The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - This Is How I Survived A Year In County Jail | Ep. #9

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Johnny describes fighting his case from inside the belly of the beast- county jail.  He breaks down the broken bail system and explains the difference between paid lawyers and "dumptrucks," talks about his first jail fight, taking a plea deal, and finally- gives tips on how to stay sane in the midst of the madness.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a saying in the county jail. Each day feels like a month. Each month feels like a year. You wake up to the worst pain that a human being can feel. If you're a drug dealer and you're looking for a good connect, the best place to go is jail. They call it the Department of Connections. He reaches over, even as I'm on top of him,

and he hit me twice as hard as I hit him. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell. Before we get started today, we have a very special announcement. We have just launched the official Patreon page for the Connect podcast. If you go to patreon.com slash the Connect show, you can sign up to become a member and get access to exclusive bonus content that you can't get anywhere else. You guys, we have so much incredible stuff coming up.

We're going to be hitting the road soon and going to a lot of these places that we talk about on the show. And we're going to be conducting a lot of very special interviews and getting a lot of very special interviews and getting a lot of. a lot of behind-the-scenes footage, much of which you will not be able to see on the main YouTube channel. You'll also get other benefits like early access to merch drops, exclusive participation in YouTube live zooms, plus weekly bonus episodes of different interviews and things that we do just for the Patreon members. You guys, YouTube makes it very difficult to monetize a lot of the content that we put out there, especially some of the stuff that we're going to be showing. you is just too raw for the YouTube channel. They won't allow us to make money off of it.

So the best way to support us and support the show and allow us to keep growing and making better and better content is by going to sign up for the Patreon. 499 a month. A cup of coffee gets you in and makes you an exclusive member of the Connect and our community. Once again, go to patreon.com slash the Connect show and sign up today. All right, let's get into it. What's up, you guys? I want to take a minute to thank our amazing sponsor, Canada Dips, the nation's number one CBD dip pouch company. You guys, if you're a chewing tobacco and you're trying to wean yourself off of that shit and you love the benefits of CBD, Canada Dips is perfect for you. I'm telling you I use this product every single day. It's great for sleep. If you want to fall asleep,

they have strains for focus and energy, and they just have shit just to mellow you out. It's completely THC-free and has none of the harmful ingredients contained in real dips like tobacco, nicotine, etc. Right now, Canada Dips is proud to present the sleep and energy, also known as the fuel line. It comes in five different flavors, mint, caramel, peach, mango, and mocha. And you can get 30% off when you go to canadips.com slash connect. If you don't like the psychoactive effects, don't worry. These pouches are completely THC-free.

Go over to canadips.com right now and use the promo code, That's C-O-N-N-E-C-T to get 30% off your order. You guys support them because they support the show. It's a fantastic product. I use it every day, and I can't recommend them enough. Hit the link in the description to get 30% off. All right, so in the last episode, I talked about my fall. I was getting ready to get out of the game.

I had a million dollars in cash. I was going to move to Columbia, buy a hotel, and live happily ever after with my shorty, Maria. and it all came crashing down months before I was able to make it happen. I told you about taking the cops on a high-speed chase, how they found out where I lived and raided my house and found almost a million dollars in cash, and then hauling me off to jail where I was interrogated by Homeland Security and the DEA.

They were convinced that the money they had seized was tied up in a larger drug conspiracy. They thought I was a player with the cartels, when in reality, I was just picking up work from them. I didn't have any real ties to Colombians or anything like that, but they wanted me to give up Maria. They wanted me to give up Intel on the Sina Lowens in Northern California, and I refused to do it.

So therefore, they charged me with federal racketeering and money laundering crimes. And the next day, my lawyer, Gorski, the fat man, visited me and told me that I could potentially face life in prison for this shit. So now I'm locked up in county jail. The hardest time that an inmate will ever do, it's Guantanamo Bay and it's county, man. I'm telling you, it's hell on earth. Ask any criminal, that first night in jail, you sleep like a baby, and you wake up to the worst pain that a human being can feel. It's like your girlfriend leaving and your parents dying wrapped up into one times 10.

The depression is severe. And that was like me, my first night. I dreamt that I was poolside at my new hotel in Cartagena, Columbia that I had purchased with my drug money. And I had Maria on my arm, and she's gorgeous. She's dressed in a skimpy little string bikini. And I can literally feel and remember the moment that she slid her bottom off. She slid her panties off. And I'm getting ready to mount her.

And I can literally feel myself going inside of her when, And I hear the loudspeaker wake me up for chow. That's what it's like. It's like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat. That's your first wake up in the county jail. I was broke. I'd lost all my money. I was getting charged with federal racketeering.

And I knew I'd probably never see Maria again. And at this point, all I'm thinking is, at least I have bail money. I need to get before the judge so I can get my bail set, pay them their money and get the fuck out of here. The problem was I got arrested on a Friday. So that means by the time I got in there, it was Friday night. The courts are closed till Monday. So I got at least the weekend to spend in this fucking hellhole.

