No Jumper - How Matthew Cox Stole Millions From Banks... Until the FBI Hunted Him Down

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Follow Matthew Cox https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/ 6:50 From mortgage broker to becoming a million-dollar fraudster 34:23 How Matthew Cox created documentation for kids that didn't exist 52:12 Matthew Cox stayed on the Run for years using stolen identities 1:37:00 Matthew Cox talks about snitching to get his sentence reduced ----- Shout out to all our members who make this content possible, sign up for only $5 a month https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNNTZgxNQuBrhbO0VrG8woA/join Promote Your Music with No Jumper - https://nojumper.com/pages/promo CHECK OUT OUR ONLINE STORE!!! https://nojumper.com NO JUMPER PATREON http://www.patreon.com/nojumper CHECK OUT OUR NEW SPOTIFY PLAYLIST https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5tesvmDS8h50LkjnSAWMOs?si=j6sJD6DkR4mk5NZZWnlK7g Follow us on SNAPCHAT https://www.snapchat.com/discover/No_Jumper/4874336901 Follow us on SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/4z4yCTjwXa4an6sBGIe7m5 iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/no-jumper/id1001659715?mt=2 Follow us on Social Media: https://www.snapchat.com/discover/No_Jumper/4874336901 http://www.twitter.com/nojumper http://www.instagram.com/nojumper https://www.facebook.com/nojumper http://www.reddit.com/r/nojumper JOIN THE DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Q3XPfBm Follow Adam22: http://www.instagram.com/adam22 adam22bro on Snapchat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. No Jumper. Coolest podcast on the world that today I'm sitting down with Matt Cox. No, I know, Matthew Cox, but I'm wondering, is it, does it come off the wrong way if I were to describe you as a legendary scammer?

I like it. I'm good with that. I'm good with scumbag. I'm good with a con man. Really? So you still own that? Yeah, you know, it's funny. The first time I saw an article where they called me a con man, I was offended.

Really? You know, because I was still kind of, I thought of myself as a legitimate person that was doing a little something great. But, you know, as time goes on, you go to prison. and you start looking, you start reading or writing your story and looking at your story and you start to realize like, oh yeah, yeah, no, you're a con man, bro. Like, what are you doing? What are you? I was fooling myself.

Right. And before we like get into the gist of your story, I just want to point out that when I was watching, you tell the story of your life, it just felt like I was watching an alternate reality version of how my life could have gone. Because the type of person that I am is that every single job I ever had as a kid, I always found a way to pull off some sort of scam. But they were all very, like, low level, you know? And when I'm watching yours, and I even worse as a mortgage salesman on the phone for a

couple of days, which didn't really go too far. I was like 18. I don't think I actually really understood what a mortgage was. But it just like really struck me as like, holy shit, everything that you did along the way, I would have justified it to myself in the exact same way that you did. And I don't think people realize that a lot of people who take on lives of crime, like, you find little ways to cut corners that ultimately amount to very, very serious federal crimes. But it's not like you in your head decided that you were going to go down that path. It just sort of came together as you slowly found little cheat codes along the way.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a slippery slope. It starts with something very, you know, minor. And then it keeps getting, and you get away with it, and you become emboldened by it, and then you start getting brazen. And those little frauds get larger and larger and larger until you're just everything. It's just an all-out scam that you're running. Yeah.

I mean, in my case, I don't know other people, but in my case, it just became this massive scam. And, you know, by the time the cops or the FBI had indicted me or charged me and I lost my license, I was like, okay, well, then this is what it is. you're you're a fraudster and you're going to commit fraud and now you might as well like the hand like the gloves are off you might as well go all in definitely and we'll get right into the whole story and everything but i'm just curious about the fact that you don't seem like you reject the label of scammer like how do you make sense of it in your current life and what are your thoughts on you know lying and cheating at this point i mean at this point i'm i'm extremely honest like I don't, you know, if you, if anybody looks at my story, like I'll tell, I'll tell the honesty,

even to my own detriment, you know, like everything. I'm not concerned about it at all. I'm especially not concerned after going to prison for as long as I am. And honestly, I'm on the definitely pretty high on the, on the sociopath scale. So it doesn't affect me. And, you know, when I was here people say, oh, I don't care what other people think, but they really do care what other people think. And the truth is, is like, I just don't.

care what you think. Like I'm I'm gonna tell you what's going on, what's going on my head, I'm gonna be honest about it, you're gonna be accepting of it or you're not going to. And if you're not, then I don't need you in my life. And if you're good with it, then great, we can, you know, we can have a relationship and we'll be cool. They probably didn't use this language when you were young, but do you feel like you would qualify as autistic in modern terms? No, I mean, only because I'm very good with people. Okay. You know, I have several buddies that are definitely on the spectrum. And even though once they get to know you, you get used to them,

but then I'll notice like three people will walk over and we'll start talking. And I realize immediately how he's behaving. And other people will say, wow, you know, your buddy, he's something's off. I'm like, yeah, you're right, you know, but he doesn't know you. Well, you shouldn't, that shouldn't matter. That shouldn't matter. Right. You know, I can immediately walk into a room, shake everybody's hand, be extremely, you know,

charismatic, gregarious, inviting to everyone. Right. So, you know. So when you say you identify the sociopathic side of you, like, what are the characteristics that make you come to that conclusion? Just that I have a lack of empathy for other people and that I'm not concerned, typically not concerned about my actions and how they affect other people. I mean, I'm concerned about getting what I want out of this situation.

You know, luckily, for the most part, I've, I have focused on financial crime, so I never went out of my way to try and harm someone, right? Like if somebody wants to give me money, and I've had multiple people try and give me money to invest. I'm like, yeah, I'm good because I'm thinking, this is an individual, he's going to lose all of his money. I don't want to, and it's not so much that I'd feel bad for him. I don't want to deal with that. I don't need this guy coming after me the rest of my life. He knows who I am. He knows where I'm at.

But if I go to Bank of America and they, and I borrow $250,000 from them, and I borrow $250,000 from them and they never see a dime. I don't I could care less right. I'm not losing an ounce of sleep. Yeah. And the same with me. Like when I was younger, I spent a couple years doing credit card fraud and never even really thought about who was on the losing end of it. Like it just was like whatever to me now, I don't know that I would have had the heart or the callousness to, you know, if somebody had came along and said like, hey, I'm a, I got 10 grand for you if you go kill this guy. Yeah. I don't think I had that in me. I'm not I'm not I just don't have any tolerance for violence I'm not interested in

violence at all yeah first of all I'm not built for violence I'm five foot six I weigh a hundred and you know I'm a hundred and what my 170 now oh man um yeah I mean I'm not I'm not a violent guy it's probably not going to go well for me but sometimes I see like a certain celebrities like Jeff Bezos and his security and they're like very not intimidating at all and I have to assume that these guys are capable of extreme violence I'm sure right but that's probably I'm sure That's how he wanted. He doesn't want to put that, have a bad look. Yeah.

That's what's funny, though, is that the rappers like to have the seven and a half foot tall fat black dude who, you know, pushing people out of the way. Yeah, it just doesn't really. It strikes you as intimidating. It's almost like that's the value proposition for them. They like the way that it sort of advertises their clout for the world. But okay, so let's go through this. You started working in the mortgage industry at what point?

How did you lead up to that? We don't have to do like the full length version. There's a lot of different interviews out there, but we can just dig into it. Yeah, I mean, I was dating a chick that was a stripper and I was not, I was trying to be a, I was trying to do something in a business. And I, at the time, all of those ventures had failed. And you're how old and where, where are you coming out of that time? I was like 29 years old at this point. At this point, I've lost pretty much every job I've tried to have because I just could not keep up with a workload.

I'm dyslexic. I have a BA, but it's in fine arts. Like it's prepared me to do nothing. And by 29, you're starting to feel pretty frustrated by the workforce. Of course. Maybe this just isn't for me. Nothing's working. And so now I'm laying hardwood floors.

I'm putting in window. You know, I'm doing construction work, right? A handyman kind of stuff. And so the girl I was dating, she ended up working as a mortgage broker and she said, you've got to do this. And so I went, got my license, became a mortgage broker. And within a month, I'm already got three or four loans going. and I went to close my first loan.

And, you know, I walk in. I've got the file. I got the whole thing. And my mortgage, I collected all the documents. I'm ready to send everything off to underwriting. And my manager looks through the whole thing. And she pulls one document out and she says, it looks great. It's ready to close.

But this one document, it's a verification of rent, shows that your borrower has been 30 days late on her rent in the last two years. That's it. The deal is it's done. You can't have been 30 days late on your rent No bank wants to lend to you And so I was like What do I do? And even though I thought I knew it was over

And she pulled out a thing a white out And shook it up and she said if I was you I'd white it out Make a copy stick it in the file They'll never find it Right They'll never catch it And I was like are you serious? And she was like she said yeah

And that's another thing people don't really understand About getting into doing any kind of crime or fraud Is that a lot of times If somebody who's in a position of authority Tells you that it's okay You'll just kind of take that at face value Yeah and well and I I knew it was, I knew, and I even told her, I said, that's, that's fraud. I'd go to prison. I was like, I'd go to jail. And she was like, no, she said, listen, they catch it and they think you're involved. You might lose your job. But that's it. She's, you don't have to do it. And but then again, I was also a couple months late on my car payment. I was, uh, and I had a mortgage. I had a mortgage. I had a mortgage. I mean, I'm, things are going bad. So I was, well, I guess I did have a choice. But I was, I was probably a month behind on my, on my, on my, my mortgage. I mean, things are going bad. So I, well, I guess I did have a choice. But I, but I was. I was. I was. But I was. I was. I was. I was. I was. I was. I

And I whited it out, sent it in maybe a week later the loan closed. I got a check for $3,500. And it was on. I was just like, this is the way, this is it. Next guy that comes in, this is 20 years ago. He made $45,000. If he made $52,000, he could get the loan. Right.

So I changed his W-2s. I changed the pay stubs. I send it in, wait. Four days later, underwriting calls and says, hey, you're ready to close. You can close tomorrow and next day. It's up to you. It's like, hey, ready to close. Boom, another check.

$3,000, $4,000. And it just went that way for, I don't know how long it was, six months to a year before I went and I started my own place. But keep my mind, I immediately became the top selling broker in that office. Within six months, they made me a manager. Six months later, I ended up opening my own place, hired a bunch of guys. So fast. Like within a year, you open your own spot.

Yeah, but I think by that point, I'm like 30. And the money was coming in, you know? it's funny it was back then I mean you know it's 20 years ago but I mean that was 10 15000 dollars a month that was a ton of money a ton of money and in Florida so I open my own place I hire a bunch of guys almost none of them have any experience I mean these guys are like you know one guy was like a doing pest spray you know spraying houses and another guy was used car salesmen and so they come in I kind of train them. I make them go get their license. Like, we were all licensed. Get their license. And before

you know, those, they're closing loans. And within three or four months, we're running a mill. We're doing several million, two, three million dollars a month in bad loans. And this is back when houses in Florida were 100 grand, 150. And you could buy shitty houses for 50 grand, 60 grand. And when you're training these guys, are you just normalizing things and just saying like, hey, this is what you do. If you need to increase their income, you just wipe this out and you add this information. Right. Most of that stuff I did. So I would explain like, look, you know, you can do this and this, you know, or you could

send it to the lender like this and they're going to say no. Or if you want, you can do this. And, you know, I tell them and they say, well, how do I do that? I said, well, come to me. I'll make the W2s. I'll make pay stubs. And a lot of these guys would start doing it themselves. But initially I was doing stuff for them.

But before long, you realize like he doesn't even ask anymore. He's making his own W2s. And of course, we would get like back. then what was it quick books I think we got quick books so you could make w2s and paste up so we started getting the software that allowed us to do that that sort of thing and so we could alter these documents and then it becomes you know I turned it into verifying people's employment right so I started buying shell companies back then I don't know if you can still do it you could go on sunbiz com and if a company had been around for a few years and then let's say they stopped paying their their

their yearly fee to be a corporation, they become inactive. Well, after three years of inactivity, you could buy that corporation. So I could go pay the fees by the corporation, and I'm buying a corporation that is 10 years old. So now I own, and I can change the name. So now I own a 10 year old company and I can list it. I can list the phone number. I can have the phone number going to a cell phone sitting on my credenza. So if somebody calls there to verify employment, they're calling my credenza phone.

I pick it up, I answer, I say, hey, it's this express tax services, and I verify your employment. You've got W-2's pay stubs. They can check on SunBis. It's a real company. They can see it's got a real tax ID number. It's done. We're done. I can list it on the yellow pages back then.

You have the yellow pages. Or I could list it in the business directory online. So I could cover all that. And then that turns into, we got to a point where if I needed to verify your down payment or that you had enough money in the bank to. let's say for what are called reserves. I finally got to a point where I just started making fake bank statements, and then I ended up making fake bank websites.

So now I can have bank statements. I can send those to the lender, and if they call the bank to verify it, well, one, they can go online, they can look at, there's a website. They can check out the website. They know it's a real bank. Because I remember the first one I did was Southern Exchange Bank, Southern Exchange Bank of Clarksville.

And nobody had ever heard of it, right? I did Bank of Ebor. Like, these aren't real banks. So if they thought, I've never heard of this, and they go online, it's got a real website. You can go through it. It tells all about the bank. Now, you can't verify it on the bank,

or the bank statement's online, but you can look and see it's a real bank. And then if they call, then I pick up the phone. I put them on hold. I tell them, hold on, let me check, let me do this. I can verify this for you. Sure, hold on.

You asked for a couple verification questions, and that's it. I can verify the bank statements. To a bank that they don't even have, the money. Right. There's no money. So at what point along the way though, like was there a tipping point from your perspective in which you entered into a situation in which you like knew that this was going to end poorly? Because at a certain point like the, you know, writing things out on the documents feels like you could conceivably think like, okay, I'm never going to get caught doing this.

So it's not that big a deal. But at a certain point, you're creating these fake banks and everything. you have to assume that somebody's going to come along at some point, right? Well, what had happened was there were times when we would get caught. So typically what would happen is a broker is doing this. At this point, I own the mortgage company, so I'm not really closing loans. I own the mortgage company. You're closing. You're a broker.

You're closing the loan. So we would get, let's say I'd get a phone call from, and this happened one time, I had a bunch of, they were kids. cancel checks, right? This is back when people wrote checks. So you have canceled checks and they have the numbers on the back of them when they go through the check machine or the system at the bank and it puts a bunch of numbers on the back and it says it's canceled and it's got all these kind of little stamps and stuff. And so I made a bunch of them for different banks and all you had to do as a broker was fill out the check and then put your, put your borrowers name and data, name and, sorry,

address on the check, make a copy, send it in. So they now, a cancel check, there's no better proof of payment, right? So you've been paying $900 a month for your rent. Here's 24 months canceled checks. That's proof of rent for two years. So this guy had been doing that. Most of the guys had done this at least once or twice a month. And one day I get a phone call from a bank and they say, listen, we have an issue.

We caught, it's like a million dollars in bad loans that this one broker, had done. Keep in mind, I'm the one who made the checks. But they're not calling me. They're saying there's a problem, this broker, this is what he did. And I'm saying, you mean a rogue broker? Like not, like I don't know anything about this. Sounds like one of my brokers did something wrong. Or maybe, maybe one of their, I said, maybe it was given to them by the borrower. You seem there's plenty of people I can, I can shift blame. Now, unfortunately, this guy had like maybe six or seven loans that had this had happened with. And so, they already knew it and they'd already pulled a bunch of other loans from that broker.

He'd been using the same checks over and over again, so an underwriter caught it. So now it's really, they've sold a million dollars already to household bank, and they have a million dollars. So I immediately, I got the feeling they were trying to tell me like, hey, you have to buy these loans back. And I went, listen, if that's the case, I said, I don't have the money. I can't cut you a check for $2 million. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Listen, we just want to let you know this is what's going on. You need to take care of this broker. You need to figure out what you're going to do with him. If he works there, we're not going to do any more business with you. We're going to go ahead and sell these to household bank. And if any of them come back on us, we want to let you know at that time we're going to expect that you're going to help us get rid of them. And I went, absolutely. Of course.

