back to indexBrett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal | Lex Fridman Podcast #272
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I was on the run for four months, stole $600,000.
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I was in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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One day I had stolen the night before
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and stolen 160K out of ATMs.
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Went in the next morning, I woke up,
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signed on to cartersmarket.com,
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which was ran by Max Butler, the Iceman.
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And there's my name, US Most Wanted on it.
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And that gets your attention.
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That was my real name with US Most Wanted beside of it.
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Nobody knew my real name in that environment at all,
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but then they did.
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And it was talking about me being part
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of the Secret Service, Operation Anglerfish,
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So of course, they're all like.
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Everybody's after you.
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They're like, oh yeah, we're gonna get this son of a bitch.
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The following is a conversation with Brett Johnson,
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a former cyber criminal who built the first
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organized cybercrime community called Shadow Crew
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that is the precursor to today's Darknet
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and Darknet markets.
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He's referred to by the United States Secret Service
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as quote, the original internet godfather.
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He has been the central figure in the cybercrime world
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for almost 20 years.
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Placed on the US Most Wanted list in 2006
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before being convicted of 39 felonies for cybercrime,
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escaped from prison, and then eventually being locked up,
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served his time, and now is helping people understand
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and fight cybercrime.
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This was a raw, honest, emotional, and real episode.
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Brett has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people,
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and yet his own story is full of trauma and pain,
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and also redemption and love.
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This is a good time to say that I have and I will
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talk to people who have served time in prison,
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and perhaps people who currently are in prison.
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I will try to do my best to both empathize
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with the person across from me and not let them sugarcoat,
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explain away, or dismiss the crimes they committed.
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This is a tough line to walk,
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because if you close your heart to the other person,
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you'll never fully understand their mind and their story.
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But if you open the heart too much,
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you can be manipulated to where the conversation
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reveals nothing honest or real.
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This requires skill and willingness to take the risk.
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I don't know about the skill part,
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but I'd like to take the risk.
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I always wear my heart on my sleeve.
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If I get hurt for it, that's life.
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As I've said, I want to understand
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what makes a person do these crimes,
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the particular characteristics of their temporary
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or permanent madness, their justifications,
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but also their humanity.
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I believe each of us have the capacity
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to become both the criminal and the victim,
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the predator and the prey.
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It's up to us to avoid these paths
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or to find the path to redemption.
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It's on each of us.
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It's our responsibility and burden
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of being human in a complicated and dangerous world.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Brett Johnson.
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You were convicted of 39 felonies for cybercrime
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placed on the US most wanted list in 2006,
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escaped from prison.
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You built the first organized cybercrime community
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called Shadow Crew that is the precursor
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to today's darknet and darknet markets.
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And for all this, the US intelligence service
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called you the original internet godfather.
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So first question, how did your career
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as a cybercrime criminal begin?
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My life of crime begins when I'm 10 years old.
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10 years old, man, think about that.
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I mean, you were probably playing the robots
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You know, usually kids are doing the Lego bit,
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getting involved with sports, everything else.
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And with me, it wasn't like that.
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With me, I'm from Eastern Kentucky.
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Eastern Kentucky is one of these,
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it's like parts of Texas, parts of Louisiana,
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that if you're not fortunate enough to have a job,
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you may be involved in a scam, hustle, fraud,
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whatever you want to call it, man.
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I was, my parents, my mom was basically
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the captain of the entire fraud industry.
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So this is a woman that at one point,
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she's stealing a 108,000 pound Caterpillar D9 bulldozer,
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tramming it down the road.
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You know, at another point, she's taking a slip
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and falling a convenience store trying to sue the owner.
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We had a neighbor she acted as a pimp for at one point.
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That's my mom, my dad.
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Wait, wait, wait, the neighbor acted as a pimp?
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My mom prostituted, I mean,
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she acted as a pimp for a neighbor.
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Her name was Debbie and my mom used to sell her out.
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Debbie needed money and my mom would find men
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for her to sleep with for cash
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and she'd take a part of the cash.
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So Sauna's like she diversified the methodologies
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by which she hustled.
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Very, had that entrepreneurial spirit.
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You know, we see that a lot with cyber criminals,
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you know, that sense of being that entrepreneur.
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So what was the motivation you think for her?
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Is it basically the rush of playing with the system
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or being able to know the rules
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and break the rules and get away with it?
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My mom's a complex character.
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She is, there's no one single motivation.
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So my mom was the individual, she's still alive.
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My mom was the individual who tested people.
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She wanted to know how far she could abuse you
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and you come back and still love her.
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So, and that was with every relationship she's ever had.
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She would cheat on the men she was involved with.
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She would abuse her children, me and Denise.
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Psychological, physical?
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Oh, it was mental, emotional, physical,
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everything, everything.
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I mean, she used to beat me and Denise with belt buckles,
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you know, and that ended when she was,
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I forgot what we had done.
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I think that it may have been the part
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where she accused me of stealing her marijuana,
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but she was hitting me and Denise.
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We were living in a single wide trailer at that point.
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She was hitting me and Denise.
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We were on the bed trying to get away from it.
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And Denise kicks her through a closet is what happens.
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And Denise stands up and she said,
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you're through hitting me.
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And that was the last time that mom hit us at that point.
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So sorry to take us there.
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You're, for people who know you
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and people should definitely watch
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some of your lectures online.
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You're extremely charismatic and fun and jolly
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and whatever word you want to use.
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But, you know, if we look at that kind of life,
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there's darkness there, there's a struggle there.
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There's a lot of darkness.
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So if you, how did you feel?
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If you go back to the mind of the kid you were
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with your mom, was there sadness?
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Was there things like depression, self doubt,
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all those kinds of things, or did you see this crime,
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this chaos as ultimately exciting?
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You know, I don't think,
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back then I didn't view it as exciting.
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Now it becomes exciting when I start being involved
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in cyber crime, all right?
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But back then it was simply a means to an end
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So you take a 10 year old kid
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and the way I get involved in crime is,
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like I said, my mom was the fraudster.
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My dad was a good guy.
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He just forgot he was this good guy.
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You know, he was always, he always had these principles,
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but his issue was is he loved my mom so much,
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he was scared of her leaving.
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So if she wanted to do something, commit crime,
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cheat on him, whatever,
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he would pretty much just put up with it the one instant.
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So, I mean, this woman used to,
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she used to bring men home in front of him,
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tell him that, hey, I'm leaving you.
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I don't love you anymore.
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I want you to die, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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There were two instances where the man,
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where he can't take it anymore.
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And the first instance, I was,
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I guess I was seven or eight.
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My sister Denise is a year younger than I am.
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My dad actually files for divorce,
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files for divorce at that point.
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My mom kind of goes crazy.
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My dad, I was with my dad.
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My sister was with my mother
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because that's that Eastern Kentucky mentality.
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You know, men stay with men, women stay with women.
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So he was filing for divorce.
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Me and my dad, we were living in an apartment.
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My mom was living with her grandparents
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and with her parents bouncing back and forth
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And I remember I was sleeping in the bed.
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We had a single wide bed.
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My dad slept on the sofa.
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I woke up one night
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and there was some sort of ruckus in the living room.
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So I wake up and I walk into the living room
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and my mom has a knife to my dad's throat.
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And basically you're not going to steal my son from me.
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My mom was this individual
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that when she knew she went so far,
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like I said, she was always this person that tested.
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What can I do this to you?
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And you'll still come back.
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She knew, she was always also this person
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that if she went too far, she knew it.
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And she would always try to divert that into something else.
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All right, so she knew at that point she'd went too far.
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So what does she do?
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She gets up crying, goes to the bathroom
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and pretends to slit her wrists
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so that my dad Ray will respond to that,
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not respond to what she's just done to him.
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That was my mom in a nutshell.
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She had a history of doing this kind of stuff.
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Motivations as far as fraud with her,
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I think with her it was, she was an LPN.
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She had a very good nurse, but she didn't want to work.
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It was a lot of it.
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So with her, it was easier for her to commit fraud.
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And when I say commit fraud,
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it was against businesses, against people.
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I remember at one point she's buying
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over the counter capsules and emptying the capsules out
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and putting some other crap in there
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and selling at a speed and people were buying it.
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She did anything she could for money.
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And of course I get involved with that.
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What happens is we were in Panama City at that point
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and my mom leaves my dad and the way she left my dad,
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my great grandfather had died.
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My mom tells all three of us, hey, I'm taking the kids
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and we're going back to Eastern Kentucky
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to attend the funeral.
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Well, that was her leaving.
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Me and Denise didn't know it.
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She didn't pack any of our clothes at all.
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She stows her clothes in the trunk of the car
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and she leaves my dad and I don't get to see my dad again
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for I think five, six years, something like that.
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My mom, like I said, she used to bring men home
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in front of my dad.
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She would, he'd sit there and cry and beg her not to do it.
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She'd do it anyway.
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When she leaves him, she kept up that.
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So we were living at my grandparents house.
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My grandfather, he had converted the house.
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He had raised the house up
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and built apartments underneath of it.
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So me and my sister and my mom lived
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in one of the apartments underneath
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and that whole side of the family was just nuts, was nuts.
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My granddad, Paul, he would,
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this is a man that he didn't want you
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to eat any of his food.
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So, you know, there was no such thing
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as me and Denise going upstairs to eat.
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If he found out me and Denise was taking a bath,
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we were allowed to bath and bathe in two inches of water
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because he didn't want to have to pay the water bill.
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You know, if you couldn't have the TV on,
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when he went to bed at night,
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you had to have the television, the volume.
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You could watch it, but without volume
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because if he heard it, he would get up
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in the middle of the night
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and he would kick the power breaker,
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turn off all the power on you.
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This is my, this is my, the family, right?
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So my mom, she used to leave me and Denise at home
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for days, man, for days.
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She'd go out and, you know, party.
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And I mean, sometimes she'd take me into these with her.
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We'd wait in the car.
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Sometimes we'd wait in the living room
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as she went and partied and everything else.
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Most of the time she left us at home
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and my entry into crime, Denise walks in one day,
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she's nine years old, man.
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She walks in one day
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and she's got a pack of pork chops in her hand
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and looked at her and I said, where'd you get that?
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She's like, I stole it.
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And you know, it's like, show me how you did that.
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So she takes me over
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and she shows me how she steals food,
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how she's stuffing it down her pants.
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So we start stealing food.
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I'm like, hell yeah, let's do that shit.
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So start stealing food.
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And we get to the point where we're wanting a sandwich.
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Well, you can't stuff a loaf of bread down your pants.
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So there was a Kmart in the shopping center.
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I go over to the Kmart, get a hoodie off the rack,
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take the tags off of it, wear it out, work just fine.
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And the way you steal bread
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is you put the hoodie over your shoulder,
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stuff a loaf of bread down the sleeve
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and you walk out with it.
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So we started doing that.
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How'd you figure that out?
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Just thought pattern.
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So there's like strategic thinking here.
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Yeah, you know, you can't wear the hoodie
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and put the bread down here
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cause you might mash the bread when you zip it up
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or they might notice the bread.
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Yeah, we have to think through that.
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You gotta think through it.
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But you gotta realize by this point,
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I'm already seeing what my parents are doing.
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You know, I'm already seeing the plotting.
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That kind of puzzle solving
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was something you were already developing yourself
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individually cause you're pretty young.
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Yeah, 10 years old, pretty young.
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But seeing how they act, how they respond to things.
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And my mom, I guess you could call it a good thing,
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they never kept any of that hidden from the kids.
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You know, there was no discussions behind closed doors.
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All that happened in front of everybody.
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And from your young minds perspective,
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seeing that kind of crime, you basically,
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you know, a lot of us kind of grow up
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thinking there's rules you're not supposed to break.
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If you see other humans breaking those rules,
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then you realize those rules are just human made.
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But it gets worse than that.
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I was in an environment where there were no decent people.
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I didn't really meet my first decent person
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until I was 16 years old.
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That was a high school teacher.
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So what happens is, you know, we start shoplifting food.
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My mom finds out that we've been stealing stuff
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and you know, she joins us.
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Yeah, she comes in, you know, I've got the television,
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I've got the Atari 2600, play the hell out of it.
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She starts seeing this shit.
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She's like, where'd this come from?
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And I'm like, well, we found it.
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She's like, you didn't find that.
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Denise, Denise stands up, we stole it.
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My mom, show me how you did that.
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And she gets her mom too, to join in.
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And she used to run me and Denise
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as these little shoplifters.
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We'd take, you know, we'd steal stuff for her.
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We would distract security
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and her and my grandmother would steal stuff.
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They got caught doing that.
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But that's the entry into crime.
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And Denise, you know, I'm adamant and I kind of mean it.
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But the truth is I say, and I do mean it,
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that I'm responsible for my choices as an adult, all right?
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I believe that when you're a child, you can't control that.
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The adults in your environment control what you do.
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Once you're an adult though, your choices are yours.
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Now that being said, there's some,
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you can't dismiss that childhood
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influencing what I did as an adult.
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You can't do that.
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I mean, it was kind of written on slate that,
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hey, this guy's gonna be this guy when he grows up.
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That's like sometimes that one person you meet,
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that decent person can turn the tide of your life.
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Absolutely, absolutely.
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So what happens is, you know, the abuse,
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everything continues on, when I'm 15,
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my dad was in Panama City, Florida.
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My mom was in, you know, we were in Hazard, Kentucky.
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She was dating this guy.
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My mom was this woman that the abuse would,
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it was crazy abuse, man, just crazy stuff.
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She would tell me and my sister, you know,
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that she gave up her life for us,
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that she was gonna leave one day and never come back,
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that we'd find her dead in a ditch someplace.
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She'd go out and date these men and she'd come back
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and she'd talk about how these men were abusing her.
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You know, so she'd be dating this guy
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and she'd come back and she'd, you know,
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start talking about how he had tried to rape her,
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you know, trying to get me to respond to that.
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And I would respond to that.
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Make no doubt, I would respond to that.
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Well, what happens is, and I knew that,
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I don't know if I knew it was abuse at that age, all right,
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but I knew things were fucked up.
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And I was talking to my dad in Panama City
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and I really had it in my head
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that I was gonna go down and live with my dad.
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And I called my dad one day.
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I was set to go to, me and my cousins
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were gonna go see Return of the Jedi.
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It had came out again in the theaters.
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So I called my dad, it was a Sunday,
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called my dad and he told me,
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he had either gotten married
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or he was about to get married to this woman.
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And basically Brett Johnson
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wasn't gonna go down to Florida.
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You know, I was gonna stay in Hazard.
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I had to call my dad from payphone,
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but the result of that was I walked him into a hospital,
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got in an elevator and a woman got in the elevator
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at the same time and I snapped
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and beat the hell out of her right there.
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And I was 15, didn't really know what the fuck happened.
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Didn't really know, but.
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Just anger came from somewhere.
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And you know, the elevator,
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beat the hell out of this lady.
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Turned out she looked a shitload like my mom,
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but the elevator doors open.
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And one of the security guards,
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I played basketball with his son.
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So he saw me immediately.
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I knocked the hell out of him, took off running,
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made it back to the house where my grandparents were.
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They didn't know what had happened.
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So I didn't say anything.
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About an hour later, Kentucky state police,
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they pull up in the front yard and two of them get out
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and I'm sitting on the front porch and me and my cousins are
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and they start walking up where everybody starts walking
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And I'm like, I just remember saying, what do you want?
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Well, you know what they wanted.
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They wanted to arrest Brett Johnson and they arrested me.
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I went in and I told them everything.
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Spent three months in a county jail.
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They didn't have juvenile facilities in that county.
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So I spent three months in solitary, went to trial,
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pled guilty to assault in the first degree.
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The judge sentenced me to time served
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and a psychological evaluation
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where they sent me to Louisville, Kentucky.
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Spent 30 days up there and they cut me loose.
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They wanted me to have counseling after that
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and never went to counseling.
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You know, I wanted to, but mom was like, don't need it.
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And so never went to counseling.
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And I became this pariah in the county. It's crazy, man.
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I mean, not a day goes by that I don't think about that.
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That moment in the elevator.
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And what happens is, you know, you're 15.
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Fuck man, you're 15.
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So I go back to the high school that I was in
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and I'm this piece of shit.
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So everybody, you're not the outcast.
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So I moved, we moved, we were in Whitesburg at that point.
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I finished up the year there and moved back to Perry County,
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which is where Hazard is.
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So we moved there and they've got three high schools here.
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They've got MC Napier, they've got Hazard High School
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and then they've got Dills Combs High School.
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So I was within, me and Denise were within
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half mile of MC Napier.
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Show up there the first day of school
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and I met me and my mom and my sister
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were walking into the school and the kids won't let me in.
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The kids stand out there, he's not coming in.
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So my mom starts raising hell and I'm like,
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nah, let's just go, let's go.
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So from there it was, we went down to the city school,
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Hazard and the principal tells my mom,
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Denise can come, he can't.
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So my mom wants to raise hell and I'm like, no,
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let's just take me to this other school.
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So this other school was like 15 miles away
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and country high school.
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So I go there and they accept me
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and I walked in the first day
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and this English teacher
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name's Carol Combs, I walked in
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and handed her the paper, she was my homeroom teacher
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and she heard this voice,
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that is the way she explains it today,
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she heard this voice and she looks up
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and she was like, son, have you ever done any drama before?
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And I'm like, no maam,
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but I'm interested in the academic team,
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I was this quick recall guy, right?
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And she's like, no.
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She's like, drama.
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I'm like, no, I'm not interested in theater,
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I'm interested in academics.
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Well, she was the head of the drama department
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and head of the academics department.
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So the deal was, tell you what,
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you can get on the academics team
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if you start with theater too.
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And I was like, okay.
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So what happens is she was the only,
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she was the first decent person I met in my life
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and she became this kind of surrogate mother to me.
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So under her tutelage,
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I become one of the top academic team guys in the state.
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Around there, I was captain of the team,
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I was this just scourge across all the counties
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in that part of Kentucky.
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If we had a meet, it was like,
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Jesus Christ, that's Brett Johnson.
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And it was like, she used to tell people
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they would, the high school that I came from was Whitesburg
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and the first time that Whitesburg came against us,
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she told me, I was talking to her about a year ago
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and she told me, she's like, Brett,
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she said, that first meet against Whitesburg,
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she said, the captain came in, looked at you and said,
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oh, you've got that Johnson boy on your team?
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And she said, my response was that Johnson boy is our team.
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So, but I did that and then with theater,
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I ended up, my senior year,
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I won best actor and actress in the state.
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Only guy to ever do that in the state.
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So, did pretty well, man, did pretty well.
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Had scholarships coming out of high school
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and everything else and I'm the idiot that turned them down.
link |
Ask you a funny question.
link |
You'd make a hell of a, I mean,
link |
of all the many things you could probably do,
link |
you would make a hell of a actor.
link |
I'm very good on stage.
link |
I'm very good on stage.
link |
Have you acted professionally anywhere or not?
link |
Not professionally.
link |
We've done the college circuit and stuff like that.
link |
What happened was is, so I turned down the scholarships,
link |
you know, scared of leaving, I guess is what it was.
link |
Started in community college
link |
and the community college there hires
link |
a new theater director out of California.
link |
Well, he knew the guy
link |
that ran the San Jose State Theater program.
link |
A guy named Edward Emmanuel was his name.
link |
His claim to fame, he had written the Three Ninjas movie.
link |
Remember that, the three little ninja kids
link |
back in the eighties, he had written this damn film
link |
and it had made a shitload of money.
link |
So, he invites Ed Emmanuel to come down and see the play
link |
and Ed had written this Civil War piece.
link |
So, we put that on.
link |
I was doing like, it was a multiple role thing.
link |
I was doing like 18 different roles in the show.
link |
So, Ed sees the show and he was like, scholarship.
link |
He said, look, he said,
link |
right now you're a big fish in a small pond.
link |
We'll make you a big fish in a big pot.
link |
And I was like, deal.
link |
So, I took the scholarship, man.
link |
And he was like, I'll be back in two weeks.
link |
Two weeks later, this guy flies back in.
link |
He drives down to where I'm living.
link |
I'm out shooting ball with one of my cousins and friends.
link |
He pulls up and he gets out of the car
link |
and I was like, I'm walking over to him.
link |
I was like, hey man, I'll walk you in.
link |
You can meet my parents.
link |
He's like, no, I got it.
link |
So, I keep shooting ball.
link |
He walks in the house, stays about 15 minutes,
link |
walks out, white as a sheet, doesn't say a word to me,
link |
gets in the car, leaves.
link |
I don't hear from him again.
link |
Had no idea what went on.
link |
Takes me a couple of weeks.
link |
What happened is my mom, he walks in and introduces himself.
link |
My mom pulls a knife on the guy.
link |
You are not going to steal my goddamn son from me.
link |
Scares the guy to death.
link |
He bugs out and kind of broke my spirit at that point.
link |
So, went into, just full fledged into scams,
link |
crimes, everything else.
link |
I had already been, when I was a minor,
link |
I'd already been kind of brought up
link |
on that side of the family with the crimes
link |
that they were doing.
link |
My mom was drug trafficking, the pimp stuff,
link |
illegally mining coal, charity fraud.
link |
Illegally mining coal?
link |
Yeah, wildcatting coal.
link |
Can you explain that?
link |
Yeah, so, to properly mine coal,
link |
you have to get a permit, all right?
link |
Eastern Kentucky, a lot of people don't,
link |
they can't afford the permits.
link |
They can get them a piece of equipment.
link |
You get a dozer or a loader or whatever you're going to get
link |
or an auger or what have you.
link |
So, you start mining, but you don't get the permit.
link |
So, you don't have to do the, you don't have to pay.
link |
Back then, it was like $3,500 for a two acre permit
link |
or $5,000 for a two acre permit.
link |
Let you strip mine the coal on that.
link |
Then you have to pay for the reclamation on top of that.
link |
So, once you uncover the pit, take the coal out,
link |
you have to cover back up the pit, sow grass,
link |
make sure everything is environmentally friendly.
link |
You got a silt pond, everything else at that point.
link |
So, the whole idea is you buy an acre of land
link |
or some area of land and then you can,
link |
there's a whole process you're supposed to go through.
link |
How many people involved in a mining,
link |
the smallest number of people required
link |
for a mining operation?
link |
You can do it with three or four people.
link |
So, you've got your loader operator,
link |
you've got your dozer operator.
link |
You need, you can farm out the trucking to someone
link |
if you need that or trucking company if you need to do that.
link |
Then you've got your, whoever owns the business as well.
link |
So, very few people can run an operation like that
link |
and profit fairly well as long as
link |
you don't have to do the reclamation,
link |
all that crap on top of it, all right?
link |
The reclamation gets pretty expensive.
link |
So, if you're uncovering a pit of coal,
link |
a pit, so a ton of coal is basically about 36 cubic inches
link |
is what a 2000 pounds of coal weighs
link |
if you're in Eastern Kentucky
link |
because it's at the weight of the bituminous coal
link |
The fact that you know this is awesome.
link |
The fact that you know exactly the volume
link |
of a ton of coal, I mean, it's great.
link |
Yeah, you learn this shit, right?
link |
Can you rattle this shit off?
link |
So, you uncover the pit and then you've got to sell the pit.
link |
Well, the thing is, is that,
link |
where are you gonna sell the coal?
link |
Well, you sell it to one of these other coal tipples
link |
that knows that they're buying the shit illegally.
link |
So, back then a ton of coal was,
link |
they'd give you like 36 bucks per ton is what that is.
link |
And you'd have to go out and you'd test the BTUs on it.
link |
You take a sample to the lab, test the BTUs,
link |
you take that into the company.
link |
British Thermal Unit.
link |
So, you'd test what the BTU on the coal was.
link |
How pure the coal is.
link |
How pure the coal is, what BTU it burns at.
link |
Back then, a good BTU was around 12.9
link |
was what you'd get, all right?
link |
So, 12.9 coal, $36 a ton.
link |
You'd take that sample over to the coal tipple.
link |
They'd say, okay, we'll buy this for you.
link |
How many trucks you got or how many tons you got?
link |
And you'd say, this is what we've got.
link |
Then you'd hire the trucking company.
link |
And where you get it out because you've got the agents
link |
that are looking for you by this point
link |
because the people that you've bought the rights
link |
to whoever the landowner is,
link |
you said you're gonna give them $2 a ton or whatever this is.
link |
Well, the other people there,
link |
are you paying them off or are you not?
link |
Well, if you're not paying them off, guess what?
link |
They know your ass is mining it illegally.
link |
They're gonna report you.
link |
Well, all of a sudden, you've got all these inspectors
link |
that are coming around and everything.
link |
Hey, we know what you're doing.
link |
So, they're looking for you to get the pit out.
link |
So, when do you get the pit out?
link |
Right in dead of night.
