The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Surviving The Aryan Brotherhood: Texas Inmate Exposes Secrets Of America's Most Feared Prison Gang

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Despite growing up in a strict military home in Houston, Texas, Rex Holloway became a troublemaker at a young age. Falling into the wrong crowd, he quickly found himself in the world of drugs, burglary and armed robbery. This lifestyle caught up with him when he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Once inside, he continued a path of destruction and joined the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas gang. Rex quickly built a name for himself in the gang and became a shot caller. He spent a lot of his time in and out of solitary confinement and giving orders to other members in the prison. Then one day after an attempted hit gone wrong, Rex began to rethink his life and the decisions that held led him there. He decided to quit the gang and turn his life around. Since he has gotten out of prison he helped other people, become a successful businessman and has a great family life. This is the story of Rex's incredible redemption from gang leader to health coach and philanthropist. Go Support Rex! Executive Powerbuilding: https://a.co/d/ie8tbDo The Wolf And The Lion: https://a.co/d/60jOLDr TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rexholloway Website: https://rexhollowaywriter.com/ This episode is #sponsored by Rocket Money! Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to https://www.rocketmoney.com/connect Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I didn't want to just do prison gang stuff. I wanted to learn how to be a real gangster. Once I decided to join, and I prospected directly under the general, which was like, made every other member step back. Like, you couldn't touch me. Right as I got there, war kicked off with Aryan Circle. So I would get orders passing the word. Like, it's, get it, man, it's on.

And try to kill. Rex Holloway grew up in a strict military household outside of Houston, Texas. But from a young age, he was in court. breaking into houses, selling drugs, committing armed robberies. He even worked for an organized theft for it. Then, when he was 17, his life changed forever. He was sentenced to 10 years in Texas state prisons, some of the most brutal in the country. He was quickly recruited by the most violent and well-organized white gang in the state, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Putting in work for the gang, he was eventually made a shock call. He spent six out of his 10 years locked in solitary confinement,

where he gave orders to his soldiers in the general population. After a botched murder attempt against a rival, Rex had a come-to-Jesus moment and dropped out of the gang. He spent the remainder of his sentence improving himself through studying and reading. Today, he's a successful oil and gas salesman and an author of the novel The Wolf and the Lion. This was a powerful story that exposes not only how corrupt and violent the conditions in Texas prisons are,

but also gives an inside look at the Aryan Brotherhood and how they organize and conduct their 3,000 man operation from behind the wall and on the streets. And most importantly, it is Rex's story of redemption. And for an incredible bonus episode with Rex, go over to patreon.com slash the Connect show you already know. You guys, you're going to love this one. It was absolutely fascinating. Rex Holloway right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. So I was a senior lieutenant.

When you get to a certain level, you start thinking strategically. and you're in jeopardy. They don't tell you what they have going on in the free world. They tell you we do have stuff. And we're saving you for that. Forget this prison stuff. Don't get into stuff. Don't get tattoos.

Chill out. That's when I see the lights behind me start to 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. Then 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. The reason that I had you on the show, the reason that I responded to you was because, like me, you don't come from the trailer park. You don't come from the wrong side of the tracks. You went to private school. You had both of your parents. It seemed like a good childhood.

Absolutely. And you didn't even go 180. You went 360 the other way. Yeah. So please, just walk us through it. Start from the beginning. Yeah. So I was born in Houston. And then we moved out to a small town outside of Houston when I was really little. But those first few years until I was about four or five were, in hindsight, pretty important.

because I quickly learned that I didn't like rules. And the thing is, my mom will tell you I would never sit on her lap. She could never hold me. I was gone. I was high energy and always just out and about and doing stuff. And I have two sisters, one older, one younger, and they're perfect angels. And then you have me, the middle son who's just hell on wheels. but not violent, not in my parents' face causing disruptions,

always more to myself. And I can distinctly remember my older sister playing a game in the front yard and she declared herself with the neighbor kids. And she declared herself the queen of whatever. And I went, you know, I'm three or four years old and I thought, well, you're only doing this to put yourself above me so you can tell me what to do. So I said, well, then I'm God. You know, I'm trumping her.

And she ran and told, and my mom gave me this big speech about you can't play God. And it just all became immediately clear to me how this whole rules thing works and that people will use it for their own advantage. Immediately, it had to have been less than four years old. I figured that out. So at the same time, I was going to preschool and they wouldn't let me bring my toys. But this is the 80s. So we had the old metal lunchbox. My mom would make my lunch and stick it by the front door.

And she would pat me down on the way to pre-K because I would have toys. But then I learned to just put them in the lunchbox. And nobody ever searched the lunchbox. So then I would go to school and I would set up my lunchbox like a little barrier so nobody could see. And I'd be playing with my toys where nobody could see. And it was really just to put one over on the system. I have to be honest. It was just, I didn't even really care about playing with them.

It was just so nobody could tell me I couldn't do it. And I just learned to be really slick at an early age just to be oppositional. And it's just a truth. I didn't, my entire life, I really couldn't even face or explain that that's what I was doing. because I would be very proper in front of adults. Everybody was very, you know, complimentary of my manners and respect for adults. But, you know, every chance I got, I was getting over on something. So then we moved to a smaller town and more of a rural, I mean, it's like a rural subdivision.

What did your parents do? My dad is an oil business or was in the oil business. He was originally a high school football coach, and there's no money in that. So he's very athletic, very sports focused, started doing oil and gas stuff. Disciplined rules-based? Yes. No smoking. My parents don't smoke, drink, do drugs.

They're very Christian. They're very conservative. They're very good Texas people. They love antiques and farming and stuff. stuff like that. So I was just immediately not like them. You're like a fallen angel. Yes, you could say that. You could definitely say that. And so when we moved to a more rural setting out of the city, it was a neighborhood that was very wooded. We were surrounded by forest and it was filled with kids my age. And this is again the 80s. So they're like, get out, go out. And so I

grew up kind of rough and tumble with a lot of boys my age outside in the woods or playing sports. We would have rock wars where we would just chunk rocks at each other, bottles, you know, busting heads open with bottles and stuff. And just we were kind of bullies. And we would play a game where we'd ride around the neighborhood on bicycles and try to kick each other off the bicycle, lots of stitches and things like that. Again, before. kindergarten, so very small. A dog attacked me once, tore up my back really bad. It was our dog. And my parents, my dad being a football coach, and then my mom grew up on a ranch. And so my mom is not a sweet, tender woman. She's not going to baby anyone. And their attitude was kind of like,

leave the dog alone. And when you're little, you know, it's, it hurt. It really hurt to get clawed up like that. Well, then for your parents to not even... They're not mean. They're just more like, be a boy, get over it, you know? And never abusive or mean, like the exact opposite. They're very nice people. But another example, on the beach, I stepped in a pit of broken glass.

Again, I'm like four or five years old and got glass all in my feet and blood everywhere. and they picked the glass out and it healed over. And it healed over with some glass still embedded in my foot. And so my foot swole up. And my mom sat on my chest while my dad cut it out with a razor blade. Oh, my God. And I still to this day won't let anybody touch my feet. So it was a tough love, tough up and boys don't cry, kind of old school, southern upbringing.

Absolutely. Got it. Yep. And then, you know, the first time I ever got on a school bus, an older kid in the neighborhood boxed my ears real hard like that. Which if you've never had that done, it shuts you off. It's incredibly painful. And so all of these things kind of were piling up to teach me that you need to be tough.

Yeah. A boy has to be tough. And I think my father used to show us a lot of military movies. He was not military, but we used to watch a lot of World War II movies, Vietnam movies, and I had a big collection of war books, PT109, the story of John F. Kennedy when he was in World War II, lots of Vietnam books. And so I would, being high energy, even after I played all day, I was still up. And so I'd be in my room reading, adult-level books and writing and drawing and things until

late at night. and I developed a big interest in the military. And so from an early age, I was going to be a Green Beret. I saw John Wayne, the Green Berets. That's what I'm going to do. And, you know, again, growing up in the woods and playing in the woods. And so I just knew I was going to be in the military. And in the 80s, you had Rambo, you had on Schwarzenegger.

It was just like, it was just kind of this tough guy persona that I was feeding into. And my friends were along with, we were all feeding it. to. We all wanted to be tough. Were you breaking rules? Like when did getting in trouble and breaking law come into play? Like immediately. So as I said, I learned to stash toys to bring to school. Well, it didn't take much longer that going to Walmart or something with your mom and

you want a toy and she says no. And I just figured out you can stick it down the front of your pants and you can still get the toy. So then that became the game. and I was just an awful, awful klepto all through childhood. And my buddies were to, and we would have competitions. We would sneak through the woods. The first time of the police were called on me, I was six.

Because we would take off for miles through the woods. And they'd have to come find us. We'd come back after dark, but, you know, moms are crying. There's cops everywhere. And we would just, if we liked something, we'd steal it. Or if we didn't like someone, we would steal from them. So if there was someone in the neighborhood gave us a dirty look, we'd come back to your house. And it may just be your garage, whatever we could get easily.

It was kind of our way of getting over on people. Wow. We would steal other tools, just anything to annoy them. And it really wasn't to be mean as much as it was just like a game. And I honestly felt like I was training to be. a green beret. You know, if you, they're always going behind enemy lines to acquire Intel or whatever. This is the game that I'm playing in my mind. I didn't really feel bad about it, but we would steal. So in your mind, you're a little soldier. Like

you're living out life already, you know, yeah, looking for advantage instead of just growing and living in the moment like most children. I'd say about half the kids of the neighborhood went towards more playing sports and being good kids. Now, I played every sport all the time. And it just, the stakes weren't high enough. I didn't really care about parents patting me on the back or buying me pizza because I scored a goal. It just didn't really matter to me. I had this double life of playing sports and doing pretty good in school, gifted and talented programs and all that stuff. But behind the scenes, just, stealing, stealing, stealing.

So I think that finally came to a head with the law when you're in high school. Right. So I went in junior high, I tested into a private school where you had to be accepted. And I got accepted in coming out of public school and going to a private school in another city with wealthy kids. We were middle class, but these are like actual wealthy kids. And the teachers are all Ivy League. and you have to take notes like you're in college and stuff. And this is seventh, eighth, ninth grade.

Right. And played a lot of sports there. And it was just being around like a higher caliber of kid and a higher caliber of teacher. And I learned a ton. You had to take Latin and all this stuff. They have like a 98% Ivy League acceptance rate from that school. It's very prestigious. And, you know, in that time, I really just got more interested in girls and sports.

and I was still stealing, but also older girls were introducing me to cigarettes. You probably too, you're tall. I was six one by like seventh grade. Wow. I shot up. So I had interest from older girls and older girls like to do things. So I was kind of moving fast at that time. And then I had to come back to public school.

and as a sophomore in high school, just financially wasn't working to keep me in private school, came back to public school, and in the town that I grew up in, there's only one high school. Everyone goes there. It's very large, and it's mixed.

This is important. The county that I grew up in was once upon a time, one of the largest slave-owning counties in America. There's a map showing, the distribution of slaves in Texas in that particular county at one point had 80 slaves for every white person. Wow. Yeah. It's all, it was all plantations. Right. Okay. So those would be wealthy slave owners. Yes. Because most slave owners had like one slave. Right. No. These,

so if you had 80, you're a baller. Massive, massive, massive cotton plantations, which were later converted into prisons. That's the history. The history of Texas prison is just the evolution of the slave trade, really. Right. And are those prisons still there? Absolutely. Sitting on old plantations? Yes.

And they still work you like a slave. We'll definitely have to talk about that. Oh, I got chills. Chills up my arm. Texas is very much different than West Coast prison. In Louisiana, Alabama, the South, their prison systems are really just a continuation of slavery. And they love to work you in the sun. So, um, came back.

came back to public school and our county and our school, there was just a lot of black people. There's a lot of white people, but there's also a lot of black people. And they've kind of always been there. And I say, I use the term country ghetto. That's how our county was. So coming from like elite private school back to public school, which I had grown up with these kids in early elementary school junior high. So I knew the deal. I still had friends. Came back, but now it's high school. And now you've got drugs. And now you've got drinking.

And now you've got parties and things like that. And black kids. And black kids and gangs and stuff. You're right. More fun, but more drugs and more dangerous. Yep. And it's the early 90s. Hey, guys.

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Now, is there, is it segregated? No. Okay. Explain that. That's also important. Now, the town itself is, I grew up, my neighborhood was all white. And then the black side of town is on the other side. Were your parents prejudiced?

Not at all. Not at all. They grew up fairly middle. class and well off during segregation in a segregated high school. But they're very Christian. And so we were raised to not judge people like that. Like my mother does a lot of volunteer work. And just being racist was not acceptable. I've never heard any of that. And so I had black friends growing up from the other side of town. They'd come over to my house. I'd go over to their house. And it was clear that, you know, sometimes economically we weren't in the same situation.

But when you're little, you don't really pay up much attention. You're playing sports together. So every sport you play, you're on the team with black kids, with Mexican kids, and so on. And we were very integrated in our friend groups. A lot of my best friends were black. And nobody really thought anything of it in Deep East Texas. Now, you do, of course, you have some severe rednecks. and clan type behavior there too, but not really with the middle class kids.

Right. Now, at the high school that you were at, the public school, now it's all integrated and mixed. Are the gangs mixed as well? We didn't have so much of that. So Houston, especially in those days, I'm going to refer to Houston because I was in a small town, but within the periphery of Houston. So we kind of adopted their culture. It bled out to us.

And Houston was really not like a crippling blood. This is the early 90s, now it is now. They've migrated from here. But here we are, right, in the dead center of it, right? They migrated from here to Houston. But in those days, the black culture was a hustler culture. It was about, this was a crack dealing days, you know, and it was about getting money and having nice cars and stuff like that.

So, and it's important because that started to impact me. impact me in the way that I thought. So I came back to high school, public high school, and I was a preppy kid, loafers with no socks, braided belt, shirt tucked in. I was about the girls in sports. Letterman jacket, lettered in two sports. The first year I was back, older girlfriend, older best friends, they're all seniors, and we're going to parties, introduced to marijuana, introduced to alcohol, and just running around with girls and stuff, but really not getting into trouble, still stealing, still smoking cigarettes. A lot of things my parents didn't approve of, but they didn't necessarily know.

Then my junior year, and my junior year in high school, mind you, I'd always want to join the military. That was still my plan. And I'm going, okay, I'm a junior, getting close. One day I saw a Marine recruiter in the cafeteria in his full uniform. So I went and talked to him. I want to join. What do I need to do? And he just blows me off.

I realize now that he was way more concerned about high school girls. He was probably in his early 20s. But he was way more concerned about posturing. because he kept looking around me and I'm like, hey, I'm right here. Let's talk about this Marine Corps stuff. And he was just like, get away, kid. And I realized now what he was doing.

But it was a big bummer to me. And this is, in the early 90s, the Berlin Wall had fallen. And I had grown up with the Wolverines. Like, we're going to fight the commies down with Russia. Well, then that went away. Sure. And then you had the war in Bosnia. then it's the Clinton administration.

You had the war in Bosnia, and then you had Mogadishu, you know, Black Hawk down. And my father and my friend's fathers were all baby boomers, Vietnam era, and they were not pro-military. They weren't hippies. They were conservatives.

But this is like Rush Limbaugh days, and it's Clinton in office, so they don't support him. And nobody was supporting me going to the military. Nobody. It was college. We go to college. That's what you're going to do. Seems reasonable. It does. But I hated school. Absolutely hated it.

Never wanted to continue to college. And so I've just started to feel like nobody wanted me to go to the military. The military didn't want me. It's just, what am I doing? It's kind of the end of a dream. Yeah. And I can feel like the end of high school. and what am I going to do? And I'd rather die than go to college. I just really couldn't stand another day of school.

And luckily, because I had been in private school, I had so many credits that I only had to go half a day. So I would go from 8 to 12, and then I would go to work for my uncle doing construction work at 4.25 an hour. And I was happy to make. I was lucky if I made 200 bucks a week, you know, working like a slave in the sun.

