1048: Shaun Attwood | From Raves to Riches to Ruin Part Two

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1:23Getting contacts doesn't have to be a hassle. Let 1-800-CONTACTS get you the lenses you need right now. Order online at 1-800-CONTACTS.com or download the free 1-800-CONTACTS app today. Before we start this show, I want to let you know it has some adult themes in it, so no kids in the car for this one. And if you leave the kids in the car and you still play the episode, don't blame me when they have nightmares. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. May 16th, 2002. I'm on my computer up in the morning trading options. And there's a knock on the door. Bam, bam, bam, bam. 10B, please. We've got a warrant.

1:56Open the door. Run to the window. The whole apartment complex is surrounded. Speak to my missus and we're like, what should we do? Better let them in. We get halfway through the living room and then just boom. Door just flies off the hinges. Hands above your heads, don't move. Get on the effing ground now. Put your hands on your head.

2:21Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of incredible people from spies to CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional Emmy nominated comedian, extreme athlete or Russian chess grandmaster. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs.

2:52They're a great place to begin. That's why they're called starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics such as persuasion and negotiation, psychology, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, cults, geopolitics, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, part two with Sean Atwood. This is a crazy, amazing conversation in so many ways. If you haven't heard part one, definitely go back and check that out. Otherwise, this part's not gonna, you're gonna jump in the middle and frankly, you're just gonna ruin it for yourself.

3:23So go back and listen to part one. And for the rest of you, I know you can't wait to hear the rest of this one. It gets worse. Somehow, it gets worse. So here we go, part two, with my buddy, Sean Atwood. It seems like there was a moment or phase of your life where you felt lost and out of control. It seems like you plowed through that pretty well, though. Or not. All right. I quit the importation. Right. But I hadn't quit going out on the weekend partying with my mate. My inner demons, I didn't address them until years later through therapy and philosophy and psychology and yoga and meditation.

3:59So I didn't understand the psychodynamics of what was going on. I still had to get high every weekend. The walls were howling for me to come out and party. And I would leave my girlfriend at home, go out with Wildman, go out with G-Dog, getting high in Tempe. Is this Claudia, I think? Claudia, yeah. And you meet her family and they're this normal, functional family. Yeah, God bless them. And I think in the book, you have this moment where you're like, who am I? You feel like you're a normal guy who's a stockbroker, but I have a secret life that's really shitty where I'm a drug dealer. There's a lot of tension having those two people exist in the same brain, basically.

4:37Yeah, when you're living double lives, it's very stressful. Yeah. Drugs probably alleviate some of that stress temporarily, but they make the overall situation worse. Over time, the pleasure of drugs goes down because you're always trying to get back to where you started. but the pain the side effects is rising in the background and they cross but if you're addicted you can't stop so you're still taking drugs even though the side effects is up here hoping you get back to here but you're just burning yourself out this is why most of my mates are dead yeah a lot of the people from the book i was like writing these names down i was like oh i gotta ask about this person this person but then by the end of book three it's like dead dead dead dead this person vanished we think he's maybe okay we're not sure dead dead dead dead alive but now you're updating me.

5:23Actually, he died a couple years ago after the book was published. So this is not a, there's a timer running on your life that just starts going maybe faster and faster. You just can't see the clock. One of the most dangerous situations then was with Sammy DeBall's son. Yeah. So the ecstasy ring, Mike Papa was running this ecstasy ring, one of these steroid jack guys. Sammy DeBall moves to Tempe with his family in witness protection after testifying against Gotti. Papa brings in Gerard Gravano and Karen Gravano, the kids of Sammy. Sammy starts acting in advisory capacity. He doesn't know what's going on on the street level.

5:58One of the evidences against him is a call where Gerard asked for money for gas, and Sammy says, yeah, I'll send you money for gas. But that's Sammy putting money into the ecstasy ring. When I got arrested, this was May 16, 2002, in Towers Jail, Maricopa County, I finally met Gerard Gravano. In prison? In the Maricopa County Jail System. Oh, I see. In the beginning. The guards chained him to Wildman to see what would happen. They didn't like him either, apparently. They knew from the news there was a beef. Oh, so they were... Guards like to create situations for their own. They're stirring the shit.

