Latest / Nightmare Success In and Out / From Film Sets to Federal Charges: John Santilli Surviving the System

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From Film Sets to Federal Charges: John Santilli Surviving the System · Nightmare Success In and Out

• 0:00
  So my mother was sick for about a month.
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  It was a back issue. We thought Eventually it got so
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  bad we took her to the hospital. And I think 2 weeks later, she
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  ends up dying. It was pancreatic cancer.
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  It was a shock. And then about two weeks after
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  that was when they raided me. And I was told specifically
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  because I asked my attorney many times.
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  I said, you know, are they going to raid anybody coming to my
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  that's the case. I don't want my kids to be
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  traumatized. You have three kids.
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  They said they would let us know and OK, April 13th, 2021 before
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  5:00 AM, bang on my door like crazy.
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  I could put a piece of tape over my Ring doorbell and I went down
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  there and they said we have a warrant for your arrest but not
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  for your premises. So I had my hands up and I said
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  I have kids upstairs. What happens when your worst
• 0:53
  fear becomes your reality? Hi, I'm Brent Cassidy, welcome
• 0:57
  to the Nightmare Success In and Out podcast where we explore how
• 1:00
  to overcome your fears and nightmares that set yourself
• 1:03
  free. We're going to be exploring this
• 1:05
  topic with guys that was in Leavenworth with and others who
• 1:08
  survived their own nightmare. These stories can be inspiring,
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  sometimes sad. There's some humor, but
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  hopefully you can come away with a nugget of something that'll
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  help you knock down some of the prisons you built up in your own
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  mind. All right, welcome back,
• 1:26
  Nightmare Success. In and out, listener.
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  This is where you come from. What happens when your worst
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  fear becomes your reality? How do you adapt, survive,
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  overcome, set yourself free? And folks, don't forget to like
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  this thing up. Share it out, subscribe.
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  It really helps the show, and I so appreciate it.
• 1:42
  So who are we talking to you today on Nightmare Success?
• 1:45
  Well, my guest today is filmmaker John Santilli, and he
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  is a producer whose fingerprints are on projects ranging from
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  grid gritty indie films all the way to major studio releases
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  like Bill and Ted Face the Music with Keanu Reeves.
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  He's been executive producer on The English Teacher with
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  Julianne Moore, Missing William and the thriller Held Hostage in
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  My House. And of course, there's the Tales
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  from the Crypt reboot. But here's what makes John a
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  true nightmare success story. John went through his own
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  personal nightmare, a federal securities fraud case that
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  resulted in his conviction, his world collapse, his career, his
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  reputation, his relationships, his identity, all of it was put
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  through the fire. It was kind of like the moment
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  where most people just say I'm done, disappear, never recover.
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  But John didn't. He's fought through it, he
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  survived it, and he's built rebuilding his life piece by
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  piece. Not not from hiding from a from
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  what happened, but by talking about it, learning from it and
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  continuing to create takes a little bit of grit, some
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  resilience. I can't wait to jump into all
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  this. Buckle up, folks.
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  story. Welcome in John.
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  How are you, man? I'm good.
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  Brenton, how you doing? I'm doing good, doing good.
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  So I don't know that I've there's been 200 some odd
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  interviews and I don't know that I've actually had somebody on
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  who has been in film. And it like when you were
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  growing up, John, was that something as a kid?
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  I mean, were your parents involved in that stuff?
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  Were you thinking, How did that all come around for you as a
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  kid? I think when I think a lot had
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  to do with probably my dad, because I wanted to be my father
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  was a police officer and I wanted to be a police officer
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  and I want to go to the FBI. But then when I was about 12
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  years old, I had, I got type 1 diabetes.
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  So at the time, I'm not sure how it is now, but at the time like
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  certain conditions, diabetes being one of them, type 1
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  diabetes being one of them, you couldn't be in the field like
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  the FBI. And that's really what I wanted
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  to do. So that and, and you couldn't, I
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  don't think you, I think you could be a police officer, but
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  you couldn't, you couldn't become a police officer.
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  You could stay a police officer if you got it while you had it,
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  but. You couldn't go in with it.
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  Yeah. So that and then the, the me and
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  my father, you know, I was a big sports fan.
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  My father wasn't. The only thing we really had in
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  common was I want to be a police officer and we love movies.
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  Well. I'm curious what growing up in a
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  household when your dad's a police officer, What?
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  Like what's that like as a kid? You become a little bit of a
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  monster. You think whatever you want.
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  Your father wants to kill you all the time because, you know,
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  you're embarrassing him because you think, oh, my.
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  What happens is, you know, you're 16.
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  You get pulled over. They see the sticker on your
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  car. They say, oh, who's, you know,
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  who's the sticker? It's your father.
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  And they let you go. You don't even have to do much.
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  And, and, and that happened a lot.
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  And I think as a kid, you just get a little sometimes.
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  Yeah, Yeah. But yeah.
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  So growing up, John, was did you have a pretty normal I think you
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  grew up up E, right? Yeah, I grew up in Rhode Island,
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  born and raised pretty normal. You know, I have a sister, very
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  loving household. Parents were great.
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  I mean, you know, it was a lower middle class.
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  You know, we didn't. We always had food, we always
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  had clothes. We didn't struggle for that
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  stuff. But yeah, I mean mostly very,
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  very good family. Brothers, Sisters.
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  Yeah, just one sister and older sister and myself.
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  So you, you move along, you got this, your dad's a police
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  officer and, and you just, you just early on decide that that's
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  not going to be your route. Did you start thinking in high
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  school about film or did that? How did?
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  How does that come to somebody? I, I have, I guess the, the
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  curse and the, the blessing of being a bit irrational.
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  Yeah, that helps. I've, yeah.
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  Like, I've always believed you pretty much do whatever you
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  want. And sometimes, you know, I'm not
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  saying I'm always rational, but I've always believed you can
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  pretty much figure out whatever you want to do and do it,
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  especially at a young age. And I just, I wanted to do that.
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  And everybody thought I was crazy because we're in Rhode
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  Island. But, you know, I, I, I was
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  interested in it quite, you know, right after high school, I
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  interned on a few films that were happening in Rhode Island.
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  And I was waiting tables at the same time.
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  And then I'd gotten out of it for a bit and I was teaching
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  computers and like a nonprofit organization.
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  And I did that for a few years, met my wife there.
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  And the program ended. It was DHS and United Way funded
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  and it ended. So I told my wife we weren't
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  married yet. We had just bought a house.
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  I said I think I want to go back into film and I was never in
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  film when we were together. She never met you in films?
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  Yeah. She films from a small town, her
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  father's in construction, very similar to my family, and she
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  thought I was crazy. But to her credit, and I'm very
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  grateful she supported me. She said OK and in her mind she
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  was panicked. So I had about, you know, 7-8
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  months I was collecting because I got laid off in that program
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  and I, I took a bunch of, I got a bunch of films free.
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  I would work for free and then people liked how I worked and
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  they would hire me at odd jobs and just work my way through
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  that way. OK, so getting into film in
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  Rhode Island, were you thinking that you you were going to have
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  to move to really get this thing going, or did you think that the
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  being in film and doing that could all just happen where you
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  were? When I was younger, when I first
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  got into it, so I did a movie called Outside Providence and
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  then I worked like like a week on Something About Mary because
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  they shot in Rhode Island first. Oh God yeah, I love that.
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  Great show, great movie. Yeah.
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  And I thought I was, I thought I was going to have to move at
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  some point. But what ended up happening when
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  I got back into it was the the tax incentives were very strong
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  in Boston and Rhode Island. So a lot of films and projects
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  were coming because, you know, independent films, actually all
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  films follow the the tax incentives.
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  Wherever the tax incentives are, that's where they go and, and
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  shoot. So that's it created.
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  There's a lot of business here and a lot of commercials, a lot
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  of lot of opportunity. So when did you first think, hey
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  this is going to work for me? Probably because.
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  You've been in some big stuff. Yeah, well, you know,
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  interestingly, I, I worked a bunch of smaller jobs when I,
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  when I got laid off, I got a position on a film called
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  Telltale. And it was, and I'll never, I
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  always remember I'm a big sports fan.
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  But it was February 2018 because it was the day I started, the
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  day after the Patriots lost their perfect season to the
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  Giants in the Super Bowl. So I did that.
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  I was an assistant production coordinator.
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  So you have a production assistant, which is like the
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  first position you go into. And an assistant production
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  coordinator is you're in the office and you're again, bottom
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  of the barrel. And I did that.
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  And the people that I worked with were, you know, they liked
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  me. I would get there before them,
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  leave after them. I would end up taking some of
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  the producers home and talk with them quite a bit.
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  And a year later I produced my first film with them, which was
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  the English teacher. So it was just they, they gave
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  me a lot of, you know, a lot of really good advice and followed
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  it. And I just, you know, I was a
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  hard worker. So I would, I'd always, I always
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  made sure that I was busy, whether I looked what I, whether
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  I was busy or not, I just looked busy.
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  And that was one of the things one of the producers said that
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  was his advice. He said, I always act like
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  you're busy even if you're not. And he would.
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  And he was right, because people like that.
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  And I got there before them and I would leave after them, so.
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  What was? What was your next step after
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  that? So from there I, I, I was
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  working on a lot of commercials in between and I worked on a
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  movie or an Italian TV show in Massachusetts.
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  And then I worked on a second unit of a bigger film called
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  Knowing with Nicolas Cage and the production managers, the
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  unit production managers or line producers are the people that
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  pretty much run the day in and day out of the production.
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  They make the they. Make everything go.
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  Yeah, yeah. So there were, there were two
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  people that one for the gentleman from the Italian show
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  and then the, the woman from the show, knowing that I did really
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  liked me, that I was a hard worker.
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  I was starting a family and, and they were super helpful and, and
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  they would kind of coach me along and I would go for jobs
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  and I would get jobs that I wasn't qualified for.
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  And I would talk to them every day during the job before and,
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  and they would tell me, you know, you still got to do, you
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  got to stand here, you know, when everybody's wrapping up and
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  I'd stand there and just stare at them.
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  So nobody gets extra overtime. And just really I, I was very
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  fortunate. So you step into this, you start
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  making stuff and you and, and it's how long between the time
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  we're talking about right now to when the nightmare started for
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  you. So I would say 2001 two.
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  I said 17, right? That was 2000, 2008, not 18.
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  I got that. I figured that.
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  So I got back into film around 2006.
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  It was about 10 years, about 10 years, because 2016 is when
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  everything happened and it was for something I had never done
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  before. It wasn't even in my wheelhouse
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  as far as the the film industry. Well, let's talk about that
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  because the, I mean, when in fact, you just sent me something
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  that almost had a timeline on it and the chance to read all of
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  it. But it's, it's, it's, I mean,
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  you really went through a lot and, and there were a lot of
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  different pieces of people involved and you had partners
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  and you never know, you know, when you have these partners.
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  When this all started kind of getting crazy.
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  When did you feel like things didn't feel right?
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  So the show was 2016. I mean, there were things, it
• 14:40
  was craziness when we put it together because there was a lot
• 14:44
  of people involved, a lot of attorneys involved.
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  And again, it was something I had never done before.
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  So I would say before it got to the point where I was concerned
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  was probably 2018, about two years, yeah.