And that just really doesn't get you very far. So I'm in high school. I've got girlfriend. I've got a truck. I've got a little bit of money in my pocket. I've got more freedom. And I don't know where I'm going with this anymore. And like the, I was always interested in the military, but we also used to watch a lot of gangster movies.

Old Italian mafia stuff. And that was all, it's like I didn't really, I never wanted to. be a bad guy. That was never my plan. It was to be a green bray. But right there in high school, when I felt the green beret thing slip away, there was a lot of drug dealing going on at that time. It was the crack epidemic. And so selling weed was kind of a cool thing. Yeah. As you know, of course. And that's an easy entry point to the drug game for like a middle class white guy. Absolutely. You know, you might not have your pocket full of crack like the black kids at school. But weed is like, okay, now I'm in the game. Let's see where

this goes. That's right. And so I have no luck. I tried to sell a kid a joint, one joint, a $2 joint in first period health class, and another kid saw. And he went and told. Oh, my God. And I had two joints in a cigarette pack in my jacket. And this is a very square, very conservative area of the world and they acted like I had heroin. Yeah. It was just a huge meltdown. My sister had been very prominent president of this and that and cheerleader and dating the captain of football. Everybody knew us.

And so it was just this huge disappointment to everybody. My girlfriend's parents made her break up with me. I got suspended. It was just a catastrophe, you know, to my parents. and I came back to school after my suspension and I beat up the kid that ratted on me. Wow. I attacked him before first period.

Because you're not a good businessman, but that's a gangster move. I was so mad because he confronted my girlfriend. My girlfriend confronted him in the hallway and he pushed her against the wall. Oh, wow. While I was suspended. So I kind of had no, it's just fury, just rage.

You know what I mean? It wasn't really trying to. to prove. I didn't have a plan. I was just angry. Did you get in trouble for beating him up? Oh, yeah. I got suspended again immediately. And my parents weren't even mad. My mom was actually like, well, I don't blame you for that one. My mom's kind of tough. She's really tough, actually. Old Testament folks, you know? Right.

Eye for an eye. But from then on, I was just under the microscope of everybody. And, you know, they kick you off sports teams. Once you get caught with drugs, you can't play sports anymore. They just take everything from them. And at the same time, still stealing, still. What are you stealing? Shoplifting clothes. It's stealing stuff out of people's houses.

How did you square, like, wanted to be in the military and being this like honorable rules following soldier and then also being addicted to stealing? I had no concept. I did not have a mature concept of what it means to be in the military. Right. I didn't think about the rules and you got a march and all that stuff. I thought I'm going to be behind the scenes, behind enemy lines with face pain on, slitting throats. You know, I got to be a badass. Yeah, you're 16.

What do you know? Very immature thinking. So how did this lead to the burglary ring? Okay. So selling drugs got me into trouble. I was still stealing. And at that point, I just kind of stopped trying and wanted to become more of a gang. I made a conscious decision like, I'm going to sell drugs.

I'm going to do serious crime now. You've taken away my other stuff. So this is what I've got left. And it was probably a little bit of a suicidal type self-destructive, like screw everybody. I'm already in trouble all the time anyways. Everybody's watching me. I might as well do something serious. And kind of like a switch, man.

I just went from military to gangster. And, man, started. burglarizing houses, like first started breaking into cars and stealing electronics, stealing stuff like that. We'd ride around town. You know, now we've got wheels. Yeah. We're out of the neighborhood and we're everywhere.

And breaking into cars is foolishness because nobody cares about that stuff. You take it and try to sell it on the other side of town and they give you $10 for a radio. You know, it's nothing. It's nothing. You're not going to get anywhere like that. So then what

I figured out was you can sell guns on Martin Luther King. In the East Texas, you want to know where the black people are? Martin Luther King Drive. So I could, if I stole stereos, I might not be able to sell it at all. Nobody might not want it. I might have to throw it in a ditch. But guns, you could sell out the window in two minutes.

I just had to drive the other side of the town and find somebody standing on a corner looking like they sell rocks and be like, and they're going to pass me money and I'm going to pass them a gun and we're gone. And so that started to turn into real money. But it's a small town. And also at this time, my white friends pretty much were like, you're going too far. Yeah. And they backed off.

Right. At least the ones from my neighborhood that I grew up with. You're breaking into people's houses stealing their guns. Yes. Holy shit. In Texas, that's you're playing with your life. Absolutely. I crawled through a guy's doggy door during the daytime and went into their bedroom.

room and he was in bed asleep. He woke up and was like, hey, what are you doing? And you've never seen a white boy run so fast. I was out of there. I was tall and slim so I could shoot through that doggy door and get out of there. Now, did you start keeping a gun on you when you did the breweries? Yes, always had guns. And some of the guys, so I stopped hanging out with my better friends and hanging out with bad kids from the other side of town. One of whom had shot a kid in school and junior high, like all the bad kids. We all kind of, it's small town. You gravitate together.

And, yeah, eventually got caught. How long were you doing these burglaries for? That probably only went on for about six months before I got caught. How long did you do? How many did you do? Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stopped by my local total wine and to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices,

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Sometimes just recklessly going, that looks like a good one with no case to just go in. Just go for it. Just wild, you know. Oh, that is reckless. Very reckless. That is wild. You know, when you live in a big city, you've got older criminals that kind of school you. But I had no guidance.

And I did know some kids from the bad side of town who knew stuff. But you can't really trust that because they're really trying to get over on you too. You know, you think y'all are buddies, but they're really using you. And I knew that. I figured that out early. So you couldn't always trust the guidance that you got. And so I just tried to do it all myself. and just figure it out.

So you would go in there alone. You didn't have some crew. I did, but a lot of them just weren't as ballsy as me. I had a couple buddies that were down. But like one of my best friends, he was just more violent. He was more like he'd tell you he's going to sell you drugs. And then when you show up to buy it, he just beat you up and take your money. And now I was never really that kid.

I was never really that much of a bully. I had friends that were bigger bullies. But I just wanted the stuff. Yeah. I really fell in love with cars. At 15, you know you're getting your driver's license, and I really just thought cars were everything. And then I learned how much they cost,

and rims and stereos. We would customize every vehicle. And so I became very materialistic. And so I would steal stuff that I wanted. And it kind of became, it was already a game, but it kind of became like my whole lifestyle, was just stealing. And selling guns for money to swoop, stupid, you know, what do you call it?

You know, put rims on your car. Yeah, right. And the thing about when you're trading, you're selling guns to drug dealers, they often want to swap you drugs. And so they would sometimes it'd be a really good like two for one kind of value deal. And I would take it in crack sometimes. A lot of times you try to get weed, a couple ounces of weed. was so cheap back then. Yeah.

You know, 100 bucks of weeds, like two ounces. Crack, they give you double, like giant rocks, you know? What kind of guns were you getting out of those houses? Anything from pistols to shotguns. Shotguns don't bring as much. Pistols sell immediately. Shotguns are about half as much.

Nobody really cares. But you could sell a deer rifle for 100 bucks to the right guy, you know. I don't know what they're going to do with it. But pistols were gone instantly. Yeah. Wow. That was always the goal. But, yeah, I got.

caught, stole a whole bunch of guns and they tried they, I ran through the woods and they tracked me through the woods with dogs. Oh my God. And they eventually caught up with me on the other side of town. I had a whole bag full of guns. And so that I was 16. And that was my first stint in juvenile. They sent me in Texas, you do 10-day juvenile. It's like a hold before you have your hearing. Yeah. Did that. It was like this old juvenile. I used to be a county jail. Yeah. And it was bars and just ancient.

It was very miserable. Yeah. And my poor parents were so sad. Oh, devastated. In those days, they thought if you were doing this kind of stuff, you were on drugs. Mm-hmm. And the funny thing is, I really wasn't. Drugs were always around and I would do them.

But I wasn't strung out on anything. I wasn't, like, doing crime to buy drugs. I was just trying to figure out who I was and what my life was. going to be about and I knew I didn't want to be like an accountant or something awful and boring, which is kind of what it was expected from my circle. So stealing and then selling drugs became something that I was proud of. Sure. Like, I'm cool.

And a lot of the black kids liked me because I brought white customers. I had all the white friends that were scared to buy from them, but they would come around with me, you know. So I had this little clientele. It was never big. I was never a big drug deal. I've never been very good at it. And it's, you know, trading guns for weed was stupid because we smoked weed. So never made any money off that. But I went to juvenile for burglary, got out with a year probation, made like zero effort to change anything. Ended up with a gun charge in Austin, still juvenile just a few months later. Are you breaking into houses again? Or what are you, what are you doing? Probably. I think I was probably selling drugs more at that particular time. I was carrying a pistol around.

I think I was probably selling drugs, but always stealing too. Got caught with a pistol, didn't really need to have it, but back to juvenile. And now they violated my probation. And so they wanted to send me to rehab. Give me one more chance, you know, to not be. be an asshole. So they sent me to rehab. And like I said, I wasn't on drugs. Like, not like that. And so I hated it. I was there. You had to stay three days before they give you your free world clothes back. You're like in scrubs the first three days. Three days in, I met up with this guy. We're on the same page. We're like, let's get the hell out of here. As soon as they gave us our free world close back, we busted out. We kicked the back door and hop the fence. We're in Houston and took off.

And they chased us. Like, we'd see the van. They're trying to run us down. And we're, like, diving into these bayous and swimming across and we escaped. And he had a girlfriend on the north side of town. So we made our way up there. Now, this guy that I escaped with is, he's like a redneck country boy from, there's a county right outside of Houston, Montgomery County, that is filled with rednecks with ankle

monitors. You know what I mean? It's like meth and thieves and it's kind of well known. And he's one of those kids. So we were, and I came from a neighboring county. So we buddyed up and we hitchhiked and robbed a black dude and did all this stuff to get to the other side of town. We get there and we're shacking up with his girlfriend. Her social circle, her friend group and his involved these two guys.

I'm going to say their name. Sean and Michael, who cares? Sean and Michael, and they were also country boys from Montgomery County, and they had multiple apartments in this nondescript apartment complex where they had a whole crew of thieves that lived in these apartments. And they had multiple pickup trucks. And they were secretive. They partied all the time.

So we would be over there, you know, know, just partying. But then they're like, we're going to go, we're both pretty strong boys. They're like, we're going to go do this deal. Y'all want to come. Sure, we're not doing anything else. We need some money. Is it meth at this point?

No, no. They're stealing. So they're stealing just to do it. Now, it took, I say just to do it. They're stealing for a living, professional. They're older. They're in their 20s. I'm still 16.

So it took time to figure out that they were in a like a tiered organization. There was an old, old man that ran the whole thing. And I met him once. And he had this giant old warehouse complex in this industrial park in North Houston, just in the back of the warehouse, you know, last place you'd ever think. And he had a bunch of illegal immigrant workers. And they were doing honest work there too because there was well. welders and stuff going.

But he was the fence. He was the big-time fence. And he was like the skinny old cowboy, smoked cigarettes, big handlebar mustache, and just mean as shit. Big belt buckle, just leather-faced. He's a Tarantino character. For real, for real, just growled, gravely old voice. And he would tell them, I never heard him do it.

I met him when we were, I think, dropping off some stuff or trying to collect payment or something. You could tell he was scary. And he told those dudes exactly what to get. They had a whole system. Wow. And so the first time we went with them, we would line up multiple pickup trucks, like a convoy of country boys. You would never think these guys are criminals. Right.

You know, they're cowboy boots and stuff, kind of the opposite of what you expect, which worked in their favor. Totally. And middle of the night, we would go to these very specific offices. And they had a way. They wouldn't show you how to do it unless you paid them. $1,000, but they had a way that they could take a lock off of a door, a commercial door in about a minute with a flathead screwdriver and some vice grips. Wow. They wouldn't, they'd tell you, go watch out.

They would not let you watch. And you'd hear them over there clanking and scraping and then claimant, you'd hear the pieces falling on the ground. And they'd yank the door open and they say, go. Because if you open the door and there's an alarm, you have a minute, two minutes, whatever to go and delay before you have to go. the alarm off. Well, we couldn't do that, but we could get the door open. So we have like two minutes, hence all these boys that they had with them and all these trucks. And we would just go and just start snatching electronics, just ripping them off the desks. Fax machines and monitors, you know, it's big old computer stuff. How times have changed. Fax machines were valuable. Back there,

that's right. We just cleared, clean desks off and stick them in the trucks and take off. And these boys, they're like 16, 17, like you. Yes. Okay. Yes, yes, exactly. High school kids. And how much are you getting paid for? That's a good question.

So one of, and we were really working. This is, one time we hit a garage, a tire changing place. I hope this one doesn't come back on me. It was a tire store. And it butted up to a giant empty lot that was like two football fields. And so we parked the truck. behind the empty lot, cross the tall grass

through the back lot, broke in the back of the tire store. Now we're stealing sets of tires. Yeah. And break computers. And this shit is heavy. You know, and we're packing,

you're taking two low profile tires and packing them and walking through the wood, I mean, through the field and throwing them in the truck. And we've stacked as trucks full of stuff. So it's real work.

Yeah. How often were you working? Every day. Every day. Every day. So now I'm on the run. We're sleeping in this girl's house where her parents are oblivious. And we're hungry.

We didn't have anything. We broke out. We didn't have clothes or anything. So if we wanted something, they would take us to go steal it, including food. Like you stole everything. When we needed clothes, they, Took us to the mall. We went in.

We'd put on 10 pairs of jeans, 15 shirts and walk out. You know, that's how you got your clothes. If you wanted food, we would go, sit down, eat, and we'd get up and run. Okay, so you weren't really paid in cash, fiat currency. We were paid in promises. Right. Of course. We were supposed to get our cut.

And as time went by, the excuses and lies and, you know, this guy's got it. Oh, we're going to get it this day. and they just never came through. And then they ditched us. And so we caught, Sean, we caught up with him at a parking lot at a store one time. And we chased him down. He made it to his truck and got away. But we chased him physically footchase through the parking lot.

We were going to tear him limb from limb because, yeah. But in hindsight, how foolish were we? You're running around with a crime ring. Right. And you're surprised that they lied to you. They steal from everybody. You're surprised they stole from you. How much do you think Sean and Michael were getting paid from the fence?

Oh, they had to have been making thousands of dollars unless they were complete fools. Right, totally. They had to have been. They were so good. Like, we'd be riding around and Sean would go, check this out. And he'd pull in the Home Depot, go in his glove box, rifle around, pull out a yellow receipt, like an old Home Depot receipt. we'd go in there, walk around, get a flat bed dolly, put a couple welding machines, brand new machines on there, and he'd say, all right, go out the front.

And then he'd go out the, he'd put that receipt between his lips. Yeah. And then push that cart with both hands, push it out the back door. Yeah. Nobody'd stop him. Wow. Nobody'd stop. We stole so many tools, thousands and thousands and tens of thousands.

Houston has a lot of theft rings. Uh-huh. It's a big thing there. And wonder why that is? Well, it's very international city. Most of the theft rings now are foreign. Yeah. You know, we get a lot of Central Americans.

Right. They're really good at it. Yeah. Usually, it's hard at cars. Yeah. Had a lot of vehicles and things broken into in Houston. But I think the war on drugs and how much time people get for selling drugs has moved people into the theft space. That's-and-into the burglary space.

Yeah. Because it's a lot less risk for. still pretty high reward, it seems like, if you do it right. It can be. I mean, especially now with the smashing grabs, like, you're not grabbing tires anymore. You're grabbing like $80,000 Gucci purses times however many, you know, a bunch of little black kids can carry. And if you're making a thousand bucks a day, that is a really good living. I mean, that's very hard to make that legally.

So even 500 a day, if you can clear, that's, you can definitely live on that. Who do you think the fence, this old, yeah. redneck buying up all this stuff that you guys stole for Sean and and Michael. Where was he moving it? How do you think you move stolen goods like that? Probably on the legal market, right? I would say, I would say probably flea markets. Right. And maybe even sending some across the border. Sure. That happens a lot. Stuff that's stolen in Texas, along the border, it makes its way across the board. Cars and things. Were you guys also stealing guns? Or did, did you avoid that? Not with that cruise. Okay.

