The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1047: Shaun Attwood | From Raves to Riches to Ruin Part One

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Raves, riches, and ruin: Former ecstasy kingpin Shaun Attwood exposes the dangerous world of drug trafficking and its violent criminal connections. [Pt 1/2] What We Discuss: Shaun Attwood, a former stockbroker turned drug dealer, recounts his journey from the UK to Arizona, where he became involved in the rave scene and eventually established a large ecstasy distribution network. Shaun's story involves interactions with dangerous individuals, including members of the Mexican Mafia and associates of former show guest Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, highlighting the violent and unpredictable nature of the drug trade. The narrative illustrates the gradual escalation of criminal activities and the blurring of moral boundaries as Shaun became more deeply entrenched in the drug world. Shaun describes the intense paranoia and constant threat of violence that accompanied his lifestyle, demonstrating the high personal cost of his choices. Despite the dark nature of the story, Shaun's experiences offer valuable insights into the dangers of drug abuse and the importance of making positive life choices. His journey towards redemption, which will be further explored in part two later this week, serves as a powerful reminder that it's never too late to change course and seek a better path in life. And much more — be sure to tune in to part two of this conversation here later this week! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1047 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we start this show, I want to let you know it has some adult themes in it, so no kids in the car for this one. And if you leave the kids in the car and you still play the episode, don't blame me when they have nightmares. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. They waited until the guard did the security walk so they could torture him until the next security walk, which is about 30 minutes. And I'm sat in that cell next door, and I've never heard noises like it coming from a human being. It sounded like a cat was on fire or something. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical

advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional war correspondent, neuroscientist, astronaut, or tech luminary. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your

Spotify app to get started. Today, wow, this story, man, Sean Atwood is a well-known crime YouTuber, but his story absolutely bananas. It's like nothing I've ever heard in my life, and I mean that. He's a fascinating character. Came from the UK to the U.S., started one of the largest drug gangs in the country. Crossed paths with biker gangs, mobsters, cartel members, ends up in one of the worst prisons in the United States slash the whole world. I mean, it's like a third world prison here in the United States. I don't want to ruin it, but this episode is just, well, it's going to ruin your lunch, but it's a fun ride. It goes without saying probably no kids in the car for this one, for sure. This one will entertain you. It'll teach you a thing or two,

and maybe mostly just remind you that whatever mistakes you've made in life, well, you're doing great. Sean was very candid and uncensored in this one and is just a banger of a conversation. And again, don't listen, especially to Part 2 while you're eating. Here we go with Sean Atwood.

Thanks for coming all this way to do this show. Thank you for rescheduling and seeing me. It's great. Yeah, man, I was, I'm glad we were able to make it work. It's been a long time in the making. And I know that you're not going to come to the U.S. anytime soon. We'll get into the reasons why at some point. So I'm glad we got to do it in person.

Band for life. Yeah, banned for life. Tell me what you grew up in, you were kind of a punk growing up. You're in the fake gang. So the punk rock was like the sex pistols, holidays in the sun, God save the queen, all that kind of stuff.

That was the first music that excited me. And then it all went dull. And then the rave scene started. And that hooked me right back in. The EDM. Man. So with the raves, and I love the rave scene. I wasn't as hardcore as you, but tell me about getting into that,

because that was kind of your entree into like, hey, this music's more fun if you're out of your mind on drugs. So I was at a time of my life, I was going through social anxiety, I was too self-conscious to dance, won't call them talk to women. I actually almost got beat to death by some drunks, and they left me unconscious, smashed pieces of my teeth out, so I got these nice veneers. my front teeth. Oh, they are nice and white. And that compounded my social anxiety. So I was going through a bit of a stressful period of time as a teenager. And then this scene began. Prior to the scene, people had to line up at nightclubs and wore nice clothes and the bouncers came out and looked

at everyone and decided who could get in. Interesting. The young people just started smashing the doors in of warehouses, airplane hangers, wore and all this crazy colored clothing, taking ecstasy and dancing to this new style of music. So I'm seeing this on the TV every weekend. It was on the news. All these wide-eyed ravers. Cops, like, trying to get it under control, but didn't quite know how to deal with it.

I'm thinking I want some of this. I'm a mate. How was that? Liverpool University studying business. And my mate out of my economics class said, you need to come and check this out. So we went to Manchester. It was a club on Oldham Road called the Thunderdome,

tried ecstasy, tried speed, about 30 minutes in. His face just lights up and he's got this smile and he's like, tried to get me to dance. And I'm like, no way, because I'm still that self-conscious person. And I let him go and dance 45 minutes in. I'm just mooching around this. There's people, you know, lines of people around these walls, looking at this dance floor, nothing's really happening as if expecting an elephant to materialize. I'm thinking, what's all this about?

45 minutes in, my knees just buckle. I can feel all my clothes melting into my skin. I can't stand up anymore. I sit down like, I just sat down like this. And then I just feel all my tension and stress and everything just melting away. I'm just sat down the floor smiling. People, I'll never get it. I can just see people's jeans walking around me and I'm just looking at them smiling.

And they're all high in X2 and they've got the same smile. And you don't have to say anything. You just recognize each of a smile. And then my mate came, grab me up. And that was it. And I just, I danced all night long. I didn't even want to stop to take a piss. I even ended up getting on the front stage.

And after that, raving became my religion. Yeah. Well, I feel like we're selling it a little too hard. So stay too. If you were thinking, that's for me. Stay tuned for a little while because there is a slight downfall that we should probably explain. So let's even zoom out from the rave scene a little bit.

You start getting interested in investing, which is not, I know that's a non sequitur, but it's important here. What gets you into this? I mean, you're in B school, so maybe you're just like, I need to make some money. Stocks are where you make money. So again, as a teenager, about six of us elected to do economics. and I had an aptitude and the teacher could see this.

