The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - I Was Forced To Smuggle Drugs In Prison | Ep. #6

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Johnny breaks down day-to-day life in a maximum-security prison, including shot-callers and their function on the yard, how drugs get smuggled in and the underground drug economy, the types of weapons used in shankings and killings, prison riots and how they occur, and his cellmate Jimmy who protected him from being killed by the Aryan Brotherhood.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And a couple days later in the ICU, he ended up dying. But just the power and the violence they're able to manipulate simply by giving the word is astounding. There is no good time when you're on a max yard. Good time will get you killed. You have to jump in and fight or you will be beaten and exiled and maybe killed by members of your own gang later on. So it's the scariest thing you've ever been a part of. When you get a buck 50 razor across the face, it'll open it up so bad you'll need 150 stitches. Prison is a powder keg of anger and fury and frustration and anxiety, and it's animals in a cage who just go crazy.

Hey, what's up you guys? Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell. Thank you so much for all of the feedback that we've gotten so far. Our show is growing and it's growing fast. So make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on alerts so you get notified whenever we drop new content. All right, let's get into the video. In this episode, we're going to be talking about prison politics and day-to-day life on the inside and what it takes to survive in a maximum security prison. I'm at Umatilla Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison, and I have 36 months on my sentence. And that's day for day. There is no good time when you're on a max yard.

Good time, like my boy Roger told me while we were chained up on the gray goose, heading out to prison, he said, Mitchell, there is no good time. Good time will get you killed. 36 months, three years is nothing. I know it sounds like a lot to a civilian on the outside, and it is. But inside a prison, it's nothing, I promise you, it's a catnap. I was known as a short time. But now I'm here on a max yard surrounded by lifers and guys doing 20, 30 years, and I got to survive. Now, keep in mind, I'm not gang affiliated.

And as I described in the last episode, I pissed the white gangs off, the Aryan Brotherhood, right away on my first day by A, playing basketball with the black guys, because you're never supposed to mix races for any reason when you're in prison, and B, for refusing to stab my cellie who was a sex offender or a perceived sex offender. So in most places, that's a death sentence right away, just for getting out of line. But I had three things going for me that really protected me and helped me survival while I was in there. One, I had a good crime. I had good paperwork, and I described the difference between good and bad paperwork in the last episode. I had really good paperwork on me.

I was a high-level drug dealer, and that got out really quick. So I was, you know, a boss, so to speak, as soon as I hit the cell block. Secondly, I was a great hooper. I was a great ball player. And I know it sounds funny, but the black guys had respect for me immediately and kind of brought me in as their token white guy and somebody who was not to be fucked with. or else you were going to have to go see them. So that protected me from the black guys who might have wanted to come see me in a certain way or maybe, you know, try to fucking tune me up or extort me.

So I had that going for me. But most importantly, I was sold up with a shock caller. That man's name was Jimmy, Jimmy DeSort. And to this day, I am convinced I know, in fact, that he is the reason that I walked out of that place alive. So Jimmy was the shot caller for the whites on our particular prison yard. Every max yard in the country, doesn't matter what state you're in, has a shot caller for each race. So the blacks have their own shot collar, the Latins or the essays, as we called them, the white guys and the others.

And of course, the others is a gang that has Egyptians, Native Americans, Eskimos, you name it, right? Filipinos. each racial group has their own shock collar. We called them the key holder. So Jimmy had the keys to R-E-R. And he was a biker. On the outside, he was affiliated with the Hells Angels. He was actually a patched-in member of the Angels.

He had the big Angels' wings tattooed on his back, as a matter of fact. And they're very powerful in the Oregon and Washington prison systems. Actually, more powerful than the Aryan Brotherhood, who is the main white gang in California prisons. They're very strong down there. But in Oregon, they kind of take a backseat to the Angels. So the fact that I'm selled up with one of the most powerful dudes in the entire Two Rivers Correctional Facility meant that I was protected just by being associated with them. Jimmy DeSort was the biggest gangster I've ever known, and I've known a lot of them.

He's from the East Coast, and he actually got his start as a bodyguard for the Gambino family. But he's only half Sicilian and he quickly realized that he could not ever be a made member. So he just picked up shop and moved to the West Coast where he got affiliated with the Hells Angels and eventually became a fully fledged, patched in member. And what he did was he basically invented the West Coast meth game. Back of the day, they called it Ice. So before all the Sinaloans and the Mexicans had a monopoly on it, meth was a kind of a homegrown, domestic synthetic manufactured drug. And we all know about the famous Walter White from Breaking Bad.

