Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - WHY So Many People Go Missing On Vacation (True Unsettling Stories)

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

WHY So Many People Go Missing On Vacation (True Unsettling Stories)

If you go on vacation and then see a crime of opportunity and murder somebody else. There's so many cases like that. This person isn't from South America. How much of an investigation can they do in South America about what's going on here? And a lot of times, the local beliefs, they don't want to make a big deal out of it anyway. They don't want to scare off tourists and make it seem like murders happen here. I've always wanted to be in film and TV. I saw the script a couple of years out of college.

It was called Just Friends. And it was a romantic comedy movies that wound up getting made, and it stars Ryan Reynolds and Anna Farris and Amy Smart. It doesn't really have any crime in it. The crime is of the heart where he wants to date the girl. She just wants to be friends and trying to overcome that. And our big thing was we sold the show called Brain Games to National Geographic Channel, and that was all about neuroscience and how your brain works. And, you know, the tricks it plays, like why optical illusions work,

and why magic works. And actually, we worked with a guy named Apollo Robbins, who you may have heard of, but his big thing was he was the world's preeminent, like, pickpocket. Okay. So he could, like, steal the stuff right off your, you know, glasses right off your face and be wearing them, and you wouldn't notice it.

And he had a great line. He would say, they don't pay me to steal stuff. They pay me to give it back. And when the pandemic came, we couldn't make TV. So we got microphones and we started podcasting and we do a kids educational podcast called Who Smarted, which has blown up to become one of the top kids educational podcasts. But you don't make a lot of money doing kids educational podcasts. So you're like, what else can we do?

And I love crime movies, you know, Henry Portrait of a serial killer, a man bites dog, a lot of cool crime and serial killer type stuff. And as it turns out, my wife, Kim, is also a huge crime buff. Yeah, women are something like, is it 65 or 70% of the consumers of violent, violent true crime? Because it's funny that, I mean, this just might interest you real quick, is that my channel, which I almost never do anything on violent crime. So most of my stuff is like credit card fraud, bank, you know, bank robberies, maybe bank

fraud on men, or even drug cases, that my consume, the people that consume that, the people that consume that, based on the analytics, it's like 93, 94% male. Right. So, but it's, but violent crime, like serial killers, murders, it's women. Yeah. It's, I don't know what it is. I know one of the things, you know, we talk about is, um, women, love to play detective. Like even my wife, like she says she missed her true calling as a forensics

or as crime scene investigator. Like that wasn't that big back when she was like figuring out what to do. She did work for many years as a social worker in domestic violence shelter. So she did get to see, you know, some real dark stuff. And even as bad as like the batterers were to the women, the women were also really bad at like turning on each other in the shelter and snitching on each other to get somebody kicked out. And so, yeah, she was around a lot of, you know, dark, dark stuff there. But she's always had a true crime at heart. You know, that's always been her thing. I am good at coming up with names of crime shows. And I had seen a case where two people had gone on vacation and one person on the drowning and a car.

kayak accident, and I was like, oh, wow, that's like a slaycation. Because they, because they weren't sure, did she, you know, did she tamper with the boat? Was it sabotage or was it an accident? And I said, oh, it sounds like a slaycation. And we're like, oh, that title is pretty good. Let's do that. So it's basically slaycation is a new podcast that we're launching January 9th. It stars me, my wife, the True Crime Nut, and my business partner, Jerry. And Jerry has had some success in the true crime space. He's obviously a TV producer as well. And we were at a company called Jupiter Entertainment,

and they had the first season of a show called Homicide Hunter, with Sergeant Joe Kenda. And it was murder cases that he had overseen while he was in Colorado. And he had like a huge success rate, like solved 90-something percent of his cases. So the first season hadn't done that well. So Jerry, he brought in a new showrunner, and together they rebooted Homicide Hunter, and it blew up. It became one of the most successful true crime shows of all time. So we have a little bit of true crime cred.

And then, you know, the format of our show is my wife, Kim, and Jerry do the research on the cases, and I deliberately don't know what's coming. So they tell me the story, and then I can ask questions and make questions. jokes and comments and you know learn about it in real time almost like I'm a proxy for the listener right you know it's a fun it's a fun setup and the cases are great it's kind of like my favorite murder a little bit I think we try not to like they really I mean we love that show but they really are over the top we love murder yeah yeah they yeah they that's their space that's their line, you know, we do comment, like, these things are fucked up, but also, like, you know,

I'm a film guy, you know, so I like a twisty, turny story. And I know we have a good case when I'm like, I think she did it. Oh, wait, I don't think she did it. Maybe that was an accident. Oh, wait, no, no, no, now I'm back on, she did it. Wait, no, I'm not sure. And, you know, these cases, because the evident, you know, it's like they find a tampered apparatus. Okay, it seems cut and dry. Then an expert comes out and says, actually, you don't need that for the kayak to function properly. You know, like a thing had been removed, the plug. Oh, and the plug was found in her car. She must be the murderer. No, actually, they had taken the plug out months ago. Their cat played with it as a toy, and the kayak doesn't need the plug to, you know, keep from

submerging. So was it murder or was it an accident? You listen to the 911 call, and we're trying to decide, were they a good enough actor to get away with it or not? And that's a pro tip. I always say, if you're going to murder somebody, take some acting lessons because you're going to have to do some acting. I always hate that, by the way, when they hear the 911 tape and they're like, oh, they were over the top or no, they were too calm. You don't know how you're going to react. You know what I'm saying? I interviewed a guy.

I interviewed a guy who was found guilty of his wife's murder. and then they came to find out that it was her best friend who murdered her. And they were upset because when he called 911, he said she had killed herself. Right. But the problem was when he went in, all he saw was blood on her and her laying down. And he didn't realize like she'd been stabbed,

whatever, 20-something, 30 times, you know, in the, like basically in the neck area. Like, what all he saw was she was laying in a, in a pool of blood she had an answer she had tried to um she had i think she uh made attempts on suicide before so you know he didn't think that and suddenly it became oh he did it he was trying to cover it up by saying she committed suicide but obviously once we got there we realized it wasn't so that he lied therefore he must have done it was like it's just in a panic you know and then other people you find out somebody did brutally kill their spouse or something they came in and they were very calm. Right. My wife was found dead or my husband was found dead. He was shot in the head.

And then he was that against you. They're like, his demeanor. Yeah. We do get into that a lot. Yeah, we do get into that a lot, especially, yeah, you know, how you acted, you know, even in the police station, like you're waiting to be interrogated and they got the camera on you. And the person gets up and starts doing some stretches or something because they've been sitting for hours. And it's like, Look, look, look how calm they are. Look, they're doing jumping jacks. They must be the murder. It's like, what?

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. You know, it's funny. We actually did work on a true crime podcast. And actually, it was more like a little video series for Facebook starring Amanda Knox, who obviously in Italy was accused of killing a roommate. And she, same thing, we bring it up all the time because the way she acted in the police station didn't jive with the way they thought somebody should act if they were truly innocent.

And so much of her life was messed up because of a stupid, you know, behind the scenes videotape of a car at a police station. Yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous. Yeah, everybody reacts different. Yeah. So how, at what point did you decide that you wanted to do this?

Like, have you always, you know, were your, was your family involved in TV? or, you know, like, do we raise in Hollywood? Now, you know, family members were involved or no? You know what it is? I've always been a storyteller. Like, I love telling stories. Like, if five of us go out, it's like, you tell the story.

You know, you're going to have the best way of telling the story, add the jokes, add that, you know, the embellishments when necessary. And, yeah, you'll make the story good. So I've always had that storyteller at heart. And then, yeah, I saw the movie Jaws. when I was a kid, and I was like, yeah, I want to make movies, preferably about sharks, but they don't have to all be about sharks, but I love the idea of, like, because that was supposed to be a stupid movie, right? It's like, a shark is killing people. Okay, we've seen

lots of creature movies. But then you're like, whoa, this is a great movie, you know? And so much of it. You know, it's so funny, too, that people, if you ask them, let's say, about jaws, you know, oh, it's about a shark. But the truth is, there's very little shark scenes. There's very little of that. It's like Rocky. If you ask somebody, oh, yeah, it's a boxing. movie. Really? Because there's like maybe five or 10 minutes of boxing. It's really more like a love story. It's a character movie. It's a great

character movie. And yeah, and so in fact, it was funny. I said to my wife if we had a boy, we were going to name it quaint, but luckily we had a girl. But the thing is, yeah, so I had the film bug grabbed the camera,

my friends, we would make movies all the time. I was fortunate enough to get it to NYU Film School. made movies. My roommate at film school was a guy named Todd Phillips who went on to huge and, you know, obviously

Joker and Hangover movies and stuff. And actually, I have a funny story that, so one of the things Todd worked on at film school was a movie called Hated. And it was about a punk rocker named G.G. Allen, who was like the most hardcore punk rocker of all time.

He would shit on the stage. He would take off all his clothes. He'd smear the crap all over his face. He would attack the audience. He'd smash his teeth out with a microphone. He'd smash the audience teeth out with the microphone. This guy was completely out of control. His concerts, quote-unquote, concerts rarely lasted more than three or four songs.

The police were often called, and either he was getting arrested or he had to flee out the back door and somehow was able to get a cat, naked and covered in piss and shit and blood. Anyway, the point is, Gigi was a big fan of the serial killer John Wayne Gacey and they would go visit John Wayne Gacy in prison so when we were making this movie we thought oh maybe we should get John Wien Gacy who was painting in prison we'll get him to paint a portrait of Gigi and that'll be our poster art

so it's like how do we get a hold of it well you know through the you know Gigi and his punk rock connections we were able to get word to John Wien Gacey and of course Gacy is like, if you send me a picture of the director with no shirt on, I'll consider it. We're up on the roof, taking pictures of Todd. Like, how do I pose for this? How do I pose for a serial killer's approval to paint a painting? Yeah.

So we take the pictures. We send it to Gacy. Gacy approves. He paints the painting. They smuggle it out. We turn it into a poster. And it's the poster for the movie. However, what we didn't know is, or didn't count on, was, you know, Gacy got our phone number and would call us collect at the apartment constantly, constantly.

And it was like, always a collect call. We're two broke college kids. Collect call from the Indiana State Penitentiary. Will you accept the charges? And my friends are like, who's that? I'm like, just telling Casey. And they're like, what? Put them on.

Put them on. So I'd put them on. And, you know, he just would have the most. darkest sexual-laden conversation he was you know obviously crazy and then one year this shows up and it's a christmas card from john gasey oh wow and so yeah you're on its christmas list so anyway uh that was a diversion but uh back in yeah back in film school i met jerry um and we We had sort of parallel paths, Jerry Colbert. He was doing more, actually, theater in college, and then got more into television.

I was more film. So we had these sort of parallel paths where he was show running and I was writing movies. Like I said, I was fortunate. I was able to sell a couple of things. I started getting hired to do rewrites on things. And then our paths crossed about, I don't know, 10 years, like, you know, early, from 2008, I'd say, or 2008, 2009, somewhere around there. It was a writer's strike.

I was out of work. The deals I had all fell apart. So I was able to get into TV with Jerry. We worked on something together. And we had a great time collaborating. He had hired me for something. And then we did the show Brain Games. And that got Emmy nominated.

