The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Baltimore Drug Kingpin Reveals Making Millions Selling Heroin For The Mafia

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Steven Dixon, a former Baltimore heroin kingpin, reveals how the city’s drug trade really worked during its most notorious era—from New York suppliers and mob connections to high-purity heroin, street corners generating staggering amounts of cash, and the operation that made him millions. He breaks down how heroin moved from New York to Baltimore, how dealers controlled territory across West Baltimore, why trusted connections mattered, and how the drug economy seen in The Wire compared to what was actually happening on the streets. But the money and power came with a devastating price. After building a massive operation and owning more than 100 properties, Steven eventually became addicted to heroin himself—losing the empire, the money, and nearly everything else. After years of addiction, he finally got clean, returned to school, earned a master’s degree, and dedicated his life to helping others recover through addiction treatment and behavioral health programs. This is the inside story of Baltimore’s heroin era—from millions in drug money to addiction, recovery, and redemption. Go Support Steven! Recovery Facility: https://absolutehbh.com/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: Cash App! Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/1ekoiacn #CashAppPod Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. Superpower! Head to https://superpower.com and use code CONNECT at checkout for $20 off your membership. Get 100+ biomarkers tested every year, plus a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod NordVPN! Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/theconnect. Itʼs risk free with NordVPNʼs 30-day money-back guarantee! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Meet Steve Dixon 00:37 Baltimore's Heroin Kingpin 02:11 Reflections on the Drug Trade 03:32 Why Baltimore is a Heroin City 05:13 The Nigerian Connection 07:44 Building a Fortune 10:53 From Heroin to Fentanyl 12:07 This Episode Is Sponsored By Cash App 13:27 Growing Up in Baltimore 16:04 A Life on the Streets 19:03 Acquiring Turf and Connections 21:27 Regrets and Community Impact 23:35 Keys to Success in the Game 25:31 The Mob and Nigerian Sources 27:00 Distribution Network 30:43 This Episode Is Sponsored By Superpower 32:13 Police and Stash Houses 34:54 Violence and Stickup Boys 37:24 The Fall: Addiction 40:16 Investing in the Community 42:16 This Episode Is Sponsored By NordVPN 43:52 The Addiction to Money 45:40 A Day in the Life 50:38 Handling Massive Cash 52:37 The Turning Point 56:30 Dodging a Federal Case 58:00 Descent into Addiction 01:01:40 Losing Everything 01:04:10 Life as a Homeless Addict 01:07:26 The Road to Recovery 01:11:20 Helping Others Get Clean 01:14:42 The Rehab Industry 01:18:22 Redemption and Legacy 01:20:24 Is Baltimore Better Now? 01:23:57 Changing Attitudes in the Community 01:27:02 Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Everybody who was selling heroin was getting the money. So I started gravitating towards it there, started making $4,000 or $5,000 a day or something like that. It was always about heroin. Baltimore has always been a city that's looked for down the highs. The connect that I got through Lewisburg, that was one of the major five families. They used to fly it down to me.

The first week of the month, that's when people get paid, welfare checks, social security checks. That was the $100,000 days. I was handling half a million millions of dollars at a time. Meet Steve Dixon, one of the premier heroin kingpins to emerge from the city of Baltimore. Steve came of age in the late 70s and early 1980s, at a time when wholesale China white heroin was selling for $100,000 a kilo. By 1985, Steve and a handful of other players were supplying virtually the entire city and the surrounding Baltimore counties.

Steve was having 10 bricks of raw heroin flown in by helicopter by the Gambino family from New York every week. Plus, he was the first kingpin to make connections with Nigerian importers, who introduced him to a special Pakistani gray heroin, which was even more potent and profitable than the China white. He might come off as a modest guy, but ask anyone from Baltimore who was getting money in that era, Steve was that dude. But unlike most kingpins of his status, Steve never ended up in prison. Instead, he got hooked on his own product, and for 12 years was a stone-cold Baltimore street junkie. After he finally got clean, he became a drug counselor and is now one of the most respected

and well-qualified substance abuse specialists in the state of Maryland. Ladies and gentlemen, this man was like Prop Joe from the Wire. He pulled the puppet strings of the narcotics trade in Baltimore. Except unlike Joe, Steve didn't end up dead, quite the opposite. He's doing so much good now, his way of making him. up for the years of destruction that he caused the city. All right, you guys, let's get into it. It's Baltimore's finest Stephen Dixon right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, I was asking off camera about drug users in Baltimore because the whole game, the whole kingpin drug economy only exists because so many people are out there getting high, buying. Right? Well, I don't like people to use that term, Kingpin. I have a friend that when he was in the feds, and they were sitting around talking about how many corners they controlled or how much money they made.

And a guy from one of the cartels came up and said, pulled them to the side. I said, I really like you. Say, but you guys shouldn't use that kind of language. Say, because we compete to take over whole states or continent. We compete to take over the West Coast, the whole East Coast. And you guys talking about taking over a corner. Yeah, there's levels to Kingpins, right?

We talk about Kingpin as an urban city kingpin. When we talk about drug trafficking and all these things, I think we forget that all of this millions of dollars is being generated from the misery of drug addicts buying $10 pieces out of time. Absolutely. And why Baltimore, you know, you really got on in the late 70s, early 80s, this huge heroin boom when the rest of the country was starting to boom with crack cocaine. Why is Baltimore traditionally been the opioid capital of American big cities? I don't know what that's about because other cities were always moving towards cocaine. Baltimore was still, it was a heroin. It was always been in the 60s, my uncles and everybody else that I knew.

It was always about heroin, always about heroin. Cocaine came at a little later time, and then crack came a little later after that. But Baltimore has always been. Heroin has been the king of this economy. Now, you know, it's not the king anymore. Fent is, but it's always been a city. that's look for down the highs. Is that because of the slow,

and I have no idea, I'm literally just speculating, it's maybe the slowness of the culture. You know, everybody's very nice here. This is a really friendly, kind of slow-moving town. It's a city, but it feels like a town. It feels like a middle American city. I could be in Kansas City right now, but we're 45 minutes away from the nation's capital.

We're a coastal metropolis. Could it be that? That, whereas New York, everybody's working 80 hours a week. They want to sniff Coke and smoke crack. I don't know because New York was a heroin capital, too. True. We used to go to New York. That's where all our plugs came from, where all our connects came from.

Baltimore guys used to go to New York to make that happen. So that was up until a point. Then in the early 80s, we had this big surge of Nigerians that came. Do you know about that? So we had a surge in Nigerians that came, and they came, they were bringing pure heroin from Pakistan or Afghanistan. And they were like swallowing it and pooping it out or they were bringing in suitcases, luggage or whatever. And they made the price, they made the quality of heroin go extremely high. And this was in the very early 80s.

And so you could take one ounce of what they had, and you could put stuff on it, like you could put 70 ounces of cut on it or 60 ounces of cut on it. So it was making the profit margin. The margin just blew up. And what could you sell an ounce for after you cut it? Well, then you would bag it all up and sell it in $100 bags, $50 bags, $35 bags, $70 bags. So the economy was much different, too, because people... who were getting high, either had jobs, or they were professional, they were bank robbers, they were professional boosters, they were people who stole.

And the corners were, I can give you example, when I went from being on the corner, and my whole income combined with the package I had and the money and everything, I might have had about $5,000. dollars. And in a short period of time, I looked up and I was handling half a million, millions of dollars at a time. And I had two different plugs. I had, well, to get back to it, I had a friend that really blew up. He blew up because he had a Nigerian connect. He ended up in the feds. He ended up in the feds with 15 years. And he copped out. And he got 15 years. And he got 15 years. Well, while he was in the fairs, he plugged me into two different people who are very well known.