Well, Jimmy knew the actual Walter White in New Mexico. So he started buying in bulk from him and trafficking it all the way up the I-5 and dominating that kind of northwest early meth market and moved it as far as Vancouver, Canada, which is a big Hell's Angels stronghold. So he was trafficking meth from Albuquer. to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Portland, to Seattle, all the way up to Vancouver. He kind of invented the market on the West Coast. But like a lot of drug dealers, and especially meth dealers, Jimmy got hooked on his own product,

and pretty soon he was a fully sucked up junkie. And one night, I didn't think this was in the late 80s, he went to rob his partner, and he ended up killing the guy and the guy's old lady. He got pinched, and they gave him life. They didn't even give him life. they gave him 500 years. That's not an exaggeration. 500 years.

He showed me his paperwork. The guy's release date was like 2489. It was 500 years from the day he was sentenced. It was like laughable, dude. I mean, the guy has to die five times and come back to life just to get out. So it was surreal. When I met Jimmy, he had already been locked up for over 20 years. And he had spent time in dozens and dozens of Christians.

federal prisons, state prisons, prisons in different states. They were always moving him around because he was such a powerful leader that whenever he ended up in a facility, he always ended up being the leader and bringing in the drugs and calling the shots. Jimmy was just had it like that. He had the juice. Now, you got to understand, it's very rare that a short timer like me would ever even talk to somebody like Jimmy, much less be sold up with them.

The guys doing life are treated differently in prison. They're given special treatment, really. They're given more respect by the guards. They're given kind of deferential treatment by the inmates. A, because a dude doing life has nothing to lose and he could snap and kill you if he's having a bad day. And B, just the humanity of it. No matter what a guy's done, you just feel some kind of horrific dread and anguish for them,

knowing that they are going to die in this place. It took me months of being locked up with Jimmy before I finally just started to look at him as any other dude doing time. It was surreal being in a cell, a box with a guy that you were staring at who was a walking dead man. I mean, he was breathing

and his organs were functioning and his mind was still working, but this was the furthest that it went for Jimmy. I would say up till three or four in the morning every night, just listening to Jimmy, tell me stories about the old days when he was a free man. And they were incredible. The detail, the specifics of it were so on point. It was like Jimmy had died the day he came to prison. And everything else that happened before it was the story of his life. And he was, you know,

some third party narrating this journey. It was incredible and it was heartbreaking. And Jimmy was a good dude. I will defend him as long as I live. He's done some bad things, but he deep down was a good person and just a victim of the circumstances of his life. But he was also the shock caller, and he had responsibilities as a shock caller. Shot callers are the leaders of their gangs. So Jimmy, specifically, had the keys to the yard that we were on for the whites. Now, there were three other key holders, right? The one for the black guys, one for the essays, and one for the others. And the purpose of having a shot caller, just like having any other boss or gang leader, is to keep order on the yard. A shot caller's main job in prison is to regulate the drug traffic on their specific yard. Most people

know this already, but drug use and drug dealing is as rampant in prison as it is on the streets. The most common drugs in prison are weed and meth by far. I don't know. I don't know. I I saw some heroin while I was down, but not a lot, and I saw almost no cocaine. And there's good reason for that. Heroin is difficult to smuggle in, and it's just difficult to make, you know, a shooting rig out of. It's difficult to dilute down so you can smoke it. Meth is very easy. It's cheap and two grams of it.

Just a small balloon can keep an entire cell block high for a week. And weed, of course, marijuana is the other one because obviously this is what most people want, and it's what people are smuggling in the most. And just like in the free world, drugs get smuggled into the prison the same way, a variety of methods. You know, I've heard now there's prisons that have drones flying in and actually delivering the drugs to the windows of some of the cells, probably in Europe or these old penitentiaries that have, you know, still bars on the windows, right? But for the most part, in America and two rivers where I was at, it's one of two ways. It's brought in through the visiting room by the inmates' loved ones or through the guards.

