The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1048: Shaun Attwood | From Raves to Riches to Ruin Part Two

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Raves, riches, and ruin: Former ecstasy kingpin Shaun Attwood exposes the dangerous world of drug trafficking and its violent criminal connections. [Pt 2/2 — find Pt 1 here!] What We Discuss: The extreme brutality and inhumane conditions in the United States prison system, including rampant violence, unsanitary living conditions, and inadequate medical care. The complex and dangerous social dynamics within prison, including racial segregation, gang politics, and the constant threat of violence. The psychological impact of long-term incarceration, including the difficulty of reintegrating into society and the lasting trauma experienced by both inmates and their families. The systemic issues within the American prison system, particularly the profit-driven motives of private prisons that perpetuate a cycle of crime and recidivism rather than focusing on rehabilitation. The power of personal transformation and education, as demonstrated by Shaun's journey from drug kingpin to advocate for prison reform. His story shows that even in the darkest circumstances, individuals can find ways to grow, learn, and ultimately use their experiences to make a positive impact on society. And much more — be sure to check out part one of this conversation here if you haven't already! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1048 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. May 16th, 2002, I'm on my computer up in the morning trading options, and there's a knock on the door. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. 10b please, we've got a warrant, open the door. Run to the window. The whole apartment complex is surrounded.

Speak to my missis and we're like, what should we do? Better let them in. We get halfway through the living room and then just boom. Door just flies off the hinges. Hands above your heads. Don't move. Get on the effing ground now. Put your hands up your head. 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

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. just visit jordan harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your spotify app to get started today part two with sean atwood this is a crazy amazing conversation in so many ways if you haven't heard part one definitely go back and check that out otherwise this part's not going to you're going to jump in the middle and frankly you're just going to ruin it for yourself so go back and listen to part one and for the rest of you i know you can't wait to hear the rest of this one it is it it gets worse somehow it gets worse so here we go part two with my buddy

Sean Atwood. It seems like there was a moment or phase of your life where you felt lost and out of control. It seems like you plowed through that pretty well, though, or not. All right. I quit the importation. Right. But I hadn't quit going out on the weekend partying with my mate. My inner demons, I didn't address them until years later through therapy and philosophy

and psychology and yoga and meditation. So I didn't understand the psychodynamics of what was going on. I still had to get high every weekend. The walls were howling for me to come out and party. I would leave my girlfriend at home, go out with Wildman, go out with G-Dog, getting high in Tempe. Is this, is it Claudia, I think? Claudia, yeah.

And you meet her family under this, like, normal, functional family. Yeah, and I think in the book, you have this moment where you're like, who am I? You feel like you're a normal guy who's a stockbroker, but I have a secret life that's really shitty where I'm a drug dealer. There's a lot of tension having those two people

exist in the same brain, basically. Yeah, when you're living double lives. Yeah. It's very stressful. Yeah. Drugs probably alleviate some of that stress temporarily, but they make the overall situation worse. Over time, the pleasure of drugs goes down

because you're always trying to get back to where you started. Yeah. But the pain, the side effects, is rising in the background and they cross, but if you're addicted, you can't stop. So you're still taking drugs, even though the side effects is up here, hoping you get back to here, but you're just burning yourself. out. This is why most of my mates are dead.

Yeah, a lot of the people from the book, I was like writing these names down. I was like, oh, I got to ask about this person, this person. But then by the end of book three, it's like, dead, dead, dead, dead. This person vanished. We think he's maybe okay. We're not sure. Dead, dead, dead, dead, alive. But now you're updating me. Actually, he died a couple years ago after the book was published.

Right. So this is not a, there's a timer running on your life that just starts going maybe faster and faster. You just can't see the clock. One of the most dangerous situations then was with Sammy DeBolson. Yeah. So the Exocene Ring, Mike Papper was running this XEC ring, one of these steroid jack guys. Sammy DeBull moves to Tempe with his family

in witness protection after testifying against Gotti. Right. Papa brings in Gerard Gravano and Karen Gravano, the kids of Sammy. Sammy starts acting in advisory capacity. He doesn't know what's going on the street level. One of the evidences against him is a call where Girard asks for money for gas

and Sammy says, yeah, I'll send you up money for gas. That's Sammy putting money into the ecstasy ring. When I got arrested, this was May 16, 2002, in Towers' Jail, Maricopa County. I finally met Gerard Gravano. In prison? In the Maricopa County jail system. Oh, I see. In the beginning, the guards chained him to Wildman to see what would happen.

They didn't like him either, apparently. They knew from the news there was a beef. Oh, so they were... Guards like to create situations for the own. They're stirring the shit. Oh, interesting. Wildman's looking at me like watching. they did you want me to do him in and i'm like no let's talk to him and see you know how his case is

going because his case started a couple years before i was we're talking to him all night long because they wait you up for court the night before you're in court the next day you're in transportation all day he later on tells me that they had a bounty on me and we were in a strip club who had a bounty on you the gravano the grvano enterprise yeah they had a bounty on me and we were in a gay bar called the crowbar in central phoenix me wild mangy dog wild woman and about a dozen more people. And they advised me to leave. They said it's getting a bit moody.

And we left. In the bar. Yeah. I feel like you should take off. Yeah. But what I didn't know was a striptease girl I'd called in for the bounty to the Gravano's. They got an armed crew that were on the way to come and try and take me out to the desert

and hold me for ransom. Wow. And they said if the ransom wasn't paid, they were just going to eliminate the competition. Yeah. That's what he told me. We've got a documentary coming out on a huge American network. Oh, man. Where they've filmed me and my family

that came to the UK, they've gone and filmed Sammy the ball and his family. And this is going to be one of the stories in it. They've also interviewed people who worked for me and my detectives.

How did you get caught at first? You said you were in the jail system, but how did you, what was you getting caught? What was that like? When did that happen? So, 10 witness statements were made to the police against me. One was from a house,

well, I'm going to destroyed in Mexico, after he'd blown up another house in Mexico. Some of them were people who worked for Sammy the Bull, and one of them was Skinner. None of them had the inside scoop on the organisation except for Skinner, who's my sales guy. So Skinner had got so scared of Wildman after we realized he'd firebombed Wild Woman's apartment. Skinner got so paranoid that he went to the cops and then left the state. And later on in jail, there was a guy called Joey Crack,

who was on my co-defendants, and he was telling me stories. And he said he showed up at Skinner's apartment, and Wellman had found out where it was, and he was in there. And Wildman just grabbed his neck, thought it was Skinner. And Joey Crack was like, it's crack, it's crack, don't kill me, don't kill me. And Crack said, well man, I'd sweat just running down his face, dripping off his ears. And he had every weapon. No, every known weapon laid out like hammers, golf clubs, knives, baseball bats, everything. So Skinner was the one who gave the inside scoop.

