The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Are The Chinese America's New Weed Kingpins? Ep #23

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Johnny talks about America's new illegal cannabis kingpins-- the Chinese, the spy balloon and the fact that China might be gearing up for war.  And finally, he interviews a former enforcer for the Detroit mafia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I assumed that marijuana legalization would put drug dealers out of business, especially in this country. It would make it so hustlers like me would just become irrelevant. I admit that I was wrong. That's when I see lights behind me start to flash. 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, shanks, 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've made it out of that place alive. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Connect. I am your host, Johnny Mitchell.

As always, like, subscribe, follow us on all socials. Turn on notifications so you get alerted whenever we drop new content. You guys, listen to us. You can listen to The Connect as a podcast. Go over and subscribe on Spotify or iTunes. Leave us a comment. Give us a review. All of that stuff helps.

We want to get that side going. as well. And of course, Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show. You guys can now call in and ask me questions, which I will then read on the air like you're going to see me do today. We have an amazing episode today, you guys. We're going to be talking about Chinese drug gangs, a gigantic Chinese mafia run pot bust out of Denver, Colorado that goes back 10 years.

Plus, we got a mafioso as today's guest. We interview a guy who used to run and be an associate. with the Detroit Kosanostra. He's going to talk all about that. Dude, we got stories about Jimmy Hoffa. It's crazy. I'm so excited. Let's get into it.

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Well, first of all, today is my birthday. I am 37 years young today. It has been 20 years since I first stepped foot in the game. I remember this is back in, what would it be, 2003, on my birthday, my 17th birthday. I was a junior in high school. I had saved up the money that I got from mowing lawns and doing chores. I went to the mall with my buddy, and I bought a sprint cell phone. They were the little brick phones, right?

They weren't brick, but they were like just the little phones with the buttons. I don't even know what you call them. I have this antenna that you pull out that was about twice as long as the phone. Okay? It had the game snake on there for all you old millennials like me. You'll remember these phones. And I went to the, so I went to the Sprint store, I bought my phone, bought my first cell phone. Then I go buy, I go down to the Chinese market and I buy, you know, a 200 pack of sandwich baggies, right?

And what do you think I did next? I went down to the smoke shop and I bought me a little $40 digital scale. And finally, we went down to the weed man. And we copped our first sack. We bought, I went in with my boy, who we've talked about on this show, my old friend and drug dealing partner. We went down and we bought an ounce of weed.

We paid $250. It was our school friend, Antoine, gangster. Guy was already selling crack and bringing guns to school at 15 years old. It's where I saw crack for the first time. Antoine gave it, passed it to me in science class. Try that on. I held up at an ounce of crack at the back of the science class. And he had a gun in his backpack, okay?

His father was a gangster. This is where Antoine got all his game from. His father had a bunch of hustles. He was a pimp named Sweet Tea. Shout out to Sweet Tea if he's still living and free, hopefully. And he also had his hand in a bunch of drugs, right? Obviously hard white, powder. And he was a weed man.

That was why a lot of dudes were back in the days. Like a lot of like these black kind of old school old heads, we called them. They had like four or five different hustles, right? They had three different drugs they sold. You know, maybe they had selling for them on the side. And, you know, maybe they were filing, you know, faulty insurance scams or whatever. But so we go down to Sweet Tea, Antoine's father, knocking the door. He meets us at the door.

He's wearing a leopard skin robe. It's like four in the afternoon. Guy's still wearing his bathrobe. He invites us in. He's got a couple of his walking around and thongs and like that. And he brings out at the time

the biggest bag of weed I had ever seen. It's probably only like a pound. But to me, that shit looked like, I mean, it looked as big as a ocean. It was wild. And he weighs it out in front of me, drops the sack off, right?

An ounce of weed. That was like, an ounce of weed was like weight at the time. Like you could bubble off that shit. and we had no idea what we were doing. We totally, me and totally fucked the sack up, right? Lost money.

Smoked it all. But it was the beginning. It was the beginning. I was relentless. I knew there was something here. I had a gut feeling. Like I've f***ed up a lot in my life, but I have a gut feeling

whenever I find something that I think I can be good at. It was like this comedy and show business. Like I have no business ever coming to L.A. I have no connections here. I never did anything artistic when I was a kid. The only thing I was good at was making my friends laugh in the lunchroom, right? But in my gut, I was like, uh, I think I can do this. And a lot of that was when I was locked up and, you know, doing time.

I would go do those open mic nights or those talent shows at Two Rivers Correctional facility. That was like a major, like, catalyst, right? But I don't know. In my gut, I was like, Dan, I love attention. I think, I don't know, I got a mouthpiece. Maybe I can do this.

And that's how I felt when I caught my first ounce of weed. I was like, I think there's something here. I'm going to blow up and I'm going to make a million dollars off of the shit. If somebody else can do it, why can't a young Johnny Mitchell? And I was relentless. And I never stopped until the day I got locked up. But I was a millionaire. And so, I don't know.

take that for what it is. If you have a gut feeling about something, if you feel like you have a passion for something, as long as it's positive, right? I definitely don't recommend selling drugs on this program, although many of you are joining the Patreon just to get my drug connect. So clearly you don't listen to any advice I give you.

But for the majority of you, normal people, if you find something that you like and you think you can be good at it and make money, do it relentlessly. do it the best, do it often, and it will materialize for you. I promise you. And in fact, it was drugs. It was the game.

It was me having success in the drug game, me manifesting that that made me think afterwards, oh, you know what? Maybe I can have some success in this other thing, this show business thing, comedy, podcasting, whatever it is that I do now. travel to, you know, Sinoa, Mexico and talk to a bunch of weirdos, right, involved in the cartel. So I don't know. I guess I just share that because it's like, you know, a man reaches a certain age and

he reflects, he looks back at what he's grateful for and the things he's accomplished and his failures. And as long as that teaches you something, there's really nothing wrong with failing. In fact, it's necessary. And by the way, shout out to everybody that is coming up to me, right, on the street. in the gym, you know, shaking my hand. I appreciate it. Thank you guys for making this show big enough to where I can't bring ugly chicks out in public anymore.

Because, you know, I'm going to get recognized. I guess that's a good problem to have. A couple weeks ago, I took this gal, very nice gal, but a little bit of a dog. I brought her out to one of my favorite bars in my neighborhood. And as I get a couple of drinks, I'm at the bar ordering a couple of tequila. for us, right? And I just hear over my shoulder, hey, it's Johnny Mitchell. Is that his chick? And I heard that. And I'm not going to lie, I wanted to put the drinks down, turn around, and walk out. But I didn't. I'm a nice guy. So my point is, thank you. Thank you for making me have to go get a private gym, because I'm so

uncomfortable when you approach me at LA Fitness and tell me you love my videos. Well, I'm trying to, you know, uh, squat my prison legs out of existence. But honestly, I love it. So always, when you see me, always come give me love, because that's what motivates me to keep doing this. So, uh, let's get into it. Because this episode's all about weed. You guys, I admit that I made a mistake. I admit that I was wrong. If you watch this show from the beginning, if you go back and read my book, Days of the trap, I assumed that marijuana legalization would put drug dealers out of business. It would put the weed man out of business. It would cripple the cartels, especially in this country. It would make it so hustlers like me would just become irrelevant.

I was sure of it. I was sure that I was the last generation to take advantage of the illegal marijuana gold rush, right? In many ways, I was right about that. But dude, I have never been more wrong about the effects that it had on crime. Now, the Chinese gangs that immigrate to this country, generally they get their hands into a few things, right? It's either fentanyl because they bring it over, the chemicals over from China, and they deal a lot with the cartels, right? So Chinese precursor chemicals, you know, they have agents that will make deals with

Sina Loa and Nuevo-Halisco down there in Mexico. to supply them with the precursors for meth and fentanyl. In the United States, though, these guys specialize in indoor weed growing operations and at a massive scale. In my day, back in Portland in the mid-2000s, it was the Vietnamese. There's a big Vietnamese community in Portland, and they were known to have the weight. They were known to have the bricks. but the Chinese now have that shit sewed up. And they're Asians, so they're fastidious with it.

They're organized. So today we're going to talk about probably the biggest Chinese weed cartel out of the state of Colorado, in the history of Colorado. So this story goes back to 2009 in Denver, Colorado. The DEA performed what they dubbed Operation Fortune cookie, which is hilariously racist. This was the name of the task force that was trying to take down this Chinese weed syndicate that was flooding, literally flooding Colorado, making hundreds of millions of dollars a

year. So this is all began, and the leaders of this organization were a couple of brothers. one of them owned a restaurant in Denver that was famous all over the world. George Bush, George W. Bush would come there and personally request to go eat at this restaurant. They knew politicians. They knew business people in the community. This was kind of like a cornerstone of this Denver suburb. Okay?

This is important to the story. This is one of the brothers. Okay. The other brother was the master. mine behind the weed operation. This brother had gone to Canada before moving to Denver and according to authorities had perfected his indoor growing ability there in Canada, then moved to Colorado and ended up bringing over all of his other relatives from China and from Canada and opening up shop

and starting the weed cartel. So you have these two brothers. One of them grows the weed and, uh, you know, controls the operation, oversees the management of the, of the weed business. And the other brother who owns the restaurant laundered the money through the restaurant, okay? So these guys were buying suburban Colorado homes. They were paying like 350 to 500 grand per home. And they would get really cheap mortgages in which to do this.