I mean, what am I going to say? No, you should call the FBI. Of course. I say, of course, of course. And so that was it. So think about it. They know they've already sold a million dollars in bad loans. They're okay with that.

They know they have a million dollars in bad loans. They're going to sell them those too. They're perfectly okay. And that's what happens is that I would get caught and the banks would cover for it. If I gave them a reasonable explanation, they would say, okay, well, is there any way? And sometimes they'd ask me to, can you just pay us back? And I go, well, how about I refinance that house and get you your money back? Yeah.

And then I'd refinance the house and get them their money back. Sometimes they'd even take less money than we owed them. They'd take a short pay. Right. Because they just wanted it gone. They didn't want to call the FBI. They don't want to call the FBI. Right.

So I, you know, you start feeling invincible, right? Like the few times that I was caught, I got out of it. And I could always, you know, if they called up and said, hey, listen, there's fake W-2s and pay stubs in this loan package. My first thing would be like, are you telling me that my borrower gave me fake W-2s and paystubs? think about it. What am I? They're going to say, oh, well, no, we think, we think maybe you had, me, I would never.

Why would I, are you serious? I'd just be completely offended. You know, you get offended. You tell them I would never do that. Why would I jeopardize my business? Who do you think you are? It's not going to, they're not going to do that. They're going to say, well, they haven't closed the loan yet.

It's not a big deal. Just want to let you know, we can't close this loan. Okay, no problem. They, you know, they tell you they're going to deny the loan. They deny the loan. And I just pick up the loan and I go to another, another, bank or lender and they closed a loan a week later. Yeah, because when it comes to lending out money to people who are not qualified to necessarily take on that debt, it's all good until it goes badly.

And that's essentially what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis is that it went badly for a lot of people all at once and that was massively destructive to our economy. But you got caught before all that, right? Yeah, what ends up happening is I did this for years, like, whatever, a few years. And then some friends of mine, which was a woman by the name of Gretchen and Pete, Zayas, they were friends of my wife and I, that I was married to at the time. Their office, well, they had run a, they were helping someone do what's called a straw man scam where they were buying a house that was, where houses worth, let's say, half a million dollars.

But they were getting them, they were saying the house. were being sold for let's say a million dollars. So the banks lending them, let's say 900,000. So they're taking the $400,000 and these guys are running away with them. They're using a straw man, a fake person to get these loans. Or maybe it's a real person. It could be you, right? Like most people, if you said, listen, we're going to borrow $2 million. We're going to give you $400,000.

And but all these properties are going to go into foreclosure. But you'll be okay. You won't get into trouble. Most people would say, absolutely, sign me up. And that's what they did. They use a straw man to buy. buy multiple houses. They were selling for 400,000, 500,000, but they were getting like, let's say, a million dollars, $900,000 loans on them. And they ended up making, I don't know if it was half a million to a million dollars. They only made around 40 or 50,000 in broker fees. But when they got, when the FBI came in and arrested them, they immediately cooperated against me.

And they didn't really have anybody to throw into the bus because they were doing all the fraud themselves, but they said, hey, we know a guy that owns a mortgage company and they're doing a bunch of fraud. And so they wore a wire on me. And in the middle of that whole thing, when they actually, they wore the wire and I realized it while I was sitting there talking to them, I realized they had said some stuff and I was like, oh, man, they're wired. And I was shocked because my, man, listen, my wife at the time told me, don't talk to him anymore. I was like, don't talk to him. What are you talking about? Like we babysit their kids.

Right. We just got back from Puerto Rico for a week. But your wife had that instinct before you did? She knew, bro. Listen, if I listened to this chick, I'd have never got. Listen, there were so many times she was like, don't, listen, don't do this. You were making good money. You don't have to do.

Let's not do it. And I was like, no, I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. You know. Somebody with extreme risk tolerance like yourself kind of needs somebody who's a little bit more conservative in the corner, right? But I'm also an asshole, right? So I'm also, you know, I'm also like, you don't know what you're talking. talking about right because I'm getting away with it yeah so but I haven't yet found a situation that

you can't get yourself out of which only emboldened me right it just made me think I was you know just you know I listen and I'm arrogant narcissistic and just think I I can do anything at this point and I everything's working and like I said when it's not working doesn't matter I can get myself out of it so um but yeah I in the middle of this conversation I had with them I realized that they they were had a wire and I even said I said wow I was like yeah I hope you're going to get something for this. And she starts, Gretchen starts crying.

And she said, Matt, I'm sorry. She said, I don't have to go to jail. She says, I have a kid. I said, I don't have a kid? I said, all right, listen. I said, tell the FBI agent to call me, tell him not to come in my office.

Because I knew when they went to her office, everybody quit. And I got like 12 guys doing fraud. FBI walks in shows a badge instead of they need to talk to Matt Cox. Everybody's going to pack up their shit and leave. Did all other guys work? for you know enough that they would have been able to effectively rat on you? Yeah, of course, of course. Everybody knew everything, right? It's a small office.

Right. And I, so anyway, I go back to the office, the agent calls immediately, calls and says, listen, you know why I'm calling. He didn't even pretend. He says, you know why I'm calling. He said, you know, he said, we need to schedule an interview for you to come in and talk to us. I said, absolutely, no problem. Can I come in on Tuesday? He said, sure, we schedule an interview. And this is like a Thursday. And I spend the next few days going to interview defense attorneys, federal defense attorneys. And I end up hiring a guy, give him like $75,000 to plead guilty, right? Like I'm not telling him we're going to trial.

Okay. I'm saying, first of all, you're not going to trial for $75,000 with the feds. But give them $75 grand. But you already knew that you weren't going to fight it? I can't. Or they basically told you like it's not worth it. Well, I know I can't. I know I can.

I know they already have fake documents in their, you know, possession. I already know that these two people just had a wire on me where I'm openly talking about fraud. I'm done. I know I'm done. So I'm just like, hey, just trying to get me the best deal. And so that the lawyer was named Gary Trombly. Gary had already called the U.S. attorney because, you know, they already know these guys. And they called the U.S. attorney, actually called the other people's attorney.

You know, Gretchen's attorney. And so probably the second meeting I had with him, he sat down with me. He said, listen, you know, you haven't been indicted yet. You have a criminal complaint. You know, I can keep you from being indicted. And I was like, okay. He said it's called a pretrial intervention. And I said, okay, what does that mean?

He said, well, he said, one, he said, if you, because I was telling him, there's no dollar loss. there's no money that's lost, right? These are just some bad loans. It means that this person should not have gotten $500,000 with the loans. But the loans are being paid, and almost all of them had been paid off. Or I'm sorry, had been sold. So they don't even exist. Right.

You could give a mortgage to somebody who shouldn't be able to get that mortgage, but odds are they're still going to be able to pay off the mortgage. Correct. So my mortgage, the fraud amount for me is $55 million. But keep in mind that that's just because that's how they calculated. If I get you a loan for $500,000 and you shouldn't have gotten that loan because you don't have a legitimate W-2 job, you don't file enough in taxes, you don't qualify for the loan, but I make it look like you qualify. So you get the loan, half a million dollars. And you make all the payments. Guess what? That's a they would, the FBI or the U.S. Attorney's Office said that's half a million dollars on fraud, Mr. Cox just committed. What are you talking about? It's connected to a house. It doesn't matter. So that's how they get the $55 million. A huge chunk of that. that got mortgages that are paying.

So what ends up happening is my lawyer sits down and tells me, hey, here's what I want to do, is I want you to go in to your office, grab as many files as you can get, we'll meet with the FBI, and you lay out all the files, and you go over 10 or 20 files for every broker at your office. You cooperate against the brokers, and I can keep you from being indicted. because you don't owe any money. And I'm like, I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Yeah, roll over on all your guys that you put in position to do this. That probably wouldn't have became criminals if it wasn't for you.

Right. Possibly. Possibly. I mean, I mean, no, I know. I agree that it was, that it was my fault. I mean, that's, yeah, you know, I definitely put them in a position. That's absolutely 100% true, what you're saying. Okay.

So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Right. And the reason I thought that was because, you know, I grew, up watching the godfather right you don't tell on your friends you don't tell on this you don't do you don't tell anybody and so i'm watch it so i was like i'm watching this stuff i'm like oh yeah no no no and so i said absolutely not i'm not i'm not going to do that i said listen i said first of all i don't even think i can get any jail time i there's no dollar loss and so we went back and forth and he ended up saying uh and i was really just looking at being a felon and being on probation which i didn't

think was going to be a big deal uh and so i said no i'm not going to do that you're not realizing how bad being a felon is, you know, not realizing the detriment that can be to your life. Right. But so I said no. And but now when I look back on it, had I been given that opportunity knowing now or knowing then what I know now, I would have gone into like the Friday meeting that we had and with a dolly and scooped up the file cabinets and rolled them into my truck and turned around and said, you guys are going to be getting some phone calls from the FBI.

Right. I suggest you get an attorney. And I'd have fucking rolled over and cut every one of those guys' throats. because the moment I got in trouble, they all cut my throat. Of course. Everybody did. People, people that I knew that weren't involved. Like, you, you don't even, you're not even involved.

You're not even on the FBI's radar. They're going to the FBI and saying, I know stuff I should tell you. You're not even involved. They don't even know who you are. Like, you know, and you also have to understand that these are, these are like soft white guys. These are middle class guys that are scared. They're all tough until the FBI's knocking on the door. And so I get it.

But I also think that I did myself a huge injustice because I thought that there was some kind of street code for white collar criminals that I realized once they all rolled over on me doesn't exist at all. It's funny because you get into the situation because you have this sort of sociopathic traits, but then ultimately you just weren't willing to go far enough with it. Because if you had, then it would have helped you out a lot. Oh, yeah. But then I would have just cut everybody's throw. Like I'm still thinking about some kind of a loyalty to these guys. And that really when that happened, I realized, oh, there's no loyalty. Like you should have, you fucked up.

You should have ratted everybody out. Yeah. So I end up becoming a felon. And one of the things that I got three years probation and I can't own the mortgage company anymore. Keep in mind, all of these guys still work there. Like I become a felon and all these guys are still working there. Like they don't quit. For you.

Well, no, because what I do is I sell the company to a CPA who was a guy I knew who was a CPA. And he'd seen the kind of money we were making. And he was like, yeah, this is. And so he kept me on as a consultant, which is funny because I was allowed to do that, even under probation, which is typically not allowed. But I was allowed to do it. Also, because there was no, you know, it was basically I lied in an application with what it boiled down to. So they thought, okay, he's got three years paper. It's not as big of a deal as we thought.

And so I'm being kept on as a consultant for like $8,000 a month. But listen, $8,000 a month is not enough. By that point, I'm divorced. My child support is $2,000. So your wife dipped out as soon as the charges came down? Yeah. And I hate to say that because. But they usually do, right?

The women are usually out of there once it gets. And I wasn't a good husband. Okay. It's not like I was like, you know, listen, like I'm cheating on her. I'm just a douchebag. I don't come home. I'm coming home at 10 o'clock at night. I'm working all hours of the day, you know.

And so she was just like, she's like, and now this guy's, he just lost this business. He just lost everything. And also by divorcing her, she got all up, we had about 50 some odd rental units. She got all the rental unit. So she had enough money to support herself without me being attached to it. And so, you know, and I was okay with it. I was like, like I didn't want to be married anyway. So we're divorced.

My child supports 2,000 a month. You know, my, my bills are. are seven, eight thousand, nine thousand. I mean, my bills are $12,000 a month. I'm making eight. And I thought, well, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start flipping properties. That's what I'll do.

And so there's an area in Tampa called Ebor City. Really run down, but they're always, the city's always dumping money into it. You know, they're trying to kind of revitalize the area. They would get some grant for $80 million and build a huge complex and they'll renovate 20 houses. And so they're always trying to bring it up. But the houses in general, a decent house was. selling between 100 to 150,000.

But a shithole house was selling for 50 grand. And so you could go buy rehab, you know, rehab. And you go buy rehab for 50 grand. You put, you know, 30 into it. You hope to sell it for 120. You know, maybe make yourself 20 or 30,000, depending on some closing costs and fees. And I thought, that's what I'm going to do. And I was like, because I'd already been doing it a little bit.

And I went, yeah, but you know what? Like the problem is the only reason I've been able to do it in the past is I would do it and I would sell to a customer that I knew I could get the loan for. Right. And I thought, oh, well, just get them the loan. And I thought, well, if you're getting them the loan, you mean you're committing fraud. You're going to commit fraud to make sure they get the loan. Yeah. Well, then you're committing fraud again.

Right. So, and I was like, but there was just no way. I knew there was no way to make money flipping properties. Not the kind of money I wanted to make. Right. And so I thought about it and I thought, you know what I need to do. is I need to buy these properties. I need to be able to get them to appraise higher

than the 100 or 105, whatever, once I've renovated them. I thought, so I was dating a chick that worked at a title company. She was the manager of a title company. And I went and I explained to her, how can I buy these properties for 50 and get the sale to make it look like I bought it for 200.

And she said, if you pay the extra doc stamps on the deed, then it'll show up at a $200,000 sale. So let's say for a $100,000 piece of property, it's $700 for $200,000 piece of property, it's $1,400. I'm buying these things for $50, so it's $350. So if I just pay the extra $1,050, that $50,000 sale will show up it for $200,000.

So what I did was I went out and I thought, okay, so if I do that, enough of those in one area, the whole area will shoot up through the roof. And I was like, okay, because that's what happens with an appraiser, right? So they send an appraiser out. He looks at your house. He compares it to three other houses in the area within half a mile to a mile that have sold within a year. And I thought if I do that enough of those in one area, that'll drive the prices up. And I was like, yeah, but these people are not going to buy these houses for $210,000.

Right. They all live there too. They all have a pretty realistic idea of what shit is worth. Right. And they're not going to be able to pay. Like, that's a huge payment compared to what these guys are used to. So I thought, and the problem with the buyers in those areas are that, those areas are that, they just don't qualify.

They don't have good credit. And so I sat there. I said, what I need to do is I need people to have good credit. I need to, you know what I need to do? I need to make my own people. Like I started thinking about, well, you know what?

You could get somebody who had perfect credit, a straw man, to come in and buy them. What are you going to do? Then what? You pay the mortgages for a few months, let them go into foreclosure. Like now it's another scam.

Yeah. So I'm like, so I'm like, okay, I can drive the prices up. And then you have to split the, the money with them, right? Like I said we make $100,000 on a purchase. I got to give you $50,000. Like, I'm not doing that. And I went, yeah, you know what I need to do? I need to make my own people. So I, it's a longer process, but I figure out, I start calling social security and I figure

out how to convince social security to issue me social security numbers to children that don't exist. So I make a fake birth certificate, a fake shot record for like a 10-month-old child. And I go into Social Security and I say, hey, my son was born with a midwife at home. I basically just called them 30 times and gave him different scenarios until one of them worked. Right. I said, so my son was born at home. He's 10 months old. And we were with the midwife and the pediatrician never had a social security number issued.

And she's like, really? She's like, well, he should have. I'm like, I know, but he told me to come here and get it done. And I had filled out what's called an SS5 for explaining everything. I give her the document. She looks at him. She goes, well, hold on. He's got to have a social security.

She looks on the thing and looks it all up and goes, yeah, you're right. He doesn't. Okay, well, let me go ahead and let me issue one. Boom. Ten days later, I get a social security card in the mail. I then get three secured credit cards in that kid's name. I don't say he's a kid. Obviously, I see he's a 30-year-old man.

