Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal

00:00:00.000 | I was on the run for four months, stole $600,000.

00:00:03.480 | I was in Las Vegas, Nevada.

00:00:05.160 | One day, I had stolen, the night before,

00:00:07.320 | I had stolen 160K out of ATMs.

00:00:09.520 | Went in the next morning, I woke up,

00:00:12.760 | signed on to cartersmarket.com,

00:00:14.680 | which was ran by Max Butler, the Iceman,

00:00:16.920 | and there's my name, US Most Wanted, on it.

00:00:21.160 | And that gets your attention.

00:00:24.120 | That was my real name with the US Most Wanted beside of it.

00:00:26.480 | Nobody knew my real name in that environment at all,

00:00:29.160 | but then they did.

00:00:30.280 | And it was talking about me being part of the Secret Service,

00:00:33.840 | Operation Anglerfish, everything else.

00:00:36.480 | So of course, they're all like--

00:00:37.440 | - So everybody's after you.

00:00:39.400 | - Oh yeah, we're gonna get this son of a bitch.

00:00:41.760 | - The following is a conversation with Brett Johnson,

00:00:46.200 | a former cyber criminal

00:00:47.840 | who built the first organized cyber crime community

00:00:50.400 | called Shadow Crew that is the precursor

00:00:53.200 | to today's darknet and darknet markets.

00:00:56.200 | He's referred to by the United States Secret Service

00:00:58.960 | as quote, "The original internet godfather."

00:01:02.040 | He has been the central figure in the cyber crime world

00:01:05.120 | for almost 20 years,

00:01:06.640 | placed on the US Most Wanted list in 2006

00:01:10.280 | before being convicted of 39 felonies for cyber crime,

00:01:14.080 | escaped from prison,

00:01:15.400 | and then eventually being locked up,

00:01:17.680 | served his time,

00:01:18.960 | and now is helping people understand and fight cyber crime.

00:01:24.320 | This was a raw, honest, emotional, and real episode.

00:01:29.320 | Brett has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people,

00:01:32.880 | and yet his own story is full of trauma and pain,

00:01:36.960 | and also redemption and love.

00:01:39.520 | This is a good time to say that I have,

00:01:43.400 | and I will talk to people who have served time in prison,

00:01:46.760 | and perhaps people who currently are in prison.

00:01:50.480 | I will try to do my best to both empathize

00:01:53.080 | with the person across from me,

00:01:54.680 | and not let them sugarcoat, explain away,

00:01:57.280 | or dismiss the crimes they committed.

00:02:00.440 | This is a tough line to walk,

00:02:01.920 | because if you close your heart to the other person,

00:02:04.640 | you'll never fully understand their mind and their story.

00:02:08.000 | But if you open the heart too much,

00:02:10.720 | you can be manipulated

00:02:12.240 | to where the conversation reveals nothing honest or real.

00:02:16.520 | This requires skill and willingness to take the risk.

00:02:21.520 | I don't know about the skill part,

00:02:23.360 | but I'd like to take the risk.

00:02:25.120 | I always wear my heart on my sleeve.

00:02:27.160 | If I get hurt for it, that's life.

00:02:29.800 | As I've said, I want to understand

00:02:32.600 | what makes a person do these crimes,

00:02:34.600 | the particular characteristics of their temporary

00:02:37.640 | or permanent madness, their justifications,

00:02:41.560 | but also their humanity.

00:02:43.520 | I believe each of us have the capacity

00:02:45.520 | to become both the criminal and the victim,

00:02:48.320 | the predator and the prey.

00:02:50.760 | It's up to us to avoid these paths

00:02:53.200 | or to find the path to redemption.

00:02:55.520 | It's on each of us.

00:02:57.320 | It's our responsibility and burden

00:03:00.360 | of being human in a complicated and dangerous world.

00:03:04.180 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:03:07.160 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:03:09.200 | in the description.

00:03:10.320 | And now, dear friends, here's Brett Johnson.

00:03:14.200 | You were convicted of 39 felonies for cybercrime

00:03:19.160 | placed on the US most wanted list in 2006,

00:03:22.920 | escaped from prison.

00:03:24.680 | You built the first organized cybercrime community

00:03:27.240 | called Shadow Crew that is the precursor

00:03:30.120 | to today's darknet and darknet markets.

00:03:32.860 | And for all this, the US intelligence service

00:03:36.280 | called you the original internet godfather.

00:03:39.520 | So first question, how did your career

00:03:42.920 | as a cybercrime criminal begin?

00:03:45.300 | - My life of crime begins when I'm 10 years old.

00:03:47.920 | 10 years old, man, think about that.

00:03:49.440 | I mean, you were probably playing with robots

00:03:51.340 | when you were 10.

00:03:52.720 | Usually kids are doing the Lego bit,

00:03:55.400 | getting involved with sports, everything else.

00:03:57.120 | And with me, it wasn't like that.

00:04:00.080 | With me, I'm from Eastern Kentucky.

00:04:02.320 | Eastern Kentucky is one of these,

00:04:04.140 | it's like parts of Texas, parts of Louisiana,

00:04:08.340 | that if you're not fortunate enough to have a job,

00:04:11.280 | you may be involved in a scam, hustle, fraud,

00:04:13.640 | whatever you wanna call it, man.

00:04:14.880 | I was, my parents, my mom was basically

00:04:19.880 | the captain of the entire fraud industry.

00:04:22.360 | So this is a woman that at one point,

00:04:25.440 | she's stealing a 108,000 pound Caterpillar D9 bulldozer,

00:04:29.720 | tramming it down the road.

00:04:31.240 | You know, at another point, she's taking a slip and fall

00:04:33.240 | in a convenience store trying to sue the owner.

00:04:35.640 | We had a neighbor she acted as a pimp for at one point.

00:04:38.880 | That's my mom.

00:04:40.200 | My dad.

00:04:41.800 | - Wait, wait, a neighbor acted as a pimp?

00:04:45.520 | - My mom prostituted, I mean,

00:04:47.560 | she acted as a pimp for a neighbor.

00:04:50.080 | Her name was Debbie, and my mom used to sell her out.

00:04:54.440 | You know, Debbie needed money,

00:04:55.440 | and my mom would find men for her to sleep with for cash,

00:04:58.680 | and she'd take a part of the cash.

00:05:00.560 | - So it sounds like she diversified the methodologies

00:05:05.080 | by which she hustled.

00:05:06.920 | - Very, had that entrepreneurial spirit.

00:05:09.840 | - Okay.

00:05:10.680 | - You know, we see that a lot with cyber criminals,

00:05:14.160 | you know, that sense of being that entrepreneur.

00:05:16.680 | - So what was the motivation, you think, for her?

00:05:19.200 | Is it money?

00:05:22.640 | Is it basically the rush of playing with the system

00:05:27.080 | or being able to know the rules and break the rules

00:05:31.920 | and get away with it?

00:05:32.960 | - My mom's a complex character.

00:05:34.700 | She is, there's no one single motivation.

00:05:36.900 | So my mom was the individual, she's still alive.

00:05:40.640 | My mom was the individual who tested people.

00:05:44.440 | She wanted to know how far she could abuse you

00:05:48.040 | and you come back and still love her.

00:05:50.200 | So, and that was with every relationship she's ever had.

00:05:53.920 | She would cheat on the men she was involved with.

00:05:56.120 | She would abuse the, her children, me and Denise.

00:05:59.320 | She would--

00:06:00.840 | - Psychological, physical?

00:06:02.280 | - Oh, it was mental, emotional, physical,

00:06:05.240 | everything, everything.

00:06:07.440 | I mean, she used to beat me and Denise with belt buckles,

00:06:12.160 | you know, and that ended when she was,

00:06:16.160 | I forgot what we had done.

00:06:18.320 | It wasn't much.

00:06:19.160 | I think that it may have been the part where she accused me

00:06:24.160 | of stealing her marijuana, but she was hitting me and Denise.

00:06:29.240 | We were living in a single wide trailer at that point.

00:06:32.680 | She was hitting me and Denise.

00:06:33.840 | We were on the bed trying to get away from it.

00:06:35.920 | And Denise kicks her through a closet is what happens.

00:06:40.720 | And Denise stands up and she said,

00:06:43.720 | you're through hitting me.

00:06:45.720 | And that was the last time that mom hit us at that point.

00:06:49.080 | But--

00:06:50.240 | - So sorry to take us there.

00:06:51.640 | You're, for people who know you

00:06:53.680 | and people should definitely watch

00:06:55.200 | some of your lectures online.

00:06:57.120 | You're extremely charismatic and fun and jolly

00:07:01.240 | and whatever word you wanna use.

00:07:03.160 | But, you know, if we look at that kind of life,

00:07:06.760 | there's darkness there, there's a struggle there.

00:07:10.900 | - There's a lot of darkness.

00:07:12.320 | - So, how did you feel?

00:07:16.480 | If you go back to the mind of the kid you were

00:07:20.000 | with your mom, was there sadness?

00:07:24.200 | Was there things like depression, self-doubt,

00:07:28.280 | all those kinds of things?

00:07:29.400 | Or did you see this crime, this chaos

00:07:32.680 | as ultimately exciting?

00:07:34.720 | - You know, I don't think,

00:07:36.160 | back then I didn't view it as exciting.

00:07:37.880 | Now it becomes exciting when I start being involved

00:07:40.160 | in cyber crime, all right?

00:07:42.320 | But back then it was simply a means to an end,

00:07:44.920 | was all it was.

00:07:45.760 | So you take a 10 year old kid

00:07:46.840 | and the way I get involved in crime is,

00:07:49.600 | like I said, my mom was the fraudster,

00:07:51.440 | my dad was a good guy.

00:07:53.520 | He just forgot he was this good guy.

00:07:55.920 | You know, he always had these principles.

00:07:58.360 | But his issue was, is he loved my mom so much,

00:08:02.400 | he was scared of her leaving.

00:08:04.840 | So if she wanted to do something, commit crime,

00:08:07.960 | cheat on him, whatever, he would pretty much

00:08:11.320 | just put up with it.

00:08:13.080 | The one instant.

00:08:14.680 | So, I mean, this woman used to,

00:08:16.760 | she used to bring men home in front of him,

00:08:19.280 | tell him that, "Hey, I'm leaving you.

00:08:21.040 | "I don't love you anymore.

00:08:22.060 | "I want you to die, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

00:08:24.160 | This was my mom.

00:08:25.320 | There were two instances where the man,

00:08:30.880 | where he can't take it anymore.

00:08:33.000 | And the first instance, I was,

00:08:34.680 | I guess I was seven or eight.

00:08:36.360 | My sister Denise is a year younger than I am.

00:08:38.600 | My dad actually files for divorce.

00:08:41.080 | Files for divorce at that point.

00:08:42.840 | My mom kind of goes crazy.

00:08:44.940 | My dad, I was with my dad, my sister was with my mother,

00:08:49.080 | because that's that Eastern Kentucky mentality.

00:08:50.800 | You know, men stay with men, women stay with women.

00:08:53.600 | So, he was filing for divorce.

00:08:57.880 | Me and my dad, we were living in an apartment.

00:09:00.560 | My mom was living with her grandparents

00:09:03.840 | and with her parents,

00:09:04.680 | bouncing back and forth between the two.

00:09:06.480 | And I remember, I was sleeping in the bed.

00:09:08.760 | We had a single wide bed.

00:09:09.840 | My dad slept on the sofa.

00:09:12.160 | I woke up one night and there was some sort of ruckus

00:09:14.640 | in the living room.

00:09:16.000 | So, I wake up and I walk into the living room

00:09:18.520 | and my mom has a knife to my dad's throat.

00:09:22.120 | And basically, "You're not gonna steal my son from me."

00:09:25.140 | My mom was this individual that,

00:09:28.040 | when she knew she went so far,

00:09:29.680 | like I said, she was always this person that tested.

00:09:32.240 | Well, can I do this to you and you'll still come back?

00:09:35.000 | She knew, she was always also this person

00:09:38.960 | that if she went too far, she knew it

00:09:42.640 | and she would always try to divert that

00:09:45.080 | into something else.

00:09:46.320 | All right, so, she knew at that point she'd went too far.

00:09:48.940 | So, what does she do?

00:09:50.160 | She gets up crying, goes to the bathroom

00:09:53.680 | and pretends to slit her wrists

00:09:56.760 | so that my dad, Ray, will respond to that,

00:10:00.040 | not respond to what she's just done to him.

00:10:02.520 | That was my mom in a nutshell.

00:10:03.800 | She had a history of doing this kind of stuff.

00:10:06.160 | Motivations as far as fraud with her,

00:10:09.820 | I think with her it was,

00:10:11.480 | she was an LPN, she had, and a very good nurse.

00:10:17.000 | But she didn't want to work, was a lot of it.

00:10:20.680 | So, with her, it was easier for her to commit fraud.

00:10:25.400 | And when I say commit fraud,

00:10:26.680 | it was against businesses, against people.

00:10:29.520 | I remember at one point she's buying

00:10:31.720 | over-the-counter capsules and emptying the capsules out

00:10:34.760 | and putting some other crap in there

00:10:36.480 | and selling it at speed and people were buying it.

00:10:39.280 | She did anything she could for money.

00:10:41.160 | And of course, I get involved with that.

00:10:42.520 | What happens is, we were in Panama City at that point

00:10:46.960 | and my mom leaves my dad.

00:10:50.720 | And the way she left my dad,

00:10:53.080 | my great-grandfather had died.

00:10:55.840 | My mom tells all three of us,

00:10:58.360 | "Hey, I'm taking the kids and we're going back

00:11:00.560 | to Eastern Kentucky to attend the funeral."

00:11:02.760 | Well, that was her leaving.

00:11:05.360 | Me and Denise didn't know,

00:11:06.280 | she didn't pack any of our clothes at all.

00:11:07.980 | She stows her clothes in the trunk of the car

00:11:11.040 | and she leaves my dad.

00:11:12.360 | And I don't get to see my dad again

00:11:13.680 | for I think five, six years, something like that.

00:11:16.920 | My mom, like I said,

00:11:17.840 | she used to bring men home in front of my dad.

00:11:19.940 | She would, he'd sit there and cry and beg her not to do it.

00:11:22.840 | She'd do it anyway.

00:11:23.880 | When she leaves him, she kept up that.

00:11:28.120 | So we were living at my grandparents' house.

00:11:31.720 | My grandfather, he had converted the house.

00:11:33.500 | He had raised the house up

00:11:35.040 | and built apartments underneath of it.

00:11:37.320 | So me and my sister and my mom

00:11:39.200 | lived in one of the apartments underneath.

00:11:40.880 | And that whole side of the family was just nuts.

00:11:44.640 | Was nuts.

00:11:45.480 | My granddad, Paul, he would,

00:11:49.920 | this is a man that,

00:11:51.320 | he didn't want you to eat any of his food.

00:11:56.360 | So, you know, there was no such thing

00:11:58.120 | as me and Denise going upstairs to eat.

00:12:00.360 | If he found out me and Denise was taking a bath,

00:12:03.800 | we were allowed to bath and bathe in two inches of water,

00:12:06.840 | one time a week,

00:12:07.880 | because he didn't want to have to pay the water bill.

00:12:10.040 | - There's rules.

00:12:10.880 | - There are rules.

00:12:11.720 | You know, if you couldn't have the TV on,

00:12:14.600 | when he went to bed at night,

00:12:15.920 | you had to have the television,

00:12:17.340 | the volume, you could watch it, but without volume.

00:12:20.400 | Because if he heard it,

00:12:21.440 | he would get up in the middle of the night

00:12:23.520 | and he would kick the power breaker,

00:12:25.280 | turn off all the power on you.

00:12:26.960 | This is my, this is my, the family, right?

00:12:29.280 | So my mom, she used to leave me and Denise at home

00:12:32.320 | for days, man, for days.

00:12:34.480 | She'd go out and, you know, party.

00:12:36.880 | And I mean, sometimes she'd take me and Denise with her.

00:12:40.360 | We'd wait in the car.

00:12:41.740 | Sometimes we'd wait in the living room

00:12:43.880 | as she went and partied and everything else.

00:12:46.220 | Most of the time she left us at home.

00:12:48.320 | And my entry into crime, Denise walks in one day,

00:12:52.840 | she's nine years old, man.

00:12:54.640 | She walks in one day

00:12:55.520 | and she's got a pack of pork chops in her hand.

00:12:57.920 | And looked at her and I said, "Where'd you get that?"

00:13:00.200 | She's like, "I stole it."

00:13:01.940 | And, you know, it's like, "Show me how you did that."

00:13:04.400 | So she takes me over and she shows me how she steals food,

00:13:07.000 | how she's stuffing it down her pants.

00:13:09.080 | So we start stealing food.

00:13:10.120 | I'm like, "Hell yeah, let's do that shit."

00:13:11.840 | So start stealing food.

00:13:13.400 | And we get to the point where we're wanting a sandwich.

00:13:16.000 | Well, you can't stuff a loaf of bread down your pants.

00:13:18.500 | So there was a Kmart in the shopping center.

00:13:20.940 | I go over to the Kmart, get a hoodie off the rack,

00:13:25.340 | take the tags off of it, wear it out, worked just fine.

00:13:28.420 | And the way you steal bread is you put the hoodie

00:13:30.580 | over your shoulder, stuff a loaf of bread down the sleeve

00:13:32.860 | and you walk out with it.

00:13:34.320 | So we started doing that.

00:13:35.380 | - How'd you figure that out?

00:13:36.820 | - Just thought pattern.

00:13:38.180 | - So there's like strategic thinking here.

00:13:43.180 | - Yeah, you know, you can't wear the hoodie

00:13:45.340 | and put the bread down here 'cause you might mash the bread

00:13:48.040 | when you zip it up or they might notice.

00:13:48.880 | - Yeah, we have to think through that.

00:13:50.460 | - You gotta think through it.

00:13:51.740 | But you gotta realize by this point,

00:13:53.780 | I'm already seeing what my parents are doing.

00:13:57.100 | You know, I'm already seeing it.

00:13:58.420 | Just seeing it plodding.

00:13:59.500 | - That kind of puzzle solving was something

00:14:01.540 | you were already developing yourself into as a kid

00:14:03.180 | 'cause you're pretty young.

00:14:04.180 | - Yeah, 10 years old, pretty young.

00:14:05.820 | But seeing how they act, how they respond to things.

00:14:08.380 | And my mom, I guess you'd call it a good thing,

00:14:11.220 | they never kept any of that hidden from the kids.

00:14:14.460 | You know, there was no discussions behind closed doors.

00:14:17.660 | All that happened in front of everybody.

00:14:19.260 | - And from your young mind's perspective,

00:14:22.300 | seeing that kind of crime, you basically,

00:14:25.900 | you know, a lot of us kind of grow up

00:14:27.620 | thinking there's rules you're not supposed to break.

00:14:29.780 | If you see other humans breaking those rules,

00:14:31.900 | then you realize those rules are just human made.

00:14:35.660 | - But it gets worse than that.

00:14:37.060 | I was in an environment where there were no decent people.

00:14:42.820 | I didn't really meet my first decent person

00:14:44.980 | until I was 16 years old.

00:14:47.100 | - Who was that?

00:14:47.940 | - That was a high school teacher.

00:14:49.860 | So what happens is, you know, we start shoplifting food.

00:14:54.420 | My mom finds out that we've been stealing stuff

00:14:56.660 | and, you know, she joins us.

00:14:58.980 | - What's that?

00:14:59.820 | - She joins us.

00:15:00.780 | - Yeah, she comes in.

00:15:01.620 | You know, I've got the Intellivision,

00:15:02.700 | I've got the Atari 2600, playing the hell out of it.

00:15:05.020 | - Oh my God.

00:15:05.860 | - She starts seeing this shit,

00:15:06.820 | she's like, "Where'd this come from?"

00:15:07.940 | And I'm like, "Well, we found it."

00:15:09.100 | She's like, "You didn't find that, Denise."

00:15:11.380 | Denise stands up, "We stole it.

00:15:13.420 | "My mom, show me how you did that."

00:15:16.660 | And she gets her mom too, to join in.

00:15:19.500 | And she used to run me and Denise

00:15:20.740 | as these little shoplifters.

00:15:21.940 | We'd take, you know, we'd steal stuff for her,

00:15:24.500 | we would distract security,

00:15:27.740 | and her and my grandmother would steal stuff.

00:15:30.820 | They got caught doing that.

00:15:32.380 | But that's the entry into crime.

00:15:34.900 | And Denise, you know, I'm adamant,

00:15:37.620 | and I kinda mean it.

00:15:41.260 | But the truth is, I say, and I do mean it,

00:15:45.780 | that I'm responsible for my choices as an adult.

00:15:48.980 | All right?

00:15:49.820 | I believe that when you're a child,

00:15:51.300 | you can't control that.

00:15:52.260 | The adults in your environment control what you do.

00:15:55.020 | All right?

00:15:55.860 | Once you're an adult, though, your choices are yours.

00:15:58.900 | Now, that being said, there's some,

00:16:01.740 | you can't dismiss that childhood

00:16:06.060 | influencing what I did as an adult.

00:16:10.860 | You can't do that.

00:16:12.140 | I mean, it was kinda written on slate that,

00:16:14.980 | hey, this guy's gonna be this guy when he grows up.

00:16:18.260 | - That said, like, sometimes that one person you meet,

00:16:20.740 | that decent person, can turn the tide of your life.

00:16:23.820 | - Absolutely.

00:16:24.660 | So what happens is, you know, the abuse,

00:16:26.620 | everything continues on.

00:16:28.060 | When I'm 15, my dad was in Panama City, Florida.

00:16:33.540 | My mom was in, you know, we were in Hazard, Kentucky.

00:16:37.100 | She was dating this guy.

00:16:40.500 | My mom was this woman that,

00:16:42.580 | the abuse would, it was crazy abuse, man.

00:16:48.100 | Just crazy stuff.

00:16:49.500 | She would tell me and my sister, you know,

00:16:52.020 | that she gave up her life for us,

00:16:55.100 | that she was gonna leave one day and never come back,

00:16:57.660 | that we'd find her dead in a ditch someplace.

00:17:00.220 | She'd go out and date these men, and she'd come back,

00:17:02.060 | and she'd talk about how these men were abusing her.

00:17:05.620 | You know, so she'd be dating this guy,

00:17:07.540 | and she'd come back and she'd, you know,

00:17:10.660 | start talking about how he had tried to rape her,

00:17:13.060 | you know, trying to get me to respond to that.

00:17:14.620 | And I would respond to that.

00:17:16.060 | Make no doubt, I would respond to that.

00:17:18.460 | Well, what happens is, and I knew that,

00:17:21.260 | I don't know if I knew it was abuse at that age, all right,

00:17:23.860 | but I knew things were fucked up.

00:17:25.500 | I was talking to my dad in Panama City,

00:17:29.020 | and I really had it in my head that,

00:17:31.340 | that I was gonna go down and live with my dad.

00:17:35.460 | And I called my dad one day.

00:17:40.460 | I was set to go to, me and my cousins

00:17:42.900 | were gonna go see "Return of the Jedi."

00:17:45.220 | It had come out again in the theaters.

00:17:48.140 | So I called my dad, it was a Sunday.

00:17:50.460 | Called my dad, and he told me he had either gotten married

00:17:54.460 | or he was about to get married to this woman.

00:17:56.860 | And basically, Brett Johnson

00:17:59.460 | wasn't gonna go down to Florida.

00:18:01.140 | You know, I was gonna stay in Hazard.

00:18:03.620 | Had to call my dad from payphone,

00:18:05.020 | but the result of that was I walked into a hospital,

00:18:09.420 | got in an elevator,

00:18:12.460 | and a woman got in the elevator at the same time,

00:18:16.820 | and I snapped and beat the hell out of her, right there.

00:18:21.180 | And I was 15.

00:18:22.620 | Didn't really know what the fuck happened.

00:18:27.300 | Didn't really know, but--

00:18:28.980 | Just anger came from somewhere.

00:18:30.500 | Yeah, yeah.

00:18:32.060 | And, you know, the elevator,

00:18:37.060 | beat the hell out of this lady.

00:18:39.980 | Turned out she looked a shitload like my mom.

00:18:42.460 | But the elevator doors opened.

00:18:48.740 | One of the security guards,

00:18:51.380 | I played basketball with his son.

00:18:53.500 | So he saw me immediately.

00:18:55.140 | I knocked the hell out of him, took off running,

00:18:58.620 | made it back to the house

00:19:00.180 | where my grandparents were.

00:19:02.900 | They didn't know what had happened,

00:19:03.980 | so I didn't say anything.

00:19:06.540 | About an hour later, Kentucky State Police,

00:19:10.140 | they pull up in the front yard.

00:19:12.300 | And two of them get out,

00:19:13.780 | and I'm sitting on the front porch,

00:19:15.500 | and me and my cousins are,

00:19:16.620 | and they start walking up,

00:19:18.100 | everybody starts walking out of the house.

00:19:19.540 | And I'm like, I just remember saying,

00:19:21.020 | "What do you want, what do you want?"

00:19:22.220 | Well, you know what they wanted.

00:19:23.860 | They wanted to arrest Brett Johnson.

00:19:26.060 | And they arrested me.

00:19:27.780 | I went in, I told them everything.

00:19:29.740 | Spent three months in a county jail.

00:19:33.220 | They didn't have juvenile facilities in that county,

00:19:37.580 | so I spent three months in solitary.

00:19:39.700 | Went to trial, pled guilty to assault in the first degree.

00:19:44.740 | The judge sentenced me to time served

00:19:48.500 | and a psychological evaluation,

00:19:50.180 | where they sent me to Louisville, Kentucky.

00:19:52.620 | And I spent 30 days up there,

00:19:55.060 | and they cut me loose.

00:19:55.900 | They wanted me to have counseling after that.

00:19:59.180 | And never went to counseling.

00:20:02.740 | You know, I wanted to, but mom was like, "Don't need it."

00:20:05.740 | (laughs)

00:20:06.740 | So never went to counseling.

00:20:08.140 | And I became this pariah in the county.

00:20:13.140 | It's crazy, man.

00:20:16.780 | I mean, not a day goes by that I don't think about that.

00:20:21.540 | That.

00:20:22.380 | - That moment in the elevator.

00:20:23.460 | - Yeah.

00:20:24.580 | And what happens is, you know, you're 15.

00:20:29.140 | Fuck, man, you're 15.

00:20:30.500 | So I go back to the high school that I was in,

00:20:34.620 | and I'm this piece of shit.

00:20:38.700 | - So everybody, you're not the outcast.

00:20:41.460 | - Everybody knows.

00:20:43.300 | So I move.

00:20:44.140 | We move.

00:20:44.980 | We were in Whitesburg at that point.

00:20:47.140 | I finish up the year there and move back to Perry County,

00:20:52.260 | which is where Hazard is.

00:20:54.220 | So we move there, and they've got three high schools there.

00:20:57.940 | They've got MC Napier, they've got Hazard High School,

00:21:00.260 | and then they've got Dill Scombs High School.

00:21:02.700 | So I was within, me and Denise were within

00:21:06.100 | half mile of MC Napier.

00:21:09.340 | Show up there the first day of school,

00:21:12.700 | and I met, me and my mom and my sister

00:21:16.060 | were walking into the school,

00:21:17.900 | and the kids won't let me in.

00:21:19.500 | The kids.

00:21:22.660 | Stand out there, he's not coming in.

00:21:25.340 | So my mom starts raising hell,

00:21:28.980 | and I'm like, "No, let's just go, let's go."

00:21:30.780 | So from there, we went down to the city school, Hazard,

00:21:34.780 | and the principal tells my mom,

00:21:36.860 | "Denise can come, he can't."

00:21:39.540 | So my mom wants to raise hell, and I'm like,

00:21:42.940 | "No, let's just take me to this other school."

00:21:45.700 | So this other school was like 15 miles away.

00:21:48.340 | And, you know, country high school.

00:21:52.460 | So I go there and they accept me,

00:21:57.140 | and I walked in the first day,

00:21:59.220 | and this English teacher,

00:22:01.940 | names Carol Combs,

00:22:05.340 | I walked in and handed her the paper,

00:22:10.340 | she was my homeroom teacher,

00:22:11.980 | and she heard this voice,

00:22:14.420 | as the way she explains it, she heard this voice.

00:22:17.860 | And she looks up and she was like,

00:22:21.340 | "Son, have you ever done any drama before?"

00:22:24.140 | (laughing)

00:22:26.180 | I'm like, "No, ma'am,

00:22:27.580 | but I'm interested in the academic team."

00:22:29.260 | I was this quick recall guy, right?

00:22:31.340 | And she's like, "No."

00:22:33.060 | She's like, "Drama."

00:22:35.860 | (laughing)

00:22:37.540 | I'm like, "No, I'm not interested in theater,

00:22:39.980 | I'm interested in academics."

00:22:41.980 | Well, she was the head of the drama department,

00:22:44.500 | and head of the academics department.

00:22:46.060 | So the deal was, tell you what,

00:22:48.540 | you can get on the academics team

00:22:50.460 | if you start with theater too.

00:22:53.140 | And I was like, "Okay."

00:22:54.820 | So what happens is she was the only,

00:22:56.820 | she was the first decent person I met in my life,

00:22:58.740 | and she became this kind of surrogate mother to me.

00:23:01.860 | So under her tutelage,

00:23:03.700 | I become one of the top academic team guys in the state.

00:23:08.660 | Around there, I was captain of the team,

00:23:11.420 | I was this, just scourge across all the counties

00:23:15.780 | in that part of Kentucky.

00:23:17.460 | We had a meet, it was like,

00:23:20.020 | "Jesus Christ, that's Brett Johnson."

00:23:21.820 | (laughing)

00:23:24.060 | She used to tell people they would,

00:23:27.420 | the high school that I came from was Whitesburg,

00:23:29.940 | and the first time that Whitesburg came against us,

00:23:32.860 | she told me, I was talking to her about a year ago,

00:23:35.780 | and she told me, she's like, "Brett,"

00:23:37.940 | she said, "That first meet against Whitesburg,"

00:23:40.460 | she said, "The captain came in, looked at you,

00:23:44.660 | and said, 'Oh, you've got that Johnson boy on your team?'"

00:23:47.580 | And she said, "My response was,

00:23:49.540 | 'That Johnson boy is our team.'"

00:23:52.180 | (laughing)

00:23:54.660 | But I did that, and then with theater,

00:23:57.740 | I ended up, my senior year,

00:24:00.540 | I won best actor and actress in the state.

00:24:04.060 | Only guy to ever do that in the state.

00:24:05.940 | So, did pretty well, man, did pretty well.

00:24:08.940 | Had scholarships coming out of high school

00:24:11.900 | and everything else, and I'm the idiot that turned 'em down.

00:24:14.500 | - Can I ask you a funny question?

00:24:15.740 | - Yeah.

00:24:16.660 | - You'd make a hell of a, I mean,

00:24:18.340 | of all the many things you could probably do,

00:24:20.220 | you'd make a hell of a actor.

00:24:23.180 | - I'm very good on stage, I'm very good on stage.

00:24:26.060 | - Have you acted professionally anywhere?

00:24:28.460 | - Not professionally, we've done the college circuit,

00:24:31.300 | stuff like that.

00:24:32.140 | What happened was, so I turned down the scholarships.

00:24:36.060 | Scared of leaving, I guess is what it was.

00:24:40.180 | Started in community college,

00:24:41.860 | and the community college there

00:24:44.140 | hires a new theater director out of California.

00:24:46.340 | Well, he knew the guy that ran

00:24:48.620 | the San Jose State Theater Program.

00:24:50.940 | Guy named Edward Emanuel was his name.

00:24:53.060 | His claim to fame, he had written the Three Ninjas movie.

00:24:56.340 | Remember that, the three little ninja kids

00:24:58.460 | back in the '80s?

00:24:59.300 | He had written this for damn film,

00:25:00.820 | and it had made a shitload of money.

00:25:02.940 | So, he invites Ed Emanuel to come down and see the play,

00:25:06.140 | and Ed had written this Civil War piece.

00:25:09.140 | So, we put that on.

00:25:11.460 | I was doing like, it was a multiple role thing.

00:25:13.700 | I was doing like 18 different roles in the show.

00:25:16.140 | So, Ed sees the show, and he was like, "Scholarship."

00:25:19.580 | He said, "Look," he said, "Right now,

00:25:21.100 | "you're a big fish in a small pond.

00:25:22.620 | "We'll make you a big fish in a big pond."

00:25:24.220 | And I was like, "Deal!"

00:25:25.660 | So, I took the scholarship, man.

00:25:27.620 | And he was like, "I'll be back in two weeks."

00:25:29.300 | So, he flies out.

00:25:30.420 | Two weeks later, this guy flies back in.

00:25:33.060 | He drives down to where I'm living.

00:25:35.420 | I'm out shooting ball with my cousins and friends.

00:25:39.620 | He pulls up, and he gets out of the car,

00:25:42.620 | and I walk over to him.

00:25:43.940 | I was like, "Hey, man, I'll walk you in.

00:25:45.740 | "You can meet my parents."

00:25:47.020 | He's like, "No, I got it."

00:25:48.500 | I was like, "Okay."

00:25:49.500 | So, I keep shooting ball.

00:25:50.460 | He walks in the house, stays about 15 minutes,

00:25:54.740 | walks out, white as a sheet, doesn't say a word to me,

00:25:58.580 | gets in the car, leaves.

00:26:00.940 | I don't hear from him again.

00:26:02.740 | Had no idea what went on.

00:26:04.740 | Takes me a couple weeks.

00:26:06.540 | What happened is my mom, he walks in, introduces himself.

00:26:10.580 | My mom pulls a knife on the guy.

00:26:12.220 | "I will kill you.

00:26:14.700 | "You are not gonna steal my goddamn son from me."

00:26:17.700 | Scares the guy to death.

00:26:19.340 | He bugs out.

00:26:20.540 | And kinda broke my spirit at that point.

00:26:24.020 | You know, I was like, "Okay."

00:26:27.020 | So, went into, just full-fledged into scams,

00:26:32.020 | crimes, everything else.

00:26:34.060 | I had already been, when I was a minor,

00:26:37.220 | I'd already been kinda brought up on that side

00:26:39.700 | of the family with the crimes that they were doing.

00:26:41.340 | My mom was drug trafficking, the pimp stuff,

00:26:45.380 | illegally mining coal, charity fraud.

00:26:48.780 | - Illegally mining coal?

00:26:50.100 | - Yeah, wildcatting coal.

00:26:51.380 | So, you--

00:26:52.220 | - Can you explain that?

00:26:53.060 | - Yeah, so, to properly mine coal,

00:26:55.980 | you have to get a permit, all right?

00:26:58.580 | Eastern Kentucky, a lot of people don't,

00:27:00.460 | they can't afford the permits.

00:27:01.980 | You know, they can get 'em a piece of equipment.

00:27:04.100 | You know, you get a dozier or a loader,

00:27:05.420 | or whatever you're gonna get,

00:27:06.420 | or an auger, or what have you.

00:27:08.260 | So, you start mining, but you don't get the permit.

00:27:10.740 | So, you don't have to pay, back then it was like $3,500

00:27:14.500 | for a two-acre permit, or $5,000 for a two-acre permit.

00:27:17.580 | Let you strip mine the coal on that.

00:27:20.540 | Then you have to pay for the reclamation on top of that.

00:27:22.780 | So, once you uncover the pit, take the coal out,

00:27:25.740 | you have to cover back up the pit,

00:27:27.660 | sow grass, make sure everything is environmentally friendly.

00:27:30.420 | You gotta have a silt pond, everything else at that point.

00:27:32.940 | - So, the whole idea is you buy an acre of land,

00:27:35.020 | or some area of land, and then you can,

00:27:36.940 | there's a whole process you're supposed to go through.

00:27:38.540 | - Entire process.

00:27:39.380 | - How many people are involved in a mining,

00:27:41.940 | the smallest number of people required

00:27:43.980 | for a mining operation?

00:27:45.060 | - You can do it with three or four people.

00:27:46.820 | - Okay.

00:27:47.660 | - So, you've got your loader operator,

00:27:48.480 | you've got your dozier operator.

00:27:49.900 | You need, you can farm out the trucking to someone,

00:27:52.860 | if you need, or a trucking company, if you need to do that.

00:27:56.540 | Then you've got your, whoever owns the business as well.

00:27:58.700 | So, very few people can run an operation like that,

00:28:01.780 | and profit fairly well, as long as you don't have to do

00:28:05.660 | the reclamation, all that crap on top of it, all right?

00:28:08.860 | The reclamation gets pretty expensive.

00:28:10.900 | So, if you're uncovering a pit of coal,

00:28:12.860 | a pit, so a ton of coal is basically about 36 cubic inches,

00:28:18.100 | is what 2,000 pounds of coal weighs,

00:28:20.700 | if you're in Eastern Kentucky,

00:28:21.860 | 'cause it's the weight of the bituminous coal

00:28:24.420 | and everything.

00:28:25.260 | - The fact that you know this is awesome.

00:28:26.380 | (laughing)

00:28:28.420 | The fact that you know exactly the volume of a ton of coal,

00:28:33.420 | I mean, this is great.

00:28:34.300 | - Yeah, you learn this shit, right?

00:28:35.460 | You can rattle this shit off.

00:28:36.580 | So, you uncover the pit, and then you've got to sell the pit.

