The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - I Got In A High Speed Chase With The Feds | Ep #8

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Johnny describes the day he got arrested-- a high-speed chase with the Portland Police, trying to bribe the cops, and getting interrogated by the DEA.  Finally, he gets charged with federal drug charges.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

and 10 kilos a blow. I know I said I just wanted to make a million. Two sounds a lot nicer. And that's when I see the lights behind me start to flash. And I didn't even think. I just hit it. Bam. I started taking off down this residential street,

probably 80, 90 miles an hour. He looks at me and he goes, fucking say it again, you little shithead. That's another two years I tacked on. And I was so stunned. I had no saliva left. I mean, picture the worst bond. that I've ever had on stage as a stand-up comedian.

And it could not compare to the dread and humiliation that I had at that moment. And I was speechless. I was, there was no, there was no ratting or informing because I could not physically speak. What's up, you guys? Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell. As usual, make sure to subscribe, like, leave a comment, turn on alerts so you get notified whenever we drop new content.

Follow us on Instagram. Now, pick up your new The Connect merchandise. That's right. We have a line of T-shirts and hoodies out right now in all sizes, and it's a limited run, too. So after we sell out, there are no more available. So make sure you click the link in the description to get yours today. Okay, so last episode I talked about my time in Colombia and all of the craziness that was involved with that. I was hooked up with the officeina, the drug cartel that runs Medellin.

I moved some powder. I fell in love with a woman who was engaged to a big-time money launderer, his name was Andres. And Andres ended up being murdered. And still sketchy circumstances surrounding that. But before any of that happened, if you watched the last episode, you'll remember that my plan was to move to Colombia, open up a hotel on the coast, and get out of the game and start washing my drug money through the hotel and, you know, live happily ever after. And if you missed last episode, the way that I was going to buy that hotel with my drug money

was I was going to transport my cash that I had sitting in Portland, Oregon to one of Andres's connects in the States. And then Andres in Colombia was going to purchase the hotel his own money, his own Colombian money, and then he was going to transfer the deed of trust into my name. Very easy, simple, little money laundering scheme. So I give Maria a kiss. I tell her I'll be right back and I hightail it back to Portland. I also needed to make my money back from the trip, too.

I had burned through like a quarter million dollars in three months while I was down there. That's like spending a million dollars in the States. It was crazy. I was staying in long-term $1,000 a night suites in high rises in Medellín and Carthagena. I mean, these things were amazing. They would take up the entire floor of these new buildings and they had gigantic Rapparound balconies. I was buying high-end hookers three, four times a day.

I met Maria, and we started chartering private jets. Places all over South America. We would go on vacation to Rio. We would go to Buenos Aires and watch polo matches. It was insane. So I get back to Portland, and as you know, if you watched the last episode, I had my best friend and drug dealing partner helped me load $400,000, and I was getting ready to drive that bitch across the country

and give it to Andres' connect. And then two nights before I'm about to leave, I get a phone call from Maria. Andres has just been assassinated as he is pulling out of his driveway in Carta Hena and his bodyguard got hit too. All right, let me take a minute to thank our amazing sponsor for today's episode, Canada Dips,

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You guys, these are an amazing sponsor. I'm so happy to be partnering with them. Support them because. they support the show. It's the ultimate way to get off tobacco. There's no smoke. There's no smell. There's no messy cleanup. There's no tobacco juice. You can pop these things on the go on the golf course around your girlfriend or your wife. I mean, there is no downside to it. Head over there right now, Canada dips.com slash the connect. All right, let's get back into it. That's when things got the realest they had ever been in my time by almost decade run in the drug business. I told

he was like, what the fuck were you doing down there, Mitchell? As a matter of fact, after that happened, he decided to retire. He'd been thinking about it for a long time. He's always been sharper than me and less greedy, too. He knew that the game we were playing had an expiration date and he had just met a girl. He'd put a down payment on a house and he was going to take the cash he had and start a business. He was he was winning. He was, he was winning. He was, he was, He was getting out while he was ahead, something that 99% of drug dealers are not able to do. And to this day, that kid does not have a scratch on him. He's a family man.

He owns a business and a house. He's a beautiful wife. And the guy has not spent one minute in jail. So props to . He watches these episodes. He's always been smarter than me. And he has always been more rational than me. I was a dreamer.

I was the one always pushing the limits. So he told me he was getting out and my first reaction was perfect. I get to keep all the money now. I'll make my million in half the time. But now I'm flying solo, which is also a lonely place to be when you're on top in the drug business. I had about $600,000 to my name at this point. And I said, great. I will make a clean million and I'm done, never looking back.

The problem for me was this is 2010 and the price of weed is dropping rapidly around the country, as we knew it would. States were this close to legalizing it. So more and more middlemen, traffickers like me, were shipping their product across the country. So therefore, there was more supply on the East Coast and in the Midwest, so the prices were coming down. So even a year before, where I could get, say, 3,500 a pound wholesale to my connections in New Jersey, now they wouldn't pay more than like 31. They were like, hey, look, you know, we have multiple suppliers that we can go through. We just love you. We have a long-term relationship with you, but we can't pay anymore. So it's cutting into my pockets. And now I'm back working with by Sina Loan connection in Northern California.