One of them was an old Jewish guy that was in, had been locked up forever related to the French connection. And one of them was a black guy that was locked up. I forgot me. Well, when he got caught in New York, he had like $12 million in his wall, right? He's just both of those guys are deceased now. So he connected me to them. I used to go to Lewisburg to visit him. He connected me to them. But at the same time, I had African connects too. So I had the African connect here that was bringing the Nigerian connect to Baltimore.

But the drugs were coming from Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever. So that dope was different than China White dope? Yeah, it wasn't. So the connect that I got through Lewisburg, that was through one of the major five families that wasn't supposed to be selling drugs. They used to fly it down to me. From New York. From New York. They used to bring ketoes.

And that was that white shit. That was kind of white or tan. Right. And then the Nigerian Pakistani dough. It was darker brown, dark tan, dark tan. Sandy light, but it hadn't been cut. The Nigerians weren't interested in cutting it. They were interested in getting rid of.

And that quality was even higher than China what? Any drugs that have ever hit the streets of Baltimore. But the quality of it made people make money. Right. Made a lot of money. So you could be essentially a street dealer, but if you had enough money to buy one ounce of pure Pakistani heroin, you could basically, you become a millionaire very quickly.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. Now, the, you know, a lot of working class Baltimoreians were actually functional drug users, right? Like I was asking that off camera, like, you know, the construction guys and bus drivers and all these people, city workers, probably maybe school teachers, I don't know, would go through the strips in the morning to, you know, buy a couple of capsules, get them. up and then after work, go through and buy a couple more. Absolutely.

You can't do that with fent and all. Not really. Because Fentt takes your whole life over. And because of what it does to you physically. So Fent attacks the lungs. And it attacks how much oxygen is put into the bloodstream. And then that, once that hits the brain, it makes you just delirious and your screaming, you're beating yourself.

You can't go to work. And then when you have the xylazine, which is a small cat, a small cat tranquilizer, animal tranquilizer, that's hooked up in it. That causes all the open wounds. So where are you going to work at?

And you've got open wounds, you're smelling bad, you're looking bad. So most of those people are living in Bandos and all that kind of stuff. So do you think that the drug culture do you think, A, did a lot of those junkies, those drug users, those functional drug users, I mean, what happened to them? From the 80s?

Yeah, the 80s, 90s, even the 2000s, before fentanyl. Now that they can't get it, now that there is no more heroin. Well, groups just went in treatment and got clean. So Baltimore is not only the heroin capital. Baltimore is also a treatment capital. It's treatment centers everywhere in Baltimore. So it's thousands of thousands of people that are in treatment. So there has been progress.

There really has been, yeah, getting people clean. Absolutely. I own a treatment center, absolute healing, and I work at two or three other ones, and they're all filled with people. All of them are trying to get their cell together. Of course, people do relapse, go back out. But people are trying to get clean. And Baltimore has hundreds of methadone clinics here.

So it's a little different. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating. So in certain ways, fentanyl either brought you to your knees and ruined your life or it forced you to get clean because now you can't get high and have a life anymore. No. So it's kind of a blessing in certain ways because it's so bad, you're like, okay, I'm done with drugs. Right. So fent doesn't allow you to be a functional addict. That doesn't happen.

No. That's not going to happen. No. Today's episode is brought to you by Cash App. Now, I've been using Cash App for as long as it's been around since I've had a smartphone, 16 years, and I love how simple they make it to send and receive money. But if you're not already up to speed, Cash App is more than just a safe way to send and receive money.

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Visit our link in the bio. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. services provided by Cash App's bank's bank, prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Cash App Visa Debit Flex cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDICC, and the BankCorp, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa, USA, Inc. Inc. C, terms and conditions with Sutton Prepaid Card, Sutton Debit Flex Card, and Bank, Credit, and Discounter, and Discount, and Discount, and Discount, and Discount, and Discount, Visitcash.cash.com So let's talk about you. You're born and raised where in Baltimore? Well, my family comes out of projects, Gilmore Holmes. My mother was the oldest of seven.

Her father worked at the shipyard, my grandfather, and a very strict man, worked every day. But he has seven children. My mother's oldest of seven. So my mother was very bright, graduated from high school at 16, and she went to college and became a school teacher, so she got a bachelor's degree and a master's degree with a specialty in special education. So we moved from Gilmore Holmes to uptown to West Baltimore. It was a very nice neighborhood. It was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.

But of course, when we moved in, we were one of the first few black families in their neighborhood. And when we moved in, of course, white flight happened. And so then they built this thing called the Highway to nowhere and knocked down a lot of houses, which they did in every city urban renewal. and those people moved uptown. So when they did that, I actually went to

a laboratory school from the kindergarten through the fifth grade. It was on the college campus. So the professors and the student teachers there were my instructors. And then after that, I went to Catholic school for two years. But after that, I went to public school.

And once I got in public school, it was, either become a part of it or go home every day without your shoes on your feet or every day without a coat on or something like that. And what year is that? I want to say when I got in, I went to public school started eighth grade. So we're talking like early 70s? Yeah, early 70s.

Okay. Yeah, I was born in 57, so early 70s. So this is when a lot of the. Vietnam veterans are coming back. A lot of them black. I'm sure that contributed to the heroin problem. I have four uncles went to Vietnam. Three of them came back, heroin addicts.

Yeah. Three of the four. Wow. Yeah. So my mother's, brothers, yeah, they came back. They're highly addicted. So maybe that's what started the next 20-year wave of heroin use. Absolutely.

In the Vietnam War. Absolutely. And so from there, I mean, I got involved in. I kind of lived like a bipolar life. Inside the house, my mother was a school teacher, and my father worked at Social Security. Had good jobs, middle class jobs. But outside the house, I had to be one way inside the house.

I had to be enough of it. So we started, the guys I grew up with, we started doing things like snatching pocket books, burglaries, stealing cars, going in jewelry stores, bust the case open, snatched the jewelry and run. and all that. And then, you know, just becoming involved in street life.

And so from there, each one of us kind of like tried to figure out what we were really good at. So the shoplifting, the burglaries, all that didn't appeal to me. What appealed to me was when I saw the guys with the big cars and the fur coats on, the jewelry. And so I gravitated towards that. I started selling marijuana first, nickel bags of weed, and then I would sell acid. And as I got to be a little older in my late teens, I started selling a little bit of cocaine. I was going to stay right there. Cocaine just came to our community.

I was going to stay right there. But everybody who was selling heroin was getting the money. So I started gravitating towards that, started meeting connections. and went back to the projects, went back to Gilmore home. Everybody calls one court, Bruce Court, went back to Bruce Court, and started making some money, started making $4,000, $5,000 a day or something like that. And then I met a guy, came home from prison, and he showed me the game. Like how to really, like, mix it and really become...

Yeah, and he acquired a nodded. during connection and when he acquired that connection, I learned a lot from him, but he ended up going to prison. And when he went to the feds, I started visiting him and he showed me how to take it to the next level. Okay. But correct me if I'm wrong, connects wouldn't just put any old dealer down with a package, right? Like that's why there was such a hierarchy in so much money is you had to have the guy. You had to have the guy. You had to have to connect. So, For me, he wouldn't mess with, he only messed with four or five guys, the guy I'm telling you about. And those, all five of us end up having a certain section of the city.

One guy was in Lexington Terrence. One guy was in, he had Division Street, Park Heights. I had Gilmore Holmes, and I acquired another place called North from Plasky. Now, when you say you acquired, how do you acquire drug dealing real estate? At times you acquire it through force or whatever, but I didn't have to do that because I had the better product. I had the product. So I moved into North and Plasky, and North and Plaskey is where everybody really knows me from. Okay.

