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"The Fall of a Financial King: The James Catledge Story" · Nightmare Success In and Out

• 0:00
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 0:03
  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
• 0:10
  nightmares that set yourself free.
• 0:12
  We're going to be exploring this topic with guys that was in
• 0:15
  Leavenworth with and others who survived their own nightmare.
• 0:19
  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
• 0:28
  prisons you built up in your own mind.
• 0:32
  All right, welcome back, Nightmare Success.
• 0:35
  And now, listeners, this is where you come from.
• 0:37
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 0:39
  How do you adapt, survive, overcome?
• 0:41
  Set yourself free? Folks.
• 0:43
  Don't forget to do those things that people talk about all the
• 0:46
  time when they come on these shows.
• 0:49
  Follow this thing up, subscribe, share it out, like it up.
• 0:52
  It really helps the show and I appreciate it.
• 0:55
  So who are we talking to today? Well, I have really, I've been
• 1:00
  looking forward to this interview and I got to give a
• 1:02
  big shout out to both our friend Matt Cox.
• 1:07
  I think he talked to both of us and said, hey, you guys, your
• 1:10
  stories are kind of somewhat there's little bits and pieces
• 1:13
  here. You guys need to get together
• 1:14
  and James and I did get together and I got to tell you his story
• 1:21
  will be a movie because you know, there's the wolf of Wall
• 1:24
  Street out there. This has got all kinds of good
• 1:27
  stuff to that the Wolf of Wall Street didn't have.
• 1:29
  But if you're, if you've tuned in today and you want to know
• 1:35
  about what's inside a true entrepreneur and, and, and it,
• 1:41
  what makes him tick, then you've gotten to the right place.
• 1:46
  Cause James Cartilage is that guy.
• 1:48
  He, and, and his story kind of ramps up in a way that, you
• 1:52
  know, you see somebody who's got it in their DNA as an
• 1:56
  entrepreneur. He, he started with that whole
• 1:58
  thing of getting his confidence up when he was doing the Mormon
• 2:02
  thing, going door to door and, and, you know, reporting his
• 2:06
  numbers every night and wanted to be at the top of that.
• 2:08
  And, and then he gets into radio sales and he, he, he starts
• 2:12
  figuring out how to do this a whole different way that anybody
• 2:15
  else is selling radio time. And he does it better than
• 2:17
  anybody else. And then he steps into this and,
• 2:21
  and I know this part of the world building a sales team, an
• 2:25
  insurance agency, but it wasn't like of 200 people or, you know,
• 2:29
  500 people, 8000 individuals nationwide.
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  And things got really good. And then it got into the world
• 2:37
  of, of real estate. The real estate was, hey, why
• 2:40
  don't we diversify a little bit? And then a guy came to him and
• 2:44
  it all looked great. It's down the Dominican Republic
• 2:47
  and it's all the fancy stuff you got maximum.
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  And everybody else is involved in this.
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  And it looks like that we can sell these shares and they do.
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  And it goes great and then it doesn't.
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  And this whole thing rolls into resilience building, losing,
• 3:05
  surviving and prison. And then there's motivational
• 3:09
  speaking in here too. So I can't wait to jump into all
• 3:13
  this with James and, and talk and, and, and just unpack all
• 3:17
  this. He said, how much time do we
• 3:19
  have? I said, we got as much time as
• 3:20
  you need, James, we got as much time as you need.
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  Before we unpack all that, I want to recognize Autoplaza
• 3:27
  Direct. You know, who likes spending a
• 3:28
  couple weekends walking car lots looking for a car and then you
• 3:31
  go spend four or five hours in a dealership to buy a car.
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  It's kind of like a root canal appointment.
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  Well, there's a better way to take away all that pain and
• 3:38
  hassle getting a car. It's called Autoplaza Direct.
• 3:41
  They're your personal car concierge.
• 3:42
  Just tell them the car you want, what you can say, and they'll go
• 3:45
  find that car for you. They'll negotiate your best
• 3:48
  price. They also offer you warranties
• 3:49
  and finances, all full service. Go to autoplazadirect.com to get
• 3:53
  started with your personal car concierge.
• 3:55
  The new hassle freeway, the car buying experience you deserve.
• 3:59
  Auto Plaza direct. Tell them Brent from nightmare
• 4:00
  success sent you James Kalich. How are you my man?
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  Hey, man, I'm doing great. Great, great introduction.
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  I, I've forgotten a lot of that story that that's really a great
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  intro. Let me say this on the outset,
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  Brent, you've got a great show. I'm going to be.
• 4:16
  On it. And I'm I'm glad to know this is
• 4:20
  being broadcast inside prisons all over the United States.
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  It's a big deal. In a, in a, in a real weird way,
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  that's become an important audience for you and I.
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  Those are our friends. Those are our allies.
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  Those are guys who are heart goes out to so thanks for having
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  me. Yeah, I appreciate that.
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  And and you know, I think that's probably one of the bigger
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  things when you have a perspective of of your what goes
• 4:51
  on in your mind and what what you're thinking and what you see
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  and going through the prison experience like you and I did,
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  we meet good people. And then when you leave you, you
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  leave those people on the battlefield that should be home.
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  And well, it changed. It changed a lot of what what I
• 5:08
  think, and it's a lot of reason I do this show is it there's a
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  lot of good stories that people can connect to.
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  And, and if it helps break a narrative of that negative
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  narrative that everybody that has made a mistake and they went
• 5:23
  to prison, that they always are going to be bad or they always
• 5:25
  need to be in prison. There's a lot of different
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  things that you can learn from, from people who survive a
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  nightmare and make it through and, and can share that with
• 5:34
  people when they're in their dark moments.
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  But I want to get to James your, your childhood experience is
• 5:41
  interesting to me 'cause you know, well, I'll just tell us a
• 5:46
  little bit about it, 'cause that kind of a crazy thing happened
• 5:49
  when you were eight years old. But can you walk us through how
• 5:52
  your life gets started? Yeah, yeah.
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  First of all, it, it's really important to point out that that
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  I am completely aware that I had a great childhood and, and I, I
• 6:04
  was 100% raised by a mentally healthy single mother and I and
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  I and I know many people that are tuned in to your, to your
• 6:14
  show may not have the blessing of that.
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  But. Relating to this story, my my
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  brother's 5 and I'm eight. There's only two of us.
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  My mom and dad are married on this this day.
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  My dad takes us to the movies. It's in the middle of summer.
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  We we get dropped off at the babysitter to attend the movies.
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  Dad leaves us there with the babysitter.
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  We watched the movie. The movie was King Kong.
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  I'll never forget this day at the end of the movie, it's a
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  long movie it's like 3 hours and 15 minutes.
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  End of the movie babysitter calls from a pay phone.
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  My dad and he needs more time for for whatever he's involved
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  in and so she's instructed take us to a restaurant inside the
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  mall area. So we finished there, dad picks
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  us up on the curb, runs us home, sits down on our bed and we have
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  bunk beds. My brother's on top, I'm on the
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  bottom. Dad takes us into our room,
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  babysitters in the living room, sits down on the edge of our bed
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  and says he says this. He says he says hey your mom and
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  I are getting divorced and I'm leaving and I wanted to tell you
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  myself and so if you got any questions now I'm 8.
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  You're 8 years old. A lot to take in as an 8 year
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  old I'm. 8 years old and he says and we're I'm very intimidating
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  by my dad too. He's a he's a strong,
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  disciplined, put together guy. He's so much distant in his
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  emotional availability. And so I, you know, I have no
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  question. Whip.
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  Somewhere in the background of this, he does.
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  He does have a whip that hangs on his chair that's it's more
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  used as a visual understanding that this is possible.
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  And of course, I tested the limits of that and saw that a
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  few times myself. You know it was whipped for
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  sure. Not abused, but certainly
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  spanked with that thing. Yeah, well, I think we all were
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  at this. You know you, I think I'm 58
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  years old. Being spanked was just part of
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  what you did as a kid, and that's how it happened.
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  That's exactly right. So that was my situation.
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  But on that day he says I'm leaving.
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  If you got any questions now did.
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  You see this comment, James? No, no, no.
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  My mom and dad had some verbal warfare, you know, back and.
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  Forth, Yeah. I just assumed this is what
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  parents do, you know, they fight with each other and but wasn't
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  wasn't physical. No, nothing physical.
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  I've never seen my dad physical with my mother ever.
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  But it was a lot of verbal disrespectful communication back
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  and forth. Certainly unhealthy.
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  That's the only warning I would have had, but I didn't even know
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  really divorce. I mean, we're, we're in Memphis,
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  TN, in the middle of the heart of the South.
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  Divorce is really an unusual thing.
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  People stay together, they raise their kids, they go to church on
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  Sunday. It's it's not divorce was kind
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  of like an anomaly. It, it wasn't a regular pattern
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  at that time, you know, at my age.
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  So my little brother's got nothing to say.
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  I've got nothing to say. Dad hops up, walks out the front
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  door. I'll watch him back out the
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  driveway with the babysitter to take her home.
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  And I may, I decided probably ought to call mom.
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  She's got a new job. She's got an office working at a
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  law firm. I dial her up and I, I said,
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  hey, dad, dad, dad's left. I, I think you ought to know
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  this. And she said, what do you mean
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  the left? And I said, well, he, he just
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  said to me, you two were getting divorced.
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  He's leaving and goodbye that that's just what happened.
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  And she said OK, I'm on my way home.
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  When she's on her way home, I go to kind of explore around this
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  little house. We got 1500 feet on one floor.
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  I go exploring the house and all the doors are locked from the
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  outside where I can't get in these doors.
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  And I thought that was kind of weird.
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  My mother, when she gets home, gets a little butter knife and
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  kind of gets through the the lock a little bit and gets in
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  and, and we learned that that a lot of the stuff's gone.
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  You know, a lot of stuff that belonged to my mom and dad is is
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  gone. And that's what he needed the
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  time for. That's what the movie was,
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  that's what the restaurant extra time was about.
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  And that's why we were the babysitter.
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  He basically took stuff. They call it stuff.
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  Yeah, that my mom would need to, you know, kind of restore to
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  have a a normal, you know, house.
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  But that that, that on that day, little James was now the man of
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  the house. And whether, you know, at 8, you
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  don't know quite right what that means.
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  But I did feel a protective internal drive to protect her
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  and protect him, my little brother.
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  And that's the way it began. And I believe on that day, I
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  kind of grew up. It was, I don't recall much
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  prior to that, but I recall almost everything
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  photographically after that. And I could tell you I was in
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  what they called an old soul. Older.
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  If, if, if you met me at 8:00, you thought I was 15.
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  If, if, if you met me at 15, you say the guy that's going on 30.
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  I always was older mentally. We were raised Mormon for sure.
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  Mom had us in the Mormon church. I was in the scouts, my brother
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  was in the scouts. We both are Eagle Scouts.
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  We, we, we went on our Mormon mission.
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  He went to Taipei, Taiwan. He speaks Mandarin Chinese.
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  They didn't trust me out of the country.
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  So I went, I went to Santa Rosa. I went to Santa Rosa, CA, you
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  know, kind of, I'd never been to California at that point from
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  Tennessee. So that was a foreign country as
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  far as I was concerned. And I spoke English, you know,
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  of course, in California, but so that, that that's, that's the
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  childhood. Wow, and so to so to James, the
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  the going through the Mormon and and and and go with the door to
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  door thing. Was that something that you, I
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  mean, I, I know that that's something to go through this and
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  then they all people talk about it, but was it something that
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  you enjoyed or was it was it torturous?
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  It's a great question. It really is, Brett.
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  I, I, I thought it was going to be torturous.
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  I anticipated 2 years of torture.
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  It, it's a like a rite of passage for a Mormon young man
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  to do that. And frankly, you're kind of
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  programmed to believe that no beautiful woman's going to want
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  you unless you've been through this rite of passage.
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  And so this is kind of what the guys who don't have a mental
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  issue go do. And I, I was expecting to do
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  time, basically to do time and, and hopefully have a have a
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  reasonable experience and, and they get back home with my life.
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  As it turned out, it was quite a good experience and, and I
• 13:43
  believe I became a man on on that missionary journey and I
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  believe I learned a hell of a lot about myself and frankly,
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  that human nature and, and those skills to this day continue to
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  serve me. And, and right away I, I
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  believe, for whatever reason, my wiring, maybe my childhood
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  disappointments, whatever I, I was, I was geared for this.
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  I could do this well and I had a good experience baptized a lot
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  of people. I, I don't want to get into the
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  record setting that went on, but it was record amounts of people
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  were baptized in the Mormon church on my watch and there
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  were all sorts of created methods to do that.
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  We're done. And anyway, it was a good
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  experience. I became a leader.
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  I learned a lot about myself and others and I, I frankly found my
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  voice not in a religious sense, but in a just being a man, being
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  accountable, being disciplined, being responsible.
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  I, I, I found a way of life that I liked.
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  I, I like myself in that way of being.
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  I, I like to be disciplined. I like to be focused.
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  I like to be reliable. I wanted to be relied upon and I
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  and I found that home on that mission.
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  I think that's really interesting because I'm
• 15:17
  wondering if that's what gave you the confidence that you had
• 15:22
  when I, I know you, you want you, you, you wanted to go to 1
• 15:25
  college and then you ended up in another college.
• 15:28
  But really grades were not the thing that you excelled at.
• 15:33
  It was more of a confidence of seeing things and, and being
• 15:37
  able to visualize it and then and taking action with it, which
• 15:41
  are all things that happened in your life.
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  But do you think that maybe that gave you confidence with doing
• 15:47
  that missionary work I. I, I think it did.
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  I, I really do. I, I can't speak if you're
• 15:53
  measuring self esteem. I, I don't really know how much
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  self esteem was intact prior to this experience.
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  I, I, I would say it was vulnerable If, if I were to self
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  diagnose a young James Catlage part of the mission, I would say
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  vulnerable Could have gone either way.
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  Just it's a 5050. But the mission anchored me.
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  It, it, I would say it did give me a high level of
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  self-confidence. I left the mission feeling like
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  I could set my mind to things and do them.
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  I I really did. I and I and I think.
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  But, and the reason I ask you that question is, is that I
• 16:39
  noticed in a lot of the different things about your life
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  is that you had a lot of confidence or, and, and got
• 16:46
  people to believe around you, Hey, this is what we should do.
• 16:49
  Maybe we haven't done it before, but actually this is the way we
• 16:51
  should go with it. And, and you know, that's an
• 16:54
  ingredient for, for building things and, and to, to lead
• 16:58
  things is people have to believe in what you're saying.
• 17:01
  So you get out of college, what's what's the next step?
• 17:04
  Yeah, I, well, getting into college was difficult, but what?
• 17:07
  But once I got in there and got out, I was recruited.
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  I had to work through college. I didn't have any scholarships
• 17:17
  or anything like that. I had to pay all the bills, the
• 17:20
  rent, the tuition, the food, you know, if it required finances, I
• 17:26
  had to pay for them. So I worked full time while
• 17:29
  going to college and I was recruited by one of my accounts.
• 17:33
  I was an account executive with the radio station.
• 17:36
  One of my accounts was Miracle Ear Hearing Aids and the owner
• 17:39
  of the, it's a franchise system where this, this gentleman named
• 17:43
  Barry Finley owned 5 franchises, the locations and he owned them
• 17:49
  in Las Vegas. And he was using me to do the
• 17:53
  advertising on the radio station.
• 17:55
  It's Robert Wright, the ads. We would produce the ads and we
• 17:58
  would run them on my radio station that where I worked.
• 18:01
  And he said, listen, when you finish your schooling, would you
• 18:05
  consider coming to work for me and maybe supervising general
• 18:10
  managing my franchises that are located in Las Vegas?
• 18:14
  Because he lived in Salt Lake City where I was working.
• 18:17
  And I said, I don't know anything about hearing aids.
• 18:20
  You know, I'm not an audiologist.
• 18:23
  I'm I'm not a doctor. I, you know, what are you
• 18:25
  talking about? He said, no, no, no, no, no.
• 18:28
  I'm not talking about being an audiologist.
• 18:31
  I'm talking about supervising the selling of hearing aids, he
• 18:35
  said. I have audiologists.
• 18:37
  They know how to test the hearing.
• 18:38
  They are licensed and credentialed.
• 18:40
  I want them to report to you on the movement of the hearing
• 18:44
  aids. And I said, well, I think I
• 18:47
  could do that. And he offered me a salary that
• 18:51
  was almost 6 figures. It was like $90,000.
• 18:54
  Now I'm 2423 1/2. Years old.
• 18:58
  He offers me $90,000 + 100 dollar bonus on every hearing
• 19:03
  aid soul. And he's currently selling
• 19:06
  currently like 40 to 50 a month. And, and I talk him into a bonus
• 19:15
  on the stuff already being sold, not new stuff.
• 19:18
  And then any new stuff continue that bonus.
• 19:21
  And so I'm making good money and nothing was more strange than to
• 19:27
  get to Las Vegas, rent and have these men that are as old as my
• 19:32
  grandfather and father. Yeah.