It became National Geograph's highest rated show. Oh, yeah. It's huge. I mean, I can, like, it's funny how many of the shows that you've mentioned that I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember that or I heard what I've watched. I've watched an episode where they were on brain games where they were showing, it was something where they were turning things where it looked like one thing and then you turned it and suddenly became something else. You're like, oh, that's not a face at all. Right. Or that is a face. Well, it flips. It's like it's concave and then you turn and then it suddenly convex or whatever. And like your brain just makes that. Yeah, makes that leap Put for you, yeah. Yeah, so that was a lot of fun. We did five seasons and 50-something episodes of that show. Like I said, it was Emmy-nominated.

So we started our company based on the success of that show. And then we did a couple of things, including a show called Brain Child, which was like, hey, you know, the thing with Brain Games was it was made for adults, right? It was National Geographic Channel. It aired at like 10 o'clock on a Monday. But we knew a ton of kids were watching.

They were fascinated by this. And our audience was way younger than the typical NatGeo audience. Like I think the average NatGeo viewer was like 67 years old. The average brain games viewer was like late 30s. So it was like a tremendous drop. And we knew tons of kids were interested in this. So when we stopped doing brain games, we did a show called Brain Child for Netflix. And we did a season of that, 13 episodes.

And we expanded beyond just the brain to like talk about all kinds of things like space in the ocean, emotions and stuff like that so that we just got data like that's in the top 15% of all Netflix shows still today even though we came out in 2018 or something so kids are still watching the hell out of that

so that was sort of our entertainment slash educational journey and then yeah then we got into podcasting like I said with Who Smarted but Slocation is a chance for us to be on mic be ourselves be funny

but also get into these dark cases. And like I said, the cases on slaycation are so twisty and terny. And people, you know, criminals, you know, they make, they're brilliant in so many aspects. And then they make a colossal error that how could they do that? Yeah. I'll give you an example. There was a guy he pushed his wife off a cliff and made it seem like an accident. And he would have gotten away with it, except he had a.

map in his car of an ex on the remote spot where she was found and it's like wait was complete yeah just no listen i i i have some friends that are brilliant and then they were caught just that they would do the dumbest thing before before i mention that i want to say one i like your salvador dolly clock oh thank you um and uh well and then i was going to ask like what are some of your favorite episodes or cases. What I was going to also wanted to mention is I have a friend

that would hit his he had a quick version of his crime is that you know he was able to make fake IDs so so he's got a guy that makes fake IDs he's big on putting people together so one

that's a problem because you're involving lots of people in your in your crimes but whatever The point is he's got somebody who can make fake IDs. So he ends up getting connected with a guy that worked in the fraud department for Bank of America. He tells them about something that's been happening. And he's like, and it happens at banks everywhere. And there's really nothing we can do about it. Even though we know there's a fraud being committed, there's just nothing we can do.

It's just the cost of doing business. And that is that take yourself, for example, you've got $13,000 in your bank account. You go and you send your your debit card to somebody in another state. You tell them to go into, let's say the post office and tell them, go buy $9,000 worth of money orders. So they do. Or even if you went to a store and went and bought something for nine grand, you go and you do it. And then for, you know, whatever, 45 minutes later, you walk in. I go to the bank and I say, my money's gone.

My money's gone. Yeah. So by law, the Electronic Transfer Act, they have to put the money back. Right. Now, they can investigate it. And if they investigate and they find out that it was, that you were involved, then they can reverse the charges. Well, here's what's interesting about that is this guy was like, so the bank employee tells me this. And he said, now, I don't know what you can do with this, but I feel like you're the kind of guy that could do something with it.

I'm just letting you know, this is the thing. no bank investigates any of these crimes under $10,000. So if you take $8,000 or $9,000, the worst they will do is close your account. What he did was he was like, okay, so he went and he thought, if I have guys, if I give people fake IDs and have them go open bank accounts in other states, and each person can open about three accounts before the fourth bank, they start asking questions like, hey, you've opened three other accounts in the last two days. or whatever. So he said, so if each guy puts about $10,000 in the account, I removed $9,500 or $9,000,

they go in a 20 minutes later or five minutes later and ask for some cash and have the bank tell them, you don't have any money. You've got like $200. Right. What do you mean you want $9,000, you want $500? What are you talking about? I got over $10,000 and they're like, you're in another state that I couldn't possibly be in. Right. Right. So any, and he said my problem with that was where do I find these people? Like, who's? going to do that. And I was like, yeah, yeah. So where did you find him? He said, first appearance. Now, he'd been arrested over and over again. So he said, I went to the courthouse. And when people get arrested and they go for their first appearance, typically the prosecutor stands up and says,

Your Honor, we're not giving this guy any bond or we're giving him $5,000 in bond. He's been arrested twice for credit card fraud. He's been arrested for check fraud. He's been arrested for telecommunications fraud and he goes they basically read their resume right so I would sit there for two hours and I would end up with five people's names he said if they didn't get bond I would write

them a letter money on their books and say hey call me I'm going to bond you out of jail they would call him on a phone that is a burner phone and he'd explain the scam to them over the phone and say now if you're interested

I will bond you out he would they of course these are career criminals are like they're on me out yeah so he said you know if you bonded out like four guys he's and typically their bonds are 500 bucks a thousand i'm going to give them 10% down it's nothing you know it's five thousand dollar bond he's like but they're broke because most of them are drug addicts um so he said i would bond them out and when they would go to get their property they would he would have his wife go and put a phone in their property because when you the where your property's held you can go there and say, hey, John Smith is about to be bonded out.

I'm his wife or I'm a friend of his. He doesn't have a cell phone. Can you put this in with this property? And they would always go, yeah, of course. They put it in the bag. And so when he got it, he would get the phone. He'd call the number. They'd say, take a photo of yourself, send it to me.

They'd send it to him. They would then send him the IDs, a plane ticket. He'd go, open the accounts, wait a couple of days, get the debit cards, scan them, send the duplicate debit cards back to Florida. They would go take the money out of the account. And then they'd go back in the guy would go back in the bank. And he was sending two or three people every single month doing this. So he's making, the scam was netting to 300,000 a month.

He's giving the guys 30%. And he said they were always good for a trip or two. And then they'd get back on drugs or they'd get re-arrested. But I always thought it was brilliant. And the way his whole kind of scam unraveled was this. one day he and his wife basically it's a little bit more complicated this is one of the stupid things that he did got him onto his trail he and his wife were on vacation and they used a stolen credit card to buy their hotel room for a week and i'm like you've got half a million dollars in the bank you've got a hundred thousand something

dollars in cash why would you use a stolen credit card he goes why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. Well, why would I pay for it when I have a stolen card? I'm like, because this is you. Why would you take that risk? Why? Why? would you he's like well i just and that got him caught eventually that's one of the things that led to his right there's well there's multiple things that ended up you know converging but that's one

and that's but that's the kind of things that he would do that's such a cell phone that's such it like you had expected to be one of these knuckleheads that he hires somebody yeah it was he owned it himself yeah yeah it was um and that's what always tends to get these guys that i i would meet it would be like one little thing it's like why did you do that why did you just give the person the money back like out of a guy whose whole Ponzi scheme came undone because of like a $100,000 that suddenly he took from somebody and their daughter started freaking out and said they started saying they were going to call the police. They're going to call the FBI. They're going to do this. They're going to do that.

Something's wrong. I don't think something's wrong about something's wrong about your financial Ponzi scheme. And instead of him saying, listen, I'm just going to give you the money back. He he didn't. I go, why didn't you? And he goes, you know, I mean, she was being such a jerk about it. I'm like, you'd stole $50 million. Right. It's a hundred grand. He's like, I know, but you made me so mad. It was just like, what do you think? These guys do stupid things. Yeah.

Oh, I got a scam for you. You are the perfect guy. You were the guy that would appreciate this the most. So back when we were in college, like I said, Todd and I looked together. It was like freshman year was like 89. 90. We had a guy. He was the brother of this Russian girl that we knew at school. Her older brother was like a high roller guy show up.

and then the fancy car and the fancy clothes and we're like, what does he do? He basically tells us this is what I'm doing. And I want you guys, if you guys want to be in. This was the early days of like the 1-800 numbers. Oh, 1-800, blah, blah. And you could set up those numbers

to cost whatever you want, to charge whatever you want per minute. If you, you know, it's like, you know, phone sex, only $1.99 a minute or whatever. But you could make it $100 a minute, $99 a minute. Of course, no one's going to want to pay that, so no one would ever call that number. But what you can do is you set it up to be $99 a minute.

Your first minute is whatever, and then every other minute is $99. Then he would hire two gibronies like me and Todd to go into office buildings, dressed like a messenger with a boxer or something under our arm, and say, hey, I've got a package for, you know, John Smallberries. There's no John Smallberries here. What? can I call my home office? Yeah, sure. You pick up the phone, you call the 1-800 number, you hang on the phone for a couple minutes, you have a fake conversation, you've just charged

up about $500 in call, hang up, sorry, go to the next office right in the same building, and you just work your way down. You can, you know, 20 offices per floor, 30 floors in New York, and, you know, the charge gets eaten up and, you know, they don't get the phone bill to, who knows. And in the day, thousands and thousands of dollars. So we just, you know, tried it once and we're like we lost our nerve and we're like this is crazy we're going to get kicked out of college we're in NYU we're trying to make movies like this is stupid but this guy was ready to pay us cash and he's like I've got an army of people can you know all over canvassing the city just making calls to my stupid 1-800 number or whatever I was pretty I thought that was pretty

smart yeah the the the one 900 numbers that I mean I've heard a couple of scams like that you know most of them are like calling you know to like Jamaica or Haiti or right you know and they would they would do it for so many months and build up a credit line with the phone company that gate provided the line and then at some point when they were so millions of dollars in debt to them they would close the company down restart it in somebody else's name change offices and and start all over again and just you know so it was funny like the guy that I knew that was kind of investigating this whole many of those he said like we knew like we would go and we would look and we're like he's selling it for 75 cents a minute we're selling

him the minutes for 85 cents a minute it's like like we know it's about to go under right but yeah that's uh yeah those back of the day those always the big time scams and then they eventually they fall by same thing with the PPP loans like these guys are making tons of money they're doing great, and they're thinking, I'm brilliant. No, it just hasn't caught up to you. Exactly. Two years later. What was your thing?

I know that you had, like, did you have a couple of things? I mean, I had several, but probably the easiest kind of to explain is it was bank fraud. Okay. And I had owned a mortgage company and eventually, you know, it was, we were doing fraudulent things in mortgage company. Eventually, I was placed on probation, federal probation for three years. and that's where the scam that I'm basically most kind of known for is there's something, do you know what a synthetic identity is?

I think, but you must. Yeah, it's kind of like a stolen identity, but it's not a real person or it's a combination of fake people. What I did was I went into social security and I figured out how to get social security to issue me social security numbers to children that don't exist. So I'd give them a fake birth certificate, fake shot record. me a social security number, whatever name I wanted. And then I would go out into an area, you know, lower middle class area and I would buy houses for, let's say for the sake of argument, like $50,000. Well, one, I got the social security number and I would get secured credit cards.

So after paying the minimum payment for six months, they would have 700 credit scores. Right. You only needed a 620 to borrow, to get a loan, a mortgage from the bank. right so plus of course i've got w2s pay stubs i have all the documents right and so my person and i had eight or ten of these guys i would we would go out and i would buy a house in their name for fifty thousand dollars i would record the sale of that house at two hundred thousand so if you went to public records it looked like i just bought a house for two hundred thousand so what happened if you buy enough of those within an area the whole area starts to go up. Yep. And when the bank, and if you want to borrow money against the house, you want to refinance your

mortgage or get a mortgage, the bank send somebody out or you send them an appraisal based on the comparable sales in the area, all of which are mine. The bank says, this thing's worth $210, $220, $2.40. This whole area is going through the roof. So we would then refinance the house, borrow the money. And so each person borrowed, you know, only one mortgage per house, five or six houses at each person. So $1 million, $1.5 million, you'd make $750,000 to $900,000 a million per person. We would make the payments, of course, you know, for about five or six months and then we'd stop paying. And then when, of course, when the, you know, the collection started coming in, we would get

the letters saying, you know, hey, you're in foreclosure. I would then cut out, I cut out an article from the newspaper. This was back when you had newspapers. You know, you cut out the article. Well, we retyped the whole thing where there was like a 17 car pile up on Interstate 4 and someone was life-flighted to Tampa General Hospital.