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  Walk us through what happened. So we had ownership in the
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  project which was in Vegas and my company owned I, I was on the
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  board with, with three other very large people or entities
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  and I was by far the smallest fish in that pond.
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  But we had, you know, about 22% of of the shell, which was
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  significant. And we had investors that came
• 15:34
  through US when everything was happening.
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  Originally, we were going through another company, a
• 15:42
  management company who brought us the deal.
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  They were getting kicked out and we were asked to be the direct
• 15:49
  owners. We spoke to that company because
• 15:53
  we didn't want to circumvent them because they brought us to
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  the table. There was a legal issue with an
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  investor that they had and, and they said if you can keep us on
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  as a management company, well, that's how we make our money.
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  That's all we care about. So we said OK, and we went back
• 16:06
  to the show and we said that's what we said.
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  And he said, he said if they, if you keep them on as a management
• 16:11
  company, we'll still come in and do that.
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  They agreed. We were given a $2,000,000 piece
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  that ended up changing to 1.875. The reason that's significant is
• 16:24
  because they, that was one of the things they portrayed that I
• 16:27
  misrepresented. It wasn't.
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  I was misrepresenting it. That's what we had at the time.
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  Then it changed. So our documents had that and
• 16:34
  then it changed. And I would tell people this is
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  what this says, but it's actually going to be this.
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  So it was a little bit of a different structure than I had
• 16:45
  dealt with and it's actually very simple.
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  I feel silly saying that I didn't understand it because
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  when looking back, it's actually fairly simple with limited
• 16:53
  partnerships. But I never dealt with one
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  before with the GP and the LP. And we had an attorney that was
• 16:59
  creating all of our contracts and he created the companies,
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  which we always do. We always have a special purpose
• 17:07
  vehicle for whatever project. So like if I have John Santilli
• 17:12
  Productions and I have a movie come through, I create an LLC
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  underneath me for that movie. So it's stand alone so that all
• 17:20
  the other projects don't get hurt if there's an issue on that
• 17:22
  project. We did that.
• 17:27
  The attorney, like I said, the attorneys drafted all that, went
• 17:31
  back to the show and said we need to change the name on the
• 17:34
  contract because we're creating a special purpose vehicle.
• 17:37
  The attorney who I spoke to daily at that point said let's
• 17:41
  just, there's a lot of it's Vegas.
• 17:43
  There's a lot of, there's a lot of things that we had to I guess
• 17:49
  do and qualify for. We had to be on a liquor
• 17:51
  license. So there's a lot of like red
• 17:52
  tape we had to go through. So we said let's do it with the
• 17:54
  main company and then we'll change it to the other company
• 17:57
  because they're not going to know the other company because
• 17:58
  it's a brand new company, said, OK, we did that.
• 18:05
  At one point we closed the deal and we have investors in our
• 18:10
  company and we have investors in this limited partnership.
• 18:16
  And that's where it got a little bit wonky because the way the
• 18:18
  contracts were created was very confusing.
• 18:21
  So just to give you an example, my company was a Loris
• 18:25
  Entertainment. Then my attorney created a Loris
• 18:29
  Entertainment LP and then the Loris Entertainment GP, which
• 18:33
  was the general partner is. So it was and then they LLC was
• 18:39
  a limited partner in the in the limited partner.
• 18:43
  It was just very confusing. So so.
• 18:44
  And I guess the other part of the confusing part of it, it's
• 18:48
  all the same name, just with the back end of it's different.
• 18:51
  That's why and I didn't understand what everything was
• 18:54
  and my partner wasn't in. One of my partners was an
• 18:56
  attorney, but this deal is. Do you know all these guys?
• 19:01
  Have you done deals with them and other deals?
• 19:03
  No. OK, so this was this is this was
• 19:05
  a new thing. Yeah.
• 19:08
  And the and the people that you were in bed with were new people
• 19:11
  that you hadn't been partners with in the past.
• 19:15
  The, the people on the Vegas show, the, the partners I had,
• 19:18
  I, I did, I, I was, I was with them for a while.
• 19:23
  So my partner that was an attorney, his cousin was an
• 19:26
  attorney and he created all the documents.
• 19:29
  And this was going on like as far as putting the deal together
• 19:34
  with one of our bigger investors.
• 19:36
  This was happening late at night.
• 19:37
  I didn't raise the money myself. There was somebody that came in
• 19:39
  and brought the investors in. OK.
• 19:41
  One of the things that they said was that.
• 19:43
  It was. His job to go out, Yeah, I mean,
• 19:45
  I was technically soliciting. I was, I'm not saying I wasn't,
• 19:48
  but I wasn't gated that out wasn't me going out to people as
• 19:50
  it seemed. So there was this guy that was
• 19:54
  handling all that and he had a big investor who was one of the
• 19:58
  major investors and going back and forth.
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  You know, I was, you know, for, for several days because we were
• 20:05
  right up against the deadline for several days up until we had
• 20:09
  to close. I was probably up until 6-7 in
• 20:13
  the morning. They were, they were in LA, but
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  I'm in Rhode Island. So I was up overnight and my
• 20:19
  attorney and I'm sorry, my, my partner who was an attorney
• 20:22
  doesn't work after hours pretty much.
• 20:25
  So I had to handle all that and I was not, I was not qualified.
• 20:32
  Let's just say that I wasn't qualified.
• 20:34
  I'd go back and forth with, I never talked to the investor
• 20:37
  directly, but this one guy I talked to everyday, he'd go back
• 20:40
  to him and call me back and go back and you know, he wants this
• 20:44
  or that. And, and because of that, we
• 20:46
  ended up getting a really, they put something in the contract
• 20:50
  that we didn't know about that I didn't know about and basically
• 20:53
  took advantage of us. But because I didn't know again
• 20:57
  what to look for, my attorney wasn't available.
• 20:59
  So that was kind of the how it all the process happened.
• 21:03
  Once we close with that person, he had come up with an idea of
• 21:09
  selling off our shares for a higher value, which you can sell
• 21:13
  them off, keep a piece. But because the show is now
• 21:17
  gaining attention, we can make money that way.
• 21:20
  So that's what we ended up doing, and that's what ended up
• 21:24
  causing the problem. So did I mean, but that seems
• 21:28
  like that's something that people do all the time where you
• 21:31
  get the you get the show funded, you get it, then you start
• 21:34
  getting recognition. Then you can bring other people
• 21:35
  in and you can, you know, basically make money is on the
• 21:38
  on the gap. So when did it come to you that,
• 21:44
  Oh my gosh, I'm in trouble? So we there's a lot of back
• 21:52
  story and I don't want to get into this as long and it's
• 21:54
  boring, but I had a dispute with the main investor.
• 22:02
  We also had a slate of shows with this management company,
• 22:06
  which was The Voice, America's Got Talent, and then another new
• 22:11
  show that they were doing in Vegas.
• 22:14
  And this investor was putting a lot of money into it, something
• 22:17
  around 24,000,000. And yeah, so when there was an
• 22:24
  issue with this particular investor, I probably let it go
• 22:29
  on for a little bit too long because I didn't want to blow
• 22:31
  the other deal. And he ended up backing out of
• 22:36
  that anyway. Once he did, that caused some
• 22:41
  problems. Like when, when all this was put
• 22:43
  together and you know, you were, looked like you had it set to
• 22:47
  roll because you were you, you're done kind of the the
• 22:51
  major pieces of it. When did you get because you
• 22:55
  know, a lot of times, you know, a business, it's, it's a funny
• 22:58
  thing in business when it's it's you're, I've never been in the
• 23:02
  film business, but I know that in business as an entrepreneur,
• 23:06
  you're building a business, you take risk and sometimes you take
• 23:09
  risks that you've never taken before to try to get to the next
• 23:12
  step. And it sounds like to me, what
• 23:15
  we're talking about, John, is that you had an opportunity.
• 23:19
  It was a bigger opportunity, and you had to take risks to get
• 23:22
  this thing to make it happen. But because you had these
• 23:25
  partners, it kind of looks like it fell apart around it.
• 23:29
  And you were standing there and they started making accusations
• 23:33
  to try to limit their exposure to get out.
• 23:37
  Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of truth to that.
• 23:42
  Yeah. The, you know, with, with the,
• 23:46
  when we had an issue with one investor, what happened was he
• 23:49
  had backed out of that one, that larger slate and he had
• 23:56
  purchased, he had sent us money for additional ownership of
• 24:01
  this, the Vegas show because we were, we were again selling them
• 24:04
  for a higher value, but he was just buying them 1 to 1.
• 24:08
  So he, he sent us money, cashier's checks to buy
• 24:11
  additional shares. After he backed out of the other
• 24:14
  one. I had a conversation with my
• 24:15
  attorney and we had no contracts, but there's no
• 24:19
  agreement if you don't have a contract, right consideration of
• 24:24
  I can't remember what it is. So we sent him back that his,
• 24:29
  his, his investment was $375. We sent in cashier's checks, yet
• 24:35
  they were they were sent into 100,000 and 275.
• 24:38
  So we sent him 2/1 for 101 for 275.
• 24:42
  And then we, my attorney wrote a letter, sent it registered mail.
• 24:46
  He never responded to that. Fast forward a few more months.
• 24:53
  This was just before the show was this was just after the show
• 24:56
  opened. Fast forward a few months until
• 24:59
  the when the first distribution was coming and he had reached
• 25:04
  out to the show and threatened to sue them.
• 25:08
  It was me said it was a Ponzi scheme, all this stuff, and at
• 25:12
  that point, that's when everything got really kind of
• 25:15
  crazy. Well, and if I remember right
• 25:18
  that's $375,000 was and your bank recommended that that you
• 25:24
  cancel those checks after six months and as soon as you cancel
• 25:27
  those checks is when he said it was all wrong and you never had
• 25:31
  attempted to pay and all the other things that that went
• 25:33
  through. So that's really.
• 25:35
  Afterwards, like it was being checked every day.
• 25:36
  Yeah. And he said he cancelled Lowe's.
• 25:39
  So what happens next in that situation?
• 25:42
  Well, so before we canceled those checks, we had sent them,
• 25:46
  he reached out, we had our first distribution.
• 25:51
  The distribution was paid out to all the investors.
• 25:53
  Everybody who had a contract got paid by the contract.
• 25:57
  This investor reached out. I never got paid again by the
• 26:01
  show. They just stopped paying me.
• 26:03
  And that's that's what started causing problems with the other
• 26:05
  investors during this process that six months goes by and
• 26:10
  that's when they added the oh, it's bank fraud because you, you
• 26:14
  didn't you cancel these checks. But I had a conversation with
• 26:18
  the bank manager who advised me of this.
• 26:22
  You know, it's that that claim, although it's out there, they
• 26:26
  didn't have a lot of of room to stand out, like to stand out
• 26:29
  with that, that claim. But they did, they didn't make
• 26:32
  it about a year after that initial when he initially
• 26:41
  reached out to the show, he filed A lawsuit and they filed
• 26:48
  arbitration on the same day. So they were obviously in
• 26:50
  coordination. He was a very wealthy person.
• 26:52
  He made it known to them that he, he, you know, he'd be around
• 26:57
  and invest in future stuff and wanted us taken care of him.