We didn't burglarize houses. Right. No residential. It's all commercial. No stealing cars. No breaking into cars. It wasn't considered to be worth it. Right.

You want stuff that's still new and in the box or very high value. Right. And computers were considered high value back then. Yeah. Now they're whatever. Everybody has a computer. But we stole enough to outfit entire businesses. Like you could start your business from the stuff that we stole.

Wow. And those guys were good. They were really good. but they screwed us. They never paid us anything. So how did this resolve itself? I got tired of it. You know, it was pointless.

It wasn't going anywhere. I got kind of homesick. And so I went back to my small town and I was there less than probably 12 hours before. I went home. I was sleeping on a friend's couch. I woke up with the police in the living room. So a lot of the story of my teen exploits is, friends ratting me out. I've skipped a lot of stuff. It's just friends snitching. I'm shocked.

You guys didn't snitch out the burglary gang. Good on you. Yeah, no. For fucking, you know, they fucked you over. I was only in trouble. Yeah, I know. I was only in trouble for running off from the rehab, rehab, which counted as a violation of probation, juvenile probation. So they popped me. Yeah. Back in juvenile. And now they decided. they're going to send me to long-term juvenile. Right. I got 90 days in this facility in West Texas, which was a true, it was like a prison for kids. Yeah.

So went there and that's where I really got exposed. It was a lot of Mexican gang members from San Antonio and Austin. Right. And I learned about street gangs. At that time, San Antonio was like leading the world and number of street gangs. Time Magazine even did a cover about it, an article about it. an article about it. And so there was tons of these little street gang members,

and they would teach me about stealing cars. But there was also a lot of black kids from my Beaumont, and I had a cellmate was a Gladys Street Pimp, GSP's, which is a Beaumont street gang. I think they're Crip affiliated. He was my cellie for most of the time. And man, it's teenage boys and you're bored. So all we really did was not,

When I say fight, not in anger, fight for fun. Like body blows and slap boxing and we figured out how you could roll up your pants, your state issued pants and twist them up into these like billy clubs. And we would cut the lights out and just whip the hell out of each. Like who can take it the longest, you know? And so it was just a lot of fighting. We carried shanks. Yeah.

So you're prepping for the real deal. You're prepping for the penitentiary. Yeah. They had boxing glove. I mean, they had a heavy bag and speed bag. And so one of those sports that I was really into was wrestling. I wrestled through junior high and high school. So kind of growing up with a lot of rough and tumble boys playing sports and then wrestling,

I really just kind of had a gnat for fighting. And so I always did good. You know, I always did fine in juvenile. I really never had any problems. I was a little bit of a bully and I was tall. I was six to and, you know, I just, I hated doing time for the boredom of it. But I never had, nobody ever bullied me. I never had any trouble.

I'd knock somebody's teeth out, you know? Boy, you're really not thinking about the future. Not at all. Now I'm like, kind of getting like, I'm an ex-con, you know, like I'm the tough guy. Because every time I'm getting out of juvenile, I'm going back to my bad group of friends. Right. And they're like kind of impressed. You did your time.

You didn't rat. You know, we're just kids, but we're living this gangster lifestyle. Gangster rap was big. We're like listening to DJ Screw and UGK and running around with our pants sagging, carrying guns. Nice. You know, just knuckleheads. This is 1994. I think we called that a wiga.

Definitely. The wigger generation. Oh, geez. Your first generation, I was second. That's funny Because I left the ER off of it intentionally We're very PC on this podcast

Rap was Black people music Until the early 90s for us When The Chronic came out Snoop and Dr. Dre It crossed over And even my redneck buddies would listen to rap

At that point And so I had been like a heavy metal kid before that. And then, yeah, started, it just all kind of was feeding into this. I'm not going to be a green bray. I'm not going to go to the Army or college. Well, no, of course not now. Not now for sure.

So what next? You're going in and out of juvie? Yeah. Well, when I got out of that. How many times can you go out before they finally say, we're sending you to prison? That's a good question. I didn't find out because I got out and after 90 days in that West Texas facility and now I'm kind of on the outs with my family. Yeah.

And so I moved in with these guys, these black guys. One of them was 30-ish. The other one was in his 20s and they were real drug dealers. Right. In fact, one of my roommates had been shot seven times. Teeth shot out, bullet holes all in him and stuff. And the other ones, you know, solid gold teeth. Yeah. You know, I'm in there. Like, I'm cool now, you know. And so we had, we just called

Swisher houses back in the days. It was, you would come by, everybody wanted pre-roll blunts, $5 a piece. And so you'd buy a pound of weed and we would sit there and after you get all the stems and seeds out, because this is back in those days. And we would have a circle set up of splitting swishers, loading them up, rolling them, and we'd have boxes and boxes full of these pre-rolled Swishers. Fascinating. It's like now where you go get a pre-rolled at the dispensary. Right. It was such a thing in that era. Even Swisher Howe, they made a record label. Swish a house records.

And that was because of that time. Well, you just get tons of traffic like that. Yeah. They're coming by, they're buying two joints or two blunts, three blunts, three for tens and stuff like that. And you have people stopping nonstop. white, black, boy, girl, everybody. We didn't even sell very many ounces. You'd have a few people. You might sell a quarter pound or something to,

but it was all day just blunts. And we had a room, the dank room where, because people come by and like, I got 20, you know, give me five and smoke one with me. So now you're smoking. Because people are coming in and out, in and out, in and out, and everybody wants to smoke with you. So you're in the back room just blaze.

all day. And our duplex was at the end of a cul-de-sac of nice people with kids. Yeah. And we've got traffic. We've got people in the front yard acting up, just smoke billowing out the windows. I'm sure the whole street probably smelled. And so, of course, the heat got on us. Yeah. It didn't take long. Yeah. Funny story. We had a secret compartment in the floor. I had cut the floor and built this box underneath so you could lift the floor in the closet. We had all our weed in there. And it got filled with fire ants one time. We had pounds in there.

And it was fire ants love weed. Wow. I had no idea. But we opened it one time and it was like a whole fire ant mound going in there. We had to sit there for hours pouring it out on trays and mushing ants to try to save those are Texas problems. Yeah. Those are Texas drug dealer problems.

For real. Wow. For real. So that place got raided? It was coming because they would, the police would come down the street and hit their overheads and woo. Yeah. And then slowly drive out.

They'd come in there like blazing and just to, just to mess with us. Yeah. You know, and the riding was on the wall. We're about to get busted. We would put so foolish, nobody knew what they were doing. We would put trash bags filled with busted open tobacco and empty boxes. Like hundreds and hundreds of swisher sweet rappers. They know all that to do is snatch your trash and they know exactly what you're up to, you know?

And we were just foolish. Nobody knew any better. So the heat got on us big time. And the buddy that was running things was like, that's it. And he had to connect. So our connect was in Houston. Or my bro, he was from Missouri City, Mo City, which is like a mostly black suburb of Houston. and he had connects with the cartel in East Houston,

Mexicans that had houses with bricks of weed. And, you know, the cartel was different back then. I never really thought of, I wouldn't even call them a cartel. They were just the Mexicans. Yeah. You know, and they were high-sized, they were foreign. They were call them wetbacks, no offense.

That's just what they call them in Texas. And they're not from here. Even the Mexicans call them that. And they carried guns and all that stuff. but they were, you know, business men and they'd sell you some weed if they didn't think you were a cop, 300 a pound or whatever. A lot different than it is now. And when he said that's it, well, we can't even get anymore. I have no supply, not really.

So I went, you know, burglarizing is just stupid. After years and years of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff and never seeing really anything from it. I was like, I'm not going back to that. Better just go straight for the money. We got plenty of guns. And so I started doing robberies. Stores, individuals. Wow.

Anybody should pick up. No civilians. In fact, one time we were going to rob a truck. Somebody was idling in their truck at a apartment complex office at night. And we walked up to rob them. and the door opened as we approached and it was a uniform police officer. We had guns on us. We were going to rob whoever was in that truck.

We were like five feet away from pulling from drawing down. And he got out. And he was like, what are y'all doing? Because we looked obviously like we were up to no good. And it was a uniform cop doing security. He would have shot us dead. Yeah.

We would have not. Or you would have never got out of prison. Or it never would have got out of prison if we would have shot him. That's right. So we were robbing. I say not drug dealers. We were the worst for robbing customers. You know, we'd tell kids, we got you.

Yeah, yeah, bring the money. We got you as soon as you show up. We don't get out of here. So you're just pulling guns on people. Yeah. Taking their shit. Yeah. That was a big thing at that time.

It was a tough guy thing. But it was also, again, like my buddies were more violent than me. So I could kind of help with the planning. And I would throw down. but I got buddies that'll leave you bloody. And that just wasn't me. I never left anybody bloody. So did you remember like a big score?

Did you hit? Or are you just, are these like just piecemeal? Peacemeal. Opportunistic. Yep. Yep. Now, I had, I thought, a plan.

I thought, I'm going to learn how to do these robberies and then I'm going to be a bank robber. Point break. Some of these movies where they're jumping on the counter and everybody get out. You know, that was, heat. That was my M.O was this big takeover, jump up on the counter. Everybody get down, you know, jumping. I could smooth jump over a counter at, like a gas station or a grocery store. I had actually been in a robbery when I was little.

It's hard to catch all these details. When I was little with my mom at a grocery store, we were in there when it got robbed. And so, and I watched it go down. She was oblivious. I watched them go down. They robbed the customer service people where they had the safe. And everybody was still just checking out their groceries. And as soon as they left, the lady and the customer service started screaming and security kind of chased them and stuff.

So it always kind of stuck in my head like, hmm, robberies. Wow. But I could vault over a gas station clerk's, you know, countertop and be in their face. but then I learned about things like time lock safes. You know, gas stations don't have any money. No. If you get really lucky, they might have a few hundred dollars, but anything over that, they put it in a time lock safe.

And again, I didn't have anybody teaching me how to do anything. So I would just be at the house and go, pockets are a little light, let's go. And whoever was around me, because I didn't have a car. So whoever was around me and whoever had a call, I had to put my little crew together. And it was always a different crew, which is really stupid. And we would go out of town to another small town

and find something that looked good, hit it, and take off. Make a few hundred bucks. It was chump change still. And head back home and it would last you for a day. And then you got to do it again. Not really getting anywhere. Well, got caught. You know, there's nothing else to say about it.

it. We robbed two stores one day and they got enough of a description of the vehicle that cops, they happened to bump into us and we still had the guns and the money and everything in the car. Yeah. So there was three of us. The oldest guy was 32. Yeah. How old are you? I was 17. And then the other guy was probably in his early 20s. Yeah. And so we got busted red-handed with. With, we tried to, oh, we're here to see our cousin nonsense. You know, they get out of the car. They found all the gun. Nobody needed to snitch.

Yeah. They caught us right handed. So what's the charges? Two counts of aggravated robbery. Mm-hmm. Which is a first-degree felony. Yeah. And the aggravated has to do with the use of a deadly weapon.

Right. So 17 is adult in Texas. Yep. A lot of places. Yeah. So, yeah. County jail. Yeah.

My fall partners mostly bailed out. I was in a tank with them at first, which was kind of cool. But then they had to paint or something. So they moved us into single man cells. And during that time, I got convicted. I went to court. And they all got. I'm sorry?

You took it to trial. No, no. Sorry. I court in the, I plea bargains. Okay. There was no chance. How long were you waiting in jail? Six months. Okay.

Six months. And so my fall partners bailed out. They all got probation. Everybody did. And I had a lawyer. Parents hired a lawyer. Bless their heart. And if I had committed those robberies 26 days earlier, I would have fallen under an old law.

I got busted on September 25th. September 1st is when laws changed in Texas. They had just changed the law and gotten much more strict. Right. And if I had committed my crime just a few days before, I could have gotten boot camp, 90 days boot camp, and then release these, it's called shock probation. Yeah.

Was not an option for aggravated crimes after September. So now it's a mandatory minimum, probably, right? Yeah. Five to 99 to life for this huge range first degree felonies. So all they ever offered me was 10 years. Two tens run concurrent. Did your juvenile sheet come into play in sentencing? They knew.

They knew. No, but can they use it against you in sentencing? I don't know. I don't think so. Well, they say they can't, but you don't know what they're thinking. That's right. I'm sure if you didn't have any kind of juvenile sheet, they probably would have offered you five. Maybe.

Maybe, but you know what's funny. When I was in county and they split us up to, they said just to paint the cells, but then they put all my buddies back in a tank and they left me in an isolation cell. They said it's because it was my age. They said it was because I was only 17. But I think they knew that I was going to be the one that got the time. Because everybody else only had one count. I got hit with two counts.

And so they were determined to heap it on me. But also my fall partners were black. and that county is very redneck. And they didn't like that. A white kid running around with black kids. But the black kids walked, though, with probation. Yeah. That's the irony of it.

They took it out on me more because I think they saw me as kind of like a race trader. It's that kind of redneck. Jesus. And I wrote a note one time to one of my fall partners explaining some stuff. And I called the jailer, the head jailer. some names and I passed it to the janitor to give and he snitch he went and gave it to the jailer and they almost kicked my ass wow they came and opened my door and came in there like he was mad wow like cow I got cowboy hats and big ass man in my little cell and you know and they're going

off like if I would have popped off even one little bit they would have stomped me out wow yeah different different set of rules down there. Yeah. It's deep south stuff, you know. Okay, so you cop out to 10. Cop out to 10. Yeah, 17 years old. You know, I spent probably four months of that in basically isolation.

Single man, you know, county is. You don't even come out. Laying in a bunk and they still had cigarettes. So I'm laying in my cell smoking and losing weight. I lost weight in county. So I roll up TDCJ, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 17 years old.

Now, while I was in county, I came across one old convict and he was kind of a crackhead, so I didn't really respect him. He just was like a homeless type guy, and he told me, because he would see me with my fall partners. You know, they're all tattooed

and gold teeth and all this stuff, and he's like, you know you're not going to be able to do that in prison, right? He said, and you're going to trip out when you go to prison and everybody separated. He's like, you're going to learn,

you have to stay to your own. And he's the only, that was the only advice I ever got about prison. And it didn't really stick with me that much. I didn't really get it. So, and I, because I've been in juvenile and it's not like that.

I mean, nobody was on that. So I'm like, you can't tell me anything. I know about doing time. So 17 years old, pull up to the holiday unit. Now, Texas prison used to have about 60 prisons. Don't quote me on these numbers. they're probably wrong.

But there was like 60 prisons in the whole state. But in the early 90s, because of the crack epidemic, and this was like the super predator era. Tough on crime. Tough on crime. Yeah. They had expanded the prison system tremendously to like 200 prisons. Wow.

Just state prisons. Yes. Not even to mention the federal prisons. Right. Just state. They changed the name from text department of corrections to text department of criminal justice. And they expanded it tremendously.

You know, now it's like prison systems. It's like California and. Texas are like way up here in terms of number of inmates. Yeah. And everybody else is below is a massive system. So it used to be when you came in, you would go to this one unit called Diagnostics. It's this old red brick prison. What's the prison you're at?

The first prison they brought you to? Holiday unit. Holiday unit is what they call it. Ironic, yes. So you used to go to this one prison called Diagnostics and they would do your classification and stuff there. And so that's kind of what I. was expecting, I didn't realize that they had expanded the prison system so much that there was no way to filter all the incoming inmates into one prison. So they had built all of these

warehouses they called transfer facilities and their dorms. Their 2,000 man, up to 4,000 man, I think, prisons, razor wire and all that. But it's like steel metal buildings, 100 man dorms, And everybody's showing up there, chain buses from the big cities, the small counties, everybody starts there. And so your first two years in Texas prison, you're in what they call transit. And so there's a bunch of these transfer facilities, they call them. I went to a holiday union. There's Garza West. There's tons of them.