• 19:37
  You're managing. According to me in in a
• 19:41
  supervisory way it was you. Talk I got, I got to say I, I so
• 19:45
  identify with you, James, because when I moved down to
• 19:48
  Texas, so I think I was telling you this earlier, I was 22
• 19:52
  getting ready to turn 23 and I was recruiting and interviewing
• 19:57
  people that were, you know, some of them were 60, some of them
• 20:01
  were in their 50s. And so you, you, you almost have
• 20:05
  to just decide, you know, it's kind of like sports what we're
• 20:10
  doing. This is what we're doing.
• 20:11
  Yeah, yeah. And and and they quickly
• 20:14
  realized this is what we're doing.
• 20:16
  And and it is a decision. Hey, listen, if you lack
• 20:19
  self-confidence, if you, if you smell it, self esteem you, you
• 20:25
  cannot do this because they will tear you apart.
• 20:29
  And, and these are mature men who, who know the way life works
• 20:33
  and they know I don't. And so we, I, I did have, I
• 20:39
  remember having a conflict with one of them.
• 20:41
  And I said, Hey, look, if, if, if you're, if you're waiting on
• 20:45
  me to leave you, you, you got a long wait.
• 20:50
  You, you, you, you better make a decision to go sell hearing aids
• 20:53
  elsewhere because I'm going nowhere in this pressure that
• 20:57
  you're feeling by my presence is not going away.
• 21:02
  So you're going to sell hearing aids.
• 21:03
  We're not just testing hearing. You're you're, you're way too
• 21:06
  credentialed to just be a tester.
• 21:09
  You've got to help people understand the miracle is in the
• 21:12
  purchase. The miracle is not in the
• 21:14
  testing. And so I ended up having to talk
• 21:18
  these old men into how to sell hearing aids and we sold a lot
• 21:24
  of hearing aids. And at the end of a year, I had
• 21:27
  a one year contract that was renewable every year, the end of
• 21:30
  a year. Brett, I, I made the decision
• 21:33
  that this bored me, even though it's making a lot of money.
• 21:36
  I, I'm, I'm single, I have no debts, I have no crabs.
• 21:40
  I'm really no debt guy, no credit card guy.
• 21:43
  I paid cash for my stuff and I I I'm making more money, frankly,
• 21:48
  than I need. Oh, I mean that that time period
• 21:51
  when you're that age, it feels like that could be the richest
• 21:53
  you've ever will be because you don't have really a whole lot of
• 21:56
  I. I know at that point, I mean, I
• 21:58
  mean, seriously, I don't know a lot of people at that young age,
• 22:02
  but I, I felt like I was the richest guy I knew.
• 22:05
  And, and I, I like that feeling too.
• 22:08
  That's another thing. I like that feeling.
• 22:10
  I wanted to be that guy and, and and so my Bishop in the Mormon
• 22:16
  church and I'm active in the Mormon church as a single guy
• 22:20
  making money. My Bishop says to me, you should
• 22:23
  sell insurance and I I said sounds like a scam to me.
• 22:29
  What are you talking about? Why?
• 22:31
  Why? You know what?
• 22:32
  Do you? I don't believe in insurance.
• 22:34
  Nobody in my family owned insurance, nobody in my family
• 22:38
  playing that far out it, it just sounded like I'm going to give
• 22:42
  you how much for how long and you're going to pay me millions.
• 22:45
  What are you talking about? It did sound like a scam and I
• 22:49
  and he was a trusted guy. So I said, I just need you to
• 22:53
  explain to me before we talk about a job, explain to me how
• 22:57
  it works. What's the math on this?
• 23:00
  Does it work? Is it a scam?
• 23:03
  Now, I knew insurance was somewhat legitimized throughout
• 23:07
  society, but I didn't know anybody had policies and I'd
• 23:11
  never discussed their policy with them.
• 23:13
  And so this Bishop began to unfold for me my understanding
• 23:17
  of this financial instrument. And for the first time in my
• 23:21
  life, I understood actuarial details about how a life
• 23:25
  insurance policy worked. That made sense it it, but I
• 23:30
  never thought about it and it it never registered with me prior
• 23:34
  to this conversation. So he had never had these
• 23:37
  conversations before with anybody he had hired and he was
• 23:41
  running a very successful agency and I was asking these crazy
• 23:45
  questions from a very suspicious angle and he knew that and he
• 23:51
  wanted to hire me desperately. He gave me a proficiency test
• 23:55
  and and scored that this guy to our friends today.
• 23:58
  We, we had lunch about a month ago here where I live in Las
• 24:02
  Vegas and, and his name is Chris Zockel.
• 24:05
  He's, he's a dear beloved friend and, and I, I remember this
• 24:11
  interview where we go into this proficiency test.
• 24:15
  He's telling me all about how I did the test everything.
• 24:18
  He hires me. I'm now in financial services
• 24:22
  and I worked for him for three years and really was tutored
• 24:26
  well. He taught me so.
• 24:28
  Well, I I I was a. Sponge learning the way he was a
• 24:33
  master of this domain and and I wanted to be as good as he was
• 24:38
  at this and so he taught me and I'll let you continue to ask
• 24:44
  questions, but up until that moment I work for somebody else
• 24:49
  in in financial services. So does that at that time
• 24:54
  because you had such a good mentor and you know, a lot of
• 24:55
  times you read these books and that's there's mentors scattered
• 24:59
  throughout. It's but you also have to be the
• 25:01
  person that's humble enough to take on a mentor to to ask the
• 25:05
  questions that I I don't know this and and then absorb it like
• 25:08
  a sponge. And I think that's something
• 25:11
  James, that is a good piece of of a nugget of wisdom to
• 25:17
  somebody that's listening is, is that when you're when you're new
• 25:21
  is something and you got somebody around, there's nothing
• 25:24
  wrong with saying, hey, I don't know how do you do this?
• 25:27
  And, and a lot of times the guys that are getting it right, they
• 25:30
  want to share with you how they're getting it right because
• 25:32
  they feel really good about the fact that they got it.
• 25:35
  They've got this doubt. So true, so true.
• 25:38
  I, I've, I've talked to my mother about this at length.
• 25:40
  My mother's still alive today. She's 81 years old.
• 25:43
  And she said for whatever reason, when your when your dad
• 25:47
  pulled out, you began to seek male role models and they became
• 25:53
  mentors to you, whether it was your scout master, whether it
• 25:57
  was your mission president, whether it was your first job at
• 26:00
  the radio station when you got home.
• 26:02
  And and then it was very friendly at the hearing aids.
• 26:05
  And now it's Chris Auckland. The injuries.
• 26:07
  You're right. And I think there is a message
• 26:10
  in there unrelated to me, but related to perhaps a young
• 26:14
  person trying to figure it out. You have got to be willing to
• 26:19
  subject yourself to coaching you.
• 26:22
  You've got to be humble enough to take notes.
• 26:24
  You've got to be reliable yourself.
• 26:26
  You can't expect a mentor to come to you.
• 26:30
  You've got to be willing to go to them, go to the mountain, go
• 26:32
  to where the information is. And, and for me, I just want to
• 26:36
  be great. I just want whatever I was going
• 26:38
  to do, I wanted to be great at it.
• 26:41
  I didn't want to be embarrassed at being mediocre.
• 26:45
  I'm not wired to be average. And so there's these vulnerable
• 26:50
  windows when you start something new where the vulnerability
• 26:55
  outruns the the success, the the lack of knowledge is is larger
• 27:03
  than than your self esteem. And you've got to be willing to
• 27:07
  close down that gap as fast as possible.
• 27:11
  If you're wired like me, you've got this thing on OverDrive
• 27:13
  night and day, trying to close the gap between lack of
• 27:17
  knowledge and knowledge putting in the hours.
• 27:20
  And with Chris Ockel, I did that.
• 27:22
  I mean, this man taught me the business and, and I was a
• 27:26
  student of the 1st Order and I felt like when it was time to
• 27:31
  leave Chris, I was. I want to talk about that,
• 27:34
  James. What?
• 27:36
  What gave you the opportunity to jump the nest?
• 27:39
  I was recruited. A guy who had left, We were
• 27:43
  running the number one agency in the beneficial Life was the name
• 27:47
  of the company. They probably had 20 different
• 27:50
  offices across the United States.
• 27:52
  We were the number one office in Las Vegas for the company.
• 27:56
  I was the top salesman in the number one office for the
• 27:59
  company. And so one of the guys who had
• 28:02
  left previously took note of the fact that I was pretty good at
• 28:08
  this and came back to recruit me.
• 28:11
  Now we were friendly. I really looked up to this guy.
• 28:13
  He was there ahead of me. He was really professional.
• 28:16
  He had played professional baseball for the Angels,
• 28:19
  California Angels. He was really top shelf guy.
• 28:24
  His name is Scott Childress. And Scott and I are still close
• 28:28
  today. And so Scott and I had lunch
• 28:31
  together. He says, hey, listen, you ought
• 28:33
  to be running your own shop. You, you know enough, you, you
• 28:37
  should be independent. You should not be working for
• 28:39
  one company because one company does not fit all customers.
• 28:43
  And that really appealed to me. I thought, you know what, you're
• 28:45
  right, I sit with a lot of people, not my products don't
• 28:47
  fit that scenario. And so he talked me through the
• 28:53
  rationale of being independent. And he was going to help me get
• 28:57
  contracts lined up. And of course, he was going to
• 29:00
  override my activity If if I worked with him, he was going to
• 29:03
  override my activity. And I was all for that.
• 29:06
  So Scott Childress recruited me into a company called World
• 29:10
  Marketing Alliance located in Atlanta, GA.
• 29:15
  They had just founded the company in 1991.
• 29:18
  This was this was 94. So they're relatively, you know,
• 29:22
  coming off the foundation phase of the company.
• 29:26
  And I show up there and I'm already trained in financial
• 29:29
  services and I just needed a place to plant my flag and it
• 29:33
  kind of apply these skills that have been amassed in these other
• 29:38
  industries over the years. And that, that that's, that's
• 29:42
  where my life took on a whole new.
• 29:45
  Trajectory. Really, James, you at this time,
• 29:49
  how old would you have been? 2720.
• 29:54
  Six. You're a young man.
• 29:56
  Yeah, still. Still.
• 29:57
  Young, Yeah. And you plant this flag in Las
• 30:01
  Vegas. Yes.
• 30:02
  OK. And, and when you started
• 30:05
  building, because you talking about 8000 plus agents, you
• 30:10
  know, one of the things that I've always seen in, in, in
• 30:13
  sales, however you build, you got to have good systems and you
• 30:17
  got to have good training. Did you did that all just start
• 30:21
  from the beginning with you on making that happen?
• 30:23
  No, no. And you're so right, it does
• 30:26
  require exactly what you just said.
• 30:28
  The systems have to be duplicatable if you're going to
• 30:32
  scale it. It's got to be something that
• 30:34
  every person can do and understand easily.
• 30:38
  And I, I did, I learned that from the mission.
• 30:42
  Our mission is like that. Our mission was systematic.
• 30:45
  Our mission was duplicatable accountability.
• 30:48
  So you got real good at it. I'd steered away from that over
• 30:53
  at Beneficial, Beneficial Life because it was just me as a solo
• 30:57
  artist and, and my emotional IQ is pretty high.
• 31:01
  I, I, I've had my real IQ tested too, but my emotional IQ is much
• 31:06
  higher. And so I'm, I'm in a position
• 31:10
  to, to literally be nimble and agile without a script.
• 31:14
  And that's not duplicatable. And, and so it's almost the
• 31:17
  enemy of scalability. It, it, I was almost destined to
• 31:21
  be a solo operator, not, not really wired to be a team
• 31:26
  builder. And So what I found at World
• 31:30
  Market Alliance was a guy running the company named Hubert
• 31:33
  Humphrey, who was an expert at what I was completely deficient
• 31:38
  in. I, I did not know systems.
• 31:44
  Yeah. So my energy, my passion and his
• 31:49
  system was almost like a dynamite stick.
• 31:52
  And, and he literally took me under his wing.
• 31:55
  I spent a year there off his radar.
• 32:00
  I made $288,000 my first year business at World Market
• 32:04
  Alliance and I remember getting a call from Hubert Humphreys,
• 32:08
  the CEO of the company and there's thousands of agents.
• 32:11
  Thousands. And I think I've got 5 at the
• 32:15
  time. I think I've got 5 agents and
• 32:18
  these are my friends for beneficial right who when I left
• 32:21
  they left. I mean these I really don't have
• 32:24
  scalability skills. Hubert Humphrey called me and
• 32:28
  I'm in my office and I think I'm a big shot.
• 32:31
  And I've got five guys with desks in my office.
• 32:35
  The lease is in my name. I've got a receptionist out
• 32:38
  front. I'm a legitimate business.
• 32:41
  And And Hubert Humphrey calls me and he says, hey, boy, it's the
• 32:45
  way he talks, right? He's from the South.
• 32:46
  He's from Macon, GA Hey, boy, how's it going?
• 32:49
  Just want to congratulate you. You had another great month.
• 32:53
  He says, when are you going to come out and see me?
• 32:56
  I said, well, I'd be honored, you know, to come out and see
• 32:58
  you. Let let's set that up.
• 33:00
  And he says, I want to tell you something and that this, this,
• 33:06
  this statement changed my life, Brent.
• 33:08
  He says, you do know I can replace you with three average
• 33:13
  guys, right? And and I said I I didn't really
• 33:19
  know what he meant by that because in my mind, you can't
• 33:23
  replace me. That's the way I think about
• 33:26
  myself. Sure, he said.
• 33:27
  He said, let me, let me break it down for you.
• 33:30
  He said you did $288,000 in the last rolling 12 months.
• 33:35
  He said that's about 3 of my average guys.
• 33:39
  He says the average guy around here makes about 90,000.
• 33:43
  He says, so right now you represent about 3 dudes.
• 33:47
  He said, so if I recruit 3 more dudes tomorrow, I can replace
• 33:53
  James Catholic. And I got to tell you this.
• 33:57
  This is offending me to the Clover because because I just
• 34:01
  feel irreplaceable. Exactly.
• 34:03
  But he's making the point, right, that I'm not
• 34:07
  irreplaceable. And I said to him, I said, what
• 34:12
  do you want me to do about it? Just almost like smart aleck,
• 34:18
  because I really don't know where he's headed because I
• 34:20
  thought he called to compliment me, but it feels like he's
• 34:23
  challenged. Yeah, he said well I'm going to
• 34:26
  tell you what you got to do. You got to stop thinking you
• 34:29
  know everything. He goes, cuz right now you're in
• 34:34
  a trap. You think you know everything
• 34:39
  there is to know and guess what that's going to produce for you
• 34:43
  next year about 300,000 and then the next year is probably
• 34:48
  320,000. He says that if we run this
• 34:51
  thing out, you're going to Max out at about a half 1,000,000
• 34:54
  bucks. He says, and that's a poor man
• 34:58
  with your skills. He said he, he said, I got to
• 35:01
  tell you, I wouldn't want to report to God with your skill
• 35:04
  set and a half, $1,000,000 a year.
• 35:07
  It's what he says to me on the phone.
• 35:09
  He goes, he goes, that would be an embarrassing meeting.
• 35:13
  He said, what I think you got to do is be prepared to retool
• 35:17
  yourself. He goes, you've got skills,
• 35:20
  you've got immense capacity, but it sits dormant.
• 35:24
  Currently it sits dormant. You know how to close a deal and
• 35:29
  you've taught five others within yelling distance how to close
• 35:31
  the deal. And that's the extent of it.
• 35:33
  James, he goes and you can't confuse this with anything other
• 35:36
  than that. And, and, and so he, we arranged
• 35:40
  for me to fly to Atlanta, GA. We have a sit down meeting at
• 35:43
  the Magnolia Cafe in Atlanta, GA where this man commits me and we
• 35:50
  end up writing it on a napkin. I will move it the speed of
• 35:54
  instruction. This is what's on the napkin.
• 35:56
  I will move it the speed of instruction and I will do
• 36:02
  precisely what you tell me to do relative to the system.
• 36:09
  Love it. Can we write that on a napkin?
• 36:11
  I sign it, he takes it. Now, I can tell you this, eight
• 36:16
  years later, I got 8000 people on my table.
• 36:21
  And he taught me by pointing frankly at others who were great
• 36:25
  examples of what to do. And I get, I guess the key
• 36:30
  really was I was willing to do it.
• 36:32
  I was willing to do it because I did need to rewire me.
• 36:37
  I had to rewire me in order to pull this off.
• 36:40
  But I, I, I was not going to be replaced by three average guys.
• 36:46
  He took he. Took a shot at yourself, Esteem,
• 36:49
  he said, hey, listen, and that caught you, caught you by
• 36:52
  surprise. I said, hey, I can't, I don't.
• 36:55
  I'm not going to be replaced by three average guys.
• 36:56
  What do I need to know? I was, I was replaceable and for
• 37:00
  the first time in my life I understood it.
• 37:03
  I understood it from a guy who knew the way and, and I have
• 37:06
  total respect for him. And due to this day, Hubert
• 37:10
  Humphrey was a man way down the highway from me mentally,
• 37:16
  emotionally. He he was a guy I was willing to
• 37:19
  surrender to from a training standpoint.