And he's also feeling the crunch, too, because the price of weed dropping affects the growers the most because middlemen like me can play growers off of each other, right? And the last thing farmers, you know, these guys with big weed grows want is products sitting around unsold. So I remember when I went to see him after I got back from Columbia, he had just harvested a thousand pounds. So I would pay for 40 at a time and he would give me an extra 40. So I would actually be bringing up 80 pounds of weed from Northern California to Portland where I would ship it across the country. And I had about three people working for me. I had two separate mules, people I would rotate in and out to drive down, pick up the product, and bring it back.

And I had a third guy who kind of did everything else. He would pick up packages of money. He would help box up the weed. I also paid him to secretly follow the drug mules as they made their journey south and then came back up north with the trunk full. And the reason I would do that is because, obviously, if, say, one of my drug mules is coming back north on I-5, he gets pulled over, and the cop finds all the product. If he immediately starts ratting me out, right? If he says, hey, copper, I'll tell you who the guy is. Call him up right now.

We'll record it. I'll wear a wire. Whatever you want. If they just completely fell to pieces and started singing, then the guy following him would call me. That was the kind of precautions that I was taking. And a lot of drug dealers do that. They actually keep an eye on their workers by having spies

and making sure that if there is a raid or if they get jammed up by an undercover, that they don't turn around and immediately point to guys like me, the supplier. That's just one of the methods that drug dealers use to keep themselves safe. And there's a few other methods, right? And none of them are foolproof. As I've said before, there is ultimately nothing you can do to prevent being arrested if you stay in this game and sell drugs at the level I was selling it at. You are destined to fall off the cliff at some point.

I don't care how good you are, how slick you think you are. But in the meantime, what you try to do is prevent that happening for as long as possible, so you can make the most money. One is to avoid the wiretap. Wiretap is the classic way that local cops and feds put cases on people. And that was obviously more prevalent in the old days before cell phones, of course, right? It's very easy to wire up a landline for the cops. But it happens today, too.

Cops have caught up with the criminals when it comes to bugging. And even in Europe, for example, they had an encrypted phone network that drug dealers and criminals could just talk to one another. And it would jam the satellites and cell phone companies didn't even have access to it. But the cops interpull broke into it. And they could see everything that the dealers from Colombia to London, in to Amsterdam we're talking about and they brought everybody down. So cops can absolutely get up and tap your cell phone. So in my operation, I used burner phones or bat phones we called them back in the day. And I would send a neighborhood kid into a 7-Eleven with his hoodie on

and he would buy up all of the $20 little prepaid phones that they would have on the rack. And I would go through 30 of those a week. I would make one phone call with them and throw it way. I would always let my connects and my buyers know what the next number to reach me on was. And that was it. So if the cops were trying to put a case on me through wiretapping, they would have to go get a new warrant for every single number that I used. Long term, they probably still could have made a case stick with enough work, but the idea was to make it as difficult for them as possible. And you're asking yourself, well, John, what about your buyers on the East coast. What if they had wiretaps on them and they didn't change their phones and you got caught up

in a conversation with them? That's very true. That's why I tried to only use single word text messages or quick phone calls where I never used my name. Because these guys I was selling to, they didn't know my full name. They didn't know my real address. They didn't know anything about me except I was a guy from Oregon named John shipping them weed. So even if there was a wiretap going on them or even if they were turning around and ratting me out to the feds, they didn't have anything to go on. They would have to open up a whole new investigation in Oregon, in Portland, in order to link me into the conspiracy. The idea was just, again, create separation between you and the crime.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, as they say. So the idea was for me, I want to have almost nothing in my possession whenever possible. informants are obviously probably the biggest reason that drug dealers go down. And as I mentioned, I paid somebody to follow around my workers whenever they were doing dirt for me to make sure that they wouldn't get arrested and in the process turn around and rat me out. That's why drug gangs all over the world operate in packs usually because it's much easier to snip out an informant or a turncoat within the group when you roll as a unit. It's very obvious when somebody breaks routine or when somebody goes missing and then turns back up a couple of days later without an explanation.

That might mean that they got arrested or they got bagged holding some work and they were in the interrogation room and they gave up some people and the cops spit them back out and said, all right, motherfucker, wear this wire and go give us information on your gang. But I was a lone wolf. I was an independent contractor, just a small businessman. so I had limited resources to pay for counterintelligence or counter surveillance. I know a lot of drug gangs actually have people in the police force, or they pay private investigators $1,000 a day to follow around the local narcotics units of the police forces in whatever area they live in to see if they are following that gang. I couldn't really do that.

I didn't have the kind of criminal connections, and I didn't want to spend the money frankly. So I was definitely vulnerable and I knew it. Police use informants in all kinds of ways, but the most common is probably the buy bust. That's when the cops will give an informant, Snitch, marked money, and they will send him into a drug house to buy the drugs and come back and give the drugs to them. They then take pictures of it, send it down to the judge's office, and then they write up a warrant, and then they go raid your house. And the laws vary from place to place, obviously, right? In Portland, when I got our stash house rated, our lawyer told us afterward that the cops had to get two controlled buys in order to get a warrant. It all kind of depends.