And the guards are just as dirty and corruptible as the inmates who are serving time in the prisons that they're working at. A lot of these prisons, most of these prisons, are in very remote rural areas where some of the only jobs are working at the prison. The cops are poor. They're working class. They know many of the people that they are guarding, right, from the first. outside world. And these guys are just one step away or one bad decision away from actually

being inmates themselves. So it's really no surprise that they're so easy to corrupt. I mean, cell phones now in jail, they've got the latest iPhones. You know, there's inmates in there with huge TikTok accounts with iPhone 14s making videos and shit. You're not smuggling a gigantic iPhone in through your ass. You're not keistering that in. You're not getting your girlfriend to smuggle that in through the visiting room, you know, where there's cameras pointed at you from every direction. They're getting him brought in from a dirty guard. And I think the going rate when I was an inmate for a cell phone was about a thousand bucks. That's what you had to pay a guard to bring a cell phone in for you. Tobacco, too, is a big one. Tobacco was outlawed. I know first in the

federal system, but then later on, the states followed suit and made cigarettes illegal in prison, which, of course, is the dumbest thing you can do because now there's a thriving black market for cigarettes. So that's the other one. I think a drum of tobacco cost about 500 bucks to have a corrections officer bring in for you. So, of course, the prices for drugs and cigarettes are fucking ridiculous. A tiny little stick of weed. And to describe what a stick is, you know when you're rolling a blunt or you're breaking down some weed to put into a bowl and the dust or the shake falls off of it? ends up on your old CD case or your coffee table, right? It's the stuff you would just scoop off or vacuum up. That's the amount we're talking about. It's 0.1% of a gram at most rolled up in a little stick of paper. That costs seven bucks. That's how much drugs cost in prison. A line of meth,

my God, that would cost you $20 easily, which is like the price of a whole gram on the streets. $20 would get you just a small line off that gram in prison. On my yard, at two rivers, the gangs who had the best drugs were the blacks with the weed and the whites and the essays bringing in the meth. I don't know why exactly the black guys dominated the weed. I think it's because they're baby mamas or their family members. We're just willing to take that chance and bring in balloons through the visiting room. So the visiting room is tricky. It takes balls to have somebody, you know, take a penitentiary chance by smuggling you in a balloon. while there's guards watching,

while there's cameras overhead in the visiting room. I've heard of a trick where, like, your baby mama or whoever, will have a balloon on her, right? And she'll get it past the guards. And then she will go to the vending machine of the visiting room and will buy you, the inmate, a bag of chips. And then we'll open the chip bag and you'll both be sitting there at the visiting room,

you know, talking, catching up, sharing chips. And then very subtly, she will take that balloon and reach into the bag and drop it inside the chip bag. And then you'll keep eating a few more chips and then you'll grab the balloon and you'll swallow it. That was one of the ways. Then, of course, you go shit it out, right? But, you know, there's a ton of other little tricks.

I wasn't involved in any of them, so I can't really speak to it. But, you know, guys doing decades in prison have a lot of time to think of these little ways to get shit in. But I knew black dudes specifically who were getting high three times a day. It was unbelievable. It was like being in college or something.

And for the meth, it was the white guys all the way. And I think that was because guys like Jimmy were able to corrupt a lot of the guards who were, you know, these honky working class white dudes all the way out in Eumatilla, Oregon. It's nothing but rednecks. So I think they just felt that kind of racial bond. You can call it racism if you want. But the white guys, the white inmates, were just able to get on a level with the guards. and there was this one CEO in particular that Jimmy had in his pocket. And he was bringing him in whatever Jimmy wanted, short of an actual prostitute.

Whatever we wanted, this guard was bringing in for Jimmy. So one night in the middle of the night, it's like 5 a.m. I hear a bang, bam, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, on the cell door. And I jump off my bunk and I'm all disoriented. And I see that it's the guard who Jimmy has bringing shit in for him. And I go, what's up? And he said, hey, they're tossing cells. Tossing cells just means when cells get searched or raided.

Every month or two, just like in the free world, the cops would show up on our cell block with canine dogs and big riot gear on, and they would go sell to sell searching for weapons and cell phones and drugs. And that was a big deal because, of course, if you get caught with a balloon or you get caught with a knife or a cell phone, you're going to the hole at minimum. or you might be getting charged with another crime, depending on how much shit they catch you with. So I turned to Jim and I say, hey, it's a raid.