link |
So, you're loading it up two o clock in the morning,
link |
hauling this ass out is what you're doing.
link |
You sell it out from there.
link |
And your mom ran operations like this?
link |
And you said you worked the mine too when you were younger?
link |
Yeah, I learned how to run a loader, run a dozer,
link |
learn how to clean off a pit, everything like that.
link |
So, this is the lifestyle you grow up in.
link |
You learn how to do this stuff.
link |
And so, I knew how to do charity fraud as well,
link |
insurance fraud, so.
link |
Can we break down some of these?
link |
Charity fraud, it's much more romantic than what it sounds.
link |
It was basically, it was basically standing beside the road
link |
with a sign and a bucket taking up collections
link |
for homeless shelters, for abused women,
link |
for children, stuff like that.
link |
Then later on, I branched off.
link |
When I started off on my own,
link |
I would set up my own charity company
link |
and do some telemarketing and go on by
link |
and collect checks and things like that.
link |
We're gonna talk about that.
link |
But actually, can we just step back
link |
and talk about your mom and your dad?
link |
Given all of that, given all the abuse,
link |
the complex ways that she played with love,
link |
to see how far she can push you and the people around her,
link |
and they still love her.
link |
Today, do you love her?
link |
You know, I called my dad yesterday.
link |
My dad, he's dying now.
link |
He's got a heart condition.
link |
He's not gonna get the operation to fix it.
link |
So he's like, fuck it, I'm ready to go.
link |
And I'm like, I looked at him,
link |
because hell, I'm 52 now.
link |
Prior to 52, I'd have been like, no, you need to do this.
link |
But I looked at him and I was like, I understand.
link |
And so he's not gonna get the operation.
link |
I was talking to him yesterday and he asked me,
link |
he's like, have you seen your mom?
link |
And I was like, dad, I've not talked to her
link |
for about two years.
link |
And I told him, I was like, I love my mom,
link |
but my mom is not a good person.
link |
And he told me, I was talking to him on the phone yesterday,
link |
and he told me that it took him several years
link |
to really understand that.
link |
You know, he loved her too,
link |
but it takes, when you're getting abused like that,
link |
especially my dad, my dad came from a good family,
link |
everything else, and, you know, upstanding family.
link |
And I think that when you're that victim of abuse,
link |
you know, you've never seen it before,
link |
you've never encountered it, and then it happens,
link |
well, you're like that frog in water all of a sudden.
link |
You know, you get to the point where it gradually increases
link |
until how do you get out of it?
link |
Everybody else sees what's happening, but you don't.
link |
I grew up in that environment though, you know,
link |
so it took me a long time to come to terms with that.
link |
My sister came to terms with it long before I did.
link |
You know, my sister, she's been a decade
link |
without talking to my mom,
link |
like she had tried to commit suicide, I didn't know that.
link |
What got me so bad is she said at one point
link |
that she always thought someone was gonna come in
link |
and save us, and my response, just immediate response,
link |
not even thinking about it, my response was,
link |
well, Denise, I knew no one ever was.
link |
And looking at things now,
link |
I think that's where our paths diverged.
link |
Me, it was, if you wanna do it,
link |
if anybody's gonna take care of you,
link |
you gotta take care of yourself.
link |
You're on your own.
link |
You're on your own, you know, it's up to you.
link |
And Denise has always been that child
link |
that has expected someone to come in and save her.
link |
Well, and almost like it's all going to be okay, somebody.
link |
Yeah, and I knew it wasn't.
link |
Unless you make it okay, it ain't gonna be okay.
link |
So, you know, I was.
link |
Are you able to forgive her, your mom?
link |
My boundary with my mom, the reason I've not spoken with her,
link |
over two years ago, I started this legal career of mine.
link |
I've been the guy who has,
link |
I spent a lot of time thinking about my past
link |
and those choices and what brought those choices around.
link |
So I'm big about taking responsibility for my actions.
link |
I think it's really important you have to do that.
link |
Well, my mom, not so much.
link |
So I was talking to her, you know,
link |
and I would start saying, you know,
link |
she would start the conversation talking about,
link |
she didn't understand
link |
why Denise wouldn't speak to her anymore.
link |
That was one of her tropes.
link |
So, and my response started to become,
link |
well, because you were the abuser
link |
and you spent your life doing that to her.
link |
So it's more healthy for her not to talk to you.
link |
So she's still not able to see the flaws
link |
in her ways of the past.
link |
So my ultimatum to my mom was, look,
link |
when you're able to admit
link |
that you abused the people in your life,
link |
accept that responsibility
link |
and be able to discuss it with me, we'll have a talk.
link |
Other than that, I don't want to talk to you anymore.
link |
So for the first year it was, you know,
link |
calling, cussing my wife out, cussing me out,
link |
you know, I don't need you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
link |
And then finally it started to taper off
link |
and she's never really contacted me after that point.
link |
And your dad is dying.
link |
What do you take from the way he's taken on death?
link |
Just saying, fuck it.
link |
You know, it's the man.
link |
And what have you learned from your dad?
link |
What do you love about your dad?
link |
He's one of these guys that, you know, like I told him,
link |
I told my dad about the abuse and everything else.
link |
And there was a point.
link |
So, you know, I told you about the elevator stuff,
link |
but before that, man, it was,
link |
it took me 40 years to talk about that,
link |
but it also took me 40 years to talk about,
link |
there was a point that my mom and dad would leave the house
link |
and I would urinate in the floor.
link |
Is that like out of anger?
link |
Piss on the carpet.
link |
Carpet pissers like the Lebowski, right?
link |
It really tied the room together, dude.
link |
It really tied the room together.
link |
I was talking about that
link |
and this lady comes up to me after the presentation
link |
and she had a career previous to that
link |
where she dealt with abused kids.
link |
And she told me, she was like,
link |
Brett, she's like, it's a control mechanism.
link |
The only control you had was that.
link |
And she's like, kids do that.
link |
And I was like, so I'm not unique.
link |
She's like, no, you're not unique in that.
link |
So that, you know, this whole history of abuse,
link |
Denise dealt with it by drinking,
link |
by trying to commit suicide, things like that.
link |
And then finally she escapes.
link |
I'm the kid that didn't.
link |
And not only that, my wife pointed out to me that,
link |
again, it's that Eastern Kentucky mentality stuff.
link |
You know, the male's expected to do things.
link |
So with me, it was almost like I stepped up
link |
to take part in those crimes
link |
so that Denise didn't have to.
link |
And she was able to avoid all that.
link |
Other than that one shoplifting stuff,
link |
Denise doesn't break the law anymore.
link |
She goes off to be a, she's a good parent.
link |
She's an angry parent.
link |
She's a good parent.
link |
She's a teacher, a good citizen overall.
link |
I was just the guy that kept right on going with it.
link |
So let me ask you about that.
link |
So your life of cyber crime.
link |
In describing some of the things you did or knew about,
link |
"'I once stole several thousand dollars worth of coins
link |
"'from a family trying to sell them
link |
"'to put a new roof on their home.
link |
"'Another time, I sent a counterfeit cashier's check
link |
"'to a victim and he ended up being arrested for it.
link |
"'I lied to family, friends, everyone I knew.
link |
"'I was a truly despicable person.'"
link |
"'One of my Ukrainian associates script
link |
"'had someone who owed him money kidnapped and tortured.
link |
"'He posted pictures of it online.
link |
"'Another member, Iceman,
link |
"'used to flood his enemy's email addresses
link |
"'with child pornography, then called the police on them.'"
link |
That's some stories.
link |
Can you tell some of these stories that stand out to you
link |
that are particularly despicable or representative
link |
or interesting when you look back
link |
that defined your approach and who you were at that time?
link |
Let me say that I did not care about my victim, all right?
link |
I cared about me, is what I cared about.
link |
It's rough to admit that.
link |
You don't give a shit what you're doing to anybody else,
link |
you only care about you.
link |
But that's the truth of the matter.
link |
I didn't care about the victims.
link |
The lady, that wasn't even at the beginning of my career
link |
as a cyber criminal, that was right at the last of it.
link |
By that point, Shadow Crew had made
link |
the front cover of Forbes, August of 04.
link |
October 26th of 04, Secret Service had shut us down,
link |
33 people arrested, six countries in six hours.
link |
I was the guy that was publicly mentioned as getting away.
link |
What happened was is I was the guy who was,
link |
I had kind of invented this crime
link |
called tax return identity theft
link |
and was stealing a lot of money.
link |
I went through all my stateside savings
link |
and Shadow Crew gets shut down.
link |
I don't have any way to come in with any money,
link |
so I start running counterfeit cashier's checks,
link |
defrauding people with that,
link |
having them send products or bullion collections,
link |
what have you, by COD, collect on delivery,
link |
and I would pay with it
link |
with a counterfeit cashier's check.
link |
This lady was on eBay.
link |
She had been collecting these silver coins all of her life.
link |
You know, the U.S. currency used to be,
link |
the coins used to be silver,
link |
so she had a whole collection of these things,
link |
like, I don't know, 80, 90 pounds of this stuff,
link |
and I'm a very good social engineer.
link |
So, convinced her that I was a legitimate person,
link |
that, you know, hey, send it to COD,
link |
you can use my FedEx account to do that
link |
or my UPS account to do that.
link |
I'll pay with a cashier's check,
link |
you can take it in, same as cash.
link |
She believed that, she was, even on the ad,
link |
and we talked on the phone and everything else,
link |
she had told me that she was a single parent,
link |
and it was the only money that she had
link |
to put a roof on the house for her and her kids,
link |
and I didn't give a damn.
link |
I didn't give a damn.
link |
What was more important was me at that point.
link |
Can I ask you a question about the social engineering aspect?
link |
So maybe specifics like the methodology,
link |
email, you said phone,
link |
maybe you could discuss this process
link |
from a bigger philosophical perspective
link |
of what is it about human beings
link |
that makes it possible to be social engineer,
link |
to be victims of fraud?
link |
So, first let me say that I became a social engineer
link |
as a child, all right, because the adults in my environment,
link |
as a child, I had to know exactly what they were thinking
link |
and be able to try to manipulate that for survival.
link |
So I became a social engineer for survival initially,
link |
all right, and one of the things that I've seen
link |
with a lot of cyber criminals is the exact same thing.
link |
They're really expert ones.
link |
They become a social engineer as a child,
link |
then later on, they use those tools to victimize others.
link |
Which is fascinating because you're,
link |
in order to understand what others are thinking,
link |
you have to be extremely good at empathy.
link |
So you have to like really put yourself
link |
in the shoes of the other person.
link |
And yet, in order to do cyber crime,
link |
you have to not care about the pain
link |
that might cause them once you manipulate them.
link |
So you have to empathize and yet not care.
link |
Exactly, and I would argue,
link |
I would argue that that is not a sociopath
link |
because a cyber criminal, and I was no different,
link |
most cyber criminals justify those actions.
link |
So the justification becomes what's important.
link |
With me, the justification was why I did it for my family,
link |
did it for my wife, did it for my stripper girlfriend.
link |
So, and I believe those justifications.
link |
That's a good story, I heard that one.
link |
I like that, because I care about love a lot.
link |
Yeah, so the big picture of that is trust.
link |
How do you establish trust with a potential victim?
link |
All right, now I would argue online
link |
that that trust is established through a combination
link |
of technology, tools, social engineering.
link |
All right, so we trust our tech.
link |
We trust our cell phones, we trust our laptops.
link |
A lot of times we don't understand how they operate,
link |
but we trust the news that comes across the line.
link |
We trust the phone numbers that show up.
link |
We trust IP addresses if we're advanced enough
link |
to look at an IP address or a domain
link |
or anything else like that.
link |
Criminals use tools to manipulate that,
link |
spoof phone numbers, spoof browser fingerprints,
link |
whatever that may be, whatever the tool may be.
link |
Then that lays a base level of trust.
link |
At that point, you shoot in with the social engineering
link |
and lay whatever story that is in order to manipulate
link |
that victim to act not out of reason,
link |
but out of emotion all of a sudden.
link |
This is fascinating about the way humans interact
link |
with the world, which is you're almost too afraid
link |
to not trust the world.
link |
You have to find a balance.
link |
You have a lot of conspiracy theories now
link |
about distrusting institutions and thinking
link |
like everything around us.
link |
It's like I've been listening to people
link |
who believe the earth is flat.
link |
And that conspiracy theory is fascinating to me
link |
because it basically says that you can't trust anybody.
link |
Like everything you hear is a lie.
link |
So that's one, you can live that life
link |
or you can live a life
link |
where you're just naively trusting everything.
link |
And we as humans have to,
link |
because that life is kind of full of happiness
link |
if nobody screws you over.
link |
Cause you meet people with the joyful heart
link |
and you get excited and all that kind of stuff.
link |
But if you do that too much, you're gonna get burned.
link |
So you have to find some kind of balance
link |
in terms of optimizing happiness where you trust,
link |
I mean, but verify and on the internet
link |
that becomes really tricky.
link |
You're almost too afraid to distrust everything
link |
cause you'll never get anything done on the internet.
link |
But then if you trust too much, you can get screwed over.
link |
And so the social engineering comes in where you're like,
link |
I'm not sure if I should trust this.
link |
You kind of help them build the narrative
link |
where it's like, it's good.
link |
So in a lot of the times that social engineering
link |
is just feeding into what the victim wants to believe.
link |
It's not really coming up with a brand new story at all.
link |
It's just knowing what that victim is,
link |
what the motivations of that victim is
link |
feeding into it at that point.
link |
So you have to, again,
link |
that social engineer has to almost immediately know
link |
what's driving that person that they're talking about.
link |
If I'm working on a phone,
link |
talking to someone over the phone,
link |
I have to know within seconds what I need to say,
link |
how I need to act to interact
link |
with that customer service agent
link |
or whoever I'm talking to on the other end of the line.
link |
So fascinating because you truly are empathizing
link |
with the other person.
link |
This business man, Steven Schwarzman.
link |
And I've talked to a few times.
link |
He mentioned this thing that,
link |
the way you build deep relationships
link |
is you really kind of notice
link |
the things that people are telling you.
link |
Like what they want and what they're bothered by,
link |
what are their big problems in their lives?
link |
Because everybody's saying that all the time
link |
and most of us are just ignoring it.
link |
But if you take the time to listen,
link |
you know somebody at that point.
link |
Absolutely you do.
link |
Then you have to be able to dismiss it.
link |
You have to dismiss it after.
link |
You're looking for that just to see
link |
how I can manipulate that is what you're trying to do.
link |
So the lady was one story,
link |
another truly despicable story.
link |
We'll get to script in a second.
link |
But another truly despicable story.
link |
We were one of the really first groups
link |
that started phishing attacks.
link |
So that is a social engineering attack.
link |
That's another social engineering attack.
link |
That's sending that fake email out
link |
that looks like it's coming from a website
link |
or your financial organization or whatever
link |
and saying, hey, we've got a security problem.
link |
We need you to update your account information.
link |
Well, back then no one had ever seen a phishing attack.
link |
So you could ask for all the information.
link |
You were getting just complete identity profiles
link |
on a phishing email.
link |
Nowadays you can't do that.
link |
Nowadays you look for basically credentials
link |
because everyone is aware of phishing.
link |
But back then it was complete information.
link |
We had phished out, I don't know, 200,000 eTrade accounts.
link |
That's what we had the login credentials for.
link |
The login password, yeah.
link |
Login password, complete social, date of birth,
link |
mother's maiden account information, everything else.
link |
So we had access to those eTrade accounts.
link |
eTrade initially had no security in place.
link |
So you could cash out the account,
link |
ACH the money out to whatever account you wanted to,
link |
went through just fine.
link |
Made them alive on that for four to six months.
link |
eTrade got to the point where you couldn't
link |
do any ACH coming out.
link |
They locked everything down.
link |
Well, you're still sitting on thousands of eTrade accounts.
link |
How do you make money on that?
link |
That's a good question.
link |
So what you do is you find some fat cat that's
link |
got his retirement invested in blue chips.
link |
Same time you find a penny stock,
link |
you open up a brand new account, buy into that penny stock,
link |
cash the fat cat out, buy into that same penny stock,
link |
bump and dump schemes all of a sudden.
link |
So you're destroying people's retirement accounts
link |
for just a few thousand dollars.
link |
And of course, eTrade's response is, not our problem.
link |
It's your problem.
link |
You shouldn't give up your password
link |
or what have you at that point.
link |
And you still see that issue today with Zelle scams
link |
and things like that.
link |
So you know, the instant payment that they have.
link |
So it's the same kind of operation,
link |
same type of difference with different payment mechanisms.
link |
You find an easy way to exploit a system,
link |
and typically the financial organization, not our problem.
link |
Our system's secure, it's the humans, it's their errors.
link |
You know, you've got some culpability in that,
link |
and you're just trying to avoid paying the part of the bill
link |
is what's going on.
link |
One of the things, just to stand fishing for a bit,
link |
is it really makes me sad because there's been people
link |
on all kinds of platforms, including YouTube comments,
link |
They figured out emails somehow.
link |
So people are now seeing the followers
link |
of this particular podcast who are fans,
link |
they're finding them on platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube
link |
and so on, and they are figuring out
link |
ways to get to those people by another channel, which
link |
I suppose seems more authentic to those people.
link |
So they send them an email from what looks like me,
link |
and with this kind of loving message.
link |
The interesting thing, the emails
link |
sound like something I would write.
link |
So these aren't even, at this stage, it's not even,
link |
it doesn't feel automated.
link |
Or if it's automated, there's a human in the loop
link |
that's really fine tuning it to a specific,
link |
or maybe I'm very predictable.
link |
But it's very loving in the way I would write that message.
link |
So think about that, all right?
link |
So when Phishing first comes out,
link |
you could look at the language of the text or the website
link |
and say, eh, if you were paying attention, that's so OK.
link |
So that's not an English speaker who wrote that, typically.
link |
But as time has went on, as the awareness of what a Phishing
link |
attack looks like, we have people
link |
that are sitting down now and making sure
link |
that the language is proper.
link |
It gets worse than that, though.
link |
If you look at business email compromise,
link |
so the way a business email compromise typically works
link |
is the attacker will find a payroll person, find a CEO.
link |
He will fashion a spear phishing email, which
link |
is that's a Phishing attack that's targeting
link |
one specific individual.
link |
So he'll fashion a spear phishing email.
link |
And the way he does that is he pulls all the information
link |
he possibly can on that person, that CEO.
link |
Maybe he'll spear that CEO just to get their login credentials
link |
to their email, just to read the emails.
link |
And he'll go in there, and he'll start
link |
reading all these emails.
link |
He'll specifically read the emails to the payroll
link |
department, see what that relationship is.
link |
Are they talking about their kids,
link |
talking about relationships, talking about vacation?
link |
What are they talking about?
link |
How are they talking?
link |
Are they friendly?
link |
What are they doing, all right?
link |
So then he decides, well, I'm going to go ahead
link |
and spear phish the payroll department as well.
link |
So then he spear phishes in, gets those credentials.
link |
At the same time, he creates a Unicode domain
link |
in whatever the company name is, all right?
link |
So instead of that English alphabet I,
link |
he's got that Russian letter that looks like an I
link |
but without the dot on top, all right?
link |
Comes back into the email, into the payroll email,
link |
blocks the real CEO's email, replaces that with the Unicode
link |
email that he's got, and then sends out a message
link |
using the correct language, the correct relationships,
link |
everything else, and says, hey, we're updating
link |
our account status, I need you to send this payment
link |
instead of over here, they've set up a new account,
link |
send all payments over here now.
link |
And that is business email compromise in a nutshell,
link |
all right, works great.
link |
Probably the larger the organization,
link |
the more susceptible to that kind of attack
link |
because there's like a distribution of responsibility
link |
to where you're more likely to believe that,
link |
okay, this other person is responsible,
link |
I'm sure they secured everything.
link |
I'm okay listening to this.
link |
So that's business email compromise,
link |
and those crimes, and that's one of the things
link |
you see about cybercrime.
link |
Cybercrime's not really sophisticated.
link |
It's not, the attacks are not sophisticated.
link |
The stat is 90% of every single attack uses a known exploit.
link |
It's not zero day attacks, they're out there,
link |
but if you're a criminal waiting on a zero day to profit,
link |
you're gonna starve to death.
link |
The meat and potatoes are that 90%, known exploits.
link |
And then the rest is, well, you're saying it's,
link |
maybe you mean it's not technically sophisticated,
link |
but it's social engineering sophisticated.
link |
Very sophisticated on that end, very sophisticated.
link |
I mean, it's a fascinating study of that.
link |
That establishment of trust and then using that trust
link |
to defraud that victim.
link |
That is something.
link |
I wish, obviously, all of these folks
link |
are really good at hiding.
link |
I wish you could tell their stories in a way,
link |
which is why you're fascinating,
link |
is you're able to tell these stories now,
link |
because it is studying human nature by exploiting it,
link |
but you get to understand our weak points,
link |
our hope, our desire to trust others.
link |
Also, the weak points and the failures of digital systems
link |
and at scale, humans have to connect.
link |
This is a weird question, asking for a friend.
link |
Is spear phishing itself illegal?
link |
What's the legality here?
link |
Oh, it's all illegal.
link |
So here's what, okay, let me construct an example.
link |
So if my friend were to spear phish like a CEO, right,
link |
and get their information and after they get control,
link |
say, of their Twitter account,
link |
they tweet something loving and positive, what's the crime?
link |
Unauthorized access of advice.
link |
What will be the punishment, do you think?
link |
That becomes questionable.
link |
So no monetary loss, or was there a monetary loss?
link |
Probably not, all right?
link |
So you have to figure out who the victim is
link |
before charges are pressed.
link |
Now, the crime would be unauthorized access, all right?
link |
But no real victim on that,
link |
unless the person whose account you took over
link |
takes exception to that.
link |
So there's not really standard fines.
link |
Probably nothing's gonna happen, right.
link |
So, I mean, that's kind of interesting,
link |
because it's, so when I got the ransomware,
link |
when I got the zero day attack on the QNAP mass,
link |
they basically say the criminal is QNAP, the company,
link |
for having so many security vulnerabilities.
link |
They're like, you are the victim of QNAP's incompetence.
link |
That's the way they kind of phrase it.
link |
And see, I don't agree with that.
link |
I don't agree with that at all.
link |
Let's, so I've got 130 page class action lawsuit
link |
printed out at the house, I've been going through it,
link |
that catalogs how SolarWinds lied for years
link |
about their vulnerabilities, and they lied to investors.
link |
The people who came in, the honorees who they would hire,
link |
would, you know, they would not pay attention to them
link |
when they said, you know, you've got these issues,
link |
they would say, go away, shit like that for years,
link |
until SolarWinds, you know, the attacks become apparent.
link |
My view on that is that the only person
link |
responsible for the crime are the criminals
link |
who did the attacking, the actual criminals, not SolarWinds.
link |
Now, does that mean that SolarWinds isn't all fucked up?
link |
They are, and there needs to be some accounting in place.
link |
But the only individual, the only people responsible
link |
for crime are the criminals, and that's either online,
link |
in the physical world, what have you.
link |
Being an idiot is not a crime.
link |
You know, being criminally negligent is,
link |
and I think that SolarWinds is certainly responsible,
link |
not responsible, they're culpable for what happened.
link |
Can you actually tell folks about SolarWinds?
link |
What is it, what are some interesting things
link |
that you're aware of?
link |
SolarWinds was very, it provided a backbone of security
link |
for hundreds, thousands of different companies.
link |
If you looked at, a lot of security companies
link |
were using SolarWinds that would allow you
link |
to get a snapshot of the entire system
link |
that they were working on.
link |
So what happens is, is you get a Russian group that comes in
link |
and they basically, they hack into SolarWinds
link |
and get access to it, and it allows them
link |
to view every single thing, I mean, every single thing
link |
about every single client that SolarWinds had at that point.
link |
So entire snapshots of all the IP that was going on,
link |
all the emails, all the communications,
link |
every single secret that was going on with those companies.
link |
If a company had software like Microsoft,
link |
it allowed them to look at the source code
link |
of everything that was going on.
link |
I mean, it's just a complete and total nightmare, all right?
link |
And something that you are not going to recover from.
link |
I mean, it's done at that point.
link |
You know, there's not been a lot of news lately about it,
link |
but the fact of the matter is, is that's the type of attack
link |
that's a catastrophic attack.
link |
So there's a huge amount of information
link |
that was read, saved elsewhere probably.
link |
And so now there's people sitting on information.
link |
So think about one of the attack vectors
link |
has been Microsoft Outlook 365, things like that.
link |
This allowed the attackers to look
link |
at the source codes of that.
link |
So they have the source code now,
link |
so they go through it line by line.
link |
Where are the vulnerabilities?
link |
Let's find new vulnerabilities, new zero days.