May 16th, 2002. I'm on my computer up in the morning trading options. And there's a knock on the door. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Bam! Jump up, look through the P-Pol. It's blacked out. Tempe, please, we've got a warrant.

Open the door. I'm wondering, is it the cops? Or is it someone pretending the cops come to rob me? Run to the window. Look through the window. Shit. The whole apartment complex is surrounded. Oh, man.

Go through to the bedroom, speak to my missus, and we're like, what should we do? Better let them in. We get halfway through the living room and then just boom. Door just flies off the hinges. They come in, hands above your heads. Don't move. Get on the effing ground now.

Put your hands over your head. And it's like, have you ever been for a SWAT team, right? No. No, not from the perspective, actually. I should say yes, but not from the perspective of the person who has the gun pointed at them, generally. No. So you see all these visors and these very intense eyes behind these visors.

There's some lights, some bright lights. You know, you know, if you make a mistake, your life's, over in seconds. Yeah. Time kind of freezes. And then they just jump on you and crush you. One of the detectives just grabs me up, gets in my face. English, Sean.

You're a big name from the rave scene and we've got you. I have no idea of this guy is at this point, but he knows well and fall well away. You've been his life for three years. Exactly. Yeah. From the police paper that I read later on, he's like sat next to me in restaurants and everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that was his moment where he was like, oh, this is, that was. was the payoff. He had, he had a few drinks that night for sure. Yeah. Finally cracked you down. Oh, they were celebrating, yeah. Man, okay, so you go to prison. By the way, the prison stuff is so gross. We'll get into some of that, but even in the beginning you're like, there's something called prison itch. Tell me about this. So, there's Durango foot rot, whereby if you go in the shower without your shoes, oh man. Your foot just ends up getting fungus on it and turning green and stuff. There is, it's almost, what, 120, 130 degrees in the summer in the American scale.

Yeah. So there's a tiny vent called a swamp cool event at the back of the cell. The air coming in, it was like as warm as baby's breath. The only time it worked was when the county health inspector walked through the building. And then it went back to the broken setting. So we're being cooked alive in a concrete oven and it wreaks havoc on your skin. Yeah. You get all these skin infections that itch and bleed.

It looked like I spilled battery acid on my leg at one point. You get these bed sores on your behind because you sat around the lot. Now, at night when you're trying to sleep, you're basically just rotating on your bunk in a pool of sweat. And the itchiness from these skin infections and bed sores is keeping you awake all night. But if you scratch yourself, because you're sweating constantly day after day, the outer layers of your skin turns soggy. So you got this itchiness Scratch yourself And clumps of your own skin

Detach you under your nails Oh my God, that's really awful Yeah That's really, and everyone has this Pretty much Yeah, I mean people were just getting naked And throwing buckets of water on each other Trying cool down

Holy smokes Yeah That's truly awful And then there was the insects There was a spider called a brown recluse And they'd come out at night Looking for food And you roll around and you sleep

You touch it, it get you You wouldn't even see it just wake up the next day of little pinpricks on your skin, no big deal. In the following days, the pus would start to come out and the venom, it eats into your flesh down to the bone on some occasions and causes what's called a volcano lesion. There were guys in the jail who've been in shootouts, and these spider bites are putting bigger holes in people's bodies than bullets. And we say to the guard, this guy's got to go to the doctor, take him to medical. It's the policy of the jail not to treat insect bites. You put yourself in here. You, you, put yourself in here.

deal with it. So there was a guy called Alejandro. He'd done a drive-by shooting, teenager. And every night he'd get up and watch the news because he might be up for the death penalty if one of his victims died. One girl got a bullet through her back, came out the front and took her nipple off and all these people in critical condition. So every night he'd go up and watch the news. Anyway, he got bit and it looked like a baseball of yellow plasma was trying to come out of his back. Oh, man. Guards wouldn't take him to medical. So in the day, room, big guys, arm locked him on either side to hold him steady. There was a Russian guy in there, had been in the military and said he knew how to dress wounds. He comes up behind Alejandro and he's

massaging this guy's back and all his puss is running down the back. And I'm mopping it up with the toilet paper. This is going on for about 10 minutes. Big guy's almost fainting. Sweat stripping off his ears, off his chin. We need more guys to hold him. Because it hurts so bad. Other guys are jumping on to hold this guy when all the pus was finally. finally out, what the Russian guy said, the best thing he could do for him was put salt on the wound to reduce the bacteria. Oh, my God. This is like Stone Age. This is how you treat a wound in Afghanistan or something like that. Sheriff Joe Apio, America's toughest sheriff. So you were in this notoriously horrible U.S. prison, and that he later went to, later was, I think, either in prison or convicted of... He was convicted of racial profiling and contempt of course, but Trump pardoned him.

So he was looking at six months in his own jail, but he got away with it. Oh, that would have been poetic. Six months isn't even that long. You mentioned the food in this prison was like not real food almost? Breakfast was moldy bread and green bologna. Green? Yeah. Not supposed to be green, just happens to be green.

Just raw sausage meat that's got this green shine to it. Oh. And then the mold on the bread, blue green, sometimes it had these fantastic psychedelic colors that look like works of art. And we scratched the mold off the bread. We were that hungly. hungry or if the bread was stale put it in water and swill it to get it down. Evening meal was a mystery meat slot we called Red Death. Red Death.

It looked like carroty vomit blended with blood. All kinds of random meat in it and it stunk. Occasionally there was a dead rat in it. One time we gave a rat back to the guards and they said they would investigate and they came back and said it was just a potato so the jail couldn't get any trouble. Sheriff Joe on his favorite quotes, it costs us more to feed our police dogs than our prisoners, 50 cents or less per day to rotten food.

And our police dogs are working for a living. I see. Yeah. That's horrifying. Yeah, you mentioned the banned toothpaste from China. What was that? How was it banned? It wasn't banned if you had it, I guess.

If you Google a mer fresh toothpaste, A-M-E-R-Fresh, it will come up, I think it was a case in prison legal news or something, that it had anti-freezer something. something in it. Yeah. Oh, man. So all this toxic stuff, they're just disposing of it onto the prisoners. Basically, they're torturing you guys there.

Yes. Yes. And a lot of people won't have any sympathy for prisoners. However, there's a level of humanity that you should generally afford somebody, especially non-violent criminals. You got the guards murdering the prisoners? Yeah. Brian Crenshaw, Scott Norberg.

You got a blind guy, failed to produce his ID for the evening meal. They pulverized them, put him into a coma he died of a month later. Scott Norberg, mentally ill man wandering neighborhood, they started beating him up. His face is turned blue. A female guard says, stop it. His face is turn blue. And they just kept beating him.

