The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - A Mafia Associate Reveals How Canadian Mob Is Stronger Than The U.S. | The Connect

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

Germano Tomassetti was living in a homeless shelter in Winnipeg, Canada as a young adult when he befriended a high ranking member of the Canadian mob. He soon found himself collecting debts, blackmailing wealthy business owners, and running scams all around the globe. He was making millions of dollars until one day it all came crashing down. He's here today to tell us about his days as an international criminal and what led him to leave it all behind and change his life. Go Support Germano! IG: https://www.instagram.com/therealgermanotomassetti/ This Episode Is Brought To You By The Following Sponsors: Manscaped: https://www.manscaped.com/ Promo Code: CONNECT Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's up to you whether or not you choose to go with it. But you said you can make a lot of money, you can earn a lot of money. And then that started a whole other chapter from here. Today's guest is Germano Tomasetti. He is a Canadian criminal and mafia affiliate. He made millions of dollars around the world laundering money for criminal groups and pulling scams like identity theft.

This guy ran scams. in four continents in seven years. He had bank accounts all over the world. He was rubbing shoulders with some of the most ruthless Albanian and Italian criminal gangs. He lived in South America. He was laundering money

through Panamanian bank accounts. This guy is like a James Bond novel. It was wild. You're going to love this episode. He told us some stuff that was truly too crazy to show on the YouTube. You can hear that on the bonus episode

if you go over to patreon.com slash the Connect show and make sure to check out his book coming out called the Winnipeg story. Without further ado, I give you Germano Tomasetti right here on The Connect. Sometimes we actually have that choice in life, like that one choice that changes everything. That same day or the same week, I lost a quarter million dollars, which was all my money at the time. That's when I see the lights behind me start to flash. And I didn't even think. I just hit it.

I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, popped out, closed the door, and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shank. It's like six inches. And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours. Don't ever leave the cell block without this. He was the reason I made it out of that place alive. Germano Tomasetti. Tomasetti, yeah.

I'm not a betting man. Yeah. But if I had to gamble, I'd say it's Italian. Correct. You're the first Canadian we've had on the show, man. That's great. You're from Winnipeg. My family is from Calgary.

Oh, really? Yes. That is news to me. So we knew a lot about Winnipeg growing up. we always associated it with being a rough place. Yep. A working class place. Yeah.

Tell us about it. How was it like for you growing up? Yeah. So it was, you know, if you want to compare it to like, you know, something in the U.S.,

I would say something like Detroit. You know what I mean? Just blue collar, hardworking people. And a city that slept on a lot. You know what I mean? The whole idea of what I wanted to do with the book was put it out there

because there's so many interesting stories. There's very interesting people. but because it's this blue-collar place that kind of gets ignored, right? Nobody would think that a Canadian would look like you. You look like you on a pizza shop in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn. Yeah. So are there a lot of Italians, Italian Canadians in Winnipeg? In Winnipeg?

Yeah, definitely. So the country is pretty split up. Like, if you look at the northern and southern Italians, obviously everybody knows, like in Quebec and Montreal with the Sicilian mob and stuff like that. Right. Ontario is more Calabrian. And Winnipeg is, I'd say it's a good mix of both. You know what I mean?

Winnipeg itself, on the other side of things, beside it being a blue-collar city, it's also a very important place in the underworld and in Canada's underworld because we're dead center, right? We're the Midwest. So everything that comes from Vancouver has to pass through us and everything that comes from the ports in Montreal and in Ontario.

also have to pass through us. Right. Right. So it was a, it was a, it was an important piece of the puzzle for a lot of people. You look at a lot of the bikers and the organized crime and stuff like that. Winnipeg's always been a key place. And if, if people dig deep enough, you know, even on Google or whatever else, you'll find that, that a lot of people wanted it.

A lot of people wanted to kind of take it over. But it's almost kind of this freelance place. It's like everyone's kind of out there doing their own thing. There's no real boss. There's no real control. of the city. It's just kind of independent groups

doing what they want and they all mesh together well and fascinating. Who are those groups? So obviously the Italians are in there. They have to be

anywhere in North America, right? But there's also our big foreign group out there is Filipinos. Right? So we have one of the, if not the largest, one of the largest

Filipino communities in Winnipeg in Manitoba. and after them, Ukrainians. Ukrainians have actually been there for quite a while, Polish. And then, yeah, you're going to see the bikers coming in constantly just because of, you know, it's almost like a way station. Are native gangs present in the city? I think I saw something about how native gangs are pretty wild in Saskatchewan in general.

No, I'm sorry, Manitoba. Yeah, no, but you're not wrong with Saskatchewan, though, either because we're very similar, right? We're both prairie provinces and we have a lot of the same ideologies and the same criminal criminal groups and stuff like that. There's definitely, you know, Aboriginal gangs and Indian gangs, they're very heavy because they have the numbers, right? Right. So if you wanted to look at who's the biggest group in Winnipeg, it's definitely them because

there's just so many of them. But you have to keep in mind and you know this from your experience over the world, that you need connections. Right. If you're going to be a big time player, you can't just be a big guy in your city. You need to know people down south, overseas, whatever else. And that's not something that they did. You know what I mean? They worked within Canada. They worked with U.S. groups and stuff like that. But they didn't really branch out to South America, Colombia, Italy, any of these other places, right? So what, when you were growing up, I don't know how old you are?

35. I just turned 35, yeah. So when you were growing up, what was the big racket? What was the big racket? What was the moneymaker that you were either involved in or, you know, you had family members or community members that was involved in. So what age are we talking here? Like, take us back from the beginning. Do you have wise guys being Italian? Do you have, you know, Sicilian or Italian mafia in your family? Um, so I'm, I come from a background. I'm Calabrese, Calabrian and and Abruzesee from Abruzzo, which is close to Lazio, close to Rome and stuff like that. Um, um, there's definitely members in my family that are in organized crime.

You'll probably notice this just from the people that you've talked to even before me. We don't like to say certain words. We don't like to say certain organizations. So I'll refer to someone as Calabrian. I'll refer to someone as Albanian. I'll refer to someone as Chinese or whatever. I'm not going to say actual groups. And that's just out of the respect of the people that I've worked with throughout the years.

They're just, that's the way that they are. They don't like to be mentioned. So if somebody is involved in organized crime, you call them a Calabrian. That's like the code word. No. See that, that for me, how do you refer to a mobster, say of Italian origin?

In the U.S., it's a wise guy. They don't like saying mafia. We don't even say mobster, bro. Like we don't, in Canada, we don't speak like that. Like, and that's just, that's my experience with it. I'm not saying that nobody speaks like that. Because, you know, everybody is definitely influenced from, you know, mob culture. Like, and we're talking about American mafia, La Costa Nostra, that kind of thing.

but we just refer to people as who they are, like they're ethnic backgrounds. Do you know what I mean? We're not going to say the name of the organization because a lot of these are still secret. You know, you know some names. For instance, you know, we were talking earlier and I was talking about the podcast that you did,

the episode that you did that introduced me to you. And that was the episode that you talked about Cartagena. So the group that you talk about there that you know you were connected with that you knew, I know is a different name now, right? So that's another thing. Names are changing and factions are changing and stuff like that. Totally.

So for me, okay, let's take it back to the beginning. I didn't get involved into serious crime. And that means, you know, when I got into money laundering and I got into debt collections for organized crime and stuff like that until I was about 26. So that doesn't mean that I wasn't doing illegal activity earlier. No, when I was younger, I was doing stupid shit. You know what I mean? I was, you know, I was in the streets with some of my friends,

African gangs and stuff like that. And we would rob people or whatever like that. I tried to stay out of it, to be honest. I hung around with a lot of guys that were doing dirt, but I was trying not to. I didn't like drug dealing. It wasn't for me. I had a lot of guys making a lot of money right next to me that were doing it

and doing it on a decent scale. Selling pot? No, pot. There was no money for pot there. because you got to keep in mind just again where we're located everything comes from bc right so everything the whole it gets more and more expensive and it gets drier and drier as it comes to us you know what i mean but if you know is there not an internal market for it people

don't like to smoke weed and yeah of course yeah but that's that's not where the real money was and you again you have to look at the the ethnicity of the gangs right so african african canadians i was able to say americans african canadians were like uh it was Crack was the big thing. Oh, wow. Yeah, still up until I would say the last five or six years, to be honest, it was crack. Canadian crack dealing. Yeah.

Right. But no, that's where the money was. Is there meth up in the middle of Canada? Yeah. So, okay. So, yeah, you know, that's a great topic. That's what's dominating right now. Meth?

Yeah. Unfortunately, in Winnipeg, meth is really grabbed a hold. And it did like 10, 15 years. years ago too when the rave scene was really strong meth was big along with ecstasy and mdma but meth as well um and then it kind of disappeared for a while and then what i've noticed and this is just kind of what i noticed from walking down the street or or seeing some of the junkies that are in my city they don't look like they're from there they don't look like they're from winnipeg they don't look like they're even from canada and that's really hard to explain to people but like i know what junkies look like in

Minneapolis or in Grand Forks or wherever else. And they have just a different look to them and a different vibe. And I've really started to see since, you know, the last couple of years with the meth almost crisis that's happening in Winnipeg because it's pretty bad. The junkies are, they look more and more American to me. So I don't know if someone's set up shop in Winnipeg or if someone's moving stuff up to Winnipeg or what it is. But Winnipeg is starting to become a location for that, which really sucks.

you know what I mean? Because that hard shit, bro, like whether it's crack or whether it's meth or, you know, a fentanyl. Fentanyl's a fucking, you know, huge problem everywhere right now in North America, including my city. Selling drugs in Canada, to me always seemed like a good proposition because you guys, I mean, you don't go to jail for anything. I mean, you kill somebody you're out in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it's definitely more lenient. You're not, you're not wrong. And, and bro, there there are tons of dealers, right? Like I told you,

crack was big because a lot of the people would go out to Ontario or they would go out to Vancouver or Calgary and get, you know, the Coke there. Wholesale. Right? And then they would take it to Winnipeg and then, you know, cook it up and, you know, the math. You're making fucking four times like what the fuck you put in.

So, or more. So do you think that those are the entry points for wholesale drugs, you know, heroin, Coke, are probably Vancouver, Toronto. It's 100%. Yeah. Those are the ports, right? Anywhere where the port is.

And that's why you see so many wars going on. You know what I mean? Like there's an internal struggle right now. Excuse me. In Montreal. And there has been for years because Montreal is like, everybody wants that. The Americans want it.

The organized crime groups, whoever it is, you know, Italian, Irish, French. They all want that port because it's just, if you have that, you have the whole northeast section, right? So we're talking about Boston as well. We're talking about New York. We're talking about not just Canada, right? And if you really, again, you dive into the history,

you'll see that, you know, there was an attempt back in the day from the Bananos to try and whack out the Montreal boss and that failed. And our guys, like the Canadian gangsters, ended up whacking out their boss. Is that right? Yeah. You guys beat us? You can look at it. Yeah, it was crazy.

Wow. Yeah, it's just such a rich port. There's so much money in Canada now. Just the other day, the biggest bust ever in Toronto history happened. So it was $90 million worth of product. There was like 500-something kilos of Coke and then 400-something of meth. And again, that's where you see. Okay, meth is like a serious thing.

There's hundreds of kilos being busted. So let me ask you this. With that kind of weight, that kind of, of wholesale, uh, cocaine, meth, all of it's coming from Mexico. Are you aware of any presence of Mexican wholesale dealers in Canada now? Me personally, no, but I can tell you that it certainly feels like it. Uh, like when I told you that, you know, even the junkies started looking, no offense, more American, right? They didn't look like they were from our parts. That was the first thing that I thought. I said, you know, this doesn't look good guys. You know what I mean? Like,

because a lot of my friends are up there on a higher scale. And I said, something is going on in the shadows right now. Like something is changing in Canada, right? And to be honest, Canada was a great place before when it came to dealing and stuff like that because you don't have that level of violence that you do in, in the states on the streets or in Mexico, obviously. So if Mexican groups start moving into Canada, that's going to be bad for a lot of organizations in Canada. because they're not used to that war, you know what I mean? That, that, that, that violence. Yeah, I don't expect that they'll move in, just like they don't really move into the states.

They just have customers. So I'm, I'm wondering, like, who has the capacity in Toronto, or Toronto, as you say, in Canada? Who has the capacity to be buying that much weight? Who can pick up 500 kilos of Coke? What group? So, so without, again, without saying names of the group? And you can leave it to your imagination or whatever, but bikers, right? Bikers are huge in Canada, especially on the coasts, which is where where it's important, right?

