The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Inside America's Largest Black Prison Gang: Shot Caller Reveals The Truth About The DC Blacks

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

In this explosive episode with Eyone Williams — a former federal inmate, shot caller, and author — who breaks down the truth behind the infamous "DC Blacks" in the federal prison system. From growing up in Washington D.C. during the crack era to serving 17 years in some of America's most dangerous prisons, Eyone shares raw and unfiltered stories of violence, survival, and redemption. Learn how a young teen sentenced to 15-to-life became a respected leader in the prison system — and discover why the "DC Blacks" aren't what the media says they are. 🚨 Topics Covered: -The origins of the "DC Blacks" and prison car politics -Surviving Lorton, Youngstown, and the private prison chaos -The brutal truth about juvenile life sentences -Street life in 1980s D.C. during the crack epidemic -Why federal time hits different for D.C. convicts -Life after prison and Ion’s success as an urban fiction author Go Support Eyone! Website: https://www.eyonewilliams.com/ YouTube: @D.C._Blacks Check out Johnny on the road! For tour dates visit https://www.micdropcomedy.com/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: Brooklyn Bedding! Go to https://www.brooklynbedding.com and use promo code CONNECT at checkout to get 30% off sitewide! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. You survived the Miami weekend.

Nailed the speech and maxed out your credit card in the name of friendship. Now you've got one hangover, four pastel dresses, and zero reasons to wear them again. Sell them on Deepop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. And you at least get some of your dignity money back. Someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop where taste recognizes taste. Eon Williams is a former federal inmate and shock caller for the D.C. blacks, the most populous and violent African-American gang in the federal prison system. Eon came of age in the late 1980s in Washington, D.C., which was at the time the murder capital of the country.

When he was just 16 years old, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life inside the federal prison system. Because remember, in Washington, D.C., every crime is treated as a federal crime. Eon gives fascinating insight into who the D.C. blacks actually are and how they exist as nomadic prisoners inside federal penitentiaries throughout the country. The stories are insane. From the infamous Lorton Penitentiary, which was known at the time as the killing factory, to understaffed private prisons where he and his gang rioted against the COs, to finally bidding in the major leagues at USPs like Lee County and Lewisburg,

Eon has seen it all and done it all. Today, he's an accomplished author of urban fiction. Check out his books at eonw Williams.com as well as his YouTube page, D.C. Blacks. Links to those will be in the description of this episode. And make sure to check out the Patreon with Eon, where he talks about what he did after he got out of prison. Turns out he's quite the accomplished drug dealer. That was a fascinating chat. Patreon.com slash The Connect show.

All right, guys, this was an odyssey. So buckle up. Eon Williams, right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. us about D.C. Tell us about growing up in D.C. during that era. And you know what I mean by that era. All right. That's a good way to start off. I ain't think you were going to start off there because, you know, to start off in that era is to skip childhood. Well, tell us about that then. Tell us about, you know, what kind of family you grew up in. All right, cool. That's perfect. All right. I was born in the 70s. I'm 48 years old. I was born

of 1977. I was born to teenage parents. My mother was 16. My father was 17. So I can't tell you much about the 70s, other than me and you was just talking, and I know a little history, but I can't tell you anything from memory of the 70s.

My memories go back to at least the early 80s. In the early 80s, as I told you, my mother and father were teenage parents. So my father went to prison when I was probably about four years old. He went to what's called Lord. and I'm sure we're getting to that. And my mother's had, both of them had drug problems, although they was in the streets as well, you know, back in the day.

Even if you had a drug problem, you still might have ran the street. So if you ran the streets, you still could have had a drug problem. Drug a choice at that time for inner city, Washington, D.C. was heroin. And my mother ended up having an OD from her. I went about six years old. So that's about two years after my father went away. And she passed from that OD? She died.

My mother died. That was a tragic. event in my life. When my mother died, I was six years old and I didn't fully understand what she died from or how she died, so I can't really speak to that now. Of course, later in life, I did, and I could speak to that. But I had a southern grandmother that's from North Carolina from the south, which is why when we spoke a little bit about D.C. being kind of like a southern state. A lot of people don't know that a lot of the black people that came to the District of Columbia migrated from the south and went to other places just like my grandmother for an example, which

my mother's mother, had 16 siblings. Those 16 siblings from the Shurn family migrated to D.C., Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, and I'm leaving one man one of the cities out. But those are the only ones that I really remember because I visited those people there. So anyway, to make a long story short to go back to the childhood part, my grandmother raised me and my grandma. I was born at Howard University Hospital. Howard University Hospital played a big role in my life

in a lot of black people, period, if they had been there for, a couple generations like myself and my family. And then my grandmother stepped in at six years old and began to raise me. And but I told that part of that story out of place a little bit. When my father went to jail, my grandmother basically took over

because my mother was still running around. My mother went to prison and stuff, a few little skirmishes with the law as well. My grandmother actually died four months before my mother, which asked a whole lot of conflict to life and what was going on in the household at that time.

But my aunt, which is my mother's sister, in my opinion, you know, although I still made a bunch of tragic life-changing mistakes without her, I mean, I don't know, you know, I like to believe that a lot of things are predestined, but just to speak on a human level, like without my aunt, I don't know if I would have been dead earlier or on death row or some other type of situations because as much as I royally mess my life up with certain mistakes that I made as a teenager. She was always there to help me then, help me while I was in, and helped me get back out and helped the transition from, you know,

being a more educated criminal because when you go to the feds and you go to prison, not just the feds, when you go to prison, if you survive prison, even if you change your life when you become rehabilitated or you find a new purpose, I think unless you've got a mental problem, you're still a better criminal because you learn things there. So she helped me even in transition and out of that stage too. But what happened to your father? How long was he down for?

My father did. During the time of my childhood, my father had to do at least six years. I'm going to say from like 80, like 81 and like 87. Yeah. And that was law and that's for armed robbery. Nothing, no major organized crime stuff. Like I said, you know, my father was a teenage parent to me and amongst different little hustles and stuff he was doing

because my father was a good hustler, good gambler, on an average level. I'm not saying nothing that's going to make the paper, but when I was a kid and I was growing up after he had done prison and he had came home, I met friends of his.

And I met a lot of his friends when I went to prison, sadly, too. Yeah. So you missed, wow, you lost everybody by the time he was six years old. Everybody in the house, except for my aunt. Yeah, and she's the one

who raised you and saved you. Now tell us about, I mean, because you were young when you fell. You never heard anybody say it like that, but saved as a good. good work. Yeah, I hear people say that prison just makes you a better criminal. If you choose to let it, you know, that's, but everybody's got a choice. And that's what you said. Like, it is a school for crime

if you go in there like that. But I'm not so sure that it, if you don't choose to put yourself in it, short of like self-defense, I don't think it's going to, if you say, I'm not going back to that, I think you can avoid it. Do you agree with it? Do you agree with it? that? Yeah, because you made the pretense of what you're saying if that's what you want to do. But remember when talking to me, although I agree with it, but remember when talking to me, I went to prison at 16. I ain't talking about juvenile. So whatever I chose to do right or wrong, I was still very impressionable. So sometimes I speak as if other people understand that, and I forget that some people go to prison at 40 years old, 30 years old. They are already

adults. They've already been paying mortgages, rents, and tuition and things like that. When you go to jail as a kid, which I went to jail, I mean, I never referred to myself as a kid when I was a kid. But you were. When you go to jail and you get a 15

a life sentence, a lot of times, I'm short, I just say a life sentence because technically that's what it is, but I was thinking about things we might talk about, and I just wanted to get the specifics while I was talking to you, because a lot of people may see it and may not understand. But when you get a life sentence of any As a kid, I don't personally believe it has the same effect as it has good or bad, more severe

or less severe for an adult. But for to go to jail as a kid when I, at 16 years old and get charged as an adult, you don't really know what's coming your way next. And certain things, and when I say certain things, I'm speaking specifically about violence, right? Certain things you're going to have to learn just to survive. So, you know, I was speaking from that aspect. But by the time I think I took control of what left of my life was to take control of while in prison, it was at an era in time or a point in time.

Whereas though I'm not sure how much you or some of the, you know, the viewers that follow your platform may know. But the Supreme Court has now agreed with science on the development of the brain. I'm sure you're aware of all this. So now they're saying that your brain doesn't fully develop the 20 or 25 years. And laws have been changed based on this. Some of these laws that affect juvenile life is all over the country came from some of the stuff I'm talking about right now.

But I just say that to say that at the point in time that the law has said that you mature is the point in time that I began to mature in prison. So I kind of fit the trajectory of everybody that want to proclaim that they have been rehabilitated. Now, I don't want to get too nerdy because I'm into all type of reading, right?

But I used to always have intellectual debates with the aunt that I was telling you about that it was no reason for me to attempt to be rehabilitated or to be rehabilitated because if you look into the definition of the word rehabilitate, you take rear weight, habilitate me that you were already ready. In my situation, I was never already ready. It was nothing to rehabilitate myself too. I needed to fix myself and change myself into something. Now, you know, that's no disrespect to my family. they gave me a lot of tools, right? But at 16 years old, I couldn't buy a pack of cigarettes. I couldn't buy liquor.

I didn't have a driver's license. So it was just so many tools. I'm going to just use the word tools that I just didn't have. It's no way to go say, oh, I'm going to rehabilitate myself and go back to a point of time when I wasn't like this. It was never no time other than childhood innocence when I was anything different than that. No, you barely had a chance to live before you fell. That's why the Supreme Court, I think they banned.

life in prison for minors because it's... They come from the laws that I'm talking about. Come from Montgomery and this other case out of Florida and Alabama, Florida and Louisiana that pass these laws. Some of those laws are the reason that people like me are not in prison no more in the D.C. system. Although I got out 10 years before that law. That's another story, too.

Okay, so you barely knew your father. He came home and then... I'm not going to say I barely know him. I knew my father very well because I saw him every weekend. Lawton is a different type of place. I saw my father two, three times a week. So I'm very well. I can't let you say that. Wow. Okay. So you went and visited him and you were

stayed in touch. Okay, that's something. I mean, it's not just me. A lot of kids that had, unfortunately, had parents in Lawton because Lawton is only 20, 30 minutes away from Washington, D.C. If you had a father or a parent because there were some women there too back in the day, it's a little different. That's another. I don't want to make it seem like such a sad story,

but when D.C. and Congress got rid of Lorton and the D.C. Department of Corrections, and now they sent men, which are convicted criminals all over the country, it's a further strain on that family unit there. And my father was able to instill some manly principles in me as a boy because I was able to see him multiple times a week. Okay, but now they shoot people to catch cases in D.C.

all over the country. Right. I ended up in Coleman. Right. I ended up in Oregon. Right. Okay. So explain this because this is the fascinating technicality about crime and punishment in Washington, D.C.,

because it's not a state, of course. It's a district. It's its own autonomous city state, for lack of a better term. So if you catch a case in Washington, D.C., even if it is not a federal crime, you end up going to the feds. Is that correct? Okay. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. Now, let me put a little bit of my opinion in it before I go to just the facts, right? When people say certain things are not federal crimes, technically that's correct, okay? But the court systems of D.C. is based on this right here, set up like this.

You have a federal court. You and many people are aware of what goes on the federal court, mostly white-collar crimes or RICO conspiracies and different things like that. But in the District of Columbia, which is Washington, D.C., is a federal district. It only had a federal court there as opposed to counties and states that had a federal court, a state court, and a court underneath that, whether it be circuit court, which is a big court on the state system or a district court, which is a small court in the state system.

D.C. had none of that. But D.C. had a bunch of street crime. Arm robbery, gambling, prostitution. Let's just go to it. We ain't got to go to none of the big crimes. The federal courts in D.C. got tired of dealing with it. It created a court specifically in the federal court that was called a court for General Sessions.

In layman's term, that court for riffraff. Murder, armed robbery, pickpocker. That's those small crimes. So they created what it's called D.C. Superior Court in the early 70s to relieve the U.S. District Court of Riff-Raff Prime. That's the other court.

So staying on topic about what I'm saying is that everything is federal. So even though they created another court and created a whole other code of law, which is called D.C. Code. In reference to the parallel of federal code, which is U.S. Code, the D.C. Code laws have come, have been created

from the federal laws by the U.S. attorney. So to go back to the overall thing, as long you don't commit a crime that's considered a misdemeanor, misdemeanor is a prosecuted by what's called the Attorney General of the District of Columbia. This is a local official. But everything else, even when you go to Superior Court, even my charge, I caught a murder charge at 16 years old. I was prosecuted by the United States Attorney in Superior Court. So what I'm saying to you and anybody who may not understand it is even at 16, I was prosecuted by the United States

government, not a local government, because our local government does not prosecute, Yeah, there is no state, so therefore there's no state court. You get it? So everything you do, like a lot of people just say everything you do is federal, everything is feds, but for sure you are prosecuted by the United States attorney. So you could get in a fight in a bar in the District of Columbia, a bar fight. Some guy pulls out a knife, you pull out a gun, you shoot him to death, you catch, that would be normally a state charge. That would be like manslaughter two or something like that. Second degree manslaughter. That would be a state case. You'd do five, seven, eight, ten years.

but if you do that in D.C. You're going to go to the feds for that. You're going to go to the feds, but not because of what we're talking about. Let me give it to you in a short way. The only reason you go to the feds for that is because D.C. no longer has a department of correction. They have nowhere to send you.

When Lorton was around, Lorton closed in 2001. When Lorton was around, if you catch a case like that and it stayed low in the low court, they're going to send you a behind to Lorton. I see. So the closing of Lotton basically...

L-O-R-T-O-O-R-R-L-L-L-O-R-L-L-L-L-O-L-L-L-O. Okay. You've got that southern drawl. Yeah. That's my fault. The closing of Lorton basically condemned everybody that got caught for a federal destination. Wow. Yeah. So you could be catch a murder over some bullshit, some street shit, and then now you're

sold up next to a fucking Colombian drug kingpin. I'm glad you said that, right, bro. Because, and we don't have to get into that now, we might get into that later. But that is the reason that people from D.C. gets so much of, bad stigmas put on them because every form of criminal goes to the feds. And when I define certain things, I'm saying, just imagine the state of New York, if it didn't have a department of corrections, you would see everyone from the pick pocket to the kingpin. That's why you see so much different elements of a criminal when you walk, when people

from the fed say, hey, I've been around D.C. guys. When people say they've been around D.C. guys, from the perspective of a person, like you with a platformer for the perspective of a person that don't know nothing about prison, the next question should be what kind of D.C. guys have you been around?

And I'm not asking you that. I'm saying that's the question. Because when you say, I've been around the D.C. guys, you might have been around Riffraif. You might not have been around the elite. Hey, guys, this summer I will be on the road doing stand-up comedy plus a live episode of The Connect.

On August 20th, I will be in San Diego, California, On August 21st, I will be in Chandler, Arizona, right outside of Phoenix. And then on August 24th, I will be in Plano, Texas. That's the Dallas area. Again, doing stand-up comedy, plus some special guests doing a live episode of The Connect. Go to linktree.com slash Johnny Mitchell, or go to micdropcomedyclub.com and search my name. All three of those venues will be Mike Drop Comedy Club venues.

Come out and see me, San Diego, Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas. We'll see you there. Now, is that why the D.C. blacks are so ubiquitous in the federal system? Is it because there's so much riffraff out of D.C. and there's just so many people because there is no state system we go to? Is that the reason that that's been the strongest car in amongst the African Americans in the federal system? You say that with an element in the question that the D.C. blacks are the strongest car, and we skipped over if the D.C. blacks are even real. Like, I want to answer the question, but I want to ask you as the person to answer the question, do you believe that the D.C. blacks are an entity? This is just what I've been told talking to everybody that's been in the feds. Can we correct that first?

Yeah, of course. First and foremost, there's no gang or group called the D.C. lacks, okay? And what I mean by that is that a certain breed of guy out of Washington, D.C., which most of them were religious guys, they were small as Americans, or they were guys that were NOF, a nation of Islam, food of Islam, right? F-O-I, I mean, right? And they came into the fizz in the 60s and the 70s, and the federal Bureau of Prisons had never seen nothing like it based on that because most people, African-Americans, that come from somewhere, are in some sort of gang. We didn't have gangs, but we had a group of people that defendants. We had a group of

people that the feds did not understand that most of them wore fizzes, coofies, beers, and they were radical. Now, keep in mind, they came into the federal system right after the black nationalist movements, your black power, your black panthers. These things didn't really root in D.C., but things like the more signs temple did root. By the time they came to the feds and the feds couldn't label them, Crip, blood, AB, GD, they said, well, it's the guys from Washington. Well, who are the guys from Washington? The black guys. Who are they? They're the D.C. blacks.

It was really a confusion. So I want to get that straight right now before we even go further because now through time and people being around guys, they have started to say D.C. blacks, but you interviewed a guy, I forgot his name,

but he was a Bulldog from Fresno. He actually said the blacks from Texas and the blacks from Florida. He said Florida blacks and Texas blacks. I said, that's good that he said that because when I talk to Johnny, I can mention that. Some people just say the Cleveland blacks,

the New York. Blacks. It was no different when the Bureau of Prison started saying the D.C. blacks because they didn't know what was up with us. Now, to go past that, some people have taken it as pride and saying this and that, but there's no group that's technically the D.C. blacks. That's just some stuff that people from outside say. So that's not when groups like the Mexican Mafia or the Aryan or the Aryan Brotherhood, when they catch big cases inside a prison, there are no cases like that on the D.C. Blacks. It's impossible to do. When you go in, you don't get. categorized as a D.C. Blacks?