And they had, these guys were legit. They had fake buyers. They had people they paid to live in the houses. to manicure the lawns, to keep them up to speed with the neighbors, right? They didn't let these houses go into decay. These are nice upper middle class homes and Aurora and other neighborhoods surrounding the city of Denver. And they would gut the basements and they would start growing weed in them. And they could get up to a thousand plants per house.

And they owned hundreds of houses, hundreds of houses turning out thousands of pounds per house every three months and moving these pounds at wholesale. These boys were moving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of product. And they were so efficient, in fact, they were so smart about what they did that, according to this article, to avoid detection by the electrical company, because obviously that uses a ton of power when you're growing weed like that, they would actually figure out a way to drill into the electrical system of the city and start siphoning off power from the city grid. So it was separately metered. So they couldn't tell.

It basically fooled the utility companies. So these guys were killing it. And they were into Coke, pills. They controlled and operated brothels, prostitution houses, dotted throughout the suburbs. They had gambling parlors, high-end gambling houses. And these, again, all operated in nice neighborhoods, all under the noses of all of these legitimate middle-class people. And the money was laundered, as I said, through these Chinese restaurants that were very famous. They would pay workers to sign phony W-9s, where they would actually pay them in drug money, but make it look like they were paying them out from legal.

legal proceeds from the business. This is all on a, it's a well-oiled machine. And the DEA has no idea about this at the time, right? Then one day, according to this article, somebody walks into a local branch of the North County police department and gives them a tip. He says, you got to hear what's going on. There's these two brothers.

They're making millions of dollars. they're running a gigantic indoor weed cartel, and they're doing it, you know, essentially out in the open. And they've never been caught. Now, the Connect has an inside source that tells us that this man's name, he goes by an assumed name, Tom, right? Tom was another Asian guy who was basically embedded. He was a drug dealer.

He was embedded with this cartel. And he was extorting them. He was basically demanding cash payments from these guys in order to not go to the authorities. So apparently they had failed. They missed a payment or whatever. So Tom gave this tip to the feds. So the feds start to set up on these guys, right? They get wiretaps.

They track down their houses. They figure out what's going on. They assume, wow, we are about to hit. a huge score. All right? And they set up, dude, they set up for about a year on these guys. So this is about 2009, 2010, when they get ready, they're suited up. They're about a week away from hitting all of these spots out once.

They got wiretaps, they got indictments, they've got warrants. They're really going in. Like, this is a coordinated raid, okay? But then suddenly, before they're able, to get into action on one of the wiretaps, they had their Chinese translator, they hear one of these brothers say, shut it down, shut the operation down,

shut it down. And they're like, what the fuck? Why would they be shutting it down now? Clearly, they knew that the feds were on to them. So all of a sudden, the guy who's leading the raid says, we got to go, we got to go, we got to go. So they run in, they start the, operation the next day at dawn.

They seized a bunch of shit. They seized thousands and thousands of plants, a couple million dollars in cash. I think up to 50 houses where they were growing all the product, right? Arrested a bunch of people, but they still only had about a fraction of the product and the money that they thought they were going to get. So a week goes by.

they figured out that these Chinese cartel members got a tip from a cop. One of the cops, because remember, they ran those Chinese restaurants, and that's where they got in. And it was known that the local division of the drug police, the narcotics cops out of North County in Denver, would eat at this Chinese restaurant. And this was, you know, this owner, this Chinese guy was, paying to help politicians get elected.

He knew the chief of police, knew a lot of these cops. So obviously what happened was one of them got wind that they were setting up on these guys and they went to their Chinese friend, the guy who paid them and been, you know, helped fund their elections just like everybody does. And he said, hey, they're coming for you. So it was a corrupt cop that essentially helped

these guys get away because I don't think any of these guys did any prison time. I think they got a massive fine. I think they were charged with money laundering, but, and I don't know the exact details of it, but they basically got away with it. They got it, and I think the guy got his Chinese restaurants. I think he's got, he, guy maybe got his restaurant seized too. I'm not really sure, but I know none of these guys did big time. And they were making millions. So flash forward 10 years, 2021. And by the way, that was the biggest bust in Colorado history. That was the biggest marijuana bust at that time, 2010, in Colorado history.

Flash forward 11 years, 2020, what was it? 2021. They hit another gigantic drag net, another huge operation raiding these marijuana houses. And again, you've got to remember, by 2021, Pot had already been legal in Colorado for like, what, Brian, almost eight years. But they're still, they're still at it. They take this bus down. Same, same format, right? Suburban houses used to grow thousands and thousands of high grade indoor marijuana plants.

It's the same guys. It's the exact same guys who had the operation back in 2010, the same Chinese. guys, exact same business model, and it's even bigger. The 2021 raid was bigger than the 2020 raid. And that is now the biggest pot bust in Colorado history. So these Chinese brothers, man, they kept topping themselves. And it's no surprise. It's no surprise because they didn't do any prison time back when pot was illegal. So why would we not pick up and do the same thing now? my assumption had always been that when pot became legal,

as we knew it would, even back in the 90s, we knew it was an inevitability, certainly during my era, the early and mid-2000s, we knew that it was right around the corner. My assumption had always been that as soon as the floodgates open,

as soon as marijuana becomes legal, two things would happen. First, everybody would get, end of the game. Every kind of grower, every kind of legal operator, mom and pop all the way up to giant private equity firm would completely absorb the market, flood it with so much weed, that the prices would drop so much that nobody, it wouldn't be worth it for somebody to operate in the black market anymore. Everybody would go buy from dispensaries. Even consumption, I thought,

would go down. Kind of like it did in Portugal. Back in the 90s, Portugal made drugs legal, decriminalized all drugs, and consumption of illegal drugs has consequently gone down. I thought all that was going to happen. I thought it was going to be like liquor. As soon as 1930 or whatever year prohibition ended in the United States, it became completely legal. There's almost no bootlegging anymore. They're in the deep south. there's dry counties right Mississippi Louisiana there are some dry counties where people still make

and traffic and moonshine but it's a it's a sliver it's a mom and pop business I figured that was what legalized pot would do to black market pot I figured we're up the game is up we had a good run clearly that hasn't happened it hasn't happened it hasn't happened even in a state like California

which is the biggest market but also where the majority of the legal players have sunk billions of dollars into legal cannabis cultivation and distribution. It's where Wall Street money has flocked to. It's where so many legal operators have set up shop. 2022. What are we in now? 2023.

80%. Brian, and you can look this up so the people believe me. 20, 80% of the weed market in California is still illegal. It's still in the black market. So that tells you one of two. It actually tells you what that tells you is the taxes are too high on it, first of all, right?

So I go into a dispensary to buy a gram of weed. That costs me 20 bucks. But with the city fee, the state fee, all these other fees built into it, that there's about $13 taxed onto that $20 bag. So for me, if I'm a weed consumer, it's, I guess it's more worth it for me to go down the street and get it from, you know, from the old school dope man, right? Now, personally, I go to the dispensaries now. I don't, I like not having to call a guy up.

I like going down, you know, and having it be like a retail business. The customer service is very good. it's very safe it's dependable it's open all the time basically I know I can go there basically during the 12 hour block of time during the day I don't have to wait on a guy

in a parking lot to show up you know and you know how drug dealer time is but most people prefer clearly statistically prefer to buy their pot on the black market because of the price so in Colorado clearly, clearly the same thing is happening.

Now, I don't know about the retail space, Brian, if you could look up to what the illegal versus legal market is in Colorado. But clearly, you see this hasn't taken out the hustlers. The legal weed space has not taken out the drug dealer. And, you know, so probably what a lot of these Chinese guys are doing now is they're selling their wholesale pot that they grow, illegally, they're selling it to legal dispensaries. Sure. Sure. And that they probably can't get as much for their pounds, right? Because you have more operators now growing legally. But these guys are still

making millions. They're still shipping it out of state. There's still plan. And Denver, if you look into Denver, Colorado, there is mafia activity there, baby. Not Italian mafia, but it is a, it's in the middle of the country. And it's a perfect transshipment point between the West Coast and all of those Midwestern states. So those Chinese guys, those gangs out of Colorado, they're shipping to all of those states around at, Oklahoma, Texas, you name it, Kansas, Missouri, all of these places where pot is decriminalized now, but still barely legal and where most people are still used to buying their weed off the street. Still a big, big market there, which I underestimated for sure. Now, I knew, I knew that pot shipping pot across the country would be harder during legalization because the

price is down, right? So I think that I was right when I made that prediction years ago about marijuana legalization taking out your average drug dealer. I think I was right about that in certain ways. I think guys like me, middlemen, I think we are basically extinct. Because remember, I didn't own the means of production. I didn't grow any weed. Never grew a plant of weed in my life. Didn't care to do it. Didn't know how to do it. Wasn't interested in it. Didn't care about the horticulture. All I gave a fuck about was the money. How much was I buying it for and how much could I fetch on the other end from my buyers. I think that middlemen are just basically finished because you can't get enough. If I'm a buyer, if I'm a drug dealer buying it wholesale in Oklahoma, let's say, or Missouri

or Georgia, a place where pot is still basically illegal, you know, on a higher level, I don't need a guy like me anymore. I can very easily find a grower. I can just, bypass the middleman if I'm a buyer and just go straight to the grower and cop my shit wholesale from there. Right. So I think in order to get rich as a drug dealer in 2023 when your product is marijuana, you have to own the whole, you have to control the whole thing. Either have to be the buyer in the retail state, usually in the Midwest or the East Coast, where you're copping it wholesale, bulk at a time, and then selling it out retail, or you have to be the grower. You have to be the one of these Chinese gangs, these Armenian gangs in L.A., you know, everybody's doing this in L.A., right?

