Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - WOLF OF WALL STREET PRISON EDITION | How Convicts Make Millions In Prison

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

WOLF OF WALL STREET PRISON EDITION | How Convicts Make Millions In Prison

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Twizzlers, keep the fun going. I was wanted for armed robbery, kidnapping, torture of a hostage, aggravated assault. Just one day, my brain, like, shifted. And I kind of realized, like, I want to be in prison forever. A newspaper article comes out about an inmate. making more money than the warden. He was making 170, 180 a year. I was making 60 a year, which is more than almost all the guards, right? Like my wife, I was doubling her income as an inmate. Probably around the time I got into junior high, this is when I started to get into a little

bit of trouble. I don't know why, like I said, my parents had a lot of money. We did a lot of fun things. My dad had a boat in an airplane. We used to fly from Phoenix to California. It's not like they were absent. No, no. They worked a lot. Yeah, they definitely worked a lot, but they gave me good guidance. they were like they were good parents they didn't beat me they didn't drink excessively like they had really good parents uh i just have um i have a personality i have that ADHD where i'm a hundred miles an hour at everything i do and um well i think also for some for some kids having parents that are successful it sounds like a cop out but but but i think that mentally i think it's it's true that when your parents are are ultra successful especially if you have two parents like that

like that, then there's a ton of pressure on you to be successful. So you either, you either try and emulate them and bust your ass in school and have a plan and try and, you know, following their footsteps, or you say, well, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to rebel. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, like, there's just, there just really are two different. That's like, it's really like that's, those are the two things that I've noticed growing up. There were the guys like your dad's a dentist and he's making half a million dollars a year and your mother's a lawyer. And both your parents are doctors and you know or these two guys are doctors and now this kid wants to be a doctor and he goes to medical school and he becomes a doctor and then this guy

is a complete fucking knucklehead and he's doing burglaries and he's robbing cars and he's selling drugs like what are you doing bro you just it's just i don't know why yeah no that's you you nailed it exactly in the head uh junior high this is probably where i started i guess like you said rebelling right like that's kind of the road i went down and i wanted to fit in with the cool kids. And then, and at my junior high, all of the cool kids smoked. And I know they say like that's a, what's the word? Like, it's so cliche to say, gateway. It's a gateway drug. For me, it was. Like, for me, marijuana is like, I can, like, if I look back at my journey of, like, how I ended up in prison, marijuana was easily the first step. Like, that's the first identifiable step. So I started

hanging out with the kids who smoke. And then what happens when you hang out with kids who smoke, you start smoking white and that was probably seventh grade eighth grade um started getting into fights just the kids that was hanging around they're getting into fights they're stealing their shoplifting they're smoking weed they're sneaking out at night you know go to parties or they're ditching class and so nothing major you know small teenage junior high stuff but um it was kind of like the pivotal moment that i think i could have either turned around and say hey i'm going to get my life together I'm going to just keep going down this road, and that's pretty much what happened. I kept going down that road, didn't make the right decision.

And come high school, it had gotten so bad, my mom sent me to military school. So in ninth grade, I go to ninth grade in Arizona's high school. So I went to military school for about six months, got expelled for messing with a girl on school premises, got caught, and had like text messages from her and stuff that I shouldn't have had in my phone. in the school just didn't take kindly to it and they you know pretty much it was kind of like one of those like no warning type schools right and i think my parents had spent a little bit of money to get me into that to get me into that school right so i uh got expelled from that school and then uh went to a public school can i ask a question sure yeah did you ever see the movie taps mm-mm you never saw

i think i've heard of it no uh what is it oh my god colby i'm never going to ask colby he doesn't know um he shoot he's basically your age um Yeah, it's actually one of the first movies that Tom Cruise was in. Okay. And they're in a military school. So it's a military school. I don't know how many kids are in it, 200 or something. And basically, they're cutbacks and they're going to close the school.

And they don't want the school close. And so when they administrators show up to start the process of removing things from the warehouse and take the guns and start doing that, the kids secure the guns. And they secure everything. So you've got adults showing up. Yeah. Like, where's this? Where's that? And they're like, and so the one, the top ranking, you know, officer, which is a high school student who's like 17.

And everybody else is like 15, 16, 17. And they have, it's like, when you start watching the movie, you're like, this is a, this is a military album. They're driving. They've got military grade trucks, jeeps. They've got at that point, at that time, it was M16s. They've got like, you know, 40 cow machines. Sheen guns? I mean, these kids are practicing, you know, so when they show up, like, there's like eight or ten guys that show up and they're sitting there with their clipboards. They're

like, where is everything? They're in the warehouse. It's just a great scene. If you can find this scene, Colby, it's worth plugging. Like, the scene is the kids walk in and they're like, where are all the guns? Like, where? Hey, son, what's? And the kid walks up. He's like, hey, look, I understand you guys are here. We're trying to stop this. We want, we want to talk to whoever's in charge and they're like yeah that's not how it's done it's it's a done deal this is what's happening where are all the weapons and they get into an argument and the man grabs the gut the kid and by the arm and literally up on the upper tier of the warehouse all of a sudden you hear and there's got to be 60 guys and they all lean over with m16's pointing at him and they are like oh frozen he's

like sir you know like unhand me he's like we want to speak with you're not taking anything out of this school and they're like they are terrified they basically hold the whole school they put the national guard around them they've got these kids have sandbags they've got you know the the the 40 millimeter or 40 whatever 40 cows like they've got they hold this like months it's a siege it's insane it is a great movie and tom cream what's so funny about is tom cruise has like a minor role oh really obviously he's not the star no he's like he's a secondary actor too. But you'll realize, you see him. This is before he did risky business. He's like 16 years old, 15, 16 years old. It's like his first major role, but he's like a minor part,

but it's a great movie. No, I've never even, oh, you got to see this movie. Yeah, I might check it out. Having a lot of old movies. You'll, you'll realize like, like, like, bro, I mean, maybe it's over the top, but you'll probably realize like, oh, there's a ton of similarity. So they do stuff where they're interacting with 12 year old kids who are dressed. Yeah. folding their clothes. Yes, sir, no, yes. You know, it's like, these guys are your kids.

Yeah. They've got some great scenes in there. Yeah, I like old movies. I'll check it. One of my favorite movies of all time is of Tom Cruise, a few good men. That's like my favorite movie. I watch it with my son, like,

because I'm trying to get my kid to be a lawyer. So I watched it like two months ago with my son. Oh, listen, it's, listen. Somebody asked me that day, like, what's a legal scam that's going on right now? And is it being a lawyer? It's a license to seal, bro. You know how, lawyer? You can be a shitty lawyer and make a ton of money.

Oh, yeah. It's ridiculous how much money to lawyers make. Well, you can always fall back on it too. Yeah. Like if you go, I told me, my daughter's, she's 15, she wants to go to University of San Diego or University of Southern California to go get a degree in marine biology. And my daughter's smart. Like she's very intelligent, just naturally intelligent.

And I have tried to tell her, I'm like, hey, listen, like I get it. You want to go study whales. I'm all for that. I support you. But you might want to learn to type. Yeah. And a lot of the times when you go get these degrees in like marine biology, the chances of you actually ending up studying whales

are probably not that great. Like, I'm not trying to talk her out of it. Well, even if you got the top job, what do they pay? I don't know. You know, like, what's a... Maybe $100,000 a year, I guess, if you worked for like... I can't even imagine you could make $100 a year doing that. Like, that'd be like the top job or something.

Yeah, like on a research vessel or something, maybe $70 grand a year? I don't know. It's probably all funded by, like, donations. So it's probably, you're right. It's probably $50,000 a year most. So, and I've tried to tell her, I said, listen, like, you can go to college. This is the problem. Kids these days, like, they don't actually know what they want to do. So because they don't know what they want to do, they don't

do anything. Just go get a degree in, they'll go get a law degree and then go become an attorney, is what I told her. And then if you, and then when you're done, you'll still be young. Because my daughter's Native American, so the tribe pays for everything. Oh, wow. She can go to any college in the United States that she wants to. Like, she can go anywhere where she wants, study anything she wants, just go become an attorney. And in seven years, After, you know, four-year bachelor's degree in three years of law school, you can go into law in any field, right? Like marine biologists, like research organizations, they have attorneys. You can go work for that kind of organization.

And then if you don't like it, you already have a bachelor's degree. Go get, now it's that much easier just go get a second bachelor's degree in marine biology. Go learn something that you can actually use, like, that you'll make money with or you're going to end up miserable with a four-year degree in something that you can't use. I'll tell you something that shocked me when I was like 15, 16 years old that really, like straightened me up like oh wow like this is like i it was the first time i realized like you know because i thought because my parents had money like they were upper middle class yeah so you know they're going on several vacations a year we you know there there were times when we tightened our belt here and there but still my dad has like all all the kids had cars so you've got

like five cars in the family yeah you know i didn't because i was young but at that time but when i was 16 boom you got a brand new car you like the whole thing but brand new a couple years old but the point is, is that we weren't struggling. And I used to think, oh, we've got plenty of money. Oh, my dad will pay for it. My dad will pay for it. Because if I ever asked him for $20 or $30, he was always like, well, what's it for? All right here. He never said no. So I thought, oh, that money is available. It was when one day my mom said, listen, like, I don't think you understand how this works. So twice a month, she did the bills. And she brought me, so I started doing the bills with her where she breaks this is what your dad's check is for this is what we owe so the mortgage is

this much and you're like okay do that calculation and so you're doing the calculation with her and very quickly you realize like there's not enough money like we owes $8,000 to visa she's like well now listen we don't have to pay the whole 8,000 we can pay the minimum and let's try and to pay some and she explained how a credit card work so we had the minimum was like 150 bucks okay and then let's let's take the extra money and do this and we're going to keep $400 so we can eat. Oh my God. You see what I'm saying?

You do that for six months and you start realizing we're spending everything that dad makes. And until you realize that as a kid, you think, oh, my parents have tons of money and they can pay for anything. No, no. It's tempered.

And then you suddenly start realizing like someday I'll be in that position and maybe I won't be as well off as my parents because they chose jobs that were predominantly based on something that they were going to be able to make a decent living at. I'm choosing to follow whales. Right. Like, well, then don't expect that you're going to be driving a nice car like mom and dad.

Right. We're living in a nice area. Like, listen, my dad drove us out to the projects one time. I was fucking terrified, right? Yeah. It was rough. Yeah. There are cars on blocks.

There were scary people. Stand on the court. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's an eye opener for sure. Yeah. My parents never sat down and kind of had that experience with me. I learned that as I, when I got out of prison and I started running a business. And then you kind of see like, wow, it doesn't matter how much money comes in. It goes out just as fast. Like you can bring in, you know, 100 grand a week. If 100 grand is going out, it doesn't matter. Nobody's giving you 100 grand. Like I had to hire employees. I had to have overhead. I had to have this. Before you know, you're like, yeah, I brought in an $100.000. But it costs me, you know, $92,000. Yep. So, well, I'm sorry, we got off track. So you're in school, you're hanging with the wrong crowd. Yeah, military school.

Oh, yeah, military school. You get kicked out. I was messing with a girl in the bathroom, text messages, my phone. Yeah, I get kicked out. So my mom's like, okay, well, now you're going back to public school. Now, this is probably where, you know, the decline starts to speed up a little bit. I go to public school. It's a big public school, like 4,000 students.

So there's just a lot going on. And right around this time, I start. experimenting right with other stuff so like I like well let's try some mushrooms I love I guess I would be what 14 probably here yeah I know my daughter's 15 so I said her thing like oh my god I was doing it was at 14 15 I would freak out if I found out my kids are doing stuff like that but um shrooms and like I said earlier I'm kind of one of those hundred miles an hour type people so when I did use drugs I liked to kind of push it.

Like, so I would eat, like, I would try, well, I did three grams. Let's try five grams and see, because I enjoyed it. And then let's try acid. And then let's try pain. And my parents kind of by now are starting to see, like, obviously they're not dumb. Like, they know what's going on. So they're starting to see patterns around here. And I end up getting expelled from that school as well for getting into a fight twice, like back-to-back, like back-to-back fights in the principal.

and then just a bunch of other small stuff that have been happening. So I get expelled from that school, and my mom is like, I'm done. Like, it's just, it's been too much. You're going to go live with your real dad. And now my real dad, who definitely didn't have as much money as my mom and my stepdad, he is, it's a much different dynamic at home with him. He's older. So right now my dad is 78.

He was born in 1944. So when I was born, he was like 45 already. And, um, so he's in his 60 or close late 50s or 60s, right? So that's, yeah, around this time. Yeah, around this time, yeah, he's like in his early 60s, if late 50s maybe, but he is much more just kind of like, well, be home by 9 o'clock. Yeah. And me, I'm like, oh, sweet. Like, I just hit the jackpot.

And he lives in this weird part of Phoenix where Phoenix is kind of weird because there's really nice areas right next to the really bad areas. Right. And there's a really nice part of Phoenix. known as Arcadia and there's a really kind of rough part of Phoenix right next to Arcadia and that's the school zone so I ended up in this unique situation where I went to a very nice upper middle class school but I lived in like kind of the run down side of town and all the kids at the school like you know it's it's Camelback Mountain so there's it's a lot of millionaires kids pulling up in their you know dad's Mercedes their dad's Ben's and um I

I'm, you know, smoke this time. I'm, you know, doing my problems a lot. That was kind of like my drug of choice. Around 15, I would say it was. And I'm also, like, in this neighborhood where, like, drugs are, like, easily accessible to me. I can just go buy, we start. Immediately, I just start meeting people who, you know, have, I'm very social.

I get along with people pretty well. So as soon as I moved to my dad's house, I already pick up a whole new group of friends. And then I kind of see the opportunity. Well, I can buy drugs from the neighborhood I live in and then go to school and sell them to the rich kids who live on Camelback Mountain. This is what everybody does. That's the natural go-to move, right? Yeah, and it worked pretty well.

I had a buddy. We're still friends to this day. He was pretty much the only pot dealer in school. And he lived in that kind of same bad part of town that I lived in with my dad. And his dad was very much the same way. In fact, his dad was an old hippie from like the 80s. His dad just passed away a few years ago from cancer.

But his dad would, his dad was the, You can smoke. You can drink beer as long as you're here and I can supervise you. So I know you're not out, you know, getting in trouble or going to get a DUI or get into a car accident. So, of course, we would always hang out at his house because we were allowed to smoke. We were allowed to drink there. Right. And so I start hanging out with him a lot.

And he is already selling at school. So he takes me and introduces me to his drug dealer. And we're in sophomore year now. So we're probably 15. and his drug dealer is a big Mexican dude who's probably 30 covered in tattoos bend to prisons

got a giant hand tattooed on his neck with like the West Side City logo not the kind of guy that you'd want a teenager hanging out of it. Hanging around with a 15 year old, right and I remember this day

I'll never forget this day the day we met him my buddy took me over there and the day we met him he had a music studio the drug dealer had a music studio and it's in a really really bad part of Phoenix

and we go into the music studio and there's like two little rooms one's like a little studio where they do the recording one's like a closet where there's just like a bunch of recording equipment then there's like a kind of like a big not an auditorium but like like a stage like a like where you could perform

like maybe 40 or 50 people can hang out and these guys were like music artists in Phoenix they were kind of like well known they were drug dealers they were members of a big gang that was out in Phoenix and we go into the studio Were they, I forget the name. There's like a group of, there's Mexican, I know there's Mexican bands or whatever that they perform where they all dress the same and they basically sing about narco traffic.

Yeah, no, those are called Coritos. Oh, yeah, yeah, Coriados. Like those are songs about, no, these guys were like hip hop artists. Okay. They're from West Side City, which is like a big part. It's like a gang in Phoenix, right? And so when we go to meet them, inside like the middle of the big. room where the stage is at. There's a pool table. And he has this big duffel bag and he opens it up

on the pool table. And I remember this is the first time I ever saw like a large amount of and he pulls out like probably like a 10 pound brick. Now this isn't like chronic. This isn't dro. This is, you know, 2005 seeds and stems. And Phoenix is on the border. So we get like all the right in from Mexico or at least we did back then. I don't even think this kind of exists. Because I was that bad. Yeah. I had like the, I don't know if you were ever a pot smoker. but it had stems in it. He'd have to go through and pick out. The kids these days,

like Kobe has no idea what I'm talking about. Right, right. He opens it up. He's got this big brick. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I've heard the term brick or,

you know, where they were like, oh, it's, it's low grade. Yeah. It's, and seeds and, yeah. You can get a pound of this stuff

for like 500 bucks back then. Right. Whereas, like, a pound of hydro or chronic back then, it's like thousands of dollars. So this is just regular, you know, you'd buy 20 bucks to get your little sack.

You know, that's what all the kids they're smoking back in the 90s. Because they don't have any money. You're the teenagers. They don't have much money to spend. You're right. Exactly.

And really, to be honest, Chronic and Hydro weren't like a big thing back then. Like they weren't really out. Like I had never seen it until like I probably was 16, I would say. Everything really back then was like Reggie, that's what we called, or Mersh or Shwag or Mexican Brick, whatever you want to call it. But it was all the same stuff. But it was sealed up and he had a razor or a knife and he opens it.

And it kind of like, I remember like popcorned out onto the pool table. and he's got a pool table in the middle of the studio and I remember I looked down into the pockets of the pool table and there was like just like old dried up in the pockets so you could tell he had been busting open bricks in this table for a long time and I kind of brought it up to him I was like I was like dude you got you got like in these pockets

he's like yeah it's like it's old carry like take it if you want it's pretty much what he told me right and I was like are you serious and he's like yeah you can have it and we were buying a pound away so I filled up all these baggies like with this old dried up weed that had been sitting in like the pool pockets and there's probably four or five ounces of that and then we bought a pound me and my buddy had gone half and half it was 500 bucks i'd saved up 250 he had saved up 250 and uh we took it to school the next day i sold all that dirt came out of

the pockets to you know some dorky kids who right who couldn't get where else and didn't know didn't know what it was and uh that's when i started selling and from there i started to make money once again, you know, 100 miles an hour into everything I do. And I start to make money. I start to get known in school. I'm like the cool kid. Like I'm fitting in finally, which I guess had always kind of been something I tried to do. And like I'd say like probably like these were like the best teenage years because after

this is when like the real trouble starts and my life like took a much more serious turn. But we start going to parties. We're hanging out, you know, selling. doing firms experimenting we do pain and stuff like that occasionally and then um probably towards like the end of sophomore year um we graduated from selling to selling and um we'd pick up like an ounce at a time break it up into teeners and eight balls and towards like i'd say the end of the sophomore year we're experimenting more partying more hanging out more my dad's kind of just like you know hang out go do whatever you want just be home

by nine and even then I was always breaking that rule or I would sneak back I would come home at nine and then sneak back out at 10 o'clock when he went to sleep and then just go hang out on the streets all night with my buddies and still go to high school sometimes yeah yeah sometimes and then I eventually ended up getting expelled from that school as well so I got expelled from three high schools and so that school I got expelled because I was a TA in my sixth period I was the TA in the admin office right like where the principals at the vice principals at all the administrative ladies and i went into uh you know sixth hour just like super high and they knew and they searched me and i had a bunch of stuff in my backpack and i had already been in trouble a couple times once again

i've already got this you know whole reputation and paper trail that's kind of followed me the cops get called this time and they arrest me and they take me to my dad's house and release me to my dad And he's kind of like, I don't want to deal with this anymore either. I just don't listen to anybody. I don't care about what anybody's telling me. So he kind of, he's like, you got to get out. And so. And how old are you, 17 at this point?