The way you would get categorized as an A.B. Not the same thing. Not the same thing for an example, right? To even try to stay in the lane that you mentioned the Erian Brotherhood. You mentioned the Mexican Mafia. If we look at the Aryan Brotherhood's RICO indictment from 2001 or whenever they caught that big one, they took Barry Mills, T.D. Biggham,

and all of them, the court in California. They had levels, leaders, enforcers, hang or on, wannabes, you know, they had all these things breaking down because that is,

and this is not me screaming or revealing something that's some secret. The Aryan Brotherhood based on their operation, based on even their members saying, I'm a commissioner,

I'm this, I'm that, and the history of it, and the history of the Mexican mafia, those are organized groups that they organize themselves. D.C. Blacks has no leader, has no home base,

has no group, has no bylaws. That's a total creation of the feds. Now, what there is is a bunch of guys that came from D.C. And we have a mentality, whether prison or not prison, we grow up with a mentality of sticking together. Keep in mind, the District of Columbia was the fugitive slave hideout.

So the District of Columbia didn't always produce a certain type of thought. Like we use the term hooker now. Hooker goes back to murder bay in D.C. when there was lawless areas. So if you do the history on D.C., a lot of stuff go with that. But my overall thing is that there's no one group that's the D.C. blacks. And if there was a one group that was a D.C. black, then I believe that we would be able to put them in the category with an Aryan Brotherhood or Mexican Mafia because the Feds would have charged that group for doing something. Think of mind.

When people talk about the beef, the war between the D.C. blacks and the Urian Brotherhood, and they say, well, the D.C. blacks never did nothing. There's no one to charge for every murder that a person could document, illustrate, or talk about pertaining to the Aryan Brotherhood, there was a murder in response, but there's no group to put it on. Hmm. Yeah, I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it's, maybe it's both. Yeah, for what perspective, yeah. Well, how do you guys keep order on the yard? You know, like, there's real reason. I don't, I don't obviously glorify the gang. life, but there really is good reason to have structure and order in a place as violent and, and, and just, just furious with rage as prison, right? Because you got to, anything could pop off.

So you have to be able to discipline your own. You have to know where the drugs are coming in from. You know, you have to make money. You have to keep rank. It's like being in war. So how do the black guys from D.C.? I'm just going to call them the D.C. blacks. But, you know, the black guys from DC, how in a place like, I don't know, Hazleton or Leavenworth. I'm talking about the worst of the worst. How do they protect themselves and organize themselves and survive? Good question. Let me break it down to the simplest form. First and foremost, I want to say that it's prison by prison first. So, you know, everything that you just mentioned pertaining to organized gangs.

I don't want to keep mentioning those particular ones, but the ones that we mentioned and other ones, G.D., bloods, everyone has, you know, an order, right? Prison to prison D.C. are going to organize themselves. Okay, so let's just stay at Hazel then since you asked that one joint. The same order that these gangs may have,

which may come for structure or what I'm going to, you know, leisurely say, some bureaucratic bullshit, right? You know, just putting it together. But, In D.C. in a specific prison like a Hazelner, it's going to be run by the guys that have the trust in the people who know what they're doing the most. I don't want to single any of my homies I'll write this minute for the sake of what I'm talking about. But let's just say I had a homie by the name of Big Black, right? And Big Black is sterile.

He's been in prison 10, 20 years. He know what he's doing with his hands. He know what he's doing with his head. He know the law. code that we live by. He knows the history. He knows whose cousin is who, whose uncle is who. And he know the history of blacks from where we're from,

which we're going to say D.C. blacks. He knows the history with them and the Spanish guys, them and the white guys and them in the gangs. He is going to be one of the guys that's going to have more say-so than some of the others. Now, since I'm talking realistically, I've got to create this other guy. We're going to call this other guy Sosa. Sosa can get the pack in. He could get everything in from up to down to whatever you want.

If he's thorough, and we're going to assume that Sosa is sterile, and he's from D.C., and he can get the pack in now, you had to do this influential. He's the jailhouse guy to know what he's doing. Sosa might be a jailhouse guy now, but he's been in jail lesser than Big Black, so he got more street connections. He could get on the phone, say, A, Bay, call him, call him, somebody going to drop this off, drop this off. These are the people who are going to have the most say-so. And then, not to make D.C. sound so terrible, but we do, unfortunately, produce a bunch of violent criminals,

and I don't mean that the people are violent, like a D.C. guys more violent than the rest. They prosecute violent crimes. 90-some percent of the crimes that are prosecuted in the D.C. Superior Court are some form of violence. So I'm just saying that now when you're looking at the personnel, if we're building a, you know, how they say basketball teams

are in reconstruction, you know, prison yards flip. So now if we're constructing the team and we're saying, man, who we got here, Hazel, then, and Big Black and Sosa say, yo, we got 600 guys here. Only two of those guys, 200 of those guys, maybe going to pass the cut to be in the car.

You get what I'm saying? So that order is going to... A hundred, 175 are killers. I mean, if we say that, but we guess, but just to be realistic, it's on the paperwork. But it stands to reason, though.

It stands to reason, because if you can get prosecuted for, if all violent crime, which is normally not federal crime, is now federal crime, it stands for reason that the most African Americans, black people are going to be from D.C. And a lot of them are going to have violent crime. So it's just reasonable, and that just makes sense.

Not only they're going to have violent crime, remember, as you just mentioned, most of the other guys that's coming to the federal system, unless they're on a RICO or CCE where murders or shootings was involved, they're going to go to their state system. That's right. They're going to go to Attica.

They're going to go to Pelican Bay or San Quentin. They're not going to go to the fed. So another one of the reasons why that's in effect is because you're attempted, we don't have attempted murder in D.C. It's a soul-in-tempted kill, but you know what that is. You're attempted murder, your murder, your carjacker, your arm-robber, that's all it is. So when we have to pick from the dudes who are going to roll, man, Joe Blow just stole, I mean, Joe Blow owe us $5,000 and he ain't paying, and he got a crew,

and we got to go see them, hypothetical, right? when the DC guy look around who they had to support, almost every one of us are in there for a violent crime. Let me put it that way. So, I'm not going to say that this guy right here from Cleveland, it's less man, less thorough, less dangerous than us.

But when you look at all of them right there, I just pick Cleveland out of hat. Shout out to Cleveland. I got family there. But you're going to see a drug dealer, a pimp, some type of guy that might have a fraud case. You're not going to see near one of them.

Not that you don't have any of them to have violent charges. You're not going to see none of them from any jurisdiction in there solely on a violent charge. That's not what the feds do. That's right. So basically it sounds like the D.C. blacks, it's a structure or a loose organization just based on seniority. What you bring to the- Geographical area is very important. And what you bring to the table?

Can you bring a balloon in? I never heard that like that, but I would- And can you kill? And are you willing to kill? I ain't going to say, are you willing to kill? kill, ultimately you might say, are you willing to kill? But are you with the team? Are you with the men or you not? Just like when DC, for example, when I first went to 11 work, it was only two tables.

I didn't do this, so I'm going to act like I did it, but we had some homies that grabbed tables and put them together like we're not standing up. You don't have to figure out, as you're going to kill us, you're not going to kill it, or you're not with it. If you're not with it, you're not with us. So, like, you know, for the sake of what you're saying, ultimately, yeah, you willing to kill, if you, like, I got a homie that to tell you. I'm not going to say his name, though.

I got a homie that's very serious, and he'll tell you, if you're not trying to do this, don't come get me. But he would tell you that if you, what I'm going to do, I'm not trying to leave nobody breathing. That's an extremist. So I don't have nothing but respect for a guy that's going to give you that type of warning because a lot of people don't know what they're getting into. So we don't have to say how you're going to kill, but when you go to war and in the feds, like, I never understood them guys that's in a bunch of, like, I see these videos on the internet that. but it's five, six, seven, ten people jumping on a guy and the guy get up and walks away. I'm not here to promote or condone no violence,

but when it's wartime, like, it's not about playing. And that's all I'm going to say on that, though. So when certain guys from D.C., and this is how we get certain names, because everybody from D.C. is not violent, contrary to popular belief. But the ones that are into bringing that raft when it's time, like some of my buddies are not into fighting.

Like, I had some buddies that the average boxer will beat them silly. But their mentality is so extreme that they're not trying to box no way. Hmm. Yeah. The average person sleeps about a third of their life. You sleep eight hours a day. Why not invest in a mattress that's going to improve your sleep and improve your life? Brooklyn Bedding just sent me one of their mattresses.

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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. I never heard of anybody asking like, that I give you the real version of, in my teenage years, after I started getting in trouble, I went to juvenile a couple-time gun charge,

driving without a license of mine and stuff. The only one I got convicted of was carrying a gun in junior high school. But I went to juvenile, real juvenile for those charges. And where I'm from, your juvenile detention facilities were seeding all in Oak Hill. So I went through there a couple times with my first, into actions and skirmishes with the law for drug dealing or gun child or driving without a license. But I started selling drugs in between this era and time. So between like, I want to say 88, 89, right, when I first started playing around with

selling drugs, selling cocaine, right? 11 years old, you're selling crack, I assume, viled up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, only 12 years old specifically. My birthday's in the summer. So that summer, between 11 and 12, I started selling Coke. You know what I mean? And we started selling wholesale back then. Like it wasn't no major connect.

For $50, you get $520 rocks. For $100 bill, you get $1020 rocks. You do you what I'm saying? And that's how you would start. Unless you came from a family that already had it like that. But you could get wholesale coke like people go to Walmart and get bread these days back there. But I wasn't no major player in that. I don't know how much of you a major player you're going to be in no 12 and 13 years old.

But as I started to learn more about selling drills, I had cousins that was hustling, and I had uncles, I had uncles and my father that was, I'm going to call them significant players, right, for lack of a better term. But in the process of growing and hustling, you know, I started to, you know, by a quarter ounce, a half an ounce, a whole ounce, and then you stopped buying crack, and you stopped buying powered. I heard you talk to somebody about that, so many people know that. By the time I stopped buying powder, I understand the chemistry.

of putting it in a bowl with water and pulling it out hard. Now I understand why you don't buy hard and you do buy soft, right? And I stopped buying my work from a particular person. I mean, people who don't know my case, I just don't feel like shitting on the dead or none of that right there. But in the process of doing that, I started learning that, you know, some coke or some product is better than others. This particular guy was, you know, buying some work from him from a certain amount of time

and then all of a sudden the work went and what it was supposed to be. I had a problem with that. And I'm 16 at the time, so you know my maturity and my judgment skills is not what they are right now. But your 16 is old enough to be stupid.

It's old enough to act like a grown man. Like I got brolic now. You know, I buy ounces. You can't give me some shit that's not going to come back or I'm going to come see you. I mean, even when I got past the ounces, that's what the problem was. Once I learned how to cook it and I got past ounces,

now I'm at 62, now I'm at 125. Wow. I'm like, that's a lot of coke for a young, for a teenage boy. That's a lot of coke. It was some guys that was my age that was, that was more advanced and sophisticated than me. Wow. I mean, to the point where they play with the whole thing. That's fucking crazy.

Now, I mean, it's Washington, D.C. Don't, like, you know, not to, not to throw it off, but, you know, it was the murder capital. We had the king of crack cocaine allegedly there, like. Rayful. Well, that's what they name it. But, yeah, that, that guy was there. that time, you know what I mean? And a lot of other guys like him. You know what I mean? But I'm not saying this to, you know, to lean no allegiance towards him. I'm just saying that anyone that has

read about or know anything about the late 80s, early 90s, in D.C., you will hear his name. There's no way I can overlook that, right? But it's just fascinating because that'll never, that was such a brief phenomenon in American, urban American history that like 16-year-olds could have a thousand grams of cocaine and you're operating like adult business when you should be like learning to drive and like finger banging chicks. I never operated as an adult like an adult business at my age and time and I don't want to blow myself up. But I'm saying and I'm still on the 16 what happened. I ain't lost that part. But I have a lot of buddies between 15 and 20 years old. I ain't going to say a lot of them. A handful of buddies between 15 to 20 years old and other guys from

Washington DC can stamp this that were millionaires. Wow. You know, there's a guy by the name of Mustafa Tariq, right? And he talks about a guy named Big Head Gurry. Anybody who follows the whole Alpo, Rich Porter story, which has been told a thousand times, I'm not here to regurgitate that. But in his D.C. response to that, he was explaining how he went to school with this guy, Big Head Gary.

And he said that Big Head Gurry was a millionaire in high school. How many people know millionaires in high school? school. Now, this is not my story, so I can't go too deep into it, but I'm telling you that this is not an anomaly in old school DC drug dealing law. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's unreal. I mean, the only teenage millionaires back then are literally Long Island politicians kids that are spoiled, like the Kennedy kids and black guys. I'm just talking shit, though. I'm just saying, I'm just telling, I'm trying to explain to be how wild the crack arrow was.

Teenagers are millionaires unless you were literally sions of the wealthiest people in America or ghetto kids from D.C. that had a fucking plug. That's wild. There is no middle, like middle class kids like me like envied black guys from the hood because we weren't around a bunch of crackheads who would buy drugs from us. Like if I'm 16 from Portland, Oregon from like a really normal. two-parent household, I can't just hop into the drug game like kids from the Northwest D.C. could. You know what I'm saying? So it's just, it's kind of a fascinating dichotomy. Now, ultimately,

everything fell apart and, you know, it ruined communities around the country. Portland, Oregon had a bunch of open-air drug moggers you could, but it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't, and it probably never did. We're talking about, hold on. I don't talk about now on the future, but let's go back to the 80s and the 90s. I don't want to get into systematic racism and all this other stuff my aunt be talking about, but for sure, I didn't, those opportunities were everywhere in D.C.

No. I used to catch the bus to school through multiple neighborhoods. I might catch the bus to school. Like I live in a part of Northwest, it's almost by Maryland, right? and DC is like a diamond so I'm all the way at the top of the diamond

but I had to catch the bus all the way downtown and then all the way back across town because this was the only way to get to this particular white neighborhood that my aunt found the way to get me in school in, right? And I say that to say that I seen the whole city as I used to travel on this bus at 13 and 14. I might have drove

while I was still in the inner city park going down 14th Street or going down 13th Street I might have drove or rode on the bus through 20 drug strips. So drug strips were normal to me as a kid. And I think everybody that grew up in the 80s and the 90s in D.C.,

at least they lived in the inner city, they would tell you that, like from block to block. Like from my neighborhood, I grew up on Fifth Street, but the first hood would be Rittenhouse. Then there would be Kennedy Street. Then there would be Crittenden Street.

And then you get down to Morton. And I can do this all the way down the whole street. Every street had an operation. I'm not going to say it was like, the wire, but every street had their own homegrown cluckers and junkies, had their own homegrown dudes that's doing their thing, whatever it was, up, down weed, whatever it was. That was everywhere in DC. I thought it was normal.

That's what I mean. It was a tremendous, I know it's poison, and ultimately it's ruinous to the community, but it was a tremendous economic boom to young black people. And, you know, that's, it is an anomaly in American history. and it's, I'm glad it's over, but it was, you know, I talked to guys from Harlem. Yeah, I talked to guys from Harlem. I'm like, they used to just fuck off like 50 grand a night, you know, in 89. I'm like, can you imagine if you just bought those buildings up there?

You guys have Trump money, you know? Now, of course, but when you're 19 and you grow up in that environment, there is no respect for money. You don't know what it is. You think it's normal. But it's, I'm just trying to tell you. It is an anomaly, and it was not normal. Gotcha. But so this is the environment that's so fascinating.

This is the environment that you are selling drugs in as a teenager. As a very, very small, small spoke in the wheel, though. So you're picking up 120 grams of Coke. It's not nothing. You can really turn that around when you're cooking it up and making real money. I learned how to make mistakes and fix it. Okay. So you can only do that with a couple extra grams.

Okay. So you're buying, your connect sells you bad work. One time, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to say that because even at times before that, maybe I didn't know I was getting spanked since I was so young back then. Right. But, yeah, I can honestly say that. But the junkies, as we used to call them,

going to inform you of what you have as soon as you hit the block back then when you were younger. And what I used to do, I used to, my. My father, as I spoke to you by my mother and my father, my father, they came from dope dealing. Anybody that knows guys that sold dope, know that you get up early to do it. I was so young, I didn't know the difference between dope and Coke, and I noticed that some of my family members, going back to my father and them, they had to, whether they was on it or selling it, right? They got started early in the morning. And when I ventured off and I ended up started selling, yay, I thought that you supposed to get up early in the morning. that's really not a Coke thing.

But I created a rush that used to come at 8 or 9 in the morning just for me. So I found little ways like that to separate myself from other guys that was my age. Like some of my homies that had better opportunities. Like I got a homie to his big brother sold weight. He never competed with me. His big brother had weight. His big brother sold A for Keys. You dig what I'm saying?

Like he might get a brick and make eight packages out of it. 8, 8, 8, 8. He's gone. He's done. And eight sales, the whole brick gun. Right. I didn't have that opportunity. One of the reasons I probably didn't have that in my life,

not that I'm regretting it, but I thought about this when I was thinking about our interview is that I had uncles around me like a guy named Michael Saldus Frey, a guy named Wookie Doon named Eddie Maffers. These guys 30 years old than me, but they were the shit at the time. They were so important that when I decided that I wanted to get into the streets, their friends and their associates would not embrace me.