I mean, the FBI, the feds could do almost anything they want. I've heard of dealers got their houses raided with warrants by an informant simply telling the cops that, yeah, I bought heroin from that house. That was it. And that's the flaw in the war on drugs. That's why you see all these people getting their houses raided by SWAT team members and shot to death, and then turns out they had the wrong house. So that's the buy bus. That's why you never, as Biggie Small said, sell crack where you rest at. You never, ever, ever, doesn't matter what level of the game you're at, sell drugs from the place that you live. And I'm guilty of doing that many times over in my drug career. But if you listen and hear one lesson that I give from these videos, it's that you never keep the work where you sleep.

There's also the reverse bus. And those are a little less common nowadays. They usually happen at the higher levels. But that's when a undercover cop or an FBI agent will actually pose as the drug seller and wear a wire while he's selling drugs to an unwitting dealer. And they will take the guy down that way. I was never that worried about a reverse bust, though, because in general, the cops don't like to give away the drugs they've seized, even if it's only temporary. So it was mainly the by-bust and getting set up on a wiretap that I was worried about and that I used any and all means to prevent. But the craziest and the scariest way that cops use informants is by allowing people to actively deal drugs while snitching.

So they might catch a guy with a couple ounces of meth on the streets of Portland, Oregon, and they'll say, okay, motherfucker, you belong to us now. We're going to let you keep dealing, keep selling your dope as usual, but we want four different dealers every month in handcuffs. Because cops don't give a shit about getting drugs off the street. In fact, they want more drugs on the street. That's what keeps them employed. And especially these local police departments work off yearly budgets.

So the more numbers they bring in and the more drugs, they seize means they're going to get more money the next year. And they're also under pressure by the sheriff or the chief of police to produce numbers so they can get reelected at the end of the year. It's also politics. Everything is politics. Now, I don't know for a fact, but I grew up with a kid, and I won't say his name here, but everybody in my neighborhood watching this video knows who this piece of shit is. He was a bully. He was a scumbag. He was also a big time drug deal. But he never, ever went down. He was reckless, too. He would drink and drive. He would shoot people. He would always carry guns on him. He was a gangster, but he didn't have any backup. He didn't have a

crew. And we were like, how is this guy not getting locked up after so many years? He would even get pulled over with work. He would get pulled over. He would get pinched. The guy never seemed to go to jail. And it's been speculated by numerous people that this guy is actually working for the cops. In fact, when the cops raided my place, I was dumbfounded because nobody should have known where I lived. The only person who knew was this particular kid. But I wasn't in the drug game with him. I wasn't selling him drugs directly. So I figure there's no way this guy's ratting on me, because we're not even, you know, working together. He was just a casual acquaintance who would come through every now and then and smoke weed and we would catch up because he was like an old friend

from the neighborhood, you know. So it's possible that I was just one guy within his monthly quota, but we'll get to that later. 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. So now here I am. Running towards a million bucks. I got 80 pounds of weed coming up from Northern California every week like clockwork, making a pit stop in Portland, and then getting shipped off to the East Coast. And if you watch my first video, I was sent it off in the mail through UPS. in FedEx and in mobile storage units.

And I had two groups of buyers over there. I had the Italian kids in South Jersey, the Philadelphia area, and then I had Dominicans, Washington Heights. And the Dominicans were way safer. I mean, these guys moved cautiously, way more cautious even than guys out of South Jersey, which was surprising because these were the offspring of mafia dudes who had all been taken down on big RICO charges.

So you think they would be trying to avoid. the feds the most, but, you know, Washington Heights Dominicans, those are black guys, right? Blacks and Latinos are usually the most cautious and best drug dealers, simply because they're profiled more than the white kids, right? So they're taking less chances and they're just moving more thorough. The Italian kids, they would send me packages of money, sometimes up to $60,000, and I would open it and $100 bills would just spill out of the packages. And they reeked. They fucking smelled like they'd been smoking blunts and blowing the smoke all over the money while they were counting up. And I would call them up screaming. Like, guys, why don't I just go turn myself in right now? What are you trying to do to me? You got to package my money the way I package your product. The other issue, as I mentioned earlier, was that I was making less money. I used to make a thousand dollars profit after expenses per pound. Now I was making like five or six hundred. Still good money. But

but I had to ship twice as much product just to make the same amount that I was making before. Still, towards the end, I was clearing 40 Gs a week off of 80 pounds. So that's a nice chunk of change. That's, what is that? 120 a month. So over the course of three months, the summer of 2010, I made about 350,000 in cash. Got back the money that I'd blown in Columbia, plus some. I had over a million bucks.

I was getting ready to tell the game, Sayonara, and get the fuck out. never look back. But then something happened. So one day I got a call for my Sina Loan connection in Northern California, and he tells me he wants to meet. And I thought that was strange because he's never said anything like that before. So the next day I met him in Eugene, which is where I went to college at UO and where I got my drug dealing career started all those years ago. I sat down with him at a diner and I said, what's up? And he told me that, he told me that, His group of Sina Lowens in Northern California was transitioning out of the marijuana business. He had a couple of grow ops, huge 10,000 plant rows in southern Oregon get busted recently.