And he goes, okay, you know, he'd been through this before. So he grabs both of the shanks that we had hidden in our bunk and a package of tobacco, and he passes them through the cell door to the guard. Ten minutes later, there's cops all over the cell block. We are standing on our underwear on the tier, along with, you know, hundreds of other inmates. And the cops are in everybody's cell,

flipping mattresses over, searching everybody's shit. A couple of the dudes get walked out in handcuffs going to the hole. Obviously, they found their cells dirty, but we were squeaky clean. And that was all thanks to Jimmy. That was the juice that he had with some of these guards. The power that shot callers have is incredible. To this day, I cannot believe just the way Jimmy was able to give orders and manipulate just by just by power of his word alone. I mean, we've all seen movies and documentaries about the Mexican mafia, who is the strongest prison gang in America, they control drug dealers on the outside. So the shock callers inside of California prisons are getting profits

kicked up to them from crack and meth dealers in South Central. It's amazing. They order people to get murdered on the outside, obviously on the inside too. But just the power and the violence, they're able to manipulate simply by giving the word is astounding. And Jimmy was the same way. He got a cut of the profits from the meth deals that Hells Angels bikers were doing on the outside, even 30 years into his prison stretch. The other function of the shot caller, of course, is to order the hits, the stabbings or the killings of other inmates. From day one of living with Jimmy, he told me, look, I know you're not a gangster. I can see you're a good kid. You're a smart kid. And I want you to walk out of this place. But there's no free rides.

and you're going to need to put in some work. I know you're not a killer, but you're going to have to pay your way. And I said, all right. So I kind of became Jimmy's errand boy, I guess you could say. I would collect a lot of the drug debts that were owed. I would bring a lot of balloons back from the kitchen, where he got me a job.

Sometimes I would take balloons from the cell block when they arrived and took them to the kitchen where I would give them to a different inmate, also part of the Hell's Angels, but who was on a different yard. And Jimmy loved using me to pass balloons because I wasn't gang-affiliated, so that means I was getting searched less, which I, of course, had no problem with because searched means strip-searched.

And we all know that's when you get naked and you spread your ass and you cough for this fucking guard. I was just under the radar. I was not somebody that they suspected, therefore I was kind of the perfect drug mule. How would I smuggle the balloons? Well, you'd probably guess I shove them up my ass. That's the main way that prison drugs get smuggled. We call them keistering in there. I don't know why they use 1950s terminology, but they're still saying that.

So you shove a balloon up your keester. Sometimes you smuggle a prison shank that way, too. That seems incredibly painful. I never had to do that. But I would stick a balloon up my ass. I would always have the end of the balloon, the little rubbery part, sticking out kind of like a tampon. so I knew that it wouldn't get stuck in there,

and then I would have to go to the emergency room and be humiliated, plus go to the hole. So I would, you know, keyster a balloon every couple of weeks. If I knew I was working in the prison kitchen, Jimmy would give me a balloon and he would say, okay, you're going to drop it off to this guy. I would go do my shift in the kitchen, where I worked as like a sous chef, actually.

And then I would go to the bathroom. I would take the balloon out, and I would, you know, pass it off to, whoever was receiving the package that day. And prison debt collection was, you know, I'm not going to get into the specifics, but, you know, I had to lean on a few people who were junkies and that owe Jimmy money. So, you know, that's, you rough a guy up, you, you know, maybe threaten him, whatever it was. I never had to step on anybody too hard because they knew that Jimmy's word, you know, was his word. And that meant death, ultimately, if you weren't going to pay. But I would

take people's payments. The prison drug economy operates in a variety of ways. A lot of it involves bartering, but the cleanest way to sell somebody drugs and receive payment from them when you're both locked up is kind of like this. So say, I want to sell you a gram of meth in prison, and that costs whatever, 300 bucks, let's say. I would have somebody on the outside meet somebody that you knew on the outside, and you guys would exchange the money that way. So Jimmy would be on his cell phone talking to one of his soldiers on the streets who was collecting money from the loved one of whoever he was selling drugs to in prison. And when he got the word that they had the cash, he would then take the balloon and give that inmate the drugs. Does that make sense? Now,

that's the cleanest way. Obviously, bartering is a huge one. So if you don't have anybody in the outside who's able to bring whatever person the drug dealers have on the outside physical cash, you can pay for it in canteen or commissary. So a bag of coffee, for example, is worth about $7. So if I wanted to go smoke weed, I might go to one of the black guys who had it and I would say, hey, I'll trade you a bag of coffee for a stick of weed, right? So the same was true with the way that Jimmy dealt methamphetamine. And if somebody owed $200, I might be taking their entire canteen bags

for the next month. So our cell was packed with junk food. We had Doritos for days, cup of noodle, cigarettes, coffee. It was like being in a snack bar. And these drug debts are by far the most common reason that prison shankings happen. And just like the mob on the outside,

in prison, you can't stab or touch anybody, especially not a maid guy without getting the blessing from the shot caller first. And Jimmy took this very seriously. He was all about respect, and he did not allow anybody to act without his blessings first. And that was because he comes from a Sicilian background. And as I said earlier, he came up working for the Costa Nostra, and he ran his outfit much the same way. So in my 18 months at Two Rivers Prison, somebody got stabbed or slashed about once a week. There's a difference between stabbing and slashings.