Mr. Dillon, St. Joe's witness, Cheshire, and he started to give me classes of my own. So he's reopening the Financial Times as all these columns of numbers. Year high, year low, price, day high, day low, P ratio, dividend. And I'm like looking at all this fascinated and he's explaining what it all means.

Around that time it was Maggie Thatcher, was the Prime Minister and there was these ads come on the TV. She was privatising British Telecom. The shows were going to be 50 pence opening on the first day of the day dealings. That was the price you could buy them at. I see. So this is a state-owned enterprise, and you're thinking, hey, they're going to make 50-cent shares, 50-pence shares. That seems low for the company that runs all the phones in the whole country. Exactly. I see. Okay. And she was

handing the state silver over to her bodies in the city at a very discounted rate. Yeah. So I was allowed to buy a couple hundred, no, 100 pounds of it was it at that time. My parents wouldn't give me money because they hated Maggie Thatcher. They were hard-core labor. And then my dad's like, we're not lending your money, that bloody Maggie Thatcher. We're not bloody Tories like your nan. And a light bulb went off over my head. Grandma. So went down to my nans out to my nans out.

I had a nice Sunday dinner and hit her up for some money for B-T shirts. And I think we put a hundred quid in or something. And it doubled the first day. Yeah. So I was hooked. Yeah. Oh, man. If only you'd put in a little bit more.

I do eventually. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, looking back now, was it the high of the gamble and the wind? that maybe got you as opposed to the fundamentals of the stock market? It was like a new and fascinating world I was going into. I became obsessed with reading about the giants, like the great short-sellers of the stock market crash of the 1920s,

people like George Soros. I was finding everything I could possibly find out about George Soros and hero-worshipping him at that point of my life as a kid. Michael Milken was another one. I was like, these are the biggest incomes ever filed in the history of the world. Yeah. I could do this. I got to like get into this somehow.

I've got to get into this. So I kind of like plan like the Chinese, like 10 year plan. I'm thinking I got to put all this effort in and I'll be able to get to where these guys are. Eventually I want to buy my own island and go to America and make these millions, fly all my mates over from the UK. Yeah. They were my initial goals. Buying your own island now is a little bit.

maybe doesn't have the same allure, or I should say, is slightly frowned upon, because the question is then, what kind of island? What do you need it for? I did write a book called Who Killed Epstein? Yeah. He's soured the island image. Yeah, he's ruined private islands for the rest of us, unfortunately. Your audience, among other YouTube audiences, does still talk about George Soros.

However, there's a slightly different angle to the YouTube chats and comments about him these days. So did you want to be sort of a legit stockbroker or were you, yeah, okay. I wanted to be a legit investment analyst. Yeah. But my family members were in Arizona. So I flew to Arizona and I quickly realized in the Wall Street world, it's predominantly stockbrokers because there's some very wealthy people, Sun City, Paradise Valley. So that's how I started out.

I sent my resume off to all the local stock brokerages. And I wasn't aware at the time. I was sending it off, but it landed on the desk of a penny stock brokerage, proper wolf of Wall Street style. And that's how I started out, baptism of fire. Really? So you're like, oh, I'll just join this perfectly respectable firm known as, I don't know, whatever, link later in Sons. What was that like? Do you show up to an office?

You sure? Or like a warehouse with folding chairs in it? No, it was proper. Okay. Top of a skyscraper office, full length of windows. It's been there six o'clock in the morning sales meeting. All the rookies are stood there. The boss was like a mafia don.

He's got these two powerhouse heavy hitters. Like drill sergeants, you're only as big as these numbers on the board for the month. Smiling brokers make the most money. We had to have mirrors on our desks to smile into. Pacing brokers make the most money. We had to have like 24 foot curly cords. All the brokers like pacing all up and down. Oh, right. No cordless phones, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are calling your wives, if you're talking. calling your girlfriends. Other brokers are calling your clients. Lunches. Other brokers are calling your clients. It was insane. That is like boiler room. There was biker gangs

dropping off crystal meth and coke. To the office? Oh, for you guys. No, for the office. So you could stay awake and do your thing. We'll get to how meth increased my production quite. Your productivity? Yeah. It does do that I would imagine. Yeah. Oh, my

God. How long did you last at a place like this? Because this sounds horrible. So my first year or so, oh my gosh, that's longer than I would. What we did, I partnered up with another rookie broker, and we decided to jump ship to a more respectable firm, but we knew they were trying cannibalize our clients. I see. As soon as you leave, they hammer your clients as they stay with us. Yeah. So we came in every night and photocopied the entire office's clients. Oh. So we could hit back when they hit us. Oh, I see. So they're thinking, we're going to cannibalize our clients. And you're thinking, you can try. But I got. I got the phone book. I got the Roller-Dex.

Exactly. Ooh, wow. I am shocked that they did not see that, know that. They did, because there was meetings and they were asking about the photocopy of the council why it had gone up so much. Oh, I see. And me, I'm a mate, had to stay stum. And when we did move, there was kind of an escalation of, well, for example,

we had clients that someone else had clients of, and the people who else had the clients of, were threatening to car bomb. The guy who was my partnership in the brokerage, and we had to go and buy guns. They were threatening to kill him. Yeah, we had to go and buy guns. That's somehow a very American way to handle the situation. We're going to blow you up.

Well, that's fine. We have armed. We're armed now too. So they didn't kill you. Did they try? We were armed, and we were told to back down from calling their clients, and we did. Okay. The head guy, King spoke to the head guy at our brokerage, and we were told to back down.

Gotcha. Yeah, so it was like a. Two mafia dons keeping the peace. You don't call their clients. We won't call your clients. Yeah. And then you have to like, I don't know, go in a basement and light an effigy on fire or something and everybody's okay. What a weird.