00:28:40.180 | Well, the thing is, is that,

00:28:41.820 | where are you gonna sell the coal?

00:28:43.180 | Well, you sell it to one of these other coal tipples

00:28:45.660 | that knows that they're buying the shit illegally.

00:28:48.620 | So, back then, a ton of coal was,

00:28:50.600 | they'd give you like 36 bucks per ton, is what that is.

00:28:54.100 | And you'd have to go out, and you'd test the BTUs on it.

00:28:56.660 | You'd take a sample to the lab, test the BTUs.

00:28:58.980 | You'd take that into the company.

00:28:59.820 | - What's BTU?

00:29:00.780 | - British Thermal Unit.

00:29:02.200 | So, you'd test what the BTU on the coal was.

00:29:04.740 | - How pure the coal is.

00:29:05.860 | - How pure the coal is, what BTU it burns at.

00:29:08.900 | Back then, a good BTU was around 12.9,

00:29:12.540 | was what you'd get, all right?

00:29:14.100 | So, 12.9 coal, $36 a ton.

00:29:17.020 | You'd take that sample over to the coal tipple.

00:29:19.400 | They'd say, "Okay, we'll buy this for you.

00:29:21.460 | "How many trucks you got, or how many tons you got?"

00:29:23.140 | And you'd say, "This is what we've got."

00:29:24.700 | Then you'd hire the trucking company.

00:29:26.160 | And where you get it out, because you've got the agents

00:29:29.900 | that are looking for you by this point,

00:29:32.260 | because the people that, you've bought the rights

00:29:35.980 | to whoever the landowner is.

00:29:37.620 | You said you're gonna give them $2 a ton,

00:29:39.620 | or whatever this is.

00:29:41.340 | Well, the other people there, are you paying them off?

00:29:44.240 | Or are you not?

00:29:45.200 | Well, if you're not paying them off, guess what?

00:29:47.020 | They know you're mining it illegally.

00:29:49.900 | They're gonna report you.

00:29:50.940 | Well, all of a sudden, you've got all these inspectors

00:29:53.180 | that are coming around and everything.

00:29:54.340 | And hey, we know what you're doing.

00:29:55.900 | So they're looking for you to get the pit out.

00:29:57.540 | So when do you get the pit out?

00:29:58.920 | Right in the dead of night.

00:30:00.140 | So you're loading it up two o'clock in the morning,

00:30:03.080 | hauling it's ass out is what you're doing.

00:30:04.780 | You sell it out from there.

00:30:06.120 | And your mom ran operations like this?

00:30:08.980 | Yeah, yeah.

00:30:10.260 | And you said you worked the mine too, when you were younger?

00:30:12.540 | Yeah, I learned how to run a loader, run a dozer.

00:30:14.220 | Learned how to clean off a pit.

00:30:16.160 | Everything like that.

00:30:17.700 | So this is the lifestyle you grow up in.

00:30:22.060 | You learn how to do this stuff.

00:30:24.700 | So I knew how to do charity fraud as well, insurance fraud.

00:30:28.540 | Charity fraud, can we break down some of these?

00:30:31.820 | Charity fraud, it's much more romantic than what it sounds.

00:30:34.580 | It was basically, it was basically standing beside the road

00:30:39.340 | with a sign and a bucket, taking up collections

00:30:42.500 | for homeless shelters, for abused women,

00:30:44.860 | for children, stuff like that.

00:30:47.560 | Then later on, I branched off.

00:30:49.660 | When I started off on my own,

00:30:51.020 | I would set up my own charity company

00:30:53.380 | and do some telemarketing and go on by

00:30:55.140 | and collect checks and things like that.

00:30:57.100 | We're gonna talk about that,

00:30:58.140 | but actually, can we just step back

00:30:59.860 | and talk about your mom and your dad?

00:31:04.260 | Given all of that, given all the abuse,

00:31:08.100 | the complex ways that she played with love,

00:31:12.300 | to see how far she can push you and the people around her,

00:31:15.700 | and they still love her, today, do you love her?

00:31:20.700 | I called my dad yesterday.

00:31:22.700 | My dad, he's dying now.

00:31:24.500 | He's got a heart condition.

00:31:25.540 | He's not gonna get the operation to fix it.

00:31:27.380 | So he's like, "Fuck it, I'm ready to go."

00:31:29.220 | And I'm like, I looked at him, 'cause hell, I'm 52 now.

00:31:32.700 | Prior to 52, I'd have been like, "No, you need to do this."

00:31:35.200 | But I looked at him and I was like, "I understand.

00:31:38.340 | "I understand, you're done."

00:31:40.480 | And so he's not gonna get the operation.

00:31:42.820 | I was talking to him yesterday and he asked me,

00:31:44.260 | he's like, "Have you seen your mom?"

00:31:45.820 | And I was like, "Dad, I've not talked to her

00:31:47.060 | "for about two years."

00:31:48.700 | And I told him, I was like, "I love my mom,

00:31:52.580 | "but my mom is not a good person, she's not."

00:31:55.660 | And he told me, I was talking to him on the phone yesterday,

00:31:59.220 | and he told me that it took him several years

00:32:01.820 | to really understand that.

00:32:03.500 | He loved her too, but it takes,

00:32:05.580 | when you're getting abused like that,

00:32:07.500 | especially my dad, my dad came from a good family,

00:32:09.960 | everything else, and upstanding family.

00:32:13.040 | I think that when you're that victim of abuse,

00:32:17.380 | you've never seen it before, you've never encountered it,

00:32:21.420 | and then it happens, well, you're like that frog in water

00:32:24.700 | all of a sudden, you get to the point where

00:32:27.220 | gradually increases until how do you get out of it?

00:32:30.100 | Everybody else sees what's happening, but you don't.

00:32:32.820 | I grew up in that environment though,

00:32:34.740 | so it took me a long time to come to terms with that.

00:32:39.060 | My sister came to terms with it long before I did.

00:32:42.180 | My sister, she's been a decade without talking to my mom,

00:32:45.820 | like she had tried to commit suicide, I didn't know that.

00:32:48.380 | What got me so bad is she said at one point

00:32:51.700 | that she always thought someone was gonna come in

00:32:55.980 | and save us, and my response, just immediate response,

00:32:59.140 | not even thinking about it, my response was,

00:33:00.820 | well, Denise, I knew no one ever was.

00:33:03.500 | And looking at things now,

00:33:07.020 | I think that's where our paths diverged.

00:33:10.340 | Me, it was, if you wanna do it,

00:33:14.300 | if anybody's gonna take care of you,

00:33:15.500 | you gotta take care of yourself.

00:33:16.900 | - You're on your own.

00:33:17.820 | - You're on your own.

00:33:18.820 | It's up to you.

00:33:21.180 | And Denise has always been that child

00:33:24.580 | that has expected someone to come in and save her.

00:33:28.300 | - Well, and almost like, it's all going to be okay,

00:33:30.940 | somebody-- - Yeah, and I knew it wasn't.

00:33:34.060 | No, no, you go-- - Unless you--

00:33:36.220 | - Unless you make it okay, it ain't gonna be okay.

00:33:38.960 | - Are you able to forgive her, your mom?

00:33:45.760 | - My boundary with my mom,

00:33:47.880 | the reason I've not spoken with her,

00:33:50.080 | over two years ago, I started this legal career of mine,

00:33:55.080 | I've been the guy who has, I spent a lot of time

00:33:59.720 | thinking about my past and those choices

00:34:02.260 | and what brought those choices around.

00:34:04.240 | So I'm big about taking responsibility for my actions.

00:34:06.780 | I truly am, I think it's really important

00:34:08.240 | you have to do that.

00:34:09.560 | Well, my mom, not so much.

00:34:12.560 | So I was talking to her, you know,

00:34:14.720 | and I would start saying, you know,

00:34:16.280 | she would start the conversation talking about

00:34:19.320 | she didn't understand why Denise

00:34:20.840 | wouldn't speak to her anymore.

00:34:22.280 | That was one of her tropes.

00:34:24.200 | So, and my response started to become,

00:34:26.040 | well, because you were the abuser

00:34:28.800 | and you spent your life doing that to her,

00:34:31.100 | so it's more healthy for her not to talk to you.

00:34:34.360 | - So she's still not able to see the flaws

00:34:37.920 | in her ways of the past. - No, no, not at all.

00:34:41.160 | So my ultimatum to my mom was, look,

00:34:44.640 | when you're able to admit that you abused

00:34:47.720 | the people in your life, accept that responsibility

00:34:51.520 | and be able to discuss it with me, we'll have a talk.

00:34:55.840 | Other than that, I don't wanna talk to you anymore.

00:34:58.560 | So for the first year, it was, you know,

00:35:00.520 | calling, cussing my wife out, cussing me out.

00:35:03.740 | You know, I don't need you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:35:07.640 | And then finally it started to taper off

00:35:09.600 | and she's never really contacted me after that point.

00:35:13.300 | - Your dad is dying. - Yeah.

00:35:18.020 | - What do you take from the way he's taken on death,

00:35:21.140 | just saying, fuck it?

00:35:22.940 | - You know, it's, the man--

00:35:25.460 | - And what have you learned from your dad?

00:35:27.740 | What do you love about your dad?

00:35:30.100 | - He's one of these guys that, you know, like I told him.

00:35:33.100 | I told my dad about the abuse and everything else

00:35:37.700 | and there was a point, so, you know,

00:35:39.540 | I told you about the elevator stuff.

00:35:41.220 | But before that, man, it was,

00:35:43.660 | it took me 40 years to talk about that.

00:35:47.980 | But it also took me 40 years to talk about,

00:35:52.980 | there was a point that my mom and dad would leave the house

00:35:58.820 | and I would urinate in the floor, all right?

00:36:04.420 | And--

00:36:05.260 | - Like, out of anger?

00:36:09.820 | - No idea why, all right?

00:36:11.700 | But I would, piss on the carpet.

00:36:13.820 | Carpet pissers like the Lebowski, right?

00:36:16.180 | (laughing)

00:36:18.420 | It really tied the room together, dude.

00:36:20.340 | - It really tied the room together.

00:36:22.140 | - I was talking about that and this lady comes up to me

00:36:24.300 | after the presentation and she had a career previous to that

00:36:29.300 | where she dealt with abused kids.

00:36:31.900 | And she told me, she's like, Brett, she's like,

00:36:34.260 | it's a control mechanism.

00:36:37.260 | The only control you had was that.

00:36:40.100 | And she's like, kids do that.

00:36:42.180 | And I was like, so I'm not unique?

00:36:43.540 | She's like, no, you're not unique in that.

00:36:45.660 | So, you know, this whole history of abuse,

00:36:49.580 | Denise dealt with it by drinking,

00:36:51.800 | by trying to commit suicide, things like that.

00:36:55.140 | And then finally she escapes.

00:36:56.380 | I'm the kid that didn't.

00:36:57.220 | And not only that, my wife pointed out to me that,

00:37:00.540 | again, it's that Eastern Kentucky mentality stuff.

00:37:02.820 | You know, the male's expected to do things.

00:37:04.820 | So with me, it was almost like I stepped up

00:37:08.700 | to take part in those crimes

00:37:12.220 | so that Denise didn't have to.

00:37:14.620 | And she was able to avoid all that.

00:37:16.620 | Other than that one shoplifting stuff,

00:37:18.180 | Denise doesn't break the law anymore.

00:37:19.980 | She goes off to be a, she's a good parent.

00:37:22.860 | She's an angry parent.

00:37:24.180 | She's a good parent.

00:37:25.020 | She's a teacher, good citizen overall.

00:37:27.780 | I was just the guy that kept right on going with it.

00:37:30.980 | - Kept on going.

00:37:31.820 | So let me ask you about that.

00:37:33.020 | So your life of cyber crime.

00:37:36.500 | (laughing)

00:37:37.340 | In describing some of the things you did or knew about,

00:37:40.260 | you said, quote, "I once stole several thousand dollars

00:37:43.740 | "worth of coins from a family trying to sell them

00:37:47.180 | "to put a new roof on their home.

00:37:48.860 | "Another time, I sent a counterfeit cashier's check

00:37:52.940 | "to a victim and he ended up being arrested for it.

00:37:56.020 | "I lied to family, friends, everyone I knew.

00:37:58.640 | "I was a truly despicable person."

00:38:01.140 | - True.

00:38:02.420 | - One of my Ukrainian associates,

00:38:04.500 | Script had someone who owed him money,

00:38:07.220 | kidnapped and tortured.

00:38:08.780 | He posted pictures of it online.

00:38:11.380 | Another member, Iceman, used to flood his enemy's

00:38:15.460 | email addresses with child pornography,

00:38:17.540 | then called the police on them.

00:38:19.740 | That's some stories.

00:38:20.820 | Can you tell some of these stories that stand out to you

00:38:23.900 | that are particularly despicable or representative

00:38:28.900 | or interesting when you look back

00:38:31.220 | that defined your approach and who you were at that time?

00:38:36.220 | - Let me say that I did not care about my victim.

00:38:41.260 | All right, I cared about me is what I cared about.

00:38:44.980 | It's rough to admit that.

00:38:47.900 | You don't give a shit what you're doing to anybody else.

00:38:51.780 | You only care about you.

00:38:52.820 | But that's the truth of the matter.

00:38:54.280 | I didn't care about the victims.

00:38:56.480 | The lady, that wasn't even at the beginning

00:38:59.220 | of my career as a cyber criminal,

00:39:01.540 | that was right at the last of it.

00:39:03.060 | - Which lady?

00:39:03.900 | - The coin lady.

00:39:04.940 | By that point, Shadow Crew had made

00:39:07.500 | the front cover of Forbes, August of '04.

00:39:10.580 | October 26th of '04, Secret Service had shut us down.

00:39:13.860 | 33 people arrested, six countries in six hours.

00:39:16.900 | I was the guy that was publicly mentioned as getting away.

00:39:20.620 | What happened was is I was the guy who was,

00:39:23.580 | I had kind of invented this crime

00:39:25.700 | called tax return identity theft

00:39:27.860 | and was stealing a lot of money.

00:39:29.980 | I went through all my stateside savings

00:39:33.660 | and Shadow Crew gets shut down.

00:39:35.540 | I don't have any way to come in with any money,

00:39:37.820 | so I start running counterfeit cashier's checks,

00:39:40.900 | defrauding people with that,

00:39:42.380 | having them send products or bullion collections,

00:39:45.840 | what have you, by COD, collect on delivery,

00:39:48.260 | and I would pay with it with a counterfeit cashier's check.

00:39:51.080 | This lady was on eBay.

00:39:54.060 | She had been collecting these silver coins all of her life.

00:39:57.180 | You know, the US currency used to be,

00:39:58.700 | the coins used to be silver.

00:40:00.420 | So she had a whole collection of these things,

00:40:02.580 | like, I don't know, 80, 90 pounds of this stuff.

00:40:05.580 | And I'm a very good social engineer.

00:40:09.180 | So convinced her that I was a legitimate person,

00:40:13.780 | that, you know, hey, send it to COD.

00:40:16.060 | You can use my FedEx account to do that

00:40:18.740 | or my UPS account to do that.

00:40:20.580 | I'll pay with a cashier's check.

00:40:23.460 | You can take it in, same as cash.

00:40:25.740 | She believed that.

00:40:26.600 | She was even on the ad and we talked on the phone

00:40:29.820 | and everything else.

00:40:30.660 | She had told me that she was a single parent

00:40:33.340 | and it was the only money that she had

00:40:34.940 | to put a roof on the house for her and her kids.

00:40:39.460 | And I didn't give a damn.

00:40:41.460 | I didn't give a damn.

00:40:42.300 | What was more important was me at that point.

00:40:44.420 | - Can I ask you a question about the social engineering?

00:40:46.340 | So maybe specifics like the methodology,

00:40:50.820 | email, you said phone.

00:40:53.900 | Maybe you could discuss this process

00:40:58.000 | from a bigger philosophical perspective

00:41:00.320 | of what is it about human beings

00:41:03.520 | that makes impossible to be social engineer,

00:41:06.680 | to be victims of fraud?

00:41:09.800 | - So first let me say that I became a social engineer

00:41:14.800 | as a child, all right, because the adults in my environment,

00:41:20.040 | as a child, I had to know exactly what they were thinking

00:41:23.480 | and be able to try to manipulate that for survival.

00:41:26.560 | So I became a social engineer for survival initially.

00:41:31.260 | And one of the things that I've seen

00:41:32.740 | with a lot of cyber criminals is the exact same thing.

00:41:35.320 | They're really expert ones.

00:41:37.500 | They become a social engineer as a child,

00:41:39.220 | then later on they use those tools to victimize others.

00:41:43.180 | - Which is fascinating because in order to understand

00:41:46.220 | what others are thinking,

00:41:47.060 | you have to be extremely good at empathy.

00:41:49.260 | So you have to really put yourself in the shoes

00:41:52.180 | of the other person.

00:41:53.540 | And yet in order to do cyber crime,

00:41:56.780 | you have to not care about the pain

00:42:00.980 | that might cause them once you manipulate them.

00:42:03.340 | So you have to empathize and yet not care.

00:42:07.100 | - Exactly, and I would argue,

00:42:08.660 | I would argue that that is not a sociopath

00:42:11.500 | because a cyber criminal, and I was no different,

00:42:13.740 | most cyber criminals justify those actions.

00:42:16.100 | So the justification becomes what's important.

00:42:18.780 | With me, the justification was,

00:42:19.980 | well, I did it for my family.

00:42:21.660 | Did it for my wife.

00:42:22.540 | Did it for my stripper girlfriend.

00:42:24.340 | So, and I believe those justifications.

00:42:26.540 | - I'm just gonna tell you that

00:42:27.660 | 'cause I care about love a lot.

00:42:28.980 | - Yeah, so the big picture of that is trust.

00:42:33.980 | How do you establish trust with a potential victim?

00:42:40.500 | All right, now I would argue online

00:42:42.860 | that that trust is established through a combination

00:42:45.160 | of technology, tools, social engineering.

00:42:48.060 | All right, so we trust our tech.

00:42:50.380 | You know, we trust our cell phones.

00:42:51.660 | We trust our laptops.

00:42:53.340 | A lot of times we don't understand how they operate,

00:42:55.060 | but we trust the news that comes across the line.

00:42:57.020 | We trust the phone numbers that show up.

00:42:59.420 | We trust IP addresses if we're advanced enough

00:43:02.380 | to look at an IP address or a domain

00:43:04.100 | or anything else like that.

00:43:05.500 | Criminals use tools to manipulate that.

00:43:07.580 | Spoof phone numbers, spoof browser fingerprints,

00:43:10.240 | whatever that may be, whatever the tool may be.

00:43:14.080 | Then that lays a base level of trust.

00:43:16.540 | At that point, you shoot in with the social engineering

00:43:19.820 | and lay whatever story that is

00:43:21.500 | in order to manipulate that victim

00:43:23.100 | to act not out of reason, but out of emotion

00:43:26.300 | all of a sudden.

00:43:27.740 | - This is fascinating about the way humans interact

00:43:30.380 | with the world, which is you're almost too afraid

00:43:34.600 | to not trust the world.

00:43:35.440 | You have to find a balance.

00:43:36.420 | You have a lot of sort of conspiracy theories now

00:43:40.380 | about distrust institutions and thinking like

00:43:42.940 | everything around us.

00:43:44.060 | It's like I've been listening to people

00:43:46.320 | who believe the earth is flat.

00:43:48.300 | And that conspiracy theory is fascinating to me

00:43:52.020 | because it basically says that you can't trust anybody.

00:43:57.020 | Like everything you hear is a lie.

00:44:00.460 | So that's one, you can live that life

00:44:03.300 | or you can live a life where you're just

00:44:04.980 | naively trusting everything.

00:44:06.780 | And we as humans have to, 'cause that life

00:44:08.840 | is kind of full of happiness if nobody screws you over.

00:44:13.220 | 'Cause you meet people with the joyful heart

00:44:16.620 | and you get excited and all that kind of stuff.

00:44:18.780 | But if you do that too much, you're gonna get burned.

00:44:21.980 | So you have to find some kind of balance

00:44:23.780 | in terms of optimizing happiness where you trust,

00:44:28.740 | I mean, but verify, and on the internet

00:44:32.000 | that becomes really tricky.

00:44:34.300 | You're almost too afraid to distrust everything

00:44:36.020 | 'cause you'll never get anything done on the internet.

00:44:38.820 | But then if you trust too much, you can get screwed over.

00:44:41.340 | And so the social engineering comes in

00:44:44.140 | where you're like, I'm not sure if I should

00:44:46.260 | trust this, you kind of help them build the narrative

00:44:50.620 | where it's like, it's good.

00:44:51.620 | - It's good.

00:44:52.460 | - It's good.

00:44:53.280 | - So in a lot of the times, that social engineering

00:44:55.660 | is just feeding into what the victim wants to believe.

00:45:00.660 | All right?

00:45:01.540 | It's not really coming up with a brand new story at all.

00:45:03.620 | It's just knowing what the motivations of that victim is,

00:45:07.380 | feeding into it at that point.

00:45:08.940 | So you have to, again, that social engineer

00:45:10.900 | has to almost immediately know what's driving

00:45:14.860 | that person that they're talking about.

00:45:16.300 | If I'm working on a phone, talking to someone

00:45:18.620 | over the phone, I have to know within seconds

00:45:21.340 | what I need to say, how I need to act

00:45:23.300 | to interact with that customer service agent

00:45:25.820 | or whoever I'm talking to on the other end of the line.

00:45:28.100 | - So fascinating because you truly are empathizing

00:45:31.220 | with the other person.

00:45:32.060 | - Absolutely.

00:45:33.300 | - What is it, this businessman, Steven Schwarzman,

00:45:36.540 | I've talked to a few times.

00:45:40.540 | He mentioned this thing that, you know,

00:45:44.020 | the way you build deep relationships is you really

00:45:47.820 | kind of notice the things that people are telling you,

00:45:51.220 | like what they want and what they're bothered by,

00:45:56.140 | what are their big problems in their lives?

00:45:58.300 | 'Cause everybody's saying that all the time

00:46:00.900 | and most of us are just ignoring it.

00:46:02.500 | - Right.

00:46:03.340 | But if you take the time to listen,

00:46:05.420 | you know somebody at that point.

00:46:07.180 | Absolutely you do.

00:46:08.580 | Then you have to be able to dismiss it.

00:46:10.780 | - And dismiss it after.

00:46:12.260 | - You're looking for that just to see how I can

00:46:14.380 | manipulate that is what you're trying to do.

00:46:17.020 | So the lady was one story, another truly despicable story.

00:46:22.020 | We'll get to script in a second.

00:46:23.900 | But another truly despicable story,

00:46:25.860 | we were one of the really first groups

00:46:28.940 | that started phishing attacks.

00:46:30.700 | - What's phishing?

00:46:31.540 | - So that is a social engineering attack.

00:46:33.580 | - PH by the way, phishing.

00:46:34.620 | - Yeah, PH, that's another social engineering attack.

00:46:36.780 | That's sending that fake email out

00:46:38.900 | that looks like it's coming from a website

00:46:40.580 | or your financial organization or whatever

00:46:42.380 | and saying, "Hey, we've got a security problem.

00:46:44.260 | "We need you to update your account information."

00:46:46.980 | Well back then, no one had ever seen a phishing attack.

00:46:50.500 | So you could ask for all the information.

00:46:53.260 | You were getting just complete identity profiles

00:46:56.220 | on a phishing email.

00:46:57.340 | Nowadays you can't do that.

00:46:58.340 | Nowadays you look for basically credentials

00:47:00.140 | because everyone is aware of phishing.

00:47:01.980 | But back then it was complete information.

00:47:03.860 | We had phished out, I don't know, 200,000 eTrade accounts.

00:47:08.420 | That's what we had the login credentials for.

00:47:10.020 | - Login password, yeah.

00:47:11.140 | - Login password, complete social, date of birth,

00:47:13.900 | mother's maiden, account information, everything else.

00:47:17.740 | So we had access to those eTrade accounts.

00:47:20.380 | eTrade initially had no security in place.

00:47:24.180 | So you could cash out the account,

00:47:26.180 | ACH the money out to whatever account you wanted to,

00:47:29.940 | went through just fine.

00:47:31.540 | Ate 'em alive on that for four to six months.

00:47:34.060 | eTrade got to the point where you couldn't do

00:47:38.660 | any ACH coming out.

00:47:40.340 | They locked everything down.

00:47:42.780 | Well, you're still sitting on thousands of eTrade accounts.

00:47:46.340 | How do you make money on that?

00:47:47.860 | - That's a good question.

00:47:51.540 | - Yeah, so what you do is you find some fat cat

00:47:53.460 | that's got his retirement, invested in blue chips.

00:47:57.220 | Same time you find a penny stock,

00:47:59.420 | you open up a brand new account,

00:48:01.540 | buy into that penny stock, cash the fat cat out,

00:48:04.420 | buy into that same penny stock,

00:48:06.500 | bump and dump schemes all of a sudden.

00:48:08.140 | So you're destroying people's retirement accounts

00:48:11.020 | for just a few thousand dollars.

00:48:12.940 | Bam, bam, bam.

00:48:13.980 | And of course, eTrade's response is, not our problem.

00:48:17.980 | It's your problem, you shouldn't have given up your password

00:48:19.900 | or what have you at that point.

00:48:21.500 | And you still see that issue today with Zelle scams

00:48:24.020 | and things like that.

00:48:25.340 | - Which scam?

00:48:26.300 | - Zelle, so you know, the instant payment that--

00:48:28.540 | - Oh, so it's the same kind of operation,

00:48:29.820 | same type with different schemes and mechanisms.

00:48:32.260 | - You find an easy way to exploit a system

00:48:35.420 | and typically the financial organization,

00:48:37.980 | not our problem, our system's secure,

00:48:40.180 | it's the humans, it's their errors.

00:48:41.740 | Well, not really.

00:48:43.740 | You know, you've got some culpability in that

00:48:45.900 | and you're just trying to avoid paying part of the bill,

00:48:49.340 | is what's going on.

00:48:50.180 | - One of the things, just to stand fishing for a bit,

00:48:52.420 | is it really makes me sad 'cause there's been people

00:48:57.420 | on all kinds of platforms, including YouTube comments,

00:49:00.660 | but emails too, they figured out emails somehow.

00:49:04.620 | So people are now seeing the followers

00:49:09.620 | of this particular podcast who are fans,

00:49:13.940 | they're finding them on platforms like LinkedIn

00:49:16.860 | and YouTube and so on, and they are figuring out ways

00:49:21.420 | to get to those people by another channel,

00:49:24.400 | which I suppose seems more authentic to those people.

00:49:29.400 | So they send them an email from what looks like me

00:49:34.660 | and with this kind of like loving,

00:49:37.980 | the interesting thing, the emails sound like something

00:49:40.660 | I would write.

00:49:41.860 | So these aren't even, at this stage, it's not even,

00:49:44.540 | it doesn't feel automated or if it's automated,

00:49:47.460 | there's a human in the loop that's really fine tuning

00:49:51.580 | at this specific, or maybe I'm very predictable,

00:49:53.940 | but it's very loving in the way I would write a message.

00:49:56.980 | - Well, and so think about that, all right?

00:49:59.340 | So when Phishing First comes out,

00:50:02.020 | you could look at the language of the text

00:50:04.100 | or the website and say, "Eh, if you were paying attention,

00:50:06.620 | "that's so okay."

00:50:07.860 | So that's not an English speaker

00:50:09.380 | who wrote that typically, all right?

00:50:11.300 | But as time has went on, as the awareness

00:50:14.340 | of what a phishing attack looks like,

00:50:16.700 | we have people that are sitting down now

00:50:18.500 | and making sure that the language is proper.

00:50:20.940 | It gets worse than that though,

00:50:21.980 | if you look at business email compromise, all right?

00:50:24.220 | So the way a business email compromise typically works

00:50:26.760 | is the attacker will find a payroll person, find a CEO.

00:50:31.540 | He will fashion a spear phishing email,

00:50:34.060 | which is that's a phishing attack

00:50:35.860 | that's targeting one specific individual, all right?

00:50:38.980 | So he'll fashion a spear phishing email.

00:50:40.740 | And the way he does that is he pulls all the information

00:50:43.820 | he possibly can on that person, all right, that CEO.

00:50:48.820 | Maybe he'll spear that CEO just to get

00:50:54.220 | their login credentials to their email,

00:50:57.100 | just to read the emails.

00:50:58.140 | And he'll go in there and he'll start reading

00:50:59.940 | all these emails.

00:51:01.220 | He'll specifically read the emails

00:51:02.980 | to the payroll department, see what that relationship is.

00:51:06.100 | Are they talking about their kids?

00:51:07.580 | Talking about relationships, talking about vacation.

00:51:09.500 | What are they talking about?

00:51:10.460 | How are they talking?

00:51:11.300 | Are they friendly?

00:51:12.340 | Are they sterile?

00:51:13.300 | What are they doing, all right?

00:51:15.060 | So then he decides, well, I'm gonna go ahead

00:51:17.060 | and spear phish the payroll department as well.

00:51:20.020 | So then he spear phishes them, gets those credentials.

00:51:22.580 | At the same time, he creates a Unicode domain

00:51:25.700 | in whatever the company name is, all right?

00:51:27.700 | So instead of that English alphabet I,

00:51:29.740 | he's got that Russian letter that looks like an I,

00:51:32.220 | but without the dot on top, all right?

00:51:35.220 | Comes back into the email, into the payroll email,

00:51:38.340 | blocks the real CEO's email, replaces that

00:51:41.820 | with the Unicode email that he's got,

00:51:44.180 | and then sends out a message using the correct language,

00:51:48.900 | the correct relationships, everything else,

00:51:51.060 | and says, hey, we're updating our account status.

00:51:53.940 | I need you to send this payment instead of this over here.

00:51:57.020 | They've set up a new account.

00:51:58.100 | Send all payments over here now.

00:51:59.820 | And that is business email compromise in a nutshell,

00:52:02.620 | all right, works great.

00:52:04.460 | - Probably the larger the organization,

00:52:06.580 | the more susceptible to that kind of attack,

00:52:10.140 | 'cause there's a distribution of responsibility

00:52:14.820 | to where you're more likely to believe that,

00:52:16.860 | okay, this other person is responsible.

00:52:18.980 | I'm sure they secured everything.

00:52:21.020 | - Absolutely.

00:52:21.940 | - I'm okay listening to this.

00:52:23.340 | - So that's business email compromise,

00:52:25.940 | and those crimes, and that's one of the things

00:52:27.780 | you see about cybercrime.

00:52:28.820 | Cybercrime's not really sophisticated.

00:52:30.820 | It's not, the attacks are not sophisticated.

00:52:32.860 | The stat is 90% of every single attack uses a known exploit.

00:52:37.860 | It's not zero-day attacks.

00:52:41.100 | They're out there, but if you're a criminal

00:52:43.060 | waiting on a zero-day to profit,

00:52:44.380 | you're gonna starve to death.

00:52:46.220 | The meat and potatoes are that 90%, known exploits.

00:52:51.220 | - And then the rest is, well, you're saying it's,

00:52:54.860 | maybe you mean it's not technically sophisticated,

00:52:57.620 | but it's social engineering sophisticated.

00:52:59.900 | - Very sophisticated on that end, very sophisticated.

00:53:02.380 | - It's a fascinating study of human psychology.

00:53:04.420 | - That establishment of trust,

00:53:05.860 | and then using that trust to defraud that victim.

00:53:09.420 | That is something.

00:53:11.260 | - I wish, obviously, all of these folks

00:53:14.340 | are really good at hiding.

00:53:16.700 | I wish you could tell their stories in a way,

00:53:19.420 | which is why you're fascinating,

00:53:20.980 | is you're able to tell these stories now,

00:53:22.780 | 'cause it is studying human nature

00:53:26.980 | by exploiting it, but you get to understand

00:53:29.420 | our weak points, our hope, our desire to trust others.

00:53:34.420 | Also, sort of the weak points

00:53:40.780 | and the failures of digital systems

00:53:42.860 | and at scale humans have to connect.

00:53:46.020 | It's fascinating.

00:53:46.900 | It's a weird question, asking for a friend.

00:53:50.900 | Is spear phishing itself illegal?

00:53:54.860 | What's the legality here?

00:53:56.260 | - Well, it's all illegal.

00:53:57.180 | Absolutely it is.

00:53:58.220 | - Is it absolutely?

00:53:59.180 | So here's what, okay, let me construct an example.

00:54:02.460 | So if my friend were to spear phish a CEO, right,

00:54:08.500 | and get their information, and after they get control,

00:54:14.580 | say of their Twitter account,

00:54:16.220 | they tweet something loving and positive, what's the crime?

00:54:21.220 | - Unauthorized access of advice.

00:54:23.700 | - What will be the punishment?

00:54:26.040 | Do you think?

00:54:27.600 | - That becomes questionable.

00:54:29.120 | So no monetary loss, or was there a monetary loss?

00:54:33.000 | Probably not, all right?

00:54:34.760 | So you have to figure out who the victim is

00:54:37.160 | before charges are pressed.

00:54:38.200 | Now, the crime would be unauthorized access, all right?

00:54:42.160 | But no real victim on that, unless the person

00:54:47.080 | whose account you took over takes exception to that.

00:54:50.840 | No monetary loss.

00:54:53.120 | - So there's not really standard, like, fines?

00:54:55.120 | - Probably nothing's gonna happen.

00:54:56.280 | - Right, right, right.

00:54:57.400 | So I mean, that's kind of interesting,

00:54:59.920 | 'cause it's, so when I got the ransomware,

00:55:04.280 | when I got the zero-day attack on the QNAP mass,

00:55:07.700 | you know, they basically say the criminal

00:55:13.600 | is QNAP, the company,

00:55:17.560 | for having so many security vulnerabilities.

00:55:22.320 | Like, you are the victim of QNAP's incompetence.

00:55:26.280 | That's the way they kind of phrase it.

00:55:27.880 | - And see, I don't agree with that.

00:55:30.120 | I don't agree with that at all.

00:55:31.920 | So, SolarWinds.

00:55:33.740 | (both laughing)

00:55:36.400 | So I've got 130-page class-action lawsuit

00:55:41.200 | printed out at the house, I've been going through it,

00:55:43.120 | that catalogs how SolarWinds lied for years

00:55:47.200 | about their vulnerabilities, and they lied to investors.

00:55:49.760 | The people who came in, the auditors who they would hire,

00:55:53.480 | they would not pay attention to them

00:55:57.040 | when they said, "You've got these issues,"

00:55:58.580 | they would say, "Go away."

00:56:00.320 | Shit like that for years, until SolarWinds,

00:56:03.040 | the attacks become apparent.

00:56:04.880 | My view on that is that the only person

00:56:10.960 | responsible for the crime are the criminals

00:56:14.040 | who did the attacking, the actual criminals,

00:56:16.520 | not SolarWinds.

00:56:18.000 | Now, does that mean that SolarWinds isn't all fucked up?

00:56:21.360 | They are, and there needs to be some accounting in place.

00:56:25.540 | But the only individual, the only people responsible

00:56:29.380 | for crime are the criminals, and that's either online,

00:56:33.640 | in the physical world, what have you.

00:56:35.480 | Being an idiot is not a crime.

00:56:39.900 | (both laughing)

00:56:43.120 | Being criminally negligent is,

00:56:45.200 | and I think that SolarWinds is certainly responsible,

00:56:48.640 | not responsible, they're culpable for what happened.

00:56:52.280 | - Can you actually tell folks about SolarWinds?

00:56:55.400 | What is it?

00:56:56.240 | What are some interesting things that you're aware of?

00:57:00.640 | - SolarWinds was very, it provided a backbone of security

00:57:05.640 | for hundreds, thousands of different companies.

00:57:10.800 | If you looked at a lot of security companies

00:57:14.480 | were using SolarWinds, that would allow you

00:57:16.400 | to get a snapshot of the entire system

00:57:19.080 | that they were working on.

00:57:20.440 | So what happens is, is you get a Russian group

00:57:23.040 | that comes in and they, basically,

00:57:27.800 | they hack into SolarWinds and get access to it,

00:57:30.640 | and it allows them to view every single thing,

00:57:34.640 | I mean every single thing, about every single client

00:57:39.400 | that SolarWinds had at that point.

00:57:43.040 | So entire snapshots of all the IP that was going on,

00:57:46.880 | all the emails, all the communications,

00:57:48.800 | every single secret that was going on with those companies.

00:57:51.780 | If a company had software like Microsoft,

00:57:54.440 | it allowed them to look at the source code

00:57:56.560 | of everything that was going on.

00:57:58.000 | I mean, it's just a complete and total nightmare,

00:58:01.440 | all right, and something that you are not

00:58:03.920 | going to recover from.

00:58:06.740 | You're not.

00:58:08.040 | I mean, it's done at that point.

00:58:10.760 | You know, there's not been a lot of news lately about it,

00:58:13.520 | but the fact of the matter is, is that's the type of attack

00:58:16.080 | that's a catastrophic attack.

00:58:17.920 | - So there's a huge amount of information

00:58:20.960 | that was read, saved elsewhere, probably.

00:58:23.720 | - Oh yeah.

00:58:24.560 | - And so now, there's people sitting on information.

00:58:27.280 | - Absolutely.

00:58:28.100 | So think about one of the attack vectors

00:58:29.520 | has been Microsoft Outlook 365, things like that.