link |
You know, I said zero days aren't common,
link |
but this opens up an entire new threat surface
link |
So it's a completely catastrophic attack.
link |
Once all the chips are down, everything's tallied up,
link |
people are going to be like, yeah, we're done.
link |
All right, this whole computer thing,
link |
we tried it and we're walking away.
link |
That's terrifying.
link |
So you're saying that there's not been obvious
link |
big negative impact from that yet.
link |
There's been a lot of negative impact,
link |
but we're just starting.
link |
So the capacity for destruction is huge here.
link |
How much involvement from nation states
link |
do you think there is on this?
link |
You know, it's interesting.
link |
So you've got Iran, you've got North Korea,
link |
China, Russia, you got the big four.
link |
You also got Brazil.
link |
You've got all these other countries
link |
that are interested in the United States as well.
link |
Nation states are interesting
link |
depending on who the nation state is.
link |
All right, so Russia is very good about working
link |
with the type of criminal that I used to be.
link |
You know, they'll enlist these guys
link |
and steal information or what have you,
link |
then Russia will take the information they want to,
link |
and they'll basically go off and sell whatever you want to
link |
and make some money.
link |
China's all about IP.
link |
North Korea is about stealing money
link |
because they really don't know
link |
what the hell else to do right now, but...
link |
So North Korea is actively involved in cybercrime.
link |
They've stolen a shitload of Bitcoin, everything else.
link |
So absolutely, they're actively involved with that.
link |
Very, very skilled attackers, very skilled.
link |
But even if you look at, you know,
link |
I told you that stat about 90%, all right?
link |
So even though SolarWinds is going to be
link |
the number one attack,
link |
the followup to that is this NotPetya attack that happened.
link |
And so that was the most sophisticated attack
link |
launched by the Russian Sandworm Group
link |
using all known exploits throughout.
link |
So it's not, again, it's not...
link |
You're right in the sophistication
link |
is typically not technical sophistication,
link |
but it's a social engineering sophistication.
link |
How do you get these things put together
link |
in line to attack and succeed?
link |
But when you get access to the source code,
link |
that's where technical sophistication could really do
link |
And that's when you find out real quick,
link |
that's what separates the men from the boys in this game.
link |
All right, because all of a sudden it's not,
link |
I don't have to worry about social engineering.
link |
I've got source codes and I've got professionals
link |
that are looking at that.
link |
And that's your ass.
link |
Which then enables probably even more powerful
link |
social engineering methods too.
link |
I mean, it's just the cascade of...
link |
Is this terrifying to you, by the way?
link |
That this world that we're living in,
link |
as we put more and more of ourselves on the internet,
link |
into the metaverse, that there's so many more
link |
attack vectors on our wellbeing?
link |
What's terrifying to me, I used to preach it on Shadow Crew,
link |
is the idea that the perception of truth
link |
is more important than the truth itself.
link |
It doesn't matter what the facts are,
link |
it matters what I can convince you of.
link |
That's what's terrifying to me.
link |
So you look at deep fakes, you look at fake news,
link |
all this stuff that's going out,
link |
that becomes truly terrifying.
link |
Maybe there's an angle where it's freeing,
link |
if nothing is true and you can't trust anything.
link |
But you see, we as human beings, we wanna trust.
link |
We do, we need human interaction.
link |
And for that human interaction,
link |
you have to have a degree of trust.
link |
But it's more like you let go of an idea of absolute truth
link |
and it more becomes like a blockchain style consensus.
link |
So you let go of like, you know what?
link |
There's this human dream, you get this on the internet,
link |
you get like facts, as if there's at the bottom,
link |
at the bottom, there's one turtle that's holding
link |
this scroll that says, these are the truths of the world.
link |
The problem is, I mean, maybe believing
link |
that is counterproductive.
link |
Maybe human civilization is an ongoing process of consensus.
link |
And so it's always going to be, everything is shrouded
link |
and you can call them lies or you can call them inaccuracies
link |
or you can call them delusions.
link |
It's constantly going to be, it's going to be a sea of lies
link |
and delusions, but our hope is to over time
link |
develop bigger and bigger islands of consensus
link |
that allows us to live a stable and happy society.
link |
Don't call it true, call it a stable consensus
link |
that creates a high quality of life
link |
for the inhabitants of the island.
link |
I like it, I mean, I like it.
link |
I mean, we're going to agree on this.
link |
And then don't use outlook, no, I'm just kidding.
link |
So maybe a step back, you mentioned, I'd love to talk
link |
about ShadowCrew, maybe this is the right time
link |
to actually, yeah, let's go to ShadowCrew
link |
because it's such a fascinating story.
link |
So tell me the story of building ShadowCrew,
link |
the precursor to today's darknet and darknet markets.
link |
This is why you're the original Godfather.
link |
This is it, this is it.
link |
I faked a car accident to get married,
link |
got the money from that.
link |
I remember, like my dad, man.
link |
I'm the guy that, you know, I get from mom,
link |
I get the criminal mindset.
link |
From dad, I get that, don't want him to leave.
link |
To get married, what's that story?
link |
How did you fall in love there?
link |
My first girlfriend was a preacher's daughter
link |
and crazy over her, dated her for five years.
link |
And she figured out pretty quickly that,
link |
well, not quickly, it took her five years
link |
to figure out that Brett Johnson is not the man of God.
link |
I could talk it, but more that agnostic than anything,
link |
she breaks up with me.
link |
So I was at the community college.
link |
You'd make one hell of a preacher by the way.
link |
I've got that Langston Hughes problem.
link |
I'm looking for Jesus to show up and he just doesn't.
link |
So I was at the community college
link |
and I was a straight asshole.
link |
I was arrogant, conceited, everything else.
link |
And I had posted an advertisement
link |
on one of the billboards looking for an adult babysitter,
link |
hot blonde, you know, come visit me in the library.
link |
Buddy of mine shows up and he's like, Brett.
link |
And I was like, yeah.
link |
He's like, hottest girl in school, right down the hall.
link |
And I was like, serious?
link |
And I was like, let's go see.
link |
Walk over and there's these two guys that are hitting on her.
link |
So I just walk up and me and Todd, that was my buddy,
link |
walk up and I'm just sitting there and listening.
link |
And they're giving the spill and everything.
link |
And she's just kind of taking it in.
link |
Finally, I looked over and I was like,
link |
you want to get out of here?
link |
And one of the guys looks at me and he's like, hey,
link |
we're talking to you.
link |
And I was like, well, you're talking at her.
link |
You're not talking to her.
link |
I'm about to save her ass from you.
link |
Yeah, that's a smooth pick up line, by the way.
link |
If I ever heard one, that's good.
link |
You want to get out of here?
link |
So start dating, and she was the girl
link |
that screwed my brains out.
link |
And I fell head over heels.
link |
We got married six months later.
link |
That's what love does.
link |
That's what it does.
link |
And she didn't know I was a crook.
link |
She knew I was very bright.
link |
She knew I did a lot of theater, stuff like that.
link |
Got a job at, I was in hazard.
link |
There was no jobs to be had, so I got a job in Lexington,
link |
because we were going to be moving to the UK.
link |
Got a job in Lexington at Lexmark testing printer boards,
link |
So I would leave on a Thursday night,
link |
work three 18 hour shifts at Lexmark,
link |
come back home on Monday.
link |
Got married, faked a car accident
link |
to get the rest of the money that I needed to get married.
link |
And the faking on that, man, I had bought a Chevy Spectrum
link |
Gave like $500 for it.
link |
My aunt had previously defrauded USAA insurance
link |
on a car accident, and she was telling me all about it.
link |
She's like, look, go down to this chiropractor.
link |
Make sure you get the insurance where
link |
they'll pay for a rental car.
link |
They'll pay lost wages.
link |
I was like, they pay lost wages?
link |
She's like, yeah, they pay lost wages.
link |
She's like, by the way, you work for me.
link |
And I was like, I work for you.
link |
And you get to define the wage.
link |
And you could also define how long you were unable to work.
link |
And the chiropractor will sign off on any damn thing.
link |
So my cousin, Ronnie, he figures out that I'm going.
link |
He finds out I'm going to fake this car accident.
link |
So he comes to me.
link |
He's like, hey, man, can I get in on that?
link |
I was like, yeah, man, you get on that.
link |
So this kid, he's five days younger than I am.
link |
This kid, he goes to the dentist the day
link |
that we're faking it, has a tooth pulled,
link |
tells the dentist not to numb it, not to stitch it,
link |
He shows up the day that we're driving out
link |
to fake the accident.
link |
He's got blood all over his shirt.
link |
He's still bleeding out of the mouth and everything else.
link |
I'm like, are you OK?
link |
He's like, yeah, man, it's going to be good.
link |
It's going to be good.
link |
My mom, by this point, I'm living with my grandparents.
link |
My mom is up in the head of a hollow.
link |
So we're like, we'll just do it up there.
link |
We'll go act like we're visiting my mom on the way back out,
link |
ran over a mountain.
link |
So we go visit and everything, come back out that night,
link |
run over the side of the hill.
link |
Me and Ronnie walk back up.
link |
Of course, it totals the car.
link |
Walk back to my mom's, acting like we've wrecked.
link |
She knows what time it is and everything else.
link |
And file the claims.
link |
So that gets the money to get married.
link |
And me and my wife moved from Hazard to Lexington.
link |
And I'm the kid that my crime, usually, if I was a single guy,
link |
wouldn't break the law.
link |
I would be all right.
link |
But females involved, oh, yeah.
link |
Got to spend the money.
link |
Got to show them gifts.
link |
Everything else was never enough to show love
link |
in some sort of healthy way.
link |
Always had to go overboard.
link |
And typically, it was buying or stealing
link |
some sort of expensive crap.
link |
So that was the thing.
link |
That was the way you show love is by buying expensive gifts.
link |
Or something overboard.
link |
Back then, with Susan, initially, it was,
link |
don't worry about working.
link |
You just worry about going to school.
link |
She was a music major.
link |
I was like, you just worry about going to school.
link |
So don't worry about cooking and cleaning.
link |
So not only was I this guy that was going overboard,
link |
but I was kind of a control freak, too.
link |
So here I am, 60 hour a week job, 18 hour class load,
link |
cooking and cleaning.
link |
Something had to give.
link |
Quit the job and start back in fraud.
link |
And trying to hide that from her at the same time.
link |
So it was initially telemarketing fraud.
link |
The first job I had was a telemarketer at a cemetery,
link |
selling gravesites.
link |
And then that ended.
link |
Went over to work for the Shriners Circus, Shriners
link |
And it was a third party company that
link |
was doing all the telemarketing.
link |
Made really good money doing that.
link |
And then they pivoted over to working with Kiwanis Clubs,
link |
selling food baskets to the food banks and everything.
link |
So I stole the phone list and started at my own Kiwanis Club
link |
and would do the telemarketing, go out twice a week
link |
and pick up checks.
link |
Well, what happened was is I'm going out picking up checks,
link |
go knock on a door.
link |
Turns out one of the persons that I had called
link |
was a law enforcement officer.
link |
So he was like, who are you?
link |
I'm with the Kiwanis Club.
link |
And he's like, no, you're not.
link |
So got arrested, spent three months in a county jail
link |
for theft by deception.
link |
And we had to move from Lexington back to Hazard
link |
and live with Susan's parents.
link |
They had gotten a desktop computer, HP.
link |
And I started surfing around online.
link |
And didn't really know how to make money on eBay.
link |
At about the same time, I'm committing low level frauds
link |
And I don't really talk about that in the past.
link |
The first time I've really talked about that.
link |
But I would pay for it with bad checks.
link |
So more person, so not using a platform like eBay and more.
link |
I would find somebody that had like a stereo system on eBay,
link |
something like that.
link |
And I'd pay for it with a bad check
link |
and would rely on them not to chase me
link |
because they were out of state at that point.
link |
And the dollar amounts were very low.
link |
So got the money to move to finally
link |
did those schemes enough to get the money
link |
to move back to Lexington.
link |
And by this point, I'm doing, like I said,
link |
these schemes on eBay.
link |
And I'm like, there's got to be a better way
link |
to make money on eBay.
link |
So didn't really know how.
link |
One night, I'm watching Inside Edition with Bill Riley.
link |
And they're profiling Beanie Babies.
link |
So I'm sitting there watching.
link |
The one they're profiling is this one called Peanut,
link |
the Royal Blue Elephant.
link |
Selling for $1,500 on eBay.
link |
I'm sitting there going like, shit,
link |
I need to find me a peanut.
link |
My initial thought was, well, there's
link |
got to be one in one of these Hallmark stores
link |
in Kentucky someplace.
link |
So I skip class the next day.
link |
Went out around all the Hallmark stores looking for peanut.
link |
He's on eBay for $1,500.
link |
So after a few hours of that, I'm like, hmm.
link |
Turns out they had a little gray Beanie Baby elephants
link |
Picked up one of those for $8.
link |
Stopped by Kroger on the way home.
link |
Picked up a pack of Blue Rit dye.
link |
Went home, tried to dye the little guy.
link |
So that was a nightmare.
link |
Turns out they're made out of polyester.
link |
Get them out of the bath.
link |
Looks like they've got the mange.
link |
And what happens is, so I'm trying to dye the damn thing.
link |
I'm like, well, that's not going to work.
link |
That's just not going to work.
link |
So I got online, found a picture of a real one,
link |
posted it on eBay, and I was like, well, what I can do
link |
is I can claim that's the one I've got
link |
and then maybe claim that it got messed up in the mail
link |
and work out like that.
link |
So posted a picture of a real one online.
link |
Woman thought I had the real thing.
link |
That social engineering kicks in immediately.
link |
I didn't want to be on the defensive.
link |
I wanted to put her on the defensive.
link |
So as soon as she wins the bid, I send her a message.
link |
Hey, we've not done any business before.
link |
I don't even know if I can trust you.
link |
What I need you to do, protects us both.
link |
Go down the US Postal Service.
link |
Get two money orders totaling $1,500.
link |
Send them to me issued by the US government.
link |
That way we're both protected.
link |
Soon as I get the money orders, I'll send you your animal.
link |
She believed that.
link |
Didn't ask any questions at all.
link |
She believed that.
link |
Sent me the money orders.
link |
I cashed them out.
link |
Sent her the creature.
link |
Immediately got a phone call.
link |
I didn't order this.
link |
My response, lady, you ordered a blue elephant.
link |
I sent you a blue fish elephant.
link |
And she got pissed.
link |
And she kept calling.
link |
What I found out, and that's really
link |
the first lesson of cybercrime that most of these criminals,
link |
including self, learns.
link |
If you delay a victim long enough,
link |
just keep putting them off.
link |
A lot of them, they get exasperated,
link |
throw their hands in the air, walk away.
link |
You don't hear from them.
link |
And none of them, to this day, none of them
link |
complain to law enforcement.
link |
So it's a mixture of you're exhausted by the process,
link |
so it's just easier to walk away,
link |
and second, almost like an embarrassment.
link |
So there's a whole slew of reasons, all right?
link |
There's the exhaustion, certainly.
link |
There's the embarrassment.
link |
So if you figure out, if you look at it today,
link |
where does the embarrassment come from?
link |
Well, the media, family members,
link |
we're all very good about blaming the victim for crimes.
link |
Why would you click on the link?
link |
Why would you send money to somebody you don't know?
link |
So you've got that that's going on.
link |
You've got the issue of, who do you complain to?
link |
Back then, you didn't know.
link |
Do you complain to local police?
link |
Because she's in another state, so which local police
link |
do you complain to?
link |
Do you complain to the feds?
link |
Well, the dollar amounts aren't high enough
link |
to complain to feds.
link |
Feds are going to tell you to go local.
link |
Local's going to tell you, hey, it happened in Kentucky.
link |
Kentucky's going to tell you, well, shit, you're over there.
link |
We need you to come in.
link |
So there's this whole issue of the jurisdiction,
link |
of the blame factor, everything else.
link |
So I got away with that crime and did it under my own name
link |
I kept going and got better at it,
link |
started to understand how to hide identities,
link |
Started selling pirated software.
link |
Pirated software led into installing mod chips.
link |
The initial pirated software was Sega Saturn, PlayStation 1.
link |
Well, you had to have a mod chip in those
link |
to play the pirated disk, so I started
link |
selling and installing mod chips.
link |
That led into installing mod chips in the cable television
link |
boxes so you could watch all the pay per view, which in turn
link |
led into programming satellite DSS cards.
link |
Those 18 inch RCA satellite systems,
link |
pull the card out of it, program it, turns on all the channels.
link |
Started doing that.
link |
Can we just pause?
link |
That is very entrepreneurial.
link |
So just technically, so there's laws and rules
link |
that you're breaking nonstop.
link |
So there's also legitimate ways of doing
link |
that, which is break the rules of the conventions of the past.
link |
That's the first principles thing.
link |
That's what Elon Musk and his ilk do all the time.
link |
That is guts and brilliance.
link |
But when it's crossing the lines of the law,
link |
actually sometimes the law is outdated.
link |
The thing is, as a human being, you
link |
have to then compute the ethical damage you're doing.
link |
Like ethically, the damage you're
link |
doing about other human beings, that is fundamentally
link |
the thing that you're breaking, is you're
link |
adding to the suffering in the world in one way or another,
link |
and you're justifying it.
link |
But in terms of me sort of as an engineer,
link |
that is some gutsy thinking.
link |
That's how Woz and Steve Jobs thought.
link |
That's innovation.
link |
And maybe just think, if you can introspect your thinking
link |
process here, this is a new, I like
link |
how you remember this in HP, this
link |
is a totally new thing to you.
link |
Computers is another domain.
link |
How were you figuring these puzzles out,
link |
presumably mostly alone?
link |
When you were thinking through these problems, is there,
link |
this is a strange question to ask,
link |
but what is your thinking process?
link |
What is your approach to solving these problems?
link |
So the approach is you do something, and you fuck it up,
link |
and you're like, you think back, OK, how do I fix that?
link |
You fix that aspect, you commit the crime again.
link |
And it goes a little bit further, and it screws up.
link |
OK, how do I fix that?
link |
What's the issue on that?
link |
How do I fix that?
link |
So there's not a deep design thinking like that?
link |
Later on, it becomes that.
link |
Once you lay that groundwork of the way
link |
these schemes are working, it becomes that.
link |
And you can apply that to other things in cybercrime
link |
But initially, it's basically trial and error.
link |
You've got a problem, how do you solve that problem?
link |
So I'm committing these crimes under my name,
link |
how do I solve that?
link |
Well, one of the first principles
link |
that we started to teach on Shadow Crew
link |
is all crime should begin with identity theft.
link |
That's one of the main first principles
link |
that a lot of people to this day still don't really get.
link |
All right, why would I commit a crime under my name
link |
if I can do it under your name?
link |
So that's one of the big buffers.
link |
And that takes trial and error to get
link |
to that point where you start to understand
link |
that's the way crime should operate if you're a criminal.
link |
But with me, it's trial and error.
link |
It's that childhood where that mindset
link |
is kind of ingrained in you where you're looking
link |
for ways, let's say nontraditional ways
link |
of getting around things or getting through things.
link |
I mean, one of the questions I'll probably ask this later
link |
is there's also a unique aspect to the outcome
link |
of what you were doing, which is you weren't,
link |
you didn't get caught for a very long time.
link |
We'll talk about why that is.
link |
And the thing is, it's so interesting,
link |
all crime probably should, to be effective,
link |
should start with identity theft.
link |
I like that identity theft
link |
because identity theft can take so many forms.
link |
So yes, so Shadow Crew.
link |
So what's, so as we're, you started with love.
link |
Started with love.
link |
So now we're doing these schemes online.
link |
I'm selling to these,
link |
I'm programming these satellite DSS cards.
link |
And one of the interesting things,
link |
and you still see that to this day,
link |
is something will happen
link |
that will create an industry for criminals, all right?
link |
So what happened is Canada, Canadian judge,
link |
rules about the same time
link |
that I'm doing these satellite cards,
link |
Canadian judge comes out and says,
link |
hey, it's legal for my citizens to pirate those signals.
link |
And his reasoning was is since RCA
link |
doesn't sell the systems up here,
link |
my citizens can pirate it.
link |
Okay, so what happens is is overnight,
link |
about the same time PayPal comes into play.
link |
So PayPal is coming right online at about the same time.
link |
Overnight, a little cottage industry
link |
pops up in the United States.
link |
You go down to Best Buy, buy the system for $100,
link |
take it out in the parking lot, open system up,
link |
pull it, open box up, pull the system out,
link |
pull the card out, throw the system away,
link |
program the card, ship its ass to Canada, $500 a pop.
link |
Started doing that.
link |
Making, you know, $3,000, $4,000 a week doing that.
link |
I'm like, yeah, that's good.
link |
I have so many orders, I can't fill all the orders
link |
and quickly think to myself,
link |
why do I need to fill any of them?
link |
They're in Canada.
link |
You know, who are they gonna complain to?
link |
Because I already found out people don't complain, all right?
link |
They're not gonna complain to anybody.
link |
Especially in Canada.
link |
Especially in Canada.
link |
And I'm having them send money.
link |
That's when PayPal's first into play.
link |
And it amazes me that everybody is using PayPal.
link |
It's like, you don't even have to really ask.
link |
They're like, can we pay by,
link |
yeah, you can pay all day long by PayPal.
link |
And PayPal had no clue what they were doing with security.
link |
So it's like, okay.
link |
So they're sending money to PayPal.
link |
I'm having the PayPal cashed out to bank accounts
link |
in my name at that point.
link |
And I get scared because by that point,
link |
I'm still in four to $6,000 a week.
link |
And I'm like, somebody's gonna be looking at money laundering.
link |
So get it in my head.
link |
I'm like, best thing that I can do
link |
is get a fake driver's license,
link |
open up a bank account using that driver's license,
link |
cash out at the ATM.
link |
No idea where to get a fake ID.
link |
So I get online, looked around.
link |
Spent a couple of weeks looking around.
link |
Thought I found a guy.
link |
He went by the screen name of Fake ID Man.
link |
Thought I found a guy, sent him $200, sent him my picture.
link |
And I'm like, what the hell, man?
link |
He had a little website set up with reviews.
link |
And I'm like, oh, it's all legitimate.
link |
He's building that trust that I talked about.
link |
So the end result, I got pissed.
link |
And there was no site that dealt with anything
link |
criminal or cyber crime related.
link |
The only real avenue you had was an IRC chat session,
link |
internet relay chat.
link |
And that, I'm sure you've been on that.
link |
It's this rolling chat board.
link |
You don't know who the hell you're talking to.
link |
Most of them are full of shit.
link |
You can't trust anybody.
link |
And you're sitting there trying to conduct business.
link |
So if somebody claims they've got a product or service,
link |
Are they just gonna rip you off?
link |
Because in those channels, everyone's a criminal.
link |
I kept looking around and I've happened upon a website
link |
called Counterfeit Library.
link |
And Counterfeit Library only dealt with counterfeit degrees
link |
and certificates, degree mail type stuff.
link |
But they had a forum and no one was using the forum.
link |
So I basically get on there and bitch every day.
link |
I got ripped off, don't know what to do,
link |
bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
link |
About the same time I started doing that,
link |
two other guys show up.
link |
One's named Mr. X, he's out of Los Angeles.
link |
Other guy's named Beelzebub,
link |
he's out of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
link |
And we all become buddies.
link |
So a few weeks of me bitching,
link |
a few weeks of them responding.
link |
Beelzebub gets me on ICQ and he sends me a message.
link |
He's like, I went by the screen name of Gollum
link |
at that point, Gollum Fun.
link |
And he's like, Gollum, I can make you
link |
a fake driver's license.
link |
And I was like, well, motherfucker, do it.
link |
And he's like, well, I'm gonna charge you for it.
link |
I'm like, yeah, you are.
link |
I was like, no, you're not.
link |
And he's like, look, man, he said,
link |
this business, if you're gonna do this,
link |
you have to trust people or you're gonna fail.
link |
He said, so I'm gonna charge you $200,
link |
but I'm gonna send you a driver's license.
link |
Well, by this point, I'm friends with the people
link |
who own Counterfeit Library.
link |
We're emailing, chatting, everything else.
link |
And I tell him, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna send you $200.
link |
That way, when you rip me off, I'll have them ban you
link |
and I don't have to deal with you anymore.
link |
And he's like, bet.
link |
So I sent him $200, sent him my picture.
link |
Two weeks later, I get a driver's license.
link |
Name is Steven Schwecki out of Ohio.
link |
And real guy, worked at ADP payroll to this day,
link |
works at ADP, is where the guy works.
link |
Got the driver's license.
link |
And to me, at that point in time,
link |
it was the prettiest thing that I'd ever seen.
link |
You know, I'd never seen a fake ID before.