• 37:22
  And I did. And he taught me what he knew.
• 37:24
  He transferred his brain to the best of his ability into my
• 37:29
  brain. And it it changed me.
• 37:31
  It changed me forever. Yeah.
• 37:33
  Well, it gets us, it gets us to the point, James, to where you,
• 37:37
  this thing blooms up. You're making big money now.
• 37:40
  You, you're in a different class of what's going on business
• 37:43
  wise. And then, you know, it's, I
• 37:46
  forget who it comes to you and talks to you about real estate,
• 37:50
  but it's not something you've been doing.
• 37:52
  It's not something that's not a world you're in, but you're
• 37:56
  willing to listen and and you're open to it.
• 38:00
  Walk us through how that all happened.
• 38:01
  Yeah, Hubert sells the company World Marketing Alliance.
• 38:05
  I stay one more year. I'm on the executive board of
• 38:08
  the company. I'm I'm literally there for the
• 38:11
  transaction. I'm there for the renaming of
• 38:14
  the company. I'm there putting the policies
• 38:16
  in place so that company's got a future with its new owner.
• 38:21
  I then decide I'm going to do my own thing.
• 38:24
  I start my own company, net worth solutions, and I bring a
• 38:29
  whole bunch of my leaders with me.
• 38:32
  And then we go regrow the rest into another 8000 people.
• 38:37
  Many of them are the same, but a lot of new IT.
• 38:40
  It's our company. We're growing this thing five
• 38:44
  years into independence basically.
• 38:47
  We've got a corporate jet, we've got our own headquarters, we've
• 38:50
  got pilots that take me where I need to go to see all the guys.
• 38:54
  We're across Canada. We're obviously all across the
• 38:58
  United States doing business. And this is the the world at the
• 39:03
  time. You may recall this print.
• 39:06
  It's 2008. Real estate real.
• 39:12
  Estate, everybody's buying second and third houses.
• 39:14
  It's like Monopoly. Everybody's picking up rental
• 39:17
  properties. My housekeeper had two rental
• 39:19
  properties. Everybody's got rentals and, and
• 39:23
  so our clients are pushing us. We're doing life insurance and
• 39:27
  annuities. We're helping folks with their
• 39:30
  living trust that, you know, basic financial planning
• 39:33
  instruments and we're getting pressure from our clients to
• 39:38
  offer real estate. They would like to stay with us.
• 39:40
  Once they find a trusted advisor, they'd like to stay
• 39:43
  with that. Advice all under one roof.
• 39:44
  Right. And so I task our CFO Jerry to
• 39:49
  go find us a real estate solution.
• 39:52
  I don't want to have all my guys have to be at Century 21 with a
• 39:55
  real estate license. So find us a solution that can
• 39:58
  get kind of be a product that fits into our mix.
• 40:02
  He brings back a real estate developer, it's probably six
• 40:05
  months later, a real estate developer that presented at a
• 40:08
  seminar he attended that they are building hotels, plural, in
• 40:15
  the Dominican Republic. It's it's those hotels that
• 40:19
  Maxim magazine has their brand on.
• 40:23
  So if you Google today, Maxim Bungalows Dominican Republic,
• 40:28
  you can actually see the project that I'm talking about.
• 40:31
  Well, they present to us that they've got one hotel built,
• 40:35
  they're going to build several more for Maxim.
• 40:37
  There's a big demand for tourism in the Dominican Republic and
• 40:40
  they're going to build a product that fits beautifully into our
• 40:44
  arsenal. And so everything's great.
• 40:47
  I hire lawyers on my side that represent our firm already.
• 40:51
  He's got lawyers on his side. They're in all these meetings.
• 40:54
  We pay for everything. We're now selling a A.
• 40:59
  Basically, it's a A. It's not a deed of trust, but
• 41:02
  it's like a promissory note that's going to pay a fixed rate
• 41:07
  of interest, 8% per year, and it's secured by room one O 1,
• 41:12
  room 1O2. Room 1 by each room.
• 41:14
  Yes, it's a hotel condominium. The deed of the hotel secures
• 41:19
  the the note. All right.
• 41:21
  So it's, it's what they did, the lawyers they deed.
• 41:25
  And. Then they fractionally.
• 41:27
  Deed 240. Deeds off.
• 41:32
  That like a fractional jet. That's it.
• 41:34
  The same thing. Yeah.
• 41:35
  Fractional jets, fractional condos, fractional hotels.
• 41:38
  So this is not a foreign idea. It's a familiar idea for people
• 41:42
  in that space. Well, we, we do this for five
• 41:46
  more years. We raise $180 million for them.
• 41:50
  They build 2 hotels in addition to the one they've already got.
• 41:55
  We're in the middle of building the third one.
• 41:57
  This is 2009. When they tell me they need more
• 42:05
  money now, the way it works is we're we're busy selling this
• 42:08
  for a fixed price. It's you.
• 42:10
  You can't just raise the prices. You.
• 42:13
  You. Well, you guys are doing great.
• 42:14
  Yeah. I mean, everything's going.
• 42:15
  You guys are. Everybody's getting paid.
• 42:17
  Everybody's getting paid. You guys get and I think if I
• 42:20
  remember you get 20% or the 1st for 20% for your commissions.
• 42:23
  And yeah, the group, it's all fantastic. 20% comes back to our
• 42:29
  company, 12 we pay the field with the sales guys, 8, our
• 42:32
  company keeps to run the company and then of course I'm the sole
• 42:36
  shareholder of the company, so I get the profits, but should.
• 42:40
  But yeah, the bottom line is 20% of the gross belongs to us.
• 42:43
  We don't even scrape off rent the 20.
• 42:46
  We send all the money to the Elliott Corporation.
• 42:50
  They take the 20 and wire it back to us to pay out to our
• 42:53
  people. So we, we do this for years.
• 42:57
  Everything's going great. Well, they start putting
• 42:59
  pressure on us for more money. I said, guys, that's not going
• 43:02
  to happen. They start threatening that the
• 43:05
  threats were you should put some of your own money in.
• 43:07
  They know, they know I've got a lot of money.
• 43:09
  We you should put some of your own money in.
• 43:11
  And I said, well, it's not my hotel.
• 43:14
  I'm not, I'm not putting my own money in a we're, we're raising
• 43:16
  money for you guys. You you've got to get your
• 43:19
  financial house in order. That was the whole idea.
• 43:22
  Yeah. We're going to build resorts.
• 43:24
  We need you to raise money and and this is how the partnership
• 43:27
  works. That's exactly right.
• 43:29
  So Long story short, I decide I have to sue them because this is
• 43:38
  they're they're not, they're not listening and they've stopped
• 43:41
  paying the clients the quarterly rate of return the clients used
• 43:45
  to get it and of course, so. That's a part of the story that
• 43:48
  I was when that happened, James did we're did you know that was
• 43:54
  happening or did did did you have the customers come to you
• 43:56
  to say that they weren't getting that?
• 43:58
  Oh no, I'm a customer too, so I'm not.
• 44:00
  Oh, you're a. Customer in the in the equation.
• 44:01
  OK. So you're not getting that?
• 44:03
  My mother's not getting her quarterly.
• 44:04
  Got it getting my quarterly. A lot of my agents are in this
• 44:08
  thing too. They're not getting there.
• 44:09
  So all right, become aware of the moment they stop paying.
• 44:13
  But but the other thing is it's like really big things are
• 44:15
  happening too. I mean, these are really nice
• 44:17
  resorts. You've got Kim Kardashian and
• 44:21
  and Reggie Bush and these people celebrity this and everything's
• 44:25
  maximum and everything's big. Yeah, I had.
• 44:28
  Dinner. With Kim Kardashian and Reggie
• 44:30
  Bush the the developer, my partner Derek Elliott, myself,
• 44:35
  Kim and Reggie, the four of us have a private dinner and it and
• 44:40
  it's all about how great Maxim is and how great this resort is
• 44:42
  and it's everything's great. It could.
• 44:44
  Right. It's all branded out.
• 44:45
  Everything's perfect. Celebrities.
• 44:47
  It's. All green light we're getting
• 44:48
  picked up in Escalade the airport no, this is this is VIP
• 44:54
  scenario here totally yeah there is no red flags there's no.
• 44:59
  That's what I want. The reason I brought that up is
• 45:00
  that that the, the, the bigness of this was fantastic.
• 45:05
  I mean, intoxicating. You know, you guys got into this
• 45:09
  deal, you got an opportunity to diversify.
• 45:13
  Dominican Republic is a place that everybody's going for
• 45:15
  tourism. These guys, these guys are
• 45:17
  already in it. They've already built a place
• 45:19
  and then they get this Sheridan deal.
• 45:20
  They need to redo that. And then there's this third
• 45:22
  place And, and all you're thinking is, well, that gets us
• 45:24
  more inventory. We get more inventory, we can
• 45:27
  sell more stuff. Why wouldn't we want to do that?
• 45:29
  We're doing it, yeah. It's all exciting.
• 45:32
  The the client's as excited as I am.
• 45:35
  It it, it couldn't be big. I don't know how it'd be bigger.
• 45:37
  I mean, are things great you do to make it bigger?
• 45:40
  And so and so then, then, then the, the, the shit hits the fan.
• 45:45
  You go up and I think you visit with Derek's dad and say, hey, I
• 45:50
  don't know if he's on top of all this.
• 45:53
  I think you're the brains of this.
• 45:55
  And I don't know that, you know, everything's going on.
• 45:57
  But I don't feel good. I don't feel good.
• 46:00
  Yeah, and, and and he's, he seems very attentive to that
• 46:04
  conversation, but then nothing changes.
• 46:08
  And, and it's, it's in that moment I realize I personally
• 46:12
  got to do something the, the, these people, 644 victims and
• 46:17
  they are victims, 644 people followed us to the Dominican
• 46:23
  Republic, right? They don't get there without my
• 46:27
  company leading them there. And so as good as it is, and we,
• 46:31
  we have owners weeks every year in June where everybody comes
• 46:35
  down, they stay at the hotel. We've had The Beach Boys there.
• 46:38
  We've got, I mean, it is, it is a family friendly, fun thing.
• 46:44
  And here we are. It's now I've got I've got red
• 46:48
  flags. OK, so the red flags go up.
• 46:50
  You, you tell your attorney, hey, I, I can't, I got so many
• 46:55
  things going wrong here. I, I, we got to sue him and he
• 46:59
  says I don't do that. And he says you get to another
• 47:01
  attorney and then then that goes into a civil suit.
• 47:06
  Right. But right before we get there, I
• 47:08
  want to I want to insert this important piece because it
• 47:11
  mattered in the ultimate criminal indictment.
• 47:15
  It mattered. The reason we're able to do this
• 47:17
  podcast today and I'm free is because of this moment here.
• 47:24
  My attorney, my first attorney, who was there when he set
• 47:28
  everything up at the Elliott's, says to me, wisely, he said,
• 47:32
  James, I graduated with the criminal chief of the Department
• 47:41
  of Justice for the attorney general's office here in Nevada.
• 47:46
  We graduated together, Brigham Young University law school, he
• 47:51
  said, I don't know if this is a criminal enterprise.
• 47:55
  I don't know if there's a crime in progress.
• 47:57
  I hope not. But by God, if there is, why
• 48:02
  don't we just walk across the street with a box of all the
• 48:07
  sales materials, sit down with Rusty Marsh.
• 48:10
  It's his name, Rusty Marsh. Russell Marsh.
• 48:13
  For those who were following up thoroughly, we crossed the
• 48:17
  street to meet with Russell Marsh.
• 48:20
  Russell Marsh says, thank you, I'll look into it.
• 48:22
  He's the chief. Now.
• 48:24
  All prosecutors in the criminal division report to Rusty Marsh.
• 48:30
  So he can assign a prosecutor. He can assign FBI agents.
• 48:34
  He, you know, he can manage this.
• 48:36
  So my attorney says, what's the next steps, Rusty, for James?
• 48:42
  And he said, well, I'll have a couple of agents go out, meet
• 48:44
  with him and they can ask him whatever questions they want to
• 48:47
  ask and we'll take it from there.
• 48:49
  But really appreciate you bringing this to our attention.
• 48:52
  OK. OK, so this is this is November
• 48:55
  of O9, OK. My attorney says to me this
• 49:00
  needs to remain private. This needs to be remained secret
• 49:04
  in case we need to sue them. So this is before we get into
• 49:09
  civil litigation. So this box has been filled.
• 49:12
  I didn't. Know that I didn't know that one
• 49:13
  was before the other. Yes, this.
• 49:15
  Glad you. Glad you stopped it reversed.
• 49:18
  Really important piece of the story because basically it lets
• 49:24
  the world understand on the record that I believe there's a
• 49:28
  problem and I believe it's significant enough that I'm
• 49:33
  willing to meet with the FBI about it.
• 49:36
  And, and this is a voluntary maneuver between my attorney and
• 49:39
  I where we're trying to privately report what we believe
• 49:44
  could be criminal conduct. We don't know.
• 49:47
  We we, we, we have no evidence that there.
• 49:49
  Is things just don't feel right. Well, we're not getting paid
• 49:52
  that the the the clients are not getting what they bargained for.
• 49:56
  So the minimum is civil. It it could be criminal so that.
• 50:00
  Break the contract or whatever there could be civil.
• 50:02
  Right. 3-4 weeks later, there's been no FBI agents.
• 50:05
  My attorney follows up with Russ Rusty Marsh.
• 50:08
  Rusty Moore says, hey, listen, we're busy.
• 50:11
  We got terrorism. You know that, you know, we, we,
• 50:14
  we got a lot going on here. We're, we're not chasing down
• 50:16
  the Dominican Republic to look into some business deal you're,
• 50:20
  you're involved in. OK, That's, that's the word back
• 50:23
  to my attorney. So now I know Brett, I've got a
• 50:28
  suit. So strategically I make the
• 50:32
  decision none of my clients should pay for this because this
• 50:38
  is not their doing. So I I didn't know what it was
• 50:42
  going to cost, but it ended up costing 1.4 million to file and
• 50:47
  chase through a verified complaint.
• 50:50
  Now verified complaint, you probably know what this means.
• 50:53
  It means that the facts in the complaint are verified
• 50:56
  factually. The attorney in the in the
• 50:59
  firm's reputation is verifying the facts contained in the
• 51:04
  complaint. The way they do that is they
• 51:06
  send private investigative teams down the Dominican Republic to
• 51:09
  interview employees, come back with deeds and understanding
• 51:13
  about hotel ownership and understanding about bank
• 51:15
  accounts, and then we file. So the whole thing costs 1.4
• 51:21
  million. I've got 644 plaintiffs.
• 51:24
  The law firm divides us into two groups.
• 51:27
  If you're an agent for my company and own the product,
• 51:31
  you're in one group. If you're not an agent of my
• 51:34
  company, but you own the product, you're in a different
• 51:36
  group. 2 law firms financed by me, representing 2 separate
• 51:42
  groups of people in one suit. So very expensive, very
• 51:46
  complicated. We file in federal court in
• 51:49
  Miami, the Dominican Republic, and Canada.
• 51:53
  The same lawsuit gets served in all jurisdictions.
• 51:57
  The. Elliott's are from Canada.
• 52:00
  Yeah, the Elliott's live in Toronto, Canada.
• 52:01
  That's their home base and they're Canadian citizens.
• 52:06
  So we, we are now underway. Now you can imagine when they
• 52:11
  get word that they're being sued, this is not a secret
• 52:14
  matter anymore. I'm now enemy #1.
• 52:18
  So they send a letter, Brent, to all clients.
• 52:23
  James Cartledge and his organization have misrepresented
• 52:26
  the products you've purchased. We need to hear from you
• 52:29
  directly so that we can fix the wrongs that have happened to
• 52:36
  you. So basically, it's the sales
• 52:38
  organization that's the problem. It is not the developer.
• 52:41
  It's not the management. Of my crazy salesman That's
• 52:44
  crazy salesman misrepresented. Again.
• 52:47
  And everybody knows sales guys are rogue and everybody knows
• 52:50
  sales guys exaggerate and and say things that are not true to
• 52:55
  earn a Commission. So the judge knows this too.
• 53:00
  So it's a hell of a defense. It's really a good defense.
• 53:04
  Good one because it. Divides by 6.
• 53:06
  Right into the stereotype. Yeah, it divides by 644 people,
• 53:11
  right? It.
• 53:11
  And and then it, it gives the judge the impetus to be able to
• 53:16
  have a reason to dismiss the case and encourage everyone to
• 53:23
  refile separately. And then the judge refers.
• 53:28
  A judicial referral from a federal judge is heavy when it
• 53:32
  goes to the Department of Justice, to the IRS, into the
• 53:37
  Securities and Exchange Commission.
• 53:39
  For those of you listening at home who don't understand this,
• 53:42
  that means three federal agencies that wear windbreakers
• 53:47
  that have their initials on the back are all headed my
• 53:49
  direction. Now.
• 53:51
  This is my lawsuit. This is the project that I sold
• 53:56
  all this. Yeah, I, I paid for the lawsuit.
• 54:00
  I, I've literally now, now let's, I'm not a victim here.
