Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Wall Street’s Biggest Hustler? Meet the Real Wolf

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

JOSEPH VITALE IS A HANDSOME, charismatic, high pressure broker who works in South Florida’s private equity market. Vitale becomes entangled in multiple scams, two murders, and a federal indictment.Follow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers,

you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexsavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. The silver Lamborghini flies around the corner. From that point on, I was hooked. He walked me around the office. He's like, hey, Zoni, what did you make this month? 150 grand. You know, hey, Jay, what did you make last year? 3.4 million. These are guys in their 20s. This is really messed up how this whole thing went down. She comes by my office and she pitches me.

Everything seems legit. I start raising capital. Your guys are calling investors saying, hey, we got a new company. Here's what we need. Put in 100,000, 200,000. Something is definitely wrong. I drive to the bank. And she had spent 350 grand out of that $400,000. This is a criminal situation here. And our name's all over it. Royce started partying too much.

You know, he stopped coming in. You know, out of the first round, that $5 million, we raised, Royce raised $12,500. At this point, I keep hearing it for more people that he's going to have me killed. So I'm driving over there. I call him, meet me around the house, going in the back by the dock, he says. I start thinking to myself, like, that was odd. I call my girlfriend and I said,

Do you think that this guy would really kill me? Yeah, what are you stupid? Turn around right now. I get a phone call. He says, whatever you do, don't come to the office. There's like 40 FBI agents here. So I booked a flight to Ecuador. I remember when I was indicted, I thought time for a trip.

We go to the airport and they close in on me. They say, excuse me, can I see you pass me? Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I'm going to be doing an interview with Joseph Vitaly. This is very possibly one of the best interviews and stories I've ever heard. You absolutely need to watch this video. It's got a bunch of double crosses, twists, turns, murders, several scams. It's genuinely going to be one of the better videos you will ever watch. Check it out.

I grew up on Long Island. Okay. No. Yeah. Middle class family, right? And I ended up going to FAU down here in Florida. Right. And made it through about a year and a half.

And one night I met a guy driving a Lamborghini. That's how I got into the whole stock thing. Right. Well, you were dating? Just go to Alicia. Yeah, you were dating? We were hanging out. You know, she was from, I knew her from high school, back up in New York.

And she was down here for, you know, for, like a two-week vacation. We were hanging out. And we went out to a restaurant, I think it was Jay Alexander's in Fort Waterdale. And she's like, come here. I want you to meet my friend, Erica. And then she starts telling me about her boyfriend. And she starts bragging about this guy. She's like so impressed. And, you know, so I go over, I meet them. And he's like, how are you doing? My name is Isaac Grossman. He puts his hand out and I'm Joe Vitale. Right. These guys, like, old formal. So we had drinks, you know, for, you know, two, three hours at the restaurant.

And then we went out to some club. When we walked out of the restaurant, they're like, follow us. The guy's car comes flying out of ballet. And mind you, I'm like, you know, 19-year-old kid from New York, you don't see cars like this, you know, every day. Down here, they're a dime a dozen. Right. So I'm like, since this Lamborghini, you know, the silver Lamborghini flies around the corner. Look at this guy who's like, probably 29, 30 years old.

They get in, I follow them, and then... What are you driving? Like a bullswagon. Like, be a Volkswagen, Bassat. The thing had, like, like, tint peeling off of it. Right. I was, like, potting behind them. This guy's, like, cutting in and out of traffic.

So, uh, so we follow them to a club. And, I mean, I was just, I was just blowing away. I'm like, how's this young guy? Usually you see, you know, old people driving nice cars. living in, you know, lavish lives. So this guy was, like I said, 2930. So I started asking him about what he does for a living. He explains to me the whole brokerage industry, what he does.

At that time, I really didn't even understand how stocks work. Never bought a stock. Right. Never looked into stocks. Never really, you know. You were an art school, right? You wanted to be an artist. Yeah, correct.

Yeah, I was going to school for graphic design. And so he gives me his card. He's called me on Monday. and, you know, and, you know, we'll give you an interview, and if you have what it takes, you know, maybe you can be a part of the team. So I go down there on a Monday. I was working like two jobs at the time. I went down on a lunch break.

He sat me in the waiting room for about 45 minutes, my entire lunch break. And the reception, she brings me back into his office. He had this huge cornerglass office. I walk in, and I'll never forget it. He was sitting there on the phone, and he says, something along the lines of you know this is Isaac Glousman your favorite broker have you been

and then he goes into this conversation and maybe four or five minutes on this call he looks over at me he winks and then he hangs this phone up and he says I just made $16,000 on that phone call he's like what do you make today

yeah I think it was I told him like 50 bucks yeah so and I just lost my job for fuck because you wait 45 minutes yeah So, so from that point on, you know, he, I mean, I was, I was hooked. You know, I told myself, I can either go back to my job, go back to FAU, try to figure out a way to build a career in graphic design and, which, you know, I mean, I had confidence in myself in that field, but I knew and know that, you know,

that, you know, things take time. When he walked me around the office and he pointed out all the broker... You're never going to make $16,000 on a phone call. Yeah. Right. He walked me around the office. He's like, hey, Zoni, would you make this month? There's only, he was like $150,000.

You know, hey, Jay, what did you make last year? And you're like $3.4 million. These are guys in the 20s. Right. So I basically told them. I said, listen, bring me on board. I'll do whatever it takes. I mean, I'll work to learn.

what it is you have to say or do or no and uh you know i'm at your disposal so um that was basically it then i started you know working in the training program with them for a couple of months and then i got licensed was the training program though how how did that work the training program was like you worked it was i mean i'm sorry i remember because you were like it was like the whole boiler room type like you worked for a guy under a guy for so long and then at some point when you get licensed and you've done, you've made so many accounts for them, then they give you a certain amount of accounts. Yeah, so the program worked where they would give you $200 a week,

you know, like beer money. Yeah. And you would have to work under their license, you know, which is obviously a violation. A lot of firms did it at that time, you know, tier two brokerage firms where they wouldn't have like, you know, any sort of analysts, they wouldn't have marketing. These were firms that were specifically, you know, outbound coal-calling type firms.

So the training program was $200 a week. You work under my license. You know, we would make phone calls as our senior broker. And at the end of the day, we would bring them on board for a small amount of money, maybe, you know, $10,000, $15,000. Excuse me. And once they were in for that amount, right, and they had paperwork out of the way, then they would go into the hands of the senior broker

or the senior broker's partner and then they would raise capital from the guy, trade the guy, and, you know, and develop the relationship. So we had to get 50 accounts before they even scheduled our test for a Series 7. And the plan was once we passed our test, then we'd get 20 accounts back

so we would, you know, hit the ground running. Right. But they never gave any back. Right. So how long did it take? for you to raise the 50 to get the 50 accounts. I did it in like, it was like less than a month. I spent, I'd say from 9 a.m. to 11, maybe midnight, Monday through Friday, Saturday I would

go in the office and I would work from 10 to 4 or 5 Sundays you weren't supposed to make calls. But, you know, we would tell them obviously that the scenario was that important that, you know, rather than being home with our wife and our newborn that we're here on the phone with them because the market still opens tomorrow morning. Was there a wife and a newborn? No. So, yeah, we embellished. I mean, that's the way we were taught.

I mean, it was nothing, there weren't any materialized to me. You don't have to tell me. I'm with you. Listen, when I started as a mortgage broker, I was there like 80 hours a week. I practically slept in the office. You could call there at 10 o'clock at night. I asked phone. Boom.

Eagle ending. Yeah, right. The matter of fact, the boss, they would have meetings and they would call the offices. And I would, they'd call like 20 of them and I'd be the only one there, 1030 at night. Yeah, same with me. And I remember one time the guy, the owner of the company, goes, what are you doing there at 1030 at night on a Friday night? And I go, I'm working. Are you the only one there?

Of course, I'm the only one here. I said, do you know why I'm the only one here? I remember he goes, he goes, why? I go, because they're weak, bro. They're all weak. I was just so, I was so into it. Yeah, right? It's like you don't feel like you're working. Yeah.

I used to tell my client, I take two six-month vacations a year because I love what I do. But, yeah, I mean, you get it. It was just, it's like a rush. And when you start loving the craft, it just becomes easy. It doesn't become tiresome. You know, you just like the energy is just, it's just, it doesn't push. When you're the top guy, when you're the top one in the office and everybody's asking you questions, then it's, you thought I was working 60 hours.

Now I'm bumping at the 80. Yeah. Like now I may get a little caught in the back. I love it so much being here. Yeah. No, I mean, any relationship I've ever been in since that day has always been strained because, I mean, I wouldn't take vacations. I would hate going on vacation.

I mean, I'd bring my laptop. I'd bring my work with me. I'd be on the phone half the time. I mean, it was like an addiction. And, you know, I called it a healthy addiction. But, you know. So, so. So you got the accounts, you passed your, what was it, your series what?

We had to take a Series 7 for stocks, bonds, options, and then Series 63, which was like Blue Sky, so you could operate in every state. Okay. And how long did you, what happened at that firm? Did you stay at that firm? I stayed, that firm was Emmett A. Larkin, and this was, I believe, in June. of I think 05 and then I stayed at Emmett Larkin for probably maybe six, seven, eight months max and then I left. I left Firm. I went to intercap wealth management. With Grossman? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you went with

Grossman. Did you guys team up and go there or what? Yeah. He, uh, Erica, right? Erica, his, his mistress right she blew up his marriage so the girlfriend the girlfriend that you met that you guys had lunch had lunch with was actually Grossman's girlfriend on the side his his mistress and yeah his whole his whole his whole his whole white she melted down the entire relationship with the yeah it's like all the partners of the firm they lived right next door to each other built houses next to each other they were super close and um the when that happened you know the wives were you know they were getting in the years of all the other partners and there were it was was just stupid and then they fought and uh you know they're just big egos so he ends up blowing up

one day in the office walking out he says you know vitalie come with me so i walk with them and then he uh he basically made me a proposal and he said i'm going somewhere and i'm going to do something big and you're the best account opener i've ever seen you know because by that point the uh the brokers they never taught me how to raise capital in a big way or or or or or trade stocks or I didn't even know how to write a ticket I was just literally a trainee that got licensed and then was just a prolific account opener so I you know I had the ability to make call calls and you know lure in new investors with relatively small dollar figures you know with the promise that you know obviously judging me on a small dollar figure you know let that dictate the

kind of performance you know in the kind of account that we develop or whatever and then they would take over so so they kind of kind of kept you there like why why why let you right why move you up this guy's fucking bring in yeah they hold you they hold you down right with the promise that correct if you keep doing well we're gonna right exactly it's all bullshit yeah so they hold you down there and then uh when isaic walked out and he pulled me with him he said listen there's two parts of the business obviously you have the bloodline of that business bringing in new relationships and then you know the second part which is developing those relationships so you know you always kind of need a team in some sense and and him and i made a great team so he said come with me

we'll be 50 50 on everything i'll bring my existing book of clients we'll go over we'll get a fat sign on bonus somewhere and then uh you know the rest is history i'll teach you how to trade how to raise i'll teach you how to you know utilize analysts the right analysts uh going forward and uh and so we We went to several different interviews. We ended up at a company called Intercap Wealth Management, which was in the same city, you know, just made three, four miles from, you know, that first office. And this is Palm Beach or? No, Broward County.

Broward County. Yeah. Okay. And there was, there was, there was, there was like theatrical, the whole thing that went down, of onboarding us because Isaac was just, he was one of the most colorful people I haven't met my life. Right. And, you know, he was magnetic.

And a lot of people like being around him. But he was like, he was kind of like pit bull, too, because he would be your best friend. And then out of nowhere, he would just snap at you. And he did this several times in the negotiation with Intercap. So they went back and forth. And then finally we came to an agreement. We started working at Intercap.

And, you know, we did pretty well pretty quickly. And, you know what happened after that. Yeah, eventually he walks again, right? yeah he gets to do it uh he's basically he's he's he's hard to get along with like he's very volatile but i mean lots of guys are like that like well i think the problem is is what you know i mean what i notice is that you you don't really succeed without having some kind of personality defect you know what i'm saying like most most CEOs are narcissists you know they so it's like the same thing that makes them a horrible a horrible individual to be in a relationship with

makes them a dynamic leader in an industry. You know what I'm saying? So it's like it's such a hard balance. You know, you look at Trump like, you know, he's a narcissist. You know what I'm saying? So I'm sure he's a nightmare to have a relationship with, but let's face it, he's also winning and winning. And you know, you know what I'm saying?

So it's like it's a balancing act. It's, and same thing with a lot of guys, a lot of salespeople. I know it's like, like they'll go up and talk to anybody. Yeah. And he would dominate, he would dominate conversations. Right, right. Conversations.

Next thing you know, you're giving them money. you're signing over stuff you're like i love this guy he's the yeah you would feel stupid not right but then again if things don't go his way he could snap on you like that yeah yeah and stab me in the back and sabotage you right you know very uh he was he had psychological issues uh but you know also there's a lot of drugs you know yeah a lot of drugs in the industry in general i mean yeah yeah at that time there wasn't much of that going around uh at that time okay but then uh after that you know when his marriage deteriorated then he became pretty pretty heavy in that stuff so so what happened um you eventually uh start your own company or you went yeah i know you went somewhere else

i know you went to new york for a while right didn't you go back to new york yeah uh that was when our first month at intercap he negotiated like a two hundred thousand dollar sign-on bonus i believe it was and then um that was really that was really the first money i made and in stocks, believe it or not, sign-home bonus, because those seven or eight months at Emmett Larkin were not profitable at all. I was opening accounts for people, building books of business. I'd walk into the office and, you know, my senior broker at that time, whoever adopted me, because I had no money, so they had to provide leads to me.

And then I had to partner up with someone that knew how to actually develop, you know, investors and relationship. So I'd walk in the office and, you know, one day I remember my senior broker, his door was shut all day. And, you know, he never came out to give me leads. And I'm sitting in a boardroom. I'm 19 years old, 20 years old. And, you know, I'm sitting there waiting all day, knocking on his door. You know, Donna, you're going to come out here?

I need some leads. And they just sat in it all day. Never came out. So then I went home that day. Like, you know, what the hell was that? The next day I go back into the office and it was the same thing. So he was in there just working. You know, his secretary was coming in and has his office.

Joe, he's busy. So I start realizing. like, this guy's screwing me over. Right. So I come to find out that I opened an account with some really big guy. He was some board member of some publicly traded company. He sent a bunch of money and, you know, the guy didn't want to share in the commissions. So that happened three, four times in the course of the first seven, eight months in the industry.

And then when Isaac had bolted, I went with him. And I hadn't made any money to that point. And, you know, I was struggling. I was, I mean, literally got evicted from my apartment within that time. had too much pride to go back to my family and you know I told Colby you said you were like you were like actually living in your car sleeping showering at the fucking gym the whole thing yeah that 200 a week paid for my dry cleaning

it put gas in the car and and basically peanut butter and jelly so I was willing you know I made those sacrifices because I was actually I was actually going through the motion and succeeding in doing what it took to make money, but these other senior brokers just weren't sharing it with me. But I started working at this place, Eagle Lennie. I was two car payments behind. I used to park my car down.

I used to park it like a couple of buildings away from where my apartment was until I thought they're coming to get it. At some point, Ford's going to want their truck back. Did they get it? No, they didn't because I ended up closing a loan. But I mean, the pressure to close that loan, you know, I closed a loan. I got the money. I caught it up.