They'd lost millions of dollars. He had his best workers get arrested and deported. And plus the price of weed was dropping and dropping. And he was like, look, this is becoming not worth it for me to grow and sell weed anymore. So what he wanted to do was dial in on cocaine. Now, obviously, I had been dealing in our drugs for years, meth, coke, heroin,

but he was purchasing them on the state side. So he was paying 17 to 20,000, whatever the markup was or the kilos after they crossed the border. He told me his plan. He wanted to actually move a load of Colombian cocaine from Sinaloa onto a ship and have that ship go up the Pacific, past California, and land in the port of Cusbe, Oregon, which is a tiny little port town right there on the Oregon coast, about halfway through the state.

So think about the money potential, right? So instead of buying a kilo for 20 grand after it's already crossed the border, I could buy it for four grand in Mexico and have him bypass the middlemen, the mules, and the other dealers who would actually cross the drugs for him, and he could just pop it up right into, directly into his market in the Northwest. He told me he wanted to do a test run with 200 keys, and he was going to hide them in a big avocado shipment from Mexico. He had just opened an avocado business, and he had an avocado farm,

so he had an easy way to actually get the Coke in the avocados onto the ship. What he needed was somebody to receive it on the state side. And what he wanted me to do was actually create a fake vegetable import company that would receive the avocados on this end. So basically all I would have to do is fill out the paperwork and make it look like I had a legitimate business importing fruits and vegetables from Mexico. And he told me he'd pay me $100,000 just for putting my name on the LLC. And what that would do would give him cover so that his workers would work for my LLC and offload the Coke.

As soon as it made it through customs in the port of Coos Bay, his workers would take the boxes of avocados with the blow in it and put it into a warehouse to a wait. And I thought that was quite the caper. I thought that was pretty fucking cool. But, you know, $100,000, I was making that in three weeks. I told, look, man, I'm getting close to retirement. I can't take that type of risk. I'll tell you what, instead of money, give me 10 bricks a blow from that shipment. And we'll call it even.

He said, perfect. 10 bricks, I can turn that into a million bucks. Fuck 100,000, you know? So we agreed and we arranged for me to go down to Coo's Bay and select a warehouse and using money and my LLC purchase warehouse space where we would actually store the avocados with the drugs hidden inside once they made it from CNA Loa. And that sounded like the perfect plan to me. Even if the drugs got intercepted, I just own the fruit company. I was not the one who actually loaded the boxes of avocados in Mexico onto the ship. I had plausible deniability. There were many

ways that I could beat the case, worse comes to worst. And 10 kilos a blow. I know I said I just wanted to make a million. Two sounds a lot nicer. You see the greed at play? Do you see how greed and fast money can completely corrupt a person's morals in this game? And I just couldn't stop it. It could not help myself. I told myself, this is my retirement plan, but sometimes the game will force you into retirement. September 8th, 2010, that is the day that it ended. You never forget the day that your world comes crashing down. And it sounds so cliche, too, like Ray Leota and the third act of Goodfellas, right? I kept here in helicopters. But it's true. You always wake up on the day you get arrested feeling strange. I woke up and I was supposed to go down to meet in Coos Bay. In a couple of days,

I had some money arriving from the East Coast, two packages, and I just felt shitty. I was depressed. I had all this money. I felt like Tony Montana when he's slumped over the table, rich as fuck. And he's like, is this what it's all about money? I felt completely alone in the world. That's very true. The higher you ascend in the drug game or any criminal game, the lonelier you are.

I had to lie to my parents. I was ashamed to even show my face at family events. I would have to tell them I was, you know, working for a marketing company. And when they all really knew the truth anyways, I was isolated from my friend group, from college. They had all gone legit. My best pal and my partner in crime had gone straight. So I just was completely alienated from the civilian world. And the criminal world, there are no friends.

So I just kind of was internalizing all that. on the day that I woke up and I said okay well I got to I got to get going I got to go get my money I mentioned before that I had several different locations around Portland that I used to receive money packages from the East Coast I had stash houses I had shipping centers and I had PO boxes this particular day both of my money packages were arriving at my PO boxes so I got my car and I went to collect the first one now keep in mind I used work for every part of my business. I didn't touch the product at all at this point.

I had somebody bringing my cash down to California, bringing the pot back, keeping it at a stash house. I had somebody else bagging it up and another person to drive it to wherever it was getting shipped off from. The drug money was the only thing that I actually handled myself. All of the other elements of my business were hands off.

I had people working for me doing the dirty work. work. They would drive down to Northern California. They would drive back with the product. They would ship it out. They would do everything besides collect the money. That was what I wanted to do. I couldn't trust anybody that much. I felt like I had to be the one to collect and receive the money that was coming in from the East Coast. In hindsight, that was a mistake, but that was just a piece of the business that I felt like I had to be involved in personal. I pick up the first package. Check the money, 30 grand, it's all there, perfect. I take my phone out, this is the first iPhone, and I check the FedEx tracking to the second

package that's supposed to come in, and I see, oh, that's strange, it's delayed. Now, remember, I said in previous videos, if a package of product or money is delayed for any reason, it's a dead package. For security, it should be considered done. But for whatever reason, I said, okay, I'm going to give it a little bit of time. I went and had some lunch. I made a few phone calls. and I checked the phone again, it says that it's been delivered.