I just changed the year of his birth. Get three secured credit cards, make the payments. and in six months I've got 700 credit scores. So now I can buy these properties for 40, 50,000. I can record the value at 220, 190, 210, and I can have placed them in fake people's names with perfect credit and have them refinance the property, which is what I do. So now, I've got multiple synthetic identities with perfect credit.

And keep mind, they have W2s, paystups, because, you know, I can make those. You can verify them, you know, I already got the companies. You want to verify that they have the money in the bank? You can call the banks. Matter of fact, I can give you the bank statements. And you can call and verify. You can do all that. And then as far as, well, where have they been renting? Well, I can give you the canceled checks or not even that. I eventually just, I just incorporated a property management company and an older property management company. I could just answer the questions myself. The property

management company doesn't require cancel checks. So now this is perfect. I start having these guys go in, buy these properties and refinance the properties. So they're buying the properties at 40 or 50 grand. We're recording the value at 220 and they're refinancing them and getting a loan for like 180, 190. On a property that I've got maybe $50,000 into, I maybe put $10,000 in repairs. Because I don't do anything to the inside. I just paint the outside, trim the trees, mow the yard,

have an appraiser go out, go by, take photographs of the outside of the place. Eventually, I mean, initially what I was doing was just twisting the appraiser's arms and saying, bro, you need to say, there's no deferred maintenance that the property's in great shape. And they had him and haul and you know, and I broke a moment. I'm closing. And keep in mind, I'm still using the mortgage company that I used to own. I'm like, bro, you make $5,000, $6,000 a month off of us. Like I'll just cancel all the fucking appraisals.

And then you just start over somewhere. Don't get crazy. We don't have to go there. And so they did initially they did it. But then that got to be a pain in the ass. And so what I did was I eventually ordered the software myself. And I'd still have them come out and do the appraisal and get all the numbers. and then I take their numbers and I put it all in

and I just get rid of the deferred maintenance. So I could make the appraisal. I could make the whole package and send it in. I'd send it in. We go to the closing. Eventually, I'm able to open up banks, bank accounts in these guys' names. And initially I made the fake IDs myself, right?

This was back, this is 20 years ago. Like fake IDs now are difficult, right? You need a thermal printer. You need like a Fargo 5,000 thermal printer and the whole thing. I couldn't do that. I'd have to buy all that equipment. This is when you could basically sand off the information,

print the information, in reverse on a piece of laminate and glue it over and go into a bank and they would run it and they'd give you a bank account. Right. That worked until I went on the run. And then I actually figured out I had to, I figured that I had to end up going into the bank, the DMV and getting them to issue me an actual driver's license, which I do. When you say you were like making fake birth certificates just for example, like how deep into the sort of underworld did you have to get to do something like that?

Or was that relatively easy? It was easy. I actually just started calling and trying to get the. security paper. So the security paper on a lot of like for instance South Carolina has the security paper. It just it's one of those you know it's multi-colored. I mean you can buy them when they're not multicolored or they're just like you know blue and they have just waves in them right. But if you make a copy it says void if copied well that's what so if you're a 30-year-old or 40-year-old men and this was 20 years ago. So this is if you're 50 years ago they don't have

the really pretty nice ones like they do now with holograms and all this shit. They had them on this paper. So I just had to make a template and print it out on the paper. And then I ended up getting a stamp that said South Carolina vital statistics. But I couldn't even get the stamp. Every time I tried, they would say, no, we can't make that. So I ended up saying a South Carolina corporation of virtual records. And I etched out everything except for South Carolina.

and then it looked rough. And so you couldn't really tell what it said and it just was a stamp. But it was an emboss stamp. You could see part of it, but the emboss stamps wear down anyway. You can't see them anyway. I never had anybody not take these birth certificates

as 100% authentic. They would grab them, they'd feel it, and they'd go, okay, sit over there. That's it, they'd just like that. They don't read them. They just go, yeah, sit over there. I was almost offended sometimes when they would really scrutinize the documents.

I'd be like, hey, hey, hey, hey. I worked hard on this. Look at this. This is quality shit, bro. So how many years were you doing that? And how much money would you say that you made before you ended up getting caught and having to go on the run? Gosh. I'd say several.

I'd say I made a few million. Let's say I made, I mean, the government said I made 11.5 million. That's not true. Let's say, and I keep in mind, a lot of people were involved in the whole thing. So let's say I made two or three million myself. But I'm also buying property because we're also doing, I also started a development company. So I'm buying property. We've got three or four.

That's not true. We had three houses. We had three houses halfway done. We're starting another one. But we've got a hundred vacant pieces of land. So I'm doing this for a while. Let's say 18 months to two years. I borrow $11.5 million.

I'm making whatever. Let's say I've made $2 or $3 million, but I've dumped it back into real estate. And a friend of mine. knows what I'm doing and I'm helping him out. And one day he's asked me like, he's like, I want to do what you're doing. Is there any way I can get in on this? And I don't really need his help, right? Like, I've already got, I already doing well.

And so I said, look, how about we do this? How about we have, I take you and we have you do one in Orlando. And he says, okay. So he does it in Orlando. I already had a chick that was doing it in Clearwater. So to make a, because we don't have six hours. This girl goes into the bank one day. She closes a loan, gets a check for $95,000.

We go to another title company, walks in there, signs all the documents, and the woman looks at it and says, you don't look like your ID. And by the way, it was her picture. This is what always bothers me. This is why whenever people say, like, you know, what messes, what messed you up. It wasn't anything I did.

It was little things that I couldn't control. the title agent looked at the ID and said, this doesn't look like you. It was her picture. Yeah. So how do you, how can I think? It is her.

And so she calls another title company agent. And she looks at it and she goes, yeah, yeah, no, that's her. What do you mean? That's her? She's, I don't know. It doesn't look like her. Now she changed her hair. And she's like, I mean, I changed my hair.

She's, no, it just doesn't. You know what? She says, let me make a copy. She makes a big copy, blows it up and says, we're going to hold the check. I'm going to get back with you. So when she comes. out, I say, look, we're hit. This woman's going to make four or five phone calls. She's going to

figure it out. And so she said, well, what about the check for 95,000? I went, no, no, no, no, we're done with the 95,000 on check. That's over. We're not cashing that. And she's, I'm like, you know, first of all, you have to go open a bank account. Like, you're not going in, like, it's over. Let's, we'll start over. And keep in mind, this, this chick doesn't have any money. It's easy for me to say, we'll start over, scrap it. We'll do it again. In a month, we'll be in a better position. In her mind, that 95K already exists, yeah. Of course, she thought by the end of the day, She was what, we were closing the three or four loans. She thought by the end of the day, she's going to make $200,000.

Now she's making nothing. And so she says, look, can we, let's give the check. Let me call Travis, my buddy who was doing the same scam in Orlando. Let me call Travis and see if he'll deposit the check. She calls Travis. She tells him, we're on speakerphone. And this was the old, this was, I had one of the first phones that had a speaker on it, too, by the way. It wasn't like this is, this is old.

This is pre-smart phone. So, and we're sitting there talking on this phone. And, and he's like, yeah, give me the check. I'll deposit it. He already had a couple bank accounts open. He was already doing the scam that she was doing. And he's already pulling out money. He already pulled out like 400,000 out of the bank.

And she's like, he's like, yeah, I'm good. He's like, well, you think it's good, Matt? I said, no, I don't think it's good. I think it's bad. I think this woman's going to figure it out. And I think that they're going to attach it. And I think it's going to be a problem. And he's like, yeah, you're, you're, you know, you're fucking, you know, you're

And, you know, she has a pussy. You know, and I'm like, okay. So she gives him the check. He deposited the check. Four or five days later, I call. Because back then you had to wait for checks to clear. I call four or five days later. He says, hey, look, I know what you're calling for.

I'm actually on my way. I'm actually pulling in the bank right now. I said, oh, okay, so you're getting the money. And he's like, no, no, no. They called. They needed me to, they need to see me sign the back of the check. And I go, what? Yeah, yeah.

They said because it was, you know, over a certain amount. of money. Matter of fact, I think that check was 105,000, because I think what he said was because it was over 100,000, they had to witness me, me endorsed the check. And I had deposited many, many checks way over 100,000. And I'm thinking to myself, no, no, no, no, no, there's something's wrong with that, bro. Don't go in the bank. Don't go in the bank. The cops are going to be waiting for you. And he goes, I'm in the parking lot, Matt. There's no cops here. They're not going to be in car and in, you know, in a cruisers. Like they're waiting for you. He's like, no, no, no. And he's like you're, I remember he said, he said, you're shaking like a little girl. You stop shaking like a

little girl, you know, and I was just like, and I, no, no, no, don't do that. Hangs up the phone, goes in. We're waiting around. We're waiting around. Maybe 30 minutes later, I start calling his phone. It goes to voicemail, voicemail, voicemail, voicemail. I'd say this goes on for six hours. And finally, I pick up the, I go to a pay phone. This is when there used to be pay phones. went to a pay phone and call his call the fake identity he was using a guy he was his fake identity was um um um david silver i call david silver's number and a police officer answers this was officer you know this is detective you know john someone's oh who is this and i was like uh this is lee black and he goes uh and i said hey can i talk to david silver and he goes he said no who is this again i'm like

i just hung at the phone i realize what am i doing right hang out the phone and I know he's been arrested. So the next day, I get a phone call. He says, you got to get me out. You got to bomb me out. So I go to his brother-in-law, give him some money. He bonds him out. Then we get him a lawyer.

I give him like $15,000 for the lawyer, because it was a state case. Anyway, he insists. I get him out, get him a lawyer. He's insisting, like, don't worry, bro. Like, you know, that's keep in mind there's $400,000, $400,000 missing. And he's like, if I can just get the money back. No, no, no.

I said, I'll get you the money back. I'll get you the money back. Then nothing will happen. He's like, I might not have to go to jail. But if I do go to jail, like, you'll watch my daughter, right? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. He's like, my sister can watch her, but you'll pay. Absolutely, I'll pay for everything.

I'll pay for everything. And so in the meantime, what I don't know is he's already met with. I paid the lawyer. And the lawyer immediately said, you need to work with a task force against this guy. So there's a task force that's put together. and he's working with the task force. And that goes on for months. And what's funny, too, is looking back on it, how much he was milking me.

He kept coming. He's like, man, you know, I need money. Like, I'm thinking about starting like a tree trimming business. But, you know, I can't do it in my truck. I'm like, well, let's go get you a new truck. We go get you a new truck. Yeah. You know, I don't know what that was.

Back then you could get a truck like a for 15, 20 grand. But he's smart, though. He knows he has you in the position where you're going to do whatever to come happy. Of course. Of course. I'm throwing my, you know, he comes in. He's like, look, I need to, you know, I got to buy some chainsaws, you know, but I want like the industrial ones because the ones from Home Depot are no good. You got to go, they're about two grand. Of course, you know, I want to start. He's starting a tree company business, which he runs to this day, by the way. Then he needs a boom. You know, the boom that goes up in the tree. He needs. Those are 15 grand, by the way. Then that's the kind that you pull behind. I'm, I'm, I'm embarrassed that I didn't suggest you get the boom. That's my fault, Travis. That's my fault. I'm, I'm, I'm, it was stupid. Absolutely. We need to get that. This guy milked me for 25 to 35 grand over the next six months while he's burying me.

Wow. I had dinner with him about six months ago. Anyway, I still talk to him. Okay. He still runs that business. It's just all old school shit at this point. No, no. Oh, no.

He turned it into something. He really turned it into something. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. No, that stuff I just got him started. He's high. Now he's just got like 20 guys working for him, you know, hired laborers and just drives Ryan does quotes all day.

Got it. But so that goes on for, like I said, four, five, six months. And then I'm still running my scam because I don't know anything's going on. And then one day I have a buddy who was a sheriff's deputy and Steve Sutton. And I'm saying this because I know in the comments people will be like, this dude's just throwing names out there, right? You ever get that? No, a little bit, yeah.

Anyway, but Steve Sutton didn't get in any trouble. But Steve Sutton comes to me, this is 20 years ago, I'd love to find Steve. Anyway, Steve wore, he wore overalls. He'd wear like a wife beater and overalls. Not a lot of people wear overalls, well. Right. You know, I'll bet you he wears him to this day. So, and he's a good old boy, sheriff.

And I had done a bunch of loans for him and his wife, maybe about a million dollars worth of bad loans, right? where they bought like a bunch of investment properties. And he had divorced his wife and he was buying additional properties. But these are properties like I'm getting them the loan and we're getting them cash back. And he's fixing up the houses with it, right? But it's still an illegal loan. And because by this point, the FDLE have already served subpoenas on a bunch of the title companies on loans that I was a part of, his name is come up. So one day a woman, so he comes to me one day.

at like four o'clock, and he says, hey, Matt, can I talk to you? And he's in his uniform. I'm like, yeah, what's up? And he says, listen, he said, I used to date a chick that works for the Tampa Police Department. He said, okay. He said, she recently was on a task force. Is it all right? He said, they handed the task force over to the FBI yesterday.

And she came to my house this morning because she said that my name had come up. And I went, really? And now I'm a little worried. And he goes, yeah. And I said, well, what was the task force about? he goes, it's on you. I went, what? He said, do you know somebody

that got arrested in Orlando? And I went, yeah. And he said, well, that person has been cooperating wearing a wire. They've dug through all your stuff. My name came up because some of the properties, you've been helping me and my name come up on some of these files.

He's like, and so basically they handed over all their findings to the FBI and they're going to come arrest you in a few days. And I mean, I'm like, fuck. I'm already on federal probation. So I was, so I sat there and I was like, okay, and I remember he said, what should I do? I was like, what do you mean? He goes, well, they got my name.

I said, no, no, no. I said, you're a deputy. You tell them, you came to me to get the loan. I set up the loan. You showed up, you signed the pay. You gave me your document. You don't know what I sent the lender. You got, you were going to get $40,000 back on this loan and 60 on this one.

And you did, and that was all construction money. And you've been using it for construction. You're not a broker. You don't know how it works. That seems legal, legitimate to you. It's like, okay, okay. And so I tell him all that, and he's fine. And so I end up, he's like, well, what are you going to do?

And I said, oh, I'm leaving. Like, I can't go to prison. I'm a soft white guy. Like, there's no fucking way. I'm going to do well. I've seen Shawshank Redemption. And that guy was like six, four. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to do well in prison.

Right. So, you know, I don't know anything about the federal system. I don't know anything about camps. I don't know anything about lows. Like, I have no idea. Everything I've seen, I saw two movies about prison. One was Shawshank. One was a movie called The Animal Factory, where they basically raped this young guy.

It's not good. That's what they really sell you on is the idea. If you go to prison, you're getting raped. And in reality, unless you are in like the worst or the worst prison, it's pretty unlikely. And they're not going to send me to someplace like that. Financial crimes. That's a financial crime. I have no idea, though.

And I'm already terrified. And I'm already in federal probation. So I end up packing up my stuff. I was able to pull out like 80 grand in like one day. Like from that at 4 o'clock, that day to the next day, I was able to pull out 80 grand. That was it. I just wrote a bunch of checks to people and that was it. Everything else is tied up in credit lines, real estate.

Like I have no time to get anything. I get 80 grand in cash and I take the girl I was dating, which I barely even knew. I've been dating this chick like a month. And so I don't even know her. And so she says, I want to come with you. And I'm like, we never, we never even know each other. Like, what are you talking to? And she's like, you know, it doesn't matter.

I think I'm in love with you. I'm like, don't think I'm in love with you. Like, this is not, you know, but and, you know, I look back and was such a huge mistake. But, you know, I, but I said, okay, absolutely you can come with me, no problem. When you're in that sort of mental state, anybody who's available to you starts to seem a lot more desirable, right? Right. And what, not just that, it's also leaving everybody you know is terrifying. You know, like, I've seen guys that have shown up for prison to turn themselves in to do 12 or 14 years in prison.