And anything can happen in 48 hours, especially in the county. When you go to county in any major city in America where there's gangbanging, you have to fight. We call it the fade. And anybody who wants to stay on mainline has to fade right away. If you don't fight, you will get kicked off general population and you'll have to go either to an isolation, cell, go to the hole, or get put in PC protective custody with the child molesters. My first fag came that morning. I was in line to get breakfast and I had my little breakfast tray and it's slop, obviously. The only thing that's good to eat is a cinnamon roll that they give

me. So I sit down with a group of strangers, junkies, you know, fucking dirty white boys, shaved heads, tattoos all over their bodies. And I'm about to fork my cinnamon. roll and I'm starving. I haven't eaten for like a day since I was arrested. So my mouth was watering for this fucking cinnamon roll. And as soon as I go to take a bite, this giant fucking white rhino guy with a shaved head comes by and spears the cinnamon roll with his own fork, puts it on his tray, and he calls me a punk, and he walks away. And that's called getting punked out. Getting punked out in jail or prison is getting humiliated publicly in front of everybody. To be made, to be a punk. Being a punk is the lowest form of human in the joint. That's the trigger word. Those

are fighting words. So as soon as this guy came by, grab my fucking cinnamon roll and said, punk, called me a punk motherfucker and walked away. I had to address it right then and there. And I look over at the guys who were sitting at the table with me and they just shook their heads, picked up their trays, got up, and walked away. And to not have addressed that would have been like co-signing it. It's like getting bullied and not standing up to your bully. And that just opens yourself up to all kinds of victimization, especially when people see that. They're like, okay, he can be punked. So they could come extort me, beat me down, whatever the fuck. But at the time, I didn't know how serious the punk jacket was. I was just fucking pissed off because I wanted that

cinnamon roll so badly. So we finished eating. And the whole time I'm getting snickered at by the other tables. You know, I feel like the dorky kid that's at a new high school who just got bullied by the jocks. And as we're standing up to head back to ourselves, this big black guy kind of walks up behind me and goes, hey, you better go see about that. And I was like, what? He was like, you need to go fight that motherfucker like, now. And it hit me. I'm like, of course, right? So I walk straight up to this dude, this big, burly, baldheaded white guy with a Nazi lightning bolt on the side of his neck. And I was like, let's fucking go. Let's throw down. And he's, he was like, oh yeah. And later I realized that it was that guy's first day in jail too. So he knew

that he needed to fight to get his respect. So that's why he had punked me out to test me. So this was a battle for both of our respect at this point. So then this guy walks over to the guard, the CEO who's sitting in his guard booth where he can see the entire cell block in front of him and he whispered something to him and the guard nods at him. And then the guy walks back to me and goes, meet me in the bathroom after line movement. And I said, okay. And that's how a lot of the fights in jail are organized. It's like a schoolyard fight. Hey, meet me on the playground at three o'clock, motherfucker. That's kind of how it's done. So I go back into my cell and I wait for the next line movement, which again, if you remember, if you've seen the earlier episodes, that's when the

doors open and inmates are able to go in and out and use the phone, go to the day room, et cetera. So now I got two hours or so to sit in my cell, getting ready for the fight. I'm scared out of my fucking mind. I don't want to break a fucking knuckle on this guy's face. I'm worried about my teeth, you know, my beautiful little fucking features. It's a vanity thing with me. I did not want to lose teeth or get my nose even more crooked than it already is naturally. I was fucking worried.

I also had no footwear. When you first go to jail, you don't have any shoes. They give you plastic sandals. And plus, this guy had like 30 pounds on me. I mean, he had done time. He had real prison strength. He was chiseled and he was probably 6-1, 6-2. So I knew my only advantage was surprise and reach.

I'm 6'6 foot 6. So I thought if I could catch him with a hard right straight out of the gate, then that would open him up and give me time to, I don't know, get some body blows. Who knows what the fuck? I was just going to wing it. I just knew that I had to cripple him as hard as I could. could with the first punch. That's always how I've taken street fights is make sure to just drop them with one hit. So a couple hours go by, the doors open, now it's time for line

movement. Here we go. And in the day room, you could feel that palpable energy. Whenever there's about to be violence in prison or jail, everybody kind of knows whether there's going to be a stabbing or a fight or a riot. It's, I don't know, it's the energy in the air. Everybody's a lot quieter. and people still go about their business trying to act like nothing's wrong, but they know some shit's about to pop off. So in the corner of my eye, I can see this guy heading for the bathroom, but I know that I have to beat him there if I got any chance of making this a fair fight. So I book it over to the bathroom and I see the guard.

He gets up, turns, and walks off the cell block. And I'm like, wow, this is like out of the movies. This is about to be a real jail fight. and I beat this guy to the bathroom by like five steps. That's it. And as soon as I walked in, there's a blind spot just to the right of the door. I got in position. I took a roll of toilet paper that I'd smuggled from my cell out of my shirt,

and I wrapped my right fist with it. And as soon as this guy walked in, I hit him as hard as I've ever hit anyone in the side of his temple. And I knocked this dude over. Boom. And he falls against the urinal. And he kind of opens himself up. and I took my big, long, skinny leg, and I just put it in the middle of his chest, and it dropped him.

And I go over, and I jumped on, started kicking him, punching him. He reaches over, even as I'm on top of him, and he hit me twice as hard as I hit him. And I go sprawling. So now we're both on our feet squared up, having a one-on-one fade, and we start trading blows. The problem is his blows are like twice as hard as mine. And I'm telling you, he's using my head as a punching bag at this point. I look like Stallone and Rocky One when he's about to go down. And the toilet paper roll is falling off my hand.

