How Matthew Cox Stole Millions From Banks... Until the FBI Hunted Him Down

31:13And so they're always trying to bring it up. But the houses in general, a decent house was selling between$100 ,000 to$150 ,000. But a shithole house was selling for$50 ,000. And so you could go buy a rehab. You know, rehab. And you go buy a rehab for$50 ,000. You put, you know,$30 ,000 into it. You hope to sell it for$120 ,000. You know, maybe make yourself$20 ,000 or$30 ,000, depending on some closing costs and fees. And I thought, that's what I'm going to do. And I was like, because I've already been doing it a little bit. and I went, yeah, but you know what? The problem is the only reason I've been able to do it in the past is I would do it and I would sell to a customer that I knew I could get the loan for.

31:53And I thought, oh, well, I'll just get them the loan. And I thought, well, if you're getting them the loan, you mean you're committing fraud. You're going to commit fraud to make sure they get the loan. Yeah. Well, then you're committing fraud again. Right. So, and I was like, but there was just no way. I knew there was no way to make money flipping properties. Not the kind of money I wanted to make. Right. And so I thought about it and I thought, you know what I need to do is I need to buy these properties. I need to be able to get them to appraise higher than the 100 or 105, whatever, once I've renovated them.

32:24I thought, so I was dating a chick that worked at a title company. She was the manager of a title company. And I went and I explained to her, how can I buy these properties for 50 and get that, but get the sale to make it look like I bought it for 200. And she said, if you pay the extra doc stamps on the deed, then it'll show up at a$200 ,000 sale. So let's say for$100 ,000 piece of property, it's$700. For$200 ,000 piece of property, it's$1 ,400. I'm buying these things for$50, so it's$350. So if I just pay the extra$1 ,050, that$50 ,000 sale will show up at$200 ,000. So what I did was I went out and I thought, okay, so if I do that enough of those in one area, the whole area will shoot up through the roof.

33:09I was like, okay, because that's what happens with an appraiser, right? So they send an appraiser out. He looks at your house. He compares it to three other houses in the area within half a mile to a mile that have sold within a year. And I thought if I do that enough of those in one area, that'll drive the prices up. And I was like, yeah, but these people are not going to buy these houses for$210 ,000. Right. They all live there too. They all have a pretty realistic idea of what it shit is worth. Right. And they're not gonna be able to pay. Like that's a huge payment compared to what these guys are used to.

33:38So I thought, and the problem with the buyers in that, those areas are that they just don't qualify. They don't have good credit. And I, so I sat there, I said, I, what I need to do is I need people to have good credit. I need to, you know what I need to do? I need to make my own people. Like I started thinking about, well, you know what? you could get somebody who had perfect credit, a straw man to come in and buy them. What are you going to do? Then, then what? Then you pay the mortgages for a few months, let them go into foreclosure. Like now it's another scam. Yeah. So I'm like, so I'm like, okay, I can drive the prices up.

34:12And then you have to split the money with them. Right? Like I said, we make a hundred thousand dollars on a purchase. I got to give you 50 ,000. Like I'm not doing that. And I went, yeah, you know what I need to do? I need to make my own people. so i it's a longer process but i figure out i start calling social security and i figure out how to convince social security to issue me social security numbers to children that don't exist so i make a fake birth certificate a fake shot record for like a 10 month old child and i go into social security and i say hey my son was born with a midwife at home i basically just called him 30 times and gave him different scenarios till one of them worked right i said so my my son was born at home uh he's 10 months old and uh with we were with the midwife and uh the pediatrician never had a social security number issued and she's like really she's like well he should have i'm like i know but he told me to come here and get it done and i had filled out what's called an ss5 form explaining everything i give her the documents as she looks at him she goes well hold on he's got to have a social security she looks on the thing and looks it all up and goes yeah you're right he doesn't.

35:19Okay. Well, let me go ahead and let me issue one. Boom. 10 days later, I get a social security card in the mail. I then get three secure credit cards in that kid's name. I don't say he's a kid. Obviously I see he's a 30 year old man. I just changed the year of his birth, get three secured credit cards, make the payments. And in six months I've got 700 credit scores. So now I I can buy these properties for$40 ,000,$50 ,000. I can record the value at$220 ,000,$190 ,000,$210 ,000. And I can have placed them in fake people's names with perfect credit and have them refinance the property, which is what I do.

35:57So now I've got multiple synthetic identities with perfect credit. And keep in mind, they have W-2s, pay stubs, because I can make those. You can verify them because I already got the companies. You want to verify that they have the money in the bank? you can call the banks. Matter of fact, I can give you the bank statements and you can call and verify you do all that. And then as far as, well, where have they been renting? Well, I can give you the canceled checks or not even that. I eventually just, I just incorporated a property management company and an older property management company. I could just, I could just answer the questions myself.

36:29The property management company doesn't require canceled checks. So now this is perfect. I start having these guys go in, buy these properties and refinance the properties. So they're buying the properties at 40 or 50 grand. We're recording the value at 220 and they're refinancing them and getting a loan for like 180, 190 on a property that I've got maybe 50 ,000 into. I maybe put$10 ,000 in repairs because I don't do anything to the inside. I just paint the outside, trim the trees, mow the yard, have an appraiser go out, go buy, take photographs of the outside of the place. Eventually, I mean, initially what I was doing was I was just twisting the appraiser's arms and saying, bro, you need to say there's no deferred maintenance, that the property's in great shape.

37:09And they would, you know, they'd hem and haw and, you know, and I'd, bro, come on, I'm closing. And keep in mind, I'm still using the mortgage company that I used to own. I'm like, bro, you make$5 ,000,$6 ,000 a month off of us. Like, I'll just cancel all the fucking appraisals. And then you just start over somewhere. Don't get crazy. We don't have to go there. And so they did initially, they did it, but then that got to be a pain in the ass. And so what I did was I eventually ordered the software myself and I'd still have them come out and do the appraisal and get all the numbers. And then I take their numbers and I put it all in and I just get rid of the deferred maintenance.

37:40So I could make the appraisal. I could make the whole package and send it in. I'd send it in. We go to the closing. Eventually, I'm able to open up banks, bank accounts in these guys' names. And initially, I made the fake IDs myself, right? This was back, this was 20 years ago. Like fake IDs now are difficult, right? You need a thermal printer. You need like a Fargo 5000 thermal printer and the whole thing. I couldn't do that. I'd have to buy all that equipment. This is when you could basically sand off the information, print the information in reverse on a piece of laminate and glue it over and go into a bank and they would run it and they give you a bank account.

38:14Right. That worked until I went on the run. And then I actually figured out I had to, I figured that I had to end up going into the bank, the DMV and getting them to issue me an actual driver's license, which I do. When you say you were like making fake birth certificates, just for example, like how deep into the sort of underworld? Did you have to get to do something like that? Or was that relatively easy? It was easy. I actually just started calling and trying to get the security paper. So the security paper on a lot of like, for instance, South Carolina has the security paper. It just, it's one of those, you know, it's multicolored or I mean, you can buy them when they're not multicolored or they're just like, you know, blue and they have this waves in them.

38:51Right. But if you make a copy, it says void if copied. Well, that's what, so if you're a 30 year old or 40 year old men, and this was 20 years ago. So this is your 50 years ago. They don't have the really pretty nice ones like they do now with holograms and all that shit. They had them on this paper. So I just had to make a template and print it out on the paper. And then I ended up getting a stamp that said, um, South Carolina vital statistics, but I couldn't even get the stamp. Every time I tried, they would say, no, we can't make that. So I ended up saying, um, um, uh, South Carolina corporation of virtual records.

39:28And I etched out everything except for, um, South Carolina. And then it, then it looked rough. And then, so you couldn't really tell what it said. And it just was a stamp, but it was a, it was an embalt stamp. You could see part of it, but the embalt stamps wear down anyway. You can't see them anyway. I never had anybody not, not take these birth certificates as 100 authentic right they would grab them they'd feel it and they go okay sit over there that's it they just like that they don't read them they just go yeah sit over there i was almost offended sometimes when they would really you know scrutinize the documents i'd be like hey hey i worked hard on this look at this this is quality shit so how many years were you doing that and how much money would you say that you made before you ended up getting cut and having to go on the rent um uh gosh the problem i'd say several i'd say i made a few million let's say i made i mean the the the government said i made 11 and a half million that's not true uh let's say and i keep in mind a lot of people were involved in the whole thing so let's say i made two or three million myself but i'm also buying property because we're also started a development company.

40:40So I'm buying property. We've got three or four. That's not true. We had three houses. We had three houses halfway done. We're starting another one, but we've got a hundred vacant pieces of land. So I'm doing this for a while. Let's say 18 months to two years. I borrow 11 and a half million. I'm making whatever. Let's say I've made two or three million, but I've dumped it back into real estate. And a friend of mine knows what I'm doing and I'm helping him out. And one day he's asked me, like, he's like, I want to do what you're doing. Is there any way I can get in on this? And I don't really need his help.

41:16Right? Like I've already got, I'm already doing well. And so I said, look, how about we do this? How about we have, I take you and we have you do one in Orlando. And he says, okay. So he does it in Orlando, I already had a chick that was doing it in Clearwater. So to make a, because we don't have six hours, um, um, this girl goes into the bank one day, she closes a loan, gets a check for 95 ,000 goes to another, we go to another title company, walks in there, signs all the documents. And the woman looks at her and says, you don't look like your ID. And by the way, it was her picture. This is what always bothers me.

41:57This is why whenever people say like, you know, what messes, what messed you up? It wasn't anything I did. It was little things that I couldn't control. The title agent looked at the ID and said, this doesn't look like you. It was her picture. So how do you, how can I fix, it is her. And so she calls another title company agent and she looks at it and she goes, yeah, yeah, no, that's her. What do you mean that's her? She's, I don't know. It doesn't look like her. Now she changed her hair and she's like, I mean, I changed my hair. She's no, it just doesn't. You know what? She's let me make a copy.

42:30She makes a big copy, blows it up and says, we're going to hold the check. I'm going to get back with you. So when she comes out, I said, look, we're hit. This woman's going to make four or five phone calls. She's going to figure it out. And so she said, well, what about the check for 95 ,000? I went, no, no, no, no, no. We're done with the 95 ,000 dollar check. That's that's over. We're not cashing that. And she's I'm like, you know, first of all, you have to go open a bank account. Like you're not going in like it's over. We'll start over. And keep in mind, this chick doesn't have any money.

42:58It's easy for me to say, we'll start over, scrap it, we'll do it again. In a month, we'll be in a better position. In her mind, that$95 ,000 already exists. Of course. She thought by the end of the day, we were closing three or four loans. She thought by the end of the day, she's going to make$200 ,000. Now she's making nothing. And so she says, look, let's give the check. Let me call Travis, my buddy who was doing the same scam in Orlando. Let me call Travis and see if he'll deposit the check. she calls travis she tells him we're on speakerphone and and this was the old this is i had one of the first phones that had a speaker on it too by the way it wasn't like this is this is old this is pre-smartphone so and we're sitting there talking on this phone and uh and he's like yeah give me the check i'll deposit it he already had a couple bank accounts open he was already doing the scam that she was doing and he's already pulling out money he already pulled out like 400 000 out of the bank and she's like he's like yeah i'm good i'm he's like what you think it's good matt i said no, I don't think it's good.

43:53I think it's bad. I think it's, this woman's going to figure it out. And I think that they're going to attach it. And I think it's going to be a problem. And he's like, yeah, you're f***ing, you're, you know, you're f***ing, you know, and I'm like, okay. So she gives him the check. He deposited the check. Four or five days later, I call because back then you had to wait for checks to clear. I call four or five days later. He says, Hey, look, I know what you're calling for. I'm actually on my way. I'm actually pulling in the bank right now. Um, I said, Oh, okay. So you're getting the money. And he's like, no, no, no.

44:19They, They called. They needed me to, they need to see me sign the back of the check. And I go, what? Yeah, yeah. They said because it was, you know, over a certain amount of money. Matter of fact, I think that check was$105 ,000 because I think what he said was because it was over$100 ,000, they had to witness me endorse the check. And I had deposited many, many checks way over$100 ,000. And I'm thinking to myself, no, no, no, no, no, no. Something's wrong with that, bro. Don't go in the bank. Don't go in the bank. The cops are going to be waiting for you. And he goes, I'm in the parking lot, Matt.