And what part of, for people that aren't super familiar with Baltimore, what area is that? West Baltimore. Okay. Gotcha. Avon, Barksdale's territory, if the wires, your only reference. Yeah, he's from. They were the Westside guys in the show. They were from, you know, they changed the name, but they're from Lexington Terres.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Which was a gold mine. Why? Yeah. Because it had, it was a high-rise buildings. Look at the most people.

Yeah, hundreds and hundreds of people lived there, thousands of people lit there. And they were the guys who originally had the drugs. That's where people went to go cop. Okay. So you had spots in the projects? I had one spot in the projects. projects, Gilmore Holmes. And then spots in like row house communities? Yes. Were they abandoned buildings? Abandoned buildings weren't out there. Okay, right. Right. So when people see Baltimore and they see all these

abandoned buildings, somebody lived there. Right. They didn't just build them like that. Yeah, they weren't, we didn't have abandoned buildings. Right. If you saw an empty house, there was somebody had just moved out of that house. Right. There was no such thing as the abandoned building. Right. And, um, yeah, 80s and going into the crack world made that happen. Why is that? Because people got on drugs and people couldn't afford their houses anymore. And the landlords weren't coming back, fixing them up. It's better for the landlord just to put boards on it and get a city tax credit or something.

Then the fight with somebody about some rent that they're not going to get because the person is on drugs or whatever. Right. So all those are banned those, that's, I mean, it's not, it's a fair. new phenomena. Baltimore didn't look like that. So when people see those images on the wire or the corner, that happened in the 90s

into the 2000s. No, it was communities. And really, let me just say this, I really want to make sure this gets in. I'm not really proud of my background. It is my background,

but I tell people all the time, People come to talk to me about this stuff all the time. I don't really like to talk about it at all because I was an embarrassment to my family. I did a lot of harm to the community. Those abandoned buildings, I look at them and say, I'm responsible for some of that. You follow what I'm saying? And so I don't pride myself on this. It's just my story.

It is what it is. Well, why do you think, do you think it was just environment? because you come from a two-parent household, which is supposed to be like the bedrock of what keeps kids from straying into crime. You know, they had middle class jobs. You had all the opportunity to go to college. What happened in the 70s to urban black America?

To you? What happened to me was I came outside, and outside was a lot of peer pressure. And I could have went a lot of different ways. I ended up dropping out. I went to high school for about two months maybe. I probably didn't go to a class. The 10th grade year was like the worst year ever.

It was, you know, I was every day after school, I was somewhere even doing something. I was breaking in something, stealing a car, selling some weed. and everybody in my neighborhood was doing something. What was it about you that made you good at drug dealing? Because clearly you had a knack for it. You know, if you're getting put down by Italians and, you know, mob guys and international plugs, like, again, they don't give that out to just anybody. So was it because of your unassuming nature that you weren't flashy?

Or what was it that, what do you think? Like, yeah, just what do you think gave you the edge? I'm going to pay the money. I'm going to count the money right. You know, I used to take a million, two million, three million, sometimes more to New York every Wednesday or Thursday. I'm going to take the money there. I used to go and, you know, I was trustworthy to, you know,

back then, rats were. out like they are now. If they were, we didn't know it. In my community, we knew the two rats. We know those two guys. We knew who they were. And they were dope things, you know what I mean? And so I'm not serving them.

I'm not going to sell them no dope. You want to sell them some dope. You sell them some dope. So, you know, it wasn't that many rats. And they weren't giving out, they weren't giving out the time that they were given out. They started giving out. started giving that time out in the 80s.

So you were cash on delivery when you went to see your plugs in New York? No, they used to give it to me up front. Okay. They would give it to me up front and then I would come back with the money. And then sometimes I would have my own money as well. Right. Yeah. So it's kind of here's a million of mine and you give me an extra million, whatever that is?

Well, they would give it to you and say, this is, you know, this key is $250. Bring me this $250 back by such and such. day, bring me this 200 back, by such and such day, and they might give you five or six something, or if they had cocaine, give you 10 or 15 of those. But I didn't even mess with me. I would have kilos of cocaine sitting around wouldn't even bother to really try to really sell it that much because the money wasn't in that at that time. Crack wasn't out yet. Right. Yeah, what's 50,000 for a key when this key, I can make 750 after I bag it out? Right.

How many kilos would you pick up in New York? Well, they would bring it here. Right. So that was another thing, too. With the Italians, I didn't have to worry about going to get it. Oh, you would just take the money up to them. That's incredible. They must have loved you.

Well, they had a way to move ahead. It was easier. Me being on the highway, wouldn't have that good. No. Yeah, we had the thing, the Jersey Turnpike. You're not going to make it out of day. That's when they pull, if you're black, they're pulling you over, right? Without estate plates?

Yeah. Absolutely. So they bring you what's an average week look like? Sometimes they would bring me three or four or five keys. Yeah. Two or three depends on what they had. But I'm going to say this for anybody who doesn't know, they play fad to a degree. And then they turn into who they really are.

The mob guys? Absolutely. Absolutely. Stop bringing you three that are good, two that are bad. bring you two that a good one that's bad, you know, then you still owe them the money. You know what I mean? That's what always happens.

So when you met the Nigerians, they sounded like they were the better source. They were in the beginning, in the beginning and two, until you got some people that put them down. I said, man, you know what they're doing with that, right? You know how much they're making? Right, let me teach you this. So towards the end, they turned out to be rotten too.

Okay, so if you've got two sections of the city, right, how are you distributing? Do you have? No, but not just that. I had hundreds of guys that were coming by weight from me. Okay. Hose. Okay. Can you go into that a little bit?

Yeah, you know, the world was out. And if I trusted them, if I knew them, and I had a lot of guys around me that knew other guys. Right. So I had a partner, too. So he has sections. I had sections. So were these Baltimore guys or were they coming from out of town? No, Baltimore guys.

And then we had guys that came from D.C., guys that came from Virginia, too. So then your retail operation, how many, like after you bag out a kilo. So a kilo of raw heroin? Right. How, the 1,000 grams of raw heroin? You can make that in two. How many grams? So the way to look at it is this, is that you can take, in Baltimore during that time,

you used to have a baby lactative from Italy called Benita. And then you had a pharmaceutical tool called quinine, and you would mix those two together. And then you would take those two and mix the heroin. Well, if you had an ounce, it was of raw heroin. At some point, you could put 40 ounces of that mixture on. and then you bag it up depending on what you were selling the bags for. You might get 50 bags, I mean, give $50 a bag, $60 a bag. So let me give you an example.

North and Pulaski at its height, on good weeks. And those weeks depended on certain things, too. We'll get into that. But North and Pulaski, I used to get $100,000 a day just off that one corner. That's not counting what was coming up. out of Gilmore Holmes or what was coming out of. The other areas, I had two guys over East Baltimore. I just saw them at a party about a month ago.

They were making $50,000 a day. They had Perkins. They had Perkins projects. Right. And they were making $50.60 a day. Then my partner had some guys in other parts of East Baltimore. They were getting 20 a day, stuff like that. So $100,000, and that's out of...

One corner. Right. Now, this is the 80s, so are they actually on a corner or do you have people coming up into a house? No. Open air. Open air. Open air. In the corners. So the houses, you have stash houses. Then you have guys who are runners. Then you have, it's a business. Then you have touters. They're the guys who stand on the corner to tell everybody. Got that bomb. Got that WMD. Right. Who's things. So really, the wire. filmed in the 2000s is literally stories from taken from the 80s. Right. Because by the 2000s, it's already too hot.

You can't be operating. Well, the open-air drug market, they say this is one of the last cities that still has that. So if you go to North and Pennsylvania right now, it's an open-air drug market. The police are going to be parked right there. Guys are going to be selling drugs, you know. Right. Because now they can't jump out and jump on you because of Freddie Gray stuff and all that. I see.