And I would insert my guy's name in there. And I'd highlight it. And I'd write a letter from his sister saying, my brother is in a coma. the doctors say even if he wakes up he'll never work again you might as well take the house and of course if they if the bank pulled re-pulled his credit they would see well this guy's got five mortgages and he's got four personal loans and three credit cards or four credit cards and they're all in default like this is clearly true if you called his his work I was his work you know we had multiple employers they would say I'm sorry he's no longer here he's sorry there was an accident was checking out

Right. And so they just foreclosed on the property and, you know, resold it. So I borrowed $11.5 million in like 18 months or something like that in multiple people's names. A friend of mine got caught and he got caught running a scam that was connected to my scam. You know, he wanted him on it and something went wrong and he ended up getting caught. And they put together a task force, which ultimately came after me. And then I went on the run for three years and I continued to commit for all. God. Right. So, but what you might find interesting, so only since you, you mentioned this person's name, is that the names, predominantly the names of my borrowers were William Blue, James Red, Michael White, Lee Black, you know, Brandon Green. So you can imagine how, how easy it was. When my buddy got arrested, he said, listen, I know somebody who's running a much bigger scam. And he's like, and I can prove it to you right now. Pull up the property appraiser's website for Hillsborough County. Red, five foreclosures. William Blue, seven foreclosures. You know, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom. This guy currently owns four houses. He's about to buy another one. In six months, they'll all be in foreclosure. So yeah. Why do I got to be Mr. Pink? Exactly. That's, so let me ask, I'm just, uh, I'm just, uh, curious like what made you go from hey i'm i've got a mortgage company like it just wasn't

profitable enough or whatever like what made you say i'm going to do this this very complicated scam um you know it what it explaining it or it seems complicated right it to me it's like it's like riding a bike like if i explained to you about riding a bike right now you would you'd never ridden a bike it's impossible but once you start riding the bike within a week you're doing wheelies you're jumping ran you're right you're you know so to me it was very it you know owning that mortgage company so I had owned a mortgage company like I said prior to doing that scam you know I was already periodically changing W-2s or making fake canceled checks that's what I'm saying okay so it's

starting a small things because like if you start riding a bike it's because I want to get around and my friends had bikes and you know like there's a reason why you learn go through that like what was the yeah the reason behind and you get emboldened by it right You know, every time a loan went through and you close it and you made your little $3,500 broker fee, then that was like, wow, like it worked. You know, and the few times that I, it's not even a few times, the many times we got caught, I was able to kind of learn from those experiences because you'd have an underwriter call up and say, listen, this person's W2 is fake. And you go, what? And they go, yeah. And you say, well, are you telling me my borrower, gave me a fake W2?

how did you how did you find it and they go oh well turns out that the tax ID number we went on the web one of the ways we check is we do this and this and this and I thought next time that needs to match exactly and so you know after three or four years of owning that that mortgage company I'd learned how to make since although I hadn't really done it at the time I knew it was possible to make synthetic identities and it was possible to raise the purchase or to to to record sales in public records at a higher level. And you have to pay, the reason people don't do this typically is you have to pay extra doc stamps. If you buy a house for $100,000, you pay about $700 in dock stamps. If you just pay another $700,000, I'm sorry, another $700, it shows up as

a $200,000 sale. Right. So, you know, these were just little things that I learned. And And then I was able to manipulate that whole system. And, you know, and then I just made it worse for myself because when I came on, when, when they came to arrest me, I was tipped off by a sheriff's deputy that was a friend of mine that they were going to come arrest me. The FBI was going to come arrest me. So I took off on the run for three years. You know, I only had a couple days. So I was only able to leave Tampa with like 80 grand and you're not going to get far on 80 grand. So I immediately, over the next three years, I borrowed about three and a half.

to four and a half million dollars running additional more scams a little bit more complicated you know i've so i've had what's next to your charges what yeah exactly just making it worse and worse yeah so you know and i had the worst thing was too is that you know by that point i was able to i figured out how to go into a dmv get them to give me a driver's license i was able to get passports. The U.S., the State Department would issue me passports. So, you know, the times that I would get caught running these scams, if I'd get handcuffed by the police and question, they'd bring me downtown. They'd question me. I'd convince them I hadn't done anything wrong. They let me go. Right. You know, I'd, like, these are things that happened over and over again. I've

numerous, you know, and then, of course, it got worse and worse. It was, you know, there were tons of newspaper articles. Then I was in Fortune magazine. I was in Bloomberg. Oh, boy. Date lines running. So, you know, it's just, it's like, it's like, I'm thinking, well, this will go away. It's not going away. It's getting worse. Every time I turn around, there's another article. So, you know, eventually I end up getting caught and, you know, went to prison. Well, I'm glad you kept it in the financial world and didn't veer it because, you know, there is, you know, like, there are guys in our, you know, the cases that we cover that.

have that sort of like I'm running a scam and then I need to also eliminate a person to to really you know get that insurance money or you know whatever um you have one of those oh yeah one of our first cases was a guy he was he had everything uh you know impersonating people uh his big thing though he he um he became like a pastor and he would uh you know he knew the the very religious people were probably the easiest to do and he would meet the women and he would come across his, you know, I'm doing all this charity work and all this stuff. And he seemed like the greatest guy. And then he would get all kinds of, you know, five different life insurances on that person. And then, you know, I don't want to give too much away,

but like, you know, came and swept her away from work. Hey, I booked us an anniversary trip. And they'd been married for a little while. So it didn't, it wasn't like an immediate thing. I mean, we've had people that kill each other on their honeymoon. But this guy, you know, he had waited a bunch of years. And then one day on their anniversary came to the woman's job. A car was packed. Don't worry. We don't have to go home. We're going right on vacation. I packed all your stuff for you. Huge red flag. If someone packs your stuff for you and won't let you go home and call anybody, probably a red flag. Whisks her away to the Colorado, the Rocky Mountains. And then, yeah, And then she winds up, you know, off a cliff and, you know, he swears it was an accident.

She fell. She was taking the selfie or whatever. But he had all these life insurances on her. And then also it turned out his first wife died in the same, not the exact same, but also like was changing a car tire and the jack broke and fell and the car fell on her. I see this has been covered. Yeah, a little bit. way yeah this way oh yeah yeah um it just uh yeah this was this to me was like the quintessential slocation because this guy yeah this guy was great uh in terms of you know pure evil and uh yeah

his wives and and stuff like that um but you know again you're you kept it financial uh and this guy decided he had to he had to take lives to uh to get what he wanted um you know i was going to say this uh was it a slick willie sutton said you know they said why do you rob banks and he said well that's where the money is so exactly um gosh the the i was going to say that reminds me of that did you ever hear about there were there were two brothers own a mason company and they would hire like uh homeless people to work as laborers and they would give them a place to live like on like they had two or three acres or something they'd give them put them in a shed.

And after they'd get insurance policy on them, they'd basically have them drink themselves to death. Yeah, I did hear about that. For the insurance. It was, yeah, the insurance money is like,

and there's so many cases like that. So many stories that are, you know, it's funny too. A lot of people will go on vacation. And I think it's part of the going on vacation is I think that they're basically like this person isn't, from South America.

Like how much of an investigation can they do in South America about what's going on here? That happens a lot where, yeah, you know, what is the local, and a lot of times the local, the local police or whatever, they don't want to make a big deal out of it anyway. They don't want to scare off tourists and make it seem like murders happen here. So they do try to bury a lot of these. There was that famous case, you know, a woman with her friends, Schenkela Robinson went to Cabo with her friends and, you know, wound up, you know, found in the morning dead after a night of partying. And, you know, the friends said it was, they drank too much or whatever. But then

there's a video of her, like, being beaten up by one of her friends and stuff. And it made national news. But the autopsy, the original autopsies, oh, yeah, yeah, they just concurred. Yeah, no big deal. Because they just didn't want the publicity. But, you know, it was such a, you know, a fervor back here in the States, people. And then as new, as new evidence would come out, like that, like, you know, the leaked videotape of the girl being beaten up. It's like, wait, there's more here. And she had, like, you know, damage to her face. It's like, that wasn't in the original autopsy.

They were like, oh, yeah, she must have drank too much. And so, yeah, but a lot of the local authorities don't want the publicity, don't want to make it seem like murders happen here. But we do say, yeah, vacation is the, you know, I make the joke, I say, if you can't kill somebody on the vacation, then you have no business killing people because you just are not cut out for it. you're doing stuff that you don't ordinarily do, you're in weird position, you know, you're kayaking, you're hiking, you're on cliffs, you're on mountain trails, there's very few people

around, there's always drinking, there's always like nightlife stuff. Now we don't just cover, like, so we say, you know, we say, you know, if a couple, you know, if one murders the other, that's a slaycation. If you go on vacation and you get murdered, we'll also, cover that. There's some interesting cases like that. A couple goes on vacation, meets another couple. They seem like good people. And then after a night of partying, they don't show up to work on Monday. What happened to them? And, you know, trying to trace those, you know, those last moments or whatever. Was it the couple? Was it something else? Did they just disappear? You know, so we say, if you leave for vacation in the plane and you come home under the plane,

then you've been on a sleutcation. Do you ever interview like the detectives or is this just research and then you got you kind of ask questions? Yeah, we might get there, but right now it's just, it's just they research the hell out of it and then I try to probe and ask questions and make off-color jokes and my wife gets mad at me. So it's a, it's a funny dynamic. Oh, good.

No, I was just going to say, I was going to say something like, I forget what it was last night. Like, like, two days ago, my wife was just, something happened and she looked at me and she's like, I am so glad that I married you. She's like, I mean, she's like, I love you so much. You were such a great guy. And then the next day, we were having a conversation at this desk and I said something that I knew she was. going to be like what did you say and she i looked up at her and i said something i anyway whatever it was and i looked at her and she goes why am i married to you wait a minute are you the same person who just no i don't believe me i get that i get that a lot too uh i mean it's funny because it's

like i'll make sometimes i'll make a joke or i'll have a joke that i'm like i shouldn't say it but i got to say it so what i'll do is i'll say you know what i was going to say was and then i'll say the joke as if like I didn't say it, but now I, you know, I'm just blurting it out because I was going to, I thought this thing, but it's, it's terrible. And then my wife will just look at me and she's such an asshole. I know. And it's like, you know, we're recording. And she's like, yeah, I know. But I mean, I think that's part of the fun. And, you know, we do bring our marriage dynamic into it and, you know, raising our daughter. And, you know, and it's great because, you know, we've all known each other for over 30 years. So it's like we have a camaraderie that

you can't really fake. Right. Yeah, we try not to be the podcast that's just laughing at, like, nonsense and nothing. You know, it's like, let's make sure you laugh at something that's actually funny, and let's, you know, tell the stories. You know, it's funny. I know you love, yeah, you love the little crime. I have a story that I think you'll appreciate.