You get there, and it's so funny, the first inmate at the back gate, it was just, just monstrous, just laughably huge guy, 400 pounds or something, just scariest-looking guy you ever saw it. With the sweetest voice, just as gay as could possibly be. And you know they chose him to be scary, right? Like you're supposed to be like, oh, no, you know,

it's going to be definitely coming from my butt. And coming there in Texas prison is harsher than you. expect from the guards. Yeah. The system itself is harsh. They do not play. Do they beat people up pretty often? You come in the back gate of a Texas prison on some shit and watch.

They will stomp you out. They love it. And they'll get away with it? Absolutely. If the guards rat on other guards, they have problems with guards. Like the guards stick together. They're their own gang. Right.

And you, it's nothing nice. They don't care about your name, where you're from. nothing. They scream at you. It's like drill sergeant stuff, you know. And if you are even a little bit out of line, it's on. They will definitely whoop your ass. Do they take you down to like a separate room without cameras and do it there? No. Or will they just beat the shit out of you in front of everybody to make an example of you? Yeah, it's like they don't do it where other inmates can get involved because, you know, you're all in, you're always in some kind of holding cage or something. So they'll just take you out and take you over here and rough you up and stick you right back in there.

Dudes will put guys back in there and they're just whimpering and shaking and stuff because they just got their ass kick. Wow. They just don't play. And a lot of the guards, especially they load them up at intake. It's a huge football player looking prison guards, you know. And they're in your face and putting you on the wall. They're trying to get you in.

Make sure you understand from the moment you get there, you're not in charge. We are. Yeah. And so go through this awful intake process, getting your head shaved and shower and you get your, you're all white uniform. And no talking, sitting on hard benches, just processing you through like cattle. And then you go to your dorm. And it's just madness because it's all these young guys. First off, it's everybody mixed together.

Yeah. You might have three years for DWI. and this guy's got three life sentences for a gang-related murder next in the same dorm. So everybody's thrown in together and it's all these kids, teenagers and stuff from the big cities from Dallas and Houston and Austin. And they're getting thrown in there together. You've also got ex-cons and gang members, prison gang members, and they're mixing it up with them. And so it's just madness, you know. Awful.

Texas prison is predominantly black, majority. 40 black. It's about 40 to 50% black and it's about 25 to 30% Hispanic and then 25 to 30% white. So white people, the minority. Minority. Wow. And not just in number, but in quality. Because with the whites, you get all the junkies and the old guys with DWIs and stuff like that who are not thugs. Right.

And so on any pod, on any dorm, you might only have one or two white dudes that will stand up for themselves. And you're just screwed for the most part. Now, that said, I pulled up 17, 6 foot 2, like 150 pounds, you know, not intimidating anybody. Right. But I didn't have any trouble. I didn't have any problems. At this time, Tongo Blast was starting. Tongo Blast is now the biggest, they call it a gang.

So I'll call it that. They might not call themselves that. But there's like 30,000 Tongo Blast members now. And I was there before they got started. Blast, the term blast at that time used to just meet, it was a casual term. So somebody might be like, what's up with the coffee blast? Meaning like, can I get some coffee? What's up with the pin pal blast?

Can I get a pin pal? I think it came from Austin. I'm not sure. But you had this dynamic that was changing. The Texas prison system had grown tremendously and they were locking up young offenders much more. But young offenders were also doing worse crimes. So they're all getting put in here with these older prison ground members. But this new generation of Hispanics, they want to use the N-word and listen to rap and stuff.

In the old Cholo-type Mexicans are, they don't like that. They're like, you need to listen to Nortenos and, you know, you need to talk like a Mexican and dress like a Cholo. And all this like black culture we all are adopting is not cool. But the young gang, the, excuse me, the young Mexicans did not want to join the old traditional Mexican mafia, Texas syndicate, the existing prison gangs. They didn't want that familia style rank and all that. They wanted to do what they wanted to do. And so, man, they rock and rolled almost daily. And the Tongo Blast is a Hispanic gang.

Well, the new generation. Right. Because Tongo meant city. And so at this time, dudes would say, you'd be like, if I was just say, if I was talking to a Mexican, I'd be like, you know, who you're with? And he'd be like, I'm just down with my Tongo. And that would just mean they were down with their hometown. See, this was like proto's early days. So you had all the Houston Mexicans wanted to stick together. All the Austin Mexicans wanted to stick together, the Dallas.

And so, but the existing prison gangs didn't like these dudes. ganging up and not joining them. Because they had their cities traditionally under their control. So, like, Mexican Mafia, the Emmy is with San Antonio. If you're a Mexican and you're from San Antonio, you immediately fall under the Mexican mafia, whether you like it or not. That's the way it always was. Well, now you've got all these young Mexicans talking about we're San Antonio.

We're just down with our Tongo. We're just down with the city. Right. But they didn't have that rank structure, constitution, all that stuff. and the like I said the Emmy didn't like it the Texanicate didn't like it and so they would bang heads and they would you know the Mexicans got their boots on

here it goes you know what I mean go out to the rec yard you're going to get gas right it's all these like short guys but they're just going so they were the wildest ones you would say the Latino gangs that that was one thing the Latino gangs I'm sure same way in California were the most active as far as gang stuff but the blacks are the majority Yeah.

And so they, it's kind of a black man's prison. They run the place. Yeah. The guards a lot of time are black. Most of the guards are black on most of the units. And so like the blacks get to have the janitor jobs and the kitchen jobs and stuff like that. So then how does this all end up with you joining the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas? So once I wrapped up on holiday unit, well,

I've spent a few months there, and then they sent me to another transfer facility. They just moving people around to make room called the Bartlett unit. And it was where I was going to be to finish out my first two years. And when I got there, they actually sent me there. They sent a chain bus office over there to fill empty bunks from a riot. They had just had a black versus white riot. And they had cleared out all the white dudes out of two buildings. And so we got to fill those cells.

That was fun, man. It was so tense. It was dark. It was really ugly. You know, when we got there and you find out, like, there's like one white dude left. Yeah. You know, he's got half his teeth knocked out. And he's like, oh, it wouldn't ship me yet.

You know, like, it was bad. And so you just kind of, you know, do your thing. Again, nobody bothered me. Back up on holiday unit, on holiday unit. That's where I had my first fight. And I got myself into it. this little crazy black dude that I thought we all knew was a piece of shit. We did.

He stole something from a Nigerian bunk guy who had his bunk right next to mine, an older Nigerian man. He stole some stuff from him. And so when we came back from Chow, it was kind of all came out of Chow. We came back from Chow and they were going to square off. But the little thief dude came by to our side of the bunk. to my part of the day room, which is where the square is,

where you box, right? And for some dumb reason, man, I swung on him. And when I, I just, I can't even explain it.

I just kind of wanted to get it over with, right? So I swung on him, and the Nigerian guy swung on him at the same time. And that's when I learned that you have to stick to your own people. Because, man,

those black dudes lost their mind. And so, immediately another one jumps in and starts, you know, hitting me. So I hit him. So now we got four guys fighting. So I'm like, fight with him for a second. We stop. But now the whole dorm is up.

Right. You know, and the guards allow you to fight in Texas. Oh, wow. You can, if you ask, especially if you ask permission. Wow. But they also know they can't really stop it. Wow. So they actually, the guards actually came on the pod.

They came in to watch. Wow. Which happens a lot. as long as they'll tell you, everybody sit down. Don't get in it. You know what I mean? But these guards, it was a younger black officer,

so he let them, they were ring around me, you know, the whole. Gladiator school. Yeah. And you don't get sent to the hole for fighting afterwards?

Not as long as you listen to the guards. Wow. If you violate and don't do, if they tell you to stop, stop. If you know what I mean, if you're fighting in church or something,

you're in trouble. So you can't get involved at anybody's business, even if you think you're doing the right thing and helping somebody out because it's going to cause a race riot. Absolutely. Okay.

Yep. So they made the blacks made that the thief dude square up. He squared up with the Nigerian. They fought to a standstill. And then they made him come fight me. And so he and I fought to a bloody standstill. And that's when I was talking about laying in county jail and smoking cigarettes and stuff. You know, I fought until I couldn't lift my arms anymore.

I literally just couldn't lift my arms anymore. And he knocked me out. And I hit the ground. I popped back up. He didn't knock me out again, but the guards were like, whatever. And it put me aside. And then another dude, he was still mad about some racial stuff. So he swung on me.

And so we fought again. And so I ended up fighting three dudes back to back. And, man, you know, my eyes are swelled shut. I got blood everywhere. But every one of those dudes that hit me, I touched them right back. So they had us all in the bowling alley, which was like a main strip through the prison. And they made a stand and watched the poll, watch the white pole all night.

Wow. Stand out there in the cold. You learned your lesson, though, about prison politics. I did. I did. And I never had a problem with black people after that. No black inmates after that. So then the A, B.

You're in the new unit now. Go to the new unit. And I got moved to another block. And there was a guy there named Bam. And Bam was not a serious criminal. He was in for some minor thing doing a turnaround. He was about to be back out. But his half brother was an ABT general.

And he was the youngest ABT general. And he was like the most hot up and coming, had the most going on. Okay. Before we move on, can you explain for us the difference between the ABT and the AB, the Aryan brotherhood and the brand? Yeah.

And how they're different in Texas. Completely good. And how the structure operates, if you would, please. Sure. So, A.B., the California Aryan Brotherhood is its own thing. And as far as I know, has no connection with anybody else using that name. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was formed in the early 80s when they segregated, when they integrated the prison system. Texas was segregated prison system until 1980. It took federal court order to desegregate. And that led to, it was under a whole different system before then. You had building tenders, which were inmates that worked for the guards, that carried nightsticks and keys and shanks, and they kept the order. They did away with that system in 1980.

And they integrated. So for the first time, black inmates and white inmates are on the same. In those first couple of years, they had like 100 murders. It just went nuts. It went absolutely crazy. And that gave rise to the prison gangs that we have now. Right. So the original guys that wanted an Aryan Brotherhood franchise in Texas reached out to California and they said no.

And I'm guessing it's probably because they just don't do that. Right. So that's why it's Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. And that's very important. It has no connection with AB in California at all. In fact, it was told to me like if you have an ABT patch, don't go to California. Right. Like if you end up in prison in California, you'd be.

might have problems with that. For sure. Because you're not supposed to. For sure. And we did not use like the clover leaf and things like that that are kind of traditional AB symbols. Right. Didn't use those. What about the swastika? The ABT patch has a giant swastika in the middle of it. It's a huge shield. It's the whole side. And it has a shield with two light rays behind it and it's got a big swastika in. And it's got a big swastika in it and it says Aaron Brotherhood of Texas and it's got some lightning bolts in it. Do you have one on you? No.

No. You never got one. We were forbidden. I had a different, I'll explain. We were not supposed to get them because in Texas, if they, ABT is a security threat group, designated STG. And if they, once you're confirmed as a member, they send you to ad seg. Right. And they wanted us to stay in population.

Right. In general population to be active. So we were forbidden from getting any kind of marks. So only the shot callers sitting in segregation, giving the orders, have those tattoos, I assume. Generally, some people just go ahead and get them. Right. But generally, yeah. Okay.

Now, can you explain that? So just like the A, B, in California, you know, the shot callers sit in Pelican Bay. They sit in San Quentin. Most of them haven't been on the main line with the general population for decades. That's right. But they wield power. I didn't believe it until I talked to enough people on this podcast. And they're like, no, the power is real.

And they're very small. They're very, very selective in who they actually make full-blown members. And they call shots to everybody in every single prison in California. All the other white gangs basically take orders from Pelican Bay. Is the structure similar in Texas with the ABT? Could you explain that, go into detail about that? Yeah, sure. So for instance, like I said, I met a general, an ABT general, which is the highest rank.

They have five generals. I met his half-brother. And he was, this general was already in administrative segregation on Ferguson unit. Whenever I got connected, his brother wrote him. He was like, hey, this is a good guy. Keep an eye on this one. And so we started corresponding. And that's all those guys do.

You used to, and it probably still can. if you had a lawsuit or something going, they had to let you buy a typewriter, one of those big old electric typewriters. And if you ever get on a block with like a general of MA, Texas syndicate, anybody, all you hear is that typewriter going all day. They're just in their typing orders.

Sending kites to prisons all over Texas. They would get carbon paper and put it between the sheets of typing paper, to make duplicate copies of orders and there would be tiny little print just, you know, all the instructions. Hidden. A lot of times, man, they didn't even really hide anything. A lot of, most of the kites and stuff

that I got were just open. Okay. You know, there's always the wink and the nod prison kind of, you know what I mean. But. Now, what kind of orders are they giving? Not openly criminal. Right. A lot of the decision.

are made at the unit level because they read the mail. The cops read the mail, obviously. And so, like the first on Bartlett unit, I got introduced to those guys. And there was really no ABT on that unit. It was mostly new people. But little by little, some members started showing up there. And we started conversing. And then I was working in intake on that unit under classification.

as kind of like a clerk. And so I had the ability to get inmates moved to different bunks and different buildings and stuff like that. And so I over time moved all the Peckerwoods onto one block, my block, my pot, excuse me, dorm. And so, man, we had it going on. We had like 10 dudes on one pod and we had no issues. And two of them were talking to or had relations with female staff.

And we had stuff going on with visitation. So now I'm still not a member, not even a prospect. And we're bringing in drugs. We're bringing in cash. We're bringing in tobacco was really big. The female, there weren't officers. One was a teacher. One was a RN, a nurse.

We're bringing us stuff. Right. And so we had it going on. The thing is- What are you using cash in person? for? Mostly tobacco from the guards. Right.

You know, the cash is used to buy drug. This is before cell phones. So the cash gets smuggled in to then give to the guards. So they bring shit in. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because the cash is way easier to smuggle in. Right.

You know, you can roll up $10 bill, get you a pack of smokes. The loose tobacco. Yeah. They'd take those tops or whatever loose tobacco and they mash it. The guards would mash it super flat, like paper thin. and they'd layer about 10 packs in the bottom of their boots and just walk in with it. But like my head, the junior lieutenant,

which was the head AB guy on that unit, I mean, he was sleeping with the head of medical, whose husband was the head of maintenance on that prison. And she, yeah, she brought all kinds of, they all did. There was a lot of them were bringing in a lot of stuff. But I had a pair of boots that I had modified to where you could peel the soul. Yeah. And it had a hollowed out heel that would stick back with the super sticky stuff they used on the windows.

And it would hold like a little bick lighter or like a little thing of meth or whatever. Wow. And I would rent it to other inmates. Rent the boot. Yeah. The smuggling boot. Wow. And they would go to medical, I mean, go to visitation and bring back stuff.

And so we had a lot, you know, there's tattooing going on. We got a lot of stuff going on in this one pod. Wow. Well, things would happen, you know, not. like a misunderstanding with the Mexican mafia on the handball court. And it leads to a fist fight, which now leads to we all got to fall out and see what's going to happen about this. So I'm not a member of anything, but some of my buddies are, and these are my friends. You go to chow with them.

You're sitting at the table playing dominoes with them. Everybody sees you with those guys. If they got to fall out, if they have to strap it up and fall out to see what's up, you got to go. And the thing is, like, if somebody's going to jump them, if it's going to jump off and they're going to attack them, they're going to attack me too because they don't, they think I'm with them because we're hanging out all the time. So over time, I was just like,

I need to have more say in politics. I'm going to be here. I'm not getting out. I'm going to have to do the whole team. So I need to have more say. And that kind of led me to like, let me just go. head and do this. You know, let me go ahead and join. Yeah. That way I can guide these dudes who are

causing problems. A lot of these white dudes are just not very sophisticated. They're country. Some them can't read. Of course. They don't like black people. Yeah. They don't like Mexicans. Yeah. It's just constant problems, you know. So how hard is it to join? Like what does that require? It should have been harder. Okay. But because of the expansion of Texas prison at that time, You had thousands of new inmates coming in. And there's another big Texas prison, white prison gang, and that's Aryan Circle. And so without realizing it at the time, I came in during something of like an arms race between AC and ABT. Okay.