Like they showed up at the gate. It's like, you showed up for that. You didn't, like, I would think, why wouldn't you take off on the run? They're like, well, I'd never be able to see my parents again or my kids or my. And so, you know, it's a terrifying for people that I realize that the other thing is most people can't leave and never contact their family again. They just can't do it. And so what the authorities do is they wait and they just watch their family. Because they know they're going to, they keep a tab on their family.

And they, you know, and every once in a while they start to realize that there's a phone call from Iowa that comes in twice a month and on every Friday. And they go, okay, this guy's in Iowa. Let's track it back. We'll go sit on that phone. Let's go sit on that pay phone or whatever. Right. And so anyway, he, so I mean, anyway, I grab her and we, we leave. because everything was going wrong

and at least I didn't have to be alone. And so I take her with me and we go to Atlanta. And so the fraud that I had been running in Tampa was a fraud that I could buy a house, I could make it appear that the house was worth $200,000, I could borrow against that, pull the money out, and I would make six months worth of payments.

And then I'd stop paying. And so this person has bought four or five houses and they'd stop paying on four or five houses. So that person has borrowed a little over a million dollars typically, million, million, million point two. And maybe they've made five or six hundred thousand dollars. Now, I didn't get the five or six hundred thousand dollars. You know, this guy gets 50, this guy gets 50, this guy, people that are doing stuff for me. And then a lot of that's going back into real estate.

I owned a ton of real estate. So, but once that synthetic identity stopped paying, the houses would go into foreclosure. And the bank didn't know they'd been scammed. Because what they thought was, we lent $180,000 or $190,000 on a house that's worth $210 or $2.20. The guy made six months payments, then he stopped paying. So let's just foreclosing the property. By then it's too late for them to check the W-2s. They can't check to see, verify, see if any of this stuff is real.

Right. And so I, for two years, houses are going to foreclosure nonstop. And the bank doesn't even know they've been defrauded. Well, when I went on the run, like the gloves are off, right? And I don't have time to wait six months to prepare these synthetic identities. I need money now. So what I do is we go to an area called Alpharetta, Georgia, and we rent a house from a guy named Michael Shanahan.

It's a house worth $200,000. And I make a fake ID saying, my name is Michael Shanahan. So I, and I get a fake social security number in his name issued by the Social Security Administration. And I start a little credit profile on him. It's not his social security number. It's not his day to birth. It's not really even his full name. His full name was like Michael Shane Shanahan.

And mine was like Michael Sean Shanahan, whatever. So I start getting a couple of credit cards in, but I won't be able to get credit scores for six months. But at least if you pulled the credit, there's something there. Right. That verifies like where I work, that sort of thing. Because when I apply for the credit cards, of course, I say I work at wherever, whatever institution I said I worked at. And then what I do is I go downtown and I pull the title to his house. And when I pull the title to his house, I see that he's got three mortgages on there.

He's got a first mortgage, a second mortgage, and a home equity line of credit. I create three different satisfaction of mortgages. So when you pay off the mortgage to your house to Bank of America, Bank of America mails a one-page document. It's called the satisfaction of mortgage. Two public records. It's notarized. It's got the information that's on the original mortgage. and it says that you have paid off,

says Adam paid off this mortgage. Satisfied. They record that document and guess what? Your mortgage disappears. So now you don't know anything. So I did that three different times with three different Bank of America

because each one looked a little different. And so I sent those, I went in and handed it to them actually. They recorded them. All those mortgages were satisfied. So now I'm living in a house worth $200,000 that is bought 10 years ago

as Michael Shanahan. I then turn a house. around, so I have no mortgages on the house. It's free and clear. I then call three hard money lenders, guys that just lend you money based on the equity in your property. I call three of them. Each one of them shows up at, one shows up at like nine in the morning, one shows up at one, one shows up at four. They all walk around the house. They go, yeah, I'll lend you $150,000 on this. I go, okay. I then schedule three different title companies, or three different closings with three different title companies, and we close those loans. Wow. Now, they don't care if I have a job.

I do tell them, I have a job. I have W-2's pay, but they don't really care about that. They're only lending 150,000. Then they charge huge fees. And I end up closing those loans. So I end up making a profit of roughly $400,000. So we close all at the same time. 400. So there's three mortgages, about 450 roughly. After closing costs everything. Let's say it's about 400,000. Take that money. I deposited into multiple banks and I start pulling the money out of the bank. So now I've got money. Yeah. In this particular case, I was pulling out 8,000, 7,000, 6,000 out of many, many different bank accounts. I only had a problem one time towards the very end. I got frustrated and I went to cash a check for $29,000.

And when I cashed that check, I'd cashed the check in the name. I had a fake, well, it was a real ID. By this point, I'm actually going into the DMV and getting the DMV to issue me real driver's licenses, real IDs. And I had a driver's license in the name of a guy named Scott Cugno. And so I had gotten a cash license. Shears check issued to him from the title company, from the closing. And so I go into the bank and I go to cash this check for $29,000. And the manager comes over and he's like, yeah, something's

not right. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, I don't know. Something's not, something's off. Let me, we're going to have to check on this. I said, absolutely, no problem. I need two forms of ID. No problem. Here's this. Scott, I also opened several bank accounts in his name. So I have a, I have a debit card. I have a visa. Yeah, sure. No problem. And I sit there and I wait. And They make a bunch of phone calls. And then at some point, they call me. Somebody calls me, and I don't recognize the number. I pick up the phone.

I answer the phone. And it's a woman. And she says, hi, is this Michael Shanahan? And I go, yes, it is. And she said, hi, I'm, this is Kimberly from SunTrust Bank. I'm just calling to verify that you issued a cashier's check or wrote a check. to somebody's in here. They're trying to cash large check.

His name is Scott Cugno. I wonder if you could verify the funds. And I go, absolutely. I said, yeah, that's Scott Cugno. And the check is for $29,000. Is there an issue? And she goes, no, no, we're just verifying that it's. I said, oh, okay.

And I'm like, how did you get my number? And she went, oh, we called the title company because they're a client. And we called them. And they said you had had a closing. and they checked the, they checked your application and they gave us the phone number. I'm like, oh, okay.

If they had done anything, if they looked anywhere else, they would have got the real Michael Shanahan. Instead, they called me. And I'm like, okay, okay, well, thank you. And she's like, yeah, I hope that's okay. I said, no, it's no problem. I hang out the phone.

Manager comes walking in five minutes later, says, hi, Mr. Cognow, we've got the money. He and another woman walked out. I'm assuming it was Kimberly, whatever her name was. And they count out $29,000. And I scoop up to $20,000. I put it in my pocket.

And I start walking out. And I remember he stopped me. And he said, Mr. Cugnow? And I said, yeah, what's up? And he says, I'd like to say that I feel very apprehensive about this transaction. I go, really? What is it exactly? And he goes, I can't put my finger on it.

And I go, it'll come to you. And I turn around and just walk out. Get in my car. I'm like three or four days later, the Secret Service showed up. But by that point, and I'd taken out 400,000, I'm gone. Yeah. And look, there's other things I was doing, right?

Like, we did the same scam in Tallahassee, where actually the chick I left with, her name was Becky. Becky pretended to be a woman by the name of Teresa Knight, and she borrowed a mortgage on a house. So we're doing this. We're getting funds. I did the same thing. Well, at this point, so at this point, I realize that I can't keep driving around in these names.

And keep in mind now they have the name Scott Cugnow. Yeah. That's trash. So when I leave, when I pack everything up and we moved, like we packed up and we moved to South to Charlotte, North Carolina. Well, I have to trash everything and start over. Right. And I realize what's going to make it faster, instead of making the synthetic identities, what makes it faster is we go to, we start, I start surveying homeless people. You know, don't judge me.

So I start surveying homeless people. And what I do is I have a statistical survey. And I would go out and I made a little badge. I actually had the picture on the badge was I pulled it from my wanted poster because at this point there's a bunch of newspaper articles on me in the Tampa Tribune and there was a newspaper used to be called the St. Petersburg Times. They did like a bunch of them talking about because at this point they're wanted. And so when the thing in Atlanta hits, it's like, hey, he's wanted here and now he's in Atlanta. And he just robbed, you know, I think they had some number like, oh, it was a million dollars. It was $450,000.

It wasn't a million. And then there's one in, you know, in, in, in, uh, Tallahassee. And we've, there's more in, in Orlando. And they're putting, they're making it sound like I'm doing it everywhere. Like, um, so I go to Charlotte and I start running a scam in, in, um, Columbia, South Carolina. But I'm doing this. Now I'm surveying homeless people. I make a statistical survey form.

I made the form up. get a clipboard, make a little fake ID that says statistical surveyor. And I walk around where homeless guys that look about my age. And I tell them, hey, I'm taking a survey for the Salvation Army. We're trying to determine where we place our next homeless facility. And would you mind taking a survey? They go, I'm not interested. I go, well, it pays $20 cash right now.

You're going to give me $20 cash right now. Yeah, right now. It takes five minutes, bro. And they go, yeah, what do you need? I go, no, I'll fill it out. And I just ask them the questions. Name, date of birth, social security number, mother's maiden name, all the things. All the things you should never give anybody.

And they just readily give me everything. And, you know, where you're ever in the military, have you ever had, what states have you had an identification in? Have you ever had a U.S. passport? Everything. So I would then go order all of their documents. I'd order their high school transcripts. I'd order their birth certificate, their social security card. I would register to vote in their name.

And I'd go to a state where they had never had an ID and I would register to vote in that state or even get a make a fake lease. and I'd go into the DMV and I'd get them to issue me a driver's license in their name. And then I turn around, I'd get a passport. So I was able to travel, right? So, you know, while on the run, I'd been to Jamaica, Bermuda, Mexico, Croatia, Greece. We went to Italy. I mean, so I'm traveling on these on fake passports. And what would be the smartest move for you in retrospect to have done at this point

to just go to some foreign country and set up shop and just never come back to America? Yeah, but I, you have to understand that there had not been a time when I hadn't been able to talk my way out of something. Right. And I give you an example, like, I'm just driving a car. I'm driving, first of all, if you don't, if your driver's license doesn't matter because you're dumping it in six months or three months, you'll drive like a maniac. I'm I'm driving 95 miles an hour.

This is back when like the speed limits, what, 55 or 65. I'm driving 90. But that is the kind of thing you should avoid if you just don't want to get pulled over in general, right? But if I get pulled over, listen, this one guy got so many tickets in his name, I ended up having to go to traffic school so he didn't lose his license. I mean, I got like two cars and an apartment in his name. So I don't want to lose his license. Yeah. But I mean, yeah, I, so I'm getting pulled over, but I'm not getting pulled over with like a dead body in the trunk and a broken tail light.

You pull me over the. My name is, you know, my name is, let's say, Walter Holcomb. The car is Walter Holcomb. the full coverage insurance, Walter Holcomb, everything's perfectly fine. Everything's legit. Everything's paid for. So it's not like,

like, hey, you've got a suspended license? Absolutely. I do not. I just got the license three months ago. And I'm the only one. Walter Holcomb lives under a bridge. You didn't even have a license. Right.

And I know it's good because I ran a copy of his driver's license report. And I even got some guys that would have issues and I'd fix the issues. So they owed $400. I'll pay the $400. So anyway, I end up, so while I'm in Sharver, Charlotte, and this is how brazen it was, while I'm Charlotte, I end up going to Columbia, South Carolina, as a guy named Gary Sullivan, which I had was a homeless guy that I had an ID in his name. I buy two houses. I borrow 1.3 million or 4 million? One point, 1.3 million? I think it's 1.3 million on these houses, multiple mortgages. I'm going in the bank, cashing the checks, or, you know, pulling out cash. And I have whatever, 10 bank accounts. I go in one of the banks, and what had happened was I had borrowed one of the mortgage companies.

It's a little complicated, but basically they had sent an abstractor to public records, to check public records, because I was going to borrow money against that property. But they did it after everybody else did. So by the time I was closing loans, their abstractor showed up and saw that there were other mortgages showing up and realized this is a fraud. So they called Wachovia. They called a bunch of banks, but Wachovia was one of them. And I went into Wachovia Bank and I'm getting a check for nothing, four or five grand. And the girl sees me and she says, hold on a second. She walks in the back.

But it was a new account and that was a normal thing. If you ask for more than four grand, they had to call it in. They always did this. So I asked for like six grand, five grand, whatever. She goes in the back and I'm waiting. And all of a sudden two deputies walk in and they grab me from behind and put cuffs on me. And they say, hey, you know, you're not under arrest. We're just detaining you until the detective gets here.

So they walk me into the whatever, the manager's office, and I sit down. Like, what's going on? They said, you know, we don't know. We were just told to detain you. I said, okay. So the detective shows up. He walks in, and I remember thinking, I didn't know much about law enforcement, right? So I remember just thinking it was like, I knew this, at this point, the Secret Service and the FBI were looking for me.

And so I thought it was like an FBI agent. The guy walks in, he says, hey, I'm a detective. with the financial crimes division from whatever the name of the county is that county like Richland County and he shows me his badge and he says he wants to let you know you're being detained because there's been a complaint file

blah blah blah and I'm like okay he said but he's calling me Gary Sullivan so I'm realizing he doesn't have any idea who I am and he says I said what's the issue and he goes well the issue is that they they say you borrowed three mortgages on

this one of the piece of property that you phone. I actually had like six mortgages. So they only found three because keep in mind they mail them in. It takes several days to get there. First of all, you close. It takes them a few days to prepare the documents to mail them in. It gets mailed in. Then it sits on somebody's desk for it. So it could be weeks before it shows up. So three showed up. And I went, I looked at him and I went, is that illegal? And he goes, you know, I don't know. I don't know. And I remember thinking, I'm walking out of here. So what ends up happening is he and I talk. We get on the phone with the head of Wachovia's fraud department.

And they are telling him, the guy is telling him, this guy's running a scam. Arrest him. He's saying, I don't know if he is running a scam. My story was I went into Wachovia. I told them I needed to get a mortgage because I needed to borrow $300,000 because I was going to start flipping properties. And he said, that's right. You own another piece of property.

I said, right, I'm rehabbing that property. He was okay. So I said, but I'm going to borrow a bunch of them, right? And I said, so I'm going to do a bunch of them. So I need to get 300,000. They said they could do it. I said, so the one loan officer at Wachovia said, I can get your first mortgage for 190. I've got a friend that works over at a SunTrust.

She can get you one, a second mortgage for 150, 180. And then I have another friend that can get you a helock. I was like, okay, cool. And I looked at him and he goes, did you think that was strange? I go, is it? And he goes, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. He doesn't know.

And people had back then people had they don't now because of the Dodd-Frank Act But back then you could get a first mortgage or second mortgage and a he lock people lots of people had them And so I explained that well he's a guy on what Kobe is screaming they're all first mortgage But nowhere on a mortgage does it say it's a first second or third mortgage because what determines the placement of the mortgage It's the placement that determines it's a first second or third so I said I read those documents I said none of them said they were first or second and they just they were just liens and so So I know entirely too much for this guy, right? So we're arguing back and forth.

He's saying, this guy's doing this, this guy's doing that, this is a scam. And then he says, look at his ID. His ID starts with zero zero zero. It's a fake ID. And the investigator, detective, he says, no, no, I ran this guy through NCIC. This guy, this is Gary Sullivan. This is a real ID. Our ID start with zero, zero, zero.

This guy's out of like California. And this guy's in South Carolina. Right. He doesn't know what the IDs look like. So, and I remember, I lean into him and I go, bro, are you serious? I said, so now I'm not Gary Sullivan? I go, what are we doing here? He goes, I know, Gary, I know.

So, I mean, he's totally on my side. Right. And so we end up, he ends up hanging up on the guy telling him he's going to talk to his lieutenant, talk to the district attorney. He has to be following him back to the police department. and fill out a report on what my version of what happened was. And so I fill out the whole thing. And he at that point, he tells me to wait in the, in the, like, they have cubicles.