The prisoners were yelling why he's still beating him. He's already dead, and they were still beating the corpse. People can Google them and research it, and they were lawsuits that were settled. We'll link to some of this in the show notes. It's quite horrifying, actually. Tell me about introducing yourself to the gangs. Because that was one of the first things you told me on the phone

is you have no choice. You have to introduce yourself to the gangs. You can't just be like, I'm not playing that game. You play their game. Well, they introduce themselves to you, depending on what color your skin is. Okay. So as soon as I go in, you've got these neo-Nazis from the Erian Brotherhood, who are low-level guys at this stage.

They've got Hitler on them. They've got swastikers. They've got lightning bolts, SS. One guy even had Hitler, Zeig Heiling, over a gas chamber, with Jewish people dying inside the gas chamber. Oh, wow, that's a class act. These are some of the early tattoos that I saw, yeah, on these guys. And I'm like, holy shit.

So they're like, hey, you're getting that cell over there kind of thing. Go in the cell, close the door behind me so I can't get out. Three of them, I'm trapped. They're like, what are your charges? So my charges are you on a printout from the jail. It's all legal terminology. I don't even understand what it means. So I say to them, I don't know what my charges mean.

this is no good answer. Right, because they think you're hiding something, right? So I assume it's like they're making sure you're not like a pedophile kind of guy that they have to murder at that point? Does that happen? Do they kill pedd? Because you hear like, oh, they just go into segregated protective custody, nothing ever happens. But some of them try and go undercover in general pop, and it is KOS if they get outed.

And I've got a couple of stories of that. KOS, kill on site. Yeah, I've got a couple of stories of that happening if you want those and they're really brutal. Yeah. So I say, I don't want my charge is mean. Now they got up against the wall. like, what the F do you mean? You don't know what your charges mean.

Are you a chomo? I don't even know what a chomo is. I pull out my charge sheet. They make me show it on. Oh, chomo, child molester? Yeah. Crime syndicate, continuous criminal enterprise, conspiracy, conspiracy, bail bond, $750,000.

Like, damn, you guys, the mafia or what? $750,000 bond? And they loved that. The atmosphere changed right away. I'm like, no, we're not the mafia. We're doing raves, FECC. One of was like, yeah, I killed someone at a rave.

He was on GHB. So they then explain the rules. If anyone calls you a punk, a bitch, or hits you. You must fight him on the spot, or as the whole gang will attack you. Because you're a bad representation or something. That's the rule.

Your whole race will attack you if you don't defend yourself if someone hits you or calls you a punk or a bitch. It's automatic you're going to get battered by everyone. People are going to go, why is that? But it seems functional, right? Because if you can get away with it, then it's going to happen more. So your job is to make sure nobody gets away with it.

Someone calls you a punk or a bitch. You have to go in the cell and the stairs and fight them right away. Otherwise, every one of your race is going to batter you. Yeah, wow. Yeah. That's the first rule they told me. Then you can't go and sit with the other races on the tables in the dayroom. So there's 45 men in an area designed for 15.

They've got these hexagonal, octagonal seats and tables, bolted to the floor. There's crappy old TV on the wall. You've got the blacks, the Mexicans, the Mexican-Americans, and the whites, the woods. Yeah, yeah. They're the four gangs. You can't go and sit at the table of the bases. You can't go making friends with the guards.

They'll smash you for snitching. So there was an early occasion where I was working out with a guy called sniper. He was La Victoria gang member out of Tempe, working out with sniper, and he's a Chicano, Mexican-American. The neo-Nazis say to me while I'm working out with this guy, hey, we want a word with you. I look at sniper. Go talk to your people.

Go in the cell with them again. Like, Wood, what do you think you're doing right now? I don't know. I don't know. I've been working out, you know. Take a look around the day room. Do you see any of the white boys working out with the other races? Nope.

You got a lot to learn, Wood. Now finish your workout. At least they're being polite with me. And that was because Wild Man was in there as well. I wasn't allowed in the same tower as him, but they knew he was with me. And he'd already established himself. I see.

So he gave you a little bit of clout, like this is my guy. He was a good man to get rested with. I bet. Holy smokes. Except your lucky charm, I guess. So what does happen to the pedophiles in prison? I thought they just went into segregated, or what do you call it, protective custody,

they hang out with each other at the end. You said someone they tried to get out of there? All right, so the prison system is, there's all these complexes and they do have their own prisons now. But when they go court or they're in transportation or if they're trying to go undercover in general population, it enables people to get access to them and do things, which does happen quite a lot.

So, for example, then, a guy who come in with me was suspected of something. They had him in the shower beating the crap out of him. They left him whimpering in a pool of blood. And then this guy goes up to the main gang guy and says, look, why can we still hear him? You didn't smash him good enough? And the gang guy goes, yeah, we did him good enough.

And he's like, nah. And he goes in trying to crack this guy's head up like it's a coconut. Just crack, crack, crack, crack. So you can hear it. So he looks dead on the floor. I go back to my cell and then there's an announcement, lock down, everybody locked down because the guards on a security walk has seen it. This guy's getting carried out on a stretch and there's not just blood coming out of his head. There's yellow stuff coming out of his head.

Brain fluid, I guess. There was another one where the head of the Mexican gang, lived next door to me. And he had two cellmates and one of them was a Jehovah witness and he was going around preaching all day to people. And pissing people off.

He did it to me as well. And then that was it called the watchtower, that thing. And one day he goes to court and he's on the news, his case, and molesting his own knees. Oh, man. The head of the gang was so embarrassed

that this guy had lived with him for months. They waited until the guard did the security walk so they could torture him until the next security walk, which was 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. It started out with the normal sounds of head getting bashed against toilet, body getting thrown its wall, body getting thrown around. Ah, uh, uh, you know, normal, don't hit me, uh, uh, uh. And then it just went into the animal kingdom of cells. Wow. Yeah. By the time he got out that cell before the security walk,

He was covered in blood from head to toe, and he banged on the plexiglass door, and it just slid open, and he just collapsed on the floor, and we never saw him again. Do you think he died? You just don't know. Yeah, wow.

National Geographic researched my locked-up abroad episode that they made called Raven Arizona, and they said that 57 people died in that jail around the time I was there over a five-year period. Wow. Is that higher than normal? It sounds higher than normal. Highest rate of death out of all the jails and prisons in America.