This is probably a dumb question. Were you licensed to sell any of this or was it just like whatever? Yeah. Over time, I had all the licenses. I had Series 7. I had the stock market options traders license. And I had the branch manager license. Oh, wow.

So you actually studied for these exams and took them. Well, that's another story. So get to the office when I'm first applying. And he says, to make money, you've got to have your Series 7 license and to serve your Series 7 license, you've got to take the test. I said, I need to start making money right away because it was a commission-only job. There was no salary. But you've got to take the test.

I said, well, can I just skip the test? He says, you can't skip the test. I'll go and get the test button. You can see how difficult it is. Comes out with this big old test book, slaps it down. I'm looking through it. Now, bear in mind, I've just done a economics degree. Liverpool University Business Studies,

nearly all calculus and really long essays of complicated financial equations. He puts this multiple choice test book down in front of me. He answers that A, B, C,D. I said, look, this is easy. I don't need the test. He says, well, there's a section on trading options.

Let me show you that. Shows me that. Say, look, I've been trading options. Back in England, Val Reef's gold mine options, South Africa, Gulf War, all these options. And he looks at me, and he's got this intense look on his face. He's like, Sean, I like the confidence you've got.

And I've never in my life, you know, I've skipped a test for anyone. And this time, I'm going to take a chance on you. I've got a good feeling about you. But I don't like it when people let me down. And he just gave this big frown. He just gave this big frown. I was so cocky and confident back there. I do.

I could ace it, and I did. Wow. So he let you work without taking the test? Yeah, get on the phones right away. Wow. And he didn't seat me with the rookies. He put me at the back. on what was known as the criminal quad.

Well, little did he know that you would live up to your expectations, of you. Wow, that is such a crazy, it really does remind me a boiler room, except then when the guy comes in with the series seven, Ben Affleck kicks him out of the room, right? We don't hire brokers, we train brokers,

or something like that, yeah. It was similar to strippers all the time. Any time of celebration, had a limo full of strippers downstairs, bikers dropping off coke and meth. It was bonkers. So you're staying awake all day and late into the evening selling this stuff? Or do you take meth in the morning?

Sales meeting. Okay. And going home at 9 or 10 at night from cold calling 500 numbers a day. 500. You get 10 people agree to receive your brochure and business card in the mail. And then out of 10 or 20, one will buy and invest in the stock market. Holy cow. Yeah.

What are you screening for? I like people who don't know any better. Is it a sucker that you're looking for? I'm confused. beginning, they just slammed the phone book down and I started calling the Chinese names because I knew the Chinese people work very hard and have a higher average income. Their education is really strong and liked to gamble. So I had a lot of Chinese clients in the beginning. Then I got hold of a list of America West Airlines bondholders. Okay. They had crashed. They'd gone from 100,

par down to five, five cents on the dollar. So I started to call them and get them to buy more and also to call my existing clients and get them to buy the bonds while they were down. If the company defaulted, they would lose everything. Right. But if there was some kind of restructuring, they would go back to par, which they eventually did. Oh, so that was actually a good investment. That was one of my first early hits. Wow, interesting. Smart. Do you think your British accent helped people think this guy's smart? He comes from England because it's kind of a stereotype. have in the United States. Not only that when I came to America as a teenager, you know, just a normal lad from this chemical manufacturing town. Yeah. My aunt changed my date of birth

my passport, so I was 21, took me out nightclub in, and was introducing me to all these beautiful American women as Paul McCartney's nephew. Oh, man. So can you imagine when these women heard my English accent? And they're like, his uncle's a beetle. That's ridiculous. What a, what a wing woman right there. Not only am I going to commit a... felony by altering your passport and taking you out for alcohol, which is super, super illegal on top of illegal. I'm going to lie to the people we meet and tell them that your dad is a billionaire musician, a list celebrity. Ironically, though, towards the peak of everything, Paul McCarty does end up living down the mountain range from me in Tucson. Yeah. Uncle Paul. But your friend kind of got

too heavy into the drug scene, right? The at-work-in-office drug scene proved to be a little bit too much for this guy. He burns out, yeah. How does that kind of happen? He just chooses the drugs over the work and just... Yeah, he ended up owing people money, and he got in a car chase with the cops.

Oh. He ends up in jail. He was limping around, and then he left the state in a hurry. Oh, geez. Yeah. And this is like your homie at the office? We were like that, yeah.

And I should have thought to myself, right? this is where that leads to yeah that's a good point and my boss as well when I was at a crossroads I were already started to get into the rave scene and I was experiment with ecstasy sales I was in my car in the car park outside

the brokerage counting cash on my lap and the boss's secretary was in the car next door and she looked over and saw all the cash I got calling to the boss's office the next day and he says Sean you're at a crossroads in your life right now you can keep putting in the hard work that you're doing and building on your success

and going up to here. Or you can abandon that and go down this road of excitement and end up in hell and his eyes widened. Whoa. And I didn't listen. Yeah.

This episode is sponsored a part by methamphetamine. Actually, nope, I'm being told that is incorrect. It is instead sponsored by the fine products and services that support this show. That's circular logic. Don't think too hard about it. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book

all these great authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know like and trust. I know you're not booking for your podcast, probably, but I'm teaching you how to build your network for business, for social reasons, whatever it might be. We know that relationships help you live longer, live happier. This is a free course.

I'm not charging for it. There's not like a weird upsell or anything at the end. It's over at six minute networking.com. The course is easy, not cringy. It's not awkward and like cheesy. It's not going to make you look bad or feel bad. It's just going to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, and it takes five minutes a day.

Five minute networking was taken. That's why it's six minute networking. and many of the guests on our show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Once again, free at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Sean Atwood.

I'm surprised that a guy who's running a questionable operation that is supplying you with meth is like, hey, I'm a little concerned about where you're headed. I will give you meth in the office in strippers and booze, but I'm a little bit, I'm questioning your judgment.