They were like, e, nobody going to tell you. your mother or your grandmother that I had a hard time doing. I had to work my way up around peers that was my age. For example, like first quarter ounce I ever got, I got from a homie that was only a year older than me that was buying an onion. So he getting 28 grand. He's going to give me seven. But I never had those opportunities like some of my other buddies or some of my

homies that came from families. You know, some families pride their self on not necessarily being criminals, but underground black market living. You know what I mean? Like I know some people that have no credit, but they might got hundreds of thousands. Not now. I'm talking about back then when that money was all around,

like we just spoke about, you know, their grandmother is the only one that owned the house. All the nephews is drug dealers and bank routes, but the house has never been repossessed because nobody going to let that house go. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, but you were pretty good.

You were pretty motivated. So you had at 15, 16, you had like crack lines early in the morning? Not lines, but I'm just out there first, so yeah, I had a rush that was coming up. I mean, when I say lines, and I'm not trying to downplay it, right?

When I say lines, I'm thinking like the wide where they lined up around the corner, but I had regulars. Wow. And that rush would come in the morning. The people that was looking for Lord Reyes or Lord Eon,

they was there 8 or 9 o'clock on Rittenhouse, 5th and Rittenhouse. And that's because I learned to get out there faster than, well, my man, Gould Blacks, he dead. Now I don't mind. in his name, but we had a homie named Gooblax, and he was our age, but he was so advanced, and just in my part of town, he was so advanced and hustling that, like, I ain't even going to

lie, I learned from him. I learned certain things like tricks. For an example, I give you a trick. One of my other little homies, he had some, yay, from another part of town that he bought to our part of town, and he was selling it was better than I was. So, my man, blacks was like, you ain't got to do nothing, man, he said, man, I'm junkies, yeah, the shit better. He said, make, oh, I'll do two for one. I said, if I do two for one, then I ain't going to make no money. He said, you will make some money. You's not going to make the same amount.

If you go out there, you're two for one. All your shit going to go, then you're going to come back. And whatever your profit is is in there. So, say for instance, I spent $1,000, right? And I would normally make back $2,000. If I do $2 for $1,000, I'm making $1,500, but I might make $1,500 two or three times before he finished out. So I learned to do certain things like that.

And then I had a New York homie that told us the tricks with the vows. Well, when I was growing up, we sold Coke and bags. We had a homie from New York that bought the vows down. A lot of people who ever sold vows, you could play illusion games with vows. So I just started learning little stuff like that. I mean, and even at this point in my life now where, you know, I'm writing and I'm doing stuff with film,

I'm always trying to find a way to bring the illusion to the plate. Marketing. Yeah. That's what you're going to marketing in the young age. Yeah. Okay, so were you going to school when the Coke really started to ramp up? Did you drop out of school? See, like we had moved so fast.

Before I even got in trouble where I was a hell of an athlete. School was my thing. Like, you had, when I was growing up in Washington, D.C., school was the spot to go before it was the club. For us, the club was the go-go. So after school, when you were in that area, you might go to the go-go, and before social media, Instagram and all this stuff.

People know you about what you do when you go to the club. I'm saying that for the go-go. But school was the first stage for me, to dress, to rap, to box, and I was a good football player. I was one of the best football players, junior high school football players

the year before, I went to prison. We actually went undefeated and won the first junior high school Washington, D.C. public school championship. So, you know, at all those times, you know, I was really just living off who my family was.

Like, I didn't have to break no law to go to school to look fresh, you know, at that time, like some of the other guys. So at that part of the childhood, you know, we kind of skipped over it. But sports and just looking good was a northwest uptown D.C. thing. Being tough, being a thug.

I mean, looking good came with hustling. So hustling was always a part of uptown thing. But as far as gunplay and that murder capital stuff that came and later, that came by force. Not just in my life, but for the whole city, I would say. Okay. So you were selling crack, but also playing sports and going to school. You had to go to school in order to play to go to the game. So I came out about that, yeah.

So did you catch your case while you were in school? I was in the ninth grade. I was only in high school for two months when I caught the. the case. I was on the run. Matter of fact, I stopped going to school once the homicide came to my aunt's house because then I realized that, you know, I'm not going to say I realized it wasn't a joke because it never was a joke. But I realized that they're going to charge my ass as an adult this time. Like, I never cared about the life with the juvenile life. I never cared with two with a, two with a, I never cared about that. But when I realized that they

was going to charge me as an adult, and although I didn't get 20 to life, and they turned the time up, all I remember back in that day is all of my buddies that had went on murder had got 20 to life. So in my head at 16, I was like, then they're going to give me 20 to life. But in all that shout at, they was giving a bigger number by the time I got in. They was given 36 to life for first degree murder. Even for minors? Once you charge as a adult, oh, that's right. Kill the minor. None of none of those. No, that's not just for you, but a lot of people when I talk, they say minor. You get no, none of that applies no more. So was there a cutoff?

Like was 16 made you an adult? Was there like an age? So they could charge you with murder as an adult at 14? Not in D.C. In D.C. you got to be at least 15. Okay. But they just changed some laws under Title 16, which is the D.C. law that allows them the charges is that.

And now you have to be 16. You don't skip the whole 15-year-old thing because some of that's great. It don't matter. But there are like nine charges. And I can tell you the main ones. Murder, or so would intend to kill, rape. And something else. We could just stop at those, right?

But it's something like nine charges, no matter what you do, if you're 17 to 15, you're going to get Title 16 and charges as an adult. They took the 15 off of them, but for sure, 16 and 17, there are some automatic charges. And I do want to make a point before we move on past the automatic charges. There's a case called United States v. Kent, a young teenager that was robbing post offices in D.C. in the 50s. A post office is equivalent to a bank for people who don't know. So he's automatically charged as an adult, and he did it at the time when they didn't have a D.C. Superior Court,

which I just explained to you. So he was automatically fed. It wouldn't have mattered. But being as though it was a post office, it was equivalent to a bank. His case created laws for all juvenile offenders across the whole country. D.C. is so wicked. They passed parallel laws so that the laws that the Supreme Court gave to all juvenile offenders

would not apply for a D.C. young offenders. For D.C. young offenders, the United States Attorney's Office has the sole authority to charge you as adults. That's not like that. Nowhere else in the country. Everywhere else in the country, you are supposed to get a herring before you go to an adult court. D.C., and they may have changed it now since the last time I researched it, is at least one of the only jurisdictions that the United States Attorney has the sole authority to prosecute you and send you to adult court. So that's what

what's going to happen to me regardless and other people. So that's the deal. Go back to the 16 thing, you just said. Okay, so tell us about the case, man. All right, so I gave you to, you know, how I got this. So at the end, by the time, I used to hang with some robbers, too. For an example, I went to juvenile, and I met some guys that was into other things. That's why we had that conversation about adult prison that you become a better criminal.

I went to juvenile as just a dude that was selling drugs, and I came out of juvenile and turned into a robber. Why? I had another cousin that knew what my stash was at while I was in juvenile. He ran through my stash, fuck my stash up. And it's so crazy that he ran through my stash. My stash went a number about an ounce and like $1,100 in a pistol. He found a stash, ran through all the money, all the drugs, put nothing back. The only thing was in the stash when I got home was a 32 automatic. And I took that 32 automatic and started going on robberies with some of my buddies that was robbers.

But getting to the case, as you... you select people who may be a lick, these people ended up becoming a lick for me and my man, because I was saying, yo, I think we're going to get them. They was playing with the shit. So instead of me just doing something to anybody, we're going to get them. And these are the people that I was buying the work from at first, as I told you earlier. So let's bring it all the way back up the speed. So when we plighting this robbery, these dudes and sold me something that's incorrect,

now and I want to do something to get them back. Instead of me just doing something valid, making it a beef, we turned into an armed robbery. So I called Joe Blow, lured him to the location to rob him. Joe Blow bought another person with him. As an adult, if I was still a criminal, I probably should have called it off because now that's something that's an element that it is not a part of, and I'm just thinking about that while we're talking about.

Anyway, in my young, stupid, immature mind, I said to myself, man, fuck this. I'm going to kill both of them. And, you know, in the process of that, I'm going to take the shit, and then we're going to finish what we're doing, and we're going to keep it moving. Like, nothing ever going to happen.

But anyway. How much work did you order from him? At that time, we only ordered the 62, but he only came with an onion. So in the process of that, when they get it, he was like, no, I only got an onion left and this and that. His man, and I don't think I ever told the story before, his man realized that something was wrong. And his man said, no, let's get back in the car. We got all the car to negotiate some stuff. And I'm telling you with some elements of the story that I never really talked about, but I played guilty to us.

So the only thing I ever want to be careful about is not really to disrespect the people's family. As far as the mistakes we made, we was in a game, man. But let's get back to that. So anyway, when a dude started to realize that, you know, this is not a regular drug deal, that this might be a robbery or this might be a kidnapping, his buddy was like, come on, man, let's get back in the car. Eon, you get up front. In the murder capital, in probably the whole country, but specifically in Washington, D.C.,

a person will be better off shooting you and killing you than telling you to get in the front seat. Okay, do I need to? Well, that's cool. All right. In my mind, I'm not even going to lie. Once I was told to get in the front seat in my head, I was going to hit everybody.

So what I did was, you know, I'm already holding the work. Like, the work is in my hand. You know, technically I can walk away. But I'm so young and I'm thinking, damn, they know where I live here. You know, damn, they're older to me. Dan, they could get somebody to do something to me. So, my rational mind at that point of time, I got back in the car,

once we got back in the car and I heard the door shut, I whipped out and I started shooting. I hit the dude in the back of the car. He ain't making it. The other dude tried to jump out of the car and run. I chased him down three, four blocks. I told you, I was playing football at that time, so I'm in pretty good shape. I mean, you know, not to go back and tour, but I see it in my head. I never forget I had a revolver, six shot three-fifty-seven.

I hit the dude in the back of the car twice. Boom, I chased breath down. And I was in a dark place at that point of time, too, and I never forget, while I'm chasing him, I'm not shooting. And I kept telling them. I said, bro, I'm not going to shoot. I'm not going to stop running. I'm not going to stop running.

You know what I mean? Because I was in a dark place, and I ended up chasing two, three blocks, and caught him and hit him. And he didn't die, and he told the police that I did it, and that's pretty much how that. There's no other way I can say that. I can't make that nice or pretty. Like, that's what ended up down.

I ended up shooting him in his face, broke his jaw. he didn't die. I left. I got locked up about a month later for the crimes. Do you think if you had killed him, caught two bodies? Do you think you would have still been in prison? Being as though you asked the question like that, to be honest with you, man. If I would have killed him, I don't think I would have went to prison. So I probably would have kept on living a life that way or somebody would have ended up killing me. Right, right. I'm sure somebody would end up trying to kill me. But at that point, I could have made another mistake with a robbery or a drug dealing or killing.

But if I would have got away with that killing, I mean, two more shootings occurred after that. I mean, for the weeks that I was out, three more situations occurred. I had multiple joints when I went in. Wow. But I played guilty to this and everything else went away based on witnesses going away. But if I would have, if he would have died, I wouldn't have went to jail for that. There's no telling what I would have went to jail for.

And sadly, that wasn't the first time. that that had happened. Like, that wasn't the first time the murder was the, you know, was the entree because we was living there. When I'm saying we, I'm talking about my little generation of guys is where I'm from.

Almost all of my crew right now, my crew, that was my crew. Almost all of them are dead or still in prison. And most of us went to prison and got those sentences as a juvenile. It's only about, from my real, real inner circle,

it's only about three of us that's still alive. One, then got on drugs. another one that's paralyzed. I'm the only one that I consider to have all my faculties. I mean, if you consider that. I mean, think about that mature, like, silver lining that you just found there. You're like, yeah, if I had killed him, I wouldn't have gone to prison.

I probably would have got bodied. I probably got a shot to death in the street, you know? I mean, all my buddies ended up shot to death or in prison. I mean, the ones that was in his life, like, I got a best friend that live on my block. He don't know who I'm talking about. He lived one house away from my grandmother. That's the house of the street we grew up. on. He's a thorough guy. He's not a square, but he's not a bona fide crook. He never went to

prison with all us. Those are the only people that survived. And what I think allowed him to survive was after me and my cousin and another one of our childhood friends on the same block, I'm talking about the block. We come off. When he looked up by the time he was 17, all of us was gone. I was in on murder. My cousin, it's like a brother that grew up in my household was dead. Other buddy that door to him had been slammed on his head, his neck broke. Now he did. He's the only one that's alive and free. Wow.

So when I'm saying my crew, I mean my crew in the streets because this guy, his name AJ, I can say his name. Shout out to my man, AJ. AJ going to be like, damn, but he always tell me, he said, you and my killing them, y'all ain't scared me straight. It just made me think more. He said, by the time I looked up and I was graduating high school, everybody on the block was gone. He said it reminded me of boys in the hood at the end when they flashed back.

and everybody disappears. A Doboy, which is Ice Cube, Ricky that got shot in the back. He said life was like that for him. Like, everybody just faded away and disappeared. I mean, lo and behold, I came back in 17 years. Yeah, right, right. Wow, it really was that real.

And that... And this is the... This is 93. Like, this ain't 89, 90. This ain't Wayne Perry in the murder, like, 91, 92. Like, you know what I mean? This is a year after that.

Mm-hmm. So, like, this is when the... Erda capital er was simmering down in my opinion. Right. It was. It was. Even by 93, it was the demand for crack was just starting to wane a little bit. But it was still, I mean, yeah, it was still violent. I mean, at least. And then hood's all over. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. So how long, so you got arrested a month after the shootings? Yeah, like a month I had. No more than two months because I ran to, I don't mean ran like that. But I shot down a fort laud. of deal probably about like let's say six weeks and you were fighting your case for how long did you did you thought you might have had action like did you consider taking it to trial man that's funny

i did so uh i tried like i'm too smart for my own good even when i was younger i thought i was so smart so by the time i realized that homicide was on me they was coming to get me in i was charged of the dog. I don't know if I based this off of TV or uncles or cousins that have been to prison on my interaction with law enforcement, but I came up with an alibi. You know, I came up with what I thought was a defense. So I had a girl, we were staying at a hotel, and this was true. Even after the crime, I retreated to a hotel that I was staying at with a girl. By the time I was arrested, I thought that I will fight this case based on my alibi, and I thought that my homies was the best homies and my

homies would never break the code they would never tell on me and you learn so fast that that shit is not true like you learn that real fast like I've been in trouble since as an adult and had code offenders that didn't but some of that was lucky my judgment skills after already being in bad situations back then I was

on some real live hood time like you know if you from my neighborhood and we together it's all us but that's not true so well there are other people tell him besides the victim? I was just getting ready to say that. Now, a lot of people don't know this, and this goes into the story, I had two would-be co-defendants. I never spoke about this. One of these would-be co-defendants. I'm not going to say his name, but people from my neighborhood

will know who it is. One of these would-be co-defendants turned states. He caught a drug charge a couple weeks after I was in and knew where the murder weapon was. He retrieved a murder weapon from who he had sold it to. He sold the murder weapon to somebody and he was supposed they got rid of it. He caught a case, a distribution case, worked with the prosecutor on that case saying, look, I know the Lord Eon did Blasey Blasey,

and not only do I know he did it, I know where the weapon is. So they say, where the weapon at? He said, I sold it to Joe Blow. He took the homicide detective on my case and the prosecutor on my case to Joe Blow House and some type of way got the weapon. I was told that he told the people,

man, they know you got the weapon. The people supposed to told them if you give us the weapon, we won't charge you, and that's how they got it. This is how I end up pleading guilty, so I'm really getting to something. And my lawyer got a picture of this weapon and showed me this weapon. And I lied to my lawyer at the time. I still was talking this. I didn't do this shit, and I got an alibi.

My girl going to the stamp it. Her name was Molly Armstrong. I really like this lady. This lady convinced me to plead guilty. Not in the way that people say on TV and in the stories that, oh, they help me throw my life away. What she did was she didn't keep challenging that I was lying. She sat across a table from me in a legal visit earlier at D.C. jail.

She had been coming to see me for weeks at this time, and she just slid a piece of paper across the table to me. And when I got the paper, I looked at the paper. It was a 357 revolver. It was a picture of it. This was a unique weapon. It's not like just a regular Glock that you see, and another person got a regular guy.

It had unique things on it there. I knew that it was that joint. So soon as I seen the pitch, I look back up at her just like I'm looking at you. And she said, is that your weapon? I said, nah, just slid it back because now I'm still dealing. I had a public defender at that time. I'm dealing with them like all of y'all of the system. She said, listen, Eon, you can tell me it's not the weapon, but I know who gave them this weapon.

I know where this weapon came from. I think this is the weapon. And he said, I think that your friend who gave them the weapon is telling on you. And he knows that you weren't at the hotel with the girl. and the police have already found the girl, and the girl said that you weren't there either. So now we got to relook at all this. So I say that to say that when I was in there fighting

and this is what I was doing and I realized that your friends are not really your friends, that people, oh, I said two potential co-defendants. And the other potential co-defendant just disappeared off into the night and never was identified. I mean, even this one that told was never identified as being a participant.

