Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - The $180 Million Ponzi Scheme That Suckered Celebrities

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

The $180 Million Ponzi Scheme That Suckered Celebrities

Derek and I have dinner with Kim Kardashian and Reggie Bush. You do $60 million in about five months. This is a Ponzi scheme. $180 million was the loss. Now I have everybody suing me. 96% of these cases plead guilty. You need to find a way out of this legal situation. And that window will present itself.

And when it does, you must go through it. Really, my whole childhood, teenage years all the way to college in Memphis, Tennessee. Okay. Then I was rejected from Brigham Young University. grades were too low right the C student and they accepted me to BYU Idaho okay so I went to BYU Idaho spent two years there and then went on a Mormon mission are your parents Mormon my mom's a Mormon my dad's not were you raised Mormon I was raised Mormon okay all in what did what did your parents do just wondering uh dad was a sales guy regional sales guy uh for North

American Phillips Sylvania Phillips electronics right and then mama's house wife. Yep. A Mormon housewife. Are she allowed to be with a guy who's not Mormon? Is that okay? No, no. It's very frowned upon. Okay. Yeah. We felt the judgment. It was basically like a single mom taking her two boys to church. My dad actually had a whip on his, I don't know who made this thing, but it's not a belt. Right. A belt would have been, you know, you know what's coming. You know what's coming. This was a whip with some strands of leather on the end of it and a handle. And buddy, when he grabbed that, it was on. And it's not straight up, hey, keep your pants up. We're going to skin on that whip. But that's the way I was raised. They split when I was eight and a half. Dad set us down on our bunk bed, my little brother and I. He's five. I'm eight. Right. Dad set us down and said, hey, you need to know, I'm leaving. And your mom and I are getting divorced. And this, today's the day I'm moving out. And so did you? Have any inkling?

Not an inkling. I heard them fighting a lot, you know, but, you know, it seemed like parents always did that. Yeah, that was my perception. Your friends would tell them all my parents fight sometimes. Oh, you know, exactly. I had no, you know, I did not see this coming at all. He takes us to the movie theater with our babysitter. We're seeing the movie King Kong.

I remember the movie. It's because it's a long movie. Yeah. By the time we, he picks us back up, gets us to the house again, all the interior doors on all the bedrooms are locked. he's gone in and emptied the rooms of furniture and then locked the doors and then pulled them shut so that my little brother and I don't see that he's emptied the house. But the house is emptied. The living room's got a couple of things left. He's taking his chair and, of course, that whip. And he's taken other things from the living room that were valuable to him. He can't

take the piano. It's too heavy. But he's taking my mom's stuff, basically. And so at eight years of age when he drops us off he literally doesn't sit back down he's already told us he's leaving so he basically says by kids and pulls the door shut and heads out and i call my mom right away like hey this seems pretty important sorry to bug you um she's at work she's got a new job so maybe she knew this was coming because this is a new job for her yeah and maybe they had discuss this together, but not with the kids. And I said, hey, listen, a dad just left. And he's not coming back. He's explained this to me. He's not coming back. How old are you? I'm eight. My brother's five. And all the doors are locked, mom. And what do you mean the doors are locked? Aren't you in the

house? I said, no, not the front door. The doors to the interior bedrooms are all locked. And she says, I'm on my way home. So she comes home and she knows how, you know, with a little butter knife to get in all these little chinty doors and we walk in and every the furniture's gone. Furniture in their bedroom is gone. The nightstands or yours too. No, no. No, our bunk bed is there. Our stuff is there. Our children's stuff is there. Okay. But he's emptied his office. He's emptied their shared bedroom. All right. He's basically, he took more than he should. Yeah. But he took his stuff too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it just felt totally like a violation, right? It's one thing to pull out. It's a whole other thing to pull out with mom stuff. I mean, it just felt terrible. So she's in a mess. She's in a mess, right?

We're trying to, you know, give her some comfort, some support. And I just remember it was kind of a devastated day. It was a day you kind of marked time by in your childhood. Yeah. I can see you skim over this when you tell your story. Yeah. Because this bothers you. Yeah. I can see it. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny how some things you can talk about, I can talk about horrific things and laugh through the whole thing and there are some things that just hit to turn that night right right you know it's it's my parents were 13 years apart in age so he was always a little like a granddad type dad he was a little older and and we were his second family he had already had a family and and and i knew them they were like basically stepbrothers right and i remember when he pulled out and took all

that stuff, I thought, man, that, it just, it's, we, we didn't have any money. I mean, it, it just seemed like too much. Like, what are we going to do? Will we actually make it? I don't actually know what the move is here. Right. I don't, I don't know what security is underneath us at this point. And at eight years of age, I don't even know the finances. I have no idea how this is all going to work. But I knew he was in charge of bringing home a living. Right. It paying the bills. And now that it's not, I don't even know child support. I don't know alimony. These are all phrases I came to learn later. Yeah. But I will tell you this, the man paid his child support every month, every month. I'm the one that I get out, we would do visitation,

which, by the way, I hated it. I was on the sports teams and stuff in school. And I, I literally couldn't compete in some of the events and some of the sports because it's dad's weekend. Right. And so we're pulled right out of our friend group and even some of the church stuff was important to me. All of that gets, we're now doing dad. It's time. It's like doing time. Yeah. We're now doing dad's time. And then we get injected back into our family. He's a chain smoker, two and a half packs. And he's smoking the car these days. You know, the window's straight up. You can't breathe. All this is going on. And so going to and from dad's place was a little painful. He would write the checks in the car sitting in my driveway before I'd run back into mom and hand me the $200 check, which was child support. And they had a different range of alimony. I'm not sure I paid that. But he did. paid his child support and paid his alimony and that and the little job she had got us through yeah i never felt like we were near homeless or anything or or felt any of that strife we could have been near i i don't know yeah she was balancing all these important things and so we didn't

have to worry about it okay yeah so let's go forward a little bit since sure you know you eventually you applied to go to college you went through high school yeah applied to go to college you went through high school applied to go to college. I was terrible student. Right. And you were saying weren't good enough to get into first college. It was not. I feel that all this paperwork by myself. And I was half-hearted about it. I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to college. That was my view at the time. I was totally kind of lost at that age. And so I filled it out because that's kind of where all my friends were going. And so I filled out. And then I was rejected. And I thought, oh, this is terrible. I'm going to be going to some school in Idaho. I don't even know where Idaho is. I'm in Tennessee at this time.

I really thought it was Indiana. I thought Idaho was Indiana. When you memorize the, it just seemed closer. When they told me it's near the West Coast, this Idaho place, I thought, well, I don't think I want to go there. It's a long ways. And so I end up literally latching a U-Haul trailer to the back of my Chevrolet Manza, loading it up with some of the stuff from my house, and heading to college alone. And settling in to.

At the time, it was called Rick's, think about this, this guy's name, Rick's College, okay, okay? How late at that? It sounds like, it's like a website. We're in a guy's house going to college, right? This is me coming up with a Cox University. This is Cox University. Send tuition now, right? So I'm going to Rick's College, which sounded so embarrassing.

I didn't want to tell anybody this. Well, they later changed it to BYU, Idaho, because it was the feeder school in the BYU Provo. Better move. It was a much better move from marketing. standpoint. They could raise the tuition. But I had a good experience there. I had a great experience. I met really good people. And Rick was great. Rick was fantastic to all of us. All eight of us. No, no, it was a big school. But it did feel like, am I headed to, you know, a neighborhood,

you know, red schoolhouse? Where am I going to school here? But it was, it was fine. I had a great experience. And then from there, I was called to do a mission for the church where they send you this really formal letter you will now set aside all personal affairs all personal affairs and you will now dedicate yourself to the service of jesus christ you're now going to there's no money involved in this this is not a uh we're going to pay you a wage or something they're taking some huge assumptions in this letter they are they are taking huge assumptions and all the guys that i look up to and admire like big brother type guys they're all doing this and so I don't personally have a relative who's done this.

I'm like the first kind of line up for this. And it feels a little like a firing squad type thing. I mean, it's seriously, I'm completely putting, you know, I have two jobs to pay my way through school. Okay. I'm working two jobs. And now I'm going to give up all jobs and have mom mail me $240 a month to survive my Mormon mission.

And I'm thinking, number one, I don't know if she's got 240. And the 240's in the letter. If I'd gotten called to London, England, it's 800. I got called to Santa Rosa, California. And the letter says, 240 a month. I'm thinking, gee, whiz, this seems lean. 240. Golly, I'm spending 240 now.

I'm probably spending $1,000 as a student. Right. What are they going to do for 240? What year is this? 87 to 89. Okay. Yeah. Doesn't matter.

It's 240. You can't live on $2. You're a part. I mean, really, where are we going to live? I mean, it's like, you know, and we got bikes. You know, you can't imagine riding a bike in a suit. You just can't conceive it. But we did that.

We did it. And it's hard to feel cool. It is hard to feel cool mounting a 10 speed in a suit with a vest and a tie. And you're buttoned up tight. This is not a loose situation. You're getting up at 6 a.m. And everything's tight. Tight as a drum.

And you're getting on a bicycle. And that sprocket wants to grab all that loose material. I mean, there's plenty of times. we're chewed up in the sprocket driving these 10 speeds around. But I had at least when you knock on people's doors, they're receptive, they want to see you, they're sympathetic. They are sympathetic. I was being a smart act.

No, no, they do not want to see you. Mormons. They do not want to see you. Matter of fact, they confuse us with the Jehovah Witnesses quite a bit with the book and the watchtower and the whole thing. And we are not the Jehovah Witnesses. Our doctrine is quite different, the whole experience. But they do feel sympathy.

And I kind of figured out a kind of a wrap at the door to get in because the objective is to get in. You need to get in the living room and have this discussion about Jesus. And I'm telling you, their rejection's unbelievable. We end up playing a game of baseball where if you get them to open the door, it's your own first base. If you get in the door at second base, if you get seated, it's third base. And if they let you open scripture and get into that, it's a home run. And so we would play baseball every day, trying to keep track of how many bases, how many doubles, triple.

I mean, this is what guys are doing just to get through the day. Get through it. And they were doing that all day every day. There's no work. This is the work. And you were to report back, this is interesting. We probably have some LDS Mormon guys listening here. They'll totally understand this.

At 9 p.m. every night around the globe. And there's 55,000 of us out there, 55,000 Mormon missionaries reporting at 9 p.m. in their time zone, their numbers for the day. Now, our numbers are, how many doors did we knock? How many people did we talk to? How many books of Mormon did we hand out? How many discussions were had? And these are standard discussions the church provides us in a three ring binder to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people. So nobody's winging it. We're in a three ring binder when we get in the house. House. And Joseph Smith was a prophet of God. And I mean, we're covering the whole thing. So they're measuring this. And every night at 9 o'clock, it doesn't matter your 19 years of age. Doesn't matter that this is when people get piercings and tattoos. This is the age range where this is occurring. We are accountable to our district leader who's accountable to the zone leader, who's accountable to the mission, who sends it to Salt Lake Daily Data is reported to Salt Lake City on these missions. And so they're keeping track of this stuff tightly.

The objective is to baptize people. Right. To get them to join the Mormon church. That is the mission critical. Right. And so everything we're doing is measurable activity to get us there. And I've got to tell you, after two years of doing that, you come home, you're set up for business. You set up to be serious about business.

You're focused. You're accountable, you know. I think it helped me. I think it helped me grow up. I had some really treasured experiences out there. there. And I think when I came back, it was, I was ready to go. I was focused. I'd gotten through boyhood into manhood in that two-year window. Okay. Yeah. So, I returned to BYU Provo, finish there. I got to work my way all through school. I've got to pay the bills.

I have a question, were you, what were your numbers, though? Were they, were they? Stellar. Really? Stellar. Yes. It's since nobody's got records, we're just going to stay with stellar. Top performer. top performer yeah i did want to be a top performer yeah whether we're measuring jesus discussions or we're measuring anything else i wanted to be a top performer okay sure all right so you go so i'm back in provo yeah uh i'm selling radio advertising i'm writing the ads selling them to car dealerships to chiropractor offices any restaurants any business who needs to advertise on the radio. I'm handling the region I'm in. It's called Utah County. I'm the radio account executive

for Utah County selling radio advertising. And that was a hard job to get. I had to really, when I first got there, I had no car and I had no money. So I'm on a bus going from job interview to job interview with the help wanted ads. And first job I wanted was at this radio station. I wanted to be in radio. I wanted to be on the air. That's what I wanted to be. And And everybody I interviewed with said, look, there's no money in that. Right. You don't want to be an on-air personality. There's no money in that.

You're not ultra-crankite, okay? I was just say if there is if you're like the top. Rick D's or something, we're going to pay you. Yeah. You're not rig D's. Right. You need to be in sales. And I just kind of took their lead.

And so sure enough, it turns out I was pretty good at that. And so I'm writing the ads. And I found a little trick, Matt. If you write the ad before you sell it, meaning target. the business, write the ad, record it. Get one of the DJs to record the ad. I could go in with my micro cassette recorder, press play. And he would, the guy, the business owner would say, is that what we're running on your station? Said, not yet. I had this produced because I thought it would be fantastic for your business to have this on our radio station. So I had our own air

personality, produce it for you in anticipation of our meeting today. And so I sold all my ads by pre-producing them were the guys that had been there a while they weren't allowed to do that they weren't thinking this way and the GM came to me when they said look I don't like this at all you you are having our owner talent recording ads you've not sold yet okay this is a huge waste of resources I said well listen listen I believe it's an edge I said we're all the same team here and I kind of had to pitch the GM I said listen I believe I can sell everybody we do this with If you'll just let me write the ad, I can write the ad, and then let me use the right owner of personnel, the morning drive guy or the afternoon drive guy, let me use the right

guy for the client and I'll sell everything. Don't worry. If it's not making you money, we stop doing it. But I'm telling you, I can sell better with this edge and say, let me do it. And so it worked out quite well. I was making good money. Finally, I was able to buy a car, able to move on with my career. And I was making enough money.

I was feeling a little bored by school. I was making, close to six figures, actually. I was the number one guy at the radio station, selling lots of ads, winning the trips. This is what? In the late 80s, early 90s? I'm home in 89. So this would have been 9091.

I got two years left at school. So I'm using those two years. I'm driving a brand new Infinity G20, which at the time was like my dream car. And it was the first car I ever purchased that wasn't used. Right. And it was all purchased with radio money. Yeah, I was going to say that's a lot of, and that's a lot of money back then.

It's a lot. I felt intimidated going into the dealership. I'd never have actually been to a new car dealership before, and I'm sure they took me for a ride, but I only had so much money. I only had so much. So they weren't going to take more than I had. So I wanted a new car and they sold it to me. It's great. I loved it. I love the experience. Right. And I think without the mission, none of that occurs.

Right. I still been very confused about what I wanted my life to look like. So how, I mean, what did you, but you said you wanted your life to be, you, on-air talent. I did. Right. So what, what, where does it go from there? You said you just worked there for two years. So why did you leave there?

One of my accounts was Miracle Ear hearing aids. And this guy and I developed quite a friendship. He was like a mentor to me. And he says this, I'm near graduation, almost finished with school. And he says to me, I have five locations of Miracle Ear in Las Vegas. would you be willing when you graduate to move down there and manage the five locations? He says, I already have audiologists that measure the hearing and do the doctor work. I don't need you to do that.

I want you to manage sales. I want you to make sure audiologists aren't just measuring hearing loss, but selling hearing aids. I said, absolutely, I could do that. I said, what's something like that pay? Because I need to make sure it pays more and I'm being paid now. And he basically offers me a salary close to six figures and a bonus on every hearing. hearing aids old, which is more money than I'm making now. And hearing aids back then are what, $1,200?

Maybe a little more. A really nice, and you got to sell two of them. Typically, you're selling too. Right. That was a good experience because the wife can always hear better than the man, always. And the man always says she's mumbling. Yeah. Always.

So we're still talking more. She talks too much. She's jumbling her words. She's not making sense. It's the way she talks to me. I just can't understand. When you speak, James. I can understand you.

When she speaks, it's not, they would say that all the time. I said, well, I'm just telling you, we've measured the hearing. You don't hear good. That's the bottom line. And we just want to make sure you hear good. She wants to talk to you without screaming at you. So anyway, so a lot of hearing aids. I did that for one year and was recruited by my Mormon bishop to financial services.

He says you should not be in hearing aids. And I thought, okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. It's a little out there for me. but it's paying good he says when is your contract up i said well i'm due to renew in one year but i'm bored so i won't renew it probably what are you thinking he says well in order to sell life insurance you need to be licensed financial services is life insurance annuities mutual funds stuff

like that okay so i don't understand you're the mormon bishop my bishop for the mormon church wants you to sell insurance for the mormon church or he also owns a he owns an insurance agency Okay. And it's just so. Not for the Mormon. He just, no, what's funny,

you just said that. It's actually the Mormon church's insurance company. Oh. Beneficial life. The Mormon church owns a holding called beneficial life. The church is insurance company. But that's coincidental. Okay.

He's not a Mormon bishop who has to work for church companies. He just runs an insurance agency that the church happens to own that insurance company. Okay. He could work for another all state or something, but he didn't. He says, I think you'd be good at this. Would you take one of our test, kind of an entry-level personality profile test?

An aptitude test. That's it. An aptitude test. I failed. I took three of those tests. Oh, you did? I failed all three tests. This guy says to me, he says to me when I take this test, he said, I'm not seen a higher

score. That's what he says. I'm not seeing a higher. I said, I get terrible grades, man. If this is about grades, it's not going to go well. It's about aptitude. You can't really fail it. It's whether or not you get the score, whether it's programmed to do this.

Right. Do you have the personality type? is going to enjoy this job and do it for a long time and not leave. That's it. That's what they're concerned about. And I did exceptionally well on it. And he says, I'm willing to invest my time in you based on your score on this test.

He says, you're going to work here at the office. I'll assign you one of our secretaries. That's what they used to call them, by the way, secretaries. So we're going to assign you one of the secretaries. And you're going to sell life insurance. And I've never seen an insurance policy.

I don't think our family ever had one. I don't even know if it's a scam. You don't really know how it works. For all I know, it's a scam. You give them 50 bucks and they're going to mail you half a million? What are you talking about? How does that work? What's the actuary on that?

So I needed him to explain that it's legitimate first. And then once I understood it, I thought, oh gosh, everybody needs this. I was going to say it's actually, it's actually, if you fall within the parameters and follow it, and it's actually insurance like term life insurance. I don't really thrilled with, but whole life. Oh yeah, permanent insurance. We call it permanent insurance. It's permanent or temporary.

It's funny you say that because term policies, 96% of term policies expire before you do. I know. So it's all cash. That's why they're so cheap. It's all cash in their high commission. Yeah. So it's a terrible thing. And I hate that you hear these pundits out there pushing that stuff.

But anyway, that became my career. I start there and within three years. I leave and go out on my own and I build a team. I figure out how to build a team to actually. sell insurance annuities. Then I got my securities license that sell securities, mutual funds. And then I have a supervisor license, a supervised people selling mutual funds. And we're hitting paid dirt now. We're moving on up, as George Jefferson says. We're moving way on up. I learned how to do the insurance business and how to build a financial services practice. And we're doing

very well. I get married. And Tiffany and I start dating. We get married. I think the year we got married, I cash flow $312,000 that year. What year is this? This is $94.94. Yeah, because I finished with Miracle Lear, that one year contract, and then start with him. And then that first year, I did not make $300, the first year, beneficial. I made 108, and then the next year climbed the ladder cross 312 you know my dad was uh worked for state farm man uh state farm insurance he was a manager for like honestly that was his career like 50 years he he not 50 i think he retired when he was 70 so probably 40 45 okay he started when he was in his early or mid 20s he must have been very good at it he was he was very good at being a manager okay um he was not a great

sales person sure uh he didn't really have the bullshit kind of person Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You need to be okay with everybody. Yeah. You need to be able to be slightly offended without getting offended. Yeah, oh yeah. I think he had that problem. You know, you have to be able to mesh with everybody.

He couldn't, but he was a great sale. I mean, he was a great manager. Yeah, he had an organized mind. Yeah. He could get things organized. And he knew how to tell you to, you know, like you've heard this. Like the guys that, you know, it's the teacher. You know what I'm saying?

Like, if you can't sell, then teach, you know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. For sure. And that is a true phrase. And it's funny, too, because he's the first. person to tell you that. He was like, I was okay. He was like, I mean, I went through the motions. I did average. The management thing came up. I said, that's, that's for me. Because he was a great manager. He was great of motivating people. Yeah. And that's a different skill taught for being

a complete prick. Yeah. Great. He was great at this part of his life. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. I totally get it. So that's what I did. I broke out on my own. I mentioned that. And breaking out on my own was a breakthrough for me because I now was in charge. I could use all the systems understanding I had about how to manage people. And actually, I even developed a little technology. We called it the analyzer that if one of my new agents asked you 27 questions and hit a button, it would calculate not only your net worth, but your tax inefficiencies. It would calculate your retirement readiness. And so we could actually project how much premium you need to put in to max out tax free benefits. We could we can maximize how much shortfall you would have if you didn't change

anything. Don't change anything. This is where you're going to end up. And if you can live, if you can live for three months in retirement and then die, you've got enough. Right. If you, if you need to live 20 years, we've got to save more. Right. Right. So we, the analyzer allowed all my agents to have tools necessary to convince the client and we got to save more. We got to put more away. And we got to get on it now to benefit from compounding interest. So that was our mission. We were helping families grow and build net worth. And our guys felt great about it. We ended up at the peak of the company with 8,000 agents. Okay.

Licensed agents. 33 states, all provinces of Canada. And we have a company plane, two pilots. They're flying me from location to location so I can return home the same day, be with my family. The company's exploding. You'll remember this because you're in the middle of your mortgage. I'm waiting for you to tell me that the internet killed. this, right? No. No. No, no, no, no. Okay. No, the federal government killed this and we're getting there. Okay. Yeah, yeah. The, you're in the, you're right, right now in the business called Impact Net Worth. Okay. That was the name of the business. Right now, Impact Net Worth is, is firing on all cylinders and everybody's trying to join the business. They want to be licensed in

this business because we've got the tools, we've got the products, it's fun. We're going on trips, there's conferences, everybody's enjoying the culture. It's a great business. And my CFO, who's a 22-year Air Force retired military guy, he's in charge of all the money. All commissions being paid. He's in charge of my money. He's in charge of the bills that my family pays. He's in charge of all the money flowing in and out of this agency. He says, James, we've got to add another product. We need real estate. Everybody, everybody who's got a housekeeper, housekeepers have two and three rental properties. He says, we need to have real estate as an option for these net worth people,

that people are trying to build their net worth. You can't just sell them financial instruments. Some of them need real estate. And I'm thinking, I don't, we can't get everybody in real estate license. That's too much. It'll slow down our machinery. He says, well, let's find a product that doesn't require the license. And so I said, all right, Jerry, go find that.

I'm open. We're just going to add more products to the flywheel here. No problem. Well, so a developer doesn't have to have everybody licensed because they all work for the development company, right? That's correct. That's correct. He attends a conference where several developers are presenting. Now, he's a smart guy. This is a, he was the comptroller for Nellis Air Force Base before I hired him.

I mean, this is a serious financial guy. He brings guys over to the office that he met at that conference who were presenting the developers. I was not there. They're interested in Jerry. Jerry gives them a business card about impact net worth and what we're doing and how big we are. And they're interested instantly in getting involved in this distribution channel. They want their products, their development products inside this distribution. Because with 8,000 people, they can blow out whatever real estate they've got to develop condos, whatever they've got quickly. And they can grow on our back. That's the way they're viewing it. Well, I don't meet them. I don't really know enough about real estate. I certainly don't know off about development. That seems it's out of my league. It really is. It's not my thing. I'm into financial instruments and helping people grow and build their net worth and developing the systems to do that. I don't really know the real estate piece. Well, Jerry says, you got to meet with these guys. They'll tell you all about it, how it works. They're going to create a product

for us, and it'll be dialed into what our clients need. And that sounds very appealing to me. number one they are the experts number two they're going to build a product and craft it around our client's needs i said we'll set the meeting up i'll come i'll come to the meeting but i liked him vetting it a little bit and doing the due diligence that that help relieve me a little bit that i'm not kind of making a decision outside of my domain right all right so it's the day of the meeting they roll in in a limousine we see them pull up in front of our conference room our comfort trum's located. It's a glass coffer room pushed up against the outer wall of our office so we can see everybody that pulls up into the parking lot. They pull up in a limousine. A guy pops out with

the cowboy hat on. I said, Jerry, these are guys? And it looks a little weird, rambunctious. These guys pouring out of this thing. It looked like they may even be intoxicated. So they're bumbling out of the, and obviously I'm Mormon and kind of living those principles at this point. Right. So the alcohol thing's a no-go. You know, if these guys are trying to come to the meeting, We got nothing to talk about, right? Well, they come in could not be more charming, could not be more, feel like hometown Midwest type guys. Right.