It's not a murder story, but, you know, it was something. I worked in a factory in Hackensack, New Jersey, and we made car washes. all the all the all the all the all machinery that you'd find in a car wash okay arms the curtain uh the conveyor that pulls your car and there was a guy there named carlos who was the cutter he would cut all the angles and the flats and the beams and the tubes and stuff and Carlos loved to steal uh this guy was just addicting to stealing the rush of stealing it didn't even matter what it was he just loved stealing stuff i had i had fucked up my car So Carlos offered to give me rides to and from work.

In exchange, he would raid my parents' like freezer and like take my dad worked in the meat business. So he would take steaks and burgers. He's like, I'll take the little chickens. And I was like, those are capons. He's like, yeah, whatever. And so this guy loved, you know, he loved taking the meat in payment for rides home. But the thing was, every ride was fraught with danger because he had a little pickup truck. and as we're driving he would just pull over and jump out of the car and grab something off someone's lawn bikes a lawn gnome

garden hose whatever he'd just grab it throw it in his truck and just drive off and i'd be like what are you doing he's like hey man this kid's got to learn you don't leave your bikes out when carliss is around and i was like okay so at each speed too like i was like at least stop at the red lights you can pull over for that Anyway, there was a warehouse across from our factory, and it had a loading dock, and our warehouse did not have a loading dock. So we always had to use their loading dock to put the machinery onto the big. Stop. Do you know how fast you were going?

I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nissan. Buy your tickets now. I get a free Tilly Dog. Chilly Dog, not included. The Naked Gun. Tickets on sale now. August 1st.

tractor trailers to ship it. And while we were there, he noticed that the warehouse was open and he could just go right in. And they had like boxes of clothing and stuff. So he would just go in, help himself to a box, run back to our factory. He'd open it up. And then he'd try to sell the stuff. Hey, guys, t-shirts, $5, $3 for 10. And the guys were like, you just stole that.

It's like they would just help themselves to it. But eventually he started taking so many boxes that the warehouse knew something was up. So they kept that door closed. Didn't stop Carlos. He'd go in a window, open the window, Carlos in, box out, Carlos out, window closed, off he goes. So then they built a big fence around the warehouse. And they put a dog of vicious, like early days of pit bulls,

like when, you know, the most ferocious dog you've ever seen into, you know, inside the fence. And I'm, you know, snarling, barking. I was afraid to eat my lunch outside, even though it was in the fence. Like, if it got loose, it would kill you. And I say, I guess it's over, Carlos. And he's looking at the dog.

And he's just rubbing his chin. He's like, oh, man, it looks like a happy dog to me. Whatever, dude. Neither would say, yeah, they put the dog inside the warehouse when we use the loading dock. And we were terrified. We're like, if this dog gets out, we're dead. I had gotten hired to work on a film shoot for a week or so. So I disappeared.

Did the film shoot come back. and when I get to work, Carlos drives up, drives me to work. I noticed that there's no dog in the yard. And I say to Carlos, I was like, oh, man, did it kill somebody? And he just kind of smiles or whatever. And I'm like, oh, this dog must have ripped somebody apart. That day, Carlos said, hey, you want to ride home? Sure.

Get in the car. We're driving. I say, did you forget where I lived? You made a left instead of a right. He goes, I want to show you something. He pulls up in front of his house. he whistles the dog comes running out of the house he stole the dog

I was going to say I knew he I knew he was going so I was just like yeah hats off to Carlos wherever he is whatever prison he's in now or maybe not I don't know but yeah I mean I've always been fascinated by stories about crime and then you know these these stories were just the dislocation stories

are just so I mean I don't want to use the word fun because there's, you know, people, you know, are getting killed. But they're so tricky and convoluted and twisty and terny. You really won't know until the very end was in an accident or was it murder. And even at the end, you're like, no, there's still something there. And sometimes the people are caught, sometimes they let go. How many episodes do you have per season?

Well, we just, you know, we just started, like, we haven't, even figured out what a season is we've recorded 11 so far we're launching uh the idea is to record two to a month uh and just stay ahead of our schedule and you know uh it's it's interesting because our with our kids educational podcast we never did a season we just keep going we have 500 yeah okay i think with this we'll probably you know maybe 20 something episodes and call that a season um you know well i mean i guess now you don't really have to have a season. I was thinking more kind of TV-ish kind of. Well, and it depends. Typically, when you go to a production company, like they typically buy a certain or fund a

certain amount. So they're like, okay, your season's 12 or we need 14 of these. Are you concerned about there being an end? I mean, listen, how many high profile, like, it's got to be high profile enough for you guys to be able to find them right i mean that that's how we started we you know because i said the first one i was like man it's location and and then we got excited and then it's like okay let's see if we can find 50 or more than there's probably something we found over well over a hundred oh okay so you know uh they're not all going to be super twisty internees sometimes uh but they all have something yeah you know uh they they all have something that's going to suck you in and uh you know um we've even done a couple that are like two parters because there's so much

you know you think it's going one way and then all of a sudden a new piece of evidence it's like oh my god we can talk another hour about this it's like all right then we will they surprised me with one the other day there was like um jeremy started recapping i'm like why are we Recapping. I know where we are. He's like, because you think you know where we are, but we're going to do the rest in part two. I was like, oh, shit. People were been talking for 50 minutes. Like, okay. So we did, yeah, we did a two-parter on a case. Yeah, I was going to, I interviewed a couple of, actually, they were, there are actresses that are turned to podcasters. And they do a podcast called, I met my murderer online. yeah yeah the problem is is like because they're basically going off of people that met like on dating apps right like I just like how many are there yeah that might be a little bit more finite yeah well that yeah that's why I said yeah we we cover people that murder each other on the on vacation or if you get

murdered and then the white well if you go on vacation and then see a crime of opportunity and actually murder somebody else and then leave because you're like, hey, I'm in a far country. I can probably get away with it. What's the guy that murdered, gosh, the girl Holloway? Oh, Natalie Holloway. Yeah. Vanderloot. So we haven't even done that one yet. That one could be like a three-parter, you know, it's like, but it's so known that we've kind of avoided. It's, it's, it's, it's, but there's new revelation. So I mean, it is, but you know, here's the problem is like, I've always heard bits and pieces, bits and pieces, right? And now it's come out. to where he's basically, hasn't he basically admitted it and been?

No, there's actual closure on it after years of nothing. So, yeah. Right. So now you could probably do an episode, even if it was just one episode on the highlights of it because like I don't know the whole, I know bits and pieces and I'm sure that's a sick guy. Like he's, I mean, the fact is, is like, I don't want to say this. Like murdering one person. It's almost like, okay, murdering one person, okay, but murdering, but then he murders another person, you know what I'm saying?

So, but yeah, he clearly is just a serial killer that maybe only got to, you know, maybe only got to two. He may, there may be other people out there, who knows, but this is, like you already know the scrutiny you're under. Right. Well, like you said, you do the one thing, you get away with it and you become a more, right, you know, and then you're like the polar bear that got a taste for it. and you're like, I can do it again. In fact, he's probably thinking, like, I'm the last person they would think, right? I mean, after everything, I've been, that guy would never remember somebody. Look at all the scrutiny and look, you know, I don't know.

But we definitely will cover Natalie Holloway. We've, I think, avoided it because it was so known. You know, like, there are cases that we do that are no. And look, we just discovered there was a lifetime movie made on one of our cases. about a guy who took his fiance, or actually they just got married. Honeymoon, Great Barrier Reef.

He's a Mr. Pro Scuba Diver. And she's never scuba dive. And she's terrified. And he won't even let her take the lessons. Like, no, no, no, I've got it. I've got it. And they lied in their interviews so that she would just be able to scuba dive without even getting the lesson.

Is it just a guy who's got murder on his mind? Or is he just this alpha male asshole who's like, I can teach better than they can. Trust me. Right. Be with me. Well, they go down there. She starts to panic and he's trying to fix her breathing apparatus is not working something, blah, blah, blah. And suddenly she starts to sink and he gets panicky and he goes up to the surface. And then she's found dead and they try to rescue her, but she's already gone. Then it comes out like, oh, some other diver thought he saw them struggling and

thought he saw him pulling at her, at her, you know, respirators, you know, and then, so then that came out, but then something else came out that, like, the respirator makes a noise or something if it's, and it didn't make, you know, so there's like little weird evidence that swings it back and forth, like a pendulum, like, oh, he's guilty. Oh, wait, maybe not. You know, oh, yeah, because he had claimed that something was wrong with his thing, and then they tried to say, like, well, that would never happen, but then they prove that that can happen and that it did happen. So it's like, you just never, you never quite know. And then he escaped, he got back to the States and then Australia wanted him, like to, you know, but they don't have an extradition

treaty or whatever. They weren't going to send him back. But then he went back on his own. Yeah, so these cases are convoluted and they're really cool. And as far as true, Greg, I was going to say, there's one, I was thinking about one that it's not, I don't, it's not a murder because it was a, I think it was a couple that went out like scuba diving and they were left by the boat like they got too far away and they just got left and they just said okay they got to eat my sharks like is that the open water yeah they made a movie yeah it's just horrible horrible yeah yeah like shark movies so of course i saw that one yeah uh they they counted wrong and uh they thought they were they counted somebody twice or something like that and then they left them there um

Yeah But that could be on our show Because they definitely died on a vacation So we That fits under the slication umbrella Like I said If you leave in the plane And come home under the plane

If you pack a bag And come home in a bag Just like that's You're good You're good Yeah good for you I'm going to say It's horrible

I know I know I know What kind of karma Am I building up with this? Yeah I was going to say This is going to But this is one of those things you're going to have to answer to.

Right. Answer for, sorry. You know, it's funny because I say all the time, like my wife is so, you know, she's got the best voice of the three of us. She's the one that sounds like a podcaster. And she, you know, her whole thing is like she's doing true crime. She just wants to understand the human psyche and how are people capable of doing. This is, this is that, and this is part of the women thing. Like, they want to know.

They want to know. Can people be fixed? What is it? What do I look for? Why, you know, how have I gotten away? you know, I'm lucky that it wasn't me, but it could have been me, blah, blah, blah. So she's coming from that angle. I'm like, people are going to love you.

Jerry, he does research, and he's very empathetic, and he almost like doesn't like the true crime genre, but he understands that, like, some of these stories need to be told, and he wants to, you know, champion the victims, you know, whatever. So I said, people will like, or be neutral on him, and then they got me, and I'm like, I'm the asshole. They'll either like, they'll think I'm funny. Or they'll be like, this guy's an asshole. I'd rather play that part.

Yeah, we too. Yeah. Don't rage. Listen, just to fucking yell at me. But, you know, listen, people, she's never going to understand the human psyche. I can tell you right now, and I was in prison for 13 years, and people are just horrific. They're just horrible. We're a horrible species.

Really are. Right. Right. The animals just took over. It'd be probably better. I don't know if I mentioned this. or not. But when, you know, I was in prison, I wrote, I started writing true crime stories. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. So I wrote, actual or nonfiction. No, no, true crime. Like, these are, because

think about it. Imagine the wealth of, of, of, uh, oh, you mean, the stories of the other inmates. Right, right, right, right. Right. And with, um, when you said Todd Phillips, uh, Todd Phillips. So I wrote a, a book on a guy named Ephraim Devoroli. Okay. And. And, War dogs. Yeah. The movie Wardogs. So I was locked up with him and I had just finished my own memoir. So I talked to him about writing, you know, that he should write a book, you know, and I had a, I said, oh, I got a literary agent if you want one.