44:51There's no cops here. I go, no, they're not going to be in car and in, you know, in a cruisers. Like they're, they're waiting for you. He's like, no, no, no. And he's like, you're, I remember he said, um, he said, you're shaking like a little girl. You stop shaking like a little girl, you know? And I was just like, and I, no, no, no, don't, don't, don't, hangs up the phone, goes in. We're waiting around. We're waiting around. Maybe 30 minutes later, I start calling his phone. It keeps, goes to voicemail, voicemail, voicemail. I'd say this goes on for six hours. And finally, I pick up the I go to a pay phone.

45:25This is when there used to be pay phones. Right. Went to a pay phone and call his call the fake identity. He was using a guy. He was his fake identity was David Silver. I call David Silver's number. And a police officer answers. This is officers. You know, this is detective, you know, John. Someone's. Oh, who is this? And I was like, this is Lee Black. and he goes uh and i said hey can i talk to david silver and he goes he said no who is this again i'm like i just hung at the phone i realized i'm what am i doing right hang out the phone um and i know he's been arrested so the next day i get a phone call he says you got to get me out you got to bond me out so i go to his brother-in-law give him some money he bonds him out then we get him a lawyer i give him like 15 grand for the lawyer because it was a state case anyway um uh he he He insists I get him out, get him a lawyer.

46:20He's insisting, like, don't worry, bro. Like, you know, keep in mind, there's$400 ,000 missing. And he's like, if I can just get the money back. Oh, no, no. I said, I'll get you the money back. I'll get you the money back. Then nothing will happen. He's like, I might not have to go to jail. But if I do go to jail, like, you'll watch my daughter, right? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. He's like, my sister can watch her, but you'll pay. Absolutely. I'll pay for everything. I'll pay for everything. And so in the meantime, what I don't know is he's already met with. the i paid the lawyer and the lawyer immediately said you need to work with a task force but against this guy so there's a task force that's put together and he's working with the task force and uh that goes on for months and what's funny too is looking back on it how much he was milking me he kept coming he's like man you know i need money like i'm thinking about starting like a tree trimming business but you know i can't do it my truck i'm like well let's go go get you a new truck let's go get you a new truck we go get him a new truck yeah you know i don't know what that was back then you could get a truck like a for 15 20 grand but he's smart though he knows he has you in the position where you're going to do whatever you're happy yeah of course i'm throwing my you know he comes in he's like look i need to um you know i gotta buy some chainsaws you know but i want like the industrial ones because the ones from home depot are no good you gotta get they're about two grand of course you know i want to start he's starting a tree trimming business which he runs to this day by the way so i pay him then he needs a boom you know the boom that goes up in the tree he needed those are 15 grand by the way um then that's the kind that you pull behind him of course i'm i'm i'm embarrassed that i didn't suggest you get the boom yeah that's my fault travis that's my fault i'm i'm it was stupid absolutely we need to get that bro this guy milked me for 25 to 35 grand over the next six months while he's burying me wow i had i had dinner with him about six months ago um anyway uh i still talk to him okay uh he still runs that he still runs that business it's just all old school shit at this point no no oh no he turned it into something he really turned it into something oh okay okay yeah yeah no he didn't that stuff i just got him started he's high now he's just got like 20 guys working for him you know hired laborers and just drives around and does uh does uh quotes all day got it um but uh so that goes on for like i said four five six months and then i'm still running my scam because i don't know anything's going on and then one day i have a buddy who was a sheriff's deputy and uh steve sutton and i'm saying this because i know in the comments people will be like this dude's just throwing names out there right you ever get that no a little bit anyway but steve sutton didn't get in any trouble um but uh uh steve sutton comes to me this is 20 years ago i'd love to find steve anyway steve wore he wore overalls a tea he'd wear like a wife beater and overalls there's not a lot of people wear overalls well right you know i'll bet you he wears them to this day so and he's a good old boy sheriff and i had done a bunch of loans for him and his wife maybe about a million dollars worth of bad loans right where they bought like a bunch of investment properties and he had divorced his wife and he was buying additional properties but these are properties like i'm getting the loan and we're getting them cash back and he's fixing up the houses with it right but it's still an illegal loan.

49:31And because by this point, the FDLE have already served subpoenas on a bunch of the title companies on loans that I was a part of, his name has come up. So one day a woman, so he comes to me one day at like four o 'clock and he says, Hey Matt, can I talk to you? And he's in his uniform. I'm like, yeah, what's up? And he says, listen, he said, I used to date a chick that works for the um tamper police department i said okay he said she recently was on a task force said all right he said um they handed the task force over to the fbi yesterday and she came to my house this morning because she said that my name had come up and i went really and now i'm a little worried and he goes yeah and i said well what was the task force about he goes it's on you i went oh he said do you know somebody that got arrested in orlando and i went yeah and he said well that person has been cooperating wearing a wire uh they've they've dug through all your stuff my name came up because some of the properties you've been helping me and my name come up on some of these files he's like and so basically they handed over all their their findings to the fbi and they're going to come arrest you in a few days and i mean this is i'm like fuck i'm already on federal probation so i was so i sat there and i was like okay and i remember he said what should I do?

50:53And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, well, they've got my name. I said, no, no, no. I said, you're a deputy. You tell them you came to me to get the loan. I set up the loan. You showed up, you signed the pay, you gave me your document. You don't know what I sent the lender. You got, you were going to get$40 ,000 back on this loan and 60 on this one. And you did, and that was all construction money. And you've been using it for construction. You're not a broker. You don't know how it works. That seems legal, legitimate to you. he's like okay okay and so i tell him all that and he's fine and uh so i end up he's like well what are you gonna do and i said oh i'm leaving like i can't go to prison i'm a soft white guy like i'm there's no way i'm gonna do well i've seen shawshank redemption and that guy was like six four like i'm not i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do well in prison right so uh you know i don't know anything about the federal system i don't know anything about camps i don't know anything about lows like i have no idea everything i've seen i saw two movies about prison one was shawshank Like one was a movie called The Animal Factory.

51:50Right. Where they basically raped this young guy. You know, it's not good. That's what they really sell you on is the idea. If you go to prison, you're getting raped. Absolutely. And in reality, unless you are in like the worst of the worst prison, it's pretty unlikely. And they're not going to send me to someplace like that. Financial crimes. That's a financial crime. I have no idea though. Yeah. And I'm already terrified. And I'm already on federal probation. So I end up packing up my stuff. I was able to pull out like 80 grand in like one day, like from that at four o 'clock that day to the next day, I was able to pull out 80 grand.

52:24That was it. I just wrote a bunch of checks to people and that was it. Everything else is tied up in credit lines, real estate. Like I have no time to get anything. I get 80 grand in cash and I take the girl I was dating, which I barely even knew. I've been dating this chick like a month. And so I don't even know her. And so she says, I want to come with you. And I'm like, we never even know each other. Like, what are you talking about? And she's like, you know, it doesn't matter. I think I'm in love with you. I'm like, I don't think I'm in love with you. Like, this is not, you know, but, and, you know, I look back, it was such a huge mistake.

53:01But, you know, I, but I said, okay, absolutely. You can come with me. No problem. When you're in that sort of mental state, anybody who's available to you starts to seem a lot more desirable, right? Right. And not just that. But it's also leaving everybody, you know, is terrifying. You know, like I've seen guys that have shown up for prison to turn themselves in to do 12 or 14 years in prison. Like they showed up at the gate. Like you showed up for that. You didn't like I would think, why wouldn't you take off on the run? They're like, well, I'd never be able to see my parents again or my kids or my.

53:32And so, you know, it's a terrifying for people that I realize that the other thing is most people can't leave and never contact their family again. They just can't do it. And so what the authorities do is they wait and they just watch their family because they know they're going to they keep a tab on their family. And they, you know, and every once in a while they start to realize that there's a phone call from Iowa that comes in twice a month on every Friday. And they go, OK, this guy's in Iowa. Let's track it back. We'll just sit on that phone. Let's go sit on that pay phone or whatever. Right.

54:02And so anyway, he so I mean, anyway, I grab her and we leave because, you know, everything was going wrong and at least I didn't have to be alone. And so I take her with me. And we go to Atlanta. and so the fraud that I had been running in Tampa was a fraud that I could buy a house I could make it appear that the house was worth$200 ,000 I could borrow against that pull the money out and I would make six months worth of payments and then I'd stop paying and so this person has bought four or five houses and they'd stop paying on four or five houses so that person has borrowed a little over a million dollars typically million million point two and maybe they've made five or six hundred thousand dollars now i didn't get the five or six hundred thousand dollars i you know this guy gets 50 this guy gets 50 this guy people that are doing stuff for me um and then a lot of that it's going back into real estate i owned a ton of real estate so but once that synthetic identity stopped paying the houses would go into foreclosure and the bank didn't know they'd been scammed because what they thought was we lent 180 000 or$190 ,000 on a house that's worth$210 ,000 or$220 ,000.

55:19The guy made six months payments, then he stopped paying. So let's just foreclose on the property. By then, it's too late for them to check the W-2s. They can't check to see if any of this stuff is real. And so for two years, houses are going to foreclosure nonstop, and the bank doesn't even know they've been defrauded. Well, when I went on the run, like the gloves are off, right? and I don't have time to wait six months to prepare these synthetic identities. I need money now. So what I do is we go to an area called Alpharetta, Georgia, and we rent a house from a guy named Michael Shanahan. It's a house worth$200 ,000.

56:00And I make a fake ID saying, my name is Michael Shanahan. And I get a fake social security number in his name issued by the Social Security Administration. And I start a little credit profile on him. It's not his social security number. It's not his date of birth. It's not really even his full name. His full name was like Michael Shane Shanahan and mine was like Michael Sean Shanahan, whatever. So I start getting a couple of credit cards in, but I won't be able to get credit scores for six months. But at least if you pulled the credit, there's something there that verifies like where I work, that sort of thing.

56:34Because when I apply for the credit cards, of course, I say I work at wherever, whatever institution I said I worked at. And then what I do is I go downtown and I pull the title to his house. And when I pull the title to his house, I see that he's got three mortgages on there. He's got a first mortgage, a second mortgage, and a home equity line of credit. I create three different satisfaction of mortgages. So when you pay off the mortgage to your house, to Bank of America, Bank of America mails a one-page document. It's called the satisfaction of mortgage to public records. It's notarized. it's got the information that's on the original mortgage and it says that you have paid off says adam paid off this mortgage satisfied they record that document and guess what your mortgage disappears so now you don't know anything so i did that three different times with three different bank of america because each one looked a little different and so i sent those or i went in and handed it to them actually they recorded them all those mortgages were satisfied so now i'm living in a house worth$200 ,000 that is bought 10 years ago as Michael Shanahan.

57:39I then turn around. So I have no mortgages on the house. It's free and clear. I then call three hard money lenders, guys that just lend you money based on the equity in your property. I call three of them. Each one of them shows up at one shows up at like nine in the morning. One shows up at one, one shows up at four. They all walk around the house. They go, yeah, I'll lend you 150 ,000 on this. I go, okay. I then schedule three different title companies, three different closings with three different title companies, and we close those loans. Wow. Now, they don't care if I have a job. I do tell them I have a job.

58:08I have W-2s paid. But they don't really care about that. They're only lending$150 ,000. And then they charge huge fees. And I end up closing those loans. So I end up making a profit of roughly$400 ,000. So we close all at the same time. So there's three mortgages, about$450 ,000 roughly. After closing costs everything. Let's say it's about$400 ,000. take that money. I deposit it into multiple banks and I start pulling the money out of the bank. So now I've got money. Yeah. In this particular case, I was pulling out 8 ,000, 7 ,000, 6 ,000 out of many, many different bank accounts. I only had a problem one time towards the very end.

58:43I got frustrated. I went to cash a check for$29 ,000. And when I cashed that check, I cashed the check in the name. I had a fake, well, it was a real ID. By this point, I'm actually going into the DMV and getting the DMV to issue me real driver's licenses, real IDs. And I had a driver's license in the name of a guy named Scott Cugno. And so I had gotten a cashier's check issued to him from the title company, from the closing. and so i go into the bank and i go to cash this check for 29 grand and the manager comes over and he's like yeah something something's not right and i'm like what do you mean he's like i don't know something's not something's off let me we're gonna have to check on this i said absolutely no problem i need two forms of id no problem here's this here's scott i also opened several bank accounts in his name so i have a i have a debit card i have a visa i have yeah sure no problem and I sit there and I wait and they make a bunch of phone calls.

