Shaun Attwood - Reformed Drug Kingpin: The Man Who Faced 200 Years In America's Deadliest Prison

Full transcript: Shaun Attwood on London Real

2:45 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Shaun Attwood, the British author, public speaker, and ex-drug kingpin.

3:02 You left the UK for America as a broke graduate, and within a decade became a stock market millionaire living a double life. You soon became massive in the rave scene in America, distributing millions of dollars of ecstasy in competition with the Mafia, mass murderer Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. In May 2002 you were arrested and faced a 200-year prison sentence in America’s deadliest lockup, where you navigated horrific conditions and gang violence. There you read over a thousand books on psychology and philosophy to better understand human nature and your addictive personality.

3:35 Today you’re banned from America for life, and travel the world speaking to audiences about your experience in jail and the consequences of crime. Shaun, welcome to London Real. Thank you for having me. I’m Brian. I love this studio, great backdrop.

3:47 Thank you very much. Man, you’re dressed for success. I like it. Man, looking good. Uh, wow, man, like where to start?

3:53 Um, I followed your story there. There’s so many lessons, and like, that’s what I want people to try to take away: the things you learned along the way, and how certain things happened. Um, but it feels like you live many different lives. Uh, you know, like six different incarnations, really. I’ve used up all my nine lives.

4:09 Yeah. I mean, before we jump into it, do you ever wonder what made you kind of do these crazy things? Because it’s not a normal person that pursues all of these things. Did you ever say, did I get hit on my head as a baby, or, you know, do you have a weird personality that likes to push the envelope, because of so many intense situations? I mean, you basically put yourself into, and kept into, those things.

4:34 I’ve absolutely no excuses to fall back on. I take full responsibility for my insane behavior. I came from a loving family, good upbringing, good education, business studies degree, made all this money in the stock market. What I had, or what I lacked, was emotional maturity and common sense. I’m in my 20s.

4:55 I’ve come from a little town, a chemical manufacturing town. Now I’m the man in Arizona throwing raves up to 10,000 people, and it just becomes one big ego trip. Wow. But you were always driven. You always wanted more, somehow.

5:09 Yeah, I’m an extreme workaholic. Um, where did that come from? When I was a kid, I showed an aptitude for economics, and my teacher, Mr. Dillon, would give me classes on my own, and he’d explain all the numbers in the Financial Times. I was only 14. And when I was 16, I was confident enough to make my first investment: borrowed 50 pounds off my nan, invested it in British Telecom.

5:35 It doubled right away. That was when Maggie Thatcher was privatizing everything, so I’m telling everyone in my hometown, then I’m going to go to America and make a million, fly you guys over. And that’s what I eventually did. Flew all my mates over to Arizona. Wow.

5:49 And why Arizona? Why go there to be a stockbroker? Why not the City of London? Why not Wall Street? Because as a kid I would visit my aunts in Arizona, and coming from the Northwest, it’s quite cold and rainy, and Arizona, planes coming into land, you see all the swimming pools in people’s backyards.

6:08 The sun’s always out. They hear the English accent, they roll out the red carpet. And when I was 16, my aunt, she changed my date of birth in my passport so I was 21. Took me out nightclubbing, and she’s introduced me to all these American women as Paul McCartney’s nephew. So I’m thinking, I want some of this when I finish university.

6:31 And that’s what I did. Wow. All right, so that was the Oasis for you. You knew people there? Yeah.

6:36 For you, that was the dream. That was the American dream. Okay. Now, there’s not a lot of stockbroking places in Arizona, last time I checked. How did you find one, and how did that happen?

6:47 So I wanted to be an investment analyst, and I did originally apply to places in London. It didn’t go anywhere. I like crunching the numbers and looking at the charts and all that kind of stuff, doing the research, but when I got to Arizona in ’91, because there is a lot of money in Phoenix and Sun City, big retirement community in Sun City. I don’t know how it is now. There were a lot of stockbroker, stockbrokerage outfits in central Phoenix, you know, handling those clients’ money.

7:17 And it sounds fancy to people, stockbroker, but if you’ve watched Wolf of Wall Street, you know it’s just glorified telesales. I had to call 500 numbers a day, and I was in an outfit that was just like Wolf of Wall Street. We had, like, 24-foot curly cords. Pacing, brokers make more sales. We had mirrors.

7:38 Smile and dial, you will make more sales. We had these business meetings where you’re only as big as your numbers are on this board for the month. If you’re calling your wife, if you’re calling your girlfriend, you’re losing sales. Lunch is for wimps. If you’re out at lunch, other brokers are calling your clients.

7:57 It was proper drill sergeant mentality. I love it. I’m fresh out of uni. They put me on this squad called the criminal squad, not with the rookies. Hardest-looking people.

8:09 One of them was an ex-Vietnam vet, and he would just have flashbacks to start kung fu kicking the area around him. Number one, top salesman. He had like a bottle of vodka in his briefcase at all times, hardcore alcoholic. And another one, I’d just come out of prison, and he was telling his clients he’d been in hospital for two years fighting cancer, and he was calling people from lists of people who’d had cancer. So these guys were called the criminal squad, and I’m just in there, this shy, you know, fresh-out-of-uni person, and these guys absolutely schooled me on all the sales techniques.

8:48 So in the beginning it’s commission only. I’ve only got my student credit card to live off. I’m worried about to come home, down to living off cheese on toast and bananas. But five years in, I was grossing half a million a year. Um, got my own staff, secretary, but that’s at the point then where I’m thinking, do I want to be in the rat race?

9:07 Gotta be in the office with a six o’clock in the morning sales meeting. I start making money from the party scene, and greed and ego took over. Okay, so six a.m., because Wall Street opens at 9:30 exactly. Early. These guys, ex-Wall Street, or somewhere in California, to know, to yell all that stuff from I mean, this bucket shop must have had some experience.

9:26 So there was a lot of regional brokerages, and they had head offices in Florida, Colorado, and I got, I kind of like worked my way out of the lowest level. Bucket shops are more, it’s more of a respectable regional brokerage by the end of it. Okay, that cleared through Bear Stearns. Okay, were you involved with Bear Stearns? I mean, yeah, I did business with Bear Stearns as, like, a counterparty, so until they went bankrupt, right, in ’08 or something?

9:55 Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what, but those guys are pretty hardcore as well? Yeah. Yeah, all right. So you’re doing that, you’re working the phones, but you’re making good money.

10:02 You invested some of that in tech stocks? Yeah. So you got that million in your early 20s, then? Right? Yeah, well, no, sorry, late 20s.

10:09 My goal was, I watched Wall Street, I’m going to be a millionaire by the time I’m 30. So that’s what I did. That’s what Bud Fox says, right? Yeah, I want to be a millionaire by the time I’m 30. Such a great movie, man.

10:21 I try to watch it as often as I can. Greed is good. It’s good. Uh, all right, so you get there, you’re the stockbroker, you’re probably, I mean, cold calling isn’t in your nature. I mean, you’re more of a shy guy by nature.

10:32 In a number of countries, yeah, but you have to call 500 numbers a day. 99 point whatever percent are telling you to f off, and it breaks you in, right? Okay, you toughened up, you got it tough, and that’s why you’ve persevered. Okay. Nothing was going to stop me conquering the world at that age.

10:50 All right, so you’re still, you have a lot of fire in you. You really are motivated. Yeah. Okay, did you fly your mates in like you said you were gonna do? And I did, and that was what led to the foundation for the criminal enterprise.

11:01 Okay, so you start partying? Yeah. Was there a party scene there in Phoenix, or did you just find it was a rave scene? It was a fledgling rave scene. Okay.

11:11 And because I had a lot of money, I was just showing off, giving out pills for free to my mates. The ravers were calling me the Bank of England. That was my nickname. Why did they call you that? Because they knew I was in the stock market, going on, all this money, and they were coming to me to ask me to invest in the raves.

11:28 Okay, so that’s kind of how it started to come together. But it would cost to put on a rave, five thousand, ten thousand, more. Biggest one that we put on was called Orgasmic Bliss. It cost a hundred grand, 100 grand, five stages, uh, on Bumblebee Ranch. Okay.

11:43 Yeah, but 10, 20, 30 grand for a lower-level one. What can you make on a party like that if you put in 100 grand? If you sell in the ecstasy, you can make a lot. Okay. Yeah, that’s where the profits are.

11:54 That’s where the profits are. Okay. But what happened was, around that time, when I was still a broke and about to move over to the underworld, I flew my best mate over from England. Wild man. This huge guy who was in prison in this country, and we were best mates from childhood.

12:14 So in my idealistic mind, I’m thinking, I need to get him out to America so he won’t go back to prison, and get him a job as a wrestler. So I rented him, because he’s big. Yeah, how big is he? So people should know, he’s presently six foot two, and about 26 stone, which in pounds is 270 pounds. 14 is it for stone?

12:36 Yeah, okay, something like that. All right, so about 300-some pounds, and not a muscle head. He’s got this physique of a bear. When he actually was on the run in Mexico, they said the Mexicans would kill him. Um, but they respected him.

12:49 They called him El Oso, the bear, because of his fighting style. So when Wildman flew over, I rented him a house by the George and Dragon British pub in central Phoenix, thinking he would just go and have drinks with the expats, and he’d chill out, and he won’t get any trouble. So a month or so into his stay in this property, me and my girlfriend go over one night, and we knock on the door, and a bunch of Mexicans answer, and I say, where’s Peter? They’re like, what?

13:22 I said, where’s Peter? It’s like, no pizza. We don’t want a pizza. No, where’s Peter? He lives here, and they all pull guns out.

13:29 And then me and my girlfriend are like backpedaling across the street, and Wildman Peter comes bouncing over the road, laughing. He’s got this really deep demonic laugh. He’s like, don’t worry about them, they’re the local crack dealers. They like to move around a lot. The guy at the back is their Colombian boss.

13:52 He wants to invest in the stock market, and because they like to move around a lot, I’ve rented them this place, and I’ve moved into those, and they buzz in because I can do a hundred-dollar crack rock in one breath. So he gets me all this free crack, so he’s just like staying up for days now on crack and crystal meth. And he gets moved around various properties, and we end up in Tempe in this massive apartment complex. Um, are you no longer stockbroking?

14:22 Now I’m still stockbroking. You are still stockbroking, and this was the experiment, now, with the first batch of pills to be sold. Okay, because he’s in this apartment I can only get 5,200 ecstasy from the local dealers. Okay, this is local dealers in Arizona. In Arizona.

14:38 And what’s the ecstasy scene like at this point? It’s illegal, because it was legal until the late ’80s in America, right? It was big in Dallas, I think. Yeah, it was, and then they made it illegal, and then rave kind of grew out of it. So this is early ’90s?

14:50 No, late ’90s. This is now ’96, ’97. Okay. Yeah, so it’s getting popular. It’s getting popular, but it’s hard to get.

14:59 Okay, so it’s going for 25, 30 a pill. Okay, so all these people are coming to these little palm parties, and um, I’m seeing the potential to sell ecstasy. So we end up finding out where the local dealers are getting the pills from. They’re getting them from this surfer gangster guy out of LA, who I’d happen to have a situation with um, at an after party about a year before all this went down. He was threatening some girls.

15:32 I was from Arizona. He was high on crystal meth, and I grabbed him by the balls, and I was like, I was feeling like I’m not a tough guy. I don’t, I don’t, I’m talking about, you’re screaming by the balls, you must be, I was on crystal meth and GHB at the time, which gives you false courage. So I grabbed him by the balls. He was surprised.

15:48 He showed up. So now I’m thinking, right, all right, this deal, this transaction’s been set up to go and buy a thousand pills off him. Is he gonna get revenge on me for grabbing his balls at this party, or is he gonna do the deal? So I take two crews in cars of big guys. I’ve got Wildman.

16:06 I’ve got this other guy called Seth, who’s a huge guy, and I’ve got Acid Joey. Both Seth and Acid Joey are dead right now. More than half of my party friends are dead right now because of the risk-taking lifestyle. And if you think about your own drug use back then, why were you doing it? Why do you think it was attractive to you?

16:25 I don’t want to make excuses for my behavior, but years later I had to go deep inside myself and address the root causes of why I got involved in drugs and crime. And one of the things that the therapist helped me understand was that I almost got beaten to death by some drunks when I was a teenager. I just passed my driver’s license test and went to fill up my mum’s little red car with petrol. Some drunk started to behave abusively towards me, and I thought it was brave to stand up to them, but it was a mistake.

16:57 They were, like, big, 20s rugby-player size. Got me on the floor, started kicking me in the head, kicking me in the body. One pulls out an iron bar, just bam, knocks me in the teeth, actually knocking pieces of my teeth out, and all I can do is just lie there, like this in the fetal position. My whole body’s going warm and numb. It got to the point where I couldn’t feel the pain anymore, so I thought they stopped hitting me, so I opened my eyes, and it’s still like bam, bam, hitting me.

17:27 I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t feel the pain. I thought to myself, I started s***ing myself, honestly. I thought I was gonna, I was getting killed. And, um, but I went unconscious and woke up in this pool of blood, and they smashed the car windows, and my vision was blurred. I managed to drive home.

17:41 Parents took me to the hospital. I was broken, with my teeth, because I’ve got these nice videos, three, um, but after that, I won’t go out and dance. I won’t talk to women. Too self-conscious, and I was, I was really, um, this introverted, shy person. And then the rave scene began in Manchester and Liverpool.

18:00 It just hit like boom all over the country. Took ecstasy. I won’t stop dancing, hugging complete strangers all night long, talking to women, and it transformed me. Now that might sound like an advertisement for ecstasy, but what actually happened was drugs became my crutch. You start out, and it gets you this high, and the pleasure’s high, but the pain is low, but that reverses over time.

18:26 So for over 10 years I’m doing more and more drugs, mixing my drugs up, doing harder drugs, always trying to get back to the early feeling, but I’m getting more and more addicted, until I cross over into the dark side of drugs, and all that s*** hits the fan, and you can never get back to those first few ecstasy feelings. Right? I’ve heard some scientists say that over time you build up some type of an immunity to it, that you can never actually continue taking it and get those same highs, even if you wait in between.

18:56 The very first time you take it, it’s just like your system’s just a virgin, and it’s just like mind-blowing, but then the pain of the side effect just rises a slight little bit every more time, and the pleasure incrementally goes down, tiny, tiny bit, every, until they eventually cross. And I only learnt this in jail, because the guys in jail were at the end of that road of drug use. Um, two-thirds of hepatitis C from sharing dirty needles, 90% were injecting heroin and crystal meth.

19:30 It was really sad. Yellow jaundice, skin, teeth falling out. Now it costs 30,000 to treat hepatitis C, interferon. If the jail treated them all, the jail will go bankrupt. They would rather you just die.

19:43 Get a healthy prisoner on that bone, because they get fifty thousand dollars per prisoner to house you. That’s how they make their profits. So they’d say to the guys that were dying from this, you know, well, if they sued in court and got the treatment awarded to them in court, which takes years anyway, your liver’s going out by then. Some of the guys who sued in court and won those cases and were eligible for the treatment, the jail would then say to them, there’s just one more requirement now for you to get this treatment: stop taking the heroin.

20:15 And some of them would just choose to take the heroin and die. And that’s how I saw the sadness of addiction, and how the pain can rise way above the pleasure, and you can’t stop. Right? What’s the pain when you’re taking ecstasy in the very beginning? Yeah.

20:31 Um, the pain was having to take a break from dancing to go to the toilet. Right. So there is pain with ecstasy, with a drug, first time? It doesn’t. The pain does not register.

20:42 This is what I have to explain to school kids. Okay, I do talks in schools across the country, and when you first take drugs, it’s just fun, fun, fun. That’s all you see. The pain is not going to register, but they’re putting themselves on that road of drug use which is eventually going to take them to a place where that pain is going to be rising, and if they get addicted, they can’t stop. And now that’s not to say that most people who try drugs are going to end up there.

21:10 No, most people who try weed, who try ecstasy, are going to go on to have completely normal lives. I may be able to do it in moderation, but it’s people like me that have got addictive personalities, and we’re going to self-destruct at some point, maybe even die. Right? Okay. And with ecstasy, like, the downside of that is the next day you’re completely flat.

21:30 Your dopamine systems are all kind of just tapped out and gone, and you can never reach that high, and it does lead you to other, stronger drugs. Yes, and I managed that through Xanax. Okay. I would not have that come-down. I would just take Xanax, wake up as crisp as a baby.

21:47 If I needed energy, get on some crystal meth, get some GHB. It just comes to the point where you’re managing your whole life through Pharmaceuticals. Okay, and do you ever think about why those drugs attracted you? Because when I look at my history with alcohol and drug use, I think I was trying to get out of my own head, that was constantly pushing me to do more. How come you’re not good enough, Brian?

22:06 You got to work harder, you got to get more. I think I was somehow taking a break from myself that was so demanding. I see what you mean. People are like, to let off the steam of the workday, go to the pub, or just to get away from me for a second, to not be kind of worrying about what I’m doing or not doing or being critical, and just take a break for just a bit of peace, because I couldn’t get away from myself. I had social anxiety.

22:30 Okay. All right. And I even, and you wanted that human connection, and you couldn’t get it without the drugs. At the peak of my drug-taking, people thought, you know, this guy’s so powerful, you know, he’s got running a criminal organization, hundreds of people working for him. He’s got his bouncers armed to the teeth, and all this stuff.

22:46 As soon as I was off the drugs, I was back to that shy, anxious person who didn’t want to be around people. They just saw me on drugs, and that put this tough mask on me. It was fake. Got it. Interesting.

22:58 All right, so we, we fast forward a little bit. So going back, Wildman comes over. Yeah, like your alter ego. You’re kind of like the brains and he’s the brawn, right? And you feel better with him around, because he’s the muscle, he’s the scarier guy, and crazy as well.

23:12 Crazy anything could happen around him, and he introduces me to all the people in the underworld. So wherever you house Wildman, he’s been housed in Mexico, LA, you name it, he takes control of all of the street people right away. They all just start worshiping him, even in LA after a couple of days. Sunset Boulevard, pink, dodgy pink hotel, street people coming all night long, just dropping off free drugs, swimming, everything. He ended up just staying there with the street people.

23:39 So we put him in this apartment complex, Rancho Murrieta, Tempe, Arizona, massive complex. You know, Tempe is a university town. Massive demand for ecstasy. And um, he moves in with some people at home, behind the rent. I, I take care of that.

23:58 Throws these parties, typical party in here. He’s got, like, um, Native American, transgender street prostitutes, um, gang bangers are in there, you know, armed with guns, Russian mafia, Italian mafia, drag queens, striptease dancers, and this is just non-stop. This is how he lived, just nonstop. Everybody’s on pills and everyone’s having a good time telling each other their life stories. Right.