00:58:33.800 | This allowed the attackers to look

00:58:35.340 | at the source codes of that.

00:58:37.360 | So they have the source code now,

00:58:39.260 | so they go through it line by line.

00:58:41.560 | What are the vulnerabilities?

00:58:42.600 | Let's find new vulnerabilities, new zero days.

00:58:44.640 | I said zero days aren't common,

00:58:46.560 | but this opens up an entire new threat surface

00:58:49.040 | all of a sudden.

00:58:50.020 | So it's a completely catastrophic attack.

00:58:52.520 | Once all the chips are down, everything's tallied up,

00:58:54.840 | people are gonna be like, yeah, we're done, we're done.

00:58:57.320 | - Yeah.

00:58:58.160 | (laughing)

00:59:00.400 | All right, this whole computer thing, we tried it.

00:59:03.280 | - We're done.

00:59:04.120 | - We're walking away.

00:59:04.960 | - We're done.

00:59:05.800 | - That's terrifying, so you're saying

00:59:08.280 | that there's not been obvious, big,

00:59:12.680 | negative impact from that yet.

00:59:15.400 | - There's been a lot of negative impact,

00:59:16.920 | but we're just starting.

00:59:18.300 | - Right, so the capacity for destruction is huge here.

00:59:22.520 | How much involvement from nation states

00:59:24.640 | do you think there is on this?

00:59:26.640 | - You know, it's interesting.

00:59:28.140 | So you've got Iran, you've got North Korea, China, Russia,

00:59:32.440 | you got the big four, you also got Brazil.

00:59:35.520 | You've got all these other countries

00:59:36.680 | that are interested in the United States as well.

00:59:39.140 | Nation states are interesting

00:59:42.120 | depending on who the nation state is.

00:59:44.460 | All right, so Russia's very good about working

00:59:46.240 | with the type of criminal that I used to be.

00:59:48.260 | You know, they'll enlist these guys

00:59:49.980 | and steal information or what have you,

00:59:51.880 | then Russia will take the information they want to,

00:59:54.080 | and they'll basically go off and sell

00:59:55.920 | whatever you want to and make some money.

00:59:58.280 | China's all about IP.

01:00:00.320 | North Korea's about stealing money

01:00:02.520 | because they really don't know

01:00:03.720 | what the hell else to do right now.

01:00:05.760 | But--

01:00:07.200 | - So North Korea is actively involved in cybercrime.

01:00:09.480 | - Absolutely, they've stolen a shitload

01:00:11.360 | of Bitcoin and everything else.

01:00:13.320 | So absolutely they're actively involved with that.

01:00:15.760 | Very skilled attackers, very skilled.

01:00:19.120 | But even if you look at, you know,

01:00:20.160 | I told you that stat about 90%, all right?

01:00:23.540 | So even though SolarWinds is gonna be

01:00:25.920 | the number one attack,

01:00:29.320 | the follow-up to that is this NotPetya attack that happened.

01:00:34.040 | And so that was the most sophisticated attack

01:00:36.600 | launched by the Russian Sandworm Group

01:00:39.000 | using all known exploits throughout.

01:00:41.680 | So it's not, again, it's not,

01:00:43.720 | you're right in the sophistication

01:00:46.080 | is typically not technical sophistication,

01:00:48.620 | but it's that social engineering sophistication.

01:00:50.840 | How do you get these things put together in line

01:00:53.480 | to attack and succeed?

01:00:55.080 | - But when you get access to the source code,

01:00:58.080 | that's where technical sophistication

01:00:59.560 | could really do a lot of damage.

01:01:01.120 | - And that's when you find out real quick,

01:01:03.420 | that's what separates the men from the boys in this game.

01:01:06.120 | All right, because all of a sudden it's not,

01:01:07.800 | I don't have to worry about social engineering.

01:01:09.640 | I've got source codes and I've got professionals

01:01:12.440 | that are looking at that, and that's your ass.

01:01:15.180 | - Which then enables probably even more powerful

01:01:19.000 | social engineering methods too.

01:01:20.820 | I mean, it's just a cascade of...

01:01:22.720 | Is this terrifying to you, by the way?

01:01:27.600 | That this world that we're living in,

01:01:30.360 | as we put more and more of ourselves on the internet,

01:01:35.300 | into the metaverse, that there's so many more

01:01:39.300 | attack vectors on our well-being.

01:01:41.300 | - What's terrifying to me,

01:01:43.460 | I used to preach it on Shadow Crew,

01:01:45.820 | is the idea that the perception of truth

01:01:50.220 | is more important than the truth itself.

01:01:52.900 | It doesn't matter what the facts are,

01:01:54.500 | it matters what I can convince you of.

01:01:57.140 | That's what's terrifying to me.

01:01:59.220 | So you look at deep fakes, you look at fake news,

01:02:02.540 | all the stuff that's going out,

01:02:04.280 | that becomes truly terrifying.

01:02:06.500 | - Maybe there's an angle where it's freeing,

01:02:12.480 | if nothing is true and you can't trust anything.

01:02:16.320 | (laughing)

01:02:18.480 | - You see, we as human beings, we wanna trust.

01:02:21.160 | We do, we need human interaction,

01:02:23.320 | and for that human interaction,

01:02:25.440 | you have to have a degree of trust.

01:02:27.480 | But it's more like you let go of an idea of absolute truth,

01:02:32.400 | and it more becomes like a blockchain-style consensus.

01:02:36.160 | So you let go of like, you know what,

01:02:38.800 | there's this human dream, you get this on the internet,

01:02:43.240 | you get facts, as if there's at the bottom,

01:02:47.520 | at the bottom there's one turtle

01:02:49.040 | that's holding this scroll that says,

01:02:52.120 | "These are the truths of the world."

01:02:54.400 | The problem is, I mean, maybe believing that

01:02:58.120 | is counterproductive, maybe human civilization

01:03:01.640 | is an ongoing process of consensus.

01:03:05.080 | And so it's always going to be, everything is shrouded,

01:03:08.740 | and you can call them lies, or you can call them inaccuracies,

01:03:11.440 | or you can call them delusions.

01:03:14.160 | It's constantly going to be,

01:03:15.400 | it's going to be a sea of lies and delusions.

01:03:19.620 | But our hope is to, over time,

01:03:22.320 | develop bigger and bigger islands of consensus

01:03:24.760 | that allows us to live a stable and happy society.

01:03:27.800 | Don't call it true.

01:03:29.280 | Call it a stable consensus that creates

01:03:34.000 | a high quality of life for the inhabitants of the island.

01:03:37.000 | - I like it, I mean, I like it.

01:03:38.640 | I mean, that's, we're going to agree on this.

01:03:40.520 | - And then don't use outlines, no, I'm just kidding.

01:03:43.360 | So maybe a step back, you mentioned,

01:03:45.840 | I'd love to talk about ShadowCube,

01:03:48.520 | maybe this is the right time to actually,

01:03:50.080 | yeah, let's go to ShadowCube,

01:03:51.440 | 'cause it's such a fascinating story.

01:03:53.040 | So tell me the story of building ShadowCube,

01:03:54.720 | the precursor to today's Darknet and Darknet markets.

01:03:59.800 | This is why you're the original godfather.

01:04:02.960 | - This is it, this is it.

01:04:04.600 | So I get married.

01:04:06.640 | I faked a car accident to get married,

01:04:09.140 | got the money from that.

01:04:10.160 | - You're romantic.

01:04:11.120 | - I'm romantic, like my dad, man.

01:04:13.320 | I'm the guy that, from mom, I get the criminal mindset,

01:04:16.720 | from dad, I get that, don't want him to leave.

01:04:19.640 | (laughing)

01:04:22.520 | - So you get married.

01:04:23.620 | - I met this girl. - What's that story?

01:04:26.360 | - Oh, dude, I was--

01:04:28.200 | - How did you fall in love there?

01:04:29.720 | - My first girlfriend was a preacher's daughter,

01:04:32.120 | and crazy over her, dated her for five years,

01:04:35.280 | and she figured out pretty quickly that,

01:04:38.720 | well, not quickly, it took her five years to figure out

01:04:40.920 | that Brett Johnson is not the man of God.

01:04:43.080 | (laughing)

01:04:45.160 | I could talk it, but more that agnostic than anything,

01:04:50.160 | she breaks up with me.

01:04:52.360 | So I was at the community college.

01:04:54.920 | - You'd make one hell of a preacher, by the way.

01:04:56.600 | - Thank you.

01:04:57.440 | (laughing)

01:04:59.720 | Yeah.

01:05:00.560 | Yeah, I've got that Langston Hughes problem.

01:05:04.080 | I'm looking for Jesus to show up, and he just doesn't.

01:05:06.720 | (laughing)

01:05:09.000 | So I was at the community college,

01:05:10.520 | and I was a straight asshole.

01:05:12.040 | I was arrogant, conceited, everything else.

01:05:14.520 | And I had posted an advertisement on one of the billboards

01:05:18.800 | looking for an adult babysitter, hot, blonde,

01:05:21.880 | come visit me in the library.

01:05:24.120 | Buddy of mine shows up, and he's like, "Brett."

01:05:26.320 | And I was like, "Yeah."

01:05:27.640 | He's like, "Hottest girl in school, right down the hall."

01:05:29.960 | And I was like, "Serious?"

01:05:31.040 | He's like, "Yeah."

01:05:31.880 | And I was like, "Let's go see."

01:05:32.960 | (laughing)

01:05:34.280 | Walk over, and there's these two guys

01:05:36.080 | that are hitting on her.

01:05:37.440 | So I just walk up, and me and Todd, that was my buddy,

01:05:40.840 | walk up, and I'm just sitting there and listening,

01:05:43.440 | and they're giving the spill and everything,

01:05:45.240 | and she's just kind of taken down.

01:05:46.680 | Finally, I looked over, and I was like,

01:05:48.800 | "You wanna get out of here?"

01:05:50.640 | And one of the guys looks at me, he's like,

01:05:53.320 | "Hey, we're talking to her."

01:05:54.160 | And I was like, "Well, you're talking at her.

01:05:55.800 | "You're not talking to her.

01:05:57.040 | "I'm about to save her ass from you."

01:05:59.400 | - Damn, that's a smooth pickup line, by the way,

01:06:01.280 | if I've ever heard one.

01:06:02.120 | That's good.

01:06:02.960 | You wanna get out of here?

01:06:04.200 | - So start dating, and she was the girl

01:06:08.560 | that screwed my brains out, man.

01:06:10.960 | And I fell, I head over heels.

01:06:13.160 | We got married six months later, six months.

01:06:16.000 | - That's what love does.

01:06:17.040 | - That's what it does.

01:06:18.240 | And I had, she didn't know I was a crook.

01:06:22.800 | She had no idea.

01:06:24.280 | You know, she knew I was very bright.

01:06:26.240 | She knew I did a lot of theater, stuff like that.

01:06:28.740 | Got a job at, I was in Hazard.

01:06:32.800 | There was no jobs to be had, so I got a job in Lexington,

01:06:35.800 | 'cause we were gonna be moving to UK.

01:06:38.520 | Got a job in Lexington at Lexmark testing printer boards,

01:06:43.240 | circuit boards.

01:06:44.360 | So I would leave on a Thursday night,

01:06:46.920 | work three 18-hour shifts at Lexmark,

01:06:50.520 | come back home on Monday.

01:06:52.100 | Got married, faked a car accident to get the rest

01:06:58.000 | of the money that I needed to get married.

01:07:00.240 | And the faking on that, man, I had bought a Chevy Spectrum

01:07:07.240 | at a car auction, gave like 500 bucks for it.

01:07:09.800 | My aunt had previously defrauded USAA insurance

01:07:14.000 | on a car accident.

01:07:15.080 | And she was telling me all about it.

01:07:16.320 | She's like, "Look, go down to this chiropractor,

01:07:18.720 | "make sure you get the insurance where they'll pay

01:07:20.200 | "for a rental car, they'll pay lost wages."

01:07:22.480 | I was like, "They pay lost wages?"

01:07:24.120 | She's like, "Yeah, they pay lost wages."

01:07:25.760 | I was like, "Hmm."

01:07:26.960 | She's like, "By the way, you work for me."

01:07:29.120 | And I was like, "I work for you."

01:07:30.360 | So.

01:07:31.200 | - And you get to define the wage,

01:07:34.360 | and you can also define how long you were unable to work.

01:07:37.160 | - Exactly, exactly.

01:07:38.400 | And the chiropractor will sign off on any damn thing.

01:07:40.480 | All right, so my cousin, Ronnie, he figures out

01:07:45.200 | that I'm going, he finds out I'm gonna fake

01:07:47.000 | this car accident.

01:07:47.840 | So he comes to me, he's like, "Hey man, can I get in on that?"

01:07:49.720 | I was like, "Yeah, man, you get in on that."

01:07:51.460 | So this kid, he's five days younger than I am.

01:07:54.000 | This kid, he goes to the dentist the day

01:07:55.800 | that we're faking it, has a tooth pulled,

01:07:58.240 | tells the dentist not to numb it, not to stitch it,

01:08:01.080 | just pull it.

01:08:01.920 | (laughs)

01:08:02.760 | So he shows up, he shows up the day that we're driving

01:08:06.240 | out to fake the accident, he's got blood all over his shirt,

01:08:08.400 | he's still bleeding out of the mouth and everything else.

01:08:09.960 | I'm like, "Are you okay?"

01:08:10.800 | And he's like, "Yeah, man, it's gonna be good,

01:08:12.160 | it's gonna be good."

01:08:13.000 | I'm like, "Okay."

01:08:13.840 | So we, my mom, by this point,

01:08:15.680 | I'm living with my grandparents.

01:08:17.300 | My mom is up in the head of a hollow.

01:08:20.320 | So we're like, "We'll just do it up there.

01:08:22.040 | We'll go act like we're visiting my mom."

01:08:23.760 | On the way back out, ran over a mountain.

01:08:26.120 | I was like, "Okay."

01:08:27.280 | So we go visit and everything, come back out that night,

01:08:30.680 | run over the side of the hill.

01:08:32.360 | Me and Ronnie walk back up, of course it totals the car.

01:08:35.880 | Walk back to my mom's, acting like we've wrecked,

01:08:37.960 | she knows what time it is and everything else,

01:08:40.040 | and file the claims.

01:08:41.840 | So that gets the money to get married.

01:08:44.440 | And me and my wife moved from Hazard to Lexington.

01:08:48.180 | And I'm the kid that,

01:08:50.480 | my crime usually, if I was a single guy,

01:08:57.680 | wouldn't break the law.

01:08:59.080 | Wouldn't, I would be all right, you know?

01:09:00.560 | But females involved, oh yeah, oh yeah.

01:09:03.720 | Gotta spend the money, gotta show 'em gifts,

01:09:05.640 | everything else was never enough to show love

01:09:07.840 | in some sort of healthy way.

01:09:09.320 | Always had to go overboard.

01:09:10.520 | And typically it was buying some,

01:09:11.680 | or stealing some sort of expensive crap.

01:09:13.360 | - So that was the thing, that was the way you show love,

01:09:17.280 | is by buying expensive gifts.

01:09:19.120 | - Or something overboard.

01:09:20.680 | Back then with Susan initially,

01:09:23.520 | it was, "Don't worry about working, I got it.

01:09:26.600 | You just worry about going to school."

01:09:27.840 | She was a music major.

01:09:29.520 | I was like, "You just worry about going to school.

01:09:31.560 | So don't worry about cooking and cleaning, I got it.

01:09:34.560 | I got it."

01:09:35.400 | So not only was I this guy that was going overboard,

01:09:37.800 | but I was kind of a control freak too, right?

01:09:40.240 | So no, I got it, I got it, I got it.

01:09:42.260 | So here I am, you know, 60 hour a week job,

01:09:46.560 | 18 hour class load, cooking, cleaning.

01:09:48.800 | Something had to give.

01:09:50.360 | I quit the job, I couldn't do it.

01:09:51.840 | Quit the job and start back in fraud

01:09:55.120 | and trying to hide that from her at the same time.

01:09:57.860 | So it was initially telemarketing fraud.

01:10:00.560 | Started, I was working at,

01:10:03.760 | the first job I had was a telemarketer at a cemetery

01:10:07.280 | selling grave sites.

01:10:08.880 | And then that ended,

01:10:11.400 | went over to work for the Shriners Hospital.

01:10:14.440 | And it was a third party company

01:10:16.680 | that was doing all the telemarketing,

01:10:17.800 | made really good money doing that.

01:10:19.720 | That job ended and then they pivoted over

01:10:22.880 | to working with Kiwanis Clubs,

01:10:25.180 | selling food baskets to the food banks and everything.

01:10:29.320 | So I stole the phone list

01:10:32.480 | and started up my own Kiwanis Club

01:10:34.880 | and would do the telemarketing,

01:10:36.760 | go out twice a week and pick up checks.

01:10:39.440 | Well, what happened was is I'm going out

01:10:42.760 | picking up checks, go knock on a door.

01:10:46.240 | Turns out one of the persons that I had called

01:10:48.480 | was a law enforcement officer.

01:10:50.800 | So he was like, "Who are you?"

01:10:52.960 | I'm like, "I'm with the Kiwanis Club."

01:10:55.400 | And he's like, "No, you're not."

01:10:58.080 | Got arrested, spent three months in a county jail

01:11:00.920 | for theft by deception.

01:11:03.080 | Got out and we had to move from Lexington

01:11:08.080 | back to Hazard and live with Susan's parents.

01:11:10.920 | They had gotten a desktop computer, HP.

01:11:15.040 | And I started surfing around online, found eBay.

01:11:19.880 | And didn't really know how to make money on eBay.

01:11:22.760 | About the same time, I'm committing low-level frauds

01:11:28.200 | online.

01:11:29.040 | I don't really talk about that in the past.

01:11:30.960 | The first time I've really talked about that,

01:11:32.440 | but I would pay for it with bad checks.

01:11:36.200 | - So more a person, so not using a platform like eBay,

01:11:40.680 | more--

01:11:41.520 | - I would find somebody that had like a stereo system

01:11:43.680 | on eBay, something like that,

01:11:44.840 | and I'd pay for it with a bad check

01:11:46.720 | and would rely on them not to chase me

01:11:50.320 | because they were out of state at that point

01:11:51.680 | and the dollar amounts were very low.

01:11:53.960 | So got the money to move to, finally did those schemes

01:11:57.440 | enough to get the money to move back to Lexington.

01:12:01.760 | Got to Lexington and by this point I'm doing these,

01:12:04.440 | like I said, these schemes on eBay.

01:12:07.160 | And I'm like, there's gotta be a better way

01:12:09.160 | to make money on eBay, gotta be.

01:12:11.000 | So didn't really know how.

01:12:12.560 | One night I'm watching Inside Edition with Bill O'Reilly

01:12:16.520 | and they're profiling Beanie Babies.

01:12:18.880 | So I'm sitting there watching and the one they're profiling

01:12:20.760 | is this one called Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant

01:12:23.600 | selling for $1,500 on eBay.

01:12:25.800 | I'm sitting there going like, shit,

01:12:27.320 | I need to find me a peanut.

01:12:28.760 | My initial thought was, well, there's gotta be one

01:12:32.640 | in one of these Hallmark stores in Kentucky someplace.

01:12:35.480 | So I skipped class the next day,

01:12:36.880 | went out around all the Hallmark stores looking for peanut.

01:12:39.720 | No idiot, he's on eBay for $1,500.

01:12:43.780 | So after a few hours of that, I'm like,

01:12:46.960 | turns out they had a little gray Beanie Baby Elephants

01:12:51.480 | for $8, picked up one of those for $8,

01:12:54.480 | stopped by Kroger on the way home,

01:12:56.080 | picked up a pack of blue Rit dye,

01:12:58.400 | went home, tried to dye the little guy.

01:13:00.480 | So that was a nightmare.

01:13:02.600 | Turns out they're made out of polyester,

01:13:04.740 | get them out of the bath, looks like they've got the mange.

01:13:07.640 | And what happens is, so I'm trying to dye the damn thing.

01:13:11.680 | I'm like, well, that's not gonna work.

01:13:13.240 | That's just not gonna work.

01:13:14.620 | So I got online, found a picture of a real one,

01:13:17.400 | posted it on eBay.

01:13:19.120 | And I was like, well, what I can do is,

01:13:21.920 | I can claim that's the one I've got,

01:13:25.520 | and then maybe claim that it got messed up in the mail

01:13:28.400 | and work out like that.

01:13:29.360 | So posted a picture of a real one online.

01:13:32.320 | Woman thought I had the real thing, she wins the bid.

01:13:35.600 | That social engineering kicks in immediately.

01:13:37.520 | I didn't want to be on the defensive,

01:13:39.520 | I wanted to put her on the defensive.

01:13:41.400 | So as soon as she wins the bid, I send her a message.

01:13:44.040 | Hey, we've not done any business before.

01:13:46.160 | I don't even know if I can trust you.

01:13:47.800 | What I need you to do, protects us both,

01:13:50.680 | go down to the US Postal Service,

01:13:52.280 | get two money orders totaling $1,500,

01:13:54.980 | send them to me, issued by the US government,

01:13:57.560 | that way we're both protected.

01:13:59.060 | Soon as I get the money orders, I'll send you your animal.

01:14:02.600 | She believed that, didn't ask any questions at all.

01:14:04.720 | She believed that.

01:14:05.680 | Sent me the money orders, I cashed them out.

01:14:09.680 | Sent her the creature, immediately got a phone call.

01:14:12.640 | I didn't order this.

01:14:13.880 | My response, lady, you ordered a blue elephant.

01:14:16.840 | I sent you a blue-ish elephant.

01:14:19.840 | And she got pissed, and she kept calling.

01:14:23.040 | What I found out, and that's really the first lesson

01:14:26.160 | of cybercrime that most of these criminals,

01:14:27.680 | including self, learns.

01:14:29.160 | If you delay a victim long enough,

01:14:30.720 | just keep putting them off, a lot of them,

01:14:32.760 | they get exasperated, throw their hands in the air,

01:14:34.600 | walk away, you don't hear from them.

01:14:36.720 | And none of them, to this day,

01:14:39.600 | none of them complain to law enforcement.

01:14:41.480 | They eat it.

01:14:42.800 | - So it's a mixture of like you're exhausted

01:14:46.480 | by the process, so it's just easier to walk away,

01:14:49.480 | and second, almost like an embarrassment.

01:14:52.160 | - So there's a whole slew of reasons, all right?

01:14:54.560 | There's the exhaustion, certainly.

01:14:56.760 | There's the embarrassment, so if you figure out,

01:14:58.640 | if you look at it today,

01:14:59.680 | where does the embarrassment come from?

01:15:00.960 | Well, the media, family members,

01:15:03.560 | we're all very good about blaming the victim for crimes.

01:15:06.520 | Why would you click on the link?

01:15:07.600 | Why would you send money to somebody you don't know?

01:15:09.280 | Blah, blah, blah.

01:15:10.240 | So you've got that that's going on.

01:15:12.240 | You've got the issue of who do you complain to?

01:15:15.720 | Back then, you didn't know.

01:15:17.000 | Do you complain to local police?

01:15:18.160 | Because she's in another state,

01:15:20.000 | so which local police do you complain to?

01:15:22.600 | Do you complain to the feds?

01:15:23.600 | Well, the dollar amounts aren't high enough

01:15:25.400 | to complain to feds.

01:15:26.440 | Feds are gonna tell you to go local.

01:15:28.120 | Local's gonna tell you, hey, it happened in Kentucky.

01:15:30.720 | Complain to them.

01:15:31.600 | Kentucky's gonna tell you, well, shit, you're over there.

01:15:34.080 | We need you to come in.

01:15:34.920 | So there's this whole issue of the jurisdiction,

01:15:38.320 | of the blame factor, everything else.

01:15:40.500 | So I got away with that crime,

01:15:43.320 | and did it under my own name at that point.

01:15:46.040 | I kept going and got better at it.

01:15:49.440 | Started to understand how to hide identities,

01:15:51.760 | things like that.

01:15:52.600 | Started selling pirated software.

01:15:54.760 | Pirated software led into installing mod chips.

01:15:57.400 | It was for, the initial pirated software

01:15:59.280 | was a Sega Saturn, PlayStation 1.

01:16:02.040 | Well, you had to have a mod chip in those

01:16:03.800 | to play the pirated discs,

01:16:05.440 | so I started selling and installing mod chips.

01:16:08.760 | That led into installing mod chips

01:16:10.720 | into cable television boxes,

01:16:12.280 | so you could watch all the pay-per-view,

01:16:13.800 | which in turn led into programming satellite DSS cards.

01:16:18.160 | Those ATNH RCA satellite systems,

01:16:20.880 | pull the card out of it, program it,

01:16:22.640 | turns on all the channels.

01:16:24.560 | Started doing that.

01:16:25.880 | Can we just pause?

01:16:27.280 | That is very entrepreneurial.

01:16:32.880 | So just technically,

01:16:35.980 | so there's laws and rules that you're breaking,

01:16:42.040 | nonstop.

01:16:43.320 | So there's also legitimate ways of doing that,

01:16:47.280 | which is break the rules of the conventions of the past.

01:16:49.960 | That's the first principles thing.

01:16:51.400 | That's what Elon Musk and his ilk do all the time.

01:16:55.440 | That is guts and brilliance,

01:16:59.580 | but when it's crossing the lines of the law,

01:17:03.100 | actually sometimes the law is outdated.

01:17:07.300 | The thing is, as a human being,

01:17:09.040 | you have to then compute the ethical damage you're doing.

01:17:12.760 | Like ethically, the damage you're doing

01:17:14.240 | about other human beings.

01:17:15.220 | That is fundamentally the thing that you're breaking,

01:17:18.040 | is you're adding to the suffering in the world

01:17:20.960 | in one way or another, and you're justifying it.

01:17:24.240 | But in terms of me, sort of as an engineer,

01:17:27.800 | that is some gutsy thinking.

01:17:29.460 | That's how Woz and Steve Jobs thought.

01:17:33.080 | That's innovation.

01:17:35.680 | And maybe just think,

01:17:37.800 | if you can introspect your thinking process here,

01:17:41.840 | this is a new, I like how you remember this in HP.

01:17:46.540 | Like what, this is a totally new thing to you.

01:17:50.180 | Computers is another domain.

01:17:53.640 | How were you figuring these puzzles out,

01:17:56.040 | presumably mostly alone?

01:17:58.320 | - Alone.

01:17:59.160 | - When you were thinking through these problems,

01:18:01.360 | is there, this is a strange question to ask,

01:18:04.760 | but what is your thinking process?

01:18:08.680 | What is your approach to solving these problems?

01:18:10.760 | - So the approach is, is you do something,

01:18:14.200 | and you fuck it up, and you're like,

01:18:16.340 | you think back, okay, how do I fix that?

01:18:18.440 | (laughing)

01:18:19.760 | So you fix that aspect, you commit the crime again,

01:18:23.840 | and it goes a little bit further, and it screws up.

01:18:26.720 | Okay, how do I fix that?

01:18:28.640 | What's the issue on that?

01:18:29.560 | How do I fix that?

01:18:30.380 | - So there's not a deep design thinking like--

01:18:32.920 | - Later on, it becomes that.

01:18:33.960 | Once you lay that groundwork

01:18:36.280 | of the way these schemes are working,

01:18:38.280 | it becomes that, and you can apply that to other things

01:18:41.520 | in cybercrime as a whole.

01:18:44.480 | But initially, it's basically trial and error.

01:18:47.440 | You've got a problem, how do you solve that problem?

01:18:50.880 | So how do I, I'm committing these crimes under my name,

01:18:54.440 | how do I solve that?

01:18:55.440 | Well, one of the first principles

01:18:57.960 | that we started to teach on Shadow Crew is,

01:19:00.280 | all crimes should begin with identity theft.

01:19:04.000 | That's one of the main first principles

01:19:05.720 | that a lot of people to this day still don't really get.

01:19:08.280 | All right, why would I commit a crime under my name

01:19:10.280 | if I can do it under your name?

01:19:12.160 | So that's one of the big buffers,

01:19:13.880 | and that takes trial and error to get to that point

01:19:15.880 | where you start to understand that's the way

01:19:17.960 | crime should operate if you're a criminal.

01:19:20.660 | All right, but with me, it was, I mean, it's trial and error,

01:19:25.040 | it's that childhood where that mindset

01:19:28.200 | is kind of ingrained in you,

01:19:30.080 | where you're looking for ways,

01:19:32.400 | let's say non-traditional ways of getting around things

01:19:36.560 | or getting through things.

01:19:37.880 | - I mean, one of the questions,

01:19:39.640 | probably ask this later, is there's also a unique aspect

01:19:43.600 | to the outcome of what you were doing,

01:19:45.240 | which is you weren't, you didn't get caught

01:19:48.320 | for a very long time.

01:19:49.760 | - Right.

01:19:50.600 | - We'll talk about why that is.

01:19:52.040 | And the thing is, it's so interesting,

01:19:54.120 | all crime probably should, to be effective,

01:19:59.200 | should start with identity theft.

01:20:01.400 | I like that, identity theft,

01:20:02.800 | 'cause identity theft can take so many forms.

01:20:05.240 | - Right, right.

01:20:06.920 | - So yes, so Shadow Crew.

01:20:08.940 | You started with love.

01:20:13.240 | - Started with love, so now we're doing these schemes online.

01:20:17.220 | I'm selling to these,

01:20:20.280 | I'm programming these satellite DSS cards,

01:20:22.040 | and one of the interesting things,

01:20:24.200 | and you still see that to this day,

01:20:26.040 | is something will happen

01:20:29.120 | that will create an industry for criminals, all right?

01:20:33.480 | So what happened is, Canada, Canadian judge,

01:20:37.440 | rules about the same time

01:20:38.480 | that I'm doing these satellite cards,

01:20:40.580 | Canadian judge comes out and says,

01:20:42.000 | "Hey, it's legal for my citizens to pirate those signals."

01:20:47.000 | And his reasoning was,

01:20:49.240 | since RCA doesn't sell the systems up here,

01:20:51.520 | my citizens can pirate it.

01:20:53.960 | Okay, so what happens is, is overnight,

01:20:57.480 | about the same time PayPal comes into play.

01:20:59.720 | So PayPal's coming right online at about the same time.

01:21:03.320 | Overnight, little cottage industry

01:21:05.440 | pops up in the United States.

01:21:07.280 | You go down to Best Buy, buy the system for $100,

01:21:09.420 | take it out in the parking lot, open system up,

01:21:11.380 | pull it, open box up, pull the system out,

01:21:13.040 | pull the card out, throw the system away,

01:21:14.720 | program the card, ship its ass to Canada, $500 a pop.

01:21:17.880 | Started doing that, business is good.

01:21:21.520 | Making, you know, three, $4,000 a week doing that.

01:21:23.760 | I'm like, yeah, that's good.

01:21:25.160 | Have so many orders, I can't fill all the orders.

01:21:28.960 | And quickly think to myself,

01:21:30.540 | why do I need to fill any of them?

01:21:33.720 | They're in Canada, I'm down here.

01:21:35.960 | (laughing)

01:21:37.160 | You know, who are they gonna complain to?

01:21:39.140 | Because I already found out, people don't complain.

01:21:42.620 | All right, they're not gonna complain to anybody.

01:21:45.160 | So I start--

01:21:46.000 | - Especially in Canada.

01:21:46.840 | - Especially in Canada.

01:21:47.960 | (laughing)

01:21:49.000 | And I'm having them send money,

01:21:50.640 | that's when PayPal's first into play.

01:21:53.040 | And it amazes me that everybody is using PayPal.

01:21:58.040 | It's like, you don't even have to really ask.

01:22:00.440 | They're like, can we pay by,

01:22:01.460 | yeah, you can pay all day long by PayPal.

01:22:03.320 | And PayPal had no clue what they were doing with security.

01:22:05.920 | So it's like, okay.

01:22:08.360 | So they're sending money to PayPal,

01:22:09.880 | I'm having the PayPal cashed out to bank accounts

01:22:13.360 | in my name at that point.

01:22:14.720 | And I get scared, because by that point,

01:22:17.480 | I'm still in four to $6,000 a week.

01:22:20.160 | And I'm like, somebody's gonna be looking

01:22:21.520 | at money laundering.

01:22:23.520 | So, get it in my head, I'm like,

01:22:25.480 | best thing that I can do is get a fake driver's license.

01:22:28.960 | Open up a bank account using that driver's license,

01:22:31.240 | cash out at the ATM.

01:22:33.320 | Good, no idea where to get a fake ID, not a clue.

01:22:36.560 | So I get online, looked around,

01:22:38.720 | spent a couple weeks looking around,

01:22:40.360 | thought I found a guy,

01:22:41.600 | he went by the screen name of Fake ID Man.

01:22:43.920 | Thought I found a guy, sent him $200, sent him my picture.

01:22:47.700 | Dude rips me off.

01:22:49.120 | (laughing)

01:22:51.520 | I'm like, what the hell, man?

01:22:53.520 | Oh, I got played.

01:22:54.360 | He had a little website set up with reviews,

01:22:57.920 | and I'm like, oh, it's all legitimate.

01:22:59.400 | He's building that trust that I talked about.

01:23:01.800 | So, the end result, I got pissed.

01:23:06.160 | And there was no site that dealt with anything

01:23:11.160 | criminal or cyber crime related.

01:23:14.000 | The only real avenue you had was an IRC chat session,

01:23:17.040 | internet relay chat.

01:23:18.520 | And that, I'm sure you've been on that.

01:23:20.760 | It's this rolling chat board.

01:23:22.800 | You don't know who the hell you're talking to.

01:23:24.680 | Most of them are full of shit.

01:23:26.000 | You can't trust anybody,

01:23:27.280 | and you're sitting there trying to conduct business.

01:23:29.440 | So, if somebody claims they've got a product or service,

01:23:32.200 | do they have it, does it work,

01:23:33.400 | or are they just gonna rip you off?

01:23:34.400 | Because in those channels, everyone's a criminal.

01:23:37.000 | I kept looking around,

01:23:40.920 | and I happened upon a website called Counterfeit Library.

01:23:44.600 | And Counterfeit Library only dealt

01:23:46.720 | with counterfeit degrees and certificates,

01:23:49.120 | as well as degree meal type stuff.

01:23:51.720 | But they had a forum, and no one was using the forum.

01:23:55.320 | So, I basically get on there and bitch every day.

01:23:58.360 | I got ripped off, don't know what to do,

01:24:00.360 | bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

01:24:01.560 | About the same time I started doing that,

01:24:03.280 | two other guys show up.

01:24:04.820 | One's named Mr. X, he's out of Los Angeles.

01:24:07.360 | The other guy's named Beelzebub,

01:24:08.720 | he's out of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

01:24:11.760 | And we all become buddies.

01:24:13.480 | So, a few weeks of me bitching,

01:24:15.240 | a few weeks of them responding.

01:24:17.760 | Beelzebub gets me on ICQ, and he sends me a message.

01:24:20.800 | He's like, I went by the screen name of Gollum

01:24:22.560 | at that point, Gollum Fun.

01:24:24.060 | And he's like, "Gollum, I can make you

01:24:26.080 | "a fake driver's license."

01:24:26.920 | And I was like, "Well, motherfucker, do it."

01:24:28.640 | And he's like, "Well, I'm gonna charge you for it."

01:24:30.640 | I'm like, "Yeah, you are."

01:24:32.320 | He's like, "I am."

01:24:33.880 | I was like, "No, you're not."

01:24:35.440 | And he's like, "Look, man," he said,

01:24:37.900 | "this business, if you're gonna do this,

01:24:40.140 | "you have to trust people, or you're gonna fail."

01:24:44.120 | He said, "So, I'm gonna charge you $200,

01:24:46.660 | "but I'm gonna send you a driver's license."

01:24:49.000 | Well, by this point, I'm friends with the people

01:24:51.080 | who own Counterfeit Library.

01:24:53.080 | We're emailing, chatting, everything else.

01:24:55.640 | And I tell him, I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna send you $200.

01:24:59.500 | "That way, when you rip me off, I'll have them ban you,

01:25:02.280 | "and I don't have to deal with you anymore."

01:25:04.000 | And he's like, "Bet."

01:25:04.880 | I'm like, "Okay."

01:25:06.360 | So, I sent him $200, sent him my picture.

01:25:08.860 | Two weeks later, I get a driver's license,

01:25:11.680 | name is Steven Schweke, out of Ohio,

01:25:13.720 | and real guy, worked at ADP Payroll to this day,

01:25:17.340 | works at ADP, is where the guy works.

01:25:19.760 | Got the driver's license, and to me,

01:25:23.420 | at that point in time, it was the prettiest thing

01:25:25.660 | that I'd ever seen.

01:25:27.300 | I'd never seen a fake ID before.

01:25:29.540 | I thought it was great.

01:25:30.820 | Turns out, looking back, it was like, eh.

01:25:32.920 | - That is kind of a strong first step

01:25:39.620 | in creating a fake identity.

01:25:42.540 | - Very strong.

01:25:43.540 | Very strong.

01:25:44.380 | So, this guy-- - So, that was like,

01:25:46.180 | Gasko just, on the point he made,

01:25:51.180 | that if you're gonna be successful in this,

01:25:54.340 | you should have people you trust.

01:25:56.940 | Is he right on that?

01:25:58.000 | - Oh, he's absolutely right.

01:26:00.060 | He's absolutely right.

01:26:00.900 | - So, you have to have, this is like mob.