59:41And then at some point they call me, somebody calls me and I don't recognize the number. I pick up the phone and I answer the phone and it's a woman. And she says, hi, is this, um, uh, is this Michael Shanahan? And I go, yes, it is. And she said, hi, I'm, I'm, this is Kimberly from SunTrust Bank. I'm just calling to verify that you issued a cashier's check or wrote a check to somebody in there. They're trying to cash a large check. His name is Scott Cugno. I wonder if you could verify the funds. And I go, absolutely. I said, yeah, that's Scott Cugno. And the check is for$29 ,000. Is there an issue?

1:00:22And she goes, no, no, we're just verifying that it's okay. And I'm like, how did you get my number? And she went, oh, we called the title company because they're a client. and we called them and they said you had had a closing and that uh and they checked the they checked your application and they gave us the phone number i'm like oh okay if they had done anything if they looked anywhere else they would have got the real michael shanahan instead they called me and i'm like okay okay well thank you and she's like yeah i hope that's okay i said no it's no problem i hang up the phone manager comes walking in five minutes later says hi Mr.

1:00:59Cugno we've got the money he and another woman walked out I'm assuming it was Kimberly whatever her name was and they count out$29 ,000 I scoop up the$29 ,000 I put it in my pocket and I start walking out and I remember he stopped me and he said Mr. Cugno and I said yeah what's up and he says uh I'd like to say that uh I feel very apprehensive about this transaction I go, really? I go, what is it exactly? And he goes, I can't put my finger on it. And I go, it'll come to you. And I turn around and just walk out. Get in my car. And like three or four days later, the Secret Service showed up. Oh, shit.

1:01:34But by that point, I'd taken out$400 ,000. I'm gone. Yeah. And look, there's other things I was doing, right? Like we did the same scam in Tallahassee where actually the chick I left with, her name was Becky. Becky pretended to be a woman by the name of Teresa Knight. and she borrowed a mortgage on a house. So we're doing this. We're getting funds. I did the same thing. Well, at this point, so at this point, I realized that I can't keep driving around in these names. And keep in mind, now they have the name Scott Cugno. That's trash. So when I leave, when I pack everything up and we move, like we packed up and we moved to South, to Charlotte, North Carolina.

1:02:14Well, I have to trash everything and start over. And I realized what's going to make it faster Instead of making the synthetic identities, what makes it faster is we go to we start I start surveying homeless people. You know, don't judge me. So I start surveying homeless people. And what I do is I have a statistical survey and I would go out and I made a little badge. I actually had the picture on the badge was I pulled it from my wanted poster because at this point, there's a bunch of newspaper articles on me in the Tampa Tribune. And there was a newspaper used to be called the St. Petersburg Times.

1:02:48they did like a bunch of them talking about because at this point they're unwanted and so when the thing in atlanta hits it's like hey he's wanted here and now he's in atlanta yeah and he just robbed you know i think they had some number like oh it's a million dollars it was it was 450 thousand dollars it wasn't a million um and then he should then there's one in you know in in uh tallahassee and and we've there's more in in orlando and they're in they're putting they're make it sound like I'm doing it everywhere. Like, um, so I go to Charlotte and I start running a scam in, in, um, Columbia, South Carolina, but I'm doing this.

1:03:28Now I'm surveying homeless people. I make a statistical survey form. I made the form up, get a clipboard, make a little fake ID that says statistical surveyor. And I walk around where homeless guys that are look about my age. Um, and I asked, tell them, Hey, I'm taking a survey for the Salvation Army. We're trying to determine where we place our next uh homeless facility and you know would you mind taking a survey they go i'm not interested i go well it pays 20 cash right now you're gonna give me 20 bucks cash right now yeah right now it'll take five minutes bro and they go yeah what do you need i go no i'll fill it out and i just ask them the questions name date of birth social security number mother's maiden name all the things you should never give anybody and they just readily give me everything and you know were you ever in the military have you ever had what states have you had identification in?

1:04:12Have you ever had a U.S. passport? Everything. So I would then go order all their documents. I'd order their high school transcripts. I'd order their birth certificate, their social security card. I would register to vote in their name. And I'd go to a state where they had never had an ID and I would register to vote in that state or even make a fake lease. And I'd go into the DMV and I'd get them to issue me a driver's license in their name. and then I turn around I get a passport so I was able to travel right so you know while while on the run I've been to Jamaica Bermuda Mexico Croatia Greece we went to Italy I mean so I'm traveling on these on fake passports and what would be the smartest move for you in retrospect to have done at this point to just go to some foreign country and set up shop and just never come back to america yeah but i i you have to understand that there had not been a time when i hadn't been able to talk my way out of something right and i give you an example like i'm just driving a car i'm driving first of all if you don't if your driver's license doesn't matter because you're dumping it in six months or three months you'll drive like a maniac i'm driving 95 miles an hour this is back when like the speed limit's what 55 or 65 i'm driving 90 but that is the kind of thing you should avoid if you just don't want to get pulled over in general all right but if i get pulled over listen this one guy got so many tickets in his name i ended up having to go to traffic school so he didn't lose his license i mean i got like i got like two cars and an apartment in his name so i can't lose his his i don't want to lose his license yeah um but i mean yeah i i so i'm getting pulled over but i'm not getting pulled over with like a dead body in the trunk and a broken tail like you pull me over the my name is you know my name is let's say walter holcomb the car's walter holcomb the full coverage insurance walter holcomb everything's perfectly fine.

1:06:04Everything's legit. Everything's paid for. So I'm not, it's not like, like, Hey, you've got a suspended license. Absolutely. I do not. I just got the license three months ago. And I'm the only one that Walter Holcomb lives under a bridge. He didn't even have a license. Right. And I know it's good because I ran a copy of his, of his, uh, his, um, driver's license report. And I even got some guys that would have issues and I'd fix the issues. So they owed$400. I'll pay the$400. So anyway, I end up, so while I'm in Charlotte, it, I mean, this is how brazen in it was, while I'm in Charlotte, I end up going to Columbia, South Carolina as a guy named Gary Sullivan, which I had was a homeless guy that I had an ID in his name.

1:06:42I buy two houses. I borrow 1.3 million or 4 million, 1.1.3 million. I think it's 1.3 million on these houses, multiple mortgages. I'm going in the bank, cashing the checks or pulling out cash. and I have whatever, 10 bank accounts. I go in the bank, one of the banks. And what had happened was I had borrowed one of the mortgage companies. It's a little complicated, but basically they had sent an abstractor to public records to check public records because I was going to borrow money against that property, but they did it after everybody else did. So by the time I was closing loans, their abstractor showed up and saw that there were other mortgages showing up and realized this is a fraud.

1:07:28So they called Wachovia. They called a bunch of banks, but Wachovia was one of them. And I went into Wachovia Bank and I'm getting a check for nothing, four or five grand. And the girl sees me and she says, hold on a second. She walks in the back, but it was a new account. And that was a normal thing. If you ask for more than four grand, they had to call it in. It always, they always did this. So I asked for like six grand, five grand, whatever. She goes in the back and I'm waiting, I'm waiting. And all of a sudden two deputies walk in and they grabbed me from behind and put cuffs on me and they say hey you know what you're not under arrest we're just detaining you until the detective gets here so they walk me into the whatever the manager's office and i sit down like what's going on they said you know um we don't know we were just told to detain you i said okay so the detective shows up he walks in and i remember thinking i didn't know much about law enforcement right so i remember just thinking it was like Like I knew this at this point, the Secret Service and the FBI were looking for me.

1:08:23And so I thought it was like an FBI agent. The guy walks in. He says, hey, I'm a detective with the financial crimes division from whatever the name of the county is, that county, like Richland County. And he shows me his badge and he says, I want to let you know you're being detained because there's been a complaint file, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, OK. He said, but he's calling me Gary Sullivan. So I'm realizing he does he doesn't have any idea who I am. And he says, I said, well, what's the issue? And he goes, well, the issue is that they say you borrowed three mortgages on one of the pieces of property that you own.

1:08:59I actually had like six mortgages. So they only found three. Because keep in mind, they mail them in. It takes several days to get there. First of all, you close. It takes them a few days to prepare the documents, to mail them in. It gets mailed in. Then it sits on somebody's desk. So it could be weeks before it shows up. So three showed up. And I looked at him, and I went, is that illegal? And he goes, you know, I don't know. I don't know. And I remember thinking, I'm walking out of here. So what ends up happening is he and I talk. We get on the phone with the head of Wachovia's fraud department, and they are telling him, the guy is telling him, this guy's running a scam.

1:09:37Arrest him. He's saying, I don't know if he is running a scam. My story was I went into Wachovia. I told them I needed to get a mortgage. because I needed to borrow three,$400 ,000 because I was going to start flipping properties. And he says, that's right. You own another piece of property. I said, right, I'm rehabbing that property. He was okay. So, uh, I said, but I'm going to borrow a bunch of them. Right. And I said, so I'm going to do a bunch of them. So I need to get 300 ,000. They said they could do it. I said, so the one loan officer at Wachobi said, I can get your first mortgage for 190.

1:10:05I've got a friend that works over at a SunTrust. She can get you one, a second mortgage for 150, 180 and then i i have another friend that can get you a heloc i was like okay cool and i looked at him and he's and he goes did you think that was strange i go is it he goes yeah i don't i don't know i don't know he doesn't know yeah and people had back then people had they don't now because of the dodd frank act but back then you could get a first mortgage a second mortgage in a heloc people lots of people had them and so i explained that well he's a guy on wachovia screaming they're all first mortgages but nowhere on a mortgage does it say it's a first, second, or third mortgage because what determines the placement of the mortgage, it's the placement that determines it's a first, second, or third.

1:10:48So I said, I read those documents. I said, none of them said they were first or second. I mean, they just, they were just liens. And so I know entirely too much for this guy, right? So we're arguing back and forth. He's saying, this guy's doing this, this guy's doing that, this is a scam. And then he says, look at his ID. His ID starts with zero, zero, zero. It's a fake ID. And the, the, the, um, investigator detective, he says, no, no, I ran this guy through NCIC. This guy, this is Gary Sullivan. This is a real ID. Our ID start with zero, zero, zero. This, this guy's out of like California and this guy's in South Carolina.

1:11:29He doesn't know what the IDs look like so and i so i remember i lean into him and i go bro are you serious i said so now i'm not gary sullivan i go what are we doing here he i know gary i know he said so i mean he's he's totally on my side right and so we end up he ends up hanging up on the guy telling him he's going to talk to his lieutenant talk to the district attorney he has me follow him back to the police department and fill out a full, a full, fell out a report on what my version of what happened was. And so I fill out the whole thing and he, at that point he tells me to wait in the, in the like, like he, they have cubicles.

1:12:13You can't stay in the cubicle, right? So he can't leave me in the cubicle while he had to go and get like the lieutenant to sign off on his report. So he said, can you wait in the hallway? And I said, sure. So I go wait in the hallway and there's all these wanted posters. My Secret Service's most wanted poster is on the thing. It was the only color wanted poster on the thing. And keep in mind, I mean, we don't have like I can tell you multiple times that I went into places and there was actually one time a title agent that actually recognized me from my wanted poster, which was in the back room, gets up, goes in the back room, looks at the wanted poster.

1:12:47And he got confused, right? Like he's looking at it and he said, now keep in mind, by this point I'd had, I've had a nose job. I've had a hair, two hair transplants. I had, um, I had what they called it a mini facelift liposuction teeth were done. Wow. So, and even though I look the same, you know, it's subtle, right? But, but I also, the picture that he had is a picture of me looking crazy. Like my hair's long and it's combed crazy. And I'm there with short hair, a nice button-down shirt. I look like a professional. That guy looks like a lunatic. He's wanted by the police. I look like a normal person.

1:13:25He looks at my application, and it says that I've worked for the same job for like seven years and just recently moved to the town. And he looked at this. He said, well, this guy just moved from Florida. This says this guy is wanted out of Atlanta. This is not the same guy. Right. Even though it said wanted for bank fraud, identity theft, it didn't matter. For him, it made sense. He went back. He let me sign all the papers. I walked out with a check for$200 ,000. And what year are we at at this point?

