Latest / Nightmare Success In and Out / A True Survivor Story: Creator of Prison Land Jerry Durand

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A True Survivor Story: Creator of Prison Land Jerry Durand · Nightmare Success In and Out

• 0:01
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 0:04
  Hi, I'm Brent Cassidy, welcome to the Nightmare Success In and
• 0:07
  Out podcast where we explore how to overcome your fears and
• 0:11
  nightmares that set yourself free.
• 0:13
  We're going to be exploring this topic with guys that was in
• 0:15
  Leavenworth with and others who survived their own nightmare.
• 0:20
  These stories can be inspiring, sometimes sad.
• 0:23
  There's some humor, but hopefully you can come away with
• 0:26
  a nugget of something that'll help you knock down some of the
• 0:29
  prisons you built up in your own mind.
• 0:33
  All right. Welcome back, nightmare success,
• 0:35
  In-n-out listeners. This is where you come from.
• 0:36
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 0:38
  How do you adapt, survive, overcome?
• 0:42
  Set yourself free, folks. Don't forget.
• 0:44
  Don't forget to follow, subscribe, share this thing out,
• 0:47
  like it up. It really helps the show.
• 0:50
  OK, so who we talking to today? What are we doing today?
• 0:54
  Well, I've got Jerry Duran with me and really interesting the
• 0:59
  whole the whole story layout of this thing is, is interesting.
• 1:04
  And you know, whenever I've got somebody on here that there's
• 1:08
  there's a bit, it's a it's a white collar investigation and
• 1:11
  how it all transpires and that. But Jerry was an investor, you
• 1:15
  know, he, he had, and it was trading and foreign currency.
• 1:20
  He had investors that, you know, were expecting a return.
• 1:25
  Anyway, everything went from bad to worse to prison.
• 1:28
  And it was a pretty big case. And, and Jerry ended up getting
• 1:33
  240 months. We were just talking about that.
• 1:36
  I actually thought that what I was reading was a typo.
• 1:39
  I didn't think that I was reading that right.
• 1:41
  And when we got on here, before we hit the play button, I asked
• 1:45
  if that was really it. And it really is it.
• 1:47
  He had 240 months. He says COVID saved his life
• 1:51
  because he was able to get out after almost serving nine years.
• 1:57
  But what's really interesting about Jerry's, he hasn't let any
• 2:00
  of this keep him down. He's been out about four years
• 2:02
  and he's he. And I got connected by David
• 2:05
  Grosky, who is somebody, I think that actually was with Jerry at
• 2:11
  the time, or some of the time they're in prison.
• 2:15
  And he's got a really interesting idea that he's
• 2:18
  developing. And it's called prison land.
• 2:21
  And, you know, everybody's got some curiosity about what goes
• 2:25
  on in prison, how does it happen?
• 2:27
  What happens? What would it be like to live in
• 2:30
  it? And that's what this is.
• 2:31
  It's prison land a game, and you actually become the inmate and
• 2:35
  you buy your commissary and you walk and do and whatever.
• 2:38
  You're actually inside the game. And I think it's a fascinating
• 2:43
  idea. We're going to talk about that.
• 2:45
  Before we do, I want to welcome in and recognize our show
• 2:50
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  It's the new hassle freeway, the car buying experience you
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  deserve Auto Plaza direct. Tell them Brett from Nightmare
• 3:26
  Success sent you. Welcome in Jerry Duran.
• 3:29
  How are you? I am well, thank you.
• 3:32
  I I like your intro and you know you, you better have a sense of
• 3:37
  humor because if you don't, you're going to go through the
• 3:41
  most miserable time in your entire life.
• 3:44
  It's as humbling as you're ever going to get and it changes your
• 3:50
  priorities. So you're doing a great job.
• 3:54
  I appreciate this. This, this is, and I forgot to
• 3:56
  say, Jerry, you're, you're an old radio guy too.
• 3:58
  I mean, you had a radio show all about investing, and I don't
• 4:04
  know how long you did that. We did it for quite some time,
• 4:07
  many, many years. It was called Wealth Survival
• 4:09
  and I was on one of the. Well, the title of that.
• 4:12
  Patriot affiliates. What I did was I really didn't
• 4:16
  talk about investing. I because I was afraid of the
• 4:20
  word. The.
• 4:22
  You know what I mean. So we spoke about what was going
• 4:27
  on in the markets and it was probably from about O 4 through
• 4:33
  2010 in that. There would have been a lot to
• 4:35
  talk about. So much to talk about.
• 4:37
  I mean, there was the collapse, the O 8 collapse and I started
• 4:41
  out on shortwave radio. The I can still see the very
• 4:47
  first I did not know that I had. You know, I piled on live, OK,
• 4:52
  and there was nobody, nobody to talk to.
• 4:54
  It was just me and my dining room table with papers laid out
• 4:59
  all over the place and speaking about what the topics were.
• 5:04
  It was all audio, Yeah. So nobody could look at me
• 5:07
  shuffling papers and things like that.
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  But surprisingly, what I what I come to learn was the people who
• 5:17
  are out there really are looking for, you know, what's out there.
• 5:24
  I mean, are you satisfied with just like you're talking about
• 5:27
  the auto purchase? Are you really satisfied with
• 5:30
  this broker? Are you really satisfied with
• 5:32
  the way this is your insurance guy?
• 5:35
  And if you're not, give us a call, we'll talk.
• 5:39
  What what we were dealing with at that time was the Forex
• 5:44
  market, foreign currency exchange, and those who had
• 5:49
  various strategies were called commodity trading advisors,
• 5:55
  Ctas. Each one had a different
• 5:58
  strategy. Some were pretty far out there,
• 6:02
  others were very, you know, conservative.
• 6:05
  And it really is a matter of finding the guys who were making
• 6:11
  a success with their strategy. So were you getting Jerry?
• 6:16
  Was this a almost like a lead source for you of people that
• 6:19
  trusted you and listen to you and they give you a call and and
• 6:23
  and some of them have become clients?
• 6:26
  100%, I didn't. I didn't have any license.
• 6:29
  I acknowledge that. We brought them into a seminar,
• 6:33
  invited them to a seminar, and we would spot these around the
• 6:37
  country, Arizona, Miami area, Minneapolis, Chicago, and bring
• 6:44
  them in and bring in variety of different strategies.
• 6:49
  Had one guy who did nothing but equities, one guy, you know,
• 6:53
  there was a variety of different commodity guys who had
• 6:58
  strategies in the foreign exchange.
• 7:01
  The beauty of that time for us, a good return in the equities
• 7:06
  market was like -2%. OK.
• 7:09
  So they're all losing money. Yeah.
• 7:14
  And that was when I think the collapse of, you know, a whole
• 7:17
  variety of things went down about O seven O 8.
• 7:22
  So currency is basically cash. Yeah.
• 7:27
  And it's just a matter of what exchange.
• 7:31
  Oh, if you and so if you went to different exchanges, you could
• 7:35
  possibly play the spread. Is that how that would work?
• 7:38
  There's a whole variety of strategies that you could have.
• 7:41
  But yes, that was the key factor what what we were doing was
• 7:47
  called the carry trade. OK, now you can Google it, look
• 7:51
  it up. And my belief on a strategy, it
• 7:58
  works until it don't work. That's the way all those
• 8:01
  investments are. All these investments are, so
• 8:03
  the carry trade really took advantage of the spread between
• 8:07
  the, the interest rate of the Japanese yen, which was 0 at
• 8:11
  that time and the US dollar and the British pound, which was
• 8:15
  about 5 1/2, five and a quarter. You simply get the investors
• 8:22
  dollars, convert them to yen, leverage it, put it back into
• 8:29
  the higher interest rate, 1 and now you're getting multiples of
• 8:32
  that. And the leverage at that time
• 8:36
  was all over the board, I mean all over the board as high as 4
• 8:40
  to 500%, 4 or 500 times. So most of our trades were done
• 8:48
  in Zurich. If you're going to be in the
• 8:51
  Forex market in any kind of fashion, that was either New
• 8:55
  York, London or Zurich. We chose Zurich because there
• 8:58
  are some pretty smart guys over there, some solid banks and.
• 9:01
  International stuff. Right.
• 9:02
  Yeah. And I commuted to Zurich,
• 9:04
  Switzerland every about 3 weeks for a couple of years.
• 9:09
  Wow. Well, let's, let's talk about
• 9:11
  this because we kind of jumped into your your training, Take
• 9:16
  the take the audience back. Where did you grow up?
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  What was your family like? Have siblings?
• 9:20
  What was that? What was that all going on in
• 9:23
  your life? Dirt poor farm boy from southern
• 9:25
  Minnesota. I have Seven Sisters.
• 9:28
  Oh my gosh. No brothers three daughters No
• 9:31
  sons have a wife, mother the. So you had Seven Sisters.
• 9:37
  Where did you fall into that that ranking?
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  #7 I had one, one younger. Wow.
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  And as a. Matter of fact, last year was
• 9:44
  the first year any significant deaths.
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  We lost four brother in You sit there and you know, it's
• 10:13
  not like you're in different rooms.
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  It's like 1 big room. Yeah.
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  Everybody has a chore to do. One teacher.
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  One teacher. One teacher.
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  It's like a little house on the Prairie.
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  Exactly. Or the OR the Waltons.
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  So the first grade comes up, second grade, 3rd grade, and
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  they're all done the same subject.
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  Yeah. OK, you hear everything by the
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  time you're in 4th, 5th, 6th grade.
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  If you don't get it, you shouldn't be in school anyway
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  because you turned it off. It's been beat to your head.
• 10:41
  But did you know? Go ahead.
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  Did you know Jerry at that time as a as a young kid that you
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  were good with numbers? I did realize how good I was
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  with numbers, but throughout, I'm telling you, probably up to
• 10:56
  the last couple of decades, I could race a calculator on on
• 10:59
  multiplications and you could give me double digit, triple
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  digit, you know, I just could see it.
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  Yeah, yeah, I think people are born that way.
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  Yes. So you get so you get out of
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  that one room schoolhouse at graduate on where'd you go?
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  Went to I'm from southern Minnesota, so I went to high
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  school there, went to college, went to Arizona State for a
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  short period of time, and then ended up with the University of
• 11:24
  Minnesota. My major was business,
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  ultimately A. Little different in temperatures
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  there from Arizona. To no question about it, I, I
• 11:32
  went to Arizona to get away and, and the, my future wife was, you
• 11:40
  know, wanted to get back home to her family.
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  And so we came back to Minnesota and went to high school.
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  OK, so you get out of college. What's what's Jerry thinking?
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  What do you what's your big, big plan?
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  Well, this is a little different than the normal person would do,
• 12:01
  but I was always into fighting. So I fought for the Minneapolis
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  Judo Club and I trained with the University of Minnesota
• 12:09
  wrestlers and couple of buddies of mine were working for Vince
• 12:15
  McMahon, senior of the WWF. So the guy says, hey, why don't
• 12:20
  you go out and train because that's pretty good size.
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  So I went out and trained with Walter Killer Kowalski in Salem,
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  MA and went into the professional wrestling arena
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  back in the early 80s. Oh my gosh.