So it's just fists. And I'm able to find a little room and I gave him one right under his fucking eye. And it just starts swelling his eye up. But it also felt like it had broken my hand. And that's why I had wrapped my hand with toilet paper in the first place because I knew I probably would have broken my hand against this fucking Neanderthal's face. It lasted for maybe a minute, but a minute in a street fight takes forever. So by the time the guard did run in and break it up, we were grateful.

I was sweating bullets. I was panting. It felt like I was about to have a heart attack. And he yells, hey, enough, get against the wall. He looks at her faces. He makes sure that nobody has to go down to medical, and he just sends us back to ourselves. He didn't even take us to the hole.

And that's because he knew that this was not a fight over beef. This was just what happens when you go to county. This is a fade. And I got in a bunch of fights like that while I was in county, and they were all over punk checks. You know, dudes would see me, this skinny dude, not gang affiliated, and they would try to test me. And a few times I probably didn't even need to get in the fights, but I would do it just so they would send me to the hole, and I could get some time alone away from the cell block and all of the madness, so I could jerk off in peace and just sleep for a couple of days. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off Summer Right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer,

Total Wine and More is my go-to, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family. I'll grab refreshing beers, easy drinking wines, and some hard seltzers for the cooler. And with everything that goes into summer, it's nice knowing you're getting the lowest prices. Total Wine and More. Your Memorial Day, Made Easy.

Shop Total Wine and More in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly must be 21. So the first thing that happens after you get arrested and go to county jail is the arraignment. And that's when you go before the judge and they read off all of the charges. And that Monday, when I went to court for my arraignment and read the charges, it was like five pages long. I couldn't believe everything they'd hit me with. Every single count of money laundering you could think of, conspiracy, RICO, all the way down to

alluding police for the chase that I had taken them on, down to trying to bribe the cops. It was insane. I mean, I couldn't believe it. They were making me out to be like the second coming of El Chapo or something like that. And the prosecution, whether it's the DA on the state level or in my case, the federal level, the assistant U.S. attorney, they do that on purpose. They will overcharge somebody. So that way, even if half of the charges get thrown out, something will most likely stick. And I got the fat man Gorski at my side during my arraignment. And God blessed that man. He saw me getting ready to drop dead at that very moment. And he said, kid, it's all good. Just relax. Don't look at anybody. They're going to set us bail. Everything's

going to be fine. We're going to get you out of here by the end of the day. Boy, was that fat motherfucker wrong? So the arraignment is also where your bail is set. And in the last video, I explained to you that when I was arrested, my first phone call was home to my mother where I told her where my drug money was. It was hidden in her attic. And I said, you've got to bring this to the fat man. This is bail money. So I was excited because I was like, at least they didn't get the bail money. They took everything else, but not my bail money. And it varies by state. But normally the person arrested has to come up with 10% of the total bail amount. So let's say your bail is set at 500. grand, you have to pay 50,000 to make bail. And you get that back when you come back to court. That's how they incentivize you to not skip out on your court appearance. So as I said, I had 250,000 in cash, so therefore I could make a $2.5 million bail. And I thought there's no way they're going to set my bail that high anyways. I mean, $2.5 million is like an absurdly high bail amount. If you're charged with murder, your bail is not that expensive. And remember, I'm like rich compared to,

most people that get arrested. The bail system in America, as we probably are well aware of by now, is fucked up for that reason because a person charged with a crime is still an innocent person. You have a constitutional right to be tried and found guilty of a crime. And before that happens, you are innocent. But the cash bail system in America makes it so if you're charged with a real crime and you don't have any money, you're going to be languishing in the county jail for as much time as it takes for you to have your day in court and, you know, be found either guilty or innocent of the crimes you're charged with. So, you know, I saw guys in county who'd been there for years fighting their cases simply because they could not afford to bail out. It's a nightmare.

I actually read that in India, there's such a shortage of lawyers that common street criminals, people that shoplifted, could be sitting in jail waiting to see the judge for years and years and years. So it's completely a wrecked system. That's why the first investment, no, the second investment that a drug dealer should make is putting away bail money. The first is a lawyer, and we'll get into that in a minute. there is one legendary story while I was in county of a guy charged with murder. He was accused of

killing his drug dealer. The guy was a heroin addict, I think, and he also sold dope. And he was in a high security wing of the Multnomah County Jail, isolated completely for six years, six years in a tiny little cell. It's kind of like being in the hole. And he was fighting a murder charge. He was fighting, you know, what would have been a life sentence, and he eventually beat it and was sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter. So he had served almost the entire sentence of his 10-year stretch in county jail. So, you know, he went and did four years in the penitentiary. Time served means that when you are sentenced to prison, the time that you've served in jail waiting to be adjudicated, right, to go before the judge and get sentenced, they count that. So this guy had a

10-year prison sentence, but he had already served six in county jail. So therefore, he only had another four to do after he got shipped off to the penitentiary. Think about that. He only served 40% of his prison sentence in prison. In my opinion, the bail system is set up this way to squeeze and torture the inmates to get them to accept a plea deal. So the justice system, as it is right now, is so bogged down with cases that if every inmate, took their case to trial, right? Instead of accepting a plea deal for a lesser sentence, the whole thing would completely collapse. Remember, you have the right as an American citizen under the Constitution to take your case, the crime that you are charged with, all the way to

trial. But if you do that, in reality, in this system, and are found guilty, you will be given the maximum sentence. So think about that. It's like, you have a lot of the right to go to trial, okay? But if you're found guilty of exercising your right to trial, you'll be given as much time as the law will allow. It's like revenge. And that's the whole thing with mandatory minimums, right? That's the whole problem with it. It's unfair because you could be charged with and facing a huge amount of time. And so a prosecutor will exploit that and be like, hey, man, if you fucking take this shit to trial and lose, you're going to get 10 years. But hey, I'm offering you three right here if you just be a good boy and sign on the dotted line.