I, you know, and it was, but there were months. It was, you, a month, and my mortgage payment, listen, by the time I got to a position where I was making some money, I couldn't do anything with it. Nobody would lend me any money. I've been laid on my mortgage payment, laid on my car payment, my credit cards are behind, you know, so I mean, I know, I didn't stay in my car, but I'm damn sure wasn't far from it. Yeah, no, they, a lot of the senior brokers in that industry, what I notice is they try to force younger guys into debt. Right. Because, you know, it puts pressure on you to show up, you know, those extra hours are on that Saturday. and you know they did that and you know i followed suit and i got into debt i got the nice car and you know

the nice apartment at that time you know it was you know 21 years old with like 10 grand a month in debt quickly so uh there was it was a lot of pressure to perform and uh it was hard to do that with isa right but um but we did eventually you know we got it together for about a year um So we're making some money. Yeah. We, you know, we, he had, he heard his back at, I believe, his daughter's soccer game. He was coaching the team. I think she was like, I don't know, like six, seven years old.

And he got hooked on like pain pills. And he just totally stopped coming into work. And that's what actually forced me to learn how to raise capital, how to actually have conversations with these investors, you know, not just plow through them and, you know, and beat them up for, check so uh you know i had heard i'd heard him enough times to start to do it on my own and uh he it's it was odd because he was a little bitter about it but i mean that was literally making us money he was just sitting home and you know he got real burnt out on that whole thing um and then

eventually the firm uh the management came to us and they had issues with him not showing up and you know it was really on on the 24 the principal the principal the principal of the firm, him and I had a good relationship and he's like, he kept coming to me like, you know, why are you doing this? Like, you know, half these tickets are they got his name on it. Right. Like his rep number.

And I said, you know, he's working from home. And, you know, and he knew that wasn't the case. So, it became an issue. And and then again, they wanted to let us go because, you know, he just, he wasn't showing up and living up to his, you know, what they call

fiduciary responsibility. Right. And I was running everything. I was recruiting brokers. I was training them. I was opening accounts. I'd run back into the private office. And, you know, I'd call the investors. I'd trade.

I'd try to put strategies together for them. It just was like an 18-hour-a-day job. So, yeah, he did it again. All right. So at some point you go to New York and- Yeah. So they fire both of us. and you know I had enough of Isaac I told him I said listen this is the third place that we're at

and you just seem to piss everybody off it's impossible to work with you so I went back to the owner of that firm who I called him up one day he was in Brooklyn in New York they had a branch up there and I negotiated my job back with the with the idea that I would be under his supervision because when you work at any brokerage firm, typically the investors or the clientele, they're the property of the firm. And they didn't want to let one guy go and then have one guy here in fear of me

just kind of funneling out property of the firm. Yeah, he goes and starts his own place and you start sending people until eventually you've got a large enough book of business to leave yourself. Exactly. So I went up to New York on probation. He said, just come up here, stay up here for 30, 60, 90 days, whatever.

we'll see how it goes and you know you can learn a few things uh it'll be good for you and uh you know you'll be uh you know one of the guys up here so so i go up there and he's like he told me that i could stay with his cousin this guy dmitri and i remember i get out so i bring one of my cold callers with me okay this guy met and we walk out from the airport and we're getting picked up by by James' cousin Demetri and we get into the car and he had like one of the supercharged x-5s and if you've ever been on the BQE the Brooklyn Queens Expressway it's super tight like the lanes are like probably like I mean it's like the like the width of this right everything like you're almost side swiping cars when you're driving so he drove us to his uh he had like a brownstone in

Beaver's Brooklyn he drives us there at probably like 150 miles an hour this guy and he doesn't say one word in the car and then this is the guy that we're staying with for you know one two or three months right so you know we got in we got settled in and uh and you know that was my home for about probably the whole 90 days i stayed up there on probation how did you do there uh did well that was when the fine the whole financial crisis was was settling in so surprisingly i did i did those were my best months 2008 i think it was November okay um so you were there for what happened why so you come back to come back to florida yeah start your own place or go go to work someplace else or do you just go stay at the

same place no no i uh so i had maybe about a six-month stretch or a seven-month stretch working without isa and i mean i had some of my best months just now you're right now you're on your feet right you can yeah we were hitting like you know more than six figures a month every month I think we hit like a half one month and then you know it was it was interesting because I met a group of guys that they were involved in in startup companies and you know a friend of mine introduced me to a group and as well as I was doing when I met these guys they were doing one two three million dollars a month right right so and commission right So just for context, like after 2008, like the financial crisis, right, like the stock market, like everything, a lot of stuff's going to shit.

Yeah. But one of the big things, so one of the things was that a lot of companies were going under, but a lot of companies are starting. And somebody has to get that money. Yeah. So somebody has to come up with the money. If I got a startup and I need $5 million, who do I go to to get that money? Where do I raise that money? And that's what these guys were doing.

Right. Yeah. And liquidity, I mean, it wasn't there. it was I mean extremely difficult for a company to get money and the banks obviously you know the banks they were almost like non-existent yeah they're going under left and right they're being bought up there exactly so you know there was an opportunity there and I saw that opportunity and I went for it and luckily enough in I think it was November of 08 like I said I had taken all my client's assets and and started I started playing the ultra shorts like EEV against the emerging markets and

FXP I believe it was against the financials and you know it was like three times inverse and when they would go down these things were fly and I was buying it at like 90 selling it at like 180 at the end of the day and then doing it again and again and again so I built up a lot of you know trust in those months and then I figured it was a good time for me to kind of segue into something that could potentially perform because nobody I mean people were just really holding what they had there was no new money going on the market So I had access to capital at that point. And then when I moved into the private space, I mean, I enjoyed it.

It was kind of difficult for me because it was hard for me to generate urgency because there's nothing opening or closing or trading or moving. So, you know, it was a whole other animal for me. But I figured out how to make it work. Yeah. So now you have to come up with the proposals, the pitch. You have to get them to give you money. And then they have to wait.

Right. You have to wait, the companies, they're doing this, they're releasing a place, they're doing this. Now it's a long-term strategy that you may not be getting money back for years. Like SpaceX. Right. They were founded in 2002. Yeah. It's just more and more money getting dumped in, dumped in, dumped in, dumped in, but if it does it, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Then the windfall is massive. So did you start, so you started your own company at that point? Yeah. Okay. And you're, you got a group of guys. Where did you start it? right in full order we had a couple of different

locations because I mean a lot of brokers were I mean they left the industry you know just like I did they were looking for other opportunity that was when like the whole precious metal thing kind of emerged because you know gold was you know preservation of capital so to say or a hedge against inflation

yeah everybody finds declining precious metals right so all right so you move in there you hire a bunch of guys Nope. What happened? Is this where Michelle, is this Michelle Braun or is that a little later?

She came probably six, seven, eight months into that whole private world. Are you still, you're still driving the Volkswagen? No, definitely not. What are you driving now? I mean, I had a couple of nice cars. What kind of cars? I was a little over the top. What did you have?

I mean, yeah, I mean, I've got the picture. I got pictures on the, on the website. Like, I've seen the cars. Do you have a Lamborghini, a Ferrari? It's weird because those kinds of things, they kind of, they, they don't like, like now, now, now they're, now they embarrass you now. But it was, but it at 20, at 19 years old, it impressed you enough. Yeah. That you dropped everything, moved into your car and hung out for four months to make that happen.

Right. But now you look back. But I think, I think it's like, and I get into this all the time. I don't know. I'm sure you never watch any of myself. But I get in this all the time. But like, you know,

what was so important, you know, in my 20s and 30s. And then, you know, then I just, I do equate it to go into prison. Then I go to prison and you're living on nothing for years.

And you're okay. You know, even there's, it sucks for the first three months. It's like you're trying, I'm just trying to think about how to kill myself. But, you know,

like how can I do it? So when does the guard come? What will I use? you know but three four months then you start you know your expectations of life hit rock bottom yep and then you start enjoying just little things yeah you adapt and then you also enjoy not having the stresses right so now looking back seeing how I behave 50 grand a month in bills is stupid looking back 20 years 20 years ago and seeing how I behaved I'm like it is it's embarrassing I'm like fuck right what were you thinking like the things you were doing the

risk you were taking to live or or give off a certain appearance right like optics were everything at that point it's it's crazy but the people that watch this want to know so you're driving a Lamborghini you're driving a Ferrari you're dating I had like uh I had a lot I mean a lot of cars I was a car guy I got pictures I got pictures on the internet pictures the house I got pictures I got a picture of him Colby I got a picture of him in front of I want to say it's either one a Lamborghini or is it two Ferraris or something like that or and you're like you're you're in front of your house and you're like this you're like and they're both behind him

with like the four car garage or something it's like a Mediterranean he picked up on the cheap he's like oh I got that cheap for like two and a half million like cheap for two and a half yeah yeah the guy was going under and I swooped in and I was like and he's sitting there like yeah like this was a couple of Lamborgades

behind him but now he's like it was doing okay I was doing all right I was getting by so you open the place Michelle Braun is there something it's nothing about it's basically moves in I mean I know you had like a year or a few years before Michelle Braun came in yeah yeah and that whole thing so what happened with that so who who is Michelle Braun oh you can Google her matter of fact she had a tattoo in her

ass it said Google me bitch no it didn't yeah and it's probably still there today unless she got removed so Heidi Heidi Fleiss just for anybody who's watching there was a chick because didn't know. And people to watch this aren't old like me. Well, they are. Some of them are. So there was a chick named Heidi Fleiss. She was like a lemonade stand compared to Michelle. Yeah. So Heidi Fleiss was like the madam to the stars in Hollywood. And when she went under, that was just as the internet was kind of like taking root, right? Like people started using the internet. And so Michelle Braun came in as Heidi Fleiss went to prison. Michelle Braun came. And

came in and started all these websites and took over the clientele and then some of Heidi Fleiss's, you know, the vacuum that Heidi Fleiss left. And so Michelle Braun was, was huge. She took it to the next level. Yeah, she definitely. She had like, Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs and, you know, and she would cater to like their, their fantasies, the Hollywood crushes and all that stuff. And she would happen. And I got all these, I got pictures of her on the site with she she's with uh is it charlie sheen she's with i have her with um is it nicholas cage like she's got all his photos with like all kinds of people about mickey roark when he was you know when he had a career uh you know i'm sure he's a nice guy uh so anyway um so what happened so

anyway uh so i mean life was like charmed i mean life was i was living a good life right i was 23, maybe turning 24. Yeah, I was 23, turning 24. Because the address to that, that ridiculously big house that I bought was 23, 24. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. So I was, 23 years old, turning 24. And I would frequent the gentleman club down the block from my office. And, you know, I'd create different quotas for guys because apparently,

these strip clubs are pretty motivating, you know, for stockbrokers, right? Right. So we were at, they had, what was it called? Solid Gold. And they had a grill in their restaurant called the Palms. The Palms Grill was a place we'd go eat at a lot. You know, they had great food there. And we'd be at the, they had like a long dinner table that seeded maybe, I don't know, like

15 people, right? So, you know, I take all the guys there that did well for the day, and we just get some food or whatever, and then I either, you know, I'd either go home or whatever, sometimes, you know, we get a little wild and hang out. So, we're eating one night, and this woman walks up to me with long blonde hair, you know, big fake boobs, and, you know, like over-injected lips, no offense. But she walks up to me and she says, are you Joe Vitale? and I look at her like yeah honestly I thought she was a stripper and she was trying to like give me a lap dance or something so I tell yes and she says

I'm Michelle Braun I'm John Boyle's girlfriend and I say okay nice to meet you and then she tries like pitching me some deal John Boyles was he was like a well-known guy he was he was the son of I believe Jack Boyle I never met his father but I guess

they opened up or built the restaurant, J.Bs on the ocean over there. So it's kind of like a family name in the area. Yeah, yeah. They were, like, I guess they had a big development company. But the guy was always around town driving his phantom, you know, party and hanging out and stuff. So she tries to pitch me this deal in the middle of, you know, this club, restaurant or whatever. And, you know, right away, I was like, listen, you know, just, yeah, come to the office tomorrow or whatever.

And, you know, if you want some food or some drinks, you know, just hang out with us. so she did that she spent you know a couple of hours just bullshit and she told me a little bit about herself she never mentioned anything about you know like the whole madam stuff right um but she was well spoken and you know real respectful so when she left i walked her outside to a car you know just to make sure she got out all right and um she she was driving uh john broil's uh phantom at that time so you know i knew the connection was real obviously real and um And that was that. I gave her my card.

She ended up calling me, I think, the next day or the day after that. And she comes by my office and she pitches me. What was the pitch? It was about a company called Agro Energy. And it was an alternative energy company. But they turned agro, they turned algae into biodiesel fuel. And it was led by a guy named Dr. Jacob Gittman. and he was some scientist out of Russia

and the scientist had been working into this operation over here and trying to get it out there for like the last two, three years and what he was looking for was $5 million to build a facility in homestead. And in this facility, I guess they would grow the algae and then they'd have the process and the technology to convert that algae into biodiesel fuel. So, I mean, that was pretty much the whole pitch. And she, you know, she was, I mean, she went all out on, on courting me and trying to get me involved in that.

So, you know, she believed in it. Right. And her conviction led me to, to agree to go down to Miami and, you know, sit down through this presentation and meet, you know, the scientist. Meanwhile, I mean, at that time, honestly, I really didn't even take any more deal. I was doing several deals and, you know, we didn't have enough bandwidth. Right. So you go down there? Yeah.

So we go down there, and this is really messed up how this whole thing went down. It was slick. I was going to say, it, it, so, like, from your perspective, I get that you're, you know, that it's like this fucking, you know, but from looking at it from the outside, like, it is slick. It is good. When you explained it to me, like, I got, like, goosebumps. I was like, wow. Yeah, she out did you, Matt.

Yeah, that was. I was like, wow. like I didn't see that coming I couldn't believe it man I was like when I thought back on everything I wasn't even I mean I wasn't even ashamed to myself for like being ignorant oh yeah anybody I did it fallen for yeah like I went through all the right uh protocols I mean to to make sure that everything was okay I mean the problem is she was in the machine in the machinery you know I'm saying like the ghost and you know she's in the machinery debunking yeah everything that you you know my life changed after that like my entire life it took a different direction um after

meeting that woman and it's funny because right now she opened up that that that uh that reseller of her maize burkin bags in miami yeah yeah it was it was all it was all like a chinese fakes or shit right like crazy counterfeits yeah she was selling bags to like christ jenner listen based on her based on her history you should just know i know i know it Anything she's involved in is going to be. I know it the whole time. I mean, when I was, somebody told me they said they don't even have availability like that.

Like they don't produce them in abundance like that. Like how she was selling them. So you go to Miami to meet with the doctor. So I go to Miami. I walk into this guy's office. Now he's sitting at the end of a conference table next to this gentleman, Mark, Yagala, who's his name? So Michelle and I walk in.

we walk over to them and you know i extend my hand i introduce myself and he's like hi i'm dr jacob gittman i shake the other guy's hand mark yagalla and uh and then we sit down and dr gittman you know he has this whole uh presentation he i mean he gave a really really good presentation just everything was so detailed and articulated and i was impressed so mark the guy next to him he i mean he said very little but when we had left that day, Michelle and I went back to my office and we talked about it and I said, you know, it's pretty cool. So she said, I mean, they need five million. What do you, what would you do it for? So her and I spoke about that, right? We went back and forth and, you know,

decided on a figure that we felt, you know, could be pushed through, right? Right. she goes back she allegedly negotiated everything right and and then she comes back to my office the next day and she has things notarized signed and all that with between her and him right and then she says just just add your signature wrong with me whatever we'll open up a separate company we'll raise the money for them and we'll we'll we'll open up somewhat of a fund right and then we'll send it to them in tranches and half a million dollar tranches in lieu of stock, right? Right. So now mind you, I'm still, I think at this point, maybe I'm 24.