To be a significant number of people. They definitely have a lot of people on the coast. The Italians, definitely. There's a certain group. Again, I can't say the name because I'm friends with a lot of these guys and how to respect. I can't say anything or I don't want to. but a certain group from southern Italy, their faction in Canada in Ontario

is now becoming one of the most important in the world. You can almost say it's the base of this group. So that lets you know how powerful it is in Canada. Yeah. And these guys, you know, they're... Are these first generation people? Are these people from the other side? Or is it there, is it like in New York?

You know, the family's Italian, but they've been here for four generations. No, so this specific group, group, some of these guys have been around for 100 years, right? And we're talking about like prohibition days. You know what I mean? Like they've been here that long. But you have to understand, I'd say the biggest difference between, and I'm just talking about Italians, with organized crime between Canadians and Americans, is Canadians are actually more traditional. They're actually more old school. And if you talk to a lot of guys overseas, like, you know,

in Italy and even other parts of England and Germany. and all these other places, the Canadian gangsters, the Canadian organized crime groups, Italians, whatever, they get a lot of respect. They do because they're just, they're good at business. There's no bullshit. There's no flexing. They're very good in the shadows.

And that's what any organized crime groups should really strive to be. Certain can't because where they're geographically located, they have to show face. They have to show violence. They have to, you know what I mean? we're talking about south a border. But when it comes to these other groups that are operating all over the world,

the last thing you want to do is be known. You know what I mean? You want to be in the shadows. You don't want anyone to see you. And Canadian gangsters are really good at that. Well, there is something about the modesty of Canadians that I think plays well to that. You know, Americans are very ego-driven.

Crime is so celebrated in pop culture that I think a lot of gangsters and drug dealers like to be flashy and they want people to know them. So, but where does Winnipeg? Your hometown fit into this Canadian drug traffic. Is it just people, you know, wholesalers moving it through?

Exactly. Is that, as it sounds about. Yeah. And you have to keep in mind, like there's some of the ship takes a lot of time, right? So there's guys that like to move things

as quickly as possible because they think it goes under the radar or whatever. And then there's guys to actually really take their time with it. And they'll take a few weeks to move something from, let's say, the port of Montreal to, you know, somewhere in British Columbia, right? They just take it very slowly. Take us through that. Take us through the economics of a kilo of Coke that first gets into the country in Montreal versus what it's sold for by the time it gets across the country to Vancouver or vice versa.

What is the kind of markup? You've done episodes where you talk about it going from Columbia. up, right? Like we're talking about cocaine. All the places that it has to stop between and how many times it gets stepped on or whatever else, the same thing happens in Canada. And it's already been stepped on five fucking times or six times by the Americans, by the Mexicans, by whoever came before them, right? So what is it bought for? What is it sold for? What's the estimate? What is a kilo if you got the plug? So at the southern border right now, if you're getting it right now?

Like today? Yeah. So I'm just going to explain to you. And we, we know these things. Yeah. It comes across the border. Right now,

a kilo of Coke, you know, in Laredo, Texas is only like $15,000. Yeah, it's very cheap right now. That's when you have the plug. That's you're getting it

straight from straight after it comes across. Yeah. If you're that guy in Canada, what are you paying for it? Okay. So I can, I can't speak on the other side of things because remember,

that's not my field. That's not where I'm at. I know people that are in But for instance, I have guys in my city that are paying about 32 right now. Wow. In Winnipeg. In Winnipeg. So they're probably the guy, the guy that they're getting it from that's probably in

Winnipeg is getting it for 2930. Oh, wow. And then. That is very cheap. Yeah. It's, well. It's gone down from about half from when I, I remember a brick being 60 G's in Canada. 10, 12 years ago.

Yeah. Well, even just like pre-COVID, the price was way different. And then, you know, I think I watched on one of your episodes, like there was a, there was a time where the Colombians ramped up everything. Right? Because there was so many droughts and stuff like that. And they wanted to have, you know. They thought there was going to be another shutdown. So they really overproduced.

Exactly. And now there's a glut in the market. There's so much just sitting there. Exactly. it's dropped the price, you know, an enormous amount. Yeah, that's what I think happened. Like, especially, we sit in Canada as well. So how do you fit into this?

So you weren't really a criminal growing up. Right. Why? I did some dirt, but yeah, nothing, nothing big. Who were your parents and what kind of family did you grow up in? Okay. So, um, the way that I grew up was my father was a criminal. Um, he wasn't around much.

After about 10 years old, I didn't, I didn't see him for like, I don't I don't know, 16, 17 years. He was in and out of jail constantly. One of the things that's in the book is he started around 17 or 18 years old. You guys have Safeway out here in the U.S.? Yeah. So back in the day, he robbed a Safeway. And this was before, you know, money trucks were going out every day, right?

These guys would, like, do it once a week or whatever. We're talking like 45 years ago, right? So he ended up when he was 18 or 19, 18 years old. old, he, he hit up a safeway. And he had two other friends with him and they got away with about 60 grand, which is a lot of fucking money back then. Sure. Worked 45 years ago.

And then he was always doing criminal stuff like that. Very hard worker though, like very blue collar as well at the same time. Love to, love to dance, love to sing, had an amazing voice, performed in like Italian festivals and stuff like that out there. But his real downfall, in my opinion, was when he got into. drugs, right? So he was always his whole life from what I'm told was very anti-drugs until he was in his early 30s and his cousin kind of introduced him to cocaine. And, you know, cocaine is whatever. You're having a good time and fun and stuff like that. But it led into heroin. And once he got

into heroin, his life was over. So in the last 20, I want to say 20, 30 years, he was addicted to heroin. And he died a couple years ago during COVID. And I wasn't told how he died, but I imagine that it was an overdose or it was suicide one or the other, right? My mom, complete opposite. My mom was just like a hard worker. She raised us kids. It was me and two sisters living at home, two older sisters, and she was just a hardworking good woman, kind of the glue of the family, kept everybody together. But I never had a good relationship with her, and that was on me. I was very angry. Like from the moment I was born, I don't know, but there was something inside of me that had this this anger towards her and my sisters and beyond authority.

And, you know, I always had that. The cold. Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah. But I'll fast forward a little bit here because there's so much to tell about my childhood, but, you know, this is a true crime podcast at the end of the day. So you're 26. What changed?

I was working at a call center. I was making decent money at that time, like $20 something an hour, which I was happy with. You know what I mean? But I had this weird thing going on with this married woman there. And this woman was like a 10. You know what I mean? Like this is not a woman that I should have something going on with.

But I think that she just liked what I represented. She was very miserable in a relationship. I was this fun younger guy that was taking her out to hookah lounges and bringing her around rappers and stuff like that. You know what I mean? So she was very intrigued by that. And it started super fun and just, you know, we're kidding and stuff like that. And then it just seemed like she took it a little too far. And she told me that she was going to leave her husband and all this kind of stuff.

And I was like, what, you know, we weren't fucking or anything like that. You know, I don't even excuse me. I don't know if I can swear here. Sure. Okay. You know, it was starting to get uncomfortable for me. And then one day I went and talk to the supervisor. And I was like, listen, man, like, I need you to move me or her.

Like, I don't care which one it is. You can move me or whatever. And he asked me why. And I told him. And he starts laughing. And I don't blame the guy because she, like I said, she was a 10. Like if she's...

Winnipeg 10. Yeah, no, no, no, no. We'll say on LA 7 or LA 8th. That's good. Okay. All right. That's decent, right? Merry balls miss from our friends over at Manscaped. The holidays are approaching, but what if I told you that the celebration started early this

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he thinks I'm joking or whatever. And I said, man, like I, you know, if you don't do this, then I got to quit. And he's like, you know, then go. And that was it. So after this, I decided like to take a break just from life, right? So I decided to be homeless. Okay.

And I'm not talking about on the streets. I'm not talking about like, you know, doing drugs and squeegee guy or whatever like that. But I decided to go to a shelter and take a couple months to myself. where I just like recuperated from everything that I've been going through for several years, right? Which is discussed in the book.

If you want to know more about the earlier years, read the book. There's the, you know, the first half of the book really is about my life and how I grew up and a lot of more in-depth and emotional stuff. But the other half of the book is the, you know, the criminal aspect.

So I spent a couple of months homeless. And to be honest, it was great for me. It's almost like, you know, my father was institutionalized from jail, right? So, you know, having a bed, having the three meals, having, you know, your workout regimen or whatever the fuck it was. Like certain guys operated well like that. I never thought I would because I was always kind of like a wild card. And I didn't like structures or systems or anything like that. But I somehow fell in love with it almost there.

And it was a peaceful time in my life. It was the calm before the storm. Right? Shortly after I meet a guy who's an Italian guy from another part of Canada, I believe from Quebec, right? I believe he was Sicilian. And I also believe that he was hiding out. He was hiding out in my city. There had been a bust recently, a huge Canadian bust in Ontario, in Quebec. And a bunch of guys were on the run. A bunch of guys got caught, like a couple hundred of them got caught. It was huge. And this guy, his story wasn't. adding up when I saw him, you know what I mean? Like, he didn't stay at the place because I actually slept there, right? But he would come by a lot. You could tell the guy was a little bit lonely. He wasn't completely all there.

And he was, he was older, right? So I, the way that I met him was like, you know, he, I think I was wearing like, you know, like a soccer jersey one day, a Italian jersey. And he asked me if I was Italian. I said, yes, he starts talking to me and his language was Sicilian. My Italian's not very good. My Spanish is good now. Because I spent so much time in Latin America later on.

But my Italian wasn't good. And the dialects in the south are completely different. Sicilian has Greek in it. It has some Arabic. I don't know what the fuck this guy's saying to me. So I said, listen, man, like, you know, I'm Italian, but I don't speak that much. And I definitely don't speak Sicilian. But we hit it off.

And I just kind of help this guy out, to be honest. I would, you know, grab food for him. You know what I mean? I would, if he was cold, I go grab my blanket. He's like a grandpa. You know what I mean? And he had some interesting stories. I think he was fucking nuts.

But he had some very interesting stories just about how he grew up in Sicily and stuff like that. One day I noticed him eating. And he has dentures, right? And his teeth fall out. Right? His top row of teeth fall out. And that's not that weird. You know, whatever.

All the guys have dentures. But then I noticed he was eating as well, right? He was eating at the same time. And I noticed his fingertips, right? They were like gone. So what I mean by that is like if you can picture someone dipping your fingers in acid, right? And it almost going down to the bone, right? That's what his fingers looked like.

So you couldn't really see, you know, you look at your finger right now and you see the patterns, right? Of your fingerprints. And he didn't have that. Right. So I thought that was really strange. And keep in mind, this guy was always telling me stories that didn't add up. But when I saw this, I saw dentures and I saw the fingerprints thing. The first thing that I thought was, remember, I also thought this guy was on the lamb, right?

And, you know, there's a lot of guys that will go to extreme measures when they're on the lamb, right? Plastic surgery, getting rid of their fingerprints and their teeth to be identified, right? I don't know if it works so much in Canada, but if you're from, you know, a fucking farm from back home or whatever, that shit will work great. you know, if they don't have your, if they don't have your, your dental records. Wow. Or your fingerprints, right? So that confirmed to me that this guy, you know, he's a little shady. Like, you know, I already kind of knew that.

But to be honest, like I had seen so much shit in my life and I was so comfortable in the dark, we'll say, in the underworld, in the shadows, whatever it was, that it didn't bother me at all. I was just kind of like more intrigued. I was like, okay, now who the fuck is this guy, you know? And then shortly, shortly after, like I said, this is going on for a couple of months. Shortly after, I'm walking back to the mission, right, where I was staying. And I see him. And he comes up to me, he says, I'm leaving. I'm going home.

And I said, well, where the fuck is that? You know, he's like, you know, out east. He said, out east. And I already knew, I'm pretty sure he's from Quebec, you know, to this day. He never told me. But he said, you know, I want to thank you for everything. you've been a great friend to me. You've been my only friend here.

You're the only person that's kind of looked out for me. I didn't know anyone here. And he never really again explained to me what he was doing there. But he was just really appreciative that someone on a real level too. Like, you know, not on some G code or something like that. But it was just, you know, a young guy looked after him. You know what I mean? It made him feel like, you know, more comfortable there.