And that's why in America, the majority of criminal cases do not even make it to trial. They end in a plea deal because, you know, criminals, especially drug dealers, would rather get the fuck out of jail and, you know, are too scared to take it all the way to the box, as we said. They're too scared to take it to trial because they know if they lose, they're going to get fucking hammered. So it's absolutely, in my opinion, a way the bail system is a way to, you know, for the prosecution to win the maximum amount of cases and to build up their statistics. Also, if you have to stay in county jail fighting your case and you take it all the way to court and let's say you win, well, you still lost all of that time that you spent in jail. So say this guy, charged with murder, had beat his case. after six years and got to walk free that day, well, what happened to the six years you just spent in jail as an innocent person, right? And you can sue, and a lot of people do, but still, it's your

fucking life. You're not going to get that much money out of it. So the entire system is fucked, but these are the realities that were facing me as I went that day to try to bail out. So now here I am at my arraignment, listening to the U.S. attorney. read off my charges to the judge, and I'm just waiting to hear that number. I'm waiting to hear how much it's going to cost me to get out of jail. And that's when I hear the U.S. attorney say to the judge, the court recommends a no bail hold on Mr. Mitchell.

Did he say no bail? Did I just hear that right? And I turned to my lawyer, Gorski, and I can just see a beat of sweat coming down his fat forehead, and he's looking panicked. and when your lawyer is sweating, looking panicked, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. The U.S. Attorney continues. He goes, from the amount of cash that the government seized from Mr. Mitchell, for him taking the cops on a high-speed chase, for his clearly international criminal connections,

we deem Mr. Mitchell a flight risk. We think that if we let this guy bail out, he's going to run for it and not show up in court. I look over at the judge. She's kind of just scanning my file dispassionately. Shrugs a little bit. Looked at the U.S. attorney, looked over at us. And she agreed. And she hit her gavel and said, okay, well, Mr. Mitchell's denied bail. And I'm like, yo, fat guy, what the fuck just happened?

And before he can say anything, I feel the bailiff come up behind me, handcuffed me, and start leading me away out of the courtroom back into the county jail. It was like getting swallowed whole. It was a fucking nightmare. But that's what happened. I got a no bail hold on my case. And that's very rare. They reserve that for kingpins and people, you know, that have major crimes.

Fucking Jeffrey Epstein had a no bail hold on his case. Also, if you're an illegal immigrant, they will usually give you a no bail hold. So therefore, a lot of cartel members had no bail holds who I met in the county jail. And that's because, obviously, if you are a Mexican, and you get caught with, you know, a couple pounds of dope, and they let you bail out. What's the first thing you're going to do? You're going to fucking go back to Mexico, obviously. But that was wild.

And at that moment, I knew we were in for a fight. I knew that I'm going to have to dig in and fight my case from the belly of the beast, from jail. I actually remember this one Mexican dude from Colima in southern Mexico, and he had been involved in one of those big weed grows in northern California, like the kind that supplied me. And he was just a trimmer. He was just a guy brought up there, you know, completely illegal, no paperwork, probably didn't even know what state in the U.S. he was in.

And they had raided the pot field he was working at. And he wasn't wearing any shoes at the time. He didn't even have like an ID on him. But he escaped. He fled into the forest and was able to escape the feds who were bust in the place. And he still got all the way back to Mexico. The fucking guy didn't have any shoes, didn't have any money, but the underground network of illegal Mexican immigrants is so strong he was able to get down to a road in the forest, flagged somebody down and just hopped on what they called the caravan and made it all the way back to Mexico.

And he was living there for like 10 years. And he was a free man. And he decided it was safe to come back to the States. but he had a warrant out the whole time. So as soon as he crossed the border, they arrested him and they sent him back to stand trial in Oregon. That's why they say, if you're a criminal and you want to meet other criminals,

if you want to network, the best place to go is jail. They call it the Department of Connections. That's what we referred to the DOC as. If you're a drug dealer and you're looking for a good connect, you know, the county jail is a good place to start. Everybody's talking, everybody's exchanging phone numbers. you know, it's like getting an education in crime.

You hear about how other people got arrested, the tactics they used, the kind of lawyers they have. I mean, it's a boot camp for how to do crime. I can't tell you how many times throughout the period of my incarceration, I would meet other criminals, whether they were buyers or suppliers or whoever, and they would say, hey, as soon as we get out, we got a link, we got to start working together.