And so some of the, at that time, the new white guys, some were going AC, some were going ABT. AC was considered to be younger and more rambunctious, just more fighting, more violent, more wild. ABT was more established. It was the OG clique, you know. And I wanted to learn, I didn't want to just do prison gang stuff. I wanted to learn how to be a real gangster. That's right.

I'm never going to get to be a Gambino. Yeah. But I can do this. Yeah. And these guys are into stuff. You wanted to be a shark caller. Yeah. Well, and I wanted to do real crime, like big drug dealing.

like actual make some real money out of this, you know, not this little piddly stuff, this kid stuff. So you thought you could make big money in prison selling drugs? And after. Okay. And after. So you were trying to make connections from when you got out? ABT's got a whole thing going in the free world. Okay.

Big time. Explain that. Well, it's mostly meth dealing. Right. That's what I figured out. Right. There, ABT, despite the Aryan prefix, is a criminal organization. Mm-hmm.

All prison gangs. are split by race. Yeah. The Mexican mafia is not called the Caucasian mafia. It's the Mexican mafia. It's not the Mexican and black and, you know what I mean? So everybody split into their own. So do they, do the shot callers like La M.A., you know, for instance, the organization is they give directives to the street.

Right. Right. So it actually starts in prison in California with the shock callers who are giving orders to the drug dealers in the free world. Is ABT set up the same way in Texas? Yeah. The generals have, the generals are in charge of prison and free world.

And then they have majors. Some, if you're a mate, once you go, it goes general, major, captain, lieutenant, sergeant. Now, when I was in it,

it went prospect, full member, general lieutenant, senior lieutenant, senior lieutenant, captain, then general. So this is highly organized. Oh yeah.

25 page constitution. I've written it about 500 times. Oh, shit. I could damn to remember it right now. Oh, so there's room to move up. Absolutely. And that's what they were grooming me for. I see.

Because I had sense. And the thing is, like I've said, I was never really like this gung-ho violent guy. Yeah. And I always had black friends and I understood black culture. And I understood Mexican culture and gang culture. So I was a peacemaker, to be honest. I really, that's the way I looked at it and I was successful at it.

I could squash beef by talking to people respectfully. And we just had so much going on. But once I decided to join and I prospected directly under the general through the mail. Oh, I see. Yeah. That's kind of like there were members, there was a junior lieutenant and a couple other members on the facility to observe me and give me orders and things like that. But officially my sponsor was a general, which was like made every other member step back. Like, you couldn't touch me.

Right. Because I was favored because of his brother. His brother just, we were cool. He just liked me. And I stood up for myself. You know, I just didn't have any problems. So you become a lieutenant. Well, I did a whole year as a prospect.

And during that time, I had to do stuff like, you know, I was expected to sell cigarettes. Like, I would have a bunch of cigarettes in a sock down my front of my pants, you know, looped over my boxers. And you'd just be walking around like selling crack, you know. Just be walking around. And they'd have to go talk to this, bro. Yeah. You know, can I get cigarettes?

And he'd just be like, hey, come here. And they'd be like, give them two. And then I had to keep the shanks. I had shanks all in my mattress. Wow. What kind of shanks? Big old welding rod shanks. Because the whites always have dudes in a maintenance shop.

We always have dudes in a maintenance shop and the wood shop and all that. And then a lot of those guards are rednecks and kind of favorable. You know what I mean? They're not going to search you quite so hard. And so, man, I had the shanks. Every shank I ever had was like made. To kill people. That's a kill you shank.

A big old welding rod with a big old wooden like screwdriver style handle. I've had plexiglass, big, you know, long double edge. razor sharp. They look like swords. Yeah. You feel like Aladdin with that thing, you know? Man, there was this black officer that was, I think he figured out who I was because he would just randomly started picking on me. I was not a in a lot of trouble.

I'm never in anybody's face. But he would just, he'd come on the dorm and be like, you know what it is. And he would come and shake me down. And one time he had my mattress ripped open with his whole arm in there. and I had two welding rod shanks buried in that mattress and he didn't find them. Wow. I was standing on the wall with about 500 cigarettes down the front of my pants. And so I kind of secretly undid the sock and let it fall down my leg.

And when he looked away, I kicked and it shot across the day room like a comet. And this old Mexican dude caught it. And he put it in his newspaper and he went and sat on the toilet. So I got away with it. that but um are you single-selled no this is a dorm okay okay so you're still in dorms still in dorms okay and so anyway that's when i joined and i did my year probation yeah never got caught prospect never got caught with cigarettes or shanks or nope i mean i know a lot of them a lot of this is in collusion with the guards but right no i never i never had a whole shot in the in the prospect time

man i barely got in trouble over there out a couple fights um nothing too serious uh And then I finished my prospect period. And after a year, they made me a full member. And then my junior lieutenant was the guy that ran the unit. He was the one that was hooking up with the head of medical. And they busted them. And so they shipped him. And so suddenly I found myself junior lieutenant, which is a temporary rank.

It's like they give it to you because somebody has to call the shots. Who's going to call it? Right. And so at that, by then, we probably had about eight or ten members on the unit. And I actually picked up a prospect of my own. And see, all this is going really fast. I haven't even been to a real prison yet. Right.

I'm still just in a transfer facility. God, imagine that. And it was just this. And in retrospect, I realized it was an arms race against Aryan Circle to recruit. Like, if you were even half solid white dude, you're getting, you know, recruited. Right. Right. And the writing was on the wall. Should have seen what was inevitably going to happen.

Right. So then my time, all right, I picked up a prospect. I gave him a copy of our Constitution, the rules of the gang, and a hand drawn. It's all handwritten. Yeah. People just make copies. This stuff exists from people copying it by hand. So you give it to your prospect and you tell them, copy it.

You have to write it out. What are some of those just very quickly? What are like some of the basic tenets of the ABT constitution? So the one that everybody knows right off as it says the exact wording, I forget, but it's like even though it was originally founded on racial principles, it's no longer limited to racial stuff. That's their way of explaining, like we have this all-white culture thing going on, but we're not skinheads.

ABT actually admires motorcycle club culture. They're very big into MC outlaw type culture. That's really if you, that's really who they mimic. And so like none of them care about, they'll have swastasca's all over them. But the Mexicans have 13 and Aztecs and stuff all over them. And the blacks, they have their own. You know, they'll even do Zulu shields and stuff like that. It's just branding.

It's just trying to. trying to establish a culture where one really doesn't exist. Because the Crips have, like the Crips and the Bloods, they don't have constitutions and captains and sergeants and all that. But they have a culture. Yeah. There's a Crip culture. There's a blood culture. And that keeps them together.

Well, whites really don't have that. So they try to make that in prison by kind of adopting Schwastikas and Hitler and stuff. But, man, those guys don't care. Right. I think everybody knows that by now. They're not like that. Not to say that there aren't individuals who feel that way, but the organization has no political agenda.

Right. Or overtly racist. No, in fact, you're not even supposed to be like antagonizing other races. I kicked a guy out for that. Right. Because you can cause a race riot. Absolutely. We don't need that.

And we don't want to be seen as troublemakers because the guards don't like that. And we need them to bring us stuff. Of course. Of course. So you don't disrespect the guards. You don't start race problems. You don't back down. Yeah.

But no, that's not really part of it. And what I really realized is how many of those guys are just meth heads that when they come to prison, clean up and now they're gangsters. Right. Right. But, you know, because a drug addict learns how to talk to talk and stuff from being around drug dealers and being on the street. But most of the members were not big gangsters in the free world. Sure. A lot of them were junkies.

Yeah. And you come to prison and you start eating. eating healthy and working out and talking big game. But I'm a kid. You know, I'm 18, 19 years old. So how do you get moved after this unit? What takes you to your actual home, your prison? So the prospect, I gave him my constitution and copy of the badge.

And then a few days later, they shipped me because my two years in transit was coming out. And at that time, they have to send you to like a real prison. Right. So I left without my copies of the Constitution and things, which is important. It comes up later. So I go through the next layer of them deciding where they're going to send me, classification, excuse me. Next layer of classification, they send me to Diagnostics Unit.

They call it Bird Unit now. And there you're segregated. And so you're only, it's two man, so it's an old. old prison like Attica or, you know, Alcatraz with the bars and red brick. And so I get a white sally. Well, I'm laying in my bunk and this kid comes to my door. And they're, you know, they're going to roll the door and let him in. And before they, he's reaching through the bars.

Hi, how are you shaking my hand through the bars? And I'm like, what the hell? And I look and, man, he's got staples all down his face, his arms in a cast. You know, he's all fucked up. up and they let him in the cell and I'm like, what's up with this kid? And he's, I mean, it's literally like his face is like deformed from whatever happened to him. And so I start talking to him and it was one of my bros did that to him on the transfer facility that they were on. And this kid was in for statutory rape.

He had had a girl, they were from some, he immediately started explaining himself to me. And unlike Oregon and some other states where they demand your paperwork, that's not really a thing that happens in Texas for every single person. I never saw it. So I didn't ask him for his paperwork or anything. And I'm only going to be here for a couple of days. This is transfer. But he starts explaining himself. And he spills all the beans.

But he was from this very country, rural, very Christian, like old style family. and this girl's family was friends of the family. And they were just like naturally dating because they all went to the same church and stuff. Well, her family found out. And he got in big trouble. And they gave, you know, they don't play that in Texas.

There's no statutory rape. It doesn't say statutory rape. It just says rape on your paperwork. And this is a state where you could marry a 13-year-old until like 1981. So I don't know where they come off as high. and mighty. Right.

When I was 17, my girlfriend was 15. When I went to prison, my girlfriend was 15, you know? Of course. I was a junior in high school. She was a freshman. Oh, yeah. She left me. Good.

For her. So, it, they had stomped him, but they had been using him. And the thing about ABT is you can't do any, there's no gayness of any sort allowed in the slightest bit. And I found out later that the, the captain on ABT captain on that unit had been using that boy in the in the unacceptable ways. And so that left led him getting in trouble. But I honestly, I felt bad for the kid.

I mean, there's nothing. I mean, he had so many staples in his face. Like his skull wasn't even right anymore. His arm was shattered. You can't have bad paperwork and be in ABT. That goes without saying. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. And that's why like I've shown, I brought mine. Like, when you go to join, you have. to go to the front. They won't even take your paperwork from the courts. You have to go, there's a specific procedure and you go and get your fingerprints done and you request, it's a process you go through with the FBI and they send you their certified paper saying what your conviction is directly from the FBI. It has to have the original FBI stamp and all that stuff on it, which is what I've got. I see. And you have to send that in. You have to show that. What do you mean? You have to send it

into who? To your captain or to your general or somebody. Oh my God. It's official. Yeah. You have to sign. So you had asked me what are some of the things in the ABT of constitution. And of course, it has the rank structure. It has the overall purpose of the gang, which is crime. And then it breaks out the different violations of rules. And so you have kind of like the prison system, we have major and minor infractions. And a minor and a minor and. And a minor and, infraction could be literally anything. While a major infraction would be like snitching or something like that. And there's only one punishment for major infraction. And that's death. If you get a major infraction, you got to hit on you. Did that happen to while you were down?

Did that happen to members? Yeah, yeah. We'd smash dudes out. Try to get them. Try to end them. They've got pretty good medical. So they usually saved their life. Did anybody get stabbed?

You know, Texas is not quite as stabby as some other places. They really liked to use back in those days the can and a sock or steel-toed boots. We had steel-toed work boots still. And so two or three guys stomping on your head is more likely. But they took out, we had steel locks at the very beginning. And they took them all out and replaced them with these dinky plastic locks. And but a can of Jack Mack and a sock, a couple socks tied up real good. It'll split a head open too.

So you were involved in some of these smashouts, we'll call them, of people that violated? Yeah, later. Okay. Later. So anyways, you're in the cell with this guy. Yeah, and it's just interesting because I hear, you know, J.D. and people talking about, you know, how Chomo's get it in some states. And the funny thing in Texas, I think they segregate them.

I think they're all on their own unit. They have these like sex offender programs on certain prisons. and I think they're all south of Houston. Like Ramsey's unit, central unit, because you just don't really come across them. Sure. They would get smashed, but they separate them. So you don't see as much of that as you hear about in other states.

But he was one. So anyway, from there ended up going getting classified. Now, I've really not gotten any major trouble, and I had a pretty decent job on the last unit. So they sent me to this unit called the Hodge unit. And the Hodge unit sits next door to the state mental hospital. So if you get convicted for a crime and found to be mentally incompetent, you don't go free. You go to a special prison for crazy people.

And it's awful. And Hodge unit. Is this where in Texas? Rusk, East Texas. Small town in East Texas. Wow. And so there's Skyview unit. There's the state hospital in Rust.

And then there's Hodge unit. And Hodge unit had three buildings of mentally retarded offenders. And one building of minimum security, regular inmates. Because none of those other inmates can cook, clean, do maintenance, anything. And they put me in the maintenance shop as a clerk in the parts room. And this is telling this because my first assignment in the parts room at the maintenance shop on this minimum security unit was to do fraud. there was is a whole parts room like a home depot right not that big but just shelves of light fixtures and light sockets and stuff and there's just tons of it missing because the maintenance bosses all have contracting businesses out in the free world and they're stealing all the equipment those like ground fault circuit of gfc i plugs they're kind of expensive cases and cases of them missing.

And these are people working as prison guards, supervisors. Yep. Wow. They wear free world clothes, but they're, uh, their staff. Yeah. And they're, they're plumbing bosses or whatever. And these are private prisons. This is a state.

These are state employees. Yeah. And so, yep. And, wow. Inmates don't need ground fault circuit interruptor plugs for what? Right. What do I need all this stuff for? So they or.

So the head of maintenance, the head guy, he sat me down. he said, you're going to go through here and you're going to inventory this whole thing. Buckets and buckets and shelves of stuff. Liquids out in the back laydown yard, count the steel, count everything. You're going to measure everything, count everything. And anything that's missing, you're going to come tell me and we're going to concoct a work order for it. You're going to make work orders showing this plug was used in this cell to replace a busted plug on this day. And I spent months doing fraud for the state for the head of maintenance to cover up all the stuff they'd been stealing.

And they just trusted you? Yeah, there was no like, I didn't get anything for it. Yeah. It was like you can do this or you can go back to your cell, you know? I don't know. It was just what you're going to do. So were they under investigation by like, you know, internal affairs or something? I think that's what they were worried about.

Okay. I think so. Yeah, it was coming a state. a state audit. Yeah, so I did that in... Did they get popped? Did the guards get busted? Wow.

No. They never would have done much to them anyways. There's so much fraud in prison. In Texas prison, they're famous for like entire bulldozers going missing and stuff. Wow. Yeah. Millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Gone.

Oh, absolutely. Wow. Yeah, definitely. That's the warden's money, as they say. Don't mess with the warden's money. the thing on hodge unit it was very low key and a couple area and circle guys showed up there and they were actually both from california there were california peckerwoods you know california peckerwoods always have the city that they're from or the area that they're from

across their stomach and so they were both those kind of guys and we became good friends i didn't have any bros there right um so i hung out with those guys and Was the assumption was when you got to your your long-term prison, that's when you were going to go to work? Yes. Okay. I see. Yes. And they would just assume, ABT would just assume you not do anything too serious until you get out.

Right. Especially if you've got, I only had 10 years. Oh, okay. So they really want, they're building a free world. They don't tell you what they have going on in the free world. They tell you we do have stuff. And we're saving you for that. Forget this prison stuff.

We're saving you. So I would get orders to just chill out. Okay. Well. Don't get into stuff. Don't get tattoos. Chill out. So only if you had a life sentence, would they use you to go kill somebody or to create,

you know, overt acts of violence? Yeah. You'd hope. But like I said, the orders are generated a lot of times on the prison itself. And so it kind of depends who your commander on that unit is. Because I ended up, and I'll tell a story to me. I ended up with a guy who was, I was saying, it was very murderous. Like he just loved murder, killing, not fighting, not very much killing was his thing.