And he, you know, and so we had a conversation and he was, I was like, you know, he said, I could never write it. I could never write a book. He said, because, you know, he's like, I'm ADD. I'm bipolar. He said, I'm all over the places. I couldn't focus long enough. And I said, okay. I said, well, you know, you could get somebody on the street to write it, like a goat's writer.

He clearly had tons of money. And I said, you know, I'll, if you want, I'll help you write an outline. And he was like, you know, I'll think about it. Well, later on, months later, Todd Phillips bought the rights to the Rolling Stone article based on his story. Right. But it was the story was based on his co-defendant's version of the story. But of course, he's the main character. He's the more, you know, the other guy's there.

right but but uh and so you've seen the movie like the bulk of it even though it's david packow's telling you he's narrating the interest more interesting of the two characters is is that from devroly so you know he comes to me and we talk and and he i told him on help write the outline and so we start writing an outline and then he asked if he could read my book so he read my book and he said bro you should you should write my story and i was like i've i said i'm not i'm not like a really a writer and he's like you that bro your your story's great you're talking about. You can do this.

So I end up writing his memoir. It's called Once a Gun Runner. And then he leaves with it, doesn't talk to me, just blows me off. Then he publishes the book and he sues Todd Phillips and Warner Brothers. I didn't know that part. While I was in prison, I then try and enter the lawsuit. you know, I file paperwork saying, hey, I want to intervene. This guy ripped me off and now he's suing Todd Phillips based on the book.

He was saying that Todd Phillips stole his manuscript, which in fact, they did, I believe, based on DeBeroli's motion, that Warner Brothers did actually get a hold of his manuscript because he was shopping it around to do a documentary or another, you know, because you can mind these projects are going on at the same time. Todd Phillips, they hadn't even finalized. the script at the time or the you know the screenplay had been written it was rewritten once once they got Jonah Hill to play they got Ephraim they rewrote the script again but by that point they had acquired the manuscript now this is according to Deverelli's uh man his motion and he actually has a connection they actually did send it to the vice to the son of one of the vice presidents of warner brothers they send it to his son who does documentaries right so there's a direct connection there

And even, it's funny, too, because in their, all their responses to the most, all the court proceedings, never once did Warner Brothers say, we never got a hold of his, they never denied it. Right. But what they did was, they altered the story so much they said that basically the movie's fiction. Oh, wow. So then they turned around and sued Warner saying, you advertise it as being a true story. I'm saying it's not to advertise as a fictional movie. Right. And they were like, so now there's something called the Landhammed Act.

They're like, now you violated the Lanham Act, which means that you knowingly lied to the public. So now they soon, so finally Warner comes in, they, they settle the lawsuit with him. I exit prison, and I'm still in the lawsuit with Devoroli, so Devoroli settles with me. Oh, wow. In the meantime, while this whole thing's going on, this is years of battling. And I'm in prison. Like the idea that you can fight a civil lawsuit from in prison is ridiculous. But I happen to be in a prison where there were a lot of lawyers.

Right. So I also. Right. So which will do what will work for nothing. Right. Like they're just trying to pass their time. Very shush-shake. Right.

Yeah. And what I ended up doing was while this was happening, I'm still writing stories. So I had written all of these stories while I was in there. And you know, you hear so many stories. Like being in prison, you'd hear a guy's story. story and you would go, how is that not a movie? How is that not? And you could see that sometimes you'd read their case, you know, their paperwork.

They would have, maybe they'd be fighting their case or you'd read their transcripts and the various FBI 302s, which is like, you know, chronologically kind of documents the case and your views, that sort of thing. And you're like, how is this, this is the most insane thing I've ever heard. But the truth is, a lot of these guys. They don't have high school diplomas. And even then, they can't really write their story. They're not writers.

And they can't take on a project that's going to take three to six months. And they can't do the research. And they can't. So what I did was I started writing their stories. And some of them were full-blown books. Right. Some of them were just, you know, nine or 10,000 words synopsies, which is essentially like an article of the story.

And, you know, I did that for, I did that probably the last four or five years of my sentence. And that made my time just go by so quickly, so quickly. It was, it was real. And that's why, that's kind of how I ended up. And productively, you know. Right. Well, I also got some guys in Rolling Stone magazine.

I optioned their life rights. I, I, then when I got out, I optioned some guys life rights, some other guys. You know, I'm working with. multiple production companies and I'm sure you know this you're always working with like if I told you all the things that are going on right now it sounds great but honestly I've been out of prison for four years and they're always sound great just before the bottom falls out and you start over and the bottom falls out and you start over like yeah so it all sounds great right now right until it's up yeah right I mean yeah totally I totally know exactly what you're talking about and

you have to have a million oars in the water or any of them actually going to push the boat because it changes overnight. I was going to say, like, how is you, you know, how is what you did, like, not a show? How is there not a TV series based on all these? But then again, at the same time, they don't like necessarily crime.

Like, the true crime genre is murder. And if it's not murders and stuff, now, granted, maybe some of your stories are murders, but, you know, you said, like, how is this not a movie? One of my teachers at NYU was like, a writing teacher had a great phrase. He said, there are ideas and there are movies. When you can tell the difference between them, then you can make money in this business.

So there's a lot of great ideas. Wow, that's a great idea. But isn't a movie. A movie has to have all these different parts and a character that's relatable and an arc and all this stuff, three acts. So there's a lot of stuff like, that's an amazing story. But does that story translate into a movie? or maybe it's like you said maybe it's an article or maybe it's a novel or maybe it's a book of short

stories that you know that's part of your collection you know or it's an anthology or it's you know it's a crime series that each episode is its own thing so yeah there's there's many different ways to do it but like yeah i'm listening to what you're saying like you know i want to get your book you know but that's really that's really interesting about the ward dogs thing uh it's funny I actually wrote a book about that whole because the battle from inside of the prison is so hilarious

and so it's outrageous the way we're even finding things out like literally the book was published and I hadn't heard from Debroli or the literary agent they were still pitching the book then we stopped talking they stopped returning or stopped

answering the phone stopped returning emails I have no access to the internet and then one day I'm sitting down with a bunch of guys and this inmate comes by and he goes hey he said Cox you making any money on that book and I go what book and he goes

he said um Devereoli's book and I went no I said they they never got a publisher and he goes what are you talking about and he opens up no no he opens up Oceans Drive magazine and there's a there's a big picture where Devoroli's got about a hundred books behind him and he's at the at the Miami book fair signing books and I'm like the book you wrote yes

oh my name on it like my name's on it oh okay yeah yeah it wasn't like I didn't do a whole ghost riding like I'm in prison I'm not trying to get the money right you know there's like you could you could you could have given me $100,000 in prison I can only buy $300 worth a commissary a month like I can only like it changes nothing for me right right they're not going to let me out of jail. Because I owe six million. If I gave the government a hundred thousand, they'd be like, yeah, thanks. It was six million. You're not getting out of jail. So the money was the, right. Yeah, it was about getting out. And, you know, by this point, guys are coming up to me saying, Cox, you, when you get out, you got to do a podcast. And I was

like, what's a podcast? Like that term didn't even show up in, you know, and it wasn't even a term until 2009. What year is this, by the way? This is, war dogs came out in what? Oh, gosh. 17, 18? Okay. Yeah. So I, I, um, you know, guys are

telling me, you got to do some, a true crime a true crime podcast and I don't even know what that is. Yeah, you could do one on YouTube. You could do one on Spotify. I don't know what these are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These aren't things. I was locked up in 2006. I don't know I've never been on YouTube. Guys are trying to explain to me what a podcast. I'm like, so it's like a radio, like a radio program. It is, but it's not.

What does that mean? Right. It's like a little, like a 45-minute radio program. And where does it go? Well, they put it on different platforms. What does that mean? Like a website. Kind of like a website, but not.

What does that mean? Like, no idea. So, anyway, yeah. So when I got out, that's, you know, that's, like, that's how I ended up here. Right. You know, and I try. Brilliant what you did. The more I, the more I, I mean, I, you know, I just was, you know, looking into it.

Yesterday when we decided we were going to do this, I started looking into it. Yeah, I was like, wow. And it's a, it's a cool niche. And you've got the, you know, you've got the inside, you know, you're a true, like, expert in what you're doing, you know. That's why I don't do anything really on violent crime because. And there are a few murders. Like, I've done stuff, but I'm never talking to the murderer.

It's always like someone on the case got murdered by another co-defendant or, you know, there was a, or the guy that I'm talking to was blamed for the murder, but he didn't do it. And then later, it came out. He didn't do the murder, but he went to jail for something else, let's say, you know. And so you're like, okay, so we have to include the murder and what happened, but. But it's not the books of it, right. Yes. Yeah, like I said, you know, the good thing about podcasting is you can just do it on your own.

You don't have to have somebody say yes or not. Yeah, because we do when you're doing a movie. I mean, I write a movie. I sold it. It still took five years to get made. Countless rights. And every time, oh, we had a director. And then the director got fired because they didn't like, he wasn't doing what the studio wanted.

So the second director came in. And then the actor comes in and then changing the movie again over and over. And, you know, it takes five years to get made. TV shows go faster in some regards, but also a lot of, you know, the studio and the network and the this and that, you know, a podcast, I mean, the brilliant thing is you do what you want and you put out what you came up with, you know, like our Who Smarted podcast, we don't get notes. We give the notes. I give the notes to the writers. And we put out the show exactly the way we want it. And it's, you know, and it's fun. With Slaycation, we're funding it ourselves. We didn't sell it to a place or anything. We're going to just, you know, because we see the model. You put it out yourself. You build up an audience through promo swaps and whatever.

And then, you know, if it's good content, you know, hopefully the people come. But, you know, you build it up. And then you sell the ads and then have a subscription. And, you know, it's a viable thing without having to hear no from a studio or a network or whatever. Yeah. And it takes forever to get the, first of all, it takes forever to go through the whole pitching process. And then when it's all said and done, you're lucky if you get the no. You ever notice that?

Like sometimes you just get the blow off and you're like, and you get the, oh, we're going to talk to Sally next Tuesday. Oh, we're waiting for John to come back from vacation. Oh, we're not buying anything for the next two months. It'll be in the next pitch session. Oh, and they can drag you for six months to a year before you finally go. Very true. Someone wants to say no.

We've built up enough of a reputation in the TV space that at least we get the no. but now in the podcast space we've had companies reach out to us ask us if we wanted we're partnered with them create a show together we come up with IP great they love it give us a budget we give them a budget and then they blow us off and we're waiting for three months and it's like are we doing this or not well we had a really bad what is that to do with like we're doing this you know so it's like oh listen I've done that with TV series and then suddenly you think you've got something you've all had the meetings you're already writing the episode and guess what they get bought out by Disney right the murder there's always the murder like okay but but no no but

we had a we had a no I know everything's on hold yes you know what I better do I better do I better just start pumping out content on YouTube that's what I better do there you go right exactly exactly you're playing it smart so yeah well playing it smart based on default because it was a part of plan. Gotcha. The best offense is a good defense. So, okay, well, listen, we'll put the, like, we can put the link into, or in the description box.

Okay. Or, um, uh, floor flakation. Yeah. And, as a matter of fact, if you could send me, you got, I'm sure you have some artwork. Yeah. I'll have Nick sending everything over. Gacy didn't do it. No.