The dad's got the cowboy hat. He's wearing boots. He's got the jacket with the patches. I mean, it just feels like a good guy. And then his son is there. The old man's name is Fred. The son's name is Derek. Derek's about my age.

I think I'm 35, 36 at the time. So, and they brought a third wheel with them from their company. in the Dominican Republic named Tim. Tim is their head of sales in the Dominican. So they're basically here to do a show for us. And we've got waters out in the conference room. We've got little note pads and everything. And I've got a screen that we can put stuff up on the screen to see if we need to see anything. They come rolling in. They're not drunk. They just poured out of that level a little funny. And I do have a guy. I got to tell you now, I had a gut. I had a gut feeling at this first meeting that something's not right. And I

And I chalked it up to my insecurity about real estate. I kind of dismissed the gut over, I just don't know enough of other states. Naturally, I'm going to be suspicious of everybody. If you start coming at me with mortgage stuff, I'm just going to be suspicious because I don't know enough about it. Right. So I just was chalking my gut, but I'm telling you, as it turns out, that gut was trying to help me.

Yeah. So we do the meeting and they said, listen, we will design the product. for you. Maxim Magazine, the publisher, wants to hold the Hot 100 Maxim Contest at our resort. We need to finish our spa suites. Ocean World, which is SeaWorld in Europe, is building adjacent to our property. They need more rooms. We need more rooms, and we need to be able to host the Hot 100 Maxim Contest for Maxim. They would like to partner with us from a branding standpoint. They would like to put the Maxim name own our hotel and call it the Maxim Bungalos.

I'm thinking this is really big time. Right. This is, I mean, everybody's heard of this publishing company. And I'm thinking this legitimizes this product in a very special way. It's not, and by the way, where the hell is the Dominican Republic? I'm thinking to myself, where is this? And so I don't have a globe in my office, but I'm asking these guys, please tell me where this country is.

And is it a country? Is it a province of another country? Tell me all about it. I really don't know. I've never been there. So they laugh, you know, and they tell me all about where the Dominican is, how big it is. Nine million people apparently live there. And then they tell me this.

I was going to say you were raised in Tennessee. I was raised in Florida like, listen. So you know where the D.R. is. The geography was not a big deal. Like I knew that there was the south and there were those bunch of square states up to the west. Yeah. And out west is railroad tracks.

That's it. Right. That's all you need to know. That is. What else do you need to know? Right. So they tell me where the D.R is. That's what they call.

call it now. And they said, we want you to come down. We want to tour you around what we've already built, our existing property. We want to show you what Maxim's got us doing. We want to show you the ocean world so you can kind of get a feel for it. And I said, I'd be honored to come down. I said, but I'll be honest with I don't sell this stuff. I'm running a company. I have great financial advisors that would be selling this. I need to include them if we're going to do a trip. They said, oh, whoever you want to bring. How many you got? I said, well, I have a board of advisors that are my top salespeople. And they decide trips we go on.

They decide contests we run. They really are important glue in this large apparatus with 8,000 agents. They're the leaders. I said, I would want to bring five couples. And they said, no problem. We'll pay for the flights. We're going to take care of you. When you get there, you're going to love this.

It's going to be great. And I said, it's starting to sound good, man. It's starting to sound very good. So the trip's planned. I let the guys know. And I have pretty good control with these guys, the board of advisors. They know I'm running this company. And they know if I say no, it's a no from a product standpoint.

Right. We're not adding it. If it's a no, it's a no. But I tell them in this one, because remember, I got that weird feeling. And I don't really know this area, the real estate. I tell them all in a group before we go down there, if any of you nicks this, we don't do it. we're not doing it if any of you are uncomfortable with anything they tell us we don't do it so we kind of all agreed that we're all in or we're not in at all right and i said but i'd like that one of

one of my guys top guys is a lawyer john top guy making a lot of money in my company is he's a lawyer by trade we went to b yu together he says i'll ask the legal questions i said that's good john because we don't really know the legal questions. And then we started assigning people. Why don't you ask the financial questions, Jerry? Why don't you ask the marketing questions? Why don't you ask the employee question? We just make homespun due diligence assignments.

Right. We get down there and I got to tell you, it's a four star, not five star, four star, full-blown resort, terraced into the hillside, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, lots of sand, and villas terraced along the hillside in a hotel sitting right in the heart of it. And it's an open air lobby with marble everywhere, waterfalls. It's fantastic. Five pools. This is all done.

This is what we see when we arrive in this relationship. And I'm thinking, man, we're kind of lucky here. We've kind of found a developer. Well, it's excited to work with us. Yeah, you're not looking at models. No, yeah, we're not looking at models. This shit, a chunk of this thing is done. They can clearly pull this off.

Exactly. They've already pulled it off. Before they met us, they pulled it off. That's exactly right, Matt. That's exactly what I felt. And so we started asking our questions. And my meeting is with Derek and Fred because we're trying to structure what's the product going to look like.

Right. And they want to know from me. What do you need it to look like? I said, well, if we're talking about condos, that would be hotel condos and we're going to have rental income for the condo owner, I said, if you took half the rent and the owner took the other half, is that leave you enough to run the hotel piece of it? I mean, is it enough money for it to be properly? profitable for you, if the room night's $300 and you took $150 and we gave $150 to my customer,

will that work for you? And they said, absolutely. I said, okay, so how about what are we selling? Are we going to sell the whole condo? Are we going to fractionalize it? We're going to divide it into pieces? What are we going to do? And they said, well, fractional makes us more money. And I said, it creates more bite sizes for me. It's somebody with 50 grand can play ball. They don't have to have 180. I said, it's easier for me to do fractions. So they start papering fractions. And so we move on down the road. We agree to do business. We agree on the commissions. And we agree on 20% of every dollar that comes in is commissions. And we're going to pay on my side. I take 12 of that to pay my people. We take eight of that to keep in-house for profits. And I take a bunch of it. Right. I'm running

the company. So 20% of every dollar is going to come to us for commissions. All checks from clients buying fractions are made out to the Elliott company. All checks. It all gets FedEx that comes to our clients send it to our guys. Our guys send it to our headquarters in Nevada, Las Vegas. We then put it all in a FedEx package. Goes to the Dominican Republic to the resort. They deposit in Dominican banks and they wires our commissions. So that's kind of the strong. structure of the deal. Okay. And it's, we do 60 million in about five months.

And this is being well received, okay? Right. This has been added to our, we call it a fact finder, our needs analysis. We've added real estate as a section for the needs analysis. So people are refined their homes. They're taking the cash. They're harvesting the equity in their homes. Yeah.

And they're taking the cash. You remember this era. Yeah, yeah. This is your era. They're taking the cash and they're buying fractures. And Elliott's willing to finance the fractions. If you put 50% down, they'll take the other 50% over a 10-year period at 8% money. And so we're not paid commissions on the finance piece. We're only paid commissions on the cash piece, the money that's being raised.

The maximum bungalows hasn't even begun. I'm there for the shovel-in-the-ground ribbon-cutting. We pulled 60 million together selling the existing property that was already built as fractions because that's going to give them the cash to build the maximum bungalows. So they basically leverage their existing property right to raise the dough to build the maximum bungalows. Well now we're in the ground and they do have models for these demos and we're looking at pieces of cloth and this is going to be the interior. This is going to be the rugs. It's going to be all the furnishings. These will be the beds. You know, it's right now we're looking at raw land above the hotel.

where they're going to put five buildings, and they're going to put 180 new units that we're now going to sell as brand new five-star Max and Bungalows. And so this is the part of real estate I'm less familiar with. It's basically a vision with ground-up construction. The construction director's name is Jason, and we're still friends today. Jason's in charge of all construction. Hires all the subs. He's in charge of the money that gets allocated to him to build.

and he does his job. He's a boy scout in this regard. He's completely accountable to me on timelines, everything going on so we can communicate it to our clients, what's happening with their units. Right. Well, we start selling those units, and those were called the residences. That's a product we had, the residences. So we're selling those, they're selling before they can be built.

I mean, they're selling fast. Right. Because everybody, there's a scarcity to this. There's limited supply, you know, limited inventory, you know, Everybody wants a piece of this. And many of my agents are buying the condos because they know that these things are going to appreciate. And then there's an existing sales team to sell them, our guys. Right. There's 8,000 sales guys to sell these units if you want to go liquid, if you're ready to unload it.

I place on site at the resort, my own paperwork team and my own sales director to greet our clients if they want to come kick the tires and be a part of the tour and see the thing live. right so so my team is there in a nice glass office that's been set up by the elliots that but it's my team they've got our crested logo on the glass door frosted it looks you know special for us well i've got dominican men and women running that office and reporting to our office in nevada about sales checks collected you know the whole sales process well it's going everything's going good. We move along. Maxim starts bringing their A-list celebrities down. Derek and I have dinner with Kim Kardashian and Reggie Bush. This is back when they were dating. So it's an early part of her career. She's with Reggie Bush. He's now at, he's now an NFL football player. By the way, he's probably

5-7, 5-8, something like that. He's not a big guy. And it's hard to believe he was such a powerful running back at USC because he's a smaller guy. And he's got a very high-pitched voice, by the way, very high-pitched voice, like a Mike Tyson type of voice. And then, so we're at dinner, Kim Kardashian, Reggie Bush, Derek Elliott, and I at dinner, private dinner at the resort. They want to hear all about the plans, what's happening, because this is going to be the A-list drop spot for the Hot 100, all the magazine covers, everything for Maxim is going to be occurring at this resort.

It's their first resort. Right. I'm so excited. This is such an easy sale for my guys. It's an easy transaction. Our company becomes, you can imagine, a little lopsided, life insurance is a hard transaction. This is an easy transaction. So this has become a big part of what's going on at Impact Net Worth is tours to the Dominican

Republic to see things, right? So I'm even sure my sales guys are exiting the needs analysis that we're supposed to do and they're selling real estate to anybody who is interested, right? So it's moving kind of fast like that. And I remember feeling like at our quarterly training, we do quarterly training, we bring them all in and we train them at our headquarters, I remember feeling I need to really stand on this needs analysis because it's what keeps us clean. It's it's what keeps the process purer and then we're not just becoming a resort, real estate sales office that we're actually a financial planning firm trying to help people build net worth. And I remember needing to really zero in on that a lot because this is big money, selling us. This resort real estate is fast money, and it's just an easy transaction.

But it also will end. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Let's face it. At some point, they'll finish building all these and then we won't have another project in the work. If we don't have another project in the works, then you've just fall, you got to fall back and you don't want to have to rebuild that wheel or that business.

Well said, because they're trained now to do the whole process. But I could see quickly it's evolving into, wait a second. These are Elliott salespeople. we've got a we got to reign in elliott's so good i mean they brought the maxim in i mean they did the job there they brought maxim in all the they brought the a list celebrities in they are doing their job making this an unbelievable place to come so no complaints from them no or for me of me of them right yeah none none i feel great about it then comes the announcement james our attorney has brought us a new property across the island in a place called Juan Dolio.

Santa Domingo is the capital city of the Dominican Republic. The beach town adjacent to Santa Domingo is called Juan Dolio. We're buying as a company with our profits. This is the Elliot's talking to me. We're going to purchase a three-star Sheraton that's on the water. Three towers. It's completely constructed. There's people staying in it now.

the bank has assumed the debt from the owner that owned the sheriff. Sheraton flew their flag, but a local Dominican owns the hotel. We're buying it back from the bank. The bank has repossessed this property and we've got a deal. We're going to buy that hotel and Maxim is willing to put their name on it, put a recording studio in the top three penthouses so that those can be places that celebrities with musical careers can come and record music and this is going to become another destination in the DR for Maxim.

I think this is a dream come true. It's more inventory. And when you look at this inventory, there's over $100 million in sales here. When you just break down the doors and break down the fractions, 13 fractions per door, it's $100 million in sales here. And I'm thinking this is amazing. Well, I go take a look at it. It's, it's tired. It's a tired property. Now, from the exterior, if you don't go in, oh, this is unbelievable. It's pushed against the ocean. It looks amazing. The location's great. The building's built. Distance is beauty's best friend.

Right. Well said. That's exactly right. In this case, for sure. So I get in there and they want to show me these penthouses. I'm telling you, it's a day. I mean, I'm waiting to homeless folks. I mean, it's a crack house in the United States.

This is a crack hotel. Right. This place looks bad. It looks like some dangerous activity has occurred in this hotel. Well, I'm thinking, well, Max, I'm not going to put up that. You know, this place is going to have to be completely. straightened out. Yeah. So I, I start going, again, this is not my domain, but I just have some basic

questions if we're selling this. Is it, from an engineering standpoint, sound? Right. It is going to stand because that's expensive if you got to redo that. Number two, what all needs to be done to bring this thing to five stars? Maxim's heavy, man. They like this stuff right. Everything looks great. And they're dealing with celebrities. They don't want to stay at a three or four star. It's going to be perfect. They're going to be perfect. They're going to be escalated down. from the airport. They're white-gloved at the airport. They're clearing customs with VIP treatment.

Everything's going to be perfect. So they assure me that all that's good. And they know I don't know. You know, they know I'm just asking questions to repeat it. Right. I don't have the capacity to do an investigation of their claims. But I believe everything they're saying. Now, interestingly enough, I know the purchase price.

It's $8 million. dollars it's five million in cash three million dollar note from the bank and they're going to let the note in other words you can assume the note yeah the bank was five million dollars it's an eight million dollar hotel that we're going to sell for a hundred million we're going to sell a hundred million dollars worth of inventory now it needs according to jason the construction man that i know well and trust him it needs about 20 million dollars for the work maximum looks at it it's got everything they want the plumbing the internet that you know everything got to be improved. They want to move the lobby around. I'm a part of those meetings. They want to

move elevators around. They want to open up spas. They want to open up the glass in the front to see the ocean better. No breakups in the windows. They want glass railings. It sounds like a great plan. So we paper it to sell it. Now, the paper guy, charge of the contracts, when you buy a fractional piece of real estate, I don't know if you're about a timeshare or anything like that, the paperwork is extraordinary. And the way we are told these are going to be sold is through a beneficial interest. In other words, we're selling a percentage or a beneficial interest in a trust that sits in Delaware. So the trust in Delaware owns the deed to the property. The trust in Delaware owns 300 room key deeds. Each room is a deed. And if you buy

one-13th, you buy a beneficial interest in that deed that's sitting in that trust in Delaware. This is the matrix that you've got to go through in order to buy a timeshare or fractional hotel condo. Beneficial interest. That's the legal term. If you buy one today from Hilton or you buy one today from Marriott or Wyndham, they use beneficial interest. This is the paperwork of choice. Right. We have hired, now, the Elliott's have hired. I'm a part of the meetings, but they're paying for it. Greenberg-Torrig is the largest real estate law firm on earth, on earth. And they are pros at having developed the beneficial interest pathway

to straighten out all the timeshare nonsense that existed previously. So beneficial interest is their designed pathway for us to, everyone's signing, they get a white leather binder with all the things they've signed when they buy one of these fractions. Right. Even if they spent a little bit of. of money it's paper properly greenberg targ had to come to the resort had to check it all out now again they know a little bit more about this stuff than i do the elliots say to me we're now

buying a peninsula out in the middle of the ocean called meaches 500 acres in a palm tree forest that's jutting out into the ocean and i'm thinking we're in the middle of this reconstruction of this sheraton how in the world And so I asked Derek, and he said, oh, no, no, this is with our profits. We've got, we've got other investors. This is the next project. We're going to do overwater bungalows. We're going to build another hotel there.

We're just moving the flag further down the Dominican Republic. And this is a special piece of property, very special. This is probably a billion dollars worth of build out. It's 500 acres. It's probably a billion dollars once it's all done. Yeah. And I'm thinking this is just more inventory for us. And we're getting 20% of everything sold, man.

you start talking billion here 100 million here i mean this this is significant right it's significant yeah i was going to say the one the profit margin is 70 million and you're getting 20% of 70 million so 14 yeah yeah yeah yeah and on 100 i mean on little 50 000 investment we're going to make 20 million from the southern i mean that's the gross but these numbers are huge yeah they change the nature of the business they certainly change the nature of my net worth they're changing everything. Well, I'm concerned about this next purchase. I think it's going to take, there's not enough of a team to be busy over there and finish this Sheraton properly. And so I start quizzing Derek, and he's a bit flamboyant, his personality, and maybe not as focused,

certainly not as focused as I am. I'm a real detailed, granular type thinker. And I need to really have thing spelled out in order for me to repeat them to a large organization. And so anything that's loose on the edges, I'm not even comfortable repeating it because it'll get watered down or maybe it's not true. And I can't repeat that and this is my company up. Right. You say something to me untrue and I have to repeat it. Yeah.

I'm messed up. Yeah, yeah. You've messed my whole company up. So I don't repeat a lot of the things he says and I get his dad involved. Fred Elliott has been kind of distant letting the son run the business. Fred says to me, in a meeting that I called, he says, why is Derek not at this meeting? I said, well, I need to talk about Derek. And I don't want to offend Derek.

I said, but you've got me working side by side with him. And when we made the deal initially, you came in, you were part of the pitch. You're the one that gave me the tour of the place. You're the guy I trust, Fred. You're the guy that, frankly, is the brains of the operation. And I think you've got your son. He does not have your brain. he does not have what's going on in your central processing unit going on in his okay what he's

great at is entertaining celebrities right he's fantastic at that he's posing for magazine shoots if there's a maxim party he's flown to it i mean you just yeah the the face of the company is not is almost never running the company that's right that's right like so you you probably don't want to ask him a lot of questions because he's going to be like uh that's jimmy's department Right. That's right. And so this guy's busy doing Hollywood stuff. And so I said, Fred, I'm concerned about the new purchase. And he goes, oh, the ribbon cutting set. You're going to be a part of that, right? We're going to fly your team down. We use helicopters. We've got the whole thing set. He says, Alexander, whatever, from Russia is coming over. He's one of the big investors. And so I thought, okay, okay, well, maybe you're doing this all with Alexander's money. Some oligarch or whatever from Russia. I've never met Alex. I don't know who this guy is. So I said, I'm concerned about Derek's attention on Wondolio. I said, we've almost sold this thing out. And it looks to me like we've got a new elevator shaft.

It looks like the escalators are being repaired. And the rest of the thing looks pretty tired, man. And my guys are wanting reports on what's going on. Their clients won't reports because they don't get their rental income until those things open. Right. And you're already buying another projects. And this one's not even wrapped up. And you're way away from it being completed.

That it scares the heck out of me. And I, this gut thing is like, man, I'm in deep, man. And they've made Wondolio, they've allowed myself. And I've got, I don't know, million three into Wondolio myself because that purchase price. They wanted me to participate in that. So I've got my own family money in this thing. And then some of my top agencies, advisor guys, they've earned their way into ownership

at Wondolio by performing the rest of that. down payment by raising the money basically so we own a piece of wandolia this is not just a hotel for the elliots this is we're in it with the elliots right and so there's some this i have all sorts of conflicted thoughts here if i raise holy hell i'm shutting down my project right that that it's not a sales project now i have ownership in this thing right and then my guys are involved they're accountant on me to kind of know the turf here, know the terrain. So I'm really kind of scared. I've got a stomach feeling, you know. And meanwhile, one of my sales guys in Idaho, oddly enough, Bob, I won't use the last name, Bob and Joyce, it's a couple. The regulators have shown up

at one of their seminars and sat in the chairs, recorded their presentation. Regulators for Idaho? Yeah. Okay. Department of Finance. Oh, yeah, yeah, Department of like Department of Banking finance that's it man that's florida department yes all these states have these really aggressive guys yeah yeah that are there to catch bad guys and so bob and george's not bad guys and we're we're not bad guys we're doesn't matter if the fbi i knocks on your door and flashes the bag and says when and you ask you some questions you immediately think oh my god what have i done for sure for sure so department of finance wants to depose bob and joyce over their recorded seminar now i have to hire a lawyer for them because I don't want them loose up in Idaho with some local yokel.

So I call the Elliott's lawyer at Greenberg-Tarig. I said, look, they've got apparently a problem with your paperwork. I mean, you guys papered this thing. So many looked at all the states and everything required in each of the states. Well, you're going to need your own attorney on this one. This is their attorney tells me that. You're going to need your own attorney on this one, James. We represent the Elliott's.

And if they've got a problem with us, we're going to respond to it. But it sounds like they got a problem with you and your salespeople. Now, there's a little division occurring here that doesn't feel good, man. We've raised a lot of money and we've been paid a lot of money. And all the checks have gone out at the clients on time for five, we're five years into this now. All the checks have gone to the clients beautifully. And this just feels like, you know, sometimes lawyers can kind of mess something up. Right.

This feels like they're separating us a little bit. Right. So I called Derek. I said, look, I just talked to Rick down in Santa Monica about to pay. work in Idaho. He goes, what'd Rick tell you? He said, we need to hire a lawyer. He goes, that's what you got to do. So he's, I could tell Rick's already talked to him. He's now cold. Derek, I mean, this, this was a friendly situation until now. I said, Derek, we didn't create that paperwork. You paid a lot of money to create that legal paperwork. Is there a chance that

Idaho wasn't prepped right? We got 35 sales in Idaho. I looked up the total number of sales in Idaho. at 35 sales up there. He says, well, there's an investigation. They've contacted us. There's, apparently they've contacted you. And we're just going to handle this separately. I said, aren't they investigating your real estate project? Right. He goes, our real estate project. But then why is an our attorney representing us? Yeah. And the attorney has made it clear to me that the Elliott's paid his bill. Right. And that he now represents the aliens if it comes to it. Now, he's been giving me a lot of guidance. Right. guy's been guiding me all along. He's been telling me what can't be said, what should be said,

that the rent is not rent. It's non-use fees. If you don't use it, we pay a non-use fee. It's not rent. I mean, I have all this instruction from this guy, but now all of a sudden, he's dried up now that the regulator's on the scene. Right. So I call Jim, I'm not going to use his last name, but I call Jim in the Department of Finance. And I said, hey, what, what's the issue? What do we get into here? He goes, we're in the middle of a deep investigation. I'd like to drive down for my Idaho to Las Vegas and meet with you directly? I said, wouldn't that be outside of your jurisdiction? Do you have any authority down here? And he says, I do not. Are you trying to evade authority? He says this to me. I said, absolutely not. I just wonder why you get in your car and drive from Idaho.

I said, what are we doing? Where are we headed here? And he doesn't, he don't want to say. He didn't want to commit himself too early here. He says, we're going to depose your salespeople up here. We'll get to the bottom of this. But I don't like how this. is going. And I mean, literally, he's... What is the issue? Apparently, our guys are selling something that's considered a security in the state of Idaho. Okay. And we've deemed it as timeshare real estate regulated by timeshare realtors. That's why... On July 18th, get excited. This is big! For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurf my pants. That's a little too excited. Sorry. Smurfs. Only did this.

July 18th. The paperwork has done the way it is with the beneficial interest. Right. The Department of Finance has deemed it as a security in the state of Idaho. Now, that's a whole other matter. That's a different paperwork. That's an SEC filing. That's, it could be federal. I mean, this is right now state issue, but this could turn into nasty. And so I said, are you suggesting I hire a lawyer and they deal with your department? He says, you do what you need to do. Is he being cold like this? No, totally. I'm telling you exactly the way he's making me feel. Totally cold like this. Totally cold. Well, this guy's a player at the end of this story, right? It's this same guy. So I hire a lawyer, my company does, to represent Bob and Joyce. I read through the deposition

after it comes back. Oh, it's a gotcha. It's seven hours of gotcha. Seven hours who trains you. How do they train you? What's the paperwork? Or are you where this was a security? Does someone tell you this wasn't as secured even though it is who told you who did the training you know basically i'm running the company so everything's pointing to me right everything's pointing to me so i tell bob and joyce don't worry we're going we're going to hire a lawyer to deal with this and and they they represented you in your deposition we use the same firm to deal with department of finance but do not do any more seminars right and do not do any more selling until we get to the bottom just go back to your needs analysis and get back into the life

and the other stuff you're supposed to be doing anyway. And so they scared to death, but they said, okay, well, come to find out, Jim Burns circles back and says, if you guys are cooperate against the company you work for, we'll make sure that you guys don't have any civil issues, and I don't refer this to the criminal division in the state of Idaho. And that scares them so badly, scares them so badly. They don't tell me. And he tells them not to tell me.

and so they're now internally providing all sorts of recorded calls they're providing all sorts of materials as though we're in some clandestine behavior you know and you can make you can make sales meetings bad right i mean if you've taken out of context and you listen you can turn that into manipulation persuasion aggressiveness all sorts of things that don't sound savory well this is what this cat's up to and he thinks he's Barnaby Jones running a full-blown FBI unit in the Department of Finance for Idaho. I mean, it sounds cartoonish, Mayberry, you know, that's what it feels like to me. Because you're throwing Idaho in there. If you could, if you could, if I said Boston, Massachusetts.