24:28 Yeah. So it was through him opening this door into this underworld to me, of the night people, that I saw the business potential and made my connections that were necessary to lay the foundation for the criminal enterprise. Wildman, he was so insane, his behavior. He got deported multiple times, and that’s smuggling him back into the country, sending, like, Mission: Impossible style teams of people through Canada and Mexico to bring him back into the country.

24:56 The judge had ruled that he was a menace to society and permanently banned him, but I kept smuggling him back in. So he was coming and going over the years, but the enterprise was building and building and building, okay, through these other people. And so when do you decide you’re gonna go full on into the ecstasy business and the party business and leave stockbroking behind? And was it a financial decision, or was it about power and fun and acceptance? Power, fun, ego, acceptance, the women, everything.

25:29 You’re the man. If you’re the man, if you’re Mr. Cool Guy, you’re throwing parties for up to ten thousand people, you know, in charge of the VIP area. People are coming up to you all night long, “Thank you for the pills and the parties.” That my ego was as big as the Grand Canyon back then. Back then, let’s put it that way.

25:46 Yeah, and I, I was just feeding it. I surrounded myself with people who were equally insane as myself. That’s why, you know, more than half of them are dead now. We were all reinforcing each other’s crazy behavior, and there was nobody to put the brakes on. We’re all trying to outdo each other on, you know, all our bizarre stunts.

26:06 And in a way, you’re also throwing these rave parties that have all these good vibes and happiness. Oh yeah. It’s not like you guys are dealing crack. That would have been a different vibe, right? Because you just would have been hardcore drug dealers competing with other people.

26:18 You’re, like, you know, having fun and telling yourself you’re having fun. It wasn’t like Scarface. It was cuddle puddles and Vicks inhalers. What’s a cuddle puddle? Where a bunch of ravers are sat on the floor in a circle, massaging each other’s shoulders.

26:37 I didn’t rave enough, obviously. Oh my gosh. And what was the other thing you said, Vicks inhalers? So if you’re on ecstasy and you do the Vicks inhaler thing, it’s like I almost have an orgasm. All right, so all right.

26:49 And look, I mean, like, as a drug, ecstasy can be beneficial to some people. I mean, PTSD sufferers use it. I’ve had Rick Doblin here from MAPS, and they’re using it for couples therapy and PTSD. And yeah, I mean, like, it’s hard to overstate that. In limited doses, there are some good things that can happen if you don’t go down the addiction road.

27:08 And I concur. Trump should give me a pardon and allow me back in. No, just a joke, because like I said, I’m in drugs education it’s what it leads to, the lifestyle. Okay, and it’s the lifestyle that’s more addictive than the drugs and the cash. I’ve written extensively about Pablo Escobar.

27:28 They estimate he was worth about 30 billion. His brother Roberto said, a lot, why don’t we just buy our own island, kick back, we won’t get wiped out by our rivals, we won’t end up doing life in prison. Escobar said, I’m running a multi-billion dollar enterprise. My money puts the president of Colombia in power. I’ve got thousands of people working for me, and you want me to kick back on an island on a deck chair, sipping a cocktail?

27:55 You’re out of your mind. And because of that decision, he lost his life early. But it’s, that it, it’s addiction to the lifestyle is more powerful than anything. Wow. Yeah, that makes sense.

28:06 That totally makes sense. All right, so you’re getting into this underworld, you’re throwing the parties, you got Wildman, who’s introducing you to all sorts of types that are now, and now you’re thinking, I’m going to build this enterprise. Um, you want to go big, because why not? And it feels good, and you’ve got the ego and all the connections. Talk to me about how it starts to get big, because you now start needing more people in your organization.

28:32 You need to supply the stuff. You need security. You need to worry about law enforcement. What are those first couple years like? Okay, I’m guessing this stuff, you know, security came through Wildman’s apartment parties.

28:47 I was at one of them. I was supplying the ecstasy, and a guy comes in, Mexican-American guy, long, darker prison tattoos on his arms, ruggedly handsome, and his name’s G-Dog, and he’s supplying the coke and the weed, and he’s got this serious air about him, like, you know, prison toughness. So we’re just chilling out, people are listening to music. I think we’re playing some Tongue or some, uh, European trance, and a cop walks in, and he goes, I could smell weed from outside.

29:25 Nobody moved. Works in full uniform. Yeah, yeah. Tempe police. Yeah, walks in, and, um, G-Dog just whips out his gun, points at the cop’s face, and says, the only one who’s not leaving is you. [expletive] everybody.

29:36 Wrong. I’ve never seen anything this heavy before in my life. So we all run off into the night. Now, this apartment complex, Rancho Murrieta, has got massive buildings, huge buildings, and we’ve kind of got operations in various buildings. Some people holding the drugs, you know, some people selling the drugs over here.

29:57 So I go into one of those apartments. Police sirens, everything. Come in, we’re like, all right, we’re crapping ourselves. What should we do? Should we flush our drugs?

30:06 Will he, you know, will he remember everyone in that part? There’s no way he could remember that, but we’re in this discussion, basically: what should we do? And then all of a sudden bang, bang, bang, bang, bang on the French window. Oh, s***, is it the cops or what? We look out, and it’s G-Dog.

30:19 He’s like, let me in. Now I learned some very important lessons. Because of G-Dog, he comes in, and he says, the cops can’t get a warrant that fast. Turn the lights off, turn the TV off, nobody make a [expletive] sound. Nobody answered the door, and people are still whining and thinking, should we flush the drugs or what?

30:41 He was right. That’s what we did. Cops knocked on the door. They went next door. They kept going on the way.

30:46 And he said, I actually took him to another property in Phoenix. I said, look, because you’re so hot here, come to one of my other properties. And then he said, because you and your friends protected me, me and my brothers have got your back. I had no idea what that meant. And it was a few months later, because my brothers want to meet you.

31:06 One brother wants to meet you, so he’s got a house in Tempe. To his brother, there’s all these cars, these classic low-rider cars outside. And brother answers the door, short guy, bald head, wife-beater vest, and he’s looking up at me like, who, you know, who is this guy? And he hears my accent, he’s like, damn, you talk funny. He’s like, come, I guess you must be from England.

31:32 He’s like, come in and meet my homeboys. So I go into the living room, and there’s all these just massive Mexican-American guys, like steroid-steroided out, prison tat, wife-beater vest, shorts down below the knees. slabs of coke, slabs of crystal meth, all these different weighing scales, various guns, like AKs, mini machine guns, and they’re all just looking at me like I don’t belong. Though, you know, like they want to eat me. So I’m thinking, oh, f***, my heart’s going to jump out my chest.

32:05 Big one swings a spoonful of coke in my face, like, snort this. I look at G-Dog. He’s like, yeah, it’s not that. If you don’t snort it, they think you’re undercover or you’re a snitch. They’re going to take you out to the desert.

32:19 So I’m looking around the room, and, um, Nat Geo did a good version of this in my Banged Report episode, but they condensed two scenes. They put these guys in LA, which didn’t actually happen. It happened in Tempe. I’m looking around the living room, and they got the biggest TV I’ve ever seen. They’ve got a little TV showing all the comings and goings on the street.

32:42 We’re on top of the big TV. I do a double take. I’m thinking, all right, I’ve seen one of them before in a Rambo movie. They got a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on top of the TV. I still don’t know where they are until years later, but I know they’re serious.

32:56 I end up in business with them. I’m going over to that house, and every time I go over there, there’s that lethal atmosphere. I’m in and out, but they said to me, look, if you ever get in trouble, if you get pulled over leaving here, the cops do not have a right to search your vehicle. Tell them you’re in a hurry. They don’t have probable cause.

33:14 Keep going. Worst-case scenario, if they force a search or arrest you, this is the lawyer we want you to call, and years later, when everything went down, that was the lawyer that I called, and I’d probably still be in prison right now if it wasn’t for him. Yeah. Wow. All right, so these guys, we found out later who they were.

33:36 So I’m taking G-Dog home one night, right? Years later, after I’ve met them, the whole neighborhood is blacked out. The cops have got light ones, and they’re guiding traffic with the light ones. As we pull up to his brother’s house, they’re all being brought out by a federal SWAT team in handcuffs, and if we’d got there a bit earlier, we would have got caught up in that raid, but it was news headlines that night: leaders of the New Mexican Mafia, most powerful criminal organization in Arizona.

34:08 They were trying to assassinate witnesses, police, the head of the prison system, judges, you name it, and it had all the mug shots on the news, and they were the guys who had been dealing with over those years in the house. Yeah. Wow. And was it always tense with them, or did you guys ever… Oh God.

34:23 There was the, uh, the night of the ecstasy party. So they said, we’re to do ecstasy, most of us for the first time. Our women are coming over, I brought them the pills. I get a call in the middle of the night: we need more pills, before now. If you’ve ever taken XTC and you remember your first time, yes.

34:46 So they wanted a second one, so they’re all in there, like these big, smiley, sweaty overgrown teddy bears picking me up, bear hugging the life out of me, trying to tell me their life stories. “We love your pills, England, man.” Yeah, that was the only time that they were ever smiling like that. Every other time they had that lethal did business with them, which meant you sold them pills and they distributed for you. They provide protection.

35:17 They got stuff off me, and I got stuff off them. Okay, let’s just leave it at that. Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Did you guys ever just stop yourself and say, this is really uncanny, that this kid from England is hanging out with these tatted-out Mexican muffins?

35:31 To an extent, it’s a buzz. One of the things that scared me early on, and this is when I was just crossing over from stockbroker to rave and entrepreneur, was in that huge apartment complex I just described. I got a call from a guy who was distributing XTC for me, called Fish. He called the brokerage, and he said, look, I need you and Wildman to get over here right away. I said, all right, cool, can you tell me what’s up?

36:03 He says, I can’t say on the phone, so I went to Wildman’s place in central Phoenix, and the local street people there told me he was out debt collecting for the Colombian crack lord with the other big guy, Seth, and they were my two main goons. So they were, I couldn’t access them, so I went over to this guy’s house, Fish, in Tempe, his apartment, sorry, and I, I am alone, knock on the door. Fish answers. His woman is behind him, and she’s crying. I’m immediately thinking she’s been sexually assaulted, you know?

36:42 And you know, they want Wildman and Seth to do something about it, find the guy, something. So I look at them. I said, I’m like, what’s up? And they won’t speak. They’re like, paralyzed with fear.

36:52 I hear a noise from the back room, an electrical crackling, like, what the hell is that? So they’re like, they won’t tell me. They say, just go and see for yourself. I walked down the hallway, and I opened the door, and there’s a friend of G-Dog’s, let’s call him Alex, and he’s an older Mexican guy. He’s got grey hair swept back, very stately, burning about him, and he’s overlooking a group of Mexicans who are overlooking, on the carpet, a naked man who’s hog-tied.

37:33 He’s got, like, a rockabilly quiff and a gag, and he’s going like this, like a rocking horse on the floor. And he’s giving instructions to them in Spanish. They’ve got cattle prods, and they’re just periodically electrocuting him, and when they do so, piss is just shooting out of this guy’s [expletive] onto the floor, and he’s, I can see he’s just terrified for his life. So I still don’t know what’s gone down. Now I know Alex from G-Dog.

38:06 I’m all good with him, and he’s just like, you know, this is just an average day at Walmart for him. He’s just looking at me like this is nothing, and smiling with this, welcome to the family smile. So in my head I’m thinking, okay, I’m in with these guys. I don’t want to hang around there. This is way too heavy.

38:26 I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Are they going to kill him, or what? I’m s***ing myself. Are the police gonna come? I gotta get out of here, but I can’t just turn around and leave, because then they’re gonna think I’m a liability, and they’re gonna do something to me, maybe take me out to the desert.

38:42 So I’m just there for a little bit, trying to ascertain what’s going on, and Fish tells me, this guy robbed us. I’ve got your stuff in here. I’ve got their stuff in here. He came over to buy some stuff. He must have watched the apartment, watch me leave, and came back and robbed us, but I came back and caught him, and I called you.

39:08 Because he stole your stuff, I call them because he stole their stuff. And they got here first. I was kind of glad that they got there first. So I talked for a little bit. I say, look, to Alex, I’ve just come over in a hurry from my workplace.

39:27 You know, I could not find Wildman, I couldn’t find Seth. We would have done whatever we could to help you. I’m gonna go, I got to go back to work, and he was like, you know, just see you later, kind of thing. No problem at all. So all the way back to work I’m haunted by this guy on the carpet.

39:45 Yeah, he’s robbed him, he’s done bad, but seeing people suffering like that, it’s not in my nature. So I’m thinking, are they going to kill him? What’s going to happen? What I found out was they called his friends, and they said, look, 10 grand, you’ve got 24 hours, or he’s dead. And the money was paid, and he was released.

40:04 That was the end of that. All right, so you start getting used to this whole other side, but it’s too late to get out, and you don’t want to get out either. You’re just riding it. I don’t want to be involved in scenarios like that, but I’m loving being the man. Okay, I’m loving the after parties.

40:19 We’re renting villas in the Scottsdale Hilton, huge, like massive studio area in the middle, where we’ve got DJs playing, two, like, end suites on either side with Jacuzzis, people, you know, going around naked on roller skates, and strippers putting candle wax on people, and we take all the paintings down in this villa, close all the curtains. Every single painting has got a different pile of drugs on it, and this is all free, that’s what I’m paying for for my workforce. So you’ve got a pile of ketamine on one painting, a pile of cocaine, another pile of crystal meth on another, pile of ecstasy on another, XANAX, assorted Mexican pharmaceuticals.

41:02 And these parties are going on for days, and when it comes time to go back to the reception and pay for the, for the renewal, I’m just putting my sunglasses on. I’ve got my roller boots on. I’m just skating up to the reception, and this is one of the parties resorts in Arizona. I’m just skating up to the reception, plunking down 500 cash for another day. My mind is just, oh man, I can’t believe we didn’t get busted.

41:32 Some of the stupid things that we did. Is was that one of the best parties that you went to? Those after parties were some of the most insane parties of my life. Okay, well, I almost died a couple of times as well, from what overdose. So I mentioned all the different paintings we have with the drugs.

41:49 Yeah, someone said, let’s just make a painting and get like a spoonful of drugs from every painting and just make a mountain of mixed drugs on this. I’m already high on crystal meth and GHB and ecstasy, and I’m like, yeah, So GHB is the date-rape drug. Well, it’s called a date-rape drug, right? But that’s what the media have labeled it. Okay, bodybuilders used it because it puts you in a deep sleep and promotes relaxation and muscular growth.

42:20 Okay, so you took it to counteract the crystal meth? I took it myself because it mellowed me out, and I, um, really enjoyed sex on it. Okay, but would you forget things, or forget who you were? Okay, in the trajectory of your drug-taking career, there comes a point, and there’s no going back, once it reaches this point, where you do start to forget what you did the previous day, and that’s, like I said, you’re entering the dark side. But I’m going to give you a story on that in a second.

42:51 Let me just go back to the paintings. So, showing off, now I just shove a bill in my nose, and instead of taking out a line to do of this mixed mountain, I just shoved a whole bill into the mountain and snort. And I don’t know what happened with time or anything, because nothing made sense anymore. I went unconscious, but I could see something. I had this experience whereby I could see, like, stars in the sky, and I was talking to them, and I didn’t know who I was anymore.

43:27 I was s***ing myself. I didn’t know who I was, where I was, how I was going to get home or anything. After going round and round with the stars in the sky for so long, I started to hear voices in the room. I couldn’t move my body. I was completely paralyzed and blind.

43:40 In the beginning the voices scared me, but then, um, I heard some of the people who worked for me, I was very close to, and one of those managed to get me into a bathroom and start talking to me, and it got to the point where I could speak, but I was blind. I was like, thinking, oh my God, is my sight ever going to come back? And she’s talking to me and talking to me and comforting me, and in the end I did recover, but they said I just looked dead. And that was just one occasion.

44:10 I restricted my friends: if I overdose, just put me in a bathroom, don’t call the cops, don’t call an ambulance, because you’ll all get busted. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I didn’t think I was going to see past 30. That was just one example of many, but people said I was flopping like a fish on the floor, like I needed a heart thing. Yeah, so you really didn’t think you were going to live past 30?

44:32 No, just be, and you didn’t care. It’s been kind of because you’re doing drugs all the time and living in so many drugs, living that life just like f*** the world, basically. Right. Yeah. Okay, just like only youth can do.

44:44 So you’re late 20s now? So, yeah, I’m getting towards my late 20s. Oh, the other story about memory loss. Yeah, I went to a rave, went to an after party, I’m so high, put my head through a plasterboard wall, missing a nine-inch nail that would have gone right into my skull. All I remember is waking up the next day.

45:04 My friends had took me home, covered in puke, vomit all over the carpet, vomit all over the bed. The vomit on the carpet has changed the color of the carpet. So I called out a specialty carpet cleaner to get the stain out of the carpet. He’s like, this on the floor, trying to scrub this thing out. He’s looking up at me, shaking.

45:23 He said, Shaun, whatever chemicals you had in your body are so strong I can’t get them out with your carpet. But there was no wake-up call till the SWAT team came. Okay, all right. Now let’s talk about that, before the SWAT team comes. So you’re getting bigger and bigger as an empire, and you can no longer source your ecstasy from local sources?

45:44 Um, so you have to start going international. Is that right? So the guy that I grabbed his balls, I went out to his apartment in West Hollywood, right? Two cars of people were watching it to see if, um, he wasn’t even home. Wasn’t even home, thinking, all right, the cops gonna come, is he setting up a deal, is he gonna jack me for grabbing his balls?

46:07 All this stuff. I go in there, he eventually shows up with some surfer gangsta dudes. If you ever watched that movie Point Break, yeah, yeah, people like that. Okay, I think, oh f***, these guys gonna jack me, but I’ve got Wildman on standby. He’s ready to storm in within 10 minutes if I don’t come back out.

46:22 So I go in, and I say to him, I’ve got the money. Have you got the pills? Yeah. And he goes in the back and brings out this massive bag of, might have been Mitsubishis, and, and how much are you paying for these at this point? Well, I’m paying top dollar at this point, for fours or something like 12.

46:42 It’s going to go way down over time. Okay, um, I say to him, can I try one? First he goes, yeah, would you like to get, get you a drink? I said no, I’m just going to chew it, because I know how ecstasy tastes. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy as I’m chewing this thing, and, um, yeah, it tasted spot on.

47:00 A good pill should be 125 milligrams of MDMA and clay, like usually a beige, white, speckled press. That’s usually a good pill, and then you can taste it. I could taste it. Yeah, I could taste it, right? I did so many pills.

47:13 I was doing 20, 30 per weekend at one point. Wow. I just, weekend. Yeah, I mean, well, men trying to outdo each other again, just showing off, because you can only get so high in ecstasy. Complete waste of money, really.