So. It's better. what he does it he's not he wasn't the greatest painter he's better listen that the uh the um the painting of him painting the clown you know just so creepy

right and your clowns in general are creepy right you know his whole thing his whole like I've watched several documentaries on the whole thing and his just the arrogance um just across the board he was just such a an odd guy on the phone he would he even to us he wouldn't even admit he would just be like

I don't know who put those bodies there the only thing you can charge me with is running a cemetery without a license we're like oh come on right give it up the phone in the shower because it was so bad like we take a shower afterwards but we're like well we should just put the phone in the shower so we can shower during the call because it's so grimy but at the same time it's super intriguing you know nobody else was getting that call so you're like right well um yeah definitely send me some art and send me a uh send me a a headshot of you yeah because otherwise you're going to end up getting a screenshot yeah my my editor will just take a screenshot of you and make a make a um

he'll make a thumbnail with that so if you want to have any hope of getting a picture that you're okay with. Okay. You really need to hit, send some kind of a headshot. Okay, we'll do. All right. Well, I really appreciate it. Give me, give me one second. Hold on. Let me do this. This is my, I got to do this thing. Yep. Hey, I appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you get notified of videos just like this. Leave me a comment, and I will try and respond. Also, if you want to check out Slaycation, please check the description box. We're going to put all the links in the description. box, and I really appreciate it.

Please consider joining my Patreon. Thank you very much. See you. Here's old. The average brain games viewer was like late 30s. So it was like a tremendous drop, and we knew tons of kids were interested in this. So when we stopped doing brain games, we did a show called Brain Child for Netflix, and we did a season of that, 13 episodes, and we expanded beyond just the brain to like talk about all kinds of things, like space and the ocean, emotions and stuff like that. So that, we just got data.

Like, that's in the top 15% of all Netflix shows. Still, today, even though we came out in 2018 or something. So kids are still watching the hell out of that. So that was sort of our entertainment slash educational, you know, journey. And then, yeah, then we got into podcasting, like I said, we smarted. But Slakation is a chance for us to be on mic, be ourselves, be funny, but also get into these dark cases. And like I said, the cases on slaycation are so twisty and turny.

And people, you know, criminals, you know, they make, they're brilliant in so many aspects. And then they make a colossal error that how, how could they do that? Yeah. I'll give you an example. There was a guy he pushed his wife off a cliff and made it seem like an accident. And he would have gotten away with it, except he had a map in his car. of an ex on the remote spot

where she was found and it's like, wait, was? Completely, yeah, just, no, listen, I have some friends that are brilliant and then they were caught

just, they would do the dumbest things. Before I mentioned that, I want to say, one, I like your Salvador dolly clock. Oh, thank you. And, well,

and then I was going to ask, like, what are some of your favorite episodes or cases what I was going to also wanted to mention is I have a friend that would his he had a

quick version of his crime is that you know he was able to make fake IDs so so he's got a guy that makes fake IDs he's big on putting people together so one that's a problem because you're involving lots of people in your in your crimes but whatever

the point is he can he's got somebody who can make fake IDs so he ends up he ends up getting connected with a guy that worked in the fraud department for bank of america he tells them about something that's been happening and he's like it happens at banks everywhere and there's really nothing we can do about it even though we know there's a fraud being committed there's just nothing we can do it's just the cost of doing business and that is that take take yourself for example you've got 13000 dollars in your bank account. You go and you send your your debit card to somebody in another state. You tell them to go into, let's say the post office and tell them, go buy $9,000 worth of money orders. So they do. Or even if you

went to a store and went bought something for nine grand, you go and you do it. And then for, you know, whatever, 45 minutes later, you walk into the bank and I say my money's gone. My money's gone. Yeah. So by law, the Electronic Transfer Act, they have to put the money back. Right. Now, they can investigate it. And if they investigate and they find out that it was, that you were involved, then they can reverse the charges. Well, here's, here's, what's interesting about that is this guy was like, so the bank

employee tells me this. And he said, now, I don't know what you can do with this, but I feel like you're the kind of guy that could do something with it. I'm just letting you know, this is the thing. no bank investigates any of these crimes under $10,000. So if you take $8,000 or $9,000, the worst they will do is close your account. What he did was he was like, okay, so he went and he thought, if I have guys, if I give people fake IDs and have them go open bank accounts in other states,

and each person can open about three accounts before the fourth bank, they start asking questions like, hey, you've opened three other accounts in the last two days. or whatever. So he said, so if each guy puts about $10,000 in the account, I removed $9,500 or $9,000, they go in a 20 minutes later or five minutes later and ask for some cash and have the bank tell them, you don't have any money. You've got like $200. Right. What do you mean you want $9,000? You know, you want $500? What are you talking about? I got over $10,000. And they're like, you're in another state that I couldn't possibly be in. Right. Right. So, and he said, my problem with that was, where do I find these people? Like, who's going to do that? And I was like,

yeah, yeah. So, where did you find him? He said, first appearance. Now, he's been arrested over and over again. So he said, I went to the courthouse. And when people get arrested and they go for their first appearance, typically the prosecutor stands up and says, Your Honor, we're not giving this guy any bond or we're giving him $5,000 in bond. He's been arrested twice for credit card fraud. He's been arrested for um check fraud he's been arrested for telecommunications fraud and he goes they basically read their resume right so i would sit there for two hours and i would end up with five people's names he said if they didn't get bond i would write them a letter money on their books and say hey call me i'm going to bond you out of jail he would they would call him on a phone that is a burner

her phone and he'd explain the scam to them over the phone and say now if you're interested I will bond you out he would they of course these are career criminals are like on me out yeah so he said you know if you bonded out like four guys he's and typically their bonds are 500 bucks a thousand I'm giving them 10% down it's nothing you know it's five thousand dollar bond he's like but they're broke because most of them are drug addicts um so he said I would bond them out and when they would go to get their property, he would have his wife go and put a phone in their property because when you, the where your property is held, you can go there and say, hey, John Smith is about to be bonded out. I'm his wife or I'm a friend of his. He doesn't have

his cell phone. Can you put this in with this property? And they would always go, yeah, of course. They put it in the bag. And so when he got it, he would get the phone. He'd call the number. they take a photo of yourself send it to me they'd send it to them they would then send him send him the IDs a plane ticket he'd go open the accounts wait a couple of days get the debit cards scan them send the duplicate debit cards back to florida they would go take the money out of the account and then he they'd go back in the guy would go back in the bank and he was sending two or three people every single month doing this so he's making now that the scam was netting to 300,000 a month, he's giving the guys 30%.

And he said they were always good for a trip or two and then they'd get back on drugs or they'd get re-arrested. But I always thought it was brilliant. And the way his whole kind of scam unraveled was this. One day he and his wife, basically it's a little bit more complicated. This was one of the stupid things that he did that got them onto his trail. He and his wife were on vacation and they used a stolen credit card to buy their hotel. room for a week. And I'm like, you've got half a million dollars in the bank. You've got a hundred thousand something dollars in cash. Why would you use a stolen credit card? And he goes,

well, why would I pay for it when I have a stolen credit? I'm like, because this is you. Why would you? He's like, well, I just. And that got him caught? Eventually, that's one of the things that led to his, well, there's multiple things that ended up, you know, converging. But that's one of, And that's, but that's the kind of things that he would do. It's such a cell phone. That's such a, like, you, I'd expect it to be one of these knuckleheads that he hires, somebody. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was, um, and that's what always tends to get these guys that I would meet.

It would be like one little thing. It's like, why did you do that? Why did you just give the person the money back? Like, out of a guy whose whole Ponzi scheme came undone because of like a $100,000 that suddenly he took from somebody and their daughter started freaking out and said that it, started saying they were going to call the police. They're going to call the FBI. They're going to do this. They're going to do that. Something's wrong. I don't think something's wrong about something's wrong about your financial Ponzi scheme. And instead of him saying, listen, I'm just going to give you the money back. He didn't. I go, why didn't you? And he goes, you know, I mean, she was being such a jerk about it. I'm like, you stole 50 million dollars. Right. It's a hundred grand. He's like, I know, but you made me so mad. And it was just like, what do you think? These guys do stupid things. Yeah. Oh, I got a scam for you. You are the

Perfect guy. You're the guy that would appreciate this the most. So back when we were in college, like I said, Todd and I looked together. It was like freshman year was like 89.90. We had a guy. He was the brother of this Russian girl that we knew at school. Her older brother was like a high roller guy show up and then the fancy car and the fancy clothes. And we're like, what does he do? He basically tells us, this is what I'm doing. And I want you guys, if you guys want to be in.

this was the early days of like the 1-800 numbers call 1-800 blah blah blah and you could set up those numbers to cost whatever you want to charge whatever you want per minute if you you know uh it's like you know phone sex uh only a dollar 99 a minute or whatever but you could make it a hundred a minute 99 dollars a minute of course no one's going to want to pay that so no one would ever call that number but what you can do is you set it up to be 99 dollars a minute like your first minute is whatever and then every other minute is $99. Then he would hire two gibronies like me and Todd to go into office buildings dressed like a messenger with a boxer or something under our arm and say, hey, I've got a package for, you know, John Smallberries. There's no John Smallberries here.

What? Can I call my home office? Yeah, sure. You pick up the phone. You call the 1-800 number. You hang on the phone for a couple minutes. You have a fake conversation. You've just charged up about $500 in call, hang up, sorry, go to the next office right in the same building. And you just work your way down. You can, you know, 20 offices per floor, 30 floors in New York. And, you know, the charge gets eaten up and, you know, they don't get the phone bill to, who knows. And in the day, thousands and thousands of dollars. So we tried it once and we're like, we lost our nerve.

And we're like, this is crazy. We're going to get kicked out of college. We're in NYU. We're trying to make movies. Like, this is stupid. But this guy was ready to pay us cash. And he's like, I've got an army of people can, you know, all over canvassing the city, just making calls to my stupid 1-800 number or whatever.

I was pretty, I thought that was pretty smart. Yeah, the, the, the 1-900 numbers, I mean, I've heard a couple of scams like that. You know, most of them are like calling, you know, to like Jamaica or Haiti or, you know, and they would charge whatever. And they would do it for so many months and build up a credit line with the, phone company that gate provided the the line and then at some point when they were so millions of dollars in debt to them they would close the company down restart it in somebody else's name change offices and and start all over again and just you know so it was funny like the guy that

I knew that was kind of investigating this whole many of those he said like we knew like we we would go and we would look and we're like he's selling it for 75 cents a minute we're selling him the minutes for $0.85 a minute. We know it's about to go under. Right. But yeah, that's, yeah, those. Back of the day. Those are always the big time scams.

And then they, you know, eventually they fall up. But same thing with the PPP loans. Like these guys are making tons of money. They're doing great. And they're thinking, I'm brilliant. No, it just hasn't caught up to you. Exactly. It's two years later.

What was your thing? I know that you had, like, did you have? Did you have a couple of things or? I mean, I had several, but probably the easiest kind of to explain is it was bank fraud. Okay. And I had owned a mortgage company and eventually, you know, it was, we were doing fraudulent things in mortgage company. Eventually I was placed on probation, federal probation for three years. And that's where the scam that I'm basically most kind of known for is there's something,

do you know what a synthetic identity is? I think, but you might as well. Yeah, it's kind of like a kind of like a stolen identity. but it's not a real person or it's a combination of fake people. What I did was I went into social security and I figured out how to get social security to issue me social security numbers to children that don't exist. So I give them a fake birth certificate, fake shot record.

They give me a social security number, whatever name I wanted. And then I would go out into an area, you know, lower middle class area and I would buy houses for, let's say for the sake of argument, at like $50,000. Mm-hmm. Well, one, I got the social security number and I would get secured credit cards.