Yeah, I'm like 16 right now. And he kind of just kicks me out. And so I don't want to go back with my mom. My mom was really strict. My dad's really relaxed. But neither of them want me. I just keep getting in trouble. So I kind of just go stay with friends for a little while.

I have money, so I, you know, but I can't get an apartment in my own name. I can't get a hotel. I'm 16 years old, so I can't, you know, I don't even have a car, a driver's license at the time. And I kind of float around with different friends for quite a few months. And then eventually I meet a girl who later on I would have a child with, she's from the reservation. And so I started spending a lot of time down there on the Indian reservations with her and selling, you know, drugs down there on the reservations. very easy. There's a lot of money to be made down there. And I start hanging out with my one

particular friend who I've known since I was about, yeah, about 16 actually is when I met him. So I met a new friend. And this is when we decide that we're not going to sell anymore. We're just going to steal it, right? Like, why go buy it? And that's just silly. When we can go steal it. Yeah, I know. And I don't, to be honest, I don't know where the idea came from. I don't even know how we got into robbing drug dealers, right? It seems like such an abstract thing to even think of. But, and I honestly, I can't even tell you who the first time I did it was. I think I might have an idea.

You know what I think I'd do. There was a kid at school. He went to my buddy school and he went around telling everybody that he had a shoebox full of cash under his bed and that his dad sold and that they had a bunch of money, a bunch of dope in the house. And so we went in at probably midnight. It was a trailer park. We went into the trailer park at midnight, me.

Knowing that they're there. Yeah, yeah, they're home. Yeah. Because I mean, the thing about robbing drug, here's what, because I actually wrote a story about these two brothers that used to rob drug dealers. And one of the things that they were like, they were like, look, like, if you get the drop on them,

that they're not calling the cops. Yeah. They're like, so if I hit you for 100,000 or 10,000, thousand or five bricks of whatever he's like they're not calling the cops he's like and then and they always didn't know who the guy was they were being set up by a task force agent so he's like they don't know us they just know that two guys came in kicked in the door and i was like yeah but they've got guns in there he's like yeah but they're not expecting right he's like so if you can get the drop which you almost always can yeah he said then he said it's a pretty good deal as opposed to he's like

as opposed to he said robbing some rich guy he's like what are you going to get some jewelry that you can't get rid of or you're getting next to nothing for he's like going to a house that the cops are going to investigate that's in a gate like he really had it kind of thought out like it seemed like a good deal but to me like I just don't want to kick in a door to something first of all I obviously I'm not going to do that but if I was going to not kicking in a door where I know inside there's probably four guns yeah somebody may if there's some guy that's in a spare room that I don't know about and he's got three minutes and realize it was what happens so we never we I don't I don't want to say never.

We almost never kicked indoors. It was very, very rare for us to kick indoors. In fact, in my opinion, that was the worst way to do home invasions, right? The goal with the home invasion is you never want to shoot your gun. You never want a gun shot to go off, right? Because once a gun gets fired, people call the police. People call the cops. And the entire situation changes, the entire dynamic changes.

Everything changes once a gun is fired. And they're coming quick for a gun for a 911 gun fired. Yep. Especially in Phoenix, especially in the suburbs where a lot of these like, mid to higher level of drug dealers, we're living in the suburbs. They weren't in, like, the projects. And we weren't,

you can't really rob a drug dealer in the projects because there's people standing outside at all hours of the night and you can't just walk up, you know, knock on somebody's door, like midnight or kick a door at midnight. So, and we use, see, we use that method much more than the kicking in the door.

We would knock on doors. Right. Because I'm 35. Look how young I look now. Right. Imagine how young I looked at 16. So a lot of the times I would just knock on the door. And people see a kid that looks 12.

I'm lost. We would use the, hey, I live. Have you seen my mom? We'd use the, I live a street behind you. My cat jumped to the fence. Can you look in the backyard and see if my cat's in your backyard? My God. Yeah, we used that method for quite a while.

But the first time we did it in the trailer park, in fact, we did knock on the door late at night, like 12 o'clock, but it was a trailer park. These people kind of, they were up late at night, they party, they were drinking there, you know. And we knocked in the door, I think the brother opened the door, and we just put a gun in his face. and pushed him inside his mom was sitting right there put the mom in the ground put the dad in the ground put him on the ground there was no shoebox full of cash there was not a shoebox full of cash I think maybe there might have been a thousand bucks worth of stuff in there oh shit at the most yeah but we were 16 so that was you know it was a lot yeah so when you're 16 I think that might have been the first one I could be wrong the guy I'm talking about I don't want to say his name

but the guy I'm talking about who I did most of this stuff with were co-defendants and we're still best friends to this day. Right. We've been best friends since we were kids. He went and then he did nine years in prison. I did seven years. He was already a convicted felon. He was already in probation when he got caught.

So he's very lucky. He only got nine years. I was my first time. But yeah, we're still friends today. So I can always just call him up like, hey, what was the first time? Right. And he might, he might remember.

I was always the more logical, you know, plan things out kind of person. And I got like a huge adrenaline rush. So like I said, I'm not 100% sure if that was, was the first time I did it, but I know that once I started, we probably did, I'd say a hundred, maybe more, maybe, maybe, I don't know, maybe 200. Like, I really have no idea how many, I just know it was a lot. There were times that we do two or three in a day. How long did

this go on? Probably until, well, until I got caught until I was 19, so yeah, two. And people are home. Like, you're not, you know, aren't you, why not stakes a place out and wait for people to leave we would try that sometimes um most of the time we just went in and got it like once we found where the place was at so um like i can give you like specific examples like different and i had i always had like two different crews that i did this with i had an older crew of friends these guys were all older than me they were like probably eight to 10 years older than i was and then i had the one friend who i was just me and him him and i would just do it alone just the two of us a lot of the times and um i did like more of the bigger jobs like

with the crew, the older crew. And even though they were older, they would let me plan it. So, like, with those guys, the first one we ever did, I think there was a house way, way out on the west side. And these guys were known, there were some white kids.

They were known to sell a lot of, like high-end, like hydrochronic, a lot of, a lot of, and they had a boat sitting in the carport. Carport's like a garage. Yeah, yeah. Garage. Okay, so they had a boat sitting in the carport.

And I remember, I told him, I was like, hey, look, I'm just going to walk up. to the door and ask if they're selling the boat and then you guys like come around the side and then just you know put a gun in the face right and so I go up to the door I knock on the door and no mask no nothing yeah

we wore masks on some of them but like for these guys they're like like we knew we kind of knew who they were whenever we did this we we had information on the people right like we had to know there was something in the house like this isn't just like a random house and so we knew who they were we knew if they were like affiliated with you know gangs are the cartels because in Arizona a lot of people are affiliated with the cartel and so obviously

you want to kind of steer clear of them yeah but um so these guys are some white boys that you know surfer white boys that sell a bunch of chronic and dro and I go knock on the door and I remember a dog big ass dog pokes his head up through like the blinds and starts barking going crazy and I'm knocking the door again knocking the door again nobody answers so I'm getting ready to walk back to my homies who were like in a suburban like kind of like right on the corner and tell him like, hey, nobody's here. And this big truck pulls up like an F-350. It's jacked up like eight inches.

And he pulls in the driveway as I'm walking out of the driveway. And I'm like, oh, shit. Like, the truck was so big. Like, in my mind, I'm thinking the guy who's driving it is going to be like some huge dude. Right. And, you know, the door opens and this dorky little white kid hops out. And he's maybe like five foot six. Right.

And he's like, can I help you? And he's like, real suspicious. And I'm like, yeah, man, I was looking at your old fishing boat. And, you know, my brothers and I, we live across the street. We saw your boat and wanted to know if you guys are selling it. And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah. And he kind of starts showing me around like the boat, like telling me all about the boat. You know, like, cool, do you mind if my brother comes over?

He's just across the street. So I text the homie. I'm like, yo, come on. And so he's, we're in the carport. He's kind of like walking us around the boat. My buddy comes and he joins me. And as soon as my buddy gets there, I just pull a gun out and the kid. And I'm like, hey, listen, don't move.

And the kid goes, he goes, no, man, listen, just take the boat. You can have the boat. And we're like, listen, open the door, take us inside. and we're not going to hurt you and he's like no man just take the boat this is broad daylight it's probably like 11 in the morning like it's the middle of the day and after a while we get him because he he tried to give us the boat for about five minutes

and then I think my homie hit him actually is how we got him to open the door we get him to open the door and then the other homies there's three of us comes from the truck we take him inside we lay him down on the ground in the living room and I'm kind of just sitting on the couch yeah the dog's right there the dog's right there the dog's right there and it's a big dog and dog's just kind of like

filling us out because his owner is kind of like you know stressed out so we lay him down to the ground we're like listen just lay down like relax we're not going to hurt you if you like just relax

and the homie start tearing the place apart I'm sitting on the couch I've got a gun in my lap and I look down like after a couple minutes and the dude is like whispering to the dog like the dogs like they're kind of smell in his face like trying to figure out like what's going on

and the dude's like whispering to the dog like in one one. No, you get him. Get him. And I'm like, I swear to God. And so I call, I'm like, yo, come here. I call the homie.

I'm like, come here, watch him. And so the homie comes out and starts watching the dude laying down. I go to the refrigerator. I grab some lunch meat. Throw it out back. And then I slide the Arcadia door open, throw it out back. The dog runs out back after the lunch meet. I close the door.

And then I kicked the shit out of this kid for like two minutes. Tie him up with some PlayStation cords. We finished tearing the place apart. And that one we did pretty good. We got like, I think, over two pounds of like, chronic and chronic back then was worth a lot of money you know this was before dispensaries were around this was you know and then we had we got all of his cash we got we took all the video game systems we take like everything that's inside and and then that was you know the job that's

that was like a typical job but now it wasn't always dorky you know right surfer kids from you know L.A. either there were times um so what are you doing with this I understand what you're doing with the cash but you just are you just then turning around reselling everything okay yeah so we'd split it up you know three ways split it the cash, and if there was like PlayStation's or Xboxes or whatever, we'd just figure out whatever with it. And then laptops, you know, somebody might go sell. In fact, we had a guy that would buy a lot of it off us for dope. We would take him electronics, and then he would take the electronics down to Mexico. Because for whatever reason, I think electronics are worth more

in Mexico. And he would just give us, you know. Yeah, at least you're not really worried in Mexico for tracking back across the border. Yeah, he would take all kinds of stuff down there. I still know him to this day, too. But, um, so that was like kind of the normal job. There were obviously other, other jobs that weren't, like I said, dorky kids from California. There were guys, um, that were, you know, kind of affiliated. Yeah, more serious.

And the trick with them was, like I said, we never, we never kicked indoors ever. That was not our get down. It was always, it never made sense to me like, just kicking a door. Because if these guys are inside and they're jacked up on, you know, math or something like that, um. they're going to have a gun on them and they're going to be already paranoid they're already looking out the window these guys I was going to say kind of like what I was saying was like you know you don't really know where they are in the house like if there's three guys and ones in the back room even if you get the drop on the first two guys the guy in the back room now has his gun walks out in the hallway and you know he gets to drop on he could get to drop on you you don't know we had a situation kind of like that luckily the guy in the back room didn't have a gun he had a screwdriver and yeah he had a screwdriver and this was this was a bigger one these guys were bisos they were from Mexico there was like six people in the house and they were like chill actually it wasn't even a house it was like a little condo and one of them came out like at maybe probably midnight I'd say we

were kind of sitting across the street and we were just watching the place and then one of them came out to smoke a cigarette this is a very common technique we would use they would come outside to smoke a cigarette or they'd come outside to get something out of their car or they would you know pull up from somewhere and be walking from their car to their you know front door and the goal was to get them in that time period. So, like, you have to kind of time it right and get good at this, but he comes outside to smoke a cigarette. So we, you know, jump out and kind of just walk down real casual. And then we just grab him while he's smoking a cigarette. As long as you can get the gun out before he can reach for anything. And then have him quietly walk you in the house

so you can walk inside. Yeah. And the funny one about that time was, um, we were told there was only like two people in this place. They're like, hey, listen, um, these are Paisa, these are guys from Mexico. And we were told about this place from another guy from Mexico. And we were told about this place from another guy from Mexico I guess maybe they were like not friends or rivals I don't know but he had said hey look there's a house with a bunch of black tar in it and if you guys go there

you'll find some stuff so we were told there's only like maybe two maybe three people in this house we got the guy when he was smoking a cigarette we walked him right through the front door and when we got inside there's probably six people sitting down and they all kind of like reached but we were already like there's three of us

our guns are already in our hands And we're already in. Like by this and then so they all laid down. And usually these guys, like they kind of know they get down too. Like they know just lay down. Like it's not worth it. It's just lay down, give them the stuff, get rid of them. We can try and find them labor.

Yep. And that was actually one of our biggest scores we ever got. We got two bricks of black tar, which is worth a lot, like two keys of black tar. But there was a dude in the back hallway who had a, he was in the hall. He was in a room, but my buddy went to go clear the rooms in the back. And he walked into this guy. like he hit the corner of the hallway and walked into the guy and the screwdriver like got him like it didn't go in deep but it like got him and the guy had like a screwdriver because he kind of knew what was going on he didn't have a gun luckily but he had a screwdriver and uh kind of like stab my buddy and it didn't you know penetrate very deep but it could have been a lot worse so it just to you know mention that situation you had said you never know when somebody's in one of those back rooms so that kind of thing does happen but um this goes on for a couple years like I said we we did hundreds and hundreds of these things and um Um, I go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say, does anybody, any of the, your crew get arrested for other things, or prior to this, like you're concerned, like, boom, they, they got, they got Jimmy. Are you, we concerned? Like, he got arrested. He'd look at 15 years for something else. Are we concerned that he's going to say something? Not, um, no, the funny thing was actually, no, like, we were actually the first ones to get arrested, but there were a lot of people who were definitely concerned. Like, my little brother knew what was going on. He was very close friends with my girlfriend, and she kind of told him. And so him and I had this really long conversation.

We sat down one night, and he said, hey, look, like, you're going to die. Yeah. Like, you're going to die. Like, you have to stop or you're going to die. And I remember, like, it hit me really heavy, and I had thought about it. But it just didn't sink in. I don't know what was wrong with me. I just, like, I was so stuck in this world for, you know, and it was such a different world than I had grown up in.

and I guess I was enjoying it too much. I don't know if it was the adrenaline. Every time you get away with a crime, you become emboldened by it. So you start thinking to yourself like, no, I know what I'm doing. I'm professional. I know what I'm doing.

I'm good at this. Yeah. I've done, we've done 50 of them. At this point, we've done 75. I've never had a problem. Yeah. You know, trust me, I know what I'm doing. You get, you know, not realizing like just one fly in the ointment that you can't account for.

We were looking for like the mythical big score, too. So everybody knows that, like, in Phoenix, you know, there's houses. There's, they're like drop houses where there's hundreds of pounds inside, or if not thousands. Because what happens is everything comes across the border and then it sits in Phoenix till it gets out distributed out to Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Florida, wherever it goes. I know a buddy. I have a buddy that ran. I wrote a story about a kid that he and the Mexican guy that was part of the cartel ran that. Or ran those houses.

Like, he would go. They would rent multiple houses. and he's like they'd fill them up with hundreds and hundreds if not like you said thousands of bricks and he said then you should do it you take this many bricks and you go and you meet someone this minute he's like you never make sure you're not followed back to the house nothing yeah we they were mythical we heard story in fact one of them got busted by the cops and we saw it in the news and it had like four or five hundred pounds in it and like so in our mind we're thinking like man like if we one of these like we're going to find one and we were always

looking for that so we were paying other dealers to find out like hey who's your dealer and who's their dealer and like where are these places and we never found one in fact i never i never met anybody who did find one right um in prison you know i think there were people there who were running and who got caught but like before i went to prison i never saw one i never actually found one the closest we ever got was there was a place on the reservation that got busted by the cops and they wrote a newspaper article about it and we had kind of known about that place but we had never hit it and we knew that they sold the place but yeah so close yeah but um so that was kind of what was pushing us is maybe we'll get one of these things and

who knows how much money we'll get and uh it's funny uh i had a buddy on the reservation he calls me up one morning and he goes hey mike i got like a bunch of your help selling it and i said okay cool so he pulls up he's got like a big old brick and i'm like where did you get it from he goes i was driving uh on the i 10 or the i 10 section that connects to the indian reservation and there was a van that was broken down on the side of the road so i pulled over to help the guy out and the guy needed like something from you know like an auto part store so i ran him up to the auto part store and brought him back and the dude was so grateful he asked me if i smoked and uh you know he asked my buddy if my buddy smoked and my buddy said yes and he said here take as much as your trunk can

fit and he opened up the back of the van and there was like hundreds of pounds in the back of the van and he filled my buddy's trunk up with like this huge but uh and i ended up helping my buddy sell it so but like had that been me and i had found that guy right like like I would have taken the whole van. Right. I would have bet. But, yeah, we never found, like, the huge, huge score that we were looking for. So a lot of it was just fueled by adrenaline.

And then when my daughter was born, so the girlfriend I had who was from the reservation, she gets pregnant. She gives birth to my daughter. I'm 18. And I remember right after my daughter was born, like, a week later. A couple guys I knew who were in a different crew that sometimes we did work with. They had called me and said, hey, we're going on to Tucson. There's this big job.

Do you want to go with us? And I was like, no, I can't. My daughter was just born. I'm hanging out with my kid. And they go. They go down to this big job. Apparently some guy owned like a tire store or an automotive store. They kidnapped him.