1:13:572005, probably. Oh, okay. So I get caught in 2006. So what happens is I end up leaving there. The girl I was dating at the time, right, Becky, we end up getting into this huge argument. and we'd been in arguments before where, I mean, we're screaming matches, right? Like yelling and screaming, and the cops would show up. Now, of course, I knew the cops were all night. She's screaming at 2 o 'clock in the morning in an upscale high-rise in downtown Charlotte. I know the cops are coming. Back then, if the cops come on a domestic violence, somebody goes to jail no matter what. So I'm bolting, and this has happened multiple times.

1:14:33so we get into a screaming match at her new place in in in houston downtown houston 20th some odd you know 20 25th floor some brand new building and we get into a screaming match and i'm like yeah i'm done i'm done so we end up arguing over the who's we only had five or six hundred thousand dollars we argue over it i end up taking a hundred thousand dollars and leaving now i wanted to split it but basically the ultimatum was i'll call the police wow and so and the the argument for her was you should take a hundred thousand because you can go and make a million dollars i can't make a million dollars like i can't i have to live off of this and i was like you know you're right but she's not wanted she could get a job oh she is she's already done some mortgage fraud of her own she's also verifying people's employment okay she's uh she's opening up bank accounts we're depositing money into and she's got fake ids she's driving a car that's in somebody else's name she's got a driver's license she's got a passport in someone else's that was like a good negotiator that she was able to tell you to only take 100 grand you know what's so funny every time i would tell this story in prison and they're not that it's nothing against black guys but the every black guy every one of them would say why didn't you kill her that's what i was like i must be a black guy that's what i was thinking i'm like wow this has got to be the part of the story where he kills her but i know you ain't gonna tell you know i was i always was just like well i'm not gonna kill her and they'd be like well bro it's half a million dollars you left her with half a million i'm like yeah on the hood people killed women or whoever for like five grand never mind half a million yeah yeah it didn't even occur to me i'm just i'm just trying to get out of there before she's get so loud that the cops show up right so i take off i actually called i was called people that I knew from back home just to say, Hey, what's going on?

1:16:21And how are you guys doing? Everything's good. And, uh, one of the person people said, listen, I've talked to the FBI several times. This is a broker that I knew. And she said the name of the, or that the FBI agent wants you to call her. So she, so I call her. Well, at first I say, I'm not going to call her. She has no, listen, call her. You might be able to turn yourself in and maybe you only get a couple years. Like, what do you understand? It's getting worse. There's got to be there. There's new newspaper articles every week. So I, I call, um, I call the FBI agent, talk to her a couple of times, try and tell her, Hey, you know, what can I get?

1:17:00She ended up saying like seven years for, for just for Tampa. We go back and forth. Cause you know, keep in mind at this point, there's millions at this point, right? So it's, it's, it's, it's on top of what's already there. so we go back and forth back and forth i realize she's lying to me um about the seven years because that was seven years for tampa not for atlanta not for what i just did right which they haven't even found out about yet anyway uh i end up hanging up the phone on her i'm not turning myself in i'm not tearing myself in for seven years when that doesn't include this other stuff yeah so i chuck the phone i go back to charlotte i to pick up my car that's the only reason i went back you might drove all the way from houston back to charlotte in an in a in a rider truck with no id because the what's her name the chick kept all my shit so i'm i go back i got 100 grand in cash and i get in a rider and i'm driving around and ride her truck on you know like this is not good um i get back there i drop off the truck i go in to get my vehicle i get my vehicle i remember for some reason i thought if i could just get in my vehicle bro i'll be all right and i got my vehicle So it was in one of those under one of those, uh, you know, parking garages, the concrete ones.

1:18:11So I'm driving down the whole thing and I, I pull out and I just remember thinking, bro, I'm good. You're good. You're going to be okay. So I drive to the Starbucks, which is right across the street from my apartment complex. I'm going to get some coffee cause I'm leaving. I'm going to go to Nashville. Right. Cause I listen to country music. Like I'm sure a lot of your listeners. Um, so I think I want to go to Nashville. Like I like country music. I'll go to Nashville. Uh, and then I'm going to go to Nashville. And so I walk into Starbucks, I order my stuff, and there's two people from the apartment complex that are there.

1:18:42Keep in mind, it's been about five days since I left Charlotte. Right. Since I walked, I'm sorry, Columbia, or Columbus. Since I walked out of that Columbus Police Department, it's been five days. I'm now at a place where the vehicle that I was driving was registered to this address. So I get my coffee. These people are looking at me from the apartment complex, and they're having a meltdown. though the female of the two walks out the back the guy just stands there staring at me he gets his coffee he's just standing there it's crowded and it's you know what i'm saying is it's crowded but i'm like like i don't know something's wrong and what i thought it was is it's like the fifth of the month sixth of the month i haven't paid my my rent and i'm thinking they probably just put like like they're they're taking it serious right like i don't know why he's what she went to go do anyway i get my coffee i go outside he follows me outside i get in the car i start my car I'm playing with the CDs this is back when you had CDs they would come in like a rack of CDs and you'd shove it in the thing and so I'm getting a CD watching him I mean totally not concerned but I am like what this I almost want to get out and be like bro what's your problem what's happening um but I'm too too short to be confrontational um so you know I'm just kind of looking at him and all of a sudden I put on my seat belt I'm sitting here I'm start the car and he starts screaming he's right here he's right here and I look up I look in the rearview mirror and there's two guys running towards the back of the car and i punch it and i fucking take off down the road now it's funny because it it's you know it would be it had posi traction and i mean you know how it had that that you know now you you hit the gas it doesn't spin out yeah like in the movie wouldn't it be great it'd slide sideways and it could but that none of that happened you know and cars would peel off and squeal and i cut off traffic but really there was nobody there so i just drove off you know i was already driving off but you know and when i explained it i say i take off everybody i can see in everybody's mind like the car side slides sideways and he takes off and none of that happened i just drove off and the guys were but they did run kind of in the middle of the street and start and look at my tag number right but it was the same vehicle that i that they had anyway right and so they did put a bolo out now i always thought that was the fbi but when i got the freedom of information act once i got arrested i was in prison uh it turns out that was the U.S.

1:20:54Marshals, which I didn't even know really at that time, um, that how involved they were, but they were actually flying all over the country looking for me on some of the false leads and stuff, but they were, they were knocking on doors there. They were serious. So I ended up going to Nashville. Well, I actually, I actually, when I left there, I actually drove straight to a homeless shelter and surveyed like three guys, but I get the Nashville. I order, I order a bunch of, I actually rent an apartment in a place called Green Hills, which is where like a really nice area. I rent an apartment. I order all the documents.

1:21:33And probably within five or six days, I've got a driver's license. And the day after that, I've got a new car. And the name of one of the homeless guys, his name was Joseph Carter Marion. His name was no Marion. What? No, it was Joseph Marion Carter Jr. And I went by Carter. So I bought a car. I got an apartment, got a driver's license, got a car, everything. So I'm set up. And I basically start running the same scam again. I start buying cheap properties, recording the value high, driving up the price of the area. I end up borrowing like$2.5 million,$3.5 million. And I start a development company.

1:22:17And I figure, I'm just going to hang out here. I start dating a chick named Amanda. I never see Becky again. This takes a lot of guts to do this all over again in another city. But I also have no money. I mean, I've got maybe$100 ,000. Man, I'm cutting through it fast, right? Like, you know, you're staying in hotels. You're buying stuff. You're buying cars. You're buying. So it's going quick. But very quickly, I start borrowing money. I end up with this chick, Amanda. And we lived together for about 18 months. I meet her and we start just running a development company but I'm also doing the refi scam and properties are going to foreclosure and I'm just keeping the money and the banks don't have any clue and everything's going great and then one day she found out who I was How'd she find out?

1:23:04So the way that happened is that we had a corporate lawyer who was setting up the corporations and doing things for us, right? So one day she called me and she said hey, I need you to send me a copy of some letter I had signed, some contract, an agreement. And for some reason, I faxed it to her and she said she didn't get it. This is back from faxes. There's no faxes. So I call Amanda and say, look, can you print that doc out and fax it to her or email, whatever. She goes, okay. She goes online. She goes on my computer and opens up the computer. And when she goes into Word, she finds a letter and it was said letter to mom and dad and she didn't know what my real name was she knew i was on the run right she didn't know that so she starts looking and she looks at it she looks at the letter and says to georgia margaret cox and it's signed matthew so she looks up matthew cox boom secret service i was on the secret services most wanted list on the fbi's most wanted list i'm on the u.s marshals most on list there's 35 newspaper articles about me there's there's just it's everywhere so now she's and i find out that she finds out and we have a whole argument about it but i don't leave i should have left.

1:24:11I didn't, you know, I thought I was in love, you know, she won't tell anybody. Um, so I stay there and, but she's constantly checking my name. And so one day she checks and she sees that Dateline is about to do a one hour. Uh, they're going to do a one hour, um, special on me because Becky had been caught and, and Becky's going to be interviewed. Becky, her lawyer, the U S attorney, the secret service agent. And I'm thinking this isn't good. you know back then you could hide forever there was no real social media it wasn't what it is now that's why i just keep thinking about throughout this whole thing is like holy shit this is such a forgotten era where a lot of this stuff was possible you could never do this now you couldn't go on the run like that now because even in the airports and shit they have like facial recognition technology yeah i'd be done yeah so but i'm not going to beat out dateline right because what's going to happen is back then there's there's three or four there's there's four there's your local channel and then there's like there's like three major channels and then maybe you've got some you've got cable but it's still not it's a bunch of other local everybody you've interacted with over the years is going to immediately become aware of this that's exactly what's going to happen yeah somebody that i've bought the barista at starbucks is going to be watching this and go holy shit that's that guy carter he comes in every day and he gets a vanilla latte oh my gosh he's going to call the police because they make me sound like a horrible person he's going to do the right thing.

1:25:33He's going to call the police. He's going to turn me in. So I, you know, even if it's not then let's say nobody, let's say I up and left, right. It doesn't matter in six months when they replay the episode, I'm screwed again. I'm done. So I start thinking, I'm going to go to Australia. You know, I'll get some more plastic surgery. I'll go to Australia and Australia at that time, you could go to Australia and they would make you a permanent resident alien. They wouldn't take your fingerprints. You just had to show up with a copy of your, of your, um, of your criminal record, which you get printed out at the local police office, police place.

1:26:05And the guy that I was who has a passport and a driver's license does not have a criminal record. So he can go in. I can go in with his criminal record, which there isn't one. We had a couple of misdemeanors. And if you showed up with two hundred thousand dollars and a business plan, they make you a permanent resident alien. I can do all that. So that was my plan that a man and I were going to go do that. And what ends up happening is as we're pulling out cash, she tells a friend of hers what's happening. Her friend calls the secret service. Secret service sits on my house for three or four days.

1:26:38One day I pull up. I get out of the car. Boom. They pull up. They get on the ground. Get on the ground. I get on the ground. They handcuff me. And it's over. It's over. It's over. Wow. I'm done. You know, it'd be great if it was a super sexy ending, right? Like, you know, when there was a car chase and I ran and dove off of a cliff and swam towards a boat. There's none of that. No. So you don't even have enough money at this point to mount like any serious legal sense. Oh, no, I had tons of money. Oh, OK. They took it all. Oh, oh. It's all fraudulent money. Like immediately they go in and seize all your accounts, which is funny because you would think it would be difficult.

1:27:17But really all that is, is they just they prepare a document. They go into a judge. They say, we've already got this guy indicted. We know who he is. Here's who he's pretending to be. We need to sign this. Judge signs it. They walk in the bank, say, boom. Freeze all of his accounts. Get us cashier's checks. Give it to us to the federal government. They just take it. It's gone. Wow. So I've got no money. I get a public defender. And I'm completely f***ed. I'm just done. And what are they? How does the trial go? There's no trial. I can't go to trial. I'm done. I mean, I can't go to trial. I'm guilty.

1:27:49I'm extremely guilty. Right. And they got a mountain of evidence. Yeah, I get a public defender who's yelled at me actually a couple years ago because she's like, you make it sound like I didn't do anything. And it's not that she didn't. So I shouldn't say that because I do the way I say it, have said it in the past is like she didn't do me any favors. But the truth is there were no favors to do. There's two things that can happen at this point. You can say, okay, how much time and just take it. or you can cooperate. There's only two things. Right. Now, by the time I sit down with her, she's already told me everybody in Florida has cooperated.