So after paying the minimum payment for six months, they would have 700 credit scores. Right. You only needed a $620 to borrow, to get a loan, a mortgage from the bank. Right. So, plus, of course, I've got W-2s, pay stubs. I have all the documents, right? Right, true. And so my person, and I had eight or ten of these guys, we would go out and I would buy a

house in their name for $50,000. I would record the sale of that house at $200,000. So if you went to public records, it looked like I just bought a house for $200,000. So what happened if you buy enough of those within an area, the whole area starts to go up. Yep. And when the bank, and if you want to borrow money against the house, you want to refinance your mortgage or get a mortgage, the bank send somebody out or you send them an appraisal based on the comparable sales in the area, all of which are mine, the bank says, this thing's worth $210, $220, $240. This whole area is going through the roof. So we would then refinance the house, borrow the money.

And so each person borrowed, you know, only one mortgage per house, five or six houses at each person. So $1 million, $1.5 million, you'd make $750,000 to $900,000, $900,000 a million per person. We would make the payments, of course, you know, for about five or six months and then we'd stop paying. And then when, of course, when the, you know, the collection started coming in, we would get the letters saying, you know, hey, you're in foreclosure. I would then cut out an article from the newspaper. This was back when you had newspapers, you know, you cut it out the article. Well, we retyped the whole thing where there was like a 17 car pile up on Interstate 4 and someone was life flighted to Tampa General High Hospital and I would insert my

guy's name in there and I'd highlight it. And I'd write a letter from his sister saying my brother is in a coma. The doctors say even if he wakes up, he'll never work again. You might as well take the house. And of course, if they if the bank pulled, repulled his credit, they would see, well, this guy's got five mortgages and he's got four personal loans and three credit cards or four credit cards. And they're all in default. Like, this is clearly true. If you called his, his work, I was his work. You know, we had multiple employers. They would say, I'm sorry, he's no longer here. He's, there was an accident. It was checking out. Yeah. Right. And so they just foreclosed on the property and, you know, resold it. So I borrowed $11.5 million in like 18 months or something like that in

multiple people's names. A friend of mine got caught. And he got caught. He got called. He got caught running a scam that was connected to my scam, you know, he wanted in on it and something went wrong and he ended up getting caught. And they put together a task force, which ultimately came after me. And then I went on the run for three years and I continued to commit fraud. Right.

So, but what you might find interesting, so only since you mentioned this person's name, is that the names, predominantly the names of my borrowers were William Blue, James Red,

Michael White, Lee Black, you know, Brandon Green. So you can imagine how easy it was. When my buddy got arrested, he said, listen, I know somebody's running a much bigger scam. And he's like, and I can prove it to you right now. Pull up the property appraisers website for Hillborough County. Red, five foreclosures.

William Blue, seven foreclosures. You know, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom. This guy currently owns four houses. He's about to buy another one. And in six months, they'll all be in foreclosure. So, yeah. Why do I got to be Mr. Pink? Exactly.

That's, so let me ask, I'm just curious. Like, what made you go from, hey, I've got a mortgage company? Like, it just wasn't profitable enough or whatever. Like, what made you say, I'm going to do this very complicated scam? You know, it was explaining it or it's, seems complicated, right? To me, it's like, it's like riding a bike. Like, if I explained to you about riding a bike right now, you would, and you'd never ridden a bike, it's impossible. But once you start riding the bike, within a week, you're doing wheelies, you're jumping ramps, you're,

right, you know, so to me it was very, you know, owning that mortgage company. So I had owned a mortgage company, like I said, prior to doing that scam, you know, I was already periodically changing W-2s or making fake canceled checks. That's what I'm saying. Okay, so it's starting a small things because like if you start riding a bike, it's because I want to get around and my friends have bikes and, you know, like there's a reason why you learn, go through that. Like what was the, yeah, the reason behind. And you get emboldened by it. You know, every time a loan went through and you close it and you made your little $3,500 broker

fee, then that was like, wow, like it worked. Right. You know, and the few times that I, it's not even the few times, the many times we got caught, I was able to kind of learn from those experiences because you'd have. an underwriter call up and say, listen, this person's W2 is fake. And you go, what? And they go, yeah. And you say, well, are you telling me my borrower? Gave me a fake W2? Well, how did you, how did you find it? And they go, oh, well, turns out that the tax ID number, we went on the web. One of the ways we check is we do this and this and this. And I thought, next time, that needs to

match. Exactly. And so, you know, after three or four years of owning that that mortgage company, I'd learned how to make although I hadn't really done it at the time I knew it was possible to make synthetic identities and it was possible to raise the purchase or to record sales in public records at a higher level and you have to pay

the reason people don't do this typically is you have to pay extra doc stamps if you buy a house for $100,000 you pay about $700 in dock stamps if you just pay another $700,000 I mean, I'm sorry, another $700, it shows up as a $200,000 sale. Right. So, you know, these were just little things that I learned, and then I was able to manipulate

that whole system. And, you know, and then I just made it worse for myself because when I came on, when they came to arrest me, I was tipped off by sheriff's deputy that was a friend of mine that they were going to come arrest me. The FBI was going to come arrest me. So I took off on the run for three years. you know I only had a couple days so I was only able to leave Tampa with like 80 grand and you're not going to get far on 80 grand so I immediately over the next three years I borrowed about three and a half to four and a half million dollars running additional more scams a little bit more complicated you know I've so I've had what yeah exactly just making it worse There's a longer seat, yeah.

So, you know, and I had, the worst thing was, too, is that, you know, by that point, I was able to, I figured out how to go into a DMV, get them to give me a driver's license. I was able to get passports. The U.S., the State Department would issue me passports. So, you know, the times that I would get caught running these scams, if I'd get handcuffed by the police and questioned, they'd bring me downtown, they'd question me, I'd convince them I hadn't done anything wrong, they'd let me go. Right.

But, you know, I, like, these are things that happened over and over again. I've numerous, you know, and then, of course, it got worse and worse. It was, you know, there were tons of newspaper articles. Then I was in Fortune Magazine. I was in Bloomberg. Oh, boy. Datelines running. So, you know, it's just, it's like, it's like, I'm thinking, well, this will go away.

It's not going away. It's getting worse. Every time I turn around, there's another article. So, you know, eventually I end up getting caught and, you know, went to prison. Well, I'm glad you kept it in the financial world. And didn't veerage because, you know, there is, you know, like there are guys in our, you know, the cases that we cover that have that sort of like, I'm running a scam. And then I need to also eliminate a person to really, you know, get that insurance money or, you know, whatever. Do you have one of those?

Oh, yeah. One of our first cases was a guy, he was, he had everything, you know, impersonating people. His big thing, though, he became like a pastor, and he knew the very religious people were probably the easiest to do, and he would meet these women, and he would come across his, you know, I'm doing all this charity work and all this stuff, and he seemed like the greatest guy, and then he would get all kinds of, you know, five different life insurances on that person, and then, you know, I don't want to give too much away. but, like, you know, came and swept her away from work. Hey, I booked us an anniversary trip. And they'd been married for a little while. So it wasn't like an immediate thing. I mean, we've had people that kill each other on their honeymoon.

But this guy, you know, he'd waited a bunch of years. And then one day on their anniversary came to the woman's job. Car was packed. Don't worry. We don't have to go home. We're going right on vacation. I packed all your stuff for you. Huge red flag.

If someone packs your stuff for you and won't let you go home and call anybody, probably a red flag, whisks her away to the Colorado, the Rocky Mountains. And then, yeah, and then she winds up, you know, off a cliff and, you know, he swears it was an accident. She fell.

She was taking the selfie or whatever. But he had all these life insurances on her. And then also it turned out his first wife died in the same, not the exact same, but also like was changing a car tire and the jack broke and fell and the car fell on her.

I see this has been covered. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, this way. Oh, yeah, yeah. It just, yeah, this to me was like the quintessential slaycation because this guy, yeah, this guy was great in terms of, you know,

pure evil and, yeah, his wives and stuff like that. But, you know, again, you kept it financial. And this guy, decided he had to take lives to get what he wanted um you know i was gonna say this uh was it a slick willie sutton said you know they said why do you rob banks and he said well that's where the money is right so exactly um gosh the the i was going to say that that reminds me of that did you

hear about there were there were two brothers own a mason company and they would hire like uh homeless people to work as laborers and they would give them a place to live like on like they had two or three acres or something they'd put them in a shed right after they they'd get insurance policy on them they'd basically have them drink themselves to death yeah i did hear about that for the insurance it was yeah the insurance money is like i and there's so many cases like that so many stories that are you know it's funny too a lot of people will go on vacation and and i think it's part of the going on vacation is I think that they're basically like this person isn't from South America. Like how much of an investigation can they do in South America about what's going

on here? That happens a lot where, yeah, you know, what is the local, and a lot of times the local, the local police or whatever, they don't want to make a big deal out of it anyway. They don't want to scare off tourists and make it seem like murders happen here. So they do try to bury a lot of these. There was that famous case, you know, a woman with her friends, Schenquilla Robinson went to Cabo with her friends and, you know, wound up, you know, found in the morning

dead after a night of partying and, you know, the friends said it was, they drank too much or whatever, but then there's a video of her, like, being beaten up by one of her friends and stuff. And it made national news, but the autopsy, the original autopsies, oh yeah, yeah, they just concurred, yeah, no big deal, because they just didn't want the publicity, but, you know, it was such a, you know, a fervor back here in the States, people, and then as new, as new evidence would come out like that, like, you know, the leaked videotape of the girl being beaten up. It's like, wait, there's more here. And she had, like, you know, damage to her face. It's like that wasn't in the original autopsy. You're like, oh, yeah, she must have drank too much. And so, yeah, but a lot of the local authorities don't want the publicity, don't want to make it seem like murders happen here. But we do say, yeah, vacation is the, you know, I make the joke, I say, if you can't

kill somebody on the vacation and you have no business killing people because you just are not cut out for it. I mean, you're doing stuff that you don't ordinarily do. You're in weird position. You know, you're kayaking, you're hiking, you're on cliffs, you're on mountain trails. There's very few people around. There's always drinking. There's always like nightlife stuff. Now, we don't just cover like, so we say, you know, we say, you know, if a couple, you know, if one murders the other, that's a sleocation. If you go on vacation and you get murdered, we'll also cover that. There's some interesting cases like that. A couple goes on vacation, meets another couple, they seem like good people, and then after a night of partying,

they don't show up to work on Monday, what happened to them? And, you know, trying to trace those last moments or whatever. Was it the couple? Was it something else? Did they just disappear? So we say, if you leave for vacation in the plane and you come home under the plane, then you've been on a location. Do you ever interview like the detectives, or is this just research and then you kind of ask questions? Yeah, we might get there, but right now it's just they research the hell out of it. And then I try to probe and ask questions and make off-color jokes and my wife gets mad

So it's a it's a it's a funny dynamic um but I was going to oh good no I was just like I was just going to say I was going to say something like I forget what it was last night like two days ago my wife was just something happened and she looked at me and she's like I am so glad that I married you she's like I mean she's like I love you so much you were such a great guy and then the next day we were having a conversation at this desk and I said something that I knew she was going to be like what did you say and she I looked up at her and I said something I anyway whatever it was and I looked at her and she goes why am I married to you wait a minute are you the same person who just no I don't believe me I get that I get that a lot too uh I mean it's funny because

it's like I'll make sometimes I'll make a joke or I'll have a joke that I'm like I shouldn't say it, but I got to say it. So what I'll do is I'll say, you know, what I was going to say was, and then I'll say the joke as if like I didn't say it. But now I, you know, I'm just blurting it out because I was going to, I thought this thing, but it's terrible. And then my wife will just look at me and feel like, you're such an asshole. And it's like, you know, we're recording. And she's like, yeah, I know. But I mean, I think that's part of the fun. And, you know, we do bring our marriage dynamic into it and, you know, raising our daughter. And, you know, And it's great because, you know, we've all known each other for over 30 years.

