The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Largest Ecstasy Dealer In U.S. History Explains How He Moved 40 Million Pills, Beat Feds In Trial

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

In this revealing interview, Lewis Ziskin shares his incredible story of being one of the biggest drug traffickers in the United States during the late 1990s. Operating a massive ecstasy empire, Ziskin imported millions of pills from Europe, working with dangerous criminal organizations like the Chinese Triads and the Italian mafia. Ziskin details the high-stakes world of drug trafficking, the massive DEA bust that brought his operation down in 2000, and how he managed to represent himself in court, ultimately beating a life sentence. He talks about the fear, betrayal, and close calls he faced while running his operation, as well as his eventual transformation from a criminal to a successful tech entrepreneur who now supports prison reform and addiction recovery programs. Go Support Louis! YouTube: @louisziskin1357 IG: https://www.instagram.com/louisziskin/ New Startup: https://www.oculi.ai/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: PrizePicks! Download the app today and use code CONNECT to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/CONNECT Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

1.75 million pills was the most we did. I wasn't dealing with anybody who wasn't buying 200,000 pills. By 1999, all of L.A. treated us like we were the godfather of the city. This guy, the main rat, got busted. They're like, you got to kill him. Getting too much further into this, you might never get out. I was very well aware that I was swimming with sharks. This is the story of one of the biggest DEA bus you've never heard of.

It all starts with this man, Louis Ziskin. A Los Angeles native, he became one of the biggest importers of European MDMA, aka Ecstasy, into the United States. During the late 1990s, he used elaborate methods to traffic over 40 million ecstasy pills with numerous criminal associates, including the Chinese triads in London, as well as the Dutch and Italian mafia clans. In the year 2000, he was arrested on what was then the biggest bust in DEA history and spent the next three years fighting his case, in which he acted as his own lawyer and beat a life sentence. Today, he's a successful tech entrepreneur and launches startup companies worth millions of dollars, which he uses to frequently donate to prison reform and addiction recovery programs.

For more bonus content with Lewis, including his journey through the federal prison system, go over to patreon.com slash the Connect show. All right, this is an exciting one. We've never had anybody on quite like Lewis. Without further ado, this is Louis Sivis. right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. They kidnap them, dude. They tell me it's $5 million.

I wasn't a good person who did bad things once in a while. I realized that I was a bad person who did good things once in a while. I had a life case for CC continuing criminal enterprise. I represented myself, I want to call the government to the stand. And I beat the fucking ass. Pandemonium. That's when I see lights behind me start the flash. And I didn't even think.

I just hit it. I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, hopped out, closed the door, and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shank, it's like six inches. And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours. Don't ever leave the cell block without this. He was the reason I made it out of that place alive.

You're Jewish. You grew up in West Hollywood, so I'm going to guess also Russian. My dad's side of the family is Russian, but they actually come from Cleveland. They've been here for a couple generations. My mom's from Lithuania, though. she was born there so close okay gotcha so well not russian but cleveland so crime is not far away when we're talking cleveland yes did you have anybody involved in organized crime or anything in your family like that my grandfather ended up being an engineer for mcdonald douglas and actually

made the tools to build the f-16 before he moved out of cleveland used to run numbers for a guy by the name of mo daylitz wow now obviously this was not a story that was shared until after his death. Of course not. Especially with my being a troublemaker from a young age, there was no reinforcement of that. My family was actually great. They didn't, you know, they, they were there.

They loved me. They did the best that they could in all situations. So they certainly weren't trying to reinforce any of my negative behavior by telling me stories about my grandfather. So what was it then? Because that's just like my family was. What was it that allured you to the strong? streets. Well, initially it was like the hypocrisy that I noticed at a very young age. You know,

the kind of things like give grandma kiss and tell her you like the toy even that you don't, right, initially. And it's ironic. There's studies out now that show that parents are actually the ones that teach the kids how to lie. And it's actually becoming more and more prevalent, the more politically correct we become. The irony is that the parents are the ones who get the most mad when the kids lie to them. And then as we were, you know, we're going to be. And then as we. were you know as i was going through school i would notice other things and i said to myself well if they don't have all the rules why the fuck do i interesting did you see hip he did you see hypocrisy within society as well oh yeah 100 percent i mean there's a ton of it everywhere you know it and i

noticed it at a young age um and i just didn't you know one one of the stories i think i shared this before, but this is the best illustration of it is I was selling these raffle tickets for a Jewish school I was going to. And if you sold X amount of raffle tickets, you were supposed to get a cassette recorder, right? And I sold that amount and some, actually enough for three cassette recorders. And, you know, I went and asked the head of the school, hey, where's my thing? Oh, we don't have them in yet. Three days later, I was in his office for detention. And he wasn't there, but the janitor service was there and they were opening, you know, and cleaning and everything. And I saw a stack of brand new cassette recorders there. So the next day I asked him again, I said, hey, what's up with the tape recorders? When are we going to get our prizes? Because other kids had gotten their prizes. And he said, well, they didn't come in you. So when you see that from an authority figure or those types of things, right, Or also the double play, you know, like my dad was very much always on my side.

So when I would get trouble with school, you know, he'd say one thing and then say something else when we came home. You know, the, the, so I noticed that. It's not anybody's, my parents' fault or anybody's fault. But I do watch this in society now as we've developed a society that would rather have a pretty lie than a hard truth. Yet we get very angry when our kids lie to us. Sure. Well, it seems like you were a salesman from a young age, too, a natural kind of entrepreneur, which I feel like a lot of legitimate business people and entrepreneurs don't accept the status quo.

Correct. However, some of us, that personality meets a criminal opportunity, whether that's the history, the place that they're brought up in and like the drug economy. So did you grow up in the 90s or how old are you? I'm 55 in a few days. Oh, wow. So you remember. I was born in 69.

Oh, so you remember the 80s. Yeah. The 80s was when I was growing up. And really what happened was it was exactly like you said, an opportunity presented itself. I was at a party in London and with some guys who were supposed to be running shit. And they were passing yellow cocaine around. And I was like, what the fuck is this, bro? I thought you guys were running shit, man.

This is garbage. I have a big mouth. Anyway, they're like, are you fucking taking the piss, mate? You can fucking do better. You know, that's how it started. And everybody knows about the exe thing, right? But really, it started with cocaine. And so I said, yeah, of course I can.

I'm from fucking L.A. I didn't even have a cocaine connect at the time. I mean, I knew a couple of people to call for it, but it wasn't in that business. And then, you know, got it together, sent a couple kilos over there, which is a story all in itself. And that's pretty much how it started.

And then, you know, you got the ups and downs. You're learning customs forms and duties and why are you sending a $400 box overnight? If there's no value to it, I mean, that was, it's a funny story, but it's also one of the things that makes me feel stupidest when I tell it. But we were sending FedEx and you,

initially. And down by Robertson and Ted Freeway used to be the FedEx office. And at five o'clock back then, the line was out the door with people trying to make the cutoff. So we would literally just go down there and be copying people's account numbers. So we weren't even paying for the shipping. But initially, I was putting no duties owed just because I thought that that more paperwork would make it more of a headache and have less of chance going through, which was totally wrong and retarded to even think that. But when you don't have a base case knowledge of the business that you're going into, those types of things happen. Happened to me many years later in tech. And we, so, you know, a bunch of stuff happened. We lost a bunch of stuff.

So hold on. How did it work? Because I thought I was new to the game in 2010 from mailing drugs through the mail. Now, here you are. What is it, 88 or 89? No, we were doing it in 97. We started. 97 to 2000. That's when you were shipping kilos to London. London and bringing Excessy Bank. Okay. So how did it work with FedEx? Would you set at FedEx overnight? Yeah, we'd send it FedEx overnight.

They didn't have all the different levels of service back then that they have now. So if it was FedEx, it was overnight. They didn't even have ground back then. Ground didn't exist at that time. And so literally all I had to do was check the box. Yeah, charge duties to FedEx account number. Not going to cost anything, totally free. And it took me losing a lot of money to finally figure that out.

And I feel sometimes I think I'm smart. But other times when I tell these stories, I feel like such a fucking jackass idiot. So how would you lose a box of Coke? Like when I lost a package of weed, it didn't happen a lot. I was very good. But when it did happen,

we would notice the tracking on the internet would just stop. Like it would just arrive. at like the sorting facility, let's say, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and it wouldn't move from there. You know why the tracking stops? Because they intercept it somehow. Okay, so FedEx's insurance to this day will not allow their drivers to participate in a controlled delivery. This was the one thing I did know then. That was what gave me the idea to use FedEx.

So I figured if you watch the delivery arrive and it's your normal driver, it's fine. no matter what. Oh, interesting. If you watch, and it's not your normal driver, and they drop it off, and they go around and deliver more packages, it's fine. If they drop it off, break every traffic law racing down the street around the corner to a parking lot three blocks away where there's a bunch of suburban. Probably shouldn't pick that package up. Well, I noticed that when a box would, we call it a dead package,

when it died, it wouldn't, sometimes it would show up empty. So that means that the actual drivers or somebody in the sorting facility jacked you. Somebody worked for FedEx. Most likely one of your Vax popped and your smell gave you. Right. So then a couple days later, an empty box would show up at the house, the delivery address or whatever. That's when the law wasn't involved. When the law did get involved, they would call you and say, hey, we have your package waiting at, like, corporate in whatever market.

you were sending the package to. But when you were sending kilos before the internet, like in 97, I don't think you had any way to track where the box was going in real time. You had the 1-800-Go FedEx number. That's all you had, right. And so you do the tracking. But for us, we were locked in on the drivers. Okay.

So, but then how would a box get lost with kilos and it going to London? Well, what I learned after several losses is that it was actually not customs. It was customs, but it wasn't the drugs that we're seeing. It was Her Majesty's Customs and Exice, because they were looking at that saying, what is worth sending overnight that's going to cost you 400 bucks back then that has no value to us? That was suspicious.

Now an Algo would trip that immediately. But back then they did most of this ship by hand. Right? So that was, we ended up, they ended up opening it to look at it to see if we were paying the right amount of taxes. and, you know, once they open it's dead. And then they would get a warrant and then try to bust. Try to do controlled deliveries.

Right. But you, okay. And did your guys in London ever get popped? No. One guy got popped after I was busted because he kept trying to do the same thing. I see. With a guy that was no good and that turned out bad. So how many times, how many kilos do you think you sent over to London?

Well, the informants say between two to three tons. But you know, bro, you know how the feds are and rats are, right? So whatever they say, you got to like just chop it in half. Best case scenario. There's no way it was due to three tons. But we'd get 60, 80 out in a week. Wow. You know?

Who was your connect here in L.A.? Different guys. Mexicans mostly. And that's why the exes started because they didn't want English pounds. There was no euro dollar yet. They didn't want English pounds. The Mexicans were only taking. taking greenbacks. I had some black dudes that got me kilos. I had another dude who used to,

he had a drug sniffing dog, right? And it was a shitsum seven. So it was also trained for seeing eye. And this guy would go into storage units all over the country, get a with his fake blind glasses on and his cane and his dog. He'd get a storage unit, the ones that are open where you can get in 24 hours, get a storage unit, and then late at night, he'd come back and have the dog sniff all the units, and then he'd come back and hit the unit. Wow. And so this dude ended up with baseball card collections, coin collections, cash, and lots of drugs. And sometimes he'd show up at my house at 11 o'clock at night, three in the morning. And he'd be like, I got 22 keys, man. Can you give me 10 cash each right now? And I was, yeah, they're going for 15, 17 at the time. Absolutely.

So I got them from a variety of places, but interesting thing was I did try to pay the Mexicans to up my connect. And I was like, look, I'll give you $250 grand, up my connect. I'll promise I'll give you $1,000 off everything. But they just, they wouldn't do it. So, you know, I'd end up in like Silver Lake at some garage, you know, auto, you know, where they do brakes and transmissions and shit. And a fucking beat up truck would come rolling in and they'd cut open the tires and the spare tire and take it apart. And it was really nerve-wracking because now I got to sit there and cut these fuckers open because you want the good ones, right? Most people don't realize that nobody gets paid for transport.

What they get to do is cut the product so that part of it's theirs now. And that's how it works all the way up from, you know, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, all the way up through Central and South America. Nobody's actually, hey, you're going to. They're paid in cocaine. Yeah, they're paid in cocaine. That's actually, you make more that way. Yeah. So, well, the problem is also is you start getting out of the, you know, people say 95% that's bullshit.

Doesn't mean like fuck off. But, you know, 88, 89 is really, was really top quality, really good, no problem for the customers over there and look like the fish scale and everything, right? But you start dropping below 85, 84, you know, now some people are going to be fishy about it. They're going to have their nose stuck up a little bit. Did you know how to test the Coke for its purity by the time it got to you? I knew how to look at it. And yeah, there was a couple tricks I used to do. I would wet my finger and touch it.

And if it dissolved, it was clean. It doesn't dissolve. It's cut with a nostitol or whatever the fuck they're using, right? Right. It's long before the fentanyl all days. Right. So you would say if something was cut, you would say, I don't want that one. Yeah.

And ultimately, when it ended up happening, as I told those guys, I was like, look, the quantities I'm buying, I could be paying 11 or 12. I'm going to keep paying you 15. Just give me the good ones. Right. So that got worked out after a year. It's one of those kinks you work out of the system. Yeah, if you can buy 80 birds a week, you're going to make friends with those guys. Yeah.

They're going to do business. They're going to negotiate with you. Yeah, it was always cash. I didn't need any credit at that point. In the beginning, I started on credit and had some disasters, but got our way through it. But by that point, it was all cash. Ladies and gentlemen, today's banger of an episode is sponsored by the one and only prize picks. Prizepicks is America's number one daily fantasy sports app with over 5 million active members.

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app. $5 gets you in the game. So go check out prize picks today. Run your game. So you're paying $15 on a key and then what are they, what are your guys in London buying each for? So the guys in London were, what they do for me is they hooked me up with

MSN, uh, Chinese, military intelligence most people don't know this but the people's liberation army is the largest port real estate property holder in the world right and they have a different system the east has a different system than we do while they might have internal struggles between the triad and the government in china one they keep that pretty much quiet they keep their family business to themselves because there's no opposition party to to scream and yell right um gives them a strategic advantage in some areas. And so, but when they're out of the country, me and you can blend in to many countries and people wouldn't know, you know, you get a tan, you change your clothes, you change your hair, you grow a beard. There's a lot of countries people wouldn't know, right? But when the Chinese go someplace, they can't blend in.

Everybody knows they're Chinese. So they actually deal with the triads internationally. So when they bring this oil out of, you know, the same thing they were doing with the Fedron, same thing they're due with fentanyl they bring it out to the triads and then the triads handle the business so we were connected with some of them in london and they were getting the coke and we were getting the oil and basically conversion worked out to 32,000 pills per kilo um i'm not quite sure i'm following so okay you're getting 32,000 but they're paying you in oil yeah they're paying us in oil because there's also another misconception and amsterdam everybody thinks in rotterdam and belgium everybody thinks they're

manufacturing ecstasy. They are not. What they're doing is a final refining process. They're crystallizing this oil. It's not like these crazy cook labs like you know, you're pill pressing there, you're refining there. But the oil, the crystal is the pure final MDMA, 3-4 methyline dioxide methamphetamine product. Right? People call it Molly. They call it MDMA. If I hear another one of these kids try to tell me that they're different, I don't have any hair left, but I'd pull it out. It's like the question is how much active ingredient of M3-4 methyline dioxide methamphetamine is in there. Did you cut it with anything other than bonding agent to make the pill hold itself together? Some guys wanted it cut with speed, the rave or dude, so we'd make them green triangles.

They were cut with speed, right? And because that's what they wanted. That was their thing. Other people, typically older people, you know, in their 30s who were really excited at that time in L.A. in 1997 that there was good pills because there hadn't been good pills for a while. they typically wanted to clean stuff you know the three four hour high you could take more but you could go to sleep afterward etc and so we gave the customers what they wanted so what does oil when you say oil what does that mean like literally come have you ever seen those uh for kerosene the outdoor cook stoves the fuel bottles yeah but oil would literally come in bottles like okay so we're not talking like hash oil we're not

talking some kind of oil that you know okay we're talking about Petrol. Well. Like literal like oil. No, not. No, it's a, it's, it's a chemical, it's chemically made this oil. It's not going to run your car, turn into gasoline. But it requires, you know, a little bit of heat, a little bit of refinement, and then you end up with crystalline MDMA.