So I agree. And I sign and I go with her. We open up this business. It was called Sterling Capital Trust. And the day we opened it, I, you know, I had a conversation with her on how things would be run. And, you know, we each had our. roles because she wanted to be actively involved and and to take on that extra deal i needed it so

she was going to handle uh some things on the admin end and and she did that she did it well for the time you know that we did it together all right um but i asked her could dr getman come into the office and give that same presentation to my guys and she said yeah sure you know i'll call and you know we'll see if you can come in um so he was supposed to show up to the office I think two days after that. He didn't come, though. The gentleman that was sitting next to him. Mark.

Right. His CFO would come. And Mark came. He gave a decent presentation, right? But it wasn't the same. And, you know, I went with it. You know, my brokers were somewhat excited. It was another deal, right?

Something else to bring to their clients. And, you know, we negotiated a nice equity stake in the company. And, you know, when, you know, we negotiated a nice equity stake in the company. And, you know, when. When he left, I was convinced that he was, you know, who he said he was. Yeah, yeah. This is a real deal. This is the CFO showed up.

He pitched. I brought everything to my attorney on Dr. Gittman. He was a real scientist. I mean, he had some, you know, accolades or whatever. And he had never been, you know, he didn't have a checker pass or anything. So I started raising capital. You know, we're putting some of our guys into the deal. And when we hit just over 400,000, and this isn't a matter of like, I don't even know, like two weeks, you know, we just kept, we were slowly piecing into it.

At that point, Michelle's role was to make sure that the capital, right, got transferred over to Agro Energy in the low of the stock certs. And she had to make sure that the investors received their stock certs. Right. So the process is your guys, your, your, your. Your guys are calling investors saying, hey, we got a new company. Here's what we need. Put in 100,000, 200,000. So guys are given 20,000, 50,000, 5,000, 100,000.

You guys, and then they're going to get stock in the company in exchange for that. And, of course, hopefully the company ends up becoming huge and your stock becomes worth way more than what you invested. Right, right. And we didn't want any one guy to have any too large of a position because, you know, it's an early stage venture. And obviously, you know, there's a lot of risk associated with it. So, you know, we were kind of just building like a little,

portfolios in these startups. So two weeks later, you got about $400,000 and the money goes into the bank account and she's supposed to send the money to him. I changed the plan. It was supposed to be every half a million, right? We sent over. So I told her, because it was dragging out a little longer than expected. So some of the guys that initially got in, you know, it was like, like I said, about two weeks in, you know, they were like, you know, where's my stock shirt, right?

So I told her, listen, every quarter million at this pace, because I had so many other deals going on. Right. Every quarter million, just, you know, exchange it. And so she was supposed to do that. So some of my first guys in, they kept that, you know, badgering me. They're like, oh. Long Bendy Twizzlers candy keeps the fun going. Keep the fun going.

Twizzlers, keep the fun going. Listen, what's going on? Like, where, where's my stock? So I would go to Michelle and I pressure her to get it done. So one day I go into the office and Michelle doesn't show up. I call her, she doesn't answer. And I'm thinking maybe she's sick, maybe she has something going on. So then this happened the second day.

And then again, the third day, and by the third day, I'm like, there's something wrong here. So I drive to her house in Boca and, and, um, and she's not there, right? And I'm trying, like, look at the windows. I'm calling her, her phone's off. And, you know, it was then I said to myself, something's definitely wrong. So I get in my car, and I drive to the bank.

And, you know, I was ignorant for not looking sooner, I think. But again, I mean, everyone had their role. And I was, I mean, just overwhelmed by the amount of, you know, work that I took on in the first place. So I see the account and she had spent like, I don't know, $350,000 out of that. $400,000. Yeah, yeah, on like stupid shit, like at nightclubs, you know, at like, uh, Sacks Fifth Avenue. Wasn't there one for like the dog, doggy pig?

Puppy Palace, yeah. Like, it was just petty shit. Like I never, honestly, I never expected anyone to try to do something like that because I know it's possible. I know how much, you know. Plus, you'd been to this guy's his lab. You've met the doctor. Like, everything seems, everything's legit. Yeah. Like, why was you doing? She's dating this successful guy in town. She's driving his car. You know, where she lives. Yeah. And she had a beautiful house of her own. I mean, right. She's clearly successful. Right. So I'm thinking, why would she, you know, why would she use this as a piggy bank? You never even crossed my

mind until I saw that. And I mean, she had like, she spent like 15 grand at like, like, live nightclub. I mean, it was just ridiculous stuff. So I pick up the phone. I call my point of contact in the company, which was Mark Igala, right? The CFO. I say, Mark, Michelle, she spent the money. He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, Michelle, she spent the money that we were raising for Agro Energy. And he said, she told me that you guys hadn't started to raise yet. So, I mean, I just turned white at this point. Like, I knew at that point, I'm like, this is all fucked up. Right.

You know, this is, I didn't know who is who at that point, but I just wanted to fix it. So I said, Mark, listen to me, I don't know what the situation is. Who told who, what? But the fact is, I have clients, and I think there was like, I don't know, not that many of them, but there was probably, in that, like, 400 and change, it was probably about 18, 20, 25, 20 clients, I don't know, like just 5, 10 grand, whatever. And I said, we have to have a solution for this because this is absolutely going to go criminal.

Right. I mean, forget about regulatory. I mean, this is a criminal situation here. And our name's all over it. So we need to either get these guys stock or give their money back. Right. And so I ask him, I mean, you have stock in the company?

He said, yeah, yeah, I have shares. I have a position in the company. I said, okay. Do you have $400,000 of stock? He said, yes, I do. And he said, what do you want me to do? Give my stock to them. I said, give it to them now, and we'll figure this out later, right?

I'll help you out with it, whatever. You know, let's just put this thing to bed. So he agrees. Then he says, she spent all the money? I said, no, there's like, I don't know, I think there was 80,000 left, actually. So I said, no, there's 80 grand in the account. That's it. and we raised out like 400 and something

thousand. So he said if I'm giving 400 grand of stock at least send me to 80,000 them. Right. So, yeah, so I agree. You know, and looking back, it's so stupid the way I was doing things. I was doing things on the fly. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's just like thinking that people

saw the world the way I saw it. And so I send him to 80,000. I pick up the phone to confirm you got it. And now Mark is ghost. Right? He's gone. He won't answer the phone. so oh my god i remember the feeling still it was like i felt like i was in a prison cell right there actually um so now i'm like wow i'm on my own with this shit right so then are you realizing

he's a part of the whole thing now or you just yeah and now i'm thinking the whole all of them are bullshit so now i call up uh and when i when i spoke to mark originally what he had told me He's like, no, no, don't say anything to Dr. Gitman. Right. He's like, he'll probably contact the authorities. He thought that you didn't start either, and he's going to freak out because you're going to give the company a bad name and get it wrapped up and all this BS. Right. So I said, okay, if you can solve the issue, then it stays between us.

I just want these guys either have their money back or what they're paid for. So when he vanishes, now I have to call Gitman. Right. Right. At that time, I didn't have 400,000 cash, right? I probably had like 200, I don't know, close to 300,000 cash, which I was ready to pay, to give to the investors. Right. Dr. Gitman answers the phone, and I say, hey, Dr. Gitman, it's Joe Vitaly.

How you doing? He said, Joe who? I said, Joe Vitaly. And he said, I'm okay. What's this calling regards to? I said, our business that we have together, right? the raise that I was doing for you, he said, he said, no one's raising money for my company.

I'm like, Doc, do you remember me? He said, not really. And I said, I'm the guy that walked in your office with that tall blonde woman a couple of weeks ago. He said, oh, yes, yes, yes. So now I'm like, thank God. You know what I mean? Thank God.

Right. We're getting somewhere. This part, at least this is legit. He's a real doctor. This is a real company. Okay, at least that's really legit so far. Yep. So he says, so he says, yeah, I remember you.

I do, I do, I do, right? With the blonde woman, you guys came in. Yeah, she's like, so have you been? I'm like, not good. So I raised $400,000 or $430,000 for your company that's gone. So I tell him everything and he's like, you got to be kidding me. He's like, listen. He's like, kid, you know.

nothing to do with me. He's like, you're on your own, right? He's like, I never signed anything. I said, I have your name notarized on a contract with Michelle Braun, the blonde woman. And he said, I never saw her after that day. How the hell could I have it notarized with her? I was never in the same room with her. So then, obviously, instantly, I realized. Right. So I said, I just sent money to your CFO. He said, I don't have a CFO. He said, I don't have a CFO. I said, wait, what? So he said that he doesn't have a CFO and he's right now currently the president and

an interim CEO and CFO, right? He's, you know, wearing many hats. So I said, I met your CFO in that meeting. He was sitting next to you when I walked in the room. You know what he tells me? He said, he was with you. He just got to the meeting early and sat next to me. kid so when he walked in he's sitting at the table right is that like so uh so i

realized i was on my own with it so i go back home and i think i had like a couple shots of a blue and then i sat there and i was like i got to give the money back right yeah so i started going one by one and i'm writing checks to these guys and And I went through and I think I paid like $220,000 back and I had some more money. And then I was just like just getting liquid on different things that I had out there to cover the whole nut, right? And I did. And I had it. I had the amount, right?

So when I hit like just under a quarter million and the whole payback process, I realized I didn't have every investor because I was like I paid everyone back and it's only like it was like 220 grand. Right. So I'm like, holy shit, the process that we had was so faulted because Michelle Braun, she would get the data on the investor, some of which were new that we, that we, you know, freshly onboarded. And the lead would get shredded. So, you know, there would never be a dupe file or somebody calling internally an existing, you know, client. And so she would do that. and then she would put them, she would obviously have all that info in her computer.

But she don't have. Right. She was gone with her laptop. And that's what she worked off of, which is another lesson I learned that, you know, people can never work on their own computers or devices when they come to your own.

So now, you know, it's like a, I mean, I'll never break that rule. Like I will always, you have to work on the company devices. So, So she had the last $210,000 of clients in her computer that I didn't even know. By the time I went to the bank, they had subpoenaed. They had gotten wind or whatever.

They shut the account down because complaints started coming in. And it was just a mess. I started calling her, leaving a voicemail. I'm not trying to trap you here. I'm going to pay back the investors. I need your laptop. Give me your laptop. I'll take care of it. Your name's all

over this. You should be concerned. And I never got a call back. So that was that. I went to my attorney and I told him what happened and he said to me I got the worst legal advice ever. He said to me you don't want to go to the authorities

because if you do then you're likely to incriminate yourself. He said, how do they know that you weren't in on it or that you weren't there at live nightclub or there at puppy palace and I'm like I definitely wasn't there at Planned Parenthood. It was a charge

from Planned Parenthood. One of the girls. Oh my God. So, well, which was horrible because literally if you had gone into the feds or even the state you could have gone in and they would have done like a pretrial intervention where they would have said

look you just make it good and we won't charge. you. Like that happened. I could have gotten the data from them and paid it. Right. Yeah. Like anybody that shows up or just look, anybody that, you know, yeah, of course they have the subpoenaed from the records. They would have subpoenaed the bank and where these wires

come from. Let's track them back. Let's get these people paid. But it didn't work out. Instead, your lawyer, listen, the amount of, the amount of bad information and advice that lawyers give is ridiculous. You know why he gave that to me because he gave me a price. If it does go

criminal. No, right away. I didn't pay like 50 grand just to talk to the guy. He was a pretty high profile guy like around town. Everybody said great things about him. So I give him like $50,000. And he said that was going to be it. And then maybe like another 20 or something if we ended up going to trial, right, eventually. But he kept doing continuance after because eventually that, you know, they came from me.

So I sat there like a duck following his orders. They come for me. And, you know, the U.S. Marshal, they, they. whatever, forget that whole thing. The point is, I took his advice and, you know, the whole process of continuances and continuance after continuance, it put the guy in a position, the attorney, in a position to say, you know, we need more money. So I'm like, you know, you told me $50,000. Right.

And then maybe another $20,000 if we went to trial. So throughout that course, they're like getting $50,000, $50,000, $50,000, $50,000. all the way through these continuances. I'm like, you're not even doing anything. You're finding, you know, you're finding, like, a piece of paper. Right. So every time he'd look at me and say, let me ask you a question. He said, what's your freedom worth, Joe?

Dick! So I'm like, I just got scammed. Yeah, you're scamming. Yeah. So, I don't know. Yeah, I paid $75,000 for an attorney to plead me guilty. To take a plea. Yeah, that's what they do.

But, no, I mean, we need them, and there's some good ones. and Frank Mastor is an amazing attorney. He is. That's my guy. So you end up getting charged with running a boy for conspiracy to run a boiler room. Yeah, yeah. But you pay the money back. Yeah, so half of it was already like paid back, obviously.

So we, I got charged with the same thing that Michelle Brown got charged with. I fucking amazing, amazing. idiot so we had to pay like 110,000 to balance right because that's all they got affidavits for because the rest were paid um so the 110 000 each up front to stay out of jail right and um then they give me a year of house arrest uh with uh five years probation so here's the part and i remember we were right in the store i remember telling saying this to you is that here's the part that kills me, she only got 400 and some odd thousand. If she had just issued the fake certificates, if she'd issued fake certificates, she could have got half, two million, five million.

Yeah, I never would have. Who knows? I never would have known. Right. If the investors had gotten these fake certificates, they would have kept, he would have kept raising money. She would have kept issuing the, um, the certificates till she got the five million. And, then she could have disappeared with the five million and then of course he would have figured out one day somebody would have wanted to go buy the company or go take a tour or talk to the doctor or something at some point it would have it would have all fallen apart but she could have got five million instead she you know like an idiot just immediately just started like woohoo and sort running running around puppy palace and buying you know collars for her dog or whatever like just

ridiculous so yeah for a limited time at McDonald's Enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for $5 bucks plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery.

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 dinner's July 18th.

so so you were on probation yeah i did uh i did the one year home confinement was miserable and then uh five years four years four years probation and uh yeah what the one guy get what was the one guy that actually went to jail man so that was so that was so sad that was like a really sad moment because you know he was like he was basically a partner like he was he was working his way into a partnership with me and you know it was a great guy and he for some weird reason right because you know we had to turn ourselves in right and then bond out and um and you know i had a private attorney right defending me he had a public defender and he took an open plea with the judge

and for that, for what Michelle did. Right. And they gave him 15 years in prison for that. And he didn't do a goddamn thing. He's just one of the guys raising the money. Right. So he's one, but think about it. All this happening is I work for somebody, I cold call, I raise money.

And they come in and they say, hey, they give a presentation. hey there's this agro you know agro what's it called energy agro energy here's what we do blah blah blah they give them some some glossy brochures they show them a website they say we're raising money here's how much you get he's like okay okay just like any other company that came in a light company a doorbell company a company that makes wrist watches whatever they're raising money for they come in they give a pitch they go oh okay they start making cold calls they raise the money and then a few weeks later he finds out he's being indicted. Like, what do you mean? There's an arrest war. What do you mean? What did I do?

Gets a, doesn't have the money to get a private attorney, gets a public defender. Public defender says, he's saying, I didn't do anything wrong. All I did was what I was told to do with, they came in. It's just like anything. I didn't do it. I didn't know that these people were spending the money. And the public defender says, well, you can go in front of the judge and do what's called an open plea. But you're at the mercy of the judge. You can explain to the judge what happened. I didn't know anything. I didn't do anything. Here's what happened.

And the judge may take pity on you. Instead, they give him 15 years. Yeah, I heard he fell to his knees. He went in front of the judge and said, Your Honor, this is what happened. He explains, I worked for this company. They came in. We do cold calls.

We raise money. I didn't know it was a scam. Judge gave him 15 years. And everybody else got... Probation. House arrest and probation. Because they... Because they had private.

attorneys that made a made or even if they had a public defender they they took a plea bargain they took a plea they admitted guilt and took probation or admitted guilt and paid a fine right yeah yeah so everybody else in private attorneys but they they made their agreement up front he felt like yeah I can explain this I can explain this to the judge he'll understand he didn't they can't really claim ignorance in anything any any sort of criminal activity They don't want to hear it. No. You can't say, I didn't know.