He revealed that he was a participant when he began to tell on me. But the other one, me and him still friends to this day. He's still alive to this day. He didn't go to jail for the situation. And I ended up pleading guilty to second-degree murder, and they dropped the assault with intent to kill for the guy that I shot in the face. I see. And they dismissed all the other violent acts that I had while I was on the run,

which none of those were charges to be charged. But you know, sometimes you suspect on such-and-such, such, and then you may be charged with something that's a complaint. But if you don't get an indict, if you're not indicted on it, it's no way, there's no vehicle to go to trial. Right. So. Okay.

Yeah. So it could be worse. Like, you didn't go there to kill anybody. You were there to rob people. Now, you know, I'll tell you what, if you were in a place like Oregon, you'd be doing all day. If you're from a honky state and you got caught, even though you went to- If I was in Virginia.

Yeah, right. Across the, yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Now, when you go to trial for a, we'll call it a riffraff. It's not a riffraff crime.

Somebody got killed. But it is a riffraff crime. It's not a federal... It's a... But it's a riffraff bullshit crime. When you go to federal court for a riffraff charge in D.C., does the same axiom hold true that it does in most federal cases? The feds win 99% of the time, or is it different?

Do you actually have action in a case against the feds when it's a riffraff crime caught in D.C.? Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. like do they have the same success rate in prosecution okay they don't that success ratio doesn't apply to dc superior court okay it may apply to dc federal u.s district court across the street and the only reason why i say i don't think it applies the superior court is because the u.s. attorney's office that prosecutes the cases in dc superior court only prosecute 65 percent of them and they only convict a lower ratio than that reason being is that the arrest that comes, whether it be a gun charge or a murder charge, comes from DC police.

And DC police have been notoriously known to violate the Fourth Amendment and all other type of pre-arrest rules. So that's the only, it's a technicality difference that is not the same. And also, before we lead that, murder is the hardest charge to convict them. And I'm sure you know why. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants to switch you to MintMobile today.

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Well, I think, as we all saw with the ditty case, I think sex crimes are pretty tough, too. No, I mean, to convict them. Like, you're saying it opposite.

I'm saying murders are the hardest charges to convictor. You say sex crimes are pretty hard, too. He got convicted of a sex crime. He just didn't convict it of RICO. Right. But notoriously, I mean, there was a ton of sex crimes within that RICO case that were so long ago and witnesses, because of memory and stuff like that. Like, I just know for fact that sex crimes, especially from the past, are very hard to, to prosecute generally.

He got caught for prostitution and some, he got caught with some bullshit. Transitation for prostitution. Man, yeah, but everything, all the shit did have washed him up, he beat. He only went down on two. That's, goes, that backs up my point. It's very hard to convict on sex crimes. None of the other charges were the sex crimes. He didn't rape nobody.

That wasn't an actual joke. DeRico is not a bona fide sex crime. So I'm not even disputing this with you or debating it with you. am I talking about it? I don't think he should have ever been charged with RICO. And if you look at all the elements of RICO, he was on RICO by him fucking self. I know. No, it was horseshit.

But anyway. Okay, so when you signed, you pled out and you got sentenced to 15 to life, did you, what did you think? Were people getting out with the people that had an indeterminate sentence like that, 15 to life, 20 to life,

were they getting paroled some of them? Or were they all just doing all day? I couldn't gauge that at that time for the people who was getting that time at that point in time. But I had done some juvenile time, and one of my juvenile bids, they did a program that's like a scared straight. It's not scared straight. But they actually bought convicts from Lawton, because Lawton was still open, to my probation office, right? And we met guys. And I never forget this dude.

I don't know his name to this day. But me and my buddies, we were sitting in the back. We're not taking none of this shit, sirs. We don't kidding anything about probation. Fuck this shit. We're waiting to get out. out of here, we're going to smoke some weed real quick for we got to go back to the shelter house.

We delinquents. But some type of way, you know how they say if I could just help one, there's one dude, although I still went to prison and spent 17 years in prison. His story got me. So he was saying, I mean, he looked good and healthy. He had on jeans because in Lawton in some place you could wear street clothes.

So he had on jeans and some Timberlands and a polo hoodie. And this is how we used to dress back then in the street. So I'm looking at him. And he's talking about he had a second degree murder conviction and, you know, he had been in jail 11 years, and he was coming home, and he only had 15 in life. I didn't listen to nobody else, but I remembered him. And I was like, damn, he got 15 in life on murder now.

I was 15. 15 years was life sentence to me back. Like, I kept, like, 15 years, oh, my God. When you're 16 years old, you can't comprehend. You know what I mean? I'm going to be 31 when I get out. I'm so old. I haven't even lived that long.

Yeah, I'm just going to stab somebody. Fuck it. So I remembered him, and I never forget. And my father used to come see me all the time at this point of time. You'd come see me bring me liquor, weed, like, pops used to make sure we were straight. When you were in jail? When I was in jail on this beef right here. I mean, my father is probably, we could go into that.

Old black guys are so cool. Oh, man. See, my father was a convict. Like, I met dudes when I got to prison that remembered he was bringing me pack at that time. But anyway, they offered me 20 to life at first because it was two shootings. Right. And they didn't connect the two shootings. I don't think they connected the two shootings.

is at first because the dude who started telling was telling in a way where he was separating himself from our drug dealing. You get what I'm saying? So he was saying that me and my friend, the deceit, no little Eon, and my friend the decedent sold Eon drugs. Technically he was lying. I called him for the drugs.

You digging what I'm saying? But in the process of him saying, I don't do nothing. I don't sell drugs. That's my friend and Eon is the one that he was dealing with it. He tried to kill both of us. So that was his story regardless. So in the process, of me taking a cop. I'm basically saying,

all right, since he wanted to tell the story like that, I don't know who shot him. But I take the cop to the second degree murder for the homicide. And that's how I end up doing it. It was kind of like my lawyer worked it out. Like, for real, for real. If you take a cop to this,

we'll drop this. And I end up getting the 15 of life for the homicide, which I was going to get for him anyway, because the eight-wick Curry 15 in life. That's like an attempted murder. I see. But I took the charge by myself

and nobody else went to jail. So it doesn't sound like, you were really thinking about paroling at the time. Like, you were like, fuck that. It's set so far in the future, 15 years. I had no understanding on parole, right? Let me try to go a little bit into my mindset, the psychological aspect of it.

My father, who had done time, he was so upset that I kind of had gotten to some street shit without no guidance. Like, you know what I mean? He never wanted that for me, but once I was in it and he came on from prison, he used to try to reel me in and I was just kind of gone

and I thought that he was on some old time or stuff but really wasn't but we could get into that another time but anyway the mega long story short when they kept offering me to 20 to life it put me in a position to be defensive like I ain't doing no fucking 20 to life

they're gonna give me number 30 to life and trial fucking let's go to trial so he kept saying ah you're right I don't want you to do 20 so in the process of negotiating back and forth for my attorney right talking back before she came back with a 15 of life deal And my father kind of inspired me to jump on it

Based on that I still had the other charge out there Depending on what you're talking about I was charged with murder first So when I keep saying the other charge out there I got the charge of shooting the witness in the face They ended up dropping that I think that they knew that that was going to be a hard charge To convict her

You know what I mean? But I pled guilty to that 15 of life My father kind of inspired me to do that And as far as when you say parole I never thought about making parole My real thing that I had an issue with And I spoke to my father about it many times

back then before I had to make that decision on my own was, can I survive long enough to make parole? And that's to be honest with you. And when you're in the feds? I mean, Lord, fuck the feds. Fuck the feds. I spent I spent seven years in Lorton and private prisons before I went to the feds and I seen more killings than Lorton in the private prisons than I seen in the

feds. Okay. So tell us about Lorton. Tell us about the private prison system because we haven't really had anybody in private prison, maybe one guy on this show that's told us about it. And it sounds like fucking. anarchy in there.

Go straight to the private prison? Tell us about your journey through the first seven years before you went to the actual federal. First and foremost, I got child as a adult while I was 16. In D.C., jail, they sent you to a place called

North One. North One is the two top tiers of the unit, and the bottom tiers is as a total separation and special handling. So you had your Wayne Perrys, your Markets, your Sean Branches, all these big-time dudes that got named front page of the paper type dudes

and they're in there charged with banging. So we're around already. I don't know why you would put juveniles around all the top killers. And I ain't talking about for the danger aspect. I'm talking about for the influential aspect. But this is who we grew up around. First time I've ever seen somebody get stabbed in that,

first time ever seen somebody stab to death, that was in the juvenile block, okay? Now, I spent about all together 13 months up there. I tried to escape from the jail up there and whipped the police, took the keys, popped all the cells. By the time they called us, they whipped us, they did us bad, and they sent us to Lorton. So now I'm in an adult prison without a conviction. Like, that's technically illegal. I'm not sentenced. I did have a conviction because I pled guilty already, but I wasn't sentenced

for pleading guilty until about 90 days later. So in Lorton, I mean, I'd have seen a dude get stabbed in the eye. And Lorton, I'd have seen a dude with his hands cuffed behind him, walking down a tear because it's a max where I was at. And a dude that stabbed him with, we basically call a harpoon, there's a broom with a knife tied to the end of it. And there's a catwalk about as far away from me as you are. Stuck him right here, kept him to the wall all the way over there where you had. I seen him die. Uh, Lord, and I could just go through a, like, Lorton was a killing ground. Like, I never seen nothing like it, but it was organized violence, right? And that's just a few thing. I mean, I got stabbed in my neck in a knife fight while I was in the GCJ. I got a big hole in

my neck. Yeah. How did you survive that? Were you leaking pretty bad, or did they obviously miss the artery? They did miss the artery. And, um, to be honest, since we're just talking like, some physical combat, I don't think the knife was the sharpest knife. Like, you know, a lot of these knives we see in the Feds are crewed, this wasn't really a real, it could have been a bone crusher, but that's not what it was. It wasn't a banger, yeah.

Yeah, like, if it was some of the shit that I seen in Lourke nor the Feds, because you did, like, I've seen, listen, I'm not saying that the Fizz is not valid. You know that's not true. I'm just saying some of the stuff that I seen before I got to the Feds, the Feds ain't have shit on it. Wow. You know what I mean? Now, let's get to the private

present. I was a couple of them. I was in New Mexico. I was in Arizona. I was in the northeast Ohio correction facility to CCA. Now, hang on for one sec. How long were you out Lorton before? And why did they send you to the private prisons? All right. I was in Lorton from, I got there, August. Okay, I was in Lotton from 17 to 20 years old. Mm-hmm. And max security. That's called DeWall. And the only reason I got sent out of it is because Congress came out with the Federal National Revitalization Act, where Congress changed many things pertaining to the budget and the governance of the District of Columbia.

Because remember, Congress has sole authority over the District of Columbia, which is why I believe the District of Columbia will never be a state. It's in the Constitution. But when they changed this, part of that document, that law, was to close the D.C. Department of Corrections.

And in the process of closing the D.C. Department of Corrections, they had to start shipping us out. And it was just my load of night. It was just my time to go in the summer of 1990. A day before my 20th birthday, I got sent to O. Youngstown, Ohio. Were you happy to get the fuck out of Lorton? I was happy to get out of the wall. I was uncertain where I would go.

Keep in mind, D.C. prisoners at this time and at some of the other times in history, we are the only nomadic prisoners that have roamed the whole country on buses going to prisons and jails that some people have never heard of. When I say some people, I mean myself, like, I went to Estancia in New Mexico. Yeah. know. The only thing I know about Mexico is Santa Fe. Like, I went to Estancia in New Mexico and did time there. Were you ready to bang? Like, were you ready, like, as soon as you hit the yard? In the feds? Just, or your whole journey, like, were you with the mess? To be honest, no, I was with the shit. I mean, until I changed and started living for myself,

yeah. The juvenile block breeds a mentality that's the closest thing I can explain to you as a gang mentality. What I mean by that is even in the juvenile block, in some sense of ignorance in North One in the juvenile block, which is still adult jail. I'll be mixing people up because I say juvenile. For me, I was still called the juvenile, but I was charged as an adult along with 50 other 16 and 17 year olds that are housed in an adult jail, DC jail. Now, the left side of the tip, we call that top left. The right side of the tip, we call it top right. We got to beefing with each other in there like we were blocks and hoods. It's a mentality of the young bull.

You know what I mean? So we had already got into that. So when you say was you with the shit, yeah. I mean, and for me, going into violent places, a lot of us, especially on the right side, we had packs, do-a-die-packs that no matter what happened. Fuck the older dudes. Fuck that Lord and shit.

Fuck them. Remember we had this conversation about the D.C. blacks? Now, I'm never going to say we was like, fuck the old homies or the D.C. blacks. But some guys that came before. us had those jailhouse reputations of sexual assault and different type of things like that. I've heard that. I've heard that.

Thank you for bringing that up. I've heard, we've heard gruesome stories about straight up gang rape perpetrated by the D.C. blacks from other people that have done real Fed time. I think they line. Is that true? First and foremost, I think they line. And I'm not going to say that they ain't never seen nothing like that. But raping federal prison is not even a thing no more. Like, it's too many willing participants.

Now, back in the 70s and state joints, and it probably in the 50s. This is from the 90s that we heard this in the early 2000s. It's not no bunch of no rape going on about no D.C. dudes or no other dudes in the fairs. Rape is a state prison thing. Maybe back in the day it was a little bit more, but I've been in, I've been in 12, 13 prisons. Rape is not even no big thing in the feds. Most people hold hands with boys now. Right, right.

Like, you don't have, I'm not saying that young. kind of rape though like in my opinion. I'm not saying that ain't rape. I'm not saying that's not. But I'm saying stories that you hear from Lucasville, stories you hear from Attica, stories you hear from the Q, stores you hear from Angola with people on two blankets overdue's and three, four dudes going there and do wah-wah.

You know, that shit don't happen no more. I was there. Ain't nobody throwing no blanket. Not in the U.S. pen. Right. Ain't nobody throwing no blanket over no three-four dudes taking some little curly head, long hair, light skin boy. That shit ain't happening.

But they exaggerate. They line. Damn. Has it happened? I never seen it, but I heard plenty stories. Not just, Lorden. In the 60s and the 70s, things like this happened in all state prison. It wasn't even a big federal thing.

So these dudes will be coming home. I'm not going to say nobody lying. I'm not going to say nobody ain't seen this. But I can tell you from Edward to the Victorville to Hazard and the Beaumont. Ain't no bunch of raping going on. They exaggerating. And I'm going to just leave that dick. Does the, is there a stigma?

in the feds amongst the blacks, the D.C. blacks, about having sex offenders in their car. Like the way that the whites and the Mexicans will run somebody off instantly if they find out that bad paperwork. That's what they said. But all the white boys that was on a compound with me had boys and had faggers that they was prostitutes. So, like, when dudes talk that shit, I don't even know where they get that from. I'm talking about your paperwork. Talk about your paperwork. On your paperwork? Yeah, I'm talking about if you have bad paperwork. If you're talking about paperwork, then that's still going to be prison to prison. If a dudes and Beaumont and they checking, we're just talking D.C. right now.

If dudes and Beaumont checking paperwork for that, which is a serious junk, especially at the time when it was bloody Beaumont, I wouldn't care who you was if your paperwork wasn't right. You had to go on hold. But we're talking specifically about sex offenders. Yeah, you're going to go on hold. But Petersburg is a freak joint. Why would they check your paperwork at Petersburg when Petersburg is a freak junk?

Marion is a freak junk right now. Marion is not the old Murray. Murion is a sex offender junk. Do you think anybody, D.C., New York, California, you think anybody checking paperwork in Marion, anybody checking paperwork at, what's the other, the Petersburg, too, is a junk for freaks. And what I mean by freaks is chomoles, pedophiles, all these, like,

so I don't want to make that example because that's clearly not what you're asking. So let's stay on the penitentiary. Most dudes that got bad paperwork in a bloody penitentiary, I ain't talking about them. I ain't going to call Allenwood a pussy penitentiary, but Allenwood was like a program penitentiary. It had certain dudes there and you could get got there, but Allenwood had a strong Muslim population,

a strong program population. Hazleton and Beaumont at different times, they was off the chain. If we're talking D.C., even a D.C. do paperwork on how to be right amongst that circle, but remember this. We could take Hazel and a Coleman, for an example. You might have red side, blue side.

So if all the thorough D.C. niggas is on the red side, D.C. dudes is on the red side. Who can control what's? going on on the blue side. And a lot of these dudes, a lot of these dudes that come on podcast and tell these stories about DC guys being robbers and rapists. They're DC guys that robbers and rapers. Let's get that out of the way. My question was, do thorough D.C. Black cars allow dudes with bad paperwork. No. Absolutely. No. And it's only if you're talking about the thorough ones. You get it? Like a lot of people say, I've been around D.C.

dudes. And they, they was in three rivers. Three rivers is a dropout yard. They said, I've been around DC dudes and DC dudes do this, then Terry Hut, Terry Hut does a dropout, y'all. Don't tell me you've been around DC dudes unless you've been around the men. That's what we call them. Right. If you've been around a bunch of suckers, a bunch of fuck boys, a bunch of faggots, a bunch of dudes that fuck with kids,

you ain't been around no men anyway, so don't have any, don't be in no conversation with me. Right. Okay, so in that sense, it's exactly similar to how the other race... Any men. Black, white, or Spanish. You dig what I got you? I got you. Okay. So, yeah, so you leave Lorton.