• 54:04
  I made, I made my company made $36 million in the selling of
• 54:10
  this these projects. And, and I certainly got my
• 54:13
  commissions and my team got theirs and my company employees
• 54:17
  got theirs. So there can be no doubt James
• 54:20
  was paid, James's sales people were paid.
• 54:24
  So and, and we really do have no, the, the victims occur.
• 54:29
  And the reason there's real victims is their real estate is
• 54:32
  now in jeopardy. Their real estate in the yield
• 54:36
  from that real estate is also in jeopardy.
• 54:39
  So that's where we get into victimization.
• 54:42
  That's where we get into why they're a permanent victim,
• 54:46
  because the lawsuit, when the judge threw it out, all of a
• 54:50
  sudden the banks that are loaning money to the Elliott's
• 54:53
  in the Dominican seize control of these properties because
• 54:57
  they've they've got liens against commitments the
• 55:00
  Elliott's have made on the island.
• 55:02
  And so now my United States citizen clients are hung up with
• 55:09
  Elliott liens tied to their property in the Dominican
• 55:12
  Republic. And so now we got permanent
• 55:14
  victims and, and so the Department of Justice decides
• 55:19
  after a three-year investigation from 2009 to 2012, they decide
• 55:25
  that they're going to indict 2 people, James Catlage, the head
• 55:30
  of the sales organization and Derek Elliott, the head of the
• 55:34
  development company. So dual indictments for multiple
• 55:39
  counts of mail fraud, oddly, mail fraud.
• 55:43
  So that that's that's, that's that's how the indictment went
• 55:47
  down. That is fascinating that that
• 55:54
  you brought that lawsuit. You you brought it over.
• 55:57
  I didn't know the thing with Rusty before that.
• 56:01
  Yeah. And then you go and you file a
• 56:03
  lawsuit and then it gets broken up.
• 56:05
  And then you've got a special master in there that that
• 56:07
  becomes a part of this. What?
• 56:08
  What happens next? Well I can tell you this
• 56:11
  retrospectively. I wouldn't change the single
• 56:15
  thing I did. I mean I I literally have
• 56:19
  thought about this for 15. Years.
• 56:20
  I mean, what else would you have done?
• 56:22
  What I my attorney, my, my criminal defense attorney, which
• 56:26
  I later have to hire, but the criminal defense attorney
• 56:29
  suggested that it was my civil suit that brought all of this
• 56:33
  pain. It was my filing of that suit
• 56:35
  that brought me to the arms of justice and and.
• 56:39
  Well, I mean, it put it, put a red hot light on it, it did.
• 56:42
  They didn't even know about it. You're the one that was
• 56:44
  providing the box of stuff. I mean, check this out, this big
• 56:48
  box of stuff like that we don't really have time to look at.
• 56:52
  It so, but I'll tell you right now, I'm the one that delivered
• 56:55
  the clients to the Dominican Republic.
• 56:58
  I have no option, Brent, that there is no other path for me.
• 57:03
  I'm not the type of guy that can just move on and say you guys
• 57:07
  work it out, sue if you want and we'll defend the suits.
• 57:11
  That's not my style. How long, James, does it take
• 57:16
  from the time that you went into that courtroom for the civil
• 57:21
  case, for the 1.4 Millie split and then it gets, it gets all
• 57:25
  jumbled up to when you get the criminal indictment?
• 57:28
  2 1/2 years. OK, 2 1/2 years you then you get
• 57:31
  indicted. Yeah, OK, let's let's take it
• 57:34
  from there. What happens once you get
• 57:37
  indicted? Well, just prior to the
• 57:40
  indictment, when, when I'm trying to be proactive, man, my,
• 57:44
  my mind is proactive. I Oh yeah, trying to be and.
• 57:47
  It feels like you're in molasses when you get on and all this
• 57:50
  stuff. Everybody's moving too slow.
• 57:52
  Your attorney's not doing what you're asking them to do.
• 57:55
  I told you to check this out. Did you?
• 57:57
  Did you read that? Did you read my e-mail that I
• 57:59
  sent you? I.
• 58:00
  Don't think you've made that document right?
• 58:02
  Exactly. That's exactly, exactly how I
• 58:04
  felt. Everybody's moving in quicksand
• 58:07
  and I'm I'm up on the shoreline saying, hey guys, we got stuff
• 58:10
  to look at here. All right, exactly the.
• 58:12
  Moment the judge Alan Gold, the federal judge of Miami, did the
• 58:16
  judicial referral to the three agencies.
• 58:20
  I now know I need to hire a criminal defense attorney.
• 58:26
  I convince my criminal defense attorney to take me to San
• 58:32
  Francisco, where the case had been assigned to spend 14 hours
• 58:38
  with the prosecutor and the two FBI agents.
• 58:41
  No, he did not want to do this meeting.
• 58:43
  My, my guy. He he says this is the stupidest
• 58:47
  thing I've ever been involved in.
• 58:48
  You may be the stupidest client I've ever had.
• 58:53
  James, what you're doing, why? I'm doing this.
• 58:55
  You don't know what you're doing, James.
• 58:57
  And you prepaid me. So if you want to be a fool
• 59:01
  here, I'm going to let you be a fool.
• 59:03
  And, and, and, and the, this meeting, we've signed documents
• 59:08
  so that they can't arrest you during the meeting.
• 59:11
  But I'm telling you this, this ain't a great idea.
• 59:15
  And, and I am so certain that I can lead them to all the
• 59:21
  mischief and then I can guide them to where I think things may
• 59:25
  have gone wrong. And then I can help them uncover
• 59:29
  what they need to uncover to make sure my clients don't
• 59:34
  suffer any further. That is my entire objective with
• 59:38
  all this. And, and nowhere in my mind,
• 59:42
  nowhere in my mind are they going to twist this into my
• 59:46
  wrongdoing. And there's, there's, there's
• 59:48
  not an e-mail, there's not a text.
• 59:51
  There's there is no plan for me to climb in a smoke filled room
• 59:56
  with Derek Elliott and figure out a conspiracy to steal
• 1:00:00
  people's money. It's not.
• 1:00:02
  Not only is it not in me there that didn't occur.
• 1:00:05
  It didn't happen. There was no yeah, it didn't
• 1:00:08
  ever happen. It didn't.
• 1:00:09
  And by the way, why would it need to happen?
• 1:00:12
  I've been paid 36 million. Dollars, you're doing great.
• 1:00:15
  Exactly. And, and here's the other thing,
• 1:00:18
  why would I want to disrupt the gravy train?
• 1:00:21
  Along really well, exactly. Hotels to build?
• 1:00:26
  Yeah, more inventory. We're looking at more inventory.
• 1:00:29
  One of the I. I I want to say this though too
• 1:00:31
  because there's a lot going on. You're a dad of 6/6 kids and
• 1:00:38
  you've got a wife that that has riding along on this train. 23
• 1:00:43
  years married. What's going on in that world at
• 1:00:46
  the time that you're going to be with the the Justice Department
• 1:00:49
  of San Francisco, the agents or whatever, what's happening on
• 1:00:53
  the other side of your world? Hey, man, it's my children are
• 1:00:57
  not old enough to even conceive of what a criminal complaint is.
• 1:01:02
  They're not old enough to understand they're little kids.
• 1:01:04
  Department of Justice is they're, they're literally, but
• 1:01:09
  my, my wife at the time, she literally is in tears almost 8
• 1:01:15
  hours a day. It's any time she sees me in our
• 1:01:18
  home, she wants to know when is it over?
• 1:01:22
  When, when, when is this over? Is the meeting in San Francisco
• 1:01:26
  with the FBI? Is that what would be?
• 1:01:27
  Over. I thought the courtroom in Miami
• 1:01:30
  is where it would be over. What?
• 1:01:32
  I know you did nothing wrong. We own this stupid product.
• 1:01:36
  So what is going on? I thought I married a smart guy
• 1:01:39
  here. I when?
• 1:01:40
  When I got involved with you, not only did you convince me
• 1:01:44
  that you were smart, but I actually believed it.
• 1:01:47
  So why? Why are we in this mess?
• 1:01:50
  How did you possibly get us in this mess?
• 1:01:53
  This is her perspective, Brett. Yeah, no, I and I, I reason I
• 1:01:57
  wanted to ask that because it's, it's a big part of your world
• 1:02:01
  when you're going through this. And, and a lot of times us guys,
• 1:02:04
  we, we get off and we talk about this other side, but we, we know
• 1:02:08
  as we look back on it, you were dealing with a whole another
• 1:02:12
  world. Now, my kids were older, they
• 1:02:14
  were teenagers and one was in college.
• 1:02:16
  And so they, they were experienced in a different way
• 1:02:18
  than than a young kid, but they always experienced it because
• 1:02:21
  the kids will then grow into it and then find out about it as
• 1:02:24
  they get older. But OK, I just wanted to loop
• 1:02:27
  back around, but going back to that meeting now that you
• 1:02:30
  weren't supposed to have that your attorney didn't want to go
• 1:02:33
  to what happened with? That 14 hours on the tape on
• 1:02:37
  recording, we're transcribing the whole thing.
• 1:02:40
  We have a transcriber. They have a transcriber and I
• 1:02:44
  get face to face with the two agents who did the investigation
• 1:02:47
  to determine the indictment. So I, I, I got a face to face
• 1:02:51
  with these gentlemen to understand who they are and what
• 1:02:54
  are they up to? Because I, for the life of me, I
• 1:02:56
  can't figure out what are you up to?
• 1:02:59
  Like, what is it? What are you doing?
• 1:03:01
  The objective here? Are we trying to uncover the
• 1:03:05
  truth or are you just looking to do something different?
• 1:03:08
  It's a notch in the bell for another conviction with a
• 1:03:11
  nickname with a good life. In my mind, I just didn't
• 1:03:14
  believe in conspiracy theories. I didn't believe in this idea
• 1:03:17
  that there's this this world where indicting people that may
• 1:03:23
  not have committed a crime was kind of in the cards.
• 1:03:26
  I just thought if you've been indicted, you damn well did it,
• 1:03:30
  and already. Said you.
• 1:03:31
  Hey, you know what, James? You brought you.
• 1:03:34
  You just brought up something really so absolutely spot on.
• 1:03:39
  Actually, most people think indictment and conviction are
• 1:03:42
  the same thing. That's.
• 1:03:43
  Right. That's right.
• 1:03:45
  And. And it kind of almost is, I
• 1:03:47
  mean, when we say that because somebody says you're indicted,
• 1:03:50
  they think you're convicted. But in the real world of the
• 1:03:53
  United States of America, if you are indicted, 9697% of the
• 1:03:57
  people plea out because of all the things surrounding this.
• 1:04:01
  Very, very, very few people go to to trial.
• 1:04:03
  So that's why indictment and conviction are almost. 60%
• 1:04:07
  conviction rate on an invite, but when it's the federal
• 1:04:09
  government in the 4% who dare go to trial, 84% of those are
• 1:04:14
  convicted in trial. Yes.
• 1:04:17
  So we're talking and the there was a guy that was on, there was
• 1:04:20
  a guy that was on this show of the first season.
• 1:04:22
  He was in the mortgage business and he said, you know, you could
• 1:04:26
  go to trial. But he said it's kind of like
• 1:04:30
  the LA Dodgers playing your beer softball league team.
• 1:04:34
  It's probably not going to end up very good.
• 1:04:36
  No, it's not going to end up good.
• 1:04:38
  My attorney said to me. The words he used were several
• 1:04:41
  lethal bullets have been fired at you, They are lethal.
• 1:04:47
  So. What happens after this 14 hour
• 1:04:51
  meeting? They said we'll get back to you.
• 1:04:54
  And so we go months, months and I would say 11 months after that
• 1:05:02
  meeting. Now, my attorney, of course, is
• 1:05:04
  staying in touch, but nothing's happening.
• 1:05:08
  I'm convinced that they now know enough to not include me in
• 1:05:12
  whatever shenanigans they're involved in.
• 1:05:15
  And there is no indictment yet. They come to me.
• 1:05:19
  And they said we want you to cooperate against Eric Elliott
• 1:05:23
  and in exchange for that will give you 11 years.
• 1:05:26
  Oh. My gosh.
• 1:05:28
  And, and I, I, I said 11 years of what?
• 1:05:33
  And they're talking about prison, which I'm, I, for the
• 1:05:37
  life of me, Brad, I, I, I don't know how we're jumping to that.
• 1:05:41
  I, I, I have no idea how we're getting there.
• 1:05:43
  Like I'm the guy that reported these people.
• 1:05:46
  I, I own this stuff. My mother owns.
• 1:05:49
  What are you talking about in prison?
• 1:05:51
  I took the box to Rusty. Yeah, I took the box across the
• 1:05:54
  street to Rusty Marsh. Yes.
• 1:05:56
  And by the way, in the end, Rusty Moore, God love Rusty
• 1:06:01
  Moore, signed an affidavit explaining all of this detail in
• 1:06:07
  rich detail so that my federal sentencing judge would see it
• 1:06:13
  and understand. And that was an improvised
• 1:06:16
  moment in the end. Yeah.
• 1:06:18
  But I, I keep thinking they're gonna call and say, hey, our we
• 1:06:23
  made an error here. Our bad, Completely
• 1:06:26
  inconvenient. You know, it's as far as we're
• 1:06:29
  concerned, you can wash your hands of this.
• 1:06:32
  I kept thinking that was the meeting we were going to have.
• 1:06:35
  And every time my attorney called out, well, this is it.
• 1:06:37
  This, this is where he's going to explain it.
• 1:06:39
  The apology. No, no, that that meeting's not
• 1:06:42
  coming. And if you're in the middle of a
• 1:06:45
  pre indictment scenario and you're crossing your fingers
• 1:06:47
  that call ain't coming. It is not coming.
• 1:06:50
  So get your mind right and prepare yourself to negotiate
• 1:06:54
  because that call is never coming.
• 1:06:58
  So I, I remember another call. I'm waiting outside.
• 1:07:01
  My son is lifting weights. He's on the football team and
• 1:07:04
  he's got a trainer and I the, the, the gym is a ways from our
• 1:07:08
  home. And so when I take him, I've got
• 1:07:10
  to park in the parking lot. He kind of wait the hour while
• 1:07:13
  he does the workout. So we're in Southern California.
• 1:07:17
  I usually use that time to make calls.
• 1:07:20
  And so I'm in the car and I remember on this day, this is a
• 1:07:24
  day that we're going to hear from the prosecutor, they want
• 1:07:26
  to discuss with us a new deal. And so I'm hoping that I can do
• 1:07:32
  it within this hour. Well, we get on the phone, we
• 1:07:37
  got all the FBI guys, we got the prosecutor, we got my 3 lawyers.
• 1:07:42
  And, and then we got, you know, my son is in the, in the gym
• 1:07:45
  with his trainer and, and I need this thing to kind of go fast.
• 1:07:50
  I, I I don't need this thing protracted where my little boy
• 1:07:53
  can get back in the car come. Get back in the.
• 1:07:55
  Car and I can't hang up early so this is all got to go down while
• 1:08:00
  he's in there it's very emotional the bifurcation of my
• 1:08:05
  life is in this parking lot literally well I dialed the
• 1:08:10
  number we we've looked this thing high and low.
• 1:08:13
  The prosecutor says, we've looked this over, we know your
• 1:08:16
  guy's not the bad guy here, but he, but he, but he did.
• 1:08:20
  We believe, no, that the Elliott's were skimming.
• 1:08:24
  We believe he did know this, that the other we believe this,
• 1:08:28
  we believe that of course, all his beliefs are not founded in
• 1:08:31
  any evidence whatsoever, because I, I know there's no evidence of
• 1:08:34
  that. And, and, and then he says my
• 1:08:37
  attorney, that's the sad part. My attorney doesn't know what
• 1:08:39
  the evidence is. He's just got to believe they
• 1:08:41
  do. And so when I talk to him, he
• 1:08:44
  thinks I'm a liar and, and, and he's sure they know because
• 1:08:48
  they're going to take a case to trial.
• 1:08:50
  So he they're more believable than I am, which is really bad.
• 1:08:54
  Well, they they then get to the final offer, which is and it
• 1:08:59
  ain't going to get any better from from here forward.
• 1:09:02
  It's going up. You need to understand James
• 1:09:04
  Catledge from here forwards going up.
• 1:09:06
  Or just take it off the table. That's another one.
• 1:09:08
  Just take it off the table all together.
• 1:09:10
  Just forget. It the fact we're even doing a
• 1:09:11
  deal as a courtesy to you. Exactly. 8 1/2 years is what
• 1:09:15
  we're willing to let you do. And, and that's because we see
• 1:09:19
  enough here to understand you could be helpful to us in
• 1:09:22
  prosecuting Derek Elliott. And so we're going to give you 8
• 1:09:25
  1/2 years, but you've got 24 hours to respond to this and,
• 1:09:30
  and, and you've got to admit to all these things that we've got
• 1:09:33
  written up and. And so even the monster details
• 1:09:36
  we have in there, you're just going to have to choke those
• 1:09:38
  down. Except that things we need that
• 1:09:40
  the. Things that are completely lies
• 1:09:42
  you're going to have to see. This is part of it.
