The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - How Arthur Rapkin Survived Mexican Prison & Life As A Drug Trafficker Turned Healer

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

#726: Today we're sitting down with Arthur Rapkin, a former drug smuggler, author, musician, Bob Dylan impersonator, Chinese medicine practitioner, and survivor of torture in a Mexican prison. In the late 60’s, he ventured into the dangerous world of drug trafficking cocaine and was subsequently apprehended in Mexico where he then spent time in a Mexican prison. He tells us his wild story as a self-made outlaw whose misdeeds ultimately influenced U.S. drug trafficking policy, and led to his life-changing personal transformation. To connect with Arthur Rapkin click HERE   To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE To Watch the Show click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential Head to the HIM & HER Show ShopMy page HERE to find all of Michael and Lauryn’s favorite products mentioned on their latest episodes.   This episode is brought to you by Nutrafol Nutrafol is the #1 dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement, clinically shown to improve your hair growth, thickness, and visible scalp coverage. Go to nutrafol.com and use code SKINNYHAIR to save $10 off your first month's subscription, plus free shipping.   This episode is brought to you by Squarespace From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Go to squarespace.com/skinny for a free trial & use code SKINNY for 10% off your first purchase of a website domain.   This episode is brought to you by CORT Furniture Build your own furniture rental package today at cort.com/podcast   This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog It's never been easier to invest in your dog's health with fresh food. Get 50% off your first box & free shipping by going to thefarmersdog.com/skinny   This episode is brought to you by Alastin Visit www.alastin.com/skinny for 10% off your ALASTIN purchase with code SKINNY   This episode is brought to you by Cotton: The Fabric of our Lives   Cotton is The Fabric of Now. Learn more at TheFabricOfOurLives.com   Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her.

Aha! I had the good fortune of having an extraordinary life, and I wouldn't change anything because I didn't know better at the time. You know, I didn't know that cocaine was going to turn into what it turned into. I didn't know anything, and I thought that what I did was, you know, for the most part, I had a lot of good times. But what I did realize was that going after more money and going after fancy cars and all this stuff, I didn't value human relationships very much. I didn't understand how some people could be happy with little to nothing. But I realized now that if I had to do anything different, it would have been in valuing human relationships and more kindness and compassion.

Today, we have an incredible episode with someone who has one of the wilder stories we have heard on this podcast, and that is Arthur Rapkin. Arthur Rapkin recently wrote a book called Poison for Rats, Six Kilos That Changed Everything. And it begins with Arthur being pulled off the tarmac on a first-class flight in Mexico City. He was then immediately brought to a Mexican jail and interrogated, actually even being tortured, having the tip of his finger cut off, and then spending a year in Mexican prison. He was one of the original US drug traffickers in the 70s, before all the things that we've all seen now on Narcos and subsequently. And this is just a wild story. And it's a true story. This is a no holds barred conversation.

We asked all the questions we were curious about. Arthur did not hold back. And it's also a story of redemption and how he later became a doctor and a healer and it's just crazy how this is a real story and how someone's life can take so many twists and turns and that honestly he even survived to tell it so for those of you that are looking for a great story looking for something a little bit different than what we typically deliver on this show looking for a little bit of a human connection and understanding of how somebody can get into this trade this one is for you with. With that, Dr. Arthur Rapkin, welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her show. This is The Skinny Confidential, him and her.

I picked up a lot of checks, you know, in restaurants and stuff and had a Rolls Royce, so I was a legend in my own mind, a master criminal. But in prison, I realized what real criminality was. And I decided I'm not one of these guys. I don't want to be in for a year or two or three or four and then get out for a year or two and then back in. You know, when you're a criminal, I mean, crime pays. You know, we're rolling right now. And I'm going to leave all that in there because I think it's a good way to open it. There's a quote that you have here.

It says, if you're going to be bad, be real bad. I always feel like if you really want to be bad, be really bad. And what specifically do you mean by that? And I guess what led you to kind of think that way? I would say that a lot of my mentors were guys that weren't necessarily criminals, but they were hustlers. And hustlers in the day, back in the day in the 60s and 70s, didn't have the same connotation as it does today. Hustlers and hustling in those days usually was a connotation that was attributed to people who were doing things off the beaten path, off the norm, you know, ticket scalpers, guys who fenced stolen goods, people who sold siding. I was with a group

of guys that were siding salesmen and learned a lot from them. They were all hustlers and they didn't work for, they didn't have a salary. They weren't on payroll. If they didn't really make sales every day, then they weren't able to provide for themselves or their families. And those were the people that they were much older than I was, because I was out of school by 10th grade. I no longer was in high school. I hung out with these guys at a restaurant called Mark's Big Boy, which I think in California was called Bob's Big Boy. Oh, yeah. Wait, which was first, Mark's or Bob's? I think Bob's was first, and Mark's was in Wisconsin. It was owned by the Marcus family. And so it was called Mark's Big Boy. And that's where these guys were in the mornings when other

kids my age were in school. I would go to the restaurant and hang out with siding salesmen and it was just a whole culture of hustlers. Do you remember your first hustle as a kid? I was with this guy named, we called him the Schmutz, his name was Joe Solacek and he was the Schmutz because he always had a little something on his face or his tie. And he had a black Cadillac and he was a sighting guy. And he used to say, you know, Artie, Artie, successful guys are done by noon. Then we golf. One day he said, come with me, come with me. We'll go see what I do.

And I got into his Cadillac with him. And it was another guy in the back, Ronnie Plotkin, who, Ronnie Plotkin, who made a custom shirts with monogram sleeves, which I actually had one at 17, monogrammed dress shirt. And we went to a house that needed, you know, some work done to it. Joe got out of the car and Ronnie set up a tripod on the front lawn at the house with a camera. And Joe went to the door and told them that he showed him credentials that he was from Life Magazine. And he had Life Magazine with him and he showed them an article. And, you know, Life Magazine was a big magazine in the day. Showed him an article about a house that was all redone.

And he said that he was choosing, if they wanted, we were going to choose their house as the next one for Life Magazine. And if they decided to do it, they would get 50% off. And so she called her husband, Fred, and we went in and sat on the couch or on the coffee table. And he said, I was his son out of school for the day. And they bought the siding job for $2,500. And we got back in the car and Joe looked at me. That's when he said, Artie, successful guys are done by noon. Let's go golfing. And a short time after that, within a year, I actually went to Leo Lieberman's print shop,

which was the print shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and designed a press card with photos in the book. And the name of the company that I made up was Syndicated News International. And I used that press card to get into every concert. The first one was the Young Rascals. And I'll never forget, I was in the bedroom, in the hotel room of Felix Cavalieri,

the leader of the group. And in those years, there were no credit cards and there were no ticket masters. And so all the box office was all cash. It was like $200,000 that they were counting out on the bed. And I was sitting there with a little tape recorder as if I was really a news correspondent. And I just did that to hang out. So that was probably the first thing I can think of. So is this how it starts, I guess, in the world of crime? It starts kind of like small, kind of maybe harmless things where you're kind of sneaking to things and then you kind of get a taste for maybe a faster life and you start to want to do more? Is that kind of what happens? I would say that, you know, I never really wanted to be like my father who was a furniture salesman

who took the bus home from work. I didn't want to be like the other kids in school where they'd ask Tommy, what did he want to be? And he was wanting to be a fireman or a policeman. When I was young, there were TV shows on Saturday morning. One of them was called Soldiers of Fortune. And it was about two guys dressed in safari suits. And, you know, every week they had some new action that was cool. And then there was Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon went from planet to planet and he landed on this planet called Mongo. And there was an emperor of Mongo called Ming. And Ming used to kidnap this really good looking woman who was on the spaceship with Flash. And then he would have her on a slab, like a ritual, like he was going to sacrifice her to the lions and stuff. Today, it would probably be a little different spin on that.

Flash would come in and rescue her and all this. And so then there was Tarzan, you know, a remarkable white man who was the only person in the jungle who could communicate with animals, none of the natives did, but he swung around and did. And for some reason, I wanted to live out of that imaginary thinking. You know, someone created those shows out of their imagination, immigrants from other countries who own the studios. And they created those shows, including the White Picket Fence and Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. And I really wanted to live out of this imaginary type of thinking, I believe.