Tell us about the private prison experience. I think this is fascinating. All right, so they came in the jailhouse, the cell block, four block, about four, five o'clock one day. Now, through the newspapers and through other loads, I hate to say it like that, but that's probably how the slave ships was back in the thing. They probably knew that, yeah, man, I don't want to go.

But it just hit me. Yeah. But we knew I was on the top tier, the rock. sadly I was in the same cell my father had been in 20 years prior like yeah but I mean 18 cell on the rock that's the same cell my father was in when he was there but you can see from four block into two block across the little wreck yard two block top 10 bottom till had been emptied out so we seen them coming there with the chains and everything get up bobo woo it's real loud really aggressive we don't know where they're going you never know where you're going back then so that day I believe that was a Saturday for us a first Friday or Saturday, because I got to visit the next day. My grandmother came to see me the very next day they lived in Ohio.

They came in there, and they said, bang on the door, everybody just pack up, get naked, stripped down, blah, blah, blah, they took us to the gym, and put us on the bus. Now, now I'm saying that in the fast way, but the whole lot of stuff was going on, this was kind of like, man, I never seen that. It reminded me the movie Skyface

when they was in that immigration part and it was just a bunch of wild stuff going. That's how much commotion was going on. I'm 19 at the time. I'm still young. I never been nowhere else, so I don't know what to expect. And I'm actually a little. little apprehensive because I'd heard a bunch of fad stories about some of the stuff.

Man, you didn't just talk about, right? I never seen it, so I don't know if it's an exaggeration or what. My mind all over the place is what I'm trying to tell you. First place I get to is Ohio, Youngstown, Ohio. They lock us down just when we got off the bus. And then the next day they let us out for what's called orientation, right? First day in orientation, two dudes that had B from Lorton and D.C., so crudy, D.C., DC sent everybody to have problems with each other.

They just emptied them into this joke. Like, I'm surprised more people didn't die than did die. While I was there, two people died, and they had about 13 attempted murders. All right. But the very first day, right in front of the war and everybody, two dudes that had problems from Lowe and went straight to work right this soon as I got off the bus.

Now, I heard stories of that, and this was just the first time I saw it. I saw it many times after, but I never seen dudes stabbing each other in front of the administration. That was the first time I seen. And then after I saw that, I realized that, because I got into some shit about three weeks later, but I realized that my survival or my safety was predicated upon myself. It wasn't the PO's not going to help me.

The administration not going to help me. And I realized, I mean, Lord was vicious. But when they start sending us places where the people didn't know how to deal with us, and what I mean deal with us is that these people thought that even when they seen this work right here, that they can stop that, stop, sit down, get that. you got to bring a baton, the mace, the uniform, the turtles. Like, that's not how, I know there's a lot of men from other places, but that's not how dudes that slinging that knife going to operate.

So after that, man, another thing that I seen up there that was wild is that they didn't have any limitations or rules on how they use all these ride tactic toys. I ain't even going to call them. They had so many toys for us, the shielded buzz, Like they, like a guy hit ass naked coming out of the shower with their electric shield. And I ain't do nothing. They was just beefing with us.

What I mean by us is the D.C. guys. Yeah. The same people that the feds call us D.C. blacks. And the CCA, they weren't calling us D.C. blacks. They was calling us Lorton niggers or D.C. prisoners. Okay? And their beef was just that. So I got not just, everybody who was in that unit, they dropped gas on us from the ceiling.

they ended up getting hit with a lawsuit. One of our legal Eagle jailhouse lawyers filed a class action lawsuit for a lot of monies. I don't know how much money it was, but even people like me, just the regular little people load down on a totem pole, got like $1,500. Now, that's not no money, but if you can say there, hundreds of people getting $1,500, that was a couple dollars. They dropped, they shot gas at you or they dropped it, like grenades or something. And they hit the ground and they spent.

I mean, it's so crazy, guess what really pissed them all. they had never really dealt with no Lorton guys Lorton guys, I don't care Lorton guys different man Like we bred different In the way in which we did with the police My homie started wrapping tiles Around their face

Grabbing the joints And it's a little slot like this That mail can come out of the bubble And we was throwing the grenades Back into the bubble Boom, boom boom All in the bubble So for people don't know

What the bubble is That's the command center In the middle of the unit Where they control everything from But these dumb people With this private prison built a slide in it so you could slide mail or soap or paper through it. And it was big enough to slide the grenades back through it.

Wow. You guys are like Palestinians, dude. In that environment, that's how that was because they was doing things. I mean, technically, they didn't know how much gas to drop on us. Like, people could have died that day. Well, that's the thing. Private prisons, they're, yes, they pay the staff less because they operate for profit. So they don't have unions.

they don't have the same safety regulations because all that costs money. So these people are trying to keep their expenses as low as possible as any business person would do. So I've also heard you can fucking pay these guys. I've heard drugs are rampant in private prisons. I heard it's easy to flip the guards. I ain't been in one in 20 years.

But we, but I'm going to just talk about that one. I'm not going to speak like I got an expert opinion on how it is now. But from my experience in private prisons, private prisons always cut corners. I think since, you know, the bottom line is about the investor who makes money. Everything will get cut short.

But shout out to my man, Gator, and Titus and all these guys that were in a private prison in Tennessee, Mason, Tennessee. They took over the whole prison, tore the prison up, got inside the bubble, so much so that they sent every D.C. prisoner out of that prison to Leavenworth, Turrey Hut, and different places. Now, this is before me. This is like the late 80s, 88, 89. So CCA, which is why I think they treated us like they treated us when we got to be. at the Youngstown, Ohio in 97 because they had already...

The dude that was the chief of security, this name was Warfiel. I never forget this black man name. He had been in Tennessee where my homie gayed and Ron and buddy love and all these dudes took that prison over. This is in the news. Like anybody that wanted, they could check this.

They took the prison over and the prison ride and got into the command centers. I mean, if you're on a command center, pause for a second. If you're on a command center in any one of these prison jones, you have gotten into the nervous central system of the... you have taken over the prison.

You can open the doors. Right. Like, a lot of times it arrives, dudes take over the prison like Alica, San Quentin, on the yard. Right, right. They were inside the bubble,

which, as we call it. Run for it, guys. Bing. Yeah. All right, so, okay, so when you were there. When I was there, the chief of security

from those, that prison in Mason, Tennessee, was there. He was on overkill with us. Right. That's why the shells got out. They had the taser that you could shoot, like the harpoon.

Yeah. They had all type of tactical toys, man. They had things that I thought you were only supposed to have, like, if you're getting out of black trucks and you're LAPD. They had that type of stuff there. And then another thing that occurred in the private prisons, since they want to, since, you know, you mentioned it and they want to cut calls, the security was so laxed, like 13 dudes cut a hole in the fence and walked out.

One of them got almost the candidate, like, top, like Northern New York. CCA, Youngstown, Ohio. I never seen nothing like it. That's wild. I remember I had a visit coming. This is one thing. thing that was wild to me. Now, I'd have been in Lorton.

Lorton is a killing ground. This is not me saying it's the Washington Post documented this. I had a visit coming one Saturday. Ohio was so vicious. I cut the TV on while I'm waiting for the visit. Youngstown News come out. Now the south side of Youngstown, Ohio is like a black area. Some whites there, too, but it's like major black area.

In the era and time, when we was there, they had drug-related killings all the time. It reminded me of Southeast D.C. Yeah. I'm watching the news. I'm watching it. So boom, the news come on. It's been a shooting in Youngstown. They say that. The very next clip is there's been a stabbing death and a non-fatal stabbing at Youngstown, Ohio, CCA. I said, we ain't getting no visit. Like, you'll cut the news on killing information from the prison. In your own prison. I thought that was crazy. So you hadn't even heard of the killing in your own facility?

I see it on the news. Like, we laying in the cell. Holy shit. I'm waiting up telling my cellie. And I'm waiting for that. I'm waiting for tree. And my cellie waiting for my tree. We like, brothers, it ain't like he working me or nothing, but I'm the one that's coming off this day. So I said, bro, she don't be lying, bro. She's like, she's coming. She's coming. Slum dropped it off his day. I see she coming.

a prison that's only DC. And what is a prison that's only DC? DC dudes, be killing DC dudes. Like, a lot of these dudes tell these stories, they only see how we behave in the Feds. They never seen how DC dudes behave with DC dudes. Well, you killed a DC dude on the streets. That don't count.

Like, that homie shit don't mean that in the streets. Like, I hate to say it like that. It might mean something to those of us who them build a calm brotherhood or Bono. We had some comratery. before or after, but in Rome you do as the Romans do, it's every man for itself in the streets unless something like prison or the army or sports

have united you. So yeah, I did kill a dude that's from D.C. in the streets, but I didn't do that in the fairs. But in Lorton, me and other D.C. dudes that had beef, fighting, stabbing everything. Yeah. Like, that unity that everybody seems to fear so much in the fairs, I think it's only by necessity

because I've seen dudes go to war together in the fairs and come back to Lord and then kill each other. Wow. Jesus. Yeah, because you have to fight somebody, I suppose. And when it's just D.C. dudes, hey, you're my enemy again. You know how prison go. Okay.

My shoes look better than yours. I got more tobacco than you. Did you ever get tried in there? Did you have to keep something on you for protection? I mean, I'm a paranoid guy today. So I kept a knife. Like, you got like, we, I'm from that school of thought from D.C. guys where is, though, that you wake up before the door is open.

Your shoes already on. your boots already on, and you should never have to ask nobody for a weapon. Like, this ain't high school. This is the penitentiary. But how do you procure something? Like, if you just get to- I was taught when I first got to prison and the juvenile, shout out of my man, Andre Brown. He told me how to make a knife out of anything.

You can put me in, like, them escape rooms out here that people go to, and I can make a knife. So you, well, you take something from your bunk or anything you see out of made. The first knife I ever made in jail, I made it off the border of the mirrors. They had these fake things that reflected. They called mirrors. And in some old prisons they still there. DC jail, they don't exist because of people like myself and others. But they had these metal borders that go around this pretend mirror.

If you can get another tool and for some reason they was always there, my homie gave me an ice pick. And the ice pick were made out of the things that you push to make the sink water run. If you get to the back of it, and I keep saying, if you can, you can always get into the mob closet, break them off. That's your first piece. You sharpen that now you got an ice pick. Ice pick really.

I've seen dudes die with an ice pick, but the ice pick really just gonna keep a motherfucker off your ass. I'm saying that in the most gruesome way because that's how I was taught. But you could take the ice pick, and the ice pick can almost turn into a screwdriver or a prided tool. They used to have these big foam trays

that they used to feed us on. These things are dangerous. I've seen dudes get their head split open with them. So I would use it like the chisel and the hammer. I take the ice pick, and I use the big tray, and I bang the ice pick off of these little things that I like screws that they make that you have to have special tools to turn them. So even if you acquire

a screwdriver or an island wrench or anything like it, you still couldn't do it. But they had grooves in it for the special tool that they used. And I took the ice pick. And this was a practice. It wasn't no technology that I exclusively had. And I take the tray and you bang. It's tedious. But you know when you pop the doors the next morning, your man that's coming to see you got a knife. If you're in a situation like that, you would do this all day. And I did this for like 16 hours. Wow. And it's loud. Bang, bang. And you keep them out. You only turn it a quarter of or something every time. And I did that all the way around the whole Joan. And at the end, you get three pieces of metal and one bullshit piece of metal. And I gave you two of my homies, two pieces of metal. I kept a big piece of metal,

and I began shopping. And that was my first night. Wow. And that's, you said it's like that, it's like a foot long. Only in the only one, the one that I chose as an example to describe to you is a board of a mirror that's about 12 inches this way and 10 inches that way. So you get a 10 inch or 10 inch or 12 inch, and then you get a half of the part that you break. Like one of them comes up and it's going to be blunt. You know, I seen a dude shopping one, but as a kid, I didn't think that you could do it, but you can't sharpen it. And that's not something you carry around every day, like when you go to yard.

That's just something to defend your- Bangor. That's a, well. That's to defend your house if somebody runs in, right? That's a good way to say it as an adult. But as a kid, I didn't even know the difference between what you toting what you had. Yeah, as 25-year-old and a 30-year-old convict, I had little, shit that was in the yard, little shit you could curry in your drawers, little shit you could bury.

I didn't know that it was a difference. So back then, the big one was the only one I had. Wow. You got a sword right off the jump. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't know no difference back then. But I will tell you this. I've never, I'm not one of them jailhouse dudes who say, oh, I was killing motherfuckers and it. I met dudes that got bodies, one, two, and three, right? In jail? In jail. And the point that I'm bringing that up, shout out to my man, freeway. He passed away. But he got a, man. Man, he got a accidental murder. I don't feel as though I'm shitting on him by saying that. He stabbed a dude one time and I don't believe he meant to kill him.

Somebody else could debate that amongst my circle, but I believe he took some shoes from a dude, the dude came to him to see him about the shoes and in the process of him dealing with the shoes that he took. You know how some people say, ain't no talking. Instead of him doing some talking, he took the shoes, he slunk. Boom, he hit him one time.

But they got died, but he killed him with a small-ass knife. And I talked to him many moons later. And I said, bro, like, why did you take off running if it was like that? Not running like a cowboy running to get away. He said, I don't know. He said the knife was so small that when I hit him, I felt something when it came out.

I just knew it was badder than I thought. And this was his explanation. But I say all that to say to them little knives, I don't know if it's because you don't see them or they lead such a bad damage to you when they hit you. Like, those are the knives that I've seen to take people lives. All right, class, settle down. Today's lesson is on the Arco Rewards app. Try to stay with me.

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At participating locations, terms and conditions apply. Yeah, I mean, if you hit somebody the right way, if you hit him the wrong way sometime like he did. Like if you stab somebody with a knife, knife, you don't know what's going to happen. No. Like out of scene, dude, like, I got a, I got a homie who I'm not going to say his name,

and he got one of them jailhouse joints. And he was convicted of it, but it was precision. Like, he specifically hit him, and according to his, he went to trial, the prosecutor put up a diagram of a body and pointed to it and said, that he had pictures of this diagram in his cell with circles around arteries. Oh, my God.

He's like Bill the Butcher from, uh, that's what the prosecutor said. Remember Bill the Butcher? From what, uh, help me out here. Yeah, escaped from New York, King of New York. King of New York. No, no, that was, that was Frank White from, from, uh, Bill the butcher from gangs in New York. Oh, gangs in New York. That's just a kill shot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's stabbing the pig. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Holy shit, dude. Like that. He had a, he had a, he had a, he had a, he had a, they found some type of, uh, A picture in his cell, and it wasn't like he circled it. It was whatever the picture came from and it had arteries like, this is your liver, this is your kidney, this is your heart. Shit like that. How many private prisons did you go to?

How long were you there in the private prison system? And by the way, tell us why you wouldn't just go straight to the feds after Lorton. Like, how do they decide, is it based on bed space? I think it's on where your number come up back because keep in mind, D.C. had to funnel about 10,000 prisoners into the federal system. Like between 8,500 and 10,000 because you're going to always have, and I'm still on point with what you're saying,

but you're going to always have about 1,800 to 2,000 guys at D.C. jail. Those guys are mostly unconvicted. They're going to have to go somewhere. Now, put that into effect with Lorton holding between 7,000 and 8,000 on a good day or a bad day,

sometimes more, in eight different prisons that's called Lorton. Lorton is a part of the D.C. what was now defunct, the D.C. Department of Corrections, the prison system, but it was about eight prisons. And they select you to go to prisons at that time when they was closing it based on certain, sometimes they just didn't kid. If you had a bunch of time like most of us on the buses, they called us the dirty 40s. That's how we pulled up. Two buses of 40. Now, those people, you get said anyway, my first stop was Colorado, then 11 were they're just bouncing us around.

But why did you go to the private prisons first, even though you were sentenced to federal prison? I wasn't sentenced to federal prison. I was sentenced to 15 in life under the custody of the U.S. Attorney General. So the U.S. Attorney General can send you anywhere. But technically, I was local, so I got sent to Lawton. Which, if none of these population, congressional,

bureaucratic problems wouldn't that have occurred, I would have stayed in Lawton the whole time until I made parole unless I became so unmanageable that Lawton wanted to send me to the feds. I see. Okay. So is that eventually what happened? No. What eventually happened is that the National Revitalization Act came out

and it killed the D.C. Department of Corrections and all budgets that would pay for such. So they had to send us to the feds because technically you are sent us to the U.S. Attorney General any time you are convicted in D.C. and federal court or Superior Court, so technically, at any time they could have sent us to the Fed, They just did it because they were closed in Lorton

and there was nowhere else to house us. Okay, so when you went to these private prisons in New Mexico and Ohio, that's technically Lorton. No. Like they consider that? No. Technically, you're already in transit for the feds. I see.

So it's, my question was, why didn't they just shoot you straight to the feds? Why did they have to send you to these private? They didn't shoot me straight to the feds because I got convicted of a local crime. So I suppose to stayed in Lorton, but Lorton closed as a prison. I get that. I get that. Why did you go to the private prison? first and not the federal prisons. It's what I want to know. All right. I went to the private

prisons first because they could not take 10,000 people at one time. So for years, many people, many people languished in private prisons. Okay. So that basically they were just, that makes sense. You are in the custody of the feds there. The fans had already taken control of us. Technically, they already had control of us because you sent us to the attorney general. But the fairs made sure that these private people were paid along the way until we got there. Like, now, It's still a couple of D.C. guys in some private place right now, but not for overcrowding, but because they've been held by this place or some type of way they might have had an immigration thing in there journey.