01:26:03.680 | - You have to--

01:26:04.520 | - You have to have an inner circle that you trust.

01:26:07.780 | - I'm sure you've probably heard me say this before.

01:26:11.420 | Successful cyber crime, all right?

01:26:14.580 | There are three necessities to being successful online

01:26:17.580 | if you're a criminal.

01:26:18.540 | Three necessities are gathering data,

01:26:21.080 | committing the crime, and then cashing it out.

01:26:24.260 | All three of those necessities have to work in conjunction.

01:26:26.700 | If they don't, the crime fails.

01:26:28.420 | The problem, and it's a huge problem,

01:26:30.740 | is that one guy can't do all three things.

01:26:34.100 | You've got the people who gather the data.

01:26:37.020 | Basically, the general store sells people

01:26:39.700 | who sell PII, credit card logins, data tools.

01:26:44.540 | They always sell the spoofed phone numbers

01:26:46.260 | and the RDPs, stuff like that.

01:26:48.620 | A lot of the times, those people don't know

01:26:49.860 | how to commit the crime, and those people certainly

01:26:51.940 | don't know how to launder the money out

01:26:53.260 | and put cash in pocket.

01:26:54.660 | So, you've got, either because of a skill level,

01:26:58.060 | sometimes a geographic location,

01:27:00.180 | limits what that individual can do, all right?

01:27:03.300 | So, you have to rely on people who are good

01:27:06.220 | in areas where you are not in order

01:27:08.620 | for that crime to succeed.

01:27:10.660 | And that means you have to trust those people.

01:27:15.420 | So, what happens with Shadow Crew?

01:27:17.580 | All right, so, Counterfeit Library is the start, all right?

01:27:20.580 | Counterfeit Library transitions over to Shadow Crew.

01:27:24.540 | Right before that transition, there's a Ukrainian guy

01:27:27.900 | by the name of Dmitry Golubov.

01:27:29.660 | He was a spammer at that point in time.

01:27:31.300 | He saw what we were doing with Counterfeit Library,

01:27:34.500 | and he liked it.

01:27:36.020 | He was getting all these credit card details,

01:27:37.820 | and this kid, I mean, he's a kid,

01:27:39.980 | this kid has an idea, and his idea was,

01:27:42.260 | I wonder if people would buy stolen credit card details.

01:27:45.260 | - That's pretty good Ukrainian-Russian accent.

01:27:47.620 | - So, he picks up the phone, he calls his buddies,

01:27:52.260 | they call their buddies, they have a physical conference

01:27:55.060 | in Odessa, 150 of these cyber criminals show up,

01:27:58.460 | and they launch this idea, they launch a website

01:28:01.580 | called Carter Planet, which is the genesis

01:28:04.460 | of all modern credit card theft as we know it, all right?

01:28:07.500 | So, remember I mentioned those three necessities

01:28:10.700 | of cyber crime.

01:28:11.540 | Dmitry had all the credit data in the world,

01:28:16.060 | and he partnered with all these other Ukrainians

01:28:17.820 | who had all this data as well.

01:28:19.580 | The problem was, is so much fraud had been committed

01:28:22.220 | on that eastern side of Europe,

01:28:24.100 | that every card had been shut down.

01:28:26.500 | Even if you were a legitimate cardholder

01:28:28.900 | and tried to cash it out, you weren't doing it

01:28:30.980 | at that point.

01:28:32.060 | So, again, those three necessities,

01:28:33.740 | gathering data, committing crime, cashing out.

01:28:35.860 | Dmitry had the data, they could commit the crime,

01:28:38.980 | they could not put cash in pocket.

01:28:41.660 | So, we were running Counterfeit Library,

01:28:44.380 | one day I get this message, or not a message,

01:28:46.740 | one day, Scripps shows up, and he posts,

01:28:49.980 | just on the general forum, he posts,

01:28:51.300 | "Hey, I've got credit card data.

01:28:53.300 | "Give me an address, give me a burner phone number,

01:28:56.540 | "wait five business days, order whatever you want to."

01:28:58.940 | We had never seen anything like that,

01:29:01.340 | we were a PayPal fraud and eBay fraud site,

01:29:03.660 | is what we were, and fake driver's licenses.

01:29:06.260 | So, and we had, I guess we had two,

01:29:08.260 | three thousand members at that point.

01:29:09.940 | So, the response from the members was,

01:29:13.860 | that can't be real.

01:29:16.180 | You've gotta be law enforcement,

01:29:17.580 | it's gotta be trying to get us arrested

01:29:19.500 | and everything else.

01:29:20.500 | Let me backtrack a little bit.

01:29:23.380 | So, the driver's license that I had got,

01:29:27.100 | Beelzebub had an idea.

01:29:28.780 | What he wanted to do, is he wanted to sell

01:29:32.180 | driver's licenses.

01:29:33.340 | Mr. X wanted to sell social security cards,

01:29:36.620 | he made a very passable social security card.

01:29:39.180 | Me, I had no skill level on that,

01:29:40.900 | I knew PayPal fraud and eBay fraud.

01:29:42.820 | So, Beelzebub was like, "Tell you what,

01:29:45.380 | "you be the reviewer.

01:29:47.220 | "That way you get every product or service

01:29:49.340 | "that comes in, they'll have to send it to you,

01:29:51.340 | "or let you have access to it,

01:29:52.940 | "you can learn the entire game,

01:29:55.360 | "and because you're not selling anything,

01:29:57.760 | "it gives you legitimacy on the reviews."

01:30:00.500 | All right?

01:30:01.380 | So, I started out as a reviewer,

01:30:02.620 | the only reviewer on Counterfeit Library.

01:30:05.620 | So, over the next year, Beelzebub,

01:30:08.740 | turns out he was a pot grower.

01:30:10.100 | He goes back to growing pot,

01:30:11.780 | because he wasn't making shit selling driver's licenses.

01:30:14.420 | Mr. X, about a year and a half in,

01:30:16.780 | he gets arrested, cashing out driver's,

01:30:19.500 | credit card, not credit cards,

01:30:20.500 | cashing out at casinos, doing some shit with that.

01:30:24.180 | So, I'm the only guy left standing,

01:30:26.160 | and I'm at the top of the heap.

01:30:27.580 | So, and it becomes this thing where,

01:30:30.420 | if I review somebody, they make a lot of money.

01:30:33.860 | If I don't, you don't do business here.

01:30:36.700 | So, Scripps shows up, saying he's got this,

01:30:38.780 | I'm the only reviewer on site.

01:30:40.480 | People think he's law enforcement.

01:30:43.900 | First week, it goes like that.

01:30:45.460 | After a while, I'm like, "Okay, I gotta do something."

01:30:47.260 | And I'm scared, man, 'cause I'm like,

01:30:48.740 | "He may be law enforcement."

01:30:50.540 | So, I get him on ICQ, and I'm like,

01:30:51.920 | "Hey, you have to be reviewed."

01:30:53.100 | He's like, "What the hell is that?"

01:30:54.700 | So, I tell him what it is, he's like, "You review me."

01:30:56.780 | I was like, "Yeah, that's the idea."

01:30:58.500 | So, give him a drop address,

01:31:00.660 | give him a burner phone number, wait five business days,

01:31:04.420 | and I try to hit Dell for $5,000.

01:31:06.820 | The order fails.

01:31:08.100 | I get back on ICQ, "Hey, man, it didn't work."

01:31:10.340 | He's like, "Give me one more chance."

01:31:11.940 | I was like, "Look, I'll give you one more chance,

01:31:13.660 | "but it's your ass after that."

01:31:15.020 | And he's like, "One more chance."

01:31:16.660 | I'm like, "Okay."

01:31:17.500 | Give him another address, another phone number,

01:31:20.060 | wait another five business days,

01:31:22.380 | hit Thompson's Computer Warehouse for $4,000,

01:31:25.300 | Dell for $5,000.

01:31:26.860 | Order goes through, get the products in.

01:31:28.860 | I post that review on Counterfeit Library,

01:31:33.820 | and literally overnight, we turn from an eBay,

01:31:36.940 | PayPal fraud site to a credit theft site.

01:31:39.940 | And that becomes a lot of money really quickly for members.

01:31:44.100 | So, we were doing, now it's called CMP fraud,

01:31:46.700 | Card Not Present fraud.

01:31:47.660 | So, you hit an online merchant

01:31:49.660 | with stolen credit card data.

01:31:51.220 | Back then, a fairly experienced fraudster

01:31:54.500 | could profit 30 to $40,000 a month.

01:31:57.420 | Okay?

01:31:58.580 | Just buying laptops, what have you, and cashing out,

01:32:01.700 | put them on eBay for sale and sell them like that.

01:32:03.900 | 30 to 40K a month was the profit on that.

01:32:06.820 | Script had a lot of buddies.

01:32:08.460 | He had people like Roman Vega,

01:32:10.980 | these other guys that would sell not just credit card data,

01:32:14.100 | but counterfeit physical credit cards as well.

01:32:17.260 | We had-

01:32:18.100 | - Counterfeit, not stolen.

01:32:20.060 | So, counterfeit.

01:32:20.940 | - Counterfeit.

01:32:22.980 | - That must be tough to do.

01:32:25.100 | - So, the connections-

01:32:25.940 | - That must be harder than driver's license.

01:32:28.180 | - It's crazy.

01:32:29.020 | So, what BOA initially had,

01:32:32.780 | and I became the United States salesperson for BOA,

01:32:37.100 | but what he had was,

01:32:38.220 | is he was the first dumps provider in the United States.

01:32:42.420 | So, on the back of your credit or debit card,

01:32:44.500 | there's a magnetic stripe.

01:32:47.020 | Three data tracks on the stripe.

01:32:48.380 | There was the first data track is customer's name,

01:32:50.340 | second data track is the card number,

01:32:52.540 | forward slash, 16 digit algorithm outside of that.

01:32:56.020 | That's important.

01:32:56.860 | We'll get back to that in a few minutes.

01:32:58.460 | Third data track is called indiscriminate data.

01:33:00.460 | No one uses it.

01:33:01.420 | So, what's bought and sold is the second data track.

01:33:05.660 | It's called the dump.

01:33:06.860 | And the reason that's sold is when you go into a shop,

01:33:10.020 | you insert the card or you swipe the card,

01:33:12.780 | the only information that's sent out for verification

01:33:15.260 | is the second data track.

01:33:17.220 | That goes to the processor bank for verification.

01:33:19.700 | The first data track that customer's name

01:33:21.580 | shows up on the screen of the cashier in front of you.

01:33:24.580 | So, what typically happens is,

01:33:26.340 | is you buy 10 of these dumps.

01:33:28.180 | You get 10 counterfeit cards.

01:33:30.540 | Encode track two on all 10 cards.

01:33:32.380 | Track one, you create one fake driver's license.

01:33:35.300 | Track one is just the name

01:33:36.660 | of that one fake driver's license.

01:33:38.140 | That way, when you go in the shop,

01:33:39.500 | swipe the card, track two gets sent off for verification.

01:33:42.060 | Track one shows up on the screen in front of the cashier.

01:33:44.900 | If you ever ask for ID, you pull out the fake ID.

01:33:47.540 | Everyone's nice, warm, fuzzy.

01:33:48.820 | You walk out with the cameras, Rolex.

01:33:51.140 | - And track one could be, it doesn't have to be connected.

01:33:54.060 | It's not connected to track two.

01:33:55.100 | - Not connected at all.

01:33:56.300 | All right.

01:33:57.260 | That's one of the big problems, all right?

01:33:59.180 | - Yeah.

01:34:00.020 | - So, Scrip brought a host of technical people

01:34:05.020 | into that type of environment,

01:34:06.980 | all committing credit card theft.

01:34:08.500 | We had proxy providers.

01:34:10.180 | We had all these people that were doing this stuff.

01:34:13.040 | We start making a lot of money, a lot.

01:34:15.540 | And the reason that happens is, again,

01:34:17.620 | Scrip did not have the ability to cash out.

01:34:21.140 | So he was reduced to selling things.

01:34:23.580 | And at the same time, he's looking for,

01:34:25.140 | how do I make more money?

01:34:26.620 | All right?

01:34:28.100 | The Ukrainians happened upon this thing

01:34:31.500 | called the CVV-1 breach, or hack,

01:34:34.380 | is what they called it.

01:34:36.100 | So what happens is, remember I told you of track two.

01:34:39.080 | Card number, forward slash, 16-digit algorithm.

01:34:43.420 | You gotta know the algorithm to encode it

01:34:46.280 | so you can swipe the card or take it to the ATM machine.

01:34:49.340 | All right?

01:34:50.180 | ATM.

01:34:51.760 | You gotta know it.

01:34:52.780 | Now, we were fishing data from hell.

01:34:54.800 | I mean, we were doing a lot of fishing, a lot.

01:34:58.540 | We were getting pins, we were getting card numbers,

01:35:01.340 | but you can't get that algorithm.

01:35:03.620 | So, the Ukrainians start testing stuff.

01:35:05.840 | What they found out was,

01:35:08.860 | no bank had implemented the hash on track two.

01:35:13.620 | So, you take the card number, forward slash,

01:35:15.860 | any 16 digits, it would encode.

01:35:19.340 | Take it to the ATM, pull cash out,

01:35:21.800 | 'cause you got the pin.

01:35:23.100 | All right?

01:35:24.220 | Started doing that.

01:35:26.280 | - Well, wait, sorry, I'm trying to understand.

01:35:28.620 | So, that means, so if there's no,

01:35:32.020 | are they generating random numbers,

01:35:34.640 | or do they have valid numbers for track two?

01:35:37.080 | - No numbers were needed at all,

01:35:38.320 | as long as just the track two was a complete track two.

01:35:41.800 | - So, it's a valid track two that doesn't matter,

01:35:45.680 | so the pin is the thing that gets you in?

01:35:48.560 | - So, back then, all right,

01:35:49.760 | back then what we're talking about is,

01:35:51.200 | you need to, typically, today you'd need a whole track two.

01:35:54.320 | You need that valid track two.

01:35:55.800 | All right, you need the 16 digit card number,

01:35:59.000 | the forward slash, and then whatever that algorithm

01:36:01.320 | is on the side of it.

01:36:02.360 | All right?

01:36:03.200 | Back then, none of the banks

01:36:04.840 | had implemented that algorithm.

01:36:06.760 | So, while the algorithm was there,

01:36:08.920 | you didn't need it to encode.

01:36:11.340 | - Interesting.

01:36:14.440 | - Interesting.

01:36:15.880 | - So, you can't make a lot of money

01:36:18.280 | with physical fake credit cards, debit cards.

01:36:23.280 | - Card not present fraud, remember I told you,

01:36:25.480 | was $30,000 to $40,000 a month.

01:36:27.480 | All right?

01:36:28.320 | That turned into $30,000 to $40,000 a day.

01:36:32.520 | The Ukrainians, again, they can't cash it out.

01:36:35.680 | They've got all the data on the planet,

01:36:38.200 | but they can't cash it out,

01:36:39.240 | those three necessities of cyber crime.

01:36:41.400 | So, the deal became, you have to rely on the Americans.

01:36:44.580 | Tell you what, we'll give you 40%.

01:36:46.600 | So, you had all these cashiers that were 40%

01:36:49.880 | of $40,000 a day.

01:36:51.160 | Yeah, we'll take that.

01:36:52.280 | All right?

01:36:53.340 | Send the rest of it over to buy Western Union

01:36:55.560 | or what have you to your Ukrainian contact.

01:36:57.880 | That's before cryptocurrency came into play.

01:36:59.720 | Now, you had a couple of forerunners with E-Gold

01:37:01.760 | and Liberty Reserve, things like that.

01:37:04.320 | But, back then, it starts out with Western Union,

01:37:07.660 | then it becomes prepaid cards,

01:37:09.360 | sending track information over,

01:37:11.120 | loading the card up like that,

01:37:12.440 | and then finally you get to E-Gold, Liberty Reserve,

01:37:14.480 | and today it's with crypto that's used.

01:37:17.340 | Started stealing a lot of money, a lot.

01:37:23.240 | And that got law enforcement attention.

01:37:26.560 | So, we started to see, I mean, it's a crazy ass story.

01:37:30.400 | We started to see IPs coming in

01:37:33.600 | from law enforcement agencies, government agencies,

01:37:35.640 | because back then, they didn't know how to shield

01:37:37.200 | your identity either.

01:37:38.260 | So, you saw Secret Service, you saw DOD,

01:37:42.060 | you saw all these, and you're like, that's interesting.

01:37:45.460 | At the same time, we had, it was called a hack,

01:37:52.600 | but it wasn't a hack.

01:37:54.140 | We had a guy that worked at T-Mobile in Los Angeles.

01:37:58.840 | This is the same guy that, back then,

01:38:01.260 | published Paris Hilton's phone contact list.

01:38:04.620 | That made a lot of news.

01:38:06.860 | Not only did he do that, but it turned out

01:38:09.780 | that the Los Angeles Secret Service agency

01:38:12.420 | was using T-Mobile phones.

01:38:14.220 | So, he's getting text messages of the Secret Service

01:38:17.940 | investigating Shadow Crew,

01:38:19.980 | and he posts those damn things on Shadow Crew.

01:38:21.820 | So, I'm sitting there going, head of the pile.

01:38:23.900 | I'm sitting there going, this is not gonna end well.

01:38:27.060 | This is not gonna end well.

01:38:28.620 | So, at the same time, I had access,

01:38:31.420 | I started out with access

01:38:33.100 | to the Indiana State Sex Offenders Registry,

01:38:35.700 | and I was using that to create bank accounts,

01:38:37.860 | laundered the money out,

01:38:38.700 | and I would sell the bank accounts, stuff like that.

01:38:40.980 | They shut that down.

01:38:43.140 | The next database I had access to

01:38:44.940 | was the Texas Driver's License Database,

01:38:47.660 | and started using that to create fake driver's licenses,

01:38:51.100 | what have you.

01:38:52.140 | And then, finally, we happened upon

01:38:54.440 | the California Death Index.

01:38:57.300 | All right?

01:38:58.860 | Complete information.

01:38:59.860 | Mother's Maiden, socials, DOBs, all that.

01:39:03.380 | And it's like, gotta be a use for that.

01:39:06.260 | Well, you can use it to create identities all day long.

01:39:09.660 | My idea was, I wonder if you could take somebody

01:39:14.660 | that's died and then file for social security death,

01:39:18.460 | not death benefits, but social security benefits

01:39:20.320 | for that individual, and get that recurring paycheck in.

01:39:23.180 | So, that takes a lot of research

01:39:24.660 | to start seeing if you can do that.

01:39:26.780 | How does the federal government know if you're dead?

01:39:29.420 | Do federal indexes reference state indexes?

01:39:32.700 | You got all these questions that pop up.

01:39:34.940 | Well, it turns out, federal indexes

01:39:36.780 | don't reference state indexes.

01:39:38.260 | It's against the law.

01:39:39.780 | It also turns out, the only way the federal government

01:39:42.220 | knows you're dead is prior to 1998,

01:39:46.100 | the family had to file a social security death benefit

01:39:51.000 | for that person.

01:39:52.540 | All right?

01:39:53.820 | Prior to '98--

01:39:54.660 | - Which, of course, most people don't.

01:39:56.020 | - Right, prior to '98, it took the family.

01:39:58.580 | After '98, the hospital can do it,

01:40:01.220 | the funeral home can do it, or the family can do it.

01:40:03.580 | So, a lot more people have it filed if they've died.

01:40:06.540 | - But it's still, there's a lot of people

01:40:08.340 | probably-- - A lot of people don't.

01:40:09.860 | Because that death benefit's only like $219.

01:40:13.260 | - Yeah.

01:40:14.100 | - Okay, nobody's thinking about that shit.

01:40:16.000 | So, I started to apply for social security benefits.

01:40:19.880 | Nope, number's dormant.

01:40:21.780 | So, they want you to come in for a physical interview.

01:40:23.780 | Here I am, you know, 32.

01:40:26.540 | You're not gonna pass as a 65-year-old, so no.

01:40:29.660 | So, the next idea I had was,

01:40:31.600 | wonder if you could file income tax returns on these people.

01:40:36.020 | Turns out you can, all day long.

01:40:40.460 | So, I started doing that, and I started to steal.

01:40:44.060 | Once I got ramped up, 'cause you test everything.

01:40:46.280 | You know, you're testing to make sure,

01:40:48.140 | I gotta figure out what the deposit instrument is

01:40:50.420 | and everything else.

01:40:51.260 | And once you get all that lined out,

01:40:53.260 | I started to steal $160,000 a week,

01:40:55.980 | every week for 10 months out of the year.

01:40:58.540 | - By paying taxes?

01:41:00.740 | - By filing fake returns.

01:41:03.020 | - Yeah, filing fake tax returns.

01:41:05.100 | - So, you find a business, and the way the system worked is

01:41:08.360 | the IRS will issue a refund on somebody

01:41:11.740 | before they're able to verify

01:41:13.100 | that that person worked for an employer.

01:41:15.380 | Still works like that today.

01:41:17.460 | All right, so.

01:41:18.460 | - And you're keeping the amounts relatively low.

01:41:20.580 | - Keeping it $3,000.

01:41:22.620 | - All right.

01:41:23.460 | - Amounts are very low.

01:41:24.300 | - But you're still able to achieve scale

01:41:25.720 | because this large index of real people.

01:41:27.220 | - I got to where, and I was manual.

01:41:28.940 | Later on, a couple of buddies of mine

01:41:30.300 | went automated with it.

01:41:31.540 | - Wait, you were doing this by hand,

01:41:33.020 | so there's no code involved?

01:41:34.780 | - All manual.

01:41:35.740 | - Wow.

01:41:36.580 | - I'd file a return once every six minutes,

01:41:38.240 | work 10 hours a day, three days a week.

01:41:42.180 | - So, clicking on, so typing fast and clicking.

01:41:44.740 | - One return every six minutes.

01:41:46.580 | That's changing IP, that's changing address,

01:41:49.340 | everything else, one return every six minutes.

01:41:51.700 | For three days a week.

01:41:54.060 | Fourth day, I would take a road trip,

01:41:57.060 | plot out a map of ATMs, and then the next two days,

01:42:00.900 | cash out, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

01:42:02.900 | All right, come back home, rinse and repeat.

01:42:05.220 | Turns out that a backpack, I don't see any sitting

01:42:09.020 | around here, but a backpack will hold $150,000 of 20s,

01:42:12.940 | is what it'll hold.

01:42:14.400 | So I'd put 150K in 20s in a backpack,

01:42:16.660 | I had a spare bedroom, I'd come in,

01:42:19.340 | toss the backpack in the bedroom.

01:42:21.020 | - This is very, very important information,

01:42:23.060 | and the fact that you know it is also very.

01:42:25.340 | First, we started with the volume of coal that weighs a ton,

01:42:27.900 | and now a backpack holds $150,000 of 20s,

01:42:32.260 | and then you can multiply that by five for hundreds.

01:42:35.300 | - Yeah.

01:42:36.260 | - I like this. - Of course, it's 20s,

01:42:37.100 | most of the time it's 20s coming out of an ATM, right?

01:42:39.660 | Each 20 weighs a gram. - That's true,

01:42:40.500 | you can't do 100.

01:42:41.980 | Each 20 weighs a gram.

01:42:43.860 | - So you can actually go by weight,

01:42:45.500 | which is what federal authorities do

01:42:47.300 | when they get a pallet of cash, they just weigh it.

01:42:49.900 | - Oh, they just weigh it, okay.

01:42:52.180 | - So 150K is seven and a half keys of cash.

01:42:55.720 | (laughing)

01:42:57.140 | - That's pretty light.

01:42:59.460 | - Not bad, not bad.

01:43:00.300 | - Yeah, so you get a big backpack,

01:43:02.100 | do a good run of David Goggins with it, nice, I like it.

01:43:05.760 | The fact, you know, this is great.

01:43:08.580 | So wait, where does that come in with the backpack?

01:43:11.340 | - So what happens is, I didn't know how to launder money.

01:43:14.060 | All right, so I'm throwing cash in the spare bedroom,

01:43:17.300 | one day you open up the bedroom,

01:43:18.900 | and you're like, gotta do something with those backpacks.

01:43:22.180 | And that's when you start learning how to launder money.

01:43:25.060 | You know, cash-based businesses, things like that.

01:43:26.900 | I had a production company,

01:43:28.060 | had a couple of detailing company,

01:43:29.580 | I was thinking about going into food trucks,

01:43:31.940 | things like that in Charleston.

01:43:33.100 | - Actually, can you pause on that to take a tangent there?

01:43:35.300 | How does money laundering work?

01:43:39.100 | I mean, at that time,

01:43:40.660 | and what years are we talking about?

01:43:42.300 | - This is, by the time the tax return schemes go into play,

01:43:46.880 | we're talking 2002, 2003 is when tax returns start.

01:43:51.020 | - And so what, at that time,

01:43:53.300 | and what you're aware of now, how it evolved,

01:43:55.980 | how does money laundering work?

01:43:58.360 | - You know, it's not that much different.

01:44:00.660 | It's really not.

01:44:02.220 | You get a cash-based business,

01:44:04.180 | start laundering the money,

01:44:05.100 | or putting the money through that,

01:44:06.180 | saying the transactions are legal.

01:44:08.100 | You then start depositing it into bank accounts.

01:44:11.180 | From bank accounts, my thing was,

01:44:14.060 | have bank accounts in the United States, Mexico, Canada,

01:44:19.060 | and then finally bounce over to Estonia,

01:44:22.400 | was the final destination of all this stuff.

01:44:24.040 | And the idea is to try to move them to so many places

01:44:28.460 | that by the end of the day, it looks legal,

01:44:31.200 | and you can't trace it all if you're ever caught,

01:44:34.480 | which you ultimately are.

01:44:36.280 | But, so the cash-based businesses--

01:44:38.280 | - So when you say, sorry to interrupt,

01:44:40.040 | the cash-based businesses,

01:44:41.820 | so you have money that needs to be moved to other people.

01:44:46.820 | So how does that work?

01:44:49.660 | What's the business?

01:44:50.900 | Are people providing you a service,

01:44:52.700 | and you're giving them money?

01:44:54.380 | - Right, so you do the Ozark thing if you wanna do that.

01:44:57.500 | So you can gamble, cash out something like that.

01:44:59.660 | So it trips to whatever casinos you've got.

01:45:02.580 | You've got your production company or your detail company.

01:45:05.900 | So how many cars you're cleaning a day,

01:45:08.100 | how many companies have you got to do that?

01:45:10.260 | All right, whatever that company is,

01:45:12.640 | it's gotta be cash-based.

01:45:13.720 | Somebody's paying you in cash is what you're doing.

01:45:16.920 | You have to have enough of those cash-based businesses

01:45:19.020 | where it doesn't look funny, all right?

01:45:21.500 | Because if you're a detail company

01:45:23.120 | making $100,000 a month, that's a problem.

01:45:26.120 | (laughs)

01:45:26.960 | - Yeah.

01:45:27.780 | - Okay, so then you start depositing into that.

01:45:30.340 | Well, because of the Patriot Act,

01:45:33.200 | a suspicious activity report, SARS,

01:45:36.160 | came in at $2,500 instead of the 10K that it used to be.

01:45:40.380 | So all of a sudden, you've got multiple bank accounts

01:45:42.260 | that you've gotta set up, all right?

01:45:44.700 | Fortunately, what you also had is you had

01:45:46.740 | a bunch of prepaid debit cards

01:45:47.980 | that were coming into play at the same time.

01:45:49.860 | So a combination of bank accounts, prepaid debits

01:45:53.760 | that had ACH abilities attached to those as well,

01:45:56.500 | and you start running them all together.

01:45:58.380 | Then once it's out of the United States,

01:46:00.260 | you don't have to worry as much.

01:46:01.340 | You can start funneling that into fewer bank accounts

01:46:05.320 | until finally you've got the one main account

01:46:07.660 | that's over at Banco Leteco in Estonia at that point.

01:46:11.260 | That's what you've got.

01:46:12.940 | - So a bunch of hops that end up

01:46:14.860 | at a place that you can't trace.

01:46:16.340 | - And to give you an idea,

01:46:17.180 | I was arrested February 8th, 2005.

01:46:19.820 | My last seizure was 2010.

01:46:22.900 | Got the last seizure notice.

01:46:24.300 | So, took 'em, they got it,

01:46:27.300 | but it did took 'em that long to get to it.

01:46:30.300 | - So how do the stories like with Scrip

01:46:33.180 | that come into play here where he had someone

01:46:37.680 | who owed him money kidnapped and tortured,

01:46:40.080 | so when does it turn darker?

01:46:45.080 | - It turns darker the more money you make.

01:46:48.760 | Scrip was a kid that he was stealing enough money

01:46:52.820 | that he was able to buy whatever estate he wanted to,

01:46:55.080 | and he would brag about touring the countryside,

01:46:57.960 | and if he saw property that he liked, he would buy it.

01:47:00.920 | And that was not just a brag, he was doing that.

01:47:03.820 | So this kid is stealing a lot of money.

01:47:05.740 | At the same time, he's got connections politically

01:47:08.580 | because of his family.

01:47:09.820 | He's got connections, and that family's got connections

01:47:12.020 | with a Ukrainian mob, all right?

01:47:14.100 | So he's got these inroads,

01:47:16.180 | and people are looking out for him,

01:47:17.700 | and he's stealing a lot of money at the same time.

01:47:19.980 | Somebody doesn't pay him a decent amount of money.

01:47:24.300 | Somebody doesn't pay him.

01:47:25.340 | Now we had never, with Shadow Crew,

01:47:28.140 | with Carter Planet, with Counterfeit Library,

01:47:30.540 | we were basically the geeks, all right?

01:47:33.680 | We were just the fraudsters, the social engineers.

01:47:36.840 | We had never really considered violence.

01:47:38.840 | The rules that I had in play were,

01:47:40.520 | hey, we don't do child pornography,

01:47:43.120 | we don't do counterfeit currency, we don't do drugs.

01:47:46.780 | And the only thing we ended up really obeying

01:47:48.860 | was the child porn stuff,

01:47:50.400 | except for Max Butler, who you mentioned earlier.

01:47:52.800 | Scrip, someone rips the guy off,

01:47:57.180 | and he comes online on Shadow Crew at that point,

01:48:02.180 | and he posts these pictures one day.

01:48:04.300 | And I mean, it was a detailed narrative

01:48:06.580 | through the pictures.

01:48:07.420 | Had the guy that rammed in the van,

01:48:10.340 | had the door open, rammed in the van,

01:48:12.700 | had the guy tied up, had the guy being tortured,

01:48:15.780 | and the response was, this is what happens

01:48:20.260 | when you steal from me.

01:48:22.500 | And that's the first time that violence came into play

01:48:27.500 | at that point, and that's when things got,

01:48:29.900 | you start realizing things are getting a little serious.

01:48:32.540 | - How did that make you feel?

01:48:34.640 | - The first response is, can't be real.

01:48:37.860 | He's just doing that.

01:48:41.460 | He's wanting to send a message.

01:48:44.100 | Then you're like, no, that's real, that's real.

01:48:48.360 | - Were you afraid in your own heart

01:48:51.980 | that you might descend to that too?

01:48:55.340 | If you see that, or was it pretty clear to you

01:48:58.420 | that that's a line that some people can cross

01:49:02.260 | and some can't, and you're not one of those

01:49:04.100 | that can cross it?

01:49:04.980 | - You know, I gotta tell you, I joke with my wife.

01:49:07.740 | The joke I tell my wife is,

01:49:13.020 | if I knew some guy that had 8,000 Bitcoins,

01:49:15.980 | I might be persuaded to ask him for access to that.

01:49:19.580 | And she was like, how?

01:49:20.460 | And I was like, well, hammer and toes.

01:49:22.740 | I say that as a joke, but there's that line

01:49:29.860 | where you're like, I remember who I used to be.

01:49:33.780 | If you're looking at that kind of money,

01:49:37.540 | I might be persuaded to do that back then.

01:49:40.960 | And I think that was Scripps' issue,

01:49:46.820 | is it was a lot of money to him.

01:49:49.220 | - It was the money, and then there's,

01:49:51.780 | violence can also be gradual.

01:49:53.300 | So over time you do a little more,

01:49:54.460 | a little more, a little more, a little more.

01:49:57.260 | - You get used to what's going on, and then--

01:49:58.820 | - Get desensitized.

01:49:59.740 | - And you figure, you take somebody like Ross Ulbricht,

01:50:02.900 | the Silk Road guy, all right?

01:50:04.920 | Ross was not a violent guy, he was not.

01:50:08.980 | But at that point in time, he was sitting on 24 million

01:50:12.340 | in Bitcoin, he was the only game in town.

01:50:15.180 | And that 24 now is like, I don't know,

01:50:17.300 | 22, 24 billion, some crap like that.

01:50:20.500 | But he felt in danger of,

01:50:25.500 | this guy was gonna turn him in.

01:50:28.700 | You know, it was a blackmail on him and everything.

01:50:29.980 | So Ross thinks he hires a couple hitmen to kill the guy.

01:50:34.860 | So it becomes that thing,

01:50:36.740 | and I saw that over and over again.

01:50:38.580 | And I'd like to say I wasn't like that,

01:50:41.340 | but given the same circumstances,

01:50:44.020 | I would have probably done the same thing.

01:50:46.380 | - And also when you're, it's not just about money,

01:50:49.140 | there's a lot of other forces.

01:50:50.320 | Like if you're threatened for your wellbeing,

01:50:54.500 | or for your wealth, or for your power,

01:50:56.340 | all of us operate under different motivations.

01:50:59.380 | - Plus that online aspect with those communities like that,

01:51:02.660 | if you're the head guy, you really feel like

01:51:04.900 | you're the parent of these guys.

01:51:06.420 | So if somebody's starting to threaten them,

01:51:07.940 | it's like, all right, what do I need to do?

01:51:10.500 | - So what do you make of Silk Road?

01:51:12.100 | The Shadow Crew started something that today

01:51:16.460 | you can call Darknet and Darknet markets.

01:51:19.620 | So these markets that operate, that trade,

01:51:22.380 | trade things, everything from child pornography to drugs,

01:51:28.700 | to, I mean, what else?

01:51:30.940 | - Everything.

01:51:32.620 | - What are the dark things that humans want to do

01:51:34.780 | that they don't want anyone to know about?

01:51:36.740 | All of those things.

01:51:37.900 | - Right.

01:51:39.980 | So can you maybe tell me, you know what,

01:51:44.100 | let's just even step back.

01:51:45.220 | What is the Darknet?

01:51:46.260 | How big is it?

01:51:47.660 | What happens there?

01:51:48.980 | - Let's backtrack a little bit more

01:51:51.020 | before we get to that, all right?

01:51:53.140 | What Shadow Crew did,

01:51:55.620 | other than dealing in all these stolen wares,

01:52:01.780 | what Shadow Crew did that's really important.

01:52:05.020 | Remember those three necessities that I talked about?

01:52:08.040 | But the important thing is,

01:52:09.540 | is it established trust among criminals, all right?

01:52:13.220 | Because that's a necessity.

01:52:14.380 | You have to be able to trust who you're dealing with

01:52:17.460 | 'cause you have to deal with somebody.

01:52:19.340 | You have to, all right?

01:52:21.260 | So how do you know you're not dealing with a cop?

01:52:23.500 | How do you know you're dealing with somebody that's skilled?

01:52:25.540 | How do you know you're gonna deal with somebody

01:52:26.660 | that's not gonna rip you off?

01:52:27.980 | You have to be able to trust that individual.

01:52:30.060 | The Shadow Crew provided that trust mechanism for criminals.

01:52:32.980 | You had that communication channel, the forums,

01:52:35.820 | where you could reference conversations,

01:52:37.720 | weeks, months old, take part, learn from those conversations.

01:52:41.320 | You had vouching systems and review systems in place,

01:52:44.060 | escrow systems in place.

01:52:46.080 | You had, you could,

01:52:47.120 | knew by looking at someone's screen name,

01:52:49.720 | if you could trust the individual,

01:52:51.480 | network with the individual, all right?

01:52:53.280 | And that community of just humans

01:52:57.520 | provided that backbone of trust.

01:53:01.240 | And that's really interesting when you think about it.

01:53:04.040 | You had the trust that was there,

01:53:05.480 | but you also had this,

01:53:06.580 | almost this instantaneous information that was available

01:53:12.640 | about the community or about cybercrime at large.

01:53:15.360 | And that's still in play today, all right?

01:53:18.020 | So when, that was the way things were

01:53:21.400 | until a couple of things happened.

01:53:23.120 | And one was cryptocurrency.

01:53:25.600 | The other one was the Tor browser, the dark web.

01:53:28.960 | Now I was working with the Secret Service,

01:53:30.900 | ripping the Secret Service off,

01:53:32.840 | when Tor comes into play, all right?

01:53:34.840 | So we got a memo in one day

01:53:37.000 | and it was talking about the Tor browser.

01:53:38.840 | And it was like, we really need to be careful with this.

01:53:41.840 | This is going to be a problem.

01:53:43.240 | And so we all fired up the Tor browser

01:53:45.640 | and it turns out it was, this was 2005, early six.

01:53:50.480 | It turns out it was completely unusable.

01:53:52.160 | Could not use it at all,

01:53:53.220 | simply because no one was using it

01:53:55.080 | and it was extremely slow.