Right. Ignorance is no excuse for the law. I think that's the term. And, yeah, 15 years. I mean, you know, here's this. I still speak to him. He's out now. Oh, yeah?

He didn't do 15 years, right? He got to. No, no, no. He did, I think, seven? Seven years? Something like that. Seven years. Yeah.

Well, listen, I'd be bitter. I'd be a bitter, bitter, pissed off person. like that would that would that would ruin my good nature oh man because i have a good nature i'm a nice person i feel you know i'm a pretty pretty happy go lucky guy i'm not better at all but i'm also very guilty yeah you did it like if i had gone to if i went to prison because that i wasn't guilty i come out burn that place down oh man i'd be pissed oh i'd be oh i can't imagine that like that seven years or something you didn't do really didn't really didn't didn't have any part in you know i interviewed a guy the other day did 16 years for a rape and a

murder at 16 years old didn't do it and wow got released 16 years later what he did 16 years and then after 16 years how they figure out what like an old thing uh no the um uh what is it the innocence project came in and found out retested the DNA and uh found out that who the DNA went to was a 29 year old guy and since when this guy was in in prison for the rape and murder he didn't commit, the guy that did commit it, killed a school teacher. Cops totally frightened. Why did they put him in prison? At that time, they didn't have the technology?

They had DNA, but they didn't have the Codis, the database where you could test it. So they tested it against him. They knew it wasn't his DNA. They said, oh, she's promiscuous. It's some other high school student. Well, then 15 years later, he gets the Innocence Project to test it again against to put it into Cotis. Let's see if we can find the guy, the real guy.

They find the real guy. They release him. he gets out he sues yeah but they didn't make a case to say oh that was just the guy that was with him before him no no because they they had they had pinpointed an actual student they had said oh it's this student keep mind he had a public defender who did nothing who's basically like oh take a plea take a plea like he he did nothing to them trial i mean it's just complete and then the cops listen it's you got to watch the video you'd have to watch the whole interview it's it's fucking horrific but still same thing it's like what's going on like it's horrible the more of these

I do, like I'm actually a big proponent of of law and order. Like I'm, I'm like I don't have a problem. Right. You need it. Right. So, you know, I'm, I'm not like a, I don't have a bad taste I'm out from the place. What I don't like is how how the authorities or investigators or whatever you want to call it. Right. I feel like their performance is somewhat competitive in a way. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like it's just another notch in their belt. Right. It's about getting a it's about indictments yeah it's about let's get the indictment let's get the arrest they should be rewarded on accuracy right but they're not really concerned about justice and that's what I'm as I do more and more of these I'm like are you serious like you hear that you hear it

and you're like that's like there's no way the cops didn't know and sometimes the cops are even just completely faking the information like like like they're they're creating information they're lying they're blatantly lying I mean I feel like this they're fearful of wasting the government's resources that's like the greatest fear if they're conducting 18 months investigation to come up in the end they're like on these guys didn't do anything and if a 16 year old kid has to get a life sentence well then that's fine i need the promotion he has to do life that's my that's that's problem like that's literally that was like how they were huh that was like uh almost like racini right yeah well yeah but at least rcini was doing anything doing something he was actually russini was actually making methamphetamine like he was actually a drug dealer at least you were

you were in the you were in the position to be to be framed right but this is just a high school kid who happens to live a mile away from where they found the body oh that that was this guy that that was the scenario yeah yeah and he and he was a student they were also he was a he was a student of the school they were in some of the same classes somebody brought up 16 year old somebody brought up his name he went in for an interview they said hey let's do a polygraph he does the polygraph they tell him he failed they questioned him for seven hours straight tell him these the the cops are got these other cops are going to hurt you i'm trying to help you just go ahead tell him a story just just admit that what you admit you did this and I can get you won't be arrested I got to get you out of here

you just got to tell him something so he says okay okay I did it I did it and he's crying where they're where they wear you down they keep you in the room for like seven hours you're 16 years old two days and you get so tired you just want to like oh you can have a nice warm bed buddy don't worry here's a pillow you know we'll give you a bed just admit it they're so tired you see these things that they're like all right fine I did it let me go sleep well and he's 16 years old you're 16 years old, you've never had a grown adult, especially a police officer, yell at you, pound the death, get in your face, threaten you. They're scaring him. He's terrified. And he thought eventually he just says, okay, okay, I did it. Can I go home now? You're under arrest. But anyway,

so, so eventually. Well, I have a question about, yes. Yes. Yeah, sorry. Oh, no, well, that's not the scam. Well, I know how, how do they target you? How do they know? How do they know, like what Michelle brawn yeah just she just needed a stock broker she needed somebody raising capital at that time there was like only a few guys in town that were uh at the time there was only a few guys in town that were i guess successful at like raising money for you know to say the five to ten million dollar range startup companies um there was really only just a few of us that were kind of out there about it and and doing it in that way John Boyle

He knew me And he just he dropped my name and told her You know where my office was And where you know where my crew hangs out and everything And then and then so she pulled up on me You know But I definitely wasn't quiet I mean it was pretty loud around town

So Yeah It's a good question I figured I should have Yeah But I already knew that Because I knew Because you had told me before

So yeah Yeah Okay, so What's up with the, what happened with the bouncy house? You're in the bouncy house? The bouncy house. You know, I've seen that.

Did I send you the video? There's a video. You probably thought I was making that up for a second. No, no, I was trying to pinpoint the actual, like the date. Memorial Day. Yeah. And I remember when I read the story, I was like, I wonder if there's a video.

There is, there's a video of the bouncy house, the whole thing. Do I remember correctly there was five with six kids? And it, there was a bunch of kids. Some of them. Broken arms, they fell out. Yeah. Tornado picked up a bouncy house at the beach. Right.

He's still on probation, by the way. So he's still, I'm sorry, this is when you were at the beach. You were at the beach and on probation, not interested in raising money. Behind me, I'm like, I'm never messing with any. I don't ever want to touch OPM. Right. I don't want to go near, you know, I'm like, I don't want to go near stocks. I don't want to do anything.

I just want to enjoy my life. Right. Right. You know, and go work at Walmart or something. Yeah, yeah. And you're at the beach one day? Yeah, I'm there with my girlfriend and we're hanging out on the sand, relaxing with Memorial Day. And she has a son.

He was, I don't know, three years old. And they had a bunch of these bouncy houses on the beach for Memorial Day, whatever, the city, you know, provided them. And I see something coming in from the ocean. like it was a cloud and it looked like it was falling into the ocean right so i'm like well look at that over there and uh it was a tornado so a tornado comes on to land and it swoops up one of the bouncy houses with kids in it it takes it like 90 feet in the air are you watching it right now no no we should play it bro like it like it like they show like the people are screaming like there's a bouncy house it throws it over there's over the over the didn't it throw it over like the street or

something. Yeah, it landed, I think, in the road or something like that. And her son was just in that fancy house. So anyway, the, so that happens. So now I was like, I don't want to go in the water. So then I put my shoes on and let's just go to the restaurant, you know, get something to eat. I want to get the hell away from that ocean. It's like popping out white squalls and shit. So we do that. We leave the beach and we start walking up A1A. And when we get to a restaurant, I think it was Cafe Del Mar right there on Fort Laudette Beach, I hear my name called. So, you know, I look around and I see an old friend of mine. This guy, Royce Teets. And he was sitting there with two ladies. One was his girlfriend. One was his girlfriend's friend. Nice people.

you know they're you know young professionals and uh I've known it for I don't five six years prior to that we met but mind you I mean I just got out of that whole thing like house arrest I haven't seen a lot of people you know it's kind of you know off the grid for a little while so I say what's up how you doing I was in great shape at the time like that's what you do when you have you know money problems you work out every day all day and then you start making a little money and and then you get fat and start eating lobster all day, right? I know.

I'm going to lose his 15 pounds minimum. Go ahead. So I see voice and, you know, we start talking, how you been? How you doing? He tells me about a project that he's working on. And obviously it was, I mean, it had to do with the whole raising capital. Right. Private equity, startup stuff.

And so we talked for a half hour, 45, minutes come down by the office joe come check it out man and i'm like listen i don't want to you know i don't be part of anything like that right now i just i don't trust anyone i mean i lost faith and everything you know i felt like i went through all the uh you know the proper channels and proper protocol to know if something's bullshit or uh or real and and i failed right so i don't have confidence in myself at that point to work in that space so i'm like all right you know whatever give me your number and we'll go get lunch one day so we do that we get lunch at the cheesecake factory on my solas and uh he then takes me over to his office and i swear if uh it was like a drug

like i walked in the office with him and i see guys like writing deals i see people on the phone laughing with their clients having like you know great conversations um and i just felt like i just bumped into like the one that got away you know and uh i just like everything just went out the window i swear like all my like uh strength to abstain getting involved in that industry because i felt like you know the industry had just put me through that and chewed me up right um it went out the window and we started instantly we were like negotiating we're like sitting in his office okay so so how does the deal work you know what's the valuation you know who put that valuation on it

you know what's what's your role what's your cut da da da and then for the time I went home I had my whole plan right I had everything planned out mapped out in my head and so I showed up the next day and and that's and then we started working together from that of point forward. Okay, so you had your plan. What was the plan? The plan that I made with Royce or the plan that I made with myself.

What were both plans? What were the plans? Royce's plan was to have me get back into the industry and work for him. Right. Right. He's like, I just got a power broker involved. So, you know, he figured I would go in there. He'd sit me down and, you know, wherever I fit.

in and I'd basically, you know, make a living and put a bunch of money in his pocket. My plan was to basically, you know, get my beak wet again, you know, shake off the rust, and then show out and then renegotiate and say, you know, what am I doing here? Because, I mean, you know, I know what I'm capable of. and uh i didn't want to i definitely i hadn't worked for anyone since i was 23 22 so i wasn't ready to go sit in a cubicle and you know what i mean right so it was just uh it was like a kind of uh you know a foundation that i needed to get back in okay so what happens so so i start working in there and And he had been involved in a, it was really, it was a medical deal.

And not to get too into that, the details aren't important. But bottom line is I got in and I worked alongside, you know, all the employees. And about two weeks in, I opened up a ton of accounts, right? I attracted a bunch of new accounts. And then I was there one day when, Royce brings in a friend of his with two other people. And I believe their names were Lex, Anthony, and David. And these guys had a couple of different projects they were working on.

They were pretty cool projects. One was like a wind turbine, right? Which I never, I mean, I saw like a million of those deals. So I was like, whatever. You know, I'm not interested in that. Not that it was my say at the time, right? Right. These were deals that were brought to Royce.

but one of them was a deal that involved the lottery, okay, and the idea was to create a mobile app or a web app, as they call it, you know, both a web presence, but obviously, you know, a corresponding mobile application, iOS and Android, and it would be a lottery concierge service where if you wanted to play the lottery, you wouldn't have to walk into a store and wait in line and buy a ticket, and especially if you lived in one of the 16s or so states that don't have lottery, you wouldn't have to drive over state lines to buy a ticket or not buy a ticket. You would always have access. So we would facilitate the purchase or, you know, Lodonet was called, would facilitate the order

and actually conduct the transaction, safeguard the ticket, and then make a marketing opportunity out of any winning. If someone won, they would create, you know, spectacle out of it and deliver the winnings and, you know, promote a lot on it. So, you know, collect like a 50-cent concierge fee if a user bought up to five tickets in any one particular lottery. That deal was presented that day. And, you know, the founder of that, David. Gray, David Gray. Right.

Right. He basically said, he basically said, he basically said, he showed me. demo and he looked around like how do you guys do this like what like you you literally can generate a following and generate awareness and investment interest over the phone I said yeah I mean so a lot of the business is done and he's like he was almost he almost didn't buy in I think I so I said watch this so I picked up the phone and I called one of the guys that I had opened like a week or two prior and I think it was like 50 grand or something. So I got him committed the first investment for that idea and startup. And he was just

like, holy shit. You know, I mean, this is possible. And incredibly talented guy, that's what I was interested in. So when that came around, this is like two weeks into working with voice, when that deal came into the office along with David, I didn't pay much attention to the other guys. I started getting invoices here i said listen you have to do this deal and i want to do it with you right you know i'm not going to sit here in a cubicle for long you know that i'm either going to go my own way and get my own deal or you and i do this together and you know what i'm capable of right you know whatever deal i take on you know i complete it i finish it and you know do it pretty efficiently so he was a little uh opposed to it you know he didn't want to lose control and you know

He wanted to keep me down like usual in that industry. But he accepted, and we agreed, made an agreement to go 50-50, and that meant both in, you know, as far as working towards the deal and accomplishing the deal, recruiting, training, managing, and obviously, you know, raising capital because we knew we had to grow to take down, you know, several rounds that, you know, we're playing. plan for the company so what was the first first round uh the series the a round was five million and then the b round was going to be another five and then we knew that you know obviously the C would probably be like 25 at least uh or more uh once you know the company had some traction but right now you're just on the five million so yeah okay so you know we ought to do we ought to play the he there's a tape are they um there's a little video the they use to pitch investors right like it's a little lottery net we should put that at the end

of the or we could either put the link in yeah put the link in yeah put the link in and it's a it's a cute little demo of you know them you know explaining like you know about the tickets and everything but it's like a little um it's an animation yeah it's like an animated uh uh pitch deck kind of yeah it doesn't talk about like really it talks a little bit about financials but not about the actual investment opportunity to break down and anything like that. But it's super, but it's good. It's a treat, right? Yeah, yeah, it is.

It's good. Dave did an incredible job when I, and he did so fast. You know, when I met David, because I was never like a high-tech guy, when he watched us work, he said to me something along the lines of, he's like, I can't believe how effective you are. I mean, when you're working like a caveman. Right. And I was like, where hell is this guy?

Pick it up the phones. Yeah, you know, writing notes like on paper. Right. I just, I never adopted the whole like CRM idea. At that time. Right. Yeah, and this is like probably 2015 or something, which I was kind of late to the game. And now, now you know, I'm like the opposite, right?

Right. But, you know, I had my little index card box with my index cards in it. And like with Sharpie, I have a pipeline. and these were like, you know, interested party. So it was pretty generous. And then I was excited about the fact that David offered to help build a CRM, okay, which is, you know, a customer relationship management software. And it's basically something that would help us with our workflow

and the entire sales process to work more effectively and produce more so we can knock down the raises quicker. Right. So obviously I'm like, yeah, that'd be awesome. So he started off with a process where at the end of every lead, you know, he created a button where we would just have to fill in the email and then convert it to a prospect. And at that point, an investor kit would be sent out automatically. Okay. And then we started adding in features like read receipts.

So then we would get notified when a prospect was actually, you know, engaging with the document. documents, which was huge and different for me at that time. Now it's, you know, it's like typically in every CRM. But I was so intrigued by it and started using it. I mean, like really adopting it. And I was fully bought in. So Royce and myself, we went and got another location. At that point, we start knocking down the raise, you know, getting guys involved. Royce had an old book of clients obviously because you know he he never had had any time away from right the industry so he had his you know his preferred clients and and we just went at it you know we raised a fair amount of money in the first month we went down and got a big office with like a warehouse in the back and you

know we had this whole idea that we would make the office a place that nobody would ever want to leave right you know stripper pole let's leave that out it wasn't my idea nobody was more upset about the stripper pole than me it was degrading it was degrading to women it was wrong I just wanted a comfortable safe place for people a safe space right I did make it a requirement though that the pole is removable okay

so it was like a standard fixture in the office it was like but there was a hydraulic system you pushed a button and it came up through the through the through the floor bring them on there was a vote on it you lost I did okay I believe you so um all right so the office is cool yeah so so we got two spaces right next to each other uh in this building and the warehouse in the back, you know, we blew the wall out and made a conjoining door. And on one side, we had the tech team. On the other side, we had, you know, the sales and, you know, the finance end, right? Royce and I were 50-50 on the finance end.