• 1:09:44
  That's just part of the deal. That's right.
• 1:09:45
  That's right. So we know you.
• 1:09:47
  Don't like that, that stuff that you, I know you don't agree
• 1:09:50
  with, but you're going to eat it.
• 1:09:51
  Yeah, it's right. That's the way it's going to be.
• 1:09:53
  That's part of the deal. So we hang up.
• 1:09:56
  I got about 15 minutes left. My attorney calls me direct.
• 1:10:00
  He says, all right, what do you want to do?
• 1:10:03
  I say, what do you mean? What do I want to do?
• 1:10:06
  What I want to do, what I want to do is the amount of time that
• 1:10:09
  innocent guy does. That's that's what I want to do.
• 1:10:12
  That's exactly the amount of time I want you to negotiate for
• 1:10:15
  the amount of. Time.
• 1:10:16
  I want you to feel that, Mister Attorney.
• 1:10:18
  Right. That that's what I want to do.
• 1:10:22
  So why is it you called me and he says, 'cause we have to
• 1:10:27
  discuss the deal. I said there is no deal.
• 1:10:30
  This deal is going to trial. There.
• 1:10:32
  There is no deal. I said this is insane on the
• 1:10:35
  surface and how you don't see that, how you with a straight
• 1:10:38
  face can even say this to me is crazy.
• 1:10:42
  And he said, James, I believe you're delusional.
• 1:10:44
  I believe, I believe you're completely delusional.
• 1:10:47
  I believe you do not understand the moment.
• 1:10:49
  You do not understand the moment you're in.
• 1:10:53
  And I said that may very well be, but you do and you know,
• 1:11:00
  your client's innocent and the idea that you would want him to
• 1:11:03
  accept the deal for 8 1/2 years. I, I find that to be my Robert
• 1:11:08
  right malpractice. It's terrible and it's.
• 1:11:11
  So this is the discussion we had on that day.
• 1:11:14
  And so it it then goes several more years.
• 1:11:21
  Several more years. 2018. And these guys say you've got 24
• 1:11:28
  hours to accept this. Well.
• 1:11:29
  We we tell them no. We.
• 1:11:31
  I know, but I'm just saying that that that it was we were in a
• 1:11:34
  hurry at that point and we several more years.
• 1:11:37
  That's correct. Listen, this is this is 2 we're
• 1:11:41
  in 2013, them messing with me post indictment trying to get me
• 1:11:46
  to do a deal. It goes to 2018.
• 1:11:50
  We're two weeks from trial and my attorney says, James, you've
• 1:11:57
  got a lot of good facts. I said right, it's the truth.
• 1:12:01
  Are usually good facts. They're very convenient in a
• 1:12:04
  moment. Living.
• 1:12:05
  I don't want to go. I don't want to gloss over this.
• 1:12:07
  How are you living in those years between 13 and 18?
• 1:12:11
  Hey, listen, I'm not going to divulge too much on your
• 1:12:14
  podcast. You were not going to have a
• 1:12:16
  private discussion about this, but I but I will tell you this,
• 1:12:21
  what you just said was very difficult.
• 1:12:24
  Yes, we moved from our four and a half million dollar home in in
• 1:12:28
  the bridges. We put that in a pile of cash.
• 1:12:31
  We sold it and put it in a pile of cash.
• 1:12:34
  Did a global settlement for all civil litigation for that home.
• 1:12:38
  We're now leasing homes in the children's school district so
• 1:12:42
  they can go to church at the same place so they can still be
• 1:12:45
  with their friends at school. We got them in middle school,
• 1:12:47
  elementary school and one starting high school.
• 1:12:50
  So. It's a lot, Brett.
• 1:12:53
  There'll be a day soon enough where we can get into surviving
• 1:12:58
  an indictment because that's what was going on.
• 1:13:03
  That's literally what was going on.
• 1:13:06
  Well, I know I you and I talked a little bit about that and I
• 1:13:10
  was in three years of of waiting, you know, a pretrial
• 1:13:13
  and and that's a weird time period to live your life, you
• 1:13:18
  know, just just your family, your it's a cloud doing working
• 1:13:23
  wise, just every. Yeah, it's, and you wake up with
• 1:13:26
  it, you go to bed with it, and it's just a a thing that's
• 1:13:29
  you're, it's a. Dark cloud to destroy you.
• 1:13:32
  Absolutely it does. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:13:34
  And there there were. I in my own podcast, I do an
• 1:13:38
  audio version in 20 minute segments where I unveil some of
• 1:13:44
  this psychological torture for people who may be suffering like
• 1:13:49
  this and what they can do about it.
• 1:13:51
  Because I had to, I had to live through it.
• 1:13:53
  And, and there were, hey, man. Well, there's you.
• 1:13:56
  There's only two choices to it. You either just survive it and
• 1:14:00
  you know, it's horrific and you know it's a nightmare or you end
• 1:14:02
  it and and there and some people do that, you know.
• 1:14:06
  Plenty ended, yes, Yeah, those are the two choices.
• 1:14:10
  And then, yeah. And then if you're gonna survive
• 1:14:13
  it. And that's your choice.
• 1:14:14
  If you decide to do that, you now get to decide what you want
• 1:14:18
  it to look like on the backside of it, because now every choice
• 1:14:21
  you make, if you're going to survive it, now every choice you
• 1:14:24
  make dictates with the backside of this will look like.
• 1:14:30
  So that began to be very important to me once I decided
• 1:14:34
  in my garage late one night that I'm going to do this and one day
• 1:14:40
  this will all be over. What will that day look like?
• 1:14:43
  And if that day is eventually going to come, let's go and live
• 1:14:47
  like that now. And so that began to build
• 1:14:51
  momentum for me, restore my spirit, and began to attract the
• 1:14:56
  right people into my life to frankly doing me, strengthen me,
• 1:14:59
  and become the mentors in this phase of my life.
• 1:15:03
  And I like that a lot. So after all these years go by,
• 1:15:08
  how does it come down to you? We talked about it last week on
• 1:15:11
  the phone. But can you tell us, James, how
• 1:15:15
  this all comes down to where you finally get your deal?
• 1:15:18
  Yes. We, the controller of the
• 1:15:23
  Elliott Resorts who managed the money, came forward about six
• 1:15:29
  months prior to this sentencing, the final window where I'm going
• 1:15:34
  to do the deal. Six months before he came, he
• 1:15:36
  called me and he said are you still dealing with all that?
• 1:15:39
  He was, he was kind of in hiding, hoping he wouldn't.
• 1:15:43
  Be involved and. He said are you still dealing
• 1:15:46
  with all that? And I said, God yes, I'm still
• 1:15:49
  dealing with a lot. Where the hell have you been?
• 1:15:51
  Yes, I'm still the to. Hear from you.
• 1:15:53
  Knows Brent. He knows I'm not guilty of
• 1:15:56
  anything. He's the one that paid us our
• 1:15:58
  commissions. He's the one that paid our
• 1:15:59
  clients. He knows.
• 1:16:01
  All the backroom stuff. Yeah, he knows it all.
• 1:16:05
  And I and I said his name is Tomas.
• 1:16:08
  I said, Tomas, are you willing to help me?
• 1:16:12
  He goes, what can I do? And I said, well, you need to
• 1:16:16
  fly to San Francisco and meet with my attorneys on the record.
• 1:16:20
  And, and I don't know the formality of that, if it's going
• 1:16:24
  to be videoed or audio recorded or it's just notes, but, but I,
• 1:16:28
  I, I need you to go forward on the record, man.
• 1:16:30
  You know, it would save me. It literally would save me
• 1:16:33
  because right now they think I'm equally involved with Derek
• 1:16:38
  Elliott. They think that somehow he and I
• 1:16:41
  decided he would get 80%, I would get 20%.
• 1:16:44
  I said, I have no idea who would sign up for that.
• 1:16:47
  If they're involved in a scheme, if minimum it's 5050 and if
• 1:16:52
  you're raising the money, it ought to be 8020.
• 1:16:56
  You know, I I said that that is not the current belief on the
• 1:17:01
  lay of the land. I need your help to my he says.
• 1:17:04
  I'll do it now. This is this.
• 1:17:07
  Is wow, you talk about a lifeline.
• 1:17:09
  This is risky on his part, but he's an Elliott employee, or
• 1:17:14
  was, you know, the Elliott Corporation fell apart shortly
• 1:17:18
  after a lawsuit. But he's a former Elliott
• 1:17:21
  employee for sure. He has some contingent liability
• 1:17:24
  here, so my attorney talks him, coaxes him into coming to San
• 1:17:29
  Francisco. My attorney preps the
• 1:17:31
  prosecutor, preps the FBI agents.
• 1:17:34
  We get into a room with me, my attorney, the same group that I
• 1:17:39
  met with for 14 hours, and a stenographer that reports to the
• 1:17:43
  federal judge. It's overseeing my case.
• 1:17:46
  There's a video camera on in the room now.
• 1:17:49
  My attorney's got a binder with tabs full of great questions
• 1:17:53
  because we're preparing for trial.
• 1:17:56
  They have maybe two 8 1/2 by 11 pieces of paper.
• 1:18:01
  The other side, they've not prepared for trial.
• 1:18:04
  That's what I know sitting in this room.
• 1:18:06
  They are not ready for trial. They still think they're going
• 1:18:09
  to get a deal. It's obvious preparation of this
• 1:18:13
  meeting. Well, Tomas spills all the
• 1:18:16
  beans, explains to everybody in the room that when the cattleids
• 1:18:21
  would come down with his team, they'd double up on construction
• 1:18:24
  when cartilage would leave that thin back out the construction.
• 1:18:28
  They were putting on a show for me.
• 1:18:29
  And of course you can't be involved in a conspiracy if
• 1:18:32
  they're trying to put on a show for you.
• 1:18:34
  So he explains all that. My my attorneys follow up
• 1:18:37
  questions are just nailing these points.
• 1:18:40
  There's a couple of moments where we do a timeout and leave
• 1:18:43
  the room, leaving Thomas in there while the prosecutor, my
• 1:18:46
  attorney saying, what are we doing?
• 1:18:48
  What, what it it's pretty obvious, man, you, you, you got
• 1:18:52
  an innocent guy here. Are we really talking about
• 1:18:54
  taking him to trial? And so those are the type of
• 1:18:58
  disguise. Finally the momentum shifted
• 1:18:59
  here. So we get we get done, Tomas
• 1:19:03
  back to his hotel. I'm back to Vegas from San
• 1:19:06
  Francisco. My attorney calls and says,
• 1:19:08
  listen, I think I can do it. A new deal.
• 1:19:13
  I said a new deal. This isn't over.
• 1:19:17
  What what are you talking about? A new deal?
• 1:19:19
  He goes, look, we're going to trial and Tomas's testimony will
• 1:19:22
  be a part of the trial. We got it all recorded.
• 1:19:24
  The judge wanted this recording. We're going to use it at trial.
• 1:19:28
  And, and the jury may love it and the jury may not love it.
• 1:19:35
  And the jury's going to hate the fact you made $36 million and
• 1:19:39
  the jury's going to see 12 victims up in the witness box
• 1:19:43
  who lost their money, right? And, and the jury's going to
• 1:19:47
  hear about how often you golf and the jury's going to hear
• 1:19:51
  about your airplane and that you're rich and they're poor.
• 1:19:55
  And so if, if you want to play those cards, James, you, you
• 1:19:59
  play a different kind of card game than I do, that that is not
• 1:20:03
  a winning hand. And this is sadly not about the
• 1:20:07
  truth, man. This is not about the truth.
• 1:20:10
  This is about an escape route that allows you to get your life
• 1:20:14
  back. Yes.
• 1:20:16
  So the moment comes, James, and it's and your your attorney says
• 1:20:19
  it's go time. This is it, next week's trial,
• 1:20:23
  and you're thinking what? I can't believe it's come to
• 1:20:27
  this. I'm I'm not even searched
• 1:20:29
  prisons on my computer. I've never, I've never even
• 1:20:33
  looked up a prison. I I don't know anybody who's
• 1:20:36
  been to prison. I mean, what are we talking
• 1:20:38
  about here? This is I kept waiting for the
• 1:20:42
  day they would roll over the paper and say.
• 1:20:47
  Our mistake, sorry. Totally our mistake this.
• 1:20:51
  Sorry for the hassle. Yeah, we're so sorry for all
• 1:20:54
  this. Nope.
• 1:20:56
  That day never came, was never going to come.
• 1:20:58
  I just need to get my mind around the idea that this is
• 1:21:02
  happening. Yeah, and.
• 1:21:04
  And I and I've got to figure out a way to manage it.
• 1:21:07
  James, I want to say something that's not and I know that
• 1:21:10
  people listen to this. Some people have dealt with the
• 1:21:12
  system. Some people are just dealing
• 1:21:13
  with things in their own life. But IA lot of people have a hard
• 1:21:17
  time believing that. Until the night before I was
• 1:21:21
  going down to plead guilty. It had never occurred to me
• 1:21:28
  because I've been fighting for six years.
• 1:21:30
  Oh my God, I'm going to be a felon, I'm going to be an ex
• 1:21:32
  felon, I'm going to go to prison.
• 1:21:33
  And I had not dealt with that because I spent all my energy on
• 1:21:37
  fighting the case. And like all of a sudden it's
• 1:21:40
  like when guys are fighting stuff like that, it's like, it's
• 1:21:44
  hard to believe that you really haven't dealt with that.
• 1:21:46
  But you can't deal with that because that's that's not space
• 1:21:50
  that you want to go to or live in or be a part of it.
• 1:21:53
  But then when you finally hit it, it's like.
• 1:21:55
  Bam. Wow.
• 1:21:57
  Yeah, it's, I think this is a success trait, truthfully.
• 1:22:01
  It's, it's one of those where there's probably a whole group
• 1:22:04
  of people who actually are willing to think about the
• 1:22:07
  downside of every scenario and, and, and not me.
• 1:22:13
  I'm only thinking about winning and, and what winning looks like
• 1:22:17
  and how it's defined. And any surrender in the other
• 1:22:21
  direction is risking the victory.
• 1:22:23
  Exactly. Bring you down, Yeah.
• 1:22:26
  So, so, so bottom line is, is here's here's what happens.
• 1:22:31
  He says, I'm going to go negotiate for five years with a
• 1:22:35
  cap. And I think they'll do it based
• 1:22:39
  on what just occurred with Tomas in San Francisco.
• 1:22:44
  And I said, I said, you know what, for the first time in all
• 1:22:49
  these years, I feel, I feel inclined to say go do it.
• 1:22:55
  Go do it. Get it done.
• 1:22:57
  And it's the. First time I've felt inclined
• 1:23:01
  that direction. I called my mother as soon as I
• 1:23:03
  hung up with David, my attorney, David Chestonoff.
• 1:23:06
  Soon as I hung up with David, I called my mother and I said,
• 1:23:08
  mom, now she's been on this ride from day one.
• 1:23:12
  I said, mom, I'm going to run something by you.
• 1:23:15
  I want your opinion on it. And I explained to her this
• 1:23:20
  current lay of the land. And she said, son, I feel good
• 1:23:26
  about it. I feel good about it.
• 1:23:29
  I said what I said. You feel good about your son
• 1:23:35
  going to prison because that's what we're talking about.
• 1:23:38
  We're talking about agreeing to go to prison, not fighting it.
• 1:23:44
  We're now surrendering. To giving it to them.
• 1:23:47
  Right, yes, she said. I can't explain why I feel that
• 1:23:50
  way, but I, I think it's right. I, I feel like it's the right
• 1:23:56
  moment, it's the right time and you got to end this son.
• 1:24:00
  You got to end this. It's been too long.
• 1:24:02
  It's too long. It's.
• 1:24:04
  So with that tacit approval, I felt strongly that I'd made the
• 1:24:11
  right decision. This was almost a confirmation.
• 1:24:14
  So I waited. I guess it's probably 2 days.
• 1:24:19
  David and the team, they always call me as a team when they're
• 1:24:22
  trying to talk me into something.
• 1:24:25
  David calls me for announcements, but if they got
• 1:24:29
  to move me, they call as a team and clearly they've strategized.
• 1:24:34
  You're going to say this, you're going to say this and I'm going
• 1:24:37
  to hit heavy on this. You can tell it's been a team
• 1:24:40
  approach. We're dealing with this crazy
• 1:24:43
  eye cartilage. So they call me and they said,
• 1:24:48
  are you sitting down? And I said, yeah, I'm sitting
• 1:24:51
  down, but whatever you got to say, I can handle standing up.
• 1:24:55
  He said we got a deal. I said, explain to me exactly
• 1:25:00
  the deal. He says we got a five year cap.
• 1:25:03
  No matter what the judge thinks or says is capped at 5.
• 1:25:08
  We have the right to argue down to zero and they're going to
• 1:25:13
  resist that. That's part of the deal.
• 1:25:15
  They're they are agreeing to fight you to to five and we're
• 1:25:19
  agreeing to fight them to zero. I said, well, what about this
• 1:25:23
  statement of facts? We, we, we can't agree to this.