Yeah, because we signed that little addendum with the fares that, you know, the police officers don't want to lose their pensions and all that. So they're not. Right. Today's episode is brought to you by Superpower. I hate going to the doctor. I hate the process of it. I hate how long it takes for me to. get an appointment and then I finally get in there to actually see a licensed doctor. I'm in there for

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No, I don't even know how that works. You know, the police were my mortal enemy at that time. But you didn't have police cars stationed across the street from your corners in 1982. No, we had those ones you see on TV. They jump out undercover. Right. Yeah. The Tuesday and Thursday guys?

Yeah, but they used to be every day. Okay. North Plasky, they had to be every day. So your spots would get hit every day? Yeah, the corners, yeah. Yeah. And every now and then, they might read a house that you had a stash in and something. Did they ever get, like, significant quantity?

No. No. Like, how could that? You'd have to be the dumbest fool to have the holes. Yeah. Because you got all kinds of houses everywhere. Right. Yeah.

You pay somebody, you pay somebody to use the house. You pay somebody, most of the time it's an addict. Sometimes it's an older person just needs money. And you pay somebody to sit in the house. and they come to the back door, back window, they call it hitting out of the house. And the runner gets it, goes back to the corner, collects everybody's money, goes back,

puts the money through the window, put the money through the door, whatever. That's how I worked in. So you really had it set up like a business. It is a business. But I mean, you had people on salary. Yeah, people on salary, but also you had people who got, like if you,

If you were on the corner, like North Plast, you had 70s for a while. So out of the 70s, they would have to, the runner would take $50 to the house. They'd get to keep 20. Or they would take, you know, 60 to the house. They'd get to keep 10. But just imagine you get $10 and you sold 50 bags. You sold 100 bags. You know what I mean in the day.

So you're doing these kind of numbers, you know, millions of dollars a week. Yes, absolutely. That's a massive operation to have to oversee. Absolutely. Like, how did you do that? I know you had a business partner, but did you have, like, managers and people that keep a track of the riffraff?

Yeah, absolutely. And then you would always have some, you have guys who were, you know, their whole thing was to hold the gun, or their whole thing was to protect the stash house. Or, you know, you just paid people, you had to pay for, everything. It's a business. It's a real business. And we treated it that way. Now, in terms of the violence, was there anything like what we saw on the wire? Absolutely. Absolutely. He had a stick-up man. The guy, Omar and the wires, he's modeled after

three or four guys that all of us personally knew. So, you know, his name wasn't Omar. But when he came around, that kind of stuff happened. And when he come through with the shotgun? Yeah, or guns or three or four different guys with him. Carlos is stick up boys. They would stick up guys. But the thing about most of them is that when you gained a rapport with them, man, you just can't rob my guys. You know what I mean?

What you need? Let me look out for you. What you need? You know what I mean? Man, you are right. You know what I mean? Oh, so you would like basically pay them like a tag. acts.

You don't look at it because back then they would say, oh, he's leaning on you. Well, that's a soft lean. So you don't look at it like that. You're going to make sure if he comes with respect, then you're going to give him respect. But if it comes with an attitude that I'm really leaning on you, you're going to give me this. Then at some point, he's going to disappear too. So that's going to happen. Yeah.

Now what became of them? Those sticker boys. Most of them, I mean, there's very few retired sticker boys. Most of them are retired another way, even in prison or they did. Because the guys just getting all this money not going for that. You know, they romanticized it with Omar. But we, you know, we had the real Omar, the real guy. He just passed away a couple of years ago.

He, you know, he wasn't playing. You know, his name was known in this town that if he came around, he wasn't coming around to say hi, he was coming around to pull that gun out. And would he smoke people? Would he kill people that gave him a problem? Absolutely. They had bodies on them.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that's, there's so much money in the streets. It's not really surprised you had guys like that. Well, I think the money. I don't know, I look at it now, and I say, I don't think, well, first of all, it's not my belief system. First of all, let me say this to you, is after my run, you know, I became addicted to drugs. I forgot, maybe 12 years or something heavily addicted to heroin, and sometimes I hate it crack, but, you know, I was addicted to crack as well, but heroin was what I was addicted to.

And what ended up happening is that I had to come to some kind of spiritual awakening about this whole thing. This whole thing. This whole thing was, I just look back at it now and it was horrible. It was horrible. People lost their houses. People's children OD. People were killed. Baltimore was known to be a small city of its size.

We were at three, 400 murders a year. regularly. Well, think about if a city this small, back in the 80s, could produce $100,000 worth of drug money from one corner. Think about how many people have to be buying. Buying drugs. But this is what you have to understand, too.

You had major strips all over Baltimore like that. I wasn't like a unique character. It was during that time, it was ten of them. me. And then during that time, it was 10 people above me. That was 10 of them. You know what I mean? So you, and did you guys all have the same connects? No, everybody had different connects. Who generally, though, were those the same, the sources, either Nigerians or it was coming from out of New York sometime. Right. And did you know these other dealers, these local

kingpins? You all knew each other? each other yeah okay and you respected each other's turf more or less somewhat sometimes you know some of us didn't like each other some of us like each other some of us like each other some of us love each other you know what i mean and something depends on where you were from who you grew up with that kind of thing if somebody's connect fell off and they couldn't get good dope would a method of taking over somebody's corner, be sending your workers with the good stuff to like take your customers. Most of the time, those guys, if you had somebody that you were all right with, you could go and buy something from them.

Right. Yeah. I see. Yeah. Corners in Baltimore were very territorial. You could lose your life literally for even trying that kind of stuff. Right. So the retail for you was more profitable than the wholesale.

Yeah, but I still made money on the wholesale. Right. Okay. And you're paying a lot of money, but you're also, you're making a lot of money. Were you buying buildings? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm the one that's known. I built, on the corner that I had rocking, I brought a abandoned store and I tricked it out and had a 24-hour store. It's very similar to a 7-Eleven with, with hot meals and stuff in there as well. And then I had two brief salons. I had a bar and club out in the county.

That didn't jump off too well. And I had about 100, 100 of these houses, apartment buildings. Right. Do some of those buildings, those 100 plus properties you own, do some of them now look like these fixed up and worth a million? Once I ended up on drugs, it started trickling away.

Right. Yeah. Right. It started trickling away. That's unique. Your story is unique because a lot of the old school heroin traffickers started out as junkies themselves. Like Nikki Barnes was eaten out of a trash can in Harlem. A lot of these guys and that's how they learned about heroin was being so addicted to it. And that's how and they made a lot of connects that way. And then they cleaned themselves up and they

themselves became these big kingpins. You went the opposite way. Yeah, I was always addicted to, I wanted large sums of money, and I wanted nice cars. I wanted a Bentley. I wanted a Rose Rose Rose. I wanted to live in nice places. Did you have all those cars? I had real nice cars. I never achieved the Rose or the Bentley.

Because in Baltimore during that time, if you'd have brought a Rose or Bentley, that would have been that. That's it. Yeah, everybody who went real crazy with cars, of course, all of BMWs, stadiums, you know, that kind of stuff. But anything above that, you were asking for a lot of attention. I clearly could have done it, but it didn't make sense. This video is sponsored by NordVPN. You guys have heard me talk about VPNs before.

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and all of your online privacy to gain. That's NordvPN.com slash the connect. Thanks, Nord. So yeah, you're addicted to the lifestyle. You're addicted to the... Took a lot to break that. Of course. What was more addictive drugs or drug money? Well, I woke up every day when I was a heroin addict with the, you know, the stomach hurting, loose boughs, nose running, eyes running, and just the compulsive thought. But physically, but mentally, psychologically, my addiction to money was really, really bad. I couldn't stop myself.