And I didn't think about that or realize that until I wrote the book. You mentioned off air about how something that you were really good at is you were good at being clever. When do you remember knowing that? Was that an awareness that you had when you were young? It was about last week. You know, the book was, I've done a lot of therapy in my life and the book was the greatest therapy to get to know myself and to figure out really who I am and what my life was really about because it was so different than anybody else that I knew. People used to take bets that I wouldn't live to 30. They did a lot of betting that I wouldn't do this or I wouldn't do that. And the idea that I'm talking about, the therapeutic thing, was trying to really delve into what made me do these things,

right? I mean, we all know people that at one time when we were teenagers thought about growing pot in their attic or basement, right? But that didn't mean they all did it. You know, so when I was 19 and a half years old, I went to Cartagena, Colombia to hack my way through the jungles and be an adventurer and soldier of fortune. And it's kind of weird to think about what drove a suburban Jewish kid to do that. Did you have a good family upbringing? It was weird. I would say that it was an average except for when I was seven years old and my parents told me that out she wasn't killed in a car accident, that

she was alive and had married a black police officer by the name of Burt Lancaster. And you're probably, I don't know if you're old enough to remember who Burt Lancaster is, but that was his name. And because my parents couldn't handle that. They couldn't handle that he was black? I think that that was it. And I also think she might've done a few other things that I don't handle that. They couldn't handle that he was black? I think that that was it and I also think she might have done a few other things that I don't know about maybe maybe had to do with writing bad checks or I don't know but all I know is when I was 16 and I discovered that she was not

dead and she was alive I called her my zombie sister. So I think that was a little bit unusual in a family upbringing. Other than that, I think it was pretty usual. When you found out she was alive, what was the first thing you did? Well, I went looking for her. I went into the actual inner city and, you know, in those years, it wasn't frequent where there were mixed marriages. So I went into the inner city where I kind of heard the general area where she might be living and I asked people I said well do you know do you know where there's a family where there's the white wife and a black husband and finally I found the duplex that they lived in. They actually asking several people and I went there and rang the doorbell. What happened? Her kids answered the door, and I went there and rang the doorbell. What happened?

Her kids answered the door, and then I went up and saw my sister and reunited with her, and it was, you know, it was pretty strange. And later, I never really thought about this at the time, but later I realized that I was the only person in the world who thought that she was dead, because, you know, family knew she wasn't dead. The community knew she wasn't dead. Everybody knew the reality. They just kept it from you. Except for me. And again, that's something that came through in a therapeutic way for me while writing the book was realizing that I was the only one. So I didn't really know

it back then. How does one decide at your age, I'm going to go to Columbia? I was playing poker with a couple of friends. One's name was Howie and Howie had a drug dealing business where he would sell pot and hash i'm talking about like 1968 and uh every month or so these characters would show up that had really cool clothes one of them's name was steve and the other one's name was sunny they weren't always together but it seemed like they came into town and when when they were in town that, you know, they would drop off their hash and whatever they were smuggling heroin to Howie. We were playing poker and I showed some interest in smuggling. It was like, you know, these guys are smugglers. I actually had a karate school at the time. So I was pretty straight. I had a band, I played in the band and, uh, was a musician, but I, I wasn't making any money and nobody really cared about karate.

So it was difficult to pay the rent, but Howie always had money and would pick up the check at the Chinese restaurants or wherever we went, and that was kind of a, an interesting lure to me and another guy named Tom who lived upstairs of me in the duplex, who was this Irish guy who was really crazy. The two of them worked together. So we were playing poker. I won a Citron Maserati off of Sonny during the game. And then I said, I wanted to be a smuggler. I'd like to be a smuggler. How do you get to be a smuggler? What do you have to do?

And he told me, well, you know, the new thing is going to be cocaine. I never really heard of cocaine. And it's in the late 60s. Yeah, like 69, maybe early 70. And I didn't know anybody who had cocaine. I didn't know anybody who did cocaine. Everybody that I knew was doing things like 70. And I didn't know anybody who had cocaine. I didn't know anybody who did cocaine. Everybody

that I knew was doing things like angel dust, LSD, mushrooms, marijuana. So he said, you get that in Columbia or you could get it in Bolivia. But if you go to Columbia, that's where you can get it. So I made up my mind to go to Columbia. And Steve said he knew somebody who had bought down there. And if I was interested, he would arrange that that person could possibly meet me and make the introduction so I wouldn't get robbed. And with that in mind, I made plans and actually went to Cartagena, Columbia. Do you at any point think that you going to Colombia was kind of like a fuck you to your parents because they had lied to you about something so intense

and then they kind of kept it? No. No, I had done things like I actually performed in concert as Bob Dylan. Wow. At 17 years old. I was a musician and I used to do a solo act in coffee shops, they called them, where beatniks would snap their fingers after a song and it was just about turning into hippies. And I didn't have a real good singing voice, but I had a voice that sounded just like Bob Dylan. Andylan and you know in those years

it was before mtv uh and nobody really knew what people looked like they just heard the music on the radio a guy that sold guitars in a guitar store said to me you know we could promote you as bob dylan and actually sell tickets and make some money and i I thought, oh, okay. So I had the actual guts and courage to go up on a stool and perform for a couple thousand people as Bob Dylan. So I did that. Then in the martial arts arena, I had a sensei, a martial arts instructor who convinced me I could, there was this Japanese martial artist who his legend was that he had fought a bull and he killed the bull by chopping its horn off at the base of the skull. And so, you know, I was a young guy, very impressed with my master who

really was a well-known karate master in Chicago, who had been involved in a lot of crazy, what they called dojo wars of Chicago. And actually there were some deaths involved in those wars, in the dojo wars. And anyway, so he convinced me that I could fight the bull. And so I was going to fight the bull. I really believed it. And I was working and chopping bricks. So I had done these things. So it wasn't like going to Columbia was the first really off the wall escapade for me. And I had been successful in the other endeavors. When it sounds like too, this is early enough.

This is before the drug trade really heats up and you start having people getting in a lot of trouble for it, right? If this is early, it didn't, drug smuggling didn't, I don't think it's what people are thinking later on, you know, especially when narcos and stuff comes out and they see how, you know, the DA and everybody got involved. But this was, it sounds like it was early enough where like nobody really knew what was going on. Yeah, exactly. There, there was no bad connotation. It was, this came out of the times where, for instance, I had been living in San Francisco in 69. And, and in those years, you know, you'd be listening in Golden Gate Park to

the Jefferson airplane and somebody would be standing next to you and they would open their hand and there'd be some capsules and pills and you could take whatever you wanted to. Nobody was selling drugs really. And so it was not a lot of money in it at the time. No, it was like sharing the, you know, they always call it the time of love. And so people would get high and want to share that feeling. And it wasn't about selling anything. And when I went to Columbia, it was kind of that type of thinking. When you landed in Columbia, what was the first thing you did? Checked into a hotel. Nobody spoke English except the manager who spoke a little English.

And I asked him if he knew where I could, I wanted to go to see a marijuana cocaine farm. Is that normal to ask there or is that weird? I thought it was legal there, but it, and he looked at me and went, and, uh, I thought, well, that's it. And I went and told my girlfriend who was waiting for me in the, in the restaurant. I said, you know, I think I just blew it. The funny thing is about two hours later, the manager comes walking in there and he's got a guy with him who's wearing a University of Georgia, I think, sweatshirt. And his name was Roberto. And he said, oh, Roberto will take you to nightclubs and get

you anything you want, you know, if you want to have a good time. So we arranged that night to go to a nightclub with Roberto. And we're in Cartagena, Colombia. It's like being in Miami Beach. We're driving down this road with palm trees. And Roberto's in the front passenger seat and he's got a driver and we're in the back seat and he, he asked me, he looks over the seat and he says, you know, where, where are you from? And I knew he wouldn't know about Milwaukee. So I said, well, you know, near Chicago.

And he goes, Ooh, cold air. He said, oh yeah, it gets colder. Hmm, snow? Oh yeah, we get a lot of snow there. And then he said, we have snow here. And I looked at my girlfriend, Paula. I said, you believe it? It snows here?