You can't stay in the cubicle, right? So he can't leave me in the cubicle while he had to go and get like the lieutenant to sign off on his report. So he said, can you wait in the hallway? And I said, sure. So I go wait in the hallway. And there's all these wanted posters. my Secret Service's most wanted poster is on the thing. It was the only color wanted poster on the thing.

And keep in mind, I mean, we don't have, like, I can tell you multiple times that I went into places. And there was actually one time a title agent that actually recognized me from my wanted poster, which was in the back room, gets up, goes in the back room, looks at the wanted poster, and he got confused, right? Like he's looking at it and he said, now keep in mind by this point, I'd had, I've had a nose job. I've had two hair transplants. I had what they called it a mini face lift. Liposuction.

Teeth were done. Wow. So, and even though I look the same, you know, it's subtle, right? But I also, the picture that he had is a picture of me looking crazy. Like my hair's long and it's combed crazy. And I'm there with short hair, a nice, you know, buttoned down shirt. Like I look like a professional. That guy looks like a lunatic.

He's wanted by the police. I look like an old person. He looks at my application and it says that I've worked for the same job for like seven years and just recently moved to the town. And he looked at this. He said, well, this guy just moved from Florida. This says this guy's wanted out of Atlanta. This is not the same guy.

Right. Even though it said wanted for bank fraud identity theft, it didn't matter. For him it made sense. He went back. He let me sign all the papers. I walked out with a check for $200,000. And what year are we at this point? 2005, probably.

Oh, okay. So I get caught in 2006. So what happens is I end up leaving there. The girl I was dating at the time, right, Becky, we ended up getting into this huge argument. And we'd been in arguments before where, I mean, we're screaming matches, right? Like yelling and screaming. And the cops would show up.

Now, of course, I knew the cops were all night. She's screaming at 2 o'clock. in the morning in an upscale high rise in downtown Charlotte, I know the cops are coming. And back then, if the cops come on a domestic violence, somebody goes to jail no matter what. So I'm bolting. And this has happened multiple times. So we get into a screaming match at her new place in Houston, downtown Houston, 20th, some odd, 20, 25th floor, some brand new building. And we get to a screaming match.

And I'm like, yeah, I'm done. I'm done. So we end up arguing over the who's, we only had five or six. $600,000. We argue over it. I end up taking $100,000 and leaving. Now, I wanted to split it, but basically the ultimatum was I'll call the police. And so, and the argument for her was, you should take $100,000 because you can go and make a million dollars. I can't make a million dollars. Like I can't, I'll have to live off of this. And I was like, you know, you're right. But she's not wanted. She can get a job. Oh, she is at that point. She's already done some mortgage

fraud of her own. She's also verifying people's employment. Okay. She's, uh, she's opening up bank accounts. We're depositing money into, and she's got fake IDs. She's driving a car that's in somebody else's name. She's got a driver's license. She's got a passport in someone else's name. Sounds like a good negotiator that she was able to tell you to only take 100 grand. You know what's so funny. Every time I would tell this story in prison and they're not that is nothing against black guys, but the, every black guy, every one of them would say, why didn't you kill her? That's why I was like, I must be a black guy. That's I was thinking, I'm like, wow, this has got to be the part of the story where he kills her,

but I know you ain't going to tell her. I always was just like, well, I'm not going to kill her. And they'd be like, well, bro, it's half a million dollars. You left her with half a million? I'm like, yeah. On the hood, people kill women or whoever for like five grand, never mind half a million. Yeah, it didn't even occur to me. I'm just trying to get out of there before she gets so loud that the cops show up.

Right. So I take off. I actually called, I was called people that I knew from back home. home just to say, hey, what's going on? How are you guys doing? Everything's good. And one of the people say, listen, I've talked to the FBI several times. This is a broker that I knew. And she said, the name of the, or that the FBI agent wants you to call her. So she, so I call her. Well, at first I say, I'm not going to call her. You might be able to turn yourself in. And maybe you only get a couple of years. Like, what do you understand? It's getting worse. There's got to be, there's

newspaper articles every week. So I call the FBI agent, talk to her a couple of times, try and tell her, hey, you know, what can I get? She ended up saying like seven years just for Tampa. We go back and forth because, you know, keep mine at this point, there's millions at this point, right? So it's on top of what it's already there. So we go back and forth, back and forth. I realize she's lying to me about the seven years because that was seven years. because that was seven years for Tampa, not for Atlanta, not for what I just did.

Right. Which they haven't even found out about yet. Anyway, I end up hanging up the phone on her. I'm not turning myself in. I'm not tearing myself in for seven years when that doesn't include this other stuff. Yeah. So I chuck the phone. I go back to Charlotte to pick up my car. the what's her name the chick kept all my shit.

So I'm, I go back at 100 grand in cash and I get in a rider and I'm driving around and ride her truck on, you know, like this is not good. I get back there. I drop off the truck. I go in to get my vehicle. I get my vehicle.

I remember for some reason I thought if I could just get in my vehicle, bro, I'll be all right. And I got my vehicle. So it was in one of those under one of those, you know, parking garages, the concrete ones.

So I'm driving down the whole thing. And I pull out. And I just remember thinking, bro, I'm good. You're good. You're going to be okay. So I drive to the Starbucks, which is right across the street from my apartment complex.

I'm going to get some coffee because I'm leaving. I'm going to go to Nashville, right? Because I listen to country music. Like I'm sure a lot of your listeners. So I think, I want to go to Nashville. Like, I like country music. I'll go to Nashville. And so I walk in a Starbucks.

I order my stuff. And there's two people from the apartment complex that are there. Keep in mind. It's been about five days since I left Charlotte. Right. Since I walked, I'm sorry, Columbia, Columbia or Columbus, since I walked out of that Columbus Police Department, it's been five days. I'm now at a place where the vehicle that I was driving was registered to this address.

So I get my coffee. These people are looking at me from the apartment complex and they're having a meltdown. The female of the two walks out the back. The guy just stands there staring at me. He gets his coffee. He's just standing there. It's crowded. And it's, you know what I'm saying?

It's crowded. but I'm like, like, I don't know. Something's wrong. And what I thought it was is it's like the fifth of the month, six of the month. I haven't paid my rent. And I'm thinking they probably just put like, like they're taking it serious, right?

Like, I don't know why he's what she went to go do. Anyway, I get my coffee. I go outside. He follows me outside. I get in the car. I start my car.

I'm playing with the CDs. This is back when you had CDs. They would come in like a rack of CDs and you'd shove it in the thing. Yeah. So I'm getting a CD watching him. I'm totally not concerned. But I am like what this is. I almost want to get out and be like,

bro, what's your problem? What's happening? But I'm too short to be confrontational. So, you know, I'm just kind of looking at him. And all of a sudden I put on my seatbelt, I'm sitting here, I'm starting to start the car, and he starts screaming. He's right here, he's right here. And I look up, I look in the rear mirror, and there's

two guys running towards the back of the car, and I punch it. And I fucking take off down the road. Now, it's funny because it's, you know, it would be, it had posy traction. I mean, you know, it had that, you know, now you hit the gas, it doesn't spin out.

Yeah. But like in the movie, wouldn't it be great? It would slide sideways and it could, but none of that happened. You know, cars would peel off and squeal and I'd cut off traffic, but really there was nobody there. So I just drove off. You know, I was already driving off. But, you know, and when I explained it, I say, I take off everybody, I can see in

everybody's mind like the car side slide sideways and he takes off and none of that happened. I just drove off. And the guys were, but they did run kind of in the middle of the street and start and look at my tag number, right? But it was the same vehicle that they had anyway. And so they did put a Bolo out. Now, I always thought that was the FBI, but when I got the Freedom of Information Act,

once I got arrested, I was in prison. It turns out that was the U.S. Marshals, which I didn't even know really at that time how involved they were, but they were actually flying all over the country looking for me. Some of them were false leads and stuff, but they were knocking on doors. They were serious.

So I ended up going to Nashville. Well, actually, when I left there, I actually drove straight to a homeless shelter and surveyed like three guys. But I get to Nashville. I order a bunch of, I actually rent an apartment in a place called Green Hills, which is where like a really nice area. I rent an apartment. I order all the documents. And probably within five or six days, I've got a driver's license. And the day after that, I've got a new car.

and the name of one of the homeless guys his name was Joseph Carter Marion his name was no Marion what wait no it was Joseph Marion Carter Jr and I went by Carter so I bought a car

I got an apartment got a driver's license got a car everything so I'm I'm set up and I basically start running the same scam again I start buying cheap properties recording the value high

driving up the price of the area. I end up borrowing like two and a half million, three and a half million. And I started a development company. And I figured, I'm just going to hang out here. I start dating a chick name Amanda. I never see Becky again.

This takes a lot of guts to do this all over again in another city. But I also have no money. I mean, I've got maybe 100 grand. Man, I'm cutting through it fast, right? Like, you know, you're staying in hotels.

You're buying stuff. You're buying cars. So it's going quick. But very quickly, I start borrowing money. I end up with this chick, Amanda, and we live together for about 18 months. I meet her, and we start just running a development company. But I'm also doing the refi scam, and properties are going to foreclosure,

and I'm just keeping the money, and the banks don't have any clue. And everything's going great. And then one day, she found out who I was. How'd she find out? So the way that happened is that we had a corporate lawyer who was setting up the corporations and doing things for us, right? So one day she called me and she said, hey, I need you to send me a copy of some letter I had signed,

something in some contract and agreement. And for some reason, I faxed it to her and she said she didn't get it. This is back from faxes, there's no faxes. So I call Amanda and say, look, can you print that doc out and fax it to her or email, whatever? She goes online, she goes on my computer and opens up the computer and when she goes into Word,

she finds a letter, and it was said letter to mom and dad. And she didn't know what my real name was. She knew I was on the run. Right. She did know that. So she starts looking and she looks at it. She looks at the letter and it says to Georgia Margaret Cox and it's signed Matthew.

So she looks at Matthew Cox. Boom, Secret Service. I was on the Secret Service's Most Wanted List. It's on the FBI's Most Wanted List. I'm on the U.S. Marshall's Most Wanted List. There's 35 newspaper articles about me. There's just, it's everywhere. Wow.

So now she's, and I find out that she finds out. We have a whole argument about it, but I don't leave. I should have left. I didn't. You know, I thought I was in love. You know, she won't tell anybody. So I stay there, but she's constantly checking my name. And so one day she checks and she sees that Dateline is about to do a one hour, they're going to do a one hour special on me.

Oh, boy. Because Becky had been caught. And Becky's going to be interviewed. Becky, her lawyer, the U.S. attorney, the Secret Service agent. And I'm thinking, this isn't good. You know, back then, you could hide forever. There was no real social media. It wasn't what it is now.

That's why I just keep thinking about throughout this whole thing. It's like, holy shit, this is such a forgotten era where a lot of this stuff was possible. You could never do this now. You couldn't go on the run like that now. Because even in the airports and should they have like facial recognition technology. Yeah, I'd be done. Yeah. I'd be done.

Yeah. So, but I'm not going to beat out dateline. Right. Because what's going to happen is back then there's three or four. There's four. There's your local channel. And then there's like, there's like, three major channels and then maybe you've got some you've got cable but it's still not it's a bunch

of other local everybody you've interacted with over the years is is going to immediately become aware of this that's exactly what's going to happen yeah somebody that i've but the barista at starbucks is going to be watching this and go holy shit that's that guy carter he comes in every day and he gets a vanilla latte oh my gosh he's going to call the police because they make me sound like a horrible person he's going to do the right thing he's going to call the police he's going to turn me in so i you know even if it's not then, let's say nobody, let's say I up and left. Right.

It doesn't matter in six months when they replayed the episode. I'm screwed again. Right. I'm done. So I start thinking, I'm going to go to Australia. You know, I'll get some more plastic surgery.

I'll go to Australia. And Australia at that time, you could go to Australia and they would make you a permanent resident alien. They wouldn't take your fingerprints. You just had to show up with a copy of your, of your criminal record, which you get printed out at the local police place.

And the guy that I was, who has a passport and a driver's license does not have a criminal record. So he can go in. I can go in with his criminal record, which there isn't one. They had a couple of misdemeanors. And if you showed up with $200,000 and a business plan,

they make you a permanent resident alien. I can do all that. So that was my plan that a man and I were going to go do that. And what ends up happening is as we're pulling out cash, she tells a friend of hers. What's happening?

Her friend calls a Secret Service. Secret service sits on my house. for three or four days. One day I pull up, I get out of the car, boom, they pull up. Get on the ground, get on the ground. I get on the ground. They handcuffed me. And it's over. It's over. It's over. Wow. I'm done. You know, it'd be great if it was a super sexy ending, right? Like, you know, there was a car chase, and I ran and dove off of a cliff and swam towards a boat. Right. There's none of that. No. So you don't even have enough money at this point to mount, like any serious legal defense. Oh, no, I had tons of money. Oh, okay. They took it all.

Oh, oh. Mind it's all fraudulent. Like immediately they go in and seize all your accounts, which is funny because it, you would think it would be difficult, but really all that is, is they just, they prepare a document, they go into a judge, they say, we've already got this guy indicted, we, we know who he is, here's who he's pretending to be. We need to sign this. Judge signs it. They walk in the bank, say, boom, freeze all of his accounts, get us cashier's checks, give it to us to the federal government. They just take it. It's gone. Right. It's gone. Wow. So I've got no money. I get a public defender.

And I'm completely. Yeah. I'm just done. And where do they, uh, how does the trial go? There's no trial. No trial. I can't go to trial. I'm guilty.

I'm extremely guilty. Right. And they got a mountain evidence. Yeah. My, I get a public defender. Um, who's yelled at me actually a couple years ago because she's like, you, you, you make it sound like I didn't do anything. And it's not that you didn't.

So I shouldn't, and I shouldn't say that because I do the way I say. have said it in the past is like she didn't do me any favors she did but the truth is there were no favors to do there was there there's two things that happen can happen at this point you can say okay how much time and just take it or you can cooperate there's only two things right now by the time I'm I sit down right with her she's already told me everybody in Florida has cooperated right and you don't really have anybody that you could throw in there that's done anything even close to as bad as what you've done. Right. Like Amanda actually has done nothing. Right. She was in the dark. Right. And to be honest, in white collar crimes, you don't have to, you know, a lot of guys will say, oh, you got to give somebody bigger than you. Not really. A lot of times it's the big guy. He gives all the little guys and he gets a great deal. Right. So you could be the, you know, the kingpin and you just say, hey, here's all my distributors and here's the guys they work for. And here's the guy.

doing the money laundering. And of course, they're all under him. And that guy ends up getting five years, and those guys all get 20. Yeah. So, but I don't even have that because everybody's already cooperated. And as time goes by, I get arrested at the end, like the very end of 2006.

So as 2007 is passing, the people always say the 2008 financial crisis, right? But that's because that's when the tart bill was signed. It actually starts in 2007. In early 2007, they start to see the ripples. This bank starts failing. Two months later, another bank fails. Two months later, four banks fail.

Then Lehman fails. Then it's like, holy, towards the end. So by the time I get sentenced, banks are failing all over the place. They're talking about a bailout. They're, you know, everything's about mortgages, mortgages, mortgages. and I get sentenced to 26 years. Wow. Now, I'm not, no, I don't want to lie and say,

oh, you know, when they came to me and said, hey, we want you to help us out. I'm like, I'm ready to help you. What do you need? What do you want these people to have said? Right. I'm ready to cooperate. I'm ready to cut everybody's throat.

But the truth is, when I go in and I talk to them, they already know that. Yeah. They already know that. They actually have a stack of FBI 302 forms this big. And that's just, I mean, we're talking about that right there is, I don't know, that's about 3,000 pages, 4,000, no, man, about 2,000 pages of just FBI 302s,

which are interviews. Not to mention the Secret Service, they don't have nearly as much because they came in on the tail end. They don't have as many, as much money wasn't, but it ended up being whittled down to, like, personally, I think I got them down to 15 million. They said I owed, like, it started high, but I got them down to like $6 million. None of that mattered, though.