Slashings are usually not meant to kill the person. It's the most common form of discipline within a particular gang. So at Rikers Island, in New York, for example, slashings are the most common form of razor attacks, and over there they call them buck 50s. When you get a buck 50 razor across the face, it'll open it up so bad you'll need 150 stitches. That's where that saying comes from.

Stabbings are usually meant to kill you. Now, I knew some inmates who went to put in work because they had to save face or they were ordered to by a gang who had ways to stab somebody a bunch without actually making it fatal. But normally, if somebody comes at you with a burner, we call it a burner or a piece, when a shank that we had was maybe eight inches long, the one that I kept specifically on me whenever I went to yard or whenever I went to chow. that thing was meant to open you up and hit an artery. Gangs like the whites and the essays, they got so good with the knife work that they actually would educate their gang members on the best places to hit somebody for a kill shot.

You know, it was like Bill the Butcher in gangs of New York showing Leonardo DiCaprio on the pig where the wounds were and where the kill shots were. And the hits could happen anywhere. It just kind of depends on who's doing the hitting. If it was somebody who was doing life, it didn't really matter where you got killed, because they would just go to the hole or they would be sentenced to death.

It didn't really matter. They were never getting out anyways. So if you are a prison shock caller, Jimmy, for example, always gave his hits to other lifers because they were the ones with little or nothing to lose. If you remember the last video that I did, I was handed a shank by Jimmy the very first day that I walked into his cell. And that thing never left me. There was three kinds of shanks.

The first one was the ox. So the ox is just a small razor that gets smuggled in by the guards. And you fasten that to a razor, to a razor that you use for shaving. And in my opinion, that was the best for killing because you could sneak up behind somebody and nick them, right? The artery in his neck, and they've got five minutes before they bleed out. That happened on my cell block. So there was a hit.

It was a Pisa gang member on a Serenio gang member. These are the Latino gangs. there was some kind of beef over something. I was sitting in my cell the day that it happened. I was reading a book and all of a sudden I hear some commotion going on in the day room. And I kind of peek out of my cell and I just see all of the inmates turning their backs and walking steadily towards their cells. And when that happens, you know there's been a hit. Nobody sticks around.

Nobody says anything. Nobody makes any noise. Nobody screams. They just get up. They turn and they walk away. that's when you know something has just happened. Somebody's just been stabbed. So what had happened was this Pisa guy had come up behind a Serenio and taken that ox

and just slashed the artery in his neck and the guy fell over and he bled to death. I actually didn't see the guy, Jimmy, who was in the cell with me at the time, he just goes, hey, kid, it's a hit. Don't look. And I kind of just froze and my blood went cold. and I went and I laid on my bed and, you know, all kinds of emotions are going through me. And, you know, 10 minutes later, the bell rings and there's a million COs on the cell block. And we're all made to line up with our hands up against the wall.

They took a few dudes off in handcuffs. And, you know, that was that. The other shank is the big knife, the big long knife. And that's always smuggled in either from the kitchen, maybe it is a knife. knife itself, an actual knife that we used to cut food in the kitchen. They would sand that down, and that makes a really good blade. That's a good one to defend yourself with, too. There were a knife fights where a guy got attacked, and he had one of those on him, and it turned into like a stand-up, straight-up, one-on-one knife fight. People could even use a coat hanger to kill

you. I remember I was working in the prison kitchen, and one time they found a dude, not dead, but he had been actually run through with the end of a coat hanger. These guys had bent him over and stabbed him repeatedly and so hard with a coat hanger that it was jutting through his body and they'd then thrown him into an old laundry cart. And the guy, I guess he was a snitch or something, but by some miracle, the guy ended up surviving. He's hanging up in a closet somewhere right now. But really anything could be made into a shank. There were plastic shanks and spoons that were whittled down and the end chopped off. Those are amateur. Those are baby shanks, we called them. Those couldn't really kill you. Those are kind of meant to just deter or fight off an attacker. A lot of those shanks were kept