• 1:25:26
  This, this is false, right? I'm not going to say to a judge
• 1:25:32
  that this occurred because it did not.
• 1:25:35
  I'm not, I won't do that. And he said, well, James, the
• 1:25:39
  four corners of the law requires to do some very specific things
• 1:25:43
  here. So why don't you let me kind of
• 1:25:48
  figure out how to work with them on this and we can we get it?
• 1:25:52
  I said, listen, I promise you, you're not putting me.
• 1:25:54
  You don't want to have me in front of a judge with my arm to
• 1:25:59
  the square swearing to things that are not.
• 1:26:03
  I actually won't do it. So we need to come up with
• 1:26:06
  language that I can say I did. He says, you, you got that?
• 1:26:13
  He says you have that language. I said I do not, but you got
• 1:26:17
  this. Your this is your profession.
• 1:26:19
  I'm sure we can work this out. He goes, let me call him real
• 1:26:22
  quick. Stand by.
• 1:26:23
  He calls him, calls me back, he goes.
• 1:26:25
  They're willing to let us write the statement of facts.
• 1:26:27
  Now, you know how rare this is. They're willing to let us write
• 1:26:31
  the statement of facts. And this becomes the way they
• 1:26:34
  can affix a law that I broke to the one count of mail fraud.
• 1:26:41
  They're going to hang me with one count of mail fraud.
• 1:26:44
  And then they need and need it to be within the four corners of
• 1:26:48
  the actual statute of the law, the criminal justice books.
• 1:26:51
  And they're going to let us write it.
• 1:26:53
  And so we, I won't bother you with this, but we went through a
• 1:26:56
  thesaurus of words, try to gymnastically figure out how to
• 1:27:03
  say one thing and mean another. I mean, it was just nauseous.
• 1:27:08
  And finally came down with the fact that I agreed that I helped
• 1:27:16
  Derek Elliott write emails or construct emails that would go
• 1:27:20
  out to the clients that had a propensity to persuade them into
• 1:27:26
  the fraud. And, and I'll tell you what,
• 1:27:29
  those emails we had, we had actual emails where I had told
• 1:27:33
  Derek, if you're going to send the checks to the client and
• 1:27:35
  you're going to do an updated newsletter, please include
• 1:27:38
  photographs. Please include.
• 1:27:40
  Yeah. Updates, the elevators, the all
• 1:27:44
  the new stuff that's been please include.
• 1:27:46
  So they had plenty of emails where I helped the Elliott's
• 1:27:49
  construct a continuation of the mail fraud.
• 1:27:53
  And you could say that that was something you did because you
• 1:27:56
  thought that they should be updated and and.
• 1:27:58
  What's going on, right. And to this day, I would do it
• 1:28:01
  again. I would want the clients
• 1:28:03
  completely updated on everything where their money's going.
• 1:28:07
  That that was the hardest part, Brent, is I'm actually spending
• 1:28:13
  money taking extraordinary risk fighting for the very clients
• 1:28:19
  we're looking to put me in prison.
• 1:28:22
  And it, it really turned ugly. I had folks showed up at my kids
• 1:28:27
  football games, my kids athletic events with the, you know, the
• 1:28:31
  fathead where they can do a picture of you and the fathead
• 1:28:34
  showed up at my kids sports events.
• 1:28:37
  I mean, it was it was too much for my wife to bear.
• 1:28:40
  I'll tell you. That Tiffany could not bear
• 1:28:43
  this. And, you know, some of us have
• 1:28:46
  bandwidth that we don't quite know how broad it is until it's
• 1:28:52
  tested. We I understood her bandwidth
• 1:28:57
  was narrow and he she did not have the emotional bandwidth to
• 1:29:00
  withstand this. This was too much.
• 1:29:03
  And I don't falter for it. This is our divorce was created
• 1:29:07
  through this extraordinary trial.
• 1:29:10
  Yeah. So what happens on the day of?
• 1:29:13
  Because if I remember there's there's some more movement,
• 1:29:16
  things can happen with the with the attorney you.
• 1:29:19
  Know I I've agreed to five years and I'm going to argue for less,
• 1:29:23
  but I can do five I've I've made the.
• 1:29:26
  Same deal that I, which is crazy.
• 1:29:29
  I'm researching, doing time. I'm meeting with Michael Santos.
• 1:29:33
  I've driven to Newport Beach and had several meetings with
• 1:29:36
  Michael Santos. I'm meeting with other people
• 1:29:38
  who've been inside. I, I, I I'm now gathering my
• 1:29:41
  expertise or doing. Time How am I going to eat this
• 1:29:45
  elephant? Right.
• 1:29:46
  That's right. If I'm going to do time, I'm
• 1:29:49
  going to do it well. And so I'm, I'm, I'm just doing
• 1:29:52
  what I can do within my power to come up to speed on this.
• 1:29:57
  Yeah, now I'm going to. Now I'm going to tackle this
• 1:30:00
  task. Yes, yeah.
• 1:30:02
  And and I've, I'm going to self surrender.
• 1:30:05
  I've got 90 days. She gives me 90 days to self
• 1:30:08
  surrender. And so we're going to now be
• 1:30:10
  sentenced. So I kind of know what we've
• 1:30:14
  agreed to. So this is a formality.
• 1:30:17
  I've got my mother there, my brother there, and about 35
• 1:30:20
  friends who have flown in from across the United States.
• 1:30:23
  Some are friends, some are actually victims.
• 1:30:26
  Right, right. Just good folks who know the
• 1:30:29
  truth. So we're all gathered there and
• 1:30:32
  then, And then the victims are there, too.
• 1:30:34
  There's there's always a dozen. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:30:37
  Any movement on my case, they're sitting there so the the judge
• 1:30:44
  begins the sentencing and she she says, I don't know how we
• 1:30:48
  got here now this is all the transcript.
• 1:30:51
  I have no idea how we got here. I don't like it.
• 1:30:54
  This man has said he's been innocent for eight years.
• 1:30:58
  I've read everything submitted to this court.
• 1:31:00
  Unless you're hiding documents from the court, I don't know how
• 1:31:03
  you got here. I don't know how he agreed to
• 1:31:06
  five and I don't know how you let him agree to five.
• 1:31:09
  You, you think he stole $180 million and and you think he's
• 1:31:13
  innocent. You're willing to give him five?
• 1:31:16
  You're willing to let him have 5?
• 1:31:18
  I don't understand what you guys are doing.
• 1:31:20
  This sounds like a completely compromised situation.
• 1:31:23
  You got an innocent guy who deserves his facts before a
• 1:31:26
  jury. So it's it's I'm of the opinion
• 1:31:30
  this man deserves his facts in front of a jury.
• 1:31:34
  This is taking too long. He's resisted too long, and the
• 1:31:38
  idea in this late hour that you would come up with some grand
• 1:31:42
  bargain is suspicious. And my attorney, you know, who
• 1:31:47
  does this for a living, says, your honor, we've worked hard on
• 1:31:52
  this deal. Mr. Cartilage is agreeing to 60
• 1:31:57
  months but would like to negotiate for less.
• 1:32:02
  The prosecutors worked very hard on this deal for many, many
• 1:32:05
  years. There's been FBI agents put a
• 1:32:07
  lot of hours in on this. We're finally at the end.
• 1:32:11
  Mr. Elliott pled guilty 7-8 years ago.
• 1:32:15
  He's waiting for his punishment based on how this turns out.
• 1:32:19
  So, you know, we're here to end this today.
• 1:32:23
  And she says, well, not so fast, not so fast.
• 1:32:27
  She says this is this how they do it in Vegas?
• 1:32:29
  You know, she insults him on his Vegas background.
• 1:32:32
  Is this how they do things in Vegas beside how we doing here?
• 1:32:36
  I'm going to meet with my clerks in my chamber and find out if I
• 1:32:42
  have to accept this deal because I'm inclined to not accept this
• 1:32:46
  deal. What I'd like you guys to do is
• 1:32:49
  go out in the hallway and discuss amongst yourself a
• 1:32:54
  different situation because I'm not liking this at all.
• 1:32:57
  You, the Constitution doesn't have anything in there about
• 1:33:00
  this. The Constitution gives this guy
• 1:33:04
  a chance to clear his name and. And he's seen all the filings
• 1:33:08
  for the last eight years or whatever it's been that she, she
• 1:33:12
  don't want to see this all just thrown away.
• 1:33:14
  She wants the facts before the jury.
• 1:33:16
  Yeah. Right, right.
• 1:33:17
  She's read enough about my defenses.
• 1:33:21
  She likes them and and she even says on the record, this is a
• 1:33:26
  sales agent. I got to tell you something,
• 1:33:28
  James, before we go any further with that, that is unusual
• 1:33:31
  because for the most part your judge, your federal judge is
• 1:33:35
  going to be a previous prosecutor, possibly US,
• 1:33:39
  whatever those could be. And, and this isn't this isn't
• 1:33:45
  really normal for a judge to step into an agreement.
• 1:33:48
  Abnormal. Yes, completely abnormal.
• 1:33:52
  I had an A jailhouse lawyer who I did time with who became a a
• 1:33:56
  good friend actually read my transcript.
• 1:33:59
  He said I've never seen anything like this.
• 1:34:01
  He said this is this is crazy. He said don't ever get rid of
• 1:34:05
  this. He said this, this tells you the
• 1:34:09
  story. That's right, this lady
• 1:34:11
  understood. She said I.
• 1:34:13
  Work role in this. He was baiting you to go to
• 1:34:15
  trial. Yeah, she wanted me to go.
• 1:34:17
  And my mother's sitting there thinking, oh, this is so good.
• 1:34:21
  This judge, This judge understands my son and the whole
• 1:34:25
  situation, You know, so we go out the hallway, Brett, my
• 1:34:29
  attorney is face to face with the prosecutor.
• 1:34:32
  And of course, they worked hard on this.
• 1:34:34
  And everybody has. And, and I step out there and
• 1:34:38
  say, guys, what are we doing? And, and my attorney rolls
• 1:34:42
  around toward me and he says, you're going back in there and
• 1:34:47
  you're doubling down and you're letting her know this is what
• 1:34:50
  you want. She's willing to do what you
• 1:34:53
  want. She trusts you.
• 1:34:55
  She thinks in your favor. So she needs to know you're OK
• 1:35:02
  with this right now. She thinks we've corrupted the
• 1:35:07
  situation and and you got, hey, listen, this ain't about us.
• 1:35:12
  We're I'm going back to my law firm and he's going back to his
• 1:35:14
  office to prosecute somebody else.
• 1:35:16
  All right, so this is about you. This is about you.
• 1:35:21
  Get back to your life. So you've got to do this, James.
• 1:35:25
  You're facing 28 years if this goes to trial and you lose on
• 1:35:30
  one count. You're a leader, you're head of
• 1:35:35
  an organization. You're you're, you're
• 1:35:38
  sophisticated in your means. Those are all aggravating
• 1:35:41
  elements that go into the Senate scene that put you in AUS
• 1:35:46
  penitentiary to begin your time. He and he says everyone in there
• 1:35:52
  will know you're innocent and for 28 years you can scream it
• 1:35:57
  inside the, the yard of that facility, but that's no life,
• 1:36:01
  man. That's no life.
• 1:36:03
  We, we've got to go in there and we got to tell this judge, this
• 1:36:06
  is what you want. So I, I kind of agree with this.
• 1:36:11
  I, I, they, they, I am moved by their discussion.
• 1:36:17
  I go back in, she's at the bench.
• 1:36:21
  She sees me. She says, come up here to the
• 1:36:25
  bench. Now I have a podium I'm supposed
• 1:36:28
  to be at with a microphone. She wants me at the bench where
• 1:36:32
  I'm not on the bike. She don't want my family to hear
• 1:36:35
  this, and she don't want the victims to hear this.
• 1:36:38
  She moves the microphone aside. She says, what do you want to
• 1:36:42
  do? And I said, I feel terrible
• 1:36:46
  about what's occurred. I'm going to plead guilty today.
• 1:36:52
  She said, very well put some mic back.
• 1:36:56
  She says, stand back over there, we're about to hear you, she.
• 1:37:00
  And then she proceeds with a very formal approach to
• 1:37:04
  sentencing me to 60 months. 60 months. 60 months and so I left
• 1:37:11
  there. She gave me 90 days to
• 1:37:12
  surrender. As a side note, I watched Tiger
• 1:37:16
  Woods win the Masters. Yeah, 2. 1019, right?
• 1:37:21
  That's right before I surrendered and I self
• 1:37:24
  surrendered to the facility in Taft, CA Federal federal camp
• 1:37:31
  and. I want to get into that and how
• 1:37:33
  you handled that. You had some time to think about
• 1:37:37
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  Eastern Time. For more information, go to
• 1:38:45
  prisonist.org. prisonist.org. So you finally get to the the
• 1:38:50
  space you thought you'd never be.
• 1:38:51
  James, you're you're, you're voluntarily surrendering your
• 1:38:56
  freedom. Yeah.
• 1:38:58
  And walk us through that. Yeah, my, I've emptied my
• 1:39:05
  condominium. My boys helped me do that.
• 1:39:08
  We put it all in storage. I, I'm divorced now, living on
• 1:39:14
  my own, and I drive to Las Vegas from San Diego, where I was
• 1:39:19
  living near my family. And I'm going to stay one night
• 1:39:24
  with my mom and then my mom and my brother are going to drive me
• 1:39:28
  to Taft, CA and say bye. So it's April 19th of 2019.
• 1:39:39
  We drive to Bakersfield, stay the night at the Best Western.
• 1:39:44
  I I show up at 11 AM the next day to self surrender.
• 1:39:49
  You surrender to a low facility prison where they've got the the
• 1:39:54
  means to receive you in intake. I walk through the front doors
• 1:39:59
  of my family. We sit in a lobby waiting for an
• 1:40:01
  officer to meet us. Officer big fella comes around
• 1:40:05
  the corner. He's probably 6 foot five, 215
• 1:40:09
  lbs. They I'm 6 foot tall, you know,
• 1:40:13
  probably 190. This, this is enormous.
• 1:40:16
  I've I've, I've got, I'm called ahead to figure out what I can
• 1:40:20
  bring. Basically, I can bring my Bible.
• 1:40:24
  I can bring my contact a sheet of paper with my contacts on it
• 1:40:29
  and and and if I've got eyeglasses and I didn't at the
• 1:40:32
  time I. Didn't I?
• 1:40:33
  Didn't either. I got that while I was in.
• 1:40:35
  I did too. I got my readers inside.
• 1:40:37
  Another inmate gave him my readers.
• 1:40:40
  So, so basically I, I got nothing other than my Bible and,
• 1:40:46
  and, and a piece of paper. And so this guy standing behind
• 1:40:49
  a podium in the lobby, he tells my family, you guys can go say
• 1:40:53
  you goodbyes, Make it quick. We got some work to do here.
• 1:40:57
  I say goodbye to my family. They go out one door.
• 1:41:00
  I'm back in here with this guy. He has me take all my clothes
• 1:41:04
  off, put me in an orange jumpsuit.
• 1:41:08
  He has me squat and cough. Apparently that is a way to
• 1:41:13
  determine if I've hidden weapons in my inner cavities.
• 1:41:19
  I did not know that until this moment, but that's apparently
• 1:41:21
  why they have you squat and cough.
• 1:41:24
  I am handcuffed for the first time behind my back.
• 1:41:28
  I am measured on the wall how tall I am.
• 1:41:31
  They develop an ID for me. They DNA swab me.
• 1:41:35
  Then they roll me around into a processing center where I'm
• 1:41:40
  going to meet with a counselor, a medical technician, a nurse.
• 1:41:45
  And then by the way, each between each of these visits,
• 1:41:49
  I'm waiting in a concrete cell. That's right.
• 1:41:52
  This person to arrive. This is all preconditioning.
• 1:41:55
  You have no idea how long you're going to be there.
• 1:41:58
  Nobody says anything to you about anything 5.
• 1:42:00
  Minutes. No, they say nothing.
• 1:42:02
  Nothing. Sit there.
• 1:42:04
  Right. Yeah.
• 1:42:05
  You're you've you've lost control, by the way, the first.
• 1:42:07
  Message And then I think it's all by design, don't you, James?
• 1:42:10
  It is, yeah. This is designed to train me
• 1:42:13
  that I'm now not in charge. No longer have control.
• 1:42:16
  We no longer will give you information when you want it.
• 1:42:19
  That's it. I'm no longer in charge of
• 1:42:21
  anything right other than what goes on right here.
• 1:42:25
  That's right and. That becomes pretty damn
• 1:42:27
  important. Very important.
• 1:42:29
  Yeah. And and when you're in charge of
• 1:42:31
  nothing but that, you better get good at that.
• 1:42:35
  Better get really good at that. Yeah, so I, I realize real
• 1:42:39
  quickly that's all I got is, is control of my spirit, my drive
• 1:42:45
  and my soul. What goes on right here is now
• 1:42:48
  all I've got. It's all I've got left because
• 1:42:51
  they've taken everything else. So I'm in there and I'm thinking
• 1:42:56
  about what it's going to be like at the camp because I, I really
• 1:43:01
  don't know. I've not been in the camp.