link |
I thought it was great.
link |
Turns out, you know, looking back, it was like, eh.
link |
That is kind of a strong first step
link |
in creating a fake identity.
link |
Very strong, very strong.
link |
So this is. So that was like, Gasko just,
link |
on the point he made, that if you're gonna be successful
link |
in this, you should have people you trust.
link |
Is he right on that?
link |
Oh, he's absolutely right.
link |
So you have to have, this is like mob.
link |
You have to have an inner circle that you trust.
link |
You know, I'm sure you've probably
link |
heard me say this before.
link |
Successful cyber crime, all right?
link |
There are three necessities to being successful online
link |
if you're a criminal.
link |
Three necessities are gathering data,
link |
committing the crime, and then cashing it out.
link |
All three of those necessities have to work in conjunction.
link |
If they don't, the crime fails.
link |
The problem, and it's a huge problem,
link |
is that one guy can't do all three things.
link |
You know, you've got the people who gather the data.
link |
Basically, the general store sells people
link |
who sell PII, credit card logins, data tools.
link |
They always sell the spoofed phone numbers
link |
and the RDPs, stuff like that.
link |
A lot of the times, those people don't know
link |
how to commit the crime.
link |
And those people certainly don't know
link |
how to launder the money out, put cash in pocket.
link |
So you've got, either because of a skill level,
link |
sometimes a geographic location,
link |
limits what that individual can do, all right?
link |
So you have to rely on people who are good in areas
link |
where you are not in order for that crime to succeed.
link |
And that means you have to trust those people.
link |
So what happens with Shadow Crew, all right?
link |
So Counterfeit Library is the start, all right?
link |
Counterfeit Library transitions over to Shadow Crew.
link |
Right before that transition, there's a Ukrainian guy.
link |
By the name of Dmitry Golubov.
link |
He was a spammer at that point in time.
link |
He saw what we were doing with Counterfeit Library
link |
He was getting all these credit card details
link |
and this kid, I mean, he's a kid.
link |
This kid has an idea.
link |
And his idea was, I wonder if people would buy
link |
stolen credit card details.
link |
That's pretty good Ukrainian Russian accent.
link |
So he picks up the phone, he calls his buddies.
link |
They call their buddies.
link |
They have a physical conference in Odessa.
link |
150 of these cyber criminals show up.
link |
And they launched this idea,
link |
this launches a website called Carter Planet,
link |
which is the genesis of all modern credit card theft
link |
as we know it, all right?
link |
And so, remember I mentioned those three necessities
link |
Dmitry had all the credit data in the world.
link |
And he partnered with all these other Ukrainians
link |
who had all this data as well.
link |
The problem was, is so much fraud had been committed
link |
on that Eastern side of Europe,
link |
that every card had been shut down.
link |
Even if you were a legitimate card holder
link |
and tried to cash it out,
link |
you weren't doing it at that point.
link |
So again, those three necessities,
link |
gathering data, committing crime, cashing out.
link |
Dmitry had the data.
link |
They could commit the crime.
link |
They could not put cash in pocket.
link |
So we were running counterfeit library.
link |
One day I get this message,
link |
or not a message, one day script shows up.
link |
And he posts just on the general forum.
link |
He posts, hey, I've got credit card data.
link |
Give me an address, give me a burner phone number,
link |
wait five business days, order whatever you want to.
link |
We had never seen anything like that.
link |
We were a PayPal fraud and eBay fraud site,
link |
is what we were, and fake driver's licenses.
link |
So then, and we had,
link |
I guess we had two, 3,000 members at that point.
link |
So the response from the members was, that can't be real.
link |
You've gotta be law enforcement.
link |
It's gotta be trying to get us arrested and everything else.
link |
What, let me backtrack a little bit.
link |
So the driver's license that I had got,
link |
Beelzebub had an idea.
link |
What he wanted to do is he wanted to sell driver's licenses.
link |
Mr. X wanted to sell social security cards.
link |
He made a very passable social security card.
link |
Me, I didn't, I had no skill level on that.
link |
I knew PayPal fraud and eBay fraud.
link |
So Beelzebub was like, I'll tell you what,
link |
you be the reviewer.
link |
That way you get every product or service that comes in.
link |
They'll have to send it to you or let you have access to it.
link |
You can learn the entire game.
link |
And because you're not selling anything,
link |
it gives you legitimacy on the reviews, all right?
link |
So I started out as a reviewer,
link |
the only reviewer on Counterfeit Library.
link |
So over the next year, Beelzebub turns out
link |
he was a pot grower.
link |
He goes back to growing pot
link |
because he wasn't making shit selling driver's licenses.
link |
Mr. X, about a year and a half in,
link |
he gets arrested cashing out driver's, not credit cards,
link |
cashing out to casinos, doing some shit with that.
link |
So I'm the only guy left standing
link |
and I'm at the top of the heap.
link |
And it becomes this thing where if I review somebody,
link |
they make a lot of money.
link |
If I don't, you don't do business here.
link |
So script shows up saying he's got this.
link |
I'm the only reviewer on site.
link |
People think he's law enforcement.
link |
First week it goes like that.
link |
After a while, I'm like, okay, I gotta do something.
link |
And I'm scared, man,
link |
because I'm like, he may be law enforcement.
link |
So I get him on ICQ and I'm like,
link |
hey, you have to be reviewed.
link |
He's like, what the hell is that?
link |
So I tell him what it is, he's like, you reviewed me.
link |
I was like, yeah, that's the idea.
link |
So give him a drop address, give him a burner phone number,
link |
wait five business days,
link |
and I try to hit Dell for $5,000.
link |
I get back on ICQ, hey man, it didn't work.
link |
He's like, give me one more chance.
link |
I was like, look, I'll give you one more chance,
link |
but it's your ass after that.
link |
He's like, one more chance.
link |
I go, okay, give him another address, another phone number,
link |
wait another five business days,
link |
hit Thompson's Computer Warehouse for $4,000,
link |
Order goes through, get the products in.
link |
I post that review on Counterfeit Library,
link |
and literally overnight,
link |
we turn from an eBay PayPal fraud site
link |
to a credit theft site.
link |
And that becomes a lot of money really quickly for members.
link |
So we were doing, now it's called CMP fraud,
link |
card not present fraud.
link |
So you hit an online merchant
link |
with stolen credit card data.
link |
Back then, a fairly experienced fraudster
link |
could profit 30 to $40,000 a month, okay?
link |
Just buying laptops, what have you,
link |
and cashing out, put them on eBay for sale
link |
and sell them like that.
link |
And 30 to 40K a month was the profit on that.
link |
Script had a lot of buddies.
link |
He had people like Roman Vega,
link |
these other guys that would sell
link |
not just credit card data,
link |
but counterfeit physical credit cards as well.
link |
Counterfeit, not stolen.
link |
That must be tough to do.
link |
So the connection.
link |
That must be harder than driver's licenses.
link |
So what BOA initially had,
link |
and I became the United States salesperson for BOA,
link |
but what he had was,
link |
is he was the first dumps provider in the United States.
link |
So on the back of your credit or debit card,
link |
there's a magnetic stripe.
link |
Three data tracks on the stripe.
link |
There was the first data track is the customer's name.
link |
Second data track is the card number,
link |
forward slash 16 digit algorithm outside of that.
link |
We'll get back to that in a few minutes.
link |
Third data track is called indiscriminate data.
link |
No one uses it, all right?
link |
So what's bought and sold is the second data track.
link |
It's called the dump.
link |
And the reason that's sold is when you go into a shop,
link |
you insert the card or you swipe the card,
link |
the only information that's sent out for verification
link |
is the second data track, all right?
link |
That goes to the processor bank for verification.
link |
The first data track, that customer's name,
link |
shows up on the screen of the cashier in front of you.
link |
So what typically happens is,
link |
is you buy 10 of these dumps.
link |
You get 10 counterfeit cards
link |
in code track two on all 10 cards.
link |
Track one, you create one fake driver's license.
link |
Track one is just the name
link |
of that one fake driver's license.
link |
That way, when you go in the shop, swipe the card,
link |
track two gets sent off for verification.
link |
Track one shows up on the screen in front of the cashier.
link |
If you ever ask for ID, you pull out the fake ID.
link |
Everyone's a nice, warm, fuzzy.
link |
You walk out with the cameras, Rolex.
link |
And track one could be, it doesn't have to be connected.
link |
It's not connected to track two.
link |
Not connected at all, all right?
link |
That's one of the big problems, all right?
link |
So Scrip brought a host of technical people
link |
into that type of environment,
link |
all committing credit card theft.
link |
We had proxy providers.
link |
We had all these people that were doing this stuff.
link |
We start making a lot of money, a lot.
link |
And the reason that happens is, again,
link |
Scrip did not have the ability to cash out.
link |
So he was reduced to selling things.
link |
And at the same time, he's looking for,
link |
how do I make more money, all right?
link |
The Ukrainians happened upon this thing
link |
called the CVV1 breach, or hack,
link |
is what they called it.
link |
So what happens is, remember I told you track two,
link |
card number forward slash 16 digit algorithm.
link |
You gotta know the algorithm to encode it
link |
so you can swipe the card or take it to the ATM machine.
link |
You gotta know it.
link |
Now we were fishing data from hell.
link |
I mean, we were doing a lot of fishing, a lot.
link |
We were getting pins, we were getting card numbers,
link |
but you can't get that algorithm.
link |
So Ukrainians start testing stuff.
link |
What they found out was no bank
link |
had implemented the hash on track two.
link |
So you take the card number forward slash any 16 digits,
link |
Take it to the ATM, pull cash out,
link |
because you got the pin, all right?
link |
Started doing that.
link |
Well, wait, sorry, I'm trying to understand.
link |
So that means, so if there's no hash,
link |
are they generating random numbers
link |
or do they have valid numbers for track two?
link |
No numbers needed at all,
link |
as long as just the track two was a complete track two.
link |
So it's a valid track two that doesn't match,
link |
so the pin is the thing that gets you in?
link |
So back then, all right, back then,
link |
what we're talking about is you needed,
link |
typically today you need a whole track two.
link |
You need that valid track two.
link |
All right, you need the 16 digit card number,
link |
forward slash, and then whatever that algorithm
link |
does, the other side of it, all right?
link |
Back then, none of the banks had implemented that algorithm.
link |
So while the algorithm was there,
link |
you didn't need it to encode.
link |
So you can make a lot of money with physical of fake.
link |
So much money that card not present fraud.
link |
Card not present fraud, remember I told you,
link |
was $30,000 to $40,000 a month, all right?
link |
That turned into $30,000 to $40,000 a day.
link |
The Ukrainians, again, they can't cash it out.
link |
They've got all the data on the planet,
link |
but they can't cash it out,
link |
those three necessities of cybercrime.
link |
So the deal became, you have to rely on the Americans.
link |
Tell you what, we'll give you 40%.
link |
So you had all these cashiers
link |
that were 40% of $40,000 a day.
link |
Yeah, we'll take that, all right?
link |
Send the rest of it over to buy Western Union
link |
or what have you to your Ukrainian contact.
link |
That's before cryptocurrency came into play.
link |
Now you had a couple of forerunners
link |
with eGold and Liberty Reserve, things like that.
link |
But back then it starts out with Western Union,
link |
then it becomes prepaid cards,
link |
sending track information over,
link |
loading the card up like that,
link |
and then finally you get to eGold, Liberty Reserve,
link |
and then today it's with crypto that's used.
link |
Started stealing a lot of money, a lot.
link |
And that got law enforcement attention.
link |
So we started to see, I mean, it's a crazy ass story.
link |
We started to see IPs coming in
link |
from law enforcement agencies, government agencies,
link |
because back then they didn't know
link |
how to shield their identity either.
link |
So you saw Secret Service, you saw DoD,
link |
you saw all these like, and you're like,
link |
that's interesting.
link |
So, you know, and at the same time,
link |
it was called a hack, but it wasn't a hack.
link |
We had a guy that worked at T Mobile in Los Angeles.
link |
This is the same guy that back then
link |
published Paris Hilton's phone contact list.
link |
That made a lot of news.
link |
Not only did he do that, but it turned out
link |
that the Los Angeles Secret Service Agency
link |
was using T Mobile phones.
link |
So he's getting text messages of the Secret Service
link |
investigating Shadow Crew,
link |
and he posts those damn things on Shadow Crew.
link |
So I'm sitting there going, head of the pile,
link |
I'm sitting there going, this is not gonna end well.
link |
This is not gonna end well.
link |
So at the same time, I had access,
link |
I started out with access
link |
to the Indiana State Sex Offenders Registry,
link |
and I was using that to create bank accounts,
link |
launder the money out, and I would sell the bank accounts,
link |
They shut that down.
link |
The next database I had access to
link |
was the Texas Driver's License database,
link |
and started using that to create fake driver's licenses,
link |
And then finally, we happened upon
link |
the California Death Index, all right?
link |
Complete information, mother's maiden,
link |
socials, DOBs, all that, and it's like,
link |
gotta be a use for that.
link |
Well, you can use it to create identities all day long.
link |
My idea was, I wonder if you could take somebody
link |
that's died and then file for social security death benefit,
link |
not death benefits, but social security benefits
link |
for that individual, and get that recurring paycheck in.
link |
So that takes a lot of research
link |
to start seeing if you can do that.
link |
How does the federal government know if you're dead?
link |
Do federal indexes reference state indexes?
link |
You got all these questions that pop up.
link |
Well, it turns out, federal indexes
link |
don't reference state indexes, it's against the law.
link |
It also turns out, the only way the federal government
link |
knows you're dead is prior to 1998,
link |
the family had to file a social security death benefit
link |
for that person, all right?
link |
Which of course most people don't.
link |
Right, prior to 98, it took the family.
link |
After 98, the hospital can do it,
link |
funeral home can do it, or the family can do it.
link |
So a lot more people have it filed after,
link |
if they've died after.
link |
But it's still, there's a lot of people
link |
who probably don't. A lot of people don't.
link |
Because that death benefit's only like $219, okay?
link |
Nobody's thinking about that shit.
link |
So I started to apply for social security benefits.
link |
Nope, number's dormant.
link |
So they want you to come in for a physical interview.
link |
Here I am, you know, 32.
link |
You're not gonna pass as a 65 year old, so no.
link |
So the next idea I had was,
link |
I wonder if you could file income tax returns
link |
Turns out you can, all day long.
link |
So I started doing that.
link |
And I started to steal, once I got ramped up,
link |
because you test everything.
link |
You know, you're testing to make sure,
link |
you gotta figure out what the deposit instrument is
link |
and everything else.
link |
And once you get all that lined out,
link |
I started to steal $160,000 a week,
link |
every week for 10 months out of the year.
link |
By filing fake returns.
link |
Yeah, filing fake tax returns.
link |
So you find a business, and the way the system worked
link |
is the IRS will issue a refund on somebody
link |
before they're able to verify
link |
that that person worked for an employer.
link |
Still works like that today.
link |
And you're keeping the amounts relatively low.
link |
Keep them at $3,000.
link |
Amounts are very low.
link |
But you're still able to achieve scale
link |
because this large index of real people.
link |
I got to where, and I was manual.
link |
Later on, a couple buddies of mine
link |
went automated with it.
link |
Wait, you were doing this by hand?
link |
So there's no code involved?
link |
I'd file a return once every six minutes.
link |
Work 10 hours a day, three days a week.
link |
So clicking on, so typing fast and clicking.
link |
One return every six minutes.
link |
That's changing IP.
link |
That's changing address.
link |
Everything else, one return every six minutes.
link |
For three days a week.
link |
Fourth day, I would take a road trip,
link |
plot out a map of ATMs.
link |
And then the next two days, cash out.
link |
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
link |
Come back home, rinse and repeat.
link |
Turns out that a backpack,
link |
I don't see anybody sitting around here,
link |
but a backpack will hold $150,000 of 20s,
link |
is what it will hold.
link |
So I'd put 150K and 20s in a backpack.
link |
I had a spare bedroom.
link |
I'd come in, toss the backpack in the bedroom.
link |
This is very, very important information.
link |
And the fact that you know it is also very,
link |
first we started with the volume of coal that weighs a ton,
link |
and now a backpack holds $150,000 of 20s.
link |
And then you can multiply that by five 400s.
link |
It's also times 20s coming out of ATM, right?
link |
Each 20 weighs a gram.
link |
Each 20 weighs a gram.
link |
So you can actually go by weight,
link |
which is what federal authorities do
link |
when they get a pallet of cash, they just weigh it.
link |
Oh, they just, they just weigh it.
link |
So 150K is seven and a half keys of cash.
link |
One and a half, 15, oh, that's pretty light.
link |
Yeah, you get a big backpack,
link |
go do a good run with David Goggins with it.
link |
The fact that you know this is great.
link |
So wait, where does that come in with the backpack?
link |
So what happens is I didn't know how to launder money.
link |
All right, so I'm throwing cash in the spare bedroom.
link |
One day you open up the bedroom and you're like,
link |
gotta do something with those backpacks.
link |
And that's when you start learning how to launder money,
link |
cash based businesses, things like that.
link |
I had a production company,
link |
had a couple of detailing company.
link |
I was thinking about going into food trucks,
link |
things like that in Charleston.
link |
Actually, can you pause on that to take a tangent there?
link |
How does money laundering work?
link |
I mean, at that time and what years are we talking about?
link |
This is, by the time the tax return schemes go into play,
link |
we're talking 2002, 2003 is when tax returns start.
link |
And so what, at that time and what you're aware of now,
link |
how it evolved, how does money laundering work?
link |
You know, it's not that much different.
link |
You get a cash based business,
link |
start laundering the money or putting the money through that,
link |
saying the transactions are legal.
link |
You then start depositing into bank accounts.
link |
From bank accounts, my thing was is
link |
have bank accounts in the United States, Mexico, Canada,
link |
and then finally bounce over to Estonia
link |
was the final destination of all this stuff.
link |
And the idea is to try to move them to so many places
link |
that by the end of the day, it looks legal
link |
and you can't trace it all if you're ever caught,
link |
which you ultimately are.
link |
But so cash based businesses, you know.
link |
So when you say, sorry to interrupt,
link |
the cash based businesses,
link |
so you have money that needs to be moved to other people.
link |
So how does that work?
link |
What's the business?
link |
Are people providing you a service
link |
and you're giving them money?
link |
Right, so you do the Ozark thing if you wanna do that.
link |
So you can gamble, cash out something like that.
link |
So it trips to whatever casinos you've got.
link |
You've got your production company or your detail company.
link |
So how many cars are you cleaning a day?
link |
How many companies have you got to do that?
link |
All right, whatever that company is,
link |
it's gotta be cash based.
link |
Somebody's paying you in cash is what you're doing.
link |
You have to have enough of those cash based businesses
link |
where it doesn't look funny.
link |
All right, because if you're a detail company
link |
making $100,000 a month, that's a problem.
link |
Okay, so then you start depositing into that.
link |
Well, because of the Patriot Act,
link |
a suspicious activity report, SARS, came in at $2,500
link |
instead of the 10K that it used to be.
link |
So all of a sudden you've got multiple bank accounts
link |
that you've got to set up, all right?
link |
Fortunately, what you also had
link |
is you had a bunch of prepaid debit cards
link |
that were coming into play at the same time.
link |
So a combination of bank accounts, prepaid debits
link |
that had ACH abilities attached to those as well,
link |
and you start running them all together.
link |
Then once it's out of the United States,
link |
you don't have to worry as much.
link |
You can start funneling that into fewer bank accounts
link |
until finally you've got the one main account
link |
that's over at Bank Letico in Estonia at that point.
link |
That's what you've got.
link |
So a bunch of hops that end up at a place
link |
that you can't trace.
link |
And to give you an idea, I was arrested February 8th, 2005.
link |
My last seizure was 2010.
link |
Got the last seizure notice.
link |
So they got it, but it didn't took them that long
link |
So how do stories like with Script that come into play here
link |
where he had someone who owed him money
link |
kidnapped and tortured.
link |
So when does it turn darker?
link |
It turns darker the more money you make.
link |
Script was a kid that he was stealing enough money
link |
that he was able to buy whatever estate he wanted to.
link |
And he would brag about touring the countryside.
link |
And if he saw property that he liked, he would buy it.
link |
And that was not just a brag, he was doing that.
link |
So this kid is stealing a lot of money.
link |
At the same time, he's got connections politically
link |
because of his family, he's got connections
link |
and that family's got connections with a Ukrainian mob.
link |
All right, so he's got these inroads
link |
and people are looking out for him
link |
and he's stealing a lot of money at the same time.
link |
Somebody doesn't pay him a decent amount of money.
link |
Somebody doesn't pay him.
link |
Now we had never, with Shadow Crew, with Carter Planet,
link |
with Counterfeit Library, we were basically the geeks.
link |
All right, we were just the fraudsters,
link |
the social engineers.
link |
We had never really considered violence.
link |
The rules that I had in play were,
link |
hey, we don't do child pornography,
link |
we don't do counterfeit currency, we don't do drugs.
link |
And the only thing we ended up really obeying
link |
was the child porn stuff, except for Max Butler,
link |
who you mentioned earlier.
link |
Script, someone rips the guy off.
link |
And he comes online on Shadow Crew at that point
link |
and he posts these pictures one day.
link |
And I mean, it was a detailed narrative through the pictures.
link |
Had the guy that rammed in the van,
link |
he had the door open, rammed in the van,
link |
had the guy tied up, had the guy being tortured.
link |
And the response was, this is what happens
link |
when you steal from me.
link |
And that's the first time that violence came into play
link |
at that point, and that's when things got,
link |
you start realizing things are getting a little serious.
link |
How did that make you feel?
link |
The first response is, can't be real.
link |
He's just doing that.
link |
You know, he's wanting to send a message.
link |
Then you're like, no, that's real, that's real.
link |
Were you afraid in your own heart
link |
that you might descend to that too?
link |
Like if you see that, or was it pretty clear to you
link |
that that's a line that some people can cross
link |
and some can't and you're not one of those that can cross it?
link |
You know, I gotta tell you, I joke with my wife.
link |
The joke I tell my wife is, you know,
link |
I knew some guy that had 8,000 Bitcoins.
link |
I might be persuaded to ask him for access to that.
link |
And she was like, how?
link |
And I was like, well, hammer and toes.
link |
And I say that as a joke,
link |
but there's that line where you're like,
link |
I remember who I used to be.
link |
And if you're looking at that kind of money,
link |
I might be persuaded to do that back then.
link |
You know, that's, and I think that was Scripps issue
link |
is it was a lot of money to him.
link |
There's the money.
link |
And then there's, you know, violence can also be gradual.
link |
So over time you do a little more, a little more,
link |
a little more, a little more.
link |
You get used to what's going on
link |
and then I get desensitized.
link |
And you figure, you take somebody like Ross Ulbricht,
link |
the Silk Road guy, all right.
link |
Ross was not a violent guy.
link |
But at that point in time, you know,
link |
he was sitting on 24 million in Bitcoin.
link |
He was the only game in town.
link |
And that 24 now is like, I don't know,
link |
22, 24 billion, some crap like that.
link |
But he felt in danger.
link |
This guy was gonna turn him in.
link |
You know, it was a black mountain and everything.
link |
So Ross thinks he hires a couple hit men to kill the guy.
link |
So it becomes that thing.
link |
And I saw that over and over again.
link |
And I'd like to say I wasn't like that,
link |
but given the same circumstances,
link |
I would have probably done the same thing.
link |
And also when you're, it's not just about money,
link |
there's a lot of other forces.
link |
Like if you're threatened for your wellbeing
link |
or for your wealth or for your power,
link |
all of us operate under different motivations.
link |
Plus that online aspect with those communities like that,
link |
if you're the head guy,
link |
you really feel like you're the parent of these guys.
link |
So somebody is starting to threaten them,
link |
it's like, all right, what do I need to do?
link |
So what do you make of Silk Road?
link |
The Shadow Crew started something that today
link |
you can call dark net and dark net markets.
link |
So these markets that operate, that trade,
link |
trade things, everything from child pornography to drugs,
link |
to, I mean, what else?
link |
What are the dark things that humans want to do
link |
that they don't want anyone to know about?
link |
All of those things.
link |
So can you maybe tell me, you know what?
link |
Let's just even step back.
link |
What is the dark net?
link |
What happens there?
link |
Let's backtrack a little bit more before we get to that.
link |
All right, what Shadow Crew did,
link |
other than dealing in all these stolen wares,
link |
what Shadow Crew did that's really important.
link |
Remember those three necessities that I talked about?
link |
But the important thing is,
link |
is it established trust among criminals, all right?
link |
Because that's a necessity.
link |
You have to be able to trust who you're dealing with
link |
because you have to deal with somebody.
link |
You have to, all right?