I said, okay, great. Whenever a drug dealer starts thinking that way, he's really heading for a collapse. Any kind of, oh, great, there are no coincidences in the drug business. It's a much too sensitive and precarious game to be taking any kind of unnecessary chances. The whole thing has taken a chance, right? The entire business is a gigantic roll of the dice, so you don't roll wherever you don't need to. But when you go as long as I did without getting arrested when you had as much money as I had, any criminal will just start to get lazy.

I'll just start to get a little soft and kind of rest on their laurels. And that's what happened to me. So the money package had arrived at one of those like shipping stations where I kept a little P.O. box. And it was only about a mile from my house. It was in the neighborhood. I walk in, I say, hey, I signed for it. I picked it up. I walked out. I put it in the trunk of my car and I started driving back to my apartment. And at this time, I was living in a townhouse in a very nice area. I'm talking about my next-door neighbor was a lawyer and the guy on the other side of me was a surgeon. It was a nice, quiet, white neighborhood and I waved alone.

and I, you know, gave the kids nuggies. And I was just living like, you know, a very affluent neighbor, all-American boy that you would want living in your neighborhood. It was a complete double life. And nobody knew where I lived. That's the other thing as a high-level drug dealer to keep yourself safe. You never wanted to have an apartment in your name. You never wanted to have your car in your name.

I didn't even have a bill in my name. Nobody, except for one person, a kid who I think, may have given the cops my location, knew where I lived. The only thing that made my operation dirty was that I kept a bunch of money in this apartment. I had bricks and bricks of money stashed all over the place. I had a safe next to my bed where I kept 150, 200 grand at all times, but I had no work. I never kept any product there. So I'm about a half a mile from my house, and I see two Suburban's kind of in unison getting, the lane behind me. And immediately, I knew this was trouble. They followed me for a couple of blocks,

and they started to get closer, and I was like, all right, well, there's no way I'm going home. We're going to go for a little ride. I pull up to an intersection, and instead of going straight towards my house, I take a right. And that's when I see the lights behind me start to flash. And I didn't even think. I just hit it. Bam. I started taking off down this residential street, probably 80, 90 miles an hour. And I see the cops. I expect them to start chasing after me. I wait for the helicopter to start flying over my head.

But it didn't come. And I said, that's so fucking strange. And later on, I talked to my lawyer and he said, that's actually a mandate of a lot of local police departments. They do not give high-speed chases through residential areas because if they kill a kid who's walking across the street, they can be held liable. But I didn't know it at the time.

I was driving like my life depended on it. I took a right, I took a hard left, I took another right, and then I parked the car, hopped out, closed the door, and I started running. And I started jumping through fences, darting through alleyways. This was my neighborhood. This is where I grew up. I know every other family, probably willing to hide me.

I took off the hoodie that I was wearing. I threw it into the garbage can, and I just started walking casually around my neighborhood. And I was shaking. I was sweating. I walked into a 7-Eleven to buy a cigarette. I didn't even smoke, but I was so on edge. I had to calm down. And I did that for about two hours. And I was racking my brain. I was spinning my wheels. I was who snitching on me? Which one of my workers knew that I had money coming in that day from the East Coast? And the answer is nobody. They didn't know where I received my money from. So it probably couldn't have been one of my

workers. And later on, I would find out that they had put a little tracking device into the money package. And about two hours have gone by at this point. And I decide that it's safe to walk back to my house. I'm leaving the car with the money stashed on that little residential street. The apartment was not under my name. And I said, okay, I'm probably fine. Nobody knows where I live. So 10 minutes later, I'm back at my townhouse and I'm looking up and down the street, nothing. And I said, okay, maybe I just dodged a fucking. bullet. I walked into my house. I locked the door and I went and I hit under the covers and I was like, I'm not moving for a week. I close my eyes and I wake up to the loudest pounding I have ever

heard and I was like, yep, yep, they found me. And you can always tell a police knock. It's very obvious. It sounds like they're already kicking your door in. So I get up and I look through the window and I can see that I got the house surrounded. So I said, you know what? I give up. I'm going to fight this out in court. Because what do I look like as this kingpin running from the cops? You know, real kingpins usually don't run. They don't put up a fight. They pay lawyers to do the fighting for them. These guys were Portland vice cops. So it was not the DEA. It was not Homeland Security. Not yet anyways. These were just local pigs. They were not in SWAT gear. They were just plain clothes. And there was no kicking in the door or anything. I opened the

door for them and they showed me the search warrant. And I said, no problem, guys, come on in. I don't have any weapons. They had their guns drawn, but it wasn't made to get on the floor. I just turned around. They cuffed me up and they proceeded to search the house. I could have made them get a warrant for the safe that I had, but I said, what's the use? They're going to get a warrant. So I gave them the code of the safe next to my bed. They took out whatever, $200,000 in cash right there. They quickly found another three or four that I had hidden in the house. So that was a nice haul right there.