01:53:56.440 | So-

01:53:57.280 | - So for people who don't know,

01:53:58.240 | Tor browser is a way to be completely anonymous.

01:54:01.440 | - As long as you properly know how to use it.

01:54:03.320 | - Right. - Huge caveat.

01:54:04.600 | - Yeah. - All right.

01:54:05.440 | So developed by the United States Navy

01:54:07.840 | and they developed- - I know this.

01:54:10.080 | - Oh yeah. - It wasn't the hackers that-

01:54:12.200 | - Uh-uh. - Interesting.

01:54:13.280 | - US Navy, to this day, the number one funder of Tor?

01:54:17.280 | Military, to this day, all right?

01:54:20.400 | - Interesting.

01:54:21.240 | I mean, the same, I guess with the internet,

01:54:22.480 | the origins are-

01:54:23.920 | (laughing)

01:54:24.760 | - So it was developed so that operatives

01:54:27.640 | could communicate with each other

01:54:28.880 | without being identified, all right?

01:54:31.360 | That then goes open source.

01:54:33.140 | They release it, EFF comes in,

01:54:35.200 | starts sponsoring and everything else like that.

01:54:38.320 | The next idea was, well, you know,

01:54:40.160 | people can get around their country's firewalls,

01:54:42.560 | whistleblowers can use it, things like that.

01:54:44.160 | Well, someone forgot to mention

01:54:45.800 | that the first adoptees of tech,

01:54:48.000 | if you can use it to launder money or remain anonymous,

01:54:50.920 | are criminals.

01:54:52.880 | And so criminals start to use the damn thing, all right?

01:54:56.660 | So along the same time we get, well, a few years later,

01:55:00.040 | we get Satoshi Nakamoto pops up with his ideas for Bitcoin,

01:55:05.040 | and then Ross Ulbricht runs with it.

01:55:07.660 | Ross Ulbricht decides he's gonna start up Silk Road.

01:55:10.140 | So initially, the people who were using Tor,

01:55:13.060 | which later is the dark web,

01:55:15.100 | people were using Tor or just talking with each other,

01:55:18.580 | visiting websites, communicating like that.

01:55:21.560 | Someone figured out, hey, man,

01:55:22.700 | we could host websites on this thing,

01:55:25.920 | and they have a lot of trouble finding the box.

01:55:28.960 | So that is the advent of Silk Road all of a sudden.

01:55:33.700 | Ross Ulbricht has this idea

01:55:35.140 | that he's gonna change the world

01:55:36.740 | by becoming the largest drug dealer on the planet.

01:55:40.940 | So he opens up the Silk Road,

01:55:42.580 | and the only payment instrument he allows is Bitcoin.

01:55:46.500 | So if those people out there are wondering

01:55:48.660 | why Bitcoin is going at, what, 44K today?

01:55:51.780 | - Yeah. - Yeah, it starts up.

01:55:52.620 | - And by the time this is out,

01:55:54.100 | it could be 100,000 or 10,000. - Absolutely, absolutely.

01:55:56.700 | - We'll see. - Who knows?

01:55:57.700 | (laughing)

01:55:59.440 | If it's 10,000, I'm going to buy some.

01:56:01.580 | (laughing)

01:56:04.020 | - Which is a hilarious statement to make

01:56:06.060 | because that statement would be ridiculously wrong

01:56:09.240 | like five years ago, right?

01:56:10.460 | - I know, I know, I know.

01:56:12.720 | - People 100 years from now will be laughing.

01:56:14.580 | Wait, it was that low?

01:56:15.980 | (laughing)

01:56:18.500 | - So he only accepts Bitcoin,

01:56:20.100 | and that's, of course, the initial use case of crypto

01:56:23.900 | is no one wants to admit it today,

01:56:26.540 | but the initial use case is we're going to buy a bunch of pot.

01:56:29.820 | (laughing)

01:56:30.820 | We need somebody, we need a way to pay for it.

01:56:33.540 | So that's what happens.

01:56:35.420 | Ross, it's really interesting to me.

01:56:38.740 | If you look at motivations of cyber criminals,

01:56:43.180 | the motivations are status, cash, ideology, all right?

01:56:47.980 | My guys, all cash, across the board, all cash.

01:56:51.400 | Ross is ideology.

01:56:54.640 | He really believed he was going to change the world.

01:56:57.100 | He really did, and I've been fortunate.

01:56:59.260 | I actually know the guy who ran Silk Road 2

01:57:03.660 | and have talked to the kid, everything else,

01:57:07.020 | and I will tell you that those guys

01:57:10.040 | who are motivated by ideology,

01:57:13.060 | they are a completely different breed.

01:57:16.060 | They really are.

01:57:17.060 | It's not, you know, the cash guy, it's low-hanging fruit.

01:57:21.640 | The ease of, it's hard to stop committing crime,

01:57:26.300 | but it's much easier for a cash-motivated individual

01:57:29.380 | to stop than it is that ideology guy.

01:57:32.500 | That Silk Road 2 guy, he's still got it.

01:57:35.060 | You know, he's not breaking the law,

01:57:36.500 | but you can see it's like, he wants to.

01:57:38.980 | (laughing)

01:57:40.140 | He wants to.

01:57:41.340 | So it's--

01:57:42.180 | - That's fascinating that, I mean,

01:57:45.740 | the worst atrocities in human history

01:57:47.700 | are committed with people that operate under ideology.

01:57:51.180 | All the other motivations are much weaker.

01:57:53.160 | - But you think about it, with Ross,

01:57:55.560 | I mean, very bright guy, very bright guy.

01:57:59.660 | But think about the amount of cognitive dissonance

01:58:02.300 | that the guy's got that he thinks

01:58:04.760 | he's gonna change the world by running a drug site.

01:58:08.300 | I mean, certainly, I mean, could he have changed the world?

01:58:12.700 | Yeah.

01:58:13.540 | Could he have done it like that?

01:58:15.860 | Probably not.

01:58:17.300 | - Well, I can still mend those arguments.

01:58:19.260 | I listened to quite a few libertarians,

01:58:22.340 | and you can push that to anarchists.

01:58:24.140 | You know, there's a lot of people that argue.

01:58:27.940 | So I actually talked to Professor Columbia,

01:58:32.820 | who actually argues that all drugs should be legalized,

01:58:35.180 | and not at a philosophical level, political level,

01:58:37.460 | but the fact that all the negative consequences of drugs

01:58:41.340 | that people talk about actually have to do

01:58:44.660 | with other factors in your life.

01:58:47.220 | - I would agree with that.

01:58:48.300 | - And so that's a, okay, but that's more like a argument

01:58:51.580 | about negative aspects of drugs.

01:58:53.640 | I think the ideology comes in where it's like,

01:58:56.420 | well, nobody should tell you what to do.

01:58:59.300 | You should be, you should have the responsibility

01:59:01.980 | of your own actions.

01:59:03.100 | The government or any other institution shouldn't be

01:59:08.700 | the rule setters, the constraints for how you live your life.

01:59:14.580 | And so that, I could see that argument being made,

01:59:17.160 | and ultimately if you like create an open market for drugs,

01:59:22.160 | how that could build a better society,

01:59:24.620 | it might break down the outdated, the corrupt,

01:59:28.140 | the bureaucratic institutions.

01:59:29.600 | I mean, you can make that argument.

01:59:31.860 | - There's an argument, and let's be fair.

01:59:33.620 | I wanna be fair with it.

01:59:34.580 | I mean, did he change the world?

01:59:38.180 | We do have this whole thing called cryptocurrency.

01:59:40.540 | - Yeah, in the long arc of history, perhaps.

01:59:43.060 | - Yeah, we do have that.

01:59:46.060 | That's a biggie.

01:59:46.900 | - And that might have been for it to take hold in society,

01:59:50.720 | maybe the darker parts of society at first,

01:59:52.960 | maybe that was necessary.

01:59:54.160 | - Right, I mean, maybe.

01:59:55.360 | I mean, we'll see how it pans out.

01:59:57.320 | Shadow Crew, we had this guy, Albert Gonzalez,

02:00:02.320 | his kid's name.

02:00:04.520 | We had, we were growing so big

02:00:06.720 | that I had to start farming things out.

02:00:11.240 | So the first thing I started farming,

02:00:12.680 | I instituted this review system.

02:00:15.600 | Kind of establishing that trust mechanism

02:00:18.320 | even further for criminals to use.

02:00:20.020 | We needed somebody to take care of our

02:00:24.320 | tech aspects of the forum.

02:00:25.920 | So, an associate of mine by the name of Kim Taylor,

02:00:29.620 | we were looking for a forum techie.

02:00:31.440 | He comes to me one night, and he's like,

02:00:33.000 | "Found our forum techie."

02:00:34.240 | I was like, "Who's that?"

02:00:35.080 | And he's like, "It's this kid."

02:00:37.000 | And I was like, "Is he any good?"

02:00:38.440 | He's like, "Well, he knows the software."

02:00:39.600 | I was like, "Okay."

02:00:41.320 | We just signed his ass on.

02:00:43.160 | He went by the screen name of Kumbajani,

02:00:45.620 | was his screen name.

02:00:46.780 | And he starts selling credit cards after a while

02:00:49.780 | under a screen name of Scarface.

02:00:51.620 | And that CB1 breach, where you're cashing out

02:00:56.620 | the track twos at ATMs, $40,000 a day.

02:01:01.200 | So Albert's in New Jersey one day, broad daylight,

02:01:06.860 | and stands at an ATM for 40 minutes, just standing there,

02:01:11.940 | feeding in one ATM card after another,

02:01:14.900 | pulling out cash, taking the 20s out,

02:01:17.600 | stuffing them in that backpack.

02:01:19.560 | Meanwhile, just across the street,

02:01:21.320 | a couple of cops just happen to be there.

02:01:23.920 | And they start noticing this kid just standing there.

02:01:28.340 | So 40 minutes they watch this kid, 40 minutes.

02:01:31.620 | Finally, one cop looks at the other,

02:01:33.500 | "Let me see what's going on there."

02:01:36.220 | Walks over across the street.

02:01:38.120 | Albert's wearing a wig.

02:01:39.260 | He's got the disguise on, everything else like that.

02:01:42.060 | Asks him, "Kid, what are you doing?"

02:01:43.980 | Albert falls apart.

02:01:45.280 | We didn't know Albert had been arrested.

02:01:48.780 | So Albert immediately goes in,

02:01:51.120 | "I wanna work for the Secret Service."

02:01:53.060 | At that point in time, Secret Service,

02:01:57.160 | I referred to, and I wanna make sure

02:02:01.780 | that I don't say it's not like that anymore.

02:02:04.700 | But back then, they were fucking idiots.

02:02:07.580 | All right, they had no clue what was going on.

02:02:09.460 | - So there was a competence issue

02:02:10.940 | that they were working through, is one way to put it.

02:02:12.740 | - That's a nice euphemism.

02:02:14.820 | We're fucking idiots is another way to say it.

02:02:18.980 | - So they're just like not aware of this digital world.

02:02:21.780 | - They had no clue, no clue.

02:02:23.100 | The way that Albert tells them how to catch us,

02:02:26.180 | because they looked at him, "How do we catch him?"

02:02:28.660 | And Albert's like, "I'm serious, I'm serious."

02:02:32.460 | So Albert's like, "Well, you could try a VPN."

02:02:35.660 | What's a VPN?

02:02:37.480 | So he explains it to them, they're like,

02:02:39.760 | "That's a good idea."

02:02:41.820 | So I quit Shadow Crew.

02:02:43.940 | I was worried about all the news that was coming in

02:02:45.620 | and everything like that.

02:02:46.460 | I'm still in 160K a week.

02:02:47.860 | I didn't know Albert had been arrested.

02:02:49.820 | I'm worried about being arrested.

02:02:52.540 | I know the writing's on the wall,

02:02:54.540 | and I'm like, "I'm quitting."

02:02:56.700 | - Where did you see the writing?

02:02:58.380 | - The IPs that were coming in,

02:03:00.420 | the text messages about the Secret Service investigators

02:03:03.300 | I referred to. - The building,

02:03:04.140 | so the pressure's building, it's not gonna end well.

02:03:05.620 | - Man, this is not gonna end well.

02:03:07.220 | This is going to be bad.

02:03:09.120 | So I announced my retirement of February 15th,

02:03:13.600 | oh, I'm sorry, April 15th, 2004 is my retirement.

02:03:18.220 | I think that's 2004.

02:03:19.900 | And I quit, I walk away.

02:03:22.720 | Well, Albert had been arrested.

02:03:24.980 | They cut him loose.

02:03:26.220 | No one knows he's been arrested.

02:03:27.340 | He comes back into Shadow Crew.

02:03:29.100 | I leave, Kim Taylor at the same time,

02:03:31.740 | he's kind of on the run, which if you wanna know that story,

02:03:34.540 | that's a nightmare story in and of itself.

02:03:36.900 | So my second in charge, Kim Taylor, this guy,

02:03:40.400 | there was this guy named David,

02:03:42.460 | oh, what was his name?

02:03:45.180 | He was, El Mariachi was the guy's name.

02:03:49.080 | David Thomas, David, yeah, yeah, he was a film guy.

02:03:52.480 | - Scarface, yeah, yeah.

02:03:54.940 | - So El Mariachi, real name David Thomas,

02:03:58.420 | he's on the run out of Nebraska for check fraud.

02:04:02.460 | He comes to us on Shadow Crew, telling us this sad story.

02:04:06.300 | We take up a collection for this guy, send it to him.

02:04:10.600 | I get him a job working with a low level carter,

02:04:13.820 | trying to make him some money.

02:04:15.320 | El Mariachi, or Thomas does this for a few weeks,

02:04:19.340 | comes to me one day and he's like,

02:04:20.580 | man, I'm not making any money.

02:04:22.100 | I'm like, okay, let me see what I can do.

02:04:23.420 | Well, I had a Ukrainian guy by the name of Big Buyer.

02:04:27.140 | He, real friend of mine, and I contacted him,

02:04:30.380 | I was like, look, man, I got a guy

02:04:31.420 | that wants to do some work, can you help the guy out?

02:04:33.020 | And he's like, I got it.

02:04:33.980 | I was like, okay.

02:04:35.140 | So he sends Thomas enough money to go,

02:04:38.500 | Thomas is in Texas at that point,

02:04:40.300 | sends Thomas enough money to go from Texas

02:04:43.360 | to Issaquah, Washington, and rent an office space.

02:04:47.100 | All right?

02:04:48.540 | So Thomas goes up there, rents his office space,

02:04:50.980 | him and his girlfriend, rents an office space.

02:04:53.560 | And the plan is, is Big Buyer is going to place an order,

02:04:59.380 | get products sent, Mariachi's going to get the product

02:05:03.300 | listed on eBay, cash out 50/50.

02:05:05.620 | Easy enough, all right?

02:05:07.100 | So Big Buyer places an order.

02:05:09.060 | First order is Outpost.com, $18,000.

02:05:11.960 | The largest order Outpost.com had ever received

02:05:16.320 | at that point in time.

02:05:17.420 | Order goes through.

02:05:19.780 | - It goes through still.

02:05:20.620 | - Goes through, he gets the product, all right?

02:05:23.620 | Mariachi comes back, tells me,

02:05:25.180 | tells my second in charge, Kim Taylor.

02:05:27.080 | Kim Taylor at this point, I'm 33, 34.

02:05:31.100 | Kim Taylor's 46.

02:05:32.520 | He works at the Tattered Cover Bookstore

02:05:35.000 | in Denver, Colorado, is where he works at this point.

02:05:37.860 | And he fancies himself Jason Bourne.

02:05:40.740 | All right, he's even got one of the screen names

02:05:42.220 | of Jason Bourne.

02:05:43.720 | So I'm like, all right, so Mariachi's telling us

02:05:46.420 | how much money he's making and everything else.

02:05:48.300 | I'm like, well, that's good, I'm glad you're all right.

02:05:50.360 | Kim contacts me, he's like, I wanna go to Issaquah.

02:05:53.420 | And I was like, why?

02:05:54.540 | And he's like, to make some money.

02:05:55.500 | I'm like, you're making money.

02:05:57.140 | He's like, I wanna go to Issaquah.

02:05:58.660 | I was like, all right, go, be careful.

02:06:00.820 | So he gets in the car.

02:06:03.020 | Saturn is what he's driving.

02:06:04.580 | He drives his little piece of shit Saturn

02:06:06.900 | all the way up to Issaquah.

02:06:08.480 | Gets there, you know, midnight.

02:06:10.700 | They party all night long

02:06:12.540 | because they've never met each other.

02:06:14.300 | They're just celebrating, partying, drinking,

02:06:16.200 | everything else like that.

02:06:17.780 | Meanwhile, Big Buyer has placed another order

02:06:22.340 | with Outpost.com, $17,000.

02:06:27.240 | The second largest order Outpost.com

02:06:30.040 | had ever received at that point in time.

02:06:33.480 | By this point in time,

02:06:34.520 | Outpost knows the first order was fraudulent.

02:06:37.080 | Guess where it's going?

02:06:38.200 | The exact same address the first order goes.

02:06:41.200 | So Outpost picks up the phone, calls Issaquah PD.

02:06:44.200 | Hey, we got a fraudster.

02:06:46.560 | Issaquah's like, would you mind sending some empty boxes?

02:06:51.320 | And Outpost is like, be happy to.

02:06:54.440 | So the rule was, is on credit card fraud,

02:06:58.280 | if you've got full account access, you place the order.

02:07:01.920 | The morning it's supposed to arrive,

02:07:03.720 | you sign into the bank account or the credit card account.

02:07:06.240 | If you can sign in, you go pick up your product.

02:07:09.200 | If you can't sign in, you go back to sleep that day.

02:07:12.480 | All right?

02:07:13.760 | Well, Big Buyer was the guy who placed the order.

02:07:16.360 | Mariachi and my second in charge are partying.

02:07:19.960 | All right?

02:07:20.800 | So they're supposed to contact Big Buyer.

02:07:22.980 | They don't.

02:07:24.320 | Meanwhile, Big Buyer is raising hell,

02:07:26.920 | getting up with me like, hey, where are the guys?

02:07:31.200 | I can't find them.

02:07:32.280 | They don't need to pick up this product.

02:07:34.400 | So I can't get in touch with them.

02:07:36.320 | They go down to pick up the...

02:07:37.440 | So Mariachi's got a Cadillac, old '70s Cadillac.

02:07:41.440 | He's got a Cadillac, pulls into the complex.

02:07:45.600 | Now, Mariachi's driving.

02:07:47.500 | Kim Taylor's in the passenger seat.

02:07:51.600 | David Thomas's girlfriend's in the backseat.

02:07:54.160 | As they pull into the complex,

02:07:55.840 | going through the parking lot,

02:07:57.560 | Mariachi just happens to glance over and he sees a van

02:08:00.600 | with a guy sitting sideways in the van.

02:08:03.000 | And he looks at Kim Taylor and he's like,

02:08:05.660 | that's an undercover.

02:08:07.840 | And Kim's like, ah, it's fine.

02:08:10.480 | So they pull up to the office complex.

02:08:13.600 | Kim's like, I'll go in and get the packages.

02:08:16.720 | So he walks in, looks at the guy behind the counter.

02:08:19.640 | I believe you have some packages for us.

02:08:21.240 | Guy's like, one second.

02:08:23.440 | So he disappears around the wall,

02:08:26.120 | out pops the Issaquah PD, arrest Kim.

02:08:29.760 | David Thomas is in the car watching all this happen.

02:08:32.480 | He bugs out and they arrest him on the interstate

02:08:37.000 | where he has three fake driver's licenses in his wallet

02:08:40.240 | along with his real driver's license, another no-no,

02:08:43.180 | but they get him.

02:08:44.180 | So David Thomas had outstanding warrants out of Nebraska.

02:08:48.140 | We couldn't bond him out.

02:08:50.160 | Kim Taylor didn't have any warrants, so we bonded him out.

02:08:53.840 | My third in charge, Kidd, Seth Sanders was his name.

02:08:59.920 | He bonds him out, uses his girlfriend's account

02:09:02.620 | to bond him out.

02:09:03.480 | And I get Kim Taylor to go to Utah

02:09:08.480 | where another friend of mine agrees to house him,

02:09:13.520 | him and his wife.

02:09:15.200 | So I think everything's fine and all that.

02:09:18.680 | About three weeks later, this guy in Utah

02:09:21.400 | gets me on the phone, "Hey, he's gotta go."

02:09:24.440 | (laughing)

02:09:25.280 | And I'm like, "What's going on?"

02:09:27.520 | He's like, "Well, the only thing he's doing

02:09:30.480 | "is popping ecstasy tablets every day, all day."

02:09:33.840 | And I'm like, "Seriously?"

02:09:35.200 | He's like, "Yeah."

02:09:36.020 | I was like, "Okay, he's gotta go."

02:09:37.120 | So we kick him out of there.

02:09:38.860 | By this point, I've got another crew that's coming through.

02:09:40.620 | I mean, I had all these crews running.

02:09:42.440 | Had another crew that's coming through Denver,

02:09:45.360 | send Kim back to Denver to partner up with these guys.

02:09:49.040 | Kim gets these guys arrested.

02:09:52.060 | So by this point in time, I'm exasperated.

02:09:54.800 | I just wanna throw my hands up in the air and walk away.

02:09:57.940 | So my retirement's coming up at the same time.

02:10:00.720 | So I'm like, "Fuck it, I'm done."

02:10:03.680 | So I tell everybody, the rest of the admins

02:10:06.120 | and the mods there, I'm like, "This is what's going on.

02:10:07.920 | "You guys need to watch out for this.

02:10:09.380 | "We need to ban Kim, not let him back in.

02:10:11.880 | "Be careful what's going on."

02:10:13.400 | I walk away.

02:10:15.220 | At the same time I walk away,

02:10:17.860 | Kumbajani, Albert Gonzalez, comes back into play.

02:10:20.900 | He sees everything that's going on.

02:10:22.560 | He uses that to his advantage.

02:10:24.100 | He starts banning everyone that's suspicious of him.

02:10:26.860 | Sets up the VPN at the same time and says,

02:10:29.200 | "Hey, to make sure we're all secure,

02:10:31.440 | "I need all transactions to go through this VPN."

02:10:34.880 | VPNs ran by the Secret Service.

02:10:37.580 | All right?

02:10:38.420 | Secret Service ends up, I think they ended up cataloging

02:10:40.540 | like $7 million worth of transactions

02:10:42.520 | over the next four or five months.

02:10:45.160 | Shadow Crew makes the front cover of Forbes, August 2004.

02:10:49.780 | Headline, "Who's Stealing Your Identity?"

02:10:52.600 | October 26, 2004, United States Secret Service arrest,

02:10:56.740 | 33 people, six countries, six hours.

02:11:00.360 | I was in Charleston, South Carolina when I saw it happen.

02:11:02.860 | And I'm like, (laughs)

02:11:05.740 | - So you're the one that got away.

02:11:08.460 | - I'm the one public, there were a couple other guys

02:11:10.260 | that got away that they didn't publicly mention.

02:11:12.480 | One, his name was Tron.

02:11:14.980 | He was a--

02:11:16.060 | - Zero?

02:11:17.060 | - Yeah, exactly.

02:11:18.140 | But he went by the screen name Tron.

02:11:20.980 | He had access, almost unfettered access,

02:11:24.200 | to Bank of America.

02:11:25.320 | So what happens is they identified the guy,

02:11:29.580 | Secret Service is in the air to go get him.

02:11:31.800 | They call the Ukrainian police.

02:11:33.340 | "Hey, we're coming down to arrest this guy."

02:11:34.820 | Ukrainian cops are like, "Oh, come on down."

02:11:37.980 | So as soon as they got off the phone,

02:11:39.300 | Ukrainian cops get in the car, go down and tell Tron,

02:11:42.300 | "Hey, they're coming to get ya."

02:11:44.500 | - Yeah.

02:11:45.340 | - (laughs) So he bugs out down to South America

02:11:47.780 | and they don't catch him, I think,

02:11:48.860 | for six or seven years after that, something like that.

02:11:51.220 | - But caught him eventually.

02:11:52.660 | - Caught him eventually.

02:11:53.500 | - Well, let me actually ask you on this point.

02:11:55.740 | You've said that if you do cybercrime,

02:11:58.900 | eventually it's not gonna end well.

02:12:00.860 | - It does not end well.

02:12:02.220 | - Why is that?

02:12:03.780 | - So I don't wanna say that's because

02:12:05.460 | you're gonna be arrested,

02:12:06.300 | because honestly, very few people are arrested, all right?

02:12:10.220 | But it doesn't end well because of the type of person

02:12:13.420 | that you become.

02:12:14.860 | You quoted me earlier, you lie to everybody around you.

02:12:20.700 | You lie to yourself, you lie to your friends,

02:12:23.340 | you lie to your family, of course you lie to your victims.

02:12:25.780 | You don't have any friends.

02:12:27.940 | I went 20 years without friends.

02:12:30.860 | I had associates, I didn't have friends.

02:12:33.500 | - And you can't truly trust anybody.

02:12:35.300 | - You don't trust anybody.

02:12:36.700 | You don't trust anybody.

02:12:37.900 | I had my wife, I was married for nine years.

02:12:42.620 | I lied to her every single day of those nine years.

02:12:46.220 | And it took her nine years to give up on me,

02:12:49.740 | to realize that I was that piece of shit.

02:12:52.540 | And she leaves at that point.

02:12:55.540 | Then from there, I started dating a stripper

02:12:58.300 | and lied to her.

02:12:59.940 | I thought I had friends, I lied to all those people

02:13:02.020 | that I knew that thought they were my friends.

02:13:04.780 | I lied to them the entire time.

02:13:06.980 | You become that individual.

02:13:09.720 | I don't think a lot of people really understand

02:13:12.020 | how bad that is.

02:13:14.240 | You know, you talked about, you pointed out that woman

02:13:17.240 | that I ripped off, she was trying to put a roof

02:13:19.720 | on her house for her friggin' kids, man.

02:13:22.040 | You're that person, you're that person.

02:13:24.880 | - So you're also lying to yourself.

02:13:27.460 | And that's not a mindset in which you can

02:13:32.560 | grow as a person, find happiness,

02:13:38.540 | find genuine, simple human affection,

02:13:41.080 | which is what love is.

02:13:42.960 | Simple, real friendship, all of those things.

02:13:46.160 | - So I went to prison, of course.

02:13:48.360 | One of the most important lessons

02:13:50.600 | that I've learned in prison,

02:13:52.580 | because cyber crime, crime as a whole,

02:13:54.480 | if you're a criminal, it's an addiction.

02:13:56.960 | If you're addicted to something,

02:13:57.960 | whether it be drugs, crime, gambling, what have you,

02:14:00.520 | if you're addicted to something,

02:14:01.760 | you cannot love anything else except the addiction.

02:14:05.880 | The addiction comes first.

02:14:08.260 | All right, and you pointed out some of those

02:14:11.200 | truly despicable things.

02:14:12.680 | Scripps, for example, tortures that guy.

02:14:16.060 | You get to the point where it's like,

02:14:18.020 | okay, this is the business.

02:14:20.540 | And I tried to convince myself that I'm a businessman,

02:14:25.420 | but I'm a good guy on the other end.

02:14:27.160 | And you're not, you're not.

02:14:28.640 | So those lies become part of it, everything else.

02:14:32.140 | Yeah, you get the higher-ups are usually arrested,

02:14:37.040 | they are, but you've got millions

02:14:38.600 | of cyber criminals these days.

02:14:40.320 | So most guys are not gonna be arrested.

02:14:43.120 | So you may be arrested,

02:14:45.000 | you may be like freaking Jonathan James.

02:14:49.520 | He was a miner, a very talented individual, very competent.

02:14:54.320 | He had, as a kid, he had broke into NASA, DOD, Pentagon.

02:14:59.080 | He shut the NASA computers down for six weeks.

02:15:01.520 | This is that kid.

02:15:03.500 | Then he decides he wants to go into credit card theft,

02:15:06.140 | partners with Albert, he's arrested with Albert.

02:15:08.540 | Law enforcement, they were gonna blame him.

02:15:13.240 | He was the only competent individual.

02:15:15.980 | So this kid gets up one day, he wasn't in prison yet.

02:15:19.280 | He gets up one day, goes in his dad's bedroom,

02:15:21.220 | gets out his 45, walks in the bathroom,

02:15:24.320 | and blows his brains out.

02:15:26.580 | You know, you've got things like that.

02:15:28.960 | Or you're gonna rip somebody off,

02:15:31.240 | and you're gonna end up like Scripps did with that guy,

02:15:32.960 | the guy who ran Evolution Marketplace.

02:15:37.260 | No one knew who, two people ran that, a guy and a girl.

02:15:40.760 | And no one knew who they were.

02:15:42.820 | He ends up stealing about $24 million,

02:15:45.060 | a lot of it from Ukrainian mob,

02:15:46.860 | and they found him about a year later

02:15:48.760 | on a beach without his head in hands.

02:15:51.140 | But, you know, it always goes south.

02:15:53.340 | But more than anything, to me,

02:15:54.860 | the negative thing is you really become somebody

02:16:01.540 | that, I mean, just truly a despicable human being.

02:16:05.720 | When you get to the point

02:16:07.360 | when you're destroying people's retirement accounts,

02:16:11.960 | you're stealing money from a woman

02:16:13.360 | that simply wants to do something good for her family.

02:16:18.240 | When you become that individual,

02:16:20.560 | and you're okay with that, my God, man.

02:16:23.240 | I got to the point, I had one guy ripped off,

02:16:26.360 | it's like for $900,

02:16:27.600 | this is when I first started the cybercrime stuff.

02:16:29.920 | This is when I was becoming competent.

02:16:31.960 | And I ripped him off for like $900,

02:16:35.540 | and he sent me an email.

02:16:37.460 | And he was like, the email said something like,

02:16:42.460 | "I guess you needed the money, and it's okay.

02:16:47.600 | "You know, you keep it."

02:16:48.860 | And I'm getting chills right now thinking about it,

02:16:51.820 | but it's that, where you become that individual,

02:16:56.820 | and you become that person.

02:16:58.820 | And I'm like, I'm not gonna lie,

02:17:00.220 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:01.420 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:02.500 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:03.340 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:04.180 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:05.000 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:05.840 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:06.680 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:07.500 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:08.340 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:09.180 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:10.000 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:10.840 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:11.680 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:12.500 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:13.340 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:14.180 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:15.000 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:15.840 | I'm not gonna lie to you,

02:17:16.680 | I'm not gonna lie to you.

02:17:21.680 | - "True Romance" by the way, great movie.

02:17:23.720 | - It is a great film.

02:17:24.920 | It's truly a great film.

02:17:26.640 | - Even Brad Pitt, who makes a brief appearance, is genius.

02:17:31.080 | There's so much good acting there.

02:17:32.840 | Anyway, so tell me that love story.

02:17:35.760 | - All right, so you know what,

02:17:37.480 | like I said, from my dad,

02:17:39.560 | I get that fear of being abandoned.

02:17:41.640 | You know, I lied to my wife for nine years until she leaves.

02:17:45.500 | And I was in Charleston, South Carolina.

02:17:48.040 | Man, what happened was I noticed that Susan,

02:17:51.880 | she was not coming to bed like she used to.

02:17:56.120 | She'd stay up all night long,

02:17:57.500 | and sometimes she'd go and be gone a few hours

02:18:01.400 | and everything else.

02:18:02.240 | And I'm like, "Well, something's going on."

02:18:03.400 | And I'd pass by her computer

02:18:05.520 | and she would minimize the screens.

02:18:07.000 | And I'm like, "Well, gotta figure out

02:18:08.800 | "what the hell's going on."

02:18:10.880 | So put a key logger on her system.

02:18:13.400 | - As anybody should in a relationship.

02:18:17.160 | - Absolutely, 'cause you trust 'em, you know.

02:18:19.760 | Why not?

02:18:20.600 | - You should be tracking all their movements,

02:18:22.320 | all their touching.

02:18:23.160 | - Exactly, exactly.

02:18:24.160 | Like I said, I was the control freak too.

02:18:26.720 | So I found out she'd been cheating on me.

02:18:29.520 | And she was--

02:18:30.360 | - See, there you go, they had a reason.

02:18:31.920 | - They had a reason, I justified.

02:18:33.960 | So I found out she was cheating on me.

02:18:35.320 | She was asleep when I found it out.

02:18:36.760 | And I sat there looking at it and I was like, "Well, shit."

02:18:40.000 | So got up, walked in the bedroom,

02:18:42.120 | opened up the wardrobe, got a suitcase out,

02:18:45.120 | started putting her clothes in it.

02:18:46.680 | And she wakes up, she's like, "Where are you going?"

02:18:48.320 | I'm like, "I'm not, you are."

02:18:51.360 | Well, my bravado disappeared pretty quickly.

02:18:54.680 | I took about a week of both of us crying and arguing

02:18:59.680 | and everything else.

02:19:01.360 | And she finally left.

02:19:03.640 | And I went through this depression.

02:19:06.400 | I went, I was in Charleston, South Carolina.

02:19:09.440 | I would just walk around the house

02:19:10.480 | kind of stumbling in a daze.

02:19:12.960 | Realized I was getting suicidal

02:19:15.200 | and was smart enough to do something about it.

02:19:18.440 | And picked up the phone book.

02:19:19.840 | And that's where there's always this sense of humor.

02:19:22.680 | So I picked up the phone book

02:19:23.520 | and I'm going through the yellow pages.

02:19:24.720 | I'm like, "Psychologist, criminal psychologist,

02:19:27.240 | 'cause I need that."

02:19:28.360 | (both laughing)

02:19:30.320 | Called the psychologist, crying to her.

02:19:32.200 | I mean, crying on the phone, told her everything.

02:19:33.720 | I'm this criminal, this is what's happened.

02:19:35.360 | She's like, "Come in now."

02:19:36.760 | So I go in, spill my guts,

02:19:39.000 | and saw her for about four months.

02:19:42.280 | And I joke about it, but it's true.

02:19:44.000 | She was trying to get me to stop breaking the law

02:19:47.440 | and to go into real estate.

02:19:48.880 | And I remember telling her, "Is there a difference?"

02:19:51.080 | (both laughing)

02:19:52.000 | She was like, "Yes, there's a difference."

02:19:54.640 | So saw her for about four months.

02:19:56.000 | I was 34.

02:19:58.040 | I didn't start drinking until I was 34.

02:20:02.200 | I'd never done drugs, anything else like that.

02:20:04.640 | 'Cause my mom was an addict as well.

02:20:07.040 | So I was this guy that always wanted to be in control.

02:20:09.720 | Didn't wanna lose control of myself.

02:20:13.520 | And had never been to strip club.

02:20:15.840 | So one night I was getting lonely.

02:20:19.560 | So I walked into the strip club.

02:20:20.800 | Actually, I was researching this strip club.

02:20:22.400 | It was Joe's Roundup in Charleston, South Carolina.

02:20:26.720 | - Joe's Roundup. - Joe's Roundup.

02:20:28.520 | Little bitty hole in the wall stuff.

02:20:30.280 | I was, yeah, real classy.

02:20:32.320 | So I walked in, and I'm literally that guy, man,

02:20:36.640 | that fell in love with the first,

02:20:38.760 | the first stripper that he sees.

02:20:41.440 | She walks by, I'm like, "That one?"

02:20:44.400 | So I didn't know the strip club game.

02:20:46.200 | Again, criminal, naive as hell.

02:20:48.320 | So belly up at the bar, order the beer.

02:20:52.440 | I'm sitting there drinking it.

02:20:54.400 | She comes over to me, and we start talking.

02:20:57.800 | And she's like, "Would you like to get a bottle of champagne?"

02:21:01.000 | I was like, "Does that mean going in back or what?"

02:21:03.160 | She's like, "Well, yeah, you need to do the bottle

02:21:04.880 | to go in back."

02:21:05.720 | I'm like, "Sure, let's buy a bottle of champagne.

02:21:08.000 | $400 bottle of Corbel."

02:21:10.400 | - Wow.

02:21:11.240 | - So I'm like, "All right."

02:21:13.280 | So then again, that bravado disappears pretty quickly.

02:21:15.440 | I get back there, and we talk for two hours.

02:21:18.840 | And nowadays, I understand that most men

02:21:21.160 | who go to strip clubs,

02:21:22.840 | strippers are their therapist most of the time, all right?

02:21:25.960 | So I'm sitting there talking, we're talking.

02:21:27.800 | And of course, she's sizing me up.

02:21:29.600 | She's looking at the watch.

02:21:30.600 | She's like, "What kind of car you drive?"

02:21:32.440 | (laughs)

02:21:33.760 | Everything else, and I'm like,

02:21:35.160 | telling her and talking.

02:21:36.640 | So at the end of the night, I'm like,

02:21:38.040 | "Really nice meeting you."

02:21:39.080 | She's like, "It's so nice meeting you too."

02:21:41.880 | So I leave.

02:21:42.920 | - You guys just talked.

02:21:45.280 | - Just talked.

02:21:46.120 | - And there's no damp feeling of love and all that.

02:21:48.800 | - Yeah, so just talked, just got along pretty good.

02:21:51.120 | I'm like, "I like her, I like her."

02:21:54.240 | So come back in a week later,

02:21:56.960 | walk in and call her over.

02:21:59.480 | And I was like, "Look," I said, "I'm not,

02:22:01.680 | I said, "That was my first time to a strip club."