All these, you know, illegal operations that are investing, growing in bulk, usually indoors, right? Or the Mexicans who grow out in the desert, they have the huge greenhouses. You have to be the grower and the middleman. You have to grow it and then sell it to the end buyer. There is no more, there's not enough money in the game. The price of the pound is low enough now to where, there's no money in the middle for guys like me. But there's still money in it, man. There's still a lot of money in it. Brian, did we find out what the legal versus illegal market is?

Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local total wine and more to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friendly guides can help. Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and More. Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B-21. I don't have it in Colorado and California. The latest report they had was 73% was illegal. Seventy-three percent. Yeah, 73% of the weed that's bought in a state with almost 50 million people.

That is, it's still, there's still billions of dollars in pot, no doubt about it. Now, what it's done to, what, what have the effects been on the prices, Brian, in Colorado specifically? Prices have come down a lot. For illegal or illegal? I would say both. They're really tracking legal. Right.

It's the only like solid evidence they have. Right. It was year over year skyrocketing up until like a year and a half ago. And then it just started plummeting. And they're seeing negative sales for the first time since the legalization. It started in 2021. And it's been on decline since. So there's negative sales.

It's a year to year decline in the demand for pot. That probably has a lot to do with the artificial inflation of the demand during the pandemic. mentioned. You know, people are indoors. They're stuck inside. They're doing nothing. They're watching Netflix all day. They're getting fat. And they're smoking a lot of weed. Now, 2021, 22 happens. Everybody's vaccinated. Everybody's going outside again. Everybody's back to work. Pot sales have gone down a little bit. Also, there's just so much supply, too, because all of these growers who came about during the pandemic have now finally cropped and have their businesses going and, you know, now they've got nobody to buy it, right? But you know what I bet? And I guess I can't prove this with the evidence, except when you look at

these gigantic pot bus, I bet the crooks are doing as good as ever. I really do. They're much, when you grow and operate illegally, you can just move quicker. You don't need permits. You don't need to wait on the city. You don't have to pay hefty fines or fees to get going. And, you know, you don't need to wait. And you can just invest in your product, grow it, and then hit the street with it. So I would, I don't know, man, I think the black market might be here to stay. I really do because the taxes aren't going anywhere on the legal cannabis. So why wouldn't a, why wouldn't a black market pop up to feed that demand of cheaper cannabis at the same? kind of quality. Of course it'll always exist. And now what's happening is these places like Denver,

Colorado are losing huge amounts of revenue, huge amounts of projected revenue that they thought they were going to make back from taxing the product. People are like, no, no, no, no, no, we ain't giving you the taxes. We want our cake and eat it too. We want legal cannabis, but we want to buy it without the taxes. So God bless America. So this is a fascinating thing. So, you know, if they legalize drugs like cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, meth, whatever, whatever you have it, whatever you have it, I mean, it really is not going to stop anything. Because just like cannabis, marijuana, they made it legal, and the states where it's fully legal, you have the most illegal grows. It's the reason these Chinese guys moved to Colorado in the first place because of the lax state laws. That's where they decided to pick up and begin their grow operations.

And look, they were right. They got bagged with millions of dollars worth of product. Huge federal probe and state probe back in 2010. Nobody did any time. Not real time anyways. They might have spent, they might have taken a little cat nap, spent a year or two in jail, but basically just paid their way out. So I don't know what kind of, you know, the corruption that was involved.

Who really knows the details? all of it, but there was certainly was. I mean, you know, the cops, cops are the ones who initially tipped off these, these Asian guys that the, the feds were after them. But so the same goes for cocaine, right? If you made cocaine legal, they made coca leaf legal to grow in Colombia. And consequently, now there is more cocaine flooding all of the European American Asian markets than ever before. So, you know, I admit I was wrong about that. You know, it's sociopolitic sociology is funny at times. You think, okay, one thing plus one thing equals another thing, but sometimes the math doesn't add up. The Chinese, let's talk about that. I mean,

just in general, these guys run a tight ship. You heard about this Chinese spy balloon? We heard about this? There was a Chinese balloon. that was outfitted as a spy device that was floated over the entire length, width of the United States, from sea to shining sea, coast to coast, without any American authorities picking up on it. Now, that is some Chinese ingenuity. You see the Chinese ingenuity and how they're able to have a massive, multi-million dollar indoor pot grow in a suburban Colorado community. Damn, they get that from somewhere.

They get that from the old country. And boy, I tell you, that is some next-level Sutterfuge. So they were able to float, and Brian, am I being incorrect on the details? Do you want to fill in any more details of it that we might? I'm looking it up right now. I don't know if it's officially been confirmed that that's what it was. It was suspected like spy balloon.

Yeah, it was over Montana, which is where it was spotted. And they had to wait until it was not over, you know, land. Land, yeah, basically to shoot it down. Wow. Wow. And I guess the Chinese government said that it was some kind of like weather like weather tracking balloon that had been blown off course and ended up where it was.

interesting so you know we have talked shit yeah well we can go as far as to say we've we've talked shit on peter zaheim before on this program peter zahean is a political scientist kind of a brilliant guy he's been on rogan now a few times he's very hot on youtube he's uh he's coming kind of like a Jordan Peterson before the the political affairs realm he's very flamboyed he's starting to slick his hair back he's probably getting ready to quit his professorship at whatever university he works at to you know start a patreon as all these dorks are right as we've said before these dorks need to stay in their lane a little bit leave the entertainment to guys like us anyways he's made some pretty outlandish uh claims about like the cartels and they're

involvement in the U.S. We've talked about those before. What I really like Peter, what he does, though, is he talks about the future of China and of Russia, and he's basically saying that they're done, they're doomed. They have an irreversible population decline, and in the next 10 years, you're going to see their economy implode, you're going to see the Chinese government possibly fold, or you're going to see a major political shift like a coup d'etat. Furthermore, you're going to see aggression.

You're going to see aggression, and you're already seeing it on the part of the Chinese. Because what happens when a government, especially a totalitarian government, gets backed into a corner, they get aggressive. It's kind of like trying to back Putin into a corner, as is what's happening now with NATO in the West. Their refusal to come to the bargaining table with him, he's like, okay, motherfucker, well, I got my hand on the nukes. So you want to take me out? We're all going to die in this bitch. It's going to be a Jonestown massacre in this motherfucker. So with the Chinese, what they've started to do is they're buying up gold like crazy.

They're buying up gold and precious metals, just like Putin was doing in the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine. So this is what warring countries do. This is what countries in the modern world who are preparing for war do is they start backing their currency up with a precious metal because they know as soon as they invade somebody or they go to war against Taiwan or the United States, all of the other countries in the world are going to quit doing business with them. And it's going to collapse their currency. So they want their currency to be backed up by precious metals. That is a potential. You could see in the next, you could see, you're going to see, in the next five years, serious Chinese aggression towards the United States and its allies.

So that is a concern. I read that the other day and I thought, wow. Now, I do think China is doomed. I do think Russia is, I think those are doomed societies for those reasons that Peter talks about. On irreversible population decline, no faith in, by business people in the government with the government, right? Because if you're a business person in China, if you're a business person in Russia, you can't operate without paying up to the government.

The government is the mafia over there. And they tax their soldiers, their workers, hard. So everybody's scrambling. Every rich person in China in Russia, they're scrambling to get their money out because they know it's never safe in their home countries. So you're going to see defectors from the Chinese party. You're going to see civil unrest, which we're already seeing with like the COVID zero protests. You're going to see massive, massive upheaval.

Then that's when you're going to see the war. So you're going to see the massive internal economic collapse mixed with the civil uprisings. That's when you got to look out. Because whenever a totalitarian government faces resistance or uprising by the people that they control, they try to distract them by making war. I mean, democracies do this too, right? We know this. War is the biggest distraction.

It's what unites the people. It's what makes patriots out of cynics. And it's what distracts the people from the problems domestically. So I would say, without a doubt, and hey, probably be wrong on this too, right? Just like we were wrong about the effects of marijuana legalization on the black market. But I'd say, looking at the facts, listening to experts, I predict that Taiwan is going to be the first domino to topple within the next five years. And that is not an easy thing. The U.S. can't just go to war against China.

certainly not and we're giving billions of dollars already to Ukraine so this might be a good time for China to strike but make no mistake this is a desperate dying country and it is a dying dictatorship so but hey props to the Chinese cartel and these Chinese guys man they're good they launder money for the Mexicans. They have their own grow operations. They move a ton of fentanyl and Coke in Canada. Look it up. Those big fentanyl busts that are going on in Vancouver, BC, those big heroin interdictions that are going on in Vancouver and Montreal, these are port cities. These are cities that have gigantic Asian and Chinese diasporas. So if you go to Vancouver, B.C., go to a typical neighborhood in Vancouver, there's no signs in English.

It's all Chinese, and they're parking their money there. Chinese cartels are buying up real estate just to sit their money outside of China, and it's making everything go up. Yeah, those are the Chinese gangs. They got real hustle in them. So they're good, man. So, yeah, but that one of the most fascinating parts about this whole thing is, is it seems like, at least in states like California and Colorado,

there's been virtually no difference in the way that the illegal marijuana cartels operate post-legalization. All right, you guys, we are going to get in to, we're going to take some Patreon questions now. As promised, if you're a Patreon member, you sign up $4.99 a month. You can call us in, dial that number right there on your screen, call in leave a voicemail. If it's not too psychotic,

we will play it on the program, and I will answer that for you. It can be anything you want, guys. It doesn't even have to be drug-related. It doesn't even have to be related to me. If you got advice about a business you're trying to launch, you need some motivation, holler at daddy. I got you.