And I would say, yeah, fuck yeah. And now, now I know how to do it differently. I'll do it better this time. I will make a different move. I'll be sure to set aside bail money or hide my money this way or I'll start laundering it faster. You know, you have so much time to think about what you did wrong when you're locked up. It's really no surprise that so many criminals after they get out go right back to doing the shit that got them locked up because they've been in this school on how to do crime. They were in crime university, and I was the same way. After arraignment, you either make bail or you don't. And for the majority of criminals who don't make bail,

now you're sitting in county waiting for your trial or your guilty plea. And most county jails, like the one that I was in, are not single cells, they're dormitories. So after I had my bail hearing, was denied bail, I was taken from the downtown Multnomah County jail out to, a bigger jail called Inverness on the outskirts of Portland. And that's a jail with dormitories, with literally big dorm-sized rooms that would house people on bunk beds, right? So that's how most county jails are. Most people don't get individual cells like in a penitentiary. So I'm literally

bunked up with hundreds of other inmates. We look like we're, you know, military guys about to get deployed, right? That's kind of how it looks. It's just barrack style bunks. And jails and places like California are so overcrowded. I mean, you've probably seen on like CNN or these 60 Minutes specials of inmates literally sleeping in hallways because there's no room for them in the dorms. And other high security wings, dude, I've heard of them putting six guys into one cell built for two men. So you can imagine what can kick off when there's that much overcrowdedness and that many gang members stuffed together. like sardines in one place. I mean, it's brutal, and that's why I call it the hardest time that an

inmate will do. The first week I was in there, this dude got tied up and beaten almost to the point of death in his bunk while he laid in his bunk at night, and it was by his own gang. It was a black dude, and he got just fucked up, and he was a rat. He was a rat, and that's how they dealt with rats in there, not a lot of stabbing. I know in the LA County jail, there's a lot of stabbing. Where I was at, it's mostly beatdowns. And the difference between a rat and a snitch in jail are as follows. A snitch is somebody who is snitching on somebody else outside of the jail, right? So a bank robber who's in jail snitches on his partner who's not in jail. That's just a snitch. That's just a guy who's cutting a deal with the government to get leniency. And those

dudes usually were either beaten or just shunned, right? They're just humiliated and made to, you know, leave the cell block. A rat was different. A rat was somebody who was part of a gang who was actively informing on that gang to the guards or the prison administration. And those dudes were dealt with, you know, with severe beatings or, you know, killings. And that's why your lawyer, if he's a good lawyer, will tell you to never talk about your case with anybody in there. Because, you know, guys are desperate. If they have any information that they can use as leverage to try to get time cut off their sentence, they're going to go do that. So you never talk about your case in any kind of detail with anybody in there who you don't

absolutely trust. And of course, you never talk over the jail phone. Many a criminal has gotten pinched or had extra charges added on because of something they said over the phone. I mentioned in the last episode that my parents' house got raided because I called them over the phone and told them to take out the money that I had hidden in their attic. So about three weeks later, they got a knock on their door, you know, these nice white people lawyers at their house in Northeast Portland, and it was the cops. and they had a warrant to search the house. And to their credit, they were very nice.

They didn't bust in there like they were, you know, raiding a meth house. They went straight up to the attic, climbed in there and searched around for the money, and it was gone. But they knew to go up there because the DA and the U.S. attorney on my case went back and listened to the recorded phone calls on the jail phone

and heard me tell my mom that. If you're in jail and you need to pass off sensitive information, you always do it through your lawyer. So I would have the fat man visit me about once a week to give me any kind of updates on my case and also for me to pass messages along to anybody in the outside world who I didn't want, you know, the government to know about. And they choose to put you in a jail dorm based on your security clearance, right? So I've been in low security dorms and I've been in high security dorms. I much prefer the high security dorms because that's where you're surrounded by real criminals.

You're with cartel members. You're with hitmen. You're with all stripes of dudes in serious trouble. So at least you're around guys that are kind of like you, you know? In the low security dorms, it's junkies. The county jail is made up, I would say, of like 80% just drug addicts. And they get brought in off the street and they're filthy. Guys coming down off their high will be withdrawing, screaming in pain.

If you ever smelled a heroin addict coming down, I mean, it's like they perspire this like, it smells like heroin. They're literally walking pieces of heroin. And they will be twitching in their bunks, crying out, begging for help, begging for morphine. It is disgusting. It's brutal. It's a complete, you know, dystopian nightmare. That's why I would much prefer to be in a high security dorm surrounded by, you know, these cartel guys.

Having a good lawyer can mean saving you years of your life spent in prison. In the system, there's two kinds of lawyers. There's a paid lawyer and there's a dump truck. And a dump truck is a public attorney. It's a state's attorney or a federal attorney. It's, you know, the kind that's assigned to you if you can't afford one, right? Like we all know from the movies when you get your Miranda rights read, if you cannot afford an attorney, the courts will appoint you one.

And that's always either a dog shit attorney, or an attorney that's so buried in cases that they just can't possibly give yours the attention that it needs. I've seen dudes getting fucked by dump truck lawyers. Many guys I would talk to would be getting ready to go to trial and they hadn't talked to their attorneys in months. You know, can't get the lawyer on the phone. He doesn't even know your name. And it gets to the point where you're almost working for your lawyer. That's what most guys who don't have any money to hire a real attorney will have to do.