02:22:03.320 | I said, "Don't know you, I like you.

02:22:04.800 | I'd like to know you more.

02:22:05.800 | Would you like to go out to dinner?"

02:22:07.840 | And she was like, "Yeah."

02:22:10.160 | I was like, "Where would you like to go?"

02:22:11.960 | So she says, "Rue de Jon."

02:22:13.800 | And I was like, "Don't know what it is?

02:22:15.560 | That's where we'll go."

02:22:16.400 | So I go back and I was,

02:22:17.880 | I had a theater buddy at that point in time

02:22:19.560 | 'cause I was trying to get my life,

02:22:21.080 | yeah, trying to get my life together.

02:22:23.120 | JC was his name.

02:22:24.400 | And I was like, "I got a date."

02:22:25.560 | And he's like, "You got a date?"

02:22:26.760 | I was like, "Yeah, man, I got a date."

02:22:27.880 | And he's like, "Okay, where are you going?"

02:22:30.400 | I was like, "Rue de Jon."

02:22:31.480 | And he's like, "Take your wallet."

02:22:33.360 | (laughs)

02:22:34.560 | I'm like, "Yeah."

02:22:35.400 | And he's like, "Take your wallet."

02:22:37.600 | I was like, "All right."

02:22:38.920 | So we start doing the lunch and the dinner thing.

02:22:43.680 | And I get to where I really like her.

02:22:46.760 | I was 34, she was 23, and got along really well.

02:22:51.840 | Listened, had common interest in music and arts

02:22:55.440 | and stuff like that.

02:22:56.480 | She had, I mean, it's stereotypical.

02:22:58.560 | She had graduated college

02:23:01.200 | with a degree in religious studies.

02:23:04.560 | - Wow.

02:23:05.400 | - Yeah.

02:23:06.400 | So I was like, "All right."

02:23:07.800 | - So yeah, you just fell in love.

02:23:09.960 | - Yeah, we got along really well, really well.

02:23:12.640 | So I ended up moving her in with me.

02:23:14.600 | She hadn't quit her job.

02:23:16.440 | And what was happening was she was working weekends

02:23:21.440 | and the club would close at three or four.

02:23:25.320 | She wouldn't come home until 10 or 11 in the morning.

02:23:30.240 | And most of the time it would be a phone call

02:23:32.840 | saying, "Come and pick me up, I can't drive home."

02:23:35.920 | And then I'd never used drugs, had never been around.

02:23:39.720 | My mom, Valium and pot and things like that.

02:23:42.360 | But as far as interacting with her,

02:23:43.840 | I'd never done anything like that.

02:23:45.520 | By this point in time,

02:23:47.240 | I'm kind of getting head over heels with her.

02:23:48.840 | I've moved her in with me and everything.

02:23:50.320 | And I had never, I was 34,

02:23:54.280 | I'd never went through a woman's purse in my entire life.

02:23:57.760 | And so she comes in, passes out,

02:24:00.960 | and I'm like, "I gotta know what the fuck's going on."

02:24:04.440 | And went over and went through her purse, found cocaine.

02:24:09.440 | And the straw, cut off straws and all that stuff.

02:24:13.160 | And I'm like, broke my heart.

02:24:15.440 | I just sat there and started crying.

02:24:17.440 | Got online and I'm the guy that can find information.

02:24:23.360 | So I started looking for forums on strip clubs.

02:24:26.840 | Found a forum, found that one,

02:24:29.760 | found where it was talking about her

02:24:32.000 | prostituting herself to support the habit.

02:24:35.880 | And that got me, man.

02:24:40.520 | That got me.

02:24:41.360 | I was talking about everything she was doing to do that.

02:24:45.720 | - And that broke your heart there.

02:24:46.960 | - Oh man, yeah.

02:24:49.520 | So I didn't have the heart to tell her

02:24:53.680 | that I knew she was prostituting.

02:24:55.840 | But I went to her and I was like,

02:24:57.200 | she's waking up and I was like,

02:24:58.160 | "Look, I found this in your purse.

02:25:00.240 | "I can't have that."

02:25:02.640 | And she's like, "Well, you think I'm prostituting?"

02:25:04.440 | I was like, "No, no, I don't think that."

02:25:06.280 | I knew it, but I didn't mention it to her.

02:25:08.720 | And I was like, "I can't have that."

02:25:11.760 | "Well, I don't do that.

02:25:13.000 | "It's just a one-time thing."

02:25:14.000 | I was like, "All right."

02:25:15.520 | So she went back to work

02:25:18.040 | and continued to do it for a couple more weeks.

02:25:20.120 | And then finally I was like, "I can't."

02:25:23.000 | So I picked her up one morning.

02:25:24.240 | It was like, she couldn't drive home.

02:25:28.720 | Before I picked her up, I had written her a note,

02:25:30.960 | left it on the pillow.

02:25:32.840 | So I brought her home, tucked her in the bed,

02:25:35.480 | and told her I'd be back that night.

02:25:40.480 | Told her she had a letter when she woke up.

02:25:43.480 | I woke up and the letter was basically,

02:25:45.360 | "I love you.

02:25:46.760 | "If you can't stop this, don't be here when I get back."

02:25:50.600 | And I went to Columbia that day.

02:25:55.040 | Came back that night and she had quit her job.

02:26:01.400 | And she quit drugs that night.

02:26:09.280 | Really quit 'em.

02:26:12.440 | And I got it in my head.

02:26:16.800 | That I needed to do whatever I needed to do

02:26:21.800 | to make sure she didn't go back to that.

02:26:26.640 | That became, to me, because of my background,

02:26:34.240 | that meant spending a lot of money.

02:26:37.520 | And so every night was $300 to $600 for dinner.

02:26:42.520 | It was $1,000 shoes every week,

02:26:47.120 | $2,000 purse every week, all that.

02:26:49.520 | I had most of my money laundered out to Estonia.

02:26:53.360 | And Elizabeth, at the same time, she quit.

02:26:59.840 | But she didn't want me to go anywhere.

02:27:07.640 | All right, she wanted me there all the time.

02:27:12.060 | I guess that was that connection.

02:27:14.280 | I guess she was scared she might go back to something.

02:27:16.800 | So, Shadow Crew gets busted.

02:27:21.720 | I go through basically all my US funds.

02:27:24.920 | Can't get anything from overseas.

02:27:26.760 | Shadow Crew gets busted October.

02:27:28.480 | I can't go into committing tax fraud because season's over.

02:27:32.880 | Can't go back into credit fraud

02:27:34.240 | because Shadow Crew's been busted.

02:27:35.780 | I don't know who to trust online.

02:27:38.120 | I'm left with running counterfeit cashier's checks

02:27:40.940 | to get money in, trying to make it until

02:27:43.120 | I can start back with some other fraud,

02:27:46.480 | and lying to her the entire time.

02:27:49.200 | - She knows about none of this?

02:27:50.840 | - None of it.

02:27:51.680 | And she thinks I've got a shitload of money.

02:27:55.800 | And she's got expensive taste.

02:27:58.680 | And at the same time, she couldn't be intimate.

02:28:05.380 | I mean, the girl loved me.

02:28:09.160 | That's the first time I've really said that.

02:28:11.320 | - So there's a deep love there, both ways.

02:28:15.480 | - Yeah.

02:28:16.320 | Yeah.

02:28:18.800 | - The things we do.

02:28:19.760 | - So, she couldn't be intimate unless she was stone-cold drunk.

02:28:26.560 | I mean, just shit, stone-cold drunk.

02:28:32.980 | And I, you know, shit, I didn't mind her drinking alcohol.

02:28:38.160 | I'd rather have that than cocaine.

02:28:40.880 | So, that was the intimacy there.

02:28:44.640 | And I kept, I had this,

02:28:46.120 | I kept thinking if I continued to invest,

02:28:50.140 | that it would work out.

02:28:52.880 | You know, that just keep going, she'll be all right.

02:28:58.360 | We'll be all right.

02:29:00.440 | And what happens is, like I said,

02:29:06.520 | she thought I had money, she thought I had money.

02:29:09.600 | She wanted a couple of Tiffany engagement rings.

02:29:11.800 | So I said, we can get married.

02:29:13.800 | You know, I figured marriage, show her that I love her,

02:29:17.040 | show her it's gonna be all right.

02:29:18.440 | So I was like, let's get married.

02:29:21.320 | She's like, well, I've always wanted a Tiffany ring.

02:29:23.880 | Shit, I didn't have money to buy the Tiffany ring

02:29:25.480 | 'cause all my money was overseas.

02:29:26.920 | So here I am, I defraud, so it's counterfeit cashiers.

02:29:31.220 | I find a, like a three carat ring on eBay for 20 grand.

02:29:36.660 | And pay for it with a counterfeit cashier's check.

02:29:40.540 | At the same time, because she doesn't want me to leave,

02:29:43.980 | she needs me there.

02:29:45.820 | Typically, if you're doing that type of crime,

02:29:47.740 | you need to be traveling.

02:29:49.420 | You can't do it in one central area

02:29:51.580 | because you're gonna be identified pretty quickly.

02:29:53.940 | I knew that, but I didn't have much choice.

02:29:57.140 | So start running counterfeit cashier's checks

02:30:00.500 | to get the money to live and everything.

02:30:03.540 | Get the engagement ring.

02:30:06.820 | We were scheduled to be married.

02:30:09.020 | Our wedding date was February 26, 2005.

02:30:16.480 | February 8, 2005, I've got a Tiffany wedding band,

02:30:24.100 | couple of them coming in.

02:30:26.380 | And I get arrested in Charleston, South Carolina.

02:30:32.020 | And she didn't know.

02:30:34.340 | I told her, I said, "I've gotta go pick up those rings."

02:30:37.180 | She thought I was just having them sent in.

02:30:39.500 | Said, "I gotta go get those rings."

02:30:40.700 | And I said, "We'll go out to dinner after that."

02:30:43.220 | And I left at like eight o'clock in the morning.

02:30:46.920 | And I was arrested at, I think 1130, something like that.

02:30:52.780 | Of course, I wanted to call her.

02:30:56.540 | And the FBI got me.

02:30:58.660 | It turns out it was controlled delivery.

02:31:00.560 | There were like 30 agents in the parking lot.

02:31:03.180 | FBI got me, Charleston PD got me.

02:31:05.660 | Within 45 minutes, the Secret Service comes in,

02:31:08.500 | takes over that investigation.

02:31:09.820 | They knew exactly who they had.

02:31:11.420 | Along about seven o'clock at night,

02:31:15.240 | they're like, "We wanna search your house."

02:31:18.620 | And I was like, "Look, I'll sign off on the search

02:31:20.980 | "if you let me go with you so I can see her."

02:31:23.780 | And they were like, "Okay."

02:31:27.260 | So I got to see my phone at that point.

02:31:28.900 | I had like 140 calls where she had been trying

02:31:33.300 | to call all that time.

02:31:34.520 | - She has worries.

02:31:35.500 | - Yeah.

02:31:36.700 | And so they loaped me up and held,

02:31:40.480 | I mean, you talk about 10, 12 cars, 40 agents,

02:31:45.480 | everything else.

02:31:46.580 | She's got a dog at that point.

02:31:47.940 | I'm scared they're gonna shoot the dog.

02:31:49.940 | It was dark and they had me walk up

02:31:57.260 | and they're all behind me.

02:31:58.780 | And I knock on the door and tell her the police are there

02:32:01.500 | and she needs to put the dog up.

02:32:03.860 | So she does and they come in and just start ransacking.

02:32:08.180 | Put me in cuffs, set me down,

02:32:09.660 | start berating her with questions.

02:32:11.420 | She had no idea what the hell was going on.

02:32:13.780 | - Were you able to say a word or two to help her understand?

02:32:16.860 | - Yeah, I was trying to tell her.

02:32:18.180 | And at the same time, they take a watch off her wrist,

02:32:21.620 | they let her keep the ring.

02:32:22.980 | They're telling her, "I'm this guy.

02:32:25.820 | "What's my real name?"

02:32:27.380 | Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang across the board.

02:32:29.540 | - So she's probably terrified.

02:32:31.060 | - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:32:33.340 | And I tell her, I was like,

02:32:34.700 | "Look, they're gonna arraign me tomorrow.

02:32:36.240 | "Don't come, don't come."

02:32:38.460 | I said, "I'll see what's going on, but don't show up."

02:32:42.420 | Of course, she's there the next morning, her and her dad.

02:32:45.220 | And she's back in the back crying.

02:32:47.740 | They're reading off the charges.

02:32:49.540 | I'm under $300,000 bond, everything else.

02:32:55.540 | And that's it.

02:32:57.960 | They throw me in a cell.

02:33:01.060 | Meanwhile, more charges keep coming in.

02:33:03.120 | It's like 10, 12 charges a day at that point.

02:33:10.300 | And I'm trying to call her to make sure she's all right.

02:33:13.220 | - Does it get through?

02:33:16.620 | - So I spent three months in jail.

02:33:19.020 | And during that three months, she visits twice.

02:33:21.580 | I get like three or four phone calls to her.

02:33:24.140 | Looking back now, I understand why.

02:33:28.060 | Back then it was like, I'm the victim.

02:33:29.780 | Why doesn't she talk to me?

02:33:31.180 | But now I understand why.

02:33:35.180 | Hell, the girl loved me too.

02:33:37.260 | She found out I was this piece of shit.

02:33:39.220 | After a week in county jail,

02:33:43.500 | two agents fly in from New Jersey,

02:33:45.860 | two Secret Service guys, pull me out of cell,

02:33:48.420 | looked at me and they were like,

02:33:50.480 | "We got your laptop?"

02:33:51.460 | And I was like, "Yeah."

02:33:52.460 | And he's like, "Well, have you got anything

02:33:54.780 | "on your laptop?"

02:33:55.620 | I was like, "Yeah."

02:33:56.460 | He's like, "You're gonna be charged for it."

02:33:57.540 | I was like, "I figured."

02:33:59.260 | And then he looks at me, he's like,

02:34:01.680 | "Can you do anything for us?"

02:34:03.260 | And I told him my exact words were,

02:34:07.120 | "Look, you let me get back with Elizabeth,

02:34:08.660 | "I'll do whatever you want me to do."

02:34:11.260 | And he looks at me, he's like,

02:34:12.600 | "We're gonna get you out."

02:34:14.180 | I was like, "All right."

02:34:15.220 | So they let me sit there for three months

02:34:17.940 | to get a taste of it.

02:34:19.420 | And get me out, my sister,

02:34:22.540 | they have the bond reduced to $1,000.

02:34:25.260 | My sister pays the $1,000 bond.

02:34:27.220 | By this point, she's disowned me

02:34:29.340 | because I'm dating the stripper.

02:34:31.820 | And Denise bonds me out.

02:34:35.980 | The person that I call immediately is Elizabeth.

02:34:40.260 | I'm out.

02:34:41.200 | And she's like, "I'll be there."

02:34:43.500 | I was like, "Okay."

02:34:44.660 | So it's like 11 o'clock at night.

02:34:49.060 | I'm in the parking lot of the Charleston County Jail.

02:34:52.480 | Me and a Secret Service agent standing there.

02:34:55.900 | And Elizabeth had a friend that owned a limo company.

02:34:58.740 | So she pulls up in a limo.

02:35:00.780 | Gets out, pops the trunk,

02:35:04.580 | gets these two plastic containers out

02:35:06.900 | that have my clothes in them.

02:35:08.400 | Drops them on the pavement,

02:35:12.540 | comes over, hugs me,

02:35:14.500 | call me later.

02:35:15.420 | Gets in the car, drives off.

02:35:18.440 | I'm sitting there crying like a baby.

02:35:20.700 | Agent looks at me, "Is that your fiance?"

02:35:23.220 | I'm like, "Yeah."

02:35:24.060 | And he's like, "I am so sorry."

02:35:25.500 | And I'm like, "Yeah."

02:35:26.580 | (laughing)

02:35:28.260 | I had--

02:35:29.100 | She sounds fascinating.

02:35:31.420 | Yeah, yeah.

02:35:32.380 | Pull up in a limo.

02:35:33.620 | (laughing)

02:35:35.860 | I had $30 to my name at that point, $30.

02:35:40.120 | The agent had to pay for my hotel room that first night.

02:35:43.860 | So he drops me off after paying for the hotel room,

02:35:45.820 | buy me something to eat.

02:35:47.260 | Soon as he drops me off, I take that $30,

02:35:50.200 | walk a half mile to Walmart,

02:35:52.200 | buy a prepaid debit card

02:35:53.800 | so I can start back in tax fraud.

02:35:56.040 | Soon as I get back to the hotel room,

02:35:57.520 | call Elizabeth, beg her to come see me.

02:35:59.480 | She comes to see me and we talk most of the night

02:36:03.280 | and convince her to give me a chance.

02:36:05.560 | I tell her that I,

02:36:06.400 | hey, everything's gonna be all right.

02:36:07.900 | They're gonna hire me.

02:36:08.740 | I'm gonna be this big consultant.

02:36:11.060 | Lies, lies.

02:36:12.460 | Just so she'd get back with me.

02:36:14.280 | And she's like, "Okay."

02:36:16.640 | And so we moved from Charleston.

02:36:20.540 | The field office is in Columbia, South Carolina.

02:36:23.720 | And I'm breaking the law.

02:36:27.200 | Even before I start working with them, I'm breaking the law.

02:36:30.440 | And so they've got me in the office,

02:36:33.760 | the field office, they got this big war room in there.

02:36:36.380 | I'm on a laptop, outside line,

02:36:38.900 | laptops hooked up to a 50 inch plasma monitor on the wall.

02:36:43.220 | They've got a desktop sitting directly next to me,

02:36:46.980 | outside line, two secret service officers

02:36:50.180 | in the room at all times

02:36:51.280 | with a South Carolina law enforcement officer.

02:36:54.000 | My job is four to six hours a day, surfing the web,

02:36:59.340 | picking up targets, intel,

02:37:01.220 | teaching them how cybercrime operates,

02:37:02.940 | everything else like that.

02:37:04.780 | For the first two weeks, they are extremely diligent.

02:37:09.220 | They pay attention to everything that's going on,

02:37:10.820 | ask questions, everything else.

02:37:12.040 | But the problem is, is that that shit gets boring real quick

02:37:17.040 | 'cause I'm very fast online doing that.

02:37:20.460 | So they're like, "What the hell is he doing?"

02:37:22.620 | And it gets tiring looking at a guy just doing that shit.

02:37:25.540 | So after two weeks, they get lazy and bored

02:37:28.940 | and they start watching porn instead of watching me.

02:37:33.940 | At the same time, they've got a key logger

02:37:37.260 | and they've got Spectre Pro and Camtasia,

02:37:39.700 | key loggers and taking snapshots

02:37:41.720 | of everything that I'm doing.

02:37:43.880 | Every night it goes on a DVD-ROM on a spindle.

02:37:47.000 | So I'm like, "They're not gonna go through that shit."

02:37:50.740 | So I'm like, "Fuck it, start breaking it all

02:37:54.440 | "from inside the secret service offices

02:37:56.440 | "while they're in the room, why not?"

02:37:58.560 | That continues for 10 months.

02:38:02.660 | At the same time, the relationship with Elizabeth

02:38:07.000 | fell apart, completely fell apart.

02:38:10.180 | - Wow.

02:38:11.020 | Do you have an understanding of why?

02:38:13.920 | Is it just because her heart got broken

02:38:17.240 | 'cause there was lying?

02:38:18.360 | - It was the trust.

02:38:19.200 | - She felt like she did a lot to sacrifice

02:38:22.160 | for the relationship.

02:38:23.240 | - You've got a woman there that,

02:38:28.240 | she had even said it.

02:38:33.080 | She was like, she had told one of her friends

02:38:38.560 | when we were out having dinner one night,

02:38:40.560 | and this was before I got arrested,

02:38:42.840 | she told one of her friends that I was the only guy

02:38:45.360 | that ever asked her to stop using drugs.

02:38:49.000 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:38:52.180 | Yeah, I mean, I have to say that,

02:38:53.680 | that part of the story is so powerful.

02:38:57.940 | - And--

02:38:58.780 | - And that she chose to do it and she chose to stop.

02:39:02.840 | - And she told me that, there's one instance

02:39:07.480 | she told me that if she didn't marry me,

02:39:09.560 | she'd never be married.

02:39:10.960 | And as far as I know, she's never been married.

02:39:15.920 | - And so it started to fall apart there.

02:39:17.880 | - Yeah, because I was that piece of shit.

02:39:22.400 | - Still, you didn't take a step.

02:39:25.540 | By the way, can I just say how just moving it is,

02:39:29.640 | how honest you are, but thank you.

02:39:32.160 | Thank you for being that person.

02:39:34.680 | But at that time, there's still that line.

02:39:38.520 | - Oh man, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:39:40.720 | So it's falling apart.

02:39:43.480 | She wants to start going to strip clubs

02:39:46.800 | and I'm like, fuck it, why not?

02:39:50.200 | We'll go.

02:39:51.640 | So we started going to strip clubs and she'll come back

02:39:54.200 | and be getting wasted and we'll have sex, what have you.

02:39:58.080 | And one night she looks at me and she was like,

02:40:03.080 | "I think it'd be funny if you got a blowjob

02:40:08.080 | from somebody else."

02:40:11.440 | And that got me, that got me.

02:40:16.520 | I was like, to me, that was the final straw right there.

02:40:20.720 | I was like, she doesn't care for me anymore

02:40:23.280 | or anything else like that.

02:40:25.480 | We'd been going to strip clubs.

02:40:27.280 | So I started dating another stripper

02:40:29.120 | and she knew something was going on.

02:40:33.480 | And she looks at me one day and she's like,

02:40:37.000 | "Why don't you just tell me that it's over?"

02:40:39.080 | And I looked at her and I said, "It's over, we're done."

02:40:42.160 | And I told her, I was like, "Look," I said,

02:40:45.800 | "Whatever you want, we're renting an apartment."

02:40:49.560 | I was like, "Whatever you want in here, take it."

02:40:52.960 | And I said, "Not only that,

02:40:55.200 | but I'll make sure you got money."

02:41:01.480 | "For several months, so you're all right."

02:41:04.120 | And I was like, "Just leave me, leave my TV

02:41:07.280 | and leave me some plates and stuff."

02:41:10.360 | So I go to work that day at the Secret Service,

02:41:15.000 | come back that night and she's taken everything

02:41:19.240 | and left a picture of herself in the bedroom on the floor.

02:41:22.760 | I'm like, "Okay, I guess I deserve that."

02:41:25.520 | - She's got, I like her.

02:41:28.760 | She's got- - Yeah, she was cool.

02:41:30.080 | She was cool.

02:41:31.400 | So I've given her a thousand dollars like every two weeks

02:41:36.400 | for some shit like this.

02:41:37.680 | And it gets to the point,

02:41:40.200 | 'cause I'm doing this tax fraud from inside the offices.

02:41:43.600 | Well, the debit card companies are pinging the cards.

02:41:47.920 | They start to realize that,

02:41:48.760 | "Hey, some son of a bitch is stealing money

02:41:50.840 | using our debit card."

02:41:51.840 | So they start to shut down the cards

02:41:53.280 | before I can pull cash out.

02:41:55.000 | So I start not to have the money to send to her.

02:41:57.360 | And I'm like, so she calls and she's like,

02:42:01.080 | "Look, I have to have money."

02:42:02.960 | And I was like, "Well, look, I'm doing what I can.

02:42:05.840 | You promised money."

02:42:06.840 | And I was like, "Look, if you knew what I was doing

02:42:09.280 | to get this money, you wouldn't be asking that."

02:42:11.680 | And she was like, "I need money.

02:42:13.960 | My rent's behind by a month right now."

02:42:16.640 | And I'm like, "Your rent's behind?"

02:42:18.120 | She's like, "Yeah."

02:42:18.960 | So I was like, "Okay."

02:42:20.400 | So I pick up the phone, call the rental office.

02:42:23.480 | And I was like, "Just wanna make sure that,

02:42:27.040 | I'm sorry I'm behind on the rent

02:42:28.600 | for this apartment number."

02:42:29.800 | She's like, "Oh no, that rent's paid up three months."

02:42:32.480 | It's like, "Okay, hang up, call Elizabeth back."

02:42:35.720 | I was like, "You're behind on the rent?"

02:42:38.160 | And she was like, "Yeah."

02:42:39.480 | And I was like, "Funny.

02:42:41.840 | They just said you're up on it three months."

02:42:43.480 | And she gets quiet and she's like,

02:42:45.560 | "Well, you lied to me too."

02:42:47.560 | And I was like, "You're right.

02:42:50.560 | I did, I did that."

02:42:52.440 | I was like, "But look, I can't do it anymore."

02:42:54.760 | And that's the last time I spoke to her, right there.

02:42:59.840 | What happens is,

02:43:01.440 | is I was breaking the law from inside the offices.

02:43:06.440 | I had a buddy that his name was Sean Mims

02:43:11.040 | out of Los Angeles.

02:43:12.640 | I had taught him how to do tax return fraud.

02:43:14.880 | I had told Sean, I go missing, right?

02:43:18.320 | I go missing for three months.

02:43:19.360 | I told him if I ever went missing not to contact me.

02:43:22.400 | And so I go missing, then I show back up online.

02:43:26.840 | First day he contacts.

02:43:28.480 | So he becomes a target.

02:43:29.960 | And they identify him pretty quickly at that point.

02:43:33.200 | He's set to be arrested sometime in March of six.

02:43:38.200 | That's when he's set to be arrested.

02:43:40.920 | Operation Rolling Stone was the name of the operation.

02:43:43.160 | Nine people were supposed to be arrested that night.

02:43:45.840 | So secret service goes and arrests this guy.

02:43:49.960 | They search his apartment and don't find anything.

02:43:53.720 | The apartment manager comes out and explains to him

02:43:56.360 | how Sean has done all kinds of work to the apartment.

02:43:58.440 | As a matter of fact, he brought in $30,000

02:44:01.760 | worth of Italian tile to put in the apartment

02:44:04.640 | that he's renting.

02:44:06.000 | And by the way, last night he had a U-Haul out here

02:44:09.320 | and took out a whole shit load of stuff.

02:44:11.760 | So secret service comes back in.

02:44:15.640 | They look at me and they're like,

02:44:16.840 | we need you to take a polygraph.

02:44:18.560 | And my answer was, I ain't taking a polygraph.

02:44:23.280 | So they're like, well, we'll throw you back in jail

02:44:25.040 | if you don't.

02:44:25.880 | And I was like, call my lawyer.

02:44:26.720 | Lawyer gets me on the phone.

02:44:27.800 | He's like, you don't have to take polygraph.

02:44:30.440 | I was like, well, good, I'm not going to.

02:44:31.600 | He's like, but they will throw you back in jail.

02:44:34.040 | I was like, don't wanna do that.

02:44:35.880 | He's like, have you done anything?

02:44:39.080 | And I was like, yeah.

02:44:41.280 | And he's like, well, you can try to pass the polygraph.

02:44:45.240 | (both laughing)

02:44:46.840 | I'm like, okay.

02:44:48.160 | So I was like, let's take the polygraph.

02:44:51.320 | They asked three questions.

02:44:52.400 | The questions were, have you talked to anybody?

02:44:56.440 | Have you been on a computer outside of the offices?

02:44:59.000 | Have you talked to the press,

02:45:00.440 | which I was interviewing with a New York Times writer

02:45:02.560 | the entire time?

02:45:03.800 | And then have you contacted or warned anybody

02:45:05.880 | about investigations?

02:45:07.160 | And I failed polygraph completely.

02:45:09.640 | So they revoked the bond.

02:45:11.120 | Take me back down to Charleston County, throw me in a jail.

02:45:15.160 | Three days later, Secret Service shows back up

02:45:19.840 | and pulled me out of a cell.

02:45:21.440 | It's Jim Ramacone and Bobby Kirby.

02:45:23.360 | And they were, I mean, honestly, they were good men.

02:45:27.320 | And they gave me chances upon chances to do the right thing.

02:45:30.960 | And I was not ready to do that.

02:45:33.640 | And Jim Ramacone and Bobby's in there.

02:45:36.640 | And Bobby, I mean, Bobby was a friend.

02:45:39.080 | I mean, he truly was.

02:45:40.520 | Later on, a couple of years ago, I had a chance to,

02:45:43.080 | a couple of years ago, I had a chance to,

02:45:48.440 | to have lunch with the man.

02:45:51.400 | And I told him I was sorry for everything I did to him

02:45:55.120 | 'cause I got him and another agent fired.

02:45:58.120 | And I told him I was sorry for what happened.

02:46:01.400 | And he told me then, he's like, "We were your friends, man.

02:46:05.360 | "We were truly your friends."

02:46:07.480 | So they were good men.

02:46:08.320 | - They wanted to help.

02:46:09.160 | - Yeah.

02:46:10.440 | - They wanted you to be a good man.

02:46:12.520 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:46:13.360 | And what got me so damn bad is I told him, I was like,

02:46:17.560 | "Man, I'm trying to be a better guy."

02:46:19.520 | And he's like, "Brett, you always were a good guy.

02:46:22.520 | "You just didn't know it."

02:46:24.040 | And--

02:46:24.880 | - Fuck, people like that.

02:46:26.040 | - Yeah.

02:46:26.880 | - We need people like that in this world.

02:46:28.240 | - Yeah.

02:46:29.080 | - You need somebody to basically believe--

02:46:32.480 | - Oh, man.

02:46:33.320 | - That you can be a good man.

02:46:35.480 | - So Jim Ramacone pulls me out.

02:46:37.280 | He's the second in charge in South Carolina.

02:46:39.640 | He's got the Miranda waiver in front of him, right?

02:46:43.360 | And he looks at me, he's like, "I'm playing hard ass.

02:46:45.820 | "Bobby's over here looking distraught,

02:46:47.360 | "and you know, like a hurt dog."

02:46:49.440 | And Jim's like, "Here's the way this is gonna work."

02:46:52.880 | He said, "You're gonna tell me everything you've done

02:46:55.280 | "the past six years, or I'm gonna make up my mission

02:46:58.080 | "in life to fuck over you and your family."

02:47:01.480 | And he said, "Not just this case.

02:47:03.480 | "Once you get out of prison,

02:47:04.960 | "I'll hound you the rest of your life."

02:47:07.240 | Then he slides the Miranda waiver over,

02:47:09.120 | and he's like, "Now you wanna talk?"

02:47:11.600 | And I looked at him, I was like, "Nope."

02:47:14.000 | (both laughing)

02:47:15.920 | He was like, he gets up, gets all red in the face,

02:47:19.360 | storms out, on the way out, he's like, "Fuck you very much."

02:47:23.320 | So I go back to the cell.

02:47:24.800 | A week later, I was only under state charges.

02:47:28.360 | A week later, judge rules they revoke the bond improperly.

02:47:33.000 | - Wow.

02:47:34.680 | - Oh, reinstates the bond,

02:47:37.880 | nobody calls the Secret Service to tell him I walk out.

02:47:41.380 | I walk out, I was dating this stripper,

02:47:44.440 | and I told my mom, I was like,

02:47:47.040 | "Well, if they're gonna fuck me,

02:47:49.120 | "they're gonna have to find me."

02:47:50.760 | (both laughing)

02:47:52.320 | - I see she went on the move.

02:47:53.640 | - Yeah, I called this stripper girl up,

02:47:55.480 | I'd given her like 60K, some bullshit like that.

02:47:58.640 | And I told her, I was like, "Kim, I need some money."

02:48:01.960 | And she was like, "What?"

02:48:03.440 | I was like, "Look," I said, "Give me $1,000.

02:48:05.960 | "I'll give you back $3,000 in two weeks."

02:48:08.240 | She was like, "Okay."

02:48:09.080 | So I met her in Augusta, Georgia,

02:48:10.920 | and got the thousand from her

02:48:14.120 | and started driving west on I-20.

02:48:16.640 | No idea where to go to, anything else.

02:48:18.560 | Got to Dallas.

02:48:20.400 | There was a prepaid debit card supplier in Dallas.

02:48:23.120 | Went in, walked in the office,

02:48:25.320 | convinced the guy, social engineering,

02:48:27.440 | convinced the guy to give me 60 prepaid debit cards

02:48:29.640 | without a driver's license,

02:48:30.680 | without payment, anything else he did.

02:48:33.120 | And that started the run.

02:48:35.300 | I ended up stealing, from that, I stole like 160K profit,

02:48:39.040 | used that to buy a Jeep Cherokee,

02:48:41.040 | and the idea was to steal enough money

02:48:43.960 | to bug out to Florianopolis, Brazil,

02:48:47.280 | and set up shop down there,

02:48:49.460 | (laughs)

02:48:51.040 | and do it again.

02:48:51.880 | That was the dream.

02:48:52.700 | That was it, that was it.

02:48:53.680 | So I was on the run for four months,

02:48:56.160 | stole $600,000.

02:48:58.280 | I was in Las Vegas, Nevada.

02:48:59.960 | One day, I had stolen,

02:49:01.560 | the night before I had stolen 160K out of ATMs.

02:49:04.340 | Went in the next morning, I woke up,

02:49:07.600 | signed on to cartersmarket.com,

02:49:09.520 | which was ran by Max Butler, the Iceman,

02:49:11.760 | and there's my name, US Most Wanted on it.

02:49:16.000 | And that gets your attention.

02:49:18.960 | That was my real name,

02:49:19.920 | with the US Most Wanted beside of it.

02:49:21.320 | Nobody knew my real name in that environment at all,

02:49:24.000 | but then they did.

02:49:25.120 | And it was talking about me being part of the Secret Service,

02:49:28.680 | Operation Anglerfish, everything else.

02:49:31.300 | So of course, they're all like--

02:49:32.300 | - So everybody's after you.

02:49:33.880 | - They're like, oh yeah,

02:49:34.720 | we're gonna get this son of a bitch.

02:49:36.720 | So I sit there looking at it,

02:49:38.160 | and I was like, said it out loud,

02:49:39.520 | I was like, well, Mr. Johnson,

02:49:40.720 | you've made the United States Most Wanted list,

02:49:42.920 | what do you do now?

02:49:44.120 | And I was like, I'm going to Disney World.

02:49:46.560 | (laughing)

02:49:47.800 | - Literally.

02:49:48.640 | - Literally, literally, said that out loud.

02:49:50.800 | So loaded up the Jeep,

02:49:53.120 | drove from Las Vegas to Orlando, Florida,

02:49:56.760 | and got the two annual passes,

02:49:59.800 | one to Disney World, the other one to Universal Studios.

02:50:03.000 | Paid for a timeshare,

02:50:05.160 | they were building these new timeshares

02:50:07.320 | right off of Universal Drive,

02:50:08.960 | building these brand new timeshares,

02:50:10.800 | paid for a timeshare, nine months cash.

02:50:13.800 | I was like, we take cash?

02:50:15.000 | Yeah, we take cash, there's $12,900.

02:50:18.040 | Then it wasn't furnished,

02:50:19.240 | so I went down to a furniture store,

02:50:20.800 | bought $30,000 in furniture.

02:50:22.920 | They had seized a DVD collection of mine worth 30 grand,

02:50:27.080 | bought that back,

02:50:28.360 | and proceeded to go to Disney World every day.

02:50:32.040 | And that lasted about six weeks.

02:50:35.320 | They used a trigger fish, is what they use nowadays,

02:50:38.200 | it's called a stingray, to find me.

02:50:42.000 | So one day I was, it was like 10.30 in the morning

02:50:44.880 | on Saturday, September 16th was the day, 2006.

02:50:48.400 | Yeah, 2006, September 16th.

02:50:50.920 | I was used to the builders coming around, knocking,

02:50:54.040 | making sure everything was all right.

02:50:55.920 | So I was asleep, heard this knock at the door,

02:50:59.200 | and get up, look through the keyhole, nobody's there,

02:51:02.200 | you know, people, nobody's there.

02:51:03.600 | I was like, huh.

02:51:04.680 | Open the door, step out into the hallway,

02:51:06.960 | walking down the hall is Bobby Kirby,

02:51:09.760 | another South Carolina guy and a Orlando,

02:51:13.520 | Orange County cop.

02:51:14.640 | And they turn around, and they're like, "Hey, Brett."

02:51:17.720 | I'm like, "Hey, Bobby, how are you?"

02:51:19.400 | And it's like, "We're good, how are you?"

02:51:20.960 | And I'm like, "I'm fine, would you like to come in?"

02:51:23.360 | He was like, "Let's put you in cuffs first."

02:51:25.520 | And I was like, "That's probably a good idea."

02:51:28.040 | (laughing)

02:51:30.720 | He walks in, he's like--

02:51:31.560 | I like those guys.

02:51:32.720 | He's like, "Have you got anything in here?"

02:51:34.600 | And I was like, "Yeah, there's $120,000 in the bedroom."

02:51:37.400 | And he was like, "Seriously?"

02:51:39.040 | I was like, "Yeah, that and an AK-47."

02:51:41.240 | (laughing)

02:51:42.280 | His face goes white, and he's like, "You got a rifle?"

02:51:44.680 | And I was like, "No, I'm kidding with ya."

02:51:46.720 | (laughing)

02:51:47.560 | He was like, "Okay."

02:51:50.760 | So they throw me in jail in Orange County,

02:51:54.040 | and they give me diesel therapy.