Brian, let's get into it. Hey, I was just wondering, did you know the strains that you were getting from the cartels or like, Did they just give you the kilos and you just give them the money for it? Thanks. Okay. Thank you very much.

Who was that? Let's shout them out too. Guys, leave us your name when you call. Leave us your name, your location. And if you want. If not, if you're one of those guys, if you're calling from, you know, Columbia and you're on a blocked line and encrypted code, then just the message will be fine.

What strains was I picking up from the cartel? I had no idea. I had no idea. I had no interest. Didn't care. I knew that I was picking up high grade outdoor bud that was either grown in the forest, in the sequoia or the redwood forest down there in northern California or in a greenhouse. So it was effectively high grade outdoor.

I knew that's what I was getting. But we never had any strands. They didn't brand it like that back in the day. It's not like now where in Sina Loa, you know, the dispensaries look like what we got in L.A. You know, you got Captain Crunch and Blue Dream and O.G. Cush. None of that mattered to the cartels that it didn't matter to me. When you went to indoor growers, our artisanal guys and guys who were really into it. There were criminals, but they were also potheads.

They took a lot of pride in their weed. it was indoor strains, they'd be like, oh man, this is the AK-47. This is the Northern Lights. That's the people who would brand it. The cartels didn't even know what state they were in, basically. They knew they were somewhere in or around California. So they certainly didn't give a fuck about naming strands of weed. They knew how to grow high-grade outdoor, and I could look at it and be like, okay,

I got to the point where I could look at it and be like, this isn't worth $2,400. you're trying to give me for this? You're trying to get me for? No, no, no, no. I'll give you 22 for this. Like, it got to the point where I can eyeball it and know exactly what my buyers on the East Coast would pay for it per pound. So that's about as sophisticated as we got with it.

And I could also, during the drought season, when there was not a lot of outdoor or almost no outdoor weed, I could go to, sometimes the cartels would have indoor product that they would buy at wholesale and they would just, middle matter to me, and then I can look at it and be like, okay, this is, this is high grade or this is like top shelf, right? Because in August of 2009, on the West Coast, the pot mecca, I could still be buying a pound at wholesale for almost $4,000. That was a big risk. So you had to really make sure that you were buying the best quality when you were paying

top dollar or else you might lose money on the other end, on the sale end of it. So yeah, but no, we never named it, didn't give a shit about the strains. It was either good outdoor, Bammer outdoor. We called it Bammer, right? Which was like shake and seeds and all that stuff. Or it was indoor.

Good indoor or top shelf indoor. Back in the mid-2000s, I think most of the outdoor grows in like NorCal at least. Most of it was like OG Cush. Was that what it was? I mean, that was like the huge boom. Gotcha. You know, you went from Sensamia to Chronic and then O.G. Cush was like the next. That was like the third wave of like huge.

Interesting. There you go. Well, it might have been. But, you know, in communications, when it came to how we discuss things, it was never like, hey, I got O.G. Cush. It was like, hey, we're cropped. I got. And it was like the three tiers, right?

It was Baro, Mediano. Mediano was like mids. Those were like, that was like good weed. That was a good commercial weed that you could make good money off of. That was the sweet spot. That's where we tried to stay.

We tried to avoid Bammer at all times. We tried to stay in the middle because we could cop a pound of really good outdoor weed, fresh from the crop. Tons smelled great. had a lot of beautiful hairs on it, had crystals, all that stuff. To an untrained eye, it probably looked like indoor weed. We would buy that, you know, say we would buy 50 pounds of that for $2,000 a pound.

That is a great deal. That is a great deal because I can take, I can pay $100,000 for 50 pounds and sell each pound wholesale 10 at a time for $2,400, $2,500. Everybody's happy. Everybody's moving it fast. I can sell it across the country for $3,000 a pound. And everybody's moving it fast. So I can make $1,000 a pound.

I can invest $100,000 to make $50. It's not quite a double up. It's not a cocaine double up, but it's a high profit margin. It's a 50% markup. And you got customers coming back to you. Everybody wins in that. situation everybody makes money on the chain the high-end stuff was great too but you couldn't get as much of it not nearly as much of it and you didn't have as many buyers uh wholesale buyers for that because

you had to have those buyers on the east coast had to have so much investment capital so that was the only that that was the downside of that so yeah thank you for your question you guys Johnny, what's up, dude? Listen, I would love to hear your Mount Rushmore of drug movies. Just give us like your top pick, and shows. Drug movies and drug TV shows your top picks. We talk in Sicario, Alfa Dog, Blow. I don't know.

You tell us. Like which ones are really good, like they're accurate. They nailed it. The story's legit. And which ones are just straight up horseshit. I would love to hear your answers. The show is fucking great. I've watched every episode.

Some of them more than one, actually. Keep killing it, man. I fucking love the connect. All right, thanks. Hell yeah. Thank you, Alex. Top drug movies. We'll start with movies and then we'll get into TV.

Scarface. It's just number one. Is it accurate? Yes and no. It is accurate in that the flash and the style of the Miami drug dealer in the 70s and 80s, They nailed it. If you go back and look at, you know, pictures from like cocaine cowboys and all that, about that era, dude, Tony Montana, like his flash, he owns a fucking tiger.

He's got a tiger in his backyard. Yes, that is all accurate. And I love the story. This character, he's on the Muriel, the Marial boat lift. This Cuban from communist Cuba who's got nothing. You all nothing. Do you work all day? I work 12 hours.

I got octopus coming on my fucking ears. And he wants the world and everything in it. That's, I love that part. What's not accurate is that he's portrayed as like the top kingpin of Miami. And he's a Cuban guy. In reality, the people running shit were the Colombians. It was Griselda. It was Rafa.

It was everybody. It was the, the Choas. It was there, the, the Choa clan from Colombia. they were the ones who just had the connections to the wholesalers. They were the wholesalers. They were the suppliers. They were the connect. And they sent their people over to Miami and were giving their product exclusively to them.

So they dominated the market. So the Cubans were middlemen. The Cubans were originally the guys buying product from the Colombian wholesalers and selling it out to retailers. once the Colombians moved their people up to Miami, they completely took over. So that's the only part where that was a little inaccurate. But I mean, it's just,

it's one of the greatest movies of all time, and it is absolutely my favorite drug movie. If I would have to pick a runner up, I have to pick a runner up in that category. I'll just say paid in full. Why not? Paid and full, because, you know, we filmed with the paid and full guys in Harlem a couple weeks ago. Or the guys who paid and full was based off her, right? And that's Rich, Rich Porter, Alpo Martinez, who they call Rico in the movie as portrayed by Cameron.

And AZ. AZ is portrayed by, excuse me, Wood Harris in the movie. Go watch. This is an underground cult club. classic paid in full. If you haven't seen it, it's from 2002. It's produced by Dame Dash and Rockefeller records at the height of Rockefeller. It is a hood movie, but it's a well-made hood movie.

It's got a little bit of budgeting issues, but it is a solid movie. And it portrays the flash and the excitement of the crack era in the 80s in New York, in Harlem. And it's so personal to me because the, the rapper, who I grew up emulating and loving, right? Whether that be Cameron and Dipset, Big L, Fat Joe, all of these 90s, New York, hip hop and gangster rappers, everything that they talk about, everything, all their style and swag,

even the names. AZ is the name of a rapper. AZ was actually supposed to be like the next Nas. AZ and Nas were a team. and they had a rap group back in the 90s called The Firm. AZ took his name from the drug dealer, AZ from Harlem. So everything that they got from the cars and the style and the stories, all those rappers, they got that from the crack era in the 80s,

from the paid and full guys. So you've got to watch it. If you love hip hop and if you love New York like I do, I mean, oh, I can watch it. And there's so many quotables to that movie, too. It's just, ooh, I get chills thinking about it. I love that movie. So I'll give that.

And it's Black History Month, so I want to give black actors there due, too. So go watch that. But really, the best drug content is in the television shows. The Wire and Narcos are probably better than any drug movie. If we want to talk about, you know, how well they're made and the accuracy of it. There's no question. I mean, go watch the wire. You see how the corners operated and still operate in Baltimore.

You see the way those people live. I mean, it is a culture. You start out as a corner boy looking out for the cops. Then you become a runner. And then you get hit with a pack, right, from the OG. And then you get your little corner. And now you got people working for you, you know, and you take. And then you come up and you get bigger and you got a kilo.

and then you might take a corner. You drop a body, right? Put a bullet in some guy's head, and now you got that corner. And now you're working. All that is true to life. Now, the later episodes of the Wire are, it gets a bigger budget,

it becomes more Hollywood. Yes, they take a lot of liberties. But the way that drugs get sold throughout the city, it's portrayed 90% accurate, I would say, in the early seasons of the wire. And then, of course, Narcos. Narcos, they do take liberties, but we've done a lot of research on this show,

and that is close to true life as it gets. You know, they hit in the seasons, the early seasons that involve the Medellín cartel, where they talk about how the Ochoas were just as powerful and rich as Pablo Escobar. That's true to life. and you know, Pablo is in old movies and TV shows like Blow with Johnny Depp. They portray Pablo as like the number one dude, right?