6:34Oh, interesting. Wildman's looking at me like, what should I do? Do you want me to do him in? And I'm like, no, let's talk to him and see, you know, how his case is going because his case started a couple of years before I was. We're talking to him all night long because they wait you up for court the night before you're in court the next day you're in transportation all day he later on tells me that they had a bounty on me and we were in a strip club who had a bounty on you the gravano the gravano enterprise yeah they had a bounty on me and we were in a gay bar called the crowbar in central phoenix me wild man g dog wild woman and about a dozen more people and they advised me to leave they said it's getting a bit moody and we left.

7:13In the bar. Yeah. I feel like you should take off. Yeah. But what I didn't know was a striptease girl had called in for the bounty to the Gravanos. They got an armed crew that were on the way to come and try and take me out to the desert and hold me for ransom. Wow. And they said if the ransom wasn't paid, they were just going to eliminate the competition. Yeah. That's what he told me. We've got a documentary coming out on a huge American network. Oh, man. Where they filmed me and my family. They came to the UK. They've gone and filmed Sammy the Bull and his family. And this is going to be one of the stories in it.

7:43They've also interviewed people who work for me and my detectives. How did you get caught at first? You said you were in the jail system, but how did you, what was you getting caught? What was that like? When did that happen? So 10 witness statements were made to the police against me. One was from a house Swellman had destroyed in Mexico after he'd blown up another house in Mexico. Some of them were people who worked for Sammy the Bull. And one of them was Skinner. none of them had the inside scoop on the organization except for skinner who's my sales guy so skinner had got so scared of wild man after we realized he'd firebombed wild woman's apartment skinner got so paranoid that he went to the cops and then left the state and later on in jail there was a guy called joey crack who was one of my co-defendants and he was telling me stories and he said he showed up at skinner's apartment and wild man had found out where it was and he was in there and Wildman just grabbed his neck thought it was Skinner and Joey Crack was like it's crack it's crack don't kill me don't kill me and Crack said Wildman had sweat just running down his face dripping off his ears and he had every weapon no every known weapon laid out like hammers golf clubs knives baseball bats everything so Skinner was the one who gave the inside scoop May 16th 2002 I'm on my computer up in the morning trading options and there's a knock on the door bam bam bam bam jump up look through the peephole it's blacked out 10b please we got a warrant open the door i'm wondering is it the cops or is it someone pretending the cops come to rob me run to the window look through the window shit the whole apartment complex is surrounded oh man go through to the bedroom speak to my missus and we're like what should we do better let them in And we get halfway through the living room and then just boom.

9:33Door just flies off the hinges. They come in. Hands above your heads. Don't move. Get on the effing ground now. Put your hands on your head. And it's like, have you ever been through a SWAT scene, right? No. No, not from the perspective, actually. I should say yes, but not from the perspective of the person who has the gun pointed at them, generally. No. So you see all these visors and these very intense eyes behind these visors. There's some lights, some bright lights. You know, you know. If you make a mistake, your life's over in seconds. Yeah. Time kind of freezes. And then they just jump on you and crush you.

10:10One of the detectives just grabs me up, gets in my face. English Sean, you're a big name from the rave scene and we've got you. I have no idea who this guy is at this point, but he knows well and full. You've been his life for three years. Exactly. From the police paperwork that I read later on, he's like, sat next to me in restaurants and everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was his moment where he was like, oh, this is, that was the payoff. Yes. He had a few drinks that night for sure. Yes. Finally cracked it in. Oh, they were celebrating, yeah. Man. Okay. So you go to prison. By the way, the prison stuff is so gross.