But I wasn't there yet. I haven't gotten to meet him yet. So on Hodge unit, I was cool with Arian Circle. And they ended up jumping a guy and they both got shipped off. And so then I didn't have anybody. And so I had signed up to go to AC repair class. I was going to try to go to school. And it came time for me to go to AC repair, which was not offered on Hodge unit.

So they had to ship me. So they put me on the chain bus and I went to Torres unit, which is kind of a huge setup. Like Torres was the first unit that I went to that had a nickname. They called the Raging Bull. And it had recently had a very well publicized riot. Some inmates were killed. It was what we call a rock and roll prison. It was only minimum security.

And it's in South Texas. And half the unit is minimum custody. half the unit was a higher custody. When I got there, I had a lot of bros there. And you're in, like, when you first pull up on the chain bus, and they sit you in a holding cell outside, the inmates who can just walk by. And they're coming up to the cage. The cage is just like faces looking at you, like, yo, who are you?

What's up? You know, everybody's on you. And if they come and look and you look like you might be solid, they'll be like, what's up with you would? And it'd be like, go, you know, who are you with? You know, because they were just trying to put you in touch with your people and be like, you know, I'm with these guys. And they'd be like, all right, you're with those dudes.

Okay, we'll send them over here. And sure enough, they'd be like, oh, yo. And then somebody would come over there and talk to you. And you'd be like, all right, they're probably going to send you to D-block. So we'll connect with you there and stuff. So you're already getting laced up. You haven't even talked to like the major and the warden yet. Right, right.

You come in. You go to J-2. building started in D Block. And my captain was in there. My lieutenant was on D Block because D Block was like when you first come in, it goes, each building has three pods. And now we're in cells. Okay. Yeah. Hodge unit was cells too. Now we're in cells, but these are newer units, newer prisons. So the cells are around the day room rather than just the tiers. Yeah. It's just two tiers. And it's like a whole different world than Hodge unit, where everybody was kind of laid back

and just doing their time. But I will say I saw the best fight of my entire life on Hodg unit. I saw two black dudes go out of like 30 minutes. It was incredible. This is good as any bare knuckle fight you could see on TV. So it did have its action, but not like this.

So I get to Torres, I go to my block, and they put you in the fields. Texas, I know. A lot of people don't. I didn't even know this, but in Texas, you work in the fields. If you don't have like a chow hall job or you're not in school, then you go out in what they call the Ho Squad.

And it's the prisons in Texas grow their own food. So it's thousands of acres of rows of everything from okra to green beans to cotton. And they have guards on horses with guns. Wow. And also you don't get paid. Slavery. Yeah, states, I'm always laughed when I hear states that get like 16 cents an hour. I feel like that meme.

I'm like, y'all are getting paid? Yeah. Fucking spoiled, boogey. Yeah, in Texas, you work or you go sit in isolation. Take your pick. You refuse to work. Yeah. Isolation.

Until you work. Yeah. Or you can just sit there. Yeah, you can sit there and sit there and sit there if you continue to refuse. Wow. Yeah, with no privileges, like a Bible and some legal material. And that's it. You know, they will, yeah, so you go to the field and you're up at four in the morning.

You're out there lined up, beating the ground with a big hoe, a big aggie, they call it. Guards on horseback with guns. And you work all day and your feet are bleeding and your hands are bleeding. And they let you fight. If somebody wants to call you out or whatever, as long as you don't use a farming implement as a weapon, which they will shoot you. for. They let you fight. Did they tell you that?

But like, hey, if you use this hoe to try to beat somebody we're going to shoot you? Yeah. Inmates tell you. And they really don't let you fight like close to the prison. Like if y'all are off away working in some back pasture, then they'll more let you do it. But they call, if you line up and they like call cadence, almost like the old Negro spiritual like stuff, it's all in coordination. And they have these. kind of like wraps that they do,

a one and a two and, and you're out there all day doing that. It's miserable. Now, the higher ranking members of the ABT or powerful prison sets, how do those guys not have to go out and work? It's because they're in segregation. They're not allowed human contact.

I see. Got it. So they use it as a punishment thing, also to make you tired. So if you're young, you're asking them to go work in the fields. And they try to wear you out. But the only thing is it just makes everybody

really angry. Yeah. And I've seen guys slam their foot in the door. I've seen a guy pour boiling water on his foot. I've seen a guy slice his own Achilles tendon. I've seen a guy have another guy beat his foot with a shitter brush, break the break his foot to not have to go to work. Because this is the only way you can get out of it.

Right. This is disability. So I've seen guys give themselves or have their buddies give them a disability. It's like shooting yourself so you don't have to go to nom. Yep. That's exactly right. And so it really sucks. But I got a decent job.

Well, I was there for school. And so after I did the fields for a little bit, they moved me to the better side of the prison. And I was just waiting to go to, you know, AC repair class. And the captain, my captain and my lieutenant got sagged in that period because they were under investigation for their own stuff. And that left me as the last one that had had ranked somewhere else. Uh-huh. So now I'm rank on Torres unit. Yeah.

And I barely got there. And I've not even been a member for two years yet. Well, no, excuse me, two years. You had to be two years before you could qualify for senior lieutenant because that was a permanent rank. And so, but I'm on the minimum custody side. Well, one day I went to go to laundry and I didn't make it laundry call. I didn't make it to the door in time. And the guard was a dick.

And he tried to slam the door and just kind of reflex. I stuck my foot in it. Mm-hmm. And so he opened the door. and he grabbed me by my shirt and he pulled me through the door and I swatted his hand off like that out of reflex assaulting an officer. So just like that, just trying to go to laundry, I lost my chance of ever going to AC repair school. I lost my status, my custody, everything. Like I was never going to get to go to school after just for doing that.

You know, they call all the backup come. They didn't have to slam me. I whatever, put my hands on the wall. there's no point. They didn't beat my ass or anything, but I had to go sit in isolation and they bumped me back out to the fields and back to the sorry-ass side of the unit.

Could you beat somebody up and get shot over to like a more high security place? That's what I would do. I would not do a day. I would rather sit by myself for 10 years than slave for these fucking crackers. For real. Yeah.

And a lot of dudes did. They would refuse. They would do anything to not have to go work in the fields, for sure. But I really wanted to go to AC repair school. You know, I really wanted to try to do something. But they took that because of swatting his hands. So back to, back to E Block this time. So how do you have responsibility if you have to go be a slave five, six days a week? How do you also, you know, your responsibilities? How do you juggle that with the responsibilities of the gang? It's tough. I can say that you don't work every day in the field. There's a lot of weather days.

but also like all the hardheads and all the young gang members are in those field units, those field blocks. They're not over here like working in the chow hall and stuff too much. That's inmates who are minding their own business. So you're always around, whether you're in the fields and the chow hall or whatever, you're around the politics. You know, all the inmates over here, all the barry west techas, all the crips, all the bloods. We're all on like two buildings. Wow. There are some on the other side, but they're chilling.

You know, they're not as loud. So back over there. Now, there was this, I got to tell this story because it's interesting. And a lot of people wonder about, hear about getting checked. Like when you first show up to prison, you got to get checked. And so that's kind of the way it was on Torres. But if you were, if you're already affiliated with somebody, nobody's checking you. If you're already a gang member, nobody's checking you.

I was real strict about which white dudes were able to sit at our table. It's probably like this everywhere. You only have a fixed number of tables on the block, and most of them belong to the blacks, probably half, and then the Mexican gangs each have one, and then the whites have one or two tables depending, because we might not even have 10 guys on a whole 100 man or 50 man or whatever it was, a block. So if you're not a peckerwood, if you're not a proven solid dude, you cannot sit at this table.

You sit on the floor. You can sit over there on the benches, but you can't sit at the table and you can't walk with us to child. I mean, if you're just like a little brother type, like you're not a gangster, but you're not a punk. You're not paying protection. Then you could walk to child with us, but there's only four seats at the table. It's going to be held by gang members mostly. And so there was this guy. His name was Dyer.

And he was a white dude, but he was not anybody. But my bro, for some reason they were friends, I think from another unit. And so my bro, who was a junior lieutenant, was friends with this guy and had actually connected this guy with his sister. And I think they were married. Dyer was married to my bro's sister. And so he's telling me Dyer's cool. Look out for him. And I'm like, he's not us.

I don't know, whatever. And I let the guy walk to chow with us and stuff like that. Well, then one day I wake up and they tell me, hey, man, Dyer caught out last night. You know, he told the guards, you got to get me out of here. I was like, why? What in the world? You know, what happened? Well, come to find out, he had been paying protection to the Barrio Aztecas since he was on another unit.

And they had kept it a secret. He was secretly paying them, which is just a huge violation. violation, you know. Why was he doing that? I guess they intimidated him enough. They scared him enough. I think they had come from a Connell unit, which is really rough, and he was just scared, and they'd forced him to pay protection.

And so he was doing it secretly. None of us knew. And I'm letting this guy walk to chow with us. And I was immediately and furious that this dude who was an embarrassment, because it looks bad. I'm supposed to be gangster, gangster, you know, head of this unit, not just this block, but I speak, I speak

for all the white dudes on the block, all the white dudes on the, on the building, and then for my gang. You know, because any, as the highest ranking member of ABT, I speak for the whites on whatever block I'm on.

You know, so there's that racial aspect, even though, unless they're with a gang. If they're AC or white knights or something they speak for themselves. But usually they would confer with me anyways. So this guy's not us, but he's white. So and people have seen me talking to him. People have seen me probably even letting him sit at the table. And now he just caught out. That makes me look weak. You know, it's like, why are you conversing? You're a gangster. Why are you conversing with punks? So this is a whole problem. Now, mind you, there's like booty bandits and dudes paying protection and stuff.

Like, it's a rock and roll unit. There's a lot of white dudes with big old black boyfriends. You know what I mean? So it's like a big deal to not look even the slightest bit weak is crucial. And this, the way this has gone down has put me in jeopardy. So are the white dudes getting raped by these black dudes? Are they giving up their booty for protection? Like, what's that dynamic?

Are they homosexuals? Not always. Yeah. Not always. So it's more of like, hey, you know. They scare them into it. So, yeah, we'll keep going with this story. So I've got a problem now where I have been,

my respect has been diminished because of this situation with this guy. And I thought, what am I going to do about it? and what I came up was the only way I can be sure that the guys sitting at my table are solid is if I check them. We're going to have to, nobody else going to do it. I'm going to have to do it. So I made it a policy. If you come on my block and you're white, I don't care who you are, you have to fight. I have to see it.

I'm not taking a word of this guy, you know, saying you're okay. Nope, no more. So the next two guys that came white dudes that came on the block. And this isn't a prison that you just come to off the street. Like you already have to have been somewhere a minute to end up on Torres. The next few dudes, we go in Estelle and we bang it out. And it's fine because, yeah, we're going to bust each other up, but I'm not going to try to kill you. You know, it's not that.

And some cribs and bloods who come to the window and they'd watch and stuff like that. Well, then they got smart. And so the white dudes that would come after that, they're sellies. If they got a black cellie, their cellie would be like, hey, check it out. As soon as they hit the block, soon as they're in their cell, you're either going to fight me or you're going to have to fight that white dude out there. There's no way around this. You're going to fight me or you're going to fight him. Or you can just go ahead and pay me protection right now and I'm going to go tell him that you're with me.

He's not going to want to deal with you after that. And so the next two dudes in a row, man, caught a ride. That's what they call it in Texas. Catching a ride means paying protection. Caught a ride with their celly. immediately, like as soon as they're on the block, not a punch thrown, just scared. And cool. They'd come tell me, hey, man, that dudes with us.

All right. I don't want them. And they make them sit on the floor and, you know, they make them cook their food and give them all their money and all that stuff. They do. It's awful. Abusive. Yeah, it's terrible.

Those guys live hell. Every moment of every day their life is hell. You'd rather die than be one of those dudes. Just to get out of one fist fight and they're paying for it like that. Yeah. It's awful. And it is what it is. So this started causing problems with the other whites, the gang members and stuff,

started kind of going like, dude, what are you doing? Like, you shouldn't be doing this. You know, they try to make me feel bad. Like a lot of Peckerwoods had to fight to get that shit to stop. And now you're bringing it back. And I'm like, I'm not bringing it back. It was coming back. You know what I mean?

There's booty bandits that's looking at us differently because of this. dire situation, this dude. You know, I've got to do this to reassert that we're not weak just because that one dude was. And it was just essential to me. Well, then the wrench and the gears, man, we got this guy, young kid, came on the unit, and he was mixed, white and Mexican. And he looked Mexican, Mexican, he looked Arab. He was so dark, dark hair, dark, just completely Mexican.

His last name was like Rodriguez. But he said, my mom's white, my dad's black. I never knew my dad. I grew up in the country. All I know is white people stuff. I don't hang out with those guys. I don't speak Spanish. They're talking Cholos, San Antonio, gangbanger stuff.

I don't know anything about that. I'm a peckerwood. And I went, oh, man, this is a whole problem. Because I can check white dudes. White dude, white dude can go fight all day. That's nobody's business. Nobody cares. But you look Mexican.

Yeah. And if I go in a cell with you, these dudes over here are going to have a problem with that. And he wouldn't back down. He wouldn't back off. I try to convince him like, dude, I'd send Mexican mafia over there to talk to this dude. Like convince him to sit at y'all's table so we can just avoid this. Nope, nope, wouldn't do it, wouldn't do it. And I said, okay, I talked to the Mexican mafia and I was like, this is what's got to happen. I have a policy and I have to stick to it. I'm really live or die on this. And they talked about it for a while And they came back and they said, do what you got to do.

We don't want him. And I should have talked to more people than that. But so we went to go in the cell. And Al Torres, it's so wild. We could break the doors. So you could snatch the doors open. They couldn't keep us pinned over there. We would break the doors.

And you could go up and you could grab it on the bottom and tilt it. Anybody who's on Torres knows, I'm telling the truth. You can jerk it at the bottom and yank the door open. So they came in to do their count time or in and out or whatever. And it's dark and it's nighttime. So there's no light coming through the one little window in the cell. And then the light switch for the cell is like deeper inside the cell. You have to go around the toilet and all that.

So it's like, all right, dude, you want to do this. We're going in the cell. And I have somebody snatch the door open and we're supposed to go in there. And he turned. he doesn't want to go. He turns and hesitates. So I shoved him just to get in there so they can slam the door behind us. He turned around and he popped me right in the face.

So we got to go now. So now we're fighting. We go in the cell. They close the door behind us. And we didn't have a chance to turn the light on. And there's no light through the any. So we're in the pitch dark. We're in the pitch dart.

And he's tall as me. Skinny kid, but he's tall as me. And we're in there just scrapping. And, you know, I can box, but not in the dark. And so we beat the hell out of each other. We beat each other to a standstill. And when they let us out, it was just ridiculous. Both of our, we look the same.

Eyes black, nose, bloody, lips, swollen bloody, just blooded, you know, just beat up. And it's kind of funny because everybody's seen me fight and knows that there's no way that this kid could have had a chance. The crib, everybody just thinks it's hilarious, right? So then we go to Chow the next day. And that's when you see your boys from the other side, you know, and they can't talk to you. But they see me. And they're like, oh, shit. Like, he's all beat up.

Like, that's our leader. Like, did he get jumped? And so I just see their faces like, oh. And then we went back to our block and my bros start falling out of place. They're coming over there with like brooms and mops or acting like their janitors to sneak in because they think something happened to me. So they're stacked, they're coming over here to help. And I'm having to explain to them like, no man, nobody jumped me. It was this

situation. And the Barrio Aztecas got had a problem with it. They didn't like that, that that had happened. And I ended up kind of having to stop doing all that checking dudes and stuff. So where does this lead us to? How do you eventually move out of Torres? Or what moved you out of Torres? So

remember I said my prospect, I had left him, my constitution and stuff. He decided he needed to mail it back to me. And so I was under the radar mostly. And he mailed it and they intercepted it. And so the

gang intelligence officer came and got me and he's like, you're a gang member? Are you really? Like he was trying to play like, I don't believe it. trying to see if I would explain. And I'm going, I don't know what that is. I don't know anything. My God, dang, they already got me.