Wow, geez. That's crazy. Yeah. And you're coming from the UK where I don't know what prison's like here, but I assume you don't grow up watching prison stories that are that traumatizing? No. Prison here, a lot of bad things can happen, and it has got more out of control,

but American, Arizona, jail is off the scale. Yeah. You know what sounds a lot more fun than prison itch, the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. if you're wondering how I manage to book all these amazing folks for the show, the thinkers, the authors, the creators. It's a circle of people that I know like and trust, right? I get a lot of warm introductions from people. I get a lot of people coming to me, of course, because I've built

a reputation in the industry. I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for yourself. This is a free course over at six-minute networking.com. It's about improving your relationship building skills. It's not just for work stuff. It's obviously not just for booking a podcast. I know like 99% of you are not doing that. But the course is really easy. It takes six minutes a day. There's no awkward strategies or cheesy tactics. Just something that's going to make you better at work, better outside of work with your friends. A lot of systems to help you systemize things if you're already a good networker. And again, six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where

you belong. And you can find the course at six minute networking.com. Now, back to Sean Atwood. You mentioned the gangs intimidate people into making their significant others do favors for the gang. So tell me about this. Is that how things get smuggled in, usually? There was an article in the Phoenix New Times about my case, English Sean's Evil Empire 12 pages long, Evan had done 10 times more. When the Nazis found this out,

yeah, it was good because I was getting a few extra milks and slices of cheese for breakfast. But they started pressuring me to have my girlfriend bring stuff in because I obviously had huge drug connections. Right, okay. But what happened was a race riot erupted, and those guys who were pressuring me got moved. Oh, I see.

So you ended up kind of lucky because they were like, oh, well. And then they just got replaced. Hoof, man. Your family surely was worried about you, right? You were the smart kid, stockbroker, and then dot, dot, dot, you're in the worst prison in America? My mom was flying over and to see her all crumpled up in the visitation room and breaks my heart. Yeah. She's been outside, sniffed dogs on them, waiting for hours, hearing the stories of all the Mexican people trying to get in, how sad the stories were.

I just feel blessed that my parents had my back. Yeah. Yeah. That must have been so stressful for them. It was really stressful. My sister had to have counseling. My mom had a nervous breakdown. Because of that Phoenix New Times article,

I asked my aunt not to show up my mom. She said it was on the internet and my mom read it. Oh, man. And she was a college teacher. And she ran up to some of the students after reading it saying, I know you've read the article. I know you know what's going on. They didn't have a clue what she was on.

I got it from the school. And she'd been on off medication to this day. Oh, so she just had it like a, an anxiety attack type of thing. She had a meltdown, yeah. Yeah. Jeez. Oh, man, it must have been tough to face them

when they visited you. You know what? Visits are like gold. Yeah. Visits in your mail are like gold. Just any communication with the outside world. This situation was so intense just to get out of your cell

and sit with a family member. Even though it is in a bizarre environment, you're breathing easy for like an hour or two and communicating with your loved ones and finding out what's going on in the outside world because you've completely lost track of what's going on in the world. Yeah, I would imagine it's just like,

it's like the only breath of fresh air. Yeah, totally. That you have, wow. Some prisoners even manage to make babies in visitation. Is that a conjugal visit or they just happened to be real slick? This was before there was so much camera technology and stuff. Gotcha.

You'd have some guys stand in a row and get it on behind the... Can you imagine being a little? and the woman in that situation, it's like, all right, we're going to do it behind this row of strangers. One of my mates is a guy called T-bone, who met later on big US-X Marine. I believe he fathered more than one child in visitation. Wow.

Yeah. Wow. I don't, it'd be hard to get it up in those circumstances. Maybe not. You haven't had it for six months. You never know. I feel like mine, I would just shrivel up, literally and metaphorically. I would just be like, nope, I'm done.

One of the hardest part is going without relations. Yeah. And if you've gone without it, you're like in heat kind of basically. Sure. Jeez. You hear about all like the prison rape and stuff. Is that, I mean, that's a bad prison. So I assume if it happens at all, it's happening there.

Can I be extreme in my stories? For sure, yeah. Way more extreme than have been so far. Yeah. Because this might get demonetized, but it's like whatever, you know. So I met a trans, a six and a half foot charismatic trans prisoner. And she had a tough boyfriend at the time, but she told me her history from decades earlier. and she said when she first came in

she clicked up with the gang Blood In Blood Out Ab, the Aaron Brotherhood. They had a transsexual in their gang. No, when she first came in, she wasn't there. She was a big six and a half foot guy. Gotcha. When she first came in. This was decades before I met her.

She was collecting debts, I think, for the AB, and it's blood and blood and blood out, and they used people that and brutalize them, and she got gang rape multiple times. And I said, what happened? She said, the first time I was a gang rape. They beat me up, knocked me unconscious, rape me while I was unconscious

and shove things inside my body I said what did they shove inside your body a broomstick I said well how did you know if you were unconscious that they'd put a broomstick inside you and she said when she went to the toilet afterwards she could tell by what came out wow she said

I sat in myself for weeks for months waiting for the scars to go away there's nothing you can do if you report it you're a snitch they'll put you in a dungeon for years for your own protection you can do absolutely nothing other to kill the perpetrators. The victim is labelled a rat, a punk and considered less than human. I said, well then, how did you stop it? And she said, I started

standing up for myself. I started fighting back. I was ruthless. You've got to be ruthless. Now, if she hadn't told me the truth was what she's done at the time. I had to get that off some other prisoners. So what Zina had done, she was studying anatomy and she came with an idea. And the next two times the gang came to rape Zena. The first member of the gang to put his hand on her, she plucked these eyeball out so it was dangling from the optic nerve oh man when I first heard that I didn't even think it was possible

I didn't even yeah it sounds fake it does sound fake so I clicked up with a guy a martial arts guy I'm in prison and he told me to join a dojo when I got out which I did I continued I did karate and as you go up in karate they teach you what's called bird beak strike

where you just go in take the eye out comes out now when the eye comes out like that there's fluid that can come out through the skull into the socket and the eye might not, that coats the brain, and the eye might not necessarily go back in. Oh, man. But it is a lethal thing that people who are at the top levels of martial arts

and close protection know these kind of moves, but that's what she was doing. So after doing that twice, they left her alone, but they moved on to some of her friends. One friend, the gang raped him, shoved a light bulb in his backside, and made bets on who would smash it first. Oh, wow.

And that prisoner committed suicide afterwards. Another one was gang raped, held down, they got a shovel from the work crew, cut his head off. And when the head was finally off, they positioned it in an area of the prison where the rival gangs would see it to make the point that they were the most violent

and ruthless out of all the gangs. And again, that was the area in Brotherhood. This was years before I was in prison, mind you, before all the cameras and everything. And I think 60 minutes at a program about Arizona prison and said it was the most dangerous part of real estate in the whole country. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, oh my gosh. That's these stories and the book make you, if you are thinking of doing something that would land you in jail, not that I was keen on going to prison beforehand, but you read this book and you are like, no, never, we'll do nothing to ever possibly risk going in there.

Just the cockroaches story alone. You want to talk about the cockroaches a little bit? You must even have nightmares about these cockroaches. I could do half an hour on cockroach stories, but let's just say that one year in, I asked for a bail reduction. My bail was $750,000. Yeah.