• 27:01
  So, you know, a year, just about about a year after that, he
• 27:06
  filed on the same day. And then I had to go to
• 27:08
  arbitration. Eventually.
• 27:10
  I had multiple attorneys, but it was just, it was expensive.
• 27:15
  It was very expensive and I didn't have the money.
• 27:17
  Eventually I ran out of money and couldn't fight everything.
• 27:20
  I was getting sued by, you know, there's a lot of smaller
• 27:23
  investors. And this is what really bugs me.
• 27:29
  Everybody, like I said, everybody was paid.
• 27:31
  When I got paid, I didn't get paid.
• 27:32
  Again, these people were brought in through someone else.
• 27:35
  They don't know me from a hole in the wall.
• 27:41
  They invest in something, get paid once and then never see
• 27:44
  anything else. And nothing makes sense to them.
• 27:46
  Why aren't you getting paid? I don't know.
• 27:47
  They're just not paying me. Well, how can they do that?
• 27:50
  I don't know. They're just not paying me.
• 27:52
  And that's, you know, that ended up pissing people off.
• 27:54
  And I don't, you know, although it was frustrating, I don't
• 27:57
  blame them. I mean how?
• 27:59
  How? Because I don't know.
• 28:00
  They don't know the inside of where anything is going on.
• 28:02
  They just know that they've invested money.
• 28:04
  Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, and, and who
• 28:06
  knows what they were told? I know.
• 28:08
  And the stuff that I saw, things that they were told.
• 28:11
  I mean, you know, you talk to a lot of people.
• 28:14
  A lot of these people were approached with did you know
• 28:18
  this happened? And then the story was told so
• 28:20
  much after the fact. When everything's going on, when
• 28:22
  it's when they're trying to indict you, this is the story.
• 28:25
  It's did you know this person did this?
• 28:28
  And then they say these things. And of course the people, what
• 28:30
  are they going to say? Like they're going to be pissed
• 28:32
  off. They're not going to call me up
• 28:34
  and try to talk to me. And, and they don't know me.
• 28:36
  They just think I'm, you know, I'm a scam artist now.
• 28:39
  Well, you have some crazy things that happened.
• 28:43
  You know, the, you have, you know, the, the, the FBI comes
• 28:48
  over to your place and you know they weren't supposed to and,
• 28:54
  and your kids are there and your wife.
• 28:59
  What when that day happens? What what's, what's going
• 29:02
  through your mind? Well, you know, they, they
• 29:05
  reached out for the first time end of the end of 2020 and I
• 29:14
  wanted to speak to them. They would never speak to me.
• 29:19
  They would never look at anything that I had well.
• 29:21
  Yeah, you actually just wanted to show them what everything
• 29:23
  was. Yeah, you were.
• 29:25
  You're wanting to work to show what the situation was because
• 29:28
  it's kind of confusing. Yeah, there there's an issue
• 29:31
  with a contract change that was they they blasted out there, but
• 29:34
  I have an e-mail from my attorney telling me to change
• 29:37
  the contract. I asked him.
• 29:38
  I said they didn't make this adjustment.
• 29:39
  He said just change it yourself and redline it.
• 29:42
  I changed it. I didn't redline it.
• 29:44
  I was wrong but but I I was. Trying to do what the attorney
• 29:48
  was telling you to do. The the intent was was to try to
• 29:51
  make it right. And the contracts, the way they
• 29:53
  were written, they, you know, they, they put out there that
• 29:57
  the kind that I, I sold something I didn't own for one.
• 30:01
  And that's in half the news outlets out there just ran with
• 30:05
  that and said I didn't own anything when I was in the press
• 30:08
  releases. Like I can't put myself in their
• 30:11
  press releases, right. So they said I didn't own
• 30:14
  something. But the way it was structured,
• 30:16
  the contract literally said they're buying a share in this
• 30:21
  company that's owned by this company.
• 30:23
  So the main company owns them and it's passing them through
• 30:26
  this company, they're beginning the financial interest.
• 30:28
  So it was, I didn't design the contract, that's just the way it
• 30:31
  was. But there was it was all kind of
• 30:34
  lined up like that. So they when they the.
• 30:37
  The media version narrative was is that you had designed a
• 30:42
  scheme through these random shell companies.
• 30:48
  I mean, it's what happens in these situations when
• 30:51
  something's complicated, the way that you're supposed to design
• 30:56
  things looks if you put it on up on a wall and they put it on the
• 31:02
  news, it looks bad because it's because it's like you.
• 31:06
  Like in our case, we had an insurance company, we had a, an
• 31:09
  LLC in every state because we were audited differently.
• 31:13
  And that's just the way that it was.
• 31:14
  That's the way the attorney set up.
• 31:15
  But when they put it up on a huge board near in 25 states, it
• 31:18
  looks like you're you're creating some kind of weird maze
• 31:21
  and it's something you didn't create.
• 31:24
  It's just the way that the legally that it's set up.
• 31:27
  So you get through all this, John, and you know that things
• 31:33
  you don't have money to fight this thing.
• 31:36
  It's coming at you from different angles.
• 31:40
  Did they contact you and say, listen, we're we're going to
• 31:43
  indict you or we're going to arrest you?
• 31:44
  What? Like how does this come down for
• 31:46
  you? No, they, they eventually
• 31:49
  reached out to my attorney and, and that's when I had said that,
• 31:53
  you know, let me just, I said I'm willing to, if I did
• 31:57
  something wrong, I'm willing to take responsibility for that.
• 32:03
  And I just wanted to talk. I wanted to show what I had.
• 32:07
  So because they were saying that, you know, they come, how
• 32:11
  they reached out was with a plea agreement.
• 32:13
  They sent a plea agreement to my attorney, which was terrible.
• 32:17
  And that's, and I'm like, no, that's crazy.
• 32:18
  So I asked to speak, they said no and they came back with the
• 32:21
  worst plea agreement. And then that happened 3 or 4
• 32:24
  times. But going through this, one of
• 32:29
  the things I wanted to tell them what?
• 32:30
  Well, the show itself we had, I had the ownership in the show
• 32:35
  that I, I had approached the show and things got really bad
• 32:39
  and people weren't getting paid. And they said I'll step out or
• 32:42
  we'll break this one person off. He'll make more money because
• 32:45
  now he doesn't have to share with me.
• 32:47
  And then I'll keep my other people and everybody will make
• 32:50
  out and they'll make out better. The only person that loses is me
• 32:54
  and, and my partners. They refused that.
• 32:57
  And then when the government had reached out, that was the show
• 33:00
  itself refused that. And the, and the investor, the
• 33:03
  government, I had wanted to say, yes, I tried to make this right.
• 33:08
  I, I was very naive. I thought, and I thought that
• 33:10
  they cared about intent. So I said, I, I said I wanted, I
• 33:15
  wanted to show this. And then we had another very
• 33:18
  large production that I just finished.
• 33:21
  It was a a live event and it made a ton of money.
• 33:25
  And my my partner, my other partner out West and I were
• 33:29
  going to make quite a bit of money.
• 33:31
  And we said we can pay those investors back.
• 33:33
  So at least their whole once that money comes in and then
• 33:36
  we'll deal with fighting whatever we have to fight with
• 33:39
  the show and all that. And the.
• 33:44
  The was that the boxing event that?
• 33:47
  Yeah, yeah. That did really well, yeah.
• 33:48
  Yeah, and I had to stay on the outside mostly because of I was
• 33:54
  being sued by everybody. So my name couldn't be on
• 33:56
  anything at that point. Which ironically, the reason my
• 34:00
  partner who did that wasn't on the actual company for the show
• 34:05
  was because he had issues before and he couldn't be on it.
• 34:08
  And I was the only one that was clean.
• 34:11
  But boxing is not very not very clean himself.
• 34:15
  We don't really care as much I guess, but that there was a lot
• 34:18
  of money that came in. Long story short, I found that
• 34:22
  well, he went and bought a very nice multimillion dollar house
• 34:26
  with it. And I have no direct proof of
• 34:31
  this that he was, he made a deal with the FBI and the government.
• 34:37
  However, he was my business partner.
• 34:40
  We did everything together and there was no statement or
• 34:43
  discovery from him in in the case file.
• 34:47
  So that didn't make a lot of sense.
• 34:48
  So I can you know put 2 which. Is common.
• 34:51
  That happens a lot. They use one person to get to
• 34:54
  another person. Yeah, and they and they didn't
• 34:56
  care. They let.
• 34:56
  I mean, there was so much money coming in from that, you know,
• 35:01
  it was, it was, it was more than enough to take care of people,
• 35:04
  which. Could have solved all the issues
• 35:06
  of whatever you were dealing with.
• 35:07
  Yeah. So getting back to the the plea
• 35:10
  agreements and and the the refusing the plea agreements was
• 35:15
  was the raid a shock? Yes so my my mother was sick for
• 35:21
  about a month and it was a back issue we thought.
• 35:23
  Eventually it got so bad we took her to the hospital and I think
• 35:28
  2 weeks later she ends up dying. Was pancreatic cancer.
• 35:32
  It was a was shot. And then about two weeks after
• 35:34
  that was when they raided me. And I was told specifically
• 35:39
  because I asked my attorney many times.
• 35:41
  I said, you know, are they going to raid anybody coming to my
• 35:44
  house? I'll go and stay in a hotel if
• 35:46
  that's the case. I don't want my kids to be
• 35:49
  traumatized. You have three kids.
• 35:52
  They said they would let us know.
• 35:53
  And OK, so April 13th, 2021, they said, you know, before 5:00
• 36:00
  AM, bang on my door like crazy. I could put a piece of tape over
• 36:03
  my Ring doorbell. And I went down there and they
• 36:08
  said we have a warrant for your arrest, but not for your
• 36:11
  premises. So I had my hands up and I said
• 36:14
  I have kids upstairs. They brought me outside.
• 36:19
  And then I still can't get an answer on this.
• 36:22
  But then the agents just kind of all came in the house and went
• 36:25
  Upstairs, Downstairs after they just told me they had no
• 36:28
  warrant. But there was about maybe 1213
• 36:33
  cars, 1517 agents. And I live on a small little
• 36:37
  dead end in a condo. It's not like I'm in this multi
• 36:40
  $1,000,000 mansion. I live in a, you know, 3 bedroom
• 36:43
  condo on at the end of a dead end on a very quiet street.
• 36:47
  So it was. Chaos.
• 36:50
  Yeah, I didn't. There was they knew I wasn't a
• 36:53
  risk or a flight risk or a danger.
• 36:55
  Right, right. And as we were talking about
• 36:58
  before this, this before we hit the record button, they they,
• 37:02
  they randomly just choose who and when they're going to do
• 37:04
  that. They don't there's there's no
• 37:06
  set and it's just random. You know, you're it.
• 37:10
  So I, I know that had to have been horrific.
• 37:14
  Your kids are in there, your wife's in there.
• 37:17
  You weren't expecting this, obviously weren't expecting them
• 37:20
  to go in the place that you live.
• 37:22
  What was the next thing that happened?
• 37:27
  So, you know, after they, they, they just came through
• 37:31
  everything. They, they went upstairs and
• 37:32
  they said stuff for my wife and kids, told my wife in front of
• 37:36
  the, the kids what was going on and took me in, you know, booked
• 37:44
  me. I was there for.