Or if you said New York or let's say the United States, Los Angeles. Or even if you just went said, hey, for the federal government. Yes. Right, right. I'd sober right up. Right. Well, this is what's going on. And I am kind of laughing it off a little bit, you know, because I am saying Idaho. And it feels like, you know, it feels like, there's 35 sales here. Right. Okay. If we add them all up, it may be $300,000. So what, what, it's the worst case scenarios.

We're going to give them all the money back. They have their money. Right. Exactly. And that's what I told Derek. I said, why don't we just refund these people's money? Right. And by the way, they got the money.

We got the commissions. We're willing to be clawed back on the commissions. Yeah. But you got the 80% of the money. You got to get the money back. And he says, oh, no, we're not doing that. We'll see what this investigation goes. Well, come to find out.

I'm fined $150,000 from Idaho. Personally. Okay. I got to pay it. The Elliotts are fined $40,000. Right. Okay. So that right there tells me some monkey business went on in discussions about solicitation and overselling or whatever.

We're to blame. Sales guys are usually to blame for stuff like this. So I pay the fine right away. I have it. I pay it. And the part of the settlement is a settlement with the Department of Finance is to refund if they want all 35 people's money back if they want that or have them signed proper paperwork disclosing what should have been disclosed in the original paper that Greenberg Tauri built. So this is like chaos, man. This is a serious, legitimate law firm.

And so I said, Derek, Greenberg's got to repaper this. thing. And whatever they missed in the original, maybe these blanketed missed Idaho thinking it wasn't a big deal. But we've got to have it right. So we have to hire real estate agent to go into Idaho, meet with all 35 people with these disclosures. They've got to sign. Do they all sign? And we're trying to get them signed to keep the transaction. So there's not this massive clawback, right? Well, I think 20 of them said we keep it. We like it. Right. And 15 of them wanted the dough back. Okay. Elliot's never pay it back. So I'm the secondary backup.

Right. So now you've, I got to pay them back. But you, at least you own those properties, assuming there will be built, assuming, assuming the properties that are profitable, assuming it's legitimate, assuming it's not a partial Ponzi scheme. Idaho wants us to pay it back. Right. So did you think about turning around and suing them, stopping all sales with them completely and suing them? Because that might make a, should have.

That, I think, would make them go, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, buddy. It would have, it would have. I did not do that. Did not do that. Didn't have advice to do that. Didn't ask for advice to do that. But looking back, that would have been a good moment. Or even filed a lawsuit against the law firm.

You're the one that prepared the. I promise you, that's a legitimate suit. GT, as they call themselves, design the paperwork. They are the authority. The guy we deal with is the public speaker at all. the conferences he goes on stage at all the timeshare conferences as the authority in timeshare and hotel condos he's the keynote our guy right the guy that ordered this paperwork like this so idaho is the first of the regulators to arrive this clown refers it to the SEC

i was going to say i would include uh i would have included um oh god a max of magazine in the lawsuit and Maxim would have gone to them. They'd been like, what the are you doing? Exactly. You're using our name, our likeness. Fix this now. Exactly. That's exactly right.

Yeah, again, I didn't do this. But you're still trying to be diplomatic about it. Well, yeah. And I think there's some greed in it, to be honest with you. We're making a lot of money. Yeah. This is a successful situation. I don't want it undone.

And I certainly don't want it undone on a temporary situation in Idaho that we can quickly resolve. It just felt like, you know, there's a whole lot more cherry in the pie here let's keep rolling hate to say this but i was it makes me think of and not that this is a scam but yeah or necessarily but um but i just remember i was running a deal where we were going to make two million dollars and one of the i was running and one of the lenders figured out what was going on and they were like hey you owe us a hundred thousand dollars and i remember the chick i was with was like well let's just pack up and leave i'm like why don't I just pay him the I'm not going to blow two million I'll give them the

hundred thousand buying the two million right 100 gram of course and she was like no but we could just take out and I mean I'm like and what keep the 300 thousand we've made so far I'll get back the hundred thousand and keep going get the other two million like what are you doing like short-sighted yes it's it's fear yeah this is still reasonable you know a reasonable thing that we can pull off and right just panicked and wanted to but yeah so I can see that it's like the uh um Yeah. Thinking I'm still focused on kind of the big picture here. And it's working.

It's working. This is a minor hiccup. We pay a fine. Yeah. We redo the paperwork. We end up with some extra condos. Let's keep going. It didn't feel good.

The division that occurred there with the legal battle. It felt very isolating. I always felt we were a team until this moment. And then Derek has now bought a yacht for the Wondolio property. These Wondolio units are not redone. Right. Now, he's justified the purchase of a yacht. which i don't know probably 800 grand it's not millions but it's it's probably 800 grand and i know

client proceeds were used to buy this thing and he's down there using this yacht yeah and he says it's part of the HOA for the condo and that's not complete yeah that's not complete and the yacht is complete with the captain and stewardess is on board and so you know it's just the whole thing feels it's getting a little slimy it just feels like why are we delaying the wandola what why are we doing this. And a lot of my agents want to go see Wondolio. They want to go, and it's a drive. It's five hours from, we're in a city called Pretta Plata. It's an airport there. It's five hours around the horn on the highway to get to Wondolio. So a lot of guys haven't seen it. It's a long ways. So how are these, how are you going to populate this with celebrities and? Oh, no, they fly into

Santa Dvinco, a different airport. Why don't you just not fly in there? No, we could, but the hotel we stay at, the one that's been built, that we stay in for free, where our sales team is, is in Plata. Right. So they haven't taken the trip. That's our base camp. Yeah. Yeah.

So our guys have not gotten in rental cars and made the trip. It's just inconvenient. But they now want to. Right. These delays are no good. And by the way, when you get your quarterly check from the Elliott's, there's an update in there on construction. And the update's not changing.

It's kind of the same rehash. And by the way, this is mail fraud, okay? Yeah. Because anything in there that's been mailed with that check and sent to a client that is known to be untrue, it's a male for all for it. Okay. So I decide that I feel strongly enough that I want my attorney for Impact Network, my personal attorney for the company that I've always had. Loem firm at the Elliott. It's this attorney helped establish this company.

And as any little twist, he's been the attorney for the firm. Pete is his name. I want Pete to meet with Richard at Greenberg-Torik. I want the two to have a discussion. I want to know why you separated. I want to know what happened to paperwork in Idaho. And I want to know what went down there. I want my attorney to find out.

Attorney to attorney. Are we on the same team or not? So I tell Derek, I want Rick to fly from Santa Monica to Los Angeles. We're not coming to Santa Monica. I need him to fly to Las Vegas. or I will not continue selling. I need these two attorneys to have a discussion, and I'll be sitting in the room for the discussion.

He says, I will be too. So he arranges his lawyer to fly in. They have this meeting. I heard such promising stuff from Rick to my guy Pete. Oh, Idaho is not a big deal. It was a mistake. The paperwork was not done the way it should have been. A lot of this stuff gets delegated within our firm.

We got a huge firm. A lot of things in Idaho was not specifically plated. They do consider a security. We didn't know they would consider the security. Some states do that, and they kind of overreact. We've done the right thing in Idaho. We do not see a problem going forward. It was all uppity-up assurances.

So they leave. I stay with Pete. And I said, all right, what do you think? What's going on here? He goes, I don't trust that guy. he said i don't trust that guy at all right he says and i'm glad we had this meeting because it's on the record he goes and i've got all sorts of notes now for the file about the commitments he made today he says but you know what i would do if i were you is what he says to me it scares me to death

he says you got to turn them in i said turn them in to who what are you talking about turn them in I said, what are they doing that we're turning them in for? Right. He says, James, let me just tell you where this could go. There's a chance they are skimming from the money you're sending down and not applying it as you think they are to the construction budgets. If they are doing that, they're running a Ponzi scheme with the money you're bringing in. Therefore, you're running a Ponzi scheme. Right.

And the fact you have ownership in Wondolio means you should know you're running a Ponzi scheme. He says, I'm going to tell you something. I know you. I know that is not what you think is happening. He goes, I've seen this. He goes, I graduated law school with the criminal chief in the U.S. Attorney's Office across the street. I want to go see him with you. This is the chief, head of the prosecutors in the prosecution division for criminal conduct.

And this is for federal. federal, U.S. attorney. Not a district attorney. Tell me this is what you did. You did this, right? He says, he says, James, we are doing this as your counsel. I'm strongly recommending you go do this. And I'm going to go with you. I says, what do they need when we go in there? He says, I need all your sales material. I need every brochure you've ever used. I need everything they've built for you to use in your seminars, your materials. I want the contracts that they built for you. We're taking a box across the street. and we're sitting down with Russ. I'm going to use his full name. I don't use full names in my podcast because I don't have permission to. Russ Marsh, criminal chief U.S. Attorney's Office in Las Vegas, Nevada.

We go see Russ Marsh. Russ is Pete. Good to see it. What's going on? He said, well, we got a situation here. My client may be involved in a criminal enterprise, an ongoing criminal activity. And we just wanted to point this out to you, have you aware, Have you send your agents out to meet with Mr. Catlitz?

He's prepared to meet with your agents and answer any questions. And while we believe this is a hot situation, and I'm looking at him like, do we believe this is a hot situation? I mean, it seems a bit exaggerated to me, actually. Based on what I know, and I do know, this seems like Pete's carrying on a little bit. Like, this is kind of fun. And I'm thinking, dude, this is serious, man. you're accusing people of committing a crime and Pete does know what he's doing.

Yeah. He's protecting me, right? He totally knows what he's doing. So Russ just, thanks, thanks, Pete. I'll take a look at the box and we'll get back to you. And Mr. Catless, we have your number here. I probably will send some agents out to meet with you at some point and they can ask you whatever they want to ask you. I said, no problem.

No problem. That's why we're here. And when I get Pete out in the hallway, I said, Pete, what was that? He said, James. I know you don't believe this is happening. He says, but I as your attorney believe that this is a criminal enterprise. I believe you're raising all the money. They're stealing a good portion of it.

And they're using some of it to build the hotel, but not all of it. Like you believe they are. That you've represented to your clients that they are. Yes. And the problem is is that because you're a part of it, because you're a partner in it, you have a fiduciary. A fiduciary responsibility. Yes. You know, to.

He sees all this. Yeah. Clearly. Right. Like you do. I didn't see it like this. I thought most people don't realize what their responsibilities are under the law or how they can twist it.

Yes. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Like it's like the salesman that sells you the car and then you go in the finance box and then you're saying, well, you can't blame the salesman if the finance guy did something wrong. Right. You know what I'm saying? They'll try.

Right. So don't think they won't try. That's right. That's right. And, of course, they need to say something like, did the salesman show you the application? Did he take any information? Did you take this? Did you take that?

Well, he really kind of, they'll make that leap of saying, well, he should have, then he had a responsibility to explain to you this. And you're like, salesman, he opens a door and says, let's drive 20, you know, for the next 10 or 20 minutes. And do you like the car and great, go talk to Jimmy. Right. I got your keys. Yeah. He doesn't know anything. Right, right.

But that's not how they're going to show it. And that's not how it's going to play in court. No, it's not. Right. No. So Pete knows this. He's been through this before. He says, he says, just wait for the agents.

They're going to call you. You're going to be fine answering their questions. Right. You're not involved in any crime, James. We know this. But you don't stop. You don't stop anything, right? He says to me, stop.

So we do stop. I make no announcements. Now, this is important. See, I was actually thinking to myself maybe not stop because, and here's why I would justify not stopping. Yeah. because I don't want to stop and then the agents get there and the agents say we need you to go kind of undercover and get this information where or why well if I've stopped then I'm not a part

of those meetings anymore I can't help you yeah I know this is such good retrospect I mean looking back this this is right but Pete suggests don't sell another stick of this then you have to do then you have to do what your attorney and I did I did and and he says do no grand announcements get with your leaders and have them spread the word with no press releases, no internal memos, nothing, because we don't want the Elliot's to understand yet that we're ceasing activity. Yeah, so he's still thinking you might need to cooperate in some. That's what he's thinking, right.

So a week goes by, I said, Pete, do we think they got my cell phone? Do we get the right number here? I haven't heard from these guys. He said, let me call her. He calls over, he says, Russ. He says, yeah, I got to get the agents assigned. I got to get the, you back. It takes forever, forever.

No, no, no, no, no, no agents come a month later, month later. No agents come two months later. I said, I said, Pete, I said, we've stopped selling. I said, my guys won't know what's going on. But don't the Elliot's, aren't they asking questions now? Yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm making up all sorts of stuff. You remember 2007, 2008, we've got a kind of a financial crisis happening globally. Right. Refis can't happen anymore. Money stride up. So you're kind of, you're using a lot of those excuses. 100% guys are concerned, public's concern, people are freaking out. People are holding on to the cash. Yeah. We just, we just taking a breather. Yeah, I do not tell them that we've shut down sales. And I'm still visiting the resort, checking on construction, all this stuff. Is construction happening?

No. No, no, no, no, no. But some stuff has occurred. And in the end, when we get to the discovery and we get to the line item, they spent 14 million in there. by the time out of out of what we needed 20 oh yeah we needed 20 in there to open it they spent 14 and they and they had it the equipment and everything and jason testified that we were doing it we replaced bread ovens you know if we were trying to not build this we don't put bread ovens in there right we don't put a new elevator in the elevator was working we did this to we were moving this

toward maxim okay that's the construction guy all right so i tell i tell i tell Pete, I said, Pete, I got to sue them. I got to sue them in civil court. If this is not going to, if the, if the feds are not going to investigate this, I've got to respond to the clients because they've now missed one payment, first payment five years. They missed a quarterly payment. And they've made up a banking issue in the DR. We need to move banks to the U.S. The DR slow with the checks. Checks don't clear in time so we can't cut to checks. And that's, you should have that money set aside, right, in a reserve. So that's, that's, right there feels Ponziish right there with checks aren't clearing we're writing checks you know the moment the money stops coming in now you don't have anyone to pay out right right right right right it's the whole thing man it's it's the gut and i'm feeling it hard i mean i'm feeling i got six kids mad my wife and have six children they're all little guys and we're living in a big old house we've got big obligations we're connected to our church it's important to us uh i belong to a club we live on the golf course, you know, those people are important to me.

I feel like I have a reputation, right? And I've come to learn. That's meaningless. Right. It never meant anything. But at the time, it felt important to me, right? So I'm really scared. And I tell Pete, I said, look, we got to sue him, man.

He goes, well, I don't do class actions. I said, look, let me tell you something. You got me down this road, this yellow brick road, a long ways. I said, you need to help me with that fancy lawyer, book of yours, find a lawyer that can serve a lawsuit in the Dominican Republic, in federal court in the United States, and in Toronto, Canada, where these folks are residences. They live in Toronto, Canada, the aliens. I said, we need a multis jurisdictional lawsuit. And I don't know if it's class action or not. It seems like it should be. But we've got to represent the clients. You've got to protect them from this. He said, well, our firm clearly won't do. He's got a big firm. Our firm won't do it. I'll find you a firm. He calls me, says, I got a guy in Miami who's bilingual. He's that senior partner at a law firm, big, big rating on this firm, big, big super lawyer firm.

He says, they will serve the suit in the Dominican Republic. He says, my research, James, says that they also have their corporation domiciled in the Turks and Kcos, which is weird. He says, but we're going to serve that suit there, this firm will, and we'll serve it in Toronto, Canada, and we will personally serve these guys. And now that's going to, of course, be end of, oh, yeah, yeah. This is the end of, the beginning of a war. It's the beginning of a war.

So I go meet with the guy in Miami. We fly the company plane down. So I wonder, are these people, are they, you're saying the residents of Canada, are there, are they, are they Canadian citizens? They are. Are they, were they born in Canada? Yes. Okay.

These are Canadians. Okay. Because I've known, I've met several, I don't want to say many, but several Canadian conmen in federal prison. And they were always under the assumption, like that, because they're committing crimes. They're in Canada, but they're stealing from Americans. They always feel like they're safe in Canada, not realizing that Canada will hand you over to the fucking. 100%.

It's not Morocco. Right. It's Canada. Yeah. And so they think, they think, oh, in Canada, if you do a nonviolent, you know, scam, like, you might get four years, but you're going to do two months. And then the rest of it, you're going to do on an ankle monitor in your living room. Correct. Like, you're not getting any time at all.

But then they get grabbed by the U.S. And they say, you're doing 15 years. And they're like, what? And you're doing all of you. You're not camp eligible. Right, right. They have first step back eligible. Right.

And they, oh, listen, you've never, I've never heard anybody cry more than the Canadians. Oh, yeah. How unfair they were treated. Oh, yeah. You're just treated like they're treated like Russian mobsters. They're treated like Russian mobsters because they get the same treatment. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to do all your time.

There's no good time credit. You will not do it in a camp. We're taking it all the way. And then we deport you when this thing's over. Well, you know what they do is they immediately put in, although they have to wait like to do half the time. They're waiting for that halfway to transfer to try and get a treaty transfer. Yeah. To their prison apartment in Canada.

Yeah. And that's what happens is you know that they move. They go through a little processing for a few weeks. And boom, they do. They put them right in their living room. Yeah. Yeah. Canadians are soft with the criminals.

Yeah, for sure, not to U.S. So, so in the end, I convinced Pete to turn me over to that firm that it's Michael Diaz is the name, Diaz Royce is the name of the firm, but it's Michael Diaz we're dealing with. He's the senior partner to firm. And he says to me, he says, do you want a firm to represent you or your clients? I said, well, can't you represent both of us? he says no way it's a conflict he says i either have to represent you right because there may be a point where your clients are at conflict with you right and need to sue you okay you know i hear that at all i'm thinking oh my gosh this is this is a nightmare a tidal wave of litigation i said well at

this point i want to protect them so i'm willing to finance the lawsuit and he likes that one check writer for the big lawsuit. He says, well, before we sue anybody, I'm going to do investigation. I'm going to send private eyes to the resort. They're going to meet with existing employees. He says, I'm going to interview those guys on tape because I'm going to find out what's going on down there. He says, and then I'll report back to you what type of lawsuit we have and what claims we'll make in a verified suit. Now, I've come to learn that a verified suit means we verified these facts. This is not the plaintiff came up with some stuff and we wrote it down. This, we verify this as a firm as officers of this court that this is going on.

Right. So that's pretty important in the suing of people business. So I said, I need to represent both of us. The client's in me. I can't stand on an island here while I'm financing these folks lawsuits. He says, well, in the law, they have to have their own retainer if we represent them. And you can pay some of it. You can pay all the hard work, all the heavy lifting.

But they'll need to pay some percentage, some small amount, so that they have personally retained us. And so they all get retainer agreements. He moves them to a sister firm. So the clients are represented by a sister firm that he kind of leads that litigation. He represents me and all my salespeople who also need representation because they bought the products like I did. We own these condos. This is not something we sold to others. it didn't do ourselves. We love this idea. You're going to appreciate, we're going to flip them,

we're going to make a bunch of money. I think that'd be a huge defense. Like I've dumped my own money into it. It's a huge. My mother owns these condos. Tiffany and I own $1.3 million worth of these condos. We're all in on this. I was as fooled as anybody. As it turns out, the judge really liked that position as it turns out. So here we go. It's on. The investigators come back and say, There's a criminal enterprise underway. This is a Ponzi scheme. One of the financial guys knows it. The other financial guys is doing the bidding for the other.

He doesn't really know, not asking questions. He may know, but he's not, he told us he don't know. But there is a Ponzi scheme happening, and the Elliotts are conducting it. So we now know for sure that this lawsuit must go forward. And we also know that my guy was right, and the Fed should have interviewed me, when we took that package across the street and they didn't. So we're now taking what we know as a criminal

matter into a civil courtroom. Well, as it turns out, this case is assigned to Judge Alan Gold. Alan Gold worked for Greenberg Torrig for 30 years of his career. Oh, okay. Okay. And he wants the case, man.

He's going to take the case. He's not going to recuse himself. I was going to say, you can't shoot. Well, it's almost impossible to get them to get a judge switched. As we know with the Trump case. Yeah. Which we'll talk about later. But the bottom line is Judge Allen Gold.

He's also the guy that, you know, the secret cases in Switzerland with all the bank accounts, Swiss bank accounts, the guy that turned those over and said the U.S. citizens must reveal their Swiss bank accounts. Right. Or they'll be held to pay. Judge Allen Gold. Okay. So this is my guy. Okay. This is the suits in front of this guy.

Well, the elites appear to defend themselves. And these sales guys have misrepresented our product. And it's been hell on us. And we've worked so hard to kind of cover the mistakes these guys have made. They've sold things that don't exist. They've sold products that weren't designed this way. They've frankly misrepresented left and right, almost everything we've told them to do. And so this is a mess created by them and their leader, James Catledge.

That's what's going on here, Judge. And I'm sitting there thinking, this is quite convincing. This is unbelievably convincing. Can't believe if I did this. Right. I'm sitting there thinking, wow, how do you actually defend that? I mean, it's like, of course, salespeople always misrepresent stuff. I mean, that's like obvious.

I know what I'm running a sales company. I know they do that. But I was going to say, you've also, all the paperwork you got was from their law firm. And you should have emails. What was the name of that firm? What? Yeah, the, I understand. Okay.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And the judge is, of course, got a history with this firm. But you still have, like I still have emails. I have, I have paperwork that came in. Every document that the client signed said, I don't care what you were told. This document represents the complete nature of this transaction.

Do not sign it if you think it is different than anything you've been done. I mean, these documents are so locked down. It becomes the standing governing document for the client to rely upon. So even if a salesman totally was misrepresenting everything, that document stands on its own as your transaction. So I feel quite comfortable how this thing went down with our sales guys. And I'm running a legit company. So I know our guys.

I know our top leaders, the guys who sold most of it. And I know they're not misrepresenting this. We were down there ourselves taking these people through tours. And why would we need to misrepresent? They pay us the same amount. Why not just represent what it is? I mean, it doesn't change the amount of the commissions to misrepresent it. Right.

It's a good deal. It's a good product. Assuming it was working the way they said they were working. Right, right, right. The design is right. The design is good. The budgets of the hotels were right. There was enough money to build the hotels.

Right. Unless you're buying, you know, a million dollar yachts and God knows what else. Casino wires. We found casino wires in the discovery, a million dollar casino wire, right out of client money, right to Rio Suites in Las Vegas. Right. Derek was a gambler. Right.

And notorious gambling. gambler with a host, a casino host, that took care of him and limoed him around when he's in Vegas. That's the limo they poured out of when they came to see me. He was a gambler. And I wondered why they got a limo, you know, and I just get a rental car come out here because they were there for the things. They were there to gamble too. Right.

So they're gambling away their last investors money? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Because they had investors. They had other investors. We'll come to learn from Canada that never got what they were told either. So bottom line is this.

Judge Allen Gold, after nine months of back-and-forth motion practice in hearings, says, I'm throwing the case out. All of you clients, 644 of you, need to file separate lawsuits. This is not a class action. And you need to name your salesperson. And the company they work for in the next suit, don't just name the Elliott's, because a crime has occurred here. We just don't know who committed it.

And we are not an investigative courtroom. We're here to handle contracts and civil matters. This is a matter for the enforcement agencies to look into. And so all of you need to file again your lawsuit. We'll pay your filing fees. The $15 filing fee, we're going to pay that for you. Because I know this is a big hassle in a long time, but please name your individual salesman

and the company they work for and you can name the L.A. If you want, they're the developers. They're responsible. So now I have everybody in civil litigation. Suing you. Suing me. Right. Fifteen states. I don't know. It's got to,

it's got to be $100 million in different lawsuits. I've got to hire attorneys for every state. I've got to have firms in every state. I mean, it's unbelievable. Now, now, that, bro. I would, no, I'm just closing.

down ship I'm pulling my money I'll just take I'll just deal with the judgment like there's no that'll wipe you out that wipe you out completely eight years of it it's been eight and a half million dollars in defending these these cases okay and so so here and you don't even have the money it's not like you have the money I got 20% of it we kept eight as a company it's paid out 12 to my guys so I can't get that either I basically got eight percent that I could pay right because that's the part I got you know as a company I felt like I could responsibly pay that. Right.