All right, so by then, this was five years later. That's bad. This was five years later. So my boss by them was a different boss. Okay, okay, okay. We changed brokerages about five times. All right. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm thinking, when the guy who's feeding you meth at breakfast is telling you

you're making bad choices, that's, you got a, that's a red flag. No, he never knew about the meth for my final boss. Okay, that makes more sense. So instead of thinking that's where this leads, you're thinking, well, that can never happen to me, luckily, knock on wood. And I was having far too much excitement. Sure. I flew my childhood mate over from England Wildman.

Yeah. And that's where my whole world just changed. So why do they call him that? He's an earned reputation. Well, man, had red dots in his head telling him to hurt people from when he was a teenager. So he was schizophrenic, I guess? I don't know how to classify it. Psychopathic maniac.

He grew massive in his high school, and the teachers were so scared of him. They had him outside raking leaves with the cur-taker. He was picking teachers up and putting him into rubbish bins. He was fighting the bouncers on nightclubs when he was a teenager. He'd come home black and blue like a bus had hit him. That's how he got his rocks off. That's strange. What was that guy's childhood like?

Well, he comes from a good family, and all his brothers are completely normal. Oh, so he really is just wired poorly. Wired differently. Oof, poor guy. And whenever he was going to commit some violence, his face would look completely calm. One eyebrow would stay flat, and the other eyebrow would just go straight up. And that's going to come into the story later on. That's really scary.

And you were friends with this guy and he didn't ever try to kill you? What happened was, I was part of a little gang on the streets not like the gang's now. Harmless. We'd watch too many American movies

like the Warriors and the Wanderers and we called ourselves the sweats. And the head of the gang was Wildman's brother and he would not let Wildman join the gang. He'd beat him up and say, look, eat dog shit and we'll let you join.

Wellman would eat dog shit and he still won't let him join and give him a kick and tell him to F off home. So I felt sorry for Wildman because he was two years younger than me, and that's a lot when you're in your teens. So I splintered off from the group with him and his cousin, Hammy,

and we formed their own clique. It was at the top of my town, there's a quarry called Pex Hill, and overlooking the quarry, there's a tree we used to climb on, and we called it the thinking tree. And in the thinking tree, we'd plan our lives, and Hammy would say to us,

Sean, what are you going to do when you grow up? And I'm like, I'm going to go to America, make a million, fly you guys over. and when I fly a wildman over, I'm going to get him a job as a wrestler so we can fight Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant.

Wellman's because I would ask, well, man, what are you going to do? And well, man would say, I'm going to prison and spend the rest of life in prison. I've got red dots in my head telling me to hurt people. Oh, that's horrible. And both of those things happened. I went off to America,

I made the money in the stock market, and Wildman went off to prison. But when he got out of prison, I then flew him over. And this was five years into my stop-broken career, got him a house by the George and Dragon British pub in Central Phoenix thinking he'd just kick back and have drinks with the expats.

Within a few weeks or months, we go over to the house, me and my girlfriend one night, a bunch of Mexicans answered the door. And I say, where's Peter? There's no Peter here. So, yeah, where's Peter? Where's Peter? He lives here. There's no Peter here. They kind of like brandish guns,

and we start back tracking me and my girlfriend. Wow, man, just merry. bounces over the road. Like, what hell's going on, Peter? We just got nearly shot. It's like, oh, don't worry about them. They're the local crack dealers. They like to move around a lot.

I'm staying in their place over here. They're in mine. And I'm buzzing and they're buzzing because I can do a hundred dollar crack rock in one breath and they're giving it me for free. It goes, dingle, ingle, dingle, sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, and it calms down my red dots.

Calms down his red dots? That's really horrifying. Then he said, the guy at the back is from Columbia. He's running them. and he wants to invest in the stock market. Get out of here. This is my stock broker, guys. Here's my crack dealer clients.

The next month, my aunt calls me at the office and says the house is headline news. There's yellow tape around it. Someone's being shot dead. You need to get your ass up there. You might be dead. I sped up there, got paranoid because they had drugs and stuff in the car. There was cops.

There was a news crew. I went back to work, waited, come back again when it all calmed down. there's blood on the doorstep, go in the living room. Wild man sat there with a homicide detective with a very somber face. Talked to the homicide detective. He asked me some questions. When he's gone, I said to Wildman, what's happened? A couple came over to buy crack from the Mexicans, a female and a male.

Because the Mexicans had gone back over the street. The female went back over the street to get the crack. The man stayed in the house with Wildman. The man had a gun. Wildman had never seen guns before. He said to the man, England. I don't know how guns work. Can you show me how to work? The man goes, yes, the safety's on it, pulls the trigger and shot himself in the head right in front of Wildman and died on the step.

Safety was not on. Wow. That's horrible. Yeah. My God. So then Wildman said he was having nightmares wanted to get out of that place and moved into a place on the south side with some females he knew from the drug community. They were living with this big steroid head, door man guy, looked like a Shippendale with this blonde hose claiming he was gangsters disciples. I put the rental situation. I fixed it. They said they were behind, so I fixed it, gave the landlady a check. Next day, the landlady gives me a call. While man's been evicted, I say, why has he been evicted? He beat his roommate up. Well, how do you know he beat his roommate up? He said the roommate was seen running for his life through the apartment complex in the middle of the night, with plasterboard

powder all over his head and face, and there's human head-sized holes in all of the walls. Fortunately, Weilmann had done that so fast, I was able to stop the check. The females, one of their boyfriends in Tempe, was behind on his rent. I fixed that. Move Wildman over to Rancho Marietta, this huge apartment complex. We're all day long, Wildman invited in the homeless people, the gangbangers, the streetwalkers, Native American, trans, sex workers, striptease dancers, Russian mafia, Mexican mafia, New Mexican Mafia, and it was through him opening the door into that world,

I made the initial criminal connections that established the Exorcet Empire. It's interesting you roped the Native Americans in with all of those other folks. What is that all about? Half my click ended up Native Americans. As the criminal enterprise grew, most of the people in my inner circle who I trusted, about half of them were Native Americans. Acid Joey was one of my closest RIP acid. Joey, he was into LSD and ketamine and he was found dead and he's swimming pool of his clothes on.