And we know now that that's not true. He was just one of the founders of the cartel. And they get that right in Narcos. And they get a lot of share. And really, even in season three about the collie cartel, much of that is accurate down to a T. And Mexico, the Mexico episodes as well. So, yeah, that's going to be television.

And then documentaries, without question, cocaine cowboys. Go look it up. I think it's on Netflix now. You can go get it anywhere. Cocaine Cowboys, I think it's from like 2006. It's a documentary by the Corbin brothers out of Florida. And they talk all about the cocaine wars and of the 70s and 80s and how all of that got started. They interview the white guys, John Roberts, who was connected directly with Griselda and the Colombian cartels.

And you just, you hear it out of the horse's mouth. And it's like all of those stories, everything, like you see people getting chainsawed up with their heads cut off and Scarface. That happened in real life in Miami in the 70s and 80s. It's wild. And they have like follow ups to it too. It's incredible. So yeah, go check those out. but those would be my favorite pieces of drug content.

Thank you, Alex. Where does American gangster fall on that in terms of like a boss falling and then the war that ensues after this? Yeah, yeah. So American gangster with Denzel Washington. First of all, great story. I can't give it as a top movie, though, because it's just, they just kind of bombed. They just didn't make the movie right.

As a story, it's a very compelling story. But also there's rumors that. Frank Lucas was not one of the top guys, not one of the top kingpins out of New York. There's always contention about who made more money. I do love that story, though. So if you haven't seen American gangster, I know many of you are young,

go back and watch that. It's about Frank Lucas, who's a country boy from South Carolina. He comes up to New York in the 50s, and he starts working for Bumpy Johnson. Bumpy Johnson was the first black Harlemite who sold heroin for the mafia. He was the first guy.

He was the first black guy who the Italian mafia would deal with. And so Frank Lucas was Bumpy's driver. And when Bumpy died, Frank saw the potential in the heroin market in Harlem. And what he was able to do was go over. He said he looked at the Italians, right? The French connection, all that stuff.

Oh, dog, the French connection might be one of my, the French connection is my favorite drug movie. It's because it's such a good movie. Scarface and the French connection. But anyways, I digress. The French connection was based, was a true story about these French and Italian, Sicilian heroin dealers who would supply the American mafia with wholesale heroin.

Frank Lucas was the first black guy to go around them. He said, no, no, no, fuck the middleman. He went over to Thailand and hooked up with the golden triangle over there. and started getting his heroin brought in through Vietnamese, Vietnam soldiers who were over there fighting the war, American soldiers in Vietnam, they would actually smuggle the heroin bricks to the United States

in dead American soldiers' coffins, and they would bring it up to New York and sell it. So as far as, like, OG drug dealers go, that's, he might be one of my favorite. I just didn't like the movie very much. But yeah, thank you. There's tons of great movies out there. Go watch the French connection.

Now, this next message is so bat-shit crazy that I thought it would be fun to play it, and then I will answer it the best I can. Brian, go ahead. Hey, Johnny, this is Michael. I recently joined your Patreon and also your Google page. I was wondering if you can help a brother out out here in Columbia. Okay, so Michael. Thank you for your support.

Thank you for being a member of the Patreon. I can, once again, I will say that I cannot hook you up with anybody in Columbia. I mean, I haven't been down there in a long time. I actually don't even know if my connects are still living or not incarcerated. If you want to find somebody to sell you drugs in Columbia, that is like saying, I want to go to Disneyland. I'm in L.A. Do you think that can happen? I promise you it can happen, okay?

If you got some money to throw around down there, it doesn't take long. Now, if you just want to buy a joint or some Coke, you just go up to those vendors. You go to, what is it, Parque Dierras, Parque Dieras. It's in the Poblavo neighborhood. That's where all the tourists go. That's where I used to sell my Coke, right? You go to that little strip where all the hostels are, and you'll see a bunch of, like, street vendors. You'll see guys that are selling sodas and candies, you know, pushing their carts,

along. All those dudes are on deck. All those cats have drugs. So you can just co-cop it from them. It's probably still pretty good. You want to go higher up. You're going to have to meet somebody from La Ophicina. If you go back and watch the episodes, you'll know that that was my wholesale drug source there, right? Now, I was connected with somebody already. I was connected with a guy from the Sina Loa cartel, my pot supplier, and a business. America who put me in touch with somebody down there, right? I had an end. But I promise you guys, if you just, if you got 5,000 bucks and you make friends down there

and you speak a little Spanish and you meet, you just, you know, you know, you know it if you know it. If you know, you know somebody is cool, that person's cool. You don't have to feel awkward. If you want, you are friends with a buddy from Medellegina and you say, hey, I want to buy a kilo of cocaine. Can you help me do that? If he can't take you straight to the source, he can get somebody to take you straight to the source.

And they're very customer service oriented down there. Just a couple of bucks here and there. We'll get you to a guy. I promise. It's the factory, you guys. There's no shortage of it, and it's not going anywhere. This is your journey. You don't need Johnny.

Half the fun is finding it. it's half it's it's it's half the battle but it's it's almost all of the fun okay i promise you the only thing more fun is when it goes up your nose right but god the excitement it's like getting to the mountain top okay it's like climbing machu pechu it's like some really it's a hike up a steep cliff with a beautiful view and it's it's killing your legs your legs are on fire and you got a blister on your heel and you're dehydrated and you think, God, if I can only get to the top. But once you make it there, the view is that much better. You don't want me to carry you up to the top.

That's the whole point. The whole point is to walk it yourselves, guys, Michael. So go find the connect yourself. I promise you. I promise. This is my challenge to you. Find it and report back to me in two weeks. It shouldn't even take you that long.

Thank you for your support. Last one came in as a message, not a voicemail. Gotcha. Have you ever or will you ever consider doing DMT? And that's from Luke. Thank you, Luke. I have never done DMT. Yes, I would consider doing it.

I would consider doing it. I'm not at a place in my life right now where I feel like that's where I want to put my energy, if that makes sense. Like I'm really, I'm in hustle mode. I'm in like, I'm in war mode pretty much constantly. And I know that could be an unhealthy state to live in mentally. I'm trying to offset it with meditation and rigorous exercise and dieting and gratitude every day.

But yeah, in my 40s, I'm, I'm absolutely going to do DMT and see how that changes me. Right. When I feel like financially and professionally I'm out of place where I don't have to worry I can even take some time off. Right now I feel like to do a drug like DMT, I would just need to take time off. I really don't have it. Brian, explain to me your DMT trip,

because I know you've done it before. What would you tell Luke? Because he sounds like he wants to do it. In terms of what it's like? Yeah, yeah. And what it's like and just briefly, like, how it changed your life, I guess. I mean, it's what, you know,

like movies and cartoons have depicted, you know, like other psychedelics as forever. Like it's truly the one that I've done that made me, like I literally left the planet in my trip. Like seeing things that are not there. Yeah. Like you might have like altered perceptions with other things,

but with DMT you will see a completely different reality. Yeah. It doesn't last very long, but when you're in it, there's no concept of time. So you don't know, oh, that was only 15 minutes. It feels like time doesn't exist. Yeah. I personally think things like that, even things like mushrooms,

there's a reason why historically, you know, shaman and wise men have been the ones to administer it because you're dealing with some pretty heavy elements of the earth and you need somebody who's very familiar with those things that can help you out with it. But there's, I mean, there's places, you know, in Latin America where you could go do ayahuasca treatment, which is very similar.

Yeah. And it's like guided path through it. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I would definitely recommend, you know, using a shaman, using an expert. You know, Brian's rock and roll. So he just does that shit like while he's skateboarding with his friends. But, but yeah, no, I think it's great.

Now, if you want to hear a horror story, Neil Brennan, a well-known comedian, very good comedian. He did DMT, but he did like the special DMT. There's like two different kinds of DMT. There's like the shit that takes you off the planet and then some other shit that evidently puts you in a different galaxy. He did that one. He did that one. And no joke. And he talks about this on his podcast too.

He said that he was having flashbacks and, and what do you call it? Aftershocks for over a year. So he thought he was going to die. He said he would just six months after he did it, he would be. on a date and suddenly he would start to get high again and and freak out and as Brian said leave the planet. He said he would not change his life. He's more empathetic. He's more loving. All of these benefits that we hear from people who have done DMT, he said he would not do it again for a billion dollars. So again, this is why you want to to use an expert. But I, you know,

let me know how it goes and, you know, let's do something together sometime. I would recommend, because I had a period of my life where I was heavy into psychedelics, read the psychedelic experience by Tim Larry. Okay. It's basically a rewriting of the Tibetan Book of the Dead via psychedelics, because the idea is, you know, it's the death of your ego and the rebirth of your new kind of outlook on life. and it really does have it's got some really great insight in terms of like what you might experience but also you know how to kind of interpret it and use it moving forward beautiful tim leary go read it

uh thank you guys we appreciate it uh thank you for support uh sign up for the patreon let's uh i love hearing from you guys i love the comments i love you guys DMing me i love you coming up to me on the street. I love you catching me with an ugly broad out of the bar. It doesn't matter. I genuinely like think of us as a family and I'm so grateful that you're on this trip with me and then you're fucking spending this time with me on my birthday. I'm an old man. But God damn it, I fuck like an even older man. All right. What else do we have? So we, today we had a fascinating guy on. His name is Alonzo, but he goes by Gunner. And this is a guy out of Detroit.