You know, if it could come down to it. But 80% of the money is in the Elliott's hands or was. Right. Without the expenditures. So the judge says, so refile your cases. And by the way, I'm referring this, judicial referral to the Department of Justice, to the SEC and to the IRS. Okay. Because they have the capacity to get to the bottom of this.

And you folks deserve an answer. And I believe these three agencies are going to get you your answer. Well, they come calling. The Windbreaker team comes calling. They want to meet with me, the Windbreaker team. Pete, my guy will not let me meet with any of these guys. But Pete says you now need a different kind of an attorney. You need a criminal defense attorney.

And then you need an attorney that's licensed in all these states. He says, you can't hire 15 firms. He said, they'll kill you. They'll wipe you out in 90 days. He says, you need one guy that's licensed in as many states as possible that can kind of diffuse some of this stuff and maybe create a global settlement. This is literally the words they use. I said, well, I've got a little money overseas in the Cook Islands, and they deal with

Switzerland. Cook Islands, I have a trust in the Cook Islands, and they deal with Switzerland. And so I've got a little money there. My home's paid for. The airplane's paid for. The Vegas house is paid for. So I'm not trying to hide. assets. I mean, I'm totally exposed. These things are my wife in my name. There's no liens against

any of them. And I've got a few million dollars in a brokerage account. And I've got a few million dollars overseas. And I'm thinking, how in the world can I weather this? This is, it's, it feels torrential. I mean, it's just heavy, heavy. And I drive to, believe it or not, Idaho is back on the scene. I drive to Idaho to hire a guy named Monty, who's a lawyer who's probably 65. It's like a senior guy who happens to carry licenses in all these states. And he's been a former U.S. attorney before. So he's got some experience with the federal government. He's going to deal with my Idaho guy who's still snooping around. My Idaho guy is still around the Department of Finance. He's still involved,

still suing because he wants all that money back on those 20 or 15 that didn't. They wanted their money back in the aliens aren't paid. So I owe all that money to. Right. And so he tells me he wants an evergreen. Do you know what an evergreen retainer is? They basically just keep billing you and billing you and you have to pay it? Normally you pay a retainer. Right. And that's supposed to cover you.

I'd never heard of this phrase before, evergreen retainer. It means it's always green. You put 25,000 in it. When I get down to 15, you put 10 more in. When I get down to 15, you put 10 more in. Right. When that evergreen drops below 15. I don't work for you anymore.

Okay. So Monty set me up on an evergreen retainer as though I've got evergreen money trees. Right. But that's the deal to represent me in civilly in all these states. So, I mean, it's overwhelming. A young dad with, I mean, the wife, a wife has no bandwidth for this. This is, this is, she don't want to hear about. Here's our strategy.

I mean, this is too much. It's too much. She wants to be what? Just to stay at home. Maybe with a different husband. Maybe with a different husband. This isn't what I signed up. No, no, I did not sign up for this.

And how could you get us into this? Oh. Mr. Smart guy. You're the smart guy, right? How did you get us into this? Our whole marriage, I've heard about how smart you are. So it comes down to this. Right.

Yeah. So how smart are you? Yeah. I mean, I'm telling it's too much. I mean, we've got real people who have lost real money now. that have pictures of me that are, you've been a NBA game where they've got the large picture of your face and they're, you're shooting free throws and they got this sign up. I got them showing up my kids ball games with these faces of me.

There's two or three of these folks showing up. It's not that funny. I'm going to tell you, they've somehow figured out how to make these signs. Right. I don't even know where you go to get these signs, but they figured out how to get my face on these signs. I'm the announcer in my son's high school, but my son's a tight-in. know the football team. I'm the announcer in the booth. Now, thank God. They didn't know I'm in the booth and that's my voice over the microphone, over the PA system. But they're in the stands.

Where is James Catledge? And they flipped a sign around. It's my big face. And then my wife is in there. And our friends. Maybe they're fans. Oh, they could be fans. I never thought about it, Matt. I didn't think about it. That's the problem. These are fans. I hear people in the comments saying all kinds of stuff about me and I think, oh, they're fans. These are fans. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I never processed it like that. I should have thought about it like that. But with the, where is James Catledge? I mean, it's like, oh, man, they're looking for the house.

They're looking for, they're looking to breach the gate. You know what I mean? It's that kind of crazy. So, and listen, they lost money, man. They did lose money. Yeah. I made money. So there's no doubt about their victimhood status.

There can be no doubt about that. And I know many of these folks could not afford to lose this money. I know that. Shouldn't have invested in a product unless you can afford to, you know, did you haven't signed the seasoned investor thing where they have, they signed it. Then they can't afford to lose it. They signed everything they needed to sign to take possession. If you wanted a safe, if you wanted a safe investment, you should have put your money in Bank

of America. I know it. I know it. And by the way, they all show up for every hearing, you know, they all show up for every motion. They're all there. They're picketing the federal building, the days of my. motions. If I'm to appear. I feel bad because I know that you probably wanted a host that was

going to be like, my God, you were going through hell. But you got to do a laugh about this. You got to go laughing. No, it's the only way I can do it. It's now quite funny. Okay. But it was not humorous during. By the way, this went on. Just to give you some time frame here. Because, listen, they wanted, they met with me. First of all, the FBI does finally come. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. They do finally come. year yeah no no god no it's been 2008 i secretly report to russ marsh 2009 we launched the lawsuit 2010 my i convinced my defense criminal defense lawyer by the way i have to tell you how he got paid that's an interesting thing i want to go meet with them all right let's go meet with them

so this is like four years later oh yeah this is three and a half years after i've been in the the bowels of the U.S. Attorney's Office reporting this potential crime in progress. They now have questions. Okay. So I said, let's go meet with him. He goes, James, maybe you don't understand our criminal law works. You don't meet with the FBI.

You don't give them clues. They're not here to help you. No, they're not actually interested in what happened. Let's start there. They want no clues about what your version of the facts are. They've developed a narrative and you either fit into that narrative. or you were the enemy of that narrative, period. Right.

I said, listen, I know what happened. I took every breath of it. I took every step of it. Let me help them understand. He goes, do you think that much of yourself that you're that convincing? You think you're going to walk in there and do some salesmanship on these guys? Because you've sold some radio advertising or something in your past. These are not that type of people.

They're looking to hurt you, man. they're looking to hurt you. They want to take every clue you give them. They're even going to let you sign something called a queen for a day. Yeah. And by the way, I don't know if you want to be a queen, and I don't know if you want it to last only a day. But if you were a queen for a day,

you give them every clue to investigate the crime that they think you're in the middle of. And they'll take every clue. They can't take anything you say on that queen for a day and hurt you with it. But they can take all the clues and go get other facts to bury you. And that's what they're wanting. to do. Right. So are you suggesting I set up that meeting and, and we go and do that? I said,

yes. No, listen, Matt, this is, this is, this is how I felt. I just wanted them to understand what happened. You've been watching too much law and order. You think, probably, you think that, like, they're out for justice and to do the right thing. I kind of did. I, I, I really did. I, I'm the guy that's got the American flag off the front porch, okay? Yeah. I'm a Pledge of Allegiance guy. I'm an Eagle Scout. I actually believe this stuff supposed to be like this. Okay. I think a lot of times it is. Yeah.

But it was not in this case. Not, not, yeah, not once they've, one, listen, once they have 600 victims. 644. Yeah. Screaming, you're involved, which I'm sure everybody's doing it now because now they've all been pointed to you. And they got a judge. They got law firms help them. And they got a judge that said, this guy needs to be on the, on your next lawsuit.

And that, and it's, it needs to be investigated by a crime. by the crime, I'm sorry, by the Justice Department, a criminal investigation, then, and you're the, you're the lead, the lead guy, they, even people that thought, I like this guy, he, I knew what I was getting into. I don't think he was involved. After three and a half years of this, or two years or whatever they, and talking to their attorney, they've realized like, wow, I was duped, right. Mr. Charming got me. Yeah, yeah, he got me. And he may have tricked me. These con men, they're good. Yeah, they're good. Yeah, yeah, that's right. They, they've got to be nice.

They wouldn't be good con, man. I mean, I heard that a thousand times. So I tell my attorney, David Chesnoff out of Las Vegas, I said, I said, David, I do want to meet with him. I really do. He goes, all right, I'll set it up. You're the client, man. I'm going to set it up.

And I'm telling you now, you can mark it down. It's a mistake. I said, okay, man, I'll mark it down. But thank you for setting it up. And I'm convinced that the 14 hours I spend with them. over two days, over two days, 14 hours, I'm convinced they now know everything. And this is just going to end quickly. They're going to look into it.

They're going to say, hey, you know what? Yeah. We got it all. It makes sense. Thank God he came and sat down. What you said to us makes a hell of a lot of sense. And I was so glad you came in. That was really wise of you.

And you are an Eagle Scout, aren't you? Okay. This is not what happened. well I was told by the way I got three lawyers in there I've got the head prosecutor in there I'm not going to use his name two FBI agents who are assigned the case I know them well and the FBI agent who's a auditor okay I got her there too she's going to check the financials out so all four there note taken like crazy one of the this is kind of a funny moment in this intense intense a lot of guys

Gotcha questions, right? And I got a there's no gotcha. There's not a blackberry. There's not an email. There is no secret meeting with cigar smoke where we agreed to divide the dough up of these people. That didn't occur. And I even said in the interview, I said, do you think I would have committed a crime for 20% of the money? You've met with the other guy, right?

You think he gets 80? I get 20 based on your interview of him? No, it'd be the opposite, okay? If a crime was committed, well, I'm going to do it for 20%. Well, I was going to say, and wasn't I already rich? Yeah, right, right. It's totally. Totally.

I mean, I don't need this. I'm financing the lawsuit of the clients. I'm going to talk to the agent. I'm the one telling my attorney. Right. I put my own money into it. My parents' money. My mother's retirement is in this thing.

Right, right. Right. And one of these guys, I'll just tell you now. He's got his stuff there. I see him pull something out from underneath his briefcase. He says, what about this? And it's a business card that says got the Elliott logo on it. And it says James Catledge.

And it says, board advisor. He goes, how do you explain this? I said, I said, I've been looking for those cards. They promised me, they printed them. They told me they would send me those cards. You've got them. Why do you have them? I never got those cards.

I said, how is it you have my board of advisor cards? I said, I was definitely on their board of advisors. I was giving advice left and right about construction, about timelines, about everything. I said, well, what was your point in bringing that up? Right. Did you get them out of my dresser? Yeah, what is this? Because I actually never did get the card.

They had them printed. Right. And I just never received them yet. Right. But apparently the Elliott gave the agent the cards and said, oh, he's one of us. right he's definitely one of us see his card so it meant nothing but it was a gotcha moment to let me know how little they knew about the case yeah and then he kept going into where they worth what you were selling them for were they worth what you were selling them for

I said they're worth what the client will pay yeah that's how we measure work that that's that's how that's how an appraisal works that that's it I said that sure to yours it's worth about $15 right but it's probably 115 at Dillard's yeah so it's worth 15 so I don't know who we got to deal with on this crime that occurred at Dillard's right Dillard's, but you overpaid. It might be worth $200 if you put Tulsa and Gabana on it. It might be $350, $400. And if your initials are anywhere on that cuff, we can really ratchet that price.

He goes, what are you talking about? I see, what I'm talking about is the law of economics and how actually things get sold in this world and how they work. I said, I'm really not sure what you're talking about. The value of a condo is exactly what the person's willing to pay for it. That's the value of the condo. And I didn't set the prices. Elliot's the developer.

They tell me I have the price sheet from them. They wanted to make me out as the mastermind. It created it, designed it, priced it. And I kept going back to for 20%. Well, you didn't get 20%. You got... No, yeah, I got 8%. I got 8.

But they knew, on paper, 20 was wired to our company bank accounts. So they want to pretend that I don't have anybody working for me. And I kept it all in my jeans. Right. There's not a business going on here. I kept it all. Well, that's not the case. So my guy gets up. We leave. After 14 hours, we leave the next day. And I said, okay. He said, do you think you did some good in there? That's what he said. I told you. That's what I said. I told you. They would get it. They would get. He goes, they didn't get anything. They didn't get anything. They didn't get anything. He goes, they got a lot of clues is what they got. Got a lot of breadcrums. You gave them the breadcrumbs to lead back to the palace. They're going to interview everybody that you mentioned. They're going to now know the context of those people.

Instead of it being hard for them, you made it very easy. He says, I expect to hear from them in the next week. You are a target of a criminal investigation. And that's an official term. And they're going to figure out a way to indict you. and maybe you gave them all the information they needed to complete the evidence folder for your indictment. I said, oh, I hope that not.

I said, I hope that did not occur. I said, I wanted to meet with them ahead of the indictment so that they didn't have to indictment. He goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you accelerated the indictment here today. And you tell them, I feel like we were in two different meetings. Yeah, well, my meeting went well. I swear to you, that is how I felt. And I realized, I just don't know criminal justice. I just, this is unfamiliar to me.

And my guys dictated it all down. I even went home and read the whole thing and I still liked it. I read the whole thing and I liked it. I really did. Even some of the aggressive debates I had with the agents, I liked it. I felt like I was so forthcoming, so candid, right? And that, I guess I want your audience to know. Don't do that.

Please don't do that. It's absolutely a mistake. Like, I had a friend of mine from the club whose wife is a federal judge. He took me to breakfast and he said, James, I want to talk you about your case. These guys all know me. They know I don't have it in me to steal money or need to. Right. He says, I want to talk to you about your case.

He said, I talked to Marilyn, his wife, before I came to meet you for breakfast. And I asked her for any advice for you. And of course, she can't meet with you. You know, she's a federal judge. but she wanted me to say this to you. She said to help James understand that the truth is the first victim in all litigation. There will be other victims. He may be a victim.

There will be people who lose money, but the truth goes down first. So stop trying to tell the truth. He goes, you don't need to lie. Yeah. But quit trying to find clues that reveal all these facts. He says, that battle's already lost. that battle is lost he says and I know what you're trying to do you're the type of guy that wants to just explain it because you feel in your heart you didn't do anything wrong he says but people

lost money you're in charge and so all this explaining all this looking for clues hoping that they'll turn over the paper and say oh i got it that thanks for clearing this up on that day doesn't come that they don't come what you need to be focused on and what my wife wants you to focus on is a window to escape. You need to find a way out of this legal situation. And that window will present itself. And when it does, you must go through it. You must go through it. You cannot be stubborn. You cannot believe that you're the exception. He says, 96% of these cases plead guilty. And not 96% of people are guilty. He says, in the 4% that dare go to trial, 90% of those are convicted. He says, we're talking 99.6% of all.

all criminal indictments, end in guilty. So you need to exit this notion that you're going to get out of this without some damage. There'll be damage. And the truth needs to, you need to stop running that down. You can live with the idea that you know the truth. But nobody cares in the criminal justice system about any of that. The trial's not about that. And they don't let you stand up there and tell the whole story.

They keep cutting you off. they're going to cut you off you're outside the narrative i'll ask the questions you give the answers your honor i'm going to declare him a hostile witness he keeps telling the truth up here that that is what is going on so don't you think for a minute that going to trial gives you some opportunity to soapbox this thing into explanation yeah yeah if anything it accelerates your ride to the turnstile and lengthens the time behind the wire i had a um a buddy who went to trial made a mistake going to two three weeks of trial he said for a full day they just stood up and went over his bank account and asked him about different checks he'd written now think

about this is a jury who is driving they're driving 10 to 15 year old toyotas and chevys yeah and they're making minimum wage and they hate you because you're driving a bentley and you're living in a three and a half million dollar house and they're sitting there going what's this $27,000 check for what did you guys spend 15 is this what's this vacation let's search some pictures of the vacation so while your clients were losing money and couldn't do this and couldn't do that you spent $15,000 on a vacation and and what about this how much was your Mercedes? Here's where you bought a Mercedes for your wife for 200,000 and I noticed that your your Bentley cost 800,000 and just the whole day he said we spent almost the entire day going over checks that

I had written. Suffocating him with his lifestyle. Right. He said, and I'm looking at the jury. He said, and they hated my guts. They hated him. They hated him. He's like, I'm writing checks and spending money in a couple of days that they don't make an entire year. Yeah. And they couldn't even get themselves out of jury duty. Yeah. They hate my guts. That's right. That's right. And he was like, he's like, he's like, I kind of felt like at that moment I thought, man, I'm, I'm, I'm going to lose this. Like, this is bad. Like this is I really, well, even though I know I didn't do anything wrong. I'm really bad. Yeah. on that day you realize this is not a battle about the truth yeah it's a battle of can i get this jury to hate you enough right right yeah how can i manipulate this jury into yeah my attorney told me he said look james this is the way this is going to go down you got to get your mind around the idea that you may have done something wrong yeah yeah get your mind around that he goes you need to process that you need to absorb that we'll help you understand the law and you can kind of figure out where you may have cross the line. He says, because unless we can get there, you're going to do a lot of time. He says, sentencing guidelines have this at 28 years without

enhancements. Without enhancements. It's $180 million. $180 million was the loss. So now we're going to make you a sophisticated means. We're going to make you a leader. Yeah. And we're going to make this aggravated basically you you've created the sophisticated means in your leadership a crime that has harmed 644 people yeah more than 200 victims uh you were in charge of more than more than 20 individual conspirators yes all of these oh yeah and i'm i'm blowing those numbers up with the size of my company exposing uh what is it um what is it uh basically it's um a position of sure oh um miss or misuse of a position of trust or something like that. Fiduciary.

I'm saying it along. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many enhancement that you're like, you're like, wow. Yeah. Changing jurisdictions to evaded detection. You're like, well, I didn't move.

Right. The Dominican Republic. Yeah. They're made. Cook Islands. Yeah, exactly. They'll just, they keep adding them and adding them. And you're like, who sat down and made up these things?

That's right. That's exactly right, man. That's what was happening. And my attorney says, he says, here's real simple, man. You're not a crazy guy. You don't seem irrational to me. But you're acting irrational, James. He said, here's what they're going to do.

They're going to put 13 people with Kleenexes in the witness box who now live in a cardboard box because of this investment. They're then going to tell the jury that you play golf four days a week. They're going to tell the jury about your homes, your airplane. They're going to tell them all about your wonderful life. And that's an enemy in this scenario. It's not good. Your wonderful life is a disaster in this scenario.

And then you're going to want to take the stand. I know you. You're crazy. You're going to want to go on the stand and you're going to want to let them tear you apart. And as they make you the enemy of all that is good. And so you are going to be convicted. Period. You made money. They lost money. Matter of fact, you made all your money. Your salespeople made all their money. And these people are the losers. Because when Judge Allen Gold shut down the case. He closed the resort. It ushered all the employees off the resort, shuddered it, closed the bank accounts

to pay the special master his fees for the investigation. In order to pay the special master, he has to shut the resort and empty the operating account. So 300 grand was the bill. Just so happens to be that's the balance in the operating account. That's amazing how often that happens like that. happens so coincidental isn't it it's terrible actually judge allen gold created a permanent loss for all these people they had their condo if they were at the other resort they had their condo

that wandolio still could be finished with just a few more million dollars it could be finished it could be saved even if you had the elliots out investors in it's not how they were shut it all down they don't they don't care the truth doesn't matter nor does the losses to the victims they really are not interested in recovering those losses. No, they created losses, actually, in this case. So I actually dragged this out from 2012. That's when the indictment finally hit. Think about it. I interview with them in 2010, 14 hours, took until 2012 October to finally indict me because they weren't sure how to do it. They indict me and Derek Elliott on the same day, October of 2012. Derek pleads guilty within week.

hires an attorney, a former U.S. attorney, pleads guilty instantly, and agrees to cooperate against James Catledge. I was going to say, when you know you're guilty, it's very easy to plead guilty quickly because you know, I can't wait. That's it. I don't want to fight this. I'm clearly guilty. They got me.

They got me. What can I do to mitigate my circumstances? And James knows the truth and will bury me if he was the cooperating witness. But I wasn't going to plead guilty. And I told my attorney, I said, I'm not playing that game. I said, and by the way, him cooperating, I said, don't be worried about that. There is no email. There is no text.

There's no. They don't need that. They don't need that. I mean, I don't know this. I love your face. You've told this story to people that are on your side that don't understand the law and are like, and I'm like, well, yeah, exactly. They don't have anything on you. That's not how it works.

It's not how it works. They need two or three guys to get on the stand and point at you. The jury says, well, these three guys are working. with the government. The government trusts them. They're trustworthy. They said they're trustworthy. The judge agreed that they're trustworthy. That's why he put them on the stand. And they all pointed at James. James is guilty. And he made a lot of money. Right. And they lost a lot of money. The equation just made so much sense. And they're paying me like $14 a day to be sitting in this jury box. Right. Because of you. Well, this greedy bastard has dragged this thing out for years. Yeah. It's time we

usher justice in right now for this guy. Well, I don't go for that. I do not go for that. I let my attorney know, hey, listen, I'm not interested in pleading guilty anything. What exactly would you have me plead guilty to? Just paint the picture for me. How much time is the right amount of time for an innocent man to do? Just give me that time. I'll sign up for that amount. James, this is irrational. You're having an irrational conversation with yourself. This is what he would tell me. I said, but listen, find out what they want to do. So they come at me. And I'll never forget this. I'm in my car. My son's doing a workout with his trainer, he's on the football team. So I drop him off at his workout. I'm in the parking lot. I don't want to drive back home. So I'm in the

parking lot. And I've scheduled this call to fit. He's in there. And I'm in the parking lot. And I'm listening to the prosecutor. I'm listening to the FBI agents. And I'm listening to my attorney. and I'm supposed to be quiet on the call. I'm not allowed to say anything. I'm supposed to listen in as they tell my attorney how much time they want me to do. And the first offer was 11 years, man. And you know this because you've dealt with this, but your situation was a little different. But my boy's in the workout and I'm trying to time this thing so I don't have, I'm not at home having this call.

I'm alone in my car and man, he's lasted a long time and I'm watching my watch. I'm thinking, I don't want my boy to get this car. I can't hear this. And I'm kind of keeping it low with them. They really, I had a meeting early on because I knew it's going to the papers. I had a meeting with my three oldest and my wife and I said, guys, I got to talk to you about something. I've been accused of something that dad didn't do and I'm going to be defending myself and

it may hit the papers. Your school teachers may find out about it. We're going to meet with the principal. had the principal into our home and I told her what was going on and I said any questions you've got I'm happy to answer them I said we're not hiding from this we're going to face this head on and anything you want to know if you want me to meet with the teachers I'll meet with the whatever whatever you want to talk about and she's man I really appreciate you tell us this is heavy for your family we'll take care of the kids she was very reassuring we're going to take care of the kids

I'll make sure the teachers are cool and if they want to talk to you I'll make that available to you So my kids are informed. A wife can't even speak during this meeting. I mean, she is just emotional. It's difficult. And so I'm having to explain that mom and I are together on this. And, you know, it's just difficult for her to deal with. And when I hear this 11 years, man, I'm thinking, okay, we're just on different sides of the planet.

This is like a parallel universe situation. And so David says to them, guys that's that's untenable we're not listening to this we're taking this to trial we got great facts we got great evidence uh mr catliss his money's in this thing his mom's money's in this thing um he's done nothing wrong here and and you guys don't seem to be listening very clearly i watch him defend me like an advocate on that phone and i'm not allowed to speak he calls me back instantly right after we hang this phone up with the prosecutor in the fbi he says james what do you want to do I said not that yeah I said I'm not doing that I said I promise you

I am crazy I will absolutely not do that I'll go all the way to trial and risk everything I will not do that he says I know that was unfair it was unreasonable I didn't expect that that was a lot higher than I thought I said what do you think's fair what I mean you seem to have a sense for this what do you think fair is he says well we're not getting the zero right he says I think if we could get them down to five, that's something we could digest. And you can do five, James. I know you can handle five easy. I said, well, today, the answer is zero, zero. I'm right where I was before this call. You've got to do a better job explaining to them, my innocence. And you need, whatever you got to dig up, whoever we got to interview. He says, what about that financial

officer that knows that they mailed you just commissions and that you weren't involved. in any finance meetings and you weren't, you know, you didn't even know about the construction delays until you came down and witnessed them yourself because they were pretending to be doing construction in a timely manner and sending out letters saying this. He says, what about that guy? Is that guy still around? I said, yeah, but he lives in Switzerland. The guy's a Swiss citizen that was working in the DR. He goes, do you know him. I said, do know him. He said, well, can we get him to testify like a video deposition? I said, oh, I think he would do that. He's totally my friend. I think he would totally do that. He says, all right, I'm going to file a motion with the

court because this will tenderize these guys. He said, I'm going to follow a motion with the court and get the judge to approve. This is a critical witness protecting your constitutional rights to a fair trial. This is Elliott's employee in the finance department. He's a critical guy that knows how the money distribution went. Right. We want to interview him on video. And I believe the government will do the right thing if they think that guy could show up at trial. But we want to give him a preview of his testimony. I said, okay. So we file to get a Swiss citizen to do an interview.