47:23 Don’t, don’t try that at home. Okay, um, you chew it and you spit it out? No, I was just chewing it. Okay, and I want to get high, so I’m eating it, going to drive back to Arizona listening to DJ Sasha and got high on ecstasy, but I managed to be able to drive around on ecstasy. Um, again, don’t do that at home.

47:42 Completely irresponsible. So, lucky I didn’t die in a car crash or something. So he gives me the pills, I give him the bills. Go back to Wildman’s apartment, and we sell those within the weekend. They’re gone.

47:57 Now, that is my decision-making then. I can see how much money I can make of this versus staying in the stock market as a broker. But because of that, I lost absolutely everything, because the police take everything you’ve made, legally and illegally. Okay, yeah. So I guess to the point where I can only get five thousand, ten thousand out of LA pills.

48:16 Yeah. Find out they’re getting it from Holland. I can’t leave the country because I am an illegal alien. I’m just there on a visitor’s visa, overstaying my six-month visitor’s visa. So I get testing kits from a website called DanceSafe, where you can test the pill.

48:34 It’ll turn, like, a blue-purple color, and you know it’s pure stuff. I send guys out to Holland. They make the connections. You know, now we’re getting them for like two dollars a pill. With all the cost of the smugglers and the legal fees and everything else, three dollars a pill, up to 30, 40,000 pills at a time.

48:50 Now I had a woman come to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport with pills in vitamin jars. She got stopped, and they took her in a room, and they searched everything. They put the pills on the table, and they said to one of them, she said, vitamins. They said, cool, have a nice day, and put them back in the luggage. So I consulted someone who’s an expert in these matters, a lawyer, and he said, start bringing him in through Mexico.

49:20 So that’s how I established my Mexican operation after that. Okay, yeah, and what are you selling these pills for now? People say, and the police said, and the local media said, you know, Atwood was bigger than Sammy the Bull. Sammy the Bull was a flash in the pan. He moved a lot, but he got arrested quite quickly.

49:38 I had about a four- or five-year run, but what the police, the prosecutors do, they say you’ve sold x number of pills at the top street price, and that’s the level of dollars they put to get their news headline or get their arrest. So over the years, if you calculate how many pills are brought in, and say they were 25, 30 a pill, it was well over 10 million, um, dollars’ worth of pills, probably in the, in the low, you know, above that. Low numbers, above that.

50:11 Now people say, you know, where did all that money go, Shaun? If you’re making that much money, people automatically think you’re making all that money, but you’re not. I had it structured like a corporation. Let’s say I’ve got 200 people working for me at any time, it’s fluctuating, so what I’m doing is dividing it into factions. We’ve got a head of each faction, and we have, like, crime family dinner each month with the heads of the factions.

50:38 So where’d you get this structure from? Watching movies? Well, I did my business studies degree. Okay, and I’ve been there. It’s always been economics, in the stock market, my whole life, but factions is different, isn’t it?

50:49 Like, you don’t learn that in school. Maybe my terminology is a bit, okay, different. Yeah, right, but you had these subgroups that would operate as cells that were similar in structures? Yes, exactly, report to you, but they were independent, so they could run their own distribution and organization independently. Yes, yeah, exactly.

51:06 You would do the smuggling in and distribute. Well, here’s how it was organized then. So head of each unit gets, say, 5,000 pills from me, and I will give them on credit, let’s say ten dollars a pill. They’ve got mid-level people, they’ll give 500 to 102 at a time at, you know, 15, 20, and then they’ve got people selling 25, 30 in the clubs. So there’s all these different chains, links in the chain of distribution.

51:40 So if I’m bringing in 40,000 pills, let’s say, and I’m fronting them out at 10, but my costs are three, I’m making seven times forty thousand, quarter million. Not bad. But it’s still not forty thousand times twenty-five, thirty, right? Okay, so you have to pay, all the distribution network has to be paid, and then you’ve got your legal expenses. What’s legal?

52:04 Everybody who worked for me, as opposed to, send me the ball, and this is why some people defected to me. Some people played both sides, was because I had four legal benefits. So you get arrested, you get a lawyer assigned to you right away, you get your bail money posted, you get free legal advice if you’ve never been arrested before, if you’re a first-time offender, and you’re distributing XTC locally, you’re not international smuggling it, then, um, you’re probably going to get bailed out right away.

52:32 No need to snitch. So I’m protecting my own ass as well. The New Mexican Mafia school me, and all this, so I schooled all my people on it as well, including never to smuggle weed. Go around weed, but expose yourself to weed smoke. Why?

52:46 Why not weed? Because I had a guy really messed up. Every sniffer dog in the world is trained to sniff weed and coke. It takes a specially trained beagle to smell ecstasy. So you asked about the importation and the distribution side.

53:03 We’ve covered the distribution, but we’ve not covered the bringing it in. So I’ve got a right-hand guy called Cody Bates. I have one of my guys who’s dead as well, and, um, Cody Bates, he rented apartments just to put the cash in, just to put the pills in, and he took his best mate to Holland to bring a load back. His best mate had never been out the country, so he bought him some hydroponic weed as a birthday present, because he’s never been out the country.

53:36 He decided to bring it back to America to show it off to his friends. They’ve got ten thousand plus pills on them, and this, you know, fifty dollars’ worth of hydroponic weed. So by this point, people are not flying from Holland to Arizona, it’s way too risky. I’ve got planes going from Hermasio airport to Mexico City to Earth France, and then you’re just getting the train over to Holland. And this is before 9/11.

54:04 So again, don’t try this. You can just put it in your luggage. If you don’t want to be that secure, people could just pop them in pillowcases. But people who were muscular had them screwed in like computer towers, things like that. So they get to a checkpoint in France, the sniffer dog just walks right up to him, because he can smell the weed, but he’s a bust.

54:25 Cody Bates goes to the men’s room and flushed all of his pills. He got through. Now legal benefits were immediately assigned to the other guy, because it was international smuggling on that level. The best sentence we could get him was a couple of years in France, and he could speak French by the time he got out of that prison. All right, so you’re covering all the legal stuff, yeah, and you’re setting up this whole operation.

54:49 You have dinner every month with everybody, the factions, the five families, or however you got people going, and you’re running this. Yeah, it’s a good organization. You’re proud of it? Yeah, I’m not. I’m not having to use violence even, because people are scared of my association with the New Mexican Mafia, and people are scared of, of Wildman moving in with them.

55:10 They’re more scared of that than him beating them up, because Wildman was so wild, he was completely unhousable. Houses ended up blown up that he was living in. Houses ended up burnt down that he was living in, not on purpose, like trying to scare people, just because he was so wild and crazy and these things would happen. So whoever was at the top of the list of owing me money, while I would just shop at the house, you roll, Shaun, money. He would sit on your sofa, and that was it.

55:40 Then he wouldn’t leave within 24 hours. The Native American trans, best-type street prostitutes would be over, the gang bangers with their little, with their guns would be over, Mexican mafia, Russian mafia, drag queens. Your kitchen, the crack will be getting cooked up in your kitchen. The Colombian crack lord would be utilizing that facility. Mexican mafia runners would be coming over, carrying out your TV and your furniture.

56:11 You’d be watching it go, and there’s absolutely nothing you could do about it, and within weeks you would generally move out of your own place, and Wildman would stay there until the eviction notice came, or the police were going to come and they kicked him out. And that’s how Wildman lived. He just went from house to house of people who owed me money. He was banned by all the hotels. There were points where he was just, just, uh, homeless, living under a tree in Tempe Beach Park with a Rambo knife and a baseball bat, so people were terrified of, while they’re moving.

56:44 And that was the greatest motivation for people to keep paying their debts. Okay, and so you ran this organization of this size for four years? Oh yeah, about that, without violence, the worst of violent situations. Not saying there was no violence. I didn’t order violent situations, but people came to people who worked for me, and money was owed, and things happened.

57:06 Yeah, okay. What’s the thing you learned of doing business that way for so many years? Like, what’s something that you would have been surprised you know? I talk to prisoners, and I tell them: if you’ve got the entrepreneurial skills to run a business, a drug business, you’ve got to, you know, be on top of your finances. You’ve got to have people pay the debt.

57:27 You’ve got to avoid being caught by the police. If you’ve got that skill set, you can apply that to anything in life. So the lessons are endless. I got established in the rave scene of having a good product. If you’re running a business, one of the most important things is to have a good product and a good reputation.

57:47 It got to the point where people who were selling pills were saying they were Sammy the Bull, because they were getting pills that were coloured counterfeits that didn’t have that quality level from the Holland pills. Some of the guys who were working for Sammy the Bull were selling those pills, telling people that they were getting them from English Shaun. And that’s when it started to mess with your rep. Let me just stop you there. What the hell is Sammy the Bull Gravano, who I’m assuming is Italian, New York City, John Gotti associated, what the hell is he doing in Phoenix or in Arizona?

58:17 And then you started seeing different people show up at the rave clubs, like these kind of steroided-out, like you know, Italian goomba-looking guys. No offense to anybody who might look like that. And you’re like, something’s going on here. So why? Because I didn’t know he was involved in that.

58:35 Okay. So I’ve recently watched Sammy “The Bull” Gravano’s interview with Patrick on ValueTainment. Yeah, Patrick’s been a guest here. I mean, he had you on his show as well. I’m a big fan of Patrick, and he’s got his niche.

58:46 He’s got a great niche in the Italian mafias. Yeah, and so you heard Sammy talk in there. What did you take away from that? Okay, so he, what Sammy said was, and this is possible, he said that they put the ecstasy charge on him, and he took it because it was a lesser charge from some of his other stuff. He’s saying that he wasn’t running that business.

59:06 I know that his kids were in it, and I know, for legal reasons, he would perhaps have to say that, but also I know how the prosecutors embellish. You know, if they can pin an XTC business on Sammy the Bull, they’re going to get this huge headline. The prosecutors in Arizona would love to just say, this is Sammy the Bull’s XTC business. So I don’t know what the reality is, whether he was actually running that business, or, you know, his son was running it, or not.

59:35 Um, I would love to interview him by webcam, if I could do that. That would be classic, because the local cops had me and him pegged as these big competitors, and the people who were distributing for the Gravano organization, let’s say, whether it’s that other song, were going around telling people they were working for him. You know, one call to him and they could have people taken out to the desert. And what were they doing in Arizona? In your business, all right.

1:00:04 So I established my business very early on. The local cliques within the Arizona rave scene were like competing and warring against each other, so me and Wildman get in there, solve all the disputes, harmonize this situation, and incorporate all of them into the organization. So I’ve got the locals locked down, and then a new kind of ecstasy dealer appears on the scene. This is towards the end of it, now, towards the SWAT team raids. And they are these big steroid-head jock characters, these meatheads that we’ve not seen before in the clubs.

1:00:42 Yeah, you know, bragging at the biggest ecstasy dealers, the biggest XTC barons in the world, and they’ve got the leopard-print polyester shirts on and all this stuff that affronts your ego. Still, so still. Yeah, they say they were, they were, they were stepping on my toes big time, but what caused the beef was, um, my top sales guy, Skinner. They lured him to a nightclub, and this is a guy I took from the streets. He was smoking crack and eating out of dumpsters when I met him, and he got a house, and he was doing well, and, you know, we really were like a tight crime family, and this is why in Sammy the Bull’s case, everyone cooperated.

1:01:31 They didn’t have legal benefits. They weren’t that tight. They were fake. In my 57, I think that was in my case there was over a hundred, and only four people cooperated, because we were such a tight-knit um, we were generally friends. Your family, you looked after each other.

1:01:45 Family of misfits. Okay, and, um, they lured Skinner to a nightclub in Scottsdale, saying they were going to buy pills off him. They took him into the men’s room, knocked his teeth out, took all of his pills, and took all of his money, and that’s when I knew it was getting heavy. And Sammy the Bull also had another click working for him, called the Devil Dogs, these white supremacists who were, um, beating the crap out of people and barking and howling like dogs when they smashed you.

1:02:17 Yeah, so, cos, Costly started to get heavy. So Sammy’s moving in on your business, because he hears you’re making a ton of money, the minions. Yeah, moving in. All right. Was he based in the Southwest, Tempe, Arizona?

1:02:29 Sammy always was. Yeah. I had a female, let’s just say, infiltrate the organization, and she was getting invited over barbecues and stuff, and giving us reports on the setup that they had there. Okay. In his house, is he always based there?

1:02:44 Yeah, because what happened was he testified against Scotty, and I’ve listened to his reasons for doing that, and I’ve spoken to his son about it as well. His son ended up in the jail with us. They actually chucked his son to Wildman, the guards, to see if anything would happen. I think just for the hell of it. But because the son got arrested before us, we were able to get a lot of information out of him about the legal proceedings, and you know, just what the prosecutors were coming at them with.

1:03:14 Um, so Sammy “The Bull” Gravano testified against Gotti. He was the highest-ranking member of the mafia to ever cooperate. He gets put in witness protection in Tempe. He says, I ain’t no fake-ass. I ain’t gonna be wearing a beard and pretending I’m somebody I’m not, hiding out in some ranch in Nebraska.

1:03:36 I’m right here. I’m in Tempe. If they want to come and get me, I’ve got a few surprises for them. And he is a stone-cold killer, definitely a formidable character. I could see that in his, in his, um, interview with Patrick.

1:03:55 You know, he’s still got that fire inside him, not somebody to be messed with. And so he decides, because he’s got nothing better to do, to move in on your operation. So I don’t know who made the decision. Like I say, after listening to Sammy’s interview, all I know is from what I spoke to his son. His son was definitely high in the Gravano ecstasy ring, and all I know is from the people on the ground level who we were interacting with.

1:04:20 They were throwing Sammy the Bull’s name out left, right, and center, saying they were working for Sammy, and, um, Girard was definitely in the mix. The Sun was definitely in the mix. Did that scare you? Yeah, because after they knocked out the teeth of my top sales guy, I moved over a hundred miles away to Tucson, Arizona, in a gated, guarded community called Sin Vacus, up in the Santa Catalinas, in the mountains up there. Um, you couldn’t even get up that street.

1:04:51 There was, like, a guard with a barrier, and you had to call a house for anyone to get a car in there, to be even let up into that neighborhood. So that’s how scared I got, because it was all cuddle puddles and Vicks inhalers, but then all of a sudden it started to get violent. And my thing was, right, I’ve got the heads of each unit around me, and they’ve got their minions out at the street level. If the minions get arrested or harmed, there’s a level of insulation.

1:05:22 I’ve got all these heads. But once the heads start to fall, that’s my shield gone. I need to get the hell out of town, move to Tucson, and that was the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived in my life. Sounds nice. Yeah.

1:05:36 And Gravano tried to buy pills from you, but you said no at one point. What happened was, prior to me knowing who they were, I’m with a woman, my third wife, and she’s, um, she’s something else, man. She was a very intelligent woman, university graduate. She joined, she fancied a striptease dancer so much she joined the strip club just to seduce this woman, and f***ed her, and you got to be a part of that whole thing. Well, not with that woman, because they had a thing that they just liked to do themselves, but with certain other people, and we can get to some of that if you like.

1:06:20 And you just kind of let her do that, and that was okay. Oh yeah, I thought that was quite inspirational. So she’s got another bisexual girlfriend who is dating one of these new types of ecstasy dealers, the steroid-head jocks, and the steroid-head jock says to her, that girl you’re also having sex with her boyfriend-husband. We didn’t get mad at some point. Is English Shaun, can you guys arrange a, uh, a meeting, because we have a business proposal for him?

1:06:57 So I still don’t know about Sammy the Bull or anything at this point. I’m just wondering who the hell these guys are. So the meeting was arranged at Heart Five, like a small bar-club-ish, uh, entity in Tucson. I’m thinking there’s a risk that something might go down, so I’ve got a bouncer, Rosetti, we’ll call him. I’m stopping to think of things, because for legal reasons I have to change people’s names.

1:07:24 I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. Rosetti, we’ll call him. And Rosetti is one of my bouncers. He’s got a gun. And Rosetti, actually, I used to tell him stories about Wildman before Wildman arrived, and he was thinking, oh, you know, you’re just filling me with s*** about all these stories.

1:07:39 But, while, when I was to ride, this was a big guy. Rosetti, he said, wow, I can’t believe how strong this guy is. He just picks me up and throws me around like I’m a ragdoll. Yeah, so I take Rosetti to Heart Five. Me and my wife show up.

1:07:53 Rosetti’s kind of like keeping a distance from us, as if he’s not with us, because if they try to kidnap me, he’s just going to open up on these guys and just start shooting. They take me into a back room area. There’s like a sofa. Some people are sat on it. There’s two guys.

1:08:07 There’s the Spaniard and this massive steroid-head guy, like six and a half foot plus. Um, the Spaniard’s not a big guy, but he’s, you know, he takes me back in there. Steroid-head guy tells everybody to jump up and leave the room. They all run out. I sit down.

1:08:24 Like I mentioned, I’m the shy, anxious person off drugs, but I’ve been glugging the GHB on the way into this, and the GHB, I feel like I’m a wolf on it or something. My jaw comes out. I get this like powerful sensation, so I’m in there with this false courage. I’m sat on the sofa in the middle of these two guys, and they’re talking. They’re talking to me, and, um, I just grabbed the kneecaps and started squeezing, like my grandfather Fred, God rest him, when I was a kid.

1:09:02 I used to go over 2000. You know, he’s grabbing I’m like, so far right, I’ve got, I’ve gotta pretend I’m crazy to these guys or something, because I’ve got this reputation. So you have a reputation of being crazy? Yeah, because when I’m on the drugs, all these crazy things I’ve done on the drugs. Okay.

1:09:19 I’ve got to do something to just establish myself right away. All right, so Mark just sent sensible. The Spaniard was sensible, um, the, the steroid-head guy, he is looking at me like I’m crazy, and they say to me, Spaniard says, um, English Shaun, we know you’re a big name from the rave scene, and you’re moving a lot of pills. We’re also moving a lot of pills. Why don’t you start selling pills for us?

1:09:57 And my response is, I’ve got a good reputation. You know, I’ve got a lot of connections with the locals, and I’m getting my pills from Holland. None of those colored pills you guys are getting. So now I’ve dissed the pills, basically. So the big guy, now this is where he springs up.

1:10:17 Now he jumps up, and he’s like, who the f do you think you are, disrespecting our pills? Don’t you effing know who we work for? Sammy the Bull. One call to him, and we can have you taken out to the desert. So I click, it squeaks in my mind then, but I’m not sure whether he’s just spinning the game, trying to say something that he’s not connected with, just trying to impress me.