1:28:34Right. And you don't really have anybody that you could throw in there that's done anything even close to as bad as what you've done. Right. Like Amanda actually has done nothing. Right. She was in the dark. Right. And to be honest, in white collar crimes, you don't have to. A lot of guys will say, oh, you got to give somebody bigger than you. Not really. A lot of times it's the big guy. He gives all the little guys, and he gets a great deal. Interesting. Right. So you could be the kingpin, and you just say, hey, here's all my distributors, and here's the guys they work for, and here's the guy doing the money laundering.

1:29:06And, of course, they're all under him, and that guy ends up getting five years, and those guys all get 20. Yeah. So, but I don't even have that because everybody's already cooperated. And as time goes by, I get arrested at the end, like in the very end of 2006. So as 2007 is passing, the people always say the 2008 financial crisis, right? But that's because that's when the TARP bill was signed. It actually starts in 2007. In early 2007, they start to see the ripples. This bank starts failing. Two months later, another bank fails. Two months later, four banks fail. Then Lehman fails. Then it's like, holy, towards the end.

1:29:50So by the time I get sentenced, banks are failing all over the place. They're talking about a bailout. They're, you know, everything's about mortgages, mortgages, mortgages. And I get sentenced to 26 years. wow now i i'm not no i don't want to lie and say oh you know when they came to me and said hey we want you to help us out i was like i'm i'm ready to help you what do you need let who what do you want these people to have said right i'm ready to cooperate i'm ready to cut everybody's throat but the truth is when i go in and i and i talk to them they already know that yeah they already know that they actually have a stack of fbi 302 forms this big and that's just i mean we're talking about that right there is i don't know that's about 3 000 pages 4 000 no man about 2 000 pages of just just fbi 302s which are interviews not to mention the secret service they don't have nearly as much because they came in on the tail end they don't have as many as much money wasn't um but it ended up being whittled down to like personally i think i got them down to 15 million they said i owed like it started high but I got them down to like six million none of that mattered though by the time I get I get into sentencing I get sentenced I get 26 and a half years uh-huh and that's it I got 26 and a half years I go to prison okay but I don't do 26 and a half years yeah how do you guys know well I'm a slippery slippery motherfucker okay so what ends up happening is they ask me now dateline's already come out and I know we're tight on no that's good we probably got like another 40 minutes yeah oh shit okay yeah so i was really racing through things um so what ends up happening well this is this is actually good because your your viewers well this will be great okay you're they'll be very upset disgusted so i get 26 years i go to prison i go to uh the medium security prison okay uh at coleman because i had 26 years.

1:31:50If you have over 20 years in federal sentence, you have to go to a medium. Even though my security level was the security level, I was like at a two. And I was only at a two because I had a detainer. So as soon as I got rid of the detainer, I dropped down to like a one or a zero. I have no criminal. I have no security. My security level, it's non-existent, but they still sent me to a medium. So while I was waiting to be sentenced, my lawyer had told me, listen, Dateline wants to interview you. And I was like, okay, well, I don't want to be interviewed. I mean, why would I be interviewed? And she said, well, because the U.S.

1:32:26attorney said that they'll consider that substantial assistance. And I was like, okay, now substantial assistance is if you provide assistance in a case, and if you provide assistance in that case, if you further the case, they can reduce your sentence for it. They don't use that part of it ever, right? Very seldom. Typically, so it's written where it says if you further the case and you give them that they can give you a reduction for that. If the information you give them leads to an indictment or arrest, they can give you a reduction for that. If they give it to you at sentencing, it's called a 5K1.

1:33:08If they give it to you afterwards, it's a rule 35 after sentencing. So, and I've just heard lots of people explain this and sometimes they get it wrong. They're like, no, no, if they give you information beforehand, but they don't use it till after, it doesn't matter. You can give them information at any time. Once you're sentenced, it's a rule 35. So she's saying, look, we're trying to get you a 5K1, but I didn't give them any information that led into any arrests. Not for lack of trying. so um i know people be like the snitch mother honestly snitching has been so normalized in hip-hop over the last few years that it's it's gonna be offensive to a much smaller number of people than it would have been a few years ago i i listen i i'm so used to it at this point it's just it cracked the the screaming and hollering just cracks me up also within hip-hop there's like generally uh an assumption or like a kind of revised mentality which is like if you're in a gang and you snitch on your fellow gang members, then you're a snitch.

1:34:06But if you commit crimes or if you snitch on somebody and you're just a civilian, all good. And I feel like in a situation like yours where it's a bunch of scamming and stuff. Everybody's already told on me. And the other thing is, listen, I didn't burn a piece of paper. I didn't take an oath. There was no ceremony. I didn't promise anybody I wouldn't rat them out. They all ratted me out. Like, I'm just assuming this is like I said, I wish I'd done it earlier. That would have saved me a felony and my whole life could have been different. Yeah. So but it is what it is. So I I end up I get interviewed by Dateline.

1:34:47Like, I mean, the marshals let them in. They come in. That guy with the long face comes in and, you know, you hurt people. You know, that that guy, I forget his name. Yeah. He comes in and they so they'd already done one one hour special. They're now doing a second one cut with my interviews. so that they do that one and they're doing this at the we're doing it the behest of the u.s attorney which said we'll consider it substantial assistance and and even though you're not giving them information that you didn't already tell them right you're not giving dateline anything new right they're saying it's a public service announcement okay my lawyer is saying well yeah she can do that she's mad they can give it to whatever they they can whatever they can justify giving it to you that's what they can give it to you for and we're and i've never read at this point i've never read what a what a what a reduction is or substantial i've never read any of this i'm stuck in a u.s marshals holdover there's no i'm not looking into i'm assuming she's handling it so and i also am assuming i'm going to prison for a long time she told me over and over again you're getting you're going to end up with probably 12 to 14 years and then then uh they're you know they're going to reduce your sentence for all this for for doing this stuff that you've done which is the dateline thing and she's like they're gonna you may be out in five or six years.

1:35:56I'm like, holy shit, that'd be amazing. So I go to sentencing, I get sentenced, I've done the dateline, but just before the sentencing. So let me go back to that. This is always funny. I go back to that. And just the night before I call her and I said, Hey, have they told you what they're going to recommend yet? And she goes, yeah, I just got off the phone about an hour ago. And I said, Oh, what'd they say? And she said, the U S attorney said that they're not going to give you a 5k one and i went really why and she said i said but i did dateline she goes i know and they played it and they said it just wasn't enough i said but they said they said they said they'd consider it substantial assistance and she said i know and they said we did consider it and it's not enough consider it substantial assistance which to me meant it was a guarantee no no we said we'd consider it which to me that's a guarantee that's not what consider means we'll think about it.

1:36:49So that's part of being a criminal is that you kind of always look on the bright side when it comes to things that will benefit you. Right. Right. Hope. Hope's getting me through. You always, you need a lot of hope to get by. Yeah. So I end up, so I guess that it's 26 years. I go to the medium. I'm at the medium. I'm super depressed, obviously. Um, and I'm, uh, at the medium, I'm there for three years. I'm bitching and complicate everybody. I'm bitching. They got too much time. This is bullshit. 26 years. Oh my gosh. Whatever that, what's happened. This is wrong um it's everybody else's fault i didn't i didn't deserve this especially when you had that five years in your head for a little while there yeah you know you get married to that and and so you know i'm but i eventually uh you know i i there's a guy there and he's like listen stop bitching you're sitting at a table bitching about your 26 years with two other guys that are leaving here in a box he's like i get it it's a long time you shouldn't have got that kind of time but come on man stop so i was like he he's like for people gonna hate me and around you they're gonna hate you you're gonna hate yourself it's not a good way to do your time and i he was right and he was absolutely right but it took a few years so towards the end of the first that first three years i i decide i'm gonna start writing i'm gonna write a book because everybody kept telling me bro your story story is amazing like okay i'm gonna write a book so i i write i write I start writing a memoir, but by this point they move me to the, to the low.

1:38:11So I'm right. I write my memoir in the low and I don't know what I'm doing. I, I'd read a bunch of books, but I, I, I bought the book. Um, oh gosh. Uh, like, uh, uh, how to write memoirs for dummies and the idiot's guide to writing true crime, you know, I, and I read them and I, so I, I write the book. I rewrite it a few times. It takes about a year. And do you have anybody on the outside that you're still close with at this point? At this point? Yeah. I have my, I have my mom and I have one or two people that will, you know, You know, like it's funny, the people that will come see you are the people that you that you did nothing for.

1:38:43The people that made a million or half a million or made tons of money that didn't go to jail. They hate your guts. They don't want to answer your phone calls like you made a million dollars and you didn't go to jail. And you told on me. And you won't answer my calls. But this person who is a childhood friend that I hadn't even talked to for five or six years, this person shows up. This person put money on my books. Like, you know, so I mean, think about my mom. Like I basically just took off one day. I'm just gone. She's coming to see me every two weeks. So I'm sitting there at this point. You know, I had been on the run for three years.

1:39:17I've been doing the total is probably closer to close to five years. I'm sorry, close to 10 years that I was just committing all these scams over the course of 10 years. I'm in prison. I start writing my memoir. I write my memoir. I end up getting a literary agent. I end up writing another guy's memoir by the name of Ephraim Devaroli. Did you ever see the movie War Dogs with Jonah Hill? I think I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wait, why are you writing someone else's? Well, he's going to pay me. So we have an agreement. And he's leaving soon and he needs a memoir because Warner Brothers was about to make the movie War Dogs.

1:39:50Oh, so they didn't know that you wrote it. You just wrote it. No, no, no. I worked with him. But you worked with him, but like the publishing company or whoever is making it. No, no. You're a ghost writer. Most people don't even write their memoirs. It'll be like, and his, it was Ephraim Devoroli and Matthew Cox on the thing. But, so I'm doing that. While that's happening, American Greed reaches out to the U.S. attorney and says, we'd like to interview Mr. Cox for an American Greed episode. She calls my lawyer. I talked to my lawyer one day. She says, listen, they want you to do American Greed.

1:40:21So I'm interviewed by American Greed. She said, they will consider it substantial assistance. So I do it. It airs six months later, five months later. And we call the U.S. attorney. And the U.S. attorney says, it's just not enough. And this is what the black guys call it. They're pimping me. So I learned that term when I would tell people. They go, dang, Cox, they're pimping you. To be honest, it doesn't really sound like that substantial of assistance. It sounds like you're just writing a book to make some money and to better yourself. It's American greed. Right, but even that, it's like this is publicity.

1:40:55This is just like something that a lot of people would do just for the attention. Right. But I know lots of people that were approached by them and didn't do it. Right. They don't make, you know, it's American greed. You ever seen a good one? They never make the criminal look good. I know they're going to make me look horrible. Right. Okay. So it's like, this is just going to bash me, but I'm doing it because I'm being told to do it. So there's no benefit for me to do it. And if I didn't do it, there's a good chance they don't, they don't run the episode at all. Right. They don't need to. There's already two datelines on me, but if they can get me to do it, Then they get to interview the U.S.

1:41:26attorney, my lawyer, everybody will be interviewed. And they all want to be interviewed, right? Like they're law enforcement. They want to be interviewed. So I do it. They say, yeah, it's not enough. Then I get approached by, by this point, the Dodd-Frank Act has been passed and they've changed the mortgages. And now all mortgage brokers have to take continuing education every year, nine hours. Three hours of that is on ethics and fraud. So I'm contacted by a school, a national school that wants to write this course. and they want me to write the course part on ethics and fraud. U.S. attorney tells my lawyer we want him to do it.

1:41:59This guy goes up to Atlanta, meets with the district or with the U.S. attorney. U.S. attorney signs off that we will give him a reduction. We will consider it. I do it. They start using it. Six months later, we approach them and they go, it's just not enough. So what I do is I end up filing what's called a 2255 against my lawyer, saying that my lawyer gave me bad advice. She told me that these public service announcements or whatever you want to call them, public service services would be considered substantial assistance. But in reality, what's in the books, it does not meet. So it's very easy to say, this is what you've been having me do.