Like for example, I wrote a book about a guy named Panama. I got this book called Money and Everything. Panama did so much time. He had 100 and some years in D.C. Life centers in New York. He ended up getting back on all these things, right? That's a whole other story. But at the end, he had to go back to Panama.

but when he was released from New York, he still had to go do something like 30 days in ice. So, you know, there's some black people that get caught up with the ice thing, and that was one of those situations. And some people may still be in ice joints. Ice uses private prisons as well, so that's my point. Got it.

Okay, so the private prisons were literally just a stopover while they were waiting for space to open up in proper federal prisons. And these private prisons receive money, all that funding comes from the feds. The feds in D.C. depending on when, but yeah. Right, right. Even when you're saying D.C., you're still saying the fares

because the budget comes from Congress, so that's a word game. So if you catch a case in a private prison, that's going to fall under federal jurisdiction, at least in your case, right? Not always. I got a buddy to kill two dudes in that private prison in Ohio, and he got 20 years in Ohio,

and Ohio was so much so that didn't want to deal with it, they let the time run together for two murders. He got 20 for one murder, 20 for the next murder. They let the time run together. And then they say, oh, by the way, we're going to let that 20 years run with the 20 years you're doing to D.C. Just get the fuck out of Ohio. So don't worry about it, man. You're cool.

You want to come home now. First degree murder? No, he had multiple murders from D.C. when he was 17. But by the time he was 27, he killed two more people in prison. That's what I mean. The prison murders usually get shot to death row. Like, they don't. So he's just doing concurrent time on two first of degree murders in prison.

Like, we're not taking you to trial number. But they looked at his paperwork like, man, you got forever in D.C. All right, we're going to give you 20 years. He went and killed another person. He gave him 20 more years. And he didn't do it at once. Listen, he caught the body. The first one, right?

Went to the hole. Caught another body in the hole. Years later, they took a cop to the charge and they sent him to ADX and he'd been in ADX. You know what ADX is, right? And he'd been in ADX for 26 years since then. Okay. So he technically never did a time for it. So he could have come home, but he had to kill another cop.

He had to kill another person. I told you there was a lot of bullshit going on. They had his house with our enemies. This guy, he don't play. He don't play. I'm not saying he don't play because he a killer. He's a killer by survival standards. He's not a predator.

Can you get it? It sounds like he doesn't play, and that's the reason he kills. I mean, it's the justice system is so fucking. He's not going to see this. I promise you that. He's going to see it. He's about to get out. In Florence?

He's going to get out. He's back in Virginia now going to court. Wow. Listen, everybody from where I'm from and around the church. I got to have him on, dude. I want to talk to somebody who's been in ADX. Florida. Oh, ho.

Oh, ho. I got a dude by the name of Fly. Did 50 years, 26 in Florence, Colorado. Now he's moving around. You need to talk to him. He was in Colorado, Florence, for 26 years. And all together, at one stretch, he did 50 years. But he did 26 in Florence, Colorado.

Well, look, a lot of these guys are very lucky because, and the justice system is so inconsistency. Even the American justice system, in my view, is one of the best in the world, despite all its flaws. But the sentencing, it's so inconsistent. It's so unbelievably scattered. It depends on where you are. If a place has budget, if a place like Ohio is just sick of guys from D.C., two bodies in prison would get you the electric chair a lot of states. But they just said, we're so tired of you being on our state. Yeah, you know what?

just finish out your 20 and get the fuck out of here. You know, a lot of people just get so unlucky and then very lucky. It's fascinating. Okay, so this makes total sense now. You're a stopover. You know when you're in the private prisons that sooner or later, your ticket's going to get called and you got to go to the feds. Do you realize that? In our situation, I think we all knew that.

Okay. Maybe somebody who just get sent there from their county, we knew that the only reason we are not in Lorton no more is because Lorton is closed. and we knew that at some point, we didn't know if it was going to be this year or the next year, we would be in the feds. It took me three years to get to the feds. Were you happy to finally go to the feds? Only at the time, because I spent 13 months

in Sussex, Sussex, Sussex 2, death row was in Sussex 1. And the Virginia state system where I had, that's the closest I can imagine to being enslaved. Like, they got black people on horses with the overseer has to. treat you worse than white people, at least when I was there. Wow.

Wow. They hated D.C. dudes, and I don't know if that came from the way they was trained. They might have trained them to believe that we were so bad that when we came, they treated us so bad. Right. That's what Banky Pound, who's on here. He describes a lot of those Virginia prisons as modern-day plantations. Shout out to Banky Pound. We had many conversations where we compared to compared.

Like, I knew that he had done like 30 years out there and just on social. meeting we was kicking it, but one day we kind of got, you know, a little more intimate in our conversation. And I said, damn, Banu, you did all that time out there. I said, you know, I was in this prison and that prison and this prison. He said, oh, I ain't know that y'all came. He said, yeah, when I got the Sussex, too, he said, y'all was just leaving. And he recalled the time. And I was one of the last D.C. prisons lead at prison. And that's how we kind of clicked, because he was like, D.C. was. I mean, we kind of busted Joan open because they treated us so bad that by them treating us so bad,

they got to do more work. By the time Virginia came, they was relaxed. They was like, all right, this Virginia. We're going to let them like, I think we opened up the prison for them

because Bangy was like, even when y'all left, dude gave me a color TV. Like, I left three, four color TVs behind. You couldn't take them to the Feds. And the only reason I had so many is because when my homies was leaving, they was leaving the TVs with me.

Okay, so tell us about the Feds. Where'd you go first? My first stop in the Feds. Well, that's kind of funny. All right, my first stop on a compound in the Feds is Lee County, but that was not really my first stop in the feds because as I was traveling through these private prisons

when they were shutting down the private prisons, they were still sending us to the feds as another holdover like they was doing us already. So I left Arizona in 1998. My first stop was Colorado. But those stops, I don't really consider them real stops. And what I mean by that is that we stay in the hole. So boom, I was in the hole in Colorado.

Now, I do tell guys when I talk to my old timers that I've been to Leavenworth because we stayed in a thing is called Building 31. I forgot the name of that jump. We stayed in one of these old parts of the building,

parts of the prison. But I stayed there for so long that it was like we did a bid. This is when Leavenworth was really, really the hot house. When you get off the bus and you go into the R&D, the R&D got a little air condition,

as soon as you leave out of there, it touch you. When I'm saying it touch you, like you feel it. It's almost like it grabs you at the hot house in Leavenworth. So anyway, we stayed there. How so? Because it was just so violent?

No, heat. Oh, wow. Willie heat. It's a different form of heat in the summer. Like the name of the prison is the hot house. I thought that that was from some stuff like you just mentioned. Maybe it's so much drama as this. Nah, I went there in August.

I've never been to, and I've been in some prisons where they had no, Lord didn't have AC. The heat is intense. I don't know. It's almost like they got a ball or something, some type of something that's close to that front door. But anyway, I went to Leavenworth, and I stayed in the whole,

in Leavenworth for a minute, and then I went to, and when I'm saying, I, this is two buses of 40. Right. It's not just... All D.C. guys from the private prison. Right. It's a warehouse bus.

And we went to Memphis, the whole bus. And from Memphis, we went to Petersburg, stayed in Petersburg for a weekend, and then we ended up in Sussex, too. Why did we end up in Sussex, too? because D.C. was just contracted with anyone that could hold us.

So Sussex 2 became our last transit. I didn't know it, but we would end up being there for 13 months waiting for placement in the feds. And I didn't know that Lee County, that's the United States Penitentiary in Virginia, Big Stone Gap, Penitent, Gap somewhere, almost Tennessee. It wasn't open yet, so I didn't realize. I'm probably glad that I didn't know this. We were going to stay there to the prison was open. Wow.

Yeah, and just so happened they came to get us, and when you asked was I happy, I was so pleased to get out of this one prison, bro. Yeah. So you guys... This prison is ran like a jail and I had already been in prison and anybody should be able to understand. That prison was ran like a jail. You can't take a guy out of prison where he's already learning, working, programming, exercising,

and then put him in a jail. So you guys opened up Lee Prison. Lee County, yeah. I would say that and that's how we say in the offense. We opened it up. Like when I say we opened it up, there were no fences there when we got there. There were no metal detectors.

So does it... It smells like new. Smells like new paint. Yeah, and it's way out in the hills like they blew the mountain up and made a gap. Right. And it's nothing but grass and pine. That's all you smell. Like, we couldn't even listen to no music for months.

We was just listening to Mountain Music. We couldn't even get a radio station out there. So, and was that a USP? That's the penitentiary. How do they house you with no fences and no metal detectors? When I say that, maybe I'm talking fast again, there's walls in gun town. That's what the penitentiary is. But now they have built fences and sections inside penitentiaries

to further control the population. Of course. Of course. So don't, don't, don't get too much in what I'm talking about the fence. I'm talking about the control fences. I got you. You don't need no fences around a penitentiary because they built with walls. Okay. So how long were you there?

What was Lee? What was opening a prison like? Ah, that's good question. That's the first prison I ever. Well, Youngstown, we opened it, but that don't, that was a big mistake. So that, I don't think that fall in the context of what we said. The first prison that I opened would have been Lee County. What comes with that?

And the feds is a little different because even though it's a new joint, you know, when the feds opened up a new prison, they send workers, COs and wardens and administrators from other places. So they're not really slacking like the Youngstown place was. They hire people straight from Youngstown that ain't know nothing and they had a couple people over them training them. Didn't know how to deal with us. But in Lee County, what I learned there was that first and foremost, whoever gets to a prison first is there, y'all. I learned that. I'm not going to say I learned it the hardware.

I learned it hands on because, and whoever gets to a prison first pretty much run a yard if they can control the y'all. They send about 600 D.C. dudes there for about a year, it was like Lord.

Imagine 600 D.C. motherfuckers. I would be so scared and I'm not racist, but I'd be like, that's a lot of black people. See, you still got some stereotypes in your head.

Of course I do. I'm old school. Right, but if you met me in a compound, And we'd have been cool, then my friends would have been cool and blah, blah, blah, but go ahead. Okay, so, and as you said, it was like Lorton. It was, that's why opening up, they say opening up a prison is the most dangerous. When I said, like Lorton, we would beefing with each other.

Right. That's, that's a, any time you put D.C. dudes together and a big number like that, it's going to be infighting. Right. I don't know why I can't explain it in a way. And that's just one thing. But another thing that I learned being there is that, And I learned this in Ohio. When you're the first people at the prison,

you got to get all the metal. You got to get all the nides and shit. All the potential, you get them first. Like, at first, I didn't understand it. Old Time had to him. He said, if you don't get it, somebody else get it. Right. So that's one thing that we did.

And another thing about opening a prison is that I learned that you can kind of, if you got convicts around. I ain't talking about convicts like what I was at that time. I was just a 25-year-old learning, filling my weight. Now, keep in mind, me at 25 years. is different than your average. At 25, I've been in jail nine years. I'm a different 25.

But you got real convicts there and law library people. And they say, listen, y'all focus on the drugs and the weapons. We need law books. We need to, like, they focus on some of the more important things. That's why I really had myself, I got a lot of respect for the older homies that came before me. I mean, that's how I actually created my platform, D.C. Blacks, to respect those guys and to throw them a bone back in the joint. as people forgot about them.

But nevertheless, those guys got certain classes, Arabic, English, law 101, things that I would have never thought. At 25, I didn't care about it. And I didn't go to trial. So I didn't even realize that the law was important to me until about that time. Like, I got out of jail, which I'm sure we're going to get into that. From bumping into these old, damn, that's crazy. From bumping into these old guys at the law library.

Okay. Was it wild to now you're in the feds to be around such strict racial segregation? I'm sure you saw the Spanish guys, the Mexican guys come in, and I'm sure you saw the white guys come in. Was that pretty eye-opening to see, like, the discipline and the kind of strict rules around race that exist in federal prison? I like that question. I had never been around it.

So we misunderstand it a lot. And I think, for real, a lot of times, DC guys and other guys just never get to know each other because we get off on a bad foot because we had cultural clashes. Like, a man like you, right? not at this age, neither. But at a younger age, just a white man could walk in, and I'm going to automatically see you as either opposition.

Or administration. Opposition or lick. Either way, I could be wrong either way. But in our head, I ain't talking about your bona fide man from D.C. that went to the feds from the jail. I'm talking about dudes that have been poisoned and contaminated or corrupted by the Lawton experience. A Lawton person is a person.

that if you're not they buddy, you don't want to, a D.C. guy don't want a a Lorton guy around. That's the problem when a lot of these dudes come on these platforms and talk to people and they say D.C., D.C., D.C., they really should say Lorton and Fead, those two totally different monsters. Your Lorton guy is your

your guy that all the people say the bad things about D.C. Most of those guys are Lorton guys. Right. But anyway. So with this, like, you can be killed by your own people when you're rolling with the whites for, getting drunk and calling a black guy the N word or something like that. Oh, do you mean somebody other than this? Hang on, my question is, D.C. Blacks, very disorganized, very for yourself in a way,

even though, you know, you roll with a car of men. But when you're in the federal prisons, you have to learn rules of etiquette and discipline in order to avoid race riots. That's why you see the Mexicans and the whites disciplining themselves is a lot of times is to avoid kicking up dust with other races. It's to keep order. Did you guys have to learn that? Did you guys have to really learn

and organize yourself? No, I don't agree with that. Those groups, as you just mentioned, they are organized gangs. They got rules and structure even if they're making. We don't have that. So the only thing that's going to be all the code or structure is what we know.

So what we know, you don't tell if we together, if one go, we all go. We got basic rules. Right. As far as what you said to not get into racial shit, I can dig that. I would say that's truthful for other people, but for D.C. guys, remember, it's prison to prison, case to case,

group to group, right? You don't want to get into it with nobody. It don't matter if it's race. We don't want to get into it with Florida because little homie over here stealing. You over here stealing, but we're getting tens of thousands of dollars selling Jonah Tobacco. So we're going to check you when I'm saying we as the group. But however, D.C. got so much every man for itself,

if that one dude is into that is sterile enough to say, hey, I don't need to be with the pack. I'm a long wolf. Then that's how D.C. guys get a lot of bad beats because we got a lot of long wolves. Because if he's thorough enough to stand on his own, guess what? He can. And I mean, I can mention 20, 30 dudes right now that are what we call renegades. Now, they're not renegades because they rats or they rapists.

They renegades because they came from Lawton. And then Lawton was their own man. So we got a lot of these type of situations that other people can't explain. Well, did you guys then get into problems with the other races? When you were at a place like, say, the prison you opened, Lee County. When I was there, no, nobody, it was too many of us. They didn't know. Like, if it's 600, maybe 50 is with the shit.

I'm telling you, man, like really, like, the numbers may not be exact. But I'm telling you, when I was there and we could use. that as an example, out of 600 people, I didn't know 600 people. Right. You know what I'm saying? But for sure, I knew at least 100, 150 from Lord, and I knew them.

Now, some of the guys that came there when I was there, after 2000, that came from D.C. jail, they never been to the Lord, never been to the feds. They like a fish. Technically, like, I don't even know them. Now, you from, like, for an example, I'm thinking about a guy that's from my neighborhood.

So I knew him as a kid, but I didn't know him as an adult. and now you're here and now. I'm saying, yo, you from my real, real neighborhood. Like me and you really homies, I want you to behave like this. Not for me, but I'm saying in order for you to be cool, you to be cool with me and the whole car,

I don't want you stealing. I don't want you on drugs. I don't want you fucking with boys because I don't want that shit to bother us and we're going to have to get into something. So whatever you went to, keep it like this so we don't have no problems. That's what I used to do for people

who was from my specific neighborhood. That term, homie, is, You could flex it. But my real homie from my real block, I'm there old to home me. And that was sad because I was so young, but that's how things had changed by that time. Now, the overall, it was guys that were older to me that I looked up to when I was in Lorton. And they taught me shit. And now that we're in the feds.

They still had certain type of rank and pool. And those are the guys that I kept it cool with. Like, I fought a dude from Washington, D.C. in Lee County. That's how many. It was just too many of us. I actually like being in prisons. not being in prison. I actually had a better time

when there were less people from where I'm from. I had less trouble. I had less bullshit. And we really had to depend on one another when I was in place. Like I'd have been in a joint

where it was only 45 of us. That's almost unheard of the day. But I was in a far out prison in Florence, Arizona too. That same prison, I was there and it might have been 145 of us

but there was 900 Mexicans. So I didn't be like, people always say, oh, there's so many they got the numbers. I can sit here and tell you five, six prisons I was in when we did not have the numbers and we behaved the same, bro. What was the worst prison? What was the hardest, the hardest place to bid?