on the prison yard and they were buried inside of the grass on the yard. So case of riot popped off. You just had something you could pull out of the dirt really quick and start doing work. Good shanks were in high demand and Jimmy had the best shanks and you would actually pay a lot of money to have somebody who worked in the woodshop or the kitchen to smuggle in a real knife that you could use to kill somebody. And those are the ones that we had in our cell for Jimmy. Gladiator fights are when the prison guards will organize or allow two beefing gang members to fight to the death usually. So say a CEO knows that two rival inmates are beefing, he will actually come to one of them, especially if he wants to see another inmate who might be a problem. He wants to see that guy go. So he will go up to

both of the gang members and he'll be like, hey, I'll give you guys 10 minutes in an area of the yard or in the chow hall where the cameras are off and you guys can battle it out. And I knew about several guards at Two Rivers Prison that actually took bets on who was going to win and who was going to die in these gladiator fights. Another method is just tossing rival gang members into a cell together, like two beta fish, right? You put them together in a cell and they fight to the death. That was another way that guards, you know, either it was a sadistic reason,

they got kicks out of it, or like I said, if an inmate was a real problem and they wanted to see him dead, this is one of the ways that they made it happen. So the yard, the kitchen, and the showers. Wherever there were the most blind spots in the prison is where the most shankings occurred. And with the white guys specifically,

stabbing's were the only way that beefs got handled. There's no fighting in prison. There's no stand-up fades. That's county jail shit. With the whites and even amongst the Latinos, if there was a problem that you couldn't resolve with your words, it had to come down to blades. So the mindset behind that was there isn't any issue or problem that I shouldn't be able to resolve with my words if I have a beef with somebody. And if it is that serious, if it can't be resolved with words, then that means somebody's got to go. Somebody's got to die. And it's a sensible policy because they don't want their members, their gang members, their followers having scraps all the time and fighting and getting sent to the hole because it makes the cell block hot. It makes the yard hot. It brings the cops to the cell block where we've got drugs and we've got weapons and we've got cell phones. And it just kind of fucks up the order and the operations of that particular gang. So that's why the whites say, no fighting. You're going to stab somebody. or you're going to talk it out. I did see some crazy-ass fights in there, though. I remember there was

this one person named Apple. That was her street name. And I say her because Apple was a she, but she was the modern version of a transgender person. She had beautiful fake tits, long, dark hair, you know, African-American, brown skin, and a big fucking dick. And Apple was a lifer. Apple was doing life. Apple had killed a cop on the outside back in the 90s. I don't know if she was, you know, stealing money to pay for the full surgery or whatever, but she had ended up killing a cop and had ended up in prison. And she was a legend in the Oregon State prison system. She was a golden glove boxer. And obviously, when you're a trans person in prison, you are constantly being brutalized, constantly being assaulted. So she learned how to box. And,

she would just tune motherfuckers up. Now, when I met Apple, she must have been 50 at the time, so she was losing a step or two. But she ended up at two rivers because she had beat the shit out of somebody else at another prison, and so they moved her here. And she ended up on our cell block. And a lot of people didn't like that.

There was a Crip shot caller, you know, leader of the Crip gang, who was on the cell block when Apple first came on, and he was riffing talking a lot of shit, talking about how they needed to get this freak off the yard and blah blah blah blah how could they let this motherfucker walk the main line yada yada and i knew there was about to be a problem almost right away and on the very first day this shock caller with a shank in hand

ran up into apple's cell during line movement that's when all the doors open and prisoners are free to walk in and out so the cell doors open and this shock caller runs up into apple's cell with a knife and Apple must have fucking pulled some John Wu shit and grabbed it out of his hand and started beating the shit out of him. She beat this motherfucker up so bad that he started screaming and begging for his life.

He shit his pants. There was blood all over the cell. And the guards, I'll tell you what, the guards took their time breaking that one up. They must have not liked this crypt dude because they let him get beat almost to death before they ran in and they started pepper spray and Apple and they had to wheel this Crip shock collar out on a gurney.