He's a Sicilian guy who grew up in the 80s and 90s in Detroit. And he was just mob tied. He's got a legacy mob family. You know, I didn't even know Detroit had mafia. I didn't know that. I thought the mafia families outside of New York were like Buffalo, Philly, Cleveland, and Kansas City. I had no idea that people were operating out of Detroit.

But it makes sense because it's got all the same elements as those other mob cities. right you got a huge blue collar community you've got you know a drug addicted population you've got a corrupt and a very corruptible uh political and judicial system and detroit is probably the most corrupt it's the most corrupt city in america and a lot of that had to do with the mafia from the 60s through even today i'm sure there's plenty of people getting paid off this was fascinating he talks about the drug dealing that went on, how he got into collections for his uncle Tony. Also, he talks about how his other uncle Tony,

because you see all these guineas, they got uncles. They got uncles the way black guys got cousins, right? Might be blood related, might not be, doesn't matter. It's still Uncle Tony. His uncle Tony was one of the founding members of the Detroit

mafia clan. He was one of the prime suspects in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. You guys heard that right. If you go back and watch the Irishman, it gives the history of it, but go, go study about Jimmy Hoffa. Jimmy Hoffa was the head of the Teamsters Union. The Teamsters Union, the Teamsters are a union of truck drivers who were at a time in American history, the most powerful union in America.

Now, the unions, the Teamsters, had a pension fund, right? So you pay your union dues, you're a truck driver, you pay your union dues, goes into a pension fund. Now, what Jimmy Hoffa was doing is he was giving, taking this pension fund and giving out loans to the mafia so they could build up their casinos. Because remember, this is at a time where casinos were legal, but you couldn't get a loan from the bank to build one. a mafia guy. It was still considered for either legal or moral reasons. The bank wasn't given out

loans. So what does the mafia do when there is a demand that isn't being fulfilled by the legal space? They step in and fill it. So Jimmy Hoffa was giving loans to all of these different mobsters out of Detroit, Vegas, New York, Miami, wherever they were to build casinos. And what the mobsters were doing is they were skimming off the top of those casinos, right? Go back and watch the movie casino. They explain how it was done in real life. So obviously what happens is he got greedy, got out of pocket, and they ended up having to take him out, right? And he disappeared. He disappeared out of Detroit. And Gunner, the guy who we interviewed today, his uncle Tony was one of the prime suspects in his disappearance. Never did a day in jail, though. I think eventually he went down

for tax evasion in the 90s. But this is, this is one of the last eras of the golden age of the mafia is this era, right? It was this teamster, Jimmy Hoffa, 1950s through the 90s era where it was a first generation Sicilians born in this country who had that classic Kosa Nostra, you know, the families out of New York, the commission. That was uncle, his uncle Tony was involved in all this stuff. And it's amazing because most of these guys did very minimal jail time. And it's because corruption was so endemic, was so widespread in America back then that everybody from federal judges all the way down to local cops were getting paid off by the mafia.

And we talk about how the Detroit mafia still operates today. Go check out his books. He's got like nine novels. He wrote while he was in prison, nine of them. It's got a cool radio show. He's got a clothing line. Enjoy the episode. Al Lindblum, everybody.

So Gunner, tell me about your origins. Tell me about your time in the street and, you know, how you grew up and your time in jail and writing books and all of that. Let's hear it. So I grew up in Gross Point, Michigan, for the most part. My grandparents, my father was abusive drunk and my mother was mentally ill. So he divorced when I was four. And I went and moved in with my grandparents. You know, I don't know nothing about mob or nothing at this time.

I'm just a little kid. But where they lived was, they had been living there for like 30 years at the time. And it would just happen to be basically ground zero for the mafia. My grandfather, Peter Paul Tocco, his cousin, which I believe is the second cousin, was the boss of the mob. He didn't, you know, he became the boss in, I think, 1979. But his name is Jack Tocco, Joko. And anyways, they were pretty close. they, you know, they saw each other often, talked often.

But basically all of my grandfather's pizons, all of his gumbadis, that's what they call them gumbodies, just means best man. They were all, not all, but a lot of them were associate of the mob on some levels that are at the very top, some levels are just barely. Like, I was around them all my life, but not really working for them or not really involved with them, just seeing them at my house, talking them at family functions, seeing them at church, always around them, you know. These are guys that have been watching my life, all my life, and they see what a f-up I am. I'm a freaking, a total screw-up with all the felonies and the

fighting and the jail and the bombs and they're looking at me going, he's, you know, he's destined for one, to be one of us, in a way, at least. So I get out of jail, I go live with my grandma grandpa, grandpa, Toco. Before I went to jail, I was living with my cousin Joe and Dino and was like a bachelor plaid and was all these freaking, like, muscle head mother efforts. But they got strung out on dope. While I was away in jail, they got strung out on dope. Well, I didn't want to go back to a spot where these guys are strung out on a dope. One of our cousins introduced us to something called Newbane with this is injectable morphine.

It's like synthetic morphine. And they all got strung out on this. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to live with my grandparents when I get out. And so I get out in about two or three weeks after I get out of jail, I have a graduation party I'm supposed to go to, my cousin Nina's. I promised my grandmother I'd go. But I didn't go. I went to the beach to hang out with my boys and, you know,

Chase pussy and whatever. I forgot all about it because I'm, by the way, as soon as I get out of jail, I mean, my boyfriend's me 10 pounds of weed. Another boy, Tony Bommerito gives me a case like $10,000 with steroids.

So I'm back in the game three days out. I'm just like, boom, boom, boom. Live with my grandparents calling up everybody. You need, you need, you need, you need. And I'm back in the game. So I don't really want to work or nothing like that. I'm just hanging out at the beach, lifting weights, eating, sleeping like a loser.

I'm a loser. So my grandmother calls me. she beats me with her code and she says why aren't you at Nina's graduation party? I was like, oh man, I forgot about it. It's like, you need to get down here right away. The whole family's here. Have some respect.

She's going away to college in the fall, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm like, oh, I'm way out at Metropolitan Beach. And just way on the other side of town on my ninja, my crotch rocket. I jump on my ninja, fly to a freaking, like a store, buy a card and put a $100 bill in the card. This is cheesy. I don't even remember this era of clothing, but I was wearing a suit vest with no shirt underneath.

and like, you know, like dress shorts. Do you remember that? I don't, thank God. I was too young for that. It's so bad. It's so bad. Back then, it was like the cool thing. Especially muscle heads.

If you were a muscle head, you wore like a suit. I had a black suit vest. Nothing underneath. Gold chain, black shorts, dress shorts, and like rock port boots, black rock court boots. And I've come whipping up for this party.

This is like a really nice high end party. It looked like the party in the godfather. The movie of the godfather used to the party. Yeah. They had a circus tent over the back. This big house and gross point with a big pool and stuff. There's got to be 100 to 150 people there. Music's playing from the back.

I come walking up. All my little cousins are like, yeah, yeah, I'll have to play with me, play with me. So I go into backyard. I start getting some food. And under the main tent, it's this big round table, right? And I see my grandparents just sitting at it. And they're sitting there with all these aunts and uncles that I know. And one of them is Tony Jackaloney, who we talked about earlier.

He's just, you know, he's a street boss of Detroit mob. He's basically the face of Detroit mob. At the time, I know he's a big shot mafioso. I don't know how high, what level, nothing, because I didn't care. I didn't ask, wasn't my place. I just knew from my Uncle Pete that he was a very high-ranked mafioso. He had come to our house. He would say, Alonzo, how you doing?

He liked to talk to me. He was very, he was very talkative with me. A lot of my old uncles thought I was an idiot, but he liked me. So while I'm at this party, I get my food, and I go inside to give my cousin Nina. an envelope and say, you know, congratulations on graduation and good luck at school, blah, blah, bonner. And then I come back outside and I hear, my grandpa said to Uncle Tony, he says,

can you find, he says, Tony, think you can find Alonzo some work? He's got to stay busy. He's got out of jail. And he goes, yeah, sure, Pete, I'll find him something. And my grandmother goes, no, no, no, no, no, he doesn't need to work. No, no, no, he's going to go to school in the fall. And my grandpa says, well, he's still got to work. I don't want him to, you know, stay out of trouble, still got to work.

And my grandma says, no, he's good. So I speak up. Now, they're all speaking in Sicilian, so they don't think I know. They don't think I can hear it. But I got enough. I hear your name, Alonzo three, four times in a row. You're like, now I start putting it together. And I say, do I have any say in this?

And they all look at me, this whole table full of old, you know, old Sicilians. And they're like, you know what we're talking about. I said, yeah, you know, grandpa asked Uncle Tony to get me some work or a job or something. And my grandma, and my grandma says, we're done talking about it. She slams her hand. She's like, you're going to school. Boom. So my grandpa and my uncle kind of look at each other and they're like, eh.

So I get home a couple hours later and I said, why is grandma so, you know, against me working with Tony? Not that I wanted a job because I didn't. And she sees, my grandpa says, you know, you're not stupid, Alonzo. You know what Tony does. And I said, oh, yeah, I guess. I didn't realize it was like that type of job. You know, it was just like maybe it was like a real job. So a couple weeks later, I get a, Tony comes over our house and he says, Alonzo, I got your job bouncing at this nightclub called Brownie's on a

The very high-end posh place right on the Lake St. Clair on a marina, and high rollers pull up their boats and yachts and crap and dock it right on the deck. It's high roller Central, big, big, big money. And he gets me the job as a head bouncer there. I'm 19, or 20, I turned 20 years old. And it was Mob Central, all these freaking young wise guys, all the basically young mafiosos all over town, especially the East Side guys, who all lived in Gross Point right there. They come in every night, and they all knew I was at Toko.