link |
So how do you know you're not dealing with a cop?
link |
How do you know you're dealing
link |
with somebody that's skilled?
link |
How do you know you're going to deal with somebody
link |
that's not going to rip you off?
link |
You have to be able to trust that individual.
link |
The Shadow Crew provided
link |
that trust mechanism for criminals.
link |
You had that communication channel, the forums,
link |
where you could reference conversations weeks, months old,
link |
take part and learn from those conversations.
link |
You had vouching systems and review systems in place,
link |
escrow systems in place.
link |
You knew by looking at someone's screen name,
link |
if you could trust the individual,
link |
network with the individual, all right?
link |
And that community of just humans
link |
provided that backbone of trust.
link |
And that's really interesting when you think about it.
link |
You had the trust that was there,
link |
but you also had this,
link |
almost this instantaneous information
link |
that was available about the community
link |
or about cyber crime at large.
link |
And that's still in play today, all right?
link |
So that was the way things were
link |
until a couple of things happened.
link |
And one was cryptocurrency.
link |
The other one was the Tor browser, the dark web.
link |
Now I was working with a secret service,
link |
ripping the secret service off,
link |
when Tor comes into play, all right?
link |
So we got a memo in one day
link |
and it was talking about the Tor browser.
link |
And it was like, we really need to be careful with this.
link |
This is going to be problem.
link |
And so we all fired up the Tor browser
link |
and it turns out it was, this was 2005, early six.
link |
It turns out it was completely unusable,
link |
could not use it at all,
link |
simply because no one was using it
link |
and it was extremely slow.
link |
So for people who don't know,
link |
Tor browser is a way to be completely anonymous.
link |
As long as you properly know how to use it, huge caveat.
link |
All right, so developed by the United States Navy
link |
and they developed it.
link |
I don't know this.
link |
It wasn't the hackers that, interesting.
link |
US Navy, to this day, the number one funder of Tor,
link |
military, to this day, all right?
link |
I mean, the same, I guess with the internet,
link |
the origins are the dark web and DOD.
link |
It was developed so that operatives could communicate
link |
with each other without being identified, all right?
link |
That then goes open source.
link |
They release it, EFF comes in,
link |
start sponsoring and everything else like that.
link |
The next idea was, well, you know,
link |
people can get around their country's firewalls,
link |
whistleblowers can use it, things like that.
link |
Well, someone forgot to mention
link |
that the first adoptees of tech,
link |
if you can use it to launder money or remain anonymous,
link |
And so criminals start to use the damn thing.
link |
So along the same time we get,
link |
well, a few years later,
link |
we get Satoshi Nakamoto pops up
link |
with his ideas for Bitcoin,
link |
and then Ross Ulbrich runs with it.
link |
Ross Ulbrich decides he's gonna start up Silk Road.
link |
So initially the people who were using Tor,
link |
which later is the dark web,
link |
people were using Tor or just talking with each other,
link |
visiting websites, communicating like that.
link |
Someone figured out,
link |
hey man, we could host websites on this thing,
link |
and they have a lot of trouble finding the box.
link |
So that is the advent of Silk Road all of a sudden.
link |
Ross Ulbrich has this idea
link |
that he's gonna change the world
link |
by becoming the largest drug dealer on the planet.
link |
So he opens up the Silk Road
link |
and the only payment instrument he allows is Bitcoin.
link |
So if those people out there are wondering
link |
why Bitcoin is going at what, 44K today?
link |
Yeah, and by the time this is out,
link |
it could be 100,000 or 10,000.
link |
If it's 10,000, I'm going to buy some.
link |
Which is a hilarious statement to make
link |
because that statement would be ridiculously wrong
link |
like five years ago, right?
link |
I know, I know, I know.
link |
People 100 years from now will be laughing,
link |
wait, it was that low back then?
link |
So he only accepts Bitcoin,
link |
and of course the initial use case of crypto
link |
is no one wants to admit it today,
link |
but the initial use case is we're gonna buy a bunch of pot.
link |
We need somebody, we need a way to pay for it.
link |
So that's what happens.
link |
Ross, it's really interesting to me.
link |
If you look at motivations of cyber criminals,
link |
the motivations are status, cash, ideology, all right?
link |
My guys, all cash, across the board, all cash.
link |
He really believed he was gonna change the world.
link |
I've been fortunate.
link |
I actually know the guy who ran Silk Road 2
link |
and have talked to the kid, everything else,
link |
and I will tell you that those guys
link |
who are motivated by ideology,
link |
they are a completely different breed.
link |
It's not, you know, the cash guy, it's low hanging fruit.
link |
The ease of, it's hard to stop committing crime,
link |
but it's much easier for a cash motivated individual
link |
to stop than it is that ideology guy.
link |
That Silk Road 2 guy, he's still got it.
link |
You know, he's not breaking the law,
link |
but you can see it's like, he wants to, he wants to.
link |
That's fascinating that, I mean,
link |
the worst atrocities in human history
link |
are committed with people that operate under ideology.
link |
All the other motivations are much weaker.
link |
But you know, you think about it,
link |
with Ross, I mean, very bright guy, very bright guy,
link |
but think about the amount of cognitive dissonance
link |
that the guy's got,
link |
that he thinks he's gonna change the world
link |
by running a drug site.
link |
I mean, certainly, I mean, could he have changed the world?
link |
Yeah, could he have done it like that?
link |
Well, I can steel man those arguments.
link |
I listened to quite a few libertarians
link |
and you can push that to anarchists.
link |
You know, there's a lot of people that argue...
link |
So I actually talked to a professor at Columbia
link |
who actually argues that all drugs should be legalized
link |
and not at a philosophical level, political level,
link |
but the fact that all the negative consequences of drugs
link |
that people talk about actually have to do
link |
with other factors in your life.
link |
I would agree with that.
link |
And so that's, okay, but that's more like a argument
link |
about negative aspects of drugs.
link |
I think the ideology comes in where it's like,
link |
well, nobody should tell you what to do.
link |
You should have the responsibility of your own actions.
link |
Like the government or any other institution
link |
shouldn't be the rule setters,
link |
the constraints for how you live your life.
link |
And so I could see that argument being made
link |
and ultimately if you like create an open market for drugs,
link |
how that could build a better society,
link |
it might break down the outdated, the corrupt,
link |
the bureaucratic institutions.
link |
I mean, you can make that argument.
link |
There's an argument and let's be fair.
link |
I wanna be fair with it.
link |
I mean, did he change the world?
link |
We do have this whole thing called cryptocurrency.
link |
Yeah, in the long arc of history, perhaps.
link |
Yeah, we do have that.
link |
And that might've been for it to take hold in society.
link |
Maybe the darker parts of society at first,
link |
maybe that was necessary.
link |
Right, I mean, maybe, we'll see how it pans out.
link |
Shadow Crew, we had this guy, Albert Gonzalez,
link |
Albert Gonzalez, that's the kid's name.
link |
We had, we were growing so big
link |
that I had to start farming things out.
link |
So the first thing I started farming,
link |
I instituted this review system,
link |
kind of establishing that trust mechanism
link |
even further for criminals to use.
link |
We needed somebody to take care of our tech aspects
link |
So an associate of mine by the name of Kim Taylor,
link |
where we're looking for a forum techie,
link |
he comes to me one night and he's like,
link |
found our forum techie.
link |
I was like, who's that?
link |
And he's like, it's this kid.
link |
And I was like, is he any good?
link |
He's like, well, he knows the software.
link |
And I was like, okay, we'll just sign his ass on.
link |
He went by the screen name of Kumbajonny,
link |
was his screen name.
link |
And he starts selling credit cards after a while
link |
under a screen name of Scarface.
link |
And that CB1 breach where you're cashing out
link |
the track twos at ATMs, $40,000 a day.
link |
So Albert's in New Jersey one day, broad daylight,
link |
and stands at an ATM for 40 minutes, just standing there,
link |
feeding in one ATM card after another, pulling out cash,
link |
taking the 20s out, stuffing them in that backpack.
link |
Meanwhile, just across the street,
link |
a couple of cops just happened to be there.
link |
And they start noticing this kid just standing there.
link |
So 40 minutes, they watch this kid, 40 minutes.
link |
Finally, one cop looks at the other,
link |
let me see what's going on there.
link |
Walks over across the street, Albert's wearing a wig.
link |
He's got the disguise on, everything else like that.
link |
Ask him, kid, what are you doing?
link |
Albert falls apart.
link |
We didn't know Albert had been arrested.
link |
So Albert immediately goes in,
link |
I wanna work for the Secret Service.
link |
At that point in time, Secret Service,
link |
I referred to, and I wanna make sure I don't say,
link |
it's not like that anymore.
link |
But back then, they were fucking idiots, all right?
link |
They had no clue what was going on.
link |
So there was a competence issue
link |
that they were working through is one way to put it.
link |
That's a nice euphemism.
link |
So, or fucking idiots is another way to say it.
link |
So they're just not aware of the digital world.
link |
They had no clue, no clue.
link |
The way that Albert tells them how to catch us
link |
because they looked at him, how do we catch them?
link |
And Albert's like, Albert, I'm serious, I'm serious.
link |
So Albert's like, well, you could try a VPN.
link |
So he explains it to them, they're like,
link |
that's a good idea.
link |
So I quit Shadow Crew.
link |
I was worried about all the news
link |
that was coming in and everything like that.
link |
I'm stealing 160K a week.
link |
I didn't know Albert had been arrested.
link |
I'm worried about being arrested.
link |
I know the writing's on the wall.
link |
And I'm like, I'm quitting.
link |
Where did you see the writing?
link |
The IPs that were coming in,
link |
the text messages about the Secret Service investigators
link |
So the pressure's building.
link |
This is not gonna end well.
link |
This is going to be bad.
link |
So I announced my retirement of February 15th,
link |
I'm sorry, April 15th, 2004 is my retirement.
link |
I think that's the 2004.
link |
And I quit, I walk away.
link |
Well, Albert had been arrested.
link |
They cut him loose.
link |
No one knows he's been arrested.
link |
He comes back into Shadow Crew.
link |
I leave Kim Taylor at the same time.
link |
He's kind of on the run, which if you wanna know that story,
link |
that's a nightmare story in and of itself.
link |
So my second in charge, Kim Taylor, this guy,
link |
there was this guy named David, oh, what was his name?
link |
He was, El Mariachi was the guy's name.
link |
David, yeah, he was a film guy.
link |
So El Mariachi, real name David Thomas,
link |
he's on the run out of Nebraska for check fraud.
link |
He comes to us on Shadow Crew telling us this sad story.
link |
We take up a collection for this guy.
link |
Send it to him, all right?
link |
I get him a job working with a low level carter
link |
trying to make him some money, all right?
link |
El Mariachi, Thomas does this for a few weeks,
link |
comes to me one day and he's like,
link |
man, I'm not making any money.
link |
I'm like, okay, let me see what I can do.
link |
Well, I had a Ukrainian guy by the name of Big Buyer.
link |
He, a real friend of mine.
link |
And I contacted him, I was like, look, man,
link |
I got a guy that wants to do some work.
link |
Can you help the guy out?
link |
And he's like, I got it.
link |
So he sends Thomas enough money to go,
link |
Thomas is in Texas at that point,
link |
sends Thomas enough money to go from Texas
link |
to Issaquah, Washington and rent an office space, all right?
link |
So Thomas goes up there, rents his office space,
link |
him and his girlfriend rents an office space.
link |
And the plan is, is Big Buyer is going to place an order,
link |
get product sent, Mariachi is going to get the product,
link |
list it on eBay, cash out 50 50, easy enough, all right?
link |
So Big Buyer places an order.
link |
First order is outpost.com, $18,000.
link |
The largest order outpost.com had ever received
link |
at that point in time.
link |
Order goes through.
link |
It goes through still.
link |
Goes through, he gets the product, all right?
link |
Mariachi comes back, tells me,
link |
tells my second in charge, Kim Taylor.
link |
Kim Taylor at this point, I'm 33, 34.
link |
He works at the Tattered Cover Bookstore
link |
in Denver, Colorado is where he works at this point.
link |
And he fancies himself Jason Bourne, all right?
link |
He's even got one of the screen names of Jason Bourne.
link |
So I'm like, all right, so Mariachi is telling us
link |
how much money he's making, everything else.
link |
I'm like, well, that's good.
link |
I'm glad you're all right.
link |
Kim contacts me and he's like, I want to go to Issaquah.
link |
And I was like, why?
link |
And he's like, to make some money.
link |
I'm like, you're making money.
link |
He's like, I want to go to Issaquah.
link |
I was like, all right, go, be careful.
link |
So he gets in the car, Saturn is what he's driving.
link |
He drives his little piece of Saturn
link |
all the way up to Issaquah.
link |
Gets there, you know, midnight.
link |
They party all night long
link |
because they've never met each other.
link |
They're just celebrating, partying, drinking,
link |
everything else like that.
link |
Meanwhile, Big Buyer has placed another order
link |
with Outpost.com, $17,000.
link |
The second largest order Outpost.com had ever received
link |
at that point in time.
link |
By this point in time, Outpost knows
link |
the first order was fraudulent.
link |
Guess where it's going?
link |
The exact same address the first order goes.
link |
So Outpost picks up the phone, calls Issaquah PD.
link |
Hey, we got a fraudster.
link |
Issaquah's like, would you mind sending some empty boxes?
link |
And Outpost is like, be happy to.
link |
So the rule was, is on credit card fraud,
link |
if you've got full account access,
link |
you place the order.
link |
The morning it's supposed to arrive,
link |
you sign into the bank account or the credit card account.
link |
If you can sign in, you go pick up your product.
link |
If you can't sign in, you go back to sleep that day.
link |
Well, Big Buyer was the guy who placed the order.
link |
Mariachi and my second in charge are partying, all right?
link |
So they're supposed to contact Big Buyer, they don't.
link |
Meanwhile, Big Buyer is raising hell,
link |
getting up with me like, hey, where are the guys?
link |
I can't find them.
link |
They don't need to pick up this product.
link |
So I can't get in touch with them.
link |
They go down to pick up the,
link |
so Mariachi's got a Cadillac, old 70s Cadillac.
link |
He's got a Cadillac, pulls into the complex.
link |
Now Mariachi's driving,
link |
Kim Taylor's in the passenger seat,
link |
David Thomas's girlfriend's in the back seat.
link |
As they pull into the complex,
link |
going through the parking lot,
link |
Mariachi just happens to glance over and he sees a van
link |
with a guy sitting sideways in the van.
link |
And he looks at Kim Taylor and he's like,
link |
that's an undercover.
link |
And Kim's like, ah, it's fine.
link |
So they pull up to the office complex.
link |
Kim's like, I'll go in and get the packages.
link |
So he walks in, looks at the guy behind the counter.
link |
I believe you have some packages for us.
link |
Guy's like, one second.
link |
So he disappears around the wall,
link |
out pops the Issaquah PD, arrests Kim.
link |
David Thomas is in the car watching all this happen.
link |
He bugs out and they arrest him on the interstate
link |
where he has three fake driver's licenses in his wallet
link |
along with his real driver's license, another no, no,
link |
So David Thomas had outstanding warrants out of Nebraska.
link |
We couldn't bond him out.
link |
Kim Taylor didn't have any warrants.
link |
So we bonded him out.
link |
My third in charge, kid, Seth Sanders was his name.
link |
He bonds him out, uses his girlfriend's account
link |
And I get Kim Taylor to go to Utah
link |
where another friend of mine agrees to house him,
link |
So I think everything's fine and all that.
link |
About three weeks later, this guy in Utah
link |
gets me on the phone.
link |
I'm like, hey, he's got to go.
link |
I'm like, what's going on?
link |
He's like, well, the only thing he's doing
link |
is popping ecstasy tablets every day, all day.
link |
And I'm like, seriously?
link |
I was like, okay, he's got to go.
link |
So we kick him out of there.
link |
By this point, I've got another crew that's coming through.
link |
I mean, I had all these crews running.
link |
Had another crew that's coming through Denver.
link |
Send Kim back to Denver to partner up with these guys.
link |
Kim gets these guys arrested.
link |
So by this point in time, I'm exasperated.
link |
I just want to throw my hands up in the air and walk away.
link |
So my retirement's coming up at the same time.
link |
So I'm like, fuck it, I'm done.
link |
So I tell everybody, the rest of the admins
link |
and the mods there, I'm like, this is what's going on.
link |
You guys need to watch out for this.
link |
We need to ban Kim, not let him back in.
link |
Be careful what's going on.
link |
At the same time I walk away,
link |
Cumberjani, Albert Gonzalez, comes back into play.
link |
He sees everything that's going on.
link |
He uses that to his advantage.
link |
He starts banning everyone that's suspicious of him,
link |
sets up the VPN at the same time and says,
link |
hey, to make sure we're all secure,
link |
I need all transactions to go through this VPN.
link |
VPNs ran by the Secret Service.
link |
All right, Secret Service ends up,
link |
I think they ended up cataloging like $7 million
link |
worth of transactions over the next four or five months.
link |
Shadow Crew makes the front cover of Forbes, August, 2004.
link |
Headline, Who's Stealing Your Identity.
link |
October 26, 2004, United States Secret Service arrest,
link |
33 people, six countries, six hours.
link |
I was in Charleston, South Carolina when I saw it happen.
link |
So you're the one that got away.
link |
I'm the one public.
link |
There were a couple other guys that got away
link |
that they didn't publicly mention.
link |
One, his name was Tron.
link |
But he went by the screen name Tron.
link |
He had access, almost unfettered access to Bank of America.
link |
So what happens is they identified the guy,
link |
Secret Service is in the air to go get him.
link |
They call the Ukrainian police.
link |
Hey, we're coming down to arrest this guy.
link |
Ukrainian cops are like, oh, come on down.
link |
So as soon as they got off the phone,
link |
Ukrainian cops get in the car, go down and tell Tron,
link |
hey, they're coming to get you.
link |
So he bugs out down to South America
link |
and they don't catch him I think for six or seven years
link |
after that, something like that.
link |
But caught him eventually.
link |
Caught him eventually.
link |
Well, let me actually ask you on this point.
link |
You've said that if you do cyber crime eventually,
link |
it's not gonna end well.
link |
It does not end well.
link |
So I don't wanna say that's because
link |
you're gonna be arrested because honestly,
link |
very few people are arrested, all right?
link |
But it doesn't end well because of the type of person
link |
You quoted me earlier, you lie to everybody around you.
link |
You lie to yourself, you lie to your friends,
link |
you lie to your family.
link |
Of course, you lie to your victims.
link |
You don't have any friends.
link |
You know, I went 20 years without friends.
link |
I had associates, I didn't have friends.
link |
And you can't truly trust anybody.
link |
You don't trust anybody.
link |
You don't trust anybody.
link |
You know, I had my wife, I was married for nine years.
link |
I lied to her every single day of those nine years.
link |
And it took her nine years to give up on me,
link |
to realize that I was that piece of shit.
link |
And she leaves at that point.
link |
Then from there, I started dating a stripper
link |
I thought I had friends.
link |
I lied to all those people that I knew
link |
that thought they were my friends.
link |
I lied to them the entire time.
link |
You become that individual.
link |
I don't think a lot of people really understand
link |
You know, you talked about, you pointed out that woman
link |
that I ripped off.
link |
She was trying to put a roof on her house
link |
for her freaking kids, man.
link |
You're that person.
link |
You're that person.
link |
So you're also lying to yourself.
link |
And that's not a mindset in which you can
link |
grow as a person, find happiness,
link |
find genuine, simple human affection,
link |
which is what love is.
link |
Simple, real friendship, all of those things.
link |
So I went to prison, of course.
link |
One of the things, one of the most important lessons
link |
that I've learned in prison,
link |
because cyber crime as a whole,
link |
if you're a criminal, it's an addiction, all right?
link |
If you're addicted to something,
link |
whether it be drugs, crime, gambling, what have you,
link |
if you're addicted to something,
link |
you cannot love anything else except the addiction.
link |
The addiction comes first, all right?
link |
And you pointed out some of those truly despicable things.
link |
Script, for example, tortures that guy.
link |
You get to the point where it's like,
link |
okay, this is the business.
link |
And I tried to convince myself that I'm a businessman,
link |
but I'm a good guy on the other end.
link |
And you're not, you're not.
link |
So those lies become part of it, everything else.
link |
And yeah, the higher ups are usually arrested, they are.
link |
But you've got millions of cyber criminals these days.
link |
So most guys are not gonna be arrested.
link |
So you may be arrested.
link |
You may be like freaking Jonathan James.
link |
He was a minor, a very, very talented individual,
link |
He had, as a kid, he had broke into NASA,
link |
He shut the NASA computers down for six weeks.
link |
Then he decides he wants to go into credit card theft,
link |
partners with Albert, he's arrested with Albert.
link |
Law enforcement, they were gonna blame him.
link |
He was the only competent individual.
link |
So this kid gets up one day, he wasn't in prison yet.
link |
He gets up one day, goes in his dad's bedroom,
link |
gets out his 45, walks in the bathroom,
link |
and blows his brains out.
link |
You know, you've got things like that.
link |
Or you're gonna rip somebody off,
link |
and you're gonna end up like scripted with that guy,
link |
the guy who ran Evolution Marketplace.
link |
No one knew who, two people ran that guy and a girl.
link |
And no one knew who they were.
link |
He ends up stealing about $24 million,
link |
a lot of it from Ukrainian mob,
link |
and they found him about a year later
link |
on a beach without his head in hands.
link |
But you know, it always goes south.
link |
But more than anything, to me,
link |
the negative thing is you really become somebody that,
link |
I mean, just truly a despicable human being.
link |
When you get to the point when you're destroying
link |
people's retirement accounts,
link |
you're stealing money from a woman
link |
that simply wants to do something good for her family.
link |
When you become that individual,
link |
and you're okay with that, my God, man.
link |
It got to the point, I had one guy I ripped off,
link |
it's like for $900,
link |
is when I first started the cybercrime stuff.
link |
It's when I was becoming competent.
link |
And I ripped him off for like $900,
link |
and he sent me an email, and he was like,
link |
the email said something like,
link |
I guess you needed the money, and it's okay.
link |
You know, you keep it.
link |
And I'm getting chills right now thinking about it.
link |
It's that, where you become that individual.
link |
Can I actually backtrack?
link |
Listen, I love love, okay?
link |
And there's a story that you fell in love with a stripper.
link |
I mean, you have to tell the story.
link |
So how did you fall in love with somebody,
link |
not that there's anything wrong with that profession,
link |
but it's romantic.
link |
It's like a true romance, by the way, great movie.
link |
It is a great film.
link |
It's truly a great film.
link |
Even Brad Pitt, who makes a brief appearance, is genius.
link |
There's so much good acting there.
link |
Anyway, so tell me that love story.
link |
All right, so like I said, from my dad,
link |
I get that fear of being abandoned.
link |
I lied to my wife for nine years until she leaves.
link |
And I was in Charleston, South Carolina.
link |
And what happened was, I noticed that Susan,
link |
she was not coming to bed like she used to.
link |
She'd stay up all night long,
link |
and sometimes she'd go and be gone a few hours
link |
and everything else.
link |
And I'm like, well, something's going on.
link |
And I'd pass by her computer
link |
and she would minimize the screens.
link |
And I'm like, well, gotta figure out
link |
what the hell is going on.
link |
So put a key logger on her system.
link |
As anybody should in a relationship.
link |
Absolutely, because you trust them, so why not?
link |
You should be tracking all their movements,
link |
Like I said, I was the control freak too.
link |
So I found out she'd been cheating on me.
link |
See, there you go, they had a reason.
link |
They had a reason, I justified.
link |
So I found out she was cheating on me.
link |
She was asleep when I found it out.
link |
And I sat there looking at it and I was like, well, shit.
link |
So I got up, walked in the bedroom,
link |
opened up the wardrobe, got a suitcase out,
link |
started putting her clothes in it.
link |
And she wakes up, she's like, where are you going?
link |
And I'm like, I'm not, you are.
link |
Well, my bravado disappeared pretty quickly.
link |
I took about a week of both of us
link |
crying and arguing and everything else.
link |
And she finally left.
link |
And I went through this depression.
link |
I was in Charleston, South Carolina.
link |
I would just walk around the house kind of stumbling in a daze.
link |
Realized I was getting suicidal.
link |
And was smart enough to do something about it.
link |
And picked up the phone book.
link |
And that's where there's always this sense of humor.
link |
So I picked up the phone book.
link |
I'm going through the yellow pages.
link |
I'm like, psychologist, criminal psychologist,
link |
because I need that.
link |
Called the psychologist, crying to her.
link |
I mean, crying on the phone.
link |
Told her everything.
link |
I'm this criminal.
link |
This is what's happened.
link |
She's like, come in now.
link |
So I go in, spill my guts.