The judge doubled it to 1.5 million, so I got moved over to maximum security. Okay. Just as a big screw you, they doubled it. Yeah, the prosecutor filed 12 more charges against me with an additional bond and all this stuff. Anyway, it's about two in the morning when I get to my cell in Mac security. Two-man's cell? That's an improvement. But I'm wondering why my cellmate is asleep on the top bunk.

I'll never forget it. I can just see it right now. It's ingrained. I walk in. He's got a sheet wrapped around him and stuff. And it's dark. just like this weird movement on the walls and the ceiling I'm thinking what's what's going on

something drops off the ceiling and bounces off my shoulder like what the hell was that look at the walls and ceiling something's not right here perhaps because I've been awake so long my eyes are playing tricks so I put my face right up to the wall and it's covered in cockroaches

like the classic American cockroach size of like an almond nut and they're just swirling around everywhere Now I go to look at where the brackets are for my bunk where they're screwed into the wall and there's a big old hole and they're just pouring onto the bunk where I'm supposed to go to sleep.

Then I look at my cellmate and I realize now because it's the desert, why has he got your sheet wrapped all the way around him? So in the end, that's what you've got to do. You've got to wrap the sheet around you should look like the mummy and leave a breathing hole. It does keep them off you, but it traps the heat to your body. Yeah.

You've got all these bleeding skin infections and bed sores and itching. when you've got that sheet around you, it's torture. So you end up just throwing the sheet off and letting them crawl on you. They don't bite. Right. They tickle your feet, your legs. So this day, if, you know, my girlfriend tries tickling my hands,

I flinch because I woke up so many nights of them, tickling my hands are just casting them off like that. Oof. They get on your face, mouth, nose. But their favorite place of all is going in your ears to eat your ear wax. It's like funny to them. And I know that because if I go, got like a bit of cloth to try and clean my ears out and then the ways were filthy and then hung it

under the sink they'd get on it and they pulse where the ear wax was so the neighbor who was asthmatic he wakes up one morning out of breath grabs his inhaler and shoots the cockroach into his mouth yeah into his mouth his throat starts freaking out saying he can feel it move around inside him oh my god he's trying to throw it up and it's stuck inside and it won't even come out even in the daytime there was so many of them. The fellas were doing cockroach races gambling on the winner. And at night time they'd try and trap them

with like peanut butter and stuff. And they'd come down the stairs with them all the dead ones and they'd empty them into the trash can under the stairs. It didn't matter how many we killed. They owned the building. Yeah. It's very tricky.

You know, I've got my Amerifresh toothpaste that I'm cementing the cracks with. And there was a moment in time where I got moved to this cell and it was quite bad. And I used all my a merrifresh to cement. And two days later, they moved me again.

It's the one that was even worse. And I had no amherrash. Oh, no. It smelled nice and minty, and it was keeping them out. So I have this new one, they're just coming in full force. And if you try and kill them, they release like a chemical scent. And these warrior ones run under your door, like, what the F, you know, backing up the other one. Oh, really?

The pregnant ones have got this, it looks like a little piece of a worm with all the babies in. If they detach that or attach it under your bunk, I would find them attached to books and stuff like that, and they'd put them in the toilet. But if you don't spot them, all the little babies come out and they're just running everywhere. And there was like albino ones, like white ones. You have to live in harmony with your cellmates over time

and you learn all of the characteristics and mannerisms. And you just get on with it. You're just reading books and they're just going by you. You've got your commisserie tied up so they can't eat through the paper to try and get your peanut butter. And you're just taking countermeasures So that once they come out at night They'll eat anything in their path

Nail filings, her, earwax, paper Oh man That's really gross I'm surprised they don't eat things like attached to your skin or hair They do Oh they do? They get on you to do all that They pretend to be dead as well

So I've seen them just slammed flat And I'll be reading the book And an hour later I'm looking over And the thing's reforming itself And then walking away like the Terminator. In the toilet, they pretend to be dead in the water. And what they're doing is they're holding oxygen to themselves

in this position that they look like they're dead. And then once they get access to go again, they go again. Good God, man. They're really clever. This is like being in a medieval torture dungeon or something like that. Like this is what you'd expect prison in 15, 20. Dante. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. You actually seem to have a really good memory of specific days, conversations and stuff like that. Did you take notes on what was happening? Yeah, I was so lucky, Jordan. Okay. That Claudia, who stayed with me for the duration of the Maricopa County jail period, which

was 26 months, I wrote to her up to two to three times a day, and she kept all those letters under her bed. And when I got released at the end of the sentence, she FedEx them over. So all the details of the cockroaches that day, what I'd be doing with her, conversations, the noise of the shower dripping at night. the men snoring. I would never have had that treasure trove of detail if it wasn't for Claudia,

keeping all those letters. And I put those in my books. Yeah. Hard time is the jail one if people are interested. Wow. Yeah. Wow. You wanted to read a thousand books in prison, right?

So early on them, I said to myself, I think this was around the time I got sentenced, which was 26 months in. I knew I was going to do in a six years total. So I said to myself, Oh, that six years total. Maybe I'll be asleep for a third of it. That gets it down to four.

Three or four years is like a university degree. I could turn this into the educational opportunity of a lifetime. Yeah. And I plan to read over a thousand books throughout my incarceration. Because before prison, all I ever read was stock market books. I thought fiction was frivolous. I thought I knew everything. What else is there to learn?

And once I did start to read, I realized how little I knew and how much there was to learn. I want this fantastic journey through literature. Wow. Wow. Did you make it through a thousand books? Yeah. In 2006, I read 268, and I wrote them all down and rated them. And I was keeping account.

I did over a thousand. I learned a lot of philosophy and psychology. Yeah. And those changed my worldview and helped me go inside myself and address the reason that I got involved in drugs and crime. Wow. How are your eyes? When I got out of prison, I was short-sighted because of all of the reading.

Yeah. And I thought I was going to need glasses. But to get to my gym and karate and stuff, I had to do quite a long walk because I didn't have a car at that point from where I lived through this park every single day, two or three times a day. And I believe looking at those long distances

got my muscle back in gear without me having to fall back on having glasses. Interesting. Yeah. You repaired your vision, your body repaired itself. Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah.

That's fascinating. Did the gangs ever come for you, you know? Like, were they ever like, all right, you're a liability or we don't like it? I mean, it seems like you can't avoid danger for the whole time. So when I started blogging from the jail and then blogging throughout the prison part of it as well, I turned it away from not so much being about the conditions, but it's been about the stories of the prisoners. So you're writing a blog in prison.