1:42:38They're not going to give me anything. You told me I would. Had I known, I never would have taken the initial plea deal. I would have gone to trial. anything to try and get out of my current plea and because they'll probably knock some time off right right so i throw that out there and i have a guy who's a disbarred attorney named frank amadeo who's doing all the legal work he's a disbarred attorney he's got like 22 years um and so he's fighting them for me this guy was is just batshit crazy i mean he's he's bipolar he has features of schizophrenia he's just insane but his legal work is amazing and so we're battling with them.

1:43:14And I'm actually time bar right now. You have a one year time bar. I'm way over the time bar, but he manages to keep pestering them and try and he starts to get around the time bar. And so finally, the U.S. attorney comes and says, listen, I'm going to we're going to reduce your sentence by one level. That would be it would have been 30. That would have been 40 months. No, that would have been 40 months. Every every level off is less and less time. So it'd be 40 months and the next level off might be 36. The next one might be 33, you know. So they said, we're going to reduce it by one level 40.

1:43:46And so I argue, I want to go back to court. So I go back to court and I argue in front of the judge that that's not nearly enough. And so the judge, we put everything that I've done out there, everything they've said. And the judge says, he thinks about it and he goes, okay. He says, listen, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you three levels off. That's seven years. He goes, and for somebody who has no arrests associated with their case, that's a pretty good deal, Mr. Cox. And he said, and that's the decision of the court, and that's it. Boom, seven years. Hits the gavel, bam. He walks off.

1:44:22I got seven years off. Wow. I went from 26 1⁄2 to 19 1⁄2. How did you feel? I was very upset. Really? I thought I was going to get more. Well, I mean, it's 19. I got 19 1⁄2 years. I'm still like, Jesus, I'd already done six years. Yeah. So I'm like, you know, I'm thinking. So I did a calculation in my mind. I did this and this and this. And I thought, you know what? I'd probably be out of here about seven years. And I thought, you already did six. It was roughly six, six and a half. And I thought, you didn't think you could do six and a half? You didn't think you could do the time you already did?

1:44:55You could do this. And now I was writing stories. I was writing books. I had gotten some guys in Rolling Stone magazine. We'd optioned the life rights for that. I had optioned life rights for another property. I had a literary agent. Like I'm doing, I'm making money in prison. I'm building a reputation as a writer. There are writers that are working with me that are written in Rolling Stone and Wired. I mean, these guys are on my CoreLinks account. Like we're communicating. I'm getting information for them. I'm helping them with stories. So I figured, you know what, fuck it. You can do another seven years.

1:45:31And so I get back and I'm walking the track. And I'm walking the track with this guy. There's a guy named Ron Wilson. My dad did a year in the feds when I was in elementary school. And many of his stories were basically just him walking the track. Walking the track with some guy. There wasn't a lot else to do, yeah. I'm walking the track with this guy, Ron Wilson, worth the low. Ron Wilson was there for, he ran a$57 million Ponzi. It was actually$102 million, but there was$57 million in loss. You know, when you tell people you've got gains, they count that. So it ends up being$102 million. It was a loss of 57.

1:46:08And he was locked up, and he's currently cooperating with his co-defendant, against his co-defendants. Now, of course, only I know this. Nobody else knows this. Nobody else really knows what's going on with me. They know I went back to court. They know I got my sentence reduced. But the sentence reduction was he did Dateline. He did American Greed. He did this. You can read all of it on Pacer. so it looks like mr like he didn't cooperate he was doing all these other things right so although they're like some guys are questioning like it seems odd i've never heard of that before but the people doing the legal work are like no that's what happened so i'm not really i don't nobody's giving me a hard time but but it's it's you know it's questionable and i've also there's never been a time when i haven't where somebody didn't come up to me and they would go hey Cox, how much time you got?

1:46:58I'd be like, 26 years, but somebody could tell me where there's a dead body and I could be out next week. They go, damn, Cox is like that. I go, it's just like that. They laugh and everybody, he's funny. I'm not joking. It's not a joke. You didn't have anything that you could tell. No, I don't have anything. I'm walking with Wilson. We're walking around the track. I know he's cooperating against his people. He got 19 and a half years. I've got 19 and a half years. he knows I just got back he also knows that I'm like I'm like hey I'd cut anybody's throat if I had to to get out of the fucking place we're not friends so we're walking one day and he's complaining about the secret service agent in his case and he's telling me he's I'm never gonna get my sentence reduced they're not gonna reduce my sentence I'm like why do you keep saying that and he's like they think I hid Ponzi scheme money I'm like yeah but you said you gave them all the money he's like yeah you don't understand I'm like okay well I guess I don't we keep walking walking.

1:47:53This goes on for like a month or two. He says it every once in a while. I go, well, you won't worry about it. You'll file a 2255 and Frank will force them to give you something. You don't understand. I said, what do I understand? He said, my wife, he said, the truth is, he said, I did hide Ponzi scheme money. I go, really? And I said, okay. And he said, and my wife, since he's been arrested and sent to prison, his wife found out he was having an affair. And his wife was insane. He's like, she'll burn the whole house down around her. He said, she didn't care. And I said, okay. He said, well, I gave my wife, he said, I don't know, $150 ,000.

1:48:31And, and, and my brother's got maybe 30 ,000 and she knows it. So I'm afraid she's going to go to them and give them the money just to make sure that they can, they'll use that to not give him anything. Even if he cooperates and helps get them, these people indicted and arrested and sent to prison, they'll say, yeah, but he hid Ponzi scheme money. He lied to us. We're not going to give him anything. So far, they didn't have anything. He'd done nothing but been cooperative. And so he's like, yeah, she's going to me. And I'm like, I said, well, she wouldn't do that. She's already told him she doesn't have anything.

1:49:01She she'll get charged. Now you don't understand. She won't care. And I was like, OK, but wait, first, let me tell you what happened, the way that happen. The way it happened is we were walking the track and he kept saying there, you don't understand, they're not going to give me anything. And I looked at him and I said, why do you keep saying that? And he looked at me and he goes, can I trust you? And I go, probably not. And he goes, I did put away some Ponzi scheme money. And he just tells me exactly what I just told you. And I'm like, okay, okay. And so I go back and lay in bed that night. and I think, is that enough to get a sentence reduction?

1:49:39Is what he told me, I know this is horrible, by the way. I know everybody watching thinks this scumbag. This is another guy, a fellow inmate in prison. I know, I feel horrible. I kind of like it, man. Dirtbag, slivarian. Oh, I fucking give a shit. I'm ready to cut these motherfuckers' heads clean off. Wow. It gets worse. so so what happens is is i'm thinking you know they didn't want to give me anything to begin with and what has he got 200 000 not even 200 000 he owes 57 million dollars i'm going to give them give them information and he might they might get 180 000 and then you know what else is going to happen i'm going to get shipped or he's going to he's going to know that i did this and somebody's getting shipped my mom lives down the street she lives an hour away she comes to see me every two weeks, I'm never going to see my mom again.

1:50:31And I'm just like, I'm sitting there. And I was like, that's not something that I would, I'll get nothing. So I say nothing. Well, remember, I'd written my memoir. Well, when I went back to court, I wanted the transcripts of that. So late, a month or so later, like I'm disappointed in myself because I didn't call right away. A month and a half later, I call my lawyer to say, hey, you were going to send me my transcripts. And she goes, oh, gosh, Matt, you're right. I'm so sorry. Let me send you the transcripts. Okay. And I say, okay. And she goes, hey, she said anything going on? And I go, what do you mean?

1:51:09She said anything happening in there? Keep in mind, this is my second lawyer. This is the one that was given to me to represent me on my first Rule 35. She didn't even want to talk to me. She hates me too, by the way. She's like a congresswoman now. She said when somebody brings my name up, she goes, f*** that guy. She goes, he threw me under the bus. because I said she didn't want to help me when they had paid her. So the fact that she answered the phone was shocking. The fact that she said anything going on in there, and I went, like, what? And she goes, I don't know. Anything happening? I went, no.

1:51:38I mean, oh, I said, listen to this. And I tell her, this guy told me, and I tell her. She goes, hold on. She looks him up. She goes, whoa. She goes, this is a bad guy. She goes, let me look into it. I said, okay. Hang out the phone. Send me my transcripts. Because a lot of people will say, oh, he didn't – he acts like it was a fluke. It was a fluke. Trust me. I wish I'd called. But this is just the way it happened. A couple – listen, two, three days later, the CO comes up and he goes, Cox, during the next move? And I go, yeah. He goes, go to SIS. That's internal security. And I'm like, oh, okay.

1:52:14Now, keep in mind, I was writing stories. So I've been called to SIS a lot because I would order people's Freedom of Information Act. I get their information in because I'm writing their stories to find out what dates, this and that. and so i go there and i walk in this guy goes cox come here sit down i'm like okay what's going on here sit down it was the other assholes he calls phone dials the phone number gives me a phone goes here you gotta talk to this guy get the phone it's adrian agent um his last name was griffin something griffin uh secret service agent you know uh griffin and i'm like uh yeah and he's like he said i understand you know where ron wilson hid ponzi scheme money and i go oh i want something in writing.

1:52:48No, he's, I promise you, you'll get, you'll, you'll get a reduction for this. I said, no, I won't, bro. You're not even, you can't even promise that. The fact that you just said you could tells me you're lying. That's a lie. They can't. I need something from the U.S. attorney. So I get his, his, his, um, email address. We trade emails. I put them on core links. He eventually two or three weeks later, he sends me something from the U.S. attorney saying, If Mr. Cox's information helps recover a substantial amount of money or leads to indictments, we will consider it substantial assistance. That's the best you're going to get.

1:53:22Once again, substantial. You're not going to get a promise. So it's the best I got. So I send an email. We email back and forth, back and forth, and I tell him what I know. Then he starts asking me questions like, hey, ask Wilson this. Okay. Take a couple days. And I have to wait for him to approach me. I can't walk up to him and say, hey, that guy, Paul, was he involved in? I can't say that, right? I got to spark up a conversation where eventually he talks about him. Well, who was helping with that? One of your guys? Oh, yeah, it was a guy named Paul. Oh, did he know what was going on? No, he didn't know what was going on.

1:53:50So you know what I'm saying? So you got to spark up that conversation. It takes time. So this goes on for months, three, four, five months, six months. And then one day they say, listen, Wilson's about to get some bad news. I said, really? I said, yeah. I said, well, what is it? He said, we can't tell you. you need to tell us what he tells you i said okay so one day i'm walking and his he sees me and he goes cox and i go yeah what's up like i'm a little i'm a little freaked out right like this isn't a good situation you know he's like cox and i'm like yeah what's up i don't know if he's gonna attack me i don't know what's gonna happen i don't really think that's gonna happen but he's a fraud guy it's also this is like low security like nobody's stabbing each other people are stabbing each other but these are gang members and people like like white collar guys aren't stabbing each other right Right, right.

1:54:35But I don't know. I don't need to get thrown in the shoe. I don't need to get called to lieutenants off. I don't need this. So he cocks, and I'm like, yeah, what's up? And he goes, you're not going to believe that. She's got phone with my lawyer. I said, okay. He said, they called my wife and my brother in. I said, really? He goes, yeah. He said, my wife denied everything. I said, okay. He said, but then she showed up the next day, and she walked in, and she gave him$350 ,000 in cash. And I went,$350 ,000? He goes, yeah. My brother walked in and gave him$150 ,000. The wife was, it was cash and silver, bullion, and gold, precious metals.

1:55:13It came to about$350 ,000. And the brother gave him$150 ,000 in cash. And I went, I said, you said it was like$100 ,000 or$150 ,000. And he goes, ah, because I didn't know if I could trust you. And I go, Ron, Ron, that hurts. We're kindred spirits. so he um he says uh yeah i uh but yeah he said i i don't know what's going to happen he said i i they told him that i i gave them that money i hid that money i was like and first i was half a million dollars right and i was like oh okay and then he goes uh and i said well what's your lawyer says he doesn't know that's all he knows and i said okay so i go back i i sent an email This is what he said.

1:55:56He didn't know anything else. Maybe a week or two later, I get an email. They say, but he's about to get some bad news. Still takes four or five days, right? Like he's not calling his lawyer every day. His lawyer's got to get the news. The lawyer has to send an email. He's a check the emails to call, get the lawyer on the phone. It's like five, six days go by, whatever. And then I see him one day, I'm walking and he goes, Cox. And I'm like, yeah, what's up? I walk up to him and he says, you're not going to believe this. He said, they indicted my wife, my brother and me. Now, before I say anything else, just because I don't want you to think I'm a nice guy.