And, you know, and David ran the whole tech side. And he ran it, I mean, incredibly well. It was a tight ship. You know, we had like 40 to 50 guys there plugging away. quality assurance as opposed to the sales team side which is they're having they're having Friday night meeting they bring in midgets and throw them through through and through and through goals and yeah I see I hear it was a little shirt for Tuesdays in that warehouse we built the bar you know we had pool tables we put barber chairs in there I never wanted guys to leave and go get a haircut on Friday I'm like just

stay here we'll cut your hair right we had barbers come in you know across the there was a guy that had a he owns the tent team fahad he uh he would bring over like a water reclaimed system because i wanted to wash the cars too so we took care of our guys you know we literally on friday nights we washed their cars uh you know gave him haircuts i helped them look sharp you know we had the tailors come in and you know measure them you know get them nice suits they'd go meet with clients you know and uh and you know we supported all that We had everything catered, lunch, dinner. And this is such a vanilla version of what I got when we were in prison.

It was, there was a whole bunch of other stuff involved. But anyway, I hear you. It was important to us. You know, we, we ironed their clothes. We make sure everybody used, we had a, we had a curse jar. Milk and cookies. No. But it was, it was a nice operation.

And it was, it was a successful operation. because I ended up realizing after the beta test that Dave ran where he actually, he launched and executed on some affiliate marketing. You know, the mobile app was live. You could go on there. We set up relationships with different vendors throughout the country that would install a high-speed laser printer. They'd print out right on the lot of scantron when an order would come in.

So they were partners of ours. and then they would package everything up and they'd send it off the lot on that and we'd take possession of everything. So once we had some traction, I had done some gold deals in Columbia, so I had these attorneys over there. And in conversation with one,

he said that the lottery was privately owned in Columbia. I think it was called Balado. Bilato. And I was shocked. I was like private. Because, you know, in the U.S., you have state lotteries, like the Florida lotto,

California lotto, and then you have federal lotters, like Powerball Mega Millions, which are the bigger ones. And in South and Central America, a lot of the different lotteries are privately owned. So you could start a business, and if you obtain a gaming license, you can launch a lottery. Right. As long as you follow the different, you know, requirements, like how much money you have in the bank, the bond, and all that stuff. So as a little pet project in the background, I start pushing. that, you know, we started, I started funding these attorneys to go down there and poke around. And we come to find out that, that he ended up having a contact in, within the Gaming Commission of the, in Peru.

Right. The Peruvian Gaming Commission. So I tried to force him or, you know, promote some sort of engagement between them. And once they started speaking, I mean, they were really open to. the idea of of us being a part of something down there they put us in touch with the existing lottery called latinka and throughout all this and i'll tell you about about the whole model and then you know i think it's important to share with you uh obviously you know how anthony comes into the fold yeah but uh all this more and royce the whole how royce that whole relationship

deteriorates. So we're at this stage now where we're starting to poke around down in South America and we start thinking, well, we can be a lottery concierge service or help these lotteries down there go digital because down there they're very, I mean, they sell lottery in such a primitive way. They have like these ropes and strings. I don't know if you've ever seen it at like stoplights. They have like lottery tickets on like strings or something.

It's insane. They have like reps that go out there and sell lottery. Right. And they do good numbers. In Lima, they were doing $10 million a day, right, in lottery. 50% goes in the jackpot and builds it up, and the other 50% goes in the company's pocket, right? So we're at this stage where we're prospecting different gaming commissions.

And I call a prospect one day that was put on my desk from one of my callers by the name of Thomas Jacobson. and he's a I think he ran some sort of ranch in Texas I believe and Thomas Jacobson says to me you know your proposal looks great

it's interesting but I don't do anything unless my broker my money manager gives me a green light so he wanted to run it by his money manager he goes in and does that

and I get a phone call one day and on my voicemail I hear someone and by the name of Anthony Calabope asking me to call him back and give him some more information. He had a couple questions in regards a lot on it. And typically there's so many fish in the sea and so many interested parties at this stage of things that, you know,

I mean, I never really, I'm like, all right, I mean, the guy who wants to do it. Yeah, lots of phone calls, lots of emails. Yeah, like, you know, time management's important, right? So I was like, I mean, typically I won't call these people back. It's like, you know, I'm not going to have an argument with your broker. I mean, to try to bring another guy, is like asking your wife if your mistress is pretty. Right.

I know what the guy's going to say, right? So, for some reason, I called him back. I don't know why. It was something he said, I guess, that, or the mood I was in. And I called this gentleman back, and we, he asked me a few questions. And obviously, why are you calling it? What are you asking my client to do? What are you asking me to invest in?

what are you guys who are you so so i explain everything we end up on the phone for i kid you not maybe three or four hours going back and forth about just all these random things right all industry related and towards the end of the conversation long story short uh he ends we end up coming to an agreement of not only getting his client involved but then rolling his whole book into owning a piece of this And we negotiated his payout, you know, his commission structure, finder fees, or whatever we want to call it. And he became a representative of Latternet, right? So we worked together for the next three, maybe four months, you know, remote. He was out of Las Vegas.

And I don't know how in depth you got and all that in the story. he ended up you guys he's funneling some of his customers to buy to invest and then eventually he comes in to uh to the the u.s and you pick him up at don't you pick him up at the airport something like yeah yeah yeah so he uh he was engaged with uh with a local girl from florida and they moved out to los Vegas because you know he had he had a drug problem uh and you know he had gotten and was a part of like, you know, the 12-step program, like hearing into it. And he just wanted to get away from Florida. So he moved out to Las Vegas.

He was happy over there. And we really built up a solid friendship over the phone, never met each other because he was just, I never met anybody like him. You know, he focused a lot of his energy on the same things. He was extremely talented at what he did. And, I mean, we were finishing each other sentences. You know, I know it sounds corny, but, you know, we would do conference calls with clients and investors. And we were just really, the synergy was there, right? So I was trying to do everything in my power to get him to move back here because I wanted his energy in there.

Right. Because, you know, we're always pushing for growth. So he was opposed to the idea. He kept telling me, listen, flawed is bad for me. Right. And, you know, just leave it at that. So being as persistent as I am, right, I kept pushing, and I didn't really know that he had a problem at that point. I just figured, I don't know, he just didn't want to live here, right?

Right. He ends up telling me, and by this point, mind you, three, four months into this, we had raised like probably $2 million, I mean, effortlessly. So he was an asset. So I tell him, I basically bribe him. to come. I'm like, listen, I'll get you this, I'll get you that, I'll buy you, you know, whatever you want. You want a car, you want this. I mean, I knew the guy's a huge asset. Right. I do well together.

So eventually he flies in. I go and I pick him up at the airport. And the minute this guy walks out of the terminal with his fiancé, I spot him and I was like, I know this guy. I was sure of it. Like, I've seen him before. I've met him before. And it's, you know,

obviously industries become small the longer you're in them right right and uh when he was getting his bag and loading in the car i just at the weirdest feeling what i did yeah i snapped the picture of him because i wanted to ask around you know what i went through with michel brawn made me extremely right like hypersensitive to to things going on and you know whatever i got involved in so i wanted to get people's opinion or just know if they knew who he was so he loads his bags up nice to meet you finally you know put a face to the name so and so forth they jump in you know we're talking we're you know catching up we're making plans and uh and that's all fine right he had a house

already he was renting out i think in the del Rey area and it just so happens that a tenant of his had moved out so it was a perfect opportunity for me to kind of push him into not getting another tenant and just moving his life here so we could build together So I dropped him off at that house and he's over there. He's repairing things, fixing things with, you know, contractors and whatnot. The next day, our plan was to meet into the office at, I don't know, 9 o'clock, say. When I left him, I went and met up with Royce, okay, my partner. Right.

And I sat down with Royce and he's like, okay, did you pick the broker up, you know, the guy from Vegas. I said, yeah. And I show him the picture. I said, let me ask you a question. Royce, do you recognize this guy? And I'm staring at him. And I remember when it was yesterday. He, like, they literally looked like he was going to throw up or something. And then he stares at me. And he's like, he's like, what is? Is this a fucking joke? And I'm like, you know, I was like laughing. And like, what are you talking about? I thought he was like joking around. And anyway, I come to find out that this guy was Royce's mentor and I think 16, 17 years prior to this, he had brought Royce into the industry and his name wasn't Anthony Calabope. His name was Frank Nuzzle. So in my mind,

I'm like, I'm like, here we go again, this crazy shit. Right. So he's using an alias. Correct. Right. At this point though, like you're using. an alias right like because you're you're not supposed to be working in this industry right i was very scared of of uh of getting in trouble right and now i'm not doing anything egregious at this point it's a i mean ladenet is a real company um the money's going where it's supposed to go you're raising the money you're doing everything by the books but technically you don't have a license so you're using an alias yeah and and you didn't need a license for the structure we had okay However, in my first running with, you know, that whole situation with Michelle Ron, I was banned from the industry, right, for life, which is like so aggressive, in my opinion, because, I mean, it was one thing that happened and whatever it is.

Right. Well, so here's what, here's Colby. So here's, here's what's interesting, is that he's using an alias and Anthony's using an alias. they both know they're using aliases they never address it they just continue on addressing each other as that and even though

he knows that he knows and he knows and he knows they never say anything they just continue on I thought that was like professional courtesy like I just uh

and I wasn't using an alias to run away from anything but the fact that I was branded as a bad actor yeah yeah which suck because I never intended to screw anyone over. I never intended for anything, you know, anything to hurt anybody. Yeah.

But no, I don't think that's what I did. I don't think that's the case. I just think it's, I mean, I know that's not the case. I know you're using it because I had a license. I lost my license. I'm not technically supposed to be, you know, doing this. So I don't want it to come up. I'm not planning on.

It's not like out you're setting up a scam, you know. Right, right, right. So. So, but I couldn't understand. why he used an alias and i just figured maybe it was a similar situation right right but in any case i never asked right um but i knew who he was i knew he was real talented and i knew he was real talented and raved about his talent before i ever even met the guy because you know we had conversations obviously about how we got into the industry um you know who taught us and uh and i

always knew that name frank nozzo because voice would talk about him and he knew the name I'm Isaac Grossman, right? Because, you know, we'd share stories or whatever. So, I was like, this is crazy. I'm like, this guy. So now this guy had a falling out with Royce a long time ago. And apparently they were like enemies because they had disagreements. Anytime that happens in the brokerage industry or, and you talk about splitting up

clients, one's always going to say that the other one robbed them. Right, right? Right. And he'd shown you, Roy, had shown you his photograph before that's why you that's why you that's why he looked familiar exactly yep so uh after that um i was already i mean i started getting like i just started already wasn't he already being yeah okay yeah he started uh we were making a lot of money and he started uh he started uh he started just partying too much going out take a vacation

you know he stopped coming in frequently you know he had no schedule right he would pop in whenever he wanted to and I was the one there opening up at 8 a.m. leaving at like 11 at night every single day right I become like obsessive when I do things and it kind of made me you know obviously I was a little angry about the fact that we're 50 50 on this and I'm doing every ounce of the work you know out of the first round that five million we raised Royce raised 12,500 dollars and and and we raise the rest, right? So Anthony has no idea that his enemy is my partner. And Royce now knows that Anthony is Frank.

So I tell Royce, listen, this is not planned, Royce. I said, you saw how it happened. I called a guy from Texas, Tom Jacobson. This is Tom Jacobson's broker, you know. He's like, what are the odds? I get it, but I have nothing. It's not a fucking plan, Royce. So he says, I don't want, I don't want anything to do with him.

He said, I don't want him near me. He's like, just tell him to go back to Vegas. So I'm a good partner, right? And I make a deal with someone. I'm going to see it through. And had he really wanted that and had he been persistent, I would, I would have agreed. I would have said, no problem, right? We'll cut him off.

but I told him, I said, Royce, you, uh, you haven't done much, you know, I'm killing myself over here. Right. And this guy's bringing in money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Forget it. I mean, he probably made six figures that last month off the guy, right?

Off his production alone. You know, he rolled millions of dollars in, uh, and there were other things, too, that we were doing and that, that he contributed to. So, you know, I, I expressed myself and I said, you know, You know, I'm killing myself over here in this office, giving it everything I got. And, you know, I didn't plan for this. I have a partner that's absent right now. And that's the first time that we exchanged words about his lack of effort.

So he, you know, he says, you're a guy such an ego maniac. I could see it in his face, like, you know, anyone who says anything negative. Like, you can't give him constructive criticism, right? Right. He thinks there's a personal attack. So he says, I don't know, man. And he's like, I don't know, I really, he's like, he's the devil. He's evil.

I'm like, all right, you know. I kept pushing. He finally says, okay. I say, voice, do not come in tomorrow, though, please. Like, let me talk to him, okay, first, before you come barging in the office and you got to start, you know, throwing fists. So he said, fine, do what you got to do. Because he didn't want to stop his vacation either, you know?

Right. Now I'm getting on him a little bit about not working so hard. So the next day, we walk into the office. and you know I'm waiting I usually got there first I'm waiting for everyone to get in and Anthony shows up I'm like how you doing I show him around he's all excited we have gorgeous office and everyone loved the lounge area right it was super cool and we're talking and then who comes stumbling in Royce right after he promised me that he wouldn't come in so they immediately start like brawling in the office

okay like right at each other and it was a mess and yelling but not fighting right yeah no like even like getting like physical and everything like and then uh but you know how guys are like an hour later we're all at the bar having a drink right and they're like oh man i love you you know whatever so royce from that point on just got worse and worse and worse because he put himself in a state of mind where he wasn't producing and um and whatever it was the substance abuse uh you know uh the fact that he had a couple of guys around him that were actually i mean just a lot more talented it really like shattered his ego and his confidence and um and we like saw it happen you know uh he started because of his lack of performance he actually

started bashing the deal and saying that's why I'm not contributing like I don't like this and I don't like that and there was I mean it was a beautiful deal right it really was we actually went as far as to get our agreements with Latinka in Peru were to become a partner of Latinka the gaming commission down there said that we can't have part or take part in the purchase of lot of tickets or facilitate the purchase if we don't have our own gaming license. So the ticket said, we'll buy you out. And nobody wanted to sell because I don't get 10, 20 million. I mean, what was possible was way greater than that.

And we were all patient enough to wait. So they said, okay, fine. The other option is, because we do want to do this because in Peru, you have 50 million people, okay? and the vast majority of them have smartphones. A company Vietel, they built a 50,000 mile fiber optic cable through the whole country,

and they were dialed in, right? They all had Wi-Fi. So they end up making a meeting with us to the Gaming Commission. And now, we're now in a position right now, right, with all this going on with Royce and Anthony or Frank, where we're in line now

to potentially get a gaming license over there. Roy saw all of this, and he knew what was going on, and everyone knew what was going on. And he started just getting really bad, right? And he started feeling, I guess, jealous of the fact that, you know, Anthony and I were just crushing it. You know, we were doing some cool things and funding a lot of projects. At this point, he starts telling people that I'm stealing from him. Okay. And by a very good friend of mine, he approached me.

He said, listen, are you screwing your partner over? And I'm like, no. Every penny I get, he gets. Right. And so we get to the point where I kept hearing this thing. So I tell Royce one day, I say, Royce, I keep hearing that you're saying that I'm screwing you over. He's like, no, I would never, no, I'd never say that. So then it gets to the point where he said.

because you're screwing me over, right? This guy was a maniac. And then as things go on, the next couple of weeks after that, I keep hearing it for more people that not only I'm going to screw him over, but he's going to have me killed. And in my mind, I'm like,

this guy's not going to do anything like this. He's out of his mind. Right. Because first of all, I'm not screwing him over. Second of all, he thinks he's like some sort of gangster or something. And, I mean, like, you're a broker. Right.