And he basically said to me like, you know, I'm going to have some work for you in the future. I think that you're gonna, you know, that you're, that you're a capable guy and I trust you and you seem loyal and you did all these things for me when you didn't have to. You don't know who I am or, you know, and he even told me, he's like, I know you're a smart guy. I know you knew that I was lying to you half the time, but it's because I had to. I can't trust anybody. And that kind of let me know, okay, yeah. So he told me that someone was going to reach out to me. I handed him, uh, I didn't hand him, but I didn't hand him. But I, wrote down my email, my phone number, and he said, someone's going to reach out to you in the next

couple of months, and I have a business opportunity for you. It's up to you whether or not you choose to go with it. But he said, you can make a lot of money. You can earn a lot of money. Bro, I'm homeless. I don't have a job at this point. So somebody tells me I can make a lot of money, obviously, I'm going to go for it. So shortly after I got out of the mission and I moved into an apartment with a friend at the time. And I was at a bar, a friend's bar, who calum, and I got a phone call from a French Italian guy. So it just confirmed to me even more, excuse me,

that this guy was from Quebec. And he basically said he's a friend of the old man. And he knows it's my birthday, or that my birthday was coming up or whatever. You know, he had a gift for me. I was like, a gift. It's like, I'm going to be at Winnipeg Airport in a couple hours, right, a three-hour flight or two-and-a-hour flight,

whatever it was. But I want you to meet me here. I didn't meet him at the airport. I met him somewhere else. He obviously knew my city though. You know, from this, like I said, he was an outsider. He sounded like he was from Quebec. But he knew, oh, you know, go over to this place by this place.

And I'm like, how the fuck does this guy know where these things are? So I go and meet the guy. And he just basically says to me what the old man said, but he repeats it through himself. And he said, you know, when the old man was here, like you, you're the only person that he considered a friend. He had a lot of enemies. he couldn't let people know who he was or where he was or anything like that and you didn't seem to care, you know, he'll never forget, you know, the times that you brought him his food or, you know, his teeth would fall out and you wouldn't laugh at him. You'd help him.

I'd pick up his teeth and I'd go clean him, give it back to him. You know what I mean? He really respected that. And for me, it was just, I'm an empath. I'm naturally. I want to help people. You know what I mean? I've always felt like a leader, but in a way that not like a dominant, violent leader, but like just taking care of the people around me, right?

So he goes on and tell me, he's like, you know, he said that you might be interested in making some money. So, you know, I have two envelopes for you. So he hands me one envelope. He's like, that's your gift. You know, happy birthday. Thanks for everything you did for the old man. He appreciates it. I appreciate it.

I remember he kept saying we a lot. We appreciate it. So let me know that there's a group involved. And then he hands me another envelope. And he's like, you know, take a look inside after I leave and make your decision. There's a number at the bottom of this piece of paper. And if you're interested in you, you can call me. So I opened this first, the gift, right?

You know, after I walk away and get into a taxi. It was about, it was about, I can't remember exactly. And I'm always bouncing back. It was, I want to say it was like $3,800. Right? Okay. And keep in mind, I'm broke at the time. So $3,800 is like, that's paying my rent for a month or two

and, like, you know, putting some food in the, in the fridge. I'm really happy. And then in the other envelope, was a list of names, phone numbers, addresses, and amounts in dollars, right?

So I kind of gathered, you know, I had to call the guy after a couple days after I thought about it, but these were debts. You know what I mean? Yeah.

What kind of debts were they? What amounts? Do you remember? Yeah. So I remember the first couple, it's almost like he did it in order, which I really like, because I like people that are like,

you know, like that, you know, put shit in order. alphabetically and all that kind of stuff. I don't know why. I'm like that. But I like organized.

So, you know, you start at the top and there was like, you know, $850. Like there's nothing, three grand, whatever. I think the final amount, because there was about 10 different names and numbers on there. And I think the last amount was around 15K or whatever, right? And all it said was like, you know, if you're interested, like, contact me back, right? So eventually I called a guy from a from a pay phone And I say, you know Is this what I think it is?

Like you want me to go collect this money And he's like, yeah He's like, can you handle that? I was like, yeah, no problem And where were these people located? In my city. Okay, so there was two There was one in Ontario and there was one in Quebec as well

In Montreal. Or no, sorry, Laval in Quebec, right? Which is outside of Montreal. But and that was the bigger amount, actually. I should say that. So all of them went well, to be honest. Like I collected in Winnipeg first because I had never gone to these other provinces and I didn't really know a lot of people there.

I had some family, but not like connected guys or anything, just family members that would tell me like what to do in the city or whatever. So everything went smoothly and... How did you have any resistance? Like how do you, how did you go about collecting money? Okay. So this, again, this is explained in the book, but I really want to, I want to make it clear. I wasn't a tough guy.

You know what I mean? Like I could be, right? Like a lot of people know me as a tough guy in the sense that I can be hard to deal with. I got a bit of an anger problem sometimes. Like if you piss me off, I'll explode, that kind of shit. But I was not like a violent guy. So I was the guy that they sent before they sent the other guy. Right.

So like when it's not that serious, I go in there and I was like, you know, if you owe three, five grand, whatever it is. So listen, man, just put something on it. You know what I mean? If you can't pay the full of money. amount, just pay something. If you owe three to five grand, you know, pay 500 bucks, pay a thousand. Give me something so that I can go to this guy and say he's trying, you know, so you don't get your ass kicked. You know what I mean? And then there's obviously someone, someone, someone bigger.

Did you know why they owed money? Yeah. So it ranged, bro. So it ranged from everything from Coke debts, right, to gambling. Sure. Like horse races and stuff like that. And, which is something in Winnipeg. I never thought that that exists in Winnipeg, but I found out earlier on that it was. Yeah, we've learned actually just through the course of the show. I mean, honestly, wherever there's blue collar money, you have a lot of gambling going on, a lot of horse racing.

Fixed. A lot of fixed stuff. Yeah, that, oh, wow, yes, of course. I saw your guest the other day. And I actually, I know a guy that was doing that. And of course, wherever you have Italians, you have, you know, organized crime. You have brackets like this.

and gambling and sports gambling specifically, I mean, is one of the most prevalent, you know, rackets amongst, that's why I don't watch sports, man. Yeah, I love soccer,

football, whatever you want to call it, but I can't even enjoy it because I just always think, like, this shit is probably fixed, man. Because, and some of it goes on such a high level.

Like, you know what I mean? You've heard a lot of stories, I'm sure, even NBA and NFL. I doubt that's happening anymore. If it happens, it's probably with,

you know, ultra-rich, Middle Eastern, Saudi, Qataris, you know, that buy their whole teams. Yeah, I don't think the, you know. And they are doing that though. Yeah, you look at like Premier League in the England.

They're buying entire football clubs right now. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. So you're collecting this money. Yeah. You got, how much did you, were you able to get 80% of it? 70% of it?

Did you get all of it? All of it. Wow. The first run. The first run. I got all of it. And he wasn't expecting that. He's just saying work it.

But I'd say within two and a half weeks I got everything and it totaled up to I'd say probably around 30 grand right which he was very happy with and keep in mind like this guy was sending me to do this not just on his behalf but on other people's behalf because you know how it is like with bookies and stuff like that like um they'll hire someone externally right so for instance let's say if if i went to these guys and it was a larger amount let's say like because it did get much larger later down the road which i'll talk about but um let's say it was like 50 grand, right? And I went in there and I was like, listen, man, you got to kick up five or 10 right now.

And the guy's like, fuck you. Go fuck yourself. You know, then we would send in someone else. And it was typically biker type guys. If it wasn't bikers at all, because the truth is from my experience and this is just my experience, Italians will kill you. You know what I mean? Like, they really will.

And bikers, they're, they're tough. as fuck. They're big guys. They're intimidating. They know how to smash people's heads in. But they can also like control themselves a little bit, which which might sound nuts to you. But there's, I know a lot of Italian guys that when they fly off the handle, they can't stop. It can't just be a beating. Do you know what I mean? So they they purposely like you don't if this guy's making you even if he's been a bitch and he doesn't want to pay. You know, you look at the. long run, how much you're making off this guy for years, right? Even if he's being a little shit, you still want to have him in your, he's a long-term customer. He's a long-term customer. Yeah, murder is not so easily done, especially when you just have like an addicted gambler. Like at the end of the day, you look at what he's paid. It's like, well, he's paid me a half a million bucks. So what if he's late this time? But it sounds like the Italians are, you know, they've risen to like a white collar level now. They're running wholesale drugs, gambling rackets, and they use the

bikers for the dirty work. They're the brutes. Yeah. Okay. And it's been like that for a while. If you look, the most interesting politics, like gangster politics that exists in Canada, that's ever existed in Canada, is in Quebec. Yeah. So if you, if you ever watch bad blood, like about the risutoes and stuff like that. Yeah. Um, that's all facts, man. So like it, you know, you had Irish, Haitians, French, and Italians, and bikers all working together. And it was under this system. And unfortunately, that system has failed, right? Like, Vito Rizudo died. And he was really our godfather in Canada. It doesn't matter if you were Collabrian or Sicilian or a biker or whoever. That guy is Canada's biggest gangster ever. I don't care what anybody says. That's just a fact.

The guy had stupid money, stupid power. And he's like our John Gotti, something like that. Exactly. He wasn't. And he kind of was like that. You know, I don't want to say anything else. When, uh, what are the laws around organized crime? Like, so I know the RCMP, Royal Canadian amount of police. That's your FBI. Basically, yeah. What, like, uh, what are the, do they have big RICO laws, like big, uh, organized crime,

racketeering laws in Canada, the way they do in the U.S. to take down the mafia? No. Really? Yeah. That's why it's probably so prevalent still. Yeah. that's not to say that they don't exist at all, right?

Like there's definitely, it's not RICO. It's not called RICO or anything like that. I don't know what it's called. And I'm just going to be honest here. But you don't see that typically. You don't see that in Canada. Like the person that is caught doing what they're doing wrong is the person that's charged, right? They don't even like to say like with the news report I told you the other day, the biggest

bus that we had in Ontario, there was $90 million worth of product. They don't, they don't say any names. They don't say any organized, you know, crime groups or anything like that. Even though it was obvious, like, you know, it was to me, it was obvious. It's because they're so PC in Canada, too. They don't want to say, there's a bunch of Italians. There's a bunch of. Yeah.

So, okay, wow, that, that stands to reason then that there's still a lot of entrenched, like, old school, organized crime. Definitely. So take us, fast forward us now. So you, do you do a good, you do a good job? Yeah. Uh, what comes next? Okay, so the, the deck collections I did for about a year and a half. And how much are you keeping?

How much you get to make? 10%. Typically. Yeah. Which I was happy with, bro. Because the first month, I'd say the first month that I did it, I probably made 8K, right? 8,800. And fuck, man.

Like, I, you know, I just come from being homeless and broke and poor. So $8,500 is a lot of fucking money. And I knew that it was only going to get bigger. The amounts were going to get bigger. The trust in me was going to get bigger. So you know what I mean? I ended up, you know, over that year and a half, I'd say I probably did at the end of it, like, around 150 to 160K. Right.

Wow. And collections. Yeah, exactly. So obviously, I didn't save all of it. You never save all of it. I didn't save shit. I'm notorious for that. But I saved tens of thousands of dollars.

And I eventually walked away. I walked away from it for two reasons. So I was told that it was a good idea for me to start carrying a pistol, right? Carrying heat, which I never did. I never did for a year and a half. And I wasn't comfortable with it. I didn't like it because I didn't want to have to fucking use it.

Point blank period. I'm not going to, I was making good money, but I'm not going to kill someone over like 10 grand, 20 grand. That's just fucking stupid. You know, I'm not going to go to jail for 10, 20, 30 lifetime, whatever the fuck it was, even though it's less in Canada, right? More lenient. How common is it for Canadian criminals to have guns?

Because there really are no Second Amendment rights there. I know every Canadian has a rifle because they love hunting. But handguns, illegal handguns. It's terrible in the streets, bro. Really? So everybody's packing. Yeah. So like a lot of the guys, you know, we were talking about the Aboriginal groups, right? Yeah. The African gangs, a lot of Arabs coming over, like the Syrians that came in, the refugees,

Afghans, Iraqis and stuff like that. They're pretty big out there. they are some wild motherfuckers and they're heavy loaded. Wow. Yeah. And they don't give a fuck to use it to be honest. And that's, again,

it's kind of what I don't like about Winnipeg because whenever you, and you know this, bro, whenever you go to a place that is controlled by a certain organization or group, petty crime and little shit like that almost, it doesn't exist, right? Because they run their city,

their country, their province, their state, whatever you want to call it, like a business. So when someone gets robbed, a tourist gets robbed or whatever, that's bad for business.

Now you got cops. Now you got heat. Now you got media attention. The problem with my city is that there's no one in full control. There's definitely strong players. And a lot of these guys communicate with each other and stuff like that. But the kids, you know, and I call them kids, even though I'm 35, I'm still young for, for, you know, for a lot of those guys, the old timers.