And this is crazy. Government resists it. We're not going to Switzerland. We're not doing that interview. And you're not doing that interview. Well, the judge says, well, I don't know about that. I think I may more be interested in that interview. And I think Catledge needs it.

Because it's his case and it sounds critical. So it takes six months. We get the government of Switzerland to approve this deposition and force him to fly to San Francisco for this video deposition. I haven't seen this guy in like eight years. Right. He's sitting in a room. And I really don't know what he's going to say.

I know he should say, but I don't know what he's going to say. The same team is in there. My team is in there. We've got a videographer in the room. And we're now on the record interviewing this guy. So what do you know about the finances of the L.A.? Were they skimming? These are our questions.

Yes, they were skimming. Did Catlas know they were skimming? He says, I don't know what Catledge know. He says, what do you know about? Catledge is pay. He goes, I don't know what he got paid, but we paid the company 20% of every transaction. Okay. Is there any way, do you have a feeling?

Maybe not fact. We have a feeling about Catledge's knowledge of theft of the money. He goes, well, my feeling would be he wouldn't approve of that because it's his clients. His company's got a pretty good reputation. And it wouldn't serve his best interest. It's the right answer. Right. He's given the right answer.

But you don't know until it's asked, right? And you don't know. Is he scared? You know, you don't know. Has they got to him first? Is he concerned about being charged himself? I swear to you, these are all real things. So we go through hours and hours.

of this. And this thing is a green flag, man. This is a wonderful interview. This guy's a truth teller. And it's going good. Well, it ends. My boys shut the binder. They dismissed him to go back to his hotel. My guy looks right at the prosecutor. Says, all right, boys, we're going to trial. We've heard all. We need to hear here. This is unbelievable. You got your guy is cooperating who's guilty of sin against his employee. Okay. James don't even matter here. Right. This guy says his boss was stealing the money. It says Catledge, who has no interest in whatsoever, never worked for Catledge, says he wasn't, shouldn't have, wouldn't have. So I think we'd take this thing to trial. It was just a few months later, I get the phone call for my attorney, David. And he's got everybody on the phone. When he's got everybody, David, Richie, and Robert on the phone, when everybody's on the phone, we got an announcement. He says, James, I think we're to. pivotal moment here where you can decide now to go to trial and probably lose. Right.

It's just my feeling about this. He goes, it's not because I'm not prepared, James. We've been at this thing seven, eight years now. We're totally prepared. We know everything there is to know. Government may not be as prepared as we are, but we are totally prepared. I think you lose anyway. He says, it's irrational to think you're going to win.

he says nobody wins these these these are not winning these no federal cases aren't winning winnable cases right it's not going to happen no the deck has come 100% stacked in their favor totally it's a it's a hammer so big it's impossible to overcome it without total look he says so even with you good facts i think i take him the five year deal right now and and i'd like to argue for probation with a max cap of five years, not leave it open to somebody, not leave it to the whim of the probation apartment. We're not, we're not worried about your PSI messing with this. No matter what PSI says, five year cap or no deal. Five year cap or we go to trial. He says, if I can get that cap in place, will you take that deal? I said, get the cap in place. Yeah, I'm not, hey, you guys,

I'm not going to bother with it. He goes, we either going to trial. are you going to let me negotiate in good faith with your permission that that's acceptable i said okay i'll do five that's the first time it's the first time my mind crossed into wow i'm actually going to go to prison right and i'm agreeing to it which was so tough that for me to get there and i remember calling my mother immediately after that call i said mom she's been with me through the whole thing. She's been right there. I said, I want to talk about something with you and I just want your gut or your opinion. She's got good judgment. I said, I've agreed to do five years. She's dead silent because she knows I'm innocent, right? Right. She said, son, I feel good

about it. Just like that. Son, I feel good about it. I said, you feel good about me going to prison? she says no i just telling you my reaction when he said that was let's get this over with it's over right let's if if they can get that done i feel good about it and i know you you'll be fine you'll be fine in there you'll do well in there right she said don't let's don't be afraid of prison she says it's the fear of prison it keeps the government it's the bully when you take away that fear they can't bully you because it doesn't matter you're not afraid of the time I said, well, I think I could do five. I did my Mormon mission, man.

That, hey, listen, that's hard. Okay, that's hard. All right. I think I can do time. They don't require you to knock doors in there. They don't require you to report at 9 o'clock your numbers. Midday naps, a lot of racquetball. All the tennis.

Yeah. Got very good at pickleball. So with that, I felt confident. You know, mom signed off on it basically. And I thought, well, listen, this is the. lady that'd be worried. This is the one person on earth, even beyond my wife, who would be very concerned about this. And if she's okay with it, but why shouldn't I be? So I called David back and I said, I want you to proceed in earnest to get this done. Let's get this thing over with.

He says, all right. I'm going to push them around. I think they'll do it, James. I think they don't want to prepare for trial. And I think they've got some issues with this case. And they know it. They know it better than we know it. They know their issues. They know their witness is bad too. Derek Elliott is a bad witness. I said, all right, let me know. Three days later, they called me back. And they said, we got it done. And I want you, I'm going to send you the statement of facts, which basically take the four corners of the law and allow them to box you into one count of male fraud. I need you to read the statement of facts and make sure you're comfortable with it. Well, they send it to me, Matt.

It's completely made up. Nothing in that statement of facts is anything about what I did with the resort of the project. Nothing. It's offensive. It's so bad. It's exaggerative. It's not true. It's completely offensive.

And so I said, I'm not signing off on this. He said, it's bad. I don't like it either. Here's one of them. I'm going to call the guy back, and I'm going to tell him to give us permission to write the statement of facts. And you can write what you think you did wrong. It can swear to a judge that you did wrong under oath. And that when that judge quizzes you from every angle about taking responsibility, you can say, absolutely.

Because I need you there, James, because she's going to hate this. She would like your facts in front of a jury. We know that. We know that the government has not presented anything to date that shows you were guilty of anything, that you knew anything and said something different. We know that and we know she knows that. She's going to be surprised that you're taking five years and that they're willing to take five years on a $180 million crime with 644 witnesses. This is not adding up. So I need you to be able to look her in the face and say, I take full responsibility for this.

I feel terrible about this and I I wish it had never happened and I would do anything to restore these people's money to them I would do anything and we're so far beyond that I need you in a position to have that conversation with the judge and all those people that will be there I said well let's let's get busy with the psalis let's let's go let's figure out what this thing needs to look like and we literally played word pretzel for five versions of this thing no no we needed to say that. No, we got to keep that in there. Well, it's not true. You need a bunch of stuff that's not true in here. Or can we go with the truth? At some point, somebody's got to want the truth in the statement of facts. I mean, it's really crazy, Matt, that we're having this

conversation with folks who don't really want the truth in there. Right. They want their narrative that they indicted on. They need to look kind of like that. And we've really departed from that at this point. We're down to one countermail fraud where they found an email. They showed me the email where I instructed the Elliott's in the Elliott organization. Make sure when you send the next update, you give them specific construction timelines, put photographs in there, please, of the elevator shaft, all the things you did. I want photographs in there. Now, I'm now guiding the mail.

And as you know, if fraud occurred, mail was used, and I'm now guiding the mail. so they're okay so but and they're saying that that was an instruction's to fool right like that that's okay but either way you had an email that said oh yeah you're really just trying to inform your your clients that things are happening that's what that's what that is but they're going to they know they're going to twist it if they can get we can get on the stand we can take this email and have Elliott twist it yeah yeah yeah yeah so he's constantly telling us what to tell the clients many things that weren't true we were told to say and right right yeah he'd was bullying us a lot, you know. That's what they were going to go with. But, you know,

I must tell you, with the heaviness of all of this, we, we decide to do it. They accept it. The statement of facts goes in and now it's time to be sentenced. And we have the right to argue down to zero probation. Yeah. Up to five. The judge two hours into sentencing. Sentencing is supposed to be 45 minutes. Right. Two hours. I got my whole family and friends there. Many of my, really my advocates are all there. Two hours in, the judge says, you know what? I don't like this. I don't like any of this. I don't like the fact you accepted a plea deal after all these years. Why would you do that? Our Constitution gives you a right to take your facts to a jury of your peers to have your

name cleared and you were giving that up today and i'm not sure i'm comfortable with it she says i would like you mr catlis to meet with your attorneys because i'm about to recess i need you out in that hallway meeting with your attorneys and talking this through is this really what you want to do now i'm going back into my chamber for my law clerk figure out how i can undo this because you guys signed a binding agreement that the only way i can undo it is i can't mess with the time i have to put you to trial and and i think this is a case come on man we've been at this a while this is a case for trial and and i'm not comfortable at all and she starts lecturing the prosecutor with her finger about what he has not shown what he has

not proven and what is he hiding and why is he not shown her why would he allow her to go this far not see anything that that's worthy of indictment and so i'm thinking oh man she's the trial judge yeah but you know what's what you you understand and so what she's doing is she's telling them you know what i'm saying she's telling them instructing them yeah she's kind of instructing and letting them know like your case is weak he could go like he could get a better deal than this like she i don't think they really care whether you take a plea you know what i'm saying they they know and she she already knows why you're taking it yeah i'm running out of money i'm broke and let's face it you know that i if i go to trial i can be found because you've seen you've seen

hundreds of people. He knows the percentages. Right. You've seen hundreds of people that you're looking at thinking, this guy made the mistake of going to trial. He probably should have gotten probation, if anything. Yeah. And now I'm going to be put in a place where I have to give him 20 years.

And I can't do anything. I've got the sentencing guidelines and I have to abide by it. The judges are in a shitty position sometimes. No, I agree. Most of them are just assholes. But when they know something's wrong, they're still, they're still boxed in by the system. Yes. Yeah.

So I think there's no latitude there. I think she's trying to let them know, you know what I'm saying? You might need a better deal. You might need a better deal than the five years thing. Well, he and he, it's very wise what you're saying because as it turns out, in my mind, I'm sitting there listening to all this banter back if she's lecturing. My guy, she's out of the, you're still thinking going home. I'm, yeah, I'm thinking, I'm thinking two things.

We now have leverage with the prosecutor, right, the judge just created for us. And I'm thinking, let's go to trial. I still don't know you're right so we get in the hallway my attorney looks at me right in the eyes and he says don't even think about it you're going to march back in there and double down on your guilt and you're going to do exactly what we discussed this is not the moment he says I promise you you could be inside for 28 years explained to all those inmates how innocent you are and they would believe you and you'd be wearing green clothes for 28 years or we can get back to your life. life and get on with your life and get back to productive citizenry with your children that's what today is about restarting the rest of your life so do not lose the moment here so i said i got it i understand so i went back in and she he didn't go he didn't go back to the prosecutor and say no he should have he had leverage created drop it down three years he had leverage he did not use that leverage and I'm so emotional with the heaviness of this moment. I'm not quite thinking clearly about

that. Looking back, that's what was happening, Matt. What you're saying is what was happening. And I'm not clear enough in that moment to say, hey, look, we got maximum leverage right now. Yeah. I'm just, I'm not the strategist in this moment. I should have been, but I'm not. It's been so heavy for so long at this point, right? So my whole family's like, they're going to go to trial. You know, I can clear my son's name, you know. They're all, I mean, you can just feel the anticipation, the hope of it all. Well, the judge starts in on my attorney again, starts in again. And he says, Your Honor, before I answer any more questions, I need to know if you're going to accept this plea.

Because the more answer these questions, you're actually messing with trial material now. And I need to know before Mr. Catledge answers anything else, before I answer you. anything else? Are we saving this information for a trial? Are you going to accept this plea? Because if so, he would like to go ahead and do his elocution right now. She looks right at me and decides in this moment. It looks right at me and she says, are you ready to do your elocution? She kind of like, are we doing this? Like, if you don't, I'm supporting this, right? And I said, Your Honor, I'm ready. She says, very well, I agree to accept the plea.

And I'm now going to read you for all these criminal requirements. You know, she goes through these accounts are being dropped. This account is being added. Do you understand the charge against you? Do you understand you're pleading guilty? Is that right? Yes, that's right. And have you been, has a gun been held to your head?

Have you on drugs? If you're drinking, you've sound mind, is anyone threatened you, you know, the whole thing. And then she says, do you have anything you'd like to say? You don't have to say anything, but if you would, this is your time. And I did have something to say. And my guys had kind of helped me write it. I wrote it and then they, you know, we're not saying, man. You know, they cleaned up all the stuff, you know, that I shouldn't say.

And so I told the judge, I said, I'm going to read this. I usually don't read, you know, when I'm speaking to someone personally, but I think in the moment here, just to stay on track, I need to read this. So I read this very emotional allocution where I took full responsibility for the crime. And I'm telling you, that part was hard, so hard. And then I apologize to the victims because, man, I know they lost money. I know they suffered from this. I know they were given the, you know, the rigmarole with Judge Allen Gold.

I know that their losses were permanent because of that case we filed to defend them. Right. And I let them know, hey, look, I defended you. I wanted this to work well for you. I spent mine and Tiffany's money to, you know, try to get your money back. I mean, I really did. And one thing that we didn't mention is our family home was $4.1 million, pay. for. And to settle all the civil litigation, we put that home in trust for all those law firms

to equally distribute the proceeds of the sell of that house. We moved out of that home, began to rent homes from that point forward. And the proceeds of that house went to those victims. And so we were all along, we were trying to square up, trying to make it right. But I can say this, having gone inside, having prepared myself, prepared my mind, and actually to do the time. It helped me. It clarified for me some things about me that I think made me better to actually have that experience.

I know not everybody feels that way who goes to prison, but I got enough of it that I needed it. I needed it. I didn't need it for what occurred. Right. It was a purifying experience for me personally and left there better, improved. And frankly, I met some people. people that I needed to meet and that needed to meet me. And the experience we had together was

extraordinary. I mean, I remember you recanting your departure from prison the day you left. And I feel the exact same way. It was, it was emotional. Not because of my freedom, because of my exit. I'm exiting friendships that were deeper maybe than any I had on earth. And only someone who's done time feels that. It's so hard to imagine feeling that way about being. incarcerated. But we do, there's a fraternity of guys that have that experience that I'll never let go of. And, and those guys come to my home today. Those guys are coached by me today, success coaching. I coach a lot of these guys. And I love them. I love them. Our rep, you know, they call them a shot caller and a medium or a pen, but at a camp, they're a rep. But that guy's my best

friend. I mean, I'd do anything for this guy. And we established a rapport in there that was unbelievable. And I revealed to him parts of himself he did not know existed that were so obvious to me, so obvious in conversations that he was hiding behind Braun. He was hiding behind his gang affiliation. He was hiding behind, frankly, the crimes he committed. And it self-identified himself as those things when he wasn't right he never was but you can kind of stereotype yourself into these these shameful things and it can ruin your life and I I worked hard in there to help guys work through shame and guilt that they didn't need to feel and I think it was good for me it was certainly good for me and what did the judge what did the judge give you sorry the five years

Five years. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. She didn't have to. Yeah. She could have. And we were all shocked when she did because she knew the situation.

She knew all the situation. And when she said 60 months, it's as though she just flipped in her head. It wasn't like, oh, yeah, you can see this coming from a while. It was like in the moment, like what? Like I felt like that night when she drove home from that courthouse that she was like, oh, God. I'd get too much. I felt that way. You know what actually happened my judge one time, my lawyer at the time,

my lawyer at the time, named Millie, you know, and she'd come to the jail and see me and talk to me about this and this and this, and she'd just sit there and talk to me. And she'd go, you know, the weirdest thing happened with your judge the other day? And I went, what's that? She said, he sentenced. someone to like 20 years and he actually the guy's brother stood up and kind of you know basically the judge you know someone he spoke for him before sentencing yeah spoke to the judge

and was saying a bunch of stuff and the judge mouthed off to him because the guy kind of mouthed off about the justice system and this and that and he mouths off back oh gosh they go back and forth back and forth and he was um so he was irritated he And then he gave him 20 years. She is, which is what the government wanted to give him 20 years. That was what it was supposed to be. She's like, he knew he signed up for 20 years. And the judge drove home.

Okay. Interesting. And the next day, she said like two days later, three days later, she said the judge's clerk called and said, like, have they transferred this guy yet? And she's like, no. She's like, okay, well, we're resetting. The J&C. We're redoing it. We're redoing it.

Brought him back. knocked off like five years said I'm resentencing you when I went home I made a mistake I I was emotional or when I did that I was emotional I thought about it I thought about this I thought about that God and yeah and I love that yeah damn and when you talk about when we're talking about the judges when I was saying like the judge is trying to tell the prosecutor they can't say it there's something they know I know and and like in my case I had filed a 2255 at one point my second 2255 and the judge was like legally like I can't he he he he said in the motion he said I can't I'm I'm not able to remove this and resentence you like I can't do it it falls

outside of jurisdiction yes and he said but I think there's an argument here and he said so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to allow you to appeal this because I think it should be appealed. So he's saying like based on the law, I'm not allowed to do this. But if you can get the appellate court to say I can do it, I'll do it. And he said, and I'm basically said like, I'm so sure of this. I'm going to waive your certificate of eligibility. Which is, that's a huge rule. You got to qualify for that. Yeah, you have to go and fight in front of a magistrate judge. And a 90% of times they're like, no, I'm not giving you. You're done. That's right. It's like I'm waiving that. He is, and I'm also waiving the $500 fee that you have to pay to do it. He said,

so when I got that and I read it, and I read it and I thought, man, this guy just, just denied it. Well, yes, but I read it and I thought he denied it. He denied my appeal. And I gave it to the guy doing my legal work. Frank Amadeo. And he read and he said, man, he just told the U.S. government that he believes that he does have, should have the jurisdiction. You have a case. Yeah. And he just, they're wrong. And every single block or whatever wall that's in your way, he just knocked down. I love that.

And he also told the appellate court, this, like he's telling them, I want. There's meat on this bone. Yeah. Well, not only that, like he was saying the way he had said it was like, I want to be able to do it. Yeah. Give me the right to do this. Yeah. And so, and here's the reason.

And so Amadeo was like, I was like, okay, so we're going to appeal. He goes, yeah, we're going to fight the appeal, we're going to do the appeal, we're going to do that. I'm going to start writing it before any of that happened because also the prosecutor knows that's what they know that language. They know what's going on. I don't. Yeah. I thought I just got. Oh, yeah.

He said, no, no, you just got, this is almost as good as being resentenced. Right. Before we could do anything, they immediately try to give you less points. They tried to give you points. They filed a one level reduction and this and, you know, they immediately, your honor, give them a lawyer. we want to get this because they wanted to circumvent circumvent that completely so they still had some control of it yeah oh yeah yeah yeah it could minimize the damage right and so it could be much worse for them right because now we're in a negotiation yeah that's right as opposed to just having to

being forced to allow the judge and it would have shown precedence oh yeah precedent which they don't want to be no no no u.s attorney wants to be the the the u.s. attorney that got precedence um set that diminish their hammer correct yeah in in in the uh in favor of the defendant. That's right. Now, they do precedents in favor of them. Great. That's right. And they're like, the judge just told the appellate court. Exactly. You know what? Get file a rule 35. Get them back into court. Get him a lawyer. Get them this. Let's limit this as quick as possible. Yes. So, but see, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It takes a lawyer to understand what's going on. Frank knew it instantly. Right. He knew it. He goes, oh, man, this is a

roadmap to your success here. Yeah. I'm looking at it. I can't it to him. It looks like failure. In tears. I got denied. He's like, this is great. news. Yeah, right. He sees it correctly. Right. I love that guy. And then of course the next, over the next, when they file this over the next week or two. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Or over the next month or two, they get the, they start filing. They get the, they start doing their thing. It's like, wow, you were right. Yeah, man. And that's when they sent the lady and she gets you the three. Yeah. No, Frank said to ask for four, but we would take three. I hate to interject my, my thing. No, I love it. I love it. But I'm saying like, I can see the, the judge

saying all of this. Communicating with tea leaves. Right. Yeah. But in the end, it's like, look, man, I'm going to go broke doing this. I'm still going to lose. Yeah. You know, because you know they don't play fair.

And as much as a judge can do, in the end, the government can just. Oh, yeah. They got all control. Right. Total power. The idea that, and we can discuss this when we talk about Trump, but the idea that a grand jury is in secret in that you can, can't have a representative in the room and that your lawyer can't be in the room, that you can't be

in the room, and they're discussing your fate. And then the idea that the script is secret, the transcript is totally secret. And I interviewed a grand jurist, not in my case, not in my case, but just happened to be a friend that was on a grand jury. She says, James, we indicted 76 people over 18 months. I never didn't indict anybody. Right. She says, why would we? We don't even know the other side of the story. all we have is the one side that's completely designed to persuade us we can ask questions but it's of the one side we don't have the other side she says when i listen to your podcast games it was the first time i realized that i needed to have the defendant in the room to ask them about these accusations and then i would bet 70% of our indictments wouldn't have occurred if we just had representative

from the defendant's side. You want another one? Tell me. Of course, that's completely, you're right. The grand jury system is completely unfair. The second thing that's unfair is this, is that a jury has no idea what you're facing. So people think, oh, well, the jury must have been okay with him getting 30 years. They found him guilty.

They knew he could get 30 years. No, they don't. No, they don't. All they know is, is he guilty or innocent? of these of the four corners of this crime right so like 90 i'll bet 80 to 90 percent of the discussions in there because i've known people that were on juries yes where some people were saying i want to go home i'm tired of this yeah we're here this guy's here look what does it matter he's probably just going to get probation yeah right he's probably going to get a couple of years this is meaningless right

he's a gang member he probably deserves he deserves he deserves at least he's going to get five or six years and he probably deserves that for something. Right. And then of course, they got him on this one. Right. So they find him guilty. Yep. And they think, oh, he's going to get probation. And then three months later, they read in the paper, the guy got 25 years. And the first thing 90% of these people say is, had I known he was looking at that much time, I never would have found him guilty. Right. Deliberations would have been much longer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's right. The sentencing guidelines are not part of the jury instructions. never no i know it so they have no clue the only time they're allowed to know what you're facing

is if you're facing the death penalty that's it's the only time you understand that if you find him guilty he may end up receiving the death penalty it is a death penalty case okay we know that yeah capro case those those are so overwhelming horrific anyway the heaviness of the yeah yeah and they usually get them yeah to wrap this up in total i got to self-surrender you know they didn't hold me in a transfer center or anything like that uh The prosecutor was working very collegially with my lawyer. I got to under when they arrest you at the arraignment, that was an appointment. I showed up in my suit.

They take me down. I'm not even handcuffed. They take the photos, the D&A Schwab. That was all a courtesy. All of that courtesy between my lawyer and the prosecutor's office, I think afforded me lots of favors that I hear so many tormented stories about that the arrest on the arraignment, the knocking the front door down, coming in the house in front of your kids with guns load, none of that. Nobody, nobody was in my home ever. Nobody kicked in the doors of my office

and stole the servers and, you know, put your pens down. Not, none of that ever occurred, ever. So I think that's a huge benefit, blessing to having hired a criminal defense lawyer early. And then, listen, all this stuff that I'm so foolish and naive about, I think bought me some courtesies. If I'm going to end up going to jail, I'd like it to be a softer ride, a smoother transport to get there. I self-surrendered. Yeah. And my mom and my brother take me, walk right to the front door.

That's a wild day. When they go back out that door and you're heading in for the cough and the squat and the orange jumpsuit, we're going to take the pictures and we're going to build your ID. How about the way the guards talk to you? Oh, no. Never been talked to. It's dehumanize you. Yeah.

And you can't shake your hand. The first thing I wanted to do is shake the fellow's hand when I met him. We don't do that here. I know, backed up, maybe we don't do that here. I thought, okay, all right. It's a dehumanizing experience. I'd never, when I got arrested the first time, I'd never, the police officers did not talk to me as as rudely.

Right. And exactly dehumanizing as the guards, you know, and they talk to your family like that. Yeah, they do. They just fucking scumback. They do. Yeah, it made me feel bad about cops. It made me feel bad about correction officers. It made me really kind of not like these people.