02:51:57.280 | And diesel therapy is, it took like two weeks

02:52:01.560 | to transport me from Orange County, Orlando,

02:52:04.760 | to Columbia, South Carolina.

02:52:06.480 | And what happens is, is you stop at every county jail

02:52:08.760 | you possibly can, go through the processing,

02:52:11.400 | which is about six hours.

02:52:13.160 | Once you get to your bunk, hey, time to transport ya.

02:52:16.600 | (laughing)

02:52:18.040 | They do that on purpose?

02:52:19.840 | On purpose, on purpose.

02:52:21.640 | Wears you down mentally and physically and everything.

02:52:24.720 | I get to Columbia, South Carolina.

02:52:26.920 | Now while I was at Orange County,

02:52:29.000 | what happens is this inmate,

02:52:31.040 | because we were in federal holding,

02:52:32.720 | this inmate, he looks at me, his name was Yeti,

02:52:35.240 | and he's like, "Hey man, you know the only time

02:52:37.600 | "you get off in federal prison is the drug program."

02:52:40.560 | I was like, "Well man, I don't use drugs."

02:52:42.400 | And he's like, "You can find a drug problem, can't ya?"

02:52:45.680 | And I was like, "I can find a drug problem."

02:52:48.760 | So what happens is, is every county jail I stop at

02:52:51.600 | on the way to Columbia, I tell 'em I'm alcoholic and cocaine.

02:52:56.600 | So by the time I get to Columbia, South Carolina,

02:52:58.880 | they've got this paper trail of Mr. Johnson

02:53:00.760 | requesting help for drugs.

02:53:04.880 | I had hired Strom Thurman's son as an attorney.

02:53:09.880 | They make me drop him because I paid for him

02:53:12.200 | with illegal funds.

02:53:13.520 | So they give me a public defender.

02:53:15.960 | He gets a psychological evaluation ordered for me.

02:53:18.520 | So psychologist comes into county jail,

02:53:21.680 | four hour interview, about halfway through,

02:53:23.680 | he looks at me, he's like, "You use any type of drugs?"

02:53:25.760 | I was like, "Yeah."

02:53:26.600 | He's like, "What do you use?"

02:53:27.640 | "Cocaine."

02:53:28.480 | "Smoke or snort?"

02:53:29.320 | "Snort."

02:53:30.160 | "How much?"

02:53:30.980 | "An eight ball a day."

02:53:32.520 | "That's a lot."

02:53:33.360 | "Yeah."

02:53:34.200 | "Do you have any trouble out of that?"

02:53:36.200 | "Yeah, I can't get an erection."

02:53:40.080 | And he looks at me and I'm looking at him like,

02:53:43.520 | 'cause I had gotten that shit from Boogie Nights.

02:53:46.440 | Finally I'm like, "Is that right?"

02:53:51.800 | And he was like, "It could happen."

02:53:54.320 | I was like, "Okay."

02:53:55.520 | So that makes it into my pre-sentence report.

02:54:00.520 | So all federal inmates, probation office

02:54:03.640 | and prosecutor, they do this detailed background check

02:54:07.040 | to basically tell the judge how much time to give you.

02:54:09.840 | So that drug bit with that interview makes it into the PSR.

02:54:14.600 | So day of interview, I mean day of sentencing,

02:54:17.840 | I'd pled guilty, day of sentencing,

02:54:19.840 | the prosecutor, he stands up

02:54:23.600 | and this dude is screaming at this point.

02:54:26.680 | And he's like, "Mr. Johnson's manipulated

02:54:28.840 | the Secret Service, he's manipulated the prosecutor."

02:54:31.600 | Then he points at the judge.

02:54:33.040 | "And he's manipulating you today, your honor.

02:54:35.640 | We insist on the upper limits of the guidelines."

02:54:38.440 | Well, I had been telling everybody in the jail

02:54:40.520 | that if they give me any more than 60 months,

02:54:43.320 | I am not staying.

02:54:45.040 | So we're like, "Okay, sure."

02:54:47.960 | So the judge looks at me and she's like, "I agree."

02:54:51.800 | I'm like, and she says, "75 months."

02:54:55.080 | So I looked at my lawyer and I was like,

02:54:57.520 | "Can you get the drug program for me?"

02:54:59.440 | He's like, "I don't know how I ask."

02:55:00.760 | So he stands up, "Your honor, will you order

02:55:03.800 | the drug program for Mr. Johnson?"

02:55:05.480 | The judge says, "No, but I'll recommend he gets evaluated."

02:55:09.320 | So the Secret Service had told her, "Hey, he's full of shit."

02:55:12.920 | So she's like, "No, but I'll recommend he gets evaluated."

02:55:15.000 | I looked at my lawyer and I was like, "What does that mean?"

02:55:16.920 | He was like, "You're probably not gonna get it."

02:55:18.640 | And I was like, "How soon can you get me to the camp?"

02:55:22.160 | And he was like, "Well, if you don't appeal,

02:55:24.720 | I can get you there pretty quick."

02:55:26.200 | My exact words were, "Fuck the appeal, get me to the camp,

02:55:30.320 | I'll take it from there."

02:55:31.760 | He looks at me like I'm the biggest idiot in the world.

02:55:35.360 | I get sent to, 'cause you can get a camp recommended.

02:55:38.400 | I have friends, family members look for camps

02:55:42.080 | that don't have a fence around them.

02:55:43.760 | And we settle on Ashland, Kentucky.

02:55:45.820 | Six weeks later, I'm in Ashland, Kentucky.

02:55:49.120 | And pull up there, 14 foot fence, razor wire on top.

02:55:53.960 | And I'm like, "I don't climb fences."

02:55:56.480 | (laughs)

02:55:57.320 | So I go in.

02:55:58.760 | First question I ask is,

02:56:00.160 | "Are there any jobs outside of the fence?"

02:56:02.200 | And he was like, guards like,

02:56:03.740 | "Well, you can work in the National Forest."

02:56:05.600 | And I'm like, "No, I'll die out there."

02:56:07.240 | (laughs)

02:56:08.080 | He was like, "Well, you could do landscaping."

02:56:09.720 | I'm like, "I can run a weed eater."

02:56:12.000 | (laughs)

02:56:13.360 | Two days later, I walk into the landscaping office

02:56:16.920 | and the cop, this is this genius

02:56:19.280 | of some of these people and institutions.

02:56:21.200 | The cop behind his desk, the entire wall

02:56:25.440 | is a blown up photo of the compound and the outlying area.

02:56:29.720 | So I can literally sit there and plot where I'm going.

02:56:34.120 | All right?

02:56:35.000 | My dad, I hadn't spoken to that man in years.

02:56:40.000 | And he shows up at my sentencing

02:56:43.160 | and stands up in front of the judge.

02:56:45.760 | And he's like, "Your Honor,

02:56:47.120 | I wanna make sure Brett gets a good start.

02:56:49.720 | He can lip with me when he gets out, everything else."

02:56:52.720 | Looking back, the man meant that.

02:56:54.800 | And I just thought it was bullshit at the time.

02:56:58.120 | So he starts to visit me in prison.

02:57:00.600 | I mean, yeah, in prison, he starts to visit.

02:57:02.320 | And about the third visit in, he looks at me, he's like,

02:57:06.140 | "I've been reading about you online."

02:57:07.720 | I was like, "Yeah."

02:57:08.560 | He's like, "Yeah."

02:57:09.840 | He's like, "That's a lot of money you made."

02:57:11.240 | I was like, "Yeah."

02:57:12.560 | He's like, "You think you can teach somebody how to do that?"

02:57:16.160 | (laughs)

02:57:18.560 | And I'm like, so what I used to say,

02:57:21.680 | and again, it's this thing of,

02:57:24.480 | really coming to terms with things.

02:57:26.160 | What I used to say was,

02:57:27.780 | is I thought my dad was back in my life

02:57:31.880 | and that he was just trying to use me.

02:57:34.080 | All right?

02:57:35.080 | The truth of the matter was,

02:57:36.720 | is that my dad hadn't really seen me

02:57:39.080 | except in that frame of crime,

02:57:43.320 | being that criminal with my mom, everything else.

02:57:46.560 | I really think that's how the man

02:57:47.840 | was trying to communicate with me.

02:57:49.920 | - He wanted to connect with you in the places

02:57:52.040 | where you know, where you love,

02:57:53.280 | where you're interested in,

02:57:54.840 | where your addiction is, essentially.

02:57:56.400 | - And what I did is I manipulated the man

02:58:00.000 | into helping me escape.

02:58:01.920 | So I agreed to teach him how to do tax fraud.

02:58:04.240 | And in return, he had, the only money he had to his name,

02:58:06.840 | he had $4,000 cash.

02:58:09.080 | So I manipulated him into giving me that

02:58:11.240 | and to dropping me off a change of clothes,

02:58:13.280 | a cell phone, and a driver's license.

02:58:14.840 | The only driver's license he had

02:58:15.960 | was my driver's license, Brett Johnson.

02:58:18.320 | So I was at the camp for, I don't know, six, eight weeks.

02:58:22.720 | And the hardest worker that landscaping had ever seen.

02:58:25.660 | (both laughing)

02:58:26.840 | At one point, the cops got me on a mountainside

02:58:29.720 | with a broom, sweeping off a mountain.

02:58:31.680 | I'm like, "Yeah, we'll do that, absolutely."

02:58:34.160 | - So you're building trust with the guys there.

02:58:36.280 | - Yeah, working my ass off.

02:58:37.480 | And then six weeks, I take off.

02:58:39.640 | And I lasted, I think, two, three weeks,

02:58:42.640 | something like that.

02:58:43.720 | US Marshals, I made it 120--

02:58:45.040 | - Took off, you escaped.

02:58:45.960 | - Yeah, escaped, escaped.

02:58:47.600 | US Marshals, they're canvassing a three-state area.

02:58:50.160 | They find me, I think, 250 miles away.

02:58:51.920 | It's like Lexington, Kentucky.

02:58:53.800 | They find me in Lexington

02:58:55.120 | because I had to use my real driver's license.

02:58:57.320 | I had a laptop, I had prepaid debit cards,

02:59:00.920 | and I had stolen identity information.

02:59:03.000 | And the way it got me was I had dyed my hair

02:59:07.520 | this flaming red, I had this deep tan,

02:59:10.320 | I didn't look anything like myself.

02:59:12.040 | And I was at a hotel, had the curtains open,

02:59:16.760 | saw this guy, I was on the laptop,

02:59:19.640 | saw this guy walk by.

02:59:21.120 | He walks by the window and he stops.

02:59:24.680 | And then he backs up, he looks inside,

02:59:28.120 | he knocks on the window.

02:59:30.120 | I look up at him, he's like, "You."

02:59:32.720 | I was like, "Me?"

02:59:33.560 | He's like, "You."

02:59:34.840 | Then he pulls out this badge and he points at it.

02:59:37.480 | He's like, and then he points at the door, "Now."

02:59:41.280 | So I was like, "Oh, okay."

02:59:42.480 | So I open up the door and he's like,

02:59:44.560 | "US Marshals Service."

02:59:46.320 | So they arrest me and--

02:59:49.240 | - How did they track you down?

02:59:50.560 | - They canvassed that area.

02:59:51.520 | They talked to every hotel, everything else.

02:59:53.720 | I had--

02:59:54.560 | - So it's like a traditional, like they were just tracking--

02:59:56.720 | - Traditional police work is what it was.

02:59:58.400 | - So it wasn't like from the internet

02:59:59.960 | they kind of got something--

03:00:00.800 | - No, no, just straight police work.

03:00:02.640 | - Good, good, good police work.

03:00:03.480 | - US Marshals are outstanding in everything they do.

03:00:05.760 | So they arrest me.

03:00:06.720 | I go to a, I'm initially held at a county jail

03:00:09.640 | in Moorhead, Kentucky.

03:00:11.280 | And that, man, that was one hell of an experience there.

03:00:14.640 | But then I'm transferred after sentencing on that.

03:00:17.360 | So sentencing, here's the weird thing.

03:00:20.360 | So I spent like, I think, two or three months

03:00:22.440 | at the county jail in Moorhead, Kentucky.

03:00:26.200 | Get sentenced.

03:00:27.520 | At my sentencing, it happens so quickly

03:00:31.560 | after the initial sentencing

03:00:33.520 | that they use the exact same pre-sentence report.

03:00:36.360 | The report that's got all that drug shit in there.

03:00:39.120 | So at my sentencing, prosecutors there,

03:00:42.080 | Secret Service is there, judge me, my attorney.

03:00:47.080 | Prosecutor stands up, he's like,

03:00:48.800 | "Your Honor, we would like it if you would consider

03:00:51.680 | "that when Mr. Johnson was arrested,

03:00:54.000 | "he had a laptop, he had all this information with him,

03:00:56.480 | "looks like he was engaged in identity theft yet again."

03:01:00.040 | Judge looks at the prosecutor, says, "No."

03:01:03.480 | Says, "Hey, if you were gonna charge him with it,

03:01:05.200 | "you should've charged him with it.

03:01:06.320 | "I'm only considering the escape."

03:01:08.520 | Then he looks at me, and he's like, "Mr. Johnson."

03:01:11.600 | He said, "It looks like by you keeping your mouth shut

03:01:13.880 | "right now, you're really saving yourself

03:01:16.600 | "a pretty serious charge."

03:01:17.760 | And my response was, "Yes, Your Honor."

03:01:20.440 | And he was like, then he opens up the pre-sentence report,

03:01:22.720 | he's fingering through, and he's like,

03:01:24.040 | "It also looks like before you got involved

03:01:26.840 | "with all these drugs, you were a pretty good citizen."

03:01:30.040 | I was like, "Yes, Your Honor."

03:01:33.240 | And he's like, "So here's what I'm gonna do."

03:01:34.800 | He said, "I'm gonna give you 18 months on the escape."

03:01:38.760 | I was like, "Okay."

03:01:40.200 | He said, "I'm also gonna give you,"

03:01:41.280 | no, it was 15 months on the escape.

03:01:42.360 | He said, "I'm gonna give you 15 months on the escape."

03:01:44.080 | He said, "And I'm also gonna order

03:01:46.000 | "the drug program for you."

03:01:47.680 | I was like, "Yes, Your Honor."

03:01:51.720 | So the drug program gives you a year off,

03:01:54.920 | and it gives you six months and halfway house.

03:01:59.240 | So by escaping, I got out of prison three months earlier

03:02:03.640 | than what I should have gotten out of.

03:02:05.520 | - So the original thing about drugs worked in the long-

03:02:09.840 | - It worked.

03:02:10.680 | - In the long term.

03:02:11.520 | - Now, the interesting thing with that,

03:02:12.340 | and this was the best lie I ever told,

03:02:13.840 | honestly, the best lie I ever told.

03:02:15.600 | I spent eight months in solitary confinement, okay?

03:02:20.400 | Eight months.

03:02:21.800 | And that's an experience.

03:02:23.100 | 'Cause you ain't got no books for the first month or so,

03:02:27.480 | then they give you a King James Bible.

03:02:29.380 | Yeah.

03:02:31.720 | And then-

03:02:33.000 | - For a month, no books.

03:02:35.000 | - No books for a month.

03:02:36.400 | - This is a pretty small-

03:02:38.320 | - Six by nine room.

03:02:39.240 | - Six by nine.

03:02:40.160 | - Yeah.

03:02:41.240 | - No books.

03:02:42.080 | - No books, no paper, no pen, no pencil.

03:02:44.440 | - You're alone with your mind.

03:02:45.600 | - You got a mat, a toilet.

03:02:47.240 | - What's that like?

03:02:50.040 | - You sleep as much as you can.

03:02:52.240 | You're sleeping 16, 18 hours a day is what you're doing.

03:02:55.600 | - What about, were you thinking about

03:02:57.640 | even just going back to like Elizabeth?

03:03:01.680 | Are you thinking about-

03:03:02.560 | - You go through all that.

03:03:03.720 | - The whole thing.

03:03:04.560 | - You go through all that, every bit.

03:03:05.640 | - Your mom too?

03:03:06.740 | - Yeah, going through every single bit of that.

03:03:08.880 | And so you're supposed to get out an hour a day.

03:03:12.960 | Law says you're supposed to get out an hour a day.

03:03:15.320 | That's the law.

03:03:16.360 | That's not the way things actually happen.

03:03:18.220 | What actually happens is,

03:03:19.120 | is you're lucky to get out an hour a week.

03:03:21.580 | You take a shower twice a week and that's it.

03:03:25.400 | You get a phone call once a month.

03:03:26.880 | - Oh, so you don't get to see nature.

03:03:28.800 | - Don't see anything.

03:03:29.760 | You're getting solitary.

03:03:31.320 | All right, and it takes about a week.

03:03:34.240 | The first week is the roughest.

03:03:36.520 | You're bouncing off the walls that first week

03:03:38.480 | 'cause you can't sleep, can't do anything else.

03:03:40.720 | Then you start to adapt to it after a while.

03:03:43.680 | When that book does arrive, you're happy as hell to have it.

03:03:46.600 | I've well-versed in the King James Bible.

03:03:49.920 | So you're happy to have it.

03:03:51.920 | Then finally you get other books

03:03:53.840 | that come in from that point.

03:03:55.520 | Spent eight months at that.

03:03:57.880 | And they send me out to a real prison,

03:04:00.560 | Big Spring, Texas, West Texas, where...

03:04:04.940 | Have you been out there?

03:04:07.280 | - No.

03:04:08.120 | But I can tell.

03:04:10.000 | - Prairie dogs and tarantulas is what it is.

03:04:13.120 | No kidding, it gets so hot that warnings come on the radio

03:04:17.680 | telling you not to drive on certain streets

03:04:19.680 | because they're melted.

03:04:21.160 | That's Big Spring.

03:04:22.500 | So if you've seen the movie "From Dusk Till Dawn,"

03:04:27.280 | the opening scene is in Big Spring, Texas.

03:04:29.580 | - So it's hot.

03:04:31.760 | - Yeah, very hot.

03:04:32.600 | So, and that's where I find out what a real prison is.

03:04:35.400 | And it's not ran by guards.

03:04:38.520 | Prisons are ran by inmates, and that's a fact.

03:04:41.720 | So you're met at the door by whatever race you are,

03:04:46.720 | is what happens.

03:04:48.320 | So Big Spring is a converted Air Force compound.

03:04:50.840 | It's a disciplinary prison,

03:04:52.160 | so you get the bad guys that are in there.

03:04:54.200 | So I get...

03:04:55.360 | I go through processing, and I'm walking up to the unit,

03:05:00.200 | and I'm met at the door by a guy named Nick Sandifer.

03:05:03.600 | He's the treasurer of the Aryan Brotherhood.

03:05:06.240 | And first question out of his mouth is,

03:05:09.160 | "Any more white guys come in?"

03:05:10.720 | And shit, I didn't know.

03:05:11.720 | I was like, "I don't know, four or five?"

03:05:13.800 | Next question is, "What are you in here for?"

03:05:17.440 | My answer was, 'cause I'm like, "I ain't got no worries."

03:05:19.360 | My answer was, "Computer crime," smiled at him.

03:05:21.800 | (laughs)

03:05:22.640 | And it turns out, wrong thing to say

03:05:25.760 | because computer crime is not credit card theft

03:05:28.200 | or hacking or any bullshit like that.

03:05:30.120 | Computer crime in prison is child pornography.

03:05:34.120 | So tell him that.

03:05:35.440 | He looks at me like I'm a piece of shit,

03:05:37.720 | goes and gets his buddies.

03:05:38.880 | They circle around.

03:05:40.720 | "What are you in here for?"

03:05:41.760 | I like how the Aryan Brotherhood has lines.

03:05:45.040 | They're like-

03:05:45.880 | Oh yeah.

03:05:46.720 | Child porn.

03:05:47.540 | That's it.

03:05:48.380 | That's the bad guy.

03:05:49.960 | They circle around.

03:05:50.800 | They're like, "What'd you say you're in here for?"

03:05:53.400 | So I'm sitting there trying to explain it to 'em.

03:05:55.760 | They're like, "You know, you tell a good story.

03:05:57.200 | "You still said this."

03:05:59.160 | Now, computer crime basically really does mean

03:06:02.960 | usually child pornography.

03:06:04.800 | In prison, yeah.

03:06:05.640 | Yeah.

03:06:06.480 | And what you see, and that's one of the things you find out,

03:06:08.280 | the guys that are going in there for child porn,

03:06:10.980 | they will tell 'em it's credit card theft.

03:06:13.800 | Right.

03:06:14.640 | So, yeah.

03:06:15.560 | Right, they've learned.

03:06:16.680 | So I'm that guy that's-

03:06:17.960 | But you also don't, I mean,

03:06:19.320 | for people who are just listening to this,

03:06:20.840 | you don't exactly look like the typical computer hacker.

03:06:24.800 | That's true.

03:06:25.640 | That's true.

03:06:26.480 | That's very true.

03:06:27.480 | But I don't look like the pedophile either.

03:06:29.320 | That's right.

03:06:30.600 | That's right.

03:06:31.480 | But it's like it doesn't make it seem like you're,

03:06:33.800 | I mean, I guess you're not wearing a hoodie

03:06:36.000 | and you're not like emo, dark.

03:06:39.960 | The way it actually works in prison,

03:06:43.140 | they won't attack you until they know.

03:06:47.220 | All right, so they have to see paperwork,

03:06:49.560 | which now in federal prison,

03:06:50.920 | you don't get transported with paperwork because of that.

03:06:54.240 | So they have to see paperwork

03:06:55.520 | or a guard will tell them what you're in there for.

03:06:59.180 | Guards will tell who the pedophiles are.

03:07:02.400 | So none of the guards told 'em that I was anything.

03:07:05.920 | So for the first month, they think I am,

03:07:08.240 | but they're not doing anything

03:07:09.440 | 'cause they don't know for sure.

03:07:11.120 | At the end of the first month,

03:07:12.140 | I had been talking to Kevin Poulsen

03:07:14.280 | over at Wired Magazine about Max Butler.

03:07:17.640 | He does an article about that, shows up in Wired Magazine.

03:07:20.360 | So at the end of the first month,

03:07:21.360 | Wired Magazine hits compound, front cover,

03:07:23.840 | all the story.

03:07:24.880 | You would think, you would think it saved me.

03:07:27.240 | So I'm reading the article, really happy about it.

03:07:29.660 | So what happens is four o'clock is mail call.

03:07:31.960 | Four o'clock's a standup count nationwide.

03:07:34.000 | After four o'clock is your mail call,

03:07:35.520 | they hand out all the mail for the day.

03:07:37.160 | So the mail comes, I get the magazine.

03:07:38.800 | I'm like reading through it, I'm like,

03:07:39.640 | "Well, shit, I'm good to go."

03:07:41.560 | Then it says, "Brett Johnson,

03:07:43.840 | "secret service informant," in the article.

03:07:46.520 | - So you're now a snitch.

03:07:49.560 | - Which is right up there with the pedophiles.

03:07:51.720 | (laughing)

03:07:53.720 | We go to dinner after that.

03:07:55.360 | At dinner, you can hear it.

03:07:57.080 | You can hear the chat, "We got a snitch.

03:07:58.680 | "I think it's that guy over there."

03:08:00.960 | Warden, next day, shuts down the entire compound.

03:08:04.680 | Calls me into his office.

03:08:06.060 | They got security there,

03:08:07.160 | you got the counselors there and everything else.

03:08:08.480 | Warden looks at me, he's like,

03:08:10.040 | "Did you give an interview to Wired Magazine?"

03:08:12.640 | I'm like, "Yeah."

03:08:13.880 | He's like, "Do you not know they will kill you in here?"

03:08:17.160 | I was like, (laughing)

03:08:19.480 | he was like, "Do you feel safe?"

03:08:21.800 | Well, I know if you tell me you don't feel safe,

03:08:24.400 | they transport you.

03:08:25.240 | Transport you means another eight months

03:08:27.120 | in solitary confinement.

03:08:28.640 | You start to see shit in solitary after a while.

03:08:31.840 | So I'm like, "No, not gonna do that."

03:08:33.200 | So I'm like, "Completely safe."

03:08:34.920 | He was like, "Look," he's like,

03:08:37.060 | "If anybody says anything to you,

03:08:39.820 | "immediately come to us

03:08:42.040 | "because they'll fucking kill you."

03:08:44.600 | So they do a locker search,

03:08:45.840 | try to confiscate the magazine.

03:08:47.120 | Say, "Can't."

03:08:47.960 | The next day, I walk into the unit.

03:08:50.280 | There's Nick Sandefur laying on his bunk,

03:08:52.200 | magazine wide open reading it.

03:08:53.960 | I'm like, "Oh shit."

03:08:55.640 | Walked up to him, I was like,

03:08:57.460 | "Hey, Nick, what are you doing?"

03:08:58.480 | He's like, "Oh, doing some reading."

03:09:00.080 | I was like, "Anything interesting?"

03:09:01.320 | He's like, "It's getting there."

03:09:03.000 | (laughing)

03:09:03.840 | I was like, "Let me save you the trouble."

03:09:07.080 | Take the magazine, turn over the page.

03:09:08.560 | I was like, "Right there is what you're looking for."

03:09:10.960 | He was like, "Man, I already knew."

03:09:12.680 | I was like, "Do we have a problem?"

03:09:15.680 | And he looks at me, he's like,

03:09:18.000 | "Is anyone on the compound you told on?"

03:09:20.120 | I was like, "No."

03:09:21.280 | He's like, "Until someone gets here you snitched on,

03:09:24.640 | we're okay."

03:09:25.960 | I was like, "Okay."

03:09:28.120 | He's like, "But I need you to do something for me."

03:09:32.080 | All right, so in federal prison, you gotta have a job.

03:09:35.240 | Everybody works.

03:09:36.080 | Doesn't matter what you do, but you gotta work.

03:09:37.560 | I got a job in education teaching a lit class.

03:09:41.200 | Every Wednesday, 6 to 8.30 p.m., lit.

03:09:45.280 | And had all, every area on the compound

03:09:48.800 | signs up for the lit class.

03:09:50.280 | Had a couple guards every now and then popped in.

03:09:52.400 | And did we teach lit?

03:09:54.840 | No, we taught fraud every Wednesday, 6 to 8.30 p.m.

03:09:59.840 | That's how I didn't get my ass beaten.

03:10:02.120 | And my other job, I had two jobs with them.

03:10:04.680 | The other job, you get to the point, it's weird, man.

03:10:07.800 | You get to the point, people walking off the bus.

03:10:11.680 | You know immediately two groups of people.

03:10:13.960 | You know who the bank robbers are, immediately.

03:10:16.720 | Just by them walking off the bus,

03:10:18.080 | you're like, "That motherfucker's a bank robber."

03:10:20.360 | And you know who the pedophiles are, immediately.

03:10:23.560 | So my job as the white guy

03:10:26.320 | was to approach the white pedophiles

03:10:28.720 | and have a conversation.

03:10:29.840 | And the conversation was basically,

03:10:30.960 | "Hey, don't know what you in here for.

03:10:34.600 | "Don't care what you in here for.

03:10:36.880 | "But if you got some sort of fucked up charge,

03:10:40.000 | "you need to tell me.

03:10:42.000 | "If you tell me, everything's gonna be all right.

03:10:46.240 | "If you don't tell me, you see those guys over there?

03:10:49.380 | "If you start to associate with them,

03:10:51.120 | "or they start to talk to you,

03:10:52.520 | "and then they find out you're in here on something,

03:10:55.400 | "they're gonna kill you."

03:10:57.240 | And what are the things?

03:10:58.120 | Pedophile.

03:10:59.600 | Pedophile, rapist, anything that harms children,

03:11:02.640 | harms women, anything like that.

03:11:04.720 | There are, it's like the mob.

03:11:07.120 | There's rules, there's an ethical code.

03:11:10.440 | Even if you have the division between races on all that,

03:11:15.160 | you still have these lines drawn.

03:11:17.760 | And there's a hierarchy too.

03:11:19.680 | Very, very much so.

03:11:20.520 | And what that looks like in prison,

03:11:22.000 | depending on the, it depends on the security class

03:11:25.080 | that you're in, what level prison.

03:11:27.640 | But at that prison, what that looked like was,

03:11:31.040 | you're not allowed to talk to anybody.

03:11:33.360 | You're not allowed to watch television.

03:11:35.520 | You can go to the library.

03:11:37.300 | You don't associate with anyone except your own type.

03:11:40.740 | If you do anything like this, we will kill you.

03:11:44.640 | If someone wants to extort you, we will do that too,

03:11:49.200 | and you won't tell on us, or we'll kill you.

03:11:52.680 | So that's the way that works at that point.

03:11:55.480 | And everybody quickly learns this.

03:11:58.120 | Quickly, quickly.

03:11:59.680 | And so typically the guys would say,

03:12:02.360 | "I just wanna do my own time."

03:12:03.700 | That would be the line.

03:12:05.120 | And it's like, okay, don't mess with him, all right?

03:12:08.440 | Every now and then you'd have somebody lie,

03:12:11.760 | and that would come with those types of consequences.

03:12:14.560 | I got to see, while I was there,

03:12:17.740 | saw two people murdered,

03:12:20.040 | saw, went through three prison riots,

03:12:23.160 | and through my entire tenure in prison,

03:12:25.200 | saw four suicides.

03:12:26.960 | The people who got killed, it was,

03:12:29.840 | so we had, outside you had this track,

03:12:32.000 | third of a mile track.

03:12:33.420 | You walk it counterclockwise,

03:12:35.720 | and inside of the track you got two handball courts.

03:12:38.200 | So of an evening, it happened both times,

03:12:41.620 | you, all of us would be walking, doing our exercises,

03:12:45.160 | and at the top of the key, like a flock of birds,

03:12:47.680 | you'd see all the inmates start to migrate down

03:12:51.080 | toward the gate.

03:12:52.000 | So the first time you see that, you see that migration,

03:12:55.240 | you look up in the distance,

03:12:56.340 | and this other, one of the inmates got another inmate down,

03:12:59.900 | and he's just hammering his head right into the pavement,

03:13:02.840 | like that right there.

03:13:04.000 | Well, guards don't stop that,

03:13:05.600 | because a guard may get hurt.

03:13:07.440 | So a guard, it's 15 minutes coming out to stop that,

03:13:11.660 | until everything's over.

03:13:12.500 | By that point, the guy doesn't have a head.

03:13:15.260 | They shut the compound down, and this is what happens.

03:13:17.740 | So you shut the entire compound down,

03:13:20.020 | they make two lines of the inmates,

03:13:22.740 | and what happens is, the inmate walks into a room,

03:13:25.780 | they shut the door behind the inmate,

03:13:27.300 | guard asks them two questions.

03:13:28.660 | First question is, did you see anything?

03:13:30.340 | The answer is no.

03:13:31.620 | Second question is, if you had seen anything,

03:13:34.140 | would you say anything?

03:13:35.460 | Answer is no.

03:13:36.620 | Guard then says, get the fuck out.

03:13:38.480 | And that's it.

03:13:40.080 | Anybody that stays in any longer than that,

03:13:42.980 | is automatically suspect.

03:13:45.820 | So there was one incident, I remember this Hispanic guy,

03:13:49.560 | he's in there for a few minutes.

03:13:51.640 | And everybody's like, what's going on?

03:13:55.880 | (laughs)

03:13:56.720 | So his people then call him over,

03:13:59.440 | explain to us what went on.

03:14:01.200 | - Yeah.

03:14:02.040 | - And it happens like that.

03:14:03.200 | - It's fascinating, 'cause you talked about

03:14:05.080 | the network of trust in the cyber crime community.

03:14:10.080 | And here's a network of trust.

03:14:12.540 | - Absolutely.

03:14:13.380 | - In the prison crime community.

03:14:15.060 | - Absolutely.

03:14:16.340 | - Trust.

03:14:17.460 | - Trust matters.

03:14:19.000 | Trust drives everything at the end of the day.

03:14:21.140 | The riots that I went through,

03:14:23.100 | the first riot, man, you're scared to death.

03:14:26.340 | Scared to death.

03:14:27.540 | You know, you've got the cops dressed up

03:14:29.440 | in the Ninja Turtle outfits,

03:14:30.700 | you've got the rubber bullets, the tear gas canisters,

03:14:34.540 | all that crap, you've got the inmates

03:14:36.380 | that are raised in hell, scared to death.

03:14:39.260 | The second riot, you calm down.

03:14:42.420 | Second riot, you start to notice.

03:14:44.660 | This is a racial riot.

03:14:46.200 | This is typically, and almost always,

03:14:48.700 | it's Hispanics and African Americans.

03:14:50.860 | - So you get to detect what is the motivation for the riot,

03:14:54.500 | what is the reason, and that gives you some calm.

03:14:56.620 | - That's exactly right.

03:14:57.460 | So the second riot, you start to notice this.

03:14:58.740 | Hey, man, this ain't me, this ain't our group.

03:15:02.700 | Third riot, no shit, third riot, you lay in your bunk.

03:15:05.760 | (laughing)

03:15:07.900 | You let 'em wage war all around you,

03:15:10.740 | and every now and then you have an inmate

03:15:12.100 | that'll run up to you and he'll point to a locker,

03:15:13.700 | he'll say, "Is that your locker?"

03:15:14.820 | And if you tell him yes, they leave it alone.

03:15:16.860 | If you say, "It's not my locker,"

03:15:18.020 | they'll break into it and steal everything out of it

03:15:20.100 | and go from there.

03:15:21.540 | And that's what happens.

03:15:22.700 | But--

03:15:23.540 | - So you did your time for five years.

03:15:25.460 | - Five and a half.

03:15:26.300 | - Five and a half.

03:15:27.980 | You made it out.

03:15:28.900 | - Made it out.

03:15:29.740 | I went through, I told you it was a good lie

03:15:31.780 | that I told, I went through

03:15:32.940 | the Residential Drug Abuse Program.

03:15:35.740 | It's a nine-month intensive therapy.

03:15:37.900 | And the way I got to that, this counselor at Big Spring,

03:15:42.220 | he bought this.

03:15:44.740 | He wanted inmates to be educated.

03:15:46.900 | He was a really good guy.

03:15:48.320 | So he wanted inmates to be educated.

03:15:49.700 | He got a discount on a game theory class set.

03:15:54.700 | So he gets all these discs and everything,

03:15:56.780 | and he's asking, "Does anybody on the compound

03:15:59.420 | "know anything about game theory?"

03:16:01.060 | And somebody says, "If anybody does,

03:16:03.460 | "it'll be Brett Johnson."

03:16:04.820 | So he comes up to me one day at my buggy,

03:16:07.540 | he's like, "Are you Brett Johnson?"

03:16:09.140 | I was like, "Yeah."

03:16:09.980 | He was like, "Do you know anything about game theory?"

03:16:12.700 | And I was like, "Yes, I do."

03:16:14.580 | (laughing)

03:16:15.420 | So I start rattling off Prisoner's Dilemma

03:16:17.260 | and everything else.

03:16:18.100 | He's like, "Will you teach the class?"

03:16:20.100 | So I start teaching that.

03:16:21.140 | I start teaching inmates public speaking

03:16:23.420 | and to make friends with this counselor.

03:16:26.640 | So it gets to the time where I'm supposed

03:16:28.820 | to be transferring out to this drug program

03:16:30.580 | that they only had in Fort Worth,

03:16:32.900 | and the transfers are taking like four or five months.

03:16:36.460 | That's four or five months I could be out free.

03:16:39.300 | So I went up to him one day and I was like,

03:16:40.940 | "Look," his name was Keely, I was like,

03:16:42.500 | "Look, man," I said, "Is there any way

03:16:45.260 | "that I can get transferred out any sooner?"

03:16:47.100 | And he looks at me, he's like, "Brett, I cannot help you."

03:16:50.780 | And I was like, "I appreciate that.

03:16:51.980 | "Thank you so much for even trying."

03:16:53.860 | So he said that, a week later, I'm on a bus

03:16:57.260 | going to Fort Worth.

03:16:59.260 | So he got me to Fort Worth.

03:17:00.100 | - I got you.

03:17:00.940 | - Yeah. - I love it.

03:17:02.060 | - So it was a nine-month program,

03:17:04.260 | 24 hours a day of cognitive behavioral therapy.

03:17:06.700 | Had nothing to do with drugs.

03:17:07.820 | It was all peer study stuff and CBT training.

03:17:12.060 | And honestly, it's the best thing that could ever happen.

03:17:15.940 | Truly is.

03:17:16.780 | - Well, that part, what was the thing

03:17:19.840 | that changed you as a man?

03:17:21.620 | Is it the solitary confinement?

03:17:23.540 | Was it the years?

03:17:24.660 | Was it losing the people you loved?

03:17:28.820 | Or was it that behavioral therapy?

03:17:30.620 | - It's a combination, man.

03:17:31.940 | It's a combination.

03:17:32.940 | So my sister disowns me.

03:17:36.500 | The only person I had in my life.

03:17:38.300 | I mean, me and my sister, that's it.

03:17:41.420 | I mean, I loved Elizabeth, I love my wife now,

03:17:43.860 | but it's me and my sister.

03:17:47.100 | We went through all that shit together.

03:17:49.260 | So Denise disowns me.

03:17:50.300 | She doesn't talk to me for an entire year

03:17:52.900 | when all this stuff happens.

03:17:54.660 | And after I get arrested on the escape,

03:17:58.940 | she ends up driving seven hours to come see me

03:18:01.620 | to tell me she loves me.

03:18:02.500 | And I don't see her again for five and a half years.