1:10:44 I’m looking at him, I’m thinking there’s quite a high chance of that, but the other guy’s very serious character. I can tell with him he’s on the level. So I say to the Spaniard, um, there’s enough demand in Arizona for us to coexist. I appreciate them inviting me and offering me this opportunity, but I’m just going to decline, but I want to give you a heads- up, since you guys have moved into the rave scene. All these undercover vehicles now are parked outside of the raves and the clubs.

1:11:23 They’re going around with cameras filming everybody’s license plates and filming all the comings and goings. I don’t think the problem for us is each other. I think the problem is the police, and you’re attracting too much heat to the scene. And then, and you know, it was all left respectfully. That was the end of that.

1:11:49 So I get out of the Rosetti’s outside, and he’s like, what did they say? I said, they said they’re working for Sammy the Bull, and he’s like, oh, [expletive], man, this is getting way too heavy. If they are working for Sammy the Bull, um, it’s getting serious. So I wondered how long the piece would last, and it was after that my guy got his teeth knocked down. That’s when the piece ended.

1:12:15 Was there an incident where you thought Sammy was going to take you out somewhere, or his guys? And yeah, and when I moved to Tucson, um, those guys did have people looking for me. Um, someone that was a, that said there was a hitman in town who was going to put my head on a silver platter, and all this stuff. Um, because I had all the local people locked down and knew exactly all the comings and goings. So the people, like my eyes and ears, they were telling me everything that was going on.

1:12:47 If there was a stranger in town who was asking for, who was asking for me, all the information was just flowing back to me. So it went from me being completely safe, for me, now having to run things from way behind the scenes. So I’m, I’m, on, you know, in this million- dollar house on the side of this mountain in Tucson, not leaving the house. Now Cody Bates, he’s driving all the way from Phoenix to the house, and he’s giving me, because we can’t speak on the phone about any of this, he’s running down everything that’s happening.

1:13:13 He’s distributing all the pills to all of the heads of the units, collecting the money, putting the money in that apartment, and everything’s secured. The operation is secured, but there’s this new threat in town. Okay. Yeah. All right, okay.

1:13:27 And what are some of the crazy things you used to do? Like, people thought you were crazy. Yeah, well, I think most of it, um, a lot of it just was spilled over from Wildman, because people just saw me and Wildman, and Wildman was just non-stop. We went into a bar one time, like a biker bar, rough-ass place, and we were shooting pool, and a giant walks in, like a proper, almost Andre the Giant-sized guy, and I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life.

1:14:01 And everyone just turns around and looks at the giant. Now, when Wildman is going to do something dangerous, he has this characteristic where one of his eyebrows goes up, like almost a 90-degree angle, and I see his eyebrow go up, and I say, look, Peter, don’t do anything, please. Come on, we’re just chilling. We’re just having a game of pool. But he can’t help himself.

1:14:29 He’s just attracted to anything dangerous. He walks over to the giant, holds his hands out, says hello, and, Peter, what’s your name? And the giant tells him his name, and Wildman won’t let go of his hand, and he’s squeezing his hand, and he’s been up for like a week. He’s not slept for a week on crack and crystal meth. His eyes are just completely blood red.

1:14:53 Looks so psychopathic. So he’s got this, he’s locking up this giant, squeezing hand. He goes, if I were you, I’d be in the circus, you [expletive] freak. The giant goes, what did you just say? And, well, my gosh, you [expletive] heard me.

1:15:11 If I were you, I’d be in the circus, you [expletive] freak. Whole bar is watching. I’m thinking, oh my God. And in the end, they were just staring at each other for a while, and everything just calmed down. The giant did not step up and try and fight.

1:15:30 Well, Wildman, you could see this, this guy was smoldering but dangerous. They made friends. Wildman called me over. They took me outside. The giant showed us his car.

1:15:41 He had a specially made seat in the back of his car, because he was so tall. That’s how he sat in his car. He gave us his number, and he said he would calm a rat, do the rounds, that collect him. I lost his number. Can you imagine?

1:15:56 Can you imagine? You own money, a Wildman shows up with, like, a seven- foot guy. That just added to the insanity, but Wildman was like that constantly. You’re still out of your mind. Do you miss those days?

1:16:14 I look at it. I look at it as a phase that I went through. Do you miss it a little bit? No, because I know if I tried to do anything like that now, I’ll probably die, and I’m lucky to be alive. Of all of my friends, dead, and I look back with nostalgia, but I don’t want to repeat it.

1:16:31 Okay, but you’re not, you don’t regret it? I do, and I don’t, because I’m more of a nervous breakdown. My sisters have cancelled. I could see, you know, I broke down and cried, listening to my dad ask a judge for leniency at my sentencing hearing, and seeing the pain and suffering on the faces of my family. It makes me sick to my stomach to this day.

1:16:58 So you don’t want to put your family through that. That’s another thing I tell the kids now. On the other hand, I say to the kids, they say, would you do it again? I say, yes and no. Yes, because I had to go through it to grow up and learn the lessons.

1:17:13 You know, it’s brought me here to speak to you today, and it takes me to all these kids I never imagined to be doing all this talking to. Okay, all right. I guess we got to talk about how it all came undone. Yeah. So what happened?

1:17:27 How did the SWAT team come to say hi? Now, I met a woman after all my marriages. I’d met a woman, falling in love. You had a lot of women going on, one of the strippers. That’s what motivated me to do a lot of this.

1:17:41 Was it? Yeah, it was. If you’re a character in the scene, high up in the underworld, there are women that are attracted to that, let’s put it that way. Okay. Yeah, and you enjoyed that?

1:17:54 I enjoyed that. Yeah, I’m a tester on testosterone, a 20-something-year-old, who’s not going to enjoy that, right? And all these women are throwing themselves at you because you’re the kingpin, man. Got a bisexual wife who’s inviting women into our relationship. Now, her thing was they’re allowed to give us both oral sex, but then they have to leave, and we have sex ourselves.

1:18:20 That was the line she drew on our wedding day, on our wedding day, on the Las Vegas Strip, I’m coming home from the Little White Chapel, in the Las Vegas, Little White Chapel, whatever it is, and a guy swings a sleazy magazine in her face. I think we’re staying at, maybe he sees this palace. She says, it’s my wedding day, I want to go to a brothel. So I say, cool, you know what, it’s getting away with what my wife wants. Call the brothels up, tell them me and my wife want to come over.

1:18:57 She’s bisexual. No chance. These are gentlemen’s clubs. So I’m calling and calling and getting more and more disheartened. She’s pouting.

1:19:09 This isn’t going to happen. I’m telling her, right, call a woman out. She, you know, she’s got this magazine, so my hopes are raised again, but I’m thinking they’re going to say the same thing. If I call a woman now, they’re not going to do this kind of behavior. Call an escort agency.

1:19:26 My wife’s bisexual. It’s our wedding day. Have you got a woman who will come out who can accommodate both of us? Oh, yeah, no problem at all. 150 an hour, whatever it was.

1:19:36 I’ll send someone over, beautiful brunette, blah, blah, blah. So we’re waiting for this woman to show up now, because I’ve got relationships with the New Mexican Mafia and the Mexicans in Mexico. I can get coke, pure coke, twelve thousand dollars a kilo, not like the [expletive] on the streets of London. So my wife’s got the coke, and she’s doing some lines. Escort shows up.

1:20:03 Again, I’m thinking this isn’t going to go through once I tell her what we want. We just got married. My wife wants oral sex first, then me, then you’re going to leave. That’s that. Yeah, 150, no problem.

1:20:16 But she looks over at the coke. Can I do a line? Yeah, but we live in Arizona. It’s pure stuff. You know, be careful how much you do.

1:20:24 Oh, I can handle my [expletive]. Pulls out a bank card, pulls the rail out, snorts a line. Huge line. I mean, my wife, like, oh, wife goes first. She’s on the bed, and the brunette’s going down, and then I’m getting turned on, naturally, watching this, thinking, when are they gonna be my turn?

1:20:47 Going red in the face. Verse bits over, they jump up. The escort wants to do more cocaine. Another huge line. So bye.

1:21:00 Oh, by the time I get on the bed, she’s so high on cocaine, she grabs my dick with this iron welder’s grip. I don’t, I’ve got to hold on to my nut, because I’ve got to have sex with my wife on our wedding day. So this is my dilemma now. How do I not come when this is over the top? Let’s go.

1:21:25 Hang on, I’m thinking of everything possible. You know, Margaret Thatcher, Pythagorean, trying to get my dick to go down. In the end they had to stop her. But the sad thing was, then she did more cocaine. She’s so high she starts telling us a life story.

1:21:41 Gets a picture out of a kid in our handbag, said she’s new to the business. You know, she’s supporting a kid. She’s got this kid in Nebraska staying with her parents. She’s doing things she doesn’t necessarily want to do. She thinks we’re the coolest couple in the world, asking us if she can come back to Arizona with us, and all this stuff.

1:22:01 And my wife’s like, you know, get rid of her. My heart’s open, and I’m feeling sorry for her. She goes to the toilet. Wife says, look, either you get rid of her or I will. So in the end, had to say, a lot, we got, we got things to do.

1:22:13 She gave us a number and she left. But yeah, so that’s what went down on our wedding day. Jesus Christ, Shaun, I don’t know what to say about that story. All right, so the SWAT team comes in. Meet a woman, fall in love.

1:22:28 This is a year before the SWAT team raid. She said to me, this is dangerous, what you’re doing. You know, the Sammy the Bull stuff’s gone down. He’s been swat team raided. Um, the New Mexican Mafia guys, if she knows about it, they’re all raided.

1:22:44 Everyone’s getting ready. I’m the I’m the last man standing, up the bigger entities that people are worried of in that period of time. Yeah, I love you, Attella, you’re right, it is dangerous. I’m going to quit the importation of the XTC. I thought I got away with it.

1:22:59 So you did quit the importation? Yeah, a year before the SWAT team came. I thought the police had to catch you with the drugs. Well, the one thing that the New Mexican Mafia didn’t tell me was about the statute of limitations. I learned that the hard way.

1:23:13 Statute of limitations in Arizona is such all it takes is someone from your past, within a seven-year period, for a drug crime to tell the cops they did a deal with you, and they’ve got a witness. And there was 10 witnesses, 10 witnesses for 10 deals, or for one deal, not necessarily deals. Um, the main witness was Skinner, who Sammy the Bull’s people knocked his teeth out, and the reason he testified against me, because as the organization started to crumble, Wildman and Skillet, Skinner had a beef.

1:23:48 Skinner owed money, a lot of money, and he recruited a bouncer of mine to go against me. Those guys started to go against me, and Wildman was deported. When he came back, and Skinner, right away I took Wildman to Skinner’s apartment to squash this and scare the living daylights out of Skinner. And when Skinner saw the size of Wildman at his door, that was squashed right away. But rivalry started between the two of them then, because Skinner was my top sales guy.

1:24:22 I raised this guy from a dumpster to have in the house and everything. This beef started. And Skinner pulled another trick. Wildman’s woman was Wildwoman. Tough Scouser people must go to her than Wildman, some of them.

1:24:40 And, um, Skinner had this, uh, gang of Black Southside gangsters come to Wildwoman’s house to save her after she’d just been firebombed. Firebomb goes through her window, almost sets fire to her, then this Black gangster crew comes, says, look, get in our car with all your pills. It was totally set up by Skinner to jack Wildwoman’s pills, because she’s so tough, she says, I don’t know who the f*** you guys are. I ain’t getting in no car, and the pills were already safe somewhere else.

1:25:19 Wildman finds out he ends up back in prison, but he finds out I pay her deportation lawyer to expedite his release. He gets released, flies back for the third time, I think. He’s on the phone to Skinner from the jail saying, I know what you tried on my woman. I’m coming back to killing her. So Skinner got so scared, thought Wildman was going to kill him, he went to the cops, and that was, that was the main witness against us.

1:25:40 Got it. Yes. Okay, so you have been out of it for a year and then the SWAT guys come to get you, May 16, 2002. I would like to say, before we go to, I still haven’t addressed my inner turmoil. I’m still sneaking off on the weekends to get high.

1:25:57 With, well, am I leaving my woman at home? Really? Yeah, I couldn’t. I stopped the invitation, but I couldn’t fix my addiction. I couldn’t stop it.

1:26:05 Okay, addiction to what? All the drugs and the lifestyle. Really? Yeah, yeah. I had to get high at those weekends.

1:26:11 The wolves were howling as soon as they got here that weekend. The howl of the walls was so loud, I had to go with the wolf pack, otherwise I would go crazy. I felt all that stuff inside me hadn’t been addressed. That took years later. So what was that?

1:26:25 Do you think you wanted to get high and get away from yourself? You wanted to be around people. You wanted to be the man. I wasn’t happy in my own skin. I’m happy in my own skin now.

1:26:37 I can go out and dance. I don’t even drink. Dance all night long before Paul van Dyk. Close my eyes, just get into the vibe of the music. But I wasn’t happy in my own skin.

1:26:47 I was a fragile person. Yeah, so I thought I got away with it. I’m studying Spanish in college online, stock trading. May 16, 2002, I’m up early, doing a stock trade. Tempe, please, we have a warrant.

1:27:08 I don’t know if it’s the cops or what. What if someone’s pretending? Jump up, look out, the people, it’s blacked out. Go to the window. The complex is surrounded by the cop SWAT team.

1:27:18 Go through to the bedroom to my missus. What we’re going to do all right? Better let him in. Halfway through the living room, then just boom, door just flies off the hinges, hands above your heads, don’t f***ing move, get on the ground now. And in that instant, when you see a SWAT team just open up in front of you with all the guns pointing at you, you know if they even accidentally start shooting, your life is over in a second.

1:27:45 So you just drop. Everything goes in slow motion, and then they crush you. But then the detective, who I learned was my nemesis from the police paperwork, when I read the police paperwork, he just hoists me up by the cops. He’s like, English Shaun, you’re a big name from the rave scene. You know, we’ve finally got you just like, really in my face.

1:28:06 So I start yelling, I am exercising my right to remain silent, love. I’m exercising my right to remain silent, love. Shout out to my girlfriend, so she won’t speak to the cops. I’m only in my boxer shorts. Um, they ended up just grabbing me and throwing me out down the stairs at the outside apartment, and then hustling me off in the police car because they want to interrogate her.

1:28:28 Yeah, wow, it’s quite a day. Oh yeah, and it was just starting. So what happens next? We haven’t even got to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jail yet. That’s when it really starts.

1:28:41 Um, Tempe police have established this outdoor facility where they’re processing all my co-defendants, because there’s so many of us. I’m in this police car thinking it’s just me. Then all of a sudden, all my guys start popping up in this processing center: Cody Bates, rave DJs, smugglers. So I’m starting to grasp a little bit the magnitude, but inside my head is saying, well, there’s no drugs in your house. The guy let you go.

1:29:08 I’m clasping onto that. So Tempe Police Department is the first thing. Then they shuttle bus, we’re in our handcuffs, over to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s intake, and this is an underground, horseshoe-shaped formation. It’s called the Horseshoe. You cannot see outside.

1:29:34 You don’t know if it’s night, all day, and all the new arrestees are coming in. So as our vans are there, all these guys have just been arrested, who’ve been tased, who’ve been beat up by the cops, who’ve been in fights, who were high, they were homeless, this very agitated, uh, line of people, and they see us start to get out of the van, and now they started to yell at one of our co-defendants, show us your tits, basically. These fellas, like, thinking they were funny.

1:30:07 And Wildman, his eyebrow goes up, because we’re all in this van, and this woman gets out, and they’re yelling at her as well. Oh, well, Wildman. The police, like, get out of the van one after another. Can’t, if I want to, Wildman just stops as he’s getting out of the van. He’s got this Viking beard at this time as well.

1:30:24 He just looks, you know, absolutely insane. He just puts his Viking beard up like this, and he yells at all the prisoners, stop talking s*** to our women, otherwise I’ll have any of you in there when I get in there with you in a minute, and they all just completely shut up. Wildman’s a good guy to get arrested with, let’s put it that way. Said like only a Northerner. Right.

1:30:52 Okay, gotcha. So we go in. First thing is there’s a woman behind a Plexiglas screen, and she just starts yelling at you. Have you got any lice? Have you got any scabies?

1:31:04 Have you got hepatitis C? Have you got AIDS? They’re just asking you all these questions. Then the cops, the guards, big grill sergeant guys, dressed in black, bald heads, they take your belt, take your shoes, and go through a metal detector, and then you enter the Horseshoe. So there’s all these cells designed for so many people, but people are in them.

1:31:32 They’re like, you’re like this, next to the person next to you, on the floor. There’s no space whatsoever, and fights are breaking out. There’s, you know, 24th Street Bloods versus the Crips and the West Side, and all this stuff. Fights are breaking out. There’s blood on the walls.

1:31:52 The guards, if the fight’s breaking up, the guards drag people out, and it looks like a medieval torture device. It’s called a restraint chair, like this black chair tilted back. They strap you in it and put a hood over your head. People are just like rocking. It’s called a spit hood, so you won’t spit on anyone.

1:32:12 And you’re in there for days. You only know whether it’s night or day, because the heat falls and rises against the wall, and it gets to the point where you get a piece of paperwork, and you see a judge. And that’s when I knew, then, they had my charge. Was, um, I made charges, conspiracy, head of a crime syndicate, continuous criminal enterprise, and my bail was 750,000 cash only. So I knew I was in deep s*** at that point.

1:32:47 And did you have that money? And even if you did, can you post your own bail? I’d flown people over, put money in their names, thinking, if I get arrested, you know, that could be used to bail me out. The cops had arrested me and all my mates on the same day, and they put a virus in my computer called the NetBus Trojan horse, and they saw where I had all my money as well. They took everything, legal and illegal gains.

1:33:14 Yeah. All my pension from when I was a stockbroker, and everything, everything. Yeah, okay. So what’s going through your head right now? How do you feel?

1:33:21 I’m thinking, holy s***, I’m gonna have to call my parents. That is what is killing me. The purpose of having people on standby to bail me out was I would never have to turn to my parents. Did they know what you were doing? They flew over, and they just thought I was, well, they saw me day trading on my computer.

1:33:40 Okay, is that, yeah, an accomplished stockbroker, or do they know better? Well, I knew I wasn’t a stockbroker anymore, but I was day trading. Okay. And throwing raves, at a rave clothing store and a rave music store and everything. Okay, so they all look legit?

1:33:53 Yeah, yeah. Um, there was a situation where my family flew over when I wasn’t in the gated, guarded house, and some guys knocked on the door who didn’t know, and they looked like they were from the scene, and they looked like, you know, there was a problem. We’re watching a Bruce Willis movie in the living room at this point in time, and I tell my family, I’ll just keep watching that. You know, I’ll answer the door. I’ve got a shotgun for home protection, so I’m thinking I’d get the shotgun, my parents won’t see.

1:34:23 I go to the door, go to the door with a shotgun. What do you want? We’re looking for Acid Joey. I said, Joey doesn’t live here. I said, Joey owes us money.