I see. I see. Okay. So it is effectively liquid. 90% of the way there. It's liquid MDMA. Okay. I see.

And so that's eventually how you end up getting paid. You're not getting paid in cash or pounds. No. At first we were. getting 22, 23,000 pounds a kilo. Okay. And then we were buying pills. But as the quantities went up and as the business relationships became tighter, then we ended

up being exclusively having the oil, all of the refineries in Amsterdam, Belgium, and Rotterdam and all the other cities where they were operating, like they had to get it from us. Now, my strategy, having not grown up to be a gangster, was I'm going to let everybody make more money with me than they make with anybody else so if they're going to rat on me they're going to rat on me and they're going to protect me i could still go out to dinner with my fiance at the time without an entourage i never had security and that was my strategy even here i i used to pay the mexicans a little bit more for the blow i used to let the guys in europe get a little bit more out of

each bottle of oil than they did before they were getting 30 percent we were leaving them 35 Okay, so everybody was doing more. Everybody was happy. We made a little bit less, but, you know, we had very few problems for someone who didn't have an army behind. Yeah, yeah. So you were sending kilos of Coke to England in cahoots with... In Italy and Amsterdam and Israel. I mean...

And so, and who were your contacts? How did you make contacts in those other countries? Oh, it was always through the dudes we knew in London. It was always a contact. of there. And who were those dudes? Were they Albanians at this point? No, they were Chinese. Okay. Chinese Brits or Chinese that were from China that just had set up in London? Well, the way it works with them is their organizations are set, right? So they rotate people through. And in this time, there was two Chinese guys there that were running some other legitimate cover businesses. And then after they put in a few years, they rotate out and another one comes in. It was interesting because that was the same organization that when I had problems in Thailand,

they were able to give me some intel about who I was dealing with. Fascinating. I feel like nobody talks about the Chinese gangs in places like London. All you hear about now is Albanians and sometimes the Irish. Well, Albanians are crazy, bro. I did time with a lot of them. One of my best friends is a guy I met in prison Albanians. Okay.

They're insane. And you see it even in prison, like the Italians, the Russians, everybody, all the white dudes who want to claim European instead of, you know, Peckerwood or whatever, they're all under the Albanians. Right, right. Now, did when you expanded beyond England to places like Italy, for instance, were those also triad members receiving the work? I don't know who it was receiving the work. I'd get the address from them and I'd take care of it and they'd handle the accounting. Okay. This was there, you know, the craziest thing to me was is the first, you know, we're making money,

we're young, we're in our 20s. But the realization dawned on me after about a year and a half that, oh my God, there's really big players that are eating from this, that we're like just kind of tourists in this world, right? Like, listen, I put my record up with anybody that's been to prison. I fucking got sentenced to 30 years. I took the hit. I had a life case for CC continuing criminal enterprise. I represented myself and I beat their fucking ass in federal court.

All the docs are open. My appeal attorney was able to use that to win my appeal and get me back. I ended up with 15 and a half instead of 30. I did my 12. I didn't rat on anybody and da-da-da-da-da. But doesn't mean I'm the toughest guy in the world. I can put my record up there with anyone. I don't know many people that could have survived that.

Yeah, you were just a drug trafficker, but I understand perfectly what you're saying. It's because there are no more criminal gangs in the U.S. really. But in Europe, they're very organized, they're rampant, and they're very much like old school mafia in terms of how structured they are. So I think that's kind of, you saw that and we're like, wow, this is really wild. Yes. I'm supplying the Andrangata. Where in Italy were you, were the addresses that you were sending the work to?

Just outside of Rome and Brindisi. A lot of it went to Brindisi, which was surprising to me because it's a port city. It's right down in the bottom of the boot. Okay. So that's in Drangeta. That's where the, that's in Brangeta territory. And probably some Camorra, some Naples guys, because that's pretty close to Rome. And the Corsicans in Marseilles, they ran the Marseilles port back then.

Did you send any work to France? Yeah, we went and did, you know, we went down there and talked to them because they had the port. So, I mean, when you have access to the port and containers, That was the next evolution for us, right? So tell us about that. Did you graduate from FedEx to? Yeah, we ended up doing air cargo. We did C cargo.

We did private jets. You know, I was, it's, we did everything that, that as, you know, once you make money and you have like exploratory capital, let's call it, in any business, everything gets easier. Okay, try 20. So it work? Okay, give them 50. Yeah. Even for customers, for lines, for anything, any potential. way to get the job done, right?

Starts beta. That's what it's called the beta phase, and then you move out from there. Yeah, and it actually served us well in PPE because we'd experience this with drugs, but people would come and say, I want a million pills, right? Bro, I don't want to do a million pill deal with you

because there's a million pill, and I don't know you. There's a million pills, and for us it was $5 million bucks, right? So you got a million pills and $5 million in cash. That means there's 10 million plus on the scene. Let's do 100,000 a time. Let's build a little trust.

Ain't nobody going anywhere. And you see that in deals today, even in the legitimate world, right? Like I saw this in PPE. People would say 10 million masks, 100 million masks, 10 million boxes of gloves and this and that. And I'd be like, well, look, bro, I've got three pallets of gloves that you can have today. Right? I've got a warehouse in Van Nuys Airport that's. got two million masks in it and you can come down and look at them, let's just do them 50,000

at a time until we build a relationship. We can get it done in a day or two. Yeah, kiss me first before we do anal. Yeah. And like if you're playing straight, right, then everybody's going to be happy with that. The people who are, and this proved itself in PPE over and over and over again, the people that were only interested in talking about 10 million boxes of this, 10 million boxes of that, million of these. They're all full of shit.

You know, they'd be taught, and we knew because I'd said to one guy, I was like, oh, so you did five million masks in one deal. Oh, yeah, how'd you do it? Oh, whoa, we did an air cargo. I'm like, so how many 747s did you have? Oh, we fit it all in one? No, dude. You did not. Even if you have a 747B with the front

nose loader, you did not fit 5 million 3M masks in there. Actually, you needed four and a half of those planes at a minimum. Five million's not a number you would do. Same thing with people who ship containers. Normal container shipping is three or seven containers. The doo-doo does one with no history. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, total wine and more is my go-to, especially when I'm firing

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That's not going to work. So going back to the late 90s, 2000s, you're sending, say, 100 bricks a week or so over to these various countries in Europe, England, Italy, France. you start getting paid in the liquid molly we'll call it oil but you know liquid uh it had a oily MDMA it had an oil that's why we called it that okay oily there was a chemical name for it it just been 30 years almost so then so you would you would get that kilo for kilo right kilo for drum of oil. Yeah, well, actually, it ended up being about six things of oil for a kilo,

but those six things would make us and net us after a 35% chopped to the people who were refining it and pressing it for us. And who were those people real quick? Oh, those were mostly Dutch. There was some gypsies. And those, and was that all coming from Amsterdam or where was that? Oh, they were all over. Amsterdam, Belgium, Rotterdam. And also in a bunch of little gypsy towns that You wouldn't expect anything. You know, you see like not a, uh, looks almost like a mobile home. Hybrid. It looks like a house that you can't tell it's a mobile home.

But when you look at it really close, wow, that might be a mobile, like one of those kind of setups, right? And so they have these like, you know, little communities like that. Wow. And you walk into one of them and it's fucking three pill presses. Wow. And you walk into another one and it's, uh, you know, they're cooking stations. Yeah.

And they were doing all kinds of other shit besides, you know, they were into web. And everything else. I mean, a lot of people used to come to us asking us to move weapons. Right. They saw just by the numbers that we had something working. And what it really was is that we were just always trying new stuff. FedEx was great. Air cargo was also great.

Containers were great. The private jet thing was great. But I can say this, we never had only this thing. Yeah. And, you know, it wasn't, people would think that we were bigger and more organized than we were. Whereas it just be me and you sitting, okay, we got to move fucking, you know, 40 birds. How are we going to do it?

Oh, well, let's wrap these in software boxes and leave the CD-ROM in there. So if they get scanned, they'll see the CD-ROM and think everything's fine. You know, I mean, it was a creativity on an individual basis, as an as-needed basis. Yeah, the same way we're sitting here doing a podcast. We'd be sitting going, okay, this is what we've got to figure out for this week. Like, people would think it was like this super-ordial.

organized company, but it was on a week-to-week basis, bro. And you had guys over there, the guys we had working over there, we're doing the same shit. There's a million three pills. We got a, okay, we can put, you know, 80,000 of them on FedEx. We'll put this on air cargo. We'll put this on a private jet. Well, you know, and we'll throw this on a container with the next, with the next batches,

first 300,000, you know. Okay. So, so you've got the keys over there. You take payment in oil. then how do you actually get cash out of that? Do you keep it in Europe and sell it? No, we make the pills and we send the pills back here. I see. Okay, so the pills are made over there and then sent over here ready to for resale.

Yeah, so when you sell them, it solved the problem. We no longer had English pounds. Right. We weren't committing a free felony by smuggling money that can't grow. You have the same risk. You can lose it if you smuggle the cash. Then you got to exchange it. IDs all over fucking town, seven, six grand at a time, which was bullshit.

one of the things I found out is they're tracking everything over a thousand. Yeah. They make you fill out a $10,000 paper, but they're tracking everything over $1,000. They're reporting everything over $3,000. Yeah. And you're filling out the paper at $10K, right? So you avoid all that. You sell the pills.

You got dollars again, which is what they wanted for the cocaine. So you don't have to worry about currency exchange. This is like the equivalent of Bitcoin. This is what Bitcoin solves is the problem of international trade. and the, yeah, the currency exchange, the conversion. So this is, did you have people in the markets you were sending the Coke to? Did you have contacts there that were also cooking down the oil into pills? Or did you have to send that to somewhere else?

They delivered it to me in Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Okay, so that's where they were pressed. Yeah. Oh, I see. Okay. They would refine the oil there, press it there, and send it back. And it was great because the Chinese would just deliver it to us right there. So these Chinese were your complete gateway into all of this.

Yeah, it's, it's, you know, later when the whole case went down and this guy, Monier Deary, the main rat, got busted. He got busted with 5,000 pills. He got bail. He jumps bail on that 5,000 pills and he's running around like crazy. And I'm like, I'm not dealing with him anymore. You know, they told me, they're like, you got to kill him. I'm like, I ain't fucking killing.

nobody bro there's plenty of money here they're like lewis you don't understand any of this fucking shit you're running around europe with your hundred thousand dollar watch and your girls and your parties and your Lamborghini and and all this shit because of us we make that possible for you right now and they had gotten it one of my guys who'd been kidnapped back for me um and this is how the business works that dude's got to go and i was like if you do that i'm out and so you were non-violence you have a strict non-violence policy. Well, dude, killing people over at that point in my life for what I was doing at that time. Yeah, I was, I thought there's an, you know, I was, I guess, kind of naivete thinking, I thought

there's enough money to go around. Why do we need to kill anybody? That's because you're American. I thought the same way. I thought the same way. It doesn't make any sense. Ripping people off doesn't make any sense. But if he does rip you off, let him go.

I just made a million dollars this week. Yeah, you know what? was interesting. I used to when I met New Connects over there in the beginning and over here for cocaine, I would give them, or you're going to bring me 10, here's 150 grand. And great. And my friends would be like, what the fuck are you doing? I'd be like, bro, I'm going to find out two things right now. One, if they're going to rob me, I'd rather they'd do it without a gun in my face. Two, if they're stupid enough to steal that 150 grand, when I'm the kind of connect who could give that to them. Rather than doing the business, I'd rather know now, and that is super cheap. And I had,

you know, it worked out for me. Okay. So tell us about the pills coming back now. How far into this operation did you start moving away from currency conversion from pounds and dollars and going to pills? Oh, like right away. Right away. You couldn't, you know, you, you're flying back with pounds. And I was really excited the first time we got something through and we're flying back with pounds. And bro, you're scared the whole time. You can lose the money. You know, you're, there's, to me, that was just, it didn't make any sense. There's a risk being taken here where even if you get through, you're going to lose 10% of it on the exchange.

When you go to, remember all the Thomas Cooks? I don't know, you're young. But back then there was Thomas Cooks all over the place. Currency exchanges everywhere, right? So now you're going to, you're going to spend literally. a week because you're every time they ask you for ID, you're just going to grab your shit and leave. Right? Like, so now you've got to find the places that are more lax that are just happy to get the business.

When they know you don't want an ID, then you're going to, you know, they're going to charge you a little bit more. You're going to get whack 10%. Right. And when you take that into account, that's 10% of the whole payment, not 10% of your profit, not 10% of the cost of the block. It's 10% of everything. Yeah. It's, uh, that's all profit. Yeah, it's staggering.

It's, you can't, you can't keep doing business like that. Yeah. And, and also, I was very keenly aware of the paper trail that it leaves. So we were looking for another way. I knew about the XC thing because some guys I knew had done some and I'd sold a few for them. They were bodypacking it, right? Right. I was never big on the humans carrying anything because if a human gets busted, it's got a mouth that's going to keep you awake at night.

It needs a lawyer, which is. expensive and it needs bail potentially which is also expensive whereas if a box gets busted it doesn't have a mouth you can sleep at night it doesn't need bail and it doesn't need a lawyer so all that money that you just saved and anxiety that you just saved you're right back in the game you're you know some people are worried about falling down my life path has always just been hey you're gonna fall you just got to be really good at getting up i'd rather just be really good at getting up right then worry my whole life about falling down. That's great.

I love that. So pills were coming back in FedEx mostly. FedEx at first. And then, like I said, we switched to air cargo. We did C cargo. We were doing everything. The private jet thing was really fun. That was a cool little.

How much are you getting back in, like, say, compared to like a FedEx box versus C cargo? Well, FedEx boxes, we typically get about 60 to 80,000, depending on. on the pill size, right? So we started doing shape pills because they were harder to counterfeit. We'd bring Mitsubishi's and all the supermans and all these other pills back, right?

And Ferraris and 007, every igloos, boo does that. So many, I can't, you know, whatever. You'd bring them back and then people would counterfeit them. They'd make shitty pills with the same press. So what we started doing is we started shaping the pills. So you got like

pink pentagons, like Revano got busted. with right like i remember watching that those were our pills i was like how did this fucking rat get our shit right like that's how far down the line he was right and mike actually the rat i was telling you about earlier was selling to his guy andre wagner white boy and uh that dude was a rat so he ran up a big tab with mike while mike was had jumped bail on the 5 000 pills and then rated on him when he owed him a couple million bucks and then same thing with uh you know grvano's crew over there So that was the bridge. Okay.

But how are you getting it over, though? Like, and how many, so you could get over 80,000 pills in a box. Yeah, actually explain that market because I have no idea. Like, so ecstasy for young people watching that don't know, this is not Molly. These are pressed ecstasy pills. And they were big in the late 90s, early 2000s. There was a big rave scene. It was big and rap.

We brought that here. Four Aces, Four Aces promotions was another rap, Bobby Stewart. They called him Kingpin. I wanted him to fucking cut his tattoo off and put King Rat instead of Kingpin. But the point is it was big all over America. And like in pop culture, like even my favorite rappers from the Bay, black guys were taking ecstasy. Like they made the thizz they called it, you know.

Yeah. So we do. So FedEx, for example, let's do that one. That's easy. We put 60 to 80,000 per box. And then we might do three boxes on the same air bill. Or we might send a bunch of, you know, you know, send it three days in the week, four days in the week, five days in the week even.

Yeah. And, you know, as long as you got enough different addresses. So we had, you know, we had like people who did real estate, right? And this is before the key boxes that they all had. Yeah. But we would just, we knew vacant houses and we'd deliver right there. And since we were watching the driver, you don't need to go in. As long as it's a regular driver, hey, you walk up to him, you signed for it, you smile.

And they leave. and they never even know that you were never inside that house. Right? So we'd send it to all these big houses in Beverly Hills up Benedict Canyon, Nichols Canyon, right? Where, you know, people weren't there. The other thing we did is when we started, we started after a while, we started using this software stuff.