You know, relax. you're still cutting him checks every week he's just is even coming in the office at all he's just collecting checks yeah and uh and a lot of people ask me well why would you even do that but despite how i looked on paper at the time my reputation locally was important to me because i had a lot of guys that believed in me and that came and worked with me and uh i don't care if i make a bad deal right you got to see it through and then just tell yourself i'm never going to do another deal with this guy right what was his beef with this got yeah is that coming up oh they just felt yeah go ahead sorry they well the story behind that was frank and uh this is real name

frank nozzle frank and uh frank and royce they worked together uh royce was his junior broker and when uh when royce left Frank Royce actually he took some clients with him and I believe he took clients and did a separate deal without his senior broker's knowledge and then he comes up

one day and he drops some money on the table like here's your share it's just a dumb thing to do and he went and did a deal without his partner and then his partner was supposed to believe that that was his share or why would you call it clients without me

just a bunch of drama so then they broke up the partnership and they both the tactic client book and you know and i don't know how many millions that on the management but it just ended bad you know and uh uh that's the whole backstory but for me but um now so are we going to call them frank or we're going to call them anthony what do you want to still confused which one do you want to stick with uh anthony anthony anthony yeah so anthony is continuing to work with us everything's great there um we're now approaching the point where we're about

to close out the A round. Right. And Royce's threat, he's telling people he's going to have you killed. Right. And he's also, he starts becoming a cancer. He would show up in the office from time to time, and he would actually start saying negative things about the company. Right.

Like how, like it's BS that we had, that we were in line to get a gaming license in Peru. He was so uninvolved that these things, to him, they didn't sound possible maybe. So we thought that they weren't real, maybe. And who knows what he thought. But the fact is, is he was bashing the company. Right. Not only are you now not contributing, but now you're making it my job harder. Right.

And you still expect to get a check cut. Right. So that's when we actually did cut him off, okay? Because now you're an enemy to the company. So once that happened, then I started really hearing this that he's going to have me killed. Right. Right. And what I then did, I called him.

him one night because I'm not going to let that linger right you're going to try to solve the issue or come to some sort of understanding and I was ready to go over his house one night so I call him he sounded just like out of it that whole day I remember thinking to myself like we might get to do a fist fight with this guy like you know we might get to a fight at some point and um i'm on my way over there and uh that night i remember he just sounded off he really sounded like just so fucked up uh when i was pulling down the road i called him and i said hey voice i'm down the block just give him a heads up you know like open the door or whatever and uh and he said to me he said don't go to the front door he said meet me around

in the back by the dock so I'm walking around But this whole time during the day He knew you were coming that night Yeah, okay Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah So he, okay, so he kind of had a plan Yeah, I mean in retrospect, yes

Okay At the time I just, I figured We were gonna talk it out And figure something out And I mean, whatever But, so I'm driving over there I call him, Royce, I'm down the block Meet me around the house

Going the back by the dock, he says Right I said, okay, I hang up. I start thinking to myself. Like, that was odd. He said it like, he just, again, he sounded weird. He sounded, he almost sounded like he was crying or something, right? Like, just destroy it.

So as I'm pulling up, I called my girlfriend at the time and I said, do you think that this guy would really do some crazy shit? Like, do you think he would try to actually kill me? I mean, what do you think? And she instantly, she's like, yeah, what are you stupid? Did you tell her he said, come around the back? Yeah, yeah, I explained it. And she said, that's shady.

She's like, what do you? She's like, turn around right now or go meet him somewhere at a public place, at least. Right. So I said, yeah, you're right. I hang up the phone. And I call him back. And now I'm driving like real slow on the street, trying to manage this situation. I say, hey, boys, meet me at the L house down the block.

I'm going to go grab a beer. so he says I have beer he's like I have beer here he's like just just come here he's like yeah he's like I'm in my pajamas all right I'm like okay I said hey uh is ter what's up with terry she wanted to see these pictures from the fourth of July party I'm like uh what's she up to he's like Terry's sleeping he said just just come in the back all right so by now uh Terry's girlfriend yeah Terry's his girlfriend well actually fiancee. So now I'm like, that's cool, bro. I'm like, you know what? Just meet me at the L house. And he said, he's like, bro, he's like, just come in the back. Come. He's like, come in the

back. Well, I'm back here now. I'm in my pajamas. He said, I would never hurt you. He's like, Terry loves you. You like family to us. Who's that you think about getting hurt? Exactly. So it struck me as odd. And I said, listen, voice. I'm going to go to the L house. Come meet me at the L house. I'll buy your drink, right? Put some clothes on. Better yet come in your pajamas, whatever.

All right. So he responded and said something like, something along the lines of, come in the back by the dock. He starts, he starts, like, blowing up, right? Just like a madman scream. Right.

That you just, like, you know, like what the fuck is going on here this guy's losing his shit right so uh at this point I'm pulling in the driveway right and I hadn't

my exhaust was loud on my car and uh I'm pulling in the driveway I hang up the phone and I throw it in reverse and I'm pulling out I pull away and I see him run out in the street

right with his boxers on right and he's like flailing I'm like what the fuck you this guy's gone so the whole thing was creepy right the next day I get a phone call and the way at all happened was so fucked up too I mean I get a phone call the next day from a mutual friend of ours this individual by the name of angel and angel calls me and says Joe he's like did you hear what happened last night I said no what he's like voice he killed your sister I'm like my sister what

I'm like what are you talking about so I hang up on I'm I take my phone I call my sister who lives in Boca right and she answers the phone I'm like Jess she's like yeah I'm like you okay she's like yeah I'm fine why I'm here with mom and I'm like I was I mean I was

I was bugging out I hang up on her I call back angel I'm like what kind of sick joke are you playing He's like, no, no, I'm sorry, no, not your real sister. He killed Terry. Okay, now Terry's his fiancé, and she used to always call herself my sister, right? Right. Me and Royce, you know, at one point, you know, we had a real close friendship.

We were like brothers, right? Right. And before everything started, you know, getting, going south. So I was just, I mean, I was in disbelief, right? And, I mean, immediately I was thinking, so he explains everything to me. He's like, he killed her. He, there's yellow tape in front of the whole house right now. You can't even get over there.

I'm like, how did you find out? He said, I was blowing him up. I was calling him, calling him, calling him. He didn't answer the phone. So then he called another mutual friend of ours. And this guy happened to be on the phone with her, right? When she was shot. Oh, okay, okay.

And he told him everything. He told him, like how it went down. It was such a sad day because, I mean, she was an amazing human being. I mean, the woman, she, you know, she had some hardship early in life and she came up and built a business, a single mother. I think 11 and 9 were the age of her kids from a previous marriage. And she had an incredible business, beautiful house. She was living, you know, the American dream. And now she's dead, right?

So, you know, just creep me out the whole thing. So the police report, right, and the news that night, like after you left, they got into an argument. And he shot her a couple of times, right? It was it once or twice with an AK-47. Yeah. So the neighbors call. No, no, no. The neighbors didn't call.

No, but I think he called. Yeah. I don't think anybody called. Did you hear the recording online? No, I haven't heard that. I don't know if it's still there, but I heard it once. So, oh, I heard it, it was part of the, part of the news, right? Is it a news clip?

I don't know. I don't even know how somebody found it, I was, you said. He called whether or not she was already dead before you came or after, I don't know, exactly with the time. I think it might have been shortly after you didn't show up. So. I think it was before maybe. You think maybe?

I don't know. He sounded so desperate. But, I mean, I've always thought, since that happened, I've had the thought that maybe he was trying to get me there so desperately to say that I killed her. Right, right. Come around the back. Right. Terry's sleeping? Yeah, she's.

Yeah. So you come around the back. There was an argument. You were breaking in. You were going to kill him. Whatever. She got shot in the scumple. Who knows?

But the point is, is that he calls this 911 call and says that she ended up, she pulled a gun on him. they fought over the gun it went off then when they get him downtown and they see by this point they've got him downtown they can see the blood splatter they can see the um the gun the gun powder residue everything they realized she was about six feet away so he he was holding the gun he shoots her so then he changes his story again you know uh the gun went off she was coming at me she had a knife If, you know, it changes like three or four different times until he eventually breaks down and says. Right, then what happened was that he shot him, yeah.

He said that there was, uh, excuse me, he said that there was, he was cleaning the gun, didn't know that there was one in the chamber. Then when they found the gun, there was one in the chamber. Right. So he said that it reloaded, which means the clip was in it. Right. He said it, well, he was cleaning it and there was one in the chamber or didn't know it, the clip wasn't in it.

Well, if it went off, then it wouldn't reload, it wouldn't reload. There was, yeah, had to be. So that's when they caught him in the life. Right. It was just multiple lies. And eventually he breaks down and says that he, you know, there was whatever. It went off. You know, she got it.

He got it away from her. He was holding it. It went off. You know, I never talked. I've seen the individual that was on the phone with her. Right. When she died. But I never brought it up just out of like respect.

I didn't, I'm sure. I heard he went through some things like after that because he was close with her. Right. But I've always been curious. You know, I never asked him. But, you know, he knows. he's probably the only president knows what happened. So the voice gets grabbed.

He's not getting out. Like you're not getting bond. Right, right, right. You're in jail for first jury murder. So what, what happened as far as you know at that point? Yeah. So I was not supposed to be in that industry that I was operating in. Right.

And, you know, the securities industry, anything to do with stocks and, you know, all that stuff. Anyway, at that point, I had a feeling that he was going to start making it known for what reason. I don't know, to get like a bit of mattress maybe. But he's trying to get out of a life sentence. I'm sure he's trying anything at this point. Like once they've got you, now he's scrambling. Yeah, I mean, but to think that that would get you out of late.

I mean, you know. Anyway, I mean, he did what he did. And so, I mean, I kind of knew that that something was coming down the pipe. I didn't think it would be, I thought it would be like regulatory. Right. So he tells the authorities, he tells the authorities that you guys are raising money. You're involved. You're not licensed.

They're doing raises. They're bringing in money. But he lies. Then he end up saying like, oh, it's a Ponzi scheme. Like he's, it's bullshit. Like he starts saying they're not, they don't even have a license. They don't like all the things that he's kind of been saying it, but, but it aren't true. He just starts playing all that up and starts, yeah, just to try and get.

You should put the link up to the gaming commission. It's still active, actually. It's actually still active right now. I check from time to time. Right. I have it, I guess. But, um, but yeah, all that was, uh, he made it out like everything was, you know, not true. Like everything was a scam.

And I guess they fed into it. I mean, he was a great salesman when he sobered up. he had no choice he was sober in there and he was probably selling the shit out of him right so uh i mean i knew that i probably would lose the ability to be involved but i never expected what happened right you know i never in a million years expected to see that happen you know what happened so what happened i wasn't in the office one day and uh i get a phone call from the same friend that told me that that that Royce was trying or planning or was going to kill me right right and uh he says whatever you do he's like don't come to the office

and i said why what's going on he said there's like 40 FBI agents here right and they're wearing their windbreakers running through the office chaining up everything taking phones taking computers, taking laptops, shutting everything down. I'm like, why? He said, I have no idea. So, so I have a lot of the strokes. I didn't go in the office, right? I call my other partner, right, at that time.

So we had become partners, right, through, you know, different deals that we had made at that time. And he was leading the development a lot on it. And this is David, right? Yeah, yeah, okay. And he says, these guys, they got the wrong place, man. He's like, this is, he's like they took my phone. They took everything.

Honestly, I don't even remember how I called him, but I was on the phone. But everyone's phone was gone. I guess he got to a phone call me, probably at that time. And so we met up. And it's weird. I had a feeling that something like that could happen. because I mean I've seen how I've seen how law enforcement operates sometimes and it's you know if they feel that something's going on it's almost like something will be created

like Warren Buffett says if you put a cop on someone's tail for 500 miles they're bound to get a ticket right so I knew something was going to happen I just didn't I never expected that but uh it happened that happened and then i went to my attorney and i said tell me the deal like what's going on you know where do we stand and he he said give me some time because they dropped a stack of papers like this big like the SEC it was regulatory at that point and um you give me some time my guys will go through it and we'll tell you know what everything looks like so people that don't understand when you say regulatory what do you mean so right now it's not criminal right so You have two. So you basically have the criminal justice system. And then you have the regulatory

bodies that regulate different industries, this one, right, being the SEC, the Security Exchange Commission. So they regulate anything that has to do with securities, you know, the equity markets and whether you're licensed or unlicensed or registered stock or unregistered securities. anyway the regulatory issues you can never go to jail for right it's a fine right company to get shut down right you can lose licenses and things like that criminal I mean obviously everyone knows what criminal is right and typically on a situation like that the regulatory will lead because then I'm guessing it saves a lot of work for the criminal justice system because typically they'll review that file and say, yeah, there's criminal activity in here.

Yeah, you know, I was going to say, plus if you go to court on that, they get to go in and the depositions and do all these things that basically just builds more, you know, most of the time, these guys are trying to get out of it. So they're doing the depositions. They're providing this, trying to satisfy the regulatory investigation. And in the meantime, they're openly incriminating themselves. So then when the FBI says, okay, guess what? It's criminal. And we're going to use all that. yeah all your depositions all of these you know um you're still under your Miranda

anything you say or do even in there right you're done against you yeah so so maybe a day goes by and I contact him again and at this point I'm like off the grid I'm like this is crazy right you're not going home staying with my friend yeah you're yeah I was like sick to my stomach and uh I get back with my lawyer and he says he's like he's like Like, this is, like, this whole thing is, like, criminal. I'm like, really? And he says, yeah, and I read through it myself, right? I just didn't want to believe it.

I'm like, let me wait to hear the good news, hopefully. Or here, this is a bunch of BS. But there was no getting out of it because their indictment, what they, I mean, allegedly, it was all fake, right? What they had written in that discovery was just completely. completely inaccurate. They said that we didn't have a gaming license. They said that all the money was spent and misappropriated on personal things and luxury lifestyles. Not even the case. I mean, look, half the things that the people around in and around that deal have the things that people had was from previous dealings, right? I mean, anyway, it was just like, it was frustrating because I, I know that when, you know, when the feds go for someone they have, I think it's like a 98% is it, 98% point. Right, 98.5% success.

Conviction, right, right. So whatever they thought. And you're not supposed to be there. Exactly. And that's why I didn't have a leg to stand on. Right. So I knew right then and there, I'm like, I'm going to have to take a plea on this. Again, on something that I didn't do.

It's like It was the most frustrating Situation because here I'm just trying to do business right And I keep Getting involved with the wrong guys And as a result You know I'm having to defend myself And

You know at that point I had to make a decision I was like You know we Technically Right We're on the verge of taking over the entire lottery in Peru okay because now going back just a little bit from that point after

Royce had had killed Terry there was a we had gotten the license right so I was going to say there's a newspaper article in Peru about how they gave you the license like there's a there was a whole thing yeah oh Peru on on the newspaper so when when as I mentioned before Latinka the lottery there Latinka gave us a foot in the door with the gaming commission because we refuse to be bought out so they gave us a foot in the door and they set us up with the whole commission

to have a meeting to then get our own independent license to then work with them to, you know, digitize the lottery, right? Right. They were only selling tickets to like Lima, 10 million people in Lima and they were doing about 10 million a day.

Right. So, you know, Peru has 50 million people. Yeah. And mountainous regions, farmland. Right, but they're not in a, in a place to buy lottery tickets, but they all have cell phones. So they all have an iPhone.