Oh my gosh. Well, a man died two years ago. 29 and a half stone, six foot two, absolute massive man from multiple organ fairly from all the drugs he'd done and all the, how he'd hammered it over his lifetime. He died in prison? Died at his house. Oh, so he was out of prison? Yeah, out of prison by nine yet.

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Okay. I have to say in the books, I've read all three books, the paranoia you get from the drugs sounds miserable, man. That would feel like that would be enough for many people to quit. It's just got to feel the worst.

Can you speak to that a little bit? Because it sounds so awful. Some of the things you sort of have these monologues where you're like, I thought this, and then I thought this, and then I thought this. And I'm thinking, that's no way to live, man. Good, Lord, no matter how good that stuff makes you feel, that feeling would be awful.

That ain't exactly. When you've been up for days, you start to hallucinate and have paranoid thoughts. Now, there was an occasion when Wildman came over one time, one of my bouncers was a guy called Rosetti from the Rosetti brothers. And when I was telling Rosetti about all these

wildman stories before he came, Walmama, Rosetti thought I was full of it. And he said, when Wildman arrived, he just picked me up and threw me around like a rag doll, that's how strong he is. So me and Rosetti was in the front and Wildman was in the back. And Wildman's been up for days

and I'm looking at his eyes in the mirror and his eyes are just blood red. He's been smoking crack, smoking meth for days. His eyes are blood reddy, look, he's looking like the devil, but he's got this wicked stir on me, like a paranoid evil stir. And I'm looking back at him. I said, what's wrong, Peter? I know what you're up to.

What's wrong, Peter? I know where you guys are taking me. Where are we taking you, Peter? You guys are taking me to the desert. And I'm thinking, if he thinks we're taking him to the desert, he's about to snap our next. Oh, yeah. So I did manage to talk him down. What we would do usually is we'd dose him with Xanax as fast as we could, put it in something,

knock him out, and he'd wake up, and he'd be mentally adjusted. But the paranoia does create intense situations, and it was paranoia between Wildman and my top sales guy Skinner, who was also smoking crack and embalming fluid, shirm, and doing all kinds of other. What is shirm? It's like PCP, embalming fluid, you get it on a stick. Okay. Enbalming fluid, like the stuff they use to embalm dead bodies. He was smoking that.

Yeah, it's called a shirm stick. Oh, my God. Yeah, so those two guys, Skinner was like little brother. And when Wildman came over, he was big brother, Skinner saw us spending more time with Wildman, and he started to put the paranoia between the two of them. Skinner started to scheme against us. And what happened was when Wildman was in a deportation camp,

because he was deported multiple times for being a ministered society. Well, yeah. When he was in a deportation camp, Skinner planned to firebomb Wild Woman's apartment. So his girlfriend, wife? Wildman's a tough Liverpoolian girlfriend. Some of the people in our community were more scared of her than him. She was a tiny blonde.

The cops have got surveillance of her running down the street with a giant fan, trying to smash Wild Man's head in. With a giant fan? With a fan, like a big old fan on a stick. Like those big fans. Yeah, literally a fan. Yeah, one of those, yeah. Oh my gosh.

My gosh. Sit and Nancy over here. They were, yeah. The fire bomb came through the window, just missed her face, set fire to some stuff, and she's got something on her face. This is in the UK. Someone's trying to kill her. No, no, this is all in Arizona. Oh, my gosh. Everything I'm talking about is in Arizona.

Oh, my goodness. Okay, I'm just making sure. So she was over here, too. She was pedaling ecstasy for me, and he was the enforcer, the chief enforcer. Right, okay. Yeah. So you've already gotten into selling ecstasy at Raveson. Once Wilman came on his first trip, which ends. with him completely homeless, living under a tree in Tempe Beach Park with a Rambo knife,

a baseball bat and a stripper who liked to have a private part to taste. Those two were like Bonnie and Clyde, just robbing clothes, eating meals and going and not paying. The cops got him and he got deported from being a menace of society. But through the connections he'd established in Tempe, Acid Joey, these mafia people, I went on to build the ecstasy business from there And Wildman didn't come back then until another two years. So you're building up your drug dealing business. Are you still a stockbroker at this point in time? No.

I've quit my job, quit my house, quit my girlfriend, all at the same time, moved into a secure high-rise building in downtown Phoenix and went full-time into the party scene. What is full-time in the party scene? What does that mean? Like you're going out every night, staying out all night and selling? Well, in the beginning, I was going. getting ecstasy from LA. I cultivated two to three suppliers.

And pretty much exactly what you just said. I'm getting up, you know, very late in the day. And I'm going out and doing the rounds. That sounds like it would be fun at first and then quickly become not fun at all. Well, it was fun for quite a while, actually. Well, maybe. But then it became intense paranoia in hell.

Yeah. You can't get up off that slippery slope no matter how hard you try. Really? So you can't just sort of like get clean for a while and it's fine. If you watch any movie, like, below, there is a story arc. Yes.

Where there's the glitz and the glamour and the fun and the females and the partying and everything else. Then there's the middle section where you're at your peak now, but the competition come in and the feds come in. And then there's the end section where everyone is so drug addicted and paranoid. And the cops have got all this case against you now. And the competition is trying to take you out or stamp you out or kidnap you, as in Sammy the Bullson tried to kidnap me.