He's like, okay, well, he did some more research, and he would contact me and be like, all right, I realize now who you are. And the captain, his name was junkyard. He left. So now you're in charge. And as long as you're cool, I'm cool, just keep things under control. Interesting. And it was a lie. He was just waiting to get me.

So never admitted to anything, went back to my cell. And there's tons of stuff happened on Torres, but just keep it pushing. They did their investigation. They had a hearing in Huntsville, the Security Threat Group Management Office, went through their process to confirm me as a gang member. And when he investigated me the first time and told me like, I know who you are, but I'm going to let you stay in population. I knew that was a lie.

So then I started getting blasted. I started getting, I had a big shield put on my chest. put on my chest. I had some big lightning bolts on my neck. Wow, really? Yeah. You've got them, you don't have them now. You got them lasered off. My hands used to be covered. I got all that stuff. So why did you, what made you start getting tatted? I knew I was going to get confirmed. And I was like, I don't want to be like the only guy in SEG without my patch. Yeah. Yeah. This is where all the patched up real, you know, guys are. So I want my stuff. Yeah. And I hadn't even done anything. Like, I hadn't stabbed anybody. I hadn't done anything like that. Yeah. I'm just

fist biting and checking people and stuff like that. So they came and got me and were like, it's your turn. Now is your time. And they just packed up my stuff. Yeah. They took some pictures of me and stuck me in isolation. And I had been locked up for about four years, a little over, closer to five maybe. And they're like, you're not going to be in general population.

You are unsafe. Like the papers I showed you, it's like unsayable. to be around other inmates. So now you're validated. Yeah. And now I'm never going to be able. I'm going to the, they call it the promise land,

but it was honestly like my biggest nightmare. Okay. I was terrified of going to ad save. Right. Because it's isolation. Right. And I just like, I'm only a kid.

You know, I'm in my early 20s. And this just happened to, I thought it could happen someday, but I didn't think it would happen that soon. Right. And so they is, is the unit, the ad seg unit in Torres? Or is it a different prison? They don't have them there. Okay. So it's only going to be on a maximum security unit. Right. And there's only certain ones I think that have it. This was before they built dedicated high security units without or nothing but ad se. They built like five or so of those later. But at that time,

they would just send you to whatever maximum security unit had certain blocks dedicated to ad seg where you're just locked down. Right. So the first. But you're in a pod with other people, right? You can go fishing and you can talk to people through the vents, but you're never, you don't get out of your cell hardly. Hardly.

Right. So they sent me to East Ham unit first. East Ham's famous because a Clyde Barrow escaped there, Bonnie and Clyde. Oh, wow. So that shows you how old it is. An old prison. Yeah. Okay.

Yep. And so it's ironic, really. But I ended up there. And the interesting thing is they put you on a block with all your bros. Yeah. And we didn't have enough. So we were split.

It's, you know, this is an old prison with the bars, yeah, three tiers. And they put you in a cell and they have in SEG, they have this diamond mesh welded on the front of the bars. You're more isolated.

You can't just reach through the bars. Yeah. And they use shields and stuff. You come out with your hands cuffed behind your back with two guards on you. But my row, we were on three row, was all my bros. Wow.

And I was like, cool. And the guards were cool because it's considered a convict farm. A convict farm in Texas is like older inmates. Yeah. Who are not really all about fighting and rock and roll and they're just old now. Yeah. And while I was there, our highest ranking member who was one of the generals, he was the commissioner of the wheel committee, which is the highest one.

He showed up from another unit. He'd been in SEG forever. He'd been in prison like 25, 30 years. Wow. Dirty Joe. Dirty Joe showed up. And it was like, wow. He's like a celebrity, you know what I mean?

So I'm getting it to go out to the yard. We're not together. We're in separate cages, you know, but I'm able to talk to our leader leader. Wow. And I had, I didn't want to get the official patch because it has a swastika on it. And like, I'm not racist. My grandfather's fought in World War II. I'm not putting a schwarzik on me.

Yeah. And so I had a patch that I had designed that had Roman numerals one to 20. And he didn't like that. He did not like that because it wasn't official. Right. You know, he was mad about that. He wanted you to get a swastika. Yeah, he weren't supposed to get a non-approved patch, you know.

Now what is your function supposed to be like now that you're a rank? ranking member in SAGE. But you're in SEG. So what good are you? Mail. Writing orders through the mail. And had you met enough people to where you had those connections? Yes.

And are you mostly sending that mail to Torres, I assume? Because that's where you're, that's where you bidded first and have all the, the low ranking members. I was still in charge of Hodge unit, which was laughable because there was nobody really there. Right. Right. And then Torres unit.

Okay. And then on East Ham, everything was cool, but then there was a guard there that I had actually gone to high school with. And we'd had minor childish beef. Right. And he told the administration that he knew me. I'm sure that's required. Yeah.

And so they're like, you got to go. Oh. So they sent me what we call across the river because East Ham is on one side of the Trinity River and on the other side is Ferguson unit. Okay. Ferguson unit is infamous. It's, they call it the gladiator farm. It used to be. It's old.

It was built in the 1950s. And it used to be where they sent all the underage inmates. Like if you were convicted as an adult, they would send you there, the youthful offender program. And so it was just known for rock and rolling. Yeah. But I'm in SEG. So they send me over there. And again, I'm on a block with all my bros.

And they had about six blocks of ADSEG, but it was a whole different world. Because just because you're in SEG does not mean you're not still active. Really? And on East Ham, nobody was really, we were not really at war with anybody. And so I was chilling. We were just eating spreads, you know, running the line, passing magazines. It was cool. I was only there a few months.

And then they sent me to Ferguson. Yeah. And it was a whole different deal. And I had a lot of bros there. And they were very active. And right as I got there, war kicked off with Aryan Circle. Okay. And it started, it started on another unit.

and the orders came through the mail. Okay, so how did it start? So I'm a little confused on this because I've read now in the, it's funny to read in the news afterwards. All this is documented. It's made the paper. Yeah, oh yeah. It's all in indictments and Department of Public Safety memos and stuff. It's all online.

They used to call it the Terrell unit, but now they renamed it to Polonski and it's where the death row is. but on Terrell unit used to be really bad at that time. And Aryan Circle got into it. I know they killed a white knight over there. And then somehow I think we got into it with them too unrelated. Aaron's Circle was really feeling themselves. And we were starting, we were, we'd see each other in general population and be like, what's up? But it was always kind of like a, we used to call them circle jerks and stuff.

So we didn't have active beef, but biggest kids on the block kind of problems. And it just was inevitable going to come to a head. So whatever started, my understanding is somebody got stabbed. Somebody stabbed somebody on Terrell unit. And they ended up gassing a chain bus. And there was all this stuff happened. And so the word went out, go hot. It's all right.

And they had some guys in SEG and we did too. And my, so I was a senior lieutenant, which followed me as I went unit to unit. And I was still a senior lieutenant. At this point, I was over East Ham, Torres, and Bartlett. Wow. And I didn't have any active rank on Ferguson. So I was just like remotely managing guys.

And passing the word, like it's, get it, man. It's on. Wow. And there was another. And when you say it's on on site, when you send those kites out, that means whatever, try to kill. Yeah. Yep. Try to kill.

For sure. And what do you do? Are you thinking, okay, if somebody does get killed, this letter could link me to a murder conspiracy? Absolutely, it could. Of course it could. But you didn't even, you didn't try to conceal that. Yeah, you would have dress it up a little bit. You know, I hear people talk about codes and stuff, and they did used to try that stuff, but the guards had hacked those codes instantly.

Yeah. And truthfully, you know, I don't want to give anything up, but there's, you got legal mail and you got lawyers. and you got ways of passing stuff. You got. Oh, so they use lawyers to pass messages. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

And the mail volume is so incredible. I doubt they just don't have the manpower to search everything. Yeah. No, they don't. Some of them get through. Man, I know gangs that have college professors who are members. What? Yeah, I'm dead serious.

White gangs? Yep. Yep. That have really important square people that you wouldn't think are involved. They idolize it. They want to be part of something cool. That's so weird. Yeah.

That's so deep. They would pass the messages and the orders, the serious, serious orders. We didn't really code them. We just passed them through back channels. Right. And it didn't always make it. You could be months and many tries trying to get instructions to people. And it's you're, when you start, when you get to a certain level, you start thinking strategically.

And you're in jeopardy. So like if you're the head of whatever gang on that unit, in general population and a war kicks off with somebody else on another unit. If they get their orders before you get yours, guess whose head's getting cut off when you don't even see it coming. And you got a knife in you and you're like, what? You're like, what happened? I thought we were cool.

Yeah. Like you don't even know. Wow. It's that serious. Yeah. At any moment, you're like, I've got to always be on because they might have gotten orders and I don't know. Right.

I haven't gotten. Maybe they intercepted mine. Right. do you know did anybody at those other prisons Torres Hodge unit the other one did anybody get killed because of your kites not that I know of did anybody get killed in that war yes where at at Ferguson I couldn't tell you what units no so on Ferguson my commander my captain was X Aryan circle he had actually cut his own

patch off and then shanked their due when he was in general population and he was cool with our general they had been the general that brought me in that i was under all my time they were personal friends from general population they had known each other before they got sagged and he had told the captain if you want to quit them and join us you got to take your patch off and you got to get one of them and so he had done it and he was um he was doing a life sentence already i'm going to make up a name for him we'll call wizard. Wizard was doing a life sentence.

And he had stabbed up one of the, he had a thirst for blood for those guys just because. He had a thirst for blood for everybody. And so when we went to war, just because you're an ad seg doesn't mean you're not at war. And so we would make spears out of magazine paper with metal tips, rolled up jack-knack can dip it in some shit, stick it through the bars, shank somebody at a distance. Dudes would make harpoon guns with magazine, again, twist up the magazine paper into a dense little cone, put a tip on it, make a barrel out of magazine paper again, get the elastic out of your boxers and, you know, heart through you.

You'll stick in you. Absolutely. Yeah, you get enough power behind it and it's close range because every. Everything's real. They wait until you're coming down the run and you're right in front of their cell. And just, wow. So I always joked that we had, we had a guy named youngster and they see had a guy named youngster. And they both ended up spearing each other. Wow. And so that's the way you could touch somebody when you're isolated. There's no physical contact. What's another way? Well, you could cut the fence. It took a lot of time. And the Mexicans were really more about that. Well, yeah, they would obviously. They would slowly. You see the southern border. Yeah. It was a joke. It's a joke. They would slowly cut the fences on the rec yard.

And they could, you know, it's chain link fence, but with string and salt and blades from pencil sharpeners. Wow. And things, you could slowly cut through the fence. The fences segregates general population from Ad Seg? No, the fence that separates individual wreckyards for Ad Seg. So they would take a rec yard and they would build chain. link fence all the way up to a roof. I see.

And on East Ham, the fences didn't go up to the roof. They went up about 10 feet and had razor wire and dudes would climb through it to get at each other. Just so they could go. Yep. Several times guys would climb through the razor wire. They'd take the cuts. So did, that's incredible and psychotic.

Did somebody did end up getting killed in this conflict? Yeah. And we, the biggest hit that we did was. one of our guys dashed the Aryan Circle captain in the face with paint stripper and blinded him. Yeah, out on the rec yard. Jesus, fuck, what is that? What does that mean? Paint stripper, so it's a liquid that you could pour it.

If you were to put it on a painted surface, it'll bubble it up and eat it away. Right, right. And so we got some. We had the connections in the maintenance shop. And any white janitor has to do what we tell them. or we're just going to have some peckerwoods at your cell if you don't do what we say. So they would bring us. They had no choice.

Yeah. And we would get poison and weapons and stuff from the maintenance shop. But yeah, he dashed that guy in the face. And they left the guard, ran off. Yeah. You know, his handcuffed behind his back. So he was walking out. They were bringing him out to the rec yard.

And my bro was already in there. And he had a peanut butter jar full of paint stripper with Kool-Aid in it to make it. So it looked like Kool-Aid. Hit him right in the face and the guard ran off and left him. And that guy was out there with his hands behind his back, couldn't wipe his face. And they left him for a while. And it ate his eyesballs out. Oh, my God.

Yeah, it blinded him. And he was a confirmed gang member. Right. So he still has to be in SEG. Right. And they sent him to a stelle high security. And if he was a captain, he probably had a life sentence, which he was, something up there. Yeah.

So he's probably still sitting in a cell by himself blinded right now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think about that one still to the day. That's brutal. But like my bro youngster, he got kidney or liver failure from getting speared. Wow. We would do what we could, you know, you had to. So people are getting just life flighted out, getting wheeled out.

Yeah. Anybody else gets stabbed on like general population? Yeah. But the thing is, I was not over anything in general population. So Wizard, the guy, I always point above me because he was literally in a cell right above me. And we could, he could drop his line down, fishing in and pass kites. And so the war with AC went on and we did what we could do. And then the administration, this is also all documented online.

The administration called their head guy, cowboy, and our head guy, Dirty Joe, and they put them on a unit together. They shipped them together and they put them in a legal meeting cage. And they told them, y'all worked this out because if not, we're going to put everybody on you guys under conspiracy laws. You're going to be done for life. And Dirty Joe was within a few years of getting out on a life sentence. He had an old life sentence where he only had to do 30 years. So he was like within five years or something, he wanted to get out. So they sent out the orders like, stop, it's over for whatever that accomplished. And, you know, I got bros going to court for assault, you know, assault with a deadly weapon. They're getting more time and stuff like that.

people lost kidney functions and things. I was kind of like, I don't know. We just weren't real happy about that, about ending it, which is weird. Because I never had a problem with those guys. Remember, I had friends. That's what I said. I hung out with those guys in a circle on another unit.

And you just follow orders. Well, once the war stopped, wizard didn't want to stop hurting people, basically. And so he just started a little. looking for more targets. And there was these guys. So this is the big story that nobody knows, really. There was three guys.

Two were exes, ex members. And one, best I can tell, had kept a clock radio when our general got saved. So you could say he stole his clock radio, his $9. crappy radio. Well, they put all three of them on a block with us in AdSig on the same row as Wizard on two row. Well, that's a mistake because all he's going to do is figure out how to get those guys. And that's what he did.

And so we came up with a scheme to have one of our members pretend like he was quitting. And that way he could get close to those guys. He could be like, I'm an ex. now. And it took months to convince this. This is a plot that went on for months and months to slowly convince those guys to trust our dude. We're planting them like a mole.

Well, while this is happening, they moved this old dude into a cell next to me. And he claimed he used to be a member back in the day and there was a falling out. He had all these. He was a big talker. He was an ex-heroine. Well, he's a heroin addict. So he had all this game. He could talk good.

shit, you know? And he's like impressing Wizard. I couldn't stand him because he was in these weird conspiracies. I mean, you've been there. You know, guys get into some kind of wild political views. Yeah, I don't like prison motherfuckers. Yeah, but anyways. So I know exactly what you mean. I like drug dealers and bosses. Right. Prison motherfuckers are just, I used to call it the stupid place. Yeah. So Wizard starts trusting this guy. And he, I have no say, he's several ranks, above me. He confides in him our plan. This is an outsider. This is outrageous to me, you know, and Wizards a buddy of mine. We're personal friends too. I'm like, what are you doing? You can't tell this guy, are you out of your mind? But he was kind of jealous. Like, I had gotten to do time

with Dirty Joe and met the old timers. But he had, Wizard had only been on Ferguson with young knuckleheads and never really got the, sorry, never really got exposed to the older convicts. And so he was wanting to get like old game and stuff from this guy, but he was lying. I just knew it in my gut. I was like, this guy is running game. I don't know why he's in Seg, but he was never one of us. So it came time to do the hit. it came time that we're going to get these three guys.

How are you going to get them? Poison. So we got poison from through the maintenance shop. Okay. What kind of poison? I don't want to say. Why? Because I feel like if I do, they might consider it like giving up something that they've got gone.