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  I came back to Minneapolis and formed a wrestling school with a
• 12:36
  guy by the name of Eddie Sharkey, who was recognized as a
• 12:41
  pretty tough guy. We were partners and we had a
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  training school. I didn't want to Ventura.
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  Was the governor there in Minnesota right?
• 12:49
  Well, if you look at the 1981 Minneapolis Star Tribune paper,
• 12:54
  what happened was baseball was on strike at the time.
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  Yeah. So Major League Baseball was on
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  strike. So I had a call from a reporter
• 13:03
  at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and said, hey, can we do an
• 13:06
  article on your school? I said, yeah, bring it on.
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  So, you know, we kind of fabricated the school, but that
• 13:14
  following Sunday, the Minneapolis paper will always
• 13:16
  come out Saturday night. OK, Friend of mine called me
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  says, hey, get the paper. So I happen to I was on the
• 13:23
  front page of the sports page. My picture was the whole thing.
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  It was our school. And the inside was a picture of
• 13:30
  Jesse Ventura on his back as one of the students.
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  Oh my gosh. Well, he wasn't one of my
• 13:35
  students. He was one of Eddie Sharkey
• 13:36
  students and that expanded. We trained the Road Warriors, we
• 13:40
  trained Barry Darsell, Rick Rude.
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  I mean, we had the school just turned out monstrous talent.
• 13:46
  Wow. But I needed to make a living
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  and I was making an OK living doing that and I got into the
• 13:53
  brokerage business. So I got into the the brokerage
• 13:56
  business in 81 and was very good at it.
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  The difference was it's a work ethic.
• 14:05
  When you come from, you know, a poor background and you're on a
• 14:09
  farm, you don't call in sick to the animals and say I'm not
• 14:13
  feeding you today or you're not going to get this doesn't
• 14:16
  happen. So I showed up at work when they
• 14:20
  opened the doors and I left when they closed the doors.
• 14:24
  So I went to the very top of the sales and, you know, how do you
• 14:28
  understand what to sell? How do you sell a product?
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  Call the Competition, Act like you're a buyer.
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  And that's what I did. So these people would try to
• 14:38
  sell me. And so I'm learning how to sell
• 14:40
  by doing that because I know I'm not going to buy from them.
• 14:43
  But oh. That's a that's an age-old
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  wisdom thing to teach because it's, you know, Sam Walton.
• 14:52
  His his best thing that he did all the time was he'd be flying
• 14:56
  in around looking for places around to, to put a Walmart, but
• 15:00
  he'd always stop in to Kmart and shop around and see what
• 15:04
  everything was going on and see what.
• 15:07
  Everybody else is doing so. So anyway, Fast forward to that,
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  I got very good at the brokerage business and was able to because
• 15:16
  I didn't take any, I could bring in sales guys and they honestly,
• 15:23
  they're afraid of me. They didn't want to cross my
• 15:25
  path. So they show up for work on time
• 15:27
  and I would take a sales force from maybe a four or five guys
• 15:32
  and blow it up to 180 guys in a short period of time.
• 15:35
  And the guy who owned the company loved me.
• 15:38
  So that's how I got into that brokerage business and learned
• 15:41
  that. And I learned that was worst
• 15:45
  thing to to work for somebody else is to work for yourself.
• 15:49
  So you work for myself. OK.
• 15:50
  So I decided to spin off and become my own entrepreneur and
• 15:54
  create my own business. And how old would you have been
• 15:57
  when you did that? 40s.
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  OK. You've done quite a bit as far
• 16:02
  as building up sales and working for somebody else.
• 16:05
  So you spun yourself out in your 40s and then what did you do?
• 16:09
  Well, then I, I went into, I traveled around the country
• 16:13
  giving various expanding sales forces.
• 16:18
  I would run ads in various papers like.
• 16:20
  The and everybody's always wanting sales.
• 16:22
  Of course. Everybody wants big sales, wants
• 16:25
  to know how to do it. Yeah.
• 16:26
  What's the secret? Yeah, well, it sounds, it sounds
• 16:32
  so easy. There's nothing, there's nothing
• 16:36
  easy about. I remember when I was a 15 year
• 16:38
  old kid and my dad over the summer, he said, britch, you
• 16:43
  want to make some money? He said, I'm going to give you.
• 16:47
  He just gave me these sheets, these like big square sheets and
• 16:51
  they had people's phone numbers and their addresses on them.
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  And he said, if you can set appointments for these
• 16:58
  salespeople, you can get, I'll give you some of their
• 17:01
  Commission. I said, well, OK, I'll try that.
• 17:05
  I mean, I'd never, but it was cold calling.
• 17:07
  Yeah. Maybe some of the best
• 17:09
  experience I ever had because I had to figure out what worked,
• 17:12
  you know, Right. And one of the one of the crazy
• 17:14
  things that I found that weren't Jerry, it's just two old sales
• 17:17
  guys talking to each other. But I found out that if I
• 17:20
  apologize to the people first, I said, yeah, this is Brett from
• 17:25
  Sessions Funeral Home. I gotta apologize to you, Jerry.
• 17:27
  I was supposed to get some information out to you yesterday
• 17:30
  and just ran out of time. What would be a good time to
• 17:32
  drop that off to you in the morning of the afternoon?
• 17:34
  Yeah. And what happened was, is it
• 17:36
  confused them on the fact before they were going to say yes or no
• 17:39
  because I was already late. They were already supposed to
• 17:42
  have gotten the information. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.
• 17:44
  I I, you know, you start working these word plays out and you
• 17:47
  find out what works and you know.
• 17:50
  It's crazy, yeah. Just cold calling and having to
• 17:54
  figure something out like that. Then you can you can actually
• 17:56
  teach that kind of stuff too, but you almost have to figure it
• 17:59
  out yourself so you have the confidence to teach it to
• 18:03
  somebody else. But yeah, it's funny how that
• 18:05
  all works. It's.
• 18:06
  Difficult to, you know, if, if somebody has call reluctance,
• 18:12
  yeah. They're always.
• 18:13
  Getting ready to get ready to get ready and it's the guy that
• 18:16
  just walks in, doesn't know what he's doing, picks up the phone,
• 18:18
  starts talking to people. That's the guy you want.
• 18:21
  Yep, so. But that's that's ancient
• 18:24
  history. Yeah, it is ancient history.
• 18:26
  Can't call anybody on the phone. But it took us to, oh, for sure.
• 18:30
  It took us to where we are. And you said I was on the radio
• 18:34
  business. So what I learned was that you
• 18:38
  can reach a, a wider audience, let them qualify themselves,
• 18:45
  because the, the, the last thing I want to do to somebody is try
• 18:48
  to convince them of something. I just, if this isn't for you,
• 18:52
  let's not, let's not do this. Don't, don't waste your time and
• 18:57
  please don't waste my time. So if this makes sense, go
• 19:01
  ahead. If not, that's OK too, because
• 19:03
  there's just too many people out there to to try to convince
• 19:07
  somebody that's not comfortable with it.
• 19:11
  So you get on the radio, I assume that you're doing pretty
• 19:14
  well because I mean, if you built up big sales teams, you
• 19:16
  would have made money doing that and then you were able to go out
• 19:18
  on your own. We did very well.
• 19:22
  So as you got in, as what we talked about in the beginning,
• 19:25
  you guys started doing the currency stuff.
• 19:26
  I'm sure you were doing well with that.
• 19:28
  When did it come into your world, Jerry, that you thought
• 19:32
  or heard or felt that something might be going on?
• 19:35
  It could be bad. Well, I, I didn't until after I
• 19:39
  was gone. So what happened was we were
• 19:43
  spilling money, OK, and we were making so much money.
• 19:49
  The the concept of where you make the money is the spread.
• 19:55
  So the, the biggest banks in the world are at the edge of the
• 19:59
  Cliff, OK, if those banks go down, we got a problem.
• 20:04
  Now with cryptocurrency, it's a different story.
• 20:06
  But back then the UB s s of the world and the chases and the,
• 20:10
  the, the, you know, Goldman, those, those are the places
• 20:13
  where their spreads are the narrowest.
• 20:17
  So as you can get closer to them, you get a narrower spread
• 20:21
  from your bid and ask between the products.
• 20:24
  And that's what I was going to Zurich, Switzerland for.
• 20:28
  So what happened was I said that we should acquire a bank in
• 20:35
  Switzerland. We had that kind of money and we
• 20:39
  were getting ready to do it. Now the most dangerous guys in
• 20:43
  business to me, because I was probably in my mid 50s then,
• 20:47
  right? Most dangerous guys in the world
• 20:50
  were guys who were in their 30s. Yeah.
• 20:53
  Who had never failed. Right, they hadn't lost yet.
• 20:56
  Hadn't lost yet and they were invincible.
• 20:59
  And I believe that to this day. So unfortunately my partners, I
• 21:04
  had two partners who were in their 30s.
• 21:07
  One was an equities guy, brilliant.
• 21:09
  He was, he was good at what he did.
• 21:11
  He was killing it actually, you know, way better than the -2%.
• 21:15
  He was getting probably a four to 5% rate of return.
• 21:19
  And another guy who was actually a gambler and if you think about
• 21:25
  it, the the reason he got me into the currency business, I
• 21:29
  said why would I go into that? He called me.
• 21:31
  He said I need you in this, you know, because he'd been one of
• 21:33
  my sales guys. I he said, well, if you take all
• 21:38
  the dollars that are spent in drugs, pornography and gaming in
• 21:45
  one year, it doesn't equal 1 day in the currency business.
• 21:49
  I said you got my attention. So.
• 21:51
  So it's multiple trillions, you know, maybe 5 to 7 trillion back
• 21:55
  then per day. And all you needed to do was
• 21:58
  take a little sliver out of those transactions every day and
• 22:01
  you're making huge amounts of money.
• 22:04
  So he wanted to build a casino in Panama, the country of
• 22:09
  Panama. OK.
• 22:11
  The equities guy wanted to buy 10% of the Minnesota Wild.
• 22:15
  And this is all on the documents.
• 22:16
  Yeah, yeah, I read about it. So, and I said, guys, we can't
• 22:21
  do all three at once, but let's buy the bank first.
• 22:26
  So when 230 year old guys are so much smarter than a 50 year old
• 22:30
  guy, and instead of dividing the pot by 4, let's divide it by
• 22:34
  three. They devised the plan to get rid
• 22:37
  of me, which they did. And I quite frankly wasn't all
• 22:42
  that upset about it because I knew what to do.
• 22:44
  Now, OK, I get it, you guys can get rid of me.
• 22:48
  But there was several $1,000,000 that they owed me, which I
• 22:51
  eventually never got. So I left the company with a,
• 22:57
  with a fight. You know, you owe me.
• 22:59
  I'm back and forth. We're arguing about what they
• 23:02
  owe me. And those were some of the
• 23:06
  allegations that the prosecutor said that I had never left
• 23:10
  because I was arguing for my piece of the pie.
• 23:12
  Well, that means you were still involved in getting.
• 23:15
  So that's how my aiding and abetting got it.
• 23:17
  But what happened was I parted company in June of O 8.