And she elbowed me and said, not that kind of snow, you fool. And that's really how I got my contact because the guy that Steve said would introduce me never showed up. So what, I'm so curious about what the micro moments of getting into this business are, meaning like, do you go and buy $200 of cocaine and just start selling it small? Do you buy a way bigger amount? Does he give you it and let you do it on consignment? How does it work? In case I need a career change? Yeah. Because again, you were saying right before we got on air that at this time or roughly around this time, you're having million dollar years, one, two million dollar years at a time where like that, I don't think, I mean,

there's inflation now, a lot of inflation. I don't think people understand how much money that is in the 70s contextually. So how does one get there, I guess? What's the first brick? Well, the first buy was, I think, it was less than $2,000. I remember being in this nightclub and Roberto introduced me to a guy who took me into the bathroom and he opened up this little envelope and with his little finger, he did a sniff and then he offered me a sniff. And we went back to the table. He spoke no English and Roberto spoke, I wouldn't call it really good English, but he spoke some English. And, you know, he said, would I like to buy some? And, uh, I didn't know it at the time, but you know, he meant that I want a gram or something because he was really a tour

guy. That's what he did for a living. Uh, and I said, yeah, I'd like to buy some. And he said, well, how much would you like? And I said, I don't know, like a couple pounds. And he just kept a straight face, but he had never done anything like that. And so he said, okay. And I had to front him the money and he went to Barranquilla, Colombia, which is through the jungles in another city. I had to wait overnight. He was supposed to come like back in four or five hours, but it was overnight in the next day day and he did come back and he did bring it and so i took it back to the united states and i just remember about three months went by and i had like seven or eight thousand dollars on my kitchen table what did airport security look like at this

point well in columbia they had terrorists which you know, I've only heard a terrorist in Ireland when I grew up. They, and then I, these terrorists in Columbia that were kind of like the terrorists in Cuba before Fidel Castro, he was, you know, led the terrorists, but so they had all armed soldiers that would search you before you got on the plane. But I had put the cocaine into a Right Guard deodorant can and into an Aquanet hairspray can. Now in those years, aerosols were new. So if you wanted to go from a roll-on deodorant, which was the norm, to the new Right Guard,

you know, basically everybody had Right Guard in their medicine chest. So when I used these right guard cans and configured a way to, I tore the tops off of them and then I took them down there empty and then put new tops on and glued them with Elmer's glue. I just kept my fingers crossed that I was going to go through Miami customs carrying it in a carry-on bag with my syndicated news international press pass, which was right next to my, you don't even need a passport. In those years, you only needed a driver's license.

So it was a very naive time. It wasn't what we think of today about cocaine. That's why I wanted to ask. They weren't looking for any drugs coming from Colombia. But when you have pounds, you said pounds of cocaine, and it fit perfectly? To me, how did you get all of that cocaine over there? The right-guard cans were 13 ounces, and 13 ounces, believe it or not, of white powder fit in there. And the Aquanet can was one pound, 16 ounces. Look at that. That's exactly what it is.

I know, that's why I asked you. You could put the 16 ounces in and you could put the 13 ounces. And then I had my girlfriend, Paula, so she had Aquanet and Right Guard. And so we came back with those cans and our carry-on bags. They never opened the bags in Miami Customs.

Didn't open the zippers. So we made it back. And that's, you know, think about, I've thought about this. If I would have had somebody rob me in Columbia and take my money and not come with the stuff, that would have been my last trip. If I would have been killed in Columbia and take my money, that would have been my last trip. But it was a successful trip and I made it through Miami Customs without them opening the bag. So after my friend, Tom, the crazy Irishman that lived upstairs, who was a really well-known bartender in Milwaukee, he knew how to give it away until people wanted more. And so when I had like $12,000 on my kitchen

table, I took that and I went back to Columbia. It was about three months I had like $12,000 on my kitchen table, I took that and I went back to Columbia. It was about three months later, spent $12,000 with Roberto, came back. And then I remember having $67,000 on my kitchen table. And then I took the $67,000 and went back and then it became 350,000. And then that, you know, it escalated over about, I would say maybe a little over a year to where I was going down there with 150,000 and buying a kilo of cocaine for $5,000. And so at this point in time, to give people some context, how big or small is the drug trade in the U S is this before Escobar?

Is this before many of the things that people have seen, you know, later adapted to television? Or is this around the time now? No, it was before. There were no cartels. Colombia wasn't really growing cocaine. They were buying it from Bolivia

and Peruvian sources and from Chile. And then they were the closest country toward, you know, North America. So people would go there to buy the cocaine, but they weren't manufacturing it until they realized we should be manufacturing it instead of buying it and smuggling it in from other countries. So it was just a very naive time. Nobody had, for instance, when I came back with cocaine and I fronted it to somebody, what happened was after a short period of time, they got a better place to live. They had a nicer apartment or

house. They had a nicer car. They were able to not be struggling financially. Nobody had abused it as yet. So nobody realized that there was the dark side that was in the future. Nobody. I'm interested in the logistics and operations side. So when you're exponentially building the business and you're getting more and more money, do you have, it almost sounds like this is weird, but it sounds like you're building like this infrastructure of a business. You have the bartender, Tom doing the sales. You have your girlfriend helping you smuggle it. like it was their thought to the operations and how people were going to move yes as a matter of fact while we were using the aerosol cans i took my parents as couriers to south america they just thought they were getting a

vacation with their son art so the nice the nice little jewish family and my girlfriend's brother, he came down. And so now we were five of us. So, you know, we could carry a lot more. And then I had a friend in Estes Park. I had a home in Estes Park by then. I had a farm in Wisconsin, a home in Estes Park. I had a home in Sonoma, California. And this friend in Estes Park, I said, you know, I think cruises would be a good idea. And he said, you know, I think my mother might be interested. She lives in Texas and works at a department store in Dallas and makes like 6,500 a year. So I offered her 10,000 if she would take an all expense cruise for 10 days in the Caribbean. And when that cruise touched Cartagena, which was part of the itinerary, right?

Like wherever it went, Cartagena, Colombia was a tourist stop. I had Roberto, who was a tour guide, who had one of the buses. So when the 2,500 retirees got off the cruise, Roberto had a picture of Lily, and he would go, Lily? And she'd go, yeah, get on this bus. And then they would go to the Emerald Store,

and they would go to the monastery, and then they would go to the Del Caribe Hotel, which had a number of shops, and he would tell Lily, go up to room 212, Art's up there, Arturo. And she'd come up and I'd be in room 212. And I had gotten the cocaine in Bogota by then and brought it to Cartagena. And Lily would come up to the room, I would give her the cocaine. But while she was with the other people on the bus and they'd go to these different stops, they'd go to a store and then Lily would say, I'm looking for something

for my grandkids and my kids. And so Roberto would go, how about that nice Serapi? You know, the things like Clint Eastwood used to wear in the old Westerns. And she'd go, okay. Cause she knew she should do whatever he said. And so the shopkeeper with the pole would get it off right in front of, you know, 45 other retired people, take it off the wall, and then he would wrap it in a balsa, and then he would give it to Lily. Well, what everybody didn't realize was what he took off the wall wasn't what he handed to Lily. What he handed to Lily was wrapped already and prepared. So we moved from even going to my hotel room. I didn't even get near the stuff. And then it would be given to the courier. She would get back on the cruise. They never searched people who got back on the cruise because all they did was get off and buy t-shirts. Does Lily know that she's smuggling cocaine and do your parents know that they're smuggling cocaine and how are you putting something in your parents' luggage? Well, I just asked my parents to take this right guard and

Aquanet and we were using aerosols and put it in their bags and they knew I was doing something, you know, but I had been in a lot of trouble over the years. And so they knew that Arthur was doing something, but I said, listen, don't ask because I don't want you to know. Are they benefiting off the money? Yeah, I actually paid them each 10,000 and they got a condominium in West Palm Beach. Now, are you, are you dipping into your own supply? Yes. I had quite a good habit. The first time that I took the sniff, I realized that you felt exhilarated and had a good bowel movement. And so I got hooked.

Nowadays, it's so laced with baby laxatives and baby powder and all kinds of creatine, all this weird shit. Creatine? Yeah. Yeah? No. Yeah? Maybe I got to get there. I got to get up my creatine.