1:56:34No chance. So I want you to know the depth, the depth of this. When you cooperate against someone, there are about three different kind of levels of cooperation. There's kind of like an ancillary cooperation where let's say you tell them something like you get arrested and the cops have got you. And they go, can you tell us anything? thing. You go, listen, my next door neighbor, he, he makes ice and they go, you know, cause I don't want to say the word, um, cause they, they make ice. Uh, he's manufacturing ice. And he's like, they're like, Oh, okay. And then they, they raid the house. They raid the next door neighbor's house and they bust them.

1:57:10What did you do? You gave them a little bit of information. Now it's good information. You're probably going to get maybe 20 % off your sentence for that. Or they say, okay, well, listen, here's what we're going to do. We're going to let you go. can you go over there and buy some we're going to put a wire on you so now they wire you up and you get you make a couple of buys right that's more than just i gave you some information now i could get the guy could search me find that i'm in danger and they definitely know the information came from me they're going to know even if you pull up and arrest me and i act like i don't it doesn't matter they're going to figure it out so i'm in danger so you maybe get 30 percent if you go, but what if you have to testify in that case?

1:57:52You got to testify on this guy. You're probably getting 30 to 40 % off your sentence, depending on what area. In California, I think it's probably more than that. But in the district I'm in, it's about 30 to 40 % because they're just six. So you're looking at, let's say 40 % if you have to testify. So when Wilson goes, you're not going to believe this. They indicted me. I went, really? He goes, yeah. He said, they're going to uh my lawyer said they're going to bring me back for arraignment they're going to bring me back to south carolina and i'm like holy shit he goes what do you think i should do and i go i think you should go to trial that's what i think because if he goes to trial i know that i have to testify because they can find it's a whole new charge they own the charge directly came from me right i'm the person all these e all these emails they're going to show her who's this who's this i have to be i'm the only person that's going to have to be on the stand right so i say it immediately thinking i need to convince this guy to go to trial and uh he's like oh wait i don't know i said no listen man that's the only way to negotiate you got to go to trial you got to this i'm telling you right now what happened he tells me i said oh listen all they got you don't know they could have had that money to begin with that could have money a long time ago you know you got to go to trial you'll get the best deal i lean into him a little bit and he's like yeah let me think about that i probably will go to trial yeah so we kind of go back and forth i'm like yeah yeah yeah so two days later he's on the pack out and he leaves you believe that motherfucker took a plea so pissed off so fucking disappointed so uh he goes back he takes a plea his wife and brother get like like the brother had to get to like somebody had to do 100 hours of community service they both got like a year probation one person had to do like 100 hours one had a person had to do like 20 i don't know who was more capable or who was more probably the wife probably had to do more time because she actually went in and just lied and then the next day thought about it came back But either way, they both got a year of probation.

1:59:43And Wilson got, he pled guilty, and he got six more months added onto his sentence. Which was, so he went from 19 and a half years to 20 years. Here's the thing. So. Once again, we go back to the U.S. attorney and say, I want my sentence reduced. Well, before I say anything, so I don't forget this. Wilson never does the extra six months. COVID hits a few years later. So like four years later, COVID hits. He gets let out on COVID. So the six months that I gave him, not that I care, but he didn't even do the six months. He didn't even do the 19 years. He only did like, I don't think he even did 10 years.

2:00:24I don't think he even did half of his sentence. Right. So what happens is we go back to this court and say, hey, go back to the U.S. attorney. I need a sentence for this. And they say, we don't even know what you're talking about. What are you talking about? Like, we don't know about any cooperation. So, of course, I send the letter in. Frank files a motion. We send in a letter. We get them to lie in the motion first saying that they have no idea what we're talking about. We send in a letter saying, you know, from the U.S. attorney. And then they come back. We go back and forth with them. Eventually, they agree to reduce my sentence by they start with one level.

2:00:59And Frank argues with them back and forth. And we argue them all the way up to three levels, which is five years. Because by this point, this has been going on. Remember, I had about seven years left? It's already been like a year or so. So by the time this happens and we're arguing, I end up getting five years knocked off. I'm like a year from the door. So when it hits, I'm a year from the door. They put me in. I'm literally a year later. I'm done. I'm in a halfway house. I get seven months halfway house. And yeah, so I go to the halfway house. I mean, that's it. I'm walking out the door. Do you have a huge amount of restitution at this point?

2:01:39I have. I owe$6 million at this point. And the whole time I was on probation, I was paying. So that's five years of probation. So you got to pay the whole time. And now I'm paying. I don't want to say I'm paying because. but people an embarrassingly small amount in comparison to the total no no a large amount in comparison i know other people like this guy owes 22 million dollars he pays 150 a month that's i'm used to hearing about that yeah that's yeah oh no no no it's it's in the thousands okay you know and i'm arguing with you know where i'm arguing trying to get it reduced but but still it would take you like hundreds of years to pay off the total the interest they're telling me i owe interest on the loan now i'm almost positive that i remember that i had no interest on they're telling me I'm earning$500 a day in interest.

2:02:23Like, what are you talking? What are you talking about? Like what, what, you know, I'm sorry, I'm never going to pay. I'm never going to be able to pay that off. I know I'm just paying every month. I'm just throwing money at a losing cause. But it was 6 million. Now they're saying it's like eight and a half million because they said I owe, I owe, but, but I, I don't think that's true because I don't think I owe interest on it at all. I'm almost positive that the judge said I did not owe interest, but whatever. It doesn't matter. Even if it's 6 million, I'm not paying off 6 million. So how do you get back to normal life?

2:02:52I mean, I got out and I had written a bunch of true crime books. And so as I was, as I got out of prison, as I'm ending that last couple of years, guys are telling me, listen, man, you need to do a true crime podcast. What they thought, what they, they meant was like kind of true detective, kind of, kind of a, like the, the audio ones were huge, right? Not the podcast like this. I don't know if you consider this true crime or you can, you know, there's. Dabbling in it. Okay. So they were saying you need to do that. And so when I got out, that was kind of my mindset was like, yeah, I'll probably do a true crime podcast.

2:03:26And I'd never been on YouTube because when I got arrested, YouTube had been out for a year. People were putting their home movies on it. Right. I've never been on it. For no reason. 2007, the wild, wild west of YouTube. Yeah. And I got arrested in 2006. Yeah. And 2005 is when it came out. Yeah. So 2009, the term podcast was invented. Yeah. There was no podcast until 2009. That's crazy. Yeah. So I'm getting out there. So people are explaining to me what a podcast is. And I'm like, okay. So I get to the halfway house. I start looking into it. And I'm thinking, yeah, maybe I could do this. I could probably do this.

2:03:58And then a guy named Danny Jones, I contacted him. I had a friend that kind of put me in contact with him. And I contact him. And I explain my story and tell him I want to do a podcast. Can you answer some questions? He said, absolutely. He starts explaining to me about AdSense and sponsors and that sort of thing. And I'm like, okay. And I know I don't have the capability of doing it. And he keeps telling me, man, I want you to come on the podcast. I want you to come on the podcast. And I go, okay. But I'm in the halfway house. I can't. So I said, well, when I get out of the halfway house. So I'm out of the halfway house maybe a month or two.

2:04:28And he calls me up one day. He said, listen, man, I need you to come do a podcast. I've had two guests cancel. And I need to put something up by tomorrow. I need you to come today. And I'm like, you know, like I did say I was going to do it. Like, oh, it's like I can't not do it. And I look at his channel and I realize now I was looking at the clips channel and the clips are getting 3000, 5000. I'm like, nobody. And to me, viral meant millions. Right. And I'm like, nobody even watches his channel. And I thought, OK, yeah, I'll do this. Like, you know, there's one or two that have 50 or 100 ,000.

2:05:04But what I didn't realize was he actually had a good size channel. He's actually at that time had like 300 ,000 subscribers. And this is your first one in what year? this is 2020 before covid okay just before covid so i go

2:05:23no this is this is the in 2019 this is like october november of 2019 so i go i walk into the place and i sit down and i said listen man um he goes he said i said what do you want and he goes how long does your story take and i said but i've been telling this story for 10 years I said I got a 15 minute version I got a 30 minute version I got an hour I got a two hour what do you want he's give me the two hour version I said all right and we sat down and I told the story two hours and 15 minutes only because he asked a few questions and I tell the whole story I'm sure I did a better job than I did here um and it got two million two point I think is it 2.4 now 2.5 million wow and so so you know because you know it blows up and then it trails off and then so it hit within four months it had over two million and then it's probably got another half a million or 400 ,000 in the last four years, five years.

2:06:13Nobody watches it. And then, of course, when that happened, Patrick Bet David contacted, his people contacted me, and they flew me out. This was when he was in Texas, and I did his, and his got like 2.6 million or something. And then I did Soft White Underbelly, and that got 2. whatever, 3 or 4, I don't know. And then Vlad contacted me, and then I did Vlad, and then I did, you know. But in the meantime, while I'm doing all this, I did not start a channel. so because i kept thinking you know i needed this this is i needed this setup right i need the the black magic i don't know what these are but you know i needed the black magic and i needed this and i needed the i needed the good mics and i'm living in a i'm living in a halfway house i'm not i'm sorry i was living in a rooming house at that time so i'm out from halfway house to rooming house i'm living in the spare room of somebody who's got a cop living next door another guy I live in another room.

2:07:06And so I don't know what I'm doing. And so finally I decide that when COVID hits, I pick up my phone and I start the channel with my iPhone, which is what Danny told me to do. And I should have done six months earlier, but I was an arrogant prick. I started this with an iPhone on a bike stand. I had a bike shop and I would take the stand where we would work on bikes and I just put the phone on there. And multiple of my classic interviews from back in the day have like half the video missing because people would call me in the middle of it. so I just have the audio. But that's, and that's, by the way, everything you're saying is exactly what Danny said because I'm complaining I don't have the right equipment.

2:07:41He said, listen to me, let me explain something. He said, you do it now. He said, and in a year from now when you have the right equipment and you're putting out quality stuff, people, five years from now, three years from now, people will look back and they will say, I was following you when you were making videos on your iPhone in your kitchen. And he said, they want to follow you on your journey. And first of all, they're more concerned about the audio than they are than they are the video. And, you know, all these things I didn't know. And so I could have done, you know, I waited too long.

2:08:12I did start the channel. So when my star was rising, that's when I should have done it. By the time it's dwindling, that's when I did it. But it's still it's, you know, listen, it still did very well. It still did very well. It's like I'm not complaining. OK, is that your main thing at this point is the podcast it's the podcast I also do um I do uh uh keynote speeches for banks and cyber convention I know it's hilarious but can you imagine like Bank of America's paying me two or three grand to go talk to them um I still owe them like a million yeah so they want I can't even open a bank account Bank of America so uh I can't even get an American Express card like they're like you owe us 40 mil 40 thousand dollars you know like I when one of the things I did when I took off on the run was of course I ran up all my credit cards I hit American Express for 40 grand I can't get an American Express card.

2:09:00They're holding resentment. So, yeah, so that's, so I do the podcast. We just actually got, we're at 1.1 million. Subscribers? Yeah. Wow, that's impressive. Yeah, we're doing good. Yeah, I've got a million on Facebook and then, you know, I don't know what it is, TikTok. They're not a million, it's like half a million. So was there ever any temptation to do anything illegal or was that essentially like cleansed out of you by being miserable in prison for all those years? I would say, and here's what I actually told my probation officer this. She said, the last time you were on probation, you stole$11.5 million while on probation.

2:09:38She said, well, I don't have to worry about that now, right? And I went, and she goes, what does that mean? And I went, that means that if in a year from now, I'm riding the bus, I can't pay my bills, I'm struggling, and I'm hungry. I said, I am probably going to commit a massive, massive crime, and I'm going to leave the United States because that's where I f***ed up last time. Wow. And I said, but, you know, let's hope that doesn't happen. She goes, I am not as shocked by that as you would think. She said, but let's hope it doesn't happen. She said, you know, I have a good feeling that it's not going to.