1:34:32 Acid Joey owes me money as well. I’d rather you, you know, he’s in San Francisco. I’d rather you didn’t come to my house. And they see the gun, and they ended up leaving. I turned around with the gun on my parents’ seat.

1:34:42 See me stopped over, shotgun. My mom, I could just see in her eyes, you know, the fright, and, um, so my explanation is, in America there’s a lot of shootings. You know, road rage during Arizona, when it, the heat is at the maximum, people just start shooting each other and killing each other on the roads. So I say, and there’s always a serial killer running around on the headline news. I say, it’s crazy out here.

1:35:09 You know, most people have guns with home protection. A lot of people do. Yeah. So they kind of, like, listened to that, but in the back of their minds it was eating away at them. Then I sent them off to Sedona, where I had a contact.

1:35:19 One of my clients was the Red Rock Lodge when I was in the stock market in Sudan, and, you know, got my nice Jacuzzi sweet up there to go and chill out in the Red Rock mountainous landscape. All right, so they were good. All right, so back to the jail. You’ve got a serious charge, you can’t make bail, you’re worried about calling your parents. What happens?

1:35:36 What happens next? I call my aunt, and, um, she says, you know, they’ve got to be told, and all this. And oh man, hearing the pain in my mom’s voice. I don’t even know if I could say the story. It just f***ing kills me.

1:35:57 What do you tell her, though? Do you know you’re going to be locked up? Um, I’ve got serious drug charges. Yeah, and just hurt in the heart, right after everything she’s done for me, for my entire life. What does she say?

1:36:17 It wasn’t what she said. It was the pain in the voice. It just went right into my soul. She was disappointed with you. She was worried.

1:36:25 I knew, because they’re such good people, they would have my back, but it was shameful for them, your behavior. Well, what hurt me the most was letting them down and breaking their hearts, and being so far away, and then I’m in a dangerous situation now, the worst thing they could possibly imagine that someone would have done. Got involved in drugs and let them down like that, and the shame, and just everything just hitting me all at once. Yeah, so they said that they would do whatever they could for me.

1:37:00 And I knew, I knew even before I got on the phone, that they had my back, and it just made me feel doubly guilty and doubly sick from putting them through it. Yeah, because it was, it was gonna be, it was a long, it was a long journey. Okay. Yeah, wow. All right, and then now it’s time for trial and sentencing.

1:37:18 And what you know, what ends up happening? 26 months. I’m fighting the case where? And where are you housed at this point? I’m housed in the jail that’s got the highest rate of death in America.

1:37:32 This is Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Maricopa County jail system. National Geographic, who did my Locked Up Abroad episode, they researched it. 62 people died in that facility over five years, around the time I was, uh, and they weren’t just people who were murdered by the Aryan Brotherhood and the gangs. I’ve got videos on my YouTube channel of the guards murdering mentally ill prisoners. Yeah.

1:37:58 One prisoner, um, Brian Crenshaw, was a partially blind shoplifter. Failed to produce his ID for the evening meal. Guards pulverized him, broke his neck, severe internal injuries. He went into a coma. He died over a month later.

1:38:16 Scott Norberg, mentally ill man wandering a neighborhood, they brought him in, they started beating him and electrocuting him with Tasers. A female guard tried to stop it, stop beating him. His face turned blue. They pushed her off. They kept beating him.

1:38:32 The inmates watching from the holding cell started yelling, why you still beating him? He’s already dead. And they couldn’t stop themselves from beating the cops that had already turned blue. They were like a pack of animals, just beating this corpse. And I watched these videos, and it’s like the amygdala kicks in, and they’re like a wolf pack.

1:38:57 They go in, one of them starts beating the guy, to get down, the rest jump on, and you can just see the ferocity in their faces. A guy’s dead, and they can’t stop themselves. The complete animal side of nature has taken over. These are guards. Guards.

1:39:13 It’s one thing seeing the gang members smash someone, and I saw a lot of that. I saw people’s teeth just getting knocked out, bounced on the floor. I saw a guy with his leg pointing the wrong direction. So a mentally ill old man who wouldn’t stop babbling all day, as I walked past him, blood would just squirt, not the back of his head. It’s one thing to see the prisoners do that, but seeing the guards do things are supposed to be protecting you just takes a whole new scary level, and some of those guards.

1:39:44 As well, the family members sued. The victims of the guards sued the jail, and in federal court, and forced them to release the footage. That’s how I got the footage, and some of the guards who were found guilty in federal court for those deaths. The boss of the jail afterwards, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, gave him promotions and pay rises. So this is one of the most lethal areas in Arizona, um, ever, because the architect, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, had created this, this hell.

1:40:21 Enough. Yeah, and that’s where you’re there for 26 months, 26 months, and, um, they separated me from Wildman. They put me in Tower Six. So as I go in, um, the AB come up to me. That Aryan Brotherhood had the skinheads, and they’re like, hey, hey, Wood, you know what are your charges?

1:40:40 Wood, Wood, Wood. Oh yeah, Pekka Wood, Pecker Wood, like, hey, Wood. Where are you rolling from? You know, Pecker Woods is a click inside the prison. Yeah, it’s kind of like, mate, I guess because I had no her, I kind of looked a bit like a Wood to them.

1:40:56 So I go in, and they’re like, you know, what are your charges? No, first of all, oh, sorry. They’re like, we want a word. Review in the cell over there, and you can’t say no, or they’re just going to smash it into the wall. So go in the cell.

1:41:07 Is this right? When you get in, oh yes, okay, charge check is right away. Heart check, maybe. They put me in the cell, close the door, can’t get out. Biggest one’s in my face.

1:41:18 What are your charges? So I’m new to it. You know, I’ve read conspiracy, criminal syndicate, all this stuff. I have no idea what that means. They’ve not caught me with drugs.

1:41:28 What’s going on? What is there, a drug deal that they’re gonna say on X day? All this is going through my head. I’m confused, so I say to these guys, I don’t know what my charges mean. Now that is the worst answer in the world.

1:41:43 What do you f***ing mean, you don’t know what your charges mean? You were chomo? They got me pinned up against the wall, now about to smash me. He says, chomo, what does that mean? I don’t even know what chomo means.

1:41:52 Right. Okay, something so confused. I pull out my charge sheet. My Nat Geo episode didn’t show. I pulled out my charge sheet.

1:42:01 They read the charge sheet, crime syndicate, conspiracy, and they see my barely 750,000, and they love that. They’re like, damn, who did you guys kill? Are you the maf? Yeah. What?

1:42:14 I’m like, no, raves. Ecstasy didn’t kill anyone. And then they explain all the rules. Once they’ve accepted you, they know you’re not chomo, because some charges are KOS, kill on site, pedophile stuff. Right.

1:42:27 Explain. So explain that, so drug rules, explain. All right, so drive by shooting is SOS, smash on sight, beat down, because they don’t like drive-by shooters, because they harm women and kids. The convict code is don’t harm women or kids, so pedos, KOS, kill on site. Pedophile, any kind of sexual charges against kids, kill outside, kill onsite.

1:42:52 On site. Yeah, yeah, smash on site. Um, if you can’t sit at a table with another race, they’re going to smash you for that. You can’t make your friends with the guards, talking to the guards for too long. They’ll think you’re a snitch.

1:43:06 They’re going to smash you for that. You must take a shower, they’ll smash you for bad hygiene. So on and on and on it goes. Um, they, they, they school me a little bit. I’ve been in the Horseshoe for days.

1:43:20 They said I stunk like a wet dog, go and take a shower and put some shower sandals on so you don’t get Durango foot rot, and they gave me. I said, I haven’t got anything to brush my teeth. If they gave me this tiny little splayed toothbrush to look like they’ve been cleaning the toilet with it. But I used to brush my teeth. I was so desperate in the shower.

1:43:40 There’s like a puddle of, like, you know, jigs and pubes on the floor, and I pick up a piece of soap out of this puddle and wash myself with this piece, wash it off in the water, and wash myself. This pizza. This is how desperate I am. This is how much I stink. And then I go back to my cell.

1:43:58 Now they asked me about another guy who came in. Now most people would be surprised that guys in prison would care, first of all, about crimes against someone outside of prison, or care about your hygiene. But I’ve had Wes Watson on, who spent time in prison, but the clicks all happen based on race, and that’s your security, and you then make sure that those people all have good paperwork, and if they don’t, then they get rid of you. Right? So, and hygiene, super important.

1:44:23 Right? All these protocols. It goes militant in there. It goes militant, and from having my own true crime podcast, Brian, and interviewing people who’ve been in prison all over the world and getting the complete back stories, what I’ve learned is a lot of people who get involved in crime and addiction do so because something traumatic has happened to them in their childhood, and a lot of those guys have been abused as kids: sexual abuse, physical abuse. And I can understand if a pedophile ends up in an environment where people are hardcore criminals who’ve been abused as kids, they’re gonna get lynched.

1:45:02 They’re gonna take that rage out on that person. Okay, yeah, okay. And I saw it. I saw it very quickly. Um, a guy came in, who they asked me about him.

1:45:15 I said, I don’t know anything about this guy, but they suspected he was a chomo, obviously. So they got him in the shower, and they beat the s*** out of him in the shower and left him whimpering in a pool of blood. Well then the big guy says that wasn’t enough, and, like, oh, we smashed him good, dog. Didn’t smash him good enough. The big guy says, so he goes in, and he’s just, like, he’s trying to crack this guy’s head up like it’s a coconut.

1:45:40 Just crack, crack, crack, until this guy’s unconscious and looks dead. And the guard comes every 20, 30 minutes. They do a security walk. Lockdown, everybody lockdown. So I go back to my cell, put my face to the window, and he’s getting carried on the stretcher, and there’s not just blood coming out.

1:45:57 He’s had this yellow stuff, kind of. He’s had, like, brain stuff coming out with his head, and you just don’t know if these guys are dead or alive until it pops up on the news. Um, yeah, there’s a lot of violence going on there, every day. Every day someone’s getting smashed, because you’ve got all these racial gangs, they’re all high on, um, and crystal meth, getting paranoid about each other, and heroin. Um, let’s talk about the drugs.

1:46:21 You can get drugs in prison. Most people don’t even understand that there’s more drugs in prison than anywhere on the face of the earth. So in the long run, the people who can keep the drug businesses going are the large criminal enterprises, like the cartels and prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood, because in the short run, all the young, all the, uh, smaller people get wiped out. They don’t have the resources to keep it going.

1:46:50 So if you’re the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and you’ve got people in a closed environment, 90% of whom have got addiction issues, it’s your ideal market to sell drugs to all day long. The illegal drug market gets bigger every year because of the drug laws, and these gangs get more and more power through drug money, and that’s how the Aryan Brotherhood has now become a number one cause of murder throughout the entire country, to murder for hire, in and out, outside of prison. Italian mafia goes to those guys now, because they’re considered some of the most stone-cold killers.

1:47:28 It’s all come out of the U.S. prison system. So yeah, 90%, we’re injecting heroin and crystal meth. I was housed, two further, hepatitis C from sharing dirty needles, because that’s the only way to get through that time, or they come in addicted, and then it’s such a depressing place. All of the above. So we take people who are, I just like to say that I thought prisoners lock him up and throw away the key before I got arrested.

1:47:54 The pedophiles, rapists, serial killers, I had no idea that the media just puts that out there to keep the public misled and hating on prisoners. Then the media says, on the other side, they’ve got PlayStations, they’ve got gourmet food, they’ve got luxuries at the taxpayers’ expense, and that also keeps the public hating on prisoners at the peak of the war on drugs, to fill the private prisons, which are getting fifty thousand dollars a year of taxpayers’ money. They mass incarcerated low-level drug users, with the biggest category being pot heads.

1:48:26 Over half a million pot heads, weed possessors, not dealers, weed possessors a year we’re getting fed into the U.S. justice system. So I got in, and I saw the average arrest was a Black kid or a Mexican kid with a bit of weed, getting like a two- to five-year sentence. I saw that prison was the biggest house of the mentally ill. More than half of my friends were soldiers. They’d come back from wars traumatized, government didn’t give them any help at all, they got on street drugs to self-medicate for the trauma, PTSD, and they’d ended up in prison.

1:49:05 So I learned that prison housed society’s most vulnerable people, and I became a prison activist through that. And I’m not saying, you know, pedophiles, serial killers, rapists should have it easy. Through my activism, I’m saying those guys should be doing more time. Why are there people under three-strikes laws? People say that I’m making this up.

1:49:28 I was in Holland at the Hemp Museum. It’s on the wall over there. Under three-strikes laws, there are people still doing life sentences in America for weed possession, which is 25’s alive, and the political pedophiles, government is telling us they don’t even have the resources to investigate them. It costs fifty thousand dollars a year to have someone in prison for 25 years. That’s one point something million.

1:49:47 That’s where the money’s gone. It’s ridiculous, so that corporations and politicians can make tens of billions of years in private prison contracts, all based on the war on drugs, quote unquote, all based on the one drugs. That’s why I’ve written a series of books on the war on drugs, to expose it. And the Americans do that better than anyone else. Well, the Americans are sick of it, the public.

1:50:08 That’s how, why weed is getting decriminalized on the state level. I mean, there are some states prior to this where if your teenage kids got pulled over in your car with weed, please keep the car on the civil asset forfeiture laws. So it’s got to such an extreme in America. There’s been a backlash. People have voted for legalization, to decriminalization, at the state level, but U.S. federal government has maintained weed as a Schedule One substance, more harmful than crystal meth and cocaine with no medicinal value whatsoever, because that’s where the corporations want it to be.

1:50:44 And you’ve got to see the fallout of that in human lives, in prison, and it’s ugly and nasty. If you arrest a kid for weed, and I’m a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, LEAP, and they say, we’re, you know, we’re cops, we’re joined to arrest the bad guys. We were assigned to infiltrate student groups, get them high on weed, and then arrest them at the end of the month. What does that do to that kid? He’s criminalized, he can’t get a job, he goes to the jail, where he gets recruited by the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, because he’s so scared of the gang, he thinks if he doesn’t join, he’s going to get attacked or raped.

1:51:18 He gets neo-Nazi tattoos. They give you swastikas and SS lightning bolts for beating people up and collecting debts for the gang. To be a full member of the AB, to get patched in, you have to murder someone for them. Completely indoctrinated into that world, that young person. He makes his criminal connections in prison.

1:51:40 He gets this addiction to heroin, and possibly hepatitis C, by the time that kid gets out of prison, he’s ruined. He’s made a name for himself in the criminal community, so that’s what he goes right back to, and as soon as he gets rearrested, guess what? Fifty thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money per year, back to the prison, Corrections Corporation of America are boasting in the annual report to their shareholders: “Our profit growth is guaranteed because they keep coming back.”

1:52:09 They’re not correcting people, they’re breaking them. Well, yeah, it’s a serious breakdown. Yeah, and I know that’s true. Um, you mentioned rape. How graphic can we get on your show?

1:52:25 Well, you know, within reason. Uh, you know, because a lot of people think that happens in prison. Does it happen? And it doesn’t happen if you’re in the Aryan Brotherhood or in one of the racial cliques. Right?

1:52:38 All right, prison rape is so common. They enacted a law, PREA, Prison Rape Elimination Act, to force the prisons to give the prisoners a rape class to get taught how not to get raped. And it is a complete waste of time. It’s just a box-ticking exercise, so that the admin can say, hey, they’re still raping each other, but, you know, we did our rape class. Now, in the rape class, you watch some predators in the day room, and the young people coming in are hungry, and if they take food, they’re in debt that they can’t repay, so they’ve got them.

1:53:27 So then they say, look, you’re in debt, pay us the step, or you’re gonna get stabbed. I got no money to pay the debt. All right, well, you need to go in that cell over there and do whatever that guy says, or else you’re going to get stabbed. And the people who go and do that, then that sexual act, that’s called becoming a prison punk, or getting turned out, and there’s no coming back from there. There’s no coming back from there.

1:53:56 And the conclusion of the rape class was to report rape. If you report anything, you’re a snitch. So a young, mentally ill prisoner was gang-raped, and nobody reported a single thing. Now, my nine-and-a-half-year sentence was nothing compared to some of the prisoners I’d met, and they told me stories from the decades before I was in the Arizona prison system. I think it was a 60 Minutes documentary, um, saying that Arizona prisons were the most dangerous, uh, parts of real estate in the whole country right now, people getting killed and raped.

1:54:33 And the most gruesome story I was told comes from a six-and-a-half-foot trans prisoner called Xena. I’ll say she, because it’s disrespectful to call the trans prisoners he. So when Xena first came in, she clicked up with the AB. Um, she was big, weight lifting, blood in, blood out, and debt collecting for the AB. What does “blood in, blood out” mean?

1:55:00 Well, you can’t. If you’re in the gang, that’s it. If you want to leave, you’re, your blood’s going to get spread. You’re going to die. So, um, they use people up and they brutalize them, and in Xena’s case, we were writing a blog to raise awareness of prison rape, so I said, what happened?

1:55:20 The first time was a gang rape. They beat me up, raped me, beat me unconscious, raped me while I was unconscious, and shoved things inside my body. I said, how do you know if you were unconscious? That they raped you. When I went to the toilet after, I could tell by what came out.

1:55:44 I said, well, what did they shove inside your body? A broomstick. I said, well, um, what did you do after? I went into my cell and just prayed that the scars would go away. There’s absolutely nothing you could do.

1:56:07 You can’t go to the guards, or you’ll be a snitch, or they’ll put you in a dungeon for years and say it’s for your own protection. You can, the victim is labeled a rat, a punk, and considered less than human. You can’t do absolutely nothing. You can’t get someone prosecuted for this. That’s absurd.

1:56:27 So she just went off into her cell, and, um, got moved to another yard where the same thing happened. She said, they beat me up, they use me as a sex toy. I’m a prostitute, a punk. There’s no recourse, no one to talk to. You know, you can’t do anything.

1:56:41 I said, um, does it mostly happen to young people? Yes, it does. It can happen to anyone. Big, bad dudes, skinny, even the ugliest people in the world, people who come to prison who are street smart, who don’t understand the mentality of ghetto life, it happens to them the most. I said, well, how did you stop it?

1:57:02 I took the abuse for as long as I could, then I started fighting. I won most of the fights when I stood up and told them I didn’t care about getting killed. It stopped. You’ve got to be ruthless. Gotta be ruthless.

1:57:15 Now, that is understatement. Xena hadn’t told me the truth as to what had happened, because she didn’t want to risk any trouble for what she’d done. Xena was studying anatomy, and she came with an idea. The next two times the gang came to rape Xena, the first member of the gang to put his hand on Xena, Xena plucked his eyeball out. It was dangling from the optic nerve.