By the time I get into sentencing, I get sentenced, I get 26 and a half years. Uh-huh. And that's it. I get 26 and a half year. I go to prison. Okay. But I don't do 26 and a half years. Yeah.

How do you guys cut down so much? Well, I'm slippery, slippery motherfucker. Okay. So what ends up happening is they ask me, now date lines already come out. And I know we're tight on. No, that's good. We probably got like another 40 minutes, yeah. Oh, shit.

Okay. So I was really racing through things. So what ends up happening? happening. Well, this is actually good because your viewers will, this will be great. Okay. They'll be very upset. Disgusted. So I get 26 years. I go to prison. I go to the medium security prison at Coleman because I had 26 years. If you have over 20 years in federal sentence, you have to go to a medium. Even though my, even though my security level was the security level, I was like at a two. And I was only at a two because I had a detain.

So as soon as I got rid of the detainer, I dropped down to like a one or a zero. I have no criminal. I have no security. My level security levels, it's not existent, but they still sent me to a medium. So while I was waiting to be sentenced, my lawyer had told me, listen, Dateline wants to interview you. And I was like, okay, well, I don't want to be interviewed. I mean, why would I be interviewed?

And she said, well, because the U.S. attorney said that they'll consider that substantial assistance. Oh. And I was like, okay, now substantial assistance is if, is if you provide assistance in a case, and if you provide assistance in that case, if you further the case, they can reduce your sentence for it. They don't use that part of it ever, right? Very seldom. Typically, so it's, it's written where it says if you further the case or you, and you give them that, they can give you a reduction for that. if the information you give them leads to an indictment or arrest,

they can give you a reduction for that. If they give it to you at sentencing, it's called a 5K1. If they give it to you afterwards, it's a Rule 35 after sentencing. So, and I've just heard lots of people explain this, and sometimes they get it wrong. They're like, no, no, if they give you information beforehand,

but they don't use it till after, it doesn't matter. You can give them information anytime. Once you're sentenced, it's a Rule 35. So she's saying, look, we're trying to get you a 5K1, but I didn't give them any information that led to any arrests, not for lack of trying. So I know people will be like the snitch, motherf-

Honestly, snitching has been so normalized in hip hop over the last few years that it's going to be offensive to a much smaller number of people than it would have been a few years ago. Listen, I'm so used to it at this point. It's just the screaming and hollery just cracks me up. Also within hip hop, there's like generally an assumption or like a kind of revised mentality, which is like if you're in a gang and you're snitch on your fellow gang members, then you're a snitch. But if you commit crimes and or if you are, if you snitch on somebody and you are just a civilian, all good. Right.

And I feel like in a situation like yours where it's like, you know, it's a bunch of scamming and stuff. I mean, everybody's already told on me. Yeah. Yeah. Like everybody's like it's also. And the other thing is, listen, I have. I didn't burn a piece of paper. I didn't take an oath.

I didn't, there was no ceremony. Like, I didn't promise anybody I wouldn't f-rat him out. They all ratted me out. Like, I'm just assuming this is, like I said, I wish I'd done it earlier. That would have saved me a felony and my whole life could have been different. Yeah. So, but it is what it is. So I end up, I get interviewed by Dateline.

Like, I mean, the marshals let them in. They come in. That guy with a long face comes in and, you know, you hurt people. You know, that guy, forget his name. Yeah. He comes in and they, so they, they'd already done one, one hour special. They're now doing a second one cut with my interviews. So that, they do that one.

And they're doing this at the, we're doing it at the behest of the U.S. attorney, which said, we'll consider it substantial assistance. And, and even though you're not giving them information that you didn't already tell them, right? You're not giving dateline anything new, right? They're saying it's a public service announcement. Okay. My lawyer is saying, well, yeah, she can do that. She's mad, they can give it to whatever they, they can, whatever they can,

whatever they can justify giving it to you, that's what they can give it to you for. And I've never read, at this point, I've never read what a, what a, what a reduction is or substantial. I've never read any of this. I'm stuck in a, in a U.S. Marshal's holdover. There's no, I'm not looking into. I'm assuming she's handling it.

So, and I also am assuming I'm going to prison for a long time. She told me over and over again, you're getting, you're going to end up with probably 12 to 14 years. And then, then, they're, you know, they're going to reduce your sentence for all this, for doing this stuff that you've done, which is the dateline thing. And she's like, they're going to, you may not be out in five or six years. I'm like, holy shit, that would be amazing. So I go to sentencing. I get sentenced.

I've done the dateline. But just before the sentencing. So let me go back to that. This is always funny. I go back to that. And just the night before, I call her and I said, hey, have they told you what they're going to recommend yet? And she was, yeah, I just got off the phone about an hour ago.

And I said, what did they say? And she said, the U.S. attorney said that they're not going to give you a 5K1. And I went, really? Why? And she said, I said, but I did dateline. She was, I know, and they played it. And they said, it just wasn't enough. I said, but they said they said they'd consider it substantial assistance.

And she said, I know. And they said, we did consider it. And it's not enough. Considerate substantial assistance, which to me meant it was a guarantee. No, no, we said we'd consider it. To me, that's a guarantee. That's not what considerer means. We'll think about it.

So. That's part of being a criminal is that you kind of always look on the bright side, when it comes to things that will benefit you. Right, right. Hope's getting me through. You need a lot of hope to get by, yeah. So I end up, so I get said it's 26 years. I go to the medium.

I'm at the medium. I'm super depressed, obviously. And I'm at the medium. I'm there for three years. I'm bitching and complete. Like everybody, I'm bitching they got too much time. This is bullshit. 26 years.

Oh my gosh. Whatever's happened? This is wrong. It's everybody else's fault. I didn't deserve this. Especially when you had that. five years in your head for a little while there. Of course. Yeah. You know, you get married to that.

And so, you know, I'm, but I eventually, you know, I, I, there's a guy there and he's like, listen, stop bitching. You're sitting at a table bitching about your 26 years with two other guys that are fucking leaving here in a box. He's like, I get it. It's a long time. You shouldn't have got that kind of time. But come on, man, stop. So I was like, he's like, for people going to hate being around you, they're going to hate you. You're going to hate yourself. It's not a good way to do your time. And he was right. And he was absolutely right. But it took a few. years. So towards the end of that first three years, I decide I'm going to start writing. I'm going to write a book. Because everybody kept telling me, bro, your story is amazing.

Like, okay, I'm going to write a book. So I write, I write, I start writing a memoir. But by this point, they move me to the, to the low. So I write my memoir in the low. And I don't know what I'm doing. I, I'd read a bunch of books, but I bought the book, oh gosh, like a, a, a, how to write memoirs for dummies and the idiots guy to writing true crime. You know, and I read them. And I, so I write the book. I rewrite it a few times. It takes about a year.

And do you have anybody on the outside that you're still close with at this point? At this point, yeah, I have my mom. Okay. And I have one or two people that will, you know, like, it's funny. The people that will come see you are the people that you did nothing for. The people that made a million or half a million or made tons of money that didn't go to jail. They hate your guts. They don't want to answer your phone calls.

I was like, you made a million dollars and you didn't go to jail. And you told on me and you won't answer my calls. But this person who is a childhood friend that I hadn't even talked to for five or six years. This person shows up. This person put money on my books. Like, you know, so I mean, think about my mom. Like, I basically just took off one day. I'm just gone.

She's coming to see me every two weeks. So I'm sitting there at this point. You know, I had been on the run for three years. I've been doing the total was probably close to five years. I'm sorry, close to 10 years that I was just committing all these scams of the course of 10 years. I'm in prison. I start writing my memoir. I write my memoir.

I end up getting a literary agent. I end up writing another guy's memoir by the name of Ephraim Devoroli. Did you ever see the movie Wardoggs with Jonah Hill? I think I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wait, why are you writing someone else's? Well, he's going to pay me. So we have an agreement.

And he's leaving soon, and he needs a memoir because Warner Brothers was about to make the movie Wardogs. So they didn't know that you wrote it. You just wrote it. No, no, no, I worked with him. But you worked with him, but like the publishing company or whoever is making it. No, no, you're a ghost writer. Most people don't even write their memoirs.

Right, yeah. It'll be like, and his, it was Effron Devereiroli and Matthew Cox on the thing. Okay. But so I'm doing that. While that's happening, American greed reaches out to the U.S. attorney and says, we'd like to interview Mr. Cox for an American Greed episode. She calls my lawyer. I talked to my lawyer one day.

She says, listen, they want you to do American Greed. So I'm interviewed by American Greed. She said they will consider it substantial assistance. So I do it. It airs six months later, five months later. And we call the U.S. attorney. And the U.S. attorney says, it's just not enough. And this is what the black guys call.

They're pimping me. So I heard I learned that term. When I would tell people like, they're like, you know, they go, dang, Cox, they're pimping you. To be honest, it doesn't really sound like that substantial assistance. It's like it sounds like you're just writing a book to make some money and to better yourself. It's American greed. Right. But even that, it's like, you know, this is publicity.

This is just like something that a lot of people would do just for the attention. Right. But I know lots of people that were approached by them and didn't do it. Right. They don't make, you know it's American greed. You ever seen a good one? They never make the criminal look good. I know they're going to make me look horrible.

Right. So it's like this is just going to bash me, but I'm doing it because I'm being told to do it. So there's no benefit for me to do it. And if I didn't do it, there's a good chance they don't run the episode. at all. They don't need to. There's already two date lines on me. But if they can get me to do it, then they get to interview the U.S. attorney, my lawyer, everybody will be interviewed. And they all want to be interviewed, right? Like their law enforcement, they want to be interviewed. So I do it. They say, yeah, it's not enough. Then I get approached by, by this point, the Dodd-Frank Act has been

passed and they've changed the mortgages. And now all mortgage brokers have to take continuing education every year, nine hours. Three hours of that is on ethics and fraud. So I'm contacted by the by a school, national school that wants to write this course and they want me to write the course part of on ethics and fraud. U.S. attorney tells my lawyer we want him to do it. This guy goes up to Atlanta, meets

with the district or with the U.S. attorney. U.S. attorney signs off that we will give him a reduction. We will consider it. I do it. They start using it six months later. We approach them and they go it's just not enough. So what I do is I end up filing what's called a 2255

against my lawyer saying that my lawyer gave me bad at She told me that these public service announcements or whatever you want to call them public service You know services yeah um would be considered substantial assistance but in reality What's in the books it does not meet so it's very easy to say this is what you've been having me do They're not gonna give me anything you told me I would had I known I never would have taken my my my the initial plea deal I would have gone to trial anything to try and get out of my current plea and because they'll probably not some time off, right? Right. So I throw that out there. And I have a guy who's a disbarred attorney named Frank Amadeo who's doing all the legal work. He's a disbarred attorney. He's got like 22 years.

And so he's fighting them for me. This guy is just bat shit crazy. I mean, he's bipolar. He has features of schizophrenia. He's just insane. But his legal work is amazing. And so we're battling with them. And I'm actually time bar right now. You have a one year time bar. I'm way over the time bar. But he manages to keep pestering them and try and he starts to get around the time bar and so finally the u.s attorney comes and says listen i'm gonna we're gonna reduce your sentence by one level that would be it would have been 30 that would have been 40 months no it would have been 40 months every every level off is less and less time so it'd be 40 months and the next level off might be 36 the next one might be 33 you know so they said we're going to reduce it by one level 40 and so i argue i want to go

back to court. So I go back to court and I argue in front of the judge that that's not nearly enough. And so the judge, we put everything that I've done out there, everything they've said, and the judge says, he thinks about it and he goes, okay. He says, listen, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you three levels off. That's seven years. He is, and for somebody who has no arrests associated with their case, that's a pretty good deal, Mr. Cox. And he said, And that's the decision of the court. And that's it. Boom, seven years.

Hit the gavel, bam. He walks off. I got seven years off. Wow. I went from 26 and a half to 19 and a half. How did you feel? I was very upset. Really?

I thought I was going to get more. Well, I mean, it's 19. I got 19 and a half years. I'm still like, Jesus. God, I've already done six years. Yeah. So I'm like, you know, I'm thinking. So what I did the calculation in my mind.

It did it by this and this and this. And I thought, you know what? I'd probably be out of here about seven years. And I thought you already did six. It was roughly six, six and a half. And I thought, you didn't think you could do six and a half. You didn't think you could do the time you already did. You could do this.

And now I was writing stories. I was writing books. I had gotten some guys in Rolling Stone magazine. We'd optioned the life rights for that. I'd optioned life rights for another property. I had a literary agent. Like I'm doing, I'm making money in prison. I'm building a reputation as a writer.

There are writers that are working with me that are with the written in Rolling Stone and wired. I mean, these guys are on my Coralinks account. Like, we're communicating. I'm getting information for them. I'm helping them with stories. So I figured, you know what? You can do another seven years. And so I get back and I'm walking the track.

And I'm walking the track with this guy. There's a guy named Ron Wilson. My dad did a year in the feds when I was in elementary school. And many of his stories were basically just him walking the track. Walking the track with some guy. There wasn't a lot else to do. I'm walking the track with this guy, Ron Wilson, worth the low. Ron Wilson was there for, he ran a $57 million, it was actually $102 million, but there was $57 million and loss.

You know, when you tell people you've got gains, they count that. So it ends up being just $102 million. It wasn't, it was a loss of 57. So, and he was locked up, and he's currently cooperating with his co-defendant against his co-defendant. against his co-defendants. Now, of course, only I know this. Nobody else knows this. You know, nobody else really knows what's going on with me.

They know I went back to court. They know I got my sentence reduced. But the sentence reduction was he did Dateline. He did American Greed. He did this. You can read all of it on Pacer. So it looks like Mr. Like he didn't cooperate.

He was doing all these other things. Right. So although they're like, some guys are questioning like, that seems odd. I've never heard of that before. but the people doing the legal work are like, no, that's what happened. So I'm not really, I don't know, nobody's giving me a hard time. But it's, you know, it's questionable.

And I've also, there's never been a time when I haven't, where somebody didn't come up to me and they were go, you know, hey, Cox, you know, how much time you got? And I'd be like, 26 years, but somebody could tell me where there's a dead body and I could be out next week, you know what I'm saying? They go, damn, Cox is like that. I go, it's just like that. And they laugh and everybody, oh, he's funny. I'm not joking.

Yeah. But it's not a joke. But you didn't have anything that you could tell. I don't have anything. So I'm walking with Wilson. We're walking around the track. And I know he's cooperating against his people. He got 19 and a half years.

I've got 19 and a half years. He knows I just got back. He also knows that I'm like, hey, I'd cut anybody's throat if I had to to get out of the fucking place. We're not friends. So we're walking one day. And he's complaining about the secret service agent in his case. and he's telling me he's,

I'm never going to get my sentence reduced. They're not going to reduce my sentence. I'm like, why do you keep saying that? And he's like, they think I hid Ponzi scheme money. I'm like, yeah, but you said you gave them all the money. He's like, yeah, you don't understand. And I'm like, okay, well, I guess I don't. We keep walking, walking.

This goes on for like a month or two. He says it every once in a while. I go, well, we won't worry about it. You'll file a 2255 and Frank will force them to give you something. You don't understand. I said, what do I understand? He said, my, he said, the truth is, he said, I did hide Ponzi scheme money. I go, really?

And I said, okay. And he said, and my wife, since he's been arrested and sent to prison, his wife found out he was having an affair. And his wife was fucking insane. He's like, she'll burn the whole house down around her. He said, she didn't care. And I said, okay. He said, well, I gave my wife. He said, I don't know, $150,000.