Like they might still use that method. So poisoning an op is an official way to kill somebody. Anyway, any way you can get it done. There's no, any way that you can get it done. And so I've thought about saying it, but I'm afraid that if something, they're going to be like, oh, that's like dry snitching by saying how they, because they might still use the method. So they get poison. We get poison. From where?

From the maintenance shop. And we have the janitor bring it to us. Uh-huh. And we're going to poison, we're going to make tacos. We're going to have the dude that has moved in with. those guys as a mole. Right. We're going to have him say, oh, I got money for it's my birthday.

We're going to bust down a big spread. I'm going to share it with y'all. He's been buddying up with them. And we were so cold about it. Nobody in our organization knew he didn't really quit. We told our own people. He quit. Wow.

Yeah. And it sucked because he had a personal childhood friend back there with us. And they were both members of us. So he's trying to tell, he's having to tell everybody, like, I quit. And his childhood friend is like losing his mind. Right. You know, like, what do you mean you quit? But we're telling him, shut up, you know, just wait.

Months and months go by. He moves in, gets close to him. Can I ask you this? You guys are in segregation. So how I thought you were isolated in your own cells. Yes. So he's next door to the guy you're trying to kill this mole? Yes.

They're all on two row. They're all, I don't know if it's exactly next door. Maybe there's a couple of cells different. but you run the line, you know. Okay. How do you do that? How do you get, so that's through the toilet? No, out on the run.

So how do you get like tacos from my cell to your cell, but say you're like three cells down? Man, we could talk about how things get done and seg all day. Sure, but just give us that example. This is pertinent. So you take boxers, the elastic band out of boxers and you unravel them and it comes apart in string. You get rid of the elastic stuff, but the string is strong. You twist it, twist it, twist it and make a twine, you know, make an actual rope. And you get a deodorant, a roll on deodorant, and put some wet toilet paper in it.

So it has some weight to it. Yeah. And you tie your line to the end. Now, these cells are tiny. Five by nine. I'm six two. So I touch both walls like this. Yeah.

Yeah. You touch both walls like that. And it's three steps. from my toilet to the bars. Because the bunk can the toilet take up a lot. So you have just enough room to do push-ups. That's all you have in your wholesale. And the bottom of the door, they try to keep us from doing stuff.

They put mesh on the doors. They welded plates on the bottom of the doors. These are those doors that they roll the old timey. They roll them from the control panel booth and they slide open. But because of that, they have to leave gaps at the end. and it's only a gap about that big, but you can get that deodorant and shoot it down the run. And if it hits somebody's,

if it's Peter's out halfway, they'll reach out with their pole, which is a magazine stick with a dental flosser or something on the end, hook it, bring it in, and they'll shoot it down there and pass it all the way down. And the tacos, you know, like I said, you got a gap about that big.

Right. So wrap those tacos up real good. Time on the street. string and they're going to pull them down. Got it. Okay. Got it. So you're, you're, you've got the poison smuggled in from the maintenance. And, and that's how does that get smuggled in? The, the, the, um, so you have SSI staff support inmates, which are just janitors.

Right. They push the broom. And so got it. If you have a white janitor. It's like an orderly. An orderly. We've caught in some in Oregon, for example. Yeah, exactly.

So they have, like I said, if they're white, they have no choice but to cooperate. or otherwise we're just going to come for you. Copy that. Copy that. They, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they do brought it to us. Now, you can't tell us what kind of poison, but is it a powder? No. It's a liquid. Okay.

And. And. We put it in some tacos. Uh-huh. And we sent them to the dude who is the mole who's supposed to do the hit. And there's lots of fishing going on. You got to fish them up. Yeah. You're pulling tacos up to two row, you know, you know, through the fence and stuff.

And he waited a while. I'm waiting. He's got the stuff. You know, heart pounding. And next thing I hear, hey, gun, because he's called me shotgun. Hey, gun, put out your pole. That means I'm going to send you a line. And I'm like, and it's the mole guy.

I'm like, what? I don't need to hear from you. You know what I mean? Until it's like, you're supposed to be an egg. Like, I haven't spoken to this guy because we have to, people can hear over the run and we're saying he's an ex. So we're only talking to him secretly.

Yeah. And he's calling my name over the run. So I'm like, oh, here we go. And so he shot me a kite back and he was like, look, I'm not doing it. Wow. I'm not going to do it. Y'all are setting me up.

I only have, you know, like a 10 year sentence, 15 year sentence or something. He's like, I'm not going to kill three people. Oh, yeah. And everybody. We're all going to eat them. Yeah. Holy shit.

He was going to feed them. He was going to, Like, here's your tacos. And do you think that poison would have killed him? Well, two of the guys had hepatitis C and had liver failure, more or less. So they were not hanging on that strong to begin with. Right. So I don't know.

I don't know for sure. It should. It would have been enough to cause big problems for them internally. Yeah. If not, I think it probably would have. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's treacherous, man.

Had you known it's treacherous. Yeah, it's unreal. It's like, you know, killing a king or a dictator. They used to do that. That's like the oldest way to kill somebody, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing.

When you get real deep into the gang life, especially in prison, dudes have time. Yeah. And they will hatch plots that you will never see. If you get killed in prison, most likely it's your own people doing it to you. And you know that. That's the thing about the gang life. Yeah.

Like you think you're making your life safer and not, That's exactly opposite. Like, you are far more likely to die by your own people at that point. Because they, the gang is like a beast that needs to feed. Yeah. And if there's nobody to feed on, it will find people to feed on. And you get guys like Wizard who are passionate about murder. Yeah.

You know, he'd been killing people since he was a teenager. So that to him was like the ultimate measure of a man, but also a thrill. You're not having sex. you're in prison. You know what I mean? So what do you have to get thrilled off? And guys will just get into the violent side of it as a hobby, really, to be honest. So he refused to do the hit.

And that's warrants a death sentence for him. Yeah, we would all, yeah. Well, and the guy that this outsider who has finagled his way into our mix would have definitely rat it. Yeah, of course. So I'm not going to lie. When he said, I'm not going to do it, I went, oh, thank God. Yeah. You know, because it's triple gang related homicide.

We're all going to get ratted out. Everybody's hearing this pat tacos getting pat, you know, like we're not getting away with this. And so in the time that I was in Sega, I'd already been in Sega a few years at that, or a couple years at that point. I have been reading. I had been drawing. I had been writing.

I had been thinking about my life. And I had been growing up, maturing. Right. And I spent a lot of time. reading philosophy and mathematics and economics and critical thinking and college level stuff. We can talk about forever. But it really just changed. It helped me to make better decisions.

And while my whole life had been kind of daredevil stuff, just testing my boundaries and trying to be tough and trying to be hard, I changed from reading. I was like, this is stupid. We're killing people over clock radios. know who Warren Buffett is now. Right. You know, I know about stock market stuff. Like, what am I doing? This is ridiculous. And, and I know how much, I'm like, typing and sending letters and viewing all this. Like, this is work. Yeah. Like, there's people, their stockbrokers making a ton of money doing this kind of stuff. And I, you know, management and all. And so, uh, that night, I quit. And I told you drop your line. I sent him a note.

I said, I'm out. I don't do this anymore. And believe it or not, he sent me a note back. He said, me too. Wow. And he quit the same night I did. Was the mole? Yeah.

That was supposed to. No, no, no. Sorry. Well, now I've said his name. Oh, Wizard. Wizard. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. I should have put that together. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So he dropped out too. Yeah, he quit too, the same night. And I think because of that,

so our bro that dashed the guy in the face and blinded him, he was going to court for that. And he went to the walls unit in Huntsville where you go when you're going to trial. And he ran into our general. And they happened to be on the same block, like in transit. Yeah. And they talked. And he came back and he sent word that we were all right.

Like as long as we didn't disrespect or cause any problems. And we used to kind of have that policy. Like if somebody retired, like if you were in SEG and you slid back and you were like, I'm just going to finish my time and go home. As long as you didn't disrespect us and you didn't go join another gang or anything like that, if you just truly went civilian and shut up and did your time, we wouldn't come searching for you. Oh, wow. So you guys are a little nicer than the California, A.B.

Yeah, they have no mercy. Right. And I can only, it doesn't mean everybody feels that way. And if somebody were to do something to me, nobody would be mad at them about it. Right. You know, but there was nobody actively out for us. And so we both quit. And the funny thing is, a month or two later, I'm out on the yard, still in SIG.

Because in that time, there was no way to get out of SIG. Once you were confirmed, that's it. And out on the yard one day, the head of the Texas Mafia, which is another white gang, came by. And he was like, I know y'all didn't quit. You and you and old boy are up to something. Because we had just pulled the move with the fake. He quit. He really didn't quit.

You know, everybody heard that. And they're like, man, these guys were devious. Like, you really got to watch these guys. And so they were convinced that we were just pretending to quit and that we had a bigger, like, we're going to kill everybody. You know what I mean? Right. And I was like, no, for real, I wouldn't play that game because you know, no, no. You know how I know you quit?

I was like, how? He said, because the day you quit was 12, 20, 2000. December 20th, 2000. I remember I had on my chest, A, B, T, in Roman numerals, one, two, 22, 2000. Right. So he was like 12, 1, 2, 20. It's a symbol, right? It's a sign. And I went, first, that's crazy. That's crazy. That's a crazy coincidence. But I promise that's all it is is a coincidence. And this will come up later. But so I still had five years left to go. And do you let the staff know? Do you let the prison know? Like, hey, we're, yeah. You send them a little

I 60 and say, like, I quit. I'm not with it anymore. And it didn't matter. I never heard back. There was nothing. Now they have a program. They started it right before I got out called the grad program where I guess you can do what you got to do and they'll let you back out to population eventually. But that wasn't even an option. Yeah. And so I just finished, I was like, I'm going to have to do my time. So you sat how you had another four years to go? Yeah. And they kept you in that same location. They moved you around. Yeah. I did all the rest of it on Ferguson. And they would move us around. Eventually they moved on. And they knew that I was that I quit because they segregated the ex. from the active members eventually, and they moved me with the exes.

Yeah. And so there was like a whole row of us that were all ex-members. And we just chilled and didn't bother anybody. And I sat in my cell and I read and I drew and I... Were your parents aware of any of this as it was going on? A little, yeah. The gang bang, and visit me. Politics.

Yeah. When they would come visit me, they'd be like, okay, now you're in like a worse situation. What's going on? Right. Because at first, when you're minimum custody, you can get contact visits. You can hug your mom and stuff. But in SEG, it's no human contact. So your visitation through the glass.

And so that hurt my mom a lot. And I have to say, the night that I quit, I thought about her a lot. For the first time, I was like, do you want your mother's only son? Do you want her as much as she's gone through? As much as you put her through, you're going to go to death row. Right. That's what you're going to do to her now. Right.

And I did. And I thought about her a lot. And I was like, if I gave half of the loyalty that I give to this gang, to my mom, I would, she'd be happier and I'd be doing better. Like, I'm just, I'm one step from death row. Right. Do you think you would have gone to death row if you got convicted of that? Oh, yeah.

Three gang related murders. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They would have killed all of us for that. And you're in Texas, man. Yeah. And they say they're going to do it. They will definitely do it.

I mean, the guy, and it's, SEG sucks, but there's worse levels. Like, there's level one, level two, level three. When you go to level three, add SEG, like, there's steel across your bars. There's no air conditioning. It's 100 degrees. Like, you have, at least with the bars and the mesh, you get a little air circulation. But level three, it's solid and they take everything. Like, you can have a Bible and whatever's legally.

They have to let you have. But you get no commissary, no nothing. Like, you're going to. lose weight. It's awful. It's horrible. And so I was only just a step or two away from the lowest you can be in society. I mean, if you're in administrative segregation, maximum security, you are. It's like those Russian dolls, like the hole keeps getting smaller. Yeah. Smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until they finally just kill you. And I'm like, yeah, or you kill yourself. Right. Or your own gang members kill you. And it's like, I'm not getting anywhere with this. What is the

point of this. Yeah. And so, yeah, I, I finished my time. Yeah. And what's really funny, they let you go from the Walls Unit in Texas. And so they drove me, they chain bused me from Ferguson to the Walls unit. The day I'm supposed to get out. And there was a hurricane came through.

So I got postponed. I couldn't get out until after that. But the morning I was going to finally get out, they came and to take me to the shower. They made me cuff up. Two guards escort me to the shower Take me back, put me in the cell And like two hours later they come and they're like, all right We're gonna let you out and they just opened the door

Wow. And I just walked out like I hadn't been No human contact for six and a half years They just once your sentences up. Yeah I actually did an extra day. I did 10 years in a day because of the hurricane You just walk out Like all right go what do that feel like to walk? Surreal like with no handcuffs on Completely surreal is unbelievably weird.

I remember just how crazy it felt to put on shoes, like real shoes with good souls, like Nike's. It was like, it was... Well, the sun. I hadn't seen the sun in years. That's so... No sun in years. Not even on the yard?

No, it's got a roof. Right, of course. It's all closed in. Nope, no sun for years. I hadn't seen a TV. I hadn't seen a cell phone. Yeah. I hadn't...

All you have in Texas prison is a clock. radio with some headphones and yeah I didn't know anything about anything and I tell people you know now I've been out 19 years and for until recently it's gotten better but for the first 18 years for sure I I had nightmares every night yeah every night I'd be back in that cell and it was it's hard to explain how awful it is is because in a dream, time goes slow. It feels like years, right? Even though you've only been asleep for a few hours.

And that's what it's felt like. Just sitting back in that cell. We're skipping over a lot. But I mean, I think most people can figure out that six and a half years and a five by nine cell when no air conditioning is its own hell. You know, we're talking about the gang stuff that happened. But there's lots of years of staring at the walls. Yeah. Well, let's talk about it on Patreon.

But yeah. Oh, I got to take a breath, man. That was incredible. That was incredible and fascinating. And I'm honored that you reached out to me. I'm honored to be here. Yeah, yeah. It was really, man, avoid it, folks.

Avoid it. So you've done a lot since you got out. Yeah. But you wrote a couple of books. So let's plug them. Plug away. Where can they get you've written a novel and a bodybuilding manual, which I'm going to read and probably do nothing about, but they'll try to.

Where can they find them? Amazon. Yeah, they're both on Amazon. During the pandemic, I went ahead and got three different fitness certifications, something I said I was going to do in prison. Yeah. Everybody gets into fitness in prison, right? So I said, I'm going to do it. And I did.

And then I just went ahead and wrote the book. that's beginning to end really all you need to know about fitness or at least bodybuilding and strength training and diet. And then the novel is something that I also promise myself I would always do. The wolf and the lion. Yeah. If you mix sons of anarchy with heat or den of thieves or something, you'd be real close. So it's outlaw, motorcycle gang, that,

is going to rob the legal cannabis industry in Colorado. And there's tons of treachery and deceptions and all the things that I learned in my time in organized crime. Wow. You should sell this in prison. This would be a hit. I'm going to, I'm actually, I donate to prisoners. I have a deal worked out with a vendor, a book vendor. Okay.

And if somebody tells me they want to send a copy of the novel to their loved one in Texas prison, I have it sent there to them. Awesome. Awesome. And then you're on TikTok. I am. Plug the plug the TikTok. Yeah. What is it? Rex Holloway.

I don't know the name of it, but it's, uh, your handler does. Yeah. Rex. That's, something like that. Well, we'll find it and we'll put it in, uh, in the description. Yeah, I'm not, I've not been a big social media guy. So this is the very first time, you know. Yeah.

You were down for a long time with a clock radio. So we can't expect you to be an influencer on TikTok all, you know, overnight, right? That's right. So anyways, Rex, that was awesome. Thank you so much. We're going to talk about that isolation. And we're going to get into a lot more of that spiritual stuff that made, you know, your transformation possible. over on Patreon. But that was mind-blowing. Thank you for coming out here to L.A.

And to your beautiful black wife. I mean, you're talking about the progress of America. You've got an Aaron Brotherhood guy married to a black woman. So that's right. That's, what a country. What a country. So, all right, Patreon, patreon.com slash The Connect Show for more Rex Holloway. Thank you, everybody. And we will see you later. Take care.