It hurt. It hurt bad. The first thing that happens when you get collared, when you get arrested, especially as a drug dealer, they immediately sit you down and they want to make a deal with you. And good cops will treat you like not only you're their buddy, but like they're your savior. They're like, hey, man, we can get you out of this. You're a good kid. You got a future.

You got places to be. Let us help you. They're for being high school educated jocks. Cops are pretty well trained in psychology. So as a couple cops are searching the house and bringing out the drug money, the other two are sitting me down and they're talking to me. They're saying, hey, look, we got enough here to probably give this over to the feds and give you a nice five-year stretch.

So work with us here. Who are you picking up from and who are you shipping it to? So right there, I knew that they didn't know anything. When cops ask you questions, especially when they ask you the same question over and over again, that means they don't know anything. That's why they're asking you questions. If the DEA had kicked in my door and said, Mitchell, it's time to go and just led me solemnly into the back of a police car,

I would have known I was fucked. That means they got a RICO case on you. They got all the evidence they need. They have an indictment signed off by the judge. They don't need to ask any questions at that point. These cops are grilling me over and over. Where are you sending your stuff? Where are you picking it up from?

Right there, I felt a washer relief just for the fact that I knew it wasn't by buyers on the East Coast or, God forbid, the Sinalowans were actually ratting on it. But still, in the back of my mind, I was like, how the fuck do these guys know where I live? And I kept asking them that. and they would just chuckle at me like, ha, you wish we would tell you that, scumbag. And, of course, what they wanted to do was kick me out right away.

They wanted me to immediately get back out on the street and start picking up drugs so they could make their bus, right? And at this point, it's about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and it's just me and five of the cops that were involved in the raid, the ones in the Suburban's were following me from the post office a few hours ago.

They hadn't made a big to do. I don't even think the neighbors knew what was happening at this point. It was not a big scene. So I said to myself, now is your time, Mitchell. So I looked at the lieutenant guy in charge of that squad and I said, okay, let's just be frank here. It's just us. Your boss isn't here yet. Nobody knows about this.

What is it going to take? How much do you need? You got about 700 in cash right here. You take that. That's all yours. I have another 300 in cash. I can get you if you give me an hour. You just got to let me out of here.

I will tell you where to pick the money up and you give me a day. Just give me a day to get out of here. I was trying to bribe the cops. Wouldn't you have? I mean, these are not feds. These are local scum. These are the easiest guys to corrupt, obviously, because they make the least, right?

And, you know, if this had been 30, 40 years ago, if this had been in a little town in the south or the east coast in some Irish Boston neighborhood, they probably would have let me go and taking the money, but these are fucking dorky Boy Scout, Northwest white cops. And so as soon as I made that bribery offer, the lieutenant was actually pissed at me. He looks at me and he goes,

fucking say it again, you little shithead. That's another two years I tacked on. So ultimately, I ended up being charged with bribery. So for all you drug dealers out there, you got to know, bribery comes with it an extra charge. So I said, okay, man, it's cool. I knew that the charge probably wouldn't stick because after all, it was basically his word versus mine, but I knew the money wasn't getting me out of this jam. So I went to plan B, fake names. Giving out fake names to cops

is an old school trick that used to work before computers. Cops would arrest a drug dealer, and the drug dealer would say, I'll give you every you want. I'll give you this guy slim over here. just let me go and I'll find Slim for you and I'll sell them some drugs and then you can bust them. I kind of tried to do that with these cops. I started throwing them a couple of fake names of some supposed dealers in the area who I could hook them up with and they would make nice busts. But of course, they said, all right, let me go run those names through my computer and sure enough, they would come back and be like, we never heard of a guy like that. They didn't trust me. After I tried to bribe my way out of it, the trust had been diminished big time with me and those guys. So they said, look, your time's running out. You tell us everything or we are going to give your case over to the DA. And I know you think you're smarter than the cops. I know you're going to try to talk your way out of a jam. These people, this is all they do. They do it all day every day. They talk to hunk's drug dealers who they've arrested and they get them into a jam and they make them trip over their work. the next thing you know they got a confession.

Shut up. The only thing you have to tell cops is nothing. You can literally just sit there as they talk to you and you can be like some kid on time out and just with your head down. But probably what you should say is do what you got to do. I'm not talking to anybody until I have by lawyer, lawyer. That's all you need to know. I know some guys who got arrested and they just sit there and they'll be getting yelled at

by the cops and they'll just say, lawyer, lawyer. lawyer and it will piss the cops off and they'll threaten to punch your teeth in like they did me they'll threaten to beat you up they might even put their hands on you you should hope they put their hands on you because that means that's a lawsuit you're if you have a good lawyer he can take anything illegal that the cops do and use that as leverage to help you either beat your case or get charges dropped they even brought out a piece of paper and wrote out a little mini confession for me to sign. And they said, look, Mitchell, all you got to do is sign this and give us your supplier.