They will have to go down to the law library and just kind of take matters into their own hands and hope that what they put together, you know, from building their own case, the lawyer can then present adequately during trial. That's where the phrase jailhouse lawyer comes from. It's from dudes, you know, having to study the law on their own because their own attorney won't do it. I remember this guy who had such a bad lawyer, and every time he would go before the judge, he would beg for a new attorney, a new attorney, a new attorney. new court-appointed attorney, and the judge would deny him that. So finally, what he did was the next time that he and this dump truck were in court together, he turned to the judge and he goes, Your Honor, this man grabbed my cock. As long as I live, I swear to God, he said that. And so they had to assign him a new lawyer because they couldn't prove that the guy was lying,

you know? And inmates in jail have different ways of referring to a particular case. So if you were just guilty, dead to rights, you were fucked. You were done. You were washed. But if it looked like you had a chance of beating your case or getting a bunch of charges dropped, you had what we called action. So on my particular case, I had action. So I would go to these old timers in jail who had been locked up half their lives and they'd seen every kind of case and had every different kind of lawyer. I would tell them, yeah, you know, I'm paying my lawyer like a quarter million bucks and they would read over the charges. they'd be like, oh, young blood, you got action. And it's ironic because I was not able to bail out of jail. So the money that I could have spent on bail, I actually used to pay my attorney, the fat man Gorski, even more. So I think in the end, it actually helped my case because the more you're able to pay your lawyer,

the more he can go to private investigators to get information he might need. The more that, you know, a lot of places are super corrupt, a lot of, you know, district attorneys actually get paid cash to drop a case. So just the more you can pay a lawyer, the more in general they can focus on you and the better off you're going to be usually. This is why it's crucial if you're in my position, a high-level drug dealer, to have a lawyer on retainer, meaning you've already given him money and have money put aside before you get arrested. So you're prepared.

You know, I've said this before on these videos. If you're a drug dealer going about your day, living life, not prepared to get arrested, you are in for a world of hurt because you're going to get hit with charges and lawyer fees that you can't afford and you're going to fuck up and end up snitching or, you know, just get sentenced to a huge amount of time because you weren't prepared for this. You were out there running like everything was sweet, but shit is never sweet. I promise you that. So let me reiterate one more time. When you start making big money, the first two investments you make are not a car, a house, a watch. It's a good lawyer and bail money. I'm only in jail for about a month when Gorski shows up at the jail and tells me that the feds want to play ball. They offered me five years to plead guilty. And that's always good news. When you're offered a plea bargain by the DA or the U.S. attorney right away, that means they don't have a strong case.

against you. So instead of going all the way to the box to court, they just want to offer you a nice, quick deal to get you out of the way so they don't have to face potentially losing in a trial. Make no mistake. As an American citizen, you have the right to a trial, but that is the last thing that the government wants to give you. They're so bogged down with cases, plus they just are human beings. The district attorney and the U.S. attorneys, they don't want to lose. And the feds are notorious for this. The federal government usually will never charge anybody with a crime unless they're absolutely certain that they can win it. They have like a 90% conviction rate for this reason. Remember, it's all about statistics. The more stats that a prosecutor can put up,

the more money they're going to get. And usually these guys are jockeying to become judges or politicians. So if they can brag and say, I've put away, you know, I've given thousands of years, of incarceration timeout, the more that they can run on a, you know, tough on crime kind of ticket. Now that was more common back then. Now that we live in this crazy, you know, ultra-liberal society, right? It's not smart for a person to brag about how much they've locked people up. But back then, and for years, decades before then, you know, that's how people got elected by being tough on crime. So they want the stats. Kamala Harris, the vice president, right? She was, was a tough on crime politician out of San Francisco. She locked a lot of people up for drug crimes,

for nonviolent crimes, but she buried it during the election. She wasn't bragging or talking about that at all. So you see kind of how the culture is shifted. Anyways, so the fat man Gorski was very optimistic. He said, look, they're offering 60 months right out of the gate. We need to hold out for even less time. So you see what a good lawyer is doing right there? He's literally going back and forth with the prosecuting attorney, right, the U.S. attorney, negotiating for years of my life, like I was, you know, an object. And Gorski would tell me that. He would be like, dude, I know you're suffering in here, but the longer we can hold out, the longer you can hang on, the more desperate the government will become, and the more apt they're going to want to be to cut even more time

off. And that's like business 101 of negotiations, right? You never want to be the first person to throw the offer out. You want to let somebody else bring it to you. And B, the longer you stay silent, the more uncomfortable you're going to make the other guy and the more apt he's going to want to be to negotiate something in your favor. So that's what the fat man was doing. But of course, that's easy for him to say. I'm locked up in here in hell with these fucking animals and every day feels like a week. Now, I'm obviously no legal expert, but in my experience, it is much easier for the feds to make a case or get a guilty plea than it is for the state. And that's because of the RICO Act and, you know, the anti-mafia laws that were started back in

the 70s. So in a Fed case, they usually don't need any physical evidence. You know, they can find a guilty plea on you without money, without drugs usually. A couple of snitches could even do it, right? A couple of guys getting on the stand saying, this man sold me 10 kilos of Coke could be enough to find you guilty in federal court. In state court, you need more evidence. You need a preponderance of evidence, whether that be drugs, money, a wiretap. Not to say the feds don't have that either, but again, the feds draw the rules up. They're the highest law of the land, and they drew the rules in favor of them winning most of their cases. So again, the fact that they were offering me five years meant that they really knew they did not have a

a lot to make a strong case. Let's review my case really quick. I was caught with a little over $750,000 in cash. They did not find any drugs, any drug paraphernalia, any drug ledgers, any cell phones with incriminating evidence on them. The only thing they had was a shitload of cash. And obviously the cash had been sent through the mail crossing state lines, right? Hence, they were able to make a federal case out. They also had text messages between the between me and Maria in Columbia about a month earlier. But there was no direct connection to the money because we were talking about personal ship.