Tell us about a day in the life at the height of your getting money. I couldn't stop myself. I'll tell you this, North and Pulaski during the first of the month, right? The first week of the month, that's when people get paid, welfare checks, social security checks. That was the $100,000 days. The next week might be $80,000 days. The week after that might be $60,000. So the last week of the month when when money is drying up might be 40 a day, 50 a day, I used to complain about it.

Yeah. I thought that was like, and I look back, I said, how insane was that? Somebody's getting 40,000 a day. And out of that 40,000, maybe 20 of it is yours. And you and your partner are getting 10 a day apiece. Yeah, how much did your parents make in a year back in 1983? Right. Right.

About what you got on a bad day. A bad day. Right. Yeah. You follow me? So. The power, because what it really equates to is power. Yeah.

Yeah. Because I tell people it, it leads you to a lot of things. You know, you could take $50,000 buy some jewelry, $100,000 by jewelry. You can buy any car you want. You can live where you want. You never have to get up early if you don't want to, to go. to work. But I got up early because I knew that was the time to beat the undercover police. So I would get up early because of that.

Can you explain that? Yeah, well, they had schedules. They would come out. You know, they would be out. Every now and then, they would be out like six in the morning, but they're going to knock somebody's door down and go in their house. Most of the time, they got to send their kids to school and stuff like that. So they're not going to come out there on a schedule, 8 o'clock in the morning. So we would get up five or six in the morning, go make all our deliveries, go make all our sales, and then go back in and duck out for a couple of hours until it's time to come around and see about collecting money. Because heroin's an early morning thing, right? Yeah, you got to have a shop open in the morning.

Yep. Okay. And were you your shops running 24 hours? No. No. That was something that started when crack came out. Most people's shops used to close like almost by the time it was dark,

the shops closed because now you're inviting the vampires, the Dracula's, the werewolves getting ready to come out. And you don't want to be out there. You want to keep your people in that position. And did you have respect for the neighborhoods you were dealing in?

Like when the kids were walking to school, you had respect for the kids. You have respect for the older people. But places, like Northamplasty, Lexington Terrace, their projects, the respect started to dissipate. Everything was going away. Because now it's just about the money.

Did you have people that would come to you, good people, that would say, hey, I need a job? Yeah, yeah. People who were working people, older people, they might say, you can use my house for the day. You might pay them like $300 a day. so you can set up in the house, $200 a day, whatever. How old were the people, like, did you have an age requirement for somebody that wanted to, like, work in a shop?

Yeah, yeah, of course. You wouldn't have having real young kids, so let me just say this. Let's back up a little while. Before the period that I came in, I was a young guy. I was in my 20s, right? before that period, you couldn't even be that young selling drugs. That was like a new phenomenon. Right.

It was older guys. And everybody couldn't sell drugs. Everybody had to have a hustle. But to be a drug dealer was like a special thing now. Anybody sells them. Right. I'm just thinking about the wire, you know, it's like a bunch of 12-year-olds and oversized white teas and their servant. You know they mixed that together.

So, but that's not what your shops look like. No. No, our shops were grown men. They were professional. Yeah. in their 20s. Okay. In their 30s.

Okay. Did anybody that worked for you go on to become a big-time dealer? A bunch of the guys. When I became a drug addict, a bunch of the guys that were close to me, they rose up. Because, I mean, your workers, if you were getting, you know, I don't know what your profit was a week, but maybe close to a million bucks, your workers probably became millionaires. Or your people buying from you. Yeah, I had a little kid in the neighborhood that was a real trustworthy. He was one of my biggest dealers for a while.

And so it got to the point where we couldn't bag it all up. We couldn't deliver it all. Me and my partner. We couldn't deliver it all. We couldn't bag it all up. We couldn't count the money. So we had an apartment that had a room about this size where ones and fives were on the floor like this. because what can you do with them?

It looks like Magic City. Yeah, the people. All-Star Weekends. The people, the Nigerians don't want ones and five. The Italians don't want tens and twenties. You understand what I'm saying? So what are you doing with all this money? It's just sitting around.

We got bags and bags or money just sitting around that you can't do anything with. And I looked up. Most of the properties were, we had to put them in somebody else's name. Right. Most of the cars wasn't somebody else's name. So I looked up and I said, this is a, you know, this is not even really making sense.

Because you're making all this money. You got a half a million dollars. You got a million dollars. You can't eat. What can you do with it? What can't. What do you do with half a million dollars in wants? Nothing.

What do you do with it? You give it away to people. You spend it on foolish stuff. What do you do with it? Do you remember the craziest purchases you would make with just ones and fives? Yeah. I remember what I used to do with it. I used to put big, big forks of it in my pocket,

and I would have bags of it in whatever car. I let you drive different cars around, old cars and stuff so I could sneak around. And I would go out on the corner, and people would say they would see me coming. I would give it away because what could I do with it? So right after me, right after the time period of me, the next level of guys started saying,

We won't take ones and fives. And that works? Yeah, that worked. You want some dope. You're going to make sure you come with tens and twirl us. We don't take ones and fives. Now, how would you convert, you know, five kilos that you made into 100 kilos, right? How would you get the connects back 50s and hundreds?

Yeah, well, I would get all the 50s and hundreds that I had. And then I would have places that I could go and try. trade money into, but they couldn't take it all. They couldn't take it all, yeah. So that must have been like the time-consuming process. That's why when I look back over it, and I look back over all the guys, and even when I watch your podcast, I watch all the podcasts, to me, I come up with everybody's a failed criminal.

Most of them end up in prison, end up in drugs, killed, and very few. I know very few guys who ended up with a whole lot of anything. Where the properties? Where are my properties gone? I ride past him and look at them. You're knocking the door. Hey, I used to own this. I used to own this house.

So very few make out. So to me, so let me tell you, I'm over to jail for close to a year. And I clean up. I'm over the jail. I'm clean. make my mind up, I'm gonna be clean. And so when I get out, I went back to the same thing for a little while.

And 30 days later, I'm locked back up. But I'm locked back up this time because a girl wants to come in my, I'm living in a house that I brought. She wants to come in the house. She lived across the street with a mother. She wanted to come in the house and smoke some coke.

But it's early in the morning. And I can't take the smell of the coat because I'm going to be dope sick. So we get to argue She tells me she throws a brick through the window So I put on my boots And I grabbed the brick And I beat in the head with it, right?

So I get locked up right there on the spot So when I get locked up Some other stuff happened The police handcuffs me, put me on the curb And let her Her mother And her sister who had muscles in the mustache jump on They beat me so

bad when I got over to jail, the guards over the jail says, he looks at me, he says, damn, Dixon, this is crazy. You look like that. And he calls the other guards. He said, look, it looked like somebody put two cats in a bag, spin it around, and then tied it over his head. Because I was all, I mean, I was in bad shape when I got there. So I stayed that time for 45 days. And when I came out, I got a GED along the way.

And when I came out, I started going to college. And what year was that? 90. I got out. I got a lot. That was 99. 99. 99.

So let's back up a little bit. What year do you think you were at your pinnacle in the streets? Probably like 85. It never lasts long. It might have been, you know, I had the pinnacle never last long. Right, right. So the Pinnacle might have been two years. It might have been 85 to 87 or something.

Okay. And then did you consider leaving the game? I always thought about it. But I always said when I get that extra, when I get that one more, when I get, so I tell people all the time, before I was addicted to drugs, I was addicted to one thing. More. I was addicted to more. I couldn't stop.

I couldn't stop myself. And then it would always be something to happen. Of course. Always be something happened. Some house gets raided. Somebody messes up some money. Something, the kilo would come, but it wasn't as good as the kilo that came last week.