No, I just heard that it's like laced. At this point, when you're doing pure Colombian cocaine, it's probably real different, I would assume. I'm sure it is. I haven't been into it myself for quite a while. The stuff I was getting from Roberto, the way he was buying it because he wasn't really a dealer, was also somewhat cut, but it wasn't like anything you'd get in America. It still was by 75%. Then when I moved and went to Bogota, I got much closer to better sources. And that's where I started to meet guys who later would become cartel guys. That's when it started to, my next question was going to be,

when does this start to kind of heat up and maybe get more dangerous for you? It never was really too dangerous for me. I was very fortunate. You know, I had a charmed life. When I went to Bogota, I met a guy who really appreciated that I was going to take this stuff from his home and go to the United States and distribute it. And then I came back and bought three times as much. And then I came back, you know, three times a year and did that. And he didn't have to do anything except have it there. I recently put up a post on my Instagram. You can go see it. I'm wearing like a denim outfit. And I talked about my hair journey. And I feel really confident in talking about this because my hair went from not great to long, thick, full, no shedding, and no extensions. And it's been an exploration, let me tell you. This has been something that I have become a practitioner at,

is hair. I have really tried it all. And there's a couple of things that I do that I think have really helped. I obviously went from blonde to brunette, which has been life-changing. I microneedle my scalp. I do scalp massage. I also am not a big fan of washing my hair a lot. I probably wash it, I don't know, like three times a month. Sue me. And then I supplement. And the supplement that I use for my hair that has helped with hair thinning, shedding, and hair issues is Nutrafol. You guys have probably seen this brand everywhere. It's very popular. Nutrafol is the number one dermatologist-recommended this brand everywhere. It's very popular. Nutrafol is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement. It has over 1 million people seeing thicker, stronger, faster growing hair with less shedding. And I'm one of them. And this is something that I think is a really great supplement.

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If I had had this hack when I was in college, it would have really changed my life. I wish I had it. It is furniture rental. Okay. Say you're making a short-term long distance move, you're relocating, or you're starting a new chapter, or you just don't want to be tied down to owning furniture, court has the solution. This is absolutely incredible. Basically, furniture rental is going to change your life. It lets you lean into different eras of your life. I love this because I change my mind a lot and I like to switch things up. Sometimes I'm feeling not a lot of color. Sometimes I want to add a pop of color. And this is amazing because you can rent it, not own it. I think that sometimes you just want to move to a new city on a whim, but you don't want to have to bring your furniture across the country. Well, enter Quart. Quart makes it easy to furnish the space quickly and on your

own terms. You get white glove delivery, setup and assembly. So they come, they deliver everything, they set it up, they assemble it. It's almost like having like a boyfriend, like a honey-do list. And then they'll pick it all up when you're on to your next move. And then you could do like a whole new furniture situation. They also have this move-in ready package. And basically you receive free professional styling to ensure your home fits your needs. You give them a few details about your space and they do the rest. Build your own furniture rental package today at court.com. That's c-o-r-t.com slash podcast. How were you so high level with this if you were doing cocaine? I feel like if I, when I had fun in high school, I would feel like I got hit by a Mack truck the next morning.

Like, how are you able to function? I don't know because it got to a point in Estes Park, Colorado, where I was injecting it in my vein about 20 times a day. Wow. And so it was, I don't know the answer to that. And I look back, I really don't know. I hit the floor once and Paula, who by that time was my wife, she was going to call, you know, I don't even know if they had 911, but she was going to call for help. And I just thought I was going, I thought I was dying.

And I asked her to just stay with me and I and I just thought I was going. I thought I was dying, and I asked her to just stay with me, and I wanted to just, I was fine. I didn't want to have anybody come. And I didn't die, but I don't know, really. It got to the point where anytime I went to do a trip, I would just stop using for about six weeks prior to the trip. So you were able to sort of like be a functioning in a way. Yeah, I did. I, I, and I became very disciplined about that. And I turned into like a general patent when I was going to do a trip where I actually figured out every little,

everything, every detail about it. We used to have these, it was like an old telephone book in Los Angeles that were all the flights. And I'd figure out which flights and what day and what time and what was the best way to do this so that... By that time, I was already being investigated. So I wanted to keep my distance from everything. And I did. I took care of all the arrangements. I basically would arrange the buy, then I would have couriers take it to Cartagena, then they would have Roberto have them get off and on the boat. And then when it came into the country, I had distributors in Milwaukee, Chicago, Colorado, San Francisco, and it became a big, fairly big kind of family business. Talking to you and hearing you tell the stories about how this was exponentially growing in the money and how you would take, you know, three, six, whatever the numbers are, and you would leave those amounts and then go back and keep it growing. It sounds like a lot of this was partly the rush of maybe building the thing and doing the thing.

Absolutely. Right. Like not even having the money, but actually accomplishing the bigger sale or the bigger smuggle. Does that resonate at all? It was, it was a challenge. And really the money in those years, we didn't have anything like a counting machine. And so it was really a hassle to count all that money that was coming in in terms of it would come in in fives tens twenties fifties and you what we would do is we'd get a stack of like ten thousand that we counted and then we would just stack all the other money about that same heights it's like that scene from blow when

they're just sitting with all the with johnny dev have you seen that movie uh-huh when they're just sitting in the room with all the cash boxes and they're just that's what we yeah that's what we would do and it was the challenge and i had the intelligence division of the irs and the dea actually come to my house which was up outside of estes park and they came up and it was a snowstorm and they had to like trudge through. I didn't have a paved driveway or anything. And they came to the door to ask me some questions. And I foolishly thought it was a good idea to just pretend that there was nothing to hide. So I let them in and I had a young son, a little baby. His name is Josh. And I was heating a bottle and they came in and I handed them the baby while I was heating the bottle. And then they came in

and they said, you know, here I am up on top of the mountains and stuff. And I've got a Rolls Royce and a Citroen Maserati. They know that I'm doing this. How do they know? Because, you know, people would get busted. Let's say you were coming out of a nightclub at midnight and maybe you didn't stop for a stop sign or maybe you had a light out. And so you got stopped and you had some cocaine. And they would say, well, you know,

where's this cocaine coming from? And people would go, well, there's this guy named Art, Art Rapkin. He has a house in Cartagena, Colombia. He also has a house up in Estes Park. And, you know, so they heard my name through several different sources over the course of probably a couple of years. And I had an attorney who, uh, was sitting in this bar called someplace else in downtown Milwaukee. And it was a place downtown where it was right across from the federal building. And so at five o'clock, all the federal employees would hang out at this bar. And he heard in the booth next to him, them talking about this guy named Rapkin and cocaine. So he called me on the phone and said, you know, this is out of my league.

Now you need to have a different attorney. And he recommended this other attorney named Stanley because he heard them talking about that I hadn't filed a tax return. So if you can think about it, when I was 19 years old and I was in the karate and struggling, I could hardly pay my rent on my karate studio. And then a year later, I'm making all this money and foolishly buying cars and so forth. I never thought about filing taxes. I had never filed taxes in my life. And so it wasn't like I was trying to evade taxes. I just didn't think about it. And they were looking at that going,

well, wait a second. And they checked with Braniff Airlines. They're out of business now and Transworld Airlines. But they saw on their records that I'd fly from Miami to Cartagena, Miami to Bogota several times a year. And then they tracked where I was living. And they just, you know, these guys were, they made 35 grand a year. They had three kids. They were driving, you know, these guys were, they made 35 grand a year. They had three kids. They were driving a, you know, Chevrolet. I was considered to be the bad guy.

And how much money at this point, between 19 and whatever age you were here, when they start tracking down, how much money do you think you had made? I probably had like a million in safety deposit boxes. And I had some buried on my farm, which actually is still there. Where's the farm? Give us the address. It's in Sullivan, Wisconsin. I had buried it in thermoses. Somebody's going to get out there to sell it. Someone's going to start looking for your farm now. Well, that was part of, you know, there, there's a TV series that's going to be done now from the book. The purpose of the book really was to

initially was to get a film a movie but the story became so big that the publisher roger gasman said it's too big for a two-hour movie we're you know we're not going to get funded like a movie with three and a half hours that actually now the rights were bought by a woman named Kelly Saunders, who's a well-known TV series and movie producer in Los Angeles. She did Smallville. She did The Hot Zone. She's done a lot. There's a National Geographic Network. There's a series called Genius that she just is working doing. So she bought the rights to do a TV series to do a season. Are they going to keep the book title? I love the title.

Yeah, the title's good. I don't know. It's out of my hands, you know. When all of this is going on, if you look back now and you could edit what you were doing, meaning you could say, don't get that car, don't get that house, don't buy that plane ticket. When you look back, what would you tell yourself? I would tell myself to, uh, be more low key. Yeah.