Yeah, I want to hear about that. All these things going on. And then it ends in prison, death, nut house. You can't go back to the first chapters. Right, right. That's true. It's irreversible. So tell me about your competition then was Sammy the Bull's son? I had it locked down in Arizona of all the local people because when I would pull up on the south side,

outside some warehouse in my twin-turbo-space ship RX-7 with both surround sound, commander Tom just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The ravers would come to me and talk to me, and they knew I had money, and they'd asked me to invest in their projects, and they nicknamed me the Bank of England. Now, these little cliques were competing against each other, and when they had differences, we would have sit downs, and me and Wildman would adjudicate, but through all this process, incorporated all these people into the criminal enterprise.

We had about 200 local people working for us. Oh, wow. That's pretty big. So, at the locals locked down, all of a sudden, this new kind of dealer appeared on the scene, like a steroid head jock type guy with a leopard print polyester shirt. And I'm thinking, who the hell are these guys? Where are they pulled from? East Coast D-bags. Yeah.

And they clicked up with. They had this other group called the devil dogs, these jocks, who would beat people up and how like dogs as they beat people up, I think they were like a bit nationalistic. Sounds a little bit Nazi. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, who the hell are these guys?

So at the time, I was on to my third wife. She was doing lesbian internet porn when I met her. She joined a strip club because she fancied one of the strippers and she seduced that woman, and they were doing lesbian internet porn. I'm thinking this is, you know, the ideal life. I'm a testosterone. This story goes from zero to 60 over and over and over and over again.

Just in case anybody out there has not. notice that. And there's testosterone charged chap in his 20s, and I'm thinking this is the ideal life. Anyway, through one of my wife's, bisexual wife's lesbian girlfriends, bisexual girlfriend, sorry, let me rephrase this. We're going to have to mark this episode as explicit. I think that goes to that saying. Some stuff, yeah, anyway. My bisexual life was having a lesbian relationship with a bisexual woman, and the bisexual woman was having a hetero relationship with one of these new types of Excercy dealers. I see.

So through the women, they arranged a sit down at a bar called Heart 5 in Tucson for me to find out who these guys are. So I get the Rossetti brother as my bodyguard. I say, look, going after me and my wife, if they try and kidnap me or take me out of the back, just open up on the mofos. He's strapped. To get a bit of bravery for this, I do some meth, chug some GHB. My wife chugged away too much GHB.

had to be carried out at the end. But anyway, we go into the bar. There's this guy, stocky guy. And he's like, yeah, English Sean, you know, come through to the VIP room. Go through to the VIP room. There's lots of people in there. There's this massive six and a half foot muscle bound blonde guy.

And he screams, everyone's got the room and get up off the sofa. So I'm thinking, I've got to do something crazy here to try and make these guys think I'm a bit loco. What can I do? And I remembered my grandfather, Frederick, who was rescued in the Battle of Tunisia by Americans, of all as I wouldn't exist. He was left for dead.

Wow. When my grandfather, Frederick, would walk past me in his house, he would always grab me above the knee like that and make me jump. Yeah, yeah. So as I'm sitting down with these two. I do that to my kid too. As I'm sitting down with these two meat heads, I grabbed their knees above the legs and tried to make them jump.

You just did that to these, like, strapped gangsters. Like, I'm just going to make your knee do that thing you do to like a five-year-old kid where they start laughing. That's yeah, that's effective. So, so the guy who was nice to me, who had introduced himself already, he's like, English, Sean. We know you're a big name from the race.

English Sean, that's your nickname on the scene? It was back then, yeah. We know you've got a lot going with the locals, but why don't you start working with us? And I say, I'm getting beige presses from Holland, 100 or 125 milligrams of MDMA and clay. This is like high grade ecstasy.

Yeah, we send testing kits out there from a website called down safe to make sure we're not get any bunk stuff because that's how people die when there's bunk stuff in it and so I'm saying to these guys then your colored pills you know I've got a reputation to uphold I'm kind of dissing their pills yeah yeah like you guys sell trash I sell the good stuff that's why I don't work with you we have quality standards over here we got quality standards big guy jumps up off the sofa who the F do you think you are disrespecting our pills? Don't you know we work for? Won't call to

Sammy the Bull and we can have you taken out to the desert? Right, right. So I don't know if he's just blowharding. Of course. Oh, this is real. Sammy's retired by this point, correct? Just out of prison? Sammy is in the mix. What they were saying was correct. Uh-huh, okay. Interesting. Yeah. I'll get to that bit of sessions. Yeah, sure.

So, I say to them, look, it's not each other we need to be afraid of. It's the feds since you guys have lit the scene up, going around bragging that the biggest drug barons in the world, there's undercover cars going through the car parks, filming everybody's license plates,

there's undercovers coming into the raves, pretending to be people from out of state who want to buy pills. It's not each other we need to worry about. It's the feds, and we left it at that. And on the way out, you know, we carry my wife out, me and Rosetti. So she had done, GHB is a drug for those of you who are not familiar. It's like alcohol, but you need a couple of capfuls

and it's like you've had 20 drinks, right? Is that accurate? All right, so GHB, it used to be legal because it promoted muscle growth because you're going to such a deep sleep. Now, we were getting it from the muscle boys at the gay bar. It's hugely popular in the gay bar

because it also relaxes the sphincter. Oh, God. You know a lot about this stuff. I was going to say I could use it for sleep, but now I find that it might have multiple benefits. Talking to the right guy. You take a capful and you're high for an hour or two. It's not a big commitment like meth or ecstasy or anything like that.

And at the end of that hour or two, if you're coming down on it, you can have another catful and you can just coast for the night. It relaxes you and it's good for other activities. Sleeping. He means sleeping. Sleeping, sleeping. But we would club drug cocktail it with other substances and experiment and verry. Back then I was usually on ecstasy.

meth, GHB, and sometimes ketamine and then I come down after Xanax. At the same time. So you did all the...