But I'm talking like 20-year-olds, like 25-year-olds and even younger. They're just wild, man. So it's become like a street gang situation like any American city, Chicago. Yes. Okay. And it's changing. Yeah. And I also told you how, you know, it's starting to look like we're having external forces

coming into. So it's not a good combination going on right now. Right. How much is it to get an illegal pistol if you're in Canada? From what I know. It's probably good business, though. I'm sure the bikers, the Hells Angels. Yep.

They're notorious for running guns. Yep. I'm sure that's big business up there. And they're huge in Canada, bro. You got to keep in mind like Vancouver. Yeah. Probably one of the most important places for that group in the world. You know, it's just, it's just, and they're heavy out there.

Yeah. You know, I was there for a couple weeks last year. I think that's their headquarters. It feels like it. Yeah. Well, we used to go, we used to go buy pot, you know, way back of the day before it was legal. Yeah. They had all the bars down in that, like, cede area of downtown Vancouver.

And they had people just with fanny packs on slinging, you know, slinging dime bags of pot. Yeah. And they owned all the strip clubs. Yeah. And they brought in wholesale drugs. They used to trade. The big thing back in the day was trading American bud. No, excuse me, trading American bricks of Coke for Canadian pounds of weed. Really? Yes. So if you were, imagine that's how expensive weed was back in the day. It was almost brick for brick, almost. A pound of cocaine for a pound of marijuana was the exchange at the border. Yeah. So it's totally changed now. But, you know, they're very active still. sure they're into meth and, you know, wholesale fentanyl trafficking. So, but now here you are. You're not a gangster. You're just a guy that's, you know. So you saw an opportunity. Yeah, totally.

So what? So did you get a pistol? How did it result? No. So I told you there's two things that were going on that made me decide to back away. So one was the pistol. And then I also had a friend that was involved in organized crime in Winnipeg. and he kind of let me know that these guys are,

you know, they're impressed with you. They like what you're doing and stuff like that. And it almost sounded like that it was going another route. They were going to start asking me to do other things. Maybe you were going to become the guy that put his hands on people or killed people or...

It felt like it was going away from the deck collections. I was fine with the debt collections, but it sounded like it was drugs. And it sounded, which I didn't like. And it also sounded like it was, um, you know,

putting in work, you know what I mean, on people, right? So I got over there while I still had the chance. And I almost immediately left the country for the first time ever in my life. I was probably 20, 2015 or 2016 was the first time I actually left Canada. And then- And you didn't tell them, obviously, right? No, no, I did. No, I did.

I did. I told them, you know, like, you know, I've been doing this for like a year and a half. You know, I'm a young guy. I want to start traveling a little bit. I want to start seeing places. I, you know, I was super respectful about it. And because they hadn't made the offer yet, I couldn't refuse. You know what I mean?

Right. So it's like they, you know, it might have been a different case if they asked me. Right. But I just heard they were about to. So I got the fuck out of there and I started traveling. And that's how I got into other, other crime. Okay. Yeah.

So before we, you tell us where you traveled to, who was that old man? with his with who who what position was he the old man that you took care of with his fingernails or his fingerprints all he's a capo okay of of uh the Montreal one of the Montreal one of them there's a lot Italian crime family there's there's a couple that are talked about constantly but there's actually a lot and he he was on the run from because there was a war going on or it was from no feds okay gotcha yeah but there was also a war too okay so there's constantly a war between the class in Ontario and the Sicilians in Quebec because the the the clobrians want the port everybody wants the fucking yeah wow and so they're going to war over the port like they do in the old country right now wow um and the guy had his finger net or his fingerprints saw it off or yeah i don't know what it was it looked like acid like that's the only guess i have for it but yeah it was almost like just bone that's wild so where did you go when you left Canada okay so i have to retract just a little bit. When I was still homeless, I was sitting there at a hookal lounge,

was talking to my brother. And he was telling me he was about to go to Mexico. He just, you know, he loved it out there and he thought he found a woman or whatever. So, you know, he's going to go try his thing out there. And now intuition has always been a big thing for me. Dreaming has always been a big thing. I've always visualized things that would happen in my life that actually did. And it could be two years later, five years, 10 years later, whatever. If you believe in law of attraction, which I do. I created a lot of images inside my head of what my life was going to look like. And it was absurd to people when I spoke about it.

So for my brother, for instance, I'm sitting there. I'm homeless at the time. I've got one of those big camper backbacks on my back. And I'm telling him like, you know, I don't know how. But by the end of this year, I'm going to make $100,000. Right? And he's like, what are you talking about? I had no scams going on.

I had no money. had no job, nothing like that. By the end of the year, I didn't make that kind of money, but I think I made around 30K or whatever. The following year, I did 200, right? So I go to beat my brother. The first place I traveled to, to answer the question, bluntly, is Mexico to see my brother.

Where in Mexico? Cancun. But real Cancun, not the fucking hotel zone, but like, you know, the real spot. And, you know, I took him out and showed him around and stuff. Unfortunately, that trip, I will also, say, me and him gotten a little bit of a fight. He's not like me. He's not, he's not, he's not, he's not, um, he didn't grow up tough. You know what I mean? He grew up, uh, spoiled, you know,

and, and that comes through our relationship. It did. It used to, not now, but it used to come through. He had an attitude. You know what I mean? There's a lot of times that I had to fight people for him because he had a big mouth. He's a year or two younger than me. Um, but, uh, you know, we're in Plyadal Carmen. And, uh, we were walking around and, uh, we were walking around and, and, And he said something really, you know, just stupid. I forget what it was. It was not that big of a deal at the time, but it was disrespectful. So I slapped him in the back of the head, you know.

I didn't punch him or anything. I didn't give him a slap. I was like, man, you got to shut the fuck up. Like, you're in Mexico now. You can't be talking to people like that, whether it's me or anybody else. Like, you got to understand, like, this is a dangerous place that you're in. And I don't want you mouthing off to the wrong guy and getting your head fucking cut off and you being stuffed in a trunk.

You know what I mean? Because I was very well aware of the culture that. you know, surrounds these tourist destinations in Mexico. So, and unfortunately on that trip, two things happen. So I get to fight with my brother. Don't talk to him for five years after that because he was so cheezed about it. But I got robbed for the only time of my life I've ever been robbed was in Mexico. It was on that first trip.

And it was beautiful. I got to say, you know, that sounds ridiculous. But I really, like, I really respected how they did it. You know what I mean? Even afterwards, I was obviously pissed. and a little bit freaked out. Rob by a hooker. We've all been there, dude.

No, no, no. No, that comes later on. That's a different part of the world. But, um, so basically what happened is we're taking a bus from the hotel zone to real Cancun where he lives and we get off at this bus stop. And somebody gets off the bus that's wearing one of those tourist guide shirts. The guys that all run around Cancun, you know, like, uh, all the clubs and stuff like that. So I notice it, but I don't think anything of it at the same time, right?

So this kid gets off. He's probably a couple years younger than me. Maybe he's like 23, 24. He gets off at the same stop as us. Now, we have three blocks to walk to get home to his place, my brother's place. But this kid goes right, right away. He goes like, we're walking down a straight street, you know, and he takes one of the side streets. So I think nothing of it.

So we're two blocks away, you know. And then I had a chain on at the time. and I just feel the pull, right? And, you know, it rips. And it was, it wasn't a, it was like a $1,000 chain gold-plated. It wasn't anything, excuse me, serious. But when I turned around, the kid that had gotten off the bus with me is the one that grabbed the chain.

And maybe five, 10 feet away from him. There's another kid about the same age, 24 years old, 23 years old, or whatever it is, on a scooter pointing a pistol at me, right? So anyways, I got my revenge though, which is a good part of the story. I ended up paying some guy to rough the guy up and just kind of let him know. And that wasn't so much for me. That was for my brother because I didn't want him looking weak in that neighborhood. Do you know what I mean?

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It's so strange why you would act that way In Mexico Like you're acting like you're on the streets In Winnipeg It's like you don't live there But it's my brother bro Yeah Yeah and I can't

I can't Like listen man like when So you know the guy's there, he's holding the pistol to me. He's shouting in Spanish. My Spanish is non-existent at that time. I don't remember what he's saying. So I put my hands up.

I let him take the chain. The pendant fell off of the chain. I grabbed that after they had left. But this kid fucked up. So what he did was a couple days later, he sold my chain for some weed. And the guy that he sold it to was a barber in the same barbershop that my brother goes to get his haircut and stuff like that.

So there's this guy and I think he was like a part of the well-known El Salvadorian gang. You know what I'm talking about? Tattoos all over the face. Just say the name, dude. MS-13. Nobody's coming for you. What are you talking about? Could be another one.

No, that's the only one. Who gives a goddamn. Okay. So that's what he looked like to me. You don't come down to be on the connect to be coy. Right. Okay. We snitch on here.

We need details. So what were you doing down there? You got your chain back. You got revenge. It's all petty. What are you doing in Mexico? What do you start doing to make money? You brought five grand down there.

Yeah, yeah. What's the next step? Well, I left shortly after, bro. Okay. Yeah, because of the thing that happened with my brother, right? So I spent the rest of the year traveling. I went to, whatever, I went to New York for the first time, went to Puerto Rico, went to Chile. And I was just chilling.

Living. Yeah, living. Yeah, I wasn't doing anything. When I got into my next racket, if you want to call it, that was probably the following year. So I started going to Italy. The first time I went was, I want to, I think it was January of 2016 or January of 2017. I'm not completely sure. I think it's 2017.

Anyways, I go to Italy for the first time. I spent about a month out there. And while I'm there, uh, I was referred to somebody in Milan, right? And, and, and this was just like, you know, this is a good guy. Go check him out. And the other guy was told the same thing about me. Right. And, uh, it's kind of like, you know, when you meet someone else that's shady.

because you met him through a certain guy, right? So for me, like, I already knew that the guy that I was meeting was into some shit. And he was, he's a collaborating guy. And there's a lot of them in Milan. Milan is a focal point right now. Interesting. Tell us about that really quick. How is Milan related to the larger criminal networks in Italy?

Oh, Milan is like, it's like, how can you say? Because Milan is northern Italy. It's very European. it's completely different from the south. With the money, bro. Yeah, there's so much money. There's so much money. So what are Calabrians and, you know, the people from Naples, the Camorra, what are they doing up in Milan?

So everything that you can imagine from, you know, from drug trafficking to extortion to legitimate businesses. Right. You got to keep in mind like the, all the Italian criminal organizations for the last, I'd say, 20 something years. have been trying to legitimize themselves. That doesn't mean that they're not involved in other stuff, but they're constantly trying to take that dirty money and put it into clean money. That's the name of the game.

You know what I mean? When you talk about money laundering and stuff, you want to have legitimate assets and stuff like that. They can't be taken away from it. Right. Right. So for me, I met this guy.

We became, you know, pretty close. I saw him, I'd say maybe three or four times, but we'd spend like six hours together. And he started. talking to me about Panama, right?

And I don't know a fucking thing about Panama. Up until then, I had only visited Chile, Puerto Rico, Mexico, not on a criminal vibe at all, just going there for a vacation. Now I start hearing about money laundering. I hear about like the stuff that they're setting up with real estate companies and how they have people inside of the banks and, and, you know, if I want to get a deposit box, you know, they could they could do something for me and stuff like that. And then I eventually that same year, not the same trip, because I go to Italy about five times that year.

I went back to Europe five times on top of going to Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver. I was all over that year. And that was a year where I made a lot of money too. I had a couple of other scams going on. What were you doing? One of them I can't talk about. I just, I can't. It's too close to home.

I'll just say it like that. You know, like if the feds are going to get me, I want it to be a little bit difficult at least. So I'm not going to talk about certain things. But one of the things that I was doing was selling banking information, right? So we would get, we had a guy that had, that would get, you know, it's almost like, you know what the dark web is. You know how you can get credit cards and profile information. Yeah. We had someone in a bank that would actually get us everything.