It would always be something that happened. And I think it's meant to be that way because it's not supposed, you're not supposed to sell drugs to thousands and thousands of people who destroy their lives. Well, how did you dodge a huge case? Because I became a drug addict. Right, but before that, like the whole city knows you.

This is a small town. Everybody, especially back then, knew. Well, there were building cases on everybody else by the time it got to. Listen, when I was, when I was, I was really on drugs, really on drugs. And so I went to go buy some, some raw heroin. I think it was like $20 or something. And so I go in the house. During this time, these people are selling it out of the house.

I go in the house. It's like 20 people in there. they're buying drugs. Boom, boom, boom, the door comes down. It's a task force. It's a Baltimore City task force with a DEA task force. So they come around. They ask everybody their name.

So they come around to me. But I look emaciated. I messed up. So they come around to me and they say, what's your name? So I said it real slow. Stephen Dixon. And so the guy writes it down

and walks away. So a few minutes later, he comes back, he said, what's your name again? So I said real slow again. Stephen Dixon. He said, I knew it was you, motherfucker. I knew it. They had raided my mother's house,

but they had broke, my mother's living in a real nice condo. They had broke her lock. They snuck in. And they were taking pictures and they wide tap the phone and all this stuff. And so he calls the other agent

over the 2DA. He said, this is, you know who this is? He was like, I don't know that guy. Yeah, he's a junkie. He's a dopey. He said, no, man, that's Steve Dixon. They used to be the guy. Yeah, that's that guy we were following around.

That's that guy we were going to get. Said, but we didn't get him because he fell off the face of the earth. Okay, so that's like, it's almost like the drugs saved you. Because how much time in prison did all those other guys that were involved in your circle? They were getting life sentences. Right. They were getting 40, 50 years. Right.

They were doing 20 years, 30 years. So what year did you start using? Probably like towards the end of 87 or something. Do you remember why? Yeah, the pressure running. It's stressful. It was stressful. I was driving home.

It would take me, to get home would take me 20 minutes. It would take me two or three hours. Because you're spinning. Spinning, going through alleys. speeding up. I don't even know how I got home. I was watching the rear view mirror so much. I don't even know how I got home.

Sticker boys looking for me. So you got all this hair on, lying around, and you just said, you know what, let me just. Yeah, I started sniffing some of it. Just to just unwise. Just a little drop. Just a little drop. I match here.

And before that, so for five years, during that run for five years, I never got high, never drank, never did anything. But before that, I used to smoke weed, drink, sniff cocaine, stuff like that. Before I started really making money. Right. I stopped and started to make money.

And how long did it take you to go from a matchhead to, you know, to your on junkie? Well, I had the store. I used to, the store was still operating, the 24-hour store, like a 7-Eleven. And I used to go in there. I might stay in the house on a binge for like two or three weeks. I went in the store one night, man, and they had hired some more employees didn't know me. So I come in the store

and they were like, I'm like, I started to walk behind the counter because I'm going to take the money out of the cash register so I can have money to get out with. And the lady says, I'm going to be to call the police on you. Who are you? I say, call a police on who? This is my fucking store.

She was like, this is not your store. The guy I see that comes in here don't look nothing like you and don't act like you. She's talking about my partner. So I get mad. I pick up the cash register and smash it. She won't give me the code to open the cash rest. So I pick it up and smash it in the middle of the floor.

And I take all the money out of it. And during that time, he had physical food stamps. So I took the food stamps and went outside and threw them all up in the air on the corner. Right? And I put the money in my pocket. So she calls my partner, say, some madman just came in here in pajamas. Talking about this is his store. And my partner came to look for me.

Cut that shit out, man. But I was gone. I was all the way gone. How long did that take you from first starting to when you... Were all the way gone? Yeah, or like that. Like a year's time. I was all the way gone, but I still had money.

And in the beginning of it, I still had... I might have four or five ounces of heroin and stuff like that. I might still have 20 or 30,000 sitting around 40,000 or 50,000 cars sitting around. What did you do with the business? The business is, like all these kilos you were moving. Right. By then, I'm gone. I'm not in it.

We had a dry spout. My partner's gone to get a new connect. I'm not involved in it. I don't know what's going on anymore. I'm not getting any money out of it. It just cut me out. He did what he's supposed to do. For sure.

Absolutely. Okay, so you just stopped caring about everything. Yeah, because I was on drugs. Right. Yeah. So you just stopped caring about everything. Absolutely. Because I had such a big heroin habit.

My habit was so big because I had, you know, ounces and ounces of the raw heroin, the real good heroin. And so it just took me somewhere, and I never had a heroin habit before, so I never knew what the effects of it were going to be. And so it took me a long time to get out of that. Did you wish somebody in their early days

had just kidnapped you and forced you to just go through that week of just hell? It would have been more than a week, but I used to think about it. But I used to get clean periodic. I went to treatment 17 times. I got on a methadone program twice, and I was on Suboxone when it was buprenorphine. It was experimental.

And you said, the skin poppet. And once a day, twice a day, right? And none of that really worked for me. None of it really worked for me. How soon after you started using did you just lose everything? Like how long, explain how that process. It was a process. Yeah.

So I say I was using for about a year. people started noticing it. And I used to always say, well, I've been up all night. I was tired. I've been bagging up. I've been counting money. You know what I mean? I was with a girl, all that kind of stuff.

So I used to play that one for about a year. But after that, that ran out. And then my behavior started to change. I wasn't early anymore. I wasn't, you know, I got in a fight with another guy that was a kingpin at that time. He later turned out to be a rat. I got into a big fight with him because I went to buy some drugs from him. I was supposed to give him about $5,000.

And I had used some of the money without even realizing it, end up giving him $4,000 and some change. And a month later, he was looking for me. We got into a real bad fight. So I've been in fights with two of our kingpins. I didn't know you guys fought. Yeah, well, we usually don't, but I guess out of respect for each other, you know. And so, yeah, and there's stories that everybody in Baltimore knows about those two fights that I had. One of them, he, both of them caught me when I was on drugs.

So had I not been on drugs, things would have been a little different. So they took advantage of that. Right. And, but. And then how, and then so by a year in, you would just stop dealing? I was still dealing a little bit. And people who used to work for me or other guys who knew me knew that I had ways to make things happen. And so they were still, but I didn't have by no means that I had ways to get kilos anymore.

I might be able to get an ounce here, an ounce there, two or three ounces, stuff like that. Did your connects cut you off? Absolutely. Did exactly what they were supposed to do. They must have sniffed you out. Yeah. One of them was the Italians were trying to figure out how to do something to me. Really?

Oh, yeah. Did you ever fuck their money up? Yeah, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. How much? They say I owed them like a half a million or something. You could get knocked off back then for a half a million. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Wow, like you just owe them on a package? Well, they gave me what we call tops and bottoms. They gave me two kilos or something that was real good, and they didn't give me a kilo or something that wasn't nothing. And they gave me the tops, and they gave me the bottom. But they'd still charge me for that.

I couldn't pay for it. It wasn't. I couldn't move it. Right. So by the 90s, you're just in and out? Yeah, by the 90s, I'm using drugs all the time. I'm homeless. I'm a 10th grade dropout.

Well, I went to 11 for two months. Don't have no job skills. I never worked anywhere, really, in my life. I went in the Army for a very short period of time. I signed up for two years, didn't even stay to two years, got a general discharge under honorable conditions. I was in 100 first airborne, but by then it turned to air salts. So, you know, I used to repel out helicopters.

I was a medic in the Army. I worked at the Social Security Administration two years temporary. But other than that, I never had a job before. I didn't have any education, no skills. So I had to come back and reinvent myself. How described that life of a Baltimore heroin addicts? How much were you spending a day just to be well? Well, just to get well during that time, I might have needed.