So it's like we have a camaraderie that you can't really fake. Right. Yeah, we try not to be that podcast that's just laughing at like nonsense and nothing. You know, it's like, let's make sure you laugh at something that's actually funny. And let's, you know, tell the stories. You know, it's funny. I know you love, yeah, you love the little crime thing. I have a story that I think you'll appreciate.

It's not a murder story, but, you know, it's something. I worked in a factory in Hackensack, New Jersey, and we made car washes, all the, all the machinery that you'd find in a car wash. Okay. The arms, the curtain, the conveyor that pulls your car. And there was a guy there named Carlos, who was the cutter. He would cut all the angles and the flats and the beams and the tubes and stuff. And Carlos loved to steal. this guy was just addicting to stealing the rush of stealing it didn't even matter what it was he just

loved stealing stuff i had i had fucked up my car so carlos offered to give me rides to and from work uh in exchange he would uh raid my parents like freezer and like take my dad worked in the meat business so he would take steaks and and burgers he's like i'll take the little chickens and i was like those are kpons he's like yeah whatever and so this guy loved you know he loved taking to meet in payment for rides home. But the thing was, every ride was fraught with danger because he had a little pickup truck. And as we're driving, he would just pull over and jump out of the car and grab something off someone's lawn, bikes, a lawn gnome, garden hose, whatever.

He'd just grab it, throw it in his truck and just drive off. And I'd be like, what are you doing? He's like, hey, man, his kid's got to learn. You don't leave your bikes out when Carlos is around. And I was like, okay. So at each speed, too, like I was like, at least. stop at the red lights. He didn't get pulled over for that. Anyway, there was a warehouse across from our factory, and it had a loading dock, and our warehouse did not have a loading dock.

So we always had to use their loading dock to put the machinery onto the big tractor trailers to ship it. And while we were there, he noticed that the warehouse was open, and he could just go right in, and they had like boxes of clothing and stuff. So he would just go in, help himself to a box, run back to our factory, he'd open it up, and then you'd try to sell the stuff, hey, guys, t-shirts, $5, $3 for 10, and the guys were like, you just stole that. It's like, they would just help themselves to it. But eventually he started taking so many boxes that the warehouse knew something was up, so they kept that door closed.

Didn't stop Carlos. He'd go in a window, open the window, Carlos in, box out, Carlos out, window closed, off he goes. So then they built a big fence around the warehouse. house and they put a dog of vicious like early days of pit bulls like when you know the most ferocious dog you've ever seen into you know inside the fence and I you know snarling barking I was afraid to eat my lunch outside even though it was in the fence like if it got loose it would kill you and I say I guess it's over Carlos and he's looking at the dog and he's just rubbing his chin he's like oh man looks like a happy dog to me whatever dude

Neither say, yeah, they put the dog inside the warehouse when we use the loading dock. And we were terrified. We're like, if this dog gets out, we're dead. I had gotten hired to work on a film shoot for a week or so, so I disappeared. Did the film shoot come back? And when I get to work, Carlos drives up, drives me to work. I noticed that there's no dog in the yard. And I say to Carlos, I was like, oh, man, did it kill somebody?

And he just kind of smiles or whatever. And I'm like, oh, this dog must have ripped somebody apart. That day, Carlos said, hey, you want to ride home? Sure. Get in the car. We're driving. I say, did you forget where I lived? You made a left instead of a right.

He goes, I want to show you something. He pulls up in front of his house. He whistles. The dog comes running out of the house. He stole the dog. I was going to say, I knew he. I knew where I was going. So I was just like, yeah, hats off to Carlos, wherever he is.

whatever prison he's in now. Or maybe not. I don't know. But, yeah, I mean, I've always been fascinated by stories about crime. And then, you know, these stories were just, the dislocation stories are just so, I mean, I don't want to use the word fun because there's, you know, people, you know, are getting killed. But they're so tricky and convoluted and twisty and tourney. You really won't know until the very end was in an accident or was it murder.

and even at the end you're like I don't know there's still something there and sometimes the people are caught sometimes they let go how many episodes do you have per season well we just you know we just started like we haven't even figured out what a season is

we've recorded 11 so far we're launching the idea is to record two to a month and just stay ahead of our schedule. And, you know, it's interesting because with our kids education, we never did a season. We just keep going. We have 500. I think with this, we'll probably, you know, maybe 20-something episodes and we'll call that a season, you know. Well, I mean, I guess now you don't really have

to have a season. I was thinking more kind of TV-ish kind of. Well, and it depends. typically when you go to a production company like they they typically buy a certain or fund a certain amount right so they're like okay your seasons 12 or four we need 14 of these or um are you concerned about there being an end I mean listen how many high profile like it's got to be high profile enough for you guys to be able to find them right I mean that that's how we started we you know because I said the first one I was like man it's location and then we got excited and then it's like okay let's see if we can find 50 or more then there's probably something we found over well over a hundred oh okay

so you know they're not all going to be super twisty internees sometimes but they all have something yeah you know they they all have something that's going to suck you in and you know um we've even done a couple that are like two-parters because there's so much going on going one way and then all of a sudden a new piece of evidence and it's like oh my god we can talk another hour about this it's like all right then we will they surprised me with one the other day there was like um jerry started recapping i'm like why are we recapping i know where we are he's like because you think you know where we are but we'll do the rest in part two i was like oh shit we've been talking for 50 minutes um like okay so we did yeah we did a two-parter on

on a case yeah i was i interviewed um a couple of actually they were there are actresses that are turned to podcasters and they do a podcast called uh i met my murderer online yeah yeah the problem is is like because they're basically going off of people that met like on dating apps right like i just like how many are there yeah that might be a little bit more finite Yeah. Well, yeah, that's why I said, yeah, we cover people that murder each other on the, on vacation, or if you get murdered. And then the white whale, if you go on vacation and then see a crime of opportunity and actually murder somebody else and then leave because you're like, hey, I'm in a far country. I can probably get away with it.

What's the guy that murdered, gosh, the girl Holloway? Oh, Natalie Holloway. Oh, Hallow. So we haven't even done that one yet. It could be like a three-parter, you know, it's like, but it's so known that we've kind of avoided. It's, it's, it's, it's, but there's new revelation. So I mean, it is, but, you know, here's the problem is like, I've always heard bits and pieces, bits and pieces, right? And now it's come out to the, to where he's basically, hasn't he basically admitted it and been?

No, there's actual closure on it, uh, after years of, of nothing. So, yeah. Right. So, so now you could probably do an episode, even if it was just one episode on the highlights of it, because. Like, I don't know the whole, I know bits and pieces, and I'm sure that's a sick guy. Like, he's, I mean, the fact is, is like, I don't want to say this. Like, murdering one person, it's almost like, okay, murdering one person, okay. But murdering, but then he murders another person, you know what I'm saying? So, but yeah, he clearly is just a, a serial killer that maybe only got to, you know, maybe only got to two. There may be other people out there, who knows, but this is, like, you already know the scrutiny you're under.

Right. Well, like you said, you do the one thing, you get away with it, and you think, oh, right. You know, and then you're like the polar bear that got a taste for it, and you're like, I can do it again. In fact, he's probably thinking, like, I'm the last person they would think, right? I mean, I, you know, after everything I've been, that guy would never remember somebody. Look at all the scrutiny and look, you know, I don't know. But we definitely will cover. Natalie Holloway. We've, I think, avoided it because it was so known. You know, like,

there are cases that we do that are no, and look, we just discovered there was a lifetime movie made on one of our cases. About a guy who took his fiance, or actually, they just got married, Honeymoon, Great Barrier Reef. He's a Mr. Pro Scuba Diver, and she's never scuba dive, and she's terrified and he won't even let her take the lesson like no no no i've got it i've got it and they lied in their interviews so that she would just be able to scuba dive without even getting the lesson is it just a guy who's got murder on his mind or is he just this alpha male asshole who's like i can i can teach better than they can trust me right with me well they go down there she starts to panic and uh he's trying to fix her breathing apparatus is not working

something, blah, blah, blah, and suddenly she starts to sink and he gets panicky and he goes up to the surface and then she's found dead and they try to rescue her, but she's already gone. Then it comes out like, oh, some other diver thought he saw them struggling and he thought he saw him pulling at her, at her, you know, respirators, you know, and then, so then that came out. But then something else came out that like the respirator makes a noise or something if it's, and it didn't make, you know, so there's like little weird evidence that swings it back and forth, like a pendulum, like, oh, he's guilty. Oh, wait, maybe not. You know, oh, yeah, because he had claimed that something was wrong with his thing. And then they tried to say, like, well, that would never

happen. But then they proved that that can happen and that it did happen. So it's like, you just never, you never quite know. And then he escaped, he got back to the states. And then Australia wanted him, like, you know, but they don't have an extradition treaty or whatever. They weren't going to send him back, but then he went back on his own. Yeah, so these cases are convoluted and they're really cool. And as far as true, Greg, I was going to say there's one, I was thinking about one that it's not, I don't, it's not a murder because it was a, I think it was a couple that went out like scuba diving and they were left by the boat. Like they got too far away and they just got left and they just said, okay, they got eaten by sharks. Like, is that the, is

That's the open water? Yeah, they made a movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's just horrible, horrible. Yeah, I like shark movies, so of course I saw that one. Yeah, they counted wrong, and they thought they were, they counted somebody twice or something like that, and then they left them there. Yeah. But that could be on our show, because they definitely died on a vacation.

So we, that fits under the location umbrella. Like I said, if you leave in the plane and come. home under the plane. If you pack a bag and come home in a bag, it's just like that. You're good. You're good. Yeah, good for you. Um, I'm going to say, it's horrible. I know, I know, I know. What kind of karma am I building up with this? Yeah, I was going to say, this is going to come. This is one of those things you're going to have to answer to. Right. Answer for, sorry. You know, it's funny, because I say all the time, like my wife is so, you know, she's got the best voice of the three of us. She's the one that sounds like a podcaster. Uh, and she, you know,

her whole thing is like she's doing true crime. She just wants to understand the human psyche and how are people capable of doing so. This is, this is that, and this is part of the women thing, like they want to know. They want to know. Can people be fixed? What is it? What do I look for? Why, you know, how have I gotten away?

You know, I'm lucky that it wasn't me, but it could have been me, blah, blah, blah. So she's coming from that angle. I'm like, people are going to love you. Jerry, he does research and he's very empathetic and he almost like doesn't like the true crime genre but he he understands that like some of these stories need to be told and he wants to you know champion the victims and you know whatever so

I said people will like or be neutral on him and then they got me and I'm like I'll I'm the asshole that people will either like they'll think I'm funny or they'll be like this guy's an asshole but I'd rather play that part yeah me too yeah don't rage listen just to fucking yell at me

stuff but you know listen people she's never gonna understand the human psyche I can tell you right now I was in prison for 13 years and people are just horrific they're just horrible we're a horrible species

really are right right the animals just took over it'd be probably better hey I appreciate you guys watching do me a favor hit the subscribe button hit the bell so you get notified

of videos just like this leave me a comment and I will try and respond also if you want to check out slaycation please check in the description box, and I really appreciate it. Please consider joining my Patreon.

Thank you very much. See you.