I don't know if it was actually, it worked really well, but I don't know if it worked for the reason why everybody thought, oh, they're going to scan it and they're going to see the CD-ROM and they're going to think it's nothing. I mean, the weights off. everything's fucking off. But I think it was just that time like where, you know, as long as you had

seasoned accounts, right? You're, bro, we were using some fucking huge name accounts. And so you're using seasoned because we're getting them for free, like I told you, using season accounts and they're going to, you know, addresses that are like one-offs. It's not repeated.

Right. Right? Because we're using different addresses. And then what we started doing is just when we started the software, we started addressing them to, schools like a school the address wouldn't be the schools but it would be LA Unified School District right and so we did all the little I don't know how much that worked or didn't work but I do know when I was in trial you know we landed more than 95% of our shit mm-hmm yep that sounds right that sounds right and and and we know that because one of the rats is fucking dumb motherfucker

so he's key he was the greatest worker though ever this guy Mike year he was the best like this dude was unbelievable got to give credit where credits do and he was an unbelievable rap for the feds he got just as into that you know he thought he was a cop at one point um but he so he keeps all the records of all his expenses and everything he's got storage units and fake names this and that and so but he keeps the fucking receipt for the storage unit in the fake name back then storage were 12 dollars 10 dollars so they found a storage and in the storage this dude had kept all the boxes. Oh, my God.

That had come FedEx from the whole time. Oh, no. The empties, but they had the labels on them, so they had the weight. Mm. Right. Then there was, you know, 700,000 pills in the storage. Right. Right.

So some people are too thorough. Yeah. Yeah, that fucking idiot. Before we get to that, though, because I'm enraptured now, tell us about C cargo. How does that work? How do I get? how does Louis get say I don't know 300,000 pills? How many pills do you get in a cargo

over a million? You could put probably 20 million pills in a cargo container. The question is how do you disguise it? Are you disguising it? Are you on a good line? What's your customs broker situation like? So does that work? The key thing is the customs broker. That's your insight. That's your tracking. Right? That dude has to be or somebody in his office has to be on team because they know, based on what they're receiving from customs,

pick up notices, clearance notices, they know if something's wrong. I see. That's your tracking. So you got to have a customs broker, right? And did you have those contacts in Europe? Or did the Chinese have us? No, we had those contacts here.

Where the Long Beach? First, yeah. The port of Long Beach. Yeah, well, it didn't matter so much which port you sent it out of. It mattered the customs broker. Where was coming in? Sure.

Well, it mattered who your customs broker was. When it was coming this way, your customs broker here is everything. Whether it's coming air cargo, whether it's coming sea container, anything that's not like FedEx or D.HL or Flying Tigers back then was one of my favorites. How did you, so you rely on these corrupt brokers, these corrupt people that work at the port. So how did you originally find this person? Well, bro, you know, when I was younger, I used to have, I was run around. first this guy James Deary he had a pager and he would service like all these people you know they

call he'd sell him grams later on in life I had another friend Simon who did the same thing but when james uh died his mom gave me his pager because I'd been he overdosed right but I've been kind of looking out for him for a few weeks and I was over his apartment after he died and I come in there and these two guys are harassing his mom and I fucking grab the baseball bat that was by the door and fucking, I didn't hit him, but they, if you're pressuring a dude's mom, you ain't about nothing, right? So they fucking go scurrying out, but she was very appreciative. They were trying to steal his stuff because they knew he was dead.

And basically she didn't have anything. He'd always been taking care of her. So she gave me that pager, and I met a bunch of people like that, you know, and when you're the dude, I always tell people, guys, they're always listening to like the Andrew Tates of the world and this and that. And, hey, if you got a billion dollars, his technique. with women are going to work for you, right? But if you don't, and you're a normal person,

just be the guy with the bag of dope at three in the morning. I know this from personal experience. Some other jackass is going to go take them out, spend thousands of dollars, this, that thing, at three in the morning after he drops them off, who do you think they're calling? The dude with the bag of dope. So through that, you met a ton of people.

And I think this is one of the things that people don't realize is that, you know, they see a graphic designer, or do your business card in 10 seconds. Well, now AI does it, whatever. But you're not paying for the 10 seconds. You're paying for the 10 years. It took that dude to learn it in 10 seconds, right? So same thing.

Like you go through life and you meet. I had high volume interaction with people that I didn't know from delivering Coke, from being out at the club, or, you know, whatever it was. And, you know, you develop those connects that you don't even know you're going to need later. But then when an idea comes, we all look into our Rolodex and say, who do we have that can help us with that. And that was someone that I'd met actually delivering blow at three in the morning. Yeah.

It turned out he worked at the port of long. At the port of Long Beach. Well, his office is outside the port, but it's in that area. Right. So they're the same. It's like what I tell people, people always ask me, they get a DUI. They ask me, oh, do you know a good lawyer? I'm like, dude, don't get a good lawyer.

Go down to the fucking court and watch the lawyer that's stalking the halls. That's a dude you want. He knows the clerks. He knows the judges. He knows the vacation schedule. He knows the cops. He knows everything. You need a mechanic for that.

You don't want a lawyer. You want a dude who knows everybody. And he's going to be super cheap in comparison. And it's going to be much less of a headache. It might take longer to settle your case because he's waiting for all the pieces to fall into place. A vacation here. A time off there. Somebody's sick here.

And boom, all of a sudden you're in court and nobody's there and dismissed. Right? That's the dude you want. Not the high-powered dude that's wearing the fire. $5,000 suit that's going to come and irritate the prosecutor in the first place. So you have your mechanic now. What did you have to pay him if you wanted to run a load of X through the port, C cargo?

We were giving him 50 a whack. 50 Gs. Okay. So then what kind of volume do you need to move to make that worth it? Well, you figure it out, bro. If you're paying fucking basically 50 cents a pill, what kind of volume? I mean, we were doing millions of pills. We were always, it was a nothing expense.

You know, we did other things like I saw. sent two times we did this. I sent people to Europe as a couple on a private jet. And I had them fucking spending and everything. A couple hundred grand. Right? And then they flew in with Louis Vuitton trunks and made the whole scene and staying. The George Sank was closed at that time, but there was a Plas Vendom hotel right next to the Ritz.

We had them staying there. Everybody's seeing them because you got to remember back then there was no algorithms. There was no high-tech shit like they have now. Most of DEA, CIA, all their shit was human intelligence, right? So you want to make a scene as being a rich couple, so you're off the radar. If they can, back then, if they could explain what you're doing in their country, you no longer deserved eyes. They were always looking at the people that they couldn't explain. What is this fucking kid doing here who's got no job fucking, you know, so I wasn't a good person to do that, right?

Obviously. Okay. So you sent this couple. Yeah, you said, well, they weren't really a couple, but they acted like a couple. a couple and they go shopping and they're staying and they're there for 10 days. White people I assume. Yeah. And then you bring them back. And then how much are they carrying on them?

Oh, 1.75 million pills was the most we did like that. We did 1.3 the first time and 1.75 million second time. And that's on a private jet. All loaded in Louis Vuitton trunks. And then you bring it back and there's a lot

of fucking flack about this. Like when I told this story before, besides the fact that you can look it up online. The way that worked was actually sweet because the dude that we used to use his private jet to go to Vegas, we used to pay him in cash. So he comes to me one day and he's like, look, Lewis, I don't know what you do,

but I want to show you something and clue you in on something. And he showed me like the map of the United States. And he said, hey, when you're flying these places, you clear customs back then by radio two hours before. So he showed me, look, all of these customs offices are more than two hours away from these airports where you need to refuel coming back from Europe, right? You got Maine all the way to the Dakotas. There's tons of them all in there, right? So if they're going to come and search the plane, you're going to be on the ground for hours before they get there.

So all you got to do is be able to, you know, get your shit off. And that's probably still like that, I assume. Yeah, to us to, I think what I noticed from comments on, on another time when I told this story is there's different procedures now since September 11th at different airports. There is not a uniform procedure. Right. Because I told the story before and you had a bunch of pilots say, oh, that's not true. I was like, dude, this was 1997 before September 11th. Also, there's a trial transcript.

If you're really infatuated, you can go read with the deed. The EEA said about it, right? And then, you know, also there's, I think they have to rate them as different security levels, right? Different threat assessments that they make. And so if you're taking off from certain countries, I think they might make you file, you know, clear now before you take off. Sure, sure. But back then, this was 97 and there was just, it was just different. And it was because that was shared with us that we went and did that.

So then if a fake couple can bring a million and a half pills back on a private jet, what can you get doing sea cargo? Oh, the problem with sea cargo, right, is two things. When we did it, one, you've got to be cautious about how this stuff is going, right? If you're going to bring it in, we wanted to always, sea cargo would only go to this drag queen that I had in Florida, was one of my two best customers. This gay couple in San Francisco and this.

drag queen in Florida were actually my best customer you know the gays they don't they don't have kids every night Saturday night to them they're happy that people are just respectful to them and don't try to rip them off or treat them like shit right like respectful great people dear friends still to this day um and uh the drag queen out of florida because you what you don't want is you don't i don't know if you ever seen uh 5 000 pack of pills or even a vac of weed go through a three three the Panama Canal in a container at 140 degrees, it's not good. Your vac is going to pop. Your pills, if there's any moisture in them and there's moisture and everything are going to

turn to butter. Wow. Did that happen? No, we avoided that. That's why we only wanted to go. We didn't want to go through the canal. Okay. So then you would put it on a ship where we never tried to max it out.

We were sending the orders of like, you know, 600,000, 400,000, whatever their orders were. Oh, I see. You never tried to go like 5 million pills or whatever. No. Okay. What was your, so, and you would send them out of what port in Europe? Oh, that's why I said talking to earlier Marseille, the Corsican. Wow.

That was so, because they control that port and they must have people. Yeah, so they, they totally, if you want to send stuff into Europe or out of Europe, the Corskins back then controlled the Marseilles port. Right. Probably still do. But they, you know, you got to, it's gambling, right? Like, the biggest gambles. there is is here's my 10 million bucks worth of drugs, United States Customs. I'm handing it to you and I'm hoping that you're going to hand it back to me because you're

not going to know what I just gave you, right? So that's what it is. Also, when you're exiting, you need an export release. Well, the Corsicans handled 50% of that. You didn't have to worry about export or import if it was coming through their thing. You didn't have to worry about a customs broker. You didn't have to worry about nothing. They got that port wired. They're getting that container off the ship. Law enforcement's never going to fucking see it. They'll open it. They'll break it down for you and they'll bring you out over a court.

If it's hot, this happened once they brought out kilos over the course of three days just in a backpack. Wow. Wow. So they have it. They're that locked in in Marseilles. Oh, the Coruscans run Marse. Now, so it goes through, it leaves France. It avoids the Panama Canal.

Yeah. How long? so it takes a different route, I guess, around the horn of Africa? No, no, it comes straight from straight out of the Mediterranean across the Atlantic. Okay, gotcha. Oh, yes. Now, it might stop at a few places along the way. That's the other thing people don't realize about sea cargo, right?

They talk about fast boats. They talk about this or that. But there's slow boats just like the RTD or metro bus. There's the express one that doesn't stop at every stop. And then there's the one that's slow that stops literally at every stop. Right? Like, so C cargo is exactly like that. So you have to know the roots that you're on.

And before computers, it was a little bit more difficult, but that's where the customs broker would come in. Because they have the manifest. And they would be able to tell you which shipping lines to use, when to use them, how to use them. Hang on. But if you didn't want to go through the Panama Canal, how did you get the loads? Where would, where were the loads? Oh, they'd come into Florida. I see.

I see. So then did you have a custom? Yeah, the drag queen was there in Florida. But was the customs agent at the port? Did you have somebody? We had a customs broker. Got it. Which we got from our customs broker here.

Wow. It's so corrupt. It's crazy. Everything is, though. That's so fascinating. Well, especially today, like I'm so fascinated. All of that Coke that leaves Ecuador, I mean, you could see, obviously, it's easy to pay off somebody at an Ecuadorian port.

But the fact that Rotterdam and all these other places, the Netherlands, I think that is Rotterdam, but then what's the port in Belgium? Oh, God. Anyways, but the fact that these, but so much blow gets through there, they're all, somebody's getting paid off for all of it. It's brute force attack. Everything's coming out of South America into Africa. So that's a free run.

That's a free run. Free run. Now you're coming up through land through North Africa. Now you've got, what, 100 kilometers, 200 kilometers at some point to go from North Africa across the Mediterranean into, uh, into Europe. Yeah. So they're actually shifting.

Antwerp. Thank you. That's in Belgium. Yeah. So the Antwerp and Rotterdam are the ports, the most active drug ports, in the most developed law-abiding by the books country. And still, the corrupt, the port is just, there never stops being corruption there. Well, the bus there is light, right?

So it's a funnel. you're always getting criminal mentality is path perceived path of least resistance right so it's always going to create a funnel back when we were doing it um if you sent like if you sent someone with three kilos on them to Amsterdam and it was 2,999 grams one gram under three kilos if you're coming from a South American country they're putting you back on a plane that same day back to your country no bust Wow. So funnel created by the perceived path of least resistance. And then add to that, the way the drug game works is brute force attack.

Yeah. Right? Like, we're going to send so much that it doesn't matter what you catch. And this is where a lot of like aspiring drug dealers or guys that I knew along the way didn't understand that. It's not money from day one. Right. You know, you're going to. There's a learning curve to it, right?

You learn, do you have good customers? Do you have a good route? Do you have a good line? Do you have a good supply? There's optimization that goes along the way, and there's some losses that are trickled in there. Right? Well, you can't expect that if you have a hundred bucks,

you're going to turn it into 150 on this one. If you want to do that, you've got to have $1,000 so that out of 10 chances, you develop a system to do it continuously, right? It's like anything else. So did you have a brute force attack going into Europe with your coat? and then for pills on the way back? Did you have that strategy? We did as much as we could.

In between being young kids who were millionaires at 27, 28 years old in cash and wanting to party and tell everybody to fuck themselves. And that was another hypocrisy, actually, right? When I was growing up and when I was in my early 20s going to the clubs in L.A., I'd see these older dudes, you know, the big car, the big house, the parties, the clubs, the girls. I'd be like, man, them dudes are rolling. I can't one day I'm going to be you know I'm going to have what they have and then when you hit and you're you know you're you're fucking sitting on three four million cash at 27 years old and you look around at these guys you realize oh they're all full of shit back then for 10 grand a month you could act like a millionaire who was four grand to rent one of these hill houses in the 90s it was 500 to have the big Mercedes a month on a lease and bottle service back then meant they wrote your name on the fucking bottle and brought it back to your table and brought it back to your table and brought it back to your tank table next time you came.

Yeah. Like it wasn't, you know, they didn't have pro chicks out there drinking your shit to try to run up your bill. So imagine what $3 million a month. I don't know how much you were spending, but you could live like the biggest baller. We did our best to be the biggest jackass as we could be, you know, the cars, the house, all the shit that goes with it. But, you know, like my partner and best friend, you know, Tamer, what he says, he's like,

oh, the youth and the money, man. It's a lethal fucking mix. Totally. the youth is wasted on the young yeah uh but you know listen i mean we it was there was also fun to it it's just it's everything every experience gives you perspective going forward in your life so at your height what do you think you were sending out uh cocaine wise every week bringing in pill wise and the how much money were you making off that our best are so our best if you say by the week first let me clarify there was sometimes be three four weeks where we wouldn't do anything because like i said

we'd be out party we'd be in ebiza back when you know the road in front of pacha but back then was dirt if you tried to act like you had money back then people didn't want anything to do with you in ebiza and when i hear people talk about burning man when i was locked up it very much reminded me of the the mentality of abiza in the late 90s or the mid 90s everybody oh here you want to some, oh, you got, oh, you're hungry. It wasn't a money status thing. It was a galitarian. Yeah, it was much more like that.

And that's what I imagine, you know, when I'd be reading Wired Magazine locked up, reading about Burning Man, I imagine that was just the Mad Max version of Ibiza. I was obviously disillusioned when I got there when I got out. Absolutely. But, uh, okay. So you're, tell us about the height. And what year was that, by the way? The height was in 2000.