And my brother's got maybe $30,000. And she knows it. So I'm afraid she's going to go to them and give them the money just to make sure that they'll use that to not give him anything. Even if he cooperates and helps get them these people indicted and arrested and sent to prison, they'll say, yeah, but he hid Ponzi scheme money. He lied to us. We're not going to give him anything. So far, they didn't have anything. He's done nothing but been cooperative. And so he's like, yeah, she's going to fuck me. And I'm like, I said, well, she wouldn't do that. She's already told him she doesn't have anything. She'll get charged. Now, you don't understand.

She won't care. I was like, okay. But wait, first, let me tell you what happened, the way that happened. The way it happened is we were walking the track and he kept saying they're, you don't understand, they're not going to give me anything. And I looked at him and I said, why do you keep saying that? And he looked at me and he goes, can I trust you? And I go, probably not. And he goes, I did put away some Ponzi scheme money. And he just tells me exactly what I just told you. And I'm like, okay, okay. And so I go back and lay in bed that night. And I think, is that enough to get a sentence reduction? Is what? What he told me, I know this is horrible, by the way. I know everybody watching things to scumbag. This is another guy, a fellow inmate in prison. Oh, I know, I feel horrible. I kind of like it, man. Dirtbag, all the very.

Oh, I'm fucking kidding shit. These guys. That's amazing. I'm ready to cut these motherfuckers' heads clean off. And it gets worse. So what happens is, is I'm thinking, you know, they didn't want to give me anything to begin with. And what does he got? $200,000, not even $200,000.

He owes $57 million. I'm going to give them information and he might, they might get $180,000. And then you know what else is going to happen? I'm going to get shipped or he's going to, he's going to know that I did this and somebody's getting shipped. My mom lives down the street. She lives an hour away.

She comes to see me every two weeks. I'm never going to see my mom again. And I'm just like, I'm sitting there. And I was like, that's not. not something that I would I'll get nothing. So I say nothing. Well, remember I've written my memoir. Well, when I went back to court, I wanted the transcripts of that.

So late a month or so later, like I'm disappointed to myself because I didn't call right away. A month and a half later, I call my lawyer to say, hey, you were going to send me my transcripts. And she goes, oh gosh, Matt, you're right. I'm so sorry. Let me send you the transcripts. Okay. And then I say, okay. And she goes, hey, she said, anything going on?

And I go, what do you mean? Does anything happening in there? Keep in mind, this is my second lawyer. This is the one that was given to me to represent me on my first Rule 35. She didn't even want to talk to me. She hates me too, by the way. She's like a congresswoman now. She said, when somebody brings my name up, she goes, that guy.

She says, he threw me under the bus. Because I said, she didn't want to help me when they had paid her. So the fact that she answered the phone was shocking. The fact that she said, anything going on in there? And I went like, what? And she was, I don't know. anything happening? I went, no.

I mean, oh, I said, listen to this. And I tell her, this guy told me, and I tell her, and she goes, hold on. She looks him up. She goes, whoa. She says, this is a bad guy. She says, let me, let me look into it. I said, okay, hang out the phone.

Send me my transcripts. Because a lot of people will say, oh, he, he didn't, he acts like it was a fluke. It was a fluke. Trust me, I wish I'd called. But this is just the way it happened. A couple, listen, two, three days later, the CEO comes up and he goes,

Cox during the next move and I go yeah he goes go to SIS that's an internal security and I'm like oh okay now keep in mind I was writing stories so I've been called to SIS a lot because I would order people's freedom of information act I get their information in because write their stories to find out what dates this and that and so I go there and I walk in this guy goes Cox come here sit down I'm like okay what's going on here sit down it was the other assholes he calls phone dials the phone number gives me a phone goes here you got to talk to this guy get the phone it's agent agent um his last name was Griffin, something Griffin, a secret service agent, you know, Griffin. And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, he said, I understand you know where Ron Wilson hid Ponzi scheme money.

And I go, oh, I want something in writing. No, he's, I promise you, you'll get, you'll get a reduction for this. I said, no, I won't. Bro, you're not even, you can't even, you can't. The fact that you just said you could tells me you're lying. That's a lie. They can't. I need something from the U.S. attorney. So I get his, his, his email address. We trade emails. So I put them on core links. He eventually two or three weeks later, he sends me something from the U.S. attorney saying, if Mr. Cox's information helps recover a substantial amount of money

or leads to indictments, we will consider it substantial assistance. That's the best you're going to get. Once again, substantial. You're not going to get a promise. So it's the best I got. So I send an email. We email back and forth, back and forth,

and I tell him what I know. Then he starts asking me questions like, hey, ask Wilson this. Okay. Take a couple days. And I have to wait for him to approach me. I can't walk up to him and say, hey, that guy, Paul, was he involved in? I can't say that, right? I got to spark up a conversation where eventually he talks about him.

Who was helping with that? One of your guys? Oh, yeah, it was a guy named Paul. Oh, did he know what was going on? No, you didn't know what was going on. So you'm saying? So you got to spark up that conversation. It takes time.

So this goes on for months, three, four, five months, six months. And then one day, they say, listen, Wilson's about to get some bad news. said, really? So, yeah. And I said, well, what is he? He said, we can't tell you. You need to tell us what he tells you. I said, okay.

So one day I'm walking and his, he sees me and he goes, Cox. And I go, yeah, what's up? Like, I'm a little freaked out, right? Like, this isn't a good situation. You know, he's like, Cox. And I'm like, yeah, what's up? I don't know if he's going to attack me. I don't know what's going to happen.

I don't really think that's going to happen, but he's a fraud guy. It's also, this is like low security. Like, nobody's stabbing each other. People are stabbing each other. But these are gang members and people like white collar guys aren't stabbing each other. Right. So but I don't know. I don't need to get thrown in the shoe.

I don't need to get called to lieutenants off. I don't need us to. I don't need this. So he's Cox and I'm like, yeah, what's up? And he goes, you're not going to believe that. She's got full with my lawyer. I said, okay. He said, they called my wife and my brother in.

So really? He said, yeah. He said, my wife denied everything. I said, okay. He said, but then she showed up the next day. She walked in and she gave him $350,000. in cash and I went three 50 he goes yeah my brother walked in and gave him 150,000 it was her the the wife was it was cash and and and silver uh bullion and gold at precious metals we came to about

350 and the brother case there was 150 000 in cash and I went I said you said you said it was like 100,000 or 150 000 he goes ah because I didn't know if I could trust you and I go Ron Ron that hurts we're kindred spirits So he says, yeah, but yeah, he said, I don't know what's going to happen. He said, they told them that I gave them that money. I hid that money. I was like, and first I was half a million dollars, right? And I was like, oh, okay.

And then he goes, and I said, well, what's your lawyer? He says, he doesn't know. That's all he knows. And I said, okay. So I go back, I send an email. This is what he said. He didn't know anything else. Maybe a week or two later, I get an email.

they say, but he's about to get some bad news. Still takes four or five days, right? Like, he's not calling his lawyer every day. Lawyer's got to get the news. The lawyer has to send an email. He's a check the email. He's a call, get the lawyer on the phone. So like five, six days go by, whatever.

And then I see him one day. I'm walking. And he goes, talks. And I'm like, yeah, what's up? I walk up to him. And he says, you're not going to believe this. He said, they indicted my wife, my brother, and me. Now, before I say anything else,

just because I don't want you to think I'm a nice guy. No chance of that. So I want you to know the depth, the depth of this. When you cooperate against someone, there are about three different kind of levels of cooperation. There's kind of like ancillary cooperation where, let's say you tell them something. Like you get arrested and the cops have got you and they go, can you tell us anything? You'll listen to my next door neighbor, he makes ice. And they go, you know, because I don't want to say the word.

Because they make ice. He's a manufacturing ice. And he's like, they're like, oh, okay. And then they raid the next door neighbor's house and they bust them. What did you do? You gave them a little bit of information. Now, it's good information. You're probably going to get maybe 20% off your sentence for that.

Or they say, okay, well, listen, here's what we're going to do. We're going to let you go. Can you go over there and buy some? We're going to put a wire on you. So now they wire you up and you get a, you'd make a couple of buy. eyes, right? That's more than just I gave you some information. Now, I could get the guy could search me, find that I'm in danger. And they definitely know the information came from me. They're going to know, even if you pull up and arrest me and I act like I don't know, it doesn't

matter. They're going to figure it out. So I'm in danger. So you maybe get 30% if you go, but what if you have to testify in that case? You got to testify on this guy. You're probably getting 30 to 40% off your sentence, depending on what area. And kind of. California, I think it's probably more than that. But in the district I'm in, it's about 30 to 40% because they're just six. So you're going to, let's say 40% if you have to testify. So when Wilson goes, you're not going to believe this, they indicted me. I went really.

He goes, yeah, he said, they're going to, my lawyer said they're going to bring me back for arraignment. They're going to bring me back to South Carolina. And I'm like, holy shit. He goes, what do you think I should do? And I go, I think you should go to trial. That's what I think. because if he goes to trial, I know that I have to testify.

Because they give mine, it's a whole new charge. The charge directly came from me. Right. I'm the person. All these emails they're going to show her. Who's this? Who's this?

I have to be. I'm the only person that's going to have to be on the stand. Right. So I say it immediately thinking, I need to convince this guy to go to trial. And he's like, oh, I don't know. I said, no, listen, man,

that's the only way to negotiate. You got to go to trial. You got to this. I'm telling you right now. What happened? He tells me. at all, listen, all they got. You don't know, they could have had that money to begin with.

That could have money a long time ago. You know, you got to go to trial. You'll get the best deal. I lean into him a little bit. And he's like, yeah, let me think about that. I probably will go to trial. Yeah. So we kind of go back and forth.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So two days later, he's on the pack out and he leaves. You believe that motherfucker took a plea. So pissed off. So fucking disappointed. So he goes back. He takes a plea. His wife and brother get like, like the brother had to get to like,

somebody had to do 100 hours of community service. They both got like a year probation. One person had to do like 100 hours. One hundred person had to do like 20. I don't know who was more capable or who was more. Probably the wife probably had to do more time because she actually went in and just lied. And then the next day he thought about it came back. So, but either way, they both got a year probation.

And Wilson got, he played guilty and he got six more months added onto his sentence. Which was, so he went from nine, you're 19 and a half years to 20 years. Right. Here's the thing. So once again, we go back to the U.S. attorney and say, I want my sentence reduced. Well, before I say anything, I don't forget this.

Wilson never does the extra six months. COVID hits a few years later. So like four years later, COVID hits, he gets let out on COVID. So the six months that I gave him, not that I care, but he didn't do the six months. He didn't even do the 19 years.

He only did like, like, did he? I don't think he even did 10 years. I don't think he even did. half of his sentence. Right. So what happens is we go back to this court and say, hey, go back to the U.S. attorney. I need sentence for this.

And they say, we don't even know what you're talking about. What are you talking about? Like, we don't know about any cooperation. So, of course, why send the letter in? Frank files a motion. We send in the letter. We get them to lie in the motion first saying that they have no idea what we're talking about. We send in the letter saying, you know, from the U.S. attorney,

and then they come back. We go back and forth with them. Eventually, they agree to reduce my sentence by, they start with one level. And Frank argues with them back and forth. And we argue them all the way up to three levels, which is five years. Because by this point, we've been, this has been going on. Remember I had about seven, I had about seven years left? Yeah.

It's already been like a year or so. So by the time this happens and we're arguing, I end up getting five years knocked off. I'm like a year from the door. So when it hits, I'm a year from the door. They put me in, I'm literally a year later, I'm done. I'm in a halfway house. Wow. I get seven months halfway house.

And yeah, so I go to the halfway house. I mean, that's it. I'm walking out the door. Do you have a huge amount of restitution at this point? I owe $6 million at this point. And the whole time I was on probation I was paying. So that's five years of probation. So you've got to pay the whole time.

And now I'm paying, I don't want to say I'm paying because, An embarrassingly small amount in comparison to the total? No. A large amount in comparison. I know other people like this guy owes $22 million. He pays $150 a month. I'm used to hearing about that. Yeah.

Oh, no, no. No, it's in the thousands. Okay. And I'm arguing with, you know, where I'm arguing trying to get it reduced. But still it would take you like hundreds of years to pay off the total. The interest, they're telling me I owe interest on the loan. Now I'm almost positive that I remember that I had no interest on. They're telling me I'm earning $500.

day in interest. Like, what are you talking? What are you talking about? Like, what, you know, I'm sorry, I'm never going to pay. I'm never going to be able to pay that off. I know I'm just paying every month. I'm just throwing money at a losing cause. But it was six million. Now they're saying it's like eight and a half million because I said I owe it. I owe, but I don't think that's true because I don't think I owe interest on it at all. I'm almost politely the judge said I did not owe interest, but whatever. It doesn't matter. Even if it's six million, I'm not paying off six million. So how do you get back to normal life? I mean, I got out

and I had written a bunch of true crime books and so as I was as I got out of prison as I'm ending that last couple of years guys are telling me listen man you need to do a true crime podcast what they thought what they meant was like kind of true detective

kind of a like the audio ones were huge right not the podcast like this I don't know if you consider this true crime or you can you know there's dabble in it but yeah so so they They were saying you need to do that. And so when I got out, that was kind of my mindset.

It was like, yeah, I'll probably do a true crime podcast. And I'd never been on YouTube because when I got arrested, YouTube had been out for a year. People were putting their home movies on it. Right. I've never been home. It's no reason. 2007, the Wild Wild West of YouTube. Yeah.

And I got arrested in 2006. Yeah, yeah. And 2005 is when it came out. Yeah. So 2009, the term podcast was invented. Yeah. There was no podcast until 2009. That's crazy.

Yeah. So I'm getting out there. So people are explaining to me what a podcast. is. Yeah. And I'm like, okay. So I get, I get the halfway house. I start looking into it. And I'm thinking, yeah, maybe I could do this. I could probably do this. And then a guy named Danny Jones. I contacted him. I had a friend that kind of put me in contact with him and I contact him. And I explain my story and tell him I want to do a podcast. Can you answer some questions? He said, absolutely. He starts explaining to me about AdSense and sponsors and that sort of thing. And I'm like,

okay. And I know I don't have the capability of doing it. And he keeps telling me, man, I want you to come on the podcast. I want you to come on the podcast. And I go, Okay. But I'm in the halfway house. I can't. So I said, well, when I get out of the halfway house, so I'm out of the halfway house, maybe a month or two. And he calls me up one day. He said, listen, man, I need you to come to a podcast. I just had, I've had two guests cancel. And I'm, I need to put something up by tomorrow. I need you to come today. And I'm like, you know, like I did say I was going to do it. Like, oh, it's like I can't not do it. And I look at his channel. And I realize now I was looking at the clips channel.

And the clips are getting 3,000, 5,000. I'm like, nobody. And to me, viral meant millions. Right. And I'm like, nobody even watches his channel. And I thought, okay, yeah, I'll do this. Like, you know, there's one or two that have 50 or 100,000. But what I didn't realize was he actually had a good size channel.

He's actually at that time had like 300,000 subscribers. And this is your first one in what year? This is 2020 before COVID. Okay. Just before COVID. So I go. No, this is the in 2019. This is like October, November of 2019.

So I go, I walk into the place, and I sit down and I said, listen, man, he goes, he said, what do you want? And he goes, how long's your story take? And I said, I've been telling his story for 10 years. I said, I got a 15 minute version. I got a 30 minute version. I got an hour. I got a two hour. What do you want?

He goes, give me the two hour version. I said, all right. And we sat down and I told the story two hours and 15 minutes only because he asked a few questions. And I tell the whole story. I'm sure I did a better job than I did here And it got 2 million I think is it 2.4 now 2.5 million And so so you know because you know

It blows up and then it trails off And then so it hit within four months it had over two million And then it's probably got another half a million or 400,000 The last you know four years five years Nobody watches it And then of course when that happened Patrick Bet David contacted his people contacted me And they flew me out

This was when he was in Texas And I did his and his got like 2.6 million or something. And then I did soft white underbelly and that got two point whatever, three or four. I don't know. Right. And then Vlad contacted me. And then I did Vlad and then I did, you know. But in the meantime, while I'm doing all this, I did not start a channel.

