in fact catch is open right around the corner half a block away right but the press knows are full shit so jay knows a bunch of the uh jay and our guys knew a bunch of the former military dudes that were running security for nbc a bc all these channels all over bbc and jay says and you know we've been been to the front, right? We've been to Carkey. We've been to the Dombas. We went, saw with Polish Intel and saw the whole thing, you know, what their actual needs were, what, you know, thousands and thousands of letters from, from, you know, on scene lieutenants, writing thousands and thousands of letters to aid organizations, not NGOs for stuff like socks and underwear
Starting point is 04:46:22 and shit like that. And we're like, dude, with all the shit we sent over. here, they have to ask nonprofits for socks and underwear. And they're running out of weapons every day. And then you realize as you start getting close to doing a transaction with them, that they're stealing 30 to 50% of every transaction. Now, I'm not saying that we should cut Ukraine loose, but I am saying that there's 600,000 homeless Americans, half of them are probably veterans, and it would only be $45 billion to build 600,000 apartments at $75,000 a key, But we're going to send another $60 billion over there when the government is going to steal half of it and has stolen half of it? I understand.
Starting point is 04:47:04 I hear you. I mean, what the fuck? Dude, there's no way Ukraine's going to win. There's just no way. They're going to give up the territory they lost. That's how this ends. And if they keep fighting, they're going to lose more. Russia hasn't even sent it to regular troops in there yet.
Starting point is 04:47:17 They're using the jails. Right. And it's funny. You watch people arguing about this shit. And I'm like, dude, you guys are arguing over shit. You don't, like, none of you know you're arguing over what liars are telling you. It's crazy. So the Ukraine thing was really, I mean, we didn't end up doing anything because I didn't want to go back to jail.
Starting point is 04:47:38 But it would have been very, very, very easy. I told a bunch of people when I came back, I was like, listen, man, I don't know what we're doing over there. But you're running military contracts through Ukrainian nonprofits to get to the Ukrainian government. Are you stupid or you're just trying to give it away? Right. How is our shit? And then when we hand them hardware, how does that end up in Africa? Right.
Starting point is 04:48:05 Which is where Wagner and Russia and China are running the show because we decided to tell people that we wouldn't get them aid unless they accepted gay marriage. And while I don't give a shit about gay marriage, that's where America's at. You can't go tell an African country that. You can't dictate terms to them. They're not evolved to that point yet. Like, and so that's why we have no foothold in Africa. And we're trying to hold on to stupid-ass shit like Congo and Sudan right now, which is out of Africa's probably not the most valuable place to have influence.
Starting point is 04:48:40 Same shit. Layers and layers and layers of lies. And I tell people, I was talking to YPO. And I said, you know, I spoke for YPO in Hawaii Young President's Organization. And I said, you know, it's funny. the people civilians claim moral high ground over convicts right but when when the head dudes in a joint sit down because they have to talk they don't start by saying oh we love you they start by hey kill you if i had a chance that honesty is what breeds respect which is why when they make a deal it sticks
Starting point is 04:49:18 and it's exactly the same reason why when our politicians go to do it they can't make any deal because they can't reconcile the layer of lies from the deal to the news disseminated to the public. There's too many layers many times. That's why they can't do shit. It's that simple one. I hear you. You ready to wrap it up?
Starting point is 04:49:44 What are we doing? Whatever else we got? What else do we got? No, I don't think we have anything else, do we? Yeah, I would just say wrap it up, and then if we have time, we'll hit a couple, I'll hit a Patreon story. Yeah, so I'll just wrap up with what I'm doing now.
Starting point is 04:49:58 Okay, yeah, yeah. I got, you know, so now I've had a little break. I'm like, Chil and I got a new startup going. It's called Oculi. We put cameras on cars and feed the live video feeds into an AI to tell you if you're being followed, to tell you if multiple cars are following you, personal security, anti-kidnap type of stuff. Okay. And then we added a thermal camera to the.
Starting point is 04:50:23 not anything to do with AI, but so that you can see if there's people hiding in your bushes before you pull up. And then when the car is like, say, your wife takes the kids to the park, the car moves into Century Mode very much like a Tesla. I don't think we can call it Century Mode because that's, that's Tesla's thing, but something similar, where the cameras stay active and now it starts feeding an app instead of your in-car screen through the auxiliary, and we run it through public, all the faces through public databases, like offenders, child molester, shit like that. So if you're at the park with your kids and there's one of those people near you,
Starting point is 04:50:59 you'll get a notification and know that. Okay. So that's what we're working on now. And I'm pretty excited about that. I think that's, you know, personal security space is very, very, very, it's a big growth industry right now. And I think there is, you know, in a lot of countries, a lot of wealthy people are worried to, you know, kidnaps in South America and Asia are a huge.
Starting point is 04:51:21 problems um and also i think a lot of people would like to know better who it is around them right especially when your kids are around right do you cut them loose in the park is everybody safe is this or that the other things so that's what we're working on now and we got that in development and uh you know doing a little raise and and this time i kept my name off the front page and uh and that's it that's That's where we got going. And doing Inside Troop Crime podcast with Matthew Cox. Yeah. That's a big one.
Starting point is 04:51:57 All right. We're going to do a few of these. All right. All right. Well, listen, I appreciate you coming out. Bro, thanks for having me, man. This was fun. This was fun.
Starting point is 04:52:05 You don't get to, smart people are hard to find. So when you find them, it's always entertaining. I appreciate that. No, rarest commodity. It's not big tits. It's not a model-looking chick. It's not a muscle builder. It's not.
Starting point is 04:52:18 If you think of the rarest quality for humans, it's intelligence. I mean, can't buy them like you can't boobs. It's certainly rare. Yeah. Yeah. Boobes are for sale. Brains are not. I'm wrapping this up.
Starting point is 04:52:37 Okay. You're a talker. You can enter whatever you want. You're a talker like me, bro. Like, yeah, you'll go forever. But, yeah, listen, I appreciate you coming. This was fun. It was a great story.
Starting point is 04:52:48 and hey I appreciate you guys watching do me a favor hit the hit the subscribe button hit the bell share the video also we're going to put some some stories that didn't make the interview on Patreon so please go to Patreon please join for 10 bucks a month we have exclusive content on Patreon it's 10 bucks it's not a lot of money I really appreciate it it helps us produce a podcast thank you very much for watching see you

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