And it was, it was a for sure thing. So I could get a list of maybe a thousand names with all the personal bank. information and I would pay roughly like I don't know maybe three to five grand for this holy shit for a thousand people's names yeah where where is this located you could do that's in Canada so this is what this is one of my rackets that I had in Canada and the guy the guy was so rich like the guy that that gave me that connect right because it was somebody else that that brought me in so you're a good guy if you want to make a couple extra grand do this he introduced me to some Albanians and some Nigerians in England in London. And these guys are the masters

at, as far as I know, uh, for, um, running credit cards and stuff. Right. Of course, they're notorious for that. Yeah. So explain how it works. You buy, uh, this list with all this banking info. USB stick. Okay, right. It's all on it. It's all on a hard drive. Yeah. You buy it from like a teller or the bank manager. Yeah. Uh, a teller. Okay. So you buy it from a teller. Who do you sell it to and how much do you sell it for? So again, I was walked into this. So that means that there was already sellers. This guy, the guy that brought me in, Chinese guy, he, this was too little for him. This guy was huge. He was making, like, I'm guessing, I don't know, three, four million dollars a year. So what I was making off of, so remember, I'm paying three to five grand for these USB sticks,

right? But I'm going over to London or other parts of England. England, Cardiff, Wales, spent a lot of time out there as well. And I'm selling this stick for like 10 to 12,000 pounds, right? Which is giving me about 18,000 Canadian. So, and you're selling it to like the Nigerians or whoever's grabbing? It was usually, like I would only do it once or twice a year, to be honest. It was just like a little extra money while I'm in England. I can pop this off. You know what I mean? And for me, it was, it was always Albanians and Nigerians. Yeah. That was it. I don't think I ever sold to it like an Englishman or an Irishman or anything like that. It was always those guys because they were so good. They're so good at what

they do. You know, they had the machines to make the credit cards and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, they showed me their operation one time and it was fucking nuts, bro. I walked into this place that was no bigger than this, what we're in right now, but there's like 20 fucking dudes making cards. You know what I mean? They had like 10 different machines and God only knows how much those guys were making off of what they spent 15 grand on me for it. It's way better than drugs. Oh, way better. Way better than drugs.

And here's, okay. Got to get your money out of Canadian banks, folks. Right? Wow. That's why I stayed away from drugs, bro. So I had a personal issue with drugs, right? A lot of my family was affected by it. A lot of my friends were affected by it.

I saw the ugliness in it. Didn't like it. It wasn't for me. But on the other side of things, I also saw the risk. the reward. And I said, I got these guys that I know that are doing blue color or sorry, white color crimes. And they're making millions. You know what I mean? And I know a couple of guys that even got caught. These guys got like three to six months. Some of them didn't even do time. And then I got a friend on the streets that sells like, you know, a couple ounces of crack.

If he gets caught with that, he's going to jail for five years. Or he's going to snitch because everybody does on the streets. Right. You know, that's the one thing I hit about the streets too. Everybody snitches. And when you're looking at it outside, of the organized crime perspective. These guys have no loyalty to each other. They're animals, bro. Yeah. So they'll snitch on their best friend, their cousin.

Yeah, there is something about narcotics that just breeds, I mean, because it's drugs. It's poison. So it causes people to lose any kind of respect they have for themselves or loyalty to have. The world values go out of roof. What's the other big scam? So identity theft is gigantic. What is that the scam of scams or is there like another kind of fraud? Yeah.

And in general. No, money laundering. So that's when I get into Panama. Gotcha. So keep in mind, I have a couple of these things going on. I'm still collecting debt every once in a while. Like if there's somebody like, you know, oh, I got a guy in Winnipeg because I'm always in Winnipeg.

If I couldn't do it myself, I get someone else to go do it, right? And how would you get work? Would you go into a town and say, hey, I need money? And would you call up, you know, call up an organization in Montreal and be like, say like, hey, I'm going to be in Winnipeg. If you have anything for me. Like how would you garner this work? Like, you know, flying around the world.

Because I, because I had my guys that I worked with for a year and a half or two years. And they said, you know, if you can do this or whatever. But I wasn't doing that much. So I, again, I got into the, got into the cards. And then keep in mind about a year or so back when I'm in Italy, I get introduced to this idea of Panama. But I also get introduced to a man from Panama, right? And this guy is who I ended up becoming. very close with and it helps me make

hundreds of thousands of dollars. Is he a Panamanian guy or is he a Calabrian in Panama? No, he is Lebanese. Yeah, but he's been in Panama forever as far as I know. They're very strong in Latin America. I don't know if you've noticed that. I have no idea.

No, really. Lebanese are very good at money laundering. I'm going to say that right now. And I'm not just saying in Latin America, but a lot of places that I went to in the world, Lebanese were there, bro.

And they were doing, you know, some serious stuff. So how I get into it, I go down there. The first thing I get is this deposit box. So there's a woman that,

well, that runs a bank, not runs it, but she's like, whatever, she's an assistant or manager or whatever. And she'll get me a deposit box.

And the beauty of this thing is that I don't have to go in there with a passport. I don't have to go there and with anything else. I just have this box. And every once in a while, I put, you know, three grand in it, five grand in it, or I take out.

And the crazier part of this story is, um, hang on, hang on. So you're taking money from your contacts in Italy, flying it over to Panama and putting it in this box? Uh, sometimes, but more so remember, the guy that I had met from Panama, right? Okay. So he, he got me some work in Panama as well. And it, and it ranged everything from helping people get through the, the Dorian Gap.

Yeah. Dary and Gap. Sorry, Dary and Gap, sorry. I had a little couple things going on out there as well.

But tell us about the money laundering. Who's cash are you putting in that safe deposit box? My own. Okay. My own cash.

So this was like my safety net. Right. Yeah, because I didn't trust banks. You know, because I literally had a friend that like gave me

lists of client information for a bank. So I'm like, fuck no. Like, never mind just the fact that my money's dirty and I don't want it

being under scrutiny. At the same time, I don't fucking trust banks to be capable of actually keeping my fucking money safe. So tell us about Panamanian banks really quick, though. Are all the banks like that? Can you just walk in and get a safe deposit box without an ID? Or you got to fleece somebody. You got to pay somebody. It's tough.

Okay. Yeah, from what I know, right? And I didn't get this by myself on my own. Okay. No, I'm not going to act like I walked in there and did this myself. Somebody hooked it up. And like I said, I just used it as a box to put some savings in. I was in Panama a lot, I'd say three, four times a year.

And I would typically, only one time in four years, I took money out, right? It was one time one of my accounts got frozen and I had no money and I had to get some money out of the safety deposit box. But other than that, every time I went to Panama, I was usually putting in five to eight grand. And that was usually cash. Yeah. Right?

So I had, you know, I have a lot of contacts obviously in Winnipeg and Canada where I could take, you know, eight grand on the fucking plane, bro. You know what I mean? 10 grand's a limit. So I would just go there and dump eight grand and, you know, that's it. That was your bank. You would do your dirt around the world, whatever you were doing, and then you would come put the profits in your Panamanian bank.

Great. But that's just the savings. Yeah. So I had access to other accounts and two. I had one in Cardiff. I had one in Italy. I had one in Panama. And then I had another one in Canada.

So I was going to say where it was, but I don't want to snitch on myself here. And we were using a business in Canada, right? We're washing a lot of money through there as well. That's where I got the majority of my money as well was from this company that we were embezzling quite a bit of money out of. I'd say, I can't say for the other groups that were involved, but I was getting around 200 grand from this place every year.

I assume it was a cash business or no. It was supplies. interesting. Yeah, like, let's say like automotive supplies. So you had somebody on the inside that was stealing from the, okay. CFO. Well, a CFO. Yeah. Okay, and your job was to then

hide or wash the embezzled money. Yeah, well, for me, I was introduced to this person to put the brakes on them and basically say like, we know what's going on with this place. We know that people are using it for this and that. We know what the owners are involved

with and, you know, extortion shit. and we wanted our piece out of it, right? Wow. So my piece ended up being a big piece and I bought that piece. That's an important thing to talk about. I actually paid for the information to get to the CFO, right? So that's back in, I'd say, I want to say that's like 2018, 2019, where I get involved in that. So keep in mind, some of the rackets were really small.

I'm talking about those USB sticks. That's only bringing me like, what, 30 grand a year, right? but I had all this other stuff going on as well. I'd say I was probably running three or four different rackets a year. And that was where I went from making, you know, I told you that first year. I made like 30 grand or whatever it was. And then I did 200 the next year. And then I did 400 the next year.

And then I would say from 2018 or 19 up until 2022, which is last year when I walked away from everything, I was doing at least $400,000 a year. Wow. just between all of your rackets. Yeah. So you're an international criminal. I was, yeah.

Wow. So you're like an independent guy. You're connected to organized crime, but you're essentially just a freelancer. The best place to be. Wow. Totally. Yeah.

Because I had, man, I had backup. I had connects. I had whatever. I was treated with a lot of respect. I had a nickname in Italy with, with a collaborating group.

And it was El Lupo Solitario, which is like the lone wolf. Yeah. I was going to guess Gordo. No, that's Spanish. Yeah, I know my shit. And so you're stashing money in banks around the world, but mostly Panama, cash. Yeah, for the savings that I don't touch, was in Panama.

You got to have that nest thing. And it wasn't a lot. Got to have that nest thing. You got to have that couple hundred thousand. We call it get out of town cash, right? Exactly. Yeah. That was my like, if shit hits the fan in Canada, I take a flight to Panama, I go grab this money.

I fucking disappear. Right? And I was never worried about that. Like keep in mind, like I said, it was white color crime. It was big. Tell us about some of these other hustles. First of all, tell us about how you were helping smuggle migrants through the Dary and Gap. So one of the trips that I went on, we can't talk about all the countries that I went to.

I did I did 33 countries in six years. But in, in, I don't want to, I want to get this right. So 2000. 20, 2019, I think. I was in Ecuador, right? And I fucking fell in love with it, man. It was right in the heat of COVID. And nowhere else was open.

So I was like, I'm going to Ecuador. Fuck it. I need to go back to Latin America. And this is the only country I can get into. I'm going. So I went there and nothing was really going on for me at that point. I had a lot of money put aside and stuff like that, but nothing was really going on.

And I ended up becoming friends with a lot of Venezuelans. out there. And these guys wanted to get into Panama. So I don't know if you know this, but Panama is a hub for a lot of different reasons. I'm aware. Yeah. Yeah. So drug hub, flight hub.

Money laundering hub. Yeah. And even like legitimately, like, you know, the Latinos that want to move to other countries and make money, Panama's great. It's the US dollar. You know? And let's say they're making 200 back home a month. They can go to Panama, make 500, 600, 800, 800, 800.

a thousand, which is like unheard of. How doing what? Legitimate jobs. Just labor. Oh yeah, just labor. Yeah. You can like right now, I know a girl from Honduras that lives in Panama and she runs a call center for these New Yorkers that basically like left her the company to manage.

And most of the employees are making at least 750 USD a month, which is a lot of money. Yeah. For someone from Honduras? Yeah. That's a whole year's worth. She's making even more, right? She's supervising the thing. Yeah.

So she's probably making like 1,500 or something like that, which is a lot of money. So, yeah, Panama is such a, you know, an important place. So anyways, I become friends with these Venezuelans and some Ecuadorians as well, some, some people out there. And they begin to tell me like, you know, we want to get to Panama. You know what I mean? So these are migrants. These are people that fled Venezuela.

Yeah. They started telling me, like, you know, do you know anyone? Like, out in Panama. I was like, yeah, I've been going there the last couple of years And, you know, I didn't obviously I didn't talk about what I was doing But one guy, my barber actually I got really fucking close with him

And I started telling him certain things And he wanted to get the fuck out Ecuador And he had a lot of friends that were willing to pay And they were willing to pay good money And the cartel guys were taking less Right? Because it's obviously the cartel moving them through The Colombians. But they, you know,

I can't say, say for everybody, but for like most of these guys, they, they were paying around 1,500 to 2 grand each person. Just to get to Panama? Yeah. Oh. But like if you really think about it, like for the, you know, it's a, it's, it's a dangerous route to take through the, through the gap in the military. How do you get, uh, how do you get from what, what city in Ecuador were you in? I was in Quito and then I spent some time like on the coast. I was in Yaku. So how do you get from Kito or Wai Akeel to Panama. To be honest,

bro, I don't know. I'm not going to lie. I didn't walk the guys there. You know what I mean? I just kind of found them the contacts, but you got to keep in mind, these guys walked from Venezuela to Ecuador. Walked. Oh, yeah. Across a continent. Yeah. It's wild. Well, no, but no, you're,

if you think about it geographically, maybe you don't know this, bro. They're right next to each other. Oh, okay. I always assume Colombia, they have to go through Colombia, but you're right. Southern Venezuela. Exactly. I mean, still, it's not a walk down the street. You know, you know Venezuela, right?

So it's like a lot of people are desperate to get out of there. But yeah, so fast forward. We'll fast forward through all this stuff. I'll talk about my time in Colombia. Sure. So real quick, though, you would connect them with, you know, cartel guys in Ecuador. Yeah.

That would smuggle them through Colombia probably. Guys in Panama. Yeah. That would come out to Ecuador. Oh, wow. Yeah. And take them through. right? And you just got paid a percentage per person?

Yeah. Like not, not to be honest, bro, I, I actually just wanted to help these guys. Yeah. I didn't make any real fucking money.

Oh, okay. Gotcha. Maybe 500 bucks per guy. Yeah. But, you know, 20 goes through.