Yeah, in the beginning, it was smuggled out of the maximum security Madison Street jail, and it's all time to stand people can go back online, John's jail journal, J-O-N-S, and read the original entries. and it was all the conditions and then I started writing about the characters and what happened was some of the prisoners were getting letters and books sent in but other prisoners were getting

a bit jealous and telling people yeah, Atwood's writing about you and he's putting it online and guys would run into myself say you effing writing about me I'm gonna effing smash you, I ain't giving you no permission to put anything out there about me there was another occasion where

I wrote about how the prisoners were making homemade syringes from items you could buy from the inmate store, the commissary. Now, bear in mind, some of the places I was housed, 90% of the prisoners were injecting heroin. Two-thirds had hepatitis C from shirring dirty needles, which was slowly killing them. Yeah, really sad. And it was called Rig Builders, this blog entry. It got put online and a shock caller on a neighboring yard put a green light to have me attacked or killed for putting this out there. It's like snitching. That was his viewpoint of it. Now, concurrently, I was writing the life story for a guy called Two Tonys,

old school Italian Mafia. He was part of the Bonano Crime family under Bill Senior. And he ended up opening the first discotheque in Alaska. And he ends up in this like story of it's like sons of anarchy versus the sopranos. Okay. Yeah. So I wrote his life story. It's called the Mafia philosopher Two Tonys if people want to get. it. Every day I was sneaking into his cell to get his life story written down in my little chicken scratch and then I was smuggling it out through the British embassy so that they couldn't open it and because he was confessed to murders and stuff. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. Now, when this guy put out this green light to have me attacked, two Tonys, there was two or three days.

People were trying to get in my cell attacked me, all this stuff, but I managed to keep them at bay. While two Tonys was calling a favor to get it squashed, it was quite her. Herry, my parents were visiting me. It was very stressful. I thought I was going to get done in. But in the end, two Tony's called in a favor and got it squashed. And two Tony's, when I said goodbye to that offense, he had tears in his eyes. And he told me I'd been like the son he'd never had.

That's something, eh? Yeah. That's really something. Yeah. No one's ever shown these guys any sort of real goodwill. He was doing 144 years for leaving the dead bodies of rival gangsters from Arizona to Alaska. He described himself as a whacker of men. Wow.

Yeah. Jeez. Speaking of getting kidnapped and murdered by mobsters, I have been instructed to read the following by the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show,

and you probably do because you've been hanging out for a long time. This is a long episode. I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show

are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Also a little inside baseball that many of you may not know when you use our promo codes, it really does help support the show. So we don't get a percentage of every direct sale, but it lets the company know that people are hearing the ad, and they're more likely to renew their ad campaign with us. So if you are signing up, please use our codes. It's sometimes, Jordan,

but not always. So go to the deals page over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. It's a win-win because you get a discount and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Sean Atwood. What are the politics of a hit in prison? Like, I know it's a complicated. question, but it seems like, we're going to kill you. Well, actually, this other guy kind of likes him, so he's going to call in a favor. What does that mean? Who do you talk to?

Why do they owe you that? Do they have to respect it? I mean, there's a lot going on here, a lot of moving parts. It's politics all day long. Yeah. So, in general, if you wanted to hit someone in prison, it depends on the status of that person in the prison hierarchy. You could just give someone a $50 bag of heroin

and they could kill someone for you. But if you kill someone who is higher up in the hierarchy, that's going to come back on you. Everyone's connected to everyone else. So you've got to ascertain who someone is before you do a hit on him. Because if you hit an important person, you know, you're going to get hit. So you don't want to be a nobody in prison, though, because then you can get killed for 50 bucks.

Happens all the time. There was one guy towards the end of my sentence that they tried to kill him. They tried to poison him. They tried to hang him. And I think they killed him in the end. And some of the guys I was sat with in the chow all ended up for the death penalty. Yeah, whof, man. I'm guessing I know the answer to this question,

but do you think prison rehabilitates people at all? I'm guessing you didn't see a whole lot of that in there? I mean, it sounds like you had a life-changing experience, but it wasn't because of what you did. It wasn't because of them torturing everybody in prison. Because I'm a self-starter with good family support and an education, I maximized the situation in terms of education and writing all these stories down.

for these books. But in general, what I saw is it's someone comes in who's young, perhaps, misguided for a lower level of fence. Even if it was like weed back then was almost a million the rest of year. They click up with the gang because they're going to think their booty's going to get taken.

They're terrified. The gang puts all these neo-Nazi tattoos on them, gets them on heroin. If you put a swastker on someone's forehead and they go for a job interview, coming right back to the gang. Yeah. The jail knows if they allow,

it to be gang and drug-infested mayhem, they're coming back to the jail. As soon as they come back to the jail, it was $60,000 a year per person of taxpayers' money to house that person. So by allowing it to be drug and gang-infested mayhem, giving them $50 on the gate when they get released and have a nice day, they know they're coming right back. It keeps the gang in business and it keeps the jailing business. That's horrifying. I mean, you mentioned everybody you blogged about went back to prison, everybody. They all do, yeah, or they die. Or they die, yeah. And we have barely scratched the surface of how horrible this place was. You mentioned there's disease guys with hepatitis C and open sores doing food prep. There's one scene where, it's already going to get

demonetized. There's one scene that I physically had to fast forward because I couldn't listen. This has never happened to me in the history of listening to anything. The transgender woman in prison who decided to cut out her own testicles, I actually felt sick and I thought I was going to throw it. And again, I am not that guy who's like, oh, I can't listen to this. I could not. listen to that. I had to skip through it, but I got enough of the gist of it. That was the only book in my entire life where I was like, I can't listen to this, I can't listen to this account of cutting off your own balls. In the book prison time, we put the entire letter from that trans prison in the, and it's excruciating detail what she did. I mean, I can give a summary if you want for the

listener. Yeah, yeah, a little sneak preview of what it's like to cut your own testicles out. So this prisoner wakes up one morning, drinks a couple of, a coffee, no painkillers whatsoever, she's got a Mosby's medical dictionary, felt tip pan, draws lines on a scrotum, where she's going to get the razor blade on. I'm already feeling it. Cut the scrotum open. The testes are on branches called Vazdeferens and the spomatic cord. So she goes to one side and starts to sever through this branch and this spomatic cord. I probably should say, don't listen to this if you have kids in the car or you're about to eat, but I think I'm already too late.

One testicle comes off. The other testicle must know what's about to happen and retracts inside this person's body. Oh, my God. So now she's had to put her hand into her guts to try and find this other testicle. And she's like feeling mushy things and organs and stuff. And there's testicles, it's frightened. There's nowhere to be found, yeah. So where she's got it tied off to stop the blood comes undone.