Yeah. And that's not my nature, but I really left there with a bad taste in my mouth about, frankly, they're not in charge of enforcing the judgment. They're in charge of securing the prison. Right. And yet somehow their security guard assignment has got them feeling like they're in charge of imposing some punishment upon me because I'm in there. They don't even know I'm in there.

They have no idea the machinations I went through to get there. Yeah. So many of them, they would say, and I avoid it all conversations. with these guys, all of them. But I remember many of them saying, well, you don't like it? Shouldn't do the crime. Yeah.

So they know anything about what went down. It's cute until they get a DUI and they immediately want preferential treatment. Exactly. Or they smuggle something in. Yeah. And they get indicted. What do you mean? I could go to prison.

You can't put me. I'm not one of these guys. You are. They're all busy and dying. Busy bringing stuff in. They're all busy with the extra money bringing stuff in. We had a guy and I don't want to get too specific here because this is uncharged crime but we had a I'll just say a counselor slash not a guard a counselor slash unit

manager you you you you know you know who these people are receiving a salary from an inmate to have his legal boxes filled with all sorts of things that visit so he would go every week lawyers were visiting him every week and his legal boxes were full with protein, caffeine pills, hair color, white teeth whitener. All the nonsense to keep this guy looking young was in his legal boxes. And you know how your search going back in? Not this cat because he's coming out of a legal meeting, but the legal boxes. And they go right back basically to his storage unit.

And it can't be messed with or tampered with. But at all his stuff in it. And the guy that was paid a salary, literally the whole time he was there, made sure that happened. Yeah. So this is the kind of nonsense. that's going on in there. These whole you than now.

I want to be at, though. Yeah, these whole, yeah, right. You fill your legal boxes up with stuff. Listen, every, every inmate wants to ride smooth. Yeah. And if you're going to put some time in there, you should try to make it smooth. Yeah. No doubt about it.

And we don't have to discuss on this podcast all the ways that it can be made smooth, but there are plenty of ways. And there's some stuff you shouldn't mess with. Right. Phones. That's the greatest mistake you can make as a white call. our federal inmate is these stupid phones because they've got the software. We know every number that got dialed.

They're going to one day get the phone. Okay, one day they're getting the phone and they put the software in it says every number that was ever dialed. They check it against the visit list. And we know Madcox, I don't care if you had the phone or not, you made a call from this phone. Yeah. Same part.

Never camp eligible again. When you say phone, you mean phones are smuggled in. Yeah, cell phones are smuggled in. Yeah, not the people might think not the inmate. Yeah, not the phones we get the minutes on. We should be on. Yeah. It's a mistake I see the smartest guys make. They get on those stupid phones because one in two inmate has a doggone phone in there.

Yeah. Which is insane. Why would you, why do you need more than 500 minutes? What are you saying? And who are you saying? Well, they're basically almost running scams out of the- But that's got to be it. I mean, why else would you need more than 500?

I don't have that much to say. Well, I mean, or they have access to that way. They have access to that way. They have access to that way. That's YouTube. They can watch a movie. Yeah. They're doing all sorts of salacious nonsense on the cell phone.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So that's the legal case that got me behind the wire. I have a question for you. And we can get to the rest of this, but I need to know this because I've thought about this a lot. I know your whole story through Lex Friedman's thing. I listen to all friggin' seven hours that thing.

Okay. And I've sent that version to dozens of people because that's the, I think it's the best full story. It's the best. It's the full story. here's the question Matt Cox does the mortgage fraud stuff

a lot of tidly wing stuff all along the way that's occurring right now all over town that stuff you were doing with whitening out stuff and moving stuff around to help people get loans

that's occurring a lot okay the the idea of going on the run right and then doing larger we're going to satisfy the mortgage now

because we're going to borrow more money against this house because I'm going to satisfied the loan where you're living in and still paying your mortgage payment you don't even know this is occurring i'm satisfying this loan with some made-up documents and i'm taking 200 grand off this thing and i keep moving i'm using synthetic identities i'm using homeless people IDs it seems like you're pressing the accelerator on this stuff it doesn't seem to be capped it i've got a containable crime here i can yank a hundred grand a month off this crime and i'm just going to keep it right there

that's plenty it seems like you're mashing the accelerator almost like on a suicide mission. Your personality is risk-averse. It is, that's why you're so thorough. You're looking to so understand the system that you avoid all risks. At least eliminate everyone you can see before you commit the crime. Eliminate any chance of getting caught here. That's what made it good.

It's what made it totally thorough. But it seems like you're accelerating. The longer time went on, you kept pushing them. the risk you kept pushing the risk is that true i mean i i think it's true but i think i also every time i got caught i got out of it so i just kept thinking you know every time you you become emboldened by it more more brazen so i just kept every time i got caught and i convinced i just paid them off or i got the convinced the lawyer i hadn't done anything wrong or i'll bring you the money yeah yeah yeah yeah the cops that they got the wrong person

yeah yeah yeah the bank made a mistake not me yeah they cut me loose. So, you know, every time that happened, instead of saying, hey, I got lucky and I thought I'm just that good. Okay. Like, I can, I can keep pushing the envelope. It was that good. And I think it would have remained for a long time. Yeah. Because you're using synthetic IDs. I mean, it's like, who are we chasing here? Is it a John Doe? I mean, what is going on here? The girls messed you up. I mean, the ladies that you had in your life, for whatever psychological, issues they had, they messed you up. They reported this and they got them on your trail. And then, of course, the lady, you were in business ratted you out and the tape recorder at the

pizzeria and hey, we've never lied to the FBI. That whole scene right there. That's BS. They totally ratted you out. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, no. I know they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My lawyer told me that the, the, the, their lawyer told them. Yeah, go get this guy. Yeah. But I'm saying my lawyer talked to their lawyer, their lawyer basically said, yeah, what, what my clients have, what, what what the FBI's got on you now, it's full, but it's done. Okay. Is that why you were willing to match the accelerator? We already know enough to take you down.

Therefore, you're going to go. You're going to leave. And you're going to continue doing what you're doing. And matching the accelerator is almost like, look, I'm caught anyway. Well, I mean, once I was wanted, yeah, then there's, there's no, you know, the governor's off. That's it. And then, yeah. The wanted position allowed you to match the accelerator.

done. I know. Yeah. So what's it, you know, in my mind, what does it matter if you're done for 5 million or 50 million? Yeah. Doesn't matter. I don't realize that it does matter.

You're sure, the sentencing guidelines are proportionally different. I have no idea. Right. I got it. So, so the girls, you know, you know that, that they're going to be the trouble. Okay. And you're keeping your ID different with them. Well, here's the thing with that is that everybody always, not everybody, but people

I think people that are prone to figure out where'd he go wrong where most people are just being entertained the guys that are like where did he go wrong always zero in on every time you've been in trouble it's because of a woman I never once thought that

until I did the podcast with Danny's he didn't make the connection I never really considered it that that there was you're right there was a woman involved in every one of those I never thought that until I looked to the comment section And everybody was like, bro, the girls.

Women, women, women always get people. Women always, and they would go on. I was like, no, I was like, I don't think of. And I started playing it in my mind. I thought, every time. Gretchen, you know, Amanda. They shut it down. Yeah, every single, you know, Becky.

They brought them to your door. Every time. But I never, I never really thought about that because I always kind of thought like I hit up or it wasn't thinking that it was, you know, my choice in women or that women were. Take all those women out. You know, I always think I would get caught Oh no, I think I still be on the run I do too Because I also think that

I do too And the one thing I've always said is that Becky And I knew this from the beginning When Becky got caught and got this lawyer Yeah The lawyer got so much attention Because this was just local newspaper article Yeah Tampa

Wasn't until this lawyer Who worked for like the Johnny Cochran law firm Right she's you see her To this day you'll see her on CNN Forget her name I have it down somewhere she got a magazine article in Fortune Magazine done. So she's the one who got, you know, got Dateline.

She's the one who got all these people involved. She's the one who she was trying to get me placed on America's Most Wanted. Oh my God. They actually, I actually have an FBI 302 form where Candace Calderon contacted after speaking with the lawyer contacted America's Most Wanted. And they said, we do not do nonviolent crimes. About a year later, they started doing, well, after a year after I got caught, they started doing nonviolent crimes. Wow, you would have been in there.

Otherwise, they would have done it. They were like, look, great story. We'd love to do it. The guy's on the run. Like, it meets all of our parents. It's a great story. But he's nonviolent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, but yeah. You would still be on the run. Oh, I think I would because if I hadn't been caught, I certainly was. Would you backed off? I always, slowed it down. I always feel like I would have backed off. But I'd probably be somewhere in the United States with just a bunch of real estate collecting rent. Because my whole thing was like, I want to get $5 or $10 million in real estate, keep investing, collect rent.

I'm good. Yeah. Like I don't need to be committed. That's where it should have ended. Right. But it didn't happen. And to be honest, I probably got it caught anyway. I'm just, you know, who knows.

It keeps telling myself that, oh, no, I would have done this. Really? Would you? Yeah. It may be. Yeah, right. And what's interesting is you had the system so dialed in, you knew. First of all, figuring out the idea that satisfying a loan with a made-up document satisfies the loan.

Yeah, that's crazy. And the idea that that is possible. Yeah, that's ridiculous. It's stupid. It's such a flaw. Yeah. And because you got caught, all those flaws have now been revealed. Yeah, but nothing was changed.

Oh, none of them have been addressed. None of them. I can send a fake satisfaction loan right now. You can get rid of your home. Right. Absolutely. Right now you can get rid of the mortgage on. your house. Oh my goodness. Wow. Why would they not cure that? What's the reason for not

curing that? Who benefits from it and who is harmed by it? If Bank of America's mortgage is removed and you like you've committed fraud. Yeah. Bank of America still owns that house. Yeah. So they can still acquire the house. They just file a suit for quiet title. Or they start foreclosing saying, hey, we accidentally, or this was in part of a fraud, we're not foreclosing on the house. They're still the number one. There's no reason for them to push.

If it was a fraud and I borrowed multiple mortgages on a house, the first one gets filed. The second one after that, they can file against the title policy and get paid back because it's fraud. Okay. No reason. The insurance, you would think that, oh, well, the title insurance companies, they would want to correct it. Why? Title insurance are one of the only companies out there that have a minimum. Yeah, I'm sorry, a minimum that they have to pay. Okay. And there's so much profit margin. Let me give you an example. If I go in and I say to a, you go to a title company right now and they say, we're going to charge you a $4,500 for your title policy on your half a million dollar policy. And that's too much. And you go to lawyer, you go to another title company and say, hey, there's, um, uh, there's this, I'm about a half a million.

house and but I'm uh they're they're charging me four thousand dollars not 4500 but 4,000 can you beat that they'll go they'll look at you and be like no we can't we have to charge you 4,500 there's a minimum they have to charge i see so they already know you're lying yeah you know so so and and in that 4500 it's almost all profit if you go and look at these these title companies these they're mad and there's only like four or five big ones they own all the little ones. Okay. They own massive amounts of stuff dealing with real estate.

They own tons of appraisal companies, survey companies. Like, there's so much profit in it. They almost never pay. So why would they want to correct a system that incentivizes people to get title policies that are 95% profit? Yeah. There's no incentive. And the government, does the government lose?

No. The government doesn't lose any money. Do you think there's a lot of guys doing? what you were doing? Well, when I was doing it, there was very few, but there's more and more people doing it now. There's more and more articles about it. And you've kind of taught a bunch of people out to do it.

I mean, I don't feel like I've done anything to contribute towards that at all. But I think there's been a lot of information. There's YouTube out there. People hear things. They start trying, trying different things. Yeah. And there are forums out there that I have no doubt there's forums out there right now.

Step by step. Yeah, that have step by step instructions. Because when you hear about the people they're doing it now, it's so low budget. Yeah. It's not sophisticated people doing this crime. No. It's kind of like the tax fraud.

At first, the people that were doing it. All people in the industry, all accountants, CPAs, business people. You know, it's all, you know, top shelf individuals. Yeah. But then it got out there. And now it's like drug dealers are doing it. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

People that live in the projects are going around filing, you know, It's a massively amounts of fraud involved in it. And they don't have a high school education, but they can figure this out. Yeah, right. Well, it's, once you explain it, it's like, if that's the thing, I can do it. Yeah. That's an easy thing to do. All right, let's talk about prison.

Yeah. Let's get to it. So what, so how was prison? Good times. For me, it was actually, I mean, yeah, I don't want to recommend that to anybody. Right. But it was a good experience for me. Right.

And I think it was a choice. choice that did you go to a lower camp camp never never set foot in a low taft california okay just outside of bakersfield north of los angeles uh kind of out in the desert it's it's a privately managed bureau of prison contract okay so the bop owns the facility and they built it and then a private company called mtc management training corporation manages the contract so these are private employees the warden The guards, counselors, they all work for MTC. How many people are there?

At our camp, 300 at the camp, there's a low there, had 1800, maybe 2,000. Right. Inmates. But you just said you went to a low? Camp. To a camp, sorry. To a camp, sorry. Yeah, the camp is a satellite of the low at Taft.

Yeah, they kind of maintain the grounds. That's right. That's right. They're cooking, the landscaping, the working in the laundry, lots of that stuff is some of the campers. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing with Coleman.

Like, Coleman's got a camp that basically maintains the... USBs. Yeah. Well, the lawns. Okay. Sure. All the landscaping and everything. The tree trimming.

Like, there's a bunch of stuff they do. Right. But they also, when there's lockdowns and things, they'll, they'll make the food. They'll bring them in. They're not going to go into a pen, but they'll show up. What was interesting about being assigned to Taft is this, this is this is, this is, So crazy. So my friend Jack, because he uses his first name, is a lawyer and an accountant. And he's probably 71, 72 years old. He's a member of the golf club I belong to. And when I get indicted,

he wants to meet with me right away and kind of reassure me that, you know, he's with me and like help me find my lawyer and all of that stuff. So he's a part of the meeting to hire my lawyer. He tells me early on, he says, if you ever in this case end up, going to prison. He says, I need you to go to Taft. And I'm thinking, Jack, what do you know about prisons? And you know how this is. In the beginning, you can't get your mind to go to researching prisons. Right. In the beginning, it's like defending myself. The whole thing's about defending myself. I don't even start looking at prisons online until I've agreed to the five-year deal. Right. So when he says that he's way early on this and I had almost forgotten it.

But when I agreed to it, he's one of the guys I counseled with about the five-year cap. He says, all right, this is a good idea. He goes, don't forget about Taft. I said, Jack, why is Taft a big deal? And it happens to be close to Las Vegas. It's within five hours of Las Vegas. So my mom can get there. My kids live in San Diego.

They can get there. So it's kind of central. And he said, James, the guy that owns that prison contract, the head of MTC we raised our children together at Salt Lake Country Club we're friends and we play golf together and I'm going to arrange for you to play golf

with the owner of the MTC company who has the contract and Taft now I got to tell you it was very very clear you do not ever call me but I will make sure things run smoothly for you right yeah

yeah and I know this guy has 27 contracts for federal federal and state facilities this is a big part of his life and I'm there 90 days now your first week is the hardest that Your first week is like, oh, my God, I'm sleeping in a warehouse. Yeah. These are concrete floors. Why are these guys not being quiet? Why are they so damn loud at 10 o'clock? And lights are out, for God's sake.

Can we, it's not a slumber party. Everybody be quiet? What is happening? It's like a slumber party. Yeah. For teenagers. It's like a really, really shitty summer camp. Yeah, well, it is.

That's a good way of putting it. That's exactly right. So the whole, the first week's terrible. about 90 days in, James Catledge to Camp Control. James Catledge to Camp Control. Now, whenever you hear that, you're in trouble, okay? Nobody gets called to Camp Control to see how your stay is. Right.

What is that? Like the Lieutenant's Office? It's like the... This is where all the guards are. Not the warden. Warden's up at the low. Okay. Camp Control is the camp boss, the director, all the guards are up there in the eye.

I would think that'd be like the Guard Shack. Like the Guard Shack. Yeah, that's right. The bubble. This is where they're running things from camp control. Yeah, yeah. They're probably playing poker. I don't know what the hell they're doing. It's two-way glass. They're behind they're doing. God knows what. Well, when you get called to Camp Control, it's usually something's going down. Somebody's told on you about something or you're about to go to the shoe, you know, something like that. So two of my buddies roll up with me to Camp Control. And we get there and the ward and says, what the hell are you two doing here? And they've been around a while. And they said, we're here because you call Catless Camp Control. We won't find out what the hell is going on. And she said, well, you don't, it's none of your business. What's going on? You got, you guys need to get out of here.

So they leave. She says, Mr. Catlitz, just take a seat right in here. This is the hallway outside of visitation. It's the hallway. It's classes now. We use it for classes when it's not visitation. But this is the hallway, like the lobby with a cushioned chairs are. It's the only cushioned chairs in the facility.

So I'm seated in those chairs. She says, James, do you know, Catledge? She says to me. Catlas, do you know, I can't see his name? Do you know, do you know so-and-so? I said, I sure do. And she says, okay, well, he's on his way over from the low to see you. And this is the warden man.

Right. And it's a female. And she's a little concerned about it. Number one, how do you know this guy? What is up here? And I see him, because I know him. Yeah. He's coming through the door into this hallway area.

and he sees me oh and he's got a couple of lieutenants with him and there's the assistant wardens with him he sees me and he goes cadledge how the hell are you he bypasses these guys comes over gives me a huge hug now you know this is completely completely inappropriate yeah yeah grabs me hug he goes how the hell are you man how the hell are you and everybody standing there aghast it's it's guards it's the social warden it's the warden i said i'm doing great bob everything's great here. Everything is fantastic. He says, I'm glad to hear it. He says, Warden, do you have a place we, Catledge and I can meet privately? She says, you don't want a guard in there with you? He goes, oh, heavens, no. Why, but I need a guard in there? This is my

friend. Well, we meet privately. And he says, are you teaching any classes? I said, no, I'm not teaching any classes. He goes, do you want to? I said, actually not. I would prefer not to teach any classes right he says well if you want to let me know and i'll let the warden know i said i said i don't know if that's a good idea he says tell me about the washers and dryers anything not working i said well there is a dryer not working i have a guy helping me with my laundry and he says the dryer's been out and we has to wait extended periods of time to get the stuff dry he goes all right he says how about the microwaves how are they working i said well i think they're all working to be honest with you i don't do a lot of cooking uh with the with the microwaves but i think they're

he goes okay all right no problem with the microwaves he says how's the food i said it's horrible he's horrible he goes we're doing our best he goes we're on a limited budget we're doing our best he's wanting to know a full survey on the food i said but please improve the food i mean if you're able to do it man please and he says we're going to get that dryer fixed he goes you count on that well i i said it's so nice of you to come visit he goes are you safe everything okay there i said oh god no I got friends. Everything's good, man. How long have you been here at this one?

90 days. 90 days. Oh, okay. I'm in there long enough to kind of make my pack with my guys. And so we're having a good experience. And he says, okay, I'll be back. I never really give big announcements about when I'm coming, but you'll hear me call you to Camp Control and they'll bring you up.

We'll do this again. And I'll do this throughout your stay. Now, I got to tell you that. Can the inmates see that they saw him with you? No. No, not yet, not yet, but this thing spreads pretty quickly, dude. This spreads, you know. The guards will tell the ending.

Exactly. Inmate.com is, you know, it's crazy. So this thing, so he says, why don't you walk me to wear the warden? The warden's giving a tour to my investors. Won't you walk me to wear the warden? It's, I'm walking with this guy on a tie and the slacks and the whole thing. And we're walking all the way to the warden. I said, hey, good to see you, man.

He gives me another hug. And the inmates, you know, they're laundering up on the decks and stuff for the housing units. I mean, they're watching this whole thing go down. And within, within an hour, there's a dolly with a dryer on it headed to our unit. And I know right now, he just called that in. He got that thing fixed. And the thing was sitting in the warehouse. Nobody knew that is sitting in the warehouse.

You know, all these things that you could fix instantly or sitting in the warehouse to fix instantly. Well, we, I get to back to the housing unit, he goes, who's that guy in the tie? You're walking around a lot. I said, this is the guy that owns a place. What do you mean? own the BOP owns his place. I said, well, I think the BOP owns it, but he's the, he owns the contract to manage his place. How do you know him? I said, he was a family friend, you know, as a family friend. And he's, he's in town and he wanted to see me. He knew I was assigned here. So he wanted

to see him. He goes, that's wacky, man. That's some wacky stuff. Can my counselor calls me to her office? She says, I understand, you know, Mr. So-and-so. I said, oh, yeah, we go back a a minute. She goes, all right, you need anything. You just let me know. The warden come. And she says, listen, don't call him for anything. You need anything. You tell me, don't call him. And I said, I didn't call him this time. I would never call him.

Right. She says, all right, just if you need something. So they don't really know the extent of this relationship. And I almost think he doesn't want them to know the extent of this. Right, right. It's almost like. He wants to keep on their peas and key. Right.

He wants them on their toes. And I'm a great pawn for that experience. And it turned out pretty good. I mean, anything that needed to be fixed or repaired, I just let the team know. Hey, look, we got to get this fixed in here. This is unacceptable. This is unacceptable. And they're going to the warehouse to find.

They're rattling through stuff trying to find out. We got digital TVs installed. We got, you know, so we're watching the NFL on full 4K. We got digital. They were all in the warehouse. I had a guy come report to me. He says, Calais, did you know that there are digital receivers in the warehouse for these TVs in these TV rooms? I said, get them, get them, bring them in here.

What are you talking about? Bring them in here. He says, I can just bring them in here. I said, bring them in here. So he brings it, we put it in the white TV room first. Right. We do it at 2 a.m. The last evening count before the morning.

So we get that thing. Oh, I got a digital guy and that knows how to do all this TV stuff. So he does it in the white TV and we are popping with 4K. It's like unbelievable. Well, we share a room with the Islanders. They're in a skinny part of this large room and they got a TV. two TVs in our room that we've done digital on. So the

guy that's in charge of the remote control and the Islander, he goes, hey, Catledge, what's going on with the TVs? I said, you like that? He said, hell yeah, I like that. He said, is there another one of those thing, those thing of a jigs that you guys used to get that tuned in like that? I said, let me find

out. So I tell him a guy, that warehouse guy, I said, hey, look, how many more of those are in there? Give me the total count. He says, it's like 16. I think he's one for every TV in all housing units. I see, bring them all to me. God, there's such pieces of shit. They are. This stuff is sitting there.

They bought enough for every TV. How many microwaves we have for 180 guys? One. Oh, no, no, no. We had like eight per housing unit. Oh, we were overdone to microwaves. At one point, we had four. And then, no, I think we had five at one point. It got down to one.

Then they'd bring in two. Then it'd get down to one. Then it'd get down to nothing. There were scumbags and they couldn't. You had to get past them. Oh, yeah. The wait in line. No, no, no, no.

And here's the worst thing is that there were guys, inmates that worked in the warehouse that would tell you that you talked to the counselor and he'd be like, we don't have it. We don't have the money. We don't have the budget. And then the inmates that work in the warehouse would say it's in here. There's in here. It's on a shelf. Yeah. We got 40 brand new boxes of mine.

I just pick one up and bring it with me. They're like, no. And they would go, what? Who told you that? Who told you that? You're like, well, I'm not going to tell you who told them. Right. He's lying to you because there's none.

Oh my gosh. No, no. we had full access to everything in that warehouse at this point. So we get all that stuff brought to the Islanders. We get his done. He says, thank you, man. I really appreciate we get that TV all dialed in for him. Then I got a buddy in the other housing unit that is the dude in the PISA group.

He's the guy. He's the boss of the Paisas on the yard. There's 75% Paisas. And I go to him and I said, you want your TV? He's tuned up. He goes, what do you mean, tuned up? I said, well, it's blurry. would you like it to be digital he says yeah whatever i said come over and look at our tv he comes

oh my god those new TVs i said no it's the same tv we just got a digital processor added to the back of it he says oh god yeah you can fix these i said i have the guy do it tonight so we go through me doing speaking and my digital guy doing the installing every single race and tv room we get them all dialed in and now everything's good yeah people love you good everything's very good everything's very good And so we end up, I mean, this is the God's honest truth, we end up, where I figured out in this, this is, anybody going inside needs to understand this, credibility matters most inside a federal facility. Now most don't have it because they're natural liars. They're pathological. Their credibility sucks. They can't help themselves with spread rumors. They can't resist it. Right. Since we don't have internet, we live off the inmate, the room. The room. tumor meal of the inmate. Well, I realized I'm not doing that. I will not do that. And so my guy and I,

Greg, decided if we don't know it to be factually true from the warden directly or from my surrogates on the outside, looking this up, then we don't repeat it. We don't do it. And so we got to the point where in order to get something straightened out, they came to Greg and I. Like, hey, what's going on with the closing of Taft? What's going on? Well, we don't know. We'll get back to you on that. And we would start holding meetings on a weekly basis with the reps. Right. Pulling them into the cubicle and saying, here's what's going down, guys.