You make a little bit of money. But, um, yeah. Okay. So after this, um, I'm actually in Ecuador when I get introduced to Colombia for the first time.

So 2020, the end of 2020, I'm in, Kito in Ecuador and one of my buddies from back home, the Cuban guy, he hits me up and he says, you know, I'm going crazy here. Like, you know, the lockdown was so bad in Canada, especially in Winnipeg at one point. She's like, I need to get the fuck out of here, man. He's like, where are you? I'm like, I'm in Ecuador. He's like, do you want to go to Colombia? And I was like, you know what? I haven't been there. Like, why not? He's like one of our friends, this girl will name her Kay.

she's a national, a Colombian national, but she lives in Winnipeg now. And she was going out there. And I was just going to go to Bogota, right? And she hits me up and she says, you should really check out Cartagena. She's like, I'm going to be in Cartagena. So I said, okay, well, you know what I'll do is when it be right after New Year, so like January 1st, January 2nd. I fly to Bogota myself to check everything out and just check out the country and stuff.

and then shortly afterwards, I went to Cartagena. I was there for about a day or two alone and then my friends start coming in. Now, this is where my life changes. Keep in mind, it's still, it's still the pandemic. So everything's closing around midnight. Everything's dead. We go out. We have a good time, whatever.

We're walking out. There's a guy outside. He says, hey, you want to come to an after party? Normally I would say, fuck that, you know. But my friends, they were so drunk. and they were having a good time. So I said, you know, fuck it, let's go.

So we, you know, they have their own taxis, right? The guys that work for them. And we go to this club and it looks like nothing from outside, right? You can't tell that anything is inside. And, you know, we get to what looks like a house door. We go inside. There's, you know, a madam, like an older woman working.

And then, you know, two cartilitos, right? Two little guys sitting there and a group. I should say a group of them. And they pat you down. And we walk through curtains that kind of look like the ones behind me and the ones behind you. And we go down this flight of stairs. And, you know, we open it up. And all of a sudden we're in this club.

And, you know, there's a stripper pole with a catwalk across the swimming pool. And you know what I mean? I mean, I'm having deja vu. Right? Yeah. Yeah. We probably went to the same place. So you're in a whorehouse.

You're in a and you're, the first time you're in Columbia, you walk into one of these places thinking it's going to be like a bar and you're like, why is every woman in here not only the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, but basically butt naked. Yeah. So we get in and keep in mind, it's 12. So there's no one there. We're the only group there. Right.

It's early. It's early. So I said to the guy, I was like, you know, what's going on here, man? Like there's no one here. So, bro, it's 12. Like we just opened. You know, I was like, okay, that's how it works over here. You guys open when everything closes.

Okay. And then he's like, but check this out. You know, he goes over. He hits like some alarm or some whatever. It makes some noise. It sounds like some siren goes off. And then the girls come out. And, you know, I'm thinking like, I'm drunk, but I'm just laughing.

I'm like, oh, my God, here we go. So what happens is we're all having a good time. We're popping bottles. We're spending a lot of money. We're making friends with everybody. And then there's this one girl and she's just like a thought. You know what I mean? like just fucking

she's hair down to her fucking ankles and fake tits, fake ass, you know, just like beautiful. Not my type at all. But my buddy loves it. He loves that type,

right? But she got sent to me by, you know, whatever, the manager, the owner or whatever, because he was obviously, I was the one with the money.

So she comes and she starts talking to me and I literally say at one point to my friend across from me, I'm like, bro, switch with me. Let me sit with her friend. Her friend, quiet, shy, nerdy, had glasses, like kind of almost looked like a librarian or something like that and just had no interest in what was going on.

Was not impressed with the bottles. Was not impressed with the flex. Was just, just didn't want to be there. And I liked her. Sure. Yeah. I was like, this one's more like me, to be honest, right? That's what I can take her out of this place.

Oh, that's what happened. So many young men in a Colombian whorehouse. baby I can get the only one I can get you out of here I love it so it takes me back yeah I get to know her and I and I

one of the first things I said to her and my Spanish was okay at the time but it was like broken so it was basically saying like what are you doing in this place you know I understand there's a certain type of woman that comes into this place

like you don't fucking fit the bill right you know and she said you know I'm from Venezuela you know what it's like out there just like I have two kids, right? I have a three-year-old daughter and a, I don't want to say, I want to say like 10-year-old daughter and minimum wage is like five bucks, you know what I mean?

A month. Yeah. Yeah. So it's horrendous. She's like, she told me the whole story and basically she was groomed, right? She had a girl that moved from Venezuela down there and lied to her, you know, in the beginning, in the beginning. She wasn't stupid or anything like that, but she said, I'm working at this club.

It's full of tourists. You'll be serving. You know, whatever. So by the time she gets to the club, bro, because she goes the illegal route, right? She goes on the little fucking boat and through the jungle and whatever the fuck else. Spent all our money probably to get there. Exactly.

So we spend the next couple of days in Cartagena, my group of friends, and we would go back there. I liked the girl. I was not on a love thing, though. I just liked spending time with her. Didn't want to fuck her, nothing like that. Just wanted to chill with her. her. So we go back a couple of nights and then I get an email saying that they're about shut down all the flights between Latin America and Canada. So we got to get the fuck out.

Now, I'm thinking to myself, the last night that I was there, so this is like three days after I met her, I told her, I'm like, I'm going to get you out of here. You know, I said, I don't give a fuck what you do. You don't got to come with me. I'll, you know, I'll get you back to Venezuela. I'll put some money in your pocket, you know, like I'll give you 10, 15 grand. You can start your own fucking business, whatever the fuck it is. I just want to get you out of here. You're not happy here. You don't make any money for this place. I can tell just by looking at you. She just didn't want to fuck a lot of guys. Yeah. No. Yeah. If you don't fuck, you don't make any money. And I end up talking to one of the bosses, right? Like the guy that runs the place when I asked for permission. Uh, whether, because you know how it is. Some of them are on contract. They can't just fucking leave. But I did ask permission from the guy. And, uh, you know, it was a cartel owned place. Most of those places are. Especially on the coast. Big tourist money out there and stuff. Right. So I, I, you know, I asked them. I'm like, you know, is it okay if she leaves with me? You know?

And, you know, we talked for about 10, 15 minutes and eventually at the end, he said, I don't see any problem with it. It's like, you're absolutely right. She doesn't belong here. Get her out of here. Whatever. So I head back to Canada. And at this point, feelings have grown.

You're flying with her back to Canada. No, I can't, bro. She's Venezuelan, right? Of course not, right? Yeah, the visa. So you just got out of there, gave her a bunch of money. In that time, I sent her to Bogota. Like I said, I made a couple of friends that worked inside one of the hotels

there. So they kind of watched over her and made sure that, you know, someone didn't jump on her because, you know, I didn't know the way things worked out there. I left immediately. I bought a ring. So I was going to, I was not planning to propose to her right away, but I fell in love with her. How long after you flew back to Canada? Did you return to Columbia? Okay, that's it. A minute they let me out that hotel, I fucking left. I think I spent one or two days visiting my friends because I'm like, yo, guys, I met this woman like I'm going to Columbia, you know? And you can have imagine what they thought. Like you're fucking nuts, man. You met someone that worked in a place like this and, you know, I get it. I fucking get it. I would never think that something like that could happen. And I would probably make fun of somebody that did the same thing that I did. I get out there. Two weeks later, like I said, I got a different room. I went. I showered. And then this was the most important moment for me, bro. It was when I knocked on her door for her room. And that was going to tell me right there. Is this real? Or is this real? Or is this? just a fucking game, right?

And she opened and she just started bawling and she jumped on me and hugged me and just kept saying, you know, Te Extraño like I miss you. And I proposed to her that night on the balcony, a hotel in Zona T in Bogota. And then that started a whole other chapter for me. Wow. And you're married to this day? Legally, yeah. Wow.

But I left her last year. I left everything. including, you know, the criminal life and everything else. Last a year ago today, like I was mentioning to you earlier, a year ago today, I left Columbia, I left my marriage, I left, you know, the criminal life, left money behind, lost, uh, we'll probably have to talk to this a little bit more in depth, but that same day or the same week, I lost quarter million dollars, which was all my money at the time. Okay. So yeah, we got to know about this. What, what was happening after you proposed to her,

she said yes bring us until yeah you left Columbia what were you doing I'm gonna try and give the shortest version of this because it's so much like we were only together

about two years but like holy shit we went through a lot yeah we bounced country to country I ended up reconnecting with my brother in Mexico after five years

six years not seeing him brought her out there met his wife he had a baby with her great time probably one of the best moments of my life going back to Mexico

seeing my brother having a wife with me and just like this whole family thing. It was beautiful. Craved it my whole life. We got married in the Bahamas, I want to say four months later after we met. And then throughout this time, though,

I'm trying to find somewhere for us to live. Because we're basically living in Colombia and visiting other countries, right? But we can't do this forever. You know, she could. She could go through the refugee status or whatever, protected status. But it's going to be harder for me,

especially because I'm a criminal. I don't want to be under the microse. scope. I don't want them looking at everything that, you know. What are you doing? What kind of crime are you running? At that time? Yes. I'm still, I'm still doing a, there's still money laundering. Yeah. So I still, whose money are you laundering? Is it, are you from all over the world? Typically, it was from Canada. Right. So I'm doing it three, four times a year. Right. Same hustle. Same embezzlement hustle. Got it. So yeah, that was that that, that was the majority, bro. That was the huge chunk, the lion's share. Right. Like I said, it's like 200.

sometimes more a year. And that's how I got up to 400, right? Right. If I'm still doing the thing in England once or twice year and I'm making 30 to 50K or whatever. And then I'm doing 200, 250 through here. Yeah. You know what I mean? And then...

That adds up. And that's a huge amount of money in Colombia. Oh. You're rich. Forget about it, bro. Yeah. Yeah. And where we ended up settling on,

so I'm going to get to this, but we end up settling on Paraguay. So I'm looking for places to move that are quick, uh, are not going to, put me under a microscope are sympathetic to the Venezuelans because you got to use what you have, you know, and they really were. So for anyone that doesn't know this about, um, uh, Paraguay, you can get your permanent residency usually within 70 days. It's good for 10 years. There's no

taxes on foreign income. And it gives you access to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Yeah. Same rights. So if you want to go to school, if you want to start a business, buy real estate, you can do it on all those places. So I'm like, this is ideal. And it was, it wasn't very, uh, wasn't very expensive at time either. Do you know what I mean? It was like for the whole package, like paying the fucking corruption's big there. Yeah, totally. You can see why lawyers. Yeah. I fell in love with it right away. Like we're here. We found the country. We found where we're going to live. We can stop fucking bouncing between countries. I can walk away from the shit because I wanted to walk away, bro. She had kids. You know, and the kids were going to come with us.

Where are they living at the time? They were in Venezuela. Okay. Yeah, they were with her sister in their family house. And then throughout the next year, some stuff happens. We get in some fights over really stupid shit. Is your money stashed in the same box where you originally got it? Yeah, for about four years.

How much money you got in there at this point? At that point? Your nest egg. It wasn't a lot. I'm not going to lie to you. It was like, at that point, it was probably like 70K. What did you want to do? do getting out of the life, you know?

I had plans. So I had plans in Paraguay. But I just want to like, before we get to that, I got to tell you how this whole story ends. Okay. Because I was forced to walk away. Even though I was on my way out, it happened at a time that I didn't expect it to. So whatever, we get in these fights. Then I go nomad.

I start going, I want to say early 2022 in the span of a month and a half. I was on four different continents. I was fucking, I don't know, in 10, 15 different countries. And I was just spending like crazy. And I was broken up with my wife at the time. Like I wasn't with her. And I was bringing friends out everywhere. And I was walking away from a lot of stuff.

It was a bad place for me. And you weren't making any money. You weren't hustling at all? I still had the embezzlement thing going on, which was the, again, the lion's share. It's like money coming in. So how does that work real quick? So you're embezzling out of a company in Canada. do you have to give a percentage to your contacts up there?

No, because I bought it. Right. So one thing that I mentioned earlier on was like... So you're just stealing money and then hiding it. You're not really... This is not classic money laundering where you're taking it from one source and disguising it. You're just jacking money and hiding it. Well, no, we did do that as well.

So explain that. For my own, for my own, for my share of the money, no, it was just, we, it was moved through several different accounts in Canada. And then a lot of it would come out in cash for me. Right. And then we had other ways of doing stuff too. Like I don't, I don't bring it up because we didn't do it very often.

But like, you know, diamonds, right? Gold. Really? How so? What about them? Man, like you can, there's a lot of, you can get away with going through an airport, probably wearing a Rolex watch this worth 30, 40 grand.