I guess like at 6 o'clock in the afternoon when the store was closing, they went in. They took him and his employee, the last two guys who were in the store. They took them back to his house. He had like this nice house in Tucson, like a really nice house. and they said like look we know who you are we're keeping you until we get what we want and pretty much the dude who had the house he made a phone call

and he got them like well over like $100,000 in cash and dope delivered to like a place where they could pick it up safely and I guess the whole time they had them there they were you know drinking with him like but he was tied up but they weren't like hurting the guy or anything

but when they came back from Tucson they stopped to see me on the way because the reservation is between Tucson and Phoenix and they stopped to see me on the way and they gave me like a thousand bucks and like a little bit of stuff you know to sell and they were like dude you should have went with us

and I was like oh my God are you serious like the one time I don't go is this huge job and those two guys they're from a different crew later on after I was already in prison they went and committed a home invasion and somebody shot at them and my buddy

there's two of them we're just going to call them Joe and Bob so I don't say their real names Joe's a white dude Bob's a black dude they went to go rob

somebody who pulled a gun on him Joe stepped in front of Bob and Bob was trying to shoot the guy shooting at them but Bob shot Joe in the back of the head so they were best friends

like these guys are best friends so he killed his best friend friendly fire yeah on accident he got I think he's doing like 25 years right now yeah so and that

happened while I was already locked up and that was during a home invasion yeah during a home invasion somebody else had pulled a gun out to shoot at them and then he you know just stepped in front you know because we're not like trained yeah yeah like we don't know what we're doing and there were kids and uh but yeah so he he died in there he got right in the back of the head one shot and uh the other homie he's 25 years i haven't even i don't i don't remember his last name to be honest so i can't even look him up to see when he gets out but um these are guys that i had done jobs with i so we knew things you know could go bad for some people they did go bad. Um, I guess towards probably around, I'd say, I was probably 18 still when our first job

went really bad. Now, this is my best friend and I. We, uh, we go to this condo. This guy, the guy we're robbing is kind of an OG in Chandler, which is like a suburb of Phoenix. Um, he's really well known out there. And we go to, um, rob this guy. He's sitting out front smoking a cigarette and like a lawn chair and he's got a buddy with him. and we go up and we pull a gun on this dude and we're like hey look go inside and it's like maybe 10 o'clock at night 11 o'clock at night and right off the bat like I kind of felt something was wrong with this one we had another homie in the car and then me and my one friend my main buddy uh we're the one you know doing it and when when we pulled the gun on him the guy almost

like reached in our gun like he tried to like grab the gun out of our hand and like he was he was like an OG and I think he just wasn't scared like he just looked in our eyes and he just wasn't He's had lots of guns pointed out of him. Yeah, he's looking at like these, you know, kids. Like, we're 18-year-old kids, and he's just not scared. So you see, 18-year-old kid I would be scared about because, like, the 45-year-old man is probably going to think twice before shooting, you know, shooting. The kid is oblivious to the repercussions of what's happening. And I'd be afraid, okay, some 17- or 20-year-old will pull the trigger because he just doesn't understand.

No, you're exactly right. That's usually the case. A lot of the times when these kids get locked up from murder, they're kids. They make dumb, you know, dumb choices. I interviewed a guy who's like a former kind of hitman and John A. Light. That's crazy. And he was saying, because they were, you know, apparently there's kind of like an open hit out on him, right? Because he cooperated.

And somebody had asked him, like, are you ever worried about like one of these, you know, one of the older gangsters coming? He's like, the older gangsters? He's like, no. He was, some young kid trying to make a name for himself. finding me and killing me. He's like, I don't worry about it too much. He said, but that's who you need to worry about it. He said, because he doesn't understand what taking a life means.

He doesn't understand that he's not going to get away with it. He doesn't understand he's going to spend the next 30 years in prison. He's like, he doesn't understand that. He thinks, oh, I'm going to shoot this guy and make a name for myself. It doesn't really, he's because it's so romanticized. He's like, it doesn't realize, like, you just won, took a life and you're going to, you just ruin yours. Yep. No, romanticized is like the, that's the perfect word for it.

That's the same thing. When we were kids and we were in the middle of all of this, we thought, like, hey, if we get caught, we'll probably get like a year or two in prison and we'll get a bunch of tattoos and, you know, we'll come back out and just get right back to war. And it was romanticized like going, you know, that whole lifestyle. And in reality, like, it was all BS. Like, none of it's real. Like, none of that stuff.

I wish I could teach that to kids. But there's really no way to put those experiences into words and show people that it's just really not what you think it is. Like prison, that lifestyle is not what you think it is. It never ends good. It always, and you're always going to be just miserable, like, depressed in a way that you can't even explain. So, um, anyways, we get this guy.

So the guy goes to grab the guy. He goes to grab the guy. He doesn't get it. So he gets up and he starts walking back towards the door. And, uh, he walks inside. And as he walks in, he just slams the door behind it. Like, he just like, reaches behind him and slams the door. Like, he just like, like, slams it right. buddy's face and locks it like quick and so my buddy starts kicking the door and immediately like I already know like something's wrong like this is not he's got to go for a gun yeah this and and my buddy

kicks the door and maybe on like the third kick I'd say it goes in and um you hear a gunshot as soon as the door opens gunshot and like the thing was when we went into this place it was well we never go all the way in but the lights were all off it was pitch black so when he got in there he must have had a gun like on his waistband or something just locked the door turn around and aimed it back out the door we're outside and there's lights so we're illuminated so to him inside of a pitch black room

you're great target we're easy yeah he can see us but he's in a pitch black room we can't see anything and all we hear is one gunshot and I kind of just grab my buddy and like pull and I said no like don't like let's not do this like it's not gonna end good so we run back to the car and we're running back to the car and he goes I think I got hit

yeah I was gonna say did he get hit what had like yeah so we get in the car we jump in the back seat and I told the homie who was driving he said go to the hospital now and I pull the shirt up on my buddy and I'm like dude I'm like I'm like wear where where he's like I can feel it though I got hit and then he starts he's like I can't see anything

like my vision's getting blurry my legs are getting numb and like I'm looking for blood no blood not a drop of blood anywhere I literally tore his shirt off I'm looking for a hole and I'd say maybe after like a minute I find it I find like this little tiny ant bite and I like I'm like what the f I poke it

and he goes ah I said is that it he goes yes and i was talking shit i was like i was like you little bitch i'm like i'm talking all kinds of shit to him like like that's not even like it looks there's no blood like what and um what i didn't know what he so he got shot by a 22 yeah and it cauterized itself going in there's no it's not like the movie it's like there's no blood like there was none at all and um it didn't go out in the back so like generally what you want like if you get shot in the stomach is you want it to go in your stomach and out your back right the 22 doesn't do that it goes in and then it bounces up and down.

Yeah, so it could do a lot of damage. Yeah, and we got him to the hospital luckily in under five minutes, but it had hit, it ate a bunch of his stomach because it had bounced up and down his stomach, and then it hit like his spleen or his kidney or like a bunch of stuff internally. He went into the hospital weighing 180 pounds. He came out maybe 105, 100, like a skeleton.

How long is he there, a few months? I don't know, maybe a month. Yeah, I remember when I were, when I dropped him off, and his family, like my, family like i grew up with like i've known it since i was probably 15 16 very close to his family very close to his sister and his mom and his grandma and so i had to call them like hey listen he got shot he's in the hospital and they're freaking out and they're so mad at me and i was always the bad influence really like you know um my parents like to say it's because i was hanging out with bad

influences it was really me and um so what would the police show up yeah well so i i ran in and i dropped him off and um they in in the police report for this case it says they identified me by i had a cross tattooed of my arm they identified me by a cross on my arm and then i have a scar on my lip and um i'm in the i'm in the hospital camera footage so i just dropped him off then i got in the car and left like i ran out of there because i didn't want to be in the i knew the cops were going to show up we've got all kinds of stuff in the car like we don't want you know we don't want you know we don't want to be there at the hospital when the cops show up but um you know thank god he survived um we uh after this point we become like huge targets on the radar right because gunshots

get reported in that part of channeler well what does he tell the police that we were walking down the street and somebody tried to shoot us of course the cops are like i don't believe that i don't but there's nothing they can do yeah his exact story was we were just walking down the street and they're like well we saw your buddy mike on camera and he's like yeah we were walking on the street and some guy just pull up and shot at us right and that was that was the story uh but obviously the cops had a report of gunshots in another neighborhood and so they kind of

put one and two together and they go over there to the guy and they ask him what happened he was a yeah two kids tried to rob me and I shot one of them and so now that guy was a PISA he was an illegal immigrant he ended up later getting deported right he wasn't even supposed to be

in like the U.S so he ended up later getting deported were you ever charged yes so yeah we but so Not right away, right? Because, one, the guy's an illegal immigrant. He didn't really want to testify in court. So I didn't get arrested that night.

He didn't get arrested that night either. He went into the hospital, and I think he might have stayed in the hospital a month. I can ask him. Like, he'd come on here and talk to you if he ever wanted to talk to him. Right. I could ask him. I think it was about a month. I just remember when he came home, I went and saw him, and he weighed like 105 pounds.

It was crazy. He lost 70 pounds, like just, this bullet just bouncing in his stomach, just eating everything. But he got lucky. He didn't have a colostomy bag or anything like that. He was not paralyzed. He didn't hit his spine. He got very fortunate. And today now it's just like this tiny little scar.

We still joke about it all the time whenever I see him. I knew a kid that honestly looked just like you, who was Puerto Rican. Okay. He had been shot by an AK-47, like, I don't want to say 10 times. He had holes where the bullets had come out in his back. He was wild. Like, he was wild. Like, you're like, you got shot by, like, one time is insane to survive.

And I mean, he, you know, they, like, oh, he was like, he had been in the hospital for months and months. And of course, he got out and immediately started, you know, gang banging again and doing whatever he was doing in Puerto Rico. See, that doesn't hear me straight. Like, right. He was, he was nuts. He was nuts. He was also young. He was probably in his late 20s.

Right. This was when he was in his early 20s. And he's in Puerto Rico. There's, there was 30, 40 percent unemployment. I mean, he's. You know, he grew up in the projects, and the projects of Puerto Rico are horrific. So third world.

It's a whole different world. Right, right. But an AK-47, I mean, the bullet, you could, the holes in his back were insane. Like the scarring, it was like, and going in there, so tiny. Yeah. Yeah, when it comes out, it's huge, right? When it goes in, it's tiny. When it comes out, it's huge.

It's amazing what the body can, like, withstand. But he'd had to have a colostomy back. He said for like six months or something or a year or something. He's walking around. Oh, wow. yeah yeah but you didn't have to keep it forever so at least no no he got it eventually they got it oh that's good yeah yeah so he yeah he never had a closet me back at all he came home like a month later and he was he was good to go but after that happened that's when we kind of like we got

on the radar of the cops a lot more this like kind of got their attention and um by now it's like a full time like career almost right like we're doing like like i said like some there were days we'd go and do two or three um do your parents at this point realize that no so that that no contact at all your mom cut me off completely oh I was going to say because I was thinking like your buddy getting shot and his family knowing might have bled into your family he retired oh okay yeah he kind of retires for like but still I thought maybe they that family some of those family members might have reached out to your family and said hey listen I don't know if you realize this but sometimes that happened they didn't talk um his family his family like very he's Mexican his family's from Mexico they're very very close-knit family right like it's kind of family like grandparents live in the same house as parents and son and like four generations in the same house very close-knit cultural um and they're still like that to this day in fact like we go over there on easter and hang out with him and his family and like they're they all know us like it's just one big family so right um but they didn't know my family they don't know my mom and uh he when it happened

his family just like no like you're not going out anymore like you're not going anywhere you're going to stay home right you're not going to go out there and die me on the other hand I keep running the streets and we got to the point like I said it it's now I'm with my older crew the crew I kind of mentioned before and we got to the point where you know it's it's multiples every single week and um up until I turned 19 and uh there's one particular one I was gonna when I so when I turn 19 I guess I'll just jump to this part because this is the more important part. When I turned 19, I didn't really slow down. I just was trying to spend a little bit more time with my daughter. I knew that we were definitely on the radar of the cops. So I went to the Indian reservation up north. I hit out there for like three months probably. And then up there, kind of the same stuff. I wasn't robbing anybody, just, you know, smoking, drinking a lot, partying a lot, and then selling because it's so far, like the reservations, everything costs 10 times more up there. Like, you can take a case of, like, beer and go sell a beer for five bucks a piece or ten bucks a piece up there because they're dry.

The reservations are dry. There's no alcohol on them. And so that's what we would do. We would go, we wouldn't take beer. We would take vodka. We would go by cases of, like, cheap pop-off vodka, which is like this nasty vodka. Right. We'd go sell it up there, and we'd hide.

I was just hiding out there for months. And then eventually I decided that I wanted to come back to Phoenix. So I come back to Phoenix, get right back into the swing of things. And we get like a weekly apartment. And this is how dumb I was and high I was. In my mind, I thought the apartment was like a safe place. Like I thought it was like a good area. Like we could kind of lie low, you know, sell, conduct our business and like not draw any attention.

Later on I come to find out it's like one of the hottest spots in Phoenix like for drug and drug activity. And like the whole time and it's always under surveillance. All right. So like the whole time, I'm thinking like, yeah, no. Nobody's going to notice us here, but really, like, I'm in like a spot that everybody, you know, when I got to jail and prison, everybody knew, they're like, why would you do that there? Like, the cops are always in that spot watching. So, but I just wasn't in the right state of mind ever. We decided to get an apartment that was like a working, working apartment, right? It was a drop house for us where we would store stuff.

We would meet up there. We'd, you know, sell dope out of the place. And we probably used it for, I'd say, eight or nine months. months and we just kind of continued on the same path. In fact, we even got worse to the point where we found out that like you could take stuff down into Mexico. You could take guns down into Mexico and sell guns down in Mexico because a gun in Mexico is worth twice what it's worth here. So, you know, if you had guns that were stolen, which we did, we would take them down to Mexico. We'd take 20, 30 at a time and go sell them down there. And my buddy, the one I was real close with, his family is from Mexico. And they breed, to this day, they actually breed

birds like parakeets parrots macaws and my buddy he got this bright idea to go down there and buy like eggs right like to set up an incubator and his truck and put it under the right under the back seat because you're not really supposed to like transport livestock across the border unless you have like some sort of permit and so we would go out into Mexico and hang out like all the time and then if you're 18 there you can drink where you can go into the strip clubs and so we were able to do stuff in Mexico that we weren't able to do, you know, in the United States, and we're in Phoenix, which is like three hours from the border. So we'd regularly drive down into Mexico, buy, you know, bird eggs and stuff and try to, most of the time that didn't work. But, and then we met people

down there. We hung out with people down there and took guns down there and sold guns down there. And so this last, this is like my final eight or nine months of freedom. This is pretty much what we're doing the last eight, nine months. And then we're selling drugs and we're still robbing drug dealers. now one day I'm probably let me see it's probably six in the morning I remember it was very early I had my own apartment across the street from this apartment right and I remember I got up the the mother of my daughter she had a job on the reservation and my daughter would go to her family's house on the reservation as well so the mother of my daughter she drives to work She drops my daughter off with her sister.

And then I woke up and I went over to this apartment across the street that we were using. And I remember I went inside. My buddy was living there, right? But I didn't like sleep there, party there, or stay there or anything like overnight usually because my daughter's mom would get pissed. Or I had to be home every night. So I go in here like at maybe six in the morning. And I remember I got there. And I'm crazy OCD even to this day.

Like I'm super neat and clean. And I got there and the place was a mess. And I remember I kind of woke him up. and I was like, dude, like, we have to get, like, some of this stuff out of here. There's, like, random stuff that's been stolen in here. Like, there's laptops. There's, like, there's people's driver's licenses, like, credit cards, like, just a bunch of stuff that you didn't want there. And there was this, I don't know what they're called, but those big glass jars that hold, like, people put change in them.

Yeah, yeah, like the big water jugs. Exactly, but made out of glass. So they had stolen one, like, a month before that was full of, like, change. I think there had been, like, $6, $700 and quarters. in this thing, right? But they had kept the jar and they had just like poured all the change out slowly. And so I hit the jar. I broke it with a hammer. And then we kind of like just threw everything. We set the jar inside a pillowcase and then started throwing all the trash, like all the credit cards, all the licenses, all like, there was like foreign currency, you know, laptops that we

just probably couldn't resell, just a lot of stolen stuff. And I was like, dude, we have to start getting this stuff out of here, throwing this stuff away. You know, what happens? This is a weekly apartment it's not like a yeah like you signed a 12-month lease right what happens if they come in here to clean on accident right and they see a bunch of crazy stuff so um i woke him up him and i start cleaning the place up together and um he uh he has this pillow case like full of stuff and like take it down to the dumpster now we're on the third story it's a three-story apartment complex it's called the budget suites it's in mesa arizona on like eighth street and dobson i think and he goes outside when he goes outside i pour a line like a big one right and i snort a line

right and um because i was around that time i'm i'm you know i was partying pretty pretty heavy back then so he's walking downstairs i snore a line i go outside and i light a cigarette and i'm standing out on the patio and he's like on the second floor going down and there's a white guy like in jeans and a t-shirt walking right past him and um he gets down to the dumpster and i'm kind of like you know just puffing on my cigarette and i hear get on the ground you piece of mother blew your head right right and um i thought my buddy was getting robbed so i looked down and he's like on the ground he's got his hands on his head and there's three white dudes with ar-15s in plain clothes right aimed aimed at him and then the other white dude who had been coming at the stairs at the

same time is almost to the third floor I'm at and he points at me and goes that's him and so I just ran right I run there's like a hallway that's in these apartments it's it's an outdoor hallway I run through it and this guy's like chasing behind me he's probably 15 yards me maybe 10 yards behind me I jump right

off the balcony on what floor third floor yeah I jump right on the balcony what's beneath you an oleander bush I have oleanders here I don't think It's like a big, big bush. And I was just really high. And I remember there were people, like, outside, like, at the apartment complex. And I remember them kind of, like, screaming.

I think they thought I was trying to kill myself. They thought I was trying to commit suicide. And I landed in the bush, and I just immediately just jump up and take off running again. And my little brother, the one I mentioned earlier, he also has an apartment on the same corner. So I run across the street. Well, first, I hide behind a trash can. That's an auto zone. like a dumpster, I catch my breath, and then I run over to his apartment. And I kick open the door

to his apartment, and his girlfriend, he's gay, so it's like his best friend. She's there with her boyfriend, and they're kind of like just sitting on the couch, like watching TV, and my little brother's at work. So I ran, and I was like, I kicked the door. I'm like, where's my brother? And they're like, he's gone. He's at work already. And I go to the freezer, and I open it up, and he has a bottle of vodka on the freezer and I just take like a big swig and uh like I'm just in a whole different state of mind and I didn't have my phone because when I had gone into start cleaning up the apartment I take everything in my pockets and I always set stuff like on the counters I don't like having stuff in my pockets and so all I had on me was um I think uh my cigarettes a lighter and that's it

yeah my cigarettes and a lighter I didn't have my phone so I take her phone and I call the mother my daughter and I say hey the cops just raided the spot I'm at my little brother's apartment I need you to come get me like right now she's already on the reservation by now she's at work and she's like okay I'll I'll be there as soon as I can the reservation from Mesa is a solid 40 minute drive and she's okay I'll come get you I say hey I'm on my brother's apartment she goes don't leave and then so I hang up I give my brother's friend her phone back and she's freaking out by now and she leaves like she just leaves the apartment and I'm so my brother's place alone and I remember I looked out the window and there's like plain-closed cops across the street.

They're like walking everywhere. And so I just kind of waited out in my brother's apartment. He's got like an empty apartment. It's got a couch, a bed, and like a TV sitting on the floor. Like there's nothing there. I don't have a phone. I have no idea what time it is and I have no idea how much time has passed. So I go into my brother's bedroom and I swap out into his clothes.