Okay. How much did you bring in, do you think, if you had to estimate? Well, I have a pretty good idea. I mean, it was over a three-year run from 97 to 2000. It was about 40 million bills. Nice. Now, that was me and Tamer. Yeah.

And there was another guy initially, like I said, Bobby Stewart, who's a rap, piece of shit. And how would, off of... I just know this from the government's docs. Right. What were you wholesaling pills for? Like, what did they sell for? At first they were at first when we, you know, got the first 100, 200,000, you know, you're getting them back, 100, 200,000, 150,000. I actually got out of debt. And, uh, had 150,000 pills. And we were selling them, you know, 5, 10,000, 2,000 for somewhere around 10 bucks. And you were getting them for 50 cents. Well, at that time, we weren't. Okay. This was in the beginning, right? This was in the beginning. That was once the thing was streamlined. At first we were, I mean, I was paying a lot. lot. I was paying, you know, almost two pounds, two pounds a pill. Which would have been like,

we were getting, you know, 22,000 pounds for a kilo. So you're getting about 10,000 pills per kilo, but that's still, even at 10 bucks a piece, the lowest we sold them at that time was like 850 apiece. But at like 10 bucks a piece, dude, you're turning a kilo into 100 grand. Yeah. Now, obviously, like everything like we talked about earlier, you optimize, the connect gets better, the volume goes up. Right. And once it was fully optimized and we were running the oil through the, through the Chinese and the Netherlands and Belgium, we obviously did a lot better.

It was 32,000 pills per kilo. But the price had come down by that time to about five bucks a pill. Right. And I wasn't dealing with anybody who wasn't buying 200,000 pills at least at a time. So that was one drop, was 200,000 pills? Yeah, 200,000 pills, million, wasn't taking 20. was a full asshole. So $5, $5 a pill, $200,000 at a time was about a million dollars a deal.

And you made and you and you profited a lot. You know, you add the expenses depending on how we brought it. You know, they never ended up costing us more than a dollar a pill all in once we were optimized. In the beginning, they did. So you made about 75%. Well, then it got even better because like the gay guys up in San Francisco said, hey, we want to pay four, not five. And I said, well, okay, you're going to pay me in advance if you want to pay four and you'll get your stuff two weeks later. And they said, okay, let's try it.

They said, okay. Yeah, they said, okay, let's try it. They gave me 400 grand for 100,000 pills. I put 100 grand in my pocket immediately. I bought 20 kilos with the other 300 grand. Ended up with 75% of the pills for free again. Wow. Without any money. going out. Incredible. That was very close to the end. I wish that would have run for about a year. How many buyers?

Was it just those two main buyers? By that point, by the last year and a half, I was only dealing with them. Wow. A drag queen and a gay couple out of San Francisco. What a progressive operation this is. What a very woke. You don't look like a guy that deals with gays and drag queens. Oh, some of my best friends are gay, and I don't mind drag queens.

Sure. I like people that keep it real. Yeah. I don't I've been everything. I've been a scumbag. I've done horrible things in my life. I've also done some good things in my life. I've done some things that other people might find challenging

and I've done some things that I've found challenging that other people find easy. I just like it when people keep it real. So if you're keeping it real, that's great. Now, as far as progressive politics, I have a little bit of a different view there than what the mainstream is. But, you know, for example, on the transit, thing, I think it's great. You're trans. Fantastic. You live in America. You can be trans. You can

dress however you want. But hey, if you're dressed like a female, I'm going to dress you as a female. Yeah. You know, if you're dressed like a male, I'm going to dress you as a male. Now, I live in L.A. If I can't tell what you're dressed as, I'm going to avoid, I'm going to ask your name. Whatever it is, just be attractive. Yeah, yeah. That's the main thing. As long as it's a good transition, you're fine. We'll accept you. But I do think I do have a problem in the sense that gender dysmorphia is real. I've looked into this. It is real. It's a real thing. It's 0.05% of the population at the last measurement, but the measurement might be totally trash, but we'll take it because that's what they put out there, right? Fantastic. Well, we need a targeted

approach to identify those individuals. What we're using right now is a celebratory approach to attract more people and you're not identifying the ones it needs a targeted approach. Bow and arrow approach, sniper approach, that type of thing, rather than celebrating mental health issues and creating an in-crowd so that more people want to participate, especially when you're dealing with these gender medications and things that can't be reversed. And it's funny because it's the same people now who are pushing those. this who were the same ones you're again you're young but when i was younger they used to catch dolphins in tuna nets right and they made the fishing industry change all their nets to avoid that

well it's these same people that seem to not care if they catch a kid up just in the in-crowed out-crow thing rather than identifying that this person really needs these therapies it is it is trendy now to be mentally ill to be autistic and all that. That's not. But we'll say that for the Patreon. No problem. Okay, so 2000 is really when it's like

you're killing it. Everything is running like a well-oiled machine. Oh, from the end of from the end of 97, mid-98, 99 and 2000 we're killing it. Wow. And you would go to Europe. Would you go to Europe every time to oversee the

pills that were getting sent back? Or did you, were you trusted? Did you have enough trust in your partners over there? I'd send friends of mine from over here. They'd go work over there for two months. They'd get 200 grand. They'd stuff boxes, vacuum sealed, do everything.

We had, they'd drive. The gypsies would drive a car in front and behind them. It's in case the cops. They could make an accident with them. We didn't have any problems like that, right? And, you know, listen, they had this place called Yobiam. It's, you know, basically a brothel where each room is a different theme.

And you have all the costumes. You can be a Greek god. You can be a Roman emperor, whatever. You know, you can be Pharaoh, whatever. And it was a big place there then. Where? In Amsterdam. Okay.

And that was a company expense. The guys could go there anytime they want. So you had friends from L.A. working, pressing the pills? No, no. They'd get the pills pressed. Okay. And then they'd handle the vacking, the packing, the driving and the dropping.

To wherever, if it was getting shipped out, mailed out, or flown out. Whatever it was, dropping a pallet off, whatever it was. $200,000 just for doing it. And all expenses paid, including your hookers. Yeah. Yeah. High class hookers. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. And then at the end of the month, we'd let you, you know, we'd say, hey, if you want your cash, you can have your cash here. You can have it there. or if you want, you can take half your cash and buy pills at our price and send them home and sell them for yourself so you could actually make some real money. So you solve the problem of the currency exchange. You move the pills when they're here. Now you've just got millions of dollars every transaction.

Are you smart with it? Are you blowing all of it? Are you laundering it? What's your strategy? I typically don't confirm or deny this just because, as you understand, the legal aspects of what I can say is that the federal government never found any money of mine. That's public record. And I don't want to comment about what I did or didn't do spent or didn't spent because the way the legal system works is you say something, you don't even read.

It gives them some kind of course of action. Do you think after almost 25 years, if they heard you on a podcast talking about what you did with your money, they could come? after you. Oh yeah, because I have a fine. I have a fine and, you know, I make payments on that. I see. But I just don't want a course of action. I'm not worried that I did anything wrong. I just don't want them to have a cause of action against me. I don't, you know, so you can't speculate. You can't even say what you think lifetime you made just for. Oh, I could tell you at one point I was sitting on 30 liquid. Forget all the shit. Wow. That was my high point as far as 30 million.

Now, remember, we're spending, you know, I go to Central Pay for two months in Monaco, I spent two million bucks there, bought a Lamborghini, my friend got a Ferrari, we're fucking clubs, you know, we're a bunch of 20-year-old kids. It was funny because the first few nights were at La Cove, the club in Biblos there, the girls are looking, waiting for some old man to pop out that's paying for all this, right? It was just a bunch of young fucking kids. We were all in our 20s, you know.

It was your friends must have loved you. Yeah, we had a great run. It was fun. Listen, man, it was, it's one of those things you look back and you say, you know, I wasted, I realized in prison that I wasted 95% of my potential when I didn't finish my education. And I did that, but now that I've accepted that, I've internalized that and I use that to analyze the things that I do now and in the future to make sure that. But, you know, I don't end up in that situation again. I can look back on it and say, yeah, okay, all that's true, but we had a fucking hell of a run and had a great time. I mean, experiences that, gee, no, just most people are just never going to happen.

Never. What did 30 million bucks, did you have that? Okay, I'm going to ask this a delicate question. Like, how do you sleep at night knowing that liquid is out there? it could be, you know, whatever. Somebody breaks in. You got it in a storage unit and some asshole, the drug sniffing dog just hits on your unit. Like how did you have a strategy for safekeeping that at least?

Safeguardant? Can I ask you that? I was, you know what, bro, the truth is looking back on it with everything I've learned since then. I was just a lucky idiot. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I mean, bro, I took a million dollars and I got a blue box and I got Tiffany box that fit it perfectly. 22 pounds fit the million perfect like this.

And I got Tiffany wrapping paper and wrapped it, Tiffany, with a bow on it. And I kept it as like an ottoman in my living room. And only me and my friends would know what that was. So you could just have your feet on the ottoman? Yeah, you'd feed up on it. We'd throw it to each other back and forth like a medicine ball sometimes. Wow.

And people would be sitting there like, you know, because I had some people at my, I was pretty sketchy about that, selective about that. But I had a lot of parties. I mean, where, you know, there's a hundred people in the house. And people are sitting on this thing and standing there. And none of them have any idea. And me and all my friends used to just laugh like crazy.

Now, your cocaine connects, have they evolved at this point? Because you're spending so much money? No, I kind of gave up the whole trying to get. I was just, hey, the system worked. And I told them, you know, I got in the best I could out of them. I was giving them 15 apiece instead of 11. I wasn't negotiating. And they turned out to be trustworthy as far as giving me all the good ones.

Mm-hmm. Right. And so did that, were there any ever droughts? Oh, yeah, of course. So there's time. There's stuff. But we love that because once you have money, you know every Christmas time they take off, right? Everybody in L.A. knows that.

Prices go up here every year. Well, in November. before they took off, they got 330 of them left. Oh, we'll take them. Yeah. And then you could probably raise the price, too. I didn't do that. I knew we could have, but all I was looking for was continuity of business.

Sure. And I didn't do that because it was very clear in my mind, especially later on, that I was in over my head and that my idea of allowing people to make more money with me than they did everywhere else is what had been saving me. I'd had a kidnap situation with my friend Simon, got kidnapped in Amsterdam. Okay. And Simon was a friend that you sent over to work. Dear friend.

And he was going to be the guy that was going to oversee the pills getting shipped out? Yeah, he's overseeing that. I mean, he's even not there on a two-month thing. He left here. He got busted for, he used to deliver grams. He got busted with two kilos at his house. We got him out on bail and he took off. So he was going to be there permanently.

I see. And he's dealing with, he's Bulgarian and he was dealing with some Bulgarian guys. And I told him, I was like, bro, do not show them anything. Don't tell them anything. Don't front of money. Buy slow from them, 10, 20,000. Don't tell them 100,000, 500,000 pills. Right?

Like this was before we had the oil thing organized, right? This is about 10 months in almost the first years down. And anyway, Simon doesn't listen to me and, you know, big talking out. they fucking kidnap them, dude. They call me and they tell me it's $5 million. The problem for me, the biggest problem for me, was that I actually had it, right? Like, I'd just gotten it.

I've got it. It's not a problem in the sense, like I'm happy that I'm able to get my friend back. But the problem is you're going to give up that $5 million because you've got it. If you don't have it, it's not a problem because you have to deal with the reality of, I'm going to have to find another way to get my dude back, right? So here, you know, so I call the Chinese dudes. And I say, hey, bro, can you guys handle this exchange for me and this and that? What, what the fuck?

Give me the number. I give him the number. Like 15, 20 minutes later, Simon calls me. He's like, I don't know what the fuck just happened. But these dudes just apologized to me, kissed me on the head and fucking and gave me back my phone and let me go. Well, you know why that is, Louis? because unlike you, the Chinese are willing to kill. And the Bulgarians and the other crime groups know this.

And that is why they handle business that way. Yeah. That's why, that was one of the examples they used when Mike started ratting. And they were like, that dude's got to go. And they're like, we'll take care of it for you. And I was like, no. You know, like, but I also mentioned before, like I was very well aware that I was swimming with sharks. like and big sharks not like the fucking white tip ones in Maldives that everybody acts like they're

gangster for swimming with you're dealing with gray whites yeah you're dealing and so i was very aware of that at all times and part of me like many times there was offers to do bigger shit there was offers for heroin there was offers for you know transporting for people this and that renting our transport you know besides the fact that we didn't have as well oiled the system is on a week to week basis as we discussed before, I was very conscious of like, you know, getting too much further into this, you might never get out. You were dealing with real gangsters. Yeah.

And they were making money and everybody was happy and people were treating me nice. And I was getting away with all kinds of shit, you know, everywhere I went. And, you know, I'm a fucking, I'm 28, 29, 30 year old kid running around Europe to Lamborghini, $100,000 watch, girls, this, that all. When people didn't do that. That wasn't happening then like it happens now. You know, we were spraying bottles of crystal in clubs. That wasn't happening. We brought that shit back here.

I brought that back from Santropay. Like, so I was, that was always in my head. And I think actually that is what set me up really well for prison. Because I was also useful. They did make more money with me than they made with other people. I was reliable. I did stick to my word. I didn't make promises I couldn't.

Right? And I think that those, if people ask, you know, how do you not have a problem in prison, those would be the four things I'd tell people. Okay. So let's talk about how you got there. What year and how did it unravel? So in December of 2000, two girls who were working for that guy, Mike, I told you about the main rap, Monier, Derry. these two chicks were working for them.

They were dropping packages, picking up packages, doing whatever. In Europe or here? Here. He'd have the addresses or whatever. He had them working for them. I didn't really know them. And they're stealing shit out of the boxes before they bring it to them. And they're stealing cocaine that's going there.

Right? And they're using the account numbers that we're using. You never want to overlap account numbers. So if you've got a box in the air with this account number, you're not going to put anything else on that account number until that's clear. You don't want air, we used to call it air traffic control, right? Like you can't. There's no crash landings.

So you don't want 10 other packages taken down because you're on the same thing. So these girls had stolen some kilos and used the FedEx account number to ship it to Israel to their own customer. It got busted. And that took this package down, which was. actually a three fed pack FedEx box so it was 60 and 60 or 180,000 pills

on one air bill so it was still only one air bill right so controlled delivery they go pick it up they're not there they're lazy everything else right and the package is late yeah they go to pick it up anyway which

not okay and then they stopped there it was out in Riverside and then they stop at that mall Monobello Mall on the 10 freeway to open the boxes and steal their ship before they drop it off to Mike. Well, the cops have a tracker. They can't let that shit out in the open. The minute you open the box, they're coming to get you. So they come get them in the parking lot, and they fucking just immediately rat on everything they know.

Then they do another controlled delivery to Mike's house. They get this guy, John, busted. They don't get Mike. He's not there. but they find a bunch of records. They find 400,000 pills in a Volkswagen Rabbit parked in his building. They find the storage receipts. They find all this stuff through following that box the rest of the night,

those boxes the rest of the night. And they get to the storage. They find like 1.7 million pills there that were tamers. Not mine. They were tamers, but they also find all the boxes historically that we did FedEx. because nobody ever threw them out. That's the guy. Yeah.

You mentioned earlier. And all the labels are on it. So you have all the drug weight there. Oh, my God. So are the feds able to stack that drug weight in sentencing? Yeah. So we were off the chart. For us, it was 35 to 1 against the weed table.

Every drug in the feds goes off the weed table, right? Like heroin's 500 to 1. So XC at that time was 35 to 1. But we were so far out. We were in the 360 to life. Like you're so far off the chart. They actually changed it. because of us.

Yeah, they're like, Jesus, fucking Christ. Yeah, because in December they get this 1.7 million pills, right? And they arrest these people and this and that. And the press comes out and they've destroyed this trafficking network, this and that other thing. And they got their handle on it. Well, six months later in July of 2000, they catch 2.1 million pills air cargo on Air France.

same people same shit they had an egg on their face right but hang on before we get there they make this bus but so mike did they get mike they didn't get mike okay so mike and tamer and you are still out operating do you but you know this went down yeah so you know you got some heat on you yeah actually me and tamer are sitting at my i had the penthouse it's this four-story building on wilshire Utama Royale. If you're going west to Santa Monica from Beverly Hills, the first nice condo building on the right is Utama Royale. It's about half a block east of Beverly Glen. Across the street is Sterling International Tower. That's where Tamer and Al and them lived. Mike lived, I think at the diplomat, a few blocks further down. Everybody lived kind of on the

Wilshire corridor at that time. I was in between houses, and so I just rented a furnished unit there for a couple months before I moved to my new house. But they were staying there. So me and Tamer literally on my balcony watching the feds ripping up his place across the street smoking a joint, right? And we're watching the Ferraris and the Porsches get towed out of the garage and this and that. But then we watch them like, they get all excited and they all take off.