And we promise you'll be home for dinner tonight. You can sleep in your own bed. And I'm not going to lie to you, that sounded good. There was a big part of me that considered giving up my connects on the East Coast, because I knew I had $250,000 that the cops hadn't found stashed in my parents' house. So as soon as they let me go, I knew I was going to run home, grab that money, jump in a car and fucking drive till I hit Mexico. I mean, I was going to go even further than that.

I was going to drive to Columbia and you can't even drive there. But I couldn't do it. I'm not a rat. And, you know, let's face it. They hadn't caught me with a bunch of incriminating shit. All they had was money. Now, they had a ton of it. But I had a great lawyer and I said, you know what?

We're going to fight this thing. So I told the cops, you know what? Go fuck yourself. I fucked all your mothers. let's go to jail. And that's what happened. He called a cruiser. It cuffed me up.

And it took me to Molnomah County Jail, the downtown detention center. So now I'm getting driven into the bowels of the Moloma County Jail, which is the main downtown jail in Portland. And the first time anybody goes to jail, it's the most out-of-body experience because you're in the belly of this giant, bureaucracy and you don't know how anything works and nobody tells you anything.

And the first thing that happens is the cruiser, the police cruiser, they'll take you into the basement where they offload prisoners. And as I was driving down there and I was looking at the sunlight disappearing as we were going into this ominous basement, I thought, there's some guys who will never be leaving this place. That's the last real daylight they'll ever see in their lives. So the first thing they do is take your shoelaces and line you up with all the other guys fresh off the street. Bums, white guys who got DUIs, everybody.

And I was this drug king. They lump everybody together. And the initial pat down is when you still have your street clothes on, you walk up, put your hands on a desk right there. They search you. And then they send you to basically a, it looks like an airport little waiting room where you watch TV and you wait to get assigned to what, cell block in the jail that you're going to be assigned to.

So as I'm waiting in line with all of these other losers who had just been fresh arrested and taken off the street, we're almost up to the desk where we get our initial search, right? And there's this black dude in front of me. He puts his hands on the desk, right? He spreads his legs. And as he's being patted down by the jail guard, the guard's like patting down his chest area, I see this little white thing fall out of his pants

and I look down it's a crack sack this guy's got what looks to be a half an ounce or a whole ounce of crack and I know it's cracked because I've seen it before it's that little off white yellow pebbles and I said oh my fucking God and I look at the guy

and I just see a bead of sweat running down his face as he looks forward getting searched he doesn't say anything and the guard said okay you're good next person and I walk up there and I'm getting padded. I'm getting searched.

And an orderly starts walking by. An orderlies are people in jail, inmates, who do stuff around the prison to make a little bit of money. They're guys who are in jail working. And this guy's sweeping the floor. And as he walks by me, I look over my left shoulders. I'm getting patted down. He looks down, sees the sack of crack, looks up at me,

and sweeps the ounce of crack into the dust pan and keeps moving. Whatever that black guy was owes that orderly five years of prison time. That was an ounce of crack. That's fed time. So that was my introduction. That was my very first five minutes in county jail. So then they take your shoelaces, they give you back your shoes, and again, you're still in your street clothes.

You're in a waiting room with everybody else that's been arrested. And it's really scary because these guys who have been taken in off the street haven't been strip search. So somebody could easily have a weapon on them or a glass pipe or something that the cops didn't find during the initial search. So I had my head on a swivel that whole time. There's guys in there, homeless guys, guys on PCP, wigging out, damn near having overdoses in front of you. It's fucking crazy. I saw this crazy or homeless dude, somebody, he was pressing up. against a guy who was using a phone, making his phone call,

and he gets in this dude's face who's on the phone, the dude takes the phone and starts smashing him in the face with the fucking receiver, as he should have, right? I mean, it was crazy. And that's where I make my one phone call. And who do you think I call? Who is the first person that you call the first time you go to jail? You're damn right.

I called my mother. I called her up, and I could hear the devastation in her voice, but she held it together. God bless her. I said, Mom, you need to call the fat man. It's happened. And the fat man was code for my lawyer.

This guy named Gorski. I'll shout him out. That's his real name. One of the best defense lawyers in Portland. And he's an obese guy. Got four fingers on his right hand. You know? And my whole thought process was,

let me get the fattest lawyer possible because somebody with enough money to eat like that, it's got to be winning some cases. So I told mom, call the fat man. and there's money in the attic and move it because they're probably listening in on this phone call, which is true. The DA actually went back weeks later

and got a warrant to search my parents' house because they heard me on the jail phone talking about the money, but my parents had moved it. They gave all that money to my lawyer. And I hung up the phone and I took a seat and as soon as I sat down, the jail guard said, Mitchell, you got visitors.

And I said, oh shit. visitors already, and I haven't even been sentenced yet. It's my lucky fucking day. So the guard puts me on an elevator, takes me a few floors up, and now he starts walking me through the hallways of these windowless little rooms in the Wilma County Detention Center. And he sits me down on a little room, and there's three dudes and suits already waiting for me. And I'm like, I've seen too many movies. These got to be fucking feds.