Oh my gosh. Your poor brain. Frazzles. Your poor brain. Whatever was left of it. Yeah. So, wow. Now for a word

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at Wood. Okay, so you're in with these heavy hitters now. You're on their radar. Surely you're on law enforcement radar, maybe, but probably, right, at some point? Well, the heavy hitters I was in with was the New Mexican Mafia. So when Wildman was on his first visit, he introduced me to some guys. By now, in Rancho Marietta, this apartment complex, we've got one building, an apartment is dealing another, we're storing cash, another we're after partying in.

We've got this structure to it that's building up. What happened was, we're partying in one of them. and a cop walks in, he goes, I could smell weed from outside, nobody move. I'm talking to this ruggedly handsome Mexican-American guy called G-Dog, who is dealing the white and the green. And he just pulls out a cop to the gun and says, the only one who's not leaving is you, mofo, everybody run. I've never seen anything this heavy before in my life.

We all just run off into the night. I go into another apartment where we've got pills and stuff stashed, and we're like, what should we do? Should we flush our stuff? Should we flush our stuff? next thing there's a knocking on the French window bang bang bang bang and it's G dog he's like let me any school doors he says look they can't get a warrant just like that turn the lights off turn the TV off nobody answered the door everybody shut the F up

and they did knock and then they went next door and we harboured him we hadn't flushed our stuff we sell out our stuff there was one cop car by the end of the night it all calmed down they had helicopter out and everything yeah because the guy put a gun to a copse out holy smokes in the end I said to him look because you're so hot in this area I've got a house in Phoenix, let's go there and shoot pool and do lines. And that's what we did. At the end of the night, he said, look, Sean, because you and your friends had my back.

Me and my brothers have got your back. I had no idea what he meant. A couple months later, he invites me over to his brother house. One of his brothers. He answers the door, short guy, know her, looking at me with this mean face. He hears my English accent, and he lightened up a bit. He's like, goddamn, you talk funny.

Come in and meet my homies. I go into the living room and there's like the biggest Mexican-American American guys have ever seen. They've got the little wife beat of vests on, shorts down below the knees, tattooed out the chains, looking at me like they want to eat me. I'm, you know, crapping myself. I'm looking around the room.

That's the biggest TV I've ever seen in my life. They've got a TV watching the street. I did a double tape. I'm like, hold on a minute. That's not an ornament. On top of their TV, they had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher out of a Rambo movie. Wow.

Yeah, yeah. So these guys are like real mafios, like Mexican mafia? I didn't know it until they got arrested a couple of years later and they were headline news and the heads of the New Mexican Mafia the most powerful violent criminal organization Arizona at that time. They tried to assassinate the head of the Department of Corrections

that assassinated witnesses trying to assassinate cops, all this stuff. There was another situation while I was still a stockbroker relating to them. So I get a call from one of my guys this is the apartment we hid at that G-Dog knocked on the French window. Two guys in there, one's called Seth,

one's called Fish. Seth's dead as well now. He was one of my right-hand guys, big guy. Anyway, Fish calls me. He's like, look, I need you to get Wildman and Seth and come over here fast. We've got a situation. So what's the situation? I'd rather not say on the phone. So I go looking for Wildman and Seth and they're collecting debts for the Colombian guy in Phoenix, so I can't find him. It's like 30

minutes to an hour later by the time I get to 10p. Knock on the door, Fish answers the door of his girlfriend, girlfriend's crying. I think, oh no. Someone's assaulted her or something. They want Wildman and Seth to beat this guy up. So what's the matter? They can't talk. Too frightened to talk. I hear this noise.

Zzz. Coming from the other room. Like, what's that? Your best go see. Walk into the living room. There's a guy that's previously been introduced to me through Wildman and the G-Dog and them. It's this old Mexican-American guy with this silver.

Stately swept back, huh? He stood with his back to the wall, overseeing a bunch of Mexicans with cattle prods. And on the floor is a man, naked hogtide man with a rockabilly quiff who's gagged. And when the guy with the silver her gives the instruction, they electrocute this guy. He rocks like a rocking horse. His eyes are almost popping out of his head. And pee shoots out of his penis. So I should not laugh. But that's a ridiculous visual. What did that guy do?

Right. I'm thinking, I've never seen anything else I've been before again. I'm not expecting you to say any of this. I'm terrified, right? Yeah. I look at the Silverhead guy, and he's smiling at me with this welcome to the family grin. So I'm thinking, I got to put a brave, a tough guy hacked on here. Yeah. And I got to not show any fear.

Are they going to think I'm a liability? Right, right. So I say to him, wow, looks like you guys have got this situation under control. Yeah, whatever situation there might have been. I will tell Wildman that he's not need. did. But I got to get back to the office because I've come over in a hurry. And they make some guys just smile at me like, welcome to the family. Oh my gosh. So I walked out of that room towards the other room into near where the door were fishing his girlfriend were. I'm like, what has happened here?

What they said was, as you know, I'm dealing exosy for you, but I'm also moving product for them. That guy is one of my customers. He watched the place. He found. He found. He I thought I had gone, but I'd come back, and I caught him in here. I called you, I call them, they got here first. So he was trying to rob the place? He was trying to rob my stuff and their stuff. Oh, they're going for the stash. The stash?

Yeah. But they got there first. Oh, man. Now, I was worried on the way back to the office about the fate of that guy, but what eventually happened was they called his roommate and said to pay $10,000, or he was going to get taken out to the desert and the 10,000 was paid. Wow, yeah, don't rob drug dealers.

I mean, I guess that's... Some people do it and get away with it, other people don't. Not after related to the Mexican Mafias, no. It seems like you always have to be so vigilant because you've got to make sure people don't think they can steal from you. So, like, you're like this friendly dude, by nature, I assume.