1:57:40 Now, I didn’t even think that was possible. At the time, I was just in shock, thinking, bloody hell, you know, is she making this up? I had a workout partner in prison called Iron Man. He told me to join a dojo when I got out. I did karate since I got out, and in karate they teach it to us.

1:57:55 It’s called bird-beak strike, where you just bam, just go in and pluck the eyeball out. Now, when the eyeball is dangling out like that on the optic nerve, it doesn’t just go back in and behave normally either. The fluid cushioning the brain can come out from the hollow, and you can die. The eye might be pointing the right, right, wrong direction, or you could go blind, become all kinds of damage can happen. So Xena did this on two separate occasions.

1:58:23 She pulled eyeballs out, and they classified her as extremely dangerous, but they moved on to some of her friends. One friend was gang-raped. They held him down, they shoved a lightbulb in his behind, and they made bets on who could smash that lightbulb first. And that guy committed suicide afterwards. And another guy, they got a shovel from the work crew, and they held him down and 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 they were the most violent and ruthless out of all the gangs and hearing this stuff from Xena.

1:59:04 Man, it made me, I, I feel like I had a gardening guardian angel. I was just blessed to get through it so unscathed. In more recent years, Xena woke up one morning, drank a cup of coffee, grabbed the felt-tip pen, and started to draw lines on the scrotum. Now, the testicles are on two branches called the vas deferens, and the trans prisoners, they want to stop the testosterone coming in and get estrogen smuggled in. So with no painkillers whatsoever, she had a Mosby’s Medical Dictionary that she was looking at, her anatomy, in this Mosby’s Medical Dictionary.

1:59:47 She picks up the razor blade, slashes her scrotum open, inserts her fingers into one side, and she did manage to successfully cut off by slicing through the spermatic cord and the gristle. She managed to slice off this testicle. I’ve got like 10 pages of detail on this in my book, Prison Time. Now the other testicle must have known what was coming, because it retracted inside her body, so she’s now got her hand up in her guts, looking for this other testicle, and she says she could feel, like, mushy stuff, like organs and things, just scrambling around, looking for this testicle, but where she’s got the blood tied off, comes undone.

2:00:44 Red-hot pain is now just searing through her head from cutting the other testicle off. The blood’s squirting out, and she’s realizing, you know, she’s got limited time to try and get this other one. Someone sees this. She’s actually bleeding to death. Someone sees this, and they only just got a helicopter in time to get to the hospital to save a life.

2:01:11 And the prisoners I met, that’s just one of them. Um, T-boned two Tonys. They’ve done decades, and the stories they told me just absolutely blew my mind, and that’s why to this day, you know, that’s what made my YouTube channel blow up, was posting the stories of these guys on it. Yeah, super crazy stuff. But did, does the Aryan Brotherhood not allow the brotherhood to partake and stuff like that?

2:01:38 All right. So it depends where you are, what yard you’re on, who’s running. Right? You’re building what the politics are on that yard. I mean, I was in places where there was a gang leader, an Aryan Brotherhood leader, uh, in that building, and every night we were coming out, and there was a nightly fellatio show, whereby a trans Native American was giving a white guy a [expletive] in an opposite pod, and we could see this through the Plexiglas, and everyone was just like, it was like a comedy thing.

2:02:16 Everyone was just throwing out these dirty, crude remarks. It was like the rules vary by the yard. There was not a common code. Yeah, but then another, that got that leader moved, and then a shot caller came from Buckeye prison, and right away he sent word over to the white guy getting that [expletive] that he was gonna get annihilated if he did not stop immediately, and he stopped immediately. So it depends.

2:02:42 You know, Xena is talking about the Aryan Brotherhood. This happened in the Arizona prison system back in the ’80s, maybe the ’90s. The politics have changed a lot over the years, so it depends who’s in charge and where you are at in time. But in general, if you go in and you’re in the white race, and the shot call is, um, and the young people come in, and you know, they click up and they play along with it, and there is a degree of protection, because the Aryan Brotherhood was started out of California because of this very reason.

2:03:21 What I noticed, Brian, is it’s an animalistic thing. People ask me, which gang is the most dangerous? It’s not danger by gang, it’s danger by numbers. Whichever gang has the most numbers brutalizes the gang with the least, and causes the racism of the U.S. justice system. The prison population was Blacks were the majority for a long period of time, especially in California, and then the whites started coming in.

2:03:52 Now the white, because they’re the majority, started to rape, I’m sorry, because the Blacks because they were the majority, started to rape the whites. And then the Aryan Brotherhood came about as a form of protection against that brutality, but then later on it morphed into this massive drugs and murder for hire. I got it. Okay. Now that makes sense.

2:04:10 So yeah, it’s not, it’s a fluid thing. Someone could say to you, these are the prison rules, that’s not going to apply all over America and every single jail and prison in that country. Yeah, and then every security level’s got different rules. Yeah, minimum security versus super max. It’s, it’s all, it’s, yeah, there’s a lot of variation.

2:04:31 Speaking of super max, that’s where you later went. Halfway through, I was in supermax. I was locked down for a long time. Okay. How are you dealing with this mentally, being around all this savageness?

2:04:41 And brutality. And do you find, you, I mean, you seem like a guy that normalizes the situations, but you were in this beautiful million-dollar house before, and now you’re here. How do you deal with that over the month? Okay. There are various stages of adaptation to an intense environment, where anything can happen at any moment, when you first go into Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jail system, and heads are getting bashed against toilets, and bodies getting thrown around.

2:05:09 Are you trying to get used to that? Sounds and hearing people in agony. You are in shock, so for nights I’m on my bunk, triple bunk cell, top bunk, it’s where you start out. My mattress, I stay, mattress, it’s uh, skinny as a yoga mat if I’m face down on the mattress. My heart’s going.

2:05:36 Have you ever held a little bird or a mouse in your hand, and you can feel my heart’s going like that for the first few days. You can’t. I can’t sleep at all. Um, the gang members, the prisoners, are coming up to me, saying, get that look of shock off your face, or else you’re gonna get smashed. And then six months in, I’ve got what’s called dead eyes.

2:05:58 It’s on my driver’s license and passport photo now, whereby if you show any sign of weakness, it’s going to get exploited. So you just look completely immune, and you look tough with dead eyes, but actually, it’s again, it’s another mask. You’re internalizing your fear, and your adrenaline’s still going, but you’re not showing it. I mean, even to this day, if I go to a restaurant or pub, I prefer to sit with my back against the wall just because I’m hypervigilant to danger.

2:06:31 Okay, because it was a dangerous place for you there? Oh yeah. So Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jail, one of the most dangerous places on earth for anybody, right? Yeah. Um, soon after you get sentenced, your bail gets jacked up.

2:06:46 You get sentenced, you go to Super Bowl, you go to supermax when you’re, ju, was a series of things that happened. Okay, so me and my co-defendants are hanging tight. We’re not signing the plea bargains, which is what they require. While Wildman’s telling people, you know, don’t sign the plea bargains. I am prosecutor then tries to separate me from my co-defendants, so um, she puts a do-not-house with me on my co-defendants.

2:07:08 She gets my bail doubled to seven, um, to 1.5 million, so I get moved over to maximum security. Now I’m completely away from my co-defendants. I’m over into max security for about a year, mostly on lockdown for a year. Then a final, uh, was I got sentenced to nine and a half years, and she put it down on the paperwork as 34 years. So I was fast- tracked to supermax, where it wasn’t even supposed to be, which does house the most violent, dangerous prisoners, including death row.

2:07:39 Yeah, and this 200-year sentence, that was when you first got arrested. All the charges added up. That’s what facing the 200. So over the 26 months of fighting my case, within months they slapped on me serious drug offender status, which carries 25 years to life. I had about a dozen charges a year in.

2:07:57 They added another dozen charges, and they, um, in court, they said, because I wasn’t signing a plea bargain, if I did go to trial and lost, they could stack my 20-plus charges up to a maximum 200-year sentence. Now I’m lucky, because I got that lawyer, that Alan that the New Mexican Mafia told me to get, and he got me a loophole as a first-time, non-violent drug offender with a UK citizenship, non-US citizen. I ended up signing for nine and a half, but I only had to serve six, and that’s because, you know, my parents came up with 100 grand to pay that lawyer.

2:08:39 In America, you get what justice you can afford. If my parents hadn’t come up with 100 grand, I’d still be in prison right now. Now, yeah, I reckon there was a guy before me who had a drug case, and they offered him a 15-year plea bargain, of which he would have had to serve, I think, 80, 85%, and he said no, that was too much time, I’m going to trial. He went to trial, and they gave him 200 years. So when I was in court after that, my prosecutor, she was saying to her deputy, yeah, Outward thinks he’s smart.

2:09:18 He’s going to go to trial, he’s refusing to sign a plea bargain. He’s going to end up like X, who got the 200 years. I’ve no problem at all giving out 200 years. And I, I was, um, about ready to kill myself at that point, thinking I was never getting help. How are you dealing with all this depression and stress?

2:09:37 So, my, so once I’m in my second year in the max security Madison Street Jail, locked down most of the time, my girlfriend was my lifeline. She was visiting me three times a week, so the prosecutor charged her with one prescription pill found on the day of the SWAT team raid, which didn’t have a written prescription right next to it, which is a Class 6 felony. Co-defendants can’t visit co-defendants. She can’t visit me anymore. It’s so hot in this place.

2:10:06 You know, my skin’s literally falling off. Now, by this point, every day I’m just like like a stinking, like a sweaty dog. Talk about the heat. If, if, if, um, I’ve got all these skin infections and bed sores. It looks like I’ve spilled battery acid on my leg.

2:10:22 My ass has got these bed sores because I’m sat on my ass all day, but when I scratch myself, my skin’s soggy by now, and clumps of my own skin are just detaching under my nails, because you’re in the desert. How hot is it? Sonoran Desert, 50 degrees, 50 degrees Centigrade. It’s in, in, in the summer, 50 degrees, 120,100. Yeah, 30 degrees.

2:10:42 Um, and people just walk around in their boxers, because it’s so hot. There is a vent attached to this at the back of the cell, attached to what’s called a swamp cooler. Now, the only time the air was coming out of that swamp cooler properly was when the county health inspector walked through the building, and as soon as the county health inspector left the building, it went back to the broken setting. And what I mean by that is, we would ask the guards, why don’t you turn the air on?

2:11:11 And they just say it’s broken. That was the standard response. They didn’t want to spend any money at all on the prisoners, including the food. Breakfast was moldy bread and green bologna, and we were so hungry we would scratch the mold off the bread and try to eat it, or if the bread was stale, we put it in water and swell it to get it down. Evening meal was a mystery meat slop called Red Death.

2:11:35 It looked like carrot-y vomit blended with blood. It had all kinds of random meat in it, and it stung an occasional dead rat in it. Now one time we gave a rat back, we complained, and the guard said they would investigate, and they came back later in the day, and so the jail won’t get any trouble. They said it was just a potato. Well, Wildman said he loved the Red Death.

2:11:57 People would just stack the Red Death trays right next to the door, and mentally ill people would just go and eat the Red Death. Yeah, so you’re hot, you’re sweating, and your skin turns so soft that when you scratch it at night it’s coming off. And I’m facing 200 years, and they’ve stopped my girlfriend who visited me, and I’m thinking you know, I’d rather just end my life at this point, and that’s what I planned to do. So I was just gonna slash my wrist after regard to the security walk, and it would be 30 minutes before the guard came back to check on me.

2:12:30 I was hoping that was enough time for my blood to bleed out properly. This was in a completely cockroach-infested cell. I mean, they were just dropping off the wall, on us, off the ceiling on us. Talk about the cockroaches. Like, um, they would come out at night, right?

2:12:45 So when I, when the mobile got doubled by the prosecutor, it’s 1.5 million, I got moved over to max security. So it was about two in the morning when I arrived in Marcel, in the, in the max security Madison Street, um, God. Puts me in two-man cell, two bunks at the back, bolted to the wall. My soul mate is asleep on the top bunk. That’s a bit weird, because they fight over the bottom bunk in Towers jail.

2:13:11 What’s going on? There’s a bit of light coming in, but it’s kind of dark in there, so I’m walking, you know, just checking it out. I’m getting an easy feeling. Something drops off the ceiling and bounces off my shoulder. What the hell was that?

2:13:24 The walls is like the swirl effect. So I put my face right up to the wall to see what’s going on, and it, it’s, it’s covered in American cockroaches about the size of almonds. And then I’m looking at the bracket where I’m about to sleep. Big hole next week, and they’re just pouring out onto the bunk where I’m supposed to sleep. That’s why my cellmate is on the top bunk.

2:13:48 Oh my God, I’m gonna get to sleep with these [expletive] crawling on me. So my cellmate was cocooned like the mummy, a little breathing hole with a sheet around him, in a breathing hole. So yeah, roaches wouldn’t climb on him. That’s the way to do it, but that traps the heat to your body, and you’ve got all the bleeding and skin infections and bed sores, which you can’t possibly see, because it’s so itchy. So I tried to cocoon, and in the end, they just end up letting them crawl on me.

2:14:15 They, they start out on your feet, on your hands, on your legs. So this day, if anyone tickles my hands, I flinch, because I woke up so nice, and tickling my hands, your face, mouth, nails, but the favorite is going in your ears to eat your earwax. It’s like honey to them. Now, I had a neighbor who was asthmatic. wakes up one morning out of breath, grabs his inhaler, takes a blast, shoots a live cockroach inside himself, starts freaking out, saying he can feel it move around, throws up, and it’s stuck inside him when it won’t even come out.

2:14:52 Even in the daytime, there were so many prisoners doing cockroach races, gambling on the winner. Now, over that year in max security, I learned to try and combat and eventually just, you have to live in harmony with your cellmates, whether they are humans or insects. So there was various stages of adaptation to that. So, in the beginning, wrapping the sheet around me, freaking out, blah, blah. Then we had this toothpaste called Amerifresh, which, years later, came out was made in China and had some kind of toxic antifreeze in it.

2:15:28 Um, so I started to use the Amerifresh to paste the cracks in the walls, sealing these cracks, and the smell was all minty fresh. I remember, so proud of myself. I was locked down. I used all my Amerifresh sealing all these cracks. And then the guards, because they like to move you around regularly, “Outward, roll your [expletive] up,” that means you’re getting moved to a new cell.

2:15:55 So I got moved to one of the most cockroach-infested areas, and I had no Amerifresh toothpaste to seal the cracks with. And, um, you know, you’re trying to sleep, and then they’re just tickling you, and you’re waking up, and you’re just throwing it off, and then you’re going back to sleep, and throwing it off, and I learned all of the characteristics during this time, and this is what got my writing discovered. The Guardian did some excerpts of what I wrote about the cockroaches.

2:16:24 Um, they’re funny. If you threaten them or smash one up or something like that, they communicate through chemical smells, and they release these chemical smells, and then the warrior ones come running under your door like, what’s going on? To protect the other ones. Pregnant ones have this little pouch, it looks like a piece of a worm, with all the eggs in. And heaven help you if they attach that under your bunk or to a book that you’ve not read in a while, because all the little babies just all manifest in your cell, and they’re everywhere, just doing loop-de-loops all over the walls.

2:17:01 There was albino ones, like white ones. I don’t know if they were shedding the skin. White ones would come in, and, um, they will eat absolutely anything. I can understand how people say that they are the most durable thing, and they would survive a nuclear war. I saw people absolutely smash cockroaches until they were, they just, like, they were completely flattened and dead, and I’d be reading, look over, it’s still, uh, still flattened, and didn’t look and then, you know, and a couple of hours later it had reformed and just walked off.

2:17:36 Now, drowning them, they hold, they, they do this when they’re in water. They look like they’re dead, but they’re actually just holding oxygen to themselves. The sneaky little bastards. Yeah, so it doesn’t matter how many we killed, they own the building. And you have to learn to live in harmony with them.

2:17:56 Some of the fellas made traps using peanut butter, and then they kill them, and they put all the dead ones into the trash. But literally, at lockdown was 10 at night. No, lockdown was eight at night, lights out was 10 at night, and this whole building had all these cracks in the walls, and they would start to appear, and then you see their antennae, and they’re going like this, just like this army waiting to invade, and as soon as the lights would go out, it was the worst time for me, was living with them, and some of my soulmates.

2:18:29 But um, it did get my writing discovered, I think, because it was so extreme, and people are interested in it. But they were the conditions at the point I was going to kill myself. That’s what was going on, all that stuff. So I’m going to bleed out, just lie over the cockroaches and bleed out, but what stopped me from doing it was I wanted to say goodbye to my family and friends. And what I mean by that was, I was allowed seven photos.

2:18:57 So I get the photos of my mum, dad, girlfriend, sister, and I did start to cry, because I’m thinking my mum was going to get a call saying, your son’s just slashed his wrists in a foreign prison, and he’s dead. And I, I, I’m sat there just thinking, oh my God, I can’t put my mom through this. And that’s what stopped me from killing myself. And I know the world hates a whiner, and I’m not trying to make excuses and be a whiny here. I completely put myself, you know, in that predicament through my own bad choices.

2:19:26 Yeah, I take full responsibility. Wow, but you didn’t kill yourself, and you kept going. That was a turning point, getting fought, getting pushed to the brink of suicidal insanity, crushed the egotistical, narcissistic, hedonistic party person out of me, because for that first year, until that point, I was wild. If I had got released, I would have gone back to getting high with Wildman on the weekends, even though I wasn’t trafficking. Now, nine and a half year sentence is one of the happiest days of my life, because when you’re facing 200 thinking you’re never ever going to get your life back, million-dollar house, plasma-screen TV, Jacuzzis, none of that matters anymore.

2:20:10 You just want to get your life back, and now I wake up with a smile on my face, because there are no dead rats in my food, there’s no cockroaches in my bed. I’m free. I’m in the West. There is some scary stuff going right now, but in general, looking at, you know, the war-torn areas of the world and the famine- torn areas of the world, and the people surviving those in those countries. Um, there’s always somebody worse off.

2:20:36 Yeah. And so that was a switch in you, and you start reading books. You read over a thousand books when you were in there. Yeah, and this is when Shaun changed. Yeah, someone gave me all I never read my entire life was finance books.

2:20:48 The last book I’d read was To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, required reading. My sister’s got a degree in classical literature, so we were complete opposites. I was the money guy, and she was the book girl. So someone gave me Brave New World by Huxley and 1984 by Orwell, and I saw in those books, I saw in Huxley parallels with my party lifestyle. I think they were orgying on some drug called soma and having these parties in Brave New World, and in 1984 I saw the tyranny of an authoritarian system, the conditions in the jail, you know, Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

2:21:31 He was basically like a neo-Nazi, uh, redneck worshiper of Harry Anslinger, who said, you know, make, gonna make weed um illegal because Black men will want to rape every white woman. It’s like Sheriff George had a worked under him and had a portrait of him in his office, so he created this absolute, um, neo-Nazi totalitarian hell on earth, which was reflected in 1984, and they gripped me. And someone said, it, reading improved your writing, so I just went on a mission, and I read over a thousand books in just under six years.