And I feel like it's been two hours. and I'm like, dude, where's, where's, you know, my daughter's mom? Like, where's she at? Where's my girlfriend? And so I, uh... When you swap out through the clothes, is it like a baby blue shirt with like Rhinestone? Is it like... No, it was a fuzzy hat.

It was a blue shirt, but it was like a blue button-up shirt. And I did have a hat on, and like, I think I just put on some shorts. And, uh, it was a lot different. It wasn't like anything flamboying. But, um, uh, so I feel like it's been two hours. and I've been kind of just pacing his apartment, right? Because I'm high. Right.

And I'm stressed out. It's probably 10 minutes. Yeah, no, it would have been like 20 minutes. Okay. And there's cops everywhere. Like, I'm across the street, though, so they're kind of still like at the other apartment complex. So I decided. But clearly they don't know where you are.

Yeah, no, they don't know. Or in your mind, do you think they're closing in? Or, yeah, I just wanted to get as far away. Like, honestly, I really wasn't thinking that clearly. So I decided to go outside, like, go look around the parking line and see if she's there. right and maybe she just you know didn't find my brother's I don't know I don't know what I was thinking I go outside I'm kind of standing by the pool and um there's a there's a guy he's on his phone and like wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt and he looks at me and he goes he's about 10 yards

away he goes you better not run like that's what he says like just like looks me right in the eye and he goes you better not run and I didn't even think twice I just run and there's a fence there's a fence between that apartment complex in the next building which is a college it's a pima community college and the fence has um spikes on it and so he's chasing me um the fence is maybe another 15 yards so i run i grab the fence by the spikes at the top and i just like throw myself over um he shoots his taser i hit the fence in my stomach and then like my momentum kind of like throws my body over the other side of the fence Well, you're lucky you didn't get stuck on the fence.

Well, yeah, I ended up going over the fence. So I landed, and I remember hearing the taser, and I remember I felt the taser, and it went in my elbow right here. You can't see him. There used to be two little tiny dots. Both of them went in right here. But when I fell off the fence, one of them came out, and I just kind of like, I landed on the ground, and I ripped the other one out. Now, he's only like maybe three feet away from me. The only thing separating us is this fence, and he's not going over the fence, right?

I'm like a young kid in good shape I can just fly over fences He can't He's trying to like reload his taser And I get up and I just start running again And I remember like very clearly Like I'm seeing stars Almost like like Looney Tunes

Like you can see stars in your vision My shirt is ripped open in half There's a huge gash Like down my stomach And there's blood And there's a next Another set of apartment complexes This part of Mesa

Like Dobson Road and like baseline southern It's all apartment complexes And the college and the hospital So I run into the next Set of apartment complexes I jumped the first fence I see And the guy has like an outdoor laundry room And I just run in there

And like there's like A little like back section That's like card not cardboarded like It's got like a piece of plywood And like sectioned off It's really hard to explain But it's like a little laundry room In his backyard of a condo

Right? A very small backyard And I remember I just run in there And I lay down And I'm laying there for probably 10, 15 minutes and I remember a cop walked by like now they're going through this condo they know I'm somewhere in this condominium complex hiding and the cop goes

he goes yeah that's the second time he's ran today I remember I heard him clear and then another 10 15 minutes later I hear a dog like sniffing I'm like oh my god it's a cop dog it's not it's this big ass pit bull and it walks up to me and it just kind of like looks at me

and then it just like goes back inside and then probably 20 minutes later I hear it an Arcadia door slide open and somebody walks into the room I'm in and so I had my shirt had been torn at half I had gone into the dryer and the guy had a shirt in there and I remember it said

it was the stereo company Fleetwood they make like he had a shirt that said Fleetwood on it and I put it on and this white guy he goes into his laundry and probably to get his laundry and he sees me just laying in there like bloody and he goes what the

and I go oh I got stabbed like some people are chasing me and I didn't have anything and he goes I don't know what you did man but you can't stay here that's all that's all he said And he goes, are you wearing my shirt? There's a bunch of blood on it because, like, my stomachs tore open and it had bled through.

He said, just keep it, but you can't stay here because there's cops everywhere. There's a helicopter up in the sky. Right. So I go out his back gate. I just open the gate. I walk out. We're still in the middle of this condominium complex. About 50 yards to my left is a cop car sitting, like, in the parking lot.

And then you can see, like, a cop kind of walking on that side. I just walk right over to the next condominium. And I just walk right into that backyard. I just open the gate, and I walk right into that backyard. backyard. I hit out in that backyard. Well, I broke into their condo and then I stayed in this place for probably four or five hours, right? By now it's probably, by the time I got into this place, it's probably 10 or 11 in the morning. And I've stayed here now until like four or five in the afternoon. So I've been there pretty much all day and they're not home. So I just hung out in their condominium. I switched

clothes again. I switched into their clothes. And I remember they came home and I kind of went out under the backyard and they didn't see me like I heard like I heard like people near the front so I just kind of I would I already been waiting near the Arcadia door for them to come home as soon as I heard them near their front door I went into the backyard and I kind of just like hid like in a corner and I sat there for another two hours and um I had switched into their clothes and I had taken some groceries out of their cupboard and put them in like a grocery bag and uh when the sun started to go down maybe around like six or seven um I finally I was like you know I'm just going to do it so I walked out of the gate and

And there was a cop to my left, maybe 40 yards. There's still, like, there's cops everywhere. They're still walking this condominium looking for me. And he's maybe 40 yards. And I kind of just, like, nodded, like, did like a little wave. And I'm in a whole different set of clothes, and I have a bag of groceries in my hand. Right. And I just, like, walk.

And then I get out to the main road, which is Dobson Road, runs north-south. And then to my right. Are you bleeding anymore? Yeah, but I have a different shirt on now, so it hasn't really soaked through. Right. It's kind of, like, scabbed up. We're not scabbed, but it's not, like, blood pouring out of the thing. It wasn't very deep.

It was just that it was... It was a deep scratch, a really deep scratch. And it left me with a long scar. You can't see it because I have a whole bodysuit of tattoos now, so you can't see it anymore. So when I get out to Dobson Road, to the left is the entrance to the condos, and then to the right is the other entrance to the condos.

There's a cop at each entrance. And so I'm like, okay, well, I can either go left and walk in front of the cops, or I can go right and walk in front of the cops, or I can just jaywalk right across Dobson Road. So I just jay walked right across Dobson Road. I get to another apartment complex, there's a black dude outside

and I remember I asked and I said hey man can I bum a cigarette off you and make a phone call and I called this girl I knew she was really close I didn't want to take a chance and call my girlfriend

because she might have been on the res like 45 minutes away so I knew this girl who lived like maybe 10 minutes away I called her and say hey I need you to come get me right now I'll meet you like outside at McDonald's that son

dobson and Southern or Dobson and Baseline and she goes okay cool she comes and gets me and she drives me back to the reservation to my daughter's mom's house or to my daughter's mom's mom's house right my girlfriend's mom's house and um I was very close to my girlfriend's mom's family on the reservation I spent a lot of time down there they knew me really well and um they kind of knew something was going on so um

the girl I had picked me up she dropped me off there and the next day was my birthday the next day was my 20th birthday so I remember this because it happened May 26th and I had always been I had always said before I turn 20 before I'm not a teenager anymore I'm going to do something crazy and I had ran from the cops like in an epic fashion the day before I turned 20 and on my 20th birthday I could barely move I was laying in bed I jumped off a three story balcony I had gotten tased I tore my stomach apart and I was just messed up like I could barely move so on my 20th birthday I laid in bed all day and then on my the next day my daughter's mom she's like I'm going to drive into town and get you a birthday birthday cake. And I was like, okay, cool. We were the only one at the house. Now, her big sister to this day is a probation officer. She works on the Indian Reservation probation department, her and her husband. And she never, she didn't like me back then because like her, she was older than us. She's about 10 years older than us. And this 18 year old kid is dating her 18 year old sister, getting in all kinds of trouble, always

involved with nonsense, and she's in law enforcement. So she never liked me. And, um, So when my daughter's- Do you blame her? No, not at all. No, I never get it. I was going to say. Yeah, in fact, her and I. She says, she's an awesome person.

We are very good friends to this day. Her and her husband, who are still both probation officers, are good friends to this day. So she calls the house. It's about nine in the morning. She calls the house the day after my birthday, two days after all this stuff happened, my daughter's mom is out getting me a birthday cake.

And me and my daughter, my daughter's a year old right now, or almost a year old. and she calls the house and she goes and i answer the phone it's a house phone she goes michael what are you doing down there i said i'm just hanging out for a couple days she goes why aren't you in your apartment at mason i said just hanging out for a couple days and she's like okay she's like who's there with you so just me and my daughter she was okay click hung up about 10 minutes later the the phone rings actually no about 10 minutes later a loud speaker comes on and you hear it goes michael bryant we have the house surrounded

we know you're inside with your daughter answer the phone The phone race. Right. I pick up the phone. He goes, this is Sergeant, you know, da, da, da, da, I know your daughter's inside with you. We do not want to raid the house. We don't want to kick the doors in with your, you know, with your daughter in there. And I said, hey, look, my daughter's at the store.

Getting me a birthday cake. She'll be back in 10 minutes. I'll come outside and surrender when she gets back because I don't want you guys taking my daughter to, like, you know, child protective services. Right. And the sergeant goes, your, your daughter's auntie is out here with us. Right. so she can take the she can take your she can take your daughter and i said look i i'm going away for a long time i'm not coming out so i can just say goodbye to my girlfriend right and the cop goes

if you come outside right now and don't put up any kind of fight then um will let you sit on the side of the house in handcuffs until she comes back i said okay so i unlocked the front door and then um i kind of just like sat down on in the living room floor they came inside they arrested me put me in cuffs and sure enough they did they let me sit outside in handcuffs until my girlfriend drove back up bawling her eyes out because the house is surrounded by cops and um um um the cop asked me he said do want to see the wanted poster so what had happened was they sent out uh he asked me if i wanted to see it and i never i don't think it's possible to find it like i wish i had a copy of it but it said that i was wanted for armed robbery kidnapping um

torture of a hostage um because supposedly we had kidnapped somebody and like uh stabbed him They were tied up and aggravated assault, trafficking stolen property, trafficking narcotics, trafficking weapons, just like this crazy long, you know, rap sheet. And what they had done was they had sent it out to like all, because like Phoenix is a bunch of suburbs, Mesa, Chandler, Tempe, Gilbert, Alwituki, and then the reservation all connected. So what they had done was they just sent it to like all the different police departments. And they knew that I had been on the reservation a lot. So they had sent it down to the reservation.

police department and the probation department and that's how the sister saw it yeah and so um they arrested me and i went to county jail to sheriff joe's county jail that's where the guy that dresses people up in the stripes and has them in pink uh yeah yeah so um has them all in tents and stuff he's not around anymore is he no he he got uh i don't know if he got like fired i don't know what happened to sheriff joe i just know he's not the sheriff anymore i think he tried to run for like mayor or governor or something like that but for a long time he was really like loved but yeah he wore he made all of us wear pink boxers pink blankets pink socks and then everything else was stripes right um the food was horrible like the county jail was just known as being like the toughest county jail

he was tough on crime that was his whole chick so um and that's when uh that's when my life of you know ridiculous drugs and home invasions pretty much ended and i started my incarceration how much how much time did you get seven years it took you got seven years or you did seven years i did seven years and i got seven years oh yeah did the whole thing why so um what happened was i went to county jail for 13 months right and generally when you signed like a plea agreement they say hey you got you know seven years um in arizona you'll do 85 percent so on a seven year sentence you should only do about five and a half years right right well what happened was I did 13 months in county, and then I got page two, which in Arizona means you pick up a new charge.

So I got it because the prosecution still had a bunch of stuff. Because they raided that apartment. There was tons of stuff inside that place. And then all that stuff my buddy had in the bag was all evidence. Like they literally caught him with a bag of evidence in his hand. So a lot of the stuff they didn't even know about was like from other crimes that they had no idea we were involved with. So they opened up all these new investigations. And we got booked on the initial like armed robbery, kidnapping.

home invasion but um so as you're there pleading guilty to other charges other charges are being loaded on exactly and so when we when i got page twoed um i picked up a new burglary and a new armed robbery and those i didn't get the back time for because i had been in county jail for 13 months but pretty much they said well yeah you don't you've been here for 13 months but you're not going to get the back time because we're just charging you with this one as of today so i did I did six years, 10 months, and three weeks

on a seven year sentence. I pretty much did 99% of my entire sentence. So I did 13 months of it in county jail, which sucked. Like county is horrible. It's just,

it's miserable. When you're in county for that long, all you want is to get to prison because you hear in prison, they've got TVs, food, visitation in person.

You know, it's not through a TV screen. And, I remember the first time I heard that was because the guys kept, man, I just want to get sentenced to go to prison. And finally, I remember I said to somebody, I was like, bro, why does everybody want to go to prison?

Yeah. Like, I like, I mean, isn't prison worse than this? They're like, what? They're like, no, bro, this is the worst time you'll do. You want to go to prison. They're like, I remember the kid said, this kid's name was Jeremy. He said, do you understand that I'll get there at like 10 in the morning? They'll let me out of R&D.

He said, just before count. He said, after count, he said, I'll go to commissary. he said I'll have an ice cream he said I'm going to have an ice cream I'm going to have like he was sitting there like I'll have all this stuff and I go well you can just go to commissary he's like you can he said but it doesn't matter you'll just know somebody that knows somebody say bro do me a favor buy this I'll get you on next one on next week he's and they'll buy it because they know you just got there and and like he was right like not that I did that but you you could have like guys would walk guys that knew how to do time yeah so you guys they got there right soon as they got

there they're like loaded up with everything yep yeah it's it's a whole prison and jail are completely different worlds jail sucks in fact when i was in county jail in my 13 months i must have gotten in 10 fights like almost every month because in county jail nobody knows how long they're doing right so everybody's stressed out it's super tense it's super just high anxiety high stress environment um it's it's miserable like it's just the worst place you can imagine like County Jail is hell compared to prison. Yeah. And when I got to prison, the whole time I was in prison,

I maybe got in two fights. And I did six years in prison, one year in county jail. I got 10 fights in jail and, you know, two fights in prison. Because it's just, prison, or jail sucks. And prisons, prison's just like, you're just kind of waiting. Prison is just like the waiting game. You're just sitting around waiting for your sentence to expire, waiting to get released.

So I got seven years. I was supposed to have gotten five. My daughter's mom, she had a bunch of money from, reservation she went out and got me this attorney he was a jag attorney who had been like in the marine corps and done like you know uh he was an attorney in the marine corps yeah yeah went out and yeah she paid him pretty much like all of her money she got from the tribe which was like 10,000 and um before so before we hired him the state was offering me 12 years that's like they were like hey you're going to sign for 12 years that's it and then after we got him they said okay

we'll give you five years in prison with five years probation and so I was like cool I'll take it because I've already been in here a year. Yeah. So I've only got to go to do. Yeah, plus the time off that you're thinking you're getting 15% off. Yeah, I thought I was going to get 15% off. Exactly. So I thought I was like I'll go do like three more years in prison.

And so I signed the plea and then I got to my sentencing date. One of the worst days in my life was sentencing listening to the judge because she told me, she like read through like all of the charges. I have more like if you look me up on the Department of Corrections website, you'll see I have a ton of charges, multiple burglaries, multiple armed robberies. And it started with close to 35 felonies. They dropped it all the way down to the end where I think I signed for about six of them. And she, the judge, she was just like, you, this is ridiculous.

You're not getting five years for this. She was, I'm going to send you to the aggravated maximum of seven years. And then I remember I just cried. I was like, oh, my God. Like, I cried. Bro, I cried like a fucking baby. Yeah, I cried. That shit sucks.

Like, it was so bad. Especially in your 20s. In your 20s, that's an eternity. Yeah. No, it's forever. You're never going to get out. Like in your mind, I'm never getting out of it. Yeah.

I'm never going to leave. Oh, and you're going to, you're going to state and because of your charges, you're going to, you're not going to a low. You go to a four. Yeah, you're going to a fucking, a tough, tough spot. Yeah. Yeah. No, I can't do that. It sucked.

It was, it was a horrible, horrible feeling. I can't even put it into words, to be honest. I just remember my daughter and her mom were both there, you know, when it happened. So I was in court and I just saw their faces. And I remember my daughter, she's. you know, probably almost two by now, and I just thought, like, man, like, I'm going to lose both of them. Right. So I get sentenced.

I end up going to prison, and I got to a three-yard, which is, so in Arizona we have two yards, three yards, four yards, and five yards. But five yards, five is maximum, but it's not really a yard, right? Like, there's no yard. Like, there's no wreck time. Like, it's just, it's 24-hour lockdown. Right. So as far as, like, yards go, you have a two-yard, a three-yard, and a four-yard.

no such thing as like a one yard which i guess like in the feds would be like a camp probably that's like what a one yard is they don't exist in the state anymore i think they used to have them that's why the you know the term is still there but i've never seen one or heard of one since i was in but um i go to a three yard that's probably where the politicians go you just don't know about it right exactly they've got one where there's 150 guys off here it's probably pretty nice and we'll talk about it because that's where that's where that's where the senators go exactly yeah so um i got to prison and um I remember I was so happy to finally get to prison because now you can go outside,

you can go work out, you can get a job, right? You can't really get a job in county jail. You can't really go to school. You can't read books. Like, there's just nothing to do in county. So I was so happy when I got to prison because I could finally start just. And I knew, even though it was more time than I expected, I knew now I have a date. I know what that date is.

And one day, I'll be out of here. And I can start working towards, you know, getting out and getting released. And something, something. I don't know what it was. My dad and my mom, they came back into my life when I got to prison. When I was in county, they didn't talk to me.

But once I finally got sentenced, my mom, she reached out, and I hadn't seen her in years. Like, my mom was like the real, like, if you mess around,

if you go to prison, you're on your own. You're a grown man. You made bad choices. This is on you. This isn't on me. You're not going to bring the whole family down. Like,

she's strict. My dad used to say, if you get yourself arrested, you don't want to call me. Yeah. Like, don't call me to get you out. You don't want me to pick you off.

My mom was the same way. My mom told me when I was a teenager, if you ever go to jail or if you ever go to prison, I will not visit you. I will not send you money. You're going to be on your own. That's it. End of story. And she did visit me, though.