We had no business dealings whatsoever. So outside of the money, all of their evidence was just circumstantial. They didn't even know about and the Sina Lowens in Northern California. So I assumed all of that time I spent waiting in jail, you know, waiting to see what the US attorney was gonna do, was them, you know, searching,

trying to make a law, between a cartel and the money they had found on me. And the fact that they brought me a plea deal so quickly meant that they weren't able to do it. So we rejected that plea deal. We rejected the 60 months and we just kind of held. We held our position. We played our cards. We didn't fold.

And over the next three or four months, I went back to court multiple times and my lawyer Gorski filed multiple motions to dismiss the case based off a lack of evidence. and the first two were denied. You know, they were denied. They said, no, there's still a case here. $750,000 in cash. This didn't just, you didn't find it in a taxi cap. So now it's kind of like this stalemate between the U.S. attorney and my lawyer, you know,

playing a poker game. And one day, finally, the feds showed their hand. It's about maybe five or six months into my county stretch when Gorski visits me and tells me that the feds really. want to play ball. Here's their offer. They offered to drop the case in exchange for me forfeiting the cash they had seized without a fight. And I was like, well, what's the catch? Of course, take the money. You were going to take it anyways, whether I was found guilty or innocent. And then he said, probably what's going to happen is the feds will drop your case and the state

will pick it up. And that's pretty common actually, but it usually happens in reverse. It's the state who will drop the charges and then the feds will pick it up. So that happens a lot in gun cases or big drug cases where the state will initially arrest a person for whatever they find on them, right? Weapons or guns and they will charge them. But then the feds will swoop in and say, we want this for, again, our statistics, we want this for our numbers. And the state will be forced to drop the case and it will become a federal case. This was happening in reverse. The feds initially wanted my case because, again, they found all this cash, and they thought they had caught a whale.

They were like, ooh, we're going to tie this in with a big cartel. It's going to make great headlines. We're going to make this huge RICO trial. Because remember, it was the state, the Portland police who initially arrested me that day. They were the ones who raided my house. So when the feds lost interest, they were more than happy to pick it up and charge me at a state level with conspiracy and with money loan. And sure enough, two days later, that's exactly what happened. I got recharged by the state of Oregon with conspiracy to commit money laundering,

you know, money laundering one or whatever, and attempting to bribe a police officer. In hindsight, if I had known how rough state prison was going to be, I would have probably told my lawyer, yo, let's just take this federal plea. Let me go do five years in some resort and then get out without having to witness all this fucking mayhem, these stabbing and killings and riots that I saw it. two rivers. The only downside to being in the feds, of course, is that in the feds, you have to do almost 100% of your time. You have to do a minimum 85% of your time. And they really have no kind of like drug programs or anything like that like the state does to get a big time cut. So I don't know,

it's a toss up, man. If I ever go back to prison, which I won't, it's going to be on the federal level because I cannot withstand another state bid. It's mayhem in there. But that's, you know, I discussed that at length in my past videos. Anyways, at the time, it was great news. But now I had to wait that much longer in county jail to go before the judge to finally sign my plea deal and get the fuck out of there and go to prison. There's a saying in the county jail, each day feels like a month. Each month feels like a year. And that never went away.

In prison, when I got in my routine, time flew by, faster than anything I've ever done in my life, actually. In county, it crept by every day. It never got easier. It never got quicker. If you're going to survive a long stretch in the county jail, this is what you do. You know, one of my great causes of suffering my first few months in county were just getting over the fact that I had lost, that my business had collapsed. I had made a million bucks, like I said, I was going to do. But instead of getting out of the game, I lost it all.

It was just that self-hatred and that repeating what I had. what happened over and over my mind and that woulda coulda shoulda, right? That is just a recipe for torture, self-torture. And when you're in county, you can't afford that. You have to be focused on staying alive, physically keeping your spirit alive and looking out for danger, right? You can't be crying to yourself and also at the same time, you know, fighting some skinhead who wants to punk you out. You have to live in the moment. And that's, kind of rule, that's a rule for life, right? You know, stay in the moment. Forget about the past. Don't worry about the future. Live now. So a guy, an old head, taught me that. And it kind of

changed the trajectory of how I did time, right? I just focused on the now and let go of whatever else was happening on the outside that I had no control over, you know? So forget about it. Forget about the past. Forget about the baby mama that fucked. over, forget about whoever ratted on you, there's no changing that. The only thing that matters is survival, how you're going to get out unscathed, relatively, and how you're going to get out with the least amount of time possible. Focus on your case. It's not bad to think about what you want to do when you get out, as long as it's hopefully something positive, right? Something for the better, a life change or a strategy about what you're going to do different.

but again, you'll also drive yourself nuts that way as well. So it's best to never think about the past. Only keep your goals in the future in mind if you're going to get out in any reasonable amount of time. If you're facing 30 years, you better just consider it a life sentence and figure out a way a routine that keeps you locked into the present.

A great way to do that is to stay in shape. You've got to work out when you're in there. In fact, if you're running with a gang and you don't work out, they will beat you until you do work out. In county jail, there's no yard. There's no exercise yard. There's no weight pile. You're lucky if there's like a little basketball court outside with some fresh air.

But the majority of the time, you're going to be doing dips on your bunk. We lifted bags full of water as weights. We would spin laps around the day room, just walking for, you know, 45 minutes a day, right? You need to sweat that out. You need to, you know, you need to exercise. You need to keep your heart rate up. All that shit, right? Burpees is the huge one, right?