2:22:09 I read 268 books in 2006. When I told my sister, she’s like, you lucky bastard. People have jobs, they have lives of responsibilities. Nobody could ever do that, unless you were like a mad monk in a cave. And I did have an epiphany moment where I felt like a mad monk in a cave, because first year, I’m wild, attached to all those material things, and then all of a sudden, facing 200 years, none of that material stuff matters.

2:22:42 I let it go, and I could not believe the intense pleasure, the feeling of release from just craving all those things I’ve had my entire life to let it go in a moment. And after that, like, wow, where’s that attachment gone, that has driven me my entire life? And it taught me also that your happiness isn’t in those things. It’s in your thoughts and in your heart, and it’s what your thoughts make it. So I read about, you know, the Stoic philosophers.

2:23:15 Epictetus. Yeah. What is he? Microsoft? Really?

2:23:18 Is Epictetus all about how you perceive things? Yeah, it doesn’t matter what is happening around you. Someone can jump in your face and say, I’m going to rape your wife and murder your entire family, and then torture you slowly to death. According to Epictetus, you determine your reaction to that situation. Through your thoughts, you can just think to yourself, all right, this person is completely mentally ill, he’s having a bad day, and just walk away, or you can engage with that, and it can become a violent situation, and you know you could possibly get killed.

2:23:53 For example, in prison, people are calling each other names all day long, and the people who react to the name-calling, they get picked on the most. According to Epictetus, someone could say something to you, you can just say, you know, thanks for pointing that out, have a nice day, don’t engage that person’s negative energy, and walk away from the situation. And what about Aurelius? What would you take away from him? Oh yeah, Aurelius.

2:24:16 I got obsessed with Aurelius, his book, Meditations, and Nietzsche, Ecce Homo was my favorite. With him, so Aurelius compares the chaos of life as a storm at sea, endure, the land jutting out into the sea, and the waves are crashing down upon you, and you’re maintaining equanimity, and Nietzsche. I wonder what Nietzsche would think if he heard um, his quotes now being used in rap music. You know, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but one of my faves is, live your life like a work of art.

2:24:55 I mean, look at how much effort people put into a work of art. If you put that much effort into your life, how much the quality of your life would improve. I think that’s something that you subscribe to? Yeah, it’s a beautiful quote, but I never heard that quote until I read you talking about yourself. That’s really good.

2:25:11 You also had some interesting cellmates, some difficult ones, and then later some kind of guardians. Can you just walk us through that? Yeah, so. All right, so first couple of years, you know, first year with Wildman, and then second year in max, third year supermax. It gets to the point where I’m on a prison yard, and I don’t know anybody.

2:25:34 Um, but you’re with the Aryan Brotherhood by definition, because you’re, because you’re white. Yeah, but that still doesn’t, caught, doesn’t prevent individual beefs of people. Okay, so you get, you get to a new, stuff. Do they make you do things, like, you’re in the brotherhood, and isn’t making you smash people or anything like that? No.

2:25:50 If you want to join the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, you’ve got to put in work. So you’ve got to pick up a knife if you want to be a full member and stab someone. If you are a white boy, you can play along with it. So, say there’s a situation whereby your building leader’s moved on. You’ve got, there’s going to be a white boy meeting to vote on who the new leader is.

2:26:14 They will come to your cell and say, white boy meeting in cell seven, get your ass in there, otherwise you’re gonna get smashed, and you’ve all got it going. Then they’re all in there with the Nazi tattoos and everything, and you vote on the new head, and you play along with it. So there’s all these guard rules and there’s all these gang rules that are in contradiction, and the gang rules can get you more time. So my thing was, you know, I’ve made relationships with the right people.

2:26:44 I’m not getting pressured to put in work by the gang. I’m just going to try and get through this by turning it into the educational opportunity of a lifetime, and that’s what it did. Just kind of flew under the radar, because so many people arrested with me in the beginning, we were one of the biggest groups in the jail, so we got that respect. They knew Wildman was in there, and I’m in a situation where he went to a prison. They said to him, what are your charges?

2:27:17 And he’d just been sentenced. He says, look, I’ve just been sentenced, I’ve had a long day, get out of my face. I just went out of sleep, right now. You’re like, no, you don’t understand who you, you know, you know who we are, as in the area in Brooklyn. You’ve got to show us your charges.

2:27:32 So we just knocked the guy out. They said, all right, you shouldn’t have done that. You know, we are, he’s like, well, you don’t [expletive] know who I am. He just doesn’t give me [expletive], you know, everybody goes, he just doesn’t give a [expletive]. Even the most dangerous gang in the prison system, he just knocks the guy out.

2:27:49 So they come back and they say to him, you know, we’ve checked up on you. We know you are now, because people from the jail system were in this prison, and they knew who he was from the jail. He’d already been behaving crazy over there. So we know you are, you know, you’ve disrespected that guy. You need to apologize to him, but we’d like to offer you his job, running this building.

2:28:17 So they gave him his job. So it depends who you are, you know. You’re not, you’re an educated person. They’d look at you probably as a resource. Second year in, I’ve been in Towers Jail for a year.

2:28:31 I know all the lingo. I’m doing the jail walk. Show up in maximum security. I don’t know anybody. The white table, the Woods.

2:28:40 I’ve got to go over, introduce myself, and make an impression on these guys. So I go over there, you know, doing the jail walk, bouncing, chest up. I know all the body language. You know, um, hey, Woody, where did you roll in from? Towers Jail.

2:28:56 You know, um, what you in for? All that kind of s***. I tell them my bail’s at 1.5 million. My bail double. Oh yeah, that was it.

2:29:04 Why are you in max? Why did they move you from medium to max? They doubled my bail from 750,000 to 1.5 million. So they’re like, they’re checking all my answers, you know, looking at our body language, everything, and I’m, I’m, I’m acting like, you know, I’m a ward, and I’m one of them, and I know that that guy, that murderer, because it’s mostly murderers in the max, in that pod, he’s making the decision as to whether to accept me or have me brutalized.

2:29:32 So I’m putting on my best show. I go back to my cell, waiting for the verdict. He comes down with his legal paperwork, his case file. A third of the prisoners can’t even read or write. Remember, slaps all his paperwork down and says, can you read through this and let me know what you think?

2:29:49 You know, they’re trying to offer me this, such-and-such blueprint. He saw completely through my tough-guy act, that I was a resource for him. So everybody has a different place to fit in, in a different role to play. You hear these videos where there’s all these, there’s these rules. It’s got to be that way, but there’s a lot of variation.

2:30:10 Okay, yeah. Who was this cellmate you had that was kind of bad news, and then how did that play out? So I end up in medium security coming out of a supermax, and I’m thinking, all right, coming up supermax, these guys have got to be a bit softer, and the guard who moved me decided to play a prank. And he puts me in with this guy who’s been a real troublemaker. And he’s a serial home invader, torturer.

2:30:40 He’s been breaking into the houses of people, drug dealers and such, tying them up with duct tape and then taking hammers to their kneecaps. And his welcoming statement to me is, I’ve got a padlock in his sock. I can smash your brains, and while you sleep, I can kill you whenever I want. Now, although I was established at the jail, he sees me as a new prisoner, as a fresh fish, and he’s an old calm. He’d already been on a transportation journey to court.

2:31:07 He’d been in a holding cell, and he’d held a kangaroo court on a sex offender, and he’d stabbed the sex offender multiple times and put the knife in his eyeball, and was threatening to pop his eyeball out. And he said to all the other prisoners, if, um, any of you say anything about me stabbing this guy, I will find out, you know where you are, I will have your eyeball, and I’ll [expletive] eat it. This is, he’d attacked guards and everything. This guy, he showed me all his paperwork.

2:31:31 He’s proud of it. Later on I wrote a bit about it. So, um, in the beginning he doesn’t know me, and, um, he’s like, um, threatening me and stuff, and I’m just like, you know, I’m, I’m just a quiet guy, you know, I’m a peaceful guy. I’m probably your ideal soulmate. But he’s running, like, a heroin tattoo, uh, operation out there.

2:31:54 He doesn’t want me around. So to try and get rid of me, he has his mate, this big 20-stone-plus guy, attacked me just when my parents have flown over to visit me for Christmas. I was told prisoners have high-school mentality, with deadly consequences, and this is an example. So he was using this guy as his cat’s paw, 48 Laws of Power, and um, so I’m walking to the visit, happy as can be, a big guy pulls a [expletive] move, sneaks up behind me, bang, that’s kidney punching me.

2:32:26 And, um, so I spin around, and now you’ve got a choice at this point. All the prisoners see what’s gonna happen. If you don’t throw kicks and punches, you’re a punk. Everyone’s going to be praying, and you’re going to be lined up but yourself, trying to take everything you’ve got. If you do hit back, however, the guards see it, you’re arrested, sent to a prison within the prison, lockdown, lose all your privileges, including your visits, and they can add more time onto your sentence.

2:32:55 If you don’t hit back, you’re going to be cleaning people’s toilets, forced into blow jobs and getting rented out as a prison prostitute. So there’s no way I’m going to allow any of that. So I start throwing kicks and punches. Now I can’t fight. I’m just like, you know, I did six months of kickboxing, but I, I, you know, look at the size of me.

2:33:15 Um, and this guy’s big, solid. He’s done proper kickboxing, and I’m punching and hitting him, and it’s like hitting a big bag of cement. He’s got one of those chins that you’re gonna break your knuckles on. So it didn’t end up very well for me. He smashes me up, knocks me down.

2:33:31 I go visit. Injured, Mum asked me what’s wrong, and I can’t say. She’s already a nervous breakdown of my situation. So there are ongoing problems with that guy. I did get moved out of the cell, and my new cellmate, Long Island, as much as people came out of the blue to harmony.

2:33:49 People came out of the blue to help me. So my new cellmate, Long Island, he’s come from a prison whereby a guy was his neighbor who, prior to his arrest, had been terrorizing the Arizona rave scene, and Wildman was brought in to deal with this guy. Wildman moved in with this guy, like I said, how they move. He moves in with people. He moved in with this guy and put the scare into him, let’s go, the living daylights out of him.

2:34:14 Well, this guy was a scary guy in his own right. He had his thumb missing, and, um, he was like a proper arm gangster, um, but he was scared of Wildman. So he told Long Island, my new cellmate, if you come across a guy in the prison system called English Shaun, I’ve done business with him on the streets. He’s a good dude. Look out for him.

2:34:38 Long Island is my new soulmate. He knows about the beef I’ve had with these guys, so to squash the beef he hooks me up with a guy who’s got the most respect in that prison, an all-timer called Two Tonys. Now he doesn’t say any of this to me. He just says, look, Shaun, would you have a game of chess with my friend, Two Tonys? Yeah, cool.

2:34:58 What’s he in for? He’s doing 141 years. He’s a multiple homicide murderer. He worked for the Bonanno crime family. He left the dead bodies of rivals from Arizona to Alaska.

2:35:12 Never have women or kids, under the old-school mafia code. I’ll go get him. I’m like, hold on a minute. Holy s***, if I beat him, will I be next? Before I can object any longer, he goes and gets Two Tonys.

2:35:24 Why is he called Two Tonys? Well, that’s a story in itself. Okay, I’ll, I’ll have to get to the, uh, lead-up to that. Okay, cool, because it’s a kind of a chronological thing. So he goes to get Two Tonys.

2:35:36 Two Tonys comes down in the day room, and I’m stood there, nervous, over this chessboard, and he sees me, and he puts me at ease right away with this fake British accent. He’s like, have you ever had bloody tea and crumpets with the Beatles? So I played him at chess. I beat him, and at the end, um, he says, Shaun, how come you beat me so fast? I said, because you kept speaking your mind throughout the game.

2:36:01 You wouldn’t show someone your hand of cards in the game of cards, would you? And he slapped his head and goes, oh, me and my big mouth. I didn’t know, but he was testing me. Long Island told him I was a writer, and, um, he said, Shaun, to stay alive on the road of life, I’ve had to become a quick judge of character. I like you.

2:36:22 I think you’re an honest guy. Would you be willing to write my life story? I said, yeah, we’ll be honored. So now I’m sneaking into his cell every single day. I’m not supposed to be in there.

2:36:30 Self-visiting is prohibited. He’s got people watching out for guards, and he’s telling me how he starts out in the Bonanno crime family. Um, Joe Bonanno Senior was the longest-running head of the mafia commission, and he never got whacked. He was very successful, very respected, and very rarely used violence, um, as opposed to some of the more, you know, violent bosses. Joe Bonanno ended up living, he was one of my neighbors, in the mountains of Tucson, in that Sabino Canyon neighborhood.

2:37:06 So Two Tonys worked under him, dealing with a guy called Charlie “Bats” Battaglia. It was a Bonanno crime family lieutenant. Now, Charlie “Bats” Battaglia had whacked people from coast to coast and got away with it, and he was an expert in disposing of bodies. So Charlie “Bats” Battaglia taught Two Tonys all of these, uh, body-disposal techniques. Well, I’m in there, and he’s telling me there’s a whole chapter on the body-disposal techniques.

2:37:33 People are interested. The book’s called The Mafia Philosopher, Two Tonys, on Amazon. Um, for example, if you’re gonna whack someone, you’ve got your hole dug nice and deep, but you’ve also got a dead dog, so you bury the body at this extra depth, and then you put a dead dog at a certain depth, so when they bring a cadaver dog out, it detects the dead dog, and they don’t dig any deeper. There was problems whacking people in Alaska, because the bodies freeze, versus the desert, you know, where the bodies can deteriorate faster.

2:38:08 And Two Tonys ended up in problems with people he’d whacked in Alaska. But the Bonanno crime family, they invested in funeral homes, and they had double-decker coffins, so the people they worked would be in a coffin with a person who was genuinely getting buried. So in the beginning Two Tonys starts out with his crime partner, Sal Spinelli, and the Bats would regularly call them to meetings in a restaurant on a Sunday morning, when everyone’s going to church, nonchalant, and give them orders.

2:38:49 This is how Two Tonys earned the name Two Tonys now. So, you know, they were in, uh, Ravedo, Bats, he’s got the pinky ring, the hair slicked back, and the suit, and everything, chewing on his, uh, Antonio y Cleopatra cigar at the corner of his mouth. You know, classic, uh, if it was going to be in GoodFellas or The Godfather, classic stereotypes. They’re absolutely in awe of the Bats, but as the Bonannos get run out of New York and they’re more settling and retiring into Tucson, they lose their strength.

2:39:26 And Two Tonys, he ends up going to Alaska. He marries the wife of a deceased senator. There’s a huge, there’s huge conspiracy theories going around about this now, um, you know, why this guy died, and whether it was intentional or not. But he ends up living in this massive house with this woman, and he opens the first disco, Attack, out in this area, and brings all of his heavies over from Tucson as his bouncers. And a biker gang start beef with his club, and a lot of those guys get taken out.

2:40:12 There’s a lot of killings. So Two Tonys now, you know, he’s got a lot of killings under his belt. It gets so heavy in Alaska he has to go back to Tucson. Charlie “Bats” Battaglia, he’s been doing a 10-year stretch, whether it’s extortion or tax evasion or something, quite a stretch. He’s back out, and he calls Two Tonys and Sal Spinelli back to this restaurant after all these years.

2:40:39 These guys have earned their stripes now. Two Tonys, psycho on cocaine, killing people, and he sits them down, he says, look, I’ve got a problem with such and such a guy, you know, you know, you’re gonna handle this for me. And he’s giving the models, and he’s talking to them like they’re just starting out, not like they’ve established themselves. And Two Tonys, he’s been up all night, and, uh, he’s getting extremely angry. He’s got his, um, he’s got his gun in his ankle holster, and he’s getting more angry that he’s getting his orders from the Bats, and he’s just about ready to turn the table over and just shoot this guy in the restaurant in front of, in front of all these, um, church-going [expletive].

2:41:19 I’m just gonna whack him right there. And, um, Two Tonys said to the Bats, you know that guy you want me to shake down is someone that I’m working with. If you’ve got a problem with him, you’ve got a problem with me. And Two Tonys challenges stirs the Bats down, and the Bats back down. And both of them knew then that the Bats was done.

2:41:42 His reputation, his career was over. And then Two Tonys’s crime partner, Sal Spinelli, said, as they were leaving that meeting, when he backed down like that, I could see the spirit of the Two Tonys above your head. And if you don’t know the story of the Two Tonys, Two Tonys were whacked. Um, they, and that was Bats Battaglia’s first whack, and he was in there with Jimmy the Weasel. The Two Tonys were robbing people, and they rubbed the wrong people out of Vegas.

2:42:15 Word came down from the bosses to take the Two Tonys out, and Jimmy the Weasel was assigned to take them out, but Jimmy the Weasel was on good terms with the Two Tonys. He’s like, you know, come and do a robbery with whatever it was. However they got him in the car, it’s all, “Battle up, we’re just gonna put slugs in them, whack ’em,” getaway driver, we’ll be off. And, um, apparently the Bats, it was his first whack, and he got nervous, and things didn’t go to plan, but the Weasel made sure Bats put some slugs in them, um, to get, you know, so they were all guilty of murder, so they couldn’t testify against each other.

2:42:51 So because they’d whacked the Two Tonys, because that was his first, Spinelli said that he could see the spirit of the Two Tonys over the table, over his head, when Two Tonys made Bats back down. Gotcha. Did you end up finishing this book? Yeah, yeah. Um, sadly, Two Tonys died in 2010 from liver cancer, museum drug-taking.

2:43:11 He did not see the release of his own book, which is called The Mafia Philosopher, Two Tonys. It’s available worldwide on Amazon right now, and it’s doing really well, but going into Tony’s cell every day, writing his life story, by the end of it he said he felt that I was the son that he’d never had. And when we were saying goodbye at the fence, um, you know, there was tears in his eyes. And some people have said to me, Shaun, how do you reconcile that?

2:43:40 You got so close to a multiple homicide murderer, but you’re a rave guy, you’re all about peace and love. And my response is, there’s good and bad in everybody, and if you focus on the good in people, it helps it to come out. Wow. What was it like leaving? Leaving.

2:44:03 I had to go on Con Air. I’ve seen the movie Con Air, Nicolas Cage. So Con Air picks me up in Arizona, and it’s federal deportation. So I’m the only gringo with a bunch of Mexicans. I can speak a bit of Mexican Spanish at this point in time, so I’m communicating with them, to the guards.