And she did write me and she did send me money once I got to prison. She was heartbroken. She sent me a letter. I remember it was the first time I had ever heard from her in years since I was 16, roughly. And now I'm 20. So it's been a couple years. and she got on my visitation list which takes like forever in prison

it takes like three months to get approved to get a visit in Arizona prisons it sucks but she got on my visitation list she brought my daughter and then she came to visit me and probably my first year in prison is when my daughter's mom is now with somebody else I got the dear John lighter I went through the whole

you know which I guess is easier because you don't really want to have a girlfriend when you're like doing a seven year sentence i used to always say i you don't want to be that guy on this saturday morning going where were you last why didn't you answer the phone you know no and there's people like that and it's so much easier to do your time single especially when you're young i get if you're you know you've been married for 10 or 15 years that's your wife when you're 20 years old it's just your girlfriend it's a lot easier you're not stressed now on the weekends Friday night like where she had she had you can't expect a 20 year old girl to be faithful

for seven years. To a guy that's not contributing at all to the household. She's got a kid. Horrible decisions. Endangering my daughter. Right. Like, who knows? One of those guys that I robbed

could have come back and kicked in my door. Right. Like, I never put any thought into the repercussions of what I was doing. And so looking back at it now, like I never blamed anybody. Like, I never blamed her sister, the probation officer for calling the cops.

Like, Elle, like, she did the right thing. Yeah, I would say that. She did what she was supposed to do. Right. If somebody was endangering, my 18-year-old daughter like that, like, I'm not, I'm not going to probably call the cops. I'm probably going to get this guy away from my daughter immediately and I'll just take care of it. But that's the right. That is the more healthy attitude to have.

No, a lot of people get stuck like in their mindsets and it's just like us versus the cops. And that's not the reality like a successful life. It's not the reality of like an adult. Like you can't be an adult with that mindset. You're still a kid. You're a 43-year-old kid. And that's what prison is full of 50-year-old children. 60-year-old children.

That's where I learned that maturity has nothing to do with age. I get there and see guys that are 50 years old playing dominoes fighting over a domino game. Like, bro, it's dominoes. You bet a honey bun, who cares? You guys are fighting over a domino game. It's the principal. The principle of what?

A domino game. First of all, if you had principles, you'd have never been here. Right, exactly. You wouldn't have made it this far. No, prison is full of just immature adults who are really children at heart and at mine so something clicked like with me like my dad my stepdad started sending me books and he my stepdad's like he's a huge nerd and I always was too as a kid I used to read a ton of ton of books and so he starts sending me books he sent me Winston Churchill wrote like a six part autobiography and like he

talks about like interviewing Churchill was the prime minister of England during World War II and he talks about like you know talking to Hitler like before World War II starts and then he sent me Alexander of Macedonia, a book on him, and Genghis Khan, and all of these history books. I just started reading.

I had nothing else really to do. I'm in prison. So I just start reading and reading and reading. And then something clicked. Just one day, my brain, like, shifted.

And I kind of realized, like, my brain is a computer, and I can rewire it, reprogram it, recode it, and be whoever I want to be. Well, I don't want to be in prison forever. I don't want to get out and come back.

I don't want to go. go out and rob people. I don't want to, I want to be with my daughter. Yeah. She was, she was really the only thing I cared about. Like, my daughter is beautiful. She was the most beautiful baby in the whole world. She's the only thing I cared about when I was in prison. It was just my daughter. All I cared about was getting visitations for my daughter. I remember the first time I got to see her, you know, because in county jail, you get visitations through, uh, through a screen. You're not actually there with them. It's like a TV screen. They're like a hundred yards away in some other room and you're just at a TV screen. So when I got to prison and I could actually

see her and I could hold her, you know, you're allowed to hold your children. And prison and the visitation. And I remember I just broke down. And that's, that's right around the time when I just started, you know, I changed everything. I changed the way I talked. I changed the, I wasn't hanging out with the guys in prison that were selling dope. I wasn't hanging out with the guys that were, you know, getting in a bunch of trouble. Prison is what you make it. It's not like the movies. It's not like, you know, all the stories. If you want to go to prison, read books all day, you can. That's what I did. I went to prison. I read books all day long. I studied. And then I got a job. when I got down to minimum I got a job

but I made something out of it for me it was seven years of education I probably knocked out 800 books and just rewired my brain and so I knew when I get released from here like I'm going to get out and take over the world I'm going to get out and achieve whatever I want to do it

I'm going to be with my daughter I'm going to restore the relationship with my daughter's mother not to be in a relationship with her but to be able to see my kid and have a good relationship just so I can always be there. And I have an adult relationship with another adult about our child. We do.

We have a great relationship. In fact, not only do her and I have a great relationship, her other children's father, her boyfriend now, I've known him for years. We've been friends for years. Him and I get along great. If something's going on, he'll shoot me a text message. There was never like any, you know, tough guy stuff. I was just like, dude.

That just doesn't go anywhere. No, exactly. So I ended up eventually, you know, if you stay out of trouble long enough, you'll get reclassified and work your way down to minimum. So once I got under five years, I got down to minimum, and I ran into a buddy who I knew from county jail. And the day I get to minimum, he sees me. And him and I are still friends to this day too.

And he goes, he goes, Mikey, you're here. He goes, listen, man, I got a job doing telemarketing. He's like, I can get you a job doing telemarketing. And I'm like, bro, what are you talking about? We're in prison. Yeah, we're in prison. You're in a minimum? Or you're at what, a low.

Yeah. Did you say low? Yep, minimum. Yeah, a minimum. Yeah, a minimum. Yeah, a minimum, but it's. It's still prison. Still prison.

Yeah, there's two sets of barbed wire fences. It's still a prison. And, uh, but he, he, so he tells me all about it. And he goes, listen, come in and apply. It pays $2 an hour. And I'm like, all right, cool. Like, that's a lot. $2 an hour in prison back then was a lot of money.

Most jobs, like you get a job raking rocks, 10 cents an hour. Yeah, yeah. You get a job in the kitchen, 30 cents an hour. You get a job being a teacher's assistant helping people get their GEDs, 40 cents an hour. I think the maximum they pay at Coleman, if you work, in the factory is um a dollar 15 maybe maybe a dollar and that's a lot 30 and that's a ton and you to be there years to get that and you're not working 40 hours a week you're working 30 you know 30 at so you're making maybe 35 dollars a week but that's a lot like that's no no that's that's for

people who don't have a lot of money for you know it's that's a good chunk especially if you can go like we would go buy packs of tobacco and roll up single cigarettes and then sell cigarettes or go buy coffee and sell shots of coffee. There's so many ways to make money in prison that aren't going to get you in trouble. I used to buy six bags of coffee and then just sell individual shots of coffee for a soup or two shots of coffee for a soup because people in prison are addicted to coffee. So it's like the number one addiction in prison. But so I go in and I apply and I get the job.

And I was the sixth person that they hired. They had five people before me. And this company had just gotten into the prison. So it was a private company. The owner, his name was Scott. He figured out that you are allowed to contract privately with the prisons and hire inmates to do telemarketing. Right. Or it could be other jobs too, but he just happened to do telemarketing.

And the way it works is he would pay the prison's minimum wage. So back then, this is 2011. Minimum wage is $10 an hour. And then the prison pays us $2 an hour. Right. So the prison's keeping eight bucks an hour per inmate. So a huge win for both parties. Yep, exactly.

Yeah, because so the business owner, he's not going into the prisons to hire inmates for cheap labor. He's still paying minimum wage. Yeah. It's that the inmates show up to work every day. Yeah. On top of that, the inmates have no distractions. The inmates are focused. They're not at the club on Friday night.

They're not drinking. They don't have wives. They don't have children. They don't have parents. They have nothing. So they're 100% focused. on a job that lets them escape prison for. Yeah, that's a great thing about having a job in prison.

Even if it's a prison job, it is an escape. You know, like you want to go to that job. Why? Because in a way, even though I'm in the prison, it's a way to get out of the prison. It's a way to, you know, I used to say, like, getting a pint of ice cream was, like, while I was eating that ice cream, like, that was 10 minutes of freedom. Yeah. You know, because you're so engrossed. Close your eyes.

Right. And the other thing is, like, your expectation. of life drops so dramatically in prison that you start taking pleasure in things that we take for granted here. So being able to go to a job and earn money in a professional environment is such a goal. We're out here, it's like, fuck that. I wouldn't want nothing to do it. Like, oh, I can do that anytime. Like, no, no, that's a goal to have a job that's paying me two bucks an hour. Yeah. Like, you know, and I go here and I don't have to be around all these scum. bags beating each other up and screaming and cussing and I'm in a professional environment and

it's you know I get to call people every day and even if they hang up on me what does it matter I still have a job it was fun it was a fun job it was so um so what we did is um the owner of the company he was a veteran he had served in um the navy and he had a contract with like the vfW and the American Legion to send them place mats and, you know, a place mat for their tables. So whenever these like VFWs would do like big events or fundraisers for the veterans, they would do like a fish fry or a barbecue and serve hundreds of plates of food and their little, you know, restaurants, there would be a place mat at every single seat. And in the middle of the place mat would be, you know, welcome to VFW post 10, you know, maybe a crossword puzzle for the kids. And then all along the

outside are little business card ads. Right. And so we would call businesses and say, hey, my name's Mike. I'm working with VFW post 10. We have placemats, you know, in the dining area for the veterans and their families. And there's little business card ads on the outside. We thought you guys, a plumbing company would be a good fit. It's $199.

What do you think? And they say yes or they say no. For $200, a plumbing company gets to have his ad, you know, at the VFW or at the American Legion, whatever it might be, it's kind of a no-brainer. So we did that for probably two years. And this was my first sales job, apart from, you know, my first legal sales job. And we started to kind of get good at it. I remember the first day I was there, I got a sale. And then the second day I was there, I got two sales. I was like, holy cow, like this is kind of fun. I'm kind of good at it. We're calling, you know, business owners. So you get to talk to a plumber, a roofer, a landscaper,

You know, all of these different business owners. And they all, business owners, one thing about business owners is they love talking about their business. And so you'd get on the phone with these guys, and I've been landscaping here in Sarasota, Florida for 19 years, and I was the first guy to do this. And, you know, and they tell you all about their story. And it was just cool because it wasn't escaped, you know. And he had these contracts all over the country. We had tons in Florida. We sold so much advertising here in Florida, tons in Texas, tons in California, the bigger states.

But he was in probably 30 or 40 states. and so we could call all over the country and we could kind of pick and choose where we wanted to call if we wanted to call into California we could if we wanted to call into New York we could and we did that for a couple years and then

some of the other inmates we grew from a team like I said I wasn't the first six in 2011 eventually we get up to about 20 guys and some of the other inmates kind of get an idea and they're like hey listen they tell the owner of the company they're like hey listen

no more place mats put up a TV and put up, like, all of the posts, the VFW posts information on that TV. And then on that TV, you can sell, instead of 20 little business card ads, you can sell 30 ads. And it's digital. So instead of charging $1.99, we can charge $2.99. And so he does. And that wasn't his idea, right?

That was not Scott's idea. That was a buddy of mine who was an inmate. It was his idea. And Scott started putting up TVs. And before long, we had one. Two TVs, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty, a hundred, five hundred, seven hundred, got all the way up to 700 TVs across the nation. And Scott decided he wanted to incentivize us.

He wanted to get us to sell even more because the prisons, they would let him give us like food, like sometimes like snacks and stuff or like he would be able to bring in like he could sometimes get like food catered into us and but like it was like a really rare thing and like he had to like pull a lot of strings to do it. well by now he's employing 30 inmates and they're making a chunk of money for the prisons because they're making eight bucks per inmates so all the prison cares about is how many more people can you get working right and Scott goes to them and he's like hey listen like I want to incentivize these guys with commissions just a small commission yeah nothing crazy 5% actually 1% the top

guys can get up to 5% and the prison goes okay well we're selling ads that are 300 bucks so a good guy might sell one, two a day. You could make 10, 15 dollars a day on each, yeah, well, on each ad. So if you're making, if you're a top guy and you're making $15 per ad and you're selling two, so that's an extra 30 bucks to 45 bucks. It's two, three, four. Well, we started to get creative because we have, really, we have all. That doesn't sound good at all. We have all of the tools, right? We have a phone. We have access to all of these different business owners. And there's like 700 TVs across the country. So not only, you know, we call up, we call up the roofer in Tampa, Florida. In fact, Tampa was one of my favorite areas to sell ads back then because he had like 15

screens in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Bradenton, Dunedin, like all of these little towns that were close to each other. I have like every city in the country memorized because of this job. Yeah, I was just going to say, it's funny that you just mentioned all. Yeah, I've been selling ads in these cities for years and years. So like I know almost every city in the country because I've been selling ads there on the phone, even though I've never been there. But, so what we would do is we'd call them up and we'd get the sell. And then, you know, we'd transfer them out of the prison, the phone call out of the prison for somebody to take the credit card, process it for $2.99.

And then we'd tell them like, hey, listen, transfer the call back into us after you have their card. And we'd get the business owner back on the phone. And if you're a roofing company and you're in Tampa, roofs cost $30, $40,000. So you'll probably drive to St. Petersburg to do a roof or Clearwater, right? Or Brandon or Bradenton or whatever. So after I sold you for $2.99, I might say, hey, listen, now that you're a customer, do you service this town, this town, this town?

And you say, yes, yes, yes, yes. As long as there's a roof there that needs replacing, I'll go out there. Well, I say, hey, listen, instead of paying $300 for one location like you just did, I can give you each additional location now for $100. bucks. So what if I have 15 locations in this area? It'll be $1,800 in the roofer who just sold a $40,000 roof. He doesn't care about $1,800. That's such a small amount of money to a guy like a roofer or an electrician or, you know, these blue collar guys that make a lot of money. And how long does that last when they pay for that? It'd be up there for a year.

A year? It's up there all year long. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's up there all year long in that TV. So you divide that by 12. That's, you know, whatever, it's $120 a month. And some of these business owners, we started to learn real quick. what kind of business owners had money. Like, I know, like, this is a science to me, and I've, like, I've mastered the science. Like, I know, if you tell me what business you're, and I know how much money you make for the most part, right?

Like, we know handymen don't make anything. Right. We know roofers make a killing. We know, like, if you're a state farm agent, it depends on how many years you've been in the industry. If you've been in the industry for 20 years and you're a state farm agent, you probably make a killing. We know if you're in the mortgage industry,

it depends on the year, right? Like right now, mortgage guys aren't doing, great but they're still doing okay two years ago they were doing great yeah and mortgage guys make a ton of money so mortgage is one of the biggest industries we sold to and um so we start getting creative and we start selling bigger ads 299 and i got i got the record for the first i sold the first ad for five thousand dollars it was the biggest sale in the history of the company at that time now um there's a guy in there he he gets in there later um him and i are still friends today he gets in there a little bit later

and not only does he like start passing everybody else he gets to number one not just to the point where like he's number one he's number one by such a huge margin that like like nobody's even on his heels

you're not even getting half like we're selling on average we're doing like a good sales guy like I was averaging like 15,000 a month in revenue right and I'm getting 5% commission on that right so 70 800 bucks a month. But he, he starts doing like 40 grand a month, 50 grand a month, 60 grand a

month, 80, 100, 120, 150 a month. And that's in sales that he's getting revenue. That's his revenue. That's just what he's generating in revenue. So he's selling $140,000 a month. And he's getting 10% of that? Yeah. So the 5% was supposed to be the maximum. Right. He was special. He got special treatment. He got 10% and because he was number one. Not just number one. Like he was number one by far.

And we had another buddy who got, who was number two. My other buddy, close, close friend of mine, he's now homeless. He was number two. And he was always like, he got to the point where he was doing like, he's the only other person who could do $100,000 a month in revenue. We're all doing $15,000, $20,000 on our best months. These guys are just monsters and they're crushing it. and eventually I got promoted to the trainer

because I'd been there since the beginning I started when there were six guys and I knew the whole get down I knew the entire system I knew how to pick who could sell and pick who couldn't sell and I would get everybody who I was training I would get their first 10 sales commission

so if I was training six seven guys at a time I'd have 60 to 70 sales rolling into me that I'd get the commission on so I was usually the fourth or fifth highest paid guy in the room and at the peak I remember I did the math in May of 2014 was my best month

I did the math and I had made that month I had made over like $6,000 and so I was like if I could do this every month I'm making like

70 grand a year but it ended up averaging out closer like I was probably making 50,000 a year maybe like 60,000 but the number one guy he was making

probably 170 a year 180 a year and it goes on like this for a while and where is this money being deposited to our books right on your books so we have two different books we have our books and our retention now your retention is a set of money that you're not allowed to touch most jobs that pay three dollars an hour they take a third of it for your books a third of it goes to your retention and then the other third goes to room and board I swear to god yeah they

charges room and board in there okay now the way he negotiated our commissions though oh yeah not only did we get commissions. We got bumped from $2 an hour to $3 an hour. He negotiated our commissions to go straight to our books instead of going to our retention. So we would get, we'd still pay room and board on it. So like if you made $10,000 in commissions in a month, you would pay the prisons $2,000 that month for rent. For rent. He paid, he did the math, and I think he paid like 50 grand to the Arizona Department of Corrections for room and board. For rent while he was in prison, because that's how much money he was making. Yeah, I was going to say, I had a Selly one time, this guy, Frank Smith, and he had, like, he was, when he came in, he was already, like, 60, 2 years old and wealthy.

And so he had, like, he had a financial, like a money manager. And he had several different retirement funds. And just one of them, he had directed to the prison. Okay. All the rest of it went to the financial manager to manage. And just one of them, but he didn't realize when he got in, you can only spend $390 a month on commissary. You can spend another, let's say, $100 on the phone. And then you can spend, let's say, about $100, we could really probably could spend a couple hundred dollars on using the computer, like Core Links to email.

Oh, okay. But he lost his Core Links privileges. When he got there, because he was corresponding with someone. and he threatened her he's like you bitch like when i get out and i find your dumb ass i'm gonna beat you know he's just a cranky old man right he threatens this this chick that he had been friends with and she made some snide comment he boom she gets it she calls a prison they take us so he never gets it back forever yeah so you're down to he has nobody to call so you've nobody to call you spend and they're depositing several thousand dollars a month in his account so when it got to

two hundred thousand dollars they the warden like they called him in and said you have to move this money yeah he's well that's my money i know that but we you can't have it on your books he's like why not you're like it's two hundred thousand dollars put in a retirement fund he's i've got retirement funds they were so funny they've always they bugged him and bugged him and bugged him they tried like we're going to go open a savings account at this bank you get you get you yeah we'll send it there we'll send some of it there yeah i don't want to send it there what are they going to get me what do you mean like you yeah he doesn't want access to his money to always have his money.

Yeah, I think it made him feel good. You know, he, he, you lose so much. Did you guys get, like, paper receipts? Like, where, like, after you bought store you to get a receipt, they showed how much money you had left, like, on it? Of course, of course. Yeah, it was love when you get up there and you'd be buying. Not that this ever happened to me because I was never went to commissary,

but guys would get up there and they're ringing up, ring it up, ring it up, and all of something. They stop and they reach it and they grab something. You're like, well, what's going on? They're like, oh, no, no, I still need my honey buns. Did I mean this? I need that. And they're like, no, no.

Well, let me give you some stuff back so I can get, at least I get my coffee. Nope. Yeah, you already got what you got. Yeah, that's what you got. This was different. We had like the Scantrons. So you'd like fill out a bubble sheet, almost like you were testing for the SATs. Turn that in, I think, Tuesday nights.