Physically? Oh, no, you say to bid. Yeah, just, but I mean, in the feds, in your experience. In the feds? Yeah, in your experience. Okay. I mean, the fans weren't no problem for me, though, but I don't even being wise,

but just trying to answer the question, I'm going to say this FCI called Gilma for me, because you said in your experience. And the only reason I say that is because I just left the penitentiary. The respect, no exaggeration, their respect in the penitentiaries is out of this world. Now, the disrespect is out of this world too, but I'm only talking about the respect. They are the cleanest places, like the floor is spick and spanned. In the morning, it's quiet. At the nighttime, sometimes,

I ain't talking about in the hole. The hole is a zoo. But they ain't going to touch the TV. The microwave is going to be clean. Somebody spilled a fool the coffee, and they're going to get it up in some of these places where I've been, right? So when I got to the FCI at Gilma, West Virginia,

motherfuckers bust in front of the line at the microwave. I had never seen that. Motherfuckers say bitch-ass, nigga, faggot, fuck boy on the football field and the basketball court. And these are friends. Wow. Now, not the whole prison. I'm just giving you an example of different things I've seen, and I can stop there.

That was hard for me because I got there after I've been in prison for nine years. I only did 17 years. Once you get to nine years, Mark, and you only got 15 of life, you technically think that you're at single digits. Because a lot of people don't consider the back number. So for me, that was real trying because not only do I not like direct disrespect, indirect disrespect irritates me. So even when I'm sitting at the TV and over here, they're all bitch-ass motherfucker suck my dick. It's bothering me.

The Spanish guys over here watching TV, this stupid guy right here that just came to jail and turn their TV. I know the Spanish boy's about to punish him. We're about to be locked down. Like, you're just seeing too much. So for me, it was when I stepped down and security level when I went to this particular prison.

But there were also good things that happened for me there, which is why I was hard to answer the question because I was able to kind of grow. a while the homie mindset is what they call D.C. blacks. I was able to kind of grow out of that because the homies that was coming in wasn't on homie time. So I started to say, you know what, I'm only dealing with these young dudes right here that I know. I'm only dealing with these old timers over here that I know from the feds. And I'm only dealing with the Muslims because I was Muslim at the time. And that's what really allowed me to get into my own and focus on myself

and write, not just to attribute it to a one religion, but to get into my spiritual self. Right. That's what I'm trying to help a lot of people in prison. Were you hustling in there? All the time. What was your hustle? What was a good hustle? At different times, I had a couple different hustles.

My best hustle ever probably was tobacco when the feds killed tobacco, but I don't know so, so blow. I didn't even sell, when I say Joan or down, I'm always talking about dope, right? I'm not one of them dudes to say dope for everything. If I say dope, I'm talking about open. Heron. Heron. Heron, no doubt.

If I'm saying up, I'm talking about white girl. That's what I mean when I say. So sometimes I just do it interchangeable. But I never sold dope when I was a kid on the streets. And a lot of people don't notice it was because of my mother's situation. Like it was just a no-no for me. But in prison, it was such a. So profitable.

Man, I never seen nothing like it. Like a match head might get you $50 or $100. Like, I heard somebody on one of your shirt. saying that they were selling something like three grams for $1,000. I used to get $1,600 for a gram when I got down to the FCI level. Like, and I wasn't even going up. For people who don't know, I wasn't bringing it in it myself. I had a homie that had a move and out of love or loyalty or something.

If he go up and he come off good, he will break me off four or five of them. So I'm making $1,500. Listen, I could sell one for $800 then. Like those numbers that I heard, I was like, they must have been at a prison where they had a lot of it. You know, when you're at a prison and you have a little tobacco or a little this or that, it goes way up. I don't care what nobody's sake.

Once I realized that my homies and my dudes was the only ones that had it, I ain't play no games with the number. 1,600 for a match head. That's half. No, no, not for the match and for the whole gram. $50 for the match. Right, but that's one gram, $1,600 wholesale. You can, I mean, a match head.

$1,600 was. if I break it down, $800 was wholesale. That's $800 wholesale. So you're doubling your money. At my time. Selling, a matchhead's like half the size of my pinky. Yeah, it's really smaller than that. Holy shit, dude.

I mean, yeah, really smaller than that. And were you selling it to everybody or just the black guys? Nah, to be honest with you, I can't even make a blanket statement like I was selling everybody. Everything I did that was breaking the law. By way of hustling in jail, I did it with a chessboard type of strategy. And what I mean by that is that if I, if I was the one

and I never did this at the FC, I did this when I was at the prison. If I was the one that went to get it out of the visiting hall, I never sold it. Nobody ever knew nothing about me. So even in the penitentiary, when I did hustle a little bit with junk, I never hand to hand to anything.

It always went to a Nietta or a... Back then it would go to a Puerto Rican or a Dominican because a lot of people don't know that in northwest D.C., you got everything else. Salvador, D.R., we got everything. So I would have homies that were Puerto Rican or Dominican and people wouldn't know it.

Not D.C. guys, I mean, other dudes on the compound. So I say to say that, that in the penitentiary, the only thing I ever sold out in the open was tobacco because I wanted to be seen doing that, I would never do it. But when I was in the FCI and we put this other scheme together, and of course I'm not going all the way into the detail. Another partner went up and got it. If he went up and got it, then I would send it to another race,

mostly to the white boys. The white dudes, once they got it, nobody ever thinks that it's me anyway because I didn't even get visits then. At the end of my bid, I never went to visit hall and touch nothing. Like, when you get parole on a life sentence and you're a D.C. guy, you got to stay in the prison until the date comes. So I wouldn't care if it was $2 or $2 million, it wasn't going to be worth my freedom.

So that's how I did it. And now, when you say, did I sell it to black guys, whether they were from D.C. or Delaware when it made a difference, I didn't have no type of hang up there. Like, I won't serve a black guy or I won't serve a white guy. That was never my issue. You just give it to somebody who would sell it. Somebody else is going to do it.

And then too many, for real, this is going to sound funny to people who don't understand it. But too many of my friends use heroin for me to really outright sell it without creating no type of problem. Yeah, they're going to want freebies. That's all that. I mean, and then, you know, you'll lose friendships from the same shit. So, like, I'd have been a situation where I'd have seen homeboys that I deal with this on it, come in a unit and get it from a Spanish guy and don't know that I got it.

Wow. Now, of course, I didn't do that all the time. I don't want to, but that was one of the ways. Were a lot of the black guys from D.C. on heroin in prison? Lorden, Lorden dad. Like, this new era, no. Like, when I'm saying new era, like, you got to. We're talking about your era, dude.

We're talking about your experience. In my era, I ain't never mess with dope, but dope is the drug of the Lorden guys. Yeah. You know what I mean? We was always my thing, and all my buddies we did, we, but Lorton guys going back to the 70s, 80s, and up, her rhyme was the drug of choice.

I mean, that's what my father and them was on. That's what my uncles in them was on. Most of the jailhouse legends that's from Lorton were on junk. That's no secret. That ain't no shame in that game. What about Blow? You said, like, you had some coke in there? I didn't know anybody.

No, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't know anybody sold coke in prison. I never sold coke down in Lorton. I sold crack before. reason being is that when my father came down, my father, when he wasn't on drugs, on heroin, right? I never wanted to send him around heroin. So, the only drugs I got in Lawton was weed or crack.

How do people smoke crack in prison? The same way they do back in the days with the people with the, uh, the tin cans and the straw, like they will make a pipe. I mean, you never seen, when you was in, you never seen the dudes that make the weed bong out of the teddy bed bottle. Yeah, that's true. I did. All right.

The same way they make the weed bong. For people who don't know, it's a honeybear bottle, and you could burn a hole in the tip and put an ink pin in it, put some aluminum. It's the same thing as the makeshift crack pipe, for real. It's just that the little four that you sit at the top for the dish is a little deeper. It's a good point.

So I had the honeybear bottle. Like, the police, every time they come up myself, I got a honeybear bottle, little honey, little water, and it smelled like we every time. In Lorton. So there were cats in Lorton that were smoking crack like that, and then blowing into the toilet, blowing the smoke in the toilet?

And Lordton, you ain't got to hide nothing. Wow. It's fucking anarchy. It could be count time and they'll blow that shit in it. And they're not everywhere. I don't want to exaggerate, right? But I'm telling you, don't nobody had nothing. If Lordin was in existence when they created the ban on tobacco,

when you come on the tea in Lawton, especially in the wall, you would smell tobacco. Yeah, that's crazy. Like in D.C. jail right now, you're supposed to be no smoker. The first thing you smell in D.C. jail is K2 on tobacco. Wow. Man, and I can get you that. That's a fact.

That's not me. talking about no secret to wash it and pose know that. It's wild. So you could smell crack smoke sometimes back in the day. In Lord, that's sweet, crack. You know the aroma. And it's crazy that you said that because I went to a hotel in North of Virginia on a visit.

And when I first walked in there, I smelled that. And my girl said, man, that's coke. I said, man, that's rocks. Man, we're out of here. Yeah. Yeah, but it's nothing like that smell. Like, I know that smells from a kid. So you were making money in there at times.

At times. Yeah, at times. Yeah, it depends on what facility you're at, and can you get it in? But even though I'm saying at times, at times it's true, but every prison I went in, I had to find a hustle. And you found one. Yeah, and I found one. Tell us about the tobacco. The feds created the market for tobacco because they banned it. And when they first banned it, I didn't pay no attention because I don't smoke tobacco.

Like my buddies, it was a, early day. I said, I said, I'm like, yeah, I can like that shit is drunk. And at the time I didn't realize that the addiction is just as strong. So anyway, to get to the point is I was trying to get out the penitentiary. And one of my buddies, his only play was dope, right? And he traded me one gram or dope for, I want to say three, four packs of tobacco, right? But the tobacco was costing $1,200 at this time. had the whole bugler pack.

Like some of my buddies that had so much of it when they came down and the price changed it got down to 600. But at the first time when all the dirty white boys, and I mentioned them by name because I was cool with the dirty white boys in this prison, the dirty white boys was putting it up. Like they knew that

the band was coming. I don't know about federal. Prison wide, but in my print... They were stashing it waiting for the band to come so that the price was... Man, listen, these guys was on their shit. So I start, this is how I got on it, because you asked me a question. How did I get in it? So, this one white guy named Jason, we end up falling. I didn't fall out with him, but

the blacks and Jason fell out. And he was one of the, he was one of the white dudes, man. Like, when I get credit, what creditors do, he was one of them, he was one of them, he was one of them, like, them white guys that had that Native American in them. You know what I mean? Like, he, with knives and shop shit, he accepted. Like he wasn't the regular white. Even though he was with the dirty white boys, he went out with the Native Americans and did their thing.

Like he was like a Leonard Peltier type of guy. Anyway, he was vicious. But nevertheless, he had a spot that was one of my man's spots before he got it. And what I mean by that, it was a black guy that had a stash spot in the back of the tear. When he left, Jason took the spot.

So it was his spot, but I knew that it was there. It was almost like a secret between me and him. Like if something happened, I know you don't even want to know that I know And that was like unspoken But nevertheless, I seen him putting the bags up And I thought he was just stashing his bags For some reason

But the weed, the tobacco wasn't illegal So I'm always thinking So in my mind I've got seen this a couple times I just said, I said, bro, why the fuck you keep stashing a bugle? He said, man, I don't tell nobody I told you this, but the administration told us They bought the ban it all the way in the whole system And as soon as he told me that

Like, I always fucked with him From that point on, every week I bought the maxed a tobacco. And then you're just guys were just putting it away. And then when it came down, shout out to the dirty white boys. That's amazing.

And when it came down, I never forget it. The first pack I sold was $1,200. $1,200. And do you sell them in sticks or you just sold it wholesale to somebody else? I sold the pack of Bueller.

Right. The pack of you used to buy for what? 150 or some shit like that. A dollar 50 cent? Like, I don't even know what the parker. A dollar 50 cent? No more than $2,3. And now it's $1,200.

It might have been more. My man said that that, at this place called Wacken Hood, he said he was selling his jokes for $2,000. Holy. The whole pack. I don't know how many

roll-ups is in a pack of bugler. I don't even know if that's still the hustle no more. Like, they had started smoking chew before I left. Like, the police was spitting on the ground and lesser guys. Remember I said that everybody's not on the same?

Lessor. Like, none of my buddies well, not back then. Nowadays, the packer was so so, so, so, so, so, uh, rare to find that even some regular guys

might be, uh, smoking chew now, but I'm only talking about the ones that were smoking to spit off the ground, but, you know, some guys was buying chew. I don't know if you hit to this, but some guys was buying the chew tobacco. And you're talking about smell. We're talking about somebody smoking crap. Oh, boy. They would take the chew out the thing and put it in the microwave. Like, we got so many problems when I was in this one prison with debt that the administration had to give us a separate microwave. Because even though they couldn't make, it was a rule that you weren't supposed to do it, they couldn't make the people stop and somebody was going to get hurt

for the dude trying to cook his food after the dude. to put the chew in the microwave. You ever seen that? No. Yeah, that's a terrible situation. So you started bubbling off the tobacco. And then how did you, after the stash that you guys put away when it was legal, after that ran out, did you have a guard bringing it in?

Not me, but the dirty white boys at this one particular spot out there. I'm not even, I mean, oh, though, that ain't nothing. I just trying to be careful what I'm saying. They had to be getting it from the law. Of course. Well. So let me not say that. Of course they did, dude.

Of course they did. Yeah, like they was getting brand new, like it was no more bugler there, and they was getting a bugler still in the pack, so they had to have an outside connect. So, but what the dirty white boy who I'm talking about is not the one that I was talking about earlier, the one that I used to do favors for, even though the going rate on the compound at that time was something like $6,700, I want to say $800 for the pack wholesale, he still will let me get a pack for $300 from the times that I got. Wow.

But don't forget that the blacks had the junk. So you were trading? Sometimes. Like he, we're not the best of friends, but I'm a good, I'm a, I'm a good dude of the blacks to be cool with because I can still get downtown. Wow. Downtown. Yeah. Downtown's what you call hair on?

Yeah, it's downtown. So the blacks tended to have hair on. And the Puerto Ricans. And the Puerto Rican's definitely. At that particular prison. Where was that? That's Lee County. We talked about the military.

And then, and then the whites tended to have the tobacco. That's fascinating. As far as what I know. But the whites at that prison was so secret if they could have had anything because if you really wasn't into buying it, you wouldn't really know. Right. The white guy, I don't know what they're doing now or later. I'm talking about when I was there, they wouldn't serve anybody anything,

which is probably how they were able to stay off the radar. Get away from, like even the one dude that I knew that I keep telling you about, I was only in close quarters with him because I was in a program unit. I was in J-Co. So J-Co is a program unit. If you're in there and you can stay low-key, right? nobody even know what you're doing. It's almost like you in the gated community

and everybody else in the projects. So dudes that was jamming when I was at that particular joint, I don't know what they was doing down in the middle court because I came from the middle court. I came out of this junk called F Block and that junk was terrible.

But anyway, I went to J Block and then J Block, which was Jay Cole, you can hide under the, you know, the perception that you're just there for the program privileges, but when I was at that point, the most money was in that block for some reason.

You know what I mean? But we also had some big time as like big Italian guys, big Puerto Rican guys that didn't really have the pool to get things, but they had the funds, the resources to get them. So I made friends with some of those guys too. Keep in mind by the time I got to that prison, I had been

in prison for nine years. But even though we all the way on the other end of Virginia, D.C. is still closer to us than New York or Atlanta, like with some of these guys, even Philly, like a lot of the Puerto Rican guys I dealt with at that prison were from Philly. Mom, can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.

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Did the car have a sunroof? It did, actually. Okay. Good story. Car buying you'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on... Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.

Okay, so what year did you realize, oh, I think I can make parole? Like, I think I can get out of here. And it's crazy. I know exactly what year. It was like 98, 99. And I got to the nine-year, almost to the 10-year mark, right? And remember, everybody, there is no parole in the feds.

You do 85% of your time if you have an outdate. The only exception, of course, is being from D.C. when you get sentenced in the D.C. Superior Court and you have a date like you had, which is 15 to life. That means you go before the board at 15. It's like a state case. It's like a sentencing of a state, but you're in the Fed. So this is fascinating.

Unless you got like a Leonard Peraltier, one of those guys that was in before 1886. Littiportig might have got a 72, 73 case, and he had life. However, he's seen a parole board maybe five times. Yeah, and they're not going to let him out. You can sit a parole board after 15 years in life or something, but they, Biden, one of them just pardon him. Somebody just got out. Yeah, he did just get out. That's right. That's right. But you're right. If you went in before, if you're one of the old-timers where you had, there was parole still. You could still have a chance of parole. Most people don't even remember that,

though. I ain't think about it until you just mentioned the 85%, because the 85% is what you're doing that one number. That's right. But what you said is correct. My time that 15 a lifetime would be like a state time. And the feds even treated us like that. Certain things, if you had two numbers, you couldn't get to residential drill program sometimes. You, you You couldn't get to certain programs depending on where they were with that number. They never treat you like your front number. Like in Lawton, I was treated like a 15-year dude. Right.

In the Feds, they treated me with 15-a-life, just like they treated the life, guys. So you were treated like a life, or how was that different? Were you treated with more respect because you had the life number? Oh, I wasn't looking at it from a respect part. But how was it different? How was treatment different? It was different because a dude with a regular life sentence, right? he automatically know that unless certain things happen with his his classification numbers,

he's never going to a medium or a low or a camp. They never considered me low in camp. We ain't never talked about that because I had the elbow. But they wouldn't even consider me for a FCI with the elbow on the back and the Lawton tended escape, stabbing, drugs. They didn't even consider me. I met dudes when I got to the FCI that had life and started in the FCI, which is a medium. Right.