2:10:12I said, okay. She goes, you seem like you have a plan. I said, I do. And so, you know, the plan did not happen exactly the way I want. It never does, right? You daydream and everything. And, you know, it moves and there's ebbs and flows. And so but yeah, it's it's I I have a bunch of true crime books, you know, my memoir, all the other memoirs I had written. And then I have the podcast and I have the the speaking engagements. But the bulk of my money comes from the podcast. Right. So I ended up what I ended up doing was I ended up hooking up with a guy named Colby who start. He had a production company, started a production company and his production.

2:10:50and I work for his production company and he runs everything. You know, you've got the, this whole crew, you got these, you know, this is, I don't know if anybody's seen, this is a massive operation, right? And, um, and that's what, that's what Colby, he started slow just with me and like one other guy and he's blown it up. And so I really just kind of show up and just do the interviews, you know, but it's, it's great. I mean, I got married, I got a nice house, I got a nice vehicle. I'm everything's it's been five six years now okay it's you know it's great wow I get to do this I remember watching watching your videos in the halfway house trying to figure out how videos work wow and there was I remember guys are like yelling at each other and stuff on the thing or arguing with each other I was like oh it was good and these are all big tall scary guys I can't go on that program yeah so what have been the most like impactful on you interviews the most moving interviews that you've done?

2:11:47You know what? Soft white underbelly, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just find... Well, first of all, Danny Jones and I have become very good friends. He's really helped me out. He's a great guy. I like jewelry. But they're more friends. I would say probably one of the ones... Like, if I tell somebody, hey, if they go, hey, man, send me something on you, I typically send them soft white underbelly. because it's like an hour long. And what's so funny is I'm so angry at the time. I was irritated. I was pissed off. I just had one bad – I was in L.A. There's homeless people everywhere. He drove me down to Skid Row.

2:12:27There's people screaming outside. People are swarming us to try and get money. I mean it was just – but I was so – the quality of this guy's – his interviews and the quality, you know, the production value. It's phenomenal. Like, it is. It's a portrait. They're amazing. I was actually asking about, like, people you've interviewed. Oh, okay. I was thinking one that I like doing. Right, right, yeah. So do you know who Jeremy Meeks is? Oh, it's the model guy from Stockton, right? Yes. Or he became a model after he got cut. What was his actual shit that got him in prison? Listen, that wasn't his first prison.

2:13:08He's been in prison like six times. Right. He was like mugshot day. Yeah. Yeah. He's just a gang member. Yeah. And, you know, they catch you for this. They never get you for anything really big. It's four years here, five years here, two years here. And then they don't do five years. They do four. You know, they do whatever. And he's in and out, in and out. And then it just happened that that one went viral. That one, even though he's got lots of mugshots, that's the one that hit the hot felon list. So I like doing his. You know what bothered me about his is that because he's such a good looking guy.

2:13:41And I had it. And I talked to him on the phone, right? When I call, I talk to him. I was like, hey, would you consider this? Because he doesn't do interviews. He had done one interview for a friend of a friend, like a friend. On a channel that has almost no subscribers. And it got like a couple hundred thousand views. So I was like, he doesn't do this. And the only reason he did mine was because I did a live where I said, was talking about people I'd like to interview. And I mentioned him, his ex-wife. watches the show. Called him and said, you've got to call this guy up. He's trying to get in touch with you.

2:14:09I want you to do the interview. So he did it. I thought he was going to have a much more fun interview because I figured he'd had kind of a pampered life because he was so pretty. I was going to be able to make some pretty privileged jokes and just dark. Just dark and just horrible and just a horrible life. And even though, you know, everything after that, even afterwards, you know, in and out of drug rehab. I mean, just, you know, but it was a good interview. Um, we probably could have talked for an extra hour or two, but he kind of flew in and flew out. Uh, and so it was like, it was like two hours or something.

2:14:48And, uh, that was a good interview. Uh, David Pakow's the guy that was in war dogs. Okay. I had wrote, I had written the book. We had a great interview. Uh, those are, those are amazing interviews. Uh, yeah, David Packows and Jeremy Meeks. Those are great. There have been a few. It's funny because the ones that it's never like the guy who did a$200 million Ponzi scheme, right? Like that guy can't tell his story for some reason. Those guys come in and they just, they don't want to own up to what they did. They don't want to. And it just goes on and on. And it's like, okay, this is, this is not a great interview.

2:15:23Like this is not a great story. It is a great story. He's, he can't tell it or he won't tell it the great stories are the guy that comes in who's basically just on and off again on drugs been arrested he's been in five car chases he's broken the house he's done all these minor crimes but he can tell his story and they're hilarious and he's got hilarious and i love to laugh like i and so those are the stories that i these guys like yeah i know i don't have like a great story you're like this fucking story was amazing and it will get 800 000 views right and i mean the other thing and for my channel that's huge that's a big 800 000 a million that's great that's crazy so uh what always bothers me is when somebody comes in and they tell a great story and you feel for them and you like that person and they walk out and they get 50 000 views and it's just like i feel like like i let them down like they deserve their story deserves better than this yeah and and i i i feel like even though you know you can't tell you don't know what's going to happen yeah i feel like i failed them you know because i know this person flew themselves out i know they sat here i know they told their story i know they gave it their all and it's like i know sometimes you feel like the space is kind of inundated because there's so few like original interviews to do because so many of the good interviews have kind of been done by a lot of people yeah like i'll call ian bick i don't know if you know yeah i interviewed him i'll call ian bick and say hey you just had this guy on he'll go yeah yeah i got him from you know mark at soft white interbelly and then you know if you look it's like this guy's been interviewed six times it's a good story yeah people suggested i interview him the guy's willing to come in you know we you know we it's we have them come in and and sometimes there's a great story sometimes we've had stories that guys have been getting 50 000 60 000 on other platforms and they'll get you know a million or or or more yeah it's kind of a roll of the dice you don't really know told the same story on this platform yeah i think that our my producer i think cor uh colby just tweaked it a little bit right like he his his thumbnail was slightly different and he had a little you know he'll you know he a little more clickbaity and so more people clicked on it and it pushed it more and next thing you know it's got two million views i noticed that with you that a lot of the older ones that did very well have simple titles but then you go on like ian bick and he has to emphasize the snitch yeah yeah aspect like they have to sort of dig into the toolbox to find things that'll make the the views go up a little more he used to have he had my face and a rat on the thing.

2:17:48And it's so funny because my wife was so irritated. I was like, what? Why are you? Well, you know, have you been reading the comments? I'm like, no. Like, and if I did, I would laugh about it. I mean, what am I going to do? You can't listen. You don't get to go into prison and snitch on somebody or just be willing to cooperate in general and then get offended when people call you a snitch. Like, that's fine. I had to weigh it. I had to say the respect of my fellow inmates or 13 years, sorry, 12, 12 years of freedom. Yeah. It wasn't a hard choice. Yeah. At all. I feel it. I want out. What, um, cause I gotta, I gotta, I gotta run in a second, but what, if there's somebody out there and they're watching this and they have at least considered a life of crime or doing things that are somewhat similar to what you've done in the past, what would be your advice to them that might deter them from taking such risks?

2:18:42I mean, it would be, you know, here's the thing, everybody, I get this all the time when I do this, the speeches, and it's always like, do you regret it? And I always hate the guys that go, oh, I don't regret anything. It makes me the man I am today. Well, the man I am today, or when I got out of prison, was a 50-year-old man whose son didn't talk to him, whose father died when he was in prison. My mother had to come visit me for 13 years every two weeks in prison. And the last couple of years in a wheelchair. You know, I mean, like I have a lifetime of regrets. Like I would do anything to go back and just be a middle class dad who teaches soccer.

2:19:30Right. Like I would love to be that guy. That's not what happened. It didn't work out for me like that. It's 100 % my fault. If I could do it again, I would be a manager at fucking Walmart. And I would teach my kids soccer. Like that is a life that I would have been proud of. I brag about what I did. You know, because I don't think anybody wants to see me sit here and cry about, you know, the anguish that I feel and the things I did. but you know so I tell the story it's entertaining it comes off like I'm definitely bragging about it but the truth is I do anything to not have that story and just be a normal person yeah you know but the the hubris that it took for you to become this guy who was doing this massive real estate scam or whatever during that period of life if someone had said to you you know all this shit isn't worth it you can just be a normal guy with a with a regular ass job and a family you would have been like I can't live that way I was too arrogant.

2:20:31I was too narcissist. I was just too much of a cocky prick, you know, and, and it's, and I listen, and I fight it all the time, all the time. Like, especially during the interviews, I have to constantly stop myself from jumping in to say, oh, that reminds me. Let me tell you about what happened. Oh, let me do it. You know, because it's not, it's, there's nothing, it's not about me. I'm trying to tell, tell this guy's story. And that's, that's hard for somebody who's, who has, you know, the issues that I have, you know, to do, because basically during most conversations, I'm just waiting for a chance to talk about myself.

2:21:02I mean, that's what an asshole I am. And I know it. And then, but knowing it is, it's hard to stop. You know, and, but those, those are the same things that make me a good con man and do the things I did. You know, you, you're just, you have this super optimism that you're not going to get caught when really you are going to get caught. shockingly uh difficult to not get caught but you just just believe in yourself have so much self-belief that you just sort of skate through for a while yeah so the short version is it's in the end it's just not it's just not worth it it's not worth it freedom is worth more than oh my god right yeah and you've heard this you know that the the the best day in prison is is sorry the worst day out here is better than the best day in prison you know you've heard that term like it's And it's just, it's absolutely true.

2:21:47But you need to take so much stuff for granted. Having a cell phone, having a watching YouTube, being able to turn the channel, you know, driving in the vehicle, walking through the airport. Yeah. I had such, the first two or three years when I would jump on, walk through the airport and get on a plane, what a great, amazing feeling. You're flying across the country. Yeah. You know, it's already, I'm at the point now where it's agony, right? It might have been out six years. So going on seven years. Yeah. Yeah. It would be seven years here. I mean, you mentioned the joy of just having a cell phone, which is the kind of thing that a lot of people who are accustomed to always having a cell phone are kind of talking about how bad for society is, et cetera, et cetera.

2:22:26I know of a guy who's in maximum security prison who his claim to fame is that he can fit four iPhones in his asshole. Yeah. I don't feel, I feel like, you know, I feel like that's not. I think about it all the time. I don't get it, but I mean, the fact that that is where they're at. Yeah. And I get, listen, the mindset of being in prison and being out of prison, and it takes a while to, you know, for a year when I would hear somebody knock on the door, bump, bump, bump, my first thought for a split second was the marshals are here. They realized they shouldn't have let me out. They're here to get me.

2:23:03And if they'd walked to the front door, I would have immediately turned around and put my hands behind them. Like it wouldn't have been thought about. I wouldn't even ask them any questions. They don't know why they're picking me up. When they'll send me a lawyer, I'll talk to him. I'll wait for four days until that guy shows up. I mean, I just would have. I at three o 'clock, three thirty, I started feeling uncomfortable, sick to my stomach because I knew I needed to be standing next to my bunk for four o 'clock count. And that was six months of that just feeling sick to my stomach. And anybody's done significant amount of time is like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

2:23:33there's just there's this the psychological damage is like and and and the worst thing is i can't blame anybody else it's my fault yeah i can't blame anybody like it's nobody made me do these things yeah so yeah wow amazing i can understand why lex did six hours with you i was really locked in there i could definitely talk for many more hours but yeah i appreciate you sharing your story with us man and i'm uh i hope our audience uh respects the lessons that you've learned because i think that one of the best and most important skills that you can gain is learning from other people's mistakes and not having to make those same mistakes yourself so hopefully at least somebody out there is is not gonna take the bait and do something that could get them locked up because yeah because they heard your story yeah like we can hope yeah thank you so much matthew and uh oh it's just tell them where to go watch your podcast i'm sure if they search your name they'll find it but yeah it's gonna go it's matthew cox inside true crime and that's the main part it's on all youtube's the main one obviously we focus on but it's it's on everything it's on you know itunes it's on spotify it's on everything so it's it's inside true crime sick thank you so much man i appreciate you yeah thank you thanks so much matthew cox make sure you go subscribe to his channel check out all of his other stuff no jumper coolest podcast world check us on youtube tiktok instagram etc like comment subscribe and shout out to our members five bucks a month they got to watch this one live appreciate y 'all all right