• 23:21
  Never turned back. Never.
• 23:23
  They didn't start to really do an embezzlement for about four
• 23:30
  to six months. So the embezzlement occurred
• 23:33
  after I left. But that doesn't matter, right?
• 23:38
  No. Because you got prosecutors.
• 23:40
  But what happened was the guys who were doing the embezzling,
• 23:44
  one was the government's key witness and another was an
• 23:48
  unindicted Co conspirator. I've got my suspicions as to
• 23:53
  what happened because they're still we're the second largest
• 23:55
  financial crime in the state of Minnesota is quarter billion
• 23:59
  dollars and still not to this day found.
• 24:04
  So, you know, it just happens to coincide with when the early
• 24:07
  days of cryptocurrency came about.
• 24:10
  And one of the guys was an absolute brilliant fellow in the
• 24:14
  middle of Zurich, Switzerland, who understood that type of
• 24:17
  thing. So I don't want to go down any
• 24:19
  rabbit hole there, but I'll leave.
• 24:20
  I'll leave that dangling. Part.
• 24:21
  That's a deep dark hole there, yes.
• 24:23
  It is. Yes, it is.
• 24:25
  And so, so Jerry, yeah. And so Jerry, so you leave this,
• 24:29
  this comes up. How are you notified of
• 24:32
  something that you're on the radar?
• 24:35
  Well, I didn't think I was. So one of the guys, I had some
• 24:41
  clients. I said I won't, I won't touch
• 24:42
  these clients for a year. I'll leave them alone.
• 24:45
  Pay me what? Pay me $1,000,000 because they
• 24:48
  owe it to be far more than that. So they agreed.
• 24:51
  But I never got the million. I got about half of it.
• 24:53
  OK. So the clients then said, hey,
• 24:57
  your year's up, can we come with you and deal with you?
• 24:59
  I said sure. He wouldn't give them their
• 25:01
  money, wouldn't release their money.
• 25:03
  So one of them said, OK, we'll just file a lawsuit or call the
• 25:07
  state. And that's when everything
• 25:09
  happened. That's what raised the red flag.
• 25:12
  I think that was the seven or nine people that wanted their
• 25:14
  money back or whatever. Yeah, Yeah.
• 25:16
  I mean, don't argue. To not give these people their
• 25:18
  money back just because you're got a vendetta against me.
• 25:21
  So that's when the digging started and everything go.
• 25:26
  And so you get pulled into this and did, did they come to you
• 25:32
  and want you to cooperate or was it, or did they always have you
• 25:37
  just in the thick of the, of the, of, of the conspiracy?
• 25:42
  And what were you thinking as far as because you actually went
• 25:45
  to trial, which somebody's got to have elephant sized balls to
• 25:49
  do there? Because I there there's only 97%
• 25:52
  of the people that get indicted plea bargain.
• 25:54
  So walk us through that. What?
• 25:56
  What was going through your mind and as you were going through
• 26:00
  that? So I only learned that statistic
• 26:03
  about two days before I finished the trial anyhow, so better late
• 26:09
  than I guess. Right, right, right, right.
• 26:11
  So this one fellow who threw me under the bus cut a deal for 25
• 26:21
  years. OK, that's all.
• 26:23
  That was the top guy cook. Cook Yeah.
• 26:26
  So I thought, OK, it's over with.
• 26:28
  This happened. I believe he went, he went down.
• 26:33
  2010 I think. Something like that.
• 26:35
  And really he was still kind of battling with the with the case.
• 26:38
  He was going in and out of court and he showed what is contempt
• 26:45
  and they got him for that. They put locked him up and he
• 26:47
  never got out. So he got the 25 year deal.
• 26:52
  I thought it's over with. I figure that's, you know, too
• 26:54
  bad, dummy. Top guy, that's who they were
• 26:56
  after. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 26:58
  And all of a sudden one morning, my house was surrounded with cop
• 27:04
  cars. I mean, surrounded, there's like
• 27:06
  13 of them. And all of a sudden I heard just
• 27:08
  doom, boom, boom. The windows were just, the horse
• 27:10
  was shaking. And my wife says, she says
• 27:12
  there's police all over the house.
• 27:14
  Want to come in? And I said, what?
• 27:15
  And you think right away now, 8:00 in the morning, something
• 27:19
  happened. Somebody was in a car accident,
• 27:20
  you know, whatever the case may be.
• 27:22
  So I walked outside. They threw me down in the steps,
• 27:27
  put me behind handcuffs on, and that one of the fat agents is
• 27:31
  screaming in my face. You know what this is about?
• 27:34
  You know what this is about, you know, screaming in my face.
• 27:36
  And no, he says, it's about Trevor Cook.
• 27:41
  I thought, is he dead? You know, I mean, I didn't know
• 27:43
  what to say. And so that's when it began.
• 27:48
  And they brought me into the house warrants.
• 27:53
  I mean, the place was swarming like with everybody.
• 27:56
  And they separated, put brought my wife out back.
• 27:58
  I mean, we were still in our pajamas.
• 28:00
  Oh yeah, it's earlier in the morning, Yeah.
• 28:02
  She was out in the back. I was in the front with the
• 28:06
  handcuffs on and just kept grilling me.
• 28:10
  Grilling me. I had my taxes spread out all
• 28:12
  over the table. I was getting ready to do my
• 28:14
  taxes or I was doing my taxes and they scrape everything
• 28:18
  together and just, you know, you, you can't make head or tail
• 28:22
  of what they do. And they said, well, am I under
• 28:24
  arrest? And they would never answer the
• 28:27
  question. So I was not under arrest.
• 28:31
  You know, I'm free to go. I hard, hard to go.
• 28:33
  And you got handcuffs behind the back and you got nothing on, you
• 28:36
  know, you got to get a pair of shorts.
• 28:39
  And so I said, so can we leave? And so I said, well, I'm going
• 28:46
  to leave them. Let me go look.
• 28:48
  And me and my wife finally got to leave.
• 28:52
  And I said, will you at least call me when you're done here?
• 28:55
  Never did that. I came back, the house was wide
• 28:57
  open, stuff all over the place and.
• 29:01
  Wow. I got on with an attorney and
• 29:05
  he, you know, directed me, says, you know, we don't know what's
• 29:08
  going to happen. We have no idea.
• 29:11
  So I I had no clue. Then they come back a couple,
• 29:14
  two or three days later. These two tough guy fat agents.
• 29:22
  Yeah. You know, you get an attorney
• 29:25
  and he can get rid of a lot of these charges for you and we can
• 29:29
  drop them down. They're really nice guys.
• 29:31
  Now we've cut a deals Like what? I says cut a deal.
• 29:34
  I says no I ain't cut no deal with you guys and you know
• 29:38
  because I didn't know I was ignorant.
• 29:40
  You know you hear all these stupid things like it only takes
• 29:43
  1 juror and innocent till proven guilty and you're going to get a
• 29:46
  fair trial. That is completely false.
• 29:50
  All the stuff you see on. On TV and there's these TV
• 29:53
  things. Come on, that's just absolute
• 29:55
  joke. So what in the world, Jerry,
• 29:57
  were you thinking? Because I mean, this is
• 29:59
  something like you're living your life and all of a sudden
• 30:03
  they invade your home, your wife, I mean, is a part of this
• 30:06
  because they've invaded her world.
• 30:09
  And these guys come back to you and say, hey, we'll cut you.
• 30:11
  What? What's going through your mind?
• 30:14
  That's when I said the stress level went through the roof
• 30:16
  where the just the ability to think clearly didn't exist
• 30:20
  anymore. The emotion was like, what is
• 30:22
  you know, what is going on? It's, you know, you've been
• 30:25
  better off being told that you're got six months to live
• 30:27
  because you got some strange disease.
• 30:30
  I mean it's it's almost in the same category I never expected
• 30:34
  to go to. Prison.
• 30:35
  How long did how long did this process last?
• 30:38
  From the time that you got into being invaded in your house to
• 30:44
  you being at trial. Two years.
• 30:47
  OK. It was May of 2010.
• 30:50
  I went to trial June. No, I went to trial April of
• 30:55
  2012. OK, so I want to take a break
• 30:59
  there 'cause I want to, when we get back, I want to talk about
• 31:01
  what it was like because we don't have too many people on
• 31:05
  here very often that actually go to trial.
• 31:08
  So I want to walk, I want us to walk through that.
• 31:13
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• 31:15
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• 31:19
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• 31:22
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  And I just want to say that Nightmare Success podcast is
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• 32:02
  support group devoted to people navigating the white collar
• 32:05
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• 32:27
  OK, So Jerry, you have two years of this.
• 32:33
  Yeah. What's, what's your relationship
• 32:34
  with your attorney? Is that good?
• 32:36
  I was appointed. I was appointed an attorney, OK,
• 32:41
  Because what they do is they freeze up all your money.
• 32:44
  You now have no money. Right.
• 32:46
  And now you got to fight. You got to fight.
• 32:48
  But one of the guys that was on here in the first, first season,
• 32:51
  we were we, he said he was in the mortgage business.
• 32:54
  He said, Oh yeah, you could go to trial with him.
• 32:55
  But he said that's like your beer softball league going to to
• 32:59
  play the LA Dodgers. You could play them.
• 33:02
  That's what you're doing. So, so they, they froze
• 33:05
  everything and now you've got to go to war.
• 33:07
  With that, they go rip your bank accounts off some cash in my
• 33:11
  safety deposit bucks that's gone.
• 33:13
  They take everything, yeah. So and now you get to fight
• 33:16
  them. Now you get to fight them.
• 33:19
  So I was appointed an attorney and you know, if you're he was
• 33:25
  well renowned. I mean, I got nothing bad
• 33:28
  against him. I can say his name, Brian Toder,
• 33:31
  good attorney, good guy. But if you look at the reality
• 33:35
  of it, this guy is getting paid, certainly not his going rate
• 33:40
  because he was in the, you know, the Super attorney category and
• 33:44
  good criminal attorney. And so if you're by suspicion,
• 33:51
  if you're somebody like him and you're used to charging back
• 33:56
  then 4 to 500 bucks an hour and they're only paying you 250, you
• 34:01
  know, am I keeping tabs of his hours?
• 34:03
  I don't think so. So if he going to turn in the
• 34:07
  CD, he does 45 minutes with me and he turns in two hours I
• 34:10
  mean. How do you know?
• 34:12
  How do you know and I don't care, right?
• 34:16
  Doesn't matter to. Me, you just want to get
• 34:17
  defense. I just want to get defense.
• 34:19
  I like the guy. So we're having a back and
• 34:22
  forth, back and forth now. Does he have an incentive to end
• 34:29
  this right away by telling me we better cut a deal?
• 34:31
  I don't think so. You said you have that go on for
• 34:35
  six weeks. You got all the publicity.
• 34:39
  I mean, the publicity was massive.
• 34:41
  I was in the newspaper. We our lives were threatened.
• 34:44
  We had to have guards there all the time.
• 34:46
  It was, it was not pleasant at all.
• 34:49
  And I get calls from people that just, who are you?
• 34:53
  There was a, there was a lady, I mean all the depositions I'm
• 34:56
  reading, she just said this guy's pure scum.