So now you've just opened it up to going from five million people in Peru to 50 million people throughout the entire country that could buy it using their phone, even though they don't have a corner store to go to. So they do have their iPhone. So good. And then all while this is happening, we start putting together a global lotto, right,

called Lotto X. And we were actually, we had marketing strategies to go into every, to go into, you know, all the major countries, all the healthy economies and we wanted to form a global jackpot we were having a lot of fun with this whole thing and so needless to say

we end up getting the gaming license but when we got it the gaming commission they start getting a little personal with us and they ask us how did you get here right like who do you guys know

in Latinka had this whole thing come about you know they love the idea. They wanted us to partner. I mean, more money for them, right? The sales tax in Peru, I believe, is 18%. Wow. Yeah. And on that 18% figure, if they're doing 10 million a day in lot of ticket sales, that's $1.8 million a day. Right. It's a lot of money for a country like Peru. So we end up telling them the whole story, you know, how I had an attorney in Colombia I did goal deals with and you know he had a contact there and so on and so forth he's like oh okay so

there's no like family relation or anything like that and I'm like no just we don't know these guys right right so then they open up and they tell us that the uh the lottery latinka there hadn't paid corporate tax in 11 years or something like that that they'd get a lot of money on sales tax and then at the end of the year when it was time to pay corporate tax they were basically like you know like get out of here like you guys may we dare you to shut us down and lose that almost two million a day right it was you know a significant stream of revenue for the government so you know they called their bluff and they were really the only game in town so the government basically pulled us aside and said the gaming commission they basically said um why do you need

latinka right i said well there's a lottery you said okay well now you have a gaming license Right. They said Latinka's due for renewal on their 10-year license in one year. Right. They said, if we help nourish you guys and help facilitate growth in Lotonet, what if we didn't renew Latinka's license next year? Right. So now we're like, sounds great, right?

I mean, now we're like jumping for joy because now we went from being a lottery technology to actually now considering to own a lottery. Right. And, you know, if you look at the numbers, if you're doing $10 million a day with 10 million people in Lima, let's just say you could do $50 million a day with 50 million people in the country, right?

If you had to, you know, if you're in front of all of them. So we start, the numbers are like mind boggings, and we can make $25 million a day if we execute on this. So we start moving on all of that, right? And we pull away from Latinka, and these guys are all mad. They're all like ex-cartel guys, by the way, that own these things.

And we got, I believe, we set up a storefront in Lima. You know, we got the machines where the balls would come up and everything. Right. We had the newspaper there. We had to schedule a time with the news station where they could film the drawing.

You know, you can't have a digital drawing, obviously, because then you could just choose numbers that weren't picked and you just keep building a jackpot. And anyway, you know, this was this was the point that we were at when this whole thing went down. Yeah. And, you know, we had to open up accounts over there and, you know, whatever. I'll just leave that for a, you know. So, so at this point, you go to the FBI and you said, here I am.

I know you guys are coming to indict me. No? Didn't happen like that. No, what happened? so my focus was on launching this lottery right um at that point i uh i i schedule a trip i asked my attorney if there was a warrant for my rest he said no i said so i can travel he said i suppose so you don't have a warrant right you have a passport i'm like yeah so uh so i booked a flight and i was flying to ecuador your girlfriend's from

Ecuador at the time, right? We were taking a trip. That seems reasonable. I mean, I know when I, I remember when I was indicted, I thought, time for a trip. Time for a trip. It's the logical thing. It's a lot of stress. It's a lot of stress.

It's a lot of stress. I get it. I get it. I'm with you. I hear you. So, so we, we, we, let me take a little shopping trip, you know, blow off some steam. and run up the credit cards i get it i get it yeah we go to the airport empty out some accounts go ahead there's a guy uh that was we're sitting in the lounge and he was shitting in the lounge

no sitting sitting sitting in the loud my god i said that's a and uh i feel like i'm back there right now it's weird i haven't talked about this since we sat on my yard right come through the airport everything's good so i'm hanging out and uh i'm next to uh my girlfriend and i look over and i see a guy on the phone and i question myself at that point i'm like am i paranoid that that guy is talking to that guy on the other end of the airport because every time he speaks he shuts up every time he speaks he shuts up i'm like it's weird and I'm watching to see if they stare at me and they never do so I'm like maybe I'm crazy so I tell my girlfriend listen that guy's talking to that guy she's like you're going crazy

so I said I'll prove it I'm going to get up and walk past them and go get a bottle of water over there at that little convenience store and you watch them and you tell me if they look at me Right. So I get up. I walk there. I'm like, I'm going to catch these guys, right? And then I grab a bottle of water. I come back.

I'm walking back. She's on a freaking phone. I'm like, I'm like, she didn't look. I know she didn't look. Right. I'm like, did they look at me? She's like, no. She said, you're crazy.

Did I know for a fact she didn't look? She's sitting there on like Instagram, like posting selfies probably. So just as I suspected, I see both. I see both of them there at the same time simultaneously probably because they're like close one and I thought almost walked out right? They start

coming converging and then they start walking right down the aisle towards me and they close in on me and they say excuse me can I see your passport? I'm like yeah I gave it to him and they said

to my girlfriend they said you can get on that plane he's not getting on that plane and right then and there I know I'm like this is going to be a long trip because what was in that indictment right in that in that in the SEC discovery it was not nice stuff and it was we didn't have a gaming license according to them and I want you to post that link because right it pisses me off for me to say you know yes your honor I lied about the gaming license yes uh it was all bullshit yes it was this and except you know uh except responsibility to get that yeah because the fear of going to trial and and losing and then i mean doing 20 years

yeah versus just taking five and saying you know yeah i did it all i'll never do it again you know so it is what it is and uh they went they brought me over they um they put me in handcuffs and and And I never saw the light of day, actually, literally, until, like, 13 months later, 14 months later, because I didn't get to where I met you until, you know, I was in the holdover. Right. Over in FTC. And then when I got there, I just, I'd never enjoyed being in the sun more. And I somewhat, I felt free. But it was a shitty situation.

So, Anthony. Yeah. What was sad? Huh? That was sad. Yeah. So what happened with Anthony? And this was how, how this was a few weeks before you got arrested or a few months?

It was like probably a month. Okay. Yeah. So a month before the FBI arrest you. When we really knew it was, we really understood Royce's vendetta. Right. When he killed Anthony. Right.

Okay, do you want to just make sure, sorry. Yeah. So we really understood Royce's vendetta when, when Anthony turned up dead, okay? Okay. He, um, I get a phone call from Anthony one day and, uh, Anthony wanted me to come by his house, he had a movie theater and, uh, yeah, they were watching some, uh, financial movie or whatever, and, uh, you know, this was after Terry's death. so I went into a little bit of like a hibernation after that because I felt like it was like a close call with me too because I was like there and I just yeah I've seen enough crazy shit

that I just really toned everything down and I was concerned about what Royce was saying in there to you know to the authorities because I was like this guy's nuts right and I declined I told Anthony, no, I'm good, right? I'm just going to hang out here in my house, just relax, whatever. I had actually set up a separate office for myself at the time

just to stay away from all the craziness. And two days later, I get a phone call from his fiancé. And she says to me, she said, yo, Anthony is dead. And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm like, I couldn't even take it anymore. There's too much shit going on. I'm like, I thought she was playing around with me or something. What a sick, like a sick joke, right?

And then I said, what do you mean? And she tells me that they found him in the bathtub of his upstairs bathroom. And she's like, I know they killed him. I mean, you know who killed him? She said there was a guy over there that I've never met before, but I named Mariko. And this guy knew he was bad news. you know they were hanging out with a couple of friends and uh and she's like he stopped answering his phone and they had those like nest thermostats yeah so she said they were partying too hard

he was hanging out with this girl and i knew something was going on i left i went to my family in virginia the day later he didn't answer his phone joe she says i turned the nest thermostat all the way up to like 92 and then i knew if he was there and okay that she'd see the temperature go back down. Right. She was like baking them out of the house. She's like, but it never went down. And when that stayed like that for like a day, she said,

I called the neighbor and I told the neighbor that a spare key to go inside and please check on my fiancé. The neighbor goes inside. She walks up the steps and she finds Anthony dead in the bathtub, right, with a pillow under his legs, right, and a towel on his shoulder. and his arms crossed like this, right? And apparently there was like a bruise or something. Apparently there was a bruise on his chest, right? The neighbor takes a picture of this.

And Kate tells me all this, and she said, I said, why would she take a picture there? Kate's the fiancé. Right. And Kate tells me because the neighbor said to me, if my husband was found dead and I was in the estate, I'd want to see how we last was, how he was found it. Right.

I don't know. So she asked Kate, do you want me to send you the picture or do you want me to delete it? Right. Kate said, send me the picture. So then, and she's crying when she's telling me all this. And I'm in disbelief. And, me, I mean, we built a really close relationship, me and Anthony. I mean, I really, really genuinely, like, valued our friendship.

Right. You know, for once, it was a guy that he was extremely talented. had no ego right never hated on anyone and was was happy for everybody when when when they actually you know did something good when you when you succeeded in something it was like you know you genuinely happy for you and you don't find that that often right there's always like a little bit of like a like a thorn in there like so um so yeah it was like it was real hurtful to to to see how that whole thing happened, how some scumbags basically, you know, took this great guy out, this incredible talent, a great human being, and what made me sick about the whole thing

was this guy was such a scumbag that he stole his clothing. Do you remember this? Yeah, and like a headset, stupid stuff. And like some bottom of the barrel guy. Right. You know. Also 30, that was like 30 grand or something, too. Yeah, and he took like whatever cash he found. Right. And the craziest part is that I heard afterwards that Anthony was actually embracing this individual. Yeah, yeah. Bringing him into his home, trying to help the guy get his life on track.

Right. Teaching him things. And, you know, he always wanted everyone around to do well. Right. And that guy was Rico. It's what, Joseph. I didn't know who he was at the time. Right.

Kate, Kate just described him. I had never, and I had no friends named Rico, right? So all I said to Kate was, listen, Kate, I don't even know what to say. I'm like, listen, this, this Rico guy, karma's a bitch, something, they'll get him, right? Like, eventually, you know, I promise you, Kate, something will happen with him and, you know, these guys, they don't care away forever, right? There's a lot of technology, and I'm reassuring her that, you know, justice will be. served right so at this point now I'm really like just disturbed by the whole thing right and actually like really went into like you know a little hiatus where that's when I built I really

started like building out the second office I'm like I'm going to stay here for a while right after that happened with Anthony but then as you know right fast forwarding a month I end up getting I ended up getting detained That day I got detained there in the airport And then they end up taking me to To county jail Where I spent actually

Main jail for like a week County jail for a month FDC For another Little over a year You know we have no outside time Right You know

So can I mention something that Like so V Right So you knew there was a girl named v there was just stick with v um so there's a chick named v that knew you and a bunch of the brokers

uh that worked for you and knew anthony and was partying she was partying with anthony and rico she's the one that introduced riko kind of into the situation yeah so um she was she showed up after after

Anthony was found or had died she shows up Rico's there Rico's torn the house apart Robbing or who's robbed him Yeah And She shows up

According to V Yeah You know She tries to call the police Yeah He won't let her He eventually basically drags her out of the house

That throws her into her Mercedes Basically kidnapped Yeah She has like a Mercedes Right Yeah Um throws her into

The Mercedes And then they leave there's log in or photographs or whatever of her coming and going in the Mercedes like you know because I got the police report right so the police

a day later two days later the homicide comes in and homicide calls her and tries to you know and she she won't talk to him she hangs up she's scared you know she's scared she knows she was there

she knows they were all party and she knows she introduced this guy into the situation so she hangs up the phone right and um doesn't really cooperate at that time with the police at all she's probably scared of what this guy would do right yeah yeah well this guy's a fucking mania so rico is by the way rico actually had just gotten out of prison and was in a halfway house escaped or whatever absconded from the halfway house and was hanging out with v and then hooks up with um with anthony and then the whole anthony's situation you know falls apart so he's in the middle of just pure insanity and he just got out of prison he's going nuts and then there's this

you know what i think of what i think is you know a murder you know so that that's where we are right now like that's what's happening so when he by the time he gets arrested i'll take okay go ahead This is, this is, you know, it's amazing. It's crazy. The, first of all, it was, it was an incredible coincidence that I even met Anthony. Right. We have to mention how you got to end up back there again, too. Right, right, right.

And then, yeah, no, it's important. Yeah, I mean, you can explain how we got back there. Okay. I want to explain my whole, my whole take on how, my experience, right, after that. Yeah, yeah. No, no, absolutely. I just want to say that he How far after the first murder is this?

Probably a couple months. Yeah. They're dropping like flies. So, so, so Anthony's found, Rico grabs V, drags her into the Mercedes,

her Mercedes, they take off a black Mercedes. In the meantime, now obviously he's on a rampage. Okay. Anthony's dead. He's robbed him. They're doing drugs.

he's escaped from the halfway house or absconded from the halfway house they're looking for him he turns around he starts robbing banks in these car so he's driving around this Mercedes robbing different banks

at one point he even robs like a grocery store and like the kid does like in through an argument he tells the kid he's got a knife and he tells the kid I will fuck you know

I'll shoot you motherfucker I'll blow your head off I'll blow your head off but he's holding a knife kid's like no you won't and then he goes ah and he says that was a person

Right, he did stab him. He stabbed him like in the chest. Yeah. The kid, I mean, he survived. Yeah. So his cashier at a grocery store or something. So he's a lunatic, right? But eventually there's a, is there a car chase?

And they chase him and they get him? He goes, what was it? He hides in a pickup truck. Oh, yeah. He does. He goes on the run. Like, they're chasing him through. They find him in a really twist his knee or something.

That's right. I can't believe you remember this. That's right. He twist his knee or something. The cops pull it like he's trying to get himself. out of the road or something like he's really hurt himself I mean he's not limping

he's hurt he can't stand up cops end up because oh because the guy he was hiding the back of the pickup truck called the police yeah calls the police it's similar to that Boston thing right they went there hiding like a boat or something I don't know

but the cops grab him and so Anthony I'm sorry Anthony so Rico gets caught by the police eventually and thrown in jail about the same time that he ends up in jail

so they're both in the the U.S. Marshals Holdover right? That's the United States Marshals Holdover. Matter of fact, my first night there that I get transferred from county over to FTC which is the holdover for the Miami for the

federal prison system in Miami. I was waiting to go to trial obviously and And the first night there, my cellmate, he's getting a haircut in the cell. And, you know, I was like, hey, you know, what's your name? I'm like, oh, my name's Joe. You can just get here today?

I'm like, yeah. And, you know, my cellmate, he introduces himself, the guy cutting his hair. He says, he said, how's your name is Joe, too. I'm like, oh, we're a coincidence or whatever. And he said, but my friend. they call me Rico right right shakes my hand and I don't think anything of it at that point but that's he ends up telling me everything I mean he that was the Rico okay that actually killed my friend and it's it's an incredible coincidence the fact that I even met Anthony over a phone call from a broker

from an investor in Texas, right? And then now you have the guy that killed my friend sitting in a cell with me. And not only that, I mean, he goes on and says, well, what are you here for? I'm like, I was a stockbroker, you know. I was involved in some private equity stuff and whatever, right? I explained.

He says, I used to know a stockbroker. This guy, man, he had a, yeah, He had a really nice house. He had a movie theater. You know, he had nice cars, all that stuff. He was like, yeah, we were pretty close. Like, are you starting to figure it out at this point? Yeah, I was like, what the fuck?

I'm like, like, Rico? But I was like, no, this is impossible. It was no fucking way. So as he starts, like, I mean, talking to me. me he then I just ignore it right I'm like at this point I'm just like you know how it is when you get in there it's like your whole world's spinning right so I'm like I can't even think about that right now and then the next day we you know they do like that pill line thing where they call you to you know people that take medication or whatever and we had like 15 minutes of like

whatever it was computer time and then they would do the pill line call so they call you know the pill line and I just got off the computer and I'm watching like just a little TV that I have up there and I see him he goes on the pill line and he comes off the pill line and he takes his medication

and he says next to me watching the TV and he starts talking about how he had to collect money for somebody and he says yeah I had to collect money

one night for somebody from a guy such an idiot he's like from some broker and he's like I had to collect money and I had to kill I had to off his ass he said

he's like I took a needle he's like I gave him a hot dose right in the heart and like instantly I thought back to to this photo of the bruise or whatever on his chest and actually I remember Kate was asking me about it

and then it clicked I'm like it's the fucking scumbag this is the guy that that did this and then it went on and on to describe it about his movie theater and this and that and like he's just like bragging and bragging and bragging you know obviously not telling me the guy's name

but yeah you know that was Rico but he also knew V right didn't he mention it? Yeah yeah yeah yeah Didn't you mention that didn't you both end up saying, oh, I knew a chick named V or no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Because he's like, you look familiar. I'm like, well, you don't. And then he said, I said, he actually, he brought it up.