10:45We'll get into some of that. But even in the beginning, you're like, there's something called prison itch. Tell me about this. so there's durango foot rot whereby if you go in the shower without your shoes oh man your foot just ends up getting fungus on it and turning green and stuff there is it's almost 120 130 degrees in the summer in arizona on the american scale yeah so there's a tiny vent called a swamp cooler vent at the back of the cell the air coming in it was like as warm as baby's breath the only time it worked was when the county health inspector walked through the building and then it went back to the broken setting so we're being cooked alive in a concrete oven and it wreaks havoc on your skin yeah you get all these skin infections that itch and bleed it looked like i spilled battery acid on my leg at one point you get these bed sores on your on your behind because you sat around the lot now at night when you're trying to sleep you're basically just rotating on your bunk in a pool of sweat.

11:48And the itchiness from these skin infections and bed sores is keeping you awake all night. But if you scratch yourself, because you're sweating constantly day after day, the outer layers of your skin turn soggy. So you get this itchiness, scratch yourself, and clumps of your own skin detach under your nails. Oh my God, that's really awful. That's really, and everyone has this pretty much. Yeah, I mean, people were just getting naked and throwing buckets of water on each other to try and cool down. Holy smokes. Yeah. That's truly awful. And then there was the insects. There was a spider called a brown recluse.

12:24Yeah. And it would come out at night looking for food. And you'd roll around and you'd sleep. You'd touch it. It'd get you. You wouldn't even see it. You'd just wake up the next day with little pinpricks on your skin. No big deal. In the following days, the pus would start to come out. And the venom, it eats into your flesh, down to the bone on some occasions, and causes what's called a volcano lesion. there were guys in jail who'd been in shootouts and these spider bites are putting bigger holes in people's bodies than bullets and we say to the guards this guy's got to go to the doctor take him to medical it's the policy of the jail not to treat insect bites you put yourself in here you deal with it so there was a guy called Alejandro he'd done a drive-by shooting teenager and every night he'd get up and watch the news because he might be up for the death penalty if one of his victims died One girl got a bullet through her back, came out the front and took her nipple off.

13:17And all these people were in critical condition. So every night he'd go up and watch the news. Anyway, he got bit. And it looked like a baseball of yellow plasma was trying to come out of his back. Oh, man. Guards wouldn't take him to medical. So in the day room, big guys arm locked him on either side to hold him steady. There was a Russian guy in there who'd been in the military and said he knew how to dress wounds. He comes up behind Alejandro and he's massaging this guy's back. and all this pus is running down the back. And I'm mopping it up with the toilet paper. This is going on for about 10 minutes.

13:48Big guy's almost fainting. Sweat's dripping off his ears, off his chin. We need more guys to hold him. Because it hurts so bad. Other guys are jumping on to hold this guy. When all the pus was finally out, what the Russian guy said the best thing you could do for him was put salt on the wound to reduce the bacteria. Oh my God. This is like Stone Age. this is how you treat a wound in Afghanistan or something like that. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, America's toughest sheriff. So you were in this notoriously horrible U.S. prison and he later was, I think, either in prison or convicted of... He was convicted of racial profiling and contempt, of course, but Trump pardoned him.

14:29So he was looking at six months in his own jail, but he got away with it. So that would have been poetic. Six months isn't even that long. You mentioned the food in this prison was like not real food almost. Breakfast was moldy bread and green bologna. Green. Yeah. Not supposed to be green, just happens to be green. Just raw sausage meat that's got this green shine to it. Oh. And then the mold on the bread, blue, green. Sometimes it had these fantastic psychedelic colors that look like works of art. And we'd scratch the mold off the bread. We were that hungry. Or if the bread was stale, put it in water and swill it to get it down.

15:02Evening meal was a mystery meat slot we called Red Death. Red Death. It looked like carrot-y vomit blended with blood. All kinds of random meat in it, and it stunk. Occasionally there was a dead rat in it. One time we gave a rat back to the guards, and they said they would investigate, and they came back and said it was just a potato, so the jail couldn't get any trouble. Sheriff Joe, on his favorite quotes, it costs us more to feed our police dogs than our prisoners. 50 cents or less per day to rotten food. and our police dogs are working for a living. I see. Yeah. That's horrifying. Yeah, you mentioned the banned toothpaste from China.