Blood starts spraying multiple feet across this cell. She realizes this is a one-shot deal now, and the pain's starting to kick in. She's still scrambling around with the mushy inside, trying to find the testicle and having no. And more and more blood's coming out, and she's losing consciousness. and in the end another prisoner spots her and she gets a heli evacked to a hospital where they save her life she was on suicide watch for a year and then she cut the other one off and what she said to me was she feels as if she is a woman trapped in a man's body

sure and by stopping the testosterone and getting the estrogen smuggled in she feels more at peace with herself that prisoner was released after 30 plus years just over a year ago I think and she contacted me and I sent her some money to try and help her, but she was institutionalized, didn't understand technology, didn't understand the internet. Yeah. Depressed and decided to commit suicide by cop. And she went out and robbed a store and just stayed there and threw the money on the floor.

And when the cop's gone, she just pulled a gun on them and they shot her dead. That's truly awful. Truly awful. Yeah, I really sad. I really sympathize with somebody like that who, yeah. I mean, that's, imagine being at that point in your life. That's really, really, really terrible. Man, I mean, I assume you have changed your.

mind about the effects of drugs and they're not so fun anymore, right? I scare the living daylights out of school kids now with talks. Yeah. Go in. You scare living daylights out of adults. Just letting you know that is the effect of this podcast, especially that last story. Some of the stories you've heard today, the kids here, like the gangs, the cockroaches, the food, the bed sores, the heat, the itchiness.

And even the cocky ones, by the time I get into all this stuff, they're on the edge of their seats. Yeah. And the teachers tell me the kids who stay behind and ask the most questions are the hardest to reach students. Yeah. And I get emailed some kids years later. Saying, you know, I was backpacking in an evening

and I saw you locked up a broad episode. I thought I would email you and tell you that when you came to my school, I was on a bit of a bad path. Yeah. And I decided that to go down that road. And thanks to your talk, you know, my life has probably turned out in a different way.

And that's what it's about, isn't it? Yeah, that's so great. Yeah, they're backpacking. In Indonesia, they're not in their third prison stint or their third jail stings. One kid was so inspired she went on to do a criminology degree at Winchester University, and the parents invited me to the graduation. That's amazing. I assume Winchester is that in the United States?

No, yeah. Oh, because I was going to say you couldn't go if it was in the United States. I was deported and banned for life from America in 2007. Sure. Yeah, so you can only attend. I assume the talks you give in the United States are on Zoom. No, I don't do any talks in the United States. I'm banned.

I just figured they could have you Zoom. in. Well, no one's inviting me yet. No, okay, not yet. I mean, it's only a matter of time now, geez. Do you think you traded one addiction for another? Because you do mention you go to the gym multiple times per day, you do yoga and all that stuff. All right.

One's healthier than the other. When I was in the last two or three years of the incarceration, I had this brilliant therapist called Dr. Owen in prison time. And he was into Eastern philosophy and his thing was, you know, you're reading all these books, Epictetus, Orelius, all this stuff. come in with your best quotes and we'll discuss them in the context of how you can use them

in your life. It's like Ryan Holiday. You know Ryan Holiday? No. He writes about all this doses. I'm surprised you don't have all those books. I'd like him. Yeah.

So I was reading all the originals and he said to me, Sean, if you've got an addictive personality, adrenaline junkie like you, you've got to view it as energy. you were choosing to put your energy into these negative addictions, you know, racing around in my car, high and crystal meth, hanging out all these gangs, there's all this stuff that got me killed. What he said, you know, if that rave music kicks in, you get that. But what he said, when those moments happen,

he's put a circuit breaker in my head. I realize now it's just energy, and I can choose to take that energy and put it into positive activity. So I've got my yoga, my gym, jogging, swimming, and all the other stuff. And that's what I do, and that's what keeps me saying.

I think a lot of people fall back on pills from doctors. Yeah. We are hunter-gatherers, two-thirds of the human body is designed for movement. If you're not moving, you're destabilizing the physical, which destabilizes the mental. I've done four or five TED talks now,

and one of them is how, what facing 200 years taught me about happiness, and the other one is on overcoming fear and anxiety. We'll link those on the show notes. Yeah, and it's all about doing physical stuff to get those endorphins cascade, instead of being wrapped up depressed and releasing the cortisol. Yeah, yeah.

You talk about your release and it's like, you were like an alien when you got out of there. Can't, couldn't eat regular foot. Tell me about when you get at, like, how do you sort of go, I'm back in society now? You said you were asking permission to use the bathroom on the airplane? They're just laughing at you. If you want to use the clip from my channel of me

getting picked up from the airport by my parents where I'm all stabbled out and bug-eyed and I'm hugging my mom and sister and they're crying. And then we're in the car afterwards, and my sister is explaining what texting is. And you can see, looking at my face, this guy looks like he's come out of some Siberian... Castaway.

It's like Tom Hanks and Castaway. Solzhenitsyn. Yeah. Evan Donosovich. Jeez. Yeah. So you type the message into the phone and it flies through the air

and lands in someone else's phone? How does that work? I'm seeing all these like kids on the streets with phones and stuff, like what's going on? Yeah. They took me for Indian food. And I tried... Chicken, Teika masala, my former favorite book.

Because of the red deaf mystery meat slop, I had flashbacks and I couldn't eat it. Couldn't eat it. I've stayed vegetarian ever since. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I went back to my hometown. Went to the fish and chips shop to try and order a curry and chips. I couldn't understand the broad accent in my hometown. They had to bring someone out from the back who talked to me very slowly like I was a nut job to get my order in.

Your own hometown accent? I couldn't understand my own hometown accent. I've been gone for 17 years. So you could only understand American... So when I got to America, I talked like this. E. Buy, Gum, Love, fish, chips and peas, and salt and vinegar. But I had to change how I speak. I'm not sure what you just said.

I heard salt and vinegar. Americans were coming up to me asking me, hey, are you Australian man? Yeah. Things like that. I speak the way I do now, because when I went to America, especially working on the phones, I had to be clear fast to make money and to chat up chicks. Yeah, there's a thing with the English accents that goes, it starts off and it hits peak charming

and after that you just don't understand what the person is saying. Yeah. And the further north you go, the harder it is for us to understand what you're talking about. Try Glasgow, we've just been to Glasgow. But by the time you get to Sheffield,

I'm going, wait, say that again? Say that again? It was surreal going from my hometown and in my parents' house. Some of you blood thins or thickens when you're in the desert. But back in cold old England, I had two, like, 20 tog duvays

wrapped around. your beanie in all my clothes, and I was still shivering at night trying to sleep. Yeah, and your friends are all out in shorts and t-shirts. That's what it's like moving to California. My dad's like, what happened to you, man? I'm like, I don't know. It's never below 65 degrees during the daytime. I need jackets.

But just being able to walk down a high street and buy a banana was the heights of ecstasy for me. I bet. You're just going around, blist out for days. Yeah. It doesn't last, but some of it are still lasted. I appreciate sleep. I appreciate food. I appreciate giving my mom a hug.