This is the facts. And they could spread it correctly to their guys. And if they didn't hear it from us, they couldn't rely upon it. Right. I mean, it could be true, but we're going to verify it before we talk about it. And so that really assisted on the inside. Credibility, if you're going in there, be quiet, listen, and maintain credibility. it's all you got yeah it's not like you're going to go in there with some heavy muscle and do any

you know any bouncing guys around use your brain and your credibility and you can have a nice ride it can be a very good ride yeah i mean i would you know i always say you know like it gets yourself in trouble you know it's right gossiping will get you in trouble borrowing or borrowing money that you can't pay gambling gambling yeah yeah yeah yeah running up debts that you can't pay oh yeah yeah it's you know being disrespectful oh being disrespectful okay i got one on that this was terrible this was my mistake the respect that word is used a hell of a lot in prison the word respect and it's it means like 99 different things based on who you're talking to right well i get on this speaking circuit called the outspoken team now you got to qualify to me on this

you've got to tell a story that would appeal to high school kids and we're going to get on a bus and go talk to high school kids a few times a few times a month and we're going to eat it's not that's not the school teachers are going to prepare meals for us that are over the top because they know we're inmates that, you know, want to have a nice meal. So I have to tell my story in front of inmates. Inmates have to vote on whether you can be on the team. And they don't care. If you got a bad story or they don't like your story, they're going to say, hey, we're not taking that on the road.

We don't want to hear that guy on the road. I don't want to hear that story again. So they send you out of the room. They bring you back in and they say, you're in or you're out. Well, they put me on the team. So I'm going to travel with them on the. outspoken team. Well, this is my mistake. We meet weekly as the outspoken team to figure out how to get to more high schools, more corporations. How do we get out of here more frequently? That's all we're

talking about. And if we can figure out groups to talk to, we can get out of here more frequently. So one of the inmates who kind of told me about the outspoken group, really nice guy, he's a PISA, he says to me, and he's in a game. He's in a game. Yeah, clearly. And he says, and he's done a lot of years. I mean, he's in his second decade or something like that. He's on his way down because he camp. He's headed home soon. But he's been in a medium. It's been in a low. Now he's at the camp. And he says, after the class, he wants my opinion on something. He says, would you be willing to write the emails? Because he's like the vice president of this group or something. He says, would you be willing to write the emails that we send out to the companies that would appeal to

because I think you're probably a fair writer. You could write these things and help it make sense. And we'd send your email out to the companies to try to get permission to come. I said, I'd be glad to do that. I said, but I'd have a better idea. Now, it shouldn't be having all these ideas, right? Nobody really wants all these ideas. Just write out your time.

Right. Why didn't you just get into a novel series? Honestly, this is a mistake I made. Could have read Game of Thrones. So this guy is this close to my face. And I trust him. He trusts me, and I'm okay being that close to his face, and I'm giving him some guidance. And he's coming back at me with some debate points, and I'm coming back at him with some debate points.

And his main dude, who's in charge of the gang, he's named one of the seven dwarfs. I can't remember what you're goofy, doofy, one of the seven dwarves is this guy's name. Right. He pulls up right here. Now, we're face to face. It's his guy. Yeah. It's his lieutenant, basically, that I'm having this.

exchange with. And they asked me to have this exchange. And we're talking about how to get these letters written and what we need to do and what shouldn't be done. If you want to get it done right, this is what you should do. And I'm basically doing executive level communication here, not inmate to inmate communication. Yeah. I've crossed the line a little bit with my aggression. Okay. I'm firm. I kind of forgot where I am. Right. This guy's right here. And I don't look at because I'm talking to you and we're having a private conversation as far as I'm concerned this is a private conversation and I am ignoring this guy right here he pushes his guy aside steps right in front of me he's a little shorter steps right in front of me he says uh you got a problem

with me I said I do not have a problem with you at all what made you think I have a problem with you he says uh because you disrespect to me just just that word you know I said uh No, I don't have a problem with it. And then I say this. Now, I swear to you, this is what I say. And this could get very ugly, very fast. But it's also a camp. It's a camp.

Yeah, that could have gone much worse. They're going to pull him off me if this, yeah, it's nasty. But here's what happens next. I said, should we go outside and talk about this? Now, I did, I said this exactly like that. And I'm not tentative when I say it. And he looks at me and he goes, yeah, I think we should. and so here's why here's my strategy this is what i wanted to get him away from his crew

where i could deal with him on his own i didn't want a these guys pile in yeah yeah this is a this is a not fighting no we're fighting all of them if there's going to be a fight he's got to fight them all right so i don't want to do that and i also want to really communicate with him as a human being i don't want this cheese moat stuff going on so i'll lead the way we go straight out the door we take a left back into the camp, I peel off into a corner, and I put my hands on his shoulders, he's a little shorter than I put my hands on his shoulders. I look him dead in the face. And I said, I promise you, I have maximum respect for you. Nothing that went on in there is anything but respect. I said, I really don't know why you feel like I disrespected you, but I'm telling you,

it's not in me to disrespect. I'm having this conversation with my hands on your shoulder. He looks right at me, just right, right. Just kind of studying me for a second. and puts his hand out and, you know, kind of brotherly grip. It says, oh, we're cool, man. We're cool. Just like this. And I said, just, just for a second, what happened that made you think? I just want to know because I don't want to do that again.

He says, you were talking to, I can't remember this guy. I can't remember these guys. You were talking to so-and-so like he works for you. I said, you're right. I totally was. I was completely talking to him like that. Because you know what? We were having a conversation.

He wasn't quite processing it like at the speed. I was delivering it. And so I was circling back somewhat assertively with him. And I shouldn't have. He said, yeah, I think you forgot where you were. I think you forgot. You're in prison, man. I said, fair enough.

It's a mistake. Totally on me. But it's not disrespect for you. He goes, oh, yeah, it is. He goes, it is. That's my guy. He goes, it was disrespect to me. I said, fair enough.

I now understand fully. So anyway, that was a close call. It was an ignorant move on my part. I didn't think of it until it was going down. It was going down fast. And so, you know, lesson learned. We friended up after that because I think he liked me on the team. And I'm an okay guy.

I'm not looking to cause anybody in trouble. I'm certainly not looking to go to war with anybody. I don't need to prove anything in there. I was trying to be helpful to the group and I overstepped my bounds Listen, I went to a guy How quickly it couldn't go bad Like I went to a guy

They had the in the Sally Port They had the door lock We were coming back from pill line I walked up just guy I walked with him Didn't talk to him We're both going back to the unit I walk up

I grab the door It's locked and I go I put my hand I go I don't have my keys You got yours And he goes It's a joke It's just a joke

I'm not the and he's like You say you say You think I'm a snitch? What the thing? Right in my face. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wow. And I went, well, what are you talking about?

And he's like, I said, I was just joking around. And he goes, and I said, what, and I said the same thing. I said, what are you doing? What's happening here? Right. And he went, he goes, man, how long you've been here? I'm like, man, I've been there like a day or two. I was like, I just got here.

And you got jokes. Yeah. And he went, and he said, and this is the medium. And I, he said, oh, he said, you don't understand what you were saying? He's like, you're calling me the police. And I'm like, right, because only the P. Sure. And I go, how?

And he goes, only the police would have keys. Keys. And I thought, you made the leap from that to you. And then, of course, if you're the police, you're a snitch. Absolutely. So I was called. So in his mind, immediately, you just called me a snitch. Yeah.

And I was like, I said, bro. I said, that's not what I was doing at all. I was joking. You know how you forget your keys? Mistake. I said that I patted mine first. He's been down so long. He does not remember.

Keyes, man. Right. And he just went, he's like, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he said, uh, all right. He said, no, I get it. You're new. He said, yeah, bro, you got to watch that shit, bro. He said, that shit go bad quick. You need a manual on this.

There needs to be a glossary. I don't think I talked to anybody for the next week. Exactly. I got nothing to say. Yeah, I certainly don't have any jokes. Yeah, I'm sitting there thinking, you're going to get yourself fucking killed. You're not prepared for this. No.

Because prison environment is, although it's better than being in, like, the U.S. Marshal's lockup. Yeah. It's better because of the county jail, what you're going to call it. It's better being in the county jail in a lot of ways. But the politics and things that happen in prison don't happen in the jail because these guys, they don't want to get in trouble before they get sentenced. They're worried about their case. They're fighting their case.

They're not concerned with that shit. Right. But when they get to prison, suddenly all those little things. It's on. It's a whole other. We live here. Yeah. It's another environment.

It's they've been sentenced. Yeah. Now, if you disrespect. Like, if you disres. respected someone, they might fight, they got a better chance of fighting you in prison than they do before they've been sentenced. Yeah. Because they don't want to get in front of the judge and say, Your Honor, he's been in six fights.

This guy's fighting. Yeah, this guy's fighting everybody in here. Right. He stabbed the guy the other day. They're talking about pressing charges. And the judge might look at you and be like, and I'm giving you 30 years. I'm giving you the high end of the guy. Yeah.

You don't need to be in society. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're right. You guys get comfortable. This is their home. They want their address is their cubicle number.

I mean, this is where they live. my my when I first got to Coleman took about three or four days for my cousin to find me on Coleman when he found me he said he said look why don't you come by the house tonight yeah it's his house and I went like they said yeah and I said I said you call it I said yeah I mean myself I'm in I'm in B3 and he explained it where he was and I went so easy to say I was like I was like bro and he said I said I can't believe you say your house I said like this isn't my house like I don't I don't I don't live live live here and he goes, you just got 26 years. You do live here. You live here. This is your home. He said, you better get used to that right away. Yeah, that's right.

So sad. It's devastating. True. Yeah. Oh, you hear it in your life. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh. It rubs you wrong instantly.

My address. Yeah. Yeah, man. What are you talking about your address? I'm mailing you anything. God damn it. Where do you stay? Yeah.

Where do you stay? Yeah. To me, I'm just staying here. He's like, all right. We'll see. All right. I'm going to give you one about being a snitch in prison because this, this, this occurred with a friend of mine he's now a very good friend but at the time it was more of a

concern for the guy he has asperger's he's reading in 11 languages he's this is like your frank guy yeah all right so i'm concerned about this guy or pete or every prison's got these guys yeah i know i got another guy um dennis coroni same thing and they're not equipped to manage socially yes all right so you got the picture of the guy now he shaved his head He is a lawyer. He is our lawyer. Certainly, I had to figure that out because he literally would not speak to anyone, somewhat isolated. And he was reading so many different languages.

Every day was a different book. And I just asked him one day. I said, are you finishing these books? Because it's a new book every day. Because I read a book every day in a different language. After 11 days, I circulate languages again. I said, okay, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. 11 languages, 11 days.

languages, 11 days, and you're finishing a book a day. I said, that's amazing, very impressive. I said, you have like a photographic memory? How are you speeding, reading through this stuff in these other languages? He goes, I can't explain it. He goes, I've been accused of having Asperger's. I said, well, I'm not a doctor, but I would confirm it. You know, I mean, this is very impressive. And we know Elon Musk has got, you know, there's some impressive guys with Asper. And you can tell, they all of them have a certain way of social awkwardness. Yes. Yeah. So he's literally isolated at his meals, at everything. And so I just include the guy. Okay. So I start tapping into his mind a little bit. The guy's brilliant. He knows everything. He wants to read my case. He wants to read the Senate scene. He wants to read the JNC. He wants to read the transcripts. He'd like to have the 302 Senate. I mean, he's really fascinated legally and does have a legal mind. He's just gifted at this. Well, he's really getting a hard time from the Pisces, who really run in our yard. Our yard is run by the Pisces.

And it just so happens, the head of the Pisces in our housing unit is my cook. He's cooking all my meals. He's using a barbecue grill out back. He's got stuff coming in from the kitchen. He's with a few commissary items, this guy's making my meals. And I'm not going to the mess hall or whatever. He is making and bringing them to me in my room. And it's good.

Well, he does not like, this guy's name is Jay. He does not like Jay at all. And the rumor has spread that Jay's probably a rat. Like he looks, he works for the police. I mean, they're just assuming the strangeness of there is a snitch. Well, Jay, Jay works in the kitchen as a dishwasher. Jay comes home from work to my unit, my cubicle, and says, I saw something today didn't like.

And he's really a righteous, right or wrong guy. He can't quite see nuance. It's right or wrong with him. I said, what did you see you didn't like? He said, well, I saw a couple of those pices. They filled up a garbage can full of food. And it was James. It was packed to the top, man.

They had eggs in there. They had all our food in there, man. And they were rolling it out the back. And I just couldn't help it. I reported it. Okay. Okay. So I said, you did what?

he says I report he's our food man I can't let her take our food I said jay they're not going to not feed us I said let me say something right now those guys make my burritos I said you forget about right or wrong the burrito gang you've just interfered with a full economic system where these guys build burritos every day and sell extra protein to most of the guys in this facility and I'm one of them right i said so you just basically stopped the distribution of the ingredients of the burritos i said who did you report this to specifically which guard he said the guy that runs a kitchen i said okay what did he say give me the words he used he said oh thank you very much i'll get right on that i said oh j jay i said jay what do you think he meant by that he said he said he said he said he

Oh, I think he's going to get right on it. I said, Jay, hey, listen, man, I said, Jay, this guy's getting paid from the burrito gang for the money they're raising, selling the burritos. I said, what he did do is he went and told the criminals that you've identified as thieves with the garbage can. He just told them that you're a rat. That's what just happened. And I said, that is happening. Whatever goes on next is underway now relative to you. you. He said, what goes on next? I said, Jay, I said, I don't know the extent of it, but I know it ain't

going to be good, man. There's all sorts of stuff they're willing to do. And there's some things you don't want them to do. These guys are making money. They might be sending money back home. They might be surviving. They're surviving. They don't get commissary money sending him, man. They sell burritos, and they make their life a little smoother with that. I said, you just interrupted a whole economic channel here at the prison. He said, I had no idea. I said, listen, man, you have stolen from the kitchen for me frosting. Right. And brought it to me. I said, what makes you so holy that you find a guy with a garbage can, the food in it? I said, you've taken a tough aware thing of frosting and brought it to me. I said, that was, we should rat you out on this. I said, I said,

I said, I don't quite understand how you're sizing this stuff up. He said, James, I'll be honest with you. I thought this was the food for the camp. And I thought that, I said, it probably was, but they got more. There's a big warehouse here. They got plenty. Nobody's getting starved out here. We're all going to get our food.

I said, but these guys are running a whole separate situation that you should not have seen. It certainly shouldn't have discussed. If you see it, you don't discuss it. You're not the HOA. You're not 911. And you're not, you know, you're, you're not. you know, you see something, you say nothing. That's what happens in here.

You don't see something, say something. I mean, that's what they teach you at the neighborhood thing. Right. We're not in the neighborhood. We're in the place where you see something. You say nothing. He said, well, what do we do now? I said, I'm going to tell you got involved in this.

I said, you got me involved in this. All right. So I said, Jay, Jay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to my cook, Chino. I'm going to ask Chino if he's heard yet about, the kitchen caper so i go to chino chino chino are friendly man yeah friendly and and i said and i'm back in here he's in the last stall the darkest unit in the cubicle he's in the he's in the basically penthouse suite yeah in the in the housing unit i said chino you got a sec he said

what's up i said um did you hear about the garbage can full of food and he oh yeah oh yeah yeah i heard about that he goes that ain't good he goes you know who that was right that's that ball-headed guy that freak that's what he says i said well i said uh do you know what he thought i'm trying to stop trying to i'm trying to i'm trying to cut this off right the pass i said you know what he thought he actually thought that was the cold food for the whole camp that these guys were heading out the back with it and and to create some type of sabotage on the food in the kitchen i said and he told montes took it right back to the boys he goes oh yeah that's for sure happened i He said, he said, now they're working on the plan.

I said, oh, no. I said, what's the plan? He said, I don't know, but it'll be good for him. They're going to turn his bed over, going to turn his locker over. They're going to put some fish in his shoes. It's going to be a mess. I said, how long does this last? I mean, is there a time limit on this?

He said, well, what he should do is roll up because what they're going to do is stay on this until he rolls up. Right. They're just going to torment him until he. So if he rolls up now, he can avoid all this. and you know rolling up for the audience it is is basically to go to the front yeah and say i need to be transferred yeah check in say i'm in danger it's dangerous for me to be here now they'll put they'll put them in the shoe for three months and then they'll ship them to another camp or even a low

because that might think he's in danger that's right and he's and he's he's assperger's enough that he's not even going to get a good break from the counselors or the shoe people i mean it's just going to be a mess and so i said jay i suggest strongly You go roll up. You need to do that. You need for your own safety. You didn't try and go talk to the guys and say, look. Not yet.

Not yet. Not yet. Fellas. Remember the TV? Fellas. I need 14 hours with you. Okay. Right.

Well, hey, yeah. We haven't installed TVs yet. Okay. That's not occurred yet. But I tell Jay, you need to roll up. And I tell Chino, I've asked Jay to roll up. I just need it clear that there's at least someone in between this that knows what's up and can maybe squel any future nonsense.

And so it gets word back to me, he needs to change jobs immediately. He cannot be in the kitchen, period. And he can't be anywhere where another hustle is going on, which is, I mean, it's tough to find the spot. You know, he's got to be on a tractor or, you know, he's got to be out of it. Right. They're putting them on probation. Yeah, that's right. That's what they're doing.

Yeah. So I let him know, you got to roll up. And he says, I can't, my wife's Vietnamese. She barely knows how to get here. She can't, she doesn't even know how to use maps. I mean, she barely finds her way from Lake Arrowhead to Taft. I mean, it's like straight road, and she can barely do it. He says, I can't move to another.

I've never seen my wife. And I said, listen, man, this could get dangerous. I mean, camps are soft, but these guys, you really offended them. And you really blew it. I mean, this is a huge mistake. I say, can you, can you assure me that you understand this and that this is never, nothing like this is ever going to happen again? Can you, can you give me some assurance?

Because I'd like to really strongly tell them, this is now over. I can't go to bat for you. If in two weeks, they're going to come to me and say, this just, right, right. If you've got some sense of God about you and that you're here to make, do God's work, then I don't know what to do with this. Right. I said, I need to know that you understand. stay in the situation he said i totally i totally understand it i said can you stop the the the impulse

to need to fix wrongs i mean you've got to stop with that i said that listen we're not running a church in here man these people are trying to have a nice experience in their many years of doing time and and you just interfered with a really nice experience they were tempting to build for themselves He said, I never thought about it like that. I said, okay, all right. So I'm basically dealing with Chino on all this stuff because we're friendly. We're totally friendly. And Chino's communicating with some bad dudes.

These are bad guys that are willing to do the damage and take the risk of turning stuff over. So every time he goes to the mess hall to eat, they're turning his stuff over. He comes back. They did it again. They did it again. I said, man, it's going to keep happening. And there really is no end to it until you roll up. I mean, you really do need to do this.

And he goes, I won't do it. You let them know. I will not do that. I said, you don't want to say it like you just said that to me? He goes, no, probably not. He says, but do communicate with them that I'll take whatever beating they want to hand out because I need to see my wife. And so I'm like feeling terrible for him now because I'm thinking, oh, God, this guy's

willing to take some abuse. And so I went to Chino. I said, look, put me in a room with the guy that's doing. the damage put me in the room with the guy let me just try to talk to him about this because i think first of all this is a brilliant legal mind these guys are trying to get first step back credits these guys are needing all sorts of things done he can do it man this this is the guy i'm using to do my stuff they're going to need him they're going to need to get from you know how they they rated us all from minimum to low risk in order to get 10 days versus 15 days right they're

trying to, I said, a lot of these guys got messed up in that system. He can fix it. So that's appealing to a Pisa, right? So he says, I'm not going to put you in the room with the guy because the guy I don't want you to know it's him. So I'm not doing that. I said, then you need to communicate because you're kind of in charge, man. I said, I know your role here. I said, you need to communicate. This is over. He understands it. And if you need to turn his bed over four more times that those more stinky fish in his shoes go do it no nobody cares and he doesn't care so he's willing to live through whatever you want to dish out because his wife in that she's foreign citizen she's vietnamese he he can't afford to have her lost while he's transferred to another

prison so they needed to understand that human element too i said and and frankly there's no risk to the thing montez was in on it there was no risk to the thing man that nobody's economics are It could have been, but they weren't. And we've, we've squeled a future snitch here. Yeah. It's a shut down. Well, they stop. They stop the harassment.

He stays. And literally, to this day, and he'll listen to this. Jay will listen to this podcast. To this day, Jay continues to thank me for keeping him safe in that experience. And I really couldn't control safety. Yeah, yeah. But I could control the communication. But he didn't have any.

advocate. He had no advocate at all. And he can't do it himself. And I just felt so bad about that. And, you know, in prison, there's nobody, there's nobody. I mean, if you're not going to do it for somebody, they're not getting it. They're not, he couldn't hurt. You're lucky he didn't do something else because I can tell you right now, this, my buddy, Caroni. Yeah. Coroni would, he couldn't do things even to help himself. You could say, Caroni, I need you to not talk to Frank. Frank's sick of you talking to him. If you don't talk to Frank, he will file the paperwork for you. It's going to take a month, but he'll do it. But he doesn't want to talk to you again. He already has all the paperwork. He already understands the argument. He's going to write it.

It'll be done in one month, but you cannot talk to him again. If you talk to him again, he will not do the, he will not do the motion. Okay, you understand this. No, I understand. I understand. I understand. I know, I understand. I don't do it. I understand. So, Corona, if you see him, And you think, I want to tell you this one thing real quick, Frank, to put into motion. To make sure you remember to put this in the motion, what are you going to do? Well, I'm not going to talk to him. You said not to talk to him. Right.

So he has all the, if he needs any additional information, he'll talk to you. But he already has the information. Do not talk to him again. You talk to him again, even to say hi. He will not do your motion because you've driven him crazy. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. He will cease working on your case.

Right. Even if it's the smallest of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, you know of communication he's drawn the line here i know i understand i understand i got it i got it two days later freaking i talked to you for a quick just one second i want to make sure that you remember to put the oh no no no and frank goes okay or don't talk to me he is don't talk to me don't and he just keeps walking and he's trailing behind him trying to talk to him and eventually one of frank's guy steps in front of him says stop go away and he goes away because he's a big guy He has these big guys around him.

And the next day, or Corona comes to, you know, me and Pete, and he's freaking out because Amadeo took all of his casework and brought it. And some guy walked and put it on Corona's bed and said, you're done. Yeah. Here's your legal stuff. I mean, to say, like if you literally, if you'd said, and I remember we were mocking him. What was his issue mentally? Oh, he's got Asperger's without a doubt.

It's Asperger's, yeah. And we sat there severe. Yeah. Annoying, but also amazing. And in some ways, he would say things that you would be talking to him and you'd say something that would remind him of something. Yeah. And suddenly, so you're sitting there talking and all of a sudden he would start, he would do the entire dialogue from the speech that, what's the guy in 25th hour? We talked about him the other day.

he was in American history Edward Norton Oh he did like you know the The Edward Norton speech Yeah He would suddenly start saying that Because you mentioned something about New York Or something about

Reminded him took him there Puerto Ricans here They're driving me crazy And all of a sudden he'd go He'd go Puerto Rican parade Worst parade in New York history And then he'd sit there And do the whole speech

Two minutes exactly And you go How is that even laid in his brain And then he'd stop and he'd go And you go You'd go Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. And you'd keep talking.

And then he'd do something, say something else, and you done? At first it was like, it was weird, but it became comical, and then it's past comical. Yeah, right. And you wonder if his criminal conduct wasn't tied to some of this disease. Oh, without a doubt, without a doubt. So his criminal thing was that he had given $50,000 to a childhood friend who wanted to start a fin, fin, a diet clinic. Sure, yeah, the pills.

And, but Finn Finn became illegal, but they'd already built out the facility and he'd already had the doctors and the doctors said, hey, why don't we just do pain management? Because pill mills wasn't a thing then. And he was like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, we can do pain management. It's becoming a big thing. They're, you know, they've got this new product on the line. It's called oxycodone.

And he's like, oh, okay, he's like, and so he's like, you know, it's oxycodone. And he starts naming off the different types of drugsies. They've had, they have this breakthrough medication. They have this control release. It's great. I got a buddy who's doing it. We could do it here. I mean, the Finfin's illegal.