That's how bad she beat him. And after that, everybody knew not to fuck with Apple, if you already didn't know in the first place. If you were dumb enough to fuck with her, you had to pay the price. So she had juice on the yard, even as a trans person. And a lot of times these trans inmates were prostitutes. So they would do sexual favors for the white gangs or for another gang.

for their protection. So if anybody showed up on the yard, right, a trans inmate who had actually made it on to the general population, the gangs would recruit her. So the white guys would say, hey, you come with us. We're going to make sure that nobody fucks with you, but you know, you got to suck me off and you got to fuck him or whatever. So a lot of that kind of prostitution operates in prison too. Now, Jimmy, my cellmate, he was old school. He didn't believe in transgenderism and he didn't want to run prostitution. He didn't want to exploit anybody in that manner. So we didn't deal in any of that, but I know a lot of the other gangs did. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, total wine and more is my go-to, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family. I'll grab refreshing beers, easy drinking wines, and some hard seltzers for the cooler. And with everything that goes into summer, it's nice knowing you're getting the lowest prices. Total wine and more. Your Memorial Day made easy.

Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly must be 21. Okay, so prison riots happen when one member of a certain racial gang has a beef with a member of a different racial gang and everybody then jumps into the fight

and it turns into a giant brawl and people get stabbed, they get shot, they get beaten. And these occur, every now and then, and it's like a release. Prison is a powder keg of anger and fury and frustration and anxiety, and it's animals in a cage who just go crazy. And it's almost like a resetting. And they usually happen spontaneously. And when they happen, it's a scary thing because if you are on the main line in a maximum security prison and a riot kicks off on your yard, you have to jump in and fight or you will be beaten and exiled and maybe killed by members of your own gang later on.

So if you're on the main line, you have to be prepared to fight. And every now and then, one of these is almost necessary to kind of make everybody chill out. But when they happen, it's the scariest thing you've ever been a part of. And this kind of stuff just came in waves, right? So at two rivers, we would go months and months and months with no kind of beef or tension and things would be relaxed on the yard, the guards and the towers above would have their rifles relaxed against their bodies. They would be chewing tobacco. They would be laughing with other inmates.

But when the beef was on, you could tell, you could feel it. And when you were on the yard, for instance, the guards and the towers would have their rifles, those big M80 long-range rifles that they had. They would have their fingers on the triggers and they would be scanning back and forth like they were in Vietnam or something like. that. And once one of those riots kicked off, you had about two minutes to do your work and get your

fucking stabbing in before you would hear that, that warning shot in the air. They would give you one warning shot, and then you would have to hit the dirt. And their mandate during a riot is to try to wound the person, try to shoot you in the leg or the arm or some other non-fatal place, but these aren't military experts. These are civil servants. So I knew about prisoners that were killed in prison riots getting shot in the back of the head. And another way you knew that a riot was about to happen was you would actually see inmates start to bring their prison boots with them to the showers. So let me explain that. So when a riot kicks off, say, on the yard or in the day room, that means wherever you're at in the prison, doesn't matter if you're in the kitchen working or you're

in the woodshop, wherever, you had to put your things down and start fighting. So if a riot kicked off and you were in the showers, you didn't want to be caught without footwear if you had to turn and start fighting the guy next to you. So my hand to God, when the tension was on, when the beef was on, I would go to the showers and me and 50 other dudes would be showering off, butt naked, with our boots still on. I'd been at two rivers for about eight months when tension started to rise and we knew that a prison riot was not far away. And it was around this same time that I started doing stand-up comedy. Many of you might know by now, you've seen my videos online. I'm a professional stand-up comedian and I began doing comedy inside of prison at Two Rivers. They would have these talent

show nights at Two Rivers every couple of weeks. So if you had good behavior, you would actually be able to go down to this little auditorium that they had in a certain section of the prison, and you could sign up on a list and go up and do whatever your talent was. It was old guys doing life that had guitars. It was harmonica players. It was poetry readers. And the crowd was raucous. And if you sucked or if they were bored, you had about 15 seconds before you would get oranges

started to get thrown at you. You would get people booing you. I remember one guy threw a chair up on. stage, fights would break out, so you really had to bring it. And I didn't even know what I was doing was comedy at the time. I would just observe these funny things that I would see day to day in the prison, whether it was with the guards and the other inmates, and I would go back to my cell and I would just write them down. They were like ideas. And later I would kind of acknowledge that these were joke premises and I would go down to open mic night or talent night and I would actually just

start reading these thoughts off and it was mostly just me trashing the other prisoners or making fun of the black guys or the essays or the white dudes I remember one of the jokes I had I was making fun of like the racist white dudes I said something like oh yeah these guys claim that white skin is the best but I saw them tanning out on the yard you know like that got a big laugh right but it was mostly just me shitting on everybody, doing impressions of the guards or whatever, and I would fucking kill. Like, I would kill so hard that people would come up to me,

people that didn't like me would come up to me and pat me on the back after the show was over. Like, man. And that's where I first got the seed planted in my head. I was like, oh, wow, you get respect by being funny. And so I told Jimmy one day, after one of these talent shows, I was like, hey, Jim, I think I'm going to try to like do this when I get out.