And then the week before, and then you'd get it the next week. We did that in county jail, right? Which I'm in county jail, but they call it you're in the U.S. Marshals, you know, the holdover or whatever. But they just contract with the county. So it's really a county jail, except it's all feds. So, but you would do that, but when you go to, when you go to, like, a prison, you have a sheet where you mark, like, I want two of these, three of the, like, it's got the stuff and you give it to them, and then they ring it up, but. And you can go any day?

No, you go one day a week. You have your day where you go. Oh, you have your day where your building goes or your unit or. You stand out there with, like, 150 guys. Yeah. And wait for them to call you, call you in your number. And you'd be out, some guys would be out there for three minutes. Some guys would be out there an hour and a half and a hundred degree weather, sweating your ass off.

Same thing in Arizona. We just stand around waiting for them but yell out our name or yell at your number and then you'd go fill up your sack. And almost panic. Like, oh my God, they just call me. Hold on. They'd shoving people out because they would be like they'd call you, you know, Cox, you know, and you're whatever, you know, 4.07117. Cox, Cox, all right, Cox, last call. You're like, fuck, I'm trying to force my way through the door.

Like, what are you doing? So, yeah, nothing fun about, uh, yeah, commissary or collect. It's so much easier just to go to a gas station and buy a honey bun if you ever. get a taste for a honey but I don't very very often I don't but um so that's what I'm saying with that kind of money in these accounts yeah they had the ward at some point

the prison has to go if we're getting this much yeah how much of the inmates you would think they would give a shit yep well he so he was in prison this is the crazy thing right he was in prison for telemarketing so he's fucking trained he's good at it

he's not just good he's the I I would be willing to bet money he's the best in the country right like i'd be willing to bet money there's nobody better than him in the country back in the day there was this guy in ari his name was don lapri he ran this don't lepr i've heard don't so my guy is don lepris number one guy oh okay he worked for don lapri and then don leprie was this huge telemarketing fraud guy got caught sentenced to 30 years in prison and then he hung himself in the county jail um my buddy was don lepris like top guy he's like a legend he's known like in the telemarketing phone bizop world in phoenix like if i say say his name. He's a legend. But we're still friends of this day. In fact, like his family and

my family are friends. I see him and talk to him almost every single day. So I'm not going to say his name. And he might even come on here with you, honestly, if you wanted to. His life is, his life is insane. Before he went to prison, he was, he went to prison for, for stealing millions of dollars. Right. Over the phone. Like, he's, and then he goes in his 10 years. The telemarketing guys are, they're great to talk to because they're, they're super smooth. They're, they're, they really are, No offense. They really are like top grade con men. You can have a conversation with them.

And if they're given the ability to lie, which obviously they're on the phones that's monitored, you're not allowed to. You stick with the script. But if you give that same guy, you take the gloves off him. Yeah. He's dangerous.

You know, you can talk people into anything. It's amazing. That's what sales taught me. He taught me so much. He's. And the psychology behind it is amazing. The things that they,

you know, I hate to say tricks, but it's just a psychology of sales where you do, where they'll, you know, so you have the high pressure guys, you have the guys that educate you on why it's a good investment

or a good deal. And then, you know, and they have all the, they have the economic clothes, the takeaway clothes, all these different things and you're not prepared for it. So when they're like,

okay, well, I understand it's not for everybody and I totally get that. And, you know, if you change your mind, let me know. And then suddenly people naturally think

I'm about to lose out on something. Right. On a deal. And they go, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. And the next thing,

you know, they're trying to convince you to sell to them. Yep. And it's like, and it's just a, it's just a slight sales technique that people aren't prepared for it. They don't realize mentally, they don't, they don't realize what's happening. Right.

And most people aren't salespeople. So it's. Right. So they're not prepared. They don't understand. Exactly. Yeah. Just to your point like that.

They're not prepared. They don't understand what's happening. And everything, what people fail to understand, though, is everything in life is a sale, right? Like, everybody you talk to, there's a sale happening, right? Either you're trying to convince somebody to believe, you know, your ideology is better than their ideology, right? Religion is just a big sale, right? Christianity, we're going to sell you. Like, that's what they say, a God and the devil have the best salesmen in the world, right? You go watch guys like Joel Olstein. Like, all Joel Olstein is, is like an excellent

sales guy. It's all he is. He's just like a top, top 1% of the top 1% of sales guys. That's Joel Olstein. That's what he is. And not that there's anything, like, I'm a Christian, not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm not a fan of Joel Olstein or any of those high-level preachers who drive around in Ferrari's private planes. But everything in life is really, we're trying to raise a million dollars or God's going to take me home. Some of that stuff is,

it's painful to watch. Yeah. It's literally painful. It's also painful that people fall for it. It's like, what do you come on, man? How are you not see through this?

Oh, I need to call them up and give them. I don't want them to take them home. No, like they get people for like everything. Like people have tithed for, you know, decades and they, you know, if they could count how much money they've given to the church.

It's insane. It's like a cult. And when you go to these churches, I started going to church when I got out of prison and like, You hear the way they, I went to a megachurch the first week I was out of prison and the whole spiel, the whole schick was donate now, visa, MasterCard, Amex, cash app, Zell, Venmo, cash, quarters, pennies, any way they can get it, right?

And I remember, like, they had brought it up like four or five times how many different ways there was to donate. And me being a sales guy, I'm just like, fuck, like this is really like, it's really hardcore and it just wasn't for me. I've never been to Omega Church since. You couldn't pay me any amount of money to walk into Omega Church. I hate those places with a passion. But anyways, I digress.

Going back to the telemarketing. So yeah, he starts getting to the point. He's making 15 grand a month, some months. Insane amounts of money. My buddy who's number two, he's doing like 80,000 to 100,000 a month in sales. He's making $8,000 to $10,000 a month.

I'm making probably four to seven, depending on the month depending on you know my commissions and my training a month and uh we were you know we're enjoying we're like millioners we're like rock stars because everybody wants to work where we work everybody wants the end you know everybody applies we hire like 10 people a week i hire because i'm the trainer i hire 10 people a week if you can make if you can get a thousand dollars a month in on in prison you're you know like we fire we like we bring in 10 fire nine of them no i'm saying if you're just a regular inmate and someone's sending you a thousand a month well that's you're rich

yeah you're filthy rich somebody's cleaning somebody's doing your laundry somebody's somebody's making your bed they're cleaning your cell you can buy anything at the store you can get anything at commissary you can yeah yeah sit down at the poker table I had like a plus credit rating I remember I had a guy a white guy

he ran the biggest store on the yard for the white boys and he told me one time he's like Mike because I went and I stored something out like two honey buns because I just had run out and I made a joke I said it's like is my credit good here and he said Mike he said you could have my whole store if you wanted it

he would just give me the entire store but and credit is like a very real thing in prison like your reputation like you know if you're good for something and having that job gave you. What do they respond? So if he gives you two honey buns, you have to give him three back?

Yeah, two for three. Yeah. Two soups, you get three back or. That's hilarious. But see, what they'll usually do is like, if you give him two honey buns and he wants three back, well, a honey bun is a dollar, so you owe him three bucks. He'll actually just bring you a piece of paper

before you fill out your bubble and say, hey, get me six suits instead. Right, that's typically what happened. The store guy, like the, every day that commissary is open. I think it was probably open four days a week. Might be open five. But every day when he would have to, sit there as people came in they'd walk in and they'd you know and he'd pull out his list and he

you know they you know here's two sodas two two two six packs of sodas four honey buns here's a coffee here's three screamers here and they just and he just his bed would be piled up yeah like the store guys that run stores in prison they're renting space in other people's lockers to store their stuff yeah because you don't have too much stuff either because the guards can technically show up yeah like hey do you have receipts for everything and no you don't have receipts for everything so like if a guard is got a wild hair up his ass he can come just take all your stuff one day yeah yeah and i've seen it happen like if you say like the wrong thing to the wrong guard and they just they're like oh okay yeah where's your receipt yeah you got a receipt for that cd player let me have that

they'll take your stuff and mouth you mouth off to him he's like okay yeah and you walk away you come back from lunch and you're all your shit's gone so uh never told the story before i'm in line me and my buddy he also works with me at telemarketing we're in the property line so in Arizona, if you buy property like a pair of shoes or a CD player or headphones or a TV, you go to the property line, you don't get it from commissary. And the property line's open from like one to two

every day. And so we're standing in line for property. And I'm at like the very front of the line. I've been in line for like 30 minutes, right? And there's this guard who works in the yard, very pretty, Mexican lady. And she's the property officer. She's in charge of it. And she has a reputation. She is a total asshole sometimes. And she

just like, she'll get mad and just shut the property window for like no reason, right? So I'm at the very front of the line and my buddy is right behind me and he's picking up property too. And this dude tries to like get into the front of the line to ask a question of the property officer. And I said something like, bro, you must be tripping or like you're tripping like you're not going to go ask her anything and slow her down. But she only kind of heard me and she thought I was talking to her and her back was like turned because she was kind of like pulling property out of like the little lockers they had.

and, um, I'm next in line and she goes, she goes, what did you say? And I said, I wasn't talking to you. And she goes, which also doesn't sound, now it sounds like you're lippy. Yeah, no, she's like, what did you say? I said, no, I wasn't, I was literally not talking to you. And she goes, okay. And then I get, she hands my property and she, she like, writes my DOC number now. Like, I saw her write something. And then, uh, I, I wasn't really even paying attention. I just kind of walked off. And then my buddy goes and gets his property next. And he catches up to me and he goes, he goes, Mike. He's like, she wrote your DOC number down. And, uh, she told the other guy.

like they're gonna come like tear your house up because she thought you were talking to her and i was like i wasn't saying anything to her and sure enough like two hours later her and another guard a dude they come to my house and they like just tear it up like they just tear all my shit out of there i have a ton of store like food just because i got a i have a bunch of money she said do you have receipts for all this i did i had tons of receipts i'm like yeah here you go and sure enough they can see i've got a bunch of money on my books and so uh anyways about a week later I saw her and I told her say hey listen

I wasn't talking to you by the way I really wasn't like I was talking to somebody else who tried to cut in line and I think you just maybe heard me say something but I wasn't talking to you and she was okay yeah and like she was kind of nice about it she said sorry I didn't mean to tear her house up that bad

because like she fucked my house up bro it was bad and so after that occasionally we would talk randomly and have like small I would just say hi and like have a little weird conversations and stuff here and there and I remember when I was about six months from going home, she had mentioned she was like, yeah, I'm not going to

be here anymore. Like, this is my last month in, uh, you know, in the prison system. I said, really why? She's like, I'm going to go, like, finish my degree as a dental hygienist and go back into the dental field. That's what I used to do before this. And so I asked her, I was like, hey, uh, you know, what's your first name? Like, can I look you up when I get out? Because I get out in six months. And then she kind of like, because you're not supposed to do this. Oh, no, no, bro. That's all that. That could, that whole conversation could have gone that. I could have got sent to a three yard just for that like you can't just you can't ask guards their names or like personal stuff but she told me she's like my first name is Raquel and you can you know look me up when you get out yeah she's

like you can look me up when you get out and I'm six months to the gate I was working out every day I was kind of jacked looking you know I was feeling confident I guess and uh she gave me her name so anyways back to the telemark and I'll come back to that story later on but um I was just going to say that's the uh yeah did you ever read um the great Gatsby yes that that's like that's the green light Yeah. You know? So you've got six months of staring at the green light. Yeah.

Thinking. Hmm. So I go back to telemarketing. In fact, at this point, we're doing good. Like, we're making a lot of money. Everything's going smooth. My last six months, it's funny because people say, like, your last year is going to slow down. Your last six months are going to slow down.

That was not the case. Like, my last year was flying by. And I was like, oh, my God, slow down. Like, it's coming too fast because I was nervous. I was scared to get out. I haven't been free since I was 19. Now I'm 26 and I'm just scared. I'm nervous and so six months to the gate is keep speeding up, keeps getting faster

and I just keep working, saving up money. I had sent a lot of money home to my daughter, sent a lot of money home to my mom. I had a bunch of these driving on suspended license tickets. I owed the court's thousands, so I paid all that off so I could get my license back. And finally the day comes and I get released. And so I get out of prison. My mom picks me up with my daughter, who's now seven years old. And my daughter was in the car.

She was in the backseat sleeping. My daughter didn't know I was getting out. My daughter thought she was coming to visit me, and she was in the back seat sleeping. So my mom, we had this whole thing planned out. My mom kind of like left my daughter sleeping in the back of the car because she just parked by the window and say, hey, I'm here to pick up this guy. And then they release you and you walked to the car. And I just sat.

I just got into the back seat. I sat down next to my daughter. And then my mom just drove off. And then I kind of like nudged my daughter. My daughter woke up and she saw me in like the back seat of the car. And like she just freaked out. Like she'd been visiting me my whole incarceration. She'd come to see me like two or three times.

She doesn't know you in any other capacity probably. Yeah, she's only seen me in orange, you know. So, um, or orange is what we wear in the prisons. And she woke up and freaked out. How old was she? She was seven. Yeah. It was 2016 January.

So she was turning eight in just a few more months. She'd be eight years old. Do she, oh my God, dad. Get down. Yeah. We're going to get you out of here. She knew, she thought that, she thought I was getting out the next month. We had kind of tricked her to surprise or like, so she thought she was visiting me

one more time. Right. This was going to be her last visit to me. And then so she woke up and I got to be there for her and, uh, it was really cool. It was like, it was the best day in my life. Like there's no words, like especially, I mean, you know, like after 13 years. Yeah, yeah. What it feels like walking out.

You can't. Yeah, it's surreal. It's like there's nothing that can prepare you. Yeah. And so. There's nothing to compare it to. Nothing at all. And I picked my buddy up when he got out.

He got out a year after me, and so I went to go pick him up. And I remember I just wanted to be there when he got out. So I could kind of have a little bit of that experience to see what it's like to get out. And so we're in Tucson. I was in Tucson prison. I said, Mom, get back home to Phoenix, like, as soon as possible. Like, I don't want to be down here at Tucson. I hate Tucson.

Stop at McDonald's. That's the first thing I ate after prison, Egg White McMuffin. And, you know. Did guys ask you what you want? Do they have those conversations, like, in state prison, like, where they're like, what's the first meal you want to have? Oh, yeah. It's the first thing. Like, when people find out you're short, like when you're close to the gate, like, that's what they're talking about.

Like, you know, oh, you're going to go back to your ex-girlfriend. You're going to go back to, you know, and I was like, no, I'm not going back. Like, I'm moving forward and like, you know, what are you going to eat when you get out? That's the big one. And I knew. And I told them, I'm going to get McDonald's because I want to get out of here as fast as possible. So I want, and I had money. I had 10 grand.

and they gave me a little plastic debit card with $1,000 on it. And so I'm out with $10,000 that I've saved up from working in there, and all my court fees are paid off. So it's a Thursday. I got out on Thursday. Thursday, January 8th, 2016. It might have been a Friday.

It was either Thursday. I think it was Thursday. But I remember, I said, Mom, McDonald's, and then the store. I need to go get a phone. So we went to T-Mobile. I got a Samsung Galaxy S6. It was blue.

Now, when I went, went to prison, I had a blackberry pearl. A blackberry. Yeah, like the little. And then I get home with the Samsung Galaxy S6, so I'm like freaking out because it's a whole different. Like, when I went to prison, I had a M-Space. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I, you know, now Facebook's out, right? I never heard of Tinder. I didn't know what P-O-F was. So I'm out. I'm single. I've got money. Did you, you didn't go to a halfway house? No, I went to my mom's.

Yeah, my mom begged me to come home. Her and my stuff had had gotten divorced actually a couple years before. But I mean, do they give you halfway house? house like can't they'll give you a yeah like if you don't have a home to go home to like to parole to you have to have an address that gets approved right and so for your address to get approved your parole officer will go to that house and take a look okay yeah so but but in the fed they'll like they'll say look like you've got like about let's say 18 months before and they'll put you in to so you can serve like the last year of your sentence in a halfway house oh no no no you

can't do that yeah okay no you stay in prison right up to your guys will say guys will say because the way the Federal the Bureau of Prison looks at it is like typically you're not getting out with any money. So it's like it's in their, it's in society's interest to put this guy in a halfway house where he can work. He's got six months. Maybe

it makes too much sense. That's why the state doesn't do it. Like it was, I got seven, like seven and a half months. Okay. And you know because I used to, you know, I was like, otherwise if I had, if I was getting out with 10 grand I'd have been like I'll do the rest of my time in prison. Yeah. The halfway house sucks.

But because I was getting out with nothing, I thought, I have to go to halfway house. Like, I have nothing. Right. I need seven months to work and save some money so I can then get an apartment. Like, I had nowhere to go. Yeah. No, my mom begged me to come home because her and my stepdad had gotten divorced. Oh, that's too bad.

Yeah, they had gotten divorced and then the money situation, well, because they had made all of their money before the recession, before 2008. And they were both in the construction industry. Which got crushed. Crush, right. My mom lost her trucking company. She filed bankruptcy. they had this big ass house they had a bunch of horse property we had a barn like our my mom's barn it was like 75 grand for the barn right they they they had poured so much money into the house and the property and then

all of a sudden there's no I remember one day after the after the recession hit all construction halted like you would just drive by like half built homes half built commercial buildings just like overnight there was no more construction like it just stopped so um his company ended up they didn't go under but they did a ton of layoffs he ended up getting laid off and it just yeah they lost you know everything and then years later they got divorced and so my mom wasn't doing as good like she she wasn't rich anymore when i got you know when i got out so she needed me to come home get a job help pay rent so the day i got out um she took me to the store i went to i went and got some clothes got a phone um a mcdonald was my first meal and then um went to the motor vehicle

department i got my license the next day i went out with my dad he took me to men's warehouse and bought me a suit because for some crazy reason i thought like i needed a suit to get a job I was like I was like I'm going to go get a job but you've never really had a job no never had a job so and I'm like he's like what are you going to do us I'm going to sales I'm fucking good at it yeah I'm gonna go get a sales job so I'm gonna go get a telemarketing job so I get a business suit to apply for a fucking telemarketing job right and so that's Friday the next day he takes me and he co-signs for a car

I bought a car I put like $2,000 down and then him and I go around to these different telemarketing jobs the first place I go into you know it's a place they sell magazines and um i apply and they hire me on the spot they're like okay you can start monday and then uh my dad and i are leaving and i get i get a message on facebook because i got in facebook the night before and now all my old buddies who i knew from prison were on there and i had already added some of them and one of them calls me he worked with me in the telemarketing room and he calls me he goes hey mike he goes i got a way better job don't go sell magazines you know we're going to sell tools to like contractors it's going to be very similar to selling you know

ads on tvs just like we were doing That's a lot bigger, that's a lot bigger, a dollar or sale. Yeah, no, we were selling like tool chests that are like five, ten grand. And I only did it for a couple months. And then it just didn't, it wasn't really what I wanted to do. I ended up eventually starting my own business. The first weekend I was out, though, I went to church, a friend of mine from prison, messaging me.