• 35:00
  I'd never met her in my life. I don't know who she was or
• 35:03
  anything. Well, you know, and, and I think
• 35:07
  it's, you know, when you, you got somebody that's going to
• 35:09
  trial, you know, the, the jury pool is tainted because of of
• 35:14
  these massive news stories that are have one strong narrative
• 35:17
  because it's being fed through the Justice Department, the the
• 35:21
  attorney general's USAUS attorney.
• 35:25
  So you've got that happening. You can't say anything because
• 35:29
  there's no one that wants the, the, the media has their
• 35:33
  narrative and they're going with it.
• 35:35
  It only helps the US attorney if you decide that you're going to
• 35:38
  go to trial. So again, we were talking about
• 35:43
  the, the deck being stacked against you with no money, your
• 35:47
  account's frozen, your, your money taken out.
• 35:50
  And then on top of that, you've got the media feeding the US
• 35:54
  attorney's story to everybody that's going to be your jury.
• 35:57
  Well, you talk about the jury pool, that's one thing.
• 35:59
  How they select it, that again, is just a, it's a circus act,
• 36:04
  OK, all these, all these legal nuances, all these protocols,
• 36:09
  come on. They're, they're worthless
• 36:11
  there. There's nothing that's going to
• 36:13
  serve justice, right? The mission for them was to
• 36:17
  convict, right? If if there was justice, it was
• 36:21
  a coincidence or it happened totally by mistake.
• 36:25
  So this reporter who sat in the front row every day and it was
• 36:30
  his narrative and I would listen to what was said in the
• 36:34
  courtroom and what he reported were just not exactly the same
• 36:39
  thing. He would meet with the jurors at
• 36:44
  lunch. They took a picture together.
• 36:46
  Couple of group photos. Did you?
• 36:48
  Were you the only one that went to trial?
• 36:50
  There was three of us, Yeah. And the other two guys that I
• 36:53
  went to trial with, I mean, there's no way you could
• 36:55
  separate them. That would have been everybody's
• 36:59
  that was in there. The other attorney said they
• 37:00
  separate me out. They're not going to convict me
• 37:03
  because there just wasn't enough stuff.
• 37:05
  It was just really petty that they got me out.
• 37:10
  So the jury actually said to this reporter, we knew these
• 37:14
  guys were guilty before they ever presented their defense.
• 37:17
  Now think about that. So that's a fair trial.
• 37:21
  Yeah. So when I get the.
• 37:24
  How long did this trial go? Six weeks.
• 37:26
  Six weeks, OK. Six weeks April, started early
• 37:29
  April and ended June 12th. Was there a time in the trial
• 37:34
  that you felt like that maybe things were going your way?
• 37:37
  Yes. Ever.
• 37:38
  Yeah. Yes, because they're the one of
• 37:40
  my Co defendants, Jason Beckman, he testified he did a smashing
• 37:44
  job. And I don't think this guy got
• 37:47
  30 years. I don't think he was guilty.
• 37:49
  There was another guy, Pat Kiley, who was 10-15 years older
• 37:52
  than me. The guy was dithering.
• 37:58
  I mean, he was, he made Joe Biden look adept.
• 38:00
  OK, so so Pat was he, he had a, he had a colostomy bag on.
• 38:05
  You know, what do you, what do you want to put this guy away
• 38:07
  for? I mean, did people lose money?
• 38:11
  Yes. Who took it?
• 38:12
  These two guys over here, maybe this one, but you want to
• 38:16
  convict us because you couldn't deal with this guy to give him
• 38:19
  five years or less. That's the system.
• 38:22
  That's the, that's the pathetic nature of the system.
• 38:26
  And you know, you don't know it until you get in it.
• 38:32
  No, you don't. And I, I'm curious because you
• 38:34
  went to trial that day that the jury came back, they came in,
• 38:40
  they sat down and they, I, I believe the way that they do it
• 38:44
  is they hand it over to the bailiff, bailiff hands it to the
• 38:47
  judge. What what was going?
• 38:49
  What goes through someone's mind when that moment happens?
• 38:51
  One of the one of the jurors lady, probably in her 30s, was
• 38:55
  sobbing. OK.
• 38:58
  It's very telling. Didn't make me feel good.
• 39:03
  The attorney for the other guy or Jason Beckman said to me, he
• 39:08
  says, you know, he said, hang in there, be strong.
• 39:13
  You know, they're going to get you for taxes, he says, but I
• 39:17
  don't think they're going to get you for anything else, he said.
• 39:19
  So there's life after. So I'm like, you know what, when
• 39:25
  somebody tells me, you know, cut a deal for this or this, it's
• 39:30
  just my, that's not my nature. No, it's not the way I was
• 39:34
  raised. If, if the consequences are
• 39:38
  whatever and you know, you don't, you don't really think
• 39:41
  about it, you cannot imagine that you're going to get
• 39:43
  convinced. It could be that bad, right?
• 39:45
  Yeah. So what was going through my
• 39:49
  head? I didn't I, you know, it was
• 39:52
  pretty blur. Talk about out of body.
• 39:54
  Yeah, you are for sure. Yeah.
• 39:57
  And what happened was once the trial ended.
• 40:03
  Then we're told we got to be within an hour's reach of the
• 40:07
  courthouse at any given time. So even though I lived about an
• 40:13
  hour away, I had no slack, no leeway at all.
• 40:19
  So when I, I mean, I'm walking around the city with a suit on
• 40:23
  getting ready and looking at that trolley going by or
• 40:27
  whatever it was the Amtrak thinking, well, should I step in
• 40:30
  front of that or not? You know, I mean you just so
• 40:32
  many. Stupid.
• 40:33
  So many things go through your mind.
• 40:34
  Go. Through your mind and all of a
• 40:38
  sudden they get a call from my attorney.
• 40:39
  They've reached the verdict. OK, It's about 9:30 in the
• 40:44
  morning, OK, on a Tuesday morning.
• 40:48
  So you don't forget that there's things you don't forget.
• 40:53
  Read off the guilty and how long do you have to wait or did they
• 40:59
  remand you immediately? Immediately Oh.
• 41:03
  If you immediately take me into custody.
• 41:05
  If you look at my interview on prison land, I said that the
• 41:11
  walls of the court, I mean, it was a fiasco.
• 41:13
  They had so many people there. They had to have a closed
• 41:16
  circuit second courtroom for the bodies to watch this.
• 41:19
  Wow. The walls of the courtroom oozed
• 41:23
  with federal agents. And I couldn't give you any
• 41:26
  other word to describe it but that, but it just like they just
• 41:28
  come out of the walls. It was lined up and they're all
• 41:31
  like you're, you know, you'd think they were going to war
• 41:34
  here. There's.
• 41:36
  Guys, sitting here, Pat Kiley is harmless.
• 41:42
  You know, anybody could easily guide him into the take a the
• 41:47
  other guy, Jason back went OK. You know, he may be a stronger
• 41:51
  kid. And me, we didn't need 70 people
• 41:55
  to take us into custody and stand there like they're a bunch
• 41:58
  of I mean, they that's what it was.
• 42:03
  And it was a very, you know, I stood up, I started to take some
• 42:08
  stuff off, throw it in my bag, my, my watch, some belt, my tie.
• 42:13
  I said, here's the souvenir to my attorney.
• 42:15
  We'll give him the tie. And what you walk through, you
• 42:20
  got this beautiful dark paneled woodwork courtroom and you step
• 42:25
  into that door, you're in a cesspool of prison.
• 42:29
  It's iron, it's concrete. It's just just the complete
• 42:34
  opposite of what you think it is.
• 42:36
  All those federal buildings are, is a prison.
• 42:40
  It's all they are. So how long did you have to wait
• 42:46
  after you were arrested to find out how long you were going to
• 42:49
  be sentenced? January 3rd, Wow, six months.
• 42:54
  So you were in. You were.
• 42:55
  In jail for six, six months, which is the worst?
• 42:58
  I mean, we all know that. They have ice there, they have
• 43:01
  everything there and there was far more violence.
• 43:05
  I was in a race riot and it was on TV.
• 43:10
  I've talked to so many people, you know, that have had had that
• 43:14
  type of situation that you have, and I've had people that were
• 43:19
  remanded before that they were, they were trying working on
• 43:22
  their trial and they took them in to try to get them to plea
• 43:26
  with them. And, and it worked because the
• 43:29
  one guy that I was with at Leavenworth, he was in for 16
• 43:32
  months and yeah, and, you know, hadn't been outside.
• 43:39
  They said that they, you know, if he didn't, if he didn't do
• 43:41
  some type of plea bargain, they were going to possibly they were
• 43:45
  going to target his wife, target his son.
• 43:47
  So he finally gave in and he ended up with A7 year, you know,
• 43:51
  deal off his plea. But there's so many ways that
• 43:54
  they use jail. But yeah, once you were, I mean,
• 43:58
  you, you handled it, you know, I mean, that's kind of like the
• 44:03
  worst possible purgatory because you know that you've been found
• 44:09
  guilty. You don't know how long you've
• 44:12
  got, but you're in the worst possible place to wait.
• 44:15
  Without question, the first few nights they put you in when I
• 44:19
  come to learn was not a dry room, but kind of like that
• 44:24
  where they think, you know, maybe this guy's going to commit
• 44:26
  suicide. So he's right here under the
• 44:28
  watch. And I thought, I ain't killing
• 44:30
  myself, you know? Not after all this.
• 44:33
  Think of what you think of maybe if you want, but I ain't killing
• 44:36
  myself. So I adapted.
• 44:40
  There was a guy by the name of I shouldn't say his name, but
• 44:45
  anyway, he was in there and he was dying of cancer.
• 44:50
  Italian guy from New York and or playing, I'm playing cards, you
• 44:56
  know, as soon as you do. And he says you can tell your
• 45:00
  wife. He said it takes typically about
• 45:02
  16 weeks for the average person to assimilate with the prison
• 45:08
  system. He said tell her you did it in
• 45:11
  booking. And he said, OK, He says,
• 45:14
  because, you know, because I'm just going to do what I have to
• 45:17
  do and man up to do what I have to do.
• 45:21
  How is your wife? Well, she was surprisingly
• 45:28
  pretty damn strong because I learned that when they had her
• 45:31
  in the back of the house and I had in the front of house, she
• 45:34
  wouldn't even tell him her name. She didn't give him nothing.
• 45:37
  I love that I said that's good, that's good.
• 45:40
  So, you know, it's tough. I mean, her mother needed in
• 45:45
  home care. So fortunately she went up and
• 45:48
  took that role and they lived together.
• 45:50
  So she was, you know, she she did OK.
• 45:55
  Yeah. I mean, what happened was I was
• 45:59
  in Mylan, Michigan, and that's where I was in the same 8 by 10
• 46:06
  with Dave Grossky for three or four years.
• 46:09
  Well, I, I'm curious, like when you were brought back and you
• 46:13
  were told that you were going to have 240 months.
• 46:17
  I didn't know that. 20 years, I know, but you find this out What
• 46:23
  I mean? I mean, that's 20 years, Yeah.