I thought I was being low key, but yeah, having a Rolls Royce at 22 years old with a driver wasn't low key. And they were flying over our house in Sonoma. Every day, a chopper would go over the house and somebody, and they weren't hiding. They were taking pictures with the big ones. How many houses did you have? Three. I had a farm. I had a house in Lake Tahoe, one in Sonoma and Estes Park at one time. Wow. So I really thought I was being low key because I wasn't in Milwaukee anymore. I was, you know, nobody really knew me out there. That's their job, you know, they're professionals. And so they would, they were watching us. And I would say to myself, I should have probably bought about five Midas muffler franchises at 22 and 23 years old.

And maybe bought a couple of street corners in LA that were just tall grass or desert at the time. But I wasn't that smart. I was very creative and I was good at the hustle. And I believed, well, this is going to sound really silly, but I believed that I was doing so well at 24 that by 30, I was going to own a hotel casino in Las Vegas. It doesn't sound stupid. I think that's that age where you do think you're invincible. And if you mix that with money and drugs, I mean, it sounds to me, I mean, I feel like every 24 year old would think like that.

You think the money's going to keep coming. Yes, you definitely, yeah. I love your advice to your younger self. We should buy some Midas mufflers. I don't know if they still have those. I don't either. Well, we're going to jump around a little bit here and I really highly recommend people check out the book because it's amazing. When you get detained, is this around the time that they're investigating you? Is this yours? Like, what can you refresh me on the timeline? Well, there, you know, I didn't realize that.

Yeah, they were had cancer in Milwaukee. And he wanted to help pay for his medical treatment. And he asked me if he could be a courier and make 10 grand, because he didn't make 10 grand driving my car and living with me. So I thought, you know, okay, we'll do this. Instead of doing the cruise with Lily and everything, we were going to Bogota. It was going to be a three-day deal. Fly in. I was going to take it in the false bottom and false top, false side cases that

we had designed and fly from Bogota to Mexico City. Mexico City, get off the plane and then stay overnight in Mexico City and then have a domestic flight to Tijuana. And then when he got off the plane in Tijuana, I had a car to pick him up and they were going to come over the San Ysidro border as if they were just there in Tijuana for the night. car to pick him up and they were going to come over the San Ysidro border as if they were just there in Tijuana for the night. Yeah. We grew up in San Diego. So very familiar. So is at this point, are you doing this because it's getting more complicated to smuggle the way you started? No, it was because it was just came, you know, it was because I had done,

I was bored. And as you mentioned before, it really wasn't about the money, but I didn't know how to do anything else. Now I was really good at this. And so I thought, well, I'll do this to help John out. And I wasn't going to be on the plane. I was going to take a different flight to Miami, but because we packed all the cocaine in the suitcases at night and didn't wear masks,

nobody knew about the mask thing. So all the powder in the suitcases at night and didn't wear masks. Nobody knew about the mask thing. So all the powder that I inhaled, I took a Valium at about four in the morning and then slept through trying to, my flight was at eight. So I missed my flight and I figured, well, I'll just grab the flight that John's on and I'll go to LA because I live in Sonoma. But I'm not getting off the plane in Mexico City. He's getting off the plane. I'm going to LA and I have no drugs. I didn't know that the DEA was actually there following us and we're on the same plane and had notified the Mexican authorities

that when that plane landed that to get me off that plane. So they managed to get me off the plane. And then they had me in a little room where they had John who had already made it through customs, but they had him in this room and they just stuck a big knife through the side of the suitcase and the powder was falling out. And they had photographers from the Mexico newspaper and they knew, I didn't know that they knew until they were interrogating me and pistol whipping me and electrocuting me with a cattle prod in the airport. What do you mean electrocuting you with a cattle prod? What does that mean for like for girls? I don't know what that means. You know, it's a cattle prod is like a little baton that's electrifies shock and they use it to move cattle when they're trying to

take them through a chute so that they can, you know, if there's a herd of cattle, they want the cattle to go through this little passageway. And so they kind of hit them in the butt with it and gives the cattle a joke. So you go from sipping champagne on the plane, they peel you off, and now they're electrocuting you and essentially torturing you to admit stuff? In the office, that's just like 50 feet away from where people are going through customs. That's what they're doing. So what's going through your brain at this time? Like, what are you thinking?

Are you thinking how you're going to get out of this? Are you thinking I'm fucked? I'm thinking, yeah, I'm going to get out of this. It might take a little time and money, but I had no drugs and I grew up in America where if you don't have any possession of anything, why would I get, you know, in trouble? So yeah, I'm with this guy, guy but you know i don't know what's going on and that's my whole rap but the guy who is who the commandante in charge he snapped his fingers and he said you think that we're stupidos and he snaps his fingers and a guy comes walking up to him and hands him this manila envelope and he opens it up

and he pulls out an eight by 10 photo of me in the Milwaukee airport. I had flown from Oakland, California to Milwaukee because my attorney met me at the airport with like a couple hundred thousand dollars. That was my attorney's job was to take the fives, tens, twenties, and fifties and turn it into fresh hundreds over the course of months. So he would do that and then- He was like washing the money essentially. Yeah.

He would go into banks and anything under 10,000, you could just give them and they'd give you back hundreds if you wanted 100, fresh hundreds. And it's a lot easier to take 100,000 of fresh hundreds than it is to try to take a hundred thousand of five tens and twenties to Columbia. So they had this picture of him handing me the manila envelope in the airport in Milwaukee. And then the guys, the commandantes said, you know, they had the window right there that was tinted. He said, it's the DEA. They're the ones that told us. They're the ones, they know.

And we know you're the boss. And you sign this confession, which was in Spanish, and then we'll stop this. But if you don't, this is going to continue. Because we know you're the boss and he's the mule. And I just kept saying no and stuck to my guns and figured that I was going to get out of it. You know, I had gotten out of everything in my life up till now.

So I figured I was going to get out of it. It wasn't until they moved me to what they call the Zapatos, which was like an underground dungeon that was really for the torture of people. And they tortured me there. Did they torture you in the dungeon? Yeah, they stripped you naked and it was less than 40 degrees down there. And then there was just a hole in the floor. The room was a small room. There was a hole in the floor where that's where you would have your eliminations. And there was some feces from the last person that was in there. I was in there alone. The other guy wasn't in there.

He was somewhere else in the facility down the hall that I was, John, who was carrying the cocaine. And then they would come in and pour water on you. And now instead of just a cattle prod, they hooked up these wires. They also like chopped the tip of my finger off. Oh shit, whoa. Put it on the table, chopped that off. Oh, you see it? So what's going through your mind when they chop the tip of your finger off and they're electrocuting you essentially?

What are you thinking at this moment? They told me that if I don't sign, that they were going to do this until I died. In other words, one of these times, and every, say, three times during the 24 hours, they would come in, pour water on you, beat you with hoses, electrocute you. They said, you're gonna die. And when you die, we're gonna just get rid of you, and no one's gonna never know what happened to you. And because I was in this room,

and I had nothing else to do, your mind is in a completely different place. It, it, it, it, words wouldn't describe it. The fear, the horror, the terror that I was experiencing at that moment, nothing that I ever experienced before in my life, I just voted in my own head for death, I thought, okay, well, I'm not signing because if I sign, I'm going to be in this room. I don't know, 15 years. I couldn't see that as an outcome. So I figured I believed in, you know, as a martial artist, I believed in transformation of energy. I

believed in the theory that, you know, you can't destroy energy, it can only change as its form. So when we die, whatever happens, happens. You still believe that? I still believe that because now, you know, I've done energy healing for years as an acupuncturist. So I just thought this is, you know, this is it. I'm not going to have my son anymore to put in the bed at night and rock in a little rocking chair we had while looking out the window at the sunset. And I'm not going to have my wife to spoon with and cuddle up with in bed. It's all over with.

So what happens? You're obviously here. They lied. So what? They didn't kill me. How long did they torture you for? It was a few days, three, four days before. I'll never forget it.

They took me out, gave me some clothes to put on, and they took me out and put me in a wooden chair outside. Like they took me up some stairs and then I was outside and all of a sudden there was sunlight. And I'll never forget that feeling of the sunlight because it was so cold being down there of how wonderful that was. And then the van pulled up and they brought John out. He looked like terrible.