• 1:43:02
  Before. Maybe this is it?
• 1:43:05
  Right. This this.
• 1:43:06
  Maybe they just messed up my paperwork and here's where I'm
• 1:43:08
  going to be. Well, I did have that fear.
• 1:43:10
  That Yeah. Well, no, I think everybody
• 1:43:11
  does. I did.
• 1:43:12
  This facility may be the one I'm stuck in.
• 1:43:15
  Exactly. Well, they finish with me
• 1:43:19
  medically, everything seems OK and, and you know, everything,
• 1:43:23
  every inconvenience for me to use the restroom to, you know,
• 1:43:28
  just a question or two you might have all these are huge put outs
• 1:43:32
  for them. You need to go to the bathroom.
• 1:43:34
  It's like a huge put up or ordeal for them.
• 1:43:38
  And and so we get through all of these inconveniences and we're
• 1:43:42
  several hours into this and a big burly guy looks like he's
• 1:43:46
  from ZZ Top comes back. He's tattooed to hell.
• 1:43:50
  He he comes back and he says, you ready to go?
• 1:43:54
  I said yes, Sir. And this is about as cordial of
• 1:43:58
  a conversation as I've had yet. Right here.
• 1:44:02
  You ready to go? Is this is as friendly as it's
• 1:44:05
  got? Right?
• 1:44:06
  So I'm following this guy through this maze of doors
• 1:44:10
  opening and keys unlocking, motorized doors opening, all
• 1:44:15
  this. I realize I've been encased in
• 1:44:18
  this place as they begin to unlock all this stuff to Get Me
• 1:44:22
  Out of there with him. We walk right out the front
• 1:44:25
  door. I came in.
• 1:44:26
  There's a little pickup truck out there.
• 1:44:28
  I'm in my orange jumpsuit still. There's an orange.
• 1:44:34
  Excuse me, There's a little Datsun pickup truck and this big
• 1:44:38
  guy doesn't even look like he will fit in the Datsun.
• 1:44:42
  As it turns out, this vehicle belongs to the camp.
• 1:44:45
  He gets in the driver's seat. He tells me to get into
• 1:44:48
  passenger seat. Now this is, you know, we're
• 1:44:53
  we're in a vehicle in front of the low security facility.
• 1:44:58
  And he says you in a gruff way. He says to me, you doing OK?
• 1:45:04
  And I said, I mean, he literally is expressing some concern about
• 1:45:09
  my well-being. And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm
• 1:45:12
  doing fine. And I really don't know if it's
• 1:45:14
  a loaded question. Right, exactly I'm.
• 1:45:16
  Assuming it is. So I said I'm doing fine.
• 1:45:20
  He goes, are you nervous? I said yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 1:45:25
  Very nervous. He said you shouldn't be.
• 1:45:28
  I said, OK, good, he says. He says the finest Pete.
• 1:45:35
  This way, he says, the finest people I've met in my life are
• 1:45:42
  back at that camp. So that's who you're going to be
• 1:45:46
  with. And in my mind, I'm thinking,
• 1:45:49
  you got to get out more. This, this is, these are the
• 1:45:52
  finest people This guy knows. They're in a prison.
• 1:45:55
  And I'm thinking, Oh my God. But in, in a, in a, in a really
• 1:45:59
  weird way, I thought this guy's endorsing people back.
• 1:46:04
  There. It calmed you down.
• 1:46:05
  Yeah, yeah. He he, he views them as quality
• 1:46:10
  people. And so I challenge him on this
• 1:46:14
  in a, in a non challenging way that we're driving, we're
• 1:46:17
  driving around the low, all this high security fencing, the wire,
• 1:46:24
  the razor wire up top. There's a couple of towers with
• 1:46:27
  guarded, you know, guys with guns at the top of these towers.
• 1:46:31
  We're moving past all of this. And he says, he says, you're
• 1:46:36
  going to be OK back there, nothing to worry about.
• 1:46:40
  He says, I was looking at your file.
• 1:46:41
  You went to. BYUI said I did.
• 1:46:44
  And I'm thinking, oh, God, here comes the Mormon jokes or
• 1:46:47
  whatever. And he says I got a daughter at
• 1:46:50
  BYU. Oh, great.
• 1:46:52
  Good. I said, oh, that's great.
• 1:46:54
  And I feel immediate relief, you know, immediate.
• 1:46:57
  And he's, he says, Oh yeah, she loved it, man.
• 1:47:00
  She loved it. And he said, what'd you do?
• 1:47:05
  It was what I did. I said, I didn't do a damn
• 1:47:08
  thing. He said, you, you didn't, you
• 1:47:13
  didn't do it. He said, then why are you here?
• 1:47:15
  I said, because I agreed to be here.
• 1:47:18
  And we have this discussion on the way back.
• 1:47:21
  He doesn't get out until he finishes here.
• 1:47:23
  He wants to hear. He wants to hear the story, guy.
• 1:47:25
  From BYU is being taken to the camp.
• 1:47:29
  So I tell him he goes. That's one hell of a story, man.
• 1:47:32
  He said. He said, you know what, I
• 1:47:34
  believe it. He said there's a lot of guys
• 1:47:36
  back here who probably didn't do it.
• 1:47:40
  He said you go, you're going to meet him.
• 1:47:41
  He goes. A lot of guys did and they'll
• 1:47:43
  tell you they did, right, he says.
• 1:47:45
  But there's a bunch that did. He said this just the way it is,
• 1:47:49
  man, just the way it is. He he's explaining this to me.
• 1:47:53
  And again he looked he does look like he's with ZZ Top the the
• 1:47:56
  group and and he hands him my change of clothes.
• 1:48:01
  And as a courtesy, he says you want to change in these before
• 1:48:05
  you go back in there because it they look a little more casual
• 1:48:09
  than this orange jumpsuit. I said, sure, where do I change?
• 1:48:14
  He so he shows me it's kind of off the visitation room.
• 1:48:16
  There's a bathroom, He said. Just changing there, he said.
• 1:48:19
  And then I'll tell you what to do.
• 1:48:21
  So this guy's being real courteous with him.
• 1:48:23
  Real, real. Courteous and and the ZZ Top
• 1:48:26
  looking guy, and for those that are listening down in the Cayman
• 1:48:28
  Islands that had never heard of ZZ Top, they're the guys with
• 1:48:31
  the long hair, the handlebar, long mustaches and beards.
• 1:48:36
  Quite the deal in the age. Yeah, really big deal at one
• 1:48:40
  point. Yes, Yeah.
• 1:48:42
  It's like a rock band. Yeah.
• 1:48:43
  So, so he so he lets me change my clothes and I come back out
• 1:48:47
  and he goes, now here's what I'm not going to walk you down
• 1:48:49
  there. This will look ridiculous.
• 1:48:52
  He said, you're going to be fine.
• 1:48:55
  And he points. Now the courtyard is probably
• 1:48:57
  120 a 150 yards through the courtyard down a sidewalk to my
• 1:49:03
  housing unit. He says you're in 32 low.
• 1:49:06
  I'll never forget that's exactly where I was.
• 1:49:08
  He goes, you're in 32 low. He says you go back there and
• 1:49:12
  there'll be an inmate see that you're new, you're wearing blue
• 1:49:15
  shoes. He knows you're new.
• 1:49:17
  You're the only guy wearing blue shoes, by the way.
• 1:49:19
  So they'll know you're new. Everybody standing up there
• 1:49:23
  knows you're new. He goes, there's a lot of guys
• 1:49:25
  back there trying to be helpful. He goes, they'll tell you where
• 1:49:27
  32 low is. That's your address.
• 1:49:30
  You set up camp there and then you go to laundry and get your
• 1:49:32
  sheets and this stuff. And I promise you there's
• 1:49:34
  inmates there looking to help you.
• 1:49:36
  So I did it and and I can tell you this print and you know
• 1:49:41
  you've done this as I cut loose from the camp control and I'm
• 1:49:47
  making that walk by myself. This is it.
• 1:49:53
  I've arrived at the moment I thought would never.
• 1:49:55
  Occur ever happened, right? And I'm here and I decided, and
• 1:50:01
  I've done this a few times in my life.
• 1:50:04
  I pulled my shoulders back, lifted my chin up, and I walked
• 1:50:08
  back with a great deal of confidence, talking myself into
• 1:50:14
  this. You can do this.
• 1:50:17
  It's this is just another environment you're.
• 1:50:19
  Built for this. You're built do this.
• 1:50:21
  That's right, yeah. So by the by the time I get to
• 1:50:24
  my housing unit, there's a guy there named Johnnie Walker who
• 1:50:29
  meets me as I come through the glass doors.
• 1:50:32
  I know it's, it's the same alcohol, Johnnie Walker.
• 1:50:36
  And he's as he's as dynamic a personality.
• 1:50:39
  As his name. Would indicate.
• 1:50:41
  So I walked through the doors. I thought he was a greeter.
• 1:50:46
  He's he's so on it. I thought he was this is his
• 1:50:50
  prison job and it's not his prison job.
• 1:50:53
  He's just looking for the new guy.
• 1:50:55
  So I walked through Johnny Walker says where are you
• 1:50:58
  headed? I said 32 low.
• 1:50:59
  He goes come with me. I followed Johnny Walker to 32
• 1:51:03
  low. It happens to be conveniently
• 1:51:05
  located directly across from the restrooms, otherwise known as
• 1:51:09
  Flushing Meadows. So all night you're not going to
• 1:51:13
  believe, you're not going to believe this, James.
• 1:51:14
  I literally had a my first bunk that was diagonal from the
• 1:51:19
  restaurants which is crazy. It's Flushing Meadows.
• 1:51:22
  It's Flushing Meadows, Yeah, Toilets.
• 1:51:24
  A. Little bit of a light, a little
• 1:51:26
  bit of a light in there, yeah. It's all night long, so I'm at.
• 1:51:30
  So bottom line. That's why I asked Johnnie
• 1:51:32
  Walker. Makes me feel at home.
• 1:51:34
  I've got a Korean guy named James in my cell or my cubicle
• 1:51:38
  and and life begins 32 low on that day, April 19th.
• 1:51:44
  So what did you do? Like, you know, for me, I got a
• 1:51:48
  prison job that I worked at the food warehouse and then I got to
• 1:51:51
  work at the Fort Leavenworth Golf Course.
• 1:51:54
  I read a lot, worked out a lot. How did you your mindset?
• 1:52:00
  Cause James, you came from a world where you wanted to be
• 1:52:03
  James. I'm sure you didn't want to lose
• 1:52:05
  James in there. How did you, how did you work
• 1:52:07
  around and and stay in that? Yeah, it's such a good question.
• 1:52:11
  I'm a people person. I love people.
• 1:52:14
  I do. I I realized right away and and
• 1:52:18
  I had Johnny Walker give me this advice.
• 1:52:20
  He said, listen, there's a lot of liars in here.
• 1:52:24
  There's a lot of folks in here who fabricate professionally.
• 1:52:27
  He said, I want you to lay low. I'm going to introduce you to
• 1:52:31
  people who you should know and I'm not going to introduce
• 1:52:34
  people you shouldn't know, he said.
• 1:52:36
  So let's just be patient with this.
• 1:52:38
  And we started walking the track together, talking as he would
• 1:52:41
  point people out across the yard and he would walk me up to
• 1:52:44
  people. He'd give me a little background
• 1:52:47
  on there before we'd introduce me.
• 1:52:48
  He didn't give my them my background.
• 1:52:50
  And we began to form a coalition of, of, of equally minded guys.
• 1:52:57
  And, and I met on day one or two, four or five key guys that
• 1:53:04
  became my group. And, and, and then, and then I
• 1:53:07
  realized I may have a role to play in here helping people
• 1:53:12
  because there's a lot of folks who are, are victims mentally
• 1:53:15
  and they shouldn't be, right? They, they, they think they're
• 1:53:18
  the victim, right. Yeah.
• 1:53:19
  They're prisons of their own mind, yeah.
• 1:53:21
  Totally. They've created all the walls
• 1:53:24
  that they constructed. And so I realized real quick
• 1:53:29
  that I can help disassemble some of that stuff and that that I'm
• 1:53:32
  verbally pretty good at talking that through.
• 1:53:36
  And so I began, I would say within the 1st 30 days, I began
• 1:53:40
  walking different guys on that track, disassembling false
• 1:53:46
  beliefs, disassembling things that just aren't true about them
• 1:53:51
  or the world. I had one guy tell me, he goes,
• 1:53:53
  you're the first white friend I've ever had.
• 1:53:56
  And I said, well, I, I promise you a lot of good white people,
• 1:54:01
  you, you, I think, I think you've been judging pretty
• 1:54:04
  harshly. And this, this was a, a, a
• 1:54:09
  Hispanic fellow who, you know, who was raised in the ghettos,
• 1:54:13
  only knew Hispanic guys, maybe a few African American guys, but
• 1:54:16
  never had a white friend ever. Didn't trust them.
• 1:54:19
  They, they, they were part of the problem.
• 1:54:21
  And, and so this guy and I got along great.
• 1:54:24
  This guy's name was Apache and and we got along great and he,
• 1:54:28
  as it turned out, he he was a leader within his group and
• 1:54:32
  Apache broke down walls within that group.
• 1:54:36
  And one after another, Apache's whole gang ends up, you know, we
• 1:54:42
  disassemble a lot of bullshit that was in their head about
• 1:54:45
  life, about prison, about life on the outside and about what
• 1:54:49
  life is supposed to be on the outside.
• 1:54:51
  So. I love that, love that.
• 1:54:55
  I did. I did a lot of writing and
• 1:54:57
  reading, but that was selfish time when it was just me.
• 1:55:01
  But I would say the majority of my constructive time was spent
• 1:55:05
  with men, me helping them and in return them helping me.
• 1:55:11
  When you were, did, were you in during COVID?
• 1:55:14
  I guess towards the back end of it, you were.
• 1:55:16
  And that that had to be horrific for all kinds of reasons because
• 1:55:19
  they could lock you down and say, you know, make it easy for
• 1:55:22
  for them with the new rules that, you know, we could.
• 1:55:25
  But while that was all happening, James, what were you
• 1:55:29
  thinking about? Because everybody gets a little
• 1:55:32
  freaked out when it gets close to getting to the door to get
• 1:55:35
  out. What, what did you start
• 1:55:36
  thinking about as far as what life was going to be for you on
• 1:55:39
  the outside? Well, I was really fortunate my
• 1:55:43
  my mother had done a great job having my family, my children,
• 1:55:47
  all six children come visit me every 30 days.
• 1:55:49
  Love that my my mother came every 30 days.
• 1:55:53
  How you stay plugged into the real world that way.
• 1:55:55
  Totally. I live from visit to visit.
• 1:55:59
  Absolutely. And mark my calendar from visit
• 1:56:02
  to visit. And it became fundamental to how
• 1:56:06
  I did my time. And so I was really plugged in
• 1:56:11
  almost from the beginning. I didn't feel like it was in a
• 1:56:12
  crack. I think it's easy to feel like
• 1:56:15
  you've slid into a crack and you go into prison because you don't
• 1:56:19
  have access to the Internet. There's not a good way to keep
• 1:56:21
  track of your network. If they don't come see it, you
• 1:56:24
  don't see them. You know what's going on, right?
• 1:56:26
  Right. And, and I'm a, I'm a good
• 1:56:28
  writer. So I, I wrote lots of letters to
• 1:56:30
  my friends so they could be updated on what I was up to.
• 1:56:34
  And I, I, I love telling them fun stories.
• 1:56:37
  I, I wanted, I wanted my friends and family to know I was not in
• 1:56:42
  danger. There was no safety risk.
• 1:56:45
  This is actually more of a comedy routine than it is a, a
• 1:56:49
  bad experience. And I wanted them to find joy in
• 1:56:55
  my journey so that when I returned, it would be, it would
• 1:57:00
  be, they would want to sit down and hear the stories as opposed
• 1:57:04
  to try to investigate if I was still the same guy.
• 1:57:10
  And I, I think there, there's a benefit in that.
• 1:57:15
  And if anybody's going in, I'm telling you right now, you need
• 1:57:17
  to do this. You, you, you, there's a risk
• 1:57:20
  that your network, I don't care how well connected you are,
• 1:57:22
  there's a risk that your network thinks the prison can change
• 1:57:25
  you, which would alter your relationship with them.
• 1:57:28
  And that's a risk they face. That's a risk your friend is
• 1:57:32
  dealing with. That's a risk your network is
• 1:57:35
  facing. Forget your risk for a minute.
• 1:57:37
  Put yourself in their shoes. They're worried about their well
• 1:57:41
  adjusted friend not being well adjusted anymore.
• 1:57:44
  Exactly. It's.
• 1:57:45
  So good plan to. Put that to bed by my
• 1:57:49
  communication and so I was constantly communicating and
• 1:57:54
  updating. I even had a live blog from week
• 1:57:57
  to week that I think mom had 160 people on that e-mail chain.
• 1:58:02
  They would get an update every week.
• 1:58:04
  And it was a it, it wasn't a misery index.
• 1:58:09
  It was, Oh my God, these stories are amazing.
• 1:58:12
  I can't wait to meet so and so and so.