So burpees have now become popularized today and, you know, fucking yoga classes and all these, you know, new fitness routines. But burpees come from prison. That gets every single part of the body. It's a push-up, mixed with a cardio workout, mixed with an ab workout, all that shit. So my bunkies, my bunkmates, you know, these Mexican dudes, they were like Marines with it. would wake me up at dawn before breakfast to hit a round of burpees with them. Reading. Reading's a huge one. I mean, people that are illiterate still read in there. People read more in jail than they read on the streets nowadays. You just get lost in books. That's a great way. That's a great way.

I would read for hours a day. My parents would send me in books. They couldn't send me in books fast enough. I read stuff, philosophy, self-help, screenwriting books. This is when I first got the seed of show business was when I was in county jail watching movies and reading books on how to write screenplays. And that's kind of when I remembered. I'm like, damn, I love writing. I'm a great writer. Maybe I could do this. I could go to Hollywood. They need people to write movies. So, you know, reading just stimulates your imagination and it keeps you from going crazy. It's why inmates, especially dudes who have been down forever, are some of the most articulate motherfuckers because they literally will just read a dictionary. They will read a thesaurus and they will study it. And

that's how they learn. They're self-taught a lot of the times. It's remarkable. Reading was the escape. It allowed me to be free even though I was locked up because, man, that was a dark place. Those were some dark times. I witnessed multiple people overdose on heroin and die in my dorm. you know, junkies, when they've been off the shit for a little while, their tolerance goes way down. So evidently, they were able to smuggle some shit in, and they just shot it up their nose, and they fucking keeled over and died. So I got to witness dead junkies getting, you know, wheeled out on gurneys in my dorm. There was this guy, I can't even remember his name.

He was a white dude in his 40s. He'd done a lot of time in prison, but he'd been out. He turned his life around. He had a family. He had a good home. He had a job. He had a trade. But he was charged with armed robbery. And he swore up and down. He didn't do it. He swore it was a friend of his. And the state was saying otherwise. They said, you supplied the guns and you committed a robbery on these guys. And he said, fuck that. He took it all the way to trial and he lost. And he got sentenced to 15 years. And the day he got back at night, he tied his sheets up into a news. and he went into the bathroom and, you know, he hung himself and they had to cut him down the next day. Imagine what that does to a person, you know, a guy in there for selling weed. I mean, you know, it changes your life.

And, you know, that kind of shit happens on a daily basis in county jail. There was another guy. He was in the bunk right next to mine as older black guy. He went to my high school. He went to Grant High School in Portland, Oregon. And he had been in there for two and a half years. there was a cold case that had popped up and DNA that was traced back to him on a murder, on a body. And he was facing the death penalty.

And we had the same high school basketball coach, me and this guy. We were talking about old times. And hey, do you remember this teacher? And wow, is this motherfucker still running around? Does you have this security guard? And it was so funny because this was like a guy from the neighborhood. And he's facing the fucking death penalty. It was surreal.

And you miss everything, too. You know, I missed all the holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving. I mean, imagine being there locked up without your family, without you at the holiday table is brutal. And the pain is remarkable. And, you know, that surrounded by all of the day-to-day violence and the fucking filth and the noise, you know, it's a miracle that the human spirit doesn't just fucking break down. and that's county jail in America. You know, you imagine these other places, right? You know, the suffering is immense.

I was really tight, too, with my bunkmates. That's what you do. You have bunkies, people in your little bunk in the larger dorm, and you become like family. You need that to survive. And one after the other, our cases start coming up to trial. And I just see these dudes, Mexican dudes, black dudes, with their cases, they step up to the plate and they fucking strike out.

And, you know, every other week some guys coming back from court and he's like, fuck, I lost. I got 15 years. I got 20 years. And so my time to bat was coming up. And, you know, thank God I had a paid killer lawyer that finally brought me the plea deal that I was willing to sign. The state didn't have a lot of evidence with the bribery charge.

That was kind of my word versus the cops. Again, they had nothing that linked the money they found to the drugs, but they were willing to go to trial. And the fat man came to me and he said, look, your trial's coming up in a month. If you lose, you're looking at like seven to ten for all of these charges. And they're very eager to prosecute you. If you lose, they offered me a plea deal of 36 months.

I recommend we take this because with good times, you can be out in maybe half that. You maybe do 18 or 20 months plus your time served. I've been locked up at that point for about eight or nine months. So I said, let's do it. Let me sign on the dotted line. Good God. Let me get the fuck out of here. I was begging to go to prison at that point. You know, you know things are bad when you're actually fantasizing about being in prison. So I went to court and I signed a guilty plea. They dropped the bribery. charges, and I pled guilty to money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. And I was to get 36 months in state prison to run concurrently. And what that means was I pled

guilty to two different crimes, conspiracy to commit money laundering and money laundering. And I got 36 months for both crimes. But they ran concurrently, not consecutively. Running consecutively means I would have to serve 36 times two. And that's pretty rare. Normally sentences, thank God, are run concurrently, meaning you do 36 months for each crime together. So three years. And that night, I rolled up and I was shipped off to Coffee Creek to begin my journey

in the penitentiary. All right, you guys, that's for today's episode. Thank you so much for watching. As usual, make sure to like and subscribe, turn on notifications, follow me on Instagram at Mr. Johnny Mitchell and at Not the Connect. Grab some merch. We are almost sold out. So make sure to hit the link in the description to get your shirts or hoodies.

And of course, Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show for all of the cool bonus content that we have coming out for you guys. We will see you next week. Take care.