You know what I mean? Right. Stuff like that. So you're taking stolen goods through? No, some of them would be legitimate, like with sales and everything like that. Like a lot of it was washing money through that kind of stuff too. So how are you, but explain that. This is what we have you here for.

How does that work? Okay, so I pay a guy to go and buy whatever, a Rolex watch, a nice presidential or whatever, 30 grand, 25 grand watch. I pay him a little bit extra. He goes and does the sale through a legitimate account. Yeah. Right. his own account or a business account or whatever.

I give him a little extra piece for it. But, you know, he signs it over to me and then it's all legitimate. He just watched it, right? Yeah. Or I want it gambling. Yeah. Whatever the fuck else. Right. And then I take it over there and I fucking sell it.

Like I would do little, but I didn't do that very often. Right. But it did happen a few times, right? And same with, uh, um, I didn't personally do it, but I had some friends that were doing it with gold, right? Like they'd buy those little, uh, the little bars of gold. Yeah. And they'd stack up a bunch of them.

And some of them would buy them from Dubai, right? They can't bring them down to Winnipeg, sell them for an extra cost. And then some of the other guys were taking that gold, bringing it to Panama or wherever else and selling it off there. Interesting. So if you're a drug dealer in Winnipeg, let's say, you buy legally purchased gold bricks from a guy in Dubai. Yep. And now, then you could sell that off in Panama and declare it as legal. or you can just have it sitting in gold

whatever you want. Okay, gotcha. The biggest thing that I noticed, again, this was a lot with other people because I didn't have to do it as much because I had a lot of my money was coming from a legitimate company, right? Like it was just, I, we were embezzling it. It was fucking illegal. So you were in on

it with the CFO. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and you were lead. CFO was in my hands. And you were leading on him yeah, through threat of violence? No, more more extortion in the beginning, blackmail. Blackmail. Because this person was very shady.

It wasn't a, you know, it wasn't somebody to feel sorry for. So did you threaten them to like go public with some dirt that you had on them? No, that happened at the end. That's when everything ended for me. Okay. So remember, we had plans to move to Paraguay. Yeah. So November of, let's say late October of last year, 2022.

I'm in Kukuta. We're at the Venezuelan border. She's waiting to get the last of the documents that we need. for her kids. I believe it was a passport and a birth certificate for the other daughter. And permission from the father so that she could leave the country to live somewhere else. So on that same trip, when I fly in from Winnipeg to Bogota, when I get to Bogota, I'm there for one or two nights airport by the hotel. I get a cryptic message from my fixer in Panama. And this is a guy that took care of things when I was not there for me, right?

He was actually a taxi driver, but he worked like hand in hand with the cartels. And he was just a straight up guy. Like this is the kind of guy you want to roll with you. I wish I had someone like him in Winnipeg because I would have took over the fucking city. You know, not literally, but like that's how you feel when you have someone that good next to you. Right. So he calls me and he basically says, you know, it's fucked. You know, your money's fucked.

And so what do you mean? And he's like the, you know, the manager. the woman, she got arrested. I said, when did this happen? You know, it's like, yesterday. I was like, what do you know? You know what I mean? Like, what do you actually know?

She got arrested. She had started fucking doing some stupid shit. So it used to just be deposit boxes. You pay her a little bit, you know, per transaction. So if I want to put five grand in, I pay her like 250, you know, 250 American. And she had a nephew that worked at the hotel I stayed at. So I didn't even have to do shit. I would let them know a couple of days in advance, right?

I would get the nephew to come up, bring me room service. I'd either take money from him or give money to him, whatever I had prearranged over those days. And then he goes and sees his Tia the same night and works in a lot. And then she puts it in the bank. Yeah. Oh, so you didn't even have to go to the bank anymore. It was perfect. Gotcha.

That's why it was such a good system. But what she started doing, so she was making a lot of money because I was not the only guy. Of course not. Yeah, and there was probably people putting way more than me, right? A lot of Colombians out there and stuff. So God only knows. But where she fucked up was, and this is, I found this out later on, was she started taking fake IDs and setting up actual accounts for some of these guys, which is not how she started. The way she started was it's locking key.

Yeah, just cash, just a box. That's it. And now you're actually using fake passports that, like, this picture doesn't even match the fucking guy that's not. in front of you. She started doing shit like that. Unbeknownst to us. Right. And those get registered in the Panamanian.

Yeah. In the global bank and all that stuff. Right. So she fucked up. And yeah, they, as far as I know, she snitched. Not on anybody in particular,

but she used the money that people were putting in the boxes to buy her way out, right? Which makes fucking perfect sense. You know what I mean? But unfortunately, for me, I lost $100,000 that day. So she had the feds or somebody come down, arrest her,

definitely, whether it was in collusion with Interpol or something like that. Yeah. And she got arrested for money laundering. Exactly. Wow. And so she cleaned out your safe deposit box. Yeah. So, and I asked him, I'm like, what do you think, bro?

Like, do you think this is like, is it what it looks like? And he's like, he said exactly what I'm saying to you right now. He's like, if she was smart, she pointed to every single deposit box and bought her way out of that. He said that it's likely that either corrupt. cops, the Panamanian government, or, I don't know, he gave me another one. It was some kind of bored the overseas like money laundering and stuff like that out there. He said that, you know, it's likely that, you know, one of those people have your money. So that's it. And it was crazy because for four years, man, nothing ever happened. Yeah. But unbeknownst to us for almost a year,

she was doing this shit with fake passports and fake residency cards and stuff like that. Yeah. So she fucked up the whole thing for everybody. So I don't know what happened to her. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody got to her because I didn't give a fuck. I wasn't going to do anything crazy over 100 grand. But like I said, God knows how much she was dealing with. So you are now broke? Almost. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I'm sitting in Kukuta. I, sorry, I was in Bogota when I got that information. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, fuck, this is my savings. Remember, I'm on my way out. I'm going to meet my wife, wait for a couple of days, go to Paraguay, apply for residency, walk away, have 100 grand here. I have another 150 coming in over through the embezzlement shit, right?

And then I have the potential through this company, something that I was working on for almost a year, where if this went through, it was a huge transaction and it was for supplies. But it was basically like a fake sale. Right. Right. but the money that was coming in was going to be in the millions and I could have named my price on it, right?

So I had a number in mind and it was between $300,000 and $500,000. So when I lost the 100th grand, I was pissed, I was cheesed, but I was like, okay, I still have $150K coming in and I have this potential. Even if I have bare minimum of $150K, that's enough for us.

Yeah. That's enough for us in Paraguay. I can go buy a condo, I can go buy a car, I can put $50 grand in the savings, make sure the kids have a little bit of money for school and whatever else. And I also had some business ideas that I wanted to do while I was out there. What are we going to do?

We're going to go straight? Straight. 100% straight. So I was going to do a call center, English speaking call center out there. Big fucking money in that. Totally. And I had contacts in Panama that had connections with AT&T and stuff like that. So I could have got something going to the point where like just to give you a breakdown of the money,

this is good for legitimate money. You're paying about 400. 150 USD per per employee, but AT&T is paying you $750 to 800 per. And you got 40 fucking employees working for you. And that's, that's a month? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we're talking about tens. Wow. Tens of thousands. So I'm, I'm good with that. And like my startup for that, what I, like what I was looking into, like, you know, just Dell desktops. Yeah. And, uh, you know, a little, uh, a little real estate space like, uh, maybe for 40 computers or whatever. It was, it was going to run me. Maybe, maybe I don't

know, 50, 60 grand. So small investment for it is a good business. That's really interesting. Yeah. So you're just contracted through AT&D or a contractor. Exactly. Wow. Yeah.

So that was one of them. I also wanted to, I'm big into hookah lounges, bro. So I had this American guy that moved to Paraguay. I was going to buy a hookalounge off of him for like 40, 50K. He didn't want it anymore. It was in that park that I told you about with all the food trucks. Yeah.

Very busy place on the weekend, made a lot of money. He was bringing in between 8 and 11 grand just off that place after everything. And he didn't even know how to run it. So if I buy that place for 50 grand and I can turn it into 20 grand a month, I'm making my money back in two and a half, three months, right? Wow. So yeah, everything was set up.

Everything was sweet. And then like I said, I was, I was not panicking. I was pissed because I was like, you know, I lost 100 grand in a day. I've never lost money. In seven years that I was doing this, bro, all the scams or anything like that, I never lost money, right? My own. You know what I mean?

if a project failed or whatever, like, whatever. How many, how many projects, as you say, or scams total, do you think you ran in seven years? Probably like five or six. It wasn't like 20 or 30 or anything like that. No, but how many transactions? Like how many actual times? How many times did you hit a lick? Hundreds?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you look at, I, you know, I keep trying to, as I was writing the book, I had to actually start thinking about what did I make here? How much money did I actually do? In the book, I say between 2016 and 2022, I did $2.5 million,

but I think I'm probably closer to three and a half or four. Wow. Yeah. When I did the two and a half, there was some other stuff. Like, I wasn't thinking about the money that I made in London, which was, you know, 30 to 50 a year for multiple years. And a couple of other things that I was doing.

So I think it's closer to $3.350. What was the money in London? That was the selling of the... the USB, like the banking information. Wow, that still boggles my mind. Yeah. It's so, you know what? When I was trying to make a decision whether I was going to stay away from the life or not, I was like, if I stay in this, I'm doing that full time.

Because like those guys, I knew guys that would sit in Dubai and make like fucking a million dollars a month off that shit. Just just buying cards and then selling them. Banking information. Yeah. And then selling them to the pros, selling them to the Albanians or the Nigerians. And you know, all those. guys they know how to work with Bitcoin and everything. Yeah, of course. So easy to move money around.

Dude, the level of sophistication in the in the criminal world, especially in Europe, is like, dude, they're not exaggerating in the movies. I mean, it's, it's wild. So those guys, those guys can take those bank lists and they have credit card printing machines. And so they're able to just make credit cards with those numbers and then just run them up until they expire. Exactly. And like, and what do you think they do? Do you think? think they just go buy a bunch of goods? You know? No, no, they sent.

Yeah, yeah. Like, like, if the limit is 10 grand, you just go into Gucci and just buy, buy shit up until, till it maxes out and then go sell that Gucci. Yeah. So I'll tell you one specific scenario. Okay. And this is happening today. All right.

This is a friend of mine that I just saw recently. You told me about this. So what he does with the cards is he's been buying in bulk furniture, appliances on like tens of thousands, you know, like $20, $30,000 orders, right? And what he does is he gets someone, you know, let's say you want this sofa and you want this fridge and whatever else. And it's the equal, it equals 30 grand or 20 grand or whatever the fuck, the whole deal. This guy will charge you like seven or eight.

Yeah. But it's all profit for him. Yeah, of course. Of course. He's buying it. So, yeah, he's made out like that. And he has a big. he has a big plan to do something with that in the future and I think it's genius.

He kind of, you know, he asked me, you know, if I wanted to, you know, get into it. But I decided when I decided to walk away. Yeah. Right. So I just want to finish with that story too. Of course. Yeah. It'll wrap up, man.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get to the end here because this is basically when the book begins. Right. Right. So, yeah, I find out my money's gone. I fly to Kukuta. and then for a couple of weeks I had deposits,

legitimate deposits coming through my Canadian bank account, right? And it wasn't very much, but it was like, you know, five grand, six grand, whatever. And this is coming from the legitimate, sorry, legitimate source.

So all of a sudden, my money stops coming in. Like for two weeks while I'm sitting in Bogota and Kukuta, I have nothing that comes in. and keep in mind I just lost 100K So I'm like I've got maybe 20 grand

25 grand to myself Got like 10 grand in the bank And I had like 10 grand American Maybe 3 to 4 grand in pesos Columbia and pesos I was gonna ask you What banks when you're moving money all over the world What's the best if you're especially if you're trying to hide the money

What banks are best Like the names? No the names? Sure. Yeah So the one that I, the one that I know that was used a lot was Scotia Bank. Scotia Bank,

which is a Canadian bank. Yeah. And why is that the best? They're the most corrupt, which is crazy to say, but it's the truth. I'll tell you something that interesting that I heard.

I can't tell you that this is factual, but I heard it from someone that is involved in banks. They told me a couple of years ago, you know, Global Bank does this survey every year of how many companies, are like red flagged for money laundering and stuff like that. And a couple of years ago when I was in what I was doing, Canada was number one. You guys were number two.

So that shocked me. Wow. Because I couldn't believe that that existed because to be honest, like up until I had met these guys in Italy and stuff like that, I didn't know much about money laundering and it never seemed to be a big thing in Canada. Not around the social circles I was in. Right. Right. I'm sure they had guys that did things for them, but it wasn't like this big thing. So this guy told me, he's like, you know, number one was Canada.