So Tamer calls the doorman who he knows. And he's like, oh, yeah, they found some storage thing. Well, now it's not a party anymore because Tamer. Tamer was like, whatever I lost, who cares about the car? I got 1.7 million pills left. Right? Like, he's not worried. Take your fucking Ferrari.

Ferrari back then was 100 grand. It wasn't like it is today. Porsche was 60 grand. Right. Right. So, okay, take my Porsche, take my Ferrari, go fucking take my big screen, go fuck off. Right. And we're sitting there literally smoking weed laughing, fucking, you know, okay, cool.

He calls it storage. Tamer, you know, for him, that was just horrible. without when it, you know, then we find out his cousin gets busted because his cousin was in his place. And then we find out that his cousin drops 400 grand and cash down the balcony to this other dude Al Maiman's place, another rat piece of shit. So they get to Al's house. Al, this fucking genius, right? He has a book about how to hide your assets in the back of the book. He wrote down all his foreign account numbers. That's called hiding in plain sight.

It doesn't always work. Well, when they brought that out for evidence in the trial, I was just like, I could barely control myself from, I mean. So how, okay, so did they bust him at the scene? They didn't bust him at the scene. They didn't get him until later. So how does this investigation keep moving through? Where does so? So anyway, they lost all these pills.

They're kind of dead in the water. They've arrested John at this point. John's not saying. But Mike's key. They need Mike to get to you guys. Yeah, they don't have Mike yet. They don't even know that Mike and they, they're scattered. It's a international task force.

It's called EarNet. They got Interpol. They got fucking DEA. They got FBI. They got IRS criminal investigation division. There was no homeland then. Right, right. They got the local sheriffs because it's a international task force.

They got a representative from everywhere. Wow. They don't know that I exist at all. They do have Tamer's picture at the top of the chart. And then Mike and all these people, they, they, my name pictures nowhere there. I was paranoid about phones. I used to just meet people. I used to buy those prepaid phones at 7-Eleven when they first came out.

They'd be by the cash register. And I'd buy whatever, the whole stack, I'd buy them all. I'd throw them in the trunk. And if me and you just met, I'd take out a brand new phone. I'd lock it so you couldn't make any calls you could only receive. And I'd give it to you. And I said, I'll call you and give you an address when it's ready. And that was that.

And the minute the card ran out or that transaction was over, literally throw it out the window, never recharged them, never anything. So they had me on Tamer's wiretap a couple times. They didn't realize it because always just, hey, I'll meet you at the spot, whatever, you know. And that was. So how did they get to Mike to get to Tamer? So they got to Mike because Mike's working with this dude, Andre Wagner, a white boy, they call him. He's selling to Sammy Gravano's crew in Arizona.

Well, this dude's a rat. So he's trying to run up as much of a bill with Mike as he can before he rats out. out his location, which he's successful at. He runs up a couple million dollar bill with him. Right. And at the same time, he's the one who ratted on all them dudes who were working with Gravano. So that's how they got Mike.

They got him at a Laker game. And then Mike just becomes a rat and just, you know, fucking tells him not just everything, but starts lying to him about all kinds of shit. Did you know that he ratted that he was ratting? Or did they let him loose after they arrested him at the Laker game? No, no, no.

they didn't let him lose. He was already jumping bail. He already had another case by 5,000 bills. They weren't letting him go. They'd by this point from the wiretaps, they'd figured out, you know, that he was a main player. And so he gets there. He just starts ratting and fucking making up stories. And thank God he did make up stories because that's how I ultimately won my appeal after I was arrested.

We went to speedy trial. Hang on. Because that's the climax. did they get how did how long after they got mike did you guys go down and how okay so now in july 2000 this is after they got mike um this would be 2001 no this is 2000 we're talking about December 99 they had a oh yes gotcha then in about april of 2000 they busts mike they catch him and then in july of 2000 uh you had uh air france air cargo 2.1 million pills that they they busted and how they busted that is old man 5-0 joe we call him he ratted to but nobody cared he's

a old man he used to drive fucking uh joseph gilboa so he uh has the palette and the paperwork and he faxed it to tamer because that's how you got to check the paperwork right you want to check the paperwork make sure there's nice stupid shit on there so it goes to kinkos tamer's living in that fucking super hollywood fucking ocean avenue pool on the rooftop it just opened he's living there and the kinko's literally right across the street but he's in bed with two fucking hot chicks banging away right doesn't go over there for like six hours well in that six hours the dea had his phone tap so they know there's a fact they know where the facts went to they had time to come all the way from downtown get a warrant get into kinkos get the shipping documentation put it back

Tamer gets there later, picks it up, looks at it, tells them everything's good. And the feds grab it in France. And it was actually one of the issues I had later because that shipment was supposed to go through Korea on the way to L.A., not directly from France, L.A. And the reason for that is we had a dude in Korean, we had a connect who had a dude in Korean customs, who when it comes through Korea, like more stuff's being added to the shipment, stationary. You never want to use clothes or electronics because they're always checking for counterfeit. But stationary is heavy. Right. And stationary is expensive if you get nice stationary.

And that's a common thing coming out of there. So we put stationary. So weights match, right? Add it to the shipment. But what he would do is be able to go in that bonded area and strip the paperwork and then move it, move the shipment out of the bonded area to make it look like the shipment originated in Korea. Wow. So nobody's looking for drugs coming out of South Korea. No. They're looking for counterfeit.

So we're using stationary. Just low low. I mean, this was just common sense stuff. Wow. I don't know how much of it worked. I couldn't tell you that this is why, but this was the type of thinking that we always had. We wanted to be, you know, we wanted to blend in with anything that wasn't, you know, drug dealers always want to put shit in VCRs. Fucking VCR, dude, the cop opens a container.

It's easy for him to open a box of VCR. Why don't you put it in there with a bunch of shit-soaked sewer pipe? Because that gets transited back to Germany and London when there's a broken valve. And it might be this fucking big. And it goes in a container also. When the cop opens in it, it fucking smells like shit and looks like shit they're humans, bro. Yeah, we opened it. We broke the seal.

We looked. It's fine. Nothing there. You know, you got a pipe that's this big that you can walk through standing up, right? With the valve and shit dripping everywhere. and this and that. And in the back of the thing, there's a bag with fucking 80 keys.

Or fucking, you know, a few hundred thousand pills, which is nothing. They're looking at the container and seeing it's empty except for this thing. They never go in it. Never. VCR, sure. I don't even need to put my gloves on.

Let me open the box. So what about this Korean drop then? So anyway, it would come... It got messed up. Well, the Korean drop didn't get messed up. But because the feds knew about it. They burnt Interpol. They burnt the French police. They promised them to give them some bus later. They are the ones who actually put that shipment on an Air France flight. Right. It was one of

the motions that I made when I was fighting the CCE and representing myself. They're like, hey, we didn't import that. We were sending that to Korea. The feds imported it. Why aren't you charging the DEA with importation? That flu? No, we didn't get to that point. That didn't work. No. No, but it was a problem for them. Because they have to prove intent. And the reason why,

and now you would say, well, bro, you'd been doing it. They busted these other things. But they had a problem. They're trying to say that one conspiracy ended December 22nd, 1999, when they busted that. And a new conspiracy started in 2000.

So they can't rely on the, they're saying it's different. So they have to prove intent. How do they know we're not shipping it to Korea? And it's going to just stay off there. But anyway, I mean, technicality, you can't win on it. But what I found when I was representing myself is the more they love to hear themselves talk.

So just file motions about any crazy shit and they will fuck themselves up. Because once they take a position, they can't change it. So get them to keep boxing themselves in. And that's ultimately when we get there. That's ultimately what happened and how I was able to beat them is they box themselves in because they like to talk to them. Okay, so this is July.

They make that 2.7 million pill bust in July of 2000. So how do the dominoes fall with you and Tamer after that? So Tamer jumps out the balcony of his building and gets away to Egypt. Okay, so they link that directly to him. Right. Obviously, because of the, he was inside fucking when he should have been getting that. Yeah, but this happened, you know, this was about a week later. Oh, I see.

That was the other thing. When the 2.1 million pills came on TV, none of us thought it was us because it wasn't supposed to be there for a few days supposed to go through Korea wasn't ever on a direct fright from Paris to L.A. So all of us for a couple days are looking around going who the fuck is moving that kind of weight

in our town. Like not as a gangster like we want to push them out. Like we just can't believe that you can absorb that much. Sure. Like I was always amazed where these fucking pills are going. How many fucking people are. are taking them. How many are they taking? All over the country. Yeah, it was crazy. Like, no matter how many you got here, they were gone. Yeah.

So, Tamer jumps out the balcony, gets to Mexico in the trunk of another friend of ours car, and then makes it to Egypt. And then he, you know, he's from Egypt. And he, then he gets to Amsterdam. Because he can't, he's got shit in storage there. And they grab them. They fucking ball of clava over. his head, he thought he was dead. He was happy it was the police when they finally... Interpol? Interpol, Dutch police, DEA, everybody.

So by the time he got to Amsterdam, his name was on the computers, was on the Interpol computer. I don't know, I'm sure, but, you know, they watched him. They followed him until he went to his storage. They were still trying to develop Intel, obviously. Wow. And there was

this Dutch guy, Johann Bovens, who's a gypsy. He's got a big name in Europe as a criminal, but he's a fucking rat. When they came to him, because he was on the wiretap with tamer, he said, oh, yeah, I know Louis Ziskin. When I first met him, he told me that he was Bill Linahan working for the DEA, and I thought I was working for him. I thought I was working for the DEA this whole time. When they showed him my picture, he said he knew the case agent already was named Bill Linaan. So he told them that I said I was Bill Leinahan.

So they were like, fucking, they hated me. They thought I'm impersonating a deed. It's not true. They've realized that later. But when they first came after me, two indictments, kingpin, everything. Part of the reason was that. So in the Europe, it's kind of the same as here. High level criminals are also working with authorities.

Oh, they, yeah, a lot of them, man. Okay. So then Tamara gets arrested. You're the last man standing, I guess. Yeah, so they show up at my house after they get that bust. How do they link you to that bust? This kid Mark Bellin, a kid I'd sold some pills to way at the beginning who got in trouble. He was one of these kids was going out to the club and probably acting a lot like me, very belligerent.

I was young and stupid. I was just a fucking jackass in many situations. I was cool, but also the alcohol and me just didn't mix. The whiskey was not. I wasn't a good drunk most of the time. But they didn't have your name in this huge. operation. No, but Mark Bellin was out talking shit all the time, getting in problems, fucking, and he was a nobody. But he was saying our name and he's with us and this and that.

And like, that was the other funny thing. Like, I freely admit, like, we weren't gangsters. But by 1999, all of L.A. treated us like we were the godfather of the city. Like, it was crazy. People used to come over to get us to settle disputes. And then we'd tax them like 50 or 100 grand and just laugh about it afterward. Like, we had no way of enforcing it. I guess we could have. We had money. We had friends.

It wasn't like we had dedicated soldiers to go do whatever. Some of the people we dealt with certainly did and looked out for us on occasion when in the rare instances where that was necessary. But it was amazing. The perception of people as to what our level of power was just based on the amount of money that they saw in a bullshit. way at a nightclub i mean everybody can be fake there it's just like prison you can tell you store you want so i'm not i'm not quite sure how you got linked and charged with cc e i mean is it

because all the other people below you like that guy yeah they all routed okay so so they rated and ccce ccc is basically three incidents so three shipments um where you control five or more people you get the lion's share of the profits and you've done this three or more more times. That's a continuing criminal enterprise. The interesting thing about CCE that most people don't know is because they always talk about the full weight of the federal government. A CCE can only be authorized by the Attorney General of the United States, period. And no AUSA can authorize it only the dude in D.C. And the reason for that is, is CCE prosecution has no limit on manpower hours, no limit on interagency cooperation, and no limit on what you can give the

informants in order to secure a conviction. So a C. C.C.E. CCE really is the full weight of the federal government. Wow. So the U.S. Attorney General at the time in 2000, what year, what month did you get busted? I got busted December 1st, 2000. Who was the U.S. attorney? Mayarchus. Wow.

Holy shit. Wow. He's doing a great job as a Homeland Security officer. That's crazy. It kind of looks like you. You kind of look like myorcas. You know what's funny? Is Mayorkas has been in law enforcement his whole life.

and if we're being honest, I've gotten more cocaine off the streets in America than he ever did in his life. And this is cocaine that got past him and his buddies that was already on the streets here ready for distribution. What do you mean by that? You got it. Oh, you bought it.

I shipped it out. Oh, sure. Yeah, that's funny. You were making cocaine leave America. Think about the irony of that. And this is cocaine that had already beat them. It's already in the country. Oh, my God. There's no de-agent that's responsible

for removing as much cocaine from the country. country as me. That is some hilarious irony. It's pretty funny. So my Orcas in D.C. signed off on your CCE case all the way out here in Los Angeles. Yeah. Mine and Tamers. Tamer got charged with it all. Wow. Okay. So Bellin, Mark Bellin, he gets busted. He rats. Mike Deary rats, John Rats, all these people rat. And, you know, so they're after Tamer. They're after me. I find out there's an indictment. And I go. self-surrender on December 1, 2000. Right. And they didn't get any money or product off of you directly, right?

No. No. And they, uh, so anyway, we go, I go in and I think I'm going to get bail. And they unseal the second indictment, which meant I wasn't getting bail. So I had two indictments. I only knew about one. One was regular conspiracy. The other one was the CC. So, uh, we go to a speedy trial on the first one, conspiracy to import, distribute, possess. and I lose six-week trial. And did you say you were self-representing? The second case. Okay, so this one, you had a lawyer.

Yeah, $2 million worth of lawyers. It was a fucking waste. Sure. Yeah, if you have a case in the feds, just get a public defender and a really badass investigator and save all the rest of your money for a real jury selection consultant. I see.

Now, if you don't have a case, once you get your discovery with the public defender that you can take to trial. You haven't antagonized any prosecutor by bringing a high money guy in. And if you have to plea, you're going to get a better plea than you will with the fucking shit talker high dollar dude. Because they get resentful that you can bring a $200,000 attorney in here when they compare their salary.

And they think even that most drug defendants are broke by the time they get to court, they think if you have that high power attorney, that's solidified. in their brain that they're doing God's work and getting you off the street. If you're really a low-level guy, which is what everybody plays at when they go to plea agreement, you never had a high power mouthpiece. You get a public defender. You get your discovery for free. Now, if once you get that discovery and you have action, now you make your decisions about,

should I get an attorney, but don't get the big name. just especially when you're caught you know if you don't have action yeah don't get the big name because and most times big lawyers i've heard the j flores of the flores brothers flores twins he told me that a lot of these big federal attorneys they want you to go to court because that's an extra million dollars or whatever they they can charge you yeah they want you to go to court and um exactly right they have a conflict of interest because the truth is the feds have a 97 percent conviction ring. So they're going to lose 97% of the time. Nobody wanted to know who my attorney was that got me 30 years. But you know whose attorney they wanted to know? The dude who got caught with 10 kilos under his

pillow and got 30 months. Everybody wants to know his attorney. Yeah. He's ratting. Yeah. So that dude, he makes 35 grand. Right? He goes to two debriefings and a sentencing. Yeah. My guys had two attorneys. They made 600 grand each. Plus, I had expenses for investigators. Everything else was two million in the first trial, right? Wow. But they were there at a six-week trial. Yeah. On a minute-per-minute basis,

the rat attorney made more money than my attorneys. So are they going to really go against, and this is why I fired my attorneys and represented myself in the second case, are they really going to go to bat for you against the United States Attorney's Office when the truth is that they need to maintain that relationship for the bread and butter of their business,

which is rats, that they need to get good deals for? They're going to sell your ass, down the river. In fact, there's a great case about it. Barry Tarlow was a big, big, big, big attorney back in the day in L.A. And they took his fucking bar license because he wouldn't represent informants. And they said that he was obstructing justice and he had to go to the appellate court. And he's like, listen, in order to represent my clients, I can't have a conflict of interest. If I'm worried about maintaining a good relationship with the United States Attorney's Office because I'm taking informants and and trying to get them a good deal,

then I'm going to think twice about vigorously defending my clients that go to trial and want to fight them. That creates a conflict of interest, which I'm not allowed to have, so I choose not to represent informants. Wow. That is such an amazing study in human psychology and the flaw, even in our great legal system. It's that, so for just to sum up, in case nobody understood what he said, when a defense attorney takes his client to trial on a,

on their behalf and goes up against the U.S. attorney, the prosecutor, there's going to be a contentious, that's going to cause contention just on a human level between the defense attorney and the prosecutor. If they're doing it the way they should. Right. Which is, yes, rigorously. Yeah. Trying to prove you're not guilt.