• 37:46
  The charge, the charge that you're being booked for is, is
• 37:49
  security selling stock, selling shares of or whatever they say
• 37:55
  the wrong intent is right. It was wire and securities fraud
• 37:59
  and then aggregated, which this one was a shock to me, which I,
• 38:03
  I think they put on a lot of people's aggravated identity
• 38:05
  theft. OK, Because that didn't make
• 38:07
  sense. I'm like, I didn't see anybody's
• 38:09
  identity. But it's the changing of the
• 38:11
  contract they said was aggravated identity theft, which
• 38:14
  I think that was probably my strongest defense because I had
• 38:17
  so much proof that it was not right.
• 38:20
  No, it was. It was.
• 38:21
  Right. And threw an attorney.
• 38:22
  Yeah, but they, they charged me. There's like 10 or 12 counts
• 38:26
  they put in the press release and this is one of those things
• 38:31
  and. They're probably agitated, John,
• 38:32
  honestly, because you turned down three or four of these plea
• 38:35
  agreements. So they thought, well, you know
• 38:36
  what, we're just going to go on. We're going to take him.
• 38:38
  We're going to scare the crap out of him and take him and and
• 38:41
  see how he likes all that. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure.
• 38:45
  But they they put on a press release that said I was facing
• 38:48
  182 years statutory maximum. Now, you know, I didn't know the
• 38:55
  legal system very well. Most people don't.
• 38:57
  And I think we talked about this before I said nobody trusts the
• 38:59
  government until they put a press release out.
• 39:01
  Government puts a press release out, everybody thinks 100.
• 39:03
  Percent. True.
• 39:04
  I see. I see Press release.
• 39:06
  I can't believe so and so didn't I?
• 39:08
  All right, stop. You know, you know better.
• 39:10
  Yeah. So 182 years, a few months after
• 39:15
  I was arrested, that the guy out in California with like a $600
• 39:19
  million fraud Ponzi scheme, Zachary Horowitz gets arrested
• 39:25
  and they put in facing a maximum of 20 years, same office, same
• 39:29
  prosecutor, you know, like, so you know, I think they pick and
• 39:34
  choose that there's something the guy didn't like about me.
• 39:37
  I don't know what the connection was, but there's something that
• 39:40
  he just. So did you go in and out or did
• 39:43
  they keep you there? No, they tried to, they tried to
• 39:46
  say I was a flight risk and luckily the judge said that's
• 39:48
  ridiculous. He is the family is not going
• 39:50
  anywhere. They took my passport.
• 39:52
  We were in Providence. I don't remember the weather if
• 39:55
  like in my mind it was like 0 but it wasn't.
• 39:57
  It was probably 40° or something.
• 40:00
  But I'm in shorts in the T-shirt and and sneakers and they said
• 40:05
  they would let me use the phone. They said they would feed me
• 40:07
  because I was a type 1 diabetic. Luckily I didn't have an issue.
• 40:09
  They didn't feed me. They didn't let me use a phone.
• 40:12
  They let me out of the federal building in the middle of I had
• 40:15
  no phone, nothing in the middle of Providence.
• 40:19
  And luckily my attorney was about four or five blocks away.
• 40:24
  So I just walked there. But they just this tonight
• 40:27
  you're you're out there you go. So wow.
• 40:31
  Well, let's jump into what happened after this 'cause I
• 40:35
  know you went through a battle and, and I mean, you're here and
• 40:38
  you survived it, but let's take a break here.
• 40:40
  I'll, I want to say a lot of people don't like how they show
• 40:42
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• 40:44
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• 40:47
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• 40:50
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• 40:52
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• 40:56
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• 41:04
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• 41:15
  discoverability.co and the Nightmare Success podcast is
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  sponsored by the White Collar Support group, Wells First
• 41:20
  support group devoted to people navigating the white collar
• 41:23
  criminal justice system. I'm a member of the white collar
• 41:25
  support group. John is too.
• 41:28
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• 41:30
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• 41:40
  For more information, go to prisonist.org.
• 41:42
  That's prisonist.org. OK, so John, you, what are you
• 41:48
  thinking? I mean your your head has to be
• 41:51
  spinning, right? Yeah, I, I, I, I don't know what
• 41:56
  I was thinking, to be honest. I.
• 41:57
  I mean, you're walking four blocks in in cold weather and
• 42:00
  shorts and AT shirt thinking holy wow.
• 42:05
  I, I think I was just, I don't, I didn't, you know, I didn't
• 42:10
  grow up sheltered. I, I, you know, I, I'm pretty
• 42:13
  street smart. Yeah, your dad was a police
• 42:15
  officer. Yeah, and I got I've, I've been
• 42:18
  in, you know, I've been around some tough situations.
• 42:21
  I've I, I don't, I don't think that I, you know, I didn't grow
• 42:25
  up in, in the hood and I'm not like, I don't claim to be a
• 42:28
  tough guy, but I've, I've seen a lot, I've been around a lot.
• 42:32
  I think I'm pretty street smart and I think a lot of that helps
• 42:36
  in business. Totally naive to this.
• 42:40
  I, I, I was just so naive to this.
• 42:43
  I thought, I truly believed that the government, I didn't think
• 42:49
  the government told the truth about everything.
• 42:51
  But, but as far as the criminal justice system, I didn't think
• 42:53
  things went like this. I, I really didn't, I, I thought
• 42:58
  it, I thought you dealt with human beings and it, and it
• 43:01
  turns out a lot of times you don't, you deal with robots and,
• 43:04
  and it's just, this is what needs to be done.
• 43:07
  And that's that. And they don't care about
• 43:10
  people, they don't care about families, they don't care about
• 43:13
  the truth. They don't care about the
• 43:14
  victims. They don't.
• 43:15
  They care about how they look. Right convictions.
• 43:19
  Yeah, yeah. And that's how the promotion
• 43:22
  system works too, then, which is it's unfortunate.
• 43:24
  You know, I had Scott Rosenblum on the on the show a couple
• 43:29
  months ago and, and he's, he's been very successful as an
• 43:33
  attorney and, and taking cases to trial.
• 43:37
  And, you know, he said the only way that you can truly get
• 43:40
  justice, and he says very, very rare is it if you have a good
• 43:45
  judge. And he said that's the only real
• 43:49
  way because everything else is is is really all set for wins on
• 43:56
  the on the government side. Yes.
• 43:58
  So when you get to that office of the attorney, what's what's
• 44:02
  he's saying, what's, what's the, what's the discussion now?
• 44:07
  So I had, I had, I went through so many attorneys, but I had two
• 44:10
  attorneys at this time. The other attorney that I had is
• 44:13
  the one who told me that they're not coming to your house.
• 44:15
  This attorney had told me you need to get to somebody in LA,
• 44:22
  local council in LA so we can use them.
• 44:24
  And my mother had just died. So I said, give me a week or
• 44:27
  two, Let me just deal with my mom.
• 44:29
  And my father is, you know, devastated.
• 44:30
  So let me just deal with this and my kids.
• 44:34
  And his was pretty much, I told you so and I didn't use him
• 44:37
  after that. He was like, I told you this was
• 44:39
  going to happen and I didn't want, that's not what I want to
• 44:42
  hear right now. I didn't appreciate that He was,
• 44:46
  he was very much the attorney. He's a very good attorney.
• 44:51
  But he pleads, that's what he does.
• 44:53
  He cleans everybody out. He's a former Jag, very
• 44:57
  accomplished. But at that point, again, naive.
• 45:02
  I was hell bent on fighting. I'm like, I'm fighting this.
• 45:04
  I'm not. There's no way I'm I'm pleading.
• 45:08
  So yeah. So I, he didn't have great
• 45:10
  advice. So my wife came and picked me up
• 45:13
  and, you know, just to, you know, well, everybody's
• 45:19
  shocking. Your wife has obviously been
• 45:21
  supportive, but I mean she has to be in complete shock of what
• 45:23
  happened and. Oh yeah, you're.
• 45:25
  A filmmaker. Yeah, this isn't, this is not
• 45:28
  the world that we know. And it's, I, I felt, I, I, you
• 45:35
  know, there's stuff that happened with my mother was
• 45:38
  awful and, and, and, and, and of course I don't, you know, didn't
• 45:44
  want to see anything happen to her.
• 45:45
  But thank God it was before I was arrested.
• 45:47
  That's all I said, because I, I to do that to her too,
• 45:51
  especially if she was sick, if she was sick.
• 45:53
  And they say, I, I it was, it was you really find out so much
• 46:01
  about people when you deal with something like this, because it
• 46:05
  just people you're just friends with that you think are are, are
• 46:09
  you're close with or have your back.
• 46:10
  And you're not asking them to do anything.
• 46:11
  You're not asking them to lie. You're not asking them to, to
• 46:14
  even have your back, but just some people just disappear.
• 46:18
  They just they're gone. And some of it is by design.
• 46:22
  You know, there's a lot of people that you don't even know
• 46:24
  that have a fear of being around somebody because somehow they
• 46:29
  could get, you know, falls on them, the feathers, you know,
• 46:32
  lands on them. And in, in some cases it really
• 46:35
  does. And, and, and we don't even know
• 46:37
  if they're talking to those people.
• 46:39
  You know that you can't because you're not, you're not in
• 46:42
  discussion about this. And a lot of people just of, of
• 46:45
  the, the government, just as a fear factor can create a wall
• 46:49
  around you and talk to people to scare them off that they won't
• 46:52
  even attempt to reach out to you because they think that somehow
• 46:55
  it's it's, it's a fear of theirs that they could somehow get
• 46:58
  involved in. And I know that's a paranoid
• 47:01
  thing to say, but there's some people that actually do.
• 47:04
  And, and there's a lot of very innocent people that get tied up
• 47:09
  into a system just because they're around it.
• 47:12
  And so that fear is real, but it makes you feel like you're on an
• 47:16
  island. And and when, when you, when
• 47:19
  you're dealing with something that you've never dealt with
• 47:21
  before, being on an island, not knowing what's next, the unknown
• 47:25
  is, is a, is a place, you know, I don't wish on anybody.
• 47:31
  Yeah, it's, it's a very lonely place, you know.
• 47:36
  You know, fortunately for me as I'm, I'm not, I'm not great at
• 47:44
  this. I do my best, but when
• 47:47
  everything started getting bad, I started meditating.
• 47:50
  I always wanted to meditate my whole life, never really could.
• 47:52
  But I started meditating because I needed to do something because
• 47:55
  I was a wreck and I was dealing very, I was, I was responding
• 47:58
  very emotionally to everything and it was affecting my kids.
• 48:02
  I something would happen on a Friday, the whole weekend would
• 48:05
  be gone. So I started doing that.
• 48:07
  And I have a very obsessive personality, so I was doing that
• 48:09
  like crazy. That helped me more than
• 48:12
  anything. As far as just perspective, when
• 48:14
  everything went bad, I was able to stop at some point and relax
• 48:17
  a bit. And I have a a pretty good
• 48:22
  ability to reframe things in my life.