He goes, hey, you want to go to church on Sunday? I said, cool, let's go. I go to a mega church. The first and only time I go to the mega church. Right. I take my daughter with me. I have a license. So on Sunday, my daughter and I drive down to Tucson.

we go to the mega church and what do you know that corrections officer who i hadn't had time to look up yet was there with her son he's two years old my daughter's seven and uh i just see her after the service and i was like hey like i'm gonna go to like peter piper pizza with my daughter like do you want to go you did you bump into her yeah just randomly bump into her just happened to see her it's like yeah i somebody had told me um my buddy had told me he's like a lot of the corrections off because tucson's not a big city it's it's really like one of those prison towns where a lot of the people there work at the prisons. And this was the big mega church in town.

He told me, he's like a lot of corrections officers go to this church. So you're going to see like corrections officers. Let's go. Yeah. So I wasn't even thinking about that, to be honest. And I go and there she is. So I just asked, I said, hey, do you, you know, you want to go to Peter Piper? I'm taking my kid to Peter Piper.

Do you want to, like, go hang out because you got your son with you? Is it like a pizza place? Yeah. Yeah, it's a pizza place. Sorry, it's a pizza place for kids where they have like. Like Chucky cheese. Like Chucky cheese, but nice. Or like Chucky cheese is kind of run down in Arizona.

I don't know, Peter Piper is like a little bit. I think they just run down everywhere, but yeah, yeah. And Chucky Cheese is creepy. Yeah, I was because I actually hate Chucky Cheese because there's so many, one, it's creepy. Two, the pizza sucks. And three, the little kids in that massive grouping are so mean to each other and stuff. Every time I've gone there, like I would go there with my son, like I physically thought, like I shouldn't be in an environment where I'm wanting to walk around punching other kids for pushing my little. son or, you know, or like, boy. I've had the urge to punch kids more times than I care to admit.

So, we go to Peter Piper Pizza, her son and my daughter, you know, they're hanging out and her and I talk. And then I just asked her on a date and she said yes. And so like the next weekend we went on a date and then the next week and we went on a date. Now, I've only been out of prison like a couple weeks. So I'm on Tinder. I'm dating like five different chicks. Like I'm texting five different chicks. She knew. I told all of them like, hey, I just got to prison. I'm not going to like settle down. I did that for about a month. sucked like it was just a nightmare trying to keep up with like you know text messages calls dates and so i kind of broke up with all of them except for the corrections officer and uh

then um i just kept working in sales and eventually we decided to um start our own business and put up TVs instead of vfWs or american legions you know well we actually did try to put up TVs and vfWs american legions and then scott the old boss sued us like he came after us hard no like it was like a war like it was a full on war for like months i didn't sleep it was a nightmare but um he ended up shutting that idea down so we're like right let's try again but now let's put TVs inside of a gym yeah or a restaurant or an urgent care or a restaurant because we have um experience talking to all of these different types of business owners all we do is just call them up call up the gym ask if they want a free TV they say what's the catch we say we're

going to install it. It's going to have your gym information. It's going to have a calendar of things happening in your area. And there's going to be ads for local businesses. That's how we make our money. The gym owners go, okay, cool, it's free. Come install the TV. We put up our first TV and then our second. Now, the guy I told you about who was like the top, top sales guy, I was preparing for him to get released, right? And so he got released, and then he comes and starts working with us. And we've been putting up TVs for six years now. We've got about 400 of them across the nation. We've got about 15 here in Florida.

Texas and Arizona are two big states. We've got lots in Arizona, lots in Texas. We're not huge in Florida. But one day we will. And that's what we've been doing for the last six years. So it's gyms. So, I mean, do you ever, so, and restaurants. Are you looking for, like, mom and pop restaurants or chains?

Sometimes chains. Sometimes mom and pops. We look for places with a big name. We don't want to put it at some little barbecue spot Nobody's heard of Because then if I try to sell an ad At a place nobody's heard of Nobody wants to buy it

So we go for like big name places But my buddy The one who made all the money When he got out He's like he's like yo he's like After you got out A bunch of crazy stuff happened So remember he was in prison

For telemarketing Right One of his victims Somehow found out That he was in prison Telemarketing And they're like Okay

This guy ripped off people for like lots of money he's probably doing it from in now he's doing it from inside prison yeah and they go to the prosecution and then the prosecution so i'm not nobody's really a hundred percent sure how this whole thing unfolded but a newspaper article comes out and then another newspaper article comes out about an inmate making more money than the warden because he was he was making one 70 180 a year i was making 60 a year right which is more than almost all the guards right like My wife, who was the former corrections officer, made like 28,000 a year. I was doubling her income as an inmate.

Luckily, walked out with some of that. Yeah, yeah. And he had sent all his money home to his wife, too, so he didn't have a lot. But they shut the whole thing down. They let the company stay in there, but they said, like, no more commissions. The shit's getting out of hand. Back to the original. Yeah, three bucks an hour, no commission.

Yeah. And now, though, they've started allowing commissions again, I think, but much more monitored than when we were doing it. Because there were, you know, there were time. that we'd be in there and guys would make three, four grand in a day, in a day in prison, because we just had that good of a sales day. You're like, what is going, how is this possible? And so, yeah, that doesn't exist anymore in the Arizona prisons. There's still a lot of call centers in there, like in the females prison, there's a call center in there. We're getting ready. We've been in talks with the Arizona prison for months now. We're getting ready to open up

our own call center for our company and all be making history as the first, as the first man who's done time in an Arizona prison who also owns a company to go back in and contract out inmate labor. So once we get the deal done, it's not going to, it's not like, it's not like big history. But it's unique. For me, it's crazy. I get to go back into the prisons as a free man. In fact, they have to give me a badge. I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want a badge. Don't call it a badge. It's called like an ID tech or something like that. But I get to go back into the prisons for our company and hire inmates build a call center in there. We'll be allowed to give them commissions, but very small. We've talked to the CEOs, the people in charge of the

program, and they know who we are. They know we're the ones that, like, the newspaper articles came out about. Like, they know the whole story. And hopefully, like, by this year, by this summer, we should have it wrapped up and we should be inside the prisons. We'll keep our main offices in Phoenix. They're on the streets. In fact, most of our main offices are full of guys who've done prison time. right like almost everybody in my office has been to prison and the calls are all monitored right they're they're periodically monitored oh yeah monitor every single call everything's recorded everything's recorded everything's periodically monitored so you know it's it's the the media is always so ready to villainize anybody you know for anything so it's but i think that's that's super cool

no they call it slave labor but that job that job gave me a career yeah i'm not stealing money anymore. And not just that inmates are begging for that job. Dude, begging. Like, they would come to me as a trainer and say, Mike, what can I do to get in there? I'll give you 50 bucks in store. I'm like, bro, I don't need 50 bucks in store. It's not even about that. If you can't sell, I don't want to hire you right now because I know right off the bat

you can't sell. And I'm just going to have to fire you. Like, I don't put me in that weird position, bro. I know you can't sell. Like, it's not and all these guys, I used to sell this on the streets. Like, it's not the same as telemarketing. There's a big, big difference. And it kind of sucks because a lot of these guys were friends and they wanted this job. I'd give some of them shots. I would try, but it never

worked. Like, sales guys are different. Like, you'd probably be a great sales guy. I know sales guys when I meet sales guys. It's, you know, unfortunately, most of those guys didn't have it. They sounded like they were from the streets. They talked like they were in the streets. You got to be able to, you know, sounds somewhat professional, talk like a normal person. And they couldn't do that. But a lot of the sales guys that did the sales in there, when they get out, the first thing they do is, oh, Mike started the same kind of company. He's doing really good. He's in Phoenix. As soon as they get out, they call me. They all have my number, and they just call me.

Mike, can I come in for an interview? Can I come get a job? Yeah, almost everybody in my office did prison time. And a lot of them do really good and stay out. My top sales guy, he makes, he averages $2,500 a week. He's every single week. He has some weeks for he makes $7,000 a week. He makes really good money.

He's been out for three years now, I think, about three years. And he's got a wife, he's got kids. He's doing really good. You know, for all the people that go back, some of them do stay out. Like my co-defendant, the one who got shot, He did nine years. He's got a wife.

He's got kids. My family hangs out with his family. We go to church together. We got out and figured. You know what? Maybe get into a business where I don't have even a chance of being shot. Right. Maybe that's the way to go this time.

Smart. He does concrete is what he does now. But he's happy. Not a lot of guys getting shot in concrete. No, no. It's pretty rare. Yeah, I always thought it would be cool to go back to Coleman and do like a, you know, I do keynote speaking. okay um but it's for like banks or credit unions or like cyber conventions like i you know i was

thought it'd be cool to go back to coleman and say hey went to prison did all this time had a plan right stuck with the plan you know what i'm saying even when it was going bad even when it looked like this is gonna i might need to think about selling used cars you know like even during that you know stuck with the plan kept my bills like like how do how do you rebuild from nothing yeah and i was actually I've always said that I was actually disappointed because when I got out they were going to give me the card the plastic card the debit card that I was planning on getting I was going to have like a dollar 50 on it which wasn't even enough to get the dollar 50 because they charged you like three dollars to use the card so and a buddy of mine

like a couple days before I got out put like 400 bucks on the card nice because he was like you're not doing that yeah like I know you think it's cute you know you think it's funny because I was like I'm gonna work at McDonald's like I wanted to be at the bottom and go up. And he was like, man, I'm not going to let that happen. So, um, so I thought that was, that was cool. But I mean, it's like I had a plan. Yeah. And it works for the most part. Right. It's, no, I think, well, I didn't really know, you know, I think having a plan, my, I didn't know what my plan. I knew what the plan was. I don't know how I was going to do it. Right. I just knew that if you work toward, if this is your goal and you work towards it every

single day a little bit. It can be, you know, just something that moves it ahead. And they may drop back, obviously. Like, I didn't know what YouTube was. I didn't know, I didn't know how I was going to get to doing a true crime podcast. This is certainly not what I expected. Right. But I knew, I knew that, and Colby's heard we say this a thousand. I knew I wanted to talk to guys about their stories because some of those fascinating conversations I'd ever had were talking to guys about their stories sitting on the yard or walking the track. You get crazy stuff in there. Right. Crazy stuff. You can't You can't even make it up. You know, you whole, oh, what, you know, nonfiction is, you know, is more insane than fiction.

Nonfiction is always stranger than fiction. Stranger than fiction. Yeah, yeah, straight, yeah. Because you can't make this shit up. And I used to think, and now, of course, I look back and I think the best content I've ever created was left on the rec yard at Coleman. You know what I mean? And so it's like, so, you know, I didn't know, I thought I was going to want to do a podcast. where it was like, you know, heavily edited.

Like, I didn't know this format existed because when I went in. This is more natural, right? Right. And you just get to talk to somebody. This is the same way to talk on the yard. Right. I like the other stuff. I like the music and cutting to B-roll and doing it.

That's cool. But I've never been able to get to that point. But this is just as good. And so, you know, obviously, like you know, I'm sure the idea that you and your wife sat down and this is what I want. Ultimately, like this is the ultimate goal for you, has altered slightly you know you're not in a you're not on the 30th floor in a building in downtown uh you know and like that no it ended up being in uh someplace i could get for better square footage in a in a not so

great area of town that you know i wanted so it's altered but in the end it's like the goal was to have the business making money doing this and i've got that yeah the the the The downside is, though, a lot of the times when you make that formula, when you make that plan, you forget to equate for happiness, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. You forget to take into account, like, well, will I, you know, enjoy doing this? And I've been doing what I do now for 11 years. I've been selling ads on TVs, training sales guys for 11 years.

And to be honest, I loved it in prison. But that's because I was in prison. Once again, the idea of the expectations of life were so much lower. Yeah. You probably loved it when you kind of first started. But don't you get to, to, you know, do something so long that it's so mechanical at some point you're it's not even that it's the sales guys dealing with salespeople every salespeople are kind of like divas and i can say that because

i'm a sales guy right like sales guys are just the most dramatic over the top pain in the ass people to deal with and generally the better the salesman the more dramatic they are right it's they all have problems they all like it's just managing all of these different types of personalities and they talk about each other and they have it yeah yeah i had a a chick named Susan Barka, who was the best sales, or the best broker I had. And she would, she would always come in and like, you know, listen, I got this deal such and such. I'm going to make this much money. You're going to walk home for this. You got to waive the application fee. Yeah. And it's like, what? No. And, you know, so we're arguing back and forth.

Yeah. You got to do this. You got to cut this. You got to do this. Hey, look, I need that. And it was, and then if I did it for her, she was the kind that would walk back into the bullpen, right? You know, you've got a bullpen. Yep. Yep. Yep. She'd walk back, she'd like, boom, got Matt to cut the such and such. And then I got four other guys going, what the fuck, bro? And then I have to sit there and say to them, like, look, you have to understand. She's making $20,000 in fees. I'm getting out of that $20,000, like I'm going to get $6,000.

Like, I'm going to get 30% of that. So it's like, you know, she's worth three of you. Yeah. You made this much last month. And you're an asshole. Sometimes you got to draw that hard line in the sand, though. not let people cross it oh i know i know but i'm so bad she was such oh she was such a bully um and she was so good it's like yeah you know and she also she also had like a best friend that owned a

brokerage business that was constantly asking her to go work there what a dick right like to steal your top yeah you know and it's like i get it i'd done the same thing but but you know when it's when you're when you're the when you're the target yeah sucks you know what i'm saying it's for sure no fun when the uh the rabbit's got the guy's got we've got sales guys like i said The other guy, he still has his operation in the prisons, and he has an operation on the street. So there's been years of back and forth. And he never expected that some of his guys, his inmates, would actually get out and do it. Out of the hundreds of people he's employed, like, we're the only ones that got out and redid it.

That's the other thing, too, isn't it? That's another thing that happens in prison. You have goals in prison, you know. How many times have you heard guys like, I'm going to go out, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. And then a year later, he comes back on a new charge. You're like, hey, what happened to you were going to work for your brother-in-law and doing plumbing? Yeah. And he makes this much.

And he made said, man, I got out. My buddy came to me and I didn't really have a lot of money. He said, hey, man, I can give you some work. And if you can get back on your feet and soul, you know, I did. But then I started making good money. Then I met this chick. She got pregnant. And, you know, he wasn't going to pay me nothing working that.

That job sucks, bro. And you're sitting there going, but you don't have to do five more years in prison. You had it all. Yeah. And they don't see it. You had it all. They get out and they don't. they want more they want everything they had back and then some and it's like to me i knew you're

never going to have all that you know sleep in someone's spare room like there's nothing wrong with that it beats this dude the worst day out here is better than the best day in prison oh i've said that all the time colby's heard me say that over and over the worst day out here is better than the best day in prison so it's it's i'm so happy fortunate blessed like you you too like it's there i see so many people go back and it's usually one of two reasons right poor work ethic right these guys do go get the job as a plumber for their brother. And what happens? Two weeks later they get fired.

It's hard work. Yeah, because you actually have to work. Yeah. Because you actually have to go do the job. You have to wake up in the morning. And then you have to go to the job site. And then you have to do what you're supposed to do. And no, you can't take nine cigarette breaks a day.

No, you can't go smoke pot behind the job site. No, you can't do. You know what I mean? You have to do what you're supposed to do. And a lot of people just, like me, never worked before they went to prison. And so not everybody adapts to that as easily. Or the second major reason, drugs. It's drugs.

Like all, at least with the state prison. federal is, but with the state prison, the vast majority of those guys are in there for drugs. For drugs. They can't stop getting high. It's like, dude, stop. Like, or you're going to just throw your whole life away. It's good. I have, I know guys in there, I have a buddy in there right now. He's 60 years old. He's been in and out three times since I've been out. He was working for me last time he got out. Disappears for weeks. Nobody's seen him. Then we get a call from the federal facility in Eloy, Arizona. Oh, yeah, I got charged for smuggling humans across the border. I'm like, bro, you had a job in my office.

You were making like $23 an hour. Like, that's not like, that's not, you're not going to get rich, but it's, yeah, yeah, it's a decent amount of, especially in Phoenix, that's a good amount of money. He's, you know, in federal. It was, it was a quick, I was going to make a quick two grand. Two grand, yeah, that's what it was for. Now I'm going to do, now I'm going to do six years. Yeah, he's back, so he did it, he had to do a year in feds because it was his first time at a federal level. I guess they only gave him a year maybe.

He said, he's like, it's not that serious, I guess, in the fed's eyes, but he was on state probation. So he violated his probation. then they just gave him the other five years or four years. Yeah, so he doesn't get out for like, he's been back in for over a year now. So I'd say he probably has three or four years left. He's an idiot. But he's 60 years old. He's been to prison eight times. He does the same thing. Every time he gets out, he starts getting high and then just makes one bad choice. And then from there, it spirals out of controlling. Bro, go to N-A meetings. Go to AA meetings. Like, don't sit around your house doing nothing. Wake up in the morning. Go to work.

One of the things I see that makes people successful after they get out is a wife, right? having like another person to hold you accountable and children help to like i had my wife with me since the beginning we've been out we've been together uh eight and a half years now she's been with me every single day it's very rare for us to ever be apart and um we work together but she holds me accountable for everything i don't drink i don't party i don't do anything i work and i go home do you know who michael franzis is yeah i've seen a lot of his videos um so i went i i went to l.a and i did his podcast recently. Sweet.

So funny because while we're talking, his wife is doing the camera stuff, right? Uh-huh. His wife is Colby. So she's doing, setting up the cameras and everything, and he and I are talking. And I said something about, yeah, well, what I was doing was this and this and this. And he goes, and, you know, he's like, yeah, I always tell these guys, if you're going to do something, you got to do it alone. I was like, and I said, well, it's, what I was doing, I was talking about one of the

larger scams where I was raising the value of properties. I said, yeah, I said, it's difficult to do that alone. Like, you have a certain skill set. He was like, yeah, but he said, it seems like if you could, if you could figure out how to. And all of a sudden, his wife looks up at him, and he goes, you know what? He said, never mind. Let's not talk about this. And I thought it was so funny to see this. He was like, you could see him. Will spin it. And all of a sudden he, yeah, yeah. Let's go ahead and sit down. And I thought, he's more scared of his wife is like yeah what he don't even you're not even talking about it dude that's what it takes like my buddies who've stayed out they've all got wives they've all got

or girlfriends that hold them accountable have somebody there to hold you my and i got my mom i got my dad i have a good family that they all hold me accountable i don't i don't do anything at all that is similar in any way to my teenage years like i don't i have friends from those years but they've all reformed also they don't they don't do those things anymore either so it's so important just like it's a complete 180 you can't you can't you know dabble your toes in it a little bit yeah it's all or none and you just have to stay away from that lifestyle stay away from drugs stay away from the people who use them i've known i've known guys that like it's not drugs but i've known you know i've had guys they'll contact me and say hey bro you know they're currently scammers

and they're figuring out how to bring it to the next level like bro if i could talk to you for like one hour like i'll give you a man i'll give you fucking three grand cash if you'll just talk i'll come up if you meet me for three and i'm like don't you understand And conspiracy? I'm already, you just listed me. Just, this is a conversation, just listed me on the indictment. Yeah. Do you guys know what conspiracy means?