So because I kept thinking, you know, I needed this. This is what I needed this setup. Right. I need the black magic. I don't know what these are. But, you know, I needed the black magic and I needed the this and I needed the good mics. And I'm living in a halfway house. I'm sorry, I was living in a rooming house at that time.

So I'm out from halfway house to rooming house. I'm living in the spare room of somebody who's got a cop living next door. Another guy I live in another room. And so I don't know what I'm doing. And so finally I decide when COVID hits, I pick up my phone and I start the channel with my iPhone, which is what Danny told me to do. And I should have done six months earlier, but I was a fucking arrogant prick. Right.

I started this with an iPhone on a bike stand. I had a bike shop and I would take the stand where we would work on bikes and I just put the phone on there. And multiple of my classic interviews from back in the day have like half the video missing because people would call me in the middle of it. So I would just have the audio. But that's, by the way, everything you're saying is exactly what Danny said because I'm complaining I don't have the right equipment. He said, listen to me. Let me explain something. He said, you do it now.

He said, and in a year from now when you have the right equipment and you're putting out quality stuff, people, five, years from now, three years from now, people will look back and they will say, I was following you when you were making videos on your iPhone in your kitchen. And he said, he said, they want to follow you on your journey. And first of all, they're more concerned about the audio than they are. Yeah. Than they are the video. And, you know, all these things I didn't know. And so I could have done, you know, I waited too long. I did start the channel. So when my star was rising, that's when I should have done it. By the time it's dwindling, that's when I did it. But it's still, it's, you know, listen, it still did very well. It's still did very well. It's like I'm not complaining. Okay.

So is that your main thing at this point is the podcast? It's the podcast. I also do, um, I do keynote speeches for banks and cyber convention. I know it's hilarious, but can you imagine like Bank of America's paying me two or three grand to go talk to them. Um, and I still home like a million. Yeah. So they want, I can't even open a bank out in Bank of America. So I can't even get American Express card. They're like, you owe it, it was $40,000, you know. Like, one of the things I did when I took off on the run was, of course, I ran up all my credit cards. I hit American Express for $40,000.

I can't get American Express card. They're holding resentment. So, yeah, so that's, so I do the podcast. We just actually got, we're at $1.1 million. Subscribers? Yeah. Wow. That's impressive.

We're doing good. Yeah. I've got a million on Facebook and then, you know, I don't know what is at TikTok. They're not a million. It's like half a million. So was there ever. any temptation to do anything illegal or was that essentially like cleansed out of you by being miserable in prison for all those years? I would say and here's what I actually told my probation officer

this. She said the last time you were on probation, you stole 11.5 million dollars. Right. While on probation, she said, well, I don't have to worry about that now, right? And I went, and she goes, what does that was, what does that mean? And I went, that means that if in a year, from now, I'm right in the bus, I can't pay my bills, I'm struggling, and I'm hungry. I said, I am probably going to commit a massive, massive crime, and I'm going to leave the United States because that's where I f***ed up last time. Wow. And I said, but, you know, let's hope that doesn't happen. She was, she was, I am not as shocked by that as you would think. She said, but let's hope it doesn't happen. She said, you know, I have a good feeling that it's not going to.

I said, okay. She says, you seem like you have a plan. I said, I do. And so, you know, the plan did not happen exactly the way I want. It never does, right? You daydream and everything. And, you know, it moves and there's, it ebbs and flows. And so, but yeah, it's, it's, I, I have a bunch of true crime books, you know, my memoir, all the other memoirs I had written. And then I have the podcast and I have the, uh, the speaking engagements.

But the bulk of my money comes from, uh, the podcast, right? So I ended up, what I ended up doing was I ended up hooking up with a guy named Colby, who start, he had a production company, he started a production company and his production company and I work for his production company and he runs everything. You know, you've got this whole crew,

you got these, you know, this is, I don't know, anybody's seeing you. This is a massive operation, right? And that's what Colby, he started slow just with me and like one other guy and he's blown it up. And so I really just kind of show up and just do the interviews, you know.

But it's great. I mean, I got married. I got a nice house I got a nice vehicle I'm everything's it's been five six years now it's you know it's great Wow I get to this I remember watching watching your videos in the halfway house

Trying to figure out how videos work Wow And there was remember guys are like yelling at each other And stuff on the thing or arguing with each other I was like oh And these are all big tall scary guys I can't go on that program Yeah so

Would have been the most like impactful on you interviews Or the most moving interviews that you've done. You know what? Soft Wide Underbelly, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just find, well, first of all, Danny Jones and I have become very good friends. He's really helped me out.

He's a great guy. I like Julie. Like, they're more friends. I would say probably one of the ones. Like if I tell somebody, hey, if they go, hey, man, send me something on you. I typically send them soft white underbelly. Because it's like an hour long. And what's so funny is I'm so angry at the time I was irritated I was pissed off I just had one bad it was just I was in LA

There's homeless people everywhere he drove me into down to to Skid Row There's people screaming outside people are trying swarming us to try and get money I mean it was just But I was so the quality of this guy's His interviews and the quality you know the production value it's it's phenomenal. Like it's it is it's a portrait. It's it's it's it's they're amazing. I was actually asking about like people you've interviewed. Oh okay. I was thinking one that I like doing right right yeah. So do you know who Jeremy Meeks is? Oh it's not so oh it's the the model guy from Stockman right? Yeah. Or he became a model after he got what was his actual shit that got him in prison? Listen he that wasn't this wasn't his

first prison. He's been in prison like six times. Right he was he was like mugshot day. Yeah yeah. He's just like a gang member. Yeah. And, you know, they catch you for this. They never get you for anything really big. It's four years here, five years here, two years here. And then they don't do five years. They do four.

You know, they do whatever. And he's in and out, in and out. And then it just happened that that one went viral. That one, even though he's got lots of mugshots. Yeah, yeah. That's the one that hit the, uh, the hot felon list. And so I like doing his. You know what bothered me about his is that because he's such a good looking eye.

And I had it. And I talked to him on the phone, right? When I call, I talked to him. And I was like, hey, would you consider this? Because he doesn't do interviews. He had done one interview for a friend of a friend, like a friend. Oh. On a channel that has almost no subscribers and it got like a couple hundred thousand views.

So I was like, he doesn't do this. And the only reason he did mine was because I did a live where I said was talking about people I'd like to interview and I mentioned him. His ex-wife watches the show, called him and said, you got to call this guy up. He's trying to get in touch with you. I want you to do the interview. So he did it. I thought he was going to have a much more fun interview. Okay.

Because I figured he'd had kind of a pampered life because he was so pretty. And I was going to be able to make some pretty privileged jokes and just dark. Just dark and just horrible and just a horrible life. And even though, you know, everything after that, even afterwards, you know, in and out of drug rehab. I mean, just, you know, but it was a good interview. We probably could have talked for an extra hour or two, but he kind of flew in and flew out. And so it was like, it was like two hours or something. And that was a good interview.

David Packow's, the guy that was in Wardogs, the guy that was in Wardogs. Okay. I had written the book. We had a great interview. Those are amazing interviews. Yeah, David Packowls and Jeremy Meeks. Those are great. There have been a few.

It's funny because the ones that, it's never like the guy who did a, $200 million Ponzi scheme, right? Like that guy can't tell his story for some reason. Those guys come in and they just, they don't want to own up to what they did. They don't want to. And it just goes on and on. And it's like, okay, this is not a great interview. Like, this is not a great story.

It is a great story. He can't tell it or he won't tell it. The great stories are the guy that comes in who's basically just on and off again on drugs, been arrested. He's been in five car chases. He's broken to how he's done all these minor crimes, but he can, tell his story and they're hilarious and he's got hilarious and I love to laugh like I and so those are the stories that I these guys are like yeah I know I don't have like a great story you're like this fucking story was amazing and it will get 800,000 views right and I mean the other thing and for my

channel that's huge that's a big 800,000 a million that's great that's crazy so uh what always bothers me is when somebody comes in and they tell a great story and you feel for them and you like that person and they walk out and they get 50,000 views And it's just like, I feel like, like I let them down. Like they deserve, their story deserves better than this. Yeah. And I feel like even though, you know, you can't tell you don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, yeah.

I feel like I failed them, you know, because I know this person flew themselves out. I know they sat here. I know they told their story. I know they gave it. They're all. And it's like, fuck. I know sometimes you feel like the space is kind of inundated because there's so few, like, original interviews to do because so many of the good interviews have kind of been done by a lot of people.

Yeah, like I'll call Ian Bick. I don't know who you know. Yeah, I interviewed him. I'll call Ian Bick and say, hey, you just had this guy on. He'll go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got him from, you know, Mark at Softlight Interbell. And then, you know, if you look, you're like, this guy's been interviewed six times. It's a good story. Yeah.

People suggested I interview him. The guys willing to come in, you know, we, you know, we, it's, we have them come in. And sometimes there's a great story. Sometimes we've had stories that guys have been getting 50,000, 60,000 on other platforms. And they'll get, you know, a million or, or, or, or, or, or, more. Yeah, it's kind of a roll of the dice. You don't really know.

He told the same story on this platform. Yeah. I think that our, my producer, I think Colby just tweaked it a little bit, right? Like he did his, his thumbnail was slightly different and he had a little, you know, he had a little more click baity. And so more people clicked on it and it pushed it more. And next thing you know, it's got two million views. I noticed that with you that a lot of the older ones that did very well have simple titles, but then you go on like Ian Bick and he has to emphasize the snitch aspect. Like they have to sort of dig.

into the toolbox to find things that'll make the views go up a little more? He used to have a, he had my face and a rat on the, on the thing. And it's so funny because my wife was so irritated. I was like, what, why are you? Well, you know, have you been reading the comments? I'm like, no. Like, and if I did, I would laugh about it. I mean, what am I going to do? You can't, listen, you don't get to go into prison and snitch on somebody or just be willing to cooperate in general and then get offended when people call you a snitch. Like, that's fine. I had to weigh it. I had to say the respect of my fellow inmates or 13 years, sorry, 12, 12 years of freedom. Yeah. It wasn't a hard choice at all. I feel it. I want out.

What, because I got to run in a second, but what if there's somebody out there and they're watching this and they have at least considered a life of crime or doing things that are somewhat similar to what you've done in the past, what would be your advice? to them that might deter them from taking such a risk? I mean, it would be, you know, here's the thing, everybody, I get this all the time when I do the speeches, and it's always like, do you regret it? And I always hate the guys that go, oh, I don't regret anything. It makes me the man I am today. Well, the man I am today, or when I got out of prison, was a 50-year-old man whose son didn't talk to him, whose father died when he was in prison. My mother had to come visit me for three years. For three years. 13 years every two weeks in prison.

And the last couple years in a wheelchair. You know, I mean, like, I have a lifetime of regrets. Like, I would do anything to go back and just be a middle class dad who teaches soccer. Right. Like, I would love to be that guy. That's not what happened. It didn't work out for me like that. It's 100% my fault.

If I could do it again, I would be a. manager at fucking Walmart and I would teach my kids soccer like that's that is a that is a life that that is a life that I would have been proud of right I brag about what I did you know I because I don't think anybody wants to see me sit here and cry about you know the anguish that I feel and the the things I did but you know so I tell the story it's entertaining it's I'm it comes off like I'm definitely bragging about it but the truth is I do anything to not have that story and just be a normal person. Yeah.

You know? But the, the, the hubris that it took for you to become this guy who was doing this massive real estate scam or whatever, during that period of life, if someone had said to you, you know, all this shit isn't worth it. You can just be a normal guy with a,

with a regular-ass job and a family. You were going to like, I can't live that way. No, I was too arrogant. I was too narcissists. I was just too much of a cocky prick. You know, and, and it's, and I, listen,

and I fight it all the time. All the time, like especially during the interviews. Yeah. I have to constantly stop myself from jumping in to say, oh, that reminds me. Let me tell you about what happened. Oh, let me do it. You know, because it's not, it has nothing. It's not about me.

I'm trying to tell this guy's story. And that's, that's hard for somebody who's, who has, you know, the issues that I have, you know, to do. Because basically during most conversations, I'm just waiting for a chance to talk about myself. I mean, that's what an asshole I am. Yeah, yeah. And I know it. And then, but knowing it is, it's hard to stop. Yeah.

You know. And but those are the same things that make me a good con man and do the things I did. You know, you're just, you have this super optimism that you're not going to get caught when really you are going to get caught. It's shockingly difficult to not get caught, but you just just believe in yourself. I have so much self-belief that you just sort of skate through for a while. Yeah. So the short version is it's in the end, it's just not worth it. It's not worth it.

Freedom is worth more than anything, right? Yeah, and you've heard this, you know, the best day in prison is. is, sorry, the worst day out here is better than the best day in prison. You know, you've heard that term. Like it's, and it's just, it's absolutely true. Yeah. But you take so much stuff for granted. Having a cell phone, having, watching YouTube, being able to turn the channel, you know,

driving in the vehicle, walking through the airport. Yeah. I had such, the first two or three years when I would jump on, walk through the airport and get on a plane. What a great, amazing feeling. You're flying across the country. Yeah. You know, it's already, I'm at the point now where it's, it's agony, right? It's been out six years.

So, six, well, going on seven years. Yeah. Yeah, it would be seven years here. I mean, you mentioned the joy of just having a cell phone, which is the kind of thing that, like, a lot of people who are accustomed to always having a cell phone are kind of talking about how bad for society is, et cetera, et cetera. I know of a guy who's in maximum security prison who has claimed to fame is that he can fit four iPhones in his asshole. Yeah, I don't feel, I feel like.

You know, I think about it all the time. I don't get it. But, I mean, the fact that that is where they're at. Yeah. And I get, listen, the, the mindset of being in prison and being out of prison. And it takes a while to, you know, for a year when I would hear somebody knock on the door, my first thought for a split second was the marshals are here. They realized they shouldn't have let me out.

They're here to get me. And if they'd walk to the front door, I would have immediately been turned around and put my hands behind my mind. I wouldn't have been thought about. I wouldn't even ask them any questions. They don't know why they're picking me up. They'll send me a lawyer. I'll talk to him. I'll wait for four days until that guy shows up.

I mean, I just would have. At 3 o'clock, 3.30, I started feeling uncomfortable, sick to my stomach because I knew I needed to be standing next to my bunk for four o'clock count. And that was six months of that, just feeling sick to my stomach. And anybody's done significant amount of time. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. There's just, there's this, the psychological damage is like. And the worst thing is, I can't blame anybody else. It's my fault.

I can't blame anybody. Like, nobody made me do these things. Yeah. So, yeah. Wow. Amazing. I can understand why Alex did six hours with you. I was really locked in there.

I could definitely talk for many more hours. But, yeah, I appreciate you sharing your story with us, man. And I hope our audience respects the lessons that you've learned. Because I think that one of the best and most important skills that you can gain is learning from other people's mistakes and not having to make those same mistakes yourself. hopefully at least somebody out there is not going to take the bait and do something that could get them locked up because they heard your story. Like we can hope. Thank you so much, Matthew. And oh, just tell them where to go watch your podcast.

I'm sure if they search your name, they'll find it. Yeah, it's going to go. It's Matthew Cox inside true crime. And that's the main part. It's on all. YouTube's the main one obviously we focus on. But it's on everything. It's on iTunes.

It's on Spotify. It's on everything. So it's inside true crime. Sick. Thank you so much. much man. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks so much. Matthew Cox, make sure you go subscribe to his channel. Check out all of his other stuff. No Jumber. Coolest podcast.

We're all. Check us on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. Like, comment, subscribe. And shout out to our members, five bucks a month. They got to watch this one live. Appreciate y'all. All right.