• 1:58:14
  I was making these people that were important to me live
• 1:58:18
  characters in the blog so that when there were visits I could
• 1:58:22
  introduce. Point him out.
• 1:58:23
  Yeah, yes, yeah. And we did, yeah.
• 1:58:28
  I love that, love that. Yeah.
• 1:58:30
  So that's how I did my time, Brent.
• 1:58:32
  That's how I that's how I survived it.
• 1:58:35
  So getting out talk us through re entry.
• 1:58:38
  Yeah, I got out early. I got out after 14 1/2 months,
• 1:58:46
  which really a blessing. I, I did not anticipate this.
• 1:58:49
  The COVID-19 hit at the end of the first year I was in there.
• 1:58:55
  And of course we're scared. We're we're thinking we're all
• 1:58:59
  at risk die, Yeah. And, and we're thinking the
• 1:59:02
  guards are bringing it in because we're somewhat contained
• 1:59:06
  from any contamination except for the guards.
• 1:59:09
  We're in and out of the public. So the guards began to isolate
• 1:59:15
  from us and and we begin to have to stay in our at the time it's
• 1:59:23
  cubicles. But eventually the Bureau of
• 1:59:26
  Prisons decided to close our camp and transfer us to a medium
• 1:59:30
  security facility. So we all get hauled up in the
• 1:59:34
  middle of the night, shackled at the ankles, shackled at the
• 1:59:39
  waist, boarding buses, By the way, if you if you've never been
• 1:59:43
  shackled. It's dehumanizing.
• 1:59:45
  You're. Walking about an inch and 1/2 at
• 1:59:47
  a time. And if you slip up and, and walk
• 1:59:51
  2 inches, you can fall flat over in your face, knock all your
• 1:59:55
  teeth out because your hands are not available to secure your
• 1:59:59
  fall. So every step you take better be
• 2:00:02
  a shuffle and you, you better be very familiar with each step
• 2:00:06
  because the the shackles guarantee you you're not getting
• 2:00:10
  a step in. So we're all shocked.
• 2:00:11
  We watched older people fall in these shackles and really get
• 2:00:16
  bloodied up because there's no way to catch them.
• 2:00:19
  There's no way for them to catch themselves.
• 2:00:22
  So anyway, it was a nightmare, literally a nightmare journey as
• 2:00:27
  they transferred all of us on buses managed by the US
• 2:00:31
  Marshals. We move, that's the most, that's
• 2:00:34
  the most difficult time. It makes sense is a transfer
• 2:00:40
  that because the transfer creates conditions that are
• 2:00:44
  unbearable. And so we're in an unbearable
• 2:00:46
  situation. You're not stopping for the
• 2:00:48
  restroom. We're not using the rest areas
• 2:00:51
  along the freeway. People are soiling themselves as
• 2:00:57
  we make our way to Fresno, CA, to the federal facility called
• 2:01:02
  Mendota, which is a medium security facility.
• 2:01:06
  Medium is a lockdown for people that are there 15 years or more,
• 2:01:12
  and it's usually a more violent criminal.
• 2:01:15
  It's usually someone who needs a little more containment.
• 2:01:19
  And so they find an empty wing of this medium security facility
• 2:01:25
  and lock us campers in a medium security facility.
• 2:01:30
  We're all paired up and then 23 1/2 hours a day, we're behind a
• 2:01:38
  steel door. This is not like a cell door
• 2:01:41
  that shuts because COVID would just work its way right through
• 2:01:44
  the cell. So it's a steel door, like a
• 2:01:46
  vault, where if you're on the backside of this door and you're
• 2:01:50
  speaking to me, I got to look it through the little glass to read
• 2:01:53
  your lips because I still cannot hear you because it's that it's
• 2:01:58
  solid steel. And when they shut those doors,
• 2:02:02
  you know, you're encased in there.
• 2:02:05
  It, it, it is a suffocating feeling, like oh.
• 2:02:09
  Man, I gave you claustrophobia. This is for you to explain that
• 2:02:11
  they. Shut those doors.
• 2:02:13
  You feel claustrophobic. You feel like, oh man, yeah,
• 2:02:16
  when is this COVID going to end? And how long?
• 2:02:19
  Did you live like that? Three months?
• 2:02:22
  Wow, in in that cell. Wow.
• 2:02:25
  With a guy named Chiwas who speaks as much English as I
• 2:02:30
  speak Spanish. So we used hand signals and
• 2:02:35
  pictures to communicate inside there.
• 2:02:39
  Now this guy was really respectful and of course I'm
• 2:02:44
  respectful and it really worked out great in that close
• 2:02:47
  quarters. But we're there three months.
• 2:02:51
  Our meals are shoved through an envelope slot in the door and
• 2:02:55
  our dirty trays shoved back through that envelope slot in 30
• 2:02:59
  minutes. Every 24 hours we get out to
• 2:03:01
  shower, which is in a see through cage.
• 2:03:07
  So the guards and everybody can just see you in the shower, see
• 2:03:10
  through cage or make your phone calls to your family.
• 2:03:14
  So you have to choose either shower or phone calls.
• 2:03:18
  And so you end up doing showers on one day, phone calls on the
• 2:03:21
  next, shower and phone call and you rotate.
• 2:03:23
  And by the way, we're cleaning the phones with all these
• 2:03:26
  chemicals because of the COVID, you know, we got all these crazy
• 2:03:29
  chemicals being moved around and we're all wearing the mask.
• 2:03:32
  Yeah. And doesn't it give you some
• 2:03:34
  kind of unique confidence in yourself that you can just about
• 2:03:37
  adapt to anything that way? Yeah, you can't.
• 2:03:39
  You can't scare me. There's nothing you can say to
• 2:03:42
  scare me. There's nothing you could do
• 2:03:44
  actually to scare me. I I, I all sorts of, you know,
• 2:03:48
  encounter since being released that I'm not fazed by.
• 2:03:52
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, there's really, I mean,
• 2:03:56
  what are you going to do? I've been arrested.
• 2:03:59
  I've been shackled, yeah. I've, I've been locked up.
• 2:04:02
  Locked down. I've been in the segregated
• 2:04:04
  housing unit. I I I've been through every
• 2:04:07
  hellscape you can create for me and I'm still OK.
• 2:04:12
  I'm still standing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:04:14
  So yes, you feel, hey, you talk about building someone's
• 2:04:18
  confidence. If you get through there and you
• 2:04:22
  keep control of your faculties and maybe come out stronger,
• 2:04:27
  yeah, boy, there, there's not a lot you can't do.
• 2:04:30
  Yeah, there's a lot there in. Fact.
• 2:04:31
  You could do everything. So let's talk about that.
• 2:04:33
  What are you doing now, James? Well, while.
• 2:04:36
  I was in, I, I had spent so many years in financial services
• 2:04:43
  during my indictment. You know, they take your
• 2:04:45
  licenses and and and you end up you can't even just.
• 2:04:48
  Strip you down to all the things that you're good at, right?
• 2:04:50
  Yes, they, they try to remove not just your money and your
• 2:04:54
  assets and your, and your family, they, they try to take
• 2:04:57
  your ability to make a living away.
• 2:04:59
  And so I decided I needed to change professions and, and I,
• 2:05:02
  you know, I've already logged at this point 45,000 hours, you
• 2:05:06
  know, 10,000 hours. You're an expert.
• 2:05:08
  I'm at 45,000 hours in my domain.
• 2:05:13
  I'm actually a prolific expert in my domain and so while inside
• 2:05:19
  I decided to move down through the technology space and develop
• 2:05:24
  a scoring algorithm that could score someone financially.
• 2:05:28
  So when you when you sit down with someone financially, you
• 2:05:31
  need to do a needs analysis to determine what they need from a
• 2:05:35
  financial standpoint. Are they retirement ready, taxi,
• 2:05:38
  fish, these type of things? Well, I developed 27 questions
• 2:05:43
  that I thought should be asked every single time a financial
• 2:05:47
  advisor sits down with a client. These 27 questions, I felt
• 2:05:52
  covered the gamut of what should be discussed to properly
• 2:05:56
  diagnose and prescribe what they need and, and also understand
• 2:06:01
  the client's ideology and the way they think about money.
• 2:06:05
  And some of it's wrong, some of it's right, you know, just where
• 2:06:08
  are they? So it's 27 questions.
• 2:06:10
  I developed an algorithm that had weight to each question and
• 2:06:13
  based on how you answer the question, it would drive a score
• 2:06:17
  in real time. And so when I got out, I put
• 2:06:20
  engineers together, you know, I just called around and found
• 2:06:25
  engineers that knew how to program and write code.
• 2:06:28
  And I developed a financial score that allows a financial
• 2:06:32
  planner to sit with a client whether you're licensed
• 2:06:36
  yesterday afternoon or been licensed 50 years.
• 2:06:39
  If you ask these 27 questions, the client will get a financial
• 2:06:42
  score. And it assesses retirement
• 2:06:44
  readiness, tax efficiency, and overall financial help.
• 2:06:48
  And the client loves it. And then AI is now attached to
• 2:06:52
  it. So AAI can now make the
• 2:06:55
  recommendations. So based on that score in those
• 2:06:59
  questions, the AI will tell you or the advisor what should be
• 2:07:02
  done. Wow.
• 2:07:04
  So I developed that software. It's, it's in subscription form.
• 2:07:10
  It's being used by financial advisors all across the United
• 2:07:12
  States. And, and so that, that's it.
• 2:07:16
  That's, I did that. I, I, I stayed in the space.
• 2:07:20
  It's what I know best. I love that I I love that you
• 2:07:23
  got stripped of what you you have is these license.
• 2:07:26
  But you figured out, well, that doesn't take my brain away.
• 2:07:29
  I can still provide things that they need in that space.
• 2:07:32
  And that's what you did, James. Yes, and I don't believe I would
• 2:07:36
  have even considered this had they not taken away the license
• 2:07:41
  because I wouldn't have had to be creative, you know, I
• 2:07:44
  wouldn't have had to think about a different way to approach the
• 2:07:49
  expertise that I still possess. And so that's what I'm doing
• 2:07:53
  today, busy meeting with financial advisory companies and
• 2:07:57
  financial advisors individually. I've got a team of engineers, AI
• 2:08:01
  engineers and code writers that manage the subscription based
• 2:08:04
  service. And so that's that's what we're
• 2:08:07
  doing. Are you?
• 2:08:08
  Still doing motivational speaking.
• 2:08:10
  You know, I get asked to do that a lot And, and I do, I, I do it,
• 2:08:15
  I, I get invited to be on great podcasts like this and, and I
• 2:08:20
  enjoy it. Yes.
• 2:08:21
  So I I still do that. I, I, I, I know that you're good
• 2:08:25
  at it because you, you have such a great way of presenting how
• 2:08:29
  you, you can feel your story, James, you, how you tell it and,
• 2:08:32
  and you can feel it. And it's thank you.
• 2:08:36
  I, I wonder what this question, because I asked this question to
• 2:08:39
  everybody that's on the show is after everything that you've
• 2:08:42
  been through, James, what's your greatest take away?
• 2:08:45
  I'm really curious what your answer is to that.
• 2:08:48
  You know, you know, what's interesting is I do have AI do
• 2:08:52
  have a take away and, and, and, and I do get asked this.
• 2:08:55
  What's the lesson you learned? If there is a lesson, what is
• 2:08:58
  it? And it's not about how the
• 2:09:01
  government can mess you up. It it's, it's not, it's not,
• 2:09:05
  it's not about anything that's been done to me.
• 2:09:08
  It's a, it's about a lesson I need to learn.
• 2:09:11
  For me. I I literally thought in my mind
• 2:09:18
  that I had a reputation and that I had spent 30 years building
• 2:09:23
  it. So proud of it.
• 2:09:25
  And I was proud of it. And I, and I spent, I spent my
• 2:09:28
  career managing it. Almost every decision I make was
• 2:09:32
  making sure that the reputation was not tarnished, damaged.
• 2:09:37
  You know, I, I, and I think a lot of professionals spend a lot
• 2:09:42
  of energy managing their reputation.
• 2:09:46
  And, and what I learned was that it, it, it's a fallacy to
• 2:09:51
  believe that I had anything to do with my reputation.
• 2:09:57
  It wasn't built by me. It was built by outsiders.
• 2:10:01
  It, it was external to me. The reputation was built in
• 2:10:06
  spite of me. But what I did build and I still
• 2:10:12
  have control of and had control of throughout was my character.
• 2:10:17
  It's, it's the way I treat people.
• 2:10:19
  It's the choices I make when the shit hits the fan.
• 2:10:24
  It's the decisions I get to make in the privacy of my mind
• 2:10:28
  between stimulus and response that dictate who I will be.
• 2:10:34
  So if you have to choose this is this was the lesson.
• 2:10:37
  If you have to choose between reputation and character, I
• 2:10:43
  would say always choose character because the reputation
• 2:10:46
  was never yours anyway it it it could be taken from you in a
• 2:10:50
  heartbeat. Mine was taken in an October
• 2:10:55
  fall of 2012. The the government decided my
• 2:10:59
  reputation was over and they decided that they would post a
• 2:11:03
  press release telling the world shit that was not true.
• 2:11:08
  And so I learned in about 30 minutes that my reputation was
• 2:11:12
  over. And then and and and It took me
• 2:11:15
  a while to figure out I mean. I What does that mean?
• 2:11:20
  Weeks defending myself, explaining, explaining,
• 2:11:23
  explaining, and then and then, and then finally I, I had to
• 2:11:26
  settle on the fact that, damn it, I didn't do anything.
• 2:11:30
  I'm pulling my shoulders back. I can look any man in the eyes.
• 2:11:35
  I, I'll, I'll tell you whatever you want to know.
• 2:11:37
  I'll answer any question you got.
• 2:11:39
  Well, all I got is my character and and I've maintained that
• 2:11:42
  throughout. It saved my ass it, it allowed
• 2:11:45
  my network to stay intact. It allowed all my friends to to
• 2:11:49
  show up at the end when I was released and say what are we
• 2:11:52
  going to do now? I love, I love that, and I love
• 2:11:57
  you breaking it and forking it into reputation and character,
• 2:12:01
  because character is that's what you see in your soul.
• 2:12:07
  Reputation is something that is exactly.
• 2:12:10
  It's the scaffolding of your life.
• 2:12:12
  You can build your life with character and and I can tell
• 2:12:16
  you, you have the total control to give that away too.
• 2:12:20
  I mean, you could screw that up with some bad decisions and and
• 2:12:24
  then I. Don't know any given situation.
• 2:12:26
  It's all about character how you handle it.
• 2:12:28
  That's right. Yeah, that's right.
• 2:12:30
  Wow, wow. What a good take away.
• 2:12:33
  What a great take away, James. I love it.
• 2:12:35
  I love your story. I love what you're doing now.
• 2:12:39
  I love how you got through it and he just never gave up.
• 2:12:43
  And the whole thing, you have little pieces, talk about
• 2:12:47
  mentoring and coaching. There's all kinds of little
• 2:12:49
  pieces in here all throughout your story that people can grab
• 2:12:52
  from. But you didn't lose yourself
• 2:12:55
  through this story. You stay consistent with who you
• 2:12:58
  were. And I think that's one of the
• 2:13:00
  biggest things. And the biggest take away is, is
• 2:13:02
  something like this happens. Very easy to lose yourself in
• 2:13:05
  your own nightmare. And then that nightmare is what
• 2:13:09
  defines you. And that's not what defines you.
• 2:13:11
  What defines you is your character, James and how you
• 2:13:14
  handled your nightmare. You know, everybody has
• 2:13:16
  challenges and and how you handle that challenge makes you
• 2:13:21
  a winner, a loser in the way that you move forward in life.
• 2:13:24
  And and I think that's what makes your story inspiring.
• 2:13:27
  Thank. You.
• 2:13:29
  Talking about gratitude and things like that.
• 2:13:31
  I've I want to thank Homestead Financial who lets me use this
• 2:13:35
  podcast room with all their fancy cameras and stuff.
• 2:13:38
  If anybody's got home, home mortgage needs, Greg Aftiev is
• 2:13:41
  your guy. He knows all that stuff.
• 2:13:44
  If you're looking for a book out there, check mine out.
• 2:13:46
  I got Nightmare Success that's on Amazon or or Barnes and
• 2:13:51
  Noble. Please leave me a review if you
• 2:13:52
  got time on Apple. If you want to know what I'm
• 2:13:55
  doing, go to brentcassidy.com. I spell it wrong.
• 2:13:59
  I spell it with ATY out of DY, as I used to say to my people
• 2:14:03
  when I was writing my emails back and forth from Leavenworth.
• 2:14:06
  Stay strong. I'll do the same.
• 2:14:08
  James Catledge, thank you so much for being a guest today.
• 2:14:12
  I think you gave so much for people to hear and listen to and
• 2:14:15
  here with you. Brent, really, I'm really
• 2:14:18
  impressed with the work you're doing and I'm a fan of your
• 2:14:20
  podcast. Love that.
• 2:14:22
  Love that James for all of you, not my success.
• 2:14:26
  In and out. Great.
• 2:14:28
  Thank you.