Right. Like, just talking. The phone call just logged me to you. Yep. Like, you know, and they're like, no, no, but if I got caught, I wouldn't say nothing. Stop it. Yeah. Yeah.

You're looking at fake time. You are going to say. And you don't even have to say anything. They're going to say you've got seven phone calls between you and him. Yep. He then went out and did this, did this. So first of all, Mr. Cross, we were adding you to the indictment. We don't need anything other than the phone calls in your record to add you.

Yeah. So, and now you can go to trial and try and get yourself off the indictment. Why? They know I can't testify. Because the moment I testify, they can bring up my past history. Right. So I have to sit there while they present what their theory of why I've been indicted to a jury. And if I was on the jury, I'd be like, oh, he did it.

This dude. Yeah. You need to do some time. Yeah, he thought you were slick. Yeah. And then the jury would think, well, he'll probably do a couple years. And then based on my criminal history, the judge would be like, you're getting 20 years. 15, yeah, 20.

It'd be like, and you don't even realize it's because you called me. Like, oh my, like they have no, just like when you thought, if we get caught, we'll get a year. Yep, yeah, it doesn't work that way. Especially once you've been in, I know guys who were in the same, like, groups of people I hung out with as a teenager who did do their six, seven years like I did, got out and they did go back. I got a buddy right now.

This idiot was stealing mailboxes. I don't know. Which is federal. Yeah, he was stealing mailbox. And they hit him for like 15 years he must say stole like a hundred mailboxes over like a period of like a month. I don't even know what he was doing I don't know I all I heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody else then we looked it up and sure enough there it was he stole in a hundred mailboxes from Phoenix and he was doing now he's in for 15 16 years. There are some things some crimes that seem silly but are because they're so fundamental to the successful to the success of a country right so like the. The mail is huge right people don't realize they're like it's just the mail it's like no no no don't that is that's almost like kicking in someone's front door right and raiding their house like it's such a personal thing and it's so integral to the infrastructure of the united states now maybe not so much

anymore because email is taken over so much of it but people still get their credit cards in the mail i was good but they're still on the books yeah it's still on the books yeah so stealing the mail or harming mailboxes or harming mailman or any of those things carry super super super super big sentences. They make an example. You know what one that it always kills me that has such a minor sentence is robbing a bank. Yeah. With a note.

Yeah. As long as you don't threaten the person with the note, because the moment they add threat to it, it's now, now you're looking at five or ten years. But if you go in with a note and they say, no, doesn't even, you know, you don't know. You don't say they have a gun. Oh, no, no, that's what turns to an armed robbery. Yeah, that's threat. No, you just have to say, like, if they say, like, give me, you know, give me all the money, you know, in the drawer, there won't be any problems. You haven't threatened them.

Right. You just have there would be problems. So, you know, I'll throw a scene. You don't know what that could mean. So if it's something vague like that and you go to them and they give you, and they're going to, they know what they're going to give you $1,500. You're not going to get anything. The average bank robber gets $3,500. So you're going to get $3,000, $2,000, whatever.

You're going to get it and you walk out. If you get caught. now granted for the amount of money you're going to get it's minor like like you're getting no money but the point is if you did get caught it's three years like if you don't have a criminal history three years for two grand i know a guy that robbed i want to say he robbed two or three banks like that he got caught um yeah he got caught he got three he got three years and what he had done here's how he got caught was when he walked out and it turned out it was the first robbery he did that he got he actually fucked up oh i think of the first robbery he was

did he did it he walked out they didn't have a good picture of him because he had a baseball cap on and glasses i think but when he walked out he touched the door by accident he knew not to but he said i accidentally like i was turning and i pushed and i actually touched the door with a couple two like two of his fingers touched the door and they dust it and they had his his info but he robbed a couple robbed actually the same bank again then he robbed another bank same way he said but then i had enough money like I had like 10 grand at that point I got and so he left that I think it was like Colorado or something I don't know but he moved to Florida and about two years later one day he got pulled over by the police warrant out yeah it was a warrant it was it really pulled over

for no reason at all like it was like he's speeding or whatever he got pulled over worst feeling too imagine imagining that like but he didn't he didn't he didn't even know he had a warning he thought he's no idea he's good no they've been looking for you for two years yeah now you're going to prison one day with the one cop pulled up he said sat there for a little bit He said, then another cop called up, pulled up. He said, then another, and I thought, it's not good. This isn't, this isn't a speeding ticket. Like, he's like, that point, they were like, get out of the car.

He's like, ah, shit. Yeah, it wasn't until, like, they put the handcuffs on him and told him. Realized what he's going in for. He's like, oh, fuck, I didn't get away. We don't get too many of the bank robber guys in state. Well, you guys get most of them in the feds, yeah. It's funny, you can get, like, I typically 99% of the time, it's, it goes federal. Yeah, you can get with the state charge.

It just depends, like, I guess, who takes over the case or how it. I think if it ends up being like a credit union or something like that, but as soon as it becomes a national bank, then it's federal. Like if it's a state bank or a county bank, which is a credit union, then a lot of time, not always, they can still pick it up, but a lot of times, because it's FDIC, insurance, it gives them the right, but sometimes it's like it's a credit union. I don't let the state handle it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you'd see them in there in the state prisons occasionally. Most of the guys, there's probably a big difference in like the savviness, I guess, of the criminals between state and federal.

Like I said, the majority of the guys in state prison are, it's drugs. They're just addicts. There's just a bunch of addicts. Drugs and violence, right? Yeah, and the drugs usually contribute to the violence. The vast majority of them are in there either for stealing drugs, using drugs, or committing a crime while on, you know. So it's almost always goes back to that. And that's what I've always, like, I have a lot of friends that get out and I've always preached that like just, dude, stay sober.

Don't drink. Oh, I can drink. No, you can't. No, you can't, buddy. You have a problem with a narcotic. You can't drink. Okay, because that's going to lead you back. to and then what happens they start drinking six months later they're getting high and they're on the

streets and then they're in prison again so it's i try to tell it to like everybody who gets out because i get calls from so many guys that get out because they want to come work with us and they you know and i tell them the first thing dude don't drink i don't even want you guys in my office smoking yeah don't even smoke it's not worth it it always lead back it lowers your inhibitions next thing you know you're doing the next drug and the next one and also you get you get used to it so it's not enough anymore and now exactly three months later the i'm doing anything anymore And I don't like, I used to smoke a lot of a teenager. I got out, I might, I think I ate an edible twice, tried it just to see, because now it was legal, right?

So now it's legal, like, oh, give it a shot. You know, it used to be illegal before I went in. Try the edible. Not good. Just too strong. Just way too strong. I don't like the smell of it anymore. So I tried to smoke.

I don't like, I don't like it anymore. And then, you know, I drank wine for a little while, red wine. I just like, no more. No, I don't do anything anymore. I don't drink red wine. I don't do anything. I think the problem was smoking with, you know, is that to me, I don't think of it. I just think it, I think the issue is it lowers your drive.

Yeah, ambition. Yeah, you don't meet like super ambitious stovers. But you know what I'm saying? So you don't, so it's like, like, why would you do that? Like, oh, it helps me relax. It helps me. Yeah. But here's what it really helps is it lowers your expectations of life and your drive.

And now you're like, like, trust me, I seriously doubt that there are CEOs of companies that are getting high on a daily basis, maybe monthly. Yeah, and if they are, it's probably an edible and it's probably at nighttime. Right, it's not during the day. Right, not during the day, absolutely not. Taking a break real quick. No. Like, no. It's not happening.

Right. I'm a big, like a big supporter of like, I don't like marijuana. I don't like when people smoke it. Like when the guys in my office, because some of them do smoke, I can't control it. You know what they come in. I'm like, bro, don't come in here smelling like that. Like, don't do that. Like, wait until you.

get off work. Don't, I hate, I hate the smell of it. It drives me insane. But anyways, that's well, how do you feel? You feel like anything else you want to touch on or you feel good? I covered a lot of it. I mean, I could always go into, I love the wife thing. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah, she's always more than welcome if you want to interview corrections officer. I've done a few years. Yeah, you did. Yeah, you did the one guy. Is he from California? No, I've probably interviewed three. Our last one was from Arizona. Yeah, yeah. What? The, uh, the mentally ill yard oh yeah yeah and now he works on the res too by the way huh yeah well i don't know which reservation but are there a few there's yeah then you have hill river salt river fort macdowell so he's a he's a

correctional officer on a reservation now huh um yeah we can't mention his name well he had to take his name on he was like whoa whoa i didn't realize you had to put my name on it's like you never said not to get your name on yeah but i don't think he even said anything i thought it was a great interview. He didn't say anything that to me would have looked bad, but he was just like, yeah, there's only, yeah, just in case. I don't understand. Like, my wife made, when she told me

what she's making like 1450 an hour, I was like, what? Like, that's what you guys made in there? Yeah. Yeah, the sergeants make 21 an hour. I was like, what? At least in the BOP, these guys were, like, they would start them off making like 35 or 36, but

you immediately can work overtime. Yeah. So these guys after a, of course, they They get bumped up, but after about three years, they're working with overtime. Some of these guys are making like 80,000. So my dad, after the construction industry, bottomed, he went out and worked at the federal prison. He's an immigration officer at the immigration prison, like where they... Oh, those are horrible.

I know. He made like $75,000 a year, though. He was making good money out there. He doesn't do it anymore now. This is my stepdad, not my real dad. My stepdad did it for probably 10 years. And then he got remarried to a lady who she was also. federal immigration officer and but they were making good money those those facilities everybody

i know that's been in them they're like bro it's it's it's they're horrific he used to tell me stories he's like he's like michael he said it's not it's not mexicans coming across the border it's like arabs it's asians it's indians he's like yeah there's mexicans too but it's and it's and he these places are dirty these people have been out in the desert for weeks and weeks and it's he told me horror stories about the places like dad you're like 65 chill out bro hey get out of there. What are you doing in there? And finally he, when he turned 66, I think is like when his social security or whatever kicked in. And now he's retired, kind of. He does like little carpentry projects in the side. But other than that, he's retired. Yeah. So not high paying

enough money for, I don't understand who would want to do that. Yeah, I don't because I knew a guy that was in an ice facility. That's what he was in. There's ice. Yeah. And he was talking about like the gangs are horrific and he's like literally like they will attack the guards he's like like they'll he's like guards are getting stabbed left and right like it's it's he's like it's it's horrible where he was that they would only be there for like three or four days like they would come in and then like get turned around and deported no no this is a facility this is a facility it's a prison where they're holding you for 18 months two years three years it's like until you're deported if you're deported while you're fighting deportation like you could be there for three four

five years he must have been like in the intake i think is what it was probably before they go to that because he said a lot of them he's like we're sending planes back to like india i was like what he's yeah we deport people back to india they're sneaking across the border from india from asia so they're coming into mexico and then coming across the border yeah and i had no idea until my dad told me about this and you know he's my dad's super conservative so he goes to the every time i talk about he goes into the politics and all biden are like all right dad take it easy so you you are starting a youtube channel yeah so originally my goal did you already have one i have one yeah i have a channel i've got about 20 videos on there my goal was to talk about business my goal was to

talk about like how I fixed my credit right like how I got up to a 750 credit score how I didn't get back on drugs how I didn't you know start robbing people again but whenever I post a video about prison you like a thousand views and then I post a video about like business and I get 40 views or I post a video about like how I quit drinking six months ago 36 views like dude like does nobody care about not drinking and I've come to the realization now because I quit vaping nine months ago I'm at nine months now I quit vaping that was a hard one for me bro like the vaping was like a nightmare and if you vape you know it sucks if you don't vape don't start it's a

horrible it's hard to quit and uh I made a video about how I finally quit using like nicotine gum and um nobody watched it I made a video about how I quit drinking nine months ago and nobody watched it I made a video about you know being a business owner and like what it takes to you know set up an LLC and get incorporated and get an EI in and how I file my own taxes I'm in college but I'm a full-time college student too I go to school for accounting so like I make videos about that and nobody watches them but I make videos about prison and everybody watches the shit man yeah so like I my goal was to talk about my life after prison but now I don't know what to do like I'm trying to find my niche and what I would do

is because look like like to me I would do a video like do your story and in parts yeah so that it's so it's this only maybe it's this it's really this only let's say the just as you get to prison Well, I don't know, whatever. You know, let's say it's two hours to four hours, like total maybe, you know, where it's an hour here and maybe do it in four parts or whatever. You release those, then you put them together in one long video and then maybe in a playlist. But if you did that, people get interested in you as a person and what got you there. Now they know what that change was and how did he rebound from the person he was to who he is.

now they're invested in you they're like wow this guy's got an interesting story and you can drag it out because you can go into multiple i'm sure there are things that you skimmed over yeah for sure you go into that and then when you start talking about getting out setting up your business hiring this guy you could then talk about like i hired this guy and his story is and you could interview that guy yeah and you could interview some of these guys that are coming into you know your um um what am i trying to say I'm not wheelhouse, but you're orbit. They're kind of orbiting around you. So you maybe interview those guys, but you could interview other guys that

maybe just some guy you know from prison or maybe you don't know him at all. He contacts you. I know a lot of guys that I've thought about doing that. In fact, my co-defendant, like it would be like a good star and my wife, you know, and I have friends. I have a buddy who did 25 for murder and he just got out. But those videos, you're going to get more views you're going to get. And just get them like emotionally invested.

People get in over time. Right. And then what happens is as you go out and then to get subscribe. you go out and do other people's podcast that drives people to your YouTube channel because I've been out of it for two months I've got 230 subscribers like so it's obvious like I'm not good at it yet like so and I understand like my first year is going to be me just practicing right like just getting on camera getting used to talking to people and then if I can get any kind of little tiny if I had a thousand subs at the end of the year I'd be happy yeah well I mean that that seems like like

this would probably people will probably get interested in you look you up and obviously I'll mention it you know to go to the channel and subscribe but you'll probably have get 200 to 400 people from this. I'm saying like 20 or 30. No, I mean, probably over the next month and a half. Yeah, that'd be cool. You probably get at least 200. That'd be amazing, yeah.

Because that's what the other people are getting. These guys that we come on and we promote. They usually get 150, 200. Yeah, that's insane. Within the month. My goal is not to make money from it either. Like I said, like mine will be exactly like yours. Whereas if in a year from now, it makes money,

it'll all just go to Matt, my videographer guy. And he works for my company. But the problem with that is this. You want to try and get monetized. Even you say, oh, I don't want to get monetized. No, no. You want to get monetized because now YouTube has an incentive to push your videos because they get to advertise on it. Well, why would they push your videos if they're not advertising?

And they'll tell you like, well, they can still advertise on non-monetized videos. They can, but they don't do it like they very seldomly do it. So now you're in a position where YouTube's saying, I'm going to push his video because we have advertised on it. It's in our best interest to get him views. right so now they push it a little bit more and now it it starts making money the channel starts making money right so the goal is obviously a thousand subscribers 4,000 watch hours get it monetized that helps push it get good thumbnails get do some clickbaity the same thing that everybody screams about like this fucking titles clickbait right well I'm sorry but it works I know

I did it on one of my longs like I did MythBusters prison edition and then somebody got mad at me in the comments for saying MythBusters Yeah, but you gotta just blow those guys at it. I don't even really look at it. I just shoot the videos. Matt does the editing, he does the uploading, he does the thumbnails.

I don't do any of it. Like I just, I just. Which is great. That's, trust me, that's, this is the role to be in as opposed to,

this is the fun role. Well, he'll be in this role eventually, right? Yeah. Yeah, he's slowly, he's slowly doing it, you know? But yeah, yeah.

So, I think what happens is, you know, it depends on what you're doing. If you want to do interview the guys that are coming in and then slowly, you can as you get more and more people you can wing in the business the big goal is to get even like 10,000 subs and then one of my company is inside the prison right right and I go like hey look I got 10,000

followers this is the kind of stuff we promote it's all positive we're not putting the prisons in any bad light right let me get some cameras in here yeah and because that I imagine that would do relatively well right like yeah well I mean anything where it's guys well first of all if a prisoner's in prison telling his story that's probably going to get a lot more views than some guy that got out their oranges on the yard and they're like, yo, we're doing telemarketing. People are going to be watching the inmates do telemarketing. Like, what the fuck?

Yeah. This is insane. So that's kind of like the goal with the whole, you know, as we move into the prisons this year and simultaneously build out, you know, a small follower audience group and then approach the prisons and say, hey, listen, would you let us set of cameras in here? You know, we've already brought it up to them and they're not, they're not, they told us it's not impossible.

We just got to impress them enough. Well, there was a guy who did, uh, after prison. I think it was called After Prison Show. Do you know what I'm talking about? There was a guy who did after prison show. I don't even know. He was huge for a while. I think I know what it is.

I think it's like a white guy or Mexican-American guy. And he started flipping houses, which is where I think he started making most of his money. Okay. But he was hiring guys straight out of prison. Yeah. And so you would meet these guys. They'd tell their story.

And then people got interested in like, what's happening with so-and-so. What's happening with so-and-so? You know, because they would come out and tell their story. He'd give them a job. He'd help him get on their feet. And so they get invested in low, what's happening?

with Juan. Right. You know, Juan was doing this. And they branch off and then do their own. Right. Sometimes they get fired.

Sometimes they go back to prison. Sometimes they, whatever. Right. But definitely, sometimes there was drama involved in it. But as long as you don't,

I think if the prison saw, you were just basically saying, look, this is how I got in here. Here's what I did. Blah, blah, blah. And now they're giving me a chance to kind of train me on how to be a telemarketer and do this and do that.

I think that would be probably huge. Yeah. Well, when the time, maybe I'll give you a call for consultation when we get approval on that this year's in time. That'd be Yeah, it'd be interesting. You'd be more than welcome to come out. How long have you've been out? Four and a half years?

You're on paper, you'd have to wait. You can get, you can get in to the prisons. It's crazy going in. I went into the federal, right? I've never been into the state. I went into the federal last year the year before in Texas. The women's, like, one yard. There's no gates. It's green grass. You can just walk off. It was crazy. But you can get into the state once you've been out. I think they want you out for five years. We're like no arrests or anything like that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, two.

go in and do like a speech or something yeah go talk to them or just go hang out and tour it and just be like you know this like it's it is crazy to see from the outside you know coming in yeah hey i appreciate you guys watching do me a favor if you like the video hit the subscribe button hit the bell so get notified videos like this share the video if you know anybody that might be interested also do me a favor and um go to mike's uh or go to the go into the description box and click on the link for mike's youtube channel and subscribe i really appreciate you guys Also, please consider joining my Patreon. It does really help me.

And I appreciate it. Thank you. See ya.