You know, once I came down to being just a regular heroin addict, before that I was doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, you know, dollars, thousands of dollars a day or something. But then when it was derailed, but then when I came down to street level with things, you know, if I could get my hands on $20 in the morning, $20 at night, it was like a blessing at that point. Most days was really hard to do that. Right.

And like how, how would, how do most normal addicts that need 40 bucks, and they're not working? Yeah. They're going to either go and work for a dealer, and the dealer give them some drugs, in the morning. You stand out there all day. You sell the drugs for him. Then at the end of the day, he gives you some heroin to take with you some blow, and then he gives you a few dollars. That's one way. Another way, they became, after the cracker, people started going in Rite AIDS, Walgreens, stealing soap and toothpaste. I never went down to that. But what I did go down to was everybody that I knew

I would go from corner to corner to corner worrying the shit out of them for money. All the dealers they used to be work for me. You know, at one point I thought they owed me something.

Lean it on people. Soft lean, not hard lean. You know, nobody knows me to be like, you know, I'm a gangster in a different way. I'm not the gangster that's going to, you know, make you do something and something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But that must have been humiliating.

Absolutely. Absolutely. To build up in this giant of a kingpin in the 80s and now you're just just a stump down, stump down jumping. Wow. Yeah. And so it took you 12 years about to get clean for the final time. Yeah, but I've been clean September the 9th of this year, I'll have 28 years clean. Wow. So when I came home, I was over to jail, like I said, for almost a year. And because I never did anything my whole life, I don't know how to play cards. I don't know how to play chess, checkers. All I knew how to do was try to get money.

So whenever I would go to jail, I wouldn't do none of that. I would just read. And so I was reading self-help books. And when you get out, what you do. And I joined when I came home, I went into a 12-step setting. And I went to, I came home the second time. The girl didn't come to court who I hit me head with the brick. I knew she wasn't going to come to court because she's somewhere smoking crack, sniffing dope.

And so what ended up happening, the judge, after 30 days, they were supposed to cut me loose. When I went to my first court appearance and the state. didn't want them to. And they made me stay 15 more days hoping they could find her. So I stayed 45 days. I went to recovery house. And it was like in October, 98. That was 98. October 98, I went to recovery house. And I went and signed up for college in February of 99. I started college in August of 99. I got a bachelor's degree in history and gotten to a program that geared you towards the Ph.D. I end up studying at like 25 universities all over the country. Wow.

Went to Michigan State for five months. Went to Ohio State a couple weeks at a time. NYU, Columbia, University of Texas, a whole lot of places. Then I finally got accepted in grad school at the University of Miami to you. and I moved to Miami for four years. Went to graduate school there, got a master's. And what? African history, African-American minor,

and the cognitive area of Caribbean literature. And then I was in the PhD program. My wife got very ill, so I didn't complete the PhD or MABD. That was in African-History, African-American minor, with a cognitive filmmaking. Then I came back in 06. and got a master's degree in psychology,

substance abuse, drugs, and alcohol as a track. So now I have the highest license you can have in the state of Maryland as a substance abuse counselor. So I don't do the counseling too much. My license caused for me to be administrative, so I own absolute healing. And I work at a couple of other places,

time organization, glowing souls, wellness R-X. I'm always the director somewhere. I'm a director at all these places, but I've been a director at 20 places in the city. And so on. And yours, the one that you own is called absolutely healing. And how many people do you think you've helped get clean in the, you know, decade, two decades you've been working in this city?

Thousands and thousands. And not only that, I've also helped. They had a ruling in Maryland called Unger versus the state of Maryland where 300 guys with life sentences had to be released because of the technicality. But they had been in since 1979. So most of them have been in late 30s, early 40s amount of years, 40 years. So out of those 300, about 100 of them, I helped with housing, getting in school, employment, stuff like that. I didn't help them get out.

But I helped them once they were released. But since then, I started a program where I started a program where I, I've helped over 200 guys with life sentences that have done over 20 years to 40 years get out. So I get letters every day. I get four or five letters from people in the state and penitentiaries every day. I'm on the phone with them all the time. So I've helped them get out. So you're kind of like a kingpin of this field.

Like you were the man when you had the work and now you're the man helping people get off. Well, I'm not going to say I was the man when I was getting the money. But I'm going to say because it was a lot of guys in my position. Right. But what I am going to say is in this side of the field, right, and the things that I've done has been a little different. I taught at the college level for 10 years as an adjunct professor up until probably like 2017, 2018. I taught for 10 years.

I taught in the history department. So what do you think it is? Why to this day there's still a drug problem in Baltimore? You know, it's fentanyl now. Obviously, even if you can find heroin, it's probably got fentanyl on it, as they say. That's the new craze. I tell people all the time that nobody really has a drug problem. They use drugs as a medication for all the other issues that they had,

All the other problems. The drugs, you know, if they attack the other problems, you attack how you feel about yourself, you attack how you interact with relationships with your mother, your girlfriend, your wife, you interact with all that stuff. And then if you get some kind of spirituality, it doesn't have to be a religion,

but along the way, I took shahid and became Muslim. So, you know, I'm very involved in a spiritual belief system. And if you don't have all that, you don't feel good about yourself, then you always will have to find some medication. If it's gambling, if it's sex, if it's shopping, America just has major addictions. But it's just that drugs are the obvious outside one that you can really look at. You know what I mean? But we have alcoholism.

We have everything. And it's all about how you feel about yourself. This is not a question to be antagonism. to you or to it's not some kind of gotcha question but it's a question that's been on my mind uh since i met carl and because i respect the work of rehab clinics and and you know really helping people get clean especially from you guys because you're like authorities on it but because the rehab clinic industry is just that an industry it's a business um do you think it overall encourages drug use because you need drug addicts to stay in business?

That's a good question. But I tell all of the people who come through the door, put me out of business. I have other streams of income. I feel like I've been sentenced to this since I didn't get the life sentence. I didn't get the 40 years. It's like the universe said this. Because I didn't go to college initially to do this. My whole thing was

I'm going to go be a college professor I'm going to have a PhD in history I'm going to teach two classes in the fall I'm not going to work in the winter I'm going to teach one class in the spring I'm not going to work in the summer and I'm going to make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year I'm going to write books, magazines, articles, whatever

and that was it but then when I came back to Baltimore it just didn't work out that way and I ended up in this field but I didn't want to be in this field I really would choose, I would love, I swear I would love to be out of it. Right. I would love to be out of it, but I do it really well.

Yeah, I think it's about who's running the rehab. Absolutely. Because I'm sure there's, I know that there's a ton of shady clinic operators. Yeah. That don't do it well at all. I won't work for them. So in the state of Maryland, the license I have, at one time is only 300 people in the state of Maryland have that license.

And only 200, other 300, have the supervisory letter that goes with it. And every clinic has to have one of those people. Well, a lot of people don't want to work a lot of places. They're doing their private practice and all this stuff. So it's a shortage of me. But I won't work for people who don't treat people well, who don't feed people well,

who don't encourage them to get themselves together. I'm not going to do it for somebody. That's a part-time drug deal. I'm not. Because that exists, you know. Absolutely. So my thing is, I don't, I look back and say to myself, I wasted my whole life.

I wasted from an 11-year-old kid to a 40, almost 41-year-old man with all these visions. It was an illusion the whole time. And I look at the guys, and I say most of them. them could have been. Now, some of those guys that were drug dealers were pro athletes waiting to happen. Some of them were TV anchors waiting to happen. Some of them were school teachers, professors, but we all made a bad choice and went into something. So I really don't, I look back over it and when people say, we don't have any regrets, I really regret that. I regret that I sold that much drugs. I regret people got murdered about that stuff. People OD, about it,

about that stuff. Children didn't get fed about that stuff. You understand what I'm saying? People's mothers. When I do group, I ask people, I say, how many people here have stolen something? And you'd be surprised the whole group, nobody raises their hand. I said, you're a damn lie. You stole your mother's peace. You stole your family's bragging rights. My mother was a schoolteacher and all her friends were schoolteachers, principals, guidance counselors. at a club. And when they would go to cookouts and stuff, all their children with doctors and lawyers.