link |
And saw her for about four months.
link |
And I joke about it, but it's true.
link |
She was trying to get me to stop breaking the law
link |
and to go into real estate.
link |
And I remember telling her, is there a difference?
link |
She was like, yes, there's a difference.
link |
So I saw her for about four months.
link |
I didn't start drinking until I was 34.
link |
I'd never done drugs or anything else like that,
link |
because my mom was an addict as well.
link |
So I was this guy that always wanted to be in control.
link |
Didn't want to lose control of myself.
link |
And had never been to a strip club.
link |
So one night, I was getting lonely.
link |
So I walked into the strip club.
link |
Actually, I was researching the strip club.
link |
And it was Joe's Roundup in Charleston, South Carolina.
link |
Little bitty hole in the wall stuff.
link |
Yeah, real classy.
link |
So I walked in, and I'm literally
link |
that guy, man, that fell in love with the first stripper
link |
She walks by, I'm like, that one.
link |
So I didn't know the strip club game.
link |
Again, criminal, naive as hell.
link |
So belly up at the bar, order the beer.
link |
I'm sitting there drinking it.
link |
She comes over to me, and we start talking.
link |
And she's like, would you like to get a bottle of champagne?
link |
I was like, does that mean going in back or what?
link |
She's like, well, yeah, you need to do the bottle
link |
when you're going back.
link |
And I was like, sure, let's buy a bottle of champagne.
link |
$400 bottle of Korbel.
link |
So I'm like, all right.
link |
And again, that bravado disappears pretty quickly.
link |
I get back there, and we talk for two hours.
link |
And nowadays, I don't understand that most men
link |
who go to strip clubs, the strippers
link |
are their therapist most of the time.
link |
So I'm sitting there talking, we're talking.
link |
And of course, she's sizing me up.
link |
She's looking at the watch.
link |
She's like, what kind of car do you drive?
link |
And I'm telling her and talking.
link |
So at the end of the night, I'm like, really nice meeting.
link |
She's like, it's so nice meeting you, too.
link |
You guys just talked.
link |
And there's still this feeling of love and all of that.
link |
Yeah, so just talked.
link |
Just got along pretty good.
link |
I'm like, I like her.
link |
So come back in a week later.
link |
Walk in and call her over.
link |
And I was like, look, I said, that was my first time
link |
I said, don't know you.
link |
I'd like to know you more.
link |
Would you like to go out to dinner?
link |
And she was like, yeah.
link |
I was like, where would you like to go?
link |
So she says, Rue de Jon.
link |
And I was like, don't know what it is.
link |
That's where we'll go.
link |
And I had a theater buddy at that point in time
link |
because I was trying to get my life together.
link |
And I was like, I got a date.
link |
He's like, you got a date?
link |
I was like, yeah, man, I got a date.
link |
And he's like, OK, where are you going?
link |
I was like, Rue de Jon.
link |
And he's like, take your wallet.
link |
And he's like, take your wallet.
link |
I was like, all right.
link |
So we start doing the lunch and the dinner thing.
link |
And I get to where I really like her.
link |
She was 23 and got along really well,
link |
had common interest in music and arts and stuff like that.
link |
I mean, it's stereotypical.
link |
She had graduated college with a degree in religious studies.
link |
So I was like, all right.
link |
So yeah, you just fell in love.
link |
We got along really well, really well.
link |
So I ended up moving her in with me.
link |
She hadn't quit her job.
link |
And what was happening was she was working weekends.
link |
And the club would close at 3 or 4.
link |
She wouldn't come home until 10 or 11 in the morning.
link |
And most of the time, it would be a phone call saying,
link |
come and pick me up.
link |
I can't drive home.
link |
And then I'd never used drugs, had never been around.
link |
And my mom, Valium and pot and things like that.
link |
But as far as interacting with her,
link |
I'd never done anything like that.
link |
By this point in time, I'm kind of getting head over heels
link |
I moved her in with me and everything.
link |
And I had never, I was 34, I had never
link |
went through a woman's purse in my entire life.
link |
And so she comes in, passes out.
link |
And I'm like, I got to know what the fuck's going on.
link |
And went over and went through her purse.
link |
Found cocaine and the straw, cut off straws and all that stuff.
link |
And I'm like, broke my heart.
link |
I just sat there and started crying.
link |
Got online, and I'm the guy that can find information.
link |
So I started looking for forums on strip clubs.
link |
Found a forum, found that one, found
link |
where it was talking about her prostituting herself
link |
to support the habit.
link |
And that got me, man.
link |
It was talking about everything she was doing to do that.
link |
And I broke your heart there.
link |
So I didn't have the heart to tell her
link |
that I knew she was prostituting.
link |
But I went to her, and I was like, she's waking up.
link |
And I was like, look, I found this in your purse.
link |
I can't have that.
link |
And she's like, well, you think I'm prostituting?
link |
I was like, no, no, I don't think that.
link |
I knew it, but I didn't mention it to her.
link |
And I was like, I can't have that.
link |
Well, I don't do that.
link |
It's just a one time thing.
link |
I was like, all right.
link |
So she went back to work and continued
link |
to do it for a couple more weeks.
link |
And then finally, I was like, I can't.
link |
So I picked her up one morning.
link |
She couldn't drive home.
link |
Before I picked her up, I had written her a note,
link |
left it on the pillow.
link |
So I brought her home, tucked her in the bed,
link |
and told her I'd be back that night.
link |
Told her she had a letter when she woke up.
link |
And the letter was basically, I love you.
link |
If you can't stop this, don't be here when I get back.
link |
And I went to Columbia that day, came back that night,
link |
and she had quit her job.
link |
And she quit drugs that night, really quit them.
link |
And I got it in my head that I needed
link |
to do whatever I needed to do to make sure she didn't go back
link |
That became, to me, because of my background,
link |
that meant spending a lot of money.
link |
And so every night was $300 to $600 for dinner.
link |
It was $1,000 shoes every week, $2,000 purse every week,
link |
I had most of my money laundered out to Estonia.
link |
And Elizabeth, at the same time, she quit.
link |
But she didn't want me to go anywhere.
link |
All right, she wanted me there all the time.
link |
I guess that was that connection.
link |
I guess she was scared she might go back to something.
link |
So Shadow Crew gets busted.
link |
I go through, basically, all my US funds.
link |
Can't get anything from overseas.
link |
Shadow Crew gets busted October.
link |
I can't go into committing tax fraud because season's over.
link |
Can't go back into credit fraud because Shadow Crew's
link |
I don't know who to trust online.
link |
I'm left with running counterfeit cashier's checks
link |
to get money in, trying to make it until I can start back
link |
with some other fraud, and lying to her the entire time.
link |
She knows about none of this.
link |
And she thinks I've got a shitload of money.
link |
And she's got expensive taste.
link |
So at the same time, she couldn't be intimate.
link |
I mean, the girl loved me.
link |
That's the first time I've really said that.
link |
So there's deep love there both ways.
link |
So she couldn't be intimate unless she was stone cold drunk.
link |
I mean, just shit.
link |
And shit, I didn't mind her drinking alcohol.
link |
I'd rather have that than cocaine.
link |
So that was the intimacy there.
link |
And I kept thinking, if I continue to invest,
link |
that it would work out, that just keep going,
link |
she'll be all right, we'll be all right.
link |
And what happens is, like I said, she thought I had money.
link |
She thought I had money.
link |
She wanted a couple of Tiffany engagement rings.
link |
So I said, we can get married.
link |
I figured of marriage, show her that I love her,
link |
show her it's going to be all right.
link |
So I was like, let's get married.
link |
She's like, well, I've always wanted a Tiffany ring.
link |
She doesn't have money to buy the Tiffany ring
link |
because all my money was overseas.
link |
So it's counterfeit cashiers.
link |
I find like a three carat ring on eBay for 20 grand
link |
and pay for it with a counterfeit cashiers check.
link |
At the same time, because she doesn't want me to leave,
link |
she needs me there, typically, if you're
link |
doing that type of crime, you need to be traveling.
link |
You can't do it in one central area
link |
because you're going to be identified pretty quickly.
link |
I knew that, but I didn't have much choice.
link |
So start running counterfeit cashiers checks
link |
to get the money to live and everything.
link |
Get the engagement ring.
link |
We were scheduled to be married. Our wedding date
link |
was February 26, 2005.
link |
I've got a Tiffany wedding band, a couple of them coming in.
link |
And I get arrested in Charleston, South Carolina.
link |
And she didn't know.
link |
I told her, I said, I've got to go pick up those rings.
link |
She thought I was just having them sent in.
link |
I said, I've got to go get those rings.
link |
And I said, we'll go out to dinner after that.
link |
And I left at like 8 o clock in the morning.
link |
And I was arrested at, I think, 1130, something like that.
link |
Of course, I wanted to call her.
link |
And the FBI got me.
link |
It turns out it was controlled delivery.
link |
There were like 30 agents in the parking lot.
link |
Charleston PD got me.
link |
Within 45 minutes, the Secret Service
link |
comes in, takes over that investigation.
link |
They knew exactly who they had.
link |
Along about 7 o clock at night, they're
link |
like, we want to search your house.
link |
And I was like, look, I'll sign off on the search
link |
if you let me go with you so I can see her.
link |
And they were like, OK.
link |
So I got to see my phone at that point.
link |
I had like 140 calls where she had
link |
been trying to call all that time.
link |
And so they load me up.
link |
And hell, I mean, you talk about 10, 12 cars, 40 agents,
link |
She's got a dog at that point.
link |
I'm scared they're going to shoot the dog.
link |
And they had me walk up.
link |
And they're all behind me.
link |
I knock on the door and tell her the police are there.
link |
She needs to put the dog up.
link |
So she does, and they come in and just
link |
start ransacking them to put me in cuffs, set me down,
link |
start berating her with questions.
link |
She had no idea what the hell was going on.
link |
Were you able to say a word or two to help her understand?
link |
Yeah, I was trying to tell her.
link |
And at the same time, they take a watch off her wrist.
link |
They let her keep the ring.
link |
They're telling her that I'm this guy.
link |
What's my real name?
link |
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang across the board.
link |
So she's probably terrified.
link |
And I tell her, I was like, look,
link |
they're going to arraign me tomorrow.
link |
I said, see what's going on, but don't show up.
link |
Of course, she's there next morning.
link |
And she's back in the back crying.
link |
They're reading off the charges.
link |
I'm under $300,000 bond, everything else.
link |
They throw me in a cell.
link |
Meanwhile, more charges keep coming in.
link |
And it's like 10, 12 charges a day at that point.
link |
And I'm trying to call her to make sure she's all right.
link |
And does it get through?
link |
So I spent three months in jail.
link |
And during that three months, she visits twice.
link |
I get like three or four phone calls to her.
link |
Looking back now, I understand why.
link |
Back then, it was like, I'm the victim.
link |
Why doesn't she talk to me?
link |
But now I understand why.
link |
Hell, the girl loved me too.
link |
She found out I was this piece of shit.
link |
And after a week in county jail, two agents
link |
fly in from New Jersey, two Secret Service guys.
link |
Pulled me out of cell, looked at me, and they were like,
link |
we've got your laptop.
link |
And I was like, yeah.
link |
And he's like, well, have you got anything on your laptop?
link |
And I was like, yeah.
link |
He's like, you're going to be charged for it.
link |
I was like, I figured.
link |
And then he looks at me, he's like,
link |
can you do anything for us?
link |
And I told him my exact words were, look,
link |
you let me get back with Elizabeth.
link |
I'll do whatever you want me to do.
link |
And he looks at me, he's like, we're going to get you out.
link |
I was like, all right.
link |
So they let me sit there for three months
link |
to get a taste of it and get me out.
link |
My sister, they have the bond reduced to $1,000.
link |
My sister pays the $1,000 bond.
link |
By this point, she's disowned me.
link |
And because I'm dating the stripper.
link |
And Denise bonds me out.
link |
The person that I call immediately is Elizabeth.
link |
And she's like, I'll be there.
link |
So it's like 11 o clock at night.
link |
I'm in the parking lot of the Charleston County jail.
link |
Me and a Secret Service agent standing there.
link |
And Elizabeth had a friend that owned a limo company.
link |
So she pulls up in a limo, gets out, pops the trunk,
link |
gets these two plastic containers out
link |
that have my clothes in them, drops them off the pavement,
link |
comes over, hugs me, call me later.
link |
Gets in the car, drives off.
link |
I'm sitting there crying like a baby.
link |
Agent looks at me, is that your fiancee?
link |
And he's like, I am so sorry.
link |
And I'm like, yeah.
link |
She sounds fascinating.
link |
Pull up in a limo.
link |
I had $30 in my name at that point, $30.
link |
The agent had to pay for my hotel room that first night.
link |
So he drops me off after paying for the hotel room,
link |
buy me something to eat.
link |
Soon as he drops me off, I take that $30,
link |
walk a half mile to Walmart, buy a prepaid debit card
link |
so I can start back in tax fraud.
link |
Soon as I get back to the hotel room, call Elizabeth,
link |
beg her to come see me.
link |
She comes to see me, and we talk most of the night,
link |
and convince her to give me a chance.
link |
I tell her that everything's going to be all right.
link |
They're going to hire me.
link |
I'm going to be this big consultant.
link |
Lies, lies, just so she'd get back with me.
link |
And she's like, OK.
link |
And so we move from Charleston.
link |
The field office is in Columbia, South Carolina.
link |
And I'm breaking the law.
link |
Even before I start working with them, I'm breaking the law.
link |
And so they've got me in the office, the field office.
link |
They got this big war room in there.
link |
I'm on a laptop, outside line, laptops hooked up
link |
to a 50 inch plasma monitor on the wall.
link |
They've got a desktop sitting directly next to me,
link |
outside line, two Secret Service officers in the room
link |
at all times with a South Carolina law enforcement officer.
link |
My job is 46 hours a day, surfing the web,
link |
picking up targets, intel, teaching them
link |
how cybercrime operates, everything else like that.
link |
For the first two weeks, they are extremely diligent.
link |
They pay attention to everything that's going on,
link |
ask questions, everything else.
link |
But the problem is that that shit gets boring real quick,
link |
because I'm very fast online doing that.
link |
So they're like, what the hell is he doing?
link |
And it gets tiring looking at a guy just doing that shit.
link |
So after two weeks, they get lazy and bored.
link |
And they start watching porn instead of watching me.
link |
At the same time, they've got a keylogger.
link |
And they've got Spectre Pro and Camtasia,
link |
keyloggers and taking snapshots of everything that I'm doing.
link |
Every night, it goes on a DVD rom on a spindle.
link |
So I'm like, they're not going to go through that shit.
link |
So I'm like, fuck it.
link |
Start breaking the law from inside the Secret Service
link |
offices while they're in the room.
link |
That continues for 10 months.
link |
At the same time, the relationship with Elizabeth
link |
fell apart, completely fell apart.
link |
Do you have an understanding of why?
link |
Because her heart got broken because there was lying.
link |
She felt like she did a lot to sacrifice for the relationship.
link |
You've got a woman there that she had even said it.
link |
She was like, she had told one of her friends
link |
we were out having dinner one night.
link |
And this was before I got arrested.
link |
She told one of her friends that I was the only guy that ever
link |
asked her to stop using drugs.
link |
Yeah, I have to say that part of the story is so powerful.
link |
And then that she chose to do it, and she chose to stop.
link |
And she told me that there was one instance she told me
link |
that if she didn't marry me, she'd never be married.
link |
And as far as I know, she's never been married.
link |
And so it started to fall apart there.
link |
Yeah, because I was that piece of shit.
link |
Still, you didn't take a step.
link |
By the way, can I just say how just moving it is,
link |
how honest you are.
link |
Thank you for being that person.
link |
But at that time, there's still that lying.
link |
So it's falling apart.
link |
She wants to start going to strip clubs.
link |
And I'm like, fuck it.
link |
So we start going to strip clubs,
link |
and she'll come back and get wasted.
link |
And we'll have sex, what have you.
link |
And one night, she looks at me, and she was like,
link |
I think it'd be funny if you got a blow job
link |
from somebody else.
link |
I was like, to me, that was the final straw right there.
link |
I was like, she doesn't care for me anymore or anything else
link |
We've been going to strip clubs, so I
link |
started dating another stripper.
link |
And she knew something was going on.
link |
And she looks at me one day, and she's like,
link |
why don't you just tell me that it's over?
link |
And I looked at her, and I said, it's over.
link |
And I told her, I was like, look, I said, whatever you want.
link |
We were renting an apartment.
link |
I was like, whatever you want in here, take it.
link |
And I said, not only that, but I'll
link |
make sure you got money for several months
link |
so you're all right.
link |
And I was like, just leave me my TV
link |
and leave me some plates and stuff.
link |
So I go to work that day at the Secret Service,
link |
come back that night, and she's taken everything
link |
and left a picture of herself in the bedroom on the floor.
link |
I'm like, OK, I guess I deserve that.
link |
She's got, I like her.
link |
She's got a sense of humor.
link |
Yeah, she was cool.
link |
I'm giving her $1,000 every two weeks
link |
or some shit like that.
link |
And it gets to the point, because I'm
link |
doing this tax fraud from inside the offices.
link |
Well, the debit card companies are pinging the cards.
link |
They start to realize that, hey, some son of a bitch
link |
is stealing money using our debit card.
link |
So they start to shut down the cards
link |
before I can pull cash out.
link |
So I start not to have the money to send to her.
link |
And I'm like, so she calls, and she's like, look,
link |
I have to have money.
link |
And I was like, well, look, I'm doing what I can.
link |
You promised money.
link |
And I was like, look, if you knew
link |
what I was doing to get this money,
link |
you wouldn't be asking that.
link |
And she's like, I need money.
link |
My rent's behind by a month right now.
link |
And I'm like, your rent's behind?
link |
So I was like, OK, so I pick up the phone,
link |
call the rental office.
link |
And I was like, I just want to make sure that I'm sorry
link |
I'm behind on the rent for this apartment number.
link |
Oh, no, that rent's paid up three months.
link |
It's like, OK, hang up, call Elizabeth back.
link |
I was like, you're behind on the rent.
link |
And she was like, yeah.
link |
And I was like, funny, they just said
link |
you're up on it three months.
link |
And she gets quiet, and she's like, well, you lied to me, too.
link |
And I was like, you're right.
link |
I was like, but look, I can't do it anymore.
link |
And that's the last time I spoke to her right there.
link |
What happens is I was breaking law
link |
from inside the offices.
link |
I had a buddy that his name was Sean Mims out of Los Angeles.
link |
I had taught him how to do tax return fraud.
link |
I had told Sean, I go missing, I go missing for three months.
link |
I told him if I ever went missing not to contact me.
link |
And so I go missing, then I show back up online.
link |
First day, he contacts.
link |
So he becomes a target.
link |
And they identify him pretty quickly at that point.
link |
He's set to be arrested sometime in March of six.
link |
That's when he's set to be arrested.
link |
Operation Rolling Stone was the name of the operation.
link |
Nine people were supposed to be arrested that night.
link |
So Secret Service goes and arrests this guy.
link |
They search his apartment and don't find anything.
link |
The apartment manager comes out and explains to him
link |
how Sean has done all kinds of work to the apartment.
link |
As a matter of fact, he brought in $30,000 worth of Italian tile
link |
to put in the apartment that he's renting.
link |
And by the way, last night he had a UHaul out here
link |
and took out a whole shitload of stuff.
link |
So Secret Service comes back in.
link |
They look at me and they're like, we
link |
need you to take a polygraph.
link |
And my answer was, I ain't taking a polygraph.
link |
So they're like, well, we'll throw you back in jail
link |
And I was like, call my lawyer.
link |
Lawyer gets me on the phone.
link |
He's like, you don't have to take the polygraph.
link |
I was like, well, good, I'm not going to.
link |
But they will throw you back in jail.
link |
And I was like, don't want to do that.
link |
And he's like, have you done anything?
link |
And I was like, yeah.
link |
And he's like, well, you can try to pass the polygraph.
link |
I was like, let's take the polygraph.
link |
They asked three questions.
link |
The questions were, have you talked to anybody?
link |
Have you been on a computer outside of the offices?
link |
Have you talked to the press, which
link |
I was interviewing with a New York Times
link |
writer the entire time?
link |
And then have you contacted or warned anybody
link |
about investigations?
link |
And I failed polygraph completely.
link |
So they revoked the bond, took me back down
link |
to Charleston County, throw me into jail.
link |
Three days later, Secret Service shows back up
link |
and pulled me out of a cell.
link |
It's Jim Ramacone and Bobby Kirby.
link |
And I mean, honestly, they were good men.
link |
And they gave me chances upon chances to do the right thing.
link |
And I was not ready to do that.
link |
And Jim Ramacone and Bobby's in there.
link |
And Bobby, I mean, Bobby was a friend.
link |
I mean, he truly was.
link |
Later on, a couple of years ago, I had a chance to have lunch
link |
And I told him I was sorry for everything I did to him
link |
because I got him and another agent fired.
link |
And I told him I was sorry for what happened.
link |
And he told me then, he's like, we were your friends, man.
link |
We were truly your friends.
link |
So they were good men.
link |
They wanted to help.
link |
They wanted you to be a good man.
link |
What got me so damn bad is I told him,
link |
I was like, man, I'm trying to be a better guy.
link |
And he's like, Brett, you always were a good guy.
link |
You just didn't know it.
link |
People like that, we need people like that in this world.
link |
You need somebody to basically believe that you
link |
can be a good man.
link |
So Jim Ramacone pulls me out.
link |
He's the second in charge in South Carolina.
link |
He's got the Miranda waiver in front of him, right?
link |
And he looks at me.
link |
He's like, I'm playing hard ass.
link |
Bobby's over here looking distraught and like a hurt dog.
link |
And Jim's like, here's the way this is going to work.
link |
He said, you're going to tell me everything you've done
link |
the past six years, or I'm going to make it my mission in life
link |
to fuck over you and your family.
link |
And he said, not just this case.
link |
Once you get out of prison, I'll hound you
link |
the rest of your life.
link |
Then he slides the Miranda waiver over,
link |
and he's like, now you want to talk?
link |
And I looked at him, and I was like, nope.
link |
He was like, he gets up, gets all red in the face,
link |
storms out on the way out.
link |
He's like, fuck you very much.
link |
So I go back to the cell.
link |
A week later, I was only under state charges.
link |
A week later, judge rules they revoke the bond improperly.
link |
Reinstates the bond.
link |
Nobody calls the Secret Service to tell them I walk out.
link |
I was dating this stripper, and I told my mom.
link |
I was like, well, if they're going to fuck me,
link |
they're going to have to find me.
link |
She just went on the move.
link |
Yeah, I called this stripper girl up.
link |
I'd given her like 60K, some bullshit like that.
link |
And I told her, I was like, Kim, I need some money.
link |
And she was like, what?
link |
I was like, look, I said, give me $1,000.
link |
I'll give you back $3,000 in two weeks.
link |
So I met her in Augusta, Georgia,
link |
and got the $1,000 from her and started driving west on I20.
link |
No idea where to go to, anything else.
link |
There was a prepaid debit card supplier in Dallas.
link |
Went in, walked in the office, convinced the guy,
link |
social engineering, convinced the guy
link |
to give me 60 prepaid debit cards without a driver's
link |
license, without payment, anything else he did.
link |
And that started the run.
link |
I ended up stealing.
link |
From that, I stole like 160K profit,
link |
used that to buy a Jeep Cherokee.
link |
And the idea was to steal enough money
link |
to bug out to Florianopolis, Brazil,
link |
and set up shop down there, and do it again.
link |
That was the dream.
link |
So I was on the run for four months, stole $600,000.
link |
I was in Las Vegas, Nevada.
link |
One day, I had stolen the night before.
link |
I had stolen 160K out of ATMs.
link |
Went in the next morning.
link |
I woke up, signed on to cartersmarket.com,
link |
which was ran by Max Butler, the ice man.
link |
And there's my name, US Most Wanted on it.
link |
And that gets your attention.
link |
That was my real name with the US Most Wanted beside of it.
link |
Nobody knew my real name in that environment at all.
link |
But then they did.
link |
And it was talking about me being
link |
part of the Secret Service, Operation Anglerfish,
link |
So of course, they're all like, everybody's after you.
link |
They're like, oh, yeah, we're going to get this son of a bitch.
link |
So I sat there looking at it.
link |
And I was like, said it out loud.
link |
I was like, well, Mr. Johnson, you've
link |
made the United States Most Wanted list.
link |
What do you do now?
link |
And I was like, I'm going to Disney World.
link |
Said that out loud.
link |
So loaded up the Jeep, drove from Las Vegas
link |
to Orlando, Florida, and got the two annual passes,
link |
one to Disney World, the other one to Universal Studios.