• 46:27
  I mean, what was it? So walk me through that whole
• 46:33
  thing. How, how how did that feel?
• 46:35
  What was it like? What I mean, to be told you had
• 46:37
  that much time thinking that you thinking that you might have an
• 46:42
  opportunity to win this case. Yeah.
• 46:43
  Yeah, I'm thinking I might get 10 or 12.
• 46:48
  OK, OK. You're always.
• 46:49
  Which is a lot of time. Optimistic, but it's not 40.
• 46:53
  So, you know, again, the points they give you, they score these
• 46:56
  points. Yeah.
• 46:57
  I mean, I was just looking at some guys who were on these most
• 47:01
  recent that's going on right now, murdered somebody, I mean,
• 47:07
  viciously killed a couple people.
• 47:09
  They're looking at 15 years. Like what is there?
• 47:11
  How do you do that? Yeah.
• 47:14
  So they tried to they were proposing 360 to life for me.
• 47:20
  OK, so you know you don't know. So that period of time in county
• 47:28
  jail, you don't know. So when I went there. 20 I'm
• 47:33
  living with the unknowns. The worst?
• 47:35
  Oh my God, my God. So so when I got 240 months,
• 47:38
  what happened was they they sentenced the guy first.
• 47:42
  That was did it alphabetically and the prosecutor and a judge
• 47:51
  just hated this guy because he was he wasn't going to roll over
• 47:58
  for anybody either. And he he really, I mean, I
• 48:02
  thought he did a masterful job when he testified and he told
• 48:07
  the truth, but the jury, you know, was so tainted against
• 48:11
  him. There was no anyway, he got 360.
• 48:19
  We didn't cross paths, but he went into the cell and I'm going
• 48:23
  out now we're in our orange right to get sentenced.
• 48:29
  He said. I purposely didn't tell you how
• 48:32
  much time I was I got because I didn't want you to get so you go
• 48:35
  out there and I was prepared to say nothing.
• 48:37
  I didn't know what that you're supposed to talk about, you
• 48:39
  know, So I just, I winged it and obviously I didn't do very good,
• 48:48
  but I but when they said 240 months, it was like, what are
• 48:52
  you going to? Do yeah.
• 48:53
  OK, so I went back and we stayed there in that place for Oh my
• 49:01
  God, it was hours, you know, would.
• 49:05
  You got the 240 months old, would you been 60?
• 49:11
  80 I went in when I was just 6060 and 80.
• 49:17
  Yeah, wow. So how soon from that moment are
• 49:22
  you finding yourself at the prison that you are supposed to
• 49:26
  be? Another three months.
• 49:28
  Wow, end of March. Wow.
• 49:31
  I got called and you know, they packed your stuff.
• 49:36
  That's it. OK, well, what do you got?
• 49:38
  You got nothing anyway, so you are, you know, you're shackled
• 49:45
  up. I mean, you know, I see these
• 49:48
  guys in the movies that are shackled.
• 49:50
  No, that's not how you're shackled either.
• 49:52
  On the waist, your hands. And because I was such a high
• 49:55
  profile guy, never heard of the black box.
• 49:58
  Yeah, that's where you can't move at all with you got the.
• 50:00
  Black box on, Yeah, black box on you.
• 50:03
  So I got that luxury and you're carted to a bus.
• 50:11
  I'm thinking, OK, God, I might be going to Rochester.
• 50:14
  No way. So I get sent down and everybody
• 50:18
  kind of gets dropped off here and here and here.
• 50:20
  So we're going to the Rochester airport.
• 50:23
  And from there you go to Oklahoma, which is like the
• 50:28
  biggest depot. You know, it's, it's a
• 50:31
  monstrous, it's at the end of the airport in Oklahoma City and
• 50:37
  it's like big silos, gigantic silos.
• 50:41
  You pull right in, get off the plane, got your conveyor belt,
• 50:46
  throw this piece of clothes, this piece of clothes, this
• 50:47
  piece of clothes. Next thing you know, you're
• 50:48
  standing there naked and then you get these boxers and this
• 50:52
  and this and this and you get this.
• 50:55
  So honestly, after what I had been through, this is like, OK,
• 51:01
  we're going somewhere. You know, we're going to
• 51:03
  actually, you can make a life or whatever.
• 51:07
  And we actually had food. I mean, I had a piece of
• 51:09
  chicken. There's like, whoa.
• 51:12
  And then these guys come around you and hey, we'll take care of
• 51:14
  this and do that. He said if you go talk to the CE
• 51:16
  OS, make sure somebody goes with you because you don't want to be
• 51:18
  talked like you're ratting them out.
• 51:20
  So you learn real quick what the deal is and you need some
• 51:24
  coffee, you need some good. So people, I tell you what, I
• 51:30
  saw a tremendous amount of kindness by prisoners, inmates,
• 51:36
  whatever you want to call them that just doesn't exist out in
• 51:40
  the real world today. Big.
• 51:42
  Shocker isn't. It isn't it unbelievable shocker
• 51:45
  how these guys come around. You need this, you need that.
• 51:48
  I got this for you. Hey, you what?
• 51:49
  Here's the deal. You know, we'll take your and it
• 51:52
  was it was amazing. So, so then, you know, I'm told,
• 51:59
  have your paperwork, you know, so you do this and we're in
• 52:03
  Oklahoma. I don't even remember how long I
• 52:05
  was there. I really don't.
• 52:07
  But I do know when we first got off the plane in Michigan, it
• 52:10
  was, I think it was late March or early April.
• 52:18
  We had T-shirts on. It's cold.
• 52:20
  We're center just I mean, we're shivering violently.
• 52:23
  There's cops are standing there in their warm jackets.
• 52:25
  They're just laughing at us. But I'm telling you, shaking so
• 52:29
  bad that you could, you know, just, they just think that's
• 52:33
  funny and you just dehumanize to the point where, OK, I get it.
• 52:39
  I see who it is. Just like cattle.
• 52:42
  Or, you know, I don't know if they would do that to cattle.
• 52:45
  Yeah, they would probably try to run him inside some.
• 52:48
  So you get to the prison. Are you in a medium or a low?
• 52:53
  OK, so Mylan used to be a medium.
• 52:57
  OK. But they had just converted it
• 53:00
  to a low and all they really did was call it something else.
• 53:04
  So all the guys there said there's no change that has been
• 53:07
  made, but it's now a low. That's why you can go here.
• 53:12
  OK, so here I am. And it's some old nasty brick
• 53:17
  buildings, you know, just, just, well now there was 3 or 4
• 53:22
  outside units that were brand new.
• 53:24
  Oh, wow, OK, yeah, 'cause I, I was just identifying with you
• 53:28
  because you're talking about the old nasty brick buildings like
• 53:31
  Leavenworth, you know, just awful.
• 53:33
  Yeah. Yeah, All right, so you get in
• 53:36
  there, you know, you've got, you've just been sentenced to 20
• 53:39
  years in prison. Jerry, how are you thinking?
• 53:44
  What's your mind like walking into this place thinking 20
• 53:47
  years? I'm in a shit hole.
• 53:49
  I made it through county for yeah, for a long time.
• 53:54
  Now I'm finally at a place I can at least figure out how to live.
• 54:01
  How are you thinking about how are you going to adapt to your
• 54:03
  world in there? So there's two things that go on
• 54:07
  in your mind, at least my you always think you got an appeal.
• 54:12
  You think that's really Val? Because you went to trial.
• 54:14
  Went to trial, I got an appeal and you know, maybe something
• 54:19
  because there, yeah, there's always hope.
• 54:21
  Yep. And I met a couple of guys and
• 54:28
  surprisingly, you know, they look at you a big time financial
• 54:33
  crime is kind of looked up to as opposed to, you know, if you're
• 54:41
  if you're some other crimes. But they look up to you, like,
• 54:47
  where's the money, You know, because everybody knows about
• 54:50
  you before you get there. Oh, yeah.
• 54:51
  They know what's booked and they know who you are and what's
• 54:54
  going on and did you do this? Are you a rat or whatever?
• 54:57
  Yeah. So I'm kind of look, yes, yes.
• 55:02
  Some of the best. You know it's better than the US
• 55:04
  Post Office. Exactly.
• 55:05
  Yeah, so I was looked up to to some degree.
• 55:09
  I didn't realize it at the time. And everybody's giving me
• 55:12
  advice. And this one guy comes up and he
• 55:14
  says here's the deal. He says you can preserve
• 55:17
  yourself in prison. He says don't do anything
• 55:20
  stupid. He says you can sleep.
• 55:23
  You got no real pressures. Eat correctly, don't eat a lot
• 55:28
  of junk and work out a lot, You know, fuel your mind.
• 55:34
  Yeah. It's physical, mental and
• 55:36
  spiritual. And you better do all three.
• 55:40
  OK. And you better do all three.
• 55:41
  And I did. I probably read 400 books.
• 55:46
  Yeah, of everything. You name it, I read it.
• 55:50
  I tried to pick up some books at the library and I'm here.
• 55:53
  Oh, wait a minute, I've read this.
• 55:54
  I read so and all of them. You don't want to get a little
• 55:56
  book, you want to get a big thing.
• 55:57
  You want to get a big Thick book?
• 55:59
  Yeah. I was reading those Greg Isles
• 56:01
  books that were like 7-8 hundred pages.
• 56:03
  That was one of my favorite authors.
• 56:08
  There it is. This guy here his books, all
• 56:13
  right, So I've got maybe four or five of his and.
• 56:17
  But you're right, you wanted to get into a big, thick book.
• 56:20
  And you want to get something that's going to cause you to.
• 56:23
  Learn something. Yeah.
• 56:25
  Yeah, it's an escape. Total escape.
• 56:28
  Yeah. One of the tricks that I was
• 56:31
  told by a bunch of, I guess bikers when I first got to
• 56:38
  county was sensory overload, Loud noise.
• 56:42
  Do this. Just keep yourself.
• 56:44
  Just just beat yourself with whatever you could beat yourself
• 56:48
  with and just don't think so. There's all kinds of tricks and
• 56:53
  you know, I started to apply them and they work.
• 56:56
  Did they make you work at that prison?
• 56:58
  Was that a work? Absolutely, Absolutely.
• 57:01
  Yeah. So this group ran this, and this
• 57:06
  group ran this, and this group ran this.
• 57:08
  So I got yard work. Not bad.
• 57:12
  Picking up trash yeah, it was a, you know, big compound and.
• 57:17
  Outside. I go outside all the time.
• 57:20
  I worked out a lot and I, I stayed in very good shape.
• 57:25
  I'm in, you know, with the AB roller, let's say the AB wheel.
• 57:31
  When I ultimately, just before I got out, I was doing reps at 25.
• 57:39
  So I'd end up doing a 40 of those.
• 57:42
  Yeah, that's a lot. Oh, no, that's, that's not easy.
• 57:46
  I, I, I think it's, it's so funny how, you know, you do
• 57:49
  certain things with the pitch. Like I got into doing pull ups
• 57:54
  and I hadn't probably done a pull up since I was like in
• 57:56
  junior high, you know, started doing 4, you know, worked myself
• 58:00
  up to, you know, four sets of 10.