Like I know you could stand up comedy is like a way to make money. Like I might move to L.A. and like try to get into show business. You know, I didn't know how it worked, but like I just knew that like I knew that I was on to something. I felt so good after doing it that I said, Jimmy, I'm going to fucking do it. I'm going to, I'm going to move to L.A. I'm going to be in Hollywood. I'm going to be in show business.

And he didn't laugh at me. he just kind of nodded his approval like, I think that's great. I think you should do it. And I think you should write a script about me. And from that point on, he could see how serious I was. He stopped letting me put in work for him.

He stopped letting me get involved with drugs or money collection or carrying shanks. Whatever was going to get me in trouble and potentially extend my stay in prison, Jimmy didn't want me involved in it anymore. Now I've been at Two Rivers for almost a full year. I only had a couple months left until my review, where I could potentially get classed down to a minimum security prison,

as long as I didn't have any strikes on my paperwork. And the tension was on. There was beef, and it involved the white guys. The Aryan Brotherhood had been jockeying for power against the Hells Angels. That was Jimmy's gang for a long time now. They wanted to be the keyholders. They wanted to be the number one white boys at two rivers.

I don't know the full specifics of it, but we were all showering with our boots on. And I was on high alert wherever I went. And Jimmy went so far as actually sending a bodyguard with me who was strapped. Wherever we went, he had a knife on him. And if I was going to the yard, if I was going to the chow hall, if I was going to the kitchen to do my shift, wherever I went, Jimmy would send somebody with me. That way I didn't have to carry a piece on me, but I had somebody there who was strapped, who could protect me if something kicked off. One day I'm coming back from my shift in the kitchen, and I walk into my cell and a CO is in there. It's the same CEO that Jimmy paid to bring contraband in for him, and he's holding my shank in his hand.

And he goes, Mitchell, is this yours? And I knew I was in trouble because he called me Mitchell. My prison name was Dirk, and everybody called me Dirk. So this was like your mother calling you your full name when she's mad at you. So he said, Mitchell, is this yours? And I said, yeah, that's mine. And he goes, okay, turn around. You're going to the shoe.

So I turned around and he cuffed me up and he took me to the hole. And the next day they sent a lieutenant down there and he goes, what are you doing? Your short time. What are you doing carrying this shit on you? And I said, you know, it's for protection. And so I went before the review board and they gave me serious. 60 days in the hole. Now, during that 60 days, a riot kicked off.

Three people ended up getting stabbed. One person ended up getting killed. And the person who killed him was my cellmate, Jimmy. Jimmy was walking to the yard when the riot kicked off. And three members of the Aryan Brotherhood surrounded him with shanks in their hand. Jimmy wasn't strapped for some reason. and one of them ran up to him with a shank. Jimmy cocked back and hit him in the chin.

He chin checked him. And he hit him so hard that he made the guy's neck snap back. And the guy fell to the ground, hit his head. And a couple days later in the ICU, he ended up dying. Jimmy put me in the hole on purpose. He knew that a riot was about to kick off any day. So he set me up. He made sure that the CEO found a knife.

in my cell when I got home from work that day. So I would get sent to the hole and the riot would happen without me there. So I didn't have to stab anybody. I didn't have to kill anybody. And I would be safe. And I would get to get out of there and go to Liminium Security Prison. So he did that for me. And that's why to this day I owe Jimmy my life.

I easily could have had to kill somebody and be spending the rest of my life in there. So I thank Jimmy and I still write him letters. And I don't hear back from him, but I hope he knows that he did a good thing. And I think part of me feels like Jimmy wanted to make up for the wrongs of his past by helping out somebody like me. And he was a religious guy, and I think he thought he was going to hell. And I didn't have the heart to tell him he was already living in it. But I think him protecting me and making sure that I got out of there alive,

was his way of kind of trying to make himself right with God. Okay, you guys, that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for watching. As always, subscribe to us on YouTube, put on your alerts to get notified whenever we drop content. New episodes come out every Thursday, so make sure you leave us a comment. We're really growing, and we love your support.

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