So that's one way that it's different. But I didn't really care about the programming part, but I met buddies that didn't have, because I had a violent charge. With a violent charge, you're not going to get a lot of programs anyway, no matter what. But some of my buddies that had drug dealing charges and didn't have violent charges

just because they got so much time out of D.C. Superior Court, they couldn't even go get the residential drug thing and a part of their release was that they must get it. Now, this only happens to D.C. This don't happen to nobody else because of the Superior Court numbers. Them Superior Court numbers sometimes be higher and then federal court numbers for worse or charges. Right.

But you had, nevertheless, you know you're about to go before the parole board. Did you have any tickets or anything? Any hole shots? Any bad behavior that was documented in prison? Not at the federal level at that time. I got caught with 200 books of stamps. That's not, I mean, it sounds like a lot for a regular, but in courting dudes is getting money.

That's not even a lot. That's one sale of stamps. Like, I know that might sell two, 300 stamps in a day. Right. Even in my mind, when I caught the shot, it was a 300-series shot. For people who don't know, that's almost the low. They might got a 400 in the feds. I don't know, but the 300 series is the lowest that I even know.

They might got some lower that. But that is the lowest type of, like, that's the misdemeanor of misdemean is a 300 shot. I mean, a stabbing is a 100 series for people who don't know. So you had a stabbing charge, but in Lorton? I had a stabbing in Lorton, attempted escape of the Lorton. Why? Did that, first of all, what happened with the arson? All right, Lorton is an old penitentiary.

For people who don't know, in old penitentiaries, there are certain levels of, like, civil disobedience. We call it demonstrating. So you can flood or you can burn when you got a beef with the police. They passed out new sheets. I didn't get any new sheets that day on a new sheet day. You might bang on your door for the police to come.

I'm on the top to you, on the rock all the way in the back. The only way to get the police attention back then is to bang on your door, which makes it loud. irritate noise and bothers everybody in the unit, or you got a way to detail come out for them to go do it. Police was bullshin. I was 16, 17.

He was one of the police that if you wasn't somebody in prison already, he didn't respect you. He didn't care. He kept saying, wait, wait, wait, I told him. I said, bro, if I don't get no sheets before 4 o'clock, you're going to be writing before you go home. As it got close to 4 o'clock, he was still bullshit. I didn't get my sheets.

I flooded. He thought the flooding shit wasn't out. Now, you can get detailed to pick it up. So when he let the detail out to clean up the ward, I said, all, you think the flood ain't nothing. I got some newspaper in here. I let all the newspaper on fire, let the mattress on fire. You got to open the door to come put the file, and that's how I got an awesome.

Fuck, dude. Yeah, it does remind me the first scene of Scarface. That's a state prison thing, though. Like, I never seen burning in the phase unless it's a riot. And then the stabbing? What happened with the stabbing? Where you caught the ticket there? Oh, for the, that's on, that's not the D.C. jail shit.

The D.C. jail shit was the shit where we was in troops. But, and they're stabbing in Law. This was some minor. As a matter of fact, they only gave me a 200-series shot because when the police wrote the shot up, they said that the other person had the knife. Technically, he only got stuck because we was wrestling for the knife. This wasn't even a real stabbing, but I had the shot for it.

But some type of way they made it a 200 series. And Lord, we call it a, I mean, if we call it, I forget what we call it. But it's still like the 100, 200. It's still the same thing. And it was his knife. So I only got a 200-series shot for that. Like, I didn't even get sent out the unit I was into another.

But that was one of the charges. And so when you go to the parole board all these years later and the feds, did they even see that? That's what I was just getting ready to say. It was only some shots that they saw. Okay. And I think that has something to do with records that were lost from D.C. to the feds. Like by the time I got to the feds and to the parole board, they may only had three or four shots in there. I've seen some of my paperwork.

They had some disorderly conducts in there, but they were copies of something that must have went to somewhere else because it wasn't in my jacket. Like, you see your jacket in some places. This was something that the parole board had had somebody had sent it to them electronically. I didn't even remember some of them. I only remembered the arson because I had to file to the courts to get it off.

Technically, it's not arson. And Lawton is called Burning Demonstration. Like, I didn't set a building on fire, but the United States Parole Commission said, we don't kid with Lord and said, that's arson to us. I had to file to the courts to get that taken off. And I did.

I was successful. I got a 44-month reduction for that. Wow. I mean, this gets into part of how I got out of prison. Okay, so go into it. Because I started litigating. Okay, got it. So let's, uh, I want to say that actually, because it's going to take too much time. We've been going. Um, okay, so you did 17. You were, you had 15 was your minimum. How did, how many times did you have to go before the board before they, they gave you parole? It's funny. I only went before the board one time. Okay, so you just didn't make it, you just had to wait to do 17. How was that possible? I went in front of the board at 11.

Okay. Like 11 to 6, let's say 12 years. Like 11, 8 months, right? Which was my time that I was supposed to see him. And in all actuality, it's the time that I thought I was going to get out. I only took that cop when me and my father was debating, e, man, you shot two motherfuckers. Like, bro, you're going to do some time.

And he kind of convinced me that the 15 of life was fair. I don't know what word we used, but we're going to say fair. Yeah, probably. All right. So in my head, I only did it because I kept saying. He kept saying, Shardy, you're 17. In 11 years, you're going to be 28. He said, you're going to be almost my age.

Like, he sold it to me. Like, he didn't want me to get the double or more. And I started buying it. Like, it took two, three weeks for him to convince me. And I started telling myself, 28, 29, all right, that ain't bad. And I thought that if I could just go to jail and do the time that I could get out, but that was far from the truth. So the first time I went up, I got a 60-month hit.

That's a five-year hit. And I didn't give up, though. I thought I was going to be all out of shape. but I was really practicing Islam to a point where it was, like, I stopped hustling, stop smoking weed. I never drank in jail anyway. I just, I didn't like made-up shit, but weed and, oh, I said I never drank. D.C. jail, I drank real liquor because my father used to bring me Bacardi,

but I didn't drink hooch. Yeah. Like, that's not my thing. Like, I just didn't like, and my cellar used to make it. And when you see the dudes make it, it kind of, uh, turns you off. Yeah. Definitely. All right, so I got the five-year hit.

And what I did, and when I got the five-year hit, I immediately, started going to the law library because I felt like the five-year hit was unjust and it was wrong. Oh, five-year hit means what? That means that you got to do five more years before you come up for consideration for parole again, which is outrageous because keep in mind, for them to sit down and tell me to do 60 more months for a fire, I started at 17 years old when you got people that's coming in right now on brand-new charges from a court building that don't got five years to do like, it was dudes that was coming in with gun charges.

They had 36 months. And you telling me I got to do five whole more years for a freaking five when the people was wrong. Right. But that's what I did. I started reading people's cases and then I realized that even if you was in a post-conviction state like me, a lot of times I didn't study law because I pled guilty.

I thought that once you plead guilty, that everything is over. That's far from the truth. Like, you can always litigate. Like, I even tried to take my cop back based on ignorance of my age at the time. And I don't know, maybe I didn't have enough time to succeed in it, but I found case laws with dudes did, but I didn't succeed.

So what I did was I kind of operated on that focus on what you can change right now. And the only thing that I could change at that time was the parole hit. I had 15 of life. They killed the D.C. parole board when they killed the D.C. Department of Corrections. And the United States Parole Commission said, no matter what your charge is, if you have a killing of, any sort. Second degree murder, manslaughter, first degree murder, premeditated murder, we want you to do at least 20-some months, I mean 20-some years. For me, the number came out to be 263 months.

Once I did demand, because in D.C., regular court, you don't get sentenced in months. You get sentenced in years. When I got accustomed to months, I started doing 120s and doubles. All right, 10 years, 10 years, 10 years. Damn, they say 263 months. Well, 120 months is 10 years. 240 months is 20 years. These bitches said they want me to 263 months. It just, it didn't make, I went berserk in my head. So I went over to the law library and I started studying, pulling out everything.

And I met a guy named Burton Haywood, rest in peace. The old time was really didn't take the young guy serious in the law library. And I didn't like that when I was young. But this one dude, he's seen something. He was like, man, showty, sirs. He said, I'm a help him. And what he did was, he did was. he showed me how to navigate the civil law.

And I got back in court, remember I said I pled guilty and I thought you couldn't do anything? Well, 2241 is Habes Corpus. And Habes Corpus in Latin means to present the body, produce the body. And you make a court or a judge produce your body when your body is being confined illegally. And I said in my court and my litigation shit

that I was sentenced to 15 in life at 16, the judge took into consideration that I was a juvenile. And he said, you know what, you got to murder and some other stuff, but you're taking a responsibility for the crime. I'm going to give you 15 in life. And he said to me specifically on sentencing, I don't know if you will ever get back,

but if you do get back, if you can do 11 years and grow and do this and do that, then you would deserve a chance to get out. That's in my sentencing transcripts. The United States Parole Commission, I don't mean to sound belligerent, but they was like, man, fuck that judge. That judge in D.C., this United States parole commission,

and we want you to do this and do that. one thing you can't do to me whether it's street, business, or anything, you can't fuck me over. So in the streets, if you fuck me over, I'm going to react a certain way. In business, if you fuck me over, in the context, I'm going to react a certain way.

And legally, when I realized that they was fucking me over, the only way for me to say, you're not going to do it, was in a law library. And I learned how to file 2241, and I filed it, and I found all the laws that made what I was going through, illegal. And for lack of a better term, I never won in court,

why I told you. I said, well, people say that, but I had a conversation with a family member that I had a night and I said, Eon, even though you didn't win and caught you won, and they made me look at it in a certain way, which I'm presenting to you. And even though the 2241 motions, when you look them up, because you can look them up, they're going to say deny. But everything that I filed in it is why they released me six months later. So they kept denying and connect the nine, everything for 60 months. And I was supposed to see the parole board in November of 2009. I don't know if it was out of spite or what, but we was locked down.

The D.C. guys and the Serenios on the compound I was on, got into some fist fight shit. That's another thing about FCIs. Dudes get hitting there, hit stab here and there, but it'd be a little less. And, like, I seen this, and this was the one time where I seen there was no knives involved, but they locked the whole joint down. And they came out the next day, and they called people out of their cell. You know how they do. And people went to the parole, and I'm laying in the bin. They never called me.

In the way, I was a little worried. I was like, damn, it's parole. They're supposed to come see everybody. You know when they're coming and they didn't see me. I was a little down, and then I said to myself, I didn't forget it. I'm going to just had to get back to writing and petitioning. But they slid a piece of paper under my door this day,

right before 10 o'clock, and they popped the doors at 10 o'clock that let the pound back out. And it was a piece of paper to say, we're going to release you on March of next year. It was unbelievable. Wow. Fucking imagine that. So basically...

Even dudes that was there had never... I ain't going to say they had never seen it, but in the way... And the way in which it happened, for me, it was just an anomaly. So, I mean, this whole thing being a D.C. Black going through this system is an anomaly, you know? Yeah, no, technically that's true. So just to kind of put that all in a nutshell, just so I understand it, you were filing motions after you got denied the first time for parole, after doing about 11 and a half years, you got denied for parole. So you started filing motions for five years that your sentence was unjust.

Yeah, exactly. Because the math was wrong. They sentenced you to too much time. I ain't going to say the math was wrong. My real issue was an ex post facto issue. An ex post facto issue means that if there was a law and a penalty in a place at a certain time, no one can change the penalty at no other time. Okay.

So they were trying to give you minimum 20. The feds were. Right. Which was contrary to the judge. That's right. I mean, even with the violent crime, they could have got away with punishing me for my behavior, but they cannot extend the sentence. They're saying that I'm not even eligible to go home until 263 months was done.

That's contrary to what the judge and the judges are more powerful authority than them. At least that was my argument, and that's what I argued. And so when you finally went back at the 17-year mark, you showed them all these motions, even though they'd been denied, and you think that probably had something to do with their decision to let you out. No, I filed the motions, and when the motions got denied, I got frustrated and I filed to the legal I forgot the name of it. I don't want to say it wrong, but the United States Parole Commission

has a department or a part of it where you can ask for reconsideration based on legal things. And everything that I had filed that was denied, I took it and compiled it into one document. I wish I had Chad GPT back then. But I compiled it all into one document. So what I filed for my educational good time,

what I filed for my behavior, what I filed from the judge, they shot it down and shot it down. But I compiled all this after the case by the name of Selman versus the parole commission came out. Shout out to my man Tony Selman. He had lawyers filed and I went through his motion

and everything that he had in his motion that he won was in mind. Make a long story short. I ain't going to get into it. I did some stuff with that too that took 16, 17 more. Everything took 16, 17 months. But I said, man, forget the judge. The judge is not trying to honor any of this because he was outside his jurisdiction. But the habeas corpus can only be filed in the jurisdiction that your body is in. So I've found.

I filed everything that I filed to the course to the parole commission for what's called a reconsideration. I believe that they read the reconsideration, which is not technically emotion. It's just a legal letter. And I think that they said, this motherfucker is right. And even if he ain't went right now, he going to eventually win. Right. That's what I believe. Okay.

And if you look up Joyce Francis versus Leon Williams, as I said, it says deny. So a lot of my homies would be like, either Jone say deny. I said, bro, I'm on the street, right? You call him from jail, right? He said, yeah. I said, well, fuck that Jones saying deny. look at the law in it and file what's in it. I'm home.

I don't care if it say denied. I'm out. That makes sense. So eventually you would have won on habeas corpus or on one of these motions. Of course, right? I think so. And they, the feds are human. They don't like to lose.

And they said, okay, stamp, let them out. And if they would have, this is another thing that I think. If I would have kept going to litigation route and I would have eventually won and it said, granted, when dudes went into the law library, well, the sued probably would have been great for me, but for other people, they would have fouled exactly what I found. And once it was granted, it had made it almost, I don't want to say landmark because there was other cases that I was using, but it would have been like a landmark case.

And that means you would have to free hundreds of guys from D.C. It's dudes from D.C. right now, because we only ones still got the intermediate sentence and determined sentence in the phase. It's only us. You might got somebody from Guam or Puerto Rico or somebody. I don't know, but like some of them, Puerto Rican revolutionaries,

if any of them are still in, they could have had two numbers, but I don't know that. But I know it's only D.C. And I know one dude right now that had 19 of life that he got in 90 or 89, 19 of life. We know 19 years has passed, and he keep getting hit after hit, after hit, after hit. So if I were the one, I think it would help some of them. Yeah, and they do think like that. They're so evil that they know that people have nothing to do but go to the library, nothing but time.

They go to a library and they're like, yeah, we can't, you know, we can't let, this guy, this rabble rouser, be thinking other people can get out. They're really, really evil. And, you know, I hope to God they're wrought in hell. But listen, you wrote, you've written how many books? Where could people go? This was all a long route to get to what you're doing now and promote your stuff. You wrote like, what, 13 books in prison or something like that? I got 13 books published. I might have wrote 40 books in prison, but I got 13 books published under Eon Williams. You can go to Amazon.com and taping Eon Williams. It may be something on it that I forgot about,

but I also have a website, eononwilliams.com. All my books are there. And they're fiction, urban fiction, based off of like characters, things you've been through. Honestly, all of those books that I'm talking about right now, all of those are considered urban fiction. But I started writing urban fiction in a way where I was being very careful and selective. So a lot of true stories, not of my life,

but of Washington, D.C. crime and underworld are in some of my books in a fictional way. As I mentioned a couple of books, and we was talking earlier, like, I wrote the book, Money and Everything. That book is about a guy named Javier Panama Card. They had the longest drug trial, murder trial involving a metropolitan D.C. police in D.C. history at that time. I wrote a book about that. And I could do this for every book.

I could go and tell you what the real backstory of the book is. Yeah. I mean, the stories from the feds are so fascinating that why not write a book about it? Hold on. Beards though that you brought up stories from the fans, I forgot. My man told me, make sure I mention it. So you just reminded me. I wrote the book, Lorton Legends, about all this stuff that we've talked about right now. And I fictionalized it because I didn't want to be what I called back then telling on somebody. Yeah. No, I know. That's what you're doing. You're writing fiction based off of reality. That's what entertainment is.

Right. So go check that out. We're going to link in the description. Any particular one people should start out with all these books. My favorite book is Lord and Legend since we're talking about this D.C. prison history. But to be honest, like just type in E.on Williams, I got a unique name. And if you enter fictional reading and you like stuff about women or D.C. or history or crime or prison, I got all that in different ways. And if you got somebody locked up, buy a book.

and send it over to them. You know what I mean? Seriously. Lord and Legends. Okay, so start out with that. We're going to switch over to the Patreon and do a little bonus episode. Man, that was a fascinating, fascinating talk. I really appreciate you coming down here, man. Appreciate you having me, man. All right. You got it. Eon Williams. Go check them out. D.C. Blacks. Make sure subscribe to the channel. Oh, that's it. And your YouTube channel. That's really what I'm on now. Okay, go for it. D.C. Blacks. Just check it out. I got a lot of stuff on there about prison, but I'm getting tired of talking about prison so now I'm kind of just expanding it to all my interests. Most of my engines are true crime traveling and stuff like that. Awesome, man. Okay, so Lorton Legends a book and then subscribe

to D.C. Blacks on YouTube. Thank you, G. I appreciate you. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show for more with Eon Williams. Take care. Peace.