• 48:27
  I think I always have. I can certainly be negative, but
• 48:31
  a lot of times I get really negative and then I take a day
• 48:35
  and then I sit back and then I reprocess and I was able to do
• 48:39
  that with this and I was able to plan and I'm very motivated by
• 48:42
  these things. I wish I wasn't, wish I was
• 48:44
  motivated just by getting up and, you know, wanting to have a
• 48:47
  good day, but motivated by bad things.
• 48:49
  So I was very obsessive for a long time.
• 48:54
  I mean, I had to go through emails and, and it's, it's
• 48:57
  literally like close to 1,000,000 emails because the
• 49:00
  back, back and forth and it's, there was just so much minutiae
• 49:07
  to try to figure out. I ended up getting an attorney
• 49:11
  out in LA who was a, a prosecutor in that same office.
• 49:17
  And he had just gone on his own and I was one of his first
• 49:21
  clients. And I'm lucky I was because we
• 49:24
  had a really good relationship and he went way above and
• 49:27
  beyond. I got charged so much more by
• 49:29
  other attorneys. He charged me once.
• 49:31
  He said if he could pay again, you pay again, if he can't,
• 49:34
  don't. And I wasn't able to.
• 49:36
  I would have if I could have. And incredibly grateful to him.
• 49:40
  But he was, he was really good in walking me through
• 49:43
  everything. Because so much of the stuff is
• 49:45
  you just don't. It's not just the researcher
• 49:48
  figuring out every part of this and making sure everything
• 49:51
  connects because you forget a lot of stuff like you don't,
• 49:54
  you're not trying to lie. But when you tell the story, I
• 49:56
  have to look back some time to say, did this happen or did that
• 49:58
  happen? Because there's so many little
• 50:00
  events. So he was, he was great.
• 50:03
  He was, he was patient with me. He spent an incredible amount of
• 50:07
  time. But one of the things they did
• 50:09
  was they, my evidence was under seal and I had to be with my
• 50:15
  attorney to view it. So he's in LA and I'm here.
• 50:20
  It's, and I'm sure they do this to a lot of people, but it's,
• 50:23
  you have this voluminous amount of evidence or discovery that
• 50:28
  you want to go through, but you have to be with your attorney,
• 50:32
  the attorneys charging you an hourly fee.
• 50:35
  So it, it just, it wasn't really like, I want to be able to get
• 50:39
  up in the middle of the night and go downstairs and look at
• 50:41
  something that I remember and, and go through.
• 50:43
  So that was, that was tough. But the, he said there was
• 50:47
  personal identifying information, but it was all my
• 50:50
  information. She wasn't.
• 50:53
  Right. Yeah.
• 50:54
  Very few things were from other people.
• 50:57
  It was my bank accounts, it was my like, I didn't care.
• 51:00
  But so that was tough. But that's I think another thing
• 51:03
  that they do to to kind of to make it more difficult.
• 51:10
  I think 1. Of the things when they, when
• 51:12
  they had that kind of thing happened, John, is they'll,
• 51:14
  they'll put in, you know, they have all those boxes, they'll
• 51:17
  put boxes and boxes and boxes in the room, you know, for, you
• 51:20
  know, in our case, we had 12 million documents.
• 51:22
  So, you know, it's like, that's a lot.
• 51:24
  And then, then they know that they're looking for one thing
• 51:27
  and they'll put that in like 1 file and, and, you know, 56
• 51:30
  boxes and you have to go through all 56 boxes to find that one
• 51:33
  file. And, and that's, that's real.
• 51:37
  I mean, they, and they can do that.
• 51:38
  There's nothing wrong with them doing that, but it's it's, it's,
• 51:42
  it's a lot. Yeah.
• 51:43
  So you get this attorney, you like this attorney, you start
• 51:46
  going through all this stuff. How long from the time that they
• 51:49
  take you and they take they raid your house.
• 51:51
  Are you in a position to where you think you're getting
• 51:53
  resolution to this? About a year and a half maybe
• 52:02
  before it fled. Before it fled, it was a year
• 52:04
  and a half and. And when you pled, was it a lot
• 52:10
  different looking than what they were trying to present to you in
• 52:13
  those original plea agreements? Well, this is something I didn't
• 52:17
  understand because my plea agreement was worse.
• 52:21
  When you read it, it looked worse.
• 52:23
  My guidelines were high. It was a 70 to 87 months and my
• 52:27
  guidelines before were like 40 to, you know, 48 or something.
• 52:31
  I don't remember the, the exact number, but my attorney wanted
• 52:38
  me to do. He thought this was a better
• 52:41
  deal because it left several things open to argue, you know,
• 52:46
  several of the enhancements and and it was very aggressive,
• 52:50
  which I think also, I think I think it portrayed their side a
• 53:00
  little negatively because it was so aggressive for what they were
• 53:03
  charging, like the actual charge and all the stuff that they were
• 53:06
  trying to say. And, and the guidelines were, I
• 53:10
  mean, I was there with like rapists.
• 53:13
  Like it was really, it was high. So he had wanted me to do it.
• 53:18
  I didn't want to. I was very adamant.
• 53:20
  I didn't, I was, I was very against it because I think I
• 53:27
  figured once I pled, that was it.
• 53:29
  So we went back and forth. He he convinced me that it was
• 53:33
  the best deal and I can make out.
• 53:37
  He was, he convinced me that I can make out with probation.
• 53:40
  I'm like, I am researching everything.
• 53:43
  I'm like nobody makes gets probation with this.
• 53:45
  I said I don't even qualify for it.
• 53:46
  And then he was explaining to me how variances work and
• 53:49
  departures and all that. Well.
• 53:50
  Him being a prosecutor from that office, he would know a lot more
• 53:53
  than most. Yeah.
• 53:54
  So I said I, I, I said I agreed to do it.
• 53:59
  I said the only thing I asked, I said in LA County there's 2
• 54:03
  million people. My town, there's a few 1000.
• 54:06
  So I said I'm not saying they don't have to put a press.
• 54:09
  If they can't put a press release out, I said, but can,
• 54:11
  can they just leave my town out of it?
• 54:14
  So my son, who was in middle school at the time, doesn't get
• 54:19
  affected by it. So we said I'll talk to him.
• 54:22
  So he talks to the prosecutor and the prosecutor says yes, OK,
• 54:26
  we, I go to California, I think it's September.
• 54:31
  We go, we do the plea agreement, we take care of it, go back to
• 54:36
  his office within an hour, I'm getting calls.
• 54:40
  They put a press release out, has my town in it, has
• 54:43
  everything they did. They, they just lied again.
• 54:47
  And I, the other thing I had asked was, can they like, wait
• 54:49
  until I get back? So, like, kids see this, I can
• 54:52
  be there. They put it out right away.
• 54:54
  They put everything they said they wouldn't put in there.
• 54:56
  And then they told my attorney. Oh, we tried, but, you know,
• 54:59
  couldn't, couldn't, couldn't get it.
• 55:03
  Yeah. So it was just, it was just
• 55:06
  shitty. I just, I regardless if I'm 100%
• 55:12
  guilty and I'm the biggest scumbag in the world, why do it
• 55:16
  to my kids? Everybody's going to know who I
• 55:17
  am, The business that I'm in, like the people that I work
• 55:20
  with, they're going to know it's me.
• 55:22
  Why do it to the kids? I don't.
• 55:25
  I don't get that. Yeah.
• 55:27
  Yeah. When you go to your sentencing
• 55:30
  hearing, what are you thinking? So there was a lot of stuff that
• 55:37
  happened in between and I think it had a direct impact on as
• 55:43
  there's stuff with the state of Rhode Island and that was that
• 55:49
  was more brutal than the federal as far as my family is
• 55:52
  concerned. I don't know if you want me to
• 55:57
  go into it, I'm happy to. Well, you can 'cause they were
• 55:59
  two separate cases, but really the same thing.
• 56:01
  Yeah. So I was charged with obtaining
• 56:04
  money under false pretenses in the state.
• 56:08
  And it was a really weird case because it was somebody I didn't
• 56:11
  deal with and it was somebody that wasn't even the investor on
• 56:14
  the contract until the day of. And my former partner dealt with
• 56:17
  them. I went to dinner with them,
• 56:19
  emailed talk to him. I didn't.
• 56:21
  I spoke to his lawyer. We negotiated a deal for a
• 56:27
  project that we owned and we were doing it to get paid.
• 56:32
  That's why we were doing the deal.
• 56:33
  We were doing it. We had producer fees.
• 56:35
  We had it for a while and it was a big project.
• 56:37
  So we were able to take an advance.
• 56:40
  Basically what you do in that situation is you take an advance
• 56:45
  on what you're good for, right? So it's more risky for the
• 56:48
  investor because you don't know what's going to move forward,
• 56:51
  but it's worse for the producer because you're giving away a
• 56:55
  bigger piece of something for for later on.
• 56:59
  So we did that. We had no issues.
• 57:02
  Six months later, the guy had an issue.
• 57:06
  It was, I didn't want to get into all that.
• 57:09
  It was so complicated. It was just nonsense.
• 57:11
  But there was an issue. We, we're going to arbitration
• 57:16
  to fight it. My attorneys at the time told me
• 57:19
  the guy doesn't live here. He lives in like Sweden or
• 57:23
  something. So if you win, you're not going
• 57:26
  to collect anything from him. The company doesn't have any
• 57:30
  assets. Just bankrupt the company and
• 57:33
  plead to the award and then you'll be done.
• 57:36
  So we did that. We also signed a side agreement
• 57:39
  with that guy saying that we would pay him if it went forward
• 57:42
  anyway, like he'd get his money, which it was going to be full.
• 57:44
  I had a $20 million offer, by the way, on that project.
• 57:47
  I had a $20 million offer in writing an e-mail.
• 57:50
  I still have it. A few months later, state police
• 57:57
  come to my house. I was taking pictures on the
• 58:00
  last day of school with the kids and to arrest me.
• 58:03
  Blown away. I had no idea what was going on.
• 58:07
  They arrest me. That was before I got indicted
• 58:10
  for on. The federal side.
• 58:13
  Yes, and I had found that the federal government reached out
• 58:17
  to the state as well. They had were kind.
• 58:20
  Of all coordinated and helping each other through the process.
• 58:22
  Yeah, yeah. So that goes on for several
• 58:25
  years where it's just pretrial and eventually we get to the
• 58:33
  point where there's going to be a trial.
• 58:34
  So I, I told my attorney I want the trial before my federal
• 58:38
  sentencing. I want to prove to the judge
• 58:40
  that I'm innocent. My attorney is about a month
• 58:47
  before the trial disappeared, would not respond to me, would
• 58:51
  not get back to me. The trial was on a Monday.
• 58:56
  On Friday my he reached out about the federal case to ask me
• 59:03
  some questions and then I said, alright, can we talk about
• 59:08
  Monday the trial? So he said yeah, he said Sunday,
• 59:14
  I'm working on this all day. So he said as of Sunday, we
• 59:20
  should, we'll have a conversation, we'll go through
• 59:23
  all the stuff. And I was sending him stuff.
• 59:24
  I had that program, I was telling you about before that,
• 59:27
  that legal program. So I had the deposition
• 59:29
  questions. I had everything laid out.
• 59:34
  Sunday he doesn't get back to me.
• 59:36
  He doesn't call me back, disappears.
• 59:37
  So now I'm worried I'm going to walk into court and I'm
• 59:39
  defending. An attorney without
• 59:41
  representation. Yeah.