I mean, all my interactions... You're not the same guy you were, but my interactions with you are like a funny dude. I mean, people listening right now or laughing or horrified and have turned it off. But you've got to be like, if you mess with me, I'm going to have you killed, which is not maybe your default kind of personality. So how present is that concern in your mind that you've got to put on a front

or you will be victimized? So when, while man left, the two closest people he left you with were Acid Joey and G. Dogg. Okay. And people knew G. Doug was with heavy hitters. Right. And Acid Joey was quite, he was quite a big guy as well because when I did set up my own security team, he became one of them. He was a very stocky Navajo guy and he was brilliant at dancing considering his weight. He danced like in this fluid way. In fact, the first time I met him, I think it was at a rave called Chupa and I noticed a circle of people watching someone dance so incredibly. And I thought, I want whatever he's on to be able to. to dance like that with his body size and structure. And I waited till he went outside and started talking to him.

And I said to him, you're on the good stuff. Obviously, where can I get that? And he started to hook me up locally. Oh, interesting. Is it not exhausting to be paranoid for a good reason? Like someone's trying to rob my stash. This person might try to take my money. Can I trust these people?

These people are dangerous and kill people, but I got to deal with them. And then you're doing drugs, but then you get paranoid and you're like, no, but it's really, my paranoia is real. but then I also have drug-induced paranoia. And then you do some more drugs to get away from the paranoia. It seems like a self-reinforcing cycle, right? You're more paranoid, but the paranoid, you're also not delusional.

Like, you are in danger. They are trying to come out. And you surround yourself of equally paranoid people who are all reinforcing each other's paranoid delusions? Yeah. That's... So people are reporting things to do. A guy reported to me that someone walked past wild woman's apartment

who looked suspicious. And I ignored it thinking he was being paranoid and she said it and I thought she was being paranoid and the next day she got swat team raided so to be able to discern what's real and what's not real is really tricky but during that two-year gap while man was gone I've got G-dog with me my main bodyguard I built up a team of bouncers now who are armed and stuff and when Sammy de balls people come into the scene wildman comes back over around that time and people are terrified of him yeah he didn't have to go and beat him He was just moving with them.

If you owed me enough money, I would have him move in with you. If he moved in with you, all your furniture was getting taken out in front of your eyes and getting liquidated by the Mexican Mafia. You got a crack dealer and a pimp in your kitchen cooking up crack. You've got all the homeless people coming in, all the gangbangers, all the strip to these girls, and it's just 24-hour insanity everywhere he went. That's so interesting. So instead of being like, I'm going to break your legs, you're like,

I'm going to give you the roommate from heaven. Yes. And it's like, here's your money, get him out of here. Several houses were blown up, set fire to, not even on purpose. No, just through sheer negligence. Shear and sheer mayhem. Oh, my God. Like, get this guy out of three days later.

Here's your money. I sold a kidney. Get this guy the hell away from me. Everybody moved out of their own house after he was in. There was only one girl who stayed. And she was a very tough girl who worked with me. And she had him walking her dogs and was bossing him around. Yeah, she was unique.

God. Towards the end of your first book, you have this sort of, is it a reckoning? You talk about how messed up your life is at this point. This is party time. You told me to read them in a specific order. Part of time, hard time for the time. Yeah, yeah.

So this is, yeah, I don't know if this was your first book, but it's the one you told me to read first. So there's a time when you're, I think, in Mexico, or you've just gotten back from smuggling drugs from Mexico to the U.S., and all your friends are super strong out, super paranoid. And you sort of reflect on your life about how this was supposed to be like, a temporary phase in how lost you are.

Can you tell me about that period of your life? Yes. So there was all this mayhem with Sammy DeBull's crew, and then they got arrested. The New Mexico Mafia guys got arrested. I think I'm going to get arrested next. I meet this woman. She sees who I'm, you know, associated with him,

and she's like, these people are scary, Sean. Yeah. If you love me, you'll get out of that. And I stopped the importation. I was in college doing Spanish classes. Okay. I was going the gym. I was doing kickboxing classes, trying to get into shape.

And I was back trading the stock market. So you could have made a pretty decent recovery. We were planning to move to L.A. To get away from where we were so hot. Moving to L.A. to get away from drugs and partying is a questionable decision. Here's a sample of my interview with Amanda Knox, who was coerced into wrongfully confessing that she was at the scene of her roommate's grisly murder without being made aware of her rights or being given access to a lawyer.

Here's a quick look inside. I was 20 years old. I was studying abroad in Italy. The day after Halloween, I came home to find a murder scene. The cops arrive. They break down my roommate's door and find her body there. And for the next five days, I was at the disposal. and mercy of the police officers, who, unbeknownst to me, had targeted me as a person of interest.

My thought was to just take direction. I did what I was told. And what I was told was by the police to come in every day for questioning. And I sat for hours and hours and hours. I often worried that maybe the reason that they were upset or short with me was because I just wasn't speaking Italian well enough. I thought that was the reason why they kept asking me questions over and over and over again. No matter how many ways I answered the same question, they never seemed happy with it. I just sort of submitted myself to what was ultimately a very coercive interrogation technique that culminated with an overnight interrogation and broke me.

I was made to believe that the reason they were upset with me was because I didn't remember correctly. I realized that the truth didn't matter and that I couldn't count on the truth to save me. People believed it. I was convicted. I spent four years in prison. Amanda Knox joins us to discuss how she put her life back together and how she lives with the residue of tabloid infamy, even after being acquitted of this terrible crime. For more, including why it's not uncommon for an innocent person to give a false confession to a skilled interrogator, check out episode 386 on the Jordan Harbinger show. That's it for part one, part two up in a couple days.

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