He looked like shit. They brought him out. And I just took for granted that if they did anything like they did to me, to John, that he signed. But he said he didn't sign. Huh? He told me I didn't sign. Did he sign? He didn't sign. Huh? He told me I didn't sign. Did he sign? He didn't sign.

I didn't know that until about four days later when we made our first court appearance in the prison they had taken us to, which was called the Black Palace, La Palencia Negro, Leckumbury Prison, which they've made a lot of documentary films about because it was like this horror palace. Have you been in any of those documentary films interviewed ever? There was a documentary that they came and actually came into the dormitory where I was, but no, I wasn't one of the people that... Okay. I tried to be, you know, of all the prisoners from North America, meaning America and Canada, that were in there, I was really the only one who was truly a real gangster criminal. I had more, there was like 13 and a half pounds in John's suitcase, which really was almost more than all the other Americans combined. Because most of the Americans were young kids who were in Mexico,

a summer vacation. They had a good-looking girlfriend with them. They had a couple grams in their shoe. Maybe they had a little bag of pot on them. Maybe the federal police wanted to have sex and raped a girlfriend. But what were the chances if you walked up in 1970 to 75 to a couple of young Americans that you'd find drugs on them? Something. So they usually did. They found some drugs on them. Then they would torture them to say that they were

taking in Spanish, these drugs to the United States to sell them. Why were they doing that? Because president Nixon had something called operation cooperation, where he was the drug war. The war on drugs stopped all the heroin trafficking coming over the border there at the San Ysidro crossing. And so he gave the Mexican government, the president, $25 million. And what did they give them back in return? Statistics. 636 North Americans arrested, 632 signed confessions and were guilty. That's what it was all about. And I was one of four that didn't sign the confessions. And John was one of the four. I didn't know that till we made our first court appearance. And in the court appearance, they read his statement, which said he was a karate student. I was his teacher.

We went to Columbia for a karate tournament and I had no idea that he was doing this cocaine deal. Wow. When you heard that, what were you like shocked? I was, yeah, I was surprised. I was really surprised. He got eventually a year later when we went to trial after a year of being in prison, I got, my ruling was what they called absuelto, which means innocent, the Spanish word. And John got eight years, which was the minimum, the minimum sentence you could get. Did he do eight years in Mexican prison? No. While I was in prison, there was a couple of us who really were, you know, smoking pot and sitting in our cells talking about, wow, this is crazy. You know, the, this whole thing that all these people were being tortured

and we should make a big deal out of this. Jimmy Carter was running for president. Jimmy Carter was a human rights activist. We should make this public. Wait, wait, wait. Pause for a second though. So you're in prison, the tortures continue. No. Once you were in prison, unless there were circumstances that they pulled you out of your cell and put you in the hall, no, you didn't get tortured. Matter of fact, once you were in prison, if you had money, you could live on a little different level than the people who didn't have money. What did you do with Jimmy Carter though? So we decided that we should start taking out full page ads. Cause I really had a lot of money in, in newspapers in the United States.

Because what was happening was, okay, here's what was happening. Let's just say it wasn't me and it was somebody else who was 22 years old and they got busted. And now the United States embassy official would notify their parents, say in Santa Barbara or something, hey, you know, your kid was busted in Mexico and, uh, Riley, you're busting. Yeah. But we have a Mexican attorney that we recommend an abogado who who's willing to represent your kid and for 25,000. And so the parents, if they had the money would come down and give it to the embassy

official, give it to the lawyer who was introduced by the embassy official. Now, if they didn't have the money, they would take a second mortgage on their house. Now, I knew this because I was in jail with a lot of people that were in this situation. So they were already these people who were in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Chicago, Poughkeepsie, New York. they were going to their congressman and they were saying, hey, what's going on down there? And so, you know, congressmen were hearing about it, but they heard about it a few times. They heard about it a few times. And then all of a sudden we took out some full page ads that were very costly, like $2,500 back in the day

in the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune that said, you know, open letter to the American people, open letter. And we talked about the human rights violations and torture that was taking place 18 miles south of San Diego, not in the Middle East, right here. So it began to get a little momentum. And the strangest thing that happened was they had a travel agents convention, a huge travel agency conventions, all travel agents from America were in Acapulco and like eight women got raped by federal and local police during this eight days of the convention.

And so they, they came back and the United States put a travel ban out. Don't go to Mexico. Our ads, these full page ads that look like real articles, but it said advertisement in small print were appearing in the papers. We were smuggling that out through our, like my wife's private parts.

We would smuggle out the whole article and she would- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. She has to shove it up her vagina? Either that or her ass, yeah. How does one... You do it for me, Lauren. You do it for me. I don't know if I'm doing that for him.

Do I have to put the whole paper up my ass? Well, there was some cylinders that were used to smuggle grass in by inmates. Oof. cylinders that were used to smuggle grass in by inmates. So the inmates, let's say that you were, I wasn't allowed because I was in a dormitory that was the highest security. So we weren't allowed to go in or out, but there were people who were inmates who were allowed, they taught art classes or whatever they worked in the woodworking shop. They would come in and then they would spread newspaper on the floor of the cell and then they would squat down and they would shit out the cylinder and then they'd open the cylinder and there'd be the marijuana that was sold.

So you would take the marijuana that was smuggled in or you would take the cylinder that was smuggled in and then use it for like a message in a bottle. Yeah. Let's talk about a better way for your pets to live, a way for them to live longer, feel better, and just thrive. And that is with one of our favorite partners, the farmer's dog. We have been talking about the farmer's dog for years now, and this is the only food that Lauren and I's dogs now eat. And that is because it is real healthy food. For those of you that are not familiar with the farmer's dog, the farmer's dog makes real fresh dog food and delivers it right to your door. Recipes are developed by vet nutritionists made from real

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therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Stop comparing and start focusing with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash skinny today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash skinny, betterhelp.com slash skinny. I want to talk about what life in Mexican prison is like for somebody who grew up in America and probably thought that they would never be in Mexican prison. And really explain the smells. I'm very curious about prison. I want to know every detail, what you're eating, what you're drinking, if you can talk to each other. Well, when I first was

let out of that van that they took me and John from the interrogation place to this huge, it looked like a medieval castle fort. I remember getting on a van and the smell was so bad that I thought, I'm not going to last here three days. I mean, the smell was so bad. And believe it or not, after three days, you didn't even notice it. But it was this old, it used to be, it was a military compound that was a cavalry compound. And the cells for most of the prison were horse stalls that they converted into cells. The first cells we were in were horse stalls

that now had like metal bunks coming out of the wall and there was nothing on them, just metal. You'd lay on that. But the dormitory O was a newer thing, a newer dorm built in about 67. There was a uprising in Mexico City at the college campus where they were protesting the government and the government went in there with the military and killed a couple hundred college students. And the ones that weren't killed were all, they built this dormitory as maximum security because they didn't want anyone to escape. And the college students came from families with money. And if you have money in Mexico, your chances of escaping are much better. So they

built Dormitorio, which was this maximum security dorm where none of the cells were locked unless you bought a bicycle lock and locked your own cell with it. Otherwise, none of the cells were locked. So anybody could roam around freely in the building, but no one could get in or out. And that was a dorm that eventually, once we were out, once we were moved from the initial stables into the dorm, that's where people went who basically, if you had any ability to have money, you were put in there. And the guy who ran it, his name was Gardner, Fernando Gardner, and they called him the mayor of Dormitory O.

And he would charge you like if... He was an inmate or a guard? He was an inmate. He actually had cut his wife's head off. So nobody wanted to mess with Fernando. And he was really from Los Angeles, and he lived in Los Angeles most of his life and ended up, I don't know how, in this Mexican prison. But Fernando had made a deal with the lieutenant colonel of the prison that he could extort people for money and everybody would benefit.

You'd go into a cell that had four bunks, and there would be three other people at least. And sometimes these cells had six and seven people, but if you had money, you could get a cell to yourself. And of course I had money. So I paid 3,500 to get a cell from myself once I was in there and realized I wasn't going to get out in three days, like the lawyer told me. So I bought a cell and had my own cell. And the cell had an actual division between the cell and the toilet and shower so that you had to make a little step up and go in and there was a wall. So when you were using the toilet or the

shower, it was private. It wasn't like the cells otherwise. Right away, that was $3,500. Then in the first week there, after all the torture and stuff, I had the commandos. This was a group of guys that did the extorting for the mayor. And they would come to your cell and say, well, you know, we're going to collect, we want 300 pesos for the lights, for the lighting. Now, I didn't speak very good Spanish, a little Spanish, because I had been in Colombia for years. But I didn't speak good Spanish. And these guys spoke a different type of Spanish I never heard in Colombia.