And so, therefore, the next time he's got to go get a plea agreement for his obviously guilty client, the prosecutor is going to remember that and be like, I don't like Barry. It fucking, that guy pisses me off because they're human. And so that's why most lawyers are dump trucks, or you're saying like people choose, basically what you're saying is, yeah, it's lawyers don't want to vigorously represent people that want to actually take their case to trial. Yeah, and there's some anomalies. Like Barry Charlo was an anomaly, right? There's a couple anomalies out there. But no, for the most part, their money comes from informants.

Right. 97% of federal law business is informant. Yeah. Right. So are you going to sacrifice that for a guy like me, even that you get a bigger check? Mm-hmm. But it's a six-week trial. Yeah.

It's three weeks of preparation minimum. Yeah. Right? It's a lot of fucking hearings. 12 hour days. Yeah. It's a lot of hearings. On a minute per minute basis, they make more money with Iraq.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's just a quick couple of court appearances and then papers signed off. Yeah. And they have a system, bro. come in. They're like, because you hired me and just because you hired me, I'm the one who can save your life. The minute you pay them, they come in. They go, oh, I got the retainer. I'm getting your discovery. We're going to smash them. Oh, I just got your discovery. There's a couple things in there I didn't know about,

but I'm going to have a come to Jesus meeting with the prosecutor and get this straight. Don't worry, you got me. Well, you know, it's kind of personal with the prosecutor. It's not going to be as easy as we thought, but you know what, I got you. Well, you know, they did offer you a deal. You know, I have to tell you, I'm a fighter, dude, but, you know, if you want to take the deal and they walk you until they condition you to being in prison. And by the time you get sentenced to 20 years and have lost all your appeals, you're conditioned. Yeah. And you're broke. And they go home and you're broke.

And this happens thousands of times a year all of the time. And so you learned that with your trial, with the $2 million you spent on your first trial? Well, with them, I learned that they just weren't competent enough. even big name attorneys for these kind of cases. I just wasn't, like I said, look, they found a storage, the storage unit we talked about. I was never there. I told my attorney at the time, one of them, I said,

go bring the storage dude here, testify I was never there. Because they had very light on evidence. All my shit and the reason why I ended up winning ultimately on appeal was because it was all fucking testimony. They never caught me with anything. I wasn't on the phone. They didn't have, you know, everybody. says, oh, my rat lied.

But everybody's rat lied. What about the 10 kilos that were in your trunk? Nobody lied about that. Right? So they do what they call harmless error analysis on appeal. Yeah, that was a lie. But even if we didn't have that lie, there was enough evidence to find you guilty.

Sure. The funny thing is, is that when you're, as a defendant, you're going for that, right? They say, well, we don't read the jury's mind. But when they're doing it to keep you in, they got no problem to read the jury. jury's mind. Well, the jury's mind still would have found you guilty because of this, even that the rat lied to you. They got no, when they're affirming, they have no problem reading the jury's

mind. When they're going to overturn, they never read the jury's mind. Yeah. Okay. So your first, the six-week trial for your first charge, your first case, what were you arguing that, hey, there was no evidence? This is basically, these guys are liars, people take. going to stand. So all those guys that used to work for you are on the stand. Oh, yeah. Stand up, point at you fucking. Wow. Actually, during the first trial, when they'd say my name, I stood up. I didn't like the idea of them pointing at me. My head was a little fucked up then, you know, between the ego and the money and the anger and everything. You're just, I wasn't my best self during that trial. I was very resentful. And these, you know, you're looking at dudes that you

legitimately made millionaires. Yeah. And especially when it came to Mike, I really felt like I'd saved his life twice. So you were at MDC the whole time? First I was at they had me in San Bernardino. Then when it got closer to trial came to MDC. Okay. And six week trial. And then I started doing that straw man shit.

My PSR came back. Pre-sentence report came back to 360 to 1,640 months. And that's when it really, that was the first time it really, really, really hit me like a ton of of bricks. Like this ain't no, this is a fucking problem. They're trying to keep, they like me so much. They want to keep me forever. So I would, that's when I started looking around like, you know, I said, you know, these fucking lawyers, something's not right here. Is there, do they have like a social paper or like a lawyer magazine or something? I wanted to find, I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. And I found the daily journal, LA Daily Journal. It's the legal newspaper. And so I ordered it.

Just because I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew I just, I needed something, right? So I want to start looking around the culture that's doing their best to keep me locked up forever. What I didn't realize when I ordered is there's something in there called the Daily Appellate Report that comes with it every day. So it's got all the Ninth Circuit cases, all the Supreme Court cases, all the appellate cases all across the country. And I started reading it. And that's why I decided I was going to represent myself because I didn't know federal rules or criminal procedure. but I knew what fucking won appeals. And I have a second case for CCE where they're using two of the predicate offenses from the first case.

So that's where I got the idea for that. In the intervening time at the same time, contemporaneously with that, I am now doing this straw man thing where I notified the judge that I'd copywritten my name. And if he uses my name in commerce, he agrees to a self-executing $500,000, for instance, UCC-1 financing statement. What's the purpose of that? So is that straw man shit, corporate government, you know, there's no jurisdiction. I'm a sovereign American citizen.

But I saw if I could create a pecuniary interest with my judge where there's money between us, even if it's up for argument, that I might be able to get him recused before sentencing because this dude was known as a hangman judge. I see. So I did that. I sent him the notifications, everything. I did the copyright. I did all of it.

And then I sent him the notification, counting on the fact that we'd be too arrogant to respond. Well, the uniform commercial code is the same way Columbia House used to send you 12 CDs for a penny. Then they're going to send you one every month, unless you specifically put in the work to tell them that you don't want it before you send it

because you've agreed by not responding. So when the judge didn't respond, he agreed. So I took the transcript of the next hearing, had my girl go up to Sacramento, file the UCC-1 financing statements for millions of dollars against this judge, recorded in L.A. And then I asked to recuse them based on a pecuniary interest. And who do you ask to recuse the judge that's about to sentence you? Oh, that's all you tell the judge.

We have a pecuniary interest. You need to be recused. Automatically, the minute you say that, another judge has to make a ruling on this particular motion. Okay. So who is that other judge? who was judge mats so they brought judge mats in and he fucking just tried to overpower me and you know but i'm looking at 30 years right and i'm looking at life on my second case yeah so they're screaming and yelling of a judge is not intimidating me at all at this point so i did the same shit to him

to judge mats you filed another whatever whatever that is yeah so that was a big mess and then they just kind of left that alone they denied my recusal motion they left that alone but that had given me time you know the second case is just starting getting started i'm not sentenced on the first case and i say okay i want to fire my attorneys and represent myself at this point well the prosecutor's happy as fuck the judge is like well you know i want to have a friend of the court attorney i was like your honor listen freda versus usa i understand the charges against me i'm doing this my own free well i understand the consequence the guiltyvert all due respect you don't really have any choice according to the supreme court i get to represent myself unless you find that i

not being honest about one of those three statements. And so I started representing myself and, you know, this recusal shit's going on and all this and that. And I'm trying to, I don't want to get sentenced to 30 years at this point. So I'm trying to drag that on as long as I can, hoping to find something. And I did. When I got my case file from my attorney, I opened it, opened the first notebook. You know, and this is something like, you know, hand of God, whatever you want to call it. I had the coolest counselor Stump Taylor at MDC on 7 South in LA.

My legal boxes come from the lawyer and it's got notebooks with three ring binders in it, right? They're not supposed to give you that. There's a Friday afternoon when it comes. He wants to leave. I've never had any problems as far as, you know, anything there, right? And Stump was like, hey, Ziskeman, take this stuff, but I'm going to need those notebooks on Monday when I get back you know i can keep all the papers right but he let me do that instead of dragging me out and i have court on one day right um it's my sentencing hearing and i get these the first notebook i open

is the wiretap transcribing from the second case that they say wasn't relevant to the first case right so they didn't give it to us and i'm looking and i notice the first thing on the inside jacket flap there's a index and like every computer index there's a last modified date but this last modified date was printed on the index so i saw that all these transcripts of all these wiretaps were translated and transcribed into english before my first trial so now all weekend i'm sitting there reading these fucking transcripts and then i'm looking back i remember things from my trial but remember no computer i got fucking legal boxes stacked in myself like this. So I'm having to remember which witness said what, when did they say it, and then go back.

You're going through two huge 1,800 hours of wiretap and all these fucking six-week trials transcript and you're trying to match them up. So at the end of the weekend, I'd found three lives. We get to court the next day. And the attorney's still there for my, Lewis Palazzo is my attorney for sentencing. and he's he i tell him hey i got this he's like no don't bring it up now like you know you save it for your appeal it's way better he's just trying to get me through sentencing so he's done yeah he doesn't want any fucking headaches right because i've already made tons of headaches with the

straw man shit and the filings and everything else so i ignore him and i tell the judge i want to speak i want to represent myself now in this case also judge says i'm not going to let you represent yourself but i'm going to let you speak so i'm like okay your honor here's government generated, this is Rule 35A, B, and C, motion for new trial based on new evidence, right? So I already knew that because I'm reading the daily appellate reports and I'm like, hey, I need to represent myself. I need to speak on this issue. So judge says, I'm not going to represent yourself, but I'll let you speak.

I say, here's government generated material that shows the witnesses were lying on direct examination. And the judge says, okay. And I said, are you saying you don't even want to look at this, Your Honor? And he's like, the judge said, I find it. ironic that you were in here the last three times saying that the rule of law does not apply to you because you're a sovereign citizen or whatever you call. And now you want me to apply the rule of law to the government. The record will stand on its own four corners. I said, so I said,

does that mean you're not even going to look at this? Mr. Ziskin, I said the record will stand on its own four corners. So I threw a Hail Mary. I fucking lied. I said, there's hundreds of this is just the tip of the iceberg. I didn't have one. I had three. Just three lies that the witnesses from combining their trial transcript to the wiretops.

Right. One of them, and they were stupid. One of them was, oh, did they, the lawyer asked, did they ever threaten your girlfriend if you didn't inform? And he said, no, but he's on wiretops saying,

hey, bro, they threaten my girl. If I don't help them, they're going to book her. Right? Like, so, okay, that's all I had, right? Yeah. And he sentences me, I get 30 years.

I go back. And now I'm representing myself on the second case. And I have Charles Sevea, who's my appeal attorney for the first case. And we do. We find fucking over 50 material. I knew they were there. I just couldn't find them. You didn't have time to find them all.

I had to read that. Once I'd read those trial transcripts 10 times, I knew where everything was. Once I'd read those wiretaps 10 times, you have the index in your brain now. I knew which box to find. So you get the post-its and you're doing all this and that, right? And lining them all up. You just couldn't do all that in one weekend. material facts like material facts like and then there was also a problem with the wiretaps um

which broke open the set so that was my appeal on the first case was based on that okay so perfect so let's slow down for a sec you get sentenced to 30 on the first case and then you immediately set your appellate lawyer in motion yeah like immediately right yeah you have to right okay so So I was intended. And you liked him. You felt confident that he was on your team. Oh, bro, he didn't even want to be my attorney at first. Okay.

My mom told me that he wasn't going to be my attorney is the greatest guy in the world. I write him every Thanksgiving for saving my life, Charles Xavier. Wow. Best attorney I've ever fucking met. He is just the bomb. Okay. So he didn't want to be my attorney at first. So I'm meeting all kinds of attorneys.

They smell blood in the water. There's tons of them coming for legal visit. Even without appointments. My mom even went to. my mommy went to Johnny Cochran. He turned down a million dollar check. Wow. He said, that's what he was taking back then.

My mom went to hire him. He said, I wish the best for your son, but big drug cases make bad law. It's not winnable, even if he is innocent. And so anyway, she threw friends, this and that, family members, my cousin Pam, you know, my family really came together and, like, made a wall around me and we're very supportive and we're doing everything they could as they done through most of my life like they really for all the shit i did i mean i've got an amazing family even to this day they support me in in you know not in criminal behavior but they're there to support me in anything i mean i can't say

enough about it my brother now your money my dad your money they didn't find any money but did you were did you have that in a place where you could tell your mom hey we need a Absolutely. No, I would never make my mom or my family a co-conspirator. So then how can you deploy a million dollar check offer to Johnny Cochran? Because she went there with the offer and someone was going to go pay that. I see. So somebody, okay, so you had, you still had help on the streets if you needed to move money. She went there because she wanted him and I said, it's okay. If you get him, he'll get paid. She has no idea of mom and family. They're Orthodox Jews. They have no idea of the mechanics.

of my money. In fact, that was one of the lies that we were able to prove is Mike said that he took money to my mom's house for me, which never happened. And the address he gave, my mom never lived at and my family's never had any relation to that. One of the other things was is when John got busted before Mike, when the two girls got busted and they got John Ebering that night, he got busted. We put up a bail package for him.

They said, oh, all that stuff was mine. well the guy who put it up owned these condos that he put up as the bail package which got denied by the way he owned them long before this conspiracy started like they couldn't have been drug proceeds

there was no payoffs on them any recently like he he had these before so these lies along with the material lies is what's stacked up that was really a problem okay so you did have people on the street that you still trusted

that could you know go deliver a package where it needed to be Yeah, but I would never, never involve my family. Understood. Understood. Okay. So now you're depellate. You get the appeal in motion for your first case.

How long before your second trial, the CCE trial started, did you put together all of the 50 lies that Mike, the other witnesses, had told? Like, how long did that take you? That took me, me and Chuck Sevilla, a couple months. So he comes to visit me. And I'm like, hey, I thought you said you didn't want the case. he's like, well, your family's very persistent. Jews. Yeah.

And I said, he's like, you know, Lewis, I made my money. I did my good Samaritan. I ran the death penalty office for the public defender for 20 years. I did my good Samaritan stuff. At this point in my career, I only like to take cases that I think I can win. And big drug cases are not winable in the feds, but you have some very persistent family members who've told me how intelligent you are. and showed me some of the things that you're talking about.

So I'm here. I'm hired. I'm retained. And if you sign the agreement, then we'll. And my family just took care of that on their own. They just paid that. And I was like,

okay, great. And we got together. He found a bunch of them. I found a bunch of them over the next three months. And we had a badass appeal brief. 53 materialize, a substantive ones. And then you had all the satellite lies, like about the girl, about the property. So you're really destroying his credibility. And also the fact that he was so heavily

relied on in closing argument because they'd never found me with any drugs. They didn't have me on the phone. They didn't find any money. So is the goal to get the whole sentence tossed? Or what is that supposed to show an appellate court? But they didn't have the evidence to convict me. That you are not guilty. The burden of proof was not not Matt. That was the argument. And so that was, and then the government argued, well, no, he has to bring this up on 2255. The wiretap's not part of the record. And my appeal attorney says, well, hey, the government shouldn't get a windfall benefit.

It's harder to win on 2255. The standards of review become more and more restrictive the further into the appellate process you go. Why should the government get a windfall from their lie and non-disclosure? And the appellate court said, actually, this is fucking crazy too. You're both wrong. The judge abused his discretion when he didn't look at the wiretaps when Mr. Iskin presented them to him. So we're issuing a Rule 10y remand to add the wiretaps, all of them now, not just the

three lies, right, which all would have been admitted. That's all that would have been admitted if the judge bothered to look and make a finding. And so now all of it gets admitted. admitted. Yeah. And the government, now, at this time, let's put a cap in the first case. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we're on to the second case to CCE because I'm on appeal for the first case. I'm still at MDC because I'm fighting the second case. I'm representing myself there. Well, we found, me and Tamer found, while we're working together on this, they have a 10-day report for the wiretap.