• 59:43
  So I, I get into court, the judge says it's going to be
• 59:46
  about a five day trial. The the trial, you know, we go
• 59:54
  into jury selection, which lasted about a day, day and a
• 1:00:00
  half. And the trial ends up being
• 1:00:03
  about two days before this. My what he ended up telling me
• 1:00:08
  what my attorney said was he said we're not going to put up a
• 1:00:12
  defense. I said, what do you mean?
• 1:00:14
  I said we have all this, you know, he said.
• 1:00:17
  They have no case. They have the burden.
• 1:00:19
  This is a valid strategy. Burden's on them.
• 1:00:24
  Yeah. If they don't prove their case,
• 1:00:26
  you'll walk out. Right.
• 1:00:27
  They had there was an attorney that I talked to.
• 1:00:29
  The only person I talked to was the attorney.
• 1:00:31
  They couldn't get him to come in.
• 1:00:33
  The only person that came in was the alleged victim said OK, I
• 1:00:37
  didn't like it. I texted people.
• 1:00:40
  I didn't lie. I was a very nervous by it.
• 1:00:41
  My my judge was a former federal prosecutor didn't like it at all
• 1:00:46
  very uncomfortable. So the the trial was a day and a
• 1:00:49
  half. The investor got up there and
• 1:00:51
  lied, said we spoke, said we emailed.
• 1:00:55
  I have my computer on the side of me.
• 1:00:57
  I show my attorney like this is my partner e-mail.
• 1:01:00
  It's emailing me. I spoke to this guy, you know,
• 1:01:03
  give me a call. I have everything in in writing
• 1:01:08
  the I also have a contract by the way, with this with this
• 1:01:13
  person. So even what there was a
• 1:01:15
  multiple levels here even what he was saying we had a contract
• 1:01:20
  for so the charge didn't make sense based on the contract.
• 1:01:23
  But then he's saying that I talked to him, which we could
• 1:01:25
  prove I didn't. I said pull my phone records.
• 1:01:28
  Attorney didn't do any of it. He, he confused me with my
• 1:01:31
  apartment, whose name was also John, who spoke to Regardless of
• 1:01:37
  that, I still don't think we did anything wrong.
• 1:01:39
  But he confused me with somebody else and they used that and they
• 1:01:42
  said I spoke to him and I manipulated him and I, I can
• 1:01:44
  prove that I didn't. It's right there in black and
• 1:01:47
  white. So the jury goes back, come back
• 1:01:52
  in an hour, find me guilty. I was I.
• 1:01:56
  This is before sentencing of the federal side.
• 1:02:00
  And and the prosecutor in that painted me out to be.
• 1:02:05
  A monster. Yeah, he was, he did a very good
• 1:02:08
  job that this guy was desperate. He was gambling, which I was.
• 1:02:12
  I was. But one doesn't have to do with
• 1:02:15
  the other. I can gamble with my own money.
• 1:02:18
  So he said he was gambling, he was desperate.
• 1:02:20
  And he was, he was, you know, lying And, and it was he, he
• 1:02:26
  crafted it very well. And my attorney was very much
• 1:02:30
  fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, Right in his closing argument, which
• 1:02:34
  didn't hear any of that. They saw some.
• 1:02:36
  They were. They're much more.
• 1:02:39
  As you know, the story is always better than the just the facts.
• 1:02:43
  Yeah, So that happened to everybody's surprise, to
• 1:02:48
  everybody's surprise, even to this day, the judge remanded me
• 1:02:52
  after that into the judge on record said there's several
• 1:02:56
  appellate issues with this case because there were a lot of he
• 1:02:58
  made some errors too. He's like, but he he.
• 1:03:02
  Immediately remands you into custody.
• 1:03:04
  Yeah, which listen, we had during my trial, we had like a
• 1:03:11
  break during lunch once where he had a murder sentencing.
• 1:03:16
  The kid was convicted of murder and he let him stay out for 60
• 1:03:19
  days to get his affairs in order.
• 1:03:21
  And I had been on pretrial for five years, federal and state,
• 1:03:25
  not a single issue. I was a low risk offender, which
• 1:03:27
  means I'd write something in and he remanded me and he did that
• 1:03:32
  because he knew that was the only way to make sure that I
• 1:03:36
  was. He got me.
• 1:03:37
  How long were you? In.
• 1:03:40
  So that was in October and I was in for 89 days.
• 1:03:44
  And so it was, it was high security and it was intake.
• 1:03:53
  So I was in the hospital for the first few days.
• 1:03:57
  I'm a type 1 diabetic. They don't understand type one.
• 1:04:00
  They treat you like type 2. I had so many issues.
• 1:04:03
  I've never passed out before. I passed out multiple times, hit
• 1:04:05
  my head. I was taken to the hospital
• 1:04:07
  multiple times. They almost killed.
• 1:04:08
  My blood sugar was over 600 multiple times.
• 1:04:12
  And the nurses I, I have all the respect in the world for nurses.
• 1:04:18
  I love them. I go to the hospital, I get to
• 1:04:19
  the most wonderful people in there.
• 1:04:22
  There were two that were just monsters.
• 1:04:24
  They called us cockroaches. They would withhold insulin if
• 1:04:28
  they were mad at me, they would they they claim you're doing all
• 1:04:32
  these things. The I always thought going to
• 1:04:38
  prison, if I went, I would be a little concerned about my
• 1:04:42
  safety. And you know, the other inmates
• 1:04:45
  and we were being targeted got a single issue with an inmate.
• 1:04:50
  The CE OS were awful, awful. They would call you the most
• 1:04:56
  derogatory terms just entering, entering the, the, you know,
• 1:05:00
  the, the quad over there. So I was there for that period
• 1:05:04
  of time. We tried to get myself out
• 1:05:07
  multiple times with medical emergency bail judge, judge just
• 1:05:17
  wasn't having it. We knew that was going to
• 1:05:18
  happen. We, we tried to get him to
• 1:05:19
  overturn as a 13th juror. We tried to get it overturned
• 1:05:23
  out of rule, I think 16 because he he allowed evidence in that
• 1:05:27
  wasn't substantiated and the jury used that to convict me.
• 1:05:33
  Didn't care. The judge said if I didn't spend
• 1:05:36
  the money so quickly, she would see my attorney.
• 1:05:40
  He would see my attorneys a point, but I spent it too
• 1:05:44
  quickly and my attorney said what judge if I get paid on a
• 1:05:47
  Friday, I can spend that money on whatever I want.
• 1:05:50
  But he couldn't see that the the state police had the wrong bank
• 1:05:55
  records. They said I spent money on
• 1:05:57
  myself right away. I sent 45,000 to my partner.
• 1:06:01
  They said I sent it to myself. I moved it from my checking to
• 1:06:04
  the savings of the same business account and then I sent I wired
• 1:06:08
  money out through there. Everything was documented.
• 1:06:11
  They said they wanted receipts. I put up 101 thousand.
• 1:06:13
  It was it was 99,000. It was 100,000.
• 1:06:16
  I put up 100,000 and 101,000 in receipts without myself or my
• 1:06:20
  partner getting paid just to prove to that, that the
• 1:06:22
  expenses. We had the deal, we had all the
• 1:06:24
  stuff in place. Nobody cared.
• 1:06:27
  So what ended up happening was I had an appeal, I had an appeals
• 1:06:30
  attorney and I had to make a deal.
• 1:06:36
  I was, I went in a few days before my 11 year old's 9th
• 1:06:41
  birthday. She was devastated.
• 1:06:43
  They were devastated. That kind.
• 1:06:45
  If I, if I had expected to be remanded or even for the trial
• 1:06:49
  to end that I would have prepared them for something.
• 1:06:51
  I don't even tell them about this because I never expected
• 1:06:53
  this, but I ended up making a deal to get out, which was
• 1:07:01
  frustrating because I I got out two days before Christmas.
• 1:07:05
  This is why I did it. I had to pay that guy the money
• 1:07:09
  back, which that wasn't even the biggest issue.
• 1:07:12
  I didn't have it. So I had to borrow it, but I had
• 1:07:17
  to pay him back basically pay for for my partner getting paid
• 1:07:21
  and all that stuff. And I had, but the biggest thing
• 1:07:24
  was I had to waive my appellate rights.
• 1:07:27
  So they wouldn't let me out, let's say waive my appellate
• 1:07:29
  rights, which is, you know, kind of interesting that they do
• 1:07:33
  that. They, they didn't want to lose
• 1:07:37
  their conviction. They didn't care if I was
• 1:07:40
  innocent. They did not care.
• 1:07:44
  One other part to this, the person who made this claim
• 1:07:47
  against me had the attorney that I spoke to, he sued his attorney
• 1:07:53
  for fraud and malpractice in Chicago in federal court, saying
• 1:07:58
  his attorney did what he said I did.
• 1:08:01
  They had a settlement. His attorney brought in all
• 1:08:04
  other people as third party defendants.
• 1:08:07
  He didn't bring in me. My name wasn't in there besides
• 1:08:10
  saying I owned the project. So if this attorney is at risk
• 1:08:15
  of losing his license, he's going to bring in everybody that
• 1:08:19
  he thinks had anything to do with it.
• 1:08:20
  He would have brought me in in a second, didn't bring me in.
• 1:08:23
  Why wasn't I brought into that? So it's just a frustrating thing
• 1:08:26
  because that then changed the whole dynamic of everything
• 1:08:31
  around me with people because now I'm a habitual offender and
• 1:08:37
  obviously everything I said on the federal was a lie because
• 1:08:40
  obviously I did strengthens. The narrative that they have out
• 1:08:43
  there, yeah. But having said that, and I said
• 1:08:46
  the time I got the worst possible judge in the state
• 1:08:51
  case, I got the best possible judge in my federal case because
• 1:08:55
  when I was told by by a consultant who has been around
• 1:09:02
  for a while, not one of the the more loud once, but he's been
• 1:09:06
  around for a while out in DC. He was very kind and spoke to me
• 1:09:11
  for a bit. And he said about my judge, he's
• 1:09:15
  he doesn't like bullies. He does what he thinks is right
• 1:09:19
  and doesn't care what anybody else thinks.
• 1:09:22
  And he has a very strong sense of family and obligation And all
• 1:09:29
  of those things held true when it came to my sentencing.
• 1:09:35
  So my sentencing got pushed a few times because of that and
• 1:09:40
  then other reasons. And then when we were in my
• 1:09:44
  sentencing after that, which was 2024, I was like June 2024, the
• 1:09:51
  government got all my records from the state, put those
• 1:09:56
  forward, said I was manipulating the system, sent in my
• 1:10:00
  healthcare records saying, you know, I was trying to make
• 1:10:06
  myself sick to get out of prison, I'm a scam artist.
• 1:10:09
  And then they recommended originally they were saying like
• 1:10:12
  70 something months. They were recommending now 87
• 1:10:14
  months. PSR still said 70.
• 1:10:16
  You know, both times the judge went through that stuff, I
• 1:10:26
  rebutted it line by line and showed that my medical records
• 1:10:32
  from the state contradicted themselves.