15:40What was that? How was it banned? It wasn't banned if you had it, I guess. If you Google a mer-fresh toothpaste, A-M-E-R, fresh, it will come up, I think it was a case in prison legal news or something, that it had antifreeze or something in it. Yeah. Oh, man. All this toxic stuff, they're just disposing of it onto the prisoners. Basically, they're torturing you guys in there. Yes. And a lot of people won't have any sympathy for prisoners. However, there's a level of humanity that you should generally afford somebody, especially nonviolent criminals. You've got the guards murdering the prisoners.

16:14Yeah. Brian Crenshaw, Scott Norberg. You've got a blind guy, failed to produce his ID for the evening meal. They pulverized him, put him into a coma where he died a month later. Scott Norberg, mentally ill man wandering the neighborhood. they started beating him up his face is turned blue a female guard says stop it his face is turned blue and they just kept beating him the prisoners were yelling why are you still beating him he's already dead and they were still beating the corpse people can google them and research it and they were lawsuits that were settled we'll link to some of this in the show notes it's quite horrifying actually tell me about introducing yourself to the gangs because i you that's one of the first things you told me on the phone is you gotta you have no choice you have to introduce yourself to the gangs you can't just be like i'm not playing that game you play their game well they introduce themselves to you depending on what color your skin is okay so as soon as i go in you've got these neo-nazis from the urian brotherhood who are low-level guys at this stage they've got hitler on them they've got swastikas they've got lightning bolts ss one guy even had hit la zieg heiling over a gas chamber with jewish people dying inside the gas chamber oh wow that's a class act these are some of the early tattoos that i saw yeah on these guys and i'm like holy shit so they're like hey get in that cell over there kind of thing go in the cell close the door behind me so i can't get out three of them i'm trapped they're like what are your charges so a charge you want to print out from the jail it's all legal terminology i don't even understand what it means so i say to them i don't know what my charges mean this is no good answer right because they think you're hiding something right so i assume it's like they're making sure you're not like a pedophile kind of guy that they have to murder at that point or what does that happen do they kill better yes because you hear like oh they just go into segregated protective custody nothing ever happens but some of them try and go undercover in general pop and it is kos if they get outed and i've got a couple of stories of that kill on site yeah i've got a couple of stories of that happening if you want those and they're really brutal yeah so i say i don't know what charges mean now they've got against the wall like what the f do you mean you don't know what your charges mean are you a chomo you i don't even know what chomo is i pull out my charge sheet they make me show it um oh chomo child molester yeah i think i see crime syndicate continuous criminal enterprise conspiracy conspiracy bail bond 750 000 like damn you guys the mafia what 750 000 bond and they loved that the atmosphere changed right away i'm like no we're not the mafia we're doing raves i can see one of those like yeah i killed someone at a rave who was on ghb and um so they then explain the rules if anyone calls you a punk a bitch or hits you you must fight him on the spot or the whole gang will attack you.

19:07Because you're a bad representation or something? That's the rule. Your whole race will attack you if you don't defend yourself if someone hits you or calls you a punk or a bitch. It's automatic you're going to get battered by everyone. People are going to go, why is that? But it seems functional, right? Because if you can get away with it, then it's going to happen more. So your job is to make sure nobody gets away with it. Someone calls you a punk or a bitch, you have to go in the cell on the stairs and fight them right away otherwise every one of your race is going to batter you yeah wow yeah that's the first rule they told me then you can't go and sit with the other races on the tables in the day room so there's 45 men in an area designed for 15 they've got these hexagonal octagonal seats and tables bolted to the floor there's crappy old tv on the wall you got the blacks the mexicans the mexican americans and the whites, the whites of the woods.

20:03Yeah, yeah. They're the four gangs. So you can't go and sit at the table of the races. You can't go making friends with the guards. They'll smash you for snitching. So there was an early occasion where I was working out with a guy called Sniper. He was a La Victoria gang member out of Tempe, working out with Sniper. And he's a Chicano, Mexican-American. The neo-Nazis say to me while I'm working out with this guy, hey, we want a word with you. I look at Sniper go talk to your people go in the cell with them again like Wood what do you think you're doing right now? I don't know I haven't been working out you know take a look around the day room do you see any of the white boys working out with the other races?