I appreciate having a good relationship with my partner. I've had a baby now, nine-month-old baby, just for you, man. And one of the things that two Tony's taught me actually because one of his favorite books was a day in the life of Ivan Donovic where they're fighting over fish eyeballs in the soup to try and stay alive in the gulag.

Where if you refuse to work, you're hung from a tree or dragged to death by a horse or thrown off a cliff, where their noses and ears are falling off because of frostbri. When anyone complained about anything where I was housed, two tonies would laugh.

You're complaining because your breakfast's cold. Ivan was fighting over fish eyeballs in the soup. There's always someone worse off. So now I've got that yardstick for the rest of my life, whereby no matter what happens, I'm not in a cell facing 200 years with cockroach. She's trying to crawl over me at night time. Nothing can ever get as bad as that.

That's true. Yeah, yeah. Do you ever miss anything about prison? Like, maybe even just the people. Yeah, totally. I totally miss the camarader. When you're going through something as intense as that with people, as much as I can describe it to you,

they're the only people who can truly understand it. You can kind of like sense some of it, but they understand it because they were there with me. It's like you're bonded for life with those people. And that's why I pledge through my activism or blog to keep campaigning for human rights. I'm not saying prisons should be holiday camps, but give them rehabilitation, give them job skills,

Give them education like the Scandinavians do. We've got the lowest crime and reoffending in the world. But hey, when the private prison contracts are in the tens of billions a year, when Corrections Corporation of America was boasting its annual report to their shareholders, our profit growth is guaranteed because they keep coming back. There's no interest in rehabilitating them in America. And it's an evil system to have companies profiting in. and lobbying for laws that house kids who are out,

taking drugs, who need some guidance, who need some mentorship, and those kids getting thrown into an environment where they're scared of getting butt-raped, so they're joining neo-Nazi gang, and they become a heroin addict, and they're a client for the state for the rest of the lives. It's absolutely evil and disgusting.

Yeah, it's really horrifying. I mean, I knew prison was bad. I never heard anything that's as bad as what you wrote about in your books, to the point where I was questioning, I was, this can't be real. This can't be real. But then, you know,

when I tried to verify stuff about the prison, it all came up again in court cases, came up again in people who had gotten out of there, came up in testimony. So if you fabricated it, you backed it up better than anybody I've ever seen. Let me say one more thing of that. Sure.

Some of the most extreme stories I've told you today pertains a prison rape. Yeah. And there was an act introduced called a prison rape elimination. act, Pria. And under Pria, they had to start teaching the prisoners how not to get raped. So you go to a class, you get a little piece of paper under your door, rape class today. And you go to the class, Jesus.

And you watch a video, and there are predators. And basically, the young people come in, they're hungry, the new arrivals. If they take food from the predators, like the Snickers barren of the pillow wherever it is, then the predator comes and says later on, you've got to pay for it. now. Well, I'm going to pay for it? Got no money. Well, then you're going to get stabbed up unless you go in that cell and do it where that guy says. Oh, man. And once they do that, they turned out, they rented out as prison prostitutes, they're punks, there's no coming back from it. The conclusion of the rape class was, to stop rape, you have to report it. If you report

anything, you're a snitch, K-OS. A young prisoner was raped right after the rape class, no reported a single thing. Sure. So don't eat the Snickers bar. At least of your concerns, though, at that point, I guess. Jeez. Don't eat the Snickers bar, kids. Better yet, stay out of prison. Keep your day jobs, folks. Don't get gangsteritis. That's whereby you've watched too many movies like Scarface.

It ends in the prison, police, death, the nut house. My mother-in-ever-ne-vers break down. My sister-sats have counselling. Most of my mates are dead. I'm glad to meet you in person, alive and well, man. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for coming out to London to do this. and I really appreciate your openness and, of course, your time.

Really appreciate you having me on, brother. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you. Here's a preview of my conversation with Danny Trejo. An ex-con turned icon featured in over 350 films and TV shows. You've seen them everywhere in machete, Breaking Bad, Desperado, and much, much more. He's never been through acting school, which doesn't matter when you're a legend slash icon.

Before becoming such a prolific star, Danny Trejo was a drug-addicted criminal hooked on heroin at age 12, who spent more than a decade in and out of prisons. Once you start doing robberies and you're using heroin, the robberies become addicted. You don't know whether you're doing robberies to support your drug habit or doing drugs to support your robbery habit. I read you robbed a store with a hand grenade. This was later on. This was like we did a robbery and we ended up with this hang grenade.

So I tried it, and it was very simple. You know, when you hold a hangar grenade and you got your hand on the pin and you ask somebody for some money, they think twice. Prison, there's only two kinds of people in prison. There's predators and they're prey. That's it. And you've got to decide every damn morning, what are you going to be? And I know a lot of people that decide I'm brave. I don't care because I'm tired.

I know a lot of people that took an elevator off the fifth year. There's no elevator. I know a lot of people that cut their wrists. I've seen guys with all the muscles in the world get stabbed by a short Mexican in tennis shoes with a big knife you know, you're fighting I don't fight you

that's prison prison has a taste put one of those fake pennies the lead one in your mouth and keep it there that's the taste of pressure that's the taste of anxiety that's the taste of fear

that's the taste of everything you feel it that's just to walk around with and when you finally lose that taste You've decided whether you're going to be predator prey. That's the only way you can lose it. For more, including how Danny Trejo walked onto a Hollywood movie set as a drug counselor and left as a bona fide actor,

and how Danny Trejo has managed sobriety for over 50 years and continues to help others maintain theirs. Check out episode 398 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Foo, folks, I told you this one was a ride. Sean is a great dude. I don't want people to think that he's like still some sort of menace to society or like a bad person. This man is living a great life in the UK. He's a generous soul.

He came a long way just to sit in studio with me and tell his story to us. He's just a good dude. I know that a lot of you might not believe that based on his story, but I really didn't get any sort of vibes from him. This is not a violent criminal. This is a guy. Well, you know, you judge for yourself. But I really enjoyed this conversation. I think Sean is just a mensch.

So I'm glad that we were able to have this conversation. and get his absolutely bonkers story out to you all as well. All things Sean will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You're going to want to check out his YouTube channel and stuff like that if you're into what he's created. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show. All at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals, please consider supporting those who support this podcast.

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and apply it right away. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a really good companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, well, it's created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Fee for this show, it's that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. You can share it with enemies, too. I really don't care. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share

the show with those you care about or strongly dislike, once again. And if you know somebody who would just really enjoy a story like this, or maybe they think that they're going to get away with some sort of minor crime and prisons not that bad, you might want to, this is a good episode to share with them for many reasons. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews

because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.