• 58:02
  And that that's really, but that's like a whole different
• 58:05
  exercise that you would never think that you would do.
• 58:08
  Yeah. But I agree, working out,
• 58:11
  reading books and really getting into, I mean, when I get when I
• 58:17
  was in, I got down to my high school weight.
• 58:19
  I mean, I, I lost 35 lbs and it wasn't very hard to lose either.
• 58:24
  I mean. Not.
• 58:25
  At all. It just fell off kind of falls
• 58:27
  off like your freedom, but it's maybe it does preserve some of
• 58:31
  your life. I don't know.
• 58:32
  But as you're walking through that, are you filing appeals,
• 58:37
  Jerry, you're absolutely doing your hope of this and that.
• 58:41
  OK. What about the outside world?
• 58:43
  Are you staying connected to the outside world?
• 58:46
  You know, I called my wife, I had called my daughter's on a
• 58:49
  regular basis. We had a half handful of
• 58:51
  friends. Then you get the access to an
• 58:53
  e-mail, which is not easy. My sisters, you know, I would
• 58:58
  get visits and to me, visits became more stressful and
• 59:04
  beneficial. I didn't like them.
• 59:07
  You. Know were they stressful to you
• 59:10
  because it puts you too close to the outside world.
• 59:15
  I wouldn't say that so much. It's that what you put your
• 59:20
  family through, what you put your, what you put your visitors
• 59:24
  through was very. I did not like that at all.
• 59:31
  Yeah, because you're sitting in there with just this, you know,
• 59:34
  and a lot of. Some and it's it's not, but it's
• 59:37
  not even easy though. It's not even easy to get
• 59:39
  through. A lot of times you get turned
• 59:41
  away and my family got turned away three times on ridiculous
• 59:44
  things. But so you had that.
• 59:48
  You did have that opening to the outside world and your wife
• 59:54
  talking to her on the phone and your visits.
• 59:56
  And yes, when you started not getting what she wanted on your
• 1:00:01
  appeals, how did you handle that?
• 1:00:04
  So again, I'm in the cell with an attorney who gets it, and
• 1:00:13
  Dave Groszky is somebody who can read 50 pages and it's like he
• 1:00:19
  just flashes through him and it's like, dude, you didn't read
• 1:00:23
  that, but he'll quote back to you pretty much everything in
• 1:00:26
  there from where it is. Very smart guy.
• 1:00:29
  Very smart guy and he's got some unique characteristics.
• 1:00:36
  The guy just so he filed the appeal or no?
• 1:00:40
  He helped me file my appeal with my attorney and we thought we
• 1:00:44
  had it because they had so many. I can't even recall what the
• 1:00:49
  what the errors were, but everything gets denied.
• 1:00:53
  OK, Everything gets denied. And that was a big let tone.
• 1:00:58
  And then your next step is your 2255 and that is where I was
• 1:01:04
  given all this information about the plea bargains.
• 1:01:08
  And I said I didn't give any plea bargains.
• 1:01:11
  And my turn is, yeah, you got 4 plea bargains.
• 1:01:13
  I said no, I didn't. And that you liar.
• 1:01:17
  Now my state of mind with what was going on possibly, but I got
• 1:01:26
  to tell you, I would sit in an office and and they give you
• 1:01:32
  from deposition reams of paper. OK, let's say that the paper
• 1:01:36
  stack is maybe 4 feet high, single sheets, and there's maybe
• 1:01:43
  3 sheets in there that are pertinent to what would help
• 1:01:47
  you. But then they just duplicate
• 1:01:49
  everything, everything, everything.
• 1:01:50
  So you got to go through it and try to find that.
• 1:01:53
  And that's not a haystack dirty. They are, yeah.
• 1:01:56
  I mean, that's the prosecutor. And to get a fair trial,
• 1:01:59
  there's, again, there's no such thing.
• 1:02:01
  They have unlimited resources. Right.
• 1:02:05
  The Fed agent who, who was, he sat through the whole trial and
• 1:02:10
  then he testifies. Well, they don't let anybody
• 1:02:13
  else do that. And if you're going to testify,
• 1:02:15
  you don't see what everybody else is saying.
• 1:02:18
  So he's got an advantage. He can come in and refute this
• 1:02:20
  and refute that and they ask him all the softball questions.
• 1:02:24
  And so, you know, I, I, I didn't get the 2255 judge denied that.
• 1:02:33
  And you know, you're thinking, OK, well, I got this much time.
• 1:02:37
  I got this much time in. Maybe this is going to happen.
• 1:02:39
  Well, then there was the What was the first step?
• 1:02:44
  Act? OK, now you got all these.
• 1:02:47
  Complicated. And I I was saying when you
• 1:02:50
  mentioned David Grosky, he's he was episode 145, if those
• 1:02:55
  listening in there want to check that out.
• 1:02:58
  So yeah. So the first step act.
• 1:03:00
  Yeah. What What was the what was the
• 1:03:03
  rumor mill in the prison about the First Step Act?
• 1:03:07
  Well, it was all over the board, first of all, and the first
• 1:03:10
  information you get from everybody is so wrong.
• 1:03:13
  OK, They're already giving everybody a free pass and we're
• 1:03:16
  getting pardons and all this. No, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:03:19
  I think you misread something. So what happens is that there
• 1:03:27
  was a lot of classes you take and you know you can you can get
• 1:03:31
  points off or something which would change your.
• 1:03:36
  What we heard from the outside was, is that they had a hard
• 1:03:39
  time even getting that staffed up to where those were even
• 1:03:43
  classes you could take. So the BOP moved like at a snail
• 1:03:47
  space to even get the thing implemented.
• 1:03:50
  And they had to push them from the Justice Department for the
• 1:03:56
  BOP to do what was supposed to be implemented for the First
• 1:03:59
  Step Act. Because it wasn't.
• 1:04:01
  There was a little bit of a conflict of interest of the
• 1:04:03
  whole thing. Absolutely absolute a fact
• 1:04:05
  because the prison system is a factory where the where the
• 1:04:10
  workers. Yeah.
• 1:04:12
  OK. And prisons do run.
• 1:04:15
  Prisoners do run the inmate or the run run the prison.
• 1:04:18
  Right, they do everything. They do everything right.
• 1:04:20
  So there's no, you know, there's just no I.
• 1:04:26
  Mean the CE OS count they do. Count.
• 1:04:28
  That's it. That's it.
• 1:04:30
  That's it. So, Jerry.
• 1:04:38
  Yes, Sir. When, when that's because you're
• 1:04:42
  talking about the first step act.
• 1:04:43
  And so when the first step act, you've realized it's not really
• 1:04:46
  going to happen the way that everybody thinks it's going to
• 1:04:48
  happen. You're about two or three years
• 1:04:51
  away from COVID. And I always wonder, like when,
• 1:04:56
  when I always think that being in prison and having something
• 1:05:00
  like COVID happen would have to be the worst time ever to be in
• 1:05:04
  prison because it's very easy for them to just shut everything
• 1:05:08
  down, lock it down, tell everybody there's no visits, no
• 1:05:11
  foam privileges, can't go outside.
• 1:05:13
  Did all that happen? So you weren't in there during
• 1:05:16
  prison? No, I left in 2016.
• 1:05:19
  OK, so I was trying to get closer to home, which was
• 1:05:26
  Rochester. OK.
• 1:05:28
  And I met with the counselor and she says we're not going to get
• 1:05:31
  this. She says you're never going to
• 1:05:32
  get this. I got it.
• 1:05:35
  Just let you know. So there's a lot of serendipity
• 1:05:38
  or whatever that happened in my situation.
• 1:05:42
  So I'm getting transferred and we're talking about now it's
• 1:05:48
  spring of 2019. Well at that same time I'm I
• 1:05:54
  hadn't got a hold of my wife much at all for the 1st, 3rd of
• 1:05:58
  the year January, February, March.
• 1:06:02
  And she finally got a hold of her in April and she's on the
• 1:06:11
  verge of crying and she says I've just been diagnosed with
• 1:06:17
  stage 4 liver and pancreas cancer.
• 1:06:20
  And then she broke down so and then, you know, you're sitting
• 1:06:25
  on these phone booths that are like half booths and you got
• 1:06:28
  people all around you and you got this so much time to be on
• 1:06:31
  there. And it's, it's a, it's a tough,
• 1:06:36
  you know, how do you, you take that call?
• 1:06:38
  And I know I'm getting get transferred now.
• 1:06:40
  I know I'm going to go to Rochester.
• 1:06:43
  And it's a matter of, you know now what happens next.
• 1:06:47
  And you're about seven or eight years in at this point and get
• 1:06:50
  that phone call. I am about that, right?
• 1:06:54
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, I, I just can't imagine
• 1:06:58
  getting that kind of news in prison.
• 1:07:00
  I mean, I mean, I saw a couple of people that did.
• 1:07:05
  I saw a guy that lost his son and he just turned into a shell
• 1:07:10
  of himself. But what happened with her next?
• 1:07:17
  So I get transferred. OK, I get to go back to
• 1:07:24
  Oklahoma. The funny part of the story is
• 1:07:28
  that, you know, I'm ready to go. I I'd packed out and it was
• 1:07:32
  supposed to be like a couple of days was two weeks.
• 1:07:34
  So now I got nothing. Everything's packed and this is
• 1:07:37
  when guys stepped up and they're not going to get it back to give
• 1:07:40
  me this, to give me that coffee, whatever the case may be.
• 1:07:42
  So I remember getting on that bus and there was a couple of CE
• 1:07:48
  OS that were really nasty. But to so we leave and we go out
• 1:08:02
  to the bus and we're all sitting on the bus and I'm ready to go.
• 1:08:08
  I mean, I'm happy, OK? I'm not.
• 1:08:11
  And this CEO put on some and I'm not a country western fan at
• 1:08:15
  all. So I don't, I don't even know
• 1:08:17
  the name of this song, but he cranked it up so that you
• 1:08:20
  couldn't hear yourself think. And he had it blasted.
• 1:08:24
  And I'm looking at these guys all pissed off about it.
• 1:08:26
  And I'm like, not good for you. You know?
• 1:08:30
  It was it was, it was entertainment to me because I'm
• 1:08:33
  going home. And it was like spit chew who,
• 1:08:36
  you know, I I don't know the I mean, I remember those words to
• 1:08:39
  the song. It was and and we just he just
• 1:08:43
  cranked it up and it's like, OK, this is, you know, getting out
• 1:08:49
  of here and went to, you know, get at the airplane and, you
• 1:08:56
  know, getting your shackled, I mean.
• 1:08:59
  Travel shackled all up. Again, shackled all up you, you
• 1:09:02
  know, you get a bag of you've gone to Oklahoma.
• 1:09:05
  No, I haven't gone to Oklahoma. I got shackled to go to a civil
• 1:09:09
  trial in Saint Louis when I was at Leavenworth and I I went to
• 1:09:13
  the county jail for. Seven, So you know how they feed
• 1:09:16
  you on the plane, right? A bag of water.