20:45nope you got a lot to learn Wood now finish your workout at least they were being polite with me yeah and that was because Wildman was in there as well I wasn't allowed in the same tower as him but they knew he was with me and he'd already established himself. I see. So he gave you a little bit of clout, like this is my guy. He was a good man to get arrested with. I bet. Holy smokes. It's like your lucky charm, I guess. So what does happen to the pedophiles in prison? I thought they just went into segregated, or what do you call it? Protective custody. They hang out with each other at the end.

21:17You said someone would try to get out of there? All right. So the prison system is, there's all these complexes and they do have their own prisons now. But when they go caught or they're in transportation population or when if they're trying to go undercover in general population it enables people to get access to them and do things which does happen quite a lot so for example then a guy who come in with me was suspected of something they had him in the shower beating the crap out of him they left him whimpering in a pool of blood and then this guy goes up to the main gang guy and says look why can we still hear him you didn't smash him good enough and the gang guy goes yeah we did him good enough and he's like nah and he goes in trying to crack this guy's head up like it's coconut just crack crack crack so you can hear it so he looks dead on the floor i go back to my cell and then there's a announcement lockdown everybody locked down because the guards on a security walk had seen it this guy's getting carried out on a stretch and there's not just blood coming out of his head there's yellow stuff coming out of his head brain fluid i guess there was another one where the head of the mexican gang lived next door to me and he had two cellmates and one of them was a jehovah witness and he was going around preaching all day to people and pissing people off he did it to me as well and then that was it called the watchtower that thing and one day he goes to court and he's on the news his case for molesting his own knees oh man the head of the gang was so embarrassed that this guy lived with him for months they waited until the guard did the security walk so they could torture him until the next security walk which was about 30 minutes and i'm sat in that cell next door and i've never heard noises like it coming from a human being it sounded like a cat was on fire or something it started out with the normal sounds of head getting bashed against toilet body getting thrown around uh you know normal don't hit me uh and then it just went into the animal kingdom of Yeah.

23:13By the time he got out of that cell before the security walk, he was covered in blood from head to toe. And he banged on the plexiglass door and it just slid open and he just collapsed on the floor and we never saw him again. You think he died? You just don't know. Yeah. Wow. National Geographic researched my Locked Up Abroad episode that they made called Raving Arizona. And they said that 57 people died in that jail around the time I was there over a five-year period. Wow. Is that higher than normal? Sounds higher than normal. Highest rate of death out of all the jails and prisons in America.

23:46Wow. Jeez. That's crazy. Yeah. And you're coming from the UK where I don't know what prison's like here, but I assume you don't grow up watching prison stories that are that traumatizing? No. Prison here, a lot of bad things can happen and it has got more out of control, but American Arizona jail is off the scale. Yeah. You know what sounds a lot more fun than Prison Itch, the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, the thinkers, the authors, the creators, it's a circle of people that I know, like, and trust, right?

24:21I get a lot of warm introductions from people. I get a lot of people coming to me, of course, because I've built a reputation in the industry. I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for yourself. This is a free course over at sixminutenetworking.com. It's about improving your relationship building skills. It's not just for work stuff. It's obviously not just for booking a podcast. I know like 99 % of you are not doing that. But the course is really easy. It takes six minutes a day. There's no awkward strategies or cheesy tactics, just something that's going to make you better at work, better outside of work with your friends, a lot of systems to help you systemize things if you're already a good networker.

24:51And again, six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. And you can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Sean Atwood. You mentioned the gangs intimidate people into making their significant others do favors for the gang. So tell me about that. Is that how things get smuggled in usually? There was an article in the Phoenix New Times about my case. English Sean's evil empire, 12 pages long. Evan had done 10 times more. When the Nazis found this out, yeah, it was good because I was getting a few extra milks and slices of cheese for breakfast.