• 1:10:34
  They would say something and then they'd be something
• 1:10:36
  different. So they would, and then they
• 1:10:39
  would also do things in pencil because they think they were
• 1:10:41
  raced. They would erase certain things.
• 1:10:45
  I was shocked because the one thing I've always heard about
• 1:10:48
  the government is they're very, very thorough.
• 1:10:50
  I don't think they looked at any of the records.
• 1:10:52
  I think they trusted the state. And that blew up in their face
• 1:10:55
  because I think that was one of the biggest factors for the
• 1:10:58
  judge. The judge knew I got screwed
• 1:11:00
  there and he was he was pretty pissed off about it and I think
• 1:11:05
  that worked in my favor. So I got pushed a few more
• 1:11:08
  times. We went out there.
• 1:11:11
  I think of that October, my wife and I landed my attorney texts
• 1:11:15
  me. He goes, I know you're in the
• 1:11:16
  air, but they just moved. They just moved the sentencing.
• 1:11:21
  So he couple months, you go back land again, same exact thing
• 1:11:26
  happens. So sorry.
• 1:11:28
  As soon as we landed in California and then we went back
• 1:11:31
  in February 25 and that was the final sentencing.
• 1:11:34
  What happened? I ended up getting three years.
• 1:11:43
  Was it not probation? I would say probation, but it's
• 1:11:46
  supervised, supervised release. Three years supervised release
• 1:11:51
  with home confinement as a condition, but I'm allowed out
• 1:11:58
  for anything with my kids, my wife, mental health, anything
• 1:12:02
  with them and my father who's been sick for a while and work,
• 1:12:07
  and they've been very, very fair.
• 1:12:12
  Well, I can tell you this, everything that you just said
• 1:12:15
  about that judge is what Scott, I mentioned earlier when we were
• 1:12:19
  talking about the only way that you get justice is if you have a
• 1:12:23
  judge that is fair. And and that's, you know, it's
• 1:12:27
  just the luck of the draw man. And you had you had those things
• 1:12:32
  that he was looking for and also being this Family Guy and it all
• 1:12:38
  checked the boxes and he went with what he was going to do,
• 1:12:41
  not what they told him to do through their charging
• 1:12:44
  documents, which is unbelievable.
• 1:12:46
  And, you know, it doesn't happen very often, John.
• 1:12:49
  I mean, I know your story, but even when I hear it again, it's
• 1:12:53
  it's, it's just fascinating. Well, and then and then, I'm not
• 1:12:58
  sure if you knew, but then they appealed it did I?
• 1:13:01
  Oh no, I did not know that. So.
• 1:13:04
  So they appealed the fact that you got the sentencing that you
• 1:13:07
  got. So my my attorney was a was a
• 1:13:12
  prosecutor and he was telling me, all right, they have two
• 1:13:15
  weeks before you're in the clear.
• 1:13:18
  So but he was thinking when he was a prosecutor who was, we had
• 1:13:21
  two weeks to appeal that they had 30, but he was he just, he
• 1:13:26
  just mixed it up. So I start looking, I see 30
• 1:13:29
  days a lot. So I didn't say anything to him,
• 1:13:31
  but we get past it about the third week I write out, I said,
• 1:13:35
  hey, Michael. I said I think I looked and I
• 1:13:38
  said everything saying 30 days. He goes, yeah, he beat me to it.
• 1:13:41
  I misspoke. And he explained that there's,
• 1:13:44
  you know, is 30 days. So on the 30th day they they
• 1:13:50
  appeal. So what happened with that?
• 1:13:52
  Did they? I'm sure you had to go through a
• 1:13:54
  hearing and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:13:55
  Yeah, So I didn't when they appealed, I didn't tell my wife.
• 1:13:58
  I didn't tell anybody because I didn't want like they went
• 1:14:01
  through enough at that point. I didn't want them to have to go
• 1:14:03
  through you're. Going to live on this one your
• 1:14:05
  own. Because we just had great news
• 1:14:07
  and I'm like, you got to be like a bit again.
• 1:14:10
  So yeah. It's all good, everything's
• 1:14:11
  fine. Yeah.
• 1:14:13
  So they had I think 30 days for their first brief and 29th day
• 1:14:23
  they filed an extension for 90 days.
• 1:14:27
  And you know, and all this is doing is obviously there's a a
• 1:14:29
  fear there, but all that's for sure doing is just prolonging it
• 1:14:34
  for you. And you're like.
• 1:14:34
  That's torture. Yeah, there's private old
• 1:14:37
  torture. There's work I can't do until
• 1:14:39
  this is done. Like there's things that have to
• 1:14:40
  get moving forward on. So that went on until about two
• 1:14:49
  or three days before their that their, their filing was due and
• 1:14:57
  my attorney emailed me and, and forwarded their e-mail saying we
• 1:15:02
  suppose there's no objections if we withdraw our appeal.
• 1:15:05
  So I said, no, I think we're good.
• 1:15:07
  I'm not going to object to that. No.
• 1:15:10
  They did and I was, I was very, very I had looked up the
• 1:15:15
  statistic for for them for the government appealing middle case
• 1:15:20
  2024 because it's not available for 25 in 2024.
• 1:15:24
  The government out of like 60,000 sentencings right around
• 1:15:29
  there they only appealed 21. Wow.
• 1:15:33
  So. That is, that is a number I
• 1:15:36
  didn't wasn't familiar with. That's incredible.
• 1:15:38
  Yeah, it's insane. So again, it made me think and
• 1:15:44
  there's some connections. Well, you know what?
• 1:15:46
  I don't know yeah, the crazy part of your whole this whole
• 1:15:50
  journey you've been on, you've gotten the harshest part of the
• 1:15:54
  equation until you got to the judge and that's where you got
• 1:15:59
  some some realness and and you know somebody that was did look
• 1:16:05
  at you looked at you like a person and then what's really
• 1:16:09
  going on here? And and then you got the best
• 1:16:11
  outcome at that point that you get cuz hardly anybody gets that
• 1:16:16
  Usually they Max you the other way.
• 1:16:17
  I had I had probation to five years and got five years.
• 1:16:20
  But so let's let's talk about now.
• 1:16:24
  I mean you're in the midst of having really good news.
• 1:16:28
  They appeal the thing that doesn't happen.
• 1:16:31
  You're unsupervised release, but you're living your life.
• 1:16:34
  You've got the you're a partner in Dial 9 entertainment.
• 1:16:38
  What's what's going on in your world now, John?
• 1:16:41
  So you know, I've I've been doing.
• 1:16:45
  Survived a war. I've, I've, I've, you know, I
• 1:16:52
  think it's real easy. I get frustrated with my, my
• 1:16:55
  wife and kids sometimes about this, you know, and this and
• 1:16:58
  they're just, they're not, they're just living their life.
• 1:17:00
  They didn't, they didn't. My wife dealt with a tremendous
• 1:17:03
  amount. My kids, we kept out mostly.
• 1:17:06
  But I get frustrated and it's, it's, you know, we all deal with
• 1:17:10
  this differently because I, I'm like, we went through something
• 1:17:14
  that was so it was just a, a bad experience all around.
• 1:17:18
  It was traumatizing for a lot of people different ways.
• 1:17:21
  And we are blessed. We got the, the, the best
• 1:17:26
  possible outcome you can imagine.
• 1:17:31
  So like when, when things happen, we get frustrated about
• 1:17:35
  these little things. A lot of times I can step back
• 1:17:37
  and say, you know what, it happened.
• 1:17:39
  It happened a week ago. I had reached out to Jeff.
• 1:17:42
  I forget what it was. Somebody, somebody said some,
• 1:17:45
  oh, somebody did a podcast about me and they just said I didn't
• 1:17:48
  own anything. And they, they, they just, you
• 1:17:50
  know, said a bunch of stuff that wasn't even remotely true.
• 1:17:54
  And I sent it to Jeff and I'm like, you know, I, I ranted a
• 1:17:56
  little bit and then the next day I text him.
• 1:17:59
  I said. This is Jeff Grant, the founder
• 1:18:01
  of The White Collars. Yeah, and he's great.
• 1:18:04
  So. And I wrote back the next day.
• 1:18:07
  I said, you know what? Sometimes I rant about these
• 1:18:10
  things and I step back and say I could be in jail right now.
• 1:18:13
  And if somebody came to me and said you have the choice to go
• 1:18:17
  to jail for three years or have 50 podcasts disparaging you put
• 1:18:22
  out, what will you do? I wouldn't even think twice.
• 1:18:26
  I wouldn't even blink. I would just say podcast, do
• 1:18:28
  100. I don't care.
• 1:18:29
  Feel like you, you get in a situation that's good and then
• 1:18:32
  that happens. It's gets frustrating, but it's
• 1:18:34
  just perspective and you're not going to change everybody.
• 1:18:36
  It's definitely perspective and, and you know, I, I would assume
• 1:18:40
  that John, in your business, you know, world, the world you're
• 1:18:44
  in, it's all creative talent. And if you can bring things to
• 1:18:50
  the table, I'm sure that which the experience that you have is
• 1:18:56
  in a chapter of your life. It's not your whole life.
• 1:18:58
  And, and you know, you've, you've done some great work in
• 1:19:03
  the film world. And I would think that that
• 1:19:05
  would be because it's, it's not Wall Street, it's artistry and,
• 1:19:11
  and movies and film. I would I would think that you
• 1:19:16
  would have possibly a path back because there's a lot of
• 1:19:21
  different people in Hollywood who have things happen to them.
• 1:19:25
  There's a lot of people with a hell of a lot worse things that
• 1:19:29
  they've done legitimately have done.
• 1:19:32
  And there's a lot of people that have done a lot of bad things
• 1:19:35
  that people know about and they continue to go on and work part.
• 1:19:41
  You know, for me, it was important to get, I said I'm not
• 1:19:48
  going to change. I'm not going to remove the
• 1:19:50
  government press releases. I'm not going to, you know, when
• 1:19:52
  I got my sentence, they didn't, they didn't put a press release
• 1:19:55
  out about that. Why?
• 1:19:57
  If they're being fair and is just reporting news when they
• 1:20:00
  put the press release out about my sentence, No, because it
• 1:20:02
  didn't look good for them. Right on their side, right.
• 1:20:05
  So you know, that's that stuff is what it is.
• 1:20:10
  You know, I work in, although I'm in a creative business, I
• 1:20:13
  work in the business end of it. A lot of times the financial and
• 1:20:19
  not just I raised money in the past, but like planning, like
• 1:20:24
  how money is going to be spent putting the actual package
• 1:20:29
  together. This is what we need here, here,
• 1:20:30
  here, here. So I won't raise money.
• 1:20:33
  I didn't want to deal with it. I don't want to do any of that.
• 1:20:36
  I could, I could ask to do it for my probation officer if I
• 1:20:40
  wanted to, but I have no interest in raising one.
• 1:20:42
  I never liked raising money, but I do make sure people stay on
• 1:20:47
  schedule. So what I've done, and I did it
• 1:20:49
  throughout this to make it easy because I don't want to be on
• 1:20:52
  bank accounts. So I just need reports.
• 1:20:54
  I need to know the plan, I need to help create the plan.
• 1:20:57
  And then when we're making the movie, I get reports and I can
• 1:21:01
  see where the spending is and I can determine what's where.
• 1:21:04
  We're spending too much, where we got to cut back.