• 1:09:20
  Nice. You got to chew it open with
• 1:09:22
  your teeth and it's just a bag of waters and, you know, maybe a
• 1:09:25
  peanut butter sandwich that you're smart not to eat anything
• 1:09:29
  or drink anything because you're not going to want to go back
• 1:09:33
  there, everybody. So it got the trip to Oklahoma
• 1:09:40
  and all of a sudden plane lands and they call six or seven guys
• 1:09:49
  off the plane right now, and I'm one of them.
• 1:09:52
  OK. So it's there's one crazy white
• 1:09:56
  guy, me and the rest are all cartel guys, OK, I mean cartel
• 1:10:04
  leaders. So you know, who you going to
• 1:10:08
  ask a question to because they're not going to tell you.
• 1:10:11
  And we'll get down. We're going a little bit and
• 1:10:17
  we're the First off and the first ones to get taken care of.
• 1:10:22
  And finally this the crazy guy says, hey, why are we?
• 1:10:26
  Why are we going into the hole we're talking about?
• 1:10:30
  Yeah, we're going to a hole, right?
• 1:10:31
  That's why they're doing it. And at that point it's like, OK,
• 1:10:33
  I don't even care, you know, as long as you guys don't Take Me
• 1:10:36
  Out and shoot me, I know where I'm going.
• 1:10:39
  I can, I can deal with anything. You don't know how long you're
• 1:10:43
  going to be there. There you can kind of see
• 1:10:46
  outside. But there's, again, there's like
• 1:10:49
  a big silo, maybe 7-8, ten floors.
• 1:10:52
  I don't know how many it holds. Maybe 2-3 thousand people at any
• 1:10:57
  given time. And so I think I was there about
• 1:11:03
  a week, zero communication. You can write letters, but who
• 1:11:07
  remembers addresses? You know, you always had
• 1:11:09
  everything. You print your label, so I don't
• 1:11:11
  know whose address is. You can't make any phone calls.
• 1:11:14
  That doesn't exist. So now my wife is dying and I
• 1:11:17
  have no information. And it's, you know, this guy
• 1:11:24
  would leave and the other guy would come in and I was alone
• 1:11:27
  for I probably was there maybe 10 days.
• 1:11:29
  Wow, something like that. Wow.
• 1:11:32
  And, and a lot of communication, no communication, a lot of it
• 1:11:36
  alone. And you learn things.
• 1:11:38
  I'm I'm looking out in the morning and I see that they put
• 1:11:42
  these little stickers on the door and those are the guys that
• 1:11:46
  are going. So I look out every morning to
• 1:11:48
  see my sticker, one sticker. Yes, I got my sticker.
• 1:11:52
  I'm going out of here and so then I'm I'm taken out and they
• 1:11:59
  have what's called a toolbox. You know what that is?
• 1:12:03
  Toolbox is a giant room, holds about 200 guys, has 1 stainless
• 1:12:09
  steel toilet in the corner and the walls are like the inside of
• 1:12:13
  a toolbox. So the noise is just
• 1:12:15
  unbelievable. OK, so me and the cartel boys
• 1:12:22
  are in one cell, one cool box that holds 200 guys all by
• 1:12:26
  ourselves. And then you got 200 guys across
• 1:12:28
  that they can see you and it's like they they look at like,
• 1:12:31
  who's this guy? Yeah.
• 1:12:31
  What's going on there? Yeah, right.
• 1:12:33
  So that was a different experience and that was my pre
• 1:12:38
  trip to Rochester, MN. So you get to Rochester and all
• 1:12:48
  this is going on with your wife. How are you able to stay in
• 1:12:51
  touch with her? And wasn't.
• 1:12:54
  I mean, I, no, I mean, once you get to Rochester, you're there.
• 1:12:57
  But I mean it when somebody's sick, I mean, it's not like the,
• 1:13:01
  you get extra minutes or anything to talk to her, I
• 1:13:05
  guess. I I mean how does that work?
• 1:13:07
  No, you get the same amount of minutes.
• 1:13:09
  Same thing. Same thing as anybody else. 300
• 1:13:12
  minutes a month 3. 100 minutes. And 10 minutes a day if you
• 1:13:16
  yeah, you can. Get you can get as many as you
• 1:13:18
  want per day I think. Yeah, no, I'm just saying if you
• 1:13:21
  want to make it to the end of the month.
• 1:13:23
  Yeah. Oh, for sure.
• 1:13:24
  Yeah. And you got to think the calls
• 1:13:28
  are like 15 minutes maybe maximum, and you're not.
• 1:13:32
  You know when you're cut off, it's done.
• 1:13:35
  Right, it's over. Boom.
• 1:13:36
  There's no, there's no leeway on there.
• 1:13:39
  So I find out she's doing good. One of my daughter's took her in
• 1:13:44
  and was trying to, you know, they just can't envision that
• 1:13:49
  mom's dying. So we're going to do this.
• 1:13:51
  We're going to do that. We're going to.
• 1:13:53
  And she lasted until November of that year.
• 1:13:59
  And I, I called and I finally got through to one of my
• 1:14:03
  daughter's and I was able to speak with my wife.
• 1:14:06
  She couldn't talk back and I learned that just just after I
• 1:14:11
  hung up. She probably passed away 10
• 1:14:14
  minutes later. Were you able to furlough to the
• 1:14:18
  to the funeral? Zero.
• 1:14:19
  No, no. They wanted like $30,000 per cop
• 1:14:23
  for me to go to the funeral and come on you, you know how much
• 1:14:26
  money you took away from me? I have nothing right?
• 1:14:30
  My son-in-law, now I knew she died because I called my sister
• 1:14:35
  who was on the way to visit. She says, I suppose you know
• 1:14:38
  that your wife passed. Barb passed.
• 1:14:40
  I says no, I didn't know until you just told me.
• 1:14:43
  So this is like a Friday. I believe my son-in-law called,
• 1:14:48
  talked to my counselor, told her they come to me Monday afternoon
• 1:14:53
  and said we'd like to bring you into this room, talk to you.
• 1:14:56
  You know your wife passed away. Well, thanks for telling me,
• 1:14:59
  guys. You know, that's all they have.
• 1:15:00
  No, there is no compassion. We are inmates are the lowest
• 1:15:07
  form you know of and you know really the reason I'm doing what
• 1:15:14
  I'm doing is because of my experience.
• 1:15:20
  As an inmate. As an inmate.
• 1:15:23
  Yeah, and well, and the and and I want to get into this prison
• 1:15:28
  land thing before we do. I just wanted to that idea of
• 1:15:34
  COVID and how you were able to get out of prison.
• 1:15:39
  Can you walk us through that real quick?
• 1:15:40
  Jerry on. On I'll Fast forward you to
• 1:15:42
  that. So all of a sudden when COVID
• 1:15:44
  hit, I mean the prison system freaked out, locked down, you
• 1:15:50
  locked down. We everybody's wearing a mask
• 1:15:52
  and they're doing all this kind of stuff.
• 1:15:54
  When you were in your cell, you could go out.
• 1:15:56
  I mean, you couldn't go out the yard.
• 1:15:58
  You could, you know, each just they just had it like it was
• 1:16:02
  nuclear war. You know, you look back on it,
• 1:16:04
  it was probably one of the stupidest things they did.
• 1:16:06
  Oh, yeah. However, So we'll Fast forward
• 1:16:10
  to June and and understand we're right at the Mayo Clinic.
• 1:16:14
  So if you got something wrong, they take you to Mayo Clinic,
• 1:16:16
  OK, Couldn't have gotten better, right?
• 1:16:20
  So June of 2020, I'm diagnosed with prostate cancer.
• 1:16:26
  OK, OK, so now I got to do the biopsy and all this sort of
• 1:16:31
  stuff, but they don't, they don't rush anything.
• 1:16:34
  October I'm diagnosed with shingles, which is severe.
• 1:16:41
  Well, I had it was on the optic nerve, so it's not like a rash
• 1:16:45
  or something. It was it hit the optic nerve on
• 1:16:48
  the left side and it goes one side or the other.
• 1:16:51
  So I lost my vision four times. So again, because I'm at the
• 1:16:55
  Mayo Clinic, I got the best doctors, the drops, everything.
• 1:16:59
  So I'm taking care of myself. And then we'll Fast forward to
• 1:17:02
  January and I've diagnosed with COVID.
• 1:17:06
  So now I got, you know, the trifecta.
• 1:17:09
  I figure I'm dying anyway. Right after my attorney found
• 1:17:16
  out my wife died, he contacted me and he says, look it, I'd be
• 1:17:21
  happy to for free. I'll do your compassionate
• 1:17:23
  release. I appreciate that.
• 1:17:25
  Thank you very much. And I, you know, believe me, I'm
• 1:17:27
  grateful to this day for that. I think again, he's a smart,
• 1:17:30
  smart guy. So it doesn't take, you know,
• 1:17:33
  two weeks to do a compassionate release.
• 1:17:35
  It takes months because you got to go through everything, all
• 1:17:38
  the forms in the fight back and forth.
• 1:17:39
  And the prosecutor doesn't want this in and prosecutor.
• 1:17:47
  So you know why I don't know because the prosecutor also was
• 1:17:53
  discussed discovered that he had prostate cancer.
• 1:17:57
  So what happens is what what happened was we filed this get
• 1:18:09
  all the documents ready, we're ready to go.
• 1:18:12
  February rolls around. I said, you're ready to file.
• 1:18:15
  What he was waiting for was my letter to the judge had to be
• 1:18:20
  very from the heart. And so I, I spent some time and
• 1:18:29
  I wrote a what I thought was here's my plea.
• 1:18:35
  He said we're ready to file. It was February 5th.
• 1:18:38
  It was a Friday and I says now what?
• 1:18:42
  He says we wait he said and it could take months.
• 1:18:45
  He said they never have to respond if they don't want to.
• 1:18:47
  OK one week later never forget 12th of February.
• 1:18:53
  I got this e-mail from my attorney in bold letters.
• 1:18:56
  We won exclamation points. Wow.
• 1:19:01
  I still get shivers to this day when I think about it.
• 1:19:03
  Get emotional. So February happens to have a
• 1:19:07
  Presidents Day, right? So the message came through on
• 1:19:10
  Friday. Monday was a President's Day, so
• 1:19:14
  I got out on that Tuesday. So that was my lead time.
• 1:19:17
  I learned from other guys who got out, when they tell
• 1:19:22
  everybody they're getting out, they immediately go put them in
• 1:19:25
  a hole for their own safety. Like, I mean, come on, it has
• 1:19:27
  nothing to do with anything, but they put them in the hole for
• 1:19:30
  their own safety. I shut my mouth.
• 1:19:31
  I said nothing to nobody. So I stayed where I was, but I
• 1:19:36
  knew it was cooking. I called my daughter and I
• 1:19:39
  couldn't speak. I said here's the deal.
• 1:19:41
  I said I got some information but I can't even talk.
• 1:19:45
  So she said you're either dying or you're getting out.
• 1:19:47
  I said I said you hit it. I said there's one that's right.
• 1:19:51
  So I walked out of there on that Tuesday, February 16th, 2021.
• 1:19:58
  Wow. Yeah.