He said, I used to hang out, because I told him I was, I lived in Fort Lauderdale. He's like, I used to hang out with this girl V. I'm like, oh, my God, definitely him, right? Right. But that was it. And he told me some crazy stories. And like I knew the guy was just like a scumbag by the way. It's funny because when we were talking, you know, I was writing the story and you told me that he had told you about how he grabbed V by the hair.

Yeah, dragged it down the beach and dragged her somewhere. Well, then when she, when I talked to her about the story, she told me that they were in Anthony's house and he had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of the house. It's funny how the, yeah, the lies like, yeah, either she's either he's done it multiple times to her. Right, like first he was the, he was friends with the broker that had a movie theater. Then he had to kill some broker. Right. But it wasn't a friend with the movie theater, right? Right.

It's just a bunch of bullshit. The guy's, you mean, obviously, fucking maniac. So you end up taking a plea. Yeah. You get what? It was about five years. Sorry. So what was the real reason behind him killing the death guy?

Okay. So initially, And when I was locked up, yeah, when I was locked up and we talked about it, right, we kind of figured that because he had said that the guy owed money. So we, you know, I made the assumption that he owed, he possibly owed the money, right? Because he was getting drugs. They were getting, V was supplying drugs to all them. Well, no, or what, just doing drugs with them? Yeah, it just, she was partying with the brokers and like, okay.

Really, that's about it. Like, just, just hanging out with everyone and, you know, that whole thing. But she wasn't really in that trade or anything. Okay, so the collection, but the collection was, when I was writing the story, was that he was collecting. Now, I guess I had always kind of assumed that he was collecting for V, right? And telling the truth. Huh? Yeah, and we assumed, we assumed that he was telling the truth.

We assumed, yeah, one, we were assuming he was telling the truth, the truth. saying that he's collecting money because he stole $30,000 from the guy. So we assumed, or I assumed, he had collected money for drugs or for V, killed Anthony and robbed him of $30,000 and whatever else he scrounged up. But since then, you know, I've spoken with V, and V is like, that's not the case, that she had gone off, come back, and she believes he killed him. Now, she has a whole theory on that Anthony killed, I'm sorry, that Rico killed Anthony for his girlfriend, Kate. That Kate wanted, well, that's, you know, that, she has a whole theory.

He's a low-level scumbag dog that basically saw an opportunity and seized it and it has no fucking heart, no integrity, no morals. I mean, I understand what you're saying. I agree. But also, I've spoken with Kate. And of course, Kate has a whole, like, there's like four different things. theories swarming around. The real problem is that the police, even though they've answered, even though they have investigated the crime multiple times now, they've reopened the investigation, that V,

when she was called, like, didn't tell them what she knew. She was scared, so she didn't say anything. And all they really have is that this guy died of an overdose. Like, that's all they've got. Now, Kate's saying he was robbed, but nobody would talk. And so it just kind of died out, right? Like, what do they do? They don't have anybody to tell them what happened.

And by the time he's sentenced, he actually, Joe actually says something to his attorney. Hey, this is what I just found out. Like, this guy killed my friend. And his attorney's like, well, don't say anything. Sorry, your attorney's like, oh, don't say anything. we want to put you involved it sounds like you're hanging out with guys that kill each other

or murderers or something so he doesn't say anything not that he's trying to say something to get time off or anything just that hey this guy murdered my friend yeah like the question answer was nuts and at the same time for something else

huh when you when you met him in prison was he in there for he was in there for several bank robbers remember I told you he escaped the halfway house and started robbing banks and not only that but I thought that and I mentioned it to my

attorney because when he said you look familiar, I was thinking, you know, because V didn't visit voice in prison and she, you know, started like, I don't know, I was shocked that she did, but, I mean, you know, friends is a friend. So I was, I was also concerned that, that he was contracted. Right. That was another theory. Right. So that's why I was like, maybe I should be moved to a new unit, right? Just like guys, you probably had a photo of me or something. That's where he recognized me. So I was like, I think I should be moved. This guy spent his whole life in prison. He's done nothing.

He wasn't out six. Rico wasn't out six months. He got out and within a month he walked out of the halfway house, hooks up with the complete animal. Starched Robin Banks, murder or kill somebody, ends up right back in prison. Got 15 years, 14, 15 years?

I don't know how good guys like that, like life like, yeah. 14, 15 years. How long goes that? Oh, um. 2017 yeah no he's still he's in the medium no he's not in the medium is he was in the medium yeah he was in the low and then when he went back he was in the low he was in the low he was in the low with me yeah he actually met the guy he's actually met him yeah i've actually met him yeah and where's royce he's doing like state prison yeah in state of florida i don't know what

prison but yeah he's so yeah it's like literally when he started talking about riko And we actually got the photo. I know that guy. I know the guy. He used to work out like crazy. Yeah, the big guy. He told me. Lunatic.

I remember he did a tattoo for this kid in my unit. And the kid didn't pay him. Kept telling him he was going to pay him. But didn't pay him. I remember him like, I remember him going, oh, I don't know. I don't know what happened. She was supposed to send the money.

It was all bullshit. The kid was just tried to get a free tattoo. And he grabbed him. He just, bow. I mean, smacked the crap out of this kid. You know, he's a big guy. you know so but anyway he got he literally got released shortly after that that's when all this happened and then he comes right back to prison a year later so you know i didn't know who he was

at the time i was just some fucking guy i just remember the name rico but yeah so he comes back he goes to the medium got 15 got four i don't know if it's 13 14 years 12 i think was it 12 and ended up going ended up going to uh yeah going the medium i don't know where he is now to the medium coleman medium i don't know if he's still there probably look it up So, yeah, it's like, isn't it, it's like Joseph Rodriguez or Hernandez. Martinez, Martinez, Joseph Martinez, yeah. But yeah, anyway, so you get how much time? About five years.

Five years. How much time do you do? About less than three. I got a year off for an adaptive drug program. I got eight months good time, seven months halfway else. Yeah, it's not bad. Not bad on five years. Three years?

Yeah. Huh. Three years. And in your eyes, you didn't really do anything wrong. You just didn't want to risk 20 more years. Yeah. No, you can't go to trial. Yeah.

Well, I mean, look, okay, what is I say now? I mean, like, kind of like, you know, I get what you're going to say about. I mean, technically, like, he's unlicensed. Imagine how this looks. I guess, are you going down for the company or for acting under your other alias? Right. Like, how does it look if he goes to trial? I'm using an alias.

I'm unlicensed. I've already been convicted of running a boiler room. I've already done... Oh, yeah, I had not a leg of a stand on it. No, he can't, like, he can't get on the stand and defend him. So what happens is the prosecutor gets up, says all of these things about him. He can't say that's not true. he can't get on the stand

if he gets on the stand I'm not credible he's not credible you're using a different name you're collecting a ton of and keep mind he is making a ton of money the jury

these are people that work at Tire Kingdom and Walmart like they hate him he's driving a Lamborghini he's got a Ferrari he's living at a three and a half million dollar house

you know he looks like a professional sports star you know he's using a fake name he's lost his license he's been convicted before they hate his gun

That's anyway. You can't go to trial. So it's like, what's the best deal I can get? Because any lawyer is going to tell you, look, look, I'm innocent. I don't give a fuck if you're innocent or not. I'm telling you right now, you're found guilty. And I can prove you're innocent. They'll convict you just because you can't say, you can't even say you're,

because here's the thing. If he gets on the stand, they can then bring up all of that stuff. Convicted felon. They're done. I'd take a plea. look like I said if right now the DEA came in and said we've indicted you for four

kilos of cocaine and I've never seen cocaine and they don't even have the cocaine I wouldn't I wouldn't go to trial how much time would you do before you went to trial probably probably at 10 years I'd probably risk child I'd do 10

you're crazy I'd give me you would do 10 because well I get the drug program I'm like that's halfway Because they're going for you 25 years. How much time is you? I did 13. But the first 10 years was the hardest.

Those last three years, they sailed by. Fucking shit. Oh my God. He's like, yeah, if they give me a plea of like eight, he's like, I'd do it. Standing on my head. I mean, I'd be hoping for five, you know, but I've never seen. So if you knew that they didn't have any evidence, but they're like, they're going to get three guys that are going to sit on the stand and say he was involved. I can't get on the stand.

I go on the stand and be like, Mr. Cox, how many times have you been in prison? How many times have you been on probation? How many of this? We've got four of your victims that are ready to them. Four of my victims. I'm here for fucking cocaine that I've never seen. He stole my house.

Yeah, he did it. Yeah, he sold cocaine. It's over. It's over. You just got to take a plea at this point. At this point, I'm at their mercy. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, I totally get that.

Sorry. man no yeah reminiscing good times right good times good time i hated that guy ricko man when i met him in there i was looking at him like uh man he was cutting hair one day right did i tell you about this what no i probably what is it so he kept like he was one of those guys he'd go around the you to sell i mean the unit and he'd be like if he saw you had support on the outside like you had books coming in and stuff like commissary or whatever he'd say to you hey

I work in the chow hole I cut hair I'll cut your hair for free or I'll give you extra food or chicken or whatever can you tell your family to buy me a book and naturally

if it was someone that didn't kill one of my best friends I'd say you're no problem buddy I got you but I told him yeah I'll think about it so then he sees a big book shipment come in one day

all right so he comes by my cell and he's like yeah take the books are here he's like did you get my book and i'm like no i'm sorry buddy and then i just like said kept reading so then he goes like this you liar and he slams my door i didn't tell you this no oh man this is great listen to this so so he slams my door so i'm thinking in my head you fucking piece of shit like you scumb bag killing my best for a fucking pair of sneakers like your bum

so then I'm like I'm like I'm like angry at this guy so he's cutting hair out on the yard one day and like with actual clippers it wasn't like that that razor and a comb thing

they do and so and this is like I don't even know it was like visitation was the next day or something and he's cutting hair on the yard and they do it like once a month i think right something like that so there's a long line right it's it's my turn to get a haircut and when i'm walking up to this chair i just kept thinking

how much i despise this guy right and i also kept thinking this scumbagg he didn't clean the clippers like for 10 heads and you know there's like mercer in there and like all kinds of weird bacterial thing you know you got to spray the clippers you're cutting you're cutting you're cutting people's hair, like mushing it against their head. I mean, spray the freaking things, right? Right. So when I sit down, I turn over and he puts the gown on me. You know, our acquaintances is like a little, it's a little strained right now because I didn't get him his book.

Right. So I turn around and I say, I'm like, RICO, can you do my favor? I was like, can you spray those clippers, bro? And he, uh, he looks at me and said, I did. and I know he didn't spray him I was watching him for like 10 11 haircuts so he goes like this

he grabs like let's say like this is the spray he goes like this I say can I see you spray him right so he goes like this so now I'm thinking this guy is a piece of shit yeah like he almost doesn't he almost wants to give people some back to

Like he's sick. Yeah. I'm like, there's no way he actually sprayed it. So I'm like, let me see you spray it, Rico, please. So you know what he does? He grabs the spray.

He unscrews the top, throws it on the ground, grabs the clippers, and he dumps the spray on the clippers. Like, out of anger, like, like, you're questioning my integrity. I'm like,

if you only fucking knew, you stumbag. So then I say to him that, I'm like, let me ask you a question, Rico. You're like a big baby, huh? I'm like, why he's such a baby?

Really, like, he wasn't crying over this. I'm like, I just said you to simply spray the fucking clippers. So he says this, I'm not cutting your hair. So he takes the gown off me, right? He rips it off me. And now I'm sitting there like, I'm like exploding inside. So I stand up, right?

I like this. It's so funny. I stand up and I say, then you're not cutting anyone's hair. So I smack all. the shit off the table, right? Clippers, like everything, like, oil, uh, everything, bro. Like, and I smacked all that all like, woof. And everybody on the line was like, hey, what the fuck? So then Rico's like this. He's like standing there. His leg was all fucked up.

Right. I'm like, I'll kick like his one leg and fall down. I mean, I mean, he was a big dude, but so then, uh, everyone's yelling and then I'm just like, fuck this, man. I go up to my cell and I'm like, I put my sneakers on, and you know. Yeah, yeah. And then he just stayed down there. I see him picking everything up off the ground. I'm like, good, you bum. And it was the last time I spoke to him.

And he never knew that you knew Anthony. Oh, listen, this is the story was in, uh, this, it was in, um, uh, the Atlantic magazine. Like, they reopened the investigation. They called the detectives. they've you know fuck it i mean whatever happens happens you know i mean look i'm just speaking about things i'm not like trying to you know get like directly involved but whatever ready uh are we so you did your three like what happens that okay you do your sentence

yeah yeah oh he i mean we met in art app we were both taking the drug program we met i I wrote a story on him. It's on my website. And we're, well, we were, we were in negotiations with a production company to do a documentary, but that kind of fell through. And at this point, you know, you got, he, you got it, would you get out a little bit before me? It took around the same time, I think. Yeah, yeah. We were basically about the same, like, I, I know, yeah.

And so, yeah, you got out. no no you got out a little bit after me because you were still in the halfway house when the magazine article came out right yes yeah so he got a few months well i got so i got out in uh early 2000 uh 2019 right when did you get out october oh okay so late 2019 okay so so he got out so um and then and then you started uh you started what you started flipping houses or something right you got out and started flipping houses and and you got out and started flipping houses and and and you Now you're doing some real estate stuff. And now that I'm off probation, I started up a brokerage and cash advance. So it's a commercial financing where we fund businesses. But we do things a lot different. And I'm enjoying it because it's, you know, it's really, it's the capital formation process where I used to raise capital for companies and ask people for money to invest into

them right right um and now and now i lend money to companies right right and but it's all really capital formation and at the end of the day you know we're getting into a lot of different aspects of it like uh like like uh borrowing or lending uh against like intellectual property and stuff like that but at the end of the day you know we do the basic cash advance too like same day funding where someone doesn't matter if they own a barber uh a restaurant or uh you know a law firm we basically um we base it all on their receivables nothing to do with their credit but you know we do other products too that rely on credit what happened to the the app where the you were developing for the to check out uh companies you're going to do that which one there's an

app you showed me this app the app that researches companies oh with uh I'm not sure which one you're talking about. I mean, I had so many projects. I started getting into so many software projects after I raised money for a lot on it. But we have a couple of different things going on right now. Like the mobile app for where you can get into lending and the compound growth is like incredible. So I want to be able to offer that to, you know, the general public, you know, where banks aren't the only ones that can lend and, you know, compound their, you know, their capital. So people get in for as little less $10.

Just a cash app. You can buy a fraction of a share. Right. You know, so, you know, people could syndicate, you know, through a mobile app. But I'm having fun. Hey, I appreciate you guys watching. If you like the video, do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button.

Hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this. Leave me a comment in the comment section and, you know, share the video because it absolutely helps. we're going to leave all the links to the lotto net well to the license we're going to leave another link to the the actual promotional little video it's kind of cool it's super cool actually if you're interested in being a guest on the show we have a form that you can fill out there's a link in the description also if you want to read the story on vitali it's called atonement and it's on my website, Insidetruecrime.com. I really appreciate you guys watching.

Thank you. See you.