That's exactly who they were. I got two DEA agents and Homeland Security in there and I said, I may never get out. I might be doing life. That's immediately where my mind went to. I'm like, I am so fucked, beyond fucked. I can't even believe what's happening. I mean, every step of this just kept getting worse and worse. So they sat me down and they said, we're with the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency.

And this is our partner with Homeland Security. they open up a manila folder and they said do you know andres throw a picture down of his fucking dead body this is andres the money launderer from cartagena and i almost fucking fainted and i was so stunned i had no saliva left i mean picture the worst bombing that i've ever had on stage as a stand-up comedian and it could not compare to the dread and humiliation that i had at that moment. And I was speechless. There was no, there was no ratting or informing because I could not physically speak. Somehow they had traced me from my time in Columbia with Andres and Maria all the way back to Portland in this short eight hour span that I had been in custody. So finally,

I'm able to settle down and I told them, yes, I had had had a relationship. with Maria when I was in Columbia. That was my girlfriend. And they said, okay, because we were able to pick up on text messages between you two just a week before that, which is true, right? I had still been texting Maria even after Andres' death. You know, we fell very deeply in love, but, you know, I knew that she was married to a guy who ended up getting murdered. But I don't know. I've never met this man.

and I have no idea what she is up to now. I, you know, we broke up. I don't live there anymore. You know, I gave them bullshit, right? But there was no hiding the fact that I was linked and connected to Maria down there. And they didn't believe me at all. They were convinced that I was tied together with Maria plotting to import cocaine from Columbia. And I wanted to be like, no, I was actually plotting to import cocaine.

from Mexico. I'm glad you brought that up. But they said nothing about the Sinalowans. They did not know about in Northern California or Cous Bay. They didn't seem to know anything about that. They wanted to know where they could find Maria. That was their main target. They said, we think that Maria had set up Andres to be killed. Of course, in the back of my mind, I had always speculated that, right? Because she hated Andres. She was engaged to be married to him, but he was very abusive. So I always thought that it was possible that Maria could have sent her uncle or one of his Sicario's to kill Andres. But thank God I didn't know anything. Unless you know in this situation, the better off you are. And I said, I had no idea. I could not help you. And they said, okay, well, what we want you to do

is help us get Maria and we'll make sure you don't spend a day in jail. And at this point, I'm spinning. I literally am about to pass out. I feel like I am in the worst nightmare. I am. and I just told them, look, we got to talk to my lawyer, right? This is textbook, DEA, government informant stuff, right? I was in a good position if I did plan on ratting because I had valuable information. Now, thankfully for me, I wasn't really facing any crazy time. If they couldn't tie this money into a larger conspiracy, they'd probably hit me with tax evasion, money laundering, and that would be that.

I'd do a nice clean five and a white collar prison. Boom, boom, boom. We're good. We come out. We move on. But my lawyer also said, look, I'll respect any decision you want. You do have valuable information that these people want. If you give them a cartel member, if you give them Maria, you'll probably walk out of here today.

And you won't have any felonies on your record. You'll be able to move forward with your life, your nice white boy life. And, you know, you won't be any worse for the wear. But I would be worse to the wear. I'd be walking around with a jacket. I would be walking around as a snitch. And look, if Maria could have Andres touched, if from Sina Loa knew that I lived in Portland, I mean, they could have found me.

They were not offering me any witness protection or anything like that. So there was that concern too, right, walking out and being gunned down by one of these groups. So that and living as a rat was just something that I was not going to do. And these DEA agents, they were actually pretty nice people. They just said, look, you have information. We know you are linked to one of these people. We found you with almost a million dollars in cash. You are facing 20 years in prison.

They always throw the craziest number at you too, right? In a calm way, which is even scarier. They told me, you can walk out of here today. We just need you to cooperate. We need you to help us. We need you to be part of the team, man. And of course, I said, look, there's no, discussion or negotiation or anything like that until I get the fat man in you. And they said,

okay, well, spend a couple nights in jail and let us know, or your lawyer will let us know when you're ready to start talking. And I said, okay, because at that point, I just needed to sleep because this had been the most unbelievable day. I'd had one day enough for a lifetime. So then the Fed said, okay, we'll be in touch. And they walked out of the room and the guard walked back in, he cuffed me up, took me to a little room, he strip searched me, first time that's ever happened, that's a lot of fun. And he threw me my jail clothes, my jumpsuit, and he walked me to my cell. And that night in the cell, I had the best sleep of my life. It was a guilty man's sleep, you know? It was like all of that stress and lying and adrenaline that I had

kept for so many years, just let go. And I was free in a way, even though I was locked up. And man, I enjoyed that sleep because the next 450 sleeps were pure hell. The next day I wake up and there's a guard at my cell door and he says, Mitchell, you got a lawyer visit. So he walks me down the hall to the visitation room. There he is. There's Fat Man Gorski, 8 a.m. waiting for me. I love that man.

And he sat me down and he said, kid, the feds want you. You get in charge with federal racketeering and money laundering. I said, well, what does that mean? And he goes, that means you're facing life. All right, you guys, that's been today's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure to turn on alerts. You get notified whenever we drop new videos.

We'll see you next week.