25:29but they started pressuring me to have my girlfriend bring stuff in because i obviously had huge drug connections right okay but what happened was a race riot erupted and those guys who were pressuring me got moved oh i see so you ended up kind of lucky because they they were like oh well and they just got replaced man your family surely was worried about you right that you were the smart kid stockbroker and then dot dot dot you're in the worst prison in america my mom was flying over and to see her all crumpled up in the visitation room man breaks my heart yeah she'd been outside sniffer dogs on them waiting for hours hearing the stories of all the mexican people trying to get in how sad the stories were i just feel blessed that my parents had my back yeah yeah that must have been so stressful for them it was really stressful my uh sister had to have counseling my mom had a nervous breakdown because of that phoenix new times article i asked my aunt not to show it my mom she said it was on the internet my mom read it oh man she was a college teacher and she ran up some of the students after reading it saying i know you've read the article i know you know what's going on they didn't have a clue what she was on about my dad had to get it from the school and she'd been on off medication to this day oh so she just had like a anxiety attack type of thing she had a meltdown yeah yeah geez oh man it must have been tough to face them when they visited you you know what visits are like gold yeah visits in your mail are like gold just any communication with the outside world this situation was so intense just to get out of your cell and sit with a family member even though it is a bizarre environment you're breathing easy for like an hour or two and communicating with your loved ones and finding out what's going on in the outside world because you've completely lost track of what's going on in the world yeah i would imagine it's just like it's like the only breath of fresh air so yeah totally that you have wow some prisoners even managed to make babies in visitation is that a conjugal visit or they just happen to be real slick this is before there was so much um camera technology and stuff gotcha you have some guys stand in a row and get it on behind them can you imagine being the woman in that situation it's like all right we're gonna do it behind this row of strangers one of my mates is a guy called t-bone who i met later on big us ex-marine i believe he fathered more than one child in visitation wow yeah wow i don't it'd be hard to get it up in those circumstances maybe not you haven't had it for six months you never know i feel like mine i would just shrivel up literally and metaphorically i would just be like nope i'm done one of the hardest parts is going without relations yeah and if you've gone without it you're like in heat kind of basically sure geez you hear about all like the prison rape and stuff is that i mean that's a bad prison so i assume if it happens at all it's happening there can i be extreme in my stories for sure yeah way more extreme than i've been so far yeah because this might get demonetized but it's like whatever you know it's so i met a trans six and a half foot charismatic trans prisoner and she had a tough boyfriend at the time but she told me her history from decades earlier.

28:41And she said when she first came in, she clicked up with the gang, Blood In, Blood Out, AB, the Iron Brotherhood. They had a transsexual in their gang? No, when she first came in, she wasn't there. She was a big six and a half foot guy. Gotcha. When she first came in. This was decades before I met her. She was collecting debts, I think, for the AB. And it's Blood In, Blood Out. And they used people up and brutalized them. And she got gang rape multiple times. And I said, what happened? She said, the first time was a gang rape. They beat me up. knock me unconscious rape me while i was unconscious and shove things inside my body i said what did they shove inside your body a broomstick hey i said well how did you know if you're unconscious that they'd put a broomstick inside you and she said when she went the toilet afterwards she could tell by what came out wow she said i sat in my cell for weeks for months waiting for the scars to go away there's nothing you can do if you report it you're a snitch they'll put you in a dungeon for years for your own protection you can do absolutely nothing other than kill the perpetrators the victim is labeled a rat a punk and considered less than human i said well then how did you stop it and she said i started standing up for myself i started fighting back i was ruthless you've got to be ruthless now she hadn't told me the truth is what she's done at the time i had to get that off some other prisoners so what zina had done she was studying anatomy and she came up with an idea and the next two times the gang came to rape zina the first member of the gang to put his hand on her she plucked his eyeball out so it was dangling from the optic nerve oh man when i first heard that i didn't even think it was possible i didn't even yeah it sounds fake it does sound fake so i clicked up with a guy a martial arts guy in prison and he told me to join a dojo when i got out which i did i continued i did karate and as you go up in karate they teach you what's called bird beak strike where you just go in take the eye out comes out now when the eye comes out like that there's fluid that can come out through the skull into the socket and the eye might not that coats the brain and the eye might not necessarily go back in and oh man but it is a lethal thing that people who are at the top levels of martial arts and clothes protection know these kind of moves but that's what she was doing so after doing that twice they left her alone but they moved on to some of her friends one friend the gang raped him shoved a light bulb in his backside and made bets on who would smash it first.