2:44:23 I’ve got my role to fill again, coming in handy. Um, this plane’s going across, uh, Arizona and California for a couple of days, dropping the stuff, putting us in jail cells, and then eventually they put me on a flight from LA to London. I’m in a prison van. Aren’t you released at this point? No, no.

2:44:45 Okay. I got released from prison to a deportation prison, and then I’ve got to do my Con Air, because I’m banned from America for life. Right? So they got with Wildman, when they deport him, they have armed guards, or guards, like, proper protection officers, on the plane with him, but for me, I wasn’t deemed dangerous. So the guard says to me, at the foot of the plane, I’m gonna take your chains off.

2:45:10 Now, don’t try anything stupid. I’m like, no, I just want to go home, man. And then we’re going to put you on a plane first, so you don’t scare the passengers with the chains on. And then I met the cabin crew, cockneys, and it was the first time in so many years that humans had talked to me like I was a person. Like it wasn’t an animal, and just hearing them talking to me like I was a normal person, which is like a miracle in my ears.

2:45:36 Get on the plane. I haven’t slept in days. I’m so excited about going home, and then all the passengers get on, and after being around sweaty, hurry-up, crazy men living with them for six years, I can smell the women’s perfume. I could smell alcohol. I could smell all these other things.

2:46:01 Um, it’s overwhelming me, but I’m also a bit institutionalized, and I put my hand up in front of everybody and I ask a female member of the cabin crew permission to go to the toilet. She’s like, you don’t need to ask. The toilets are, like, right there. I’m so, you know, if you’re in prison transport, you could ask permission to go to the toilet. So flying home, um, got the stupid movies on.

2:46:28 Um, the reason I wanted to go to the toilet was because I’ve been in prison transportation. I, I was paranoid. I was stinking. I just wanted to go and have a bird bath in prison. A bird bath is, you know, just get a bit of soap and rub it in your armpits and rub it in your mouth, and it freshens yourself up.

2:46:41 So, get, hurt, get to London, breeze through customs. I thought they met up, one hour, word with me. My mom, dad, sister there, and there’s some videos of this on my YouTube channel as well. I’m hugging my mom, hugging my sister, all crying and everything. I’m all stubbled out, look like, um, coming out with Russian ghoul.

2:47:01 I guess someone got this shocked look on my face, all pale, and, um, my sister started showing me her phone. I don’t understand any of that. You know, my thing was, before I got arrested, don’t talk on the phones, don’t go on the phones. I used to pay phone for stuff, but I’d use coded words, and, um, I wasn’t hip, or all this foam technology. How advanced.

2:47:22 They took me to Indian food right away. I ordered chicken tikka masala, my farmer favorite. Got the gag reflex because of the mystery meat slop they read after, occasionally dead rats, and it was reminding me of that. Because of that, to this day I’ve stayed vegetarian. At my house, first year, Mum said I’m like a probably dog, falling around the house, waiting for orders, institutionalized.

2:47:45 Um, so it took me a year before I moved down south. Got a public-speaking agent, got a literary agent. Thank you for those guys, you know, helping me get back on track and getting my career going, and since then published 13 books, written a lot about Escobar. My life story is a trilogy: Party Time, Hard Time, Prison Time. Drove 100 talks a year, mostly to school kids, in colleges, um, and schools scare the living daylights out of them.

2:48:15 Do you, so they won’t do all this [expletive] I did? Is that what your talks are like? Yeah, yeah, try to scare them. Imagine the jail stories I’ve told you today. They’re heavy, they’re heavy, they’re on the edge of their seats.

2:48:25 I got one kid out walking, she was so inspired she went to do a criminology degree at Winchester Uni. A family invited me to graduation, and I’ve had a meal with her family. The teachers tell me the kids staying behind at the end are the hardest to reach students, because they’re looking at me. Yeah, when they come in, I mean, drugs is the great equalizer. It affects all sections.

2:48:46 I do talks in schools like Stowe, down to inner-city Manchester, um, and London, and the gang members are looking, you know, who is this guy? But once they hear the jail stuff, they’re on the edge of their seats, and the teachers say that they’re our hardest-to- reach students who are getting engaged. If you go on my Twitter, almost with the likes, it’s just feedback that’s coming from the kids. I never know it’s going to affect everybody, but um, you know, having that kid tell me she was so inspired to do a criminology degree, and how that shaped her life.

2:49:19 Like I said, happiness isn’t in your material possessions. It’s in your heart and in your thoughts. And on my deathbed, am I going to look back at all the hours I spent looking at stock market numbers on my computer, or am I going to look back on the things I could be more proud of, like, like that kid. You know how it shaped her life. Has your recollection of all this changed in the last 10 years?

2:49:41 Do you look at it differently, or have you processed it differently? People say I’m desensitized. I talk about extremely graphic things, and then you laugh. Yeah, and the laughing is actually, and I apologize to viewers who are offended by that, it’s a coping and a defense mechanism, um, when I get nervous. These things are so intense.

2:50:03 The laughing, it actually does change your biochemistry, to make it not be as serious, mentally, and stressful to you. Yeah. What do you want people to take away from your story? Phew. So many things.

2:50:18 Um, so I’m on a mission to stop the mass incarceration of low-level drug users and people with addiction issues. Writing about the war on drugs, a series of books led me to the CIA, the Clinton and Bush crime families. You know, for Clinton, whose brother Roger got arrested in a cocaine deal and got recorded saying, some of this is for Bill. He’s got a nose like a vacuum cleaner for Bill Clinton, who, when he was state governor of Arkansas, and this information is coming from the people who worked for him, his protectors, his state troopers, and people like Larry Nichols, who worked for him, laundering the money for Bill Clinton to lock up hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders, a record amount of women.

2:51:10 I’m not talking traffickers here. I’m talking possession, people with addiction issues, vulnerable people. For us to have these psychopaths in power and think they can get away with it, I’ve been on a mission to expose this and to try and stop it. And it’s getting more and more momentum, and people are waking up to the fact that not only was Clinton, you know, a sex assaulter and cokehead, he was providing security for the drug operation, the CIA, where they were bringing in the coke from Mena, Arkansas.

2:51:43 I wrote a whole book about Barry Seal. American Made, he was flying the coke in for the CIA and weapons back out, to do this war in Nicaragua illegally, and that was run by George H.W. Bush, and his fall guy was Oliver North, and Clinton was providing the state security, the cops, to protect that cocaine coming in. So for these guys to be locking all these people up and pretending to be fighting this war on drugs, utter hypocritical psychopathic bastards, and they need to be exposed, because the amount of untold suffering that’s caused by all those low-level drug users to fill the prisons for profits, it makes me sick.

2:52:23 So that’s just one of my missions, right? Of a mission. I’ve used my nine lives flopping on the floor, high on club drug cocktails. Um, I’ve had guns pulled on me multiple times. Could have been shot dead at any, any instant.

2:52:41 And just explaining to the kids, you see all these movies, music videos, celebrity addicts that do make that lifestyle look so cool, and that’s how you get sucked in. And that, again, I don’t make excuses for my stuff, but it’s that thing. Did it, did it, did factor in. It led me to getting sucked into that lifestyle. We were joking, we’re living like characters in the movie, we’re never gonna get caught, but the fun part goes over to the dark side eventually, and it ends in the prison.

2:53:12 Please, death, mental illness. I mentioned Cody Bates. He never took the drugs, that’s why I made him the head of my security team. He got so depressed after we all got arrested, because we were his family. He went straight to heroin.

2:53:31 His parents put him in a rehab, and he hung himself. My ex-wife, I joked about, you know, all the crazy sex stuff that we did. She wanted to die like Cleopatra and get bitten by a snake, basically. So she got a one-way ticket to Egypt. She couldn’t get a snake, so in a hotel room she made a weapon out of a Mack razor, took a bunch of prescription pills, and slashed her wrists.

2:54:00 Fortunately she was rescued, and props to her, now she’s doing great work around the world, in China and Africa, and work um, educating kids. Big Micah, one of my bouncers, he um, got arrested. He didn’t get arrested with us, so he continued in the lifestyle. Then did eventually get arrested on his own case, put in prison. I think he was transporting crystal meth into another state.

2:54:27 He got skin cancer, which can be fixed now, if you get sick in prison, haven’t helped you. They say there are two death rows, people sentenced to die, and people who are sick. They don’t want to treat you. It cuts into the profits, so they didn’t treat him. It went throughout his body, and he died.

2:54:46 My friend, Prophet Jerry, was high on Xanax, passed out while he was walking, hit his head onto the corner of a tabletop, and died. Acid Joey, high on drugs, found dead in the swimming pool. And that’s just a fraction of them. Nearly all of them, my main guys, are dead. So just conveying that to the young people, hoping it could save a few lives.

2:55:14 So don’t be fooled by the lifestyle in the movies, and all that stuff. Yeah, it always just ends wrong. And people came into my life when I got out of prison to really help me get established and get my story out there, and I, I thank you for doing that, helping me today. So I now interview guys on my true crime podcast. We’ve got our prison, you know, nobody’s heard the stories, hoping to give them a leg up in the world as well.

2:55:43 So when you go for an environment as intense as what I went through, you feel bonded with those guys you’re imprisoned with for life. Two Tonys is dead. I don’t hear from Xena. I hear from a guy called T-Bone, big guy who’s stopping prison rape, a U.S. Marine, and I, on my YouTube channel, and I read his letters out, and he’s got all these people writing to him, and, and, and giving him the support from all over the world.

2:56:06 So yeah, I can tell you my story all day long, but the guys who know what I went through, 100, of the guys I was in there with, and I feel bonded with them for life, and trying to get their stories out there, and trying to get changes made in the US and in prisons all over the world. You know, uh, we both talked about, uh, Big Herc, who runs, uh, Prison Talk this year. Yeah, and I want to get him on the show, but, um, there’s something interesting about someone who’s been through a prison experience.

2:56:33 I know you have. I just had Wes Watson on the show, who did 10 years in the California penal system, and to look at than the rest of us in this world, that, you know, we get angry when our pizza can’t be delivered at 3am. You know, we delivered when there’s no oat milk at Starbucks. We get mad when, you know, and then, and then to hear someone’s experience, where you know you have nothing, you’ve stripped down of everything, and yet you still found a way to live in there and make it through.

2:57:01 I just think it’s really refreshing to hear your story, because it reframes this whole concept of gratitude in a massive way, and to see what it did for your life. I mean, okay, you’re one of the few that made it out, but it actually reframed your whole existence into a way where you seem grateful. Yeah, I am thankful for the miracle of existence. Hardship sorts out who we are and gives us a yardstick to lean on for the rest of our lives. I mean, we all get sucked in to, two small situations from time to time.

2:57:38 There was, um, a book getting published, and I woke up one morning and my internet was down, and I could feel my blood pressure rising, and remember to start up, it said when something happens like this, take a step back, breathe, calm that cascade of chemicals, and think about the toughest things you’ve ever got from your life. And then I remembered, hold on a minute, it went six years without the internet and, and freaking out. And I think right now, with things going on around the world that are stressing a lot of people out, and people being in lockdown situations, people with prison experiences have got a lot to transfer, in terms of information, to those people, to deal with lockdowns, and how to pass the time and remain sane and keep physically fit, because you have to, you’re forced to adapt to living in a room that’s the size of a toilet in prison, with two other guys, that guy’s [expletive] and pissing in front of you, and you gotta smell all that, and you’re eating your food in there, day in day out.

2:58:48 So people are freaking out right now about things going around the world. Yeah, I understand that it’s horrific that people are dying, but wherever you are, whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. Read those Stoic philosophers. Think about us in those cells with the cockroaches, unable to sleep, with dead rats in our food, with our skin just peeling off because we’re sweating so much. You know, you sat there on a sofa somewhere, you’ve got the internet, you’ve got that sense of community.

2:59:19 We didn’t have Netflix. Sit there and watch Netflix. We barely had anything to eat. I’ve stocked up on, and this is the prison habit. Um, it got to the point where I couldn’t eat the food at all.

2:59:32 I lost about two stone in the jail. My parents had, like, a concentration camp survivor at my sentencing hearing. My face was all sunk in like this. I was living off peanuts. A meal for me was a Snickers bar.

2:59:43 I’ve got neo-Nazis trying to sweat me to get that off me, and I’ve got to hold on to that Snickers bar for dear life, otherwise I’m going to starve. I had, um, I could buy, like, spend, like, 20 a week at the inmate store, so I could buy some peanuts, I could buy some peanut butter, and I learned that peanut butter will keep you full for a long period of time. It’s my fridge right now. I’ve got, like, 10 jars: peanut butter, cashew butter, almond butter, and stacks of crackers to go with it, because if things do escalate to the Italy level, where there’s food shortages and stuff like that, you know, I’m good to go with my peanut butter.

3:00:23 Use my prison techniques, because you can last months for that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I think that perspective is really important right now, you know. Yeah.

3:00:30 Um, and to know that you can do it with discipline, keep a physical practice going, find something to occupy your brain, and, like you said, if you can’t, if you can’t control it, don’t worry about it. Right? Whatever’s happening in the world, you can’t control it. I mean, you can do whatever you can to improve your own situation, but the, the nature is in control, really, of things. And epic status doesn’t matter what’s happening.

3:00:57 You could just keep feeding yourself the positive thoughts. I know it’s hard, because we have this emotional reaction. The amygdala kicks off. Amygdalas are twitching all over the world right now. I could feel it everywhere I go.

3:01:10 I could see the look on people’s faces, because when you’re in prison, you’re familiar with that, the, like, stress. It’s constant. I know all of a sudden everybody’s a prisoner in their own home, and I can see that look on their faces. But there are techniques to get that down. Learn relaxation techniques, yoga, meditation.

3:01:29 For me, when I was living in that cockroach-infested jail cell, in my second year, my, my sister sent me a book called Yoga Made Easy. I’d hid that box because I didn’t want the prisoners to see it and think I was a cis, again, to beat me up. And the yoga was great. All that stress came out my shoulder, and I loved it, but I couldn’t understand meditation. You sit there, you focus on your breathing, your thoughts stop.

3:01:53 How’s that possible? I’m a fast-paced person. My thoughts are never going to stop. So my sister kept on at me, keep trying the techniques in the book, so the maximum security cell, can’t sleep, cockroaches all over me. So what I did was, I put them on, black and white, striped pajamas.

3:02:12 I had pink socks. I tucked the pajamas into my socks, so I was like that, and that was because I knew the cockroaches would crawl on my legs, but at least they weren’t on my skin. You know, I just, the feeling of my leg on my skin was going to be too much. I was allowed seven books. Piled up the books, and wait till my cellmate was asleep.

3:02:38 The wall is here with the cockroaches all over it. I’ve got a pile of books, almost at the wall. My back’s not on the wall. I’m just a few inches away from the wall, cross-legged, got my fingers like this. You know, the cockroach isn’t messing around my feet and stuff.

3:02:52 I’m just tuning it out, close my eyes. The book says, start to concentrate on your breathing. All the thoughts are coming in. Knock it out. Concentrate on your breathing.

3:03:08 If that doesn’t work, start to count. Count your breaths, count your breaths, count my breaths. Come rest, thoughts coming back in, resume counting your breaths. And it was hard for me at first to try and get those thoughts to slow down, but because I’ve got the manic energy. I throw into things for hours and hours and hours on end.

3:03:26 Right now, every night, I’m just sat there forcing this to happen. Will to power, eyes closed, and then all of a sudden there became moments where there were no thoughts. Little spaces, and those spaces grew. And it freaked me out first, and then I got more used to it, and the spaces got bigger and bigger, until the point where my eyes were closed and I started to hallucinate and have these visualizations, and I was leaving the cell, and I was talking to people in my life who I loved.

3:04:04 And it started to get all my anxiety and my tension down, and they had put me on some kind of medication to help me sleep at that point, and the meditation was so powerful, I was able to get off the medication. Yeah. So if you are locked down, some work, and you want to put more effort into it, you get into the meditation. I say, yeah, yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, helpful stuff.

3:04:32 Yeah, and I also, I posted this the other day. I mean, these are really hard times right now, but hard times make hard people, and they made you, you know. And when you look back at your life, you’ll look back and be proud of yourself because of the hard things you overcame. You won’t be proud of yourself from the pizza you had while you’re watching Netflix. You’re proud of yourself in the hard times, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you to face something difficult and to come out, hopefully, stronger, better, proud of yourself.

3:05:00 And that’s what I think people should focus on now, and even if that means one day, when you’re locked in your place, you meditate, you do a physical practice, you create something, you write something, you stay calm, you pass the energy on. That’s a win, really, and try to stack those up. And you know you’ll grow in this time, when everyone else, I think, might want to contract. You’ll expand. There was a turning point where I said to myself, I can even just keep fighting against this in my mind, and the stress is killing me, or I can turn this into the education opportunity of a lifetime.

3:05:36 And I mentioned the various stages of adaptation. The shock, I think, a lot of people around the world are in the shock stage right now, but if you keep fighting it, you’re gonna do yourself in. You have to tell yourself this is now an opportunity to grow, to learn, and for introspection. You’ve got this extra time on your hands where you can do all these things that you’ve thought you were going to do at some point in your life, but you’ve put on the back burner.

3:06:02 So the crisis could be the biggest opportunity you’ve ever had in your lifetime. I didn’t see that at the time. I was just like, get me out of here, I’m going to die. But now, looking back, I’m grateful that I had this opportunity, and that’s what we’ve all got right now in this world. I know, I know, and you can learn that from someone who’s done time.

3:06:24 Uh, Shaun, I really appreciate you. I appreciate your story. Uh, those were some hard stories to listen to here, and I know they were hard for a lot of people watching, but I think that’s important, because they’re not going to forget this lesson. And hopefully they’ll take this away, and we’ll just forget it in five minutes, and take something away with them. Uh, you’ve got some great stuff they can go watch.

3:06:42 You got two TED talks, great YouTube channel, three TED talks, fantastic YouTube channel, uh, true crime podcast, website, social. Best way to find you? Yeah, on my YouTube channel, um. I stopped telling my own story. I got all these hard-hitting stories of all these other people who’ve been in prison all over the world, ex-cops, um, journalists, authors reporting on Madeleine McCann, Jimmy Savile, Epstein, royal family.

3:07:09 So there’s hours and hours of endless content. I’ve got 13 true crime books, all available worldwide on Amazon. My story is Party Time, Hard Time, Prison Time, multiple books about Escobar, book about Making a Murderer, and, um, American Made as well, like the CIA, the Bush and Clinton crime families. I’m gonna write a book, Who Killed Epstein, next. Oh my gosh.

3:07:30 Yeah, that’s gonna be crazy. Another Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew on the cover. Oh my gosh. Mind. Uh, look, Shaun, I’m so glad we made this happen.

3:07:39 You got a great story. Thanks for bringing that for us today, and just thanks for everything you do. Thank you for your time, and the opportunity.