What is, what is, they're saying, what is Steve doing? What she says? Steve's driving a Mercedes. You understand what I'm saying? He's a real estate developer. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, I know. Yeah. Your name will outlive you. That's right. Absolutely. So now my whole thing is like people, I was, I was infamous in the street. right the funny part is there's plenty of people in baltimore that's going to say who is this guy because of the way i carried myself but all the people who were involved in it know exactly who i was our audience is pretty astute and real recognized real is that right yeah they might think i'm just talking they might not they might not think i was really hooked up with one of the five

family the the guy that i met them through they say we're going to give you Baltimore. Yeah. We're not going to sell nothing to nobody else. You're going to move it all through Baltimore. That's what they said. And for about two years, that was true. What connect was that?

That was the Italian connect. Can you tell us what family it was? Well, if you notice, I haven't said any names. No, you haven't said any names. I just want to know the mob, one of the five families. It could be... It was the family that's known for selling drugs. There's only really one family that,

did that. It's got to be the Gambino's or the L'Case. It was only, well, there's only really one family. Because you know the Gambinos were selling drugs, and that was the excuse that Gotti gave to whack Pauli Castellano because they said Castellano was going to find out that they were selling drugs and have them killed. Absolutely. So I'm going to go ahead and say it was somebody that was working for Sammy in the Gambino family. Well, Sammy swears. He can have a sold drug. No, but somebody that was involved with him. He says that. Yeah, so no, you're

the real deal, man. You're sure. You sure? You're sure? I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it's the Gambinos, but I'll ask you off camera. And then we'll AI loop it in. You didn't get it from me. So do you, now,

now, 2026, has Baltimore, has the situation improved? Meaning, you know, the situation that we knew as urban, black Baltimore, improved. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Wow. And I'll tell you why. And you're one of those reasons. Well, not just me, a whole lot of guys. The guys who were really good at this are all out of it now. And not only that, this is the other way that you can really tell. North Avenue is the street in Baltimore that runs from one into Baltimore to the other. It runs from East Baltimore to West Baltimore, right?

And one time you would ride up and down the street and every other corner would be a wide open drug market. Pennsylvania Avenue, every other corner, straight up Pennsylvania Avenue, every project. So we had a mayor here who knocked down most of the projects. So the projects are gone. And you saw that in the wire when they blew up the projects. So that just, you know, in the wire made it look like

It dispersed it to the corners, but the corners were, that was just part of the story in the wire. All those corners were already doing all that. Those corners don't exist anymore. Now it's just a certain amount of corners, a certain areas to have those drugs. So are there less users overall? Yes. It's just the ones who are using, are using this drug that turns you into a zombie.

The Baltimore Health Department has this computerized scheme. They say that in Baltimore, they use the shootings, the stabbings, the ODs, the emergency room visits for that stuff, the arrest, the drug arrest. They put it in a computer and they come out and they say it's 50,000 practicing addicts in Baltimore a day. But the majority of that 50,000 come from somewhere else too. Hagerstown, Maryland. And they come from rural areas. Right. You call them the counties.

Yes. Yeah. Because Baltimore is only two cities in the United States that are not in counties. Baltimore is one and St. Louis is the other. So we're, Baltimore City is a very unique place. Yeah. Very unique place. It sure is, man.

And that's why they made a show here. And that's why the whole world knows you for good and bad. But at least you're known for something. Yeah. It's funny. I was at the U, right? I was at the U. And I was, I pulled up, I'm going to buy tickets to the basketball game,

the University of Miami was playing. And so when I go to the window, a tall white guy like yourself, young guy, he's a student at the U. And he says to me, he says, let me ask you a question. He said, are you from Baltimore? I was like, yeah, how the hell you know? He said, man, you sound just like the wire. I fell out last.

The guy's in the wire don't. sound like Baltimore to me. It's sound like they're trying to sound like Baltimore. Right. But, but, but that's the accent, the whole world. Do I have it? A little bit. Yeah. But you said, that's authentic though. Yeah. Like, you still have aspects of it. And that's, you shouldn't lose that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's good. So, so it's not cool anymore or normal for a young black person to get addicted to drugs in Baltimore? I'm not saying it used to be cool,

but it was a lot more accepted back then. No, it's not acceptable anymore. Because that's where it has to come from. You know what really tripped me out? People clean. Yeah, young women, when in the 80s, if you were a drug deal and you had nice cars, jewelry, you could afford clothes and stuff,

the majority of young women in our community wouldn't mind going out with you and all this stuff. Now, when I talk to young women, they're like, you're a drug dealer, that's whack. You know what I mean? They're not looking for that anymore. They're looking for something that's more stable, more, you know, they're not going to get their brains blown out

when you get yours blown out. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. So it's not, when I was doing it, even though I tried to act like I was, doing something different. Everybody knew who I was and what I was doing. You know what I mean? But I was still accepting in the community. I still paid for proms. I still help people with weddings or their gas electric bill or their mortgage or car note or whatever. I helped people buy cars.

I did a whole lot of stuff like that. Which must have felt good. And even in hindsight, you're like, that's pretty awesome. You were able to do that, but you did it with money. Yeah. Like what you, the money that you helped the community with didn't outweigh the damage to the community from all the drugs. That's the problem. You know Tupac lived here for a lot of years, right? And he has a song that says, I made a G today, but I made it in a sleazy way. And so when I look back over my life, I look at it, I'm trying to leave a different footprint than how it started out.

The things that I did, it was me and five of a guys that grew up together. I'm the only one that slept. Where's everybody else? One died. He was on drugs since we were kids. He died age-related. I have one was murdered by his girlfriend. I had one that was my strong arm.

He was just vicious. He got murdered. And I had one that just lost his mind. So I'm the last of the five. The original five. And your partner? Your original? My partner died from cancer a couple of years ago.

But before he died, he, you know, he was still buying properties. He was still doing different things. He wasn't, and he still probably was dipping a dad. Oh, so he kind of made it? No, I don't think so. Did he dodge a long bid? Yeah, he dodged a long bit, but people got, don't, nobody has anything good to say about it. Ah.

Yeah. The way that he does. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Oh, I see what you're saying. Oh, he went that way. Well, nobody knows for sure, but that's how they feel.

If a guy is out on the street that long. That's how they feel. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the positive news is you, I'm thrilled with meeting you. I'm thrilled with meeting you as well. Really honored. I hope you had a good time.

I did, man. You know it was a struggle for me to get here, right? I know. Did he tell you that? He told me that you, well, you told me you don't like. like talking about this stuff. I don't really. I don't really.

But the funny part is if it's certain guys and we're sitting around, I tell stories with them. But outside of that, I don't really, I don't like to talk about myself with that. I'm not proud of it. You know what I mean? No, I know you're not proud of it. But I think people appreciate the arc and the comeback. America loves a comeback. Yeah.

So the fact that you're making such a. positive impact on Baltimore. I actually think it's something that Baltimoreians will be proud of. Okay. So let's plug. I want to plug your rehab, your recovery center one more time. So please. Absolute healing behavioral health center.

Absolute healing behavioral health center. Yeah. We'll have a link to that in the description of the episode, in the comments. Yeah. And yeah, I reach out because a lot of people are going to see this. All right. And someone's here. Hopefully it's not Omar.

Yeah, he don't ring bells. Steve Dixon. Thank you, man.