Like US was almost half the amount of companies. So let's say a thousand companies were red flagged for being, you know, uh, suspicious of money laundering or whatever. Canada took the number one spot. And I was like, that's, that's insane to me. I thought of like 50 other countries before that, like Malta and like, you think Swiss bank accounts. Yeah. You know, you associate all these shady places. I don't know how they get away with it over there.

So is that, does that just all come from corruption from people that work inside the banks? 100%. Is that how that's possible? Yeah, you got to keep in mind that corruption is available on every level, bro. So it's not just, you know, smug ignorant bastards will tell you that it only exists in Latin America or Africa or Asia or third world countries. But it's more prevalent in first world countries. It just looks different. You know what I mean?

It's got a different face. A lot of times it's legitimate companies that don't want to pay taxes. Yep. So I assume maybe it's so does a Canadian company have somebody make profits, right, capital gains, but they don't want to pay that heavy Canadian tax. So they want to move it to offshore to Panama or the Bahamas. Yep. And I knew a lot of guys that did that, not even illegitimate, no criminal intentions.

I want to save some money on taxes. Yeah. Right. Right. And so you have somebody inside at Scotia Bank. Mm-hmm. And how does that work? How do they get your, how do they get your money from your bank account,

Scotia Bank to a bank in the Bahamas? It's already there. There's a Scotia Bank in Panama. There's a Scotia Bank in, in wherever you are in Canada, right? So how do they transfer that? But how do they transfer it offshore? Is it a click of a button or do you have to have somebody on the other end in the receiving country to also help you facilitate?

Sometimes it's as simple as it is it already being there. So for instance, like if you have a, if you have a Scotia Bank account, in from Winnipeg and you go out to Panama yeah and you go into a Scotia bank in Panama yeah you can go access money there right your money from Winnipeg yeah you can get a safety deposit box you can apply for loans but can't they find that though doesn't that seems like the authorities that's easy to trace yeah but a lot of the guys that did that what I'm talking about we're doing it in a legitimate sense right like they they wanted to do uh they just wanted to do business between Panama or safe taxes or whatever else but it's not illegal to

to like, let's say for instance, a Canadian guy goes to Panama, registers a business, starts his PR process, right, and just moves money into that bank account and, and starts that there's nothing illegal about doing that, right? But he makes the money in Canada. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm, interesting.

Yeah, no, I think that is illegal. Okay. You have to pay tax in the country that you make the money. Yeah. Now, if you were going to, you're right. Like Google, for instance. is notorious. Like they're in Ireland.

They have big offices there now because they have low tax over there. So yeah, there's many, many ways to get around it or like walk the line. Yeah. I think. But yeah, that definitely makes sense.

Walking the line. That definitely makes sense to have a bank that's already operating in the country where you want to move the money. That's the easiest. Yeah. Wow. That is fascinating. Yeah.

There's this whole criminal. this whole shady world of money that's instant that moves around the world and it makes the world go around. And the ordinary citizen has no idea it's going on. Well, and I'm seeing a lot of it coming from, like I said, like white collar stuff now. So it used, it's been around forever because of drugs, right?

Yeah. And we can go back to, you ever see banksters, the documentary banksters? No. Okay, you should check it out. So they talk about HBSC and how it started. Oh, right. And the opium trade back in the day.

and all this crazy stuff. It was basically a bank that was created for, you know, drug dealers. Right. Right. So, but what I'm seeing now from my own personal experience,

remember, I was not at the, I was not at the point of sale on every one of these things, right? I had a little involvement in everything, but I was not the guy that was like inside the bank, like doing these things, right? I was usually the guy that connected somebody to move something over or whatever.

And I got paid my percentage for it. Yeah, he was just taking a fee. Middlemaning. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And honestly, it was the safest place to be.

Right. Okay. So how does it all conclude? How does it all crash and burn? Okay. Yeah, that's basically what happens. So Bogota, I get the call. I'm out in Kukuta.

My money's not coming in. Everything kind of just stops. I lose a bunch. And then all of a sudden my flow, like the money that I had coming in, both legitimate and illegitimate, everything just halted all of a sudden. I became extremely paranoid.

I became, I thought people in my inner circle did something. Like my shit was, was pretty airtight for, for a while. And I thought the only fucking way that this is happening is somebody that I'm close to is fucking around right now. You know, so I became very paranoid to the point where I almost did something very brash. And I was going to have someone seen. You know what I mean? because I was in Columbia at the time. I couldn't do anything

somebody back in Canada. So your crew was still based in Canada, your inner circle, the people that you trusted the most. Sounds like. But a lot of these guys, I'll tell you the truth. I told you what my nickname was.

I was the lone wolf. And it was because I didn't take a lot of these guys to do anything, you know what I mean? I had some people that I worked with. But my brothers, like my best friends, the guys that were with me every day

when I was in Winnipeg, I did not involve in anything. Right. You know, I didn't want that. for them. And they ended up getting involved in some other stuff, which I didn't want them to get involved with. I really tried hard to like let everybody enjoy the fruits of my labor without taking the risk. Do you know what I mean? So yeah, everything's, you know, screwed up. And, you know,

a beautiful thing happens at this point though, too. One day, a day before my birthday, I tell, you know, my wife basically what's happening. I say, listen, like, you know, I failed. You know, I don't think we're going to be able to do this. I don't think we can go to Paraguay. I don't think that, you know, I'm going to be able to give you the life that I offered you and, you know, all the shit. Like, you know, I can understand if you want to go back to Venezuela or to Ecuador where she had some family and, you know, just end things. You know what I mean? Because, like I have nothing to provide you anymore. And I'll never forget, like I said, it was a beautiful moment because it was the first time in two years where all my insecurities and all my fucking whatever just disappeared.

And she looked at me and she said, like, are you crazy? like after everything that we've been through the last two years, do you not see I'm not with you for the money? Like I don't give a fuck what you have. If we have to go to Baraguay and I have to work three jobs, while you sit at home, like I don't care. Like we're in this together.

And again, it was a, it was a reassuring moment. It was beautiful to have in such a, in such a terrible moment. But it was short-lived. I, once I realized that everything was fucked,

that I lost everything. And I'm down to like 15, 20 grand. I realize that the right thing for me to do is to go back to Canada and, and, you know, be with my friends and just kind of figure out what's going on and send, send her back home to her family with whatever, whatever I have left. You know what I mean? Because, like, I know, like, money's going to come later on, right? But right now, if we go to Paraguay with this money, after I do the application process,

the residency, all that shit, I'm done. I'll burn through the money in three months. And then what? You know, if we can't work, if we don't. get the residency right away, we're screwed. So, you know, I, I approached it like that. I said, listen, like, you know, I think that you should go back to Venezuela. I'm going to send you home with like, you know, 5, 10K, and I'll take 5 or 10 for me. I'll go back to Canada. I'll get something sorted out and we'll revisit this, you know, down the road. And she took it the wrong way. She thought

I didn't want to be with her because she had kids. And I was like, man, I've been with you for two years. I married you after just, after where I met you and, you know, all this stuff. Like, how could you think that I care about that. You told me the first night that you had kids. I didn't care. But she took it that way. And I believe she genuinely did. She thought like,

I wasn't interested in her anymore. It's like, no, that's not at all. I feel like I failed you. What I promised you originally, I can't give it to you anymore. So I'd rather you go home, be with your family, be safe, be around people you know in a country that you know,

have some money for yourself, and we'll revisit this thing. We got in a huge fight. We ended up ending things for good. I went to Bogota for a couple of weeks, just kind of laid low, just kind of thought about everything and stuff like that. And then I went to Vancouver before I went to, I was actually going to stay in Vancouver for a couple of months. One of the companies that I was talking about that we were, you know, moving money from embezzling and stuff was in B. And I had some money trapped in one of, you know, one of the businesses.

And it was quite a bit. You know what I mean? it was like six figures like 100 grand or something like that so i went to try to get that money and i was so desperate at the time though and when you're emotional and you're desperate you make stupid fucking decisions you know the first time in my life that i really made a stupid decision i sent somebody over you know we'll call them a biker uh to visit this person and basically say you know not not in a physical violent way but basically say you owe someone money pay them their fucking money you know and then a couple of days later i get uh an email

from one of like Canada's top lawyers and basically saying like I know about everything that you've been doing this person this CFO went and and basically said everything but I knew what it was I knew what it was the CFO is at the fault they're fucked like if this person this person was scared of what was going to happen so went in lawyered up and said hey you know what can I do here but it wasn't I knew what it was from the beginning it wasn't going to they weren't going to come after me for a case or anything like that because that person is the most guilty and the first person going down. You know what I mean? Like the people that profited off of corruption, obviously they're criminals and they're going to have consequences to it, but the person

that made it available to them. You know what I mean? That stole from the company. Sure. The one that had, you know, typed up the orders and passed everything through. They're fucked. They're the most guilty. So do the company find out? Did they do like an audit and say, where's all this money going? no um that's what i believed happened at first but uh i also throughout the years excuse me i also believe that the owners ran on it i think that yeah i heard that like uh there there were two brothers i heard that one was like a degenerate gambler fucking coquette loser you know what i mean and that's why they they you know they put the brakes on him because uh he he had debts right i believe i don't know for sure but what it sounds like

is the embezzlement started happening when this guy started owing gangsters a lot of money and they said, okay, we're going to use your company. Whether it's through goods and purchases or actually just milking it out for a paycheck, right? Like myself, to give you a real idea of how it came to me,

I had an account set up that was a payable account and it was an insurance company. It was fake. It was my account. You know what I mean? But I had it constantly coming in. Where do you have that account registered? Canada.

Okay, gotcha. And it was a legitimate account. Yeah. Like in the eyes of the law at that time, it was, you know, it looked legitimate. So I make this final stupid error, you know, I send someone over a day or two later. I get this email. And it lets me know I got to stop. It's, it's going to be talked about in the book.

I told you, I released the book in October 1st. 500 copies only to my city and some friends. The book comes out January 1st, but the copy that everyone's read right now, there's going to be like two or three bonus chapters. And one of the things I say in it is like sometimes we actually have that choice in life, like that one choice that changes everything. And I believe that if I pursued this route with this money that I had tied up in this company, I would have got it, first of all, I would have got the money.

I don't have any doubt of that if I pushed. But I know for sure I would have went to jail as well. So I used that as a motivation and inspiration for myself because a year ago to the day, almost I lost everything. I lost my empire. I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I had a wife. I was moving to a South American country. I was both set up legitimate businesses.

I was walking away from the life. I was good. I had money saved, whatever. It was all, you know, peachy. And then, you know, the shit happens. And I go to being broke and I have, you know, I can make this choice. I can go and put the brakes on this person and rough them up or have someone rough them up and get that money. I decide not to, right?

And this year, what I've gone through this year, I think I heard you talk about it on an episode. I can't remember which one it was, but it's a come down. You go from making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I was visiting 10, 15 countries. I was living good, bro. It's exciting. And then I'm just fucking, I worked a job this year, bro.

Yeah. For the first time in my life, not my life, sorry, nine, 10 years. Yeah, it hurts. So I'm making like, you know, I was, okay,

it was, it was good. It was in a club and I was only working part time and I was bringing like three, four K a month. Not bad, you know, for the hours that I was putting in.

Right. But three or four K, bro. Yeah. Used to make that every two or three days, bro. So it's like, it was such a come down.

But luckily, you know, I always had in my mind to write a book. I thought I had an interesting story. A lot of stuff I haven't been able to talk about today is in that book. January, sorry, June of this year, I actually sat down.

I wrote it in about a couple of months. I dropped it in October. Two weeks ago, I was in New York, had it posted on Times Square, the worldwide announcement for January 1st. And then now I'm here sitting with you, bro. So, where can I get the book?

So you can contact me through my Instagram. Right. The Real Germano Tomasetti at the real Germano Tomasetti. That's the best way for now. I'm going to be starting my own podcast in January. And it's going to be a lot like, a lot like what you do, bringing true crime guys in, but not just stuff like that. Like I'm going to be talking to like Ukrainian refugees and Syrians that came in. Like just interesting people. Totally. And it's starting with my city. All the guests are going to start with within my city. So just to say quickly, to wrap this up, I only have 150 copies left. So now in January 1st.

Go get those people. Yeah. Hit me up if you want to see the book. And if not, wait until January 1st. It'll be an audio book available, e-book, Amazon, Etsy, all those platforms. All that. Germano, very, very nice to meet you. Love hearing your story.

Thank you. It was very romantic. It reminded me of the old times. I thought you have Just going country to country. Yeah, no, definitely I'm glad it's over with but yeah, it was fun while lasted.

It was a good time. Thanks, my man. Thank you.