Meaning when they go to the judge and they get a 60 day, 90-day, 30-day, whatever it is, wiretap, they have to make a report every 10 days. it's a simple report. How many drug calls did you find? How many calls were minimized, et cetera? And a little synopsis of anything relevant, right? But it's just literally like a number printout. How many calls? How many, whatever.

To show the judge that you're actually doing your job and that there is some drug stuff happening on this line. And so they do 10-day reports. Well, we found over the course of Tamer's Wiretap on eight different days, 21 different times, there's more calls minimized now. than there was in the 10-day reports. Well, Title III says you can't have equipment that can add, edit, alter, delete, or erase.

So how is there more minimizations, which would be an erasure? Now, then there was at the time of the wiretap itself. So, and then there was also another problem that they had, that they'd be in the middle of a drug conversation, and they'd minimize during the middle of a drug conversation. conversation. So I know what they did. They cleaned up the witnesses in the first trial to be able to lie. So they're erasing stuff in the wiretap record. And that's why they didn't disclose it in the first trial either. Wow. So they, yeah, they, they, they, what they did was is they, they minimized, you know, they're supposed to minimize.

Me and you are, they're tapping your phone for drugs. Ziskin and Mitchell are doing a fucking huge weed deal off the fucking coast of fucking wherever, right? Oregon. And they're going to tap us and the shit's fucking Mexican dirtweed, but coming in bales up to Johnny and Oregon and Ziskin facilitated. So we need a wiretap. Well, if me and you are talking and then we start talking about our girlfriend's birthday,

they're supposed to minimize. Now, if they turn back on and we're talking about drugs, they can't get that minimized part back. Right? Just like if they record me and you talking about mom or girlfriend's birthday, they can't erase that later to show that they were minimizing. So there has to be an active monitor listening to the call. They're not allowed to, like the NSA does wholesale, just record everything and go back later and fish out what they need unless you're a terrorist case, which, ironically, you know, they made narco-terrorism after September 11th after us. So a lot of drug cases now fall into that, right?

So what my problem was is I couldn't prove which of the 21 different calls they'd minimized after the fact. I knew the days and I knew there was more calls minimized on these days. So I subpoenaed MDC's version of the calls because one of the guys was in. So there's a jail version of the call also besides the DEA's wiretap. 17th C subpoena. It's a civil method. It's used improperly, technically.

But because I was representing myself, the judge, while she can't do me any favors, she has to interpret my motions and moving papers in the widest latitude. So if there is a slot that it fits into, she has to fit it in. So the government's fighting tooth and nail. And the prosecution, the judge said no. So we get those drug calls back. And in those drug calls, you know, people are saying, hey, Ziskins,

that isn't any Ziskin's shit. And Mike, the rat's saying, I know, I got the government wrapped around my finger, I know how to get a deal, and by the time all this is done, all of it's going to be on the fucking kike. That's what they minimized. I'm the guy.

I put that together. That's why I pointed out. Right, but tons of stuff like that. Okay, so hang on. So there were, Of these 21 calls, you weren't on any of them? No, no. These are calls between the rats.

Right. So you never, and so the rats are talking about how they're actively ratting. Wow. From MDC. Right. Two people on the street. I see. Right.

So the DEA gives us a street version of the wiretap. Okay. Their version. But now, I'm not saying that these are the, I have another problem. Like I said, there's drug calls that are minimized. Right? So I want that. I want that minimum.

for the reason I just told you because that was the type of stuff that was there. Well, I didn't know that. I want to know why are you minimizing drug calls? That's illegal. That's a cause of action. You've got a warrant to record drug calls. You're not allowed to minimize. Right.

So I get the 17C. So we find out what they minimized, right? Now, I still can't prove which calls they minimized after the fact. Because they could say, oh, that could have happened naturally. You know, when you're winning as a criminal defendant, they make you pin the tail right on the fucking donkey. There's no good faith exception like there is for law enforcement. There's no wide interpretation like there is for law enforcement.

There's no room for error. Yeah, yeah. You got to pin the fucking thing right in between the eyes, right? So now I'm looking at these, on these, they have these thing called line sheets, which is a summary of each call, the date and time, length of the call, minimizations, minimization, time stamps, everything. it makes it easier to work with than the whole transcript, right? If you're going word for word for a lie,

you need the transcript and the trial transcript or the statement or whatever, right? But when you're working on technical issues, the line sheets are just easier to work with. So what I noticed is they all had a monitor number, meaning that's the person who's monitoring the calls. So immediately, in a lot of these calls are in Arabic. So I go, how many fucking, this is before September 11th, remember? How many fucking Arabic monitors can the DEA fucking have?

so I start fucking asking at religious services I start going to Juma prayer I actually knew a couple of the Muslim dudes in the building like we'd been friends for a long time they're there on different case so I got it out there that I'm buying wiretaps Arabic wiretap line sheets

from anything in this time period this 2000 January to June July of 2000 August of 2000 into 2001 whatever, whatever they have, if they've got wiretaps. So I get wiretaps, right? And guess what I found? I found three times our same Arabic monitor is listening to calls on another wiretap

at the same time. That's a no-no. Why? Why is that? Because only one monitor can listen to one call at a time. Interesting. They can't listen to other people's cases. No, because then they wouldn't actually be paying attention.

Oh, wow. They can listen to it if the call doesn't have. happen at the same time. They can work multiple cases. Right. But if you're monitoring a call, you can't be monitoring a second call at the same time, because how do you pay attention to both? Right. And so, and you found these wiretaps, you bought them from other inmates that had wiretap cases. Yeah. From other Arab inmates that had wiretap cases. They were all there on Ephedron cases. All the Arabs were there on Ephedron cases, all that. That's what they were in for, right? That was their big

thing. So there was tons of them, right? Wow. And, you know, it didn't matter that I'm Jew and they're Muslim. Dude, in prison, the common enemies of the government, which led to some very interesting conversations about the current state of the world that most people would never have. Oh, I bet. But, like, when you have a common enemy that's trying to take away your whole life, you know, the Jewish fight and the Muslim fight kind of goes by the wayside

because they're a bigger problem, just like we're a bigger problem to China and Russia than either one of them are to each other, which is. is why they've gotten together. Same kind of thing, right? So anyway, I get this and it shows, it shows that. So we have, I request an evidentiary hearing. Wow. And, you know, nobody gets an evidentiary hearing, right? But what I did, the way I requested it is instead of filing it the way they file, I just wrote out an indictment. I said, hey, under the best evidence rule, I want to call the government to the stand so that they could tell us when they decided to tamper, you. I just with the wiretap to protect the witnesses in the last case.

This is what you said to argue. This is what I filed. To the judge. To get your- judge- Snyder in the second case. To get your evidence of your hearing. Okay.

So the judge, so the government bites. They bit. And they took the defense that I thought they would. They said, he's fighting his appeal here, Your Honor. That the court should not entertain that.

I said, Your Honor, this definitely benefits my appeal because two of the three predicate offenses that I'm charged with for the CCE I've been suffered convictions on. There's no secret about that. But actually, Your Honor, it's the government that's trying to pull one over your eyes and bring disrepute to your court. She looks, how is that? Well, Your Honor, if these wiretaps would have been part of the evidence as they should have been,

as the Ninth Circuit has already ruled, because Tenney remand, they gave me to make them part of the record, then they would have already been impeached, which means that when they came to take the stand in your court, Your Honor, you would be instructing the jury before they testified that they had already been found to be lying. Now, because the government lied is trying to pull one over on you, Your Honor, they're going to get up on the stand. You're not going to say that. And before the jury gets the case, you will give the standard Ninth Circuit jury instruction, which is to view their testimony with greater, greater, greater caution. That's a huge difference. on her. It's a hoodwink on the court.

So basically... And the judge ruled with me and she said, okay, Mr. Ziskin, you have to make a prima facie showing. She didn't disqualify the United States Attorney's Office because they're going to be witnesses. But that was all just bullshit. I wanted them to say that I was fighting my appeal because I had that answer. Right. And they did.

They bit on it fucking hook line and sinker. And the judge said, okay, you've got to make a prima facie showing. So we're going to have an evidentiary hearing. And I'm going to give you John Rackowski, head of DEA wiretaps, and I'm going to give you Bill Linehan, your case agent, DEA case agent. And you make a prima facie showing, and then we'll go to the next steps. So we have an evidentiary here coming up.

And the night before, I'm watching the game. You know, my cell is right in front of the black TV because they watch better shit, dude. I mean, they've always got the game on, everything, you know. I haven't been in prison yet, so I'm not into these weekly shows with commercials, any sports. And the blacks are totally down with sport. Yeah, the white, the white TVs in prison are always like fishing shows. And cops, dude.

What the fuck is that? And like deadliest catch. What is that like fucking adult continuing education or something? You're watching cops? Yeah. Like all the time. Right? Like, anyway, so I was sports.

So I had my cell down there. I got along great with them guys and knew a couple of them. Like played Pinochle with one of them. Great. You know, all good. I didn't cross any lines. I was able I, nobody could swim upstream,

but I was able to swim across stream between the case and the publicity of it, the fact that I was Jewish, and the fact that I was smart. I mean, really, this made headlines. This was in the papers and-

Yeah, made the vibe, July 2002 cover story. Fucking, it was, you know, nobody paid attention. It was in LA Times. Nobody paid attention

to U.S. News and World Report. But when that shit hit vibe, a couple years later, bro, you're like rock star, You know, and it's not like one of those paid, like, stories. It's like they're telling about us, you know, but what happened and everything. So that's, that was pretty funny. People were coming up asking us to autograph it for him.

Wow. So anyway, here we go, a night before I'm sitting there fucking drinking Prunow watching the game with these dudes and Tamer's pacing back and forth on the upstairs. On the tier, he was on the second floor. And finally he's like, bro, are you going to, you know, right? write down any questions or anything and I'm like bro I'm gonna shoot this one from the hip I got it don't worry about it I'm studying this for a year and a half at this point I've never been more I didn't need a not pad I like remembered everything I had like an encyclopedic knowledge of this particular place right and uh so anyway we get to court the next day David Chesnoff another fucking not not somebody that I'm very happy with another big time fucking attorney um I was really going to take them apart, but a friend of mine fucking, uh, is the A USA? No, no, he's, he was Tamer's attorney. I see.

I really wanted to take him apart today, but a mutual friend of ours asked me not to. So hang on. Are you and Tamer being brought to court together? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, so you're being charged together. Oh, this is good. Yes, this is really good for Tamer because you're doing all the, yeah, he's inculpatory.

He's all over the wiretaps. He's dead. But if they've been tampered with, they're no good for him. And we're knocking the witness. This is off the block because they've been found to be impeached. Right. So anyway, we get there and we get to court the next morning. I'm a little hungover, but super excited, pumped up.

Like, I hadn't done a cold plunge yet in my life, but I can tell you now that I do them. It was very similar to that. I was ready. And Chesnoff's like, oh, you're going to, you know, you want to go over your questions with me or da-da-da-da-da. And I was like, no, I need you to ask two set-up questions about firmware and this and that and software and stuff. I'm not, what do you mean? I'm not going first. I have to go second to clean up whatever mess you make.

And this was actually the moment of truth for Tamer. You know, up until this point, you know, Cheznov and Tamer could have still gone another direction, right? And I'm like, no, you go first. I'm not telling you why I'm asking the questions. And you work for fucking Tamer. And Tamer's sitting there handcuffed. I'm not handcuffed because I represent myself.

That was another story that judge. got into it with the marshals for not unhandcuffing me before so tamer's moment of truth and tall you owe me one for not taking chesnoff apart um he has he's sitting there he's handcuffed and this is the moment that you're going to cross the rubicon and really point the finger at the government and really this is not going to be nice anymore right and uh he tells chesnoff go ahead you're going to do what he wants and chesnop gets up there and he asks some questions He's like, oh, did you see I got him to admit that they didn't sign their own affidavit? I'm like, dude, fuck. Sit down.

Right? I get up there. So he was asking the kind of softball questions. Yeah. And he got the purpose. He got the Rackowski to admit that he didn't sign his own affidavit, which is legal. They're allowed to sign it for telephonic authorization. Okay.

So like lawyers do that all the time. They act like there's some big point that they got you, which was. once you know the system, actually that was nothing, dude. It goes nowhere. Okay. It's like when you read your motions for the first time, you think they're amazing. How can you lose? But when you get the government's response, it's like, oh, that's how I'm going to lose.

That's where the meat of any argument is. So anyway, I get up there and I start out, you know, I'm kind of just acting like I'm an idiot, you know, asking him stupid questions and this and that and, you know, take him off to the left. And I was like, yeah, so, you know, uh, So you have equipment according to Title III that says you can't edit, alter, delete, or erase. And then he's like, yeah. And I was like, so would it be more accurate to say that the hardware could do it,

but you have a firmware that doesn't allow it? And he answered yes, which I wasn't expecting because that's already another cause of action. Because Title III doesn't say you can, it says you cannot have equipment that can do it. It doesn't say you can have it as long as there's a firmware. It's very clear. can't edit, have equipment that can add, edit, alter, delete, or erase. So then I said, so that's like a software protection and da-da-da-da. And he's like, I was like kind of like where a monitor can't listen to more than one call at the same time.

And he fell right in. He's like, yeah, exactly. And I walked up to him and I, and my dad is actually mom, everybody. My dad's like, I can hear him. He's like telling people in the court, I know my son, something's about to happen. He's setting them up. Right? And I hear it.

I'm like, and this is going on. It's like surreal, right? Like it's it like I think I'm in a movie, but I'm living it. And it's like all. And your dad and your mom in the background and your buddy over here and a judge over. It's like, it was crazy. This is why they say get a Jewish lawyer. And if you're a Jewish, you just be your own lawyer.

Yeah. There was so much going on. Right. And you're like, but everything slowed down. Like I was in the zone like sports players talk about. Right. Yeah. So I said,

So kind of like a monitor can't listen to two calls. And he says, yeah, exactly. And I go here. Can you explain that? Pandemonium, dude. Government's objecting. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, I asked to approach to bring in the evidence. What is it?

It's line sheets that show a monitor listening to the same call at the same time. And I go, so I guess your software protections aren't working. Government objects, pandemonium, everything. How do you object to that? What are you on the grounds of what? She said, oh, we don't know if this. this material is real. And I said,

Your Honor, it's, it's government bait-stamped material. And if it's fake, I'm willing to plead guilty to the sheep. Wow. Today. And they still gave them a break.

But the damage was done. Right, right. The damage was done. And then about two weeks later, we went back. So hang on. So,

and that's, what is the official, how does the evidentiary, evidentiary hearing wrap up? We're going to have it. We're going to continue it. Okay, I see. We're in recess, so we're going to continue.

She just went all day. Went about half day. Okay. And then by the time we got in, because, you know, they take a bunch of people and then, you know, they hear other hearings. Since we had evidentiary, we went last. Right. So we went in around one. We were there until about four.

Okay. And then about three weeks later, we go back. And now it's the case agent's turn. And so we get him on the stand. And again, same shit with Chesnoff. And he does a little bit better with Linahan. And then he comes. back and I go, okay, I get up there and I'm asking him questions. And I really don't get far with him.

I really, I didn't crack him, you know, but I wasn't really worried. I felt like I had done what I needed to do, right? And, and then I sit down and the government says redirect. And the judge says, lowers or glasses, looks at the prosecutor and says, maybe you want to leave it alone. Now I'm like, what? This isn't the transcript. Maybe you want to leave alone. So now I'm thinking, what the fuck did I miss? And she's like, and the prosecutor's like, no, no, no. She gets up there and she wants to make him professional because we, we attacked his, oh, did you do your training? Did you do this? Are you a federal agent? So she wants to reestablish his professionalism and everything, right? So part of your job is this and part of your job's that and you listen. And part of your job was listening to the wiretap that's in question here today. as it was happening, like, they want to create a chain of custody. Like, this wiretap is really what it is, right? That there's nothing missing.