link |
Paid for a timeshare.
link |
They were building these new timeshares right off
link |
Universal Drive, building these brand new timeshares,
link |
paid for a timeshare in nine months, cash.
link |
I was like, we take cash?
link |
Yeah, we take cash.
link |
Then it wasn't furnished.
link |
So I went down to a furniture store,
link |
bought $30,000 in furniture.
link |
They had seized a DVD collection of mine worth $30,000,
link |
bought that back, and proceeded to go to Disney World
link |
And that lasted about six weeks.
link |
They used a trigger fish, is what they use.
link |
Nowadays, it's called a stingray to find me.
link |
So one day, it was like 1030 in the morning on Saturday.
link |
September 16 was the day, 2006.
link |
Yeah, 2006, September 16.
link |
I was used to the builders coming around knocking,
link |
making sure everything was all right.
link |
So I was asleep, heard this knock at the door,
link |
and get up, look through the keyhole, nobody's there.
link |
You know, people, nobody's there.
link |
Open the door, step out into the hallway.
link |
Walking down the hall is Bobby Kirby,
link |
another South Carolina guy and a Orlando Orange County cop.
link |
And they turn around, and they're like, hey, Brett.
link |
And I'm like, hey, Bobby, how are you?
link |
And it's like, we're good, how are you?
link |
And I'm like, I'm fine, would you like to come in?
link |
He was like, let's put you in cuffs first.
link |
And I was like, that's probably a good idea.
link |
He was like, he walks in, he's like,
link |
have you got anything in here?
link |
And I was like, yeah, there's $120,000 in the bedroom.
link |
And he was like, seriously?
link |
I was like, yeah, that and an AK 47.
link |
His face goes white, and he's like, you've got a rifle?
link |
And I was like, no, I'm kidding with you.
link |
So they throw me in jail in Orange County,
link |
and they give me diesel therapy.
link |
And diesel therapy is, it took like two weeks
link |
to transport me from Orange County, Orlando,
link |
to Columbia, South Carolina.
link |
And what happens is, is you stop at every county jail
link |
you possibly can, go through the processing, which
link |
is about six hours.
link |
Once you get to your bunk, hey, time to transport you.
link |
They do that on purpose?
link |
On purpose, on purpose.
link |
Wears you down mentally and physically and everything.
link |
I get to Columbia, South Carolina.
link |
Now, while I was at Orange County, what happens is,
link |
this inmate, because we were in federal holding,
link |
this inmate, he looks at me.
link |
His name was Yeti.
link |
And he's like, hey, man, you know,
link |
the only time you get off in federal prison
link |
is the drug program.
link |
I was like, well, man, I don't use drugs.
link |
And he's like, you can find a drug problem, can't you?
link |
And I was like, I can find a drug problem.
link |
So what happens is, is every county jail I stop at
link |
on the way to Columbia, I tell them I'm alcoholic and cocaine.
link |
So by the time I get to Columbia, South Carolina,
link |
they've got this paper trail of Mr. Johnson
link |
requesting help for drugs.
link |
I had hired Strom Thurmond's son as an attorney.
link |
They make me drop him because I paid for him
link |
with illegal funds.
link |
So they give me a public defender.
link |
He gets a psychological evaluation order for me.
link |
So psychologist comes in county jail, four hour interview.
link |
About halfway through, he looks at me,
link |
he's like, you using these type of drugs?
link |
An eight ball a day.
link |
Do you have any trouble out of that?
link |
I can't get an erection.
link |
And he looks at me.
link |
And I'm looking at him like, because I had gotten
link |
that shit from Boogie Nights.
link |
Finally, I'm like, is that right?
link |
And he was like, it could happen.
link |
That makes it into my pre sentence report.
link |
So all federal inmates, probation office
link |
and prosecutor, they do this detailed background check
link |
to basically tell the judge how much time to give you.
link |
So that drug bit with that interview makes it into the PSR.
link |
So day of interview, I mean, day of sentencing.
link |
I had pled guilty, day of sentencing.
link |
The prosecutor, he stands up, and this dude
link |
is screaming at this point.
link |
And he's like, Mr. Johnson's manipulated
link |
the Secret Service.
link |
He's manipulated the prosecutor.
link |
Then he points at the judge.
link |
And he's manipulating you today, Your Honor.
link |
We insist on the upper limits of the guidelines.
link |
Well, I've been telling everybody in the jail
link |
that if they give me any more than 60 months,
link |
So we're like, OK, sure.
link |
So the judge looks at me.
link |
She's like, I agree.
link |
I'm like, she says, 75 months.
link |
So I looked at my lawyer, and I was like,
link |
can you get the drug program for me?
link |
He's like, I don't know why I ask.
link |
Your Honor, will you order the drug program for Mr. Johnson?
link |
The judge says, no, but I'll recommend he gets evaluated.
link |
So the Secret Service had told her, hey, he's full of shit.
link |
So she's like, no, but I'll recommend he gets evaluated.
link |
I looked at my lawyer, and I was like, what does that mean?
link |
He was like, you're probably not going to get it.
link |
I'm like, how soon can you get me to the camp?
link |
And he was like, well, if you don't appeal,
link |
I can get you there pretty quick.
link |
My exact words were, fuck the appeal.
link |
Get me to the camp.
link |
I'll take it from there.
link |
He looks at me like I'm the biggest idiot in the world.
link |
I get sent to, because you can get a camp recommended.
link |
I have friends, family members look
link |
for camps that don't have a fence around them.
link |
And we settle on Ashland, Kentucky.
link |
Six weeks later, I'm in Ashland, Kentucky,
link |
and pull up there, 14 foot fence, a razor wire on top.
link |
And I'm like, I don't climb fences, so I go in.
link |
First question I ask is, are there any jobs
link |
outside of the fence?
link |
And he was like, guards like, well, you
link |
can work in the national forest.
link |
And I'm like, no, I'll die out there.
link |
He was like, well, you could do landscaping.
link |
I'm like, I can run a weed eater.
link |
Two days later, I walk into the landscaping office,
link |
and the cop, this is this genius of some
link |
of these people and institutions.
link |
The cop, behind his desk, the entire wall
link |
is a blown up photo of the compound and the outlying area.
link |
So I can literally sit there and plot where I'm going.
link |
My dad, I hadn't spoken to that man in years.
link |
And he shows up at my sentencing and stands up
link |
in front of the judge.
link |
And he's like, Your Honor, I want to make
link |
sure Brett gets a good start.
link |
He can live with me when he gets out, everything else.
link |
Looking back, the man meant that.
link |
And I just thought it was bullshit at the time.
link |
So he starts to visit me in prison.
link |
I mean, yeah, in prison, he starts to visit.
link |
And about the third visit in, he looks at me.
link |
He's like, I've been reading about you online.
link |
He's like, that's a lot of money you made.
link |
And I was like, yeah.
link |
He's like, you think you can teach somebody
link |
And I'm like, so what I used to say,
link |
and again, it's this thing of really coming
link |
to terms with things.
link |
What I used to say was I thought my dad was back in my life
link |
and that he was just trying to use me.
link |
The truth of the matter was is that my dad
link |
hadn't really seen me except in that frame of crime,
link |
being that criminal with my mom, everything else.
link |
I really think that's how the man was trying
link |
to communicate with me.
link |
He wanted to connect with you in the places
link |
where you know, where you love, where you're interested in,
link |
where your addiction is, essentially.
link |
And what I did is I manipulated the man
link |
into helping me escape.
link |
So I agreed to teach him how to do tax fraud.
link |
And in return, the only money he had to his name,
link |
he had $4,000 cash.
link |
So I manipulated him into giving me that
link |
and to dropping me off a change of clothes, a cell phone,
link |
and a driver's license.
link |
The only driver's license he had was my driver's license,
link |
So I was at the camp for, I don't know, six, eight weeks.
link |
And the hardest worker that landscaping had ever seen.
link |
At one point, the cops got me on a mountainside
link |
with a broom, sweeping off the mountain.
link |
I'm like, yeah, we'll do that, absolutely.
link |
So you're building trust with the guys there.
link |
Yeah, working my ass off.
link |
And in six weeks, I take off.
link |
And I lasted, I think, two, three weeks, something
link |
US Marshals, I made it 100.
link |
They called you escaped.
link |
US Marshals, they're canvassing a three state area.
link |
They found me, I think, 250 miles away.
link |
It's like Lexington, Kentucky.
link |
They found me in Lexington because I had
link |
to use my real driver's license.
link |
I had prepaid debit cards.
link |
And I had stolen identity information.
link |
And the way it got me was I had dyed my hair this flaming red.
link |
I had this deep tan.
link |
I didn't look anything like myself.
link |
And I was at a hotel, had the curtains open, saw this guy.
link |
I was on the laptop, saw this guy walk by.
link |
He walks by the window, and he stops.
link |
And then he backs up.
link |
He knocks on the window.
link |
Then he pulls out this badge, and he points at it.
link |
He's like, and then he points at the door.
link |
So I was like, oh, OK.
link |
So I open up the door.
link |
He's like, US Marshals Service.
link |
So they arrest me.
link |
How did they track you down?
link |
They canvassed that area.
link |
They talked to every hotel, everything else.
link |
So it's like a traditional, like, they were just tracking?
link |
Traditional police work is what it was.
link |
So it wasn't like, from the internet,
link |
they kind of got something?
link |
I don't know, just straight police work.
link |
Good, good, good, good.
link |
US Marshals are outstanding in everything they do.
link |
So they arrest me.
link |
I go to a, I'm initially held at a county
link |
jail in Moorhead, Kentucky.
link |
And that, man, that was one hell of an experience there.
link |
But then I'm transferred after sentencing on that.
link |
So sentencing, here's the weird thing.
link |
So I spend like, I think, two or three months at the county
link |
jail in Moorhead, Kentucky.
link |
At my sentencing, it happens so quickly
link |
after the initial sentencing that they
link |
use the exact same presentence report.
link |
The report that's got all that drug shit in there.
link |
So at my sentencing, prosecutor's there,
link |
Secret Service is there, judge, me, and my attorney.
link |
Prosecutor stands up.
link |
He's like, Your Honor, we would like
link |
it if you would consider that when Mr. Johnson was arrested,
link |
he had a laptop, he had all this information with him,
link |
looks like he was engaged in identity theft yet again.
link |
Judge looks at the prosecutor, says no.
link |
Says, hey, if you were going to charge him with it,
link |
you should have charged him with it.
link |
I'm only considering the escape.
link |
Then he looks at me.
link |
He's like, Mr. Johnson.
link |
He said, it looks like by you keeping your mouth shut right
link |
now, you're really saving yourself
link |
a pretty serious charge.
link |
And my response was, yes, Your Honor.
link |
And he was like, then he opens up the presentence report,
link |
he's fingering through, and he's like,
link |
it also looks like before you got
link |
involved with all these drugs, you were a pretty good citizen.
link |
I was like, yes, Your Honor.
link |
And he's like, so here's what I'm going to do.
link |
He said, I'm going to give you 18 months on the escape.
link |
He said, I'm also going to give you,
link |
no, it's 15 months on the escape.
link |
He said, I'm going to give you 15 months on the escape.
link |
He said, and I'm also going to order the drug program for you.
link |
I was like, yes, Your Honor.
link |
So the drug program gives you a year off,
link |
and it gives you six months and halfway house.
link |
So by escaping, I got out of prison three months earlier
link |
than what I should have gotten out of it.
link |
So the original thing about drugs worked in the long term.
link |
The interesting thing with that, and this
link |
was the best lie I ever told, honestly,
link |
the best lie I ever told.
link |
I spent eight months in solitary confinement, eight months.
link |
And that's an experience.
link |
Because you ain't got no books for the first month or so,
link |
then they give you a King James Bible.
link |
And then for a month, no books.
link |
No books for a month.
link |
This is a pretty small and.
link |
No books, no paper, no pen, no pencil.
link |
You're alone with your mind.
link |
You got a mat, a toilet.
link |
You sleep as much as you can.
link |
You're sleeping 16, 18 hours a day is what you're doing.
link |
What about, were you thinking about even just going back
link |
You go through all that.
link |
Going through every single bit of that.
link |
And so you're supposed to get out an hour a day.
link |
Law says you're supposed to get out an hour a day.
link |
That's not the way things actually happen.
link |
What actually happens is you're lucky to get out an hour a week.
link |
You take a shower twice a week, and that's it.
link |
You get a phone call once a month.
link |
Oh, so you don't get to see nature.
link |
Don't see anything.
link |
You're getting solitary.
link |
And it takes about a week.
link |
The first week is the roughest.
link |
You're bouncing off the walls that first week
link |
because you can't sleep, can't do anything else.
link |
Then you start to adapt to it after a while.
link |
When that book does arrive, you're happy as hell to have it.
link |
I'm well versed in King James Bible.
link |
So you're happy to have it.
link |
Then finally, you get other books
link |
that come in from that point.
link |
Spent eight months at that.
link |
And they send me out to a real prison, Big Spring, Texas,
link |
West Texas, where have you been out there?
link |
Prairie dogs and tarantulas is what it is.
link |
No kidding, it gets so hot that warnings
link |
come on the radio telling you not to drive on certain streets
link |
because they're melted.
link |
That's Big Spring.
link |
So if you've seen the movie From Dusk
link |
Till Dawn, the opening scene is in Big Spring, Texas.
link |
And that's where I find out what a real prison is.
link |
And it's not ran by guards.
link |
Prisons are ran by inmates.
link |
And that's a fact.
link |
So you're met at the door by whatever race you are
link |
So Big Spring is a converted Air Force compound.
link |
It's a disciplinary prison.
link |
So you get the bad guys are in there.
link |
So I go through processing, and I'm walking up to the unit,
link |
and I'm met at the door by a guy named Nick Sandifer.
link |
He's the treasurer of the Aryan Brotherhood.
link |
And first question out of his mouth
link |
is, any more white guys come in?
link |
And shit, I didn't know.
link |
I was like, hell, I don't know, four or five?
link |
Next question is, what are you in here for?
link |
My answer was, because I'm like, I got no worries.
link |
My answer was, computer crime.
link |
Turns out, wrong thing to say, because computer crime is not
link |
credit card theft or hacking or any bullshit like that.
link |
Computer crime in prison is child pornography.
link |
He looks at me like I'm a piece of shit,
link |
goes and gets his buddies.
link |
They circle around.
link |
What are you in here for?
link |
I like how the Aryan Brotherhood has lines.
link |
They're like, oh, yeah, this is child porn.
link |
That's the bad guy.
link |
They circle around.
link |
They're like, what did you say you're in here for?
link |
So I'm sitting there trying to explain it to them.
link |
They're like, you tell a good story.
link |
You still said this.
link |
Computer crime basically really does
link |
mean usually child pornography.
link |
And what you see, and that's one of things you find out,
link |
the guys that are going in there for child porn,
link |
they will tell them it's credit card theft.
link |
But you also don't, I mean, for people
link |
who are just listening to this, you don't exactly look
link |
like the typical computer hacker.
link |
But I don't look like the pedophile either.
link |
But it's like it doesn't make it seem like you're, I mean,
link |
I guess you're not wearing a hoodie,
link |
and you're not like emo, dark.
link |
The way it actually works in prison,
link |
they won't attack you until they know.
link |
So they have to see paperwork, which now in federal prison,
link |
you don't get transported with paperwork because of that.
link |
So they have to see paperwork, or a guard
link |
will tell them what you're in there for.
link |
Guards will tell who the pedophiles are.
link |
So none of the guards told them that it was anything.
link |
So for the first month, they think I am,
link |
but they're not doing anything because they
link |
don't know for sure.
link |
At the end of the first month, I'd
link |
been talking to Kevin Polson over at Wired Magazine
link |
He does an article about that.
link |
It shows up in Wired Magazine.
link |
So at the end of the first month,
link |
Wired Magazine hits a compound, front cover, all the story.
link |
You would think it saved me.
link |
So I'm reading the article, really happy about it.
link |
So what happens is four o clock is mail call.
link |
Four o clock's a stand up count nationwide.
link |
After four o clock is your mail call.
link |
They hand out all the mail for the day.
link |
So the mail comes, I get the magazine.
link |
I'm reading through it.
link |
I'm like, well, shit, I'm good to go.
link |
Then it says, Brett Johnson, Secret Service informant
link |
So you're now a snitch.
link |
Which is right up there with the pedophiles.
link |
So we go to dinner after that.
link |
At dinner, you can hear it.
link |
You can hear the chat.
link |
I think it's that guy over there.
link |
Warden, next day, shuts down the entire compound,
link |
calls me into his office.
link |
They got security there.
link |
They got the counselors there and everything else.
link |
Warden looks at me.
link |
He's like, did you give an interview to Wired Magazine?
link |
He's like, do you not know they will kill you in here?
link |
I was like, he was like, do you feel safe?
link |
Well, I know if you tell me you don't feel safe,
link |
they transport you.
link |
Transport you means another eight months
link |
in solitary confinement.
link |
You start to see shit in solitary after a while.
link |
So I'm like, no, not gonna do that.
link |
So I'm like, completely safe.
link |
He was like, look, he's like,
link |
if anybody says anything to you, immediately come to us
link |
because they'll fucking kill you.
link |
So they do a locker search,
link |
try to confiscate the magazines.
link |
The next day, I walk into the unit.
link |
There's Nick Sandefur laying on his bunk,
link |
magazine wide open reading it.
link |
I'm like, oh shit.
link |
I was like, hey, Nick, what are you doing?
link |
He's like, oh, doing some reading.
link |
I was like, anything interesting?
link |
He's like, it's getting there.
link |
I was like, let me save you the trouble.
link |
Take the magazine, turn it over to the page.
link |
I was like, right there is what you're looking for.
link |
He was like, man, I already knew.
link |
I was like, do we have a problem?
link |
And he looks at me.
link |
He's like, is anyone on the compound you told on?
link |
He's like, until someone gets here, you snitched on.
link |
He's like, but I need you to do something for me.
link |
All right, so in federal prison, you gotta have a job.
link |
It doesn't matter what you do, but you gotta work.
link |
I got a job in education teaching a lit class.
link |
Every Wednesday, six to 8.30 PM, lit.
link |
And had all, every area on the compound
link |
signs up for the lit class.
link |
Had a couple of guards every now and then popped in.
link |
And did we teach lit?
link |
No, we taught fraud.
link |
Every Wednesday, six to 8.30 PM.
link |
That's how I didn't get my ass beaten.
link |
And my other job, I had two jobs with them.
link |
The other job, you get to the point, it's weird, man.
link |
You get to the point, people walking off the bus,
link |
you know immediately two groups of people.
link |
You know who the bank robbers are immediately.
link |
Just by them walking off the bus,
link |
you're like, that motherfucker's a bank robber.
link |
And you know who the pedophiles are immediately.
link |
So my job as the white guy was to approach
link |
the white pedophiles and have a conversation.
link |
And the conversation was basically,
link |
hey, don't know what you're in here for.
link |
Don't care what you're in here for.
link |
But if you got some sort of fucked up charge,
link |
you need to tell me.
link |
If you tell me, everything's gonna be all right.
link |
If you don't tell me, you see those guys over there?
link |
If you start to associate with them
link |
or they start to talk to you,
link |
and then they find out you're in here on something,
link |
they're gonna kill you.
link |
And what are the things, pedophile?
link |
Pedophile, rapist, anything that harms children,
link |
harms women, anything like that.
link |
And there are, it's like the mob,
link |
there's rules, there's an ethical code.
link |
Even if you have the division between races on all that,
link |
you still have these lines drawn.
link |
And there's a hierarchy too.
link |
Very, very much so.
link |
And what that looks like in prison,
link |
depending on the, it depends on the security class
link |
that you're in, what level prison.
link |
But at that prison, what that looked like
link |
was you're not allowed to talk to anybody.
link |
You're not allowed to watch television.
link |
You can go to the library.
link |
You don't associate with anyone except your own type.
link |
If you do anything like this, we will kill you.
link |
If someone wants to extort you,
link |
we will do that too and you won't tell on us
link |
or we'll kill you.
link |
So that's the way that works at that point.
link |
And everybody quickly large this.
link |
And so typically the guys would say,
link |
I just wanna do my own time.
link |
That would be the line.
link |
And it's like, okay, don't mess with him, all right?
link |
Every now and then you'd have somebody lie
link |
and that would come with those types of consequences.
link |
I got to see, while I was there, saw two people murdered,
link |
saw, went through three prison riots
link |
and through my entire tenure in prison, saw four suicides.
link |
The people who got killed, it was,
link |
so we had, outside you had this track,
link |
a third of a mile track.
link |
You walk it counterclockwise.
link |
And inside of the track, you got two handball courts.
link |
So of an evening that happened both times,
link |
all of us would be walking, doing our exercises.
link |
And at the top of the key, like a flock of birds,
link |
you'd see all the inmates start to migrate down
link |
So the first time you see that, you see that migration,
link |
you look up in the distance and one of the inmates
link |
got another inmate down and he's just hammering his head
link |
right into the pavement, like that right there.
link |
Well, guards don't stop that because a guard may get hurt.
link |
So a guard is 15 minutes coming out to stop that
link |
until everything's over.
link |
By that point, the guy doesn't have a head.
link |
They shut the compound down and this is what happens.
link |
So you shut the entire compound down.
link |
They make two lines of the inmates.
link |
And what happens is the inmate walks into a room,
link |
they shut the door behind the inmate,
link |
guard asks them two questions.
link |
First question is, did you see anything?
link |
Second question is, if you had seen anything,
link |
would you say anything?
link |
Guard then says, get the fuck out.
link |
Anybody that stays in any longer than that
link |
is automatically suspect.
link |
So there was one incident, I remember this Hispanic guy,
link |
he's in there for a few minutes.
link |
And everybody's like, what's going on?
link |
So his people then call him over,
link |
explain to us what went on.
link |
And it happens like that.
link |
It's fascinating because you talked about
link |
the network of trust in the cyber crime community.
link |
And here's a network of trust
link |
in the prison crime community.
link |
Trust drives everything at the end of the day.
link |
The riots that I went through,
link |
the first riot, man, you're scared to death.
link |
You know, you've got the cops dressed up
link |
in the Ninja Turtle outfits,
link |
you've got the rubber bullets,
link |
the tear gas canisters, all that crap.
link |
You got the inmates that are raising hell.
link |
The second riot, you calm down.
link |
Second riot, you start to notice.
link |
This is racial riot.
link |
This is typically, and almost always,
link |
it's Hispanics and African Americans.
link |
So you get to detect what is the motivation
link |
for the riot, what is the reason,
link |
and that gives you some calm.
link |
That's exactly right.
link |
So the second riot, you start to notice this.
link |
Hey, man, this ain't me.
link |
This ain't our group.
link |
Third riot, no shit.
link |
Third riot, you lay in your bunk.
link |
You let them wage war all around you,
link |
and every now and then you have an inmate
link |
that'll run up to you and he'll point to a locker
link |
and say, is that your locker?
link |
And if you tell him yes, they leave it alone.
link |
If you say it's not my locker,
link |
they'll break into it and steal everything out of it
link |
and go from there, and that's what happens, but.
link |
So you did your time for five years.
link |
I went through, I told you it was a good lie that I told.
link |
I went through the residential drug abuse program.
link |
It's a nine month intensive therapy,
link |
and the way I got to that, this counselor at Big Spring,
link |
He wanted inmates to be educated.
link |
He was a really good guy.
link |
So he wanted inmates to be educated.
link |
He got a discount on a game theory class set.
link |
So he gets all these discs and everything,
link |
and he's asking, does anybody on the compound
link |
know anything about game theory?
link |
And somebody says, if anybody does, it'll be Brett Johnson.
link |
So he comes up to me one day at my buggy.
link |
He's like, are you Brett Johnson?
link |
He was like, do you know anything about game theory?
link |
And I was like, yes, I do.
link |
So I start rattling off Prisoner's Dilemma
link |
and everything else.
link |
He's like, well, you teach a class?
link |
So I start teaching that.
link |
I start teaching inmates public speaking
link |
and to make friends with this counselor.
link |
So it gets time where I'm supposed to be transferring out
link |
to this drug program that they only had in Fort Worth,
link |
and the transfers are taking like four or five months.
link |
That's four or five months I could be out free.
link |
So I went up to him one day and I was like, look,
link |
his name was Keely.
link |
I was like, look, man, I said, is there any way
link |
that I can get transferred out any sooner?
link |
And he looks at me and he's like, Brett, I cannot help you.
link |
And I was like, I appreciate that.
link |
Thank you so much for even trying.
link |
So he said that a week later, I'm on a bus
link |
by going to Fort Worth.
link |
So he got me to Fort Worth.
link |
So it was a nine month program,
link |
24 hours a day of cognitive behavioral therapy.