• 1:21:07
  So you just categorize everything that has to happen in
• 1:21:09
  the film and make sure that they have the money to make it happen
• 1:21:12
  as it goes through so that they don't not have any money at the
• 1:21:15
  end. I get it.
• 1:21:16
  Yeah. And there's people that I worked
• 1:21:17
  with that I worked with before and there's people that I
• 1:21:18
  started working with afterwards that like me and trust me and I,
• 1:21:23
  that's great. Everything I did was on my
• 1:21:25
  reputation in the business. So it was a a big hit when it
• 1:21:29
  when this happened. Oh, for sure.
• 1:21:31
  And I was somebody that was so focused on what other people
• 1:21:35
  thought. And so that's one of the other
• 1:21:37
  good things I think about this. It was such a an irrational fear
• 1:21:41
  of what other people think that when this happened here slept.
• 1:21:44
  Yeah, you hit the rock bottom, you got to step back up and it
• 1:21:47
  doesn't. You don't have to worry about
• 1:21:49
  that anymore. What can you do here?
• 1:21:51
  This is. Yeah, I remember when I, I, I
• 1:21:54
  had a lot of money and I, you know, I thought, gosh, what if,
• 1:21:57
  what if I lost it all? And then he, you know, when you
• 1:21:59
  do lose it all, well, you don't have to worry about that
• 1:22:01
  anymore. No more of that fear.
• 1:22:04
  I'm going to worry about something else.
• 1:22:08
  And I have, there's some things I'm working on in this, in this
• 1:22:13
  realm. So, you know, and, and I think I
• 1:22:15
  told you this, well, I'm going to talk to you about that at
• 1:22:18
  some point. I'm getting attention to a lot
• 1:22:21
  of this stuff. One of the things when I was at
• 1:22:25
  the state that I, that I quickly realized was there were so many
• 1:22:31
  kids there that a lot of them were guilty, but they were there
• 1:22:37
  for so much worse than they did. They were.
• 1:22:40
  Overcharged. Yeah, and other people, maybe
• 1:22:43
  they were, maybe they weren't, who knows.
• 1:22:45
  But the one thing that was consistent was regardless of the
• 1:22:49
  situation, they, it's most people were overcharged, taken
• 1:22:53
  advantage of, leveraged into the situation that they were in.
• 1:22:57
  And you know, that's, that's hard.
• 1:23:01
  And I, I, there's so many elements that people don't see
• 1:23:04
  the behind the scenes stuff, the family stuff, how they're
• 1:23:06
  affected. You know, people think on a
• 1:23:10
  white collar and they just think, oh, rich, rich asshole.
• 1:23:14
  That's usually what they think. But until it happens to you,
• 1:23:20
  people don't really understand that it's not just that if
• 1:23:23
  there's so many other pieces to it and things.
• 1:23:26
  And I wish there was. I wish there was a better system
• 1:23:32
  in place to keep people accountable, but to focus on the
• 1:23:39
  people that get hurt destroying somebody's life so they can't
• 1:23:43
  work again and and they can't make money when there are
• 1:23:45
  victims involved makes no sense. I don't think the victims want
• 1:23:49
  that. You can very easily.
• 1:23:51
  They monitor everything. They can very easily monitor you
• 1:23:53
  and every dime that you make. And if you can make good money,
• 1:23:56
  you can pay people back. Why not do that instead of you
• 1:24:01
  get the head headlines and jail time and it just doesn't make,
• 1:24:06
  you know, doesn't make a lot of sense.
• 1:24:07
  And I, I wish there was a better way and I hope there is.
• 1:24:10
  And. Well, I mean, it's it's it's one
• 1:24:12
  of those things, John, where the re entering society after
• 1:24:20
  something happens to you like this and it's made so public.
• 1:24:25
  You know, people have trouble with housing because you've got
• 1:24:30
  to put down, you know, a lot of times it's, it's illegal to
• 1:24:32
  discriminate against you. So that's the really bad part of
• 1:24:35
  it. It's really actually legal to
• 1:24:36
  discriminate. It's it's, it's legal to not
• 1:24:40
  give you a job because of your record.
• 1:24:43
  It's legal to debank to debank you.
• 1:24:46
  It's legal for them to just say that we don't want you, you, we
• 1:24:49
  don't like what happened to you. So you can't bank here and you
• 1:24:53
  know, the community part of it is, is that you've you have this
• 1:24:57
  situation where you have the, you know, the scarlet letter F
• 1:25:00
  on your head and you have to figure out how to live with that
• 1:25:04
  and own a story so that you can be somebody again and not be
• 1:25:10
  hiding in a corner. So all those different things
• 1:25:13
  are a lot of moving parts and they're stacked to where what
• 1:25:19
  you're talking about is it we don't necessarily have to
• 1:25:23
  destroy somebody when they get out and then just push them
• 1:25:26
  back. You know, if you can't get
• 1:25:28
  housing and you end up in the worst part of town, that's bad.
• 1:25:32
  And you know, you're in the worst part of town and, and how
• 1:25:35
  do you get out of that? So it's there's so many pieces
• 1:25:38
  to it, but there are ways I think that it could if, if
• 1:25:43
  people were more aware of it, that people would want to make
• 1:25:46
  it better because it's broken, system's broken process is
• 1:25:51
  broken. But because it's broken, there
• 1:25:53
  are things that people can do to fix it if people know more about
• 1:25:57
  it. I just don't think enough people
• 1:25:58
  know about how bad things can get when somebody has to go
• 1:26:02
  through a system that basically strips you down to, you know,
• 1:26:08
  your rock bottom moment and then you have to try to get back.
• 1:26:11
  And that's it's a tough thing. But going through all that,
• 1:26:16
  John, what do you think's your biggest take away through all
• 1:26:18
  this that you've experienced? I think I've learned a whole
• 1:26:28
  heck of a lot, that's for sure. I think in business I took away
• 1:26:37
  that just to document stuff. I didn't document a lot of
• 1:26:44
  things, even conversations, just following up with a
• 1:26:46
  conversation, hey, based on this conversation, little stuff like
• 1:26:49
  that, which could have helped me tremendously.
• 1:26:52
  I think in my personal life, like I said, it is some of it
• 1:26:58
  sucks because you, you realize some people just turn their back
• 1:27:01
  on you and family, some family, the way some people act is, is
• 1:27:06
  difficult because it's hurtful, you know, and they're looking
• 1:27:12
  from their perspectives and you're looking from yours.
• 1:27:15
  But I think, you know, you learn who the people that really care
• 1:27:19
  about you are. And I think the biggest take
• 1:27:22
  away and all of it, and I, I think I throughout this whole
• 1:27:28
  thing, I can't, I would tell my wife all the time, I'm not going
• 1:27:30
  to let them make me like them because there's a lot of things
• 1:27:34
  I wanted to say or do and be more, you know, angry at, at,
• 1:27:40
  you know, when speaking about it.
• 1:27:42
  But I said, I'm not going to let, I'm not going to do what
• 1:27:44
  they do. I'm not going to be them.
• 1:27:48
  But I think I, and I would always say I have my wife who
• 1:27:54
  stood by me through all of this and she went through a lot
• 1:27:58
  making people don't see the little things that are involved
• 1:28:02
  in the community that she's affected by.
• 1:28:05
  You know, she has her business, she's a photographer.
• 1:28:08
  Luckily her business is done well, but you know, she's gone
• 1:28:14
  through a lot. And then the things your kids go
• 1:28:15
  through. But I've said if I have them
• 1:28:18
  behind me, then hopefully I have other people that are.
• 1:28:23
  But if I don't, as long as I have them, that's, that's my
• 1:28:25
  world. So.
• 1:28:27
  That's a strong take away. You find out who the people are
• 1:28:30
  that are with you and if you've got your family, that's a lot of
• 1:28:33
  everything. Oh yeah, that's it's a big deal.
• 1:28:36
  It is. It is.
• 1:28:37
  I, I've, I've, I second that. Wow, what a, what a thing, John,
• 1:28:45
  that you experienced. And then to have all that
• 1:28:48
  ugliness and end up with a fair judge is incredible that that
• 1:28:53
  all happened the way it did. Incredibly I I I want to write a
• 1:28:57
  letter to him but I can't until I think I'm off.
• 1:29:00
  But my wife said it too. He just.
• 1:29:03
  I can't explain again I've never been in this situation before
• 1:29:07
  but when I'm giving my allocution and speaking to him
• 1:29:13
  my wife said it too. He just had like kind eyes.
• 1:29:17
  He looked like he actually cared about me as a person and not
• 1:29:21
  like I'm just I, I will be and it's not.
• 1:29:25
  He could have done that and given me a year, you know,
• 1:29:28
  because as you know, they get what they get and.
• 1:29:31
  Did he already know you'd been through hell?
• 1:29:32
  Yeah, so he could have done a lot.
• 1:29:34
  I still would have been grateful to him, but he just he, I, I
• 1:29:37
  feel like he really took me and my family into account, which
• 1:29:42
  they say that they're supposed to, but so.
• 1:29:45
  Many don't, yeah. And, and that was as a matter of
• 1:29:51
  fact, one, there was one particular investor that was at
• 1:29:54
  the at my sentencing that as I got up to get my allocution, he
• 1:29:59
  started to record me. And the judge caught him and was
• 1:30:04
  pissed and said if you do that again, you're out of here.
• 1:30:07
  And I don't know if that had anything to do with anything,
• 1:30:10
  but he just, he was very just what the guy said he was, he was
• 1:30:16
  fair. He was he did what he thought
• 1:30:19
  was right and didn't really care what anybody.
• 1:30:20
  Else didn't let anybody pressure him.
• 1:30:22
  Yeah, so. It's huge, huge.
• 1:30:24
  Well, speaking about gratitude, I'd I love the fact that
• 1:30:28
  Homestead financial home mortgage lets me use this
• 1:30:31
  podcast studio. If you've got home mortgage
• 1:30:34
  needs out there, Greg Afdov, he's your guy.
• 1:30:37
  He knows it all. If you're looking for a book,
• 1:30:41
  get it. It's Nightmare.
• 1:30:43
  Success, loyalty, betrayal, life behind bars, adapting, and
• 1:30:45
  finally breaking free. It's the story of my world.
• 1:30:50
  And if you want to know anything about me, go to
• 1:30:53
  brentcassidy.com. I spell it wrong.
• 1:30:54
  I spell it with ATY, not a DY. And if you want to see all the
• 1:30:58
  episodes, you know you can see it on all the platforms, but you
• 1:31:01
  can also go to nightmaresuccess.com.
• 1:31:04
  They'll get a little bit further background and as I used to say
• 1:31:08
  to my people when I was writing my emails back and forth from
• 1:31:11
  Leavenworth, stay strong. I'll do the same.
• 1:31:13
  John, man, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your
• 1:31:16
  story. And you got it, man.
• 1:31:18
  You made it to the other side and you survived.
• 1:31:20
  And I think you could go on and do some things that we're going
• 1:31:23
  to be reading more about all the stuff that you do and, and this
• 1:31:28
  is just a chapter. Yeah, I appreciate it, Brent.
• 1:31:30
  Thank you for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity.
• 1:31:34
  All right, folks, nightmare success in and out.