They would all say, this is my cousin Al-Tocco. and I'd be like, yeah, you know, thanks. You know, my last name's Lynn Bloom, but, you're like, yeah, your mom's a toco, so you're still a toco. The toco name carried a lot of weight and tearing a huge weight because the boss was Jack Toko. Before that, it was a toko. So, man, everybody knew I was a to-co. So I didn't, like, play it up, like, a look at me, I'm a to-co, but all my cousins did. They'd come in and they'd give me a hug. They would kiss me on the cheek, legitimately just come in and give me a hug and a kiss on a cheek, like, I was somebody.

But I made a lot of contacts there, and I made a lot of connections there, and, you know, every night I'm right. somebody's number down because they got some scam racket drug deal something going plus a ton of freaking girls in there then not long after this tony calls me seven this is where my life changed really everything kind of changes well it's about seven o'clock in the morning the phone rings i'm sleeping my room was in the basement in my grandparents house and i heard the phone rig and i'm like who else call him a freaking 650 or whatever in the morning man i roll over my grandma yells down she's like lounge on the phone i said who is it's like tony i said tony who i got like ten cousin Tony's. She's like, it's Tony Jack. What's what Tony Jack want with me? You know,

it's 7 o'clock in the morning. So I pick up the phone. I said, Tony, what's up? You know, he's like, I need a favor. I said, well, kind of favor with anything, man. What do you want? He's like, there's this girl, a friend of mine. That's how he calls her, a friend of mine. Her ex showed up drunk last night, slapped her around and passed out drunk. Can you handle that? I said, well, where is it? Where is he's like, it's right by you. I lived at 9 Mile in Jefferson. This is like 12 mile on Jefferson. So I'm the three miles away. I said, yeah, give me the address.

I'll go there. I'll handle it, no problem. He's like, you sure you can handle this? I said, yeah, Tony, come on, man. Give me an address. So I get the address and write it down. I hang out the phone. I call my workout partner,

just a big Italian kid named Dario. And the funny thing is, this is the kind of crew I hung around just so you give you an idea. I called Dario. I said, listen, get your gloves on, man, we got work to do. And he says, do I need my, first thing out of his mouth,

he don't ask nothing. He goes, do I need my piece? I said, no, and I'd bring a pool stick or something. And he did. Five minutes later, he's at the house with a pool stick. Muscle bound. So your people are ready to work. Your people are ready to work.

No questions asked. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's the kind of crew. Those are the kind of guys were hung around for sure.

So I ended up going to this freaking house. I got kind of, we pull up. It was a two-story, like, duplex type of big, a big house about it in two, apartment on top and the bottom. There's metal stairs to go up to the top. I go up to the top. And I, oh, I put out. this huge gold nugget ring. I had a lot of jewelry from, you know, my, my younger drug dealing

days. So I had tons of, like, big chains and rain. I put this huge nugget ring on. It's just this big, stupid, gnarly ring, right on my middle figure, man. And I go out of the door, and I remember tapping it on the door, click, click, click, click, and the chick, and she's a little bit chubby. She's probably 35 years old, a little bit on the chubby side. I'm thinking this is Tony's girlfriend, one of his girlfriend's, I don't know. Tony's like 70 or 65 or something. Whatever, who knows? I'm not judge and I don't care. I said to her, I said, where's he at? She's like, he's in the bedroom. And she's got two little kids sitting there. Like six, seven, eight year old boys, two of them. I said, get rid of them. Put them in a bedroom. They don't need to see this. So she

hustles them in the room and shuts the door. I'm like, where's the dude? She's like, the end of the hall, just inside the door passed out. So I go in there and I bang on the wall, boom, boom, boom, it's time to go, mother effort. And I'm really just planning on making them leave. I'm not really planning on freaking really hurting the guy real bad. But he's like, I think, I think I got the impression he was maybe a roofer A construction guy or something He's real tan and real muscular He's older to me

He's like 30 years old He's a big muscle bomb my left He's in his underwear And he's sleeping in the bed So I bang the thing It's the time to go And he looks at me He goes, who the fuck out of you man

Get the fuck out of here, kid That's what he says to me The fuck out of here kid I grab him by a freaking hair With my left hand About a hair Yank him back on the bed He starts spiring on me right away

I just yank him And I really wasn't gonna just pulverize him But he swung on me So I'm just like wham, wham, whang I just start molly whopping this dude. And then I get him, you know, after I smash him four or five times, he gives up. I got him on the ground by the throat. And I'm like this.

And he's like, you know, begging me to stop at this point because I blew his face in the hamburger with his ring. And I drag him out by his hair. And I drag him out, actually throw him out, get him to forgot here. And then she tells Tony, you know, what I did. Tony asked me, what happened. I told him. She told him the same thing. And from that point on, Tony would occasionally call me and be like, listen,

I got a problem. And you know, so you always start with like, meet me for dinner at Demetries or meet me for lunch at Demetri's. And then he hand me a name and a number and he said, call this guy,

Johnny Nev or whoever it is. He's got a problem. And originally I always go, because he's got a job for you. I'm like, oh, what's the job? Tell me it ain't concrete because I hate concrete.

And then I would go there and like, concrete, man. He's just freaking, this guy holds me a bunch of money. He's not paying. Mm-hmm. And would he pay you for these jobs? Yeah, well, he would say I got, you know, I got a friend, it's got a problem to somebody's dragging their feet or, usually it was a bookie or a loan shark who was having trouble getting money out of a guy, payment, big, whatever.

And they would give me a percentage. They would give me a percentage what I got, which was never that much. Yeah. But I remember the first one I ever did was $8,000. The first time I did it was $8,000, I got it in like three hours. I couldn't believe it. They'd give me, you know, give me an assignment, tell me who it's some young, tough guy, some young muscle-bound kid. me who told the bookie

F you, I'm not going to pay you when I want to pay you. So the bookie goes to a loan shark It says loan him the money to pay me off So I don't got to deal with him no more. So he brings the better Marty was his name A loan shark, so the loan shark Will give him the money to pay off the bookie

And the bookie don't have to deal with him no more Well, the loan shark gives him the money But he don't pay off the bookie So he keeps, he screwing both guys And that's when Tony says, listen, I got a friend with a problem, go see him So this guy's dad was a rich dude he owned a big warehouse and business.

And I went and saw him and I said, hey man, you're in big freaking trouble. I said, you know who Tony Jack is? He says, yeah. I said, yeah, the bookie that you owe, he works for Tony Jack. And the guy was like, he knew right away. Like, he was in big trouble.

I said, yeah, and this ain't going away, man. This is like, it's only going to get worse. You can't tell these people to F off. You got to answer the call, make big, you got to do something. You can't just say, if you, I'm not paying. I said, what do you got? Who and your family's got money?

I got this big business here. I know you guys are making millions of dollars or whatever it is. I said, you can't get $8,000 up? I said, if you don't, you're in big trouble. You're going to have a problem because the next guy that comes won't be talking. You'll be the guy you don't see. You don't want that guy.

I'm the nice guy. And he got on the phone. He called his dad. He told his dad, I have an emergency. I need $8,000. I, you says, I'm going to go get it. I said, I'm coming with you. I pulled a pistol out.

I let him see my pistol. I'm getting in the car because he tried anything funky with me. I got you on a gun. And the whole way there, we're kind of talking. Where do you work out? Blah, blah, blah. and being real cool with him, and it just like, he ends up getting me an $8 grand. I went and met Johnny Neb, which is the name of the bookie, and I said, here's your freaking money.

He couldn't believe it. He's got three hours. You got this freaking three hours, dude? You're the freaking, they later called me the bloodhound because I was really good at finding people who didn't want to be found. They started calling me the bloodhound. But I got $800 for that. It wasn't a lot of money, but. Yeah, yeah.

It was something. So they were basically started using you as a guy that could. collect. You were basically doing collections. Yeah, that, that and security. I worked security at Tony had some poker games that he ran these like high-end, you know, $10,000 buying poker games. Mm-hmm. At any point, did you, at any point did they try to move you up? Like, did Tony ever have interest in making you a made guy or did he just kind of use you for grunt work? you know, I don't know if what he thought of me, but by the time he was thinking about that,

they all got busted for Rico. And so that kind of, I was only like 24 years old. And so everybody got busted. And as soon as that the Rico case came down, and a lot of these guys, you know, they backed away from me and I backed away from them. I didn't, you know,

these guys, everybody's getting busted. Here's another interesting facet of the story that is that my grandfather, who hangs around all these, old mob guys and wise guys and stuff. His eyes were going bad after I got out of jail and I was living with him. So I said, Grandpa, let me drive you. Let me drive you so you don't crash the fucking car. I come crashing a car. You're going to kill somebody. So I would drive them and all these uncles that I'd known all my life who would come over to house, they're very different when they're alone at a poker game or they're in a private setting where there aren't women and children around.

So I would go down there and any of these wise guys, you know, my uncle Paul or Tony or Joe, Uncle Joe, whatever, and they would act differently. Like, they would say, how'd you like jail, Alonzo? I'm like, yeah, it sucked. He's like, yeah, I remember the time when I was in jail. And I'm thinking, I didn't even know you were in jail. And they started telling me jail stories. And they start telling me this about the time they robbed this guy.