link |
Had nothing to do with drugs.
link |
It was all peer study stuff and CBT training.
link |
And honestly, it's the best thing that could ever happen.
link |
So that part, what was the thing that changed you as a man?
link |
Is it the solitary confinement?
link |
Was it losing the people you loved?
link |
Or was it that behavioral therapy?
link |
It's a combination, man.
link |
It's a combination.
link |
It was, so my sister disowns me.
link |
The only person I had in my life.
link |
I mean, me and my sister, that's it.
link |
I mean, yeah, I loved Elizabeth.
link |
I love my wife now, but it's...
link |
Me and my sister, we went through all that shit together.
link |
So Denise disowns me.
link |
She doesn't talk to me for an entire year
link |
when all this stuff happens.
link |
And after I get arrested on the escape,
link |
she ends up driving seven hours
link |
to come see me to tell me she loves me.
link |
And I don't see her again for five and a half years.
link |
So that's really the first turnaround.
link |
Took me two and a half years in prison
link |
to accept responsibility.
link |
That was amazing that she did that.
link |
Yeah, she's something.
link |
Yeah, she saw me for 10 minutes,
link |
tell me she loves me and then I don't see her again.
link |
But yeah, you had time to think over those years.
link |
Took two and a half years to realize
link |
that I didn't commit crime
link |
because of stripper girlfriends or wives or family.
link |
I committed it because I wanted to, chose to.
link |
And that's the first turnaround.
link |
Second turnaround is the CBT training.
link |
It didn't really hit while I was in prison.
link |
I went through it and they ingrained it in you,
link |
but until you choose to make it work, it doesn't work.
link |
So I got out in 2011, didn't wanna break the law, did not.
link |
And I was under three years probation,
link |
couldn't touch a computer.
link |
I had a job offer from Deloitte
link |
to run a cyber crime office in the UK,
link |
which that was a no.
link |
Now you're not moving and that's a computer idiot.
link |
So then I had a job offer from Know Before,
link |
a phishing company, couldn't take that.
link |
I got to where I was trying to apply for fast food jobs.
link |
That's a computer, can't touch that.
link |
Okay, then what about a waiter's position?
link |
Well, that's a computer and access to credit cards, idiot.
link |
Can't touch that either.
link |
So literally could not get a job, could not.
link |
Doing food stamps, I had a roommate
link |
that paid half the rent.
link |
They tell you when you leave prison
link |
to get a job in something you care about
link |
and you won't recidivate, couldn't get a job.
link |
And what I had was a cat, and Monster the Cat,
link |
that was the cat's name.
link |
And I had enough money to feed that little guy
link |
and didn't have money to buy toilet paper for the apartment.
link |
So I was on Panama City Beach.
link |
How long were you living like this?
link |
It was a steady decline,
link |
because remember I taught my dad how to commit tax fraud.
link |
So he bankrolled a lot of that until he couldn't.
link |
And then from there, it's like, what the fuck do you do?
link |
So I didn't want to go into computer crime at all.
link |
And I ended up shoplifting toilet paper, man.
link |
Shoplifting toilet paper.
link |
Just like for the basics, the basics of survival.
link |
So about the same time I had a friend that, this guy,
link |
I'd been dating the same type of women I had been dating,
link |
you know, the unhealthy ones, the hot unhealthy ones.
link |
Yes, love, that's how that works.
link |
So I had a friend post an ad for me on Plenty of Fish.
link |
And this woman responds, my wife, she responds.
link |
And the pictures I had taken were these prison type pictures,
link |
you know, the serious like, they were there.
link |
She sends me a message of, why aren't you smiling?
link |
And my response was, that is my happy face.
link |
So we start talking and we started dating.
link |
And she's that second saving thing, man.
link |
I ended up moving in with her.
link |
I was going broke.
link |
I was about to get kicked out of the apartment and everything
link |
And she didn't say it, but I think she knew it.
link |
And moved in with her.
link |
And the job I got, my probation officer
link |
let me have a cell phone.
link |
I was going through Craigslist.
link |
This guy was advertising for landscaping.
link |
His name was Dustin DeRamus.
link |
And he's like, come on down, talk to me.
link |
So he was running this business, him and his brother
link |
were, out of his house.
link |
So I'm sitting there talking to him for about 20 minutes.
link |
He's like, can I ask you a question?
link |
He's like, are you on the run or something?
link |
So I'm like, no, why?
link |
And he's like, well, you just don't look
link |
like the kind of guy that do this.
link |
I was like, this is who I am.
link |
This is what I've done.
link |
And he looks at me.
link |
He's like, man, I got to think about that.
link |
So he tells me to go on home.
link |
That was a Friday.
link |
Sunday evening, he gives me a call.
link |
And he was like, Brett, if I hire you, will you actually work?
link |
And I told him, I was like, Dustin, if you give me a job,
link |
I promise I'll work my ass off.
link |
And he's like, show up 6 o clock.
link |
I was like, all right.
link |
So my job was to push a lawnmower 10 hours a day,
link |
five days a week for $400 a week, and busted my ass.
link |
I hit it so hard, I would come in of a night and pass out,
link |
wake up the next morning, and hit it again.
link |
And it got to the point, this dude
link |
ended up offering me to come in and partner with his business.
link |
His brother dropped out.
link |
And by that point, I'd learned everything
link |
on the business and everything.
link |
And he was like, if you'd like to come in,
link |
I'll cut you in half.
link |
And I was like, Dustin, I can't do it, man.
link |
Because I wasn't making any money.
link |
He didn't want to pay me anymore until he was able to do more.
link |
And I thought I found another job doing something else.
link |
And in a speech, I say it got cold and the grass
link |
started to stop growing.
link |
The truth of the matter was I thought I found another job.
link |
Guy was offering to pay me $1,500 a week doing the sales
link |
for oil rig training, was what it was.
link |
And I accepted the job.
link |
I quit working for Dustin.
link |
And the guy, I told him before he even offered me a job,
link |
I told him my criminal history because I
link |
was required to do that.
link |
So I was supposed to start work.
link |
Well, he calls me and tells me he can't hire me.
link |
So I'm out of work.
link |
And Dustin's already hired somebody else by that point,
link |
so I can't go back with him.
link |
And I'm that guy again, man.
link |
It's important for me to show value in a relationship.
link |
So Michelle was the only one working.
link |
I'm like, I got to do something.
link |
And I get it in my head.
link |
I was like, if nothing else, I can just
link |
bring food in the house.
link |
She was only making, I think she was, I mean,
link |
we had it hard, it was just her working.
link |
And I was like, if nothing else, I can bring food in the house
link |
and get on the dark web, get some stolen credit cards,
link |
start ordering food.
link |
Well, it gets worse than that.
link |
She's got two sons there.
link |
So I'm like, well, they need clothes.
link |
So they start stealing clothes.
link |
And it continues like that.
link |
I get arrested on a food order.
link |
And Michelle didn't know what I was doing.
link |
So she had been to work, and she was coming back from work.
link |
And I'm like, they let me make a phone call.
link |
And I call her, and I say, come to the police station.
link |
I've been arrested.
link |
And she didn't know I'd been doing that.
link |
My probation officer, of course, he didn't know anything else.
link |
At my sentencing for that, probation officer
link |
was there, prosecutor, the judge, US Marshals, Michelle,
link |
Michelle stands up, and she tells the judge
link |
that I'm a better dad to her kids
link |
than their actual father is.
link |
And by that point, I'm crying.
link |
Probation officer stands up.
link |
And he was like, we think Mr. Johnson's a good guy.
link |
We think this is a one time thing.
link |
Prosecutor says the same thing.
link |
Judge sentences me to one year.
link |
Probation officer stands back up.
link |
And he was like, Mr. Johnson, Judge,
link |
if you can give Mr. Johnson a year and a day,
link |
he can get the good time and get back to his family sooner.
link |
So the judge amends the sentence to a year and a day.
link |
So I served 10 months.
link |
They sent me back to Texas.
link |
And that's when I find out that Michelle didn't need me
link |
for what I could give her.
link |
She just wanted me for me that entire time.
link |
She stands by me the entire time.
link |
I do my 10 months, get out.
link |
We get married after that.
link |
And they kill probation.
link |
So I can touch a computer.
link |
They tell you, they were like, you know,
link |
inmates, a felon, if nothing else, he can sell cars.
link |
Well, it turns out you can't.
link |
You can sell cars if you're a drug dealer.
link |
If you're the guy that steals all the money and people's
link |
information, no, fuck no.
link |
You can't get a job selling cars.
link |
So can't get a job.
link |
And to this day, Lex, I know what my triggers are.
link |
I know what it would take to get me back
link |
into committing crime.
link |
So, and I knew I'd go so far at that point.
link |
So I looked at Michelle and I was like,
link |
let me see what I can do.
link |
Signed on to LinkedIn, reached out to this FBI super cop
link |
named Keith Malarski out of the Pittsburgh office.
link |
He was involved with my arrest and some associates
link |
and everything else and sent him a message.
link |
And the message was, you know,
link |
hey, I respect everything you did.
link |
Think you did a great job.
link |
By the way, I'd like to be legal.
link |
And dude responded within two hours.
link |
Two hours, he gives me references, advice,
link |
takes me in under his wing, everything else like that.
link |
And from that point, man, it was the head
link |
of the identity theft council did the same thing.
link |
Card not present group hires me to speak.
link |
Microsoft hires me to consult with them.
link |
And the Microsoft hire established enough trust
link |
in the industry that I was all right from that point.
link |
So now you're helping in many ways,
link |
fight the very guy that you used to be.
link |
So big picture advice.
link |
What, given that you were that guy,
link |
how do we fight cyber crime today
link |
and in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?
link |
What advice do you have to individuals, to companies,
link |
to governments of what, and also to Elizabeth,
link |
like the humans, human beings that love,
link |
that live, that are friends with cyber criminals?
link |
There's so many lessons to really be had from that.
link |
To me, the lesson, one of the big lessons to me
link |
is you can't serve two masters.
link |
If you're that guy that is committing crime
link |
or that person that's addicted,
link |
or you're in love with somebody that's addicted or has that,
link |
they don't love you.
link |
They love that addiction that comes first.
link |
It's always gonna come first.
link |
So you have to realize that.
link |
You have to know when to cut somebody off,
link |
when to end something, that knowing
link |
that they're not gonna change until they decide to change.
link |
At the same time, you gotta realize
link |
that the only reason I was able to turn my life around
link |
is because people took that chance on me.
link |
That's really the only reason.
link |
They believe that there's a good person in there.
link |
Yeah, if Malarski hadn't responded,
link |
if I hadn't had my sister, my wife,
link |
these companies that initially gave me that chance,
link |
my ass would be back in prison for 20 years.
link |
I have no doubt about that at all, all right?
link |
So you have to realize that.
link |
Cybercrime, a lot of companies that I talk to,
link |
they don't really understand or appreciate
link |
that networking aspect, that trust aspect
link |
of how criminals establish trust with each other,
link |
how they work together.
link |
A lot of companies think that it's a single player
link |
that's out victimizing them.
link |
And when you really break down how cybercrime operates,
link |
that you've got a group of individuals
link |
that are working together to hit you,
link |
but not only hit you,
link |
but they share and exchange information freely.
link |
Companies don't do that.
link |
You've got privacy concerns,
link |
you've got competitive edge concerns, everything else.
link |
Companies don't share information across the board
link |
like criminals do.
link |
Criminals do that.
link |
You have to appreciate that.
link |
You have to understand that big statistic
link |
that 90% of your tax use known exploits.
link |
It's not the stuff we don't know about,
link |
it's the shit we do know about.
link |
We're not doing anything about.
link |
So the way to defend against cybercrime
link |
is like there's a lot of low hanging fruit
link |
that you should fix.
link |
Sort of a lot of basic stuff
link |
that's already vulnerabilities,
link |
update the system security.
link |
Now that doesn't take care of SolarWinds or CNAP
link |
or anything like that.
link |
But those instances, I mean, okay, that's a big instance.
link |
But in the full spectrum of, especially in the future,
link |
because there's more and more companies
link |
that are coming online, they're becoming digital.
link |
And it's just more and more and more.
link |
And those vulnerabilities in terms of human nature,
link |
so for social engineering and the actual outdated systems,
link |
Some of it, I guess is, I mean, you're exceptionally good
link |
at this is educating on the social engineering side,
link |
is educating people in companies that like.
link |
You've got to do that.
link |
And companies have to, you know, I made that point
link |
that they never report to law enforcement.
link |
That's companies and individuals.
link |
You know, I've worked with Fortune 50 companies
link |
that will not press charges.
link |
Instead, they'll have that insider or that criminal
link |
sign an NDA, they'll pay them off.
link |
And we won't mention this shit anymore.
link |
You have to be, you have to press charges.
link |
You have to report, you have to raise the awareness
link |
of everyone in the group.
link |
You have to be, it's that idea.
link |
And I've talked about that before
link |
of understanding your place in that cyber crime spectrum.
link |
The way a criminal will victimize you
link |
depends on who you are and what you do
link |
as a person and as a business.
link |
So you have to understand that, design security around that.
link |
You know, we've got 7,500 security companies out there.
link |
A whole lot of them are snake oil salesmen.
link |
A lot of them is going to tell you that
link |
we're the one stop solution, but you're not, you're not.
link |
You're a tool, all right?
link |
And you may have a very good tool,
link |
but it's not the only tool that's needed
link |
to protect against the attacks that are out there.
link |
And we have to be open and honest
link |
about that kind of stuff if we're not.
link |
So I guess defending defense is not just like one tool.
link |
It's a process of just like a diversity
link |
and just constantly educating people.
link |
So it's the social side, it's constantly,
link |
because there's so many probably attack vectors
link |
in terms of the software that you have.
link |
If you look at it, that attack surface,
link |
you can't plug everything.
link |
It's too damn large to plug everything.
link |
But you can do the best job you can possibly do,
link |
but it takes a variety of tools to do that, all right?
link |
The idea, and Arcos is big about that,
link |
but the idea is to take the cost of fraud
link |
to the fraudster so high that they basically
link |
try to pick another target, all right?
link |
And that's the idea that you want.
link |
You want it to be not worth the criminal's time
link |
to hit your company.
link |
What about white hat hacking?
link |
So like hacking for good,
link |
sort of testing systems and then giving companies
link |
the vulnerabilities as you find them?
link |
I think it's outstanding.
link |
I do, I think that, I think pen testing,
link |
white hat stuff is outstanding.
link |
I think that you have to.
link |
It has to be tempered with what is reality as well though.
link |
All right, we've got a whole industry of people
link |
who try to sell RFID wallets,
link |
that I don't know of many RFID hackers out there
link |
on the criminal side, to be honest with you.
link |
Yeah, so some of it is just like a psychological
link |
safety blanket that's not actually providing any protection.
link |
By the way, you wrote on LinkedIn something about ID me.
link |
Why is it a problem?
link |
I was going down a rabbit hole with you.
link |
I was wondering if you were gonna mention that.
link |
You know, they lost, I guess I was partially responsible
link |
for them losing an $86 million contract.
link |
What was the contract with the government?
link |
Just with the IRS.
link |
So ID me is an identity, okay, backtrack.
link |
ID me is a marketing company that wants to say
link |
they're an identity verification company.
link |
I just wanna bring this up to see you get angry.
link |
I'll tell you what my issue is.
link |
So it's a company that's used for authentication
link |
by the IRS, I guess.
link |
IRS, Social Security Administration, VA,
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at 1.23 state unemployment offices, few other services.
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So I guess the idea is that you would be able
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to unlock your account or authenticate yourself
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as a human being by using your face or something like that.
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Or private information.
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They've got a tiered system with verification.
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They've got, you can do, they've got a free system
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which is questionable where you submit an ID
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and it's been shown, several bypasses have been shown.
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And I don't wanna talk about their security horribly bad
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because I wanna be honest, there are bypasses
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for a lot of security systems out there.
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The issue that I have with ID me is that
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their policies are somewhat questionable.
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I don't care if you're a private company
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that has those policies in place.
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But if you're a government agency
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and you as a citizen are entitled to a benefit
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or a service of that government agency,
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and then the government agency forces you
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to give up your complete identity profile
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to a private company.
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And then that private company uses that profile
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for marketing purposes, to further profit, things like that.
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I have a huge issue with that.
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I don't care if you're a private company that does that.
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I just don't think that citizens need to be forced
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into doing that in order to get a benefit
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or service that they're entitled to.
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So that's my big issue.
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So that, I mean, given how much value,
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how much we talked about the value of identity,
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you don't think that should be handed over lightly?
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No, absolutely not.
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And who would have thought that Brett Johnson
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would ever become a privacy advocate?
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I mean, it's just, people don't understand
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or appreciate the value of who they are.
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And certainly you've got a host of companies,
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ID means not the only one,
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but you've got some of these companies that say,
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well, we strip out the PII of the individual.
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We're just using the biometrics
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and the sites they're visiting and things like that.
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You can still ping that one unique individual
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out of all, using that information.
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Stripping out the PII,
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you can still ping who that individual is.
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So having lived a life of crime for many years,
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I'm sure you've connected indirectly
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to a large number of very dangerous people.
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Directly and directly.
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But the network indirectly is even larger, right?
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Are you, and I apologize for this question,
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are you ever worried for your life, for your wellbeing?
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Like having seen a world that's really dangerous
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in ways that's not, that operates in the shadows.
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Like I said, when we started Shadow Crew
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and started that initial cybercrime business, that world,
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violence wasn't there.
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Now violence is inherent in the system,
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to do the Monty Python bit.
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Yeah, the mob, the mafia are now part of this whole thing.
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Cartels are part of it.
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Drugs are inherently intertwined in cybercrime marketplaces
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because of the profit potential.
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And with that comes a lot of violence as well.
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Yeah, the cartels already brought the violence
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that they're good at from the 20th century.
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Absolutely, absolutely.
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Into the technology of the 21st century.
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Now, do I worry about that?
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It's interesting that my family worries about that.
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I think I may be just too involved in it
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to appreciate that type of danger.
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But my family worries about that.
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Do I think it's a possibility?
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I'm the guy that says what needs to be said.
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I've built my trust in this industry
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by not being scared of calling out companies and individuals
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and not being scared of targeting criminals
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or criminal groups.
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Your honesty as a human being emotionally
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and intellectually is really refreshing.
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It's a gift and thank you.
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Thank you for doing that.
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Is there a device you can give to young people today
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You broke many rules, all the rules.
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Some rules should be broken.
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So if you look at somebody young today
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in high school and college,
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thinking how they can break the rules legally
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and live a life that's something they could be really proud
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of, what would you say?
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Biggest lesson I've learned.
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You want your life to be one where you're helping people
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and not hurting people.
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And that really hit me the first time I walked into Quantico.
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You see the brightest minds in the United States
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who give up a lot of money,
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the opportunities of a lot of money
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because they believe in helping people.
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Where I spent a career just hurting and harming individuals,
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that's a hell of a lesson.
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And I'm glad I'm there,
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but I would tell people out there,
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it's fine to want money.
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It's fine to do that.
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It's fine to test systems.
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It's fine to circumvent the rules
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if you're not breaking the law.
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It's fine to do all that.
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I like doing that, all right?
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But if you've got the mindset,
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if you can just adhere to the mindset of helping people
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and not hurting people,
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I think you'll be all right at the end of the day.
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What gives you, again, given the dark web,
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given all the dangers out there,
link |
what gives you hope about the future,
link |
looking into five, 10 years, 50 years?
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I mean, hope for human civilization.
link |
If we do all right, if we make it out of this century,
link |
what do you think would be the reason?
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That's a damn good question.
link |
Because I mean, we've got a lot of bad stuff going on.
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We've got a lot of reasons.
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If I asked you the other question of
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how do you think human civilization would destroy itself,
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I'm sure you have a lot of answers.
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You know what gives me hope is
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that you see people working together.
link |
The COVIDs have been a little bit different
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because I think too many people
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wanted to play politics with it.
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That's been the heartbreaking thing about COVID
link |
is it's in many ways pulled people apart.
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I mean, because a virus involves
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kind of being afraid of each other
link |
because I mean, that was a scary thing.
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People talk about pandemics in that way
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that you're afraid of other humans.
link |
That is the most terrifying thing.
link |
It's not the destructive nature of what it does to your body.
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It's just that it pulls people apart.
link |
And then you realize how fundamental
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that human connection is to human civilization.
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Absolutely, absolutely.
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But you know, as human beings,
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we do, when things really get bad,
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when things really get bad,
link |
we do tend to respond and group together.
link |
When there's injustice, we see it, we rise up.
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I wake up every morning and I watch Fox News and CNN
link |
so I can be pissed off at everyone.
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All right, so the division, the outrage,
link |
they're really feeding.
link |
They want you, they want you to be angry.
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Yeah, that's what causes me to spare
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and what I think that, you know, we just need to.
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Elizabeth was very good.
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She taught me one hell of a lesson
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because before I met her, I was a news hound.
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News would be on all the time.
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A couple of channels of it.
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And she was the woman who didn't watch the news at all.
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And I didn't understand that back then, man.
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You know, now I'm like, it's pretty smart, you know?
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Don't need to listen to that bullshit as it is.
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That's why I love reading history books.
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I just, I feel like that's the right perspective
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on take on modern times.
link |
You know, how will this time be written about
link |
in the history books and react to that?
link |
Don't the daily ups and downs of the outrages,
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which is getting worse and worse
link |
in terms of how quick the turnaround is
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in terms of the news.
link |
I'll tell you what, I'm sitting here.
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I appreciate you talking to me.
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I do, because, you know, I talk about that relationship
link |
It's really been this kind of realization
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for me on a lot of things.
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So I really appreciate you asking those questions
link |
and everything, maybe be able to talk about that.
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I love it that you value, first of all,
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you're self aware how important love
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is in a human being's life.
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It can make you do some of the best
link |
and some of the worst things in this world.
link |
And it's good to think about that.
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It's good to think about that.
link |
That is what makes us human, is that connection
link |
and that love for each other.
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What do you think is the meaning of life?
link |
This big, ridiculous question.
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Why the hell, what are we all here for?
link |
I don't think it is ridiculous, man.
link |
To me, that meaning of life is finding out
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that lesson that we need to help each other.
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If you talk, you ask about security,
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how do you get to say that?
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But, you know, everybody's worried about themselves.
link |
The way you solve that security problem
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is it takes everybody looking out for everyone else.
link |
That's how you solve that problem.
link |
And however you take, whatever journey you take
link |
to discovering that point.
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Yeah, I mean, with me, I've been asked a few times,
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do you regret anything?
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Would you change anything?
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I've done a shitload of despicable things in my life.
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But I'm at a point in my life where I like who I am.
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And I know that I am doing exactly
link |
what I'm supposed to be doing with my life.
link |
So, would I change anything?
link |
As bad as a lot of that shit has been, I wouldn't.
link |
It made you who you are.
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The whole of it, the whole mess.
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That's trite to say that, but it's true.
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That's the weird thing, it's true.
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Also, you mentioned that you're thinking of launching a show.
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What's it gonna be called?
link |
Cause you've done a couple of podcasts.
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You're incredibly good at this.
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You're so good at this.
link |
I've done a couple.
link |
I'm on a lot of podcasts and everything like that.
link |
I had the fraud cast with a friend of mine,
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And that ended because of a difference of opinion.
link |
Depending on who you ask, one of us was an asshole.
link |
And it may have been me.
link |
But then I did the Anglerfish podcast,
link |
which that was, I gotta be honest with you, Lex,
link |
it was completely directionless.
link |
And it was Brett Johnson getting lazy.
link |
The Brett Johnson show is launching.
link |
That's the new one.
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That's the new one.
link |
That's what the new one's called.
link |
What do you think I'm doing with it?
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Making a difference, for one thing.
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But it's gonna be talking about cyber crime security,
link |
A lot of it's gonna be solo.
link |
Now I'm calling it the Brett Johnson show.
link |
I mean, because it's gonna handle crime,
link |
talk to criminals and how they turn their lives around
link |
to a degree as well.
link |
But there's some shit I wanna bitch about too.
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I can tell you're good at this.
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I'm a fan already.
link |
I wanna subscribe.
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You're launching it soon.
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Brett, you're an incredible human being.
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The honesty, the love.
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I could just see how much of yourself you put out there.
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One of the best public speakers I've ever heard.
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Definitely you should be in a Scorsese film
link |
about cyber crime.
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100%, I could tell you're a good actor.
link |
It makes perfect sense.
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Anyway, I really, I'm deeply honored
link |
that you'll spend your time with me today.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with Brett Johnson.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
link |
in the description.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words
link |
from George R.R. Martin, from A Clash of Kings.
link |
A good act does not wash out the bad,
link |
nor a bad act the good.
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Each should have its own reward.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.