03:18:04.920 | Yeah.

03:18:05.760 | So that's really the first turnaround.

03:18:07.900 | Took me two and a half years in prison

03:18:10.300 | to accept responsibility.

03:18:12.700 | Two and a half.

03:18:13.540 | - That was amazing that she did that.

03:18:14.660 | - Yeah.

03:18:15.500 | - She drove down.

03:18:16.500 | - Yeah.

03:18:17.340 | - She did that.

03:18:18.160 | - Yeah, she's something.

03:18:19.000 | She's something.

03:18:19.820 | Yeah, she saw me for 10 minutes,

03:18:20.900 | tell me she loves me, and then I don't see her.

03:18:23.140 | - Planted the seed.

03:18:24.100 | - Yeah, yeah.

03:18:24.940 | (laughing)

03:18:26.580 | - But yeah, you had time to think over those years.

03:18:29.300 | - Took two and a half years to realize

03:18:31.300 | that I didn't commit crime because of stripper girlfriends

03:18:34.140 | or wives or family.

03:18:35.340 | I committed it 'cause I wanted to, chose to.

03:18:38.180 | And that's the first turnaround.

03:18:42.060 | Second turnaround is the CBT training.

03:18:44.780 | It didn't really hit while I was in prison.

03:18:50.140 | I went through it and they ingrained it in you,

03:18:52.140 | but until you choose to make it work, it doesn't work.

03:18:56.740 | So I got out in 2011, didn't wanna break the law, did not.

03:19:00.500 | And I was under three years probation,

03:19:02.900 | couldn't touch a computer.

03:19:04.620 | I had a job offer from Deloitte

03:19:07.420 | to run a cyber crime office in the UK,

03:19:10.740 | which that was a no.

03:19:11.820 | No, you're not moving and that's a computer, idiot.

03:19:13.900 | So then I had a job offer from Know Before,

03:19:18.260 | a fishing company, couldn't take that.

03:19:20.660 | I got to where I was trying to apply for fast food jobs.

03:19:24.020 | That's a computer, can't touch that.

03:19:26.420 | Okay, then what about a waiter's position?

03:19:28.780 | Well, that's a computer and access to credit cards, idiot.

03:19:31.740 | Can't touch that either.

03:19:33.460 | So literally could not get a job, could not.

03:19:36.540 | Doing food stamps, I had a roommate

03:19:40.020 | that penned half the rent.

03:19:42.540 | They tell you when you leave prison to get a job

03:19:45.260 | and something you care about and you won't recidivate.

03:19:48.060 | Couldn't get a job and what I had was a cat.

03:19:50.340 | Monster the Cat, that was the cat's name.

03:19:54.660 | That's a good name.

03:19:56.900 | Yeah, I had enough money to feed that little guy

03:19:59.620 | and didn't have money to buy toilet paper for the apartment.

03:20:02.740 | So I was on Panama City Beach.

03:20:05.340 | How long were you living like this?

03:20:07.380 | It was a steady decline 'cause remember,

03:20:09.340 | I taught my dad how to commit tax fraud.

03:20:11.420 | So he bankrolled a lot of that until he couldn't.

03:20:14.300 | And then from there, it's like, what the fuck do you do?

03:20:18.180 | So I didn't wanna go into computer crime at all

03:20:20.780 | and I ended up shoplifting toilet paper, man.

03:20:25.220 | Shoplifting toilet paper.

03:20:26.540 | Just like for the basics, the basics of survival.

03:20:30.620 | So about the same time, I had a friend that, this guy.

03:20:35.220 | I'd been dating the same type of women I had been dating.

03:20:37.740 | You know, the unhealthy ones, the hot unhealthy ones.

03:20:41.540 | Yes, love.

03:20:43.500 | Yeah. That's how that works.

03:20:44.980 | So I had a friend post an ad for me on Plenty of Fish

03:20:48.980 | and this woman responds, my wife, she responds.

03:20:53.100 | And the pictures I had taken were these prison type pictures,

03:20:56.500 | you know, the serious like, they were there.

03:20:58.980 | She sends me a message of, "Why aren't you smiling?"

03:21:01.460 | And my response was, "That is my happy face."

03:21:04.260 | So we started talking and we started dating

03:21:08.340 | and she's that second saving thing, man.

03:21:13.300 | I ended up moving in with her.

03:21:14.980 | I was going broke, I was about to get kicked out

03:21:16.540 | of the apartment and everything else.

03:21:17.620 | And she didn't say it, but I think she knew it.

03:21:19.980 | And moved in with her and I got a job.

03:21:24.980 | And the job I got, my probation officer

03:21:30.060 | let me have a cell phone.

03:21:31.540 | I was going through Craigslist,

03:21:32.860 | this guy was advertising for landscaping,

03:21:35.060 | called him up, his name was Dustin Doremus.

03:21:38.100 | Called him up and he was like, "Come on down and talk to me."

03:21:40.020 | So he was running this business,

03:21:41.220 | him and his brother were, out of his house.

03:21:43.780 | So I'm sitting there talking to him for about 20 minutes.

03:21:46.180 | He looks at me, he's like, "Can I ask you a question?"

03:21:48.060 | I was like, "Yeah."

03:21:49.340 | He's like, "Are you on the run or something?"

03:21:52.020 | So I'm like, "No, why?"

03:21:54.100 | And he's like, "Well, you just don't look

03:21:55.220 | "like the kind of guy that'd do this."

03:21:57.980 | So I told him, I was like, "This is who I am,

03:21:59.860 | "this is what I've done."

03:22:00.980 | And he looks at me, he's like,

03:22:03.700 | "Man, I gotta think about that."

03:22:05.780 | So he tells me to go on home, that was a Friday.

03:22:09.780 | Sunday evening he gives me a call and he was like,

03:22:12.060 | "Brett, if I hire you, will you actually work?"

03:22:17.060 | And I told him, I was like, "Dustin, if you'll give me a job,

03:22:19.900 | "I promise I'll work my ass off."

03:22:22.460 | And he's like, "Show up six o'clock."

03:22:24.100 | I was like, "All right."

03:22:25.140 | So my job was to push a lawnmower 10 hours a day,

03:22:29.020 | five days a week for $400 a week, and busted my ass.

03:22:33.260 | I hit it so hard I would,

03:22:36.580 | I'd come in of a night and pass out,

03:22:40.220 | wake up the next morning and hit it again.

03:22:42.220 | And it got to the point,

03:22:44.660 | he ended up, this dude ended up offering me

03:22:49.140 | to come in and partner with his business.

03:22:51.140 | His brother dropped out and he,

03:22:53.340 | by that point I'd learned everything on the business

03:22:55.500 | and everything and he was like,

03:22:56.860 | "You know, if you'd like to come in, I'll cut you in half."

03:22:59.740 | And I was like, "Dustin, I can't do it, man."

03:23:02.540 | 'Cause I wasn't making any money,

03:23:03.740 | he didn't wanna pay me anymore

03:23:05.180 | until he was able to do more.

03:23:07.460 | And I thought I found another job doing something else.

03:23:12.460 | And in a speech, I say it got cold

03:23:14.260 | and the grass started, stopped growing.

03:23:15.580 | The truth of the matter was,

03:23:16.460 | is I thought I found another job.

03:23:18.540 | A guy was offering to pay me $1,500 a week

03:23:21.780 | doing the sales for oil rig training, was what it was.

03:23:26.620 | And I accepted the job, I quit working for Dustin.

03:23:31.900 | And the guy, I told him before he even offered me a job,

03:23:36.460 | I told him my criminal history

03:23:38.140 | 'cause I was required to do that.

03:23:39.780 | So I was supposed to start work,

03:23:42.340 | well, he calls me and tells me he can't hire me.

03:23:44.660 | So I'm out of work.

03:23:46.780 | And Dustin's already hired somebody else by that point,

03:23:49.060 | so I can't go back with him.

03:23:50.460 | And I'm that guy again, man.

03:23:58.820 | It's important for me to show value in a relationship.

03:24:03.540 | All right?

03:24:05.620 | So Michelle was the only one working.

03:24:08.580 | I'm like, I gotta do something.

03:24:12.220 | And I get it in my head, I was like,

03:24:15.100 | if nothing else, I can just bring food in the house.

03:24:17.740 | She was only making, I think she was,

03:24:20.020 | I mean, we were at it hard, it was just her working.

03:24:23.420 | And I was like, if nothing else,

03:24:25.100 | I can bring food in the house.

03:24:27.820 | And get on the dark web, get some stolen credit cards,

03:24:31.620 | start ordering food.

03:24:33.660 | Well, it gets worse than that.

03:24:35.220 | She's got two sons there, so I'm like,

03:24:38.860 | well, they need clothes.

03:24:40.460 | So he starts stealing clothes.

03:24:42.900 | And it continues like that.

03:24:44.300 | I get arrested.

03:24:45.180 | I get arrested on a food order.

03:24:47.460 | And Michelle didn't know what I was doing.

03:24:51.740 | So she had been to work and she was coming back from work,

03:24:55.980 | I get arrested and I'm like,

03:24:57.380 | they let me make a phone call.

03:24:59.340 | And I call her and I was like,

03:25:00.300 | come to the police station, I've been arrested.

03:25:02.300 | And she shows up and she didn't know I'd been doing that.

03:25:06.860 | My probation officer, of course,

03:25:07.940 | he didn't know or anything else.

03:25:09.540 | At my sentencing for that,

03:25:14.020 | probation officer was there, prosecutor,

03:25:16.780 | the judge, US Marshals, Michelle and me.

03:25:21.260 | Michelle stands up and she tells the judge

03:25:23.300 | that I'm a better dad to her kids

03:25:25.020 | than their actual father is.

03:25:26.940 | And by that point I'm crying.

03:25:31.620 | Probation officer stands up and he was like,

03:25:37.060 | we think Mr. Johnson's a good guy.

03:25:39.340 | We think this is a one-time thing.

03:25:40.660 | Prosecutor says the same thing.

03:25:42.220 | Judge sentences me to one year.

03:25:46.060 | Probation officer stands back up and he was like,

03:25:50.120 | Mr. Johnson, judge, if you can give Mr. Johnson

03:25:54.500 | a year and a day, he can get the good time

03:25:57.500 | and get back to his family sooner.

03:25:59.500 | So the judge amends the sentence to a year and a day.

03:26:01.980 | So I served 10 months.

03:26:03.100 | They sent me back to Texas.

03:26:04.980 | And that's when I find out that Michelle

03:26:08.100 | didn't need me for what I could give her.

03:26:10.460 | She just wanted me for me that entire time.

03:26:12.100 | She stands by me the entire time.

03:26:13.820 | I do my 10 months, get out, we get married after that.

03:26:18.140 | And they kill probation.

03:26:20.180 | So I can touch a computer.

03:26:21.300 | They tell you, they tell you.

03:26:22.940 | They were like, inmates, a felon, if nothing else,

03:26:26.780 | he can sell cars.

03:26:28.540 | Well, it turns out you can't.

03:26:30.540 | You can sell cars if you're a drug dealer.

03:26:32.660 | If you're the guy that steals all the money

03:26:33.900 | and people's information, no, fuck no.

03:26:35.740 | You can't get a job selling cars.

03:26:38.000 | So I can't get a job, cannot.

03:26:40.700 | And to this day, Lex, I know what my triggers are.

03:26:45.100 | I know what it would take to get me back

03:26:46.540 | into committing crime.

03:26:48.380 | So I knew I'd go so far at that point.

03:26:50.140 | So I looked at Michelle and I was like,

03:26:51.300 | let me see what I can do.

03:26:53.100 | Signed on to LinkedIn, reached out to this FBI super cop

03:26:56.940 | named Keith Malarski out of the Pittsburgh office.

03:26:58.980 | He was involved with my arrest and some associates

03:27:02.380 | and everything else and sent him a message.

03:27:05.300 | And the message was, hey, I respect everything you did.

03:27:07.820 | Think you did a great job.

03:27:09.780 | By the way, I'd like to be legal.

03:27:12.460 | And dude responded within two hours.

03:27:16.300 | Two hours, he gives me references, advice,

03:27:19.420 | takes me in under his wing, everything else like that.

03:27:22.220 | And from that point, man, it was the head

03:27:24.260 | of the Identity Theft Council did the same thing.

03:27:26.700 | Cardnot Present Group hires me to speak.

03:27:31.540 | Microsoft hires me to consult with them.

03:27:34.460 | And the Microsoft hire established enough trust

03:27:37.580 | in the industry that I was all right from that point.

03:27:40.940 | - So now you're helping in many ways fight

03:27:45.620 | the very guy that you used to be.

03:27:48.740 | So big picture advice, given that you were that guy,

03:27:53.740 | how do we fight cyber crime today

03:27:58.140 | and in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?

03:28:01.940 | What advice do you have to individuals,

03:28:03.460 | to companies, to governments, and also to Elizabeth?

03:28:08.460 | (laughing)

03:28:13.460 | Like the humans, human beings that are in the world

03:28:18.460 | that love, that live, that are friends with cyber criminals?

03:28:23.460 | - There's so many lessons to really be had from that.

03:28:29.000 | To me, the lesson, one of the big lessons to me

03:28:33.460 | is you can't serve two masters.

03:28:37.280 | If you're that guy that is committing crime

03:28:41.220 | or that person that's addicted,

03:28:43.380 | or you're in love with somebody that's addicted or has that,

03:28:48.240 | they don't love you.

03:28:49.340 | They love that addiction.

03:28:50.660 | That comes first.

03:28:51.540 | It's always gonna come first.

03:28:53.080 | So you have to realize that.

03:28:54.660 | You have to know when to,

03:28:55.940 | you gotta know when to cut somebody off,

03:29:01.220 | when to end something,

03:29:02.340 | knowing that they're not gonna change

03:29:06.100 | until they decide to change.

03:29:08.540 | At the same time, you gotta realize

03:29:09.900 | that the only reason I was able to turn my life around

03:29:13.420 | is because people took that chance on me.

03:29:15.460 | That's really the only reason.

03:29:17.820 | - They believe that there's a good person in there.

03:29:19.640 | - Yeah.

03:29:20.560 | If Milarski hadn't responded,

03:29:22.800 | if I hadn't had my sister, my wife,

03:29:24.880 | these companies that initially gave me that chance,

03:29:27.560 | my ass would be back in prison for 20 years.

03:29:30.020 | I have no doubt about that at all, all right?

03:29:32.880 | So you have to realize that.

03:29:34.800 | Cyber crime, a lot of companies that I talk to,

03:29:38.640 | they don't really understand or appreciate

03:29:40.760 | that networking aspect, that trust aspect

03:29:45.840 | of how criminals establish trust with each other,

03:29:48.260 | how they work together.

03:29:49.420 | A lot of companies think that it's a single player

03:29:52.220 | that's out victimizing them.

03:29:53.500 | And when you really break down how cyber crime operates,

03:29:56.260 | that you've got a group of individuals

03:29:58.500 | that are working together to hit you,

03:30:00.200 | but not only hit you,

03:30:01.040 | but they share and exchange information freely.

03:30:04.020 | Companies don't do that.

03:30:05.180 | You've got privacy concerns,

03:30:06.340 | you've got competitive edge concerns, everything else.

03:30:08.360 | Companies don't share information across the board

03:30:10.780 | like criminals do.

03:30:11.940 | Criminals do that.

03:30:12.960 | You have to appreciate that.

03:30:14.980 | You have to understand that big statistic

03:30:17.940 | that 90% of your attacks use known exploits.

03:30:20.460 | It's not the stuff we don't know about,

03:30:21.820 | it's the shit we do know about.

03:30:23.600 | We're not doing anything about.

03:30:25.060 | - So the way to defend against cyber crime

03:30:27.100 | is like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit

03:30:29.500 | that you should fix.

03:30:30.340 | - A lot of that, a lot of that.

03:30:31.940 | - So a lot of basic stuff that's already vulnerabilities,

03:30:34.420 | update the system security.

03:30:35.860 | - Now that doesn't take care of SolarWinds

03:30:38.500 | or CNAP or anything like that, it doesn't.

03:30:41.660 | But those instances, I mean, okay,

03:30:44.580 | that's a big instance.

03:30:45.740 | (Lex laughing)

03:30:46.580 | I mean, it is.

03:30:47.420 | - But in the full spectrum of, especially in the future,

03:30:52.160 | because there's more and more companies

03:30:56.420 | that are coming online, becoming digital,

03:30:58.900 | and it's just more and more and more,

03:31:01.460 | and those vulnerabilities in terms of human nature,

03:31:03.740 | so for social engineering and the actual outdated systems,

03:31:07.700 | all of it.

03:31:08.540 | And some of it, I guess, is,

03:31:10.540 | I mean, you're exceptionally good at this,

03:31:12.060 | is educating on the social engineering side.

03:31:14.500 | Is educating people in companies that--

03:31:16.460 | - You've got to do that.

03:31:18.140 | And companies have to, you know,

03:31:19.580 | I made that point that they never report to law enforcement.

03:31:23.340 | That's companies and individuals.

03:31:25.140 | You know, I've worked with Fortune 50 companies

03:31:27.540 | that will not press charges.

03:31:30.940 | Instead, they'll have that insider or that criminal

03:31:34.420 | sign an NDA, they'll pay 'em off,

03:31:36.820 | and we won't mention this shit anymore.

03:31:39.420 | You have to press charges, you have to report,

03:31:42.220 | you have to raise the awareness of everyone in the group.

03:31:45.580 | You have to be, it's that idea,

03:31:47.780 | and I've talked about that before,

03:31:49.020 | of understanding your place in that cybercrime spectrum.

03:31:52.740 | The way a criminal will victimize you

03:31:54.660 | depends on who you are and what you do,

03:31:57.340 | as a person and as a business.

03:31:59.800 | So you have to understand that,

03:32:00.900 | design security around that.

03:32:02.220 | You know, we've got 7,500 security companies out there.

03:32:05.220 | A whole lot of 'em are snake oil salesmen.

03:32:07.620 | A lot of 'em is gonna tell you

03:32:08.780 | that we're the one-stop solution,

03:32:10.820 | but you're not, you're not.

03:32:13.340 | You're a tool, all right?

03:32:15.220 | And you may have a very good tool,

03:32:17.300 | but it's not the only tool that's needed

03:32:19.860 | to protect against the attacks that are out there.

03:32:22.340 | And we have to be open and honest

03:32:23.980 | about that kind of stuff, if we're not.

03:32:25.500 | - So I guess defending defense is not just like one tool.

03:32:29.740 | It's a process of just like a diversity

03:32:33.340 | and just constantly educating people.

03:32:36.020 | - Absolutely.

03:32:36.860 | - So it's the social side.

03:32:38.380 | It's constantly, 'cause there's so many

03:32:40.860 | probably attack vectors in terms of the software

03:32:43.380 | that you have.

03:32:44.220 | - If you look at it, that attack surface,

03:32:45.860 | you can't plug everything.

03:32:47.420 | It's too damn large to plug everything.

03:32:50.140 | But you can do the best job you can possibly do.

03:32:52.260 | But it takes a variety of tools to do that, all right?

03:32:55.740 | The idea, and Arcos is big about that,

03:32:59.180 | but the idea is to take the cost of fraud

03:33:04.060 | to the fraudster so high

03:33:06.020 | that they basically try to pick another target, all right?

03:33:08.580 | And that's the idea that you want.

03:33:09.780 | You want it to be not worth the criminal's time

03:33:12.900 | to hit your company.

03:33:14.780 | - What about white hat hacking?

03:33:16.860 | So like, you know, hacking for good,

03:33:20.580 | sort of testing systems and then giving companies

03:33:24.820 | the vulnerabilities as you find them.

03:33:27.060 | - I think it's outstanding.

03:33:28.300 | I do, I think that, I think pin testing,

03:33:29.940 | white hat stuff is outstanding.

03:33:31.500 | I truly do.

03:33:32.420 | I think that you have to.

03:33:35.760 | It has to be tempered with what is reality as well though.

03:33:40.760 | All right, you know, we've got a whole industry

03:33:42.560 | of people who try to sell RFID wallets

03:33:45.680 | that I don't know of many RFID hackers out there

03:33:48.480 | on the criminal side, to be honest with you.

03:33:50.760 | - Yeah, so some of it is just like

03:33:51.800 | a psychological safety blanket

03:33:53.680 | that's not actually providing any protection.

03:33:58.240 | By the way, you wrote on LinkedIn something about ID me.

03:34:02.080 | (laughing)

03:34:04.520 | - What is it?

03:34:05.720 | Why is it a problem?

03:34:07.160 | I was going down a rabbit hole with you.

03:34:08.760 | - I was wondering if you were gonna mention that.

03:34:10.800 | You know, they lost, I guess I was partially responsible

03:34:14.040 | for them losing an $86 million contract.

03:34:16.500 | - What was the contract with?

03:34:18.680 | - With the IRS.

03:34:19.520 | - The government, just the IRS.

03:34:21.280 | So what is it?

03:34:22.320 | - So ID me is an identity, okay, backtrack.

03:34:25.840 | ID me is a marketing company that wants to say

03:34:28.880 | they're an identity verification company.

03:34:30.440 | - I just wanna bring this up to see you get angry.

03:34:32.400 | (laughing)

03:34:33.920 | - Okay, I'll tell you what my issue is.

03:34:36.880 | My issue is--

03:34:37.920 | - So it's a company that's used for authentication

03:34:42.240 | by the IRS, I guess.

03:34:43.360 | - Well, IRS, Social Security Administration, VA,

03:34:45.960 | at one point 23 state unemployment offices,

03:34:50.680 | a few other services as well.

03:34:51.840 | - So I guess the idea is that you would be able

03:34:54.680 | to unlock your account or authenticate yourself

03:35:00.220 | as a human being by using your face or something like that,

03:35:04.860 | or private information.

03:35:06.700 | - They've got a tiered system for the verification.

03:35:08.860 | They've got a free system, which is questionable,

03:35:13.820 | where you submit an ID and it's been shown,

03:35:16.340 | several bypasses have been shown.

03:35:17.740 | And I don't wanna talk about their security horribly bad

03:35:20.060 | because I wanna be honest, there are bypasses

03:35:22.860 | for a lot of security systems out there, all right?

03:35:26.380 | The issue that I have with ID.me is that their policies

03:35:31.380 | are somewhat questionable.

03:35:34.740 | I don't care if you're a private company

03:35:36.100 | that has those policies in place,

03:35:37.500 | but if you're a government agency and you as a citizen

03:35:41.860 | are entitled to a benefit or a service

03:35:44.500 | of that government agency,

03:35:46.660 | and then the government agency forces you

03:35:49.380 | to give up your complete identity profile

03:35:52.380 | to a private company.

03:35:53.460 | And then that private company uses that profile

03:35:55.460 | for marketing purposes to further profit, things like that.

03:35:59.420 | I have a huge issue with that.

03:36:01.740 | I don't care if you're a private company that does that,

03:36:03.840 | I just don't think that citizens need to be forced

03:36:05.800 | into doing that in order to get a benefit or service

03:36:08.340 | that they're entitled to.

03:36:09.940 | So that's my big issue.

03:36:11.740 | - So that, I mean, given how much value,

03:36:14.820 | how much we talked about the value of identity,

03:36:17.460 | you don't think that should be handed over lightly?

03:36:19.740 | - No, absolutely not.

03:36:21.580 | And who would have thought that Brett Johnson

03:36:23.020 | would ever become a privacy advocate?

03:36:24.900 | (both laughing)

03:36:26.580 | But here I am.

03:36:29.060 | I mean, it's just, people don't understand

03:36:33.260 | or appreciate the value of who they are.

03:36:37.940 | And certainly you've got a host of companies,

03:36:41.340 | ID means not the only one,

03:36:42.380 | but you've got some of these companies that say,

03:36:44.100 | well, we strip out the PII of the individual.

03:36:48.160 | We're just using the biometrics

03:36:49.420 | and the sites they're visiting and things like that.

03:36:51.600 | That's identity.

03:36:53.180 | You can still ping that one unique individual

03:36:55.660 | out of all, using that information, stripping out the PII,

03:36:58.740 | you can still ping who that individual is.

03:37:00.940 | - So having lived a life of crime for many years,

03:37:05.060 | I'm sure you've connected indirectly

03:37:08.260 | to a large number of very dangerous people.

03:37:11.580 | - Indirectly, indirectly.

03:37:12.780 | - Yeah. (both laughing)

03:37:14.220 | But the network indirectly is even larger, right?

03:37:17.700 | - Oh yeah, oh yeah.

03:37:18.580 | - Are you, and I apologize for this question,

03:37:22.860 | are you ever worried for your life, for your wellbeing?

03:37:27.020 | Like having seen a world that's really dangerous

03:37:30.340 | in ways that's not, that operates in the shadows?

03:37:35.100 | - You know, like I said, when we started Shadow Crew

03:37:41.140 | and started that initial cyber crime business, that world,

03:37:44.320 | violence wasn't there.

03:37:47.780 | It came in later.

03:37:48.980 | Now violence is inherent in the system.

03:37:51.540 | I'm doing Monty Python, but it's part of it.

03:37:54.460 | - Yeah, the mob, the mafia are now part of this whole thing.

03:37:58.820 | - Cartels are part of it.

03:38:00.020 | - Yeah.

03:38:00.860 | - Drugs are inherently intertwined

03:38:03.780 | in cyber crime marketplaces because of the profit potential.

03:38:06.460 | And with that comes a lot of violence as well.

03:38:08.820 | - Yeah, the cartels already brought the violence

03:38:12.100 | that they're good at from the 20th century.

03:38:14.100 | - Absolutely, absolutely.

03:38:14.940 | - Into the technology of the 21st century.

03:38:16.660 | - Now, do I worry about that?

03:38:20.140 | It's interesting that my family worries about that.

03:38:24.260 | All right, I think I may be just too involved in it

03:38:28.460 | to appreciate that type of danger,

03:38:32.300 | but my family worries about that, they do.

03:38:36.020 | Do I think it's a possibility?

03:38:37.520 | I'm the guy that says what needs to be said.

03:38:41.200 | I've made, I've built my trust in this industry

03:38:45.300 | by not being scared of calling out companies

03:38:49.860 | and individuals and not being scared of targeting criminals

03:38:53.740 | or criminal groups.

03:38:54.820 | - Your honesty as a human being emotionally

03:38:59.820 | and intellectually is really refreshing.

03:39:03.340 | It's a gift and thank you, thank you for doing that.

03:39:06.780 | Is there a device you can give to young people today

03:39:11.660 | about life?

03:39:13.380 | You broke many rules, all the rules.

03:39:19.140 | Some rules should be broken.

03:39:21.620 | So if you look at somebody young today in high school

03:39:23.820 | and college thinking how they can break the rules legally

03:39:28.820 | and live a life that's something

03:39:33.020 | they could be really proud of, what would you say?

03:39:35.860 | - Biggest lesson I've learned, you want your life

03:39:40.860 | to be one where you're helping people and not hurting people.

03:39:45.420 | And that really hit me the first time

03:39:48.620 | I walked into Quattro Co.

03:39:49.900 | You see the brightest minds in the United States

03:39:54.420 | who give up a lot of money,

03:39:57.060 | the opportunities of a lot of money

03:39:58.660 | because they believe in helping people.

03:40:01.900 | Where I spent a career just hurting

03:40:03.980 | and harming individuals, that's a hell of a lesson.

03:40:07.860 | And I'm glad I'm there, but I would tell people out there,

03:40:11.100 | it's fine to want money, it's fine to do that,

03:40:14.540 | it's fine to test systems, it's fine to circumvent the rules

03:40:18.240 | if you're not breaking the law, it's fine to do all that.

03:40:20.220 | I like doing that, all right?

03:40:22.020 | But if you've got the mindset,

03:40:23.580 | if you can just adhere to the mindset of helping people

03:40:26.540 | and not hurting people, I think you'll be all right

03:40:29.220 | at the end of the day.

03:40:31.220 | - What gives you, again, given the dark web,

03:40:35.140 | given all the dangers out there,

03:40:37.300 | what gives you hope about the future?

03:40:39.860 | Looking into five, 10 years, 50 years,

03:40:43.100 | I mean, hope for human civilization.

03:40:45.500 | If we do all right, if we make it out of this century,

03:40:50.500 | what do you think would be the reason?

03:40:55.560 | - What would be, that's a damn good question.

03:40:59.160 | 'Cause I mean, we got a lot of bad stuff going on.

03:41:01.360 | - We got a lot of reasons.

03:41:03.300 | If I asked you the other question

03:41:05.700 | of how do you think human civilization will destroy itself,

03:41:08.280 | I'm sure you have a lot of answers.

03:41:10.680 | - You know, what gives me hope is

03:41:14.680 | you see people working together.

03:41:16.920 | The COVID's have been a little bit different

03:41:19.160 | because I think too many people

03:41:20.480 | wanted to play politics with it.

03:41:22.200 | - That's been the heartbreaking thing about COVID

03:41:23.960 | is it's in many ways pulled people apart.

03:41:26.880 | I mean, because a virus involves

03:41:29.760 | being afraid of each other because,

03:41:34.660 | I mean, that was a scary thing.

03:41:35.760 | People talk about pandemics in that way,

03:41:38.220 | that you're afraid of other humans.

03:41:40.100 | That is the most terrifying thing.

03:41:41.620 | It's not the destructive nature of what it does to your body.

03:41:44.440 | It's just that it pulls people apart.

03:41:46.720 | And then you realize how fundamental

03:41:49.240 | that human connection is to human civilization.

03:41:51.240 | - Absolutely, absolutely.

03:41:53.040 | But you know, we, as human beings, we do,

03:41:56.380 | when things really get bad,

03:41:59.400 | when things really get bad,

03:42:00.460 | we do tend to respond and group together.

03:42:03.640 | We do that.

03:42:04.560 | - When there's injustice, we see it, we rise up.

03:42:09.560 | - I wake up every morning and I watch Fox News

03:42:14.280 | and CNN so I can be pissed off at everyone.

03:42:18.120 | - All right.

03:42:18.960 | (laughing)

03:42:19.780 | The division, the outrage, they're really feeding,

03:42:22.640 | they want you, they want you to be angry.

03:42:25.120 | - Yeah, that's what causes me despair

03:42:27.880 | and what I think that we just need to,

03:42:29.840 | Elizabeth was very good.

03:42:32.640 | She taught me one hell of a lesson

03:42:34.000 | because before I met her, I was a news hound.

03:42:37.440 | News would be on all the time, a couple of channels of it.

03:42:40.120 | And she was the woman who didn't watch the news.

03:42:44.160 | At all.

03:42:45.600 | And I didn't understand that back then, man.

03:42:48.320 | But now I do.

03:42:49.520 | You know, now I'm like, pretty smart, you know?

03:42:52.480 | (laughing)

03:42:53.600 | Don't need to listen to that bullshit as it is.

03:42:55.560 | - That's why I love reading history books.

03:42:58.160 | I just, I feel like that's the right perspective

03:43:03.920 | I take on modern times.

03:43:05.600 | You know, how will this time be written about

03:43:07.600 | in the history books?

03:43:08.840 | And react to that.

03:43:10.440 | Don't the daily ups and downs of the outrages,

03:43:15.440 | which is getting worse and worse

03:43:17.280 | in terms of how quick the turnaround is

03:43:19.440 | in terms of the news.

03:43:20.800 | - I'll tell you what, I'm sitting here,

03:43:22.920 | I appreciate you talking to me.

03:43:24.840 | I do.

03:43:25.680 | Because, you know, I'm talking about that relationship

03:43:28.440 | and everything.

03:43:29.280 | It's really been this kind of realization

03:43:32.080 | for me on a lot of things.

03:43:33.000 | So I really appreciate you asking those questions

03:43:34.960 | and everything, me being able to talk about that.

03:43:36.720 | - I love it that you value, first of all,

03:43:41.720 | you're self-aware how important love

03:43:43.720 | is in a human being's life.

03:43:45.240 | (laughing)

03:43:46.640 | It can make you do some of the best

03:43:48.200 | and some of the worst things in this world.

03:43:50.240 | And it's good to think about that.

03:43:51.640 | It's good to think about that.

03:43:52.880 | That is what makes us human, is that connection

03:43:55.280 | and that love for each other.

03:43:56.720 | What do you think is the meaning of life?

03:44:01.840 | This big, ridiculous question.

03:44:03.200 | Why the hell, what are we all here for?

03:44:05.240 | - I don't think it is ridiculous, man.

03:44:06.520 | I, to me, that meaning of life is finding out

03:44:09.760 | that lesson, that we need to help each other.

03:44:13.440 | If you talk, you ask about security,

03:44:15.160 | how do you get to say that?

03:44:16.000 | But, you know, everybody's worried about themselves.

03:44:18.560 | The way you solve that security problem

03:44:21.840 | is it takes everybody looking out for everyone else.

03:44:26.440 | That's how you solve that problem.

03:44:29.480 | - And however you take, whatever journey you take

03:44:32.400 | to discovering that point.

03:44:34.000 | - Yeah.

03:44:34.840 | I mean, with me, I've been asked a few times,

03:44:37.720 | do you regret anything, would you change anything?

03:44:40.040 | I've done a shitload of despicable things in my life.

03:44:45.040 | But I'm at a point in my life where I like who I am.

03:44:50.280 | And I know that I am doing exactly what I'm supposed

03:44:52.520 | to be doing with my life.

03:44:53.720 | So, would I change anything?

03:44:55.640 | As bad as a lot of that shit has been, I wouldn't.

03:44:59.480 | - It made you who you are.

03:45:00.920 | - Yeah.

03:45:02.000 | - The whole of it, the whole mess.

03:45:03.320 | - I've tried to say that, but it's true.

03:45:05.640 | That's the weird thing, it's true.

03:45:07.440 | - Yeah.

03:45:08.280 | - So.

03:45:09.120 | - Yeah.

03:45:09.940 | Also, you mentioned that you're thinking

03:45:12.200 | of launching a show.

03:45:13.600 | What's it gonna be called?

03:45:14.520 | 'Cause you've done a couple of podcasts.

03:45:16.440 | You're incredibly good at this.

03:45:17.640 | You're so good at this.

03:45:18.720 | - I've done a couple.

03:45:19.760 | I'm on a lot of podcasts and everything like that.

03:45:22.440 | I had the "Fraudcast" with a friend of mine,

03:45:25.880 | Carice Hendrick.

03:45:26.720 | And that ended because of a difference of opinion.

03:45:29.120 | (laughing)

03:45:31.040 | Depending on who you ask, one of us was an asshole.

03:45:34.360 | - Yes.

03:45:35.200 | - And it may have been me.

03:45:36.040 | - Yeah.

03:45:36.860 | - But then I did the "Anglerfish Podcast,"

03:45:38.560 | which that was, I gotta be honest with you, Lex,

03:45:40.200 | it was completely directionless.

03:45:41.960 | And it was Brett Johnson getting lazy.

03:45:44.040 | - Yeah.

03:45:45.060 | - So I ended that.

03:45:46.880 | The Brett Johnson Show is launching--

03:45:50.120 | - That's the new one.

03:45:50.960 | - That's the new one.

03:45:51.780 | - That's what the new one's called.

03:45:52.620 | - And, you know, I--

03:45:53.880 | - What are you thinking of doing with it?

03:45:55.580 | - Making a difference, for one thing.

03:45:58.400 | But it's gonna be talking about cybercrime security,

03:46:01.000 | helping people.

03:46:01.840 | - Interviews, solo.

03:46:04.000 | - Interviews, a lot of it's gonna be solo.

03:46:06.520 | Now I'm calling it the Brett Johnson Show,

03:46:08.120 | I mean, because it's gonna handle crime,

03:46:10.280 | talk to criminals and how they turn their lives

03:46:12.040 | around to a degree as well.

03:46:13.400 | But there's some shit I wanna bitch about too.

03:46:15.280 | - Yeah.

03:46:16.120 | - So figure it till the end.

03:46:16.940 | - I can tell you're good at this.

03:46:17.780 | I'm a fan already.

03:46:18.620 | (laughing)

03:46:19.440 | I'm gonna listen, I'm gonna subscribe.

03:46:20.280 | You should too.

03:46:21.120 | You're launching it soon.

03:46:22.600 | - Soon, next week.

03:46:23.740 | - Brett, you're an incredible human being.

03:46:26.400 | The honesty, the love, I could just see

03:46:31.400 | how much of yourself you put out there.

03:46:33.280 | One of the best public speakers I've ever heard.

03:46:36.480 | Definitely you should be in a Scorsese film

03:46:38.400 | about cybercrime.

03:46:39.660 | 100%, I can tell you're a good actor.

03:46:43.840 | It makes perfect sense.

03:46:45.400 | Anyway, I'm deeply honored that you spent your time

03:46:48.160 | with me today.

03:46:49.000 | - I am too, thank you.

03:46:49.840 | - It was amazing.

03:46:51.440 | Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:46:52.880 | with Brett Johnson.

03:46:53.960 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors

03:46:56.380 | in the description.

03:46:57.800 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:46:59.600 | from George R.R. Martin, from "A Clash of Kings".

03:47:03.620 | "A good act does not wash out the bad,

03:47:07.640 | "nor a bad act the good.

03:47:10.200 | "Each should have its own reward."

03:47:12.380 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:47:16.320 | (upbeat music)

03:47:18.900 | (upbeat music)

03:47:21.480 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal | Lex Fridman Podcast #272

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