• 1:19:59
  That's incredible, Jerry. I mean, this whole story is
• 1:20:02
  incredible. The the prostate cancer.
• 1:20:05
  What what happened with that? Well, when I got out, then I
• 1:20:09
  went to Rochester and had a biopsy.
• 1:20:11
  I did what's called a brachytherapy, which is
• 1:20:14
  radioactive injections as opposed to cutting.
• 1:20:18
  And they actually plant radioactive seeds on every on
• 1:20:25
  every cell that's cancerous. And then they do radiation for
• 1:20:32
  about 30 days. And since then I've had clean
• 1:20:36
  bill of health the the shingles actually lasted three years.
• 1:20:39
  It was a virus on this the left cornea.
• 1:20:42
  But you didn't lose your you. You have your eyesight.
• 1:20:45
  I have my eyesight, this vision. Yeah, what a what a just a
• 1:20:48
  series of just unbelievable things.
• 1:20:51
  Your wife dies, you get prostate cancer, you get shingles, you
• 1:20:54
  get COVID, you get compassionate release.
• 1:20:57
  I mean, that's just unbelievable.
• 1:20:59
  You you survive cancer. So that leads us to what do how
• 1:21:05
  you and I got together talking was through David.
• 1:21:09
  Yeah, Roski and I want to talk about this prison land idea
• 1:21:13
  because I saw the video and and and the idea, the concept, the
• 1:21:17
  game. Talk to us a little bit about
• 1:21:19
  that, Jerry. Well, there's this.
• 1:21:21
  Just this predecessor stepped there.
• 1:21:23
  I met a, a woman who's an author.
• 1:21:25
  She came to me, wanted to do a story on my, my life, she said.
• 1:21:29
  It's, it's, it's unique, it's fascinating.
• 1:21:30
  And I'm thinking, you know, it's just my life.
• 1:21:32
  It didn't seem like much to me. It's pretty.
• 1:21:35
  So she happened to know another guy they, they co-authored the
• 1:21:39
  life of Tupac. So she knew what she was doing.
• 1:21:42
  And then they took it to a screenwriter and wanted to do
• 1:21:45
  something like a series. And that's still on the back
• 1:21:49
  burner. That's possibility that we can
• 1:21:51
  dovetail it with this. The game concept came to me
• 1:21:54
  because I looked at it similar to online poker online, any kind
• 1:21:58
  of game. And I thought, OK, these things
• 1:22:03
  generate decent amount of revenue.
• 1:22:07
  And I wanted to, you know, there's people out there I'm
• 1:22:10
  looking at all the Prison Reform and all the laws.
• 1:22:12
  And I said, you know, that's that's not the way I would
• 1:22:14
  approach it because I don't believe in it.
• 1:22:18
  What I do believe is when the guy that actually came with me,
• 1:22:23
  Gilberto Chavez, when he was 15, some one of his teachers said,
• 1:22:30
  hey, you Got Talent. Let's do this.
• 1:22:32
  Let's you know, it's it's a one-on-one.
• 1:22:34
  Grab somebody, keep them out of the prison system.
• 1:22:36
  Grab somebody, keep them out of the prison system.
• 1:22:38
  Somebody's in the prison system. You talk to their family, help
• 1:22:41
  them out. How do you really need help?
• 1:22:42
  This this direct held up as opposed to I'm not here to
• 1:22:48
  change laws because it's. Big task.
• 1:22:53
  It's a task and it's is it ever going to happen?
• 1:22:55
  So I, I conceived of the game, we put it together as, as best
• 1:23:01
  we could conceptually for the money we had to do it.
• 1:23:05
  And March 20th launched Kickstarter.
• 1:23:11
  And it's, it's out there to be exposed to influencers who have
• 1:23:18
  followers and their followers. Followers send it out to people
• 1:23:24
  who can donate, contribute to this cause because our mission
• 1:23:28
  is create something that generates a revenue perpetually
• 1:23:34
  and we then will go to the people who get it.
• 1:23:38
  That would be an Advisory Board to take this money and actually
• 1:23:43
  put it to work where you can affect a person's life directly
• 1:23:48
  and add the entertainment value to it.
• 1:23:50
  The entertainment value just fuels the game and as you get
• 1:23:53
  it, you know, as you get the game with players, 1 fuels the
• 1:23:57
  other. So that's my mission.
• 1:24:00
  That's why I created the game. That's where we're at, and right
• 1:24:04
  now we're in the early stages of the Kickstarter looking for
• 1:24:09
  followers to support the cause and get us where we're going to
• 1:24:13
  go. Well, I think it's fascinating
• 1:24:14
  too, because I think, you know, people playing within the game
• 1:24:16
  become inmates within people who are making this game that went
• 1:24:20
  to prison. So it's all real and they can
• 1:24:24
  become part of the society that everybody's so fascinated with
• 1:24:28
  because they haven't been there. And, and I, I think it's a
• 1:24:33
  unique concept. It's a unique idea.
• 1:24:35
  And I love the idea of taking dollars and, and putting them
• 1:24:39
  towards people that can really affect their lives.
• 1:24:42
  So I've, I'm, I'm a fan, Jerry and I and I've, you know, want
• 1:24:46
  to help any way I can 'cause I think I know these games.
• 1:24:50
  I'm, you know, to me, I'm an older guy.
• 1:24:53
  You and I are both, you know, past.
• 1:24:55
  But, but these games are a big deal.
• 1:24:57
  And they, they generate real interest, real following and and
• 1:25:01
  hopefully it can be one of those games.
• 1:25:03
  Well, you understand, you know, inside the prison how many
• 1:25:06
  hustles there really are. And when I was there, you know,
• 1:25:10
  you couldn't just open up a poker table or a blackjack
• 1:25:12
  table. You needed permission.
• 1:25:14
  You needed to advance to do that.
• 1:25:15
  But those guys were doing that. We're making a pretty
• 1:25:17
  significant rake and all the various hustles that are in
• 1:25:25
  prison. And I want it to be.
• 1:25:28
  It's not glamorous, OK? I want the player to realize
• 1:25:31
  that this is a, it's a tough sled.
• 1:25:34
  It's it you can get, you can get stabbed in the back for any
• 1:25:37
  reason at any time. And it's, it's the reality.
• 1:25:41
  So I want to be a very playable product, but also deliver a
• 1:25:45
  message back to those and help those that we can help.
• 1:25:50
  I love it, love it. And there'll be links out there
• 1:25:55
  and, and Kickstarter campaigns already rolling, but, and we'll
• 1:25:59
  roll this interview out next week and it'll be in the show
• 1:26:02
  notes too with the link for people to get involved with it.
• 1:26:06
  Jerry, I mean, I, I think your story is like it should be a, a
• 1:26:10
  Netflix series. It's got so many different
• 1:26:13
  layers to it of things that you just like, Oh my God, I can't
• 1:26:16
  believe that happened. And then, Oh my God, I can't
• 1:26:18
  believe that happened. And then he made it.
• 1:26:21
  I mean, you adapted your way all the way through.
• 1:26:23
  You survived. You are a true survivor of a lot
• 1:26:25
  of different things, but I'm curious, what do you think's
• 1:26:28
  your biggest take away from all of this that you've been
• 1:26:30
  through? That's a good question that what
• 1:26:36
  you think is important isn't is one of my biggest takes
• 1:26:40
  takeaways and I get up every single morning.
• 1:26:44
  I have my own routine and I, I believe that being grateful for
• 1:26:53
  whatever you have doesn't matter.
• 1:26:56
  Is, is really the, the message I'd like people to be, you know,
• 1:27:00
  it's, it's all about yourself, being within yourself.
• 1:27:04
  And that's what's kept me from where I am right now.
• 1:27:10
  I love it because you you lived it and and you survived as a lot
• 1:27:16
  of people would have not. They would have just curled up
• 1:27:19
  in a fetal position and said, enough, I give and you didn't.
• 1:27:23
  And and I think so many people can learn so many different
• 1:27:26
  things from that. And I always wonder, you know,
• 1:27:29
  like what it is that makes somebody a survivor as opposed
• 1:27:34
  to somebody that chooses victimhood because you chose to
• 1:27:37
  just survive, take the next step.
• 1:27:39
  They weren't great things that were in front of you, but you
• 1:27:42
  went ahead and stepped into it, figured it out and continued to
• 1:27:47
  step. And now you are where you are.
• 1:27:49
  You, you served a lot of time in prison.
• 1:27:52
  Nobody turned off your brain. Nobody took your brain.
• 1:27:55
  You put your brain back into action.
• 1:27:57
  You never turned off your brain in prison.
• 1:28:00
  So I, I think there, I think there's a lot to learn from
• 1:28:03
  that. I really do.
• 1:28:03
  And I love the fact that this goes into 1100 prisons and
• 1:28:06
  people know, hey, it's not easy on the outside, but you don't
• 1:28:09
  have to quit. You, you can continue to work
• 1:28:12
  and go and do. And that's what you've done and,
• 1:28:15
  and survived it. And it's, it's a, it's a story.
• 1:28:19
  I, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a, a series
• 1:28:23
  because it why not? Why wouldn't it be?
• 1:28:25
  Well, I think it's going to be because of who I've got involved
• 1:28:28
  with it, yeah. These people, professionals,
• 1:28:30
  I'm. Going to be with them sometime
• 1:28:32
  in April. And it it's, we didn't just
• 1:28:35
  start it. We've been at this for three
• 1:28:37
  years. And they do happen.
• 1:28:38
  I just interviewed Divine G, He came out last week and his his
• 1:28:42
  movie Sing Sing went to the Academy Awards and he got
• 1:28:46
  nominated for best Screenplay and Coleman Domingo was up for
• 1:28:48
  best actor. Who played him in the movie.
• 1:28:50
  These things happen. Yes, they have.
• 1:28:53
  They have. For them and I appreciate it and
• 1:28:55
  you know the the last thing I'd leave you with is as long as
• 1:28:58
  you've got do not let that flicker a hole go out.
• 1:29:02
  Don't lose hope, because hope might be all they have.
• 1:29:04
  That's all there is, right? Speaking of hope and gratitude,
• 1:29:08
  I I want to thank Homestead financial home mortgage letting
• 1:29:11
  me use all this fancy stuff here in in the podcast studio.
• 1:29:15
  Hey, if you've got home mortgage needs out there, Greg Aftiev is
• 1:29:19
  your guy. He knows that stuff.
• 1:29:21
  Check him out. My book nightmare success.
• 1:29:25
  Get it. It's sat at armor armor all
• 1:29:29
  Amazon, Barnes and Noble. And if you want to go check me
• 1:29:37
  out on what I'm doing, go to brentcassidy.com.
• 1:29:39
  I spell it wrong. I spell it with ATY, not a DY,
• 1:29:42
  as I used to say to my people as I was writing my emails back and
• 1:29:46
  forth from Leavenworth. Stay strong.
• 1:29:48
  I'll do the same. Jerry Duran, thanks so much for
• 1:29:51
  sharing this story that you have.
• 1:29:53
  I think it's going to help a lot of people who want to take a
• 1:29:55
  listen. I very much appreciate your
• 1:29:57
  time. Nightmare success in and out.