It's like, yeah, I listen to all the calls and everything. And she's like, okay, I'm like, recross. And she's like, it's not your turn, Mr. Ziskin. Chesnoff. And he's like, no, no. And I just let my hand up. Like, I'm in a classroom. Recre, right.

Okay, Mr. Ziskin, it's your turn. You can recross. So now I beat around the. Bush again and the government's objecting, you know, and I was like, so you're a law enforcement officer, you have arrest powers, you do training, you do this, you do that, that, etc, right? He's like, yeah, yeah, that's exactly. And I go and you listen to some of the calls. He goes, no, I listen to all the calls. And then I go off on a different tangent. I'm like, oh, didn't we see each other before? And he's like, yes. And I was like, you were in my last trial when the witnesses that

we're talking about, we're testifying. He's like, yeah. And I was like, and, and, and you listen to all the calls. And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, did you say that you were a federal officer as well as an agent with arrest powers in court? He's like, I'm a federal agent, yes. And I said, well, I'm just wondering if you listen to all the calls and then you heard them testify, why do you tell the judge they were lying? Pandemonia. Wow. Dude. Wow.

Yeah. And then the judge said, well, I'm going to have to consider sanctions. I'm like, I'll brief you on sanctions, Your Honor. And she's like, I know you will, Mr. Ziskin. I want you guys to all brief me on sanctions. And that's when after that, that's when the government cave. They fucking said, we'll give you 20 for, remember, I've got 30. It's on appeal.

I'm looking at life now. Yeah. We'll give you 20 for everything. I said no. 17.5 for everything. I said no. I thought I had them. 15.

and a half no further prosecutions they offer so now all my friends are like free because none of my guys went to jail right i didn't rat on anybody it was all tamers side the house yeah right so and at first i really didn't want to take it either so 15 and a half you're sitting on all your money i mean to me this sounds like a no brain i'm not i'm not sitting on anything whatever yeah yeah sure okay um yeah go ahead with tamer so no further prosecutions and uh I say, okay, about a week later, I get the plea agreement, C1C deals. The judge agrees to it. So I'm not fighting to remove a plea if they don't agree. I'm not.

So they give you a locked deal, global plea, no further prosecutions. It's all done. It's all in here. And I'm going to move my second case over to the first judge who's back on remand. Because they can't move my first case to the second judge because it's on remand. Oh, okay. So this isn't tying both of your cases together. They're just offering you 15 for the CCE case.

No, global plea for both of them. I see. So I have to move the CCE case. I have to agree to let my first judge now take over my CCE case. Because I don't want two different sentencing. Because if one judge doesn't agree, I'm appealing for 20 years. So I wanted a global plea, one sentencing, C1C locked deal. Right.

So they move. I have to withdraw the motions I have pending, which were some badass motions. I had to withdraw all those. and then I agreed to moving my case. And it couldn't be the other way because the first judge was he had limited remand jurisdictional. He couldn't give up that case to anybody but that ballot court. He couldn't move it over there because it was only there

to expand the record to include the wiretap. So they offer me 15.5 global plea. I didn't want to take it at first, but I took it. And then about a week later, Tamer comes out to. the wreck deck and he's like, bro, they're not giving me the deal they want to take me to try. Now, Tamer thinks they were only going to give him 20 years, but he's never been through a sentencing. He doesn't understand if he goes to trial for CCE and found guilty, the minimum mandatory is 20, then they're going to stack the drug weight on top of it. He's looking at

360 to life. He's looking at a minimum of 30 years. Still to this day, he doesn't understand that, but whatever. That's neither here nor there, but it was 20, 30, 40. Who cares at that age? And is the case painting him, you know, with all the wiretaps, with the rats? CC on the same level. Okay. The same level as you, Kingpin. Okay. Yeah.

Gotcha. Now, he only had the second case. I was only one with two indictments. Right. So he has the second case. So I leave the basketball court. I go call Chesnoff and I tell him, hey, I'm on, it's this time. I'm on this jail phone.

You know, they all have their little number. And the reason why I'm telling you that is if the government doesn't believe it, they can listen. If they don't give Tamer the same deal, I'm. not going to plead guilty next week. They took my deal, had to reinstate all my motions. Three weeks later, they kicked. They agreed to give tamer the same range, 188 to whatever it was, 210 or whatever,

in the guideline range. And his lawyer would have to argue for the low end, but everybody knew that was going to be a shoeing because they could never give tamer more than they gave me. Right? Like, I have two indictments. They said, I'm the one that started the whole thing. Even the Tamer and Al started on their own thing and we got together later.

Like as far as the headlines went, it was, I did start my own thing, but we combined later, right? So there's no way they can give Tamer more than they gave me. And that's what his lawyer argued at sentencing. And that was that. In fact, they said my name more at Tamer's sentencing than they did. And then that was that. I went on my way to USP Lompoc. What year did you sign your deal?

What month and year? was the end of 2003. So you were in there fighting for two years? Two and a half. Two and a half years. And Tamer signed the same day? No, Tamer got sentenced a few weeks later. So I get to Long Park.

Tamer got there a few weeks later and USB Longpark and then we started our time. Wow. So you got out, you came home. You did 13? I did 12 and then, but I don't count the last year even though I was still in custody because it was halfway out so I'm confined. Okay. I was technically getting custody for 13.

but I was only in for 12, if you asked me. Once you're been in that long, when you get to the halfway house or home confinement, you're like, I don't count that is here. I'm at the Soho house right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so you've been home for about eight years now. We're going to wrap and go to- Actually, I've been home since 2012. So I've been home for about 12 years. Oh, right, because it gave you time served while you were in MDC.

Yeah. Okay. So you've been home for 10 years, over 10, 12 years. As long as I've been in L.A., wow. And you've, you're like a successful. successful entrepreneur. I mean, you have this fascinating story with starting this startup company. And that's a wild tale. So I want to switch over to the Patreon to ask you, we're going to talk about prison. We're going to talk about this startup and then a bunch of other questions that maybe that pop up that we didn't get to. But that is an unbelievable story. It's unbelievable. It's amazing. Do you look at your now and say, damn, I could have been a great lawyer, like a real lawyer. Well, remember, I told you before that I realized in prison, I was in the shoe,

and I was reading, I read Stephen Hawking's book, The Grand Design with Leonud Mladenoff, which is basically a beginner's, like kind of quantum mechanics, physics type book. It's very easily, it helps you digest the concepts really well. And I love the problem solving and theoretical, you know, hypothetical nature. of physics, right? And the idea that anything could be possible. And I started reading Hawking's papers on Einstein's works. And I realized in that moment that I couldn't do the math.

And I realized at that moment that I'd wasted 95% of my potential. Wow. And I think most of us have. Yeah. It was, it was, but that led to other enlightenment, you know, like I was very angry about the informants. And, you know, I realize the more I blame them, the more I'm belittling myself,

because if I'm half as smart as I think I am, I should have seen it coming. And then I realized that I wasn't a good person who did bad things once in a while. I realized that I was a bad person who did good things once in a while. And that fucking bothered me. But did you realize that realizing

that you were a bad person actually makes you at least not incorrigible? Like you meet a narcissist when you're in prison. Yeah. And you're like, there's nothing anybody can do. There's no amount of time. They can give you no amount of horrible shit that you've done or you're a criminal.

But you realized, oh, I was a bad person. That's the first step. Yeah, besides my criminal stuff, I just, I'd done horrible things to family and people and friends. You know, I'd done things that were just, you know, where I'd never cared about the consequence. I figured money, you know, if money can't fix it. it's not really a problem. And I applied that to everybody else, even that they might not think the same way.

And I really didn't think about consequence. On one hand, it made me seem like super cool because Lewis was wild and crazy and doesn't give a fuck and goes jumps out of planes and does crazy snowboard shit and all, you know, and we'll run into any situation. On the other hand, you don't think about the collateral damage that it creates

to other people in the lives that you mess up, including your own. And if you don't realize that, you're doomed to repeat that. But it was, it sat on me. When that hit me that I was a bad person who only did good things once in a while, when I was being honest with myself finally about the totality of my life to this point, it bothered me a lot, man. I mean, really.

When you run out of people to blame and you just got to sit with yourself, especially when you're in the shoe or in prison or whatever, just like me, been out of relationships where I'm just sitting alone and I just like, man, there's nobody to blame. Yeah, that's a real, that's a horrible pain, but necessary. Yeah. And then there's like, good things hide on the other side of bad shit. Right? Always. If there's something you don't want to do, even if it doesn't go your way, the minute you're done with it, you feel better. Right? Like, good things hide, good things hide on the other side of bad shit. And the one thing I realized about, one of the things I realized, and it served me well later,

is that when you accept the blame yourself, even sometimes when it might not be yours, the interesting thing that happens is that people look to you now for the solution. The ball's back in your hand. You get right of first correction almost, right? And that is a very powerful thing if you believe that you can still perform. Rather than being the denial, the liar, the excuser, the this or that, nobody wants to hear your answer to the problem. They know it's your fault.

But when people look at you and realize, wow, this guy just took it on the chin, he's saying it's his fault. He understands what he did wrong. Well, this guy's got to get first crack at fixing it. That means you get to keep the ball. That's good. Yeah, and you got to keep your honor. I mean, I assumed did they come to you.

I mean, look what you did for Tamer, right? Tamer did the same for me. They offered him to rat when he got extradited from Amsterdam, so I couldn't leave him behind. If you think about it, me and Tamer beat the prisoner's dilemma together. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I mean, it just is what it is. I mean. Did they ever bring you a deal to, like, give up your international connects? Like your Chinese guys and your. tons of times and even after I got re-sentenced when I got re-sentenced to 18 months 15 to half after all the shit we just talked about that that day

they said it's 11 in the morning we can have you a bail hearing by 3 o'clock this afternoon now you want to talk about a head fuck you've been in almost three years yeah you just got your case reduced to 15 and a half from looking at 30 plus life potentially and now you can literally be eating in and out in four hours

and banging a chick in five hours? Eating out, yeah. Yeah, I mean, dude, that is a head fuck, but I was so, you know, I was just like taking me back down to the cage. What I should have done is seen what they wanted. You know, everybody makes a mistake. I erred on the side of caution,

so I wasn't tempted anymore. But, you know, that's the other thing. You hear people all the time, I would never, do that. Those are always the dudes that fucking. Of course. The dudes that struggle with it in the middle of the night. That's right.

And it's never about protecting a friend. It's the few people that don't rat, it's about being able to look yourself in the mirror. The minute somebody says to you, I could never do that to my homie. They're going to rat because they're already thinking about it to be able to say it's not they're, they've passed the part that they're going to sell out their own integrity and morality. They're doing it for somebody else now. It's very subtle. But if you spend enough time in, that is an immediate predictor. Yeah.

When you hear somebody say, I would never rat for me, that's when. Yeah. They mean it because it's it's it's about how they can carry themselves afterwards. Well, they just don't say that. Like I didn't rap, but I never, for me, there was many nights that I struggled with it. Bro, I mean, and many nights that I went to sleep maybe thinking that I have to. But the problem with me was is that I've lied to people, I've manipulated, I've cheated, stolen, I've done horrible things. I've, you know, but what I haven't been able to do is look myself in the mirror and lie to myself.

And I couldn't get past that three in the morning piss ever looking in the mirror before you go back to bed. That's why I didn't. Listen, I love Tamer. It had nothing to do with Tamer. And there's plenty of other people I could have given up that I'd much rather have them in prison than me if we're being honest. Anybody would. Anybody would rather somebody else be in prison than them. And I think that's why it's so rare, especially nowadays, that people don't talk because most people are not.

self-accountable. Just to play devil's advocate slightly, they also didn't have a lot on you. Like you had action. You know, somebody who gets caught red-handed with 300 keys, and maybe they're not even his, and maybe he's from Venezuela,

and, you know, he's, he had, it was starve or beg or go to work for these dudes and maybe he got kidnapped, and he's on a fast boat, you know,

and the Coast Guard picks him up. That's just two different, It's two different things. It's two different levels. Agreed. But once that sentence comes down for 30 years, your sentence to 30 years, whatever action you got is worthless.

Sure. And you're looking at life. So while you're going through it, sure, I'm looking at this much time, or I'm looking at that much time as one thing. But once that sentencing J&C judgment and commitment order comes out and is stamped by the judge and your sentence to that time,

I mean, that's the ultimate. test. And, you know, one of the silver linings that are from my experience there is that we always, at least me, I've always hoped given a certain situation that I would behave in a certain way. Even if it's three guys against me, I have a big mouth and I would hope that I would stand my ground knowing that I'm going to get beat up. And I've been, sometimes I fall short of that in my life. and other times I've lived up to that. And it's a constant struggle, right? It's not always fighting.

I mean, the fact is I've lost more fights than I've won. I have a big mouth. I mean, that's just what it. But there's fights in life that have nothing to do with physical fights. And sometimes we live up to our aspirations for ourselves. And other times we fail. And sometimes that drives you into further failure or other times that motivates you not to fail again. So for me, that's what happened.

And when the ultimate was on the line and you're sentenced to 30 years. and you're looking at life and they're offering you to go home, which they did at that point also, for ratting on people that I knew couldn't do anything to me. I certainly wouldn't have given them people that could that I'd chosen to do that. I was the man I'd always hoped I'd be in that situation.

I gave them fucking nothing. Well, Louie, you gave us something, and that was a fantastic, entertaining episode. Thank you so much, man. Do you want to plug anything? I know you talked about getting into the media space, which you should. You're good at it. Do you have anything that the fans want to check where they can check you out?

Yeah, I'm on YouTube at It's Louis Ziskin and Louis Ziskin. And the same thing on Instagram, Louis Ziskin on TikTok. And yeah, I'm looking to do this stuff I want to do like we talked about earlier. My idea I want to start my own podcast. with convicts on current events. And we'll just tell you how we see it from our point of view. Like the conversation we had before we started, I think was a podcast in itself. And you never run out of material.

And also I've got another startup now. It's called oculai.com. And we put cameras on cars and feed it into an onboard AI, which is updated every night when you get home over Wi-Fi. And we tell you if you're being followed, we tell you with a thermal camera, if anybody's hiding in your bushes before you get hump before you pull into your garage we can tell you if anybody's following you with the drone for anti-kidnapped personal security and then when the car's parked the cameras go into kind of a monitoring mode where they run whatever state you're in it'll run all the faces that are anywhere near you or your car through the public databases of sex offenders violent offenders child molesters and notify you if you're not in the car via your app and notify your partner maybe the wife's at the park with the kids or the husband's at the park with the kids and the wife or the husband is at work. The other spouse will get the notification so they can call them.

And there's a picture of that person so you know to watch out. Hey, there's a child molester in there and keep an eye on your kid. How funny would that be if that's how a wife found out her husband was a child molester? Yeah. Honey, there's a child molester holding our child. Honey, there's a child molester. You're holding our child. Yeah.

Or they're in a database. That's, that is hell of a, that's, that's, that's going to do well. That one's going to go. So, and we'll talk about what happened with your first company. Also, a great idea. Yeah, I'm just very impressed with your mind. You're motivating me to, you know, go be the best I can be. So I really appreciate you.

Bro, aren't you the fucking best? You grew the fastest out of all the criminal content guys, no? No, I'm not the best. I'm just persistent. Persistence is way more valuable than talent. I don't care what. And being in show business, you really see that. Desire is 89% of it.

And that goes for everything. You've got to do it. It's desire. And that should actually be uplifting news to people. If a guy like me, a mediocre talent can do it, you know, find your shit. And you did it without a burpee video. Exactly. No tits.

No twerking. just, you know, content. And you haven't screamed to anybody, right? No. Wow. No, I got attacked on stage one time while I was doing stand-up comedy. That went pretty viral. But besides that, I mean, how do you replicate that?

You know, so yeah, no, it's been quite a journey. It's been quite a journey. So, yeah, I want to, we're going to make some content together. We'll do it. I'm looking forward to it. Hell yeah. Thanks, buddy. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Johnny. Of course. It's our pleasure. Patreon.com slash the Connect show for a little more Louis Iskin. Thank you so much, you guys. Thank you, Louie. We'll see you next time. Perfect.