They start telling me about this guy. And then I started telling them my stories about how I beat this guy, and I robbed that guy. And I remember looking at my grandpa. And I'm like, God, I feel weird saying these stories in front of my grandpa. But he's kind of smiling. And he's kind of acting like, hey, at least these guys are accepting of him. and I felt like for the first time maybe in a lot of my life

that I was accepted. Like these old men are like they liked me. They'd like, they would tell me all the time, you remind me of me at your age. You know what I'm saying? They're a tough guy. Always fight and always in trouble. That's how they were. But now they grew up and they got wise and I got into white collar rackets and things like that. And now they make a bunch of money and they're old.

They sit down. And their sons were coming up and their nephews were coming up like my age. But the difference is between me and them guys, they were all a bunch of Pussies, for the most part. Most of them guys, they're all like, you know, silver spoon, white collar. Daddy would give them a construction company. Talk to some friends in the government.

Those friends would give them big construction contracts. And my cousin would make freaking 500 grand off a freaking contract. I'm like, geez, I'm out here with a freaking pistol, freaking beating and robbing mother-appers trying to, you know, selling bags of weed. And you mother-avers got daddy just hooking you up with this. It was frustrating for me. but the one thing that it did work to my advantage

because I was known as a crazy, just crazy. He literally thought I was mentally ill. So whenever they get in trouble, my cousins, and whenever they get, you know, have some kind of beef, everybody's always in some kind of beef, some girl got, something with a girl usually.

And they call me. They call, oh, man, get over here, man, I got this for a guy. Or, man, I don't want to go to the club because this dude says he's going to beat my ass and blah, blah, blah. You know, a lot of people don't know. You can't project you're in the mob. Like, a lot of these people they make beef with,

they don't know these guys are in the mob. You don't walk up to a guy in a nightclub or whatever say, I'm in the mob. Do you really want to fuck with me? They don't do that. It isn't how it happened. So people are stupid. So they bring me and I walk in there and they're like,

oh man, this is the guy, right? He's fucking with us, man. Do you? And I might walk over there and bump into him or just like, what's up? You got a problem with my cousins? And I end up getting into the fight. Usually you're tearing some shit up,

always into some drama. So how did this end up? how did this end up culminating in you going to prison? How did you take a fall? Well, I do this on this whole like part-time mafia

associate, part-time gangster. I was always a gangster. I never really worked. So, I mean, I was always do, I did more gangster shit than most of these mob guys to be perfectly honest. And I was in a lot of trouble, always duck and dodging cases and just in and out for like 10 years. Some of it, sometimes it was for Tony,

sometimes it was for other people. I had my own little crew of like maybe eight or ten guys that were just it's like have my own little mob crew they were all drug dealers conscans, hussals, if you just blurted out one racket, anything, I'll tell you a story

about how I did it. Don't matter what it is, I'll tell you I was involved in it in some way or another. We just did everything. And so this is my life for about 10 years and then I get a habit.

I start using drugs. This is the crazy part. I got break my knuckle, no, I broke my ankle. and a freak accident and they gave me pain pills I like pain pills I start eating them and this leads to a full blown addiction right

so now because I'm you wouldn't know this because I had a beautiful home I had a big beautiful home was a big 240 pound bodybuilder tan Jersey Shore looking mother after you is nobody would have my girlfriend I was with a girl for 13 years she never even knew I mean she suspected maybe something but nobody knew that I was getting hired using drugs

had nice cars but garage full of toys every toy you could have I had it and what happened was I was I living beyond my means, you know, when you have all these toys in your second house and you got all this stuff, you start, you know, suddenly when you're, the amount of money you're taken in starts to become less than you're spending, you got an issue. So I started selling like serious drugs at this point. And I had a cousin named Angelo, who was a big heroin dealer. And he was, I was buying a little, started off of the, you know, quarter key, eighth key of heroin,

whatever, and I started flipping it. And I don't like selling hard drugs. The main reason I don't like selling hard drugs. I'll be perfect. Can I, can I cut you off? Yes. Sorry, sorry to cut you off here, but I am interested in this because it seems like the Italian mafia when, you know, although drugs used to be taboo, right, you would, you would be expelled or or killed for selling drugs. It seems like heroin was the main drug of choice for, for drug dealers, either wise guys or associates of the mob. Who were you? Who was supplying the heroin? Who was supplying the heroin? heroin to the mobsters, right? Of course, it used to be the old French connection

coming over straight off the boat, but in the 80s and 90s, right, the modern era, was it the black guys supplying you? Was it the Mexicans? Like, who are you buying from? Who was your source? So, for years, like you said, the French connection was part of Detroit, was involved

on that. They were bringing in kilos. This is before my time, but I knew this, I know the story. I've been told the story. Well, they were bringing in kilos and kilos inside vats are like 50-gallon drums of pasta, and stuff like that. And then that boss happened or whatever. So this is a crazy story.

You should do some homework and look into this and maybe talk about this one day. But Tony Jack, Tony Jack had built, you got to look up a guy named Frank Nitty Usher. Tony Jack brought this young black kid up and trained him to be like, he basically groomed him to be in the mob. This guy named Frank Nitty Usher is a black dude. He taught him how the mafia worked, how to structure our family, how to structure our family, how to structure a crew, how you have the boss, the underboss, consigniary, you have capos and soldiers and get, he taught him all this stuff, right?

And then he was the, Frank Niddy Usher was the precursor to BMF. BMF, BMF is what was spawned from Frank Nitty Usher. So the original black mafia and stuff, that all came from Frank Usher. If you look it up, there's plenty out there. Dude, he's got a crazy freaking story, man. Like, they killed like six freaking guys and he was able to convince a jury in an appeal that he was the target and they didn't kill him.

It's unbelievable. You wouldn't even believe it. But anyways, when I was doing this, the drugs were coming from an Italian guy, a mob guy. Where were they come? Where was he come from? I don't know. But he had access to all the heroin we could want. And at one point he gave me two kilos, which was quite a bit of heroin.

You know, it was a couple hundred thousand, $180,000 heroin at the time. And I don't know. I never asked him where he got it. I don't know. I'm sure it wasn't blacks. It could have been Mexicans, but my guess is it was a high-level mob guy in a family above my pay grade. I wouldn't have known and I had no idea. It could have came from the East Coast, maybe one of the families in the East Coast.

They're all interconnected. I don't know if you know that. But like the Detroit Mafia is very interconnected with the East Coast. They have some families have married, daughters have married sons, sons and they're very familiar. They see each other all the time. they go visit each other all the time. And this all harkens back to your first question about, you know, why don't you hear anything about the Detroit mob area?

Because they're very clever. They're very good at what they do. They are not trying to project themselves onto YouTube or onto a TV series or a documentary. If that happens, somebody's going to be in big trouble. They don't want nobody to know. They don't even let the papers talk about them in Detroit. They used to bribe the local papers to not print articles about busts. You know what I mean? If somebody got busted or arrested, they'd tell them no.

Here's how they would do it. If you put it, if you print an article about one of my guys getting busted and say mafia, I'll tell everybody in, who advertises in your newspaper to stop advertising in the newspaper. They literally had that kind of juice. Wow. Wow. They had that kind of unreal. Yeah. Unreal. And they did. So nobody printed, nobody printed on them, you know what I'm saying? We're wise guys? Now, of course, like the famous, you know, the scene from the godfather, it's like, this poison is going to destroy us at the end. It was drug dealing allowed by the Detroit Mafia?

Was that something that made guys participated in? Or were those only the associates? Dude, listen, listen, the boss, according to legend, I don't know, never asked him, never would, was against selling drugs. And I know some of the old timers were, including my grandpa and all these guys are really against selling drugs. Tony Jackaloney is the one who built an entire black mafia to sell drugs for him. He actually built BMF and all to sell his drug.

This young kid, Black Franklin Dyshire, he'd been pruning him since he was nine, brought him in and made him like a Sicilian. And he taught him how to be a master. And he says, when you're ready, you're going to build your own family of blacks. And then I'm going to front you for heroin. And you're going to make millions, tens of millions. And he did. Tony paid a million-dollar bond to bond him out when he was in jail. Because he was making so much money in the street, he needed him back on the street to keep this thing going.

They paid a million cash. Got him out and put him back on the street. So drugs is every freaking wise guy that I ever knew. And this includes, I knew a lot of these old-timers and I didn't know what the F they were doing or what they were into. I knew they were mobbed up. But I didn't get into it. I was young. I was a kid.

I don't say, hey, what do you do for money? I just knew they had some rackets, probably, you know, white collar crime and stuff like that. But all the young guys that were my age, every single one of them sold wheat. They all sold weed. Everyone, they sold big weight. You know, they could be 10 pounds.

It could be 500 pounds. It could be 1,000 pounds. But everybody was in the weed game. I know because I sold weed. So I was always, you know, juggling weed around. They figured that's the one thing that's who cares if you get busted with a bunch of weed, you know. And some guys did get busted. There was this guy named Chuck Tuck.

Thomas, who was like the main supplier, his Lebanese dude. And he got busted with two tons of it. Oh, it's cool. And 4,000 pounds in his driveway in a trailer. It was a lot. All right, you guys. If you want to see the full uncensored interview with our boy Al Gunner Lindblum, go check it out on Patreon.

Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show. It's also available for YouTube premium members. So go subscribe now. get the exact same content as you do on Patreon. Thank you so much for watching. Of course, go follow, like, subscribe, share with your friends. If you want to see me doing stand-up, go to my website,

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