Most of it was calling you a faggot and you should, you know, fuck your mother. So I didn't really know what half the stuff they were saying was, but I knew that they were coming in to extort me for the lights and the water. If I wanted water and lights, they said they'd be back in a few days. I didn't have any money. So they said they'd be back in a few days. I had gotten somebody who was cleaning in the hall to, I negotiated that I would pay them, I forget how much it was, a couple hundred pesos to get a broomstick from them. And so they gave me a broomstick and I busted it in half. And then I found somebody that had a nail from the workshop or something and actually put holes in it. And then I took my shoelaces and I made kind of nunchakos. And when these guys came to collect their extortion, there were six of them

and they came into the cell. The first guy that kind of was going to physically, you know, attack me, I hit him with the nunchucks and busted his nose open. And then the next guy I hit and the other four guys crashed into each other trying to get out the door. And that was the last time anybody messed with me in, in Mexico. So is that one of the things you got to do if they show that you're, or if you show you're not an easy target or you're not prey, that they're kind of just move on to some, to a weaker target? Well, first off, you know, after everything I had been through with the torture, I just had it up to here and I wasn't going to be easy prey. Whatever happened to me, it wasn't like I knew I was going to win or anything, but because I was a martial artist and had been in pretty tough situations before, and I'd been in fights, bar fights, dojo fights.

You know, there used to be dojo fights in Chicago where actually people died. They were like the fights in the Quentin Tarantino movies in Kill Bill. I had an instructor that got killed by a samurai sword in a dojo battle. Wow. I had a friend who got a hatchet in the back, required 80 stitches. That's how the book actually came to be, was a journalist was writing an article about these dojo wars in Chicago and found my name in the Chicago papers about it and called me up and asked me if I was the guy who was in the papers with the Dojo Wars.

And I said, yeah. He said, you're still alive. I'm like, yeah. Anyway, that's how... What is someone's morning routine in prison? What did you say? What is your morning routine in prison? Are you waking up and going outside and working out and interacting with... I'm really curious about the day in prison, what you waking up and like going outside and working out and interacting with, I'm, I'm really curious about the day in prison, like what you do every day. Well, if you don't have money at five in the morning, you're doing the fajinas. The fajinas are, you have to squat in what they call a duck walk. You couldn't rise up and you had a brick with a rag on it and you were cleaning the prison floors in the squatting position.

And if you stood up, then you got beaten and tortured. But I paid $500 to Mayor Gardner. I said, listen, you don't have to have guys extorting me. I'll just, what do you want? Here, I'll pay. I don't want to be in the fajinas duck walking. 500, okay. Then the next thing was at 5 to be in the fajinas duck walking. 500, okay. Then the next thing was at 5.30 in the morning,

they had the call where the guards came up and they yelled out, okay, everybody in the yard. And then they did the count. So they counted everybody. You had to stand there at 5.30 in the morning. So I said, how much is that not to go out? What do you mean? Well, I want, let the guard come and look in my cell

and see, and I'll say hi. So I just slept, you know, until the guard said Arturo. And then I go, hello. And then he knew I didn't escape. That was 500. So life- A day or in general? Just one time fee.

But you know, this Fernando Gardner would take the money and split it with the lieutenant colonel. Because I had money, I mean, what's money for if you can't? My wife came into the prison with $25,000. How'd she get that in? She had it all strapped on her, but the lieutenant colonel told the guards that she was coming because he knew we arranged it. We're not going to stop that from coming in because it's going to him. Right. Right.

So he gave us his office. They had this beautiful office with this huge desk and stuff. He's like Arturo, you know, your wife's coming here. You have it as long as you want. So you were, you were like the king. Are you having conjugal visits with your wife in there? You could, they let you have conjugal visits. We did.

We, she would come and sometimes she would come with my little son, Josh, who was like two. I would want to spend time with her alone. And what I had done in my cell was I had put drapes over the bars. So once you were in the room, it was kind of like being in a little dorm room with drapes over the bars and then a bicycle lock to lock. So nobody could come in, like when they were going to do a raid or something, they'd have to bang on the door going, open up Arturo and then I have to go open the bicycle lock after flushing the drugs, but I had everybody, you know, I'd give everybody a hundred dollar bills. So instead of giving the guards a hundred pesos or, you know, they were

getting a hundred dollar American bills. And I never was a problem. I would say that I got along with everybody and that's really why I didn't have to buy plywood. In Mexican prison, the first thing they tell you, the other North Americans, is buy the plywood. I'm like, what do you mean by the plywood? Well, there's a sheet of plywood that they sell you and it's about five feet long and I don't know how thick, half an inch. And the purpose of the plywood was when you go to bed at night, you put the plywood on top of you and then you pull your blanket up so that in the middle of the night, if someone comes in and stabs you, you have the plywood there. But I didn't need the plywood because anybody who needed money i would just give them money does your son remember at two going to the prison you know my son just flew out today he was he was he came to visit me because um uh our personal trainer adam von

rothfelder was here and so we yeah, yeah, Adam. So we, uh, he came down to see Adam. He hadn't seen him in years and we were all together. What I used to do with, with Josh, he doesn't remember much about the prison, but there was a guy, you know, there are some really tough guys in the prison. One guy had killed over a couple hundred people. He looked like an old actor named Charles Bronson. He just looked like he was chiseled out of stone. And he was really a sweetheart. But I would say, Felix, my wife's coming with Josh.

And he'd go, okay, I'll go down. So he would go down there and tell the guards, don't bother her. They would otherwise go in and search her in very strange, you know, they go up all over private parts and stuff because they liked doing that with a good looking American woman. They would just take advantage of the situation. So he would go down there and they all respected him because he was known to be a pretty dangerous character. And then when he got up to the cell with like the bag of cheese and meats and stuff that she had bought to bring to me, he would take my son and go to take him to the ice cream store. We had an ice cream store in the maximum security.

He would take him to the ice cream store. So I knew he was safe, my little boy, because he was with the guy that nobody would mess with. And then I would have a chance to be with my wife. And sometimes we would have sex and stuff, but a lot of times it was just the intimacy of being with someone that cared about you and talk about the attorneys and what were you doing? What's going on? When am I getting... I had no drugs. According to the Mexican constitution, I shouldn't have been there. I had no drugs and I had no one who signed a confession against me, including myself.

How long were you there? A year. When do you find out you're obviously a year, but how do you find out you're getting out? Uh, I got, they moved me out of this black palace when the new president of Mexico came in to be, and Carter became president of the United States. And we actually got this whole movement going. We did a hunger strike. We were publicizing all this pretty well.

And they actually now were having discussions about a prisoner exchange. They were going to exchange the 636 North Americans from Mexico, from prison, more prisons than just the one I was in, all the prisoners. And they were going to exchange them for all the prisoners, the 636 Mexicans that were in the United States. And the purpose was because they wanted to have prisoners near their families. So they wouldn't, their families wouldn't have to suffer and we would just live out our sentences over in North America. We're closing the Black Palace and they opened up these two new model prisons

that were supposed to be model prisons for the world to see how Mexico had changed their ways. And I was moved into one of these new model prisons. In the middle of the night, they came down the hall, I'll never forget it, about four soldiers with bayonets on their rifles, took me out of my cell and marched me into the warden's office. He would quote Oscar Wilde.

You know who Oscar Wilde was? He would quote Oscar Wilde and he had cookies and he would say, I told you, you want cook cookies and milk. And he had a bed in his office that opened up a couch that opened up into a bed. So he was a gay guy and he liked me. And he said, you know, 60 minutes. A la manana. A key.