It's already built out. You've got, the money's gone. Yeah. The 50 grand is gone. Yeah. And so they go to Corona. He's like, yeah, yeah, okay. Corona doesn't live even in New, it was, this was done in New Orleans.

Okay. He lives in Los Angeles. He's like, okay, yeah, whatever. Just, but I just want my money. I want my money back. Yeah. And I get, you know, 10% of the proceeds or 20 grand in this. Right.

And I get 20% of the proceeds or however it worked. And so they started and they hire like four doctors and it's doing well. And then then the money's like, it starts really kind of. it starts really coming in and they're and coroni is calling and once the money starts coming in it's his sole source of income so he's calling every day a couple times a day because how much money did you make assessed how much money did you make today oh okay well i need you to deposit the money i need you he's calling as his stepfather to pick up the money and deposit the money and it's cash then it becomes they're like look we got a problem people are writing checks or using credit cards

and they're bouncing and so we're thinking about just having people only accepting cash yeah only cash well they just use only cash like he can't he's like a child yeah yeah right and then then chaos right right you know bank accounts are getting closed down because they're walking in every couple of days trying to deposit 30,000 40,000 in cash bank accounts are getting closed in it down they're notifying the police or the DEA DEA is coming at like it ends up ballooning into hey much cash this is a pill mill it may maybe now I don't think it was a pill mill yeah but even if it was yeah Coroni lives in L.A. Yeah, and he's not running that.

He went to the facility one time. Yeah. And everybody said that at trial, but Corona's behavior. Yeah. And the things that he would say and the things that the staff members said he said. Yeah. Like he's, they don't know about Asperger syndrome. They just know, this guy's an annoying prick.

Yeah. And so in the end. He's not an advocate for himself. In the end, you know what happened? All the doctors who prescribed the medication. They all get, I think one guy got a year or two, another one got home confinement. Another one got like six months in home confinement. Coroni got 19 and a half years.

What? No. For money laundering. Because the pills that these guys prescribed, they're saying were illegally prescribed. And because Coronae made money and was opening bank accounts that are getting shut down. And because that money came from illegally prescribed. prescribed medication, it's money laundering, coroni's laundering money, who knows nothing about banking and is depositing the money, but he was such, there were so many people that got on the stand and

were like, he's a prick, he said this one time, he called me this, he yelled one time. We're getting him back. Right. Getting him back when he's down. Right. And he's, and listen, if being a complete douchebag was a crime, that man never gets out of prison. Yeah. I agree. He's drove me nuts. I wrote a story about him. It was a nightmare to deal with. Yeah. But a criminal mastermind? No. Doesn't have the capacity to be.

No. If you told him, if you told him he could have gone to jail for any of it, he wouldn't have done it. But what do you talk? Because he's very, he thought everything was above board. Like we got doctors. We're licensed. We got this.

We're depositing the money in a bank. I'm not pocketing the cash. Yeah. I could have lost. I could have hidden this money. Yeah. We weren't making any money. Yeah.

The idea that the man had 50 grand was, was the downfall. The idea that he even had 50 grand to put in it. Yeah, yeah, the biggest mistake was, yeah. Then he had 50. Who even gives, who goes gives a childhood friend $50,000? Like a guy that's not thinking correctly. He's not thinking, you know, yeah, he's not thinking correct. Well, you know, and he's thinking Finn, Finn, he's, he's clueless.

Yeah, he didn't know. Yeah. No, no, that is. He drives me crazy to this day when he called me. See, mentally ill people are in prison. Still in prison. Yeah, because he can't do the first step back, can't qualify for his stuff. He can't shut up long enough to get Frank to get him out of prison.

Yeah, he can't. Yeah, Frank would have had him out. Oh, that's terrible. That's terrible. Well, as you know, prison could be a, it's really what you make of it. And if somebody's headed in there, they've got to know, get your mind right. The mind is the asset. The mind will take you through it.

It can be difficult. You want to be respectful. You want to use the best manners. You're going to clean up after yourself. You're sharing a community with other men. And if you do that, you go do fine. Do fine. And you don't tell anybody about anything.

Yeah. You don't trust the cops, no sidebar. with the cops. Don't stand around talking baseball with the cops because you're more like them than the other guys you're in prison with. No, you're not at all like the cops. You're in prison with prisoners. That's your family actually when you're inside. You protect the family and talking to the cops when stuff goes down. I was going to say the nice thing about federal prison, because I don't, I don't really know about state is that the nice thing about federal prison is you don't have to have any interaction. I can, you could go six months to a year without

ever speaking with with a with a with a CEO totally you know unless you have I did it unless you have to go to a counselor meeting with your counselor right like unless they call you in but you actually have communication never it's a huge mistake to have it because when something goes down on that yard and there's somebody ratting details out well you know you know that Matt Cox he's always talking up the cops yeah he's always standing there he's got a lot to say to the cops and they seem to like him and I bet he's telling on us I mean listen I talk to it. That's what goes on. If I thought they'd get me out of prison, I'd talk to him. I got nothing to say if it ain't, if anything. Show me the exit. Listen, I even had one time I used to go in

to get mail because SIS would call me in. Yeah. They'd say, hey, we, the mail room came across this. Like, we got a bunch of paperwork here, a Freedom of Information Act where we got a bunch of sit in on this guy, John Bozziak. Why are you ordering, Doc? Why are you ordering stuff? Yeah, you're up to no good. Right. But they knew by that point, I had some. Your writing stories. And they knew it. So I'd say, no, no, he's a guy. And I explained the whole story. And they go, okay.

And when I was in there, once or twice, they would say to me, they'd go, listen, Cox, if you know anything, I go, oh, God. I go, I go, I go, I go, oh, God. I go, no, no, no, no, no, no, like, if you know where, like, if you know where cell phones in here, I'd be like, no, I wouldn't say that. I would say, do you know of any? I'd go, I'm sure there's cell phones in here somewhere. I'm like, but let's face it. Yeah.

Nobody's telling me where there's a cell phone. Like everybody on the compound knows I cooperated. Right, right, right. They're not telling me about a cell phone. No. And they kind of laugh like, all right, all right. I go. All right.

Seriously, they try to set you up to. Oh, yeah. Oh, no. They have guys. Oh, no. They tell you, we'll put money on your books. I know. And if you get somebody up and they get a charge, we'll, we can put in for a

early release. No, not early release. We can put it for a rule 35. We can get your time reduced. It's like, down or departure. Yeah, it's like, bro, like, I don't know anything. and nobody's going to trust me to get close enough. Like, let me write my stories.

Yeah, that's right. I'm writing out of the time. I got some stuff in the courts. Maybe I get out. Right, right, right. No, that's for sure. I'm going to give you one last crazy prison story. So about six weeks in, one of my Mormon buddies comes to me with a new pair of shoes.

Right. Brand new pair of Nikes that are not in the catalog. They're black. So they look like the black or white ones that are in the catalog. But these are two. $250 shoes. These are really nice tread on these things, very comfortable. And I do a lot of walking. I probably walk 10 miles a day at camp. And he brings to me, he got the tags on him still. And I said, what is this? He said, I thought you may want new shoes. I got your size and everything.

I thought you may want new shoes. I said, well, I do want new shoes, but I kind of ordered them from the catalog. And he says, oh, no, no, you know, you don't want those. He goes, when they come, you can sell them to somebody else, you want these. I said, what's the catch, man? I said, why are you bringing me shoes? He goes, listen, you're a new guy here. You're kind of with our group, and I have the ability to do this. So I just did it for you. I said, no catch.

I don't owe you anything or like that. You're not going to come to me one day and say, remember the shoes? I don't want to get into that. Right. He says, absolutely not. That's not how I roll. So he's very affirmative about it. I said, man, I really appreciate this.

So these shoes don't get attention from the inmates. Now, they don't look special. like somebody on the street would go you guys got some sketchers nursing shoes or whatever but they're really comfortable for walking and they're really good shoes well

I wear those shoes for I don't know eight nine hundred miles I mean I'm walking 10 miles a day right Taft is closing they transfer me to Mendota medium no camps camps are closed we're in the middle of COVID I'm in Mendota medium

I'm now going to sell up with a guy And we're going to sail 23 and a half hours a day. So I'm going to sell up with a guy that I've never met before. This guy's English is as bad as my Spanish. So we are just, we're not able to talk too much. They sell up. He jumps on the top bunk because he's younger, leaves me the bottom bunk, which I thought was very respectful.

Yeah. I didn't ask for him to do that. He just immediately popped up when he saw me at the door and jumped up there. Well, I have the shoes on because I transfer the shoes without a shirt. shoelaces. They don't have the shoe laces because when you transfer, they want the laces out because you're going to run. So I got no laces in these shoes. He goes, hey, where'd you get those shoes? I said, a friend of mine from Taft got him for me. He goes, who? I said, I'm not telling you who. He says, well, I'm a stuck in here with you, man. What am I going to do? I said, why do you

ask. He said, because I brought those shoes to Anthony. I said, what? He says, I'm the runner. I said, what are you talking about? What's a runner? He said, every month for 350 bucks for two years, I go to the street. I bring a duffel bag back at nightfall. He goes, and I did this for two years straight, dude, never got caught. He goes, you ever hear that fire alarm go off right at time to lock up? I said yeah man he goes you hear it go off a lot yeah malfunctioned no no no no my guys pull that if I'm not back yet brings everybody out of the unit they got to count everybody up well I'm still making my way back to the camp he says we'd fill that thing up and I got paid 350 bucks he says sometimes it's out on the highway sometimes it's been thrown in the bushes I got to find

it he goes but I'm a high school track guy he goes and I brought that I brought those shoes back and I haven't seen them since he goes so what I saw you pull in there with those shoes I knew where those shoes came from he says he goes it's anthony right i said yeah i was a gift from anthony you know that's right i worked for anthony i was a runner for anthony so this this guy brought god knows what in in a duffel bag every week every month for two years right so anyway you probably had runners at coleman but i thought this was pretty amazing i was at the low so there are no cold runners at the low because there's two layers of fence It's the barbed wire.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Nobody's getting, or the razor wire. No. But that the camp, yeah, there's guys that runners. Or they would just really, to be honest,

they would have my wife would say that they had, you know, because they would put them on like a gator. Yeah. A gator or they have trucks. And drop it close. Yeah. So they're like, look, they'll tell them like, look. And those girls are all over the place.

So you can go drop it. You don't even have to go on to Coleman. You can drop it way off Coleman. and they go get it. They'll go get it and find it and bring back. And she'll talk about how, you know, they would bury cell phones and they couldn't find them. Right, right. Lose track of where they are. So, but yeah, yeah, they, but I've heard all the runner stories. The guys are like professional like they all. This guy was giving me prison knowledge. At the end of my run, actually, I'm at the end of my time. It's COVID. I'm about to be released. And this guy's giving me prison knowledge.

I did not know at all. I mean, it was really fascinating. So we're in there, were you in during COVID? No, I got out. You were out prior? Six months before, six or eight months before. Okay. Maybe almost a year. Almost a year. Yes. Would they have let you out? I think, oh, no, with me, they would have let me out. I would have gone home immediately. That's what I'm thinking. Because I'd done so much time. Yeah. Already. And my custody, when I came in, my custody level was like a three or a four. Yellow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So they would have code would cut you loose too. Yeah. No problem. Yeah. A lot of guys got out to the COVID. But we did 23 and a half hours a day in the medium where they bringing the food to

the slots and uh you know you know what the day's like when they come say pack out yeah they knock on the glass yeah pretty amazing anyway i had a good experience pulled out of there after 14 months i can't believe it was that short should have done 60 i was prepared to do 60 yeah and uh trump William bar COVID all of it cut us loose nobody's ever been cut loose from the bureau prisons like that yeah i was going to say uh the trump side signing the first step back December of 2018 yeah so that should have knocked I forget how many whatever you know a month or month and a half off my time but by the time the BOP put it into a fact sure they're so slow right they're they they asked for like an extension here

and there oh many extensions so but when I was already in the halfway house so my counselor comes in and says listen Cox so I go what he said um he said he said he said And I forget if it's 11 or nine days. I said, look, you know, the first step back, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, right, right? Like, I'm thinking, this doesn't affect me. You know, and he looked at me. He said, knock nine days off your sentence.

And I went, nine days. So that's, it's supposed to knock like a month and a half off. He said, yeah, I know, but by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Nine days. And I go, you know what? Keep it. And he said that's nice.

He says, he says, he says, he's just our laughing. He goes, that's not how it works. You got nine days off your sentence. Right. You're leaving nine days early. I said, all right, fine. I said, I'd rather stay the nine days. I'm saving money here.

You're trying to figure out where to go to me. Yeah, he's like, you got it. That's it. That's good. We're throwing you out nine days early. That's good. Yeah, but if he told me that, you know, it was like three months before I had to leave. It's not like it was like, hey, you're leaving now.

Yeah. He came and said, hey, by the way, blah, blah, blah. I was like, whatever. I'll tell you something crazy that happened as we wrap up here. So I'm home. I was in the guest room of my mom's house for about a year. Right. I then get a home, get approved by probation.

I move into that home, move my son into that home. It's my home. I'm living there for another year and a half. Now, I'm still on an ankle monitor because I'm still under BOP custody until my 60 months, you know. And so I'm basically working. I'm driving my car. I'm in my house. I feel really free.

You know what I mean? Yeah. They're really free. Well, I get a call and they do the UA's where you got to come down to the thing and do the UA, right? Yeah. The halfway house. I'm still reporting to them, my job, my schedule, the whole thing. well they said are you are you going to come by uh and do we need to see you today before five and

i said it's probably a ua so i go down there but i got a feeling man i got a weird feeling about this i even tell my mother and my son this this this just doesn't feel like a ua so i go down there and i said mr james he's the head of security i said i'm here to do my ua and i've never toured this halfway house i've only been in the front where you check in and check out and do the ua and leave yeah okay it's all i know about this place well Mr. James says yeah come on back to my office I know the guy had an office right I thought he's always in the bubble up there so I go back to the office and he says just sit down right here if you would he said you drive your car down here today I said I did it's all right you're gonna need to have somebody come get it I said why is that we're just going to do the UA he said no you're not down here for you a way you'll be staying with us for a little bit I said Mr. James I said you got to explain me what's going on. I got a house out here. I got a son with some issues. I take him to and from work every day. I said, I've got a job. And they've been very patient with this ankle monitor.

Right. Okay. I said, you've got to do some explaining to me. What are we talking about here? He goes, I don't really know the details of it, but Mr. Montez, the guy in charge here, he says, he's the director, the halfway house. He needs to meet with you on Monday when he goes back to work. It's a Friday. He's going to need to meet with you Monday. So until then, You're going to be staying here, and we've got to get that car out of the parking lot. I'm driving a Mercedes-Based AmG blacked out in their halfway house parking lot. These things are in terrible neighborhoods, as you know, this halfway. Okay.

So I kind of need the car out of there anyway. Yeah. It's in a bad spot. I thought I was in there for 10 minutes. Right. Do the Abbott Lab, UA, and leave. He gives me a tub with a hand towel in it, with a sheet in it, some pillow in it. And I'm walking with my tub. I said, hey, look, you got to tell me where to go back here.

Now, I'm in a part of this thing I've never seen before. It opens up to these are like office cubicles that people are living in. Yeah. Okay. They've somehow taken down an office building and made it housing. All right. You can see right over the top of all these dividers. He takes me back to my area, points out, he goes, that's your bed.

And there's three other dudes in there, all laying on the bunks. I said, pardon me, guys. I'm just visiting. I said, I don't really know how long I'm going to be here. I said, but don't much. anything out of these lockers. I'll just put my stuff under the bed. You guys live here. I'm not here to disrupt anything. You guys stay comfortable. I'm probably going to be here for the weekend. And they said, what's going on? Now, these guys have been in some serious facilities.

One guy's 26 years, super glued to guys, hands to his privates, left him in the desert to die. And a tourist sees him. A tourist puts the guy in a car glued together, gets him to a hospital. spills his guts on the guy I'm in here with now. Super glue. Yeah. Okay. Super glue. That's what I call it.

That's what I call it. That's what I call it. Super glue. He knows what to do with glue. Okay. Well, he's been down 26 years and he's been here nine months. So this is his dude's house. Yeah.

So he really is not fit, equipped to handle society yet. All right. We're going to have some discussions because as it turns out, I get beyond the weekend. Well, weekend passes. And one of the security guys says, Kat, let's come up front to the speaker. I go up front. She says, I need you to sign these.

It's three violations. I promise you. One of them says, Reflection Bay Golf Club, unauthorized. No, that's where my son works. He cleans the golf carts at the end of the round. I drop him off and pick him up every day.

It takes about four minutes. You could check the monitor. I'm there four minutes. I'm not at a golf club. I'm picking my son up for more. So she says, that don't matter. you got to sign that because that was unauthorized.

I said, okay, now, my counselor here knows I dropped my son off to work and everything. Right. Yeah, we looked at your file. There's nothing in there. It says anything about that. And she don't work here anymore either, by the way. She works for the state now. Okay.

So we ran a quick check on the monitor just to make sure everything's in order before we hand a file over. And you got three violations, man. I don't know why you're here arguing this. Okay. See, the other violation is you're at the Orange Theory Fitness and Spa. and we hadn't authorized you to go to any spas. I said, Orange Theory is a workout place. It's like Gold's Gym.

That's my workout place. I go every day, five days a week. That's where I go. And by the way, if you're going to give me three of these, you're missing $899 of these because I have been going there every day since I was released two years ago. Right. I said, you're going to wake up, turn this on and give me a violation. I said, I'm missing $899 of these.

she says okay you want us to paper 800 i said whatever you got to do this is insane i said i am approved to go to the gym i'm approved to pick my son up and then the third one is an actual golf course i played golf with clients and i told my counselor about it's a business deal she says uh well it's not authorized you really you got no recourse in here with these people so they're going to turn it over their pieces of shit because it's three violations they're required to give it to the BOP and then required to sign me a designated hearing officer or DHO and a DHO's got to have a hearing on this to decide if I'm headed back to the big house right I said what are you talking about I've got a mortgage I've got a car payment my son is dependent upon me both mentally and physically

for his well-being right I said what are we doing here are you trying to help me or crush me they're not trying to help you I know I'm just throwing this out there and and she says we got you got some stuff to say and i think you need to say it to mr montes but i need you to sign these three things i said i'm not signing guilt on those what happens when i sign those she goes it just means you've read them and they've accepted them as your violations i said well i'm not doing that either you give them to montes and he can talk to me about this if he's in charge here i want a conversation with him so this dude rolls in like tuesday or whatever i've been there four days and this ain't cool i'm in a public bathroom. It's like being an airport bathroom in there. I mean, it's unbelievable. And so,

and I got a house with a shot. I mean, I've been free. They could have made a phone call and solved all that. Yes. Yeah. So I've got my attorney all wired. He's all wired up about this. He's all nervous about this. He's wanting to get all up into BOP's business and everything. I said, don't do any of that yet. It could make my situation worse. Let me try to manage this with this director. So I meet with the director. I said, look, I said, Mr. Montez. I said, you seem like you're running a good operation here. I said, I've been here all weekend with these guys.

Everything's pretty cool in here. I said, but I should not be here. I said, I have been to the Orange Theory every day for two and a half years. Okay? And I've got a violation for going to the gym. I pick my son up and you can check the monitor. I'm there four minutes and four minutes to pick him up. I said, this is insane.

He goes, that's what's going on? I said, I promise you, that's what's going on. I said, I got people, my son will show you his pay stubs. I mean, the Orange Theory, they know me as a member there. I mean, that's my gem. And he says, well, I wish we had known all this before we sent it to BOP. I said, hello, man. I said, why aren't you having a conversation with me before you're firing stuff off to the BOP?

We know that's not a manageable situation. I said, what are we doing from here? I need to know the plan from here. He goes, well, be honest with, they got his side. you're going to take you back i said don't you have a say in this aren't you in charge in here can't don't you have don't they care about your view of my custody you're in charge he said they're going to ask me i'm going to be a part of the dh o hearing and the in the lady at region is going to ask me my view of you i said well what is your view of me i'd like to know your view of me you'll seem

like you're a compliant guy we just saw a paperwork on this stuff and the and your lady left and we tried to assign it to a new lady she runs the check before she takes a corrupted file she'd like to know that we got a compliant situation and when she takes it over and and i said i totally get that man i said but i had this worked out with my counselor who was in charge of my custody that i go to all these places it sound like i needed to manage her paperwork trail and i didn't know that i didn't this is my first ride through all this he said yeah this is a big mistake i said well tell me what we can do to correct it and he he says well i'm going to talk to the a region, the lady I report to for our halfway house. I'm going to let her know all about it.

And maybe they'll let you stay with us to the end of your sentence. Look, are you talking about it? I got to go home. I swear to you, this guy says this to me. And I said, I'll be honest with. That's unacceptable. That is unacceptable. I said, I have a home, a mortgage. I am integrated back into the society. My career won't last if I'm in here. I said, these people are waiting on me. I have responsibilities with my job that was hard to get, okay? I said, this is unacceptable. You're either trying to integrate me into society or you're trying to destroy me. It doesn't seem like you're the destroyer type. It seems like your job is to make sure you can report that we're integrating back into the community.

I'm giving him his speech. And he said, well, that's right. That's what we're supposed to do. I said, would you make the phone call, the region, or just tell them the situation? It seems understandable to me that you could make sense of this. And he said, I'll call the lady. Dude, four days past, man. I've not heard word. I've not seen him traffic through the place. I decided to go knock on the door. And I said, hey, man, Mr. Montes, he looks at me like he's never met me.

Uh-huh. I said, hey, sorry to interrupt. I know you got official business going on in here. I said, but I need to know what the lady at the region said about my, he said, he reminded me of the situation. Oh, my God. He says, you just remind me of the situation. I said, I'm the guy that has a house across town with a son in it.

that needs to be physically maintained. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm going to call her today. I swear to you, this is the way they got me. And I'm so losing confidence in this situation. And I'm calling my boss. I'm calling my work.

And my boss is my friend. Yeah. He's, you know, he's helping me get through this. So I very patient through this situation. But not everybody's boss is patient like that. I mean, this could be a disaster for me. Well, two and a half months. later oh my god i swear man i swear to you two and a half months later they now letting me out to go

to my work every day i'm at my work when he calls me he says hey i got good news catlitch i said what's the good news he says they're not going to send you back i said i said montez i said are you messing with me right now because he and i become friendly yeah this is who all this time because i'm on him right and he knows i'm a legit dude that's not liking this at all okay and and he he he he he he he he He says, no, no, I'm messing with you. You're sitting down. I said, now you're scaring me a little bit here. He goes, you're free to go home.

He says, come back, sign a 24-hour release, and then we're cutting you loose after that. He goes, we're going to send you home today. After you sign this, we have to do some type of 24-hour release, and then we, whatever that is, and then we're cutting you loose. We're going to cut it all off. I said, man, that's great news, dude. And I promise you, that freedom on that day fell back. better than being freed up from camp.

Yeah. That was harder than the camp time, man, because I had already been free again. Right. Oh, my gosh. It was tough. But anyway, they've got the power to vacuum you back in. And they want that paperwork right. And I would advise anybody who's in the middle of paperwork with the halfway house,

you make sure the paperwork's right and you keep copies of it because they will mess you over. And if you've got anything wrong with you socially and you know you're not good at discussions with people, you better damn sure have your paperwork right because I think I'm only out and not back in because of discussions, conversations. I think that's what saved me. And not everybody can do that. Yeah. That's my ride, brother. All right. Well, listen, I appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate you coming. For sure. Do you don't have anything like social media links or anything you want to you do have a podcast i have a i have a podcast pretty pretty nice size audience there inside out with james catledge on spotify apple wherever you listen to your podcast right um

but it's not it's not uh video right no no it's not youtube like this yeah yeah it's all audio yeah you got to do that i know you got to do that yeah we're we've done three seasons season four will be youtube with a youtube channel a channel's already been reserved it'll be interviews right so we're moving into season four now all right season one and two we're the story. Season three was me telling life lessons. Season four is interviews with guys like you. Nice. Yeah. Well, you have to interview me. I will definitely interview you. And I hopefully be able to take this interview we did today and make it the first YouTube for Inside Out. All right. Yeah. Sounds good. Appreciate you, brother. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure to meet you.

Hey, I appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so you get notified videos just like this. Please leave me a comment. We're going to leave James's media links social media links in the description box so you can just click on them go straight there follow um also please check out his podcast uh leave me a comment share the video do all the things also please consider joining my patreon it's like 10 bucks a month really does help me thank you so much see you