31:02Oh, wow. And that prisoner committed suicide afterwards. Another one was gang raped, held down. They got a shovel from the work crew, cut his head off. And when the head was finally off, they positioned it in an area of the prison where the rival gangs would see it to make the point that they were the most violent and ruthless out of all the gangs. And again, that was the Aryan Brotherhood. This was years before I was in prison, mind you, before all the cameras and everything. in. And I think 60 Minutes did a program about Arizona prison and said it was the most dangerous part of real estate in the whole country.

31:33Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. These stories and the book make you, if you are thinking of doing something that would land you in jail, not that I was keen on going to prison beforehand, but you read this book and you are like, no, never, we'll do nothing to ever possibly risk going in there. Just the cockroaches story alone. You want and talk about the cockroaches a little bit. You must even have nightmares about these cockroaches. I could do half an hour on cockroach stories, but let's just say that one year in, I asked for a bail reduction. My bail was$750 ,000. Yeah. The judge doubled it to 1.5 million, so it got moved over to maximum security.

32:10Okay, just as a big screw you, they doubled it. Yeah, the prosecutor filed 12 more charges against me with an additional bond and all this stuff. Anyway, it's about two in the morning when I get to my cell in max security. Two-man cell, that's an improvement. but I'm wondering why my soulmate is asleep on the top bunk. I'll never forget it. I can just see it right now. It's ingrained. I walk in. He's got a sheet wrapped around him and stuff and it's dark. Just like this weird movement on the walls and the ceiling. I'm thinking, what's going on? Something drops off the ceiling and bounces off my shoulder.

32:44Like, what the hell was that? Look at the walls and ceiling. Something's not right here. Perhaps because I've been awake so long, my eyes are playing tricks. so I put my face right up to the wall and it's covered in cockroaches like the classic American cockroach size of like an almond nut and they're just swirling around everywhere now I go to look at where the brackets are for my bunk where they're screwed into the wall and there's a big old hole and they're just pouring onto the bunk where I'm supposed to go to sleep and then I look at my cellmate and I realize now because it's the desert why has he got his sheet wrapped all the way around him yeah so in the end that's what you got to do you got to wrap the sheet around you to look like the mummy and leave a breathing hole it does keep them off you but it traps the heat to your body yeah you got all these bleeding skin infections and bed sores and itching when you've got that sheet around you it's torture so you end up just throwing the sheet off and letting them crawl on you they don't bite right they tickle your feet your legs so this day if you know my girlfriend tries tickling my hands i flinch because i woke up so many nights with them tickling my hands just casting them off like that they get on your face mouth nose but their favorite place of all is going in your ears to eat your earwax it's like funny to them and i know that because if i got like a bit of cloth to try and clean my ears out and the ways are filthy and then hung it under the sink they get on it and they pulse where the earwax was so the neighbor who was asthmatic, he wakes up one morning out of breath, grabs his inhaler, shoots a cockroach into his mouth.

34:22Yeah, into his mouth. His throat starts freaking out saying he can feel it move around inside him. Oh my God. He's trying to throw it up and it's stuck inside and it won't even come out. Even in the daytime, there was so many of them. The fellas were doing cockroach races, gambling on the winner. And at nighttime, they'd try and trap them with like peanut butter and stuff. and they'd come down the stairs with them all all the dead ones and then empty them into the trash can under the stairs it didn't matter how many we killed they owned the building yeah it's very tricky you know i've got my amerifresh toothpaste that i'm cementing the cracks with and there was a moment in time where i got moved to this cell and it was quite bad and i used all my amerifresh to cement and like two days later they moved me again to one that was even worse and I had no Amara Fresh.