I'm like 60 minutes, 60 minutes. What do you mean? 60 minutes, the TV show is coming to this prison. And the attorney general, his name was Garcia Ramirez, was the attorney general of Mexico, asked that there was a representative for the American prisoners that would speak to be on 60 Minutes along with himself and the president of Mexico, who was going to be on the same segment, but from a different location. So he said, would you do that? And I'm like, okay, you know, because most of the prisoners would scream about the condition of the foods and how rats were in the refried beans. And I was, you know, more concerned about getting everybody out

because I knew I wasn't going to get out. I realized the American government were putting pressure on the Mexican judicial system to keep me in, even though I had no drugs. So what they would do is every time I was supposed to go to court, they would change, they would move that judge into a different district. And then a new judge would come in and have to catch up on all the caseloads and my case would be pushed off. And what they were trying to do was just bleed me and keep me

in Mexican prison as long as possible. Because according to the constitution, I should have been released at my very first appearance. So I didn't even speak about my case to Garcia Ramirez. I just went in and met with Garcia Ramirez, and he walked with me around this patio with his arm around me, and he spoke perfect English. And he said, let's not talk about the torture, Arturo. Let's not mention that. Let's talk about it's a political situation

where President Nixon paid the Mexican government and then they got statistics and this was done and the DEA was involved. But okay, but no one's tortured you since you've been in prison, right? No. Okay, so let's not talk about that. how Mexico wants to move all the prisoners for the benefit of their own families and themselves to the United States. Now, remember, the United States had travel advisories against going to Mexico and their peso was devaluated because of all this. So we were causing a lot of problems. Then he said to me after the 60-minute episode, he asked me, so what are you doing here? And I said, well, you know, I don't know. I didn't have any drugs. The guy on the plane had drugs. It wasn't me. And he said, really, I'll have somebody look into your case. And three attorneys came that same day, showed up and told me they were going to look into my case for the attorney general. And they came back at the end of the day and they said they were going to look into my case for the attorney general. And they came back

at the end of the day and they said they would notify the attorney general about what their findings were. And I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I had given up pretty much, I had given up hope on that whole thing. Two days later, I was taken out of my cell and taken into a room that was the courtroom. And there was John, which he actually was in a different prison by then. And they said that I was absuelto, just like that. The gavel came down. I didn't even know what that meant. And my lawyer said, that means you're free.

They're saying you're released. I'm like, what? And then John got eight years, which was the minimum, but the prisoner exchange was actually going to take place. And all the North Americans, Canadians included, were going to be taken out of the Mexican prisons and put in the United States. And we knew, we knew that they weren't going to be able to keep people sentenced for eight years or whatever because they were tortured in mexico you know so we knew everybody was getting out it was just had to be done the way they put it together the state department and so um after all this looking back now if you could go back and tell your younger self something or for the young people listening, what is the overall, I mean, there's so many lessons here, but what is the message you'd

like to convey? Because like we said earlier, your lifestyle now has changed drastically from a drug smuggler and the pace of your life has changed. And I don't know if you would look back and change anything about what you did earlier, but if you could go back, would you? No, I had the good fortune of having an extraordinary life and I wouldn't change anything because I didn't know better at the time. You know, I didn't know that cocaine

was going to turn into what it turned into. I didn't know anything. And I thought that what I did was, was, you know, for the most part, I had a lot of good times. But what I did realize was that going after more money and going after more bigger, more homes and fancy cars and all this stuff. I didn't value human relationships very much. I didn't understand how some people could be happy with little to nothing, but they could be happy.

I saw it in other countries. I saw it in Mexico. I saw it in Colombia. You know, people who didn't have anything. I was invited to a home where they had a dirt floor and everybody was happy. I didn't get it, but I kind of felt it. But I realized now that, uh, if I had to do anything different, it would have been in valuing human relationships and, you know, more kindness and compassion, uh, enjoying building relationships. Because, you know, at the end

of the day, it doesn't matter to me now where I'm at in life at my age of what kind of car I had or how successful I had or how much money I had. What's really important, I think, at least to me, is the relationships and what did you do for other people. That's really why I got into what I did with serving others through doing acupuncture and healing and coaching was because I wanted to serve others. And really, when I went to Columbia and came back with cocaine, while I did want to make some money because I didn't have enough money to pay the rent on my karate studio,

it was also really gratifying to see people doing well and being, you know, kind of uptone and happy and everybody was doing well before it kind of turned to the other side with abusing it, which a lot of people did.

I think that's the cool thing about the show is sometimes you're able to have more context and see their intention behind things. Like I did hear in the story that you mentioned that you, you liked the idea of when you were selling, changing people's lives. I heard that multiple times.

You talked about your parents. You talked about the guy whose dad had cancer. Like you, you, there was a theme across this of you having an intention to help people, which it's, if they just read the press clippings, they don't get that. Does that make sense? It does. And I didn't really realize it, but I did want to have this relationship and have people like me, you know, I wanted, I wanted that. I didn't understand it. And it was, life was moving

too fast for me. And then of course, if, you know, if you, if you have that kind of mentality of a entrepreneurial mentality, which I'm sure you guys have, you know, things are very fast and it's not easy to take time to get to know some of the things about yourself until later in life. You know, it's funny though. I think about this a lot with people who have done drug smuggling or dealt drugs. Like it's like the, that's the ultimate entrepreneur. And I wonder if you would have discovered a legal path and been, and had the same kind of revenue potential, if you would have gotten just as excited, or if there was something

about the thrill of maybe living on the edge a bit. Do you hear what I'm saying? I feel like your mind and the way you think, you could have been successful in any of these endeavors, but maybe you were just drawn to that because of the pace of it. Well, it certainly was different than what I grew up in middle class America at the time in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But in the end, when I turned to become to study acupuncture and become a, a healer and the strangest thing happened, I mean, it wasn't overnight, but over 15 years, 20 years, I ended up with several clinics. I had MDs working for me. Yeah. See, I'm not surprised. Staff of nine. We had, you know, years where we made a million three, a million four. There was no insurance billing.

It was all people paying for their health. It was really different than most acupuncturists. And I look back at that and think, well, again, you know, I really was reaching for the big ring and I had to have bigger and better. But I had this vision. I wanted to help as many people as I could. I remember thinking that about 10 years into practicing acupuncture, I thought, I really want to help as many people as I could. And once I had that vision and that intention, then my practice exponentially grew. And I had strangest thing, medical doctors were coming to see what I was doing because I would change people's lives. They'd come in at 300 pounds on 16 different medications. And next thing you know, six months later, they were off their

medications and they lost 150 pounds. It happened with my own son. So I really was able to do that. And it took me a long time to acknowledge, to give myself any real acknowledgement because I actually really thought that I was still hustling. Well, it's funny because you say that earlier you said you weren't smart, you're clever, but clearly, I mean,

listen, I've been talking to you now for an hour and a half and the speed at which you can recall things and remember. You're a pretty good storyteller. Yeah. I mean, I mean, do you want to come over for Thanksgiving? I think you're a little bit more.

I have a seat available for Thanksgiving. A little bit more than clever, Arthur. I love an eclectic Thanksgiving table. You could sit at the head. Thank you. We can get off politics and we can talk about drug smuggling. Everyone needs to go buy his book. Michael and I each got a copy, Poison for Rats, Six Kilos That Changed Everything.

Where can everyone find the book? Where can they find you if they want to reach out? The book is available in the publisher's website only. It's called Beyond the Streets. And that's where you can get the book. And the book is a large book and it's an unknown author. And so it was always the intention of getting it into the story being made into a film, or now it's going to be a TV series. And the purpose really is that, again, you know, the purpose for me was to show that you can make major changes. Life can change on a dime. And so no matter what people are going through in their own lives, that there really is, you know, light at the end of the tunnel. So hopefully I'm looking forward to seeing it as

a series and hopefully a lot of people will see it because not that many people read books anymore. Yeah. You guys got to check this thing out. And also there's a lot of really cool pictures and you can, you know, in the book of your life and things you were doing and your family. I had to prove to the publisher that the things I was saying were, were for real. And currently now I do see people and help them. I have a, just a very small practice. I'm not looking to build a business, but they can contact me through my email. My email is doctoro at gmail. It's D-O-C-T-U-R-O at gmail. And I do a lot of work with people via Zoom. If you happen to be in or near Milwaukee, I see people out of my home. People come, they spend several days. I act as a mentor. Some of them are actual healers. Some are

coaches. Some are corporate coaches. and that's the kind of work I like to do is kind of mentoring and coaching others. If you need someone to play a woman dealer, I can really turn it on for the screen. Maybe you can do the scene where you have to shove the tube up your ass. I'll do the scene. I can do the scene where I shove the tube up my ass. Oh, I want to play the commandante.

Arthur, you're a legend. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. I appreciate it.